All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
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.
00:51:01 · Chamath Palihapitiya, Jason Calacanis
And then the populist economic president that then sits on top of those decisions in '28, whether it's a Democrat or a 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 fixed. [00:51:19] S0: Okay. Sacks, any final thoughts? I'll give you a 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 eighteen months that would be productive for the country and for his legacy?
00:51:31 · David Sacks
[00:51:31] S1: Alright. 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 shlacking. 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, Pickaxe Mountain, Kharg Island, what have you. I think if you do that, you're basically gonna reenact the whole two thousand six, two thousand eight 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.
00:53:13 · Jason Calacanis
[00:53:13] S0: Right. We we 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 $4,000,000,000,000 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 and it's the worst day for a little while. This puts a bit of a dark cloud over Anthropic's 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 gonna 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 2,000,000,000,000 and then going to 3 or 4,000,000,000,000 as Gavin Baker said on this podcast, we could be looking at a 1,000,000,000,000, 1 point low x trillion. Today, markets have rebounded a bit, and all of this is based upon Chamath, are these data centers gonna go forward or not? Are they gonna be stopped? And then what is going on with governor, specifically Sacks evoked what happened here with Abbott losing to Gina Hinojosa, who took the time to do a 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, connected, I I think, think, Chamath, Chamath, to a lot of the major players in the AI space. What... What's gonna 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?
00:55:38 · Chamath Palihapitiya
[00:55:38] S2: There'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 wanna find it, but it's these two very bright earnest people from SpaceX 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. 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 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, $80,000,000,000 to then generate $3.04, $500,000,000,000? 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 gonna 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 neo clouds because they're renters. And it's pretty bad for the foundational models because they are so short of 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. You just
00:57:51 · Jason Calacanis
[00:57:51] S0: say who the hyperscalers are just so people understand the difference between them?