E159: The Bestie Awards! Recapping the best and worst of 2023

(0:00) Welcome to the fourth annual Bestie Awards! (4:14) Biggest Political Winner (10:26) Biggest Political Loser (15:14) Biggest Political Surprise (23:02) Biggest Business Winner (26:50) Biggest Business Loser (30:32) Biggest Business Surprise (35:57) Best Science Breakthrough (40:30) Biggest Flash in the Pan (42:34) Best CEO (44:53) Best Investor (47:07) Best Turnaround (50:04) Worst Company (54:21) Best Meme (56:53) Best New Tech (59:57) Best Trend (1:02:12) Worst Trend (1:07:42) Favorite Media (1:12:40) The Rudy Giuliani Award for Self-Immolation (1:17:02) Final Thoughts Follow the besties: https://twitter.com/chamath https://twitter.com/Jason https://twitter.com/DavidSacks https://twitter.com/friedberg Follow the pod: https://twitter.com/theallinpod https://linktr.ee/allinpodcast Intro Music Credit: https://rb.gy/tppkzl https://twitter.com/yung_spielburg Intro Video Credit: https://twitter.com/TheZachEffect Referenced in the show: https://time.com/person-of-the-year-2022-volodymyr-zelensky https://time.com/6329188/ukraine-volodymyr-zelensky-interview https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-11-29/global-esg-market-shrinks-after-sizable-drop-in-us https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4319127-rfk-jr-leads-2024-candidates-in-favorability-poll https://news.gallup.com/poll/512135/support-third-political-party.aspx https://twitter.com/joosteninvestor/status/1737207130111819896 https://www.google.com/finance/quote/MSFT:NASDAQ https://www.google.com/finance/quote/UBER:NYSE https://www.statista.com/statistics/277501/venture-capital-amount-invested-in-the-united-states-since-1995 https://www.google.com/finance/quote/META:NASDAQ https://www.cnn.com/economy/live-news/federal-reserve-meeting-121323/index.html https://www.ft.com/content/59fff67e-b136-4435-89e1-2400b90f4b83 https://twitter.com/NASA/status/173682682876386142 https://www.wsj.com/tech/biotech/fda-approves-worlds-first-crispr-gene-editing-drug-for-sickle-cell-disease-8c65fbb3 https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2023/5/4/23708162/neurotechnology-mind-reading-brain-neuralink-brain-computer-interface https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/george-santos-campaign-funds-how-spent-what-to-know-rcna125531 https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/taylor-swift-eras-tour-highest-grossing-all-time-1-billion-1234921647 https://www.tmz.com/2023/10/13/taylor-swift-eras-tour-money-4-billion-profit https://www.google.com/finance/quote/NVDA:NASDAQ https://www.cnbc.com/2023/10/23/bill-ackman-covers-bet-against-treasurys-says-too-much-risk-in-the-world-to-bet-against-bonds.html https://www.google.com/finance/quote/NVO:NYSE https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/solana https://www.wsj.com/health/pharma/pfizer-drug-company-cost-cutting-2da7524d https://twitter.com/RebelNewsOnline/status/1615770518606561282 https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN28H0C7 https://www.courthousenews.com/fox-news-signals-its-unlikely-to-settle-smartmatics-2-7-billion-suit https://twitter.com/thedailyfriday_/status/1686406249317830656 https://twitter.com/WatcherGuru/status/1730250975578038522/video/1 https://twitter.com/huavancuong1507/status/1737474510868058489 https://www.scotusblog.com/2023/06/supreme-court-strikes-down-affirmative-action-programs-in-college-admissions https://twitter.com/exjon/status/1348090383079641091 https://twitter.com/benswann_/status/1737547395766858206 https://twitter.com/chamath/status/1737238320235831546 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt21152040 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt26230388 https://www.youtube.com/@TheDuran https://www.youtube.com/@judgingfreedom https://www.youtube.com/@DanielDavisDeepDive https://www.amazon.com/Idea-Factory-Great-American-Innovation/dp/0143122797 https://www.youtube.com/@Thebobbialthoff https://www.youtube.com/@ziwe https://goop.com/the-goop-podcast https://www.patreon.com/RedScare https://cafe.com/cafe-insider-feed https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/09/us/university-of-pennsylvania-president-resigns.html https://twitter.com/MailOnline/status/1732791280839610390 https://www.npr.org/2023/12/21/1220557358/rudy-giuliani-election-workers-lawsuit

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

• 0:00Jason Calacanis?

  All right, everybody. Welcome back. It is our fourth annual Bestie Awards. Yes, everybody is incredibly excited to hear the biggest winners in politics and losers in business, best science breakthrough, so many amazing categories. With me again, Chairman Dictator Chamath Palihapitiya, our billionaire Pock. Welcome back to the program, Chamath. That's what I said, billionaire Pock.

• 0:25David Sacks?

  Billionaire person, color.

• 0:27Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, please get it right. And running the all in DEI group, the Rain Man himself, David Sacks, welcome back to the program.

• 0:34David Sacks?

  Good to be here.

• 0:34Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, and the Sultan of Science, welcome back to the program. Are you ready with your selections, gentlemen? Are we ready to do this?

• 0:42David Friedberg?

  J Cal, this is the holiday episode. You gotta have a little more cheer. This isn't all business, dude.

• 0:48David Sacks?

  Cue the music, Nick.

• 0:49Jason Calacanis?

  Three, two.

• 0:55Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, and here we are, everybody, back again for the 2023 Bestie Awards. This is where everybody goes crazy. Oh, my God, standing ovation.

• 1:05David Friedberg?

  Hold on, who's drinking some champagne with me? I need some champagne popping. What are you guys drinking?

• 1:09Jason Calacanis?

  These are the awards. Everybody wants to know who's gonna be a winner.

• 1:12David Sacks?

  You're right. I need a drink. Hold on.

• 1:14Jason Calacanis?

  He needs a drink for this.

• 1:15David Friedberg?

  I need a drink too. Can you, can I go get a drink? Hang on.

• 1:18Jason Calacanis?

  Everybody get a drink, loosen it up. I'm at my office. I don't have alcohol here. Look at your second drawer.

• 1:26Speaker 03

  Rain Man David Sacks.

• 1:39Jason Calacanis?

  All right, everybody. Welcome to the Bestie Awards for 2023.

• 1:43David Friedberg?

  What are you drinking?

• 1:44Jason Calacanis?

  I got a little Veuve Clicquot. You know, I love my Veuve.

• 1:47David Friedberg?

  Are you actually gonna drink it?

• 1:48Jason Calacanis?

  You know, I, people don't know this about me, but that was my beverage of choice was the old Veuve Clicquot when I would go out in New York. What have you got there, Sacks? What are you drinking for the 2023 Bestie Awards? What are you drinking?

• 2:00David Sacks?

  I'm drinking. My class is all rapasado in a class with a single big rock and I broke out my patriotic great seal United States class.

• 2:12Jason Calacanis?

  This is a tribute to the border. You got a little bit of Mexico, a little bit of the United States and is it flowing between the border and you? Is that it? It's open border now?

• 2:21David Sacks?

  The border is completely open at this point.

• 2:22Jason Calacanis?

  Gotcha. Okay. Just flooding in. You're not drinking. You're at the office.

• 2:28Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Friedberg, I mean, I didn't, I didn't plan. I brought my props to wish everybody happy holidays.

• 2:35Jason Calacanis?

  Nice. Beautiful.

• 2:36Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And the bestest sweater.

• 2:37Jason Calacanis?

  Amazing. Friedberg, everybody knows that you're a quiet solo drinker in your darkest hours. What are you drinking? There's no surprises there. What are you drinking?

• 2:47David Friedberg?

  I'm always drinking when I gotta hang out with you, J. Cal. I'm drinking a Victoria beer.

• 2:51Jason Calacanis?

  A Victoria beer.

• 2:52David Sacks?

  That is true, actually. I don't think you hang out with J. Cal sober, do you?

• 2:55Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, everybody, there it is. Woo.

• 2:58Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I cannot.

• 2:59Jason Calacanis?

  We've got the Vuvkliko. Unfortunately, at my ski house, I can't find the flute, so I'm gonna put this in a wine glass. Sorry for the sacrilege. But cheers, here's to another amazing year of the All In Podcast and the besties hanging out. Cheers.

• 3:11David Friedberg?

  You wanna say a few words, J. Cal?

• 3:12Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I'd like to say a few words.

• 3:14David Friedberg?

  In memoriam of the year?

• 3:15Jason Calacanis?

  Yes. Working with you guys has been delightful, miserable and everything in between. Congratulations on all of our success and here's to an amazing 2024 and hopefully we find a CEO and we can keep this thing going for another 150 or so episodes. Nobody thought we would get here. Everybody hates us for our success and [bleep] the mids and the haters. Love you besties.

• 3:39David Sacks?

  Cheers. Well, I would like to make a toast.

• 3:43Jason Calacanis?

  Here we go.

• 3:44David Sacks?

  Here is to three of the most talented, warm, friendly guys and J. Cal.

• 3:53Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, he was coming. That joke format for me. I told you that one. I told you misdirection. Don't ever forget it, brother.

• 4:02Jason Calacanis?

  All right. Well, to three of the most sincere, heartfelt, intelligent, loving individuals, and David Sacks, welcome to the program. We've got a huge lineup here for you. And let's just get to it. We're going to give our 2023 award for the biggest winner in politics. Last year, Chamath, you said that your prediction for 2023, now, we're going to give the actual award for 2023, but in our predictions episode last year, you said you were on Nikki Haley and short DeSantis. What a prescient call. What do you have this year?

• 4:35Chamath Palihapitiya?

  That's Brett trade paid off in spades.

• 4:38Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, big spread trade.

• 4:39Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Looking back, I think the biggest political winner was Donald Trump.

• 4:44Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 4:45Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think that the documents case

• 4:49Chamath Palihapitiya?

  galvanized his leadership in the Republican nomination. And I think that this move by the Colorado Supreme Court basically sealed the deal. I think he is going to run away with the Republican nomination and barring some catastrophic meltdown, has a better chance to get into the White House than before this Colorado case. So he was the biggest political winner, I think, of 2023. It just seems to me that if I had to really put it in a nutshell, I think that the the Dems, in this weird way, actually want Trump back in office more than the Republicans do, because everything they've done has been near cited,

• 5:32Chamath Palihapitiya?

  and I think has actually galvanized his support and increased his popularity and his ability to fundraise more than anything else.

• 5:41Jason Calacanis?

  Friedberg, who is your biggest political winner of 2023?

• 5:46David Friedberg?

  Who did I give it to last year? Do you remember?

• 5:49Jason Calacanis?

  You gave it to MBS and Saudi, that they would have the, your prediction was they would have the most important year in the monarist. But in some ways, I think they are center stage.

• 5:59David Friedberg?

  That's what I thought. Yeah, so I am giving my biggest winner. I'm giving my biggest political winner award to the nation state of Saudi Arabia.

• 6:07Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, wow.

• 6:07David Friedberg?

  Like, they are sitting in the middle of the US, China, Iran.

• 6:14David Friedberg?

  Israel, Russia, they have relations with all of those nations and relations where they are trying to be productive. Extraordinary leverage with both their capital, their geographic positioning and their energy resourcing, and painting a very positive future on how they want to reinvest their capital and modernize the country. And I think one of the biggest coups that they pulled this year was turning J. Cal to being a big promoter of Saudi after his visit to the Middle East. And so I think they're entering 2024 with great strength and leverage. So I give them credit for riding out many storms this year and coming out ahead. So it's just, it's been interesting to watch. I'm not, I'm not close or tied to them in any way, but I just think from a global leverage

• 6:57David Friedberg?

  point of view, they seem to be in a very strong place. So that's my, my award.

• 7:01Jason Calacanis?

  I can't disagree with you that the place has made incredible progress. Personal freedoms, economic freedoms, they're, the country is evolving and embracing every country on the planet, right? So you have to take that as a win. I have no business interest there, but I am impressed with the progress. So Sax, that means it's your turn to give us your 2023 biggest winner.

• 7:28David Sacks?

  My biggest winner in politics, J. Cal, I think you'll like this one, is abortion rights.

• 7:34Jason Calacanis?

  Abortion rights?

• 7:35David Sacks?

  Abortion rights. After Dobbs, abortion rights are winning on every battle where they're at issue. It's won referenda in very red states like Kansas, Kentucky, Montana, and Ohio. It swung legislatures to the Dems in swing states like Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. It swung states from court races in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin. I'd go so far as to say it's the Democrats' only winning issue, and they are putting it on the ballot everywhere they can. Ruth Bader Ginsburg pointed out around 30 years ago that we likely could have reached this resolution decades ago if the courts hadn't stolen the issue from the political process, because abortion rights were in the process of being liberalized everywhere. And in my view, the political process is messy, but it's how we finally moved past

• 8:20David Sacks?

  the issue as a nation, which is why I think Dobbs was the right decision, even if it was a difficult one.

• 8:25Jason Calacanis?

  Huh, interesting. So you are.

• 8:29Jason Calacanis?

  Smoothing over Trump's taking away the right for women to choose and saying that this is a net positive for the country, if I'm reading it correctly.

• 8:37David Sacks?

  Well, Trump didn't take anything away. The Supreme Court.

• 8:40Jason Calacanis?

  He placed the three people who didn't, right?

• 8:42David Sacks?

  The Supreme Court, hold on, I just explained it. You're not listening. Supreme Court gave the issue back to the democratic process. The democratic process is now voting to maintain abortion rights, and that is going to settle the issue once and for all.

• 8:57Jason Calacanis?

  Interesting framing.

• 8:58David Sacks?

  So all of your fears that abortion rights would fall by the wayside, because that's from court decision, have actually proven to be null and void. What we're ending up with is a better solution where the country doesn't need to fight about this anymore because the voters have expressed the will of the people.

• 9:13Jason Calacanis?

  Fantastic framing. Great save for the Republican Party there.

• 9:17David Sacks?

  Well, it won't be unless they learn how to talk about the issue.

• 9:20Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I mean, the way I would frame the same issue is that Trump stacked the deck to take away women's right to choose in order to get elected. But your framing is pretty good, too, and you're a master of framing these things. So I was torn here for mine. I had two different choices. I was either going to go with Nikki Haley, because what an amazing feat for her to even be getting close to Trump in some of these primaries. But I think the biggest winners in this year of 2023 were non-traditional candidates actually becoming somewhat viable and capturing the imagination of young people, Vivek, RFK, and Dean Phillips being, I think, the three leading candidates. So I'm going to go with

• 10:03Jason Calacanis?

  the non-traditional candidates being the big winners for 2023. And for last year, I had said that my prediction was, for 2023, was that Trump would get indicted, win the nomination, and then agree to not run because he gets a pardon. So I think I've got two or three of those in the parlay in the bag. Let's go on to biggest loser. The biggest loser in politics. When we did our predictions for 2023, Chamath, you said that you were short DeSantis. Here we are, we're giving our actual award for the biggest political loser in 2023. Friedberg, I'll start with you. Who is your biggest political loser for 2023?

• 10:45David Friedberg?

  My biggest political loser is the DEI movement. I heard, obviously, post-October 7th, the Hamas attacks on Israel. And then the following support for Hamas that came out of what have historically been groups that are aligned with DEI interests and then the DEI-driven leaders of the universities that went in front of Congress to defend their freedom of speech, rules around antisemitic

• 11:18David Friedberg?

  protests, caused a lot of folks that I know who are very liberal and very influential to wake up to the negative impacts of the DEI movement and its linkage to potentially antisemitism, which is masked in this oppressor-oppressed ideology that is the basis of a lot of these DEI protocols. And so I think it really shined a negative light on DEI this year in a way that hasn't been the case in a broader way with very influential people in a very long time. And so I think that that movement is going to take a big hit and took a big hit the end of this year and will continue to, I think, be questioned by donors and supporters of the ideologies of that movement.

• 11:57Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, Sacks, who is your biggest loser in politics for 2023?

• 12:03David Sacks?

  My biggest loser in politics for this year is Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine. And you can see this pretty clearly by just looking at the cover of Time Magazine. He began the year fresh off of winning Time Magazine's Person of the Year. And by the end of the year, the same author at Time Magazine was writing a new cover story saying that Zelensky had become delusional, he had become messianic, he was ordering his troops on suicide missions, and his own inner circle had turned on him.

• 12:32David Sacks?

  And of course, who could forget that other photo from the middle of the year at Vilnius, when all those Euro snobs turned their back on Zelensky? That was a brutal image that went viral on social media, literally the European elite turning their backs on a frustrated Zelensky. Sadly, Zelensky had the opportunity in April of 2022 to make peace, to sign a peace deal. And unfortunately, he took Boris Johnson and Joe Biden's advice to pressure Putin rather than make peace, and I think that gamble has turned into a disaster for him.

• 13:08Jason Calacanis?

  Chamath, your biggest political loser in 2023?

• 13:12Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I had a different choice, but I think...

• 13:14Jason Calacanis?

  Hmm, game time change?

• 13:16Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah, hearing David has convinced me. I will, I will go with the death of the acronyms. It was, it was close for me between that and I actually think that Joe Biden unfortunately had a very difficult run of it in 2023. When you actually think about it, the Ukraine thing was a fiasco. All of this stuff around maybe putting the hand on the scale, whether it's on Elon or against Donald Trump, it's all just very messy, I think, for him. But I do think that Friedberg is right. This is probably the beginning of the end of the acronyms. And if you look at ESG and DEI together, ESG is a little bit more measurable, but sustainable

• 13:58Chamath Palihapitiya?

  asset ownership and ESG ownership across the world shrank by 15%, which you may say, is that a big number or not? That's $5 trillion. And so where the money goes typically, so goes everything else in modern society. And so when the money starts to scurry, I think that you can pretty much expect that people's patience and support of these kinds of movements are waning. I'll go with death of the acronyms are the biggest political losers.

• 14:27Jason Calacanis?

  So you started, you were gonna say Biden, but you changed it in real time and you went DEI, ESG acronyms.

• 14:32Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Acronyms, yeah.

• 14:33Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, death of the acronyms. You know, I had a lot of talks with folks about this one. People had a lot of input. Some people said DeSantis, some people said Biden. I think the biggest 2023 loser in politics is the American people, who are now faced with a Biden-Trump rematch. Both of those individuals clearly being in different stages of decline, being over 80. And the GOP just can't quit Trump. And it seems like the Democrats can't quit Biden, despite 70, 80% of the country not wanting the rematch. So I'm going to give the American people are the biggest political losers of 2023. All right, here we go. Biggest political surprise.

• 15:16Jason Calacanis?

  This is the biggest political surprise of 2023. Sax, what's your biggest political surprise?

• 15:23David Sacks?

  Well, I think the biggest political surprise, and it was a very negative one, was the Hamas attack on Israel on the morning of October 7th, which really seemed to come out of nowhere. Only eight days before, Jake Sullivan, who's Biden's national security advisor, had declared that the Middle East had been quieter than it had been in two decades. And those words obviously proved very old time, but he wasn't alone in thinking that. I think almost everybody was really surprised by this attack. I think until then, the Middle East seemed to be on a path of progress with the Abraham Accords being negotiated between Israel and several Gulf monarchies. And I think that October 7th has really changed the political paradigm, certainly in Israel, in the Middle East,

• 16:07David Sacks?

  and I think even in American politics.

• 16:10Jason Calacanis?

  Hmm, okay. Free break?

• 16:13David Friedberg?

  It's a little bit of a nuanced take on that, but I said the rise of Hamas was the biggest political surprise. You know, Hamas is a self-proclaimed political party that was thrust to the center of geopolitics and domestic social issues across the West after October 7th, which was, I think, probably a surprise to many that planned these attacks as well. Basically, it feels to me like Hamas is the pawn that crossed the chessboard and became a queen. It's an organization that, you know, had resourcing and was influenced by, you know, many have shown connections to Iran and other wealthy states. And had very low attention levels prior to October 7th on a global basis and post

• 16:54David Friedberg?

  October 7th now has recognition and sympathy and a great deal of interest in the root cause of their party. So really incredible surprise. I don't think anyone could have predicted this at the start of the year that not just the attacks happened, but the resulting shift in the discourse and influence that's happened.

• 17:13Jason Calacanis?

  Chama, biggest political surprise of 2023?

• 17:16Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I'm going to go with a domestic choice and I think it's quite obvious, but the biggest political surprises are of Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. I don't think anybody would have predicted that he would both drop out of the Democratic Party, run as an independent and essentially collect. He is, in terms of favorability in the polls, he's the leading 2024 candidate right now. It's incredible.

• 17:45Jason Calacanis?

  People like him. That's for sure.

• 17:47Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Incredible. And nobody would have predicted.

• 17:49David Sacks?

  That's a really good one.

• 17:50Jason Calacanis?

  What do we think he will get if he runs as an independent, just percentage wise, Ross Perot as a third party candidate, get 19%? You think better than 19%?

• 17:59Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Because the country is much more fragmented today. There's a lot more protest votes today. There's just a lot of reasons where RFK can garner a lot of support and build a plurality among centrists. That wasn't possible when Perot was running because when he ran, you have to remember, like, the country was in a very different place psychologically than it is right now.

• 18:18Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I too had third party candidates as being my biggest surprise. I didn't give it to a specific one. I was debating these third party candidates against the GOP not being able to field a better option than Trump, but I think I'm going to go again with third party candidates. But I'll include Dean Phillips in that breaking ranks. I'll include Vivek, just a very young, very smart individual capturing people's imagination. Third party candidates for me is the biggest surprise. And I do think it could have a meaningful impact. If you're right that he gets over 19%, who does that, Chama, in your mind, who does that benefit and who does it hurt if the candidates are Biden and Trump?

• 18:59Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It hurts Biden the most.

• 19:01Jason Calacanis?

  You believe that? Okay. What about you, Sax? Who do you think it hurts the most?

• 19:05David Sacks?

  Unclear right now.

• 19:06Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 19:06David Sacks?

  I mean, I think on the issues, I can see a lot of populist voters wanting to go with RFK. But on the other hand, maybe he does peel away some Democratic Party voters. So I'm not sure, to be honest.

• 19:18Jason Calacanis?

  I've heard this before. Any thoughts, Friedberg, on that?

• 19:21David Friedberg?

  What was the question?

• 19:22Jason Calacanis?

  If RFK were to get, as Chama thinks, more than Perot, so that's 20% or more of the popular vote, who is that going to harm and who is it going to hurt? Trump or Biden?

• 19:32David Friedberg?

  I saw a Gallup survey that showed that there's a real shot at more than 40% of Americans being interested in a third party. And so I'm sorry, I could be totally wrong on that, but I'm pretty sure I saw that and it really kind of resonated with me. And I think our discourse here and, you know, obviously conversations with our friend group, Nick might have something on this, support for third US political party up to 63%. This is the Gallup data. Yeah, so I was right. I think that this is one of the most kind of profound shifts in American politics, at least in our lifetimes, that the right has gone very right, the left has gone very left, and they've been so rooted in identity politics that you can't really see any of these issues kind of finding compromise

• 20:17David Friedberg?

  and finding a way to lean across the aisle and get things done. And I think that's where a lot of people are just fed up. So I would love to see a third political party emerge, and if RFK breaks the dam on this, it would be fantastic. It will take, as these things always do, a number of years for a group of independents to coalesce around what that third party looks like and how it's going to be governed and so on. But this could be a really interesting shift in the dynamics of American politics. So pretty, pretty cool. I'm not into politics in the US that much, but pretty cool, I think, opportunity to reframe, you know, how do we want to build America going forward? And thinking about using a new party as a way to do that.

• 20:56Jason Calacanis?

  And we haven't even heard of No Labels, the third party platform. They're probably going to announce Joe Manchin any day now. And so that could change things as well. So that's a very interesting take.

• 21:07Chamath Palihapitiya?

  The biggest problem that we have, this may sound really dumb, but I think it's true, in launching a third party, is a viable name.

• 21:19Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think it's the most important boundary condition to have a sustainable third party is a is a good name.

• 21:25Jason Calacanis?

  Like an iconic person.

• 21:27David Friedberg?

  The Chairman's Party.

• 21:29Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Like whatever we call this party.

• 21:30Jason Calacanis?

  The name of the party, not the person they feel.

• 21:32Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No Labels is a terrible name.

• 21:34Jason Calacanis?

  That's a terrible name.

• 21:35David Friedberg?

  The Chairman's Party is perfect.

• 21:36Jason Calacanis?

  Green Party is terrible.

• 21:37David Friedberg?

  Green Party is terrible. The Patriot Party, Freedom Party, they're all terrible because they all feel like they're rooted in some, you know, either conservative or liberal cause. There's got to be some element of like, what's the right decision on each, on each topic, not necessarily, you know, how do we fight the identity politics? I think that's the key piece that's missing and.

• 21:57Jason Calacanis?

  I like the Rational Party, like a party of rational individuals.

• 22:01David Friedberg?

  That also feels disparaging to a degree, you know?

• 22:03Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 22:03David Friedberg?

  I don't know.

• 22:04Jason Calacanis?

  Branding, branding.

• 22:04David Friedberg?

  Zach, what would you call it, the third party?

• 22:07Jason Calacanis?

  Republicans.

• 22:08David Sacks?

  People's Republic of, I don't know.

• 22:11Jason Calacanis?

  Saxistan?

• 22:12David Friedberg?

  Chima, do you have an idea for a name?

• 22:15Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I'm not going to comment on this.

• 22:16Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, Chima, boo, something brewing.

• 22:21David Friedberg?

  Jake, would you have a name for a third party? You like the Rational Party?

• 22:25Jason Calacanis?

  The Rational Party or something like that where it kind of evoked, you know, people who are being thoughtful and were trying to make rational decisions in everybody's best interest, right? Something that was not about us versus them, abortion, or, you know, DEI or ESG, just something focused more on getting things done. The Getting Things Done Party. Something like that. Getting Things Done Party.

• 22:51David Sacks?

  It's a bit on the nose, but better than the Derangement Party.

• 22:54Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 22:55David Sacks?

  All right, let's keep going.

• 22:56Jason Calacanis?

  Let's keep going. Here we go. Oh, man, he's always trying to derail the show. I will not engage with some. All right, it's time for our biggest business winner. Biggest winner in business. Who you got, Chima? Who's your biggest winner in business?

• 23:11Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I mean, I don't think this is even close, but I think it's Elon Musk.

• 23:16Jason Calacanis?

  Oh.

• 23:18Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Three things, obviously, three different companies, but the rebasing of Twitter actually had an even more profound impact, I think, on Silicon Valley than it necessarily did on Twitter. Second was, I think SpaceX has really turned a corner. Starlink is really at scale. Starship looks like it's viable. And then the third is Tesla really consolidated. It's leadership in EVs and batteries and battery technology and FSD. So I think on the merits, it was not even close.

• 23:54Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, Sax, who you got? Who's your biggest business winner?

• 23:57David Sacks?

  The magnificent seven. These are the seven companies that accounted for almost all of the stock market gains this year. You can see it in this chart. It's about a 63% gap between the performance of the top names, top seven names in the S and P 500 and then the other 493 of them. I think that the S and P 493 had a 12% gain this year, which isn't bad, but it was dwarfed by the magnificent seven, which was almost 80%.

• 24:28Jason Calacanis?

  Incredible. All right. Sax says the M7, Friedberg, who you got?

• 24:32David Friedberg?

  Yeah, I'm going to pick one of the seven, which is Microsoft, just a shot down the middle of the fairway here. Despite only seeing, I think roughly 8% top line growth, the business saw its market cap grow by over a trillion dollars, 1.7 to 2.7 trillion this year. Just an incredible number. I mean, can you imagine if we ever said that 10 years ago, whether anyone would believe it? Consumer and enterprise strength and strategic strength, the fact that they were able to close the Activision acquisition in this sort of regulatory environment. And then the strength that Satya showed and the the speed at which he acted during the OpenAI weekend debacle, where he set up this whole thing where he got Sam on board and was going to retain all this value that he was extracting from OpenAI

• 25:12David Friedberg?

  and partnership was, I think, great leadership and cemented his, his position and standing as being a really thoughtful, fast acting, strategic leader for a business that's been around forever, but amazingly added a trillion of market cap in 12 months. So I just throw it to Microsoft this year. It's very hard to kind of break that business apart and say, here's all the things that are wrong with it. It's just, you know, it's just moving.

• 25:36Jason Calacanis?

  All right. Very well done. We got Elon Musk.

• 25:38David Friedberg?

  Didn't you work, didn't you work there for a while?

• 25:40Jason Calacanis?

  One year.

• 25:41David Sacks?

  At Twitter?

• 25:43David Friedberg?

  No, at Microsoft.

• 25:43Jason Calacanis?

  Microsoft.

• 25:44David Sacks?

  Oh, Microsoft.

• 25:45Jason Calacanis?

  One year.

• 25:46David Sacks?

  I was actually, no, I was locked up for two years in the wake of the Amer deal. Yeah, I was a corporate vice president at Microsoft.

• 25:52David Friedberg?

  You like it?

• 25:53David Sacks?

  Yeah, it was, I mean, it's a high quality company for sure.

• 25:55David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 25:56David Sacks?

  I mean, I was like, super active for one year because I was still in charge of, I still had a P and L running Amer, but then after one year, Amer was sort of assimilated into the Borg and

• 26:07David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 26:07David Sacks?

  I didn't have anything to do. I was kind of just like on call.

• 26:10David Friedberg?

  Right, right.

• 26:11Jason Calacanis?

  All right. I am going to talk my own book on this one and give it to Dara and the team at Uber. They got into the S and P 500, became profitable, planning stock buybacks. They resolved almost all of the regulatory issues, including getting the taxis in London to be on the app, which was their big adversary, and they were going to get kicked out of London. If you remember, this is a company that five years ago, the press and the fake news were saying could never be profitable and was going to fail. And now it is the most successful new startup in the last cycle, bigger than everybody. And so congratulations to the team over there. All right. Biggest loser in business.

• 26:54Jason Calacanis?

  The biggest loser is 2023. Friedberg, just so you know, last year, your prediction was capital intensive series B, Cs, and Ds of growth companies. Well done on that prediction. But give me Friedberg, your actual, who was your biggest loser in 2023? Oh, Sultan of Science.

• 27:11David Friedberg?

  It's sort of tied up. Obviously, there's a tail to the effect, but it's VCs who deployed most of their capital in 2021. Obviously, it was the year where venture capital deployments peaked. And what I've heard from institutional LPs this year is that, you know, not only will that vintage underperform, but it could torpedo as many as 50% of firms that are managing capital today in Silicon Valley, and it could switch the capital allocation model that reduces allocation to venture as an asset class significantly because of the torpedo that the 2021 vintage represents in performance. So that was my biggest loser for the year.

• 27:53Jason Calacanis?

  Good for me and Sacks because we were diligent during that time. All right, let's go to you, Sacks. Who's your biggest loser in business in 2023?

• 28:01David Sacks?

  My biggest business loser is Disney. It seems that every aspect of Disney's business the bed in 2023. I mean, all their major theatrical releases flopped and missed a conservative backlash against its woke social stances. You may recall that the actress who played Snow White in the remake accused Prince Charming of being a stalker.

• 28:25Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, there's a million examples.

• 28:26David Sacks?

  Even their their Marvel franchise suddenly had bombs. They had to fire Jonathan Majors, who was doing a fantastic job playing Kang in an entire franchise arc. They're gonna have to reset now because of a criminal conviction involving him. Disney Plus subscriptions fell off a cliff. Even attendance at its theme parks declined dramatically because they charged way too much for families to visit. And then finally, Bob Iger picked a fight with Elon Musk over advertising. Remember Elon probably told Iger to GFY?

• 28:57Jason Calacanis?

  Good for you.

• 28:58David Sacks?

  Yep. And tens of thousands of Disney Plus subscribers canceled their subscriptions because of that. And it all makes you wonder if Iger now wishes he had stayed retired.

• 29:07Jason Calacanis?

  I too picked Disney. I put Disney Warner Brothers. Both of them had their comic book franchises collapse simultaneously. On the on the Warner Brothers side and the DC side, the Flash and Justice League, everything came apart. Streaming was too expensive and you didn't mention these horrific strikes that they had to deal with. And it feels like they had to give a ton of concessions. So Disney was my biggest loser as well with Warner Brothers as their little brother there. Chamath, we have a consensus there. Rare consensus between Sax and I. Who did you have for your biggest loser in business?

• 29:40Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Well, you you guys partially win.

• 29:43Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 29:43Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Because I'm gonna have to

• 29:46Chamath Palihapitiya?

  agree with you guys, but I think the biggest loser in business was the go woke community who tried to synthetically and artificially use all these social movements as a way to drive revenue and just got totally burned. So Disney, Bud, Target.

• 30:07Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And I think the statement from consumers is, look, just sell a product, stay in your lane.

• 30:15Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Make a better and better product for us at lower and lower prices and otherwise just let the politicians and the voters decide social issues. And I think that was pretty clear.

• 30:24Jason Calacanis?

  All right, there you have it, folks. If you're gonna make Bud Light, people just want to drink the damn beer. They're not interested in your politics. All right, here we go. Biggest business surprise of 2023. Who do you got, Sax? Who is your biggest business surprise of 2023?

• 30:41David Sacks?

  I think it was the Fed's Bank Term Funding Program, or BTFP, in response to the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and the regional banking crisis. As you may recall, it wasn't just SVB. There were several dominos in the regional banking system that fell. It was SVB, Signature, First Republic, and even in Europe, Credit Suisse, basically, fell apart, all because of the sudden spike in interest rates. A lot of people tried to blame VCs for this, J Cal.

• 31:10Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 31:11David Sacks?

  Even you and me took some heat. The truth is that if the dominos had fallen in a slightly different order, no one would have thought to blame VCs for this. It was obviously the fact that rates had spiked up and these banks got caught off sides because their deposit base is volatile and they had loaded up on government bonds at a 1% interest and then the value of those bonds plummeted. The Fed then stepped in to prevent this from turning into a contagion. That was where the BTFP came in. And I'm ambivalent about it because I think that we don't know the long-term consequences of the Fed basically providing this liquidity to the banking system. However, it's very clear to me that there

• 31:54David Sacks?

  was a regional banking crisis underway and the Fed stepping in, I think, probably saved us from having a recession this year.

• 32:01Jason Calacanis?

  Amazing. So the Fed there. I picked Facebook for my biggest surprise this year. They changed the name of the company two years ago to Meta. They were pouring tens of billions of dollars into VR, which nobody wanted to use. The CEO was focused on the wrong thing, but they turned it around. The stock dropped to 90 and Zuckerberg, I guess, didn't want to lose. And so he laid off tens of thousands of employees, said, no more middle managers. Everybody's got to get to work. And they doubled down on their existing businesses and they've made some great progress on AI. So my biggest business surprise was the resurgence of Zuckerberg and Facebook. Chamath, who did you have for your biggest business surprise?

• 32:43Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I'll pick Jay Powell and the Fed capitulation. I think that I've been saying for a while that rates will be higher for longer

• 32:54Chamath Palihapitiya?

  for quite a while now. And I was really surprised when Jay Powell had this press conference in December, in early December, and just basically capitulated and just said, you know what, guys, we're going to be cutting probably three times next year. That was effectively the gist of what he said. And immediately, the 10-year basically just completely changed course. And it went from almost at 5% to below 4% within a matter of two and a half or three weeks. So and then the stock market has basically done nothing but go straight up. That's a huge surprise to me because I think now what the setup is for 2024 is basically, we will melt up up until the

• 33:38Chamath Palihapitiya?

  first cut, and then there'll probably be some real selling. And I would not have predicted that. The markets have become a lot more accommodative as a result. I didn't expect that. So Jay Powell really, I think, surprised a lot of us. He could have been more tempered, but he essentially decided to give away the playbook in the last month of the year here.

• 34:02Jason Calacanis?

  And it's important for everybody to understand, the Fed acts independently of the administration. It's just a coincidence, correct, Sax, that their cuts are going to come just in time for Biden economics. And if it happens to go up in the next nine months, that has nothing to do with the Biden administration, who might benefit from that if the economy washes back.

• 34:21Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Jason, Nick, I have a quote that I sent Nick. This was what Larry Summers said. And I just think it's such an unbelievable

• 34:30Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Quote that is just worth internalizing. If you just start reading here, so I prefer the Volcker Greenspan approach, which is to recognize that the Fed is a little bit like the Delphic oracles. People regarded them as omniscient and omnipotent, but they were in fact neither. So the oracles kept their pronouncements vague and oracular, not concrete and specific because it was impossible to be concrete and specific without being wrong frequently and undercutting credibility. Sure. I mean, that is just the Keep it general, yeah. Summary of what probably should have happened in these pressers. And this was an example where it was the exact opposite and the market just took it and said, I'm off to the races.

• 35:10David Sacks?

  Just to agree with that and buttress it. It's not only the fact that they gave this guidance this year, as you remember, back when we started having inflation, the Fed still stuck to the story that it would not be raising rates for some extended period of time. And a lot of these banks that had problems, basically, because they bought too many long-term government bonds. A lot of those bonds were bought during that period when the Fed was assuring them it wasn't going to be jacking up rates. So if the Fed hadn't misled them, maybe they would have made better risk decisions.

• 35:42Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 35:43David Sacks?

  So it works both ways.

• 35:44Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Friedberg, got a business surprise for 2023 for the audience here at the Bestie Awards?

• 35:49David Friedberg?

  The biggest surprise was Sam Altman's ouster and return all in a weekend. So that was kind of crazy. So I just give it to that. Nothing else to be said.

• 35:55Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Okay, the flip-flop. Love it. Okay, best science breakthrough. This is everybody's favorite. Also, the time when Saks goes and takes a leak. 2023, biggest science breakthrough.

• 36:04David Sacks?

  I've got one.

• 36:05Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You got one? Saks? You're awake during this?

• 36:07David Sacks?

  I got one.

• 36:08Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Secondly, go ahead. What's the biggest science breakthrough for you, Saks?

• 36:11David Sacks?

  According to NASA, there's a new look at Uranus. That's right, Jake Al. That's right, Jake Al. These are never before seen. Deep penetrating shots of your anus.

• 36:23Jason Calacanis?

  How deep and penetrating are these?

• 36:25David Sacks?

  Very deep, very penetrating from the James Webb Space Telescope.

• 36:29Jason Calacanis?

  Friedberg, when your anus gets probed this deeply, what's your takeaway? What's the feeling you get in this deep probing of your anus? Oh, wonder, mystery. Odd wonder?

• 36:44David Sacks?

  Well, it's a space colonoscopy.

• 36:45Jason Calacanis?

  Something gets moved with it. Absolutely. I'm going to save you for last, Friedberg. Tremath, do you have one?

• 36:51Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah, I think that this unfortunately did not get nearly the attention it deserves, but I'm going to pick the CRISPR, FDA-approved CRISPR treatment of sickle cell anemia. I think that this is just an incredibly important breakthrough. And so, you know, sickle cell basically is just a condition where the shape of your red blood cells change. It causes a lot of very painful inflammation and damage, disproportionately affects the black population, African-American population. And so now there's an approved therapy, which goes in and makes the gene edits and fixes these folks. So congratulations to Vertex and CRISPR, and I think it's just incredible.

• 37:28Jason Calacanis?

  There was, uh, my big breakthrough was this brain decoder technology. We didn't talk about it here on the show, but this project was crazy. They, they did MRI scans or fMRI scans of blood flow to different areas in the brain. They then had people listen to podcasts like The Moth, and they tracked individuals' brain activity with specific words that were said during the podcast, and they had them repeat words. Then they attached it to a language model, GPT-1, I believe, and narrowed down what people were thinking. Then they had people think thoughts, and it started to use the predictive model of GPT-1 and combined it with what was happening in their brain chemistry.

• 38:12Jason Calacanis?

  Now, this is a far way from being able to read people's minds, but for somebody who couldn't speak, let's say, the idea that you could think and then have your thoughts and the story you were telling actually come out of a computer just by thinking would be miraculous. Obviously Neuralink does this with a direct connection. What is Sacks thinking right now? Sack's still thinking about Uranus. He's going deep into Uranus right now. He's reading that paper. I can see it in his eyes.

• 38:35Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You guys know I got a colonoscopy?

• 38:37Jason Calacanis?

  Thank goodness. How was it?

• 38:39Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I got it on-

• 38:40Jason Calacanis?

  Did they put you under?

• 38:41Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Tuesday. Yeah, but I got, I didn't get the propofol. I got Demerol. I think Demerol.

• 38:46Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, you gotta go pro.

• 38:47Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I had like the Twilight sedation. So it's kind of like, you know, it was great. Don't get me wrong, but it was like 15, 20 minutes. Like it was not-

• 38:55Jason Calacanis?

  But you were kind of awake and lucid while they were-

• 38:58Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I woke up like halfway through.

• 39:00Jason Calacanis?

  You woke up halfway through?

• 39:01Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 39:02Jason Calacanis?

  Huh. Did they give you a drink? A little red wine or anything? Nothing?

• 39:05Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, they didn't talk to me. No, I just saw the, I saw the screen. I was like, what the hell? And then I just went back to sleep.

• 39:13Jason Calacanis?

  Let me tell you, propofol, it's drip, drip, drip, and then you wake up four hours later. It's the most restful sleep you ever had.

• 39:19Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Four hours? No, dude, I had a-

• 39:21Jason Calacanis?

  No, it was only-

• 39:21Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I only had Twilight sedation.

• 39:23David Friedberg?

  It's an hour, yeah.

• 39:24Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah. I had like a 20 minute Twilight sedation. That was it.

• 39:27Jason Calacanis?

  I asked them to go back up in there twice just to make sure. Friedberg, enough about Uranus. What was your biggest science surprise of 23? I know it's hard to surprise you.

• 39:37David Friedberg?

  I know you guys want to hear some crazy, specific thing, but I actually just said that there are too many breakthroughs with machine learned models with AI this year to list. LLMs that can run on small desktop machines that are open source, that outperform all models that were in existence even a few months prior. It highlights the leaps and bounds of this trajectory of development in models. And there's other specific examples, like we talked about DeepMind's GraphCast model, which is a graph neural network on the show. And obviously all the generative models in imagery and movies and music. But it's just such an extraordinary time to see us leverage our combined capabilities to drive these extraordinary gains.

• 40:19Jason Calacanis?

  So your surprise is the pace of language models and the pace of AI development?

• 40:22David Friedberg?

  Just all these breakthroughs in aggregate. I mean, I, I think it's hard, it's hard to pay attention to anyone. There's a constellation of change underway. It's incredible.

• 40:29Jason Calacanis?

  Hmm. Okay. Now it's time for our biggest flash in the pan. Who is your biggest flash in the pan, Jamar?

• 40:36Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Oh my gosh, this is a, well-

• 40:39Jason Calacanis?

  Could be tech, it could be business, it could be society, it could be pop culture.

• 40:43Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I wrote down SBF.

• 40:44Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 40:46Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think like from what looked like a too good to be wonder kind, frankly, just turned out to be an Adderall addicted grifter.

• 40:58Jason Calacanis?

  Sacks, I hope that doesn't hit too close to home. Who is yours?

• 41:01David Sacks?

  Same ballpark. I said effective altruism. The EA movement took a big hit with SBF. I would have thought that'd be enough to polish it off, but then we had the OpenAI board ousted Sam Altman, like we talked about. Apparently that was driven by a couple of their nonprofit board members who were effective altruists. I think the failure of that whole debacle will put the nail in the coffin of the EA movement.

• 41:30Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, Friedberg, you got a flash in the pan for 2023.

• 41:33David Friedberg?

  The obvious breakthrough in superconducting room temperature material, LK99.

• 41:39Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 41:39David Friedberg?

  It came and it went. Everyone thought it was going to change the world. Couple of weeks later, couldn't be replicated, was disproven ultimately. And for a hot minute there, everyone thought the world was going to change. So it was super exciting to see room temperature, superconductivity in the search for room temperature, superconducting materials get so much attention. As I mentioned, it's something I've thought a lot about since I was 13 years old. So it's super cool, but didn't happen. Came and it went.

• 42:05Jason Calacanis?

  I went with a wild card here. I said George Santos, the diva drama queen and congressman who slayed from 2023 to 2023.

• 42:16Jason Calacanis?

  And uses electric campaign funds to buy designer clothes and get Botox. So Yas Queen.

• 42:23Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And Sephora.

• 42:24Jason Calacanis?

  And Sephora.

• 42:24David Sacks?

  Not bad, not bad.

• 42:25Jason Calacanis?

  Yas Queen, just making bank over a cameo. Going to have him come in. He's going to do a, he's going to do a quick cameo here on All In Podcast. All right. Best CEO, your best CEO, best CEO. I'll go first. I'll go first. I haven't got first yet. I picked a wild card here. I went Taylor Swift. $4 billion in revenue from the tour and the merchandise and the movie and everything. Each tour stop generates $90 million for the city she lands in. She's getting 85%. She went direct to movie theaters with that concert movie and made a quarter billion dollars. She stands down. The best CEO of 2023 for me. Who you got, Jamal?

• 43:07Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft.

• 43:11Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I just think the gross tonnage of market cap dollars he added in 2023, plus figuring out how to close Activision, plus retaining maximum optionality with OpenAI,

• 43:25Chamath Palihapitiya?

  is just a masterclass in heads-down management.

• 43:30Jason Calacanis?

  Well done. Sax, who do you got?

• 43:33David Sacks?

  I have Jensen Wang, CEO of Nvidia and king of the GPU. We talked about the magnificent seven, but none was more magnificent than Nvidia, whose stock is up 235%, and earnings and forecasts keep blowing doors off. Jensen has been planning this moment for many years before the whole AI frenzy took hold, and Nvidia is now reaping the benefit of that.

• 43:57Jason Calacanis?

  Who do you got?

• 43:58David Friedberg?

  Free burn. I give it to Sam Altman, because I don't think any individual has generated more attention on a private company and its effect on the world and the future than Sam Altman and OpenAI. And I think that he's been aggressive in raising capital. This guy can raise like he can raise, and then he overbets on people. He finds talent, he gives them extraordinary comp packages, gets them to come and work on this extraordinary effort, and then gets them to deliver results. He pushes the limits, he pushes the boundaries, even beyond what's comfortable for his board members. Clearly, you know, that comes with the good and the bad. And then even after he got ousted by his board, his entire employee base threw a coup and got him back. And sure, everyone's got their economic motivations to see that happen,

• 44:43David Friedberg?

  but I still think that the setup was largely his work. So he does deserve credit for that. So all in, I think it's an incredible year for Sam Altman.

• 44:53Jason Calacanis?

  Now we move on to 2023 Best Investor. Chumap, who was your best investor for 2023 here at the Bestie Awards?

• 45:01Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It was a continuation of the last couple of years, but it's the pod shops and specifically Citadel. So I give that award to Ken Griffin. You know, pod shops, I think, have really become the hallway bully of the public capital markets, and Citadel is the kingpin.

• 45:20Chamath Palihapitiya?

  They returned $7 billion to their investors in 23. I think if you go back since 2020, they've returned more than 20 billion. They generated, you know, 15%, very steady returns, uncorrelated to the market. It's just a machine. I mean, it's incredible. It's an incredible business that he's built. So he is, there's nobody close.

• 45:42Jason Calacanis?

  Sax, who do you have?

• 45:43David Sacks?

  I've got Bill Ackman here for timing the bond market perfectly. He shorted bonds for most of the year, making hundreds of millions of dollars. And then on October 23rd, he announced that he was covering his positions and that it was too risky to stay short in bonds and he was going long. And that very day was the high point of the 10-year bond yield. The market made a bottom on October 27th. Since then, yields have plummeted, which means that the value of bonds has soared. And the best part of it is that Ackman is using his new FU money to take on Ivy League university presidents for their DEI double standards, grifting, and plagiarism.

• 46:19Jason Calacanis?

  Well, done. All right. Free break. Who you got?

• 46:21Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I also said Ackman for his timing on the Treasury trade.

• 46:24Jason Calacanis?

  I was right there with you guys, except I wanted to go with a wild card. I am astounded by the growth of TikTok. And I just worked backwards. Arthur Danchuk, who I've never met, from Susquehanna International Group, referred to as SIG in the industry, still owns, according to sources, 15% of this company, which could be worth 300, 400, 500 billion dollars when it goes out. And despite all the saber rattling, the CCP has not divested from it, even though Trump and Biden both said they were going to try to do that. And ByteDance was caught spying on American journalists using their TikTok data. So the fact that that investment is still in place, to me, is extraordinary. So congratulations

• 47:05Jason Calacanis?

  to them. But I'd sell it quick. All right. Now we move on. Moving quickly here. 2023, best turnaround. Who's your best turnaround, Jamal?

• 47:13Chamath Palihapitiya?

  This was like three years in the making, but I'll give it to Novo Nordisk. I think the amount of attention that Novo has gotten for Ozempic, Wegovy, and Ribelsus in 2023 was incredible. But you have to go back to the last decade where the first five years...

• 47:31Chamath Palihapitiya?

  There was just not much activity and they had to maintain their investment, stay strong, stay focused. And then, starting in about 2019, the stock has been about a 4 or 5X in the last 4 or 5 years. And I think these semi-glutide GLP-1s are here to stay. They're transformational on society. So that was an enormous task of corporate focus. So I'll give the turnaround award to Nova Nordisk.

• 47:59Jason Calacanis?

  Sacks, who you got?

• 48:00David Sacks?

  In light of what's happening right now in the crypto markets, I'm gonna go with Solana.

• 48:05Jason Calacanis?

  Oh!

• 48:09David Friedberg?

  Wow.

• 48:10David Sacks?

  It began the year at about $9 a token. It's now at 92 as of this moment. Obviously, it's very volatile, but it's up roughly 10X this year to date. And in light of the fact that various unscrupulous actors on the internet accuse some of us of buying Solana at a discount and dumping it on retail without any evidence, and that wasn't true, let's just say that those of us who are still holding bags of Solana are very happy campers right now.

• 48:40David Friedberg?

  Bag holder for the win.

• 48:42Jason Calacanis?

  F the bids! Friedberg, who do you got? Biggest business turnaround?

• 48:47David Friedberg?

  I give it to Dara and Uber. When he took over that business, I think it was an $8 to $9 billion net loss in 2019. $5 billion EBITDA run rate right now. Incredible forecasting, incredible skill in forecasting the sensitivities in that business, by the way.

• 49:02Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Say more, say more.

• 49:04David Friedberg?

  And, you know, obviously, he's seen the market cap just this year grow from $50 billion to $126 billion as of today. So give it to Dara for the big turnaround. Product sucks, though, I will say. It's gotten expensive, hard to get an Uber. Sit around and wait forever. So, Dara, please fix that [BLEEP]. Otherwise, good job.

• 49:22Jason Calacanis?

  Well done. I went with a one that you guys gave awards to and on all the previous awards. Sam Altman is all over this year's besties. I thought going from being fired for malfeasance to becoming a martyr and then I'm the captain now, you can throw in the I'm the captain now meme right here, Nick, for the pod. In about 10 days, he captured three full news cycles, was named CEO of the year, and the palace intrigue, raising money for an Nvidia killer in the Middle East. I mean, this guy is like James Bond plus a CEO. So what a great turnaround from fired to desired Sam Altman. All right,

• 50:01Jason Calacanis?

  let's go to our next one here. 2023, the worst company of the year. This is the company that is loathsome and horrible in our opinions. And it's that's all it is, folks. It's just four dudes' opinions. Sacks, in your opinion, what was the worst company of 2023?

• 50:20David Sacks?

  I'm gonna go with Pfizer. Just last week, the Wall Street Journal had an expose on the inner turmoil at Pfizer as its market cap has lost $140 billion in valuation in 2023. By the way, that headline is ridiculous. Pfizer did not save the world. The reason why they are off so much is because of a massive drop in demand for Paxlovid and for COVID boosters. Apparently, people do not see the value in those products. They finally figured it out. I would say that the company is also suffering from a credibility crisis by not leveling with the public about the efficacy and safety of their vaccines. The

• 51:04David Sacks?

  CEO, Albert Burla, was confronted in Davos by citizen journalists for this lack of transparency back in January of this year. And what's interesting is that if you read the Wall Street Journal piece, even his own employees are questioning Burla's candor when he announced on a company-wide virtual town hall that the company was embarking on a cost-cutting effort. The chatroom erupted in snark, quote, "Future is bright, but you might get fired," is how one employee characterized burlus spin. This led another employee to reply, quote, "Dumpster fires are always bright."

• 51:37Jason Calacanis?

  All right, Friedberg, worst company of 2023 for you. You have a worst company, most loathsome?

• 51:43David Friedberg?

  I do. I'm gonna get through this without getting interrupted. The worst company of 2023 is Mu Yuan Food Stuff. This company is pure evil. It's got 137,000 employees. It's based in China. It's the world's largest slaughterer of pigs. It slaughters 2.1 million pigs per year with the world's largest pig farm near Nanyang, where they basically take pigs from birth and breed them all the way through to slaughter. During their entire lives, these pigs never get to move more than a few inches. They live in these multi-story housing units that they never get to see sun or the light from the outside. Through their whole lives, they're kept separate from their families. Pigs are as smart as most dogs and even young children. And at the end of their

• 52:25David Friedberg?

  very painful, awful existences, they're slaughtered and fed to a growing population. China consumes over a billion pigs a year. It's a horrific situation. So, that's the most loathsome company of 2023.

• 52:43Jason Calacanis?

  Sounds delicious.

• 52:46Jason Calacanis?

  I'm sorry. Dude, you went off camera. You, you, you went off camera. No. You, Jacob. You started laughing. It's not a funny thing. I saw you laughing. That's why I started laughing. I mean, I had 15 jokes, but I'm not gonna make any of them. Uh, yeah, none of us are for factory farming. It's horrible. Who is your worst company, Chumav? Come on, Chumav, get in the game here. Who is your worst company?

• 53:10Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It's a tie between FTX and Silicon Valley Bank. One stole customer accounts and the other one just was run by...

• 53:19Chamath Palihapitiya?

  A CEO and a risk management infrastructure that really imperiled and almost imperiled an entire industry.

• 53:24Jason Calacanis?

  There you go. For me, it was Fox News. They deceived their loyal customers by knowingly spreading fake news about voting machines. They wound up firing their most loved host and our fifth bestie, Tucker Carlson, and they paid record-setting fines for misleading the public and creating massive division in our country. And they're facing an even bigger lawsuit, a $2.7 billion lawsuit with another election technology company that will happen in 2025. Pension funds are now suing this loathsome company because they lost so much money for them. So my worst company of the year is Fox News. All right. Sax, I'm sorry, I saw you go for the microphone there.

• 54:09David Sacks?

  I'm not going to defend Fox after they fire Tucker.

• 54:11Jason Calacanis?

  Exactly, exactly. That's why I put it in there for you.

• 54:14David Sacks?

  I do think the judgments, the magnitude of the judgments are ridiculous.

• 54:17Jason Calacanis?

  Okay. Now it's time, we're gonna have a little bit of fun here. Best meme. Your best meme. Fun stuff. I'll start it off this year. I love the Boston cop on a slide. I don't know if you guys have seen this one, but it went super viral. They've made millions of versions of it. This is the cop in Boston going down a slide. And the backstory here, a bunch of cops were told there's a slide that's too dangerous in Boston. One of them tried to do their duty and confirmed that it was in fact dangerous, and he got injured coming down the slide. And now anytime something is going off the track, whether it's a market or a company, you play that clip.

• 55:01Jason Calacanis?

  Sax, you're a master of memes. What do you got for us this year in the 2023 Bestie Awards?

• 55:08David Sacks?

  Well, I think the meme of the year had to be the GFY. Elon's answer to Bob Iger's attempt to blackmail him. Nick, but we need to see this in the GIF version. The way the hand motions are, it's this, then this, and then it comes back in.

• 55:23Jason Calacanis?

  Good for you.

• 55:25David Sacks?

  It's like a conductor of an orchestra.

• 55:27Jason Calacanis?

  It's just a standard, good for you. Chamath, did you have a, did you have a favorite, Chamath, a favorite meme of 2023?

• 55:33Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah, Nick, if you want to just throw it up there.

• 55:37Jason Calacanis?

  I'm a journalist and it's the kid.

• 55:42Jason Calacanis?

  No, it's not my journalism. I'm a journalist. What, what is this talking about? I think it's, it's what we all know. And I think it was further exposed this year, just the, the brazen naked ambition and corrupt nature of the mainstream media. Jason, you said it really well, and I, and it really made an impact on me. So I want to give you credit. We are all citizen journalists, investigative journalists now. And I think that that's true. I think we all have a responsibility to pick the information source and to vet it. Yeah. And never been more true than this. You gotta have multiple sources, triangulate the truth for yourself.

• 56:22Jason Calacanis?

  But yeah, I wouldn't trust the mainstream media at this point, you know, as but one of many sources. Friedberg, get a favorite meme. Get a favorite meme. No, I didn't put anything on this. Okay, you gave us six minutes on pigs being killed, but you can't come up with one meme. Okay.

• 56:39Jason Calacanis?

  Can't come up with a meme. Come on, man.

• 56:41David Sacks?

  I think it's kind of funny, actually.

• 56:42Jason Calacanis?

  It's kind of funny that he has no memes, memeless.

• 56:47David Sacks?

  Wait, we need to play the wham, wham music.

• 56:52Jason Calacanis?

  All right, best new tack, best new tack. We gotta keep things moving. Last year it was Fusion and GPT across the board. This year, I'll just get a mind out of the way real quick. I'm going to go with something more specific. ChatGPT's app has been extraordinary. It now has 4.0 in it. It has Dolly in it. I've been making incredible images to go with my, my Substack and my blog posts. That I would have paid thousands of dollars, you know, for each one of those when I was doing magazines and they have voice chat. If you haven't connected ChatGPT's voice app to the new action button on the iPhone 15, there's a button above your volume called action. You can map it to a specific feature inside of any app. I mapped it to

• 57:33Jason Calacanis?

  voice chat on ChatGPT. When I'm driving with my kids, they have a question, we put it in and we just started asking questions about history, science, whatever it happens to be, pop culture, music to ChatGPT for, and it is an extraordinary breakthrough app. And it's, you know, been downloaded, I think hundreds of millions of times now, or over a hundred million. Incredible, incredible progress there. Chamath, you got a best tack?

• 57:58Jason Calacanis?

  Best new tech?

• 57:59Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I don't think there was anything meaningful in 2023. I think there was a lot of improvements to things that were founded and started in 2020 or 2021 or 2022. Nothing new that caught my eye this year.

• 58:10Jason Calacanis?

  Sax.

• 58:12David Sacks?

  I have Starlink for JetSuite X. Of course, I've never used it, but I heard it's great.

• 58:20Jason Calacanis?

  But if you do fly with other humans who you don't know.

• 58:23David Sacks?

  I'm looking forward to Starlink for private aviation as well. But I've heard it's a real game changer on commercial flights and every kind of flight.

• 58:32Jason Calacanis?

  Freeburn. Best new tech?

• 58:35David Friedberg?

  My best new tech of this year, I think, is really important as we race to keep the promise of AI alive in the face of increasing government regulation, which is open source, locally run LLMs. So you can take an LLM and you can run it on your machine. You don't have to be connected to the internet. You don't have to have a third-party service provider making an LLM available to you. And so this allows the continued development and pursuit of productivity gains and new capabilities that emerge from these LLMs by making them local, offline, disconnected from the internet and

• 59:16David Friedberg?

  and away from the scrutiny of agencies that want to check your model and make sure it's okay. So this is really important to me. I do think like my broader trend right now is I think that there's this really scary big shift of you're either gonna end up in a new enlightenment or you're gonna end up in a new dark ages. And I think we're seeing this play out in all these conflicts around the world and all of this regulation and all of the technology that's being deemed either a threat or an opportunity. And so I think any technology capability that allows us to pursue the enlightenment is a winner for me. So anyway, this was a big shift that happened this year and there's multiple models that are publicly available that are free, open source that you can run.

• 59:56Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, 2023 best trend. Chamath, what was the best trend 2023 for you?

• 1:00:03Jason Calacanis?

  I actually didn't really, couldn't figure one out. Okay, Sax, you got a best trend for 2023. Something that happened often and became a trend.

• 1:00:12David Sacks?

  My best trend is the return of colorblindness as the standard and the pushback on DEI. We already talked about the university presidents and what Bill Ackman is doing. I would add to that, that the Supreme Court banned race-based affirmative action in university admissions in June, and red state governors like Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis took that as a green light to shut down DEI programs in their public colleges and universities. I think that this is a good trend and hopefully it continues next year because America should be a colorblind meritocracy.

• 1:00:45Jason Calacanis?

  Friedberg, what was your best trend of 2023?

• 1:00:49David Friedberg?

  The profitability focus at young companies, particularly in an age of AI copilot tools for software development. From what I've seen, it's pretty incredible. Single-person efforts can yield what historically is required six, 12, or more people to do using copilot tools in AI. So, software development is accelerated, new products, and entire companies can be built by a single individual at very low cost, building totally customized software. So, from what I've seen, it's not widely adopted, these capabilities, as you guys probably have seen as well, it's starting to be. But just imagine, once the majority of people are using these copilating tools to write software and start to learn how to use these tools, it's really going to

• 1:01:33David Friedberg?

  increase productivity globally as it finds its way into every business and everyone can become an entrepreneur and so on. So, it's incredible to see.

• 1:01:40Jason Calacanis?

  I too, Sax, was looking at the issue of DEI, and I framed mine as DEI dying and meritocracy thriving. That was the best trend for me. So, we are once again simpatico, you and I. DEI dying and meritocracy thriving. Nicely done.

• 1:01:55David Sacks?

  You really are proving you're a centrist.

• 1:01:57Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I mean, I think, or I just listened to MLK's speech and I thought, that seems like the most logical thing to do.

• 1:02:04David Sacks?

  Yeah, you're right. Absolutely. 100%. 100%. We figured this out some time ago.

• 1:02:09Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I don't know why we have to rehash it. Okay, 2023, worst trend. I'll lead it off. I had three here of worst trends. Number one, antisemitism, absolutely disgusting and horrible. Two, Trump's rehabilitation. We'll just leave it at that. And then three, people of low moral character using the freedom of speech movement to whitewash their horrible personal behavior. Yes, I'm talking about Alex Jones to all the mids in the comments. Sax, what was the worst trend for you?

• 1:02:36David Sacks?

  You had to have three, didn't you?

• 1:02:38Jason Calacanis?

  Well, I'm gonna go with antisemitism. Those are my two runners.

• 1:02:41David Sacks?

  Alright, fair enough. I think you guys will like my worst trend. It is the metastasizing national debt. This chart really makes it clear. You can see here the national debt as a function of deficit and revenues, and it's a upside down hockey stick.

• 1:02:57Jason Calacanis?

  Jesus.

• 1:02:58David Sacks?

  If a company could produce user growth that looked like this, I would invest all day long. However, this is not growth. This is basically how much we owe. And it is a bipartisan problem. It's been going on for really 20-plus years, but it is getting worse and worse under Biden.

• 1:03:17Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. Eight trillion added to the deficit under Trump and looks like five to six trillion under Biden.

• 1:03:23David Sacks?

  Well, you know, we did have a COVID meltdown where the economy was down 30% year over year. So both parties supported that bailout, and in hindsight, it was excessive. Biden's quote-unquote stimulus was passed on straight party lines after COVID was ready over. So I think we should just make sure to apportion the blame correctly. But like I said, bipartisan problem.

• 1:03:48Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I agree bipartisan. And Trump did a very ill-timed tax cut before COVID, so it was a double hit. If you want to compare it, in eight years, Obama added eight trillion, so it was one trillion a year. These new guys getting close to two trillion per year. So they doubled the velocity of spending. Just completely disastrous. Jamal, what's the worst trend for you?

• 1:04:10Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I just think it's the the general state of affairs amongst our young people, our 20-year-olds and our 30-year-olds, I think are really struggling.

• 1:04:21Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And it's gotten worse. I'll give you two examples. Here you see on your screen this year, 158,000 more Americans died than expected, which is more than all the wars combined in Vietnam. And when you look at where those death rates are, those death rates were coming from 35 to 44 year olds, which was up 26% and 25 to 34 year olds, which was up 20% above pre-COVID levels. And all we can point to from the government establishment is that it's smoking and a bad diet, which doesn't really hang together. And then the second trend is when you look at just general marriage rates amongst these same cohort of people, it's meaningfully

• 1:05:03Chamath Palihapitiya?

  worse than every cohort above it. So just societally, these folks are not tracking. In whatever dimension you want to measure, sort of like happiness, fulfillment, stability, safety, something is meaningfully wrong in these cohorts of people. And we owe it to them to figure it out.

• 1:05:21Jason Calacanis?

  The one thing you missed there, Chamath, in the Western world, at least 36% increase in suicide over the past two decades. So a lot of this is-

• 1:05:28Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It's another one. It's another one. So-

• 1:05:29Jason Calacanis?

  That might be the main one, I think, in this is the, the mental health issues are acute. Okay, we have Friedberg Urlecht for the worst trend, the bestie award for worst trend of 2023. What do you got?

• 1:05:41David Friedberg?

  I don't know. I had one. I'm going to change it on the fly. I'm going to go with the normalization of spending. I think it's probably the worst trend. Like it's, you know, it used to be a big deal. Remember when the TARP program happened in 08? And it was an incredible, single line item of $800 billion to support the troubled asset relief effort to try and keep the economy stable by buying up all of this failing debt and supporting all of these equities and keeping these businesses going. And now it's like $100 billion for this, a trillion for that. It's like we've normalized spending and COVID just made it worse. So to your guys' point earlier about the acceleration of spending, once you spend a dollar, you think it's okay to spend a dollar. And then next time you spend

• 1:06:26David Friedberg?

  two, it's not that bad. It's only a dollar more. And the next time you spend five, it's only three bucks more. And suddenly it becomes normal. And this normalization catches up to us. I've harped on this enough, so I won't go into it too much. But I think that's the worst trend.

• 1:06:36Jason Calacanis?

  Who did you change from? What was your, what was your original?

• 1:06:39David Friedberg?

  My original was the merging of the-

• 1:06:43David Friedberg?

  Oppressor oppressed ideologies that are in diametric opposition to each other. I just found this more ironic than the worst trend, I think, which is like LGBTQ groups that were pro Hamas, that were marching and supporting Hamas, which is anti LGBTQ. It was just so mind blowing to me to see some of the behavior over the last couple of months that made absolutely no sense. And it shows how little first principles thinking people are actually doing about the things that they're standing up for. Standing up for a free Palestine is one kind of point, but being pro Hamas, when Hamas would have

• 1:07:25David Friedberg?

  a responsibility of eradicating people like you is just, is just nuts to me. So there's just some of the stuff that I've seen where the oppressor oppressed ideology is trained to fit everything, even if it makes absolutely no sense. So it's just really frustrating to see.

• 1:07:42Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, now we go on to a little casual, the bestie awards for 2023, favorite media, favorite media, new things that came out in the media, could be a video game, book, music, or a TV show. I'll lead us off here, just get it out of the way real quick. For me, the secession finale, extraordinary, one of the best pieces of television ever made. And my sleeper was The Bear, season two, very niche show on FX. I think I turned a lot of you on to it. And season two had an episode, episode five, which is the forks episode, in which Cammy sends Richie to intern at a very elite restaurant and he's charged with polishing silverware. And Garrett and him get into it, why am I doing all this

• 1:08:25Jason Calacanis?

  stupid stuff? And he just tells him, listen, every day here is a freaking Super Bowl. And it's just a great, great, amazing episode of television with extraordinary performances and writing. Chamath, did you have any favorite media this year?

• 1:08:40Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Anything that Taylor Swift did this year was white hot. Here are Swifty. She is a tour de force. She's incredible and she's a genius.

• 1:08:52David Friedberg?

  What can you say? Nothing compares.

• 1:08:55David Sacks?

  I'm going to use my spot to draw attention to some podcasts that you may not have heard of.

• 1:09:01David Sacks?

  Some geopolitics and world affairs podcasts. So that probably been my number one is the Duran with Alexander Mercuros and Alex Christophero. I'd also give honorable mention to Judge Napolitano's podcast and Colonel Daniel Davis. I have found these three podcasts to be quite useful in understanding what's happening in the rest of the world. And I found their reporting and analysis to be more accurate than anything you're going to get in the mainstream media.

• 1:09:29Jason Calacanis?

  Friedberg, any favorite media for you as we get close to wrapping here?

• 1:09:33David Friedberg?

  I recently read a book that I liked. I don't know if I talked about it called The Idea Factory, on the history of Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation. Strongly recommend it. I had no idea how much this Bell Labs institution touched modern life, from radar to the transistor, to the nuclear bomb, to computing. Even information theory was developed inside of Bell Labs. It was an incredible organization that took its roots in an institutionalized monopoly, which then enabled them to have one customer that was always a built-in customer, but gave them the freedom and the resourcing to build all of these great things. And for anyone that wants to say that monopolies stifle innovation, I encourage you to read this book, because it really says

• 1:10:17David Friedberg?

  the opposite may be true, that a monopoly enables investment in long-term thinking and long-term ideas that you can never otherwise see. So I give it to that. I also had a softer one.

• 1:10:28David Friedberg?

  Have you guys ever watched Bobby Althoff's podcast? I found this so funny this year. You guys ever seen it? Her interview with Drake is hilarious. It's so funny. So she interviewed Drake, she's interviewed Cuban.

• 1:10:38Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, yes, I know who you're talking about, the deadpan.

• 1:10:41David Friedberg?

  Yeah, the deadpan. So she's got this like wholly disinterested persona, and it totally encapsulates like a Gen Z like personality in a way that you don't get in any other media. It's really, and she's hilarious when she does these interviews. And she's very unique, like Andy Kaufman or Jim Carrey, like in that sense, like unique in how she does this. I just think like, we'll see if this. Dick laughs like she may end up kind of being tired soon and see if she has a second act.

• 1:11:05Jason Calacanis?

  The Drake interview was really good. The one with Cuban, I had two problems with it. One, they sat on the ground and then two, Cuban's feet were really dirty.

• 1:11:13David Friedberg?

  Did you see the one with Shaq?

• 1:11:14Jason Calacanis?

  And so I was like, bro, like, yeah, just keep the shoes on and just, you know.

• 1:11:18David Friedberg?

  The Shaq one was hilarious. But anyway, she's, she's got great contents. It's hit or miss, by the way. I'll also say it's not consistent. Hit or miss. But I don't know, I just found her to be a little bit of a, a unique standout in, um, in content this year. Everyone's kind of me too, me too. It looks the same. She, she stood out a bit for me.

• 1:11:36Jason Calacanis?

  In that vein, have you seen Ziwe? Z I W E?

• 1:11:39David Friedberg?

  No.

• 1:11:40Jason Calacanis?

  She is a woman who interviews people and then she asks people very uncomfortable questions about race. Like, how many black friends do you have? Name them. And it is hilarious. It is like the greatest bit ever. Ziwe, shout out to Ziwe. And since we went there, um, uh, who, who's seen it? You saw it, Jamal? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if you're on TikTok, you'll see it because she just had like, yeah, she just has anybody in pop culture on.

• 1:12:04David Friedberg?

  She had, she had, uh, George Santos on.

• 1:12:07Jason Calacanis?

  She had George Santos on. Yeah.

• 1:12:09David Friedberg?

  Wow.

• 1:12:10Jason Calacanis?

  And it was just so crazy. On the podcasting front, shout out to our friend, Gwyneth Paltrow. If you don't listen to the Goop podcast, she does like interviews every other time. Really good. Red Scare, another great alternative podcast I like to listen to. From the Dirtbag Left, as they call it, and shout out Preparara's Cafe Insider, cafe.com. All right. I think, is this the end, Producer Nick? Are we here? Did we make it? Last one. Last one. We have a special award here. The Self Immolation Award. This has been named after Rudy Giuliani. So Rudy Giuliani Self Immolation Award. And this is a tough one to give this year. Sax.

• 1:12:55Jason Calacanis?

  Who do you have? Because this could be quite self-referential here. Go.

• 1:13:00David Sacks?

  I am gonna name Liz McGill, the now former president of the University of Pennsylvania. Who had been vomiting on herself for two months in the aftermath of October 7th, before she even appeared at that congressional hearing with the presence of Harvard and MIT. She answered what was clearly a moral question with a tone deaf, legalistic answer, saying that advocacy of genocide against Jews depends on context, falls into question whether one is smart enough to be university president. It's not a job that demands that much intelligence, but it does require an instinct for knowing when and how to cover your own ass. When she was finally forced to step down, it felt like a mercy killing.

• 1:13:41Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. Was she the one smirking too? She had the awkward smirk. That was what I found the most appalling, was the awkward smirks.

• 1:13:49David Sacks?

  Yep.

• 1:13:49Jason Calacanis?

  Chamath, who lit themselves on fire most of all this year? Who poured gasoline over their heads? And just lit up a stogie?

• 1:13:58Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think it's the brand and reputation of the Ivies. I think that there was irreparable harm done. Well done. Yes. We've had generations now that have been taught that that is where we send our best and brightest kids.

• 1:14:11Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But it turns out that they're getting indoctrinated into some very kind of extreme rhetoric that then produces these incapable first principles thinkers. That will be the destruction of our society if we don't fix it. So I think Harvard applications were down 17% already. I expect that trend across the Ivies to go way up. I expect contributions to go down. I expect governments to ratchet down their spending in those schools, and I expect some folks to try to take away their nonprofit status. So I think that we are going to reallocate the brand equity of the Ivies to good schools.

• 1:14:58Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And we will know what the good schools are based on their independence, their ability to churn out first principles thinkers and their respect for freedom of speech without being moral idiots.

• 1:15:13Jason Calacanis?

  Friedberg, what do you got? Well, what's that, Chuma?

• 1:15:15David Friedberg?

  Ivy League presidents.

• 1:15:17Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, well done. No, no need to add too much more there, I guess. You know, I was torn here between the namesake of this very award. If you missed it, Rudy Giuliani had a $150 million judgment against him, maybe two weeks ago, for slandering two poor, innocent people in his electoral scam that he ran with Trump. And he, I think, is going to get indicted next year for these fake electorates. So follow the fake electorates one. But that was a close one for me because Kanye West also lit himself on fire the past year with the Adidas contract and his anti-Semitism, getting kicked off Twitter X. But I feel like that was mental illness and I think Rudy Giuliani is just stupid. So I give it to Rudy Giuliani, the namesake of this award.

• 1:16:03David Sacks?

  Yeah, the only thing I'll say about that, J Cal, is I'm not going to defend him or his actions at all. However, I do think, I do think that judgment was excessive. And it's part of a pattern of ridiculous judgments that we see when you have, for example, a DC jury pool judging a conservative or a Republican whose politics they disagree with. The plaintiffs only asked for $48 million. The jury awarded three times that. It's an excessive award. I think a few million dollars as a penalty would have been a perfectly nice award. I think to bankrupt the man, which is what you're talking about, is becoming a bit of a pylon.

• 1:16:43David Sacks?

  And I'm all in favor of Rudy being the butt of jokes until the point where really you're talking about destroying his life. I think it's gone way too far.

• 1:16:53Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, these awards are

• 1:16:56Jason Calacanis?

  Curious in how large they are. They all get appealed, though, and they all come down. So I'm sure that'll come down by some massive percentage in the near future. This has been the year end episode. Can you believe it? We made it another year, guys. Here we are at the end of 2023. We'll do our predictions next week, so you'll get our amazing predictions for 2024 in the next episode. Any closing thoughts on the year we just had? Friedberg, how are you feeling here at the end of the year? Are you hopeful? Are you cheery? Are you sad? Are you excited?

• 1:17:26David Friedberg?

  I've been up since 5:00 a.m. and I just drank beers, so I'm pretty tired. But with respect, that's kind of how the whole year feels, actually. Feel like I

• 1:17:35Jason Calacanis?

  Exhausted?

• 1:17:36David Friedberg?

  Yeah, I just got up early, cranked through the day, had some beer, and I'm ready for a nap. But I'm, I'm probably more optimistic going into 2024 than I was going into 2023 because that's on a personal basis. And I think, yeah, there's just a lot going on today in the world.

• 1:17:54Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, it's complex, isn't it?

• 1:17:56David Friedberg?

  I do think as long as we embrace the Enlightenment and don't embrace the Dark Ages, we stand a shot at keeping progress alive. And I think that's the defining characteristics of human civilization is progress. And that's, I think, ultimately resolves all the conflicts and other things. We just got to keep it alive.

• 1:18:15Jason Calacanis?

  Well said. Jamath, how are you feeling here as we wrap up 2023 and looking into 2024?

• 1:18:19Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think 2022 and 2023 have been, looking back, the most important two years of my professional career.

• 1:18:29Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think I benefited, like we all, I think, I think all four of us could say this, of just an incredible set of tailwinds. And '22 and '23 were the first time where I was in a position of influence and capital and power, where I had to confront that those tailwinds can quickly become headwinds and that we are not impervious to them. So I, like Friedberg, am looking forward to '24 where I can try to put all these learnings to good use. So it's been generally good. And '23 was the most important year of my life in the sense that I got remarried. So that's been a huge personal highlight.

• 1:19:04Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, beautiful.

• 1:19:06Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Love that you guys all came to that as well.

• 1:19:08Jason Calacanis?

  It was a highlight for us, too. Absolutely beautiful.

• 1:19:10Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But yeah, I'm ready to, I'm ready to turn the page on this year and start '24.

• 1:19:13Jason Calacanis?

  Sax, any closing thoughts here?

• 1:19:16David Sacks?

  Well, I think one of the biggest surprises of 2023 is that we didn't have a recession. I mean, I think most people were betting on a recession in 23. They thought that a soft landing would be almost impossible. And in fact, the data is that soft landings almost never occur. Remember what Larry Summers said to us at our All In Summit this year, which is soft landings are like second marriages. It's the triumph of hope over experience, meaning they almost never happen. And so the fact that we didn't get that, I think that was basically a pretty important bullet dodged. Now, that being said, I do think that the whole B2B software industry definitely went through a recession. But fortunately, I think we bottomed out and are starting to see green shoots now. So things are returning to normal.

• 1:20:00David Sacks?

  On the global stage, things are still okay in the sense that the US is not directly in a war. But man, it is pretty scary. We could be pulled into-

• 1:20:11Jason Calacanis?

  It's pretty dynamic.

• 1:20:12David Sacks?

  Very dynamic. We could be pulled into a war in the Middle East any time. We still have a proxy war going in Ukraine. So there are a lot of risks still on the horizon.

• 1:20:20Jason Calacanis?

  I'll just say for the gentlemen and for the audience, it has been wonderful to have all of you, the audience, the fans of the show, and you besties in my life. Over two really tough years, it was also very proud of myself going into them. I knew I was built for war and it was a war the last few years. It was difficult, it was hard, but we all, I think, learned a lot and came out stronger because of it. And I just want to give a particular shout out to all of you guys for making this brand extraordinary and taking it to new heights. Almost all the times I've built things, brands, Gadget, Silicon, I reported, All In, whatever it is, it was a solo effort and it's just been really rewarding to be part of a team.

• 1:21:01Jason Calacanis?

  And I want to just give a particular note to Friedberg, who I think all of us owe a real debt of gratitude towards. He took the All In Summit, which was a very strong start in 2022, and he leveled it up in 2023 amazingly. And I'm just so excited to see what we do in 2024 with this amazing brand memberships. Tequilas, another 50 episode and a great all in summit next year, I hope. So shout out to my guy Free Bird for the dictator, the Sultan of Science Chairman Dictator. Sorry, apologize for getting that incorrect there. We'll get it right. Chairman Dictator and the Rain Man David Sacks. I am the world's greatest moderator and we will see you in 2024. Bye bye. Happy New Year.

• 1:21:46Jason Calacanis?

  Love you guys. Happy New Year, bitches. Bye bye. Love you besties.

• 1:21:53Speaker 03

  Rain Man David Sacks.

• 1:21:58Speaker 03

  And instead we open sourced it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it. Love you besties. Queen of Kewah.

• 1:22:11Speaker 03

  Besties are back. This is my dog taking a notice in your driveway.

• 1:22:19Speaker 03

  My other dasher will meet me at one.

• 1:22:21Chamath Palihapitiya?

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

• 1:22:29Speaker 03

  What your beak? What your beak? Beak? We need to get merch. Besties are back.