Hey, everybody, welcome to another episode of the all in

podcast. And 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, kind of

halfheartedly, 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 rain man, David Sachs and sweater Jesus

Chamath Palihapitiya. How’s everybody doing? Ready to go?

Did anybody do their homework? Oh my god, we are nine away from

episode 69. And where we will have a special guest special

guest who I’ve given the choice of coming on episode 69 or 420

Oh, no, no, no, he has to do 69. He can’t do fortune. He can do

both. He can do whatever he wants. Basically, he did no

wrong. Is he committed? What about jack? Can we get jack on?

Don’t talk about that. If you stop grinding jack. Yeah. Yeah,

maybe if you stop dunking on jack for no reason, you

insufferable sacks. Seriously, you’d suffer enough that like

I’ve alienated potential guests. Chamath alienated best now

you’re getting in on alienating. I guess it would be too much to

have jack and Chris Dixon on together. Who? Who? Oh my god,

that is so cool. Delete that. Oh, don’t look at free. I don’t

care about my relationship with AC 16. See, we all know who’s

the other person? Dick Chris Dixon. Chris Dixon. Yeah, who’s

a general partner to Andreessen Horowitz who runs their crypto

fund? Oh, nice. It wasn’t just me. I mean, very vocal lately

about web three. Why don’t you guys invite the CFO of Greylock

as well while you’re at it?

We couldn’t get the partner in charge of human capital at

Excel.

You’re getting a little bit far afield. Chris posted something

pretty innocuous on web three and jack jumped down his throat

and same thing as well. I saw the C. Dixon quote. It wasn’t

just me. Now you’re pretending you retweeted a photo of jack

jumping down Chris Dixon’s throat and saying, Whoa, what’s

going on here? Now you’re trying to pretend like he was triggered

by me. He wasn’t triggered by jack after dark jack is gone

wild. Chris Dixon did did try a little misappropriation for

which jack jumped down his throat basically. Horowitz is

saying they always culture appropriate, right? Like Jack is

just like any other guy who quits his job and then goes on

a shitposting rampage. And really like you did. Like

Shabbat did after shutting down. I’m just one of his casualties.

There’s a bunch of people he’s got. He was great. I think he

quit. I think it’s great to of Twitter so he could tweet. Yeah,

he wanted to get in there. He wants to focus on blockchain.

Clearly, 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 badgered 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 Zenefits?

Sacks like, Okay, honestly, I’m not trying to badger him. I only

have one question, which is the reason why he loves Bitcoin is

for censorship resistance. So why when he had the opportunity

as CEO of Twitter, didn’t he stand tall for resisting

censorship? David, maybe he did. Okay, 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, there’s a dynamics of

a board and lawsuits and hundreds of decisions that the

president inciting a riot at the Capitol, you’re not supposed to

create a list and publish it and say, Look at me. I’m such a good

boy. I mean, it’s not reasonable. 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

were full dunk mode. I know that’s one of your comedy

writers writing those tweets for you. Did you get was that a

punched up tweet or not? It was a punched up.

No, it was not punched up.

funnier than you actually are. Why did you have to throw my

people? Yeah, why do you have to go to the ashram? Yeah. Why are

you in?

Jack has spent years trying to cultivate this like Zen

approach.

My people nothing to do nothing to do with an ashram.

We’re getting lost in the weeds here.

Do you have a music intro?

Please welcome everybody to the 2021 Bestie Awards. Now just put

in like everybody like Denzel Washington and you know, like,

can we edit screenshots from like the last Oscars? You know,

everyone’s in our audience.

Oscars from the 80s. Like Tom Cruise getting up and cheering

and whooping. Okay, here we go.

Don’t let your winners ride.

Rain Man, David Sacks.

And it said we open source it to the fans and they’ve just gone

crazy with it.

Love you guys.

So there’s a lot at stake here, folks. And we’re going to start

it off with biggest winner in politics, a very difficult

decision here. Sacks, biggest winner in politics. Who do you

got?

I got Eric Adams, the new mayor of New York City. He was a huge

underdog candidate. He won by not being woke. He rejected the

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 an instrument of minority advancement, and he

even pushed to make New York City a tech and crypto hub, he

is going to reverse the damage done under de Blasio. He won

four or five boroughs, 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, free bird, who you got?

Okay, mine’s a little esoteric. But my biggest winner for

politics this year is the blockchain. And I’ll tell you

why I think that the embracing the blockchain as a technology

that enables an evolution away from what folks consider to be,

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 going to wake up the political class

to the fact that this system of organizing social, economic and

political action may ultimately evolve us away from the systems

that we run today. And it is a very serious threat to the

current system of politics and economics and social order. And

I think it’s starting to kind of rear its head and politicians

are starting to wake up to it. And they’re all thinking very

deeply about what it means. And so I would say the blockchain

has really kind of created a new model for organization amongst

humans, that is waking us up in the political class more than

anything else.

Okay, come off. Who do you got?

I think this is pretty obvious. But I think it’s Glenn Youngkin,

the governor of Virginia, here’s a guy that was a private equity

executive, who basically had to fade Trump, but still pretend to

feign that he needed his support and ran a pretty centrist, 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 McAuliffe. And I think that this is the

roadmap, which effectively says, whether you’re a democrat or a

republican, grab into the centrist temples, and run with

it. And you’re going to get a ton of people in the silent

majority, who are sick of all of this fringe behavior, both on

the left and the right. And so I think Glenn Youngkin was a real

canary in the coal mine for the political future of America.

All right, great selection so far, and a lot of diversity in

the picking. And so I went with Joe mentioned, obviously, the

shadow president who was able to dictate what gets passed and

build back better getting canceled, or cut from six plus

billion down to maybe 1.5 billion, if it ever gets

trillion rather, sorry, thank you, was my

hey, Sam, do you think a rising star or a foiling star after his

decision to denounce the build back better bill this year this

week?

Well, you guys have to remember that the state he’s from West

Virginia went for Trump, I like 20 points, it is a deep red

state and mentioned himself as 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 him 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, or I imagine most people who aren’t

aware of that kind of political circumstance, he looks like a

john mccain maverick kind of guy, like he’s coming in and

saying, I’m blowing this thing up. And he gets all this

attention. I think that’s 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 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 the spent new spending.

Super interesting. Yeah,

here we go. Biggest loser in politics. Who do you got? Let’s

go in reverse order. Now, Chamath, who do you got?

You go first, JL.

My biggest loser is Elizabeth Warren. She wanted everybody to

pay a lot of taxes who were in the billionaires to pay taxes,

she wanted to cancel them. And now the largest tax bill ever

paid by any American has been completed. According to a tweet

from Elon that he paid $11 billion. Every program she

wanted to work for, and fight for has been done just not by

her. It’s been done by the private sector. She was

attacking Bezos for pay in factories and getting to a $15

minimum wage. Now Amazon is regularly paying in the 20s 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, alt right. She’s, she’s basically not

important.

I’ll build on your theme. And I actually just said the

progressive left and the alt right. So I think that the

church extremes in America have basically, you know, we’ve

exposed them for the emperor with no clothes. So, you know,

we have tried progressive policies in cities and states in

America that’s failed. We’ve tried far right politics at the

federal level, that’s basically crashed and burned as well. And

now what you see is a wave of normalcy. And so, you know, all

these chortling, you know, fringe classes, get an extreme

amount of attention, because what they say is salacious or

interesting, but underneath, there’s no real substance or

follow through or real skill, there’s no basic understanding

of anything, economic policy, foreign policy, none of it. And

so they make for great soundbites, but they cannot

govern. And so I think the biggest losers, the progressive

left and the alt right. Sach, you want to 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 Quayle 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. A lot of viewers don’t even remember what we’re talking

about. But so the problem here is kind of 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 going to 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 first

female president of the United States. Just as a gentle

reminder that we had, I love it how you how you called him

calacanis calacanis. Well, he likes to monetize his name.

Okay, fried bird.

You know, I mean, I made because I thought Biden wasn’t going to

make it through the first term because he’s so old. And then he

might not be able to function.

That was that was right. Yeah, that may still happen. Yeah, I

think I might stand by that prediction. 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 is the new rule here. All right, moving on.

Oh, wait, I got my biggest loser. Oh, yeah. So 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 got to do x to get y, in order to get people to take

action. And so, you know, in order, determinism 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. And the problem with 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 map on where we sit today. And I think as a result,

he completely lost credibility with a broad swath of people who

otherwise would have been kind of still standing behind him.

Because I do think he’s, you know, he’s an honest, just

forthright scientist. But in order to drive outcomes, he had

to be very kind of stated. And it was a bit of a trap this

year. And I think he got screwed. So poor, poor Tony

Fauci. I mean, bless him, but it was a rough year.

All right, biggest political surprise. Saks, what do you got?

What’s the biggest political surprise?

Yeah, this is where I had Glenn Youngkin. And, you know, I just

add to what Schmoth already said, you know, Virginia went

for Biden by 10 points just a short time before. Youngkin, 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

the business pedigree as kind of Schmoth 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 McAuliffe had that gaffe. In their final

debate, he said that parents shouldn’t be telling the

schools what to teach. Basically, McAuliffe was cited

with the teachers unions. And whereas Youngkin sided with

parents, and really, I think a voice 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

Volcker. So let me explain what I mean by that. You know, at the

time, Volcker 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 ire towards Volcker. Similarly, I

think Manchin 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 what it means to working families. And that is

true, that but there are ways to solve for that, by just going

back and re spending the 7 trillion we already spend a

little bit better. And in time, the idea and the courage to not

pour three more trillion dollars on this dumpster fire, without

getting ourselves better organized will turn out to be an

enormous gift that he gave our kids a profile 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

your 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.

Yeah. Okay, freeberg. What do you got?

My biggest political surprise was that that insurrection crowd

made their way into the Capitol building. I mean, do you guys

remember how shocking those images were? Yeah. And what an

incredible day that was. 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 Capitol building, and cause

mayhem and damage. 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 kind of 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 doors were being kicked in.

And also, while some elected officials were kind of endorsing

the behavior to some extent, you know, at a distance, the whole

thing was just shocking. And I think a lot of us realize that

maybe our democracy and I think I mentioned this on the show

last year, is not a little more fragile than perhaps 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 sidelined her deliberately. And they don’t believe in her

which is they don’t believe in the first female vice president

and of color.

I don’t think it’s that I think that they think what is not

she’s not they think that she’s not electable. And so they’re

judging. Yeah.

So maybe they’re racist jk.

Or maybe they are saving her till after the midterms and then

going to feature her I don’t know what the strategy is the

house.

Like a fighter. They’re sitting 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

sad. Well, they did give her a task like they sent her to the

border. The problem is she doesn’t have anything to say

that’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.

It wasn’t an order da I mean, 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 going to continue to be sidelined. But if she tacks

back to the center and actually gets out there, I think she’s

really capable of doing some stuff here. She’s very

articulate. She’s very punchy. Anybody she took, you know, she

can really tell the truth. But then she can also really just

shuck and jive and say nothing when she wants to. And that’s

just what’s that corporal speak isn’t working for her.

Did anybody else notice freeberg sacks, that the initial

reaction to mansions vote or saying he wasn’t going to 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 was this weird emotional reaction. Like I got

this email I forwarded to you guys from about Yeah, and it’s

like crazy in that email, like in that in her press release or

whatever that email that she sent to us, a bunch of us got

it. I mean, Jen’s going crazy. Yeah, hysterical.

It was CYA by the administration, like they

wasted everyone’s time for six months pushing this bill forward

without checking to see if the swing votes would go for it. So

then the swing votes don’t go for it, the bill fails. And

they’re blaming those seconds.

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 to the end and then try to high pressure him or something

or flip him at the end. It doesn’t make sense to

it doesn’t make sense to push for that big a 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 Fed 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

with this terrible betting strategy by the Republican

party. Well, 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. Right. All

right.

Biggest winner in business free broke. Who you got? Biggest

winner?

2021. My biggest winner in business goes back to the Game

Stop days. And I think it was the retail investor class. You

know, they were always there to trade on the wings and in the

wake of the institutions and the markets prior to I think what

took place this year. And after what happened this year, where

they were able to coalesce and organize to make trades that

move the market against institutions in a really

meaningful way and broke several institutions in the process. It

highlighted that retail has power, retail can organize and

retail in aggregate can act to be a stronger force in the

markets than institutions. And so the retail investor is my

biggest winner for 2021.

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’re just in the zone. Yeah. 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 my 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 outsider class versus

insiders. I think that whether it’s blockchain, or web three,

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.

Saks, who do you have biggest winner in business? If it is

Elon, who’s your runner up?

Yeah, so I mean, can’t fault that Elon choice is pretty

obvious. But I would say in our world, the biggest winner was

Tiger Global. They basically productize growth stage capital

by far the biggest deployer of late stage funding, they

productized it. So pretty much founders can just send their

metrics on like a single sheet of paper, and they get a term

sheet within two days, they did by far the most deals. It’s

really the SoftBank strategy done right.

That’s a great pick 15 billion. I think it’s the amount they

deployed this year. I don’t know if you guys heard that number.

But yeah, yeah. In a single year to invest 15 billion assume a

five year fund, you know, you’re at a $75 billion run rate. It’s

pretty incredible. I mean, it really is the size of vision

fund. And I heard I don’t know if you guys heard, but they are

heavily dependent, not dependent, but they’ve built

infrastructure with third parties who source all this

data for them to really kind of measure everything prior to

making investments. They built a machine. It’s amazing.

My biggest winner in business is the ang not the fang drop the F

and go with the A and G. Amazon has a new CEO and they have a

Mr. Beat. Apple is about to hit 3 trillion. And Susan Wojcicki

and YouTube if you don’t know is now at 2 billion users 30

billion in revenue. And this of course is after Elon, because

that’s the obvious choice. So after Elon, Alphabet stock up

66% Apple stock up 31% you guys know what’s going on with those

big companies. So I’m going to go with the ang biggest loser in

business. The biggest loser in business. Who do you have

Friedberg? Who’s your biggest loser?

Well, I went I went to the opposite of my biggest winner. I

went for those institutions that that, you know, got their lunch

eaten by the 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 $2.75 billion from

Citadel and .72 just to get through his month. I mean, talk

about embarrassing. Talk about reversal of fortune. You know,

he’s obviously been a renowned investor prior to this. And you

know, there’s a few others that that were, you know, casualties

of war, White Square, a firm in London shut down half a billion

AUM. So all these folks who tried to bet against retail

during the GameStop saga, and since thinking that the world

was the way it used to be, I’ve had to kind of change.

It’s amazing that that and the insurrection bolt happened in

this year, like time is moving so fast.

Oh my god, this year is insane. Yeah, it’s been a crazy year.

All of this happened in this past year. It’s crazy to think

about we were here and I was up in Tahoe skiing 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 Sachs?

I have Chinese billionaires were the biggest loser this year.

If you guys remember, yeah, exactly. A year ago, we were

all asking, where’s Jack Ma? Well, he eventually turned up

looking very thin and kind of broken. But his experience was

just an early sort of manifestation and sort of a

canary in the coal mine of a larger CCP crackdown on all

Chinese billionaires. And the CCP really seems to be

increasing its control and putting these people under its

thumb. And there are a bunch of tech companies there like

Alibaba, DD, Tencent, Baidu, JD.com. They’ve all been

targeted for fines and tighter controls. And China’s pretty

much shut down the foreign IPO market for their tech companies.

They’ve been moving into 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 it’s really

so great. Yeah, I love hearing some of these things. It makes

me think for sure. Yeah, my my biggest losers 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 was a lot of signs that there’s

pressure building. So whether that’s measured in lawsuits,

fines, bad PR, if you put all of that stuff together, I think

the thing that that drives is decaying morale. And when you

have decaying morale, you have human capital flight. So people

leave. 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 number of issues that all of these

companies collectively are dealing with, I think that this

is sort of peak, big tech market cap is probably within the next

year or two.

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 Chamath’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 F in Fang should be replaced with the T of Tesla and be Tang

Facebook. Meta traded up 25% this year. Jekyll.

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

three, four or five years, but I would not buy the stock. I’d buy

the other three letters, I would buy the Tang, but not the F and

Fang. But I think it’s a good counterpoint. Yeah, these things

take a while to unwrap.

Well, I think, you know, I think the better trade is pick the one

that you love in Fang, and short the one that you hate and Fang.

And if you get that right, you can make a lot of money pretty

safe.

Spread there, right? The spread trade like we talked about. All

right. Biggest business surprise. What do you got sex?

What’s your biggest business surprises?

I thought that the biggest business surprise was tech

leaders and startups moving to Miami, its emergence from really

nothing in the tech scene to being a major tech hub. It was

just a year ago, one 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, he

responded, How can I help? And then since then, it’s just been

snowballing. And as 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, he’s

kept schools open. And of course, the tax rate is zero. The

income tax and the capital gains tax that is are zero. So it’s

really pretty amazing how fast it has become a major tech hub.

My answer, which was really surprising to me starting in

January, and I think I started texting you guys in January

saying, I really think we should talk about this on the pod, if

you’ll remember, 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, you know, huge slugs or

huge chunks of the margin out of what they create. And this

can ultimately translate into music, into art, into writing,

into all sorts of things. So I’m pretty excited, not

necessarily about where NFTs sit today, I think it’s disaster

where it sits today. But I think over the long run, I just love

it a disaster. I just think there’s too much of this bubbly

stuff that’s going on where people are buying into

speculative transactions that are going to lose them money and

then people are gonna be really hurt and really upset. But the

general core tech, I love the fact I love the fact that

creators people that are great at art and people that are

creative, can develop stuff and make money because 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 million in a couple of days for this constitution, and

get and basically captures every capture the entire world’s

imagination for, you know, a 72 hour news cycle, much in the way

the day traders did with AMC, and GameStop to freebirds 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 Dow that

was able to raise 40 million for the Constitution. But I was also

disappointed that the SEC in your 10 plus of crypto has not

defined the rules of the road yet. So that one group of

people, professional capital allocators play by one set of

rules. And then another group of people dows 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 dows for NFTs for tokens. And it’s just crazy that

it hasn’t happened yet. What do you got?

My big business winner, breakout company, I have two, but they’re

the same really is Moderna slash biotech. You know, these were

guys that were kind of swimming at the edges of science and R&D

and somewhat was just incapable of putting one foot in front of

the other until this pandemic and through a bunch of, you

know, emergency use authorizations, these guys have

really shown up to help the world. And in 2020, I think they

cemented themselves as now on 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 else. So I think

these two companies, these two companies really took a big step

forward in 2020. Absolutely. And just as a side note, OpenSea had

8 million a monthly value volume at the beginning of the year in

January and 3.46 billion in August. Give me a little idea of

the scale of that. Okay, best science breakthrough. What do

you got? Freeberg? 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 going to 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 starch synthesis synthesis system is your best

science breakthrough. What do you got sex?

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 vaccine. So the vaccines by itself cannot end the

pandemic. These new pills have, I think, a very good shot of

doing it next year, because they’re protease inhibitors,

they stop the virus from replicating. And just in 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.

Right one, I would like to make a counter to sexes. Point, I

would be very cautious about the side effects that are going to

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 effects would be there’s a lot that are

well documented, but the way they work biologically is they

disrupt, you know, certain systems. And those are not just

systems related to the virus, their systems in our own cells.

And so I’m personally quite nervous about them. I know that

folks are pretty encouraged by them and excited, but I’m

nervous about them.

There’s a similar medication that’s been developed for HIV,

right? That’s called prep, right? 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, you know,

when you have half a percent or 1% 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 I’m not

sure we’ve really gotten the boundaries of this yet. And the

dosage is pretty significant on them. So yeah, like, let’s, you

know, let’s keep a watchful eye on this stuff. But I’m hopeful,

but I’m also nervous.

Hopefully, the number of people who need to take it free bird

correct me if I’m wrong, if we’ve 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 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 going to catch this 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 don’t even know I had it. That’s kind of, you know, not

all the way over to herd immunity and the traditional

kind of definition of the way that we talk about it. But it

reduces the spread and the severity and aggregate. On the

other end 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 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 thing’s over, is

going to play out that way at all, this is going to 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 deaths and

hospitalization, specifically ICUs, admittance has not turned

out to be a major issue yet, knock on wood,

unless something escapes from the lab again, I think that

we’re, we’re gonna be okay. I think this is the end of the

end. So

that would be so great if this was the end of the endgame.

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 improve the vision of some

people who had 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 3, Starship, serial

number 10, SN 10, completed SpaceX third 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 can fit 300 people in it, it is a payload that is

absolutely unprecedented in terms of sending people or

things to space. And the fact that this has succeeded means

all the folks at SpaceX need to do is to scale it. And they’re

pretty good at scaling things, they just had their hundredth

landing of their smaller rocket. And so when this big boy, this

BFR, big frickin rocket gets going, it’s going to change the

nature of our species as multi planetary 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 freebird.

Do you think Starship is going to be able to orbit Uranus?

Enough to leave it out there. No, no, no. All of this needs to

stay. All right, biggest flash in the pan, biggest flash in the

pan sacks. You pick people I you told me earlier.

No, I love people, please. Yeah, no, that was yours. I had, I

think the the use of the word transitory was my biggest flash

in the pan. It seemed like for a brief moment that every

administration official, every democratic political consultant,

every talking head on TV kept using the word transitory, it

was very much the vocabulary word of the day. But now, it

turned out that the inflation was not transitory. And so the

use of the word transitory, I predict will in fact be

transitory.

My summary. Like that. What do you got? Chama? I picked all

things metaverse and web.

And web three. Yeah, I did three writ 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. Yeah. And so I think that these

trends actually have names, and those names are of companies,

and those companies create experiences that people want.

And so I just think that this whole concept of metaverse and

web three 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 Dow. 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 Dow caused a lot of

people to lose a lot of money in gas fees, transferring tokens

over to cover the expense of the ultimate purchase that was not

actually done, it felt a little disorganized, there was

questions around equity and securities and the legality and

misaligned expectations. 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 did what it was meant to do, which was to

be inspiring. That particular Dow came and went in three days.

And I’m not 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. Two 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 roughshod over the citizens of

their own city. And lo and behold, when an investigative

journalist was hired by myself, and Gary Tan did the democratic

recall and sack supported the republican recall. Lo and

behold, London breed has decided that she does not want to get

recalled. And she is fed up with the bullshit in San Francisco,

and Chesa Boudin and all of these whack jobs are all going

to get voted out and recalled. And we’ve seen it and it came up

earlier in the program. So I’m to beat a dead horse. But these

failed policies of letting people run amok and not having

some base level of protection and not listening to your

citizens 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 going to

get reelected game over. I also think that people have a

reasonable right to have their kids educated, 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, 100%.

All right. I have a feeling that we’re going to this is going to

sweep here best CEO. Should we just say 321 and say the name?

I’ll go first. I’m going to pick Satya Nadella. Oh, well done.

And the reason I say that is that, you know, he if you look

at this track record, and I thought this business could not

get any bigger, but it just is a compounding absolute juggernaut

in a machine. He has completely turned that company around. And

from, you know, big chunky acquisitions, he’s unafraid to

pull the trigger and rip the money in LinkedIn, GitHub, this

year, he did nuance. The product portfolio, 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 on to 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, first class CEO, he’s

great. He’s running a masterclass, crushed it,

crushed, crushed, crushed scale. Totally. What can Brown do for

you? That was a UPS logo. And it’s now it’s now what the

shareholders of Google, Microsoft, Twitter, Twitter,

Palo Alto networks, Adobe have said,

Okay, I can probably do for you. Okay. So much for the curry

ceiling. Okay, free. We have smashed through the curry

ceiling. Absolutely. There’s curry. I’ve penetrated the

samosa ceiling. There we go. Free broke. We got making me

hungry. I know. I’m having crab curry tonight. Can you believe

it? I went fishing. I told you guys this. I went bleep out the

name. I went fishing, fishing. And we caught some crabs. And so

in the Bay of San Francisco Bay, yeah. Oh, did you go up to like

Chrissy field? And no, we go, we go to the pier. And then they

take us out past Golden Gate Bridge to point Reyes. We caught

rockfish, which we ate yesterday. Delicious. This is on

a boat. You did it on a boat. Yeah. Oh, great, great captain.

Awesome. Yeah, it’s cool. I would take London. My 12 year

old crabbing when I lived in San Francisco off of Chrissy field

and we bring crabs home and all that. You can get these

incredible. You can get a one day sport license from the state

of California. It’s good for 10 fish and 10 crab. It’s amazing.

All right. So who do you got? freeberg? best CEO? Well, I

like I like the jack and Elon going direct experience this

year. And what I mean by that is it’s less about like how well

did the business 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.

Saks, what do you got? Best CEO?

I have Brian Armstrong, because it was about this time ago that

he drew a line in the sand and said that he was not going to

allow politics in the workplace, it was going to be a

demilitarized zone for politics. It was pulling people off

mission. And a year later, he gave us an update, it’s been the

best thing they ever did. They gave a generous severance

package to anyone who didn’t go along with it was only 5% took

it, they then went on to have a very successful IPO. It’s now a

$65 billion 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 picked

I’m picking him is not just because of the business success.

But I think there’s a lot of CEOs. In fact, I’d say most

CEOs, including some of the bigger names, that we’re all

kind of talking about, are secretly would love to do what

Brian did, they would love to basically ban politics in the

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. three great choices. Satya

jack Armstrong, I think Ilana clearly is but I’m going to pick

somebody else. So it’s not all Ilana all the time. I’m going to

go with Frank Slootman from snowflake. This company has

grown incredibly at a incredible velocity, but I just read his

book. I got a pre order of his book pre pre release of his book

called amp it up. And I had him on this week in startups, 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 zero sum game

of competitive business. And here’s 205 pages. It’s a must

read. And he just wants to win. And so my hats off to him $100

billion company. And they’ve absolutely crushed it. So best

investor, Chamath, are you gonna pick yourself for the third 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 of CIO. When did

that happen? founder and CIO of third point. And 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.

Ah, happy birthday.

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 they did the series A and

Centel. And one that had a big IPO this year, growth investing,

he, you know, was a was a great investor, early investor in

Rivian, that one public this year. He had great public

performance and 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 tundid. And to be

able to put together a team that can execute across all of those

business lines, and risk manage, and then where he still sizes,

like I’m telling you, like, it is so hard to size this stuff

properly and get it right. He did an incredible job. And he’s

just a beautiful, lovely human being. So Dan, all right, we’re

moving with Ohio, we’re moving at a nice pace. I picked the

Sequoia fund, the new evergreen Sequoia and the Sequoia fund,

the new evergreen fund. Obviously, over the past two

years, they’ve had door dash Airbnb, Snowflake unity, all

these incredible companies worth over $300 billion combined. And

now those LPS get to keep their money in this one vehicle. And I

think it’s going to make Sequoia even more powerful, great

innovation, shout out to my friend Ruloff. And I gave a

runner up to Brad Gerstner, 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

performance?

Yeah, I don’t think it counts, though, if you do it through

insider trading. So I had to roll her out. Okay, sure. So my

actual choice, my actual choice is Ken Griffin, the founder of

Citadel. He generated something like 10% returns on a $500

billion fund. I mean, just mammoth, mammoth amounts of

money. But it wasn’t just as economic, 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 is 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. One extra dollar. Yes. He got he got revenge on

the crypto people. That’s right.

That’s right. Great, great financial troll. freeberg. Do

we get yours yet best investor of 2021?

I kind of stuck to private markets just because they’re

illiquid, which means it’s harder to source. Not everyone

has the same data. We all have different data and different

points of view. So within that, I kind of said, Look, what makes

the best investor and number one is obviously good returns, 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? I know

where you’re going with this. So you know, I had three kind of

finalists. One was founders fund. And I would argue they

probably have the best consistent returns in terms of

the multiples on their funds. Tiger Global, which we talked

about earlier, which I would argue is the most scalable and

durable, as we’ve seen deploying 15 billion 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 one out. So that’s my, my tree of

success. One of the first times we’ve had two of the same in the

voting. This is incredible. Best turnaround. What do you got for

best turnaround? best turnaround,

I picked Ford.

Enormous performance. This year, the stocks up 130 odd percent.

Good portfolio mix of, you know, gas guzzling cars that still

make a ton of money like the Ford F 150s. But, you know, they

have the Mustang, they have electric versions of the Ford F

150s. They had some great investments, I think they

printed like a $20 billion gain on Rivian. So it’s just a

really, really good turnaround from what that company was,

which was if you’ve talked any car company that that could have

been up 132% at the beginning of 2021, it would not have been

Ford. So well done by that team.

Who do you have sex? Are you an investor in Fortuna?

No, no. So I went a little different for this. I said the

best turnaround was Kyle Rittenhouse his reputation. As

you recall, Rittenhouse shot three white attackers, including

two of them were sex offenders at a violent BLM protest 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 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 freedom and he has a reputation

back in the eyes of all fair observers.

Who do you got freeberg?

Well, I went from who was in the worst shape and came back from

that. And I put WeWork on here, which is an obvious and easy

choice. WeWork to me is like Rocky Balboa. Rocky Balboa could

not win the match. Rocky Balboa got so beat up, goes to his

corner. He gets patched up. He’s bleeding from his eyes, bleeding

from his nose. He’s literally about to die. His coach gives

him a little smack on the butt and says, get back out there. And

he keeps going. He’s not going to win the match. But man, for

WeWork to go from where it was a few years ago, which was days or

weeks away from bankruptcy, billions of dollars of money

injected by SoftBank, and for them to orchestrate, basically

this whole, you know, juggernaut into what looks like a business

now, and get it public via SPAC. And it now has enough capital

and a good game plan. And it looks like maybe a normal, you

know, challenge technology business was really quite a

turnaround. There was no one to sell this thing to they had to

get in there. And they had to rework this whole thing. And

they reworked WeWork and Rocky Balboa is going to 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.

All right, listen, I struggle with this one. I had two

companies that I really wanted to highlight for two 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. And so I like them.

But I actually think Disney, which was and it hasn’t

performed well this year, but they had 44 million subs. They

added 44 million paid subs this year. And people thought theme

parks would be a problem, etc. And I think they’re going to

have an absolute killer future. If Apple had not, if it hadn’t

been for antitrust right now, I think Apple will be looking at

buying Disney if they had any way to get it through there,

because the journey

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 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,

that’s why I said, like, it’s kind of hard to pick it. But I

do think like, if you look at the fundamentals of the

business, Twitter is going to go to 300 million,

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 Boba Fett, Mandalorian,

Obi Wan Kenobi, where, you know, Hayden Christensen, 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 to Disney Plus doesn’t seem to have a monopoly for me.

HBO Max is such a depth of content right now, when that

water media deal gets done. I think that’s the juggernaut

stock you want to own. It’s gonna have an incredible library

to compete with Disney.

Well, I mean, secession. And just a library, man. They’ve so

much in there. They’re releasing a soprano releasing the Matrix

tomorrow on HBO Plus, like HBO Max, they redid the Justice

League. And the new the new the new matrix comes out on

HBO Max tomorrow, day and date.

They love that because I love that they did that with Dune. I

love Dune. Totally. Yeah. Dune is an incredible movie. I’m in

my movie theater right now. So I’m gonna watch it on 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. It’s just lame. If you haven’t seen she’s

attacking. Elon and Bezos in Facebook ads trying to grift to

get $10 while she’s got 12 million equities that she paid

like $0 on because that’s how the tax system 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 roadie, Brian, Roddy, Brian, and Derek Chauvin, four

white men who killed in two different incidents, an unarmed

black man, they are scumbags, and they should go to jail and

they will for the rest of their lives. They are terrible human

beings. Great job. Saks we got for worst.

Yeah, I’ve got a name here. I don’t know if the audience knows

yet. It’s a guy named Peter Daszak, who’s a British

zoologist. He’s head of a group called the EcoHealth Alliance

that received millions of dollars in NIH grants for gain

of function research in bat viruses. If that sounds

familiar, it’s because some of that was given to the lab in

Wuhan from which COVID likely leaked. But that by itself is

not 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 and censored on that basis. And

he never disclosed his obvious conflict of interest given that

his millions of research was threatened if the lab leak three

were proven right. So this, 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 in my view.

You’re interested in hearing a point of view on this. Jamie

Metzl did an interview with Lex Friedman on Lex’s podcast, it’s

worth listening to it’s five hours long. But the the section

where they talk about what sex is sharing, I think is around the

one hour mark. And it’s a really interesting narrative that Jamie

shares about what this individual did during this

period of time and why

does it support what I’m saying? Yes.

He’s not gonna listen, but now he feels smug with himself.

Lex, it’s a genius.

Yeah, Lex is great. So my source for this has been the reporting

of Glenn Greenwald, who did some pretty good research on a great

I mean, sort of expose on the conflict of interest that was

never disclosed. And it was on this basis that all the social

networking sites then engaged in censorship. So just a whole,

you know, cluster of bad motives by, you know, people looking to

cover their ass.

But I mean, it’s worth hearing Jamie’s point of view on this,

which is he tries to identify the motivation and the

incentives that those people had when they made those cover up

decisions along the way. And I think it’s really worth everyone

taking that in. That’s what I really liked about Lex’s

podcast interview with 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, 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 consequences for another

population.

Not not Derek.

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. It’s very few people

that are purely selfish and make it to scale. But anyway, that’s

my very esoteric

I think Freeburg 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 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 year, that

when Friday rolls around, that’s all I can think about is Daniel

Craig saying, Ladies and gentlemen, for weekend, he’s

just exacerbated and exhausted as am I, my runner up was

Anakin and Padme doing their conversation. You know, for the

better, right. And you can look that up online. It’s a for pain.

It’s one of those for pain conversation ones. What do you

got your mouth? You have any best memes?

It’s the Bernie Sanders inauguration outfit. Amazing.

Always a great go to his little his little mittens. And you

know, he’s totally attached. He’s detached communist glare.

About that great meme.

It’s like he’s at a sit in at like, some college in Vermont,

in Russia in the wintertime. Exactly. Exactly. Like a little

chipmunk. Yeah. All right. Who do you got sacks? You got a best

meme,

the ever given forklift meme. This was that little forklift

trying to push that gigantic barge out of the canal. And got

hilariously repurposed. And then

like 10 years ago,

I know this year, can you believe it? And a close runner

up was my fall plans versus the Delta variant. Oh, you remember

that one? That was a great one. That was a good one.

Freeberg. Yeah, I know you don’t care about pop culture or

consume much of it. But give us your best meme.

No, I don’t have a meme. Sorry, not have a meme upgrade. I have

no sense of I like to know the good one. I’ll take that one.

Enjoy your memes, but not enough. Okay, can we upgrade

his meme subroutine? I love pop culture. This the mean thing. I

just don’t it doesn’t resonate for me. It just doesn’t pop

culture. I am a fan of pop culture. But the memes do not

make sense to me. Chop boys were great. I have trouble processing

imagery and text all at the same time. My subroutine is indexing

all images and GPT three. I’m going to produce funny jokes.

My laughing subroutine has been upgraded.

Ha ha ha ha. Sorry, it’s too easy. Sorry, Allison. Most

lonesome company live with them. Most most. I don’t think she

listens to this, by the way. 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. Okay, most lonesome company. This one is an

absolutely easy one slam dunk. It is PG&E who this year was

charged with felonies and manslaughter in the death of

four people because of the wildfires that they started

because of their inability to maintain their power

infrastructure throughout the state of California. Very rare

that a for profit corporation gets charged with felony murder

and manslaughter. So I think that’s pretty easy one. What do

you got freeberg? I think one day the human race will look

back and identify animal agriculture as worse than human

slavery. I do think that that will be a profound realization

over the next century for our species. And you say worse than

human slavery. I believe that that’s what we will realize

because the the scale of death caused by animal agriculture.

Okay. Oh, I understand how you’re saying 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 lonesome

company to me. And I stick by my my answer.

Can I can I give you a counterpoint?

Yeah. But it’s delicious. It’s a joke.

That’s not cool.

spicy take, I mean, to the human suffering of slavery, and then

equate it, but you added, I mean, honestly, freeberg, like

if you have it, look, you haven’t, 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 there’s any winners in this

conversation at this point.

Yeah, this is a longer pod. We could do this another time.

Fried chicken is really delicious. Oh, man. So is a

good steak.

Okay, we got to stop. I’m hungry.

Saks, did you have a besides Tyson Foods? What do you got?

Okay, most

of the first entering you and putting a label on?

No, no, no. So some company I had the New York Times, a new

year in 2021, called the Gray Lady winked. The author Ashley

rinseburg details decades of misinformation and agenda driven

journalism published by the times starting in the 1930s at a

Nazi sympathizer. As their German correspondent, they

covered up Stalin’s genocide in Ukraine, they assisted Fidel

Castro’s rise to power in Cuba, they lied us into Vietnam and

Iraq. They and they perpetuated the Russian collusion hoax. More

recently, the New York Times has gone all in on woke

journalism and cancel culture, purging anyone from its ranks

who commits a transgression against woke sensibilities. From

Brian Armstrong to Kyle Rittenhouse, they’ve routinely

smeared people as racist with 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 lonesome company in my

head, 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, two 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 going to 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 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 paper of record. I mean,

look at this podcast. I mean, I think like we’re going direct,

we get more views on this than any other press hit we could ever

do. And we get to try.

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.

I just it’s hard for me not to pick meta here. Best New Tech

for me, it’s dows. I mentioned it earlier. I think it’s

phenomenal. I think that they’re going to evolve and global

formation. What do you think it is?

dows? No, they’re what? global capital formation are

phenomenal. They’re phenomenal. I said phenomenal. All right,

stop making fun of the kid from Brooklyn. Okay. Do you think

this podcast we number 40 if I didn’t? Okay, enough, enough.

You ungrateful prick. Listen to me now I’m trying to get the

show over with 75 minutes in. Okay, so I say dows because I

believe that they will become legal and global capital

formation for the first time on an instant basis will exist. And

I believe 40 million is the dry run for the Constitution 400

million and 4 billion 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

three dows. What’s the best new tech for you, Mr. Polly hop

into you. I have two choices. Okay, one is in the heavens. And

that is human space travel. Okay, we had three different

companies create astronauts this year. Three amazing. That’s like

insanity. Mind. So that it’s mind blowing. And so if you

think about what the next five to 10 years can bring Jason at

what you said earlier, but, you know, making ourselves a

multi planetary species, what an inspiring thing that these

thousands of employees across these three businesses did. Huge

congrats to all three of them. I found it really inspiring. So I

think human space travel, and then the second which is much

more closer to earth is sub stack, I think really got to a

level of scale this year. That is really profound. I have found

it to be an incredible way to stay connected to the truth. And

there are some unbelievable people who are now able to

create a life for themselves by telling the truth. independent

voices. Yeah. And, and you can support them directly.

Incredible.

You know, a handful of people, Matt, I be Barry Weiss, Eric

newcomer, just a handful that jump off the top Glenn

Greenwald. But there’s there’s many more. sub stacks going to

learn how to promote these things to you in a better way,

I think over time. But I think that is incredible, you

eventually come off, there’ll be some sort of group subscription.

And then you’ll be able to put Glenn Greenwald and Barry Weiss

and have multiple publishers come in like an aggregated feed

or something to that effect. In other words, you can subscribe

to the New York Times of these independent voices, and they

would split the money across them. It’s the closest thing to

truth as a service that we have. And with pot, I’d say podcast is

right up there to sacks. I’m obviously you’re gonna pick

Colin, but after calling what he got for the best.

You know, I originally had the the CRISPR gene or anything, but

you 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. Evan Baker just tweeted this earlier today

this morning. That’s all I can say all I can say for all of us

who own yum, yum, yum, yum, yum. That’s so delicious. Okay, my

best new technology. I think the 2021 was the year of plasma

fusion. There were several iterations and step function

improvements in plasma. 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

can actually control it and harness the energy that comes

out. And there are several technologies and techniques that

have been theorized for 50 years that we could do this in a way

that the energy that we put in to create and start the fusion

reaction allows us to get more energy out. And therefore, you

have a net energy crater just by turning atoms into energy in a

way that doesn’t cause a runaway breakthrough nuclear reaction

that would be the equivalent of a nuclear bomb. And so, you know,

the MIT CFS collaboration had an excellent breakthrough that we

spoke about on one of our pods, the National Ignition Facility,

which is actually a US DOE funded facility came very close

to energy abundance. And they have a wonderful chart that

shows 20 years of doing this work. And then this year, it

suddenly balloons. And is that how they make energy on the sun?

This one is so so all of this is fusion. That’s correct. But

that’s, that’s how they make energy on the sun. Well, what

we’re doing here is, we’re basically using lasers to create

the same density that you would get on the sun that triggers

that same sort of nuclear. And what about Uranus?

Different. It’s different.

Bill never stops being funny.

General Fusion had a big breakthrough. And Bill Gates is

a big backer of a company called Terra Power that announced

that they’re building a new reactor. But I think generally

speaking, we are seeing 2021 is kind of that big step change

where this stuff is starting to move from theory.

When will we have it online?

Still, as everyone’s been saying for decades, 10 years. So every

year, every 10 years, we say 10 years.

Best trend, worst trend. Here we go. I’m going to go with the

best trend being centrism, purple pills, recalls of DAs,

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 sex

best trend hashtag woke lash. We saw this is similar to yours. We

saw a major pushback against woke ideology 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 Minneapolis where it all started. Even the mayor of

San Francisco now wants to refund the police. The attempt

to cancel Dave Chappelle totally fizzled out after the walkout

protests on Netflix. And even Barack Obama told the progressive

left to quote get over their woke purity earlier this year,

they should have listened to him and maybe they finally will next

year after losing more elections.

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

mouth? I’m going to double tap that. I had the creator 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. Tick tock is super addictive.

Stay out of the comments. YouTube is incredible. So this

is a brave new world for for creators.

All right, so worst trend, the worst trend of 2021. I’m going

to go with giving credit for work that hasn’t been done yet.

And just straight up founder and investor entitlement. I’ve never

seen it at all time peak here where people expect to be given

huge rewards before they do the work. And I’m very concerned

about the lack of governance, the lack of diligence, and

people believing they should get huge rewards before they

actually do the work. What do you got your mouth?

My worst trend is the decaying of the national security of our

supply chains. If you think about some of the really

important things that we’re going to have to get done over

the next 10 years, just 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, sacks, what do you got?

I’ve got the rise of authoritarianism around the

world. And here in the United States, I mean, even in Western

countries, like Australia, it’s basically been turned into a

prison colony for months in the name of stopping COVID. Here in

the United States, you’ve got governors like Gavin Newsom,

who’ve basically appropriated dictatorial powers through a

bogus state of emergency. You’ve now got the unvaccinated treated

as some sort of untouchable class of citizens who aren’t

able to leave their house except to buy food and medicine. They’re

even now in Europe, they’re splitting, they’re forcing

people behind partitions at the supermarket. Boston just

announced they’re banning unvaccinated people 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 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, Zack, it’s one of the reasons why we

will see people in general looking for alternative ways to

govern themselves. And it will only catalyze and accelerate

some of these other trends that I think we’ve been talking

about. My worst trend was the metaverse. I think it’s like the

renaming of something that’s been going on for a long time as

if it’s some new future thing. If anyone’s played Fortnite over

the last six years or five years, 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 what’s

already been going on, which is people find value in digital

goods, people find value in digital levels and badging. And

they find honor and progress in their lives by accomplishing

things in a digital universe. And they’ve been doing that from

Minecraft to Fortnite, to other places for a long time. And it’s

fascinating to watch. But the notion that we call this thing

the metaverse, and everyone’s trying to reclassify it as some

future singular universe, and therefore they can own that

singular universe is a pretty misstated and misguided

kind of concept. Let’s go on to your favorite book, movie,

podcast, music discovery of 2021. For music, I had war on

drugs for book, Ray Crocks autobiography I listened to on

audible, and it was great. On TV, secession, curb your

enthusiasm and dope sick were my three favorites. I think

Friedberg, what do you got? Considering that you have had

your pop culture? I will tell you guys on time. I think it’s

very important that everyone on this pod and anyone listening to

this, that has any interest in what’s going on in the world

today, broadly, read Ray Dalio’s The Changing World Order, it is

my number one, number two, and number three book

recommendation of the year, it is absolutely critical to

understand that the global world order is being reclassified, as

the United States has taken on too much debt, and will

ultimately lose its reserve currency status, as we have

seen with the transition of five or six empires over the past

500 years. And this transition is very predictable. As Ray

Dalio 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 we people are calling web three, 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 a 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 got to read it. My second Oh, I got

one more. Come on. Okay. No, of course. Keep going. Wes

Anderson’s The French Dispatch is one of the best films I have

seen in like a decade. Have you guys seen it? No, it is friggin

amazing. I feel like every shot is like a cinematography

masterpiece. The writing is incredible. The acting will blow

your mind. If you guys see that film, we 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 Arenda, 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 awesome track.

All right, sax, which Steve Bannon episode was your

favorite.

So under a book of the year, I 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 the so called

progressive agenda in cities is not working. I think it is going

to be the blueprint for a major backlash that’s already begun

here in San Francisco with London Breed taking on Jason

Boudin. I think that’s going to be a recurring theme next year.

Also, other big cultural discoveries. I like Chamath, I

have Red Pill journalists on Substack, Glenn 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?

Exactly. Let’s see. So my best album is Planet Her by Doja

Cat. danceable, fun. Kids love it. I love it.

And you dance. Okay.

You know that I have rhythm, bro.

All in summit dance party. Here we go.

Oh, yeah, from the from the waist down, as you also know,

but just beep that out, please. No, no, no, you cannot hide from

the truth, boys. Best movie is Dune. It was so beautiful.

Cinematically, just gorgeous. Incredible, incredible,

incredible movie. And then book. I’ve said 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 Girard. Myself, Peter Thiel,

there’s a bunch of us who are pretty deep. Renee Girard

acolytes. The problem is that his stuff can be a little hard

to penetrate. And so there was a book called wanting w a n t ing

by this author named Luke Burgess. superb book, very easy

to read, very accessible explains this really well. One

of the most useful mental models that I have.

And I’ll just shout out we didn’t have best comedian in

here. But I really enjoyed Hassan Minaj is 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 and really

enjoyed going to it.

Did you like Loki?

I enjoyed it. Yeah, well, what is it? What is what is Loki?

He is a cat. He’s Thor’s stepbrother. And they did a TV

show called Loki, which was like a very challenging metaverse

multiple timeline kind of concept set the stage for the

whole next wave of Marvel movies. Didn’t you think that

was the best Marvel product this year? Or no,

definitely was absolutely 100% Spider Man Homecoming, but I

think it sets in line.

Wait, we haven’t heard from Saks. Did we hear from Saks?

Yeah, Saks just picked like some right wing book.

It was like San Francisco or something and TV or whatever. I

mean, Saks, did you? You actually love movies, you’ve

made movies. Did you see a film you loved? Were you just

watching like films from the 90s?

Honestly, it’s hard to find like even one movie that I want to

you know, write home about I think it’s a lot easier to find

TV shows like we’re enjoying Yellowstone right now. Quite a

bit. I don’t know if you guys are watching that Kevin

Costner.

Nobody who’s on the left knows what Yellowstone is explain to

people this right wing phenomenon.

It’s a it’s a Kevin Costner show. I don’t know if it’s

right wing. It’s about a ranching like family like

they’re 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 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 Sicario, which if

you’ve never seen Sicario one and two amazing are the most

amazing thrillers you’re ever going to see. I mean, very hard

to watch. They’re so intense. And I think Yellowstone now is

the reason I say it’s right wing is it’s doing incredibly well in

the south, and it’s not happening in the coastal cities.

So coastal, it’s kind of like a leave me alone.

It’s very much to the republic, the traditional republican slash

American sensibility. Well, 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 has an overt political agenda. I

mean, the family who’s the subject of the show, the cost

or 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 150 years rustling cattle. Can’t wait to

see. And I don’t know how political that is. But they are

like very tough. I mean, it’s like, it’s like Sanford, San

Francisco housing. Yeah. Okay, we’re gonna keep up with this

one. This is our Rudy Giuliani award for self emulation.

Basically, people who destroy their legacy in some way, or

otherwise just bungled everything. sacks, I got to go

to you first. I know that you’ve got your writing team over at

Fox and has something going on here for this one. Let’s go.

Well, yeah, I went with the Cuomo brothers. You know,

grateful. Yes. So first, you have the governor Andrew Cuomo

member 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 AGs

office showed that his brother Chris Cuomo had used his perch

at, you know, at CNN to dig up 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 million book advance for

his COVID book. Freeberg we got who lit themselves on fire. And

well, I was a little general, I kind of said, you know, all

these politicians who made claims about the vaccine 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, damaged a lot of

reputations. And it’s 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 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 your mouth?

Senator Karen, I think Senator Karen is the obvious choice for

me. Kind of proved that she doesn’t really know much about

economics is, you know, kind of 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 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 kind of

saying is only going to get louder. I’m convinced.

But I think it’s interesting, because I think she’s overplayed

her hand massively. I mean, she’s become so shrill and such

a scold 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

want to have a beer with? You know, that that question

actually is important, because I don’t think people want to have

a beer with people who are scolding them or these moral

absolutists, like Jamal said, there is a check there. And so 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 one and done, obviously to

everybody. And yeah, he was supposed to go right into the

middle. And he has not gone anywhere near the middle or led

from the front either way. All right, here we go. My God,

Jason, how much Fox News have you been watching?

She’s just hanging out with you too much. No, I mean, it is

possible. You know, 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.

He should just started there. That’s where that was the

promise. He should have started there. That’s where that’s where

he’s most comfortable. Anyways, that’s who he is. Exactly. Like

what a head fake. And now he winds up there anyway, and it’s

gonna be too late. So it’s just a disaster. He basically took

victory from the jaws of defeat or took defeat from the jaws of

victory, right? Like just terrible. Okay, here’s an award.

I don’t know if we’re gonna make this but who was your favorite

bestie? So this is you picking up the three other besties.

Freeberg, 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 besties. So I am your

favorite bestie. No, but you know what, yesterday Chamath

served me crepes with Nutella. So he’s my favorite bestie now.

So you’re playing? No, and Saks had an incredible party and you

guys all three. Okay, I’ll tell you something. All three of you

guys have been incredibly generous. And I feel fortunate

that I know it’s a little soft moment. But thank you guys.

That’s it. I have had my chip upgraded. Emotion is complete.

I love you. My voice is cracking. This is in my

programming. But I should keep it together. That tier sub

routine has not been installed. Chamath you want to pick your

favorite bestie and or go around the horn and this is just a bad

idea. No, I love all three of you. Thank you. Yeah. I love all

three of you. But for different reasons. I’m really lucky to

have all three of you as friends. Oh, very nice. I am

very lucky to have two of the three of you have planes that I

get to fly on around the world. Second homes that I get to

freeload off of. And freeberg. You know, I just say like, you

know, get as I told your mom freeberg 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 for

me. So sincerely, you know, I was good friends with Chamath and

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 or ethos, your

effort in the world and in a world of people who are

complaining and whining and not doing I just feel so honored to

be able to be the moderator here and spend time with you

every week. I would do this if we threw the episode away every

week. Because it’s inspiring for me for the next six days until

we meet again. It really fills my bucket, it recharges my

batteries to to be with folks who just aggressively want to

solve problems in the world.

Where are we taping this next week?

So that’s like two or three weeks, we’re going to be at the

upfront summit on the second day in LA. I think it’s somebody

want to give the date? I think it’s January.

Any plans to tape from Uranus?

If we can terraform, it’s the 24th to 26. But I think we’re on

the 26th. The last day in the afternoon, all in podcast, we’re

doing it. Mark Schuster invited us and then the all in summit

will be in May. In Miami, we have the dates we’re about to

announce. But don’t email me for free tickets. There’ll be 300

tickets to the summit. 250 of them are paid. And then each

bestie gets 12 tickets to give to a bestie. This is how we’re

going to run it. Everybody has to pay and then everything will

be simulcast. All right, 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 effeminate bullshit that

you guys

what is so brutal? You’re such an asshole. What a piece of

an ass.

I will say this this group, a few relationships in particular

had a very rocky year. And so it’s Yeah. And so it’s really

YouTube. That is true. It was not it was not public. What all

that went down? Yeah, but but Chamath and I here we are here.

Chamath and I fought very hard to keep the pod together and to

make sure that you guys and you guys are literally like the two

characters from stepbrothers. And

characters you’re talking about in this spot. Yeah. And it’s

good. It’s good. It’s good to see

a idiot who crashed the bunk beds. The one on top. Yeah, he

jumps on top. I mean, I don’t even know what movie you’re

talking about. What is the two of you you Saxon J Cal found a

way to fight to almost break up to destroy everything we built

together. freebrook and I had to step in not once but on two

different occasions amount of time Chamath and I had to spend

mediating the two of you back together was ridiculous.

The time either. Yeah.

Sax could stay in his lane.

No, no, no, no, no. Don’t start. Don’t start. Don’t start next

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 want to make you a millionaire regardless. I know

your uncle’s not going to do it.

He’s doing great. He’s doing great. He’s got to take it easy

everybody. No, but people still ask me to this day was that whole

few with Jake how real or was it just for ratings? No, it was

all. It was real. The bigger feud was not the bigger feud was

not aired on the air. And right there was a second few. That’s

under that one was we signed an NDA. I’ll let you say the

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 brouhaha and the you know, sax

and I having debates about how to run the pod is I think we

came to the right place. I you know, I look at the comments.

And I think I’ve become a better moderator. I think sacks, Jamal

Freeberg, you’ve all become great at passing the ball and

showing interest in each other’s points. And I feel like we’re

playing, you know, which is always my wish for this is that,

you know, we play this game as intellectually, honestly, and

crisply, and as well with as much discipline with as much

hard work as like, let’s say the Warriors do. And I really feel

like even in the last 10 episodes, we hit a high

watermark in the in the audience, and everybody I meet

tells me the same thing. My god, the guys just do a such a great

job. I’ll say one thing. One thing that makes it really hard.

I was I was with Chamath yesterday, as you guys know,

yeah, and secret mission. One thing I observed with Chamath is

no matter how much success or wealth Chamath has accumulated,

he is still a hustler. And I think 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, grind, we grind, we

grind at 5am to the East Coast for a day. And I think all four

of us in the same are in the same vein. And that makes it

really hard for four 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 should be thankful that we can pull it

off, because it’s pretty, pretty awesome.

And can I say something nice about Jekyll? Here we go. So

it’s true that without Jekyll, this pod never would have

happened. You are the podcaster in this group, you’re the

skills, 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 should stop feeling so insecure because you

really are the reason for this pod.

Alright, listen, let me give a compliment. Saks, you bring so

many great notes to the pod. And you are so eloquent, based on

what your team writes for you, ability to read that script, and

the amount of money you spend forming your opinions from

Tucker Carlson’s ex writing team is just extraordinary, bring so

much to the table. I can’t believe I ever wanted to replace

with

nobody’s gonna know who I was threatening to replace Saks with.

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. I promise to you no

weeks off for the besties. I’m gonna be with you every Friday

night. Bye bye bye bye

know. Let your winners ride. Rain Man David

we open source it to the fans and they’ve just gone crazy with

it. Love you.

Besties are

a dog taking a notice your driveway.

Oh man, my

we should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy

because they’re all just like this like sexual tension that

they just need to release

what you’re about to be

waiting to get

I’m going