CEOInterviews.AI2025 Predictions with bestie Gavin Baker

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Jason Calacanis0:00

Welcome back to the All-In Podcast, everybody. I am your host, Jason Calacanis. I'll put in a bunch of plugs for the projects I'm working on throughout the show to annoy my co-hosts and continue the grift, but it is 2025 and we are doing our bestie awards. It's going to be amazing today. We've got so much to do today with us again for the second time, a truly amazing bestie, Gavin Baker from a treaties capital. Am I correct? Is it a treaty's capital? You put a capital management. Trades management. Oh, a trades management. Okay. And uh

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Gavin Baker0:31

Just call it House of Treaties.

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Jason Calacanis0:33

Oh, nope. Let's not get him in trouble. I pay

Gavin, welcome back to the program. Let us know um just briefly, what does a treaties do?

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Gavin Baker0:42

Thanks for having me here, Jason Chama and Dave. Uh Tradies, we're uh we're crossover firm. We invest publicly and privately in consumer and tech and we go from series A to mega cap.

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Jason Calacanis0:55

Got it. Okay. So, you are a capital allocator. your place bets on technology on the most important new companies in the world. We'll get into that. And this is our prediction show. We did our best awards.

How big is your firm, Gavin?

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Gavin Baker1:09

Uh, well, you just met the guy Freeberg. You don't just ask him how big his firm is.

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Chamath Palihapitiya1:12

The audience wants to know, is this guy a player? Like, what's the deal? You know,

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Gavin Baker1:16

Roughly $4 billion.

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Jason Calacanis1:18

Okay. All right. So, that's about a half an inch bigger than Chimath. He's really worried now. [laughter] He's not that he's the size queen or anything. We'll let your winners ride.

We open source it to the fans and they've just [music] gone crazy with it.

We're going to do a really great prediction show today and we're going to do some super predictions this year. Each bestie gets to make a super prediction or two during the show and we're going to take those super predictions Shimoth and we're going to put them on Poly Market. Yes, that's right. If you don't know Poly Market, there's a prediction market where people can place a wager, a bet, an investment in one or the other side. And uh they're

Image good. It feels like it's blurry.

It's a little blurry. That's the avalanche coming. And so I guess is that the MAGA avalanche? What is this avalanche? Is that people streaming across the border? What's the metaphor here? Jump up. Is that the huge orgasm that you're about to lay down in 2025 rocking?

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Gavin Baker2:28

No, no. This is a shout out to my friend Ruben Osland, who's the director of a bunch of really amazing movies. Um, including the one behind me, Force Measure.

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Jason Calacanis2:38

There you go. All right. We did an amazing partnership with Poly Market. Freeberg, you want to detail the partnership in some way? You I think you helped work on it. Well, we obviously have talked to Shane at Poly Market for some time and we set up a a deal with them where we could put our own markets up on the on the site. So, we're going to talk about a couple of our predictions this year and then Poly Market will post them up on on their site and people can can trade them obviously XUS and we're really excited about it because it'll allow us to kind of track how we're doing and give us the opportunity on an ongoing basis to create markets. So, there'll be an all-in section on Poly Market where you can kind of go in and see the all-in market. It's going to be really cool. Awesome. Fantastic.

And so, we just got we're all wrapping up our our uh ski trip here. Nick, I understand there was some footage, some found footage from the bestie skiing. Is that true? Oh, here we go. Look at this. Here I come down the mountain. Gavin, I want you to rate everybody skiing. Here I come.

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Gavin Baker3:36

Looking great.

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Jason Calacanis3:37

There comes looking good. And then here comes somebody. I think the technical term Joe Londale does for that third person is a beep beep. Okay, here we go. And look at this technique coming down. Look at Sham. Chamop, you really advanced this last season. Look at him cutting those S turns. Gavin, what do you think?

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Gavin Baker3:59

Listen to me. I I made a very strategic decision to stop snowboarding so I could learn to ski with my kids.

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Jason Calacanis4:06

It is so hard to learn how to do something in your 40s. No, I mean if you've never done it, but I do appreciate what you and your brother did for me last season. I learned a couple things. So, it's been my third out there with the Black Bomber.

My third season. It was great.

I am absolutely amazed at the progress you're making. Freeberg, I'm amazed you made it onto the mountain. You You were out there a number of days. You're getting it done.

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David Sacks4:28

I needed new boots and I tore my MCL last season, so I'm in It got really tweaked when I went out there, but I'm good. It was great. I had a lot of fun. I mean, I skied four days. Yeah,

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Jason Calacanis4:37

You skied four days. Okay. I finished my 16th day yesterday, but I took today off just to get prepared here. Yeah, I got 16. I do the executive program, Gavin. I go out for an hour and a half to three hours. Zip, zip, zip. 10 runs and I'm done.

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Gavin Baker4:48

I only ski in the morning.

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Jason Calacanis4:50

Yeah, that's the way to do. Same same. And end at 12:15, have lunch, relax, get a little work done.

Need a healthy healthy mix of outre and ski.

Gavin, how would you compare yourself to what you just witnessed in that video? Your skiing ability. Where would you rank yourself? Clearly, it's me, Chamath, Freeberg, in that ranking. Where would you live in the ranking?

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Gavin Baker5:12

Well, I would say I'd make two observations. First, like I'm in the bottom percentile in terms of natural athleticism, but I do have many, many thousands of hours skiing.

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Jason Calacanis5:22

Great. Okay.

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Gavin Baker5:23

And I would just leave I would just leave it at that.

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Jason Calacanis5:26

Yes. Okay. Well, then we'll be going out with you next year, new bestie.

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Gavin Baker5:31

All right. [laughter]

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Jason Calacanis5:32

We got to get to it. We're going to start off with politics, gentlemen. And we got to keep this moving because there's so many predictions. We're going to do our 2025 prediction for biggest political winner. Now, last year, well, yeah, I think we we got it kind of wrong. Freedberg, you said independent third party in the US. And we did see some of that with, you know, the breakout of Robert Kennedy. Maybe Chimath, you said independent centrists. We didn't get there with that one. And I said darkhorse presidential candidates. Maybe I get a quarter point credit there with

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Chamath Palihapitiya6:02

Wait, hold on. What do you mean we didn't get there? Independent centrists won the election for Magbet.

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Jason Calacanis6:07

Independent centrists won the election. Really? That's what you believe?

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Chamath Palihapitiya6:10

Yeah.

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Jason Calacanis6:10

Okay. I didn't think that it was the independents, but okay.

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Chamath Palihapitiya6:13

I think independent centrists swung the election for Biden in 2020 and then I think they swung the election for Trump in 2024.

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Jason Calacanis6:22

Huh. Is that statistically correct, you think, Freeberg? Do you you buy that independent centrist did the election or Gavin? What do you think?

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Gavin Baker6:29

I think it's right. Like I think a lot of there were a lot of people, not just centrists, but a lot of people who had been lifelong Democratic voters who voted for Trump. So I do think Trump won the centrists. I mean Trump Trump won everything essentially.

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Jason Calacanis6:46

Yeah. Okay. Shabbath, who's your prediction for the biggest political winner of 2025?

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Chamath Palihapitiya6:50

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

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Jason Calacanis7:40

Okay. Fiscal conservatives from Schmath Freeberg. Who's your prediction for the biggest political winner of 2025?

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David Sacks7:47

I also took a a class-based approach. I chose young candidates. So Trump's cabinet picks have an average age of 40 to 45 years old compared to the Biden cabinet where the average age is a little over 59 almost 60 years old. And I do think that this marks the beginning of a new trend in the kind of age range of political candidates shifting younger. So I think that this is something we should expect as candidates start to emerge for the midterms by the end of 2025. we'll start to see younger, new names start to pop up that deliver resonant messages and aren't part of kind of the old guard of, you know, the aging political class. So, I think that's a trend that's kind of underway now.

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Jason Calacanis8:31

Excellent. Young candidates. So, we got fiscal conservatives, young candidates. Gavin, what do you got for the 2025 prediction for biggest political winner?

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Gavin Baker8:37

I would say Trump and Centrism. For my choice for 2025's biggest political winner, I went with something similar to you, Freeberg. I said Gen X and the elder millennials. If you look at the notable Gen X appointments, you got Elon with Doge, you got Sachs, obviously Marco Rubio, my god, it just goes down. And then if you look at the elder millennials, JD Vance, Vake, Tulsi, just a lot of young people. And this is going to be absolutely fantastic, I think, because they're going to start thinking not just about themselves, uh, as the boomers are doing with social security, taxes, real estate, all the different issues that they tend to pick for themselves. They're going to start thinking about maybe their own kids and themselves. So, yeah, it's obviously a sea change is underway.

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Jason Calacanis9:22

So, there you have it, folks. For our predictions for political winner, let's go with political losser here. Prediction for political loser. We'll start off with you, Gavin, and we'll do this a little uh round robin here. will snake it around. Gavin, what do you think? Who'll be the biggest political loser of 2025?

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Gavin Baker9:37

I think Putin. I think Putin is going to lose bigly. Um, so if you are Xi Jinping, you know, Xin, Russia is a client state of China at this point. And if you're Xiinping, what is happening is now a disaster for you because Europe is starting to rearm and which is which will only accelerate this year. that will allow America to take resources out of Europe and put them in uh Japan and South Korea and all over the Pacific. And that makes it a lot harder for you to do what you most want to do, which is reunify um China and Taiwan or invade Taiwan. Uh let's call it what it is. And I just think Xi is going to begin decoupling from Putin. If you're Trump, you want to show that you're independent, that you're not um enthralled to Putin in any way. So, I think Trump is going to be a lot tougher on Putin than people think. And I think he's going to get a very very uh a deal that's very, very bad for Russia and Ukraine. And you know, you've lost half a million people. And for what?

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Jason Calacanis10:51

For what? Exactly. Yeah. And it's a thousand over a thousand days into this. Nobody from the West H, you know, in in the NATO or America. No, no soldiers have lost their lives from our side. We've just given them weapons. And so it's a humiliating defeat so far for Putin. I agree with you. Freeberg, your prediction for the biggest political loser of 2025. Freeberg's prediction.

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David Sacks11:12

I'm going to predict the pro-war neocons who are going to go head-to-head with the JD Vance and Elons and others of the world. And I think that they're going to lose. And I think that there's going to be this kind of big crack in the establishment of this this neocon movement that's been uh very proconlict around the world. And we've heard it in the speeches and in the commentary from JD and others. And I think this is going to be the year it's all going to kind of come to a head. I think they're going to end up on the losing side.

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Jason Calacanis11:42

Can I can I take the other side just just a little bit? So I think that's why you're here. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's right in reality, but I think you know Trump said something very interesting about John Bolton. He said the guy was absolutely crazy. But it was awesome having him in the room when you were negotiating deals cuz people looked at this guy looking angry, red in the face, so excited to hit the nuclear button, so excited to go to war. And you ended up with much better deals. So I think you're going to see probably a lot more bellacosity from the Trump administration than anyone expects and that's just to get a good deal for you know between Russia and Ukraine and then it's to get China to kind of decouple from Russia. So I think the um in reality I think you're right David but I think there will be a lot of rhetoric that is at odds with what you're saying before you end up being wrecked.

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David Sacks12:33

We already see it with Canada with NATO with Taiwan. There's a lot, you know, we're going to do this or this, the tariffs. Obviously, there's just a lot of very aggressive posturing leading up to the negotiations that are hopefully going to get the US good deals. We'll see.

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Jason Calacanis12:48

Shimoth, you have a prediction for your 2025 biggest political loser. Predictions, it's hard to do.

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Chamath Palihapitiya12:54

The uh biggest political loser of 2025 is going to be progressivism. So, November of last year, right after the election, I flew to London and went up to Oxford and I spoke at the Oxford Union and very impressive. My speech was a fullthroated defense of MAGA, but it was mostly an explanation of MAGA. And it was sort of the antidote to progressive instincts that had been riddling the Western G8 countries and was starting to basically come undone. And when you look at what's about to happen in 2025, in Canada, Justin Trudeau is going to lose massively to Pier Polyv. In Germany, AFD looks like they will win. In France, if there's a deadlock and it goes into an election, more than likely, Marine Le Pen is going to win. And then in the UK where you see this unfolding child rape scandal where allegedly upwards of hundreds of thousands of young girls over the course of 20 plus years were being raped by organizations of Pakistani Muslim men who were then not prosecuted for fears of stoking Islamophobia as it turns out by the current prime minister Kier Starmer. And if all of that comes to pass in the UK, I think you're going to see the Labor government fall and I think you're going to see Nigel Farage win. So what do all of these countries look like by the end of 25? It's very much a repudiation of this class-based identity politics. And I think that has enormous ripple effects all throughout the world. And so I think the biggest political loser for 2025 I think stands to be progressivism quote unquote. what they what we labeled progressivism.

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Jason Calacanis14:48

I I took something very similar. I said the racist vocal minority of each one of these parties and there's a little bit of this on either side. You have DEI on one side and then you just have outright racism on the other side and it's probably 5% of MAGA and 5% of the left. And just to recap last year's political predictions for 2024, our predictions for political loser was I said Netanyahu, Freeberg, you said Ukraine and Chimath, you said the Koch family, the GOP.

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Chamath Palihapitiya15:17

I nailed that one. I nailed that one.

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Jason Calacanis15:19

Freeberg, any thoughts on last year's or anything?

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David Sacks15:22

Who lost on the Republican side more than the Koch family, do you think?

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Jason Calacanis15:26

I mean, explain for the audience who maybe aren't as deep into it. Well, I think essentially 2024 was the end of the Republican party as we knew it. And I think what stands in its place is what I would call the MAGA reflection of a coalition of people that will be housed under the label of Republicanism, which is to say that these folks aren't necessarily Republicans. These folks are believers of the MAGA philosophy. they're just using the Republican vessel in order to run their candidates and get elected. And in that overturning of the status quo, what you had was this one family who was at the center for the last few decades of political machinery that essentially decided candidates, that had decided agenda, that had decided policy, and that was the Koch family. And they spent an enormous amount of money to get that which they stood up. Frankly, the literally the day after Citizens United happened in the Supreme Court. And I think that in that lens, those billions of dollars of investment have essentially gone to zero because I don't think it means much of anything anymore. And if you look at the new class of donors who will decide quote unquote Republican policy, it's going to be the the Miriam adds of the world, the Elon Musks of the world. And that's very different than how I think the Cokes used to decide things.

Do you think there's too much money in politics now, Gavin?

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Gavin Baker16:57

Do I think there's too much money in politics now? Um, it's it's a good question. You know, I might feel very very differently if I didn't agree so profoundly with with the largest donor in this political cycle. Yeah. I I would say the reality is is like the the the money as long as the money raised on each side is roughly equivalent. I don't think it really matters. That would that [clears throat] would be my take. You just want some equivalence. That's all.

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Jason Calacanis17:35

All right, let's do our 2025 predictions for biggest business winner. Freeberg, why don't you start us off? Biggest business winner for 2025. What's your prediction? So, I feel like we're at a really interesting inflection point that is going to make 2025 the year of autonomous hardware or robotics.

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David Sacks17:55

If 2024 was the year of kind of compute buildout and the roll out of AI systems in software, I think 2025 will be the year of the robot. You know, there's a company I we just placed an order today actually out of China called Unitry. Gavin, have you looked at this company? Yeah, it's pretty wild, actually. It's an incredible business, incredible product. So, their GO2 robot is $1,600. Has an API. Here it is. You can run a payload on it. It's got LAR on it. It's got kind of intelligence guidance systems on it. This is the robot system that was used on some of those videos we looked at earlier this year where there were machine guns mounted to the back and it was basically a new kind of field soldier. It's an autonomous field soldier, but really you can use it in scientific applications. We're looking at using them in our uh on our on our test farms where it can wander the farm and take images and report data back to us. And at such a low cost at like less than $3,000, you can do some incredible things with it. So, this business just raised a couple hundred million dollars last month from mostly Chinese investors. It's a Chinese company and I think that there's going to be, you know, other similar type businesses. You know, it kind of takes a long time for things to work and then all of a sudden they happen faster than you could have ever imagined. I think this is going to be the year where we're all going to look at humanoid robots and autonomous systems and be like, "Oh my god, I can't believe this is here." Um, so this could be the year.

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Jason Calacanis19:20

What a good choice. Such a great strong choice for the biggest winner. And uh I think the quote you're looking for is how did you go bankrupt slowly and then all at once? That's how these technology changes. And man, I would love to have one of these for the ranch to just run around and do the perimeter security. Sorry, Nick. Pull up the You guys got to watch this if you haven't seen it. Nick, find the video of the GO2 with the wheels on it managing terrain. And everyone thought this was a BS video that it was like CGI, wasn't real. It was AI generated. But like this thing is just incredible. Here it is. This is a real video of this thing.

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David Sacks19:52

Yeah. And it could learn from an LLM too, right? Like a large language model could teach it how to do something. Yeah.

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Jason Calacanis19:59

Gavin, is this real? Like what's your sense?

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Gavin Baker20:01

Absolutely real. Yeah.

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Jason Calacanis20:03

Yeah. I want to get the G1, which is their humanoid robot.

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David Sacks20:06

Yeah. So, pull up the humanoid. It's really cool.

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Jason Calacanis20:09

Yeah. It's a little more expensive.

I mean, $16,000 is the cost of a used Prius. Let's be honest, that's in spitting distance of being affordable.

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David Sacks20:18

Here's the G1. Look at this thing. 16 grand. And this thing you can, you know, you can basically command it to do things for you in your house or in your factory or in your workplace.

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Jason Calacanis20:30

Oh, come on. I knew you would do it. Oh, I was going to say maybe we could get a poker dealer. Maybe Bo, you know, I wonder if this thing could deal.

Do you guys remember that robot that was on stage for our all-in holiday spectacular that 1x?

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David Sacks20:45

So, my my brother made an observation. He said as soon as that robot came out, it's like everyone just wanted to abuse it. He's like, "Humans have this very interesting nature where like the robot emerges and all that humans want to do is like hurt the robot." It's like a very strange revelation of human behavior. Yeah. Like it just it's like, "Oh, here's something I could dominate. Here's something I can tell because we're so threatened by it. We want to make sure that we're the top of the species here." And it doesn't feel like it's going to be for much longer. I mean, these things will kick our ass pretty soon.

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Jason Calacanis21:15

Oh. Anyway, these things are amazing. I think this is going to be the year of the robots. That's my prediction.

Well, year of the robots is your prediction. I love it. Uh Gavin, what do you got?

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Gavin Baker21:22

Profoundly agree. I think Year of the Robots um inclusive of FSD, you know, I think FSD works today and it's going to it's it's going to cross into mainstream adoption where I already notice particularly if I'm taking an Uber late at night. I really really prefer to have a Tesla. Just sometimes you get an Uber driver who's who's tired and I just feel a lot safer if they have the FSD running and then obviously using it for yourself is amazing. But I think it's going to continue compounding at an accelerating rate. I think the in a lot of ways what I would say broadly is I think for a while it's going to be big businesses are winners. Big businesses that use AI thoughtfully. And the reason is is that with what is happening, what what 03 showed us, OpenAI's new model, a combination of reasoning and test time compute, like I think you're if you're a big business and you can pay a million dollars to let an AI think for 6 weeks about the most important question for your business, that's going to be a profound advantage relative to small businesses that can't afford that. And by the way, we are the other like inferred compute is going to be the the kind of derivative winner of that. We're going to run out of GPUs, accelerators, compute in 2025 the same way we did in 23.

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Jason Calacanis22:56

Okay. So, you're also long Nvidia and chip makers, grock, etc. because we're finding new uses for all that compute.

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Gavin Baker23:04

Absolutely.

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Jason Calacanis23:06

Okay. Very good. Chimath, do you have a prediction for your biggest business winner of 2025? Sir,

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Chamath Palihapitiya23:12

I think the biggest business winner of 2025 are going to be dollar denominated stable coins. Oo, I'll make two points. In 2024, two critical things happened. The first is that stable coins essentially became uncoupled from crypto volatility and it started to be used for wholesale useful functions in running businesses and there's an image here that starts to show that. So independent of crypto volatility what you saw were stable coin usage just rising up and to the right. That's an incredibly important decoupling that happened in 2024. The second, and this data is still just trickling in, but it's an incredible stat, stable coin usage at the end of the second quarter of 2024 was about 1.1 billion transactions. That summed to $8.5 trillion of transaction volume. If you compare that to Visa over the same period, it was more than double Visa's transaction volume. So I think what we have now is something that has fundamentally crossed a point of no return. Similar to how last year I thought that the big trend was going to be Bitcoin in 2024, I would say that the big trend in 25 is stable coin usage. I think we're going to finally attack the duopoly of Visa and Mastercard. I think you're going to see an innumerable number of use cases that sit and use stable coin rails. I think when Donald Trump becomes president, I think you're going to see him go after incredibly high credit card transactions and costs. You're already seeing cracks in consumer credit anyways because of these high APRs. All of this stuff is going to come to a head in 2025, I think. And I think stable coins could quadruple or quintuple by the end of 25. I think it's just going to be an enormous market.

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Jason Calacanis25:33

Great choice. Should they be regulated? Chimath, we saw at some of these congressional hearings, Tether was kind of dragged for being the primary transfer and and monetary tool for terrorism, for getting around sanctions, and for human trafficking. Should it be regulated, and how? I I don't think I'm qualified to say how it should, but I think the point is that there are these immutable logs that sit in between and on either side of all of these transactions. And so I think the knowledge is there and there are a whole bunch of third party services that add that intelligence layer. I think the the thing to really question is if you just took 300 basis points of drag out of the global economy, how valuable would that be? And I think it would be valuable just in the United States alone to the tune of a trillion dollars. So the idea that you wouldn't do it at this point is somewhat quizzical to me. So I just think that the economic justification for this now is just so profound. Gavin, let me ask you a hard question there as well. Should the United States government give up the let's face it, you know, they they have a bit of a strangle hold. They've got a bit of a monopoly on US dollars. These things are a competitor. And we were sitting here on this program for the last couple years talking about the bricks and them starting their own currency. Aren't these in some ways similar to that and they would take people off the USD standard? How do you look at that? Because that is the criticism that some people in power have put forward. I do I do think that they might be very good for the world, but I do think they would be very bad for America if they replaced if some constellation of stable coins became the new reserve currency. It is such a an advantage to be able to borrow in your own currency and to give that up lightly. That just that means you control you you you control the real size of your debt at all times. Oh wow, we have a big big debt. I mean, this is a little bit like what we just did. Let's just have let's just let inflation run hot and oh wow, that debt's a lot smaller than it was effectively. So I think it would be a big mistake. Freeberg, you have any thoughts on it? We we've been talking about currency here a whole bunch over the last couple years. any thoughts on stable coins and and just the uh monopoly we have on it?

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David Sacks28:08

I I don't know enough about stable coins.

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Jason Calacanis28:11

Well, that'll be one of our big topics for the year and we should uh definitely invite Jeremy air from USD on or USDC USDC. Jeremy, I mentioned by the way that I had this small little product that I exposed to the world which is just our research and we sit it on top of Substack. again, the tools aren't very good and we use Stripe. And Jeremy reached out to me and he's like, I'll just rebuild all of your payment rails on using US dollar stable coins. And it's a no-brainer because I'm spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in transaction costs that now I can just save and use to hire somebody else or just pay the team more. And so I just paying 10% to Substack and the 3%. Yeah, if it's obvious for me, it's obvious for everybody else. My biggest business winner prediction for 2025 is Tesla and Google. I think this is going to be the year of AI and robotics obviously, but I am just absolutely amazed at the comeback that Google has made with AI and I'm absolutely in awe of what Elon did with Colossus. If those of you don't know, Shensen Wong, Michael Dell, they all obviously participated in building out XAI and they were shocked. They couldn't believe that they stood up a 100,000 GPUs in under 45 days. Was it Gavin? Something in that neighborhood. It was a tremendous effort. And uh you know Tesla, right? Is that Tesla? Well, Elon, Tesla, XAI, and Google. That cohort who are investing heavily in AI, those two specifically, those two three names I think are going to be the biggest winners next year. They're going to come out with some things that people didn't anticipate. I don't I don't think people are anticipating what Google's going to come out with because Gemini deep research I keep telling people this and I'm using the app is so impressive. Drop what you're doing right now. Pause the podcast. Download Gemini and just start playing with deep re search on your desktop. Pay the 20 bucks for it. It is mindblowing. It blows anything else in the market out of the water. Period. Full stop. It is a step function higher.

All right, I'll just leave it at that.

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David Sacks30:23

Jason, shouldn't you uh just going with the vibe of the podcast, shouldn't you explain what it is?

J

Jason Calacanis30:28

What? Yeah. Sorry. Okay. So, what it does is Good call. Good call. Yeah. If you wanted to create a model, let's say, and I did this where I said, "Hey, make me a model based upon what it would take to replace all the cars and trips in the United States with full self-driving cars. What would that cost to do?" And if you ask that to Chat GPT or Grock or, you know, Claude, it's going to give you a decent answer. What deep research does is it goes and it figures out what the subcomponents of each of those questions would be and then it fires off multiple threads and then it searches the web in real time which Google is extremely good at and then it summarizes it gives citations and it produces a report that looks like something that Gartner Group McKenzie Boston Consulting Group would have spent I don't know 30 days on Gavin and a million dollars a half million dollars it's [ __ ] bonkers how good this is but the amount of comput it takes is extraordinary. That's why Chat GPT released something similar that's 200 bucks a month. The 01 Pro I think they call it. And then this one is like 20 bucks from Gemini. Anyway, given what Google has access to, YouTube, your G Drive, your Google Docs, etc. Your Gmail, it's going to do things that you wouldn't anticipate. Like if you were asking this question, it might look in your Gmail for possibilities to answer those questions or YouTube videos of channels you subscribe to. So, this is going to, I think, knock people's socks off and solve problems that people didn't know they had. Is that a pretty good explanation, Gavin?

G

Gavin Baker31:57

Yeah, I think it's great.

J

Jason Calacanis31:58

For last year, our predictions for business winner, Chimatas said bootstrapped and or profitable startups. I think that's a really great pick and that came to pass. We're seeing some of those go public and raise money at higher valuations or not go out of business. Freeberg, you said commodities businesses. I'm not sure how that did. Did you know? Uh, did you check on that?

D

David Sacks32:16

Pretty flat. Yeah, we didn't have a lot of the inflationary pressures that I think were underlying that thesis. So,

J

Jason Calacanis32:23

Got it.

D

David Sacks32:24

It ended up being, I'd say, a loser relative to other indices you could have bought this year.

J

Jason Calacanis32:29

I said training data owners like Reddit, New York Times, Google, etc. Reddit stock up 224% in 2024. And they launched their own Reddit answers.

Yeah, I think I got that one. Uh New York Times stock is up as well. And they uh fired off that lawsuit with Open AI. All right. Now, we're going to move on to the 2025 biggest business loser predictions in 2024. Shmat said pro sports teams because they hit peak valuations. That's looking like a pretty good prediction. Freeberg, you said vertical SAS companies because of AI disruption. That's another one that seems like a great prediction. I said smartphone manufacturers. Apple stock was up 30% in 2024, but I think we've all seen that these uh smartphones aren't advancing and people are taking their times. The sales of those are down. Services are up. I would take the other side on pro sports teams. It feels like that market is about to be institutionalized and funds are going to start buying pro sports teams.

D

David Sacks33:22

Okay.

J

Jason Calacanis33:23

That ultimately and ultimately capital markets have way more resources than kind of the wealthy individuals who've done it for to date. So I just think it's the amount of money that can go after pro sports teams is about to, you know, 10x 100x.

C

Chamath Palihapitiya33:38

No, I think I think you're totally right. The the reason I said that last year was it was pretty clear to me at the time and the NBA was the canary in the coal mine that there was a viewership problem in professional sports and specifically in the NBA the game has devolved into essentially rebounds and dunks or three-pointers and the issue with that is that it becomes just meaningfully less interesting to watch at the same time because of the the fact that the TV deals are really what determines the discounted value of these sports franchises. The TV deal was so enormous that it creates no reliable rivalries anymore because people will hopcotch teams almost every year because the compensation that they can get is just so obscene quite honestly. And I think what happens is sports will have a decent run until the next TV deals get done. M and I think if you for example take pharma ads outside of TV so like that pool shrinks if you have less viewership and so you can sell the remaining ads less effectively because there's just fewer of them and then there's fewer buyers and it shrinks yet again then the dollar pool that the television networks and the streamers are going to be willing to pay for sports will go down and the group that will be the most price sensitive are exactly who you said Gavin meaning the non trophy buyer so like you know when I bought into the Warriors I bought it purely as a trophy asset and I was price insensitive but I agree with you that now that you have the PE firms on the cap tables of these sports franchises those folks are all DCFs those folks are all Excel models I don't think that they're buying things for emotion I don't think they've grown up thinking I want to own this thing not using institutional LP dollars so I just think that's why that's why I said that in 24. So I just

J

Jason Calacanis35:34

On behalf of Phil Helmouth and I, we appreciate you made that vanity investment for the number of times we got to sit in your courtside seats. [laughter]

C

Chamath Palihapitiya35:42

Yeah, cuz I never we made with NBA players.

J

Jason Calacanis35:44

I never went to the games. I should have gone to more games.

D

David Sacks35:46

I went to your games and almost got thrown out of your seats. I got a red card one time. It's true.

J

Jason Calacanis35:51

Is it true? You did? Oh, you don't know that.

D

David Sacks35:53

I got I got a I got a call. I got a call. I think it was from the Warriors or it's from the NBA. Something to the effect of this guy that was sitting in your seats was almost kicked out. And I said, "Excuse me?" cuz I knew that it was it was the Knicks game in fairness and and he was like jawboning our own players.

J

Jason Calacanis36:10

I was getting into it with Bogat and with David Lee because I was unbelievable.

D

David Sacks36:15

I told Steve Kerr, "Listen, you're up 30 on my Knicks. Sit these guys down. This is Bush League. What if Steph Curry gets hurt out there?" Like, and uh you know, Boga told me to shut up on Andre Iguod.

J

Jason Calacanis36:26

Boat told him to basically go pound sand in a moment.

D

David Sacks36:28

He basically did. It was the funniest thing ever. I haven't. This is what happens when you get

J

Jason Calacanis36:32

B is one of our friends. He's one of our good friends. That's why it's so funny.

D

David Sacks36:36

But they came. They come over Freeberg and they tap you on the shoulder. I'm with my wife. She's mortified. And the guy hands you a card. And the card says, "You've been uh warned one time and one time only about abusive, you know, uh, behavior. If we have to warn you one more time, you will be escorted out."

J

Jason Calacanis36:56

So I look at the guy and I say, "But" and. And he goes, "Read the card." I read the card. I say, He goes, "Give me a thumbs up." That was it. I never

D

David Sacks37:04

That was it.

J

Jason Calacanis37:05

You're not supposed to. Then three years later, I'm sitting in the same seats. I'm interacting with Draymond during the finals games and everybody's hokei with it.

D

David Sacks37:13

When you say interacting, what do you mean when you say interacting?

J

Jason Calacanis37:15

Wait, hold on. Gavin wanted to make a point about what I just

G

Gavin Baker37:18

No, I just want to just just come back to Jim because for sure these private equity guys, there's DCFS. The NBA has been terribly managed. I think if LeBron said they have a big problem, you know, and I'd separate the NBA is the worst managed, NFL is probably the best managed. But the one kind of counterpoint I would say on the TV rights is Google bought Sunday Ticket and are extremely happy with it. Amazon and Netflix also bought, you know, both bought NFL games and are really happy with them. And so I just think those three companies, it doesn't really matter to them if pharma ads go away. In 18 months, you're going to be able to dynamically create an ad for each individual person and show it to them. And if you're a high-value user with a, you know, that Google knows that you're about to book a vacation, you know, they'll dynamically generate, you know, whatever, you know, hotel destinations you want and show click here. So, I just think sports, as long

J

Jason Calacanis38:15

As they command the eyeballs that they do, and I for sure if the NBA doesn't fix it, the value of those franchises will start to decline. But, um, just the fact that all of the biggest tech companies are so happy with the sports kind of rights that they've bought, they're going to buy them all. Every sport will go to one of those companies. Gavin, maybe maybe you're closer to this, but why wouldn't Apple, Amazon or Google just back up the truck to the NBA and say, 'We'll take the whole thing and then anybody who's got an iPhone gets the NBA for free and then everybody else has to pay and they figure it out in the back and they lose a, you know, five billion. They make two billion. Who cares? It's a rounding error for Apple.'

G

Gavin Baker38:57

I agree. And they, you know, I mean, they all, all except for Apple really, and Apple, they have, I think, an MLS deal, but they all kind of stuck their toe in the water, and I think they feel like, wow, the water's warm. Let's dive in. Um,

J

Jason Calacanis39:10

Okay.

G

Gavin Baker39:11

Yeah.

J

Jason Calacanis39:12

And the new deal is an 11-year deal for the NBA, so these things don't come up that often, but we'll see over time. Maybe somebody will buy one of these media companies and inherit them. Okay. Biggest business loser for 2025. What's your prediction, Gavin Baker? Government service providers.

G

Gavin Baker39:29

You do not you do not want to have the United States government at any level as over 35% of your revenue.

J

Jason Calacanis39:36

Good choice. Yes. Obviously in the age of Doge, they might not be spending wildly and they might actually look at the bill. They might check the bill.

G

Gavin Baker39:44

Crazy thought. Crazy thought.

J

Jason Calacanis39:45

Yeah. Crazy thought to actually check the bill. You never know. Shimoth, who do you predict will be the biggest business loser of 2025?

C

Chamath Palihapitiya39:53

Well, this is a little bit precarious but I don't know what the percentage draw down from here will be but I think when we look back the absolute dollar draw down of the mag 7 will be in the trillions of dollars. Okay. And the reason is not necessarily because of the underlying fundamentals of these companies but I am a little bit worried and I tweeted this a few days ago about just the general concentration of the top 7, 8, 10 companies in the indices. I think it's approaching 40%. And I think that when you look at these historic concentrations, they've generally foreshadowed a big draw down. And unfortunately I don't see how you can sort of you know inoculate yourself from that risk. So independent of the quality of these companies because I think these companies are exceptional businesses. I do think you've just had too much concentration and I think it it's it is a setup to retrade and give back and in that it could even be 10%. But 10% in the mag 8 will be a couple trillion bucks and so on absolute would be a lot. Yeah. An absolute it's a lot. Okay.

J

Jason Calacanis41:19

Freeberg who do you predict? You predict max 7 government service providers for you. Gavin Freeberg who do you predict will be the biggest business loser of 2025?

D

David Sacks41:27

Uh I'm I'm sort of on the same vein as Gavin. I went with the kind of old defense and aerospace providers Boeing, Loheed Martin, Rathon, defense 1.0 driven by kind of China dominance driven by US defense budgets that I think are going to need to shift towards a more kind of tech oriented and ROId driven rationalization and pricing and spend. So the palunteers and obviously the world will benefit and I also just think like there's a lot of failure at scale with these businesses. they've gotten too clunky and too bureaucratic as we've seen with Boeing from their space program failure in 2024 uh to the challenges with their their airplane business. But I think that this government contracting business across the board is going to be deeply challenged this year with all the new blood.

J

Jason Calacanis42:11

So the cost plus are going to suffer is what you're saying and the Androls will thrive month. Would you guys add, just a question, would you guys add the traditional consulting companies then to the mix as well? Like if you

G

Gavin Baker42:24

That's a good point too.

J

Jason Calacanis42:25

That's a great one. Yeah. If we think what we talked about with

G

Gavin Baker42:27

Like the Yros, the Tatas, the HCL's, the Accentur,

J

Jason Calacanis42:31

Cognizance, Hognissance, the EMY, all these folks are in real trouble if that if that also happens.

G

Gavin Baker42:37

That's right.

J

Jason Calacanis42:38

You mean you the efficiency that they'll gain will also be felt by their customers and their customers might not hire them. When you got a bunch of software entrepreneurs that are now advising and informing the federal government on how to run their their operations, I'm pretty sure that some of these service providers are going to get washed out. So, it's a good idea.

G

Gavin Baker42:55

The thing to keep in mind is like cost plus is a fancier way of saying time and materials and time and materials is a fancy way of saying human labor arbitrage. And I think that all of that stuff will get extremely scrutinized in 2025 because if you are buying, you know, $800 waste baskets and, you know, $9,000 uh umbrella hangers because of time and materials and all of this other crazy stuff that's in the system and all of that gets washed out, then a lot of these folks and their business models will will get put under severe stress.

J

Jason Calacanis43:30

The alignments, you know, you show me an incentive, I'll show you the outcome. the alignment of cost plus is to just keep being inefficient and and waste and and these defense contractors are taking 60 70 80% off the price of each piece of munitions or vehicle.

G

Gavin Baker43:48

Yeah, cost is terrible. No, just cost is terrible. That's all.

J

Jason Calacanis43:53

All right. For my biggest business loser prediction, I had to go through a lot of the uh people I've uh criticized and started fights with over the past year. commercial real estate came to mind because these leases are going to keep coming up and I think like they kick the can down the road a little bit. So I started there. Then I looked at Micro Strategies and that made no sense to me that they were trading at two, three, four times the book value of their Bitcoin and I think that's not sustainable. I looked at Truth Social which is like doing four or $5 million in revenue and is valued at 7 billion. That makes absolute no logical sense. But I think the one that is the most overpriced of of all of this and I think is going to see their peak valuation is open AI. I think the headwinds for open AI are being absolutely underappreciated. Like I said before in my previous one uh my previous prediction, Google is kicking ass. XAI is just getting started in building out so much big iron. Microsoft was basically on another podcast almost like laughing at OpenAI for selling them the source code and that they didn't even need OpenAI anymore because they had it all. They don't need them and they own all the big iron. I I think OpenAI's valuation made no sense. I don't think they're going to be able to keep charging the prices they're charging. And I think AWS, Apple, Google, XAI, this cohort are going to really take that $157 billion valuation and make it the peak valuation of the company. And I do I do think that there is a nonzero chance they could lose their process and these court cases of transferring 157 billion dollars in value from a nonprofit into a for-profit. I think that whole thing could blow up in your

G

Gavin Baker45:46

Super prediction is open AI will not be able to convert from nonprofit to for-profit in 2025.

J

Jason Calacanis45:50

I think that that's a small piece of it but that's a really interesting super prediction. Insert poly market graphic here. Super prediction. Will open AI convert? Is that something in

G

Gavin Baker46:02

2025? Yeah. By the way, you know, they're projecting I think in the the the leaked financials 12 billion in revenue next year, JCAL. So unlike a lot of the other things you were talking about, this is a real business with real revenue, real scale, real growth, real technology. It's it's a little bit distinct from kind of being a meme stock or being a

J

Jason Calacanis46:20

Exactly. That's why I'm picking it because I think it's easy to pick a meme stock. It's hard to pick a real company, but I do think that that revenue, which you know, a lot of it is consumer and a lot of it is developers. The developers I know all want to do open source. They don't want to have to be beholden to OpenAI and Sam Alman. They would much rather and they're already setting their queries across multiple different stacks and trying different ones. I don't think there's any loyalty to OpenAI or Gemini or any of these services. I think they'll just go with eventually open source in many cases. So anyway, that's my thought on OpenAI 2025. Biggest business deal. What do you got? Shamoth. What's your biggest business deal for 2025 prediction? Shamath, what do you got? You said Starling to go public last year.

C

Chamath Palihapitiya47:04

That hasn't happened on that one. Yeah, totally rifted on that one. I think that this is the year that we will see the collapse of the traditional auto OEMs. And I think that the the deal that happened at the end of 2024 with Honda, Nissan, I think is a bit of a signal to what the industry has to do, which is to go through a massive wave of consolidation. I think that Tesla is just in an incredible position with the quality of their vehicles and the quality of their software and the quality of their autonomy with FSD. So I suspect that after a couple of more meaningful product releases, it's just going to trigger the realization by the public capital markets that these auto OEMs are uninvestable. And I think the result of that will be a wave of auto mega mergers. And for people who don't know, Honda and Nissan signed an agreement to merge and Mitsubishi is involved because they're part of I think Nissan's alliance. This would obviously get rid of all of the redundancy, but I think this is going to touch like the European OEMs are in real trouble. You know, what does Volkswagen do? It's not clear. What does Stalantis do? It's not clear. These are all businesses that are effectively melting icebergs. And so, you know, typically melting iceberg businesses when they get put under pressure from smart investors like Gavin and and and his ilk, they're forced to merge.

J

Jason Calacanis48:45

Gavin, Gavin, you got a spread trade. Are you short these names?

G

Gavin Baker48:48

Um, I I would rather not talk about specific positions. I would just say I agree 100% with Chimoth. I think there going to lose their Chinese business because they don't make competitive products anymore. If there's not massive protectionism and we're seeing signs of that, they'll be caught between Tesla and the Chinese OEMs.

J

Jason Calacanis49:09

And I think the only way that this doesn't Chimath's the only risk to Chimath's prediction is just government intervention because they're such big employers and you know often seen as national champions. But absent really significant government support, they're all in deep trouble.

Okay, well done, Freeberg. Last year, you said there'd be some blockbuster deals for rights holders, licensing data for AI training, and Reddit did in fact sign two of those. So, uh, a great prediction from you for last year on biggest business deal. What do you got this year? See if you can go two for two.

D

David Sacks49:45

Was it just Reddit? I should probably look it up.

What do you got this year? I'll I'll just follow on my Year of the Robot theme. I do think that there's going to be massive funding deals similar to what we saw this past year for compute buildout. I think we're going to see massive funding deals for hardwarebased manufacturing buildout in the United States. And I think that those deals may take the form of kind of traditional equity from private markets or they may have some component that includes government support to to kind of motivate and drive and accelerate onshore manufacturing. We're not going to go in the US to making stuff that is like last century. I think we're going to need to move manufacturing to the next decade, next century of of production. And I think that's going to mean making some of these autonomous and robotic type systems that are going to become really critical for us, particularly with China doing this massive ramp up and buildout for both drones and robots and autonomous vehicles. So I think we're going to need to kind of onshore a lot of this and so that'll be a big amount of capital that's going to move and so you'll see a bunch of these big blockbuster deals for hardware build out in the US.

G

Gavin Baker50:55

Gavin, what do you think is going to be the biggest business deal in 2025? I think the biggest business deal is that they're going to be deals. I think there's you're going to see a title wave of M&A after four years of not being able to get anything done. I think there's an enormous amount of pent-up demand. So, kind of point number one. Point number two, something will happen with Intel and that will be big and hopefully it's good for America. And then I do think you will see a lot of these frontier AI labs that are independent be acquired. You know, I thought your points were well taken, Jason, about, you know, everything that uh, you know, Google is bringing to bear and X X AI owns their own compute. I mean, you guys can choose whichever one of these three you like, but the ultimate AI winner will be the one with the lowest cost of infrastructure cost, the lowest cost of compute, and definitionally, you can't be the lowcost provider if you're renting your compute from someone else because of markups.

J

Jason Calacanis51:53

Yeah, because there's a markup. If you're buying your compute from Azure or AWS or Google, you were at a disadvantage relative to their internal services over time.

G

Gavin Baker52:06

So, the full stack wins. Great prediction for me.

J

Jason Calacanis52:08

Last year, my prediction was that bite dance would go public or Tik Tok would get divested or some version of this. We are but 18 days away from figuring out if the Supreme Court will do just that. My prediction for this year, I was looking at all the media companies, gentlemen. And there were so many possibilities there. Warner Brothers, we talked about Apple and Disney, you know, a couple years ago. But I think the age of autonomy is here. And I think there is going to be some partnerships that will happen between Amazon, Door Dash, Uber, Tesla, Whimo, and that cohort. And I would not be surprised to see Tesla could buy Uber right now for about 10% of its market cap. and Whimo could spin out and partner with Uber. Amazon could buy Door Dash fairly easily. And with the wrath of Khan being over, the wrath of Lena being over, Gavin, it is possible that mega deals like these could go through. And if a couple of mega deals go through like this, whoever uh you know teams up here could win autonomy, delivery, food delivery, and e-commerce. This is a ginormous space. And I think, listen, I don't I haven't spoken to uh obviously my friend about it, but Tesla buying Door Dash and Uber or Amazon buying Door Dash and Uber could be the greatest service ever created if you're wanted to build a super app.

G

Gavin Baker53:34

The only thing I would add and I think dubtales with what you said and and um Freedberg's kind of year of the robot is autonomous drones. There's a company called Zipline which my firm is an investor in.

J

Jason Calacanis53:46

Fantastic.

G

Gavin Baker53:47

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

J

Jason Calacanis54:07

Well, and Amazon in I believe it's Texas is actually doing these now. They've got 60,000 SKUs is my understanding already being delivered and they just drop it in your backyard and it's there in 45 minutes.

G

Gavin Baker54:20

We talked about this like two weeks ago. I um you know Maitron in China's got this and they they have food delivery happening with these drones. By the way um just kind of dovetailing off of this. I think the other big deal potential in 2025 just to be very specific is a deal with Whimo. You know Whimo launched in SF in August 2023 in kind of an open market way. Uber and Lyft were 66 and 34% market share at the time. And in 15 months in November of 2024, Whimo is now at 22% market share of rides in SF, which is the same as Lyft. And Uber is now down to 55. So Whimo ate into both Uber and Lyft's market share by on the order of 12 points um in just 15 months. And now they're launching in LA, in Austin, all over the country. They're already in Phoenix. So I think you could see a massive and by the way, you know, they also just moved the the hardware platform over to a new drop new device that's supposedly going to bring the capex significantly down for new launches. So you'll see much improved ROIC metrics, which means that there's a much kind of more efficient way to use capital to scale. So the system works. It is scaling. They're opening up in new markets. You could see something happen with Whimo this year that could either be something like a massive financing, an IPO, or a merger or acquisition with one of the big ride sharing companies. I don't know if that makes as much strategic sense as I've thought about it a little bit, but I do think you could see a big deal with Whimo. This company is, if you guys have not been in a Whimo, uh I think we all talked about this, but it's an incredible experience and everyone I know of every age group that has been for a ride in Whimo comes out of it saying that is the future. this is going to absolutely dominate how I'm going to get around when I'm in the future. Most people say it's slow right now and monotonous and they don't like it. But, you know, because it does take weird routes, but that'll be fixed over time obviously. And uh just in case anybody thinks I'm talking my book here, I have exposure to all these almost all these companies in a in a significant way because I believe in the entire space. One and a half% of rides in the US and globally it's less than 1% are done by ride sharing. The TAM is going to go to 20% in a very short period of time and it's going to be across the board. There's going to be a lot of winners here and to my favorite Uber obviously they have deals with eight people and it's a global market. BYD produces cars for half the price of any other car manufacturer and they have full self-driving and it's pretty darn good from what I understand. So this is going to be a global competition and that means if you want to win that global competition is something like Uber and Door Dash, Whimo, Amazon, BYD, you're going to see some interesting partnerships happen very quickly, I believe, because there's so much at stake. All right, any final thoughts on biggest business deals? I think I maybe have a good one here. Consolidation in the transportation space. Okay, moving on to 2025. most contrarian belief.

J

Jason Calacanis57:09

Last year, enterprise value of open AI goes down from Chimath. It roughly doubled, but I just picked it as my prediction. So, I think we're s we're sympotico on uh what we think long term. Freeberg, you said increased probability of a nuclear weapon being used for the first time since World War II.

D

David Sacks57:25

Thank the Lord that that didn't happen. Again, this is contrarian beliefs. People are going out there.

J

Jason Calacanis57:29

I I didn't predict it was going to happen. I just said the probability went up. It was It's a tough It's a tough thing to call obviously. This is most contrarian belief. I think it's fine. Dr. Doom strikes again. It's all good.

I picked Apple would become the player in AI and they did launch Apple intelligence, but it sucks. I mean, it sucks. It's terrible. I just bought the Google Pixel Fold 9. And the Gemini works perfectly. It does everything that Siri is supposed to do. If you say, 'Please play this song.' If you say, 'Please download this app.' If you say, 'Add this to my calendar.' It does it and it does it in one fifth or tenth the amount of time that Apple takes and Apple gets it wrong every time. It's a piece of garbage. It's a disgrace. Disgraciad Apple.

G

Gavin Baker58:18

Apple intelligence is even worse than Copilot which is saying something.

J

Jason Calacanis58:22

Jason, would you like to announce you've bought the domain? Disgat.com. I own it. I'm not [laughter] selling it right now. It it redirects to Jake Paul.

G

Gavin Baker58:34

Gav Gavin Gavin, do you have any idea? Redirects to Jake Paul. What word he's even saying when he says that

J

Jason Calacanis58:41

It's Disgraciad is what people used to say in Brooklyn for somebody who is disgraceful. It is a Italian American slang.

G

Gavin Baker58:52

How do you spell it? I don't. You own the domain. You don't even know.

J

Jason Calacanis58:56

D I S G R A Z I A D. Disgraciat. Yes. And if you type in Disgraiat, it goes to Jake Paul. I bought it when I was watching the Tyson fight. It was so disgraceful. I was saying to my brother Josh the Black Bomber. This is and he just said Disgraciad. And I just said, I wonder if that's available as a domain. I'm redirecting Disgraciad right now, Tim Cook, to Apple Intelligence, the website. [laughter]

Do you guys think Tyson threw that fight that it was part of the deal? thousand%. Yes, thousand%.

G

Gavin Baker59:30

I would love I think somebody said Saudi Arabia was offering to host a remake or whatever a redo a rematch. A rematch of the fight where the winner would make 50 million and then we'll see what's what.

J

Jason Calacanis59:43

And the loser gets zero. Yes. And the loser gets zero.

This is a good use of the kingdom's money. The people want to know. We will all fly out there and do an all-in episode from that.

Did you guys see this? Did you see this thing where is it is it Logan Paul is fighting Conor McGregor in India and Conor McGregor is gonna get $250 million.

G

Gavin Baker1:00:04

What?

J

Jason Calacanis1:00:05

Yeah. It's like a whole boxing or PR stunt. I I think it's boxing and it's meant to sort of like bring a bunch of tourists into India to show them the country. But it's a quarter of a billion dollars to Conor McG.

How do we get in on this grift? Freeberg versus Baker. Polyhoatia versus Calacanis.

G

Gavin Baker1:00:24

Oh my gosh.

J

Jason Calacanis1:00:25

We need to get in our own celebrity boxing. Who would we do?

G

Gavin Baker1:00:28

Come on. Keep going. I gotta drive home. Let's go. Come on.

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Jason Calacanis1:00:30

Too much fun this episode. Chimath, what's your most contrarian belief prediction for 2025? We're going on a limb here. This is going out on a limb, folks. Don't judge us. The the spicier the take, the better here. This is where you can go freestyle.

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Chamath Palihapitiya1:00:44

I think that you're going to see a banking crisis in one of the major mainline banks. a banking crisis. Wow. There is a it's a small chance it happens, but that's a contrarian belief. Okay. Why Jimoth? Why Swan? Well, I think if I had to kind of build the the case for this, it would be along the following lines. If you add it up the total indebtedness of PAX America, which is US government debt plus corporates plus mortgage debt, and you actually sensitize it to rates that are around, call it 5%. What you quickly realize is on a dollar basis that because the amount of debt that we have has just massively exploded. That 5% rates today on 70 odd trillion dollars is actually equivalent to 10% rates 25 or 30 years ago because we only had a fraction of that debt on a dollar basis. And so the pain that you feel at 5 or 6%. Can very quickly ripple through the economy the way that it did when rates 25 or 30 years ago were 10%. And so I think that when people look at rates, they forget the actual total dollar impact because when somebody or collectively when we have to come up with three or four trillion dollars, how do you do that? And so I think that there is a non-trivial risk. I think it's small. This is why it's contrarian. But I think it's a it's a risk where if you have a marktomarket problem, if you have a credit default problem amongst the corporates or amongst enough individual consumers, what I think that happens more than anything else is that it triggers a reserve issue. And I think that the reserve issue in one of these mainline banks I have two that I think are more obvious than others, but I don't want to name them.

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Jason Calacanis1:03:01

Okay, fair enough. I love this contrarian take. This is great.

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Chamath Palihapitiya1:03:05

I think that there's a there's a small but reasonable chance that that happens.

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Jason Calacanis1:03:09

I love it. It's a great great contrarian take. Small chance, but big impact. Gavin, what do you got? Well, first Gemini deep research to um just ask it to look at the total, you know, Pax Americana debt outstanding, apply the current market interest rate to it and then look at that, you know, interest expense relative to GDP and generate that chart over time. That would be a cool chart. That would be interesting. I don't I I don't I don't disagree with Chimath. You know, any anything is possible and um you know, there there could for sure be be a problem at a big bank. I don't know that I would say it's likely, but you anything is possible. my most contrary belief. So I think that America over the next at some point over the next four years will print at least one year of greater than 5% GDP growth, real GDP growth. I think productivity is going to go vertical because of AI and deregulation. And I think there could be a world where this is the late '9s and you it doesn't sound like a big difference, you know, five or 6% versus 2 or 3% but it is a massive difference. you know, at five or 6%, you know, the economy is doubling, you'll call it every 12 years roughly versus 24 years at 3%. I mean, it's just it's a massive difference in terms of kind of the wealth of the country and individual Americans. As far as a specific prediction for 25, uh, because I don't know when when that will happen. I think you will see the Frontier Labs stop releasing their leading edge models to prevent knowledge distillation and their IP effectively being stolen. You know, Deep Seek from China, it was really impressive, but it thinks it's GPT4, you know. Yeah. So I just think you will you'll see the labs keep their best models in house, distill them and put small small models out over time. Furber, do you have a contrarian belief? And I did put into Gemini Advanced 1.5 Pro with deep research the question which banks have the great biggest chance of being insolvent or having a financial collapse or crisis. So it's doing its research right now. It'll be done in about 10 minutes, I think, which gives you an idea of how much research it does. It's nuts. Free, what do you got?

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David Sacks1:05:31

I think that the the party line is that socialism was defeated in this election cycle and that there was a resounding kind of vote from the American populace against socialism. And I actually think my my contrarian belief is that we'll see a rise a dramatic rise in socialist movements in 2025 in the United States. Okay? And I think that we are going to see, as Gavin pointed out, an acceleration of progress. we're going to see an unleashing of uh economic growth because of deregulation and AI. But I do think that some markets, we've also talked about the the the the downfall of US auto manufacturing and some other industries. There's going to be a real significant shift in 2025. Some industries and some companies are going to be huge winners and some companies are going to be huge losers. There's going to be some parts of the economy that are going to be big winners and some parts of the economy that are going to be big losers. When you have this sort of a change this fast, there are often large contingents of people that are left behind. And when that happens, I do think that the socialist policies and the socialist movements gain steam. When um Peron came to power in Argentina in the mid 1940s, that country was experiencing 8% GDP growth. To Gavin's point about accelerating growth, growth does not mean that it benefits everyone equally. And I think that some folks will see people go from being billionaires to 100 billionaires to the world's first trillionaire. And it will also start to fuel this rise. So I think that we will see an increase in the breadth and depth of socialist movements in the United States. By the way, particularly with Doge cutting government funding to programs that benefit individuals, employment being cut in in the federal government and through federal contractors. There's just a lot of rapid change that's about to kind of really upset a lot of people.

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Jason Calacanis1:07:20

I totally agree. I think AI, you know, people are fond of saying that we're in a world of AGI or ASI, money will be meaningless, but for a short period of time, money will matter more than it's ever mattered before because the amount of money you can spend on AI on test time compute is going to give you a massive advantage whether you're a company or an individual. So, I just think AI is going to really amplify inequality for some period of time. Yeah. I hope I'm wrong. Like I hope, you know, AI leads to, you know, all sorts of, you know, opportunities being created for low people.

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David Sacks1:07:59

There's a lot of there's just going to be a lot of employment and income disruption in 2025 and it's going to fuel socialist movements. And I think that this is going to be a more difficult year. Everyone thinks it's kind of rosy red because we're all working in the tech industry in Silicon Valley, but the reality on the ground for most Americans could be a lot harsher than any of us anticipate and that could make for a very difficult political environment and social environment.

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Jason Calacanis1:08:23

This is a great contrarian prediction, Freeberg. I would build on it that I don't think this is just going to hit blue collar. I am seeing in the venture industry and in entrepreneurs all over the place people who are super qualified who had six figure salaries even to mid6ig salaries not be able to find work or not find work at previous compensation levels. Why? Because people are doing more with less. It's much better to invest and do deep research and AI and automate stuff or deprecate stuff or delegate stuff to other regions than to hire Americans in some cases. And that philosophy that's happening isn't just going to hit truck drivers. It's going to hit developers potentially designers, writers part of what you guys are saying. What's the contrarian part?

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David Sacks1:09:11

Socialism. Socialism is socialism on the rise. I think it's pretty interesting because I think um you don't think it's contrary and you think it's obvious. I think the party line has been that socialism was getting knocked back this year with this election cycle and it was a mandate against socialism and some of the socialist policies that were being put forth. And I think that the contrarian view is that we're actually got this really wrong and socialism is going to be on a big rise. But just to build on what you said earlier, like woke wokeism and progressivism will decouple from socialism. I think wokeism and progressivism, you know, will be on a declining trend, but socialism in terms of the government like policy more of a role. Yeah. Ex. Yeah.

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Jason Calacanis1:09:56

Why don't we have universal why don't we have universal healthcare? Why don't we have prek or you know in every state and and you know these kind of things? I think Americans are right to ask those questions. Now, other behaviors are obviously abhorent, but you do have the right to ask why we can't figure this out and why our government has failed us in something as basic as, you know, providing after school programs or universal healthcare or universal childare. These things are easy to do. And when you see everybody getting rich and the polarization of wealth, I can understand people saying, 'Why don't we have these basic things when other countries have them?' It's a reasonable.

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David Sacks1:10:31

You're making the assumptive statement that these things are easy to do, which was what was said about education. It's like, let's give everyone access to college education with the uh the federal student loan programs. And what happened was when we introduced those programs, those schools started to charge more and the tuition went up every year and eventually the cost of education inflated away from the benefit you were getting from it. And this has happened universally in healthcare. It has happened in housing. It has happened in education. It has happened in every market where the United where the government has stepped in to provide capital to support that market is that the market basically no longer operates in a free way.

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Jason Calacanis1:11:08

I appreciate the challenge to it and I'll explain to you why I believe it's easy. If you just put this down to the states and you make it more competitive, I think you solve the problem. If you introduce school vouchers and you create competition, if you take universal healthcare and maybe you run some experiments where different states get that money from the federal government and let them run 50 different experiments, I think we could actually solve some of these problems. But you're correct. Anything that the federal government does, it eventually becomes corrupt and inefficient. My most contrarian belief was OpenAI loses its lead, loses its nonprofit to for-profit transition and becomes the number four player in AI. The total collapse of OpenAI is my most contrarian prediction for 2020. [laughter]

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David Sacks1:11:50

That's a good one. The total collapse double double doubling and tripling down.

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Jason Calacanis1:11:55

Hey man, I'm trying to make this spicy. It's a spicy category. I got it. Yeah, I got it. I'd love that. Jeff Bezos is going to still run for president. Jal,

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Gavin Baker1:12:03

Maybe he's great. I don't know. Everybody who all his friends left the company. Maybe he's great. Maybe he's a standup guy. I mean, everybody quit, but maybe he's

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Jason Calacanis1:12:12

G. Are you Are you familiar with Jake's prediction that Jeff Bezos is going to run for president? It was that was I was predicting I wanted him to. I wanted him to and he bought Washington Post and he quit the Amazon job and he bought a house in Washington DC and he went down to Mara Lago. Don't be surprised if Bezos after he gets through his uh midlife crisis and going to Coachella and partying and having a great time, which he deserves, if he comes back and says, 'You know what? I want to serve my country.' I still think he's going to sell the Washington Post or do you think he's going to hold on to it?

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Gavin Baker1:12:43

Well, let's stick with that one because that's one of my

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Jason Calacanis1:12:46

Prediction. Jeff Bezos will sell the Washington Post in 2025. That's a good poly market.

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Gavin Baker1:12:50

Yeah, sell it to Car Swisser. Sell it to Karen Swisser. [laughter]

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Jason Calacanis1:12:54

Yeah, they'll run it right into the ground. They'll double down. Uh, okay. Best performing asset. Everybody loves this one. Best performing asset. Hey, we can we you can put a price on this. Best performing asset. Last year, Chimat did a spread trade. He was long public tech stocks, short private, late stage tech stock index. NASDAQ top 100 tech stock ETF was up 10% 2024. Freeberg, you went with your uranium ETF, not Uranus, uranium ETF. And your A UR was down 1% in 2024.

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David Sacks1:13:28

Sideways.

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Jason Calacanis1:13:28

You know what? I I looked at the components of that ETF th last week when we were preparing for this. Mhm. It has absolute junk in it. Like it it was not the right the right right way to kind of trade uranium. But anyway, that was my my outcome for the

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David Sacks1:13:37

The right right way to kind of trade uranium. But anyway, that was my my outcome for the

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Jason Calacanis1:13:45

I went with the on demand economy with Uber, Airbnb, and Door Dash. Uber was up 30% but now it's only up 3% with the robo taxi headwind. Airbnb is basically flat. Uh and Door Dash up big 74%. Shout out to Stanley Tang. Great job to the team over there. So Chimath, get your flowers there. Let's do our best performing asset. Let's let our guest go first. Gavin, what will be the best performing asset of 2025?

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Gavin Baker1:14:09

I think the companies that make high bandwidth memory going back to we're gonna we're going to run out of compute. It's it's um it's actually a pretty shocking stat. High bandwidth memory is a bigger part of Nvidia's cogs on GPUs than Taiwan SIM is. And today there's two companies that can make it high and Micron. We'll see if Samsung gets their act together. But HBM memory, it's in Nvidia GPUs, AMD GPUs, Amazon traniums, and particularly in a world of testime compute and inference being so important, high bin with memory is arguably more important than it ever was, and it's been um it's been sold out for the last two years. So, high bin with memory would be my pick.

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Jason Calacanis1:15:01

Okay. Good pick. Great pick. In fact, what do you got?

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Chamath Palihapitiya1:15:06

So, let me preface this by saying that this is a pick that 90 two times out of 100 goes to absolute zero. Okay? And six out of the remaining eight times you make 10 extra money and then the final two times you make anywhere between a 100 to a,000 extra money. Okay. Sounds like bit. Okay. So, this is a loser trade. Okay. But I would be long CDS. So, what am I buying? I am buying insurance. I'm buying insurance using credit default swaps. I'm buying what's called protection that there is no default event in 2025. Again, I'm not going to tell you which companies or what maturities, but just the general idea for me is I would like a little bit of an insurance policy in 2025 so that the men and the women that we have voted in have the chance to do their work in peace. I think that there is a small chance of some volatility next year. I hope it doesn't happen. I hope that this trade like I said 92 times out of 100 losses money. I hope it loses money but if it hits it will be the best performing asset of 2025. It will be the equivalent of AMAN buying CDS right at the right at the beginning of the COVID crisis.

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Jason Calacanis1:16:42

How does one buy those?

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Chamath Palihapitiya1:16:44

You have to have an ISDA. You talk to the big investment banks and they'll price it out for you. But again, I and I just want to be clear. This is not something I think will happen. It's not

Something I want to happen. But I do think that if you look back in terms of just the tonnage of dollars you can make and the massive risk asymmetry that it presents to you, when you look at the concentration of the S&P, when you look at just the total gross amount of debt that we have, when you look at rates spiking, all of these things say having a little insurance may not be a bad thing. So

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Jason Calacanis1:17:19

I hope you're nodding. Gavin, you're nodding. You want to answer?

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Gavin Baker1:17:19

No, I was just thinking. I mean, if you know Chamath's prediction of a bank failure is true, you absolutely want to own CDS. You'll forget 100x, you'll 1,000x, 10,000x.

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Jason Calacanis1:17:36

What do you got, Freeberg?

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David Sacks1:17:39

So I went with Chinese tech stocks, Chinese tech ETFs. Wow. I think the market has kind of dumped Chinese tech stocks over the last couple of years. Everyone has taken this isolationary stance on positioning portfolios and saying we can't do business with China, it's over. But I do think the Trump administration, particularly with their recent request on TikTok, the ban on TikTok being kind of halted, they're trying to line up what I would call the great deal with China. I don't know anything about what they're actually trying to do, but I think Trump and leadership in the US government want to open up the Chinese market to American companies in order to give Chinese companies access to the American market. I think they're going to get a deal done given the position with China. That's one driver. I think there are three drivers. The second driver is that the cost of buildout of electricity production in China is unfathomable. They recently approved a $137 billion hydroelectric dam facility which is going to add another couple hundred gigawatts of electricity production in that country, not to mention all the nuclear buildout we've talked about. So the cost per kilowatt hour is already lower, the amount of electricity available is going up. And I think the Chinese Communist Party has this incredible ability to throttle up and down free markets and entrepreneurship, and this is a moment where you could see them making the throttle go towards enabling more innovation, more free market activity. It's going to be one of the motivators for them to do a deal. So when you put all of this together, I think there are a lot of Chinese tech companies that have been beat up under the assumption that this is going to be a very difficult conflict with the US in the years ahead, and I think that may not be the case going into 2025. I think these stocks look pretty cheap. I was just looking at Alibaba and it trades at a pretty decent multiple. It seems like these stocks could be poised for a pretty good run in 2025 if the macro works out.

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Chamath Palihapitiya1:19:41

This feels like a contrarian take. I mean, Trump, I don't think, is going to find a way to balance the relationship with China very well. I don't think you can rattle up entrepreneurship after you cut everybody's knees out the last time. Plus, I don't trust any accounting statement coming out of China because they could fudge whatever they want. But wow, what a great potential buy low, sell high.

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David Sacks1:20:05

The good thing is you'll know if I'm right or wrong in a year. You can

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Jason Calacanis1:20:09

Exactly. Well, no. Exactly. That's right. Pull the ETF. Absolutely. I mean, Gavin, what do you think of this hot take here from Mr. Fraberg?

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Gavin Baker1:20:16

Really cheap. I've had a, I would call it a no-China guideline ever since the Longtop financial fraud more than 15 years ago. It was just amazing. A lot of great investors owned it, and they talked a great game, and they had a Western auditor, but then it turned out the fraud was happening at the local post office where they were opening up the documents that the local auditors had signed off on, changing them, and then sending different documents, FedExing them. So I just think it's a hard place if you're not Chinese to make money. But I tend to agree with a lot of what David said. I think Trump and Xi both want a deal. I think there's a deal to be done that leaves Putin out in the cold. And if that happens, Katie bar the door. There are really high quality companies, some of them are mid-single-digit multiples.

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David Sacks1:21:21

And they're in a big market. So if you did get it right and you did

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Chamath Palihapitiya1:21:24

And by the way, the Chinese companies serve a global market. It's not just the US. They serve Africa, South America, the whole southern hemisphere.

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Jason Calacanis1:21:34

Well yeah, if you look at BYD, it's all over Europe.

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David Sacks1:21:39

It's, look, the Chinese companies have the best unit economics, the best cost of production. Everything is advantaged, particularly if you believe it's the year of the robot. There's going to be massive demand for automation and for rebuilding manufacturing capacity all over the world. China could service those markets more efficiently than any other country of origin. So it's a pretty powerful set of macro drivers.

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Jason Calacanis1:22:10

I think the Mag 7 is going to be the best performing asset. I'm taking the other side. Chamath, in an earlier prediction said maybe not so much. I think what they've learned in the last couple years is that there is an incredible earnings expansion you can do by not hiring people and outsourcing jobs to other parts of the world and automating. The gains we'll see from AI, which they're producing for other companies and for consumers, they're applying first internally. The internal application of AI will allow these companies to have earnings growth that people will not comprehend over the next couple years. So I'm going with Mag 7. We got a lot of different takes going different directions. Great episode. All right, worst performing asset last year. Chamath said late-stage tech stock index, mostly SaaS. Freeberg, you put a brilliant spread trade, short vertical SaaS, long AI cloud providers. SaaS has had a little rebound, but Google up 36% for AI cloud, Microsoft 14%, Amazon 46% in 2024. I said LLM startups like OpenAI and Anthropic, too many players. Open sourcing will kill pricing. The one valuation we can track is OpenAI and it doubled, but I think long term I'll have that one. Worst performing asset of 2025, Gavin.

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Gavin Baker1:23:35

Enterprise application software.

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Jason Calacanis1:23:37

This is basically just about 2025. I think it's going to be the year of agents, particularly in the second half. Agents just being AI models that can take action on your behalf, that can do anything online that a human can do online.

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Gavin Baker1:23:41

If the labs and the big cloud providers dominate agents, which seems likely going back to the low-cost producers will win, enterprise application software is going to be in a lot of pain. Some of these companies are talking a big game about agents, but at the end of the day they don't have their own models, they don't own their own compute. I just don't see them being ultimate winners in the world of agents. I could be wrong because they have some customer data, maybe a little data moat, and they have strong customer relationships, but most companies have relationships with AWS, Google, or Microsoft as well. So I think enterprise application software will be in pain.

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Jason Calacanis1:24:44

Okay. And Chamath, what do you got?

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Chamath Palihapitiya1:24:47

I think Gavin just absolutely nailed it. I'm going to double down on what he said. I think there's a term we will start to use more. I started using it internally at 8090 this year, which is the software industrial complex. These large, bloated enterprise software companies have convinced organizations to spend a tremendous amount of money essentially wrapping heuristics and business rules around a CRUD database. Along with that, they have perfected go-to-market and sales motion. The golf trips, the steak dinners, none of those equate to product value. In the world of agentic software and AI, you can rebuild a lot of these workflows efficiently. And I think the go-to-market is going to be driven by CEOs and CFOs who exert more pressure on their CIOs to manage spend. These next-gen AI businesses are built an order of magnitude cheaper than the companies they compete against. So even if it's feature for feature the same, the software industrial complex, these old mainline traditional enterprise software companies, I think you'll start to see fissures in those businesses in 2025. Same result, different words.

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Jason Calacanis1:25:54

And you put your time and money where your mouth is on this one. 11 months ago, you founded 8090 to get 80%.

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Chamath Palihapitiya1:26:41

The traction in less than a year is shocking. I think we're very good, we have great engineers, but my 30-person engineering team does the work of 300 people. By next year, it'll be doing the work of 3,000 people. Maybe we'll only grow by 10 or 20%. The reason is we use these tools. We're productive to an order of magnitude I didn't think was possible. As a result, we're able to price it differently. Even if it's the exact same product, its cost structure is meaningfully lowered. The ROI calculators get blown up. All the traditional go-to-market motions get blown up. In an RFP, somebody says it's $100 and you show up and say $10. At $10, it's still hugely profitable for you. Fundamentally, these enterprise application software companies, the software industrial complex, are based on making white-collar human employees more efficient. The AI companies are just going to replace that worker. It's a fundamentally different mentality.

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Jason Calacanis1:28:02

Paradigm shift, yeah.

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Chamath Palihapitiya1:28:02

And there may be a lot of pain that accompanies this. David's points around the potential rise of socialism.

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Jason Calacanis1:28:11

What do you got for worst performing asset, Mr. Freeberg? 2020.

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David Sacks1:28:15

I'm probably just going to triple underline vertical SaaS again. Per-seat pricing model being challenged, pricing being compressed as companies explore in-house tools built with AI that replace these traditional business practices. Moats are going to be destroyed.

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Jason Calacanis1:28:31

Geez, this is an obvious one on my list, but I want to make a different one. How about OpenAI? Do you have anything on OpenAI?

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David Sacks1:28:44

People left, but I don't know where they are. Where are all the other OpenAI employees? Are they on vacation?

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Jason Calacanis1:28:51

No, they've all started competitors.

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David Sacks1:28:54

Oh, right. That's what happened. Correct. They all left to compete and have revenge startups. That's an interesting trend. So consumers make five big decisions in their life as we all know. $12 billion in revenue?

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Jason Calacanis1:29:06

That's a projection, sometimes reality. $6 billion in losses too, David, against that $12 billion.

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David Sacks1:29:14

$6 billion this year or next year?

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Jason Calacanis1:29:16

I think the six is for next year, but I don't know.

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David Sacks1:29:20

I guess it makes sense why they're trying to charge $200 a month now, up from $20.

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Jason Calacanis1:29:24

They got some headwinds. Okay, consumers make five big decisions in their life: college, spouse, kids, cars, and homes. The consumer is up against it with record debt. Since you can't trade college, spouse, kids, really, I think legacy car companies and real estate are going to face continued headwinds and be terrible assets. We've overbuilt in some cases, tons of cars on lots, people can't afford homes with these mortgages. So I think these are going to be the two worst performing asset classes: legacy OEMs and real estate. As Chamath pointed out in a previous prediction, two years in a row housing values have gone down in Texas, rent has gone down. Same thing in other states where they allowed building. So that's my worst performing asset trade. Enterprise was my other choice, but I'll go with something slightly different. Most anticipated trend for 2025 last year. Chamath, congratulations, you said Bitcoin would hit $100k for the first time. Nailed it. Half court shot. At the time you made that prediction, it was probably trading at

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Chamath Palihapitiya1:30:33

Felt like a layup.

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Jason Calacanis1:30:34

Felt like a layup to you. Up 112%. Freeberg, you said predictive models and AI-driven discovery in pharma and bioengineering. How did that prediction do?

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David Sacks1:30:43

Well, there was a lot of funding and Demis won the Nobel Prize.

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Jason Calacanis1:30:47

And a Nobel Prize. There you go. So it worked out. I picked efficiency in the form of AI advancements in labor and outsourcing, and I've seen that a bunch with our investment in Athena. Go to AthenaWow.com. Got my plug in there. Let's go for most anticipated 2025 trend. What do you got, Chamath?

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Chamath Palihapitiya1:31:03

I think there are a handful of canaries in the coal mine for the end of the deep state. An obscure thing called the supplemental loss ratio. It's a mechanism banks can use to include or not include treasuries in how they calculate reserves. If we are unable to manage the debt situation in 2025, you'll see maneuvering at the edges of arcane regulations that kick the can down the road. If Doge isn't effective, there will be $10-20 trillion of debt issuance to refinance the maturing debt and plug holes. My point is, we don't need to understand the details, but if we don't move the goalposts, it's a sign that the folks running the show are the ones we elected. So that is my most anticipated trend: small arcane regulatory changes that allow us to kick the can down the road.

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Jason Calacanis1:32:56

Okay, Freeberg, you got a most anticipated trend for 2025?

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David Sacks1:32:58

My most anticipated trend is the announcement of buildout of nuclear power in the United States in 2025 as a function of deregulation and new technologies. This new government is going to be much more accommodating. It's a necessity because of the rate at which we have to do power buildouts to meet competitive demand against China. The US needs to add more electricity production capacity than we can scale with any other renewable source. Nuclear is inevitable, deregulation will happen in '25, and I know smart people starting nuclear power companies.

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Jason Calacanis1:33:54

That's a leading indicator for sure. When smart people do something with their time, that's a great indicator. Gavin, what do you got?

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Gavin Baker1:34:00

I think AI will make more progress per quarter in 2025 than it did per year in '23 and '24. The reason is with O1 and O3. This is ARC-AGI. We keep changing the goalposts for the Turing test and AGI, and we'll change them again as we blow through this. We were scaling on one axis, pre-training, then inference time compute. Now we've added a third axis: reasoning. Models benefit from the internal monologue, the reasoning trace. 18 months ago everyone said the more code you train a model on, the better it does. Code contains reasoning. So we use models to generate synthetic data with reasoning traces. You ask a model to solve a verifiable problem, show your work, do it many times, pick the best ones, feed back into the model with reinforcement learning. Now we scale along three axes multiplicative with each other. A guy on the Google team tweeted maybe five days ago it's going to be a straight shot to ASI. Ilya Sutskever gave a talk at NeurIPS and said models that reason are inherently unpredictable. The best reasoning models today are game-playing models like AlphaGo, making unpredictable moves. Now these models will make similarly unpredictable leaps in all domains. Hopefully awesome, but might not be.

J

Jason Calacanis1:36:52

Yeah, well they're going to go around corners that people might not have considered, non-intuitive. To circle back, remember I asked which banks have the biggest chance of insolvency? Tons of misspellings as I typed it. Deep Research went and found a list of banks, found top US banks by asset, for each found their latest financials, capital adequacy ratios, loan loss, etc. It created a report in 10 minutes. It gave a list: JP Morgan, Bank of America, Citigroup. It analyzed each, pulled 162 websites incredible live data. For $20 a month, the conclusion said Citigroup and Wells Fargo appear highest risk. I don't know how much is correct, but it's a good start. If you haven't used 1.5 Pro with Deep Research, go to gemini.google.com. Not being paid to say this, but it's the best product in the market. My most anticipated trend for 2025 was alluded to earlier by Gavin. Exits and DPI shower down as the wrath of Lina ends, M&A and IPOs surge. That is my prediction.

Okay, let's go to most anticipated media. I had two: James Gunn's DC Universe with Superman, and Andor season 2. I predict Clone Wars live action. But I went with a weird choice: seeing what happens with legacy media outlets owned by billionaires. Washington Post, CNN, LA Times steering towards the middle. Editors are revolting. Karen Swisher is upset. They're adding right-wing voices. It's going to be popcorn time. What do you got for most anticipated media?

C

Chamath Palihapitiya1:40:06

It is the enormity of the files that are going to get declassified and released by the Trump administration. The JFK files, Epstein files, Diddy files, who knows what they find across conspiracy theories. That content released in 2025 will be incredibly interesting.

J

Jason Calacanis1:40:50

What do you got, Dave? Media. Any anticipated media?

D

David Sacks1:40:54

I'm into AI video games. The cost of production comes way down when you use AI, dynamic storylines, new gameplay concepts. Creative talent plus technical talent at development houses can be unleashed with recent tools. Generative video, but also structural ways video games can be rebuilt where the engine runs locally generating parameters for rendering. Entirely new storylines and plot sequences. I think there's going to be a rewrite of the video game industry with AI capabilities. It's going to be incredible entertainment.

J

Jason Calacanis1:41:46

Gavin, most anticipated media 2025?

G

Gavin Baker1:41:49

Unquestionably 1923 season 2. I'm normally a sci-fi fantasy or spy guy for TV, but 1883 and 1923 hit me the way Game of Thrones did. I'm crazy excited for that to come out.

J

Jason Calacanis1:42:09

Fantastic. Are you watching Land Man? I'm enjoying it.

G

Gavin Baker1:42:14

I haven't watched it yet. I'm excited to try it.

J

Jason Calacanis1:42:16

It's quite fun. Turns out Taylor Sheridan is incredible. He's in the zone. I highly recommend Day of the Jackal. Chamath also loved it.

C

Chamath Palihapitiya1:42:26

Oh, that was really good.

J

Jason Calacanis1:42:28

Good suggestion for streaming. Amazing. What were our predictions for last year? Chamath predicted Mr. Beast, Freeberg AI-generated news, I predicted Gladiator 2 and The Three-Body Problem. Gladiator 2 was mid. Jimmy's show on Amazon Prime was the top unscripted drama in 140 of 180 countries. Incredible. All right, we're going to do prediction markets based on immigration. Trump promised 15 million deportations. I set the over/under at 5% of that: 750,000. After one year, will Trump have deported 750,000 or more?

D

David Sacks1:43:34

How are you going to measure that? There has to be a source of truth.

J

Jason Calacanis1:43:38

We'll do it based on the White House's reporting of deportations. Reasonable. And we'll check with Polymarket if we can do that. Biggest issue of the election. Obama deported more than two million people. People have forgotten he was really tough on the border. Chamath, do you have a prediction market?

C

Chamath Palihapitiya1:44:03

The Mag 7 representation in the S&P 500 shrinks below 30%. Dispersion happens to other stocks.

J

Jason Calacanis1:44:15

Good one. We'll finalize these. Another I wanted to play with is Microsoft, AWS, and Google Cloud revenue growth. Who wins in 2025? I get a sense Google is accelerating ahead. Gavin, how much have you spent on these three? Google is a lot smaller, which makes it easier to grow faster. Who has the largest dollar gain in cloud revenue in 2025? Probably not Google unless insane rates. But Azure vs. AWS will be interesting. Also, the national debt has grown about $2 trillion per year in each of the previous two administrations. Over eight years, up over $16 trillion. Trump said he wouldn't increase it. I'll set it at $1 trillion increase in the next year, over/under.

D

David Sacks1:45:41

I would set the federal debt for December 2025 US Treasury market report at $37 trillion, above or below.

J

Jason Calacanis1:46:12

You want a line where people take either side. We'll do US Treasury market report December 2025 federal debt above $38 trillion or below. Perfect, about $1.5 trillion added. Gavin, what's your sense on federal debt next year?

G

Gavin Baker1:46:39

Like most things, it'll take them time to get going. But I think they will make progress. At some point, if I'm here on All-In again, I want to talk about UFOs and the drones.

J

Jason Calacanis1:46:58

Let's talk about it now. Are you going full conspiracy theorist? Do you believe those drones were aliens?

G

Gavin Baker1:47:09

I don't know. It's clear from statements by New Jersey mayors, governors, FBI, defense department that they don't know. Trump said someone in the government knows. I think over the last eight years, every 18 months there's a big story in credible media about fighter pilots seeing things with advanced sensors. There was a New Yorker article quoting people from skunk works in the 1950s saying they absolutely saw extraterrestrial materials recovered from a crash. That's why the US made big leaps in material science. Harvard astronomy head said it's clearly UFOs. The conspiracy theory: if these are actually UFOs, not government drones from US or China, the most likely explanation in New Jersey is some sort of drill. But it's interesting that big reports coincided with scaling into nuclear technology 1945-1960 and now AI.

J

Jason Calacanis1:49:29

This is great. You can come back next week. You won. Congratulations. Gavin is now the fourth best. I love this conspiracy. How do we make a Polymarket out of this?

D

David Sacks1:49:44

Are there documents Trump will release about UFOs? Spectrum of stuff subject to FOIA.

J

Jason Calacanis1:50:00

I think it depends how deeply classified. Government won't give it up if they don't want to.

D

David Sacks1:50:12

You think the US government has documentation that there are UFOs we can't explain?

G

Gavin Baker1:50:23

Yeah, they call it UAPs now, but something funny.

J

Jason Calacanis1:50:31

What percentage chance you put on government sitting on knowledge of extraterrestrials? 20%?

D

David Sacks1:50:41

20% at least.

J

Jason Calacanis1:50:42

Gavin?

G

Gavin Baker1:50:44

I would say 25%. I take the over on 20.

J

Jason Calacanis1:50:47

So you think a significant small chance? Freeberg, Sultan of Science?

D

David Sacks1:51:02

I don't generally align with the idea that our narrow range of technology and biology visits us. I think there's extension of information gathering without moving physical bodies. The premise of UFOs moving bodies is rooted in current state of technology. Arthur C. Clarke's treatment of 2001 said eventually every civilization reaches a point where you don't need to move bodies; you gather information and affect information because you can convert molecules and energy. You turn your local part of the universe into anything you want and gather information from elsewhere. So alien bodies moving around doesn't make sense.

J

Jason Calacanis1:52:29

If Trump releases information on extraterrestrial life, I'm voting for him to have a third term. I'm going full MAGA. Changing the Constitution. This has been another amazing episode of the All-In.

Wait, one last question for Gavin. Do you think extraterrestrial life built the pyramids?

G

Gavin Baker1:52:53

Is that the most plausible explanation? I don't know. It is strange that in so many cultures worldwide there are depictions of astronauts. Renaissance paintings clearly show UFOs over cities. So I don't know.

J

Jason Calacanis1:53:36

I'm with you. I love Conspiracy Gavin. This has been awesome. No, Sacks, if you're a questioning person, these things create open loops. It's a car simulation. I'm fully vested. Driving home. The most credible thing I saw on the pyramids is they used water channels to float the stones up, like the Panama Canal.

This has been another amazing episode of the All-In podcast. Thank you everybody.

D

David Sacks1:54:23

Let's have an amazing 2025 to everybody.

J

Jason Calacanis1:54:25

Let's kick ass.

D

David Sacks1:54:26

Let's kick ass.

J

Jason Calacanis1:54:27

Let's kick ass 2025. All right, we'll see you all next time. Bye bye.

D

David Sacks1:54:32

Bye bye.

J

Jason Calacanis1:54:35

We'll let your winners ride.

D

David Sacks1:54:38

Rainman David.

J

Jason Calacanis1:54:42

And it said we open sourced it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it.

D

David Sacks1:54:46

Love you queen of winners.

J

Jason Calacanis1:54:55

Besties are gone.

D

David Sacks1:54:57

That is my dog taking your driveways.

J

Jason Calacanis1:55:03

Oh man, my appetiter will eat. We should all just get a room and have one big huge orgy cause they're all just useless. It's like sexual tension they need to release somehow.

D

David Sacks1:55:15

Wet your feet.

J

Jason Calacanis1:55:18

That's going to be good. We need to get merch.

D

David Sacks1:55:20

I'm going all in.

2025 Predictions with bestie Gavin Baker

About Gavin Baker