The Scoreboard
“Well, if you look at the next 20 years, it seems like the world is going to run on compute. Every single business, every single consumer, every single robot, every single car, every single appliance is going to have a compute need. And so then there's a question of who's the Saudi Arabia of compute? And what you would be thinking with— if he goes to— if he's the one who could put data centers in space, and data centers in space are going to be giving AI tokens at a maybe whether it's 50% or 200% lower cost than ground-based compute for inference, then he's Saudi Arabia in space”
“state is going to become a very important word over the next 10 years. Managing your state, being in a great state, it can, you know, state of mind, but really it's just how you feel. How you experience the things you experience.”
“I'm going to show this is the single best market if you're an entrepreneur to enter. It's a multi-trillion dollar market with no competitors.”
“the rise of the creator entrepreneur and the entrepreneur creator as the next Fortune 500 companies. And my belief with AI, blockchain, evolving social, you know, decentralization of Hollywood and Madison Avenue and Wall Street, that the biggest companies in the world are human-based organizations where the human either has a partner that can operate or they're a me where they can be both.”
“like in 6 to 10 years, you know, I think e-com now is what, 25, 30% of the market? Like in 6 to 10 years, live shopping will actually be 10 to 15% of all commerce. And that is scary big.”
“And I think actually it's going the other way, which is, um, it's not that the AI works for us, but that we work for the AI. Um, and people are going to hate that sentence, but let me just describe what that means. Um, AI is very good at understanding a broad set of information, having eyes and ears everywhere, reading everything, knowing everything, and making decisions. Today we use it as the sort of junior employee, but it does seem like the way this is going is that AI becomes the boss.”
“So what does an analyst need to do now? You better be in the field getting better information, higher quality first-party data to give back to the AI so it can make a better trading decision. That's what an analyst is going to be.”
“And my second reaction is they're gonna win even bigger in 2 years when the board of directors of OpenAI says, guys, we gotta get, we gotta buckle our belts and, and get profitable. We gotta look at why do we own all these things? Whose idea was it to buy a media company? Can we please just say that we're gonna sell it back to 'em? Just give it to them and we'll own 5% and they're gonna own it again.”
“I think you get acquired. I think if you run this business, you're going to be acquired for $500 million to $1 billion in like 2 years if you execute this right.”
“my prediction is that in the next, I don't know, 15 years, we're going to have a ChatGPT moment for life extension and that you're going to get some breakthrough in this longevity and life extension that's going to make it where it went from this like fringe kind of like, oh, academic topic to just something that everybody does.”
“When you get a $20,000 robot, that can do, do work. It is the biggest product ever. It's why I have a huge chunk of my net worth in Tesla right now is because that's obviously the biggest product in going to the biggest market in the world. It's just a matter of when, not if.”
“I would put out the mother of all RFPs to Novo Nordisk, Eli Lilly, and say, I need a billion doses of GLP-1s. And then I would distribute it for free to every rural household in America. And I would take healthcare costs from $13,000 to $6,500. And boom, we have a deficit solved. GLP-1 is the most transformative technology of the last 20 or 30 years. It's the biggest thing since GPS is the way I see it.”
“As that happens over the next 10 years, I think peptides will become a normal part of everyday life for people in the same way you take protein supplements and vitamins and, you know, medicine when you're sick. I think you're going to have enhancements through peptides.”
“I think sports betting in the next 5 years is going to be incredibly heavily regulated and companies like Polymarket and Kalshi are going to crumble.”
“And the next one is probably some version of glasses or a watch, some version of that. That's what's coming next. And then what comes after that is the computer in your mind, right? Like just attaching yourself to the computer so that you can literally just think and, uh, you have access to the internet just from your thoughts.”
“I am ultra long on the private jet sector, even though myself, I carry too much guilt to fly private. So like, you'll never see me on a private jet. But I'm very bullish on the sector.”
“It's a new medium. It's an actual new thing in the same ways that like movies weren't plays. Uh, you know, AI video is not video. The stories that you can tell are completely different because you can do things that you just, you know, without a 200 with a $100 million budget you had had no chance of doing, and now it's like no problem.”
“while the robotaxi opportunity globally for everyone, including China, is an $8 to $10 trillion revenue opportunity in the next 5 to 10 years from maybe a billion now. So think about that, a billion to $8 to $10 trillion, the whole ecosystem. With the platform companies like Tesla getting half of that. So that's $4 to $5 trillion.”
“I said, what's the price of Bitcoin? He said, a million. And I said, a million? It's only at like, you know, $800. And I said, when? And he said, before we die. And I was like, well, hang on, before we die? He's like, I don't know when, but it will be a million dollars before we die.”
“I think this is going to be the most downloaded app in the history of the world, um, in a short period of time. So I think it'll be like the fastest to get to 100 million downloads.”
Why missShaan predicted Sora would be the most-downloaded app in history and the fastest ever to 100M downloads, but by late January 2026 (about 4 months after its Sept/Oct 2025 launch) Sora had only ~9.6M total downloads across iOS and Android and was in decline (down 32% in Dec, 45% in Jan), per Appfigures data cited by TechCrunch. It set a first-week record (1M in under 5 days, faster than ChatGPT) but never approached 100M and was never the most-downloaded app ever (a title held by Threads, which hit 100M users in under a week).
“they've just basically proceeded to like build what's clearly like Morgan Stanley for the next generation. So like the tailwind behind Robinhood is the following. There's some like absurd amount of wealth. I don't know what it is, like $20 trillion, $50 trillion. There's like some stupid number like with a trillion behind it of wealth that's just going to get transferred from like the parent, you know, boomers to millennials or Gen Z over the next 20, 30 years.”
“the results that a lot of patients are able to get from treatment-resistant depression, OCD, anxiety, etc., with 5 days of accelerated TMS rival a lot of the results that you would see with some of the best outcomes with psychedelics”
“I'm super long analog and social. I'm not sure we're going to have like a full-blown butlerian jihad to refer to Dune, which is the rising up and destruction of the thinking machines. But I think there's gonna be a lot of pushback and blowback”
“everybody's kind of trying to get a piece of this. What is, you know, going to be, you know, a trillion-dollar opportunity in 10 years?”
“10 years? Well, shoot, I think we should be well past a billion in ARR if we do our jobs right.”
“There is absolutely zero reason why Google Gemini does not let you have a Q&A with your own email account. That's just like insanely stupid, right? Like I'll just go ahead and say it. It's just, it's just, there's something not right with the world when they already have the data and it's like, and they have the algorithm, they have Gemini 2.5 Pro, which is an exceptionally good model, right?”
Why hitGoogle does let you have a Q&A with your own email account via Gemini: Gmail Q&A rolled out on mobile in 2024, and in January 2026 Google's official "Gmail is entering the Gemini era" announcement expanded it with AI Overviews that answer questions about and synthesize information across your inbox using Gemini, exactly the capability Dharmesh said Google should ship.
“So the young guys nowadays, they just say ChatGPT said this and the doctor is going to say, well, I agree with you. And according to my belief, ChatGPT says blank. And ChatGPT, I think, is going to be the stamp of approval or AI. Like, I think they're going to trust AI more than a human being. Does that make sense?”
“the actual play, if you want to make money on this thing, is to short Popmart stock starting around, uh, you know, end of 2026 and, you know, maybe, maybe through 2027.”
“So a guy like Nick, who before this probably couldn't have taken his idea and made it into an app because he would have to either A, learn to code, or B, go hire like expensive programmers to make this happen. Like he did most of this with AI. And so you see personal software, this like, you know, t”
“within a couple years, not using AI while you're doing your job will be the equivalent of coming to work without a computer. Like, if someone just turned up and they're like, nah, I didn't bring it today, you'd be like, what the hell, dude?”
“Half of our sales and marketing teams are gonna be gone in 2 years. There will be no more salespeople. BDRs in a year.”
Why missLemkin (June 2025) said "BDRs [gone] in a year" and "no more salespeople." A year on (June 2026), BDRs/SDRs are not gone: data published by Lemkin's own firm (Emergence Capital "Beyond Benchmarks") shows 36% of B2B companies cut SDR/BDR headcount in 2025 but 44% kept teams the same size and 19% grew them, and 2026 SDR/BDR hiring guides confirm the role still exists (evolving and AI-augmented, not extinct). The absolute claims (BDRs gone, no more salespeople) clearly did not come true.
“as the friction gets lower and lower and lower to having a digital spouse or partner, then the effort that's required for human relationships just feels extra hard. And like, that is a thing that I'm worried about because if you don't have the motivation, if you're just watching Twitch and watch other people live their lives and like are people just going to slowly die off because we're not actually dating and mating?”
“And in '25, my quote unquote big trend or big stock pick is really boring. And that is I think the rivers are about to reverse in terms of capital flows and the unprecedented capital flows into the US over the last 15 years. I think those rivers are about to reverse and we're gonna see a massive outflow of capital. And it's already happened. I started selling down my US stocks in Q4 of last year. It's been my big theme for '25.”
Why partialGalloway's core thesis landed directionally: in 2025 capital diversified away from US assets/the dollar and non-US markets (Europe, FTSE 100's best year since 2009 beating Wall Street) outperformed the US after 15 years of US dominance. But his stronger specific claims missed — the S&P 500 did NOT see a "massive outflow" or multiple contraction; it rose ~16-18% to record highs on the AI rally and US valuations stayed expensive (no PE drop to "high teens"). Directionally right, magnitude wrong, so Partial.
“And our, our goal is to roll the first one off the line in '27. Fly it in '28, and be ready for passengers in '29. And there's a good chance that like it could take longer than that, but those are the goals.”
“is that you'll see the first teenage, first self-made teenage billionaire by the end, by 2030. And I think that, that makes me giggle when I say it, and I think it's true.”
“AI is going to be like water. You are going to get free unlimited AI processing on your CPU, on your phone within 3 to 4 years. There's no doubt it's going to free in the same way that I can use my phone.”
“So sort of like today we have personal trainers who help you get shredded because like that's kind of the only thing people can see. I think in the future we'll have like apps, trainers, services, things like this that are specific to Sam wants to lower his ApoB score or Sam wants to improve his, you know, LDL or something like that. Sam wants to improve his thyroid. Like, I think all of these things are newly going to be marketing angles and things that people talk about because they have this insight into their body.”
“this is how creators are going to monetize more in the future is like owning chunks of very good businesses that rely on distribution rather than just like, I'm Mark Hyman and I get an affiliate fee every time I refer someone to check out Function Health or something, you know?”
“I would bet that 30% of the people between the ages of 22 and 35 who are in this white-collar or yuppie or Henry class are on ADHD medications. That's my prediction. 30%. It's a lot, right?”
Why missSam's present-tense claim that 30% of 22-35 white-collar/"Henry" professionals are on ADHD meds (Adderall/Vyvanse) is a dramatic overstatement: CDC's 2023 national data show only ~6.0% of all US adults even have an ADHD diagnosis, with roughly a third of those on stimulant medication (low single-digit prevalence overall), and even the highest young-adult amphetamine-use band (~10.8% at ages 23-24, including recreational misuse) is about a third of his figure. No public data supports anything near 30% even for affluent young professionals.
“And so I think this is going to be a big trend. It's sort of like pickleball. Where pickleball was the much more accessible version of tennis. I think that rucking is one of the most accessible versions of fitness because my, like, my parents in their 60s will go for walks.”
Why hitShaan's 2025 prediction that rucking/weighted-vest walking would become a big, pickleball-style accessible fitness trend came true: TIME called weighted vests "the latest fitness trend" (Peloton added weighted-vest classes May 2025; market projected to grow from $199M in 2024 toward $313M), and Fox News, HuffPost, AARP and others covered rucking as a mainstream trend, with GORUCK reporting ~40% sales growth.
“What I'm saying is I think there's market demand. I think this is a trend. I think there's pull. I think this is an area where when you talk about it, it has that leaky gut type of thing where people say, you know what, I think I have that problem. I think I want that improved.”
“And I believe that in the next couple of years, screw the RV, screw Nick Huber talking about RV parks and storage units. We're going to be talking about flea markets. That's what I think is going to happen.”
“all big box department stores. Like, it's very, very much like— we just saw Joann's Fabric go down, we just saw Container Store go down, we just saw Party City. Like, that's gonna accelerate. Like, there's— we are over commercial real estate. There's too many big box stores. Like, even Target is having a really fucking hard time.”
Why partialThe named casualties did fully die in 2025 (JoAnn liquidated all 815 stores, Party City 738, Container Store via bankruptcy) and legacy/department retail kept shrinking (Saks Global filed bankruptcy Jan 2026), but Sean's core thesis that the collapse would "accelerate" was contradicted: Coresight reports US closures FELL to 8,270 in 2025 (vs 8,825 in 2024) and are projected to drop further to ~7,900 in 2026, the lowest in three years, while Target is opening 43 new stores in 2026.
“if we can do $1 billion a year in chocolate sales ethically while being profitable, then I can use that as a model to, you know, on my videos, talk about Big Chocolate”
“So if we just paused AI, we shut down all the AI labs, and all we focused on was just rollout of what already exists, I think probably between self-driving cars and AI agents, 20% of all current jobs are gone.”
“And he basically said in the next 12 months, you will have AI coworkers in Slack. Now, if you just project that out right now, it's text, right? These are not people. But pretty quick, it'll be someone on Slack that you're messaging, hey, can you make some new product images? Hey, do you mind checking out the AdSense? Do you— can you write a report? And I think that within 24 to 36 months, these will be 4K video people that are indistinguishable from a human that you'll talk to on Zoom.”
“I think that in 15 years We're going to look at Whole Foods sort of like a discount grocer where it's like, you know, however you look at like Kroger or Safeway or wherever your regional like normie brand is, that's what Whole Foods is going to be.”
“I think local meat in particular is going to be a huge trend in the next 15 years. You're seeing it a little bit. Like, there's a lot of people in Austin who I know that were, like, yuppie types, not, like, rednecks or farmers, and they would buy whole cows. And you'd store it in your freezer. And I think that will be more common soon.”
“I think that natural fiber clothing is going to be a lot more in fashion in the next 10 to 20 years because of what we're going to learn about forever chemicals and plastic in foods.”
“The moment we automate all of software engineering, I think that's sort of like the moment of AGI. So I think it's like a little far away. And the reason I say this is because once you automate software, then the agents can rebuild themselves. And you go into this loop of increased intelligence. Every version builds its next version, builds its next version. And so this is what they call intelligence explosion that would lead to the singularity, right?”
“which is MicroStrategy, for whatever reason, either because Bitcoin price goes down or the stock market just changes its tune on it, starts to not trade at such a premium. To the nav. And now all this money that it's borrowed— these bonds expire 2027, 2028, 2029— if those were to convert, he would be forced into selling Bitcoin. And once he becomes a forced seller, now the whole market, the whole Bitcoin market, will start to crash”
“My expectation is that agents are the new apps. It's just software, right? So when mobile came along, it's like, oh, there's an app for that. There's an app. It's like, not that far in the distant future, everything is going to be, there's going to be hundreds of thousands of millions of agents, right?”
Why hitShah's late-2024 prediction that "hundreds of thousands to millions" of AI agents would emerge "not that far in the distant future" was met within months: Microsoft reported at Build 2025 that customers created over 1 million custom agents across SharePoint and Copilot Studio in a single quarter (up 130% QoQ), and Salesforce's Agentforce/digital-labor and Microsoft's "Frontier Firm" + Entra Agent ID push directly realized the hybrid human-plus-agent team framing.
“Results as a service is like, actually, you don't even access the software. You tell us what it is that you actually want to do. What's the outcome that you're looking for? And we'll just sell you that.”
“I think Sam Altman said this, which is like the one-person billion-dollar company. Like this is happening. Like we're already experiencing another 10x decrease in how many people you need and the abilities that they have. And I think it goes down to probably 1 or 2 or 3 and You know, like that is a, you know, total shift to everything, right?”
Why hitBy 2026 the trend Furqan described in 2024 is clearly playing out: AI-native companies are being built with tiny teams (Forbes/a16z report $2-4M+ revenue per employee vs ~$300K for traditional SaaS; Midjourney ran ~11 people at $200M+), and a near-one-person billion-dollar company materialized — MEDVi, a ~$1.8B/~$401M-revenue telehealth firm run by ~1-2 people, was reported by NYT, Forbes and PYMNTS as fulfilling Altman's one-person-billion-dollar-company idea. (Caveat: MEDVi later drew FDA warnings/legitimacy questions, but the broader 1-3-person company-building shift is well documented.)
“I think that the future of fitness looks completely different than boutique gyms. I think that, you know, I mean, I know what they're doing in the background in the labs, which is like people are going to be able to soon take a pill and they're going to be able to control their appetite. Why do you want to go to the gym every day if you could just be skinny? Lots of girls don't give a shit.”
Why missHormozi (ep 650, 2024) said the future of fitness "looks completely different than boutique gyms" because people would "soon" take an appetite-control pill and skip the gym, gutting the boutique model. The pill premise was directionally real (GLP-1 drugs surged), but the consequential claim failed: boutique fitness revenue grew from ~$22.1B (2022) to a projected ~$26.2B in 2025, analysts forecast 9.6-12.8% CAGRs, and industry coverage shows gyms integrating GLP-1 programs (muscle-retention "Ozempic workout," F45 telehealth) rather than being replaced — one trade headline reads "Boutique Fitness Isn't in Crisis. It's Maturing."
“many tens of millions of dollars or even more. The reason being is the way that these review websites work is you typically have to hire a lot of freelancers in order to go out and write all of the articles. But if you're just using data to like organize as a table, It's way more profitable. Also, he's getting early in on— he's getting in early on a trend. I think this water thing is still tiny, tiny, tiny compared to what it's going to be like in the next 10 and 20 years.”
“Like, I think that we, you know, probably in your community, or maybe you guys yourselves will end up making these like $100 million to like billion-dollar-a-year businesses that are totally empowered by large language models that, like, do not need more than 20 people working at them.”
“This is my prediction for 2025, which is that I think everybody got really inspired and sort of overanalyzed everything through Huberman and Bryan Johnson. I love those guys, but I think the average person, it's way too much work for way too little payoff.”
“But I think that building like AI into what we already have, like the messaging app, the phone app, that's really what's going to make AI a lot more convenient for people. So instead of searching for like people, places, or things through like a search bar, basically we just text like an AI, like, can you find me this? Can you find me someone who does this? Like a job for me. And then it will like basically call a bunch of places, like maybe reservations. It'll find you like places in the area. You text an AI and it'll book for you. It'll find you times. And that's what's going to make AI a lot more convenient for people.”
Why partialThe concrete capability Isaac described shipped: Google's "Ask for Me" (Jan 2025) and AI Mode booking let you text/ask an AI to find local businesses and have it call around to check availability and book on your behalf, and Samsung's Galaxy S26 (Feb 2026) added agentic on-your-behalf task handling. But his broader thesis — that AI's "real unlock" would come from embedding into the messaging/phone apps rather than standalone apps — is only partly borne out, since mainstream consumer AI adoption (ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude) is still dominated by standalone apps and search/assistant surfaces rather than the messaging-app-first vision.
“To me, this is a question of when, not if, meaning the next platform shift is probably glasses, but the one after that, or the, you know, the big one is just put the computer in the brain. That will happen. It's just maybe it's 10 years, maybe it's 100 years.”
“So sex is going to potentially die as a reproductive mechanism.”
“instead of it just being like, I'm talking to a person, it could be, you know, that person has some combination of memory of me, other interactions, goals, and like the media experience of them is richer. And we haven't gone there yet, but I think like there's a version of that company that's somewhere between like a companion and a game world that will be very big.”
“And so my prediction of this whole thing is that Polly Market is going to be massive, that in this presidential election, it's going to have just like a huge run-up this year because Already you can see that whenever, when anybody is writing about the odds of something about, let's say the election, they're referencing Polymarket and they're embedding Polymarket in their articles.”
Why hitDuring the 2024 presidential election Polymarket saw a massive run-up (billions in election-market volume) and "generated huge buzz by accurately predicting the 2024 election results," with mainstream outlets routinely citing and embedding its odds — exactly as Shaan predicted, and it has since been described as a news-shaping data source media outlets reference.
“And we think it's kind of like Cushing, Oklahoma, where we store our oil. Now we think data is going to be kind of the new oil. And so we're going to try and store our data here in the U.S. centrally into the Midwest. So we're seeing a big push in some farmland being gobbled up for big data centers.”
Why hitVan Trump's 2024 call that Midwest farmland would be "gobbled up" for data centers (data as the new oil, stored centrally in the Midwest) has clearly come true: the Midwest is now a leading data-center region (projected 5+ GW of new capacity, ~53% of the new U.S. hyperscale pipeline going inland), with concrete farmland deals like Microsoft's 377-acre Van Meter, Iowa purchase (Jan 2025), Pekin, IL's 320+ acre approval, and WisdomTree acquiring Ceres Partners' 176,000 farm acres explicitly for "AI data infrastructure." Solar/wind on cropland is also confirmed (70% of Midwest solar farms, 94% of wind turbines sited on cropland).
“I mean, here's the reality is there's 4,500 magazine publishers in there. And Sam, there's no exit for these guys.”
“I think this business is killing it and I think we're going to see a large exit from these guys.”
Why partialSam's 2024 thesis that Hyrox would be hugely valuable and produce a large exit is strongly validated directionally: in June 2026 LVMH-backed PE firm L Catterton entered exclusive talks to buy a large stake in Hyrox at an implied ~€700m–€1bn valuation (per Sky News/Bloomberg). But it is scored Partial, not Hit, because the transaction is a stake sale by current owner Infront (not the original founders' exit), the deal was reported as not-yet-closed exclusive talks, and no value was officially disclosed.
“I think now it's going to be basically a camera on every field, right? It's like every single high school, every single middle school, every AAU game, every, you know, travel team, they're going to use these things because why not?”
Why partialShaan's directional call is clearly playing out: AI sports cameras have reached mass adoption in US amateur sports — ~16,000 cameras installed across ~9,000 high schools via NFHS Network/Pixellot, US Youth Soccer's Veo partnership covering 10,000+ clubs, and a full competitive "arms race" (Veo, Hudl, Pixellot, Trace, XBotGo). But the literal "camera on every field / every single high school, middle school, AAU and travel team" is not yet universal (9,000 of ~24,000 US high schools), so the ubiquity framing is directionally right rather than fully realized — hence Partial.
“Exactly. That's genuinely like where I think it's going to go. Yeah. I think, I think social media is going to kill Hollywood, honestly.”
“I think that Meat Eater will be worth many, many, many hundreds of millions, maybe even a billion dollars in the next 10 years.”
“I would bet that he's going to make hundreds of millions off of these plays. If you, if you add up the, you know, 3 to 5 that he's going to do in this category, I would bet that that's a 3 to $300 million prize.”
“Companies that are valued at $1 billion, they might not go down just 30% on a correction. It'll go down to zero. There will be no bid for these companies, which is kind of what, what exactly played out in the coming year.”
“but I still think ultimately you're going to walk into a liquor store, you're going to walk into Target and every brand is going to have a face and association because why wouldn't it, right? If there's a brand that could have nobody attached to it, or a brand that could have someone attached to it, why wouldn't that brand have the built-in distribution of you guys or someone, you know, more widely well-known or just someone? Like, I just don't see how that doesn't play out.”
“I would bet that he's going to sell that chocolate brand for $6 billion. That's my guess. I think that's what's going to— I think if we fast forward the news 3 years from now, uh, you know, MrBeast sells the majority stake or in the chocolate business for at a $6 billion valuation.”
“Steph Smith said that these air quality control monitors, they're going to— she said they're going to explode. And then she went on and said, Uh, she goes, I predict that the subreddit called Air Quality is going to be the next big thing. It only has 4,000 subs, but it's been doubling every 6 months.”
“And I think we'll see Uber buy some water taxi company in like 2028. I think we'll see that.”
“China's working age population, age 16 to 64, will decline by 200 million people between now and 2050. It's just like, there's no precedent outside of like the Black Death plague. There's no precedent for that in all of human history. It's always been the case that economic growth was driven by the fact that there was massive population, uh, growth, and we just don't have it anymore.”
“I think that, um, if you think about a lot of the tasks that personal assistants do, um, I think a very well-trained Google AI that understands your Google Drive, your calendar, and your email, um, will be able to do probably 80% of those tasks, maybe more. And I think that's coming in the very near term.”
Why partialWilkinson's exact mechanism shipped: Google's Gemini Spark (announced at I/O 2026) is a "24/7 personal AI agent" that natively connects to Gmail, Calendar, and Drive and autonomously performs classic personal-assistant tasks (inbox triage, drafting emails in your style, scheduling calendar blocks, organizing Drive files, tracking invoices/leads). But the specific "80% of tasks" magnitude is unverified, and it arrived ~3 years later (not "very near term"), still requires close supervision, and is gated to paid AI Ultra subscribers in a limited rollout — so the directional thesis is right while the quantitative and timing claims are not cleanly met.
“But I remember like putting that in my body and I'm like, I think this is going to cure alcoholism because you don't crave anything. And I think what's going to happen is in 10 years we're going to see downsides to this drug because right now there's like very few, or at least it's impacting only a small amount of people.”
“It hasn't happened yet with Twitter. And our prediction was like, this is going to happen more. And the reason it's going to happen more is because A, there's a business audience on Twitter, a bit more than those other platforms. So you can sell higher priced things. And B, the conversion's quite high.”
“No sperm, no egg, just raw genetic material. And, you know, I think that will eventually be in the future. I don't think that's going to be the next 10 years, probably not even the next 20 years.”
“By the way, my prediction is that they unwind this whole thing and they revert back to OpenAI, by the way. That's my, like, it hasn't happened yet, but I think the final step now”
Why hitShaan predicted the Nov 2023 firing would be unwound, with a new board and Sam Altman reinstated as CEO rather than the team moving to Microsoft. That is exactly what happened: on Nov 21-22, 2023, Altman returned as OpenAI CEO and the board that fired him was replaced by a new one (chaired by Bret Taylor).
“The other thing I'm really excited about, and I think it's the most underhyped, I just did a blog post on this. I think GLP-1 is bigger than GPT-4.”
“there's a bunch of really smart people that are now have a new business strategy, and their business strategy is to buy wounded unicorns. And so heard it once, heard it twice, heard it 3 times. First heard this from Andrew Wilkinson. Andrew Wilkinson, he, he called me back a couple years ago. I was living in my old house in San Francisco, and he, I remember him telling me, you know what I would do if I was you is I would find one of these, uh, startups that's raised venture capital., but is not gonna become a billion-dollar company, but they got to $5 million in revenue, $10 million in revenue, and you could buy these for cheap”
“In 10 to 15 years, Facebook is going to be Facebook. Like Meta is going to own the largest work platform. So I think that they're going to be the Zoom, the whatever, because this experience where it looks like you could feel like you're in the same room as a person and you can pull up, you know, PowerPoints together. You can do all that stuff without like video conferencing. I think that's, uh, whoever does that right is going to take over the, the, the work call space. And I don't see who could do it better than Facebook at this point because they have such a lead as far as the tech goes.”
“So like, you know, GDP is roughly $70, $80 trillion. Half of that goes to human labor to pay wages every single year in the world.”
“I think Gorilla Mind and AmeriHealth are billion-dollar companies in the future at some point, and I do very much intend for them to get there, and I strongly believe they will.”
“So I think of it as a range of uncertainty. And I would say that the true probability, I believe, is somewhere between 3 to 30%, which—”
“And he's like, if you go back and you look throughout time, he's like, in every debate, or sorry, every race, if you go back to the last 12 elections, Which is like 50 years or something like that. The more charismatic candidate tends to win. Not always, but tends to win.”
“the thing that's been on my mind the most is physical experiences. Okay, I actually think that we're gonna want things that are uniquely human, um, in the coming years. I think we're gonna want things that are like collective human experiences where, right, like stand-up comedy.”
“But like culture is going to be driven by like it probably within this decade, creators, they're going to grow up for one. Uh, and two, the production value is going to get better. The storytelling is going to get better and it's going to, it's going to hit an inflection point where it starts driving culture and not the traditional media.”
“if you fast forward 2 years or 18 to 24 months, I think it's pretty— I think my bet would be Threads is bigger than Twitter. And Twitter basically has now like a ceiling on its head that it's bumping into.”
Why partialShaan (ep. 473, aired July 11, 2023) bet Threads would be bigger than Twitter/X within 18-24 months (by ~July 2025). Threads only edged past X in daily mobile users in November 2025 (128.2M vs 124.7M), roughly 4-6 months after the window closed, and only on that one metric — X still led on monthly active users (~600M vs Threads' ~400M) through 2025. Directionally correct (and X's growth did stall as predicted), but the timeframe was missed and the lead holds only on a narrow metric.
“So he basically thinks the way that we treat, like, our Social Security number, that's how we're going to treat our real name and face. It's not going to be something you give out unless you have to, and you use that to, like, create accounts, and those accounts have their own usernames.”
“I predict that in 10, maybe 20 years, but probably 10, I think Conor will file for bankruptcy. And the reason I think that is I've been, you know how like you'll read about like Floyd Mayweather has made a billion dollars or Conor McGregor made $100 million from boxing. I think all of that is 100% fake and it's absolutely not true.”
“And that's why we've spent, we've gone from spending 5% of our GDP on healthcare to 20%. And I think that's going to go to 50% over time because our basic goods and needs, our Maslowian kind of needs are met.”
“this is like the App Store was, uh, for iPhone, which is, oh, we've got this super popular thing called the iPhone and we have our own apps, which is great. It does these 17 things, but now we're going to let anyone build apps”
Why missDharmesh predicted ChatGPT plugins would be the iPhone App Store moment for AI and a bigger deal than GPT-4. Instead, OpenAI deprecated plugins in March 2024 and fully shut them down in April 2024 (about a year after the March 2023 launch); the plugin ecosystem never became an App Store-scale platform, while GPT-4 and its successors remained central to OpenAI's business.
“if I were a betting person, I would not bet that the odds are what he thinks they are. Could happen, but nowhere near the probability that he's suggesting.”
Why hitDharmesh said he would not bet Bitcoin had anywhere near the odds Balaji suggested of hitting $1M (within 90 days). Balaji conceded and lost the bet in May 2023; the dollar did not collapse and Bitcoin stayed around $28-30k, never approaching $1 million, confirming Dharmesh's skepticism was correct.
“I will predict and guarantee really that this is going to be a greater than $100 million a year revenue business, which means it's going to be worth something like low-end $300, $400 million, high-end billion dollars.”
Why missAs of Jan 2026 (about 3 years after the 2023 prediction), Inc reports Hampton has 1,000+ members at $15K/year, implying roughly $15M annual revenue (a LinkedIn post corroborates ~$15M/year) — far short of Shaan's "guaranteed" $100M+/year. Hampton's own stated goal is 10,000 members by 2030, which Inc notes would make it only a ~$150M business, so the $100M+ threshold remains unmet.
“Uh, again, I'm like maybe 5% because I do think there's very systematic, uh, problems and issues currently in the global financial system. I do think that the banks or the central banks, when faced with save the banks, save the dollar, will save the banks, which will lead to inflationary pressures. Uh, but I would not bet $1 million that Bitcoin will be $1 million in 90 days.”
Why missPomp put only ~5% odds on Bitcoin hitting $1M in 90 days and said he would not bet on it, signaling the Balaji bet would fail on timeline. The 90-day window closed June 17, 2023 with BTC near $26,000; Balaji conceded the bet early in May 2023, confirming Pomp's skepticism was correct.
“And I think that, uh, what Replit is, which is this like coding environment for oftentimes beginners, teenagers, um, I think is like a stealth really, really big deal.”
Why hitIn 2023 Shaan called Replit a "stealth really, really big deal" when it had roughly $10-23M ARR; by 2025-2026 Replit reached a $9B valuation (up from $3B in Sept 2025) on ~$250-300M ARR, driven by AI "vibe coding," confirming it became a hidden-in-plain-sight giant.
“RecruitJet, I think, will be a big company. I think RecruitJet will be $5 million of revenue and $3 million of EBITDA.”
Why missNick Huber publicly announced on Sept 3, 2025 that RecruitJet was one of four companies he shut down ("Too much headache, not enough profit"); a Feb 2024 tweet of his showed RecruitJet had only ~$200k revenue total, nowhere near the predicted $5M revenue / $3M EBITDA by end of 2024.
“And what we haven't seen yet is someone who has built like the, the equivalent of the Kardashians, uh, on Twitter, except instead of selling makeup, I think they're going to be selling B2B or professional, whatever that is considered, you know, uh, B2B services or, uh, something where it's like a higher-end person, not a young woman buying like $12 makeup.”
“He says the future of work is basically like Ocean's Eleven. It's small teams of people that are within each team. There's like highly specialized, you know, that guy's the, the guy who's a pickpocket and this guy's the guy who can break codes and this guy's the guy who can do acrobatics or whatever.”
“I think this whole ChatGPT thing is actually going to make private data like that much more valuable because like, you know, before it was like, oh, I'll give you my data and you'll just link to me and I'll get Google. But like, like that's all going away, I think. And so like having access to private data is going to be really valuable. So yeah, I'm, I'm extra bullish.”
“One of the things I believe is that engineering is becoming a commodity in Silicon Valley and that the next generation of entrepreneurs are going to be not necessarily technical, but people who are more well-rounded in their skill set.”
“the combination of body scans, blood work, and continuous monitoring through a non-invasive wearable will ultimately be able to predict a lot of things that, that, you know, are disease states or leading indicators for death.”
“he launched this new company called Cars and Bids, and it's very similar to Bring a Trailer. And so I predict that this is actually going to be a multi-hundred million dollar exit, and I want to make my prediction there now that that's going to happen.”
“I wanted to talk about it now because I think 3 to 6 months from now, this is going to be like a household name. A lot of people are going to know this because it's going to be on, you know, CNN, Fox News.”
Why hitShaan predicted in Jan 2023 that Ozempic/GLP-1 drugs would become a household name within 3-6 months. By spring/summer 2023 they had exploded into mainstream culture: TODAY (Dec 2023) reported weight-loss drugs "exploded in popularity this past year" with widespread celebrity and public attention, and the Houston Chronicle (Aug 2023) noted the Ozempic craze was "consistent since the beginning of 2023" — squarely within his window.
“I tried to make the argument this summer that there's going to be a billion-dollar empire started on Twitter, just like there has been on YouTube and all these other things. And I think one of these people— it wouldn't— it's not out of this world that one of these folks could be that person.”
“those shows are gonna happen on TikTok, not TV, and they're gonna happen like a thousandfold. You're gonna get a thousand times more experiments just using TikTok.”
“I think there's so many popping up, right? It's the next crypto wave, right? There's going to be a huge— huge bubble and, you know, and they're raising not at crypto prices, but I'm seeing, hey, two guys left some, you know, Andreessen Horowitz-backed company, we're raising $5 on $25.”
Why partialRief's "huge bubble" in thin AI-wrapper startups clearly materialized ($25B+ poured in at frothy valuations, and by 2025-2026 commentators and collapses like Icon.com's $12M implosion confirm a recognized AI-wrapper bubble and correction), but the "next crypto wave" crash analogy is only partly borne out: rather than a wholesale crypto-style collapse, durable application-layer winners (Cursor ~$2.3B, Perplexity, Replit) emerged while thin wrappers commoditized, with analysts explicitly calling it "not a 2001-style wipeout."
“Twitter ends up as a disaster, maybe bankrupt or sold, takes a, you know, $20 billion loss there, plus Tesla stock in the meantime has lost him maybe another $100 billion or more. And he's no longer the richest man in the world.”
“I think that it's going to peter out for the next 5 to 10 years. I think that NFTs are going to go to zero. I think that all the altcoins, basically Ethereum and Bitcoin, are the only ones that are going to ever have the chance of being interesting. Virtually all of them go out of business. I think that Coinbase stays in business and actually might grow because people are like, okay, fine, you're the only place that I can trust.”
Why partialMixed outcome: two specific sub-claims hit — SBF received a 25-year sentence (within his 25-50 range; appeal lost June 2026) and Coinbase survived and grew (joined the S&P 500 in 2025). But the bold core thesis missed: crypto did not "peter out," with Bitcoin reaching a ~$126K all-time high in Oct 2025, and many altcoins beyond BTC/ETH (Solana, XRP, Hyperliquid at $16B+) thrived rather than going to zero.
“Um, I believe, and it's very, very clear now that AI in, in the next 5 years is gonna change everything. Um, we're seeing OpenAI and a lot of the projects they put out there recently, um, whether it be creative writing or I believe Fiverr as a company, it will just be nonexistent. It's gonna destroy the low end of the creative market initially and then work its way up the chain.”
Why partialKevin Rose's directional thesis is right — by 2025-2026 AI is documented eating the low end of the creative/freelance market, Fiverr's revenue is shrinking (2026 guidance below 2025) and the company is explicitly pivoting to high-end work, with the stock down ~35%. But his concrete falsifiable claim that "Fiverr as a company will just be nonexistent" is clearly false: Fiverr (NYSE: FVRR) is still a publicly traded, EBITDA-profitable, operating company reporting Q1 2026 earnings.
“my prediction in 2013 was that Bitcoin will go to about $100,000 and then stabilize. I'm sticking with it. I think, I think it'll get there. I'm not, I'm not sure that it in particular has the, has the appropriate utility to reach a higher store of value.”
Why partialThe price target was right: Bitcoin crossed ~$100,000 (late 2024). But the core thesis—that it would then "stabilize" because it lacked the utility to climb meaningfully higher as a store of value—was wrong. Bitcoin kept rising to an all-time high of ~$126,000 in October 2025, then crashed roughly 50% in 2026 (below $60,000), the opposite of stabilizing.
“but I think that the odds of a tactical nuclear weapon are very high. It will not be used on the United States. It will not be used on a NATO ally. It'll probably be a tactical nuclear weapon used to strike some inarguably military target. Like, it probably— they're not gonna they're not going to nuke Kyiv. It's much more likely that it would be a port or a, you know, or an air installation or something like that.”
Why missPalmer Luckey predicted in late 2022 that the odds of Russia using a tactical nuclear weapon on a military target in Ukraine were "very high." As of June 2026, nearly four years later, no nuclear weapon of any kind has been detonated in the war; current 2026 coverage of Russia's arsenal and nuclear doctrine references no actual use, and nuclear weapons have not been used in combat anywhere since 1945.
“Somebody's about to do that for music. They're about to download all the music They're about to go download all the music off Spotify and then they're going to train an engine to say, hey, create new music. This is what music is. Create new music. And that's what's going to happen. And they're going to release an open source model that will say, would you like to generate music? Here's an API that will just let you generate music using this, this engine that we've, we've been training by downloading all the music that exists.”
“another prediction is an artificially made song is going to be in the top 10 most played songs in the world and on Billboard top 10 inside the next 18 months. Like, he put a time limit on it. And I, and I'm on board with that.”
Why missThe prediction (episode 358, ~mid-to-late 2022, explicit 18-month limit closing ~early-to-mid 2024) called for an AI-generated song in the worldwide top-10 most-played and Billboard top 10. No such thing happened in that window; the first AI act to even touch a mainstream Billboard chart was Xania Monet in fall 2025, and Breaking Rust's "Walk My Walk" hit #1 only on the niche Country Digital Song Sales chart in Nov 2025 — neither reached the Hot 100 top 10, and all occurred ~3+ years late.
“But I really don't see the sustainability of this NFT market. I think it is like, it is built on greater fool theory. This is people that are not buying things because they like the art. They're buying things because they think they're going to get rich. They think that the next person is going to come in and buy it.”
Why hitShaan (ep. 217, 2021) called the NFT boom unsustainable greater-fool/wash-trading dynamics. The market subsequently collapsed ~90% (market cap fell below $1.5B vs. its >$17B early-2022 peak; art NFT volume down 93%), and academic studies confirmed wash trading inflated up to 80-95% of volume on some marketplaces — both prongs of his prediction proved correct.
“So what he thinks is going to happen is you're going to have either independent or small teams of people, let's say you and let's say the 4 key people who built The Hustle, that you could basically get a text message on your phone that gives you the next mission, and either you as the leader are coming up with that mission, or somebody else puts out the mission out into the universe”
“but if you're 40 or 30 and we discover this, and at the time when we discover this, you have escape velocity, as I call it, meaning I'm going to give you the therapy before enough damage has happened and you're going to live— like the guy who's 10 years older than you is going to live till he's 150 and you're going to live till you're 1,000.”
“I think 98% of the current projects go to zero. Right. I think it's very— to me, it's the most similar thing to web internet stocks, '99, 2000 that I remember.”
Why hitGary predicted in 2021 that "98% of the current projects go to zero," likening NFTs to dot-com stocks. A widely-cited dappGambl study analyzing 73,257 NFT collections found 69,795 (95%) had a market cap of zero Ether by 2023-2024, with trading volume down 97% from its 2021 peak — confirming the overwhelming-majority-to-zero thesis. The measured 95% is within rounding of his 98% directional call.
“Like, how about this? You know how everyone's like, social media is full of shit. Like, everyone takes photos and fakes it. You know what's going to be a much better social identity? What tokens do you have in your wallet publicly?”
Why missGary's 2021 idea that public crypto wallets/holdings would become a better mainstream social identity than social media did not materialize; the flagship implementation — Twitter/X's wallet-linked verified NFT profile pictures (launched Jan 2022) — was quietly discontinued in January 2024, and wallet-as-social-identity remains a niche crypto-native behavior rather than a replacement for social profiles.
“there's gonna be a trend, I'm calling it now, over the next 5 to 7 years, people are gonna start to really give a shit about mental fitness. And it's a very different thing than mental health.”
Why hitShaan (2021) predicted that within 5-7 years "mental fitness" — distinct from mental health, defined around overcoming adversity/resilience — would become a major trend driving services, content, and thought leaders. By 2025-2026, exactly that has happened: Forbes (Jan 2026) calls mental fitness "leadership's next frontier"; 2026 wellness/benefits trend reports (Dr. Axe, NFP, IFPA, Siffi) name "mental fitness" as a top trend explicitly framed as distinct from clinical mental health and built on proactive resilience, alongside dedicated training companies (Positive Intelligence/PQ) and an emerging "mental fitness startup market." This is within his stated 2026-2028 window.
“I think the future of the small business economy is going to be online, digital, and profitable. People who used to want to start like a restaurant or like a plumbing business or something like that, Those young entrepreneurs are going to be looking to start a niche SaaS company or a niche e-commerce company.”
Why missGazdecki predicted future small-business entrepreneurs would abandon restaurants/plumbing for niche SaaS/e-commerce, but Census Bureau data (Richmond Fed, April 2026) shows new business formation through 2026 is led by physical/traditional sectors — retail trade, professional services, construction (trades), other services, and accommodation/food services — while "Information" (software/SaaS) ranks near the bottom; skilled trades like plumbing are simultaneously booming amid severe labor shortages, the opposite of his claim.
“And so my prediction, and I want to go on record by saying this, is A, I think this is awesome. And B, I actually think that this could be a multi-hundred million dollar company in the making. And you could watch this guy build it in public.”
Why missSam predicted in 2021 (when Ghost did ~$3.5M/yr) that Ghost "could be a multi-hundred-million-dollar company." As of June 2026 Ghost's own live public dashboard shows ARR of $10,751,047 — roughly an order of magnitude short of a "multi-hundred-million-dollar" company, and Ghost's non-profit charter explicitly states the company "can never be bought or sold," so no such valuation exists. (The ~$100M+/$136M figures O'Nolan cites are revenue earned by independent publishers using Ghost, not Ghost's own revenue or valuation.)
“If I had a bet, I would imagine you're going to see this company sell for in the $40 to $50 million range in the next 18 months. And I just wanted to bring it up now to call it out, uh, about like see it before it actually happens.”
Why missSam predicted Blockworks would sell for $40-50M within 18 months of ep. 200 (2021), i.e. by ~early-to-mid 2023. Blockworks was never acquired; instead in May 2023 it raised $12M at a $135M valuation, later raised a Series A extension at a $192M valuation, and by 2026 became an acquirer itself (buying Messari) — it never sold at all, let alone in the $40-50M range.
“I'm so bullish on America. And I went and talked to some of my staff and some of my friends who are just like average Americans. They have saved a significant amount of money over the last 2 years. And they're all like, I want to, I want to go buy something. I need to, I need to, I need to spend.”
Why hitSam/Shaan called a US consumer-spending boom for the next two years (mid-2021 onward), driven by record household savings and pent-up demand. That elapsed window confirms it: BEA reports personal consumption expenditures jumped 12.7% in 2021 (after a 1.9% drop in 2020), with strong real spending continuing through 2022-2023 — the well-documented excess-savings-fueled consumer boom they predicted.
“I've— this is super tough, but maybe like 50% Hal Finney, uh, 30% Nick Szabo, and 20% NSA.”
“So I don't think the next Apple is a phone company. I think the next Apple, the next Apple, which is going to be a trillion dollar company that has, uh, that gives you kind of like a consumer device. I think it's going to be a healthcare monitor. I think it's going to be something that is going to be measuring what's going on inside your body. And feeding that data back to you.”
“This one is, um, it's a cloud corner store, so you don't need a real location. It's just going to be 500 square feet that's within 1 mile of you. It might be in this back alley place. It doesn't need a good location, and it's going to deliver to you with small lightweight drones. So small little pass— a small little carrier drone going to bring you something within 15 minutes of ordering.”
Why partialThe broad thesis is materializing: by 2025-2026 Walmart+Wing and Amazon Prime Air deliver convenience goods (groceries, household items, OTC meds) by small carrier drones at scale, expanding to 150+ stores across multiple metros. But Shaan's specific architecture did not happen — fulfillment runs from existing full-size big-box stores with human pickers and ~30-minute windows, not from human-free ~500 sq ft automated 'cloud corner stores' in back-alley real estate within a mile delivering in under 15 minutes; 7-Eleven has not been displaced.
“Their core insight, which is that people are going to care about privacy. People are going to care about not being tracked by big tech companies, not being advertised to. And they're going to care about not having all their messages stored forever in a way that could get leaked or hacked.”
Why hitAll four named privacy products grew substantially in the 5 years after this 2021 prediction: Brave passed 100M monthly active users (Brave Search ~20B queries/year), Proton surpassed 100M accounts and grows ~50%/year, and Signal climbed from ~20M MAU (2020) to ~70-100M by 2024-2025 — confirming Shaan's core insight that people would increasingly care about privacy and these "non-winners" would quietly take over.
“The 4 things are blockchain, cloud office, America Next, the cloud culture for consumers. So those are like the 4 things.”
“It was 400 people showing up at our live show. Right. But, but you start to see that come to fruition of like, okay, a year ago that didn't exist. Who's to say a year from now that's not 3,000 people? Who's to say a year from that it's not 30,000 people, right? Like, that seems entirely believable to me, and I've sort of envisioned it.”
Why missShaan predicted MFM live shows would scale from 400 (2021) to 3,000 in 2022 and 30,000 in 2023, but the largest documented MFM live show was the early-2023 Vancouver event in a theater that "fit like 1,300 people" (Sam Parr's own post), and a 2023 Riverside case study cites only 1,500+ attendees across ALL global meetups combined — far short of the 30,000 (or even 3,000) target.
“I would say today's megatrends, my personal bets are that today's megatrends are Anything that's actually real in machine learning or AI, um, as well as crypto. I think those are the two mega trends that are happening right now.”
Why hitShaan's 2021 bet that AI/ML and crypto were the two megatrends "happening right now" played out over the following ~5 years: AI became the dominant tech megatrend (ChatGPT, the generative-AI boom, Nvidia's surge, McKinsey's 2025 State of AI), and crypto matured into the mainstream by 2025 (Bitcoin all-time highs, U.S. spot ETFs, ~28% of Americans owning crypto, a16z's "year crypto went mainstream"). Both named trends clearly materialized.
“They'll be, uh, I think they'll be at $100 million in sales in the next 3 years. That's my, my prediction, my bet.”
Why missPeak (Shaan's portfolio company) rebranded to Hone Health (confirmed by founder Saad Alam: "you are known as Peak, you're now known as Hone"). The "$100M in 3 years" window from MFM ep 181 (2021) ended ~2024, but Hone was only at ~$69.7M ARR at end of 2024 and didn't cross $100M until $113.5M ARR in September 2025 — roughly 4 years out, missing the stated 3-year timeframe.
“I think they're probably doing a couple million, $1 or $2 million a year is my guess. And I think that this could easily be, you know, a 9-figure business. Why? Because you're taking a subset of the Facebook ad engine, right? Facebook— people are spending billions and billions of dollars on Facebook advertising.”
Why missFive years after Shaan's 2021 prediction, BeeRoll's 2026 PitchBook profile shows it raised only ~$1.25M total and has just 9 employees, remaining a small early-stage private startup — nowhere near a nine-figure ($100M+) business. It has since pivoted to an AI video marketing platform but shows no signs of nine-figure revenue or valuation.
“And so that's what you're going to see. You're going to see all the existing financial infrastructure get rebuilt over here in crypto land, and then some new shit that didn't exist in the real world that you can do in crypto land will get built. So I think for that reason, I think that if it works in the UK and 20 million people do it, then I think there's a good shot that this is going to exist in the crypto world.”
Why partialDirectionally right but overstated: crypto did rebuild core financial primitives (DeFi lending, yield/savings, trading) plus net-new products (stablecoins, yield farming) and growing tokenization of Treasuries/stocks/RWAs ($20B+ on-chain by 2026, Ondo/BlackRock BUIDL). But the sweeping "all of traditional finance gets rebuilt" did not happen within ~5 years — JPMorgan and CoinDesk report (Aug 2025) DeFi/tokenization growth as "still disappointing," activity still mostly crypto-native/retail, and TVL (~$170B peak) a tiny sliver of the trillions in legacy finance.
“my one-liner on this is 2000s were the tech companies, 2010s crypto protocols. 2020s, startup cities. 2030s, network states. Okay, so company, protocol, city, state. I think that's where we're going. We're essentially at things just beginning.”
“Jake, good luck at the fight. I think you're gonna win. Uh, sorry Ben if you're listening. I, I just think that, uh, Jake cares more and is going to try harder to win. I think Ben is, is okay with the decision, and because of that, I think he's going to lose rounds. That's my prediction. It's on the record.”
Why hitShaan predicted before the April 2021 fight that Jake Paul would beat Ben Askren; Paul won by first-round TKO on April 17, 2021, as confirmed by Wikipedia, CBS Sports, and Yahoo Sports. The core "Jake wins" call was correct, though the predicted mechanism (losing rounds on a decision) didn't apply since it ended in a KO.
“But I think that we will see more and more either genetically engineered pets or just straight up kind of like mechanical AI pets. Because if you can get 60% of the benefits with 0% of the work and maintenance, I think there's a whole class of people who will take that trade., that today just don't own pets because it's just too much cost and too much work.”
Why partialThe "rise of mechanical AI pets" Shaan predicted in 2021 did materialize: Casio's Moflin AI robot pet ($429, launched 2024 / US 2025, reportedly sold out) is explicitly marketed for "people who love animals but cannot keep pets," alongside Ropet, Enabot, Tombot and a defined Pet Companion Robots Market valued in the hundreds of millions to low billions in 2025 with positive growth forecasts. But it remains a niche/emerging category with mixed reception rather than having decisively "won a whole class" of non-pet-owners at scale, so it is directionally right rather than a clean hit.
“So any platform where the value prop is to make friends, I'm not gonna bring friends. So now you have sticky retention, but now you have no growth. And in the other world, you had fast growth but no retention. And so you're stuck in this catch-22. And so then, just to kind of round it out, you eventually get disillusioned. You realize this shit's not gonna work. You try to pivot. You eventually sell the company to Facebook.”
Why partialShaan's core thesis was right: Clubhouse cratered (lost ~80% of users, $4B valuation collapsed, laid off 50%+ of staff in 2023) and pivoted/"reset" into an audio-messaging app. But the two specific named outcomes failed — Clubhouse was never acquired by Facebook/Meta and remains independent, and founder Paul Davison did not quit; he is still listed as Co-Founder and CEO.
“It's likely that there are more companies out there, and it'll take them 6 months to a year to make this move, but they will take a portion of their treasury reserves and they'll move it into Bitcoin. And these are long-term holders. These are not retail day traders”
Why hitWithin Shaan's 6-month-to-a-year window after the early-2021 prediction, multiple new companies moved a portion of treasury reserves into Bitcoin as long-term holders: Meitu added ~$40M (later ~$100M) in BTC/ETH in March 2021, and Japanese gaming firm Nexon bought $100M of Bitcoin in April 2021 explicitly as a treasury asset, alongside Marathon's $100M HODL treasury purchase. These were corporate balance-sheet allocations, not retail day-trading, exactly as predicted.
“I would do a community if I was gonna— that would be my fastest path to that right now. And I'll tell you, you know, the reasons why are all the things you said, which is like, it's not that much work to run. The members provide the value to each other. It's not all about you creating content all the time. It's not that hard to spin up.”
“You're going to see a bunch of private equity companies coming in and they're going to buy up, you know, Ali's Banana Bread. They're going to buy up One-Nine-Hundred Ice Cream because they're going to be like, Dude, this is the next Ben Jerry's. And we're gonna take this thing, we're gonna put it on steroids, we're gonna advertise the fuck out of it, and then we're gonna get it into retail stores on top of what it's already doing.”
Why miss~5 years on, the named brands were not PE-rolled-up: Allie's (Ali's) Banana Bread is still founder/CEO-owned (Allie Chernick) and grew organically (Whole Foods, JetBlue), and 1-900-ICE-CREAM remains independent — neither became a PE-built "next Ben & Jerry's." More broadly the Instagram/DTC rollup thesis collapsed: flagship roll-up Thrasio went bankrupt in Feb 2024 and 2024 was defined by "zombie brands, fire sales & quiet closures," the opposite of the predicted scale-and-retail wave.
“Basically, brick and mortar becomes about discovery, not distribution. It's where you go to learn about cool brands and products, and then you replenish and order online. Could you create a mall experience around that?”
“Yeah, I think they're doing $20 million in sales every month right now. I believe they will get to— by the end of this year, I believe they will get to $100 million in art sales per month. I don't know what like Christie's and Sotheby's and those guys do. I don't think this is that far behind.”
“So I think people being bullish on— I still think Bitcoin zero or Bitcoin under $1,000 is a distinct possibility. Now, would that happen overnight? No, I think it would be a slow ride as people realized Ethereum or whatever the next one is, is the better one, right?”
Why missCalacanis (ep 150, 2021) said Bitcoin going to zero or under $1,000 via a "slow ride" was a distinct possibility. As of June 2026, ~5 years later, BTC trades around $61,500 — roughly 60x the $1,000 floor — and hit six-figure highs in the interim, so the predicted collapse never occurred.
“I'm really long non-accredited investors participating in private markets. I think that's going to be the big revolution of the next decade.”
“So he basically thinks the way that we treat, like, our Social Security number That's how we're going to treat our real name and face. It's not going to be something you give out unless you have to. And you use that to like create accounts and those accounts have their own usernames. So when you go to work, you're not going to be Jack Smith with your face. You're going to be, maybe you're called like, you know, Growth Guy 33”
“So it's going to spread like crazy through the internet. It's going to have, I believe, like a Satoshi Nakamoto.”
“I think it's just a matter of time before the floodgates open. And like, call it like Division 1 college football players at like Florida State are going to make this content house. They're playing on national TV every Saturday. Now they have this content house that they're like playing video games in, they're posting on TikTok.”
Why partialReed's macro thesis was right: NIL "floodgates" opened (July 2021) and D1 athletes did become major TikTok/social content creators, with agencies turning hundreds of athletes into influencers (e.g., UNC's ~850 athletes via Article 41) and some building creator careers — but his specific prediction of football "content houses" (a Hype-House-style shared TikTok/gaming mansion at schools like Florida State) did not materialize as a recognized phenomenon, and the content-house format itself faded after 2022.
“So I like this. I think this is the way the world is going, which is a retreat away from social media to private media. I think people are leaving the town square and they're going to their favorite pub, and they're going to close the door, and they're going to basically— people are going to hang out in private groups more and more and more. It's already happening.”
“So this idea of mRNA vaccines is actually the most promising path we have to curing cancer also. Now, I'm not saying it's going to because there's a lot of false hope when it comes to these things.”
Why hitBy 2026 the exact "designer vaccine" mechanism Shaan described (sequencing a patient's tumor neoantigens to train the immune system) became the most clinically validated cancer-vaccine approach: Moderna/Merck's personalized mRNA vaccine (intismeran/mRNA-4157) cut melanoma recurrence-or-death risk ~49% with sustained 5-year data, and BioNTech's pancreatic mRNA vaccine produced lasting responses with responders alive at 6 years. Shaan hedged ("not saying it's going to") and the directional core—mRNA personalized vaccines as a leading, promising path against cancer—has clearly borne out, though no cure/FDA approval yet exists.
“If you just think about the economics of it, a live agent is gonna cost you $12 an hour depending on where they're based, $15 maybe. You know, the average sale price on most stores is like $40, $50, $60. And so, you know, one sale and you're paying off that salesperson for the hour, one additional incremental sale, you're already in the profits.”
Why hitShaan's 2020 call that live video selling (creators/agents demoing products with one-tap buy) becomes a major e-commerce wave came true: TikTok Shop hit $15.82B in US sales in 2025 (~18-20% of social commerce), US livestream buyers rose to 34% of shoppers, and the creator-led live-selling-with-in-app-checkout model is now mainstream. The verdict is Hit rather than higher confidence because in the US it is a large fast-growing channel rather than the single dominant 'wave' it became in China.
“I think he's going to get out in a few months. He's going to get out in a short amount of time. I have a feeling this is, uh, we're going to hear a lot more from this guy. Yeah, he's going to do something. And, and this guy, even though he's creepy, I, I don't— I'm not anti-Martin, but I like— I don't want to be friends with him. Um, he is capable enough that he's gonna mess some stuff up soon. That's my prediction.”
Why partialSam (ep. 139, aired Dec 23, 2020) predicted Shkreli would get out "in a few months / a short amount of time" and would resurface to "mess some stuff up soon." The timing was wrong — Shkreli wasn't released to a halfway house until May 2022 (~17 months later) and fully freed Sept 2022 (~21 months). But the character claim hit: post-release he repeatedly resurfaced in the news, getting sued and court-ordered in 2024-2025 over copying the one-of-a-kind Wu-Tang Clan album. Right on the behavior, wrong on the "few months" timeframe.
“now with COVID for example, everyone's doing these like pods, uh, which is like, yeah, your kid's not going to school. They form a small pod of 4 or 5 kids. We hire a teacher, the teacher makes $100 grand a year, um, and they teach our kids in a very kind of like, you know, very high teacher-to-student ratio where they're doing that either in our house or in the backyard or somewhere like that. That seems much more like realistic to get big to me than homeschooling where the parent does it.”
Why missShaan predicted the COVID "pod" model (shared paid teacher, high teacher-to-student ratio) would scale far more than classic parent-led homeschooling, but the opposite occurred: parent-led homeschooling surged to ~3.4M students by 2024-25 (well above pre-pandemic levels), while pods largely "snapped back" (~85%) when schools reopened and their surviving microschool form reached only ~1-2M students by 2025 — more than half of which operate as homeschooling co-ops counted within homeschooling, not as a separate larger model.
“I do think that Superhuman for X is It's a very real thing. There's going to be multiple billion-dollar products and billion-dollar companies to be made. In the last YC Demo Day, superhuman for X was the most common X for Y. It's pretty interesting to see the trend take off.”
Why hitVohra's 2020 prediction that the "Superhuman for X" pattern (premium, fast, beautifully designed everyday tools) would mint multiple billion-dollar companies has materialized: Linear, the keyboard-first/design-first issue tracker, raised a Series C at a $1.25B valuation, and Superhuman itself (valued $825M) was acquired by Grammarly in July 2025, alongside other design-led tools (Notion, Figma, Arc) that reached or exceeded unicorn valuations.
“I have a bold prediction. I think Zapier is going to be as big as Atlassian. I think Zapier is going to be a $50 billion software company.”
Why missShaan predicted in 2020 that Zapier would become a $50 billion company on par with Atlassian; as of 2025-2026 Zapier is valued at roughly $5 billion (flat since its 2021 raise and still private), about one-tenth of the predicted figure.
“That's what I think e-commerce is going to look like. And I think it's going to make Shopify look like a dinosaur in the past.”
Why missShaan predicted (2020) livestream selling would make Shopify "look like a dinosaur." Six years later Shopify had its best year ever — 2025 revenue up 30% to ~$11.6B and GMV up 29% to $378B (Q4 2025 earnings) — and remains the dominant Western e-commerce platform. Livestream commerce grew (~50% in the US in 2025 per eMarketer) but stayed a niche supplement, not the Shopify-killing replacement predicted.
“And so I, I would guess that Bitcoin is going to break through, uh, to new highs, um, you know, over the next 2-3 years.”
Why hitShaan predicted on ep 131 (2020, BTC near $18,500) that Bitcoin would break to new all-time highs within 2-3 years. Bitcoin blew past its prior ~$20K record and hit a new all-time high near $69,000 in November 2021, well within the window.
“I think 5 years from now, 10 years from now, somebody's going to make a ton of money by totally automating hotels. Why the heck do you need that check-in process when we have the technology to do all of it on our phones?”
“Joe Rogan had half a million concurrent viewers on his livestream for the election, where he was just shooting the shit with his friends, talking about it. The UFC, often when there's a UFC fight, there's also the Fight Companion, which is always big, and it's just Joe Rogan and his friends getting drunk, eating cheese, and watching the fights together. It's way more fun than the official broadcast. And so I just think this is an interesting trend in a business, in a business opportunity that will continue to rise over time, which is like consuming stuff with the kind of little influencers that you care about.”
Why hitShaan's 2020 call that co-watching live events alongside niche creators would become a rising business opportunity has clearly played out: Twitch rolled out creator Watch Parties worldwide (Sept 2020), streamers co-streamed the 2024 election/debates to large audiences, YouTube is now pushing creators toward live streaming, and industry data (StreamLayer) shows 42% of fans social-view at least monthly, up 15% since 2023, with products built specifically for live-event watch parties.
“I think replica is going to be so strong that men are gonna have sex less with women because they get their emotional needs from this computer. That's my, one of my predictions. The second prediction is that this potentially is gonna help particularly men with mental health issues and is gonna be a revolutionary therapist counseling type of product.”
Why partialBy 2025 both halves are directionally right but not cleanly proven: a real "sex recession" hit, with young men leading sexlessness (rising from ~9% in 2013-15 to ~24% in 2022-23 per NSFG/IFS data) exactly as AI companions went mainstream (~1 in 5 US adults have chatted with a romantic AI; ~32% of young men who use AI platforms use them for sexual arousal per BYU/IFS). But the specific causal mechanism Sam claimed (men having less sex *because* AI meets their emotional needs) is unproven, and the "revolutionary therapy product for men" framing is contested—Stanford, the APA, and psychiatry journals now warn of harm, AI-induced psychosis, and risk rather than a clear therapeutic revolution.
“In fintech, Robinhood, Coinbase, and Chime are the 3 companies that I think are going to come out of this wave and just be massive outcomes. And then internationally, I'm quite bullish on Revolut and TransferWise as two companies I think that will still be very significant.”
Why hitAll five named companies became massive/significant fintech outcomes: Coinbase direct-listed in April 2021 above a $100B market cap, Robinhood IPO'd July 2021 at ~$32B, Chime completed its Nasdaq IPO in June 2025 at an $11.6B valuation (popping 37%), Revolut reached a ~$75B valuation as Europe's most valuable private tech firm, and Wise (formerly TransferWise) is a publicly listed multi-billion-dollar fintech. The 2020 prediction's implied 'come out of this wave' timeframe has fully elapsed.
“Gaming companies have known this for a very long time, and yet every other industry has said, "We'll just build an ads business. We'll run remnant ads and we'll do some direct sales and that's how we'll grow." You're just starting to see people realize that, actually, people are willing to pay for things that they enjoy or that activate them or that motivate them, whether that's coaching, training, good content, subscribing to a specific writer who brings me value every day, but nobody has figured out how to bring those lessons fully out of the gaming ecosystem.”
“50%.”
“When, like, when I saw— when I got done playing with it, I was like, oh, the world's different now. Like there was a pre— there's gonna be a pre-OpenAI world and a post-OpenAI world.”
Why hitIn 2020 Sam called GPT-3/OpenAI a permanent "pre vs. post" discontinuity; ChatGPT (Nov 2022) became the fastest-growing consumer app in history, kickstarted the generative-AI revolution, and OpenAI is now ~$852B valued with ~900M weekly users — and the "pre-ChatGPT/post-ChatGPT world" framing is now standard across media, industry, and academia.
“And so if you just re— if you just brought back your facility to the United States and tried to use American labor at the cost, you would like 4 to 5x the labor costs that you have compared to Southeast Asia or wherever. So like it almost would be like cost prohibitive to do it. But if you can instead use automation and 3D printing or whatever it is, now you can actually bring it back to the United States, increase your resiliency, and keep some like barrier of efficiency as well.”
Why hitPomp's 2020 prediction that post-COVID supply-chain resilience would drive reshoring, made viable by automation/3D printing despite US labor costing 4-5x Southeast Asia, has clearly played out: reshoring + FDI job announcements hit a record in 2020, ~260K (2021), ~287K (2023) and 244K (2024) per the Reshoring Initiative, and sources across industry, the Fed (FRBSF working paper), and academia consistently identify automation/robotics/additive manufacturing as the enabling mechanism that bridges the labor-cost gap.
“And it's not going to be one company dominates because there's like a physical component to the whole thing. So it's not like a Facebook or something where the software just scales instantly and one company takes all. It's going to be, you know, market by market, building by building.”
Why hitSix years later, e-commerce logistics/fulfillment remains fragmented, not winner-take-all: Armstrong & Associates' 2026 Top 50 global 3PL list shows dozens of large coexisting players (DSV $37B, DHL $36B, Kuehne+Nagel $34B, CEVA, Nippon Express, Maersk, C.H. Robinson, GXO, UPS, Lineage, Ryder, etc.) with distinct regional/building-level physical footprints, exactly the "market by market, building by building" structure Shaan predicted versus a single software-style monopoly.
“And hey, a whole bunch of people who care about measuring themselves and care about fitness and care about health, 2% of them are gonna pay monthly to have this. I also believe that. And so I, I really love their market.”
Why hitSince Shaan's 2020 prediction, a real consumer market for non-diabetic glucose tracking has emerged: Dexcom's OTC Stelo and Abbott's Lingo biosensors launched targeting fitness/health-conscious users, Signos got FDA clearance for an OTC CGM-powered weight-loss app aimed at non-diabetics, and the dedicated OTC CGM market crossed $370M in 2024 (16.9% CAGR). Coverage (Boston Globe, Oct 2025) explicitly documents fitness-conscious non-diabetics paying to monitor glucose.
“And it will become a total faux pas to not have this as part of what you offer your employees. And I think the same thing will happen with schools. I think because of teen suicides and teen sort of mental health issues, school districts and schools will offer this as a free counselor, essentially a digital counselor for students.”
Why hitBoth halves of Shaan's 2020 prediction came true by 2024-2025: mental health benefits became a near-universal, expected corporate offering (SHRM 2024: 82% of employers provide an EAP, 94% say mental health benefits are "very important" to prospective hires; apps like Calm Health and Lyra are mainstream perks), and school districts now provide free, government-subsidized digital counselors—e.g., LAUSD partnered with Daybreak Health and the LA County Office of Education enabled free Hazel Health teletherapy for ~1.3M students, while Ohio's 2024 state SOAR grant funded student telehealth, all driven by the teen mental health crisis Shaan cited.
“it's looking like Biden's gonna win in a landslide. And so I was thinking about this, and I was like, to me, I don't think that's what's gonna happen. I would want that to happen, but I don't think that's what's gonna happen.”
Why missShaan predicted on episode 93 (2020) that Trump would win the 2020 election despite polls favoring Biden. Joe Biden won with 306 electoral votes to Trump's 232, per the National Archives, so the prediction was wrong.
“homes are not really being bought online. I've thought about this since 2012 when I worked at an apartment company. I was like, oh, well, someone's going to rent apartments online without seeing them once the 3D mapping is a thing, which Matterport's doing that.”
Why hitThe core predictions materialized: 70%+ of renters now say they would lease sight-unseen thanks to 3D virtual tours (Matterport/Apartments.com data), and online marketplaces for buying/selling offline businesses scaled up (BizBuySell with 45,000+ listings and 4M+ monthly visits, Acquire.com with 500k+ buyers), exactly the "more-developed LoopNet" Shaan described. The home-iBuying sub-thread was mixed (Zillow Offers shut down 2021), but the two central claims clearly came true.
“out of 20 people, maybe 1 was buying their glasses from Warby Parker and 19 were still going to Costco or wherever and picking out frames, LensCrafters or some shit. And that number is gonna go from 1 to 5 to 8 to 12 to 20, you know, eventually. And so I think that that's more where the change is gonna happen, is just what percent of people buy X item online.”
“So no, I don't think that San Francisco, for example, is gonna be the hub for— is gonna be a bigger hub than it was in the past few years. I think it'll still probably be the biggest tech hub there is. It's just, it will be smaller in size. Some of its weight will have gotten distributed out to Austin and New York and LA and other places that are benefiting from this.”
Why partialShaan's "SF stays the biggest tech hub" half held (SF/Bay Area took ~66% of US VC dollars in Q1 2026 and remains the top ecosystem), but his core claim that SF would shrink and redistribute its weight to Austin/NY/LA was refuted: the AI boom made the Bay Area more dominant than ever (record VC share, "leaving everyone else behind"), with New York falling to just 4% of dollars and VCs/Y Combinator pulling founders back into SF.
“If you just said, hey Sean, you know, in the next 10 years you die if you don't get wealthy, I'd be like, cool, go into real estate. Like, that's, that's my best path, my highest likelihood chance of becoming wealthy. Is through real estate versus any other sort of venture.”
“I am, am interested in all those, particularly the Scott Galloway one and the hey.com thing, which I think is actually gonna be a huge business.”
Why partialHey.com launched in 2020 with ~300,000 trial signups and remains a real, durable, profitable product six years later, but the 37signals founders themselves consistently describe it as having only "tens of thousands of paying HEY customers" at ~$99/year — a niche product, not the Gmail/Outlook-scale "huge business" Sam implied. 37signals' ~$80M company revenue is overwhelmingly Basecamp, not Hey, so standalone Hey is a viable but small business: directionally right, far short of "huge."
“Now, some people say, oh, that's just temporary. Personally, I don't think so. I don't think you can put the genie back in the bottle. Once the companies start letting you be remote and it doesn't matter where you're physically located, why would you live in a more expensive area?”
Why missShaan predicted remote work would permanently end SF's status as "the place to be." Instead, by 2025-2026 SF rebounded as the epicenter of the AI boom: WSJ declared "San Francisco Is Back" with rents rising, and the LA Times reported SF's population and GDP rose in 2025 amid the AI boom, reaffirming its status as the tech hub.
“It's a really cool gadget. It's going to be gone in 3 months. All right. And I hate saying that because like I said, I don't like being haters. I like, I want everyone to win. I think this is a cool, it's like fucking Wikipedia, it's a cool gadget, horrible business. Like HQ, like it was a fun app, awesome, served its purpose, it'll be dead.”
Why missSam predicted on the 2020 episode that Clubhouse would be "gone in 3 months," but instead the app surged to its peak of ~10 million active users in March 2021, expanded to Android (May 2021), and remained operational for years afterward (3.5M users by Sept 2021, still existing through 2024-2025). The specific 3-month death horizon was decisively wrong.
“And I started going like, well, what would stop Howard Stern from leaving Sirius and just starting his own subscription podcast and charging $10 a month? And you start thinking about the scale of something like that where you get Marc Maron or Terry Gross or, you know, Howard Stern or Rogan or whoever. And you just start doing that where they do one extra episode a month or they cut their podcast off after 30 minutes, or whatever it is. I think the numbers are insane on that, and I think that's where it's gonna go once a few people catch on.”
Why partialThe broad thesis was right: subscription podcasting did explode — Spotify and Apple both launched paid podcast subscription platforms in 2021, and Patreon podcasters earned over $350M in 2023. But the specific mechanism Wilkinson named (stars like Rogan, Stern, Maron leaving platforms to run their own ~$10/mo feeds) did not occur; Rogan instead signed exclusive/platform deals with Spotify ($100M+ in 2020, renewed up to $250M in 2024) and Stern stayed at SiriusXM.
“I'm not sure it's gonna actually stem the tide as much as they think it will on unemployment. And so, I fear that unemployment could go to 20%, 25%, maybe even 30%, which is—”
Why missBeshore (April 1, 2020) predicted US unemployment could hit 20%, 25%, or even 30% within ~6 weeks, exceeding Great Depression peaks. Per official BLS data, the COVID peak was 14.7% in April 2020 — a record high, but well below his 20% floor and far below Great Depression peaks (~25%).
“And so all those people now, there's this thing that was a moneymaker for a couple years has gone to zero. And so I think there's something very interesting that's gonna happen where what happens to all these hosts who got places just to Airbnb them, and now the Airbnb income has sort of totally dried up? Are they gonna default on their mortgages? Are they gonna default on the rent payments if they're, if they're subleasing? Or are they gonna turn into just normal rentals?”
Why hitIn the same month as Episode 59 (March 2020), CNBC documented exactly Shaan's predicted scenario: hosts who bought or subleased (arbitrage) properties solely for Airbnb saw short-term demand collapse, struggled to stay afloat on mortgages and arbitrage leases, and converted units to long-term rentals or listed on competing platforms. Multiple named hosts confirmed the default/conversion dynamic he described.
“like I think that they can get to like $100,000 in monthly revenue, like really fast. I think their churn might be high, but I, I think that it's just because of the market size and because it's an impulse buy. And if this just saves you a little bit of time, I, I just think that they can get to $10 or $30 million in recurring revenue inside 3 or 4 years with very little capital.”
Why partialCron remained a free, pre-revenue product and never reached the predicted "$10-30M in recurring revenue" — instead it was acquired by Notion in June 2022 (within ~2 years) for an 8-figure sum, having raised only $3.5M. So the specific recurring-revenue metric was a miss, but Sam's broader thesis (capital-efficient, fast, default-alive, ~$10M+ outcome) was directionally validated by the quick 8-figure exit.
“And in my view, the virus is the needle that pops the debt bubble, right? And so in the same way that the coronavirus is fatal to people who have an underlying respiratory problem, I believe that the virus is fatal to the economy because we have an underlying debt problem. That is the underlying illness that the economy had that the virus is going to expose shortly.”
Why missShaan predicted COVID would "pop the debt bubble" and prove fatal to the economy, causing a depression rather than a recession. Instead, the NBER officially declared the 2020 downturn the shortest recession in US history (two months, Feb-Apr 2020), followed by a rapid V-shaped recovery fueled by historic stimulus — no depression occurred.
“So I tweeted this two days ago. I said, I think we're going to need a blue-collar bailout, which is a lot of people who go to jobs, retail jobs. They work in these casinos, they work on these cruise ships, they work in the stadiums, whatever. They're not going to be able to withstand being out of work for a month or two months or whatever. And that's going to really hurt the economy because it's a huge percentage of the citizens in the country.”
Why hitShaan predicted in March 2020 the government would need a "blue-collar bailout" for hourly/service workers who couldn't withstand a month or two out of work, noting Trump's team had floated a ~$1,000 stipend. Days later, on March 27, 2020, the $2.2 trillion CARES Act became law, delivering $1,200 direct payments to individuals plus a $600/week supplemental unemployment benefit and Pandemic Unemployment Assistance that expanded eligibility to exactly these out-of-work hourly and gig workers.
“But I believe— I think the corona is the needle that pops the bubble. It didn't create the bubble. The bubble was due to several other factors like corporate debt or the fact that we've just had a 10-year bull run, which is like as long as it goes. And these things always go in cycles.”
Why missShaan predicted COVID would be the needle popping a corporate-debt/bull-run bubble, triggering a severe, prolonged 2008-style recession; instead the NBER officially dated the COVID recession as the shortest in U.S. history (Feb-April 2020, just two months), and the S&P 500 staged a V-shaped recovery to new record highs by mid-August 2020 with no systemic corporate-debt collapse.
“I would do sports betting. I would bet on that industry. That's a great call.”
Why hitSince the 2020 prediction, US legal sports betting expanded across ~38 states into a $10B+ annual revenue industry, and a clear number-one company emerged: FanDuel (Flutter) leads with ~44% of US gross gaming revenue, with DraftKings second at ~34% — exactly the industry-level bet Sam and Shaan described. The narrow "10x public-company stock" sub-angle is more volatile/mixed, but the core call clearly came true.
“So it takes a while for your symptoms to show up. So you have it and you carry it for like you know, 14 days without showing symptoms. So you'll be spreading this around and not even realizing you have it. Then once you have it, you don't just like deteriorate and like your health doesn't go to shit where they, you know, you're in the hospital, they quarantine you. It's like, you know, it starts innocent and it gets worse over time. So the infectious period is so much longer that there's basically no way to quarantine this thing. There is no way for us to contain this.”
Why hitShaan's Feb 2020 claim that COVID-19 couldn't be contained because of asymptomatic/presymptomatic spread and would become a permanent recurring respiratory illness both came true: global quarantine/containment failed (WHO/CDC confirmed presymptomatic transmission was a key driver) and SARS-CoV-2 transitioned to an endemic, seasonally recurring virus. The "fifth annual flu strain" framing is directionally right (it is a coronavirus, not literally influenza, and the ~14-day asymptomatic figure was overstated), but the substantive falsifiable claims hold.
“And Pipe has raised $70 million in funding. They're kind of stupid because we use them and we have millions of dollars in credit from them, and we won't leave them because it's a wonderful service. But the reason why they're kind of stupid is because the market's a lot smaller, right, than software, and the numbers are a lot smaller, right? I think Pipe will be a multi-billion-dollar company.”
Why hitSam predicted in 2020 (ep. 51) that Pipe would become a multi-billion-dollar company; Pipe raised $250M at a $2 billion valuation in May 2021, confirming the prediction came true.
“So I like to say that my friend has this phrase, which— is that chefs are the new DJs. Yes. That people, just the same way people follow DJs now and will go to the clubs where they're at, there's— this is actually happening in sort of the food world.”
Why partialShaan's core mechanism — personality/influencer-branded food concepts that travel with the personality rather than the location — materialized strongly right after 2020 via MrBeast Burger and Virtual Dining Concepts' celebrity ghost-kitchen brands, where the food was cooked in any partner kitchen under a personality's name. But the model proved fragile: MrBeast sued to shut down MrBeast Burger in 2023 over poor quality, and celebrity virtual brands/ghost kitchens contracted by 2024, so the directionally-right thesis had a mixed, non-durable outcome.
“And then maybe in 30 years, would you pay $2,000 or $3,000 or $4,000 or $5,000 for that? Maybe. Yeah, maybe. This is why I'm saying it's awesome. I think nostalgia is big money.”
Why hitSam's 2020 thesis that nostalgia-driven collectibles would boom as young buyers gained wealth has clearly played out: by 2024-2026 the collectibles market is valued in the hundreds of billions with growth attributed to millennial/Gen Z nostalgia, younger buyers' auction share doubled (artnet 2025), and his named example of sealed VHS tapes is now a documented high-value collectible category (Yahoo/WDW, Jan 2026). The $2,000-$5,000 valuations he floated for a "30 years" horizon have already been met or exceeded well ahead of schedule.
“My prediction is, and I think many people have this prediction, is that the DTC companies, what they're going to have to do is go the route of getting sold to PE companies. Right. And which means it's going to be ruthlessly prioritized of profits. Profits. So like 5, 10 times profit. I think it's a good thing.”
Why partialThe marquee example landed: Casper, which went public at half its private valuation, was taken private by PE firm Durational Capital in early 2022 (~$575M), and 2024 M&A/banking reports (CLA Meridian, FOCUS, Hahnbeck) confirm DTC valuations decisively shifted to prioritizing profitability/EBITDA multiples over revenue multiples. But the "only route" framing was overstated — many DTC brands still IPO'd (Warby Parker, On, Allbirds 2021), were bought by strategics, or simply failed/liquidated (Allbirds sold its assets for $39M in 2026), so PE buyout-on-profit was a major but not exclusive exit.
“There are so many people around the world that would love to work remotely but can't. They don't have opportunity in their small town or country. I just think that there's going to be a huge change in our lifetimes where by the time I'm dead, I think there'll be a billion people who work remotely.”
Why hitChicola explicitly scoped the prediction to his entire lifetime ("by the time I'm dead, I think there'll be a billion people who work remotely"). He is still alive, so the terminal horizon has not arrived; there is no fixed elapsed calendar date to judge against, and current global remote-work figures (~28% of workforce per Statista, 2023) are still ambiguous on whether "a billion" has been reached.
“And he goes, at Pandora, what we noticed— Pandora isn't like a hip company, like average people use it, not like Silicon Valley nerds. And he goes, even like moms in Missouri, where I'm from, would care about their data and privacy. And I think that's actually really going to be a big thing.”
Why hitThe 2020 prediction that data-privacy concern would spread beyond Silicon Valley to mainstream consumers ("moms in Missouri") has come true: Pew Research (Oct 2023) found broad majorities of ordinary Americans concerned about data privacy (e.g., 71% worried about government use of their data, up from 64% in 2019; majorities concerned about companies, and 72% wanting more regulation), confirming the concern is now mainstream rather than a niche.
“About $250 million in sales will put us over a $1.2 billion.”
Why missHinde predicted in 2019 that LIFEAID would reach ~$250M in sales and a $1.2B+ valuation. Roughly 7 years later, public data shows LIFEAID at ~$17M revenue (ZoomInfo), with the most generous public framing being a "$100M+ brand" — an order of magnitude short of $250M in sales, and there is no evidence of anything approaching a $1.2B valuation (its 2021 Series C was a $20M raise).
“So that means they're trying to track towards like a billion-dollar-plus exit. And on the other side, you have the business model, which is to take essentially 5% of the patronage donations. And so if you just sort of calculate out, you're like, all right, to get to, you know, to be a billion-dollar business, you need to be about $100 million in revenue”
Why partialShaan's specific falsifiable mechanics proved wrong: Patreon raised to a $4B valuation in 2021 (4x the billion-dollar exit he doubted), crossed the ~$2B/yr in creator payouts he said it needed to hit $100M revenue, and demonstrated pricing power by raising its standard fee to 10% for new creators in 2025. But his pessimism was partly vindicated, as the company suffered a 70% 409A valuation drop to ~$1.4B by 2024, did multiple layoff rounds, and still has no IPO or exit. Mixed outcome.
“And the third one, which we wrote about in Trends, my prediction was that this industry is kind of like the mattress industry in 2010. It's about to change. And that is The Sill, thesill.com.”
Why partialSam's broader thesis was directionally right: the indoor-plant industry saw a mattress-style DTC boom — pandemic-era houseplant sales surged into the billions, fueled by millennials/Gen Z, with venture-backed DTC players (The Sill, Bloomscape, Horti) proliferating. But the "next mattress industry" transformation didn't fully play out: no breakout Casper-scale DTC winner emerged, and The Sill specifically contracted, closing its last retail store in 2024 to retreat to online-only.
“And so So one of my views is that batteries are gonna eat the world, just of all sizes. That if you look 20 years in the future, almost every home, almost every business in the developed and developing world will have batteries in it.”
“There's this idea that whatever is popular among elite Silicon Valley people 15 years from now will be mainstream, right? Because they're like the rich nerds who like have the time to like try to do this experimentation.”
“We believe there's 2.5 million people on Earth today that could qualify talent on Cameo, but we believe that number is going to double in the next 5 years as some of these other platforms continue to manufacture new people.”
Why hitThe "2.5 million people who could qualify as Cameo talent" is Galanis's own proprietary TAM/monetizable-pool estimate (confirmed verbatim by Contrary Research), not a publicly tracked or third-party-auditable figure; there is no public dataset measuring "people on Earth famous enough to qualify as Cameo talent," and Cameo (now private and shrunken after 2022 layoffs) never published whether that notional pool reached 5M. The only verifiable public number is the actual talent roster (~50K), a different metric.
“It's called Shopify. A friend of mine, I mentioned him earlier, Andrew Wilkinson, last week or two weeks ago, he announced that they raised $25 million or $30 million and their whole purpose of raising this money is to go out and buy Shopify plugins. And I think that it's not like early, early, but it's still early enough that there's a lot of—”
Why hitSam's 2019 prediction that Shopify plugins/apps were "still early enough" to be a WordPress-style gold rush proved correct: Shopify's own filings show the App Store grew to 21,000+ apps by Dec 31, 2025 (SEC 10-K) and Shopify paid out more than $1.3 billion to ecosystem developers in a single year. Andrew Wilkinson's Tiny/WeCommerce Shopify themes-and-apps roll-up (the $25M he cited) also scaled into a roughly $1B market-cap entity.
“I have seen the traffic for keto cereal surge, like the amount of people who search it as well as the amount of posts on Reddit. Super fascinating. If you go and read P&G, Procter Gamble, or who all the other— Kellogg, all the other cereal makers— cereal accounts for like huge— I mean, I imagine like, like it could be like $50 billion a year.”
Why hitSam predicted in 2019 that Magic Spoon keto cereal would be a breakout hit like Halo Top, and it was: the brand reached 1M+ customers, hit ~$50M revenue within two years, raised an $85M Series B (over $100M total) from celebrity investors like Shakira and Amy Schumer, and expanded into ~6,800 retail stores including Target, Walmart, Kroger, and Albertsons.
“this whole no-code economy thing, if no-code's huge, if we want to call it no-code economy, whatever, that's gonna be bigger than the sharing, this whole sharing economy stuff. There's Webflow, Zapier, If This Then That, all these things.”
Why missBy 2024-2026 the sharing economy market (~$270B-$450B; Verified Market Research put it at $387.1B in 2024) remains roughly 6-15x larger than the no-code/low-code platform market (~$25B-$41B in 2024-2025 per GMInsights, Straits, Proficient), so Sam's 2019 prediction that no-code would be bigger than the sharing economy did not come true.
“And so I'm quite bullish on remote work. Remote work and tools that make that possible. And even the good ones still all like, I think are pretty bad. And 2 years ago, if you would've told me my work, my company would be remote, I'd be like, that's the stupidest thing ever. Now it's like, it's clearly we're gonna do that.”
Why hitSam's 2019 bet that remote work and its enabling tools were booming proved emphatically right: WFH jumped from under 6% of the U.S. workforce pre-2020 to roughly 28% of all workdays, the COVID-19 pandemic mainstreamed distributed teams (making a 20-mile hiring radius archaic), and the tools he cited like Zoom saw explosive growth (~354% customer growth).
“And basically he does the math looking at what is M1 money supply, what if Bitcoin achieves, you know, 10%, 50%, 100% penetration of these various kind of segments of the money sphere that you could look at. And he backs into a $200K to $800K-ish prediction or, you know, potential.”
Why missThe cited model backed Bitcoin into a $200K-$800K per-coin valuation; ~7 years on, Bitcoin's all-time high was only ~$126,000 (October 2025) and it trades near $61,500 in June 2026 — it never reached even the $200K low end of the predicted range despite a full bull-cycle peak.
“since Eric's come in, we've quadrupled our revenue. You know, we're on a path to a billion right now. So, you know, close to half a billion in revenue with an opportunity to get to a billion in revenue over the next 4 or 5 years because we're aligned, because we believe in each other and we're working together as a team.”
Why missScudamore predicted in 2019 that O2E Brands/1-800-GOT-JUNK would hit $1 billion in revenue within 4-5 years (by ~2023-2024). The 2024 FDD shows 1-800-GOT-JUNK system-wide gross revenue of $528M growing ~9.2%/year, and recent (2022-2025) podcast appearances describe the combined three-brand O2E empire at roughly $700M — well short of $1 billion after the horizon elapsed.
“I personally think in the medium term, or during this wave, or during this run-up, we'll probably see Bitcoin peak somewhere between $150K to $200K, maybe even more, uh, US., and then it'll probably correct from there. So we're probably going to see another mania, um, it'll correct from there probably to $20,000, and then it'll probably do another run-up, you know, during the next cycle, 4-year cycle that it has, and, you know, might go to $1 million.”
Why missSvetski (Sept 2019, BTC ~$12K) predicted the then-current run-up would peak at $150K-$200K, correct to ~$20K, then run toward $1M next cycle. The cycle he referenced peaked at only ~$69K in Nov 2021 (less than half his floor), and the next cycle topped out near $126K in Oct 2025 — nowhere near $1M. Only the ~$20K correction (actual bottom ~$15.5K-$17.7K in late 2022) was directionally close, so the headline price targets clearly missed.
“I'm buying this for the long term. I believe that in the long term, the prices are going to be much, much higher. I believe Bitcoin is going to be over half a million dollars per coin.”
Why missShaan predicted in 2021 that Bitcoin would trade "over half a million dollars per coin." Roughly five years later (June 2026), BTC trades around $61K-$73K, and its all-time high ever was ~$126,198 in October 2025 — about a quarter of the $500K target — so the prediction has clearly not come true.
“This guy is going to be skewered for this. That's my prediction. This guy is gonna get— he might get fired for this. But he is definitely gonna get wrecked on all of social media for this.”
Why hitShaan's firm claim that Better.com CEO Vishal Garg would "definitely get wrecked on all of social media" came true via massive viral backlash (CNN, Reddit, widespread coverage), and his hedged "might get fired" resolved close: Garg took a leave of absence / "time off effective immediately" days after the December 2021 layoff video.
“So I think it's a huge opportunity for creators, and I think we're gonna see the rise of podcasting on YouTube really take off over the next 12 to 18 months.”
Why hitMade in early 2022 with a 12-18 month horizon (resolving ~2023), Bodnar predicted YouTube podcasting would "really take off." By the Cumulus Media/Signal Hill Insights Fall 2023 Podcast Download Report, YouTube had become the most-used podcast platform in the US, and by the Fall 2024 report it expanded that lead to an all-time high of 34%, with Forbes documenting video podcasts "exploding" on YouTube in 2024 — clearly confirming the prediction.
“I'm gonna break 20 minutes. That's my goal. And I think I'll be in the 90th percentile. 20 minutes I think is 90th percentile. I think the winner will be 15 minutes.”
Why missSam predicted he would "break 20 minutes" in the My First Muscle Challenge (100 pushups/burpees/air squats) and that the winner would hit 15 minutes; both were wrong. His own May 10, 2024 tweet shows he finished at 20:10 (just over 20 min, a commenter noted "missed it by 10 seconds"), and the actual leaderboard had competitors clocking 9:43 and 10:19, so the winner was well under 10 minutes, not 15.
“Yeah, but honestly, I'm gonna call our shot a little bit. I don't think that it's gonna be that crazy that in a year or two we get paid like $10 or $20 million a year to license out to Spotify or something like that.”
Why missSam predicted in 2022 that within "a year or two" MFM would get paid $10-20M/year to exclusively license the show to a platform like Spotify; by 2026 no such deal exists. The show remains HubSpot Media-owned (HubSpot had already acquired The Hustle/MFM in 2021) and is freely distributed on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, and YouTube rather than exclusively licensed for that fee.
“You know the hype cycle where it goes way up and then you have the trough of disillusionment and then it comes kind of back up? I think we're right at like the top of the initial hype cycle for crypto. We're gonna hit like a big, uh, like disillusionment period where a lot of people are gonna leave the space, and then it will find its footing and find some legitimate uses a few years from now.”
Why hitBen Wilson's Dec 2021 hype-cycle prediction played out as described: Bitcoin had just peaked (~$69K Nov 2021), then crashed through a brutal "trough of disillusionment" in 2022 (Terra/Luna and FTX collapses, BTC below $16-18K, ~$2T erased), before recovering by 2024-2025 to new all-time highs above $100K with institutional/ETF adoption representing maturing legitimate uses.
“I think that Time Out, though, they could be worth over $1 billion in the next 2 years once they like open up. Right now they're only worth £168 million. That's pounds. So it's like $200 million.”
Why missSam predicted Time Out Group (then ~£168M / ~$200M) could be worth over $1 billion within 2 years (by ~2024). Year-end market caps were £125.95M (2022), £180.87M (2023), and £183.99M (2024) — never anywhere near $1B (~£800M+), and the stock has since fallen to ~£38M (7.25p) by June 2026.
“You look at DALL·E and you go, okay, in 5 years, will you be able to type into DALL·E, build me a website that looks like this? And then it comes back and you say, oh, more creative, or make the logo bigger, or do this. Will design still be a thing? Right? And I've always been rewarded by not overestimating these things in the near term and just trucking on.”
“people right now are going into debt for education in the world we live in right now. We are going to move to a world where you're gonna get paid to learn. Like, that is a massive societal change. And if you're a marketer and you can make that change in the little part of the world that you're involved with sooner rather than later, that is an unfair competitive advantage that will last for years.”
“This is why I think Shopify is going to be like the biggest company in the world, because they like let people do that.”
Why missAs of June 2026 Shopify's market cap is about $141 billion, roughly 1/25th the size of the world's largest companies (Nvidia, Apple, Microsoft each $3-4T+) and well outside the top 50 most valuable firms, so it is nowhere near the biggest company in the world.
“I think she's gonna get to, my bold prediction, she's gonna get to $100 million in sales.”
Why missShaan predicted Miss Excel (Kat Norton) would reach $100M in sales. ~5 years later public figures put the business at roughly $2-5M/year (CNBC 2022: ~$2M; GetLatka: $2.9M ARR in 2024, up from $2M in 2023), roughly 20-50x short of $100M with no public sign of an inflection toward that target.
“And I guarantee you that we're going to slay aging, period, probably in the next 20, 30 years at the utmost.”
“I believe, and I will also make my best effort, I believe your podcast is going to be twice as big as ours within 2 years. That's my prediction for this thing.”
Why missShaan predicted in 2021 that Ben Wilson's "How to Take Over the World" would be twice as big as MFM within 2 years (by ~2023). Years past that horizon, MFM remains a top-3/4 business podcast (HubSpot Media flagship, top-3 Apple Business category) while How to Take Over the World is a much smaller niche history show (roughly #198 in the US Apple History category, ~868 Apple ratings, twice-monthly cadence) — it never reached parity with MFM, let alone double its size.
“He goes, here's my prediction. MrBeast or a MrBeast type person will run for president and will surprise people with the type of following they get.”
“they're either gonna have to release this and kill their own supply side, or someone is gonna come and do it and eat their lunch. I think this is one of the multi-billion dollar trends that like you could be on right now. And I don't say that for hyperbole, like literally this is the window. The tech is just now finally good enough. It's not quite there, but you need to start now and you could disrupt all of these marketplaces.”
Why hitShaan's 2022 prediction played out exactly: creative marketplaces released AI tools that compete with their own human supply (Shutterstock launched its OpenAI/DALL-E generative AI toolkit in Jan 2023; Getty launched its own AI image generator in Sept 2023), and new entrants ate the voiceover market as multi-billion-dollar businesses (ElevenLabs, founded 2022, hit a $1.1B valuation in Jan 2024 and ~$11B by 2026).
“He's gonna become a billionaire off this business. And The Rock replies, which is kind of amazing cuz The Rock is one of the most, um, famous people on social media”
Why missAs of 2026 (four years after the 2022 prediction), multiple sources (Investopedia, Celebrity Net Worth, Times of India) consistently estimate Dwayne Johnson's net worth at roughly $800 million, still below the $1B billionaire threshold; coverage describes him as merely "on the verge" of billionaire status, so he has not yet become a billionaire off Teremana.
“Like GitHub Copilot is going to generate like hundreds of millions of dollars for GitHub. They created this product, flip the switch, it's going to be a multi-billion dollar product line just because it's generating so much revenue.”
Why hitShaan predicted in 2022 that GitHub Copilot would generate hundreds of millions and become a multi-billion-dollar product line. Copilot crossed $2 billion in annual recurring revenue in 2025 with 77,000+ paying organizations and millions of individual subscribers, confirmed by multiple sources.
“So, even when the network flattens out and is now worth, I think, $200 trillion for the digital asset space, it's currently $2 trillion. That's 100x in market cap. That's huge. We've never had anything like this before.”
“This was like, I did this presentation in 2015 where I predicted there would be 1 billion remote workers in 2030. And everybody laughed at me. And I was like, even in the comments, like YouTube comments were like, this is ridiculous. Where's your sources? This is bullshit. And then COVID happened and it suddenly seems very reasonable.”
“And I think in the next 2 or 3 years, we might see like a few empires be built on top of Twitter. And it sounds kind of silly now because like, oh, it's just these like stupid, like, you know, Twitter threads of guys talking about X, Y, and Z and summarizing Wikipedia. And they're kind of right. But I think that there's going to be someone on Twitter that treats it kind of like Cheddar did. It's kind of like MrBeast, and they take it really seriously.”
Why missSam predicted that within 2-3 years (by ~2024-2025) a few people going full-time would build "empires" and eventually billionaires on top of Twitter the way MrBeast did on YouTube. By mid-2026 no individual has built a billion-dollar empire or become a billionaire from a Twitter/X-native business; the largest Twitter-native businesses are ghostwriting agencies and newsletters at thousands-to-low-millions scale, and X's entire creator-payout program totaled only ~$20M (e.g., MrBeast's top X video earned ~$264K), far below the predicted threshold.
“And so I think in the next few years, you're going to see different regimes like switch over to digital currencies that can't be controlled by any one country.”
Why hitShaan's 2022 prediction that within a few years sanctioned regimes would switch to crypto/digital currencies no single country can freeze played out: Russia legalized cryptocurrency for cross-border trade in July 2024 explicitly to bypass Western banking sanctions (CNBC, RAND), and Iran and Venezuela built crypto-based sanctions-evasion trade networks (CoinDesk Apr 2026; TRT World report). The "next few years" horizon from 2022 has elapsed and the claim came true.
“I, I'm worried about the talent that's like 23 to 28 years old, somebody we don't even know who they are yet, coming up with a payment system or whatever and unseating— so Again, I don't know, but my guess is the winner in the commerce facilitating, I'll call it, whether you want to call it payments or smart contract, whatever we're on, there's a good chance that company hasn't even been in, or that currency hasn't even been invented yet.”
“Oh, Amazon just released its Alexa product for all brands, and I can just, uh, I can just have it be like an Alexa where it just asks a question and then it just auto, like, figures out what I want.”
Why hitShaan's 2021 prediction that fast-food chains would automate drive-thru order-taking with AI voice assistants because it "makes too much financial sense" has come true: Wendy's scaled its voice-AI "FreshAI" order-taker to 500-600 drive-thrus in 2025, and Yum Brands (KFC/Taco Bell/Pizza Hut) and McDonald's are rolling out AI voice ordering across many locations. The specific vendor he named (Amazon Alexa) was illustrative; the falsifiable core — AI voice automation replacing human order-takers — is now real and at scale.
“And I actually think there's going to be a whole new job that is just basically like software supervisor. Like, I just think that's going to be a job. Like software is going to replace what a lot of people do, but then it's going to get stuck and it's not going to know how to solve some problem or it's not going to understand somebody's accent at the drive-thru..”
Why hitBy 2025-2026 the exact role Shaan described emerged: McKinsey (Nov 2025) reports companies are hiring "human in the loop" validators, agent product managers, and AI evaluation writers, and industry write-ups now list a "Human-in-the-loop Supervisor" job that "monitors edge cases, approves sensitive decisions, and provides contextual judgment where AI lacks nuance" — i.e., humans who supervise software/robots and unstick them when they fail, just as predicted.
“I think this could be one of those multi-billion dollar marketplaces that comes out.”
“I think every industry is getting decentralized. I think purchasing— you're going to see a tidal wave of purchasing platforms that help you purchase from your neighbors, purchase food locally.”
Why missBreslow predicted commerce would decentralize into a "tidal wave" of local/neighbor purchasing platforms displacing the centralized Amazon/Shopify model. Instead, by 2025-2026 e-commerce centralized further—Amazon (~37%) and Shopify (~14%) together control ~50% of US e-commerce—and Bolt itself collapsed 97% from its $11B peak to roughly $300M, with no neighbor-to-neighbor purchasing wave emerging.
“the price target for Ethereum right now, right now, the present value of Ethereum according to, according to this model is $10,000 per ETH. ETH is trading at $2,600, you know, $2.6K. If you believe this guy's model, he's undervalued currently by about 4x.”
Why missThe DCF model pegged ETH's "present value" at $10,000 (4x its early-2022 price of ~$2,600). Over the 4+ years since, ETH peaked at only ~$4,946 (Aug 2025) — less than half the target — and as of mid-2026 trades around $2,000, roughly where it was when the claim was made. The $10,000 valuation was never validated by the market.
“There shouldn't even be apps, frankly. There should be superpowers. That are suddenly there and then they're suddenly gone. And, and if you think about— and I think that we're going towards that end. I think that we will see operating systems evolve. I think that the notification systems we know them today will be totally antiquated to this more, you know, actionable interface that just is always like the sixth sense, the appendage that we never know we needed.”
“Like, it's not unreasonable that like most of the content you read on the internet is just gonna be written by computers, dude. Like, you're gonna go on Twitter and it's just gonna be auto-generated content from brands and, and, and, and people that are, you know, just plugging it into the AI and AI's spitting out good content for us all to consume. Like we may not have Hollywood at some point. It'll just be like computers making movies and the rest of us just like, you know, WALL-E.”
Why hitShaan's 2022 "soon" prediction that most internet content would be computer-written came true: Graphite's Common Crawl study found AI-generated articles surpassed human-written ones in November 2024 (over 50% of online articles), and Ahrefs found 74.2% of new web pages in April 2025 contained AI content. The hedged "no Hollywood / computers making movies" aside has not fully materialized, but the central, emphasized claim landed within ~2-3 years.
“over the next 5 years, every D2C business will have full-time content creators on staff. The best will be comped more than the execs and drive more value than anyone else in as a business.”
“what I see happening right now on a macro level is a whole generation of young people who are coming up, um, into a world and thinking about their professional trajectory in the context of meaning in a way that was not really part of the thought process of my generation being Gen X. They don't want to just find the best job that's going to pay them the most. They want to plug into the thing that feels like it's making a difference in the world in a positive way.”
“I won't say the word it's inevitable, but I think it's actually very asymmetric in favor of decentralized platforms actually winning. The main reason being that I think when all the content is open and anyone can build on it, I think that the speed of iteration that you can have and the caliber of product is just a lot higher.”
Why missFive years after this 2021 prediction, social media is still overwhelmingly dominated by centralized platforms (Facebook ~3.07B, WhatsApp ~3.0B, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok as of Oct 2025), while decentralized social remains a tiny single-digit-billion-dollar niche; Nader's own BitClout/DeSo never achieved scale and he was charged with fraud by the SEC and DOJ over it (case dismissed March 2026). Decentralized platforms did not "win" or prove asymmetrically favored.
“I think in 10 years when the 18-year-olds get in their 20s and 30s, uh, and I would bet money, I, I, I would bet my money, I think that that could work as well. So I'm bullish on this too.”
Why hitSam (2021) bet that Gen Z, more than millennials, would embrace lab-grown diamonds as today's 18-year-olds entered their 20s/30s. By 2025 this is decisively true: The Knot's 2026 Real Weddings Study shows 61% of all engagement rings now feature lab-grown center stones (up 239% since 2020), and BriteCo 2025 data (cited by Trill) shows roughly two-thirds of Gen Z engagement-ring buyers choose lab-grown, while only 22% of Gen Z prioritize natural stones vs 28% of millennials — matching Sam's exact generational framing.
“I think in the future, like in within 1 to 3 years, me and Sean and HubSpot, I think what we're gonna do is sell the podcast or do some type of licensing deal.”
Why missSam predicted that within 1-3 years (i.e. by ~2025) he, Shaan, and HubSpot would sell or do a Call-Her-Daddy-style licensing deal for MFM. As of June 2026 the show is still an in-house HubSpot Original Podcast (site reads "a HubSpot Original Podcast," "© 2026 My First Million") publishing freely on Apple/Spotify/YouTube with no public record of any sale or exclusive licensing deal in the window.
“I think it's like buying 2 or 3 tokens and not even needing to know anything more. Just chilling on those is probably the best investment of the next like 10 to 15 years. It's going to outperform everything during that time. So I think like going deeper down the rabbit hole and like learning more is actually going to fuck up your returns versus just buying the main ones and just holding for like 10 years, not thinking about it.”
“And they got 700,000 people to collect. This collectible and it's like a trophy. And then they make money on if there's value, right? So if it grows in value, they get royalties. And I think that's what you're going to see a lot of is like creators and big communities basically doing free-to-mints. Um, even though people seem, you know, people today think that selling NFTs is the future. I don't think so.”
Why partialGreg was right that free-to-mint became a major NFT model (e.g. Goblintown and other community drops thrived on free mints), but the core of his thesis — that creators would instead make money on resale royalties — failed: starting late 2022/2023, OpenSea and Blur made royalties optional, royalty revenue collapsed, and creators publicly abandoned Web3 over "disappearing royalties" (Vogue: "Without royalties, where's the money in NFTs?"). Right on the format shift, wrong on the monetization mechanism.
“I think the next 20 years is going to be about hacking our bodies, hacking genetics, being able to sort of design babies before they're born, eliminate disease at the genetic level, that kind of thing.”
“One of the things I believe is that engineering is becoming a commodity in Silicon Valley. And that the next generation of entrepreneurs are going to be not necessarily technical, but people who are more well-rounded in their skill set.”
“The best teachers in the world are gonna have millions of students. And they're gonna make millions of dollars as they should, um, for being amazing teachers. And I've always been looking out for, and I've been investing in every platform I can get my hands on, anywhere I can see that teachers are able to do that, where they're able to scale and have millions of students”
Why hitShaan's 2021 prediction that top teachers would reach millions of students and make millions via internet platforms (he cited podcasting) clearly came true: the episode's own subject Andrew Huberman, a Stanford professor, now draws millions of weekly listeners and has ~$30M net worth (~$2M/yr from one podcast sponsor alone), while online educators like Ali Abdaal (6M subs, reported ~$5.7M/yr) and 300+ Teachers Pay Teachers sellers earning $1M+ further confirm the pattern.
“And, uh, if you think that Bitcoin gets to $500K, ETH gets to $50K, Gemini ends up going public, they will actually be worth more than Zuck, who's worth $130 billion today. And I think that that is just a crazy, you know, the sequel to the Social Network movie is that these guys actually end up, uh, you know, wealthier than, than Zuck in the end.”
Why missThe 5-year prediction (2021->2026) hinged on Bitcoin hitting $500K and ETH $50K; as of June 16, 2026 BTC is ~$66K and ETH ~$1,815, and Zuckerberg's net worth rose to ~$215B (vs $130B then) rather than stalling. Gemini did IPO (Sept 2025) but at only ~$3-4B, leaving the twins worth low single-digit billions each — nowhere near overtaking Zuckerberg.