All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg - E60: The 2021 Bestie Awards PLUS Jack Dorsey starts the Web3 Wars

Starting point is 00:00:00 Hey, everybody, welcome to another episode of the All in Podcast. And it is our Gear And episode. It is our 2021 Bestie Awards. This is where we give our awards for the best and worst of what happened in 2021. We did it last year, kind of half-heartedly, but this year, hopefully we put a little bit more work into it with me again. Of course, David Friedberg, the Sultan of science, the rainman, David Sacks, and Sweater Jesus, Chimath, Pauli Haapatia. How's everybody doing?

Starting point is 00:00:32 Ready to go? Did anybody do their homework? Oh my God. We are nine away from episode 69. And where we will have a special guest. Special guest. Who I've given the choice of coming on episode 69 or 420. No, no, no, he has to do 69. We can't do 420. Or he can do both. He can do whatever he wants. Oh yeah, I basically could do no wrong. Is he committed?

Starting point is 00:00:54 What about Jack? Can we get Jack on? Don't talk about that. Yeah, if you stop grinding Jack, yeah. Yeah, maybe if you stop dunking on Jack for no reason, you can sufferable sacks. Seriously, it's sufferable. It's bad enough that like,

Starting point is 00:01:06 I've alienated potential guests, Chimaz alienated best. Now you're getting in on alienating the guests. You're gonna be too much to have Jack and Chris Dixon on. Together? Who? Who? Oh my God, that is so gross.

Starting point is 00:01:20 Did you believe that? No, don't believe that. I don't care about my relationship with ACN16's. Jack Dorsey, we all know who's the other person. The Kristixin? Kristixin, who's the general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, who runs their crypto fund. Oh, nice. It wasn't just me. I mean, it's very vocal lately about Web 3.

Starting point is 00:01:34 Why don't you guys invite the CFO of Greylock as well while you're at it? Oh my God. We couldn't get the partner in charge of human capital at Excel. Oh my God. We couldn't get the partner in charge of human capital at Excel. Got to get a little bit far afield.

Starting point is 00:01:53 Chris posted something pretty innocuous on Web 3 and Jack jumped down to throw and same thing with biology as well. I saw the C-dixin quote. It wasn't just me. Jason, now you're pretending you retweeted a photo of Jack jumping down Christyx and throw it and saying, whoa, what's going on here? Now you're trying to pretend. I love Jack. I love Jack. I love Jack. I love Jack. I love Jack. He was triggered by me. He wasn't triggered by, he's been off. Jack after dark. Jack is gone wild.

Starting point is 00:02:18 Christyx and did did try a little misappropriation for which Jack jumped down his throat. Basically, ever since Horowitz's thing thing they always culture appropriate right like Jack there's just like any other guy who quits his job and then goes on a ship posting rampage and really like you did like you like you've opted after shutting down I'm just one of his casualties there's a bunch of people he's got a lot of stuff that you was great I think he, I think it's great too. Of Twitter, so he could tweet. Yeah. He wanted to get in there.

Starting point is 00:02:48 No, he wants to focus on blockchain. Clearly, he has religion on this and he believes it. It's the future of the internet and he cares deeply about the democratization of access to finance. And I think it would be awesome to hear his views on this. I would love for him to come on and not be badgered about censorship and the role that he used to run. How would you like him talking to you about,

Starting point is 00:03:07 being the CEO of Xenifit's sacks? Like it's, you know. I'm not trying to badger, but I only have one question, which is the reason why he loves Bitcoin is for its censorship resistance. So why when he had the opportunity as CEO of Twitter, didn't he stand tall for resisting censorship?

Starting point is 00:03:22 I don't know, David. Maybe he did. Okay, so just tell us that. Right between the lines, David. I don't know, David. Maybe he did. Okay, so just tell us that. Right between the lines, dude. I don't think he has the answer to the Twitter mob and try to say, here's all the hard decisions I made that you guys didn't see. You know this.

Starting point is 00:03:34 There's a dynamics of a board and lawsuits and hard decisions that the president inciting a riot at the Capitol. You're not supposed to create a list and publish it and say, look at me, I'm such a good boy. I mean, it's not unreasonable. I just think it's a reasonable question for me to ask. Yeah, but the way you asked it was like, isn't Jack at an aweshram like praying, ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba?

Starting point is 00:03:54 Like, you were full dunk mode. I know that's one of your comedy writers writing those tweets for you. Did you get, was that a punched up tweet or not? It was a punched up tweet. I can't actually be punched up. No, it was not punched up. So, it's a lot of funnier than you actually are. That's why I'm saying so. Why did you have to throw my people? Why did you have to go to the art room?

Starting point is 00:04:09 Yeah, I mean, you would get a lot of... Jack has spent years trying to cultivate this like Zen approach. That is not the same with my people, bro. Nothing to do with an art room. Yeah, we're getting lost in the weeds here. We have a war show to do. Give him a music intro. Like a t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t Oscar, everyone's in our audience. Oscar's from the 80s, like Tom Cruise, getting up and cheering and roofing. Okay, here we go.

Starting point is 00:04:48 Go in the wind! Go in the wind! Go in the wind! Go in the wind! Go in the wind! Go in the wind! Go in the wind! Go in the wind!

Starting point is 00:04:56 Go in the wind! Go in the wind! And I said we open source into the fans and they've just got the reason. Love you guys. I'm queen of kinwa! I'm going the wind! So there nice. Queen of King of War. I'm going to leave. So there's a lot of stake here, folks.

Starting point is 00:05:08 And we're going to start it off with biggest winner in politics. A very difficult decision here. Sacks, biggest winner in politics. Who do you got? I got Eric Adams, the new mayor of New York City. He was a huge underdog candidate. He won by not being woke. He rejected the woke

Starting point is 00:05:27 sensibilities of the other Democratic candidates. He is a former cop who still packs a gun. And he made his issues supporting the police, public safety, charter schools, you know, as an instrument of minority advancement. And he even pushed to make New York City a tech and crypto. Bobby is gonna reverse the damage done under the Blasio. He won four or five burrows in the North Dakota primary, and overwhelmingly carried blackly Tino precincts if the Democratic Party has a future

Starting point is 00:05:56 after the rejection of woke. It is Eric Adams. Okay, free, Brent, who you got? Okay, mine's a little esoteric, but my biggest winner for politics this year is the blockchain. And I'll tell you why, I think that the embracing the blockchain as a technology that enables an evolution away from what folks consider to be centralized control systems

Starting point is 00:06:20 and ultimately underscores the interest of the populist notion that's sweeping over the United States is very strong. And I think it's waking up politicians and it's going to wake up the political class to the fact that this system of organizing social, economic, and political action may ultimately evolve us away from the systems that we run today. And it is a very serious threat to the current system of politics and economics and social order. And I think it's starting to kind of rear its head and politicians are starting to wake up to it and they're all thinking very deeply about what it means. And so I would say the blockchain has really kind of created a new model for organization amongst humans that is waking us up in the political class more

Starting point is 00:07:05 than anything else. Okay, Tramoth, who do you got? I think this is pretty obvious, but I think it's Glenn Youngkin, the governor of Virginia. Here's a guy that was a private equity executive who basically had to fade Trump, but still pretend to feign that he needed his support and ran a pretty centrist pro education anti-crime pro-business pro just individual you know empowerment campaign in Virginia which hasn't swung this way for a long time and basically beat Terry McCollough and I think that this is the roadmap, which effectively says whether you're a Democrat or a Republican, grab into these centrist temples and run with it and you're going to get a ton of people in the silent majority who are sick of all of this fringe behavior, both on the left and the right. And so I think Glen Yanken was a real canary in the coal mine for

Starting point is 00:07:59 the political future of America. All right, great selection so far and a lot of diversity in the picking. And so I went with Joe Manchin. Obviously the shadow president who was able to dictate what gets passed and build back better, getting canceled or cut from six plus billion down to maybe 1.5 billion if it ever gets banned. Trillion. Trillion, rather sorry, thank you. Was my, um, hey, sex. Do you do you think the man in politics, a rising star or a falling star after, um, his decision to denounce the bill back better bill this year this week? Well, you guys have to remember that the state he's from West Virginia went for Trump on like 20 points. It is a deep red state and mentioned himself as a major anomaly as a blue politician hanging

Starting point is 00:08:44 on in that state. Yeah. So the Democrats, instead of alienating him, should be thanking their lucky stars that they even haven't for any votes because any other Democratic politician in West Virginia would have gone down to defeat a long time ago. So they are lucky that mansion can vote with them at all on anything. To a layman like myself where I imagine most people who aren't aware of that kind of political circumstance, he looks like a John McCain Maverick kind of guy, like he's coming in and saying, I'm blowing this thing up and he gets all this attention.

Starting point is 00:09:13 I think that's a light of fire for him maybe. I think that's a great analogy, which I think he is the Democrats McCain, you know, he is the guy coming in there casting that very unpopular vote, the single vote like McCain did on on the repeal of Obamacare The single vote that took that down, but the reality is the Republicans on Obamacare didn't have a plausible alternative That's why McCain voted against that and I think here Um in the same way I think mentioned maybe doing the Democrats a favor because we can't afford all of this spent new spending Super interesting. Yeah, here we go. Biggest loser in politics. Who do you got?

Starting point is 00:09:47 Let's go in reverse order now, Shamath. Who do you got? You go first, Jacob. My biggest loser is Elizabeth Warren. She wanted everybody to pay a lot of taxes who were in the billionaires to pay taxes. She wanted to cancel them. And now the largest tax bill ever paid by any American has been completed. According to a tweet from Elon that he paid

Starting point is 00:10:10 $11 billion every program she wanted to work for and fight for has been done just not by her. It's been done by the private sector. She was attacking Bezos for pay and factories and getting to a $15 minimum wage. Now Amazon is regularly paying in the 20s and giving free college something hard and Bernie Sanders were not able to accomplish in their entire careers and now she continues to dunk on capitalists, entrepreneurs as the country basically says we're not interested in socialism, we're not interested in this brand of politics. They lost the election, bite in one, and now this far left politics

Starting point is 00:10:52 is I think becoming, you know, as, as unimportant as the far right, you know, alt-right. She's basically not important. I'll build on your theme and I actually just said the progressive left and the alt right So I think that the sure extremes in America have basically, you know, we've exposed them for the emperor with no clothes So you know, we have tried progressive policies and cities and states in America that's failed We've tried far-right politics at the federal level. That's basically crashed and burned as well. And now what you see is a wave of normalcy. And so, you know, all these chortling, you know, fringe classes get an extreme amount of attention because what they say is salacious or interesting, but underneath there's no real substance or follow through or real skill. There's no

Starting point is 00:11:46 Basic understanding of anything economic policy foreign policy None of it and so they they make for great sound bites, but they cannot govern and so I think the the biggest losers the Progressive left and the all right. Sacriona go next. Yeah, I mean very much in the same vein my choices Kamala Harris the vice president. She is a 28% approval rating Pulsover lagging Biden by about 10 points No vice president has pulled this poorly since Dan quail was the butt of every late night joke about 30 years ago and Boy, am I really dating myself with that reference? What's the problem? Yeah, exactly

Starting point is 00:12:23 The lot of viewers don't even remember what we're talking about. But so the problem here is kind of what Jamalth was saying. She, Harris is an equity scull. The public is tired of being lectured and hectored about its woke sins and trying to compensate for that and showing, you know, warmth with a fake laughing cackle isn't going to reassure anybody who's just been called a white supremacist. Interestingly enough, last year on our award show, Jason Callacanis made the prediction

Starting point is 00:12:52 that Kamala will be the first female president of the United States, just as a gentle reminder that we had pretty good thought. I love it how you called him Callacanis. Callacanis. Well, he likes to monetize his name. Okay, fried bird. That prediction could so come true.

Starting point is 00:13:08 You know, I mean, I, the prediction was made because I thought Biden wasn't going to make it through the first term because he's so old and then he might not be able to function. That was, that was right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That may still happen. Yeah. I mean, I think I might stand by that prediction. That's right.

Starting point is 00:13:21 We'll save it for the prediction show. Okay. We'll save it for a prediction show next week. we'll save it for the prediction show next week. We're taking no weeks off as the new rule here. All right, moving on. Oh, wait, I got my biggest loser. Oh, yeah, very sorry. My biggest political loser is Tony Fauci.

Starting point is 00:13:36 I feel like this guy got totally vised out this year. Determinism is a trap, right? In his role, you have to be deterministic, meaning you're saying you got to do X to get Y in order to get people to take action. And so, you know, determinism was needed for clarity of action to get people to take the vaccine. And he said, Hey, this is going to, you know, ultimately end the pandemic. And the problem with determinism is it drives binary outcomes.

Starting point is 00:14:02 You're either right or you're wrong. And in this case, he was wrong, right? He said, go get the vaccine. The pandemic will end. Everyone got the vaccine and the pandemic certainly didn't end and it evolved and it became this very fuzzy gray math on where we sit today. And I think as a result, he completely lost credibility with a broad swath of people who otherwise would have been kind of still standing behind him. Because I do think he's, you know, he's an honest, just, forthright scientist. But in order to drive outcomes, he had to be very kind of stated and it was a bit of a trap this year and I think he got screwed.

Starting point is 00:14:32 So poor Tony Fauci I mean bless him but it was a rough year. All right biggest political surprise. Sax, what do you got? What's the biggest political surprise? This is where I had Glenn Youngkin you know, I just had to watch Martha already said, you know, Virginia went for Biden by 10 points just the short time before. Youngkin, he secured Trump's endorsement very early and quietly and kept Trump at bay.

Starting point is 00:14:58 And then he ran as a general moderate with a business pedigree as kind of from Martha pointed out. But there was something else going on here as well. I don't think it was just centrist that would flip a blue state red. It was also that issue of schools where McCall have had that gaff in their final debate. He said that parent shouldn't be telling the schools what to teach. Basically, McCall was cited with the the teachers unions. And whereas young kids sided with parents and really I think

Starting point is 00:15:27 voiced their opposition to CRT in the schools. That became the centerpiece of his closing argument and that's what allowed him to win when the election. My biggest political surprise is Joe Manchin. I think that he will probably be looked back on in time as our generations Paul Volker. So let me explain what I mean by that. At the time, Volker was incredibly unpopular for what he did by raising interest rates to basically break the back of inflation. And it really wasn't until 30 or 40 years later through the fullness of time that we appreciated that what he did took an enormous amount of courage because in the moment it created

Starting point is 00:16:10 huge headaches and a lot of pushback and a lot of ill will and I are towards vulgar. Similarly, I think Manchin is just now starting this process of just getting completely pilloried. And people will point to a handful of elements of build back better, like childcare, that have now expired, and those childcare credits, and what it means to working families, and that is true. But there are ways to solve for that

Starting point is 00:16:38 by just going back and re-spending the seven trillion we already spend a little bit better. And in time, the idea and the courage to not pour three more trillion dollars on this dumpster fire without getting ourselves better organized will turn out to be an enormous gift that he gave our kids a profile in courage. Even if we don't right now see it and a lot of people can be angry at it, but that was the biggest political surprise is the desire for a politician. Politician, because like you have to remember Fed Chair is elected, right? You're there. You're in your out. But that was a surprise to

Starting point is 00:17:14 me that he would go through this process and what it meant at a national level for his reputation to get to the other side. Yeah. Okay. Freeberg, what do you got? My biggest political surprise was that that insurrection crowd made their way into the Capitol building. I mean, do you guys remember how shocking those images were? Yeah. And what an incredible day that was.

Starting point is 00:17:33 I mean, it was almost a year ago now and we watched on screen what felt like the crumbling of institutions that we always took for granted and assumed were impenetrable. Both politically but more importantly, physically, and to see people physically break into that capital building and cause mayhem and damage, it really exposed, I think, a nerve.

Starting point is 00:17:55 And it was a really shocking moment, a shocking day. So to this day, I still think that that's been the biggest surprise for me of the year. I don't think any of us thought that would happen. Both in terms of that we let our defenses think any of us thought that that would happen, both in terms of like that we let our defenses down and let people into that building like that, and that there was enough of a ground swell to break their way into that building. Both sides were surprising.

Starting point is 00:18:13 And also just super disturbing to watch a bunch of elected officials cowering under tables while secret service had guns drawn and doors were kicked in. And also while some elected officials were kind of endorsing the behavior to some extent, you know, at a distance, the whole thing was just shocking. And I think a lot of us realize that maybe our democracy, and I think I mentioned this on the show last year, is a little more fragile than perhaps we think it is. Trump was the biggest stress test ever for me. The biggest political surprise was Kamala Harris being sidelined. Where is she? What is she working on? I thought that the Democratic Party was going to want to feature her showcase her with some great projects

Starting point is 00:18:55 in order to maybe prep her for running if need be in 24 and certainly in 2028 and it seems like they have sidelined her deliberately and they don't believe in her, which is they don't believe in the first female vice president and of color. I don't think it's that. I think that they think that she's not, she's not, they think that she's not electable and so they're. Yeah. So maybe they're racist, J.com. Or maybe they are saving her till after the midterms and then going to feature her. I don't know what the strategy is. They're going to make it.

Starting point is 00:19:27 Like a fighter. They're saying, they're protecting her. But if she was good enough to get to help get Biden in office, why isn't she good enough to feature now? It just doesn't make sense to me that she was so silent. Well, they did give her a task like they sent her to the border. The problem is she doesn't have anything to say that will resonate with the American people, but also be acceptable to her progressive base. For her perceived progressive base because I actually think that she also has the ability

Starting point is 00:19:59 and has in the past had the ability to be tough. She had an order, G.A. I mean, she's ripped. So she completely has the ability to just be nails if she wants to be. But again, she, and again, maybe even Biden to some degree, still believe that the progressive left is the future of the party.

Starting point is 00:20:20 I think that most of us here think that it's a head fake. And until she comes to those terms herself, she's going to continue to be sidelined. But if she tax back to the center and actually gets out there, I think she's really capable of doing some stuff here. She's very articulate. She's very punchy. She can really tell the truth. But then she can also really just chuck and jive

Starting point is 00:20:45 and say nothing when she wants to. And that's just what's, that corpus beak isn't working for her. Did anybody else notice Freeberg, Sacks, that the initial reaction to Manchin's vote or saying he wasn't gonna vote for this on Sunday during the talk shows, was like dunking on him, oh my God, he's horrible.

Starting point is 00:21:02 And then immediately Monday, they were trying to reconcile with him and say, hey, let's have a reasonable discussion about this. We value your opinion as a partner. Well, it was this weird emotional reaction. Like I got this email. I forwarded to you guys from Jen. Yeah, I talked about it.

Starting point is 00:21:15 Yeah. And it's like crazy in that email, like in that in her press release or whatever that email that she sent to us, a bunch of us got it. I mean, Jen's going crazy. Yeah. It's hysterical. It was such CYA by the administration, like they wasted everyone's time for six months pushing this bill forward without checking to see if the swing votes would go for it. So then the swing votes don't go for it. The bill fails and they're blaming those votes.

Starting point is 00:21:39 Wait a second, David, does that make sense? I think it's that they just ignored what the swing votes were saying. He's been saying from the beginning, it's too big. His number was 1.5 and they just said, you know what, we'll wait to the end and then try to high pressure him or something or flip him at the end. It doesn't make sense to push for a strategy. It doesn't make sense to push for that big a bill when it's a 50-50 Senate. They should have gone for something smaller and more reasonable. I think either that or they should have made a better calculation on inflation because

Starting point is 00:22:03 again, the minute that we had these big inflation prints and The fat basically changed their tapering posture that was the bullet in the gun and you basically handed mentioned a loaded weapon and said here You go do what you will was a terrible betting strategy by the Republican well he warned them He warned them he warned that he was worried about inflation and they were saying it was transitory and then he turned out to be right. Right. All right. Biggest winner in business, free broker you got. Biggest winner, 2021 business. My biggest winner in business goes back to the GameStop days and I think it was the retail

Starting point is 00:22:37 investor class. You know, they were always there to trade on the wings and in the wake of the institutions and the markets prior to, I think, what took place this year. And after what happened this year, where they were able to coalesce and organize, to make trades that move the market against institutions in a really meaningful way and broke several institutions in the process, it highlighted that retail has power, retail can organize and retail in aggregate can act to be a stronger force in the markets than institutions. And so the retail investor is my biggest winner for 2021.

Starting point is 00:23:11 Who's your biggest winner, Chimoff, in business? I mean, this is pretty obvious. It's Elon Musk, you know, as a former owner of Tesla, as a current shareholder of SpaceX as somebody who sold him a company this year, David and I did, to see him work is magical, absolutely magical. And I think that this guy, you know, there are these impresarios who just have these virtuosos who have these moments where they're just in the zone. And he's in the zone, he's in his zone of mastery. And to see a guy like that execute, I think, is a privilege. So he's not Elon, who would you have? Because it's pretty obvious that's Elon. So did you have a second place consideration? I would actually probably double down with what Friedberg said. I do think that there was,

Starting point is 00:24:02 it's more sort of what I would say is the outsider class versus insiders. I think that whether it's blockchain or Web 3 or NFTs or GameStop, this was the year, the Constitution Dow. This was the year that loose affiliations of individuals could compete on a level playing field with organized capital. And I think that that's a really important trend for the future. Saks, who do you have biggest winner in business? If it is Elon, who's your runner-up? Yeah, so I mean, can't fault the Elon choice. It's pretty obvious. But I

Starting point is 00:24:37 would say in our world, the biggest winner was Tiger Global. They basically productized growth stage capital by far. Good. The biggest deployer of late stage funding. They productized it. So pretty much founders can just send their metrics on like a single sheet of paper and they get a term sheet within two days. They did by far the most deals. It's really the soft bank strategy done right. That's a great pick. 15 billion, I think it's the amount they deployed this year. I don't know if you guys heard that number, but... Yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 00:25:07 In a single year to invest 15 billion, the CMF 5 year fund, you're at a $75 billion run rate. It's pretty incredible. I mean, it really is the size of Vision Fund. And I heard, I don't know if you guys heard, but they are heavily dependent, not dependent, but they've built infrastructure with third parties who source all this data for them to really kind of measure everything prior to making investments.

Starting point is 00:25:30 So they built a machine. It's amazing. My biggest winner in business is the Aang, not the Fang, drop the F and go with the A and G. Amazon has a new CEO and they have a Mr. Beat. Apple is about to hit 3 trillion. And Susan Wojekki in YouTube, if you don't know, is now a 2 billion users, 30 billion in revenue. And this, of course, is after Elon, because that's the obvious choice.

Starting point is 00:25:55 So after Elon, Alphabet stock up 66%, Apple stock up 31%, you guys know what's going on with those big companies. So I'm going to go with the Yang. Biggest loser in business. The biggest loser in business. Who do you have, Friedberg? Who's your biggest loser?

Starting point is 00:26:09 Well, I went through the opposite of my biggest winner. I went for those institutions that got their luncheaton by the retail, Gabe Plotkin, and he lost so much money, shorting GameStop against these guys guys buying GameStop to the moon. He had to borrow $2.75 billion from Citadel and 0.72 just to get through his month. I mean, talk about embarrassing. Talk about reversal of fortune.

Starting point is 00:26:39 He's obviously been a renowned investor prior to this. And there's a few others that were, casualties of war, white square, a firm in London, shut down, half a billion AUM. So all these folks who tried to bet against retail during the game stopped saga and since, thinking that the world was the way it used to be have had to kind of change them.

Starting point is 00:26:59 It's amazing that that and the insurrection both happened in this year. Like time is moving. Oh my god, this year is insane. Yeah, it's been a crazy year. All of this happened in this year. Like time is moving. Oh my God, this year isn't sane. Yeah. It's been a crazy year. I mean, all of this happened in this past year. It's crazy to think about. We were here and I was up in Tahoe skiing

Starting point is 00:27:12 and all this stuff was breaking. It was crazy that time. That was actually our record episode when all had that breakout episode. Who do you have for your biggest loser, David Sachs? I have Chinese billionaires who are the biggest loser this year. I don't know if you guys remember.

Starting point is 00:27:25 Yeah, exactly. A year ago, we were all asking where is Jack Ma? Well, he eventually turned up looking very thin and kind of broken. But his experience was just an early sort of manifestation and sort of a canary in the coal mine of a larger CCP crackdown on all Chinese billionaires. And the CCP really seems to be increasing its control and putting these people under its thumb. And there are a bunch of tech companies there,

Starting point is 00:27:50 like Alibaba, DD, Tencent, Baidu, JD.com. They've all been targeted for fines and tighter controls. And China's pretty much shut down the foreign IPO market for their tech companies. They've been... Moving it to Hong Kong, right? Yeah, exactly. The CCP has basically brought all the billionaires

Starting point is 00:28:08 under their thumb. Wow. Tremoth, who do you have? And this is amazing, just so the audience knows, we do not reveal our choices until the moment. Yeah, yeah, it's really great to hear. Which makes it so great. Yeah, I love hearing some of these things.

Starting point is 00:28:19 It makes me think for sure. Yeah, my biggest loser is Big Tech. If you look at this year and you annotate it, not for their stock price, but for what I think is sort of the precursor to longer term success, there was a lot of signs that there's pressure building. So, whether that's measured in lawsuits, fines, bad PR, if you put all of that stuff together, I think the thing that that drives is decaying morale. And when you have decaying morale, you have human capital flight. So people leave.

Starting point is 00:28:56 There are some articles just recently, even about an exodus that, you know, Novi, Novi, I don't know how to pronounce it, the cryptocurrency business of Meta. It's just a really, really difficult thing to deal with when folks start walking out the door because they're just bummed out from working there. And if you just, you know, Google searched the number of issues that all of these companies collectively are dealing with, I think that this is sort of peak big tech market cap is probably within the next year or two.

Starting point is 00:29:30 Interesting. This is just so great that we all had different choices. I picked the Ang as the winner. I'm picking the FN Fang as the loser. Matter was a complete flop. It was a stupid idea to change the name of the company. The product they showed in that big tip off was like every science fiction movie we've seen for the last 30 years, the leaks, the Apple headwinds against their ads, the political headwinds, and my last point

Starting point is 00:29:57 is exactly Chimatz's last point, which is no one wants to work there. It's becoming more and more difficult if you're in Silicon Valley or you're a tech executive to see a reason to go work at that company. I think that their VR efforts, AR efforts will be beaten handily by Apple and by the Metaverse and open source, slash decentralized solutions. I think the F in Fang should be replaced with the T of Tesla and B-Tang. Facebook meditated up 25% this year,

Starting point is 00:30:23 Jack. I listen, I do think it's a juggernaut. And when things go wrong, it does take a while. So these are forward looking. If people are leaving now, maybe you'd see the impact event three, four, five years. But I would not buy the stock. I'd buy the other three letters. I would buy the tang, but not the F and Fang.

Starting point is 00:30:39 But I think it's a good counterpoint. Yeah, these things take a while to unwrap. Well, I think, you know, I think the better trade is pick the one that you love in fang, and short the one that you hate in fang, and if you get that right, you can make a lot of money pretty safe. Big spread there, right?

Starting point is 00:30:52 The spread trade, like we talked about. All right, biggest business surprise. What do you got, SACS? What's your biggest business surprise? Is your SACS? I thought the biggest business surprise was tech leaders and startups moving to Miami, its emergence from really nothing in the tech scene to being a major tech hub.

Starting point is 00:31:08 It was just a year ago, one year ago last December, that Deleon sort of mused on Twitter about, hey, can we just relocate, it's looking value to Miami. The Miami mayor of Francis Suarez jumped in, he responded, how can I help? And then since then, it's just been snowballing. And San Francisco has basically been sliding into what it's become. Miami just keeps blowing up. And it helps, I think, what's been happening on the state level there that DeSantis

Starting point is 00:31:36 has kept the state open for business and he's kept schools open. And of course, the tax rate is zero. The income tax and the capital gains tax that is are zero. So it's really pretty amazing how fast it has become a major tech hub. My answer, which was really surprising to me starting in January, and I think I started texting you guys in January saying, I really think we should talk about this on the pod if you'll remember.

Starting point is 00:32:01 And it's obviously just become a crescendo since then, it's NFTs. And it really has been incredible to watch how the individual folks in crypto have embraced NFTs as a way to tokenize the value that creators can bring to the world. And I think, yeah, there's a lot of fluff and a lot of noise and a lot of bubbles going on within this NFK space right now. Most of it will die and it will look terrible when people lose lots of money and feel bad about the decisions they made during this phase. But what I think is really wonderful about it is the opportunity it creates for creators to monetize their talent in a way that doesn't require them going through middlemen to get distribution and middlemen who take huge slugs

Starting point is 00:32:46 or huge chunks of the margin out of what they create. And this can ultimately translate into music, into art, into writing, into all sorts of things. So I'm pretty excited, not necessarily about where NFT sit today. I think it's zaster where it sits today, but I think over the long run, I just love it. Why is it a zaster? I just think there's too much or it's it today, but I think over the long run, I just love it. Why is it a disaster?

Starting point is 00:33:05 I just think there's too much of this bubbly stuff that's going on where people are buying into speculative transactions that are gonna lose them money and then people are gonna be really hurt and really upset. But the general core tech. And I love the fact. I love the fact that creators, people that are great at art and people that are creative can develop stuff

Starting point is 00:33:22 and make money because people will appreciate it and pay for it. I just think that's awesome. Fantastic. All right. So for me, it was that DAO's were able to raise $40 million in a couple of days for this constitution and basically capture the entire world's imagination for a 72 hour news cycle. Much in the way the day traders did with AMC and GameStop to

Starting point is 00:33:48 Freeberg's point earlier in the big winners. And I have a dual one here. I'm absolutely surprised about this, you know, the Dow that was able to raise 40 million for the Constitution. But I was also disappointed that the SEC in your 10 plus of crypto has not defined the rules of the road yet, so that one group of people, professional capital allocators, play by one set of rules, and then another group of people, DAO's tokens, are playing by no set of rules, or their interpretation of unclear rules, I guess would be the most charitable way.

Starting point is 00:34:23 So that's my biggest surprise. We have to have a regulatory framework for crypto, for DAO's, for NFTs, for tokens, and it's just crazy that it hasn't happened yet. What do you got, Shema? My big business winner breakout company, I have two, but they're the same really as Moderna slash biotech. You know, these were guys that were kind of swimming at the edges of science and R&D and somewhat was just incapable of putting one foot in front of the other until this pandemic and through a bunch of, you know, emergency use authorizations, these guys have really shown up to help the world. And in 2020, I think they

Starting point is 00:35:01 cemented themselves as now on a path to not just be a vaccine maker for COVID, but a whole bunch of other things, including cancer treatments and everything else. So I think these two companies really took a big step toward in 2021. Absolutely. Just as a side note, OpenC had 8 million a month of volume at the beginning of the year in January in 3.46 billion in August. Just to give you an idea of the scale of that. Okay, best science breakthrough.

Starting point is 00:35:29 What do you got free, Berger? Everybody wants to know the Sultan of Sciences, best science breakthrough. I'm a little bit blinders on this one because I think I mentioned this on the show a few weeks ago and I'm spending quite a bit of time at work on it, which is that starch synthesis system that was demonstrated by those Chinese scientists. The system itself is likely not going to be the production system that saves the world,

Starting point is 00:35:55 but the concept that we can take proteins that are expressed by different plants and put them together in a tank. Then that tank can convert molecules from one form to another by leveraging these proteins that just interact and move around in the tank. It's really an incredible demonstration. And the demonstration is inspiring. We can take carbon out of the atmosphere and make food with a minimal amount of renewable electricity.

Starting point is 00:36:21 And I think that's really a moment that will inspire a whole new realm of industrial synthetic biology work, a lot of which I hope to kind of build and participate in pretty heavily in the work that we do day to day, but it was really exciting for me. So the start synthesis system is your best science breakthrough. What do you got, Saks? I've got these new oral COVID antiviral pills that are coming out from Pfizer and Merck. The FDA is supposed to be approving them by the end of this week. As you recall last year around this time, it was these new mRNA vaccines from Pfizer Moderna, but we now have to admit that the vaccines have not ended the pandemic because

Starting point is 00:37:00 the virus can mutate its spike proteins around the vaccine. So the vaccine, by itself, cannot end the pandemic. These new pills have, I think, a very good shot of doing it next year because they're protease inhibitors. So they stop the virus from replicating. And just, and even if the spike proteins mutate, it will not prevent these protease inhibitors from working. So I am hopeful that this will be the thing, hopefully, that ends the pandemic next year

Starting point is 00:37:32 are these new antiviral pills. Great one. I would like to make a counter to SACSIS. Oh, point. I would be very cautious about the side effects that are going to arise from these protease inhibitors. And, you know, they're not as well studied as they normally would be, but they have a serious biological effect in normal cells in the human body.

Starting point is 00:37:52 And I think as more people use them, you'll see more crazy stories about side effects that are really significant in the liver. What do you mean the side effects would be? There's a lot that are well documented, but the way they work biologically is they disrupt certain systems and those are not just systems related to the virus their systems in our own cells And so I personally quite nervous about them. I know that folks are pretty encouraged by them and excited But I'm nervous about them. There's a similar medication that's been developed for HIV right That's called PrEP right?

Starting point is 00:38:23 Does that cause similar side effects? Or because people use that prophylaxically? Yeah, to some extent, and the dosage matters. And so normally you would go through many more years, I think, of testing on these things to kind of truly quantify. When you have half a percent or 1% of a population, let's say take the most extreme case, die, then a million people use it,

Starting point is 00:38:46 you're gonna have a lot of people dying. And I'm not sure we've really gotten the boundaries of this yet. And the dosage is pretty significant on them. So yeah, like let's keep a watchful eye on this stuff, but I'm hopeful, but I'm also nervous. Well, hopefully the number of people who need to take it free, but correct me if I'm wrong.

Starting point is 00:39:05 If we got this many people, Vax, who will not need to take it. And then, Omkron, Omkron. My biggest optimism is just that Omkron is a much less virulent virus and it sweeps through the population and we slowly see this pandemic kind of becoming less severe.

Starting point is 00:39:21 Which is what was predicted. Do you think herd immunity even exists? In the way that the virus evolves, no. So, by the way, it's not binary. It's not like, hey, you get herd immunity and no one's gonna catch this thing. There's clearly a spectrum of immunity, meaning like I can maybe get the virus

Starting point is 00:39:39 and be somewhat contagious for half a day or a day and I don't even know it. And then I'm spreading it for that half day but I don't even know I had it. That's kind of, you know, not all the way over to herd immunity and the traditional kind of definition of the way that we talk about it, but it reduces the spread and the severity and aggregate. On the other end, it's like everyone gets it.

Starting point is 00:39:58 It spreads like crazy. No vaccine stops it, changes anything. No amount of antibodies changes anything, and everyone just dies. And so somewhere in the middle, I think it's where we find our ground. But I don't think that the traditional definition, or the way that people talk about herd immunity, which is, hey, everyone get the shot

Starting point is 00:40:15 and this thing's over, is gonna play out that way at all. This is gonna be a slow, slow wind down. Okay, and to give Schramat some credit, you said it would be a nothing burger, and so far it looks like deaths and hospitalization specifically ICUs admittance has not turned out to be a major issue yet knock on wood. Unless something escapes from the lab again, I think that we're breake we're going to be

Starting point is 00:40:37 okay. I think this is the end of the end. So that would be so great if this was the end of the end game. My best science breakthrough is that this year we actually were able to inject in vivo so in the body genetic code for CRISPR. Two cases specifically, one was to basically reduce the production of this toxic liver protein in a bunch of folks. And then the second one, moderately improved the vision of some people who had in some form of inherited blindness.

Starting point is 00:41:06 And that's pretty incredible stuff that you can make something, put it into your body. And then your body does the work of editing out the bad genes. And that's a, so I think that's a pretty incredible breakthrough. I had the start show on my list too, but I went with starship.

Starting point is 00:41:24 For people who don't know, I'm March 3rd Starship, serial number 10, SN10, completed SpaceX 3rd, high altitude flight test of a prototype type, and they were able to ascend, and then reorient themselves and land. If you don't know, Starship is ginormous when compared to the Falcon and the other rockets

Starting point is 00:41:44 that SpaceX has produced. I got to see it actually. I went to Boka and When you look inside that nose cone You can fit 300 people in it. It is a payload that is absolutely unprecedented in terms of sending people or things to space and the fact that this has succeeded means all the folks at SpaceX need to do is to scale it. And they're pretty good at scaling things. They just had their hundredth landing of their smaller rocket.

Starting point is 00:42:17 And so when this big boy, this BFR, big freaking rocket' rocket, gets going. It's going to change the nature of our species as multi-planetary and being able to reach and put things in space that we've never been able to do. So kind of an engineering feat, but I put it under science, and also to not pick the same one as Freiber. Do you think starship is gonna to be able to orbit your anus and not leave it out there

Starting point is 00:42:47 no net and that i have veto rights you can't but i think you can no no all of this needs to stay all right biggest flash in the pan biggest flash in the pan sacks you pick people i you tell me that no i said we love people please yeah

Starting point is 00:43:04 now that was yours uh I had I think the the use of the word transitory was my biggest flash in the pan. It seemed like for a brief moment that every administration official, every Democratic political consultant, every talking head on TV kept using the word transitory. It was very much the vocabulary word of the day. But now it turned out that the inflation was not transitory and so the use of the word transitory, I predict will in fact be transitory. my summary like that. What do you got? Chimoth. I picked all things metaverse and Web 3. And Web 3. Yeah, I did.

Starting point is 00:43:54 I did. If you guys were around in the emergence of Web 2.0, there was a period where this gaggle of investors were just clamoring about Web 2.0. None of us understood what it is and we were building it. It turned out. Yeah. And so I think that these trends actually have names and those names are of companies and those companies create experiences that people want. And so I just think that this whole concept of Metaverse and Web 3 goes away and we replace it with real solutions for people that give them value and then we'll be obsessed with these companies.

Starting point is 00:44:34 And this, this two will be transitory. I went with the Constitution now. Constitution Dow, while I believe Jason that the concept was inspiring and will echo for quite some time with other improved versions and different applications, this particular Dow caused a lot of people to lose a lot of money in gas fees, transferring tokens over to cover the expense of the ultimate purchase that was not actually done. It felt a little disorganized. There was questions around equity and securities and the legality and misaligned expectations.

Starting point is 00:45:15 And while I get that there was a good intent and that folks that were involved in it were felt like it worked and I did what it was meant to do, which was to be inspiring, that particular Dow came and went in three days. And I'm not to discredit the concept, and I think that more will come in the future. But it really was such a loud moment. And then it went silent two days later. Yep. Okay.

Starting point is 00:45:38 And I picked the woke socialist leadership of cities, specifically the once great city of San Francisco, where they thought they had figured it all out and that they would be able to run rough shot over the citizens of their own city. And lo and behold, when an investigative journalist was hired by myself and Gary Tand did the Democratic recall and SAC supported the Republican recall. Low and behold, London breed has decided that she does not want to get recalled and she is fed up with the bullshit in San Francisco and Chesa booting and all of these whack jobs are all going to get voted out and recalled and we've seen it and came up earlier in

Starting point is 00:46:22 the program, so I'm to beat a dead horse. But these failed policies of letting people run amok and not having some base level of protection and not listening to your citizens. They belong in a textbook and in a preschool. You could talk about them in graduate school. Yes, this is great for a college dorm to talk about what would life be like as a communist, as a socialist.

Starting point is 00:46:42 In the real world, people want to be safe when they take their kids to fucking school, period end of story. And if people don't feel safe, you're not going to get reelected game over. I also think that people have a reasonable right to have their kids educated, not managed to some water down lowest common denominator. So as to not, so as to try to make everybody around them feel better. Yeah, 100%. All right. I have a feeling that we're going to, this is going to sweep here. Best CEO? Should we just say three, two, one and say the name?

Starting point is 00:47:17 I'll go first. I'm going to pick Satya Nadella. Oh, well done. And the reason I say that is that, you know, he, if you look at this track record and I thought this business could not get any bigger, but it just is a compounding absolute juggernaut in a machine. He has completely turned that company around. And from, you know, big chunky acquisitions, he's unafraid to pull the trigger and rip the money in, LinkedIn, GitHub. This year he did nuance. The product portfolio, you know, we had to compete with him at Slack when he was, you know, he decided to turn the sites on, on, with teams onto us. We had no choice but to basically sell the sales force. This guy is a master executor, has kept the entire company out of the press, has had the least amount of pushback around their growth and expansion, the least amount of lawsuits, the least amount of bad PR.

Starting point is 00:48:14 So just in terms of, you know, first class CEO, he's running a masterclass. He's crushed it. Crushed it. Crushed it. Crushed it. Crushed it. Crushed it. Crushed it. Crushed it. Crushed it. Crush it. Crush it. Crush it. Crush it. Crush it. Crush it.

Starting point is 00:48:27 Crush it. Crush it. Crush it. Crush it. Crush it. Crush it. Crush it. Crush it.

Starting point is 00:48:35 Crush it. Crush it. Crush it. Crush it. Crush it. Crush it. Crush it. Crush it.

Starting point is 00:48:43 Crush it. Crush it. Crush it. Crush it. Crush it. Crush it. Crush it. Crush it. Crush it. Crush it. Crush it. Crush it. Crush it. Crush it. Crush it. Crush it. Crush it. Crush it. Crush it. Crush it. Crush it. Crush it. Crush it. Crush it. Crush it. Crush it. Crush it. Crush it. Crush it. Crush it. Crush it. Crush it. Crush it. Crush it. Crush it. Crush it. Crush it. Crush it. Crush it. Crush it. Crush it. Crush it. Crush it. Crush it. Crush it. Crush it. Crush it. Crush it. Crush. Crush. Crush it. Crush it. Crush it. Crush it. Crush it. Crush.. Crush it. Crush it. Crush it. Crush it. Crush it. Crush. Crush it free. We have smashed through the curry ceiling. Absolutely. There's curry. I've penetrated the samosa ceiling. There we go. Free breakfast. We got here making me hungry. I know. I'm having crab curry tonight. Can you believe it? I went fishing. I told you guys this. I went, I don't bleep out the name. I went

Starting point is 00:49:00 finishing fishing and we caught some crabs. And so we're having crab in the bay. I'm in Fishing Fishing Fishing and we caught some crabs. And so we're having crab in the Bay San Francisco Bay. Yeah. Oh, did you go up to like Chrissy Field? And we go we go to the pier and then they take us out past Golden Gate Bridge, two point reas. We caught raw fish, which we ate yesterday. Delicious. This is on a boat. You did it on a boat. Yeah. Oh, great. Great captain. Awesome. I wanted to. Yeah. it's cool. I would take London my 12 year old crabbing when I lived in San Francisco off of Chrissy Fielde and we bring crab to home and all that.

Starting point is 00:49:31 You can get these incredible crabbing. You can get a one day sport license from the state of California. It's good for 10 fish and 10 crab. It's amazing. All right, so who do you got? Freeberg. Best CEO.

Starting point is 00:49:42 Well, I like the Jack and Elon going direct experience this year. And what I mean by that is it's less about like how well did the business perform? I mean, so many tech company CEOs have performed so well this year, it's hard to pick someone for driving business outcomes. But what I liked about Jack and Elon, Jack in particular in the last day,

Starting point is 00:50:06 is having a voice and going direct and being inspiring. I think that leadership is all about defining where you're headed, and then creating religion in the troops to follow you to go there. And I think the way that both of these folks speak directly to people and the way that they speak authentically, and that they tell a big story about where they believe the world should go and why you

Starting point is 00:50:28 should follow them to get there. Creates a model that a lot of other CEOs I think should and will start to follow. And I think we'll see a lot more of this kind of like Twitter going direct type of activity happening in the years ahead. Sex, what do you got? Best CEO. I have Brian Armstrong because it was about this time a year ago that he drew a line in the sand

Starting point is 00:50:49 and said that he was not going to allow politics in the workplace. It was going to be a demilitarized zone for politics. It was pulling people off mission. And a year later, he gave us an update. It's been the best thing they ever did. They gave a generous severance package to anyone who didn't go along with it It was only 5% took it. They then went on to have a very successful IPO

Starting point is 00:51:11 It's now a 65 billion dollar public company and A year later they are more mission focused. They've attracted more employees their diversity numbers have knocked on down And the reason I pick I'm picking him is not just because of the business success But I think there's a lot of CEOs. In fact, I'd say most CEOs, including some of the bigger names that we're all kind of talking about, are secretly would love to do what Brian did. They would love to basically ban politics in their workplace. But for whatever reason, they just don't have the co-honase to do it. I applaud Brian for taking the hit of the New York Times hit piece that then came after him.

Starting point is 00:51:48 And to stick to his guns, he did this policy. And I think Coinbase had a great year. Amazing choice. Wow, three great choices. Satya, Jack, Armstrong, I think Elon clearly is, but I'm gonna pick somebody else so it's not all Elon all the time. I'm gonna go to Frank Sluitman from Snowflake.

Starting point is 00:52:05 This company has grown incredibly at an incredible velocity, but I just read his book. I got a pre-order of his book, pre-release of his book, called Ampidup, and I had him on this week and started up, so it should come out in the new year when the book comes out. And he's a killer. He absolutely seems like a killer.

Starting point is 00:52:22 He seems like an absolute killer. And the book basically is, I do not care about how you think business works here is the zero some game of competitive business and here's 205 pages it's a must read. And he just wants to win and so my hats off to him a hundred billion dollar company. And they've absolutely crushed it so best investor. a billion dollar company and they've absolutely crushed it. So, best investor, Chimath, you need to pick yourself for the third year in a row or you guys somebody else in mind. This one, I think is an absolutely easy one, but it's my dear friend Dan Loeb. Oh, founder of CIO.

Starting point is 00:52:56 When did that happen? Founder and CIO, third point. And as I've seen, I talked to him yesterday, actually, I call him just a wish in my happy birthday, by the way, it's his birthday. I remember that. But he has shown the widest range this year and really put everything together. Yet again, kind of one of these virtuoso performances. Early stage success, so he was an early stage investor.

Starting point is 00:53:24 I think they did the Series A and Cental and One that had a big IPO this year. Growth investing, he was a great investor, an early investor in Rivion, that one public this year. He had great public performance in Upstart and a bunch of other ones. Activism, he went after Shell.

Starting point is 00:53:42 Crypto, I think he's an investor in FTX and a bunch of other things. I mean, just tundered. And to be able to put together a team that can execute across all of those business lines and risk manage and then where he still sizes, like I'm telling you, like, it is so hard to size this stuff properly and get it right. He did an incredible job. And he's just a beautiful, lovely human being. So, Dan, we're with Oihil, we're moving at a nice pace. I picked the Sequoia Fund, the new Evergreen Sequoia

Starting point is 00:54:13 and the Sequoia Fund, the new Evergreen Fund. Obviously over the past two years, they've had Door Dash Airbnb, Snowflake Unity, all these incredible companies worth over $300 billion combined. And now those LPs get to keep their money in this one vehicle. And I think it's going to make Sequoia even more powerful, great innovation and shout out to my friend Ruloff.

Starting point is 00:54:32 And I gave a runner up to Brad Gersoner, friend of the pod, who obviously did snowflake last year, but I had the grab IPO this year, which I think was the largest back in history. And I don't think it traded particularly well yet, but congratulations to Brad as my runner-up. Who do you got sex? Well, my first thought was Nancy Pelosi, but she just got my performance. Yeah, I don't think it counts if you do it through insider trading, so I had to wear out. Okay, sure. So my actual choice, my actual choice is Ken Griffin, the founder of Citadel. He generated something like 10% returns on a $500 billion fund. I mean, just mammoth, mammoth amounts of money, but it wasn't just his economic

Starting point is 00:55:15 or he's obviously a cash generating machine, but it wasn't just that it was also the way that he came out on this whole Wall Street Bat's Robin Hood scandal way back in January, remember of the whole payment for order flow as a gigantic scandal with Robin Hood. And he, along with Vlad and others, was hauled up to Capitol Hill, but they could not lay a glove on him. He demonstrated, I think, in command testimony, that all these conspiracy theories around his role had no merit.

Starting point is 00:55:47 And the populist revolt around this whole pinment, forder, forder Robin Hood thing broke against the rock of Ken Griffin. He comes out as a huge winner both economically and politically. And you left out the most important part. He was the super villain in buying the Constitution now. Yeah, and he got revenge. For one extra doll. Yes.

Starting point is 00:56:08 He got revenge on the crypto people. That's right. He got the dog on the crypto people. That's right. Great, great financial troll. Freeberg, do we get yours yet? Best investor of 2021. I kind of stuck to private markets just because they're illiquid, which means it's harder

Starting point is 00:56:21 to source. Not everyone has the same data. We all have different data and different points of view. So within that, I kind of said, look, what makes the best investor? And number one is obviously good returns. Who's got the best returns? But second is how scalable is your investing machine?

Starting point is 00:56:37 And third is how durable is it? Like, does it get worse as you scale off? I know where you're going with this. So I had three kind of finalists. One was Founders Fund. And I would argue they probably have the best consistent returns in terms of the multiples on their funds. Tiger Global, which we talked about earlier, which I would argue is the most scalable and durable as we've seen deploying 50 billion this year, and then finally, Sequoia, which has near the best returns scalable and durable with this new transition. You talked

Starting point is 00:57:04 about, and ultimately, Sequoia won out. So that's my trade-off of success. It's one of the first times we've had two of the same in the voting. This is incredible. Best turnaround. What do you got for best turnaround, Shema? Best turnaround. I picked Ford.

Starting point is 00:57:21 Enormous performance. This year the stock's up 130 odd percent. Good portfolio mix of gas guzzling cars that still make a ton of money like the Ford F-150s, but they have the Mustang, they have electric versions of the Ford F-150s. They had some great investments, I think they printed like a $20 billion gain on Rivian. So it's just a really, really good turnaround from what that company was, which was if you talked any car company that could have been up 132% at the beginning of 2021, it would not have been for.

Starting point is 00:57:57 So well done by that team. Who do you have? Sex. Are you an investor in Fortsima? No. No. So I went a little different for this. I said the best turnaround was Kyle Rittenhouse's reputation. As you recall, Rittenhouse shot three white attackers, including two of them were sex offenders at a violent BLM protests in Kenosha. The media then

Starting point is 00:58:20 painted him without any evidence as a white supremacist terrorist who went there looking to shoot people like some sort of frustrated school shooter. It turned out not to be true. There was clear video evidence at the scene that he acted in self-defense. Once there was a jury trial, all of this came out. He was acquitted on all charges and the prosecution was revealed to be politely motivated. I would say that written house now has this freedom, and he has a reputation back in the eyes of all fair observers.

Starting point is 00:58:49 Who do you got free, Burke? Well, I went from who was in the word shape and came back from that. And I put we work on here, which is an obvious and easy choice. We work to me is like Rocky Balboa. Rocky Balboa could not win the match. Rocky Balboa got so beat up, goes to his corner.

Starting point is 00:59:12 He gets patched up, he's bleeding from his eyes, bleeding from his nose, he's literally about to die. His coach gives him a little smack on the butt and says, get back out there and he keeps going. He's not going to win the match. But man, for we work to go from where it was a few years ago, which was days or weeks away from bankruptcy, billions of dollars of money injected by SoftBank,

Starting point is 00:59:32 and for them to orchestrate, basically this whole juggernaut into what looks like a business now and get it public via SPAC, and it now has enough capital and a good game plan, and it looks like maybe a normal, you know, challenge technology business was really quite a turnaround. There was no one to sell this thing too. They had to get in there,

Starting point is 00:59:55 and they had to rework this whole thing, and they reworked rework, and Rocky Balboa is gonna make it to the 10th round. He may not win the match, but, you know, he's still in it. It was pretty impressive to see them get it out this year. All right, listen, I struggled with this one. I had two companies that I really wanted to highlight for two different reasons.

Starting point is 01:00:13 One was Twitter, which had no product velocity and people thought, I'm taking out financial performance right now, I'm just looking at the product itself. And my lord, have they increased their product velocity, releasing newsletters, audio spaces, and countless other features. So I like them, but I actually think Disney, which was, and it hasn't performed well this year, but they had 44 million subs. They added 44 million paid subs this year and people thought the imparks

Starting point is 01:00:47 would be a problem, et cetera. And I think they're going to have an absolute killer future. If Apple had not, if it hadn't been for antitrust right now, I think Apple would be looking at buying Disney if they had had any way to get it through there because the jargon has been amazing. What do they turn around exactly like turn around means it's crappy and then it's not crappy. Well, I didn't do stock price, but I think they had a major threat and a major question of could they actually create their own streaming platform? Would it work and getting out of the pandemic could the parks rebound the parks have rebounded? I see. I think they're going to roll over Netflix. So the sentiment was

Starting point is 01:01:23 like God, the stock, I don't know. And they've really, I think, turned it around. Yeah, the stock's been a dog this year, but yeah. That's why I said, like, it's kind of hard to pick it, but I do think like if you look at the fundamentals of the business, I think I'm 22 and is gonna go to 300 million. Because they announced so much content from the Star Wars Marvel Pixar Disney ecosystem that is coming

Starting point is 01:01:47 this year and next year. And it's going from Book of Boba Fatt, Mandalorian, Obi-Wan Kenobi, where, you know, Hayden Krishnson and the guy who played Obi-Wan Kenobi are coming back. Like this library is going to have a ridiculous 2022. I like HBO Max more than Disney Plus. I mean, my kids watch a little Disney Plus, but they watch all the other screaming services too. Disney Plus doesn't seem to have them monopoly for me.

Starting point is 01:02:12 HBO Max is such a depth of context. So pretty good. So pretty good right now. When that water media deal gets done, I think that's the juggernaut stock you want to own. It's going to have an incredible library to compete with Disney. Well, I mean, secession.

Starting point is 01:02:26 And just like, just like, I'm having a problem. They're, I mean, secession and just like 10 of them. Just like 10 of them. Just like 10 of them. They're releasing the Matrix tomorrow on HBO Plus. Like HBO Max. And they read it that Justice League and it's about to be done. So the new Matrix comes out on HBO Max tomorrow. Yes, day and date. I love that because I love that they did that with Dune.

Starting point is 01:02:41 I love Dune. Totally. Dune is an incredible movie. Totally. I mean, movie theater right now. So I'm gonna watch it on my movie theater this week. Okay, worst humanune, I love Dune. Totally. Dune is an incredible movie. Totally. I mean, my movie theater right now, so I'm gonna watch it on my movie theater this week. Okay, worst human being, I'm gonna go first. I'm gonna say Elizabeth Warren.

Starting point is 01:02:50 I think trying to raise money off of the back of the person who raised the most money for our taxes, from taxes, is just lame. If you haven't seen, she's attacking Elon and Bezos. In Facebook ads, trying to grift to get $10, while she's got 12 million equities that she paid like $0 on, because that's how the tax system

Starting point is 01:03:12 that she has operated under for decades works, worst human being to me, Elizabeth Warren. I am going to pick Travis McMichael, Gregory McMichael, William Ri Brian, Rodi Brian, and Derek Shovon, four white men who killed in two different incidents, an unarmed black man. They are scumbags and they should go to jail and they will for the rest of their lives. They are terrible human beings.

Starting point is 01:03:43 Great job. Sax, we you got for worst human beings. Yeah, I've got a name here. I don't know if if the audience knows yet. It's a guy named Peter Dazek, who's a British orologist. He's head of a group called the EcoHealth Alliance that received millions of dollars in NIH grants for gain-of-function research in bat viruses. If that sounds familiar, it's because some of that was

Starting point is 01:04:05 given to the lab in Wuhan, from which COVID likely leaked. But that by itself is not the reason why it's my choice. He then became one of the leading signers and organizers of a letter that was published in the Lansing in February of 2020, insisting with total certainty that the virus had made the leap from animals and humans rather than leaking from a lab. In fact, he basically painted anyone who had put forward the lab leak theory as a conspiracy theorist. His influence made this so-called zoonotic theory,

Starting point is 01:04:41 the official narrative that could not be questioned online for well over a year, all the social networks since censored on that basis. And he never disclosed his obvious conflict of interest given that his millions of research was threatened if the lab leak three were proven right. So this guy, no only helped unleash a plague upon the world, he then lied about it to cover his ass

Starting point is 01:05:04 and protect his millions. That makes him the worst of my- If you're interested in hearing a point of view on this, Jamie Metzel did an interview with Lex Friedman on Lex's podcast. It's worth listening to. It's five hours long, but the section where they talk about what sex is sharing, I think is around the one hour mark. And it's a really interesting narrative that Jamie shares about what this individual did during this period of time and

Starting point is 01:05:30 why. Does this support what I'm saying? Yes. He's not going to listen, but now he feels smug with himself. So yeah, thanks. Okay. My source of experience. Lexi is genius.

Starting point is 01:05:41 Yeah, Lexi is great. So my source for this has been the reporting of Glenn Greenwald who did some pretty good research on a great, I mean, sort of expose a on the conflict of interest that was never disclosed. And it was on this basis that all the social networking sites then engage in censorship. So just a whole cluster of bad motives by people looking to cover their ass. But I mean, it's worth hearing Jamie's point of view on this, which is he tries to identify

Starting point is 01:06:11 the motivation and the incentives that those people had when they made those cover-up decisions along the way. And I think it's really worth everyone taking that in. That's what I really liked about Lex's podcast interview at Jamie was, you know, none of these things come from a place of pure evil. They come from a place of incentive and motivation where these individuals think that they're doing the right thing for some reason. And that's what motivated their behavior. But that's also why, and just to jump the gun here, I am not giving you a worst human

Starting point is 01:06:40 being answer, not a virtue signal. Really, I just go back to this point that I don't think humans are intrinsically evil. I think that a lot of people make decisions for what they consider to be good reasons or the right reasons or reasons that are, in their mind, altruistic, but ultimately have adverse consequences

Starting point is 01:06:59 for another population. Not direction. I would argue that in some cases, people who are selfish Don't make it very far in life and so they generally don't have that much of an impact in an evil way There's very few people that are purely selfish and make it to scale, but anyway, that's my very that's so correct I think freeberg raise a good point which is I think we can judge this not by people's internal motivations Because we don't really know but rather by the consequences of their choices.

Starting point is 01:07:27 Right. The adverse consequences. Okay. So best meme, I'll go first. I love Daniel Craig's The Weekend, because I've been so exhausted from this year. That one's Friday rolls around. That's all I can think about is Daniel Craig saying, ladies and gentlemen, the weekend, he's just exacerbated and exhausted as MI. My runner-up was Anakin and Padme doing their conversation, you know, for the better, right? And you

Starting point is 01:07:55 can look that up online. It's a four-pain. It's one of those four-pain conversation ones. What do you got, Shamaath? You have any best memes? It's the Bernie Sanders inauguration outfit. Amazing. Always a great go-to. That was a good one. His little nittins and, you know, his, his greatest fall bus. His detached communist glare. We got him about that.

Starting point is 01:08:17 Great meme. Yeah, great meme. It's like he's at a sit-in at like some college in Vermont. So far. In Russia in the winter. Exactly. Exactly. It's like a little chipmunk. Russia in the winter. Exactly, exactly. It's like a little chipmunk. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:08:28 All right, who do you got, Zach? You got a best meme? The ever given forklift meme, this was that little forklift trying to push that gigantic barge out of the West West canal and got a little irrepurpose. And then like 10 years ago, I know, is this year, can you believe it?

Starting point is 01:08:49 And a closer interrupt was my fall plans versus the Delta variant. Oh, yeah. Remember that one. That was a good one. Great one. I was a good one. Freeberg, uh, yeah, I know you don't care about pop culture or consume much of it, but get give us your best. No, I don't have a meme.

Starting point is 01:09:00 Sorry. I do not have a meme upgrade. I have no sense of I like to. I know the good one. I'll take that one. I have no sense of I like to I'm a good one. I'll take that one. I'm sure your memes, but not enough. Okay. Can we upgrade his meme sub routine?

Starting point is 01:09:10 I love pop culture. This the meme thing I just don't, it doesn't resonate for me. It just doesn't. I love pop culture. I am a pop culture, but the memes do not make sense to me. My job boys were great. I have trouble processing imagery and text.

Starting point is 01:09:23 I'll let the same time. My subroutine is indexing all images and GPT-3. I'm going to produce funny jokes. Ha ha. Ha ha. Ha ha. My laughing subroutine has been upgraded. Ha ha ha.

Starting point is 01:09:39 Ha ha ha. Sorry. It's too easy. Sorry, Allison. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, Sorry. It's too easy. Sorry, Allison. Most loads of companies. Most loads of companies. I don't think she listens to this, by the way. No, my wife doesn't listen to it.

Starting point is 01:09:51 I was talking to my wife about sweater care, whatever. She's like, what are you talking about? I'm like, the pod that everybody listens to. None of our wives listen to this crap. Number 40 in the world. No. Okay, most loads of companies. This one is an absolutely easy one, slam dunk. It is

Starting point is 01:10:07 PG&E who this year was charged with felonies and manslaughter in the death of four people because of the wildfires that they started because of their inability to maintain their power and infrastructure throughout the state of California. Very rare that a for-profit corporation gets charged with felony murder and manslaughter, so I think that's pretty easy one. What do you got, Freyberg? I think one day the human race will look back and identify animal agriculture as worse than human slavery.

Starting point is 01:10:43 I do think that that will be a profound realization over the next century for our species. And as I said, Did you say worse than human slavery? I believe that that's what we will realize because the scale of death caused by animal agriculture, the birth to death cycle that these animals live in in cages with no ability to touch or interact with their families, the hurt, the pain,

Starting point is 01:11:08 it's extraordinary, and part of my work that I do day to day is to figure out ways that we can use science to replace animal agriculture. So the penultimate kind of animal agriculture processor in the US is Tyson Foods. They are the most low company to me. And I stick by my answer. Can I give you a counterpoint? Yeah.

Starting point is 01:11:31 But it's delicious. It's a joke, don't stop. Oh, there we go. That's not cool. I mean, is it a spicy take? I mean, to take the human suffering of slavery and then equate it, but you added... I mean, but honestly, free bird, like if you,

Starting point is 01:11:45 you have it, nothing is like, you have it. You've never eaten any form of animal protein. So how do you know what you're missing? It's true, but he does know about cruelty. Yeah, I guess. I don't think there's any winners in this conversation at this point. Yeah, this is a longer pod.

Starting point is 01:12:01 We could do this another time. Fried chicken is really delicious. Oh, man. So is a good steak. Okay could do this another time. Fried chicken is really delicious. Oh, man. So is a good steak. Okay, we got to stop. I'm hungry. Smear. Saks did you have a besides Tyson Foods?

Starting point is 01:12:16 What do you got? Okay, most of the percent you're putting a label on the thing is it was. Most of the company I had the New York Times. A new book. No, this year in 2021. It's not very spicy. Called The Grey Lady Winked, the author Ashley Rinsberg details decades of misinformation

Starting point is 01:12:33 and agenda-driven journalism published by the Times, starting in the 1930s at a Nazi sympathizer as their German correspondent. They covered up Stalin's genocide in Ukraine. The assisted Fidel Castro's rise to power in Cuba, they lied us into Vietnam and Iraq, and they perpetuated the Russian collusion hoax. More recently, the New York Times has gone all in on woke journalism and cancel culture, purging anyone from its ranks who commits a transgression against woke sensibilities, from Brian Armstrong to Kyle Rittenhouse, they've routinely smeared people as racist with

Starting point is 01:13:04 no evidence to back it up. Remember, they are not a nonprofit, they are a corporation and they have an agenda, New York Times, most of us some company in life. And David, can I double down on this? I posted Nick, maybe you can find this, but there was an article in the Washington Post that I put into the group chat

Starting point is 01:13:20 where the Washington Post article was effectively like Washington Post forced to revisit journalism practices because of falling click through rates in lack of viewership. So in a post Trump era, yeah, post Trump era two years on, you know, they're the number of premium subscribers that WAPO has has pretty materially changed, I guess. And so, you know, they're revisiting what they're trying to write. And as you can imagine, they're going to air towards more clickbait. And it's the same for the times.

Starting point is 01:13:46 And so, to your point, we have to remember that these things are not run as public trusts. Their run as for-profit businesses. Yep. We've seen what other for-profit businesses do as it relates to information and misinformation and disinformation. And so you have to heavily discount what you read in these places. Information after profits. Trust. And then Mr. Y. Tech leaders and other people are increasingly going direct as we

Starting point is 01:14:08 talked about all year in the pod. Go direct. They are not the paper of record anymore. Direct is the new. The internet goes to the paper of record. I mean, look at this podcast. I mean, I think like we're going direct. We get more views on this than any other press hit we could ever do.

Starting point is 01:14:21 And we get to talk to you. I think we've probably eclipsed MSNBC any show that I and we're probably going to pass CNBC and Fox by the end of this year. Sure. So for me, I would pick the My Pillow guy, but that's not a real company. So I just picked meta, which is just so obvious. I just think bro, you at least themes, you're like, you're so after Facebook, you're super tilted about Facebook, you're super tilted about center to Karen.

Starting point is 01:14:43 Yes. They just keep cropping up in every category. I know, I just, it's hard for me not to pick Meta here. Best new tech for me, it's Dows. I mentioned it earlier. I think it's phenomenal. I think that they're gonna evolve and global capital formation.

Starting point is 01:14:55 What do you think it is? Dows. No, they're what? Global capital formation. Are for nominal? They're phenomenal. I said phenomenal. All right, stop making fun of the kid from Brooklyn, okay?

Starting point is 01:15:08 Do you think this podcast weighed number 40 if I didn't? Okay, enough, enough, you uncraful prick. Listen, now you're telling me now I'm trying to get the show over 75 minutes in. Okay, so. I say, dows, because I believe that they will become legal and global capital formation for the first time on an instant basis will exist. And I believe 40 million is the drive run for the Constitution, 400 million and 4 billion will happen in the next 10 years to do bigger and bigger challenges.

Starting point is 01:15:37 The world wants to bet as a unit together and this is going to be the crowning achievement of Web 3, DAOZ. What's the best new tech for you, Mr. Polyhapatia? I have two choices. One is in the heavens and that is human space travel. We had three different companies create astronauts this year. That's like insanity. It's mind-blowing and so if you think about what the next five to 10 years can bring Jason, what you said earlier, but making ourselves a multi-planetary species, what an inspiring thing that these thousands of employees across these three businesses did, huge congrats to all three of them. I found it really inspiring. So I think human space travel.

Starting point is 01:16:22 And then the second, which is much more closer to earth, is sub-stack. I think really got to a level of scale this year that is really profound. I have found it to be an incredible way to stay connected to the truth. And there are some unbelievable people who are now able to create a life for themselves by telling the truth. Independent voices. And you can support them directly. Incredible.

Starting point is 01:16:53 A handful of people, Matt Taiyabi, Barry Weiss, Eric Newcomer, just a handful that jump off the top, Glenn Gleenwald, but there's many more. Substacks going to learn how to promote these things to you in a better way, I think, over time. But I think, over time. But I think that is incredible. If you get a group subscription eventually, Jamoth, there'll be some sort of group subscription. And then you'll be able to put Glenn Greenwald and Barrowise and have multiple publishers come in like an aggregated feed or something to that effect.

Starting point is 01:17:21 In other words, you can subscribe to the New York Times of these independent voices and they would split the money across them. It's the closest thing to truth as a service that we have. And with, you know, I'd say podcasts is right up there too. Sax. I'm obviously, you're going to pick Colin, but after Colin, what do you got for the best of time? Well, I originally had the Christopher Gina and anything, but you're not already

Starting point is 01:17:39 mentioned that. So I'm going to go with Starlink. It got, yes, it just came out at the end of 2020. But this year, I kept getting better and faster. And now it's reported that Starlink is faster than the fixed broadband average in Belgium, Canada, Australia, Germany, the UK, New Zealand, and France. Come on. No way. Really? Yeah. It's pretty unbelievable. Wow. Gavin Baker just tweeted this earlier today this morning. That's the data. All I can say, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave,

Starting point is 01:18:09 Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, of plasma fusion. There were several iterations and step function improvements in plasma fusion. Can you explain what it is to people who don't know? The concept, ultimately, for plasma fusion is that you can generate a controlled series

Starting point is 01:18:36 of nuclear reactions where energy is released, and as these atoms transform and energy is released, rather than have a runaway breakthrough effect, which you would have in a nuclear bomb, for example, you can actually control it and harness the energy that comes out. And there are several technologies and techniques that have been theorized for 50 years that we could do this in a way that the energy that we put in to create

Starting point is 01:18:59 and start the fusion reaction allows us to get more energy out. And therefore, you have a net energy creator just by turning atoms into energy in a way that doesn't cause a runaway breakthrough in nuclear reaction that would be the equivalent of a nuclear bomb. And so, you know, the MIT CFS collaboration had an excellent breakthrough that we spoke about on one of our pods. The National Ignition Facility, which is actually a US DOE-funded facility, came very close to energy abundance, and they have a wonderful chart that shows 20 years of

Starting point is 01:19:31 doing this work, and then this year it suddenly balloons. Is that how they make energy on the Sun? This one, so all of this is fusion, that's correct. But that's how they make energy on the Sun. Well, what we're doing here is we're basically using lasers to create the same density that you would get on the Sun that triggers that same sort of nuclear. And what about Uranus? Different, different. It never stops being funny. General sauce. General fusion had a big breakthrough and Bill Gates is a big

Starting point is 01:20:04 backer of a company called Terra Power that announced that they're building a new reactor. But I think generally speaking, we are seeing 2021 as kind of that big step change where the stuff is starting to move from theory. What do we have it online? Still, as everyone's been saying for decades. Ten years. Ten years.

Starting point is 01:20:20 Ten years. Ten years. Okay. Yeah. Fast trend, worst trend. Here we go. I'm gonna go with the best trend being centristm, purple pills, recalls of DAs, reasonableness, and maybe the political class actually representing what most of the country wants,

Starting point is 01:20:38 which is a high functioning government that gets the hell out of the way. What do you got, Sax? Best trend, hashtag, woqlash. We saw, this is similar to yours. We saw a major pushback against woq ideology on several fronts this year. First, you had parents pushing back on CRT,

Starting point is 01:20:52 leading to a Republican sweep in deep blue, Virginia. Then the whole defund the police initiative was rejected on the ballot of Minneapolis, where it all started. Even may have San Francisco now wants to refund the police, the attempt to cancel Dave Chappelle, totally fizzled out after the walkout protest in Netflix. And even Barack Obama told the progressive left to, quote, get over their woke purity earlier this year, they should have listened to him and maybe they finally will next year after losing more elections.

Starting point is 01:21:23 I'll just repeat something I said earlier. I'll be quick about it. The Creator Economy Blossoming, new models for monetization for folks that create content, whether it's video, art, music, and there's all these new models for bringing your art to market, your content to market, and getting paid for it. And consumers are clearly willing to pay for it.

Starting point is 01:21:45 So it's awesome to see. The gatekeepers are falling away, and the GoDirect model is working. What do you got your mouth? I'm gonna double tap that. I had the creator economy. I think it's incredible what these young creators are basically creating.

Starting point is 01:22:03 It's incredible. Super, super novel and new forms of content tick tock a super addictive state of the comments YouTube is incredible So this is a brave new world for for creators All right, so worst trend the worst trend of 2021 I'm gonna go with giving credit for work that hasn't been done yet and just straight up founder and investor entitlement. I've never seen it at all time peak here where people expect to be given huge rewards before they do the work. And I'm very concerned about the lack of governance, the lack of diligence and people believing they should get huge rewards before they actually do the work.

Starting point is 01:22:47 What do you got, Chimoff? My worst trend is the decaying of the national security of our supply chains. If you think about some of the really important things that we're going to have to get done over the next 10 years, just to climb it as an example. China has done a masterful job. They control a lot of the lithium, a lot of the nickel, a lot of the cobalt, a lot of the graphite. They control a lot of the rare earths that go into the permanent magnets and we don't have a solution. So that is a really bad trend that accelerated this year, we have some really ambitious programs in America that are unfortunately stuck because of

Starting point is 01:23:29 lawsuits claiming that the wood grouse is more important than batteries. And so unless we undo that stuff, we're in a bad place. Okay, Sacks, what do you got? I've got the rise of authoritarianism around the world and here in the United States. I mean, even in Western countries like Australia, it's basically been turned into a prison colony for months in the name of stopping COVID. Here in the United States, you've got governors like Gavin Newsom, who have basically appropriated dictatorial powers through a bogus state of emergency. You've now got the unvaccinated treated as some sort of untouchable class of citizens who aren't able to leave their house except to buy food and medicine. They're even now in Europe, they're splitting, they're forcing people behind partitions at the supermarket. Boston just announced they're banning unvaccine

Starting point is 01:24:21 people from going to all restaurants, bars, nightclubclub, sport arena, fitness centers, movie theaters, and on and on it goes. On top of that, you've got censorship, you've got the centering of speech, you've got this sort of crackdown on domestic political enemies. And I think it's also emboldening authoritarian regimes like China and Russia to crack down harder on their citizens because they see what's happening in the West and they think they can get away with it. So all around bad stuff. I think to your point, SAC, it's one of the reasons why we will see people in general looking for alternative ways to govern themselves. And it will only catalyze and accelerate some of these other trends that I think we've been talking about.

Starting point is 01:25:08 My worst trend was the metaverse. I think it's like the renaming of something that's been going on for a long time as if it's some new future thing. If anyone's played Fortnite over the last six years or five years, the metaverse has been here for a long time and this notion that you can kind of Take it and make it something that doesn't exist yet. It's all about the future and make some stupid video about it I think it's a little bit lost and what's already been going on Which is people find value in digital goods people find value in digital levels and badging and they find Honor and progress in their lives

Starting point is 01:25:41 By accomplishing things in a digital universe and And they've been doing that for Minecraft, Fortnite, to other places for a long time. And it's fascinating to watch, but the notion that we call this thing the metaverse and everyone's trying to reclassify it is some future singular universe, and therefore they can own that singular universe is a pretty misstated and misguided kind of concept.

Starting point is 01:26:02 Let's go on to your favorite book movie podcast, Music Discovery of 2021. For music I had wore on drugs. For book Ray Crox autobiography I listened to on Audible and it was great. On TV, Sassession Curb, Your Enthusiasm, and Dope Sick were my three favorites, I think. Freeberg, what do you got?

Starting point is 01:26:23 Considering that you have had your pop culture. I will tell you guys one time. I think it's very important that everyone on this pod and anyone listening to this, that has any interest in what's going on in the world today. Broadly, read Ray Dalios, the changing world order. It is my number one, number two, and number three book recommendation of the year. It is absolutely critical to understand that the

Starting point is 01:26:50 global world order is being reclassified as the United States has taken on too much debt and will ultimately lose its reserve currency status. As we have seen with the transition of five or six empires over the past 500 years, and this transition is very predictable as Radalio highlights. We are following a pattern that we've seen over and over again, and we are in a moment right now where populism, whether it's authoritarianism on the right or socialism on the left, is a reaction to what is effectively a very small number of people controlling a very large amount of the wealth and the power in this country and in the world.

Starting point is 01:27:31 And we've seen this play out. And as governments and societies evolve, eventually this happens, there's a massive revolution typically triggered by some new technology emerging, like the printing press, the radio, shipping. And in our case today, I would argue what people are calling Web 3 or the blockchain as that triggering technology. And as that happens, the current dominant empire transitions and a new world order emerges. And this is not some conspiracy theory.

Starting point is 01:28:01 It's an in-depth look at the economic, political, and social organizations that have broken apart over the last 500 years, and where we sit today. It's not about politics, it's just about manifestations of human behavior over time. Done for that. Everyone's gotta read it. My second, oh, I got one more, come on. Okay, no, of course, keep going.

Starting point is 01:28:19 West Anderson's The French Dispatch is one of the best films I have seen in like a decade. Have you guys seen it? No. It is friggin' amazing. I feel like every shot is like a cinematography masterpiece. The writing is incredible. The acting will blow your mind. If you guys see that film, we can talk about it for hours.

Starting point is 01:28:36 It is just no political agenda, no nonsense in it. It's just pure art. It's really beautiful. And then on music, I'll give a shout out to a very unknown artist who I think deserves a little shout out. His very unknown artist who I think deserves a little shout out. His name is DK the drummer. DK the drummer did a collaboration with a guy named Alejandro Arranda who was on American

Starting point is 01:28:52 Idol. My kids cannot stop listening to his track that they did together. It's amazing. Shout out for that guy. I just figured he deserves it for putting out an awesome track. All right, Saks. Which Steve Bannon episode we should favor? So under a book of the year, I have a very recent choice, which is San Francisco by Michael Schellenberger.

Starting point is 01:29:11 It just came out, but it's already, I think, very influential. It's not just about San Francisco. It's really about how the so-called progressive agenda in cities is not working. I think it is going to be the blueprint for a major backlash that's already begun a year in San Francisco with London Bree taking on Jason Boudin. I think that's going to be a recurring theme next year. Also, other big cultural discoveries. I like Jamoth. I have Red Pill journalists on Substack, Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taiibi, Antonio Garcia Martinez, all of whom now have shows on Collins. So those are my choices. There's a second plug. Okay, here we go.

Starting point is 01:29:49 Chimoff, what was your favorite app besides calling? Exactly. Let's see. So my best album is Planet Her by Doge Cat, album is Planet Her by Dogecat, Danceable, Fun, Kids Love It, I love it. You dance? Wait, she's awesome. You know that I have rhythm, bro. All in Summit, Dance Party. Here we go. Oh yeah.

Starting point is 01:30:16 From the waist down, as you also. But just beep that out, please. No, no, no, no, you cannot hide from the truth boys. Best movie is Dune. It was so beautiful. Cinematically just gorgeous. Incredible, incredible, incredible movie. And then book, I've said it this before, but the way I think about the world is using these models and frameworks. One of the most useful models that I have found is this idea of Mimesis or Memehetic theory, which is that people copy each other,

Starting point is 01:30:51 that causes conflict. It was espoused by a philosopher named Renas Gerard. Myself, Peter Tiel, there's a bunch of us who are pretty deep, Renas Gerard acolytes. The problem is that his stuff can be a little hard to penetrate. And so there was a book called Wanting, W-A-N-T-I-N-G by this author named Luke Burgess. Super book, very easy to read, very accessible, explains this really well. One of the most useful mental models that I have.

Starting point is 01:31:21 And now just shout out, we didn't have best comedian in here, but I really enjoyed Hassan Menages, the King's Jester Anusho, that is not yet on streaming, but that he's doing live. It was hilarious. It was insightful. He's awesome. And really enjoyed going to it. Do you have you like Loki?

Starting point is 01:31:42 I enjoyed it. I thought I was really good. Yeah, well done? What is Loki? He is a he's Thor's stepbrother and they did a TV show called Loki, which was like a very challenging metaverse multiple timeline kind of concept. I just set the stage for the whole next wave of Marvel movies. Didn't you think that was the best Marvel product this year? I don't know. Definitely was absolutely. 100%. I haven't seen Spider-Man homecoming, but I think it sets in line. We haven't heard from Sacks. Did we hear from Sacks? Yeah, Sacks just picked like some right-wing book.

Starting point is 01:32:13 It was like San Francisco or something and then he doesn't watch TV or whatever. I mean, Sacks, did you, you actually love movies? You've made movies. Did you see a film you loved where you're just watching like films from the 80s and 90s? I mean honestly, it's hard to find like even one movie that I wanna you know write home about. I think it's a lot easier to find TV shows. Like we're enjoying Yellowstone right now, quite a bit.

Starting point is 01:32:35 I don't know if you guys are watching that. Kevin Costo. Nobody who's on the left knows what Yellowstone is explaining to people this right wing phenomenon. It's a Kevin Costo show. I don't know if it's right wing. It's about a ranching like family, like their traditional sort of cowboys

Starting point is 01:32:49 who live in Wyoming, or maybe a spontane. I'm not sure anyway. There's all these people trying to go after them to get their land, mostly developers. And they're- No, I hear it's fantastic. They're fighting to preserve their way of life, which is around raising cows.

Starting point is 01:33:06 It's Taylor Sheridan, who's the guy who did secario, which if you've never seen secario, one and two, are the most amazing thrillers you're ever gonna see. I mean, it's very hard to watch, they're so intense. And I think Yellowstone now is, the reason I say it's right, Wing is, it's doing incredibly well in the South, and it's not happening in the coastal cities.

Starting point is 01:33:26 So coastal and leaves. Well, it's kind of like a leave me alone. It's very much a good, so the traditional Republican slash American sensibility. And now they're making it into a universe so they did a prequel and it's just off the charts. It's the most viewership of any program and most people in San Francisco, New York,

Starting point is 01:33:43 and LA don't even know what it is. Yeah, I'm not sure it's like it has an overt political agenda. I mean, the family who's the subject of the show, the concert character, he's against progress. He does not want developers coming in there, building airports, building ski resorts. He just wants to preserve his way of life, which is how it's been for 150 years, rustling cattle. Can't wait to see. And I don't know how political that is, but they are like very tough. I mean, it's like, it's like San Francisco housing.

Starting point is 01:34:13 Yeah. Okay, we're going to keep up with this one. This is our Rudy Giuliani award for self emolation. Basically, people who destroy their legacy in some way, or otherwise just bungled everything. Sacks, I got to go to you first. I know that you've got your writing team over at Fox and has something going on here for this one. Let's go. Well, yeah, I went with the Cuomo brothers. You know, great Paul. Yes. So first, you have the governor, Andrew Cuomo.omo remember at the beginning of COVID

Starting point is 01:34:46 He was giving these constant press conferences There was even talk about on the part of Democrats replacing Biden with him at the 2020 convention This inspired the term Cuomo Sexuals Who saw him as a sex symbol and then he got taken down in August by sexual harassment allegations then symbol. And then he got taken down in August by sexual harassment allegations. Then a few weeks later, there's a major scandal at CNN when it leaked documents from the New York AG's office showed that his brother Chris Cuomo had used his perch at, you know, at CNN to dig a dirt on some of his brother's accusers. Then he was suspended and ultimately fired.

Starting point is 01:35:21 So both brothers self-imulated within a few months of each other. And Andrew Cuomo had to return his $5 million book advance for his COVID book. Free-break, we got. Who lit themselves on fire in that? Well, I was a little general. It kind of said, all these politicians who made claims about the vaccine, not being worth doing,

Starting point is 01:35:40 and then they got COVID. And then on the flip side of the aisle, all the politicians who said, take the vaccine or you'll get COVID, and then they took the vaccine, and they still got COVID. And then on the flip side of the aisle, all the politicians who said, take the vaccine or you'll get COVID and then they took the vaccine and they still got COVID. So, I think, again, credibility, institutional credibility and deterministic statements like that, from both sides, damage a lot of reputations

Starting point is 01:35:58 and is just brutal to watch. From one day to the next, from Elizabeth Warren to Rand Paul, people getting COVID making one claim or another about, you know, the good or the bad of the vaccine. And at the end of the day, COVID doesn't care clearly. So anyway, Query got you off. Senator Karen. I think Senator Karen is the obvious choice for me. Kind of proved that she doesn't really know much about economics is, you know, kind of proved that she doesn't really know much about economics is, you know, kind of

Starting point is 01:36:26 mean and just basically wants to, you know, is a moral absolutist authoritarian just on the left. By the way, I'll interject because I'm so passionate about this right now since I've read this book. But you know, you'll hear, you'll see in this book that this populist diatribe that you hear from both sides, whether it's the right or the left, comes from a place that's driven by an allocation of a lot of the resources, capital and influence and power to a small number of people. And whether it's Senator Karen or Donald Trump, they ultimately end up being the same characters

Starting point is 01:37:06 played by different actors over time. And the left and the right stand up with authoritarianism and socialism as the answer. And the whole thing cycles over again. And we're in this moment right now, and this sort of stuff that you guys are talking about, Senator Karen and others kind of saying, it's only going to get louder. I'm convinced. But I think it's interesting, because I think she's overplayed her hand massively. I mean, she's become so shrill and such a scold

Starting point is 01:37:30 that she can never win that beer test quite. Remember that question they ask? They pull people on about presidential candidates is who do you most want to have a beer with? You know, that question actually is important, because I don't think people want to have a beer with people who are scolding them or these moral absolutists like Jamal said,

Starting point is 01:37:48 there is a check there. And so I think what she's done is backfired. And for me, it was Biden. I mean, what a disappointing performance. He couldn't control the far left of the party. He couldn't get anybody on the Republican side to give him but one vote. He declared independence from COVID in July. I know it's not a perfect science or anything like that.

Starting point is 01:38:13 But I think that this presidency is one and done, obviously, to everybody. And yeah, he was supposed to go right into the middle and he has not gone anywhere near the middle or led from the front either way. All right, here we go. My God, Jason, how much Fox News are you been watching? He's just hanging out with you too much. He runs the red with you. No, it is possible. I really wanted a centrist for president.

Starting point is 01:38:40 He presented us such and then he hasn't done that. And now he's being forced into centrism, kicking and screaming. You should just start it there. That's where he that was the promise he should start it there. That's where that's where he's most comfortable anyways. That's who he is. Exactly. Like what a head fake and now he winds up there anyway and it's going to be too late. So it's just a disaster. He basically took victory from the jaws of defeat or took defeat from the jaws of victory, right? Like, just terrible. Okay, here's an award. I don't know if we're going to make this, but who is your favorite bestie? So this is you picking up the three other besties?

Starting point is 01:39:14 Freiburg, this is your idea. You want to create this division of why somebody is your favorite bestie on the show? I was just trying to give you a shout out for coming to my party. Okay. You know, while the other bestie said, I am your favorite bestie. No show. I was just trying to give you a shout out for coming to my party. Okay. You know, while the other bestie said, I am your favorite bestie. No, but you know what? Yesterday, Tomah served me crates with Nutella,

Starting point is 01:39:29 so he's my favorite bestie now. So you said, I'm gonna be sad, plain. No, and Saks had an incredible party. And you guys, I want to say, I'm gonna take you to the three. Okay. I'll tell you something.

Starting point is 01:39:39 All three of you guys have been incredibly generous, and I feel fortunate, and I know it's a little soft moment, but thank you guys. That's it. I had my- That. My emotion is complete. I love you. My voice is cracking. This is in my programming, but I should keep it together that your subroutine has not been installed. Shabbat, you want to pick your favorite bestie androha gore on the horn? This is just a bad idea. Shabbat, you want to pick your favorite bestie and or go around the horn and this is just a bad idea No, I love all three of you thank you. Yeah, I love all three of you, but for different reasons

Starting point is 01:40:14 I'm really lucky to have all three of you as friends. Oh Very nice. I am very lucky to have two of the three of you have planes that I get to fly on around the world And second homes that I get to free load off of. And freeberg, I actually had to say, like, as I told your mom, freeberg, I got your wonderful Christmas party. I said, getting to know your son has been one of the highlights of the last year and a half of me.

Starting point is 01:40:40 So, sincerely, I was good friends with you mom and SACs. But you and I knew each other from poker, but, you know, not great friends or super close friends yet. And I think it's been one of the highlights for me. And I really have learned to love and respect your opinions or ethos, your effort in the world. And in a world of people who are complaining and whining and not doing, I just feel so honored to be able to be the moderator here and spend time with

Starting point is 01:41:05 you every week. I would do this if we threw the episode away every week because it's inspiring for me for the next six days until we meet again. It really fills my bucket, it recharges my batteries to be with folks who just aggressively want to solve problems in the world. Where are we taping this next week? That's like two or three weeks. We're going to be at the upfront summit on the second day in LA. I think it's somebody want to give the date. I think it's January.

Starting point is 01:41:32 Any plans to tape for pure heinous? Oh, he set it up. Stop with the heinous jokes. If we can, terraform, it's the 24th to the 26th, but I think we're on the 26th. We're on the last day in 26th, but I think we're on the 26th. We're on the last day in the afternoon, all in podcast, we're doing it. Mark Schuster invited us, and then the all-in summit

Starting point is 01:41:52 will be in May. In Miami, we have the dates, we're about to announce, but don't email me for free tickets. There'll be 300 tickets to the summit. 250 of them are paid, and then each bestie gets 12 tickets to give to a bestie. That's how we're gonna run it, everybody has to pay, and then everything will be simulcast, or... All right, everybody.

Starting point is 01:42:13 Let's wrap up. I know you're not capable of saying anything emotional, but let's give it a shot, just for the audience. I mean, this is a real question, this is a feminine bullshit that you guys have. What is this? It's so brutal, you're such an question. This is a feminine bullshit that you guys have. What is that? That's my last word. So brutal, you're such an asshole. What a piece of work.

Starting point is 01:42:29 Such an ass. Can I go ahead and tell you? I will say this group, a few relationships in particular, had a very rocky year. And so it's not. No, it's not. And so it's really YouTube. That is true.

Starting point is 01:42:42 It was not public. All that went down, but, but Chimath and I, here we are, here we are, at least good. Chimath and I fought very hard to keep the pot together and to make sure that you guys,

Starting point is 01:42:53 and you guys are literally like the, the two characters from Step Brothers. And, what characters are you talking about in this pot? You're doing Chimath, right? And it's good, it's good to see us. You're the idiot who crashed the bunk beds.

Starting point is 01:43:05 The one on top. Yeah, he jumps on top and holds it up. I mean, no,ath and I had to spend mediating the two of you back together with ridiculous abundance. I didn't understand the time either. Yeah, that was the time I was going to spend. I mean, Sats could stay in his lane and be able to be on the beach. No, no, no, no, no mad at Jason this year that I threatened to make Nick a millionaire out of spite. No, Nick. No.

Starting point is 01:43:50 Nick, I want to make you a millionaire regardless. I know your uncle's not going to do it. He's doing great. He's doing great. He's got to carry you. Take it easy, everybody. No problem. No, but people still ask me this day,

Starting point is 01:43:59 was that whole few with Jake Calreal, or was it just for ratings? No, it was real. No, no, it was all. It was real. The bigger feud was not the bigger feud was not aired on the air. And right, there was a second feud. There was a second feud. That's under the A, that's under the A.

Starting point is 01:44:14 That one was out of control. Yeah, we signed an end-to-end. Yeah. I'd like to say the, I just have an operating agreement now. Yeah. It's not easy. You know, success is hard for a band, you know. And I think one of

Starting point is 01:44:25 the things I'll say about this whole brew and the, and the, you know, sacks and I having debates about how to run the pod is I think we came to the right place. I, you know, I look at the comments and I think I've become a better moderator. I think sacks, Jamal, freeberg, you've all become great at passing the ball and showing interest in each other's points. And I feel like we're playing, You know, which is always my wish for this is that you know, we play this game as intellectually honestly and crisply and as well With as much discipline with as much hard work as like let's say the warriors do and I really feel like even in the last 10 Episodes we hit a high water mark and the audience and everybody I meet tells me the same thing my guys guys Just do it's such a great job. I'll say one thing that makes it really hard.

Starting point is 01:45:05 I was with Chimath yesterday as you guys know. And secret mission. One thing I observed with Chimath is no matter how much success or wealth Chimath has accumulated, he is still a hustler. And I think that that is true for all of us. And individually and independently, we all still hustle. We try and make things happen.

Starting point is 01:45:21 We find things that others aren't doing. We push it hard. We grind. We grind. We hard. We grind. We grind. We grind. We grind up a five a.m. Yeah, five of the East Coast, four a day. I think all four of us are in the same vein. And that makes it really hard for four personalities

Starting point is 01:45:36 like that to work together a consistent way. And that underlies a lot of what I think ultimately bubbles up to the surface with some of the stuff. But we should be thankful that we can pull it off, because it's pretty awesome. And Kelly, excuse me nice about J-Kell. Here we go. So it's true that without J-Kell,

Starting point is 01:45:53 this pod never would have happened. Because you are the podcaster in this group, you're the podscales. You are the pod very entertaining and funny. And so like frankly, even though you're not as rich and smart as the rest of us, you should stop feeling, you should stop feeling so insecure because you are the reason for this pod.

Starting point is 01:46:12 All right, let me give a compliment. Zach, you bring so many great notes to the pod and you are so eloquent based on what your team writes for you, ability to read that script and the amount of money you spend forming your opinions from Tucker Carlson's X writing team is just extraordinary so much to the table. I can't believe I ever wanted to replace you with

Starting point is 01:46:37 whoo. No one is gonna know who I was threatening to replace, saxophone. It was like literally like, we're gonna replace this guitarist. Boys have a wonderful holiday. I love you. I love you, Besties. Okay, everybody, we'll see you all next week for 2022 predictions.

Starting point is 01:46:55 Our promise to you, no weeks off for the Besties. I'm gonna be with you every Friday night. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. My bad We open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy I don't want to try. Besties are gone. Go through this. That is my dog taking it away. She's right, wait. Oh man, I might have to be out here with me. We should all just get a room and just have one big hug.

Starting point is 01:47:36 Or because they're all just like this like sexual tension. But we just need to release that out. What? Your beef. What? Your beef. Beef. What? We need to get merged. What you're the bee, what you're the bee What you're the bee, bee, what you're the bee We need to get merch, these aren't that bad I'm going on a leave

Starting point is 01:47:50 I'm going on a leave

All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg - E60: The 2021 Bestie Awards PLUS Jack Dorsey starts the Web3 Wars

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