All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
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.
00:48:00 · Jason Calacanis
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 populist 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, Sacks, he's just gotta end the war. He's just gotta 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.
00:48:47 · Chamath Palihapitiya
[00:48:47] S2: Look. Before we 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 gonna look positive. So I don't 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, I think what people will say is that these policies, some 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 gonna 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 trade off 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 a 125 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 few 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 the courage to close the border when nobody else would or when when Biden just let it stream in.