E109: 2022 Bestie Awards Live from Twitter HQ

But man, Warner Media has a lot to contend with. And, you know, they could end up being a real challenger to Disney in the years ahead.

I'm telling you, Disney, Warner, which you talked about before, and Facebook are three of my big ones.

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 able to bring that and use that towards solid-state tumor cancers, it's a huge breakthrough in just human longevity and human quality of life.

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.

Yeah, you're selling a product for a company that you guys are working at. I mean, come on.

We've got the expenses reasonably under control, so the company's not 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 reduced the cost structure by a factor of three, maybe four.

And investors failed to do relevant amounts of due diligence or form a board and have proper governance over him because they wanted to be part of the hot new thing and everyone had capital to deploy.

There's a generation of investors who raised their funds in the last five years and didn't do diligence, didn't demand board seats, didn't demand boards.

Microsoft, I think, is going to release a, and this is a prediction as well, a search engine with OpenAI that has a significant impact on Google's franchise.

Google, one of the greatest businesses and franchises ever created, has no answer currently for Chat GPT, because Google's business model is to get you to click on an ad between links.

I mean, I whiffed. It just completely missed the global macro shift that we embarked on in full force starting in Q1 of this year.

I have been guiding our portfolio company CEOs to be at cash flow break even now or extend runway to Q1 2025

Well, if you're getting 10 times more distribution than the New York Times, you know what's going to happen is people will stop listening and reading.

Yeah, I would say best trend is the growing realization that the corporate media is failing. It does not tell the truth. It has an agenda. More and more people are opting out of it and going with independent media.

So, it is an absolute worldwide sea change in how we need to think about risk.

So I got that part right, but what I didn't connect it to were all the asset classes actually got pummeled.

So these companies are going to keep doing well for the next year at least.

I traded it too. I bought an energy ETF, so it worked out for me.

It does look like Congress is going to look into this. The two heads of the committees that are tasked with this have said that they're going to look into it next year.

This year's worst trend is the government colluding with Big Tech to engage in censorship. This is how they're going to do the authoritarianism.

And as you guys know, there's an absolute frigging 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.

And then number three, I think it started to change the innovation cycle where people now actually believe that they can't outspend because folks won't tolerate it.

Anybody who's thinking about going to some knockoff like Macedon or something is going to have to contend with the fact that it doesn't have nearly the distribution.

And then Uber, I put in my second. They need to do another riff. They need to cut some expenses, but they too are hitting the free cash flow and the network effects.

It's not getting better. I mean, the stock market today should be a wake up call. I mean, this is one of the worst days in the market the whole year.

Well, I think it's more like it does seem like we're headed into a recession here in 2023 The magnitude of that recession is debatable, but I think it's at least a light to moderate recession. Potentially, it's on the order of 2009

because I think Elon and I are roughly in the same place we have been for a while, which is like mid-24 is when the recession ends

And now he is predicting a hard landing in 2023 with a deeper recession than many expect.

I said in 2020, I predicted in 2021, the biggest loser in 2022 would be crypto. By the way, Friedberg, you agreed with me, and we nailed it.

I think that every CEO who responded to the regime change by cutting costs, getting leaner, extending runway, I think deserves to be on this list.

I bought it at 94, it's at 117, it's one of my best J-Trades.

One of the things we just talked about was the regime change that's happened where, you know, we all have to act differently now that the risk free rate is probably going to get to 5%.

And I think there will 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 going to go down the list of other tokens.

You know, there was a huge raft of whether it was green ESG, kind of woke liberal politics that manifested itself in all kinds of national security decisions and energy decisions that in this last year, they literally had to undo in order to stay alive.

But it still seems like a super high quality business. And, you know, valuation wise, who knows what things are going to be worth when they ultimately come to market. There's certainly no one going public right now.