2024 年预测：市场、科技与政治

Jason Calacanis (00:00:00): I found out about a free bird purchase that it's just you were there tomorrow. You heard what he bought. What did I buy? Chamath Palihapitiya (00:00:07): Pickles, the kino? What what was Jason Calacanis (00:00:09): no. No. Sacks, you missed this because you're you are a sun bird now, and the rest of us are snowbirds over the holidays. But the three of us have been hanging out skiing, having dinner for a couple of weeks. Can we had a little wives dinner? And one of the wives was complaining about the suits. Free bird purchases. Oh my god. So Friedberg. Speaker 3 (00:00:30): Do you Chamath Palihapitiya (00:00:30): have pictures of the radiation suits? Jason Calacanis (00:00:32): I don't have pictures of the radiation, Jerome. I'm trying to find one, but David Sacks (00:00:35): radiation Sacks? I thought you're gonna talk about, like, Brioney suits or something. No. Radiation Sacks? Jason Calacanis (00:00:41): You know how you went to full scale panic mode and you during COVID and you had your whole outfit. You're you're you're hazmat suit. Friedberg. Just because he's panicked about nuclear proliferation has bought Sacks for his entire family 1000 of dollars of radiation suits and nuclear fallout. And he bought 1 for his dog. Dog. David Friedberg (00:01:08): Dogs. Jason Calacanis (00:01:09): Dogs. Sorry. Dogs. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:01:10): For Monty and Daisy. David Friedberg (00:01:12): I should send you guys the photo of the dog. David Sacks (00:01:14): Bunker? I mean, David Friedberg (00:01:15): I've got it all taken care of. David Sacks (00:01:16): You need a bunker first. Right? Jason Calacanis (00:01:18): I think that's underway as well. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:01:19): How do you get to your bunker, Friedberg, with with the pilots that you'll be asking to leave their families? Well, you'll be protecting them with the guns that were stolen from the house. At least you'll have the thousands of pickles you've made. Sort of by bones of people. Jason Calacanis (00:01:36): I didn't know Friedberg was a prepper. Did you know this, Sacks? Because Saks has a little prep. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:01:42): Sacks Friedberg was howling because he was so mad. He made, like, 1000 and 1000 of pickles, and nobody would eat them including himself. Jason Calacanis (00:01:49): If they were so terrible. You literally bought a radiation pod for your dogs. David Friedberg (00:01:54): Yeah. So they that's their air filter on the right. So that they don't breathe them and you clear fall out collab. David Sacks (00:02:01): I kinda like the the prepping. David Friedberg (00:02:02): Thank you, sir. Yeah. It's good. You guys don't understand. There's a reason evolution happens in moments of what we call punctuated equilibrium. There's a massive event and certain, you know, things survive, and then that becomes the proliferant species going forward. This is the moment. Be ready. Jason Calacanis (00:02:18): You're saying paranoid rich white guys are gonna survive the nuclear holocaust is what you're saying. Paranoid rich white tech guys are gonna make it to the other side. Got Chamath Palihapitiya (00:02:28): it. How exciting. Jason Calacanis (00:02:29): Exciting. What a great future. What a future's from like, we'd rather die. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:02:35): That touches my erogenous Jones. Just the idea of it. When Sacks and Friedberg are the only 2 reproducting males left. Jason Calacanis (00:02:42): Can you imagine the the gene pool? Oh. It's like, literally, this is like some dystopian science fiction. This is like a Sacks Mirror episode. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:02:49): You'll have the pastiest preppers in the world. Jason Calacanis (00:02:52): Hasty preppers to inherit the earth. Speaker 3 (00:02:58): To let your winter ride. Rainman, David Sachs. And I said We open Jason Calacanis (00:03:13): Welcome back to the program, everybody. It is the new year, but it's the same squad. Your 4 besties are here. Shamath, Polyhop, Patia. He is now. Not just the dictator. He is chairman dictator calling in from the slopes with his beautiful bird sweater. That's a great sweater. It's a major curl net going on there. And we have David Friedberg. Also, looks like he's on the slopes, and he is wearing his Ojalo, his Ojalo, not Mahalo, Ojalo, Hat is branding here on the all in podcast, sneaking a little branding for his new startup that he is the CEO of David Sacks is with us, of course, and he cleaned up. He cleaned up a little bit here. The hair was getting out of control. We had a lot of commentary on the hair. Apparently, you cleaned up shop. David Sacks (00:03:58): I pivoted from the the Jefferson to the gecko. Jason Calacanis (00:04:01): Alright. So everybody loves when we do our predictions. And so we're gonna start off 2024. Big year for us. We have a lot going on here and all in, and we're gonna just do some predictions here. So let's get started. We're gonna kick it off with Sachs doing his prediction for the biggest political winner in 2024. Sacks, who do you have? What's your prediction for who's gonna be the biggest winner in 2024. We're bracing. Speaker 3 (00:04:25): Yeah. David Sacks (00:04:26): Well, you're gonna love this Jake Hall, but my my prediction for biggest political winner in 2024 is Vladimir Putin. Over 2023 last year was the year that Putin turned it all around. He stabilized his economy after the west attempt to sanction him to his knees, tried to collapse his economy. We issued, basically an arrest warrant from the international criminal court, He has gained the upper hand militarily in Ukraine. I think that 2024 will be a year of him consolidating gains in Ukraine. Potentially making new gains. I think that the the stalemate narrative that our media has propagated about Ukraine will be exposed as a lie. I think the Russians are in fact winning that war. And what you're seeing is that his successful stance against the west in Ukraine has only made him more influential throughout the global south and in the BRICS countries. Countries that oppose American dominance and dollar hegemony see him as the man with the plan, as as a bit of a conquering hero. And I think as project Ukraine falls apart in 2024, it's only gonna reinforce that sense that he's the big winner. David Friedberg (00:05:45): Sacks, did you see that Argentina said they're not gonna join Sacks? And that some have said that was a bit of a blow Sacks on the brakes effort to end dollar hegemony. And do you think it's really impactful, or is it just a one off David Sacks (00:05:59): I think it's a one off. I mean, Milay won in a big surprise there because the country's economy has been such a basket Jason, and he is very Pro American Pro Israel Pro West. And so he has distance Argentina from from BRIC but I think that's a little bit of a one off. The larger issue is that the whole global south now is really resisting to the collective west in a number of different ways. And so our influence and dominance is solely declining across the world, and there's many examples of that. So we can get into it throughout the show. Jason Calacanis (00:06:37): Just to be clear with the audience, you're not rooting for Putin here. You're just predicting he's the biggest winner. David Sacks (00:06:43): I'm not rooting for it to happen. I I've got other answers here that I think are negatives. As well. I wish we had made a peace deal and avoided this whole Ukraine war. I think that was a gigantic mistake by the west. Jason Calacanis (00:06:57): Yeah. So, yeah. Speaker 3 (00:06:57): You'd be Jason Calacanis (00:06:57): clear about that. Yeah. David Sacks (00:06:59): We have put Putin in this position to be the victor because we plunged into a war without sinking it through. And the truth is we can't give Ukraine enough aid to have them actually win this war. So we've contributed massively to Putin being this victor. And, you know, it was Fiona Hill, who is a Russia hawk in the foreign policy establishment, who pointed out in a speech, I think, over the past year, that the global south is using this Ukraine war as a proxy to rebel against the So in the same way that we're using Ukraine as a proxy against Russia, she said the global south was using Russia as a proxy against the west. As a way to basically dethrone American hegemony all over the world. And that that's a very negative trend. Jason Calacanis (00:07:49): So if you had Ukraine and Putin in under 7 minutes for this episode, you bet the under, you win. Friedberg, who's your prediction for the biggest political winner? In politics for 2024. David Friedberg (00:08:00): So I'm gonna go with independent third party in the US. We saw the stats last week. I think we reviewed them with a poll that showed that 60 plus percent of people are claiming interest in a third party or an independent effort outside of the traditional damn Republican split And if you look at in 1992, Ross Perot got 18 to 19% of the general election vote. RfK Junior is obviously running on an independent ticket this year. We'll see if he can even get on the ballot in a bunch of states, but I think that whether it's him or the interest in developing a third party, in the US, that there may be a big winner this year that challenges the the traditional 2 party split in this country. Jason Calacanis (00:08:45): Alright. And, Shamal, who do you got for your biggest political winner in Same. I wrote. Independent Chamath Palihapitiya (00:08:50): interests. I think this election starts the breakdown of the 2 party David Friedberg (00:08:55): Sacks same. Look at that. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:08:56): Rf k this week out. She just got added to the Utah ballot. I think that this could be the most meaningful long live thing change that we see in American politics Jason Calacanis (00:09:04): is This is amazing. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:09:05): From from the RFK candidacy. David Friedberg (00:09:07): I mean, how many people do you guys know that war Republicans at be Republicans anymore. We're Democrats and don't wanna be Democrats anymore. It's really like most. So many people want more Chamath Palihapitiya (00:09:16): of the ladder. I know more of the latter. Than I do. David Friedberg (00:09:19): Right. Yeah. That's true too. Jason Calacanis (00:09:20): Yeah. That's what I would say. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:09:21): I think I think Republicans are still firmly established. I think people are embarrassed to be a democrat right now. Jason Calacanis (00:09:26): Interestingly, I also picked The dark horse presidential candidate who will beat treasonous and corrupt AKA Trump and Biden. I think we're gonna actually see some dark horse candidate maybe beat these 2 and the rematch that nobody wanted. Wow. That's crazy. 3 of the 4 of us picked the same thing. David Friedberg (00:09:43): No coordination beforehand. Jason Calacanis (00:09:45): Yes. And this has done blind Sacks, and and Nick has my notes here so he can he can, vouch for me here. And just to go back and look at 2023, what we predicted. Sacks, you said Asian American College applicants were gonna be your biggest winner in politics. That actually turned out to be Pretty prescient. Right? David Sacks (00:10:02): Yeah. I mean, I was betting on court Jason, overruling affirmative action, and that's exactly what happened is that Supreme Court ruled against affirmative action and college admissions, saying that it unlawfully discriminated against Asian Americans. So, yeah, that worked out exactly right. Jason Calacanis (00:10:18): So that's a great prediction. I think, Chamath, you had to perhaps the best prediction of even the entire show last year your spread trade, log Nikki, and short DeSantis that paid off in spades while done there. Friedberg, you had MBS and Saudi have the most important year in their modern era are actually pretty pressing as well. They seem to Speaker 3 (00:10:38): be Yeah. I mean, David Friedberg (00:10:38): if you look at let me just post this. This was this journal article that came out in March. If you guys remember this when Saudi was considering accepting yuan instead of dollars for sales of oil to China. And then in August, the US ramped up pressure on Saudi Arabia to sell oil and dollar is not your one. Let me just pull this up for you guys, which was obviously a big follow on story where the US try to counter the actions, which is continuing obviously today where there's a back and forth. And Saudi, as I mentioned last week, I think, is in this really interesting central pivot position between all of these competing major nuclear powers and fighting for influence. And this is a big, story, and it will continue to be this year. Jason Calacanis (00:11:21): And modernizing, society. David Sacks (00:11:23): That photo of the fist bump. I mean, what a mistake that was, where Biden just gratuitously insulted MBS, compare that to the photo of Putin visiting the Middle East and meeting shaking hands with MBS, which happened just a few weeks ago, and compare the welcome that Putin got in Saudi Arabia and, I think, UAE to the welcome that Biden got. It's just two completely different levels. It was a very warm embrace on both sides. I think it was UAE. They literally had a parade for him where they had, the colors of the Russian flag up everywhere. So, you know, we've tried to portray Putin as this global pariah. We've tried to turn them into this global pariah, but it's not working. Because of the way that he is defeating the collective west in Ukraine, I think that it's given him enormous Sacks and influence in the global south and much of the developing world which would like to stand up to American dominance or or at least is tired of American dominance. David Friedberg (00:12:28): And if you double click on that article, The second one I sent on Washington trying to negotiate with the Saudis, you know, quote behind the scenes, but, obviously, this all comes out. They're asking assurances that Riyadh will use dollars, not yuan, to price oil Sacks, assurances that Saudi won't allow China to build military bases in the kingdom. And limitations on Saudi Arabia using technology developed by China. And in exchange, the US will protect Saudi will provide military protection, and will help them develop a nuclear program, which is an incredible demand. So, obviously, this is an unresolved point, but this becomes a pivot moment for Saudi Arabia. They may may become a nuclear power. Use this as leverage as the US continues to try and keep dollar hegemony alive. Jason Calacanis (00:13:14): And my prediction last year was that Trump would get indicted win the nomination and then agree not to run an order to get a pardon or something in that vein And Sacks like I'm gonna get 2 of those those 3 prac. We'll see on the pardon. He has been indicted, obviously. And he is looks like a lock to win the nomination, but we'll see. I don't it seems like Nikki Helly's doing okay. We'll see. Biggest political loser of 2024 is what we're gonna do next. Shamoff, last year, you picked DeSantis. I picked DeSantis. That was a pretty easy one. Sacks, you picked Calacanis. Also a pretty easy one. We know that, California has gotten demolished. David Sacks (00:13:51): Because specifically, California went from having a $76,000,000,000 surplus 2022 to a $68,000,000,000 deficit now. Jason Calacanis (00:13:58): Yeah. It's bonkers. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:13:59): Yeah. I don't think any of those were as obvious as they were in January last year. I think DeSantis was leading. He was collecting a lot of big Sacks, and California hadn't imploded. And I and everybody knew that they were on be under pressure, but nobody expected to be, I think, this swift. Jason Calacanis (00:14:14): So alright. I don't I Chamath Palihapitiya (00:14:14): don't think those were obvious. I think those were actually pretty decent Sacks. Jason Calacanis (00:14:17): Okay. Yeah. It's a good argument. And then Friedberg, you picked a debt issues for emerging Jason debt markets start to unravel IMF steps in. I'm not sure if I have enough information to check-in on that one yet. Any thoughts, Friedberg? Were you going to our predictions for biggest loser? Speaker 3 (00:14:31): I don't David Friedberg (00:14:31): think we had any big unwindings like I had expected But these problems are bubbling and persist. You know, obviously, Argentina took a big step with the election there. That one was one of the countries that was most at risk of having a big event last year. But Jason Calacanis (00:14:47): Chamath, who's your prediction for biggest political loser in 2024? Chamath Palihapitiya (00:14:51): The coast. I think on a dollar basis, they are the largest spender in Republican politics. They have been, and they have been the most consistent negative indicator of value. And so if you just wanna fade a trade, I think you can pretty easily just find where the those old school Republicans are putting their money and just kinda short it. And right now, as much as I was sort of long the Haley spread trade in 2023, I would probably now short that trade in 24. Jason Calacanis (00:15:25): Okay. Switching it up. Mostly because of the goats. Friedberg, who do you have? David Friedberg (00:15:28): Well, Sacks like this one, but I think Ukraine might be The biggest loser this year as attention shifts to the brewing conflict in the Middle East During an election year, like, the US is facing, continuing this funding of this Ukraine Russia conflict with US dollars is becoming a more unpopular issue for people to support. And so I think because of all these these competing interests and the political pressure, the US will probably not have the resources to commit to Ukraine. I think Ukraine's shot at being in NATO is gonna fade away. And, unfortunately, it seems like the country may be left behind by the end of this year. Jason Calacanis (00:16:10): Sacks, what do you got? David Sacks (00:16:11): Well, I totally agree with that, and I would just add demographic decline or even collapse. They've lost something like half a 1,000,000 soldiers in terms of casualties. They also something like 10,000,000 people have have fled the country. I read recently that there's only about 20,000,000 people left in the country and half of them are pensioners. So it's not even clear that the working population in the country is gonna be able to support the pensioners. And of course, the war isn't close to being over yet. So there's gonna be even more destruction that happens. So I I agree with that that pick. I up leveled my answer a little bit here to have the collective west as the biggest political loser. And Ukraine is a big part of that. Obviously, this huge bet that the collective West made in terms of pressuring and challenging Putin in Ukraine has completely crapped out, but I would also go much further than that. You look at what's happening in Israel and in Gaza right now, and I don't think that Israel's invasion of gauze is going well at all. And again, just stepping back, these answers don't reflect my desire for what I want to have happen. It just reflects my honest assessment of who the the losers are gonna be. And I just think that Israel's invasion is is not going well. It does not look like they're gonna be able to militarily achieve their objective of destroying Hamas, Admiral Kirby, who's the Pentagon spokesperson even said that the other day, which was a pretty amazing admission. At the same time, Israel is creating a huge humanitarian crisis in Gaza, something like over 20,000 Palestineians have already been killed. Over 50,000 wounded. Something like 1,800,000 of them have been displaced. Jason it doesn't look like it's gonna let up anytime soon. As a result of this, Israel is facing, I think, a huge amount of condemnation internationally. It is becoming a bit of a global pariah. So that is not going well for America and the west. And then you're gonna have a whole bunch of elections this year, both in the US and in Europe, I think that there's gonna be tremendous disruption. Things are really not going well in Europe right now. David Sacks (00:18:29): Large parts of Europe are in recession as a result of losing cheap Russian gas. This is particularly true of Germany. And I think there's gonna be some big shakeups in the European parliament, and I wouldn't be surprised if there was similar shake ups in in the US election as well. Jason Calacanis (00:18:47): Alright. And I picked for my biggest political loser. I was gonna go with the American voter, but I'm hoping that the American voters better choices and maybe we see some alternative candidates as we said in the last one. And I went with Netanyahu here. I think and again, this is just my assessment. This isn't what I want to occur in the world, obviously, but every major Israeli poll is just suggesting that they want him out, and they put the odds, vox puts the odds of his voucher at 75%. And, obviously, yeah, Gaza is not going well, and it feels like there is a massive shift in terms of what was early support and obvious support for the terror attacks on on 107, any any reasonable person would be supportive of that to, hey. Maybe what's happening in Gaza is not helping the situation and needs to be resolved. And maybe a different approach has to occur. And so I think Netanyahu is gonna be the biggest loser in 2024. Alright. Let's go on to the biggest business winner of 2024. Back to business. Last year, last year in 2023, I predicted laid off tech workers starting startup companies would be the big winner. You predicted Relativity Space 3 d printing rocket company. And Sacks, you picked America's natural gas industry, Friedberg, OpenAI. Wow. A lot of good choices there, I think. OpenAI was a huge winner in 2023, yeah, Friedberg David Friedberg (00:20:09): even with the chaos. So. I would say so. That was David Sacks (00:20:11): a good bet. David Friedberg (00:20:12): Massive revenue, the highest market cap gain of the year, probably. Jason Calacanis (00:20:15): Yeah. 3290,000,000,000. Yeah. American Natural Gas Industry, that really actually cooked in a 2023 F Sacks. Yeah. Yeah. David Sacks (00:20:24): It has new records. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:20:25): So Good predictions, man. Yeah. Jason Calacanis (00:20:27): Good pick. Alright. So let's go right to 2024 predictions. Friedberg, you haven't let us off yet. So you're gonna lead a be the lead off battery here. What do you got? David Friedberg (00:20:36): I'm going with commodities businesses, which I know is picking a specific business, but there's a lot of ways to play it. And I think there's a big commodities boom that's coming back in 2024. There's been a lot of under investment relative to demand over the past, call it, 18 to 24 months, coming out of COVID and with, rising interest rates, a lot of folks have been selling down inventory, and there now needs to be a build Sacks up on inventory and supply. There's also a bunch of cash coming into the commodities markets that was sitting in treasuries as yields go down. That cash is coming Sacks building the base Sacks, rebuilding stockpiles and supplies coming out of the past 18 months, obviously, economic activity is strong and robust. So commodities businesses are gonna see a a killer 2024. Shamapiti, I Chamath Palihapitiya (00:21:25): I think the biggest business winner in 2024 is going to be the bootstrapped startup and or the profitable startup, but The best will probably be the bootstrapped profitable startup. And I think the reason is that we are under estimating how cheap it's going to be to copy an existing business in 2024. And so if you assume that these models are gonna get 10a100 times better and you assume the cost of compute is gonna get 10 and a hundred times cheaper, and you assume the cost of energy is gonna get 10 times cheaper. You're no longer measuring in decades when a company will be subject to disruption. I think you're measuring it in, frankly, months. And so I think you're gonna be able to create these companies for very cheap and essentially have them attack an existing business, which has upside on economics because they have just a lot of people and a lot of processes that these GPTs can replicate for essentially free. So if you're profitable, you have the chance to survive. And I think if you are Unprofitable. I think that you're going to be under a lot of pressure. Jason Calacanis (00:22:43): I think it's a great pick. That's exactly what I'm seeing on the field in the early stage. Sacks, who's your prediction for a biggest business winner of 2024? Who do you predict? It's gonna be the biggest business winner. David Sacks (00:22:54): I'm predicting Andrew for its roadrunner product. Which it announced last year. And this is a drone interceptor. So it basically intercepts drones. It's built for ground based air defense. And the reason I say this is because if you saw recently what was happening in the red sea with the Houthis, the US was having to use $2,000,000 air defense missiles to shoot down $2000 drones, and that is not sustainable. So right now, we have a huge problem with asymmetric warfare where our adversaries are using very cheap missiles, very cheap drones, swarms of them, and they forced us to exhaust our air defenses which are just way too expensive on a unit basis. Jason Calacanis (00:23:43): 100 of 1000 of dollars, do you think? Yeah. David Sacks (00:23:45): I think that's right. I think the road owner system costs 100 of 1000 of dollars, but it can be it's reusable. So it's not like you just send one up to take Jason Calacanis (00:23:52): out one throw. If it doesn't blow up. If it does blow up, I don't think you reuse it. David Sacks (00:23:56): It It basically takes off at at loiters. This is, basically, AI system where it's self self driving, I guess, if you will, it has operators. But and then it returns back to its base station after it's used. It's not like a kamikaze type drone. It's actually a drone killer. Jason Calacanis (00:24:13): Oh, really? I think it is. I think it dupe dual per It can either intercept and blow something up, or it can return back to base. But we'll have to check-in on that day and chat out to our friend, Palmer. Lucky come back on the program anytime. We missed you. Shout out to our boy. Are you an investor, Sacks, in, Andrew? No. David Sacks (00:24:28): I'm not I'm not an investor, but I think I would be. Jason Calacanis (00:24:30): Yeah. You David Sacks (00:24:31): know, so They've Jason Calacanis (00:24:32): also ton of money. Yeah. Palmer. Great job. Yeah. No, Palmer. We'll all buy. Actually, I'm building a position right now. I've been buying secondary in, Andrew. And for me, I was gonna go and start up again, David Friedberg (00:24:44): but buying secondary shares in Andrew? Jason Calacanis (00:24:46): I've been building a large position in entrel. Yes. I'm I'm I'm trying to get to a 2% ownership position so I can join the board. So I've been, using So shout out to my guy. Mom, we're lucky. I am gonna go with for my biggest winner in 2024. Training data owners like the New York Times, Reddit, x, Twitter, YouTube, etcetera. I think what we learned in 2023 was that the language models are starting to hit parity very quickly and that the real value is gonna be in And it may maybe become commodities and open source may win the day. So then I think the winner is folks who have the training data, And I'm actually proposing a new business model for these language models. I think now that we've seen this New York Times, an open AI lawsuit, I think there's a really great outcome here, which is a market based solution where if you have a chat CPT account, you can log in and federate with your New York Time subscription or, you know, any other subscription. And then it gives you the tier of chat GPT for with the New York Times. And so that could be a win win for everybody, or they could obviously pay a licensing fee. And so I think this is going to be an amazing turnaround for the entire content industry if the language models respect copyright owners and come up with a sustainable system where every year copyright holders can get some money in exchange for using their training data, whether it's on images or content. So I'm For example, you should David Friedberg (00:26:13): accumulate a 2% position in OpenAI through secondary purchases and get them to do that on the board. Jason Calacanis (00:26:19): It's only 2,000,000,000. Yeah. No. I think Yeah. I I mean, we we didn't bring this up because this broke over the the the holiday break. But I think Sam Wellman's doing a great job of telling people he wants to do the right thing. And we've we've discussed previously the licensing deal they did with business insider in the in the parent company of it. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:26:35): Axel Springer. What do you think the deal with New York Times will look like? Jason Calacanis (00:26:38): I think it's gonna be a 9 figure settlement for previous stuff. And then an ongoing licensing fee in order to have the New York Times and their training data. And then you'll be able to say, Hey, what does the New York Times think of this? Right? You could actually do queries about the New York Times in it. And I think the New York Times will come up with a license that everybody can use their data if they pay this yearly fee. If you stop paying the yearly fee, then you can't train on it. And We're in uncharted territory. David Friedberg (00:27:06): You're saying there's gonna be a a New York Times model and a non New York Times model? Jason Calacanis (00:27:10): Well, I think you could do 2 different things. 1, you could do New York Times could make their own model. Right? But they could fork their model or just with the user interface, say if you wanna query New York Times information and have that as part of your results, you have to have a New York Times account. Right? So if you say I want the best coffee machines or what what's the best coffee equipment? It says, oh, if you had wire cutter, And the subscription to your times, we would include the wire cutter results. And the this idea that technologists can't do citations has been proven absolutely incorrect. There are language models out there that are using citations all the time. OpenAI, I think, will wind up losing the case if it goes to the mat. I think they're gonna pay a big licensing fee to your question Tremont. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:27:50): My prediction then is that if this happens this is not my pick, but I'm just gonna tell you. I suspect that what happens is you'll get these yearly licensing fees and then one year, the New York Times just falls off a cliff. And when it comes time to renegotiate, then OpenAI says, no. And and they won't have a choice. Jason Calacanis (00:28:10): Well, I mean, that's a possibility, but if you think about the Disney characters, you know, let's see. I don't know if you saw Nintendo and Disney characters you know, making stuff on Dolly or other things. If you make derivative works on that and you wanna have that feature as part of your image creator, you just have to have a licensing fee. And so I think that there's a win win here to be had, and I am really interested to see the market based solution because I don't think this is a Napster situation where, like, OpenAI gets shuts down. Because OpenAI is too savvy. I I bet you're looking for it. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:28:37): The big difference between Napster and this is there, the content universe was limited and small. Here, it's infinite and unlimited. And so how do you pay anything to anybody without I just think it's, like, without direct attribution of revenue, which is basically impossible, you're kind of making a value judgment, which I don't think makes any sense. I I think I think doing a revenue licensing deal is impossible when you get into the weeds. When these business people sit down and actually start to try to figure out the bid ask, I don't know as a rational coherent business Jason, what you would model in order to present the number? Jason Calacanis (00:29:13): Yeah. So one suggestion would be what percentage of the model's creation was using the New York Times data. And I think people say 1 to 2% of the original Chamath GPT was built off. A trading data was New York Times. And then if they weighted that heavily each month, like, let's say they David, New York Times is an authoritatively five times more important than these other sources. That could be upwards of 5 to 10% of the authority of that model. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:29:37): Yeah. But I say that, Jason Calacanis (00:29:38): but What's the cost? Chamath Palihapitiya (00:29:40): But what's the COGS for the, like, are you telling me that, like, an AI industry Jason Calacanis (00:29:44): has this? I mean, it's gonna Chamath Palihapitiya (00:29:45): be like a 30, 40% cost of goods. Jason Calacanis (00:29:47): You could say that Chamath GPT, or let's say Apple. I I predict Apple will do this. Right? They'll do a language model where they say 50% of the revenue that we generate from queries or subscriptions to this. Goes to the people we built it off of or the licensees. Sure. Why not? Why not? They're already the leasing industry already Chamath Palihapitiya (00:30:04): does it. That would guarantee the death of the startup. Ecosystem, and it would guarantee the lock in of big tech. Jason Calacanis (00:30:12): No. I don't think so. You could build model don't have the data in, and you can build models with it. So it'll be a choice by the person who builds the model. And synthetic data might make it so you don't need the New York Times, Shamoff. It it's early days for synthetic data. No, I Chamath Palihapitiya (00:30:23): don't have an opinion. I'm just reacting to this idea that 50% of COGS, then all of a sudden, these aren't software companies. You know, these software companies we'll have a gross margin of, like, 30%. Jason Calacanis (00:30:32): Yeah. Well, what does Spotify pay for music? You know? So the the same argument is made for Spotify, you know, or Netflix when they were licensing content. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:30:39): That's the difference. Limited in scope, meaning there's, there's only ever one hit song from Rihanna that matters or Jay Z or whomever picked Taylor Swift. And so it's a very scoped content universe. And so you can ascribe value much easier because then the user goes and actually listens to that song over another. This is about something that's happening under the waterline where you don't know how the iceberg is. Jason Calacanis (00:31:01): It's both. There are things under the model that do it, and then there's also quoting stuff. And that's really where the New York Times got their caught them with their hand in the cookie jar is that when it was regurgitating information and giving the results, It was quoting deeply New York Times proprietary content. And so that's that's where there's like a you're you're right about the training data, but you're you might be wrong about the the Yeah. David Friedberg (00:31:22): That could be fixed. Right? They could train models, and they could they could exclude storing any proprietary data. You can create a filter that says the model can't store any of this data, but it can still be trained out. Jason Calacanis (00:31:33): Or can't use it. Right? So if you say, what's the best coffee machine? It can't use the New York Times Wirecutted data. And I I bet you that Sam Weltman has already built a model without it. I guarantee you they've already built a for an emergent press here in case of emergency. Here's the 4.5 model in case they got an injunction, which would be highly unlikely. But if they did get an injunction, They just say, okay. Here's 4.5. It doesn't use the New York Times training data. So this is all uncharted territory, as we all know. Think we got everybody's business predictions. Okay. Andrew, commodities, training data, and Bootstrap Profitable startups. What a great cohort there. Let's go on to biggest business losers in 2024. 2023. Chamath said Google search as measured by profitability engagement. Sacks said the consumer Friedberg said Capital Intensive Series B Cs And D Growth Companies. That's pretty pretty good winter there. And I said white collar workers without hard skills, also known as surplus elites. Any feedback on those boys? David Friedberg (00:32:35): Your winner, I'll give you my prediction for 24. Jason Calacanis (00:32:38): Please. Yes. Go ahead. Vertical David Friedberg (00:32:40): SaaS companies, I think, are gonna get smacked this year. And I I mentioned this. I don't I can't I think we talked about this off off the show, but or if we talked about it on the show, I apologize. But, like, think these tools to write code, no code tools, copilating tools, and the ability for engineers to get 20, 50, a 100 x more productive to build custom applications for their enterprise are so incredibly powerful. I mentioned this to you guys. I know of a couple vertical SaaS businesses that some of my companies use the software, and they're getting off the software because they've built homegrown solutions in a very low cost, very low touch way. And I'm seeing that so frequently now I think this is a real threat to vertical Sacks businesses that can charge 1000 of dollars per seat per year that are getting disrupted by the ability for companies now to very cheaply and quickly build homegrown solutions Speaker 3 (00:33:36): using a David Friedberg (00:33:36): lot of the generative tools that are out there. Jason Calacanis (00:33:38): Sacks, your prediction? David Sacks (00:33:39): My prediction for biggest business solutions are in 24 is is actually the German economy. There's 2 big problems there. First is that the loss of cheap Russian gas has really cut the legs out from under the German industrial model. Their entire economy is based on industrial output and cheap Russian gas was sort of at the foundation of that. As you guys know, if someone blew up the Nord Stream pipeline, I think that has really hurt the German economy. And then second, the German car industry has been massively impacted by a sudden glut of cheap cars coming from China. So if you look at the Chinese automotive industry, It's really exploded in the last few years. And auto exports is one of, you know, is one of the biggest products that Germany manufacturers, And with German costs going up and Chinese costs coming down, that's just not a very good place for them to be. So I think double whammy for Germany. Jason Calacanis (00:34:39): Chamath, do you have the biggest business loser in 2024? Chamath Palihapitiya (00:34:43): I am going to say that 24 is the peak in terms of valuations of professional sports. Jason Calacanis (00:34:54): Oh, Chamath Palihapitiya (00:34:55): and I will give you 4 examples in 2023 that I think were in some very concerning or pro sports franchise values as of today. The first was you had an start competitor to a league that came out of nowhere, used money to overcome the ability to attract stars, talking about the live tour versus the PGA and then essentially force the PGA into merger talks with them. The second was you had a country use their balance sheet to basically try to jump start their own professional sports business. In this case, it was soccer. The country was Saudi Arabia, and the players were Ronaldo and Messi. They got one, but not the other. The third was the explosion of NIL inside the NCAA. You have people in college now. Making more, in some cases, than the same player in a professional sports context. So they're making 1,000,000 of dollars to be in college. And then the 4th, which may not seem like it's related, but there was an article in the Wall Street Journal, I think, recently, about a meaningful uptake in churn amongst all the streamers, Netflix, Hulu, all of these companies, Amazon, who are the only folks with in a position to actually have the balance sheet to keep paying a premium for professional sports rights. So I think when you put that all together, you can start to see that there's been a tipping point in enterprise values the acceleration we've seen over the last decade has slowed down. So I would say that 2024 is gonna be the year of peak pro sports values. Jason Calacanis (00:36:41): Okay. Starts to come down. And I went with smartphones. Smartphone manufacturers are facing a major slowdown. Consumers obviously love their phones and use them constantly, but people are skipping a generation of phones. And if you look at Apple's revenue, They're having a very hard time getting people to upgrade. And so I think that's gonna flatten out. They will keep trying to squeeze money out of it. Don't know what you guys spent on your iPhone 15 if you got it, but I I always buy the top of the line, and I think it was 14 or $1500 this time. And when I got the accountants, they said, oh, is this a new laptop? I said, no. It's a new phone, but I think this is gonna slow down and people will during austerity, they're gonna skip 2 or 3 versions of it. I know I skipped for the first time. I skipped the 14 this time around. So I'm going with smartphone manufacturers and Apple would be obviously tip of that spear. Let's keep moving our next prediction. Biggest business deal of 2024. Biggest business deal of 2024 I went with last year, my prediction was Amazon getting into health care. Maybe they buy Peloton or Roman Hims, and they have been getting into health care a bunch more And my my wild card was a CCP divesting of tiktok. That didn't happen. Shamap, you went Starlink goes public in a spin out from SpaceX at 75,000,000,000. That didn't happen. But Starlink is doing fantastic. Sacks, you said a deal between Putin and Xi, and then Friedberg, you said petro for yuan trade, the Saudi China trade. Any thoughts on the predictions there? Doesn't look like anybody nailed it. David Sacks (00:38:11): Well, no. Actually, Putin and Xi did make a deal their ties and urban stronger, and the trade between those two countries keeps increasing as a result of the fact that we pushed Russia to China's arms. So that absolutely happened. Speaker 3 (00:38:22): And Jason Calacanis (00:38:22): what's your prediction to share, Sacks? Biggest business deal, Sacks. What do you got? David Sacks (00:38:26): My biggest business deal is whatever the fed decides to do to replace or extend BTFP, the bank term funding program. Remember that the BTFP, which is what the Fed used to bail off the regional banking system last year, and was it like March or April, it was only supposed to last for 1 year. It's supposed to be a temporary program, but I do not think that the balance sheets of regional banks are healthy enough to survive without this continued liquidity from this program. So I think the Fed's gonna have to do something, try to replace the program, extend the program, they're gonna have to do something. And I think that regional banks are still in pretty bad shape with, you know, impaired commercial debt portfolios, and they need this liquidity as long as the yield curve remains inverted. So I think the Fed is gonna try and somehow figure out a program to keep these guys liquid until they can de invert the yield curve. Speaker 3 (00:39:31): And I think the Fed's trying to massage all of this Jason Calacanis (00:39:31): into place. David Sacks (00:39:35): Without there being a recession. Jason Calacanis (00:39:36): Seems like they'll be able to do it. Chamath, what do you got? Chamath Palihapitiya (00:39:39): I'm gonna go with the same thing. I think I was just off by your Starlink with Republic. Jason Calacanis (00:39:44): Fascinating. I like it. And, I had a a similar theme my wild card my wild card last year that the c CP would divest of TikTok. I'm gonna say this year that I think TikTok goes public. And They'll be under pressure from different political factions to get the CCP off the board. So I'm gonna go with by dance taking going public or TikTok, spinning out and going public, some some version of that. Friedberg, what do you got for this year? We got some continuation bets here from Jay Cals. David Friedberg (00:40:14): I would keep going with my Petro you on trade bet. I don't think that the US is gonna let Saudi become into clear power, but So maybe leave that one outstanding. But I think rights holder is getting licensing deals for generative AI, or there's gonna be a couple of blockbuster deals this year. Great. Where you'll see, like, Disney license out of chunk of their library so people can generate on demand video games or content or I don't know. You guys remember this company in the early 2000s called Zazzle. Do you remember that company? Jason Calacanis (00:40:44): Yeah. What was that? Chamath Palihapitiya (00:40:45): Printed stuff on mugs. David Friedberg (00:40:47): Yeah. And they had a big deal with Disney where the idea was you could put any character in any way you want on any piece of, like, t shirt or mug or whatever. Merch. Speaker 3 (00:40:57): Yeah. And David Friedberg (00:40:58): it was like, merch. And it was a big deal. I think we see that again with generative AI this year where you can take, for example, a character from a movie and generate them in an image. So anyone that has in in interesting content rights will start to license it out and get a lot of value from it. Jason Calacanis (00:41:13): Absolutely. David Friedberg (00:41:13): Because you see a couple big deals like that this year. Jason Calacanis (00:41:15): Okay. Most contrarian belief of 2024, I went American nationalism source. I think I I like that prediction from last year ahead. Shamap, you said inflation doesn't fall off a cliff as fast as people want. Sacks the bromance between Biden and Zelensky comes to an end. Friedberg, you said 2023 marks the beginning of the end of the US dollar as the global reserve currency. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:41:37): I nailed that one. Jason Calacanis (00:41:41): It it didn't fall off a cliff? David Friedberg (00:41:43): It didn't. Jason Calacanis (00:41:44): What was inflation in the first quarter of 2023? Chamath Palihapitiya (00:41:47): Just kidding. It fell off the cliff. Jason Calacanis (00:41:48): Oh, I I'm like, it's yeah. I'm like, wait a second. Speaker 3 (00:41:52): It's like, David Friedberg (00:41:52): what the fuck are you talking about? Jason Calacanis (00:41:54): Yeah. Sorry. You're confusing me. I'm like, really? That way I think you get the Jim Kramer or the, Professor Galloway moment for that prediction. Yeah. I think you might have missed that one by a bit. Alright. What do you got, Chamath, for this year? What do you got? Most contrarian relief of 2024. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:42:09): I think the enterprise value of OpenAI goes down. Oh, Speaker 3 (00:42:14): Okay. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:42:15): I don't think it has anything to do with OpenAI. I think it has everything to do with the rest of the industry. I mean, I think there's a couple of factors at play similar to what I just said earlier. But if you actually try to use these tools, which now I have been in my sort of day job as as CEO. I've been trying to build models. Sonny's been helping me. My takeaway are 2 things. Number 1 is the latency right now amongst all these AI tools Sacks building production quality code absolutely impossible. So you can't have APIs where you take 30, 40, 50 seconds in between a request to get data back. It's that's that's ridiculous. These needs to be Jason Calacanis (00:42:56): Non starter. Yeah. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:42:57): 50, 30, 40, 70 milliseconds. 2nd is the actual cost of a 1,000,000 tokens on any of these platforms is economically untenable if you're trying to build something. So Whether it's Amazon, whether it's Together AI, whether it's OpenAI, it's extremely, extremely expensive. So I think that Calacanis would tell you that if these two things are true, you should expect people to arbitrage that opening. And so if you see cloud services come out that allow you to basically get millisecond latency batch size 1, on the one hand, and second, where you have pricing for 1,000,000 tokens that sort of 10, 20¢ those folks, and they'll need to build their own custom hardware to do it, but those folks will multiply the capability of this market by a 1000x. Jason I think when that happens, the open source models really proliferate, proprietary models, and closed models go under pressure. And the existing economics of how you make money today will get reallocated to those different players. And I think in that It's gonna be very hard for existing folks. I I would say the same is probably true for David. The folks that have won up until today to maintain a multiple of market cap in this next Speaker 3 (00:44:22): year if that happens. And so my prediction is that will happen. And as Chamath Palihapitiya (00:44:22): a result, the enterprise values of of those companies. And I think OpenAI will be the most obvious. We'll go down. Jason Calacanis (00:44:31): People buying secondary at 90,000,000,000 right now will be under water next year. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:44:34): Although, it's, I, again, they have to believe that the revenue composition today is sustainable. And if you look under the hood, half the revenue is consumers paying subscriptions The other half of the revenue or enterprises paying for essentially some version of AWS. Jason Calacanis (00:44:51): Yes. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:44:51): But the problem is that version of AWS is economically non functional. It's unsustainable. It's way too expensive and it's way too slow. And by the way, that's just not an open AI problem. It's an entire industry problem. And so if this industry is really gonna be real, It needs to be literally dirt cheap and as close to 0 as possible. The minute that that happens, that revenue goes away. Jason Calacanis (00:45:16): So then they they're just left with the David Friedberg (00:45:17): subscription referral. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:45:18): By the way, people that provide that will be the ones that have the hardware to enable that 1000xing of the cost, Jason Calacanis (00:45:25): which is Azure AWS No. No. No. No. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:45:28): I think these are startups that are building proprietary hardware. Jason Calacanis (00:45:31): Oh, okay. Wow. So there's another prediction. Freeburne, what do you got? 2020 4 prediction. Most contrarian relief. David Friedberg (00:45:36): Okay. So I don't think we're past the conflict escalation stage. I think things are only gonna continue to mount So a lot of the theater that we see on a global stage is more fundamentally driven by these big cycles that we're in. So I think a a big one and a kind of tactical one. I think the big one that's contrarian is that there's an increased probability of a nuclear weapon being used for the first time in conflict. And I think that that conditioned on the fact that there are declining military supplies. There's declining appetite and capacity to support traditional conflict, meat grinder type conflicts that that we're seeing sprout up everywhere right now. And it were not everywhere, but in a lot of places. And you could see a moment where, as I mentioned in the past, someone gets backed into a corner and a tactical low yield nuclear weapon gets used. And I think that when you do that, it opens up the gates to hell. So it's a little scary. That's why, you know, we're all joking aside. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:46:39): That's why you bought the radiation since David Friedberg (00:46:41): And I and by the way, I don't think this is a high probability. And and I'm not joking. It's I don't think it's a high probability. I think it's, like, 1, you know, call it 1 to 2% chance something like this happens, but it's 10 x where it was 5 years ago. Jason Calacanis (00:46:52): And so that's my outcome of this is terrifying. Yeah. Speaker 3 (00:46:56): It's such a significant event that it's it's definitely one to kind of David Friedberg (00:46:56): be be thoughtful about And then the other one that I kinda said was tactical is I think there's a risk that turkey gets challenged to leave NATO that a lot of what's going on right now where turkey is siding with Chamath, this has obviously been talked about and rumored about for a long time. There's no real mechanism, by the way, for kicking a member out of NATO. But I'll share with you guys. There's a lot of political commentary that Turkey cannot be a trusted ally, and obviously that now, you know, Turkey is siding with folks who are actual threats to the west. The US incentive is you don't wanna see Turkey with the biggest one of the biggest armies in Europe run into Russia's arms You're gonna try to keep them in NATO, but there is a real risk that you start to see the first fracturing of NATO happen with Turkey being asked to leave or some negotiation on something that happens this year. So that that's one that I keep an eye on that is certainly not top of anyone's mind, but it certainly begins to Beg the question of the, the importance of NATO. Jason Calacanis (00:47:56): What do you got, Sacks? Your most contrarian belief. David Sacks (00:47:59): Can I first just make a comment on last year's pick? Speaker 3 (00:48:02): Yes. David Sacks (00:48:03): If it's okay, so I, you know, last year, I felt like I was going out in a limb predicting a rift in the bromance between Biden and Zelensky because it that relationship seems so tight. And with about 4 days left in the year, there was this article that came out in political that says that Biden Administration has quietly shifting its strategy in Ukraine. The article basically says that the administration wants to go on the defensive, and I think pretty clearly it wants a ceasefire and a frozen conflict it wants to get this conflict sort of out of the way swept under the rug before the election season really cranks into high gear. And the problem they have is that Zelensky does not want to negotiate a ceasefire with Russia that would involve Ukraine losing territory. So there is now a rift between maybe not Biden himself, but let's say Biden operatives the Biden administration and what Zelensky wants. And I think this will be the theme in 2024 is how do you rein in Zolinski after you've been telling the public for the last 2 years that our job is to support whatever Zelensky wants. Jason Calacanis (00:49:09): And your prediction? For this year. David Sacks (00:49:10): So my prediction for for this year is that the soft landing gets very bumpy. I think that over the last 2 months of the year, I think markets got super optimistic. They started pricing in big fed rate cuts, you know, let's call it 1 a half percent. So we had this huge stock market rally in November, December, and I think there's generally a very strong belief that the Fed will be able to pull off the soft landing. I'm not necessarily saying that there's gonna be a recession. I just, you know, I feel like I've predicted 10 of the last 2 recessions. So I keep basically predicting recession when there's not one. Yeah. But I do think that there's just been too much too soon of this euphoria, and I just think that this year is gonna be a lot bumpier than that, both politically and economically. I think there's just a little bit too much euphoria and over optimism right now. Jason Calacanis (00:50:02): I've attempted to go again with American Exceptionalism. I think I nailed that last year. America just had an amazing year in 2023 while Xi Jinping made unforced errors and getting rid of capitalism in this country and nobody's starting companies stock market falling apart, real estate falling apart. And now he's coming back to America as we saw when he had a summit with Biden asking people, please come back and invest again. Huge on Foresterra. And I think Russia with the huge on Foresterra losing 100 of 1000 of their citizens, their young people to a senseless war for no Jason. And losing customers in the west like Germany, as you pointed out. Sacks, I think American Exceptionalism will continue to soar. But I don't wanna pretty take the same prediction. So I also consider 2 other options, Apple, making huge gains in generative AI and then streaming services. Rightsizing and becoming highly profitable and having a rebound between those 2, I think I'm gonna go with Apple as my contrarian belief. I think Apple is gonna become a player in AI the end of the year. Maybe they reboot Siri, but they're gonna figure something out. And I think they're not going to remain on the sidelines when it comes to AI. So I'm gonna go with Apple making huge gains in generative. AI or AI in general. Maybe a new Siri coming soon. Best performing asset of 2024 in 2023 I women's seed stage investing. I think I'll be proven right in 5 years. But that's kinda hard to prove in the short term. Shamalff, you said cash and the front end of the yield curve. It's actually went with short term T bills as well. And, Friedberg, you went with semiconductor, capital equipment, oil, gas services, pharma infrastructure. Anybody have thoughts on their predictions from last year? Chamath Palihapitiya (00:51:41): Cash was pretty good at 5%. David Sacks (00:51:43): No kidding. Right? Jason Calacanis (00:51:44): As good as it gets. Yeah. David Sacks (00:51:46): This is not a lot of motivation to enter the markets when you're earning 5, 5 a half percent free. Jason Calacanis (00:51:51): Okay. So let's do our 20. David Friedberg (00:51:53): Cap equipment up Sacks% missing. It's a good year. Good year. Jason Calacanis (00:51:57): Friedberg? Well, what what do you a prediction for best performing asset of this coming year? David Friedberg (00:52:01): Oh, I took the uranium ETF. URA. Easy money. Whether it plays out in the next 12 months or over time, I'm not sure it's just an inevitability. A lot of folks have this bet on this trade on. It's It's gonna be a it's a it's an index on a businesses that benefit for mining and producing nuclear power, book money, uranium, producing nuclear power. China is building up 450 nuclear power stations as we've talked about. There's a lot of ESG driven demand. A lot of conflict driven demand, a big shift underway, a lot of deregulatory effort underway globally to try and get nuclear back on track. Nuclear power back on track. So these companies are gonna benefit from this big macro cycle. So it's a Jason Calacanis (00:52:45): And this is a an existing ETF where you're saying you you you roll 1. No. It's just what David Friedberg (00:52:49): I've called you, uranium, but the uranium tracking of ETF, URA is the ticker. Jason Calacanis (00:52:54): I like that a lot. Incentive case, so when David Friedberg (00:52:57): I I do a lot of esoteric general statements. This one, I thought I'd go a little specific. Jason Calacanis (00:53:01): I like it. I mean, it's it's it's a great prediction, and sentiment has certainly changed here in the US. That's what the trade David Friedberg (00:53:07): has been on. So since I'll just tell you guys, it bottomed out in March of this year at 19 Sacks. It's up 50% since then. And in the last 5 years, you know, it's up 2 x, but plenty of room to run. If you look at the underlying assets, the ETF track Jason Calacanis (00:53:25): Shamoff, what do you got? Best performing asset of 2024? What's your prediction? Chamath Palihapitiya (00:53:28): I have to do it with the worst performing asset of 2024 because it's a bit of a spread trade. So I'm gonna take the public software index, tech stock index, and my short is going to be the private tech software companies, the late stage, mostly Sacks companies. And I think we've all talked about the reasons why, but I think that the terminal valuations are getting reset in the public markets. I don't think the growth rates are there in the private companies, and so you're going to have a reset on valuation. In many cases, that reset may just be that they stay at the same valuation 3 years later, even after doubling revenue or more. The problem is you will have taken another 30% dilution between now and then because of all the stock based comp that these private companies give out. So long the public tech cycle short the private late stage tech cycle expecting a valuation contraction in the latter Jason Calacanis (00:54:27): do you got, Sacks do you think is gonna be the best performing asset of 2024? David Sacks (00:54:32): Well, I'm really not sure about this, so I would urge nobody to actually trade on this. But Yes. Jason Calacanis (00:54:37): This is this is not investment advice. Speaker 3 (00:54:40): It would Jason Calacanis (00:54:40): be clear. None of this is investment advice. Yeah. David Sacks (00:54:42): I'm not I'm not trading on this on these predictions, so you shouldn't either My guess here, just a guess, is energy is energy Sacks. Energy prices could be among the top performers of 2024 just because there's so much risk of conflict breaking out now and escalating. So I agree with Friedberg that there are huge risk of escalation in the Middle East. The Ukraine war is still going on. I think not enough attention is being paid to what's between Venezuela and Guyana. Venezuela is basically attempting to annex Guyana's Offshore Oil Reserves, which are huge. This is basically just pure theft. Ethiopia also has tense relationships with a few of its neighbors, and I could easily see there being a war that breaks out between Ethiopia and Egypt or Ethiopia and you're at Treya. And then then that could spill over and create further disruption in the red sea. We still have this unresolved issue of the hoodies. And, of course, you have NeoCon's brain for war with Iran as they always do. John Bolton just published another piece saying that we had to go to war with Iran. So there's just so many ways that the conflict could escalate and create, I think, a spike in the price of oil. Jason Calacanis (00:56:01): Alright. You know, I'd love to I in my heart of hearts, I believe the best performing asset will still be seed stage startups. But I'm gonna go with consumer comfort services. I think as austerity measures and this Whether we have a soft landing or a recession, it's clear the consumers have spent all their money. So they're gonna go for small luxuries like DoorDash, Airbnb, Uber, small things to have great experiences, and I'm talking my book in 2 out of those 3, which I own shares in. But I think consumers are gonna keep treating themselves to getting some DoorDash or, you know, getting an Airbnb and going to Japan or whatever it has to be. So Consumer Comfort Services is my pick for the best performing asset of 2024. Worst performing asset. Let's go right on to worst performing asset. We're cooking with oil. Works performing asset. I went with energy, Chamath, and tech energy junk debt. Sacks went with office hours in San Francisco, and Friedberg went with consumer credit. Wow. I think we nailed it in almost all those cases here. What do we got for 2024? It's actually got a 2024 of worse performing Jason. Again, this is not investing in vice. David Sacks (00:57:12): Yeah. So I'm not gonna trade on this. So just take it with a grain of salt, but I would bet against the magnificent 7 just because I believe that what goes up must come down and the hotter they are, the harder they fall. I'm not saying that the Magnificent 7 are actually gonna go down. I'm just saying that the S and P 493 are gonna catch up a little bit. So I would book this as a spread trade where I would bet on the S and P 493 over the Ming Dovson 7, because again, I just think that there's gotta be some catching up here and the huge gains made by the make some make an essence 7 were really based on story, you know, based on AI. And I don't see why those gains should be limited to the maintenance Jason 7 if AI is gonna place such a big role in the economy. Jason Calacanis (00:58:03): Chamath, I too, when you predicted earlier about OpenAI losing some value, my worst performing asset in 2024 is LLM startups. I believe they've been massively overvalued, and I believe open source is making an incredible run at them. I think they're gonna hit parity. And there's too many players. This is like having 15 search engines or 20 Chamath. There's just too many players, and there's too much parody. The prices make no sense. And I think they're all gonna come down by, you know, 50, 60, 70, 80% in terms of their valuations. That, that, that won't get marked in their but that will be the reality of where their stocks will trade on the private markets. Friedberg, what's your worst performing asset? Worst performing asset? Just based on what I David Friedberg (00:58:45): shared earlier, I would go short vertical Sacks, vertical software companies, and long cloud providers that have AI tools and platforms that will allow enterprises to build a custom applications in a low cost, low code way. And so you could obviously pick the companies that would go in that bucket along those those cloud bucket and go short the vertical bucket. David Sacks (00:59:09): Is there, like, a per seat price threshold that you think would kind of demarcate the companies that you think are at risk. In other words, like, I invest in plenty of Sacks Companies, that sell seats at 5, 10 bucks per per month. I'm just, like, very skeptical about it. It's yeah. That's worth and that process is wild to recreate that software. David Friedberg (00:59:31): And and so I'll give you an example that there's a vertical software provider. We're paying $5 per seat per year right now. And we look at that and we're like, okay. It's basically a data management tool for our particular vertical. Let's just go recreate that and did a very very low cost, and we're gonna replace it up. Cut that out. I don't wanna say that, but, yeah. Is it beep? So it's it's like you know, very specific, very expensive. But, I mean, Sacks, you could probably see the same thing happen in sales CRM type tools that are obviously also very expensive. And how Chamath Palihapitiya (01:00:09): much is it data received? How much do you pay? $5 per year. David Sacks (01:00:14): $5 per year. So that's basically And every employee's on it. $400 a seat per month. David Friedberg (01:00:19): Yeah. Like a 100 employees. So we're paying, like, $500. And so one of our software engineers is like, this. Sacks up a replacement for it. We're gonna roll it out in q 1. David Sacks (01:00:29): Okay. So is there is there like a per seat per month price that you think starts to where it doesn't work. Is it fifty bucks? What is the number? David Friedberg (01:00:37): I I I mean, I do the math, but, yeah, it shouldn't be in the range that it's at, for sure. But a lot of these guys, whether they had a monopoly, and it wasn't worth the company's time to try and invest in software. At the price point that they were charging, they found a market. Now the market has to compress I'm not saying that the companies go away, but I do think pricing compression is gonna hurt these businesses a lot. Jason Calacanis (01:00:55): If you pay could pay 50,000 for the same software instead of 500, you would not have spun it up yourself. So there is a reasonable number between those 2. David Friedberg (01:01:02): Correct. Jason Calacanis (01:01:03): And that reasonable number might be 250 or something. Yeah. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:01:06): But in here's the thing that we need to also factor in, which is that freeburg's companies that engineer could also then just release that product for everybody else to use at 10 and everybody else will then use it because it'll be good enough. And that, and that 80% of solution will take over the, we'll take over the market. David Friedberg (01:01:25): Yeah. That's my point. There's gonna be pricing This Chamath Palihapitiya (01:01:27): is the thing, like, I think that people underestimate how deflationary this whole thing is. That it's like Yep. Exactly. It's like 2 out of 3 orders of magnitude more deflationary than people have any inkling of. Jason Calacanis (01:01:36): Yep. Interestingly, I had, David Handmar Hansen on this week in startups and they're releasing something called once.com where they're gonna charge for software one time like we used to do. And their first product is a slack killer. And so the idea of paying per seat for slack, what they're planning to do is just charge you you know, 895. No. You find a hosting company. So Speaker 3 (01:01:58): it's gonna David Friedberg (01:01:59): be okay. So you've hosted school. It's old school. It's old school. Yeah. It's old David Sacks (01:02:02): school on prem software. David Friedberg (01:02:03): On prem, and then you pay you pay an upgrade fee when you upgrade the software, basically. I think they're David Sacks (01:02:08): gonna be paying them like a maintenance percentage That's why it's, Speaker 3 (01:02:11): you know, the old David Friedberg (01:02:12): school enterprise software, right, the pricing model was the revenue model was always built at when you did a sale, you would make, on average, 20 percent of the revenue per year in updates fees. And so that and then everything switch to Sacks, which would just continue David Sacks (01:02:26): to pay. Support maintenance, all that kind of stuff. So it's never they say it's one time. It's one time for the software, but if you wanna stay up to date, and get support and patches and all that kind David Friedberg (01:02:36): of stuff. Yeah. And then the old school enterprise software model was always, like, figure 20% of the install cost. Right? And by David Sacks (01:02:43): the way, this is one of the reasons why Oracle made so much money is they did a roll up of all these old school on prem software companies that weren't growing, but the maintenance fees were just rolling in forever. Yep. And they rolled all that stuff up. Jason Calacanis (01:02:57): And then probably raised the fees. I mean, for me, you know, when you have a 20 person company, 50 person company, the Sacks fees don't seem like a big deal, but when you get to know, when you're spending $500,000 or a $1,000,000 a year on something like Sacks, you know, then maybe you would consider other options. And I know people at large organizations that have done that because there's an open source competitor to it. So that does exist in the world. Okay. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:03:18): Now, but what Freeport is bringing up is like, why would you support $500,000 to $1,000,000 a year OpEx for software. I mean, can you really put a model together that shows that that's somehow accretive to you, especially if you're a money losing startup, it just doesn't make any logical sense. I understand that it happens. And the David Friedberg (01:03:39): fact that that software Sacks companies have been able to make 80 to 90% margins and grow on that, it has created the best business model in history. But I think what may become apparent now is that the SaaS business model is really a temporary phenomenon that existed between ubiquity of the internet and the development of AI and low cost, low code tools, for developing software. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:04:01): Yeah. The dirt it was an arbitrage of the dirt of engineers. It was gross margin that is correlated David Friedberg (01:04:06): to the right now. And now now that the work that software engineers could have done has been automated into software itself, you are going to see a lot of that RBentures Chamath Palihapitiya (01:04:15): say differently free brew. You could say, like, the number of engineers has now multiplied by a 1,000,000 fold. David Friedberg (01:04:21): That's right. And now everyone has them available. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:04:24): So then the gross margins, we're not gonna be 90%. The gross margins may be 30%. David Friedberg (01:04:28): And so everything gets competed Jason, and pricing goes down. Pricing gets compressed. And that's why this is a big macro trend for me. Like, I'm and I'm just seeing it across every company. Everyone's rethinking whether or not the pay receipt fees for all different types of software tools. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:04:41): By the way, the the part of that, which is economically true, is if you look at every other category in the economy, and you look at the gross margin profile of businesses that are not pure play tech. We have grown up and we've monetized this belief that tech companies not only can start at 80 to 90%, but stay there in deficit. Stay there. Yeah. David Friedberg (01:05:01): And they should be at 40%. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:05:03): Not even. Every other market can start off in the 50, 60, 70% when they're nascent, but capitalism competes away those margins down to 30 to 40%. Speaker 3 (01:05:12): Right. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:05:12): And a best in class business generates 20 to 25 percent EBITDA margins on a sustained basis. David Friedberg (01:05:18): Yeah. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:05:18): So if you believe that the average best run company is a 35% gross margin business with 20 to 25% free cash flow margins Text Sacks have a long way to go down. David Friedberg (01:05:29): Exactly. Exactly. Software software companies. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:05:32): Yeah. Software companies. Jason Calacanis (01:05:34): But if it's priced below the cost of you rebuilding it, then you're not you're just it's a buyer loaner, but you're just gonna Chamath Palihapitiya (01:05:41): buy it. The point is, like, when somebody does that, so Freebrook's company did that work, he doesn't even need to need want to make a profit from that software to just say anybody else can use this I have an auto GPT that will basically configure myself to you if you wanna use it. And now that n plus first company who's starting up with 2 or 3 people can now raise an order of magnitude less money and will write the GPT that connects to his And now she's this so this is my point where, like, it just it's it's it's just a race to the bottom. Jason Calacanis (01:06:14): Yep. Alright. Last year, for our most anticipated trend, Chamath and I both picked austerity. Feels like that, came to fruition. It's actually picked. David Sacks (01:06:24): You're kidding. Right? David Friedberg (01:06:25): We've not seen any austerity. David Sacks (01:06:26): We, added, like, 2,000,000,000,000 to the debt. Oh, I was talking about 34,000,000,000,000. Jason Calacanis (01:06:31): I was talking about consumer and and companies and individuals. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:06:34): Well, David Sacks (01:06:35): consumers didn't didn't cut either. I mean, they kept spending. And in fact, credit card debt is now at the highest level it's ever been. Where's the austerity? Jason Calacanis (01:06:44): Well, I think it's happening right now where people are maxed out. You're already starting to see it happen with travel in some of those areas, but yeah, we could be off by 6 months on this one. Sacks, you said Trump's influence in the GOP wanes. David Sacks (01:06:56): That was definitely wrong. Jason Calacanis (01:06:58): Yeah. That was special thinking. Friedberg, Celgene therapy. David Sacks (01:07:02): For you. Jason Calacanis (01:07:03): Wishful for you too. You know? No. David Sacks (01:07:05): That's true. I mean, right? Jason Calacanis (01:07:06): Forget. You don't want him as your candidate. David Sacks (01:07:08): Well, I can explain that. I mean, at the end of 2022, we had that election that was supposed to be a red wave and it turned into a red puddle. Remember that? And it was a part of the Jason. Yeah. Was a big loser for the GOP and a lot of the candidates, I'd say, in particular, the candidates who had been endorsed and supported by Trump ended losing and not doing very well. So and then by contrast, it seemed like the one part of the country where the Republicans have done incredibly well, was in Florida, where, obviously, the Sacks has won by, like, 20 points and added seats to their majority in the legislature. So it seemed like going into the year that DeSantis was kind of the heir apparent and Trump's influence would wane. But like you said, that may have been wishful thinking is clearly not what's happened, but a big part of the reason why Trump's influence is greater than ever is because of all this law fair, all these indictments against him, and this, prosecution and persecution of him by Biden and his minions. It's really, I think, galvanized the base to support Trump. Friedberg. Jason Calacanis (01:08:11): Well, you last year, you said cell gene therapy becoming more mainstream. How did that one pan out your prediction? Mostly Prestatrian? David Friedberg (01:08:19): I don't know about mainstream, but, I mean, we're seeing we've seen more approvals this year. It's been good. I mean, steady, steady pace of Speaker 3 (01:08:26): progress. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:08:27): The sickle cell product come up. David Friedberg (01:08:28): Sickle cell came to market. Yep. There's a few more that got approved. So in cell therapy. So it's great. Now we're seeing good progress there. And I I remember there's, like, over a 1000 in clinical. So there's this tidal wave coming to market serum of cell and gene therapies. They're gonna have a profound effect on a lot of disease conditions. So really exciting. Jason Calacanis (01:08:46): Friedberg, you wanna continue and tell us what your most anticipated trend insurance. David Friedberg (01:08:50): Here, I'm really excited, based on the progress we've seen in 2023. Of predictive models, AI driven discovery of novel molecules, materials, and methods of production in biopharma, in chemical engineering, lots of new materials, new drugs, that are actually coming out of software, not coming out of brute force, wet lab discovery processing. And then we're also seeing these really amazing generative systems on production processes and chemistry that are gonna unlock all of these new products and grow up costs. Going back to the deflationary point, not only does this introduce new products into the world that are gonna benefit humanity, but it reduces the cost of making them and reduces the footprint of making them. So there's a lot of great benefit coming from these predictive modeling tools that's starting to percolate its way into these industries. So I'm I'm excited about seeing where it comes to market this year. I'm sure we're gonna have the science corner at some point this year that it says Look at this amazing new thing that was discovered in software, and it works. And it's gonna be really cool. Jason Calacanis (01:09:53): Okay. What do you got your for your most anticipated trend of 2024. What are you most anticipating, Jevon? Chamath Palihapitiya (01:09:59): I think this is the most important year for Bitcoin that has ever existed. We are probably days away from a series of ETFs being approved And so this is the moment for Bitcoin to to use that old term cross the chasm and really seen mainstream adoption where our parents and our grandparents understand what it is, can buy it and then do buy it. And I think that if all of this comes to pass, Bitcoin will be a part of the traditional financial lexicon by the end of 2024. So that is my most anticipated trend of the year. Jason Calacanis (01:10:42): What do you got Sacks for your most anticipated trend of the year, Saks? David Sacks (01:10:46): Which MOSSA is a pretty good one. I think there's a version of that same thing in AI. I mean, I I it's hard to know exactly what all the advancements are gonna be in AI, but you know, when we look back on it in 5 or 10 years, it's gonna be pretty clear that the exponential pace of advancement in AI continued And so I can't say exactly what those breakthroughs are gonna be this year, but there certainly are gonna be some, and I think we'll see those innovations continue to percolate down to more and more of the average sort of mainstream consumer. Jason Calacanis (01:11:19): Sacks, once again, you and I are simpatico, I picked my most anticipated trend of 2024 as efficiency in the form of AI advances and outsourcing. Basically, a lot of Americans don't wanna work or they wanna work from home or they want high salaries. We have record low unemployment. Sacks to Biden. I'm joking. But all of this is forcing people to build robots, AI, and software to route around, you know, and make things more efficient. And I think the number trend I'm seeing from startups and they tend to adopt this stuff early is outsourcing to all other geographies around the world for work because it's so easy once you have a work from home philosophy, or paradigm at your company while adding somebody from Portugal, Manila, Argentina, Calacanis the same as adding somebody from outside of New York City or Silicon Valley or LA, but you can do so at a third of the price for somebody, maybe who really wants the work. And so I think efficiency is my most anticipated trend, but in the form of AI and outsourcing. Okay. Now media, everybody loves we do our most anticipated media. For 2024 for last year. I had Oppenheimer. Wow. That was great. Chamath, you had Dune part 2 that was delayed. Sacks, you also had Oppenheimer. What did you think of Oppenheimer, Sacks? David did it deliver for you? Have you seen it? David Sacks (01:12:49): I thought it was good, not great. Was very long, and it kinda wasn't on. Jason Calacanis (01:12:53): Yeah. David Sacks (01:12:54): It's not a movie. I need to see a second time. Let's put it that way. Jason Calacanis (01:12:57): Okay. And Friedberg, you said generative AI based media. For this year, I'm I have to confess I have inside information. So my prediction is gonna be the winner It turns out our favorite DJ is dropping a new album in 2024 and I got a release track. So my most anticipated media, I'll just play the route the unreleased track here. David Friedberg (01:13:22): What is this? David Sacks (01:13:23): According to NASA, there's a new look at Uranus. Greenas. Greenas. Talk Jason Calacanis (01:13:32): about my Eurena. Eurena. David Sacks (01:13:36): Is this young spielberg? Jason Calacanis (01:13:38): This is young spielberg. Coming at you, the summer jam of the year. Arenas. Speaker 3 (01:13:46): How was your colonoscopy? Jason Calacanis (01:13:47): It's a banger. Wow. There it is. Talk about my anus. Coming at you. A banger. David Sacks (01:13:53): He obviously likes the deep bass of my voice. Jason Calacanis (01:13:57): He does like the deep bass of your voice in his hands. Yes. So that's a banger. That's gonna be, I think, the that's gonna carry it's gonna be the summer anthem. The new album from Young spiel book dropping. That's the lead title Sacks. Your aunts coming at you. I also am looking forward to gladiator too is coming up, really, Scott, Lucia, the nephew Cometas, is a grown man. It's gonna be awesome, I hope. And Netflix's 3 body problem, if you haven't read the books, they're great. And that's being done by the Game of Thrones guys. That's gonna come out David Friedberg (01:14:26): to be all March. Jason Calacanis (01:14:27): And that's gonna be awesome. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:14:30): DND? Anyway, 3 body problem. Glad to Jason Calacanis (01:14:33): hear from me. David Sacks (01:14:34): Ran out, they were kinda Yeah. They were kinda on their own there, and then the show kinda declined. Jason Calacanis (01:14:40): It was a terrible last season. In this case, the 3 body problem is a complete series, and it's it's mind blowing in terms of its epicness. Sacks, what's your most anticipated median of 2024? Is there a Putin biography coming out? Is it Alex Jones's photography, 10 part series on Netflix. Speaker 3 (01:14:58): What do David Sacks (01:14:58): you got? Speaker 3 (01:14:58): What are Jason Calacanis (01:14:59): you looking forward to? David Sacks (01:15:00): Well, I I agree with you about Gladiator too. We actually have some low Jason in movies. I'm also looking forward to the dragon season too. Jason Calacanis (01:15:06): Oh, yes. David Sacks (01:15:07): But one project I will give a little plug to is Jimmy Soni's book, The founders, which is the story of PayPal and the entrepreneurs who shaped Silicon Jason Calacanis (01:15:17): Valley, the surplus David Sacks (01:15:18): that came out in 2022. The reason I'm mentioning it is because I optioned this book along with Jack Selby, who's another PayPal mafia alum, who has a film company, And so we've optioned this, and we have just made a deal with Drake's company called Dream Crew to turn this into some sort of television series. Could be done as a docu Wait. Jason Calacanis (01:15:39): Did you say Drake, the musician Drake? David Sacks (01:15:41): Yeah. He actually has a very successful production company called Dream Group. They're the producers of Euphoria, which is this huge hit. Oh, sure. On HBO. Jason Calacanis (01:15:50): Terrific. David Sacks (01:15:51): It is kind of a terrifying show. Jason Calacanis (01:15:53): If you have kids, it's terrifying. David Sacks (01:15:55): It is terrifying. Incredible David Friedberg (01:15:56): show about terrifying. David Sacks (01:15:57): It's an incredible show about terrifying, and, yeah, it is scary. Many of them. It's a big hit. So they've produced a lot of not just music, but television content. They're very interested in the story. And so we're partnering with them to create a TV show. So, hopefully, that comes together this year. David Friedberg (01:16:13): Are you in production this year on it, or is Speaker 3 (01:16:14): it No. David Sacks (01:16:15): It's going into the development this year. And, hopefully Chamath Palihapitiya (01:16:17): You get an easy credit sex? Yeah. Jason Calacanis (01:16:20): Oh, how Chamath Palihapitiya (01:16:20): much does the money for the rest of us to get EP credits? Jason Calacanis (01:16:23): 50. $50. Yeah. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:16:26): It a fifty grander David Friedberg (01:16:27): or is it a little? David Sacks (01:16:29): This is this is, this is gonna be an expensive one. Jason Calacanis (01:16:32): Oh, really? Well, who's your dream? Is it HBO? Is it dream or Netflix? Yeah. Who FBR Netflix? David Sacks (01:16:37): Ultimately, a studio would make this. Right. Jason Calacanis (01:16:40): You would want HBO or Netflix, I take it. Those are the top 2 in terms of making high quality stuff. David Sacks (01:16:44): Good. Yeah. There Jason Calacanis (01:16:45): doesn't have to be David Sacks (01:16:46): those 2, but they'd be good. It could be Amazon Prime. I mean, there's a lot of these. Jason Calacanis (01:16:49): And who are you hoping to play a young Sacks would play a young sack? David Friedberg (01:16:54): Good question. David Sacks (01:16:55): That's a good question. Jason Calacanis (01:16:56): Who would play a young David Sacks? Chamath Palihapitiya (01:16:58): What's the name of the guy that's dating Zendaya? What's your what's his name? Jason Calacanis (01:17:03): Tom Holland. How about that? Tom Holland? That'd be David Sacks (01:17:04): Oh, Peter Parker. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:17:05): Peter Parker? Yeah. Jason Calacanis (01:17:07): How about Billy Bobby Brown for you? David Friedberg (01:17:08): Only one guy can play a young sex that it would be Ryan Dossley. David Sacks (01:17:12): Oh, you guys are really shooting the moon with us? Tom Jason Calacanis (01:17:16): Holland's interesting. Kell is busy David Friedberg (01:17:18): on the internet right now. He's here to Speaker 3 (01:17:19): give you No. Jason Calacanis (01:17:19): I'm looking. I'm looking on the internet for a young actor to play youth Sacks? Well, we'll let the audience come back to Speaker 3 (01:17:24): that. Yeah. David Friedberg (01:17:24): Let the audience decide who plays a young Sacks. Jason Calacanis (01:17:27): Yeah. Shamal, if you're looking forward to anything in, media in 2024, did you have anything for us to, look out for? Chamath Palihapitiya (01:17:34): Jimmy Donaldson, Mister Beast, added a 100,000,000 subscribers on YouTube in 2023, more than two times the next largest Chamath. And if you watch his content, Mr. Beast Chamath, it's incredible. And that has become event based viewing now for 100 of millions of people. So I am really excited to see what production value gets cranked out in 2020 from these guys, but my that's my most anticipated media is, is misjudiced. Jason Calacanis (01:18:06): And Friedberg. Yeah. Anything you're looking forward to in the media space in 2024? David Friedberg (01:18:12): I mean, I put AI generated news which I think has become, like, an interesting. Have you guys seen these where there's, like, a broadcaster that just tells you been used and they're, like, naked? I haven't seen that. No. Jason Calacanis (01:18:24): That was the thing in the early days of the interview. Right? Wasn't there, like, naked news or something? Yeah. No. That was, like, a meme from the hip hop on there. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:18:31): News. No. Like naked news where, like, these people would be like in in the process of undressing as they as they, like, read the news. It was so stupid. Oh, really? Jason Calacanis (01:18:41): It was really dumb, but I it it did capture people's imagination, naked news. You could basically watch newscasters. Nate could read the news. David Friedberg (01:18:48): I do think you're gonna see a lot of this real time, generative video that's gonna take as its input, news feeds and develop some understanding and then present it back to you in whatever visual format you want. And so you'll have your own personal newscaster presenting you the stuff that's interesting and be like, no. No. Tell me less about the Middle East. Tell me more about Wall Street. Tell me more about tech. And you can basically interact with it and curate your own personal newsfeed. Whether that's through video or through text or through audio, you can have it present it to you any way you want. So I'm really excited for the date that that happened. So I don't know if they're doing scroll through Twitter all the time to get news, and then I can have, you know, a personally curated news castor. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:19:26): To your point, One of the things that one of the tasks that I had this year was the kind of like take a model and learn how to fine tune it. And Sunny and I, we took, stable diffusion and there's a mod to it called juggernaut Excel, which basically produces no, the most beautiful people you've ever seen. Like under any boundary condition, it doesn't matter what prompt you give, handsome. The people that it generates are the most stunningly symmetrically beautiful people, and All it's gonna take to your point is to just put this stuff together next year, and you'll have these people that capture your attention and can keep your attention and they'll tell you the news or whatever. David Friedberg (01:20:05): And you can just say skip. You can say tell me more. You can say go back. You can say, hey. I wanna hear more, like, double click on that story. And interact with it. It's gonna be incredible. I do think it's it's gonna happen in 2024 where a series of products will come out that start to look like this, and it'll get Chamath Palihapitiya (01:20:20): In terms of mathematics, if that, as they're telling the news, you can have another agent that's basically scoring it and telling you how biased it is. David Friedberg (01:20:29): Yeah. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:20:29): So, by the way, I'll tell you a crazy story yesterday. After Jason, Jason took Matt and I out yesterday. We had an epic day. It was incredible. Jason Calacanis (01:20:37): Two times. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:20:38): I was totally gassed skiing. And so I took an app and I fell asleep for, like, 40 minutes. And I woke up and I turned on the TV and I watched CNN for 20 minutes. Have you guys watched CNN? I can't David Friedberg (01:20:51): watch more than a minute. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:20:52): It is so bad. It is all Jason Calacanis (01:20:55): network news. Yeah. All network. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:20:56): No. It's not bad, Jason. Like, how biased it is and just how inaccurate it is If you were to watch it for an hour a day, you would have this total lopsided view of what's going on in the world that is completely not accurate. Here's my here's my point. There's nobody fact checking CNN just like there's nobody really fact checking Fox news, but my thought is these models and these AI tools should be the thing that presents objective news. And then actually just tells the truth. David Friedberg (01:21:21): I disagree. I think what'll happen is people will bias this the the delivery to what they wanna hear, and you'll end up having something that's gonna become more of an echo chamber for you. I wanna hear more about how x, y, or z is so great. I wanna hear less about the stuff that I don't agree with. And you're gonna curate your news to exactly what's happened with social media. So I don't know if that's necessarily how this will evolve too much because people don't like to hear they don't believe or what they don't already know. You mean they don't wanna hear the truth? Yeah. Jason Calacanis (01:21:46): They wanna hear the truth that speaks to them, you know, their version of the truth. Speaker 3 (01:21:49): It won't be David Friedberg (01:21:50): mostly titillated. You know? Jason Calacanis (01:21:52): It's about time I let you guys know that we ran an experiment right now, Chamath and Friedberg. I did this with Saks's permission. But Saks's participation here today was actually his AI. This is an AI version of Saks that we programmed. AI Sacks, can you reveal yourself and and what training data went into this version of AI Sacks. Can you can you give us something about your training data? AI Sacks? What training data was used? David Sacks (01:22:17): If this is a bit you wanna do, you're gonna have to give me more bad stuff. I mean, I'm smiling. Jason Calacanis (01:22:22): That would be hilarious though if we actually trade, like, a Sacks model, and we had him come on and we tried to fool the audience. David Friedberg (01:22:28): Can we just do a quick round table? If you guys were to summarize your in one word or two words, your emotional condition for 2024, what would it be? Like, how are you feeling going to 2024? Sex? David Sacks (01:22:40): Oh, I feel fine, but if I were to describe 20 four in one word, I would say the year's gonna be turbulent. Turbulan. But but but I feel I feel level. It's not me, but I feel like the world's gonna be very turbulent. David Friedberg (01:22:52): Jason. Jason Calacanis (01:22:53): Kind of exhilarated, enthusiastic about 2024. It feels like a lot of the cleanup work you know, that we had to do in 2023, 2022. Like, I I feel like a lot of that's we've we've worked through it. And, finding a lot of optimistic. So I guess that would be, you know, enthusiastic and optimistic about 2024. I'm really excited to go to work. And create I wanna create some new things in 2024. I feel very creative. Creative. Yeah. Yeah. Creative. Speaker 3 (01:23:24): I would Chamath Palihapitiya (01:23:24): say cautious and pensive. I think that just a lot of stuff is changing under foot, and I'm personally not excited to make a bunch of decisions because I worry that those decisions will have to be remade or unmade even 9 or 10 months later. So I I'm just kind of like very Pensive. I'm like, wow. A lot of stuff can change. Will change. Even just like, you know, and then Friedberg knows this, but, like, you know, there's, like, some deals underfoot that, like, I think for the industry as a law, like, as a whole, our just really meaningful things. And so to do stuff right now, fever makes me very anxious. So, right? I'm really cautious and and pensive. Right. Jason Calacanis (01:24:13): Where are you at? David Friedberg (01:24:16): I'm excited. I'm enjoying my new job as CEO at Ojalo. There's so much cool stuff happening. I'm personally excited about it. So this is the most excited I've felt in many years in terms of my my work. And then I would and I'm really excited to share what we've done next year, which or earlier this year, which I'll do. I'll do it on the show first, obviously. And then looking outside of the world, I'm just a little cautious. I'm a little nervous. I think there's a like, there's still a lot of Tinder boxes out there. So I mean, you guys know it. Like, we joke about it, but I do think there's dislike little mouth traps that can get set off. And then they set up all the other mouse traps. So there's a cup couple of those things out there that I'm a little nervous about. Jason Calacanis (01:24:52): But in the course of history, Aren't there always conflicts in the world? And, like, do you try to, like, put them on a spectrum of, like, there's always going to be conflict. There's always going to be. David Friedberg (01:25:00): There's never been this much in the world, and that's what makes me so nervous. Like, and then I think yeah. No. And I think they're related. So actual conflict relates to the debt load. And that's why I'm so nervous because we've never been you can't keep your societal fabric together if you have a lot of debt and you can't grow your economy. Those are 2. That's a simple fact. And so that leads naturally to finding points of conflict with other nations and other places. Because, you know, you look for conflict elsewhere. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:25:30): There's a good chance that will the Republicans will force some momentary temporary budget cuts in this next year. Couple of weeks shut down. Yeah. Couple of weeks. Yeah. 17. 2 weeks David Friedberg (01:25:41): 2 weeks away. Yeah. Yeah. David Sacks (01:25:42): It's pretty interesting. Under the terms of the debts that they agreed to last year, they're supposed to all agree on a new budget. And if they don't, then there's a 1% cut across the board on discretionary spending that goes into effect. David Friedberg (01:25:56): Right. David Sacks (01:25:57): If I were the Republicans, why agree to a deal? You're never gonna do better than a 1% cut in discretionary spending. If you care about austerity or just having any kind of reason in our spending, just take the 1% cut. David Friedberg (01:26:10): Yep. David Sacks (01:26:10): Yeah. Just don't agree to anything. Jason Calacanis (01:26:12): Agreed. David Friedberg (01:26:12): That's the most likely tap, right, at this point? David Sacks (01:26:14): I hope so. And, you know, a 1% cut cut is a rounding error, but the, Washington elites are gonna shriek like crazy over that. I mean, they're gonna Jason Calacanis (01:26:22): Yeah. David Sacks (01:26:22): Squeal over this minuscule cut. Like, we were slashing their budgets. David Friedberg (01:26:27): Right. David Sacks (01:26:28): But that's what we're trying to do, I think. Yeah. Exactly. Jason Calacanis (01:26:31): They're cutting their finger now and they're crying. It's like just clicked their toes. David Sacks (01:26:35): They're gonna have to David Friedberg (01:26:35): get off David Sacks (01:26:36): their arm when they got like a fingernail clip. Jason Calacanis (01:26:38): Yeah. It's nothing. David Friedberg (01:26:40): Alright. I gotta run. Jason Calacanis (01:26:41): Alright, everybody. What an amazing 2023 we had. Here's to a great 2024. You got your prediction show, and we'll be back with more news and a, and a classic all in episode next week. Have a great New Year, and, we wish you all the best in 2024. Speaker 3 (01:26:59): Your winter's wide. Rainman, David Sachs. And it said we open source it to the fans, and they've just gone crazy like that. Like, what airliners ride? I'm missing your driveway. Jason Calacanis (01:27:31): Think you, George, because they're all just useless. It's like this, like, sexual tension, and they just need to release their vows. Speaker 3 (01:27:39): What? You're a thief. What? Jason Calacanis (01:27:42): Where did you get mercy's artifacts?