E110: 2023 Bestie Predictions!
Jason Calacanis (host), Chamath Palihapitiya (host), David Sacks (host), Jason Calacanis (host), David Friedberg (host), Narrator
In this episode of All-In Podcast, featuring Jason Calacanis and Chamath Palihapitiya, E110: 2023 Bestie Predictions! explores 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.
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.
Key Takeaways
Affirmative 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Short-term Treasuries and quality infrastructure plays may outperform risk assets in a choppy, high-rate environment.
Chamath and Sacks both favor cash and front-end T‑bills yielding around 5% over trying to time a market bottom, while Friedberg prefers long-term compounders in semicap, energy services, heavy equipment, and pharma infrastructure that benefit from secular capex and reshoring.
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Inflation may not fall as quickly as markets expect due to persistent wage pressures and labor-power shifts.
Chamath frames inflation in three chapters—energy, goods, and now wages—and argues that low labor participation, unionization trends, and minimum wage hikes will keep wage inflation elevated, preventing the sharp disinflation consensus markets are pricing in.
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Notable 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
Questions Answered in This Episode
If affirmative action is curtailed, what alternative policies could best expand opportunity for talented low-income students without recreating new forms of bias?
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.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
How far can Saudi Arabia realistically go in re-denominating oil trade in yuan before provoking significant financial or military pushback from the US?
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.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
What legal frameworks and business models are needed so that generative AI can scale commercially without violating copyright or destroying creator incentives?
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.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
How should late-stage employees and founders at overvalued, high-burn startups navigate toxic cap tables, converts, and the risk of being wiped out?
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.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
If inflation proves sticky due to wage pressures while consumers are overlevered, how should individual investors and households position themselves financially in 2023?
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
Transcript Preview
All right, everybody. Welcome to 2023. Everybody's well rested and ready to take on 2023? Yes? Chamath, how was your break?
Yes. Amazing.
Okay. Saxypoo, I know you don't go to, uh, temperatures that are under 57 degrees anymore. Did you have a nice break? Did you go somewhere warm?
Yes.
Okay, that's a confirmation. Uh-
(laughs)
Wow, man of so many words.
(laughs)
And Freeburg.
I'm over cold weather vacations.
Yeah, uh, that does happen at a certain point. I-
Actually, we went to Florida. We went to the, the free state of Florida.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
What- what- what's going on in Florida at the turn of the new year, I wonder, that drew you down to the great state of Florida?
We were just freeing it up in the free state of Florida.
(laughing)
What's going on? Let your winners ride. Rain Man, David Sachs. What's going on? And I said- We open sourced this to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it. Love you guys. Queen of quinoa. What's going on?
We have our 2023 predictions now. Uh, played some music and all that kind of stuff, Producer Nick, at this point. Let's get to it. Last year, we did our biggest-
By the way, do you guys, do you guys notice that every time we talk about something, somewhere between sort of two months to a year later, The Wall Street Journal ends up writing a big think piece about it?
Yes, think piece about it, yes.
So, I tweeted into the group chat, like last year, we all talked about Sequoia and distributing public equities and-
Yeah.
... how it's very fraught and difficult. And then today, they write this big article about how people have just burned enormous amounts of billions of dollars that they could have returned to LPs, like these venture investors-
Mm-hmm.
... by not distributing.
Yes.
That makes sense. Three weeks ago, when we did our end of the year wrap up, my big winner for 2022 were the pot shops, right? Citadel. And today, in Wall Street Journal, an article lands that these guys, with 56 billion of AUM, over the last two years have made almost $45 billion of revenues. Isn't that incredible? I mean-
This is what happens, Chamath. Usually, uh-
They are j- These guys are just crushing it. And Citadel Securities did like almost, you know, seven and a half billion of revenue. I mean-
Hm.
... it's unbelievable, these businesses, how good they are.
Yes. So, let's get into, uh, and this is typical. Chamath, if you think about journalists, they're trying to get into the conversations that are occurring at the bar after the event, the late night conversation, the group chats. Well, and that's what this podcast is. It's the exposed back channel, right? And so if you listen to this pod, you got the back channel of Silicon Valley politics, tech, science, et cetera. So, let's do our predictions. In 2020, we said our biggest political winner would be, uh, Sacks and I both said DeSantis, Chamath said Xi Jinping, and Freeburg said Putin. Who do we think is our biggest political winner, uh, going forward? Who do you pick? Sacks, biggest political winner for 2023? Who will be your biggest political winner for 2023?
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