Jason Cowakanis: All right, here we go. This is Jason in the corner warming up. Shut the up, Freeberg. It's my show. All right, everybody. Welcome back to the number one podcast in the world. The podcast I, Jason Cowakanis, named, created, and I'm the executive producer for life. With me, my three miscreant friends, Chimath Poly Hapatia, our dictator. Love you, brother. Good seeing you. David Freedberg, our Sultan of Science and Thesar. Who's now made his way down to Austin. Welcome, brother. Let's go shooting. Let's get those beef ribs. David Saxs, how are you settling in to the great state of Texas? Everybody wants to know, David,

David Saxs: I'm loving the 70 degree weather. Is it like this all year round?

Jason Cowakanis: You know, it's this is a very wonderful time of year. you miss the two weeks where it goes to freezing temperatures. We have 10 days of freezing temperatures and then we have 80 days of 100 degree temperatures, but you'll be on a yacht or Italy or somewhere during that like the rest of us. That's basically all you need to know about Austin. Just get out during the summers cuz it's brutal. That's it. Everything else is fan freakingastic. But in all seriousness,

David Saxs: you're here. You're here. You're you've moved. You've doiciled in Texas. This is This is This has happened.

David Saxs: It happened in December.

Jason Cowakanis: Yes.

David Saxs: And so we closed on a new house. We moved in. Went to the DMV. I signed a lease for an Austin office for craft.

Jason Cowakanis: Nice.

David Saxs: It's done.

Jason Cowakanis: It's done.

David Saxs: It's done.

Jason Cowakanis: Okay. I got to I'll get you a dentist and whatever else you need.

David Saxs: I got a doctor, too.

Jason Cowakanis: Okay. Does this mean I have to bring Moose back? This has been the big discussion in our house. Does this mean we lose Moose or do we have you in custody?

David Saxs: He needs a significant acreage to run around. We know that.

Jason Cowakanis: Oh, he does. He does. But he misses you and I and we'll definitely bring him by for a visit.

David Saxs: And we'll we'll be playing some back gam smoking some cigars.

Jason Cowakanis: You got to come by.

David Saxs: Cannot wait.

Jason Cowakanis: Shamath, what about you guys? You guys going to come down? Two of four besties.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Matt and I started the process in December. We are coming to check things out. We have not made any final decisions though.

Jason Cowakanis: Okay. Shout out to our boy Ro Kana for driving everybody out of the state.

David Saxs: So, here's the funniest thing is we're all in the chat group discussing the California wealth tax, whether people are going to leave or not. So, Chimath, he's making a big show. I'm going to stay and fight. I'm not leaving my home. They can't drive me out. And then meanwhile, I get a call from my broker who says she's helping Chimath find a place.

Jason Cowakanis: UHOH. WHAT'S GOING ON?

David Friedberg: IS CHAMOTH DOING BACKDOOR TRADE? I'm shocked that Shamat tells you one thing and is doing another.

Jason Cowakanis: Oh my god.

David Saxs: He's at least hedging his bets.

Jason Cowakanis: He's hedging his bets.

David Saxs: A lot of people are hedging their bets. A lot of people are

Jason Cowakanis: Serge in Florida. He got a I'm sorry. Uh Larry's got a beautiful place in Florida. I see. According to the news, a lot of people and I saw Governor Abbott uh reached out to you.

David Saxs: That's right. He welcomed me to Texas on X. A lot of people did.

Jason Cowakanis: Michael Dell did Ted Cruz.

David Saxs: Ted Cruz. And yeah, it was a real welcome reception. It's funny. I never got anything like that when I was in California.

Jason Cowakanis: Jason, I I put it on.

David Saxs: The politicians were never

Jason Cowakanis: They weren't embracing you.

David Saxs: Yeah, they were embracing me. I don't know why.

Jason Cowakanis: Who knows? I put this on X. But when you look at our friends that all explicitly left, it's about half a trillion of net worth, which I think is very bad for the long-term budget of California.

David Saxs: then I can pick about 25 people just off the top of my head. And then if you think about all the people that will stay and fight, I still intend to stay and fight, but where if we're forced to look down the barrel of a an asset tax that has god knows what methodology,

David Saxs: it's the only thing that's united everybody on the left and the right. Even Reed Hoffman thinks this is insane. I think a lot of other people will leave. It's probably half the total wealth that the budget estimated would be available to be taxed will be gone.

Jason Cowakanis: Wow. I mean, these are I I don't understand.

David Saxs: That has huge implications to the social programs and the general budget of California.

Jason Cowakanis: Listen, I think this is going to be a topic. This is a prediction. I think this is going to be a topic throughout the year because it's not going away. They're gathering signatures right now.

David Saxs: I agree.

David Saxs: And we're going to find out in say April whether it's on the ballot. Now, it's possible they don't gather the signatures, but they only need about 850,000 of them. If it gets on the ballot, you know, again, we'll know in just a few months. There's going to be a huge freakout and I think there'll be a lot of people who will say, "I can't take the risk. They're going to leave the state." So, I think there's going to be a rush for the exits. There's going to be all sorts of repercussions from that. Then, there'll be an election in November. Obviously, we'll find out if it passes or not. And then there'll be legal challenges. So, this is going to be a saga. I don't think this is over by a long shot. And quite frankly, even if it's beaten in 2026, I think a lot of people expect that some version of this comes back in 2028, which is the thing that kind of pushed me over the edge in terms of leaving is I don't think this problem is going away. It's very difficult if you're an entrepreneur with a good idea to start building here because if you get stuck in success with a bunch of illquid stock and have no way to pay 5% of that value, you're going to bankrupt your own company. It just doesn't make any sense.

David Friedberg: And what if your company goes to zero the next year, which can totally happen with private companies? You still owe the tax bill.

Jason Cowakanis: Yeah. I don't know how that reverses itself. It's a terrible idea. I mean, I was talking to Roana and Eric Swallwell who we had on the program and I told these guys like these dopey Democrats, you have to stop fraud first before you start seizing people's assets or start a discussion about raising taxes. And you know, we had Nick Shirley on last week who was doing his investigative journalism. Shout out to Shirley. And uh how do we sell to the American public that we want to seize their assets while and then sending it out the back door to fund fraud? That makes no sense. It's a leaky bucket. So fix the bucket first and then let's have an honest discussion about what the right tax rate is and and why do this with a unique tax? Why not just put a point onto capital gains or income tax and and have that discussion?

David Saxs: That's a great point. You could also do what Bill Aman suggested, which is stop allowing these margin loans. There's a lot that actually live off of margin. Is it a good idea? Yes and no. Depending on the asset base you have, and if the tax laws changed, we would all change the approach.

David Friedberg: You mentioned that Larry and Sergey have left the state and they're probably getting dragged for that. But one of the reasons why I think they kind of have to is because of the super voting stock provision in this thing where the way they calculate the value of your stock is not based on its liquid market value but if you own super voting shares they multiply your ownership your super voting by the market cap of the company and they deem your shares to be worth that. Yeah.

David Friedberg: So for example Larry and Sergey I think they combined have voting power of about 52% of Google. So what's Google worth these days? uh 4 trillion

Jason Cowakanis: and a half trillion. 4 trillion.

David Friedberg: Okay. So now I think I mean they're very wealthy guys. I think they're each each worth whatever 100 billionish or whatever it is

David Saxs: I think. Yeah.

David Friedberg: 200. But now their net worth will be deemed to be I guess each one of them would be deemed to be roughly one trillion each. Not the call it 200 billion. So the 5% tax for them is more like a 25% tax of all their net worth. So it becomes and it becomes it becomes 50 because you'd have to sell more than that to overcome the drag of selling to generate 25 billion or 50 billion of net worth. You have to sell 2x that because you have to pay taxes on that,

David Friedberg: right? So now what what is the point of having that super voting provision in there? It's just totally punitive and vicious.

Jason Cowakanis: All right, so let's just go with a quick prediction here.

Jason Cowakanis: I'm going to call an audible. We're gonna get into the prediction show, folks. We've been delaying this prediction show because the world is moving at an incredible pace and the news is just, let's just call it what it is. It's just intense. And we have a lot of stories you all want us to to cover. We will cover them, but we're going to start with our prediction show. Just lightning round prediction here. Does this seizure tax, I'm going to call it what it is. It's a seizure tax. They're seizing assets. Does the seizing assets tax go into effect or not? Does it pass or not? Freeberg, you're first. Yes or no? Give us a percentage poly marketed.

David Friedberg: Well, does it get on the ballot first and then does

Jason Cowakanis: Well, we know it's going to get on the ballot. I think we agree with that. But not correct.

David Friedberg: Oh, we don't know. So then I'll make it a two-parter. Fine. Does it get on the ballot? Does it pass? Chimoth, you seem ready to go. Go.

Chamath Palihapitiya: No. Free. Go ahead.

David Friedberg: I don't think it's going to get on the ballot.

Jason Cowakanis: Oh,

David Saxs: I agree with that.

Jason Cowakanis: In California 100%.

David Friedberg: All right. Here's your poly market, everybody. Shout out to Shane. No,

David Friedberg: this is to make the ballot. This is to make the ballot.

Jason Cowakanis: This is the question.

Jason Cowakanis: Will the billionaires to Austin tax, wealth tax, drive people uh will it make it onto the California ballot? Lightly traded currently at 69%.

David Saxs: But you see how much lower it was? That spike happened after Roana elevated the issue. So when it became a cause celeb among progressives and Bernie Sanders weighed in, it spiked up from what was it like 45% to 80%.

Jason Cowakanis: Okay. So when Roana committed political sapuku, uh, it drove up. Maybe he had a bet. Maybe he placed a bet.

David Saxs: I don't think it's political suicide for him. There's only two ways it doesn't get on the ballot, right? One is

David Saxs: if the SCIU uh, which is the union that supported this, proposed it,

David Saxs: doesn't have the money to pay to collect the signatures.

Jason Cowakanis: But I, you would think that they would, right?

David Saxs: Mhm. 8 million or so is roughly what it costs to gather the signatures for these types of things. Clearly, they can find 850,000 people in California who support it

David Saxs: if they're willing to put the effort in. The other possibility is that the powers that be, let's call it Gavin Newsome and the machine are able to negotiate with this union to get them to stand down. And I don't have any insight into that because that's obviously Democrat politics, not Republican politics. H but Freeberg and Chimat might have some information. You have some insight. I don't know. We're going to we're going to leave it at that.

David Friedberg: But if it does get on the ballot, what do you think the odds are that it passes?

David Saxs: I think it's going to be a really important

Jason Cowakanis: 40%

David Saxs: moment for people to vote the ability to be industrious and have agency or what did Mamani say? It's rugged individualism versus

Jason Cowakanis: collectivism also known as communism as in collect. We collect your assets, Jamal.

David Saxs: He said that we're going to replace the fragility of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.

Jason Cowakanis: I mean, at least he's saying it out loud. I I like this new I like these new politicians just telling you straight up what we're doing.

David Saxs: Well, his new housing commissioner, have you seen this?

Jason Cowakanis: Yeah. The white lady's like, "White people must suffer." And then she's like she had these things where she's like, "I see white babies in the airport and it makes me mad." And I'm like, really? This is crazy.

David Friedberg: Um, what man broke up with this lady? Because that dude

David Friedberg: has created a monster.

David Saxs: Didn't she say something like, "We need to introduce a a new relationship between white people and property and their property rights or something."

Jason Cowakanis: Yeah, exactly.

David Saxs: I mean, they're saying it out loud now. And then I guess she had a mental breakdown and started crying when they came to see her. I

David Friedberg: No, no. What happened is they pointed out that her parents own a multi-million dollar home and then she broke down in tears.

Jason Cowakanis: Oh, her mom's a white supremacist. I didn't realize her mom was a white supremacist. That explains it all because this is all about her mom.

David Saxs: I feel bad for her parents.

Jason Cowakanis: Oh god. Can you imagine your imagine one of your kids goes and does this and says, "We have to go collect your houses." I mean, listen, let's do it. Let's do what everybody wants to hear. Our predictions for 2026. We've been pushing it off. We're going to give it to you right now. We always like to start since uh you know we got into politics here on the program at some point. The biggest political winner, last year's prediction for biggest political winner for 2025 to remind everybody. Freeberg said young candidates. Well done. Gavin who was on the show sitting in for Sachs who was busy joining the administration. He said Trump and centism would be the biggest political winner. Chimath, you said fiscal conservatives and who asked for restrained spending. It was a good thought and I said Gen X and Elder Millennials, the JD Vance, Tulsi Sachs group. So, let's go around the horn here. I wonder Friedberg, who you think will be the biggest political winner of 2026? Freeberg, your chance. Democratic Socialist of America, the DSA, just like the MAGA movement took over the Republican party, I think the DSA is taking over the the the Democratic party. And I think that's the move we'll see solidified in 2026.

Jason Cowakanis: Okay. Tight is right. Well done. Chama, who do you got for biggest political winner 2026?

Chamath Palihapitiya: Whoever is going to fight waste, fraud, and abuse at the federal, state, and local level.

Jason Cowakanis: Got it. So, it's an open lane to anybody.

Chamath Palihapitiya: It's an open lane. It's a political gambit that I think will work really well in 26.

Jason Cowakanis: Very nicely done. David Saxs. Gosh, I can't imagine who you would pick as a political winner in 2026.

David Saxs: Well, I'm gonna go ahead.

David Saxs: I'm gonna say that the Trump boom is going to be the biggest political winner of 2026.

David Saxs: The good economic news start breaking out before 2025 was even over. We have 2.7% inflation. Core CPI at 2.6. Both those are 40 basis points below expectations. 4.3% GDP growth in Q3. Lowest trade deficit since 2009. The Challenger Gray report out today showed that job cuts dropped 50% from November, which was itself down about 50% from October.

Jason Cowakanis: Give us a number for the boom. What is it going to be?

David Saxs: Hold on. The S&P 500 keeps making record highs. People are paying less for gas. Mortgage costs have fallen by $3,000. Real wages are up over $1,000. And by June, I predict we will see more rate cuts, possibly 75 to 100 basis points. And big tax refunds are coming in April. thanks to a bigger standard deduction and no tax on tips overtime and social security. So I think there is so much good economic news coming and it's already started and I think that it's going to have a huge impact not just on the economy but also on political perceptions for next year.

Jason Cowakanis: Pick your GDP for this boom year. Three, four, five or six points sacks. I'm pinning you down.

David Saxs: Pick four.

Chamath Palihapitiya: If you make it a prediction then I'd like to pick as well.

Jason Cowakanis: Okay. I'm going to go sacks first.

David Saxs: I'm going to go for 5%.

Jason Cowakanis: Within a rounding error I believe 5%.

David Saxs: Sure. Sure. Plus or minus? Chabat. You want to pick a number? You said you did.

Chamath Palihapitiya: I think the lower bound is five. I think the upper bound is 62.

Jason Cowakanis: Wow. Incredible. Well, just to put that in perspective,

Jason Cowakanis: if we print six, the only country in the modern world that we think of as a quasipier competitor that has printed six is the Chinese. In a period where it had complete and total coordination and domination of a federal, state, and local economy. And the fact that we can do it under democracy and capitalism is outrageous. Freeberg, do you want to take a stab at that?

David Friedberg: 2026 growth. Yeah. 4.6%.

Jason Cowakanis: Okay. I was going to go with between four and five as well. In terms of my prediction for the big political winner, I went back and forth between the emperor's apprentice, Darth Vance, JD Vance, or the Mandami moment. I said Darth Vance for a couple of reason. uh you know he is out there defending Trump uh and he's surging on poly market and in the polls. He's obviously the co-pilot of MAG. He's done a great job of being second seat. He is not usurping President Trump which would be a big political mistake. He's really navigating being the co-pilot there. But he is the most popular politician clearly at Turning Point USA and he is the OG in the America first America only moment. But I'm going to give the edge to the Mandami moment. He's 34 years old. We've got Ro Khan at 49 pivoting into a socialist. And I think that's because Democrats believe the easiest way to win in 2026 is to go full socialist. And Trump has, I think, given this lane because he's forgotten about the working man and woman in America. Net disapproval for Trump on the economy, 58% inflation. Despite what Sax is saying there, it's still closer to 3% than 2%. And Trump just announced he wants to increase the military budget by 50% while people are still complaining about their healthcare. And Trump has turned into a complete neocon, bombing seven countries this year and uh threatening to take over Colombia and Greenland. Who knows if that's Trump being Trump or if that's reality, but Trump becoming a neocon was not on anyone's bingo card. And uh I think Trump may have incited and given a bunch of fuel to the Mandami moment by not addressing the American people's needs and going for the international interventionism.

Jason Cowakanis: Okay, now

David Saxs: that was like three different answers right there.

Jason Cowakanis: My answer is clearly Mandami. My second place though I like to always explain my thinking is Darth Vance.

Jason Cowakanis: JD Vance biggest political loser. Last year's predictions I said Putin. Gavin said Putin. Chimath, you said progressivism and Freeberg, you said the pro-war neocons would be the biggest political losers. Uh, let's get into who we think will be the loser this year. Uh, Sax, why don't you start? Who's your big political loser in 2026, you think?

David Saxs: Well, I said democratic centism or democratic centrist, which is sort of the flip side of you guys saying that socialism or progressives are uh winners. And there's two reasons for this. One is because the socialist ideology is sort of ascended among the democratic base, especially the young people who support Maani, things like that. Unfortunately, our universities are woke madrosas have done a terrible job educating these students and they've brainwashed a lot of them into this woke ideology. But also, there's the fact that there's so few House districts anymore that are truly competitive. So both the Cook Political Report and Larry Sabado's Crystal Ball, they say that there's fewer than two dozen House races that are genuinely competitive going into 2026. That's because of uh gerrymandering and so on. So if you're a Democrat incumbent who is in one of these districts, like all but a couple dozen of them, your only real threat to losing your office is from the left, right? It's some young AOC type coming up to challenge you. And so you don't want to expose your left flank. So even the Democratic moderates have been shifting further and further to the left. And so you see this AOC mammi effect happening there. So I'm kind of in the same camp as you guys is this is not a good trend. But uh I put this as biggest political loser.

Jason Cowakanis: Biggest political

David Saxs: democratic centism.

Jason Cowakanis: Got it. Chimath, what do you got?

Chamath Palihapitiya: Can I just go back and just nitpick with you a little bit? Why do you think progressivism didn't fail? And the only reason I ask you that is outside of a few pockets of progressivism and specifically Mandani, if you look at the elections in Virginia or the elections in New Jersey, those are more centrist than progressive. And if you look at the general approval rates of Democrats, they trended consistently down through 2025 as they handgun themselves about leaving centrism and embracing progressivism. So the more talking points around progressivism that emerged, the poorer they performed. So I know your perception or some people's perceptions may be different based on one localized win, but if you look at the broad trend, it didn't work. I just put that out there just as just as the facts and not the vibes.

David Saxs: Well, I don't want it to be true. Just to be clear, I would

Jason Cowakanis: I'm I'm picking

David Saxs: I would love for the Democratic party to be

Jason Cowakanis: I don't want it to be true either, but it does seem

Chamath Palihapitiya: No, but you like it was wrong and it wasn't wrong. So,

David Saxs: well, I it might be a jump ball might be the best way to describe it because you have effect and

Chamath Palihapitiya: Okay, just look at the numerical numbers. The trends were horrible. Like meaning wherever the Democrats started, the more progressive talking points they added, the poor and poorer they performed, the approval ratings went down, the disapproval ratings went up. I'm not saying that they didn't win a mayoral race. They did do that. I'm just saying broadly speaking, nationwide, is the Democratic Party and its embrace of progressivism, at least at the federal level, has it paid off over 2025? And I would say categorically, mathematically not.

Jason Cowakanis: Okay. Now going to 2026. What is my biggest political loser? What I would say is the biggest loser of 26 is the Monroe Doctrine. I think that when historians look back on the Trump presidency, they're going to rewrite it. I think people have tried to minimize Trump's worldview as a Trump corollary. I don't think that's what this is. They even try to minimize it by calling it the Dawn Row doctrine. I don't think that's what this is. I think that there is a clear Trump doctrine that trumped the Monroe doctrine and I think that is the political loser because there is a huge body politic that has been built around the Monroe doctrine. How do we view wars? How do we view our spheres of influence? How do we view economic multilateralism versus unilateralism? All of that is out the window. You know, we view this as hemispheric dominance. That's Trump. We view it as proactive and in very specific cases interventionist. We intervene against drug cartels. We control immigration. We secure vital assets. That was you know not really the scope of the Monroe Doctrine.

Jason Cowakanis: We have more transactional relationships quite honestly which allows us to react in the moment. So I think the Monroe doctrine is the biggest loser of 2026.

Jason Cowakanis: Free your biggest loser 2026.

David Friedberg: My biggest political loser of 2026 is the tech industry. I think AI and tech wealth have become the lightning rod for populism on both sides of the aisle. I think um the right is fracturing a bit where this call it alliance between tech and MAGA seems to be getting a really strong challenge from the more populist movement. In the same sense the left is turning hard on tech because of tech's alignment with the right. And so I think we're going to see in the midterms a really big referendum against the tech industry coming out of

David Friedberg: good populist women.

Jason Cowakanis: That's a great one. Can I tell you guys a little story from yesterday? I had a meeting with three very senior sitting senators before I flew back to California. These are Republican senators and Freeberg. I was surprised exactly what you said. There is a couple of companies that have exacerbated their frustration. They view those companies, these are techs and the tech leaders of these companies as just not trustworthy and they've largely been grining these guys for a long time and they're pretty frustrated with it. So to your point, it is palpable.

David Saxs: Look, I can tell you that the natural ally for tech is with MAGA because we still believe in property rights and innovation. And if the Democratic party is truly going progressive, which means socialist, they want to rewrite your relationship to property rights, whatever that means, and impose wealth taxes and the realized gains taxes and all the rest of it. So, look, I don't think tech has that much of a choice. As Arnold Schwarzenegger said in one of those movies, come with me if you want to live.

Jason Cowakanis: Come with me if you want to live. Yes.

David Saxs: Get in the chopper.

David Friedberg: But let me say this. The reason why there's anger on the populist right is because they remember the censorship and the deplatforming and the shadow banning and all that kind of stuff. And what there needs to be is I think there just needs to be some meetings, some truth and reconciliation that happens between some of these tech leaders and some of these conservative influencers.

Jason Cowakanis: Guess what, David Tax? I know one guy who can help make that happen. No, I would I would like to host some of these meetings in 2026 and get these people together because I think that the tech companies have either realized their mistake or they were pushed into it in a lot of cases by the Biden administration.

David Saxs: Yeah, they had a gun to their head. Yeah,

Jason Cowakanis: they had a gun to their head. Now, I also think that one other mistake they've made is quite frankly they've been donors to only leftwing causes. And so, if you listen to Cernovich's account, he's like, "Look guys, you banned us. You cost us our livelihood for years.

David Saxs: Debbanked us.

Jason Cowakanis: Debbanked us. Where's the restitution

David Saxs: or at least at least start giving some support to our conservative cultural?

Jason Cowakanis: By the way, you nailed it on the head. The senators that I talked to, that's exactly what they want. They just wanted an apology. Just be honest and say you did it.

David Saxs: This asset seizure tax proposal in California and the conversation about other states, I think, is bringing a lot of people to that table. at least the tech only maybe contrary to what people may think it may actually be doing

David Saxs: a lot more positive for the right side than the left by putting this forward. This may actually be catalyzing a big change in Silicon Valley.

Jason Cowakanis: Yeah. Yeah. And if you if you think about it, if you were Zuckerberg or you were, you know, the Google executives and the FBI is telling you, hey, we need you to take care of these censorship issues. We need you to label these things, etc. You know, it puts you in a pretty tough situation if the FBI is calling you, if you're trying to do M&A. And then, you know, look, now M&A under Trump is on fire. We'll talk about that more in our prediction show. For me, I was going back and forth in my biggest political loser with these dopey Democrats who are centrists and the the new neocon Trump. Now, I don't know if Trump will continue these neocon ways. So, I'm going to just align with Sachs here that the centrist Democrats are going to be this year's biggest political losers. Now that you've mentioned twice that Trump is a neocon, I have to respond to this.

David Saxs: No, you don't. You don't have to, but go ahead.

David Saxs: Okay. Look, the the problem with neocon regime change operations was I'd say three-fold. Number one, the invasion. You have this giant invasion, land armies, huge numbers of people getting killed. Took, you know, months or a year. Took him like a year to get Saddam, right? Number two, you then have an occupation because whoever you then put in power only stays in power if you have American GIS there pointing the guns. So you end up with a 10 or 20 year occupation. And then third, you have nation building, which is you end up spending trillions of dollars basically trying to turn them into us so that our troops can leave. That was the mistake of Afghanistan and Iraq. But look, what has Trump done that is like any of those things. There's been no invasion, no occupation, and no nation building. This war, I guess, with Venezuela, if you want to call it that, it was a flawless operation. It lasted three hours.

Jason Cowakanis: I mean, I woke up and it was like, you know, the meme where it's like, "Wake up, honey." It's like, "Wake up, honey. Trump's won another war."

David Saxs: It was over before it even started.

David Saxs: They went in there and they basically captured Maduro. No Americans were killed. It was absolutely flawless operation. and they are bringing him to justice. By the way, he begged for it. He's on tape talking a lot of smack at rallies saying, "Come get me, you know,

David Saxs: calling the Americans chicken and so on." So, in any event, he was begging for it. We can go into a lot more of the the reasons for doing it and defending it, but I just don't think this is a neocon policy. And in fact, it's the Democrats who've been calling to put in this uh Nobel Prize winner that you interviewed, Freeberg, right? What's her name? Maria Kito Alonzo.

David Friedberg: Machado.

David Saxs: Machado. Okay. Anyway.

Jason Cowakanis: Oh,

David Saxs: Hector Alzando. I think it's Hector Alzando. I think he did somebody from the Brat Pack.

David Friedberg: No, she was in Running Man, I think. Anyway,

David Saxs: exactly.

David Friedberg: But

David Saxs: but

Jason Cowakanis: you're talking about the Cuban Venezuela actress.

David Saxs: I thought her name was Maria Kinchida Alonzo. Okay. Maria Karina Machado. Sorry. That's just what I thought of. Miss World Miss World Venezuela 1975 winner Maria.

David Saxs: Look, the Democrats are are criticizing the administration for not putting her in power. But look, here's the problem. Nobel prizes don't keep people in power. Men with guns keep people in power. And she doesn't have the men with guns. So, it' be American GIS. There would have to be the guns to keep her in power. And the administration has not done that. They're looking to basically work with the existing regime. And the big reason why we got sucked into Iraq is because that whole debathification process where we didn't just get rid of Saddam, we took out the entire elite of the country which created a huge insurgency. So there's been nothing like that. Jal is what I'm trying to tell you in this case. It's a whole different paradigm is what I'm trying to tell you. We're gonna need a new name for it. Maybe Chimath is right. Is definitely not neocon.

Jason Cowakanis: Not neon.

David Friedberg: Yeah, we might need a new branding for it. depends on, you know, if Trump is cosplaying Neocon when he says he's going to take Greenland, when he says he's going to take Colombia next, when he says he's going to take Cuba, he's certainly playing the character of Neocon uh publicly here. And who knows, that could be Trump just positioning himself and anchoring future negotiations. But if I was telling you, you know, before the election when you were saying, "Hey, do not let certain people become president, Nikki Haley, etc., because they're neocons and they're going to go to war with Venezuela. Are they going to go to war with Iran? Well, that's exactly what Trump has done. And as flawless as our troops did and my my lord, the we have the greatest military ever. So, just incredible job and shout out to them to do this and lose no American lives was just unbelievable. And it just says something about the dedication of these individuals. But things can go wrong no matter how good you are. We could be sitting here right now with 12 captured Delta Force. We could have 50 dead Americans.

David Saxs: Where's the war?

David Friedberg: But if that did, this is where you have to be intellectually honest.

David Friedberg: If we were dealing with a situation where they didn't pick up the target and we had lost American troops and god forbid they had taken hostages, we would be sitting here with a much different discussion and so we have to be very careful. I give but we're not I give Trump, but that is an equal possibility or certainly a non-zero possibility. Things can go sideways. You sound like when Sam Harris was saying that imagine if CO actually killed a lot of people then the conversation would be different. Well, it didn't. There was no war here. And by the way, with dead

David Saxs: and let's hope there isn't. And let's hope there isn't. You know, this is why I give Trump a lot of credit. He has been strategic. I do give you that.

David Friedberg: Stick and move. Stick and move is the game.

David Saxs: I pray that he can continue.

David Friedberg: And by the way, record first of all, even if we took Greenland, it's not going to be a there's 30,000 people who live there. But I think it's more likely that we'll we'll make a deal. I think we're going to make an offer they can't refuse.

Jason Cowakanis: Okay. Ken Harry, shout out to our guy Ken Harry. Maybe you can make a deal. Let's make

David Friedberg: them an offer they can't refuse.

Jason Cowakanis: Yeah. I mean, how much could it cost? I mean, there's nothing there.

Jason Cowakanis: Biggest business winner for 2025. Uh, looks like Freeberg picked robots and autonomous hardware. Year of the robot. I think if you include robo taxi there, you nailed it. Certainly next year will be the year of optimist uh 2027. Chimath, you said dollar denominated stable coins. I think uh given what we've seen with regulation, that was spot on. Gavin, shout out to our friend Gavin. He said big businesses that use AI thoughtfully. Another great one. I pick Tesla, which is at an all-time high. And Google, which of all of the mag seven crushed is the biggest winner, and they did 65%. So I know both of those we did. I think W all of us crushed that one. Who do you have Freeberg as your biggest business winner prediction for 2026? Go ahead, Freeberg.

David Friedberg: I couldn't decide. My number one is Huawei, which I've mentioned in the past out of China. I think Huawei's effort to partner with SMIC to go deeper in the chip stack and they're just firing on all cylinders. I do think keep an eye on Huawei over the next year. It's um it's going to outperform expectations, at least the western expectations. And the second is poly market. I think poly markets evolved from being kind of this one-off quirky prediction market to actually really providing insights into current events and the news in a way that none of us anticipated.

David Friedberg: And I do expect that after the deal we saw with NY that all of the exchanges and we're already seeing this with Robin Hood and Coinbase and we should expect something from NASDAQ this year. Dina Friedman talked to us about this, but I do think that prediction markets could become not just markets but also news and I think poly markets um just in such a position to have a breakout year.

Jason Cowakanis: Okay, great one. Chimath, biggest business winner for 2026 after yourself. Who do you got?

Chamath Palihapitiya: Yeah, it's hard. I mean, I will pick me.

Jason Cowakanis: Yep, we already done.

Chamath Palihapitiya: That one's coming.

Jason Cowakanis: It's already in the books.

Jason Cowakanis: Don't hurt your elbow. Don't hyper extend your elbow. already in the books. So, can't it's all downhill from here.

Jason Cowakanis: Nick, we need to use that meme of Obama giving himself a medal.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Jam is giving himself.

Chamath Palihapitiya: I will pick copper.

Jason Cowakanis: Okay, copper.

Chamath Palihapitiya: We are still completely underestimating how short we are in terms of the global demand supply dynamics of a handful of critical elements that we need. Again, in the Trump doctrine view of the world, that is no longer as multilateral as it was. And we need to have unilateral national security. And if you look through that lens, the asset that is set up to go absolutely parabolic is copper. And the reason is that it is at least as it stands today the most useful, cheap, amendable, conductive material that we have. That material manifests in everything from our data centers to our chips to our weapon systems. It's just everywhere, everywhere, everywhere. And right now, Jason, we are on a path by 2040 where we will be short about 70% of the global supply at current course and speed. And uh

Chamath Palihapitiya: I will pick copper.

Jason Cowakanis: Sax, what do you got? Biggest business winner of 2026. Your prediction. I said the IPO. I think 2026 is going to be a big year for IPOs. I'm not going to say which ones. I think there's going to be a bunch of them, a bunch of successful ones.

David Saxs: And I think we could see trillions of dollars of new market cap created of public companies.

Jason Cowakanis: Totally.

David Saxs: For a while, people were concerned that the number of public companies were shrinking. Public companies were actually being taken private. This is going to be a big reversal of that trend. So, I think this be part of the Trump boom will be the idea.

Jason Cowakanis: I love that one. I like that one.

Jason Cowakanis: Great one. Uh, I went with uh since I nailed the Mag 7 for last year and picked the highest performer with Google and I placed a bet on that, so I'm feeling pretty good about it. Uh, my prediction for 2026 is that Amazon is going to have a massive year interesting

Jason Cowakanis: as they continue to replace humans with robots. That's why here's a chart for you. I've been talking about this a little bit. I think this is the most important company to watch because Zuk's their self-driving is working. They're making great progress with it. And here when you look at this chart, you can see they're essentially flat in terms of hiring humans and they're surging in deploying robots and they did their whole PR comm strategy of calling them cobots and donating to toys for tots etc. I think they'll be the first corporate uh singularity which is to say the first company to have more robots driving their bottom line than humans. So that's my prediction for 2026 is Amazon. And I'm going to place a bet on that.

David Saxs: My prediction is that Jayla is such a luck box that he'll end up being right about Amazon, but not having anything to do with the reason he gave.

Jason Cowakanis: Yeah, right. He'll hire a billion humans to go do something and it'll be for a different reason. I am a luck box. That is true.

David Saxs: It'll just be better free cash flow and all of a sudden more people using AWS and Jal will be right. Well, I actually I think the reason is if you just if you think about it, I don't know if you guys have had this experience, but with the delivery business, which was kind of a dog for a long time, obviously AWS is crushing it, but that delivery business here in Austin, we get everything the same day. You're going to experience this, David, there are because of the I think the geography here and the ability to have depot centers very close. Everything you order on Amazon comes within the same day.

David Saxs: You know, I've noticed that already. I've already started ordering things from Amazon. You're right. It was all same day. I'm like, "Wait, what is going on?"

Jason Cowakanis: That's

David Saxs: what it is is we have a lot of space 15 miles outside of the city center, 20 cent, and they built these huge um warehouses. So, you just get everything within 4 hours. They're like, "We'll be right there." It's very bizarre.

David Friedberg: So, Jason, you'll buy like virtues at like 8:00 a.m. and it arrives by noon.

Jason Cowakanis: Yes. Absolutely. Absolutely. And uh when you put your order in for ethics and morality, it just never shows up. I don't know. It's lost again. Who knows? It's just incredible. We're just both ends of the spectrum here.

Jason Cowakanis: Moral. It's like, "Hello, customer support. I ordered a moral compass 2 years ago. It still hasn't arrived."

Jason Cowakanis: Okay. Biggest business loser.

Chamath Palihapitiya: I love each month.

Jason Cowakanis: It hid behind the 20 billion.

Chamath Palihapitiya: It did. Absolutely.

David Saxs: All I know is I got my beak wet. So, I hope your compass never shows up.

Jason Cowakanis: You got your beak wet on that deal.

David Saxs: Well, Sundep came to Besties and he wanted to collect all besties. We all got to place a little bet and then

David Saxs: Oh, by the way, by the way, I devested I devested my Gro shares as part of joining the government back in like February or March.

Jason Cowakanis: Oh god.

David Saxs: So,

Jason Cowakanis: oh by the way, by the way, what would that cost you like what the last triple up?

David Saxs: No, it was a small position that came from Grock acquiring Sunny's old company. We didn't invest in Gro, so it wasn't big, but the point was

Jason Cowakanis: Yeah, it's just another example of you sacrificing for the country, which I give you a lot of credit for. It's good for Sachs to put that on the record.

David Saxs: Yeah.

David Saxs: Well, it's just so ridiculous because I'm accused of somehow doing this job for money when it just keeps costing me money.

Jason Cowakanis: It's negative money.

David Saxs: XAI just raised an up round at twice the valuation from the last round and we had to divest that too.

Jason Cowakanis: Yeah. No, no, we didn't sit it out. Hold on. Let's be clear. We didn't sit it out. We divested it.

Jason Cowakanis: So, you place the bet and then before you get to collect the ticket, you lose the last double up or triple up. The economic cost to Sachs will probably exceed a billion dollars by the time he leaves.

Jason Cowakanis: Personally, this is crazy. I mean, people need to know this. It's a very important thing to put on the record. I think it's important for

David Saxs: I think everybody should know. All these dumb reporters don't get it, but Sax has sacrificed financially an enormous amount to work on behalf of the government and and the people. That's that's really amazing. It's fine. I wouldn't even say anything about it if it weren't for the fact that we got these mainstream media reporters lying and saying the opposite that somehow this job is making me money,

Jason Cowakanis: right?

David Saxs: I wouldn't say a word about it otherwise.

Jason Cowakanis: Business loser 2025.

Jason Cowakanis: Gavin said federal government service providers, I guess because of Doge and them being held to the fire uh feet to the fire there to give us a better deal. Old guard defense contractors like Bowen and Lheed was yours Freedberg and Chimath you said the Max 7 expected a decrease in uh the record concentration. I said open EI which would see a peak valuation and obviously I got that wrong. What do you got this year Freeberg? Who do you think is going to be the biggest business loser of this year? To follow up on Chimath and my conversation at the Christmas dinner, I think these state governments are going to have a real problem with finding financing because what's going on with the exposees that are underway on waste, fraud, and abuse in state agencies, I think, is going to lead to a conversation that's going to cause folks to question the long-term solveny in operations because the response won't be, hey, let's cut out the waste, fraud, and the abuse. the response is going to be we got to keep it going and that is what is going to give people fear is that if they did respond call it equivocally to the discoveries that the governments did then I think that there's an opportunity to continue to be able to borrow and access capital markets but I do worry a lot about state governments um borrowing. I think the other thing that's going to hit the the fan this year in state governments is all of these um unrealized pension liabilities. I think when these numbers start to come out this year and a lot of people are now digging deep into it, folks are going to wake up and be like, "Holy, there's a ginormous hole in these states and their obligations."

David Saxs: And why does the government have to do these pensions? Why can't we do superanuation like Australia does? We have to get this out of the I love that pick.

David Friedberg: That's called a defined contribution instead of a defined benefit. And if you get this defined contribution model and then just have good management, it all works out. So this is basically the problem with social security. Social Security is a defined benefit and then all the money just doesn't sit anywhere. It doesn't exist.

David Saxs: If it was a defined contribution,

David Friedberg: it's just a liability.

Jason Cowakanis: And let me let me give a shout out. If it was a defined contribution like Invest America accounts or Trump accounts as they're being called, and you put the money in and you see how much you have and every year you track it and that's what your retirement is going to be, just like we might have with our 401ks or our IARS, that is a system that actually has true solveny. Otherwise, it becomes this runaway train of liability. And that's effectively what the states have set up. And it's very dangerous.

David Saxs: And if we were to take government out of it and then every American just had to put 10, 12, 14% into their retirement account and it was forced, you'd have happy people who feel some agency in their lives, which the people of Australia do. Chimath, who's your loser 2026?

Chamath Palihapitiya: I will pick the software industrial complex. So these are the companies that sell licensed SAS to the corporations of America. It's about a3 to4 trillion a year economy. That is separated into three buckets. Bucket one which is the smallest is the initial licensing. That's probably 5 to 10%. Buckets two and three where all the money is made is what's called maintenance and migration which is how do I just maintain this big bulky license that I just bought for $300 million as an example

Chamath Palihapitiya: or how do I migrate it from product A to product B.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Those last two buckets represent 90% of all the dollars in revenue that's generated in software. And because of the advancement of these models and the advancement of these technological techniques that we are all uncovering, building agents, building systems, I think you're going to see that total economic opportunity shrink and contract aggressively.

Chamath Palihapitiya: The companies will still be able to do their business. It'll just be at a much much lower incremental revenue. the customers will be able to do their business. They'll have a lot more flexibility and a lot of upstarts I think will have opportunity. I'm speaking my book obviously, but I'm seeing it on the ground with you have a company building software.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Our entire business 8090s business has basically migrated to disrupting maintenance and migration patterns. I cannot describe how much opportunity there is. It's very tactical, mundane, not very sexy work, but it's incredibly lucrative. And so I expect that that thing is going to shrink. It's going to impact SAS companies, public SAS companies particularly quite severely in 20.

Jason Cowakanis: What do you got facts for your biggest business loser of 2026 prediction?

David Saxs: For me, we already talked about this, but it was California because of the wealth tax and also the ownorous regulations driving business and capital out of the state. I hope you guys are right that it does not make the ballot. If it does, I think there will be a panic and rush for the exits. Regardless, there's two major refineries closing by the spring. Higher gas prices will be the result. I just think that the politicians are not doing a good enough job in California dispelling the fears and the actual hostility of the business environment.

Jason Cowakanis: That's a great one. And I went with young white collar workers in America. I think they're going to be the biggest business loser. I think it's getting really hard for them to get entry level uh jobs. I'm seeing that all over the place because companies are having an easier job uh just automating with AI than training up Gen Z graduates. That's my belief. That's why I'm launched founder university on three continents. If you are a young person, you got to be resilient. You're going to have to be self-reliant independent of what Mandami Mandami says about collectivism. It's easier to use AI than it is to train up and we don't have professional development. That needs to come back. I just did an interview with the CEO of McKenzie, which you may have seen on the feed. And this is the big challenge in corporate America is they're taking out the bottom two or three rungs and automating stuff. And we really need to develop young people so that they have a path to take the CEO jobs eventually. And I don't think they're going to have an easy time doing that. That's why I think all young people should start companies. I am talking my own book. I am talking about founder.university. Please apply Japan, Saudi, and in America. We're going to help you build companies. Thank you for my promo,

David Friedberg: Jason. I got a text last night from a friend and it's in response to your comment about young people not being able to find jobs because of AI, which is the statement you've made a couple times. He said went to a roundabout of 50 CEOs of public and private companies and asked everyone if they're hiring junior engineers. Everyone said they are still, but not as much as before because during co every college lowered the bar on admissions and the talent just isn't as good anymore. My friend went on and he said, 'You should talk about this to counter Jal's point about AI taking young people's jobs. We see this with financial analysts and we see this with sales people we hire. The Gen Z kids are all really challenging to hire because of cultural issues, not because we're not hiring them due to AI. So, we try and hire older people primarily to to fill those roles. So, there's a real interesting point that he was making. I texted a couple of their friends to ask them their opinion and I've heard this concurrence shout out which is like a lot of people think that recent grads out of college and this may be a co era phenomenon they just don't seem to have the temperament the motivation the organizational skills

Jason Cowakanis: executive function yeah

David Friedberg: executive function and by the way some of our friends who I've talked to who have kids graduating college there's even a conversation about none of these kids are motivated to get jobs or to make money there's a very weird phenomenon in the youth right now and this may be a COVID phenomenon and it may be a cultural thing that's part of the long form of what's going on in our society or it may be a socialist trend or it may be a populist trend or it may just be that people have gotten too wealthy and the nation has truly split and you can't climb the ladder anymore. There's a bunch of things going on here, but I do not think, and I think a lot of people are echoing this, Jal, that challenges that young people are having finding employment is purely rooted in in an AI and automation phenomenon, but it may be a cultural phenomenon. And so, I just put that on the plate for you to consider that I don't I do think it's both. I do think it is partially what you're saying is that maybe these young folks um have, you know, they're just either entitled or their parents have enough money for them to skate and go sideways and maybe not be as career motivated. It could be a social thing, it could be a co thing, it could be all of those and certainly multiffactor. I just know what I see on the ground which is you know so many companies coming to me saying we can replace the bottom third of these tasks and that that those bottom third of tasks are typically done by young people out of school. So I think both things are probably true to a certain extent and time will tell. I do think it's going to be challenging and continue to be challenging and you see that in the numbers from you know Google, Uber, Coinbase, all these companies are doing more with less and and maybe that's just the nature of AI. Maybe the first thing you do is cut costs. And maybe the second thing you do is hire people who know how to use these tools. If you are a young person who uses AI tools, you're going to find a job. If you're a young person who isn't motivated and doesn't use AI tools, you're going to have a hard time.

Jason Cowakanis: Let's go with the biggest deal. Last year's predictions for biggest deal for 2025, traditional auto OEM consolidation. That was you, Chimoth. I think that we haven't seen exactly the consolidation, but we have seen those businesses come apart. So I think it's I give you definitely twothirds of a credit there. Uh Gavin said a title wave of M&A. I think he's not wrong there. That has started to happen certainly. Freeberg you said massive compute buildout deals. Of course you nailed that one. I said consolidation amongst the on demand economy. That hasn't happened but we do see a lot of deals occurring. And I said also Apple would buy Warner Brothers. I got that like a I guess uh that wound up going to Netflix. So I give myself a half point for that. What do you have as your biggest deal for 2026, David Saxs?

David Saxs: Well, I don't want to get prediction I don't want to get too specific here in terms of names of companies and that sort of thing,

David Saxs: but uh what I would say is that I think there was a breakthrough in the last couple of months in terms of these coding assistants where they've been around for a while, but there seems to have been another level of quality achieved just in the last month or so. And you're really starting to hear I mean maybe a lot of it is hype but there is I think a lot of people are getting very excited about the potential here and part of it is coding part of it is just tool use. You can download the programs and so it has access to your file drive and it can take actions on your computer. This trend feels to me like chat bots did at the end of 2022 going into 23 where it's like people were really hyped about it but then continue to play out play out in the next year and so I think these this call coding assistance/tool use I think will get bigger and bigger this year.

Jason Cowakanis: Freeberg what do you got biggest deal?

David Friedberg: Uh Russia Ukraine I think it's going to settle out this year. I think there's a lot of motivating factors to get it settled out this year. Economic and other political factors, but I do think it's going to settle out this year and it's going to bring a bit more stability to that region. And there's a whole reset that's underway this year. I think in terms of geopolitics and where the powers all sit,

David Friedberg: Trump can stop that war, he would be two for two. That would be I think this one's going to settle.

Jason Cowakanis: That would be that would be great. He may not have done it on day one, but if he gets it done in in, you know, year two, that's good enough for me. Chimal biggest deal 2026. What do you got?

Chamath Palihapitiya: It's not a specific deal, but it's an approach. I think that M&A cannot happen. And so it's the IP license M&A workaround. And I think you're going to see hundreds of billions of dollars of these kinds of deals. So this is the deal that Google did with Character AI. It's the same thing that they did.

Jason Cowakanis: Microsoft did it. Yeah,

Chamath Palihapitiya: Microsoft did it. It's obviously what Nvidia did with Grock. Why are these deals happening? Well, if you just look at what Facebook tried to do, they tried to buy Manis for $2.5 billion. Manis was a Chinese company that then left China and essentially rebuilt itself as a Singaporean business. The Chinese have now said, "We're going to look at this." They are going to actively import export controls. They're going to actively look at which technologies and even which researchers are working on things that are critical enough that it just can't go abroad in this existential fight that they believe they're in with the United States. The United States is in equivalent such position. All of this leads me to believe that traditional M&A is effectively dead. I think it's going to be impossible to get a large transaction done. So how will you do it? You'll do what Sundar did. You'll do what Satya did. You'll do what Jensen did. You'll do what we did with Scale AI. These huge licensing deals that basically replace M&A. And I think that that as a deal type will get better and more refined and tighter and better executed. We were the third or fourth of these kinds of deals and even the third or fourth iteration was quite good.

Chamath Palihapitiya: By the time that you're into the middle part of next year and you've done 15 or 20 of these things, I think the lawyers that work on these things and the accountants will just be bull. The tax treatment is not ideal but the speed at which you can do them is phenomenal because the next day somebody like Sundep can be working for Jensen which is what Jensen wants. They want the talent. Zuckerberg wants the talent working there the next day

Jason Cowakanis: and the IP

Jason Cowakanis: and the IP of course. Um you know for 2026 I think we're going to see some massive M&A. It doesn't matter to me how it occurs but I do think we're going to see a 50 billion plus deal. And I think it could be uh one of the Mag 7, an Apple, a Meta, a Microsoft or an Amazon going out and trying to buy XAI, Mistro, Perplexity, Anthropic. One of those four comes to mind. I know most of them probably want to go public and uh go it alone, but I think an offer could come in and during that race for which six or seven large language models and man it is a it is a battle where they are moving up and down the rankings and beating each other out, you know, on your question

Jason Cowakanis: and I think one of them is going to I think one of them is going to go for it. I I I think it could wind up being Apple.

Jason Cowakanis: I met Meta or Amazon who buys an anthropic or a perplexity. I started where you were, but this is why I went to this deal type as the biggest business winner because if any of those companies tried to buy, let's just say anthropic, I think it's three years of antitrust minimum. It's worse than when Microsoft tried to buy Activision because that was a niche product and even that took almost 2 years and like three or four months if I'm getting it right. It or about two years. It's a huge slog because it's a it's about global coordination of multiple regulators.

David Saxs: Yeah.

Jason Cowakanis: And get through the EU and eventually one of them takes the lead pole position. But in the Microsoft case, it wasn't just one. You had to navigate China. You had to navigate

Jason Cowakanis: Europe. So I I agree with you because I think there's companies with so much cash on their balance sheets that are effectively getting debased every day. the markets will start to punish these companies. It just seems like you're right. There's going to be a hundred billion dollar transaction. I just suspect it'll end up as an IP license.

David Saxs: Yeah. And I think President Trump, one of his great strengths is that he moves quickly. Man, what a first year. Whether you like the decisions or not, he he makes decisions. I think this is one of the things that Democrats are learning is that you got to actually get things done for the American people. I think he might instruct our government to let M&A be great again and that would be great for American exceptionalism. These companies do need to merge and to continue to grow and we should go try to get from a MAG 7 to a MAG 17. We need more bigger companies with bigger footprints taking on global markets.

Jason Cowakanis: Most contrarian belief most contrarian belief. People like this one. I said openAI loses its lead in the AI race. Uh and in fact that has happened if you look at the um arenas and you look at their market share they are being challenged. Chimath you said the banking crisis in one of the major mainline banks. Gavin said one year of 5% plus GDP growth at one point over the next couple of years. Well done to Gavin Freeberg you said socialism roars back. Another amazing prediction. What's your prediction for this year since you crushed it last year? Freeberg. Go ahead.

David Friedberg: My prediction is based on the premise that I think there is going to be this revolution in Iran and the Ayatollas are going to be out. That's not the contrarian belief. I think that's the standard belief and I think that is going to happen and that's the premise. But a lot of people think that Iran is part of the destabilizing force in the Middle East. And I do think that there is already in anticipation of the turnover with the ruling parties in Iran. there is already this brewing conflict amongst the other Arab states. So I think that between UAE, Saudi, Qatar and this fraction in Yemen and then I don't know if you guys have followed but there's this kind of emerging independence movement for Somali land which is kind of north of Somalia

David Friedberg: that there may be more conflict brewing in the Middle East than anyone anticipates for this year that will not necessarily involve Israel and and or Iran. it will actually be amongst the other Gulf states as they v for influence and power and that the contrarian point may in fact be that Iran has been a stabilizing force in that region and by removing Iran and by changing over Iran and they become this kind of independent democratic state and this particularly is going to be heightened as there's going to be this battle for who's going to take care of the Palestinians as the two-state solution emerges and what's the role that Jordan's going to have to play versus Egypt versus Saudi and it's going to lead to a lot of questions about resource allocation. So, I think that this year could end up being a little bit nastier than folks anticipate in the Middle East as Iran turns over.

Jason Cowakanis: Sax got a contrarian belief for 2026.

David Saxs: Yes, I said that AI will increase demand for knowledge workers, not decrease it. I would refer you to Erin Levy's post called Jevans paradox for knowledge workers. And the point of Jevans paradox is that as the cost of a resource goes down, the aggregate demand for it actually increases because you discover more and more use cases. So I think this will certainly happen with code. In the past has been very expensive to generate code. You have to hire engineers. There's not enough of them. It's an expensive resource. So the amount of software generated in the economy was limited by that. I think it's going to increase massively now because the cost of generating code is coming down. so much. But there's other examples too. You take a field like radiology that's frequently cited as a profession that AI is going to put out of business. That's not what the data shows. The data shows that the number of radiologists is increasing. Why? Because the number of scans that people want to make is increasing. And it's true that AI can do some of the work, but you still need a doctor to prompt the AI to interpret the AI to validate it. So you get more efficient. The cost of scans goes down. And instead of it being a super specialty that happens very rarely that you need like a referral on top of a referral to get it becomes something that's normalized and everyone starts doing it and you start getting more and more scans that leads to better and better outcomes. So I think there's going to be a lot of those examples through the economy and we're going to look back and see that the job loss narrative was not only wrong but we actually got job gains.

Jason Cowakanis: Okay. Okay. And for those of you who want to understand Jeb's paradox a little more, you can look at something like electricity or steel or concrete. When we lowered the cost of those things, people didn't use less of it. They built skyscrapers and we had more routes for more airplanes to take you on more vacations. And that went from being something only rich people did to everybody. So Jeban's paradox is definitely at work. What do you got? Uh Chimath, which what's on your uh contrarian belief?

Chamath Palihapitiya: Gosh, I have two. Well, I'll give you them both and you can just see. My contrarian belief number one is I don't think SpaceX will IPO. I think that it will reverse merge into Tesla and I think Elon will use it as a moment to consolidate control and power of his two seminal assets into one cap table.

Jason Cowakanis: Oh my god, I love that. Wow.

David Saxs: Well, he's talked about that before. He's talked about about having a holding company for years of all of the collection. You could put Neural Link in there too, right Jim? You could put in the Boring Company as well.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Sure. I'm just giving you my contrarian take. there will be no IPO for SpaceX. I think it will just be it specifically will be a reverse merger.

Jason Cowakanis: There you go.

Chamath Palihapitiya: The second contrarian take is that

Chamath Palihapitiya: I think the central banks will realize that there are limitations to gold and limitations to Bitcoin and will as a result seek out a completely new cryptographic paradigm that they can control on their balance sheet. that is fungeable, that is tradable and that is completely secure and private.

Chamath Palihapitiya: And I think the reason why that privacy needs to exist is that for the sovereignty of a country, you need to be in a position where you have assets that are not easily disclosed to anybody else, friends or enemies alike. And then separately, cryptographically, if you're going to own a currency,

Chamath Palihapitiya: you need to hedge against the eventual risk in the next 5 to 10 years that there's a quantum chip that can challenge the existing cryptographic schemes that are used. And uh for my contrarian, I was thinking about going with OpenAI losing their lead and not being the number one company again. uh because I do think that will be the trend that they will have the they'll continue to give up their market share to other players including Google and Gemini and XAI etc. But I'm going to go with a a pretty wild card here. I think the standoff with China is going to be largely resolved and I think President Trump's when he makes his visit there. I don't know if you're going to go on that one sax but I think he should be included in it obviously because of the AI race. I do think that the standoff um and the issues around Taiwan are going to be resolved and I think this could be the signature issue of Trump's second term is that we work out a working relationship where both China and America win without one of us losing.

Jason Cowakanis: Best performing asset best performing asset last year's prediction I said MAG 7 which was up 22% versus the S&P 500 at plus 17. Chimathy were long CDS for a potential run on a major bank. You said it was a long shot. Gavin said high bandwidth memory makers like Micron which was up 230%.

Jason Cowakanis: That was a great call. And Freeberg, you said Chinese tech stocks and ETFs Alibab is up 85%. Chinese tech ETF up 47% versus the S&P 500 at plus 17. So I guess that means Gavin Freedberg and then myself.

Jason Cowakanis: What do you got for this year's best performing asset? Freedberg.

David Friedberg: Poly market. Poly markets on a tear. Network effects. Replacing media replacing markets.

Jason Cowakanis: Congrats to our friend Shane. A poly market.

Jason Cowakanis: Do you have a best performing asset for 2026? Go ahead, Shima.

Chamath Palihapitiya: I would pick a basket of critical metals.

Jason Cowakanis: Okay. Basket of critical uh metals. What do you got, Zach?

David Saxs: It's getting a little bit redundant for me, but I just said the expanding super cycle in tech. I mean, again, this is just another facet of the boom. But actually, let me just show you some data that literally just came out. I feel like this is breaking news.

Jason Cowakanis: Oh, breaking news.

David Saxs: Nick, can you pull this up? US productivity just surged 4.9%, the strongest reading in nearly 6 years. And this is the news item,

David Saxs: is that the Atlanta Fed, their forecast for Q4 GDP just climbed to 5.4%. Can that be right?

Jason Cowakanis: Yes.

David Friedberg: Can we get a fact check on that? Five to six is I think where we're going to see it, guys. We're going to see some sixes get printed.

Jason Cowakanis: I mean,

David Friedberg: January 8th, 2026, Atlanta Fed's GDP now model estimate for real GDP growth in the fourth quarter of 2025 is 5.4% significant jump from the previous estimate of 2.7% on January 5th.

Chamath Palihapitiya: You have to remember that there's going to be 150 basis point correction in Q4 GDP because of the government furlow. Okay? So let's say that GDP was probably call it four. You're going to see a print of 2 and a half. So you need to readjust that because now all the government workers are back. They're recounted in GDP. If you look through 2026,

Chamath Palihapitiya: there's a handful of things that I think people do not understand. Well, number one, all of non-farm payrolls has been completely reset and rebased. And the reason why is because of immigration. So what used to be a 100 to 150 number print is now a 40 to 50 number print. Why is that important? Because when you look through earnings and you look at the lower 25% quartiles of earnings growth, they're off the charts. There's all of these anecdotal examples now of earnings just exceeding expectations. There was an article in the front page of the Wall Street Journal yesterday about Ford trying to pay mechanics $160,000 a year and having 5,000 openings. So to Sax's point, we are a coiled spring. Closing the border plus adding productivity lifts through AI and other things have created a growth dynamic in the United States that will really start to show itself in 26. So I think that you should be not short the US economy here. It is ready to rip and uh adding to all that and just giving my pick. I think if we are in a rate cut environment and the tailwinds keep happening and people have a little bit of cash laying around. My pick for best performing asset will be the Robin Hood poly market prize picks gambling wagering uh space because people will be able to have a little cash around to make some bets. You can put Coinbase in there too. I guess

Chamath Palihapitiya: by the way the coralary to what we just talked about if you see five and a half and six and a half prints and these employment numbers a lot of this affordability stuff may be not as accurate as we think it is. Everybody right now is trying to figure out, okay, well, where are the pockets of unaffordability? And there are clearly some, but those are narrow and they can be fixed, but on a broad-based basis, what Sax says is right. You have this combination of earnings growth, productivity growth,

Chamath Palihapitiya: and now this overlay where you have these tax cuts that are going to hit in 26. My gosh, I mean, asset prices in general, I think, will do well. Now you'll also see potentially home prices correct because if the president is successful in making sure Blackstone can't buy houses but on the other side people are earning more and they can enter with interest rates that are now 100 to 150 basis points lower. You'll see a boom in housing

Chamath Palihapitiya: where it's not the corporations that are buying the houses but individuals. There's a lot of variables here that can that can break in America's favor. This is why I think 6% is not unrealistic which would be absolutely nuts.

Jason Cowakanis: Okay, let's move on to the worst performing asset. Last year's predictions for worst performing asset of 2025, I said legacy car companies and real estate. Both of those turned out to be correct. Chimath, you said enterprise SAS and the software industrial industrial complex. Again, that uh looked correct as well. Gavin said enterprise SAS and Freeberg, you said vertical SAS. So, we had three SAS and I had legacy car companies real estate.

David Saxs: Let me give you check out.

David Saxs: Yeah, let me just give you some numbers on that to show you. Service Now down 30%, Workday down 18%, Docu Sign down 23%, Dropbox down 9% and Box down 6% while the S&P was up 17%. I think it's worth highlighting like it was a challenging year for this enterprise asset. There's

Chamath Palihapitiya: especially with the per seat pricing as opposed to consumptionbased pricing. If you have a static number of employees or less employees like many of these companies do, there's just less seats to sell. So their whole growth was based on land and expand. You land the client and then you expand the client because they're adding staff. If you're not adding staff, you can't uh you know, you don't have more people using Salesforce.

Jason Cowakanis: Okay. So, let's talk about our worst performing asset predictions for 2026. Who do you got? Sachs. Worst performing asset of 2026.

David Saxs: Well, I just said California luxury real estate because of the overhang of the wealth tax and all the things we're talking about.

Jason Cowakanis: Yeah, that one hits close to home, I think.

David Saxs: Now, yes, it does. Actually, what I'm hoping for is a dead cat bounce. If you guys are right that the ballot initiative fails,

David Saxs: then the overhang will be lifted and maybe I can

David Saxs: clear some real estate.

Jason Cowakanis: Clear some

David Saxs: It's not easy being It's not easy being right sometimes.

Jason Cowakanis: Yeah.

Jason Cowakanis: Fre, what do you got?

David Friedberg: What What like what what's your discount price on that asset right now? I mean, like I might make a bid, you know, if you give me a

David Friedberg: give me a good clearance. got $100 million laying around.

David Saxs: Yeah, I'm not paying 100.

Jason Cowakanis: Okay, here we go. Bestie negotiations occur.

David Saxs: All right. Um,

Jason Cowakanis: give them the bestie price. The buy it now. Bestie price. What's the buy?

David Saxs: No, no, no. Okay. By the way, you know, San Francisco has that insane luxury tax which they have in LA, too. You got to pay 5% on any piece of real estate over 25% in San Francisco. Do you know that?

Jason Cowakanis: 25% in San Francisco. Do you know that?

David Saxs: Which makes it even harder for these high-end places to trade. So wait, you're saying if I if I bought Sax's house for 100, I'd have to spend

David Saxs: Oh, he has to pay 6%.

Jason Cowakanis: 6%.

David Saxs: You got to pay your broker 6%. I mean, they're just basically freezing the market.

Jason Cowakanis: Okay. Not the buyer.

David Saxs: Well,

David Saxs: you can negotiate who pays.

David Saxs: The 5%, you know, quote unquote mansion tax has just killed LA real estate. You talk to brokers down there cuz people used to flip houses a lot more. Now you just can't afford to do that.

Jason Cowakanis: unintended consequences, folks. really bad for the

David Friedberg: Wait, you're telling me taxes slow down transaction volume and reduce the growth of the economy? That's crazy. I had no idea, Zach. You should write that down. We should do a whole thing on that.

David Saxs: Yeah, maybe we should write. I had no idea.

Jason Cowakanis: Yeah. Somebody make a note.

David Saxs: Yeah.

Jason Cowakanis: So, worst performing asset, Chimoth, what do you think? Worst performing asset.

Chamath Palihapitiya: I won't say the worst performing, but I think a very poor performing asset will be hydrocarbons. I just think that the trend in oil is inexurable and it's down and the reason it's down is irrespective of your thoughts on climate change the trends on electrification and energy storage are just unstoppable.

Chamath Palihapitiya: And so what that does is it shrinks the surface area of where oil is useful. It's not like a cataclysmic thing, but it's sort of a melting iceberg where does it see $65 or $45? And I would say on on a per barrel basis, and I think it's more likely to see 45 than 65.

Jason Cowakanis: Okay. I went with the US dollar in different permutations of how you can buy it because our debt continues to grow unabated. and you know

Jason Cowakanis: the defacement trade JCAL JCAL owning the

Jason Cowakanis: I just think it's going to be hard for you know the the USD because we're talking about we've been adding I think we're going to add two trillion in debt this year and then if we're increasing and again I I know Trump says President Trump says a lot of things but if we're increasing the military budget by 50% uh that means uh that's going to be straight to our debt line so it's going to be harder and harder for the dollar doesn't mean that America's not going to do great but the value of the American dollar is going to be challenged which we see in people moving to gold and silver and perhaps copper. Okay. If you could give us your worst performing asset of 2026, David,

David Saxs: it would be Netflix if they don't close the Warner Brother deal. I do think Netflix's service is being challenged from all sides with deep content libraries. And I think we're seeing a great commoditization happening. I've also heard directly from folks in Hollywood, the creators of new content, that people would prefer not to work with Netflix. They only uh pay creators cost plus 10% now. And so as a creator, you're actually better off not doing deals with Netflix anymore. So their content library is going to shrink because of the natural economic forces underway. Alternative, if they do close on Warner Brothers, I think they've got some good runway in terms of that content library and they'll be fine. And in that case, my worst performing asset would be traditional media stocks. And I do think that they're going to underperform. There's just such an incredible variety of high-quality content that's emerging from independent creators that are leveraging their own distribution platforms through YouTube and others. And I think that um traditional media is going to continue to be deeply challenged as we've seen for example just in the news segment with the rise of citizen journalism. So that's the that's what I would kind of

Jason Cowakanis: Yeah. And you know the the Netflix observation I think is was well founded because they're also in terms of expanding their library. They just did a deal with Bill Simmons, I see, and with um Bar Stool Sports to move over their sports shows, podcasts, video shows from YouTube, and they're going to take them off YouTube and put them on Netflix exclusively. So, that's a really interesting trend as well to keep an eye on. Okay. By the way, before we move off asset, just on best performing asset, there's one category we didn't talk about, but I think it's kind of interesting, which is the category of assets that qualify for accelerated depreciation capital equipment.

David Saxs: Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.

David Saxs: That includes things like planes, so forth. There's now 100% accelerated depreciation for certain kinds of capital equipment because of the big beautiful bill. And, you know, it kind of goes along with some of the tax cuts that we talked about, but man, that is making those markets super hot right now.

Jason Cowakanis: Absolutely. Yeah. Try buying a plane these days. It's very difficult.

David Saxs: No, Jason. It's not planes. It's like Caterpillar.

Jason Cowakanis: No, no, it's tractors. It Yeah, it's generators. It's seaman. This is why seaman stock is through the roof. All of this capital equipment, you get to write it off 100% year one. It's creating a massive infrastructure build out in the US. So,

Jason Cowakanis: absolutely,

David Saxs: there's some companies that are huge beneficiaries of this obviously because they're the sellers of the capital equipment. And of course, this is one of the reasons GDP is going up is people are actually investing in business again.

Jason Cowakanis: Okay. Most anticipated trend.

David Saxs: By the way, this is the correlary of the statement that if you reduce taxes, the economy grows. So,

Jason Cowakanis: there we go.

David Saxs: Yeah.

Jason Cowakanis: Most anticipated trend of 2025. I said the wrath of Lena ending and M&A and IPOs being back. I get some credit there. Chimath, you said the end of the deep state. I think you get a lot of credit there. Gavin said, "AI makes more progress per quarter in 2025 than it did in 2023." That's a great one. Free, you said the nuclear power buildout. I think you get some credit there, too. Yeah.

David Friedberg: Not sure. Not sure. We got some work to do there. Massive massively short nuclear.

Jason Cowakanis: You're still short nuclear, but I know the guy Howard Lutnik talked to him.

David Friedberg: I talked to Howard Lutnik as well.

Jason Cowakanis: He said he's all in on nuclear.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Free, can I tell you why I'm short nuclear? I think that we're in the very delicate part of the cycle where they've missed the window. So by the time that they deliver working SMRs at scale,

Chamath Palihapitiya: the problem is that the marginal cost of electricity will effectively be zero and it'll have gone to zero because of a combination of solar and storage as well as coal and oil. And so it's just in a very delicate place where the large form factor nuclear reactors make zero economic sense by 2032 or 2035 which is when through the Byzantine permitting and building they get it done and then the SMRs by the time that they get it done they may not be able to meet the market either. So I think it's a very complicated moment for nuclear actually not scientifically economically just does not hang together mathematically.

David Friedberg: I think that's if you assume um no shift in the demand curve and I think that like if you if you look at China going to 8 terowatts of production and by 2040 or whatever it is and we're sitting at one and we're not moving we are going to have a big catch up to do and the question is can we really build out two 3 terowatts of electricity generation how are we going to build out 2 to three terowatts of electricity generation the amount of land that you would need with solar and what's it going to take to get all of that installed and so on. And by the way, there's a lot of the stuff in China, if you look at all the big solar buildouts that they did where they're ripping it up now. This is a longer conversation, but I really do question whether we can pin everything on solar. It's going to be a mix of stuff. And so your point may be right that in the near term to meet the current kind of demand curve, nuclear is going to be economically challenged, but at some point here, there's an inflection that we have to meet.

Jason Cowakanis: So what's your most anticipated trend of 2026? Swedenberg,

David Friedberg: Iran becoming an independent democratic state. I think I'm just speaking generally anticipated. I think a lot of people are anticipating that that's going to happen this year. There's an uprising in the streets. There is a weakening of the Ayatollas and there seems to be a moment underway

David Friedberg: and the demographics are destiny. There's a lot of young people in Iran and they do not want to live under the current rule. They want to be free.

David Friedberg: But there is a major economic problem in Iran in terms of affordability. You think we have an issue of affordability in the US. In Iran, it's very hard for people just to buy their basic necessities, basic needs to the majority of people. So that that's why they are taking to the street. There's a real economic crisis underway that is motivating this turnover. Every year, everyone like anticipates some big change in the Middle East. But this could be the biggest rewriting of the Middle East in a long time.

Jason Cowakanis: Okay, Sax, what do you got

Jason Cowakanis: for category?

Jason Cowakanis: Most anticipated trend of 2026. What do you got, Sax? I said auditing government spending at all levels.

David Saxs: That's a good one. That's a good one.

Jason Cowakanis: Decentralized Doge.

David Saxs: Love.

Jason Cowakanis: Yes.

Jason Cowakanis: Let a thousand Nick Shirley's bloom.

David Saxs: Love.

Jason Cowakanis: Let's do it. Audit everything.

David Saxs: Audit everything. We need to normalize independent audits across the board.

Jason Cowakanis: Whistleblowers. Let's go.

David Saxs: It is not acceptable for Gavin Newsome, for example, to prohibit audits as he did with homeless spending. All government spending needs to be opened up and audited by the public. We need people to see where it's going.

David Saxs: And that that's just got to happen.

Jason Cowakanis: The Pentagon, when's the Pentagon's when are they going to pass an audit, right? I mean, that's one of our biggest line items. Let's get them to be audited. Hey, there's something President Trump could do.

David Saxs: They're actually at least trying.

Jason Cowakanis: They're at least failing the audit.

David Saxs: They're at least failing the

David Saxs: Gavin N's prohibiting the audit.

Jason Cowakanis: Start where you're prohibiting them first. How about that?

David Saxs: Yeah. I mean, just audit everything, I think, would be I love it. What do you got, Jim? I have a correlary to Freebergs which is I think it's the expansion of this Trump doctrine independent of your politics. If you are an economic actor, you own a business, you invest in the stock market, whatever it is, you speculate cryptocurrencies, you must understand the movements on the chessboard in 2026. The best framework that I have used to organize myself is this idea of unilateralism, economic resilience. It's just a ginormous trend and I think the output of it is going to be massive GDP prints on top of everything else.

Jason Cowakanis: Yeah. And I think I'm going to stick with my last year's prediction going into 2026 again. The wrath of Lena ending. We saw the M&A train start with Grock obviously uh Netflix and Warner Brothers, Google and Whiz. So many deals are ready to be done and they're starting to pop off in M&A. uh we can debate what structure they are and and regulators etc. but they're happening but I'll go with IPOs coming back right now. You've got to anticipate one of the following two will file. SpaceX, Andro, Stripe, Anthropic, and OpenAI. I think two of those file and it is going to be gang busters. The public wants these shares. They're buying them in the secondary markets. We have half as many publicly traded companies. the public would like to participate and this is something Trump can uniquely do that the Democrats were trying to stop and slow down which was M&A and IPOs. I think this will be the year of the mega IPO and it's going to be very exciting for Silicon Valley. It's going to be very exciting for the employees at these companies and for the pension funds and the endowments that own shares in these companies. They're going to be able to take that money and put it to good use hopefully. So, SpaceX, Andrew, Stripe, Anthropic, OpenAI, those are on the short list obviously of ones that could go public this year.

Jason Cowakanis: All right, a fun one we like to do is the most anticipated media. That's a fun one. You know, what are you looking forward to in 2026? Last year I said Superman and Andor season 2. Turns out Superman did great. Andor did amazing. It's the best TV show of the 21st century. I think Chimathu said, uh, enormity of the files that will be declassified. Epstein Files. Halfway there. JFK Files. We haven't seen those. Gavin said 1923 season two. I don't even know what that is, but Okay.

David Saxs: Taylor. That's a Taylor show.

Jason Cowakanis: Oh, that's the Taylor one. Yeah. Yeah. You watching Land Man? Land man's pretty great. Um Freeberg, you said AI video games.

Jason Cowakanis: What do you got this year, Freeberg? You you love the media. You're you're a cinnophile.

David Friedberg: What are you looking forward to in media in 2026? This isn't as much as what I'm looking forward to, but I do think the big trend in media is going to be the citizen journalism doing exposees. I think that we're just at the beginning of the expose

David Friedberg: man on the street.

David Friedberg: Man on the street pushing stuff, getting cameras in people's faces. The work of journalism has been decentralized and I think there's going to be so much more that's going to be kind of shared and uncovered this year.

Jason Cowakanis: Okay. Do you have one? Uh,

David Friedberg: and by the way, the the difference I would say in terms of what Nick Shirley is doing and what we've seen maybe in the past, but it's going to be the new trend is much of the citizen journalism in the past has been to some degree a little bit more passive. It's sort of like, hey, I caught this thing and I observed it. But now there are people that are going to actively take a camera and say, "Hey, I'm going to go discover this thing. I'm going to go deep on it." And that's what I think we're going to see happen in a big way this year.

David Saxs: Well, and there's a monetization path. You have Substack where people can give donations, GoFundMes and uh on top of that YouTube allowing you and X allowing you to share revenue on this particular category which they previously did and as Nick Shirley pointed out means there is a path to profitability there get more clicks get more views you make more money and then you can reinvest it. So I think I like your choice a lot Chimath you have something you're anticipating

Chamath Palihapitiya: exact same thing as Freebrook I'll just double down in

Jason Cowakanis: Okay. And what about you Sax? You got something you want to double down on?

David Saxs: investigative journalism.

David Saxs: No, I thought we were talking about entertainment here.

Jason Cowakanis: Well, yeah, I thought I It's okay. These guys went these guys zigged where we zagged. But

David Saxs: one of my weird like things that I watch on Tik Tok that I got stuck on and Tik Tok just keeps showing me them is these auditing videos. Have you guys ever seen these first first amendment auditors? So, these are people who take a camera, they stand on the street, and they just point the camera into someone's store or into a bank's window, and they just film the people in the bank.

David Saxs: And then they wind up spraying each other.

David Saxs: There's always people that come out. They're like, "You can't do that. You're not allowed to do that." They're like, "Okay, I think I would like you to leave. I don't want to talk to you." And they just do this and they instigate people to call the police. And what they're doing is they're auditing whether the police understand First Amendment rights. And then how the police react is basically the end of the video. Sometimes the police are like, "You can't do that." And they're like, "Yes, I can call a supervisor." And then they teach the police officer that you're allowed to stand in public places and film. Otherwise, they're just like, "Hey." They go to the business owner and they tell the business owner, "This guy's allowed to do this. Leave him alone." I don't know why, but these videos are so entertaining.

Jason Cowakanis: Well, there's tension. There's a lot of tension there. And there's something freedom of speech, which is the first amendment for a reason. stoner. The stoner comes out sometimes tries to physically confront the guy, but then you'll have like a woman walking with her like 2-year-old child and then she'll get into it and she'll be like, "Hey,

David Saxs: exactly.

Jason Cowakanis: Don't violate his constitutional rights. He's allowed to be." That's the best. That's the best.

David Saxs: It's so good. You never know what's going to happen. Each one of them is like a whole new adventure. I don't know why it's such an interesting form of content. I like love watching it.

Jason Cowakanis: It's a uniquely American phenomenon to

David Saxs: Yeah. um establish your freedom, your your first amendment rights and and they even go into like the really dicey ones or where they go to like the parking lot of a prison or into the lobby of a police station and do it and it gets pretty spicy. What do you got, Sax? You got you got any media you're looking forward to? These guys are going first amendment investigative journalism, yada yada. What do you got, S?

David Saxs: Well, the new Christopher Nolan movie is coming out. The Odyssey looks interesting.

Jason Cowakanis: Great call. Great call.

David Saxs: Yeah,

Jason Cowakanis: that's mine. Great call. I went with the Odyssey.

David Friedberg: What is that? What is that about?

David Saxs: The Odyssey.

David Friedberg: Oh, come on.

David Saxs: Come on.

David Friedberg: No. Homer's Odyssey.

David Saxs: Yes. But as interpreted by the great director of our time, Christopher Nolan.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Have any of you idiots actually read the Odyssey? This is not great. I'm sorry, but

Chamath Palihapitiya: The Odyssey is a terrible book.

Jason Cowakanis: All right.

Jason Cowakanis: Okay. So, we're going to get some good comments there.

Chamath Palihapitiya: You guys are all such wannabe poser intellectual.

David Saxs: Just Christopher Nolan is just great. It's IMAX. It's going to be epic.

Chamath Palihapitiya: It's trash. That book is blleh.

Jason Cowakanis: Okay. You know,

Chamath Palihapitiya: you don't like amic pentameter.

Chamath Palihapitiya: So, so the idea of some confused person making a movie about it is also just how do I short that? Okay. That is actually Can I short that?

David Friedberg: Can I short that movie on a poly market? I'm sure there will be. You could probably bet on the box office. Pull it out, Nick.

Chamath Palihapitiya: I bet zero.

Jason Cowakanis: Okay. It's gonna be a lot more than zero, I'm sure.

Jason Cowakanis: I I'm uh also a um a big fan of Timothy Shalabay and Doom part 3 is coming out. I also like Avengers Doomsday.

David Saxs: Dune 3.

Jason Cowakanis: Oh, I love Dune.

David Friedberg: Doom part three.

Jason Cowakanis: I love Doom one and two so so much.

David Friedberg: Two was great. I think one was a little bit of

Jason Cowakanis: Doomsday will be good. Doomsday actually I go with that.

Jason Cowakanis: Avengers Doomsday is going to be I think fantastic. Robert Downey Jr. as Dr. Doom setting up secret wars and then you're going to tie up all the previous Marvel strings.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Look at look at the Odyssey Zero.

Jason Cowakanis: They're going to use They're going to use Doomsday to bring back all the characters they killed.

Jason Cowakanis: Hey, besties. Uh here's a little something

Jason Cowakanis: I think we're about to hit today 1 million YouTube subscribers before we do our Netflix deal and take the show off of YouTube. We hit a million uh before we

David Saxs: Yeah. Wasn't it supposed to happen like a year and a half ago? We're gonna have like a million subscriber party a year and a half ago. You know why?

Jason Cowakanis: Ask me. Ask me what I do.

David Saxs: Tell me why. Tell me why. Sucks.

David Saxs: Cuz we never tell our subscribers to hit the like button or smash the subscribe button, whatever.

Jason Cowakanis: Yeah. Every other podcast I watch on YouTube, and I watch them all, they're always like, "Hit the like button. Hit the like button."

David Saxs: Oh god. Well, you know what too is the the the big trend now is to just do 10-minute quick hits as news breaks. So you you this is people are flooding the channel.

Jason Cowakanis: Ask me ask me what I think about getting to a million subscribers.

David Friedberg: Any thoughts on this seinal moment for the all-in pod hitting 1 billion subscribers on YouTube? Go ahead. I'm sorry. 1 million.

David Saxs: You're welcome.

Jason Cowakanis: You're welcome. You're welcome.

David Saxs: You're welcome.

Jason Cowakanis: What's this week at?

Jason Cowakanis: Oh, this week in Sus is quarter million. Don't worry about it. Um it's a niche show. Don't worry about it. Not bad. Just a frag. Not bad. Not bad. Hey, listen. I love doing it. Uh, the reason there's four of us

Jason Cowakanis: there's four of us, one of you. So, we have four times the subscribers.

David Saxs: Yeah. Something like that. Yeah. They listen. One of the great things you you learn in media is when you build a super team, a super band, you know, it can actually do better than everybody individually. So, collectively, we can do better. And listen, it's not for me to say.

Jason Cowakanis: Listen, you I think you've adjusted to being Ringo Star.

Jason Cowakanis: Uh, listen, I everybody says the same thing to me. Without the show, this would be propaganda and it would be uh the Trump's personal uh

David Saxs: who says that to you.

Jason Cowakanis: Everybody wants to walk moose. Everybody says the drink. That's I'm the stir in the drink. I'm the I'm the stirs the drink.

David Saxs: You're keeping the private equity wives watching. Great job.

Jason Cowakanis: Absolutely. I'm keeping them in. All the private equities love it. For every left winger you that you keep watching the pod,

Jason Cowakanis: we probably lose five

Jason Cowakanis: MAGA people show.

Jason Cowakanis: The people the MAGA people they love hating me. They love hating me and they love they come back every week to hate watch me and my takes.

David Saxs: Hate watch.

Jason Cowakanis: They do. They just like they hate watch you Jamal

Jason Cowakanis: the watch for a reason.

Jason Cowakanis: They tune in to hate you and hate me. Uh well listen it's been a great year. It's been a great year. Great job. Besties, we kept the band together for one more year. Let's do a poly market. Chances the All Podcast makes it to 2027.

David Saxs: Honestly, honestly, it's not 100%.

Jason Cowakanis: It's not

David Saxs: It's never 100%. Um, it's never 100%. We'll do the best we can. You guys love the show,

Jason Cowakanis: smash the like button, comment, link, subscribe, whatever you want to do. Write a review. Tell everybody how much you love Jamat Sweaters. and we'll see you next week on another amazing allin.

David Saxs: Bye-bye.

Jason Cowakanis: Let your winners ride.

Jason Cowakanis: We open sourced it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it.

Jason Cowakanis: Besties are gone.

Jason Cowakanis: That is my dog taking on a share driveway.

David Friedberg: Oh man, my habitasher will meet up.

David Saxs: We should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy cuz they're all just useless. It's like this like sexual tension that we just need to release somehow.

Jason Cowakanis: We need to get merch.

Jason Cowakanis: I'm going all in.