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Hey everybody, welcome to another episode of the All In podcast and it is our year end episode. It is our 2021 bestie awards. This is where we give our awards for the best and worst of what happened in 2021. We did it last year kind of half heartedly, but this year hopefully we put a little bit more work into it with me again of course David Friedberg, the Sultan of Science, the Rain Man David Sachs and sweater Jesus chamath. Polyphagia. How's everybody doing? Ready to go. Did anybody do their homework? Oh my God. We are nine away from episode 69 and where we will have a special guest. Special guest who I've given the choice of coming on episode 69 or 420. No, no, no. He has to do 69. He can't do 4:20. Or you can do both. He can do whatever he wants. Yeah, basically could do no wrong. Could you? Committed. What about Jack? Can we get Jack on? Don't talk about that. If you stop, if you stop grinding Jack. Yeah, yeah, maybe if you stop dunking on Jack for no reason. You insufferable sax. Seriously, you insufferable enough that, like, I've alienated potential guests, chamath alienated best. Now you're getting in on alienating the guest. You would be too much to have Jack and Chris Dixon on together. Who? Who? My God, that is so gross. Delete that. No, don't like it. I don't care about my relationship with 1816. Jack Dorsey. We all know who who's the other person's ****? Chris Dixon. Chris Dixon? Yeah, who's a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz who runs their crypto fund. Ohh nice. It wasn't just me. I mean, very vocal lately about web three. Why don't you guys invite the CFO of Greylock as well while you're at it? We couldn't get the partner in charge of human capital at Excel. God, yeah, yeah. You're getting a little bit far afield. Chris posted something pretty innocuous on web three, and Jack jumped down his throat. And same thing with biology as well. I saw the C Dixon quote. It wasn't just me. Yeah, Jason, now you're pretending you retweeted a photo of Jack jumping down Chris Dickson's throat and saying, whoa, what's going on here? Now you're trying to pretend. Now you're trying to pretend like he was triggered by me. He wasn't triggered by Jack. After Dark, Jack is gone. Wild Chris Dixon did did try a little misappropriation. For which Jack jumped down his throat, basically, ever since Horowitz's thing, they always culture appropriate, right? Like, just they're just like any other guy who quits his job and then goes on a shitposting rampage. Yeah, really like you did your gamer? Like Chabot did after shutting down. I'm just one of his casualties. There's a bunch of people. He's gone. I thought the Jack Energy was great. I think he quit. I think it's great. CEO of Twitter. So he could tweet. Yeah. He wanted to get in there. No. He wants to focus on blockchain. Clearly he he he has religion on this, and he believes that it's the future of the Internet. And he cares deeply about the democratization of access to finance. And I think it would be awesome to hear his views on this. I would love for him to come on and not be badgered about censorship and the role that he used to run. How would you like him? Talking to you about, you know, being the CEO of Zenefits Sacks, like, it's, you know, honestly, I'm not trying to bash him. I only have one question, which is the reason why he loves Bitcoin is for its censorship resistance. So why, when he had the opportunity as CEO of Twitter, didn't he stand tall for resisting censorship? He did, David. Maybe he did. OK, so just tell us that. Read between the lines, dude. I don't think he has to answer to the Twitter mob and try to say here's all the hard decisions I made that you guys didn't see. You know this, there's a there's a dynamics of a board. And lawsuits and hundreds of tissues are decisions that and the President inciting a riot at the Capitol. You're not supposed to create a list and publish it and say, look at me, I'm such a good boy. I mean, it's not reasonable. I just think it's a reasonable question for me to ask. Yeah, but the way you asked it was like, isn't Jack at an ashram like praying like you were full dunk mode. I know that's one of your comedy writers writing those tweets for you. Did you get was that a punched up tweet or not? He was a punched up tweet actually punched up. No, it was not punched up. Also funnier than you actually are. That's why I'm saying, why did you have to throw my people? Why you have to go to the ashram? Yeah, why you can't? Jack has sprung years trying to cultivate this like Zen approach and all of you with my people. Nothing to do, nothing to do with the ashram. Yeah, we're we're getting lost in the weeds here. Translator do you have music? Music intro like? Please welcome everybody to the 2021 Bestie Awards. Now just put in, like, everybody like Denzel Washington and, you know, like, can we edit screenshots from like the last Oscars that you know, everyone in our audience, OK, Oscars from the 80s, like Tom Cruise getting up and cheering and whooping. OK, here we go. Going on. Let your winners ride. Man David. We open sources to the fans and they've just gone crazy. Queen. There's a lot at stake here, folks, and we're going to start it off with biggest winner in politics, a very difficult decision here. Sacks, biggest winner in politics. Who do you got? I got Eric Adams, the new mayor of New York City. He was a huge underdog candidate. He won by not being woke. He rejected the, you know, woke sensibilities of the other Democratic candidates. He is a former cop who still packs a gun and he made his issues. Supporting the police Public Safety charter schools. You know, as a instrument of minority advancement and even pushed to make New York City a tech and crypto hub, he is going to reverse the damage done under de Blasio. He won four or five boroughs in the Democratic primary and overall mainly carried Black Latino precincts. If the Democratic Party has a future after the rejection of woke, it is Eric Adams. OK, Freeberg, who you got? OK, mine's a little esoteric, but my biggest winner for politics this year. Is the blockchain, and I'll tell you why I think that the embracing the blockchain as a technology that enables an evolution away from what folks consider to be, you know, centralized control systems and ultimately underscores the interests of the populist notion that sweeping over the United States is very strong. And I think it's waking up politicians and it's going to wake up the political class to the fact that this system of organizing social economic. And political action may ultimately evolve us away from the systems that we run today. And it is a very serious threat to the current system of politics and economics and social order. And I think it's starting to kind of rear its head and and and politicians are starting to wake up to it and they're all thinking very deeply about what it means. And so I would say the blockchain has really kind of created a new model for organization amongst humans that is waking us up in the political class more than anything else. OK, Chamath, who do you got? I think this is pretty obvious, but I think it's Glen Younkin, the governor of Virginia. Here's a guy that was a private equity executive who basically had to fade Trump but still pretend to feign that he needed his support and ran a pretty centrist, you know, pro education, anti crime. Pro Business, Pro just individual, you know, Empowerment campaign in Virginia, which hasn't swung this way for a long time and basically beat Terry McAuliffe. And I think that this is the road map, which effectively says whether you're a Democrat or a Republican. Grab into these centrist temples and run with it, and you're going to get a ton of people in the silent majority who are sick of all of this fringe behavior, both on the left and the right. And so I think Glenn Youngkin was a real Canary in the coal mine for the political future of America. All right, great selection so far and a lot of diversity in the picking. And so I went with Joe Manchin, obviously the shadow president, who was able to dictate what gets passed and build back better, getting canceled or cut from 6 plus billion down to maybe 1.5 billion. Ever trillions, trillion trillion rather sorry thank you. Was my hey sack was do you do you think the man in politics a rising star or a falling star after his decision to denounce the build back better bill this year, this week. Well you guys have to remember that the state he's from West Virginia went for Trump by like 20 points. It is a deep red state and Manchin himself as a major anomaly as a blue politician hanging on in that state. Yeah. So the Democrats instead of alienating him should be thanking their lucky stars that they even have them. For any votes because any other Democratic politician in West Virginia would have gone down to defeat a long time ago. So they are lucky with that mansion can vote with them at all on anything. To a layman like myself, where I imagine most people who aren't aware of that kind of political circumstance, he looks like a John McCain maverick kind of guy. Like he's coming in and saying I'm blowing this thing up and he gets all this attention. I think that light a fire for him maybe. I think that's a great analogy, which I think he is the Democrats. McCain, you know, he is the guy. I mean, they're casting that very unpopular vote, the single vote like McCain did on on the repeal of Obamacare, the single vote that took that down. But the reality is the Republicans on Obamacare didn't have a plausible alternative. That's why McCain voted against that. And I think here in the same way, I think mansion may be doing the Democrats a favor because we can't afford all of this new spending. Super interesting. Yeah, here we go. Biggest loser in politics. Who do you got? Let's go in reverse order now. Chamath, who do you got? You go first. OK, my biggest loser is Elizabeth Warren. She wanted. Everybody to pay a lot of taxes who were in the billionaires to pay taxes? You wanted to cancel them. And now the largest tax bill ever paid by any American has been completed, according to a tweet from Elon that he paid $11 billion. Every program she wanted to work for and fight for has been done. Just not by her. It's been done by the private sector she was attacking. Bezos for pay and factories and getting to a $15 minimum wage. Now Amazon is regularly paying in the 20s and giving free college, something her and Bernie Sanders were not able to accomplish in their entire careers. And now she continues to dunk on. Capitalists, entrepreneurs as the country. Basically says we're not interested in socialism, we're not interested in this brand of politics. They lost the election. Biden won, and now this far left politics is I think, becoming, you know, as as unimportant as the far right. You know alt right. She's she's basically not important. I'll build on your theme. And I actually just said the progressive left and the alt right. So I think that the short extremes in America have basically, you know, we've exposed them for the emperor with no clothes. So, you know, we have tried progressive policies and cities and states in America. That's failed. We've tried far right politics at the federal level that's basically crashed and burned as well. And now what you see is a wave of normalcy. And so, you know all these chortling, you know, fringe classes. Get an extreme amount of attention because what they say is salacious or interesting, but underneath there's no real substance or follow through or real skill. There's no basic understanding of anything, economic policy, foreign policy, none of it. And so they they make for great sound bites, but they cannot govern. And so I think the the biggest loser is the progressive left and the alt right sack. You want to go next year? I mean very much. In the same vein, my choice is Kamala Harris, the vice president. She is a 28% approval rating. Polls show her lagging Biden by about 10 points. No Vice president has pulled this poorly since Dan Quayle was the **** of every late night joke about 30 years ago, and boy, am I really dating myself with that reference. What's the problem? Yeah, exactly, yeah. Potato, a lot of viewers don't even remember what we're talking about. But so the problem here is kind of what Jamath was saying. She, Harris is an equity scold. The public is tired of being lectured and hectored about its woke sins and trying to compensate for that. And showing, you know, warmth with a fake laughing cackle isn't going to reassure anybody who's just been called a white supremacist. Interestingly enough, last year on our award show, Jason. Calacanis made the prediction that Kamala will be the first female president of the United States, just as a gentle reminder that we had predictions. But how you how you called him calcaneus calcaneus? Sure. He likes. He likes to monetize his name. OK. Fried Burger could still come true, you know, I mean, the prediction was made because I thought Biden wasn't going to make it to the first term because he's old, and then he might not be able to function. That was that was right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that may still happen. Yeah. I mean, I think I might stand by that prediction. We'll save it for the prediction show. OK. We'll save it for a prediction show next week. We're taking no weeks off as the new rule here. All right, moving on. Oh, wait. I got my biggest loser. Oh yeah, basically. Sorry. My biggest political loser is. Tony Fauci, I feel like this guy got totally viced out this year. Determinism is a trap, right? In his role, you have to be deterministic. Meaning you're saying you got to do X to get Y in order to get people to take action. And so, you know, in order, determinism was needed for clarity of action to get people to take the vaccine. And he said, hey, this is gonna, you know, ultimately end the pandemic. And the problem with determinism is it drives binary outcomes. You're either right or you're wrong. And in this case, he was wrong. Right. He said, go get the vaccine. The pandemic will end. Everyone got the vaccine, and the pandemic certainly didn't end. And it evolved and it became this very fuzzy Gray math on where we sit today. And I think as a result, he completely lost credibility with a broad swath of people who otherwise would have been kind of still standing behind him. Because I do think he's, you know, he's an honest Jeff, forthright scientist. But in order to drive outcomes, he had to be very kind of stated and and it was a bit of a trap this year, and I think he got screwed. So port poor Tony Fauci, I mean, bless him, but it was a rough year. Alright, biggest political surprise. Sax where he got what's the biggest political surprise of 2020? Glenn youngkin. And, you know, I just to add to what Shamatha already said, you know, Virginia went for Biden by 10 points just a short time before. Younkin, he secured Trump's endorsement very early and quietly and kept the kept Trump at Bay. And then he ran as a general moderate with a business pedigree, as as kind of turmoil pointed out. But there was something else going on here as well. I don't think it was just centrism that would flip a blue state red. It was also that issue of schools where McAuliffe had that gaffe. In their final debate, he said that parents shouldn't be telling the schools what to teach. Basically, McAuliffe was sided with the the teachers unions and. Whereas young coincided with parents and really, I think, voiced their opposition to CRT in the schools that became the centerpiece of his closing argument, and that's what allowed him to win when the election. My biggest political surprise is Joe Manchin. I think that he will, probably. Be looked back on in time as our generations, Paul Volcker. So let me explain what I mean by that. You know, at the time, Volcker was incredibly unpopular for what he did by raising interest rates to basically break the back of inflation. And it really wasn't until 30 or 40 years later, through the, you know, fullness of time, that we appreciated that what he did took an enormous amount of courage because in the moment it created huge headaches. And a lot of pushback, and a lot of ill will and ire towards Volcker. Similarly, I think Manchin is just now starting this process of just getting completely pilloried. And you know people will point to a handful of elements of build back better, like childcare that have now expired and those childcare credits and what it means to working families. And that is true that, but there are ways to solve for that by just going back and re spending the seven trillion we already spend a little bit better and in time. The idea and the courage to not pour three more trillion dollars on this dumpster fire without getting ourselves better organized. We'll turn out to be an enormous gift that he gave our kids a profile in courage, even if we don't right now see it. And a lot of people can be angry at it. But that was the biggest political surprise, is the desire for a politician, politician. Because you have to remember, Fed chair is elected, right? You're there, you're in, you're out. But that was a surprise to me, that he would go through this process and what it meant at a national level for his reputation to get to the other side. My biggest political surprise was that that insurrection crowd made their way into the Capitol building. I mean, do you guys remember how shocking those images were? Yeah, and what an incredible day that was. I mean, it was almost a year ago now, and we watched on screen what felt like the crumbling of institutions that we always took for being, we always took for granted and assumed were impenetrable, both politically but more importantly physically, and to see people physically break into that Capitol building and cause mayhem and damage. It really kind of exposed, I think, a nerve. And it was a really kind of shocking moment, a shocking day. So, you know, to this day, I still kind of think that that's been the biggest surprise for me of the year. I, you know, I don't think any of us thought that would happen both in terms of like that we let our defenses down and let people into that building like that and that there was enough of a groundswell to break their way into that building. Both sides were surprising and also just super disturbing to watch a bunch of elected officials cowering under tables while Secret Service had guns drawn. Also being kicked in and also, while some elected officials were kind of endorsing the behavior to some extent, you know, at a distance, the whole thing was just shocking. And I think a lot of us realized that maybe our democracy, and I think I mentioned this on the show last year, is not is a little more fragile than perhaps we, we we think it is. Trump was the biggest stress test ever for me. The biggest political surprise was Kamala Harris being sidelined. Where is she? What is she working on? I thought that the Democratic Party was going to want to feature her. Showcase her with some great projects in order to maybe prep her for running if need be in 24 and certainly in 2028. And it seems like they have sidelined her deliberately and they don't believe in her, which is they don't believe in the first female vice president and of color. And I don't think that. I think that they think that she's not, she's not. They think that she's not electable and so they're hanging. So maybe they're racist. Maybe they are saving her till after the midterms and then going to feature her. I don't know what the strategy here is. The house I don't think like a fighter. I mean protecting her, but if she was good enough to get to help get Biden in office? Why isn't she good enough to feature now? It just doesn't make sense to me. That she was so sidell they did give her tests like they sent her to the border. The problem is she doesn't have anything to say that's that will resonate with the American people, but also be acceptable to her progressive base. For her perceived, her perceived progressive, because I actually think that she also has the ability and has in the past, you know, had the ability to be tough. Water diet mean she's she she's ripped so she she completely has the ability to just be nails if she wants to be. But again, she, and again, maybe even Biden to some degree, still believe that the progressive left is the future of the party. I think that most of us here think that it's a head fake. And until she comes to those terms herself, she's not. She's going to continue to be sidelined, but if she tacks back to the center and actually gets out there, I think she's really. Capable of of of doing some stuff here. She's very articulate. She's very punchy. Anybody she, you know, she can really tell the truth, but then she can also really just Shuck and jive and say nothing when she wants to. And that's just what's that Corporal speak isn't working for her. Did anybody else notice freeberg Sachs, that the initial reaction to Manchin's vote or saying he wasn't going to vote for this on Sunday during the talk shows was like dunking on him, Oh my God, he's horrible. And then immediately Monday, they were trying to reconcile with him and say, hey. Let's have a reasonable discussion about this. We value your opinion as a partner. Well, it it was this weird emotional reaction, like, I got this e-mail I forwarded to you guys from jenschke about. Yeah, and it's like crazy in that e-mail, like in that, in her press release or whatever. That e-mail that she sent to us, a bunch of us got it. I mean, Jen's going crazy. Yeah, historical. It was triggered CYA by the administration. Like they wasted everyone's time for six months pushing this bill forward without checking to see if the swing votes would go for it. So then the swing votes don't go for it, the bill fails and they're blaming those things make sense. I think it's that they just ignored what the swing votes are saying. He's been saying from the beginning it's too big and his number was 1.5 and they just said, you know what? We'll wait till the end and then try to high pressure him or something or flip him at the doesn't make sense to strategy. Doesn't make sense to push for that big a bill when it's a 5050 Senate. They should have gone for something smaller and more reasonable. Either either that or they should have made a better calculation on inflation. Because again, the minute that we have these big inflation prints and the Fed basically changed their tapering posture, that was the bullet in the gun. And you basically handed mansion a loaded weapon and said here you go, do what you will with this terrible betting strategy by the Republican. Well, he warned them. He warned them and warned that he was worried about inflation and they were saying it was transitory. And then he turned out to be right. Alright, alright, biggest winner in business, free broke who you got, biggest winner, 21, biggest winner in business goes back to the GameStop days and I think it was the retail investor class. You know they were always there to trade on the wings and in the wake of the institutions and the markets prior to I think what took place this year and after what happened this year where they were able to coalesce and organize to make trades that move the market against institutions in a really meaningful way. They broke several institutions in the process. It highlighted that retail has power, retail can organize, and retail in aggregate can act to be a stronger force in the markets than institutions. And so the retail investor is my biggest winner for 2021. Who's your biggest winner? Chamath in business? I mean, this is pretty obvious. It's Elon Musk. You know, as a former owner of Tesla, as a current shareholder of SpaceX, as somebody who sold him a company this year, David and I did. To see him work is magical, absolutely magical. And I think that this guy, you know, you know, there's there are these impresarios who just have these virtuosos, who have these moments where they're just in the zone. And he's in the zone. He's in his zone of mastery. And to see a guy like that execute, I think is a privilege. So he's my big not Elon. Who would you have? Because it's pretty obvious it's Elon. So did you have a second place consideration? I would actually probably double down with what Freeberg said. I do think that there was. It's more sort of what I would say is the outsider class versus insiders. I think that whether it's blockchain or web three or NFT's or GameStop. This was the year, you know, the Constitution Dow. This was the year that loose affiliations of individuals could compete on a level playing field with organized capital. And I think that that's a really important trend for the future. Who do you have biggest winner in business? If it is Elon, who's your runner up? Yeah. So I mean can't fault that, Elon choice is pretty obvious, but I would say in our world, the biggest winner was Tiger Global. They basically. Like ties, growth stage capital, by far the biggest deployer of late stage funding. They productized it so pretty much founders can just send their metrics on like a single sheet of paper and they get a term sheet within two days. They did by far the most deals. It's really the SoftBank strategy done right. That's a great pick, 15 billion. I think it's the amount they deployed this year. I don't know if you guys heard that number, but yeah, yeah, in a single year to invest 15 billion, assume A5 year fund, you know you're at a 75. $1,000,000 run rate. It's pretty incredible. I mean it really is the size of vision fund and I heard, I don't know if you guys heard, but they are heavily dependent. Not dependent, but they've built infrastructure with third parties who source all this data for them to really kind of measure everything prior to making investments. They they built a machine to amazing. My biggest winner in business is the ANG not the Fang. Drop the F and go with the ANG. Amazon has a new CEO and they haven't missed a beat. Apple is about to hit. 3 trillion. And Susan Wojcicki and YouTube, if you don't know, is now at 2 billion users, 30 billion in revenue. And this, of course, is after Elon, because that's the obvious choice. So after Elon, Alphabet stock up 66%. Apple stock up 31%. You guys know what's going on with those big companies. So I'm going to go with the young biggest loser in business, the biggest loser in business. Who do you have Friedberg? Who's your biggest loser? I went. I went to the opposite of my biggest winner. I went for those institutions that that, you know, got their lunch. Yeah, by the retail Gabe Plotkin and you know he lost so much money shorting GameStop against these guys, buying GameStop to the moon, he had to borrow $2.75 billion from Citadel and Point 7.72 just to get through his mump. I mean talk about embarrassing, talk about reversal of fortune, you know he's obviously been a renowned investor prior to this and you know there's a few others that that were. You know, casualties of war. White Square, a firm in London, shut down half a billion AUM. So all these folks who tried to bet against retail during the GameStop saga and since thinking that the world was the way it used to be, have had to kind of. Change. Amazing that that and the insurrection both happened in this year. Like it. Time is moving. So this year is insane. Yeah, it's been a crazy. All of this happened in this past year. It's crazy to think about. We were here and I was up in Tahoe skiing and and all this stuff was breaking. It was crazy at that time. That was actually our record episode when all in had that breakout episode. Who do you have for your biggest loser? David sacks. I have Chinese billionaires were the biggest loser this year. I don't know if you guys remember. Yeah, exactly a year ago we were all asking where is Jack Ma? Will he eventually? Turned up looking very thin and and kind of broken. But his experience was just an early sort of manifestation and sort of a Canary in the coal mine of a larger CCP crackdown on all Chinese billionaires. And the CCP really seems to be increasing its control and putting these people under its thumb. And there are a bunch of tech companies there like Alibaba DD, Tencent, baidujd.com they've all been targeted for fines and tighter controls, and China's pretty much shut down the foreign IPO. Market for their tech companies. They've banned moving into Hong Kong, right? I mean, yeah, exactly. They're the CCP has basically brought all the billionaires under their thumb. Roth, who do you have? And this is amazing. Just so the audience knows, we do not reveal our choices until in the moment. It's really great to hear. So great. Yeah, I love hearing some of these things. It makes me think for sure. Yeah, my my biggest loser is big tech. If you look at this year and you annotate it not for their stock price, but for what I think is sort of the the precursor to longer term success. There is a lot of signs that there's pressure building, so whether that's measured in lawsuits. Finds, uh, bad PR. If you put all of that stuff together, I think the thing that that drives is decaying morale. And when you have decaying morale, you have human capital flight. So people leave. There are some articles just recently even about, you know, an exodus that, you know, Novi. Novi. I don't know how to pronounce it, the cryptocurrency business of meta. It's just a really, really difficult thing to deal with when folks start walking out the door because they're just bummed out from working there. And if you just, and if you just, you know, Google search the, the number of issues that all of these companies collectively are dealing with, I think that. This is sort of peak big tech market. Cap is probably within the next year or two. Interesting. This is just so great that we all had different choices. I picked the ANG as the winner. I'm picking the F in Fang as the loser matter was a complete flop. It was a stupid idea to change the name of the company, the product they showed in that big. Tip off was like every science fiction movie we've seen for the last 30 years, the leaks, the apple headwinds against their ads, the political headwinds. And my last point is exactly chamath's last point, which is no one wants to work there. It's becoming more and more difficult if you're in Silicon Valley or you're a tech executive, to see a reason to go work at that company. I think that their VR efforts, AR efforts, will be beaten handily by Apple and by the Metaverse and. You know, open source, decentralized solutions. I think the F in fact should be replaced with the TF, Tesla and be Tang. Facebook Media traded up 25% this year. Jackal I. Listen, I do think it's a juggernaut. And when things go wrong it does take a while. So these are forward-looking. If people are leaving now, maybe you'd see the impact of that in three 4-5 years. But I would not buy the stock. I'd buy the other three letters. I would buy the tank, but not the F and Fang. But I think it's a good counterpoint. Yeah, these things take a while to unwrap. Well, I think, you know, I think the the the better trade. To pick the one that you love in Fang and short, the one that you hate in Fang. And if you get that right, you can make a lot of money. Pretty safe spread there, right? The spread trade like we talked about. All right, biggest business surprise. What do you got, stacks? What's your biggest business surprise this year? I thought the biggest business surprise was tech leaders and startups moving to Miami. Its emergence from really nothing in the tech scene to being a major tech hub. It was just a year ago, one year ago last December, that Delian sort of mused on Twitter about, hey, can we just relocate? Silicon Valley to Miami. The Miami Mayor, Francis Suarez, jumped in. He responded. How can I help? And then, since then, it's just been ***********. And as San Francisco has basically been sliding into what it's become, Miami just keeps blowing up. And it helps, I think, what's been happening on the state level there, that DeSantis has kept the state open for business and he's kept schools open. And of course, the tax rate is 0. The income tax and the capital gains tax, that is, or 0. So it's really pretty amazing how fast it has become a major tech hub. My answer, which was really surprising to me starting in January, and I think I I started texting you guys in January saying I really think we should talk about this on the pod if you'll remember, and it's obviously just become a crescendo. Since then, it's NFT's and it really has been incredible to watch how, you know, the individual folks in crypto have embraced NFT's as a way. You know, to tokenize the value that creators can bring to the world. And I think, yeah, there's a lot of fluff and a lot of noise and a lot of bubbles going on within this NFT space right now. Most of it will die, and it will look terrible when people lose lots of money and feel bad about the decisions they made during this phase. But what I think is really wonderful about it is the opportunity it creates for creators to monetize their talent in a way that doesn't require them going through middle men to get distribution and middle men who take, you know, huge slugs. Huge chunks of the margin out of out of what they create and this can ultimately translate into music, into art, into writing, into all sorts of things. So I'm pretty excited, not necessarily that we're NT sit today. I think it's disaster where it sits today, but I think over the long run I just love the disaster. I just think there's too much of this bubbly stuff that's going on where people are buying into speculative transactions that are going to lose their money and then people are going to be really hurt and really upset. But but the general Cortec, I love the fact. I love the fact that creators, people that are great at art and people that are creative can develop stuff and make money because people will appreciate it and pay for it. And I just think that's awesome. Fantastic. Alright, so for me it was that. Douse were able to raise $40 million in a couple of days for this constitution and get and basically captures every capture the entire world's imagination for you know, a 72 hour news cycle, much in the way the day traders did with AMC and GameStop to Freeburg's point earlier. And the big winners. And I'm, I have a dual one here. I'm absolutely surprised about this. You know, the the the Dow that was able to raise 40 million for the Constitution, but I was also. Disappointed that the SEC. In your 10 plus of crypto has not defined the rules of the road yet, so that one group of people professional capital allocators play by one set of rules and then another group of people doused tokens are playing by. No set of rules or their interpretation of unclear rules, I guess would be the most charitable way. So that's my biggest surprise. We have to have a regulatory framework for crypto, for Daws, for NFT's, for tokens, and it's just crazy that it hasn't happened yet. What do you got? Your money? My, my, my big big business winner breakout company, I have two, but they're the same really as Moderna slash biontech. You know, these were guys that were kind of swimming at the edges of. Science and R&D and somewhat was just incapable of putting 1 foot in front of the other until this pandemic. And through a bunch of, you know, emergency use authorizations, these guys have really shown up to help the world. And in 2020, I think they cemented themselves as now on a path to not just, you know, be a vaccine maker for COVID, but a whole bunch of other things including cancer treatments and everything else. So I think these two companies, these two companies really took a big step forward in 2020. Absolutely. Just as a side note. Because he had eight million a monthly volume at the beginning of the year in January and 3.46 billion in August. Give me an idea of the scale of that. OK, best science breakthrough, what do you got Freeburg? Everybody wants to know the Sultan of Sciences, best science breakthrough. I'm a little bit blinders on this one because I think I mentioned this on the show a few weeks ago and I'm spending quite a bit of time at work on it, which is that starch synthesis system that was demonstrated by those Chinese scientists. And the system itself is likely not going to be the production system that saves the world. But the concept that we can take proteins that are expressed by different plants and put them together in a tank, and then that tank can convert molecules from one form to another by leveraging these proteins that just interact and move around in the tank. It's really an incredible demonstration, and the demonstration is inspiring. We can take carbon out of the atmosphere and make food. With a minimal amount of renewable electricity. And I think that's really a moment that will inspire a whole new realm of industrial synthetic biology work, a lot of which I hope to kind of, you know, build and participate in pretty heavily in the work that we do day-to-day. But it was really exciting for me. So the start sentence synthesis system is your best science breakthrough. Do you got sacks? I've got these new oral COVID antiviral pills that are coming out from Pfizer and Merck. The FDA is supposed to be approving them. By the end of this week, as you'll recall last year around this time, it was these new M RNA vaccines from Pfizer Moderna. But we now have to admit that the vaccines have not ended the pandemic because the virus can mutate its spike proteins around the the vaccine. So the vaccines by itself cannot end the pandemic. These new pills have I think a very good shot of doing it next year because they're protease inhibitors, so they stop the virus from replicating. And just and even if the spike proteins mutate, it will not prevent these protease inhibitors from working. So I am hopeful that this will be the thing, hopefully that ends the pandemic next year. Are these new antiviral pills? I would like to make a counter to saxis. I would be very cautious about the side effects that are going to arise from these protease inhibitors. And you know, they're, they're they're not as well studied as they normally would be, but there are, they have a serious biological effect in normal cells in the human body. And I think as more people use them, you'll see more crazy stories about side effects that are really significantly effects would be. There's a lot that are well documented, but the way they work biologically is is they disrupt, you know, certain systems and those are not just systems related to the virus, they're systems in our own. Cells. And so I, I I, I'm personally quite nervous about them. I know that folks are are pretty encouraged by them and excited, but I'm nervous about them. There is a similar medication that's been developed for HIV, right, that's called Prep, right. Does that cause similar side effects or because people use that prophylactically, yeah, to some extent. You know, and the dosage matters. And so normally you would go through many more years, I think, of testing on these things to kind of truly quantify, you know, when you have half a percent or 1% of a population, you know, let's say take the most extreme case, die, then a million people use it, you're going to have a lot of people dying. And and I'm not sure we've really gotten the the boundaries of this yet. And the dosage is pretty significant on them. So, yeah like let's, you know, let's keep a watchful eye on this stuff. But I'm, I'm, I'm hopeful, but I'm also nervous hopefully the number of people who need to take it. Free bird, correct me if I'm wrong, if we got this many people, Vaxxed, who will not need to take it, and then amcron, my biggest optimism is just that Omicron is a much less virulent virus and it sweeps through the population and we slowly see this pandemic kind of, you know, becoming less severe, which is. That was predicted. Do you think herd immunity even exists in the, in the way that the virus evolves? No. So there. And by the way, it's not binary. It's not like, hey, you get herd immunity and no one's going to catch this thing. There's clearly a spectrum of immunity. Meaning, like, I can maybe get the virus and be somewhat contagious for half a day or a day and I don't even know it, and then I'm spreading it for that half day, but I didn't even know I had it. That's kind of, you know, not all the way over to herd immunity and the traditional kind of definition of the way that we talk about it. But it reduces the spread and the severity in aggregate on the other end is like everyone gets it. It spreads like crazy. No, no vaccine stops, it changes anything, no amount of antibodies changes anything and everyone just dies. And so somewhere in the middle I think is where we find our kind of, you know, our ground. But I, I don't think that the traditional. Definition or the way that people talk about herd immunity, which is hey everyone get the shot and this things over is going to play out that way at all. This is going to be a slow, slow wind down, OK. And to give shamat some credit, you said it would be a nothing burger. And so far it looks like deaths and hospitalizations, specifically ICU admittance has not turned out to be a major issue yet. Knock on wood, unless something escapes from the lab again, I think that we're going to be OK. I think this is the end of the end. So that would be so great if this was the. End of the end game. My best science breakthrough is that this year we actually were able to inject. In vivo, so in the body genetic code for CRISPR. Two cases specifically. One was to basically reduce the production of this toxic. Liver protein in a bunch of folks. And then the second one moderately improved the vision of some people who had some form of inherited blindness. And that's pretty incredible stuff that you can, you know, make something, put it into your body, and then, you know, your body does the work of editing out the bad genes. And that's a I think that's a pretty incredible breakthrough. I had the starch on my list too, but I went with Starship. For people who don't know, on March 3rd, Starship Serial number 10, SN 10 completed SpaceX third. By altitude flight test of a prototype type and they were able to ascend and then reorient themselves and land if you. Don't know. Starship is ginormous when compared to the Falcon and the other rockets that SpaceX has produced. I got to see it, actually. I went to Boca and when you look inside that nose cone. You could fit 300 people in it. It is a payload that is absolutely unprecedented in terms of sending. People or things to space and the fact that this has succeeded means all the folks at SpaceX need to do is to scale it. And they're pretty good at scaling things. They just had their 100th landing of their smaller rocket. And so when this big boy, this BFR big freaking rocket gets going, it's going to change the nature of our species as multi planetary, planetary and being able to reach. And put things in space that we've never been able to do so. Kind of an engineering feat, but I put it under science and also to not pick the same one as freeberg. Do you think Starship is going to be able to orbit Uranus? Enough. Believe it out there. No, Nick, you can't have veto rights. Nick, you can't. No, no. All of this needs to stay, all right? Biggest flash in the pan. Biggest flash in the pan. Sacks you pick people. I you told me earlier. Well, I say we love people. Please. Yeah. No, that was yours. I had, I think, the the use of the word transitory was my biggest flash in the pan. It seemed like, for a brief moment, that every administration official, every democratic political consultant, every talking head on TV kept using the word transitory. It was very much the vocabulary word of the day. But now it turned out that the inflation was not transitory, and so the use of the word transitory, I predict will in fact be transitory. My summary like that where do you got chamath? I picked all things Metaverse and Web 3. And web three, yeah, 3 writ large. If you guys were around in the emergence of Web 2.0 there was. There was a period when where this gaggle of investors were just clamoring about Web 2.0 none of us understood what it is, and we were building it, it turned out. And so I think that, uh, these trends. Actually have names, and those names are of companies, and those companies create experiences that people want. And so. I just think that this whole concept of metaverse and Web three goes away and we replace it with real solutions for people that give them value. And then we'll be obsessed with these companies and. This this too will be transitory. I went with the Constitution now while while I believe Jason that the concept was inspiring and will echo for quite some time with other, you know, kind of improved versions and different applications. This particular Dow caused a lot of people to lose a lot of money in gas fees transferring tokens over to cover the expense of the ultimate. Not just that was not actually done. It felt a little disorganized. There was questions around equity and securities and the legality and misaligned expectations. And while I get that there was a good intent and that folks that were involved in it were felt like it worked and it did what it was meant to do, which was to be inspiring. That particular Dow came and went in three days. And I'm not not not to discredit the concept and I think that more will come in the future, but it really was such a loud moment and then it went silent two days later. Yep, OK. And I picked the woke socialist leadership of cities, specifically the once great city of the once great City of San Francisco, where they thought they had figured it all out and that they would be able to run roughshod over the citizens of their own city. And lo and behold, when. An investigative journalist was hired by myself and Gary Tan did the Democratic recall and Sachs supported the Republican recall. Lo and behold, London Breed has decided that she does not want to get recalled and she is fed up with the ******** in San Francisco and Chesa Boudin and all of these. Whack jobs are all going to get voted out and recalled, and we've seen it, and it came up earlier in the program to beat a dead horse. But these failed policies of letting people run amok and not having some base level of protection and not listening to your citizens belong in a textbook and in a preschool. You could talk about them in Graduate School. Yes, this is great for a college dorm to talk about. What would life be like as a communist? As a socialist. In the real world, people want to be safe when they take their kids to ******* school. Great. End of story. And if people don't feel safe. You're not going to get reelected. Game over. I also think that people have a reasonable right to have their kids educated, not managed to some watered down lowest common denominator so as to not so as to try to make everybody around them feel better. Yeah, 100% all right. I have a feeling that we're going to, this is going to sweep here, best CEO. Should we just say 3 to one and say the name? I'll go 1st. I'm going to pick Satya Nadella. Ohh, well done. And the reason I say that is that you know he if you look at this track record and I thought this business could not get any bigger, but it just is a compounding absolute juggernaut and a machine. He has completely turned that company around and. From, you know, big, chunky acquisitions. He's unafraid to pull the trigger and rip the money. In LinkedIn, GitHub. This year, he did nuance. The product portfolio heat, you know, we had to compete with him at Slack when he was, you know, he decided to turn the the sights on on with teams on to us. We had no choice but to basically sell the Salesforce. This guy is a master executor. Has kept the entire company out of the press. Has had the least amount of pushback around their growth and expansion. The least amount of lawsuits? The least amount of bad PR. So just in terms of, uh you know, first Class CEO, he he's, he's he's running a master class. Crushed it. Crushed. Crushed scale totally. What can brown do for you? That was a UPS logo and it's now, it's now what the shareholders of Google Microsoft. Twitter, Twitter, Palo Alto Networks and Adobe have said. And proud to for you. OK, so much for the Curry ceiling. OK, we we have smashed through the Curry ceiling. Absolutely. There's Curry penetrated the samosa ceiling. There we go. Free broke. You're making me hungry. I know. Gotcha. I'm having. I'm having crab Curry tonight. Can you believe it? I went fishing. I told you guys this. I went bleep out the name. I went fishing, fishing, and we caught some crabs. And so we're having in the Bay of San Francisco Bay. Yeah. Oh, did you go up to, like, Chrissy Field? And we go, we go to the pier, and then they take us out past Golden Gate Bridge two, point Reyes. We caught rockfish, which we ate yesterday. Delicious. This is on a boat. You did it on a boat? Yeah. Great. Great. Captain. Yeah, school I I would take London, my 12 year old crabbing when I lived in San Francisco off of Crissy Field, and we bring crabs home and all that. You can get these incredible. You can get it one day sport license from the state of California. It's good for 10 fish and 10 crab. It's amazing. All right, so who do you got Freeberg best CEO? Well, I like, I like the Jack and Elon going direct. Experience this year, and what I mean by that is it's less about like how well did the business performed. I mean, so many tech company CEO's have performed so well this year, it's hard to pick someone for driving business outcomes. But what I like about Jack and Elon, Jack in particular, in the last day is, you know, having a voice and going direct and being inspiring. I think that leadership is all about defining where you're headed and then creating religion in the troops to follow you to go there. And I think the way that both of these. Both speak directly to people and the way that they speak authentically and that they tell a big story about where they believe the world should go and why you should follow them to get there. You know, create some model that a lot of other CEO's I think should and will start to follow. And I think we'll see a lot more of this kind of like Twitter going direct type of activity happening in the in the years ahead. Sex, what do you got? Best CEO Brian Armstrong. Because it was about this time of year ago that he drew a line in the sand and said that. He was not going to allow politics in the workplace. It was gonna be a Demilitarized Zone for politics. It was pulling people off mission and a year later he gave us an update. It's been the best thing they ever did. They gave a generous severance package to anyone who didn't go along with it was only 5% took it. They then went on to have a very successful IPO. It's now $65 billion public company, and a year later they are more mission focused. They've attracted more employees. Their diversity numbers have not gone down. And the reason I picked I'm picking him is not just because of the business success, but I think there's a lot of CEOs. In fact, I'd say most CEO's, including some of the bigger names that were all kind of talking about, are secretly would love to do what Brian did. They would love to basically ban politics in their workplace, but for whatever reason, they just don't have the cojones to do it. I applaud Brian for taking the hit of the New York Times hit piece and then came after him and to stick to his guns. He did this policy and I think. Coinbase had a great year. Amazing choice. Wow. 3 great choices. Satya, Jack Armstrong. I think Elon clearly is, but I'm going to pick somebody else so it's not all Elon all the time. I'm going to go with Frank Slootman from Snowflake. This company has grown incredibly at a incredible velocity. But I just read his book. I got a pre-order of his book pre pre release of his book called AMP It Up and I had him on this week in Startups which will come out in the New year when the book comes out. And he's a killer. He absolutely. Look, he seems like an absolute killer and the book basically is I do not care about how you think business works. Here is the 0 sum game of competitive business and here's 205 pages. It's a must read. And he just wants to win. And so my, my hats off to him, $100 billion company and they've absolutely crushed it. So best investor chamath you to pick yourself for the third year in a row or do you have somebody else in mind? This one, this one I think is a is an absolutely easy one, but it's my dear friend Dan Loeb. Ohh, founder and CIO. When did that happen? Founder and CIO of Third Point at and of of as I've seen. I talked to him yesterday, actually. I called them just to wish him a happy birthday. By the way, it's his birthday. Happy birthday. But he has shown the widest range this year. And really put everything together yet again kind of one of these virtuoso performances, early stage success. So he was a, you know early stage investor. I think they did the Series A and centillion one that had a big IPO this year growth investing. He you know was a was a great investor, early investor in Rivian that went public this year. He had great public performance in upstart and a bunch of other ones. Activism. He went after Shell. Crypto, I think he's an investor in FTX and a bunch of other things. I mean, just. Tuned it and to be able to put together a team that can execute across all of those business lines and risk management where he still sizes like, I'm telling you, like, it is so hard to size this stuff properly and get it right. He did an incredible job and he's just a a beautiful, lovely human being. So damn right we're cooked with oil. We're moving at a nice pace. I picked the Sequoia fund, the new Evergreen Sequoia, and the Sequoia Fund, the new Evergreen Fund. Obviously over the past two years they've had door Dash, Airbnb, snowflake. Pretty well, these incredible companies worth over $300 billion combined, and now those LP's get to keep their money in this one vehicle. And I think it's gonna make Sequoia even more powerful. Great innovation and shout out to my friend Ruloff. And I gave a runner U to Brad Gerstner, friend of the pod, who obviously did Snowflake last year, but had to grab IPO this year, which I think was the largest back in history. And you know, I don't think I traded particularly well yet, but congratulations to Brad as my runner up. Who do you got sex? Well, my first thought was Nancy Pelosi, but. Performance, yeah. I don't think it counts, though, if you do it through insider trading. So I have to rule out. OK, sure. So my my actual choice, my actual choice is Ken Griffin, the founder of Citadel. He generated something like 10% returns on a $500 billion fund. I mean, just mammoth, mammoth amounts of money. But it wasn't just his economic return. He's obviously a cash generating machine. But it wasn't just that. It was also the way that he came out on this whole Wall Street bets Robin Hood scandal way back in January, remember of the whole payment for order flow is a gigantic scandal with with Robin Hood and he along with Vlad and others was hauled up to Capitol Hill, but they could not lay a glove on him. He demonstrated, I think in commanding testimony that all these conspiracy theories around his role had no merit and the populist revolt around this whole payment for order flow, Robin Hood thing broke. Against the Rock of Ken Griffin, he comes out as a huge winner both economically and politically. And you left out the most important part. He was the Super villain in buying the constitution town. Yeah, he got revenge. One extra dollars he got, he got revenge on the crypto people. That's right. He had the last laugh on people. That's right. Great. Great financial troll. Free bird, get your PC at best. Investor of 2021. I kind of stuck to private markets just because they're illiquid, which means it's harder to source. Not everyone has the same data. We all have different data and different points of view. So within that, I kind of said look what makes the best investor. And number one is obviously good returns, you know who's got the best returns. But second is how scalable is you're investing machine and 3rd is how durable is it? Like, does it get worse as you scale up? I know where you're going with this. So, you know, I had three kind of finalists. One was founders fund and I would argue they probably have the best consistent returns in terms of the multiples on their funds. Tiger Global which we talked about earlier, which I would argue is the most scalable and durable as we've seen deploying 15 billion this year. And then finally Sequoia which has near the best return, scalable and durable with this new transition you talked about and ultimately Sequoia went out. So that's my, my tree of of success, one of the first times we've had two of the same in the voting. This is incredible best turnaround, pretty out for best. Turn around, shamar. Best turn around. I picked Ford. Enormous performance this year, the stocks up 130 odd percent. Good portfolio mix of, you know, gas guzzling cars that still make a ton of money, like the Ford F1 fifties. But you know, they have the Mustang, they have the electric versions of the Ford F1 fifties, they had some great investments. I think they printed like a $20 billion gain on rivian. So it's just a really, really good turn around from what that company was, which was if you talked any car company that that could have been up 132% at the beginning of 2021, it would not have been four. So well done by that team. Who do you have sex? Are you an investor in Fortuna? No. No. So I went a little different for this. I said the best turnaround was Kyle Rittenhouse's reputation. As you recall, Rittenhouse shot 3 white attackers, including two of them were sex offenders, at a violent BLM protest in Kenosha. The media then painted him, without any evidence, as a white supremacist terrorist who went there looking to shoot people like some sort of frustrated school shooter. It turned out not to be true. There was clear video evidence at the scene that he acted in self-defense. Once there was a jury trial, all this came out. He was acquitted on all charges and the prosecution was revealed to be politically motivated. I would say that written house now has his freedom and he has a reputation back in the eyes of all fair observers. Who do you got freeberg? Well, I went from who was in the worst shape and you know, came back from that and I, I put we work on here. On an obvious and easy choice we work to me is like Rocky Balboa, you know? Rocky Balboa could not win the match. Rocky Balboa got so beat up, goes to the, you know, to his corner. He gets patched up. He's bleeding from his eyes, bleeding from his nose. He's literally about to die. His coach gives him a little smack on the **** and says get back out there and he keeps going. He's not going to win the match. But man, for we work to go from where it was a few years ago, which was days or weeks away from. Bankruptcy, billions of dollars of money injected by SoftBank and for them to orchestrate basically this, this whole, you know, juggernaut into what looks like a business now and get it public via SPAC. And it now has enough capital and a good game plan and it looks like maybe a normal, you know, challenge technology business was really quite a a turn around. There was no one to sell this thing to. They had to get in there and they had to rework this whole thing and they reworked rework and rocky. Balboa is going to make it to the 10th round. He may not win the match, but you know he's still in it. It was pretty, pretty impressive to see them get it out this year. All right. Listen, I struggle with this one. I had two companies that I really wanted to highlight for two different reasons. One was Twitter, which had no product velocity and people thought, and I'm taking out financial performance right now. I'm just looking at the product itself. And my Lord have they increased their product velocity, releasing newsletters, audio spaces and countless other features. And so I like them, but I actually think Disney which. Was, and it hasn't performed well this year, but they had 44 million Subs. Uh, they added 44 million paid Subs this year and people thought theme parks would be a problem, etcetera. And I think they're going to have an absolute killer future. If Apple had not, if it hadn't been for antitrust, right now I think Apple will be looking at buying Disney. If they had had any way to get it through there because the judge what did they what do they turn around exactly like, turn around means it's crappy and then it's not crappy. Well, I didn't do stock price, but I think they had a major threat and a major question of could they actually create their own streaming platform? Would it work and getting out of the pandemic, could the parks rebound? The parks have rebounded. I see. I think they're going to roll over Netflix. So. The sentiment was like, God, this stock. I don't know. And they've really, I think, turned it around. Yeah, the stocks been a dog this year, but yeah, that's why I said, like, it's kind of hard to pick it. But I do think, like, if you look at the fundamentals of the business, Twitter's down 2018 is going to go to 300 million because they announced so much content from the Star Wars, Marvel, Pixar, Disney ecosystem that is coming this year and next year. And it's going from book of Boba Fat Mandalorian, Obi Wan Kenobi. Where, you know, Hayden Christensen and the guy who played Obi Wan Kenobi are coming back like this library is going to have a ridiculous 2022. I like HBO Max more than Disney plus. I mean, my kids watch a little Disney plus, but they watch all the other streaming services too. Disney Plus doesn't seem to have a monopoly from the HBO Max is such a depth of content. So freaking out right now when that Warnermedia deal gets done, I think that's the juggernaut stock you wanna own. It's going to have an incredible library to compete with Disney. Well, I mean secession. And just a library, man. There's so much in there. They're releasing our soprano. They're releasing the matrix tomorrow on HBO plus, like HBO Max, like, redid the Justice League tried the new, the new the new Matrix comes out on HBO Max Tomorrow day and date. Loved that they did that with Dune. I love dune. Totally. Yeah, Dune is an incredible movie. I'm in my movie theater right now, so I'm watching my movie theater this week. OK, worst human being. I'm gonna go first. I'm gonna say Elizabeth Warren, I think, trying to raise money off of the back of the person who raised the most money. For our taxes from taxes, it's just lame. If you haven't seen she's attacking Elon and Bezos in Facebook ads trying to grift to get $10 while she's got 12 million in equities that she paid like $0.00 on because that's how the tax system that she has operated under for decades works. Worst human being to me, Elizabeth Warren, I am going to pick Travis McMichael. Gregory McMichael, William Roddy Brian. Roddy, Brian and Derek Chauvin, 4 white men who killed in two different incidents, an unarmed black man. They are scumbags and they should go to jail. And they will for the rest of their lives. They are terrible human beings. Great job. Sacks, you got for worst human being. I've got a name here I don't know if if the audience knows yet. It's a guy named Peter Daszak, who's a British zoologist. He's head of a group called the Eco Health Alliance that received millions of dollars in NIH grants for gain of function research in bat viruses. If that sounds familiar, it's because some of that was given to the lab in Wuhan, from which COVID likely leaked. But that by itself is not the the reason why is my choice. He then became one of the leading. Signers and organizers of a letter that was published in The Lancet in February of 2020, insisting with total certainty that the virus had made the leap from animals and humans rather than being rather than leaking from a lab. In fact, he basically painted anyone who had put forward the lab leak theory. As a conspiracy theorist he, you know, his influence made this so-called zoonotic theory, the official narrative that could not be questioned online for well over a year. All the social networks. Censored on that basis, and he never disclosed his obvious conflict of interest, given that his millions of research was threatened if the lab leak three were proven right. So this, you know, this guy not only helped unleash a plague upon the world, he then lied about it to cover his *** and protect his millions. That makes him the worst of my you're interested in hearing. A point of view on this, Jamie Metzl did an interview with Lex Friedman on Lex's podcast. It's worth listening to. It's five hours long, but the the section where they talk about what Sachs is sharing, I think it's around the one hour mark, and it's a really interesting narrative that Jamie shares about what this individual did during this period of time and why. Does IT support what I'm saying? Yes. He's not gonna listen but now he feels smug with himself. So yeah thanks my source Lexington to genius. Yeah. Alex is great. No so my my source for this has been the reporting of Glenn Greenwald who did some pretty good research on great. I mean sort of expose on the conflict of interest that was never disclosed and it was on this basis that all of the social networking sites then engaged in censorship. So just a whole you know cluster of bad motives by. You know, people looking to cover their ***. But I mean, it's it's worth hearing Jamie's point of view on this, which is he tries to identify the motivation and the incentives that those people had when they made those cover up decisions along the way. And I think it's really worth everyone taking that in. That's what I really liked about Alex's podcast interview with Jamie was, you know, none of these things come from a place of pure evil. They come from a place of incentive and motivation where these individuals think that they're doing the right thing for some reason. And and that's what motivated their behavior, but that's also why. And just to jump the gun here, I am not giving you a worst human being answer, not a virtue signal, really. I just go back to this point that I don't think humans are, you know, intrinsically evil. I think that a lot of people make decisions for what they consider to be good reasons or the right reasons or reasons that are in their mind altruistic but ultimately have adverse consequences for another population. Not Derek. Yeah, I would argue that in some cases. People who are selfish don't make it very far in life, and so they generally don't have that much of an impact in an evil way. There's very few people that are purely selfish and make it to scale. But anyway, that's my very esoteric freeberg raised a good point, which is I think we can judge this not by people's internal motivations, because we don't really know, but rather by the consequences of their choices. Right the the adverse consequences. OK, so best meme, I'll go first. I love Daniel Craig's the weekend because I've been so exhausted from this year that when Friday rolls around, that's all I can think about is Daniel Craig saying, ladies and gentlemen, the weekend he's just exacerbated and exhausted, as am I. My runner up was Anakin and Padme doing their conversation. You know for the better, right? And you can look that up online. It's a four page. It's one of those four paying conversation ones. What do you got chamath you have any best memes? It's the Bernie Sanders inauguration outfit. Amazing. Always a great go to. His little mittens and you know his his detached communist glare about that great meme. It's like he's at a sit in at like some College in Vermont in Russia in the winter time. Exactly. Exactly like a little chipmunk. Yeah, alright, who do you got? Sacks? You got a best meme ever given. Forklift meme. This was that little forklift trying to push that gigantic barge out of the canal and they got hilariously repurposed. And then. Like 10 years ago I know is this year. Can you believe it? And a close runner up was my fall plans versus the Delta variant. You remember that one? That was a good one. That was a good one. Freeberg. Yeah, I know you don't care about pop culture or consume much of it, but give us your best meme. I don't have a meme. So do not have a meme upgrade. I have no sense of. I like. That's a good one. I'll take that one. Your memes, but not enough. OK. Can we upgrade his meme subroutine? I love pop culture. This the meme. Thing I just don't. It doesn't resonate for me. It just doesn't pop culture. IMHO, pop culture memes do not make sense to me. Chop boys were great. I have trouble processing imagery and text all at the same time. My subroutine is indexing all images and GPT 3. I'm going to produce funny jokes, haha. Hahaha, my laughing subroutine has been upgraded. Ha ha ha. Sorry, it's too easy. Sorry, Allison. No. Slows and company live with them, mostly. I don't think she listens to this, by the way. Doesn't listen to it. I was talking to my wife about sweater care. Whatever she's like. What are you talking about? I'm like the pod that everybody listens to. None of our wives listen to this crowd #40 in the world. No. OK, most loathsome company. This one is an absolutely easy one. Slam dunk. It is a PG&E who this year was charged. With felonies and manslaughter in the death of four people because of the wildfires that they started, because of their inability to maintain their power infrastructure throughout the state of California. Very rare that a for profit corporation gets charged with felony murder and manslaughter. So I think that's pretty easy one. What do you got? Freeberg? I think one day the human race will look back and identify animal agriculture as worse than human slavery. I I do think that that will be a profound realization over the next century for our species and as you say, worse than human slavery. I believe that that's what we will realize because the. The scale of death caused by animal agriculture. OK, now you're the birth to death cycle that these animals live in, in cages with no ability to touch or interact with their families. The, the hurt, the pain. It's extraordinary. And part of my work that I do day-to-day is to figure out ways that we can use science to replace animal agriculture. So the penultimate kind of animal agriculture processor in the US is Tyson Foods. They are the most lost them company to me. And I stick by my my answer. Can I, can I give you a counterpoint? Yeah. But it's delicious. It's a joke. Here we go. That's not cool, is it? A spicy take? I mean, to take the human suffering of slavery and then equate it. But you added, I mean, murder. Honestly, freeberg like if you. Yeah, but The thing is, like, you've never eaten any form of animal protein, so how do you know what you're missing? It's true. But he does know about cruelty. Yeah, I guess I'm just saying there's any winners in this conversation at this point. Yeah, this is a longer pod. We could do this another time. Fried chicken is really delicious. Ohh man, so is a good steak. OK, we gotta stop. I'm hungry. Sax, did you have a? Besides Tyson Foods. What do you got? OK, most of you putting a label on your thing. Is it the most losing company I had, the New York Times. A new book came out this year. In 2021. I called the Gray lady, winked. The author, Ashley Reinsberg details decades of misinformation and agenda driven journalism published by the Times starting in the 1930s at a Nazi sympathizer. As their German correspondent, they covered up Stalin's genocide in Ukraine. They assisted Fidel Castro's rise to power in Cuba. They lied us into Vietnam and Iraq. They and they perpetuate the Russian collusion hoax. More recently, the New York Times has gone all in on woke journalism and cancel culture, perching anyone from its ranks who commits a transgression against woke sensibilities. From Brian Armstrong to Kyle Rittenhouse, they've routinely smeared people as racist with no evidence to back it up. Remember, they are not a nonprofit, they are a corporation, and they have an agenda. New York Times most lost some company in mind. David, can I double down on this? I posted nick. Maybe you can find. But there was a, there was an article in the Washington Post that I put into the group chat where the Washington Post article was effectively like Washington Post forced to revisit journalism practices because of falling click through rates and lack of viewership. So in a post Trump era, Trump, yeah. Yeah. Post Trump era, two years on, you know, they're they're the number of premium subscribers that Wapo has has pretty materially changed I guess. And so, you know, they're revisiting what they're trying to write and as you can imagine they're going to air towards more clickbait and it's the same for the times and so. You know, to your point, we have to remember that these things are not run as public trusts. They're run As for profit businesses, Yep. We've seen what other for profit businesses do as it relates to information and misinformation and disinformation. And so you have to heavily discount what you read in these places, information after profits, trust. And This is why tech leaders and other people are increasingly going direct, as we talked about all year in the pod go direct. They are not the paper of record anymore. Direct is the new. The Internet is the paper of record. I mean, look at this podcast. I mean, I think, like we're going direct. We get more views on this than any other press hit we could ever do and we get to troll. I think we've probably eclipsed MSNBC. Any show that on and we're probably going to pass CNBC and Fox by the end of this year. Sure. So for me, I would pick the my pillow guy, but that's not a real company. So I just picked Mata, which is just so obvious. I just think, bro, you have these themes. You're like, you're so after Facebook, you're super tilted about Facebook, you're super tilted about Senator Karen. Yes. They just keep cropping up in every category. I just, it's hard for me not to pick meta here. Best new tech for me, it's Dows I mentioned it earlier, I think it's phenomenal. I think that they're going to evolve and global information. What do you think it is? Dows no there. What? Global capital formation are phenomenal. They're phenomenal, I said phenomenal. Alright, stop making fun of the kid from Brooklyn, OK? Do you think this podcast we're #40? If I didn't? OK, enough, enough, you ungrateful prick. Listen, don't you tilting me now. I'm trying to get the show over with 75 minutes in. OK? So I say Dows because I believe that they will become legal and global capital formation for the first time on an instant basis will exist. And I believe 40 million is the drive run for the Constitution. 400 million and 4 billion will happen in the next 10 years to do bigger and bigger challenges. The world wants to bet. As a unit together. And this is going to be the crowning achievement of web. Three dows. What's the best new tech for you, Mr Polly? Hypatia. I have two choices. One is in the heavens, and that is human space travel. We had three different companies create astronauts this year. Three. Amazing. That's like insanity. So that that it's mind-blowing. And so if you think about what the next 5 to 10 years can bring, Jason, at what you said earlier about, you know, making ourselves. Multiplanetary species. What an inspiring thing that these thousands of employees across these three businesses did. Huge Congrats to all three of them. I found it really inspiring. So I think human space travel and then the second which is much more closer to Earth is sub stack. I think really got to a level of scale this year. That is really profound. I have found it to be. An incredible way to stay connected to the truth. And there are some unbelievable people who are now able to create a life for themselves by telling the truth. Independent voices. Yeah. And and you can support them directly. Credible, you know, a handful of people. Matt Taibbi, Barry Weiss. Eric newcomer. Just a handful that jump off the top. Glenn Greenwald. But there's there's many more. Sub stacks. Gonna learn how to promote these things to you in a better way I think overtime. But I think that was an incredible, incredible technology option. Eventually, Chamath, there'll be some sort of group subscription, and then you'll be able to put Glenn Greenwald and Barry Weiss and and have multiple publishers come in, like an aggregated feed or something to that effect. In other words, you can subscribe to the New York Times of these independent voices and they would put the money across them. It's the closest thing to truth as a service that we have. And with no, I'd say podcast is right up there, too, sacks. I'm, I'm obviously you're going to call in, but after calling, what do you got for the best of all? You know, I originally had the the CRISPR gene, anything, but you already mentioned that. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna go with Starlink. It got, yes it it, it just came out at the end of 2020, but this year it kept getting better and faster and now it's reported that Starlink is faster than the fixed broadband average in Belgium, Canada, Australia, Germany, the UK, New Zealand and France. Come on. No way. Really? Yeah, it's pretty unbelievable. Wow. Gavin Baker just tweeted this. Earlier today this morning. That's all I can say. All I can say for all of us who own young basex, Yum Yum Yum Yum, Yum. That's so delicious. OK, my best new technology. I think the 2021 was the year of plasma Fusion. There were several iterations and step function improvements in plasma fusion. What it is to people who don't know the concept ultimately for plasma fusion is that you can generate a controlled nuclear series of nuclear reactions where energy is released and as these atoms transform and energy is released, rather than have a runaway breakthrough effect which you would have in a nuclear bomb for example, you could actually control it and harness the energy that comes out. And there are several technologies and techniques that have been theorized for 50 years that we could do this in a way that the energy that we put in to create and start the fusion reaction allows us to get more energy out. And therefore you have a net energy creator just by turning atoms into energy in a way that doesn't cause a runaway breakthrough nuclear reaction, that that would be the equivalent of a nuclear bomb. And so, you know, the MIT CFS collaboration had an excellent breakthrough that we spoke about on one of our pods, the national ignition. Facility, which is actually a US DOE funded facility came very close to energy abundance and they have a wonderful chart that shows 20 years of doing this work and then this year it suddenly balloons and is that how they make energy on the sun, this one. So, so all of this is is fusion. That's correct. But that's not, that's how they make energy on the sun. Well, what we're doing here is we're basically using lasers to create the same. Density that you would get on the sun that triggers that same sort of nuclear. And what about Uranus? Different, different, different. That results being funny, yeah. General Fusion had a big breakthrough, and Bill Gates is a big backer of a company called Terrapower that announced they're building a new reactor. But I think generally speaking, we are seeing 2021 as kind of that big step change where the stuff is starting to move from theory but will have it online still, as everyone's been saying for years, 10 years. So every year, every 10 years we say 10 years. Yeah, fast trend, worst trend, here we go. I'm going to go with the best trend being centrism, purple pills recalls of DA's. Reasonableness and maybe the the political class actually representing what most of the country wants, which is a high functioning government that gets the hell out of the way. What do you got sacks? Best Trend hashtag woke lash. We saw this is similar to yours. We saw major pushback against woke ideology on several fronts this year. First you had parents pushing back on CRT, leading to a Republican sweep in deep Blue Virginia. Then the whole defund the police initiative was rejected on the ballot of. Of Minneapolis, where it all started. Even the mayor of San Francisco now wants to refund the police. The attempt to cancel Dave Chappelle totally fizzled out after the walkout, protest at Netflix and even Barack Obama told the Progressive Left to quote get over their woke purity earlier this year. They should have listened to him, and maybe they finally will next year after losing more elections. I'll just repeat something I said earlier. I'll be quick about it. The creator economy blossoming, new models for monetization for folks that. Create content, whether it's video, art, music, and you know, there's all these new models for bringing your art to market, your content to market and getting paid for it. And consumers are clearly willing to pay for it. So it's awesome to see the gatekeepers are falling away and the go direct model is working. What do you got your mouth. I'm going to double tap that. I have the creator economy. I think it's incredible what these young creators are basically. You know, creating. It's incredible. Super, super novel and new forms of content. Tiktok is super addictive. Stay out of the comments, YouTube is incredible. So this is a brave new world for for creators. All right. So worst trend, the worst trend of 2021, I'm going to go with giving credit for work that hasn't been done yet and just straight up founder and investor entitlement. I've never seen it at all. Time peak here, where people expect to be given huge rewards before they do the work. And I'm very concerned about the lack of governance, the lack of diligence and people believing. They should get huge rewards before they actually do the work. What do you got, chamath? My worst trend is the decaying of the national security of our supply chains, if you think about some of the really important things that we're going to have to get done over the next 10 years, just to climate, as an example. China has done a masterful job. They control, you know, a lot of the lithium, a lot of the nickel, a lot of the cobalt, a lot of the graphite. They control a lot of the rare earths that go into the permanent magnets. And we don't have a solution. So that is a really bad trend that accelerated. This year we have. Some really ambitious programs in America that are unfortunately stuck because of. You know, lawsuits claiming that the, you know, the wood grouse is more important than batteries. And so unless we undo that stuff, we're in a bad place. OK, sacks, what do you got? I've got the the rise of authoritarianism around the world and here in the United States. I mean, even in Western countries like Australia, it's basically been turned into a prison colony for months in the name of stopping COVID. Here in the United States, you've got governors like Gavin Newsom, who've basically appropriated dictatorial powers through bogus state of emergency. You've now got the unvaccinated, treated as some sort of untouchable class of of of citizens who aren't able to leave their house except to buy food and medicine. They're even now in Europe. They're splitting, they're forcing people behind partitions at the supermarket. Boston just announced they're banning unvaccinated people from going to all restaurants, bars, nightclubs, sport arenas, fitness centers, movie theaters. And on and on it goes. On top of that, you've got censorship, you've got. You know, the censoring of speech, you've got this, this sort of crackdown on domestic political enemies. And I think it's also emboldening authoritarian regimes like China and Russia to crack down harder on their citizens because they see what's happening in the West and they think they can get away with it. So all around bad stuff, I think to your point, Zack, it's one of the reasons why we will see people in general looking for alternative ways to govern themselves, and it will only catalyze and accelerate. Some of these other trends that that I think we've been talking about. My worst trend was the metaverse. I think it's like the renaming of something that's been going on for a long time, as if it's some new future thing. If anyone's played Fortnite over the last six years or five years, you know the Metaverse has been here for a long time. And this notion that you can kind of take it and make it something that doesn't exist yet, and it's all about the future and make some stupid video about it, I think it's a little bit lost and what's already been going on, which is people find value in digital goods, people find value in digital levels and badging. And they find honor and progress in their lives by accomplishing things in the digital universe. And they've been doing that for Minecraft to Fortnite to other places for a long time. And it's a it's it's fascinating to watch. But the notion that we call this thing the Metaverse and everyone trying to reclassify it as some future singular universe, and therefore they can own that singular universe, is is a is a pretty misstated and misguided kind of concept. Let's go on to your favorite book, movie, podcast, music, Discovery of 2021. For music, I had war on drugs for book uh Ray Crocs autobiography, I listened to on audible and it was great. On TV. Secession, Curb Your Enthusiasm and dope sick were my three favorites, I think. Freeburg, what do you got considering that you have had your pop culture? I will tell you guys, I think I think it's very important that everyone on this pod and anyone listening to this that has any interest in what's going on in the world today broadly read Ray Dalios the changing world order. It is my #1, #2 and #3 book recommendation of the year. It is absolutely critical to understand that the global world order is being reclassified as the United States has taken on too much debt. And will ultimately lose its reserve currency status, as we have seen with the transition of five or six empires over the past 500 years. And this transition is very predictable. As Ray Dalio highlights, we are following a pattern that we've seen over and over again. And and we are in a moment right now where populism, whether it's authoritarianism on the right or socialism on the left, is a reaction to what is effectively a very small number of people controlling a very large amount of the wealth. And the power in this country and in the world, and we've seen this play out. And as governments and societies evolve, eventually this happens. There's a massive revolution typically triggered by some new technology emerging like the printing press, the radio, shipping and in our case today, I would argue what we people are calling web three or the blockchain as that that triggering technology. And as that happens, the current dominant empire transitions and a new world order. Urges. And this is not some conspiracy theory. It's a it's an in-depth look at the economic, political and social organizations that have broken apart over the last 500 years and where we sit today. It's not about politics. It's just about manifestations of human behavior over time. Done for that. Everyone's got to read it. My second. I got one more. Come on. OK, of course. Keep going. Wes Anderson's the French dispatch is one of the best films I have seen in like a decade. Have you guys seen it? It is friggin amazing. I feel like every shot. It's like a cinematography masterpiece. The writing is incredible. The acting will blow your mind. If you guys see that film, we could talk about it for hours. It is just no political agenda, no nonsense in it. It's just pure art. It's really beautiful. And then on music I'll give a shout out to a very unknown artist who I think deserves a little shout out. His name is DK the drummer. DK the drummer did a collaboration with a guy named Alejandro Aranda who was on American Idol. My kids cannot stop listening to his track that they did together. It's amazing. Shout out for that guy. I just figured he deserves it for. Putting out an awesome track. Alright Sachs, which Steve Bannon episode was your favorite? So under a book of the year, I have a very recent choice, which is San Francisco by Michael Shellenberger. It just came out, but it's already, I think very influential. It's not just about San Francisco, it's really about how this so-called progressive agenda in cities is not working. I think it is going to be the blueprint for a major backlash that's already begun here in San Francisco with London breed taking on chaser Boudin. I think that's going to be a recurring theme next year. Also other big cultural discoveries I'd like to. Both. I have a red pill journalists on sub stack. Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Antonio Garcia Martinez, all of whom now have shows on Collins. So those are my choices. There's a second plug. OK, here we go. Chamath, what was your favorite app besides calling? Exactly. Let's see. So my best album is planet her by Doja Cat. Danceable, fun. Kids love it. I love it. You dance, you know that? I have rhythm, bro. All all in summit dance party. Here we go back from the from the waist down. As you also know, it's just people that I please help that out. No, you cannot hide from the truth, boys. God. Best movie is dune. It was so beautiful. Cinematically just gorgeous. Incredible, incredible, incredible movie and then book. I've said it this before, but. The way I think about the world is using these models and frameworks. One of the most useful models that I have found is this idea of mimesis, or memetic theory, which is that people copy each other. That causes conflict. It was espoused by a philosopher named Renee Girard, myself, Peter Teal. There's a bunch of us who are pretty deep Renee Gerrard acolytes. The problem is that his stuff can be a little hard to penetrate. And so there was a book called Wanting WANTING by this author named Luke Burgess. Superb book, very easy to read, very accessible. Explains this really well. One of the most useful mental models that I have and I'll just shout out, we didn't have best comedian in here, but I really enjoyed Hasan minhaj's the Kings Jester, a new show that is not yet on streaming but that he's doing live. It was hilarious, it was insightful and really enjoyed going to it if you like Loki. I enjoy talking a lot. Yeah, yeah, well, that is what is what is, Loki? He is a he's Thor step brother and they did a TV show called Loki which was like a very challenging metaverse, multiple timeline kind of conceptual set the stage for the whole next wave of Marvel movies. Did you think that was the best Marvel product this year or no? Definitely was absolutely 100% in Spiderman homecoming, but I think it sets in line that we haven't heard from sex. Did we hear from sex? Yeah, sex just picked like some right wing book. It was like San Francisco or something, and then he doesn't watch TV or whatever. I mean Sachs, did you, you actually love movies, you've made movies. Did you see a film you loved where you just watching like films from the 80s and 90s? It's hard to find like even one movie that I wanna, you know, write home about. I think it's a lot easier to find TV shows like we're enjoying Yellowstone right now quite a bit if you guys are watching that. Kevin Cosby, who's on the left, knows what Yellowstone is explained to people. This right wing phenomenon, it's a, it's a Kevin Costner show. I don't know if it's right wing. It's about a ranching it like family, like their traditional sort of Cowboys. Who live in Wyoming and or maybe it's Montana. I'm not sure. Anyway, there's all these people trying to go after them to get their land, mostly developers, and they're they're they're fighting to preserve their way of life, which is around, you know? Raising cows. It's Taylor Sheridan who's the guy who did Sicario, which if you've never seen Sicario one and two amazing are the most amazing, amazing thrillers you're ever going to see. I mean, it's very hard to watch. They're so intense. And I think Yellowstone now is the reason I say it's right wing is it's doing incredibly well in the South and it's not happening in the coastal cities. So coastal is kind of like a leave me alone. It it they very much appeals to the Republic. Did the traditional Republican slash American sensibility? Well, now they're making any to a universe, so they did a prequel, and it's just off the charts. It's the most viewership of any program, and most people in San Francisco, New York, and LA Don't even know what it is. Yeah, I'm not sure. It's like has an overt political agenda. I mean, the family who's the, the subject of the show, the Costner character, he's just against progress. He does not want developers coming in there, building airports, building ski resorts. He just wants to preserve his way of life, which is how it's been for 150 years, rustling cattle, can't wait to see. And I don't know how political that is, but they are like very tough. I mean, it's like, it's like, it's like San Fran, San Francisco, housing costly. OK, we're going to keep up with this one. This is our Rudy Giuliani Award for self immolation. Basically, people who destroy their legacy in some way or otherwise just bungled everything. Sax, I gotta go to you first. I know that you've got your writing team over at Fox and has something going on here for this one. Let's go. Well, yeah, I I went with the Cuomo brothers, you know. Great. Paul. Yes. So first you have the Governor, Andrew Cuomo. Remember at the beginning of COVID, he was giving these constant press conferences. There was even talk about on the part of Democrats replacing Biden with him at the 2020 convention. This inspired the term Cuomo sexuals. Who saw him as a sex symbol. And then he got taken down in August by sexual harassment allegations. Then a few weeks later, there's a major scandal at CNN when it leaked documents from the New York AG's office showed that his brother, Chris Cuomo, had used his perch at, you know, at CNN to dig up dirt on some of his brother's accusers. Then he was suspended and ultimately fired. So both brothers self immolated within a few months of each other, and Andrew Cuomo had to return his $5 million book advance for his COVID. ****. Tree bark, we got who lit themselves on fire and, well, I, I, I was a little general. I kind of said, you know, all these politicians who made claims about the vaccine not being worth doing and then they got COVID. And then on the flip side of the aisle, all the politicians who said take the vaccine or you'll get COVID and then they took the vaccine and they still got COVID. So, you know, I think again, credibility, institutional credibility and deterministic statements like that from both sides damaged a lot of reputations. And, uh, it's just brutal to watch. You know, from from one day to the next, from Elizabeth Warren to Rand Paul. People getting COVID, making one claim or another about, you know, the the the good or the bad of the vaccine. And at the end of the day, COVID doesn't care. Clearly. So anyway, where you got your mouth, Karen? Thanks, senator. Karen is the obvious choice for me. Kind of proved that she doesn't really know much about economics is, you know, kind of mean. And just basically wants to, you know is a moral absolutist authoritarian just on the left, by the way. And I just, I'll interject because I'm so passionate about this right now since I've read this book. But you know, you'll hear, you'll see in this book that this populist. Diatribe that you hear from both sides, whether it's the right or the left, comes from a place that's driven by an allocation of a lot of the resources, capital and influence and power to a small number of people. And whether it's Senator Karen or Donald Trump, they ultimately end up being this. You know, the same character is played by different actors over time, and the left and the right stand up with authoritarianism, and socialism is the answer. And the whole thing cycles over again, and we're in this moment right now and this sort of stuff. You guys are talking about Senator Karen and others kind of saying it's only going to get louder, I'm convinced. But I think it's interesting. I think she's overplayed her hand massively. I mean, she's become so shrill and such a scold that, you know, she could never win that. You know that beer test quite. Remember that question they asked they pull people on about presidential candidates is who do you most want to have a beer with? You know that that question actually is important because I don't think people want to have a beer with people who are scolding them. Or are these moral absolutists like? All said, there is a check there. And so I I think she's, I think what she's done is backfired. And for me, it was Biden. I mean, what a disappointing performance. He couldn't control the far left of the party. He couldn't get anybody on the Republican side to give him but one vote. He declared independence from COVID in July. I know it's not a perfect science or anything like that. But I think that this Presidency is 1 and done, obviously, to everybody and. Yeah. He was supposed to go right into the middle, and he has not gone anywhere near the middle or lead from the front either way. All right, here we go. My God, Jason, how much Fox News have you been watching? Just hanging out with you. Too much thread with you. No, I mean, it is possible. You know, I really wanted a centrist for President. He presented as such and then he hasn't done that. And now he's being forced into centrism kicking and screaming. He should just started there. That's where that was the promise. He started there. That's where that's where he's most comfortable. That's who he is, exactly. Like, what a head fake. And now he winds up there anyway and it's gonna be too late. So it's just a disaster. He he he basically took victory from the jaws of defeat or took defeat from the jaws of victory, right? Like, just terrible. OK, here's an award. I don't know if we're gonna make this, but who was your favorite bestie? So this is you picking up the three other besties freeberg, this is your idea. You want to create this division. Of why somebody is your favorite bestie on the show. Just. I was just trying to give you a shout out for coming to my party. OK, you know, while the other best, he said I am your favorite bestie. But you know what? Yesterday Chamath served me crepes with Nutella, so he's my favorite bestie now. So no. And Sax had an incredible party. And you guys. I want to say I'll tell you something. All three of you guys have been incredibly generous. And I I feel fortunate. And I know it's a little soft moment, but thank you, guys. That's it. Chip upgraded, my emotion is complete. But I feel fortunate my voice is cracking. This is in my programming, but I should keep it together. That tier subroutine has not been installed. Jamie, you want to pick your favorite bestie and or go around the horn and this is just a bad idea. No, I love all three of you. All three of you, but for different reasons. I'm really lucky to have all three of you as friends. Very nice. I am very lucky to have two of the three of you have planes that I get to fly on around the world and second homes and I get to freeload off of and freedberg. You know, actually, I just say like, you know, I get, as I told your mom, free break out your wonderful Christmas party. I said, you know, getting to know your son has been one of the highlights of the last year and a half from resources, surely. You know, I was good friends with youth and sacks, but you know, you and I knew each other from poker, but, you know, not great friends or super close friends yet. And I think it's been one of the highlights for me and I really have learned to love and respect your opinions or ethos, your effort in the world. And in a world of people who are complaining and whining and not doing, I just feel so honored to be able to be the moderator here. And spend time with you every week. I would do this if we threw the episode away every week because it's inspiring for me for the next six days until we meet again. It really fills my bucket and recharges my batteries to to be with folks who just aggressively want to solve problems in the world. Where are we taping this next week? So that's like two or three weeks. We're gonna be at the upfront summit on the second day in LA. I think it's somebody want to give the date. I think it's January. Any plans to tape from Uranus? Ohh he set it up. Stop with the Uranus tunes. If we can terraform it's the 24th to the 26th, but I think we're on the 26th. We're on the last day in the afternoon. All in podcast. We're doing it. Mark Suster invited us and then the all in summit will be in May in Miami. We have the dates we're about to announce, but don't e-mail me for free tickets. There'll be 300 tickets to the summit. 250 of them are paid, and then each besty gets 12 tickets to give to a bestie. That's how we're going to run it. Everybody has to pay and then everything will be simulcast. Or. All right, everybody, let's wrap up. Sacks, I know you're not capable of saying anything emotional, but let's give it a shot just for the for the audience. I mean, this is a real question, this effeminate ******** that you guys are. So brutal. You're such an *******. What a piece. You are such an *******. I I will say this, this Group A few relationships in particular, had a very rocky year. And so it's always. Yeah. And so it really is true. Well, it was not public what all that went down, but but chamath and I, here we are. Here we are. And I fought very hard to keep the pod together and to make sure that you guys and you guys are literally like the the the two characters from Step brothers and the characters you're talking about in the spot. You and Jamal there. Yeah. And it's good. It's good. It's good to see us. Idiot who crashed the bunk beds. The one on top. Yeah. He jumps on top of the whole. You know what movie you're talking about? What is the two of you? You sax and J? Have found a way to fight. To almost break up, to destroy everything we've built together. Free broke and I had to step in. Not once, but on two different occasions. Amount of time chamath and I had to spend mediating the two of you together was ridiculous. Ridiculous on the time either. Sorry there. Sacks could stay in his lane. No, no, no, no, no. Don't start, don't start, don't start, don't start. Next. Reminding me of something, yeah, he says. He said. I got so mad at Jason this year that I threatened to make Nick a millionaire out of spite. Nick, I wanna make you a millionaire regardless. I know your uncle's not gonna do it. He's doing great. He's doing great. He's gonna carry you. Take it easy, everybody. No. People still ask me this day. Was that whole few with Jake Paul real, or was it just for ratings? And it was real. I know it was all it was real. The bigger feud was not at. The bigger feud was not aired on the air. And right there was a second. That's a. That's under ideal. One was out of control. Yeah. We signed an NDA and let's just say that. Just an operating agreement now. Yeah. It's not easy. You know, success is hard for a band, you know, and I think one of the things I'll say about this whole brouhaha and the and the, you know, sacks and I having debates about how to run the pod is I think we came to the right place. I, you know, I look at the comments and I think I've become a better moderator. I think sacks, jamath, freeberg, you've all become great at passing the ball and showing interest in each other's points. And I feel like we're playing. You know, which is always my wish for this is that, you know, we play this game as intellectually, honestly and crisply and as well with as much discipline, with as much hard work as like, let's say, the Warriors do. And I really feel like even in the last 10 episodes we hit a high watermark and the and the audience and everybody I meet tells me the same thing. My God, you guys just do such a great job. I'll say one thing, one thing that makes it really hard. I I was, I was with Chamath yesterday, as you guys know, and secret mission. One thing I observed with Chamath is no matter how much success or wealth chamath has accumulated, he is still a hustler. And I think that that is true for all of us. And individually and independently, we all still hustle. We try and make things happen. We find things that others aren't doing. We push around, grind, we grind up at 5:00 AM. The cost for a day, and I think all four of us in the same are in the same vein. And that makes it really hard for four personalities like that to work together in a consistent way. And that underlies a lot of what I think ultimately bubbles up to the surface with some of the stuff. But you know, we we should be thankful that we can pull it off, because it's it's pretty, pretty awesome. They call. Here we go. So it's true that without jakal this pod never would have happened because you are the, you are the podcaster in this group. You're you are the best skills you are you make the pod very entertaining and funny and so like, frankly, even though you're not as rich and smart as the rest of us, you should stop feeling. You should stop feeling so insecure because you really are the reason for this pod. Alright, listen, let me give a compliment sacks. You bring so many great notes to the pod and you are so eloquent. Based on what your team writes for you and your ability to read that script and the amount of money you spend forming your opinions from Tucker Carlson's ex writing team is just extraordinary. Bring so much to the table I can't believe I ever wanted to replace you with. Nobody's going to know who I was threatening to replace sacks with. It was like literally like, we're going to replace this guitarist. Boys. Have a wonderful holiday. I love you one. I love you. Besties. OK, everybody, we'll see you all next week for 2022 predictions. Our promise to you. No weeks off for the besties. We're going to be with you every Friday night. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Let your winners ride Rain Man. David said that. We open sources to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it. Besties? My dog taking notice your driveway. Ohh man. We should all just get a room and just have one big huge **** because they're always useless. It's like this, like sexual tension that they just need to release stuff out there. Beat, beat. See what we need to get merchants?