All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg - 2025 Predictions with bestie Gavin Baker

Starting point is 00:00:00 Welcome back to the all in podcast, everybody. I'm your host, Jason Calacanis. I'll put in a bunch of plugs for the projects I'm working on throughout the show to annoy my co hosts and continue the grift but it is 2025 and we are doing our bestie awards. It's going to be amazing today. We've got so much to do today with us again for the second time. A truly amazing bestie Gavin Baker from a treaties capital. Am I correct? Is it a treaties capital?

Starting point is 00:00:27 treaties management, a treaties management. Okay, and just call it house of treaties. Oh, no, that's not getting me in trouble. I paid. Gavin, welcome back to the program. Let us know. Just briefly, what is a treaties do? Thanks for having me here. Jason, Chema, and Dave. Atreides, we're a crossover firm.

Starting point is 00:00:49 We invest publicly and privately in consumer and tech. And we go from Series A to MegaCap. Got it. Okay. So you are capital allocate. You're place bets on technology, on the most important new companies in the world. We'll get into that. And this is our prediction show.

Starting point is 00:01:05 We did our bestie awards. How big is your firm, Gavin? Well, you just met the guy, Freeberg. You don't just ask him how big his firm is. The audience wants to know, is this guy a player? Like, what's the deal? Tell us. Roughly $4 billion.

Starting point is 00:01:17 Okay. All right. So that's about half an inch bigger than Chamath. He's really very nice. Not that he's the size queen or anything. We're going to do a really great prediction show today. And we're going to do some super predictions this year. Each bestie gets to make a super prediction or two during the show.

Starting point is 00:01:52 And we're going to take those super predictions, Chamath, and we're going to put them on Polymarket. Yes, that's right. If you don't know Polymarket, it's a prediction market where people can place a wager a bet an investment in one or the other side and there's good, it feels like it's blurry. It's a little blurry. That's the avalanche coming.

Starting point is 00:02:14 And so I guess is that the MAGA avalanche? What is this avalanche is that people streaming across the border? What's the metaphor here? Trim up. Is that the huge orgasm that you're about to lay down in 2025? Rocking my friend? No, no, this is a shout out to my friend Ruben Ostlund, who's the director of a bunch of really amazing movies, including the one behind me, Forrest Measure. There you go. All right. We did an amazing partnership with Polymarket. Freeberg, you want to detail the

Starting point is 00:02:43 partnership in some way? I think you help work on it. Well, we obviously have talked to Shane at Polymarket for some time, and we set up a deal with them where we could put our own markets up on the site. So we're going to talk about a couple of our predictions this year, and then Polymarket will post them up on their site, and people can trade them, obviously, XUS. And we're really excited about it because it'll allow us to kind of track how we're doing and give us the opportunity on an ongoing basis

Starting point is 00:03:11 to create markets. So there'll be an all in section on Polymarket where you can kind of go in and see the all in market. It's gonna be really cool. Awesome, fantastic. And so we just got, we're all wrapping up our ski trip here. Nick, I understand there was some footage, some found footage from the bestie skiing.

Starting point is 00:03:28 Is that true? Oh, here we go. Look at this. Here I come down the mountain. Gavin, I want you to rate everybody skiing. Here I come. Looking great. There comes looking good.

Starting point is 00:03:40 And then here comes somebody. I think the technical term Joe Lonsdale does for that third person is a beep beep. Okay, here we go. Look at this technique coming down. Look at Shamap. Shamap, you really advanced this last season. Look at him cutting those s turns. Gavin, what do you think? It's great. Listen to me. I, I made a very strategic decision to stop snowboarding so I could learn to ski with my kids. It is so hard to learn how to do something in your 40s.

Starting point is 00:04:09 No, I mean, if you've never done it, but I do appreciate what you and your brother did for me last season. I learned a couple of things. So it's been my third. Yeah, I was out there with the Black Bomber. My third season, it was great. I am absolutely amazed at the progress you're making.

Starting point is 00:04:22 Freeberg, I'm amazed you made it onto the mountain. You were out there a number of days You're getting it done. I Needed new boots and I tore my MCL last season. So I'm in it got really tweaked when I went out there But I'm good. It was great. I had a lot of fun. I mean, I think I did four days. Yeah, you're three four days Okay, I finished my 16th day yesterday, but I took today off just to get prepared here. Yeah, I got 16 day I do the executive program Gavin I go out for an hour and a half to three hours, zip, zip, zip, 10 runs and I'm done. I only ski in the morning. Yeah, that's the way to do it. Same, same, same, same. And end at 12, 15,

Starting point is 00:04:54 have lunch, relax, get a little work done. You need a healthy, healthy mix of apres ski and ski. Gavin, how would you compare yourself to what you just witnessed in that video? Your skiing ability, where would you rank yourself? Clearly, it's me Chamath Freberg in that ranking. Where would you live in the ranking? Well, I would say I'd make two observations first, like I'm in the bottom percentile in terms of natural athleticism. I do have many, many thousands of hours skiing. Great.

Starting point is 00:05:22 Okay. And I would just leave. I would just leave it at that. Yeah. Oh, okay. Well, then we'll be going out with you next year, new bestie. All right. We got to get to it. We're gonna start off with politics, gentlemen, we got to keep this moving because there's so many predictions. We're gonna do our 2025 prediction for biggest political winner. Now last year, well,

Starting point is 00:05:43 yeah, I think we got it kind of wrong. Friedberg, you said independent third party in the US. And we did see some of that with, you know, the breakout of Robert Kennedy, maybe. Chamath, you said independent centrists. We didn't get there with that one. And I said dark horse presidential candidates. Maybe I get a quarter point credit there with- Wait, hold on. What do you mean we didn't get there?

Starting point is 00:06:03 Independent centrists won the election for magnet. Independent centers won the election? Really? That's what you believe? Yeah. Okay. I didn't think that it was the independence but okay, I think independence interests won the election for Biden in 2020. And then I think they swung the election for Trump in 2024. Huh? Is that statistically correct? You think free bird?

Starting point is 00:06:24 Do you buy that independent centrist did the election or Gavin, what do you think? I think it's right. Like I think a lot of there are a lot of people not just centrist, but a lot of people who had been lifelong democratic voters who voted for Trump. So I do think Trump won the centrist. Trump Trump won everything. Essentially, yeah, okay. So who's your Trump won the centrist. Trump, Trump won everything. Essentially. Yeah, okay. Shabazz, who's your prediction for the biggest political winner of 2025?

Starting point is 00:06:50 My biggest political winner for 2025 are fiscal conservatives. I think that we are going to test a very important concept in 2025. And I hope it works, which is that of austerity. And the reason why austerity has to work is that the only thing left after austerity is to cut entitlements. And I think that in doing this, we're going to figure out how much waste, fraud and abuse exists in the United States federal government. I think that that's going to spill over to a lot of state elections. And I think that the fiscal conservatives that have been clamoring for a more restrained approach to spending will have their day in 2025. Okay. Fiscal conservatives from Schmoth-Freberg, who's your prediction for the biggest political winner of 2025?

Starting point is 00:07:42 I also took a class-based approach. I took a class-based approach. Okay, fiscal conservators from Schmoth-Freberg, who's your prediction for the biggest political winner of 2025? I also took a class-based approach. I chose young candidates. So Trump's cabinet picks have an average age of 40 to 45 years old compared to the Biden cabinet where the average age is a little over 59, almost 60 years old. And I do think that this marks the beginning of a new

Starting point is 00:08:05 trend in the kind of age range of political candidates shifting younger. So I think that this is something we should expect as candidates start to emerge for the midterms by the end of 2025. We'll start to see younger new names start to pop up that deliver resident messages and aren't part of kind of the old guard of, you know, the aging political class. So I think that's a trend that's kind of underway now. Excellent young candidates. We've got fiscal conservatives, young candidates. Gavin, what do you got for the 2025 prediction for biggest political winner?

Starting point is 00:08:37 I would say Trump and centrism. For my choice for 2025 biggest political winner, I went with something similar to you, Freiburg. I said Gen X and the elder millennials. If you look at the notable Gen X appointments, you got Elon with Doge, you got Sax, obviously Marco Rubio. My God, it just goes down. And then if you look at the elder millennials, JD Vance, Vivek, Tulsi, just a lot of young people. And this is going to be absolutely fantastic, I think, because they're going to start thinking not just about themselves, as the bloomers are doing with social security taxes, real estate, all the different issues that they tend to pick for themselves, they're going to start thinking about maybe their own kids and themselves. So yeah, it's obviously

Starting point is 00:09:18 a sea changes underway. So they have a folks for our predictions for political winner. Let's go with political loser our predictions for political winner. Let's go with political loser here, prediction for political loser. We'll start off with you Gavin, but we'll do this a little round robin here, we'll snake it around. Gavin, what do you think?

Starting point is 00:09:33 Who'll be the biggest political loser of 2025? I think Putin. I think Putin is going to lose bigly. So if you are Xi Jinping, you know, Xi Jinping, Russia is a client state of China at this point. And if you're Xi Jinping, what is happening is now a disaster for you

Starting point is 00:09:55 because Europe is starting to rearm and which will only accelerate this year. That will allow America to take resources out of Europe and put them in Japan and South Korea and all over the Pacific. That makes it a lot harder for you to do what you most want to do, which is reunify China and Taiwan or invade Taiwan. Let's call it what it is.

Starting point is 00:10:21 I just think Xi is going to begin decoupling from Putin. If you're Trump, you want to show that you're independent, that you're not enthralled to Putin in any way. So I think Trump is going to be a lot tougher on Putin than people think. And I think he's going to get a very, very, a deal that's very, very bad for Russia and Ukraine. And, you know, you've lost half a million people and for what? For what exactly? And it's a thousand, over a thousand days into this, nobody from the West, you know,

Starting point is 00:10:58 in the NATO or America, no, no soldiers have lost their lives from our side. We've just given them weapons. And so it's a humiliating defeat so far for Putin. I agree with you. Freiburg, your prediction for the biggest political loser of 2025, Freiburg's prediction. I'm going to predict the pro-war neocons who are going to go head to head with the JD Vance and Elans

Starting point is 00:11:21 and others of the world. And I think that they're going to lose. And I think that there's going gonna be this kind of big crack in the establishment of this, this neocon movement that's been very pro-conflict around the world. And we've heard it in the speeches and in the commentary from JD and others. And I think this is gonna be the year

Starting point is 00:11:39 it's all gonna kind of come to a head. I think they're gonna end up on the losing side. Can I take the other side just a little bit? So I think you're- Yeah up on the losing side. Can I can take the other side just just a little bit. So that's why you're here. Yeah, I think it's right in reality. But I think you know, Trump said something very interesting about John Bolton. He said, the guy was absolutely crazy. But it was awesome having him in the room when you're negotiating deals, right? People looked at this guy looking angry, red in the face,

Starting point is 00:12:03 so excited to hit the nuclear button, so excited to go to war, and you ended up with much better deals. So I think you're going to see probably a lot more bellicosity from the Trump administration than anyone expects. And that's just to get a good deal for, you know, between Russia and Ukraine. And then it's to get China to kind of decouple from Russia. So I think the, in reality, I think you're right, David, but I think there will be a lot of rhetoric that is at odds with what you're saying

Starting point is 00:12:31 before you end up being wrecked. We already see it with Canada, with NATO, with Taiwan. There's a lot, you know, we're gonna do this or this. The tariffs, obviously there's just a lot of very aggressive posturing leading up to the negotiations that are hopefully going to get the US good deals. We'll see. Shamath, you have a prediction for your 2025 biggest political loser. Predictions, hard to do.

Starting point is 00:12:54 The biggest political loser of 2025 is going to be progressivism. So November of last year, right after the election, I flew to London and went up to Oxford and I spoke at the Oxford union and my speech was a full throated defense of MAGA. But it was mostly an explanation of MAGA and it was sort of the. antidote to progressive instincts that had been riddling the Western G8 countries and was starting to basically come undone. And when you look at what's about to happen in 2025, in Canada, Justin Trudeau is going to lose massively to Pierre Poliev. In Germany, AFD looks like they will win. In France, if there's a deadlock and it goes into an election, more than likely Marine

Starting point is 00:13:49 Le Pen is going to win. And then in the UK, where you see this unfolding child rape scandal, where allegedly upwards of hundreds of thousands of young girls over the course of 20 plus years were being raped by organizations of Pakistani Muslim men who were then not prosecuted for fears of stoking Islamophobia, as it turns out, by the current Prime Minister Keir Starmer. And if all of that comes to pass in the UK, I think you're going to see the Labour government fall, and I think you're going to see the labor government fall. And I think you're going to see Nigel Farage win. So what do all of these countries look like by the end of 25?

Starting point is 00:14:32 It's very much a repudiation of this class based identity politics. And I think that has enormous ripple effects all throughout the world. And so I think the biggest political loser for 2025, I think stands to be progressivism, quote unquote, what we labeled progressivism. I took something very similar. I said the racist vocal minority of each one of these parties. And there's a little bit of this on either side. You have DEI on one side, and then you just have outright racism on the other side. And it's probably 5% of MAGA and 5% of the left. And just to recap last year's political predictions for 2024, our predictions for political loser was, I said Netanyahu, Freeberg, you said Ukraine,

Starting point is 00:15:14 and Sharmoth, you said the Koch family, the GOP donors. Nailed that one. I nailed that one. Freeberg, any thoughts on last year's? Who lost on the Republican side more than the Koch family, do you think? I mean, explain for the audience who maybe aren't as deep into it. Well, I think essentially 2024 was the end of the Republican Party as we knew it. And I think what stands in its place is what I would call the MAGA reflection of a coalition of people that will be housed under the label of republicanism, which is to say that these folks aren't necessarily republicans. These folks are believers of the MAGA philosophy. They're just using the republican vessel in order to run their

Starting point is 00:15:59 candidates and get elected. And in that overturning of the status quo, what you had was this one family who was at the center for the last few decades of political machinery that essentially decided candidates that it decided agenda that it decided policy. And that was the Koch family and they spent an enormous amount of money to get that which they stood up, frankly, literally the day after Citizens United happened in the Supreme Court. And I think that in that lens, those billions of dollars of investment have essentially gone to zero,

Starting point is 00:16:35 because I don't think it means much of anything anymore. And if you look at the new class of donors who will decide, quote unquote, Republican policy, it's going to be the, the Muriel maddelsons of the world, the Elon musks of the world. And that's very different than how I think the Kochs used to decide things. Do you think there's too much money in politics now, Gavin? I think there's too much money in politics now. It's, it's a good question. You know, I might feel very, very differently if I didn't agree so

Starting point is 00:17:13 profoundly with with the largest donor in this political cycle. Yeah. I would say the reality is, it's like the the money as long as the money raised on each side is roughly equivalent, I don't think it really matters. That would, that would be my take. You just want some equivalents. That's all. All right, let's do our 2025 predictions for biggest business winner. Freeberg, why don't you start us off? biggest business winner for 2025. What's your prediction? So I feel like we're at a really interesting inflection point

Starting point is 00:17:48 that is going to make 2025 the year of autonomous hardware or robotics. If 2024 was the year of kind of compute build out and the rollout of AI systems in software, I think 2025 will be the year of the robot. You know, there's a company we just placed an order today actually out of China called Unitree. Gavin, have you looked at this company? Yeah, it's pretty wild actually. It's an incredible business, incredible product. So their GO2 robot is $1,600, has an API, Here it is. You can run a payload on it. It's got LiDAR on it. It's got kind of intelligence guidance systems on it. This is the robot system that was used on some of those videos we looked at earlier this year where there were machine guns

Starting point is 00:18:36 mounted to the back and it was basically a new kind of field soldier. It's an autonomous field soldier. But really you can use it in scientific applications. We're looking at using them on our test farms where it can wander the farm and take images and report data back to us. And it's such a low cost at like less than $3,000, you can do some incredible things with it. So this business just raised a couple hundred million dollars last month from mostly Chinese investors to Chinese company. And I think that there's gonna be other similar type businesses, kind of takes a long time for things to work. And then all of a sudden they happen faster than you could have ever imagined.

Starting point is 00:19:12 I think this is gonna be the year where we're all gonna look at humanoid robots and autonomous systems and be like, oh my God, I can't believe this is here. So this could be the year of the big rollout. What a good choice. It's such a great strong choice for the biggest winner. And I think the quote you're looking for is,

Starting point is 00:19:26 how did you go bankrupt slowly and then all at once? That's how these technology changes. I mean, I would love to have one of these for the ranch to just run around and do the perimeter security. Sorry, Nick, pull up the, you guys gotta watch this if you haven't seen it. Nick, find the video of the G02 with the wheels on it, managing terrain.

Starting point is 00:19:40 Oh yes. And everyone thought this was a BS video that it was like CGI wasn't real, it was AI generated, but like this thing is just incredible. Here it is. This is a real video of this thing. Yeah. And it can learn from an LLM too, right?

Starting point is 00:19:56 Like a large language model could teach it how to do something, yeah. Gavin, is this real? Like what's your sense on this? Yeah, it's absolutely real. Yeah. I want to get the G1, which is their humanoid robot. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:20:07 So pull up the humanoid, it's really cool. Yeah. It's a little more expensive. It's a little more expensive. Yeah. I mean, $16,000 is the cost of a used Prius. Let's be honest, that's in spitting distance of being affordable for the middle class.

Starting point is 00:20:18 So here's the G1, look at this thing, 16 grand. And this thing, you can basically command it to do things for you in your house. Or in your factory or in your workplace. I knew you would do it. I was gonna say maybe we could get a poker dealer maybe bow, you know, I wonder if this thing could deal. Do you guys remember? Do you guys remember that robot that was on stage for our all in holiday? Yes,

Starting point is 00:20:44 one x my brother made an observation. He said, as soon as that robot came out, it's like everyone just wanted to abuse it. He's like, humans have this very interesting nature where like the robot emerges and all that humans wanna do is like hurt the robot. It's like a very strange revelation of human behavior. Yeah, like it just, it's like,

Starting point is 00:21:03 oh, here's something I could dominate. Here's something I can tell it what to do and control it. Well, that's because we're still threatened by it. We want to make sure that we're at the top of the species here, and it doesn't feel like it's going to be for much longer. I mean, these things will kick our ass pretty soon. Oh, anyway, these things are amazing. I think this is going to be the year of the robots. That's my prediction.

Starting point is 00:21:16 Year of the robots is your prediction. I love it. Gavin, what do you got? Profoundly agree. I think year of the robots, inclusive of FSD. I think FSD works, what do you got? Profoundly agree. I think you're the robots inclusive of FSD. You know, I think FSD works today and it's gonna it's it's gonna cross into mainstream adoption where I already notice, particularly if I'm taking an Uber late at night, I really, really prefer to have a Tesla. Just sometimes you get an Uber driver who's tired.

Starting point is 00:21:47 And I just feel a lot safer if they have the FSD running. And then obviously using it for yourself is amazing. But I think it's going to continue compounding at an accelerating rate. I think in a lot of ways, what I'd say broadly is, I think for a while, it's going to be big businesses are winners, big businesses that use AI thoughtfully. The reason is that with what is happening, what O3 showed us, OpenAI's new model, a combination of reasoning and test time compute. Like I think if you're a big business and you can pay a million dollars to let an AI think for six weeks about the most important question

Starting point is 00:22:32 for your business, that's gonna be a profound advantage relative to small businesses that can't afford that. And by the way, we are the other, like inference compute is gonna be the kind of derivative winner afford that. And by the way, we are the other, like inference compute is going to be the kind of derivative winner of that. We're going to run out of GPUs, accelerators, compute in 2025 the same way we did in 23. OK, so you're also along Nvidia and chip makers, Grok, et cetera, because we're finding new uses for all that compute.

Starting point is 00:23:04 Absolutely. Okay, very good. Chamath, do you have a prediction for your biggest business winner of 2025, sir? I think the biggest business winner of 2025 are going to be dollar denominated stable coins. Ooh. I'll make two points. In 2024, two critical things happened.

Starting point is 00:23:26 The first is that stable coins. Essentially. Became uncoupled from crypto volatility. And it started to be used for wholesale useful functions in running businesses. for wholesale useful functions in running businesses. And there's an image here that starts to show that. So independent of crypto volatility, what you saw were stable coin usage just rising up and to the right.

Starting point is 00:23:55 That's an incredibly important decoupling that happened in 2024. The second, and this data is still just trickling in, but it's an incredible stat. Second, and this data is still just trickling in, but it's an incredible stat, stablecoin usage at the end of the second quarter of 2024 was about 1.1 billion transactions that summed to $8.5 trillion of transaction volume. If you compare that to Visa over the same period, it was more than double Visa's transaction volume. So I think what we have now is something that has fundamentally crossed a point of no return. Similar to how last year I thought that the

Starting point is 00:24:43 big trend was going to be Bitcoin in 2024. I I thought that the big trend was going to be Bitcoin in 2024. I would say that the big trend in 2025 is stable coin usage. I think we're going to finally attack the duopoly of Visa and MasterCard. I think you're going to see an innumerable number of use cases that sit and use stable coin rails. I think when Donald Trump becomes president, I think you're going to see him go after incredibly high credit card transactions and costs. You're already seeing cracks in consumer credit anyways, because of these high APRs, all of this stuff is going to come to a

Starting point is 00:25:23 head in 2025, and I think stable coins could quadruple or quintuple by the end of 2025. I think it's just going to be an enormous market. Great choice. Should they be regulated, Chamath? We saw at some of these congressional hearings, Tether was kind of dragged for being the primary transfer and monetary tool for terrorism, for getting around sanctions, and for human trafficking.

Starting point is 00:25:49 Should it be regulated? And how? I don't think I'm qualified to say how it should. But I think the point is that there are these immutable logs that sit in between and on either side of all of these transactions. And so I think the knowledge is there. And there are a whole bunch of third party services

Starting point is 00:26:09 that add that intelligence layer. I think the thing to really question is, if you just took 300 basis points of drag out of the global economy, massive gains. How valuable would that be? And I think it would be valuable just in the United States alone to the tune of a trillion dollars. So the idea that you wouldn't do it at this point is somewhat quizzical to me. So I just think that the economic justification

Starting point is 00:26:39 for this now is just so profound. Gavin, let me ask you a hard question there as well. Should the United States government give up the, let's face it, they have a bit of a stranglehold, they've got a bit of a monopoly on US dollars. These things are a competitor. And we were sitting here on this program for the last couple of years talking about the BRICS and them starting their own currency. Aren't these in some ways similar to that? And they would take people off the USD standard. How do you look at that?

Starting point is 00:27:08 Because that is the criticism that some people in power have put forward. I do think that they might be very good for the world, but I do think they would be very bad for America if they replaced, if some constellation of stablecoins became the new reserve currency, it is such an advantage to be able to borrow in your own currency and to give that up lightly. That means you control the real size of your debt at all times. Oh, wow, we have a big debt. I mean, this is a little

Starting point is 00:27:46 bit like what we just did. Let's just have let's just let inflation run hot and oh, wow, that that's a lot smaller than it was. effectively. So I think it would be a big mistake. Freeburg, you have any thoughts on it? We've been talking about currency here and a whole bunch over the last couple years. Any thoughts on stablecoins and just the monopoly we have on it? I don't know enough about stablecoins. Well, that'll be one of our big topics for the year. We should definitely invite Jeremy Allaire from USD on or USDC, USDC. Jeremy Allaire, I mentioned, by the way, that I had this small little product that I exposed to the world, which is just our research.

Starting point is 00:28:31 And we sit it on top of Substack. Again, the tools aren't very good. And we use Stripe. And Jeremy reached out to me and he's like, I'll just rebuild all of your payment rails on using US dollar stable coins. And it's a no-brainer because I'm spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in transaction costs that now I can just save and use to hire somebody else or just pay the team more. And so I just think- Yeah, well, if you're paying 10% to Substack and the 3%, yeah.

Starting point is 00:28:59 If it's obvious for me, it's obvious for everybody else. All right. My biggest business winner prediction for 2025 is Tesla and Google. I think this is going to be the year of AI and robotics, obviously. But I am just absolutely amazed at the comeback that Google has made with AI and I'm absolutely in awe of what Elon did with Colossus. If those of you don't know, Jensen Wong, Michael Dell, they all obviously participated in building out XAI, and they were shocked. They couldn't believe that they stood up 100,000 GPUs in under 45 days, was it, Gavin?

Starting point is 00:29:35 Something in that neighborhood? It was a tremendous effort. And you know, I just think- But that's not Tesla, right? Is that Tesla? Well, Elon, Tesla, XAI, and Google, that cohort who are investing heavily in AI, those two specifically, those two,

Starting point is 00:29:49 three names, I think are going to be the biggest winners next year, they're going to come out with some things that people didn't anticipate. I don't I don't think people are anticipating what Google is going to come out with because Gemini deep research, I keep telling people this, and I'm using the app is so impressive. Drop what you're doing right now, pause the podcast, download Gemini, and just start playing with deep research on your desktop, pay the 20 bucks for it. It is

Starting point is 00:30:13 mind blowing. It blows anything else in the market out of the water period, full stop, it is a step function higher. All right, I'll just leave it at that. Jason, shouldn't you just go into the vibe of the podcast? Should you explain what it is? What? Sorry. Okay, so what it does is good call. Good call. Yeah. If you wanted to create a model, let's say, and I did this where I said, Hey, make me a model based upon what it would take to

Starting point is 00:30:38 replace all the cars and trips in the United States with full self driving cars, what would that cost to do? And if you ask that to chat GPT or Brock or, you know, Claude, it's going to give you a decent answer. What deep research does is it goes and it figures out what the sub components of each of those questions would be. And then it fires off multiple threads. And then it searches the web in real time, which Google is extremely good at. And then it summarizes it, gives citations, and it produces a report that looks like something that Gartner Group, McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group would have spent, I don't know, 30 days on Gavin and a million dollars, a half million dollars. It's bonkers how good this is, but the amount of compute it takes is extraordinary.

Starting point is 00:31:23 That's why chat GPT released something similar. That's 200 bucks a month. The O one pro I think they call it. And then this one is like 20 bucks from Gemini. Anyway, given what Google has access to, YouTube, your G drive, your Google docs, et cetera, your Gmail, it's gonna do things that you wouldn't anticipate. Like if you were asking this question,

Starting point is 00:31:43 it might look in your Gmail for possibilities to answer those questions, or YouTube videos of channels you subscribe to. So this is going to, I think, knock people's socks off and solve problems that people didn't know they had. Is that a pretty good explanation, Gavin? Yeah, I think it's great. For last year, our predictions for business winner,

Starting point is 00:32:02 Chamath said bootstrapped or end-door profitable startups. I think that's a really great pick and that came to pass. We're seeing some of those go public and raise money at higher evaluations or not go out of business. Freeberg, you said commodities businesses. I'm not sure how that did. Did you know? Did you check in on that? Pretty flat. Yeah, we didn't have a lot of the inflationary pressures that I think were underlying that thesis. So- Got it. And ended up being, I'd

Starting point is 00:32:25 say a loser relative to other indices you could have bought this year. I said training data owners like Reddit, New York Times, Google, et cetera, Reddit stock up to 24% in 2024. And they launched their own Reddit answer. So I think I got that one. New York Times stock is up as well. And they fired off that lawsuit with open AI. All right, now we're going to move on to the 2025 biggest business loser predictions in 2024. Shomat said pro sports teams because they hit peak valuations. That's looking like a pretty good prediction. Freberg you said vertical SaaS companies because of AI disruption. That's another one that seems like a great prediction. I said smartphone manufacturers. Apple stock was up 30% in 2024, but I think we've all seen that these smartphones aren't advancing and people are taking their time. The sales of those

Starting point is 00:33:11 are down, services are up. I would take the other side on pro sports teams. It feels like that market is about to be institutionalized and funds are going to start buying pro sports teams. Okay. That ultimately and ultimately capital markets have way more resources than kind of the wealthy individuals who've done it for now to date. So I just think it's the amount of money that can go after pro sports teams is about, you know, 10x, 100x. I think you're totally right. The reason I said that last year was it was pretty clear to me at the time, and the NBA

Starting point is 00:33:46 was the canary in the coal mine that there was a viewership problem in professional sports. And specifically in the NBA, the game has devolved into essentially rebounds and dunks or three-pointers. And the issue with that is that it becomes just meaningfully less interesting to watch. At the same time because of the the fact that the TV deals are really what determines the discounted value of these sports franchises. The TV deal was so enormous, that it creates no reliable rivalries anymore.

Starting point is 00:34:20 Because people will hopscotch teams almost every year, because the compensation that they can get is just so obscene, quite honestly. And I think what happens is, sports will have a decent run until the next TV deals get done. And I think if you for example, take pharma ads outside of TV, so like that pool shrinks, if you have less viewership, and so you can sell the remaining ads less effectively because there's just fewer of them and then there's fewer buyers and it shrinks yet again, then the dollar pool that the television networks and the

Starting point is 00:34:57 streamers are going to be willing to pay for sports will go down. And the group that will be the most price sensitive are exactly who you said, Gavin, meaning the non trophy buyer. So like, you know, when I bought into the warriors, I bought it purely as a trophy asset. And I was pricing sensitive. But I agree with you that now that you have the PE firms on the cap tables of these sports franchises, those folks are all DCFs, those folks are all Excel models. I don't think that they're buying things for emotion. I don't think they've grown up thinking I want to own this thing, not using institutional LP dollars. So I just think that's why I said that in 24.

Starting point is 00:35:34 So I just want to be clear. On behalf of Phil Hummuth and I, we appreciate you made that vanity investment for the number of times we got to sit in your court side seats. Yeah, because I never went to the games. Friendships we made with NBA players. It's great. I never went to the games. I should have gone to more games. I went to your games and almost got thrown out of your seats. I got a red card one time. It's true. Is it true? You did? Oh, you don't know that story? I got a call. I got a call. I think it was from the Warriors or from the NBA, something to the

Starting point is 00:35:58 effect of Chmoth. This guy that was sitting in your seats was almost kicked out. And I said, excuse me. Cause I knew that it was the next game in fairness. And he was like jawboning our own players. I was getting into it with Bogut and with David Lee. Because I thought it was unbelievable. I told Steve Kerr, listen, you're up 30 on my next sit these guys down. This is Bush League. What if Steph Curry gets hurt out there like, and, you know, Bogut told me to shut up and Andre Iguodela-

Starting point is 00:36:26 Bogut told them to basically go pound sand in a morgue. He basically did. It was the funniest thing ever, Gavin. This is what happens when you get- Bogut's one of our friends, and he's one of our good friends, so that's why. It's so funny. But they come over, Friedberg, and they tap you on the shoulder. I'm with my wife.

Starting point is 00:36:40 She's mortified. And the guy hands you a card. And the card says you've been warned one time and one time only about abusive, you know, behavior. If we have to warn you one more time, you will be escorted out. So I look at the guy and I say, but he goes, read the card. I read the card. I say, he goes, give me a thumbs up. That was it. I never. You're not supposed to. Then three years later, I'm sitting in the same seats. I'm interacting with Draymond during the finals games and everybody's hokey dokey with it. When you say interacting, what do you mean when you say interacting?

Starting point is 00:37:15 Wait, hold on. Gavin wanted to make a point about what I just said. No, I just want to just come back to Chamath because for sure these private equity guys, there's DCFs. The NBA has been terribly managed. I think even LeBron said they have a big problem. And I'd separate the NBA is the worst managed, NFL is probably the best managed.

Starting point is 00:37:32 But the one kind of counterpoint I would say on the TV rights is Google bought Sunday Ticket and are extremely happy with it. Amazon and Netflix also both bought NFL games and are really happy with them. And so I just think those three companies, it doesn't really matter to them if pharma ads go away. In 18 months, you're going to be able to dynamically create an ad for each individual person and show it to them. And if you're a high value user with a, you know, that Google knows that you're about to book a vacation, you know, they'll dynamically generate, you know, whatever,

Starting point is 00:38:09 you know, hotel destinations you want and show click here. So I just think sports, as long as they command the eyeballs that they do, and I for sure, if the NBA doesn't fix it, the value of those franchises will start to decline. But just the fact that all of the biggest tech companies are so happy with the sports rights that they bought, they're going to buy them all. Every sport will go to one of those companies. I can't understand, Gavin, maybe you're closer to this, but why wouldn't Apple, Amazon, or Google just back up

Starting point is 00:38:42 the truck to the NBA and say, well, take the whole thing. And then anybody who's got an iPhone gets the NBA for free and then everybody else has to pay and they figure it out in the back and they lose a, you know, 5 billion. They make 2 billion. Who cares? It's a rounding error for Apple. I agree. And they, you know, I mean, they all, all except for Apple, really. And Apple, they have, I think an MLS deal, but they all kind of stuck their toe in the water. And I think they feel like wow, the water's warm. Let's dive in. Okay. Yeah. And the new deals an 11 year deal for the NBA. So these things don't come up that often.

Starting point is 00:39:16 But we'll see over time maybe somebody will buy one of these media companies and inherit them. Okay, biggest business loser for 2025. What's your prediction, Gavin Baker? Government service providers. You do not you do not want to have the United States government at any level is over 35% of your revenue. Good choice. Yes. Obviously, in the age of Doge, they might not be spending wildly. And they might actually look at the bill, they might check the bill. Crazy thought. Crazy thought. Yeah, crazy, they might check the bill. Crazy thought, crazy thought, crazy thought to actually check the bill. You never know. Chamath, who do you predict will be the biggest business loser of 2025? Well, this is a little bit

Starting point is 00:39:57 precarious, but I don't know what the percentage drawdown from here will be, but I think when we look back, the absolute dollar drawdown of the mag seven will be in the trillions of dollars. Okay. The reason is not necessarily because of the underlying fundamentals of these companies. But I am a little bit worried. And I tweeted this a few days ago about just the general concentration of the top seven, eight, nine, 10 companies in the indices. I think it's approaching 40%. And I think that when you look at these historic

Starting point is 00:40:42 concentrations, they've generally foreshadowed a big drawdown. And unfortunately, I don't see how you can sort of, you know, inoculate yourself from that risk. So independent of the quality of these companies, because I think these companies are exceptional businesses. I do think you've just had too much concentration and I think it is a setup to retrade and give back and in that it could even be 10%. But 10% in the MAG-8 will be a couple trillion bucks. And so on an absolute dollar basis.

Starting point is 00:41:16 102% would be a lot. Yeah, on absolute dollars, a lot. Okay. Freberg, who do you predict? You predict MAG-7, government service providers for you, Gavin. Freberg, who do you predict will be the biggest business loser of 2025? I'm sort of on the same vein as Gavin. I went with the kind of old defense and aerospace providers, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon. Defense 1.0. Driven by kind of China dominance, driven by US defense budgets that I think are going to need to shift towards a more kind of tech-oriented and ROI-driven

Starting point is 00:41:45 rationalization and pricing and spend. So the Palantirs and Anderils, obviously, the world will benefit. And I also just think there's a lot of failure at scale with these businesses. They've gotten too clunky and too bureaucratic, as we've seen with Boeing, from their space program failure in 2024 to the challenges with their airplane business. But I think that this government contracting business across the board is gonna be deeply challenged this year with all the new blood.

Starting point is 00:42:11 So the costs plus are gonna suffer is what you're saying. And the Andrals will thrive. Would you guys add, just a question, would you guys add the traditional consulting companies then to the mix as well? Like if you're- That's a good point too. That's a great one. Yeah, we think what we talked about with deep learning.

Starting point is 00:42:27 Like the one pros, the tatas, the HCL, the Accenture. Cognizance, HCL. Cognizance, the EMYs, all these folks that are in real trouble if that also happens. That's right. The efficiency that they'll gain will also be felt by their customers and their customers might not hire them.

Starting point is 00:42:45 When you got a bunch of software entrepreneurs that are now advising and informing the federal government on how to run their operations, I'm pretty sure that some of these service providers are going to get washed out. So that's a good idea. The thing to keep in mind is like cost plus is a fancier way of saying time and materials. And time and materials is a fancy way of saying human labor arbitrage. And I think that all of that stuff will get extremely scrutinized in 2025. Because if you are buying, you know, $800 waste baskets and, you know, $9,000 umbrella hangers, because of time and

Starting point is 00:43:21 materials and all of this other crazy stuff that's in the system, and all of that gets washed out, then a lot of these folks and their business models will get put under severe stress. The alignments, you know, you show me an incentive, I'll show you the outcome, the alignment of cost plus is to just keep being inefficient and, and waste and these defense contractors are taking 60 70 80% off the price of each piece of munitions or vehicle. Yeah. Cost plus is terrible. No, just cost plus is terrible. That's all right. For my biggest business loser prediction, I

Starting point is 00:43:55 had to go through a lot of the people I've criticized. I didn't start in fights with over the past year. commercial real estate came to mind because these leases are going to keep coming up. And I think like they kicked the can down the road a little bit. So I started there. Then I looked at micro strategies and that made no sense to me that they were trading at two, three, four times the book value of their Bitcoin. And I think that's not sustainable.

Starting point is 00:44:20 I looked at truth social, which is like doing $ or $5 million in revenue, and is valued at 7 billion. That makes absolute no logical sense. But I think the one that is the most overpriced of all of this, and I think is going to see their peak valuation is open AI. I think the headwinds for open AI are being absolutely underappreciated. Like I said before, in my previous prediction, Google is kicking ass. XAI is just getting started and building out so much big iron.

Starting point is 00:44:55 Microsoft was basically on another podcast almost like laughing at OpenAI for selling them the source code and that they didn't even need OpenAI anymore because they had it all, they don't need them and they own all the big iron. I think OpenAI's valuation made no sense. I don't think they're gonna be able to keep charging

Starting point is 00:45:13 the prices they're charging. And I think AWS, Apple, Google, XAI, this cohort are going to really take that $157 billion valuation and make it the peak valuation of the company. And I do think that there is a non-zero chance they could lose their process and these court cases of transferring $157 billion in value from a nonprofit into a for-profit. I think that whole thing could blow up in Sam Holtman's lap. Is that your super prediction? Is OpenAI will not be able to convert nonprofit into a for-profit. I think that whole thing could blow up in Sam Holtman's lap.

Starting point is 00:45:46 Is that your super prediction? Is OpenAI will not be able to convert from nonprofit to for-profit in 2025? I think that that's a small piece of it, but that's a really interesting super prediction. Insert polymarket graphic here. Super prediction. Will OpenAI convert? Is that a good one? In 2025, yeah. By the way, they're projecting, I think, in the leaked financials, 12 billion in revenue next year at JCal. So unlike a lot of the other things you were talking about, this is a real business with real revenue, real scale, real growth, real technology.

Starting point is 00:46:16 It's a little bit distinct from kind of being a meme stock or being a- Exactly. That's why I'm picking it, because I think it's easy to pick a meme stock. It's harder to pick a real company. But I do think that that revenue, which a lot of it is consumer, and a lot of it is developers, the developers I know all want to do open source. They don't want to have to be beholden to OpenAI and Sam Altman. They would much rather, and they're already setting their queries across multiple different stacks and trying different ones. I don't think there's any loyalty to OpenAI or Gemini or any of these

Starting point is 00:46:49 services. I think they'll just go with eventually open source in many cases. So anyway, that's my thought on OpenAI. 2025, biggest business deal. What do you got, Chamath? What's your biggest business deal for 2025 prediction, Chamath? What do you got? You said Starlink to go public last year. That hasn't happened yet. Totally ripped on that one. Yeah. Totally ripped on that one. I think that this is the year that we will see the collapse

Starting point is 00:47:12 of the traditional auto OEMs. And I think that the deal that happened at the end of 2024 with Honda and Nissan, I think is a bit of a signal to what the industry has to do, which is to go through a massive wave of consolidation. I think that Tesla is just in an incredible position with the quality of their vehicles and the quality of their software and the quality of their autonomy with FSD. So I suspect that after a couple of more meaningful product releases, it's just going to trigger the realization by the public capital markets that these auto OEMs are uninvestable.

Starting point is 00:48:00 And I think the result of that will be a wave of auto mega mergers. Hmm. And for people who don't know Honda and Nissan signed an agreement to merge and Mitsubishi is involved because they're part of, I think Nissan's Alliance. This would obviously get rid of all of the redundancy. But yeah, I think this is going to touch like the European OEMs are in real trouble. You know, what does Volkswagen do? It's not clear what the Stellantis do. It's not clear. These are all

Starting point is 00:48:30 businesses that are effectively melting icebergs. And so you know, typically melting iceberg businesses, when they get put under pressure from smart investors like Gavin, and and and his ilk, they're forced to merge. Gavin, you got a spread trade? Are you short these names? like Gavin and his ilk, they're forced to merge. It's just the cost of capital. Gavin, you got a spread trade? Are you short these names? I would rather not talk about specific positions.

Starting point is 00:48:52 I would just say I agree 100% with Chamath. I think these- All right, there you go. They're gonna lose their Chinese business because they don't make competitive products anymore. If there's not massive protectionism and we're seeing signs of that, they'll be caught between Tesla and the Chinese OEMs. And I think the only way that this doesn't happen, Chamath's only risk to Chamath's prediction is just

Starting point is 00:49:16 government intervention, because they're such big employers, and you know, often seen as national champions, but absent really significant government support, they're all in deep trouble. Okay, well done. Freeberg, last year, you said there'd be some blockbuster deals for rights holders, licensing data for AI training, and Reddit did in fact sign two of those. So a great prediction from you for last year on biggest business deal.

Starting point is 00:49:42 What do you got this year? See if you can go two for two. Or just read it. I should probably look it up. What do you got? I'll just follow on my year of the robot theme. I do think that there's going to be massive funding deals similar to what we saw this past year for compute build out. I think we're going to see massive funding deals for hardware based manufacturing build out, I think we're going to see massive funding deals for hardware-based manufacturing build out in the United States. And I think that those deals may take the form of traditional equity from private markets, or they may have some component that includes government support to motivate and drive and accelerate onshore manufacturing. We're not going to go in the US to making stuff that is like last century.

Starting point is 00:50:26 I think we're going to need to move manufacturing to the next decade, next century of production. I think that's going to mean making some of these autonomous and robotic type systems that are going to become really critical for us, particularly with China doing this massive ramp up and build out for both drones and robots and autonomous vehicles. So I think we're going to need to kind of onshore a lot of this. And so that'll be a big amount of capital that's going to move. And so you'll see a bunch of these big blockbuster deals for hardware build out in the US.

Starting point is 00:50:55 Gavin, what do you think should be the biggest business deal in 2025? I think the biggest business deal is that they're going to be deals. I think there's going to see a tidal wave of M&A after four years of not being able to get anything done. I think there's an enormous amount of pent up demand. So kind of point number one, point number two, something will happen with Intel, and that will be big. And hopefully it's good for America. And then

Starting point is 00:51:22 I do think you will see a lot of these frontier AI labs that are independent be acquired. You know, I thought your points were well taken, Jason, about, you know, everything that, you know, Google is bringing to bear and XAI owns their own compute. I mean, you guys can choose whichever one of these three you like, but the ultimate AI winner will be the one with the lowest cost of infrastructure costs, the lowest cost of compute. And definitionally, you can't be the low cost provider if you're renting your compute from someone else. Because of markups. Yeah, because there's a markup if you're buying your compute

Starting point is 00:51:57 from Azure or AWS, or Google, you are at a disadvantage relative to their internal services over time. So the full stack wins. Great prediction for me. Last year, my prediction was that ByteDance would go public or TikTok would get divested or some version of this. We are but 18 days away from figuring out if the Supreme Court will do just that. My prediction for this year, I was looking at all the media companies, gentlemen. There were so many possibilities there. Warner Brothers, I think the age of autonomy is here, and I think there is going to be some partnerships that will happen between Amazon, DoorDash, Uber, Tesla, Waymo, and that cohort. And I would not be surprised to see Tesla could buy Uber right now, because they're going to be able to do that.

Starting point is 00:52:39 And I think that's going to be a big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, And I would not be surprised to see Tesla could buy Uber right now for but 10% of its market cap, and Waymo could spin out and partner with Uber. Amazon could buy DoorDash fairly easily. And with the wrath of Khan being over, the wrath of Lena Khan being over, Gavin, it is possible that mega deals like these could go through. And if a couple of mega deals go through Gavin, it is possible that mega deals like these could go through. And if a couple of mega deals go through like this, whoever, you know, teams up here could

Starting point is 00:53:14 win autonomy, delivery, food delivery, and e-commerce. This is a ginormous space. And I think, listen, I don't, I haven't spoken to obviously my friend about it, but Tesla buying DoorDash and Uber or Amazon buying DoorDash and Uber could be the greatest service ever created if you wanted to build a super app. The only thing I would add, and I think dovetails with what you said and Friedberg's kind of year of the robot, is autonomous drones. There's a company called Zipline, which my firm is an investor in. Fantastic company.

Starting point is 00:53:47 Yeah, but autonomous drones, they really are the best way to deliver almost anything to suburban America. And then I think over time, it will be sorted out so that they could deliver in cities as well. So I just think that that might be a little bit of a wild card for some of these delivery services.

Starting point is 00:54:07 Well, and Amazon in, I believe it's Texas, is actually doing these now. They've got 60,000 SKUs is my understanding already being delivered and they just drop it in your backyard and it's there in 45 minutes. Well, we talked about this like two weeks ago. You know, Maituan in China has got this and they have food delivery happening with these drones. By the way, just kind of dovetailing off of this, I think the other big deal potential in 2025, just to be very specific, is a deal with Waymo.

Starting point is 00:54:35 Waymo launched in SF in August 2023 in kind of an open market way. Uber and Lyft were 66 and 34% market share at the time. And in 15 months, in November of 2024, Waymo is now at 22% market share of rides in SF, which is the same as Lyft and Uber is now down to 55. So Waymo ate into both Uber and Lyft's market share by on the order of 12 points in just 15 months. And now they're launching in LA, in Austin, all over the country. They're already in Phoenix. So I think you could see a massive... And by the way, they also just moved the hardware platform over to a new device that's supposedly going to bring the capex significantly down

Starting point is 00:55:14 for new launches. So you'll see much improved ROIC metrics, which means that there's a much kind of more efficient way to use capital to scale. So the system works. It is scaling. They're opening up in new markets. You could see something happen with Waymo this year that could either be something like a massive financing, an IPO, or a merger or acquisition with one of the big ride-sharing companies. I don't know if that makes as much strategic sense as I've thought about it a little bit, but I do think you could see a big deal with Waymo. This company is, if you guys have not been in a Waymo, I think we all talked about this, but it's an incredible experience. And everyone I know of every age

Starting point is 00:55:48 group that has been for a ride in Waymo comes out of it saying that is the future. This is going to absolutely dominate how I'm going to get around. Clearly it's the future. Most people say it's slow right now and monotonous and they don't like it, but you know, because it does take weird routes, but that'll be fixed over time, obviously. And just in case anybody thinks I'm talking my book here, I have exposure to all these companies, almost all these companies in a significant way, because I believe in the entire space.

Starting point is 00:56:14 One and a half percent of rides in the US and globally, it's less than 1% are done by ride sharing. The TAM is going to go to 20% in a very short period of time. And it's going to be across the board, there's going to be a lot of winners here. And to my favorite Uber, obviously, they have deals with eight people and it's a global market. BYD produces cars for half the price of any other car manufacturer and they have full self driving and it's pretty darn good from what I understand. So this is going to be a global competition. And that means if you want to win that global competition, something like Uber and door dash, Waymo, Amazon, BYD, you're

Starting point is 00:56:50 going to see some interesting partnerships happen very quickly, I believe, because there's so much at stake. All right. Any final thoughts on biggest business deals? I think I maybe have a good one here. Consolidation in the transportation space. Okay. Moving on to 2025 most contrarian belief last year enterprise value of open AI goes down from Chamath. It roughly doubled, but I just picked it as my prediction. So I think we're sim, we're simpatico on what we think longterm. Freeburg, you said increased probability of a nuclear weapon being used for the first time since World War II. Thank the Lord that that didn't happen. Again, this is contrarian beliefs. People are going out there. I didn't predict it was going to happen. I just said the probability went up. It's a tough thing

Starting point is 00:57:33 to call. Well, this is most contrary belief. I think it's fine. Dr. Doom strikes again. It's all good. I picked Apple would become the player in AI and they did launch Apple intelligence, but it sucks. I mean it sucks. It's terrible. I just bought the Google pixel fold nine and the Gemini works perfectly. It does everything that Siri is supposed to do. If you say, please play this song. If you say, please download this app. If you say say add this to my calendar, it does it and it does it in one fifth or 10th the amount of time that Apple takes. And Apple gets it wrong. Every time it's a piece of garbage. It's a disgrace.

Starting point is 00:58:17 Disgrace the odd Apple. Apple intelligence is even worse than copilot, which is saying something. Jason, would you like to announce you bought the domain? Disgrace ad.com I own it. I'm not selling it right now. It redirects to Jay Paul. Gavin, Gavin, do you have any idea what word he's even saying when he says that disc? Disgrace ad. Disgrace ad. Dis Disgracia is what people used to say in Brooklyn for somebody who is disgraceful. It is a Italian American slang. How do you spell it?

Starting point is 00:58:53 Oh, I don't even know. You don't even know? You own the domain and you don't even know? D-I-S-G-R-A-Z-I-A-D. Disgracia. Yes. And if you're typing Disgracia, it goes to Jake Paul. I bought it when I was watching the Tyson fight. It was so disgraceful. I was saying to my brother, Josh, the black

Starting point is 00:59:12 bomber, this is just, and he just said, Disgratia. And I just said, I wonder if that's available as a domain. I'm redirecting Disgratia right now, Tim Cook to Apple intelligence, the website. Do you guys think Tyson through that fight that it was part of the deal? Yes. Thousand percent. Yes. Thousand percent. I would love, I think somebody said Saudi Arabia was offering to host a remake or whatever,

Starting point is 00:59:36 a rematch, a rematch of the fight where the winner would make 50 million and then we'll see what's what. And the loser gets zero. Yes. And the loser gets zero. Yes. And the loser gets zero. This is a good use of the kingdom's money. The people want to know, we will all fly out there and do an all in episode from that fight.

Starting point is 00:59:53 Did you guys see this? Did you see this thing where, is it Logan Paul is fighting Conor McGregor in India and Conor McGregor is going to get $250 million? What? Yeah. It's like a whole tourist thing. Is it boxing or is it MMA? It's like a whole tourist thing.

Starting point is 01:00:08 PR stunt. I think it's boxing and it's meant to sort of like bring a bunch of tourists into India to show them the country. But it's a quarter of a billion dollars to Conor McGregor. How did we get in on this grift? Freeberg versus Baker, Polly Hoppeteer versus Calacanis. Oh my gosh. We need to get in our own celebrity box and who would we do? Come on, keep going. I got to drive home. Let's go. Come on. It's

Starting point is 01:00:30 too much fun this episode. Chamath, what's your most contrarian belief prediction for 2025? We're going out on a limb here. This is going out on a limb, folks. Don't judge us. The spicier they take, the better here. This is where you can go freestyle. I think that you're going to see a banking crisis in one of the major mainline banks. A banking crisis. Wow. There is a small chance it happens, but that's a contrarian belief. Okay. Why, Chamath?

Starting point is 01:00:58 Why? Vaxuan? Well, I think if I had to kind of build the the case for this, it would be along the following lines. If you add it up, the total indebtedness of PACS America, which is US government debt, plus corporates, plus mortgage debt, and you actually sensitize it to rates that are around, call it 5%, what you quickly realize is on a dollar basis that because the amount of debt that we have has just massively exploded that 5% rates today on $70 trillion is actually equivalent to 10% rates 25 or 30 years ago because we only had a fraction of that debt on a dollar basis. And so the pain that you feel at 5% or 6% can very quickly ripple through the economy the way that it did

Starting point is 01:02:06 when rates 25 or 30 years ago were 10%. And so I think that when people look at rates, they forget the actual total dollar impact because when somebody or collectively, when we have to come up with three or $4 trillion, how do you do that? And so I think that there is a non trivial risk. I think it's small. This is why it's contrarian. But I think it's a, it's a risk where if you have a mark to market problem, if you have a credit default problem amongst the corporates or amongst enough individual consumers. What I think that happens more than anything else is that it triggers a reserve issue. And I think that the reserve issue in one of these mainline banks, I have two that I think are more

Starting point is 01:02:59 obvious than others, but I don't want to name them. Okay. Fair enough. I love this contrarian take this is great. I think that there's a there's a small but reasonable chance that that happens. I love it. It's a great, great contrarian take. Small chance, but big impact. Gavin, what do you got?

Starting point is 01:03:14 Well, first we should use Jim and I deep research to just ask it to look at the total, you know, Pax Americana debt outstanding, apply the current market interest rate to it, and then look at that interest expense relative to GDP and generate that chart over time. That would be a cool chart. That would be interesting. I don't disagree with Chamath. Moth. You know, anything is possible. And, you know, there

Starting point is 01:03:48 there could for sure be be a problem at a big bank. I don't know that I would say it's likely but anything is possible. My most contrary belief so I think that America over the next, at some point over the next four years, will print at least one year of greater than 5% GDP growth, real GDP growth. I think productivity is going to go vertical because of AI and deregulation. And I think there could be a world where this is the late 90s. And it doesn't sound like a big difference, you know, five or

Starting point is 01:04:20 6%, first two or 3%, but it is a massive difference. You know, at 5% or 6%, the economy is doubling. You'll call it every 12 years, roughly, versus 24 years at 3%. It's a massive difference in terms of kind of the wealth of the country and individual Americans. As far as a specific prediction for 25, because I don't know when that will happen, I think you will see the Frontier Labs stop releasing their leading edge models to prevent knowledge distillation and their IP effectively being stolen.

Starting point is 01:04:55 You know, DeepSeq from China, it was really impressive, but it thinks it's GPT-4. Yeah. So I just think you will see the labs keep their best models in house, distill them and put small, small models out over time. For a break, you have a contrarian belief and I did put into Gemini Advanced 1.5 Pro with deep research the question which banks have the greatest biggest chance of being insolvent or having a financial collapse or crisis. So it's

Starting point is 01:05:22 doing its research right now. It will be done in about 10 minutes, I think, which gives you an idea of how much research it does. It's nuts. Free break, what do you got? I think that the party line is that socialism was defeated in this election cycle and that there was a resounding kind of vote from the American populace against socialism.

Starting point is 01:05:45 And I actually think my contrarian belief is that we'll see a rise, a dramatic rise in socialist movements in 2025 in the United States. I think that we are going to see, as Gavin pointed out, an acceleration of progress. We're going to see an unleashing of economic growth because of deregulation and AI. But I do think that some markets, we've also talked about the downfall of US auto manufacturing and some other industries, there's gonna be a real significant shift in 2025. Some industries and some companies are gonna be huge winners

Starting point is 01:06:19 and some companies are gonna be huge losers. There's gonna be some parts of the economy that are gonna be big winners and some parts of the economy that are gonna be be big winners and some parts of the economy that are going to be big losers. When you have this sort of a change this fast, there are often large contingents of people that are left behind.

Starting point is 01:06:33 And when that happens, I do think that the socialist policies and the socialist movements gain steam. When Perón came to power in Argentina in the mid-1940s, that country was experiencing 8% GDP growth, to Gavin's point about accelerating growth. Growth does not mean that it benefits everyone equally. And I think that some folks will see people go from being billionaires to 100 billionaires

Starting point is 01:06:56 to the world's first trillionaire. And it will also start to fuel this rise. So I think that we will see an increase in the breadth and depth of socialist movements in the United States. By the way, particularly with Doge cutting government funding to programs that benefit individuals, employment being cut in the federal government and through federal contractors, there's just a lot of rapid change that's about to kind of really upset a lot of people. I totally agree. I think AI, you know, people are fond of saying that we're in a world of AGI or ASI, money will be meaningless. But for a short period of time, money will matter

Starting point is 01:07:33 more than it's ever mattered before. Because the amount of money you can spend on AI, on test time compute, is going to give you a massive advantage, whether you're a company or an individual. So I just think AI is going to really amplify inequality for some period of time. Yeah. I hope I'm wrong. Like, I hope, you know, AI leads to, you know, all sorts of, you know, opportunities being created

Starting point is 01:07:57 for low income people. That would be awesome. There's just going to be a lot of employment and income disruption in 2025, and it's going to fuel socialist movements. And I think that this is going to be a lot of employment and income disruption in 2025. And it's going to fuel socialist movements. And I think that this is going to be a more difficult year. Everyone thinks it's kind of rosy red because we're all working in the tech industry in Silicon Valley. But the reality on the ground for most Americans

Starting point is 01:08:17 could be a lot harsher than any of us anticipate. And that could make for a very difficult political environment and social environment. This is a great contrarian prediction, Freberg. I would build on it that I don't think this is just going to hit blue collar. I am seeing in the venture industry and in entrepreneurs all over the place people

Starting point is 01:08:35 who are super qualified, who had six figure salaries, even to mid six figure salaries, not be able to find work, or not find work at previous compensation levels. Why? Because people are doing more with less. It's much better to invest and do deep research and AI and automate stuff or deprecate stuff or delegate stuff to other regions than to hire Americans in some cases. And that philosophy that's happening isn't just going to hit truck drivers. It's

Starting point is 01:09:03 going to hit developers, potentially designers, writers, project managers. What is the contrarian part of what you guys are saying? What's the contrarian part? Socialism. Socialism is going to rise. Socialism on the rise. I think it's pretty interesting. You don't think it's contrarian? You think it's obvious? I think the party line has been that socialism was getting knocked back this year with this election cycle and it was a mandate against socialism and some of the socialist policies

Starting point is 01:09:29 that were being put forth. And I think that the contrarian view is that we're actually got this really wrong and socialism is going to be on a big rise. But just to build on what you said earlier, like wokeism and progressivism will decouple from socialism. I think woke ism and progressivism, you know, will be on a declining trend, but socialism in terms of the government. Like policies, you guys are saying.

Starting point is 01:09:53 You know, having more of a role. Yeah, yeah. I think that's an interesting idea. Why don't we have universal healthcare? Why don't we have pre-K or, you know, in every state? And, you know, these kinds of things, I think Americans are right to ask those questions. Now, other behaviors are obviously abhorrent, but you do have the right to ask why we can't figure this out and why our government has

Starting point is 01:10:13 failed us in something as basic as, you know, providing afterschool programs or universal healthcare or universal childcare. These things are easy to do. And when you see everybody getting rich and the polarization of wealth, I can understand people saying, why don't we have these basic things when other countries have them? It's a reasonable thought.

Starting point is 01:10:32 You're making the assumptive statement that these things are easy to do, which was what was said about education. It's like, let's give everyone access to college education with the federal student loan programs. And what happened was when we introduced those programs, those schools started to charge more and the tuition went up every year. And eventually, the cost of education inflated away from the benefit you were getting from it. And this

Starting point is 01:10:52 has happened universally in healthcare. It has happened in housing. It has happened in education. It has happened in every market where the government has stepped in to provide capital to support that market. Is it the market basically no longer operates in a free way? I appreciate the challenge to it. And I'll explain to you why I believe it's easy. If you just put this down to the States and you make it more competitive, I think you

Starting point is 01:11:15 solve the problem. If you introduce a school vouchers and you create competition, if you take universal healthcare and maybe you run some experiments where different States get that money from the federal government and let them run 50 different experiments, I think we could actually solve some of these problems. But you're correct. Anything that the federal government does, it eventually becomes corrupt and inefficient. My most contrarian belief was open AI loses its lead, loses its nonprofit to for profit transition and becomes the number four player in AI.

Starting point is 01:11:45 The total collapse of OpenAI is my most contrarian prediction for 2020. That's a good one. The total collapse of OpenAI. Just doubling and tripling down. Hey, man, I'm trying to make this spicy. It's a spicy category. Let's do it. Yeah, no, I got it.

Starting point is 01:12:00 I got it. Jeff Bezos could still run for president, J. Cal. Don't forget. Maybe he's great. I don't know. Everybody who, all his friends left the company. Maybe he's great. Maybe he's a stand up guy. I mean, everybody quit, but maybe he's Gavin, are you are you familiar with Jake health prediction that Jeff Bezos is going to run for president? It was that was my I was predicting I wanted him to I wanted to do and he bought Washington Post and he quit the Amazon job. And he bought a house in Washington, DC. And he went down to Mar-a-Lago. Don't be surprised if Bezos after he gets through his midlife crisis and going to Coachella and partying and having a great time, which he deserves,

Starting point is 01:12:37 if he comes back and says, you know what, I want to serve my country, I still stand by that. Or do you think he's going to hold onto it? Well, let's stick with that one. Because Jeff Bezos will sell the Washington Post in 2025. That's a good polymarket. Yeah, sell it to Kara Swisher. It's not to Karen Swisher. Right into the ground. They'll double down. Okay, best performing asset. Everybody loves this one best performing asset. Hey, we can you can put a price on this. Best performing asset. Everybody loves this one. Best performing asset. Hey, you can put a price on this. Best performing asset.

Starting point is 01:13:06 Last year, Chamath did a spread trade. He was long public tech stocks, short private, late stage tech stock index. NASDAQ top 100 tech stock. ETF was up 10% in 2024. Freiburg, you went with your uranium ETF, not Uranus, uranium ETF, and your URA was down 1% in 2024.

Starting point is 01:13:27 I know. You know what? I looked at the components of that ETF last week when we were preparing for this. It has absolute junk in it. It was not the right way to kind of trade Uranium, but anyway, that was my outcome for the year. I went with the on demand economy with Uber, Airbnb and door dash Uber was up 30%. But now it's only up 3% with the robo taxi headwind Airbnb is basically flat and door dash up big 74% Shout out to Stanley Tang. Great job to the team

Starting point is 01:14:00 over there. So Chamath, get your flowers there. Let's do our best performing asset. Let's let our guests go first. Gavin, what would be the best performing asset of 2025? I think the companies that make high bandwidth memory. Going back to we're going to run out of compute. It's actually a pretty shocking stat. High-Bit with memory is a bigger part of NVIDIA's cogs on GPUs than Taiwan Semi is. Today, there's two companies that can make it, Hynix and Micron. We'll see if Samsung gets their act together. But HBM memory, it's in NVIDIA GPUs, AMD GPUs, Amazon Traniums. And particularly in a world of test time compute and inference being so important.

Starting point is 01:14:46 High-Bit with memory is arguably more important than it ever was. And it's been sold out for the last two years. So High-Bit with memory would be my pick. Okay. Good pick. Great pick, in fact. What do you got, Chema? So let me preface this by saying that this is a pick that is not a pick that you can my pick. Okay, good. Great. In fact, what do you got your

Starting point is 01:15:05 mouth? So let me preface this by saying that this is a pick that 92 times out of 100 goes to absolute zero. Okay. And six out of the remaining eight times, you make 10 extra money. And then the final two times you make anywhere between a hundred to a thousand extra money. Okay, sounds like- Okay, so this is a loser trade, okay?

Starting point is 01:15:38 But I would be long CDS. So what am I buying? I am buying insurance. I'm buying insurance using credit default swaps. I'm buying what's called protection, that there is no default event in 2025. Again, I'm not going to tell you which companies or what maturities, but just the general idea for me is I would like a little bit of an insurance policy in 2025 so that the men and the women that we have voted in have the chance to do their work in peace. I think that there is a small chance of some volatility next year.

Starting point is 01:16:24 I hope it doesn't happen. I hope that this trade, like I said, 92 times out of a hundred loses money. I hope it loses money, but if it hits, it will be the best performing asset of 2025. It will be the equivalent of Acman buying CDS right at the beginning of the COVID crisis. How does one buy those?

Starting point is 01:16:44 You have to have an ISDA, you talk to the big investment banks and they'll price it out for you. But again, and I just wanna be clear, this is not something I think will happen, it's not something I want to happen. But I do think that if you look back in terms of just the tonnage of dollars you can make

Starting point is 01:17:01 and the massive risk asymmetry that it presents to you, when you look at the concentration of the S&P, when you look at just the total gross amount of debt that we have, when you look at rate spiking, all of these things say having a little insurance may not be a bad thing. So I hope you're nodding. Gavin, you're nodding. You want to just I was just thinking I mean, if you're just thinking, if Chamath's prediction of a bank failure is true, you absolutely want to own CDS.

Starting point is 01:17:31 I mean, you'll forget 100x, you'll get 1,000x, 10,000x. What do you got, Freeberg? So I went with Chinese tech stocks, Chinese tech ETFs. Wow. I think that the market, everyone's kind of dumped Chinese tech stocks over the last couple of years. Everyone's taken this isolationary stance on positioning portfolios and saying, hey,

Starting point is 01:17:57 we can't do business with China, it's over. But I do think that the Trump administration, particularly with their recent request on TikTok being, the ban on TikTok being kind of halted, they're trying to line up what I would call kind of like the great deal with China. So I don't know anything about what they're actually trying to do. But I think that Trump and leadership in the US government want to kind of open up the Chinese market to American companies in order to give Chinese companies access to the American market. And I think that they're going to get a deal done,

Starting point is 01:18:29 given the position with China. I think that they're very likely to kind of get a deal done. That's one driver. I think there's three drivers. The second driver is that, obviously, the cost of build out of electricity production in China is unfathomable. They recently approved $137 billion

Starting point is 01:18:43 hydroelectric dam facility, which is going to add another, I think, couple hundred gigawatts of electricity production in that country, not to mention all the nuclear buildout we've talked about in the past. So the cost per kilowatt hour is already lower. The amount of electricity available is going up. And then I think that the Chinese Communist Party have this incredible ability to throttle up and down free markets and entrepreneurship.

Starting point is 01:19:07 And this is a moment where you could kind of see them making the throttle go the way towards enabling more innovation, more free market activity. And it's going to be one of the motivators for them to do a deal. So when you put all of this together, I do think that there's a lot of Chinese tech companies that have been beat up under the assumption that this is going to be a very difficult conflict with the US in the years ahead. And I think that that may not be the case going into 25. And I think that these stocks are pretty cheap.

Starting point is 01:19:31 I was just looking at Alibaba and it trades at a pretty decent multiple. It seems like these stocks could be poised for a pretty good run in 25 if the macro works out. This feels like a contrarian take. I mean, Trump, I don't think is going to find a way to balance the relationship with China very well. And I don't think you can rattle up entrepreneurship after you cut everybody's knees out the last time. Plus, I don't trust any accounting statement coming out of China because they could fudge whatever they want. But wow,

Starting point is 01:20:01 what a great potential, you know, buy low sell high. The good thing is you'll know if I'm right or wrong in a year you can. Exactly. Well, no, exactly. That's right. Pull the ETF. Absolutely. Gavin, what do you think of this hot take here from, from Mr. Freiburg?

Starting point is 01:20:17 Really cheap. I've had a, I would call it a no China guideline ever since the long top financial fraud more than 15 years ago. Or it's just amazing. It was, you know, a lot of great investors owned it and, you know, they they talked a great game. And they had a Western auditor, but then it turned out that the fraud was happening at the local post office

Starting point is 01:20:44 where they were opening up the documents that the local auditors had signed off on changing them and then sending different documents, you know, whatever FedExing them. Yeah. So I just think it's a hard place if you're, I think if you're not Chinese to make money. But I tend to agree with a lot of what David said. I think Trump and Xi both want a deal. I think there's a deal to be done that leaves Putin out in the cold, as I referenced.

Starting point is 01:21:13 And if that happens, Katie, bar the door. I mean, they're really, really high quality companies, you know, that are some of them are mid single digit multiples. And they're and it's a big market. So if you did get it right, you did. By the way, the Chinese companies serve a global market. It's's a big market. So if you did get it right, and you do tell you, it could be great. And by the way, the Chinese companies serve a global market. It's not just the US.

Starting point is 01:21:28 They serve Africa, South America, Australia, I mean the whole Southern Hemisphere. Well, yeah, if you look at BYD, it's all over Europe. It's huge. Yeah, no, look, I mean the Chinese companies, and they have the best unit economics, they have the best cost of production. I mean, everything is advantaged. Particularly if you believe it's the year of the robot, there's going to be a kind of a massive demand around the world for automation and for rebuilding manufacturing capacity all over the world. And I think that China could service those to be the best performing asset. I'm taking the other side. Chamath, I think in an earlier prediction,

Starting point is 01:22:05 said maybe not so much. I think that what they've learned in the last couple of years is that there is an incredible earnings expansion you can do by not hiring people and outsourcing jobs to other parts of the world and automating the way that we're doing it. And I think that's a great thing. And I think that's a great thing.

Starting point is 01:22:24 And I think that's a great thing. And I think that's a great thing. And I think that's a great thing. years is that there is an incredible earnings expansion you can do by not hiring people and outsourcing jobs to other parts of the world and automating. And the gains we'll see from AI, which they're producing for other companies and for consumers, they're applying first internally. So the internal application of AI will allow these companies to have earnings growth that people will not be able to comprehend over the next couple of years. So I'm going with Mag-7. We got a lot of different takes here, going different directions. What a great episode so far. All right. Worst performing asset. Last year, Tramod said late stage tech stock index, mostly SaaS. Freeburg, you put it into Brilliant. spread trade, short

Starting point is 01:23:05 vertical SAS long AI cloud providers, SAS has had a little bit of a rebound, but Google up 36% for AI cloud, Microsoft 14%, Amazon 46% all in 2024. I said LLM startups like open AI and tropic too many players open sourcing will kill pricing. Obviously the one valuation we can track is open AI and it doubled, but I do think all long-term have that one work. Worst performing asset of 2025, Gavin. Enterprise application software. Okay. This is basically just a bet. 2025 is going to be, I think, the year of agents, particularly in the second half, agents just being AI models that can take action on your behalf, that can do anything online that a human can do online.

Starting point is 01:23:53 If the labs and the big cloud providers dominate agents, which seems likely, going back to the low-cost producer is going to win, enterprise application software, I think, is going to win. Enterprise application software, I think, is going to be in a lot of pain. Some of these companies are talking a big, big game about agents, but at the end of the day, they don't have their own models. They don't own their own compute. I just don't see them being ultimate winners in the world of agents. I could be wrong because they have some customer data, maybe a little bit of a data moat.

Starting point is 01:24:33 And they do have strong customer relationships. But most companies have relationships with AWS, Google, or Microsoft as well. So I think enterprise application software will be in pain. OK. And Chamath, what do you got? I think Gavin just absolutely nailed it. I'm going to double down on what he said.

Starting point is 01:24:53 I think that there's a term that we will start to use more. I started to use it internally at 80, 90 over this last year in 2024, which is the Software Industrial Complex. These are these large bloated, in many cases, enterprise software companies that effectively have convinced incredible numbers of organizations to spend a tremendous amount of money, essentially wrapping a bunch of heuristics and business rules around a CRUD database. Along with that, what they have perfected really is a go-to-market and sales motion. The golf trips, the steak dinners, we mentioned this before, what Alex Karp railed against.

Starting point is 01:25:41 None of those things equate to product value. And increasingly in the world of agentic software and AI, I think that you can rebuild a lot of these workflows in very efficient ways. And I think the go-to-market is going to be driven by CEOs and CFOs who start to exert a little bit more pressure on their CIOs to manage spend. And in that world, I just think that these next generation AI businesses are built frankly, an order of magnitude cheaper than the companies that they compete against. And so even if it's just feature for feature the same,

Starting point is 01:26:20 I think the software industrial complex, these old mainline, traditional enterprise software companies, I think you're going to start to see fissures in those businesses in 2025. So I, I agree with Gavin, different words, but same result. And you put your time and money where your mouth is on this one. 11 months ago, you found it 80 90 to get 80% The traction in, in less than a year year to me is shocking and I don't think it speaks necessarily I think we're decent we're very good we have great

Starting point is 01:26:51 engineers but my 30% engineering team I think does the work of 300 people by next year it'll be doing the work of 3,000 people maybe we'll only grow by 10 or 20 percent so and the reason is we use these tools, we're productive to an order of magnitude that I didn't think was possible. And as a result, we're just able to price it differently. So even if it's the exact same product, its cost structure is just meaningfully lower.

Starting point is 01:27:18 And so this is what I mean where the ROI calculators get blown up. All of the traditional go-to-market motions get blown up because in an RFP or in any other sales environment, what you do is somebody says it's $100 and you show up and you say 10. Okay, and at 10, it's still hugely profitable for you. And just to add just one last thing is just, you know, fundamentally, these enterprise application software companies, the software industrial complex, and I agree with everything Chamath said, you know, they're, they're fundamentally based on making white collar human employees

Starting point is 01:27:51 more efficient. And what the AI companies are going to do is just say, hey, we're just going to replace that worker. And it's just a fundamentally different mentality. And it goes to like, there may be a lot of pain that accompanies this and you know, David's points around the, you know, potential rise of, of socialism. What do you got for worst performing asset? Mr. Freiburg, 2020. I'm probably just going to triple underline vertical SaaS again, perceived pricing model being challenged, pricing being compressed as companies explore in-house tools built with AI that replaces these kind of traditional business practices. Mojave is gonna be destroyed.

Starting point is 01:28:31 Yeah, geez, this is scary. I really want to agree, this is for all. It was an obvious one on my list, but I want to make a different one. I want to make a different one. Oh, how about OpenAI? Do you have anything OpenAI related? No, no, no, OpenAI's a great company.

Starting point is 01:28:42 Tell me why OpenAI's gonna die. I mean, all the talented people left, but I don't know where they are. Where are all the other open AI employees? Are they on vacation? They're skiing too, right? They've all started competitors. Oh, right.

Starting point is 01:28:53 That's what happened. Correct. Yeah, they all left to compete and have revenge startups. Wow, that's an interesting trend. OK. So consumers make five big decisions in their life, as we all know. College, spouse, kids.

Starting point is 01:29:04 12 billion revenue I mean, well, that's that's a projection But also sometimes reality six billion in losses to David against that 12 billion in revenue Yeah, six billion this year six billion next year. I think the six is for next year, but I yeah, I don't know I guess it makes sense why they're trying to charge 200 bucks a month now Up from 20. They got some headwinds. Okay, listen, consumers make five big decisions in their life. We know college spouse kids are the obvious ones, and then cars and homes.

Starting point is 01:29:34 And the consumer is up against it with record debt. So since you can't trade college spouse kids, really, I think legacy car companies and real estate are going to face continued headwinds and be terrible assets. Because listen, we've overbuilt in some cases, there's tons of cars on lots, and people can't afford homes with these mortgages. So I think these are going to be the two worst performing asset are people in the legacy OEMs, as Chamath pointed out in a previous prediction. And then I just think real estate is the same. If you look at a place like Texas, two years in a row, housing values have gone down, rent has gone down two years in a row, same things happening in other states where they allow you to build,

Starting point is 01:30:11 and people are leaving states where they don't allow you to build. So that's my worst performing asset trade. Enterprise was my other choice, but I'll go with something slightly different. Most anticipated trend for 2025. Last year, Chamath, congratulations. You said last year that Bitcoin would hit 100K for the first time, nailed it, half court shot. Well done. I think at the time, you made that prediction. It was probably trading at- It felt like a layup. Felt like a layup to you, up 112%. Freeberg, you said predictive models in AI-driven discovery and pharma and bioengineering. How did that do, that prediction?

Starting point is 01:30:42 Well, there was a lot of funding and Demis won the Nobel prize. Nobel prize. Yeah. So it worked out. I picked efficiency in the form of AI advancements in labor and outsourcing. And I've seen that a bunch with our investment in Athena, go to AthenaWow.com. Okay. Got my plug in there. Let's go for most anticipated 2025 trend. What do you got Chamath? I think that there are a handful of, not to overuse an overused term, but canaries in the coal mine for the end of the deep state. And I would like to point to one, which is this obscure thing called the supplemental loss ratio. And essentially what it is, is a mechanism that the banks can use to include or not include

Starting point is 01:31:34 treasuries and how they calculate reserves, et cetera, et cetera. Now why is this an interesting thing? It's not interesting for many people, it's very arcane. But if we are unable to manage the debt situation in 2025, I think what you're going to see is maneuvering at the edges of these arcane regulations that effectively kick the can down the road. And there is a chance that that could happen to help the banks because we believe that we meaning collectively America, that maybe Doge won't be as effective as it needs to be that there's still going to need to be 10, 20 trillion dollars of debt issuance to refinance the 10 that's maturing this year

Starting point is 01:32:23 and to plug holes in the coming years. My point in all of this is we don't need to understand the details except that if we don't move the goalposts here, it is a great sign that the folks that are running the show are the ones that we all elected. Okay. So that is my most anticipated trend. Small, arcane, regulatory changes that allow us to kick the can down the road, stop in its tracks. This is an example.

Starting point is 01:32:56 Okay, Freeberg, you got a most anticipated trend for 2025? My most anticipated trend is around the announcement of build out of nuclear power in the United States in 2025 as a function of deregulation and some new technologies. I do think that this new government is going to be much more accommodating. And it's going to, as I've said in the past, I think it's a necessity just because of the rate at which we have to do power buildouts to meet kind of competitive demand against China. The United States is going to need to add more power, electricity production capacity than we can scale up with any other renewable source. So I do believe that nuclear is an inevitability. I think that the deregulation will happen in 25. And I do know a lot of very smart people who are actually starting nuclear power companies

Starting point is 01:33:45 and have left very good jobs to go and do this in anticipation of this happening in 25. So I'm very bullish. That's a leading indicator for sure. When smart people do something with their time, that's a great indicator. Gavin, what do you got? I think AI, Nick, I sent you a chart. I don't know if you can flash it up, but I think AI is going to make more progress per

Starting point is 01:34:10 quarter in 2025 than it did per year in 23 and 24. And the reason is just with, with 01 and 03, this is ArcGi, it's designed, you know, we keep, we keep changing the goal posts for the T this is Arc AGI. It's designed, you know, we keep, we keep changing the goalposts for the Turing test and AGI, and I'm sure we're going to change it again, as we're going to blow through this. And I just think what has happened is we were scaling around, around one, on one axis, which was pre-training. And then we started scaling around inference time compute.

Starting point is 01:34:43 And it's very clear that we have now added a third axis of scaling performance, and that is reasoning. And what this is, is these models, the internet is composed of answers, people giving answers. And what the models really benefit from is kind of the internal monologue of somebody getting to that answer. And this is, you know, in AI terms, they call it a reasoning trace. And it's one reason, you know, 18 months ago, everybody was like, oh, wow, the more code you train a model on, the better it does and all sorts of things that have seemingly nothing to do with code. But all code, you see kind of the reasoning, the internal internal model, the thought process, the step by step.

Starting point is 01:35:27 And so what's happening is you're using models to generate synthetic data that contains these reasoning traces. So you ask a model, you know, solve this problem. It has to be a problem that is functionally verifiable, that has an answer or we know the answer. We say show your work and we have to do that many, many different ways and times. And then you pick the best ones and you kind of feed those back into the model. You apply some reinforcement learning to it. And so now you're scaling along three axes that are multiplicative with each other. And I just, you know, a guy on the Google team tweeted maybe five days ago, it's going to be a straight shot to ASI, artificial super intelligence. And I think that might be right. Ilya gave a talk at NeurIPS, Ilya Suetskever, one of the original pioneers of this field.

Starting point is 01:36:19 And he said something that I thought was scary. And he said, these models that reason are inherently unpredictable. So the best reasoning models in the world today are the ones that play games, the kind of AlphaGo, AlphaZero style models, and they are constantly making unpredictable moves that no human grandmaster ever could have come up with. And now these models are going to be making similarly unpredictable leaps in all sorts of domains. Which, you know, hopefully will be awesome. But you know, might not be. Yeah. Well, they're going to go around corners that people might not have considered that are non intuitive. And then just to circle back and do a little call back here. Remember,

Starting point is 01:37:00 I asked which banks would have the biggest chance of being insolvent or having financial collapse or crisis, tons of misspellings in there as I typed it while we were talking. And you can see what deep research did here. It went and said, here's what we're going to do. We're going to research a bunch of websites and find a list of banks in the US, find top banks by US by asset. For each one of these banks, find their latest financial savings. For each of these banks, find their capital adequacy ratios. For one of these banks find their latest financial savings for each of these banks find their capital adequacy ratios for each of these banks find their loan loss. You get the idea. And then it went in and analyzed and then it created a report. This took about 10 minutes. And when you look, it created this final report here where it gave a list

Starting point is 01:37:37 trim off of JP Morgan, Bank of America, Citigroup, yada, yada. It did an analysis of each one. And at the end, you can see all the different websites it pulled. It was well over 100 websites that it pulled live data from. 162 websites. And you have to pay for this, but it's only $20 a month. And its conclusion, this analysis has provided a snapshot of the financial health of some of the largest US banks. While all banks face inherent risks. City Group and Wells Fargo appear to be the highest risk of insolvency or financial collapse compared to JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, City Group's recent net loss, lower CET1 ratio, and high exposure. I mean, just look at this. Now, I don't know how much of this is correct. I'm no expert on this,

Starting point is 01:38:21 but it does seem like it's a pretty good start of where it's getting to. And if you haven't used 1.5 Pro with deep research, just go to Gemini.google.com. I'm not being paid to say this. I just think it's the best product in the market. And it's pretty darn impressive. Okay. My most anticipated trend for 2025 was alluded to in an earlier prediction I think by Gavin himself prediction. My most anticipated trend. Okay, let's go to most anticipated media. I had two that I was working back and forth from. James Gunn's DC Universe with Superman coming out this year. I think it's going to be a big hit.

Starting point is 01:38:57 I think it's going to be a big hit. I think it's going to be a big hit. I think it's going to be a big hit. I think it's going to be a big hit. I think it that I was working back and forth from James Gunn's DC Universe with Superman coming out this year. I think it's going to be amazing. Andor Season 2 could be amazing. I predict they're going to do a Clone Wars live action series. If you don't know the Clone Wars, watch it with your kids. It's amazing animated series that takes place during the prequels. But I went with a little of a weird choice here. I think my most anticipated

Starting point is 01:39:26 media is seeing what happens with legacy media outlets owned by billionaires and or people who no longer want to pick a side. Washington Post, CNN and LA Times specifically are steering towards the middle and trying to get back to classic journalism. The editors are revolting. Karen Swisher is upset and they're adding some right wing voices. It is going to be popcorn time for everybody. So enjoy whatever you want to enjoy. Star Wars. I got a little Star Wars for you with the Andrew season two. I got a little Superman, or you can watch the chaos in the editorial news rooms at Washington Post and LA Times. What do you got for most anticipated media, Chamath?

Starting point is 01:40:06 It is the enormity of the files that are going to get declassified and released by the Trump administration. I think it's going to be unbelievably interesting, salacious, useful, good, earnest, all of the above. So the JFK files, the Epstein files, the Diddy files, the moon landing, who knows what they find across all of these other fringe quote unquote conspiracy theories that may turn out to actually have some shred of truth. But all of that, let's call it content, for lack of a better word, that gets released in 2025 by the Trump administration, I think will be incredibly interesting. What do you got, Dave? Media. Any anticipated media for you? What do you got? I'm into AI video games. The cost of production comes way down when you use AI, and

Starting point is 01:40:59 you can have dynamic storylines. You can have new gameplay concepts, things that don't exist today. I think that the creative talent plus the technical talent that you typically find at development houses can be unleashed with tools that have come to market recently. We've seen a lot of generative video stuff. But there's also ways structurally that video games can be rebuilt where the video game engine can run locally.

Starting point is 01:41:21 It can be generating parameters that can then use an existing rendering engine. So you can have entirely new storylines and entirely new kind of plot sequences. So I do think that there's going to be a rewrite of video games in the video game industry with the variety of AI kind of capabilities that are hitting market now. And it's going to be incredible. It's going to be incredible entertainment. People that don't play video games are going to find stuff that they're going to love.

Starting point is 01:41:46 Gavin, most anticipated media, 2025. Unquestioned, 1923, season two. I'm normally a science fiction kind of fantasy, or, you know, spy kind of guy when it comes to TV. But 1883 and 1923 were the first TV shows that kind of hit me the way Game of Thrones did. And I'm crazy excited for that to come out. Fantastic.

Starting point is 01:42:10 Are you watching Land Man? I'm enjoying Land Man. I haven't watched it yet. I'm excited to try it. It's quite fun, quite fun. Turns out this guy, Taylor Sheridan, he's, I mean, he's incredible. He's in the zone.

Starting point is 01:42:22 I highly recommend Day of the Jackal. I know Chamath also loved Day of the Jackal. Oh, that was really good. That was really good. That was a good J-cast suggestion for streaming. Yeah, I'm excited to hear Day of the Jackal. So, Chacario, yeah. Absolutely.

Starting point is 01:42:35 What was our predictions for this last year? Last year, Chamath predicted Mr. Beast, Freeberg, AI generated news. I predicted Gladiator 2 and the three body problem. Gladiator 2 was mid, but okay, three body problem. I didn't finish, so I guess mid. Jimmy's show on Amazon Prime, the Mr. Beast thing was the top unscripted drama in 140 of 180 countries. Wow. Incredible. All right, we're going to do our prediction markets here.

Starting point is 01:43:05 I'm going to put up a prediction market, which is based upon immigration and the promise that Trump made to have 15 million people be deported from the country. I think in the first year, I'm going to set the over-under at 5% of that stated number, which is 750,000. So after one year in office, will Trump have deported 750,000? Less or more. That's my first prediction.

Starting point is 01:43:34 How are you going to measure that? You have to, there has to be a, like a source of truth on these things, right? We'll do it based on the White House's reporting of deportations. Yeah, it's reasonable. And we'll check with the polymarket team if there's a way to do that prediction market, obviously, but I think that was the biggest issue of the election. So I'm putting it up there with just 5% in the first year. Yeah, it is interesting. Obama deported, I think, more than 2 million people. It's like

Starting point is 01:43:56 people have forgotten, but he was actually really, really tough on the border. Yeah. Chamath, do you have a prediction market you want to put up? The Mag-8 representation on the S&P 500 shrinks below 30%. Oh, that's a good one. That's a good one. Hmm. So dispersion would happen to the other stocks. That's a good one. And less concentration.

Starting point is 01:44:19 That's a good one. So we'll finalize these. You'll be able to go to the poly market. By the way, another one I wanted to kind of play with was Microsoft, AWS, and Google Cloud revenue growth. Who's going to win in growth in 2025? I don't know how closely you guys track, but I get a sense that Google is kind of accelerating ahead.

Starting point is 01:44:37 Gavin, I don't know how much you've spent on these three. Google is. I wouldn't say they're a lot smaller, which makes it easier for them to grow faster. Yeah. Google Cloud is... Should we talk about... Yeah, I mean, I guess who has the largest gain, dollar gain in revenue in cloud revenue

Starting point is 01:45:00 in 2025? Is it Google, Amazon, or Microsoft? Well, it probably won't be Google because if they had the largest dollar gain, it would mean they were growing at insane rates. But I think Azure versus AWS will be interesting. Oh, I know the other one I want to do, which was the national debt. The national debt has grown about $2 trillion per year in each of the previous two presidential administrations, right? So over the last eight years, we've gone up over 16 trillion, two trillion per year average. So I'm going to set it at, and Trump said he would not increase the national debt. I'll just

Starting point is 01:45:40 set it at the national debt increases one trillion in the next year over under. Is that a good prediction market or is it should be two trillion? How would you do? Yeah. So what I would do is I would set the federal debt for December, the US treasury market report on federal debt in 2025. Okay. And I would set it at 30, 37 trillion.

Starting point is 01:46:01 And so you basically, the US treasury market report, December 2025, above or below 37 trillion. It's going to be above. I mean, let's just call it 38 trillion then. Yeah. You want to basically, in order to make this, when you set a line, Dave, it's got to be one where people take either side of it. It can't be everybody takes it over. Yeah. So we'll do the US Treasury market report, December 2025, federal debt above 38 trillion or below 38 trillion. Perfect. Which would be how much added in the year? About one and a half. Yeah. Yeah. I love that. I love that. That's a perfect one. We'll see if he can control the spending or if

Starting point is 01:46:38 it'll just be the same. Gavin, what's your sense on federal debt next year? I think like most things, immigration will take them time to get going. Yeah. It just, it's going to take a little bit of time, but I think they will make progress. By the way, at some point, if I'm here on the all in again, I want to talk about UFOs and the drones. Let's talk about it now. Do it right now. Are you going full conspiracy theorist? Are you, are you trying to get your seat here by being a little more Alex Jones? Do you believe those drones were aliens? What's going on? No. So I don't know. And I think it's very clear if you look at all the statements from the New Jersey mayors and governors who've met with the police, the FBI, the Defense Department, that they don't know. Now, Trump said someone Trump said, someone in the government knows what they are.

Starting point is 01:47:27 He also said he was not gonna go to Bedminster anytime soon, his resort there. I just think over the last, I'd say eight years, every 18 months, there's a big story in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Yorker, the Atlantic, very credible media sources with dozens of interviews with fighter pilots and commercial pilots talking about seeing things with advanced sensors that made no sense to them. And then there's kind of a taboo that went away. There was an article in the New Yorker where they quoted from a bunch of people who were at the Skunk Works laboratories in the

Starting point is 01:48:08 1950s and said they absolutely saw extraterrestrial materials that have been recovered from a crash. That's one reason the US made such big leaps in material science. There was the Oomana thing where essentially a lot of, you know, astronomers said, Hey, this is, this is clearly a UFO of some sort, including the head of astronomy at Harvard. And then just the conspiracy theory I would have is if, if, if, if, if these are actually UFOs and not, you know, government drones, either from the United

Starting point is 01:48:48 States or China. It seems like the most likely explanation in New Jersey is that some sort of a drill. And obviously, once this hysteria gets going, people, you know, misidentify commercial airplanes as drones. And like, why would UFOs have blinking green and red lights? But it is just interesting that there was, you know, a big concentration of these reports as we were scaling into nuclear technology, 1945 to 1960. And then now that AI is getting going, which is the next kind of technological phase shift for humanity. There's another big kind of bolus of reports. This is great.

Starting point is 01:49:30 You can come back. Come back next week. Congratulations. We have our winner for all in idle. Gavin is now the fourth best. I love this kind of conspiracy. But I mean, come on. How do we make a polymarket at this free vote?

Starting point is 01:49:44 I don't know that we can make a polymarket at this free? I don't know that we can make a polymarket on it. Gavin, are there documents that you think Trump will release about the past in terms of UFOs? There must be just an entire spectrum of stuff that could be subject to FOIA if we went after it, no? I mean, I think it depends how deeply it's classified. And, you know, I'm sure if the government doesn't want to give it up, they won't give it up. But you know, there's all the you know, there's all this. But look, let's be honest, you think that there are

Starting point is 01:50:14 docs, like there, there's documentation that the US government has that there are UFOs that there have been, we just can't explain it. Yeah, and you know, they call it UAPs now to make it, you know, not flying saucers, but it just feels like something funny. What percentage chance you put on, we have actual knowledge on a percentage basis, what percentage chance you put on the government, US government is sitting on knowledge of extra-terrestrial life.

Starting point is 01:50:41 20%, at least 20%. 20% from Tramoth, what do you say Gavin? I would say 25, I would take the over on the life. Oh, like 20%. At least 20%. 20% from Tramoth. What do you say, Gavin? I would say 25. I would take the over on the 20. Okay, great. So you think there's a non- a significant small chance that this is the case? Freeberg, Sultan of Science, what chance do you think there is this government sitting

Starting point is 01:50:58 on some extra-terrestrial life or proof of it? It's a longer conversation. I don't have time for this. But I got to be honest, I don't generally align with the idea that like our very narrow range of like, understanding of technology and biology kind of is what visits us or would visit us. I think that there's an extension of information gathering that doesn't require moving physical biological life forms from one part of the galaxy to another. So I think that the whole premise of UFOs moving bodies around is rooted in the current state of technology of humanity,

Starting point is 01:51:39 which is the basis of Arthur Clarke's treatment of 2001 as Space Odyssey, which was done before the screenplay, which was done before the book. And the treatment, which you can buy, I think highlights this the best, which is eventually every civilization reaches a sufficiently advanced level of technology that you no longer need to physically move

Starting point is 01:51:59 the bodies of the biological organisms around, that you simply are gathering information and affecting information. Because once you have the ability to convert any molecule into any other molecule, and you have access to sufficient energy, which you will eventually evolve to be able to do, you can basically turn your local part of the universe

Starting point is 01:52:16 into anything you want it to turn into. And then you're simply gathering information from all over the rest of the universe. So I would argue that there doesn't really make a lot of basic sense in why alien bodies would want to move around the galaxy. I'm just saying it right now. If Trump releases information on extraterrestrial life,

Starting point is 01:52:36 I'm voting for him to have a third term. I'm putting it out there. I'm going full MAGA. He gets a third term for me. We're changing the Constitution. This has been another amazing episode of the All In Podcast. Wait, one last question for Gavin. One for you. Oh, one last for me. We're changing the Constitution. This has been another amazing episode of the all-in-one last question for Gavin. Oh, well, let's forget him. Okay. Do you think extra trust real life? built the pyramids

Starting point is 01:52:53 Is that the most plausible explanation to the? Accuracy, I don't know. It is it is so strange the way there are You know in so many I would, cultures all over the world pre, you know, we are closer in time to Cleopatra than she was to the time of the great pyramids. Like it was a long time ago. But it's just weird that in so many cultures all over the world, there are these depictions of what looked like astronauts. And then there's all these Renaissance era paintings that clearly show what we would call UFOs

Starting point is 01:53:30 in the skies over cities. So I don't know, I just think it's- I'm with you. I love conspiracy Gavin. This has been the best- This is not a conspiracy theory. This is not a conspiracy theory. This is awesome.

Starting point is 01:53:42 I love it. No, it's like if you're, Jason, if you're a questioning person, This is not a conspiracy theory. This is not a conspiracy theory. This is not a conspiracy theory. This is awesome. I love it. No, it's like if you're, Jason, if you're a questioning person, these things create these weird un- you know, open loops that it's like hard to close in your mind. I think we're in a simulation, so I'm fully, I'm fully vested in this. Anyway, Freebird's got to drive back home. Freebird's driving home.

Starting point is 01:53:57 I think the pyramids, the best, most credible thing I saw on the pyramids was that they used water and they raised water in channels, So they put them on wood slats or something. And then they would raise like in like the Panama Canal, they would do canals and float them up and then place them and then release the water, which, you know, sounds great to me. This has been another amazing episode of the All In Podcast. And thank you to everybody. Let's have an amazing 2025 to everybody that's listening. Let's kick ass. Yeah, for sure.

Starting point is 01:54:27 Let's kick ass. 2025. Let's get it. Take care. All right. Bye-bye. We'll see you all next time. Bye-bye.

Starting point is 01:54:35 Bye-bye. I'm going all in And instead we open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it Love you Weston, the queen of kin I'm going all in What your winners line? What your winners line? What your winners line? Besties are gone That is my dog taking an illness to your driveway

Starting point is 01:55:00 Sex Oh man My half a dash or we'll meet me at the hospital We should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy because they're all just useless. It's like this like sexual tension that they just need to release somehow. What the beep beep. What your beep. What your beep. We need to get merch. The keys are back.

Starting point is 01:55:10 I'm doing all this. I'm doing all this. I'm doing all this. I'm doing all this. I'm doing all this. I'm doing all this. I'm doing all this. I'm doing all this.

Starting point is 01:55:18 I'm doing all this. I'm doing all this. I'm doing all this. I'm doing all this. I'm doing all this. I'm doing all this. I'm doing all this. I'm doing all this. I'm doing all this. I'm doing all this. I'm doing all in I'm doing all in

All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg - 2025 Predictions with bestie Gavin Baker

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.