All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
00:18:22 · Chamath Palihapitiya
[00:18:22] S2: I'll go through all the ways in which I got it wrong but I I just wanna 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 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 wanna say this again. I do not think Democrats or Republicans matter. That is my real takeaway after this election. There is a central bloc 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, 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. And 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 Friedberg, I don't think this has anything to do with socialism. I don't think the far left one particularly more than they were expected. I don't think the far right one particularly more than was expected. This was a complete and total repudiation about the state of the economy. The economy is broken.
00:21:05 · Chamath Palihapitiya
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 Texas was wasted. All the money that went into senate raises in Ohio was wasted. 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 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. And what you 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 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.
00:23:35 · Chamath Palihapitiya
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 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 150 k 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 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 gonna try to legislate economic fairness, or are you gonna 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 losing the way the Republicans lost in the midterms.
00:25:32 · Jason Calacanis, Chamath Palihapitiya, David Sacks
[00:25:32] S0: Alright. Incredibly, well explained there, Chamath, and I agree. Now is not the time to dunk. Now is 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 gonna 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 up. Trump has failed the middle class. That's the bottom line [00:26:01] S2: here. [00:26:02] S0: 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, you know... [00:26:14] S1: Well, stop clock is right twice a day, Jay Cal. [00:26:17] S0: Absolutely. I... Look. I did cheat out but let
00:26:20 · David Sacks
[00:26:20] S1: me My take on that is that you were not right until the war began. That last clip that you did, you were vindicated. Right? Because it's 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. And at the end of the day, that's what matters to people is 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 flip their vote by 36 points in this midterm relative to the twenty twenty four 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 is 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, 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 the Fed permission to cut rates, so mortgage costs come back down, and we can get back on track.
00:28:31 · Jason Calacanis
[00:28:31] S0: Sacks, 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 podcast, and 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... 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 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 and people were arguing at that time, oh, these these tariffs are gonna be great. These are awesome and that no prices would be added, and the and the American public didn't have to pay for it, this was gonna balance the budget. Not only did it not balance the budget, it did spike inflation. And president Trump should've just worked with congress. Remember, he had to go to the supreme court. He lost there. And this is a 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, no Americans, including people I know in law enforcement, people I know who employ people who have been here for twenty 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 and without their badges on. Right? 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 twenty five 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 the Epstein files out.