This is what we need.
Let him go.
All right, here we go.
This is jason in the corner warming up.
Two, shut the up.
Freeburg, it's my show.
Three two, all right everybody, welcome back to the number one podcast in the world, the podcast i, jason calacanis named, created and i'm the executive producer for life.
With me my three miscreant friends chamath palihapitiya, our dictator.
Love you brother, good seeing you, uh.
David friedberg, our sultan of science.
And yeah, the czar.
Yeah, who's now made his way down to austin.
Welcome brother, let's go shooting.
Let's get those beef ribs.
David sax, how are you?
How are you uh?
How are you settling in to the great state of texas?
Everybody wants to know.
I'm loving the 70 degree weather.
Is it like this all year round?
Know it's?
Uh, this is a very wonderful time of year.
Uh, you miss the two weeks where it goes to freezing temperatures.
We have 10 days of freezing temperatures and then we have 80 days of 100 degree temperatures.
But you'll be on a yacht or italy or somewhere during that, like the rest of us.
That's basically all you need to know about austin.
Just get out during the summers, because it's brutal, That's it.
Everything else is fan-freaking-tastic.
But in all seriousness, you're here.
You're here.
You've moved.
You've domiciled in Texas.
This has happened.
It happened in December.
Yes.
And so we closed on a new house.
We moved in.
Went to the DMV.
I signed a lease for an Austin office for Kraft.
Nice.
It's done.
It's done.
It's done.
Okay.
I'll get you a dentist and whatever else you need.
I got a doctor, too.
Okay.
Does this mean I have to bring Moose back?
This has been the big discussion in our house.
Does this mean we lose Moose?
Do we have joint custody?
He needs a significant acreage to run around.
We know that.
Oh, he does, he does.
But he misses you, and I will definitely bring him by for a visit.
And we'll be playing some backgammon, smoking some cigars.
Yeah, you gotta come by.
Cannot wait.
I can't believe you haven't come by yet.
What about you guys?
You guys gonna come down?
Two or four besties.
Matt and I started the process in December.
We are coming to check things out.
We have not made any final decisions, though.
Okay.
Shout out to our boy Ro Khanna for driving everybody out of the state.
So here's.
The funniest thing is we're all in the chat group discussing the California wealth tax, whether people are going to leave or not.
So Chamath, he's making a big show.
I'm going to stay and fight.
I'm not leaving my home.
They can't drive me out.
And then meanwhile, I got a call from my broker who says she's helping chamath find a place.
Oh oh, what's going on?
I'm shocked that chamath tells you one thing and is doing another.
Oh my god, he's at least hedging his bets.
He's hedging his bets, as are many.
A lot of people are hedging their bets.
A lot of people are hedging.
I mean, Sergey's in Florida.
I'm sorry, Larry's got a beautiful place in Florida, I see, according to the news.
A lot of people.
And I saw Governor Abbott reached out to you.
That's right.
He welcomed me to Texas on X. A lot of people did.
Michael Dell did.
Ted Cruz.
Ted Cruz, and yeah, it was a real welcome reception.
It's funny, I never got anything like that when I was in California.
Jason, I put it- For some reason.
The politicians were never- They weren't embracing you.
Yeah, they were embracing me, I don't know why.
Who knows?
I put this on next, but when you look at our friends that have all explicitly left, It's about half a trillion of net worth, which I think is very bad for the long-term budget of California.
And I can pick about 25 people just off the top of my head.
And then, if you think about all the people that will stay and fight, I still intend to stay and fight, but if we're forced to look down the barrel of an asset tax that has God knows what methodology, it's the only thing that's united everybody, on the left and the right.
Even Reid Hoffman thinks this is insane.
I think a lot of other people will leave.
It's probably half the total wealth that the budget estimated would be available to be taxed will be gone.
Wow.
I mean, I don't understand.
That has huge implications to the social programs and the general budget of California.
Listen, I think this is going to be a topic.
This is a prediction.
I think this is going to be a topic throughout the year because it's not going away.
They're gathering signatures right now.
I agree.
And we're going to find out in, say, April whether it's on the ballot.
Now it's possible they don't gather the signatures, but they only need about 850000 of them if it gets on the ballot.
You know again, we'll know in just a few months there's gonna be a huge freak out.
And I think there'll be a lot of people who will say I can't take the risk, they're gonna leave the state.
So I think there's gonna be a rush for the exits.
There's gonna be all sorts of repercussions from that.
Then there'll be an election in November.
Obviously, we'll find out if it passes or not, and there'll be legal challenges.
So this is going to be a saga.
I don't think this is over by a long shot.
And, quite frankly, even if it's beaten in 2026, I think a lot of people expect that some version of this comes back in 2028.
Which is the thing that kind of pushed me over the edge in terms of leaving is I don't think this problem is going away.
It's very difficult if you're an entrepreneur with a good idea to start building here, because if you get stuck in success with a bunch of illiquid stock and have no way to pay 5 of that value, you're going to bankrupt your own company.
Just doesn't make any sense.
And what if your company goes to zero the next year, which can totally happen with private companies?
You still owe the tax bill.
Yeah, I don't know how that reverses itself.
It's a terrible idea.
I mean, I was talking to Ro Khanna and Eric Swalwell, who we had on the program.
And I told these guys like these dopey Democrats have to stop fraud first before you start seizing people's assets or start a discussion about raising taxes.
And you know, we had nick shirley on last week who was doing his investigative journalism.
Shout out to shirley and uh, how do we sell to the american public that we want to seize their assets while and then sending it out the back door door to fund fraud?
That makes no sense.
It's a leaky bucket, so fix the bucket first And then let's have an honest discussion about what the right tax rate is.
And why do this with a unique tax?
Why not just put a point onto capital gains or income tax and have that discussion?
That's a great point.
You could also do what Bill Ackman suggested, which is stop allowing these margin loans.
There's a lot that actually live off of margin.
Is it a good idea?
Yes and no, depending on the asset base you have.
And if the tax laws changed, we would all change the approach.
You mentioned that Larry and Sergey have left the state and they're probably getting dragged for that.
But one of the reasons why I think they kind of have to is because the super voting stock provision in this thing, where the way they calculate the value of your stock is not based on its liquid market value, but if you own super voting shares, they multiply your ownership, your super voting, by the market cap of the company and they deem your shares to be worth that.
Yeah So, for example, Larry and Sergey I think they combined have voting power of about 52 of Google.
So what's Google worth these days?
About $4 trillion?
$3.5 trillion, $4 trillion.
Okay.
So now I think, I mean, they're very wealthy guys.
I think they're each worth whatever 100 billion-ish or whatever whatever.
It is 200, but now their net worth will be deemed to be i guess each one of them would be deemed to be roughly one trillion each, not the call it 200 billion.
So the five percent tax for them is more like a 25 tax of all their net worth.
So it becomes 50 because you'd have to sell more than that to overcome the drag of selling.
To generate 25 billion or 50 billion of net worth, you have to sell 2x that because you have to pay taxes on that right.
So now what?
What is the point of having that super voting provision in there?
It's just totally punitive and vicious.
All right, so let's just go with a quick prediction here, going to call an audible.
We're gonna get into the prediction show.
Folks, we've been delaying this prediction show because the world is moving at an incredible pace and the news is just, let's just call it what it is.
It's just intense.
We have a lot of stories you all want us to to cover.
We will cover them, but we're going to start with our prediction show.
Just lightning round prediction here.
Does this seizure tax?
I'm going to call it what it is it's a seizure tax.
They're seizing assets.
Does the seizing assets tax go into effect or not?
Does it pass or not?
Free burger first, yes or no.
Give us a percentage, polymarketed.
Well, does it get on the ballot first and then does it pass?
Well, we know it's going to get on the ballot.
I think we agree with that.
I don't know.
That's not correct.
Oh, we don't know?
I'm not sure.
So then I'll make it a two-parter.
Fine.
Does it get on the ballot?
Does it pass?
Chamath, you seem ready to go.
Go.
No, Schreiber, go ahead.
I don't think it's going to get on the ballot.
Oh.
I agree with that.
In California?
100.
All right, here's your poly market.
Everybody shout out to shane.
Oh, this is my guy, this is to make the ballot.
This is the question.
Will the billionaires to austin tax wealth tax drive people?
Uh, will it make it onto the california ballot?
Lightly traded, currently at 60, nine percent.
Did you see how much lower it was?
That spike happened after rokhana elevated the issue, so when it became a cause celeb among progressives and bernie sanders weighed in, it spiked up.
From what was it like 45 to 80 percent Okay.
So when Ro Khanna committed political seppuku, it drove up.
Maybe he had a bet.
Maybe he placed a bet.
I don't think it's political suicide for him.
There's only two ways it doesn't get on the ballot, right?
One is...
If the SCIU UHW, which is the union that supported this, proposed it doesn't have the money to pay to collect the signatures, but you would think that they would right.
Mm hmm.
8 million or so is roughly what it costs to gather the signatures for these types of things.
Clearly they can find 850000 people in California who support it if they're willing to put the effort in.
The other possibility is that the powers that be let's call it gavin, newsom and the machine are able to negotiate with this union to get them to stand down, and i don't have any insight into that because that's obviously democrat politics, not republican politics.
But Freiburg and Chamath might have some information.
Okay, we'll leave it at that.
We're going to leave it at that.
But if it does get on the ballot, what do you think the odds are that it passes?
I think it's going to be a really important- 40 moment for people to vote, the ability to be industrious and have agency.
What did Mamdani say?
It's rugged individualism versus- Collectivism.
Collectivism.
Also known as communism.
As in collect, we collect your assets.
Jamal, he said that we're going to replace the fragility of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.
I mean, at least he's saying it out loud.
I like this new, i like these new politicians just telling you straight up what we're doing.
Well, his new housing commissioner, have you seen this?
Yeah, the white lady's, like white people, must suffer.
And then she's like she had these things, where she's like I see white babies in the airport and it makes me mad.
And I'm like, really?
This is crazy.
What man broke up with this lady?
Because that dude Has created a monster.
Didn't she say something like we need to introduce a new relationship between white people and property and the property rights, or something?
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, they're saying it out loud now.
And then I guess she had a mental breakdown and started crying when they came to see her.
No, no.
What happened is they pointed out that her parents own a multimillion dollar home and then she broke down.
Her mom's a white supremacist.
I didn't realize her mom was a white supremacist.
That explains it all, because this is all about her mom.
I feel bad for her parents.
Oh god, can you imagine your, imagine one of your kids goes and does this?
It says we have to go collect your houses.
I mean listen, let's do it.
Let's do it.
Everybody wants to hear our predictions for 2026.
We've been pushing it off.
We're going to give it to you right now.
We always like to start since uh, you know, we got into politics here on the program at some point.
The biggest political winner last year's prediction for biggest political winner for 2025, to remind everybody, freiburg said young candidates well done.
Gavin, who was on the show sitting in for sacks, who was busy joining the administration.
He said trump and centrism would be the biggest political winner.
Chamath, you said fiscal conservatives and who asked for restrained spending.
It was a good thought.
And I said Gen X and elder millennials, the JD.
Vance, Tulsi, Sachs group.
So let's go around the horn here.
I wonder, Friedberg, who you think will be the biggest political winner of 2026?
Friedberg, your chance.
Democratic Socialists of America, the DSA.
Just like the MAGA movement took over the Republican Party, I think the DSA is taking over the Democrat Party.
And I think that's the move we'll see solidified in 2026.
Okay, tight is right.
Well done.
Chima, who do you got for biggest political winner 2026?
Whoever is going to fight waste, fraud and abuse at the federal, state and local level.
Got it.
So it's an open lane to anybody.
It's an open lane.
It's a political gambit that I think will work really well in 26.
Very nicely done.
David Sachs, gosh, I can't imagine who you would pick as a political leader in 2026.
But go ahead.
I'm going to say that the Trump boom is going to be the biggest political winner of 2026.
The good economic news has started breaking out before 2025 was even over.
We have 2.7% inflation.
Core CPI at 2.6.
Both those are 40 basis points below expectations.
4.3% GDP growth in Q3.
Lowest trade deficit since 2009.
The Challenger Gray report out today showed that job cuts dropped 50 from November, which was itself down about 50 from October.
Give us a number for the boom.
What is it going to be?
Hold on, the S&P 500 keeps making record highs.
People are paying less for gas.
Mortgage costs have fallen by $3,000.
Real wages are up over $1,000.
And by June, I predict we will see more rate cuts, possibly 75 to 100 basis points.
And big tax refunds are coming in April, thanks to a bigger standard deduction and no tax on tips over time and social security.
So I think there is so much good economic news coming and it's already started.
And I think that it's going to have a huge impact not just on the economy, but also on political perceptions for next year.
Pick your GDP for this boom year.
Three, four, five, or six points.
Sacks, I'm pinning you down.
If you make it a prediction, then I'd like to pick as well.
Okay, I'm going to go Sachs first.
I'm going to go for 5%.
Within a rounding error, I believe 5%.
Sure, sure, sure.
Plus or minus.
Chamath, do you want to pick a number?
You said you did.
I think the lower bound is 5.
I think the upper bound is 6, too.
Wow.
Incredible.
Just to put that in perspective...
If we print six, the only country in the modern world that we think of as a quasi peer competitor that has printed six is the Chinese, in a period where it had complete and total coordination and domination of a federal, state and local economy.
And the fact that we can do it under democracy and capitalism is outrageous.
Freiburg, do you want to take a stab at that?
2026 growth?
Yeah, 46.
Okay, i was going to go with between four and five as well.
In terms of my prediction for the big political winner, i went back and forth between the emperor's apprentice, darth vance, jd vance or the mondami moment.
I said darth vance for a couple of reasons uh, you know he is out there defending trump uh, and he's surging on polymarket ending the polls.
He's obviously the co-pilot of mag.
He's done a great job of being second seat.
He is not usurping president trump, which would be a big political mistake.
It's really navigating, being the copilot there.
But he is the most popular politician clearly at Turning Point USA.
And he is the OG in the America first America only moment.
But I'm going to give the edge to the Mondami moment.
He's 34 years old.
He's got Ro Khanna at 49 pivoting into a socialist.
And I think that's because Democrats believe the easiest way to win in 2026 is to go full socialist.
And Trump has, I think, given this lane because he's forgotten about the working man and woman in America.
Net disapproval for Trump on the economy, 58% inflation.
Despite what Sachs is saying there, it's still closer to 3 than 2 and trump just announced he wants to increase the military budget by 50, while people are still complaining about their health care.
And trump has turned into a complete neocon, bombing seven countries this year and uh threatening to take over colombia and greenland.
Who knows if that's trump being trump or if that's reality, but trump becoming a neocon was not on anyone's bingo card.
And uh, i think trump may have incited and given a bunch of fuel to the mondami moment by not addressing the American people's needs and going for the international interventionism.
Okay, now, there's like three different answers right there.
My answer is clearly my dummy.
My second place though I like to always explain my thinking is Darth Vance.
JD Vance, biggest political loser last year's predictions.
I said putin.
Gavin said putin chamath.
You said progressivism.
And uh freiburg, you said the pro-war neocons would be the biggest political losers.
Uh, let's get into who we think will be the loser this year.
Uh sax, why don't you start?
Who's your big political loser in 2026?
You think Well, I said democratic centrism, or democratic centrists, which is sort of the flip side of you guys saying that socialism or progressives are winners.
And there's two reasons for this.
One is because the socialist ideology is sort of ascended among the democratic base, especially the young people who support Mamdani, things like that.
Unfortunately, our universities, our work madrasas, have done a terrible job educating these students and they've brainwashed a lot of them into this woke ideology.
But also there's the fact that there's so few house districts anymore that are truly competitive.
So both the Cook Political Report and Larry Sabato's Crystal Ball, they say that there's fewer than two dozen House races that are genuinely competitive going into 2026.
That's because of gerrymandering and so on.
So if you're a Democrat incumbent who is in one of these districts, like all but a couple dozen of them, your only real threat to losing your office is from the left right.
It's some young AOC type coming up to challenge you.
And so you don't want to expose your left flank.
So even the Democratic moderates have been shifting further and further to the left, and so you see this aoc mamdani effect happening there.
So i'm kind of in the same camp as you guys, as this is not a good trend.
But uh, i put this as biggest political loser, biggest political democratic centrism.
Got it chamath, what do you got?
Can I just go back and just nitpick with you a little bit?
Why do you think progressivism didn't fail?
And the only reason I ask you that is outside of a few pockets of progressivism, and specifically Mamdani.
If you look at the elections in Virginia or the elections in New Jersey, those are more centrist than progressive.
And if you look at the general approval rates of Democrats, they trended consistently down through 2025 as they hand-wrung themselves about leaving centrism and embracing progressivism.
So the more talking points around progressivism that emerged, the poorer they perform.
So I know your perception, or some people's perceptions, may be different, based on one localized win, but if you look at the broad trend, it didn't work.
I just put that out there, just as the facts and not the vibes.
Well, I don't want it to be true, just to be clear.
I would love for the Democratic Party to be as centrist as possible.
I don't want it to be true either, but it does seem like that part is certain.
No, but you tested like it was wrong, and it wasn't wrong.
Well, it might be a jump ball.
It might be the best way to describe it, because you have the Mondami effect.
I was right.
Just look at the numerical numbers.
The trends were horrible.
Meaning wherever the Democrats started, the more progressive talking points they added, the poorer and poorer they performed.
The approval ratings went down, the disapproval ratings went up.
I'm not saying that they didn't win a mayoral race.
They did do that.
I'm just saying broadly speaking.
Nationwide, is the Democratic Party and its embrace of progressivism, at least at the federal level?
Has it paid off over 2025?
And I would say categorically, mathematically not.
Okay, now going to 2026, what is my biggest political loser?
What I would say is the biggest loser of 26 is the Monroe Doctrine.
I think that when historians look back on the Trump presidency, they're going to rewrite it.
I think people have tried to minimize Trump's worldview as a Trump corollary.
I don't think that's what this is.
They even try to minimize it by calling it the Don Roe Doctrine.
I don't think that's what this is.
I think that there is a clear Trump doctrine that trumped the Monroe Doctrine.
And I think that is the political loser, because there is a huge body politic that has been built around the Monroe Doctrine.
How do we view wars?
How do we view our spheres of influence?
How do we view economic multilateralism versus unilateralism?
All of that is out the window.
We view this as hemispheric dominance.
That's Trump.
We view it as proactive and, in very specific cases, interventionist.
We intervene against drug cartels.
We control immigration.
We secure vital assets.
That was not really the scope of the Monroe Doctrine.
We have more transactional relationships, quite honestly, which allows us to react in the moment.
So I think the Monroe doctrine is the biggest loser of 2026.
Freiburg, your biggest loser 2026.
My biggest political loser of 2026 is the tech industry.
I think AI and tech wealth have become the lightning rod for populism on both sides of the aisle.
I think um the right is fracturing a bit, where this call it alliance between tech and MAGA seems to be getting a really strong challenge from the more populist movement.
In the same sense, the left is turning hard on tech because of tech's alignment with the right.
And so I think we're going to see in the midterms a really big referendum against the tech industry coming out of this populist movement.
Good one.
That's a great one.
Can I tell you guys a little story from yesterday?
I had a meeting with three very senior sitting senators before I flew back to California.
These are Republican senators.
And Freeberg, I was surprised exactly what you said.
There is a couple of companies that have exacerbated their frustration.
They view those companies these are techs, and the tech leaders of these companies as just not trustworthy.
And they've largely been grin these guys for a long time, and they're pretty frustrated with it.
So to your point, it is palpable.
Look, I can tell you that The natural ally for tech is with MAGA because we still believe in property rights and innovation.
If the Democratic Party is truly going progressive, which means socialist, they want to rewrite your relationship to property rights, whatever that means, and impose wealth taxes and realize gains taxes and all the rest of it.
Look, I don't think tech has that much of a choice.
As Arnold Schwarzenegger said in one of those movies come with me if you want to live.
Come with me if you want to live.
Yes.
Get in the chopper.
But let me say this the reason why there's anger on the populist right is because they remember the censorship and the deplatforming and the shadow banning and all that kind of stuff.
And what there needs to be is I think there just needs to be some meetings, some truth and reconciliation that happens between some of these tech leaders and some of these conservative influencers.
Guess what?
David Techs.
I know one guy who can help make that happen.
No, I would like to host some of these meetings in 2026 and get these people together.
Because I think that the tech companies have either realized their mistake or they were pushed into it in a lot of cases by the Biden administration.
That had gone to their head.
Yeah, that had gone to their head.
Now, i also think that one other mistake they've made is, quite frankly, they've been donors to only left-wing causes.
So if you listen to Cernovich's account,
He's like, look, guys, you banned us.
You cost us our livelihood for years.
Debanked us.
Debanked us.
Where's the restitution?
Or at least start giving some support to our conservative cultural causes.
By the way, you nailed it on the head.
The senators that I talked to, that's exactly what they want.
They just wanted an apology.
Just be honest and say you did it.
This asset seizure tax proposal in california and the conversation about other states i think is bringing a lot of people to that table, sacks at least the tech people to say wait a second, maybe i shouldn't have been only left donating over all these years.
Maybe maybe i shouldn't have done this.
And i think, contrary to what people may think, it may actually be doing a lot more positive for the right side than the left by putting this forward.
This may actually be catalyzing a big change in Silicon Valley.
Yeah, and if you, if you think about it, if you were Zuckerberg or you were, you know the Google executives and the FBI is telling you hey, we need you to take care of these censorship issues, we need you to label these things, etc.
Know, it puts you in a pretty tough situation if the fbi is calling you, if you're trying to do m a and then you know look, now m a under trump is on fire.
We'll talk about that more in our prediction show.
For me, i was going back and forth in my biggest political loser with these dopey democrats who are centrists and The new neocon Trump.
Now, I... don't know if Trump will continue these neocon ways.
So I'm gonna just align with Sachs here that the centrist Democrats are gonna be this year's biggest political losers.
Now that you've mentioned twice that Trump is a neocon, I have to respond to this.
No, you don't, you don't have to, but go ahead.
Okay, look, the problem with neocon regime change operations was I'd say threefold.
Number one, the invasion.
You have this giant invasion land armies, huge numbers of people getting killed.
Took months or a year, took them like a year to get Saddam right.
Number two.
You then have an occupation, because whoever you then put in power only stays in power if you have American GIs there pointing the guns.
So you end up with a 10 or 20 year occupation.
And then third, you have nation building, which is you end up spending trillions of dollars basically trying to turn them into us so that our troops can leave.
That was the mistake of afghanistan and iraq, but look what has trump done.
That is like any of those things.
There's been no invasion, no occupation and no nation building.
This war, I guess, with Venezuela, if you want to call it that, it was a flawless operation.
It lasted three hours.
I mean, I woke up and it was like the meme where it's like, wake up, honey.
It's like, wake up, honey.
Trump's won another war.
It was over before it even started.
They went in there and they basically captured Maduro.
No Americans were killed.
It was absolutely flawless operation and they are bringing him to justice.
By the way, he begged for it and he's on tape talking a lot of smack at rallies, saying come get me.
You know calling the americans chicken and so on.
So, in any event, was begging for it.
We can go into a lot more of the the reasons for doing it and defending it, but i just don't think this is a neocon policy and in fact it's the democrats who've been calling to put in this.
Uh, nobel prize winner that you interviewed, freeberg right, what's her name?
Maria conchito alonso anyway oh, Hector Elizondo.
I think it's Hector Elizondo.
I think he did somebody from the Brat Pack.
No, she was in Running Man, I think.
Anyway.
Exactly.
You're talking about the Cuban Venezuela actress?
I thought her name was Maria Conchita Alonso.
Okay.
Maria Corina Machado.
Sorry.
That's just what I thought i mean.
This world, this world, venezuela.
1975 winner maria.
Look, the democrats are criticizing the administration for not putting her in power.
But look, here's the problem nobel prizes don't keep people in power.
Men with guns keep people in power.
And she doesn't have the men with guns, so it'd be american gi's there.
We have to be the guns to keep her in power.
And the administration has not done that.
They're looking to basically work with the existing regime.
And the big reason why we got sucked into Iraq is because that whole deep application process where we didn't just get rid of Saddam, we took out the entire elite of the country, which created a huge insurgency.
So there's been nothing like that, JCal, is what I'm trying to tell you in this case.
It's a whole different paradigm is what I'm trying to tell you.
We're going to need a new name for it.
Maybe Chamath is right.
It's definitely not Neocon.
Yeah, we might need a new branding for it.
It depends on you know, if Trump is cosplaying neocon when he says he's going to take Greenland, when he says he's going to take Columbia.
Next, when he says he's going to take Cuba.
He's certainly playing the character of neocon publicly here.
And who knows, that could be Trump just positioning himself and anchoring future negotiations.
But if I was telling you know, before the election, when you were saying hey, do not let certain people become president, nikki haley, etc.
Because they're neocons and they're going to go to war with venezuela, they're going to go to war with iran well, that's exactly what trump has done, and as flawless as our troops did and my lord the, we have the greatest military ever so just incredible job.
And shout out to them to do this and lose no american lives was just unbelievable and it just says something about the dedication of these individuals.
But things can go wrong, no matter how good you are.
We could be sitting here right now with 12 captured delta force.
We could have 50 dead americans.
But if that did this is where you have to be intellectually honest.
If we were dealing with a situation where they didn't pick up the target and we had lost american troops and god forbid, they had taken hostages, we would be sitting here with a much different discussion.
And so we have cars.
Very careful, i give.
We're not, i give trump, but that is an equal possibility.
This is like certainly a non-zero possibility.
Things can go sideways.
You sound like when Sam Harris was saying that imagine if COVID actually killed a lot of people.
Then the conversation would be different.
Well, it didn't.
There was no war here.
And by the way, with Denmark.
And let's hope there isn't.
And let's hope there isn't.
You know, this is why I'll give Trump a lot of credit.
He has been strategic.
I do give you that.
Stick and move.
Stick and move is the game.
I pray that he can continue.
And, by the way, on Greenland, first of all, even if we took Greenland, it's not going to be.
There's 30000 people who live there, but i think it's more likely that we'll we'll make a deal.
I think we're going to make an offer they can't refuse.
Okay, ken howard, shout out to our guy, ken howard, maybe you can make a deal.
Let's make them an offer.
They can't refuse.
Yeah, i mean, how much could it cost?
I mean there's nothing there.
Biggest business winner for 2025 uh, looks like freeburg picked robots and autonomous hardware year of the robot.
I think.
If you include robotaxi there, you nailed it certainly.
Next year will be the year of optimus.
Uh, 2027 chamath.
You said dollar denominated stable coins.
I think uh, given what we've seen with regulation, that was spot on.
Gavin, shout out to our friend Gavin.
He said big businesses that use AI thoughtfully.
Another great one I pick Tesla, which is at an all time high.
And Google, which of all of the mag seven, crushed is the biggest winner and they did 65 so i know both of those we did i think all of us crushed that one who do you have freeburg as your biggest business winner prediction for 2026. go ahead free I couldn't decide.
My number one is Huawei, which I've mentioned in the past.
Out of China, I think Huawei's effort to partner with SMIC to go deeper in the chip stack, and they're just firing on all cylinders.
I do think keep an eye on Huawei over the next year.
It's gonna outperform expectations, at least the Western expectations.
And the second is a polymarket.
I think polymarkets evolved from being kind of this one-off quirky prediction market to actually really providing insights into current events and the news in a way that none of us anticipated.
And I do expect that, after the deal we saw with NYSE, that all of the exchanges and we're already seeing this with Robinhood and Coinbase and we should expect something from NASDAQ this year.
Dina Friedman talked to us about this.
But I do think that prediction markets could become not just markets, but also news.
And I think PolyMarket's just in such a position to have a breakout year.
Okay, great one.
Shamath, biggest business winner for 2026 after yourself.
Who do you got?
Yeah, it's hard.
I mean, I will pick me.
Yep.
It's already done.
It's already in the books.
Don't hurt your elbow.
Don't hyperextend your elbow.
Already in the books.
So it's all downhill from here.
Nick, we need to use that meme of obama giving himself a medal is giving himself.
I will pick copper, okay copper.
We are still completely underestimating how short we are in terms of the global demand supply dynamics of a handful of critical elements that we need again in the Trump doctrine view of the world that is no longer as multilateral as it was and we need to have unilateral national security.
If you look through that lens, the asset that is set up to go absolutely parabolic is copper.
The reason is that it is, at least as it stands today, the most useful cheap, amenable conductive material that we have.
That material manifests in everything. from our data centers to our chips, to our weapons systems.
It's just everywhere, everywhere, everywhere.
And right now Jason, we are on a path by 2040 where we will be short about 70 of the global supply at current course and speed.
And so I will pick copper.
Sacks, what do you got?
Biggest business winner of 2026, your predictor.
I said the IPO.
I think 2026 is gonna be a big year for IPOs.
I'm not gonna say which ones.
I think there's gonna be a bunch of them, a bunch of successful ones.
And I think we could see trillions of dollars of new market cap created of public companies.
For a while, people were concerned that the number of public companies were shrinking.
Public companies were actually being taken private.
This is going to be a big reversal of that trend.
So I think this is going to be part of that Trump boom will be the idea.
I love that one.
I like that one.
Great one.
I went with, since I nailed the Mag 7 for last year and picked the highest performer with Google, And I placed a bet on that, so I'm feeling pretty good about it.
My prediction for 2026 is that Amazon is going to have a massive year, as they continue to replace humans with robots.
That's why.
Here's a chart for you.
I've been talking about this a little bit.
I think this is the most important company to watch because...
Zooks, their self-driving is working.
They're making great progress with it.
And here, when you look at this chart, you can see they're essentially flat in terms of hiring humans and they're surging in deploying robots.
And they did their whole PR comm strategy of calling them co-bots and donating to Toys for Tots, et cetera.
I think they'll be the first corporate singularity, which is to say the first company to have more robots driving their bottom line than humans.
So that's my prediction for 2026 as Amazon and I'm going to place a bet on that.
My prediction is that JCal is such a luck box that he'll end up being right about Amazon, but not having anything to do with the reason he gave.
Yeah, right.
They'll hire a billion humans to go do something, and it'll be for a different reason.
I am a luck box.
That is true.
It'll just be better free cash flow and all of a sudden, more people using AWS than JCal will be right.
Well, i actually i think the reason is, if you just if you think about it i don't know if you guys have had this experience, but with the delivery business which was kind of a dog for a long time.
Obviously aws is crushing it, but that delivery business here in austin we get everything the same day.
You're going to experience this, david.
There are because of the.
I think the geography here and the ability to have Depot Center is very close.
Everything you order on Amazon comes within the same day.
You know, I've noticed that already.
I've already started ordering things from Amazon.
You're right.
It was all same day.
I'm like, wait, what is going on?
What it is is we have a lot of space, 15 miles outside of the city center, 20 cent, and they built these huge warehouses.
So you just get everything within four hours.
They're like, We'll be right there.
It's very bizarre.
So Jason, you'll buy like virtues at like 8am and it arrives by noon.
Yes, absolutely.
Absolutely.
And when you put your order in for ethics and morality, it just never shows up.
I don't know.
It's lost again.
Who knows?
It's just incredible.
We're just both ends of the spectrum here.
Moral it's like trust, like hello customer support.
I ordered a moral compass two years ago.
Still hasn't arrived.
Okay, biggest business loser, i love you.
Behind the 20 billion?
Absolutely i couldn't see it.
I got my beak wet, so i hope your compass never shows up.
You got your beak wet on that deal.
Well, Sandeep came to Besties and he wanted to collect all Besties.
We all got to place a little bet.
Well, by the way, I divested my Grok shares as part of joining the government back in like February or March.
Oh, God.
Oh, by the way, by the way.
Would that cost you like what, the last triple up?
No, it was a small position that came from Grok acquiring Sonny's old company.
We didn't invest in Grok.
So it wasn't big, but the point was.
Yeah, it's just another example of you sacrificing for the country which I give you a lot of credit for.
It's good for Sachs to put that on the record.
Yeah.
Well, it's just so ridiculous because I'm accused of somehow doing this job for money when it just keeps costing me money.
It's negative money.
XAI just raised an up round at twice the valuation from the last round and we had to divest that too.
Yeah.
No, no, we didn't sit it out.
Hold on.
Let's be clear.
We didn't sit it out.
We divested it.
So you placed the bet and then, before you get to collect the ticket, you lose the last double up or triple up.
The economic cost to sax will probably exceed a billion dollars by the time he leaves.
Personally, this is crazy.
I mean, people need to know this.
It's a very important thing to put on the record.
I think it's important.
I think everybody should know.
All these reporters don't get it, but sax has sacrificed financially an enormous amount to work on behalf of the government and the people.
That's, that's really amazing.
I wouldn't even say anything about it if it weren't for the fact that we got these mainstream media reporters lying and saying the opposite, that somehow this job is making me money.
Right, i wouldn't say a word about it otherwise, all right.
Biggest business loser 2025.
Gavin said federal government service providers, I guess because of Doge and them being held to the fire feet, to the fire there, to give us a better deal.
Old guard defense contractors like Bowen and Lockheed was yours, Friedberg.
And Chamath, you said the MAC-7, you expected a decrease in the record concentration.
I said OpenAI, which would see a peak valuation, and obviously I got that wrong.
What do you got this year, Freeberg?
Who do you think is going to be the biggest business loser of this year?
To follow up on Chamath and my conversation at the Christmas dinner.
I think the state governments are gonna have a real problem with finding financing, because what's going on with the exposés that are underway on waste fraud and abuse in state agencies, i think is going to lead to a conversation that's going to cause folks to question the long-term solvency and operations, because the response won't be hey, let's cut out the waste fraud and the abuse.
The response is going to be we got to keep it going, and that is what is going to give people fear is that if they did respond call it equivocally to the discoveries that the governments did, then I think that there's an opportunity to continue to be able to borrow and access capital markets.
But I do worry a lot about state governments borrowing.
I think the other thing that's going to hit the fan this year in state governments is all of these unrealized pension liabilities.
I think when these numbers start to come out this year and a lot of people are now digging deep into it folks are going to wake up and be like holy.
There's a ginormous hole in these states and their obligations.
Why does the government have to do these pensions?
Why can't we do superannuation like Australia does?
We have to get this out of the.
I love that pick.
That's called a defined contribution instead of a defined benefit.
And if you get this defined contribution model and then just have good management, it all works out.
So this is basically the problem with Social Security.
Social Security is a defined benefit, and then all the money just doesn't sit anywhere.
It doesn't exist.
If it was a defined contribution.
It's just a liability.
And let me give a shout out.
If it was a defined contribution, like Invest America accounts, or Trump accounts, as they're being called, and you put the money in and you see how much you have and every year you track it and that's what your retirement is gonna be, just like we might have with our 401ks or our IRAs.
That is a system that actually has true solvency.
Otherwise it becomes this runaway train of liability and that's effectively what the states have set up and it's very dangerous.
And if we were to take government out of it and then every American just had to put 10 12, 14 into their retirement account and it was forced you would have happy people who feel some agency in their lives, which the people of Australia do.
Chamath, who's your loser?
2026 will pick the software industrial complex.
So these are the companies that sell licensed sas to the corporations of america.
It's about a three to four trillion dollar a year economy that is separated into three buckets.
Bucket one, which is the smallest, is the initial licensing.
That's probably five to 10.
Buckets two and three, where all the money is made is what's called maintenance and migration, which is how do I just maintain this big bulky license that I just bought for 300 million, as an example, or how do I migrate it from product A to product B?
Those last two buckets represent 90% of all the dollars in revenue that's generated in software.
And because of the advancement of these models and the advancement of these technological techniques that we are all uncovering building agents, building systems I think you're going to see that total economic opportunity shrink and contract aggressively.
The companies will still be able to do their business.
It'll just be at a much, much lower incremental revenue.
The customers will be able to do their business.
They'll have a lot more flexibility.
And a lot of upstarts, I think we'll have opportunities.
I'm speaking my book obviously, but I'm seeing it on the ground because you have a company building software.
Our entire business 1890s business has basically migrated to disrupting maintenance and migration patterns.
I cannot describe how much opportunity there is.
It's very tactical, mundane, not very sexy work, but it's incredibly lucrative.
And so I expect that that thing is going to shrink.
It's going to impact SaaS companies, public SaaS companies, particularly quite severely.
What do you got sacks for your biggest business loser of 2026 prediction?
For me.
We already talked about this, but it was California because of the wealth tax and also the onerous regulations driving business and capital out of the state.
I hope you guys are right that it does not make the ballot.
If it does, I think there will be a panic and rush for the exits.
Regardless, there's two major refineries closing by the spring.
Higher gas prices will be the result.
I just think that politicians are not doing a good enough job in california, dispelling the fears and the actual hostility of the business environment.
That's a great one, and i went with young white collar workers in America.
I think they're going to be the biggest business loser.
I think it's getting really hard for them to get entry level jobs.
I'm seeing that all over the place because companies are having an easier job just automating with AI, then training up gen z graduates.
That's my belief.
That's why i'm launched founding university of three continents.
If you are a young person, you got to be resilient.
You're going to have to be self-reliant, independent of what mandami mandami says about collectivism.
It's easier to use AI than it is to train up and we don't have professional development that needs to come back.
I just did an interview with the CEO of McKinsey, which you may have seen on the feed.
And this is the big challenge in corporate America is they're taking out the bottom two or three rungs and automating stuff, and we really need to develop young people so that they have a path to take the CEO jobs eventually.
And I don't think they're going to have an easy time doing that.
That's why I think all young people should start companies.
I am talking my own book.
I am talking about founder dot university.
Please apply Japan, Saudi and in America.
We're going to help you build companies.
Thank you for my promo.
Jason, I got a text last night from a friend and it's in response to your comments about young people not being able to find jobs because of AI, which is the statement you've made a couple of times.
He said, went to a roundabout of 50 CEOs of public and private companies and asked everyone if they're hiring junior engineers.
Everyone said they are still, but not as much as before, because during COVID every college lowered the bar on admissions and the talent just isn't as good anymore.
My friend went on and he said you should talk about this to counter J Cal's point about AI taking young people's jobs.
We see this with financial analysts and we see this with salespeople we hire.
The Gen Z kids are all really challenging to hire because of cultural issues, not because we're not hiring them due to AI.
So we try and hire older people primarily to fill those roles.
So there's a real interesting point that he was making.
I texted a couple of their friends to ask them their opinion.
And I've heard this concurrence shakeout which is, like a lot of people think, that recent grads out of college and this may be a COVID era phenomenon they just don't seem to have the temperament, the motivation, the organizational skills, executive function.
Yeah. executive function.
And, by the way, some of our friends who I've talked to, who have kids graduating college.
There's even a conversation about none of these kids are motivated to get jobs or to make money.
There's a very weird phenomenon in the youth right now.
And this may be a COVID phenomenon and it may be a cultural thing.
That's part of the long form of what's going on in our society, or it may be a socialist trend, or it may be a populist trend, or it may just be that people have gotten too wealthy and the nation has truly split and you can't climb the ladder anymore.
There's a bunch of things going on here, but I do not think and I think a lot of people are echoing this, J Cal that challenges that young people are having finding employment is purely rooted in an AI and automation phenomenon, but it may be a cultural phenomenon.
And so I just put that on the plate for you to consider.
I do think it's both.
I do think it is partially.
What you're saying is that maybe these young folks have you know, they're just either entitled or their parents have enough money for them to skate and go sideways and maybe not be as career motivated.
It could be a social thing.
It could be a COVID thing.
It could be a all of those and certainly multifactor.
I just know what I see on the ground, which is, you know, so many companies coming to me saying we can replace the bottom third of these tasks and that those bottom third of tasks are typically done by young people out of school.
So I think both things are probably true to a certain extent, and time will tell.
I do think it's going to be challenging and continue to be challenging.
And you see that in the numbers from Google Uber Coinbase, all these companies are doing more with less.
And maybe that's just the nature of AI.
Maybe the first thing you do is cut costs and maybe the second thing you do is hire people who know how to use these tools.
If you are a young person who uses ai tools, you're going to find a job.
If you're a young person who isn't motivated and doesn't use ai tools, you're going to have a hard time.
Let's go with the biggest deal last year's predictions for biggest deal for 2025 traditional auto OEM consolidation.
That was you, Chamath.
I think that we haven't seen exactly the consolidation, but we have seen those businesses come apart.
So I think it's, I give you definitely two thirds of a credit there.
Gavin said a tidal wave of M&A.
I think he's not wrong there.
That has started to happen, certainly.
Freeberg, you said massive compute build-out deals.
Of course you nailed that one.
I said consolidation in amongst the on-demand economy.
That hasn't happened, but we do see a lot of deals occurring.
And i said also apple would buy warner brothers.
I got that like a.
I guess that wound up going to netflix.
So i'll give myself a half point for that.
What do you have as your biggest deal for 2026?
David sacks.
Well, I don't want to get too specific here in terms of names of companies and that sort of thing.
But what I would say is that I think there was a breakthrough in the last couple of months in terms of these coding assistants, where they've been around for a while, but there seems to have been another level of quality achieved just in the last month or so.
And you're really starting to hear.
I mean, maybe a lot of it is hype, but there is.
I think a lot of people are getting very excited about the potential here.
And part of it is coding.
Part of it is just tool use.
You can download the programs.
So it has access to your file drive and it can take actions on your computer.
This trend feels to me like chatbots did at the end of 2022, going into 23, where it's like people were really hyped about it, but then it continued to play out in the next year.
And so I think these let's call it coding assistant slash tool use, I think, will get bigger and bigger this year.
Freebird, what do you got?
Biggest deal?
Russia, Ukraine.
I think it's going to settle out this year.
I think there's a lot of motivating factors to get it settled out this year economic and other political factors.
But I do think it's going to settle out this year and it's going to bring a bit more stability to that region.
And there's a whole reset that's underway this year, I think, in terms of geopolitics and where the powers all sit.
Trump can stop that war.
He would be two for two.
That's a good one.
I think this one's going to settle.
That would be great.
He may not have done it on day one, but if he gets it done in year two, that's good enough for me.
Jamal? biggest deal 2026.
What do you got?
It's not a specific deal, but it's an approach, I think that M&A cannot happen.
And so it's the IP license, M&A workaround.
And I think you're going to see hundreds of billions of dollars of these kinds of deals.
So this is the deal that google did with character ai.
It's the same thing that they did.
Microsoft did it, microsoft did it.
It's obviously what nvidia did with grok.
Why are these deals happening?
Well, if you just look at what Facebook tried to do, they tried to buy Manus for two and a half billion dollars.
Manus was a Chinese company that then left China and essentially rebuilt itself as a Singaporean business.
The Chinese have now said, we're going to look at this.
They are going to actively import export controls.
They're going to actively look at which technologies and even which researchers are working on things that are critical enough that it just can't go abroad in this existential fight that they believe they're in with the United States.
The United States is an equivalent such position.
All of this leads me to believe that traditional M&A is effectively dead.
I think it's going to be impossible to get a large transaction done.
So how will you do it?
You'll do what Sundar did.
You'll do what Satya did.
You'll do what Jensen did.
You'll do what Mark did with ScaleAI.
These huge licensing deals that basically replace M&A.
And I think that that, as a deal type, will get better and more refined and tighter and better executed.
We were the third or fourth of these kinds of deals.
And even the third or fourth iteration was quite good.
By the time that you're into the middle part of next year and you've done 15 or 20 of these things, I think the lawyers that work on these things and the accountants will just be bulletproof.
The tax treatment is not ideal, but the speed at which you can do them is phenomenal, because the next day somebody like Sandeep can be working for Jensen, which is what Jensen wants.
They want the talent.
Zuckerberg wants the talent working there the next day.
And the IP. and the IP, of course, you know, for 2026, I think we're going to see some massive M&A.
It doesn't matter to me how it occurs.
But I do think we're going to see a 50 billion plus deal.
And I think it could be one of the mag seven in Apple, a meta, a Microsoft or an Amazon going out and trying to buy XAI Mishro Perplexity, Anthropic.
One of those four comes to mind.
I know most of them probably want to go public and go it alone.
But I think an offer could come in and during that race, for which six or seven large language models and men, it is a.
It is a battle where they are moving up and down the rankings and beating each other out.
Know, can i ask you a question?
And i think one of them is going to, i think one of them is going to go for it i, i think it could wind up being apple I or Amazon who buys an anthropic or complex?
I started where you were.
But this is why I went to this deal type as the biggest business winner.
Because if any of those companies tried to buy, let's just say anthropic, I think it's three years of antitrust minimum.
It's worse than when Microsoft tried to buy Activision, because that was a niche product, And even that took almost two years, and like three or four months, if I'm getting it right.
It was about two years.
It's a huge slog because it's about global coordination of multiple regulators.
Yeah.
And you have to get through the EU and eventually, one of them takes the lead pole position.
But in the Microsoft case, it wasn't just one.
You had to navigate China, you had to navigate Europe.
So I agree with you, because I think there's companies with so much cash on their balance sheets that are effectively getting debased every day.
The markets will start to punish these companies.
It just seems like you're right.
There's going to be 100 billion transaction.
I just suspect it'll end up as an IP license.
Yeah, and I think President Trump, one of his great strengths is that he moves quickly.
Man, what a first year.
Whether you like the decisions or not, he makes decisions.
I think this is one of the things that Democrats are learning is that you got to actually get things done for the American people.
I think he might instruct our government to let M&A be great again.
And that would be great for American exceptionalism.
These companies do need to merge and to continue to grow, and we should go try to get from a mag seven to a mag 17.
We need more bigger companies with bigger footprints, taking on global markets.
Most contrarian belief, most contrarian belief people like this one.
I said open ai loses its lead in the ai race.
Uh, and in fact That has happened.
If you look at the arenas and you look at their market share, they are being challenged.
Chamath, you said the banking crisis in one of the major mainline banks.
Gavin said, one year of 5% plus GDP growth at one point over the next couple of years.
Well done to Gavin.
Friedberg, you said socialism rots back.
Another amazing prediction.
What's your prediction for this year since you crushed it last year?
Friedberg, go ahead.
My prediction is based on the premise that I think there is going to be this revolution in Iran and the ayatollahs are going to be out.
That's not the contrarian belief.
I think that's the standard belief.
And I think that is going to happen.
And that's the premise.
But a lot of people think that Iran is part of the destabilizing force in the Middle East.
And I do think that there is already, in anticipation of the turnover with the ruling parties in Iran, there is already this brewing conflict amongst the other Arab states.
So I think that between UAE Saudi, Qatar and this fraction in Yemen and then I don't know if you guys have followed, but there's this kind of emerging independence movement for Somaliland, which is kind of north of Somalia that there may be more conflict brewing in the Middle East than anyone anticipates for this year.
That will not necessarily involve Israel and or Iran.
It will actually be amongst the other Gulf states as they vie for influence and power.
And that the contrarian point may in fact be that Iran has been a stabilizing force in that region.
And by removing Iran and by changing over Iran, they become this kind of independent democratic state.
And this particularly, is going to be heightened as there's going to be this battle for who's going to take care of the Palestinians as the two state solution emerges.
And what's the role that Jordan's going to have to play versus Egypt versus Saudi?
And it's going to lead to a lot of questions about resource allocation.
So I think that this year could end up being a little bit nastier than folks anticipate in the Middle East as Iran turns over.
It's actually got a contrarian belief for 2026.
Yes, I said that AI will increase demand for knowledge workers, not decrease it.
I would refer you to Aaron Levy's post called Jevons Paradox for Knowledge Workers.
And the point of Jevons Paradox is that as the cost of a resource goes down, the aggregate demand for it actually increases, because you discover more and more use cases.
So I think this will certainly happen with code.
In the past, it's been very expensive to generate code.
You have to hire engineers.
There's not enough of them.
It's an expensive resource.
So the amount of software generated in the economy was limited by that.
I think it's going to increase massively now because the cost of generating code is coming down so much.
But there's other examples too.
You take a field like radiology.
That's frequently cited as a profession that AI is going to put out of business.
That's not what the data shows.
The data shows that the number of radiologists is increasing.
Why?
Because the number of scans that people want to make is increasing.
It's true that AI can do some of the work, but you still need a doctor to prompt the AI to interpret the AI, to validate it.
So you get more efficient, the cost of scans goes down.
And instead of it being a super special reality that happens very rarely that you need like a referral on top of referral to get.
It becomes something that's normalized and everyone starts doing it and you start getting more and more scans.
That leads to better and better outcomes.
So I think there's gonna be a lot of those examples through the economy and we're gonna look back and see that the job loss narrative was not only wrong, but we actually got job gains.
Okay.
And for those of you who want to understand Jevons paradox a little more, you can look at something like electricity or steel or concrete.
When we lowered the cost of those things, people didn't use less of it.
They built skyscrapers and We had more routes for more airplanes to take you on, more vacations, and that went from being something only rich people did to everybody.
So Jevin's paradox is definitely at work.
What do you got, Chamath?
What's on your contrarian belief?
Gosh, I have two.
Well, I'll give you them both and you can just see.
My contrarian belief number one is I don't think SpaceX will IPO.
I think that it will reverse merge into Tesla.
And I think Elon will use it as a moment to consolidate control and power of his two seminal assets into one cap table.
Oh my god, I love that.
Wow.
He's talked about that before.
He's talked about having a holding company for years of all of the collection.
You could put Nora link in there too, right?
You could put in the boring company as well.
Sure, I'm just giving you my contrarian take.
There will be no IPO for SpaceX.
I think it will just.
Be it specifically will be a reverse merger.
The second contrarian take is that I think the central banks will realize that there are limitations to gold and limitations to Bitcoin and will, as a result, seek out a completely new cryptographic paradigm that they can control on their balance sheet, that is fungible, that is tradable and that is completely secure and private.
And I think the reason why that privacy needs to exist is that, for the sovereignty of a country, you need to be in a position where you have assets that are not easily disclosed to anybody else, friends or enemies alike.
And then separately cryptographically.
If you're going to own a currency, you need to hedge against the eventual risk in the next five to 10 years that there's a quantum chip that can challenge the existing cryptographic schemes that are used.
And for my contrarian, I was thinking about going with open AI, losing their lead and not being the number one company again, because I do think that will be the trend that they will have the they'll continue to give up their market share to other players, including Google and Gemini and XAI, etc.
But I'm going to go with a pretty wild card here.
I think the standoff with China is going to be largely resolved.
And, I think, President Trump's, when he makes his visit there.
I don't know if you're going to go on that one saxophone.
I think it should be included in, obviously because of the ai race.
I do think that the standoff, um and the issues around taiwan are going to be resolved and i think this could be The signature issue of Trump's second term is that we work out a working relationship where both China and America win, without one of us losing.
Best performing asset.
Best performing asset.
Last year's prediction, I said Mag 7, which was up 22% versus the S&P 500 at plus 17.
Chamath, you were long CDS for a potential run on a major bank.
You said it was a long shot.
Gavin said high bandwidth memory makers like Micron, which was up 230%.
That was a great call.
And Friedberg, you said Chinese tech stocks and ETFs.
Alibaba is up 85, Chinese tech ETF up 47, versus the SP 500 at plus 17.
So I guess that means Gavin Friedberg and then myself.
What do you got for this year's best performing asset, Friedberg?
Polymarket.
Polymarket's on a tear.
Network effects, replacing media, replacing markets.
Congrats to Shane at Polymarket.
Do you have a best performing asset for 2026?
Yes.
Go ahead, Shema.
I would pick a basket of critical metals.
Okay. basket of critical metals.
What do you got, Sax?
It's getting a little bit redundant for me, but I just said the expanding super cycle in tech.
I mean, again, this is just another facet of the boom.
But actually, let me just show you some data that literally just came out.
I feel like this is breaking news.
Oh, breaking news.
Nick, can you pull this up?
U.S. productivity just surged 4.9%.
The strongest reading in nearly six years and this is the news item is that the atlanta fed their forecast for q4 gdp just climbed to 54 percent.
Can that be right?
Yes, can we get a fact check on that?
Five to six is, i think, where we're gonna see it, guys.
We're gonna see some sixes get printed.
I mean, we said January 8th 2026.
The Atlanta Fed's GDP Now model estimate for real GDP growth in the fourth quarter of 2025 is 54, significant jump from the previous estimate of 27 on January 5th.
You have to remember that there's going to be 150 basis point correction in Q4 GDP because of the government furlough.
Okay,
So let's say that GDP was probably, call it four, you're gonna see a print of two and a half.
So you need to readjust that, because now all the government workers are back, they're recounted in GDP.
If you look through 2026, there's a handful of things that I think people do not understand well.
Number one, all of non-farm payrolls has been completely reset and rebased.
And the reason why is because of immigration.
So what used to be 100 to 150 number print is now a 40 to 50 number print.
Why is that important?
Because when you look through earnings and you look at the lower 25 quartiles of earnings growth, they're off the charts.
There's all of these anecdotal examples now of earnings just exceeding expectations.
There was an article in the front page of the Wall Street Journal yesterday about Ford trying to pay mechanics 160000 a year and having 5000 openings.
So to Sax's point, We are a coiled spring.
Closing the border plus adding productivity lifts through AI and other things have created a growth dynamic in the United States that will really start to show itself in 26.
So I think that you should be not short the US economy here.
It is ready to rip.
And adding to all that and just giving my pick, I think if we are in a rate cut environment and the tailwinds keep happening and people have a little bit of cash laying around, my pick for best performing asset will be the Robinhood Polymarket Prize picks gambling wagering space because people will be able to have a little cash around to make some bets.
You can put Coinbase in there too, I guess.
By the way, the corollary to what we just talked about, if you see five and a half and six and a half prints and these employment numbers, a lot of this affordability stuff may be not as accurate as we think it is.
Everybody right now is trying to figure out okay.
Well, where are the pockets of unaffordability?
And there are clearly some, but those are narrow and they can be fixed.
But on a broad based basis.
What Saks says is right.
You have this combination of earnings growth, productivity growth And now this overlay where you have these tax cuts that are going to hit in 26.
My gosh, I mean, asset prices in general, I think will do well.
Now you'll also see potentially home prices correct, because if The president is successful in making sure Blackstone can't buy houses, but on the other side people are earning more and they can enter with interest rates that are now 100 to 150 basis points lower.
You'll see a boom in housing where it's not the corporations that are buying the houses but individuals.
There's a lot of variables here that can that can break in America's favor.
This is why I think 6% is not unrealistic, which would be absolutely nuts.
Okay, let's move on to the worst performing asset.
Last year's predictions for worst performing asset of 2025.
I said legacy car companies and real estate.
Both of those turned out to be correct chamath you said enterprise sas and the software industrial industrial complex again that looked correct as well gavin said enterprise sas and freiburg you said vertical sas so we had three sas and i had legacy car companies real estate let me give you a check out let me know those Yeah, let me just give you some numbers on that to show you ServiceNow down 30%, Workday down 18%, DocuSign down 23%, Dropbox down 9%, and Box down 6% while the S&P was up 17%.
I think it's worth highlighting, like it was a challenging year for this enterprise aspect.
Especially with the per seat pricing, as opposed to consumption based pricing.
If you have a static number of employees or less employees, like many of these companies do, there's just less seats to sell.
So their whole growth was based on land and expand.
You land the client and then you expand the client because they're adding staff.
If you're not adding staff, you can't, you know, you don't have more people using Salesforce.
Okay, so let's talk about our worst performing asset predictions for 2026.
What do you got sacks worst performing asset of 2026?
Well, I just said California luxury real estate because of the overhang of the wealth tax and all the things we're talking about.
Yeah.
That one hits close to home, I think.
Now, yes, it does, actually.
What I'm hoping for is a dead cat bounce.
If you guys are right that the ballot initiative fails, then the overhang will be lifted and maybe I can Clear some real estate.
Clear some.
It's not easy being right sometimes.
Freiburg, what do you got?
What's your discount price on that asset right now?
I mean, I might make a bid if you give me a...
Give me a good clearing price.
You got $100 million laying around?
Yeah, I'm not paying $100.
Okay, here we go.
Bestie negotiations occurring.
All right.
Give him the bestie price.
The buy it now bestie price.
No, no, no.
Okay, by the way, San Francisco has that insane luxury tax, which they have in LA too.
You got to pay 5%. on any piece of real estate over $25 million.
Oh my God, it's like 6% in San Francisco.
6%.
Do you know that?
Which makes it even harder for these high-end places to trade.
So wait, you're saying if I bought Sachs' house for $100, I'd have to spend $106?
He's got to pay 6%.
Oh, he has to pay 6%.
Six million.
And then you've got to pay your broker 6%.
I mean, they're just basically freezing the market.
Oh, okay, not the buyer.
Well, you can negotiate.
Who pays the 5?
You know, quote unquote mansion taxes just killed la real estate.
You talk to brokers down there because people used to flip houses a lot more now.
You just can't afford to do that.
Unintended consequences, folks.
Really bad for the market.
Wait, you're telling me taxes slow down transaction volume and reduce the growth of the economy?
That's crazy.
I had no idea.
Zach, you should write that down.
We should do a whole thing on that.
Yeah, maybe we should write that down.
That is crazy.
I had no idea.
Yeah, somebody make a note.
Yeah.
So worst performing asset, Chamath.
What do you think?
Worst performing asset.
I won't say the worst performing, but I think a very poor performing asset will be hydrocarbons.
I just think that the trend in oil is inexorable and it's down.
And the reason it's down is irrespective of your thoughts on climate change, the trends on electrification and energy storage are just unstoppable.
And so what that does is it shrinks the surface area where oil is useful.
It's not like a cataclysmic thing, but it's sort of a melting iceberg where does it see $65 or $45?
And I would say on a per barrel basis, I think it's more likely to see 45 than 65.
Okay, I went with us dollar in different permutations of how you can buy it, because our debt continues to grow unabated and you know the debasement trade jcal, jcal.
I just think it's going to be hard, for you know the the usd because we're talking about we've been at it i think we're going to add 2 trillion in debt this year and then if we're increasing And again, I know President Trump says a lot of things, but if we're increasing the military budget by 50, that means that's going to be straight to our deadline.
So it's going to be harder and harder for the dollar.
It doesn't mean that America is not going to do great, but the value of the American dollar is going to be challenged, which we see in people moving to gold and silver and perhaps copper.
Okay, if you could give us your worst performing asset of 2026.
It would be Netflix if they don't close the Warner Brothers deal.
I do think Netflix's service is being challenged from all sides with deep content libraries.
And I think we're seeing a great commoditization happening.
I've also heard directly from folks in Hollywood, the creators of new content, that people would prefer not to work with Netflix.
They only pay creators cost plus 10% now.
And so as a creator, you're actually better off not doing deals with Netflix anymore.
So their content library is going to shrink because of the natural economic forces underway alternative if they do close on Warner Brothers.
I think they've got some good runway in terms of that content library and they'll be fine.
And in that case, my worst performing asset would be traditional media stocks.
And I do think that they're going to underperform.
There is just such an incredible a variety of high quality content that's emerging from independent creators that are leveraging their own distribution platforms through YouTube and others.
And I think that traditional media is going to continue to be deeply challenged, as we've seen, for example, just in the news segment, with the rise of citizen journalism.
So that's the that's what I would kind of Yeah, and, you know, the the Netflix observation i think is was well founded because they're also in terms of expanding their library they just did a deal with bill simmons i see and with um Barstool Sports to move over their sports shows, podcasts, video shows from YouTube, and then going to take them off YouTube and put them on Netflix exclusively.
So that's a really interesting trend as well to keep an eye on.
By the way, before we move off asset, just on best performing asset, there's one category we didn't talk about but I think it's kind of interesting, which is the category of assets that qualify for accelerated depreciation capital equipment.
Yes, yes, yes, yes.
That includes things like planes, so forth.
There's now 100 accelerated depreciation for certain kinds of capital equipment because of the big beautiful bill.
And it kind of goes along with some of the tax cuts that we talked about.
But man, that is making those markets super hot right now.
Absolutely.
Try buying a plane these days.
Very difficult.
No, Jason, it's not planes.
It's like Caterpillar.
No, no, it's everything.
It's tractors.
Yeah, it's generators.
It's Siemens.
This is why Siemens stock is through the roof.
All of this capital equipment, you get to write it off 100% in year one.
It's creating a massive infrastructure build out in the US.
Absolutely. there's some companies that are huge beneficiaries of this, obviously, because they're the sellers of the capital equipment.
And of course, this is one of the reasons GDP is going up, as people are actually investing in business again.
Okay, most anticipated trend the way.
This is the corollary of the statement that if you reduce taxes, the economy grows.
So here we go.
Yeah. most anticipated trend of 2025.
I said the wrath of Linux on ending and M&A and IPOs being back, get some credit there.
Chamath, you said the end of the deep state, I think you get a lot of credit there.
Gavin said AI makes more progress per quarter 2025 than it did in 2023.
That's a great one.
Freebird, you said the nuclear power build out, I think you get some credit there too.
Yeah.
Not sure, not sure.
We got some work to do there.
Massively, massively short nuclear.
You're still short nuclear.
But I know my guy, Howard Lutnick.
When I talk to him I talk to Howard Lutnick as well.
He said he's all in on nuclear.
Friedberg, can I tell you why I'm short here?
I think that we're in the very delicate part of the cycle where they've missed the window.
So by the time that they deliver working SMRs at scale, the problem is that the marginal cost of electricity will effectively be zero, and it'll have gone to zero because of a combination of solar and storage, as well as coal and oil.
And so it's just in a very delicate place where the large form factor nuclear reactors make zero economic sense by 2032 or 2035, which is when, through the Byzantine permitting and building, they get it done.
And then the SMRs.
By the time that they get it done, they may not be able to meet the market either.
So I think it's a very complicated moment for nuclear actually not scientifically economically, just does not hang together mathematically.
I think that's if you assume um, no shift in the demand curve, and i think that, like if you, if you look at china going to eight terawatts of production and by 2040 or whatever it is, and we're sitting at one and we're not moving, we are going to have a big catch up to do.
And the question is can we really build out two, three terawatts of electricity generation?
How are we going to build out two to three terawatts of electricity generation, the amount of land that you would need with solar, and what's it going to take to get all of that installed and so on.
And, by the way, there's a lot of this stuff in china if you look at all the big solar buildouts that they did, where they're ripping it up now.
This is a longer conversation, but I really do question whether we can pin everything on solar.
It's going to be a mix of stuff.
And so your point may be right that in the near term, to meet the current kind of demand curve, nuclear is going to be economically challenged.
But at some point here, there's an inflection that we have to meet.
So what's your most anticipated trend of 2026, Friedberg?
Iran becoming an independent democratic state.
I think I'm just speaking generally anticipated.
I think a lot of people are anticipating that that's going to happen this year.
There is an uprising in the streets, there is a weakening of the ayatollahs.
And there seems to be a moment underway.
And the demographics are destiny.
There's a lot of young people in Iran, and they do not want to live under the current rule.
They want to be free.
But there is a major economic problem in Iran in terms of affordability.
You think we have an issue of affordability in the US.
In Iran it's very hard for people just to buy their basic necessities basic needs to the majority of people.
So that's why they are taking to the street.
There is a real economic crisis underway that is motivating this turnover.
Every year.
Everyone like, anticipates some big change in the middle east, but this could be the biggest rewriting of the middle east in a long time.
Okay sax, what do you got for category most anticipated trend of 2026?
What do you got?
Sex, i said.
Auditing government spending at all levels, that's a good one.
Decentralized love yes, Let a thousand Nick Shirley's bloom.
Let's do it.
Audit everything.
Audit everything.
We need to normalize independent audits across the board.
Whistleblowers.
Let's go.
It is not acceptable for Gavin Newsom, for example, to prohibit audits, as he did with homeless spending.
All government spending needs to be opened up and audited by the public.
We need people to see where it's going.
And that's just got to happen.
Love it.
The Pentagon.
When are they going to pass an audit, right?
I mean, that's one of our biggest line items.
Let's get them to be audited.
Hey, there's something President Trump could do.
They're actually at least trying.
They're at least failing the audit.
They're at least failing the audit.
Gavin, this is prohibiting the audit.
Start where you're prohibiting them first.
How about that?
Yeah, I mean, just audit everything, I think would be, I love it.
What do you got, Jamal?
I have a corollary to Friberg's, which is, I think it's the expansion of this Trump doctrine.
Independent of your politics.
If you are an economic actor, You own a business, you invest in the stock market, whatever it is.
You speculate cryptocurrencies.
You must understand the movements on the chessboard in 2026.
The best framework that I have used to organize myself is this idea of unilateralism, economic resilience.
It's just a ginormous trend.
And I think the output of it is going to be massive GDP prints on top of everything else.
Yeah, and I think I'm going to stick with my last year's prediction going into 2026.
Again, the wrath of Lena Khan ending.
We saw the MA train start with grok.
Obviously Netflix and Warner Brothers, Google and whiz.
So many deals are ready to be done.
And they're starting to pop off in MA.
We can debate what structure they are and and regulators et cetera, but they're happening.
But I'll go with IPOs coming back.
Right now you've gotta anticipate one of the following two will file SpaceX, Android Stripe Anthropic and OpenAI.
I think two of those file, and it is going to be gangbusters.
The public wants these shares.
They're buying them in the secondary markets.
We have half as many publicly traded companies.
The public would like to participate and this is something Trump can uniquely do.
That the Democrats were trying to stop and slow down, which was MA and IPOs.
I think this will be the year of the mega.
Ipo is to be very exciting for silicon valley.
It's going to be very exciting for the employees at these companies and for the pension funds and the endowments that own shares in these companies.
They're going to be able to take that money and put it to good use, hopefully.
So SpaceX, Android Stripe, Anthropic OpenAI those are on the shortlist obviously, of ones that could go public this year.
A fun one we like to do is the most anticipated media.
That's a fun one.
You know, what are you looking forward to in 2026?
Last year i said superman and andor.
Season two turns out superman did great, indoor did amazing.
It's the best tv show of the 21st century, i think.
Chamath, you said uh, enormity of the files that will be declassified epstein files.
Halfway there,
JFK files.
We haven't seen those.
Gavin said 1923 season two.
I don't even know what that is, but okay.
That's a Taylor.
That's a Taylor.
Oh, that's the Taylor one.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You watching Landman?
Landman's pretty great.
I have not watched that.
Freeberg, you said AI video games.
What do you got this year?
Freiburg, you, you love the media.
You're you're a cinephile.
What are you looking forward to in media in 2026?
This isn't as much as what I'm looking forward to, but I do think the big trend in media is gonna be the citizen journalism doing exposés.
I think that we're just at the beginning of the exposé marathon.
Man on the street.
Man on the street pushing stuff, getting cameras in people's faces.
The work of journalism has been decentralized.
And I think there's gonna be so much more that's gonna be kind of shared and covered this year.
Okay, do you have one?
And, by the way, the difference I would say in terms of what Nick Shirley's doing and what we've seen maybe in the past, but it's gonna be the new trend, is much of the citizen journalism in the past has been to some degree a little bit more passive.
It's sort of like, hey, I caught this thing and I observed it.
But now there are people that are gonna actively take a camera and say hey, I'm gonna go discover this thing.
I'm gonna go deep on it.
And that's what I think we're gonna see happen in a big way this year.
Well, and there's a monetization path.
You have Substack where people can give donations GoFundMes and, on top of that, YouTube allowing you an x, allowing you to share revenue on this particular category, which they previously did.
And as Nick Shirley pointed out, means there is a path to profitability there.
Get more clicks, get more views, you make more money, and then you can reinvest it.
So I think I like your choice a lot.
Chamath, you have something you're anticipating?
He's the exact same thing as freebrook.
I'll just double down and Okay.
And what about you, Sax?
You got something you want to double down on investigative journalism?
No, I thought we were talking about entertainment here.
Well, yeah, it's okay.
These guys went.
These guys zigged where we zagged.
But One of my weird like things that I watch on TikTok that I get stuck on and TikTok just keeps showing me them is these auditing videos.
Have you guys ever seen these?
First, First Amendment auditors?
So these are people who take a camera.
They stand on the street and they just point the camera into someone's store or into a bank's window and they just film the people in the bank.
And then they wind up spraying each other with the person that comes out.
There's always people that come out.
They're like, you can't do that.
You're not allowed to do that.
They're like, okay, I think I would like you to leave.
I don't want to talk to you.
And they just do this and they instigate people to call the police.
And what they're doing is they're auditing whether the police understand first amendment rights.
And then how the police react is basically the end of the video.
Sometimes the police are like, you can't do that.
And they're like, yes, I can call a supervisor.
And then they teach the police officer that you're allowed to stand in public places and film.
Otherwise they're just like hey, they go to the business owner and they tell the business owner this guy's allowed to do this, leave him alone.
I don't know why, but these videos are so entertaining.
Well, there's tension.
There's a lot of tension there and there's something freedom of speech which is the First Amendment, for a reason.
The store owner comes out, sometimes tries to physically confront the guy, but then you'll have a woman walking with her two-year-old child and then she'll get into it and she'll be like exactly, don't violate his constitutional rights.
Yeah, it's so good.
You never know what's going to happen.
Each one of them is like a whole new adventure.
Yeah, i don't know why it's such an interesting form of content.
I like love watching it.
It's a uniquely american phenomenon to yeah um, establish your freedom, your first amendment rights, and.
And they even go into like the really dicey ones where they go to like the parking lot of a prison or into the lobby of a police station and do it, and it gets pretty Spicy.
What do you got, Sax?
You got any media you're looking forward to?
These guys are going First Amendment, investigative journalism, yada, yada.
What do you got, Sax?
Well, the new Christopher Nolan movie's coming out, The Odyssey.
Looks interesting.
Ah, great call.
Great call.
That's mine.
Great call.
I went with The Odyssey.
What is it?
What is that about?
The Odyssey?
Oh, come on.
No, Homer's Odyssey?
Yes, but as interpreted by the great director of our time, Christopher Nolan.
Have any of you idiots actually read The Odyssey?
This is not great.
I'm sorry, but The Odyssey is a terrible book.
All right.
Okay, so we're gonna get some good comments there.
You guys are all such wannabe poser intellectuals.
No, it's just Christopher Nolan is just great.
It's IMAX.
It's gonna be epic.
It's trash.
That book is blech.
You don't like iambic pentameter?
So, so the idea of some confused person making a movie about it is also just a, how do I short that?
Okay.
That is actually, can I short that?
Can I short that movie?
I'm on a poly market.
I'm sure there will be.
You could bet on the, bet on the box office.
Pull it up, Nick.
I bet zero.
Okay.
It's gonna be a lot more than zero.
I'm sure.
I'm also a big fan of Timothée Chalamet in Dune Part 3's coming out.
Oh, really?
I also like Avengers Doomsday.
Wait, Dune 3's coming?
Oh, I love Dune.
Doom part three is coming out.
I think it's gonna be- I love Doom one and two so much.
Two was great.
I think one was a little bit of slow burn, but both was fantastic.
I love the two.
Doomsday will be good.
Doomsday, actually, I go with that.
Avengers Doomsday is gonna be, I think, fantastic.
Robert Downey Jr as Dr Doom, setting up secret wars.
And then you're gonna tie up all the previous Marvel strings into one bow.
Look at the Odyssey, zero.
They're going to use Doomsday to bring back all the characters they killed.
Hey, besties.
Here's a little something.
I think we're about to hit today one million YouTube subscribers.
Before we do our Netflix deal and take the show off of YouTube.
We hit a million before we announced.
Wasn't it supposed to happen like a year and a half ago?
We're gonna have like a million subscriber party a year and a half ago?
You know why?
Ask me what I think.
No, tell me why.
Tell me why Sax, we never tell our subscribers to hit the like button or smash the subscribe button, whatever.
Yeah, every other podcast i watch on youtube and i watch them all they're always like hit the like button, hit the like button, oh god.
Well, you know what they're doing.
Now too, is the.
The big trend now is to just do 10 minute quick hits as news breaks.
So you you this is jason ask me what i think about getting to a million subscribers.
Any thoughts on this seminal moment for the all-in pod hitting one billion subscribers?
Okay, i'm sorry, one million, you're welcome.
Your mom said you're welcome.
You're welcome.
You're welcome.
What's this week got this week in services?
Quarter million, don't worry about it.
Um, it's a nice show.
Don't worry about this, it's a fragile, not bad.
Not bad, hey listen, i love doing it.
Uh, the reason?
So there's four of us.
There's four of us, one of you, so we have four times the subscribers.
Yeah, something like that.
Yeah, hey listen, one of the great things you you learn in media is when you build a super team, a super band, you know it can actually do better than everybody individually.
So collectively, we can do better.
And listen, it's not for me to say, listen, you I think you've adjusted to being Ringo Starr.
Listen, I
Everybody says the same thing to me.
Without the show, this would be propaganda and it would be the Trump's personal Who says that to you.
Everybody.
Whoever comes to the house to walk Moose.
I'm the stir in the drink.
I'm the thing that stirs the drink.
You're keeping the private equity wives watching.
Great job.
Absolutely.
I'm keeping them in.
All the private equities love it.
For every left winger that you keep watching the pod, we probably lose five.
MAGA people.
If we were just the MAGA show.
The MAGA people, they love hating me.
They love hating me.
And they love to come back every week to hate watch me and my takes.
They hate watch.
They do.
Just like they hate watch you, Chamath.
But it's for a different reason.
They tune in to hate you and hate me.
Uh well listen, it's been a great year.
It's been a great year.
Great job, besties.
We kept the band together for one more year.
Let's do a poly market chances.
The all-in podcast makes it to 2027.
Honestly honestly, it's not 100.
Not, it's never 100, it's never 100.
We'll do the best we can.
You guys love the show.
Smash the like button, comment link, subscribe whatever you want to do, write a review, tell everybody how much you love to mount sweaters and we'll see you next.
Voice on another amazing all in podcast.
Bye bye, Wet your feet.
Wet your feet.
Wet your feet.
