All-In 的 2026 年预测

David Friedberg (00:00:00): This is what we need. Let him go. Jason Calacanis (00:00:01): Alright. Here we go. David Friedberg (00:00:02): This is Jason in the corner warming up. Jason Calacanis (00:00:04): Two. Shut the up, Freiberg. It's my show. Three, two. Alright, everybody. Welcome back to the number one podcast in the world, the podcast. I, Jason Kallikanis, named, created, and I'm the executive producer for life. With me, my three miscreant friends, Shamal Palihapitiya, our dictator. Love you, brother. Good seeing Chamath Palihapitiya (00:00:22): you, Antonio. David Jason Calacanis (00:00:24): Friedberg, our sultan of science. And, yeah, the czar. Yeah. Who's now made his way down to Austin? Welcome, brother. Let's go shooting. Let's get those beef ribs. David Sachs, how are you how are you how are you settling in to the great state of Texas? Everybody wants to know. David Sacks (00:00:43): I'm loving the 70 degree weather. Is it like this all year round? Jason Calacanis (00:00:47): You know, it's this is a very wonderful time of year. You miss the two weeks where it goes to freezing temperatures. We have ten days of freezing temperatures, and then we have eighty days of a 100 degree temperatures. But you'll be on a yacht or Italy or somewhere, during that like the rest of us. That's basically all you need to know about Austin. Just get out during the summers because it's brutal. That's it. Everything else is fan freaking tastic. But in all seriousness, you're here. You're here. You're you you've moved. You've domiciled in Texas. This is this is this has happened. Two of us happened. David Sacks (00:01:21): It happened in December. Jason Calacanis (00:01:22): Yes. David Sacks (00:01:24): And so we closed on a new house, moved in, went to the DMV. I signed a lease for an Austin office for Kraft. Nice. It's done. Jason Calacanis (00:01:34): It's done. David Sacks (00:01:34): It's done. Jason Calacanis (00:01:36): Okay. I gotta I'll get you a dentist and whatever else you need. David Sacks (00:01:39): I got a doctor too. Okay. Jason Calacanis (00:01:41): Does this mean I have to bring Moose back? This has been the big discussion in Speaker 5 (00:01:44): our house. Does this mean we lose Moose? David Sacks (00:01:46): Or do we have joint custody? He needs a significant acreage to run around. We know that. Jason Calacanis (00:01:51): Oh, he does. He does. But he misses you, and I I will definitely bring him by for a visit. And we'll we'll be playing some backgammon, smoking some cigars. David Sacks (00:01:59): You gotta come by. Jason Calacanis (00:02:01): Cannot wait. I cannot wait. Haven't come by yet. In Shamath. What about you guys? You guys gonna come down? Two of four besties. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:02:07): Matt and I started the process in December. We are coming to check things out. We have not made any final decisions, though. Jason Calacanis (00:02:13): Okay. Shout out to our boy, Ro Khanna, for driving everybody out of the state. David Sacks (00:02:17): So here's the funniest thing is we're all in the chat group discussing the California wealth tax, whether people are gonna leave her or not. So Chamath, he's making a big show. I'm gonna stay and fight. I'm not leaving my home. They can't drive me out. And then meanwhile, I get a call from my broker who says she's helping Chamath find a Speaker 5 (00:02:36): place. Uh-oh. What's going on? Chamath, dude, backdoor trade? I'm shocked that Chamath tells you one thing and is doing another. Oh my god. David Sacks (00:02:45): He's at least hedging his bets. Jason Calacanis (00:02:46): He's hedging his bets. David Sacks (00:02:47): A lot of are hedging their bets. A lot of people Jason Calacanis (00:02:50): are hedging. In Florida. He got a oh, I'm sorry. Larry's got a beautiful place in Florida, I see, according to the news. A lot of people. And I saw governor Abbott reached out to you. David Sacks (00:03:01): That's right. He welcomed me to Texas on x. Lot of people did. Michael Dell did. Jason Calacanis (00:03:08): You know? Ted Cruz. David Sacks (00:03:09): Ted Cruz. And, yeah, it was real welcome reception. It's funny. I never got anything like that when I was in California. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:03:14): Jason, I I put it David Sacks (00:03:15): for reason. The politicians were never Speaker 5 (00:03:18): They weren't embracing you. David Sacks (00:03:19): Yeah. They were embracing me. I don't know why. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:03:22): Who knows? I put this on next, but when you look at our friends that have all explicitly left, it's about half 1,000,000,000,000 of net worth, which I think is very bad for the long term budget of California. Then I can pick about 25 people just off the top of my head. And then if you think about all the people that will stay and fight, I still intend to stay and fight, but where if we're forced to look down the barrel of a an asset tax that has god knows what methodology, it's the only thing that's united everybody on the left and the right. Even Reid Hoffman thinks this is insane. I think a lot of other people will leave. It's probably half the total wealth that the budget estimated would be available to be taxed will be gone. Jason Calacanis (00:04:10): Wow. I mean, these are I I don't understand. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:04:13): That has huge implications to the social programs and the general budget of California. David Sacks (00:04:17): Listen. I think this is gonna be a topic this is a prediction. I think this is gonna be a topic throughout the year because it's not going away. They're gathering signatures right now. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:04:26): I agree. David Sacks (00:04:27): And we're gonna find out in, say, April whether it's on the ballot. Now it's possible they don't gather the signatures, but they only need about 850,000 of them. If it gets on the ballot, you know, again, we'll know in just a few months, there's gonna be a huge freak out. And I think there'll be a lot of people who will say, I can't take the risk. They're gonna leave the state. So I think there's gonna be a rush for the exits. There's gonna be all sorts of repercussions from that. Then there'll be an election in November, obviously. We'll find out if it passes or not, and then there'll be legal challenges. So this is gonna be a saga. I don't think this is over by a long shot. And quite frankly, even if it's beaten in 2026, I think a lot of people expect that some version of this comes back in 2028, which is the thing that kinda pushed me over the edge in terms of leaving is I don't think this problem is going away. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:05:14): It's very difficult if you're an entrepreneur with a good idea to start building here because if you get stuck in success with a bunch of illiquid stock and have no way to pay 5% of that value, you're going to bankrupt your own company. Just doesn't make any sense. David Sacks (00:05:31): And what if your company goes to zero the next year, which can totally happen with private companies? You still owe the tax bill. Jason Calacanis (00:05:37): Yeah. I don't know how that reverses itself. It's a terrible idea. I mean, I was talking to Ro Khanna and Eric Swalwell, who we had on the program, and I told these guys, like, these dopey Democrats, you have to stop fraud first before you start seizing people's assets or start a discussion about raising taxes. And, you know, we had Nick Shirley on last week who was doing his investigative journalism. Shout out to Shirley. And how do we sell to the American public that we want to seize their assets while and then sending it out the back door door to fund fraud? That makes no sense. It's a leaky bucket. So fix the bucket first, and then let's have an honest discussion about what the right tax rate is. And and why do this with a unique tax? Why don't I just put a point onto capital gains or income tax and and have that discussion? Chamath Palihapitiya (00:06:30): That's a great point. You could also do what Bill Ackman suggested, which is stop allowing these margin loans. There's a lot that actually live off of margin. Is it a good idea? Yes and no, depending on the asset base you have. And if the tax laws changed, we would all change the approach. David Sacks (00:06:46): You mentioned that Larry and Sergey have left the state, and they're probably getting dragged for that. But one of the reasons why I think they kinda have to is because the supervoting stock provision in this thing, where the way they calculate the value of your stock is not based on its liquid market value. But if you own supervoting shares, they multiply your ownership, your supervoting, by the market cap of the company, they deem your shares to be worth that. Yeah. So for example, Larry and Sergey, I think they combined have voting power of about 52% of Google. So what's Google worth these days? About 4,000,000,000,000? Chamath Palihapitiya (00:07:21): A half trillion. 4,000,000,000,000. David Sacks (00:07:22): Okay. So now I think I mean, they're they're very wealthy guys. I think they're each worth whatever, a 100,000,000,000 ish or whatever 200, Jason Calacanis (00:07:30): I think, yeah. David Sacks (00:07:31): 100. But now their net worth will be deemed to be, I guess each one of them would be deemed to be roughly 1,000,000,000,000 each, not the, call it, 200,000,000,000. So the 5% tax for them is more like a 25% tax of all their net worth. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:07:47): Well, mean, look. 50 It because you'd have to sell more than that to overcome the drag of selling to generate 25,000,000,000 or 50,000,000,000 of net worth. You have to sell two x that because you have to pay taxes on that. David Sacks (00:07:58): Right. So now what what is the point of having that supervoting provision in there? It's just totally punitive and vicious. Jason Calacanis (00:08:06): Alright. So let's just go with a quick prediction here. I'm gonna call an Audible. We're gonna get into the prediction show, folks. We've been delaying this prediction show because the world is moving at an incredible pace, and the news is just let's just call it what it is. It's just intense. We have a lot of stories you all want us to to cover. We will cover them, but we're gonna start with our prediction show. Just lightning round prediction here. Does this seizure tax I'm gonna call it what it is. It's a seizure tax. They're seizing assets. Does the seizing assets tax go into effect or not? Does it pass or not? Freeburger first. Yes or no. Give us a percentage polymarketed. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:08:42): Well, does it get on the ballot first and then Speaker 5 (00:08:44): does it Jason Calacanis (00:08:44): Well, we know it's gonna get on the ballot. I think we agree with that. David Friedberg (00:08:46): Right? That's not correct. Speaker 5 (00:08:47): Oh, we don't know. Okay. Jason Calacanis (00:08:48): So then I'll make it a two parter. Fine. Does it get on the ballot? Does it pass? Jamal, you seem ready to go. Go. No. Freebird, go ahead. I don't think Chamath Palihapitiya (00:08:56): it's gonna get on the ballot. Oh. I agree with that. In California. 100%. Jason Calacanis (00:09:01): Alright. Here's your polymarket. Everybody shout out to Shane. Oh, this is to make the ballot. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:09:05): Knicks fan. This is to make the ballot. Jason Calacanis (00:09:07): This is the question. Will the billionaires to Austin tax, wealth tax, drive people? Will it make it onto the California ballot? Lightly traded, currently at 69%. David Sacks (00:09:20): Did you see how much lower it was? That spike happened after Ro Khanna elevated the issue. So when it became a cause celeb among progressives and Bernie Sanders weighed in, it spiked up from, what was it, like, 45% to 80%. Jason Calacanis (00:09:34): Okay. So when Roe Conner committed political seppuku, it drove up. Maybe he had a bet. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:09:40): Maybe he placed the bet. David Sacks (00:09:41): I don't think it's political suicide for him. There's only two ways it doesn't get on the ballot. Right? One is if the SCIU UHW, which is the union that supported this, proposed it, doesn't have the money to pay to collect the signatures, Jason Calacanis (00:09:57): But you would think that they would. Right? Mhmm. David Sacks (00:10:00): 8,000,000 or so is roughly what it costs to gather the signatures for these types of things. Clearly, can find 850,000 people in California who support it if they're willing to put the effort in. The other possibility is that the powers that be, let's call it Gavin Newsom and the machine, are able to negotiate with this union to get them to stand down. And I don't have any insight into that because that's obviously democrat politics, not republican politics. Jason Calacanis (00:10:29): But Friedberg and Chamath might have some information. David Sacks (00:10:31): Okay. You have some insight. I don't know. Jason Calacanis (00:10:33): We're gonna we're gonna leave it David Sacks (00:10:34): at that. If it does get on the ballot, what do you think the odds are that it passes? Chamath Palihapitiya (00:10:38): I think it's gonna be a really important 40%. Moment for people to vote the ability to be industrious and have agency. Or what did Mamdani say? It's rugged individualism versus Jason Calacanis (00:10:53): Collectivism. Also known as communism. As in collect, we collect your assets, Jamal. David Sacks (00:10:58): Said that we're gonna replace Fragility. The fragility of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism. Jason Calacanis (00:11:07): I mean, at least he's saying it out loud. I I like this new I like Speaker 5 (00:11:12): these new politicians just telling you straight up what we're doing. David Sacks (00:11:16): Well, his new housing commissioner, have you seen this? Chamath Palihapitiya (00:11:18): Yeah. The white lady's like, white people must suffer. And then she's like she had these things where she's like, I see white babies in the airport, and it makes me mad. And I'm like, really? This is crazy. What man broke up with this lady? Because that dude has created a monster. David Sacks (00:11:35): Didn't she say something like we need to introduce a a new relationship between white people and property, and their property rights or something Chamath Palihapitiya (00:11:43): like Yeah. Exactly. Jason Calacanis (00:11:44): I mean, they're saying it out loud now, and then I guess she had a mental breakdown and started crying when they came to see her. I David Sacks (00:11:51): No. No. What happened is they pointed out that her parents own a multimillion dollar home, and then she broke David Friedberg (00:11:56): down in Jason Calacanis (00:11:56): tears. Oh, her mom's a white supremacist? David Friedberg (00:11:59): I didn't realize her mom was Speaker 5 (00:12:00): a white supremacist. That explains it all. This is all about her mom David Sacks (00:12:04): being I feel bad for her parents. Speaker 5 (00:12:06): Oh, god. Can you imagine your imagine one of your kids goes Jason Calacanis (00:12:10): and does this? It says, we have to go collect your houses. I mean, listen, let's do it. Let's do it. Everybody wants to hear our predictions for 2026. We've been pushing it off. We're gonna give it to you right now. We always like to start since, you know, we got into politics here on the program at some point. The biggest political winner, last year's prediction for biggest political winner for 2025 to remind everybody, Freeburg said young candidates. Well done. Gavin, who was on the show sitting in for Sacks, who was busy joining the administration, he said Trump and centrism would be the biggest political winner. Chamathi, you said fiscal conservatives who asked for restrained spending. It was a good thought. And I said Gen X and elder millennials, the J. D. Vance, Tulsi Sachs group. So let's go around the horn here. I wonder, Friedberg, who you think will be the biggest political winner of 2026. Friedberg, your chance. David Friedberg (00:13:07): Democratic Socialists of America, the DSA, just like the MAGA movement took over the Republican Party. I think the DSA is taking over the the the Democrat Party, and I think that's the move we'll see solidified in 2026. Jason Calacanis (00:13:17): Okay. Tight is right. Well done. Shama, who do you got for biggest political winner 2026? Chamath Palihapitiya (00:13:23): Whoever is going to fight waste, fraud, and abuse at the federal, state, and local level. Jason Calacanis (00:13:29): Got it. So it's an open lane to anybody? Chamath Palihapitiya (00:13:31): It's an open lane. It's a political gambit that I think will work really well in '26. Jason Calacanis (00:13:38): Very nicely done. David Sachs, gosh. I can't imagine who you would pick Speaker 5 (00:13:42): as a political winner in 2026. David Sacks (00:13:44): Well, I'm gonna Go ahead. I'm gonna say that the Trump boom is gonna be the biggest political winner of 2026. The good economic news has started breaking out before 2025 was even over. We have 2.7% inflation, core CPI at 2.6. Both those are 40 basis points below expectations, 4.3% GDP growth in q three, lowest trade deficit since 2009. The Challenger Great report out today show that job cuts dropped 50% from November, which was itself down about 50% from October. Jason Calacanis (00:14:16): Give us a number for the boom. What is it gonna be? David Sacks (00:14:18): Hold on. The S and P five hundred keeps making record highs. People are paying less for gas. Mortgage costs have fallen by $3,000. Real wages are up over $1,000. And by June, I predict we will see more rate cuts, possibly 75 to 100 basis points, and big tax refunds are coming in April, thanks to a bigger standard deduction and no tax on tips over time and social security. So I think there is so much good economic news coming and it's already started, And I think that it's gonna have a huge impact not just on the economy, but also on political perceptions for next year. Jason Calacanis (00:14:53): Pick your GDP for this boom year. Three, four, five, or six points, Sachs. I'm pinning you down. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:14:58): Pick Oh, wait. Well, if If you make it a prediction, then I I'd like to pick as well. Jason Calacanis (00:15:02): Okay. I'm gonna go Sachs first. David Sacks (00:15:03): I'm gonna go for 5%. Oh. Within a rounding error, I believe 5%. Jason Calacanis (00:15:07): Sure. Plus or minus. Shabath, you wanna pick a number? You said you did. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:15:11): I think the lower bound is five. I think the upper bound is six two. Jason Calacanis (00:15:14): Wow. Incredible. Wow. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:15:16): Just to put that in perspective, if we print six, the only country in the modern world that we think of as a quasi peer competitor that has printed six is the Chinese in a period where it had complete and total coordination and domination of a federal, state, and local economy. And the fact that we can do it under democracy and capitalism is outrageous. Jason Calacanis (00:15:43): Friberg, do you wanna take a stab at that? David Friedberg (00:15:44): 2026 growth? Yeah. 4.6%. Jason Calacanis (00:15:47): Okay. I was gonna go with between four and five as well. In terms of my prediction for the big political winner, I went back and forth between the emperor's apprentice, Darth Vance, JD Vance, or the Mondami moment. I said Darth Vance for a couple of reasons. You know, he is out there defending Trump, and he's surging on polymarket, ending the polls. He's obviously the copilot of MAGA. He's done a great job of being second seat. He is not usurping president Trump, which would be a big political mistake. He's really navigating being the copilot there. But he is the most popular politician clearly at Turning Point USA, and he is the OG in the America First America only moment. But I'm gonna give the edge to the Mondami moment. He's 34 years old. He's got Ro Khanna at 49 pivoting into a socialist. And I think that's because Democrats believe the easiest way to win in 2026 is to go full socialist. And Trump has, I think, given this lane because he's forgotten about the working man and woman in America. Net disapproval for Trump on the economy, 58% inflation. Despite what Saxe is saying there, it's still closer to 3% than 2%. And Trump just announced he wants to increase the military budget by 50% while people are still complaining about their health care. And Trump has turned into a complete neocon bombing seven countries this year and threatening to take over Colombia and Greenland. Who knows if that's Trump being Trump or if that's reality? But Trump becoming a neocon was not on anyone's bingo card, and I think Trump may have incited and given a bunch of fuel to the Mandami moment by not addressing the American people's needs and going for the international interventionism. Okay. David Sacks (00:17:35): Now There was like three different answers right there. Jason Calacanis (00:17:38): My answer is clearly Mondami. My second place though, I like to always explain my thinking is Darth Vance, JD Vance. Biggest political loser. Last year's predictions, I said Putin. Gavin said Putin. Shammoth, you said progressivism. And Friedberg, you said the pro war neocons would be the biggest political losers. Let's get into who we think will be the loser this year. Sax, why don't you start? Who's your big political loser in 2026, you think? David Sacks (00:18:06): Well, I said democratic centrism or democratic centrist, which is sort of the flip side of you guys saying that socialism or progressives are winners. And there's two reasons for this. One is because the socialist ideology is sort of ascended among the democratic base, especially the young people who support Mamdani, things like that. Unfortunately, universities, our work, madrasas, have done a terrible job educating these students, and they've brainwashed a lot of them into this woke ideology. But also there's the fact that there's so few house districts anymore that are truly competitive. So both the Cook Political Report and Larry Sabato's crystal ball, they say that there's fewer than two dozen house races that are genuinely competitive going into 2026. That's because of gerrymandering and so on. So if you're a Democrat incumbent who is in one of these districts, like all but a couple dozen of them, your only real threat to losing your office is from the left, right? It's some young AOC type coming up to challenge you, and so you don't wanna expose your left flank. So even the Democratic moderates have been shifting further and further to the left, and so you see this AOC Mamdani effect happening there. So I'm kind of in the same camp as you guys as this is not a good trend, but I put this as biggest political loser. Biggest political loser. Democratic centrism. Jason Calacanis (00:19:33): Got it. Sharmoth, what do you got? Chamath Palihapitiya (00:19:36): Can I just go back and just nitpick with you a little bit? Why do you think progressivism didn't fail? And the only reason I ask you that is outside of Jason Calacanis (00:19:47): a Chamath Palihapitiya (00:19:47): few pockets of progressivism and specifically Mamdani. If you look at the elections in Virginia or the elections in New Jersey, those are more centrist than progressive. And if you look at the general approval rates of Democrats, they trended consistently down through 2025 as they handwrung themselves about leaving centrism and embracing progressivism. So the more talking points around progressivism that emerged, the poorer they performed. So I know your perception or some people's perceptions may be different based on one localized win, but if you look at the broad trend, it didn't work. Let's just put that out there just as just as the facts and not the vibes. David Sacks (00:20:30): Well, I don't want it to be true, just to be clear. I would Jason Calacanis (00:20:33): Oh, I'm I'm not I'm picking David Sacks (00:20:34): those for the Democratic party to Speaker 5 (00:20:35): be a centrist. Either, but it does Chamath Palihapitiya (00:20:37): seem like that part series. Wrong, and I wasn't wrong. Jason Calacanis (00:20:40): So Well, it might be a jump ball. It might be the best way to describe it because you have the Mondavi effect. Is right. And okay. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:20:47): Just look at the numerical numbers. The trends were horrible. Like, meaning wherever the Democrats started, the more progressive talking points they added, the poorer and poorer they performed. The approval ratings went down. The disapproval ratings went up. I'm not saying that they didn't win a mayoral race. They did do that. I'm just saying broadly speaking, nationwide is the Democratic Party and its embrace of progressivism, at least at the federal level, has it paid off over 2025? And I would say categorically, mathematically not. Okay. Now going to 2026. What is my biggest political loser? What I would say is the biggest loser of '26 is the Monroe doctrine. I think that when historians look back on the Trump presidency, they're going to rewrite it. I think people have tried to minimize Trump's worldview as a Trump corollary. I don't think that's what this is. They even try to minimize it by calling it the Don Roe doctrine. Don't I think that's what this is. I think that there is a clear Trump doctrine that trump the Monroe doctrine. And I think that is the political loser because there is a huge body politic that has been built around the Monroe Doctrine. How do we view wars? How do we view our spheres of influence? How do we view economic multilateralism versus unilateralism? All of that is out the window. You know, we view this as hemispheric dominance. That's Trump. We view it as proactive and in very specific cases interventionist. We intervene against drug cartels. We control immigration. We secure vital assets. That was, you know, not really the scope of the Monroe Doctrine. We have more transactional relationships, quite honestly, which allows us to react in the moment. So I think the Monroe Doctrine is the biggest loser of 2026. Jason Calacanis (00:22:38): Freeberg, your biggest loser, 2026. David Friedberg (00:22:42): My biggest political loser of 2026 is the tech industry. I think AI and tech wealth have become the lightning rod for populism on both sides of the aisle. I think, the right is fracturing a bit where this, call it, alliance between tech and MAGA seems to be getting a really strong challenge from the more populist movement. In the same sense, the left is turning hard on tech because of tech's alignment with the right. And so I think we're gonna see in the midterms a really big referendum against the tech industry coming out of this populist movement. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:23:16): That's a great one. Can I tell you guys a little story from yesterday? I had a meeting with three very senior sitting senators before I flew back to California. These are Republican senators. And, Friedberg, I was surprised exactly what you said. There is a couple of companies that have exacerbated their frustration. They view those companies, these are techs and the tech leaders of these companies, as just not trustworthy. And they've largely been grin these guys for a long time, and they're pretty frustrated with it. So to your point, it is palpable. David Sacks (00:23:52): Look. I can tell you that the natural ally for tech is with MAGA because we still believe in property rights and innovation. And if the Democratic Party is truly going progressive, which means socialist, they wanna rewrite your relationship to property rights, whatever that means, and impose wealth taxes and unrealized gains taxes and all the rest of it. So look, I don't think tech has that much of a choice as Arnold Schwarzenegger said in one of those movies, come with me if you wanna live. Jason Calacanis (00:24:21): Come with me if you want to live. Yes. Get in the chopper. David Sacks (00:24:25): But let me say this, the reason why there's anger on the populist right is because they remember the censorship and the de platforming and the shadow banning and all that kind of stuff. And what there needs to be is, I think there just needs to be some meetings, truth and reconciliation that happens between some of these tech leaders and some of these conservative influencers. David Friedberg (00:24:45): Guess what, David Taks? I know one guy who can help make that happen. Jason Calacanis (00:24:48): Yeah. No. I would I David Sacks (00:24:49): would like to host some of these meetings in 2026 and get these people together. Because I think that the tech companies have either realized their mistake or they were pushed into it in a lot of cases by the Biden administration. Jason Calacanis (00:25:02): Yeah. A gun to their head. David Sacks (00:25:03): Yeah. They a gun to their head. Now I also think that one other mistake they've made is quite frankly, they've been donors to only left wing causes. And so if you listen to Cernovich's account, he's like, look, guys, you banned us. You cost us our livelihood for years. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:25:20): Debanked David Sacks (00:25:20): us. Debanked us. Where's the restitution? Or at least at least start giving some support to our conservative Chamath Palihapitiya (00:25:28): cultural policy. You nailed it on the head. The senators that I talked to, that's exactly what they want. They just wanted an apology. Just be honest and say you did it. David Friedberg (00:25:35): This asset seizure tax proposal in California and the conversation about other states, I think, is bringing a lot of people to that table, Sax, at least the tech people to say, wait a second. Maybe I shouldn't have been only left donating over all these years. Maybe maybe I shouldn't have done this. And I think contrary to what people may think, it may actually be doing a lot more positive for the right side than the left by putting this forward. This may actually be catalyzing a big change in Silicon Valley. Jason Calacanis (00:26:07): Yeah. And if you if you think about it, if you were Zuckerberg or you were, you know, the Google executives and the FBI is telling you, hey, we need you to take care of these censorship issues. We need you to label these things, etcetera. You know, it puts you in a pretty tough situation if the FBI is calling you, if you're trying to do M and A, and then, you know, look now. M and A under Trump is on fire. We'll talk about that more in our prediction show. For me, I was going back and forth in my biggest political loser with these dopey Democrats who are centrist and the the new neocon Trump. Now I don't know if Trump will continue these neocon ways. So I'm gonna just align with Sacks here that the centrist Democrats are gonna be this year's biggest political David Friedberg (00:27:01): Alright. David Sacks (00:27:01): Well losers. Now that you've mentioned twice that Trump is a neocon, I have to respond to this. Jason Calacanis (00:27:08): No. You don't. You don't Speaker 5 (00:27:09): have to, but go ahead. David Sacks (00:27:10): Okay. Look. The the problem with neocon regime change operations was, I'd say, threefold. Number one, the invasion. You have this giant invasion, land armies, huge numbers of people getting killed, took, you know, months or a year. Took them like a year to get Saddam, right? Number two, you then have an occupation because whoever you then put in power only stays in power if you have American GIs there pointing the guns. So you end up with a ten or twenty year occupation. And then third, you have nation building, which is you end up spending trillions of dollars basically trying to turn them into us so that our troops can leave. That was the mistake of Afghanistan and Iraq. But look, what has Trump done that is like any of those things. There's been no invasion, no occupation, and no nation building. This war, I guess, with Venezuela, if you wanna call it that, it was a flawless operation. It lasted three Yeah. I mean, I woke up and it was like, you know, the meme where it's like wake up, honey. It's like, wake up, honey. Trump's won another war. It was over before it even started. They went in there and they basically captured Maduro. No Americans were killed. It was an absolutely flawless operation. And they are bringing him to justice. By the way, he begged for it. And he's on tape talking a lot of smack at rallies saying, come get me, you know, calling the Americans chicken and so on. So in any event, he was begging for it. We can go into a lot more of the the reasons for doing it and defending it, but I just don't think this is a neocon policy. And in fact, it's the Democrats who've been calling to put in this Nobel Prize winner that you interviewed, Freeburg. Right? What's her name? Maria Conchito Alonso? Machado. Machado. Okay. Anyway oh. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:28:58): Hector Elizondo. I think it's Hector Elizondo. Think he Jason Calacanis (00:29:02): did somebody from the brat pack. David Sacks (00:29:04): No. She was in running man, I think. Speaker 5 (00:29:05): Anyway Exactly. But David Sacks (00:29:10): but the Speaker 5 (00:29:10): You're talking about the Cuban Venezuela actress? David Sacks (00:29:13): I thought her name was Maria Conchita Alonso. Okay. Maria Carina Machado. Sorry. That's just what I thought. Speaker 5 (00:29:19): You mean miss world miss world Venezuela nineteen seventy five winner? Maria? David Sacks (00:29:24): Look. The Democrats are are criticizing the administration for not putting her in power. But look. Here's the problem. Nobel prizes don't keep people in power. Men with guns keep people in power, and she doesn't have the men with guns. So it'd be American GIs there. It would have to be the guns to keep her in power. And the administration has not done that. They're looking to basically work with the existing regime. And the big reason why we got sucked into Iraq is because of that whole debathification process where we didn't just get rid of Saddam, we took out the entire lead of the country, which created a huge insurgency. So there's been nothing like that, J. Cal, is what I'm trying to tell you in this case. It's a whole different paradigm is what I'm trying to tell you. We're gonna need a new name for it. Maybe Jamath is right. It's definitely not neocon. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:30:12): Not Neo. Jason Calacanis (00:30:13): We might need a new branding for it. It depends on, you know, if Trump is cosplaying NeoCon when he says he's gonna take Greenland, when he says he's gonna take Columbia next, when he says he's gonna take Cuba. He's certainly playing the character of NeoCon publicly here. And who knows? That could be Trump just positioning himself and anchoring future negotiations. But if I was telling you, you know, before the election when you were saying, hey, do not let certain people become president, Nikki Haley, etcetera, because they're neocons, and they're gonna go to war with Venezuela. They're gonna go to war with Iran. Well, that's exactly what Trump has done. And as flawless as our troops did. And my my lord, the we have the greatest military ever. So just incredible job and shout out to them. To do this and lose no American lives was just unbelievable, and it just says something about the dedication of these individuals. But things can go wrong no matter how good you are. We could be sitting here right now with 12 captured Delta Force. We could have 50 dead Americans. Where's the war? Did happen. But if that did, this is where you have to be intellectually honest. If we were dealing with a situation where they didn't pick up the target and we had lost American troops and God forbid they had taken hostages, we would be sitting here with a much different discussion. And so we have to be very careful. I give we're not. I give Trump, but that is an equal possibility. David Sacks (00:31:29): It's like Jason Calacanis (00:31:30): It's certainly a nonzero possibility. Things can go sideways. David Sacks (00:31:33): You sound like when Sam Harris was saying that imagine if COVID actually killed a lot of people, then the conversation would be different. Well, it didn't. There was no war here. By the way, with deadlock Jason Calacanis (00:31:45): let's hope there isn't. And let's hope there isn't, you know? Chamath Palihapitiya (00:31:47): And this Jason Calacanis (00:31:47): is where I'll give Trump a lot of credit. He has been strategic. I do give you that. David Sacks (00:31:50): Stick and move. Stick and move is is the game. Jason Calacanis (00:31:53): I pray that he can continue this. David Sacks (00:31:54): By the way, on Greenland Street. First of all, even if we took Greenland, it's not gonna be a new there's 30,000 people who live there. But I think it's more likely that we'll we'll make a deal. I think we're gonna make an offer they can't refuse. Jason Calacanis (00:32:06): Okay. Ken Houry. Shout out to our guy, Ken Houry. Maybe you can make a deal. David Sacks (00:32:09): Let's make a offer they can't refuse. Jason Calacanis (00:32:11): Yeah. I mean, how much could it cost? I mean, there's nothing there. Biggest business winner for 2025. Looks like Freiberg picked robots and autonomous hardware, year of the robot. I think if you include Robotaxi there, you nailed it. Certainly, year will be the year of optimus 2027. Chamath, you said dollar denominated stablecoins. I think given what we've seen with regulation, was spot on. Gavin, shout out to our friend Gavin, he said big businesses that use AI thoughtfully, another great one. I pick Tesla, which is at an all time high, and Google, which of all of the max seven Crushed. Is the biggest winner, and they did 65%. So I know both of those. We did I think we all all just crushed that one. Who do you have, Freiburg, as your biggest business winner prediction for 2026? Go ahead, Freiburg. David Friedberg (00:33:04): I couldn't decide. My number one is Huawei, which I've mentioned in the past out of China. I think Huawei's effort to partner with SMIC to go deeper in the chip stack, and they're just firing on all cylinders. I do think keep an eye on Huawei over the next year. It's, it's gonna outperform expectations, at least the Western expectations. And the second is, Polymarket. I think Polymarket's evolved from being kind of this one off quirky prediction market to actually really providing insights into current events and the news in a way that none of us anticipated. And I do expect that after the deal we saw with NICEE that all of the exchanges, and we're already seeing this with Robinhood and Coinbase, and we should expect something from Nasdaq this year. Adena Friedman talked to us about this. But I do think that prediction markets could become not just markets, but also news. And I think Polymarket's, just in such a position to have a breakout year. Jason Calacanis (00:33:59): Okay. Great one. Chamath, biggest business winner for 2026 after yourself. Who do you got? Chamath Palihapitiya (00:34:06): Yeah. It's hard. I mean, I will pick me. Jason Calacanis (00:34:09): Yep. We It's already done. David Friedberg (00:34:11): That one's come. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:34:12): It's already in the books. Jason Calacanis (00:34:13): Don't hurt your elbow. Don't hyperextend your elbow. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:34:16): Already in the books, so can't it's all downhill from here. David Sacks (00:34:19): Nick, we need to use that meme of Obama giving himself a medal. Speaker 5 (00:34:24): Shemad is giving himself Chamath Palihapitiya (00:34:27): I will pick copper. Jason Calacanis (00:34:29): Okay. Copper. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:34:31): We are still completely underestimating how short we are in terms of the global demand supply dynamics of a handful of critical elements that we need, again, in the Trump doctrine view of the world, that is no longer as multilateral as it was, and we need to have unilateral national security. And if you look through that lens, the asset that is set up to go absolutely parabolic is copper. And the reason is that it is, at least as it stands today, the most useful, cheap, amenable, conductive material that we have. That material manifests in everything from our data centers to our chips to our weapon systems. It's just everywhere, everywhere, everywhere. And right now, Jason, we are on a path by 2040 where we will be short about 70% of the global supply at current course and speed. And Copper. I will pick copper. Jason Calacanis (00:35:39): Sax, what do got? Biggest business winner of 2026, your prediction. David Sacks (00:35:42): I said the IPO. I think 2026 is gonna be a big year for IPOs. I'm not gonna say which I think there's gonna be a bunch of them, a bunch of successful ones. And I think we could see trillions of dollars of new market cap created of public companies. Jason Calacanis (00:35:58): Totally. Speaker 5 (00:35:58): For a David Sacks (00:35:58): while, people were concerned that the number of public companies were shrinking. Public companies were actually being taken private. This is gonna be a big reversal of that trend. So I think this is gonna be part of the Trump boom will be the idea. Jason Calacanis (00:36:09): Love that one. I like that one. Great one. I went with, since I nailed the mag seven for last year and picked the highest performer with Google, and I placed a bet on that, so I'm feeling pretty good about it. My prediction for 2026 is that Amazon is gonna have a massive year Interesting. As they continue to replace humans Why? Why? With robots. That's why. Here's a chart for you. I've been talking about this a little bit. I think this is the most important company to watch because Zoox, their self driving is working. They're making great progress with it. And here, when you look at this chart, you can see they're essentially flat in terms of hiring humans and they're surging in deploying robots. And they did their whole PR comm strategy of calling them cobots and donating to Toys for Tots, etcetera. I think they'll be the first corporate singularity, which is to say the first company to have more robots driving their bottom line than humans. So that's my prediction for 2026 is Amazon, and I'm going to place a bet on that. David Sacks (00:37:08): My prediction is that J. Cal is such a luck box that he'll end up being right about Amazon, but not having anything to do with the reason he gave. Jason Calacanis (00:37:16): Yeah. Right. They'll hire Speaker 5 (00:37:17): a billion humans to go do something, and it'll be for a different reason. Jason Calacanis (00:37:21): I am a luck box. That is true. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:37:22): It'll just be better free cash flow, and all of a sudden, people using AWS and JCal will be right. Jason Calacanis (00:37:28): Well, I actually, I think the reason is if you just if you think about it, I don't know if you guys have had this experience, but with the delivery business, which was kind of a dog for a long time, obviously, AWS is crushing it. But that delivery business here in Austin, we get everything the same day. You're gonna experience this, David. There are because of the, I think, the geography here and the ability to have depot centers very close, everything you order on Amazon comes within the same day. David Sacks (00:37:53): Know what? I've noticed Jason Calacanis (00:37:54): that already. David Sacks (00:37:54): I've already started ordering things from Amazon. You're right. It was all same day. I'm like, wait, what is going on? Jason Calacanis (00:37:59): What it is is we have a lot of space 15 miles outside of the city center, 20 Cent, and they built these huge warehouses. So you just get everything within four hours. They're like, we'll be right there. It's very bizarre. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:38:11): So Jason, you'll buy like virtues at like 8AM and it'll arise by noon. Jason Calacanis (00:38:16): Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. And when you put your order in for ethics and morality, it just never shows up. I don't know. It's lost again. Who knows? It's just incredible. We're just both ends of the spectrum here. Speaker 5 (00:38:28): Moral it's like so I Jason Calacanis (00:38:30): was like, hello, customer support. I ordered a moral compass two years ago. Still hasn't arrived. Okay. Biggest business loser. I love you, Chma. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:38:37): It hit behind the 20,000,000,000. David Friedberg (00:38:39): It did. It did. Absolutely. Can't it. Speaker 5 (00:38:42): I got my beak wet, so I hope your compass never shows up. David Sacks (00:38:45): You got your beak wet on that deal? Jason Calacanis (00:38:48): Well, Sandeep came to Besties, and he wanted to collect all Besties. We all got to place a little bet. And then David Sacks (00:38:54): By the way just finished By the way, I divested I divested my Grok shares as part of joining the government back in, like, February or March. God. So Chamath Palihapitiya (00:39:03): Oh, by the way by the way Jason Calacanis (00:39:05): Would it would that cost you, like, what, the last triple up? David Sacks (00:39:08): Last quadruple? It was a small position that came from Grok acquiring Sunny's old company. We didn't invest in Grok. So it wasn't big, but the point was Jason Calacanis (00:39:16): Yeah. It's just another example of you sacrificing for the country, which I give you a lot of credit for. David Friedberg (00:39:20): It's good for Saks to put that on the record. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:39:22): Yeah. Good. David Sacks (00:39:23): Well, just so ridiculous because I'm confused of somehow doing this job for money when it just keeps costing me money. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:39:27): It's negative money. David Sacks (00:39:28): X AI just raised an up round at twice the valuation from the last round that we had to divest Yeah. That No. No. We didn't sit it out. Hold on. Let's be clear. We didn't sit it out. We divested it. Jason Calacanis (00:39:41): Oh. So you place the bet, and then before you get to collect the ticket, you lose the last double up or triple up. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:39:49): The economic cost to Sacks will probably exceed a billion dollars by the time he leaves. David Friedberg (00:39:53): Personally, this is crazy. I mean, people need to know this. It's a very important thing to put on the record. I think it's important for people Chamath Palihapitiya (00:39:58): to recognize. Should know. All these dumb reporters don't get it, but Sacks has sacrificed financially an enormous amount to work on behalf of the government and the people. That's that's really amazing. David Sacks (00:40:10): It's fine. Wouldn't even say anything about it if it weren't for the fact that we got these mainstream media reporters lying and saying the opposite, that somehow this job is making me money. David Friedberg (00:40:19): Right. David Sacks (00:40:19): I wouldn't say I'm worried about it otherwise. Jason Calacanis (00:40:21): Alright. Biggest business loser 2025. Gavin said federal government service providers, I guess, because of Doge and them being held to the fire feet to the fire there to give us a better deal. Old guard defense contractors like Bowen and Lockheed was yours, Friedberg. And, Chamath, you said the max seven, you expected a decrease in the record concentration. I said OpenAI, which would see a peak valuation, and I would say I got that wrong. What do you got this year, Friedberg? Who do you think is gonna be the biggest business loser of this year? David Friedberg (00:40:55): To follow-up on Jamath and my conversation at Christmas dinner, I think the state governments are gonna have a real problem with finding financing because what's going on with the exposes that are underway on waste, fraud, and abuse in state agencies, I think, is going to lead to a conversation that's gonna cause folks to question the long term solvency and operations because the response won't be, hey. Let's cut out the waste, fraud, and the abuse. This response is gonna be, we gotta keep it going. And that is what is gonna give people fear is that if they did respond, call it equivocally to the discoveries that the governments did, then I think that there's an opportunity to continue to be able to borrow and access capital markets. But I do worry a lot about state governments, borrowing. I think the other thing that's gonna hit the the fan this year in state governments is all of these, unrealized pension liabilities. I think when these numbers start to come out this year and a lot of people are now digging deep into it, folks are gonna wake up and be like, holy There's a ginormous hole in these states and their obligations. Jason Calacanis (00:41:58): And why does the government have to do these pensions? Why can't we do superannuation like Australia does? We have to get this out of the I love David Sacks (00:42:05): that pick. David Friedberg (00:42:06): That's called a defined contribution instead of a defined benefit. And if you get this defined contribution model and then just have good management, it all works out. So this is basically the problem with Social Security. Social Security is a defined benefit, and then all the money just doesn't sit anywhere. It doesn't exist. Right. If it was a defined contribution Jason Calacanis (00:42:22): It's just a liability. David Friedberg (00:42:23): And let me let Jason Calacanis (00:42:24): me give a shout out. If it David Friedberg (00:42:25): was a defined contribution like Invest America accounts or Trump accounts as they're being called, and you put the money in and you see how much you have, and every year you track it, that's what your retirement is gonna be just like we might have with our four zero one k's or IRA's. That is a system that actually has true solvency. Otherwise, it becomes this runaway train of liability, and that's effectively what the states have set up, and it's very dangerous. Jason Calacanis (00:42:44): And if we were to take government out of it and then every American just had to put ten, twelve, 14% into their retirement account and it was forced, you would have happy people who feel some agency in their lives, which the people of Australia do. Chamath, who's your loser twenty twenty six? Chamath Palihapitiya (00:43:03): I will pick the software industrial complex. So these are the companies that sell licensed SaaS to the corporations of America. It's about a 3 to $4,000,000,000,000 a year economy that is separated into three buckets. Bucket one, which is the smallest, is the initial licensing. That's probably five to 10%. Buckets two and three, where all the money is made, is what's called maintenance and migration, which is how do I just maintain this big bulky license that I just bought for $300,000,000 as an example, or how do I migrate it from product A to product B? Those last two buckets represent 90% of all the dollars in revenue that's generated in software. And because of the advancement of these models and the advancement of these technological techniques that we are all uncovering, building agents, building systems, I think you're going to see that total economic opportunity shrink and contract aggressively, the companies will still be able to do their business. It'll just be at a much, much lower incremental revenue. The customers will be able to do their business. They'll have a lot more flexibility, and a lot of upstarts, I think, will have opportunity. I'm speaking my book, obviously, but I'm seeing it on the ground because Jason Calacanis (00:44:30): you a company building software. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:44:32): Our entire business, '80, ninety's business, has basically migrated to disrupting maintenance and migration patterns, I cannot describe how much opportunity there is. It's very tactical, mundane, not very sexy work, but it's incredibly lucrative. And so I expect that that thing is gonna shrink. It's gonna impact SaaS companies, public SaaS companies particularly, quite severely Jason Calacanis (00:44:54): in '26. For your biggest business loser of 2026 prediction? David Sacks (00:44:57): For me, we already talked about this, but it was California because of the wealth tax and also the onerous regulations driving business and capital out of the state. I hope you guys are right that it does not make the ballot. If it does, I think there will be a panic and rush for the exits. Regardless, there's two major refineries closing by the spring. Higher gas prices will be the result. I just think that the politicians are not doing a good enough job in California, dispelling the fears and the actual hostility of the business environment. Jason Calacanis (00:45:27): That's a great one. And I went with young white collar workers in America. I think they're gonna be the biggest business loser. I think it's getting really hard for them to get entry level jobs. I'm seeing that all over the place because companies are having an easier job just automating with AI, than training up Gen Z graduates. That's my belief. That's why I'm launched Founder University on three continents. If you are a young person, you gotta be resilient. You're gonna have to be self reliant, independent of what Mondami Mondami says about collectivism. It's easier to use AI than it is to train up. We don't have professional development. That needs to come back. I just did an interview with the CEO of McKinsey, which you may have seen on the feed. And this is the big challenge in corporate America is they're taking out the bottom two or three rungs and automating stuff, and we really need to develop young people so that they have a path to take the CEO jobs eventually. And I don't think they're gonna have an easy time doing that. That's why I think all young people should start companies. I am talking my own book. I am talking about founder.university. Please apply. Japan, Saudi, and in America, we're gonna help you build companies. Thank you for my promo. David Friedberg (00:46:37): Jason, I got a text last night from a friend, and it's in response to your comments about young people not being able to find jobs because of AI, which is the statement you've made a couple times. He said went to a roundabout of 50 CEOs of public and private companies and asked everyone if they're hiring junior engineers. Everyone said they are still, but not as much as before because during COVID, every college lowered the bar on admissions and the talent just isn't as good anymore. My friend went on and he said, You should talk about this to counter Jay Cal's point about AI taking young people's jobs. We see this with financial analysts and we see this with salespeople we hire. The Gen Z kids are all really challenging to hire because of cultural issues, not because we're not hiring them due to AI. So we try and hire older people primarily to to fill those roles. So there's a real interesting point that he was making. I texted a couple of their friends to ask them their opinion. And I've heard this concurrence, Sheikha, which is like a lot of people think that recent grads out of college, and this may be a a COVID era phenomenon, they just don't seem to have the temperament, the motivation, the organizational skills. Jason Calacanis (00:47:45): Executive function. David Friedberg (00:47:47): Yeah. Executive function. And by the way, some of our friends who I've talked to who have kids graduating college, there's even a conversation about none of these kids are motivated to get jobs or to make money. There's a very weird phenomenon in the youth right now. And this may be a COVID phenomenon, and it may be a cultural thing that's part of the long form of what's going on in our society, or it may be a socialist trend, or it may be a populist trend, or it may just be that people have gotten too wealthy and the nation has truly split and you can't climb the ladder anymore. There's a bunch of things going on here, but I do not think, and I think a lot of people are echoing this, Jay Cal, that challenges that young people are having finding employment is purely rooted in in an AI and automation phenomenon, but it may be a cultural phenomenon. And so I just put that on the plate for you to consider that Jason Calacanis (00:48:29): there's something else going here. Do think it's both. I do think it is partially what you're saying is that maybe these young folks have you know, they they're just either entitled or their parents have enough money for them to skate and go sideways and maybe not be as career motivated. It could be a social thing. It could be a COVID thing. It could be all of those, and it's certainly multifactor. I just know what I see on the ground, which is, you know, so many companies coming to me saying, we can replace the bottom third of these tasks and that those bottom third of tasks are typically done by young people out of school. So I think both things are probably true to a certain extent, and time will tell. I do think it's gonna be challenging and continue to be challenging. And you see that in the numbers from, you know, Google, Uber, Coinbase, all these companies are doing more with less. And and maybe that's just the nature of AI. Maybe the first thing you do is cut costs. And maybe the second thing you do is hire people who know how to use these tools. If you are a young person who uses AI tools, you're gonna find a job. If you're a young person who isn't motivated and doesn't use AI tools, you're gonna have a hard time. Let's go with the biggest deal. Last year's predictions for biggest deal for 2025, traditional auto OEM consolidation. That was huge, Chamath. I think that we haven't seen exactly the consolidation, but we have seen those businesses come apart. So I think it's I give you a definitely two thirds of a credit there. Gavin said a tidal wave of m and a. I think he's not wrong there. That has started to happen certainly. Friedberg, you said massive compute build out deals. Of course, you nailed that one. I said consolidation amongst the on demand economy. That hasn't happened, but we do see a lot of deals occurring. And I said also Apple would buy Warner Brothers. I got that like a I guess that wound up going to Netflix, so I'll give myself a half point for that. What do you have as your biggest deal for 2026, David Sacks? David Sacks (00:50:21): I don't Jason Calacanis (00:50:21): wanna get prediction. David Sacks (00:50:22): I don't wanna get too specific here in terms of names Yeah. Of companies and that sort of But what I would say is that I think there was a breakthrough in the last couple of months in terms of these coding assistants where they've been around for a while, but there seems to have been another level of quality achieved just in the last month or so. And you're really starting to hear, I mean, maybe a lot of it is hype, but there is, I think a lot of people are getting very excited about the potential here. And part of it is coding, part of it is just tool use. You can download the programs and so it has access to your file drive and it can take actions on your computer. This trend feels to me like chatbots did at the 2022 going into 'twenty three where it's like people were really hyped about it, but then it continued to play out play out in the next year. And so I think these let's call it coding assistance slash tool use, I think will get bigger and bigger this year. Jason Calacanis (00:51:16): Freiburg, what do you got? Biggest deal. David Friedberg (00:51:19): Russia, Ukraine. I think it's gonna settle out this year. I think there's a lot of motivating factors to get it settled out this year, economic and other political factors. But I do think it's gonna settle out this year, and it's gonna bring a bit more stability to that region. And there's a whole reset that's underway this year, I think, in terms of geopolitics and where the powers all sit. Jason Calacanis (00:51:38): Trump can stop that war. He would David Sacks (00:51:40): be two for two. Would be Jason Calacanis (00:51:41): his one. David Friedberg (00:51:42): I I think this one's gonna settle. Jason Calacanis (00:51:43): That would be that would be great. He may not have done it on day one, if he gets it done in in, you know, year two, that's good enough for me. Shama, biggest deal, 2026. What do you got? Chamath Palihapitiya (00:51:53): It's not a specific deal, but it's an approach. David Friedberg (00:51:55): I think that m and Chamath Palihapitiya (00:51:56): a cannot happen. And so it's the IP license m and a workaround. And I think you're going to see hundreds of billions of dollars of these kinds of deals. So this is the deal that Google did with Character AI. It's the same thing that they did. Jason Calacanis (00:52:11): Microsoft did it. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:52:12): Yep. Microsoft did it. It's obviously what NVIDIA did with Grok. Why are these deals happening? Well, if you just look at what Facebook tried to do, they tried to buy Manus for 2 and a half billion dollars. Manus was a Chinese company that then left China and essentially rebuilt itself as a Singaporean business. The Chinese have now said, we're gonna look at this. They are going to actively import export controls. They're going to actively look at which technologies and even which researchers are working on things that are critical enough that it just can't go abroad in this existential fight that they believe they're in with The United States. The United States is an equivalent such position. All of this leads me to believe that traditional m and a is effectively dead. I think it's going to be impossible to get a large transaction done. So how will you do it? You'll do what Sundar did. You'll do what Satya did. You'll do what Jensen did. Do what Regeneron did with CLAI. These huge licensing deals that basically replace m and a. And I think that that as a deal type will get better and more refined and tighter and better executed. We were the third or fourth of these kinds of deals, and even the third or fourth iteration was quite good. By the time that you're into the middle part of next year and you've done 15 or 20 of these things, I think the lawyers that work on these things and the accountants will just be bull Jason Calacanis (00:53:31): The tax treatment is not ideal, but the speed at which you can do them is phenomenal because the next day, somebody like Sandeep can be working for Jensen, which is what Jensen wants. They want the talent. Zuckerberg wants the talent working there the next day. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:53:45): And the IP. Jason Calacanis (00:53:46): And the IP, of course. You know, for 2026, I think we're gonna see some massive m and a. It doesn't matter to me how it occurs, but I do think we're gonna see a 50,000,000,000 plus deal. And I think it could be, one of the max seven, an Apple, a Meta, a Microsoft, or an Amazon going out and trying to buy XAI, Mistro, Perplexity, Anthropic. One of those four comes to mind. I know most of them probably wanna go public and, go it alone, but I think an offer could come in. And during that race for which six or seven large language models and men, it is a it is a battle where they are moving up and down the rankings and beating each other out. You know? Can I ask you a question? And I think one of them is gonna I think one of them is gonna go for it. I I I think it could wind up being Apple. I Meta or Amazon who buys an Anthropic or a Perplexity. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:54:36): I started where you were, but this is why I went to this deal type as the biggest business winner. Because if any of those companies tried to buy, let's just say Anthropic, I think it's three years of antitrust minimum. It's worse than when Microsoft tried to buy Activision because that was a niche product. And even that took almost two years and, like, three or four months if I'm getting it right. It or it was about two years. It's a huge slog because it's a it's about global coordination of multiple regulators. Yeah. And eventually David Friedberg (00:55:08): get through the EU and then Chamath Palihapitiya (00:55:10): of them takes the lead pole position. But in the Microsoft case, it wasn't just one. You had to navigate China. You had to navigate Europe. So I I agree with you because I think there's companies with so much cash on their balance sheets that are effectively getting debased every day, the markets will start to punish these companies. It just seems like you're right. There's going to be a $100,000,000,000 transaction. I just suspect it'll end up as an IP license. Jason Calacanis (00:55:37): Yeah. And I think president Trump, one of his great strengths is that he moves quickly. Man, what a first year. Whether you like the decisions or not, he he makes decisions. I think this is one of the things that Democrats are learning is that you gotta actually get things done for the American people. I think he might instruct our government to let m and a be great again, and that would be great for American exceptionalism. These companies do need to merge and to continue to grow, and we should go try to get from a mag seven to a mag 17. We need more bigger companies with bigger footprints taking on global markets. Most contrarian belief most contrarian belief, people like this one. I said OpenAI loses its lead in the AI race. And in fact, that has happened if you look at the arenas and you look at their market share. They are being challenged. Chamath, you said the banking crisis in one of the major mainline banks. Gavin said one year of 5% plus GDP growth at one point over the next couple of years. Well done to Gavin. Friedberg, you said socialism rose back. Another amazing prediction. What's your prediction for this year since you crushed it last year? Friedberg, go ahead. David Friedberg (00:56:49): My prediction is based on the premise that I think there is gonna be this revolution in Iran and the Ayatollahs are gonna be out. That's not the contrarian belief. I think that's the standard belief, and I I think that is gonna happen, and that's the premise. But a lot of people think that Iran is part of the destabilizing force in the Middle East. And I do think that there is already in anticipation of the turnover with the ruling parties in Iran. There is already this brewing conflict amongst the other Arab states. So I think that between UAE, Saudi, Qatar, and this fraction in Yemen, and then I don't know if you guys have followed, but there's this kind of emerging independence movement for Somaliland, which is kind of North of Somalia, that there may be more conflict brewing in The Middle East than anyone anticipates for this year that will not necessarily involve Israel and or Iran. It will actually be amongst the other Gulf states as they vie for influence and power, and that the contrarian point may in fact be that Iran has been a stabilizing force in that region. And by removing Iran and by changing over Iran and they become this kind of independent democratic state. And this particularly is gonna be heightened as there's gonna be this battle for who's gonna take care of the Palestinians as the two state solution emerges and what's the role that Jordan's gonna have to play versus Egypt versus Saudi, and it's gonna lead to a lot of questions about resource allocation. So I think that this year could end up being a little bit nastier than folks anticipate in The Middle East as Iran turns over. Jason Calacanis (00:58:23): It's actually got a contrarian belief for 2026. David Sacks (00:58:26): Yes. I said that AI will increase demand for knowledge workers, not decrease it. I would refer you to Aaron Levy's post called Jevan's Paradox for Knowledge Workers. And the point of Jevan's Paradox is that as the cost of a resource goes down, the aggregate demand for it actually increases because you discover more and more use cases. So I think this will certainly happen with code. In the past, it's been very expensive to generate code. You have to hire engineers, there's not enough of them. It's an expensive resource. So the amount of software generated in the economy was limited by that. I think it's gonna increase massively now because the cost of generating code is coming down so much. But there's other examples too. You take a field like radiology, that's frequently cited as a profession that AI is gonna put out of business. That's not what the data shows. The data shows that the number of radiologists is increasing. Why? Because the number of scans that people wanna make is increasing. And it's true that AI can do some of the work, but you still need a doctor to prompt the AI, to interpret the AI, to validate it. So you get more efficient, the cost of scans goes down. And instead of it being a super speciality that happens very rarely that you need like a referral on top of a referral to get, it becomes something that's normalized and everyone starts doing it and you start getting more and more scans that leads to better and better outcomes. So I think there's gonna be a lot of those examples through the economy, and we're gonna look back and see that the job loss narrative was not only wrong, but we actually got job gains. Jason Calacanis (01:00:01): Okay. And for those of you who want to understand Jevan's paradox a little more, you can look at something like electricity or steel or concrete. When we lowered the cost of those things, people didn't use less of it. They built skyscrapers, and we had more routes for more airplanes to take you on more vacations. And that went from being something only rich people did to everybody. So Jevan's paradox is definitely at work. What do you got? Chamath, which what's on your, contrarian belief? Chamath Palihapitiya (01:00:26): Gosh. I have two. Well, I'll give you them both, and you can just see. My contrarian belief, number one, is I don't think SpaceX will IPO. I think that it will reverse merge into Tesla, and I think Elon will use it as a moment to consolidate control and power of his two seminal assets into one cap table. David Friedberg (01:00:42): Oh my god. I love that. Wow. Jason Calacanis (01:00:44): Well, he's talked about that before. He's talked about having a holding company for years of all of the collection. You could put Nora Link in there too. Right, Shama? You could put in The Boring Company as well. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:00:56): Sure. I'm just giving you my contrarian take. There will be no IPO for SpaceX. I think it'll just be it specifically will be a reverse merger. Jason Calacanis (01:01:03): There you go. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:01:05): The second contrarian take is that I think the central banks will realize that there are limitations to gold and limitations to Bitcoin and will, as a result, seek out a completely new cryptographic paradigm that they can control on their balance sheet that is fungible, that is tradable, and that is completely secure and private. And I think the reason why that privacy needs to exist is that for the sovereignty of a country, you need to be in a position where you have assets that are not easily disclosed to anybody else, friends or enemies alike. And then separately, cryptographically, if you're going to own a currency, you need to hedge against the eventual risk in the next five to ten years that there's a quantum chip that can challenge the existing cryptographic schemes that are used. Jason Calacanis (01:02:13): And, for my contrarian, I was thinking about going with OpenAI losing their lead and not being the number one company again, because I do think that will be the trend that they will have the they'll continue to give up their market share to other players, including Google and Gemini and XAI, etcetera. But I'm gonna go with a a pretty wild card here. I think the standoff with China is gonna be largely resolved. And I think president Trump's when he makes his visit there, I don't know if you're gonna go on that one, Saxon. I think he should be included in it, obviously, because of the AI race. I do think that the standoff, and the issues around Taiwan are going to be resolved, and I think this could be the signature issue of Trump's second term is that we work out a working relationship where both China and America win without one of us losing. Best performing asset. Best performing asset. Last year's prediction, I said, mag seven, which was up 22 versus the S and P five hundred at plus 17. Chamathi were long CDS for a potential run on a major bank. You said it was a long shot. Gavin said high bandwidth memory makers like Micron, which was up 230%. That was a great call. And, Friedberg, you said Chinese tech stocks and ETFs. Alibaba is up 85%. Chinese tech ETF up 47% versus the S and P five 100 at plus 17. So I guess that means Gavin Friedberg and then myself. What do you got for this year's best performing asset, Friedberg? David Friedberg (01:03:47): Polymarket. Polymarket's on a tear. Network effects, replacing media, replacing markets. Jason Calacanis (01:03:54): Congrats to our friend, Shane at Polymarket. Do you have a best performing asset for 2026? Go ahead, Shama. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:03:59): I would pick a basket of critical metals. Jason Calacanis (01:04:03): Okay. Basket of critical metals. What do you got, Sachs? David Sacks (01:04:07): It's getting a little bit redundant for me, but I just said the expanding super cycle and tech. I mean, again, this is just another facet of the boom. But actually, let me just show you some data that literally just came out. I feel like this is breaking news. Jason Calacanis (01:04:18): Oh, breaking news. David Sacks (01:04:19): Nick, can you pull this up? US productivity just surged 4.9%, the strongest reading in nearly six years. And this is the news item, is that the Atlanta Fed, their forecast for Q4 GDP just climbed to 5.4%. Can that be right? Yes. Can we get a fact check on that? Chamath Palihapitiya (01:04:40): Five to six is I think where we're gonna see it, guys. We're gonna see some sixes get printed. David Sacks (01:04:46): Mean, we Jason Calacanis (01:04:48): said eighth twenty twenty six, the Atlanta Fed's GDP now model estimate for real GDP growth in the 2025 is 5.4% significant jump from previous estimate of 2.7% on January 5. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:04:59): You have to remember that there's going to be a 150 basis point correction in q four GDP because of the government furlough. Okay? So let's say that GDP was probably, call it four, you're gonna see a print of two and a half. So you need to readjust that because now all the government workers are back. They're recounted in GDP. If you look through 2026, there's a handful of things that I think people do not understand well. Number one, all of nonfarm payrolls has been completely reset and rebased. And the reason why is because of immigration. So what used to be 100 to 150 number print is now a 40 to 50 number print. Why is that important? Because when you look through earnings and you look at the lower 25% quartiles of earnings growth, They're off the charts. There's all of these anecdotal examples now of earnings just exceeding expectations. There was an article in the front page of the Wall Street Journal yesterday about Ford trying to pay mechanics a $160,000 a year and having 5,000 openings. So to Sax's point, we are a coiled spring. Closing the border plus adding productivity lifts through AI and other things have created a growth dynamic in The United States that will really start to show itself in '26. So I think that you should be not short The US economy here. It is ready to rip. Jason Calacanis (01:06:31): And, adding to all that and just giving my pick, I think if we are in a rate cut environment and the tailwinds keep happening and people have a little bit cash laying around, my pick for best performing asset will be the Robinhood Polymarket Prize picks gambling, wagering David Friedberg (01:06:49): That's a good one. Jason Calacanis (01:06:50): Because people will be able to have a little cash around to make some bets. You can put Coinbase in there too, I guess. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:06:55): By the way, the corollary to what we just talked about, if you see five and a half and six and a half prints and these employment numbers, a lot of this affordability stuff may be not as accurate as we think it is. Everybody right now is trying to figure out, okay, well, where are the pockets of unaffordability? And there are clearly some, but those are narrow and they can be fixed. But on a broad based basis, what Sacks says is right. You have this combination of earnings growth, productivity growth, and now this overlay where you have these tax cuts that are gonna hit in '26. My gosh. I mean, asset prices in general, I think, will do well. Now you'll also see potentially home prices correct because if the president is successful in making sure Blackstone can buy houses, but on the other side, people are earning more and they can enter with interest rates that are now a 100 to 150 basis points lower, you'll see a boom in housing where it's not the corporations that are buying the houses, but individuals. There's a lot of variables here that can that can break in America's favor. This is why I think 6% is not unrealistic, which would be absolutely nuts. Jason Calacanis (01:08:01): Okay. Let's move on to the worst performing asset. Last year's predictions for worst performing asset of 2025. I said legacy car companies and real estate. Both of those turned out to be correct. Chamathi, you said enterprise SaaS and the software industrial industrial complex. Again, that looked correct as well. Gavin said enterprise SaaS. And, Friedberg, you said vertical SaaS. So we had three SaaS, and I had legacy car Chamath Palihapitiya (01:08:25): companies real estate. Let me email. Jake out David Friedberg (01:08:26): let me just give you, Let me just give you some numbers on that to show you Sure. ServiceNow down 30%, Workday down 18%, DocuSign down 23%, Dropbox down 9%, and Box down 6% while the S and P was up 17%. I think it's worth highlighting, like, it was a challenging year for this enterprise aspect. There's not Jason Calacanis (01:08:45): Especially with the per seat pricing as opposed to consumption based pricing, if you have a static number of employees or less employees like many of these companies do, there's just less seats to sell. So their whole growth was based on land and expand. You land the client, and then you expand the client because they're adding staff. If you're not adding staff, you can't, you know, you don't have more people using Salesforce. Okay. So let's talk about our worst performing asset predictions for 2026. What do you got? Sachs, worst performing asset of 2026. David Sacks (01:09:15): Well, I just said California luxury real estate because of the overhang of the wealth tax and all the things we're talking about. Jason Calacanis (01:09:21): Yeah. That one hits close to home, Now. I David Sacks (01:09:24): Yes. It does, actually. What I'm hoping for is a dead cat bounce. If you guys are right that the ballot initiative fails, then the overhang will be lifted and maybe I can Jason Calacanis (01:09:36): Clear some real estate. David Sacks (01:09:37): Clear some. Jason Calacanis (01:09:39): It's not easy being it's not easy being right sometimes. Yeah. Freeberg, what do you got? Working from asset. David Friedberg (01:09:46): What what like, what what's your discount price on that asset right now? I mean, like, I might make a bid, You know, if you give me a Oh. Give me a good clearance David Sacks (01:09:55): million dollars laying around? David Friedberg (01:09:57): Yeah. I'm not paying a 100. Jason Calacanis (01:09:58): Okay. Here we go. Bestie negotiations are current. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:10:01): Give them Jason Calacanis (01:10:02): the Bestie price. The buy it now Bestie price. David Friedberg (01:10:04): What's the buy it Speaker 5 (01:10:05): No. No. David Friedberg (01:10:05): No. Okay. By the way, you know, San Francisco has that insane luxury tax, which they have in LA too. You gotta pay 5% on any piece of real estate over 25% David Sacks (01:10:15): in San Francisco. Do you know that? David Friedberg (01:10:16): Which makes it even harder for these high end places to trade. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:10:19): So wait. You're saying if I if I bought Saks' house for a 100, I'd have to spend a David Friedberg (01:10:23): 100%. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:10:24): Oh, he has to pay 6%. Jason Calacanis (01:10:26): 6%. David Friedberg (01:10:26): And then Jason Calacanis (01:10:27): you gotta pay your broker 6%. I mean, they're just basically freezing the market. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:10:30): Oh, okay. Not the buyer. David Friedberg (01:10:32): Well, you can negotiate who pays them. David Sacks (01:10:34): Yeah. Percent, you know, quote, unquote, mansion taxes just killed LA real estate. You talk to brokers down there. Because people used to flip houses lot more. Now you just can't afford to do that. Jason Calacanis (01:10:44): Unintended consequences, folks. David Sacks (01:10:45): Really bad for the market. David Friedberg (01:10:46): Telling me taxes slow down transaction volume and reduce the growth of the economy? That's crazy. I had no idea. Seth, you should write that down. We should Chamath Palihapitiya (01:10:54): do a whole thing on that. Jason Calacanis (01:10:55): Yeah. Maybe we David Friedberg (01:10:56): should write David Sacks (01:10:56): that down. David Friedberg (01:10:56): I had no idea. Jason Calacanis (01:10:57): Yeah. Somebody make a note. Yeah. So worst performing asset, Chamath, what do you think? Worst performing asset. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:11:04): I won't say the worst performing, but I think a very poor performing asset will be hydrocarbons. I just think that the trend in oil is inexorable, and it's down. And the reason it's down is irrespective of your thoughts on climate change, the trends on electrification and energy storage are just unstoppable. And so what that does is it shrinks the surface area of where oil is useful. It's not like a cataclysmic thing, but it's sort of a melting iceberg where does it see 65 or $45? And I would say on on a per barrel basis, I think it's more likely to see 45 than 65. Jason Calacanis (01:11:52): Okay. I went with the US dollar in different permutations of how you can buy it because our debt continues to grow unabated. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:12:02): And, you know The debasement trade, JCAL. JCAL owning Jason Calacanis (01:12:04): the debase. Think it's gonna be hard for, you know, the the USD because we're talking about we've been added I think we're gonna add 2,000,000,000,000 in debt this year. And then if we're increasing and again, I I know Trump says president Trump says a lot of things, but if we're increasing the military budget by 50%, that means that's gonna be straight to our deadline. So it's gonna be harder and harder for the dollar. It doesn't mean that America is not gonna do great, but the value of the American dollar is gonna be challenged, which we see in people moving to gold and silver and perhaps copper. Okay. If you could give us your worst performing asset of 2026. David, for It would David Friedberg (01:12:41): be Netflix if they don't close the Warner Brother deal. I do think Netflix's service is being challenged from all sides with deep content libraries, and I think we're seeing a great commoditization happening. I've also heard directly from folks in Hollywood, the creators of new content, that people would prefer not to work with Netflix. They only, pay creators cost plus 10% now. And so as a creator, you're actually better off not doing deals with Netflix anymore, so their content library is gonna shrink because of the natural economic forces underway. Alternative, if they do close on Warner Brothers, I think they've got some good runway in terms of that content library, they'll be fine. And in that case, my worst performing asset would be traditional media stocks. And I do think that they're gonna underperform. There is just such an incredible variety of high quality content that's emerging from independent creators that are leveraging their own distribution platforms through YouTube and others. And I think that traditional media is gonna continue to be deeply challenged as we've seen, for example, just in the news segment with the rise of citizen journalism. So that's the that's what I would kinda Yeah. Jason Calacanis (01:13:45): And, you know, the the Netflix observation, I think, is was well founded because they're also, in terms of expanding their library, they just did a deal with Bill Simmons, I see, and with Barstool Sports to move over their sports shows, podcasts, video shows from YouTube, and then gonna take them off YouTube and put them on Netflix exclusively. So that's a really interesting trend as well to keep an eye on. Okay. David Sacks (01:14:11): By the way, before we move off asset, just on best performing asset, there's one category we didn't talk about, but I think it's kinda interesting, which is the category of assets that qualify for accelerated depreciation, capital Chamath Palihapitiya (01:14:22): equipment. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. David Sacks (01:14:24): That includes things like planes, so forth. There's now a 100% accelerated depreciation Boats. For certain kinds of capital equipment because of the big beautiful bill. And, you know, it kinda goes along with some of the tax cuts that we talked about. But, man, that is making those markets super hot right now. Jason Calacanis (01:14:39): Absolutely. Try buying a plane these days. Very difficult. David Friedberg (01:14:42): PPE. No, Jason. It's not planes. It's like caterpillar No. No. It's everything. Tractors. Yeah. It yeah. It's generators. It's Siemens. This is why Siemens stock is through the roof. All of this capital equipment, you get to write it off a 100% year one. It's creating a massive infrastructure build out in The US. So Absolutely. There's some companies that are huge beneficiaries of this, obviously, because they're the sellers of the capital equipment. Jason Calacanis (01:15:04): And, of course, this is one of the reasons GDP is going up as people are actually investing in business again. Okay. Most anticipated trend David Friedberg (01:15:12): By the way, this is the corollary of the statement that if you reduce taxes, the economy grows. Jason Calacanis (01:15:15): So Here we go. Yeah. Most anticipated trend of 2025. I said the wrath of LenaCon ending in m and a and IPOs being back. I get some credit there. Chamath, you said the end of the deep state. I think you had a lot of credit there. Gavin said AI makes more progress per quarter in 2025 than it did in 2023. That's a great one. Freiberg, you said the nuclear power build out. I think you get some credit there too. Yeah? David Friedberg (01:15:40): Not sure. Not sure. We got some work to do there. Massively We definitely saw them. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:15:45): Short nuclear. Jason Calacanis (01:15:46): You're still short nuclear, but I know my guy, Howard Lutnick, so I talked to him. I talked to Howard Lutnick as well. He said he's all in on nuclear. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:15:55): Friedberg, can I tell you why I'm short nuclear? I think that we're in David Friedberg (01:15:58): the very delicate part of Chamath Palihapitiya (01:15:59): the cycle where they've missed the window. So by the time that they deliver working SMRs at scale, the problem is that the marginal cost of electricity will effectively be zero, and it'll have gone to zero because of a combination of solar and storage as well as coal and oil. And so it's just in a very delicate place where the large form factor nuclear reactors make zero economic sense by 2032 or 2035, which is when through the Byzantine permitting and building, they get it done. And then the SMRs, by the time that they get it done, they may not be able to meet the market either. So I think it's a very complicated moment for nuclear, actually. Not scientifically. Economically, just does not hang together mathematically. David Friedberg (01:16:40): I think that's if you assume, no shift in the demand curve. And I think that, like, if you if you look at China going to eight terawatts of production and by 2040 or whatever it is, and we're sitting at one and we're not moving, we are gonna have a big catch up to do. And the question is, can we really build out two, three terawatts of electricity generation? How are we gonna build out two to three terawatts of electricity generation, The amount of land that you would need with solar and what's it gonna take to get all of that installed and so on. And by the way, there's a lot of this stuff in China. If you look at all the big solar build outs that they did where they're ripping it up now, this is a longer conversation. But I really do question whether we can pin everything on solar. It's gonna be a mix of stuff. And so your point may be right that in the near term to meet the current kind of demand curve, nuclear is gonna be economically challenged. But at some point here, there's an inflection that we have to meet. Jason Calacanis (01:17:33): So what's your most anticipated trend of 2026, Friedberg? David Friedberg (01:17:37): Iran becoming an independent democratic state. Think Wow. I'm just speaking generally anticipated. I think a lot of people are anticipating that that's going to happen this year. There's an uprising in the streets. There is a weakening of the Ayatollahs, and there seems to be a moment underway. Jason Calacanis (01:17:54): And the demographics are destiny. There's a lot of young people in Iran, and they do not want to live under David Friedberg (01:17:59): the current Jason Calacanis (01:17:59): They want to be free. David Friedberg (01:18:01): But there is a major economic problem in Iran in terms of affordability. You think we have an issue of affordability in The US. In Iran, it's very hard for people just to buy their basic necessities, basic needs to the majority of people. So that that's why they are taking to the street. There's a real economic crisis underway that is motivating this turnover. Every year, everyone, like, anticipates some big change in The Middle East, but this could be the biggest rewriting of The Middle East in a long time. Jason Calacanis (01:18:25): Okay. Saks, what do you got? David Sacks (01:18:27): For what category? Jason Calacanis (01:18:29): Most anticipated trend of 2026. What do got, David Sacks (01:18:32): I said auditing government spending at all levels. David Friedberg (01:18:36): That's a good one. That's a good David Sacks (01:18:37): one. T Central West Jason Calacanis (01:18:39): Doge. Love. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:18:40): Yes. David Sacks (01:18:40): Let a thousand Nick Shirley's bloom. Jason Calacanis (01:18:43): Love. Let's do it. Audit everything. David Sacks (01:18:45): Audit everything. We need to normalize independent audits across the Jason Calacanis (01:18:49): blowers. Let's go. David Sacks (01:18:50): It is not acceptable for Gavin Newsom, for example, to prohibit audits as he did with homeless spending. All government spending needs to be opened up and audited by the public, meaning people to see where it's going, and that that's just gotta happen. Jason Calacanis (01:19:03): Love it. The Pentagon. When's the Pentagon's when are they gonna pass an audit? Right? Mean, that's one of our biggest line items. Let's get them to be audited. Hey. There's something president Trump could do. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:19:11): They're actually at least trying. David Sacks (01:19:14): They're at least failing the audit. They're at Jason Calacanis (01:19:16): least failing the audit. David Sacks (01:19:17): Gavin, this is prohibiting the audit. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:19:19): Start where you're prohibiting them first. How about that? Jason Calacanis (01:19:22): Yeah. I mean, just audit everything, I think, would be I love it. What do you got, Shama? Chamath Palihapitiya (01:19:26): I have a corollary to Freiberg's, which is I think it's the expansion of this Trump doctrine. Independent of your politics, if you're an economic actor, you own a business, you invest in the stock market, Whatever it is, you speculate cryptocurrencies. You must understand the movements on the chessboard in 2026. The best framework that I have used to organize myself is this idea of unilateralism, economic resilience. It's just a ginormous trend, and I think the output of it is gonna be massive GDP prints on top of everything else. Jason Calacanis (01:20:00): Yeah. And I think I'm gonna stick with my last year's prediction going into 2026 again, the wrath of Lena Khan ending. We saw the m and a train start with Grok, obviously, Netflix and Warner Brothers, Google and Wiz. So many deals are ready to be done, and they're starting to pop off in m and a. We can debate what structure they are and and regulators, etcetera, but they're happening. But I'll go with IPOs coming back. Right now, you've gotta anticipate one of the following two will file, SpaceX, Androle, Stripe, Anthropic, and OpenAI. I think two of those file, and it is going to be gangbusters. The public wants these shares. They're buying them in the secondary markets. We have half as many publicly traded companies. The public would like to participate, and this is something Trump can uniquely do that the Democrats were trying to stop and slow down, which was m and a and IPOs. I think this will be the year of the mega IPO. It's gonna be very exciting for Silicon Valley. It's gonna be very exciting for the employees at these companies and for the pension funds and the endowments that own shares in these companies. They're gonna be able to take that money and put it to good use, hopefully. So SpaceX, Androil, Stripe, Anthropic, OpenAI, those are on the shortlist, obviously, of ones that could go public this year. Alright. Fun one we like to do is the most anticipated media. That's a fun one. You know? What are you looking forward to in 2026? Last year, I said Superman and Andor season two. Turns out Superman did great. Andor did amazing. It's the best TV show of the twenty first century, I think. Chamathi said enormity of the files that will be declassified. Epstein files, halfway there. JFK files, we haven't seen those. Gavin said 1923 season two. I don't even know what that is. But okay. David Friedberg (01:21:48): That's a Taylor Chamath Palihapitiya (01:21:49): that's a Taylor shirt. Jason Calacanis (01:21:50): That's the Taylor one. Yeah. Yeah. You're watching Landman? Landman's pretty great. I'm not Freiberg, you said AI video games. What do you got this year? Freiburg, you you love the media. You're you're a cinephile. What are you looking forward to in media in 2026? David Friedberg (01:22:07): This isn't as much as what I'm looking forward to, but I do think the big trend in media is gonna be the citizen journalism doing exposes. I think that we're just at the beginning of the expose man on the street. Man on the street pushing stuff, getting cameras in people's faces. The work of journalism has been decentralized, and I think there's gonna be so much more that's gonna be kind of shared and covered this year. Jason Calacanis (01:22:32): Okay. Do you have one, tomorrow? David Friedberg (01:22:34): The the the difference I would say in terms of what Nick Shirley is doing and what we've seen maybe in the past, but it's gonna be the new trend, is much of the citizen journalism in the past has been to some degree a little bit more passive. It's sort of like, hey. I caught this thing and I observed it. But now there are people that are gonna actively take a camera and say, hey. I'm gonna go discover this thing. I'm gonna go deep on it. And that's what I think we're gonna see happen in a big way this year. Jason Calacanis (01:22:55): Well and there's a monetization path. You have Substack where people can give donations, GoFundMe's, and, on top of that, YouTube allowing you and x allowing you to share revenue on this particular category, which they previously did. And as Nick Shirley pointed out, means there is a path to profitability there. Get more clicks, get more views, you make more money, and then you can reinvest it. So I think I like your choice a lot. Chamath, you have something you're anticipating? Chamath Palihapitiya (01:23:19): Exact same thing as Friedberg. I'll just double down and Jason Calacanis (01:23:22): Okay. And what about you, Sax? You got something you wanna double down on investigative journalism? David Sacks (01:23:27): No. I thought we were talking about entertainment here. Jason Calacanis (01:23:31): Well, yeah, I thought I'd. It's okay. These guys went these guys zigged where we zagged, but- David Friedberg (01:23:34): One of my weird, like, things that I watch on TikTok that I get stuck on and TikTok just keeps showing me them is these auditing videos. Have you guys ever seen these? First First Amendment auditors. So these are people who take a camera, they stand on the street, and they just point the camera into someone's store or into a bank's window. Oh, see the people in the bank. Yes. Jason Calacanis (01:23:54): And then they wind up spraying each other. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:23:56): You know, when the person comes out David Friedberg (01:23:57): There's always people that come out. They're like, can't do that. You're not allowed to do that. They're like, okay. I think I would like you to leave. I don't wanna talk to you. And they just do this and they instigate people to call the police. And what they're doing is they're auditing whether the police understand First Amendment rights. And then how the police react is basically the end of the video. Sometimes the police are like, you can't do that. They're like, yes, I can call a supervisor. And then they teach the police officer that you're allowed to stand in public places and film. Otherwise, they're just like, hey, they go to the business owner and they tell the business owner, this guy's allowed to do this. Leave him alone. I don't know why, but these videos are so entertaining. Yeah. They're there's some great ones. There's a lot Jason Calacanis (01:24:31): of tension there, and there's something straight of speech, which is the first amendment for a role. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:24:36): The stoner comes out, sometimes tries to physically confront the guy, but then you'll have like a woman walking with her, like, two year old child, and then she'll get into it, she'll be like, hey. Exactly. Don't violate his constitutional rights. David Friedberg (01:24:47): He's allowed to be That's Jason Calacanis (01:24:49): the best. David Friedberg (01:24:49): Exactly. Yeah. It's so good. Jason Calacanis (01:24:51): You never know David Friedberg (01:24:51): what's gonna happen. Jason Calacanis (01:24:52): And each one of David Friedberg (01:24:53): them is like a whole new adventure. I don't know why. It's such an interesting form of content. I love watching it. Jason Calacanis (01:24:58): It's a uniquely American phenomenon to establish your your First Amendment rights. And they even go into the really dicey ones where they go to, like, the parking lot of a prison or into the lobby of a police station and do it, and it gets pretty spicy. What do you got, Saks? You got you got any media you're looking forward to? These guys are going First amendment, investigative journalism, yada yada. What do you got, Saks? David Sacks (01:25:24): Well, the new Christopher Nolan movie is coming out, The Odyssey. Looks interesting. David Friedberg (01:25:27): Great call. Great call. Yeah. Jason Calacanis (01:25:29): That's mine. Great Chamath Palihapitiya (01:25:30): call. It? What is that? What is that about? Jason Calacanis (01:25:33): The Odyssey? David Friedberg (01:25:34): Oh, come on. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:25:35): Tomasz No. Homer's Odyssey? Jason Calacanis (01:25:37): Yes. But as interpreted by the great director of our time, Christopher Nolan. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:25:42): Have any of you idiots actually read the odyssey? This is not great. I'm sorry. But Tomas. The odyssey is a terrible book. Speaker 5 (01:25:52): Alright. Wait. Okay. Okay. So we're gonna get some good comments there. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:25:55): You guys are all such wannabe poser intellectuals. Jason Calacanis (01:25:58): Christopher Nolan is just great. It's IMAX. It's gonna be epic. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:26:02): It's trash. That book is blech. Okay. David Sacks (01:26:05): You don't don't like iambic pentameter? So Chamath Palihapitiya (01:26:10): so the idea of some confused person making a movie about it is also just how do I short that? Okay. That is actually can I short that? Can I short that movie? Jason Calacanis (01:26:20): I'm on a polymarket. I'm sure there will be. David Friedberg (01:26:22): You could bet Jason Calacanis (01:26:22): somebody bet on the box office. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:26:24): Pull it Speaker 5 (01:26:25): up, Nick. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:26:25): I bet zero. Jason Calacanis (01:26:26): Okay. It's not gonna be a lot more than zero, I'm sure. I I'm also a big fan of Timothy Chalabet, and doom part three is coming out. I also like Avengers Doomsday. Wait. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:26:38): Doom three is coming? Oh, I love doom. Jason Calacanis (01:26:41): Doom part three Chamath Palihapitiya (01:26:42): is love coming doom one and two so so much. Jason Calacanis (01:26:44): Two was great. I think one was a little bit of slow on the both of Doomsday will be good. David Sacks (01:26:48): Doomsday, actually. I go with that. Jason Calacanis (01:26:50): Avengers doomsday is gonna be, I think, fantastic. Robert Downey Jr. As doctor Doom setting up secret wars, and then you're gonna tie up all the previous Marvel strings Chamath Palihapitiya (01:26:59): into one block. Jason Calacanis (01:27:00): Look at Chamath Palihapitiya (01:27:00): the odyssey zero. David Sacks (01:27:01): They're gonna use they're gonna use doomsday to bring back all the characters they killed. Jason Calacanis (01:27:06): Hey, besties. Here's a little something. I think we're about to hit today 1,000,000 YouTube subscribers. Before we do our Netflix deal and take the show off of YouTube, we hit a million before we What David Sacks (01:27:20): took so much? David Friedberg (01:27:20): Wasn't it supposed to happen like a year and a half ago? We're gonna have like a million subscriber party a year and half ago? David Sacks (01:27:25): You know why? Chamath Palihapitiya (01:27:26): Ask me ask me what David Friedberg (01:27:26): I Tell why. Tell me why sucks. David Sacks (01:27:29): Because we never tell our subscribers to hit the like button or smash the subscribe button, Yeah. Every other podcast I watch on YouTube and I watch them all, they're always like, hit the like button. Hit the like button. Jason Calacanis (01:27:41): Oh god. Well, you David Friedberg (01:27:42): know what they're doing now Jason Calacanis (01:27:43): too is the the the big trend now is to just do ten minute quick hits as news breaks. So you you you this is Jason, what do want? Chamath Palihapitiya (01:27:51): Ask me ask me what I think about getting to a million subscribers. Jason Calacanis (01:27:53): Jamal, any thoughts on this seminal moment for the all in pod hitting 1,000,000,000 subscribers on YouTube? Go ahead. I'm sorry. 1,000,000. Speaker 5 (01:28:01): You're welcome. You're welcome. You're You're welcome. David Sacks (01:28:08): What's what's this week at? Jason Calacanis (01:28:10): Oh, this week in Starbucks is quarter million. Don't worry about it. It's a niche show. Don't worry about it. David Sacks (01:28:15): Not bad. Jason Calacanis (01:28:16): It's a franchise. Not bad. Not bad. Hey. Listen. I love doing it. The reason So there's David Friedberg (01:28:20): four of us. David Sacks (01:28:20): There's four of us. One of you, so we have four times the subscribers. Jason Calacanis (01:28:25): Yeah. Something like that. Yeah. Hey. Listen. One of the great things you you learn in media is when you build a super team, a super band, you know, you can actually do better than everybody individually. So collectively, we can do better. And listen. It's not for me to say Chamath Palihapitiya (01:28:40): Listen. You I think you've adjusted to being Ringo Starr incredibly. Jason Calacanis (01:28:44): Listen. I everybody says the same thing to me. Without the show, this would be propaganda, and it would be a the Trump's personal Chamath Palihapitiya (01:28:54): Who says that to you? Jason Calacanis (01:28:55): Everybody. Whoever comes Chamath Palihapitiya (01:28:57): out our moose? Group. Jason Calacanis (01:28:58): Everybody says, I'm the drink. I'm the stir in the drink. I'm the thing that stirs the jam. David Sacks (01:29:03): You're keeping the private equity wives watching. Great Jason Calacanis (01:29:06): job. Absolutely. I'm keeping them in. All the private equity is loving. David Sacks (01:29:09): For every left winger that you keep watching the pod, we'd probably lose five MAGA Speaker 5 (01:29:15): If you David Sacks (01:29:16): were just the MAGA show. Jason Calacanis (01:29:17): The people the MAGA people, they love hating me. They love hating me, and they love to come back every week to hate watch me and my takes. Hate watch. They do. Speaker 5 (01:29:27): They just like they Jason Calacanis (01:29:28): hate watch you, Chamath. The poverty watch reason. They tune in to hate you and hate me. Well, listen. It's been a great year. It's been a great year. Great job, besties. We kept the band together for one more year. Let's do a polymarket. Chances, the all in podcast makes Speaker 5 (01:29:45): it to 2027. David Friedberg (01:29:46): Honestly honestly, it's not a 100%. It's not? It's never a 100%. David Sacks (01:29:51): Never a 100. David Friedberg (01:29:51): It's never a Jason Calacanis (01:29:52): 100 We'll do the best we can. You guys love the show. Smash the like button, comment, link, subscribe, whatever you wanna do. Write a review. Tell everybody how much you love Jermott sweaters, and we'll see you next week on another amazing all in pop messaging. Bye bye. David Friedberg (01:30:36): We Speaker 6 (01:30:42): should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy because they're all just useless. It's like this, like, sexual tension that they just need to release somehow.