All-In PodcastE110: 2023 Bestie Predictions!
At a glance
WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT
All-In Besties Predict 2023: Politics, Markets, Tech, And Turmoil
- The hosts of the All-In Podcast lay out wide-ranging 2023 predictions across politics, business, macroeconomics, and culture, arguing that elites are exhausted, capital is scarce, and major geopolitical realignments are underway.
- They foresee affirmative action being struck down, MBS and Saudi Arabia gaining outsized global influence, and intense shifts in the US Republican Party as DeSantis, Trump, and potential alternatives like Nikki Haley jockey for position.
- On the business front, they predict OpenAI’s explosive rise, Starlink’s potential IPO, massive pain for capital-intensive growth startups and commercial real estate, and consumers and white‑collar “surplus elites” getting squeezed.
- They also highlight inflation’s persistence via wage pressures, potential cracks in the US dollar’s reserve status, legal and economic challenges for AI models like ChatGPT, and a coming wave of transformative cell and gene therapies.
IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING
5 ideasAffirmative action is likely to be curtailed, boosting Asian-American applicants and shifting admissions toward meritocracy.
David Sacks predicts Supreme Court rulings against Harvard and UNC that end current race-based policies, while Chamath argues affirmative action drifted into classism and discriminatory treatment of Asians, and needs restructuring toward class and opportunity rather than race alone.
Saudi Arabia and MBS may dramatically increase their geopolitical leverage by arbitraging US, China, and Russia.
Friedberg forecasts MBS as 2023’s big political winner, using oil-for-yuan deals and tech investment to influence global currency reserves and power hierarchies, while the US simultaneously weakens its own leverage with confrontational rhetoric.
The era of easy money for capital-intensive growth startups is over; many late-stage companies will die or be radically recapitalized.
Friedberg and Chamath describe a funding desert for Series B+ and high-burn companies whose implied valuations are now below their liquidation preferences, leading to toxic converts, wiped-out common employees, and only a tiny fraction emerging as the next Amazons/Googles.
Consumers and white-collar “surplus elites” are likely to be 2023’s big losers as debt, layoffs, and austerity hit.
Sacks notes soaring credit-card rates and debt, frozen housing markets, and looming recession, while JCal predicts that overpaid middle managers and non-building white-collar staff lose bargaining power as firms like Twitter and Amazon prove they can operate with far fewer people.
Generative AI will pressure Google Search’s dominance but faces huge legal and defensibility challenges.
Chamath sees Google’s search usage and margins eroding as multiple players match its AI quality, yet questions OpenAI’s moat and warns that models trained on copyrighted web data may face ‘sued into oblivion’ risks once heavily commercialized without clear rights or attribution.
WORDS WORTH SAVING
5 quotes“You cannot punish kids for willing to work their ass off… that was the unfortunate outcome of what affirmative action has become by 2022.”
— Chamath Palihapitiya
“Saudi Arabia sits at the intersection of the United States, Russia, and China… he will rocket ship to the top because of this jockeying he can now do between these three great nation states.”
— David Friedberg on MBS
“The people that do all the work get fucked and the people who do none of the work and who just want to maintain this shell game get to basically live another day.”
— Chamath Palihapitiya on toxic growth-round restructurings
“I just don’t understand how the consumer isn’t gonna finally tap out in this economy… credit card debt’s at all-time highs… and now layoffs are starting to pile up.”
— David Sacks
“The biggest potential business loser this year is Google Search… Google could lose 10 or 15% of usage to all these other sites, and that may not make any of those sites that relevant, but it’ll have a material measurable impact to Google and Google’s bottom line.”
— Chamath Palihapitiya
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