Jan 4, 2025 · 1h 55m · allin
2025 Predictions: Tech, Business, Media, Politics!
Jason Calacanis · 35m spoken Chamath Palihapitiya · 23m spoken Gavin Baker · 21m spoken David Friedberg · 19m spoken
0:00 / 0:00
▶ Watch on YouTube →
gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
In this 2025 predictions episode of the All-In Podcast, host Jason Calacanis, co-hosts Chamath Palihapitiya and David Friedberg, and guest Gavin Baker deliver comprehensive forecasts across politics, business, technology, macroeconomics, and media. Through structured prediction categories and an official Polymarket partnership, the panel analyzes the disruptive impacts of AI scaling, government efficiency audits, market concentration risks, and global economic shifts.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. The hosts hold 77.2% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
The hosts as informed peer 4.8 Guest teaching 3.5 Guest disagreement 1.5 The hosts pushing back 1.9
speaking balance: gold is the hosts, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 33:12 Gavin Counters Chamath on Pro Sports Teams
Gavin directly disagrees with Chamath's pro sports thesis, pointing out that institutional PE capital markets possess 10x to 100x more resources than individual wealthy trophy buyers.
Hardest push from the hosts ▶ 45:45 Friedberg Challenges Jason on OpenAI ValuationFriedberg forcefully rejects Jason's framing of OpenAI collapsing like a meme stock, pointing directly to its projected $12B in real revenue.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 1:14:09 Gavin's High Bandwidth Memory COGS RevelationGavin educates the hosts on semiconductor supply chain economics, revealing that High Bandwidth Memory is a larger component of Nvidia GPU COGS than TSMC fabrication.
The host holds their own ▶ 1:24:47 Chamath's Software Industrial Complex BreakdownChamath demonstrates domain expertise by breaking down enterprise software bloat, CRUD database heuristics, and how his 30-person engineering team achieves 10x operational leverage.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | The hosts as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | The hosts pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| All-In Podcast Title Bumper | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Introductory housekeeping, podcast bumper, and setup for the Polymarket prediction market partnership. Host dynamic is casual and promotional with no real debate or guest friction. | |
| Besties Ski Trip Found Footage & Skill Analysis | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 | Light banter reviewing skiing footage of the hosts. Guest Gavin Baker humorously notes his own thousands of hours of skiing experience while maintaining a collaborative tone. | |
| 2025 Predictions: Biggest Political Winner | 4 | 1 | 1 | 3 | The hosts and guest share 2025 political winner predictions. Chamath pushes back on Jason's review of last year's pick, insisting independent centrists swung the election. | |
| 2025 Predictions: Biggest Political Loser | 5 | 3 | 3 | 2 | Gavin predicts Putin as political loser and offers a gentle counter-perspective to Friedberg's neocon pick by citing Trump's John Bolton negotiation strategy. Chamath details the collapse of traditional GOP donor machinery. | |
| 2025 Predictions: Biggest Business Winner | 6 | 4 | 2 | 3 | Discussion on robotics, FSD, test-time compute, stablecoins, and AI search. Gavin educates on inference GPU shortages and test-time compute while Chamath cites stablecoin transaction volume surpassing Visa. | |
| Reviewing 2024 Predictions for Biggest Business Loser | 6 | 5 | 4 | 4 | Gavin directly challenges Chamath's thesis on pro sports team valuations by highlighting that institutional private equity capital has orders of magnitude more resources than individual billionaires. Chamath holds his ground citing TV deal fundamentals. | |
| Podcast Banter on Courtside Seats and NBA Warnings | 2 | 2 | 1 | 1 | Lighthearted story about Jason almost getting kicked out of Chamath's courtside Warriors seats. Gavin briefly adds context on tech giants' success with sports streaming rights. | |
| Gavin Baker Predicts Government Service Providers as 2025 Loser | 2 | 3 | 2 | 1 | Gavin succinctly predicts government service providers will be the biggest business losers due to DOGE spending audits. Hosts agree with the thesis. | |
| David Friedberg Predicts Legacy Defense Contractors Will Struggle | 6 | 2 | 1 | 2 | Friedberg predicts legacy defense contractors struggle, and Chamath extends this to consulting firms by dissecting time-and-materials human labor arbitrage. Gavin concurs on the inefficiency of cost-plus contracts. | |
| Jason Calacanis Predicts OpenAI Valuation Peak and Collapse | 5 | 3 | 2 | 5 | Jason predicts OpenAI's valuation peak and collapse. Friedberg forcefully pushes back, pointing out OpenAI's $12B real revenue growth compared to pure speculative meme stocks. | |
| Chamath Predicts Mass Consolidation Among Traditional Auto OEMs | 6 | 3 | 1 | 1 | Chamath predicts traditional auto OEM consolidation and collapse. Gavin reinforces the pick by adding that legacy automakers are losing their crucial Chinese market share due to uncompetitive tech. | |
| David Friedberg Predicts Massive Onshoring Funding for Robotics | 5 | 4 | 1 | 1 | Friedberg predicts massive US hardware onshoring. Gavin outlines fundamental economic rules for AI labs, emphasizing that compute infrastructure cost advantage will dictate ultimate winners. | |
| Jason Predicts Autonomous Delivery and Ride-Share Mega-Mergers | 6 | 3 | 1 | 2 | Jason predicts mega-mergers in autonomous transport. Friedberg brings detailed market share statistics showing Waymo capturing 22% of San Francisco ride-share rides in 15 months. | |
| Reviewing Past Contrarian Beliefs and Smartphone AI Performance | 3 | 1 | 1 | 2 | Jason rants about Apple Intelligence underperforming versus Google Pixel, leading into light banter about domain names and hypothetical celebrity boxing matches. | |
| Chamath Predicts a Mainline US Banking Crisis | 7 | 2 | 1 | 1 | Chamath presents a detailed macroeconomic contrarian thesis predicting a mainline US banking crisis, explaining how 5% interest on $70T in debt equals 10% rate pain historically. | |
| Gavin Predicts 5%+ US GDP Growth and Closed AI Models | 5 | 6 | 3 | 3 | Gavin predicts 5%+ GDP growth and frontier AI labs closing off open models to prevent IP theft/distillation. Friedberg counters with a prediction on rising socialist movements. | |
| Debating White-Collar AI Disruption and Federal Government Reform | 6 | 2 | 3 | 5 | Hosts debate white-collar AI disruption and socialism. Chamath pushes back on the premises, asking 'What is contrarian about this?', while Friedberg challenges Jason's claim that government reforms are easy. | |
| Reviewing Past Asset Picks and Gavin's High Bandwidth Memory Prediction | 4 | 7 | 1 | 1 | Gavin highlights High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) as his top asset pick, educating hosts that HBM represents a larger portion of Nvidia GPU cost of goods sold than TSMC foundry fabrication. | |
| Chamath Predicts Credit Default Swaps as Best Performing Asset | 7 | 3 | 0 | 0 | Chamath picks Credit Default Swaps (CDS) as an asymmetric hedge against systemic banking volatility. Gavin nods and validates the immense payoff structure of the trade. | |
| David Friedberg Predicts Chinese Tech ETFs Will Outperform | 6 | 5 | 3 | 3 | Friedberg predicts Chinese tech ETFs will outperform. Gavin agrees on cheap valuations but cautions based on historical Chinese corporate accounting fraud, recounting the Longtop Financial scandal. | |
| Jason Calacanis Predicts Magnificent Seven Will Outperform Again | 7 | 6 | 2 | 2 | Jason picks Mag 7 while Gavin and Chamath articulate the collapse of enterprise application software ('Software Industrial Complex'), explaining how AI agents replace white-collar human seats rather than just augmenting them. | |
| 2025 Predictions: Most Anticipated Trend | 6 | 8 | 1 | 1 | Gavin delivers a masterclass on AI progress, explaining 3-axis scaling (pre-training, inference, reasoning traces) and synthetic data generation. Jason demonstrates Gemini Deep Research running live financial risk queries. | |
| 2025 Predictions: Most Anticipated Media | 4 | 3 | 1 | 1 | Discussion turns to most anticipated media. Chamath picks Trump administration declassified files (JFK, Epstein, Diddy), Friedberg highlights AI-generated video game engines, and Gavin picks 1923 Season 2. | |
| 2025 Polymarket Predictions and Economic Forecasts | 5 | 7 | 2 | 2 | The episode wraps with Polymarket bets and an extended segment where Gavin shares deep UFO/UAP lore and technological phase shift theories, countered thoughtfully by Friedberg's information physics perspective. |
Statements from this episode (65)
Chamath predicts fiscal conservatives will be 2025's biggest political winners
“My biggest political winner for twenty-twenty-five are fiscal conservatives. I think that we are going to test a very important concept in twenty-twenty-five, and I hope it works, which is that of austerity. And the reason why austerity has to work is that the…”
Friedberg: Trump's cabinet appointees average 40-45 years old versus Biden's 60
“Trump's cabinet picks have an average age of 40 to 45 years old compared to the Biden cabinet where the average age is a little over 59, almost 60 years old.”
Friedberg predicts emerging political candidates will shift significantly younger by late 2025
“I do think that this marks the beginning of a new trend in the kind of age range of political candidates shifting younger. So I think that this is something we should expect as candidates start to emerge for the midterm. By the end of 2025, we'll start to see …”
Baker predicts Vladimir Putin will be 2025's biggest political loser
“I think Putin is going to lose bigly.”
Baker predicts Xi Jinping will begin decoupling China from Putin in 2025
“I just think Xi is going to begin decoupling from Putin.”
Baker predicts Trump will negotiate a deal detrimental to Russia and Ukraine
“I think Trump is going to be a lot tougher on Putin than people think. And I think he's going to get a very, very a deal that's very, very bad for Russia and Ukraine.”
Friedberg predicts pro-war neoconservatives will lose influence to Vance and Musk
“I'm going to predict the pro war neocons who are going to go Head to head with the JD Vance and Elons and others of the world, and I think that they're gonna lose, and I think that there's gonna be this kind of big crack in the establishment of this neocon mov…”
Chamath predicts progressivism will be the biggest political loser of 2025
“The biggest political loser of 20, 25 is going to be progressivism.”
Chamath predicts Justin Trudeau will lose massively to Pierre Poilievre in 2025
“Justin Trudeau is going to lose massively to peer poly of.”
Chamath predicts the Alternative for Germany party will win in 2025
“In Germany, AFD looks like they will win.”
Chamath predicts the UK Labour government will fall to Nigel Farage
“And if all of that comes to pass in the UK, I think you're going to see the Labour government fall, and I think you're going to see Nigel Farage win.”
Friedberg predicts 2025 will be the year of robotics and autonomous hardware
“So I feel like we're at a really interesting inflection point. That is going to make 2025 the year of autonomous hardware or robotics. If 2024 was the year of kind of compute build out and the rollout of AI systems in software, I think 2025 will be the year of…”
Baker predicts a massive shortage of GPUs and compute capacity in 2025
“We're going to run out of GPUs, accelerators, compute in 2025, the same way we did in 23.”
Chamath predicts dollar-denominated stablecoins will be 2025's biggest business winner
“I think the biggest business winner of 20, 25 are going to be dollar denominated stable coins.”
Chamath notes Q2 2024 stablecoin volume surpassed double Visa's transaction volume
“Stablecoin usage. At the end of the second quarter of 2024 was about 1.1 billion transactions that summed to 8.5 trillion dollars of transaction volume. If you compare that to Visa over the same period, it was more than double Visa's transaction volume.”
Chamath predicts stablecoin usage could quadruple or quintuple by late 2025
“I think stable coins could Quadruple or quintuple by the end of 25.”
Calacanis predicts Tesla and Google will be 2025's biggest business winners
“My biggest business winner prediction for 2025 is Tesla and Google.”
Baker predicts institutional private equity funds will buy professional sports teams
“It feels like that market is about to be institutionalized and funds are going to start buying pro sports teams.”
Chamath predicts sports media rights revenue will drop in next TV deals
“And I think what happens is sports will have a decent run until the next TV deals get done. And I think if you, for example, take pharma ads outside of TV, so like that pool shrinks, if you have less viewership and so you can sell The remaining ads less effect…”
Baker asserts the NBA has been terribly managed as a professional league
“The NBA has been terribly managed.”
Baker predicts major tech companies will acquire all sports broadcasting rights
“Just the fact that all of the biggest tech companies are so happy with the sports kind of rights that they bought, they're gonna buy them all.”
Baker predicts government service providers will be 2025's biggest business losers
“Government service providers. You do not want to have the United States government at any level as over 35% of your revenue.”
Chamath predicts a trillion-dollar drawdown for Magnificent Seven stocks in 2025
“I don't know what the percentage drawdown from here will be, but I think when we look back, the absolute dollar drawdown of the mag seven will be in the trillions of dollars.”
Friedberg predicts legacy defense contractors will face severe challenges in 2025
“I went with the kind of old defense and aerospace providers, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon. Driven by kind of China dominance, driven by US defense budgets that I think are going to need to shift towards a more kind of tech oriented and ROI driven rational…”
Chamath predicts time-and-materials government contractors face severe stress in 2025
“The thing to keep in mind is like cost plus is a fancier way of saying time and materials and time and materials is a fancy way of saying human labor arbitrage. And I think that all of that stuff will get extremely scrutinized in 20, 25, because if you are buy…”
Calacanis asserts MicroStrategy's valuation multiple over its Bitcoin holdings is unsustainable
“Then I looked at micro strategies and that made no sense to me that they were trading at two, three, four times The book value of their Bitcoin. And I think that's not sustainable.”
Calacanis says Truth Social's $7 billion valuation makes no logical sense
“I looked at truth social, which is like doing four or five million dollars in revenue and is valued at seven billion. That makes absolute no logical sense.”
Calacanis predicts OpenAI will peak at its $157 billion valuation
“But I think the one that is the most overpriced of all of this, and I think is going to see their peak valuation is open AI.”
Calacanis warns OpenAI faces real risk of failing its for-profit conversion
“And I do think that there is a non-zero chance they could lose their process and these court cases of transferring a hundred fifty seven billion dollars in value from a nonprofit into a for-profit. I think that whole thing could blow up.”
Chamath predicts traditional auto manufacturers face collapse and mega-mergers in 2025
“I think that this is the year that we will see the collapse of the traditional auto OEMs. And I think that the deal that happened at the end of 2024 with Honda, Nissan, I think is a bit of a signal to what the industry has to do, which is to go through a massi…”
Baker predicts traditional automotive manufacturers will entirely lose their Chinese business
“They're going to lose their Chinese business because they don't make competitive products anymore. If there's not massive protectionism, and we're seeing signs of that, they'll be caught between Tesla and the Chinese OEMs. And I think the only way that this do…”
Friedberg predicts massive funding deals for US hardware manufacturing in 2025
“I do think that there's going to be massive funding deals similar to what we saw this past year for compute build out. I think we're going to see massive funding deals for hardware based manufacturing build out in the United States.”
Baker predicts a tidal wave of corporate M&A driven by pent-up demand
“I think there's gonna, you're gonna see a tidal wave of M&A after four years of not being able to get anything done. I think there's an enormous amount of pent up demand.”
Baker predicts multiple independent frontier AI labs will be acquired in 2025
“And then I do think you will see a lot of these frontier AI labs that are independent be acquired.”
Baker argues winning AI companies must own their compute infrastructure
“The ultimate AI winner will be the one with the lowest cost of infrastructure costs, the lowest cost of compute. And definitionally, you can't be the low cost provider if you're renting your compute from someone else.”
Calacanis predicts massive consolidation between Tesla, Uber, Waymo, and delivery apps
“I think the age of autonomy is here, and I think there is going to be Some partnerships that will happen between Amazon, DoorDash, Uber, Tesla, Waymo, and that cohort, and I would not be surprised to see Tesla could buy Uber right now for but 10% of its market…”
Friedberg notes Waymo captured 22% of the San Francisco rideshare market
“Waymo launched in SF in August, 20, 23 in kind of an open market way. Uber and Lyft were 66 and 34% market share at the time. And in 15 months in November of 2024, Waymo is now a 22% market share of rides in SF, which is the same as Lyft and Uber is now down t…”
Friedberg predicts Waymo will execute a major financing, IPO, or merger
“You could see something happen with Waymo this year that could either be something like a massive financing, an IPO, or a merger or acquisition with one of the big ride-sharing companies. I don't know if that makes as much strategic sense as I've thought about…”
Chamath predicts a reasonable chance of a major US banking crisis
“I think that you're going to see a banking crisis in one of the major mainline banks.”
Baker predicts the US will hit 5% real GDP growth soon
“My most contrary belief, so I think that America over the next, at some point over the next four years, will print at least one year of greater than five percent GDP growth, real GDP growth.”
Baker predicts frontier AI labs will stop releasing leading-edge models publicly
“As far as a specific prediction for 25 because I don't know when that will happen, I think you will see the frontier labs stop releasing their leading-edge models to prevent knowledge distillation and their IP effectively being stolen.”
Friedberg predicts a dramatic rise in US socialist movements in 2025
“I think that the party line is that socialism was defeated in this election cycle, and that there was a resounding kind of vote from the American populace against socialism, and I actually think my contrarian belief is that we'll see a rise, a dramatic rise in…”
Baker predicts artificial intelligence will temporarily amplify global inequality
“So I just think AI is going to really amplify inequality for some period of time.”
Baker predicts wokeism will decline while socialist economic policies gain traction
“Wokeism and progressivism will decouple from socialism. I think wokeism and progressivism You know, we'll be on a declining trend, but socialism in terms of the government.”
Calacanis predicts OpenAI will lose its lead and become fourth-ranked AI player
“My most contrarian belief was OpenAI loses its lead, loses its nonprofit to for-profit transition and becomes the number four player in AI. The total collapse of OpenAI is my most contrarian prediction for .”
Friedberg claims the Global X Uranium ETF contains junk holdings
“I looked at the components of that ETF last, last week when we were preparing for this, it has absolute junk in it, like it was not the right, right way to kind of trade Uranium”
Baker predicts high bandwidth memory manufacturers will be 2025's best asset
“I think the companies that make high bandwidth memory, going back to, we're gonna run out of compute. It's actually a pretty shocking stat. High bandwidth memory is a bigger part of Nvidia's cogs on GPUs than Taiwan Semi is. And today there's two companies tha…”
Baker notes high bandwidth memory costs Nvidia more than TSMC chips
“High bandwidth memory is a bigger part of Nvidia's cogs on GPUs than Taiwan Semi is.”
Chamath predicts long Credit Default Swaps will be 2025's best asset
“But I would be long CDS. So what am I buying? I am buying insurance. I'm buying insurance. Using credit default swaps, I'm buying what's called protection, that there is no default event in 2025. Again, I'm not going to tell you which companies or what maturit…”
Friedberg predicts the Trump administration will reach a trade deal with China
“And I think that they're going to get a deal done given the position with China. I think that they're very likely to kind of get a deal done.”
Friedberg predicts Chinese tech stocks are poised for a strong 2025 run
“It seems like these stocks could be poised for A pretty good run in 25 if the macro works out.”
Baker predicts Trump and Xi will reach a trade deal isolating Putin
“I think Trump and Xi both want a deal. I think there's a deal to be done that leaves Putin out in the cold, as I referenced.”
Calacanis predicts the Magnificent Seven will be the best performing asset class
“I think the Mac seven is going to be the best performing asset. I'm taking the other side Chamath, I think in an earlier prediction said maybe not so much. I think that what they've learned in the last couple of years is that there is an incredible earnings ex…”
Baker predicts 2025 will be the breakout year for AI agents
“2025 is going to be, I think, the year of agents, particularly in the second half.”
Baker predicts enterprise application software will face immense pain in 2025
“Enterprise application software, I think is going to be in a lot of pain.”
Friedberg predicts vertical SaaS moats and pricing will be destroyed by AI
“I'm probably just going to triple underline vertical SAS again, perceived pricing model being challenged, pricing being compressed as companies explore in-house tools built with AI that replaces these kind of traditional business practices, modes are going to …”
Calacanis predicts legacy automakers and real estate will underperform in 2025
“I think legacy car companies and real estate are going to face continued headwinds and be terrible assets”
Friedberg predicts the US will announce a major nuclear power build-out
“My most anticipated trend is around the announcement of build-out of nuclear power in the United States in twenty-twenty-five.”
Baker predicts AI progress per quarter will exceed yearly progress in 2023-2024
“I think AI is going to make more progress per quarter in 2025 than it did per year in 23 and 24.”
Calacanis predicts M&A and IPOs will surge as Lina Khan exits
“Exits and DPI shower down and we'll have this incredible distribution as the wrath of Lena Khan ends and MNA and IPOs will surge.”
Chamath predicts the Trump administration will declassify JFK and Epstein files
“It is the enormity of the files that are going to get declassified and released by the Trump administration. I think it's going to be Unbelievably interesting, salacious, useful, good, earnest, All of the above. So the JFK files, the Epstein files.”
Friedberg predicts AI capabilities will trigger a total rewrite of video games
“So I do think that there's going to be a rewrite of video games in the video game industry with the variety of AI kind of capabilities that are hitting market now.”
Chamath predicts Magnificent Seven will fall below 30% of S&P 500
“The Magate representation on the S&P 500 shrinks below 30%.”