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

00:00:00.000 | All right, everybody, welcome back. It is our fourth annual

00:00:03.840 | bestie awards. Yes, everybody is incredibly excited to hear the

00:00:08.440 | biggest winners in politics and losers in business. Best Science

00:00:12.480 | Breakthrough so many amazing categories with me again,

00:00:15.720 | Chairman Dictator Chamath Palihapitiya, our billionaire

00:00:20.120 | puck. Welcome back to the program.

00:00:22.320 | Bye. That's what I said. Billionaire puck.

00:00:25.000 | billionaire person of color.

00:00:27.040 | Yes, please get it right. And running the all in DEI group,

00:00:31.160 | the rain man himself, David Sachs. Welcome back to the

00:00:33.560 | program. Good to be here. Okay. And the Sultan of science.

00:00:38.320 | Welcome back to the program. Are you ready with your selections?

00:00:41.160 | Gentlemen? Are we ready to do this?

00:00:42.840 | J Kelp? This is the holiday episode. You got to have a

00:00:45.960 | little more cheer. This isn't all business, dude.

00:00:47.920 | Cue the music, Nick.

00:00:49.000 | Three, two. Yes. And here we are everybody back again for the

00:00:58.640 | 2023 bestie awards. This is where everybody goes crazy. Oh

00:01:03.600 | my god standing ovation. Hold on. Who's drinking some

00:01:06.040 | champagne with me? I need some champagne popping. What are you

00:01:08.520 | guys drinking? These are the awards. Everybody wants to know

00:01:11.280 | who's going to be a winner.

00:01:12.160 | You're right. I need a drink. Hold on.

00:01:13.720 | He needs a drink for this.

00:01:15.760 | I need a drink too. Can you can I go get a drink? Hang on.

00:01:18.000 | Everybody get a drink. Loosen it up.

00:01:19.280 | I'm at my office. I don't have alcohol here.

00:01:21.120 | Look at the second draw.

00:01:22.360 | All right, everybody. Welcome to the bestie awards for 2023.

00:01:43.840 | What are you drinking? I got a little Vove Clicquot. You know,

00:01:46.240 | I love you actually gonna drink it.

00:01:48.360 | You know, I people don't know this about me. But that was my

00:01:52.120 | beverage of choice was the old Vove Clicquot when I would go out

00:01:54.720 | in New York. What have you got there? sacks? What are you

00:01:57.000 | drinking for the 2023 bestie awards? What are you drinking?

00:02:00.320 | I'm drinking my classes all reposado. And the class with a

00:02:06.920 | single big rock and I broke out my patriotic great seal the

00:02:11.160 | United States class.

00:02:12.600 | This is a tribute to the border. You got a little bit of Mexico

00:02:15.760 | a little bit of the United States. And is it flowing

00:02:18.200 | between the border and you is that it's open border now?

00:02:20.560 | The border is completely open at this point.

00:02:22.480 | Gotcha. Okay. Just flooding in. You're not drinking. You're at

00:02:28.200 | the office. Free. But I mean, I didn't plan. I brought my props

00:02:33.120 | to wish everybody Happy Holidays.

00:02:34.920 | Amazing. Freeberg. Everybody knows that you're a quiet solo

00:02:41.520 | drinker and your darkest hours. What are you drinking? surprises

00:02:45.480 | there? What are you drinking?

00:02:47.440 | I'm always drinking when I got to hang out with you Jake. I'm

00:02:49.680 | drinking a Victoria Victoria. Actually, yeah, I don't think

00:02:54.200 | you hang out with Jake house over. Oh, everybody. There it

00:02:57.440 | is. We've got the Vove Clicquot. Unfortunately, at my ski house,

00:03:02.080 | I can't find the flute. So I'm gonna put this in a wineglass.

00:03:04.520 | Sorry for the sacrilege. But cheers. Here's to another amazing

00:03:08.240 | year of the all in podcast and the besties hanging out. Cheers.

00:03:11.560 | You want to say a few words, Jake? Like, I'd like to say a

00:03:14.000 | few words in memoriam of the year. Yes, working with you guys

00:03:17.520 | has been delightful, miserable and everything in between.

00:03:20.240 | Congratulations on all of our success. And here's to an

00:03:24.680 | amazing 2024. And hopefully we find a CEO and we can keep this

00:03:29.280 | thing going for another 150 or so episodes. Nobody thought we

00:03:33.080 | would get here. Everybody hates us for our success. And the

00:03:36.920 | mids and the haters. Love you besties.

00:03:41.320 | Cheers. I would like to make a toast. Here we go. Here is to

00:03:45.720 | three of the most talented, friendly guys. And Jacob

00:03:53.520 | format for me.

00:03:56.920 | Mr. Action. Don't ever forget it, brother.

00:04:00.760 | All right. Well, to three of the most sincere, heartfelt,

00:04:06.000 | intelligent, loving individuals and David sacks. Welcome to the

00:04:09.880 | program. Here for you. And let's just get to it. We're going to

00:04:15.760 | give our 2023 award for the biggest winner in politics last

00:04:20.440 | year. Chamath, you said that your prediction for 2023. Now

00:04:25.920 | we're going to give the actual word for 2033. But in our

00:04:28.160 | predictions episode last year, you said you were long Nikki

00:04:31.280 | Alley and short to Santa's what a prescient call. What do you

00:04:35.240 | have this year? That's Brett trade paid off in spades. Yeah,

00:04:38.560 | but expression. Looking back, I think the biggest political

00:04:42.360 | winner was Donald Trump. Okay. I think that the documents case

00:04:47.240 | galvanized his leadership in the Republican nomination. And I

00:04:53.240 | think that this move by the Colorado Supreme Court basically

00:04:58.000 | sealed the deal. I think he is going to run away with the

00:05:01.400 | Republican nomination. And barring some catastrophic

00:05:06.440 | meltdown has a better chance to get into the White House than

00:05:11.560 | before this Colorado case. So he was the biggest political winner,

00:05:14.480 | I think of 2023. It just seems to me that if I had to really

00:05:18.520 | put it in a nutshell, I think that the the Dems in this weird

00:05:23.120 | way, actually want Trump back in office more than the Republicans

00:05:27.360 | do, because everything they've done has been near sighted, and

00:05:32.360 | I think has actually galvanized his support and increased his

00:05:36.760 | popularity and his ability to fundraise more than anything

00:05:40.760 | else. Friedberg, who is your biggest political winner of

00:05:44.880 | 2023? Who did I give it to last year? Do you remember? You gave

00:05:50.120 | it to MBS, and Saudi, that they would have the your prediction

00:05:54.680 | was they would have a year in the monarchy. But in some ways, I

00:05:57.800 | think they are center stage. That's what I thought. So I am

00:06:01.480 | giving my biggest winner. I'm giving my biggest political

00:06:04.000 | winner award to the nation state of Saudi Arabia. Oh, like they

00:06:08.360 | are sitting in the middle of the US, China, Iran, Israel, Russia,

00:06:15.680 | they have relations with all of those nations and relations

00:06:18.800 | where they are trying to be productive, extraordinary

00:06:21.560 | leverage with both their capital, their geographic

00:06:24.640 | positioning and their energy resourcing, and painting a very

00:06:28.200 | positive future on how they want to reinvest their capital and

00:06:31.280 | modernize the country. And I think one of the biggest coups

00:06:34.720 | that they pulled this year was turning J Cal to being a big

00:06:38.720 | promoter of Saudi after his visit to the Middle East. And so

00:06:43.280 | I think they're entering 2024 with great strength and

00:06:46.320 | leverage. So I give them credit for riding out many storms this

00:06:50.440 | year and coming out ahead. So it's just it's been interesting

00:06:52.840 | to watch. I'm not I'm not close or tied to them in any way. But

00:06:55.600 | I just think from a global leverage point of view, they

00:06:58.800 | seem to be in a very strong place. So that's my, my award.

00:07:01.960 | I can't disagree with you that the place has made incredible

00:07:06.320 | progress, personal freedoms, economic freedoms, their the

00:07:12.680 | country is evolving and embracing every country on the

00:07:16.640 | planet, right? So you have to take that as a win. I have no

00:07:20.200 | business interests there, but I am impressed with the progress.

00:07:22.880 | So sacks that means it's your turn to give us your 2023

00:07:27.680 | biggest winner.

00:07:28.360 | My biggest winner in politics, Jake, I think you'll like this

00:07:31.920 | one is abortion rights.

00:07:33.560 | abortion rights,

00:07:35.400 | abortion rights after Dobbs abortion rights are winning on

00:07:39.280 | every battle where they're at issue. It's one referenda in

00:07:43.000 | very red states like Kansas, Kentucky, Montana and Ohio. It's

00:07:47.280 | swung legislatures to the Dems and swing states like Michigan,

00:07:50.080 | Pennsylvania, Virginia. It's swung states from court races in

00:07:53.280 | Pennsylvania, Wisconsin. I'd go so far as to say it's the

00:07:56.160 | Democrats only winning issue and they are putting it on the

00:07:58.280 | ballot everywhere they can. Ruth Bader Ginsburg pointed out around

00:08:02.440 | 30 years ago that we likely could have reached this

00:08:05.320 | resolution decades ago, if the courts hadn't stolen the issue

00:08:09.280 | from the political process, because abortion rights were in

00:08:11.680 | the process of being liberalized everywhere. And in my view, the

00:08:17.440 | political process is messy, but it's how we finally move past

00:08:20.920 | the issue as a nation, which is why I think Dobbs was the right

00:08:23.760 | decision, even if it was a difficult one.

00:08:25.960 | Huh, interesting. So you are smoothing over Trump's taking

00:08:30.840 | away the right for women to choose and saying that this is a

00:08:33.720 | net positive for the country, if I'm reading it correctly.

00:08:36.680 | Well, Trump didn't take anything away. That's true. Lord, people

00:08:40.680 | like Courtney. This is gone on. I just explained it. You're not

00:08:44.560 | listening. Supreme Court gave the issue back to the democratic

00:08:48.600 | process. The democratic process is now voting to maintain

00:08:53.720 | abortion rights. And that is going to settle the issue once

00:08:56.400 | and for all. So just think for all of your fears that abortion

00:09:00.720 | rights would fall by the wayside, because that's from

00:09:02.720 | court decision have actually proven to be null and void. What

00:09:05.880 | we're ending up with is a better solution, where the country

00:09:09.000 | doesn't need to fight about this anymore, because the voters have

00:09:11.960 | expressed the will of the people.

00:09:13.160 | Fantastic framing. Great save for the Republican Party there.

00:09:17.200 | Well, it won't be unless they learn how to talk about the

00:09:20.000 | issue. Yeah, I mean, the way I would frame the same issue is

00:09:23.840 | that Trump stack the deck to take away women's right to

00:09:27.280 | choose in order to get elected, but your framing is pretty good

00:09:30.040 | too. And you're a master of framing these things. So I was

00:09:33.360 | torn here for mine. I had two different choices. I was either

00:09:36.800 | gonna go with Nikki Haley, because what an amazing feat for

00:09:41.560 | her to even be getting close to Trump in some of these primaries.

00:09:45.760 | But I think really the biggest winners in this year of 2023

00:09:50.480 | were non traditional candidates, actually becoming somewhat

00:09:53.920 | viable and capturing the imagination of young people. The

00:09:57.800 | vague RFK Dean Phillips being I think the three leading

00:10:01.080 | candidates. So I'm going to go with the non traditional

00:10:04.040 | candidates being the big winners for 2023. And for last year, I

00:10:11.240 | had said that my prediction was for 2023, was that Trump would

00:10:16.880 | get indicted, win the nomination, and then agree to

00:10:20.600 | not run because he gets a pardon. So I think I've got two

00:10:23.760 | or three of those in the parlay in the bag. Let's go on to

00:10:28.240 | biggest loser, the biggest loser in politics. When we did our

00:10:31.800 | predictions for 2023. Chamath, you said that you were short to

00:10:34.920 | Santas. Here we are, we're giving our actual award for the

00:10:38.680 | biggest political loser in 2023. Freeberg, I'll start with

00:10:41.800 | you. Who is your biggest political loser for 2023?

00:10:45.120 | My biggest political loser is the DEI movement. Huh? I heard,

00:10:50.240 | obviously, post October 7, the Hamas attacks on Israel. And

00:10:56.000 | then the following support for Hamas, that came out of what

00:11:02.120 | have historically been groups that are aligned with DEI

00:11:05.200 | interests, and then the DEI driven leaders of the

00:11:09.480 | universities that went in front of Congress to defend their

00:11:13.400 | freedom of speech rules around anti semitic protests, caused a

00:11:20.160 | lot of folks that I know who are very liberal and very

00:11:22.320 | influential, to wake up to the negative impacts of the DEI

00:11:26.600 | movement, and its linkage to potentially anti semitism, which

00:11:30.960 | is masked in this oppressor oppressed ideology. That is the

00:11:34.440 | basis of a lot of these DEI protocols. And so I think it

00:11:37.520 | really shined a negative light on DEI this year in a way that

00:11:41.640 | hasn't been the case in a broader way with very

00:11:44.080 | influential people in a very long time. And so I think that

00:11:47.760 | that movement is going to take a big hit and took a big hit at

00:11:50.280 | the end of this year, and will continue to, I think, be

00:11:52.480 | questioned by donors and supporters of the ideologies of

00:11:56.400 | that movement.

00:11:56.920 | Okay, sacks, who is your biggest loser in politics for 2023?

00:12:03.200 | My biggest loser in politics for this year is Vladimir

00:12:06.040 | Zelensky, the President of Ukraine. And you can see this

00:12:08.360 | pretty clearly by just looking at the cover of Time magazine,

00:12:11.400 | he began the year, fresh off of winning Time magazine's Person

00:12:16.200 | of the Year. And by the end of the year, the same author at

00:12:20.520 | Time magazine was writing a new cover story, saying that

00:12:23.680 | Zelensky had become delusional, he had become messianic, he was

00:12:26.720 | ordering his troops on suicide missions, and his own inner

00:12:29.520 | circle had turned on him. And of course, who could forget that

00:12:34.960 | other photo from the middle of the year, at Vilnius, when all

00:12:40.440 | those euro snobs turned their back on Zelensky. That was a

00:12:44.840 | brutal image that went viral on social media, literally the

00:12:48.040 | European elite turning their backs on a frustrated Zelensky.

00:12:51.160 | Sadly, Zelensky had the opportunity in April of 2022, to

00:12:58.080 | make peace to sign a peace deal. And unfortunately, he took

00:13:01.560 | Boris Johnson and Joe Biden's advice to pressure Putin, rather

00:13:05.560 | than make peace. And I think that gamble has turned into a

00:13:07.960 | disaster for him.

00:13:08.760 | Chumath, your biggest political loser in 2023?

00:13:12.080 | I had a different choice. But I think

00:13:14.360 | game time change?

00:13:16.640 | Yeah, hearing David has convinced me I will, I will go

00:13:20.400 | with the death of the acronyms. It was it was close for me

00:13:23.600 | between that. And I actually think that Joe Biden

00:13:27.600 | unfortunately, had a very difficult run of it. In 2023.

00:13:32.800 | When you actually think about it, the Ukraine thing was a

00:13:35.880 | fiasco, all of this stuff around maybe putting the hand on the

00:13:40.000 | scale, whether it's on Elon or against Donald Trump, it's all

00:13:43.600 | just very messy, I think for him. But I do think that

00:13:48.120 | Freiburg is right, this is probably the beginning of the

00:13:50.800 | end of the acronyms. And if you look at ESG and DEI together,

00:13:55.800 | ESG is a little bit more measurable, but sustainable

00:13:58.880 | asset ownership and ESG ownership across the world

00:14:02.680 | shrank by 15%, which you may say, is that a big number or

00:14:05.920 | not? That's $5 trillion. And so where the money goes, typically,

00:14:10.920 | so goes everything else in modern society. And so when the

00:14:14.800 | money starts to scurry, I think that you can pretty much expect

00:14:19.600 | that people's patience and support of these kinds of

00:14:23.000 | movements are waning. I'll go with death of the acronyms are

00:14:26.440 | the biggest. So you started you were going to say Biden, but you

00:14:29.200 | changed it in real time. And you went DEI ESG acronyms, acronyms,

00:14:33.200 | and okay, death of the acronyms. You know, I had a lot of talks

00:14:36.440 | with folks about this one. People had a lot of input. Some

00:14:41.720 | people said to Santa, some people said Biden, I think the

00:14:44.920 | biggest 2023 loser in politics is the American people who are

00:14:49.880 | now faced with a Biden Trump rematch. Both of those

00:14:53.920 | individuals clearly being in different stages of decline

00:14:57.520 | being over 80. And the GOP just can't quit Trump. And it seems

00:15:01.680 | like the Democrats can't quit Biden, despite 70 80% of the

00:15:07.320 | country not wanting the rematch. So I'm going to give the

00:15:09.720 | American people are the biggest political losers of 2023. All

00:15:13.680 | right, here we go. biggest political surprise. This is the

00:15:17.120 | biggest political surprise of 2023. sacks. What's your biggest

00:15:22.520 | political surprise?

00:15:23.440 | Well, I think the biggest political surprise and it was a

00:15:25.440 | very negative one was the Hamas attack on Israel on the morning

00:15:29.160 | of October 7, which really seemed to come out of nowhere.

00:15:32.200 | Only eight days before Jake Sullivan, who's Biden's

00:15:35.800 | National Security Advisor had declared that the Middle East

00:15:38.120 | had been quieter than it had been in two decades. And those

00:15:42.280 | words, obviously, prove prove very old time, but he wasn't

00:15:45.360 | alone in thinking that I think almost everybody was really

00:15:48.600 | surprised by this attack. I think until then, the Middle

00:15:54.080 | East seemed to be on a path of progress with the Abraham

00:15:56.480 | Accords being negotiated between Israel and several Gulf

00:16:01.680 | monarchies. And I think that October 7 has really changed the

00:16:05.160 | political paradigm, certainly in Israel in the Middle East, and I

00:16:08.120 | think even in American politics.

00:16:11.240 | Okay.

00:16:11.840 | Freeberg a little bit of a nuanced take on that. But I said

00:16:15.280 | the rise of Hamas was the biggest political surprise. You

00:16:17.760 | know, Hamas is a self proclaimed political party that was thrust

00:16:21.080 | to the center of geopolitics and domestic social issues across

00:16:25.640 | the west after October 7, which was, I think, probably a

00:16:29.160 | surprise to many that planned these attacks as well. Basically,

00:16:34.320 | it feels to me like Hamas is the pawn that crossed the chess

00:16:37.920 | board and became a queen. It's an organization that, you know,

00:16:41.960 | had resourcing and was influenced by, you know, many

00:16:46.040 | have shown connections to Iran and other wealthy states and had

00:16:51.160 | very low attention levels prior to October 7, on a global basis

00:16:54.320 | and post October 7, now has recognition, and sympathy and a

00:16:57.880 | great deal of interest in the root cause of their party. So

00:17:02.520 | really incredible surprise. I don't think anyone could have

00:17:04.720 | predicted this at the start of the year that not just the

00:17:06.800 | attacks happened, but the resulting shift in the discourse

00:17:10.840 | and influence that's happened to my biggest political surprise

00:17:14.920 | of 2023. I'm going to go with

00:17:16.840 | a domestic choice. And I think it's quite obvious. But the

00:17:22.120 | biggest political surprises are of Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy,

00:17:25.320 | Jr. I don't think anybody would have predicted that he would

00:17:32.680 | both drop out of the Democratic Party run as an independent and

00:17:36.560 | essentially, collect. He is, in terms of favorability in the

00:17:41.240 | polls. He's the leading 2024 candidate right now. It's

00:17:45.040 | incredible. People like him. That's for sure. And nobody

00:17:48.840 | would have predicted. That's a really good one. What do we

00:17:51.040 | think he will get if he runs as an independent just percentage

00:17:54.480 | wise, Ross Perot as a third party can get 19% you think

00:17:57.960 | better than 19% because the country is much more fragmented

00:18:01.360 | today. There's a lot more protest votes today. There's

00:18:03.760 | just a lot of reasons where RFK can garner a lot of support and

00:18:08.040 | build a plurality among centrists. That wasn't possible.

00:18:10.960 | But when Perot was running, because when he ran, you have to

00:18:14.600 | remember, like just the country was in a very different place

00:18:16.960 | psychologically than it is right now.

00:18:18.400 | Yeah, I too had third party candidates as being my biggest

00:18:22.360 | surprise. I didn't give it to a specific one. I was debating

00:18:26.000 | these third party candidates against the GOP not being able

00:18:30.720 | to field a better option than Trump. But I think I'm going to

00:18:33.240 | go again with third party candidates. But I'll include

00:18:35.960 | Dean Phillips in that breaking ranks. I'll include Vivek. Just

00:18:40.200 | a very young, very smart individual capturing people's

00:18:43.240 | imagination. third party candidates, for me is the

00:18:46.600 | biggest surprise. And I do think it could have a meaningful

00:18:49.040 | impact if you're right that he gets over 19%. Who does that?

00:18:51.560 | Chamath in your mind? Who does that benefit? And who does it

00:18:56.360 | hurt? If the candidates are Biden and Trump? It hurts by the

00:19:00.600 | most. You believe that? Okay. What about you, Saxe? What do

00:19:03.200 | you think it hurts the most?

00:19:04.080 | Unclear right now? Yeah. I mean, I think on the issues, I can

00:19:09.200 | see a lot of populist voters wanting to go with RFK. But on

00:19:12.960 | the other hand, maybe he does peel away some Democratic Party

00:19:15.840 | voters. So I'm not sure to be honest.

00:19:17.880 | I've heard this before. Any thoughts, Friedberg on that?

00:19:20.480 | What's the question? If RFK were to get as Chamath thinks more

00:19:24.920 | than Perot, so that's 20% or more of the popular vote, who is

00:19:29.240 | that going to harm? And who's it going to hurt Trump or Biden?

00:19:31.960 | I saw a Gallup survey that showed that there's a real shot

00:19:36.000 | at more than 40% of Americans being interested in the third

00:19:39.760 | party. And so I'm sorry, I could be totally wrong on that. But I

00:19:44.040 | pretty sure I saw that and it really kind of resonated with

00:19:46.440 | me. And I think our discourse here and you know, obviously

00:19:49.840 | conversations with our friend group, Nick might have something

00:19:53.280 | on this support for third US political party up to 63%. This

00:19:57.080 | is the Gallup data. Yeah, so I was right. I think that this is

00:20:00.520 | one of the most kind of profound shifts in American politics, at

00:20:06.120 | least in our lifetimes, that the right has gone very right, the

00:20:10.640 | left has gone very left. And they've been so rooted in

00:20:13.120 | identity politics, that you can't really see any of these

00:20:16.400 | issues kind of finding compromise and finding a way to

00:20:18.680 | lean across the aisle and get things done. And I think that's

00:20:20.920 | where a lot of people are just fed up. So I would love to see a

00:20:24.120 | third political party emerge. And if RFK breaks the dam on

00:20:27.520 | this, it would be fantastic. It will take as these things

00:20:31.320 | always do a number of years for a group of independents to

00:20:35.360 | coalesce around what that third party looks like, and how it's

00:20:38.640 | going to be governed and so on. But this could be a really

00:20:41.440 | interesting shift in the dynamics of American politics.

00:20:43.840 | So pretty, pretty cool. I'm not into politics in the US that

00:20:46.440 | much, but pretty cool. I think opportunity to reframe, you

00:20:50.440 | know, how do we want to build America going forward, and

00:20:52.960 | thinking about using a new party as a way to do that. And

00:20:56.560 | we haven't even heard of no labels, the third party

00:21:00.800 | platform, they're probably going to announce Joe Manchin

00:21:03.200 | any day now. And so that could change things as well. So

00:21:06.080 | that's a very interesting take.

00:21:07.280 | Biggest problem that we have, this may sound really dumb, but

00:21:11.280 | I think it's true in launching a third party is a viable name.

00:21:16.200 | I think it's the most important boundary condition to have a

00:21:22.320 | sustainable third party is a is a good name. Like an iconic

00:21:26.920 | person, the charity, like whatever we call this name of

00:21:31.360 | the party, not like person, they feel no labels is a terrible

00:21:34.440 | name, a terrible name. Green Party is terrible. Green Party

00:21:38.520 | is terrible. The Green Party Freedom Party, they're all

00:21:41.240 | terrible, because they all feel like they're rooted in some,

00:21:44.720 | you know, either conservative or liberal cause, there's got to

00:21:47.480 | be some element of like, what's the right decision on each on

00:21:51.760 | each topic, not necessarily, you know, how do we fight the

00:21:54.400 | identity politics? I think that's the key piece that's

00:21:56.840 | missing. And I like the rational party, like a party of

00:22:00.120 | national individuals, disparaging to a degree, you

00:22:02.720 | know, yeah, branding, branding. So what would you call it? The

00:22:06.480 | third party? Republicans?

00:22:08.200 | People's Republic of

00:22:10.280 | Sax Stan, do you have an idea for a name? I'm not gonna

00:22:15.760 | comment on this. Something brewing? Would you have a name

00:22:23.520 | for a third party? You like the rational party, the rational

00:22:26.200 | party or something like that, where it kind of evoked? You

00:22:31.360 | know, people who are being thoughtful, and we're trying to

00:22:34.920 | make rational decisions in everybody's best interest,

00:22:37.120 | right? Something that was not about us versus them abortion,

00:22:41.320 | you know, ti areas, g just something focused more on

00:22:45.960 | getting things done, they getting things done party,

00:22:48.800 | something like that getting things done party.

00:22:50.800 | So she has a nose, but better than the derangement party.

00:22:53.920 | Yeah, absolutely. All right, let's keep going. Let's keep

00:22:57.160 | going. Here we go. He's only trying to derail the show. I

00:23:01.320 | will not engage with. All right, it's time for our biggest

00:23:04.680 | business winner, biggest winner in business. Who you got your

00:23:09.640 | mouth? Who's your biggest winner in business?

00:23:11.400 | I mean, I don't think this is even close. But I think it's

00:23:15.440 | Elon Musk. Oh,

00:23:16.960 | three things, obviously, three different companies. But the

00:23:21.920 | rebasing of Twitter actually had an even more profound impact, I

00:23:26.440 | think, on Silicon Valley than it necessarily did on Twitter.

00:23:29.960 | Second was, I think SpaceX has really turned a corner Starlink

00:23:34.960 | is really at scale. Starship looks like it's viable. And then

00:23:39.360 | the third is Tesla really consolidated its leadership in

00:23:44.160 | EVs, and batteries and battery technology and FSD. So I think

00:23:49.160 | on the merits, it was not even close.

00:23:52.680 | Okay, so you got who's your biggest business winner?

00:23:57.120 | The magnificent seven. These are the seven companies that

00:24:01.640 | accounted for almost all of the stock market gains this year,

00:24:04.320 | you can see it in this chart. It's about a 63% gap between the

00:24:08.560 | performance of the top names, top seven names in the S&P 500.

00:24:14.080 | And then the other 493 of them. I think that the S&P 493 had a 12%

00:24:21.160 | gain this year, which isn't bad, but it was dwarfed by the

00:24:24.880 | munition seven, which was almost 80%.

00:24:28.000 | Incredible. All right, Zack says the M seven, Freeberg, who you

00:24:32.160 | got?

00:24:32.440 | Yeah, I'm gonna pick one of the seven, which is Microsoft just a

00:24:35.640 | shot down the middle of the fairway here. Despite only

00:24:39.240 | seeing, I think, roughly 8% top line growth, the business saw

00:24:42.280 | its market cap grow by over a trillion dollars 1.7 to 2.7

00:24:46.200 | trillion this year, just an incredible number. I mean, can

00:24:48.480 | you imagine if we ever said that 10 years ago, whether anyone

00:24:51.200 | would believe it, consumer and enterprise strength and

00:24:54.040 | strategic strength, the fact that they were able to close the

00:24:56.520 | activism acquisition in the sort of regulatory environment. And

00:25:01.360 | then the strength that Satya showed and the speed at which he

00:25:04.280 | acted during the open AI weekend debacle, where he set up this

00:25:07.640 | whole thing where he got Sam on board and was going to retain

00:25:10.040 | all this value that he was extracting from open AI and

00:25:12.960 | partnership was, I think, great leadership and cemented his, his

00:25:19.040 | position and standing as being a really thoughtful, fast acting

00:25:22.640 | strategic leader for a business that's been around forever, but

00:25:25.640 | amazingly added a trillion of market cap in 12 months. So I

00:25:28.960 | just throw it to Microsoft this year, it's very hard to kind of

00:25:31.280 | break that business apart and say, here's all the things that

00:25:33.560 | are wrong with it. It's just, you know, it's just moving.

00:25:35.960 | All right, very well done. We got Elon. Didn't you work there

00:25:39.400 | for a while? One year at Twitter? No, in Microsoft,

00:25:43.800 | Microsoft, Microsoft, one year.

00:25:45.680 | I was actually no, I was locked up for two years in the wake of

00:25:49.120 | the ember deal. Yeah, I was a corporate vice president

00:25:51.040 | Microsoft. You like it? Yeah, it was. I mean, it's a high

00:25:54.800 | quality company for sure. Yeah. I mean, I was like super active

00:25:57.480 | for one year because I was still in charge of I still had a P&L

00:26:01.600 | running Yammer. But then after one year, Yammer was sort of

00:26:05.040 | assimilated into the board. And yeah, I didn't have anything to

00:26:08.200 | do. I was kind of just like on call. Right, right.

00:26:10.560 | All right, I am going to talk my own book on this one and give it

00:26:13.880 | to Dara and the team at Uber, they got into the S&P 500 became

00:26:18.480 | profitable, planning stock buybacks, they resolved almost

00:26:23.080 | all the regulatory reza issues, including getting the taxis in

00:26:29.560 | London to be on the app, which was their big adversary, and

00:26:32.480 | they were going to get kicked out of London. If you remember,

00:26:34.520 | this is a company that five years ago, the press, and the

00:26:37.720 | fake news were saying could never be profitable and was

00:26:40.480 | going to fail. And now it is the most successful new startup in

00:26:44.160 | the last cycle, bigger than everybody. And so congratulations

00:26:49.600 | to the team over there. All right, biggest loser in

00:26:53.120 | business. The biggest loser. It's 2023. Freeberg, just so you

00:26:58.440 | know, last year, your prediction was capital intensive series B

00:27:01.840 | C's and D's of growth companies. Well done on that prediction.

00:27:04.880 | But give me freeberg your actual Who was your biggest loser in

00:27:09.040 | 2023? Oh, Sultan of science,

00:27:11.680 | it's sort of tied up. Obviously, there's a tail to the effect,

00:27:15.440 | but it's VCs who deployed most of their capital in 2021.

00:27:18.680 | Obviously, it was the year where venture capital deployments

00:27:22.320 | peaked. And what I've heard from institutional peas this year, is

00:27:28.320 | that, you know, not only will that vintage underperform, but

00:27:31.280 | it could torpedo as many as 50% of firms that are managing

00:27:35.240 | capital today in Silicon Valley. And it could switch the capital

00:27:39.360 | allocation model that reduces allocation to venture as an

00:27:44.400 | asset class significantly because of the torpedo that the

00:27:47.600 | 2021 vintage represents in performance. So that was my

00:27:52.240 | biggest loser for the year.

00:27:53.240 | Good for me and sacks because we were diligent during that time.

00:27:56.640 | All right, let's go to you sacks. Your biggest loser in

00:27:59.520 | business in 2023.

00:28:00.800 | My biggest business loser is Disney. It seems that every

00:28:05.760 | aspect of Disney's business, the bed in 2023. I mean, all their

00:28:12.200 | major theatrical releases flopped amidst a conservative

00:28:15.400 | backlash against its woke social stances. You may recall that the

00:28:19.560 | actress who played Snow White in the remake accused Prince

00:28:22.440 | Charming of being a stalker.

00:28:25.200 | I mean, there's a million examples,

00:28:26.680 | even their their Marvel franchise suddenly had bombs,

00:28:29.520 | they had to fire Jonathan Majors, who was doing a fantastic

00:28:33.640 | job playing Kang and an entire franchise arc, they're gonna

00:28:36.920 | have to reset now because of a criminal conviction involving

00:28:40.240 | him. Disney Plus subscriptions fell off a cliff, even

00:28:42.960 | attendance at its theme parks declined dramatically because

00:28:45.920 | they charge way too much for families to visit. And then

00:28:49.200 | finally, Bob Iger picked a fight with Elon Musk over advertising

00:28:53.760 | member Elon probably told Iger to GF why? Good for you. Yep.

00:28:58.680 | And 10s of 1000s of Disney Plus subscribers cancel their

00:29:01.720 | subscriptions because of that. And it all makes you wonder if

00:29:04.960 | Iger now wishes he had stayed retired.

00:29:07.280 | I too picked Disney. I put Disney Warner Brothers. Both of

00:29:11.960 | them had their comic book franchises collapse

00:29:14.560 | simultaneously. On the on the Warner Brothers side in the DC

00:29:18.320 | side, the flash and Justice League, everything came apart.

00:29:22.120 | Streaming was too expensive. And you didn't mention these

00:29:25.200 | horrific strikes that they had to deal with. And it feels like

00:29:28.000 | they had to give a ton of concessions. So Disney was my

00:29:31.160 | biggest loser as well with Warner Brothers as their little

00:29:34.040 | brother. They are Chamath. We have a consensus. They're rare

00:29:37.440 | consensus between Saxon. I will Who did you have for your

00:29:39.400 | biggest loser in business?

00:29:40.360 | Well, you you guys partially win. Okay, because I'm gonna have

00:29:44.400 | to agree with you guys. But I think the biggest loser in

00:29:49.080 | business was the go woke community who tried to

00:29:54.360 | synthetically and artificially use all these social movements

00:29:59.480 | as a way to drive revenue, and just got totally burned. So

00:30:03.400 | Disney, bud, target. And I think the statement from consumers is

00:30:10.320 | look, just sell a product, stay in your lane. Make a better and

00:30:15.920 | better product for us at lower and lower prices. And otherwise,

00:30:19.080 | just let the politicians and the voters decide social issues. And

00:30:22.440 | I think that was pretty clear.

00:30:24.040 | All right, there you have it, folks. If you're going to make

00:30:27.520 | bud light, people just want to drink the damn beer. They're not

00:30:30.200 | interested in your politics. All right, here we go. Biggest

00:30:33.960 | business surprise of 2023. Who do you got sex? Who is your

00:30:38.520 | biggest business surprise of 2023?

00:30:40.520 | I think it was the Fed's bank term funding program or BTF P in

00:30:46.760 | response to the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and the

00:30:49.640 | regional banking crisis. As you may recall, it wasn't just SVB.

00:30:54.040 | There were several dominoes in the regional banking system that

00:30:57.160 | fell. It was SVB signature First Republic, and even in Europe,

00:31:01.240 | Credit Suisse basically fell apart all because of the sudden

00:31:04.880 | spike in interest rates. A lot of people tried to blame VCs for

00:31:09.920 | this J Cal. Yeah, you and me took took some heat. The truth

00:31:14.160 | is that if the dominoes had fallen in a slightly different

00:31:16.640 | order, no one would have thought to blame VCs for this. It was

00:31:19.960 | obviously the fact that rates had spiked up. And these banks

00:31:23.840 | got caught off sides because their deposit base is volatile.

00:31:27.480 | And they had loaded up on government bonds at a 1%

00:31:31.640 | interest and then the value of those bonds plummeted. The Fed

00:31:35.960 | then stepped in to prevent this from turning into a contagion.

00:31:40.760 | That was where the BT FP came in. And I'm ambivalent about it

00:31:44.800 | because I think that we don't know the long term consequences

00:31:48.200 | of the Fed basically providing this liquidity to the banking

00:31:51.600 | system. However, it's very clear to me that there was a regional

00:31:54.720 | banking crisis underway and the Fed stepping in, I think

00:31:59.080 | probably saved us from having a recession this year.

00:32:01.200 | Amazing. So the Fed there, I picked Facebook for my biggest

00:32:06.040 | surprise this year. They changed the name of the company two

00:32:09.160 | years ago to meta. They were pouring 10s of billions of

00:32:12.360 | dollars into VR, which nobody wanted to use. The CEO was

00:32:17.160 | focused on the wrong thing. But they turned it around the stock

00:32:20.080 | dropped to 90. And Zuckerberg, I guess didn't want to lose. And

00:32:23.920 | so he laid off 10s of 1000s of employees, said every no more

00:32:28.240 | middle managers, everybody's got to get to work. And they doubled

00:32:31.280 | down on their existing businesses. And they've made

00:32:33.320 | some great progress on AI. So my biggest business surprise was the

00:32:38.760 | resurgence of Zuckerberg and Facebook. Chamath, who did you

00:32:41.560 | have for your biggest business surprise?

00:32:43.640 | I'll pick Jay Powell and the Fed capitulation. I think that I've

00:32:50.040 | been saying for a while that rates will be higher for longer

00:32:52.840 | for quite a while now. And I was really surprised when Jay Powell

00:33:00.360 | had this press conference in December in early December, and

00:33:04.420 | just basically capitulated and just said, You know what, guys,

00:33:07.040 | we're going to be cutting probably three times next year.

00:33:09.120 | That was effectively the gist of what he said. And immediately,

00:33:13.400 | the 10 year, basically just completely changed course. And

00:33:17.400 | it went from almost at 5% to below 4% within a matter of two

00:33:22.800 | and a half or three weeks. So and then the stock market has

00:33:26.400 | basically done nothing but go straight up. That's a huge

00:33:30.040 | surprise to me, because I think now what the setup is for 2024

00:33:34.360 | is basically we will melt up, up until the first cut, and then

00:33:39.680 | there'll probably be some real selling. And I would not have

00:33:43.480 | predicted that the markets have become a lot more accommodative.

00:33:46.520 | As a result, I didn't expect that. So Jay Powell really, I

00:33:53.560 | think surprised a lot of us, he could have been more tempered.

00:33:56.320 | But he essentially decided to give away the playbook in the

00:34:00.880 | last month of the year here.

00:34:02.040 | And it's important for everybody to understand the Fed acts

00:34:04.600 | independently of the administration. It's just a

00:34:07.280 | coincidence, correct sacks, that their cuts are going to come

00:34:11.040 | just in time for fighting economics. And if it happens to

00:34:14.800 | go up in the next nine months, that has nothing to do with the

00:34:18.320 | Biden administration, who might benefit from that if the

00:34:20.360 | economy,

00:34:20.760 | Jason, Nick, I haven't I have a quote that I sent Nick, this is

00:34:24.600 | a this was what Larry Summers said. And I just think it's such

00:34:27.640 | an unbelievable quote that is just worth internalizing. If you

00:34:33.560 | just start reading here, so I prefer the Volcker Greenspan

00:34:36.480 | approach, which is to recognize that the Fed is a little bit

00:34:39.920 | like the Delphic oracles. People regarded them as omniscient and

00:34:43.640 | omnipotent, but they were in fact neither. So the oracles

00:34:47.040 | kept their pronouncements vague and oracular, not concrete and

00:34:50.480 | specific because it was impossible to be concrete and

00:34:53.600 | specific without being wrong frequently and undercut

00:34:56.040 | credibility. Sure. I mean, that is just the perfect general

00:34:59.040 | Yeah, summary of what probably should have happened in these

00:35:02.400 | pressers. And this was an example where it was the exact

00:35:06.200 | opposite and the market just took it and said, I'm off to

00:35:09.400 | the races

00:35:09.920 | just to agree with that and buttress it. It's not only the

00:35:13.840 | fact that they gave this guidance this year, as you

00:35:15.560 | remember, back when we started having inflation, the Fed still

00:35:19.320 | stuck to the story that it would not be raising rates for some

00:35:22.280 | extended period of time. And a lot of these banks that had

00:35:26.640 | problems, basically, because they bought too many long term

00:35:30.360 | government bonds. A lot of those bonds were bought during that

00:35:33.840 | period when the Fed was assuring him it wasn't gonna be jacking

00:35:36.320 | up rates. So if the Fed hadn't misled them, maybe they would

00:35:40.040 | have made better risk decisions. Yeah. So it works both ways.

00:35:44.400 | Freeberg got a business surprise for 2023. For the audience here

00:35:48.000 | at the bestie awards.

00:35:48.920 | The biggest surprise was Sam Altman's ouster and return all

00:35:52.040 | in a weekend. So that was kind of crazy. So I just give it to

00:35:54.520 | that. Nothing else to be said.

00:35:55.680 | Okay, the flip flop. Love it. Okay, best science breakthrough.

00:35:58.480 | This is everybody's favorite. Also, the time when sacks goes

00:36:01.600 | and takes a leak 2023. Biggest science break.

00:36:04.480 | So I've got one.

00:36:05.040 | I got sacks. You're awake during this. What's the biggest

00:36:09.640 | science breakthrough for you?

00:36:10.600 | According to NASA, there's a new look at Uranus. That's right,

00:36:17.120 | Jake out. These are never before seen deep, penetrating shots of

00:36:22.800 | Uranus. How deep and penetrating are these very deep, very

00:36:26.480 | penetrating from the James Webb Space Telescope.

00:36:29.080 | Freeberg, when your anus gets probed this deeply, what's your

00:36:34.920 | takeaway? What's the feeling you get in this deep probing of your

00:36:39.440 | anus?

00:36:39.920 | Oh, wonder, mystery on wonder.

00:36:44.040 | Well, that's a space colonoscopy.

00:36:45.840 | Something gets moved with it.

00:36:47.760 | Absolutely. I'm going to save you for last. Freeberg. Chamath,

00:36:50.600 | you have one.

00:36:51.040 | Yeah, I think that this unfortunately did not get nearly

00:36:53.960 | the attention it deserves. But I'm going to pick the CRISPR FDA

00:36:58.040 | approved CRISPR treatment of sickle cell anemia. I think that

00:37:01.360 | this is just an incredibly important breakthrough. And so

00:37:04.360 | you know, sickle cell basically is just a condition where the

00:37:07.280 | shape of your red blood cells change. It causes a lot of very

00:37:10.440 | painful inflammation and damage, disproportionately affects the

00:37:15.240 | black population, African American population. And so now

00:37:19.200 | there's an approved therapy which goes in and makes the gene

00:37:21.720 | edits and fixes these folks. So congratulations to Vertex and

00:37:25.440 | CRISPR. And I think it's just incredible.

00:37:28.120 | There was my big breakthrough was this brain decoder

00:37:32.480 | technology. We didn't talk about it here on the show. But this

00:37:35.480 | project was crazy. They did MRI scans or fMRI scans of blood

00:37:39.760 | flow to different areas in the brain. They then had people

00:37:44.280 | listen to podcasts like the moth. And they tracked

00:37:47.960 | individuals brain activity with specific words that were said

00:37:54.200 | during the podcast, and they had them repeat words, then they

00:37:57.560 | attached it to a language model GPT one, I believe, and narrow

00:38:01.760 | down what people were thinking, then they had people think

00:38:05.920 | thoughts. And it started to use the predictive model of GPT one

00:38:09.800 | and combined it with what was happening in their brain

00:38:12.080 | chemistry. Now, this is a far way from being able to read

00:38:14.280 | people's minds. But for somebody who couldn't speak, let's say,

00:38:16.680 | the idea that you could think, and then have your thoughts and

00:38:20.880 | the story you were telling actually come out of a computer

00:38:23.120 | just by thinking would be miraculous. Obviously,

00:38:25.240 | Neuralink does this with a direct connection. But

00:38:27.880 | fascinating. Right now, sex don't think about Uranus. He's

00:38:31.960 | going deep into Uranus right now. He's reading that paper. I

00:38:34.600 | can see it in his eyes. You guys know, I got a colonoscopy.

00:38:37.160 | Thank goodness. How was it? I got it on. Did they put you

00:38:41.120 | under Tuesday? Yeah, but I got I didn't get the propofol. I got

00:38:44.920 | Demerol. I think Demerol. Oh, you got to go probe. I had like

00:38:48.240 | the twilight sedation. Just kind of like, you know, it was great.

00:38:52.040 | Don't get me wrong. But it was like 1520 minutes like it was

00:38:54.440 | not. But you were a kind of awake and lucid by halfway

00:38:59.240 | through. You woke up halfway through? Yeah. Huh? Did they

00:39:03.040 | give you a drink a little red wine or anything? Nothing? No,

00:39:05.960 | no, they didn't talk to me. No, I just saw that I saw the

00:39:08.800 | screen. I was like, what the hell? And then I just went back

00:39:11.200 | to sleep. Let me tell you propofol. It's drip, drip, drip.

00:39:16.080 | And then you wake up four hours later. It's the most restful

00:39:18.480 | sleep you ever had. No, dude, I had 90 minutes. Maybe it's an

00:39:23.520 | hour. Yeah, yeah. I had like a 20 minute twilight sedation.

00:39:26.560 | That was it. I asked him to go back up in there twice just to

00:39:29.320 | make sure. freeberg enough about Uranus. What was your biggest

00:39:34.440 | science surprise of 23? I know it's hard to surprise you. I

00:39:37.400 | know you guys want to hear some crazy specific thing. But I

00:39:40.040 | actually just said that there are too many breakthroughs with

00:39:43.800 | machine learn models of AI this year to list LLM that can run on

00:39:48.720 | small desktop machines that are open source that outperform all

00:39:52.160 | models that were in existence even a few months prior. It

00:39:55.160 | highlights the leaps and bounds of this trajectory of

00:39:57.840 | development and models. And there's other specific examples

00:40:01.320 | like we talked about DeepMinds graphcast model, which is a

00:40:03.880 | graph neural network on the show. And obviously, all the

00:40:07.960 | generative models and imagery and movies and music, but it's

00:40:11.080 | just such an extraordinary time to see us leverage our combined

00:40:16.200 | capabilities to drive these surprises the pace of language

00:40:20.600 | models and the pace of AI development, just all these

00:40:22.760 | breakthroughs in aggregate. I mean, I think it's hard. It's

00:40:25.560 | hard to pay attention to anyone. There's a constellation of

00:40:27.560 | change underway. It's incredible.

00:40:28.760 | Hmm. Okay, now it's time for our biggest flash in the pan. Who's

00:40:34.240 | your biggest flash in the pan? Oh, my gosh, this is a well,

00:40:39.440 | could be business, it could be society, it could be pop

00:40:42.640 | culture. I wrote down SBF. Okay. I think like from what looked

00:40:48.800 | like a too good to be wonder kind, frankly, just turned out

00:40:52.840 | to be an Adderall addicted grifter. Sacks, I hope that

00:40:59.160 | doesn't hit too close to home. Who was yours?

00:41:00.960 | Same ballpark. I said, effective altruism, the big hit with SBF,

00:41:07.720 | I would have thought that'd be enough to polish it off. But

00:41:10.760 | then we had the open AI board, oust Sam Altman, like we talked

00:41:17.280 | about, apparently that was driven by a couple of their

00:41:20.320 | nonprofit board members who were effective altruists. I think the

00:41:23.920 | failure of that whole debacle will put the nail in the coffin

00:41:27.560 | of the EA movement.

00:41:29.640 | Okay, freeberg, you got a flash in the pan for 2023.

00:41:33.320 | The obvious breakthrough in superconducting room temperature

00:41:37.440 | material, lk 99. Yeah, it came in, it went, everyone thought

00:41:40.960 | it was going to change the world couple weeks later, couldn't be

00:41:43.360 | replicated, was disproven, ultimately. And for a hot

00:41:47.680 | minute there, everyone thought the world was going to change.

00:41:49.680 | So super exciting to see room temperature, superconductivity

00:41:53.200 | in the search for room temperature, superconducting

00:41:55.560 | materials, get so much attention. As I mentioned, it's

00:41:58.520 | something I've thought a lot about since I was 13 years old.

00:42:01.280 | So it's super cool, but didn't happen. Came in and went,

00:42:05.160 | I went with a wild card here. I said George Santos, the diva

00:42:08.200 | drama queen and congressman who slayed from 2023 to 2023.

00:42:17.840 | Electric campaign funds to buy designer clothes and get Botox.

00:42:21.640 | So he asked Queen and Sephora and Sephora. Queen just making

00:42:27.760 | bank over a cameo. I'm gonna have him come in. He's gonna do

00:42:30.640 | a he's gonna do a quick cameo here on all in pockets. All

00:42:34.040 | right. Best CEO, your best CEO, best CEO. I'll go first. I'll go

00:42:40.680 | first. I haven't got first yet. I picked a wild card here. I

00:42:44.640 | went Taylor Swift $4 billion in revenue from the tour and the

00:42:48.800 | merchandise and the movie and everything. Each tour stop

00:42:51.760 | generates $90 million for the city she lands in. She's getting

00:42:55.520 | 85% she went direct to movie theaters with that concert movie

00:42:59.400 | and made a quarter billion dollars. She's hands down. Best

00:43:04.840 | CEO of 2023. For me, we got Sathya Nadella, CEO of

00:43:09.000 | Microsoft. I just think the gross tonnage of market cap

00:43:14.880 | dollars he added in 2023 plus figuring out how to close

00:43:19.040 | Activision, plus retaining maximum optionality with open AI

00:43:23.960 | is just the masterclass in heads down management.

00:43:29.560 | Well done, Saks. Who do you got?

00:43:32.120 | I have Jensen Wang, CEO of Nvidia and king of the GPU. We

00:43:38.600 | talked about the magnificent seven, but none was more

00:43:40.840 | magnificent than Nvidia whose stock is up 235%. And earnings

00:43:46.120 | and forecasts keep blowing doors off. Jensen has been planning

00:43:50.240 | this moment for many years before the whole AI frenzy took

00:43:53.320 | hold. And Nvidia is now reaping the benefit of that.

00:43:56.680 | Who do you got? Friedberg?

00:43:58.800 | I give it to Sam Altman, because I don't think any individual has

00:44:02.360 | generated more attention on a private company and its effect

00:44:05.600 | on the world and the future than Sam Altman and open AI. And I

00:44:11.160 | think that he's been aggressive in raising capital, this guy can

00:44:14.640 | raise like he can raise. And then he over bets on people, he

00:44:18.480 | finds talent, he gives them extraordinary comp packages,

00:44:21.480 | gets them to come and work on this, this extraordinary effort

00:44:24.200 | and then gets them to deliver results. He pushes the limits,

00:44:27.120 | he pushes the boundaries, even beyond what's comfortable for

00:44:30.120 | his board members. Clearly, you know, the comes with the good

00:44:33.760 | and the bad. And then even after he got ousted by his board, his

00:44:37.520 | entire employee base through a crew and got him back. And sure,

00:44:40.840 | everyone's got their economic motivations to see that happen.

00:44:43.520 | But I still think that the setup was, you know, largely his, his

00:44:47.920 | work. So he does deserve credit for that. So all in, I think

00:44:50.760 | it's, it's an incredible year for Sam Altman.

00:44:52.960 | Now we move on to 2023. Best Investor Chamath, who was your

00:44:57.720 | best investor for 2023? Here at the bestie awards.

00:45:01.040 | It was a continuation of the last couple of years. But it's

00:45:05.120 | the pot shops and specifically Citadel. So I give that award to

00:45:08.520 | Ken Griffin. You know, pot shops, I think have really

00:45:11.720 | become the hallway bully of the public capital markets and

00:45:15.920 | Citadel is the kingpin. They returned $7 billion to their

00:45:22.200 | investors in 23. I think if you go back, since 2020, they've

00:45:26.640 | returned more than 20 billion, they generated, you know, 15%

00:45:30.920 | very steady returns uncorrelated to the market. It's just a

00:45:35.000 | machine. I mean, it's incredible. It's an incredible

00:45:38.120 | business that he's built. So he is. There's nobody close.

00:45:42.200 | saxody. I've got

00:45:44.120 | Bill Ackman here for timing the bond market perfectly. He

00:45:47.960 | shorted bonds for most of the year making hundreds of millions

00:45:50.680 | of dollars. And then on October 23, he announced that he was

00:45:54.000 | covering his positions and that it was too risky to stay short

00:45:56.880 | in bonds and he was going long. And that very day was the high

00:46:00.600 | point of the 10 year bond yield. The market made a bottom on

00:46:03.880 | October 27. Since then yields have plummeted, which means that

00:46:06.840 | the value bonds is sort. And the best part of it is that Ackman

00:46:11.160 | is using his new FU money to take on Ivy League University

00:46:14.640 | presidents for their woke DEI double standards, grifting and

00:46:17.960 | plagiarism.

00:46:18.720 | Well done. All right, free Berkeley. I also said Ackman for

00:46:22.840 | his timing on the Treasury trade.

00:46:24.720 | I was right there with you guys, except I wanted to go with the

00:46:27.360 | wildcard. I am astounded by the growth of tick tock. And I just

00:46:31.960 | worked backwards. Arthur Danchik, who I've never met from

00:46:35.280 | Susquehanna International Group referred to as SIG in the

00:46:38.160 | industry still owns according to sources, 15% of this company,

00:46:43.640 | which could be worth three, four or $500 billion when it goes

00:46:46.760 | out. And despite all the saber rattling, the CCP has not

00:46:51.640 | divested from it, even though Trump and Biden both said they

00:46:54.400 | were going to try to do that. And ByteDance was caught spying

00:46:58.840 | on American journalists using their tick tock data. So the

00:47:01.720 | fact that that investment is still in place to me is

00:47:03.960 | extraordinary. So congratulations to them. But let's

00:47:06.200 | sell it quick. All right, now we move on moving quickly here.

00:47:09.600 | 2023. Best turnaround, which are best turnaround, Jamal.

00:47:13.360 | This was like three years in the making, but I'll give it to

00:47:15.720 | Novo Nordisk. I think the amount of attention that Novo has

00:47:20.320 | gotten for a Zempick, what Govi and rebels in 2023 was

00:47:24.680 | incredible. But you have to go back to the last decade where

00:47:29.000 | the first five years there was just not much activity, and they

00:47:33.840 | had to maintain their investment, stay strong, stay

00:47:38.080 | focused. And then starting in about 2019. The stock has been

00:47:41.880 | about a four or five x in the last four or five years. And I

00:47:44.560 | think these semi glutide GLP ones are here to stay. They're

00:47:48.560 | transformational on society. So that was an enormous task of

00:47:55.440 | corporate focus. So I'll give the turnaround award to Novo

00:47:58.640 | Nordisk,

00:47:59.080 | sacks, we got in light of what's happening right now in the

00:48:02.560 | crypto markets, I'm gonna go with Solana. Oh, wow. Wow. I

00:48:10.280 | began the year at about $9 a token. It's now at 92. As of

00:48:13.520 | this moment, obviously, it's very volatile, but it's up

00:48:15.840 | roughly 10x this year to date. And in light of the fact that

00:48:20.920 | various unscrupulous actors on the internet accused some of us

00:48:25.600 | of buying Solana at a discount and dumping it on retail without

00:48:30.600 | any evidence, and that wasn't true. Let's just say that those

00:48:34.440 | of us who are still holding bags of Solana are very happy

00:48:36.760 | campers right now.

00:48:44.240 | Freeberg, who do you got biggest business turnaround?

00:48:46.840 | I give it to Dara and Uber when he took over that business. I

00:48:51.200 | think it was an eight to $9 billion net loss in 2019 $5

00:48:55.520 | billion EBITDA run rate right now incredible forecasting

00:48:59.400 | incredible skill and forecasting the sensitivities in that

00:49:02.000 | business, by the way,

00:49:02.760 | say more, say more.

00:49:04.120 | And, you know, obviously, he's seen the market cap just this

00:49:06.600 | year grow from 50 billion to 126 billion as of today. So give it

00:49:12.080 | to Dara for the big turnaround product sucks, though, I will

00:49:14.400 | say it's gotten expensive card to get an Uber sit around and

00:49:17.280 | wait forever. So Dara, please fix that. Otherwise, good job.

00:49:20.960 | Well done. I went with a one that you guys gave awards to and

00:49:27.200 | on all the previous awards, Sam Waltman is all over this year as

00:49:29.560 | besties. I thought going from being fired for malfeasance to

00:49:35.840 | becoming a martyr and then I'm the captain now you can throw in

00:49:39.400 | the I'm the captain now meme right here, Nick, for the pod in

00:49:43.040 | about 10 days, he captured three full news cycles was named CEO

00:49:46.840 | of the Year, and the palace intrigue raising money for an

00:49:50.800 | Nvidia killer in the Middle East. I mean, this guy is like

00:49:53.520 | James Bond plus a CEO. So what a great turnaround from fired to

00:49:59.520 | desired Sam Altman. All right, let's go to our next one here.

00:50:03.200 | 2023 the worst company of the year. This is the company that

00:50:08.600 | is loathsome and horrible. In our opinions. And it's that's

00:50:13.640 | all it is, folks. It's just for dudes opinions, sacks. In your

00:50:17.200 | opinion, what was the worst company of 2023?

00:50:20.200 | I'm gonna go with Pfizer. Just last week, the Wall Street

00:50:23.600 | Journal had an expose on the inner turmoil at Pfizer as its

00:50:27.520 | market cap has lost $140 billion in valuation in 2023. By the

00:50:32.520 | way, that headline is ridiculous. Pfizer did not save

00:50:36.120 | the world. The reason why they are off so much is because of a

00:50:43.000 | massive drop in demand for Pax Lovett and for COVID boosters.

00:50:49.000 | Apparently, people do not see the value in those products.

00:50:52.920 | They finally figured it out. I would say that the company is

00:50:57.120 | also suffering from a credibility crisis. By not

00:51:00.280 | leveling with the public about the efficacy and safety of their

00:51:03.200 | vaccines. The CEO Albert burla was confronted in Davos by

00:51:07.280 | citizen journalists for this lack of transparency back in

00:51:10.200 | January of this year. And what's interesting is that if you read

00:51:13.320 | the Wall Street Journal piece, even his own employees are

00:51:16.160 | questioning burla's candor. When he announced on a company wide

00:51:20.680 | virtual town hall that the company was embarking on a cost

00:51:23.200 | cutting effort. The chat room erupted in snark, quote, future

00:51:28.360 | is bright, but you might get fired is how one employee

00:51:30.880 | characterized burla spin. This led another employee to reply

00:51:34.560 | quote, dumpster fires are always bright.

00:51:37.520 | All right, Friedberg worst company of 2023. For you. You

00:51:41.560 | have a worst company must listen.

00:51:42.920 | I do. I'm going to get through this without getting interrupted.

00:51:45.280 | The worst company of 2023 is movie on foodstuff. This company

00:51:49.880 | is pure evil. It's got 137,000 employees. It's based in China.

00:51:54.840 | It's the world's largest slaughter of pigs slaughters 2.1

00:51:59.520 | million pigs per year, with the world's largest pig farm near

00:52:02.960 | Nanyang, where they basically take pigs from birth and breed

00:52:07.040 | them all the way through to slaughter. During their entire

00:52:10.000 | lives. These pigs never get to move more than a few inches.

00:52:12.760 | They live in these multi storey housing units that they never

00:52:15.760 | get to see sun or the light from the outside. Through their whole

00:52:19.160 | lives. They're kept separate from their families. Pigs are as

00:52:22.120 | smart as most dogs and even young children. And at the end

00:52:25.520 | of their very painful, awful existence as they're slaughtered

00:52:29.160 | and fed to a growing population. China consumes over a billion

00:52:33.520 | pigs a year. It's a horrific situation. So

00:52:36.920 | that's the most loathsome company of 2023.

00:52:42.760 | Sounds delicious.

00:52:44.520 | Dude,

00:52:49.000 | you you you went off camera.

00:52:53.160 | You started laughing. It's nice. Are you laughing? That's why I

00:52:58.040 | started laughing. I mean, I had 15 jokes, but I'm not gonna make

00:53:01.240 | any of them. Yeah, when none of us are for factory farming. It's

00:53:04.120 | horrible. Who is your worst company? Come on, come on, get

00:53:08.480 | in the game here. Who is your worst company?

00:53:10.680 | It's a tie between FTX and Silicon Valley Bank. One stole

00:53:14.760 | customer accounts and the other one just was run by a CEO and a

00:53:20.520 | risk management infrastructure that really imperiled and almost

00:53:23.320 | imperiled an entire industry.

00:53:24.560 | There you go.

00:53:25.280 | For me, it was Fox News. They deceived their loyal customers

00:53:28.440 | by knowingly spreading fake news about voting machines. I wound

00:53:32.480 | up firing their most loved host in our fifth bestie, Tucker

00:53:36.040 | Carlson, and they paid record setting fines for misleading the

00:53:40.160 | public and creating massive division in our country. And

00:53:43.720 | they're facing an even bigger lawsuit, a $2.7 billion lawsuit

00:53:47.800 | with another election technology company that will happen in

00:53:52.040 | 2025. Pension funds are now suing this loathsome company

00:53:56.600 | because they lost so much money for them. So my worst company of

00:54:01.240 | the year is Fox News. All right, Sacha, I'm sorry. So you go for

00:54:08.640 | the microphone there.

00:54:09.200 | I'm not gonna defend Fox after they fire Tucker.

00:54:11.440 | Exactly, exactly. That's why I put in there for you.

00:54:14.040 | I do think the judgments or the magnitude of the judgments are

00:54:16.720 | ridiculous.

00:54:17.480 | Okay, now it's time. We have a little bit of fun here.

00:54:21.800 | Best meme, your best meme. Fun stuff. I'll start it off this

00:54:27.040 | year. I love the Boston cop on a slide. I don't know if you guys

00:54:30.800 | have seen this one, but it went super viral. They've made

00:54:33.760 | millions of versions of it. This is the cop in Boston, going down

00:54:37.720 | a slide.

00:54:38.160 | And the backstory here, bunch of cops were told there's a slide

00:54:46.840 | that's too dangerous in Boston. One of them tried to do their

00:54:50.120 | duty and confirm that it was in fact dangerous. And he got

00:54:52.880 | injured coming down the slide. And now anytime something is

00:54:56.280 | going off the track, whether it's a market or a company, you

00:55:00.760 | play that clip. Sachs, you're a master of memes. What do you got

00:55:06.120 | for us this year in the 2023 Bestial Awards?

00:55:08.600 | Well, I think the meme of the year had to be the GFY. Elon's

00:55:12.520 | answer to Bob Iger's attempt to blackmail him. But we need to

00:55:17.440 | see this in the gift version, the way the hand motions are,

00:55:20.040 | it's this, then this, and then it comes back in. Good for

00:55:25.400 | conductor of an orchestra.

00:55:27.360 | Just a standard good for you. Jamal, did you have a, did you

00:55:31.160 | have a favorite Jamal a favorite meme of 2023? Yeah, Nick, if

00:55:34.680 | you want to just throw it up there. I'm a journalist, and

00:55:39.560 | it's the kid.

00:55:43.080 | Journalism. What is this talking about? I think it's, it's what

00:55:48.360 | we all know. And I think it was further exposed this year, just

00:55:51.680 | the brazen, naked ambition and corrupt nature of the mainstream

00:55:56.520 | media. Jason, you said it really well. And I, and it really made

00:56:01.080 | an impact on me. So I want to give you credit. We are all

00:56:03.240 | citizen journalists, investigative journalists now.

00:56:05.560 | And I think that that's true. I think we all have a

00:56:08.720 | responsibility to pick the information source. And to that,

00:56:14.960 | yeah, they never been more true than this. You got to have

00:56:19.200 | multiple sources triangulate the truth for yourself. But yeah, I

00:56:22.520 | wouldn't trust the mainstream media. At this point, you know,

00:56:25.800 | as but one of many sources, freeberg, get a favorite meme.

00:56:29.720 | Got a favorite meme. No, I didn't put anything on this.

00:56:33.280 | Okay, you gave us six minutes on pigs being killed, but you can't

00:56:36.560 | come up with one mean, okay. With a meme. Come on, man. I

00:56:41.560 | think it's kind of funny. Actually, he has no, he was

00:56:45.160 | meaningless.

00:56:45.680 | We need to play that way of music.

00:56:49.440 | Best new tech, best new tech, we got to keep things moving. Last

00:56:55.880 | year was a fusion in GPT across the board. This year, I'll just

00:56:59.680 | get a mine out of the way real quick. I'm going to go with

00:57:01.680 | something more specific chat GPT app has been extraordinary. It

00:57:05.680 | now has 4.0. And it has Dolly in it. I've been making incredible

00:57:09.320 | images to go with my my sub stack and my blog posts that I

00:57:12.920 | would have paid 1000s of dollars, you know, for each one

00:57:15.440 | of those when I was doing magazines, and they have voice

00:57:19.440 | chat. If you haven't connected chat GPT, his voice app to the

00:57:23.320 | new action button on the iPhone 15. There's a button above your

00:57:26.760 | volume called action, you can map it to a specific feature

00:57:30.480 | inside of any app. I mapped it to voice chat on chat GPT. When

00:57:35.520 | I'm driving with my kids, they have a question, we put it in.

00:57:38.120 | And we just started asking questions about history,

00:57:40.040 | science, whatever it happens to be pop culture, music, to chat

00:57:43.440 | GPT for and it is an extraordinary breakthrough app.

00:57:47.360 | And it's, you know, been downloaded, I think hundreds of

00:57:51.400 | millions of times now or over 100 million. Incredible,

00:57:54.040 | incredible progress there. Chamath, you had a best tech.

00:57:56.840 | Best new tech, I don't think there was anything meaningful in

00:58:01.320 | 2023. I think there was a lot of improvements to things that were

00:58:05.160 | founded and started in 2020, or 2021 or 2022. Nothing new that

00:58:09.880 | company this year,

00:58:10.640 | sacks. I have starling for JetSuite x, I of course, I've

00:58:15.840 | never used it, but I heard it's great.

00:58:17.280 | If you do fly with other humans who you don't know,

00:58:22.880 | I'm looking forward to starling for private aviation as well.

00:58:27.160 | But I've heard it's a real game changer on commercial flights,

00:58:30.840 | and every kind of flight,

00:58:32.280 | Friberg, best new tech.

00:58:34.200 | My best new tech of this year, I think is really important. As

00:58:41.280 | we race to keep the promise of AI alive in the face of

00:58:46.360 | increasing government regulation, which is open

00:58:49.800 | source locally run LLM. So you can take an LLM and you can run

00:58:54.640 | it on your machine, you don't have to be connected to the

00:58:56.640 | internet, you don't have to have a third party service provider

00:58:59.120 | making an LLM available to you. And so this allows the

00:59:03.520 | continued development and pursuit of productivity gains

00:59:08.440 | and new capabilities that emerge from these LLMs by making them

00:59:12.320 | local offline, disconnected from the internet and, and away from

00:59:17.000 | the scrutability of agencies that want to check your model

00:59:20.200 | and make sure it's okay. So this is really important to me, I do

00:59:22.920 | think like my broader trend right now is I think that

00:59:25.160 | there's this really scary, big shift of, you're either going to

00:59:29.880 | end up in a new enlightenment, or you're gonna end up in a new

00:59:32.360 | dark ages. And I think we're seeing this play out and all

00:59:34.560 | these conflicts around the world, and all of this

00:59:36.840 | regulation and all of the technology that's being deemed

00:59:40.600 | either a threat or an opportunity. And so I think any

00:59:44.600 | technology capability that allows us to pursue the

00:59:47.320 | enlightenment is a winner for me. So anyway, this was a big

00:59:50.600 | shift that happened this year. And there's multiple models that

00:59:53.640 | are publicly available that are free open source that you can

00:59:56.200 | run. Okay, 2023. Best trend. What was the best trend? 2023?

01:00:01.160 | For you? I actually didn't really couldn't figure one out.

01:00:06.160 | Okay, Saks, you got a best trend for 2023. Something that

01:00:09.760 | happened often it became a trend.

01:00:11.480 | My best friend is the return of colorblindness as the standard

01:00:16.480 | and the pushback on dEI. We already talked about the

01:00:19.800 | university presidents and what Bill Ackman is doing. I would

01:00:22.560 | add to that that the Supreme Court banned race based

01:00:25.760 | affirmative action and university admissions in June.

01:00:28.120 | And red state governors like Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis

01:00:31.520 | took that as a green light to shut down dEI programs in their

01:00:34.520 | public colleges and universities. I think that this

01:00:38.800 | is a good trend and hopefully it continues next year because

01:00:41.520 | America should be a colorblind meritocracy.

01:00:44.680 | Friedberg, what was your best trend of 2023?

01:00:48.000 | The profitability focus at young companies, particularly in an

01:00:52.440 | age of AI co pilot tools for software development. From what

01:00:56.520 | I've seen, it's pretty incredible in single person.

01:00:59.480 | efforts can yield what historically is required 612 or

01:01:04.160 | more people to do using co pilot tools and AI. So software

01:01:07.840 | development is accelerated new products and entire companies

01:01:11.840 | can be built by single individual at very low cost,

01:01:14.920 | building totally customized software. So from what I've seen,

01:01:18.160 | it's not widely adopted. These these capabilities as you guys

01:01:21.000 | probably have seen, as well, it's starting to be. But just

01:01:24.080 | imagine once the majority of people are using these co

01:01:27.640 | piloting tools to write software, and start to learn how

01:01:30.960 | to use these tools, it's really going to increase productivity

01:01:34.040 | globally, as it finds its way into every business, and

01:01:36.920 | everyone can become an entrepreneur and so on. So it's

01:01:38.960 | good. It's incredible to see.

01:01:40.160 | I to sax was looking at the issue of dEI and I framed mine

01:01:44.920 | as dEI dying and meritocracy thriving. That was the best

01:01:48.680 | trend for me. So we are once again, simpatico you and I dEI

01:01:52.720 | dying meritocracy thriving, nicely done.

01:01:55.280 | You really are proving you're a centrist.

01:01:57.000 | Yeah, I mean, I think, or I just listened to MLK speech. And I

01:02:02.240 | thought that seems like the most logical thing to do. You're

01:02:04.680 | right. 100%. We figured this out some time ago.

01:02:09.040 | Yeah, I don't know why we have to rehash it. Okay. 2023. Worst

01:02:12.960 | trend. I'll lead it off. I had three here of worst trends.

01:02:16.960 | Number one, anti semitism, absolutely disgusting and

01:02:19.360 | horrible to Trump's rehabilitation. We'll just leave

01:02:22.160 | it at that. And then three people have low moral character

01:02:25.600 | using the freedom of speech movement to whitewash their

01:02:28.800 | horrible personal behavior. Yes, I'm talking about Alex Jones to

01:02:32.360 | all the mids in the comments. sacks. What was the worst trend

01:02:36.200 | for you?

01:02:36.560 | You had to have three, didn't you?

01:02:38.000 | Well, I'm going to go with anti semitism. Those are my two

01:02:40.600 | runners. Two runners.

01:02:41.440 | All right, fair enough. Yeah, I think you guys are like my worst

01:02:43.800 | trend. It is the metastasizing national debt. This chart

01:02:48.200 | really makes it clear you can see here the national debt as a

01:02:52.520 | function of deficit and revenues and it's a upside down hockey

01:02:57.320 | stick. Jesus. If a company could produce user growth that looked

01:03:01.160 | like this, I would invest all day long. However, this is not

01:03:04.560 | growth. This is basically how much we owe. And it is a

01:03:08.880 | bipartisan problem. It's been going on for really 20 plus

01:03:12.480 | years. But it is getting worse and worse under Biden. Yeah.

01:03:17.400 | 8 trillion added to the deficit under Trump and looks like five

01:03:21.200 | to 6 trillion under Biden.

01:03:23.280 | Well, you know, we did have a COVID. We did have meltdown

01:03:27.560 | where the economy was down 30% year over year. So the tax

01:03:31.000 | taxing COVID. Yeah, both parties supported that bailout. And in

01:03:34.440 | hindsight, it was excessive. Yeah. Biden's quote unquote

01:03:37.960 | stimulus was passed on straight party lines after COVID was

01:03:41.200 | ready over. Yeah. So I think we should just make sure to

01:03:44.160 | apportion the blame correctly. But like I said, bipartisan

01:03:47.440 | problem.

01:03:47.880 | Yeah, I agree. bipartisan and Trump did a very ill timed tax

01:03:52.000 | cut before COVID. So it's a double hit. If you want to

01:03:54.320 | compare it in eight years. Obama added 8 trillion. So it was 1

01:04:00.200 | trillion a year. These new guys getting close to 2 trillion per

01:04:03.920 | year. So they doubled the velocity of spending. Just

01:04:07.560 | completely disastrous. Jamal. What's the worst trend for you?

01:04:10.680 | I just think it's the the general state of affairs.

01:04:14.200 | Amongst our young people are 20 year olds and our 30 year olds,

01:04:18.120 | I think are really struggling. And it's gotten worse. I'll give

01:04:23.840 | you two examples. Here. You see on your screen. This year, 158,000

01:04:31.080 | more Americans died than expected, which is more than all

01:04:34.240 | the wars combined in Vietnam. And when you look at where those

01:04:37.320 | death rates are, those death rates were coming from 35 to 44

01:04:41.280 | year olds, which was up 26%, and 25 to 34 year olds, which was up

01:04:45.280 | 20% above pre COVID levels. And all we can point to from the

01:04:50.680 | government establishment is that it's smoking and a bad diet,

01:04:53.920 | which doesn't really hang together. And then the second

01:04:56.800 | trend is when you look at just general marriage rates amongst

01:05:00.400 | these same cohort of people, it's meaningfully worse than

01:05:04.560 | every cohort above it. So just societally, these folks are not

01:05:09.880 | tracking in whatever dimension you want to measure sort of like

01:05:13.560 | happiness, fulfillment, stability, safety, something is

01:05:17.080 | meaningfully wrong in these cohorts of people, and we owe it

01:05:20.160 | to them to figure it out.

01:05:21.120 | The one thing you missed there, right, you're not in the Western

01:05:23.720 | world, at least 36% increase in suicide over the past two

01:05:27.360 | decades. So a lot. It's another one. So that might be the main

01:05:30.560 | one. I think in this is the mental health issues are acute.

01:05:34.200 | Okay, we have free bear your left for the worst trend, the

01:05:38.640 | bestie award for worst trend of 2023. What do you got?

01:05:41.080 | I don't know, I had one, I'm going to change it on the fly.

01:05:43.120 | Oh, I'm going to go with the normalization of spending. I

01:05:45.720 | think it's probably the worst trend. Like it's, you know, it

01:05:48.920 | used to be a big deal. Remember when the TARP program happened

01:05:51.840 | in a way, and it was an incredible, single line item of

01:05:56.400 | $800 billion to support the troubled asset relief effort to

01:06:01.680 | try and keep the economy stable by buying up all of this failing

01:06:05.560 | debt and supporting all of these equities and keeping these

01:06:08.840 | businesses going. And now it's like $100 billion for his

01:06:14.280 | trillion for that. It's like we've normalized spending and

01:06:17.680 | COVID just made it worse. So to your guys's point earlier about

01:06:20.480 | the acceleration of spending. Once you spend $1, you think

01:06:23.800 | it's okay to spend $1. And then next time you spend two, it's

01:06:26.360 | not that bad. It's only $1 more. And the next time you spend

01:06:28.520 | five, it's only three bucks more. And suddenly, it becomes

01:06:31.280 | normal. And this normalization catches up to us. I've harped

01:06:34.080 | on this enough, so I won't go into it too much. But I think

01:06:36.040 | that's the worst. Who did you change from? What was your what

01:06:38.560 | was your original? My original was the merging of the

01:06:42.080 | oppressor oppressed ideologies that are in diametric opposition

01:06:47.600 | to each other. I just found this more ironic than the worst

01:06:51.360 | trend, I think, which is like LGBTQ groups that were pro

01:06:56.240 | Hamas that were marching and supporting Hamas, which is

01:07:00.240 | anti LGBTQ. It was just so mind blowing to me to see some of the

01:07:04.680 | behavior over the last couple of months that made absolutely no

01:07:07.880 | sense. And it shows how little first principles thinking people

01:07:11.880 | are actually doing about the things that they're standing up

01:07:15.640 | for. Standing up for a free Palestine is one kind of point.

01:07:21.520 | But being pro Hamas, when Hamas would have a responsibility of

01:07:26.920 | eradicating people like you, it's just it's just nuts to me.

01:07:30.520 | So there's just some of the stuff that I've seen, where the

01:07:33.080 | oppressor oppressed ideology is trained to fit everything, even

01:07:37.680 | if it makes absolutely no sense. Yes, it's just really

01:07:40.920 | frustrating to see.

01:07:42.600 | Okay, now we go on to a little casual, the bestie awards for

01:07:47.040 | 2023. Favorite media, favorite media, new things that came out

01:07:51.440 | in the media could be a video game, book, music, or a TV show.

01:07:55.720 | I'll lead us off here, just get it out of the way real quick. For

01:07:58.480 | me, the secession finale, extraordinary, one of the best

01:08:01.960 | pieces of television ever made. And my sleeper was the bear

01:08:06.320 | season two, very niche show on FX, I think I turned a lot of

01:08:09.960 | you on to it. And season two had an episode episode five, which

01:08:14.560 | is the forks episode in which Kami sends Richie to intern at a

01:08:18.680 | very elite restaurant, and he's charged with polishing

01:08:21.320 | silverware. And Garrett and him get into it. Why am I doing all

01:08:25.400 | this stupid stuff? And he just tells them listen, every day

01:08:28.040 | here is a freaking Super Bowl. And it's just a great, great,

01:08:31.520 | amazing episode of television with extraordinary performances

01:08:35.440 | and writing Chamath. Did you have any favorite media this

01:08:39.160 | year? Anything that Taylor Swift did this year was Whitehall,

01:08:43.760 | you're a Swifty. She is a tour de force. She's incredible. And

01:08:49.800 | she's a genius. What can you say? Nothing sucks.

01:08:53.960 | I'm going to use my spot to draw attention to some podcasts that

01:08:58.080 | you may not have heard of. Some geopolitics and world affairs

01:09:02.960 | podcast. So that probably my number one is the Duran. With

01:09:08.200 | Alexander victorious and Alex Christophero. I'd also give

01:09:11.400 | honorable mention to judge Napolitano's podcast and Colonel

01:09:15.240 | Daniel Davis. I have found these three podcasts to be quite

01:09:20.000 | useful in understanding what's happening in the rest of the

01:09:21.800 | world. And I found their reporting and analysis be more

01:09:25.720 | accurate than anything you're going to get in the mainstream

01:09:28.760 | media free break any favorite media for you as we get close to

01:09:32.320 | wrapping here. I recently read a book that I liked. I don't know

01:09:35.640 | if I talked about it called the idea factory on the history of

01:09:38.160 | Bell Labs and the great age of American innovation strongly

01:09:41.280 | recommended I had no idea how much this Bell Labs institution

01:09:46.840 | touched modern life, from radar to the transistor, to the

01:09:51.960 | nuclear bomb to computing. Even information theory was developed

01:09:56.640 | inside of Bell Labs. It was an incredible organization that

01:09:59.440 | took its roots in an institutionalized monopoly, which

01:10:03.360 | then enabled them to have one customer that was always a built

01:10:06.040 | in customer but gave them the freedom and the resourcing to

01:10:09.000 | build all of these great things. And for anyone that wants to say

01:10:12.160 | that monopolies stifle innovation, I encourage you to

01:10:14.920 | read this book because it really says the opposite may be true,

01:10:18.480 | that a monopoly enables investment in long term thinking

01:10:22.160 | and long term ideas that you never otherwise see. So I give

01:10:25.320 | it to that. I also had a softer one. Have you guys ever watched

01:10:29.240 | Bobby Alcoff's podcast? I found this so funny this year. You

01:10:32.400 | guys ever seen it? Her interview with Drake is hilarious. It's so

01:10:35.240 | funny. So she interviewed Drake. She's interviewed Cuban. Oh,

01:10:38.240 | yeah, I know you're talking about the deadpan. Yeah, the

01:10:41.840 | deadpan. So she's got this like, wholly disinterested persona.

01:10:45.200 | And it totally encapsulates like a Gen Z, like personality in a

01:10:49.840 | way that you don't get in any other media. It's really, and

01:10:52.280 | she's hilarious when she does these interviews. And she's very

01:10:55.000 | unique, like Andy Kaufman, or Jim Carrey, like in that sense,

01:10:58.240 | like unique and how she does this. I just think like, we'll

01:11:01.040 | see if the stick lasts, like she may end up kind of being tired

01:11:03.720 | soon and see if she has a second act. The Drake interview was

01:11:06.720 | really good. The one with Cuban had two problems with it. One,

01:11:10.080 | they sat on the ground and then two Cubans feet were really

01:11:12.880 | dirty. Did you see the one with Shaq? And so I was like, bro,

01:11:16.320 | like, yeah, just keep the shoes on. And just you know, Shaq one

01:11:19.360 | was hilarious. But anyway, she's, she's got great contents.

01:11:21.960 | It's it's hit or miss. By the way, I'll also say it's not

01:11:23.920 | consistent, hit or miss. But I don't know, I just found her to

01:11:27.600 | be a little bit of a unique standout in in content this

01:11:32.240 | year. Everyone's kind of me to me to look the same. She stood

01:11:34.920 | out a bit for me.

01:11:35.560 | In that vein, have you seen Z way? Zi we know she is a woman

01:11:41.320 | who interviews people and then she asks people very

01:11:44.560 | uncomfortable questions about race. Like how many black

01:11:47.600 | friends you have named them. And it is hilarious. It is like the

01:11:52.200 | greatest bit ever. Z shout out to Z way Z way since we went

01:11:56.720 | there on who's seen it you saw tomorrow. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if

01:12:00.680 | you're on Tick Tock, you'll see it because she just had like,

01:12:03.200 | yeah, she just has anybody in pop culture. George Santos on

01:12:07.360 | shit. Yeah. Wow. And it was just so incredible. Crazy. On the

01:12:14.480 | podcasting front. Shout out to our friend Gwyneth Paltrow. If

01:12:18.600 | you don't listen to the goo podcast, she does like

01:12:20.280 | interviews every other time. Really good. Red scare. Another

01:12:24.240 | great alternative podcast I like to listen to from the dirtbag

01:12:28.400 | left as they call it and shout out preparers cafe insider

01:12:32.800 | cafe.com. All right. I think is this the end producer Nick? Are

01:12:36.800 | we here? Did we make it last one? Last one. We have a special

01:12:41.640 | award here. The self immolation award. This has been named after

01:12:46.040 | Rudy Giuliani. So Rudy Giuliani self immolation award. And this

01:12:50.720 | is a tough one to give this year sacks because it's gonna be

01:12:58.200 | quite self referential here. Go. I am going to name Liz McGill,

01:13:02.600 | the now former president of the University of Pennsylvania. So

01:13:07.520 | well had been vomiting on herself for two months. In the

01:13:10.440 | aftermath of October 7, before she even appeared at that

01:13:13.760 | congressional hearing with the presence of Harvard MIT. She

01:13:17.280 | answered what was clearly a moral question with a tone deaf

01:13:20.900 | legalistic answer, saying that advocacy of genocide against

01:13:24.840 | Jews depends on context falls into question whether one is

01:13:28.560 | smart enough to be university president. It's not a job that

01:13:31.800 | demands that much intelligence, but it does require an instinct

01:13:34.520 | for knowing when and how to cover your own ass. When she was

01:13:38.120 | finally forced to step down. It felt like a mercy killing. Yeah.

01:13:41.720 | Was she the one smirking to? Yeah, she had the awkward. I

01:13:45.960 | found the most appalling was the awkward smirks. Yep. Chamath who

01:13:50.520 | lit themselves on fire. Most of all this year who poured

01:13:54.080 | gasoline over their heads and just lit up a stogie.

01:13:57.800 | I think it's the brand and reputation of the Ivies. I think

01:14:01.480 | that there was irreparable harm done. Yes, we've had

01:14:05.320 | generations now that have been taught that that is where we

01:14:07.920 | send our best and brightest kids. But it turns out that

01:14:12.160 | they're getting indoctrinated into some very kind of extreme

01:14:16.720 | rhetoric that then produces these incapable first

01:14:19.960 | principles thinkers, that will be the destruction of our

01:14:23.080 | society if we don't fix it. So I think Harvard applications were

01:14:27.240 | down 17% already. I expect that trend across the Ivies to go

01:14:34.080 | way up. I expect contributions to go down. I expect

01:14:40.400 | governments to ratchet down their spending in those schools.

01:14:45.040 | And I expect some folks to try to take away their nonprofit

01:14:48.240 | status. So I think that we are going to reallocate the brand

01:14:53.920 | equity of the Ivies to good schools. And we will know what

01:15:00.160 | the good schools are based on their independence, their

01:15:03.880 | ability to churn out first principles thinkers and their

01:15:06.880 | respect for freedom of speech without being moral idiots.

01:15:12.960 | Friedberg, what do you got? Well, well, Sanchima Ivy League

01:15:16.400 | presidents. Okay, well done. No, no need to add too much more

01:15:20.240 | there, I guess. You know, I was torn here between the namesake

01:15:24.440 | of this very award. If you missed it, Rudy Giuliani had $150

01:15:30.360 | million judgment against him maybe two weeks ago for

01:15:33.360 | slandering to poor, innocent people in his electoral scam

01:15:37.160 | that he ran with Trump. And he, I think is going to get indicted

01:15:41.680 | next year for these fake electorates. So follow the fake

01:15:44.600 | electorates one, but that was a close one for me, because Kanye

01:15:47.000 | West also lit himself on fire in the past year with the Adidas

01:15:51.080 | contract and his anti semitism getting kicked off Twitter x.

01:15:54.080 | But I feel like that was mental illness. And I think Rudy

01:15:57.320 | Giuliani is just stupid. So I give it to Rudy Giuliani, the

01:16:01.520 | namesake of this award.

01:16:02.920 | And the only thing I'll say about that J Cal is, I'm not

01:16:07.600 | going to defend him or his actions at all. I do think I do

01:16:13.360 | think that judgment was excessive. And it's part of a

01:16:15.880 | pattern of ridiculous judgments that we see when you have, for

01:16:20.640 | example, a DC jury pool, judging a conservative or a Republican

01:16:25.160 | whose politics they disagree with. The plaintiffs only asked

01:16:29.240 | for $48 million, the jury awarded three times that it's an

01:16:33.440 | excessive award, I think a few million dollars as a penalty

01:16:36.680 | would have been a perfectly nice award, I think to bankrupt the

01:16:40.120 | man, which is what you're talking about is becoming a bit

01:16:42.080 | of a pylon. And I'm all in favor of Rudy being the butt of jokes

01:16:47.160 | until the point where really, you're talking about destroying

01:16:50.480 | his life. I think it's gone way too far.

01:16:52.600 | Yeah, these are words are curious at how large they are,

01:16:57.160 | they all get appealed, though, and they all come down. So I'm

01:16:59.560 | sure that'll come down by some massive percentage in the near

01:17:02.240 | future. This has been the year end episode. Can you believe it?

01:17:06.280 | We made it another year, guys. Here we are at the end of 2023.

01:17:10.120 | We'll do our predictions next week. So you'll get our amazing

01:17:12.840 | predictions for 2024. In the next episode. Any closing

01:17:16.640 | thoughts on the year we just had? Freeberg? How you feeling

01:17:20.920 | here at the end of the year? Are you hopeful? Are you cheery? Are

01:17:24.680 | you sad? Are you excited?

01:17:25.960 | I've been up since 5am and I just drank beers. So I'm pretty

01:17:29.640 | tired. But with respect, that's kind of how the whole year feels

01:17:33.640 | actually feel like I exhausted. Yeah, I just got up early, crank

01:17:38.160 | through the day had some beer and I'm ready for a nap. But I'm

01:17:42.440 | I'm probably more optimistic going into 2024 than I was going

01:17:47.120 | into 2023. Because that's on a personal basis. And I think,

01:17:51.480 | yeah, there's just a lot going on today in the world. Yeah,

01:17:55.040 | it's complex, isn't it? I do think as long as we embrace the

01:17:58.040 | Enlightenment and don't embrace the Dark Ages, we stand a shot

01:18:02.840 | at keeping progress alive. And I think that's the defining

01:18:06.200 | characteristics of human civilization is progress. And

01:18:09.840 | that's, I think, ultimately resolves all the conflicts and

01:18:13.200 | other things. We just got to keep it alive.

01:18:14.880 | Well said. Chamath, how are you feeling here as we wrap up 2023

01:18:17.760 | and looking into 2024?

01:18:19.200 | I think 2022 and 2023 have been looking back the most important

01:18:25.880 | two years of my professional career. I think I benefited like

01:18:30.440 | we all I think I think all four of us could say this, have just

01:18:33.720 | an incredible set of tailwinds. And 22 and 23 for the first time

01:18:38.600 | where I was in a position of influence and capital and power

01:18:42.760 | where I had to confront that those tailwinds can quickly

01:18:46.040 | become headwinds and that we are not impervious to them. So I

01:18:51.800 | like Friedberg I'm looking forward to 24 where I can try to

01:18:55.280 | put all these learnings to good use. So it's been generally

01:18:59.040 | good. And 23 was the most important year of my life in the

01:19:01.840 | sense that I got remarried. So that's been a huge personal

01:19:04.560 | highlight. Yes, beautiful. Love that you guys all came to that

01:19:07.880 | as well as a highlight for us to absolutely beautiful. Yeah, I'm

01:19:10.640 | ready to I'm ready to turn the page on this year and start 24.

01:19:13.280 | sacks any closing thoughts here?

01:19:15.240 | Well, I think one of the biggest surprises of 2023 is that we

01:19:20.080 | didn't have a recession. I mean, I think most people were betting

01:19:22.800 | on a recession in 23. They thought that a soft landing

01:19:26.400 | would be almost impossible. And in fact, the data is that soft

01:19:30.280 | landings almost never occur. Remember what Larry Summers said

01:19:32.880 | to us at our all in summit this year, which is soft landings are

01:19:37.480 | like second marriages. It's the triumph of hope over experience,

01:19:41.520 | meaning they almost never happen. And so the fact that we

01:19:44.520 | didn't get that I think that was basically a pretty important

01:19:48.120 | bullet dodge. Now that being said, I do think that the whole

01:19:51.200 | b2b software industry definitely went through a recession. But

01:19:54.320 | fortunately, I think we bottomed out and starting to see green

01:19:57.800 | shoots now. So things are returning to normal. On the

01:20:01.160 | global stage. Things are still okay, in the sense that the US

01:20:06.280 | is not directly in a war, but man, it is pretty scary. We could

01:20:10.920 | be pulled into a dynamic, very dynamic, we pulled into a war in

01:20:14.120 | the Middle East anytime we still have a proxy war going in

01:20:16.640 | Ukraine. So there are a lot of risks still on the horizon, I'll

01:20:20.640 | just say for the gentleman and for the audience, it has been

01:20:22.640 | wonderful to have all of you, the audience, the fans of the

01:20:26.720 | show, and you besties in my life, over two really tough

01:20:30.560 | years, it was also very proud of myself going into them. I knew I

01:20:35.040 | was built for and it was a war the last few years, it was

01:20:37.840 | difficult, it was hard. But we all I think learned a lot and

01:20:41.360 | came out stronger because of it. And I just want to give a

01:20:43.360 | particular shout out to all of you guys for making this brand

01:20:47.520 | extraordinary and taking it to new heights. Almost all the

01:20:51.200 | times I've built things, brands, and gadget, Silicon

01:20:55.680 | Iron Porter, all in whatever it is, it was a solo effort. And

01:20:59.040 | it's just been really rewarding to be part of a team. And I want

01:21:01.800 | to just give a particular note to freeburg, who I think all of

01:21:04.920 | us owe a real debt of gratitude towards he took the all in

01:21:08.740 | summit, which was a very strong start in 2022. And he leveled

01:21:13.520 | it up in 2023. Amazingly, and I'm just so excited to see what

01:21:17.440 | we do in 2024. With this amazing brand memberships, tequilas,

01:21:23.440 | another 50 episode and a great all in summit next year, I hope

01:21:27.880 | so shout out to my guy freeberg for the dictator, the Sultan of

01:21:32.120 | science, chairman dictator, sorry, apologize for getting

01:21:34.880 | that incorrect there. We'll get it right. Chairman dictator, and

01:21:38.520 | the rain man David Sachs, I am the world's greatest moderator

01:21:41.400 | and we will see you in 2024. Bye bye. Happy New Year. Love you

01:21:46.760 | guys. New Year bitches.

01:21:48.160 | Bye bye.

01:21:48.800 | Have your besties

01:21:49.600 | let your winners ride.

01:21:52.440 | Rain Man David Sachs

01:21:55.280 | we open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with

01:22:01.920 | it. I love you. I'm the queen of quinoa.

01:22:04.520 | Let your winners ride.

01:22:08.800 | Besties are gone.

01:22:12.440 | That's my dog taking a notice in your driveway.

01:22:16.920 | Oh man.

01:22:19.760 | We should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy

01:22:24.360 | because they're all just useless. It's like this like

01:22:26.200 | sexual tension, but they just need to release them out.

01:22:28.480 | We need to get

01:22:35.640 | merch.

01:22:36.920 | Going on.

01:22:37.640 | Oh, man.

01:22:46.200 | [Music]

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

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