E109: 2022 Bestie Awards Live from Twitter HQ - Transcripts

everybody. Merry Christmas. Happy holidays. It is the end of 2022. And once again, we're doing our bestie awards. Yes, at the end of the year, we do our bestie awards. This is where we give awards to the biggest winners, losers, and many other categories that you love with me again. Of course,

the Sultan of Science, deep in his Kurosawa vibes. How are you doing Sultan? It was great to see you guys for dinner last night, Sacks. We missed you. That was a lot of fun. We all got together twice this week for dinner while we were on vacation. And during our dinner,

we took a vote. And Sacks, you are now the director of the All In Summit. Congratulations.

Congratulations. Yes, the grift is on. Good, good. My first act is to veto it.

Okay, there you go. Sorry to the fans. Also with us, of course, is the dictator himself, Chamath Palihapatiya, deep in his turtleneck phase and his vibes. Tell us about your winter vibes.

Bestie? I mean, I can't believe that we all took over Lake Tahoe for a week together. It's cool. It's been a lot of fun. I got to say, Sacks, you'll be surprised. JCal has the life hack of life hacks here. He's figured out how to basically get everything pre-wired, all the

restaurants, all the reservations. It's been great. I've loved it. We've had a wonderful time.

He puts an eight-person table for every night. And he does it, what, months in advance?

So every night, he's got an object. Every night, he's got an object. Every two weeks out, I get a

table of eight for five, six nights in a row, and then I invite my besties out. And oddly, it turned out there was only one person from JCal's side, just himself. There was always a room

for the rest of us to show up. Yes, there was always a room. We had a wonderful time. I picked

up the check for the nachos and Chamath brought $6,000 worth of wine. I brought my own also to the restaurant yesterday so we could open the wine properly.

It was wonderful. We've had a wonderful time. And of course, with us, looks like he had to work over the Christmas break. Sacks, how are you doing, brother? You're working today?

I'm good. I'm just hanging out somewhere.

Well, come on. You can be honest. You're at the Twitter HQ. I recognize that incredible architecture and design. They spent so much money on that office space. Beautiful office. That's definitely beautiful office.

They've got beautiful office. They've got their own bespoke coffee shop here called The Perch.

We're the people that work there.

Too soon, too soon, too soon. The people are working too hard to be hanging out in the coffee shop.

Rain man David's out.

Love you, West Ice.

We be West Ice.

Okay, so let's get started with our Bestie Awards. This is very controversial. We start with a political award. And last year, just so we're clear, this is not the prediction show. The next week will be the prediction show. This week is our winners.

Cue the music.

Yes, cue the music. Right there. Okay, here we go. 2022 predictions. This is what we predicted for the Bestie Award for biggest political winner. I said Ron DeSantis, and so did David Sacks. We predicted in 2022.

You said it after me. You said it after me. And the way you introduced it, you said, what did Tucker Carlson's writers come up with? I said DeSantis, and then you said DeSantis.

Are you starting already? Literally, I'm trying to give you your flowers. No, I reviewed the tape. Okay, take it easy. You're going to get your flowers. So Ron DeSantis, obviously a big winner. So those were great predictions. Freiburg, with a wildcard there, he predicted Putin would be a winner in 2022. That one fell a little flat. Did it not? Our friend Freiburg? Not a winner.

I reviewed the tape.

I reviewed the tape. No, I think he, you know, I mean, my projection was really built on what I thought would be a big kind of influence that he would gain this year. You know, whether he's viewed negatively or positively, he's certainly at the center of the stage right now.

Now, Chamath, your 22 prediction, this is your prediction last year for this year, was that the biggest political winner would be Xi Jinping. Okay. Now we go to our actual biggest winner. This is where we tell you who we thought was the biggest winner of 2022. Let's start with you, Sacks. Who is your biggest winner for 2022? Political biggest winner.

This was the prediction that I nailed, as you mentioned it. So the red wave fills it everywhere else, but it crashed over Florida hard. So DeSantis is my pick. He won reelection by about 20 points. And his coattails carried four new GOP house seats, which happens to be the exact size of the GOP majority. Several polls have now shown him beating Donald Trump by significant margins for the 2024 GOP nomination. He is shattering fundraising records. Florida is now the fastest growing state. Right. So he is my pick for the biggest winner, political winner of 2022.

Great. Who is your biggest political winner? Chamath. I mean, it's obvious. It's Xi Jinping. There is no single person in the world that is now as powerful as this one man. He has complete authoritarian control over 1.2 odd billion people and 20 percent of the world's GDP and a large amount of the world's debt, including a lot of U.S. dollar debt. And so, you know, it's pretty there's there's it's hard to find anybody that won nearly as much as he did.

OK, now to you, Friedberg. Who is your biggest political winner of 2022?

I mean, I think your DeSantis and Xi Jinping calls were really like good. I think the biggest surprising winner for me is like, you know, unexpected. And that would be Zelensky from the Ukraine. I don't think going into this year, people paid as much attention to him. He was certainly not a song hero, but coming through this conflict and I think leading the storyline about our common enemy of the West and common enemy of democracy being Vladimir Putin, Putin really kind of made him a superstar and a hero on a global stage. And I think that's evidenced by the fact that he's in the White House and he gave an address to the U.S. Congress yesterday. So I would make him kind of the biggest winner of the year.

It's hard to go against DeSantis. So, you know, he clearly has, as Saks correctly pointed out, gone into the lead. We'll see if he can be Trump in the primaries.

I have my doubts, but he does seem to be pulling in some of those moderates. I don't understand why you guys say he's a political winner. What did he win? He hasn't won the nomination yet. He got reelected to a state that he had before 2022. So what did he win exactly?

Well, I think a couple of things. One is when he won election to the governorship four years ago, it was by less than 1%. It was a tiny margin of victory. This was margin of almost 20%. He had coattails and he is now the front runner for the GOP nomination in 24. I think you can argue, you can make the case that maybe he's peaking too soon.

Well, I'm glad you brought that up because if you look at the data, you know, I think in the last seven or eight nomination cycles, the person that's been leading the popularity contest going into the Iowa caucuses has not won the nomination. He's peaking too soon almost.

That's a possibility because when you're the front runner, everyone takes shots at you. On the other hand, if he stays this dominant, he will drive out other contenders out of the primary and he may be able to solidify it. And if it can just be DeSantis versus Trump in the primary, he has a much better shot than if it's Trump versus a bunch of other challengers. And I think that if he continues to pull this well within the Republican party, I think Trump might not run again because Trump definitely does not want to risk being a loser in the Republican primary. So yeah, there's always front runner risks, but it's hard to say that coming out of this year, that he wasn't a huge political winner. Okay. If we're going to challenge other people's picks, I would maybe challenge Zelensky. There's no question that he's been a global media hero, but two thirds of Kiev is currently without power. 80% of Kiev doesn't have water. 30% of the Ukrainian power stations have been destroyed. Nearly half of the country's without power. There's something like 8 million displaced Ukrainians in the country and over a hundred thousand Ukrainians have been killed in this war.

Freiburg, your response? I'm not advocating for his performance as a leader. I'm advocating for his accumulation of political goodwill. And that's it.

Okay. And he is winning the war. I don't know if that's true, but is that winning? Well, in war, they say nobody wins, but it's certainly better than having your country taken over by Putin. So some would argue that's winning. Let's go to biggest losers. Biggest losers. In 2022, we predicted, again, this is our predictions from last year. And then we'll go on to our actuals for this year. Last year we predicted, Chamath said the progressive left. Sacks said Nancy Pelosi. Freiburg, you said U.S.

I mean, I don't think it's as written about as much, but the progressive left did see as much failure as the MAGA right. So they were a huge loser. I mean, to the extent that anybody thought that leftist quasi-socialist policies and politics was a winning strategy, I think that was pretty soundly refuted. Even in places that were pretty staunchly Democrat, it was really difficult for the progressive left to do much of anything but lose. So I think that was a really powerful and important repudiation. And I think it marginalizes them to a bunch of, you know, kooks almost. And I think that that's really healthy for politics going forward.

So your prediction and your actual are going to be the same, the progressive left?

Yeah, I think they were the biggest political loser in the United States, at least.

Okay. Yeah. We don't hear people talking about Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders much this year.

Yeah. And I think that the biggest political loser outside of the United States

was probably the European Union. You want to expand on that a little bit?

If you just think about the corner that they painted themselves into, how much they had to basically literally go 180 degrees away from what their policies were. You know, there was a huge raft of whether it was green ESG, kind of woke liberal politics that manifested itself in all kinds of national security decisions and energy decisions that in this last year, they literally had to undo in order to stay alive. And that makes that whole political construct, I think, very fragile. So they were they were a pretty big political loser outside of the United States.

Okay, Saks, it could be hard here to guess this one. But Saks, who is your biggest political loser in 2022? I have no idea who you're going to pick your pick.

By the way, I got Pelosi right last year that she did lose the gavel. So you've got to say that the war in Ukraine was the biggest event of the year. And obviously, you can spread the blame around to a lot of people starting with Putin, because he's the one who ordered the invasion. But I would say this is a slightly different take on the category, which is biggest political blunder occurred on January 27 of this year, when Blinken said that NATO's door is open and must remain open. And that is our commitment. He basically shut the door. He kept NATO's door open, but shut the door on any means of a diplomatic off ramp to end this conflict by promising Russia that Ukraine would not become part of NATO. That was the single biggest diplomatic blunder of this year or maybe the last couple of decades, because there's a good chance we could have avoided this disastrous war, if we had just

been willing to close NATO's door. Wonderful, great, crisp answer. Thank you for that. Nice and tight.

Friedberg, who's your biggest political loser for 2022? It was a tie for me between Jerome Powell and Liz Truss. Liz Truss just has to get recognition here for only being in office for 45 days as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. I mean, I think that cannot be overlooked. Some of the policy and folks that she put in office caused massive chaos. It was just a clear dysfunction over a very short period of time. Jerome Powell, I think this was a big surprise this year to see how the Fed chair became so politicized and his role became so politicized, both kind of the left and the right, finding reasons to question his leadership and his decision-making. The failure to raise rates soon enough led to massive inflation, is what you'll hear from one contingent of politicians and the public at large. And then the rate at which he's raising rates now to catch up to be and to calm inflation is causing people to complain on the other side. So there is really no one that seems to be happy with Jerome Powell. And I think that that was a shooting star that seems

to have completely lost its luster. Okay, so the Fed, yes, good pull there. Okay, mine is pretty clear. And objectively, it is, of course, the GOP, the red wave failed, it turned into a trickle. Trump is back. And I believe there's a good chance he will win the primary. Roe v. Wade, a complete unmitigated disaster for Republicans, they caught the car and plus marriage equality and having to deal with that women and the LGBT community vote and they have long memories. The GOP, the biggest political losers for me. Okay, I'm sure sex has no rebuttal there. So we will move on to the next

category, which is by the way, if you say it that way, then you know, the biggest political loser in 2022 were women look at like fundamental human rights were stripped away from 50% of the population. So that's not cool. And they could have left it alone. And they could have left it alone.

Well, if if what you mean is that the issue was sent to the states and each state then gets to decide, then you're right. But eat but if you look at the battles have happened at the states, even red states like Kentucky and Kansas have rejected the subsequent political push to

outlaw abortion. So it has not turned out to be just by the fact that all of these red states basically re confirmed and enshrined a woman's right to choose, may actually go more to show that the Supreme Court is totally out of touch, and that they didn't need to touch Roe v. Wade. And the fact that they did opened up, you know, a huge can of worms in 50 states that now go and need to go and adjudicate this thing, where it looked like actually that decision, even back in the day, even though the way that it was done, you know, there was a lot of room for improvement, clearly, everybody agrees with that, but was actually after, you know, 50 plus years reasonable law. And so now that you took that law away, now folks even in the red states are like, no, it was fine, which means that this whole thing was a huge political gambit more than it was actual societal

intention. Okay, so we are going to move on now. I just I'll add my final two cents to that. As I said, I do think women and the LGBT community have very long memories and the people who are in the moderate are not going to forget how they were treated by the GOP in this specific issue. So biggest political surprise, we didn't do predictions last year. But I'll just run down what everybody said was their political surprise. I said the fact that Kamala Harris was sidelined was pretty surprising to me. And that's continued. Chamath, you said Joe Manchin was your biggest political surprise. Glenn Yunkin winning Saksat was your biggest surprise. And Friedberg, the January 6 crowd, making it into the Capitol during the insurrection was your biggest political surprise. So here we go.

Joe Manchin Well, the biggest political surprise to me was no red wave. So I admit I got this prediction wrong. You know, I got all my previous ones, right, Jay Callis. I'm going to admit I got this one wrong. You know, I believe that the electorate would focus on the fundamentals. Three quarters of the country thought we're on the wrong track. Three quarters think we're in a recession. Nevertheless, the Republicans did not do nearly as well as predicted. They only gained nine seats in the House. They actually lost a seat in the Senate. And I think that that had something to do with candidate quality. And of course, the whole election denial narrative basically was a disaster for them.

Saks, Friedberg, did you have a biggest political surprise for 2022, Friedberg?

Yeah, it's also the failure of the red wave. I mean, that was my, my pick. I think the consensus going into the election was with, you know, rising inflation and the disdain that everyone had for the way politicians kind of managed us through COVID and then managed us through the economic recovery. It was inevitable to see a flip and it didn't happen. I think, obviously, we talked about why that is, but that was a big surprise for everyone.

Chamath, what was your biggest political surprise of 2022? Chamath Palihapitiya. The absolute toothlessness of MAGA and Donald Trump. I mean, he was just a scarlet letter. If you were anywhere near this guy, you were going to lose. And that's surprising considering how traditional Republicans were pandering to him up until, frankly, just a few months ago. So I think that we exposed the emperor as having no clothes and that he marginalizes and sidelines candidates into a fringe following that cannot go mainstream. That was, it was really surprising to

see how stark that was this year. Fantastic. I'm going to build on your Chamath. I had two here. Number two was Roe v. Wade, but we've beaten that. I think we just got to discuss it as much as we possibly could. My number one building on your path is that despite what's happened with Trump, the documents, the his cases in the United States and New York and about taxes, despite all of this, the January 6th insurrection, despite all this, Trump is still viable. I can't believe he's still viable and that he is going to be out there in the primaries and he's going to have to debate DeSantis. And I don't know that DeSantis can beat him in a debate. I think he might win. So this is completely scary for both me and Sacks.

mine. Well, I think he's mainly viable in the minds of the MAGA dead enders and the mainstream media who want to keep them alive and the Biden Administration wants to keep them alive and they'll do anything to keep them alive and in the news and you love keeping them in the news. So, it's a yes, it's a codependent relationship between the mainstream media which you sometimes

front for at Trump. Uh, be careful telling me what I think. We need to end the competency. Well, I wish the Republican party would finally take ownership of this disaster, that is Trump and tell him that he has no business, but you guys keep him in the game and the fact that that he's viable. Again, your personal nightmare and mine. Okay, biggest business winner, everybody excited to get off politics right now and get to our kill zone, which is business. So last year, we had predictions in this category. I had said Disney, that's an up and down prediction. I'll get into that in a moment. Tramoth, you said small and medium sized businesses, the old SMBs. Saks said rise of the rest, the fly over states. And Freeberg, you said Stripe.

wrong here? I mean, I whiffed, it just completely missed the global macro shift that we embarked on in full force, starting in Q1 of this year, it was, it is the most important business story of the year. It's just like we have an absolute complete regime change. And by the way, that regime change is so complete, and so, you know, thorough, that it even touched Japan just a few weeks ago, or sorry, just a few days ago, where Japan who find, you know, finally yielded on this idea, you're gonna work and have negative interest rates and yield curve control, even they finally broken it and raised rates. So it is an absolute worldwide sea change in how we need to think about risk. And I think that's worth talking about a little bit later in the show.

But that was the single biggest business story of the year. I'll add to what Tramoth said, I missed this too, even though on another prediction, when you asked what the biggest business loser would be, I think I said that it would be asset classes that have been pumped up by the feds money printing because you start to feel nailed. So I got that part right. But what I didn't connect it to where all the asset classes actually got pummeled. So I kind of conceptually understood that rates were rising, but I totally underestimated the magnitude of the shift, the way that growth stocks would get hammered the way that crypto would get destroyed, the fact that like Tiger basically got blown out of the industry. I mean, I had the right general intuition, but I didn't translate it into the specific asset types and the magnitude of the shift. And also the like what Tramoth said, a real regime change now, and

how markets are viewing stock performance, you start to feel

nailed. So I got really incredible. Freiburg, let's get in on this. This is somewhere where you can contribute deeply. What do you think about your take last year? And you still believe in Stripe?

Yeah, I mean, look, it's a it's a business that obviously benefited greatly from the pandemic and the adoption of, you know, the payment processing infrastructure that they've built across their across various kind of ecommerce platforms. It's, I'm not an investor, so I don't have any numbers. But there are public reports that have highlighted that the revenue increased 66% this year, they've indicated that they're probably going to experience significant revenue slowdown with the recession ahead. But it still seems like a super high quality business. And you know, valuation wise, who knows what things are going to be worth when they ultimately come to market, there's certainly no one going to going public right now. So at some point, we'll see, you know, whether valuations play out. But it seems like it continues to be a very strong, what one of the strongest private businesses that's being built in Silicon Valley,

we will get to 2022. Biggest business winners in one second. I will just say for Disney, yeah, man, what a swing. Bob Chapek in and then out and now Bob Iger back. So I feel like I got this one wrong and right. At the same time, I still believe in the company deeply. I think they're going to have a big win. Let's get to our actual biggest winner of 2022. Sachs, why don't you lead us off with your biggest winner of 2022 for business?

I said Lockheed Martin along with other defense stocks. Lockheed Martin, which makes javelins and high Mars is up 40% in the past year when most of the markets been weighed down. Northrop Grumman is also up almost 40%. And even some of the lesser performers like Raytheon and General Dynamics are up about almost 20% in a terrible market environment. The fact the matter is war is terrible, but it appears to be good business. We sent so many weapons to Ukraine, that there's recent press reports that are the US stockpiles of missiles, javelins and stingers are now depleted. So these companies are going to keep doing well for the next year at least. Now there's a new appropriation sailing through something like 44 billion of new funding for the war. It's now over $100 billion. McConnell says this is a republicans number one priority. This is now a bipartisan concern. And if you think the war is expensive, just wait for reconstruction, that's estimated to cost roughly a trillion dollars to build Ukraine back.

Sachs, can I ask you a question about that? When we fund these wars, I've heard different versions of this, can't get a clear answer. When we provide weapons and systems like this, are they not on account and we ask for money back at some point? Do you know the answer to that question?

Do you think we're gonna get money back? Are you kidding me?

It seems to be sometimes that we do. So that's why I was asking. I think it's something that hasn't been clarity on.

Look, I think the the war has been phenomenal business for the military industrial complex. That's what we're seeing here. Not so great for the rest of the economy.

Freiburg, what do you got? Yeah, I mean, I think you guys will remember last November I predicted energy and defense to be the best performing stocks for this year. Sachs is right, I think defense is up 40%. So I kind of went with the bigger oil and gas companies are up, you know, across the board about 47% in terms of equity value in the public markets a year to date, compared to the S&P being down about 20%. So over the short term, I would argue oil and gas companies, but I think that over the long term, there were a couple of big breakthrough moments that I would give kind of, you know, the winner in business that will benefit over the long term to open AI and diffusion startups. And we'll talk more about why, for those two, obviously, later when we get to the biggest winner in tech and science. But yeah, short term oil and gas, they benefited from the supply constraints and the conflict in the Ukraine. And the longer term, I think open AI and fusion startups.

Well, and by the way, I mean, just just to give Freiburg some credit here, you actually predicted the war, or you predicted a war. I don't know if you predicted this war, but you predicted war in 2022.

Yeah, that's why I predicted the war and Putin kind of rising to the center stage and the defense energy.

Whack the dog. That was a huge prediction, because I don't think most people, even most analysts, well, they were surprised even when the invasion happened. I think people were still very surprised both that Putin would order it. But also, if you study the situation, I think you got to be surprised that we didn't negotiate harder to try and prevent it.

I traded it to I bought I bought an energy ETF. So it worked out for me.

Okay, Chamath, your biggest business winner of 2022, Nick can throw it up. But it's basically any single person that understands the following formula. So if you this is the good, this is the, this is the capital asset pricing model. So what is this? This is like before you make any investment, what it actually tells you is here's the rate of return that you need to generate above the risk free rate, in order for you to justify making that investment. And if you really understood the capital asset pricing model going into 2022, it would have been difficult for you to not make money. Because all of a sudden, as the 10 year flexed up, and as, you know, the volatility, particularly of things like tech stocks went crazy, you could have figured out where you to park your money. And all these people that have built businesses around this capital asset pricing model. So you have companies, obviously. So you know, you have sectors of the economy, like defense or energy stocks, consumer goods and staples, they all had moments where they all did well. But if you take it one step above, the organizations that actually ran big macro books, or really understood how to algorithmically implement this capital asset pricing model just ran roughshod over the markets. And, you know, said in a different way, it's sort of my background, which is, you know, if you understood the capital asset pricing model, you would have been a massive bear.

could have anticipated. Okay, so am I correct saying the capital asset pricing model is the biggest winner? Or no, people that understood it. People that understood it, got it. Okay. And for my biggest winner, I went with chat, GPT, slash open AI and their partner Microsoft. Why did I pick that as the biggest one? Well, on my other podcasts, as we can startups, we played a game chat GPT versus the first result of Google's and Molly and I could not tell the difference. And in fact, we picked chat GPTs answers, often above Google's Google, one of the greatest businesses and franchises ever created has no answer at currently for chat GPT. Because Google's business model is to get you to click on an ad between links. If you give the actual answer, then the person doesn't stop clicking. If they stop clicking, Google stops making money, there is no business model in search.

Sure, you agreed with me. Well, yes, that's correct. We were in

agreement. How about that. We were in agreement sacks in well, yes, that's correct. We were in agreement. How about that? We were in agreement sacks independent. You said, Half visa slash MasterCard, we'll get into that and Coca inside asset class is benefiting from government pumps. Very interesting. The fed? stopping QE Interesting anybody have comments on their Anybody have comments on their predictions or each other's predictions from last year?

On a percentage basis, David absolutely nailed it, Saks absolutely nailed it. On a dollar basis, the biggest business loser of this year was big tech. And I think that you saw three things happen, which I think are important for the future. The first was it was the most crowded trade, both by professional money managers as well as retail. And that fever finally broke in the second half of this year. And now going into these last few weeks, you're seeing a lot of panicked selling to cover losses and other things. So I think that, number one, that happened. Number two, regulators basically said, we're going to go after these guys every single which way we can. And then number three, I think it started to change the innovation cycle where people now actually believe that they can't outspend because folks won't tolerate it. And the things that they're spending their money on seem kind of foolish. And so I think the big tech is probably not discussed enough, but it was a huge loser for this year in terms of what happened.

Absolutely, absolutely. 2022's actual biggest business loser, Chamath says, big tech. Freeberg, who is your biggest business loser for 2022?

I mean, this one's just a simple FTX. I mean, that was such an incredible revelation of the scale of the scam and the fraud and the craziness that went on. And I think what was interesting about FTX is it had implications, not just for crypto and not just for offshore regulatory and not just for fraud, but also for the investors. We had a whole debate about whether the press and journalists failed to appropriately investigate this guy rather than give him accolades because he said the right things, which he said he did over IM. And investors failed to do relevant amounts of due diligence or form a board and have proper governance over him because they wanted to be part of the hot new thing and everyone had capital to deploy. And I think what was interesting about the FTX failure is it wasn't just a failure due to fraud, but it revealed so many parts of kind of, I call it systemic laziness and systemic kind of blind eye and systemic bias that allowed and enabled this to happen. And it was really a revealing kind of failure. And that's why I kind of gave it the award.

Mr. David Sachs, who is your biggest business loser of 2022?

Well, you kind of mentioned this. I picked Bob Chapek. He's the former Disney CEO. He was Eiger's handpicked successor three years ago. Then the pandemic hit, which shut down the theme parks. Then I think the big mistake was allowing himself to be malmouthed by woke employees into picking a fight with DeSantis over the so-called don't say gay bill. Well, that caused DeSantis to retaliate by threatening the special privileges that Disney enjoys in the state. And then he had Eiger undermining him behind the scenes. This was revealed, I think it was in a Wall Street Journal story, that he was grousing to insiders that Chapek was not soliciting his advice and he was undermining confidence in him with the board. And recently, Chapek was forced out and I was put back in charge.

Fantastic choice for the biggest loser.

How brutal does Eiger look in that Wall Street Journal piece?

I mean, would anybody work for him? Yes. He is incredible. He looks terrible. I agree. I read that piece twice, actually. The CFO calling him up. She was the one who stabbed him, you know, and knifed Chapek.

It's a great Wall Street Journal, long lead. I don't think that that happens without the support of the person waiting in the wings.

Hey, listen, there's a couple of jobs you never quit. You never quit a hit TV show. You never quit a hit band like Roger Water did with Pink Floyd. Why didn't they just extend his retirement? The Disney job with the best CEO job in the world.

Why didn't they just extend his retirement? They never quit the best CEO job in the world. But Jason, why go through this? Never quit. Why go through the theatrics of like grooming somebody, putting them in your job and then undermining them. Like, all I'm saying is if you're...

I think he made a mistake. I think he made a mistake. I think he made a mistake. He quit, and he wanted it.

Come on. Also, if you're a good up-and-coming exec, I mean, what do you do if, like, all of a sudden, like, you know, you have the opportunity to get groomed for that job. It just seems really risky.

Yeah, I mean, I think Bob Iger realized when he in that piece, they say he went on his yacht, his wife didn't come with him. The Wall Street Journal piece is incredible. And he's got bored. And he's 70 something years old. He's almost like early 70s. Why would you give up the greatest job in the world? So he went back and he took it back.

Didn't Disney have a mandatory retirement age?

But this is my point is he was so he was so prolific, he could have extended it. Why not just extend it and be done with it?

Yeah. Did you guys read the book he wrote? That Ride of a Lifetime? What is it? Yeah, and I think that what was interesting about that book was the entire thing was built around a series of deals that he did. It was like I did this acquisition, then I did this acquisition, then I did this acquisition, and everything for him was building this, this this empire by doing deals, and someone whose storyline and narrative that they tell of themselves that's built as a series of deals is a deal junkie. And you're not going to be a deal junkie where that's your excitement. That's the thrill. That's the adventure that you get out of life. And then you go and sit on a yacht, you're not doing any deal sitting on a yacht. And you're going to want to get back to that. And I think it's less about kind of management and product.

of doing deals. And that's probably why he came back that lifetime. What is it was interesting

about that book? And that's probably why if this was part of Iger's diabolical strategy to get back, let me just say like, one of the ways he did it, I mean, Chapec had the right instincts, which is when this whole Florida debate happened over Don't Say Gay, highly contentious, no comment. No comment. His instinct was just to stay out of it. But then Iger made some statements about how companies have to live up to their values and that kind of stuff. And then the employees started, you know, again, you know, mowing him to get involved. And he took the bait and he got involved. And what he didn't expect is that DeSantis wasn't going to just roll over. DeSantis hit him back really hard and it cost them economically.

And then that was the whole thing that's unraveled. And in the first interview that Iger gave when asked about this question, he was like, no comment. He went right back, we're not going to get involved in politics anymore. We're not going to get involved in politics anymore. It was hilarious!

We're not going to get involved in politics anymore. He nudged Chapec to basically get involved in politics and then Chapec was became cannon

fodder for DeSantis. And then Iger said, Oh, we're out of this now. I mean, how diabolical

And then I was like, oh man, we're out of this now. I mean, how diabolical was that? It's so diabolical. So dirty.

The other two things were, the other two things were, Chapek said, we're going to take away your P&Ls to each of the leaders. That is like just neutering them. He basically said, everybody's under the CFO, everybody's going to be on one P&L. That infuriated all the creatives. And then he went to war with Scarlett Johansson over a $10 million settlement for her Black Widow. He couldn't handle talent. He couldn't handle the politics. And he wanted to control everybody's P&L, just unforced error after unforced error. Congratulations to my guy, Bob Iger.

I own the stock.

Do you think it was diabolical at all? Oh, in the best possible way. In the best possible way, which means that Disney stock is going to go up.

Yes, I'm buying more Disney stock this year. Is all the woke progressive politics that he projects, is that all just a game to mask

what a viper's nest, their executive suite really is. Are you telling me that Disney is a political corporation after Eisner and Bob Iger and all of this, Michael Ovid's, I mean, it's the history of Disney. It's the greatest job in the world. It is Game of Thrones to get that job. And Bob Iger got it back. He's my guy. I'm sticking with him. Okay. And they have the best IP in the business. I don't care how he gets that job back.

He's awesome. I got to say the IP at Warner media is a real strong contender. I mean, that's what we were talking about this yesterday, how good white Lotus season two was. All right. Let's open up the discussion. It is incredible how HBO produces extraordinary hit after extraordinary hit the quality and the consistency of that quality coming out of HBO is like nothing else. You'll go. I mean, look, Avatar two. I did not like Avatar one. I thought it was junk. Avatar two is getting panned for being junk as well. Not everything that comes out of Disney is a hit.

a real challenger to Disney in the years ahead. Scax. Did you watch the white Lotus season two? Okay. We, no problem. It is absolutely fantastic. We have to do a little fan service here. But what did you love gym off about Whitel rights season two? Give the fans a little service.

Wait. It's on season two. I haven't even see season one.

I don't even know what you guys are talking about. Okay.

Her show in television. Well, I'll tell you what's incredible is there is a diversity of characters and they weave the super like, you know interesting story together, but each of the characters are so distinct and the characters are played so well. I mean, we were talking about, you know, we were kind of at dinner life last night talking about who our favorite character was on the show and everyone has a different answer and everyone has a different reason and then, there are characters that you hate, but the fact that you hate them and the fact that you despise them, draws you in. You're drawn into these characters. I think that the way that they kind of portrayed and the way that the characters were acted by the actors, and then the way that they all kind of weaved together to tell this extraordinary story, it was really compelling, and it was just super impressive, directing, acting, writing, everything.

There are a handful of scenes in season one and season two, which I would say are unbelievably psychologically violent. And there's just no other way to describe like how they just expo, and by the way, they do it with simple shots, very simple dialogue. It's almost nonchalant in the way that they present these truth bombs, and you have to sit there and process it, and you're just like, oh my God, it's just, it's wave after wave. It's an incredible, incredibly well-written show.

The character development is extraordinary.

Amazing. Amazing.

Production and set design, by the way, also. I mean, when you watch this, don't you want it?

You want to go to those locations. Do you guys remember in season one, Saks will remember this because Saks watched it, season one. The family is sitting at the table where they're watching the Hawaiian dance, and Paula, the guest of the family, gets up and leaves. She can't take it anymore. And then the next day, they're in a discussion about it, and the father says something about, I think, hierarchy or imperialism or something, and it goes around the table, and she's just deadpan. She says, well, maybe it's just time for others to eat,

talking about fixing these wrongs, and those locations.

I had to listen to it two or three times. I'm like, oh my God, that is a line that just sticks in your brain. There's a few of those in that show that I think I would say.

And I was saying, they really draw you in. The set design, the production design, is so compelling. You want to be there. You want to be in that experience with those characters. So yeah, you're like totally drawing the pineapple suite. In this season, that whole hotel, I looked up the hotel, by the way, online. Their own set design people come in and redo the hotel. But it is an actual hotel. It's a real hotel. And they just made it so magical. Yeah, it was such an incredible- Freiberg, we should-

The pineapple suite. Yeah, you're totally drawn to

the sweet. This season, they just made- Oh, Freiberg, we should make that the host off the wall in summit 2023. Sorry, I'm working on my

Jennifer Coolidge. Sorry, I'm working on my director, David Sacks, what you'd like to do for you.

You'd like to live for you. Yeah, my biggest loser was crypto. And I think there'll be a subsequent domino to fall, which is now that Gary G, head of the SEC has FTX and the FTT tokens as the grift, he's going to go down the list of other tokens. And he is going to start doing more prosecutions of griffs in crypto biggest loser for me. All right, biggest business surprise. Let's see if we can get Sacks back engaged in the conversation now that we're not talking about art and life Sacks.

Last year, your biggest business surprise. Sacks

just produced a movie about Dolly. I know he is I'm joking with him. He's a true artist. And he sold it to

Mark Cuban. Congratulations on the sale. David, I guess

me and Cuban are besties now. Fantastic. In 2021, our selections for business biggest business surprises. I was very surprised by Dows. Chamath by Moderna. Sacks by tech moving to Miami and Friedberg. You were surprised by NFTs. What were we surprised by in 2022

Friedberg? We'll start with you. Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter, I think took everyone by surprise. It kind of went I mean, this is such an obvious one, but it went from a whimsical fantasy and idea to suddenly, you know, cold hearted reality with, you know, a huge kind of negotiating saga that took place and court battles and all the drama that ensued. And here's what I think was most surprising about it. It wasn't just the acquisition and the and the fact that the acquisition closed, but it was the the incredible veracity of the head cutting, cost cutting, the demands that people return to work, return to the office. And then what was most surprising that followed that is the impact that that seems to have had on the rest of Silicon Valley, where now nearly every VC I speak with every CEO, every board is looking to Elon's behavior for right or for wrong, for you know, moral, moral or not, and saying that's a model for how you can challenge your team to achieve the impossible in an impossibly difficult environment, which is what we find ourselves in. And so I think it was a series of surprising events. He bought Twitter, he made these incredible changes. And then everyone seems to be looking to that as a model. And it's really resonated. It's created a rippling effect.

Chamatha, do you have a biggest surprise?

I would say it's Jerome Powell and the Fed and their staunch hawkishness on inflation. I think everybody wants all of this to be over. And I think we're definitely in the last few innings of it. But I think what was surprising was how consistent and how hawkish and how bearish Jerome Powell was every chance he got. He didn't capitulate or waver from the key message, which he was saying from the beginning, which is, we have the tools to fix a broken economy. But we don't have the tools to fix runaway inflation. And so we will raise rates higher than anyone expects and keep them there longer than anybody wants. Because on the back end of it, we can fix a few broken bones. But if left unchecked, this could really do a lot of damage. And I think that that was an enormous surprise that all the political pressure in the world, all of the financial capital markets pressure in the world, did nothing to change his position.

Sax, what was your biggest business surprise of 2022

David Sacks? Well, I was it was a pretty big surprise that Adobe bought Figma for 20 billion. That price tag in this environment, pretty big surprise. But I got to say, I think Freeburg nailed it. Got to say that the business saga of the year was Elon buying Twitter. First, liberal media was up in arms that he might do it. Then they insisted that he must complete the deal. In any event, he did ultimately buy the company. Now he's affecting his changes. I agree. That's the big business story of this year. Certainly was a big surprise for me that I got deposition for six hours.

Is it a surprise that you're sitting in Twitter's headquarters today right now?

Yeah, it is a surprise. But just by the way, the rumors and speculation are getting out of hand. I am not a candidate for CEO of Twitter. So I want to put the compassion on that because it's starting to get out of hand.

Jay, the job is yours, my friend. Congratulations. All right, I guess. Let me know when I start. You've worked hard. You've been treated. You're going to take out the last man standing last man

standing out with outliers. I guess. Let me know when I start. Okay, you've worked hard. Now that Saks has said he is not taking the job. A bunch of libs have just stopped taking Xanax. The libs biggest fear was Saks was going to get that job. We just canceled a bunch of Xanax prescriptions. Congratulations to the libs. Saks is not going to be your overlord on Twitter. For me, it's obvious the Twitter acquisition is the biggest surprise by far and away. Freiburg, I couldn't summarize it better.

I was just going to add to what you're saying about new features launching while we've been sitting here on this pond. I've been checking my Twitter feed. There's a new feature where there's a view count on all of your tweets and all of everybody else's tweets as well. So you can see how many views a tweet is generating. So this tweet that I posted yesterday has 1.5 million views. It's like incredible. So it really shows the incredible reach of Twitter. And anybody who's thinking about going to like some knockoff like Massadon or something is going to have to contend with the fact that it doesn't have nearly the distribution. So I think this really shows the power of Twitter. And then Dave Rubin noticed my I tweeted this just a second ago. And Dave Rubin noted that the New York Times doesn't have anywhere near the views for its tweets because they bought all their followers, which is interesting. I didn't know that.

fascinating. This is fascinating. I'm looking at my own. I just did. How do you give a $30 billion fraud bail referring to SPF? And that was just less than an hour ago. No, it's 30 minutes. Yeah, an hour ago. And I have 50,000 views already, which is 10% of my follower count. So this is an extraordinary you see right next to likes, retweets, vote tweets, the feature train is coming. And this will change the dialogue, all these haters who are like Twitter is going to go down, who are rooting against Elon, let me tell you something, if a guy can land two rockets at a time, and he can literally restart the electric car movement, and he becomes the number one car in any category, he releases a car. And how on earth would you bet against him to build software, you have to

be idiotic. This is way too much. I mean, you guys like we should sorry like an ad for a company that you guys are working at, like, I mean, come on, I'm not working. What you guys are advisors. Right.

He's a soldier. It's like an ad like it's great. Well, you guys are advisors. Right. Well, hey, Nick, can you help me show one other feature? Cause I think it's cool. Nick, Yeah, let's go. Yeah. Keep on features.

Let's pull up my profile real quick. Yeah, let's go. Yeah. Keep on features.

Welcome to this week in Twitter. Oh my God. Twitter now has affiliate badges. You can see I've got a little craft ventures badge next to my name. So if you, you should be able to click on it actually to get to the craft ventures profile. Yeah. So you're going to be able to affiliate users with business accounts and it creates kind of secondary badges after the blue check, I think even the corporate journalists are going to love this. Because if you're a new York times writer, you'll have a little N Y T badge next to your name, wall street journal, whatever. You'll have a little bad. So more and more people are going to get blue checks and then people are going to have secondary or even tertiary badges that are basically specific to their affiliations. So let's make sure we get, let's get an all in badge. We are going to have all in badge is really soon.

Let's make sure we get awesome, make sure we get awesome. Okay, let's go for free work for works. That was our biggest business surprises. And we just

cancelled your account free work. Lock that we just took away

yet, that was locked out, we took away you

know what goes to it. Anyway, it's all good to work on Okay, best science breakthrough. He's an easy one for us to do 20 22 biggest science breakthrough. What have you got Sultan of science? We, of course have to start with you 22

Yeah, I'm going to give it obviously to the demonstration of net energy gain from the National Ignition Facility in plasma fusion that we talked about last week. I wouldn't call it a breakthrough, by the way. I think we used that as a misnomer last week, but I'm still going to put it in this category. It's more of a milestone along a very long path, a very arduous path, a very difficult work that's been taking decades. So it's a great milestone, but I think what was so important and impactful and powerful about it is that it's really catalyzed a sea change in the investing and the outlook that this is becoming more reality. As I mentioned last week, we've seen an increase of nearly 40% in the number of fusion startups. The amount of capital that's flowing in is now reaching $10 billion a year, so this is becoming a real invested or an area that's getting real investment. Some people might not think it's very investable, but that's why I think it's been an important

year for fusion, and I think it's something I highlighted last year I was excited about. I too picked fusion. Also, just point of clarity. Last week, some people, Chamath, before you go to your prediction, were saying, hey, you're talking your book on solar when you were in your disagreement with Friedberg. That's obvious. You've been very upfront that you were investing in solar.

You placed your bet. Yeah, 100%.

Yeah. So just for clarity, everybody knows he made that bet. He's talked about it incessantly.

Those idiots that were saying that are stupid. But let me further clarify what I said last week and why it's important. Nick, can you bring up the capital asset pricing model again? The most important thing for me is to make sure that we don't misallocate human capital into endeavors that I think are best left for research institutions funded by the government. And I think when you look at a capital asset pricing model and try to build one out for fusion as an example, the expected rate of return that you need to get from this is just astronomically high because of the beta of that investment risk and the market risk premium you have to generate. And so from my perspective, I think that there are probably four or five labs in the world that are capable of actually getting us to a positive energy equation. I think Friedberg, I really thank you for actually saying that it wasn't a breakthrough and more of a milestone. I think the real breakthrough is when we have positive, not just joules, but we actually convert that into electrical energy. We actually talk about power and watts. And I think that most people listening probably don't even understand the difference between joules and watts, or don't even care, and they want to jump around here or there. So the point is that there's an enormous path we need to take in physics, and I think it's best done in governments. And I don't want to see a bunch of billions of dollars get wasted to get marginal cost of energy to zero right now.

and wipe out her cancer. And now her cancer is literally undetectable for folks who got their

panties in a bunch yesterday. Now, if you bring up that capital asset pricing model again, Nick, what I'll tell you is the rate of return on a human life, in my opinion, is infinite. And so here is an unbelievable breakthrough that got very little attention because everybody was wrapped around the axle of fusion. It happened in the same week. So maybe it's understandable. I didn't understand it. But I think this is the single most important thing that happened in science, not just this year, but frankly, in the last decade. Because if you can actually now do base editing and eradicate, at least in this case, a blood-based cancer, and eventually we'll be able to bring that and use that towards solid-state tumor cancers, it's a huge breakthrough in just human longevity and human quality of life. And that happened just a few weeks ago.

Okay. And of course, for David Sacks, his biggest science breakthrough is I don't care.

So moving on. Sacks, go ahead, tell us. Yeah, I know. This category reminds me of, remember when Biden had that moment where he's like, America can be defined in a single word. And then he's like, that's kind of how I feel

about this category. America is a nation that can be defined in a single word. I was in the

Amazing how you figured out a way to be derogatory about Biden in the science section. A new low, even for you, Sacks. It's a good one, Sacks. I like it. All right. Biggest flash in the pan 2021. This is what we said. We're the biggest flash in the pan. I said the woke socialist leadership of cities, i.e. Chesa Boudin. Freiburg said the Constitution Dow. Sacks said the word transitory, very well played.

Oh, nailed that. Nailed it. The undisputable, biggest flash in the pan of 2022 was the all in summit. Oh, wow. That hurts. It went. That will always be a strong and significant memory. It was such a hot thing for a minute. And then it died. So to the all in summit, I raised my glass, I pour one out. I toast to you, to Miami. And unless David Sacks carries it from here, it was a flash in the pan.

It came, it went. That hurts. It was a flash in the pan. Sacks, who's your flash? Which democrat is the flash in the pan for you.

This is where I had Liz Truss. As you guys mentioned, she only survived 44 days as PM. I mean, that's only for Scaramucci's. She's basically fired by the bond markets after she combined a Thatcher s tax cut with massive energy subsidies to counter the price spikes caused by the war in Ukraine. That's just been actually committed to this was deemed untenable by the UK Central Bank. It crashed the pound. And I think there is a serious point here, which is that as much as Thatcher and Reagan were the two towering heroic figures of the 1980s, I think zombie Thatcherism is not going to be electrically viable in the UK, just like zombie Reaganism is not going to be viable in the United States. I think that the conservative movement has to stop living in the past. We have to develop fresh ideas to meet the economic and foreign policy challenges of today.

Chamath, do you have a flash in the pan?

I actually think fusion literally was a flash in the pan. It was it lasted 10 to the negative 10 seconds. So that more less of a flash you can't have without being a flash in the pan.

Oh, they haven't. Hey, here. Oh, look. Oh, is it the proprietor?

The proprietor, the owner for our customer support at your service to actually spend the last 15 minutes selling your new features. Yeah, on the podcast. Pretty exciting.

Well, the the like the views are like incredible. Yeah. I mean, and I saw Dave Rubin already made an observation that if you look at New York Times, their views are maybe one tenth like my views, just me. Yes, a lone tweeter. And he said that their followers are inflated by just basically

buying a bunch of follower counts. Yeah, the views thing is huge. That's why I pushed the views, which is like actually a lot harder feature to implement than you'd think, because the sheer number of transactions per second like it's I think it sort of requires system wide on the order of of three, three million transactions a second to actually calculate the view to, you know, calculate and display the view count for Twitter, Twitter global. So it's like

three million per second. It's a lot. For those of you listening, Elon Musk has joined the pod. Elon, how's the first six weeks been generally speaking of owning Twitter?

Well, it's been quite a roller coaster, which obviously you've witnessed and been on the roller coaster as well. Yes, the drama mean I've taken the drama mean it's it's quite up. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's exciting. But I think it sort of has its highs and lows, to say the least. But overall, it seems to be going in a good direction. And, you know, we've got the the expenses reasonably under control. So the company's not like on the in the fast lane of bankruptcy anymore. And we're releasing features faster than Twitter's history, at the same time as having contained the costs and reduce the cost structure by a factor of three, maybe maybe four. So, you know, the verified is obviously that that's that's that's huge revenue stream, as well as a means of identifying your life, like knowing that it's a real person and not a barter or trial situation. The having the affiliation, organization affiliation, which I suspect you talked about, that was an idea of David's that was great to have organization affiliation. So you can know that somebody is an actual professor at Stanford or that this particular handle is actually Disney, not someone simply putting I work at Disney in my in their bio.

Can you tell us how you do product iteration, Elon? Because one of the things that I think some people got jolted by over the last couple of weeks is like a bunch of things got taken away or changed or rules changed or policies changed. And there was very quick action. And then people had all this negative feedback about the quick action without communication. But your extraordinary talent is to iterate product to success. Can you just maybe share with people how you do product iteration in this context to help them understand how some of these decisions get made and why moving quickly is so important and just, you know, how you're doing

this. I'm a big believer in you wanna look at the net output. So it's sort of like, you know, what's the batting average. If it's like baseball, the point is not that you're like, hit the bowl, but it's like, well, how many home runs you get and how, like what's your actual? You're slugging percentage. Yeah. Slugging percentage. Yeah. It's like you gotta swing for the fences. You're gonna strike out a bit more, but we're gonna swing for the fences here at Twitter. and we're going to do it quickly. So, and I think generally like my error rate and sort of being the chief twit will be less over time.

I think we'll have fewer, fewer gaffes in the future. How did you get to your intuition on what the efficient frontier of employees

needed to be to make the product better?

Well, yeah. Well, I was a part of this where you basically asked the question, who here is critical and who here is exceptional?

Yeah, yes. I mean, so, I mean, really the criteria is trying to apply and obviously you aren't going to be perfect if you're moving fast and there's a lot of, you know, people you're talking about here is that anyone who is exceptional at what they do where the role is critical, they have positive effect on others and they are trusted, meaning they put the company's interests

before their own should stay.

Pretty straightforward. Yeah. And, you know, also is up for working, you know, working hard, like that would not, that would have not,

that's not Twitter's prior culture. Yeah, were you surprised that the intersection of that circle and the people that left was basically 25%? Were you surprised it was that deep or did you think your intuition was like,

it's probably somewhere in here, the intersection of that? Well, I think you could just stand back and say without knowing how many employees Twitter has at all and say how many people are really needed to run Twitter. Like they say you don't know what the employee account number is at all. How many people are needed to keep the site operational? Like let's say excluding product evolution, you basically have to keep the service going and you have to have customer, sort of a support function to take down material that is in violation of the law.

How many people, what's the minimum number of people?

That's in the hundreds probably. It's not exactly, it's not like a giant number. Yeah. Twitter still has like 2,000 people, right? Yeah, we still have 2,000 people, it's not nothing.

And actually if you, there's actually on the order of,

yeah, like almost 5,000 contractors. Like almost, yeah, almost all of the, what's called trust and safety work, which is like the support functions for the site

are done by contractors. You're doing a lot more at take down hate speech

than the company previously was doing. Yeah, absolutely. Like hate speech impressions are down by a third

and will get even lower. Maybe you could speak a little bit to the, what we discovered, I think in those early weeks, which was the incentive. The incentive previously was to create as many accounts as possible. And there were a lot of quick fixes to lowering all these, you know, what people might call bot accounts. In some cases it was people opening many millions of accounts, but we discovered this very early. How easy was it for you with the tech team to maybe lower the bot count and all the fake accounts? Maybe you could speak a little bit to that because people have seemed to think that, gosh, it's a really hard thing to get rid of bots.

And it turns out it isn't. We still have a fair number of bots in the system, but like I think the incentive structure, the way Twitter set up previously was this relentless focus on what they called MDOW, which is Monetizable Daily Active Users, although I'd say the monetizable part is dubious, but at least the things that appeared to be monetized or could be passed off as monetizable daily active users. So this, I created an incentive to turn a blind eye to a fake accounts. So if the incentive structure is like, you know, maximize the appearance of monetizable daily active users, then you're just, it's a strong incentive to pretend that a bot is real. And that's what happened. So we're taking a lot of steps to reduce the bots in trial situation. So many. And I think you're saying that in the usage, like it's not like relatively rare to have your applies

filled with crypto scams. I'm not seeing any anymore.

Freeburg, you had a question. Yeah, I mean, just on your earlier question, you know, Elon, when you first started making changes to Twitter after you bought the business, a lot of people kind of took notice at how extraordinarily swift and significant those changes were. Yeah. And there's a lot of technology companies that have CEOs and investors and boards. And we all talk to a lot of them and they're all now having a conversation like, look at what Elon did at Twitter. How can we do something as aggressive, as swift, as deep? Do you think much about kind of the model you're playing for other businesses and other business leaders, particularly in Silicon Valley and how you're operating Twitter. Do you ever kind of talk about that? Because I know you, you mostly talk about your business and you talk about the businesses you're running, but you're having a big influence, I think, in how other people kind of act and behave that are other business leaders

and run other technology companies. I mean, to Frank, I'm not really, you know, thinking about that much because I'm just thinking about like, how do we, I was just like, just get Twitter to be in a financially healthy place and fix the engine of engineering so we can have a rapid evolution of new products. So, and, you know, I mean, I guess I'm in sort of, in some ways, in a fortunate position where I don't have to answer, it's not public, and we don't have a board, really. So, I mean, so I can just go, you know, and I can take actions that are drastic. And obviously, if I make a bunch of mistakes, then Twitter won't succeed, and that'll be pretty embarrassing and sad. But as long as, like I said, as long as the batting average is good, that the wins significantly outweigh the mistakes, then, you know, it'll be a great future.

And I'm very optimistic about where things are headed. I think a lot of people want to talk about, or understand, Elon, your position on freedom of speech and your principles. I'm curious, you've been pretty upfront about it. How do you think about it post-acquisition? You know, what speech should be allowed in the platform? Kanye came back, he just went insane. His account got revoked. What have you learned, I guess, now that you own it? Because you must be getting a lot of inbound from people asking you, hey, how are decisions gonna be made, et cetera? You've been clear, transparency is super important in this, but maybe what are your thoughts on free speech

and speech on a platform like this?

Yeah, well, I mean, the general principle, I think, is that we should hew close to the low in any given country. So the low is very quite a lot by country. So I think we should be doing free speech. That's close to the low. And that's the general principle. I think there are other things where it's like, okay, like for example, if you're an advertiser, you don't want your ad, like let's say it's a family movie, next to some NSFW content, even if that content is text. It's like, they'll be like, that's probably, that's, you know, so that's part of what, you know, like, so there's more of an allowance for what you might call hate speech on the system, but it's just, it's not gonna be promoted. It's not like, we're not gonna be recommending hate speech. It's the risk of stating the obvious. And we're not gonna monetize hate speech. So, or negative speech, like that's no word advertisers want us to, you know, any, I think it's gonna be a rare product

that wants to be next to seriously negative stuff. I was gonna say you referred to it as, hey, freedom of speech, but not reach. Cause this is a very nuanced discussion. Like, should this stuff be able to hit the trends, you know, and that kind of stuff?

Yeah, yeah. Like, it's certainly possible that some things that will be regarded as hate speech will hit trends, but I think it's gonna be relatively unusual, especially as we are doing a better job of controlling the bots and trolls situation. And I do want to emphasize, like there's a difference between bots and trolls. Like bots are like fully automated accounts, but like a troll phone would be where you've got like, you know, a hundred people in a warehouse somewhere, each with a hundred phones. And so they're actually humans, and they're gonna pass a capture test or, you know, and they can, you know, reply and they're, cause they're actually good humans, but it's actually 10,000 accounts that are just, that are, they're obviously not operating as real people. So that that's, you know, stuff like that can cause things to trend negatively. That's why I'm like a big part of having just a low cost verification capability. And yeah, so like, this is definitely a work in progress. So there's, like I said, there's gonna be, and I did, like one of the first things I said after the acquisition closed was like, we're gonna make a bunch of mistakes, but then we'll try to recover from them quickly. And that's, that's what we've done. I think we've generally succeeded in recovering it from them quickly.

And it's been going pretty well. Was the Paul Graham and journalists suspensions mistakes have you talked about this publicly,

about how that all kind of got resolved at the end? Yeah, I mean, the Paul Graham suspension was definitely a mistake and actually called Paul Graham to apologize personally for that one. We did. Oh, great. Yeah. So, you know, on the journalist front, I think the journalist's essentials, the suspensions were not a mistake in that for some reason, a bunch of journalists thought they were better than regular, than everyone else. And that if they engage in doxing and, you know, other and break the rules in various ways, that they're not subject to suspension, even though your average citizen is. And I think that's just messed up. The same rules should apply to people who call themselves journalists as to, you know, anyone else on the system. They shouldn't be sort of above the rules. For some reason, they thought they should be. That's, that's, that doesn't make sense.

I don't think that's right. Yeah. And the rules being transparent and upfront, I think that's what everybody's looking forward to. Maybe some just complete clarity and transparency. And you've said from the beginning, when somebody gets suspended or this shadow banning or this sort of tips into this really weird stuff that we discovered during, or you discovered, where the journalists discovered during the Twitter files, it's kind of a bummer that people are being sanctioned or shadow banned, and they don't know it. If we're going to have a system,

the rules should be clear to everybody. Yeah, absolutely. So something I've committed to, and we'll, I think probably be able to roll that out in January. Just by the way, there is like a bit of a, you know, we are not going to be rolling out a ton of new features over, you know, Christmas and New Year's and stuff. So there's like a, you know, the next sort of feature set will probably roll out mid to late January. And hopefully in that, we'll, we can include information about why an account is suspended or has what is called within Twitter visibility filtering, AKA shadow banning. So, and some of these things like are like this, there's a lot of things that just happen accidentally where there's, you know, the rules in the system that are meant to detect whether someone's sort of bought or troll or like brigading where they're like, you know, and then an account is sort of innocently caught up in that. So like there was some accounts just suspended yesterday because but temporarily suspended. They got like 12 hour suspensions because someone in customers, someone in trust and safety thought that they had posted a nude photo of Hunter Biden or something. But they hadn't, they hadn't actually done that. I don't know. It was just basically a mistake.

It was just essentially a mistake

in the Twitter customer support that was corrected. Let me, let me ask you just a slightly broader question.

One of the things we just talked about is that there's a lot of things that you can do in a slightly broader question. One of the things we just talked about was the regime change that's happened where, you know, we all have to act differently now that the risk free rate is probably going to get to 5%. And I'm just curious across all your businesses. So Twitter, yes, but really more importantly, Tesla, SpaceX, are there decisions that you will make differently or not at all or will make that you wouldn't have made otherwise in this new regime?

And how often do you think about that kind of stuff? Well, I think it's more like, it does seem like we're headed into a recession here in 2023. The magnitude of that recession is debatable, but I think it's at least a like to moderate recession potentially it's on the order of 2009. So that's, so I think it's wise to kind of like prepare for the worst, hope for the best, prepare for the worst, don't get too adventurous. Like, like watch out for margin debt. Like I would really advise people to not have a margin debt in a volatile stock market. And, you know, from a cash standpoint, keep powder dry. You can get some pretty extreme things happening in a down market. Like Brett Johnson, who is a CFO of SpaceX was at Broadcom in 2000. And he said that, and that's a good company making good products. And he said that from peak to trough, I think in less than 12 months, Broadcom went down 97%. So like, even if you had a small margin low in there, you got crushed.

booms don't last forever, but neither do recessions. And it's a 14 year boom. So a six quarter recession seems like, you know, that might actually bounce out. The last time it was what, four or five quarters. So it's not easy. Hey, the Twitter files, how much longer are these going to go on? It seems like every week, another drop, and these are pretty controversial. How much longer are the Twitter files going to go on in your mind? Yeah. And maybe why is this important to you?

To make sure that people understand the stuff, yeah. I think it's important to like, you know, if we're going to be trusted in the future to kind of clear the decks for stuff that's happened in the past. So I mean, to be totally frank, almost every conspiracy theory that people had about Twitter turned out to be true. Is there a conspiracy theory about Twitter that didn't turn out to be true? So far they've all turned out to be true,

and if not more true than people thought. Is there a part of the files that really shocked you more than the rest of them, of the things that have been disclosed, of all of these things, is there something that really sticks out with you was like, Holy shit, I had no idea this was happening. Or is the whole thing just a big dumpster fire? They were just looking at one huge thing. Um, you know, like PSYOPS versus

the Hunter Biden thing versus the, yeah, the number of FBI people involved. That was pretty

shocking.

It's pretty intense. Yeah. Yeah. The FBI PSYOPS stuff to me was probably the one that was the most insidious. Like the rest of it, I could think of like, you know, a bunch of overzealous libs got used. Got it. You know what I mean? Sure. Sure. But to have like a secure skiff that essentially sends things that, you know, government agents want the populace to basically think, got it. You know what I mean? Sure.

all the other places where this shit's happened? YouTube, Facebook. Yeah.

That's what I did. None of it seemed that surprising to me. I mean, I don't know. Maybe I just believed all the conspiracy theories, but I've also been inside some of these companies and seen how they operate. So honestly, none of it was a surprise to me. Was it a big shock

to you, Elon? Wait, wait, wait. You, Freiburg, you were, I think you can claim that you weren't surprised that these companies were shadow banning, although they denied it. But did you really suspect that the FBI was playing a role in flagging content for these companies to take

down? Like that blew me away. Content that's got nothing to do with like terrorism. Yeah. They're not investigating crimes. There's no crime. Right. Yeah. They literally flagged satire. Maybe they didn't get the joke. I don't know.

They don't seem to be a humor driven group, but they don't seem to have the best senses of humor. But aren't they supposed to get warrants? Isn't that how it's supposed to work in a democracy? They want information. They're asking favors of their friends. Yeah, they're all friends.

That's the thing that's troubling to me. Put yourself on either side of the extremes. They're asking favors of their friends.

Hey, we have Michael Schellenberger here who broke the FBI story in the Twitter file. So let's look at him and to see, because I think maybe the audience isn't caught up

on like what was discovered. So you know, I know I have to follow Elon Musk. That doesn't seem fair. Hey guys. Hey guys, my hair back to work. So thanks guys.

Hey guys. Hey Michael. How are you? I'm good. And just a quick question for you. First of

all, first of all, who makes that sweater? I'll send you mine, man. Do you want it or are you making fun of it?

You're the master of sweaters. High praise from me, brother. High praise. Do you want it or are you making fun of it?

You're the master of sweaters, high praise from you brother, high praise. Just briefly Michael, isn't the FBI supposed to get warrants to take actions with folks? And then I guess, is that at the crux of this? Are they doing this at other companies you think? Are they just like embedded in YouTube? Should we expect they're embedded at Meta and that they don't get warrants and they're kind of tipping the scales and is that a good thing for society or a bad thing for society?

It's a bit of a basic question.

Yes. Well, I think there's multiple issues relating to FBI that I think have to be unpacked a bit. But the first one is that, yeah, FBI was constantly pushing the boundaries of what is legally and ethically acceptable in terms of requesting information. Now I think what you saw over the last three weeks was a shift in I think our own understanding that we did see more pushback from Twitter executives against FBI and some alarm bells being wrong in terms of their requests that were being made from the intelligence community. But these guys were really persistent. They kept asking for more. They kept getting more and more cooperation. It's very troubling. It does look like Congress is going to look into this. The two heads of the committees that are tasked with this have said that they're going to look into it next year. I think the other thing that we saw that I think is more troubling was this persistent effort to basically communicate to Twitter executives, but also to news media, um, national security correspondence, that there was this heavy foreign infiltration going on as this Russian disinformation. And it appeared to me looking at all the evidence both that we saw from within Twitter and from outside of it, that this was pretty organized effort to convince, uh, key executives at Twitter and Facebook, but also these key reporters that, that they should expect a hack and leak operation sometime right before the elections

having to do with Hunter Biden. I find that very suspicious. Can I make an observation? I think that maybe what we're finding out is that the mainstream media tried to go back to its 1980 cold war playbook and turn Russia into a boogeyman. But as we're seeing in the Ukraine war, you know, they're not nearly the formidable foe that we thought they were. And so it could probably be the case that in 2016 they were as inept technically as, as they are militarily right now. And so we may have just built up this monster that, uh, is kind of more like, you know, uh, uh, uh, this much smaller thing to be worried about. And we all ran with it because we had no evidence, but the Ukraine Russia war is evidence that, you know, this highly sophisticated war machine and propaganda

machine is not that good at their job. Right. Yeah. I mean, I think that what's, there's a lot of interests that were being served by hyping the so-called Russian misinformation threat. I mean, one of them was just to simply explain away the Trump phenomenon as a consequence of foreign interference. Uh, certainly the people that ran Hillary Clinton's campaign had an interest in doing that, but then you saw it become a sort of way, I think, to condition people for the release of the Biden laptop. And again, we can't, I can't prove that, but it is striking that the Yolera, this means Twitter executive, who I think was the object of this misinformation campaign, um, testified under oath that he was being bombarded with these messages all throughout 2020, that they should expect some sort of a hack and leak operation. So when the New York post finally did report on that computer, uh, in 2014, it was briefly censored by Twitter, but I think more importantly, it was discredited in the minds of many voters, including myself. I really didn't think that that laptop was what they said it was. And it turned out that it was. So I do think it's, there's a real troubling pattern of behavior by both the FBI agents, but also by the former FBI executives, including the deputy chief of staff and the chief counsel from FBI that, that were at

Twitter as executives at the time. And in fairness, Michael, uh, this has been brought up many times, but I just would like your take on it cause you're a lifelong Democrat. Correct. Until, until last year. Great. So it would, you know, uh, just less anybody think that you are like some MAGA supporter here. Just blew my sweater. This was all in the backdrop of Trump asking for the Russians, you know, during that debate to hack Hillary for him interfering with Zelensky and trying to get him to give dirt on Biden and the fact that Hunter Biden was obviously dirty. Uh, so to expect a hack, my sweater, there was massive precedent for it. So that set the

stage for this, correct? For sure. And there's definitely, uh, that going on and, and maybe that's all there was to it. It is just striking of course, because, and I didn't even mention in my, this was, by the way, this is Twitter thread, uh, part seven that I did on this issue. Um, I didn't even get into the fact that, you know, within a few days, the many, uh, former senior heads of intelligence organizations and others came out and said that it was the result of a Russian disinformation campaign. So yeah, sure. I mean, I guess we could find some other explanation, uh, for it, um, whether it was innocent or coordinated, but it is, it is striking. Also, I think the other thing that we found was the contrast between the, the threat inflation and what, what Twitter was finding themselves. I mean, there was, you know, you'll repeatedly Yul Roth would, would respond to FBI that, yeah, we looked into these accounts that you mentioned and they were all very low follower accounts with very little activity. So they just weren't finding very much foreign influence on the Twitter platform. And so I just think it was grossly inflated either for kind of good reasons or bad reasons, I would say.

Yeah, sure. Yeah. Yeah. And it's, uh, there, there's no perfect way to police this stuff, actually. And, uh, okay. Well, listen, we appreciate your reporting. Thanks for doing it. Um, and, uh, if you haven't read Michael's book, uh, San Francisco, you did some great reporting there as well. And, uh, continued success in your investigative journalism.

Correct. Thank you, Michael. Thanks guys. Appreciate it. All right. All right. Sorry. Oh, lost him. It's all right. What do you want to ask? He's still here. Oh, okay.

Because it was such a moving interview for me. What happened with that? Yeah, if you just Google Michael Schellenberg or YouTube homeless, you'll be able to find all my videos. There's a lot of them that we did with people on the street. All of them, of course, people asking and wanting to do them. But yeah, I mean, I also wrote about that in my book, which is basically that San Francisco pays cash well for a payment of somewhere between $600 to $700. Plus you can get $200 in food stamps. And a lot of people sadly use that to maintain their addiction. And this gentleman, James, with the tattoos on his face, was very honest about how he was playing the system. In fact, he was himself, we found this increasingly kind of horrified by the incentives that San Francisco is creating for people to live on the streets and live on the streets in their in their addiction. So yeah, you can find that on YouTube.

So many people say incentives drive behavior. And unfortunately, these policies all came from a good place, from a kind heart and the idea that we could help people in need. And unfortunately, the way that the incentives get structured, they can actually cause more harm than good. It's such an important lesson. I just wanted to say that because I think your reporting on this really hit that home. So thanks for doing that, I think it's really important We have, we have to do the right thing for people, but we also have to be careful that the policies are done in the right way. So thank you.

I think it's so well said, Friedberg, because when you're, Michael, and I just think you're very courageous for doing it because it's very easy for somebody to say, oh, well, you are being callous. The truth is incentives matter. And we saw, we've seen this over and over again. If you pay for something, you get more of it. And really San Francisco is bearing the burden. I think this is what your book and, you know, and a lot of the videos you've made, at least the message I got was, San Francisco has the lowest price of drugs, the lowest enforcement and the most incentives. Therefore they suffer because every person who is, you know, addicted comes here because they speak to each other and 90% of the people who are in San Francisco are here because we have created an incentive structure.

Is that directionally correct as we wrap here? Yeah, 100% correct, including just the non enforcement of laws against sleeping on the sidewalk, doing drugs in public, not requiring, ultimately, three times more people die living outside as an unsheltered, homeless person, rather than being in a shelter. And for me, that's all you need to know to know that we cannot allow our brothers and sisters to sleep on the street, no matter how desperate they sound about wanting to avoid going inside. It's three times deadlier to be on the street than inside.

So the compassionate thing is to force people into housing. Yes. And that's a great talk for people to say, but you know, cause you're, we have this perception that people have freedom and they should have the right to do this, but a person who's taking fentanyl in your research is not thinking correctly. And if it was any family member of ours, we would not want them to make that decision for themselves. We'd want somebody else to make that decision for them. Correct?

Yes. I would want that from, if I was on the street so desperate that I was, you know, smoking fentanyl and breaking multiple laws every day, of course I would want to be hospitalized. You know, and usually, you know, people overcome their addiction. That's the good news. We always leave out of it, but it is possible. People do overcome their addiction all the time, but they often need some, some, an intervention from family and friends. And if that's too late for that, then you need the intervention from the,

from the city. All right, Michael, thank you, Michael. Appreciate it. So as we get back to the all in news network, we've now gone 24 hours a day. The all in news network has launched.

We'll just have a road to Michael. Appreciate it. 24 hours a day.

We should sit at various offices throughout Silicon Valley,

letting executives and CEOs just imagine we did like a 12 hour marathon show for charity. We're just people showed up and we did a, what do they call those on TV?

What is the charity? What is the charity?

By telephone telephone telephone, J Cal a plane. Yeah. No, no, just a T yeah. Telefied J Cal has to still fly commercial and we'll do a telephone. Hey Saks, thank you for setting up those amazing drop-ins. Well done.

Thanks Saks. Thanks Saks. Thanks Saks. Thanks Saks. Your jacket. That's a great jacket. Is that custom?

That isn't East. I'll Stewart. This is the Christmas or holiday jacket.

Who is it by East. I a it's a Valentino. All right. Well, that's, that's, that's nice also. Um, okay. No, it's not nice. But okay. Let's keep going here. We've got to go to lightning round. All right. Let's move the biggest flash in the pan. We were, it was our last, I went with crypto pretty easy to say that I'm not going to give myself a big high

five, but you guys think of the Elon conversation real quick. Well, he's very talkative and he's, anything interesting or surprising for you?

I mean he said the biggest thing that people want to make sure to avoid is margin debt. I thought that was interesting.

He's working hard.

And um, he's just such a product of focused guy. He just gets his, he's like so deeply into it is like, just do it.

Of course that's it, that's it. Yeah. So, I mean, and, you know, products are made by teams. So, what I think is distinctly different here, I'm just giving my personal opinion. I don't know. By what? Microsoft Teams? No, no, no. Teams make products. And so what I just want to say here is, you know, like this. Microsoft Teams suck. No, that, I'm not, you know, don't trigger the bundle.

Oh my God, of course.

Six product.

By what? Microsoft Teams. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, the product's already looking awesome. And it was nice of him to give me that shout out on the, you know,

the affiliate badges, but I'll just give a shout out to him. I didn't hear it.

What was it? Oh, well, he gave me, he gave me some credit for the affiliate badges, but I wanted to give credit to the PMs who approached me about that idea.

I went again. The truth is there.

Let me give, let me give credit to the okay. The truth is there. Let me give, let me give credit to the actual PMs. Evan Jones and Patrick Trauger, who they approached me about this idea they had. And then I helped, you know, give it some momentum.

Here's the truth. When Dave and I spend the first couple of weeks there, now that it's a little more public, you know, it's been on the program. What we found over and over again, was that there were great features that were ready to be released. That were being held back by management. And there were brilliant people with all the ideas that you think should have been released. And they just weren't allowed to release a lot of these products. Why? Who knows? But now that ease in charge, I think you'll see the product cycle is going to go much quicker.

The most important thing I saw, which is such an important lesson for anyone running a business in Silicon Valley is that the pace of decision making matters far more than the accuracy of decision making. It's always been like one of my three big mottos- Say more about that for entrepreneurs. Unpack that. Yeah. For me like my number one, like my three things are always like grit biased action and then narrative but like biased action, the rate at which you can make decisions is a far greater predictor of success than the accuracy of the decision you do make. And so you have to be willing to embrace failure. You have to be willing to make decisions that could result in something not being done correctly or making a mistake and even getting embarrassed on the internet, you know, by making mistakes and having to call people like Paul Graham like Paul Graham and apologize for them. And I was a big moment,

as a business scales, Say more about that for entrepreneurs. Unpack that. That was a big moment.

As professional managers are brought in, their incentive is to not make mistakes. Their incentive is to do things that are predictably going to work and are predictably not going to fail. And therefore they avoid taking the risks and they reduce the rate of action, the rate of decision making. And that's why so many businesses ultimately don't scale past some sort of inflection point, or when founders that are willing to push that envelope step out, everything starts to fall apart. And it's so critically important, I think, to look at that as being, I think Elon's defining trait and characteristic is that regardless of the scale of the organization and the enterprise, he's still willing to act with that level of bias to action that you typically see in a small startup. Okay. And put his reputation at risk, yeah.

Just to sum that up, just to sum that up, I sat in a meeting yesterday. He said that if we're not rolling back 10% of the time,

we haven't pushed hard enough. Right. Wonderful. There you go, the founders listed it.

So, if you're never– There you go, the founders listed it. So if you're never rolling anything back because you never make a mistake, maybe you're just not moving fast enough. You don't have enough for the bias– You're not ambitious enough. You're not fast enough. You don't have enough of a bias towards action. You're too afraid of making a mistake.

By the way, here's– That's right.

You're not ambitious enough. You're not fast enough. By the way, here's what's so interesting about the views feature is that a bunch of websites, I think it started Instagram did a bunch of apps, deprecated likes, because they felt that it was part of this negative cycle. They took all this stuff away. Basically, views is going back in that direction and giving more granularity in terms of outside in social engagement on a post, which is, I think, interesting to see. It's happening in a moment where all these other sites and apps are actually

going in the opposite direction. It's like a standard feature on YouTube, and it's very powerful for YouTube's network effects because it shows you how many views you get. So, it discourages people from using other sites because you know you get the most distribution on YouTube. So, it's weird that other social networks don't want to follow suit. I mean, in one hour, this is an hour. They had it, but they deprecated. That's what's so interesting. But I guess, my point is, we've only had this feature for an hour, and I didn't realize how much distribution my tweets were getting, and it definitely undermines my incentive to want to go use some other platform when I see the distribution I'm getting on Twitter.

Well, if you're getting 10 times more distribution in the New York Times, you know what's going to happen is people will stop listening and reading the news.

Well, I mean, it's sort of like this podcast itself. I mean, people ask us to go.

My point is, we have to rely on social proof and anecdotes about the actual scale and the breadth and the reach because it's impossible for us to get one holistic view that shows across all of these different modalities, whether it's Spotify or Apple Podcasts or YouTube, how many people listen or watch. And we add it all up, and we think it's in this three to five million range of people. But if you just had a numerical, canonical number that was irrefutable,

you just run over everybody. This turns it into a meritocracy. This is going to be terrifying to some blue check marks when they see that the people who they report on get 10 times as many

views as they do. Of course is why when when people journalists call me or other which is why when when people journalists look at Sean Hannity, go to Sean Hannity's profile. And for the number of followers he has, how pathetically engaged his audience is it's all bots, it's all trolls,

it's all nobodies. I looked at Mitt Romney, just put out a video, whatever in the first like half hour, he had 100,000 views, like every politician who starts seeing this is going to go wait a second, I mean, the world is getting more views here than I am on MSNBC or Fox. The world is

I need to do this. I'm getting more view. The world is a more rational place if Mitt Romney

actually has more influence than Sean Hannity. Let's hope. Okay, let's move on. We got to get through this quickly. It's our longest episode ever. Here we go. We are going to do next up. It's very, this is a very important category. Best CEO of 2022. In 2021, I went with Frank Slootman and Elon Musk. Chamath went with Satya Nadella. Saks went with Brian Armstrong and Freiburg went with Jack Dorsey.

Saks is best CEO of 2022. Go ahead, Saks. Every founder took my advice to get leaners, slow down their burn, create runway, you know, weather the storm down, you know. So you're giving a generic answer, not a person. Yeah, exactly. I mean, look, I think actually a lot of the names, a lot of the names, well, here's the problem is that, you know, Can I let him do it? Yeah, that's good. Yeah, can I finish Jco? The names that you mentioned from last year would be the top candidates for this year. I mean, I think Satya Nadella had a good year. Obviously, what Elon's doing, we just talked about. It's amazing.

Yeah, just drink the whole two tablespoons of medicine, don't sip it. You got to just take it.

It's not getting better. I mean, the stock market today should be a wake up call. I mean, this was one of the worst days in the market the whole year. So I think it's getting worse

before they're getting better. Chamath, who is your best CEO of the year?

Well, the numerical answer is Vicky Holub, who's the CEO of Occidental Petroleum, stocks up like 140% this year. It's technically the best performing stock of the year, 63 billion dollar company. But that's just a numerical answer. I actually want to double down on David's answers because I agree with that. I have been guiding our portfolio company CEOs to be at cash flow break even now or extend runway to Q1 2025. Yes, because I think Elon and I are roughly in the same place we have been for a while, which is like mid-24 is when the recession ends and you need to give yourself two to three quarters of buffers so that you can go and raise around, which takes a quarter to two quarters. Once you start to get escape velocity out of a recession, having money through end of Q1 2025 I think is a minimum requirement. Of the companies that I think were the most precariously positioned, there were five of them that got their acts together and really did it. But these are all CEOs of companies that, if I said them, you would know some of them. But I do agree with David. I think the CEO that bit the bullet, so maybe publicly what I would say is the CEO of Klarna deserves a huge medal for having the courage to do it before anybody else did. The CEO of checkout.com just took a huge right down.

Friedberg, best CEO, 2020. My vote for best CEO is Warren Buffett. I think it is just simple arithmetic. He has for years and now for decades proven himself to be not just an exceptional investor, stock picker, whatever the kind of typical quip is about what he does for a living. But I think what's so extraordinary about Buffett is that regardless of the market conditions, he can kind of remain steadfast in his intent and in his mission and he doesn't kind of waver. And he doesn't take an active role in ranting and complaining about markets and politics. And I think that that's what makes him such an extraordinary leader. He stays within his zone of competence. He doesn't do things that he doesn't know about. He doesn't let the macro drive him and cause him to be kind of affected by it. And he says, this is what I know how to do. This is what I can do.

of the best kind of capital allocators of all time. I'm going to go in a similar fashion as Chamath and Saks and go with the money losing CEOs who have dedicated themselves to free cash flow and to getting to profitability from the last cycle, Airbnb and Uber were the money losers. And now Airbnb is my number one, they become a money printer. They are now making bank. And they're still growing very quickly. And then Uber, I put it in my second, they need to do another riff. They need to cut some expenses, but they too are hitting the free cash flow and the network effects. So I'm giving it to Chesky and then Dora one and two. Okay, let's keep moving. Best investor for me, I'm going with the investors, like a general category, who are demanding governance and doing diligence again, or who never stopped. Let me say it that way. There's a generation of investors who've raised their funds in the last five years and didn't do diligence, didn't demand board seats, didn't demand boards.

best investors? Chamath Palihapatiya. I will pick what are called the pod shops. So these are folks that have strategies where they have hundreds of investing pods underneath an umbrella and they have this very sophisticated risk infrastructure. So this is what Ken Griffin owns in Citadel. This is what Izzy Englander owns in Millennium. Brevin Howard is another one. De Shaw is another one. So they have all kinds of strategies but that are essentially run by computers that allocate risk, scale you up, scale you back, turn you on, turn you off, fire you overnight. And those strategies as a whole ran over the market this year. They were the best performers. They are giving back billions of dollars.

Okay, we're going to go lightning around from here. Sacks, do you have a best investor?

Yeah, I said Stan Druckenmiller. He, as you recall, last year he predicted that inflation would be lasting. This was in spring of 2021 when transitory was the word of the day. This year, he predicted the bear market rally we had in July and August. And I remember back at the Coachee Summit in May, they were around that time, he was interviewed and he basically was saying that as soon as there was a bear market rally over the summer, that he would then put a short position on. I don't know if he actually did that, but he said he was going to do that. And then it turns out that the summer rally that we had was a dead cap bounce. So he was right about that. And now he is predicting a hard landing in 2023 with a deeper recession than many expect. So sadly, I suspect he may be right yet again.

Friedberg, best investor for you, 2022.

Same. Yeah, I had Druckenmiller. I indicated that he's been doing interviews pretty much every quarter for the last two years. And he'd been pounding the table, telling everyone what's going to happen. And it all happened. And he even told people the trades in mid 2021, he said he was short, long dated treasuries and he was long commodities. And if you had put those two trades on at that time and held them to today, you would have made a fortune. And so I think he's extraordinary in his ability to kind of see macro in a way that others don't, but also to take extremely brave action with his portfolio. He's renowned for how big the bets are that he makes, and how quickly he can change his mind when he's wrong and make another big bet and still get himself out of the hole. He's incredible. So definitely give it to Stanley Druckenmiller this year.

2021, we did our best turnarounds. I picked Disney, Chamath Ford, Freeburg.

Should we stick this category? Should we stick this category?

What about the worst investor of 2022? Can we do that?

Good, Chamath. You want a Freestyle? Tell us your worst investor of 2022.

I mean, I'll put myself in the category along with anybody else who was long tech. Based, if Nick, if you can just bring, please back up this capital asset pricing model. So any of us that didn't understand this got run over this year. And just to put some very specific numbers here, there was a decent little tweet thread that Elon was a part of where they actually calculated what the expected rate of return of Tesla was. And it turned out to be almost 14% a year. And so when you start to compound 14% over three, four, five years, these numbers get very big, very quickly. And the reason why is that it has a huge beta, and we're in a world now where the risk free rate is quite high. So all of us benefited from this equation, essentially being upside down for the last 15 years. And all of us who were over allocated into things that benefited from those dynamics, frankly, got run over this year.

So we were, as a class, the worst investors of 2022. Okay, here we go. Let's do our best turnaround. I am going to go with, uh, for me, it's meta. They were losing money, hand over fist, they refused to do a rift. And then finally, bestie Brad Gerstner said, let's get fit. He did a memo. And finally, finally, Zuckerberg made some cuts, reportedly rumors he's making a 15 10 or 15% cut I heard in the back channels right now based on performance. So he's not calling it a riff or a layoff. They're just going to cut the bottom 10 or 15% again. So I think Zuck's going to turn it around. Anybody have a best turnaround?

this year? I'm going with meta. So your answer is meta was turned around by Zuck this year?

Yes, they got down to $85. And now they're up at what 110 115. Yes, he turned it around at the end of the year. It was like a Hail Mary at the end of the year. He's turned it around. I think he's

going to continue to. Yes, that is my position. I bought the stock at 94. Go with that, Jacob.

Okay. Okay. So if we're talking about very partial turnarounds here, I would say,

I would say that you can measure the turnaround as of October 24th to now.

Yes, exactly. So, uh, San Francisco is still overall a mess, but there were a few positive events that happened over the past year. And since we're looking back, we should call these out. So first of all, back, this is towards the beginning of the year, we were called three members of the school board. Uh, most particularly Alison Collins. Remember her? This was done by something like a 70 30 margin and 80 20 on, on Collins. This was the school board that had dragged its feet on school reopenings. They destroyed the merit based, uh, Lowell high school. They wasted hours of meetings on a silly plan to remove the names of names like Abraham Lincoln from the, from the schools. In any event, they were removed. Then Jake, how you refer to this.

as opposed to the radicals. Okay. We're in the lightning round here. We're in hour three of the all-in podcast, uh, marathon, this, uh, telethon. You got a best turnaround for 2022. Hard, hard,

hard one to give. So any green shoots for 2022 as Saks would say, no, I mean, uh, everything, everything's just got a disaster. Great. Freeberg, anything that you, there may be

no turnaround award until 2025. Fine. Okay. Yeah. We're a little split on this. Freeberg,

you got anything. I'll just go with your incisive fucking viewpoint and I'll pick Z together that makes sense.

That makes a lot at 94 at 117. It's one of my best beautiful, 170. It's one of my best.

Jay trades, Jay trades, I'm going to take it. Didn't you also say Disney was your pick of the year or something? I'm buying more. I'm buying more Disney. I'm buying more. This is not the

portfolio, Disney. I'm more Disney. I'm buying more. I'm telling you. Disney runner, which you talked about before, and Facebook are three of my big ones. Let's say worst

human being here. Well, I think, look, given that this is supposed to be the year 2022, I mean, you got to say that. Yes, in 2020, we all say S.B.F.

S.B.F. was the winner of this hands down. Yes, in 2020, we all say S.B.F. Okay, congratulations to S.B.F. You are consensus, worst human being. For this year. I mean, not ever, but just- For this year, only for this year. Right. Yeah. We all hate you equally. Okay, who's number two? Why do you hate him?

I hate him. Oh, that's disgusting. Did you see that? Did you see that the two guys copped to please Caroline Ellison and Gary like pancakes. But it turns out that they actually did engineer a backdoor into FTX and Alameda has been doing this for years. Oh my god.

Oh, they flip like pancakes. They flip and Alameda has been doing this for years. Oh my god, that's game over to.

You're getting 10 years. He's getting life's game over.

Game over! Strategy that we were discussing in the chat. That apparently- I think this is actually a fascinating defense strategy. I think this is their only shot. One of our besties had this theory that he was prescribed two prescription drugs. One was Adderall. What was the other one called?

This was not done. Oh yeah.

That apparently only shot.

Esam. Esam? The patch. It's a drug I wasn't familiar with. I guess it's a patch. But when you combine these two things, apparently it basically shuts down or kills the part of your brain that deals with... Inhibition. Inhibition. It's cocaine. Yeah. What if his defense strategy was, yeah, like only an insane person would do this. And I was acting insane because I was prescribed these drugs that had these drug conflicts and it like killed part

of my brain. I mean, when you think about it, when you think about it... What if every criminal on Wall Street said, cocaine is my defense.

But this, you could say he was, maybe he was legally prescribed it if you could show the prescription. By the way, I'm not saying this should get him off. We're basically workshopping what his only shot of his defense would be, right?

A defense. Well, and think about it, Sax, he acted manic after FTX collapsed. So that mania

of doing 20 Twitter spaces would be... There's something so insane about what he did, right? That it's almost like a prescribed insanity defense. Like I was prescribed a drug combination that made me insane.

Anybody have a most loathsome company as we wrap? The only way that you could come up with that is like, you'd have to have two parents that were like law professors or something.

All right. Most loathsome company FTX for me.

What if this is his defense, you know?

My parents, boo-hoo.

No, no, no, no. He'll claim insanity, JCal. He'll say... Of course.

And they'll have a... I mean, do we think that his parents aren't going to help his defense? You know, at this point, this kid's got to go away for life. That's it. You think life? I think it's got to be life. I think it's got to be 30 plus years. I mean, it's just going to be billions of dollars. What kind of justice system do we have when people go away for 20? 30... How many years? How many years?

Do you think life? How many years per billion would you... Sentence?

A decade per billion at least.

A decade.

Yeah, I mean, just... That's 100 years. You got pretty proportional. Sax, don't you think that justices should need to look at other people who are in jail for selling cocaine, for selling marijuana, for robbing a convenience store? They'll put somebody away for robbing a convenience store for a decade or two. Where are they going to put him in jail for? Just because somebody came in with a gun and robbed a convenience store, they get 20 years?

This kid's going to get off? Screw that. Yeah look, I think, what do you guys think The Overunder is here?

You think it's tastes? I'll set it at, I'll set it at 35 years.

I think 35, I think 30. I'll take The Over. I'll take 30, I think 30 is the Over Under. I think 30 is the Over Under.

I think This is, I think 30 is the Over Under result. I've said a good limem, which- I think this is made off of. I agree. Over in 30, yeah, I think-

Okay, I said 35. Good limem. I'll take the over. Oh, take 30. I think made off, this made up. I said a good line then, which is this is made up. I agree over on 30. Yeah, I think I said 35 good linemen. Which is not agreeing over on 30. Yeah, I think take 35. I think it's going to be a multiple hundreds of years centered and we'll

be gone for life and gone for life. Yeah. I think it's going to be life, but I said a good line. Okay. Most slosome company is FTX. Anybody want to go for a second?

No, keep moving. No, I'll add one. Last year I gave it to Tyson Foods, one of the largest slaughterer of animals on Earth. This year I'm going to give it to a company called Innotiv, I-N-O-T-I-V. This is the company that was busted by the feds for their animal abuse in their dog breeding facility where 4,000 beagles were rescued, one of which I adopted. And this is a publicly traded company, stocks down 90 some odd percent, which I'm thrilled to see. Terrible business, awful kind of inhumane behavior. And so I want to kind of give them

a special shout out this year. Look at you. And you're getting the virtue signaling points of rescuing the dog to increase your Q factor amongst besties. Well done.

Max Q factor. Max Q factor. Yeah. Anybody else have a loathsome? Yes, I'd like to pick this company, Zeebujubabzooza, which destroyed the environment for a bunch of

endangered species that I would otherwise have used for various fur pelts for my sweaters and such. Yes. And I would like to go with blobbly, blobbly, blah, which was torturing puppies, 18 of which I rescued and I now have them in the JCal puppy rescue. I am the most sensitive and caring person. Also, I would like to add SeaWorld. I am in the process of raising money to build bigger pools to eventually release all the orcas in captivity. That is my new focus for next year. Okay. Moving on. Oh, God, do we want to do Best Meme? Do we want to do Best New Tech?

I'll do Best New Tech. I don't have a Best Meme.

I'm going to go on with Fusion for Best New Tech. I'm going with-

I'm going to go with chat GPT. I think what was so impressive about chat GPT and the experience that everyone's had using it is that it really for the first time, I think, elucidated where these kind of machine learning tools can take us and what the kind of new product experience can be, what generative AI can yield things beyond, I think, the scope of what a lot of people were imagining before. So it was really so revealing. And as you guys know, there's an absolute friggin tidal wave of people trying to start companies that are leveraging tools in generative AI to kind of reinvent everything from workplace tools, enterprise software, all the way through to media, games, and entertainment. So that's why I think chat GPT was the most impressive new technology- Best New Tech Chamath.

Of 2020 technology. Best New Tech Chamath. Of 2020. And then SACS. Lightning round, please. Best New Tech.

Alpha Fold 3, which basically has almost near perfect accuracy in protein folding.

SACS Best New Tech. I can't improve on the chat GPT. So, yeah, let's keep rolling.

Best trend. Best trend in business and in the world. Mine is startups getting back, and investors getting back to reality and what I call the age of austerity, the age of focus after the age of excess. That's the best trend in our world, the age of austerity. What's your best trend

for 2022? Marginal cost of energy generation and storage is now in the low single digit pennies per kilowatt hour, which basically means that not only will energy be free and abundant, but it will, I think over the next decade or two, create a massive peace dividend. It will rewrite our foreign policy. It will rewrite national security. That is the reason why people should care about energy transition, not necessarily climate change, although that's important. It's a distant second

to keeping men and women out of war and keeping our borders safe. Well said. Anybody else have a best trend? Yeah, I'll pick it up.

So last year I said the creator economy, which I think referred to all these kind of creators creating new products and businesses beyond their content. This year, I think that the trend that was again, enabled and demonstrated through chat GPT is the narrator economy. I think this is going to be a really important trend going forward. We'll talk about it in the prediction episode, but I think the idea that people are, and they're starting to experience this and using chat GPT and Dolly and other kind of generative AI tools is how much you can narrate the product you want to see created and have it created for you on the fly. I think that that's a really powerful mind shift for people and frame shift for people. I think it really starts to change a lot of the way that people behave, entertain themselves, businesses operate, and so on. I'd call it the narrator economy and I think it's really starting to emerge.

Okay. Do you have a trend, Saks?

Yeah, I would say Best Friend is the growing realization that the corporate media is failing. It does not tell the truth. It has an agenda. More and more people are opting out of it and going with independent media. I think what Elon mentioned, where we're going to start holding these corporate journalists the same standard on Twitter as regular citizens. They're outraged by that, but that's a huge step in the right direction. The fact of the matter is that the press or the media is the prism through which reality is refracted. And if it's not giving us an accurate representation of the world, we can't begin to solve our problems because we don't have accurate information. And I think more and more people are waking up from the matrix and realizing that we're living in this media controlled simulation. And again, I don't think we're going to be able to make more progress until this power that the media seems to have over

our reality gets broken. Okay, let's go for worst trend. My worst trend is the Fed trying to play ketchup. The Fed trying to play ketchup. Sorry, buddy. The Fed trying to play ketchup is the worst trend for me oversteering into the crash. What do you got, Chamath, for the worst trend

of 2020? The worst trend was the continued, profligate spending by the federal government. We have record deficits, record debt. And this year, we're ending the year by adding another $1.65 trillion of spending that nobody can seemingly account for. It is truly the Christmas tree of Christmas trees in terms of bills. So, we have not gotten religion yet around being measured in how we spend money. Good one.

Worst trend, Saks. Last year, my worst trend was authoritarianism growing all over the world. And I think that's a pretty decent prediction. This year's worst trend is the government colluding with big tech to engage in censorship. This is how they're going to do the authoritarianism. We talked about it with Schellenberg and Elon, this whole series of revelations. Notice the Twitter files. We can see this collusion, this cozy relationship between the censors at Twitter and big tech and the bureaucrats at the FBI and DHS and Pentagon. This is a really disturbing dystopian relationship, as we talked about earlier. And I feel like we spend all this time talking about the authoritarianism in Russia and China. We seem to be obsessed with combating that and going to war with that, but we don't spend enough time talking about this growing authoritarianism at home. The media doesn't seem to want to report on the Twitter files at all.

Well said. Well said, Friedberg. What's your worst trend?

My worst trend for 2022 is what I would call interest rate mania. And I think that this is the mania that we've been caught up in on this show that other people on our thread, people in the business community and the investing community, where everyone's obsession with did the Fed act soon enough or late enough, and that interest rates ultimately drive success or failure with building businesses and making good investments. And the truth is, when interest rates go the wrong way, good investments can strengthen their way, can make their way through those environments. Bad investments cannot. Good businesses can make their way through and bad investments cannot. And so I think our mania around the fact that interest rates and the Fed ultimately drove bad outcomes in businesses and investments is a flawed assertion And we all want to kind of get back to the drunken days where, you know, a low interest rate environment enables us all to be successful and wealthy. And I think that that's kind of changed. So I think it's time for us to get away from the interest rate media and focus more

on solid investing and solid business building. Okay, here we go. Lightning round, we've got two to go. Favorite media of 2022. For me, it was Top Gun, House of the Dragon, White Lotus 2, but I'm going to pick my favorite here, something you may not have heard of, the film TAR. I highly recommend it, but I did like those other three. Tremendously, what do you got?

Sax for your favorite media of 2022. House of the Dragon, I guess I enjoyed quite a bit like you did. I'll give a shout out to my movie, Dolly Land, which will be coming out next summer. If we're going to include podcast episodes, I would give a shout out to the unheard episode where Freddie Sayers interviews John Mearsheimer, the professor of international relations. He explains the origins of the Ukraine war and has some really pessimistic predictions about what might happen next. I suggest everyone watch it if they want to understand this conflict

and where it may be going next year. Chamath, you have any favorite media for 2022

you want to share? I thought Yellowstone kicked ass, absolutely incredible. There's, I think it's on Hulu, but there's a show with Steve Carell, a little short series called The Patient, which is about a serial killer that kidnaps his psychologist and locks him in his basement to try to help him prevent him killing more people, which is about a series. I thought it was really, really well done. Never have I ever, the latest season, another just brilliant offering from Mindy Kaling. She's unbelievable.

Those are probably the top ones. What do you got?

Freeburg, any media? Yeah, I read a book this year that I really liked. It's called The Vital Question by a guy named Nick Lane. Someone recommended it to me. He's a biochemist and he kind of talks a little bit about the origin of life on earth. It really ties into this idea that there are certain, call it principles of physics and statistics that make life predictive and predictable. But I think the way that he kind of walks through how a lot of things emerge in life and how life ultimately kind of developed on this planet are really well shown. So yeah, I give his book a shout out. It was a really good read.

So that book, The Vital Question is incredible. The other one that he wrote, which is called Life Ascending, those two books you must read if you don't want to be a Luddite, in my opinion. All right, I will- Also for those people who don't understand the difference between power and energy, you will learn what that is.

Very good. I will also- Plus also- Very good. I have two book recommendations. Putting the rabbit in the hat is Brian Cox. You may know him from Secession. He has a great book and he reads the audio book. Very enjoyable. I'm halfway through Quentin Tarantino's cinema, speculation and enjoying it very much. So actually we'll enjoy it tremendously. Okay, and now we do the Rudy Giuliani Award for self immolation. This is for the person who poured lighter fluid and gasoline over themselves and lit themselves on fire for no apparent reason. I go with Kevin O'Leary, who's secured a $15 million bag from FTX and then decided to try to defend it.

Who do you have in your Rudy Giuliani Award? This will be controversial for you guys. I'm going to go with Elon Musk. I don't think that Elon put himself in the position that he did with bad intentions or without paying attention. I think he's taken on a role in buying and running Twitter that is principled. And in his mind and many other people's minds, a really important role that someone needs to play. Unfortunately, I think his reputation has gotten really hurt because of that role. He's not making a lot of friends and he's causing a lot of reputational damage. He obviously had a lot of good and important things he was working on prior to taking on the additional burden of Twitter. And while many people appreciate his doing it, I think that it's causing him a lot of reputational damage. And so yeah, I don't mean to kind of be offensive in saying that, but I think that Elon, I think he's gotten the biggest bet

on reputation. It's certainly been a hard thing to do. It's certainly been a hard thing to do, Zach.

The only bit of a hard thing to do, Zach. But you're saying self-immolation, Freeburg because he took it on himself. He could have just-

He took it on himself. Yeah I'm not saying it's just like dumb stupid- Okay let's try and list more interpretation. Yeah it's not like the Rudy Giuliani idiocy. I think he's taken on the burden of doing this,

and I think it's causing him a lot of reputation.

It's just like, don't do it. It's an interpretation. Yeah, it's an interpretation of the award. What do you got, a sax in Chamath?

Well, I mean, if I were to interpret the award, I think the way it was originally intended, I think I got to give it to Herschel Walker this year, unfortunately. And I wish Republicans would stop winning this award. At least Herschel never gave any speeches

next to a dildo shop, but nonetheless. I am so sorry. I'm so delighted, Saks, that you've been so self-aware about

the follies of the dying MAGA, the last throes of the MAGA nation. I want to find some Democrats to give this to. I want to give it to that brain-dead senator from Pennsylvania. What's his name? Federman. Federman. Federman. Thank you. I wanted to give it to Federman, but he won.

Federman. Federman. Federman. Thank you.

So I don't know what I'm supposed to do. It's like, no, listen, when a Republican self-immolates, like Rudy or Herschel or something like that, they get laughed out of town. And when the Democrat does it, like a Federman, they just get elected. So I don't know what to say.

All right, Chamac, do you have any final words here? All right, Chamac, do you have any final words here? Go ahead. I mean, we've got to end this episode. It's going to be the longest episode ever.

Whoo, I think it's poor producer Nick. Whoever signed the papers for the whole search and seizure at Mar-a-Lago looks kind of like an idiot.

So that was not politically astute, I think. You would say the FBI then. OK, poorly handled, perhaps.

That's actually a great one, actually, if we're going to get serious for a second. The combination of revelations, if we're going to look over this whole year. Remember, Jason, when I basically spoke up at the time they raided Mar-a-Lago and said that it was heavy-handed and unnecessary.

I keep telling you guys, for years, Donald Trump is an idiot savant minus the savant. Why all of you guys just project all of this insane, genius, evil level stuff? He's not capable of that. This is a simpleton who likes attention. He stole a bunch of souvenirs that he didn't read when he was in the White House. Hasn't read now, kept in a box downstairs just

to say he had them, but he was in the White House.

That's exactly right. I was the one who championed the souvenir.

I know he's a souvenir guy. You said he was selling secrets to the Saudis. No, I did not say that. I said finally it was souvenirs. You suggested it. You suggested it. Hold on. You were tweeting Jared Kushner an elaborate conspiracy theory. I'm saying that doesn't look good.

I know he's on a conspiracy theory when you do it. No, I did not say that. I said finally it was souvenirs. You suggested it. I did not. No, I just tweeted the news.

I'm saying that doesn't look good. And, guys, and this is the same person that basically in the beginning of his presidential campaign 2016, in front of Hillary Clinton said, Absolutely, I bend the laws that you created, the tax laws to my favor, because I'm not stupid. When she called him a tax dodger. And it turns out after all these years, then basically, he was telling the truth.

He basically once again, once again, the show ends with Trump. He's been a great 2022.

No, no, but honestly, like, like, did we learn anything except that these tax laws are egregiously stupid? And the only people that are consistently guaranteed to make money in these tax laws are real estate investors. If you put these two things together, a real estate investor who happened to be very poor at his job, which Trump turned out to be packed billions of dollars of NOLs that he was able to use to wash his taxes for years and years. And by the way, and he was clearly proud of it, he was just goading the Democrats and not releasing them. They went through all this rigmarole. And what did we find out? He

had huge NOLs, he had huge deductions, and he paid no taxes. Is that shocking to any of us? It's like, it's like Chappelle said, he came out of the house, told everyone everything you think is going on inside that house is going on and went back and then he walked back inside the

house. Yeah. It's pretty great. Chappelle got it. All right, listen, for David Sacks, the Rain Man, for the Queen of Kinwa, Sultan of Science, David Friedberg, and the dictator himself, Chamath Palihapatiya, it has been an honor and a privilege to do this podcast with you gentlemen. This is the longest show in the history of the pod. Enjoy everybody. R.I.P. producer next next 48 hours and we'll see everybody next year. Love you guys. Happy holidays. We love you, bastards.