Speaker 1All right, everybody, welcome back to the number one podcast in the world, the all in podcast. And I'd like to start by saying that all in recognizes that we are on the sacred land in Austin, Texas of the Cato, the Comanche, the Kickapoo and the Tonka Wada. And we appreciate all their sacrifices and bring us here. And we will be evaluating I just talked to our HR department be evaluating a fifth bestie Brad to white to male. So we're looking for alternative DEI fifth besties to include in the roundtable. Wow. So some big changes coming to the DEI is back is what you're saying is back. Sax, what did you have anything for the docket this week? I have an announcement. You have an announcement.
Speaker 2Okay. I'm transitioning
Speaker 1from a douchebag to an ass.
Speaker 3Sax, where do you want to start? You want to start with?
Speaker 4I think there's some really important news around SaaS out there. I mean, maybe Salesforce launched a couple of new features. Definitely top of docket type material.
Speaker 2I'd like to start with Science Corp. Words nobody in our fan base have ever said. I'm ready to go.
Speaker 5You guys want to talk about exponential time hypothesis?
Speaker 1I think that's what the audience wants. They want the SaaS update from Sax and the science update and then we can get our market review and we'll wrap the show up. No, in all seriousness, there was an election this week. We had an amazing live stream over a million views so far. Crazy, Chamath. I don't know if you knew this, but 400,000 people tuned in live making us, I believe the millionth time. I don't know if you knew this, I believe the number one election night live stream.
Speaker 2Not true. It was 500,000. And just to put it in perspective, the far right streamers got about 87,000. The far left streamers got 250,000. We got 500,000, which was bigger than most cable as well. So we were the biggest and bigger than I think most, if not all cable as well.
Speaker 4Apparently America wants hot takes from tech bros. I don't know who would have thought. Who would have thunk it?
Speaker 1And by the way, that was with only three of us. All-stars on the court. Sacks had a board meeting Thursday night and couldn't make it. Tuesday night. He was busy.
Speaker 4Yeah, I was busy that night. I was, I think I was passed out in the bar.
Speaker 1You passed out?
Speaker 4Sacks is the only guy who
Speaker 1goes to the bar with his own bottle of tequila. He's like, can you put this behind the bar and serve it to me on $50 a glass? Special thanks to Ted Cruz, Rahm Emanuel, Shane Copeland of Polymarket. Man, did he have a great night. I think Polymarket nailed it. 99% of their prediction, markets turned out to have it perfectly. The hilarious fifth bestie, Tim Dillon, Taylor Lorenz based. Taylor Lorenz was fantastic and insightful. Brad Gerser did a solid job, brought some charts and Ben Shapiro from the right. So it was a really great, great panel. And today we're going to take a pretty systematic approach to what happened this week. We're going to start with a post-mortem on the midterms. And then second, we're going to talk about the second midterm. And then we're going to talk about the second midterm. And then we're going to talk about the second half of Trump's term, the next two years. So I'm sure data centers will come up in our, in our recap, post-mortem, et cetera, but we're going to do a deep dive into the AI trade potentially cracking. So let's start with our post-mortem on what just happened in the midterms. Obviously the Democrats sweeped both chambers of Congress and they won at least 29 governor races. Dems will wind up with 54, 55, or 56 seats, depending on how Alaska and Mississippi wind up. They have a lot of, um, votes still coming in, in the house. Dems will have at least 250 seats, maybe even 260. The bigger story is where the Republicans lost deeply red states that haven't gone blue in generations went blue, including the great state of Texas. Please don't blame me. I've only been here for three years and, uh, you might be surprised at what my voting ticket looked like. Kansas. Iowa, South Carolina for the first time in decades, Trump won all of those states by double digits just two years ago compared to 2024, the GOP lost ground in every voter group, even white men. So let's go around the horn sacks. People want to hear from you most of all, I guess. So what went wrong here? What are the lessons the Republican party can learn? And what did the Democrats do right in the last 18 months leading up to the midterms?
Speaker 4This was a slacking. This was a blowout. It was, I believe the biggest midterm loss since the Watergate midterm loss. So this was obviously a big defeat for the Republicans. There's no sugarcoating it. What's the reason for that? I believe the vice president JD Vance explained it very well. It was this war. And the only thing I would add to that is it was this war and the economic consequences that follow from the war. So what am I talking about? Price of gas. It was around three bucks before the war went over four and higher. Price of diesel, even higher. And then that factors into the cost of food, all the goods that have to be transported. Also, fertilizer costs went up. And so you saw the inflation rate at the beginning of the year, back in January, before the war, it was down to 2.4%. We finally had that problem licked just about, remember it was 9% under Biden. And in the first year of the Trump administration, we brought it down to 2.4. The market was expecting multiple rate cuts this year. And we were forecasting that it was going to be down to 2.4%. And we were forecasting that 5% GDP growth, which I don't think was too overly ebullient based on what we were seeing at that time, combined with the expectation of rate cuts. Aggressive, but not unbelievable.
Speaker 1Unrealistic. Not unrealistic, yes.
Speaker 4Okay. And by the way, the prediction markets back in January were showing a 70% chance of Republicans holding the Senate. And then the House was perceived to be a toss up. I think that if this election had happened back in January, it would have been a pretty successful one for the Republicans. What happened since then? Well, you got inflation going from 2.4% to 3.7%. Again, mostly driven by the cost of gas and diesel and all these other products where you have to pay a higher cost of transportation. And you end up not having any rate cuts. You end up getting a rate hike that brought the cost of mortgages to roughly 7.5%. And that overall fed this narrative around affordability. So it's the war plus, the perception of the lack of affordability is what really created this tidal wave. Now, you know, I have to admit, I thought that, I mean, look, I didn't think this would be a great election for Republicans, but I thought that it wouldn't be this bad. I was wrong about that. You said it was a spritz.
Speaker 1It would be a spritz.
Speaker 4I thought it could be a spritz. That was based on a couple of things. Number one is that the last few elections, the pollsters have all been wrong and Trump has always managed to defy the odds. And I thought, that this polling data must fall into that pattern. And then the second thing is that the economy is not that bad. I mean, in fact, it's quite good. So just today, we had a new jobs report. It was a very robust jobs report. The number of new jobs created is being revised up. You've got unemployment ticked down to almost record low, 4.1%. You've got still pretty healthy GDP growth. In the first half of the year, it was around 2.1 to 2.5%. And then in the third quarter, the tracking by GDP now is 3.7%. So I thought, given the fact that you got great employment, you got solid GDP growth, I thought the fact that inflation was too high would not result in this type of tidal wave. I thought it'd be more like the Biden midterms, where he had extremely high inflation, but the economy itself was still pretty decent. And it ended up being more of a red spritz as opposed to a red wave. So that was my pattern recognition. It was wrong. And I think one of the reasons why it was wrong here is because I think the public is in a pretty ordinary mood. They're very concerned about affordability. It doesn't matter how good the economy actually is. It matters how good people perceive it to be for them. And in the first year of the Trump administration, we made enormous progress in delivering real post-tax household income. It rose by like 3.5%, 1%. But because of the inflation numbers over the last six months, you're starting to chip away at that, right? Because again, as long as inflation is growing faster than your wages, you're losing purchasing power in real terms. I think the electorate is getting ornery about that. And just one other thing I want to say about it, which is there's one other piece of why the war, I think, was so bad, which is it fractured the Republican coalition and the Republican base. Jake, how you've pointed this out. We lost all the podcast bros. I mean, obviously it was Tucker Carlson and Joe Rogan and Theo Vaughn and that whole set. Megan Kelly. So, you know, a house divided against itself cannot stand. I mean, we lost a huge part of our base. And I would say that the Republicans in particular are dependent on the podcast circuit. Let's call it alternative media. Why? Because the mainstream media hates us. Legacy media hates us. They will never give us a fair shot.
Speaker 1And they're 90% left. So it is what it is. Of course. Yeah.
Speaker 4And I think one of the reasons why, Trump produced such a resounding victory in 2024 as he appealed. to that whole podcasting circuit. And frankly, we should have done a better job giving them all front row seats in the White House press room. We should have stayed connected to all of them because they are our media. By the way, they don't, you know, they don't work for us. They're willing to defect, obviously. They have their own opinions.
Speaker 1They have their own opinions, but
Speaker 4we have to pay attention. I think our side has to pay a lot of attention to them because without them, we don't have any media that supports us. So I think that losing them was a big deal. It fueled the sense. And I think that a lot of those people showed up and then did a protest vote because they wanted to send the message that they want out of this war.
Speaker 1Friedberg, just a couple of quotes for you to react to. Ted Cruz called it a Watergate-level repudiation. Chamath Dasanta said, quote, close to an extinction-level event for the current GOP. And in a very long ex-post that J.D. Vance did that was pretty surprising for everybody, that there's some reporting. It was approved, maybe not approved. We'll get all that out later. But what's important is what he said. He's in line with USAC's. The Iran war was the driving force here in the loss, and that the GOP has to rebuild trust with voters on four axes, ending the war, focus on cost of living, putting America first, and maybe a little controversially change our relationship with Israel. What are your thoughts on J.D.'s post? Any other reactions? And just why did this turn out to be a tsunami?
Speaker 5I don't know if it's as much of a positioning and marketing issue as it was sort of fundamental. I'll go back to the clip from the prediction show right after Trump was elected. Can we pull that up, Nick? I think that the party line is that socialism was defeated in this election cycle, and that there was a resounding, kind of vote from the American populace against socialism. And I actually think, my contrarian belief is that we'll see a rise, a dramatic rise in socialist movements in 2025 in the United States. And I think that we are going to see, as Gavin pointed out, an acceleration of progress. We're going to see an unleashing of economic growth because of deregulation and AI. But I do think that some industries and some companies are going to be huge winners, and some companies are going to be huge losers. There's going to be some, some parts of the economy that are going to be big winners, and some parts of the economy that are going to be big losers. So I just want to zoom out on-
Speaker 1Well, I think you nailed it there, Freeberg. That was very accurate for the first year of
Speaker 5the presidency. And so if you just zoom out a little bit, the macro condition was there was a moment after the election when there was this idea of Doge, this idea that government spending would be reduced, which I believe fundamentally would have affected the cost of living. And we can argue about that. People disagree. They wash that point away. I do think it is the fundamental driver on the cost of living. Government spending. The more the government spends, the more expensive things get. I believe that. And we can go through the analysis on what happened in France. You know, government spending as a percent of GDP is one metric. How many people are employed or depend on government checks is another metric. But as the government's involved in more of the economy, things get more expensive. So when Doge was coming around, the idea of Doge, the idea of government efficiency, the idea of making sure that every dollar spent by the government has a positive ROI for the people was a great idea. We visited DC in March, of 2025. And we visited Elon and we talked about Doge and he was struggling. It was pretty clear he was struggling, not just internally, but with Congress and with the public perception of what was being done there. And I came away from that visit in March of 2025, where I also met with multiple members of Congress on that visit, Republicans and Democrats who did not give a shit about improving government spending efficiency, did not care about the total government spending as a percent of GDP. It was not a priority. And on June 5th of 2025, Elon left, and it was the end of Doge. The idea that Doge was going to continue was over. And I said China just won because to me, at that moment, the day that this ended, that this administration ended that effort, is the day that it was clear that we were going to have a runaway cost of living and a challenge for progress for the majority of Americans. And the end result of that is voting in more of these socialist principles, socialist policies, socialist politicians. So for me, my tweet on June 5th was China has just won, was the day that it was announced that Doge was basically coming to an end. And then the one big beautiful bill passed in July of 2025, which had some entitlement cost reductions, but all of the fundamental spending of the government has not been reduced. And we're still running a $7 trillion a year government budget with a $2 trillion a year deficit. So I don't think Congress was ever on board. It is a structural fundamental problem. And no one's on board with it. And I think that was key to what happened here. For the majority of Americans, they don't feel like they're getting ahead. They don't feel like they can afford things. They don't feel like healthcare is accessible, and they are struggling. And it wasn't addressed. My view was it wasn't addressed in the way it should be. And we can all disagree on policy matters. But that's my view. And as a result, people still felt that way. And that's what drove the vote. But I do think on AI, it's this idea of this oligarchy. If I'm not getting ahead, someone else is because quote, the economy is growing, quote, the stock market is growing, who is getting all of that growth, because I'm not getting it. The AI guys are the tech oligarchs are and so on. And I think that that's why AI was poised for this. But I do think that there was some external influence that happened on AI. And I'll pull up this chart here real quick, which I shared around on the group chat yesterday, which is an incredible Gallup study that shows AI optimism and pessimism in countries around the world. The most optimistic country for AI is China, 93% of Chinese citizens think AI will mostly help people in the country. And 93% of people think AI will make their daily lives better in China. And we can believe or not believe how Gallup does their surveys in China, the US is fourth last, we are worse than Afghanistan. And we're just slightly better than Malawi and Bangladesh. We're fourth on the list of countries at 36% of Americans believing that. And so I think that in addition to the priming, of the pump, which is if I'm not getting ahead, someone's getting ahead. And the AI guys, because we create the AI in this country, are getting ahead, made it really easy to attack with this oligarch narrative, that there is a group of people that are benefiting and making a lot of money. And then there's a large percentage of people that aren't. And so I think it's pretty clear that this this vector was a really effective one, whether it persists or not, if TBD and I think we should talk a little bit about what's next later in the show. Because I do think AI is going to play a role in how the politics are going to play out over the next year.
Speaker 1That's two incredibly concise and candid recaps of what happened there, Chamath. And just as a side programming note, great job on Rick Rubin's podcast this week. If you haven't checked that out, Chamath was on Rick Rubin, and it was awesome.
Speaker 5Thank you. Chamath, did you sit barefoot in his backyard with him, Chamath, or?
Speaker 2Yeah, I mean, by the way, when you go to Rick Rubin's recording studio, he walks you around and he's like, "Oh, Chamath, here's Bob Dylan's old touring van. That's where we recorded Adele's album." And then he's like, "This is where Kanye and I laid down this album, and then here's where Jay-Z and I. " I mean, it is the craziest place, but it puts you in a totally centered state of mind, I got to say. And yeah, and we sat around in his studio barefoot, sitting across each other, just talking, and then they put it out as a conversation.
Speaker 1In 10 years, he's going to be telling people, "This is where I interviewed Chamath Palihapitiya." It's amazing. I mean, he's going to be telling people, "This is where I interviewed Chamath Palihapitiya." lowest unemployment of our lifetimes. And we still had the tsunami. When you look back on it, Chamath, what do you think happened here? And you said you were in a moment of great candor and self-reflection during the live stream. You said, hey, listen, I had a blind spot here.
Speaker 2I got it totally, totally, totally wrong. I got it totally wrong. Okay. Unpack. I'll go through all the ways in which I got it wrong, but I just want to first acknowledge what my blind spot is. Like most people's blind spots, but I can just speak for myself, is through the lens of my own lived experience and very narrowly what is in my best interests. And I think what we had was a move away from the culture wars. That was very much in my best interest, but I think it was in everybody else's best interests as well. I don't think that was on the ballot. But what I don't think I understood clearly enough, and I think that this election has made extremely clear, is that since COVID, we have moved past political ideology. And I want to say this again. I do not think Democrats or Republicans matter. That is my real takeaway after this election. There is a central block of people that vote the prescient issues of our time. It was a gargantuan win for Biden. Then it was a gargantuan win for Trump. And then it was a gargantuan win for the Democrats in these midterms. What are these people voting for? I think what they are shouting now and they were trying to signal and now they are shouting is a broad-based belief that the economy has completely decoupled from reality and is broken. The economic reality in America is broken. There is a small percentage of people, the four of us on this pod and all of our friends, who are the asset owners of America. We have benefited in every weather condition. When rates were zero, we benefited because we were able to build our businesses with very cheap capital. When rates were high, we benefited because we had pricing power. And in every condition in between, whether there was tariffs, whether there were not tariffs, whether there were subsidies, whether there were not subsidies, we've all managed to continue to accumulate and grow assets. But we are few and far between. And then there's everybody else who are wage earners. And the structural capacity of the American economy to support and grow wage earners is broken. It's clear. Why do I say that? I do not think, and I disagree with Freebrook, I don't think this has anything to do with socialism. I don't think the far left won particularly more than they were expected. I don't think the far right won particularly more than was expected. This was a complete and total repudiation. This was a complete and total repudiation about the state of the economy. The economy is broken. I have a few charts to support my point of view. Number one, if this was ideological, and if ideology mattered, money in politics would have had a more direct impact on the election. But when you look at the amount of money that was spent, all of this money was wasted. All the money that went into taxes was wasted. All the money that went into Senate raises in Ohio. The better bet was to look who was being spent money on. If you had taken the opposite candidate who had no money, you would have been overwhelmingly more right. So money follows ideology. Money did not work in this election. Ergo, in my opinion, ideology did not matter that much. Next chart. Redistricting and gerrymandering also follows ideology. You try to set up the geographies. You try to set up the geographies in a way so that you could gain more seats. Look what happened of the 15 Republican seats that were redrawn so that they could capture all of them. Democrats won 11 of them. Republicans only won one. So again, ideological gerrymandering also totally failed. So we have ideological spending in politics, failure. Ideological gerrymandering, failure. Next chart. Next chart. The people who had were centrists, normal people. These are not people running around talking about communism. These were people that very narrowly focused on one thing and one thing only, which was affordability and the functioning of the United States economy. And they spoke to a large block of people that were both Democrats and Republicans. Initially supported Biden, overwhelmingly supported Trump, and then overwhelmingly went to the Democrats, largely to vote. The displeasure with the economy. That's it. I don't believe Iran really had much to do with it. I don't believe Israel had much to do with it. I don't believe AI had much to do with it. This is the American society asking for a reset on the economic principles on which we operate. And I think the obvious thing to do for the ambitious candidate on the left or the right is to take these three charts together. And I think the obvious thing to do for the ambitious candidate on the left or the right and have one very precise takeaway, which is the economic populist platform will be the one that you can take to the presidency in 28. And the path is really straightforward. Because if you look at what happened to Harris, and then you look at how aggressively all of these states moved towards what I think is economic centrism, what you have is for either side to take. I think the obvious thing to do for the ambitious candidate on the left or the right is to not worry about whether you're a Democrat or whether you're a Republican. But if you embrace reasonable standards of economic fairness, you will win. So I got this wrong. I thought top-down economics can still work. I thought that when you had asset owners building assets and investing in the economy, these things can get to everybody else. It's clearly not happening. It's not true. I have to update my priors. And my new framework is, we need to figure out how to stop all the loopholes. We need to figure out how to do some of the things we've talked about before. Stop the federal underwriting of loans. Combine that with getting rid of student debt. Take all federal taxes beneath a certain band, probably $150K to zero. There's all kinds of things that can be done now to allow the wage-earning class to feel more ownership of the United States economy. And until it happens, my prediction is not that. I'm not saying that Democrats or Republicans win, but they will violently keep going back and forth away from the status quo. Because if you are in power and you do nothing, they will vote against you. So now the Democrats have a really interesting challenge. What will you do with the majority in both houses? Are you actually going to try to legislate economic fairness? Or are you going to spend your time distracted with impeaching Trump? Because then you will find yourself, if the Republican candidate embraces the economic populist platform, you'll find yourself in a situation where you're going to have to stop losing the way the Republicans lost in the midterms.
Speaker 1All right, incredibly well explained there, Chamath, and I agree. Now's not the time to dunk. Now's the time to dissect all this. And who could have ever seen this coming? Nick, roll the tape. This is why they will lose the midterms. The Democrats are going to shellac the Republicans in the midterms. Trump sold people that prices would go down. We're back up to 3% inflation, folks. Not only is it not going down, it's going. Trump has failed the middle class. That's the bottom line. It's basically going to result in the Democrats doing a clean sweep in the midterms. Trump promised not to start a war. He did. He promised to solve inflation. He didn't. The end.
Speaker 4You know, a stop clock is right twice a day, J. Cal.
Speaker 1Absolutely. I did cheat
Speaker 4out, but let me. My take on that is that you were not right until the war began. That last clip that you did, you were vindicated. You were vindicated, right? Because it's the war and inflation. I mean, those are the two things, specifically the affordability problem that results when you have this inflation. Look, price of gas, everyone goes to the pump to fill up every week or two, and the average household is paying $200 a month more in gas costs. Then they go to their grocery store, and everything is much more expensive because the cost of agricultural products has gone way up, and so on down the line. At the end of the day, that's what matters to people. It's their pocketbook. It's like, do you have more purchasing power in real post-tax, post-inflation terms? That's how you measure if you're doing better off. And the Trump administration delivered that in the first year. We did. 3.1% increase in real household income. It was negative during the Biden years, and it was positive during Trump 45. What happened? The war begins. Price of gas and diesel and all. The rest goes up, and purchasing power starts to go in reverse. And then on top of it, you lose the young males who are, again, the fans of all these podcasts. That's where they get their news from. Young males flipped their vote by 36 points in this midterm relative to the 2024 election. So again, in my view, it's very simple. It comes back to the war and its economic consequences. Now, here's the good news. If we get out of the war, we can make rapid progress on this. All the other economic numbers are still good. Again, job growth, the job report today was great. Economic growth is still good. There are lots of very positive economic numbers. The issue is fundamentally the price of oil, the price of gas, the price of diesel, and the way these things flow through the economy. If the war has ended quickly, those prices will drop very quickly. Inflation will come back down. That will give the Fed permission to cut rates. Mortgage costs come back down. And we can get back on track.
Speaker 1Sachs, you're right. The endless war, endless inflation were the straw in the back of the camel. But I think you're absolutely wrong when it comes to what happened previously. All of the polls were correct. Everybody on the right said the polls were wrong. All the prediction markets were correct. And everybody on the right was saying that those were wrong and those were being manipulated. And for a year plus on this. And I'd like to dissect this moment by moment. I had pointed out this chart. And this is the silver bulletin, which is just absolutely nailed this cycle. They did a great job. Nate Silver is phenomenal at what he does. And here, if you look at it, it's really worth looking at. It's not just the war. Liberation Day. People forget the tariffs. Trump started the term at 5% plus net approval rating. He ended it at negative 28. This is like an over 30% swing. And Liberation Day, as I pointed out when it happened, was far too chaotic. And I spoke to the CEO of Cuts Clothing, if you remember. We had this discussion on the podcast. And he's a Trump loyalist. And people were arguing at that time, oh, these tariffs are going to be great. These are awesome. And that no prices would be added. And the American public didn't have to pay for it. And this was going to balance the budget. Not only did it not balance the budget, it did spike inflation. And President Trump should have just worked with Congress. which remember he had to go to the Supreme Court. there. And this is a leak in President Trump's game. Then over the summer, we had some pretty hot discussions here about the ICE enforcement. And I said, listen, you know, Americans, including people I know in law enforcement, people I know, who employ people who have been here for 20 years, and yes, who are illegal aliens, technically, nobody wants to see this. Nobody wants to see masked agents without body cameras, beating people up in without their badges on, that was a huge mistake. And he had a massive drop, and then started to hit negative 20% net rating. This is all before the Iran war started. And if you look at the summer of 25, with those ICE actions, it also had the Epstein files. And that's where you lost all the podcast bros. They did not want to have Trump renege on sending the Epstein files out. And of course, you get all the way to the war. And the endless allegations of grifting, and the endless inflation, and that then just plummeted from 20 to negative 23. That's a series of events that happened. And I just want to stay for the record here. I'm an independent, I vote now 55% Democrat in my life, 45% Republican, when we started this podcast was probably 7030. I have moved significantly towards the right, because of the lunacy of the left. But what happened here is the Trump 2.0 agenda, I think got abandoned. And there were tons of distraction. President Trump has the right ideas. But often his execution is extremely variable. And that's just a way of being very generous to say it's chaotic. And if you have that chaotic moment, and then everything is about the data centers, everything's about our industry, everything's about helping us. And people laugh and mock at the idea of raising the minimum wage from obviously sort of pointed out here during your talk, the K shaped economy, is kind of what you were invoking there. It doesn't feel fair to people. And I think you made a very accurate point that people are just swinging and just hoping somebody will care about the bottom half of non equity holders. That's exactly what it is. And Trump didn't make people feel like he was working for them. That's why they abandoned him. And the grifting allegations, whether they're true or not, is all going to come out. But that's what we need to talk about. And it leads us to our second topic here, our second topic, which is going to be the second topic, which is going to be what the next 24 months are going to be about. So, Sax, you wanted to get to this next 1824 months, is there a path to redemption for President Trump? Is there a way to turn this presidency around? And maybe save his legacy?
Speaker 4Well, first of all, let me put up some charts here. So you guys are doing the chart game. And I didn't know we were going to play the chart game today. So can you best judge? Yeah, Nick, can you throw up these charts? Okay, so so look, J Cal, there's all sorts of issues out there that people are going to point to. And I know you've got yours. And I'm not saying that every single issue has been executed perfectly. I do think that President Trump deserves enormous credit for completely sealing the border and solving that immigration issue. Agree with that, just as an example. But look, again, the question is, why was this not a normal midterm result? I think that the Trump approval rating versus the price of gas, it maps perfectly. Okay, Trump net approval maps to the price of gas. Okay, next chart. This was the prediction market for which party will win the Senate in 2026. And what you see is that the Republicans were expected to win by a very large margin throughout the entire first year of the Trump presidency, all through the things you were talking about. J Cal, okay, so the tariff rollout did not affect this whatsoever. That was the Liberation Day in April, not even a blip here. Okay, April of 2025 wasn't a blip.
Speaker 1And to be clear, not a blip on the Senate balance.
Speaker 4Yeah, yes, but but I'm using the approval rating I showed. I get it. But I'm using this as a proxy for what just happened where we lost what like eight or nine Senate seats. Okay, where does it start to change? March, March of 2026. What happened? When did the war begin? February, 28th of 2026. Very clear. That's where everything starts to change here in terms of losing the Senate. Next chart. Okay, now, just ask voters, what'd you vote for? Why'd you vote? Question, thinking about your vote for Congress, how important to you was the war in Iran? Crucial, 34%, a major factor, 40%. So basically, 74% of the electorate said, either crucial or a major factor. And then of those, they broke massively for blue. And this doesn't just include Democrats, obviously, it includes a lot of independents. And it even includes, I would say younger Republican voters, there's a huge divide in the party, I think, between you kind of got the Fox News group, it's kind of the over 50 or even over 60. They're, I think, still, supportive of the war. But you look at the younger voters, young males, highly against this, again, it ties back to the podcast, bros. So again, there's abundant data to show what I've been saying. Now, your question was, can Trump fix this? I think absolutely. Because the root of the
Speaker 1problem here- What's your top three things he can do to fix it? Just get out of the war. Okay, end the war.
Speaker 4That's my number one, my number two, and my number three. Because what will happen? The price of Brent crude will drop precipitously. On the day of the election, the price of Brent crude dropped 10%. Is that because something changed in the straight of war moves? No, it's because the market started to price in the mere possibility that the war would end sooner. And we got a 10% cut in the price of Brent crude, it will go from, you know, it's been as high as 117, it'll go from 110 to 70. If this war ends, gas prices will drop, diesel will drop, the price of food will drop, and then the underlying strong economic growth, the GDP growth, and the employment picture, which are still robust, will come into focus. And I think that Trump's popularity will rebound maybe back in the 40s. So that's the thing we need to do. And if we don't do that, look, if this war continues- Hold on, let me stress this one point. If the war continues, the Republicans will continue to bleed popularity.
Speaker 2I don't think this is the war in Iran. Meaning, it is in as much as it adds to a broken economy. Since COVID, the economy has been structurally broken. And I just think that there's a huge voting block that keeps swinging back and forth to either side, asking them solve the problems and giving people mandates to solve a problem. That's why I think somebody needs to understand economic populism. Do you buy that argument? Or do you think that it's more narrowly just the war in Iran?
Speaker 4I don't want to make it like so overly abstract. Like, to me, the issue is affordability. Okay? And I think the electorate really cares about that. It's like the central pocketbook issue. I agree. And I think that both economic data and the prediction markets showed that in January of 2026, we were in pretty good shape on that issue. And since then, we went backwards. And I believe that we can get in good shape again, without turning to socialism or completely restructuring
Speaker 2the economy. Remember the 24 election? I agree with you that economic affordability can be an abstract term. But I think that the voting electorate is smart enough to use a message as a vessel. And I remember in 24, the vessel, which again, I didn't hear it loud enough. But if I look back, and maybe I'm just imposing my narrative bias on it, was do you remember the whole controversy around the price of eggs? And Trump hammered Biden and Harris on the price of eggs over and over? It wasn't the price of eggs. I mean, yes, it was. But it was a window into a broad problem and an idea. And I think gas is a problem. But I also think it is a window into a broad class of problems. And I think people focus their energy on a thing because it's easier to message around a thing repeatedly. But the broader basket of
Speaker 4problems are made. Gina Hinhoso, this is the new governor-elect of Texas. So frankly, it's a race I wasn't even paying attention to because I don't think anyone expected Greg. Yeah, we assumed Abbott was going to win. Going to win. A very successful three-term governor in Texas, presided over an economic boom. That's why we moved to this state. And we thought, I mean, honestly, I think it was the biggest shocker of the whole night. Anyway, so I started watching some interviews with her to kind of catch up on what I had obviously missed. And I watched one interview she did with the New York Times, where the interviewer kept trying to draw her out on social issues, like let's call it woke issues, identity politics. And she said, listen, I'm not participating in your culture war. And then she laid out the case for economic populism as she saw it. And then she connected it to data centers, which is that the reason why data centers are bad is because they're not going to be able to do anything about it. And so I was like, well, I'm not going to do anything about it. And they are making your utility bills go up, right? You're paying more for electricity and the data centers are using up your water. think that's why the data center issue was resonant is because, I mean, there is anxiety about AI and the potential job loss that could come from that. But I think the big reason why people hate the data center so much is they perceive that it's driving up their utility bills. And the oligarchs are getting rich off the data centers while they're paying more, which goes to the oligarchs are getting tax breaks, and you're getting higher utility bills.
Speaker 1Which goes to Chamath's point of people feel they're unheard, and they're going to take the only action they can, which is going to the voting booth, Friedberg. So Friedberg, you've heard my breakdown, you heard Chamath's breakdown, and then Sachs with a little bit of a repuddle there. Let's do an alternate history here. Friedberg, if the war had not started, what would the midterms have looked like? And then what do you think happens in the next 18 months of Trump's presidency? Is there a way to turn around his legacy? And if there is a way, what two or three pieces of advice would you give this administration to focus on in their remaining 18 to 24 months of power?
Speaker 5I kind of agree with the notion that the AI data center, hysteria, and the hatred for the Iran war are both rooted in this idea that you haven't solved my economic problems first. So I don't think that they're the primary, I think that they're a reflection of the consequence of not focusing on my issues first. My economic cost problem first. So I think that's still the biggest issue. I think two things are about to happen in 27. One is, I think it's going to be very hard with this Congress and the sitting president to come to a resolution on a clean budget. And as a result, I think things are going to continue as is and I worry about the cost of things continuing to climb. And by the way, I'll just reflect on Chamath's point. COVID was an accelerating moment for this unaffordability problem for people that don't own assets in the U.S. And the reason is we doubled government spending. That's what happened. And by doubling government spending, everything inflates, including assets, which is why people who are asset owners benefit and people who are earners for their labor lose, because the cost of everything goes up. And if you're making money from a paycheck every week, you can't afford your health care, your education, your housing bill, your food, your gas. I do think that the Iran war was acutely off target, because it was declarative at the beginning, we're not going to do any new wars. And then there was a big war that was started. So it was an easy target. So I do think that this this budget question is a big one, what's going to happen with spending in 2728. And as we talked about a couple weeks ago, I think the bond market will tell you where they think that's headed. Because if we continue this $2 trillion, your deficit spending, things are going to remain expensive, they're going to get worse. And it's not about people choosing socialism as an ideology to counter Chamath's comment earlier. I'm not saying people are choosing socialism as an ideology. or as a set of principles. Socialist outcomes arise from the policies that people think are going to solve their cost issues. That's what ends up happening here, that people think the best way to solve the cost of things is to have the government do more. And then you have more socialist policies. It's not that people are saying I want to be a socialist. And that's where you end up in this slippery slope spiraling problem. And I worry about how we're going to resolve to a budget going into 27 and 28. I do think AI is going to continue to be this really big political hot point. I think the like, AI is almost like the ring of Sauron. Okay. And like, both sides want the ring of Sauron. It's this ultimate kind of tool, this ultimate power. It is a risk to the state. It is fundamentally something that takes power out of the government's hands and distributes it. Let's just assume that there isn't a company making AI and there isn't a company that's that owns all the data centers. Assume that there's a million data centers, and a million variants of open source AI. In a world like that, there is no oligarchy that's making money off AI. So just assume that that's the case for a moment, and that we can get to that end state. In that end state, the tools of AI pull a lot of power, a lot of influence away from government from the state. And as that happens, I think the actors that want the state to be central, central command, central planning, central authority, and ultimately, central power structure, are going to react violently against that. And they're going to want to have the AI. So I actually think the calls to stop the development of AI are actually calls for them to have absolute control over AI. Because it is way too powerful for them to not have the control over the AI. They want the AI. And I think a lot of the policy stuff that we're gonna end up seeing here, and this is where if you play the game theory out, I still think, I could be wrong, but I still think, we end up in a place where the government says we want to regulate compute, they're not going to regulate the chips or the models, because those are too hard to kind of catch up on. And you're never going to be able to regulate development of software, it's very hard to regulate deployment of software. But the utilization of that software is fundamentally constrained by how much access you get to compute. I think the data centers end up being treated like utilities in the future. And I do think that the government are going to try and move down this path, they're going to realize it's the best path to get what I do. Yeah, and at a minimum, they're going to get a great tax basis.
Speaker 1I think a lot of the data center stuff is performative, they just want to get a better deal. If you look at how Gina from Texas looked at data centers, she's looking at it from the community first perspective. If you look at how Trump, President Trump looked at it, it was from the company's and the economy, the GDP's perspective first. But they both wind up in the same place, which is don't disturb your neighbors, don't pollute. You know, be a good citizen and maybe splashy cashy a little bit of the funds there. By the way, Jason. So in terms of what Trump can do, I have a take, some people might find a little shocking. I'm not a big fan of pardons, right? But they're the law. They're built into the system. Both parties use them liberally, and every administration gets more aggressive in using them. So until we change that, I think Trump right now should pardon everybody. Right now, this week, pardoning Trump, pardoning Trump, pardoning Trump, pardoning Trump. Pardon his family, pardon himself, pardon every single person in the administration, because he's going to do it anyway. And then that takes off the table, the Democrats doing an endless amount of investigations, or it neuters it to a certain extent. And then he should say to them, let's work, let's make a deal. And the deal he should make, number one is do some tax reforms on the capital gains laws. Now, listen, we all make our money from capital gains. And then I'm assuming, you know, most of the people in our circle, leverage margin loans. In other words, taking loans against capital gains. And then I'm assuming, you know, most of the people in our equity holdings, we should just say anything over 10 million, you tax it at 50% of the capital gains rate. If you wind up paying the loan down, you get that as a credit. If you wind up selling shares, you pay the rest of the capital gains, get that out there, smooth it out. It's a revenue stream. And it makes it feel like, hey, when rich people take these loans, at least some tax revenue comes in and you get rid of the Bernie Sanders, all these people haven't paid taxes. And this year, they paid zero. Then we got to work on healthcare. I'll leave it up to other folks. With more experience to say what that should be. But Trump should say, hey, let's work on healthcare. I'm going to keep harping on the minimum wage. There's two ways to do it. Obviously, you could say no taxes on people under a certain revenue or income threshold, as you sort of evoke there earlier, Chamath. But just say two years a year for four years, get everybody up to $15 an hour. I know that people will call me a libtard for saying this, even though I'm a moderate independent. I think it would be good for the esprit de corps. It would counter this narrative that we don't care about the bottom half of society. And in fact, there's only 10, 15 million people who are impacted by under $15 an hour. So it's an easy thing to do. I would go with number four, a ban on trading stocks in office and doing business with foreign countries. Rahm Emanuel has this proposal, people on the right have it. So I think we should go get some consensus on that from everybody. And then finally, I think Trump should come to him and say, hey, listen, we know housing is the thing that's frustrating people a whole bunch. Let's come up with a plan to incentivize the building of new homes. And he should go right into deal mode. He should go right into popular housing. Trump, which everybody loves, if he solves two, three of these out of five, I think it would redeem his presidency. And obviously, to your point, Sachs, he's just got to end the war. He's just got to end the war, however it's possible. And I think the Dems may force his hand. And then he might say, well, you know, the Dems forced me to do it. And that gives him this golden bridge to cross. Look, before
Speaker 2we totally throw the baby out with the bathwater, I think it's important to realize that if you look at Reagan's presidency, Reagan's presidency has only grown in its stature over time because the structural changes that Reagan made were more obvious to see in its totality the further you got away from it. And I think the reality is, even though the Democrats may not want to admit this, an economic populist will have to understand that keeping the borders closed is an incredibly important thing because the base of people that you need to vote for you want more of the pie. And so sharing more of the pie with people streaming across the border is just mathematically a bad decision. So you have that. Then you have tariffs, which if you partner it with the amount of money that people have committed, if that money follows through and it actually revives domestic manufacturing, the further and further you get away from it and is allowed to compound, that's going to look positive. So I don't think it's fair to say that they lost the midterm, but I don't think it means that history will look at his presidency as failed. Right now, it's just a matter of time. And I think it's a matter of But now I think what people will say is that these policies, are obviously good, closing the border. And some, I think people will say are a question mark. And then some, I think people will say, you're going to have to get out of it like Iran. And the further you get away from it, it'll be clear. So what should he do, Jason, to your point is, I think he should probably figure out ways to support the parts of his agenda that will endure. So to your point, what is a great tradeoff to make, keep the border closed, in return for some amount of economic changes, maybe the Democrats want a higher minimum wage, okay, maybe what they should do, again, I think the simpler thing to do is 125k or under just wipe out the federal taxes, it's it's a nothing burger, it doesn't really matter in terms of the revenue that it generates, close the loopholes, but trade it off for parts of his core strategy. Because that's what will endure and people will know the president as having had the courage to close the border when nobody else would or when when Biden just let it stream in. And then the populist economic president that then sits on top of those decisions in 28, whether it's a Democrat or Republican, will have to thank Trump, because that's how the votes will have come to them. And that's how people will feel like this economic malaise is being
Speaker 1fixed. Okay, Zach, any final thoughts? I'll give you the last word again, aside from getting out of the war, we all agree, that's number one on the list. What else can President Trump do in the last 18 months that would be productive for the country? And for his legacy?
Speaker 4All right, well, look, let me just give you three examples of previous midterm elections. Okay, so we've had big midterm elections before 1994. Bill Clinton lost the house. It was a huge defeat. That's when Newt Gingrich became speaker. Clinton still went on to win reelection in 1996. So he made course corrections. Obama lost seven Senate seats and 63 House seats in 2010. That was the slacking. Made adjustments, still won reelection in 2012. So presidents can definitely come back from midterm defeats. It's pretty obvious. You just have to make corrections. What's the one that didn't work out so well? In 2006, George W. Bush lost a pretty bad midterm, because the Iraq War, people were very unhappy with it. This was three years after the start of the Iraq War. And then he wasn't up for reelection, but the Republicans then lost again in 2008. Why? Because Bush, basically, what did he do after the midterms there? The surge. So, you know, he could have adjusted course. Instead, he doubled down. So I think this is really what it comes down to. There are a lot of people, neocons, basically, who are encouraging the president to do some version of the surge, some version of doubling down, some strike. I think if you do that, you're basically going to reenact the whole 2006, 2008 playbook. If you course correct and get out now, I think you'll have a very successful next two years. That's what it comes down to.
Speaker 1All right. We dipped our toe into data centers. Let's go do a double click here and dive right in. Stocks got killed earlier this week. Nvidia, SpaceX, Tesla, AMD, Micron, everything across the board. Took a massive haircut. Close to $4 trillion in market cap wiped out. Now, again, Trump has overseen the top ticking of the market for the last two years. So overall, I think the market is still up during his second term. But this was the second, this was the worst single day in the history of the stock market by total dollars, not percentage, obviously. And it's the worst day for a little while. This puts a bit of a dark cloud over Anthropix IPO. And of course, after that, OpenAI's Polymarket, our great partner in Polymarket, thanks for Shane for coming on on Tuesday, says that they're going to have a 71% chance of going public this year. It was 95% before the midterms. And the Wall Street Journal reported today that the haircut could be baked in now, instead of 1.5 to 2 trillion and then going to 3 or 4 trillion as Gavin Baker said. On this podcast, we could be looking at a 1 trillion 1.0 X trillion. Today, markets have rebounded a bit. And all of this is based upon Chamath. Are these data centers going to go forward or not? Are they going to be stopped? And then what is going on with governor specifically, Sachs evoked what happened here with Abbott losing to Gina, you know, Hossa, who took the time to do a little presser last night and give her position went on all the top shows. She's being pretty clear. She wants a great deal. And it doesn't seem like she's against them. She's gonna let people build them out until 2028. But it's unclear what happens after that point. You're obviously connected, I think Chamath to a lot of the major players in the AI space. What's going to happen with data centers? Can the Democrats afford to pop the AI bubble by then? Putting cold water and slowing down data centers because that will tank the economy? I think we all understand that. So is that in their best interest? And is this posturing and positioning to get better deals for their local communities as is their job?
Speaker 2There's an incredible video where the SpaceX team went to Cochise County in Arizona to present their plans for this new six gigawatt data center. And if I had to characterize that video, it's on X if you want to find it. But it's these two very bright, earnest people from space. Trying to explain how they're going to reduce electricity costs by 40%. They don't use water, they'll reduce property taxes by 20%. They will be able to fund enough revenues to pay off a bond in the county. And it's just a litany of things. Yeah. Meanwhile, the audience is just screaming. And what you see the two people were very poised Riley and Katie, those are their names, good SpaceX employees, they should be proud of how they're doing. How they conducted themselves. But they were getting run over if you listen to this video. And my takeaway is Jason, that this is an emotional issue that is not tethered to the facts. As Friedberg says, it represents a totem around the oligarchy and the economic fissure that exists in the US economy. But it also represents that the deals that have happened are a little gratuitous meaning should it really be the case that the most powerful seven or eight companies need a tax break to invest 30 50 $80 billion to then generate three, four $500 billion? Probably not. Now, they're doing smart deals, because that's what made sense. But I think what the incoming governors are going to say is these things are off the table. And instead, we want to have directly measurable economic impacts before we even entertain this. I think what it means is we're going to see a slowdown. And I think what that does is it benefits the hyperscalers because they have existing capacity. I think it's very bad for the neoclouds because they're renters. And it's pretty bad for the foundational models because they are so short this capacity and they need it to grow. So to the extent that these frontier models are so much better than everybody else's product, they are the ones that need this capacity. It sets the hyperscalers to be a kingmaker. And they have this interesting game theory now.
Speaker 1Can you just say who the hyperscalers are just so people understand the difference between them?
Speaker 2Yeah, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Google, SpaceX. And what they'll be able to do is make a decision. Path number one is continue to rent in the way that you're doing it today. So the status quo rent to some customers, large corporates, right rent to the neoclouds rent to the foundational models. That's what they're doing today. Everybody does that. But then there's the path less traveled, which all of a sudden becomes really interesting. You could decide to take all of the incremental compute and advantage your own products. So Google has a ton of capacity coming online, they could say, I'm going to give it to Gemini, what does that do, it actually allows Gemini to catch up in quality, relative to the foundational models. Why? Because if you constrain the amount of assets that can actually generate compute, and a smaller surface area of it is available to the leading companies, those leading companies will have to pay more, the users will have to pay more, the user experience will decay, and then other products can have time to catch up. And now that is important. Because anthropic and open AI are in a very fast recursive loop, they're on a 60 to 90 day loop and improving their models. So now all of a sudden, without an infinite amount of supply coming online, you can slow these folks down. That's that's the path less traveled, then there is the crazy path. Crazy path, you should look for this one very narrow thing. You and I talked about this before on the pod, but SpaceX and anthropics compute deal has a mutual 90 day out. And propic can term in 90 days. SpaceX can term in 90 days terminate. If SpaceX says I'm going to terminate this compute in 90 days. That is the king making move. Why? It's a disproportionate amount of the compute that anthropic needs. It allows SpaceX to reprice that compute at the spot rate, which is probably double the market rate, right? And the market rate, and it and it's probably not just double, it could probably triple. So whatever revenue you see on SpaceX is balance sheet from ant could two to three x. And ant would have no choice except to immediately capitulate and take the higher price. It would also show all of the other hyperscalers that they are very far away from having economic yield that is optimized. And so then it forces them to consider should I be giving it to myself? Should I be selling it to the other people? It then forces the Neo clouds to take all of this money that they've raised, whether it's debt or equity, and say, I have two choices, which is to buy as much compute today as I can at whatever price it's available. Because the other path is assured destruction and bankruptcy for me, because I'm just out of the game. And so what do they do? They will take the last gasp and do whatever they have. So I think all the game theory Jason, we're literally comes down to this one deal and whether Elon decides to rip it, because if he rips it, watch out.
Speaker 1Yeah. And the other two factors here, Freebird, and just some predictions. Right now, we have the tokens here in the United States. If the governors decide that they're going to have to go to the United States, and if they decide they want to put the screws tight on big tech, hyperscalers, and Neo clouds, and they want to slow this down, they will need to understand that these data centers could be put in Canada, in Mexico, in Singapore, in Malaysia, and many other locations, the Middle East is a little bit off the table because of the war war ends, you start putting these data centers in the Middle East, then the job of doing the next large model soil. It might occur in Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, Malaysia, Singapore, we're going to be a net importer of tokens. And this will be the biggest cell phone ever, because all those 300 $400,000 jobs building these data centers are going to go away, all of that tax will be collected locally in Malaysia, where Google is putting a huge data center. And the data can make it around the world quite quickly. It doesn't need to be in the United States, which these governors are going to learn a very hard lesson in globalization. What are your thoughts here on the data centers being banned? Or if it is just posturing, and then Freeberg, could we see the United States become a net importer of tokens as opposed to a net exporter?
Speaker 5Well, they might ban the use of AI too. Okay, well, now we're going to. Yeah, a very far prediction. That's being floated. I mean, they're, that's the conversation right now.
Speaker 1Okay, unpack that who's having the conversation? What exactly is the proposal? Because that seems to me to be a little far out there.
Speaker 5The farther left you go, the more vocal politicians get on this point, which is no one sees the quote benefit of AI. And they don't want to see AI being developed, being deployed or being used. That's the general statements that are that are being made. So they want to ban both its development, its deployment, they want to ban data centers, they want to ban technology companies from making models. And they want to ban the use of AI. And they want to ban companies from using the models. And I think this sort of rhetoric leads to somewhere that's obviously more constrained than we are today.
Speaker 1What are the chances something crazy like
Speaker 5that happens, but handicap it for us here? 10%? California passed legislation and Gavin Newsom vetoed it. I think it's much higher than 10%. We're seeing state based legislation. I mean, SACS spent quite a lot of time on this. But there's a patchwork of hundreds of laws that are passing all over the country, trying to regulate model development, model deployment, model utilization, what they're allowed to do. And they're not doing that. And they're not doing what they're allowed to do. Whether the local state government gets to audit and inspect how the models operate, how people are using the models, what they're putting you say SACS answer
Speaker 1his. And fundamentally,
Speaker 5remember, a model is just a bunch of software. It's a code. It's a point about free speech. Can I actually run code on a computer? That is a restriction on, you know, someone basically reading a book is a way to think about it. Because at the end of the day, you're inputting and outputting digits, ones and zeros.
Speaker 1True sovereignty. Yeah.
Speaker 5And remember, we have laws. And we have regulations about what are those ones and zeros do. So if those ones and zeros go and take money out of your bank account and put them in mine, I broke a law, I'm a felon, I'm going to get convicted of that felony. If that is used to create a weapon that is illegal, I broke the law that is a felony. And you can go down the long list of things that people should be concerned about. So you have to ask yourself the question, if we already have laws that protect ourselves from the consequence of people using this sort of speech, this sort of software, then what are we actually doing? And I do think once again, that the primal, call it unconscious political state is that there is something that threatens the state that threatens government itself. And I think that that's a big part of the motivation here. And I've said for a long time, there's a power play. The question is, and this is me waxing philosophical for a second is doesn't organization, like anthropic, or whomever, end up in a place where they're regulatorily aligned with the state? And I think that's a big part of the motivation here. And I've said for a long time, such that the state has unlimited access to that models capabilities to development and deployment, and individual citizens and companies do not. And this is almost like if you go back, the modern, like, issue, the Second Amendment issue is no longer about who has the bullets and the guns. It's about who has this technology. Because if the state has the technology, but the citizens and the businesses don't, then the state has supreme power. And remember, there's no such thing as a state that has the bullets and the guns. And if the state has the technology, there's no such thing as a state that doesn't have central planning and command, which means you are giving a small group of people an extraordinary amount of power. And the whole point of the United States and the whole point of the Second Amendment was to always have a check on that power. Okay, so if the state ends up getting all of the AI, and no one else gets the AI, then you no longer have a check on the power.
Speaker 1I think this is like you're getting into Dr. Doom scenarios. I think you're completely wrong. I think there's like a 1% chance of the crazy like this happens. But I like that you exist in the world Freebird to present it because you are the one that's going to come out to this level of lunacy.
Speaker 5Chances you out that I by the way, Jake, call me Dr. Doom all you want. But but this this is a fundamental question about what's the intention of this country. The intention of the country was individual liberty. Yes, of course, right, the rights of the citizen, the rights of the individual, it is not about state power. And it is not about us. And we have a lot of laws that protect citizens from each other. What we're doing now is creating a different system that extends well beyond the founding principle of the United States of America. And we have a lot of laws that give a small group of actors an incredible amount of power that they're going to centrally command and control. Okay, I think that that's something that we need to pay attention to. And I'm not saying this is happening and the world's over blah, blah, blah. That's why I'm saying like, percent. It's not it's not binary as the policies
Speaker 2develop. We have to keep in mind what we're doing.
Speaker 1You're saying it's a slippery slope. You're saying Yes, okay, sacks. But I do think you know, just like the P doing where people say 10% of people are happening Chamath or sacks, you're the closest to this, you know, having been the czar. Do you think that this is in the realm of possibility? What what freebergs describing? If so, maybe you could put a percentage likelihood of it happening? And then what is your take on data centers, and the net exporter net importer of tokens, potentiality here?
Speaker 4Okay, so it's 100% that Democrats are going to make a major push for AI legislation in the next Congress. The question is what that looks like. Yeah, I don't think you have to speculate too much. To understand where it's going. I believe that Democrats want to create a surveillance and censorship state that's turbocharged by superintelligence. I mean, that's ultimately the end state. How do you get there? You create a department, a federal department of AI, you require that all the so called frontier models have to be reviewed and approved by that the regulators give their notes on it, you can't get a model released unless you address their concerns. And there are harms will include all the things that the government is telling us that social media companies should be concerned about, like disinformation and misinformation, and dissident thought all the things that the government was pressuring the social media companies to crack down on and censored during COVID. I mean, how quickly we forget all of this, they're going to basically reenact that whole regime again, using AI, and it's going to be infinitely more powerful, because we're talking about superintelligence here. So I do believe that that is the regime that we're headed towards. So it may not be exactly the version that Fieberg is talking about, where Fieberg saying that only the government can use the tools. I don't think that'll be the case.
Speaker 5Not that binary sack. Sorry, I meant, like, obviously, they're going to get access to models and capabilities that the public doesn't. At the end of the day, any amount of distinction between what a central state actor gets, and what the general public gets, is really where that distinction of power arises. And it's really what makes it difficult for the founding principles to persist.
Speaker 1Which would be a quasi, de facto nationalization of the technology here, Chamath. So what's your take on this? I'm going to force everybody to try to pin you guys down a little bit. You think that this nationalization of the technology, the government having the best version, everybody else in the United States, corporations, individuals having 60, 70, 80% of that version, you think that's a possibility here?
Speaker 2No, I don't think this is the priority. Again, I think people will get animated about this issue. But I don't think this matters. And I think that to the extent that people legislate, and oligopoly, it'll further entrench economic power. And I think that that's counter to what these people want. So I think when they connect the dots, I don't think that that's what's going to get legislated. I don't think they have the energy for that. And I think at the end of it-
Speaker 4What's going to get legislated is a quid pro quo. Okay? The quid pro quo is this. The government gets more power and the duopoly of closed model companies get more regulatory capture or moats around their business. That's going to be the quid pro quo. The government's going to come in. The Democratic Congress is going to say, look, we have to regulate this. It's unsafe. What do you think those companies are going to do? Do you think they're going to say, no, you can't do that? They're going to say, okay, let's work together on this. I think what's going to happen is- And the government ends up with more power and those companies end up with regulatory protection. I don't think so.
Speaker 2I think that to the extent that anybody legislates AI, I think it's going to be broad-based and include a lot of coverage around data centers and AI factories. And to the extent that that happens, maybe you'll get some regulatory capture on the one end, but you're going to constrain the supply so severely. On the other, that the real people that will be in control of it are Meta, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and SpaceX. And so you have to remember, the foundational model companies are not home-free. What does home-free mean? That they have a fortress balance sheet, a profitable business model, and quasi-infinite compute for their own ambitions. And right now, they are renters. And the renter class in data centers, as of- As of Tuesday, is very much at risk. And so, if anything, I think what's going to happen is all the renter classes will get co-opted. For example, I don't know if you guys saw today, but Google just took over a Crusoe data center. They co-opted the renter. They're like, you're gone. We're going to take it over. They did? Yeah. So why is that happening? It's because they have all of the core critical ingredients, specifically the power. So I think- Even a red capture campaign can only work to the extent the government then goes and violates all these other rules and says, here's all this free electricity, and go build wherever you want, and we don't care about energy, because there's no money to pay for that, and there's no political will to do that. So I think the practical reality is that you have the Mag 7 or Mag 8 have more power. And when they look at that calculus, I don't think politicians want that at all, either side. All right.
Speaker 1You know, I did a calculation this week. I was looking at the phenomenal impact that agents are having inside of our venture capital firm, Launch. And we're spending $50,000, $40,000, $50,000 a year.
Speaker 2Say the name of your venture capital firm. Launch. Thank you.
Speaker 1Launch.co. Where can I go to learn more about that? To launch.co. Thank you. Thank you very much. I'm trying to let people know I have a day job beyond podcasting. I invest in 100 companies a year. And we have 20 people. We're spending like $50,000 a year, I think, $40,000, $50,000 on these subscriptions. Grok, Claude being the main ones. I estimate we're getting $2 million in value from that. I estimate we're getting about $1 million in incremental revenue for, I estimate we're getting maybe 15 to 21 in incremental revenue for the dollars we spend. In other words, the velocity of our investments is going up because we've automated everything. And the velocity in which we create new media properties is going up because we've automated everything. We're building systems. And only 10% or 20% of people in corporate America are using this technology every day on a regular basis. In other words, there's. There's somewhere between 5 and 10 times as many people to start using this every day. And I believe when they go to Agentic, they start using this because it's so accessible to the average human being. Everything gets abstracted. You don't have to learn to do code or set up your rig or your harness. You just tell it what you want. And it uses 50 times as much. So I think there's 500 to 1,000 times the need for this. When that happens, this compute is going to go wherever it needs to go. And I can tell you what we're doing. There's only 70%, 80% of what the frontier models are capable of. We're not solving Navier-Stokes, obviously. And so we're on the verge of ordering everybody a Mac Studio of 512K for $20,000, which would mean $400,000 in compute on people's desktops and running local models first and then falling back to them because we don't want to be throttled. We want to have unmetered intelligence. So offshore data centers will be the trend of the next two years. That's what you're going to see. And desktop usage of local models. I'll just make that prediction here. Yeah. Well, let me, can
Speaker 4I, yeah, can I respond to that?
Speaker 1An open source, obviously, is the power of that.
Speaker 4I think you're onto something, J. Cal. Look, when we're talking about AI regulation in the next two years, I think we need to separate, there's two different things, right? There's federal and there's state. What the feds are going to deal with is the AI safety and creating a federal department of AI and all of those Orwellian sorts of risk around what could turn into censorship and surveillance and control. Okay. That's one bucket of issues. There's another bucket of issues around infrastructure, which will be dealt with at the state and local level, right? And both of them are going to play out. Now, at the state and local level, I think people are just being way too optimistic about what this election means. I mean, I'm seeing like Gavin Baker saying, oh, don't worry, you know, Inohoso, she seems totally reasonable. She's not threatening any projects. And, you know, I've watched interviews with her. Look, I went and watched the interviews that. Gavin watched, and I don't see the things that he's saying. I agree with you. She does not say that existing projects are protected. I agree. She simply says that there'll be no new permits issued until they pass legislation. You're right. Dealing with the issues she's talking about. You're 100%. What are the issues she's talking about? Be explicit. I'll explain it. But look, I saw an analyst from some analysis that come out and say that you do realize that projects that are under construction right now. Don't necessarily have every single permit they need to actually open for business. In other words, once you've constructed the data center, you may still have to get an air pollution permit. There's various kinds of permits that sometimes you don't get till the end. So if you take what she's saying seriously, and literally that there'll be no new permits passed until this new regulatory regime comes into effect, we could end up with a bunch of stranded, half-finished projects. Now, I'm not saying. That's not going to happen. I'm not criticizing her because I don't know what she's going to do. She hasn't even taken office yet. I'm simply pointing out that this could go a lot of ways. You know, they could do this in a reasonable way or an unreasonable way. So you could end up with a lot of half-finished projects. My base case is that the projects that are fully permitted will get done in 2027. But I don't think there's going to be major new projects in this new regime for a long time for the simple reason that there's no political incentive for any of these projects or anyone to grant a new permit or a new project. What's their incentive? Think about this. In this last election, you had both Democrats and Republicans running campaign attack ads on any politician who approved any data center. So think about if you're a politician or you're just like a civil servant who maybe wants to move up the ladder. What is your incentive to stamp approval on anything? I don't see it. I don't see anyone who is. Ambitious politically wanting to stick their neck out in any way to approve anything over the next four years. So look, I think probably the ones that are already approved and fully permitted, I think those probably get done. But the ones that are not approved yet, good luck. I think it's going to be very difficult. So I think we get by in 2027. I think they'll still be meaningful capex. I get really worried about 2028 and the Democrats, I think. In a way, have a perverse incentive around this because if that capex tanks in 2028, they will blame Trump for that, right?
Speaker 1Yeah, but they already have set the table. They have such amazing footprint right now. They're already in the poll position. Tanking the economy, I think, opens up an attack vector for them. I think they're much better off just saying, here's what we want and extract value from them. Just extract value. We want free electricity. We want schools. We want this. Just negotiate hard. And if you don't- We'll be, yeah. Yeah. And if they don't, if the data centers and these governors whose job it is to fight for their people and get the best deals, just like it's the company's job to get the best location, the best deal for their shareholders, if they can't come to an arrangement, again, these things can be put in Canada. These things can be put in Mexico. These things can be put anywhere. And we have Starlink and FiberLines. It's extremely easy. Extremely easy. It's very common to run fiber cables everywhere around the world. It's an incredible- It's an incredibly speed-efficient system we have here. It's not like 20 years ago where loading your Gmail in Japan was extremely difficult. It's very easy. It's very crisp. We have CDN technology. It's going to be a no-brainer, let alone the prescience of SpaceX, which is severely undervalued as a stock. And SpaceX, Tesla, I've been buying shares through this whole insanity. They're going to space and putting them up there. Now seems like a pretty brilliant idea, doesn't it, Jamal? Like, if they're going to block it- All of a sudden, once again, Elon saw around the corner, did he not? Well, do you remember,
Speaker 2I think we talked about this, which is, you know, we said his 90-day out with Anthropic is probably because he negotiated and he saw around the corner, not the other way around. Because people used to think, oh my God, this is really bad for SpaceX that they could pull the ripcord. It's now the question is, does it happen the other way around?
Speaker 1It's pretty interesting. I think Elon and the Anthropic team have a pretty positive working relationship.
Speaker 2Oh, this has nothing to hold on. I want to be clear. This has nothing to do with their working relationship, or whether anthropic is a good or bad company, or SpaceX is a good or bad company. This has nothing to do with that. This is a spreadsheet. And the spreadsheet will dictate the answer. And the question is, if spot spikes, you are economically forced to do this beyond a certain threshold.
Speaker 1Okay, I'll take a, I'll take a slightly other side to that. There's still a lot of acrimony between OpenAI, Sam Altman, and Elon. Elon has aligned himself very deeply with the anthropic team, they have an incredible working relationship. I don't think he just throws it open to spot, even if that was the most short term, midterm economic model. Let me finish.
Speaker 2That's not what I'm saying. You're not listening to what I'm
Speaker 1saying. Just let me finish, then you can counter you can you guys are allowed to let me finish my sentences. I know that's hard to believe. Not if you miscast what I'm saying. You can totally respond to it. Just take it take a beat. Moving to spot might be the the right, ruthless economic decision. I think that the decision made by Elon is going to be in part informed by his relationship with Sam Altman, or lack of one, and by the loyalty of anthropic and their success, making them a great long term partner, especially for the space data center business. So I could see him instead of throwing it up to spot, saying, Hey, let's meet somewhere in the middle. I think it's a longer,
Speaker 2I'm not saying throw it up to spot. What I'm saying is when spot moves sufficiently, even a long term offtake moves so much that existing contracts are negative EV. And so you just got to move existing contracts to positive EV territory. And if you can get out in 90 days and reprice something into positive EV territory, you should. So my point is more that beyond a certain point, if a bunch of data centers get slowed down, a bunch of constraint happens, there's going to be a lot less capacity than people think. The dollar cost per megawatt per month is going to go through the roof, the dollar cost of a GPU hour is going to go through the roof, and the people that will be willing to pay the premium are going to be the ginormous companies with huge balance sheets. And so you could just sell it to Google or meta if you wanted to, you don't have to sell it to open AI.
Speaker 1Okay, sacks, the really interesting part of all this just to dip into the science corner, is these, this infrastructure does two things, right inference, people using the product every day, and then building the next one. So if you want to run away with the next model, cornering compute at any price is a huge advantage. So for Google, which has been behind, if they use all their compute to make their make their model, or if Microsoft or Nvidia decide they want to start accelerating their internal models, which they have, this could be this could determine who has the best frontier model over to you sex.
Speaker 4Final word, I'll say something very quickly. When you're talking about infrastructure of this magnitude, these gigawatt power data centers, they cost around $50 billion. Okay, nobody can make that investment in conditions of uncertainty. The last thing you ever want to do is break ground on a project like that. And then when you're halfway through, you get enjoined, you end up with a strike by your workers, there's some community group that stops you, you really need conditions of certainty before you make an investment like that. And I think that we're headed towards conditions of great uncertainty. You've got our biggest data center states where there's basically been a regime change. And all those governors are basically indicating that they favor moratorium until XYZ happens, right, they can be a little bit different and what that is. So my sense is that you look, it may not be a conspiracy to hurt the Trump economy, it may just be the reality of what's going on. But I would expect that I think there'll still be meaningful capex in 2027. As a base case, meaning those fully permitted approved projects can move forward or finish. But I think by 2028, I would expect that the pipeline will either be closed or significantly reduced. And that will have a big economic impact. And I do think that Democrats will try to blame the president for that, even though they will be solely responsible for this.
Speaker 1All right, everybody has been demanding Friedberg that we do a science corner on this exponential time. Hypotheses. I guess, a layman's way of explaining it would be computers can't solve important problems quickly. But there seems to be some science and some recent innovations that say maybe this hypothesis is no longer true. Please inform our
Speaker 5audience. The reason for doing this science corner on this open AI publication is just to highlight some of the benefit and value that comes out of AI. These are like pretty substantial, you've been talking about this for a long time. And I think that's kind of what you're talking about. You're talking about the exponential breakthroughs that are happening all the math hypotheses they've published on. This one's called the exponential time hypothesis. And it starts with like the most fundamental question in computer science, which is can a problem be solved with a computer? And if so, how long does it take? And that tells you whether it's actually practically computable. This is the key point of computer science, we want to create these machines that can solve our problems. And there's a class of problems that are called P problems where you can solve them. in what's called polynomial time, the bigger the problem of a particular type, the longer it takes in polynomial time just means size cubed or size squared. It tells you how many seconds or minutes or hours it might take on a specific computer to solve that problem. And so the problem as it gets bigger, takes more time. And then there's what are called NP problems. These are problems where you can very quickly figure out if the answer is correct. So like, you know, it can take a long time to solve the big Sudoku puzzle. But you can check the Sudoku puzzle in a couple of seconds and see if it's right. That's an NP problem. And the key question in computer science has been, do P problems equal NP problems, meaning, can you actually solve any problem that you can quickly check in a short period of time? And if so, then everything is computable, the entirety of the universe is computable. And that's the big question in computer science, this idea of this exponential time hypothesis, which was proposed in 1999, by a couple of guys. And they said for a specific type of problem called a three sat problem, which we don't really need to get into, the amount of time it takes is exponential, depending on how big the problem is. So the bigger the problem gets, it's some, you know, number to the nth power. So it scales exponentially in terms of how long it would take a computer to solve it, which means that they have demonstrated that there is a class of problems that can never be solved in a short period of time. And therefore, that entire class of problems means that P does not equal NP. So that's been their hypothesis since 1999. And what OpenAI did is they disproved that. And they disproved it in 175 page paper. And it comes down to this one little formula, which you can pull up on the screen here, Nick, which we don't need to spend a lot of time analyzing to understand. But effectively, this little formula right here is OpenAI's paper demonstrating that the outcome of the paper demonstrating that this three-sat problem, this particular class of problems in computer science, can be solved in sub-exponential time, which means it will not take an exponential amount of time. So they disproved this big exponential time hypothesis that everyone thought was real. And what that means is that P could still equal NP, which means that theoretically, every problem in the universe can be solved with a computer. The solution, it's being evaluated now. So you know, it's not fully kind of verified by third parties yet. People are still trying to understand it. It's 175 pages with a very novel set of approaches that it's taken to try and get there. They did the whole thing end to end in less than 10 days. Some reports have argued they did it in a few hours. And so this was a deeply challenging question in computer science and has been for 27 years is this exponential time hypothesis real or not. And they just proved that it's not. And they did it in a few hours. So it may be esoteric for the majority of people listening to this. But it does a couple of things. Number one, it keeps in play, the idea that everything in the universe can be analyzed and every problem theoretically could still be solved with a computer. And number two, is it's amazing that OpenAI was able to do this in a few hours. And deliver this sort of a result that mathematicians and computer scientists have been struggling over for 27 years. And this proof is so far holding. So, you know, this is amazing. And so everyone in computer science, I think was kind of shocked when this came out. Absolutely. Yeah, it was shocked in terms of how it was presented, how they solved it, it was very novel. And again, it's one of these moments of humility for mathematicians for computer science being like, holy, I would have never done
Speaker 1that. And so, so actually, we're just very heated about the exponential time hypotheses in the group chat for the past three weeks. So when you hear Freiburg teed up here, this crisply, how does this impact your thought process? The thoughts on 2028 election and the future of humanity?
Speaker 4Look, I think that AI, super intelligence, whatever you want to call it is going to create a lot of good things. And the fear around it, you know, maybe some fear is justified, because anything that seems powerful can can make people afraid. And obviously, the future is unknown. So you can't prove exactly what's going to happen. But I tend to think there's gonna be so many benefits to this technology. And frankly, if we don't do it, China is going to, they're gonna be the ones that benefit. J Cal, you're right that if the US doesn't build the data centers, they'll get built in other countries. countries and we'll be paying to import the tokens from Mexico and Canada very dangerous situation it's so
Speaker 1dumb yeah crazy Chamath I saw you nodding there yeah you have
Speaker 2a background in computer science my formal education was in electrical engineering but um I mean I've worked around software engineers for so long now this is an incredibly interesting insight all right
Speaker 1another amazing episode of the all-in podcast the number one two and three podcast in the world in terms of the rankings I think uh wow what a week we had we're number one uh in the live stream and obviously four weeks running we've hit number one thank you to the audience and we truly appreciate you being on this journey with us and you can always expect as candid a discussion in the world as possible which it was very interesting in your discussion with Rick Rubin Chamath he was very very taken with the podcast and he is a somebody who understands art and unique moments in the world I thought it was very interesting that he kept pressing you on what what's the magic here because he's he's kind of the Sherpa of magic in many ways and I think the magic here is that we're candid and we break each other's chops and we try to move the ball forward with our candidates and you had some very nice things to say about all of us Chamath and I just wanted to say thank you you are my brother and I love
Speaker 2you thank you I love you too I mean what I said to him basically at the Corvid is we are a family and we get together and chop it up once a week and it's very rare to have a window into family squabbles yes I think that's basically it's basically why it works it's kind of unique you know that's maybe
Speaker 1why the Kardashians work maybe you had you had such a compliment you think to me it was the greatest compliment I think I've got in my life you said you know what J. Cal is you know that quote from the the the scene from the town where Ben Affleck goes to uh Jeremy Renner yeah and he says uh I need I need you to come with me we're gonna mess some people up and you can't ask me any questions and Jeremy Renner looks up and says whose car we take yours and mine I've always felt that
Speaker 2about you that was very complimentary all right we'll see y'all next time love you besties and it said
Speaker 3we open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it love you besties queen of kinwad besties are gone besties are gone besties are gone we should all just get a room and just have one big
Speaker 2huge orgy because they're all just useless it's like this like sexual tension but they just need to release them out
Speaker 3we need to get merch it's like this like sexual tension but they just need to release them out i'm going all in i'm going all in
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