E60: The 2021 Bestie Awards PLUS Jack Dorsey starts the Web3 Wars

Metta was a complete flop. It was a stupid idea to change the name of the company. ... I think that their VR efforts, AR efforts will be beaten handily by Apple and by the metaverse and, you know, open source slash decentralized solutions.

I picked all things Metaverse and Web3. ... And so I just think that this whole concept of Metaverse and Web 3 goes away and we replace it with real solutions for people that give them value and then we'll be obsessed with these companies. And this too will be transitory.

My worst trend was the metaverse. I think it's like the renaming of something that's been going on for a long time as if it's some new future thing. ... the notion that we call this thing the metaverse and everyone's trying to reclassify it as some future singular universe and therefore they can own that singular universe is a pretty misguided kind of concept.

And it is a very serious threat to the current system of politics and economics and social order. ... And so I would say the blockchain has really kind of created a new model for organization amongst humans that is waking us up in the political class more than anything else.

This was the year that loose affiliations of individuals could compete on a level playing field with organized capital. And I think that that's a really important trend for the future.

I say DAOs because I believe that they will become legal and global capital formation for the first time on an instant basis will exist. And I believe 40 million is the dry run for the Constitution. 400 million and 4 billion will happen in the next 10 years to do bigger and bigger challenges.

But what I think is really wonderful about it is the opportunity it creates for creators to monetize their talent in a way that doesn't require them going through middlemen to get distribution and middlemen who take huge slugs or huge chunks of the margin out of what they create.

My biggest optimism is just that Omicron is a much less virulent virus, and it sweeps through the population, and we slowly see this pandemic becoming less severe.

Unless something escapes from the lab again, I think that we're going to be okay. I think this is the end of the end.

And the populist revolt around this whole payment for order flow Robinhood thing broke against the rock of Ken Griffin.

And I think we'll see a lot more of this kind of like Twitter going direct type of activity happening in the years ahead.

there was an article in The Washington Post that I put into the group chat where The Washington Post article was effectively like Washington Post forced to revisit journalism practices because of falling click-through rates and lack of viewership.

They are not the paper of record anymore. Direct is the new. The internet is the paper of record.

So I'm going to go with Starlink. Yes, it just came out at the end of 2020, but this year it kept getting better and faster, and now it's reported that Starlink is faster than the fixed broadband average in Belgium, Canada, Australia, Germany, the UK, New Zealand, and France.

All I can say, all I can say for all of us who own SpaceX, yum yum. That's so delicious.

You've now got the unvaccinated treated as some sort of untouchable class of citizens who aren't able to leave their house except to buy food and medicine. ... Boston just announced they're banning unvaccinated people from going to all restaurants, bars, nightclubs, sport arenas, fitness centers, movie theaters and on and on it goes.

My best science breakthrough is that this year, we actually were able to inject in vivo, so in the body genetic code for CRISPR. ... That's pretty incredible stuff that you can make something, put it into your body, and then your body does the work of editing out the bad genes.

Well, you know, I originally had the CRISPR gene in anything, but Chamath already mentioned that.

And I think that's really a moment that will inspire a whole new realm of industrial synthetic biology work, a lot of which I hope to kind of build and participate in pretty heavily in the work that we do day to day.

When that WarnerMedia deal gets done, I think that's the juggernaut stock you want to own. It's going to have an incredible library to compete with Disney.

China has done a masterful job. They control a lot of the lithium, a lot of the nickel, a lot of the cobalt, a lot of the graphite. They control a lot of the rare earths that go into the permanent magnets. And we don't have a solution.

If you think about what the next five to ten years can bring, Jason, at what you said earlier about making ourselves a multi-planetary species, what an inspiring thing that these thousands of employees across these three businesses did.

If you put all of that stuff together, I think the thing that that drives is decaying morale. And when you have decaying morale, you have human capital flight. ... I think that this is sort of peak big tech market cap is probably within the next year or two.

I think the better trade is pick the one that you love in Fang and short the one that you hate in Fang. And if you get that right, you can make a lot of money pretty safe.

The CCP really seems to be increasing its control and putting these people under its thumb. And there are a bunch of tech companies there like Alibaba, DD, Tencent, Baidu, jd.com. They've all been targeted for fines and tighter controls. And China's pretty much shut down the foreign IPO market for their tech companies.

And then since then, it's just been snowballing. And San Francisco has basically been sliding into what it's become. Miami just keeps blowing up.

I think that $118 million is going to go to $300 million. Because they announced so much content from the Star Wars, Marvel, Pixar, Disney ecosystem that is coming this year and next year. ... Like, this library is going to have a ridiculous 2022

I like HBO Max more than Disney Plus. ... Disney Plus doesn't seem to have a monopoly for me. HBO Max has such a depth of content.

These new pills have, I think, a very good shot of doing it next year because they're protease inhibitors. ... I am hopeful that this will be the thing, hopefully, that ends the pandemic next year, are these new antiviral pills.

I would be very cautious about the side effects that are going to arise from these protease inhibitors. ... I think as more people use them, you'll see more crazy stories about side effects that are really significantly adverse.

But now it turned out that the inflation was not transitory. And so the use of the word transitory, I predict, will in fact be transitory.

there's a lot of fluff and a lot of noise and a lot of bubbles going on within this NFT space right now. Most of it will die and it will look terrible when people lose lots of money and feel bad about the decisions they made during this phase.