Dec 24, 2022 · 2h 17m · allin
E109: 2022 Bestie Awards Live from Twitter HQ
Jason Calacanis · 30m spoken Chamath Palihapitiya · 25m spoken David Sacks · 22m spoken David Friedberg · 21m spoken Elon Musk · 14m spoken Michael Shellenberger · 5m spoken
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gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
In Episode 109 of the All-In Podcast, hosts Jason Calacanis, David Sacks, David Friedberg, and Chamath Palihapitiya gather live from Twitter Headquarters for their annual 2022 Bestie Awards, joined by special guests Elon Musk and Michael Shellenberger to recap the year's top political, business, scientific, and cultural milestones.
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 82.8% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
The hosts as informed peer 5.1 Guest teaching 2.6 Guest disagreement 2.4 The hosts pushing back 2.8
speaking balance: gold is the hosts, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 1:14:45 Elon Musk rejects special privileges for journalists
Musk forcefully shuts down the premise that corporate media figures deserve exemption from platform rules, insisting that journalists face the exact same suspension standards as regular citizens.
Hardest push from the hosts ▶ 49:55 Friedberg calls out Sacks and Jason for advertising TwitterFriedberg directly interrupts the show to challenge Sacks and Jason for turning the pod into a promotional feature advertisement for Twitter.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 1:26:34 Shellenberger details FBI priming tech execsMichael Shellenberger educates the hosts on how the FBI systematically warned Twitter executives about an impending foreign hack-and-leak operation, effectively discrediting the Hunter Biden laptop story before publication.
The host holds their own ▶ 54:42 Chamath dismantles fusion hype with financial model and CRISPR caseChamath applies capital pricing principles to demonstrate why private fusion capital is misallocated, backing up his point by detailing a real-world leukemia cure achieved through CRISPR base editing.
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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Biggest Political Winner of 2022 | 5 | 2 | 3 | 4 | Sacks backs up his DeSantis prediction with data on his 20-point election victory and coattails, while challenging Friedberg's Zelensky selection by listing severe infrastructure metrics in Ukraine. | |
| Biggest Political Loser of 2022 | 5 | 2 | 3 | 4 | Chamath argues that European energy policy forced a 180-degree reversal, while Sacks singles out Blinken's NATO statement as a major diplomatic mistake. Chamath and Sacks debate whether the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision damaged Republicans politically. | |
| Biggest Political Surprise of 2022 | 4 | 1 | 3 | 4 | Chamath highlights how Donald Trump acted as a political scarlet letter in the midterms. Sacks pushes back against Jason, accusing mainstream media and Democrats of a codependent relationship keeping Trump viable. | |
| Biggest Business Winner of 2022 | 6 | 2 | 2 | 2 | Chamath displays the Capital Asset Pricing Model to explain why macro bears succeeded in 2022. Sacks highlights defence stock returns due to Ukraine war funding. | |
| Biggest Business Loser of 2022 | 6 | 2 | 3 | 3 | Sacks details Bob Chapek's corporate downfall at Disney, pointing out Bob Iger's behind-the-scenes maneuvering and executive politics. The group also discusses systemic laziness exposed by the FTX breakdown. | |
| 2022 Bestie Award: Biggest Business Surprise | 5 | 1 | 2 | 2 | Friedberg describes how Elon Musk's aggressive cost-cutting and headcount reductions at Twitter established a new efficiency benchmark for Silicon Valley executives. | |
| Live Twitter Feature Demo: View Counts and Badges | 4 | 1 | 3 | 3 | Sacks demos Twitter's new tweet view count feature and corporate affiliate badges. Friedberg sarcastically calls out the demo as a promotional advertisement for a company they advise. | |
| 2022 Bestie Award: Best Science Breakthrough | 6 | 3 | 3 | 4 | Chamath challenges Friedberg's choice of fusion by distinguishing between research milestones and commercial power, presenting a leukemia patient cured via CRISPR base editing instead. | |
| 2022 Bestie Award: Biggest Flash in the Pan | 4 | 1 | 2 | 2 | Sacks breaks down Liz Truss's 44-day tenure as UK Prime Minister, citing the collapse of her economic plan as evidence that outdated fiscal conservatism fails under current macro conditions. | |
| Elon Musk Joins Live: Twitter Acquisition and Product Strategy | 4 | 6 | 2 | 3 | Guest Elon Musk joins the podcast live to discuss the first six weeks of running Twitter, detailing backend technical challenges like processing three million view-count transactions per second. | |
| Elon Musk on Headcount Efficiency, Content Moderation, and Macro Economy | 5 | 6 | 3 | 4 | Elon Musk outlines operational criteria for headcount efficiency and defends content moderation actions. Musk firmly rejects special treatment for journalists who violate platform rules on doxxing. | |
| Twitter Files and Government Interference Discussion | 5 | 5 | 2 | 2 | Elon Musk warns strongly against holding margin debt during market downturns and projects economic difficulty into mid-2024. He also asserts that internal Twitter files confirmed prior censorship concerns. | |
| Michael Shellenberger Breaks Down Twitter Files Part 7 | 5 | 7 | 2 | 3 | Guest Michael Shellenberger presents findings from Twitter Files Part 7, explaining how intelligence agencies systematically primed social media executives to expect a foreign hack-and-leak ahead of the Hunter Biden laptop story. | |
| Michael Shellenberger on San Francisco Policy and Homelessness | 5 | 7 | 2 | 3 | Michael Shellenberger discusses San Francisco homeless policies, citing data that mortality rates are three times higher for unsheltered individuals on the street than those in shelters. | |
| Debrief on Elon Musk Interview and Silicon Valley Decision-Making | 6 | 2 | 2 | 2 | Friedberg reflects on Elon Musk's management strategy, emphasizing that execution speed and bias to action matter more than individual decision precision when scaling tech enterprises. | |
| Twitter View Counts & Media Impact | 5 | 1 | 2 | 2 | Chamath and Sacks discuss how public tweet view metrics expose low engagement rates for traditional media figures compared to independent creators. | |
| Best CEO of 2022 | 6 | 1 | 2 | 3 | Friedberg selects Warren Buffett as Best CEO of 2022 for his steady capital allocation discipline. Jason nominates Brian Chesky and Dara Khosrowshahi for focusing on free cash flow. | |
| Best and Worst Investor of 2022 | 7 | 3 | 2 | 2 | Chamath highlights multi-pod hedge funds like Citadel and Millennium as top investors, while admitting his own tech over-allocation failed to account for rising discount rates. Sacks and Friedberg nominate Stan Druckenmiller. | |
| Best Turnaround of 2022 | 5 | 2 | 3 | 4 | Jason nominates Meta as the turnaround of the year after cost-cutting announcements, drawing immediate pushback from Chamath and Friedberg, who argue Meta's recovery is far from proven. | |
| Worst Human Being: SBF & Legal Defense Strategy | 5 | 2 | 2 | 3 | The co-hosts unanimously name Sam Bankman-Fried as the worst human being of 2022, analyzing co-conspirator plea deals and workshopping potential legal defense arguments involving prescription drug interactions. | |
| Most Loathsome Company of 2022 | 6 | 2 | 3 | 3 | Friedberg names drug-testing supplier Inotiv as the most loathsome company for animal welfare violations, prompting teasing from Jason and Chamath about virtue signaling. | |
| Worst Trend of 2022 | 5 | 1 | 2 | 2 | Friedberg critiques the business community's obsession with interest rates, arguing that sound business fundamentals matter more than macro interest rate fluctuations. | |
| Favorite Media and Books of 2022 | 4 | 1 | 1 | 1 | The co-hosts share media recommendations for 2022. Friedberg and Chamath highlight biochemist Nick Lane's books on origin-of-life science. | |
| Rudy Giuliani Award for Self-Immolation | 5 | 2 | 3 | 3 | Friedberg nominates Elon Musk for self-immolation due to reputational damage surrounding the Twitter acquisition, leading Chamath to challenge whether taking on a difficult public task counts as self-immolation. |
Statements from this episode (61)
Chamath: Pre-Iowa caucus poll leaders rarely win presidential nominations
“I think in the last seven or eight nomination cycles, the person that's been leading the popularity contest going into the aisle caucuses has not won the nomination.”
Sacks: Trump might not run in 2024 if DeSantis stays dominant
“I think that if he continues to pull this well within the Republican Party, I think Trump might not run again, because Trump definitely does not want to risk being a loser in the Republican primary.”
Sacks outlines severe energy infrastructure damage and casualties in Ukraine
“Two thirds of Kyiv is currently without power. 80% of Kyiv doesn't have water. 30% of the Ukrainian power stations have been destroyed. Nearly half of the country's without power. There's something like eight million displaced Ukrainians in the country. And ov…”
Chamath: The EU was the biggest international political loser of 2022
“Yeah, and I think that the biggest political loser outside of the United States was probably the European Union.”
Sacks: Closing NATO's door likely could have avoided the Russia-Ukraine war
“Because there's a good chance we could have avoided This disastrous war if we had just been willing to close NATO's door.”
Chamath: Association with Donald Trump was political poison in 2022
“If you were anywhere near this guy, you were gonna lose.”
Calacanis: Trump might defeat DeSantis in primary debates and win
“He is going to be out there in the primaries, and he's going to have to debate DeSantis, and I don't know that DeSantis can beat him in a debate. I think he might win.”
Sacks: Defense stocks gained up to 40% in 2022 despite market downturn
“Lockheed Martin, which makes Javelins and High Mars is up 40% in the past year when most of the market's been way down. Northrop Grumman's also up almost 40%. And even some of the lesser performers like Raytheon and General Dynamics are up about almost 20% in …”
Sacks: Defense contractors will perform well for at least another year
“So these companies are going to keep doing well for the next year at least.”
Friedberg: OpenAI and fusion startups will be long-term business winners
“Over the long term, there were a couple of big, Breakthrough moments that I would give kind of, you know, the winner in business that will benefit over the longterm to open AI and to fusion startups.”
Calacanis: Microsoft will release an OpenAI search engine impacting Google
“Microsoft, I think is going to release a and there's a prediction as well, a search engine with Open AI, that has a significant impact on Google's franchise.”
Chamath: Big tech was 2022's biggest business loser on a dollar basis
“On a dollar basis, the biggest business loser of this year was big tech.”
Calacanis: SEC will increase crypto token prosecutions after FTX collapse
“And I think there'll be a subsequent domino to fall, which is Now that Gary G, head of the SEC, has FTX and the FTT tokens as the grift, he's gonna go down the list of other tokens and he is going to start doing more prosecutions of grifts in crypto.”
Friedberg: VCs and CEOs are adopting Musk's Twitter restructuring as a model
“Nearly every VC I speak with, every CEO, every board is looking to Elon's behavior for right or for wrong, for, you know, moral, moral or not, and saying that's a model for how you can challenge your team to achieve the impossible.”
Calacanis predicts shift to Twitter feature focus within 6 to 18 weeks
“I predict in another six to 18 weeks, we will see people talking about all the great features in Twitter, not any of the transitional issues, and people will be shocked.”
Sacks: Mastodon does not have nearly the distribution of Twitter
“And anybody who's thinking about going to like some knockoff like Mastodon or something is gonna have to contend with the fact that it doesn't have nearly the distribution.”
Sacks claims his tweets get 10-20x more reach than the NYT
“I didn't know that, but I just went over to the New York Times profile and my tweets are routinely getting 10 to 20 times more reach, more views than theirs.”
Sacks: Twitter will issue blue checks and affiliation badges to more users
“So more and more people are going to get blue checks, and then people are going to have secondary or even tertiary badges that are basically specific to their affiliations.”
Friedberg: Fusion startup count up ~40% with $10B annual capital flow
“We've seen an increase of nearly 40% in the number of fusion startups, and the amount of capital that's flowing in is now reaching ten billion a year, so this is becoming, you know, a real investable, or an area that's getting real investment.”
Chamath: Early fusion requires government funding before private handoff
“I think there is a point in time. Where private startups can take the last 20 or 30%, but I think about this like the internet, which is you needed DARPA to build V-one, and then it could be handed over to private industry. And I think fusion, when we look bac…”
Chamath: Base-edited T-cell therapy is the decade's top science breakthrough
“I think this is the single most important thing that happened in science, not just this year, But frankly, in the last decade, because if you can actually now do base editing, and eradicate, at least in this case, a blood based cancer, and eventually we'll be …”
David Sacks: Zombie Thatcherism and Reaganism are not electorally viable
“I think zombie Thatcherism is not going to be electorally viable In the UK, just like zombie Reaganism is not going to be viable in the United States.”
Musk: Twitter view count feature requires 3 million transactions per second
“It sort of requires system-wide on the order of three, three million transactions a second to actually calculate the view, to, you know, calculate and display the view count, FYI, for Twitter, Twitter global.”
Musk: Twitter is no longer on track for bankruptcy
“The expense is reasonably under control. So the company's not like on the, in the fast lane of bankruptcy anymore. And we're releasing features faster than Twitter's history at the same time as having contained the costs and reduce the cost structure by a fact…”
Musk: Twitter maintains roughly 2,000 employees and 5,000 contractors
“We still have 2000 people. It's not nothing. And actually if you, there's actually on the order of like almost 5000 contractors.”
Musk: Twitter hate speech impressions are down by a third
“Hate speech impressions are down by a third and will get even lower.”
Musk personally apologized to Paul Graham for his Twitter suspension
“The Paul Graham suspension was definitely a mistake, and I actually called Paul Graham to apologize personally for that one.”
Musk: Economic recovery will begin roughly in Q2 2024
“And my best guess is that, you know, we have Sort of stormy times for a year to a year and a half, and then things start to, dawn breaks roughly in Q to 24.”
Musk: Almost every conspiracy theory about Twitter turned out true
“Almost every conspiracy theory that people had about Twitter turned out to be true. So far, they've all turned out to be true, and if not, more true than people thought.”
Shellenberger: FBI constantly pushed legal boundaries requesting Twitter user info
“FBI was constantly pushing the boundaries of what is legally and ethically acceptable in terms of requesting information.”
Chamath: Ukraine war proves Russian military and propaganda capabilities were overrated
“The Ukraine Russia war is evidence that, you know, this Highly sophisticated war machine and propaganda machine is not that good at their job.”
Shellenberger: Hunter Biden laptop turned out to be authentic
“I really didn't think that that laptop was what they said it was, and it turned out that it was.”
Shellenberger: Twitter found minimal foreign influence from FBI-flagged accounts
“You'll repeatedly, you'll Roth would respond to FBI that, yeah, we looked into these accounts that you mentioned, and they were all very low follower accounts with very little activity. So they just weren't finding very much foreign influence on the Twitter pl…”
Shellenberger: San Francisco gives $600-$700 monthly cash payments to homeless individuals
“San Francisco pays cash well for a payment of somewhere between six to 700 dollars. Plus you can get two dollars in food stamps.”
Shellenberger: Living unsheltered on the street is three times deadlier than staying in a shelter
“Three times more people die living outside as an unsheltered homeless person rather than live, than being in a shelter.”
Calacanis: Twitter management previously held back ready-to-ship features
“What we found over and over again was that there were great features that were ready to be released that were being held back by management. And there were brilliant people with all the ideas that you think should have been released. And they just weren't allo…”
Friedberg: Decision velocity predicts business success better than accuracy
“The rate at which you can make decisions Is a far greater predictor of success than the accuracy of the decisions you do make.”
Chamath: All-In Podcast reaches 3M to 5M people across all platforms
“We add it all up, and you know, we think it's in this, you know, sort of three to five million range of people”
Chamath: Sean Hannity's Twitter followers are pathetically engaged and mostly bots
“Go to Sean Hannity's profile, and for the number of followers he has, how pathetically engaged his audience is. It's all bots. It's all trolls. It's all nobodies.”
Chamath: Occidental Petroleum is 2022's best-performing stock, up 140%
“Vicky Holub, who's the CEO of Occidental Petroleum. Stocks up like a 140% this year. It's technically the best performing stock of the year. Sixty-three billion dollar company.”
Chamath is guiding portfolio CEOs to breakeven or Q1 2025 runway
“I have been guiding our portfolio company CEOs to be at cash flow break even now or extend runway to Q one, 20, 25.”
Chamath: The recession will end in mid-2024
“Mid-twenty-four is when the recession ends, and you need to give yourself two to three quarters of buffer so that you can go and raise around, which takes a quarter to two quarters.”
Chamath: Pod shops generated double-digit returns and outperformed in 2022
“Those strategies as a whole ran over the market this year. They were the best performers. They are giving back billions of dollars. They've generated double digit positive returns.”
Sacks: US economy faces a hard landing and deep recession in 2023
“He is predicting a hard landing in 2023 with a deeper recession than many expect. So sadly, I suspect he may be right yet again.”
Chamath: Long tech investors were the worst investors of 2022
“And all of us who were over allocated into things that benefited from those dynamics, frankly, got run over this year. So we were, as a class, the worst investors of 2022.”
Chamath: No real business turnarounds will occur until 2025
“There may be no turnaround award until 2025.”
Chamath: Ellison and Wang engineered an FTX backdoor for Alameda
“They flipped, but it turns out that they actually did engineer a backdoor into FTX and Alameda has been doing this for years.”
Friedberg predicts SBF will be sentenced to multiple hundreds of years
“I think it's going to be a hundred multiple hundreds of years sentence i agree and you'll be gone for life”
Friedberg: Inotiv was raided by feds and stock fell over 90%
“This is the company that was busted by the feds for their animal abuse in their dog breeding facility where 4000 beagles were rescued, one of which I adopted, and this is a publicly traded company, stocks down 90 some odd percent, which I'm thrilled to see.”
Friedberg: Massive wave of founders building generative AI startups
“There's an absolute friggin tidal wave of people trying to start companies that are leveraging tools and generative AI to kind of reinvent everything from workplace tools, enterprise software, all the way through to media games and entertainment.”
Chamath: AlphaFold has near-perfect accuracy in protein folding
“AlphaFold three, which basically has almost near perfect accuracy in protein folding.”
Chamath: Marginal energy generation and storage cost is single-digit cents
“Marginal cost of energy generation and storage is now in the low single digit pennies per kilowatt hour”
Chamath: Near-free energy will create a peace dividend in 10-20 years
“Not only will energy be free and abundant, but it will, I think over the next decade or two, create a massive peace dividend. It will rewrite our foreign policy. It will rewrite national security.”
Friedberg: ChatGPT-enabled narrator economy will transform how products are created
“This year, I think that the trend that was, again, enabled and demonstrated through ChatGPT is the narrator economy. I think this is going to be a really important trend going forward.”
Chamath: Nick Lane's books are essential reading to avoid being a Luddite
“So, that book, The Vital Question is incredible. The other one that he wrote, which is called Life Ascending, those two books you must read if you don't want to be a Luddite, in my opinion.”