All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
00:38:27 · Jason Calacanis, Chamath Palihapitiya, David Sacks
[00:38:27] S0: eggs? Over and over. Yeah. [00:38:28] S2: 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. No. [00:38:53] S0: You're right. But the broader [00:38:55] S1: basket problem data centers. That's what... Look, I I was listening to Gina Hinojosa. 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... [00:39:07] S0: Yeah. We assumed Abbott was gonna win. [00:39:09] S1: Gonna win. A very successful three term governor in Texas presided over an economic boom, that's why we moved to the 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 kinda catch up on 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, [00:39:34] S0: right, [00:39:34] S1: like let's call it woke issues, identity politics, And she said, listen, I'm not participating [00:39:39] S2: Didn't take the
00:39:39 · Chamath Palihapitiya, David Sacks, Jason Calacanis
[00:39:39] S2: Didn't take the [00:39:40] S1: 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 are making your utility bills go up, right? You're paying more for electricity and the data centers are using up your water. I think that's why the data center issue was resonant is because, I mean, there is anxiety about AI and 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 Which [00:40:19] S0: goes to... [00:40:20] S1: The oligarchs are getting tax breaks and you're getting higher utilities. [00:40:24] S0: Which which goes to Chamath's point of people feel they're they're unheard and they're gonna 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 Sacks with a little bit of a rebuttal 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 eighteen months of Trump's presidency? Is there a way to turn around his legacy? And if it... There is a way, what two or three pieces of advice would you give this administration to focus on in their remaining eighteen to twenty four months of power?
00:41:05 · David Friedberg
[00:41:05] S3: I 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 are about to happen in '27. One is I I think it's gonna be very hard with this congress and the sitting president to to come to a a resolution on a on a clean budget. And as a result, I think things are gonna continue as is, and I worry about the cost of things continuing to climb. By the way, I'll 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 US, 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 gonna 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 gonna 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 $2,000,000,000,000 a year deficit spending, things things are gonna remain expensive, they're gonna 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.
00:43:15 · David Friedberg
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 gonna resolve to a budget going into '27 and '28. I do think AI is gonna 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 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 gonna wanna 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, my... I I still think, I could be wrong, but I still think we end up in a place where the the government says we wanna regulate compute. They're not gonna regulate the chips or the models because those are too hard to kinda catch up on, and you're never gonna 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, they're gonna try and move down this path. They're gonna realize it's the best path to get what I just described, which is the ability to control and manage who gets access to this technology.
00:45:31 · Jason Calacanis, Chamath Palihapitiya
[00:45:31] S0: Yeah. And at a minimum, they're gonna get a great tax basis. I think a lot of the data center stuff is performative. They just wanna 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 companies and the economy, the GDP's perspective first. But they all... They both wind up in the same place, which is, don't disturb your neighbors. Don't pollute. You know, be a a good citizen and and maybe, splashy cashy a little bit of the funds there. [00:46:02] S2: By the way,
00:46:03 · Jason Calacanis
[00:46:03] S0: Jason. So in terms of the the... What Trump can do, I I have a a take some people might find a little shocking, Chamath. I'm not a big fan of, pardons. Right? But they're 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, pardon his family, pardon himself, pardon every single person in the administration because he's gonna 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 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, in taking loans against our equity holdings, we should just say anything over 10,000,000, 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 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. These people haven't paid taxes, and this year, they paid zero. Then we gotta work on health care. 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 health care. I'm gonna 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 their 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 ten fifteen million people who are impacted by under $15 an hour, so it's an easy thing to do.