The 2021 Bestie Awards PLUS Jack Dorsey starts the Web3 Wars
Full transcript · Read the full conversation in order, with its original context.
Contents21 chapters
§01Catching up on the Web3 wars and Jack Dorsey sounding off§02Biggest Winner - Politics§03Biggest Loser - Politics§04Biggest Political Surprise§05Biggest Winner - Business§06Biggest Loser - Business§07Biggest Business Surprise§08Best Science Breakthrough§09Biggest Flash in the Pan§10Best CEO§11Best Investor§12Best Turnaround§13Worth Human Being§14Best Meme§15Most Loathsome Company§16Best New Tech§17Best Trend§18Worst Trend§19Favorite Media§20The Rudy Giuliani Award for Self-Immolation§21The Besties spread holiday cheer with each other§01Catching up on the Web3 wars and Jack Dorsey sounding off
Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the all in podcast end. It is our year end 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. kinda half hard to leave. 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 Saxx, and sweater Jesus, Chamath, Polly Hopatilla. How's everybody doing? We're ready to go. Did anybody do their homework?
Oh my god. We are 9 away from episode
69,
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.
He can't do 420. Yeah.
He can do both. He
can do whatever he wants.
Yeah. Basically, you could do no wrong. Did you commit it?
What about Jack? Can we get Jack on?
So I'm talking about that.
If you stop if you stop grinding Jack, yeah, Yeah. Maybe if
you stop dunking on Jack for no reason, you insufferable sex.
Seriously. You insufferable.
--
enough that, like, eye alienated potential guests Chamath's alienated best. Now you're getting in on alienating the guests.
--
it would
be too much to have Jack and Chris Dixon on together? Who? Ho?
Oh my god. That is so cruel.
Delete that.
No. Don't and, like, it's fever -- Delete everything. don't care about my relationship with a 16z. Jack Dorsey,
we all know. Who who's the other person?
Dick Chris Dixon? Chris Dixon.
Yeah.
Who's that?
Is a general part Andreson Horowitz who runs their Crypto Fund. Oh, nice.
It wasn't just me. I mean
-- --
vocal lately about web 3. 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? Go to my theater.
You're getting
you're getting a little bit
far field. Chris posted something pretty innocuous on Web Three, and Jack jumped down throat and same thing with Bellji as well.
So -- I saw the c Dickson quote.
It wasn't just me. Yeah. Jason, now you're pretending you retweeted a photo of Jack jumping down Chris Dixon's throat and saying, woah. What's going on here? Now you're trying to pretend -- I love Jack.
-- pretend like he was triggered by me. He wasn't triggered by
He's mother Jack after dark. Jack
is gone wild. Kristics and did did try a little misappropriation.
For which, Jack jumped down his throat. Basically, ever
since -- -- Horowitz's thing. They always culture appropriate. Right? Like -- Jack
is just like any other guy who quits his job and then goes on a shit posting rampage. And
Really? Like, you did enter Yammer? Like, Shamont did ever shut it down.
I'm just one of his casualties. There's of people he's gone
about a couple of days.
--
energy was great. I think he quit as
CEO of Twitter so he could tweet.
Yeah. He wanted to get in there.
No. He wants to focused on blockchain. Clearly -- Yes.
--
he he has religion on this, and he believes that 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 badger at about censorship in the role that he used to run. How would you like him talking to you about, you know, being the CEO of Zenifits, Saks. Like, it's
--
Okay. Honestly, I'm not trying to badge him. 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.
Maybe he did, David. Maybe he did ask.
So just tell us that.
Read between the lines, dude.
I don't think he has to 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. There's a there's a
-- --
dynamics of a board and lawsuits and -- Hundreds
of hard decisions that
and the president inciting a riot at the capital.
You're not supposed to create a list and publish it and say, 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 ashram like praying? Like, you're in full dunk mode. I know that's one of your comedy writers writing those tweets for you. Did you get was that a punch up tweet or not?
It was a punched up tweet.
I can't actually be fucked up.
No. It was not punched up.
Also, it's funnier than you actually are. That's why I'm
so upset.
Why did you have to throw my people? Yeah.
Why did you go to the ashram? Yeah. Why are you in Kansas?
Yeah. has spent years trying to cultivate this, like, Zen approach -- That
is something to do with my people.
--
nothing to do nothing to do with the Nashra. Yes.
Yes. We do it
now with the Nashra.
And we're we're getting lost in the weed, sir.
We've been a warm show to you. -- later. Do you have a -- You have a -- -- intro? Like,
Please, while everybody to the 2021 best awards. Now I just put in, like, everybody, like, Deadzel Washington and, you know, like
--
Yeah. Can we edit screenshot from, like, the last Oscars that, you know, everyone did our audience. Okay.
Oscar's from the eighties. Yeah. Like, Tom Cruise, getting up and cheering, and whooping. Okay. Here we go.
going all the year.
The weather winner died. Rainman, David Saffens.
We open source it to the fans and they've discovered reason.
Love US ID.
We the kid rock. I'm going on all the end.
So there's a lot of steak here folks. And we're gonna start it off with biggest winner in politics. A very difficult decision here, Saxx, biggest winner in politics. Who do you got?
§02Biggest Winner - Politics
I got Eric Adams, the new mayor of New York City. He was a huge underdog candidate. He won by not being woke. He reject did the, you know, woke 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 a instrument of minority advancement and he even pushed to make New York City a tech and crypto. Hobby is gonna reverse the damage done under De Blasio. He won 4 or 5 Burrows in the democratic primary, and overwhelmingly carried black Latino precincts if the democratic party has a future after the rejection of woke, it is Eric Adams.
Okay. Friedberg, 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 block chain as a technology that enables an evolution away from what folks consider to be, you know, centralized control systems 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 gonna 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 kinda rear its head and and 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 in the political class more than anything else.
Okay. Tremath, 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 Thane that he needed his support and ran a pretty centrist, you know, 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 road map, which effectively says whether you're a Democrat or a Republican, grab into these centrist temples, and run with it, and you're gonna 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 Glenn Youngkin was a real canary in the coal mine for the political future of America.
Alright. 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
6+1000000000
down to maybe 1,500,000,000 if it ever gets
passed. Trillion.
Trillion rather. Sorry. Thank you. Was my
Hey, Zach.
Do you do you think man is
a rising star or a foiling star after his decision to denounce the build back better bill this year this week?
you guys have to remember that the state he's from in West Virginia went for Trump at, like, 20 points. It is a deep red state, and mansion himself is a major anomaly as a blue politician hanging on in that state. Yeah. So the Democrats instead of alienating him should be thanking their lucky stars that they even have them 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 like a John McCain Maverick kinda guy. Like, he's coming in and saying, I'm blowing this thing up, and he -- Yeah.
--
has all this attention.
I think
--
Does that light a 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 in the same way, I think Mansion may be doing the Democrats a favor because we can't afford all of the spent new spending.
Super interesting. Yeah. Here we go. Biggest loser in politics. Who do you got?
§03Biggest Loser - Politics
Let's go in reverse order now, Chamath. Who do you got?
You go for a sec Jigail?
My biggest loser is Elizabeth Warren. She wanted everybody to pay a lot of taxes who were in the billionaires to pay if 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 11 $1,000,000,000. 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 in factories and getting to a $15 minimum wage. Now Amazon is regularly paying in the twenties and giving free college something her 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, Biden won. And now this far left politics is, I think, becoming you know, as as unimportant as the far right, you know, outright. Mhmm. She's she's basically not important.
I'll build on your theme, and I and I actually just said the progressive left and the alt right. So I think that the -- Sure. -- extremes in America have you know, we've exposed them for the emperor with no close. 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 startling, 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 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 alt right.
Sachs, do you wanna go next?
Yeah. I mean, very much in the same vein. My choices Kamala Harris, the vice president. She has a 28% approval rating, polls show her 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. Yeah.
Potato. And
a lot of viewers don't even remember what we're talking about. But So the problem here is kinda what Chamath was saying. She Harris is an equity scold. 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 gonna reassure anybody who's just been called a white supremacist.
Interestingly enough, last year on our award show, Jason Calacanis made the prediction that Kamala will be the 1st female president of the United States just as a gentle reminder that we had participants.
--
how you how you called him Calcutaneous Calacanis. Well, he canis?
He likes the short. He likes to monetize his name. Okay. Friedberg.
That trick should still come true. You know?
I mean, I the prediction was made because I thought Biden wasn't gonna make it through the first term because he's so old, and that he might not be able to function.
That was that was right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That may still happen.
Yeah.
I mean, I I think I might stand by that prediction.
That's right. We'll save it for the prediction show. Okay.
We'll save it for a prediction show next week. We're taking no weeks off as the new rule here. Alright. Moving on.
Oh, wait. I got my biggest loser.
Oh, yeah. Basically, sorry.
My biggest political loser is Tony Fauci. I feel like this guy got totally viced out this year. Determinism is a trap. Right? in his role, you have to be deterministic, meaning you're saying you gotta do x to get y in order to get people to take action.
And so you know, in order the mechanism was needed for clarity of action to get people to take the vaccine, and he said, hey. This is gonna, you know, ultimately end the pandemic problem with the determinism is it drives binary outcomes. 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 and it it was a bit of a trap this year, and and I think he got screwed.
So pork Portoni Fauci. I mean, bless him, but it it was a rough year.
Alright. Biggest political surprise. Saks, what do you got? What's the biggest political surprise?
§04Biggest Political Surprise
This is where I had Glenn Youngkin. And, you know, I just add to what Chamath had already said, you know, Virginia went for Biden by 10 points just the short time before. Young can he secured Trump's endorsement very early and quietly and kept the kept Trump at bay. And then he ran as a general moderate with a business pedigree as as kind of Tremoth pointed out. But there was something else going on here as well.
I don't think it was just centrism that would flip a blue state red, it was also that issue of schools where McColliff had that gap in their final debate. He said that parents shouldn't be telling the schools what to teach. Basically, McCall was sided with the the teachers' unions. And whereas, Youngkin sided with parents, And, really, I think, voiced their opposition to CRT in the schools. That became the centerpiece of his closing argument.
and that's what allowed him to win win the election.
My biggest political surprise is Joe Manchin. I think that he will probably be looked back on in time as our generation's Paul Volker. So let me explain what I mean by that. You know, 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, you know, fullness of time that we appreciated that what he did took an enormous amount of courage because in the moment it created huge headaches and a lot of pushback and a lot of ill, Will, and I are towards Volker.
Similarly, I think, Mansion is just now starting this process of just getting completely pilloried. And, you know, people will point to a handful of elements of build back better like childcare that have now expired. and those childcare credits and and what it means to working families, and that is true. But but there are ways to solve for that by just going back and resending the 7,000,000,000,000 we already spend a little bit better. And in time, the idea and the courage to not pour
$3,000,000,000,000
on this dumpster fire Without getting ourselves better organized, we'll turn out to be an enormous gift that he gave our kids. A profile and 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, you're out. But that was a surprise to 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.
Yep. Okay. Friedberg, what do you got?
My biggest political surprise was that that insurrection cry made their way into the capital building. I mean, do
you guys remember how shocking those images were? Yeah. And what an incredible day that was? 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 being 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 Chamath, it really kind of exposed, I think, a nerve, and it was a really kind of shocking moment, a shocking day. So you know, to this day, I still kinda think that that's been the biggest surprise for me of the year.
I you know, I don't 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 groundswell to break their way into that building. Both sides were surprising.
And also just super disturbing to watch a bunch of elected officials cowering under tables while Secret Service had guns drawn and bolts were being kicked in.
And also while 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 realized that maybe our democracy, and I think mentioned that's on the show last year is not is a little more fragile than perhaps we we 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 in order to maybe prep her for running if need be in 24 and certainly in 2028. And it seems like they have headlined her deliberately, and they don't believe in her, which is they don't believe in the 1st female, vice president, and 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 hedging.
Yeah. So that was my -- -- their racist, Jake. How?
Or maybe they are saving her till after the midterms and then gonna feature her. I don't know what the strategy is.
--
the house?
It's like a fighter. There's a nurse sitting
--
I mean -- -- 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 sidelined.
Well, they did give her a test. Like, they sent her to the border. The problem is she doesn't have anything to say that's that will resonate with the American people, but also be acceptable to her progressive base.
for her perceived her perceived progressive biggest because I actually think that she also has the ability and has in the past, you know, had the ability to be tough.
You know, could she run
an order yet? I mean, she's she's ripped. So she 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 I think that most of us here think that it's a head fake. And until she comes to those terms herself, she's not she's gonna continue to be sidelined.
But if she tacks back to the center and actually gets out there, I think she's really capable of of of doing some stuff here. She's very articulate. She's very punchy. Did anybody she took you know, she can really tell the truth But then she can also really just chuck and jive and say nothing when she wants to. And that's just what's that Corpus peak isn't working for her.
Did anybody else notice Friedberg Sachs? 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. 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 it was this weird emotional reaction. Like, I got this email. I forwarded to you guys from
Jen Saki.
--
about it. Yeah.
And it's like crazy. In that email, like, in that inner 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.
I mean, it's trigger.
--
CYA by the administration. Like, they wasted everyone's time for 6 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.
Does that make sense?
I think it's that they just ignored what the swing votes are saying. He's been saying from the beginning it's too big. totally.
--
number was 1.5. And they just said, you know what? We'll wait till the end and then try to high pressure him or something or flip him at
the end.
It doesn't make sense
to prefer a strategy.
doesn't make sense to push for that bigger bill when it's a 5050 senate. They should have gone for something smaller and more reasonable.
Either either that or they should have made a better calculation on inflation. Because, again, the minute that we had these big inflation prints and the FAD basically changed their tapering posture, that was the bullet in the gun. And you basically handed mansion a loaded weapon and said, here you go. Do what you will. There's a terrible
betting strategy them Republican.
Well, he warned them. He warned them he warned them that he was very worried about inflation, and they were saying it was transitory. And then he turned out to be right.
§05Biggest Winner - Business
Right. Alright. Biggest winner in business. Freebrook, where you got?
Biggest winner, 2021. My biggest winner in business goes back to the GameStop days, and I think it was the retail investor class. You know, they were always there to try laid 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.
Who's your biggest winner Chamath 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, you know, there's there are these impresarios who just have these virtuosos who have these moments where they are just in the zone.
Yep. 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 might
--
If not Elon, who would you have? because it's pretty obvious it'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 it's
more sort of what I would say is the out
Cider class versus insiders. I think that whether it's blockchain or web 3 or NFTs or GameStop, This was the year, you know, 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.
Zach 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 choices pretty obvious. But I would say in our world, the biggest winner was Tiger Global. They basically productized growth stage capital by far
could be
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 2 days. They did by far the most deals. It's really the softbank strategy done right.
That's a great pick.
15,000,000,000,
I think it's the amount they deployed this year. I don't know if you guys heard that number.
But -- Yeah. Yeah.
--
in a single year to invest
15,000,000,000
in a sum of 5 year fund, you're at a $75,000,000,000 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. So they they built a machine amazing.
My biggest winner in business is the Aang, not the Fang, drop the f and go with the ANG. Amazon has a new CEO and they haven't missed a beat. Apple is about to hit
3,000,000,000,000.
And Susan Wojciecki in YouTube, if you don't know, is now at 2,000,000,000 users, 30,000,000,000 in revenue. And this, of course, is after Elon. Because that's the obvious choice. So after Elon, alphabet stock up 60 percent, Apple stock up 31%. You guys know what's going on with those big companies.
So I'm gonna go with the Yang. Biggest loser in business. The biggest loser in business, who do you have Friedberg, who's your biggest loser
§06Biggest Loser - Business
in -- I went I went through the opposite of my biggest winner. I went for those institutions that that, you know, got their lunch eaten by retail. Gabe Plotkin, and, you know, he lost so much money shorting GameStop against these guys buying GameStop to the moon. He had to borrow
$2,750,000,000
from citadel and point 7 point 72 just to get through his month. talk about embarrassing, talk about reversal of fortune. You know, he's obviously been a a renowned investor prior to this. And, you know, there's a few others that that were, you know, casualties of war, White Square, Affirm, and London shut down half a1000000000 AUM. So all these folks who tried to bet against retail during the GameStop saga and since thinking that the world was the way it used to be, it had to kinda Chases.
-- amazing that
that and the insurrection both happened in this year. Like, it time is moving
so fast. -- insane. Yeah. It's been a crazy year.
All of this happened in this past year crazy to think about. We were here. And I was up in Tahoe skiing, and and all this stuff was breaking. It was crazy that time. That was actually our record episode when all in had that breakout episode.
Who do you have for your biggest loser, David Sacks?
I have Chinese billionaires who are the biggest loser this year
As you
guys remember yeah. Exactly. A year ago, we were all asking, whereas Jack Ma, well, he eventually turned up looking very thin and and kinda 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 companies there 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
--
And moving it to Hong Kong. Right?
I mean -- Yeah. Exactly. They're the CCP has basically brought all the billionaires under their thumb.
Wow. Chamath, who do you have? And this is amazing. Just so the audience knows, We do not reveal our choices until in
the moment. Yeah. It's really great
to hear.
--
so great. Yeah.
I love hearing some of these things. It it makes me think for sure. Yeah. My 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 the precursor to longer term success.
There is 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. There were some articles just recently even about, you know, 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 And if you just, you know, Google search the 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
2.
Interesting. This is just so great that we all had different choices. I picked the Aang as the winner. I'm picking the f in FANG as the loser. Meta 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 is exactly Shamat'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, you know, open source slash decentralized solutions.
I think the in FANG should be replaced with the t of Tesla in B Tang.
Facebook metatraded up 25% this year, Jackal.
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 of that in 3, 4, 5 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. But I think it's a good counterpoint. Yeah. These things take a while to unravel.
Well, I think, you know, I think the the bet 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 safely.
--
spread there. Right? The the spread trade like we talked about. Alright. Biggest business surprise.
§07Biggest Business Surprise
What do you got sex? What's your biggest business surprise you should
say?
The the biggest business surprise was tech Leaders and startups moving to Miami. It's emergence from really nothing in the tech scene to being a major tech hub. It was just a year ago, 1 year ago last December, that Delian sort of mused on Twitter about, hey. Can we just relocate Silicon Valley to Miami? The Miami mayor Francis Suarez jumped in.
You responded to 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 has kept the state open for business, and he's kept schools open.
And, of course, the tax rate is 0. The income tax and the capital gains tax that is are 0. 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 I started texting you guys in January saying, I really think we should talk about this on the pod if you'll remember. And it's obviously just become a crescendo since then as NFTs. And it really has been incredible to watch how, you know, the individual folks in crypto have embraced NFTs as a way you know, 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 NFT 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 or huge chunks of the margin out of out of what they create.
And this can ultimately translate into music, into art, into writing -- Great.
--
into all sorts of things. So I'm I'm pretty excited. Not necessarily about where NFTs sit today. I think it's disaster where it sits today. But I think over the long run, I just love
this -- -- disaster.
I I just think there's too much of this bubbly stuff that's going on where people are are buying into speculative transactions. that are gonna lose them money, and then people are gonna be really hurt and really upset. But but the general -- -- the core tech. I love the fact I love the fact that creators, people that are great at art and people that creative can develop stuff and make money for those people will appreciate it and pay for it. And I just think that's awesome.
Fantastic. Alright. So for me, it was that Dows were able to raise $40,000,000 in a couple of days for this constitution and get and basically captures every capture the entire world's imagination for, you know, a seventy 2 hour new cycle. Much in the way the day the day traders did with AMC, and GameStop to Friedberg point earlier in the big winners. And I'm I have a dual one here.
I'm absolutely surprised about this you know, the the the Dow that was able to raise 40,000,000 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 1 set of rules, and then another group of people DAOs, tokens are playing by no set of rules or their interpretation of unclear rules, I guess, would be the most charitable way. So that's my biggest surprise. We have to have a regulatory framework for crypto for DAOs, for NFTs, for tokens, and it's just crazy that it hasn't happened yet. What do you got, Jamal?
My my my big business winner Breakout company. I have 2, but they're the same really as Moderna/biotech. You know, these were guys that were kinda swimming at the edges of science and r and 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 cemented themselves as now in a path to not just, you know, be a vaccine maker for COVID, but a whole bunch of other things including cancer treatments and everything I think -- Great. -- these 2 companies these 2 companies really took a big step forward in
2020.
Absolutely. And just
as a side note, OpenC had 8,000,000 in monthly volume at the beginning of the year in January. and
3,460,000,000
in August. Just give me a little idea of the scale of that. Okay. Best science breakthrough. What do you Freeburger.
§08Best Science Breakthrough
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. And the system itself is likely not gonna be the production system that saves the world. But the concept that we can take proteins that are expressed by different plants and put them together in a tank, and then that tank can convert molecules from one form to another by leveraging these proteins that just interact and move move around in the tank.
is 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 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 you know, 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 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 Merck. The FDA is supposed to be approving them by the end of this week. As you'll 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 the virus can mutate its spike proteins around the the vaccines. So the vaccines by itself cannot end the pandemic. These new pills have, I think, a a very good shot of doing it next year because they're protease inhibitors.
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 are these new antiviral pills.
Great one.
I would like to make a counter to Saks's point. I would be very cautious about the side effects that are gonna arise from these protease inhibitors. And, you know, they're they're they're not as well studied as they normally would be, but there are they have a serious biological effect in normal cells in the human body. And I think as more people use them, you'll see more crazy stories about side effects that are really significant labor.
--
would be
--
There's a lot that are well documented way they work biologically is is they disrupt, you know, certain systems. And those are not just systems related to the virus. They're systems in our own cells. And so I I I I'm personally quite nervous about them. I know that folks are 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? Does that cause similar side effects?
Or because people use that prophylactically.
Yeah. To some extent, you know, 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 percent of a population, you know, let's say take the most extreme case, die, then a million people use it, you're gonna have a lot of people dying. And and I'm not sure we've really gotten the the boundaries of this yet, and the dosage is pretty significant on them. So Yeah.
Like, let's, you know, let let's keep a watchful eye on this stuff. But I'm I'm I'm hopeful, but I'm also nervous.
hopefully, the number of people who need to take it, Friedberg. Correct. If I'm wrong, if we got this many people vaxxed who will not need to take it. And then Omicron.
My biggest optimism is just that Omicron is a much less virulent virus, and it sweeps through the population, and we slowly see this pandemic kind of, you know, becoming less severe. Which is what was predicted.
Do you think herd immunity even exists
In the in the way that the virus evolves, no. So there and by the way, it's not binary. It's not like, hey. You get herd immunity, and no one's gonna catch thing, there's clearly a spectrum of immunity. Meaning, like, I can maybe get the virus 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 didn'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 in aggregate. On the other end is, like, everyone gets it, it spreads like crazy. No no vaccine stops it, changes anything.
no amount of antibodies changes anything and everyone just dies. And so somewhere in the middle, I think, is where we find our kind of, you know, our ground. But I I don't think that the traditional definition or the way that people talk about herd immunity, which is, hey. Everyone get the shot and this things over is gonna play out that way at all. This is gonna be a slow slow wind down.
Okay. And to give Chamath some credit, you said it would be a Nothing burger. And so far, it looks like debts 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 brief. We're gonna be okay. I think this is the end of the end.
So
--
Ugh. 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 hadn't some form of inherited blindness. And that's pretty incredible stuff that you can you know, make something, put it into your body, and then, you know, your body does the work of editing out the bad genes, and that's a I
think that's a pretty incredible breakthrough.
I had the starch on my list too, but I went with Starship. For people who don't know, on March 3rd Starship, serial number 10, SN 10 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 that SpaceX has produced. I got to see it. Actually, I went to Boca.
And when you look inside that nose cone, you could 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 100th landing of their smaller rocket And so when this big boy, this BFR big freaking rocket gets going, it's going to change the nature of our species as multplanetary 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 Freeport.
Do you think Starship is gonna be able to orbit Uranus? Enough. Believe it out there.
No, Nick. You can't think that I have veto rights. Yeah.
You can't Nicole, you can't honor all of this needs to stay.
Alright. Biggest flash in the pan. Biggest flash in the pan. Sacks, you pick people. I you told me earlier?
§09Biggest Flash in the Pan
No. I said
--
We love Beepot, please.
Yeah. No. That was yours. I had I think the the use of the word transitory was my biggest flash in the pan. Yeah.
It seemed like for a brief moment that every administration official, every Democratic political consultant, every talking head on TV, kept using the work 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. I like that.
What do you got, Chamath?
I picked all things metaverse and Webroot.
And Web
3.
Yeah. I did
3.
Brit large.
If you guys were around
in the emergence of Web 2.0, there was There was a period when 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. Yep. 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.
And this
this too will be transitory.
I went with the Constitution DAO. While while I believe, Jason, that the concept was inspiring and will echo for quite some time with other, you know, kind of improved versions and different applications, this particular DAO 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. And while I get that there was a good intent, and that folks that were involved in it were felt like it worked, and it and it did what it was meant to do, which was to be inspiring.
That particular DAO came and went in 3 days. And I'm not not 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 2 days later.
Yep. Okay. And I picked the woke socialist leadership of cities, specifically the once great city of 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 Garrytan did the Democratic recall, and Saks supported the Republican recall. Low and behold, London Breed has decided that she does not wanna get recalled And she is fed up with the bullshit in San Francisco and Chesse Boudin and all of these whack jobs are all gonna get voted out and recalled.
And we've seen it and it came up earlier in the program center 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 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 gonna get reelected, game over.
I also think that people have a reasonable right to have their kids educated and not managed to some watered down lowest common denominator, so as to not so as to try to make everybody around them feel better.
Yeah. A
100%.
Alright. I have a feeling that we're gonna this is gonna sweep here. Best CEO? Should we just say 321 and say the name?
§10Best CEO
Although first, I'm gonna 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, he you know, we had to compete with him at Slack when he was you know, he decided to turn the the sites on on with teams onto us. We had no choice but to basically sell to Salesforce. 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.
So just in terms of a, you know, 1st class CEO, he he's He's he's running a master class
right now.
--
crushed it. Crush crushing
scale totally. What can Brown do for you? That was a UPS logo, and it's now It's now what the shareholders of of Google, Microsoft
--
Twitter. -- Twitter, Palo Alto Networks, and Adobe have said.
Yeah. Okay. But
--
Fucking prone to for you. Okay. So much for the Curry ceiling.
Okay. Fred, we we have smashed through the Curry ceiling. Absolutely. There's Curry. I've penetrated the Samosa ceiling.
There we go. Free Burke, what you
got? You're making me hungry.
I know. Got it. I'm having I'm having crab curry tonight. Can you believe it? I went fishing I told you guys this.
I went oh, bleep up the name. I went fishing fishing -- and we caught some crabs. And so we're out in
track record
in the Bay of San Francisco Bay. Yeah.
Oh, did you go up to, like, Chrissy Field? No. We go we we
go to the pier, and then they take us past Golden Gate Bridge 2 point Reyes. We caught Rockfish, which we ate yesterday and delicious.
This is on a boat you did it? On a boat. Yeah.
Oh, wow. Great great captain. Awesome. I wanna -- Yeah. -- school.
I'd I would take London, my twelve year old, crabbing when I lived in San Francisco off of Chrissy Field, and we bring crap to home and all that. You can get these incredible criteria.
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.
Alright. So who do you got? Friedberg, best CEO.
Well, I like I I like the Jack and Elon going direct experience this year. And and what I mean by that is it's less about, like, how well did the business performed. 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, is, you know, 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 should follow them to get there, you know, 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 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 and said that he was not gonna allow politics in the workplace. It was gonna be a demilitarized zone for politics. It was pulling people off mission. A 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. It's now a
$65,000,000,000
public company. And a year later, they are more mission focused. They've attracted more employees. Their diversity numbers have not gone down. And the reason I pick I'm picking him is not just because 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 kinda 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 cojones to do it. I applaud Brian for taking the hit of the New York Times, hit piece that then came after him. And to stick to his guns, he did this policy, and I think Coinbase had a great year.
Amazing choice. Wow. 3 great choices. Satya, Jack Armstrong. I think Elon clearly but I'm gonna pick somebody else, so it's not all Elon all the time.
I'm gonna go with Frank Sluteman from Snowflake. This company has grown incredibly at a incredible velocity, but I just read his book. I got a preorder of his book, pre prerelease of his book called Amped I had him on this weekend start ups, which will come out in the New Year when the book comes out. And he's a killer. He absolutely -- -- like
a killer. He seems like an absolute killer.
And the book basically is I do not care about how you think business works. Here's the 0 sum game of competitive business And here's 205 pages. It's a must read, and he just wants to win. And so my my hat's off to him a $100,000,000,000 company. and and they've absolutely crushed it.
§11Best Investor
So best investor, Chamath, are you gonna pick yourself for the 3rd year in a row, or do you have somebody else in mind?
This one this one, I think, is a is an absolutely easy one, but it's my dear friend, Dan Loeb
--
Oh. -- founder, CIO.
When did that happen?
Founder and CIO of Third Point and of of as I've seen I talked to him yesterday, actually. I called him just to wish him a happy birthday. By the way, it's his birthday. I haven't heard 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 a, you know, early stage investor, I think, the series a and SENTALM 1 that had a big IPO this year. Growth Investing. He, you know, was a was a great investor early investor in Rivi in that one public this year. He had great public performance in Upstart and a bunch of other ones.
activism. He went after Shell. Crypto, I think he's an investor in FTX and a bunch of other things. I mean, just Tundant. 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 a a a beautiful lovely human being. So damn -- Alright.
We're moo we're cooked with oil. We're moving at a nice pace. I pick the Sequoia Fund. The new Evergreen Sequoia and the Sequoia Fund. The new Evergreen Fund, obviously, over the past 2 years, they've had DoorDash Airbnb Snowflake Unity.
these incredible companies worth over $300,000,000,000 combined. And now those LPs get to keep their money in this one vehicle And I think it's gonna make Sequoia even more powerful, great innovation, shout out to my friend, Rudolph. And I gave a runner-up to Brad sner friend of the pod who obviously did Snowflake last year, but had the Grab IPO this year, which I think was the largest back in history. And, you know, 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
--
So you're just going on performance?
Yeah. I don't think it counts though if you do it through tired trading, so I had to rule
her out. Okay.
Sure. So my my actual choice my actual choice is Ken Griffin, the founder of Citadel, He generated something like 10% returns on a $500,000,000,000 fund. I mean, just mammoth Chamath amounts of money, but it wasn't just his economic return. 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 bets, Robinhood scandal way back in January.
Remember, of the whole payment for order flow was a gigantic scandal with with Robinhood, 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 commanding testimony that all these conspiracy theories around his role had no merit. And the populist revolt around this whole payment for order flow Robinhood 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 supervillain in buying the constitution down. Yeah. And he got revenge. Extradollos.
He got he got revenge on the crypto people. That's right.
He had the last laugh on that.
That's right.
Great, great financial troll. Freebark, duplicate yours yet, best investor of
2021?
I kinda stuck to private markets just because they're illiquid, which means it's harder to source not everyone has the same data. No. We all have different data and different points of view. So within that, I kinda said, look. What makes the best investor?
And number 1 is obviously good you know, who's got the best returns. But second is how scalable is your investing machine. And third is how durable is it? Like, does it get worse as you scale up?
I know where you're going with this.
So, you know, I had 3 kind of finalists. 1 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
--
Mhmm. -- which I would argue is the most scalable and durable as we've seen deploying 15,000,000,000 this year. And then finally, Sequoia which has near the best returns, scalable and durable with this new transition you talked about, and ultimately, Sequoia went out. So that's my -- Okay.
--
my creative of success. It's one
of the first times we've had 2 of the same in the voting. This is incredible. Best turnaround. What do you got for best turnaround Tremont? Best turnaround.
§12Best Turnaround
I picked Ford enormous performance this year the stocks up a 130 odd percent. Good portfolio mix of gas guzzling cars that still make a ton of money like the Ford F One Fifties, but they have the Mustang They have electric versions of the Ford F One fifties. They had some great investments. I think they printed like a $20,000,000,000 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 that could have been up a 132 percent.
At the beginning of 2021, it would not have been Ford. So well done by that team.
Who do you have? Sachs.
Are you an investor in Fortuma?
No. No.
This so I went a little different for this. I said the best turnaround was Kyle Rittenhouse's reputation As you recall, Rittenhouse shot 3 white attackers, including 2 of them were sex offenders at a violent BLM protests in Kenosha. The media then 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 politically motivated. I would say that Rittenhouse now has his Friedberg, and he has a reputation back in the eyes of all fair observers.
Who do you got? Friedberg.
Well, I went from who was in the worst shape and you know, came back from that, and I I put WeWork on here, which is an an obvious and easy choice. WeWork to me is like Rocky Balboa. you know, Rocky Balboa could not win the match. Rocky Balboa got so beat up, goes to the you know, to its corner He gets patched up. He's bleeding from his eye, 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 gonna win the match. But, man, for WeWork to go from where it was a few years ago, which was days or weeks away from bankruptcy, 1,000,000,000 of dollars of money injected by SoftBank. And for them to orchestrate, basically, this this whole, you know, juggernaut into what looks like a business now and get it public via a spec, and it now has enough capital and a good game plan, and it looks like maybe a normal you know, challenged technology business was really quite a a turnaround.
There was no one to sell this thing to. They had to get in there, and they have 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 pretty impressive to see them get it out this year.
Alright. Listen, I struggle with this one. I had 2 companies that I really wanted to highlight for 2 different reasons. 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
44,000,000
subs. They added 44,000,000 paid subs this year, and people bought theme park would be a problem, etcetera, and they think they're gonna have an absolute killer future. If Apple had not if it hadn't been for antitrust right now, I think Apple will be looking at buying Disney if they had cut any way to get it through there because The jargon -- What do they what do
they turn around exactly? Like, turnaround 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 I
think they're going to roll over Netflix. So the sentiment was, 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. I understand.
--
why I said, like, it's kinda hard to pick it, but I do think, like, if you look at the fundamentals of the business
--
Twitter's down this year too.
is gonna go to 300,000,000 because they announced so much content from the Star Wars Marvel Pixar Disney ecosystem that is coming this year and next year. And it's going from book of Bobafat, Mandalorian, Obi Wan Kenobi, where, you know, Hayden Christiansen 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 streaming services too. Yeah. Disney Plus doesn't seem to have a monopoly for me. HBO Max is such a depth of context so freaking good.
--
right now.
When that WarnerMedia deal gets done, I think that's the juggernaut stock you wanna own. It's gonna have an incredible library to compete with Tiffany. Well,
I mean, secession
and just like -- The library, man. They've so much in there. They're they're releasing the -- -- Sopranos. They're releasing the matrix tomorrow on HBO plus. Like, HBO Max -- -- redid the league and and try to turn
it to me.
The new the new one.
--
matrix comes out on HBO Max tomorrow.
Day and date. Day
and date.
I love that because I I love that they did that with Dune. I love Dune.
Totally. Yeah.
Doing his incredible movie.
I'm in my movie theater right now, so I'm gonna watch
it in
my movie theater this week. Okay. Worst human being, I'm gonna go first. I'm gonna say Elizabeth Warren, 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.
§13Worth Human Being
while she's got 12,000,000 in equities that she paid, like, $0 on because that's how the tax system 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 Rodee, Brian, Roddie Brian, and Derek Chauvin, for white men who
killed in 2 different incidents, an unarmed black men, they are scumbags,
and they should go to jail and they will for the rest of their lives. They are terrible human beings. Great job.
Saxx who you got for worst. Yeah.
I I've got a name here. I don't know if if the audience knows yet. It's a guy named Peter Dasek, who's a British zoologist He's head of a group called the EcoHealth Alliance that received 1,000,000 of dollars in NIH grants for gain of function research in bat viruses If if that sounds familiar, it's because some of that was given to the lab in Wuhan from which COVID likely leaked. But that by itself is not the the reason why he's my choice. He then became one of the leading signers and organizers of a letter that was published in the Lancet in February of 2020, insisting with total certainty that the virus had made the leap from animals and humans rather than being rather than leaking from a lab.
In fact, he basically painted anyone who had put forward the lab leak theory as a conspiracy theorist, He you know, his influence made this so called zoonotic theory. The official narrative that cannot 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 League 3 were proven right. So this, you know, this guy not only helped unleash a plague upon the world. He then lied about it to cover his ass and protect his millions.
That makes him the worst of my view.
If you're interested in hearing point of view on this, Jamie Metzel did an interview with Lex Friedman on Lexus Podcast. It's worth listening to. It's 5 hours long. But the the section where they talk about what Saks is sharing, I think, is around the 1 hour mark And it's a a really interesting narrative that Jamie shares about what this individual did during this period of time and why.
Does this support what I'm saying?
Yes. He's not gonna listen, but now he feels smug with himself.
So yeah. Thanks. Okay.
It's his actual
office. Lexi Mitsub is a genius.
Yeah. Alexa's great. No. So my my source for this has been the reporting of Glenn Greenwood who -- Yep.
--
did some pretty good research on Great. I mean, sort of expose on the conflict of interest that was never disclosed.
And it was on this basis that all of
the social networking sites then engaged in censorship. So just a whole, you know, cluster of bad motives by
--
Yeah. -- you know, people looking to cover their ass.
But, I mean, it's it's worth hearing Jamie's point of view on this, which is he tries to identify 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 Lexus 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 being answer. not a virtue signal. Really, I just go back to this point that I don't think humans are, you know, 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 sequences for another population. Not not Derekshire. Yeah. 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 esoteric
--
So I
think Friedberg raised 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 -- Right. The outcome. Right. Yeah. 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 tier that when 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 am I. My runner-up was Anakin and Pad May doing their conversation, you know, for the better.
§14Best Meme
Right? And you can look that up online. It's a 4 it's one of those 4 paying conversation ones. What do you got? 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
his little mittens and, you know,
his -- Totally. -- boss He's detached communist glare.
We got about that.
Great meme.
Yeah.
It's like he's at a sit in at, like, some in Vermont.
In in Russia in the winter.
Exactly. Exactly. It's like
a little chip market.
Yeah. Alright. Who do you got? Saxx. You got a best meme?
The ever given forklift meme. This was that little forklift trying to push that gigantic barge out of the -- Oh, yes. -- Sunau. and got hilariously repurposed. And then -- I've seen
that, like, 10 years ago.
I know. This year, can you believe it? And a closer runner-up was my fall plans, versus the delta variant. Oh, okay. Do you remember that one?
That was a good one. -- great one. That was a good one. Friedberg. Yeah.
I know you don't care about pop culture or can so much of it, but give us your best meme.
No. I don't I don't have a meme. Sorry. -- not
have a
meme upgrade. I have no sense of.
I like Tomos, man. That was a good one. I'll take that one. Sort of joy.
--
your memes, but not enough. Okay. Can we upgrade his mean subroutine?
I love pop culture. This the mean thing I just don't it doesn't resonate for me. It just
doesn't say it.
I love pop culture. Yeah. Hi, MH. I love pop culture. My name do not make sense to me.
--
chop boys. We're great. I have trouble processing imagery and text all at the same time.
My sub routine is indexing all images, and GPT 3, I'm going to produce funny jokes. My laughing? Sab routine has been upgraded. Sorry. It's too easy.
Sorry, Allison. Most loads of company deliver them. Most -- Most loaves
of contact. I don't think she listens to this, by the way.
No. My wife doesn't listen to it. I was talking to my wife about sweater care or 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. No?
Okay. Most loads and company This one is an
§15Most Loathsome Company
absolutely easy one slam dunk. It is PG And E, who this
year was charged with felonies and manslaughter in the depth of 4 people because of the wildfires that they started because of their inability to maintain their power or throughout the state of California. Very rare that a for profit corporation gets charged with felony murder and manslaughter. So I think that's a pretty easy one.
What do you got, Friedberg?
I think one day, the human race will look back
and identify animal agriculture as worse than human slavery. I I do think that will be a profound realization over the next century for our species. And as such -- Did
you say worse than human slavery?
I I believe that that's what we will realize because the the scale of death caused by animal agriculture -- Okay.
Oh, I understand now what you're saying. Got it.
The birth to death cycle that these animals live in in cages with no ability to touch or interact with their families. The the hurt, the pain, 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 loathed of them company to me.
and I stick by my by my answer.
Can I can I give you a counterpoint? Yeah. But it's delicious.
It's a joke also. Okay. We got it. 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 -- They're murdered. Honestly, Freeport, like, if you yeah. But the thing is, look, you haven't eaten you 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'm just saying I don't think
there's any winners in this conversation at this point. Now this
is a longer pod. could do this another time.
Fried chicken is really delicious.
Oh, man. So is a good steak? I okay. We gotta stop. I'm hungry.
Smaver. Saxx, did you have a besides Tyson Foods, what do who do you got?
Okay. Most ladies and company -- -- doing you and
putting a label on your thing.
Is it Twitter? -- slow some company. I had the New York Times, a new book came out this year in 2021. Crazy. called The Grey Lady Wink, the author Ashley Rinsberg details decades of misinformation and agenda driven journalism published by The Times Starting in the 19 thirties at a Nazi sympathizer as their German correspondent.
They covered up Stalin's genocide in Ukraine. They assisted Fidelkastor's rise to power. In Cuba, they light us into Vietnam and Iraq. They and they perpetuate the Russian collusion hoax. More recently, The New York Times has gone all in on journalism and cancel culture, hurting anyone from its ranks who commits a transgression against work sensibilities from Brian Armstrong to Kyle Rittenhouse.
They've routinely smeared people as racist with 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 recent company in my opinion.
David, can I double down on this? I posted, Nick, maybe you can find this, but there was a there was an article in the Washington Post that I put into the group chat where the Washington Post article was effectively like Washington Post forced to revisit journalism practices because of falling click through rates and lack of viewership So in a post Trump era -- -- Trump.
Yeah.
Yeah. Post Trump era 2 years on, you know, they're 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 gonna air towards more clickbait, and it's the same for the times.
And so You know, to your point, we have to remember that these things are not run as public trusts. They're 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 this is why tech leaders and other people are increasingly going direct as we talked about all year in the pod.
Go direct.
They are not the paper of record anymore. Direct is the new. The Internet is 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 we could ever do, and we get to Charles.
We -- I think we've probably eclipsed MSNBC any show that and we're probably going to pass CNBC and Fox by the end of this year.
Sure. So for me, I would pick the Mypillow guy, but that's not a real company. So I just picked Meta, which is just so obvious. I just think
Bro, you have these themes. You're like, you're so after Facebook. You're super tilted about Facebook. You're super tilted about Senator Karen.
Yes.
They just keep cropping up in every category.
It's hard for me not to pick Meta here. Best new tech. For me, it's DAOs. I mentioned it earlier. I think it's phenomenal.
§16Best New Tech
I think that they're gonna evolve in global capital formation.
What do you think it is?
Taos. No. And they're what? Global Capital formation. Are phenomenal?
They're phenomenal.
I said
phenomenal. Stop making further the kit from Brooklyn. Okay? How do you think this podcast will be number 40 if I didn't okay. Enough.
Enough. You're ungrateful. Listen. Dowes. You're tilting me.
Now I'm trying to get the show over with 75 minutes in. Okay. Sorry. I say DAOs because I believe that will become legal and global capital formation for the first time on an instant basis will exist. And I believe 40,000,000 is the run for the constitution
$400,000,000 $4,000,000,000
will happen in the next 10 years to do bigger and bigger challenges. The world wants to bet as a unit together, and this is going to be the crowning achievement of web 3, DAOs. What's the best new tech for you, Mister Polly Hopatia?
I have 2 choices. k. 1 is in the heavens, and that is human space travel. k. We had 3 different companies create astronauts this year.
3. Amazing. That's like insanity. Mind blowing. That that it's mind blowing.
And so if you think about what the 5 to 10 years can bring, Jason, that's what you said earlier about, you know, making ourselves a multiplanetary 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. And then the second which is much more closer to earth is substack, 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. Yeah.
And and you can support them directly. Incredible. You know, a handful of people, Matt Taibbe Barry Weiss Air newcomer, just a handful that jump off the top Glenn clean wall, but there's there's many more. Sub Stack's gonna learn how to promote these things to you in a better way, I think, over time. But I think the plan
is if you get a proof of
protection eventually, Chomov, there'll be some sort of group subscription, and then you'll be able to put Glenn Greenwald and Barry Weiss and and have multiple publishers come in like an aggregated feed or something to that effect. In other words, you could subscribe to the New York Times of these independent voices, and
they would put the money across them. It's the closest thing to truth as a service that we have.
And with no. I'd say podcast is right up there too. Saks, I'm I'm obviously you're gonna pick call in, but after call in, what he got? the best of all.
You know, I originally had the the Christopher Gene or anything, but Shamotherapy mentioned that. So I'm gonna I'm gonna go with STARLINK. It got yes. It it just came out at the end of 2020. But this year, it 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 all I can say for all of us who own
--
Yum yum yum yum yum yum yum yum. That's so delicious.
Okay. My best new technology I think that 2021 was the year 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 nuclear series 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 could 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 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 nuclear reaction that that would be the equivalent of a nuclear bomb. And so, you know, the MIT CFS Collaborate 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 doing this work.
And then this year, it suddenly balloons. And -- Is
that how they make energy on the sun?
This one so so all of this is is fusion. That's correct. But -- That's how
that's how they make energy on the sun.
Well, what we're doing here is it 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 So it's different. It's different.
Build -- -- soft being funny. Yeah. General soft being
General fusion has big breakthrough. And Bill Gates is a big backer of a company called TerraPower 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.
When will we have it online?
Still, as everyone's been saying from their 10 years. So -- Okay. -- every year every 10 years, we say 10 years. Okay. Go ahead.
§17Best Trend
Best trend, worst trend. Here we go. I'm gonna go with the best trend being centrism, purple pills, recalls of DA's reasonableness, and maybe the the political class actually representing what most of the country wants, which is a high functioning government that gets the hell out of the way. What do you got, Saxx?
Best trend hashtag Woklash We saw this is similar to yours. We saw a major pushback against Wilkadiology on several fronts this year. First, you had parents pushing back on CRT. leading to a Republican sweep in Deep Blue, Virginia. Then the whole defund, the police initiative was rejected on the ballot of of Minneapolis where it started.
Even mayor of San Francisco now wants to refund the police. The attempt to cancel Dave Chappell totally fizzled out after the walkout protest at Netflix And even Barack Obama told the progressive left to quote get over their woke purity earlier this year. They shoulda listened to him, and maybe they finally will next year. after losing more elections.
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, you know, 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.
So it's awesome to see. The gatekeepers are falling away, and the go direct model is working.
What do you got your month?
I'm gonna double tap that. I have to create our economy. I think it's incredible what these young creators are basically you know, creating. It's incredible. Super super novel and new forms of content.
TikTok is super addictive. stay out of the comments. YouTube is incredible. So this is a brave new world for for creators.
Alright. 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 an 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.
§18Worst Trend
What do you got, Chamath?
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 gonna have to get done over the next 10 years just to make climate as an example. China has done a masterful job They control, you know, 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, you know, lawsuits claiming that the, you know, the wood grouse is more important than batteries. And so unless we undo that stuff we're in a bad place.
Okay. Saks, what do you got?
I've got the 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 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 on vaccine appeal from going to all restaurants bars, nightclubs, sport arenas, fitness centers, movie theaters. And on and on, it goes. On top of that, you've got censorship. You've got, you know, the censoring of speech.
You've got this 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, Zach, 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 that I think we've been talking about. 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 6 years or 5 years.
You know, 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, and it's all about the future and make some stupid video about it. I think it's a little bit lost in already been going on, which is people find value at digital goods, people find value at digital levels and badging, and they find honor and progress in their lives by accomplishing things in the digital universe, and they've been doing that from Minecraft to Fortnite to other places for a long time. And it's it's it's fascinating to watch, but the notion that we call this thing the metaverse and everyone's trying to reclassify it as some future singular universe, and therefore, they can own that singular universe is is a is a pretty misstated and misguided kind of concept.
§19Favorite Media
Let's go on to your favorite book movie podcast music discovery of
20 21.
For music, I had war on drugs. For book, Ray Crocs autobiography. I listened to on Audible, and it was great. On TV, secession, curb, your enthusiasm in Dopesick were my 3 favorites, I think. Friedberg, what he got, considering that you have had your pop culture, I will tell you guys -- Run time.
I think it's 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 Dahlios, the changing world order. It is my number 1, number 2, and number 3 book recommendation. of the year, it is absolutely critical to understand that the 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 or 6 empires over the past 500 years, and this transition is very predictable as Ray Dahlio highlights. We are following a pattern that we've seen over and over again.
And 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. 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 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 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 no.
Oh, I got one more. Come on.
Okay. No. Of course.
Keep going. 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 freaking 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 could talk about it for hours. It is just no political agenda, no nonsense in it.
It's just pure art. It's really beautiful.
Oh.
And then on music, I'll give a shout out to a 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 Aranda. who was on American Idol, my kids cannot stop listening to his track that they did together. It's amazing.
Shout out for that guy. Just figured he deserves it for putting out an an awesome track.
Alright, Saxx. Which Steve Bannon episode was your favorite?
So under book of the year, have a very recent choice, which is San Francisco by Michael Schellenberger. It just came out, but it's already, I think, very influential. It's not just about San Francisco. It's really about how this so called progressive agenda in cities is not working. I think it is gonna be the blueprint for a major backlash that's already begun here.
in San Francisco with London Brie taking on Jason Boudin. I think that's gonna be a recurring theme next year. Also, other big cultural discoveries I like Chamath, I have a RedHill journalist on Sub Stack, Glen Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, 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. Chamath, what was your favorite app besides Colin? Go ahead.
Exactly. Let's see. So my best album is Planet Her by Doja Cat, danceable, fun. Kids love it. I love it.
You dance?
Okay. Wait.
She's awesome.
You know that I have rhythm, bro.
All all in summit, dance party. Here we go.
Oh, yeah.
--
from the from the waist down as you also
Just beep that out. Please just check that out. No. No. It's the truth.
No.
You cannot hide from the truth, boys. Yeah. 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 mimetic theory, which is that people copy each other that causes conflict.
It was espoused by a philosopher named Renee Gerard. Myself, Peter Tiel, there's a bunch of us who are pretty deep Renaysure Art acolytes. The problem is that his stuff can be a little hard to penetrate. And so there is a book called Wanting, w a n TING 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.
And now just shout out. We didn't have Best comedian in here, but I really enjoyed Hassan Manages. the king's jester a new show. 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.
Did any of you like Loki?
I enjoyed it a lot.
Yeah. I enjoyed it. -- good.
Yeah. Well, that is it. What is
what is Loki? He is
a his stores step brother, and they did a TV show called Loki, which was, like, a very challenging metaverse, multiple timeline kind of conceptual.
Does this set stage for the whole next wave of Marvel movies. Didn't you think that was the best Marvel product this year or
no? Definitely, it was. Absolutely.
100%.
It's in Spider Man homecoming, but I think it sets in line Wait. Wait. We haven't heard
from Saks.
Did we hear from Saks? Yeah. Saks just picked, like, some right wing book. It looks like Sanford said sicko or something and he doesn't watch TV or whatever. I mean, Saxx, did you you you actually love movies.
You've made movies. Did you see a film you loved? Were you just watching, like, films for me? I mean,
honestly, it's hard to find, like, even one movie that I wanna, you know, write home about. I think these slides are to find TV shows. Like, we're enjoying Yellowstone right now quite a bit. I don't know if you guys are watching that. Kevin Cox
Nobody who's on the left knows what Yellowstone is explained to people, this right wing phenomenon.
It's a it's a Kevin costume show. I don't know if it's right wing. It's about a ranching, like, family, like their traditional sort of cowboys. who live in Wyoming and or maybe it's Montana. I'm not sure anyway.
There's all these people trying to go after them to get their land. Mostly developers And -- No. I hear it's fantastic. They're fighting to preserve their way of life, which is around, you know, Raising cows.
It's Taylor Sheridan, who's the guy who did Scenario, which if you've never seen Scenario 1 and 2, amazing. the most amazing
--
Amazing.
--
taught thrillers you're ever gonna see. I mean, very hard to watch. They're so intense. And I think Yellowstone now is the reason I say it's right, Wang, is it's doing incredibly well in the south, and it's not happening in the coastal cities. So coastal
cities -- It's kind of like a leave me alone
it it they're very much
against to
the republic the the traditional Republican slash American sensibility. 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, 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 the subject of the show, the concert character, he's just 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 a 150 years, Russell and Cattle.
Can't wait to see it.
And I don't know how political that is, but they are, like, very tough. I mean, it's like Easter.
It's like Sanfern. San Francisco Housing Parkway.
Yeah.
§20The Rudy Giuliani Award for Self-Immolation
Okay. We're gonna keep up with this one. This is our Rudy Giuliani award for self emoliation. Basically, people who destroyed their legacy in some way who otherwise just bungled everything Sachs. I gotta 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 I went with the Cuomo brothers. You know?
Great pull.
Yes. So first, you have the governor Andrew Cuomo. Remember, at the beginning of COVID, 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 a few weeks later, there's a major scandal at CNN when it leaked documents from the New York AG's office show that his brother Chris Cuomo had used his search at, you know, FcNN to Dave Dana dirt on some of his brother's accusers, then he was suspended and ultimately fired. So both brothers self immolated within a few months of each other.
And Andrew Cuomo had to return his $5,000,000 book advance for his COVID book. Fred Burke, who you got? Who lit themselves on fire? And
--
Well, I I I was a little general. I kinda said, you know, all these politicians who made claims about the back seen not being worth doing, 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. So, you know, I think, again, credibility, institutional credibility, and deterministic statements like that from both sides Chamath a lot of reputations and it was just brutal to watch. You know, from from one day to the next, from Elizabeth Warren to Rand Paul, people getting COVID making one claim or another about, you know, the the the good or the bad of the vaccine.
And at the end of the day, COVID doesn't care clearly. So, anyway -- What
do you got, Shamalff? Senator of Karen.
I think Senator of Karen is the obvious choice for me. kinda prove that she doesn't really know much about economics is, you know, kind of mean and just basically wants to you know, is a moral absolutist authoritarian just on the left?
By the way, I just 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 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 this you know, the same characters 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 kinda saying is only gonna 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 that, you know, she can never win that, you know, that beer test quite remember that question they asked, they pull people on about presidential candidates is who do you most wanna have a beer with? You know, that that question actually is important because I don't think people wanna have a beer with people who are scolding them or or these moral absolutists like Jamal said. There is a check there. And so I I think she's 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.
But I think that this presidency is won 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. Alright. Here we go.
My god, Jason. How much Fox news have you been watching?
Just hanging out with you too much. I'm on this thread with you. No. I mean, it is possible, you know, I I really wanted a centrist. For president, he presented as such, and then he hasn't done that.
And now he's being forced into centrism kicking and screaming, you should've just started there. That's where he that was the promise he should've all started there.
That's where that's where he's most comfortable anyways. That's who
he is. like, what a head fake, and now he winds up there anyway, and it's gonna be too late. So it's just a disaster. He he 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 gonna make this, but who was your favorite bestie? So this is you picking up the 3 other badges?
§21The Besties spread holiday cheer with each other
Freightberg, 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 saw it,
I am your favorite bestie.
No. But you know what? yesterday, Timov served me crates with Nutella, so he's my favorite bestie now.
So you're so
glad that
you had playing?
No. And Saks had an incredible party and you guy I want I wanna say -- -- all
3.
Okay. I'll
tell you something. All three of you guys have been incredibly generous, and I I feel fortunate. And I know it's a little soft moment, but thank you guys. That's it.
I have had my craftsmanship upgraded.
My emotion is complete.
I love you guys.
But I feel fortunate.
My voice is cracking. This is in my programming, but I should keep it together that to your sub routine has not been installed. Shabbat, you wanna pick your for bestie and or Agora on the horn.
And -- This is just a bad idea.
No. I love all
three of you. Yeah.
I love all three of you, but for different reasons, I'm really lucky to have all three of you as friends.
Oh, very nice. I am very lucky to have 2 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 Friedberg, you know, I I just say, like, you know, I get as I told your mom Friedberg at your wonderful Christmas party, I said, you know, getting to know your son has been one of the highlights of the last year and a half would be so sincerely. You know, I was good friends with him up in sacks. But, you know, 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, your 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 you every week. I would do this if we threw the episode away every week. Because it's inspiring for me for the next 6 days until we meet again. It really fills my bucket. It recharges my batteries to to be with folks who just aggressively want to solve problems in the world.
Where are we taping this
next week?
So that that's in, like, 2 or 3 weeks. We're gonna be at the upfront summit. on the second day in LA, I think it's somebody wanna give the date. I think it's January.
Any plans to tip from Uranus.
Oh, he set it up. Not with the institutes. If we can, Terraform. It's the 24th 26th, but I think we're on 26th.
We're on
the last day in the afternoon all in podcast. We're doing it. Mark Suster invited us. And then the all in summit, We'll 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 in 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 to pay, and then everything will be simulcast or alright, everybody. Let's wrap up.
Saks, I know you're not capable of saying anything emotional, but let's give it a shot. just for the for the audience.
I mean, this is a real question. This is a feminine bullshit that you guys are.
This is
my -- This
is so brutal. You're such an asshole.
Why a piece of
work such an asshole.
Can I doubt you? I I will say this this group, a few relationships in particular, had a very rocky year. And so it's nice. Yeah. And so -- -- really.
YouTube.
That is true.
It was not pub it was not pub like what all that went down. but but Shamat and I
--
Here we are. Here we are.
It's good. Shamat and I fought very hard to keep the pod together and to make sure that you guys And you guys are literally, like, the the the 2 characters from stepbrothers. And -- But what
characters are you talking about in the spot? You and Shamat?
Or -- Yeah. And it's good it's good it's good it's good Yes, sir.
You're the idiot who crashed the bunk beds.
The one on top.
Yeah. He jumps on top of the old
fence that crashed
the down.
--
know what movie you're talking about. What is the
2
of you you Sachs and Jacob found a way to fight to almost break up, to destroy everything we built together. Friedberg and I had to step in, not once, but on 2 different occasions.
The amount
of time Chavant and I had to spend mediating the two of you back together was ridiculous. And by the
way, on the time either.
Yeah. That was the time.
I don't have
the time either. Saks could stay in his lane
and be able to
--
No. No. No. No. No.
No. side. Don't side.
Nick's reminding me of something.
Yeah. He
says he said I got so mad at Jason this year that I threatened to make Nick a millionaire out of spite. Nick, I wanna make you a millionaire regardless. I know your uncle's not gonna do it. He's doing great. he's going great.
He's got that. Take it easy, everybody. No bookkeeping.
--
people so last me to this day, was that whole few with
Jake How real, or was it just for ratings? and -- It was real.
I don't
know. It was all it was real.
The bigger feud was not on the bigger feud was not aired on the air.
Right. There was a second fuse that was gonna follow you.
That's under NDA. That's under NDA.
That one was after the call.
NDA. We signed an NDA. let's just say that you're just an operating agreement now.
Yeah.
It's not easy. You know, success is hard for a band. You know? And I think one of the things I'll say about this whole and the and the, you know, Saxon 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 became a better moderator. I think Saxx, Jamoth, Friedberg, you've all become great at passing the ball and showing interest in each other's points. And I feel like we're playing 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 like, let's say, the warriors do. And I really feel like even in the last ten episodes, we hit a high watermark and the and the audience and everybody I meet tells me the same thing. My guys just do a such a great job.
I'll say one thing one thing that makes
it really hard. I I was
I was with Chemach yesterday as you guys know.
Yes. And -- -- secret mission.
One thing I observed with Chemach is no matter how much success or wealth Timoth 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. We find things that others aren't doing. We push hard.
We grind. We grind. There's grinders. Yeah.
a lot of the East Coast -- Yeah.
-- 4
a day -- And and and
I think I think all four all four of
us in the same are in the same vein, and that makes it really hard for 4 personalities like that to work together in a consistent way. And that underlies a lot of what I think ultimately bubbles up to the surface with some of the stuff. But you know, we we should be thankful that we can pull it off because it's it's pretty pretty awesome.
And can
I ask you something nice about Jake?
Here we go.
So it's true that without Jay Kal, this pod never would have happened. Because you are the you are the podcast in this group.
You're -- You
are the
glue. -- skills.
You are the glue.
You make 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 stop feeling you stop feeling. So in secure because you really are the reason for this pod.
Alright. Listen. Let me give a compliment then. Saks, you bring so many great notes to the pod. and you are so eloquent based on what your team writes for you, your ability to read that script and the amount of the money you spend forming your opinions from Tucker Carlson's ex writing team is extraordinary so much to the table.
I can't believe I ever wanted to replace you with poop. Nobody's gonna know who I was threatening to replace Zachary. It was, like, literally, like, we're gonna replace this guitarist.
boys have a wonderful holiday.
Have a
great one. I love you besties. Okay, everybody. We'll see you all next week for 2022 predictions. Our promise to you, no weeks off for the besties.
gonna be with you every Friday night. Bye bye. Bye bye. Let your winners ride. Rainman, David Sachs.
We open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy lately.
what airliners ride. Besty's our best. That is my dog
I wish you your driveway. We should all just get a room and have one big queue, George, because they're all just useless. It's like this, like, sexual tension that we just need to release somehow.
What? You're the bee bee. What? You're happy. Pure feet.
What? Where did you get merkeys are back? going all day.