E61: 2022 Predictions! Business, politics, science, tech, crypto, & more

So I was not going to bring this up. Zach said, bring it up. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. You're already creating mischaracterizations. You said you want to bring it up. I'm like, sure. I don't, I'm not going to veto it. Go for it. I said, well, we have to bring on my COVID.

Obviously I'm the second bestie to get COVID. And I told you offline without the other two besties, I will just say I got it at a social function, period. End of story. You said it's okay to talk about. Yeah. It's not like I wanted to bring it up. You want to bring it up and I'm allowing it because I, I'm fine with it.

So go for it. We all got something at Saks' event. You got COVID. I got chlamydia. It's all fine. Oh, you guys went to the downstairs rooms? I went downstairs. I skipped the basement level. God damn it. Chamath again. You promised. It was a great party. Let's hear Jason's accusation.

I've been hearing about it all week in the chat. There's no accusation. It was a great party. No, you've been saying it was a GOP super spreader. You took it with COVID. Jason, you were angry. You were angry. And you were, yeah, you were really mad at Saks because you thought he actually gave you COVID even though Saks had people test.

Every single person tested on the way in. Except you, J-Cal. J-Cal, you walked around the velvet room. I have. And you said, guess what? I'm a bestie. I don't have to test. And you walk right in that party. And guess what? At the end of the day, there's nothing.

The one person that flouted the rules got it. Karma's a bitch, J-Cal. Nothing better personifies poetic justice as what took place. I do not place blame on anybody for hosting. You walk around. You rant at Saks. You make fun of him. You poke him. You poke the bear. Republican this.

Republican that. It was a Republican super spreader. It was a GOP super spreader. And then you go to his party. And you run around the velvet rope. And you don't get your test. And you go in. And you walk out with COVID. Why should I have to test? That was amazing.

Why should I have to test? It was really amazing. I don't wait on lines. I'm a bestie. I think he walked out with COVID because I think he walked in with COVID. There you go. He was the only one not to test. So who brought it in? I did test.

My daughter and I came to your wonderful party. It was amazing. It was delightful. We tested. No, you didn't. When you got to the party. I 100% tested. Do not lie. You told us you didn't. You told us you didn't. You were either lying then or you're lying now.

I 100% tested. You were lying then or you're lying now. Which one is it? I was joking then. I 100% tested with my daughter. No. You're telling the truth. Both was on the line testing with me. I had the bracelet. I tested. 100%. When I asked you, when you got into the party and I said, how'd your COVID test go?

You said, oh, I pulled my bestie card. I walked around. I pulled my bestie card. That's not true. That's true. That's what you said. You guys are getting up on me and making up bullshit now. No, you said that. Okay. I may have made a joke, but I 100% tested.

Hold on, guys. And then I find out the reason why Jade wasn't at the party. She was home taking care of two sick kids. No, she wasn't. Yes, she was. We had one kid. So how do we know that it wasn't you? Okay. We know because. I know it was you, Fredo.

I know it was you, Fredo. That she brought it to the party. You broke my heart. All right. Here's what happened. I went to the party. I did test. There was a group of people that got there early, had tested at another event. They told me this. They tested before they got there.

And they told me that they had accidentally brought it with them because they were the first to have a positive test result. So in all likelihood, it was that group. It doesn't matter who brought it because Omicron is going everywhere. What is it? Omicron. Omicron. Omicron. It's a character from Transformers.

I don't understand that. What do you mean they brought it with them? If they tested negative. They came from another location. They tested. They claim they tested. Then they were the first to come up that next day with a positive result. It takes longer than 24 hours to incubate.

You're right. So that means they must have brought it with them. They tested on Sunday and had it. They were at the party Saturday. But you're saying they tested negative at the door. They did not test at the door. They told me. They did not test at Santa's party?

They told me they tested the day before. Or two days before. No, everybody was tested at the door, including staff, including vendors. There were people who were turned around because they tested positive. There was a group of ****** who didn't test. Oh, you're trying to blame it on ******?

No, I specifically have tried to not say the person's name and you're trying to include them in this. It's going to get bleeped out. It doesn't matter. They were all negative at the time of the party. You hosted a super spreader. They didn't get it till like five days later.

So they were not the earliest to test. No, they had it the next day. You tested positive. You had symptoms before they did. Remember the tickle in the throat? Guys, remember when he said last week he had the flu? He had the tickle in the throat? Anyway, thank you for giving me Omicron.

I am now fucking super. According to all results, I am now Superman. Have you tested negative now? Not yet. I did a test yesterday. Nine days later, I'm still coming up positive. I had two days of symptoms. Not that any of you give a shit, you rat bastards. You just laugh about my COVID.

Nobody had no point in this conversation. Did any of you say, how are you feeling? Was there any chance of death? Was there any chance? I was triple vax. I had done Moderna. At any point, though, did you feel like, oh, shit, I may have to go to the hospital.

I may need to go on a ventilator. No, no. That's too bad. I felt the tickle in my throat on Tuesday. You wanted his symptoms. He coughed three times. He sneezed twice. He prematurely ejaculated once. Those were his symptoms. ♪ Queen of Kinwild ♪ - This is gonna be our prediction show.

Last week, we did of course, our 2021 Bestie Awards. How did everybody feel about last week's awards? I think it was great, I listened to the edit. - It's done quite well. - Yeah, I was happy with it. - It was a fun show. I think we all got to kind of talk about stuff we wanted to talk about, and it was pretty dynamic.

I thought it was a good show. I liked it. - It was like a greatest hits. - So we're gonna do some predictions for next year. - Are you gonna do a drum roll and a little scene as well? - Yes, okay, here we go. Here's an opening. - But it's gotta be like flying into the future, like going through space.

- Do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do. - Warp speed. - Warp speed. - Flying through the air. Warp wormhole. Other side of the universe. Here we are in 2022. - Okay. - Biggest political winner 2022. What did Tucker Carlson's former writers tell you to say, "Sax?" - It never ends, Sax!

- It never ends. - It's never gonna end. People were intrigued about what was the second battle about. That was the big debate. - Which battle? - Oh, who knows? I can't remember the battles. There's two of those. - About the beep, beep, which led to me writing the Google doc about beep, beep.

- Oh, I know what it was. - Timoth and I deserve a Bestie Award for that. - Who's your biggest political winner? - Okay. - Let's stop with the inside baseball. - My biggest political winner for 2022, I predict my man Ron DeSantis. This will be the big winner.

He's up for reelection in Florida. He won in 2018 with less than 1% of the vote. It was a real nail biter. This time, I think he's gonna cruise to reelection quite handily and become the national front runner on the GOP side. And the reason is because he had the right approach on COVID.

He made the vaccine available. He made the antibodies available, but ultimately he treated the population like adults. He let them make their own decisions. He kept businesses open, schools open. And I think the rest of the country is gonna come around to his point of view because of the unstoppability of Omicron next year.

And so I think that DeSantis, who was much maligned and disparaged, will come out as the big winner a year from now. - All right, who do you got, Freeberg? - Vladimir Putin. I think Putin's gonna benefit from the rising conflict between the US and China. The other day, there was a call between Putin and Xi and they said, and Putin called Xi his dear friend and said that relations between the two countries had reached an unprecedentedly high level.

And I think that his position economically as a trade partner with China and as a beneficiary of Chinese economic prosperity will only grow as tensions between the US and China rise. I think we're seeing that with some of his cavalier behavior with the Ukraine right now. And I think Putin will become a stronger player on the global stage, particularly as it relates to his relationship with NATO over the next year.

And he's been a little bit quiet the last few years. He was kind of, I'd say suppressed with sanctions and all the other nonsense that's gone on to keep him at bay, but he could kind of rise up again in 2022 and he could become a real player on the geopolitical stage globally in a more meaningful way than he has in the last couple of years.

- I mean, you white guys love Putin. - It's crazy. The whites love Putin. - I don't love him. - God, I hate Putin. - I mean, if you ranked Russia GDP, do you know even, do you have any idea where it even ranks in a global scale? - Russia GDP is probably- - I mean, do you guys, for the amount of time you guys give Putin- - It's in the 30s.

- Probably eight. - Probably eight? - No, no, I think it's in the 20s or 30s. - Nigeria is like crushes Russia. Nobody ever talks about Nigeria has all the same inputs except they're black. - Yeah, they just don't have 2000 nuclear weapons. - I mean, as if those were- - That is the big reason.

I mean, it's a fallen empire for sure, but they still have 2000 nukes. - They don't work. - Landmine, the position, the energy that it provides to Europe, Eastern Europe. I mean, Russia is geopolitically pretty significant. - Insignificant economically, significant because they have a madman running the country. - I don't think he's a madman, but I'm just saying that, you know, there's a lot of ink that spilled about Russia and I don't think anybody even takes a step back and actually looks at- - All right, who do you got for yours?

It's not Putin, obviously. - Actually rank in the world, guys. My worldwide biggest political winner for 2022 is Xi Jinping. I think this guy is, he's firing on all cylinders and he is basically ascendant. So 2022 marks the first year where he's essentially really ruler for life. And so I don't think we really know what he's capable of and what he's gonna do.

And so that's just gonna play out. - You think he's the biggest political winner, really? - Oh my God, I think it's going to be a, he's gonna run rough shot, not just domestically, but also internationally, because you have to remember, he controls so much of the critical supply chain that the Western world needs to be, needs to survive, let alone- - I think you're completely wrong.

I think he's losing his power. He's scared. That's why he took out all these CEOs. He's consolidating power because he fears that they're gonna win too big and then displace him. And he has massive real estate problems over there that could blow up at any moment in time. He could face a civil war there.

I think he's totally isolated himself. - Civil war? They don't even have guns. - Every major country is removing their factories and removing this dependency. - They don't even have any guns there. What are you talking about? What are they gonna riot with? - Did you not see Tiananmen Square?

Did you not see the riots in Hong Kong? Are you not paying attention, Chamath? There's been many riots in China. They just happened to kill all the people. - Jason, those were crushed. And that's before he had full control. - I'm not saying they will be crushed, but he still will have massive amounts of, I believe, protests and yeah, he'll have to kill people.

- I think the bigger risk is that China gets better for Xi Jinping, but worse for everybody else in China. It's already worse for all the billionaires over there. It's worse for the tech industry. You've now got Evergrande, that whole gigantic debt implosion. I think there could be contagion from China next year.

I don't think Xi's gonna lose his grip in any way, but I'm not sure China's gonna have a good year next year. - It's gonna be terrible. I went with Ron DeSantis with USACS. I think he's obviously a much more, he's a much more palatable candidate than Trump. And I think Trump is not gonna wanna run.

And that brings me to my biggest political loser for 2022. As we segue, I believe this is gonna be split between Biden and Trump, the two most important people of the last four years. And I think Biden is gonna lose the midterms. And I think Trump is gonna get destroyed with this January 6th thing and bow out and not run again.

Who do you got for your biggest loser? - Let me add, I'm kinda an octogenarian to that, which is my pick for biggest political loser next year is Nancy Pelosi. There's a red wave coming. The Democrats for sure are gonna lose the house. That is baked into the cake.

And I predict she will announce her retirement shortly after that. She has served a couple of pretty consequential terms as speaker. She's never lost a vote, but with this whole build back better, she forced all of her moderates to take a vote on 5 trillion in new spending, which they then lost in the Senate.

And that's gonna cost them some seats. So she contributed to, I think her own downfall, what's gonna happen next year. - Is Nancy gonna come work at social capital and you're gonna give her a bucket of capital to work with to try to play the market? - By the way, Jason, who's the excellent writer you got from Tucker because I wanna hire them.

- All right, listen, I got somebody from the YouTube comments who said they would punch me up. All right, I got Biden and Trump, Nancy Pelosi, and then who do you got, Freeberg? Who's your biggest political loser of 2022 prediction? - Mine's a little depressing, but I'm honestly a little bit worried about the United States influence on kind of a global stage, socially, politically, economically.

And I think that there's a number of events that could catalyze kind of a precipitous series of events that could really harm the continuing influence the US has geopolitically. So, I don't really have an individual, but I kind of have the US. And it's in its role on the global geopolitical stage.

- US influence. - US influence, yeah. - And you said you thought there was gonna be this potential tipping point perhaps. Did you see that being Taiwan or what? - I've got a couple of them. I think when we get into our contrarian points of view, I'll share some of them.

- Okay. Chamath, who do you got for your biggest political loser for 2022 prediction? - Well, look, I like your pick of Trump, which is not mine, but just to double down on this Trump thing, it's incredible to see that he's, just a bamboozler. You know, that's the same guy who's like, you know, telling people to not take the vaccine, gets boosted.

Then, you know, when he finally gets outed with this other scumbag, what's that guy's name? What's that other right knob? - Sax, take out your phone and go to speed dial. Just read it. - Riley, Bill O'Reilly, Bill O'Reilly. Bill O'Reilly. - Bill O'Reilly, yeah, that's number four on his speed dial.

- Those two dopes on stage are like, yeah, I got boosted. What about you? Yeah, I got triple vaxxed. And then everybody's booing them. I mean, they're just such. - Watch what they do, not what they say. - These guys are entertainers. - If you're a dipshit on the alt-right.

- The great thing is they are phenomenal entertainers, but you can't trust a single word that they say. So Jason, I think that that's a pretty good pick. My pick is the progressive left as a class, because I think these guys are being exposed basically for just being laughingstocks.

They're quickly becoming policy jokes inside of Washington and in every city state that they run. They just can't seem to put one foot in front of the other. And they've been run amok with folks like these teachers unions who have really, really, really done a number on our children, which is now finally getting exposed in the mainstream media.

And so all of these policies are just, they're not rooted in any sort of science or legitimacy. So they are, I think, going to pay a pretty heavy political price for mainstream voters in 22. - You know what they remind me of those two guys, like the old guys from the Muppets, Statler and Waldorf.

That's what like those Trump and O'Reilly are. Okay, biggest business- - I think Biden can still save a lot of his long-term reputation. I think Trump's is- - What would Biden need to do in 2022? Number one thing- - He needs to disavow the progressives and basically shore up his party's ability to win back some seats and hold the line.

And so you're not gonna be able to end it. You're gonna be able to enter some of these places with some of this rhetoric that he basically was convinced would be necessary for him to not lose the progressive left. There just needs to be a conversation inside the White House where they actually go through the cold political calculus of my enemies, enemies, actually my friend kind of thing, and actually go back to the center.

- Yeah, he needs to pull a Bill Clinton and triangulate. - He needs to pull a Bill Clinton. - Okay. - And quickly too. - I think it's way too early to conclude that the Biden presidency is over. I mean, I think they're gonna lose Congress next year. That's baked into the cake, but he's still got two years after that to pull his chest down outside of the fire.

And if the Republicans overplay their hand and he tacks towards the center, you know, he can change his fortunes. - He can change his fortunes quickly. - He's down a pawn, but he could develop the board. I got it. - All right. - I think the voice of populism's only gonna swell over the next year.

And that's gonna be the predominant force that's gonna drive both the alt-right and the progressive left. And it, you know, you could make the case that, you know, politicians that are in seats should be kind of disavowing these, what we today are calling kind of extreme voices, but they're only getting louder and the importance of kind of populist movements, not just in the US, but you look around the world.

I mean, look at what's happening in Brazil, various European countries. I mean, it is- - Wait, so you think populism is gonna have a rebound in 2022? We're all saying that we think it's fizzling. - Well, can I just say, Friedberg- - I think populism's swelling and I think it's gonna get louder.

- Oh, okay. - Low interest rates are gonna be higher rates are simply keeping things at bay for now. And I think that's gonna shift very quickly in- - But Friedberg, populism just means what's popular. And so I think there's a huge silent majority that's always stayed on the sidelines because they're not the ones that tend to have a tendency to complain, but when things get important enough, they typically show up.

And so, you know, we may find that actually centrism is what's most popular. - I think populism is anti-elitism. And I think that there is a growing concern globally because of globalization, that power and capital has been concentrated in the hands of a few, that the voice of the majority is we want to be shared.

We want that to all be shared equally. And that's what's driving populism around the world. And it's in the US, you know, manifesting in different ways on the left and the right. And you'll see this in other countries around the world, but I don't see the fundamental driving forces changing there until and unless we have massive taxation and redistribute wealth in a meaningful way, and that's what's going to be the key to the future.

- Yeah, I think that's a big part of it. I think that's a big part of it. I think that's a big part of it. I think that's a big part of it. I think that's a big part of it. I think that's a big part of it. I think that's a big part of it.

I think that's a big part of it. I think that's a big part of it. I think that's a big part of it. I think that's a big part of it. I think that's a big part of it. I think that's a big part of it. I think that's a big part of it.

I think that's a big part of it. I think that's a big part of it. I think that's a big part of it. that are not the traditional California and New York centers of industry and wealth. I think it's a trend that's been going on, but it's going to keep getting bigger next year.

If you guys saw the net migration numbers by state, they're absolutely stunning. Stunning. So, and it's the zero-tax states that are just booming right now. It's states like Florida and Texas and Tennessee and on and on it goes at the huge expense of California and New York. I think that trend's only going to pick up steam now that salt is dead.

I think there was a hope on the part of many people that Trump got rid of salt, but then the Democrats were supposed to bring it back and then AOC rejected it. It's not coming back. And what that means is that if you're in, say, California, for example, with the salt deduction, your effective tax rate was around 8%, not 13.3%.

Now it really is 13.3%. That's a huge increase. And the politicians in California don't even realize that the tax rate has effectively gone up to the end taxpayer. And the quality of life isn't any better. We're not getting anything more for that. And so I think this X is going to continue.

That's the subtle math that they actually really need to understand. That 500 basis points, you can overcome that if your life is 5% better in enough ways where you're like, it's fine. And the reason why people are leaving is they feel that their life is actually much less than 5% worse.

Right. If the trash doesn't get picked up. The quality of life doesn't justify it. You know, your windows are getting smashed in all the time. Safety. Your kids are, you know, dead. They're depressed and need counseling because of the way that the teachers unions lock them out of school.

You're just like, forget this. I can't do this anymore. Right. You got to add those two numbers. Yeah. Here, here. That's what people really need to appreciate. I don't think it's the actual effective tax rate, but it's the delta of how poor your quality of life has gotten over these last few years relative to the tax you pay.

Yeah, I totally agree with that. And then one other effect that I think plays into this is the reshoring of American industry, which is not happening in places like California, New York. It's happening in places like Texas. Sure. Samsung just announced a $17 billion investment in a new chip foundry in Texas.

Here, I'll post this. And there's a lot of things like this happening. So as we decouple from China and bring our supply chain home. Let's go. That is going to be a big factor in the rise of the rest. Love it. Love it. And it's great. It's great for America because the wealth does need to be more evenly distributed.

It can't just go to tech and finance elites in California and New York. Yeah. All right. Um, I had two. Uh, Disney was my biggest corporate winner for 2022. Disney plus crushing it. Parks raised prices. People want to go to the park. Spider-Man just had, I think the number two or number three all time, uh, opening in a pandemic, which is crazy.

That IP is going to continue to work for them. John Favreau and David Fiolini, I think is how you pronounce his last name. Both crushing it with Mandalorian. Boba Fett, one of the great characters from our childhood now is going to have his own book of Boba Fett starting on December 3rd.

29th. Is that today or tomorrow? Uh, tomorrow. And so I think Disney is going to have a huge surge. I think they're undervalued, but my, my number one for this category of biggest business winner for 2022 was millennials in Gen Z. I think that they became completely empowered and independent.

They shook off the participation trophies and their entitlement during COVID. They realized that they have skills that are valuable. They're sought after. They learned how to make money. They traded crypto. They did stock trading. They're doing shorts, puts, whatever. On Robin hood. And they're just not impressed with people in power.

And they increasingly want to build shit and make money. I think that those two generations have woken up and I think they're going to be the biggest winners in 2022. Because dovetailing with your SMBs Chamath, I do think, uh, and I'm seeing it across my entire portfolio of companies.

Uh, you try to hire somebody and they're like, yeah, but maybe I can just start my own company. You and me and Saks are actually saying a flavor of the same thing, actually. Yeah. Because all these SMBs aren't going to happen in New York and San Francisco. They're happening all over the world.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. America and there are people that are taking empowerment into their own hands. There's tooling for them. And there's opportunity, economic opportunity for them to build businesses on their own. And basically just say, you know, f nothing will build your confidence with you sacks. Nothing builds your confidence like moving from one city to another.

And having that's a very empowering thing to do when you're just like, you know what, I'm going to just leave and go somewhere else. I'll make it myself. So I feel like they are super impressive to me really believe in I really believe in this because the three of us got there in totally different ways.

But I think it's roughly all the same, we might be triangulating around a trend here biggest business loser for 2022. I'll just give it real quick. I think crypto projects that actually don't deliver a product in 2022 are just going to be lost. I think this idea that people are going to bet on things that don't exist in the real world or don't actually have applications is going to end it's time for crypto to put up or shut up.

And I think the crypto projects that do that, which a number of them are starting to are going to store but it's going to be a big shake out there. What do you got for biggest business loser in 2022? Freeberg? I agree with you, actually, that was mine. Yeah, oh, wow.

I said crypto bubble will burst. There's a lot of scammy nonsense going on. 90% of these projects, okay, you know, are not going to yield value and fundamentals. And I also think that rising interest rates are going to affect the crypto market. There's a lot of leverage trades into the crypto assets, those will start to deliver as these interest rates shift up.

And as a whole, you'll see a large percentage of them go away or decline in value, but a small number will continue to grow in value, just like we saw in the dot com bubble blew up. There was a number of companies that survived. Most of them did not.

And the few that did survive ended up being coming worth 10 times what the current market value is. And I think that that's still possible with these crypto projects. But I'd say 90% of them are probably going to start to blow up next year. What do you got, Shabbat?

Well, I guess I'm fading you guys. And I'm also fading implicitly, Freeberg's pick of stripe. But I'm going to say, you know, I think that the biggest business loser for 2022 is Visa and MasterCard and traditional payment rails and the entire ecosystem around it. So I think that this is the year you can put on what probably will be the most profitable spread trade of my lifetime, which is to be short these companies, and that anybody that basically lives off of this two or 3% tax and be long, well thought out web three crypto projects that are rebuilding payments infrastructure in a completely decentralized way.

Now, that doesn't necessarily mean that what you say won't also happen, both that stripe will have an incredible IPO and that a lot of these scammy crypto projects will go to zero. However, if you read the white papers of these crypto projects, and you systematically put together a framework, I think you can be long those.

And you can be short Visa MasterCard because I think this is their peak market cap. And for those of you don't know, fading and sports betting taking the opposite. Side of a bet, taking the opposite team, I guess man visas market cap is half a trillion dollars, huh? It's incredible.

It's a completely contrived duopoly that doesn't mean to a young person and MasterCard is almost 400 billion. So they're trillion dollar combined market. You have to understand that the canary in the coal mine here is pretty significant. The most important thing is Amazon. Earlier this year, Nick, maybe you can post this decided to just shut visa off in the UK.

Oh, yeah. Amazon is not going to do something like that. In my opinion, unless it's a test of what they can do all around the world. And again, going back to this idea of arming the rebels, there really is no need today for all of these small businesses to sit on top of visa, MasterCard and Amex rails, it's unnecessary.

And so it'll probably get developed in the developing world first. This is why I think you know, focusing in markets like Nigeria, to me are way more exciting than talking about, right, you know, these fading Western European countries who are going to be the ones who are going to be the ones who are going to be the ones who are going to be the ones who are going to be the ones who are going to be the ones who are going to be the ones who are going to be the ones who are going to be the right.

This is where this stuff will happen. It's not to say that those are those other companies can't, you know, trundle along for a while. But when I say, you know, we'll look back in 10 years, and their market caps will be materially lower. Anybody in those traditional infrastructure and rails versus anybody in this new infrastructure and rails will be it will look like a no brainer.

Do you consider the buy now pay later companies like a firm and upstart or whatever? I don't know if upstart fits in that category. But some of these buy now pay later businesses as being the alternative to the traditional payment networks? Or do you think it's a different business?

No, I've right now I think what what buy now pay later is, is a rate arbitrage, right? When as you said earlier, rates are very, very low. So the cost of capital is low. But it again, starts to habituate the consumer experience to, I don't need to pay these users rates to these three credit card companies to facilitate a transaction of money that I already have or money that I'm good for.

That's the big idea, right. And so when you translate that into Web three in a good project or a good series of projects, you're not going to need these companies. And so it's going to I think, eviscerate trillions of dollars of market cap. Not to mention, you also have in between these two Venmo and cash app, which are not crypto, but they certainly as brands mean more to young people, like do you think Visa and MasterCard?

Yeah, do you think block used to be called square is a good pair trade against Visa MasterCard in this context? Yeah, like it. You know, I think that that starts to get closer to to the truth. My perspective is, you can kind of short anybody who's public, because anybody who's public can really only be public or will go public, because they feast off of this artificial two or 3% transaction fee.

Everybody does. The companies you want to be long are those private companies in crypto that you can read the white papers of whose protocols have utility and who's building some element of infrastructure. That replaces a traditional business. So as long as you can kind of build those things up, Balaji, for example, had a bunch of tweets this weekend where he was like, you know, I he has this idea for a mirror table.

What is that that replaces, you know, cap table management, right now? Why is that important? Well, it because it touches all of these really important KYC AML investing laws across all these countries in all of these places. It's just a very simple example of where the new company that actually builds that capability of these mirror tables will do so at virtually no cost.

And so it'll have a 50 person team. And so they're not going to have offices all over the world, their cost basis will be, you know, an order or two orders of magnitude. That's basic visa MasterCard became a tax. It took decades to have that power over folks. And then they but I think a firm does break that a firm breaks it because the people who are selling, then decide, you know what, we'll give a little bit of a discount here to get more people to buy.

Go ahead. They were the classic network monopoly network effect monopoly business, right? Like they got the small businesses, they got the credit cards, and by extension, the consumers on the network. And ultimately, they created these these absolutely locked in networks. But as with all networks, complacency kind of, you know, drives innovation.

And this field innovation that we're seeing is now starting to figure out ways to not just crack their way into the network, but to replace them with an entirely different model. Last point on this, this is not one where I think this disruption has happened. Disruption happens slow. I think it happens swiftly, swiftly being five to 10 years.

No, like in a year. Yeah, to my point is really interesting, because there's, you know, there are several billion people globally, who do not have credit and who are unbanked. And so if you think about where this is more likely to come from, it's more likely to come from an innovative model in those markets that then ultimately finds its way into the developed world.

Versus, you know, trying to break apart visa and MasterCard and go get these small businesses to switch. Switch out of them and so on today. So it's a really interesting. Okay, sacks. What do you got? I don't know if it's biggest loser. But the thing I'm most worried about is in 2022, the Fed is going to stop quantitative easing or so they have said they are, I guess March will be the last month in which they do this QE.

So starting in April, there won't be any of this liquidity pumped into the system. And so I think the the losers are going to be any of these asset classes that are heavily dependent on or have benefited from all this excess liquidity sloshing through the system. It's true that the stock market I think has already priced in rate increases and an increase in the discount rate.

But I don't know if markets can fully price in reduction in liquidity. We don't know exactly what that's going to look like. And so if liquidity is reduced next year, I think that could reverberate through a bunch of markets including you know, everything from sports cards, you know, collectibles, which have gone through the roof to art to crypto to, you know, maybe some growth stocks and on and on it goes.

So that's my biggest worry is what happens when the Fed stops QE. The biggest loser is markets because of quantitative markets that have to get off drugs, basically. Okay, most contrarian belief. Sax, why don't you tell us your most contrarian belief since I'm sure that you workshop this with the contrarian Peter Thiel himself.

It never ends. Yeah, I mean, so I have a couple of them here. Actually, you want to wait and go after everybody else? Sure. Yeah, go ahead. I don't even know if this is contrarian or just unconventional. But I think that all of this pressure in on the progressive left will manifest in the chosen one, AOC deciding to step up and run against Schumer in the primary in June of 2022.

And she will lose. Wow, that's a good prediction. I like to mouth prediction. That's a bold one. Yeah, that she would lose his ball. Well, sorry, just to give a little bit of color in this, like, let's just assume that she doesn't. Right. And you know, she shouldn't but let's think about where she's sitting.

Build back better is over. There's an enormous amount of stuff happening right now where, you know, it looks like the progressive left is really going to be put under pressure. And it's almost as if she's really going to be the standard bearer. And she needs to do something quickly.

Otherwise, she's going to have to wait until she's 38. You know, she's, you know, another six years from now, because it's not unlikely that she's going to run against Kristen, Kirsten Gillibrand. So this is kind of like it may be a moment where out of her sheer frustration, she steps up.

And then we will see whether freeburgers right or I'm right, whether the populism is really around the left or the populism is really around the silent majority. What do you got? Sex? I think it's good. I think that's a very good prediction. In a similar way, I predict that there will be a strange new respect for Bill Clinton in the Democratic Party by the end of next year.

Why? Because after the red wave, there'll be a recognition that they need to move towards the center, they need to triangulate. And, and Clinton was the one who provided the formula for doing this, he dragged the Democratic Party back to the center after they were losing elections. And the other piece of this is going to be that it's already the case in polling that Hispanics and Asian Americans now are swing voters.

And I think you're going to see in November 2022, that they go for Republicans and big numbers. And so the idea that the Democratic Party can just coast to election based on demographics, I think that theory is going to be imperiled. Yeah. And so they're going to be looking to Clinton and maybe not so much Obama, as the as sort of the predicate they should be, you know, aspiring to in the future.

I think what's important about that is those groups of people, I think are offended by the the free money gets something for nothing. They're hardworking immigrant people who have pride, they don't want handouts. And then you have this left white liberal maniac saying, No, no, you're poor, you need handouts, you don't, you shouldn't work, you need handouts, you're, you know, and I just think they don't buy it.

And that's why I think they're gonna go to the Republicans, because Republicans are hardworking and freedom loving. And what was Clinton's big tagline in his campaign, he said that he supports people who work hard and play by the rules. That was that so great. That's the message that Democrats got to refine, right?

Now, they seem to be on the side of basically, drug addicts. I mean, you know, people who junkies are contributing nothing and pitching tents in the middle of public spaces and, you know, participating in open air drug markets. Yeah, what do you got and sore losers? Don't forget sore losers.

Yeah. And hysterical free burn and hysterical people. I mean, big hysterical just never good. Look, if you'll bear with me, I have, I have three, but I couldn't really pick. So the first one is I think, and I shared this on the pod the other day, I think we'll see the start of the next episode of great global conflict.

We often rationalize the series of events that that catalyze conflict after the fact, rather than recognizing that there was emotional conditioning that allowed it to arise in the first place. I think we're in a state today, where the conditioning is such that we're more inclined to engage in conflict globally than we have been in a very long time.

I don't know if it's kind of the conflict meter, or what happened. Yeah, I think it's kind of the conflict meter, or what happened in the first place. I think we're in a state today, where the conditioning is such that we're more inclined to engage in conflict globally than we have been in a very long time.

I don't know if it's kind of the conflict meter, or what happened in the first place. I think we're in a state today, where the conditioning is such that we're more inclined to engage in conflict globally than we have you. But you know, you could see proxy wars, and proxy conflict that arise sort of like what we're seeing, you know, maybe something in the Ukraine, maybe something related to Taiwan.

But this is primarily predicated by the fact that we've got kind of this inflationary environment and the rise of populism will force the kind of domestic policymakers and legislators to say we should do something that's active and something that will allow us to unite our nations to go and get into a conflict.

conflict somewhere, or more likely to do that than not. And so I would say that the conditioning is there to see something like that happen. And so we're not kind of thinking, hey, next year is going to be a year of war. And that's why it's contrarian. I think that there may be war that we're not kind of paying attention to today, or that will surprise us after the fact.

The second thing is, I'd say China may solidify its position next year. And this is going to sound a little crazy as a leader in climate change mitigation. Whereas it's historically been considered kind of the primary foe against climate change. And there's a couple of behaviors we've seen come out of China recently that I think number one, remember, China is a very rational actor, they do analysis, they make decisions based on long term investments and thinking, they recently announced that they're going to build 115 new nuclear reactors over the next 15 years at a cost of roughly $450 billion.

That's about $3 billion per nuclear power plant. The US is currently spending $30 billion building two power plants in Georgia. And that's a huge amount of money. And that's a huge amount of money. And that's a huge amount of money. And that's a huge amount of money. And that's a huge amount of money.

And that's a huge amount of money. And that's a huge amount of money. So the Chinese have figured it out. They've also publicly declared that they're going to be completely carbon neutral with their economy by the year 2060. And they're making the investments through these nuclear power plants to demonstrate that they're actually on the road to do that.

And there are a number of other infrastructure initiatives that are meant to help them achieve significant reductions in in carbon by by 2040. So So let me just point out why this is important, because right now everyone thinks China is the foe, they're causing climate change, they're the biggest problem.

Imagine if over the next decade, China is the biggest problem. Imagine if over the next decade, China is the biggest problem. Imagine if over the next decade, China is the biggest year, some of what they're doing pays off. And everyone says, My gosh, China is leading the world in climate change mitigation, their influence socially and politically will rise.

And this this gives China a very strong kind of position, you know, on a global stage and with kind of people around the world thinking, instead of China being a foe, maybe they're the leader and the US is the laggard. And that creates a my third is very random, which is some sort of natural catastrophe.

We we never account, you know, all natural catastrophes are very low probability, but very high severity. If you multiply the probability by the severity, you have what's called the expected loss, we always undervalue the expected loss of massive catastrophes, natural catastrophes. We haven't had one in a while. It's a very low probability bet for me to say, Hey, maybe we will.

But if we do, it's certainly under appreciated in markets today. And so when these kind of, you know, black swan type events occur, did you? Did you watch Don't Look Up on Netflix? Is that why you're no, what is that? It's a new movie about a crap. Don't watch it.

It's polarizing. Let's leave it out for now. Okay. I'll watch it. It's crap. My most contrarian belief is I think this is contrarian is that American influence and exceptional exceptionalism is going to soar. That is contrarian. I think we've empowered this next generation as I talked about earlier, millennials, Gen Z are ready to be independent to build shit.

And I think Gen X is going to start taking over from boomers, as is what's happening in this very podcast here as we start to hit our prime years as executives. And then all these boomers are retiring, as Chamath has pointed out over and over again, and they're going to pass down their wealth, which then creates a perfect storm of a ton of capital, a ton of energy, lots of new ideas, a different perspective, what our economy is going to boom.

And we will prove once again, that we're the greatest country and economy in the world. Dickie, you're not you're not a contrarian. You're what we call an optimist. Yeah. Okay. And then I'll add to that, Jake, how what are we? Are we Gen X? We're Gen X. Yes. And the fighting over COVID abortion guns, social justice and all this stuff is so exhausting.

Not that these are not important issues that I think everybody is going to move to, let's just start respecting and building and solving problems. And I just think American exceptionalism will be all that happens in 2022. I just think that that is my contrarian belief for 2020. Everybody believes it's all primary.

race. Everybody believes it's coming apart. I don't think that it's coming apart. century in a year. I think it's gonna be a great year. I think it's gonna be a great year. I give my second contrarian prediction. Oh, God, here we go. Yes. Okay. Good. Here it is. I think the media, the media is going to pull a total 180 on COVID.

Okay, so after pumping out COVID fear porn for two years, you're going to change their tune next year. Some of the things you're going to hear we need to live with COVID. It can't be eradicated. They're even going to say it's it's more like a cold or flu. They're going to say that politicians can't be expected to stop it.

They're going to memory hole their support for lockdowns or we never supported that. And why is all this because we have an election next year and more Americans have already died from COVID under Joe Biden than Donald Trump. That's a pretty amazing hold. What was your term? Yeah, you've never heard the term memory hole.

It's what the memory hole got it. Yeah. But did you guys know that? That more Americans have already died from COVID under Joe Biden than Trump? That's that is stunning. Yeah, it is stunning. Are you sure? Yeah. 100% now, it's writers triple fact checked it. Yeah, they did. They did.

No, look, look it up. And it's certainly it's gonna be even more true. It's on info worse.com. You can look it up. Omicron wave. Now look, I don't blame Joe Biden for that. Sorry, why is that because Trump had no vaccine and Biden has had vaccines and everything else.

Maybe it's the consistency of the consistent, you know, one to 2000 people die a day 1400 a day. So maybe it's just that consistency in the US. Yeah, I think it's because of the Republican states that refuse to do any mitigation. Okay, let's keep going. Look, I don't blame Biden for that.

I don't blame any President United States. Nonetheless, Biden campaigned on the idea of these quote unquote, shutting down the virus. He and the Democrats claim to that they would be able to eradicate it. That was the entire basis for all these COVID restrictions. Now it's it's the case that it can't be done.

Everyone's realizing that they're gonna have to move the goalposts and memory hole ever saying that. And so the Democrats desperately need COVID to be over for the 2022 midterms. Therefore, the media will say it's over. Well, you started to see it already, because the media is probably scratching their head.

They were the ones trying to force these lockdowns, you know, basking in the glow of whatever press release the the Centers for Disease Control would put out. And all of a sudden, the CDC just had to go back to the COVID. They just had to do a complete 180.

And when they used to force 10 day quarantines, for these positive tests and people with COVID, they just backtrack to five. And why? Well, it's because there's nobody to work. And a Delta CEO asked for it last week. And now they're I don't know if that's exactly true. But the CDC ultimately really is just in the hands of big business.

And so when big business needs these workers to come back, you know, they probably pissed off a lot of unions who would have loved to have just had a positive test and stay home forever. The teachers unions, particularly, here we are. This is a really tough situation. Well, and look, and to be clear, the message that the media is going to deliver about COVID next year, it'll be the first time I agree with it.

But it's completely dishonest to them to pretend like they were never in favor of lockdowns. And they completely inflated the threat and created this whole hysteria. And next year, they're gonna have to back off. But also take into account sacks, that this new variant is much less deadly. So it would be logical for people to take a less severe action on it.

Hold on, Jason. We don't know whether there are more variants to come in the future that could be much worse. But we also don't know what could be subsequently. So the point is, the CDC made a decision, broadly speaking, about everything. They're not making a decision about Omicron. They didn't say if you have Omicron, because not as if they really even test for it.

I'm just talking to sacks. The reason they shortened this is because they didn't know what they were doing before. They don't fundamentally know what they're doing now. They're making best guesses. And the problem with these best guesses is that they're inaccurate. And it forces enormous amounts of waves of havoc.

Every time they make a decision, I'm talking about I'm talking about sacks, this prediction that the media will flip a logical person, including everybody on this call, because of Omicron taking over for Delta and being a natural blocker, it would be the logical thing to do. So in defense of the media, which I'm not apt to do, it's logical for everybody to take a different approach right now, because Omicron is 40 times more contagious, it blocks Delta, and it's become the dominant variant.

Jason Kuznicki: I think the right now the media is confused. I'm not sure which way to go. So you know, there's a high probability that they tack towards what sacks is saying. But if you read the New York Times article, it was through gritted teeth. They presented the fact that the CDC changed the guy.

Yes, if you read that article, it was like pulling teeth. The media is the media. Can you just define that a little bit? It's everybody about Fox News. Come on. It's the elite prestige media. It's the New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, on and on and on.

Do you think there's a bigger audience with the aggregate of those publications you just mentioned? Or the direct to the consumer publications that are happening on YouTube? Of course, they're being disaggregated because of their dishonesty. So does it matter? Yeah, of course, it still matters because they still have a lot of influence they do.

And no offense to everybody on YouTube. But we haven't gotten yet to the economic viability where enough people on YouTube can cover the broad spectrum of things that are important. And then the mechanisms and incentives to amplify it. So for example, that's a good point. We still need CNN, there was a woman on CNN, Nick, please post a clip that you could we posted in the group chat, talking about the incidence of suicide rates and depression in our children.

So what happened when they were locked out of school for two years, okay, and I am not going to stop talking about this. Because this is the issue of our times. These are our kids. Well, I want to get to underreported stories as well, Jan. Oh, for me, I mean, I my kids hear me rant about this every day.

So I may as well tell you guys it's the crushing impact that our COVID policies have had. They've had on young kids and children, by far, you know, the least serious risk for serious illness. But I mean, even teenagers, you know, a healthy teenager has a one in a million chance of getting in dot and dying from COVID, which is way lower than, you know, dying in a car wreck on a road trip, but they have suffered and sacrifice the most especially kids and underrepresented at risk communities.

And now we have the Surgeon General saying there's a mental health crisis among our kids, the risk of suicide girl suicide attempts among girls now up 51% this year, black kids, nearly twice as likely as white kids to die by suicide. I mean, school closures, lockdowns, cancellation of sports, you couldn't even go on a playground in the DC area, without cops scurrying, getting shooting the kids off tremendous negative impact on kids.

And it's been an afterthought. You know, it's it's it's hurt their dreams. They're future learning loss, risk of abuse, their mental health. And now with our knowledge, our vaccines, if our policies don't reflect a more measured and reasonable approach for our children, they will be paying for our generation's decisions, the rest of their lives.

And that to me is the greatest underreported story of the past year. And I don't see it being talked about anywhere we talked about at first, you know, I posted that link about the decrease in IQ points. Yep. And then we started to talk about it there slowly. And now it's trickling into the mainstream media where they're forced to talk about who's impacted.

It's not rich kids. It's not middle class kids. It's all of our fantastic clip. That CNN clip was fantastic ones who are the ones who get hit the hardest. They can't do supplemental. It's not just that. Don't don't minimize what this is. This is every child. Yes, it is proportionally affected.

It is the data was that it's disproportionately affecting minority kids. Yes. And that could be because of the sociology of the parents. But Jason, you can also have rich parents. Okay, Jay. So just saying color parents. I'm saying all poor kids, white poor kids who are public school poor kids, they're getting hit the minority kids of all kinds.

But frankly, the point is, it's all kids of all kinds. Okay, so we don't need to sub segment this to make this issue go away and seem smaller than it is. We have literally put 10s of millions of children. Yes, at risk because of our behavior. Yes. I'm agree with you.

And I'm not trying to minimize it or make it a smaller issue. Your point is that none of the smaller audience is or smaller new media folks on YouTube or their podcasting have enough breadth to really make an impact by talking about this topic. Is that what you're saying that the mainstream media is needed to hit the broad base?

No, what I'm saying is very specific. The people on YouTube cover what the people on YouTube want. Okay, the people on podcasts cover what they want. They're all very narrow, especially their narrow niche. Okay, yeah, there is no set of incentives that then threads that together. And then amplifies, right in the absence of those two mechanisms.

Right. Those are software mechanics, and economic mechanics that need to get built in. What we lose is signal right that, in my opinion, right now over the last two weeks, is the single most important signal and it is nowhere except for this one clip on CNN, and the discussion that we had two weeks ago, because the YouTube I just want to be really clear on this because the YouTube is full of react videos, right?

And so games, which is fine. And the consumer is talking about this issue and actually holding the conversation. Right. But the question is, is this really the right thing to do? Is this really the right thing to do? And how do we get to that point? And how do we get to that point?

And how do we get to that point? Because if we don't, then we're going to lose our lives. And if we don't, then we're going to lose our lives. And we're going to lose our lives. So what do we do? We're going to lose our lives. And so we're going to lose our lives.

And so we're going to lose our lives. And the reason why we're going to lose our lives is because we're going to lose our lives. And we're going to lose our lives. And we're going to lose our lives. And so we're going to lose our lives. And we're going to lose our lives.

And we're going to lose our lives. And - I thought it was a CBS, it was a CBS whatever. Was a Sunday show. - But my point is these are the things that really matter and we haven't figured it out yet. - What you're saying, and I think it's a really important point is that as a YouTuber, as a podcaster, you pick your niche that you can hit home on and you hit home over and over every week.

But no one says, I'm gonna broadly talk about the issues of our time and make sure. - No, no, that's not true. We do. - We do, but it's a small subset, but I think the bigger picture here is that -- - Listen, there's more than a million people a week that listen to this.

We've far exceeded MSNBC's average viewership. We're probably gonna pass most CNBC shows and some CNN shows by the end of next year. So we will do it, but there's not enough. There needs to be more of us. - We're an opinion show as much, we're not a traditional reporting show, right?

In the sense that like go out, gather data and facts and present them, or do you disagree with that? - Not that they do that anyway. - I disagree with that. - Okay. - I disagree. I actually think we do a decent job of filtering for the truth. And the reason we're able to do that is because of our friendship, we can hold each other accountable and call out the bullshit when we see-- - 'Cause we don't have incentives.

We don't have anything to lose, right? - I don't think there's an incentive here for us. But I wanna build on something that Zach said. See, it is very hard for the media to hold this dissonance because they're saying everybody needs to shelter in place. COVID is this huge thing.

They put the death count, they put the case counter up. They won't talk about deaths in ICU. They won't talk about who's getting COVID because they have an incentive to get more ratings through COVID or Trump, and they took that and then it's a narrative violation or it's cognitive dissonance if they say at the same time, everybody needs to shelter in place.

This thing is really deadly, but we should send our kids to school. So they couldn't take that position, Zach and Chamath. They couldn't take the position that, oh, well, kids could go to school because that would go against, hey, everybody needs to shelter in place. And they picked, I think, COVID is this super deadly thing.

Everybody has to shelter in place over children. - I think you're giving them way too much credit. I think what happened was they had a position to react to aggregate lost power and they took it. - That's real sinister. - And they did not think about the true consequences.

And it may not have happened at any one individual reporter level, but when it ladders up to the editorial board and the decisions of the people who run the mass heads of these organizations, they made the decision that currying and organizing power was more important than shining a light to do the right thing.

Specifically in this case, the thing that aggravates me the most is around our kids. I think they were going for ratings, but anyway, we can keep debating it. - Well, the one thing we can say for sure is they created a hysteria. Whether their motivation was ratings or a power grab or political advantage, there's probably all the above, but the bottom line is they wanted to create a hysteria and they've been pumping COVID fear porn into the population for the last two years.

But my prediction, like I said, is that it all flips next year. Why? 'Cause there's an election and the way the media figures out what its narrative is gonna be is they start with the election result they want, and then they reverse engineer the narrative that they think's gonna help achieve that election result.

And if it means contradicting what they said yesterday, they will memory hole what they said yesterday in order to get on board with the new narrative. That is what's gonna happen. - I do think you're right, but I think I just, I don't wanna lose this thread because this has nothing to do with COVID, meaning COVID was a symptom of this.

But if you really thought that the organized mainstream media had the right to be, has a purpose to be on the right side of justice, where were they when school boards were stripping out advanced placement programs for kids? Or where were they when they were shutting kids out? Or where were they when they were engaged in eight hour- - They can't go against the unions.

- Debates about whether a male can be on a committee because he's gay, but he's not black. I mean, these were the issues that stopped our children from literally walking into the classroom every day. And those stories were not told and they didn't happen just in one place, they happened all across the country.

And this is where those folks had a responsibility because they also probably had kids and they didn't do a thing about it. That one issue for me really drives me crazy. - Let me ask a probing question here. We assume we're gonna get out of this pandemic in 2022, knock on wood, no more variants.

What is the obligation and technique, the strategy to solve what we did to these kids? And I just wanna put it out there. We don't have to answer it now, but I think we could spend an episode just talking about that. - That's a very difficult question, J. Cal, that I think you need sociologists and psychologists and educators to help answer.

- We also need entrepreneurship and ideas and we need to have a dialogue so we can bring them on. But if we're gonna spend all this money on build back better, how about we build back the 20 lost fucking IQ points that these kids have and then we do something about the depression and anxiety they have?

- Hallelujah. - Jason, we're never gonna get there because the teachers unions won't even acknowledge that learning loss exists. The leaders- - Well, I think we need to break the teachers unions period full stop. - Yes, oh, let me make a prediction in that regard next year. There's gonna be a ballot initiative in California to the first school choice.

And the way it's gonna work is that I think there's something like $13,000 spent per pupil in California. - That's right. - That's the right number. - There's gonna be a ballot initiative that says that any parent who wants to send their kid to an accredited school can get a voucher for $13,000 from the state.

That's just gonna be on the ballot. - Competition, let's go. - I predict it. I predict it will be the big, big election in California and maybe the nation next year. And I think more than a hundred million will be spent on both sides of that thing. And I can't predict it's gonna win.

I hope it does. - This is a topic worth fighting over. This is something important to fight over. - Yes. - Absolutely. - It's school choice. 'Cause you know what? - Absolutely. - These guys pulled the wool over everybody's eyes. They slipped them the Mickey, they hoodwinked them. You need choice.

We know this as entrepreneurs. If there is no competition, things do not get better. These school unions are complacent and they are not fighting. - Let's make a resolution. Let's make a new year's resolution 'cause I think we all agree on this. I got approached about this ballot initiative.

- Let's do it. - It's gonna happen. There's gonna be, like I said, a major ballot initiative next year for school choice in California. - Let's take some all in summit money and put it towards that. - Let's get behind it. - All in summit profits, we'll put towards this.

- Yes, let's do it. - Let's pull that, I'm in, I'm in. Let's put some money behind this. - I wanna tell you just to more personalize this issue 'cause I really think a lot of people listening struggle with this. I entered the pandemic with rules. I had rules about devices.

I had rules about how much time they could be online. I had rules around physical fitness, right? I had rules around diet and it all went out the window. And it became this thing where it was like, feed them the best they can. Sometimes they eat lunch with us.

Sometimes they have to eat lunch by themselves 'cause I'm stuck on some stupid Zoom, back to back in these dumb, dumb meetings 'cause these kids aren't at school. Their only way to interact with their friends became video games like Fortnite where they could at least talk to their friends.

But then it became an addiction where they were doing it for hours and hours. - Yep, gross. - And now I'm trying to, they gained weight because they weren't physically active. And I am trying to unwind as is Nat, as is my ex-wife. We're doing it together as a team.

It is so hard. - Absolutely hard. - So hard. - These are addictions. - What about all these people who don't have the access to the resources that I have to try to unwind this? And then what happens is I send my kids to this school and oh, they may have a headache.

Guess what? They get sent home. And then their brother and sister have to get sent home too until you can test and be COVID negative for a day in a row. And so there's yet another day of school loss. - Totally nuts. - And it's like, this is supposed to be one of the best schools in the country, it's not.

- Totally nuts. - And then I think, what is every other school like then? If this is what my children have to deal with. - I think we should make this, we should have this as a major theme for 2020. - 2022 for the pod. I think it's a very important time.

- We need to hold educators and teachers unions accountable. - Absolutely. - School boards accountable all around the country to fix this. This is your responsibility. You need to fix it with us. - Listen, we held police officers responsible in the last year or two. We've seen this policing being really like a spotlight put on it.

Well, let's put that same spotlight on teachers and administrators and schools. - They'll never do it without competition. That's the only way to hold their feet. - And you know what? What I learned, Chamath, to build on what you said was, I just decided to get a teacher. And obviously I have the means to do it.

I know most people don't. I certainly didn't have it growing up. We could barely afford to exist. But I think homeschooling is a viable option. So with that 13K, I can tell you five parents who are in an underprivileged area can take that five times 13 and take that, what is that, 65K and put it together.

And for 65K, they can hire a teacher and they can do a better job with those parents and a teacher for those five kids. I guarantee it. So let's go to best performing asset of 2022. What do you got, Chamath? - This is simple. This will be battery metals.

Lithium, nickel, cobalt, graphite. Put them in a basket. You can be long these things. And I think you're gonna- - Okay, rapid fire sacks. What do you got? Best performing asset. - I just said series A venture because it's pretty unoriginal. It's what I do. I think growth got us there.

It got a little bit overfunded and overheated. And I think the seed stage also, there were so many new seed investors. Again, it might've been partially because of excess liquidity. So series A is still the choke point. And I think it's still the best area to invest in. Innovation's not gonna stop.

There's gonna be great series A investments next year. - I also picked early stage startups because that's where the magic happens. I picked early stage, like right before series A. I think SPACing, direct listings, raising money, people coming down to do the series Bs. All of that is creating a pull for more startups.

And the founders are getting very sophisticated in terms of finding product market fit and scaling globally earlier. And that's what's creating these great big outcomes, whether it was Uber or Facebook, both figuring out and Airbnb how to go global quickly. So my choice for best performing asset of 2022 is still early stage startups.

- So, Mark Zuckerberg, what do you got? - Obviously best performing asset in terms of a multiples basis, you're never gonna beat seed stage investing, certainly. But I tried to highlight and continue my kind of contrarian bet that we're gonna see increased global conflict next year. Again, driven by incumbents trying to hold onto political office and increase inflation and fueling economic growth and the American response to China.

So in a world of increased global conflict, I think assets that do really well are energy commodities, energy stocks. I recently made a big bet on energy stocks, defense stocks, and it used to be a gold. It could be the case that Bitcoin, sees a role as being a defensive position in portfolios in a world of war and conflict.

So those are my kind of macro themes for asset. - Most anticipated trend of 2022. What do you got, Chamath? A trend you're anticipating in 2022. - Peer to peer payments, the destruction of traditional rail, it will come out of Africa. - Great. Sax, what do you got? - This is where I had the civil war between progressives and pragmatic liberals.

So building on what Chamath said, you're already seeing this in the feud between London Breed and Chesa Boudin. That is really gonna, I think, blossom next year. We have not heard the last of that. You saw it in Philadelphia where the mayor, Michael Nutter took on Larry Krasner. I think you're gonna see it in New York City between Eric Adams and these Manhattan elites.

You also saw it in Washington, DC, where the progressives were blaming Manchin for losing the build back better. So this is a civil war that's gonna continue. And what Chamath predicted with AOC versus Schumer would certainly play into that. So it's grab the popcorn. It is the trend I'm anticipating the most.

- All right, there you go. Do you anticipate a similar trend with like the alt-right Trumpians and DeSantis and that kind of thing breaking up? How do you see that playing out? - Not yet. Trump isn't on the ballot in 2022. So I actually think the Republican party is gonna be surprisingly united in 2022.

I think where the trouble might come in is when we have a Republican primary in 2023. And especially if Trump runs, then all hell's gonna break loose. So yeah. - Who are the two people who would be most viable against Trump in that 2020, 2023? Ron DeSantis and Ted Cruz?

- Nikki Haley. - Nikki Haley? That's gonna be fireworks. Freeberg, what do you got? Anticipated trend? - My biggest anticipated trend for 2022 is gonna be a gold rush in biotech into what I think will become the cover story on magazines throughout the year that humans have discovered the fountain of youth.

And this will arise from these investments in what are called Yamanaka factor-based cell reprogramming methods. I've talked about this on the pod in the past. A few years ago, scientists identified that four chemicals could trigger gene expression in cells and get the cells to revert to being stem cells.

And more recently demonstrated that using lower amounts of those chemicals and other what are called kind of epigenetic factors can trigger partial cell reprogramming, which causes cells in the body to act youthful. As a result of those discoveries, an absolute gold rush is now underway. More recently, Yuri Milner, Jeff Bezos, Arch, and others put a billion dollars to seed a new company called Altos Labs to pursue therapeutics in this area.

Google has individually funded a company called Calico, led by Art Levinson, the former founder and CEO of Genentech. And just recently, Blake Byers and Brian Armstrong announced their new company called New Limit with $100 million of their own personal capital. All of these companies are pursuing the same effort, which is basically causing cells to be youthful, to regenerate in a youthful way.

And as a result, you see kind of organs and systems in the body act more healthily. And there will be magazine covers and 60 minutes articles, stories and all sorts of stuff will start to happen in 2022 saying, "Oh my gosh." Because the amount of money that's gone in in this year is going to cause breakthroughs and discoveries to start to get published about next year.

And when that starts to happen and the media and the PR cycle start to kick up, you'll see this become the year of Yamanaka factor based reprogramming. And everyone's saying it's gonna be the biggest gold rush in biotech since recombinant DNA was used by Genentech in the 80s and 90s.

All right. And I had most anticipated trend of 2022 being the accredited investor laws are going to change and evolve. And it might just be you take a test and you're now accredited. It doesn't matter if you won the lottery or you make $200,000 a year. And a legal crypto framework is going to happen, I think, at the same time.

So those regulations combined are going to empower really interesting capital formation on a global basis, whether it's running a syndicate with everybody in the world, including non accredited investors or Dows or those two things merging, or as Balaji is talking about, you know, a cap table over here that's mirrored on a blockchain at the same time and people being able to trade their interest in Chamath's fund or Sax's fund or one of my syndicates with tokens on the internet.

And that could become a major unlock where, you know, if you were in... I don't have a fund. I run a meager family office. Well, if you were in your earlier funds and somebody and there was still stuff trickling to social capital three, the people who have that could sell it back to you or sell it to each other if they wanted to get liquidity.

And that's going to be super interesting, especially if it can happen just globally where some person in China decides they want to have access to US funds. RLPs could just start selling if it was structured that way. Most anticipated film, TV series, media, yada yada for 2020-22. What do you got?

Yellowstone season nine. I watched the first two episodes. It's really great. I mean, you forget what a great actor... What's his name is? Kevin Costner. Kevin Costner is a great actor. Yes. Yellowstone is great. I'll be watching next season. But what I had down here is Thor Ragnarok. The writer director Taika Waititi is back.

If you saw the last Thor movie... Ragnarok. Ragnarok. Ragnarok was the last one. The new one is called Thor: Love and Thunder. Yeah. And you know, I'm not sure if it's the best or the worst. You know, Thor went from being, I think, one of the most boring Marvel characters in the first two movies to...

Totally. ...being one of the funniest and... Yeah. ...you know, most fun in his last movie. So I think that sequel will be really good. And then the other one is they're doing a prequel show for Game of Thrones called House of the Dragon. I'm going to have to watch that.

And then probably the Star Wars show I'm looking forward to most would be the Obi-Wan Kenobi show with Ewan McGregor. Yes. And Anakin. It's based on Clone Wars. Yes. And I had as well the Obi-Wan show, the Boba Fett show, and the Mandalorian shows all coming back are going to be absolutely bonkers.

And then there's also this token series that's coming out, the prequel, I think, that Amazon is spending a billion dollars on. And I think that's landing in 2022. What do you got, Chamath? It is the All In Summit in Miami and the birth of All In Media. So I think that we, by the end of 2022, will have published content, written content, not necessarily by us, but other forms of media interaction that get the truth out to a large swath of humanity.

Here we go. Is this moving beyond just a couple of besties doing a podcast during lockdown? Yeah. What? What? Wait, so All In Media, is that a new acronym? AIM? AIM. What are we doing? Should we buy a cable channel and just go 24 hours a day? AIM is the truth.

AIM Media. AIM Media. Okay, there you go. I didn't even know. This is news to the rest of us, but Chamath is building the media, bro. Okay, here we go. Who are we going to hire? Tucker. There'll be no shortage of folks who will want to come out of the woodwork to work with us on this.

And I think the goal should just be to make sure we figure out what the real North Star is so that we never deviate. And part of the reason that we're doing this is because we're going to be doing this for a long time. And we're going to be doing this for a long time.

And we're going to be doing this for a long time. There'll be no shortage of folks who will wanna come out of the woodwork to work with us on this. And I think the goal should just be to make sure we figure out what the real north star is so that we never deviate.

And part of the biggest thing that we did, guys, was not trying to hustle for some few shekels here or there. Which was stupid. Like J Cal wanted to. Yeah. What are you talking about? J Cal, we're gonna talk in a minute about the plan for the summer. The purity of not wrapping this thing with crappy ads and all kinds of nonsense is we've never lost our way.

We don't need some stupid deal for some crappy media company. We all have independent ways in which we can monetize our lives and our hard work. And so we should come to this to always tell the truth. I think that that's one of the, I will say one of the great innovations and decisions that you championed was not putting ads on it.

I hear it all the time for people. I mean- We're saving you from yourself, J Cal. It's an interesting idea where you- Well, whatever, I mean, media's advertising basis. I don't think we'd have influenced a show- If you have a media business that's not driven by advertising dollars and not driven by greater, by trying to maximize page views and clicks and visits, then it completely changes the equation of what's possible.

I think this was part of the idea of what publicly funded media was supposed to be, but it obviously got maybe a little bit too far afield. Yeah, it was just too- Well, then they started adding ads. I don't know if you remember that. They lost some funding and they're like, "Okay, we're gonna go for sponsorships." They're not ads, they're sponsorships.

So you're saying we're the new PBS. No, it's something different. I mean, this is- We do this without any expectation of financial reward. We do it because we enjoy it. And so- Well, except for you, J Cal, you've been- No, I mean, I have other things that make money.

Thank you very much. J Cal's doing pretty fucking good right now. Hey, Pogba Bear! Pogba Bear! J Cal's doing okay right now. All right, you're clubbing the baby seal now. Let's get it, yeah. 900 members at thesyndicate.com. Boop! Plug. Boop! Sass Syndicate just did our first deal. Boop! Sass Syndicate just did our first deal.

Boop! Sass Syndicate just did our first deal. Boop! I didn't know we were doing this category. I will promise to watch some TV. I will doubt and Abby season 16 of Doubt and Abby. He doesn't watch TV. He doesn't have any. What do you got? I would like to watch reruns of Doctor Who.

What BBC show that nobody watches are you gonna recommend? Doesn't matter. I mean, come on. What show from Finland with subtitles are- I don't know. You know, I spend a lot of time watching like esoteric videos and stuff I find on YouTube. I really think it's so interesting. It's such a different way of consuming media.

Just tell us what video game you're playing. Wes Anderson is putting out a porno. Oh, I was watching this Paul Thomas Anderson and it's so similar to Target. It's like looking at a painting. And a greasy gulch shot will be of a vernicular going up and down the mountain.

I felt like I was in the Louvre watching this movie. All right. What video game are you playing? I called, uh, I called Freeburg on the phone to talk him off a ledge when he was going crazy on the group chat. And he's like, I can't talk him on a video game.

What video game is that? I was actually playing a video game by Annapurna Interactive, which is Larry Ellison's daughter's um, media production company. And apparently, I didn't know this. They had a video game already. They had a video game arm and the video games are, and the game I was playing was called Maquette.

And um, you kind of, you kind of have this like interesting movie, like poetic experience as you play the game. So it's not really just designed to be action packed. And I don't know. I thought it was a very interesting new way of, um, entertaining oneself. Okay, we can move on.

It was highly stimulating. She made a simulation of a biology lab and uh, you actually get different beaker sizes and you have different sub proteins that you start with. You get to buy all of these lab equipment. You want, but it needs a virtual currency. It's kind of like a simulation.

It's like the Sims, but with- In order to get that virtual currency, you must first mine it. And the way that you mine is by solving mathematical equations. I made a cruelty free fish device dish, uh, in my laboratory because of the genocide of fish. That was a little controversial take last week.

I got DMs from people. That was a spicy take, Freeburg. Did you get any blow back from that spicy take last week? The spiciest of- I did. I did. The spiciest of all time. I got DMs from people. I sent me a note directly. Was it really? Cause I, people are like you're equating- Well, I think the co- well, here's the thing.

The comment I made that I think really triggered people was I said that, um, animal agriculture is worse than human slavery and, uh, maybe I'll just address it now real quick. Yeah. You know, I think the point of view that people took away from that was that I diminished, you know, the pain and the, the resonance, uh, in today's kind of socioeconomic context of, uh, human slavery.

Particularly recently in America. Um, and that wasn't my intention at all. Uh, Clearly not your intention. Yeah. What I'm trying to highlight is, you know, first of all, human slavery has been around as long as humans have been around, right? For 10,000 years back to ancient Egypt, the enslavement of humans, the removal of opportunity and freedom granted to every living being, um, is, is certainly manifest in the form of human slavery.

And we kind of take it as a very acute pain point. What I was highlighting is every year, over a hundred billion land-based animals are going to be killed. They're killed and they're born and put in, in chains and put in jails and then murdered and eaten by humans as routine.

And we don't like lift our head up and recognize just how serious and how skilled this, this, um, you know, this behavior is. The industrialization of this process, uh, is really abhorrent and there's videos you can watch. And I think when you watch them, you'll recognize just how painful it is.

This is delicious. I knew it was coming. Don't do it Chamath. No, but I do think that Chamath is a very important. Yeah. You know, Chamath voice in this is, is really the voice that's kept us from ever becoming an issue because it's not human. We don't kind of pay attention to it.

And I'm just trying to highlight that there is something that is at such an extraordinary scale that we don't pay attention to that one day we'll wake up and we'll be like, Oh my God, how do we miss that? I have complete agreement with you, Freeberg. If you look at all life being precious and you say the life of a cow, the life of a dog, the life of a human, these are all lives.

The scale of suffering is, uh, greater. And these animals, these animals can problem solve. They can feel emotion. They can recognize, they can recognize things happening to them and to their loved ones and their family members. And I think that in the context of that, to cause pain and suffering on those animals and on those creatures at the scale that we do is something that's just mind blowing to me.

And I expect that one day we will wake up and be like, I cannot believe we allowed our society to do that. But I do think that we need to solve Chamath's problem, which is how do you make something that's frigging delicious? How do you make it cheaper? Hold on a second.

It's not a problem. Like my, my perspective is I understand where you're coming from. I respect your point of view, but here's my point of view, which is we evolved to superior superiority in an evolutionary process that was not preordained. Okay. And we are now in a position where we are allowed to consume things that we choose.

Now there is also a claim that you could make that, you know, what a tiger or a lion should not be attacking and killing a gazelle. Because you know what that's causing suffering to the gazelle or blah, blah, blah. At the end of the day, how we choose to go and consume the things that we need for sustenance is a choice that we can make.

And there are probably better choices we can make over time. But at the end of the day, I think that this was a reasonable evolution of humanity and human ingenuity and intellect. And I don't feel guilty about that. I don't weigh the suffering of animals the same way I weigh the suffering of human beings.

I don't. And I would argue that when we were apes in the jungle, and we didn't have the choice, I would wholeheartedly agree with you. But today, we are a people that do have the choice. What choice do we have? And it's because we have the choice to not eat meat and still survive and still be happy, that we can make a better choice.

But it doesn't taste good. Like there's a part of my soul, I'll just be very honest with you. And I agree. And that's why I think we need to solve that problem. And that's why I believe- It's not a problem. If you made an alternative for you that tasted good, and was as affordable as the alternative, which is actually killing an animal, you would choose it.

And we haven't given you that solution yet. And when I say we, I mean, call it the techno food people. But there is a tremendous amount of money going into this area. And we will devise artificially produced meat that will not be made by killing an animal, but will be made in a lab that looks and tastes identical.

When will we have a steak or a piece of sushi? Just give us a year over on your list. You'll have a piece of sushi in three years. You will have... Right. You will be able to go taste chicken next year. It'll be very, very expensive. Okay. But cell-based meat will be available.

And then let's get to the- I think at a commercial scale within the next year. We're going to get our steak. That's really what it's about. David, my commitment to you is I will do a taste test whenever you say... You call the... You pick the place, the time.

Totally. I will show up. And if it's better, I will never eat meat again. Okay. We're not ready for that. And that's a great commitment. All right. Yeah. And I am similar in the commitment. But in the meantime... Oh, don't tell him. It's not tasty. It's distasteful. But I will say, Friedberg, if you're going to have a party and it's only vegan, you're going to have to put that on the invite.

Because I came thinking you were going to feed me. JKL came to my party. There was no meat. He was really upset. He was going around my party being like, "What the hell is this? There's no meat in this party. What am I doing here?" I went into the kitchen.

I said, "Can you make me a hamburger?" The woman from wherever- I made... Napa was like, "I've never touched meat in 30 years." Whatever. I made the most incredible ribeye on Christmas Eve. Oh my God. Ribeye. All right, everybody. For the dictator himself, Chamath Palihapitiya with great hair, a touch of gray, never looked better.

The consultant of science, David Friedberg, and Tucker Carlson's bestie, GOP front runner, David Sachs, super spreading COVID. Super spreading the truth. Super spreading the truth. Super spreading the truth. David Sachs from an undisclosed bestie hideaway, which we all know but we won't say. I'm Jake Howe, and we'll see you in 2022.

Bye-bye. It's been a great year. Bye-bye. We'll let your winners ride. Rain man, David Sachs. I'm going all in. And instead, we open source it to the fans, and they've just gone crazy with it. Love you, Wesley. I'm the queen of kinwa. I'm going all in. I'm going all in.

I'm going all in. I'm going all in. I'm going all in. I'm going all in. I'm going all in. I'm going all in. Besties are gone. Goal 13. That is my dog taking a notice in your driveway. Sachs. Oh, man. I'm the dasher. We meet you at the end of the year.

Oh, man. I'm the best. We're going all in. We're going all in. We're going all in. They're just like sexy, sexy. We're not a bitch, we're just like a bunch of... We should all just get a room and have one big huge orgy, because they're all just useless. It's like this sexual tension, but we just need to release it.

Wet your beat, wet your beat. We need to get merch. Bitches are fat. I'm doing all it. I'm doing all it all. I'm doing all it all. We're just like sexy, sexy. We're not a bitch, we're just like a bunch of... What? What? We need to get merch. Bitches are fat.

I'm doing all it. I'm doing all it. I'm doing all it. I'm doing all it. I'm doing all it. I'm doing all it. I'm going all in .

E61: 2022 Predictions! Business, politics, science, tech, crypto, & more

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