E109: 2022 Bestie Awards Live from Twitter HQ

(0:00) Bestie catch up! (3:05) Kicking off the 2022 Bestie Awards (4:12) Biggest winner in politics (9:11) Biggest loser in politics (16:37) Biggest political surprise (23:35) Biggest winner in business (29:48) Biggest loser in business (42:21) Biggest business surprise (51:16) Best science breakthrough (57:36) Biggest flash in the pan (1:42:24) Best CEO (1:47:38) Best investor (1:51:21) Worst investor (1:52:22) Best turnaround (1:55:58) Worst human being (1:59:57) Most loathsome company (2:01:32) Best new tech (2:02:34) Best trend (2:05:09) Worst trend (2:07:50) Best new media (2:10:26) The Rudy Giuliani Award for Self-Immolation! Follow the besties: https://twitter.com/chamath https://linktr.ee/calacanis https://twitter.com/DavidSacks https://twitter.com/friedberg Follow the pod: https://twitter.com/theallinpod https://linktr.ee/allinpodcast Intro Music Credit: https://rb.gy/tppkzl https://twitter.com/yung_spielburg Intro Video Credit: https://twitter.com/TheZachEffect Referenced in the show: https://civil.ge/archives/469054 https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/weapons/a39946577/us-to-replace-javelin-stinger-missile-stockpiles-sent-to-ukraine https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/capm.asp https://www.wsj.com/articles/bob-iger-bob-chapek-disney-coup-11671236928 https://twitter.com/TwitterBusiness/status/1605651865818914816 https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-12-13/crispr-gene-editing-breakthrough-brings-cancer-cures-closer https://twitter.com/ShellenbergerMD/status/1604871630613753856 https://www.amazon.com/San-Fransicko-Progressives-Ruin-Cities/dp/B08V3DV718 https://twitter.com/ShellenbergerMD/status/1491418120086454278 https://twitter.com/seanhannity https://youtu.be/HBiV1h7Dm5E https://www.amazon.com/Vital-Question-Evolution-Origins-Complex/dp/0393088812 https://www.amazon.com/Life-Ascending-Great-Inventions-Evolution/dp/0393065960 https://www.amazon.com/Putting-Rabbit-Hat-Brian-Cox/dp/1538707292 https://www.amazon.com/Audible-Cinema-Speculation/dp/B09V3FTWKY

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

• 0:00Jason Calacanis?

  Hey everybody, Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays. It is the end of 2022 and once again, we're doing our Bestie Awards. Yes, at the end of the year, we do our Bestie Awards. This is where we give awards to the biggest winners, losers, and many other categories that you love. With me again, of course, the Sultan of Science, deep in his Kurosawa vibes. How are you doing Sultan?

• 0:25David Friedberg?

  It was great to see you guys for dinner last night, Sax. We missed you. That was a lot of fun. We all got together twice this week for dinner while we were on vacation. And during our dinner, we took a vote and Sax, you are now the Director of the All In Summit. Congratulations.

• 0:40Jason Calacanis?

  Congratulations. Yes, the grift is on.

• 0:42David Sacks?

  Good. My first act is to veto it.

• 0:44Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, there you go. Sorry to the fans. Also with us, of course, is the dictator himself, Chamath Palihapitiya, deep in his turtleneck phase and his vibes. Tell us about your winter vibes, Bestie.

• 1:01Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I mean, I can't believe that we all took over Lake Tahoe for a week together. It's cool. It's been a lot of fun. I gotta say, Sax, you'll be surprised, J. Cal has the life hack of life hacks here. He's figured out how to basically get everything pre-wired, all the restaurants, all the reservations. It's been great. I've loved it.

• 1:21Jason Calacanis?

  We've had a wonderful time.

• 1:22David Friedberg?

  He books an eight-person table for every night and he does it, what, months in advance? So every night he's got an option.

• 1:28Jason Calacanis?

  About two weeks out, every two weeks out, I get a table of eight for five, six nights in a row and then I invite my besties out.

• 1:33Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And oddly, it turned out there was only one person from J. Cal's side, just himself.

• 1:37Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, should be clear.

• 1:38Chamath Palihapitiya?

  There was always room for the rest of us to show up.

• 1:42Jason Calacanis?

  We had a wonderful time. I picked up the check for the nachos and Chamath brought $6,000 worth of wine.

• 1:49Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I brought my own also to the restaurant yesterday so we could open the wine properly.

• 1:54Jason Calacanis?

  It was wonderful. We've had a wonderful time. And of course, with us, looks like he had to work over the Christmas break. Sax, how are you doing, brother? You working today?

• 2:03David Sacks?

  I'm good. I'm just hanging out somewhere.

• 2:07Jason Calacanis?

  Well, come on, you could be honest. You're at the Twitter HQ. I recognize that incredible architecture and design. They spent so much money on that office space.

• 2:15David Sacks?

  Beautiful office.

• 2:16Jason Calacanis?

  That's definitely beautiful office.

• 2:19David Sacks?

  They've got their own bespoke coffee shop here called The Perch.

• 2:23David Friedberg?

  We're the people that work there. Too soon, too soon.

• 2:28David Sacks?

  The people are working too hard to be hanging out in the coffee shop.

• 2:43Speaker 04

  Love you best.

• 2:48Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so let's get started with our bestie awards. This is a very controversial. We start with a political award. And last year, you know, this is our, just so we're clear, this is not the prediction show. The next week will be the prediction show. This week is our winners.

• 3:04David Sacks?

  Cue the music.

• 3:05Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, cue the music. Right there. Okay, here we go. 2022 predictions. This is what we predicted for the bestie award for biggest political winner. I said Ron DeSantis and so did David Sacks. We predicted in 2022.

• 3:21David Sacks?

  You said it after me. You said it after me. And the way you introduced it, you said, what did Tucker Carlson's writers come up with? I said DeSantis and then you said DeSantis.

• 3:30Jason Calacanis?

  Are you starting already? Literally, I'm trying to give you your flowers.

• 3:33David Sacks?

  No, I reviewed the tape.

• 3:34Jason Calacanis?

  Already we're fighting my brothers. Okay, take it easy. You're gonna get your flowers. So Ron DeSantis, obviously a big winner. Uh, so those were, those were great predictions. Friedberg with a wild card there. He predicted Putin would be a winner in 2022. That one fell a little flat, did it not, our, our friend Friedberg? Not a winner.

• 3:52David Friedberg?

  No, I think he, you know, I mean, my projection was really built on what I thought would be a big kind of influence that he would gain this year. You know, whether he's viewed negatively or positively, he's certainly at the center of the sage right now.

• 4:03Jason Calacanis?

  Now Chamath, your 22 prediction, this is your prediction last year for this year, was that the biggest political winner would be Xi Jinping. Okay. Now we go to our actual biggest winner. This is where we tell you who we thought was the biggest winner of 2022. Let's start with you, Sacks. Who is your biggest winner for 2022? Political biggest winner.

• 4:26David Sacks?

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

• 4:31David Sacks?

  So the red wave fizzled everywhere else, but it crashed over Florida hard. So DeSantis is my pick. He won reelection by about 20 points and his coattails carried four new GOP House seats, which happens to be the exact size of the GOP majority. Several polls have now shown him beating Donald Trump by significant margins for the 2024 GOP nomination. He is shattering fundraising records. Florida is now the fastest growing state. So he is my pick for the biggest winner, political winner of 2022.

• 5:02Jason Calacanis?

  Great. Who is your biggest political winner? Chima?

• 5:07Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I mean, it's obvious. It's Xi Jinping. You know, there is no single person in the world that is now as powerful as this one man. He has complete authoritarian control over 1.2 odd billion people and 20% of the world's GDP and a large amount of the world's debt, including a lot of US dollar debt. And so, you know, it's pretty, it's hard to find anybody that won nearly as much as he did.

• 5:41Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, now to you, Friedberg. Who is your biggest political winner of 2022?

• 5:47David Friedberg?

  I mean, I think your DeSantis and Xi Jinping calls were really like good. I think the biggest surprising winner for me is like, you know, unexpected, and that would be Zelensky from the Ukraine. I don't think going into this year, people paid as much attention to him. He was certainly not a sung hero, but coming through this conflict and I think leading the storyline about our common enemy of the West and common enemy of democracy being Vladimir Putin, really kind of made him a superstar and a hero on a global stage. And I think that's evidenced by the fact that he's in the White House and he gave an address to the US Congress yesterday. So I would make him kind of the biggest winner of the year.

• 6:30Jason Calacanis?

  It's hard to go against DeSantis. So, you know, he clearly has, as Sacks correctly pointed out, gone into the lead. We'll see if he can beat Trump in the primaries. I have my doubts, but he does seem to be pulling in some of those moderates, right?

• 6:47Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I don't understand why you guys say he's a political winner. What did he win? He hasn't won the nomination yet. He got re-elected to a state that he had before 2022. So what did he win exactly?

• 6:58David Sacks?

  Well, I think a couple of things. One is when he won election to the governorship four years ago, it was by less than 1%. It was a tiny margin of victory. This was margin of almost 20%. He had coattails and he is now the frontrunner for the GOP nomination in 24. I think you can argue, you can make the case that maybe he's peaking too soon.

• 7:18Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Well, I'm glad you brought that up because if you look at the data, you know, I think in the last seven or eight nomination cycles, the person that's been leading the popularity contest going into the Iowa caucuses has not won the nomination. He's peaking too soon, almost.

• 7:34David Sacks?

  That's a possibility, because when you're the frontrunner, everyone takes shots at you. On the other hand, he, if he stays this dominant, he will drive out other contenders out of the primary and he maybe will solidify it. And if, if it can just be DeSantis versus Trump in the primary, he has a much better shot than if it's Trump versus a bunch of other challengers. And I think that if he continues to pull this well within the Republican Party, I think Trump might not run again because Trump definitely does not want to risk being a loser in the Republican primary. So yeah, there's always frontrunner risk, but it's hard to say that coming out of this year that he wasn't a huge political winner.

• 8:13Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Okay.

• 8:14David Sacks?

  If we're going to challenge other people's picks, I would maybe challenge Zelensky. There's no question that he's been a global media hero, but 2/3 of Kyiv is currently without power. 80% of Kyiv doesn't have water. 30% of the Ukrainian power stations have been destroyed. Nearly half of the country is without power. There's something like 8 million displaced Ukrainians in the country and over 100,000 Ukrainians have been killed in this war. So yes, he's been a very strong charismatic war leader for them, but-

• 8:46Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Friedberg, your response?

• 8:47David Friedberg?

  I'm not advocating for his performance as a leader. I'm advocating for his-

• 8:54David Friedberg?

  Accumulation of political goodwill, and that's it.

• 8:58Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, and he is winning the war. So. Is that winning? Well, in war, they say there nobody wins, but it's certainly better than having your country taken over by Putin. So some would argue that's winning. Let's go to biggest losers. Biggest losers in 2022, we predicted, again, this is our predictions from last year, and then we'll go on to our actuals for this year. Last year, we predicted Chamath said the progressive left, Sacks said Nancy Pelosi, Friedberg, you said US influence globally. Interesting. And I said the extremes, both Biden and Trump. Let's go with our predictions. I'm sorry, with our actuals for this year. Chamath, why don't you go first this time? Who is your biggest political loser for 2022?

• 9:42Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I mean, I don't think it's as written about as much, but the progressive left did see as much failure as the MAGA right. So they were a huge loser. I mean, to the extent that anybody thought that leftist, you know, quasi socialist policies and politics was a winning strategy, I think that was pretty soundly refuted, even in places that were pretty staunchly Democrat. It was really difficult for the progressive left to do much of anything but lose. So I think that was a really powerful and important repudiation. And I think it's marginalizes them to a bunch of, you know, kooks almost. And I think that that's really healthy for politics going forward.

• 10:27Jason Calacanis?

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

• 10:30Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah, I think they were the biggest political loser in the United States, at least.

• 10:34Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, yeah, Elizabeth Warren. We don't hear people talking about Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders much this year.

• 10:40Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah, and I think that the biggest political loser outside of the United States was probably the European Union.

• 10:45Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, you want to expand on that a little bit?

• 10:47Chamath Palihapitiya?

  If you just think about the corner that they painted themselves into.

• 10:51Chamath Palihapitiya?

  How much they had to basically, literally, go 180 degrees away from what their policies were. You know, there was a huge raft of whether it was green, ESG, kind of woke, liberal politics that manifested itself in all kinds of national security decisions and energy decisions that in this last year, they literally had to undo in order to stay alive. And that makes that whole political construct, I think, very fragile. So they were, they were a pretty big political loser outside of the United States.

• 11:24Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, Sax. It's gonna be hard here to guess this one. But Sax, who is your biggest political loser in 2022? I have no idea who you're gonna pick here.

• 11:35David Sacks?

  By the way, I got Pelosi right last year that she did lose the gavel. So you've got to say that the war in Ukraine was the biggest event of the year. And obviously you can spread the blame around to a lot of people, starting with Putin, because he's the one who ordered the invasion. But I would say, this is a slightly different take on the category, which is biggest political blunder occurred on January 27th of this year, when Blinken said that NATO's door is open and must remain open, and that is our commitment. He basically shut the door. He kept NATO's door open, but shut the door on any means of a diplomatic off-ramp to end this conflict by promising Russia that Ukraine would not become part of NATO. That was the single biggest diplomatic blunder of this year, or maybe

• 12:18David Sacks?

  the last couple of decades, because there's a good chance we could have avoided this disastrous war if we had just been willing to close NATO's door.

• 12:25Jason Calacanis?

  Wonderful, great, crisp answer. Thank you for that, nice and tight. Friedberg, who's your biggest political loser for 2022?

• 12:32David Friedberg?

  It was a tie for me between Jerome Powell and Liz Truss. Liz Truss just has to get recognition here for only being in office for 45 days as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. I mean, I think that is cannot be overlooked. The, uh, some of the policy and folks that she put in in office caused, you know, massive chaos. It was just a clear dysfunction over a very short period of time. Jerome Powell, I think this was a big surprise this year to see how the Fed Chair became so politicized and his role became so politicized. Both kind of the left and the right finding reasons to question his leadership.

• 13:19David Friedberg?

  And his decision making, the failure to raise rates soon enough led to massive inflation is what you'll hear from one contingent of politicians and the the public at large. And then the rate at which he's raising rates now to catch up to the and to to calm inflation is causing people to complain on the other side. So there is really no one that seems to be happy with Jerome Powell, and I think that that that was a a shooting star that seems to have completely lost its luster.

• 13:43Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so the Fed, yes, good pull there. Okay, mine is pretty clear and objectively it is, of course, the GOP, the red wave failed, it turned into a trickle. Trump is back, and I believe there's a good chance he will win the primary. Roe v. Wade, a complete unmitigated disaster for Republicans, they caught the car and plus marriage equality and having to deal with that. Women and the LGBT community vote, and they have long memories. The GOP, the biggest political losers for me. Okay, I'm sure Sacks has no rebuttal there, so we will move on to the next category, uh, which is?

• 14:22Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Oh, by the way, if you say it that way, then, you know, the biggest political loser in 2022 were women. Look at like fundamental human rights were stripped away from 50% of the population. So that's not cool.

• 14:36Jason Calacanis?

  And they could have left it alone.

• 14:39Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And they could have left it alone.

• 14:40David Sacks?

  Well, if if what you mean is that the issue was sent to the states and each state then gets to decide, then you're right. But eat but if you look at the battles have happened at the states, even red states like Kentucky and Kansas have rejected the the subsequent political push to outlaw abortion. So it has not turned out to be.

• 15:01Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Just by the fact that all of these red states basically reconfirmed and enshrined a woman's right to choose may actually go more to show that the Supreme Court is totally out of touch and that they didn't need to touch Roe v. Wade. And the fact that they did opened up, you know, a huge can of worms in 50 states that now go and need to go and adjudicate this thing where it looked like actually that decision, even back in the day, even though the way that it was done, you know, there was a lot of room for improvement, clearly, everybody agrees with that, but was actually after, you know, 50 plus years reasonable law. And so now that you took that law away, now folks even in the red states are like, no, it was fine, which means that this whole thing was a huge political gambit more than it was actual.

• 15:47Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Societal intention.

• 15:49Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so we are going to move on now. I just, I'll add my final two cents to that. As I said, I do think women and the LGBT community have very long memories and the people who are in the moderate are not going to forget how they were treated by the GOP in this specific issue. So, biggest political surprise. We didn't do predictions last year, but I'll just run down what everybody said was their political surprise. I said, "The fact that Kamala Harris was sidelined was pretty surprising to me," and that's continued. Chamath, you said Joe Manchin was your biggest political surprise. Glenn Youngkin, uh, winning. Sax, that was your biggest surprise. And Friedberg, the January 6th crowd making it

• 16:31Jason Calacanis?

  into the Capitol during the insurrection was your biggest political surprise. So here we go, our 2022 biggest political surprise. Sax, let's start with you. You have a lot to say about politics. Go.

• 16:44David Sacks?

  Well, the biggest political surprise to me was no red wave. So, I admit, I got this prediction wrong. You know, I got all my previous ones right, Jake House. I'm going to admit, I got this one wrong. You know, I believe that the electorate would focus on the fundamentals. Three-quarters of the country thought we're on the wrong track. Three-quarters think we're in a recession. Nevertheless, the Republicans did not do nearly as well as predicted. They only gained nine seats in the House. They actually lost a seat in the Senate. And I think that that had something to do with candidate quality and, of course, the whole election denial narrative, uh, basically was a disaster for them. I hope that the Republicans move on and stop talking about the past. What voters want to hear about is the future.

• 17:26Jason Calacanis?

  Friedberg, did you have a biggest political surprise for 2022, Friedberg?

• 17:29David Friedberg?

  Yeah, it's also the failure of the red wave. I mean, that was my, my pick. I think the consensus going into the election was with, uh, you know, rising inflation and the disdain that everyone had for the way politicians kind of managed us through COVID and then managed us through the economic recovery. It's, uh, it was inevitable to see a flip and it didn't happen. I think, obviously, we, we talked about why that is, but that was a big surprise for everyone.

• 17:53Jason Calacanis?

  Chamath, what was your biggest political surprise of 2022, Chamath Palihapitiya?

• 17:59Chamath Palihapitiya?

  The absolute toothlessness of MAGA and Donald Trump. I mean, he was just a scarlet letter. If you were anywhere near this guy, you were gonna lose. And that's surprising considering how traditional Republicans were pandering to him up until frankly, just a few months ago. So I think that we exposed the emperor as having no clothes and that he marginalizes and sidelines candidates into a fringe following that cannot go mainstream. That was, uh, it was really surprising to see how stark that was this year.

• 18:40Jason Calacanis?

  Fantastic. I'm going to build on your Chamath. Uh, I had two here. Number two was Roe v. Wade, but we've beaten that. Uh, I think we discussed it as much as we possibly could. My number one, building on your Chamath, is that despite what's happened with Trump, the documents, the, uh, his cases in the United States, in New York, uh, and about taxes, despite all of this, the January 6th insurrection, despite all this, Trump is still viable. I can't believe he's still viable and that he is going to be out there in the primaries and he's going to have to debate DeSantis. And I don't know that DeSantis can beat him in an debate. I think he might, uh, win. So this is completely scary for both me and Sacks. I think it's terrifying. It's Sacks's nightmare and mine.

• 19:25David Sacks?

  Well, I think he's mainly viable in the minds of the MAGA dead enders and the mainstream media who want to keep him alive. And the Biden administration wants to keep him alive and they'll do anything to keep him alive and in the news and you love keeping him in the news. So it's a

• 19:41Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 19:42David Sacks?

  It's a codependent relationship between the mainstream media, which you sometimes front for, and Trump.

• 19:48Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, be careful telling me what I think.

• 19:50David Sacks?

  We need to end this codependency, J. Cal.

• 19:52Jason Calacanis?

  Well, I wish the Republican Party would finally take ownership of this disaster that is Trump and tell him that he has no business, but you guys keep him in the game and the fact that he's viable, again, your personal nightmare and mine. Okay. Biggest business winner. Everybody excited to get off politics right now and get to our kill zone, which is business. So last year, we had predictions in this category. I had said Disney, that's an up and down prediction. I'll get into that in a moment. Chamath, you said small and medium sized businesses, the old SMBs. Sacks said rise of the rest, the flyover states. And Friedberg, you said Stripe. Chamath, let's start with you. SMBs. What did you get right? What did you get wrong here?

• 20:32Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Uh, I mean, I whiffed. It just completely missed the global macro shift that

• 20:39Chamath Palihapitiya?

  We embarked on in full force, starting in Q1 of this year. It was, it is the most important business story of the year. It's just like we have an absolute, complete regime change. And by the way, that regime change is so complete and so, you know,

• 20:58Chamath Palihapitiya?

  thorough that it even touched Japan just a few weeks ago, or sorry, just a few days ago, where Japan, who finally yielded on this idea of you're going to, we're going to have negative interest rates and yield curve control, even they finally broke and raised rates. So it is an absolute worldwide sea change in how we need to think about risk. And I think that's worth talking about a little bit later in the show, but that was the single biggest business story of the year.

• 21:26David Sacks?

  Yeah, I'll add to what Chama said. I missed this too, even though on another prediction, when you asked what the biggest business loser would be, I think I said that it would be asset classes that had been pumped up by the Fed's money printing because you start to feel.

• 21:39Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Now that.

• 21:39David Sacks?

  So I got that part right, but what I didn't connect it to were all the asset classes actually got pummeled. So I kind of conceptually understood that rates were rising, but I totally underestimated the magnitude of the shift, the way that growth stocks would get hammered, the way that crypto would get destroyed, the fact that like Tiger basically got blown out of the industry. I mean, I had the right general intuition, but I didn't translate it into the specific asset types and the magnitude of the shift. And also the, like what Chama said, a real regime change now and how markets are viewing stock performance.

• 22:17Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It's really incredible. Friedberg, let's get in on this. This is somewhere where you can contribute deeply. What do you think about your take last year? And you still believe in Stripe?

• 22:28David Friedberg?

  Yeah, I mean, look, it's a, it's a business that obviously benefited greatly from the pandemic and the adoption of, you know, the payment processing infrastructure that they've built across their, across various kind of e-commerce platforms. It's, I've been, I'm not an investor, so I don't have any numbers, but there are public reports that have highlighted that the revenue increased 66% this year. They've indicated that they're probably going to experience significant revenue slowdown with the recession ahead. But it still seems like a super high-quality business. And valuation-wise, who knows what things are going to be worth when they ultimately come to market. There's certainly no one going public right now. So at some point, we'll see whether valuations play out.

• 23:11David Friedberg?

  But it seems like it continues to be a very strong, one of the strongest private businesses that's being built in Silicon Valley.

• 23:17Jason Calacanis?

  We will get to 2022 biggest business winners in one second. I will just say for Disney, yeah, what a swing. Bob Chapek in and then out, and now Bob Iger back. So I feel like I got this one wrong and right at the same time. I still believe in the company deeply. I think they're going to have a big win. Let's get to our actual biggest winner of 2022. Sax, why don't you lead us off with your biggest winner of 2022 for business?

• 23:46David Sacks?

  I said Lockheed Martin along with other defense stocks. Lockheed Martin, which makes Javelins and High Mars, is up 40% in the past year when most of the market's been way down. Northrop Grumman's also up almost 40%. And even some of the lesser performers like Raytheon and General Dynamics are up about almost 20% in a terrible market environment. The fact of the matter is war is terrible, but it appears to be good business. We've sent so many weapons to Ukraine that there's recent press reports that the U.S. stockpiles of missiles, Javelins, and Stingers are now depleted. So these companies are going to keep doing well for the next year at least. Now there's a new appropriation sailing through, something like $44 billion of new funding for the war. It's now over $100 billion.

• 24:31David Sacks?

  McConnell says this is Republicans' number-one priority. This is now a bipartisan concern. And if you think the war is expensive, just wait for reconstruction. That's estimated to cost roughly $1 trillion to build Ukraine back.

• 24:45Jason Calacanis?

  Sax, can I ask you a question about that? Are these, when we fund these wars, I've heard different versions of this, can't get a clear answer. When we provide weapons and systems like this, are they not on account and we ask for money back at some point? Do you know the answer to that question?

• 25:01David Sacks?

  You think we're going to get money back? Are you kidding me?

• 25:03Jason Calacanis?

  It seems to be sometimes that we do, so that's why I was asking. I think it's something that hasn't been clarity on.

• 25:07David Sacks?

  Look, I think the war has been phenomenal business for the military-industrial complex. So that's what we're seeing here. Not so great for the rest of the economy.

• 25:17Jason Calacanis?

  Friedberg, what do you got?

• 25:17David Friedberg?

  Yeah, I mean, I think you guys will remember last November, I predicted energy and defense to be the best performing. Stocks for this year, Saks is right. I think defense is up 40%. So I kind of went with the bigger oil and gas companies are up, you know, across the board about 47% in terms of equity value in the public markets a year to date compared to the S and P being down about 20%. So over the short term, I would argue oil and gas companies. But I think that over the long term, there were a couple of big breakthrough moments that I would give kind of, you know, the winner in business that will benefit over the long term to OpenAI and to fusion startups. And we'll talk more about why for those two, obviously

• 26:02David Friedberg?

  later, when we get to the biggest winner in tech and science. But yeah, short term, oil and gas, they benefited from the supply constraints and the conflict in the Ukraine. And then longer term, I think OpenAI and fusion startups.

• 26:11David Sacks?

  Well, and by the way, I mean, just to give Friedberg some credit here, you actually predicted the war, or you predicted a war. I don't know if you predicted this war, but you predicted war in 2022.

• 26:20David Friedberg?

  Yeah, I predicted the war and Putin kind of rising to the center stage and the defense energy.

• 26:27David Sacks?

  That was a huge prediction because I don't think most people, even most analysts, well, they were surprised even when the invasion happened. I think people are still very surprised, both that Putin would order it, but also if you study the situation, I think you got to be surprised that we didn't negotiate harder to try and prevent it.

• 26:42David Friedberg?

  I traded it too. I bought I bought an energy ETF, so it worked out for me.

• 26:45David Sacks?

  Okay, Chamath, your biggest business winner of 2022?

• 26:49Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Nick can throw it up, but it's basically any single person that understands the following formula. So if you, this is the

• 26:56David Friedberg?

  This is so good.

• 26:57Chamath Palihapitiya?

  This is the, this is the capital asset pricing model. So what is this? This is like, before you make any investment, what it actually tells you is here's the rate of return that you need to generate above the risk free rate in order for you to justify making that investment. And if you really understood the capital asset pricing model going into 2022, it would have been difficult for you to not make money. Because all of a sudden, as the 10 year flexed up and as, you know, the volatility, particularly of things like tech stocks went crazy, you could have figured out where you to park your money. And all these people that have built businesses around this capital asset pricing model.

• 27:41Chamath Palihapitiya?

  So you have companies, obviously. So, you know, you have sectors of the economy like defense or

• 27:48Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Energy stocks, consumer goods and staples, they all had moments where they all did well. But if you take it one step above, the organizations that actually ran big macro books or really understood how to algorithmically implement this capital asset pricing model just ran roughshod over the markets. And, you know, said in a different way, it's sort of my background, which is, you know, if you understood the capital asset pricing model, you would have been a massive bear. And the bear got fed this year to a degree that none of us could have anticipated.

• 28:21Jason Calacanis?

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

• 28:26Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Or no, people that understood it.

• 28:28Jason Calacanis?

  People that understood it, got it, okay. And for my biggest winner, I went with ChatGPT slash OpenAI and their partner, Microsoft. Why did I pick that as the biggest winner? Well, on my other podcast, This Week in Startups, we played a game, ChatGPT versus the first result of Google's, and Molly and I could not tell the difference. And in fact, we picked ChatGPT's answers often above Google's. Google, one of the greatest businesses and franchises ever created, has no answer currently for ChatGPT because Google's business model is to get you to click on an ad between links.

• 29:11Jason Calacanis?

  If you give the actual answer, then the person doesn't stop clicking. If they stop clicking, Google stops making money. There is no business model in search if the person gets their answer because they're done. This is an existential threat like we have not seen. And our friend Sam Altman has a line ChatGPT slash OpenAI with Microsoft. Microsoft, I think, is going to release a, and this is a prediction as well, a search engine with...

• 29:41Jason Calacanis?

  OpenAI, that has a significant impact on Google's franchise. We didn't think this would ever happen, and it's here. Okay, the biggest losers in business. We made predictions last year. I said in 2020, I predicted in 2021, the biggest loser in 2022 would be crypto. By the way, Friedberg, you agreed with me, and we nailed it.

• 30:02David Friedberg?

  Or you agreed with me.

• 30:04Jason Calacanis?

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

• 30:08David Friedberg?

  We were in agreement.

• 30:09Jason Calacanis?

  We were in agreement. Saks.

• 30:10David Friedberg?

  Independent.

• 30:11Jason Calacanis?

  You said, and Chamath, Visa slash Mastercard, we'll get into that, and Saks, you said asset classes benefiting from government pumps. Very interesting. The Fed stopping QE. Interesting. Anybody have comments on their predictions or each other's predictions from last year?

• 30:27Chamath Palihapitiya?

  On a percentage basis, David absolutely nailed it. Saks absolutely nailed it. On a dollar basis, the biggest business loser of this year was big tech. And I think that you saw three things happen, which I think are important for the future. The first was it was the most crowded trade, both by professional money managers as well as retail. And that fever finally broke in the last half of, in the second half of this year. And now going into, into these last few weeks, you're seeing a lot of panicked selling to cover losses and

• 31:06Chamath Palihapitiya?

  other things. So I think that number one, that happened. Number two, regulators basically said, we're going to go after these guys every single which way we can. And then number three, I think it started to change the innovation cycle where people now actually believe that they can't outspend because folks won't tolerate it. And the things that they're spending their money on seem kind of foolish. And so I think the, you know, big tech is probably not discussed enough, but it was a huge loser for this year in terms of what happened to them.

• 31:38Jason Calacanis?

  2022's actual biggest business loser, Chamath says, big tech. Friedberg, who is your biggest business loser for 2022?

• 31:47David Friedberg?

  I mean, this one's just a simple FTX. I mean, that was such a incredible revelation of the scale of the scam and the fraud and the craziness that went on. And I think what was interesting about FTX is it had implications not just for crypto and not just for kind of offshore regulatory, not just for fraud, but also for the investors. We had a whole debate about whether the press and journalists failed to kind of, you know, appropriately investigate this guy rather than give him accolades because he said the right things, which he said he did over I am. And investors failed to do relevant amounts of due diligence or form a board and have proper governance over him because they wanted to be part of the hot new thing and everyone had capital to deploy.

• 32:30David Friedberg?

  And I think what was interesting about the FTX failure is it didn't just, it wasn't just a failure due to fraud, but it revealed so many parts of kind of, you know, I call it, you know, systemic laziness and systemic kind of blind eye and systemic bias that allowed and enabled this to happen. It was really a revealing kind of failure. And that's why I kind of gave it the award.

• 32:55Jason Calacanis?

  Mr. David Sacks, who is your biggest business loser of 2022?

• 33:00David Sacks?

  Well, you kind of mentioned this. I picked Bob Chapek. He's the former Disney CEO. He was Iger's handpicked successor three years ago. Then the pandemic hit, which shut down the theme parks. Then I think the big mistake was allowing himself to be mau-mau by woke employees into picking a fight with DeSantis over the so-called Don't Say Gay bill. That caused DeSantis to retaliate by threatening the special privileges that Disney enjoys in the state. And then he had Iger undermining him behind the scenes. This was revealed, I think it was in a Wall Street Journal story, that he was grousing to insiders that Chapek was not soliciting his advice and he was undermining confidence in with the board. And recently, Chapek was forced out and Iger was put back in charge.

• 33:42Jason Calacanis?

  Fantastic choice for the biggest loser.

• 33:44Chamath Palihapitiya?

  How brutal does Iger look in that Wall Street Journal piece? I mean, would anybody work for him?

• 33:51Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, he is incredible. He looks terrible. I agree. I read that piece twice, actually. The CFO calling him up, she was the one who stabbed him, you know, and knifed Chapek. It's a great Wall Street Journal long read.

• 34:03Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I don't think that that happens without the support of the person waiting in the wings.

• 34:08Jason Calacanis?

  Hey, listen, there's a couple of jobs you never quit. You never quit a hit TV show. You never quit a hit band like Roger Waters did with Pink Floyd.

• 34:16Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Why didn't they just extend his retirement?

• 34:17Jason Calacanis?

  And you never quit the Disney job. It's the best job, it's the best CEO job in the world.

• 34:20Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But Jason, why go through this?

• 34:21Jason Calacanis?

  Never quit.

• 34:22Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Why go through the theatrics of like grooming somebody, putting them in your job and then undermining them? Like I, all I'm saying is if you're a good-

• 34:29Jason Calacanis?

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

• 34:32Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And also if like, if you're a good up and coming exec, I mean, what do you do if like, all of a sudden like, you know, you have the opportunity to get groomed for that job? It just seems really risky.

• 34:43Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. I mean, I, I think Bob Iger realized when he, in that piece, they say he went on his yacht, his wife didn't come with him. The Wall Street Journal piece is incredible and he's got bored and he's 70 something years old. He's almost like in the early seventies. Why would you give up the greatest job in the world? So he went back and he took it back.

• 35:00David Sacks?

  Didn't Disney have a mandatory retirement age?

• 35:02Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But this is my point is he was so, he was so prolific, he could have extended it. Why not just extend it and be done with it?

• 35:08David Sacks?

  Yeah.

• 35:09David Friedberg?

  Did you guys read the book he wrote?

• 35:11Jason Calacanis?

  Oh.

• 35:12David Friedberg?

  That-

• 35:12Jason Calacanis?

  Ride of a lifetime? What is it?

• 35:14David Friedberg?

  Yeah. And I think that what was interesting about that book was the entire thing was built around a series of deals that he did. It was like, I did this acquisition, then I did this acquisition, then I did this acquisition. And everything for him was building this, this, this empire by doing deals. And someone whose storyline and narrative that they tell of themselves, that's built as a series of deals is a deal junkie. And you're not going to be a deal junkie where, where that's your excitement, that's the thrill, that's the adventure that you get out of life. And then you go and sit on a yacht. You're not doing any deals sitting on a yacht and you're going to want to get back to that. And I think it's less about kind of management and product and it was much more about being in the midst of doing deals. And that's probably why, why he came back.

• 35:54David Sacks?

  If this was part of Iger's diabolical strategy, get back, let me just say like, one of the ways he did it, I mean- Had the right instincts, which is when this whole Florida debate happened over don't say gay, highly contentious. No comment. No comment. His instinct was just to stay out of it. But then Iger made some statements about how companies have to live with their values and that kind of stuff. And then the employees started, you know, again, you know, and Mao Maoing him to get involved. And he took the bait and he got involved. And what he didn't expect is that DeSantis wasn't going to just roll over. DeSantis hit him back really hard and it cost them economically. And then Yeah, that was a huge.

• 36:32Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And in the first interview that Iger gave when asked about this question, he was like, no comment.

• 36:38David Sacks?

  Yeah, he's like, we're not going to get involved in politics anymore. We're not getting involved in politics anymore. It was hilarious. That was hilarious. He nudged Chapek to basically get involved in politics and then Chapek basically was became cannon fodder for DeSantis. Exactly. And then Iger's like, oh, we're out of this now. I mean, how diabolical was that? So diabolical, so dirty.

• 36:59Jason Calacanis?

  The other two things were Chapek said, we're going to take away your P and Ls to each of the leaders. That is like just neutering them. That he basically said, everybody's under the CFO. Everybody's going to be on one P and L. That infuriated all the creatives. And then he went to war with Scarlett Johansson over a $10 million settlement for her black widow. He couldn't handle talent. He couldn't handle the politics and he wanted to control everybody's P and L, just unforced error after unforced error. Congratulations to my guy, Bob Iger. I own the stock.

• 37:30David Sacks?

  Do you think he was diabolical at all?

• 37:32Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, in the best possible way, in the best possible way, which means that Disney stock is going to go up. Yes, I'm buying more Disney stock this year.

• 37:38David Sacks?

  Is, is all like the woke progressive politics that he projects, is that all just a game to mask what a viper's nest their executive suite really is?

• 37:47Jason Calacanis?

  Are you telling me that Disney is a political corporation after Eisner and Bob Iger and all of this? Michael Ovitz? I mean, it's the history of Disney. It's the greatest job in the world. It is Game of Thrones to get that job. And Bob Iger got it back. He's my guy. I'm sticking with him. And they have the best IP in the business. I don't care how he gets that job back. He's awesome.

• 38:07David Friedberg?

  I gotta say, the IP at Warner Media is a real strong contender. I mean, that White Lotus, we were talking about this yesterday, how good White Lotus, uh, season two was.

• 38:15Jason Calacanis?

  All right, let's open up the White Lotus discussion.

• 38:16David Friedberg?

  It is incredible how HBO produces extraordinary hit after extraordinary hit. The quality and the consistency of that quality coming out of HBO is like nothing else. You'll go, I mean, look, Avatar two, I did not like Avatar one. I thought it was junk. Avatar two is getting panned for being junk as well. Not everything that comes out of Disney is a hit. They certainly have the best franchises. But man, Warner Media has a lot to contend with and, uh, you know, they could end up being a real challenger to Disney in the years ahead.

• 38:45Jason Calacanis?

  Sax, did you watch The White Lotus, season two? Yes or no?

• 38:48David Sacks?

  Sorry, I haven't gotten there.

• 38:49Jason Calacanis?

  No problem. It is absolutely fantastic. We have to do a little fan service here. What did you love, Chamath, about White Lotus, season two? Give the fans a little service here.

• 38:57David Sacks?

  Wait, it's on season two. I didn't even see season one. I don't even know what you guys are talking about.

• 39:02Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, it's the hottest show in television.

• 39:04David Friedberg?

  Well, I'll, I'll tell you what's incredible is there's a diversity of characters and they weave the super like, you know, interesting story together, but each of the characters are so distinct. And the characters are played so well. I mean, we were talking about, um, you know, we were kind of at dinner last night, talking about who our favorite character was on the show and everyone has a different answer and everyone has a different reason. And then there are characters that you hate, but the fact that you hate them and the fact that you despise them draws you in. You're drawn into these characters. I think that the, the way that they kind of portrayed and the way that the characters were acted by the, um, by the actors, uh, and then the way that they all kind of weave together to tell this extraordinary story.

• 39:44David Friedberg?

  Uh, it was really, um, it was really compelling and it was like just super impressive, uh, directing, acting, writing, everything.

• 39:50Chamath Palihapitiya?

  There are a handful of scenes in season one and season two, which I would say are unbelievably psychologically violent. And there's just no other way to describe like. How they just expose and and by the way, they do it with simple shots, very simple dialogue. It's almost nonchalant in the way that they present these truth bombs. And you have to sit there and process it. And you're just like, oh, my God, it's just it's wave after wave. It's an incredible, incredibly well written show.

• 40:27Jason Calacanis?

  The character development is extraordinary.

• 40:29Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Amazing.

• 40:30David Friedberg?

  Production and set design, by the way, also, I mean, when you when you watch that, don't you want to?

• 40:34Jason Calacanis?

  Jennifer Coolidge is amazing, Tremoff.

• 40:37Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Do you guys remember in season ones? Sacks will remember this because Sacks watched it. Season one, the family is sitting at the table where they're watching the Hawaiian dance. And Paula, the guest of the family gets up and leaves. She can't take it anymore. And then the next day they're in a discussion about it. And the father says something about, I think, hierarchy or imperialism or something. And it goes around the table and she just deadpan. She says, well, maybe it's just time for others to eat. Talking about, you know, like fixing these wrongs. And I had to listen to it two or three times. I'm like, oh, my God, that is that is a line that just sticks in your brain. There's a few of those in in that show that I think are exciting.

• 41:17David Friedberg?

  And I was saying like they they really draw you in. The set design, the production design is so compelling. You want to be there. You want to be in that experience with those characters.

• 41:28Chamath Palihapitiya?

  The pineapple suite.

• 41:29David Friedberg?

  Yeah, you're like totally drawn to the pineapple suite. I mean, and then in this season, that whole hotel, I looked up the hotel, by the way, online. They had, you know, their own set design people come in and redo the hotel, but it is an actual hotel. And they just made it so magical. Yeah, it was such an incredible.

• 41:44Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, Freiburg, we should make that the host of the All In Summit 2023. It would be wonderful.

• 41:52Jason Calacanis?

  Sorry, I'm working on my Jennifer Coolidge.

• 41:54David Friedberg?

  Tell your director, David Sacks, what you'd like him to do for you. Yeah.

• 41:57Jason Calacanis?

  My biggest loser was crypto, and I think there'll be a subsequent domino to fall, which is now that Gary G, head of the SEC, has FTX and the FTT tokens as the grift, he's going to go down the list of other tokens and he is going to start doing more prosecutions of grifts in crypto. Biggest loser for me. All right, biggest business surprise. Let's see if we can get Sacks back engaged in the conversation now that we're not talking about art and life. Sax, last year, your biggest business surprise.

• 42:34David Friedberg?

  Sax just produced a movie about Dolly.

• 42:36Jason Calacanis?

  I know, I'm joking with him, he's a true artist. And he sold it to Mark Cuban, congratulations on the sale, David.

• 42:43David Sacks?

  I guess me and Cuban are besties now.

• 42:44Jason Calacanis?

  Fantastic. In 2021, our selections for biggest business surprises. I was very surprised by Dow's Chamath by Moderna, Sax by Tech Moving to Miami and Friedberg. You were surprised by NFTs. What were we surprised by in 2022? Friedberg, we'll start with you.

• 43:02David Friedberg?

  Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter, I think, took everyone by surprise. It kind of went, I mean, this is such an obvious one, but it went from a whimsical fantasy and idea to suddenly, you know, cold-hearted reality with, you know, a huge kind of negotiating saga that took place and court battles and all the drama that ensued. And here's what I think was most surprising about it. It wasn't just the acquisition and the fact that the acquisition closed, but it was the incredible veracity of the head-cutting, cost-cutting, the demands that people return to work, return to the office. And then what was most surprising that followed that is the impact that that seems to have had

• 43:43David Friedberg?

  on the rest of Silicon Valley, where now nearly every VC I speak with, every CEO, every board is looking to Elon's behavior for right or for wrong, for, you know, moral or not, and saying that's a model for how you can challenge your team to achieve the impossible in an impossibly difficult environment, which is what we find ourselves in. And so I think it was a series of surprising events. He bought Twitter, he made these incredible changes, and then everyone seems to be looking to that as a model. And it's really resonated, it's created a rippling effect. I'm not saying it's good, I'm not saying it's bad, I'm not saying it's moral, right or wrong. But the whole thing was really an incredible, surprising, unexpected saga this year. So I give the Elon acquisition of Twitter kind of the award.

• 44:23Jason Calacanis?

  Chamath, do you have a biggest surprise?

• 44:26Chamath Palihapitiya?

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

• 44:32Chamath Palihapitiya?

  hawkishness on inflation. I think everybody wants all of this to be over and I think we're definitely in the last few innings of it. But I think what was surprising was how consistent and how hawkish and how bearish Jerome Powell was. Every chance he got, he didn't capitulate or waiver from the key message which he was saying from the beginning, which is, we have the tools to fix a broken economy, but we don't have the tools to fix runaway inflation. And so we will raise rates higher than anyone expects and keep them there longer than anybody wants because on the back end of it, we can fix a few broken bones. But if left unchecked,

• 45:15Chamath Palihapitiya?

  this could really do a lot of damage. And I think that that was an enormous surprise that all the political pressure in the world, all of the financial capital markets pressure in the world, did nothing to change his position.

• 45:27Jason Calacanis?

  Sacks, what was your biggest business surprise of 2022? David Sacks' biggest?

• 45:33David Sacks?

  Well, it was, it was a pretty big surprise that Adobe bought Figma for 20 billion. That price tag in this environment, pretty big surprise. But I gotta say, I think Friedberg nailed it. Uh, gotta say that the business saga of the year was Elon buying Twitter. First, liberal media was up in arms that he might do it. Then they insisted that he must complete the deal. In any event, he, he did ultimately buy the company. Now he's affecting his changes. I agree. That's the big business story of this year. Certainly was a big surprise for me that I got deposition for six hours.

• 46:04David Friedberg?

  Is it a surprise that you're sitting in Twitter's headquarters today, right now?

• 46:08David Sacks?

  Yeah, it is a surprise. But just by the way, the rumors and speculation are getting out of hand. I am not a candidate for CEO of Twitter. So I want to put the kibosh on that because it's starting to get out of hand.

• 46:19David Friedberg?

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

• 46:22Jason Calacanis?

  All right. I guess, uh, let me know.

• 46:23David Friedberg?

  You've earned it. You've earned it. You've worked hard. You demonstrated your competency. You're, yeah. J Cal, the last man standing, last man standing.

• 46:31Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Outwit, outlast.

• 46:33Jason Calacanis?

  Now that Sacks has said he is not taking the job, a bunch of libs have just stopped taking Xanax. The libs' biggest fear was Sacks was gonna get that job. We just canceled a bunch of Xanax, uh, prescriptions. Uh, congratulations to the libs. Sacks is not going to be your overlord on Twitter. For me, it's obvious. Uh, the Twitter acquisition is the biggest surprise by far and away. Friedberg, I couldn't have summarized it better. I will

• 46:59Jason Calacanis?

  In six weeks, what we have seen there is nothing short of extraordinary. Have there been bumps in the road? Has it been a little chaotic at times perhaps? But the features that are coming fast and furious are going to be the story going forward. You've seen Twitter for business, Saks had his fingerprints, all that. You may fingerprints all over that. You may have seen hashtags for stock tickers. I was briefly involved in that. There are going to be so many features coming. And this is what Elon's zone of excellence is. Product. He is an engineer. He's a product genius. The proof is in the pudding, whether it's rocket ships or the cars. We're going to see a parade of features.

• 47:40Jason Calacanis?

  I predict in another six to 18 weeks, we will see people talking about all the great features in Twitter, not any of the transitional issues. And people will be shocked. My runner up, Meta stock collapsing. That was my runner up for the biggest business shock is that they just absolutely collapsed.

• 48:00David Sacks?

  I was just going to add to what you're saying about new features launching. While we've been sitting here on this pod and I've been checking my Twitter feed, there's a new feature where there's a view count on all of your tweets and all of everybody else's tweets as well. So you can see how many views a tweet is generating. So this tweet that I posted yesterday has 1.5 million views. It's like incredible. So it really shows the incredible reach of Twitter. And anybody who's thinking about going to like some knockoff like Mastodon or something is going to have to contend with the fact that it doesn't have nearly the distribution. So I think this really shows the power of Twitter. And then Dave Rubin noticed my, I tweeted this just a second ago.

• 48:43David Sacks?

  And Dave Rubin noted that the New York Times doesn't have anywhere near the views for its tweets because they bought all their followers, which is interesting. I didn't know that, but I just went over to the New York Times profile and my tweets are routinely getting 10 to 20 times more reach, more views than theirs. So this is a super interesting indicator of who actually people are paying attention to on Twitter. It's fascinating.

• 49:10Jason Calacanis?

  This is fascinating. I'm looking at my own. I just did, how do you give a $30 billion fraud bail, referring to SBF, and that was just less than an hour ago. No, it was 30 minutes. Yeah, an hour ago. And I have 50,000 views already, which is 10% of my follower account. So this is an extraordinary. You see right next to likes, retweets, quote tweets, "The feature train is coming, and this will change the dialogue." All these haters who are like, Twitter's gonna go down, who are rooting against Elon. Let me tell you something. If a guy can land two rockets at a time, and he can literally restart the electric car movement, and he becomes the number one car in any category he releases a car in, how on earth would you bet against him to build software? You have to be idiotic.

• 49:55David Friedberg?

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

• 49:57Jason Calacanis?

  Sorry.

• 49:58David Friedberg?

  Keep doing the awards. I get it. I get it. Second ad. Yeah, you're selling a product for a company that you guys are working at. Like, I mean, come on.

• 50:05Jason Calacanis?

  I'm not working at the company. Seth's working at the company.

• 50:07David Friedberg?

  Well, you guys are advisors, right?

• 50:08David Sacks?

  Well, hey, Nick, can you, let me show one other feature, because I think it's cool.

• 50:11Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, let's go. Yeah, keep going, features.

• 50:13David Sacks?

  Nick, pull up my profile real quick.

• 50:15Jason Calacanis?

  Welcome to this week in Twitter.

• 50:16David Friedberg?

  Oh, my God.

• 50:18David Sacks?

  Twitter now has affiliate badges. You can see, I've got a little Craft Ventures badge next to my name. So if you, you should be able to click on it, actually, to get to the Craft Ventures profile. Yeah. So you're gonna be able to affiliate users with business accounts, and it creates kind of secondary badges after the blue check. I think even the corporate journalists are gonna love this, because if you're a New York Times writer, you'll have a little NYT badge next to your name, Wall Street Journal, whatever, you'll have that little badge. So more and more people are gonna get blue checks, and then people are gonna have secondary or even tertiary badges that are basically specific to their affiliations.

• 50:58Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 50:58David Sacks?

  So I think it's gonna be killer.

• 51:00Jason Calacanis?

  Let's make sure we get, let's get an all-in badge.

• 51:01David Sacks?

  We are gonna have all-in badges really soon.

• 51:03Jason Calacanis?

  Awesome. Okay, let's go.

• 51:05David Sacks?

  Except for Friedberg. Friedberg's not gonna go.

• 51:06Jason Calacanis?

  That was our biggest business surprises, and we just canceled your account, Friedberg. You're just gonna, they're locked out. We just took away your...

• 51:13David Friedberg?

  No one goes to it anyway. It's all good. Don't worry about it.

• 51:16Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, best science breakthrough. Here's an easy one for us to do. 2022 biggest science breakthrough. What have you got, Sultan of Science? We of course have to start with you. 22 biggest science breakthrough. Friedberg.

• 51:28David Friedberg?

  Yeah, I'm gonna give it, obviously, to the demonstration of net energy gain from the National Ignition Facility in Plasma Fusion. That we talked about last week. I wouldn't call it a breakthrough, by the way. I think we used that as a misnomer last week, but I'm still going to put it in this category. It's more of a milestone along a very long path, a very arduous path, a very difficult work that's been taking decades. So it's a great milestone, but I think what was so important and impactful and powerful about it is that it's really catalyzed a change, a sea change in the investing and the outlook that this is becoming more reality. As I mentioned last week, we've seen an increase of nearly 40% in the number of fusion startups and the amount of capital that's flowing in is now reaching 10 billion a year. So

• 52:09David Friedberg?

  this is becoming, you know, a real investable or an area that's getting real investment. Some people might not think it's very investable, but that's why I think it's been an important year for fusion. And I think, you know, it's something I highlighted last year I was excited about.

• 52:23Jason Calacanis?

  And I too picked fusion. Also, just point of clarity, last week, some people, Chamath, before you go to your prediction, were saying, hey, you're talking your book on solar when you were in your disagreement with Friedberg. That's obvious. You've been very upfront that you're investing in solar. You placed your bet.

• 52:36Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah, 100%.

• 52:38Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. So just for clarity, everybody knows he made that bet. He's talked about it incessantly.

• 52:44Chamath Palihapitiya?

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

• 52:47Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 52:48Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Let me, let me further clarify what I said last week and why it's important. Nick, can you bring up the capital asset pricing model again? The most important thing for me is to make sure that we don't misallocate human capital into endeavors that I think are best left for research institutions funded by the government. And I think when you look at a capital asset pricing model and try to build one out for fusion as an example, the expected rate of return that you need to get from this is just astronomically high because of the beta of that investment risk and the market risk premium you have to generate. And so, you know, from my perspective, I think that there are probably four or five labs

• 53:31Chamath Palihapitiya?

  in the world that are capable of actually getting us to a positive energy equation. I think Friedberg, I really thank you for actually saying that it wasn't a breakthrough and more of a milestone. I think the real breakthrough is when we have positive, not just joules, but we actually convert that into electrical energy, right? And we actually talk about power and watts. And I think that most people listening probably don't even understand the difference between joules and watts, or don't even care, and they want to jump around here or there. So the point is that there's an enormous path we need to take in physics, and I think it's best done in governments. And I don't want to see a bunch of billions of dollars get wasted to get marginal cost of energy to zero right now.

• 54:10Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think there is a point in time where private startups can take the last 20 or 30%, but I think about this like the internet, which is you needed DARPA to build V1, and then it could be handed over to private industry. And I think fusion, when we look back, will look very similar. And all the folks that tried to build, you know, versions of the internet that were private, I think, found themselves lagging because there's just a level of investment that's required that's best served in government. So anyways, that's, let's clarify that for all the, for all the folks who got their panties in a bunch yesterday. For the Brigadoons. But in any event, my science breakthrough of the year is that there was a 13-year-old girl, this was, you know, because of all of this fusion stuff, actually, we didn't even get to cover it because it happened in the same week.

• 54:55Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And I think this is infinitely more impressive and is an actual breakthrough, which is a 13-year-old girl in the United Kingdom who had a heretofore uncurable form of leukemia, T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia. So typically, you start in chemotherapy. If chemotherapy doesn't work, you move to bone marrow transplants. And it was uncurable. And a lab in the UK, basically using CRISPR, edited these transplant T-cells to go in and wipe out her cancer, and now her cancer is literally undetectable.

• 55:35Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Now, if you bring up that capital asset pricing model again, Nick, what I'll tell you is the rate of return on a human life, in my opinion, is infinite. And so here is an unbelievable breakthrough that got very little attention because everybody was wrapped around the axle of fusion. It happened in the same week, so maybe it's understandable. I didn't understand it. But I think this is the single most important thing that happened in science, not just this year, but frankly, in the last decade. Because if you can actually now do base editing and eradicate, at least in this case, a blood based cancer, and eventually we'll be able to bring that and use that towards solid state tumor cancers.

• 56:18Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It's a huge breakthrough in just human longevity and human quality of life. And that happened just a few weeks ago.

• 56:26Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, and of course, for David Sacks, his biggest science breakthrough is, I don't care. So, moving on. Sacks, go ahead, tell us.

• 56:35David Sacks?

  Yeah, I know. This category reminds me of, remember when Biden had that moment where he's like, America can be defined in a single word? And then he's like, that's kind of how I feel about this category.

• 56:47Speaker 05

  America is a nation that can be defined in a single word. I was going to foot him.

• 56:55Jason Calacanis?

  Amazing how you figured out a way to be derogatory about Biden in the science section. A new low even for you, Sacks. Oh, it's a good one, Sacks, I like it. All right, biggest flash in the pan, 2021. This is what we said were the biggest flash in the pan. I said the woke socialist leadership of cities, i.e. Chesa Boudin. Friedberg said the Constitution Dow. Sacks said the word transitory, very well played. And Chamath said the metaverse, also very well played.

• 57:25Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Oh, nailed that, nailed it.

• 57:28Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, very good. Everybody get your flowers, enjoy. All of those seem like pretty good selections. But this year is what everybody wants to hear about. Friedberg, tell us now, who is your 2022 biggest flash in the pan?

• 57:41David Friedberg?

  The undisputable, biggest flash in the pan of 2022 was the All In Summit.

• 57:48Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, wow, that hurts.

• 57:51David Friedberg?

  It went. And it will always be a strong and significant memory. It was such a hot thing for a minute and then it died. So to the All In Summit, I raised my glass. I pour one out. I toast to you, to Miami. And unless David Sacks carries it from here, it was a flash in the pan.

• 58:10Jason Calacanis?

  It was a flash in the pan. Sacks, who's your flash? Which Democrat is the flash in the pan for you?

• 58:15David Sacks?

  Well, this is where I have Liz Truss. As you guys mentioned, she only survived 44 days as PM. I mean, that's only for scaramouchies.

• 58:24Jason Calacanis?

  Scaramouchies.

• 58:29David Sacks?

  She was basically fired by the bond markets after she combined a Thatcher-esque tax cut with massive energy subsidies to counter the price spikes caused by the war in Ukraine that she was actually committed to. This was deemed untenable by the UK central bank. It crashed the pound. And I think there is a serious point here, which is that as much as Thatcher and Reagan were the two towering heroic figures of the 1980s, I think zombie Thatcherism is not going to be electorally viable in the UK, just like zombie Reaganism is not going to be viable in the United States. I think that the conservative movement has to stop living in the past. We have to develop fresh ideas to meet the economic and foreign policy challenges of today.

• 59:11Jason Calacanis?

  Trumath, do you have a flash in the pan?

• 59:13Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I actually think fusion literally was a flash in the pan. It was, it lasted 10 to the negative 10 seconds. So that more, less of a flash you can't have without being a flash in the pan.

• 59:24Jason Calacanis?

  They haven't. Hey, Sacks.

• 59:26David Sacks?

  Hey, guys, look who's here.

• 59:27Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Oh, look who it is.

• 59:30Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, is it the proprietor?

• 59:32Chamath Palihapitiya?

  The proprietor, the owner.

• 59:33Speaker 06

  We're customer support at your service.

• 59:37David Friedberg?

  Sacks, you spent the last 15 minutes selling your new features on the podcast. Pretty exciting.

• 59:42David Sacks?

  Well, the, like, the views are, like, incredible. Yeah. I mean, and I saw Dave Rubin already made an observation that if you look at New York Times, their views are maybe one-tenth like my views, just me as a lone tweeter. And he said that their followers are inflated by just basically buying a bunch of follower accounts.

• 1:00:01Speaker 06

  Yeah, the the the views thing is huge. That's why I I I push the views, which is like actually a lot harder feature to implement than you'd think because the sheer number of uh transactions uh per second like uh uh it it's I I think it sort of requires system wide uh on the order of of three mu- three million transactions a second to actually calculate the view to you know calculate and display the view count, FYI, for Twitter, Twitter Global. So it's like three million per second. It's a lot.

• 1:00:30Jason Calacanis?

  For those of you listening, Elon Musk has had joined the pod. Elon, how how's uh how's the first six weeks been, generally speaking, of owning Twitter?

• 1:00:38Speaker 06

  Well, it's been quite a roller coaster, which uh obviously you've um but witnessed and been on the roller coaster as well.

• 1:00:45Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, the Dramamine. I've taken the Dramamine. It's it's quite up and down.

• 1:00:48Speaker 06

  I mean, it's exciting, uh but I I think it's sort of has its highs and lows, to say the least. Um but overall, it seems to be going in a good direction and um you know, we've we've got the the expenses reasonably under control, so the company's not like on the in the fast lane of bankruptcy anymore. And we're uh releasing features uh faster than Twitter's history at the same time as having contained the costs and and uh reduced the cost structure by a factor of three, maybe maybe four. So you know, the the the verified uh is obviously that's that's that's huge. It's revenue stream as well as um

• 1:01:32Speaker 06

  uh a a means of identifying of like knowing that it's a real person and not a barter or trial situation.

• 1:01:42Speaker 06

  The ha- ha- having the affiliation, organization affiliation, which I suspect you talked about, that was a an idea of David's that was great um to uh you know, have organization affiliation. So you can know that somebody is um an actual professor at Stanford or an uh that this particular handle is actually Disney, not someone simply putting, I work at Disney in my in their bio.

• 1:02:07Speaker 06

  So I think that's gonna be really helpful. It just really just having detailed and nuanced verification. So of all the various things that you say you are, are these things validated by other people and organizations?

• 1:02:24David Friedberg?

  Can you tell us how you do product iteration, Elon? Because one of the things that I think some people got jolted by over the last couple of weeks is like a bunch of things got taken away or changed or rules changed or policies changed and there was very quick action. And then people had all this negative feedback about the quick action without communication. But your extraordinary talent is to iterate product to success. Can you just maybe share with people how you do product iteration in this context to help them understand how some of these decisions get made and why moving quickly is so important? And just, you know, how you're doing this?

• 1:02:59Speaker 06

  I'm a big believer in like, you want to look at the net output. So it's sort of like, you know, what's the batting average? If you're, it's like baseball.

• 1:03:11Speaker 06

  The point is, is not that you like, you know, hit the ball, but it's like, well, how many home runs you get and how like, what's your actual?

• 1:03:20David Friedberg?

  Your slugging percentage?

• 1:03:21Speaker 06

  Yeah, slugging percentage. Yeah, yeah. It's like you've got to swing for the fences. You're gonna, you're gonna, you know, strike out a bit more, but we're gonna swing for the fences here at Twitter and we're gonna do it quickly. So, and I think generally like my error rate and sort of being the chief twit will be less over time. But, you know, in the beginning, we'll, we'll make obviously sort of a lot more mistakes. And, you know, because it's, I'm new to the, I'm like, hey, I just got here, man. So, I mean, if you look at like the actual amount of improvement that's happened at Twitter in terms of like, so like having costs that are not insane and getting and actually shipping

• 1:04:06Speaker 06

  product that on balance is good, I think that is, that, that's great. Like, I think we're actually executing well and getting things done. I think we'll have fewer, fewer gaffes in the future.

• 1:04:20David Friedberg?

  How did you get to your intuition on what the efficient frontier of employees needed to be to make the product better?

• 1:04:27Speaker 06

  Well.

• 1:04:33Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:04:35David Sacks?

  Well, I observed part of this where you basically asked the question, who here is critical and who here is exceptional?

• 1:04:42Speaker 06

  Yes, I mean, so, I mean, really, the, what the criteria is trying to apply, and obviously you're not gonna be perfect if you're moving fast and there's a lot of, you know, people you're talking about here, is that anyone who is exceptional at what they do, where the role is critical, they have a positive effect on others, and they are trusted, meaning they put the company's interests before their own, should stay.

• 1:05:09Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Pretty straightforward.

• 1:05:10Speaker 06

  Yeah. And, you know, also, and it also is up for working, you know, working hard, like,

• 1:05:19Speaker 06

  that would not, that would not, this, these, that's not, was not Twitter's prior culture.

• 1:05:24Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah, were you surprised that, that the intersection of that circle and the people that left was basically 25%? Were you surprised it was that deep? Or did you think your intuition was like, it's probably somewhere in here?

• 1:05:36Speaker 06

  Well, I think you could just stand back and say, without knowing how many employees Twitter has at all, and say, how many people are really needed to run Twitter?

• 1:05:49Speaker 06

  Like, let's say you don't know what the employee headcount number is at all. How many people are needed to keep the site operational? Like, let's say excluding product, product evolution, you basically have to keep the servers going.

• 1:06:03Speaker 06

  And, uh, you have to have customer, sort of a support function to take down, uh, material that is in violation of the law. How many people?

• 1:06:16Speaker 06

  What's the minimum number of people?

• 1:06:18Chamath Palihapitiya?

  That's in the hundreds, probably.

• 1:06:20Speaker 06

  It's not, exactly, it's not, it's not like a giant number.

• 1:06:23Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:23David Sacks?

  Twitter still has like 2,000 people, right?

• 1:06:25Speaker 06

  Yeah, we still have 2,000 people, it's not, nothing. And, and actually, if you, there's, there's actually on the order of, uh... Like almost 5,000 contractors.

• 1:06:36David Sacks?

  Still.

• 1:06:37Speaker 06

  Almost, yeah, almost all of the what's called trust and safety work, which is like the support functions for the site are done by contractors.

• 1:06:47David Sacks?

  You're doing a lot more to take down hate speech than the company previously was doing.

• 1:06:51Speaker 06

  Yeah, absolutely. Like hate speech impressions are down by a third and will get even lower.

• 1:06:57Jason Calacanis?

  Maybe you could speak a little bit to the what we discovered, I think in those early weeks, which was the incentive. The incentive previously was to create as many accounts as possible. And there were a lot of quick fixes to lowering all these, you know, what people might call bot accounts. In some cases, it was people opening many millions of accounts. But we discovered this very early. How easy was it for you with the tech team to maybe lower the bot count and all the fake accounts? Maybe you could speak a little bit to that because people have seemed to think that, gosh, it's a really hard thing to get rid of bots and it turns out it isn't.

• 1:07:33Speaker 06

  We still have a fair number of bots in the system. But the like, I think the incentive structure, the way Twitter was set up previously was this relentless focus on what they called MDA, which is monetizable daily active users. Although I would say the monetizable part is dubious. But at least things that appeared to be monetizable or could be passed off as monetizable daily active users. So this like created an incentive to turn a blind eye to a fake accounts. So if the incentive structure is like, you know, maximizes the appearance of monetizable daily active users, then you're just, it's a strong incentive to pretend that a bot

• 1:08:17Speaker 06

  is real. And that's what happened. So.

• 1:08:24Speaker 06

  We're taking a lot of steps to reduce the bots and trolls situation.

• 1:08:30Speaker 06

  So many.

• 1:08:33Speaker 06

  And I think you're seeing that in the usage. Like it's not like relatively rare to have your replies filled with crypto scams.

• 1:08:44Jason Calacanis?

  I'm not seeing any anymore. Freebird, you had a question.

• 1:08:46David Friedberg?

  Yeah, I mean, just on your earlier question, you know, Elon, when you first started making changes at Twitter after you bought the business, a lot of people kind of took notice at how extraordinarily swift and significant those changes were.

• 1:09:01Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:09:01David Friedberg?

  And there's a lot of technology companies that have CEOs and investors and boards. And we all talk to a lot of them and they're all now having a conversation like, look at what Elon did at Twitter. How can we do something as aggressive, as swift, as deep? Do you think much about kind of the model you're playing for other businesses and other business leaders, particularly in Silicon Valley and how you're operating Twitter? Do you ever kind of talk about that? Because I know you mostly talk about your business and you talk about the businesses you're running, but you're having a big influence, I think, in how other people kind of act and behave that are other business leaders and run other technology companies.

• 1:09:38Speaker 06

  I mean, to Frank, I'm not, I'm not really, you know, I'm thinking about that much because I'm just thinking about like, how do we, I was just like, you know, just get Twitter to be financially healthy place and, and fix the engine of engineering so we can have a rapid evolution of, of new products. So, and, you know, I mean, I guess I'm in sort of, in some ways, unfortunate position where I don't have to answer, it's not public and we don't have a board really. So, I mean, so I can just go, you know, and, and I can take actions that are drastic.

• 1:10:26Speaker 06

  And obviously, if I make a bunch of mistakes, then Twitter won't succeed, and that'll be pretty embarrassing and sad. But as long as, like I said, as long as the batting average is good, that the wins significantly outweigh the mistakes, then it'll be a great future. And I'm very optimistic about where things are headed.

• 1:10:55Jason Calacanis?

  I think a lot of people want to talk about or understand Elon, your position on freedom of speech and your principles. I'm curious, you've been pretty upfront about it. How do you think about it post-acquisition? What speech should be allowed on the platform? Kanye came back, he just went insane. His account got revoked. What have you learned, I guess, now that you own it? Because you must be getting a lot of inbound from people asking you, hey, how are decisions going to be made, etc. You've been clear, transparency is super important in this. But what are your thoughts on free speech and speech on a platform like this?

• 1:11:29Speaker 06

  Well, I mean, the general principle, I think, is that we should hew close to the law in any given country. So the laws vary quite a lot by country. So I think we should be doing free speech that's close, close to the law. And that's the general principle. I think there are other things where it's like, okay, like, for example, if you're an advertiser, you don't want your ad, like, let's say it's a family movie,

• 1:12:07Speaker 06

  next to some NSFW content, even if that content is text. They'll be like, that's probably, we don't, you know. So that's part of why, you know, like, so there's more of an allowance for what you might, what somebody call hate speech on the system, but it's just, it's not going to be promoted. It's not like, we're not going to be recommending hate speech. It's a risk of stating the obvious.

• 1:12:46Speaker 06

  And we're not going to monetize hate speech. So, or, or negative speech, like that's nor would advertisers want us to, you know, any, any, I think it's going to be a rare product that wants to be next to seriously negative stuff.

• 1:13:01Jason Calacanis?

  I was gonna say, you referred to it as, hey, freedom of speech, but not reach. Because this is a very nuanced discussion, like, should this stuff be able to hit the trends, you know, and that kind of stuff?

• 1:13:09Speaker 06

  Yeah. Like, it's certainly possible that some things that will be regarded as hate speech will hit, will hit, will hit trends. But I think it's going to be relatively unusual, especially as we are doing a better job of controlling the bots and trolls situation. And, and I do want to emphasize, like, there's a difference between bots and trolls. Like bots are like fully automated accounts, but like a troll farm would be where you've got like, you know, a hundred people in a warehouse somewhere, each with a hundred phones. And so they're actually humans, and they're going to pass a capture test, or, you know, and they can, you know, reply, reply, and they're, because they're actually good humans, but it's actually 10,000

• 1:13:46Speaker 06

  accounts that are just, that are, that are obviously not operating as, as, as real people. So, that, that's, you know, stuff like that can cause things to, to, to trend negatively. That's why I'm like a big proponent of having just a low-cost verification capability. And, um, yeah, so, but like, this is definitely a work in progress. So, there's, um, like I said, there's going to be, and I did, like, one of the first things I said after the acquisition closed was like, we're going to make a bunch of mistakes, but then we'll try to recover from them quickly. And that's, uh, that's what we've done.

• 1:14:28Speaker 06

  And I think we've generally succeeded in recovering up from them quickly. And, um, It's been going pretty well.

• 1:14:37Jason Calacanis?

  Was the Paul Graham and journalists' suspensions mistakes? Have you talked about this publicly? About how that all kind of got resolved at the end?

• 1:14:45Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, the Paul Graham suspension was definitely a mistake. And I actually called Paul Graham to apologize personally for that one.

• 1:14:50Jason Calacanis?

  You did? Yeah. Oh, great.

• 1:14:53Speaker 06

  Yeah. So, you know, on the journalist front, I think the journalists' suspensions were not a mistake in that, for some reason, a bunch of journalists thought they were better than everyone else, and that if they engage in doxing and break the rules in various ways, that they're not subject to suspension even though your average citizen is. And I think that's just messed up. The same rules should apply to people who call themselves journalists as to, you know, anyone else on the system. They shouldn't be sort of above the rules. For some reason, they thought they should be. That doesn't make sense.

• 1:15:38Speaker 06

  I don't think that's right.

• 1:15:39Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. And the rules being transparent and upfront, I think that's what everybody's looking forward to. Maybe some just complete clarity and transparency. And you said from the beginning, when somebody gets suspended, or this shadow banning, and this sort of tips into this really weird stuff that we discovered during, or you discovered, or the journalists discovered during the Twitter files, it's kind of a bummer that people are being sanctioned or shadow banned, and they don't know it. If we're going to have a system, the rules should be clear to everybody.

• 1:16:08Speaker 06

  Yeah, absolutely. So, something I've committed to, and we'll, I think, probably be able to roll that out in January. Just, by the way, there is like a bit of a, you know, we are not going to be rolling out a ton of new features over, you know, Christmas and New Years and stuff. So, there's like a, you know, the next sort of feature set will probably roll out mid to late January. And hopefully in that, we can include information about why an account is suspended or has what is called within Twitter, visibility filtering, aka shadow banning. So...

• 1:16:56Speaker 06

  And some of these things like are like this. There's a lot of things that just happen accidentally. Where there's, you know, the rules in the system that are meant to detect whether someone's a sort of bot or troll or like brigading where they're like, you know, and then an account is sort of innocently caught up in that.

• 1:17:19Speaker 06

  So like there were some accounts just suspended yesterday because I would temporarily suspended. Like they got like 12 hour suspensions because someone in customers, someone in trust and safety thought that they had posted a nude photo of Hunter Biden, something.

• 1:17:46Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Here we go. Oh, no.

• 1:17:49Speaker 06

  But they hadn't. They hadn't actually done that. Um, I don't know. It was just basically a mistake. There were some accounts that were that were got a 12 hour suspension yesterday for a in error. And then they weren't they're unsure why it why it happened. It was just essentially a mistake in the with Twitter customer support that was corrected.

• 1:18:07Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Elon, let me let me ask you just a slightly broader question. One of the things we just talked about was the regime change that's happened where, you know, we all have to act differently now that the risk free rate is probably going to get to 5%. And I'm just curious, across all your businesses, so Twitter, yes, but really more importantly, Tesla, SpaceX, are there decisions that you will make differently or not at all or will make that you wouldn't have made otherwise in this new regime? And how often do you think about that kind of stuff?

• 1:18:41Speaker 06

  Well, I think like it's more like like it does seem like we're headed into a recession here in 2023. The magnitude of that recession is debatable, but I think it's at least a a light to moderate recession. Potentially, it's on the order of 2009. So that's, so I think it's it's it's wise to kind of like prepare for the worst, hope for the best, prepare for the worst. Don't get too adventurous, like like watch out for margin debt.

• 1:19:12Speaker 06

  Like I would really advise people to not have a margin debt in a volatile stock market. And, you know, from a cash standpoint, keep powder dry.

• 1:19:28Speaker 06

  You can get some pretty extreme things happening in a down market. Like Brett Johnson, who was CFO, who is CFO of SpaceX, was at

• 1:19:40Speaker 06

  Broadcom in 2000. And he said that, and that's a good company making good products.

• 1:19:47Speaker 06

  And he said that from peak to trough, I think in less than 12 months, Broadcom went down 97%.

• 1:19:55Speaker 06

  So like even if you had a small margin loan there, you got crushed. It subsequently recovered and I think to much higher levels, but you know, if there's like mass panic in the stock market, then you've got to be really be careful about margin debt. So.

• 1:20:16Speaker 06

  But I mean, this is just, as we know, this, the economy is cyclic, so.

• 1:20:23Speaker 06

  You're, and it's somewhat overdue for a recession.

• 1:20:29Speaker 06

  And my best guess is that, you know, we have sort of stormy times for a year to a year and a half, and then things start to dawn breaks roughly in Q2 24, if I were to get, that's like my best guess.

• 1:20:49Speaker 06

  Recession's don't like, booms don't last forever, but neither do recessions.

• 1:20:54Jason Calacanis?

  And it's a 14 year boom, so a six quarter recession seems like, you know, that might, that might actually bounce out. The last time it was what, four or five quarters? So it's not easy. Hey, um, the Twitter files.

• 1:21:08Jason Calacanis?

  How, how, how much longer are these going to go on? It seems like every week, another drop, and these are pretty controversial. How much longer are the Twitter files going to go on in your mind? Yeah. And maybe why is this important to you to make sure that people understand the stuff?

• 1:21:26Speaker 06

  I think it's important to, like, you know, if we're going to be trusted in the future to kind of clear

• 1:21:32Speaker 06

  the decks for stuff that's happened in the past. So, um, I mean, to be totally frank.

• 1:21:40Speaker 06

  Almost every conspiracy theory that people had about Twitter turned out to be true. So.

• 1:21:49Speaker 06

  Is there a conspiracy theory about Twitter that didn't turn out to be true? So far, they've all turned out to be true. And if not, more true than people thought.

• 1:21:58Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Is there a part of the files that really shocked you more than the rest of them? Like of the things that have been disclosed? Of all of these things, is there something that really sticks out with you as like, holy shit? I had no idea this was happening.

• 1:22:10Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Or is the whole thing just a big dumpster fire? They were just looking at one huge thing.

• 1:22:17Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You know, like psyops versus the Hunter Biden thing versus the.

• 1:22:20Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:22:21Jason Calacanis?

  The number of FBI people involved, that was pretty shocking.

• 1:22:24Speaker 06

  FBI stuff is pretty intense.

• 1:22:25Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah, the FBI psyop stuff to me was probably the one that was the most insidious. Like, the rest of it, I could think of like, you know, a bunch of overzealous libs got used.

• 1:22:35Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:22:35Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Got it. You know what I mean?

• 1:22:36Speaker 06

  Sure, sure.

• 1:22:37Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But to have like a secure skiff that essentially sends things that, you know, government agents want the populace to basically think. Seems like kind of like a really bad dystopian novel. And then it turns out it existed. And then it also, the thing is, it couldn't have just existed at Twitter. So what are we gonna do about all the other places where this shit's happening?

• 1:22:59Jason Calacanis?

  YouTube, Facebook.

• 1:23:01David Friedberg?

  It didn't, none of it seemed that surprising to me. I mean, I don't know, maybe I just believed all the conspiracy theories, but I've also been inside some of these companies and seen how they operate. So honestly, none of it was a surprise to me. Was it a big shock to you, Elon?

• 1:23:14David Sacks?

  Wait, wait, wait. You, Friedberg, you were, I think you can claim that you weren't surprised that these companies were shadow banning, although they denied it. But did you really suspect that the FBI was playing a role in flagging content for these companies to take down? Like, that blew me away.

• 1:23:31Speaker 06

  Content that's got nothing to do with like terrorism.

• 1:23:34David Sacks?

  Yeah, they're not investigating crimes. Like, there's no crime.

• 1:23:37Speaker 06

  Right. Yeah, they literally flagged satire.

• 1:23:43Speaker 07

  Maybe they didn't get the joke. I don't know, but.

• 1:23:46Jason Calacanis?

  They don't seem to be a humor driven group, but they don't seem to have the best senses of humor. But aren't they supposed to get warrants? Isn't that how it's supposed to work in a democracy? They want information. They're asking favors of their friends. Yeah, they're all friends. That's the thing that's troubling to me. Put yourself on either side of the extremes.

• 1:24:03David Sacks?

  Hey, we have Michael Schellenberger here who broke the FBI story in the Twitter files. So let's look into him and to see. He can, because I think maybe the audience isn't caught up on like what was discovered. So.

• 1:24:15Speaker 07

  Now, I know I have to follow Elon Musk. That doesn't seem fair. Hey, guys.

• 1:24:20David Sacks?

  Hey, Michael.

• 1:24:21Speaker 07

  Back to work. So.

• 1:24:22Jason Calacanis?

  All right.

• 1:24:23Speaker 07

  Thanks, guys.

• 1:24:23Jason Calacanis?

  See you later, Elon. Thank you.

• 1:24:26Speaker 07

  Hey, guys.

• 1:24:27Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, hey, Michael. How are you?

• 1:24:29Speaker 07

  I'm good.

• 1:24:30Jason Calacanis?

  Just a quick question for you.

• 1:24:31Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Michael, first of all, first of all, who makes that sweater?

• 1:24:35Speaker 07

  Oh, I'll send you mine, man. Do you want it? Or are you making fun of it?

• 1:24:38Jason Calacanis?

  No, I'm asking.

• 1:24:38Speaker 07

  You're the master of sweaters. High praise from you, brother. High praise.

• 1:24:42Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I'm asking, I'm asking, I'm asking.

• 1:24:43Jason Calacanis?

  Uh, just briefly, Michael, um, isn't the FBI supposed to get warrants, uh, to?

• 1:24:48Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 1:24:49Jason Calacanis?

  Take actions with folks? And then I guess is that at the crux of this? Are they doing this at other companies, you think? Are they just like embedded in YouTube? Should we expect they're embedded at Meta? And that they don't get warrants and they're kind of tipping the scales? And is that a good thing for society or a bad thing for society? It's a bit of a basic question.

• 1:25:04Speaker 07

  Yeah. Well, I think there's a, there's multiple issues relating to FBI that I think have to be unpacked a bit. But the first one is that, yeah, FBI was constantly pushing the boundaries of what is legally and ethically acceptable in terms of requesting information. Now, I think what you saw over the last, uh, three weeks was, uh, a shift. And I think our own understanding that we did see more pushback from Twitter executives against FBI. And some alarm bells being, uh, rung in terms of the requests that were being made from the intelligence community. Uh, but these guys were really persistent. They kept asking for more. They kept getting more and more cooperation. It's very troubling. It does look like Congress is going to look into this.

• 1:25:46Speaker 07

  Uh, the two heads of the committees that are tasked with this are, have said that they're going to look into it next year. I think the other thing that we saw that I think is more troubling was this persistent effort to basically communicate to Twitter executives, but also to news media, national security correspondents, that there was this heavy foreign infiltration going on, this Russian disinformation. And it appeared to me, looking at all the evidence that we saw from within Twitter and from outside of it, that this was pretty organized effort to convince key executives at Twitter and Facebook, but also these key reporters, that they should expect a hack and leak operation sometime right before the elections having

• 1:26:30Speaker 07

  to do with Hunter Biden. I find that very suspicious.

• 1:26:34Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Can I make an observation? I think that maybe what we're finding out is that the mainstream media tried to go back to its 1980 Cold War playbook and turn Russia into a boogeyman. But as we're seeing in the Ukraine war, you know, they're not nearly the formidable foe that we thought they were. And so it could probably be the case that in 2016, they were as inept technically as they are militarily right now. And so we may have just built up this monster that is kind of more like, you know, a much smaller thing to be worried about. And we all ran with it because we had no evidence. But the Ukraine-Russia war is evidence that, you know, this highly sophisticated war machine

• 1:27:18Chamath Palihapitiya?

  and propaganda machine is not that good at their job.

• 1:27:21Speaker 07

  Right. Yeah, I mean, I think that what's, there's a lot of interest that we're being served by hyping the so-called Russian misinformation threat. I mean, one of them was just to simply explain away the Trump phenomenon as a consequence of foreign interference. Certainly, the people that ran Hillary Clinton's campaign had an interest in doing that. But then you saw it become a sort of way, I think, to condition people for the release of the Biden laptop.

• 1:27:51Speaker 07

  And again, we can't, I can't prove that, but it is striking that the Yoel Roth, this main Twitter executive, who I think was the object of this misinformation campaign, testified under oath that he was being bombarded with these messages all throughout 2020, that they should expect some sort of a hack and leak operation. So when the New York Post finally did report on that computer in 2014, it was briefly censored by Twitter, but I think more importantly, it was discredited in the minds of many voters, including myself. I really didn't think that that laptop was what they said it was, and it turned out that it was. So I do think it's, there's a real troubling pattern of behavior by both

• 1:28:32Speaker 07

  the FBI agents, but also by the former FBI executives, including the deputy chief of staff and the chief counsel from FBI that, that were at Twitter as executives at the time.

• 1:28:42Jason Calacanis?

  And in fairness, Michael, this has been brought up many times, but I just would like your take on it because you're a lifelong Democrat, correct?

• 1:28:49Speaker 07

  Until, until last year.

• 1:28:51Jason Calacanis?

  Great. So it would, you know, just lest anybody think that you are like some MAGA supporter here.

• 1:28:56Speaker 07

  Just look at my sweater.

• 1:28:57Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, exactly. This was all in the backdrop of Trump asking for the Russians, you know, during that debate to hack Hillary, for him interfering with Zelensky and trying to get him to give dirt on Biden. And the fact that Hunter Biden was obviously dirty. So to expect a hack, there was massive precedent for it. So that set the stage for this, correct?

• 1:29:19Speaker 07

  For sure. And there is definitely that going on. And, and maybe that's all there was to it. It is just striking, of course, because, and I didn't even mention in my, this was, by the way, this is Twitter thread, part seven that I did on this issue. I didn't even get into the fact that, you know, within a few days, the many former senior heads of intelligence organizations and others came out and said that it was the result of a Russian disinformation campaign. So yeah, sure. I mean, I guess we could find some other explanation for it, whether it was innocent or coordinated, but it is, it is striking. Also, I think the other thing that we found was the contrast between the, the

• 1:30:00Speaker 07

  Inflation and what what Twitter was finding themselves. I mean, there was, you know, you'll repeatedly Yoel Roth would would respond to FBI that, yeah, we looked into these accounts that you mentioned, and they were all very low follower accounts with very little activity. So they just weren't finding very much foreign influence on the Twitter platform. And so I just think it was grossly inflated either for kind of good reasons or bad reasons, I would say.

• 1:30:28Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, yeah. And it's a there. There's no perfect way to police this stuff, obviously. And okay, well, listen, we appreciate your reporting. Thanks for doing it. And if you haven't read Michael's book, San Francisco, you did some great reporting there as well, and continued success in your investigative journalism career.

• 1:30:49David Friedberg?

  Thank you, Michael.

• 1:30:50Speaker 07

  Thanks, guys. Appreciate it.

• 1:30:51David Friedberg?

  All right, Michael. Sorry. Oh, lost him. It's all right.

• 1:30:55David Sacks?

  Well, what do you want to ask? He's still here.

• 1:30:57David Friedberg?

  Oh, okay. Hey, you did an interview on that. I think I saw it on YouTube or something where you interviewed someone who was homeless in San Francisco, and they were addicted to drugs. And they kind of said some narrative about how they were in this condition because San Francisco basically pays them to be homeless and pays them to do drugs on the street. Did that ever get published? And did that come out? Because it was such a compelling couple of minutes that you got on tape there. It really, for me, sent home a message of how far kind of progressive policies can take a society. And it's such a beacon for where things might go as other people start to think about adopting similar policies around the world, which is why I thought it was such important reporting. Whatever happened with that? And where can folks see that? Because it was such a moving interview for me.

• 1:31:43Speaker 07

  Yeah, if you just Google Michael Schellenberger YouTube homeless, you'll be able to find all my videos. There's a lot of them that we did with people on the street. All of them, of course, people asking and wanting to do them. But yeah, I mean, what we I also wrote about that in my book, which is basically that San Francisco pays cash welfare payment of somewhere between $600 to $700. Plus, you can get $200 in food stamps. And a lot of people sadly use that to maintain their addiction. And this gentleman. James with the tattoos on his face was very honest about how he was playing the system. In fact, he was himself, uh, we found us increasingly kind of horrified by the incentives that San Francisco was creating for people to live on the streets and, and live on the

• 1:32:26Speaker 07

  streets in their, in their addiction. So yeah, you can find that on YouTube.

• 1:32:29David Friedberg?

  So many people say incentives drive behavior and unfortunately the, these policies all came from a good place, from a kind heart and the idea that we could help people in need. And unfortunately, the way that the incentives get structured, they can actually cause more harm than good. It's such an important lesson. I just wanted to say that because I think your reporting on this really hit that home. Uh, so, so thanks for doing that. I think it's really important because we have, we have to do the right thing for people, but we also have to be careful that the policies are done in the right way. So, so thank you.

• 1:32:57Jason Calacanis?

  I think it's so well said, Friedberg, because when you're, Michael, and I, I just think you're very courageous for doing it because it's very easy for somebody to say, oh, well, you are being callous. The truth is incentives matter and we saw, we see this over and over again. If you pay for something, you get more of it. And really San Francisco is bearing the burden. I think this is what your book and, um, you know, and a lot of the videos you've made, at least the message I got was San Francisco has the lowest price of drugs, the lowest enforcement and the most incentives. Therefore they suffer because every person who is, you know, addicted comes here because they speak to each other and 90% of the people who are in San Francisco are here because we have created an incentive structure. Is that directionally correct as we wrap here?

• 1:33:39Speaker 07

  Yeah. A hundred percent correct. Including just the non-enforcement of laws against, uh, sleeping on the sidewalk, doing drugs in public. Now, I mean, ultimately three times more people die living outside as an unsheltered homeless person rather than live, than being in a shelter. And for me, that's all you need to know, to know that you, you should, we cannot allow our brothers and sisters to sleep on the street. No matter how desperate they sound about wanting to avoid going inside, it's three times deadlier to be on the street than inside.

• 1:34:07Jason Calacanis?

  So the compassionate thing is to force people into housing?

• 1:34:10Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 1:34:10Jason Calacanis?

  And that's just very tough for people to say, but you know, cause you're, we have this perception that people have freedom and they should have the right to do this. But a person who's taking fentanyl in your research is not thinking correctly. And if it was any family member of ours, we would not want them to make that decision for themselves. We'd want somebody else to make that decision for them. Correct?

• 1:34:28Speaker 07

  I would want that from if I was on the street so desperate that I was, you know, smoking fentanyl and breaking multiple laws every day, of course, I would want to be hospitalized. You know, and usually, you know, people overcome their addiction. That's the good news. We always leave out of it, but it is possible. People do overcome their addiction all the time, but they often need some, some, an intervention from family and friends. And if that's too late for that, then you need the intervention from the, from the city.

• 1:34:54Jason Calacanis?

  All right. Michael, thank you.

• 1:34:55Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Thanks, Michael. Appreciate it.

• 1:34:56Speaker 07

  Thanks, guys.

• 1:34:56Jason Calacanis?

  So as we get back to the All In News Network, we've now gone 24 hours a day. The All In News Network has launched. We'll just have a road.

• 1:35:05Chamath Palihapitiya?

  We should sit at various offices throughout Silicon Valley, letting executives and CEOs.

• 1:35:11Jason Calacanis?

  Just drop in. Imagine we did like a 12-hour marathon show for charity where just people showed up and we did a, what do they call those on TV?

• 1:35:20Chamath Palihapitiya?

  What is the charity?

• 1:35:21Jason Calacanis?

  A telethon.

• 1:35:21Chamath Palihapitiya?

  By J Cal, by J Cal, a plane.

• 1:35:24Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, by J Cal. Yeah, no, no, just a, yeah, a telethon. J Cal has to still fly commercial. We'll do a telethon. Hey, Sacks, thank you for setting up those amazing drop-ins. Well done.

• 1:35:33David Friedberg?

  Yeah, thanks, Sacks. Nice.

• 1:35:34Jason Calacanis?

  Thanks, Sacks.

• 1:35:35David Friedberg?

  Sacks, who made your jacket? That's a great jacket. Is that custom?

• 1:35:38Jason Calacanis?

  That is an Isai.

• 1:35:38Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Paul Stewart.

• 1:35:39Jason Calacanis?

  Isai.

• 1:35:40David Sacks?

  This is the Christmas or holiday jacket.

• 1:35:42Jason Calacanis?

  Who is it by? Isai?

• 1:35:44David Sacks?

  It's Valentino.

• 1:35:45Jason Calacanis?

  All right. Well, that's, that's, that's nice also. Um, okay. No, it's not Isai, but okay. Let's keep going here. We gotta go to lightning round.

• 1:35:53David Friedberg?

  All right, let's move.

• 1:35:53Jason Calacanis?

  Biggest flash in the pan. We were, was our last. I went with crypto. Pretty easy to say that. I'm not going to give myself a big high five, but.

• 1:36:01David Friedberg?

  What did you guys think of the Elon conversation real quick?

• 1:36:03Jason Calacanis?

  Well, he's very talkative.

• 1:36:04David Friedberg?

  And he, and he's, anything interesting or surprising for you? I mean, he said the biggest, you know, thing that people want to make sure to avoid is margin debt. I thought that was interesting.

• 1:36:12Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, he's working hard and.

• 1:36:14David Friedberg?

  He's just such a product focused guy. He just gets his, he's like so deeply into it. It's like.

• 1:36:19Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:19David Friedberg?

  Just do, do the thing he's gotta do.

• 1:36:21Jason Calacanis?

  Ultimately, product wins, right, Friedberg? I mean, i- if anything's.

• 1:36:23David Friedberg?

  Oh, my God, of course. Everything. Yeah, that's it. That's it. Yeah.

• 1:36:25Jason Calacanis?

  So, I mean, and, and, you know, products are made by teams. So what I think is distinctly different here, I'm just giving my personal opinion. I don't have a form.

• 1:36:33Chamath Palihapitiya?

  By what? Microsoft Teams?

• 1:36:35Jason Calacanis?

  No, no, no. Teams make products. And so what I just want to say here is, you know, like the.

• 1:36:39Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Microsoft Teams suck.

• 1:36:40Jason Calacanis?

  No, that, I'm not, you know, don't trigger the bundle. But I just want to say, you know, like, this is a takeover as opposed to building a company from scratch. He's had to assemble a team and then work at this incredible product pace. And I think those two things are starting to click. Week sixteen is gonna look very different than week, the first six weeks.

• 1:37:00David Sacks?

  Yeah, the products are already looking awesome. And it was nice of him to give me that shout out on the, you know, the affiliate badges. But I'll just give a shout out.

• 1:37:07David Friedberg?

  I didn't hear it. What was it?

• 1:37:09David Sacks?

  Oh, well, he gave me, he gave me some credit for the affiliate badges. But I wanted to give credit to the PMs who approached me about that idea.

• 1:37:16David Friedberg?

  Troll, I win again.

• 1:37:18David Sacks?

  Okay, fine, whatever. Let me give, let me give credit to the actual PMs, Evan Jones and Patrick Traeger, who they approached me about this idea they had. And then I helped, you know, give it some momentum.

• 1:37:31Jason Calacanis?

  Here's the truth. When Dave and I spent the first couple of weeks there, now that it's a little more public, he loves to be on the program. What we found over and over again was that there were great features that were ready to be released that were being held back by management. And there were brilliant people with all the ideas that you'd think should have been released, and they just weren't allowed to release a lot of these products. Why? Who knows? But now that he's in charge, I think you'll see the product cycle is gonna go much quicker.

• 1:37:57David Friedberg?

  The most important thing I saw, which is such an important lesson for anyone running a business in Silicon Valley, is that the pace of decision making matters far more than the accuracy of decision making. It's always been like one of my three big mottos.

• 1:38:09Jason Calacanis?

  Say more about that for entrepreneurs.

• 1:38:11David Friedberg?

  Yeah, for me, like my number one, like my three things are always like grit, bias to action, and then narrative. But like bias to action, the rate at which you can make decisions is a far greater predictor of success than the accuracy of the decisions you do make. And so you have to be willing to embrace failure. You have to be willing to make decisions that could result in something not being done correctly or making a mistake. And even getting embarrassed on the internet, you know, by making mistakes and having to call people like Paul Graham and apologize for them.

• 1:38:37Jason Calacanis?

  And that was a big moment.

• 1:38:39David Sacks?

  Yeah, that was interesting.

• 1:38:40David Friedberg?

  As a business scales, as professional managers are brought in, their incentive is to not make mistakes. Their incentive is to do things that are predictably going to work and are predictably not gonna fail. And therefore, they avoid taking the risks and they reduce the rate of action, the rate of decision making. And that's why so many businesses ultimately don't scale past some sort of inflection point. Or when founders that are willing to push that envelope step out, everything starts to fall apart. And it's so critically important, I think, to look at that as being, I think Elon's defining trait and characteristic is that regardless of the scale of the organization and the enterprise, he's still willing to act with that level of bias to action that you typically see in a small startup.

• 1:39:19Jason Calacanis?

  Okay. And put his reputation at risk, yeah.

• 1:39:23David Sacks?

  Just to sum that up, I sat in a meeting yesterday. He said that if we're not rolling back 10% of the time, we haven't pushed hard enough.

• 1:39:33Jason Calacanis?

  Right. Wonderful.

• 1:39:34David Sacks?

  So I mean, it's like if you're never rolling anything back because you never make a mistake, maybe you're just not moving fast enough.

• 1:39:41Jason Calacanis?

  You're not ambitious enough. You're not fast enough.

• 1:39:43David Sacks?

  You don't have enough of a bias towards action. You're too afraid of making a mistake.

• 1:39:46Chamath Palihapitiya?

  By the way, here's what's so interesting about the views feature is that a bunch of websites, I think it started because Instagram did a bunch of apps, deprecated, you know, likes because they felt that it was too, it was part of this negative cycle.

• 1:40:03Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And so they took all this stuff away and basically views is going sort of back in that direction and giving more granularity in terms of outside in social engagement on a post, which is I think interesting to see. It's happening in a moment where all these other sites and apps are actually going in the opposite direction.

• 1:40:23David Sacks?

  Well, it's like a standard feature on YouTube and it's very powerful for YouTube's network effects because it shows you how many views you get. So it discourages people from using other sites because you know, you get the most distribution on YouTube. So it's weird that other social networks don't want to follow suit. I mean, in one hour...

• 1:40:40Chamath Palihapitiya?

  They had it, but they deprecated. That's what's so interesting.

• 1:40:43David Sacks?

  But I guess, you know, my point is we've only had this feature for an hour and I didn't realize how much distribution my tweets were getting and it definitely undermines my incentive to want to go use some other platform when I see the distribution I'm getting on Twitter.

• 1:40:56Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Well, if you're getting 10 times more distribution than the New York Times, you know what's going to happen is people will stop listening and reading the New York Times.

• 1:41:01Jason Calacanis?

  Well, I mean, it's sort of like this podcast itself. Like, I mean, people ask us to go and...

• 1:41:06Chamath Palihapitiya?

  My point is we have to rely on social proof and anecdotes about... The actual scale and the breadth and the reach because it's impossible for us to get one holistic view that shows across all of these different modalities, whether it's Spotify or Apple Podcasts or YouTube, how many people listen or watch. And, you know, we add it all up and, you know, we think it's in this, you know, sort of three to five million range of people. But if you just had a numerical canonical number that was irrefutable, you just run over everybody.

• 1:41:39Jason Calacanis?

  This turns it into a meritocracy. This is gonna be terrifying to some blue checkmarks when they see that the people who they report on get 10 times as many views as they do.

• 1:41:48Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Of course.

• 1:41:49Jason Calacanis?

  Which is why when, when people, journalists call me or other-

• 1:41:51Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Look at Sean Hannity. Go to Sean Hannity's profile and for the number of followers he has, how pathetically engaged his audiences. It's all bots. It's all trolls. It's all nobodies.

• 1:42:00Jason Calacanis?

  I looked at Mitt Romney just put out a video, whatever, in the first like half hour, he had 100,000 views. Like, every politician who starts seeing this is gonna go, wait a second.

• 1:42:07Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I mean, the world is-

• 1:42:08Jason Calacanis?

  I'm getting more views here than I am on MSNBC or Fox.

• 1:42:11Chamath Palihapitiya?

  The world is a more rational place if Mitt Romney actually has more influence than Sean Hannity.

• 1:42:17Jason Calacanis?

  Let's hope. Okay, let's move on. We gotta get through this quickly. It's our longest episode ever. Here we go. We are gonna do, next up, it's very, this is a very important category, best CEO of 2022. In 2021, I went with Frank Slutman and Elon Musk. Chamath went with Satya Nadella. Sacks went with Brian Armstrong and Friedberg went with Jack Dorsey. Now we go on to 2022. Sacks, who? Everybody wants to know. Sacks' best CEO of 2022. Go ahead, Sacks.

• 1:42:52David Sacks?

  Every founder took my advice to get leaner, slow down their burn, create runway, you know, weather the storm down, you know-

• 1:43:00Jason Calacanis?

  So you're giving a generic answer, not a person?

• 1:43:02David Sacks?

  Yeah, exactly. I mean, look, I think, actually, a lot of the names, a lot of the names, well, here's the problem is that, you know-

• 1:43:08Jason Calacanis?

  Let him do it, yeah.

• 1:43:09David Sacks?

  Yeah, can I finish, J.K. The, the names that you mentioned from last year would be the top candidates for this year. I mean, I think Satya Nadella had a good year. Obviously, what Elon's doing, we just talked about, it's amazing. Brian Armstrong, I think, the stock hasn't done great, but he's been a strong CEO. But I don't want to repeat the same names. I think that, you know, every CEO who responded to the regime change by cutting costs, getting leaner, extending runway-

• 1:43:33David Sacks?

  I think deserves to be on this list and unfortunately, a lot of them are just resisting and they're just not yet taking the medicine or they've been taking the medicine in little drips and drabs instead of just like swallowing it whole and getting a move on.

• 1:43:46Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, just drink the whole two tablespoons of medicine. Don't sip it. You gotta just take it.

• 1:43:51David Sacks?

  It's not getting better. I mean, the stock market today should be a wake up call. I mean, this was one of the worst days in the market the whole year. So things are getting worse before they're getting better.

• 1:44:02Jason Calacanis?

  Chamath, who is your best CEO of the year?

• 1:44:05Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Well, the numerical answer is Vicky Hollab, who's the CEO of Occidental Petroleum. Stock's up like 140% this year. It's technically the best performing stock of the year. $63 billion company. But that's just a numerical answer who I, I actually want to double down on David's answer, Saks's answer, because I agree with that. I have been guiding our portfolio company CEOs to be at cash flow break even now or extend runway to Q1 2025. And they're

• 1:44:38Jason Calacanis?

  25.

• 1:44:39Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yes, because I, I mean, I think Elon and I, well Elon and I are kind of roughly in the same place we have been for a while, which is like, you know, mid 24 is when the recession ends and you need to give yourself two to three quarters of buffer so that you can go and raise around, which takes a quarter to two quarters. And once you start to get kind of get escape velocity out of a recession, having money through end of Q1 2025, I think is a, is a minimum requirement. And, you know, of the companies that I think were the most precariously positioned, there was five of them that got their acts together and really did it. But these are all CEOs of companies that, you know, I mean, if I said them, you would know some of them. But I do agree with David. I think the CEO that bit the bullet.

• 1:45:24Chamath Palihapitiya?

  So maybe publicly, what I would say is, you know, the CEO of Klarna deserves a huge

• 1:45:32Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You know, medal for having the courage to do it before anybody else did. The CEO of Checkout.com just took a huge write down. These CEOs are making sure their companies survive.

• 1:45:41Jason Calacanis?

  Friedberg, best CEO 2022.

• 1:45:44David Friedberg?

  My vote for best CEO is Warren Buffett. And I think it is just simple arithmetic. He has for years and now for decades proven himself to be just not just an exceptional investor, stock picker, whatever the kind of typical quip is about what he does for a living. But I think what's so extraordinary about Buffett is that regardless of the market conditions, he can kind of remain steadfast in his intent and in his mission and he doesn't kind of waver. And, you know, he doesn't take an active role in ranting and complaining about markets and politics. And I think that that's what makes him such an extraordinary leader. He stays within his zone of competence. He doesn't do things that he doesn't know about.

• 1:46:29David Friedberg?

  He doesn't let the macro drive him and cause him to be kind of, you know, affected by it. And he says, this is what I know how to do. This is what I can do. And that is all that he does do. And he does it so exceptionally well. And to Chamath's point, he is the largest shareholder of Occidental Petroleum, along with many other incredible businesses. And I think he's proven in a market like we just had this year, why he is kind of the most extraordinary CEO, or one of the most extraordinary CEOs, but one of the best kind of capital allocators of all time.

• 1:46:59Jason Calacanis?

  I'm going to go in a similar fashion as Chamath and Sacks and go with the money losing CEOs who have dedicated themselves to free cash flow and to getting to profitability. From the last cycle, Airbnb and Uber were the money losers. And now Airbnb is my number one. They've become a money printer. They are now making bank. And they're still growing very quickly. And then Uber, I put in my second. They need to do another riff. They need to cut some expenses, but they too are hitting the free cash flow and the network effects. So I'm giving it to Chesky and then Dara. One and two. Okay, let's keep moving.

• 1:47:39Jason Calacanis?

  Best investor for me, I'm going with the investors, like a general category, who are demanding governance and doing diligence again, or who never stopped. Let me say it that way. There's a generation of investors who raised their funds in the last five years and didn't do diligence, didn't demand board seats, didn't demand boards. Those idiots are now paying the price and they created a lot of this mess of entitlement and a lack of governance. I want to give a shout out to the Bill Gurley's of the world who fought for governance and fought for diligence in the face of being told, okay, boomer, you don't get it. Who do you have best investors? Chamath Palihapitiya?

• 1:48:21Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I will pick the what are called the pod shops. So these are folks that have strategies where they have hundreds of investing pods underneath an umbrella and they have this very sophisticated risk infrastructure. So this is what Ken Griffin owns in Citadel. This is what Izzy Ignlender owns in Millennium. Reverend Howard is another one. D E Shaw is another one. So they have all kinds of strategies, but that are essentially run by computers that allocate risk, you know, scale you up, scale you back, turn you on, turn you off, fire you overnight. And those strategies as a whole ran over the market this year. They were the best performers. They are giving back billions of dollars. They've generated

• 1:49:06Chamath Palihapitiya?

  double-digit positive returns. They're raising their fees. In some cases, some of these folks are moving their annual fee up to 4% a year, their carry up to 40% a year. Incredibly, incredibly well-run, performant businesses. They were by and away the best investors this year.

• 1:49:27Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, we're going to go lightning round from here. Sacks, do you have a best investor?

• 1:49:31David Sacks?

  Yeah, I said Stan Druckenmiller. He, as you recall, last year, he predicted that inflation would be lasting. This was the spring of 2021, when transitory was the word of the day. This year, he predicted the bear market rally we had in July and August. And I remember back at the Coche Summit in May, or around that time, he was interviewed and he basically was saying that as soon as there was a bear market rally over the summer, that he would then put a short position on. I don't know if he actually did that, but he said he's going to do that. And then it turns out that the summer rally that we had was a dead cap bounce. So he was right about that. And now he is predicting a hard landing in 2023 with

• 1:50:14David Sacks?

  a deeper recession than many expect. So sadly, I suspect he may be right yet again.

• 1:50:20Jason Calacanis?

  Friedberg, best investor for you 2022?

• 1:50:22David Friedberg?

  Same. I had Druckenmiller. I indicated that he's been doing interviews pretty much every quarter for the last two years and he's been pounding the table, telling everyone what's going to happen and it all happened. And he even told people the trades in mid 2021. He said he was short long dated treasuries and he was long commodities. And if you had put those two trades on at that time and held them to today, you would have made a fortune. And so I think he's extraordinary in his ability to kind of see macro in a way that others don't, but also to take extremely brave action with his portfolio. He's renowned for how big the bets are that he makes and how quickly he can change his mind when he's wrong and make another big bet to and still get himself out of the hole. He's incredible. So I definitely give it to Stanley Druckenmiller this year.

• 1:51:02Jason Calacanis?

  2021, we did our best turnarounds. I picked Disney, Chamath Ford, Friedberg. We were

• 1:51:09Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Should we stack this category? What about the worst investor of 2022? Can we do that?

• 1:51:15Jason Calacanis?

  Good Chamath, you want to freestyle? Tell us your worst investor of 2022.

• 1:51:18Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I mean, I'll put myself in the category along with anybody else who was long tech. Basically, Nick, if you can just bring, please back up this capital asset pricing model. Any of us that didn't understand this got run over this year. And just to put some very specific numbers here, there was a decent little tweet thread that Elon was a part of where they actually calculated what the expected rate of return of Tesla was, and it turned out to be almost 14% a year. And so, you know, when you start to compound 14% over three, four, five years, these numbers get very big, very quickly. And the reason why is that it has a

• 1:51:58Chamath Palihapitiya?

  huge beta and we're in a world now where the risk free rate is quite high. So all of us benefited from this equation essentially being upside down for the last 15 years. And all of us who were over allocated into things that benefited from those dynamics frankly got run over this year. So we were as a class, the worst investors of 2022.

• 1:52:21Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, here we go. Let's do our best turnaround. I am going to go with, for me, it's Meta. They were losing money. Hand over fist, they refused to do a rift. And then finally, bestie Brad Gersner said, uh, let's get fit. He did a memo. And finally, finally Zuckerberg made some cuts reportedly rumors. He's making a 15, 10 or 15% cut. I heard in the back channels right now based on performance. So he's not calling it a riff or a layoff. They're just going to cut the bottom 10 or 15% again. So I think Zuck's going to turn it around. Anybody have a best turnaround?

• 1:52:59Chamath Palihapitiya?

  So you're saying Zuck mission accomplished?

• 1:53:02Jason Calacanis?

  You mean Zuck turned around Facebook? Turn around this year. I'm going with Meta.

• 1:53:06David Friedberg?

  So your answer is Meta was turned around by Zuck this year?

• 1:53:09Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, they got down to $85 and now they're up at what, what 110, 115? Yes, he turned it around at the end of the year. It was like a Hail Mary at the end of the year. He's turned it around. I think he's going to continue to. Yes, that is my position.

• 1:53:21David Sacks?

  Okay, that sounds good.

• 1:53:23Jason Calacanis?

  Listen, I bought the stock at 94.

• 1:53:25Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Go with that, J. K.

• 1:53:26David Sacks?

  Okay, so if we're talking about very partial turnarounds here, I would say, I would say that

• 1:53:32Jason Calacanis?

  Zach, you can measure the turnaround as of October 24th to now.

• 1:53:36David Sacks?

  Yes, exactly. So, uh, San Francisco is still overall a mess, but there were a few positive events that happened over the past year. And since we're looking back, we should call these out. So first of all, back, this was towards the beginning of the year, we recalled three members of the school board, uh, most particularly Allison Collins. Remember her? This was done by something like a 70 30 margin and 80 20 on, on Collins. This was the school board that had dragged its feet on school reopenings. They destroyed the merit based, uh, Lowell High School. They wasted hours of meetings on a silly plan to remove the names of names like Abraham Lincoln from the, from the schools. In any event, they were removed. Then Jake, how you refer to this,

• 1:54:20David Sacks?

  we got Chesa Boudin recalled by a 60 40 margin as San Francisco DA. This was the DA who, whose agenda was decarceration. He tried to release as many repeat offenders as possible. The voters of San Francisco had enough. And then most recently, the far less supervisor Gordon Marr just got, uh, rejected by his own community this November and the new tough DA Brooke Jenkins,

• 1:54:46David Sacks?

  Got reelected in her own right after being appointed by London Breed. So there's still a long way to go in San Francisco, but there are definitely some green shoots

• 1:54:54Jason Calacanis?

  Good start.

• 1:54:54David Sacks?

  That the electorate here has had enough and is looking for the, let's say, call it the centrist Democrats as opposed to the radicals.

• 1:55:02Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, we're in the lightning round here. We're in hour three of the All In Podcast marathon, this telethon. Shabat, you got a best turnaround for 2022. Hard, hard, hard one to give. So any green shoots for 2022, as Sacks would say.

• 1:55:18Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, I mean, everything, everything's just got destroyed.

• 1:55:22Jason Calacanis?

  It's all a disaster. Great. Friedberg, anything that you have?

• 1:55:26Chamath Palihapitiya?

  There may be no turnaround award until 2025.

• 1:55:28Jason Calacanis?

  Fine. Okay. Yeah, we're a little split on this. Friedberg, you got anything?

• 1:55:32Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Or I'll just go with your, your incisive fucking viewpoint and I'll pick Zuck and Meta. That makes so much sense.

• 1:55:37Jason Calacanis?

  I bought at 94. It's at 117. It's one of my best J trades. I'm gonna take it.

• 1:55:42David Friedberg?

  Didn't you also say Disney was your pick of the year or something?

• 1:55:45Jason Calacanis?

  I'm buying more. I'm buying more Disney. I'm buying more. This is, that's what I'm doing.

• 1:55:49David Friedberg?

  Disney, I'm telling you, Disney Warner, which you talked about before.

• 1:55:53Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:54Jason Calacanis?

  And Facebook are three of my, and, you know, are three of my big ones. Let's say worst human being here.

• 1:55:59David Sacks?

  Well, I think, look, given that this is supposed to be the year 2022, I mean, you gotta say that.

• 1:56:04Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, in 2022, we all say SBF.

• 1:56:05David Sacks?

  SBF was the winner of this, hands down.

• 1:56:07Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, congratulations to SBF. You are consensus worst human being.

• 1:56:11David Sacks?

  For this year. I mean, not ever, but just for-

• 1:56:14Jason Calacanis?

  Only for this year.

• 1:56:15David Sacks?

  Right.

• 1:56:15Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. We, we all hate you equally.

• 1:56:18Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Okay, who's, who's number two?

• 1:56:19David Friedberg?

  Why do you hate him?

• 1:56:20Jason Calacanis?

  Why do I hate him? Because all those people lost their money. And, you know, there's some, it's causing chaos. I feel terrible for all these people who lost money. That's why I hate him. Oh, it's disgusting.

• 1:56:31Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Did, did you see that?

• 1:56:32Jason Calacanis?

  Anybody have a second mouth blow some person?

• 1:56:34Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Did you see that the two guys copped? To please Caroline Ellison and Gary Wang.

• 1:56:39Jason Calacanis?

  They flipped like pancakes.

• 1:56:40Chamath Palihapitiya?

  They flipped, but it turns out that they actually did engineer a backdoor into FTX. And Alameda has been doing this for years. Oh, my God. Oh, my God.

• 1:56:50David Sacks?

  That's game over.

• 1:56:51Jason Calacanis?

  They're getting 10 years. He's getting life. Game over.

• 1:56:53David Sacks?

  Well, they're talking about that interesting defense strategy that we were discussing in the chat.

• 1:56:59Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:57:00David Sacks?

  That apparently, I think this is actually a fascinating defense strategy. I think this is their only shot. One of our besties had this theory that he was prescribed two prescription drugs. One was Adderall. What was the other one called?

• 1:57:12Chamath Palihapitiya?

  This was not a drug.

• 1:57:13Jason Calacanis?

  Esam? The patch.

• 1:57:15David Sacks?

  It's a drug I wasn't familiar with. I guess it's a patch. But when you combine these two things, apparently it basically shuts down or kills the part of your brain that deals with

• 1:57:26Jason Calacanis?

  Inhibition.

• 1:57:27David Sacks?

  Inhibition.

• 1:57:27Jason Calacanis?

  It's cocaine.

• 1:57:28Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:28David Sacks?

  What if his defense strategy was, yeah, like only an insane person would do this? And I was acting insane because I was prescribed these drugs that had these drug conflicts. And it like killed part of my brain. I mean, when you think about it.

• 1:57:42Jason Calacanis?

  What if every criminal on Wall Street said cocaine is my defense?

• 1:57:46David Sacks?

  But this, you could say he was, maybe he was legally prescribed it if you could show the prescription. By the way, I'm not saying this should get him off. I'm just, we're basically workshopping what his only shot of his defense would be, right?

• 1:57:59Jason Calacanis?

  Well, and think about it, Sax. He acted manic after FTX collapsed. So that mania of doing 20 Twitter Spaces would be evidence.

• 1:58:11David Sacks?

  There's something so insane about what he did, right? That it's almost like a like a prescribed insanity defense. Like I was prescribed a drug combination that made me insane.

• 1:58:23Jason Calacanis?

  Anybody have a most loathsome company as we wrap?

• 1:58:25Chamath Palihapitiya?

  The only way that you could come up with that is like you'd have to have two parents that were like law professors or something.

• 1:58:31Jason Calacanis?

  All right. Most loathsome company, FTX for me.

• 1:58:34David Sacks?

  This is his defense, you know?

• 1:58:36Jason Calacanis?

  My parents. Boo hoo.

• 1:58:38Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, no, no, no. He'll claim insanity, J Cal. He'll say.

• 1:58:41Jason Calacanis?

  Of course, yeah.

• 1:58:42Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And they'll have a, I mean, do we think that his parents aren't going to help his defense?

• 1:58:48Jason Calacanis?

  You know, at this point, this kid's got to go away for life. That's it.

• 1:58:51David Sacks?

  You think life? Wow.

• 1:58:53Jason Calacanis?

  I think it's got to be life. I think it's got to be 30 plus years. I mean, it's just going to be billions of dollars. What kind of justice system do we have? When people go away for 20, 30, 40 years.

• 1:59:02David Sacks?

  How many years per billion would you sentence?

• 1:59:06Jason Calacanis?

  A decade per billion, at least? Yeah, I mean, just you gotta put it proportional. Sax, you gotta, don't you think the justice decision needs to look at other people who are in jail for selling cocaine, for selling marijuana, for robbing a convenience store? They'll put somebody away for robbing a convenience store for a decade or two. What are they gonna put him in jail for? Just because somebody came in with a gun and robbed a convenience store, they get 20 years? This kid's gonna get off? Screw that.

• 1:59:32David Sacks?

  Yeah, look, I think, what do you guys think the over/under is here? You think it's light?

• 1:59:35Jason Calacanis?

  I'll set it at, I'll set it at 35 years. I'll take the over.

• 1:59:39Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I'll take the over.

• 1:59:40David Sacks?

  I'll take 30.

• 1:59:41Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think this is, I think this is made off.

• 1:59:43Jason Calacanis?

  I said a good line then. What's your free bird?

• 1:59:45Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think this is made off.

• 1:59:46David Friedberg?

  I agree. I'll take the over on 30. Yeah, I think, I think it's.

• 1:59:48Jason Calacanis?

  I said 35.

• 1:59:49David Friedberg?

  I think it's gonna be a hun- uh, multiple hundreds of years sentence.

• 1:59:52Jason Calacanis?

  I agree.

• 1:59:53David Friedberg?

  And he'll be gone for life.

• 1:59:54Jason Calacanis?

  I think it's gonna be life, but I said a good line. Uh, okay. Most loathsome company is FTX. Anybody wanna go for a second?

• 2:00:00David Sacks?

  No, let's just keep moving.

• 2:00:02David Friedberg?

  No, I'll add one. I'm gonna, this year, I'm gonna give my, last year I gave it to Tyson Foods, one of the largest slaughterer of animals on earth. This year, I'm gonna give it to a company called Inotiv, I-N-O-T-I-V. This is the company that was busted by the feds for their animal abuse in their dog breeding facility, uh, where 4,000 beagles were rescued, one of which I adopted. And this is a publicly traded company, stocks down 90 some odd percent, which I'm thrilled to see. Terrible business, awful, awful, kind of, you know, inhumane behavior. And so I, I wanna kinda give them a special shout out this year.

• 2:00:37Jason Calacanis?

  Look at you. And you're getting the virtue signaling points of rescuing the dog to increase your Q factor amongst besties. Well done.

• 2:00:45Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Max factor, max Q factor.

• 2:00:47Jason Calacanis?

  Max Q factor. Yeah. Anybody else have a loathsome?

• 2:00:50Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yes, I'd like to pick this company, Zeeboodu Babzooza, which, uh, destroyed the environment for a bunch of endangered species that I would otherwise have used for various fur pelts for my sweaters and such.

• 2:01:02Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, and I would like to go with Blably Blably Bluh, which was torturing puppies, uh, 18 of which I rescued and I am now have them in the J Cal Puppy Rescue. I am the most sensitive and caring person. Uh, also, I would like to add SeaWorld. I am in the process of raising money to build bigger, uh, pools to eventually release all the orcas in captivity. That is my new focus for next year. Okay. Uh, moving on. Oh, God, do we wanna do best meme? Do we want to do best new tech?

• 2:01:34David Friedberg?

  I'll do best new tech. I don't have a best meme.

• 2:01:36Jason Calacanis?

  I'm going with fusion for best new tech. I'm going with.

• 2:01:38David Friedberg?

  I'm gonna go with ChatGPT. I think what was so impressive about ChatGPT

• 2:01:44David Friedberg?

  and the experience that everyone's had using it is that it really, for the first time, I think elucidated

• 2:01:50David Friedberg?

  where these kind of machine learning tools can take us and what the kind of new product experience can be, what generative AI can yield things beyond, I think, the scope of what a lot of people were imagining before. So it was really so revealing. And as you guys know, there's an absolute friggin tidal wave of people trying to start companies that are leveraging tools and generative AI to kind of reinvent everything from workplace tools, enterprise software, all the way through to media games and entertainment. So that's why I think ChatGPT was the most impressive new technology.

• 2:02:21Jason Calacanis?

  Best new tech, Chamath, and then Saks. Lightning round, please. Best new tech.

• 2:02:24Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Alpha Fold 3, which basically has almost near-perfect accuracy in protein folding.

• 2:02:30Jason Calacanis?

  Saks, best new tech.

• 2:02:31David Sacks?

  I can't improve on the ChatGPT. So yeah, let's keep rolling.

• 2:02:35Jason Calacanis?

  Best trend, best trend in business and in the world, mine is startups getting back and investors getting back to reality and what I call the age of austerity, the age of focus after the age of excess. That's the best trend in our world, the age of austerity. What's your best trend for 2022?

• 2:02:51Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Marginal cost of energy generation and storage is now in the low single-digit pennies per kilowatt hour, which basically means that not only will energy be free and abundant, but it will, I think, over the next decade or two, create a massive peace dividend. It will rewrite our foreign policy. It will rewrite national security. That is the reason why people should care about energy transition, not necessarily climate change, although that's important. It's a distant second to keeping men and women out of war. And keeping our borders safe.

• 2:03:25Jason Calacanis?

  Well said. Anybody else have a best trend?

• 2:03:27David Friedberg?

  Yeah, I'll pick it up. So last year, I said the creator economy, which I think referred to all these kind of creators creating new products and businesses beyond their content. This year, I think that the trend that was again enabled and demonstrated through ChatGPT is the narrator economy. I think this is going to be a really important trend going forward. We'll talk about it in the prediction episode. But I think the idea that people are and they're starting to experience this in using ChatGPT and Dolly and other kind of generative AI tools is how much you can kind of narrate the product you want to see created and have it created for you on the fly. And I think that that's a really kind of powerful mind shift for people and frame shift for people.

• 2:04:06David Friedberg?

  And I think it really starts to change a lot of the way that people behave, entertain themselves, businesses operate and so on. So I'd call it the narrator economy. And I think it's really kind of starting to emerge.

• 2:04:15Jason Calacanis?

  Okay. Do you have a trend? Sax?

• 2:04:18David Sacks?

  Yeah, I would say best trend is the growing realization that the corporate media is failing, does not tell the truth, it has an agenda. More and more people are opting out of it and going with independent media. I think, you know, what Elon mentioned, where we're going to start holding these corporate journalists the same standard on Twitter as regular citizens. They're outraged by that, but that's a huge step in the right direction. The fact of the matter is, is that the press or the media is the prism through which reality is refracted. And if it's not giving us an accurate representation of the world, we can't begin to solve our problems. So we don't have accurate information. And I think more and more people are waking up from the matrix and realizing that we're living in this media controlled simulation. And again, I don't think we're going to make more progress until

• 2:05:04David Sacks?

  the this power that the media seems to have over our reality gets gets broken.

• 2:05:09Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, let's go for worst trend. My worst trend is the Fed trying to play catch up. The Fed trying to play catch up. Sorry, buddy.

• 2:05:18Jason Calacanis?

  The Fed trying to play catch up is the worst trend for me, oversteering into the crash. What do you got, Chamath, for the worst trend of 2022?

• 2:05:25Chamath Palihapitiya?

  The worst trend was the continued profligate spending by the federal government. We have record deficits, record debt, and this year, we're ending the year by adding another $1.65 trillion of spending that nobody can seemingly account for. It is truly the Christmas tree of Christmas trees in terms of bills. So we have not gotten religion yet around being measured in how we spend money.

• 2:05:51David Sacks?

  Good one.

• 2:05:51Jason Calacanis?

  Worst trend, Saks.

• 2:05:52David Sacks?

  Last year, my worst trend was authoritarianism, growing all over the world. I think that was a pretty decent prediction. This year's worst trend is the government colluding with Big Tech to engage in censorship. This is how they're going to do the authoritarianism. We talked about it with Schellenberger and Elon, this whole series of revelations, known as the Twitter files. We can see this collusion, this cozy relationship between the censors at Twitter and Big Tech and the bureaucrats at the FBI and DHS and Pentagon. This is a really disturbing dystopian relationship, as we talked about earlier. And, you know, I feel like we spend all this time talking about the authoritarianism in Russia and China.

• 2:06:35David Sacks?

  We seem to be obsessed with combating that and going to war with that, but we don't spend enough time talking about this growing authoritarianism at home. The media doesn't seem to want to report on the Twitter files at all. Let's focus on stopping authoritarianism here.

• 2:06:48Jason Calacanis?

  Well said, Friedberg. What's your worst trend of the year?

• 2:06:51David Friedberg?

  My worst trend for 2022 is what I would call interest rate mania. And I think that this is the mania that we've been caught up in on this show, that other people on our thread, people in the business community and the investing community, where everyone's obsession with did the Fed act soon enough or late enough? And that interest rates ultimately drive success or failure with building businesses and making good investments. And the truth is, when interest rates go the wrong way, good investments...

• 2:07:18David Friedberg?

  You know, can kind of strengthen their way can can can make their way through those environments. Bad investments cannot. Good businesses can make their way through and bad investments cannot. And so I think our our mania around the fact that interest rates and the Fed ultimately drove bad outcomes in businesses and investments is a flawed kind of assertion. And we all want to kind of get back to the drunken days where, you know, a low interest rate environment enables us all to be successful and wealthy. And I think that that's kind of changed. So I think it's time for us to get away from the interest rate mania and focus more on solid investing and solid business building.

• 2:07:50Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, here we go. Lightning round. We got two to go. Favorite media of 2022. For me, it was Top Gun, House of the Dragon, White Lotus 2. But I'm going to pick my favorite here, something you may not have heard of, the film Tar. I highly recommend it. But I did like those other three tremendously. What do you got, Sax, for your favorite media of 2022?

• 2:08:08David Sacks?

  House of the Dragon, I guess I enjoyed quite a bit, like you did. I'll give a shout out to my movie, Dolly Land, which will be coming out next summer. If we're gonna include podcast episodes, I would give a shout out to the unheard episode where Freddie Sayers interviews John Mearsheimer, the professor of international relations. He explains the origins of the Ukraine war and has some really pessimistic predictions about what might happen next. I suggest everyone watch it if they want to understand this conflict and where it may be going next year.

• 2:08:37Jason Calacanis?

  Chamath, you have any favorite media for 2022 you want to share?

• 2:08:41Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I thought Yellowstone kicked ass. Absolutely incredible. There's, I think it's on Hulu, but there's a show with Steve Carell, a little short series called The Patient.

• 2:08:53Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, very good.

• 2:08:54Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Which is about a serial killer that kidnaps his psychologist and locks him in his basement to try to help him prevent him killing more people. And I thought it was really, really well done. Never Have I Ever, the latest season, another just brilliant offering from Mindy Kaling. She's unbelievable. Those are, those are probably the top ones.

• 2:09:15Jason Calacanis?

  What do you got? Free Bird, any media?

• 2:09:18David Friedberg?

  Yeah, I read a book this year that I really liked. It's called The Vital Question by a guy named Nick Lane. Someone recommended it to me. It's, he's a biochemist and he kind of talks a little bit about the origin of life on Earth. It really ties into this idea that there are certain, call it principles of physics and statistics that make life predictive and predictable. But I think the way that he kind of walks through how a lot of things emerge in life.

• 2:09:45David Friedberg?

  And how life ultimately kind of developed on this planet are really well shown. So yeah, I give his book a shout out. It was a really good read.

• 2:09:53Chamath Palihapitiya?

  So that book, The Vital Question is incredible. The other one that he wrote, which is called Life Ascending, those two books you must read if you don't want to be a Luddite, in my opinion.

• 2:10:02Jason Calacanis?

  All right, I will.

• 2:10:03Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Plus also, also for those people who don't understand the difference between power and energy, you will learn what that is.

• 2:10:09Jason Calacanis?

  Very good. I have two book recommendations. Putting the Rabbit in the Hat is Brian Cox. You may know him from Succession. He has a great book and he reads the audiobook, very enjoyable. I'm halfway through Quentin Tarantino's Cinema Speculation and enjoying it very much. So actually, you will enjoy it tremendously. Okay. And now we do the Rudy Giuliani Award for self-immolation. This is for the person who poured lighter fluid and gasoline over themselves and lit themselves on fire for no apparent reason. I go with Kevin O'Leary, who's secured a $15 million bag from FTX and then decided to try to defend it 18 ways to Sunday, burning whatever reputation he had. Who do you have in your Rudy Giuliani Award?

• 2:10:51David Friedberg?

  This will be controversial for you guys. I'm gonna go with Elon Musk. I don't think that Elon put himself in the position that he did with bad intentions or without paying attention. I think he's taken on a role in buying and running Twitter that is, you know, principled and, you know, in his mind and many other people's minds, a really important role that someone needs to play. Unfortunately, I think his reputation has gotten really hurt because of, you know, that role. He's not making a lot of friends and he's not, he's causing a lot of reputational damage. He obviously had a lot of good and important things he was working on prior to taking on the additional burden of Twitter. And while many people appreciate his doing it, I think that it's causing him a lot of reputational

• 2:11:36David Friedberg?

  damage. And so, yeah, I don't mean to kind of be offensive in saying that, but. I think he's gotten the biggest hit on reputation.

• 2:11:45Jason Calacanis?

  It's certainly been a hard thing to do. It's certainly been a hard thing to do, Sax.

• 2:11:47Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But you're saying self-immolation, Freebro, because he took it on himself. He could have just...

• 2:11:51David Friedberg?

  He took it on himself. Yeah, I'm not saying it's just like dumb, stupid self.

• 2:11:53Jason Calacanis?

  It's one interpretation.

• 2:11:54David Friedberg?

  Yeah, it's not like the Rudy Giuliani idiocy. I think he's taken on the burden of doing this, and I think it's causing him a lot of reputation harm.

• 2:12:01Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, it's an interpretation of the award. What do you got, Chamath? Sax and Chamath?

• 2:12:04David Sacks?

  Well, I mean, if I were to interpret the award, I think the way it was originally intended, I think I gotta give it to Herschel Walker this year, unfortunately. And I wish Republicans would stop winning this award. At least Herschel never gave any speeches next to a dildo shop, but nonetheless.

• 2:12:22Jason Calacanis?

  I am so sorry that... I'm so delighted, Sax, that you've been so self-aware about the follies of the dying MAGA, the last throes of the MAGA nation.

• 2:12:33David Sacks?

  I want to find some Democrats to give this to. I would have given it to that brain-dead senator from Pennsylvania. What's his name?

• 2:12:40Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Fetterman.

• 2:12:40David Sacks?

  Fetterman. Thank you. I wanted to give it to Fetterman, but he won. So I don't know what I'm supposed to do. You know, it's like, no, listen, when a Republican self-immolates like Rudy or Herschel or something like that, they get laughed out of town. And when the Democrat does it, like a Fetterman, they just get elected. So I don't know what to say.

• 2:13:01Jason Calacanis?

  All right, Chamath, you got any final words here? Go ahead. You gotta end this episode. It's gonna be the longest episode ever. Phew, I think it's poor producer Nick.

• 2:13:09Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Whoever signed the papers for the whole search and seizure at Mar-a-Lago looks kind of like an idiot. So that was not politically astute.

• 2:13:18Jason Calacanis?

  Okay. You would say the FBI, then? Okay. Poorly handled, perhaps?

• 2:13:22David Sacks?

  That's actually a great... That's a great one, actually. If we're gonna get serious for a second, the combination of revelations, if we're gonna look over this whole year. Remember, Jason, when I basically spoke up at the time they raided Mar-a-Lago and said that it was heavy-handed and unnecessary?

• 2:13:38Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I keep telling you guys, for years, Donald Trump is an idiot savant minus the savant. Why all of you guys just project all of this like insane genius evil level stuff? He's not capable of that. This is a simpleton who likes attention. He stole a bunch of souvenirs that he didn't read when he was in the White House.

• 2:14:01Jason Calacanis?

  That was my position.

• 2:14:01Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Hasn't read now, kept in a box downstairs just to say he had them.

• 2:14:05David Sacks?

  That's exactly right.

• 2:14:06Jason Calacanis?

  I was the one who championed the souvenir. I know he's a souvenir guy.

• 2:14:09David Sacks?

  You said he was selling secrets to the Saudis.

• 2:14:12Jason Calacanis?

  No, I did not say that. I said my idea was souvenirs. No.

• 2:14:14David Sacks?

  You suggested it.

• 2:14:15Jason Calacanis?

  You suggested it.

• 2:14:16Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I did not. I did not.

• 2:14:17David Sacks?

  You did. You tweeted it.

• 2:14:18Jason Calacanis?

  No, just because I bring the news. Hold on.

• 2:14:19David Sacks?

  You were tweeting Jared Kushner and elaborate conspiracy theory.

• 2:14:22Jason Calacanis?

  I'm saying that doesn't look good.

• 2:14:23David Sacks?

  I know it's not a conspiracy theory when you do it.

• 2:14:25Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And, and guys, and this is the same person that basically in the, in the beginning of his presidential campaign in 2016, in front of Hillary Clinton, said absolutely, I bend the laws that you created, the tax laws, to my favor because I'm not stupid. When she called him a tax dodger. And it turns out after all these years, he was telling the truth.

• 2:14:49Jason Calacanis?

  Oh my God. Once again, the show ends with Trump. It's been a great 2022.

• 2:14:54Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, no, but honestly, like, like, did we learn anything except that these tax laws are egregiously stupid? And the only people that are consistently guaranteed to make money in these tax laws are real estate investors. If you put these two things together, a real estate investor who happened to be very poor at his job, which Trump turned out to be, packed billions of dollars of NOLs that he was able to use to wash his taxes for years and years. And by the way, and he was clearly proud of it. He was just goading the Democrats in not releasing them. They went through all this rigmarole and what did we find out? He had huge NOLs, he had huge deductions and he paid no taxes. Is that shocking to any of us?

• 2:15:32David Sacks?

  It's like, it's like Chappelle said, he came out of the house, told everyone, everything you think is going on inside that house is going on.

• 2:15:38Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And went back.

• 2:15:39David Sacks?

  And then he walked back inside the house.

• 2:15:40Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. It was pretty great. Chappelle got it. All right, listen. For David Sacks, the Rain Man, for the Queen of Kinnois, Sultan of Science, David Friedberg, and the dictator himself, Chamath Palihapitiya, it has been an honor and a privilege to do this podcast with you gentlemen. This is the longest show in the history of the pod. Enjoy everybody. Uh, RIP producer Nick's, uh, next 48 hours and we'll see everybody next year.

• 2:16:11Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Love you guys. Happy holidays.

• 2:16:12Jason Calacanis?

  Love you bestest.

• 2:16:13David Sacks?

  Back at you.

• 2:16:23Speaker 04

  And instead, we open sourced it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it. Love you, S. I. The queen of Kenwa.

• 2:16:36Speaker 04

  Besties are gone. That is funny, a dog taking a piss in your driveway.

• 2:16:46Chamath Palihapitiya?

  We should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy because it all just feels like this sexual tension that we just need to release somehow.

• 2:16:54Speaker 04

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