December 23 2022
- Besties spent time in Tahoe
- JCal life hack - books restaurant 2 weeks out - 8 seats, etc and then invites his besties
- Sacks at Twitter HQ 🙂
- 2022 Bestie Awards
- Politics
- Winners
- What were their predictions?
- JCal and Sacks said DeSantis
- Friedberg said Putin and fell flat
- Chamath said Xi Jinping
- Actual
- DeSantis - won Florida, its the fastest growing state (maybe for fund raising) - projected to beat Trump in 2024
- Margin of victory last time was 1%, now its 20%
- Maybe he’s peaking too soon?
- Last 7-8 nomination cycles person who has been leading polling entering Iowa caucus has lost
- On the flip side maybe he scares off competitors
- Xi Jinping - no single person in the world who is now as powerful as this one man - has complete authoritarian control over 1.4B people and 20% of world’s GDP
- Zelenskyy from Ukraine (surprising winner) - no one knew about him before and now he has become superstar and hero
- 2-3rd Kiev is without power, nearly half of country is without power, many people killed and displaced
- DeSantis - won Florida, its the fastest growing state (maybe for fund raising) - projected to beat Trump in 2024
- What were their predictions?
- Losers
- Predictions
- Extreme left
- Biden and Trump
- Nancy Pelosi
- Actual
- In the US - extreme left (no one talks about Warren or Bernie)
- Abroad - EU - had to roll back a bunch of their policies
- Biggest political blunder of the year was Jan 27 2022 - when Blinken shut the door on diplomatic off ramp when he said Ukraine might have been allowed into NATO - leading to biggest event of the year - the Russia-Ukraine war
- Jerome Powell and Liz Truss (only in office for 45 days as UK PM)
- Fed chair’s role became so politicized, both left and right questioned his decision making
- Failure to raise rates soon enough
- Raising rates too much too late
- So both sides are against him
- Fed chair’s role became so politicized, both left and right questioned his decision making
- GOP - red wave failed, turned into a trickle, Trump is back, Roe v Wade has been a disaster, and GOP have lost women and LGBT vote
- Women - fundamental human rights stripped away from 50% of the population
- Predictions
- Surprise
- Predictions
- JCal - Kamala Harris
- Chamath - Joe Manchin
- Sacks - Glenn Youngkin winning
- Friedberg - Jan 6 insurrection
- Actual
- Sacks - no red wave, 3/4 country thinks we’re on the wrong track and in recession, but candidate quality and election denial hit the GOP
- Friedberg - failure of red wave - disdain with politicians managing us through covid didn’t seem to matter
- Chamath - absolute toothlessness of MAGA and Donald Trump - if you’re anywhere near this guy you were going to lose
- Jason - Roe v Wade, Trump (despite documents, all his NY cases) is still viable!
- Predictions
- Winners
- Business
- Winner
- Predictions
- Jason - Disney
- Chamath - SMBs
- Sacks - Rise of the rest
- Friedberg - Stripe
- Chamath and Sacks didn’t realize interest rate hikes’ impact on their predictions
- Disney - Bob Chapek in and out and Bob Iger back
- Actual
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Defense companies are going to keep doing well
- Up 40%
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Reconstruction will cost $1T so that will be even more than war spending
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War has been amazing for military-industrial complex
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Oil and Gas up 47% - short term
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SP down 20%
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OpenAI and Fusion startups - long term
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Friedberg predicted war
- He also bought an energy ETF
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People that understood Capital Asset pricing model
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ChatGPT and their partner Microsoft
- Jcal and Molly wood played a game for ChatGPT vs Google and they chose ChatGPT many times
- Microsoft will maybe release a search engine with OpenAI that will happen a significant impact on Google
- Jcal and Molly wood played a game for ChatGPT vs Google and they chose ChatGPT many times
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- Predictions
- Losers
- Predictions
- Jason and Friedberg - Crypto
- Chamath - VISA and Mastercard
- Sacks - asset classes benefitting from Fed pumps
- Actual
- Chamath - BigTech
- Panicked selling
- Regulators going after them
- Now they can’t spend as much as they did
- Friedberg - FTX
- Revealed so much systemic laziness and bias
- Sacks - Bob Chapek
- Iger was undermining Chapek in the background
- CFO was the one who knifed Chapek
- Iger book - entire empire was built around doing deals - he’s a deal junkie
- White Lotus is apparently incredible
- Jason - Crypto
- So after FTX and FTT tokens, other grifts will be hit
- Chamath - BigTech
- Predictions
- Surprise
- Sacks sold his Dall-E movie to Cuban
- Predictions
- DAOs
- NFTs
- Miami
- Actual
- Friedberg - Elon Musk buying Twitter
- Head cutting, cost cutting
- Impact on rest of SV - all VCs and board etc are looking at Elon’s behavior of how you can challenge your team to achieve the impossible in a seemingly impossible environment
- Chamath - Jerome Powell and the Fed and their staunch hawkishness on inflation - he didn’t capitulate or waver, said rates will rise faster and higher and stay their longer than anyone cares
- Sacks - Adobe bought Figma for $20B
- Elon buying Twitter
- Sacks got depositioned for 6 hours
- Sacks is not a candidate for CEO of Twitter - rumors are getting out of control
- Bunch of liberals can inhale now 🙂
- Jason - Twitter acquisition
- So many features
- Twitter for business
- Hashtags for stock tickers
- Viewcount - shows incredible reach of Twitter - so other knockoffs don’t have nearly the reach of Twitter
- Dave Rubin noted that NYT doesn’t have nearly the same number of views
- Affiliate badges
- Runner up
- Meta stock collapsing
- So many features
- Friedberg - Elon Musk buying Twitter
- Winner
- Science breakthrough
- Friedberg - Demonstration of net energy gain in Fusion
- Great milestone but long way to go
- Increase of nearly 40% in Fusion startups - $10B investment for this year
- Great milestone but long way to go
- JCal - Fusion
- Chamath - 13 yr old girl in UK had heretofore uncurable form of cancer - and a lab in the UK got rid of her cancer - by editing T-cells using CRISPR - actual good thing happened
- Friedberg - Demonstration of net energy gain in Fusion
- Biggest flash in the pan
- Predictions
- Jason - Chesa Boudin
- Friedberg - DAO
- Chamath - Metaverse
- Sacks - transitory
- Actual
- Friedberg - AllInSummit
- Sacks - Liz Truss (44 days as PM - 4 scaramuccis) - basically fined by bond market
- Chamath - Fusion
- Predictions
- Politics
- Elon joins the pod!!!!!
- 3M transactions per second to get view count
- First 6 weeks has been quite a roller coaster
- Releasing features faster than in Twitter history
- Reduced cost structure by a factor of 3 or 4
- Verified feature is important
- Affiliation
- Detailed and nuanced verification
- Product iteration
- Want to look at net output - want to swing for the fences
- Error rate as Chief Twit will be less over time but will be lot higher initially
- What is minimum viable people
- Who is critical and who is exceptional
- Who is trusted and is up for working hard
- 2000 people and 5000 contractors (trust and safety + support work)
- Hate speech impressions are down by a third and will maybe go down lower
- Bot problem
- Incentive structure previously was to grow monetizable mDAU - daily active users - so there is an incentive to pretend that a bot is real
- Cost cutting
- Only focus is on making Twitter financially viable
- Freedom of speech
- Should hew to the law of the country - close to the law
- Apologized to Paul Graham personally - it was a mistake
- Journalist suspension was not a mistake - they just thought they were better than everyone else
- Regime change with interest rates
- Hope for the best, prepare for the worst
- Don’t have margin debt
- Probably recession
- Cash wise keep powder dry
- Brett Johnson CFO of SpaceX was at Broadcom in 2000 - from peak to trough they went down 97% in 12 months - subsequently recovered to much higher levels but if you a small margin position you get wiped out
- Economy is cyclic - somewhat overdue for a recession
- Best guess - dawn breaks roughly in Q2 2024
- Booms don’t last forever, so do recessions
- Twitter Files
- If they’re gonna be trusted in the future they need to clear the decks in the past
- Almost every conspiracy theory about Twitter have all turned out to be true - more true than people thought
- Michael Shellenberger joins the pod
- FBI embedding seems alarming
- Twitter executives were pushing back against the FBI but FBI was very persistent
- Congress might look into this
- What is the evidence that Russia is so competent
- Russian interference was being used to explain away all kinds of things
- Like Hilary campaign
- FBI primed execs that there would be a hack and leak operation coming
- Michael Shellenberger has been a lifelong democrat (until last year)
- Homelessness problem in SF - they basically pay people
- Google Michael Shellenberger YouTube homeless
- SF pays cash welfare payment $600-700 and $200 food stamps
- James in the video was honest about the incentives and was horrified himself by the incentives that SF
- SF has lowest price of drugs and lowest enforcement - so everyone comes to SF
- 3 times more people die living outside than living in a shelter
- People overcome addiction all the time but they need intervention
- Twitter had a lot of features ready to be released but held back by management
- Pace of decision making matters far more than accuracy of decision making
- Grit, Bias to Action, Narrative
- Don’t be afraid of being embarrassed - like apologizing to Paul Graham
- Rate at which you can make decisions is far more important than accuracy
- As business scales and managers are hired they reduce rate of decision making
- If we’re not rolling back 10% of the time, we’re not moving fast enough - don’t have bias towards action, too afraid of making a mistake
- Sean Hannity has only 83K views for having 6.2M followers
- Best CEO of 2022
- 2021
- Frank Slootman and Elon Musk
- Bog Iger
- Brian Armstrong
- Satya Nadella
- 2022
- Sacks - Satya Nadella, Elon Musk, Brian Armstrong
- Every CEO who responded to the regime change and cut costs and made hard decisions
- Chamath - CEO of Occidental Petroleum - Vicki Hollub - best performing stock of the year
- Advising everyone of his portfolio to keep powder till 2025 Q1 - minimum requirement
- CEO of Klarna, CEO of Checkout.com
- Friedberg - Warren Buffet, stays within zone of competence, doesn’t let macro or politics affect him, he is the largest shareholder of Occidental Petroleum - GOAT 🐐
- Jason - Airbnb are now a money printer and Uber, they are also close to FCF (Brian CHeski and Dara)
- Sacks - Satya Nadella, Elon Musk, Brian Armstrong
- 2021
- Best Investor of 2022
- Jason - investors who are demanding governance and doing diligence again
- Bill Gurley
- Chamath
- Pod shops - folks with strategies of having hundreds of pods
- Ken Griffin of Citadel
- DE Shaw
- 2 more folks
- Have sophisticated strategies with computers - have done amazing
- Have raised annual fees to 4% per year, carry to 40% per year
- Pod shops - folks with strategies of having hundreds of pods
- Sacks
- Stan Druckenmiller - predicted recession and inflation
- Friedberg
- Druckenmiller - was short equities and long commodities in 2021 and if you listened you would have made money
- Jason - investors who are demanding governance and doing diligence again
- Worst investor of 2022
- Chamath
- Himself and anyone else who was long tech
- Chamath
- Best turn arounds
- Jason - Meta, they did a RIF and it seems to be working, and might do another 10-15%
- Sacks
- Recalled 3 members of the school board (esp Alison Collins) - by a 70-30 margin and 80-20 on her
- Chesa Boudin recalled by a 60-40 margins - decarceration agenda
- Gordon Mar
- Brooke Jenkins got re-elected in her own right
- Worst human being
- SBF
- Caroline Ellison and Gary Wang flipped and admitted to backdoors for Alameda and FTX
- New defense strategy - adderall and e-sam (patch) - shuts down or kills part of your brain that makes decisions - workshopping only shot of his defense
- Prescribed insanity defense
- SBF
- Most loathsome company
- FTX
- Inotiv - busted by Feds for their animal abuse with their dogs and beagles
- Best New Tech
- Friedberg - ChatGPT
- Jason - Fusion
- Chamath - AlphaFold 3
- Sacks - ChatGPT
- Best Trend
- Jason - age of austerity
- Chamath - marginal cost of energy generation and storage is in the low single digits of pennies per KwH - this will generate a massive peace dividend in the next decade because of energy security (climate change is a distant second goal)
- Friedberg - last year said creator community - now narrator economy
- Sacks - growing realization that corporate media has their own agenda - media and press is prism through which reality is refracted - if its not accurate people will find alternatives
- Worst Trend
- Jason - Fed trying to play catchup - oversteering into the crash
- Chamath - overspending by the government - $1.65T of spending that no one can seem to account for
- Sacks - authoritarianism last year, government colluding with Big Tech to advance agenda
- Friedberg - interest rate mania, don’t blame interest rates for all the problems
- Favorite media of 2022
- Jason - Top Gun, House of the Dragon, White Lotus 2, Tar, Putting the rabbit in the hat by Brian Cox, Quentin Tarantino Cinema Speculation
- Sacks - House of the Dragon, Dall-E Lam, Unherd episode with John Mearsheimer
- Chamath - Yellowstone, The Patient on Hulu with Steve Carell, Never have I ever
- Friedberg - The vital question by Nick Lane (origin of life on earth) (also read Life Ascending by him)
- Rudy Giuliani award for self immolation
- Jason - Kevin O leary - got $15M from FTX and doubled down on it and ruined his reputation
- Friedberg - Twitter has hurt his reputation
- Sacks - Herschel Walker
- Chamath - Whoever signed the papers for search and seizure at Mar-a-lago
- Only people who are guaranteed to make money in these tax laws are real estate investors
- Longest episode in history of the pod!
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