E60: The 2021 Bestie Awards PLUS Jack Dorsey starts the Web3 Wars

SPEAKER_03: 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? We're ready to go. Did anybody do their homework? Oh, my God. We are nine SPEAKER_02: away from Episode 69. And where we will have a special guest, SPEAKER_03: special guest who I've given the choice of coming on Episode 69 or 420. No, no, no, he has to do 69. He can't do for 20. He can do both. He can do whatever he wants. Basically, I do no wrong. SPEAKER_01: Is he committed? What about jack? Can we get jack on? Don't SPEAKER_00: talk about that. If you stop grinding jack. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe SPEAKER_03: if you stop dunking on jack for no reason. insufferable sacks. Seriously, it's enough that like, I've alienated potential guests. Shemots alienated best now you're getting in on alienating the game. It would be too much to have jack and Chris SPEAKER_01: Dixon on together. Who? Who? Oh, my God, that is so cool. Delete SPEAKER_03: that. Oh, don't like it. I don't care about my relationship with asin 16. SPEAKER_02: Dorsey, we all know who's the other person? Dick, Chris Dixon, SPEAKER_01: 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. SPEAKER_02: Why don't you guys invite the CFO of Greylock as well while you're at it? SPEAKER_03: We couldn't get the partner in charge of human capital at Excel. SPEAKER_00: 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 with apology as well. So the C Dixon quote, it SPEAKER_00: 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 SPEAKER_02: little misappropriation for which jack jumped down his SPEAKER_00: throat basically. Horowitz is thing they always culturally SPEAKER_03: appropriate, right? Like just like any other guy who quits SPEAKER_00: his job and then goes on a ship posting rampage. And really like you did. SPEAKER_03: Like Shabbat did after shutting down. I'm just one of his SPEAKER_00: casualties. There's a bunch of people he's got. I thought he was great. I think he of Twitter so he could tweet. Yeah, he SPEAKER_01: 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 benefits? Sacks like, I honestly I'm not trying to badger him. I only SPEAKER_00: have one question, which is the reason why he loves Bitcoin is for its censorship resistance. So why when he had the opportunity as CEO of Twitter, didn't he stand tall for resisting censorship? David, maybe he did. So just tell us SPEAKER_00: that read between the lines, dude. I don't think he has to SPEAKER_02: answer to the Twitter mob and try to say here's all the hard decisions I made that you guys didn't see. You know, this there's a there's a dynamics of a board and lawsuits and hundreds SPEAKER_01: of decisions that the president inciting a riot at the Capitol. SPEAKER_03: You're not supposed to create a list and publish it and say, SPEAKER_02: Look at me. I'm such a good boy. I mean, it's not reasonable. I SPEAKER_00: just think it's a reasonable question for me to ask. SPEAKER_03: 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. SPEAKER_00: No, it was not punched up. SPEAKER_03: funnier than you actually are. Why did you have to throw my people? Why did you have to go to the ashram? Yeah. Jack has spent years trying to cultivate this like Zen SPEAKER_00: approach that has nothing to do with my people. Nothing to do SPEAKER_02: nothing to do with an ashram. We're getting lost in the weeds here. SPEAKER_03: We've got a war show later. SPEAKER_03: Please welcome everybody to the 2021 Bestie Awards now just put in like everybody like Denzel Washington and you know, like, yeah, can we edit screenshots from like the last Oscars that SPEAKER_01: you know, everyone's in our audience? Okay, Oscars from the 80s. Tom Cruise getting up and cheering SPEAKER_03: and whooping. Okay, here we go. Rain Man David Saccs. We open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy. 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? SPEAKER_00: 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 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 in the primary, and overwhelmingly carried black Latino precincts if the Democratic Party has a future after the rejection of woke it is Eric Adams. SPEAKER_03: Okay, freeburg. Who you got? Okay, mine's a little esoteric, but my biggest winner for SPEAKER_01: 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, Chumath, who do you got? SPEAKER_02: 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. SPEAKER_03: Alright, great selection so far, and a lot of diversity in the picking. And so I went with Joe Manchin, obviously, the shadow president who was able to dictate what gets passed and build back better getting canceled, or cut from six plus billion down to maybe 1.5 billion if it ever gets trillion, trillion rather sorry, thank you, was my hey, do you think a rising star or a foiling star after his SPEAKER_01: decision to denounce the build back better bill this year this week? SPEAKER_00: Well, you guys have to remember that the state he's from West Virginia went for Trump, like 20 points, it is a deep red state and mansion himself as a major anomaly as a blue politician hanging on in that state. Yeah. So the Democrats instead of alienating him should be thinking they're 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 SPEAKER_01: 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. SPEAKER_00: 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 new spending. Super interesting. Yeah, here we go. Biggest loser in politics. SPEAKER_03: Who do you got? Let's go in reverse order now. Chammoth, who do you got? You go first, Jake. Oh, my biggest loser is SPEAKER_03: 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 SPEAKER_02: actually just said the progressive left and the alt right. So I think that the short 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 sound bites, but they cannot govern. And so I think the biggest losers, the progressive left and the alt right, Saks, you want to go next? SPEAKER_00: 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 Dane 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. Yeah. 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 SPEAKER_01: Calacanis made the prediction that Kamala will be the first female president of the United States. Just as a gentle reminder that we had predicted how you how you called him SPEAKER_02: Calacanis Calacanis. Well, he likes to monetize his name. SPEAKER_01: Okay, fried bird. You know, I the prediction was made because SPEAKER_03: 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 SPEAKER_03: think I might stand by that. We'll save it for the prediction SPEAKER_03: show. Okay, we'll save it for a prediction show next week. We're taking no weeks off as the new rule here. All right, moving on. Oh, wait, I got my biggest loser. Oh, yeah, basically, sorry. SPEAKER_01: 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 to determine ism was needed for clarity of action to get people to take the vaccine. And he said, Hey, this is gonna, you know, ultimately end up 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 Tony Fauci. I mean, bless him, but it was a rough year. All right, biggest political surprise. Sax, what do you got? SPEAKER_03: What's the biggest political surprise? Yeah, this is where I had Glenn Youngkin. And, you know, I just SPEAKER_00: add to what Shmutha 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 Trump at bay. And then he ran as a general moderate with a business pedigree as kind of Shmutha 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 sided with the the teachers unions. And whereas Youngkin sided with parents, and really, I think, voice their opposition to CRT in the schools, that became the centerpiece of his closing argument. And that's what allowed him to win the election. My biggest political surprise is Joe Manchin. I think that he SPEAKER_02: 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. SPEAKER_03: Yeah. Okay, free break. What do you got SPEAKER_01: 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 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 SPEAKER_03: 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 SPEAKER_01: 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 is a little more fragile than perhaps we we think it is. SPEAKER_03: 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 SPEAKER_02: yeah, yeah. So maybe they're racist, J. Cal. Or maybe they SPEAKER_03: are saving her till after the midterms and then going to feature her. I don't know what the strategies are. The house like a fighter. They're sitting, protecting her. SPEAKER_00: But if she was good enough to get to help get Biden in office, SPEAKER_03: 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 tasks like they sent her to the border. The problem is she SPEAKER_00: doesn't have anything to say that's that will resonate with the American people but also be acceptable to her progressive base, SPEAKER_02: or perceived her perceived progressive biggest because I actually think that she also has the ability and has in the past, you know, had the ability to be tough. You have an order. 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. SPEAKER_02: And until she comes to those terms herself, she's not she's going to continue to be sidelined. But if she tax back to the center and actually gets out there, I think she's really capable of doing some stuff here. She's very articulate. She's very punchy. Anybody she took, you know, she can really tell the truth. But then she can also really just chuck and jive and say nothing when she wants to. And that's just what's that corporal speak isn't working for her. Did anybody else notice freeburg sacks, that the initial reaction SPEAKER_03: to mansions vote or saying he wasn't gonna vote for this on Sunday during the talk shows, was like dunking on him. Oh, my God, he's horrible. And then immediately Monday, he's like, hey, 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. SPEAKER_02: 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. It was such a CIA by the administration, like they wasted SPEAKER_00: everyone's time for six months pushing this bill forward pecking 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. SPEAKER_03: 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. His number was 1.5. And they just said, you know what, we'll wait to the end and then try to high pressure him or something or flip him at the end. It doesn't make sense to push for a strategy. It doesn't make sense to push for that big SPEAKER_00: a bill when it's a 5050 Senate, they should have gone for something smaller and more reasonable. SPEAKER_02: 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 mentioned a loaded weapon and said, Here you go do what you will with this terrible betting SPEAKER_03: strategy by the Republican. Well, he warned them, he warned them, he was very worried about inflation. And they were saying SPEAKER_00: it was transitory. And then he turned out to be right, right. SPEAKER_03: All right. biggest winner in business free broke who you got. biggest winner 2021 biggest winner in business goes back to SPEAKER_01: the GameStop 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, Chumath in business? SPEAKER_02: 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 SPEAKER_03: Elon. So did you have a second place consideration? I would actually probably double down with what freeberg said, I SPEAKER_02: 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. Sax, who do you have biggest winner in business? If it is SPEAKER_03: Elon, who's your runner up? Yeah, so I mean, can't fault the Elon choice is pretty obvious. SPEAKER_00: 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 thing. 15 billion, I think it's the amount SPEAKER_01: 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 SPEAKER_03: and go with the A and G. Amazon has a new CEO and they haven't missed a beat. Apple is about to hit 3 trillion. And Susan would Jackie 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 gonna 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 through the opposite of my biggest winner. I SPEAKER_01: went for those institutions that that, you know, got their lunch eaten by the retail. Gabe Plotkin, and 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. Talk about embarrassing. Talk about reversal of fortune. 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 have had to kind of change. It's amazing that that and the SPEAKER_03: insurrection bolt happened in this year, like it time is moving. This year is insane. Yeah, it's been a crazy all of SPEAKER_01: this happened in this past year. It's crazy to think about we SPEAKER_03: 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 and 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 SPEAKER_00: you guys remember Yeah, exactly. A year ago, we were all asking whereas 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 coalmine 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 10 cent, 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. Chammoth, who do you have? And this is amazing, just so the SPEAKER_03: audience knows, we do not reveal our choices until it's really great to hear. So great. Yeah, I love hearing some of these SPEAKER_02: things. It makes me think for sure. Yeah, 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 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's 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 SPEAKER_03: choices. I picked the Ang 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 Chamat'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, J Cal. SPEAKER_01: Listen, I do think it's a juggernaut and when things go SPEAKER_03: 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 in Fang. But I think it's a good counterpoint. Yeah, these things take a while to unravel. I think you know, I think the SPEAKER_02: better 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. But the spread trade like we talked about earlier, SPEAKER_03: trade like we talked about. All right, biggest business surprise. What do you got sex? What's your biggest business surprises? I thought the biggest business surprise was tech leaders and SPEAKER_00: 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 dealing in 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 or 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 SPEAKER_01: January, and I think I, I started texting you guys in January saying, I really think we should talk about this on the pot, 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 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. 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 their money, and then people are gonna be really hurt and really upset. But but the general core tech, and I love the fact I love the fact that creators people that are great at art and people that are creative, can develop stuff 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 Dow's were SPEAKER_03: 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 Game Stop to freebergs point earlier and 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 Dow's 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 Dow's for NFTs for tokens, and it's just crazy that it hasn't happened yet. What do you got, Jamal? My big business winner, breakout company, I have SPEAKER_02: two but they're the same really as Moderna slash BioNTech. 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 brave, these two companies, these two companies really took a big step forward in 2020. Absolutely. And just as a side SPEAKER_03: note, open sea had 8 million a monthly 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 free burger, everybody wants to know the Sultan of Sciences, best science breakthrough. I'm a SPEAKER_01: 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 SPEAKER_03: science breakthrough. What do you got sex? I've got these new SPEAKER_00: 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 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 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, one, I would like to make a counter to Sax's point, I would be very SPEAKER_01: cautious about the side effects that are going to arise from these protease inhibitors. And, you know, 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 that 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, they're 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 SPEAKER_00: 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 SPEAKER_01: 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. Well, hopefully the number of people who need to take it SPEAKER_03: freebird correct me if I'm wrong, if we've got this many people vax who will not need to take it. And then Omcron. My biggest optimism is just that Omcron is a much less virulent SPEAKER_01: 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 SPEAKER_00: in the way that the virus evolves? No. So there, by the SPEAKER_01: way, it's not binary. It's not like, hey, you get herd immunity and no one's gonna catch this thing. There's clearly a spectrum of immunity, meaning like I can maybe get the virus and be somewhat contagious for half a day or a day and I don't even know it. And then I'm spreading it for that half day, but I didn't even know I had it. That's kind of, you know, not all the way over to herd immunity and the traditional kind of definition of the way that we talk about it. But it reduces the spread and the severity 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. And it's gonna play out that way at all. This is going to be a slow slow wind down. Okay, and to give Shammat some credit, you said it would be a SPEAKER_03: 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, SPEAKER_02: 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 SPEAKER_03: that would be so great if this was the end of the end game. My SPEAKER_02: best science breakthrough is that this year, we actually were able to inject in vivo, so in the body genetic code for CRISPR, two cases specifically, one was to basically reduce the production of this toxic liver protein in a bunch of folks. And then the second one moderately improved the vision of some people who had 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. SPEAKER_03: I had the starch on my list too. But I went with Starship. For people who don't know, a 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 free bird. Do you think Starship is going SPEAKER_02: to be able to orbit Uranus? SPEAKER_03: No, Nick. No, no, no, all of this needs to stay. All right, biggest flash in the pan. biggest flash in the pan. Sax, you pick people. You told me earlier. SPEAKER_00: No, I said we 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 SPEAKER_00: transitory. And so the use of the word transitory, I predict will in fact be transitory. SPEAKER_01: My summary like that. What do you got? Chumath? SPEAKER_02: I picked all things. metaverse and web. SPEAKER_01: And web three. Yeah, I did. Right. If you guys were around SPEAKER_02: 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. And none of us understood what it is. And we were building it, it turned out. Yeah. And so I think that these SPEAKER_02: 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. SPEAKER_01: I went with the Constitution now, while while I believe Jason that the concept was inspiring, and will echo for quite some time with other, you know, kind of improved versions and different applications. This particular DAO caused a lot of people to lose a lot of money in gas fees, transferring tokens over to cover the expense of the ultimate purchase that was not actually done. It felt a little disorganized. There was questions around equity and securities and the legality and misaligned expectations. And while I get that there was a good intent, and that folks that were involved in it were felt like it worked, and it did what it was meant to do, which was to be inspiring. That particular DAO 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 SPEAKER_03: 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 Chesapeake Dean and all of these whack jobs are all going to get voted out and recalled. And we've seen it and came up earlier in the program set up 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 SPEAKER_02: reasonable right to have their kids educated, not managed to some watered down, lowest common denominators so as to not so as to try to make everybody around them feel better. Yeah, 100% SPEAKER_03: Alright. I have a feeling that we're gonna this is gonna sweep here best CEO. Should we just say 321 and say the name? SPEAKER_02: Although first, I'm gonna pick Satya Nadella. Oh, well done. And the reason I say that is that, you know, he if you look at this track record, and I thought this business could not get any bigger, but it just is a compounding, absolute juggernaut and 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 sights 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, he's running a masterclass. crushed it 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, SPEAKER_02: Twitter, Palo Alto Networks, and Adobe have said, Okay, fucking proud to free Okay. So much for the curry ceiling. Okay. SPEAKER_03: Free. We have smashed through the curry ceiling. Absolutely. SPEAKER_02: There's curry penetrated the samosa ceiling. There we go. SPEAKER_03: Freeburg we got you're making me hungry. I know. I'm having crab SPEAKER_02: 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 we're in the San Francisco Bay. Yeah. Oh, did you go up to like Chrissy Field and no, we go SPEAKER_02: 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. SPEAKER_02: Yeah. Oh, great. Great captain. Awesome. Yeah, school. I would SPEAKER_03: 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 SPEAKER_02: 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 SPEAKER_03: Freeburg? Best CEO? Well, I like I like the jack and Elon going SPEAKER_01: 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, create 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. Sax, what do you got best CEO, SPEAKER_00: I have Brian Armstrong, because it was about this time a year ago that he drew a line in the sand and said that he was not 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, 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. SPEAKER_03: Amazing choice. Wow. Three great choices. Satya, Jack Armstrong, I think you want to clearly is but I'm going to pick somebody else. So it's not all Elon all the time. I'm gonna go with Frank Slootman from Snowflake. This company has grown incredibly at a credible 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 weekend startups which will come out in the new year when the book comes out. And he's a killer. He absolutely is like a killer. He seems like an SPEAKER_02: absolute killer. And the book basically is I do not care about SPEAKER_03: 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 dollar company. And they've absolutely crushed it. So best investor. Shemoth you to 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 SPEAKER_02: it's my dear friend Dan Lobe. Oh, founder, CIO. When did that happen? founder and CIO third point. And of what of as I've seen, I talked to him yesterday, actually, I call them just to wish him a happy birthday, by the way, it's his birthday. SPEAKER_03: Happy birthday. SPEAKER_02: 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 sent to him 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 tundit. 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 oil here, we're moving at a nice SPEAKER_03: pace, I picked the Sequoia fund to 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 rule off. And I gave a runner up to Brad Gerson, our 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? SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I don't think it counts. If you do it through insider SPEAKER_00: trading, so I had to. 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 return. He's obviously a cash generating machine. But it wasn't just that it was also the way that he came out on this whole Wall Street bets Robin Hood scandal way back in January. Remember, of the whole payment for order flow is a gigantic scandal with with Robin Hood, and he, along with Vlad and others was hauled up to Capitol Hill, but they could not lay a glove on him. He demonstrated I think in commanding testimony that all these conspiracy theories around his role had no merit. And the populist revolt around this whole payment for order flow Robin Hood thing broke against the rock of Ken Griffin. He comes out as a huge winner both economically and politically. SPEAKER_03: And you left out the most important part. He was the supervillain in buying the Constitution. Yeah, and he got revenge. extra dollars. He got he got revenge SPEAKER_00: on the crypto people. That's right. That's right. Great, SPEAKER_03: great financial troll. free break. Did we get your best investor of 2021? I kind of stuck to private markets just because they're SPEAKER_01: 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 say, Oh, 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 SPEAKER_03: first times we've had two of the same in the voting. This is incredible. Best turnaround. What do you got for best turnaround? Shama? Best turnaround? SPEAKER_02: 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 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 for it. So well done by that team. Who do you have sex? Are you an investor in Fortuna? SPEAKER_01: No. So I went a little different for this. I said the best turnaround SPEAKER_00: was Kyle Rittenhouse his reputation. As you recall, Rittenhouse shot three white attackers, including two of them were sex offenders at a violent BLM protests in Kenosha. The media then 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 freeburg? Well, I went from who was in the worst shape and, you know, came SPEAKER_01: back from that and I put we work on here, which is an obvious and an obvious and easy choice. We work to me is like Rocky Balboa. You know, Rocky Balboa could not win the match. Rocky Balboa got so beat up, goes to the, you know, to 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 we work to go from where it was a few years ago, which was days or weeks away from bankruptcy, billions of dollars of money injected by SoftBank and for them to orchestrate basically this 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 rework 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. SPEAKER_03: 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 had any way to get it through there because the job what do they what do they turn around exactly like SPEAKER_02: turn around means it's crappy and then it's not crappy. Well, SPEAKER_03: 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 SPEAKER_03: hard to pick it. But I do think like, if you look at the fundamentals of the business, Twitter is down. It's gonna 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 a 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 SPEAKER_01: 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 SPEAKER_01: to compete with Disney. Well, I mean, secession. And just like SPEAKER_01: a library, man, they got so much in there. They're releasing our sopranos. They're releasing the matrix tomorrow on HBO Plus, like HBO Max, they redid the Justice League. The new the new matrix comes out on HBO Max tomorrow, day and date. I love that because I love that they did that with Dune. I love Dune. SPEAKER_02: Totally. Yeah. Dune is an incredible movie. I mean, my SPEAKER_03: movie theater right now. So I'm gonna watch it in the 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 in equities that she paid like $0 on because that's how the tax system that she has operated under for decades works worst human being to me, Elizabeth Warren, I am going to pick Travis McMichael, Gregory McMichael, SPEAKER_02: William roadie, Brian, Roddy, Brian, and Derek Chauvin, for 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. Sax, you got for worst. SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I've got a name here. I don't know if the audience knows SPEAKER_00: yet. It's a guy named Peter Dazek, who's a British zoologist. He's head of a group called the Eco Health 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 a very 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. SPEAKER_01: So just 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 SPEAKER_00: does it support what I'm saying? Yes. SPEAKER_02: He's not gonna listen, but now he feels smug with himself. SPEAKER_03: Yeah, Lex is great. So my source for this has been the SPEAKER_00: 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 people looking to cover their ass. SPEAKER_01: 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 Derek. Yeah. I would argue that in some cases, SPEAKER_01: people who are selfish, don't make it very far in life. And so they generally don't have that much of an impact in an evil way. There's very few people that are purely selfish and make it to scale. But anyway, that's my very esoteric. I think free burger is a good point, which is I think we can SPEAKER_00: judge this not by people's internal motivations, because we don't really know but rather by the consequences of the choices. Right. Yeah, the adverse consequences. Okay, so SPEAKER_03: 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, the 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 four pain. It's one of those four pain conversation ones. What do you got your mouth? You have any best memes? It's the Bernie SPEAKER_02: Sanders inauguration outfit. Amazing. Always a great go to a good his little his little mittens and you know, his totally detached communist glare. Great meme. It's like SPEAKER_01: SPEAKER_03: he's at a sit in at like, some college in Vermont, though, in Russia in the winter. Exactly. Exactly. Like a little chip market. Yeah. All right. Who do you got? Sax? You got a best meme? The ever given forklift meme. This was that little SPEAKER_00: forklift trying to push that gigantic barge out of the Swiss canal. And it got hilariously repurposed. And then I like 10 years ago. I know it's this year. Can you believe SPEAKER_00: it? And a close runner up was my fall plans versus the Delta variant. Oh, you remember that one? That was a great one. How SPEAKER_02: was it? Good on freeberg? Yeah, I know you don't care about pop SPEAKER_03: culture or consume much of it. But give us your best me. No, I don't have a meme. Sorry, not have a meme upgrade. I have no SPEAKER_03: sense of I like to. That was a good one. I'll take that one. SPEAKER_01: So enjoy your memes, but not enough. Okay, can we upgrade his SPEAKER_03: meme subroutine? I love pop culture. This the meme thing. I SPEAKER_01: just don't it doesn't resonate for me. It just doesn't pop culture. I am a pop culture. But my boys were great. I have SPEAKER_02: trouble processing imagery and text all at the same time. My SPEAKER_03: subroutine is indexing all images and GPT three I'm going to produce funny jokes. Hahaha. My laughing subroutine has been upgraded. Hahaha. Sorry, it's too easy. Sorry, Allison. Most loathsome company. I don't think she listens to this, by the way. SPEAKER_01: No, doesn't listen to it. I was talking to my wife about SPEAKER_03: sweater care or whatever she said, What are you talking about? I'm like, the pod that everybody listens to. None of SPEAKER_02: our wives listen to this crap number 40 in the world. No. Okay, most loathsome 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 freeburg? I think one SPEAKER_01: 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 as you say worse than human slavery. I believe SPEAKER_01: 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 got a birth to death cycle that these animals live in, in cages, with no ability to touch or interact with their families. The hurt, the pain, 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 loathsome company to me. And I stick by my my my answer. Can I can I give SPEAKER_02: you a counterpoint? Yeah. But it's delicious. It's a joke. Oh, here we go. That's not cool. SPEAKER_03: Isn't it spicy take I mean to human suffering of slavery and then equate it but you added. I mean, honestly, freeburg like if SPEAKER_02: you look you have you've never eaten any form of animal protein. So how do you know what you're missing? It's true, but SPEAKER_03: he does know about cruelty. Yeah, I guess I'm just saying SPEAKER_02: there's any winners in this conversation at this point. SPEAKER_03: Yeah, this is a longer pod. We could do this another time fried SPEAKER_02: chicken is really delicious. Oh, man. So is a good steak. Okay, SPEAKER_03: we got to stop I'm hungry. me right? sacks Did you have a besides Tyson foods? What do you got? Okay, most of the company you and putting a label on your thing is it's where slow some company I had the New York Times, a new book this year SPEAKER_00: in 2020. Why is he called the gray lady winked. The author Ashley Rinsburg 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 work 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 loathsome company. And David, can I double down on this? I posted Nick, maybe you SPEAKER_02: 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 there 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 err 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 profit. SPEAKER_03: Trust. And this is why tech leaders and other people are SPEAKER_00: increasingly going direct as we talked about all year in the pod. Go Direct. They are not the paper of record anymore. Direct is the new the internet is the paper of record. I mean, look at this podcast. I mean, I think like we're going direct, SPEAKER_03: we get more views on this than any other press hit we could ever do. And we get to talk. I think we've probably eclipsed SPEAKER_02: 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 SPEAKER_03: 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 SPEAKER_02: 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 SPEAKER_03: new tech for me. It's Dallas. 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? Taos? No, I their SPEAKER_03: 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 will be number 40? If I didn't? Okay, enough, enough, you ungrateful prick. Listen, you're tilting me now I'm trying to get the show over with 75 minutes in. Okay, so I say Dallas 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 SPEAKER_03: together and this is going to be the crowning achievement of web three dows. What's the best new tech for you, Mr. Polly hoppity? I have two choices. Okay. One is in the heavens. And that is SPEAKER_02: human space travel. Okay, we had three different companies create astronauts this year. Three amazing. That's like insanity. So that 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 1000s of employees across these three businesses did. Huge congrats to all three of them. I found it really inspiring. So I think that's really exciting. So I think human space travel. And then the second which is much more closer to Earth is substack I think really got to a level of scale this year. That is really profound. I have found it to be an incredible way to stay connected to the truth. And there are some unbelievable people who are now able to create a life for themselves by 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 SPEAKER_02: going to learn how to promote these things to you in a better way, I think over time. But I think that was incredible. You get a subscription eventually to moth, there'll be SPEAKER_03: some sort of group subscription and then you'll be able to put Glenn Greenwald and barry Weiss and have multiple published 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 SPEAKER_02: service that we have and with no I'd say podcast is right up SPEAKER_03: there too. sacks. I'm obviously you're going to pick call in but after calling what do you got for the best? Well, I you know, I SPEAKER_00: originally had the the Chris Virginia anything but you already mentioned that so I'm gonna I'm gonna go with starlink it got 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. Yeah, it's pretty unbelievable. Wow. Gavin Baker just tweeted this earlier today this morning. That's the data. SPEAKER_02: All I can say all I can say for all of us who own yummy yum yum yum yum. That's so delicious. Okay, my best new technology. I SPEAKER_01: think the 2021 was the year of plasma fusion. There were several iterations and step function improvements in plasma fusion. Can you explain what it is to people who don't know? The concept ultimately for plasma fusion is that you can generate a controlled nuclear series of nuclear reactions where energy is released. And as these atoms transform and energy is released, rather than have a runaway breakthrough effect, which you would have in a nuclear bomb, for example, you 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 creator 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, 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. Is that how they make SPEAKER_02: energy on the sun? This one, so all of this is fusion, that's SPEAKER_01: correct. That's how they make energy on the sun? Well, what SPEAKER_01: 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? SPEAKER_01: Different. It's different. Bill Gates. General Fusion had a big breakthrough and Bill Gates is a big backer of a company called Tera Power that announced that they're building a new reactor. But I think generally speaking, we are seeing 2021 as kind of that big step change where this stuff is starting to move from theory. When will we have it online? Still, as everyone's been saying, 10 years, 10 years, every year, every 10 years, we say 10 years. Okay, yeah. Best trend, worst trend. Here we go. SPEAKER_03: I'm going to go with the best trend being centrism, purple pills, recalls of DA's reasonableness, and maybe the pot, 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, Sax? Best SPEAKER_00: 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 mayor of San Francisco now wants to refund the police the attempt to cancel Dave Chappelle totally fizzled out after the walkout protests and 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. SPEAKER_01: 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 SPEAKER_02: got your mouth? I'm gonna double tap that. I had the creator economy. I think it's incredible what these young creators are basically 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. SPEAKER_03: 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 to mouth? My worst trend SPEAKER_02: 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 SPEAKER_03: got? I've got the rise of authoritarianism around the world SPEAKER_00: and here in the United States. I mean, even in Western countries like Australia, it's basically been turned into a prison colony for months in the name of stopping COVID. Here in the United States, you've got governors like Gavin Newsom, who have basically appropriated dictatorial powers through 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 on vaccine appeal from going to all restaurants, bars, nightclubs, sport arenas, fitness centers, movie theaters, and on and on it goes. On top of that, you've got censorship, you've got, you know, the censoring of speech, you've got this 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. SPEAKER_01: I think to your point, Zach, it's one of the reasons why we will see people in general looking for alternative ways to govern themselves. And it will only catalyze and accelerate some of these other trends that I think we've been talking about. My worst trend was the metaverse. I think it's like the renaming of something that's been going on for a long time as if it's some new future thing. If anyone's played Fortnite over the last 6 years or 5 years, 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 is 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. SPEAKER_03: 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? SPEAKER_01: 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 in this country and in the world. And we've seen this play out. And as governments and societies evolve, eventually this happens, there's a massive revolution typically triggered by some new technology emerging, like the printing press, the radio, shipping. And in our case today, I would argue what people are calling web 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. And then on music, I'll give a shout out to a very unknown artist who I think deserves a shout out. His name is DK the drummer. DK the drummer did a collaboration with a guy named Alejandro Aranda, who was on American Idol. My kids cannot stop listening to his track that they did together. It's amazing. Shout out for that guy. I just figured he deserves it for putting out an awesome track. All right, SPEAKER_03: Sax. Which Steve Bannon episode was your favorite? So under Book SPEAKER_00: of the Year, I have a very recent choice, which is San Francisco by Michael Shellenberger. 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. Like Chamath, I have red pill journalists on Substack, Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Antonio Garcia Martinez, all of whom now have shows on call-in. So those are my choices. There's a SPEAKER_03: second plug. Okay, here we go. Chamath, what was your favorite app besides call-in? SPEAKER_02: Exactly. Let's see. So my best album is Planet Her by Doja Cat. Danceable, fun. Kids love it. I love it. You dance? You know that I have rhythm bro. All in Summit Dance Party. Here we go. SPEAKER_03: I'm black from the waist down, as you also know. SPEAKER_02: But just beep that out. Please cut that out. No, no, it's not. No, you cannot hide from the truth, boys. SPEAKER_03: SPEAKER_02: Best movie is Dune. It was so beautiful. Cinematically just gorgeous. Incredible, incredible, incredible movie. And then Book. I've said it this before, but the way I think about the world is using these models and frameworks. One of the most useful models that I have found is this idea of mimesis or mimetic theory, which is that people copy each other that causes conflict. It was espoused by a philosopher named René Girard. Myself, Peter Thiel, there's a bunch of us who are pretty deep René 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-I-N-G 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 oh, just shout out. We didn't have best comedian here. SPEAKER_03: But I really enjoyed Hasan Minhaj's The King's Jester, a new show that is not yet on streaming, but that he's doing live. It was hilarious. It was insightful. He's awesome. And really enjoyed going to it. Did any of you like Loki? I enjoyed it. Yeah, well done. SPEAKER_03: What is Loki? SPEAKER_03: He is Thor's stepbrother. And they did a TV show called Loki, which was like a very challenging metaverse, multiple timeline kind of concept. It's gonna set the stage for the whole next wave of Marvel SPEAKER_00: movies. Didn't you think that was the best Marvel product this year? Or no? Definitely was absolutely 100%. I haven't seen Spider-Man SPEAKER_03: Homecoming, but I think it sets in line. We haven't heard from Sax. Did we hear from Sax? SPEAKER_03: Yeah, Sax just picked like some right wing book. It was like San Francisco or something and TV or whatever. SPEAKER_03: I mean, Sax, 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 end? Honestly, it's hard to find like even one movie that I SPEAKER_00: 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 SPEAKER_03: explained to people this right wing phenomenon. SPEAKER_00: It's, it's a Kevin Costner show. I don't know if it's right wing. It's about a ranching like family like their traditional sort of cowboys who live in Wyoming. And or maybe it's Montana. I'm not sure anyway, there's all these people trying to go after them to get their land, mostly developers. And 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 SPEAKER_03: 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 SPEAKER_01: about to the republic, the traditional republican slash SPEAKER_03: 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 SPEAKER_00: not sure it's like it has an overt political agenda. I mean, the family who's the subject of the show, the concert character, he's 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 San Francisco, San Francisco housing. Yeah. SPEAKER_03: Okay, we're gonna keep up with this one. This is our Rudy Giuliani Award for self emoliation. Basically, people who destroy their legacy in some way, or otherwise just bungled everything. sacks, I gotta go to you first. I know that you've got your writing team over at Fox and has something going on here for this one. Let's go. Well, yeah, I went with the SPEAKER_00: Cuomo brothers. You know, grateful. Yes. So first, you have the governor, Andrew Cuomo, remember, at the beginning of COVID, he was giving these constant press conferences, there was even talk about on the part of Democrats replacing Biden with him at the 2020 convention. This inspired the term Cuomo sexuals, who saw him as a sex symbol. And then he got taken down in August by sexual harassment allegations. Then, a few weeks later, there's a major scandal at CNN when it leaked documents from the New York AG's office show that his brother Chris Cuomo had used his purchase, you know, at CNN to dig up dirt on some of his brothers accusers, then he was suspended and ultimately fired. So both brothers self emulated within a few minutes of each other. And Andrew Cuomo had to SPEAKER_03: return his $5 million book advance for his COVID book. Freebark, we got who lit themselves on fire. And, well, SPEAKER_01: 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 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, Chamath? I think Senator Karen is the obvious choice for me. SPEAKER_02: 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. SPEAKER_01: 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 SPEAKER_00: 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 SPEAKER_03: 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, SPEAKER_00: Jason, how much Fox News have you been watching? Just hanging out with you too much. No, it is possible. You know, I really SPEAKER_03: wanted a centrist for president he presented as such, and then he hasn't done that. And now he's being forced into centrism, kicking and screaming, you should just started there. That's where he that was the promise. He should have started there. That's where that's where he's most comfortable. Anyways, SPEAKER_02: that's who he is. Exactly like what a head fake. And now he SPEAKER_03: 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 three other besties. Freiburg, this is your idea of like, this is your idea. You want to create this division of why somebody is your favorite bestie on the show. Just trying SPEAKER_01: to give you a shout out for coming to my party. Okay, you know, while the other besties said I am your favorite bestie. No, but you know what? Yesterday, Chammaw served me crepes with Nutella. So he's my favorite bestie now. So no, it's Saks had an incredible party and you guys, I want to say, I'll tell you something, all three of you guys have been incredibly generous. And I feel fortunate and I know it's a little soft moment, but thank you guys. That's it. I have had my relationship upgraded. My emotion is complete. My voice SPEAKER_03: SPEAKER_03: is cracking. This is in my programming. But I should keep it together. The tier subroutine has not been installed. Chammaw 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 SPEAKER_02: 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 SPEAKER_02: friends. Oh, very nice. I am very lucky to have two of the SPEAKER_03: three of you have planes that I get to fly on around the world. Second homes that I get to freeload off of and freeburg. You know, I can't just say like, you know, get as I told your mom freeburg 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 your mom 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, your ethos, your effort in the world and in a world of people who are complaining and whining and not doing I just feel so honored to be able to be the moderator here and spend time with you every week I would do this if I could just throw the episode away every week. Because it's inspiring for me for the next six days until we meet again. It really fills my bucket it recharges my batteries to be with folks who just aggressively want to solve problems in the world. Where are we taping this next week? So that's in like two SPEAKER_03: 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 take from Uranus. SPEAKER_03: Oh, he set it up. If we can terraform it's the 24th to 26. But I think we're on the 26th. Last day in the afternoon all in podcasts we're doing it. Mark Suster 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 best he gets 12 tickets to give to a bestie. We're gonna run it everybody has to pay and then everything will be simulcast. All right, everybody. Let's wrap up. I know SPEAKER_03: 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 SPEAKER_00: real question. This is a feminine bullshit that you guys are. SPEAKER_02: So brutal. You're such an asshole. What a piece of work. Such an ass. I will say this this group, a few relationships SPEAKER_01: 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 SPEAKER_01: public what all that went down. Yeah, but but Chamath and I here we are here. We are. Chamath and I fought very hard to keep the pot 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 this by doing tomorrow. SPEAKER_03: Yeah, and it's good. It's good. It's good to see it. SPEAKER_01: You're the idiot who crashed the bunk beds. The one on top. SPEAKER_00: Yeah, he jumps on top of the whole thing. I don't even know what movie you're talking about. What is it? Two of you, SPEAKER_02: you, Sax and 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. The amount of time Chamath and I had to spend mediating the two of you SPEAKER_01: back together was ridiculous. I didn't want to spend the time SPEAKER_00: either. Yeah, I didn't want to spend the time either. Maybe SPEAKER_03: Sax could stay in his lane and be a little... No, no, no, no, no. SPEAKER_01: Don't start. Don't start. Don't start. Don't start. Nick's SPEAKER_00: 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. SPEAKER_03: No, people still ask me this day was that whole few with J Cal SPEAKER_00: real or was it just for ratings? No, it was real. It was all it was real. The bigger feud was not the bigger feud was not SPEAKER_01: aired on the air. And right there was a second fuse. That's under NDA. That's under NDA. That one was out of control. We SPEAKER_03: signed an NDA. I'd like to say the there's an operating agreement now. Yeah. It's not easy. You know, success is hard for a band, you know, and I think one of the things I'll say about this whole brew ha ha and the you know, sacks and I having debates about how to run the pod is I think we came to the right place. I you know, I look at the comments. And I think I've become a better moderator. I think sacks, Jamal, freeburg, you've all become great at passing the ball and showing interest in each other's points. And I feel like we're playing, you know, which is always my wish for this is that, you know, we play this game as intellectually honestly and crisply. And as well with as much discipline with as much hard work as like, let's say the Warriors do. And I really feel like even in the last 10 episodes, we hit a high water mark and the in the audience and everybody I meet tells me the same thing. My guys, the guys just do such a great job. I'll say one thing. One thing that makes it really hard. I was I SPEAKER_01: 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 grinding, grinding, grinding. We grind. We grind up at 5am. Yeah. So out of the east coast, four day. SPEAKER_02: And I think I think all four of us in the same are in the same SPEAKER_01: 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 this 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 J Cal? SPEAKER_00: Here we go. SPEAKER_00: So it's true that without J Cal, this pod never would have happened. You are the podcaster in this group. You are the skills. You are the pod. Very entertaining and funny. And so like, frankly, even though you're not as rich and smart as the rest of us, you should stop feeling so insecure because you really are the reason for this pod. All right, let me give a compliment. Sax you bring so SPEAKER_03: many great notes to the pod. And you are so eloquent based on what your team writes for you. Read that script. And the amount of money you spend forming your opinions from Tucker Carlson's ex writing team is just extraordinary. So much to the table. I can't believe I ever wanted to replace you with Nobody's gonna know who I was threatening to replace Sax with. SPEAKER_03: It was like literally like, we're gonna replace this guitarist. Boys have a wonderful holiday. I love you. SPEAKER_02: One. I love you besties. Okay, everybody. We'll see you all SPEAKER_03: next week for 2022 predictions. Our promise to you. No weeks off for the besties. I'm gonna be with you every Friday night. Bye bye. SPEAKER_00: Oh, man. We should all just get a room and just have one big huge door because they're all just like this like sexual tension, but they just need to release it. You're a bee. We need to get merkies.