E110: 2023 Bestie Predictions!

**Jason Calacanis** (0:00)
All right, everybody, welcome to 2023 Everybody's well rested and ready to take on 2023 Yes, Chamath, how was your break?

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (0:07)
Amazing.

**Jason Calacanis** (0:08)
Okay. Sacksie Poo, I know you don't go to temperatures that are under 57 degrees anymore. Did you have a nice break? Did you go somewhere warm?

**David Sacks** (0:16)
Yes.

**Jason Calacanis** (0:17)
Okay. That's a confirmation.
Man of so many words. And Friedberg.

**David Sacks** (0:21)
I'm over cold weather vacations.

**Jason Calacanis** (0:23)
Yeah. That does happen at a certain point.

**David Sacks** (0:25)
Actually, we went to Florida. We went to the free state of Florida.

**Jason Calacanis** (0:29)
Oh, really? What's going on in Florida at the turn of the new year, I wonder, that drew you down to the great state of Florida?

**David Sacks** (0:37)
We're just freeing it up in the free state of Florida.

**Jason Calacanis** (0:57)
We have our 2023 predictions now. Play some music and all that kind of stuff. Producer Nick, at this point, let's get to it.
Last year, we did our biggest-

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (1:06)
Do you guys notice that every time we talk about something, somewhere between sort of two months to a year later, the Wall Street Journal ends up writing a big think piece about it.

**Jason Calacanis** (1:15)
Think piece about it, yes.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (1:16)
So I tweeted into the group chat, like last year, we all talked about Sequoia and distributing public equities and how it's very fraught and difficult. And then today, they write this big article about how people have just burned enormous amounts of billions of dollars that they could have returned to LPs, like these venture investors, by not distributing.

**Jason Calacanis** (1:38)
It makes sense.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (1:39)
Three weeks ago, when we did our end of the year wrap up, my big winner for 2022 were the pot shops, right? Citadel. And today, in Wall Street Journal, an article lands that these guys with 56 billion of AUM, over the last two years have made almost $45 billion of revenues.
Isn't that incredible?

**Jason Calacanis** (2:01)
This is what happens, Chamath.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (2:05)
These guys are just crushing it.
Citadel securities did like almost $7.5 billion of revenue. I mean, it's unbelievable, these businesses, how good they are.

**Jason Calacanis** (2:15)
Yes. So let's get into, and this is typical, Chamath, if you think about journalists, they're trying to get into the conversations that are occurring at the bar after the event, the late night conversation, the group chats. Well, and that's what this podcast is. It's the exposed back channel, right? And so if you listen to this pod, you got the back channel of Silicon Valley, politics, tech, science, et cetera. So let's do our predictions.
In 2020, we said our biggest political winner would be, Sacks and I both said DeSantis, Chamath said Xi Jinping and Friedberg said Putin. Who do we think is our biggest political winner going forward?
Who do you pick, Sacks, biggest political winner for 2023? Who will be your biggest political winner for 2023?

**David Sacks** (2:53)
Well, I went a little bit outside the box here because I think we're going to have gridlock in Washington, so I'm not expecting a ton to be coming out of Washington over the next year. My pick for biggest political winner is Asian American college applicants.
There are two Supreme Court decisions that the court heard on Halloween last year. There was a lawsuit against Harvard and another lawsuit against UNC by a group called Students for Fair Admissions, and that they maintained that Harvard and UNC violate Title VI, the Civil Rights Act, because Asian American applicants are far less likely to be admitted than similarly qualified applicants from other groups.
And the federal courts in Boston and North Carolina rejected this argument, but the Supreme Court took up the cases. So they kind of went out of their way to hear this. And I think that they are going to find – I think the majority will rule to strike down these policies that really discriminate against Asian Americans. And I think they're the last group in America where it seems to be okay to discriminate against. And I think the Supreme Court is going to find that unconstitutional.

**Jason Calacanis** (4:09)
Chamath, any thoughts there? You have brought this up multiple times on the podcast over the last two years.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (4:14)
I have said that this was unfortunately – Affirmative Action, when it started, I think had very, very good intentions. And I still think that there's a place for it. The problem is that these very liberal institutions decided to play judge, jury and executioner on which minorities counted in affirmative action. And that's not what the intention was. The intention was to look at the establishment and their ability to get their progeny into these incredible schools, even when they didn't deserve to be there.