All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
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.
00:30:55 · Jason Calacanis
And, of course, you you get all the way to the war and the endless allegations of grifting and the endless inflation, and that then just plummeted them from 20 to negative 23. That... That's a series of events that happen. And I just wanna state for the record here, I'm an independent. I I vote now 55% Democrat in my life, 45% Republican. When we started this podcast, it was probably seventy thirty. I have moved significantly towards the right because of the lunacy of the left. But what happened here is the Trump two point o 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. Chamath, you sort of pointed out here during your talk. The the k shape 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 gonna 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 gonna be what the next twenty four months are gonna be about. So, Sacks, you wanted to get to this. Next eighteen, twenty four months, is there a path to redemption for president Trump? Is there a way to turn this presidency around and maybe save his legacy?
00:32:48 · David Sacks, Jason Calacanis
[00:32:48] S1: Well, first of all, let me put up some charts here since you guys are doing the chart game and I didn't know we were gonna play the the chart game today. [00:32:55] S0: So, Nick, [00:32:55] S1: can can you [00:32:56] S0: Who's got the best charts? [00:32:57] S1: Yeah. Nick, can you throw up these charts? Okay. So so look, Jay Cal, there's all sorts of issues out there that people are gonna 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 [00:33:18] S0: Agree with that. [00:33:19] S1: Just as an example. But look, again, the question is why was this not a normal midterm result? Look at 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, Jay 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 2025 wasn't a blip. [00:34:09] S0: And to be clear, not a blip on the senate balance. Yeah.
00:34:09 · Jason Calacanis, David Sacks
[00:34:09] S0: And to be clear, not a blip on the senate balance. Yeah. [00:34:12] S1: Yeah. Yes. But but I'm using this as proxy I showed. Right. 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 2026. What happened? When did the war begin? 02/28/2026. 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 that it was 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 kinda got the Fox News group, it's kind of the 50 or even 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 What's your all top year [00:35:46] S0: three things he can do to fix it? [00:35:48] S1: Just get out of the war. [00:35:49] S0: Okay. End the war.
00:35:49 · Jason Calacanis, David Sacks, Chamath Palihapitiya
[00:35:49] S0: Okay. End the war. [00:35:50] S1: That's my number one, my number two, and my number three. Because what will 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 $1.17. It'll go from $1.10 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 forties. [00:36:44] S0: Okay. So [00:36:45] S1: I... That's the thing we need to do. If we don't do that... Look. If this war hold on. Let stress this one point. If the war continues, the Republicans will continue to bleed popularity. [00:36:56] S2: I 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?