This is what we need. Let him go. Here we go. Jason in the corner warming up. Two shut the f*** up, Freeberg. It's my show. Three, two, all right everybody. Welcome back to the number one podcast in the world, The Podcast. I, Jason Calakana's named, created, and I'm the executive producer for life. With me, my three Miss Grant friends, Shamaaf Polyhapatia are Dictator. Love you, brother. Good seeing you. Love you. David Friedberg, our son-in-of-science, and yeah. This is our, yeah. Who's now made his way down to Austin? Welcome, brother. Let's go shooting. Let's get those beef ribs. David Sacks, how are you? How are you, how are you settling in to the great state of Texas? Everybody wants to know. I'm loving the 70-degree weather. Is it like this all year round? You know, this is a very wonderful time of year. You miss the two weeks where it goes to freezing temperatures.
这是我们需要的。让他走。开始吧。Jason 在角落里正在热身。"安静点,Freeberg。 这是我的节目。" 三,二,好了,大家。欢迎回到世界第一的播客节目,《The Podcast》。我是 Jason Calakana,命名、创建,并且终身担任执行制片人。我的身边是我三位亲爱的朋友,Shamaaf Polyhapatia,咱们的领袖。爱你,兄弟。很高兴见到你。还有我们的科学达人 David Friedberg,欢迎你来到奥斯汀!兄弟,咱们去打打猎吧,尝尝那里的牛肋排。David Sacks,你怎么样?在得克萨斯这个伟大州定居得如何?大家都很想知道。我很喜欢这70度的天气,一整年都是这样吗?你错过了会降到冰点温度的两周。
We have 10 days of freezing temperatures and then we have 80 days of 100-degree temperatures. But you'll be on a yacht or Italy or somewhere during that, like the rest of us. That's basically all you need to know about Austin. Just get out during the summers because it's brutal. That's it. Everything else is fan-frickened and fantastic. But in all seriousness, you're here. You're here. You've moved. You've domiciled in Texas. This is, this is, this is happened. It happened in December. Yes. And so we closed on a new house, moved in. Went to the DMV. I signed a lease for an Austin office for craft. It's done. It's done. It's done. Okay. I'll get you a dentist and whatever else you need. I got a doctor too. Okay. Does this mean I have to bring Moose back? This has been the big discussion in our house. Does this mean we lose Moose? No, he needs a significant acreage to run around. We know that. Oh, he does.
He does. But he misses you and I will definitely bring him in for a visit. And we'll be playing some backgammon, smoking some extra garbage. Yeah, you got to come by. Cannot wait. Cannot wait. You haven't come by yet. Jamal, what about you guys? You guys going to come down to a four besties? And that and I started the process in December. We are coming to check things out. We have not made any final decisions though. Okay. Shout out to our boy, Rokana, for driving everybody out of the state. So here's the funniest thing. Is we're all in the chat group discussing the California wealth tax. Whether people are going to leave or not. So Jamal, he's making a big show. I'm going to stay in fight. I'm not leaving my home. They can't drive me out. And then meanwhile, I got a call from my broker who says she's helping Jamal find a place. Oh, what's going on? Jamal, do you factor training? I'm shocked that Jamal tells you one thing that is doing another. Oh, my God. He's at least hedging his bets. He's hedging his bets. A lot of people are hedging their bets. A lot of people are hedging their bets.
I mean, surgays and Florida. I'm sorry, Larry's got a beautiful place in Florida. I see, according to the news, a lot of people. And I saw Governor Abbott reached out to you. That's right. He welcomed me to Texas on X. A lot of people did. Michael Dell dead. Ted Cruz. Ted Cruz. And yeah, it was real welcome reception. It's funny. I never got anything like that when I was in California. Jason, I put it for some reason. The politicians were never. They weren't embracing you. They weren't embracing you. I don't know why. 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. 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 if we're forced to look down the barrel of an asset tax that has God knows what methodology.
我的意思是,谈到手术和佛罗里达。抱歉,拉里在佛罗里达有一个很漂亮的地方。据新闻报道,很多人都搬去了那里。我看到德州州长阿博特联系了你。是的,他在 X 上欢迎我去德州。还有其他很多人,比如迈克尔·戴尔,还有特德·克鲁兹。他们的欢迎真的让我感到很温暖。很有趣的是,当我在加州的时候,从来没有这样的待遇。很奇怪,加州的政客们似乎从来没有欢迎我。我不知道为什么。谁知道呢。我在 X 上发布了这些。但当你看看那些明确离开的人,总净资产大约达到了半万亿美元,这对加州的长期预算是很不利的。我能想到25个人左右。而对于那些决定留下并继续奋斗的人,我仍然打算留下来奋斗。但如果我们不得不面对一个资产税,谁知道会如何计算。
It's the only thing that's united everybody on the left and the right. Even Reid Hoffman thinks this is insane. I think a lot of other people will leave. It's probably half the total wealth that the budget estimated would be available to be taxed will be gone. Wow. I mean, these are, I don't understand. But it's huge implications to the social programs in the general budget of California. Listen, I think this is going to be a topic. This is a prediction. I think this is going to be a topic throughout the year because it's not going away. They're gathering signatures right now. I agree. And we're going to find out in, say, April, whether it's on the ballot. Now it's possible they don't gather the signatures, but they only need about 850,000 of them. If it gets on the ballot, again, we'll know in just a few months, there's going to be a huge freak out.
And I think there'll be a lot of people who will say, I can't take the rest of them. They're going to leave the state. So I think there's going to be a rush for the exit. 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 bomb is going away.
It's very difficult if you're an entrepreneur with a good idea to start building here, because if you get stuck in success with a bunch of illiquid stock and have no way to pay 5% of that value, you're going to bankrupt your own company. Just doesn't make any sense. And why does if your company goes to zero the next year, which can totally happen with private companies, you still owe the tax bill? Yeah, I don't know how that reverses itself. It's a terrible idea. I was talking to Rokana and Eric Swalwell, who we had on the program. And I told these guys, like these dopey Democrats, you have to stop fraud first before you start seeing people's assets or started discussion about raising taxes.
And we had Nick Shirley on last week who was doing his investigative journalism shout out to Shirley. And 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 why do this with the unique tax? Why don't just put a point onto capital gains or income tax and have that discussion? That's a great point. You could also do what Bill Akman suggested, which is stop allowing these margin loads. 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 change, we would all change the approach. You mentioned that Larian Sergei have left the state and they're probably getting dragged for that. But one of the reasons why I think they kind of have to is because the super voting stock provision in this thing, where the way they calculate the value of your stock is not based on its liquid market value. But if you own super voting shares, they multiply your ownership. Your super voting by the market cap of the company. And they deem your shares to be worth that. Yeah. So for example, Larian Sergei, I think they combined have voting power of about 52% of Google.
So what's Google worth these days about? Four trillion. Two and a half trillion. Okay. So now I think, I mean, they're very wealthy guys. I think they're each worth whatever 100 billion ish or whatever it is. Two hundred and a half. Two hundred. 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 of 200 billion. So the 5% tax for them is more like a 25% tax of all their net worth. So 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 two X that because you have to pay taxes on them.
Right. So now what is the point of having that super voting provision in there? It's just totally punitive and vicious. All right. So let's just go with a quick prediction here. I'm going to call an audible. We're going to get into the prediction show folks. We've been delaying this prediction show because the world is moving at an incredible pace and the news is just, let's just call it what it is. It's just intense. We have a lot of stories you all want us to 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 your first. Yes or no? Give us a percentage polymarket it. Well, does it get on the ballot first and then does it? Well, we know it's going to get on the ballot. I think we agree with that. I do not know. That's not correct. Oh, we don't know. Sure.
So then I'll make it a two-part. Fine. Does it get on the ballot? Does it pass? Timoff, you seem ready to go. No, freeberg. Go ahead. I don't think it's going to get on the ballot. Oh, I agree with that. In California. 100%. All right. We marked everybody shout out to Shane. Oh, this is to make the ballot. My guy, Sean, Nick's fan. This is to make the ballot. This is the question. Will the billionaires to Austin tax, wealth tax, drive people? Will it make it onto the California ballot? Lightly traded. Currently at 16.9%. Does he see how much lower it was? That spike happened after Rokana elevated the issue. So when it became a cause to lab among progressives and Bernie Sanders weighed in, it spiked up from what was it like, 45% to 80%. OK.
So when Rokana committed political subpooku, it drove up. Maybe he had a bet. Maybe he placed a bet. I don't think it's political suicide for him. There's only two ways it doesn't get on the ballot, right? One is if the SCIU-UHW, which is the UUAN that supported this, proposed it, doesn't have the money to pay to collect the signatures. But you would think that they would, right? 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 if they're willing to put in the effort. The other possibility is that the powers that be, let's call it Gavin Newsom and the machine, are able to negotiate with this union to get them to stand down.
And I don't have any insight into that because that's obviously Democrat politics, not Republican politics. A free-bring in Shemaah might have some information. I mean, you have some insight, I don't know. We're going to leave it at that. But if it does get on the ballot, what do you think the odds are that it passes? I think it's going to be a really important 40% moment for people to vote, the ability to be industrious and have agency. Or what did Mamdani say? It's rugged individualism versus collectivism. Collectivism. Also known as communism. As in collect, we collect your assets. He said that we're going to replace the fragility of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.
I mean, at least he's saying it out loud. I like this news. I like these new politicians just telling you straight up what we're doing. Well, his new housing commissioner, have you seen this? Yeah, the white lady is like white people must suffer. And then she's like, she had these things where she's like, I see white babies in the airport and it makes me mad. And I'm like, really? This is crazy. What man broke up with this lady? Because that dude has created a monster. And she says something like we need to introduce a new relationship between white people and property, the property rights or something. Yeah, exactly. I mean, they're saying it out loud now. And then I guess she had a mental breakdown and started crying when they came to see her.
No, no, no, no. One of them is they pointed out that her parents own a multi-million dollar home and then she broke down into tears. Oh, her mom's a white supremacist. I didn't realize her mom was a white supremacist. That explains all. This is all about her mom. I feel bad for her parents. Oh God. Can you imagine what your kids go and does this? We have to go collect your houses.
I mean, listen, let's do it. Let's do it. Everybody wants to hear our predictions for 2026. We've been pushing it off. We're going to give it to you right now. We always like to start since 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. Frebarg said young candidates, well done. Gavin, who was on the show sitting in four sacks who was busy joining the administration. He said Trump and centrism would be the biggest political winner. Shemop, you said fiscal conservatives who asked for restrained spending. It was a good thought. And I said Gen X and elder millennials, the JD Vance, Tulsi, sacks group.
So let's go around the corner here. I wonder, Frebarg, who you think will be the biggest political winner of 2026. Frebarg 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 Democrat party. And I think that's the move we'll see solidified in 2026. Okay. Tite is right. Well done. Shemop, who do you got for biggest political winner, 2026? Whoever is going to fight waste rotten abuse at the federal state and local level. Got it. So it's an open lane to anybody. It's an open lane. It's a political gambit that I think will work really well in 26. Very nicely done.
David sacks. Gosh, I can't imagine who you would pick. That's a political winner in 2026. Well, I'm going to say that the Trump boom is going to be the biggest political winner of 2026. The good economic news is start breaking out before 2025 was even over. We have 2.7% inflation. Core CPI, 2.6. Both those are 40 base points below expectations. 4.3% GDP growth in Q3. Lois trade deficits since 2009. The challenger, Greer Report out today, show that job cuts dropped 50% from November, which was itself down about 50% from October.
Give us a number for the boom. What is it going to be? Hold on. The S&P 500 keeps making record highs. People are paying less for gas. Mortgage costs have fallen by $3,000. Real wages are up over $1,000. And by June, I predict we will see more rate cuts, possibly $7,500. We have a number of basic points. And big tax refunds are coming in April thanks to a bigger standard deduction and no tax on tips over time and Social Security. So I think there is so much good economic news coming and it's already started. And I think that it's going to have a huge impact on the economy but also on political perceptions for next year.
Pick your GDP for this boom year. 3, 4, 5 or 6 points. Sax, I'm pitting you. Pick a way. 3, 4 or 5. If you make it a prediction, then I'd like to pick as well. OK, I'm going to go sax first. I'm going to go for 5%. Oh, within a rounding year, I believe 5%. Sure, sure, sure. Plus or minus. Chimathi, you want to pick a number? You said you did. I think the lower bound is 5. I think the upper bound is 6. Wow. Incredible.
Well, just to put that in perspective, if we print 6, the only country in the modern world that we think of as a quasi-peer competitor that is printed 6 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? 2026 growth? Yeah. 4.6%. OK, I was going to go between 4 and 5 as well.
In terms of my prediction for the big political winner, I went back and forth between the emperor as apprentice, Darth Vance, JD Vance, or the mandami moment. I said Darth Vance for a couple of reasons. He is out there defending Trump and he's surging on polymarket, ending the polls. He's obviously the co-pilot of MAG. He's done a great job of being second seat. He is not usurping President Trump, which would be a big political mistake. 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.
在预测政治大赢家时,我反复考虑了几位候选人,包括像学徒一样的皇帝、Darth Vance、JD Vance 或“Mandami 时刻”。我选择Darth Vance,有几个原因。他公开为特朗普辩护,并在Polymarket上人气飙升,结束了民调。他显然是MAG的副驾驶员,出色地担任了第二把交椅的角色。他并没有取代特朗普总统的位置,因为这样做在政治上将是一个重大错误。他在担任副驾驶的角色上表现得非常出色。此外,他显然是Turning Point USA 中最受欢迎的政治人物,也是“美国优先、美国唯一”运动的OG(原创玩家)。
But I'm going to give the edge to the mandami moment. He's 34 years old. He's got row con 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 SACs is saying there, it's still closer to 3% than 2%. And Trump just announced he wants to increase the military budget by 50% while people are still complaining about their health care. And Trump has turned into a complete Neocon bombing seven countries this year and 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 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. Okay. Now, there's like three different answers right there. My answer is clearly my dummy. My second place though. I like to always explain my thinking is Darth Vance, JD Vance, biggest political loser. Last year's predictions. I said Putin. Gavin said Putin. Chimoff, you said progressiveism. And Freiber, you said the pro-war Neocons would be the biggest political losers. Let's get into who we think will be the loser this year.
SACs, why don't you start? Who's your big political loser in 2026, you think? Well, I said democratic centrist or democratic centrist, which is sort of the flip side of you guys saying that socialism or progressives are winners. And there's two reasons for this. One is because the socialist ideology is sort of ascended among the democratic base, especially the young people who support Mamm Donney, things like that. Unfortunately, our universities are welcome. Addresses have done a terrible job educating these students and they've brainwashed a lot of them into this woke ideology.
But also there's the fact that there's so few house districts anymore that are truly competitive. So both the Cook political report and Larry Sabato's crystal ball, they say that there's fewer than two dozen house races that are genuinely competitive going into 2026. That's because of gerrymandering and so on. So if you're a democrat incumbent who is in one of these districts, like all but a couple dozen of them, your only real threat to losing your office is from the left, right? It's some young AOC type coming up to challenge you. And so you don't want to expose your left flank. So even the democratic moderates have been shifting further and further to the left.
And so you see this AOC, Mamm Donney effect happening there. So I'm kind of in the same camp as you guys as this is not a good trend, but I put this as biggest political loser, biggest political loser, democratic centrizin. Got it. Trimoff, where do you go? 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 Mamm Donney. 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 handwronged themselves about leaving centrism and embracing progressivism. So the more talking points around progressivism that emerged, the poorer they perform. So I know your perception or some people's perceptions may be different based on one localized win. But if you look at the broad trend, it didn't work. I just put that out there just as the facts and not the vibes. Well, I don't want it to be true. Just to be clear, I wouldn't. I'm picking. I love for that Democratic party to be a sectorist. I don't want it to be true either, but it does.
No, but you just, just like it was wrong and I wasn't wrong. So it might be a jump ball. It might be the best way to describe it because you have to bond on the facts. Right. And okay, just look at the numerical numbers. The trend were horrible. Like meaning wherever the Democrats started, the more progressive talking points they added, the poor and poor, they performed. The approval ratings went down. The disapproval ratings went up. I'm not saying that they didn't win a mayoral race. They did do that. I'm just saying broadly speaking nationwide is the Democratic party and its embrace of progressivism.
At least at the federal level has it paid off over 2025 and I would say categorically mathematically not. Okay. Now going to 2026. What is my biggest political loser? What I would say is the biggest loser of 26 is the Monroe doctrine. I think that when historians look back on the Trump presidency, they're going to rewrite it. I think people have tried to minimize Trump's worldview as a Trump corollary. I don't think that's what this is. They even tried to minimize it by calling it the Don Roe doctrine. I don't think that's what this is. I think that there is a clear Trump doctrine that Trump, the Monroe doctrine.
And I think that is the political loser because there is a huge body politic that has been built around the Monroe doctrine. How do we view wars? How do we view our spheres of influence? How do we view economic multilateralism versus unilateralism? All of that is out the window. We view this as hemispheric dominance. That's Trump. We view it as proactive and in very specific cases interventionist. We intervene against drug cartels. We control immigration. We secure vital assets. That was not really the scope of the Monroe doctrine.
We have more transactional relationships, quite honestly, which allows us to react in the moment. So I think the Monroe doctrine is the biggest loser of 2026. Freeberg, your biggest loser, 2026. My biggest political loser of 2026 is the tech industry. I think AI and tech wealth have become the lightning rod for populism on both sides of the aisle. I think 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 good populist movement. 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 has just not trustworthy.
And they've largely been grin-fucking these guys for a long time. And they're pretty frustrated with it. So to your point, it is palpable. Look, I can tell you that the natural ally for tech is with maga because we still believe in property rights and innovation. And if the Democratic Party is truly going progressive, which means socialists, they want to rewrite your relationship to property rights, whatever that means, and impose wealth taxes and realize gains taxes and all the rest of it.
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. Come with me if you want to live. Yes. Get in the chopper. But let me say this, the reason why there's anger on the populist right is because they remember the censorship and the de-platforming 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 of truth and reconciliation that happens between some of these tech leaders and some of these conservative influencers.
Guess what, David, I know one guy who can help make that happen. I would like to host some of these meetings in 2026 and get these fields 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. They've gone to their head. They've gone to their head. Now, I also think that one other mistake they've made is quite frankly, they've been donors to only left-wing causes.
As you know, if you listen to Surnovitch's account, he's like, look guys, you banned us. You cost us our livelihood for years. Debanked us. Debanked us. Where's the restitution? At least, at least, giving some support to our conservative cultural policy. You knew that on the head, the senators that I talked to, that's exactly what they wanted. They just wanted an apology. Just be honest and say you did it. This asset seizure tax proposal in California and the conversation about other states, I think is bringing a lot of people to that table, sex, at least the tech people to say, wait a second, maybe I shouldn't have been only left donating over all these years.
Maybe I shouldn't have done this. I think contrary to what people may think, it may actually be doing a lot more positive for the right side than the left by putting this forward. This may actually be catalyzing a big change in Silicon Valley. Yeah, and if you 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, et cetera. 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 centrist and the new Neocontrump. Now I don't know if Trump will continue these Neocont ways. So I'm going to just align with SACs here that the centrist Democrats are going to be this year's biggest political loser. All right. Well, losers. Now that you've mentioned twice that Trump is a Neocont, I have to respond to this. No, you don't, you don't have to, but go ahead.
Okay. Look, the problem with Neocont regime change operations was, I'd say threefold. Number one, the invasion. You have this giant invasion, land armies, huge numbers of people getting killed, took, you know, months or a year. Took them like a year to get to Saddam, right? Number two, you then have an occupation because whoever you then put in power only stays in power if you have American GI's 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. It'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 at last three hours. 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. It was over before it even started. They went in there and they basically captured Maduro. No Americans were killed. It was an absolute 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 Rally saying, come get me, you know, 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 reasons for doing it and defending it. But I just don't think this is a new con policy. And in fact, it's the Democrats who've been calling to put in this Nobel Prize winner that you interviewed Freeberg, right? What's her name? Maria Conchito Alonso. Machado.
Okay. Anyway, oh, I think it's Hector Alonso. I think he did somebody from the Brad pack. No, she was in running man, I think. Anyway, but, but they're talking about the Cuban Venezuela actress. I thought her name was Maria Conchito Alonso. Okay. Maria, Karina Machado. Sorry. That's just what I thought. I mean, this world, this world then as well in 1975 winner, Maria. Look, the Democrats are criticizing the administration for not putting her in power. But look, here's the problem. Nobel prizes don't keep people in power, men with guns keep people in power. And she doesn't have the men with guns.
So it'd be American 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 of that whole debatification process where we didn't just get rid of Saddam. We took out the entire lead of the country, which created a huge insurgency. So there's been nothing like that, Jake Al, is what I'm trying to tell you. In this case, it's a whole different paradigm is what I'm trying to tell you.
We're going to need a new name for it. Maybe Jamal Thizright is definitely not Neocon. Don Neocon. We might need a new branding for it. It depends on if Trump is cosplaying Neocon when he says he's going to take Greenland, when he says he's going to take Columbia next to me, says he's going to take Cuba. He's certainly playing the character of Neocon publicly here. And who knows that could be Trump just positioning himself an anchoring future negotiations.
But if I was telling you, before the election, when you were saying, hey, do not let certain people become president, Nikki Haley, etc. Because they're Neocons and they're going to go to war with Venezuela. They're going to go to war with Iran. Well, that's exactly what Trump has done. And as flawless as our troops did and my lord, 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 of Americans. Where's the war? But if that did, this is where you have to be intellectually honest. If we were dealing with a situation where they didn't pick up the target and we had lost American troops and God forbid they had taken hostages, we would be sitting here with a much different discussion.
And so we have to be careful. I give we're not I give Trump, but that is an equal possibility. It's like certainly a non zero possibility. Things can go sideways. You sound like when Sam Harris was saying that imaginative COVID actually killed a lot of people. Then the conversation should be different. Well, it didn't. There was no war here. And by the way, with dead. And let's hope there isn't. And let's hope there isn't. You know, this is where I'll give Trump a lot of credit. He has been strategic. I do give you that. Stick and move. Stick him. Stick him.
Let's pray that he can continue. And by the way, on record string. First of all, even if we took Greenland, it's not going to be a new. There's 30,000 people who live there. But I think it's more likely that we'll make a deal. I think we're going to make an offer that can't refuse. OK. Shout out to my back. Can't how. Maybe you can make a deal. Let's make an offer that can't refuse.
Yeah. I mean, how much could it cost? I mean, it's nothing there. Biggest business winner for 2025. Looks like freeberg picked robots and autonomous hardware, a year of the robot. I think if you include robot taxidere, you nailed it. Certainly next year will be the year of Optimus, 2027. Chamath, you said dollar-denominated stable coins. Think 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 Mac 7 crushed. Is the biggest winner? And they did 65%. So I know both of those. I think all of us crushed that one. Who do you have freeberg as your biggest business winner prediction for 2026? Go ahead, freeberg. 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 going to outperform expectations, at least the Western expectations. And the second is a polymarket. I think polymarkets evolved from being kind of this one off quirky prediction market to actually really providing insights into current events and the news in a way that none of us anticipated. And I do expect that after the deal we saw with NIC 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.
Adina Friedman talked to us about this. But I do think that prediction markets could become not just markets, but also news. And I think polymarkets just in such a position to have a break out here. Okay. Great one, Chimath. Biggest business winner for 2026 after yourself. Who do you got? Yeah, it's hard. I mean, I will pick me. Yep. We need to sort of done that. That was coming. Sort of. Don't hurt your elbow. Don't hyper extend your elbow already in the books.
So, can't it's all downhill from here? I think we need to use that meme of Obama giving himself a medal. Chimath is giving himself. I will pick Copper. Okay. Copper. We are still completely underestimating how short we are in terms of the global demand supply dynamics of a handful of critical elements that we need. Again, in the Trump doctrine view of the world, that is no longer as multilateral as it was.
And we need to have unilateral national security. 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, amenable, conductive material that we have. Not material manifests in everything from our data centers to our chips to our weapons systems. It's just everywhere, everywhere, everywhere.
And right now, Jason, we are on a path by 2040 where we will be short about 70% of the global supply at current course in speed. And so I will pick Copper. Sax, what do you got? Biggest business winner is 20 to 26. You're pretty good. You said the IPO, I think 2026 is going to be a big year for IPO. So I'm not going to say which ones. I think there's going to be a bunch of them, a bunch of successful ones. And I think we could see trillions of dollars of new market cap created of public companies for a while. People were concerned that the number of public companies was shrinking. Public companies were actually being taken private. This is going to be a bigger reversal of that trend. So I think this is going to be part of that Trump boom will be the IPO. We love that one. I like that one.
I went with, since I nailed the Mag 7 for last year and picked the highest performer with Google. And I placed a bet on that. So I'm pretty good about it. My prediction for 2026 is that Amazon is going to have a massive year. Interest as they continue to replace you guys 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 dukes, their self-driving is working. They're making great progress with it. And here when you look at this chart, you can see they're essentially flat in terms of hiring humans and they're surging in deploying robots and they did their whole PR, comm strategy of calling them co-bots and donating to toys for tots, etc.
I think they'll be the first corporate singularity, which is to say the first company to have more robots driving their bottom line than humans. So that's my prediction for 2026 as Amazon. And I'm going to place a bet on that. My prediction is that Jake has such a luck box that he'll end up being right about Amazon, but not having anything to do with the Reesany game. Correct. The higher a billion humans to go do something and it'll be for a different reason. I am a luck box. That is true. It'll just be better free cash flow and all of a sudden more people using AWS and Jake I will be right.
Well, 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. You know, I've already started ordering things from Amazon. You're right. It was all same day. I'm like, wait, what is going on? That's what it is. We have a lot of space 15 miles outside of the city center, 20 cent.
And they built these huge warehouses. So you just get everything within four hours. They're like, well, be right there. It's very bizarre. So Jason, you'll buy like virtues at like 8 a.m. and it arrives by noon. Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. And when you put your order in for ethics and morality, it just never shows up. I don't know. It's lost again. Who knows? It's just incredible. We're just going to the spectrum here. It's like, so I was like, hello, customer support. I ordered a moral compass two years ago. Bill hasn't arrived. Okay. Biggest business loser. I love each mom. He had behind the 20 billion. Absolutely. I call I know he's got my bequette.
So I hope your compass never shows up. You got your bequette on that deal? Well, Sundee came to Bestie's and he wanted to collect all besties. We all got to place a little bet. And then by the way, by the way, I divested my rock shares as part of joining the government back in like February or March. That's a lot. So oh, by the way, by the way, would that cost you like what the last triple up? No, it was a small position that came from Groc acquiring Sundee's old company. We didn't invest in Groc. So it wasn't big, but the point was, yeah, it's just another example of you sacrificing the country, which I give you a lot of credit for.
It's good for SACs to put that on the record. Yeah. Well, it's just ridiculous to choose of somehow doing this job for money when it just keeps constantly money. It's negative money. Yeah, I just raised an up-round at place evaluation from the last round that we had to invest that too. Yeah. No, no, we didn't set it out. Hold on. Let's be clear. We didn't set it out. We divested it. Oh. 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 of SACs will probably exceed a billion dollars by the time he leaves. Personally, this is crazy. I mean, people make a notice. It's a very important thing to put on the record.
I think it's important for everybody. Everybody should know. All these don't reporters don't get it, but SACs has sacrificed financially an enormous amount to work on behalf of the government and the people. 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 was making me money. Right. I wouldn't say a word about it otherwise.
Anyway, business loser 2025, Gavin said federal government service providers. I guess because of Doge and them being held to the fire, feed to the fire there to give us a better deal. Old guard defense contractors like Bowen and Lockheed was yours, Friedberg. And Chimoff, you said the max seven, you expected a decrease in the record concentration. I said, Open AI, which would see a peak valuation. And I would say got that wrong. What do you got this year, Friedberg? What do you think is going to be the biggest business loser of this year?
To follow up on Chimoff and my conversation at the Christmas dinner, I think the state governments are going to have a real problem with finding financing because what's going on with the exposés that are underway on waste fraud and abuse in state agencies, I think is going to lead to a conversation that's going to cause folks to question the long-term solvency 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 borrowing. I think the other thing that's going to hit the fan this year in state governments is all of these unrealized pension liabilities. I think when these numbers start to come out this year and a lot of people are now digging deep into it, folks are going to wake up and be like, holy s**t, there's a ginormous hole in these states in their obligation.
Why does the government have to do these pensions? Why can't we do superannuation like Australia does? We have to get this out of the, I love that pick. That's called a defined contribution instead of a defined benefit. And if you get this defined contribution model and then just have good management, it all works out. So this is basically the problem with social security. Social security is a defined benefit and then all the money just doesn't sit anywhere, it doesn't exist. Right. If it was a defined contribution, it's just a liability.
And let me give a shout out. If it was a defined contribution like invest America accounts or Trump accounts as they're being called and you put the money in and you see how much you have in 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 iris, that is a system that actually has true solvency. Otherwise, it becomes this runaway train of liability and that's effectively what the states have set up and it's very dangerous.
And if we were to take government out of it and then every American just had to put 10, 12, 14% into their retirement account and it was forced, you would have happy people who feel some agency in their lives, which the people of Australia do. Chema, who's your loser 20, 26? I will pick the software industrial complex. So these are the companies that sell licensed SaaS to the corporations of America.
It's about a three to four trillion dollar a year economy that is separated into three buckets. Bucket one, which is the smallest, is the initial licensing. That's probably five to 10%. Buckets two and three where all the money is made is what's called maintenance and migration, which is how do I just maintain this big bulky license that I just bought for $300 billion as an example or how do I migrate it from product to product B? Those last two buckets represent 90% of all the dollars in revenue that's generated in software.
And because of the advancement of these models and the advancement of these technological techniques that we are all uncovering, building agents, building systems, I think you're going to see that total economic opportunity shrink and contract aggressively. The companies will still be able to do their business. It'll just be at a much, much lower incremental revenue.
The customers will be able to do their business. They'll have a lot more flexibility and a lot of upstarts, I think, will have opportunity. I'm speaking my book, obviously, but I'm seeing it on the ground because I have a company building software. The entire business, 80, 90's business, has basically migrated to disrupting maintenance and migration patterns. I cannot describe how much opportunity there is. It's very tactical, mundane, not very sexy work, but it's incredibly lucrative. And so I expect that that thing is going to shrink. It's going to impact SaaS companies, public SaaS companies, particularly quite severely. For me, we already talked about this, but it was California because of the wealth tax and also the owner's regulations driving business in 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 good enough job in California, dispelling the fears and the actual hostility of the business environment. That's a great one. I went with young white collar workers in America. I think they're going to be the biggest business loser. I think it's getting really hard for them to get entry-level jobs. I'm seeing that all over the place because companies are having an easier job just automating with AI than training up Gen Z graduates. That's my belief.
我希望你们是对的,希望这件事不会进入投票阶段。如果真的进入了,我觉得会引发一场恐慌,大家会赶紧撤退。无论如何,到春天时将有两家大型炼油厂关闭,这会导致油价上涨。我只是觉得,加州的政治家们在消除对商业环境的恐惧和敌意方面做得不够好。这真是个问题。我和美国的年轻白领工人待在一起,我认为他们会成为最大的商业失意者。我感觉他们现在很难找到入门级的工作,因为企业发现比起培训 Z 世代的毕业生,用人工智能来自动化运作要容易得多。这就是我的看法。
That's why I'm watching Founding University of Reconstance. 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. We don't have professional development. That needs to come back. I just did an interview with the CEO of McKinsey, which you may have seen on the feed. This is the big challenge. Incorporate America is they're taking out the bottom two or three runs and automating stuff. We really need to develop young people so that they have a path to take the CEO jobs eventually. 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 of Police apply, Japan, Saudi, and in America. We're going to help you build companies.
Thank you for my promo. Jason, I got a text last night from a friend. It's in response to your comments about young people not being able to find jobs because of AI, which is the statement you've made a couple times. He said went to around about 50 CEOs of public and private companies and asked everyone if they're hiring junior engineers. Everyone said they are still, but not as much as before because during COVID, every college lowered the bar and admissions and the talent just isn't as good anymore. My friend went on and he said you should talk about this to counter J.C.H.H. point about AI taking young people's jobs. We see this with financial analysts and we see this with salespeople we hire.
The Gen Z kids are all really challenging to hire because of cultural issues, not because we're not hiring them due to AI. We try and hire older people primarily to fill those roles. There's a real interesting point that he was making, our text of a couple of their friends to ask them their opinion. I've heard this concurrence, J.C.H.H.H.H. which is a lot of people think that recent grads out of college and this may be a COVID era phenomenon. They just don't seem to have the temperament, the motivation, the organizational skills. Executive function. Yeah. And by the way, some of our friends who I've talked to who have kids graduating college, there's even a conversation about none of these kids are motivated to get jobs or to make money.
There's a very weird phenomenon in the youth right now. And this may be a COVID phenomenon and it may be a cultural thing that's part of the long form of what's going on in our society or it may be a socialist trend or it may be a populist trend or it may just be that people have gotten too wealthy and the nation has truly split and you can't climb the ladder anymore. There's a bunch of things going on here. But I do not think, and I think a lot of people are echoing this, J.C.H.H.H.L. that challenges that young people are having, finding employment is purely rooted in an AI and automation phenomenon but it may be a cultural phenomenon.
So I just put that on the plate for you to consider that they don't think it's so not. I do think it's both. I do think it is partially what you're saying is that maybe these young folks have, you know, they're just either entitled or their parents have enough money for them to skate and go sideways and maybe not BS career motivated. It could be a social thing, it could be a COVID thing, it could be all of those. And certainly multi factor. I just know what I see on the ground, which is, you know, so many companies coming to me saying, we can replace the bottom third of these tasks and that those bottom third of tasks are typically done by young people out of school. So I think both things are probably true to a certain extent. And time will tell, I do think it's going to be challenging and continuing to be challenging. You see that in the numbers from, you know, Google, Uber, Coinbase, all these companies are doing more with less.
And maybe that's just the nature of AI. Maybe the first thing you do is cut costs. And maybe the second thing you do is hire people who know how to use these tools. If you are a young person who uses AI tools, you're going to find a job if you're a young person who isn't motivated and doesn't use AI tools, you're going to have a hard time. Let's go with the biggest deal. Last year's predictions for biggest deal for 2025, traditional auto OEM consolidation. That was huge. I think that we haven't seen exactly the consolidation, but we have seen those businesses come apart. So I think it's, I give you definitely two thirds of a credit there. Gavin said a tidal wave of M&A. I think he's not wrong there. That has started to happen. Certainly. Freeberg, you said massive compute build out deals. Of course, you know, 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 that wound up going to Netflix, so give me a half point for that. What do you have as your biggest deal for 20, 20, 60, if it's X? Well, I don't want to get, I don't want to get too specific here in terms of names of companies. That's the thing. Yeah. But what I would say is that I think there was a breakthrough in the last couple of months in terms of these coding assistants where they've been around for a while, but there seems to have been another level of quality achieved just in the last month or so. And you're really starting to hear, I mean, maybe a lot of it is hype, but there is, I think a lot of people are getting very excited about the potential here. And part of it is coding, part of it is just tool use. You can download the programs. 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, let's call it coding assistant slash tool use, I think we'll get bigger and bigger this year. Freeberg, what do you got? Biggest deal. Russia, Ukraine, I think it's going to settle out this year. I think there's a lot of motivating factors to get it settled out this year, economic and other political factors. But I do think it's going to settle out this year and it's going to bring a bit more stability to that region. And there's a whole reset that's underway this year, I think in terms of geopolitics and where the power is all set. Trump can stop that war. He would do for two. I think this one's going to settle. That would be great. He may not have done it on day one, but if he gets it done in year two, that's good enough for me.
Chema. Biggest deal. 2026. What do you got? It's not a specific deal, but it's an approach. I think that M&A cannot happen. And so it's the IP license M&A work around. And I think you're going to see hundreds of billions of dollars of these kinds of deals. So this is the deal that Google did with Character AI. It's the same thing that they did. Microsoft did it. Microsoft did it. It's obviously what Nvidia did with GROC. Why are these deals happening? Well, if you just look at what Facebook tried to do, they tried to buy Manus for $2.5 billion. Manus was a Chinese company that then left China and essentially rebuilt itself as a Singaporean business. The Chinese have now said, we're going to look at this. They are going to actively import export controls. They're going to actively look at which technologies and even which researchers are working on things that are critical enough that it just can't go abroad in this existential fight that they believe they're in with the United States. The United States is in equivalent such position.
All of this leads me to believe that traditional MNA is effectively done. 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 Sathya did. You'll do what Jensen did. You'll do what Jensen did. You'll do what Jensen did. These huge licensing deals that basically replace MNA. And I think that that as a deal type, we'll get better and more refined and tighter and better executed. were the third or fourth of these kinds of deals and even the third or fourth iteration was quite good. By the time that you're into the middle part of next year and you've done 15 or 20 of these things, I think the lawyers that work on these scenes and the accountants will just be the tax treatment is not ideal, but the speed at which you can do them is phenomenal because the next day somebody like Sundeep can be working for Jensen, which is what Jensen wants. They want the talent. Zuckerberg wants the talent working there. And the IP, and the IP, of course.
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. I think it could be one of the Mac 7 and Apple, Ameida, Microsoft, or Amazon going out and trying to buy XAI, Mistro, Proplexity, Anthropic. One of those four comes to mind. I know most of them probably want to go public and go it alone, but I think an offer could come in and during that race for which six or seven large language models and men, it is a battle where they are moving up and down the rankings and beating each other out. I'm going to ask you a question. And I think one of them is going to go for it. I think it could wind up being Apple, Ameida, or Amazon who buys an Anthropic or a Proplexity.
I started where you were, but this is why I went to this deal type as the biggest business winner because if any of those companies tried to buy, let's just say Anthropic, I think it's three years of antitrust, minimum. It's worse than when Microsoft tried to buy Activision because that was a niche product. And even that took almost two years and like three or four months if I'm getting it right. It was about two years. It's huge slog because it's about global coordination of multiple regulators. 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.
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. And I think President Trump, one of his great shranks is that he moves quickly. Ben, what a first year, whether you like the decisions or not, he makes decisions. I think this is one of the things that Democrats are learning is that you got to actually get things done for the American people. I think he might instruct our government to let M&A be great again. And that would be great for American exceptionalism.
These companies do need to merge and to continue to grow. And we should go try to get from a Mag 7 to a Mag 17. We need more bigger companies with bigger footprints, taking on global markets. Most contrained belief, most contrained belief, people like this one. I said, opening I loses its lead in the AI race. And in fact, that has happened if you look at the arenas and you look at their market share, they are being challenged. Shemoff, 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 was a more osmac. Another amazing prediction. What's your prediction for this year since you crushed it last year, freeberg? My prediction is based on the premise that I think there is going to be this revolution in Iran and the IOTOAs are going to be out. That's not the contraire in 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 desabilizing force in the Middle East.
And I do think that there is already an 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, that there may be more conflict brewing in the Middle East than anyone anticipates for this year that will not necessarily involve Israel and or Iran. It will actually be amongst the other Gulf states as they vibe 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.
Saksha got a contrarian belief for 2026. Yes. I said that AI will increase demand for knowledge workers, not decrease it. I would refer you to Aaron Levy's post called Jevons Paradox for Knowledge Workers. And the point of Jevons Paradox is that as the cost of a resource goes down, the aggregate demand for it actually increases because you discover more and more use cases. So I think this will certainly happen with code. In the past it's been very expensive to generate code. If 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 a 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 and top of a referral to get, it becomes something that's normalized and everyone starts doing it and you start getting more more scans that leads to better and better outcomes. So I think this can 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. Okay. And for those of you who on who understand Jevin's paradoxal and more, you can look at something like electricity or steel or concrete.
When we lowered the cost of those things, people didn't use less of it. They built skyscrapers. And we had more routes for more airplanes to take you on more vacations. And that went from being something only rich people did to everybody. So Jevin's paradox is definitely at work. What do you got? Jamal, which on what's on your contrarian belief? Gosh, I have two. Well, I'll give you them both. And you can just see my contrarian belief number one is I don't think SpaceX will IPO. I think that it will reverse merge into Tesla.
And I think Elon will use it as a moment to consolidate control and power of his two seminal assets into one cap table. Oh my god. I love that. Why? He's talked about that before. He's talked about having a holding company for years of all of the collection you could put Nora Lincoln there too, right, Jamal? You could put in the boring company as well. Sure. I'm just giving you my contrarian take. There will be no IPO for SpaceX. I think it'll just be it specifically will be a reverse merger.
There you go. So second contrarian take is that I think the central banks will realize that there are limitations to gold and limitations to Bitcoin. And will as a result seek out a completely new cryptographic paradigm that they can control on their balance sheet that is fungible, that is tradable, and that is completely secure and private. And I think the reason why that privacy needs to exist is that for the sovereignty of a country, you need to be in a position where you have assets that are not easily disclosed to anybody else, friends or enemies alike.
And then separately, cryptographically, if you're going to own a currency, you need to hedge against the eventual risk in the next five to 10 years that there's a quantum chip that can challenge the existing cryptographic schemes that are used. And for my contrarian, I was thinking about going with OpenAI, losing their lead and not being the unnumber one company again, because I do think that will be the trend that they will have the they'll continue to give up their market share to other players, including Google and Gemini and XAI, etc. But I'm going to go with a pretty wild card here. I think the standoff with China is going to be largely resolved. And I think President Trump's when he makes his visit there, I don't know if you're going to go on that one, a saxophone. I think it should be included in it, obviously, because of the AI race. I do think that the standoff and the issues around Taiwan are going to be resolved.
And I think this could be the signature issue of Trump's second term is that we work out a working relationship where both China and America win without one of us losing. Best performing asset. Best performing asset. Last year's prediction. I said, mag seven, which was up 22% versus the S&P 500 at plus 17. Chamathi were long CDS for a potential run on a major bank. Instead, it was a long shot. Gavin said, hi band with memory makers like Micron, which was up 230%. That was a great call. And Freeberg, you said Chinese tech stocks and ETFs, Ali Bob is up 85% Chinese tech ETF up 47% versus the S&P 500 at plus 17. So I guess that means Gavin Freeberg and then myself. What he got for this year's best performing asset? Freeberg. Paulie market. Paulie market on a tear. Network effects. Replacing media.
Replacing markets. Congrats to Shane. Paulie market. Do you have a best performing asset? Yes. 26. Go ahead, Shema. That would pick a basket of critical metals. Okay. Basket of critical metals. What do you got, Saks? It's got you a little bit redundant from me, but I just had the expanding super cycle and tech. I mean, again, this is just another class of the boom. But actually, let me just show you some data that literally just came out. I feel like this is breaking news. Oh, breaking news. Nick, can you pull this up? US productivity just surged 4.9% the strongest reading in nearly six years. And this is the news item. Is that the Atlanta Fed, their forecast for Q4 GDP just climbed to 5.4%. Can that be right? Yes. 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. I mean, we said, 2020 26 year. You know, 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. You have to remember that there's going to be 150 basis point correction in Q4 GDP because of the government furlough. Okay. So let's say that GDP was probably call it four. You're going to see a print of two and a half. So you need to readjust that because now all the government workers are back. They're recounted in GDP. If you look through 2026, there's a handful of things that I think people do not understand well.
Number one, all of non-farm payrolls has been completely reset and rebased. And the reason why is because of immigration. So what used to be 100 to 150 number print is now a 40 to 50 number print. Why is that important? Because when you look through earnings and you look at the lower 25% quartiles of earnings growth, they're off the charts. There's all of these anecdotal examples now of earnings just exceeding expectations. There was an article in the front page of the Wall Street Journal yesterday about Ford trying to pay mechanics $160,000 a year and having 5,000 openings. So to Sachs'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 to U.S. economy here. It is ready to rip. And adding to all that and just giving my pick, I think if we are in a rate cut environment and the tailwinds keep happening and people have a little bit of cash laying around my pick for best performing asset will be the Robin Hood Polymarket price picks gambling, wagering, that's a case because people will be able to have a little cash around to make some bet. By going missing there too, I guess. By the way, the oral area 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 base basis, what SAC says is right, you have this combination of earnings growth, productivity growth, and now this overlay where you have these tax cuts that are going to hit in 26. My gosh, I mean asset prices in general, I think will do well.
Now, you'll also see potentially home prices correct because if the president is successful in making sure Blackstone can buy houses, but on the other side, people are earning more and they can enter with interest rates that are now 100 to 150 basis points lower, you'll see a boom in housing where it's not the corporations that are buying the houses but individuals. There's a lot of variables here that can break in America's favor. This is why I think 6% is not unrealistic, which would be absolutely nuts.
Okay, let's move on to the worst performing asset. Last year's predictions for worst performing asset of 2025. I said legacy car companies and real estate, both of those turned out to be correct. Tchaikovsky said enterprise SAC and the software industrial complex again that looked correct as well. Gavin said enterprise SAC and Freeberg used that vertical SAC. So we had three SACs and I had legacy car companies real estate.
Let me give you a shake out. Let me just give you some numbers on that to show you service now down 30% worked day down 18%, docu signed down 23%, drop box down 9% and box down 6% while the S&P was up 17%. I think it's worth highlighting. It was a challenging year for this enterprise aspect. Especially with the per-seat pricing as opposed to consumption-based pricing. If you have a static number of employees or less employees like many of these companies do, there's just less seats to sell.
So their whole growth was based on land and expand. You land the client and then you expand the client because they're added staff. If you're not adding staff, you don't have more people using Salesforce. Okay. So let's talk about our worst performing asset predictions for 2026. Who do you got? SACs worst performing asset of 2026. Well, I just said California luxury real estate because of the overhang of the wealth tax and all the things we're talking about.
Yeah. That one hits close to how I think. Now, yes, it does. Actually, what I'm hoping for is a dead cat bounce. If you guys are right that the ballot initiative fails, then the overhang will be lifted and maybe I can clear some real estate. There's some. It's not easy being right sometimes. Freeberg, what do you got? What's your discount price on that asset right now? I mean, I might make a bid. If you give me a good clear amount of $100 million laying around.
Yeah, I'm not paying a hundred. Okay. We got best negotiations. Give him the bestie price. The buy it now, bestie price. It's the buy. No, no, no. Okay. By the way, you know, San Francisco has that insane luxury tax, which they have in L.A. too. You got to pay 5% on any piece of real estate over. Which makes it even harder for the high end places to try.
So, wait, you're saying if I bought taxes house for a hundred, I'd have to spend a hundred and six. Oh, he has to pay six percent. Yeah. To the day, you got to pay your broker six percent. I mean, they're just basically freezing the market. Okay. Not the buyer. Well, you can negotiate who pays it. The 5%, you know, quote, unquote, mansion tax has just killed L.A. real estate. You talk to brokers down there.
Because people used to flip houses a lot more. Now you just can't afford to do that. Unintended consequences. Really bad for the market. What you're telling me taxes slow down transaction volume and reduce the growth of the economy. That's great. There's no idea. So if you should write that down, we should do a whole thing on that.
Yeah, maybe we should write that down. I know. Yeah. Somebody make a note. Yeah. So worse performing asset, Chimoff. What do you think? Worst performing asset. I won't say the worst performing, but I think a very poor performing asset will be hydrocarbons. I just think that the trend in oil is inexorable. And it's down.
And the reason it's down is irrespective of your thoughts on climate change. The trends on electrification and energy storage are just unstoppable. And so what that does is it shrinks the surface area where oil is useful. It's not like a cataclysmic thing, but it's sort of a melting iceberg where does it see $65 or $45? And I would say on a per barrel basis. I think it's more likely to see $45 than $65.
Okay. I went with the US dollar in different permutations of how you can buy it because our debt continues to grow unabated. And the displacement trade, Jake, Jake, I just think it's going to be hard for the USD because we're talking about we've been added. I think we're going to add two trillion in debt this year. And then if we're increasing, and again, I know Trump says, President Trump says a lot of things, but if we're increasing the military budget by 50%, that means that's going to be straight to our debt line. So it's going to be harder and harder for the dollar. It 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 in 2026, 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 pay creators cost plus 10% now. And so as a creator, you're actually better off not doing deals with Netflix anymore. So their content library is going to shrink because of the natural economic forces underway. Alternative, if they do close on Warner Brothers, I think they've got some good runway in terms of that content library. And they'll be fine.
And in that case, my worst performing asset would be traditional media stocks. And I do think that they're going to underperform. There is just such an incredible variety of high-quality content that's emerging from independent creators that are leveraging their own distribution platforms through YouTube and others. And I think that traditional media is going to continue to be deeply challenged. As we've seen, for example, just in the news segment with the rise of citizen journalism. So that's what I would kind of.
Yeah. And you know, the Netflix observation, I think, is well founded because they're also in terms of expanding their library. They just did a deal with Bill Simmons, I see. And with our civil sports to move over with 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 appreciation. Capital. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. That includes things like planes. So forth, there's now 100% accelerated appreciation 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. Absolutely.
Yeah. Try buying a plainly status. Very difficult. P P. No, Jason, it's not planes. It's like caterpillar. No, it's like tractors. Yeah. Yeah. It's generators. It's Siemens. This is why Siemens stock is through the roof. All of this capital equipment, you get to write it off 100% in year one. It's creating a massive infrastructure build out in the US. So there's some companies that are huge beneficiaries of this obviously, because they're the sellers of the capital equipment. And of course, this is one of the reasons GDP is going up as people are actually investing in business again.
Okay. Most anticipated trend. By the way, this is the coral area of the statement that if you reduce taxes, the economy grows. So there we go. Yeah. Most anticipated trend of 2025. I said the wrath of LinaCon ending and M&A and IPOs being back. You get some credit there at Schumacht. You said the end of the deep state. I think you get a lot of credit there. Gavin said AI makes more progress per quarter 2025 than it did in 2023. That's a great one. Friber, you said the nuclear power build out. I think you get some credit there too.
Yeah. Not sure. Not sure. We got some work to do there. Massively. We definitely saw some short nuclear. You're still short nuclear. But I know that's a lot of how it let Nick. I talked to him. I talked to Howard. Let Nick as well. He said he's all in on nuclear. Friber, 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, the problem is that the marginal cost of electricity will effectively be zero.
And it will have gone to zero because of a combination of solar and storage as well as coal and oil. And so it's just in a very delicate place where the large form factor nuclear reactors make zero economic sense by 2032 or 2035, which is when through the Byzantine permitting and building they get it done. And then the SMRs by the time that they get it done, they may not be able to meet the market either. So I think it's a very complicated moment for nuclear actually. Not scientifically, economically. Just does not hang together mathematically. I think that's if you assume no shift in the demand curve.
And I think that like if you look at China going to eight terawatts of production and by 2040 or whatever it is. And we're sitting at one and we're not moving. We are going to have a big catch up to do. And the question is can we really build out two three terawatts of electricity generation? How are we going to build out two to three terawatts of electricity generation? The amount of land that you would need with solar and what's it going to take to get all of that installed and so on.
And by the way, there's a lot of this stuff in China. If you look at all the big solar buildouts that they did where they're ripping it up now, this is a longer conversation. But I really do question whether we can pin everything on solar. It's going to be a mix of stuff. And so your point may be right that in the near term to meet the current kind of demand curve, nuclear is going to be economically challenged. But at some point here, there's an inflection that we have to meet.
So what's your most anticipated trend of 2026, 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 Iatolas and there seems to be a moment underway. And the demographics are destiny. There's a lot of young people in Iran and they do not want to live under the current rule. They want to be free.
But there is a major economic problem in Iran in terms of affordability. You think we have an issue of affordability in the US. In Iran, it's very hard for people just to buy their basic necessities, basic needs, and the majority of people. So that's why they are taking to the street. There is a real economic crisis underway that is motivating this turnover. Every year, everyone like anticipates some big change in the Middle East. But this could be the biggest rewriting of the Middle East in a long time.
Okay. Sax, what do you got? For the category? Most anticipated trend of 2026. What do you got, Sax? I said auditing government spending at all levels. That's a good one. Decentralized, lov, yes. Let a thousand Nick Shirley's bloom. Love. Let's do it. Audit everything. Audit everything. We use a normalized independent audit across the board. With sort of lowers. Let's go.
It is not acceptable for Gavin News, 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 to see where it's going. That's just got to happen. Love it. Pentagon. When are they going to pass it on? That's one of our biggest line items. Let's get them to be audited. There's something President Trump could do. They're actually at least try. They're at least failing the audit. They're at least failing you.
Gavin News is prohibiting the audit. Star war, you're prohibiting them first. How about that? Yeah. I mean, just audit everything. I think would be, I love it. What do you got you? I have a corollary 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 chess board 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. I think the output of it is going to be massive GDP prints on top of everything else. I think I'm going to stick with my last year's prediction going into 2026 again. The wrath of Wiener Khan ending, we saw the M&A train start with Brock, obviously Netflix and Warner Brothers, Google and Wiz.
So many deals are ready to be done and they're starting to pop off in M&A. We can debate what structure they are 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, Andrewl Streip and Gropick and OpenAI. I think two of those file and it is going to be gangbusters. The public wants these shares. They're buying them in the secondary markets.
We have half as many publicly traded companies. The public would like to participate. And this is something Trump can uniquely do that. The Democrats were trying to stop and slow down, which was M&A and IPOs. I think this will be the year of the mega IPOs can 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, Andrewl Streip and Gropick, OpenAI. Those are on the short list, obviously, of ones that could go public this year.
All right, 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 Andorra season two. Turns out, Superman did great and or did amazing. It's the best TV show of the 21st century, I think. Timothy said, enormity of the files that will be declassified, Epstein files. Halfway there, JFK files. We haven't seen those. Gavin said, 1923, season two, I don't even know what that is, but okay. That's a trailer. That's a trailer. Oh, that's the trailer one. Yeah. Yeah. Watch a man, man, man, that's pretty great.
I'm not afraid of you said, AI video games. What do you got this year? Freeberg, you love the media. You're a cinephile. What are you looking forward to in media in 2026? This isn't as much as what I'm looking forward to, but I do think the big trend in media is going to be this citizen journalism doing expose. I think that we're just at the beginning of the expose man on the street, man on the street, pushing stuff, getting cameras and 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 covered this year.
Okay. Do you have one? By the way, the difference I would say in terms of what Nick Shirley's doing and what we've seen maybe in the past, but it's 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.
Well, and there's a monetization path. You have substack where people can give donations, go fund me and 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. Tomat, do you have something you're anticipating?
好的,这里有一个盈利的途径。你可以通过 Substack 接受捐款,利用 GoFundMe,再加上 YouTube 允许你们在特定类别中共享收入的平台,还有 X。正如 Nick Shirley 所指出的,这意味着确实存在盈利的途径。得到更多的点击和浏览量,这样你就能赚到更多的钱,然后可以再投资。所以我很喜欢你的选择。Tomat,你有什么期待的吗?
Exactly. Exactly. Same thing as freeberg. I'll just double down and okay. And what about you, Zach? So you got something you want to double down on investigative journalism. No, I thought we were talking about entertainment here. Well, it's okay. These guys, these guys, these guys, zigged where we zagged, but one of my weird, like things that I watch on TikTok that I got stuck on and TikTok just keeps showing me them is these auditing videos. Have you guys ever seen these first, first amendment auditors?
So these are people who take a camera. They stand on the street and they just point the camera into someone's store or into a bank's window. Oh, I see. And they just film the people in the bank. Yes. And then they wind up spraying each other. 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't 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 these videos are so entertaining. They're, they're, they're, there's a lot of tension there.
And there's something. So much speech, which is the first amendment for the reason or the store owner comes out sometimes tries to physically confront the guy. But then you'll have like a woman walking with her like two-year-old child and then she'll get into it and she'll be like, hey, don't violate his constitution. Exactly. Exactly. That's the best. Exactly. Yeah. It's so good. You never know what's going to happen. Each one of them is like a whole new adventure.
Yeah. I don't know why it's such an interesting form of content. I like love it. It's uniquely American phenomenon to, yeah, establish your free to your first amendment rights and they even go into like the really dicey ones where they go to like the parking lot of a prison or into the lobby of a police station and do it and it gets pretty spicy. What do you got, actually, you got any media you're looking forward to and these guys are going first amendment investigative journalism, Yadiata.
What do you that said? Well, the new Christopher Nolan movie is coming out. The Odyssey looks interesting. Great call. Great call. Yeah. That's mine. Great call. What is it? What is it? What is that? What is that about? The Odyssey? Come on. No, Homer's Odyssey. Yes, but as interpreted by the great director of our time, Christopher Nolan, have any of you idiots actually read the Odyssey?
This is not great. I'm sorry, but the Odyssey is a terrible book. All right. Okay, so we're going to get some good comments there. You guys are all such wannabe poser intellectual. No, just Christopher Nolan is just great. It's iMacs. It's going to be epic. It's trash. That book is left. Okay. You know, you know, like I am big pentameter. So the idea of some confused person making a movie about it is also just like, how do I short that? Okay, that is actually. Can I short that? Can I short that movie? I'm on a polymarket. I'm sure there will be. Okay, but on the bet on the box office. Polaroid. I bet zero. Okay. It's not going to be a lot more than zero. I'm sure.
I'm also a big fan of Timothy Shalabay and Doom Part Three is coming out. I also like Avengers Doomsday. Doom Three. And who I love Doom. Doom Part Three is coming out. I love Doom. I wanted to. So so much. Two was great. I think one was a little bit of slow. I love the two. Doom say we good. Do say actually I go with that. Avengers Doomsday is going to be I think fantastic. Robert Down Jr. As Dr. Doom setting up secret wars and then you going to tie up all the previous Marvel strings.
Oh, look at look at look at the Odyssey zero. They're going to use they're going to use Doomsday to bring back all the characters they killed. Hey, Abasties. Here's a little something. I think we're about to hit today. One million YouTube subscribers before we do our Netflix deal and take the show off of YouTube. We hit a million. What's it supposed to happen? Like a year and a half ago. We're going to have like a million subscriber party a year and a half ago. You know, ask me what I think you. Tell me why. Tell me why sex. Because we never tell our subscribers to hit the like button or smash the subscribe button yeah every other podcast I watch on YouTube and I watch them all.
They're always like hit the like button hit the like button. Oh God. Well, you know what I'm doing now too is the big trend now is to just do 10 minute quick hits as news break. So you this is just asking me what I think about getting to a million. So if you're off any thoughts on this seminal moment for the all in pod hitting one billion subscribers. I'm sorry. One million. You're welcome. You're welcome. You're welcome. What's this week? Oh, this week in Sarasas quarter million. Don't worry about it. It's a niche. Don't worry about it. It's a fraction. Not bad. Not bad.
Hey, listen, I love doing it. The reason there's four of us. There's four of us. One of you. So we have four times the subscribers. Yeah, something like that. Yeah, listen, one of the great things you learn in media is when you build a super team a super band. You know, you can actually do better than everybody individual. So collectively we can do better. And listen, it's not for me to say, listen, I think you've adjusted to being Ringo Star. Listen, everybody says the same thing to me. Without the show, this would be propaganda.
And it would be a the Trump's personal who says that to you. Everybody everybody has to walk moose. Everybody says I'm the drink that's I'm the star in the drink. I'm the star is the drink. You're keeping the private equity wives watching great job. Absolutely. I'm keeping them in all the private equities. Love it. For every left winger, you keep watching the pod. We probably lose five. Oh, no, you could. If you were just the mag show, the people, the mag of people, they love hating me. They love hating me. And they love the comeback every week to hate, watch me and my takes watch.
They just like they hate watching the private. We watch the court reason they tune in to hate you and hate me. 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 polymarket chance. The all-in-pogance makes it to 2027. Honestly, honestly, it's not 100%. It's never 100%. It's never 100%. We'll do the best we can. You guys love the show. Smash the like button, comments, links, subscribe, whatever you want to do.
Right, a review. Tell everybody how much you love to mouth sweaters. And we'll see you next voice on another amazing all in. Bye. Bye. You're winners. Right. Rainman David. And it said we open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it. I'm going to be West. I squee. What? What are we? Besties are gone. That's my dog. Take it. I wish you drive away. We should all just get a room and just have one big hug or two because they're all just like this like sexual tension that we just need to release that out.