E61: 2022 Predictions! Business, politics, science, tech, crypto, & more
2021-12-29 spoken.md · speaker-labeled ▶ watch ← E60 all episodes E62 →
Every number here is replayed from score_events — the same ledger the pool ranks on. Decay is what the 107 ideas nobody mentioned gave up this week; it applies only when an episode is processed.
Tier crossings
conviction thresholds crossed by this episode — 65 / 45 / 15 · ideas born here show where they landed. why 65 isn't always green
Who moved the board
each voice's force on conviction this episode — supports and opposes, weighted exactly as the replay applied them · share = % of this episode's movement
What got argued (6 ideas)
ordered by how hard each idea moved · quotes are verbatim from the transcript, timestamps deep-link into the episode
Traditional payment rails living off a 2-3% transaction tax get disrupted by decentralized Web3 payment infrastructure (developing world first, Africa P2P) — short V/MA is 'the most profitable spread trade of my lifetime', with disruption starting within a year. (The long-crypto-rails leg has no public instrument; only the short leg is scored.)
My biggest business loser for 2022 is Visa and MasterCard and traditional payment rails... this is the year you can put on what probably will be the most profitable spread trade of my lifetime... short these companies and be long well-thought-out Web3 crypto projects... I think this is their peak market cap... this is not one where disruption happens slow... like in a year.
Well, not to mention you also have in between these two, Venmo and Cash App, which are not crypto, but they certainly as brands mean more to young people than Visa and MasterCard. ... Visa and MasterCard became a tax. It took them decades and decades to have that power over folks. But I think a firm does break that.
They were the classic network-effect monopoly business... as with all networks, complacency drives innovation. And this fueled innovation is now starting to figure out ways to not just crack their way into the network, but to replace them with an entirely different model.
Scammy no-product crypto projects get wiped out in 2022 as rising rates de-lever the space; a dot-com-style shakeout where ~90% decline or die and a few survivors compound.
The crypto bubble will burst. There's a lot of scammy nonsense going on. 90% of these projects are not going to yield value... rising interest rates are going to affect the crypto market. There's a lot of leveraged trades into crypto assets. Those will start to de-lever... 90% of them are probably going to start to blow up next year.
Empowered millennials/Gen-Z plus Gen-X taking over from retiring boomers create a perfect storm of capital, energy and ideas — the US economy booms in 2022.
My most contrarian belief is that American influence and exceptionalism is going to soar... a perfect storm of a ton of capital, a ton of energy, lots of new ideas... the economy is going to boom. And we will prove once again that we're the greatest country and economy in the world.
When the Fed stops QE (~March 2022), asset classes that fed on excess liquidity — collectibles, art, crypto, high-multiple growth stocks — reprice down; markets have priced rate hikes but not the liquidity withdrawal itself.
In 2022, the Fed is going to stop quantitative easing... the losers are going to be any of these asset classes that are heavily dependent on all this excess liquidity... everything from sports cards and collectibles to art, to crypto, to maybe some growth stocks... markets that have to get off drugs basically.
EV/battery demand makes a basket of battery metals — lithium, nickel, cobalt, graphite — the top asset class of 2022.
Conditioning for great-power conflict is in place (proxy wars — 'maybe something in the Ukraine, maybe Taiwan'), driven by inflation and populism; energy commodities, energy stocks and defense stocks are the assets that do well in that world.
I think we'll see the start of great global conflict... maybe something in the Ukraine, maybe something related to Taiwan... In a world of increased global conflict, assets that do really well are energy commodities and energy stocks. I recently made a big bet on energy stocks, defense stocks.
Episode digest
written during extraction and stored in data/extractions/ep061.json — the auditable source of truth, including everything market-adjacent that did not earn a capture
The 2022 predictions episode, recorded 2021-12-29 at the exact top of the everything-bubble — a calibration goldmine. Tradeable calls: Chamath pounds the table on shorting Visa/Mastercard against Web3 rails ('most profitable spread trade of my lifetime', disruption 'in a year') and picks battery metals as asset of the year; Jason and Friedberg both call the crypto bubble bursting (90% of projects dead) even while staying long-term believers; Sacks warns that QE ending in March drains everything liquidity-dependent (collectibles, crypto, growth stocks); Friedberg discloses a fresh personal bet on energy + defense stocks predicated on 'the start of great global conflict — maybe Ukraine, maybe Taiwan'; Jason's contrarian take is a 2022 American boom. Skipped as untradeable (no public instrument): Friedberg's Stripe-biggest-IPO-ever call, his Yamanaka-factor biotech gold rush and cell-based-meat timeline, Sacks's rise-of-the-rest/zero-tax-state migration and school-choice ballot, Chamath's small-business empowerment theme and AOC-primaries-Schumer, Jason's accredited-investor/crypto framework overhaul, and all political winner/loser picks (DeSantis, Pelosi, Putin, Xi). Transcript quality: labels clean for all four besties; a stray SPEAKER_4 appears twice in banter only (once quoting a CNN clip) — no capture-worthy content affected.