SPEAKER_07: 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 POC. Welcome back to the program, Chamath.
BIPOC.
BIPOC. That's what I said, billionaire POC.
SPEAKER_01: Billionaire percent color.
SPEAKER_07: Yes, please get it right. And running the all in DEI group, the Rain Man himself, David Sacks. Welcome back to the program. Good to be here.
SPEAKER_07: Okay, and the Sultan of Science. Welcome back to the program. Are you ready with your selections, gentlemen? Are we ready to do this? JKL, this is the holiday episode. You got to have a little
SPEAKER_06: more cheer. This isn't all business, dude. Cue the music, Nick. Three, two. Yes, and here we are, everybody back again for the 2023 Bestie Awards. This is where everybody
SPEAKER_07: goes crazy. Oh my God. Standing ovation. Hold on. Who's drinking some champagne with me? I need some champagne popping. What are you guys drinking? These are the awards. Everybody wants to know who's going to be a winner. You're right. I need a drink. Hold on.
SPEAKER_06: He needs a drink for this. I need a drink too. Can I go get a drink? Hang on.
SPEAKER_07: Everybody get a drink. Loosen it up. I'm at my office. I don't have alcohol here. Look at the second draw.
SPEAKER_07: All right, everybody. Welcome to the Bestie Awards for 2023. What are you drinking? I got a little Veuve Clicquot. I love my Veuve. Are you actually going to drink it?
SPEAKER_07: 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, Saks? What are you drinking for the 2023 Bestie Awards? What are you drinking? I'm drinking my Claesus O'Reposado in a class with a single big rock, and I broke out my
SPEAKER_01:
patriotic Great Seal of the United States class.
This is a tribute to the border. You got a little bit of Mexico, a little bit of the
SPEAKER_07: United States, and is it flowing between the border and you? Is that it? It's open border now. Open border for Christmas? The border's completely open at this point.
SPEAKER_01:
Gotcha. Okay. Just flooding in.
SPEAKER_07:
Chewath, you're not drinking. You're at the office.
SPEAKER_05: I mean, I didn't plan. I brought my props to wish everybody happy holidays. Oh, how nice. It's beautiful. And the festive sweater.
SPEAKER_07:
Amazing. Freeburg, everybody knows that you're a quiet solo drinker in your darkest hours.
SPEAKER_07: What are you drinking? There's no surprises there.
SPEAKER_07: What are you drinking?
SPEAKER_06: I'm always drinking when I got to hang out with you, J. Cal. I'm drinking a Victoria beer.
SPEAKER_07:
SPEAKER_07: Victoria beer.
SPEAKER_01: That is true, actually. I don't think you hang out with J. Cal sober, do you?
SPEAKER_07: Oh, everybody. There it is. I cannot. We've got the Veuve Clicquot. Unfortunately, at my ski house, I can't find the flute, so I'm going to 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 Hangout. Cheers. You want to say a few words, J. Cal?
SPEAKER_06:
SPEAKER_07: I'd like to say a few words. In memoriam of the year?
SPEAKER_07: 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 f*** the mids and the haters. Love you, Besties.
SPEAKER_01: Cheers. I would like to make a toast.
Here we go. Here is to three of the most talented, warm, friendly guys. And J. Cal.
SPEAKER_01:
SPEAKER_07: Yeah, he was coming. In my joke format for me. I'd touch him that way. I'd touch him misdirection. Don't ever forget him, brother.
SPEAKER_07: 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 line up 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 long Nikki Alley and short DeSantis. What a prescient call. What do you have this year?
SPEAKER_05: That spread trade paid off in spades. Yeah, big spread trade. Looking back, I think the biggest political winner was Donald Trump. Okay. I think that the documents case 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 Dems in this weird way actually want Trump back in office more than the Republicans do, because everything they've done has been near sighted and I think has actually galvanized
his support and increased his popularity and his ability to fundraise more than anything else.
Friedberg, who is your biggest political winner of 2023?
SPEAKER_07:
Who did I give it to last year? Do you remember?
You gave it to MBS and Saudi that they would have the your prediction was they would have the monitor. But in some ways, I think they are center stage. That's what I thought. So I am giving my biggest winner. I'm giving my biggest political winner
SPEAKER_06:
award to the nation state of Saudi Arabia. Oh, like they are sitting in the middle of the US,
China, Iran, 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 point of view, they seem to be in a very strong place. So that's my, my award.
I can't disagree with you that the place has made incredible progress. Personal freedoms,
SPEAKER_07:
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 interests there. But I am impressed
with the progress. So sacks that means it's your turn to give us your 2023 biggest winner.
SPEAKER_01: My biggest winner in politics, Jake, I think you'll like this one is abortion rights.
SPEAKER_07: Abortion rights, abortion rights after Dobbs abortion rights are winning on every battle
SPEAKER_01: where they're at issue. It's one referenda in very red states like Kansas, Kentucky, Montana,
and Ohio. It swung legislatures to the Dems in swing states like Michigan, Pennsylvania, Virginia.
SPEAKER_01: 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 move past the issue as a nation, which is why I think Dobbs was the right decision, even if it was a difficult one.
SPEAKER_07: Interesting. So you are 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.
SPEAKER_01: Well, Trump didn't take anything away. That's true. Or people, I just explained it, you're not listening stream court gave the issue back
SPEAKER_01: to the democratic process. The democratic process is now voting to maintain abortion rights. And
SPEAKER_01: that is going to settle the issue once and for all. So interesting for all of your fears that
SPEAKER_01: 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.
SPEAKER_07: Fantastic framing. Great save for the Republican Party there.
SPEAKER_01: Well, it won't be unless they learn how to talk about the issue.
SPEAKER_07:
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.
SPEAKER_07: 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 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. Freeberg, I'll start with you. Who is your biggest political loser for 2023? My biggest political loser is the DEI movement. I heard obviously post October 7th, the Hamas
SPEAKER_06:
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 anti-Semitic
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 anti-Semitism, 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 at the end of
this year and will continue to, I think, be questioned by donors and supporters of the ideologies of that movement. Okay, Sax, who is your biggest loser in politics for 2023?
SPEAKER_07: My biggest loser in politics for this year is Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine.
SPEAKER_01: 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. And of course, who could forget that other photo
SPEAKER_01:
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, 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.
SPEAKER_05: Shemagh, your biggest political loser in 2023?
SPEAKER_05: I had a different choice, but I think game time change. 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 Freiburg 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 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. So you started you were going to say Biden, but you changed it in real time and you went DEI ESG
SPEAKER_07: acronyms. 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 to Santa, 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. This is the
biggest political surprise of 2023. Sax. What's your biggest political surprise? Well, I think the
SPEAKER_01: biggest political surprise and it was a very negative one was the Hamas attack on Israel on the morning of October 7, which really seemed to come out of nowhere. Only eight days before Jake
Sullivan, who's buying his national security advisor had declared that the Middle East had been quieter than it had been in two decades. And those words obviously proved 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 seems to be on a path of progress with the Abraham
Accords being negotiated between Israel and several Gulf monarchies. And I think that October
7 has really changed the political paradigm, certainly in Israel in the Middle East, and I think even in American politics. Okay. Free break a little bit of a nuanced take on that. But I
SPEAKER_06:
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 7, 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 had resourcing and was influenced by many have shown connections
to Iran and other wealthy states and had very low attention levels prior to October 7 on a global
basis and post October 7 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. Chama biggest political surprise of 2023. I'm
SPEAKER_05: going to go with a domestic choice. And I think it's quite obvious. But the biggest political
surprises are of Kennedy, Robert 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. People like him. That's for sure. And nobody would have predicted that's a really
SPEAKER_01: good one. What do we think he will get if he runs as an independent just percentage wise,
SPEAKER_07: Ross Perot as a third 19% you think better than 19% because the the country is much more
SPEAKER_05: 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, but when Perot was running because when he ran, if you have to remember, like this, the country
was in a very different place psychologically than it is right now. Yeah, I too had third party
SPEAKER_07: 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 chum off in
your mind? Who does that benefit? And who does it hurt? If the candidates are Biden and Trump?
It hurts by the most you believe that Okay, what about you, sex? What do you think it hurts the most? unclear right now? Yeah, I mean, I think on the issues, I can see a lot of populist voters
SPEAKER_01:
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. I've heard this before. Any thoughts? freeburg on that?
SPEAKER_07:
What's the question? If RFK were to get as Jamaa thinks more than pro, so that's 20% or more of the popular vote? Who is that going to harm? And who's it going to hurt Trump or Biden? I saw a Gallup
SPEAKER_06: survey that showed that there's a real shot at more than 40% of Americans being interested in the third party. And so I'm sorry, I could be totally wrong on that. But I 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 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 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. And we haven't even heard of no labels, the third party
SPEAKER_07: 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 biggest problem that we have. This may sound
SPEAKER_05: really dumb, but I think it's true in launching a third party is a viable name.
I think it's the most important boundary condition to have a sustainable third party is a is a good name. Like an iconic person. The chairman's party. Like whatever we call this
SPEAKER_07: party. The name of the party, not like person they feel. No labels is a terrible name. That's
SPEAKER_05:
a terrible name. The chairman's party is perfect. The chairman's party is terrible. The party is
SPEAKER_06: terrible. The 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 I like the rational party,
SPEAKER_07:
like a party of that also feels disparaging to a degree, you know? Yeah. Branding branding.
SPEAKER_07: What would you call it? The third party? Republicans. People's Republic of
SPEAKER_05: Saxon. You have an idea for a name? I'm not going to comment on this.
SPEAKER_05: Something brewing. Would you have a name for a third party? You like the rational party,
SPEAKER_07: the rational party or something like that, where it kind of evoked, you know, people who are being thoughtful, and we're trying to make rational decisions in
SPEAKER_07: everybody's best interests, right? Something that was not about us versus them abortion or,
you know, TI or is G just something focused more on getting things done. They're getting things
done party, something like that getting things done party. So she has to be better than the
SPEAKER_01: deranged from party. Yeah, absolutely. All right, let's keep going. Let's keep going. Here we go.
SPEAKER_01: So he tried to derail the show. I will not engage with that. All right, it's time for our biggest
SPEAKER_07:
business winner, biggest winner in business. We got you, man. Who's your biggest winner in
business? I mean, I don't think this is even close. But I think it's Elon Musk. Oh,
SPEAKER_05:
three things, obviously, three different companies. But the rebasing of Twitter actually had an even
more profound impact, I think, on Silicon Valley that it necessarily did on Twitter. Second was I think SpaceX has really turned the corner Starlink is really at scale.
Starship looks like it's viable. And then the third is Tesla really consolidated
its leadership in EVs, and batteries and battery technology and FSD. So I think on the merits,
it was not even close. Okay, Sax, you got, who's your biggest business winner?
SPEAKER_05: The magnificent seven. These are the seven companies that accounted for almost all of
SPEAKER_01:
the stock market gains this year, you can see it on this chart. It's about a 63% gap between the performance of the top names, top seven names in the S&P 500. And then the other 493 of them. I think that the S&P 493 had a 12% gain this year, which isn't bad, but it was
SPEAKER_01:
dwarfed by the municipal seven, which was almost 80%. Incredible. All right,
sack says the M seven freeburg, who you got? Yeah, I'm gonna pick one of the seven,
SPEAKER_07: which is Microsoft just a shot down the middle of the fairway here. Despite only seeing,
SPEAKER_06:
I think, roughly 8% top line growth, the business saw its market cap down. I think roughly 8% top line growth, the business saw its market cap grow by over 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 activism acquisition in the sort of regulatory environment. And then the strength that Satya
showed and the speed at which he acted during the open AI 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 open AI and partnership was, I think, great leadership and cemented 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. All right. Very well done. We got Elon Musk. Didn't you work there for a while?
SPEAKER_06:
One year at Twitter? No, at Microsoft. Microsoft. Microsoft. One year. I was actually,
SPEAKER_01:
no, I was locked up for two years in the wake of the Amr deal. Yeah. I was a corporate vice president at Microsoft. Did you like it? Yeah, it was. I mean, it's a high quality company for
SPEAKER_01:
sure. I mean, I was like super active for one year because I was still in charge of, I still had a PNL running Amr. But then after one year, Yammer was sort of assimilated into the Borg and I didn't have anything to do. I was kind of just like on call. Right, right. All right. I am going
SPEAKER_07: to talk my own book on this one and give it to Dara and the team at Uber. They got into the S&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. The biggest loser
is 2023. Freeburg, just so you know, last year, your prediction was capital intensive series B,
C's and D's of growth companies well done on that prediction. But give me Freeburg your actual, who was your biggest loser in 2023? Oh, Sultan of Science. It's sort of tied up. Obviously,
SPEAKER_06:
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 piece 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. Good for me and Saks because we were diligent during that
SPEAKER_07: time. All right, let's go to you Saks. Your biggest loser in business in 2023.
SPEAKER_01: My biggest business loser is Disney. It seems that every aspect of Disney's business, the bed in 2023. I mean, all their majors, the actual releases flopped and missed a conservative
SPEAKER_01: 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. I mean, there's a million examples.
Even 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 descriptions fell off a cliff,
even attendance at its theme parks declined dramatically because they charge 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 G F Y. Good for you. 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. I too picked Disney. I put Disney Warner Brothers.
SPEAKER_07: 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 Saxon and Iowa. Who did you have for your biggest loser in business?
SPEAKER_05: Well, you you guys partially win. Okay, because I'm gonna have to 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. And I think the statement from consumers
is look, just sell a product, stay in your lane. 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. All right, there you have it, folks. If you're gonna make
SPEAKER_07:
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? I think it was the feds bank term funding program or BTFP in response to
SPEAKER_01: the collapse of Silicon Valley bank and the regional banking crisis. As you may recall, it wasn't just SVB. There were several dominoes in the regional banking system that fell. It was a CB 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. Yeah, even me took took some heat. The truth is that if the dominoes had fallen
SPEAKER_01: in a slightly different order, no one would have thought to blame VCs for this. It was obviously the fact that rates that spiked up. And these banks got caught offsides 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 was a regional banking crisis underway and the Fed stepping in, I think probably saved us from having a recession this year.
SPEAKER_07: 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? I'll pick Jay Powell and the Fed capitulation.
SPEAKER_05:
I think that I've been saying for a while that rates will be higher for longer
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 tenure 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.
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 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. And it's important for everybody to understand the Fed acts independently
SPEAKER_07: of the administration. It's just a coincidence, correct, Sacks, 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.
SPEAKER_05: By the way, 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 quote that is just worth internalizing. If you just start
SPEAKER_05:
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. I mean, that is just the perfect summary of what probably should have happened in these pressers. And this was an example where it
SPEAKER_05: was the exact opposite. And the market just took it and said, I'm off to the races. Just to agree with that and buttress it. It's not only the fact that they gave this guidance
SPEAKER_01: 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
SPEAKER_01: risk decisions. Yeah. So it works both ways. Freeburg, get a business surprise for 2023. For
SPEAKER_07: the audience here at the besty awards, the biggest surprise was Sam Altman's ouster and return all in
SPEAKER_06: a weekend. So that was kind of crazy. So I just give it to that. Nothing else to be said. Okay, the flip flop. Love it. Okay, best science breakthrough. This is everybody's favorite.
SPEAKER_07: Also the time when SACS goes and takes a leak 2023 biggest science break. I've got one.
SPEAKER_07: SACS you're awake during the second biggest science breakthrough for you. According to NASA,
SPEAKER_01:
there's a new look at Uranus. That's right, Jake. That's right, Jake out. These are never
SPEAKER_01: before seen. Deep penetrating shots of Uranus. How deep and penetrating are these very deep,
SPEAKER_01:
very penetrating from the James Webb Space Telescope. Freeburg, when your anus gets
SPEAKER_07:
probe this deeply. What's your takeaway? What what's the feeling you get in this deep probing
of Uranus? Oh, wonder, mystery on wonder. Well, that's a space colonoscopy. Something gets
SPEAKER_07: moved within. Absolutely. I'm going to save you for last free broke. You have one? Yeah,
SPEAKER_07:
SPEAKER_05: 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. There was my big breakthrough
SPEAKER_07: was this brain decoder technology. We didn't talk about it here on the show. But this project was crazy. 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 the repeat words, then they attached it to a language model, GPT one, I believe, and narrow down what people were thinking, then they had people think thoughts, and it started to use the predictive model of GPT one and combined it with what was happening in their brain chemistry. Now, this is a far away 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, neural link does this with a direct connection. But fascinating right now. Sex still thinking about Uranus, he's going deep into
SPEAKER_07: Uranus right now. He's reading that paper. I can see it in his eyes. You guys know I got a
SPEAKER_05: colonoscopy? Thank goodness. How was it? I got it on did they put you under Tuesday? Yeah, but I
got I didn't get the propofol. I got demerol. I think demerol. You got to go probe. I had like the twilight sedation. Just kind of like, you know, it was great. Don't get me wrong. But it was like 1520 minutes. Like it was not. But you were a kind of awake and lucid while they were
SPEAKER_07: halfway through. You woke up halfway through? Yeah. Huh? Did they give you a drink a little
SPEAKER_07: red wine or anything? Nothing? No, no. It didn't talk to me. No, I just saw that. I saw the screen.
SPEAKER_05: I was like, What the hell? And then I just went back to sleep. Let me tell you propofol. It's
SPEAKER_07: drip, drip, drip. And then you wake up four hours later, the most restful sleep you ever had. No, dude, I had. It's an hour. Yeah, yeah, I had like a 20 minute twilight sedation. That was it.
SPEAKER_05: I asked him to go back up in there twice just to make sure. Freeburg. Enough about Uranus. What
SPEAKER_07:
was your biggest sign surprise of 23? I know it's hard to surprise you. I know you guys want to hear
SPEAKER_06: some crazy specific thing. But I actually just said that there are too many breakthroughs with
machine learning 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 and models. And
there's other specific examples like we talked about DeepMind graphcast model, which is a graph neural network on the show. And obviously all the generative models and imagery and movies and music,
but it's just such an extraordinary time to see us leverage our combined capabilities to drive these
extraordinary devices, the pace of language models and the pace of AI development, just all these
SPEAKER_06: breakthroughs in aggregate. I mean, I think it's hard. It's hard to pay attention to anyone. There's a constellation of change underway. It's incredible. Okay, now it's time for our biggest
SPEAKER_07:
flash in the pan. Who is your biggest flash in the pan, Jamal? Oh my gosh, this is a well,
SPEAKER_05: it could be business. It could be society. It could be pop culture. I wrote down SBF. Okay.
SPEAKER_05: I think like from what looked like a too good to be wonder kind, frankly, just turned out to be an
Adderall addicted grifter. Sax, I hope that doesn't hit too close to home. Who was yours?
SPEAKER_01: Same ballpark. I said effective altruism. The movement took a big hit with SPF. I would have thought that'd be enough to polish it off. But then we had the open AI board oust, 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. Okay, freeberg, you got a flash in the pan for 2023. The obvious
SPEAKER_06:
breakthrough in superconducting room temperature material lk 99. Yeah, it came in it went everyone thought it was going to change the world couple 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's 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 in and went, I went with a wildcard here. I said George Santos, the diva drama queen and
SPEAKER_07: congressman who slayed from 2023 to 2023. election campaign funds to buy clothes and get bought Botox. So he asked Queen and Sephora and so my bad. My bad. Yes, Queen. Just making bank
SPEAKER_07:
over a cameo. Gonna have him come in. He's gonna do a he's gonna do a quick cameo here on all in
pocket. 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 wildcard 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, we got you mom.
SPEAKER_05: Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft. 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 open AI is just the masterclass in heads down management. Well done. Saks, what do you got?
I have Jensen Wang, CEO of Nvidia and king of the GPU. We talked about the Magnificent Seven, but
SPEAKER_01: none was more magnificent than Nvidia whose stock is up 235%. And earnings and forecast keep blowing
SPEAKER_01: doors off. Jensen has been planning this moment for many years before the whole AI frenzy took
hold. And Nvidia is now repeating the benefit of that. Who do you got? Freebird. I give it to Sam
SPEAKER_06:
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 open AI. And I think that he's been
aggressive in raising capital this guy can raise like he can raise. And then he over bets 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, the you know, the comes
with the good and the bad. And then even after he got ousted by his board, his entire employee base through a crew and got him back. And sure, everyone's got their economic motivations to see that happen. But I still think that the setup was, you know, largely his, his work. So he does deserve credit for that. So all in, I think it's, it's an incredible year for Sam Altman. Now we move on to 2023. Best investor chamath, who was your best investor for 2023? Here at the best
SPEAKER_05: deal words, it was a continuation of the last couple of years. But it's the pot shops and specifically Citadel. So I give that award to Ken Griffin. You know, pot shops, I think have really
become the hallway bully of the public capital markets. And Citadel is the kingpin. 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. Saxony. I've got Bill Ackman here for timing the bond market perfectly.
SPEAKER_01: He shorted bonds for most of the year making hundreds of millions of dollars. And then on
October 23, 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 October 27, since then yields have plummeted, which means that the value
bonds have soared. And the best part of it is Ackman is using his new FU money to take on Ivy League University presidents for their work. DEI double standards, grifting and plagiarism.
SPEAKER_07:
Well done. All right. Free break. We got I also said Ackman for his timing on the Treasury trade.
SPEAKER_06:
I was right there with you guys, except I wanted to go with the wildcard. I am astounded by the
SPEAKER_07: growth of TikTok. And I just worked backwards. Arthur Dan check who have 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 three, four or $500 billion 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 to them. But that's solid quick. All right, now we move on moving quickly here. 2023 best turnaround, which are best turnaround, Jamal. This was like three years in the making,
SPEAKER_05: but I'll give it to Nova Nordisk. I think the amount of attention that novel has gotten for his epic wagovi and right bell sis in 2023 was incredible. But you have to go back to the last decade where the first five years 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 four or five X in the last four or five years. And I think these semi-glutide GLP ones 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. Sax, we got in light of what's happening right
SPEAKER_01: now in the crypto markets. I'm gonna go with Solana. Oh, wow. Wow. It began the year at about
SPEAKER_01: $9 a token. It's now at 92. As of this moment, obviously, it's very volatile, but it's up roughly 10 x this year to date. And in light of the fact that various unscrupulous actors on the internet, accused 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 salon are very
happy campers right now. holder for the win. Freeburg, who do you got biggest business
SPEAKER_07: turnaround? I give it to Dara and Uber when he took over that business. I think it was an eight
SPEAKER_06: to $9 billion net loss in 2019 $5 billion EBITDA run rate right now incredible forecasting, incredible skill and forecasting the sensitivities in that business, by the way, same more, same more. 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 card to get an Uber sit around wait forever. So Dara, please fix that.
Otherwise, good job. Well done. I went with a one that you guys gave awards to and all the previous
SPEAKER_07:
awards. Sam Waltman 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, 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 for dudes opinion sacks. In your opinion, what was the worst company of 2023? I'm gonna go
SPEAKER_01: 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 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 Pax Lava 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 CEO Albert Birla 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 burlesque candor. When he announced on
a company wide virtual town hall that the company was embarking on a cost cutting effort. The chat
room erupted in snark, quote, future is bright, but you might get fired as how one employee characterized burlesque spin. This led another employee to reply, quote, dumpster fires are always bright. All right, Friedberg, worst company of 2023 for you. You have a worst company,
SPEAKER_07: Mos Losem? I do. I'm going to get through this without getting interrupted. The worst company
SPEAKER_06:
of 2023 is Mu Yuan Foodstuff. 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 very painful, awful existences, they're slaughtered and fed to a growing population. China consumes over 10,000 pigs a year. It's a horrific situation. That's the most loathsome company of 2023.
SPEAKER_05: Sounds delicious. I'm sorry guys. Dude, you went off camera. You, you, you went off camera.
No! F*** you, Jacob. You started laughing. It's not a funny thing. I saw you laughing,
SPEAKER_07:
that's why I started laughing. I mean, I had 15 jokes, but I'm not going to make any of them.
SPEAKER_07: Yeah, but none of us are for factory farming. It's horrible. Who is your worst company,
Shammav? Come on, Shammav, get in the game here. Who is your worst company?
SPEAKER_05: It's a tie between FTX and Silicon Valley Bank. One stole customer accounts and the other one just was run by a CEO and a risk management infrastructure that really imperiled and
almost imperiled an entire industry. There you go. For me, it was Fox News. They deceived their
SPEAKER_07: 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. Actually, I'm sorry. I'm sorry.
So you're going for the microphone there. I'm not going to defend Fox after they fire Tucker.
SPEAKER_01: Exactly. Exactly. That's why I put it in there for you. I do think the judgments or the magnitude of the judgments are ridiculous. Okay. Now it's time. We have a little bit of fun here. Best
SPEAKER_07:
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 confirm 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.
SPEAKER_07: Sax, you're a master of memes. What do you got for us this year in the 2023 Bestie Awards? Well,
SPEAKER_01: 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 gift version. The way the hand motions are. It's this, then this and then it comes back in. Good for a conductor of an orchestra. Good for you.
SPEAKER_07: Jamal. Did you have a favorite Jamal? A favorite meme of 2023? Yeah. Nick,
SPEAKER_05:
if you want to just throw it up there. I am a journalist and it's a kid.
SPEAKER_07: I'm a journalism. What is this talking about? I think it's what we all know. And I think it was
SPEAKER_05: further exposed this year, just the brazen, naked ambition and corrupt nature of the mainstream
SPEAKER_05: media. Jason, you said it really well. And I 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 got to have multiple sources triangulate the
SPEAKER_07:
truth for yourself. Yeah, I wouldn't trust the mainstream media at this point, you know, as but
one of many sources. Freeburg got a favorite meme. Got 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.
Can't come up with a meme. Come on, man. I think it's kind of funny, actually.
SPEAKER_01: It's kind of funny. He has no memes. Wait, we need to play the music.
SPEAKER_07: Best new tack. Best new tack. We got to keep things moving. Last year was a fusion in GPT across the board. This year. I'll just get mine out of the way real quick. I'm gonna go with something more specific chat GPTs app has been extraordinary. It now has 4.0. And 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 chat GPTs 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 voice chat on chat GPT 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 chat GPT 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 100 million. Incredible, incredible progress there. Jamal, you got a best tech? Best new tech? I don't think there was anything meaningful in 2023. I think there was
SPEAKER_05:
a lot of improvements to things that were founded and started in 2020 or 2021 or 2022.
SPEAKER_05: Nothing new that caught my eye this year. Sax. I have Starlink for JetSuite X. I of course,
SPEAKER_01: I've never used it, but I heard it's great. You do fly with other humans who you don't know.
SPEAKER_01:
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. Freeburn. Best new tech?
SPEAKER_06:
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 away from the scrutability of agencies that want to check your model and
SPEAKER_06: make sure it's okay. So this is really important to me. I do think my broader trend right now is I think that there's this really scary big shift of you're either going to end up in a new enlightenment or you're going to end up in a new dark ages. And I think we're seeing this play out in all these conflicts around the world, in 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. Okay, 2023 best trend. Chamath, what was the best trend 2023 for you?
SPEAKER_07:
I actually didn't really couldn't figure one out. Okay, Sax, you got a best trend for 2023. Something that happened often it became a trend. My best trend is the return of color blindness
SPEAKER_01: as the standard and the pushback on DEI. We already talked about the university presidents and what Bill Ackerman is doing. I would add to that that the Supreme Court banned race-based affirmative action and university admissions in June. And red state governors like Greg Abbott
SPEAKER_01: 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. Friedberg, what was your best trend of 2023?
SPEAKER_06: The profitability focus at young companies particularly in an age of AI co-pilot tools for software development. From what I've seen it's pretty incredible in single person
efforts can yield what historically is required 6, 12 or more people to do using co-pilot tools in AI. Software development is accelerated. New products and entire companies can be built by
single individual at very low cost building totally customized software. 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 co-piloting tools to write software and start to learn how to use these tools. It's really going to increase productivity globally as it finds its way into every business and everyone can become an entrepreneur and so on. So it's it's incredible to see. I too, Sax was looking at the issue of DEI and I framed mine as
SPEAKER_07: DEI dying and meritocracy thriving. That was the best trend for me so we are once again simpatico you and I. DEI dying meritocracy thriving nicely done. You really are proving
SPEAKER_01: you're a centrist. Yeah I mean I think or I just listened to MLK's speech and I thought that seems
SPEAKER_07: like the most logical thing to do. Yeah you're right. 100%. We figured this out some time ago.
SPEAKER_07:
Yeah I don't know why we have to rehash it. Okay 2023 worst trend. I'll lead it off. I had three here
SPEAKER_07: of worst trends. Number one anti-semitism absolutely disgusting and horrible. Two trumps 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? You had to have
SPEAKER_01: three didn't you? Well I'm gonna go with anti-semitism those are my two runners. All right
SPEAKER_07: fair enough. Yeah I think you guys are like my worst trend it is the metastasizing national debt.
SPEAKER_01:
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. Jesus. 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. Yeah eight trillion added to the deficit under Trump and
SPEAKER_07:
looks like five to six trillion under Biden. Well you know we did have a COVID we did have meltdown
SPEAKER_01:
where the economy was down 30 percent year over year so the tax cuts in COVID yeah both parties
SPEAKER_07:
SPEAKER_01: supported that bailout and in hindsight it was excessive. Yeah Biden's quote-unquote stimulus
SPEAKER_01: was passed on straight party lines after COVID was ready over. Yeah so I think we should just make sure to apportion the blame correctly but like I said bipartisan problem. Yeah I agree bipartisan and
SPEAKER_07:
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? I just think it's the the general
SPEAKER_05: state of affairs amongst our young people our 20 year olds and our 30 year olds I think are really struggling 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 percent and 25 to 34 year olds which was up 20 percent 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 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. The one thing you missed there, right,
SPEAKER_07:
Chamath, in the western world at least 36 percent increase in suicide over the past two decades so a lot of it's another one it's another one so that might be the main one I think in this is the the mental health issues are acute. Okay we have Friedbere your left for the worst trend the bestie award
SPEAKER_07: for worst trend of 2023 what do you got? I don't know I had one I'm going to change it on the fly
SPEAKER_06: 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 dollars 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 dollars for this a
trillion for that it's like we've normalized spending and covid just made it worse so to your guys's 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 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 right who did you change from what was your what was your original my original was the merging of the oppressor oppressed ideologies that are in
SPEAKER_06: 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 a responsibility of eradicating
SPEAKER_06: people like you is just it's 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 yes so it's just really frustrating to see okay now we go on to a little casual the besty
SPEAKER_07:
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 secession finale extraordinary one of the best pieces of television ever made and my sleeper was the bear season two very nice show on fx I think I turned a lot of you onto it and season two had
an episode episode five which is the forks episode in which cami 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 stupid stuff and he just tells him listen every day here's 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 anything that taylor swift did
SPEAKER_05: this year was white hot here a swiftie she is a tour de force she's incredible and she's a genius
SPEAKER_05:
what can you say nothing's the case i'm going to use my spot to draw attention to some podcasts that
SPEAKER_01: you may not have heard of some geopolitics and world affairs podcasts so that probably my number
SPEAKER_01:
one is the duran with alexander mercurus and alex trista foro 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 free
SPEAKER_07: break any favorite media for you as we get close to wrapping here i recently read a book that i
SPEAKER_06: 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 recommended i had no idea how much this bell
SPEAKER_06: 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 the opposite may be true that a monopoly enables investment in long-term thinking and long-term ideas you can never otherwise see so i give it to that i also had a softer one have you guys ever watched bobby altoff'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 oh yes i know you're talking about the the deadpan yeah the deadpan so she's got this like wholly disinterested persona and it totally encapsulates like a gen z like a 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 a andy kaufman or jim carrey like in that sense like unique and how she does this i just think like we'll see if the stick lasts like she may end up kind of being tired soon and see if she has a second act the drake interview was
SPEAKER_07:
SPEAKER_05: 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 did you see the one with shack and so i was like bro like yeah just
SPEAKER_05: keep the shoes on and just you know the shack one was hilarious but anyway she's she's got great
SPEAKER_06: contents it's 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 stood out a bit for me in that vein have you
SPEAKER_07: seen z way z i w e no she is a woman who interviews people and then she asks people very uncomfortable questions about race like how many black friends you have name them and it is hilarious it is like
SPEAKER_07: the greatest bit ever z shout out to z way since we went there on who's seen it you saw at jama
SPEAKER_00:
SPEAKER_07: 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 she had uh george santos on she had your
SPEAKER_06:
santa interview yeah wow and it was just so incredible crazy on the podcasting front
SPEAKER_07:
shout out to our friend gwen at the 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 pre barara'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 juliani's
the rudy juliani self-immolation award and this is a tough one to give this year sachs
what do you have because it's gonna be quite self-referential here go i am gonna name liz
SPEAKER_01:
mcgill the now former president of the university of pennsylvania who so had been vomiting on
herself for two months in the aftermath of october 7th before she even appeared
SPEAKER_01: 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
SPEAKER_01: knowing when and how to cover your own ass when she was finally forced to step down it felt like a mercy killing yeah was she the one smirking too she had the awkward that was what i found the most
SPEAKER_01:
appalling was the awkward smirks yep chamath who lit themselves on fire most of all this year who
SPEAKER_07: poured gasoline over their heads and just lit up a stogie i think it's the brand and reputation
SPEAKER_05: of the ivy's 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 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 ivy's 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 non-profit status so i think that we are going to reallocate the brand equity of the ivy's to good schools 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 friedberg
SPEAKER_07:
what do you got well well said shama ivy league presidents okay well done no no need to add too
SPEAKER_07:
much more there i guess you know i was torn here between the namesake of this very award if you
missed it really juliani had a 150 million dollar 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 john juliani is just stupid so i give it to rudy juliani the namesake of this award and i hope i like that jcal is
SPEAKER_01: 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
SPEAKER_01:
the plaintiffs only asked for 48 million dollars 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 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 yeah these awards are curious at how large
SPEAKER_07:
they're 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 freeberg how you feeling here at the end of the year are you hopeful right cheery are you
sad are you excited i've been up since 5 a.m and i just drank beers so i'm pretty tired but with
SPEAKER_06: respect that's kind of how the whole year feels actually feel like exhausted 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
SPEAKER_06:
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 yeah it's complex isn't it i do think
SPEAKER_06: 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 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 well said jamath how are you feeling here as we wrap up 2023 and looking into 2024
SPEAKER_07: i think 2022 and 2023 have been looking back the most important two years of my professional career
SPEAKER_05:
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 for 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 i'm 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 yes beautiful love that you guys all came to that as well as a highlight for us too absolutely beautiful yeah i'm ready to i'm ready to turn the page on this year and start 24. sax any closing thoughts
SPEAKER_05: here well i think one of the biggest surprises of 2023 is that we didn't have a recession i mean i
SPEAKER_01: 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 dodge 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 i'm starting to see green shoots now so things are
returning to normal on the global stage things are still okay in the sense that the u.s is not
directly in a war but man it is pretty scary we could be pulled pretty dynamic very dynamic could be pulled into war in the middle east anytime we still have a proxy war going in ukraine so there are a lot of risks still on the horizon i'll just say for the gentleman and for
SPEAKER_07:
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 and gadget silica and i reporter
all in whatever it is it was a solo effort and it's just been really rewarding to be part of a team and i want to just give a particular note to uh freeberg 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 to see what we do in 2024 with this amazing brand memberships tequila's another 50 episode and a great all-in summit next year i hope
so shout out to my guy freeberg 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 sachs i am the world's greatest moderator and we will see you in 2024.
bye bye happy new year love you guys new year bitches bye-bye have your besties
SPEAKER_02:
oh
SPEAKER_04:
we should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy because they're all just useless it's like this like sexual tension but they just need to release them out
SPEAKER_03: what you're the bee
we need to get merch
SPEAKER_00:
so
