特朗普超级智能峰会、AI 治理、数据中心与中期选举

Jason Calacanis (00:00:00): Another huge shout out to Starlink. How good do I sound right now? And that's actually great. It's flawless. It's flawless. Shocking. It's amazing. Nick, show this behind the scenes shot of what it took to get us going. Starlink is bananas. David Friedberg (00:00:13): That's amazing. You guys wanna know something about the Starlink network that I think is just kinda coming out now? Basically, the Starlink network, because it's putting out radio waves and it can pick up radio waves and you've got so many of them, you've basically got a phased array telescope looking down on the Earth, and you can pick up what would otherwise be stealth aircraft from above. Jason Calacanis (00:00:34): So this is UFO detector, you're saying? David Friedberg (00:00:36): It's a stealth airplane detector. It's basically a Starlink. It could be a UFO detector. But the Starlink network basically becomes this incredible radar system that sits above the earth to look down on things that would normally be stealth from the surface of the earth. David Sacks (00:00:51): So does this mean we don't have to do a science corner today? Because you just did it. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:00:55): Jack Jack. David Friedberg (00:00:59): Great to see you, sir. Jason Calacanis (00:01:00): As one of the architects of Bretton Woods 2 Point o, Saks is on a high. He's coming in hot. We'll let your winners ride. Speaker 5 (00:01:09): Rain man gave it Saks. And it Speaker 6 (00:01:14): said We open source it to the fans, and they've just gone crazy Speaker 5 (00:01:17): with it. Love you, West. Queen of Kenwa. Going all in. Alright, Chamath Palihapitiya (00:01:22): everybody. Welcome back to This Week in AI. Sorry. All in podcast. And we've got a ton of news to get to on that You're Jason Calacanis (00:01:29): such an idea. You're an David Friedberg (00:01:30): idea. No. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:01:31): I mean, it's just the... Every week is AI on top of AI on top of AI. Jason Calacanis (00:01:35): You have a show called this week in AI, and you cover nothing about AI. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:01:39): No. No. We cover AI, but thank you for the club. This week in ai.ai. Signed up for the newsletter. David Sacks (00:01:43): In superintelligence. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:01:44): I'm gonna change the name. Week in chat DJ Kate. David Sacks (00:01:49): Say is we have four superintelligences here. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:01:52): Four superintelligences here to superintelligence. The week's intelligently discuss. The news. Yes. And what a week it was. We were sitting here just a couple of weeks ago or sitting in Los Angeles, I should say. And there was a bit of a chaotic moment. Hey, should we be should we be auditing or deselling with all this AI? And three weeks later, president Trump held a superintelligent summit in DC. Many of the besties were there and... Or three or four, I should say. On Tuesday, president Trump convened the biggest names in AI, Elon, Jensen, Za, Dario, Sundar, Satya, yada yada yada, all the way down the line and everybody from the government as well. I could ramble on about this, but, Sax, I have have a feeling you were instrumental in setting this up. So maybe I'll just hand it off to you. Tell us how this went down so quickly and then what the outcome is of this superintelligence summit. David Sacks (00:02:58): Well, the reason it happened so quickly is because president Trump convened all of these people to the White House. And I think he's the only person who could get all the CEOs of all these companies in one room. I mean, are the leading companies in the world across data centers, across chips, hyperscalers, and then obviously frontier models. And many of them, frankly, don't like each other. They have disputes with one another. We all know this. They may have lawsuits with one another. All of that didn't matter because President Trump called them to the White House for this conversation. And I've called it the Bretton Woods of Superintelligence. This was the first gathering of really all the critical players across the entire stack of the industry. And I think we had a really good, open, and honest conversation about both the opportunities and the risks of superintelligence. And as a result of that meeting, and I'd say during the meeting, we worked out this agreement that has come to be known as the White House Accord on Superintelligence That was then signed by the six major frontier model companies, and I think will now apply a new rigor, a new set of controls on the development of superintelligence so that the public can be more confident that this will be done safely. And if I could just highlight a few of the key features. So first of all, the companies who are developing these products acknowledge that they are responsible. They have to Jason Calacanis (00:04:19): be the David Sacks (00:04:19): responsible actors. Let's not deflect it onto someone else or anthropomorphize the models or talk about the United Nations. These companies accept responsibility, number one. Number two, they agree to have internal controls and to have those internal controls verified by an internal team that does that. But we don't just leave it to quote unquote self policing. It starts there. But then you have external auditors who will then validate and verify that the internal controls are working. And these companies will set up an independent committee of the board to then receive those reports. And as Gavin Baker pointed out this morning, when the board receives a report from an external auditor, you can't disregard that. It's not optional. The board has a massive fiduciary duty to then act on that. Otherwise, their DNO policy can get canceled, right? So now the board is going to receive the report of the external auditor, they have to make sure, as a board, that they're overseeing, they're providing to make sure that the frontier development is happening safely. And then finally, sitting behind all of that, you still have the FTC and the SEC, which have the ability and the responsibility to enforce the public commitments of these companies. So although this agreement was entered into voluntarily, the governance that follows from it is not voluntary. It is now de facto It's for fiduciary. David Friedberg (00:05:44): This is a critical point. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:05:45): Because it's an audit, because... And d and o for people who may be not familiar with the directors and officers, that's the liability insurance insurance that that board of directors has in case something goes wrong. So this is got teeth to it. Yes. Though it was voluntary Yes. It has deep, deep hooks into the board of directors. David Sacks (00:06:03): That's right. And and just one final point on this is that, again, this White House accord on superintelligence, it was convened by the president. It was as a result of that discussion and that conversation. We got the major companies to sign it, and I think everyone in the room... There's basically a consensus around it. And these controls can now be implemented basically immediately or very, very quickly. And it doesn't require new legislation. It certainly doesn't require some new international agreement. That's never going to happen. So this is something that can be done right away. I think it's a credit to the president. And I think this should, in large part, I think, address many of the concerns that the public has about the safe development of superintelligence. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:06:43): Absolutely. And David Sacks (00:06:44): And I think there's a lot of Democrats right now who don't wanna give the president credit around this because they wanna keep using it as a campaign issue. But the reality is that I think the president dealt with it swiftly and sensibly and practically. This is way more practical than trying to declare a pause on frontier development that China would never go along with or creating some DMV for models that, again, would slow us down to the point where China just wins. So this is very practical and it's immediate and the president deserves credit, even though the Democrats won't give it to him. But I'll notice that even Jacob Coxen, where, you know, in a way you could say that Chamath Palihapitiya (00:07:18): the The whistleblower quote unquote David Sacks (00:07:20): The so called... Yeah. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:07:21): Rage quit after six weeks who was working Speaker 5 (00:07:23): with the PR firm for the Yeah. David Sacks (00:07:25): Yeah. So I would say fake whistleblower because he was working with the PR firm the whole time, even though he said he wasn't Chamath Palihapitiya (00:07:29): Artificial whistleblower? David Sacks (00:07:30): The artificial whistleblower. But look, even he said that he was happy to read this. He was giving credit to the president, so maybe everybody else should. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:07:39): I mean, even the most cynical person, Shammoth, looking at this would say, great first step. Right? Like, if you just wanted the global UN United Nations of AI, this would be a great precursor to that, a first step where everybody's opting in to be regulated, to regulate themselves as we discussed on this very podcast with the MPAA analogy. And here we are three weeks later. Take us behind the scenes. There was one notable addition to the group of AI executives. Dario from Anthropic is obviously very anti Trump. He has never shown up for these things. The organization is 96% anti Trump, left leaning, etcetera, but he participated. So how did Dario wind up participating in this? How did he wind up doing dinner one on one with the president? Take us to the palace intrigue here. Dario was a conscientious objector. He did not wanna participate in any of this, and now he was front and center. Jason Calacanis (00:08:38): I can tell you what I heard, and I just think it speaks to how conscientious and gracious the president is. I think there was, like, a couple of previous events. He noticed that Dario wasn't invited and actually just called and said, you know, this was an oversight, and they invited him to dinner. And I think that's how it started, and they had dinner, I think, two nights before. That was widely reported. And then he stayed, and he was at the dinner. So I think it's just very smart strategic thing to do. It was also a very conscientious and and very polite thing to do as well just to make sure that this is a broad coalition of people that were included. And I think that's that's sort of been the general pattern that the president has exhibited. Let me maybe give you a couple of other things that happened at the luncheon that had an impact on me. The first was, it sounds like a very simple statement, but the gravity of it kind of has built in my mind as I thought about it. He says, whoever wins superintelligence wins. And then he just stopped talking. That was the first line of his prepared remarks. And then he said it again. And when you think about it, he's completely right. There is no world in which you're going to have this multinational corpus of people trying to allocate wins and losses on this thing. This is on the order of the industrial revolution. In fact, Sachs had some really nice comments at the luncheon, which framed it as even bigger than the industrial revolution. He went through the numbers, and it's bigger than the industrial revolution. And, like, three or four other things all added up together, this thing is still bigger. David Sacks (00:10:08): The railroads, the canals, and the electrical grid combined. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:10:11): And the Pyramids and the Great Wall Jason Calacanis (00:10:12): are Exactly. Tied to David Sacks (00:10:13): That was in the Wall Street Journal last week. Jason Calacanis (00:10:15): When you think about it that way, it's very important that we win. And so he started by setting the stage that way. He had a couple of other specific things, which was it's really important that the extremely positive use cases that exist out of AI and now SI are demonstrated. And he said you have a responsibility to lead with the benefits. And then he said you also have a responsibility to impact the local communities in which you operate. And he pointed at Meta as an example of a company doing really good things with teacher bonuses and hospitals. And we heard about that from Dina at the All In Summit. And he said, you need to continue to do these things. But meanwhile, we have to have the checks and balances, the trust and verify. After the luncheon, I had to fly to Orlando because we at eighty ninety have a long term partnership with Ernst and Young. And I was speaking to their 3,400 partners, and one of the things that Ernst and Young and eighty ninety were doing was building an entire audit infrastructure for superintelligence. And what's so cool is that we had been building it for as our first customer. But on the heels of this, I think we're gonna be able to take that infrastructure and roll it out to everybody as SAC said, because everybody's gonna need it. And there's really three things that you're gonna need in an age of superintelligence so that boards are protected, CEOs have visibility, and all of the other compliance infrastructure and governance infrastructure of a company like D and O insurance and all these other things are kept in place, which is end to end traceability. Which is to say, when you deploy superintelligence, you need to know what's going on. You need to map it to the policies so that you understand what the risks are. All companies have standard operating procedures, but you need to know exactly when you're deploying superintelligence, how that builds on top of your standard operating procedures. So you need to map policies to risk. And then the third is you need to have auditable evidence, which is your way of showing all of your downstream ecosystem, here's what I've done. So if anybody taps you on the shoulder, whether it's a lawyer, whether it's an auditor, whether it's a regulator, whether it's in a lawsuit, whether it's a customer, hey, how did this happen? Jason Calacanis (00:12:24): You can present something. So these are like very practical same things. And you can expect folks like now to deploy this broadly and quickly to all of the companies that they work with. And this is just one extra step. But if you think about how fast this happened, this is like three weeks. And you have this solution where the alternative was hit the pause on trillions of dollars of GDP so that we could sort this out in a multinational body. The alternative was crazy. So I think what happened was historic and important. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:12:56): Was there any pushback on the doomerism narrative? Take us behind the scenes. Jason Calacanis (00:13:01): Jensen was really powerful. He said something to the effect of alarmism without solutions is unproductive, which I thought was helpful grounding. But he said alarmism with solutions is helpful. Everybody had the same perspective in the room, to be honest. Was that Chamath Palihapitiya (00:13:19): directed at Dario, that comment? Jason Calacanis (00:13:22): It was just generally said, but I think, you know, if we had David Friedberg (00:13:24): to guess who the story is gonna be Chamath Palihapitiya (00:13:26): Did Dario respond after that? David Friedberg (00:13:29): I mean, well Jason Calacanis (00:13:30): Susie and I David Friedberg (00:13:31): were sitting right across from so Jason Calacanis (00:13:32): it was very fun just to watch his reactions in general. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:13:34): So please unpack it. What was his reaction to that comment? Jason Calacanis (00:13:37): Oh, I'd be like, he listened. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:13:39): Got it. Who moderated the discussion, Sachs? How was this moderator? Were you the moderator? I noticed I didn't get an invite. The world's greatest moderator wasn't there, but Trump's a pretty good moderator himself. Who moderated discussion? David Sacks (00:13:51): Moderates it. The president Chamath Palihapitiya (00:13:52): The president actually actively moderates it. David Sacks (00:13:55): Oh, yeah. No. No. No. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:13:56): He Give an example of his moderation. I would like to take some notes here. David Sacks (00:13:59): Well, first when we got there, you know, this is in the Eastern of the White House, I believe. And through the back of the Eastern, you get to the where this new corridor to the ballroom's gonna be. And so we did a quick tour out there, and he showed us what they're building. And it's really amazing. And I break that one Chamath Palihapitiya (00:14:14): the new ballroom? David Sacks (00:14:15): The new ballroom and the new East Wing Of The White Chamath Palihapitiya (00:14:17): to wear... Did you have to wear hats and to go into the construction zone? You're on David Sacks (00:14:20): the Yeah. We walked we walked out there and, I mean, the cranes were out there. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:14:23): They Foundation, David Sacks (00:14:24): ball, where are Chamath Palihapitiya (00:14:25): we going? David Sacks (00:14:25): They are making record progress. You know, the thing is, like, seven stories. So the ballroom itself is two stories, but it goes five stories down. Oh, wow. So there's all sorts of stuff that they're building there for. The bowling alley, the sun. No. No. For the military. There's all Chamath Palihapitiya (00:14:38): sorts of I know. David Sacks (00:14:39): There's like all sorts of vaults that they want. But in any event... And he's gonna have it done in like a year, under budget and on schedule. Speaker 6 (00:14:47): By the David Sacks (00:14:47): way, when it's done, I predict that it'll be so nice that all future presidents will really wanna use it, and it's things that the White House has needed for a long time. They're gonna look back and say, why did they give him such a hard time doing this? Chamath Palihapitiya (00:15:01): So... That's such a distraction too, by the David Sacks (00:15:03): The fact that we had a builder in the White House who just enjoys doing it and is so good at it, I mean, why why wouldn't you take advantage of those skills? Chamath Palihapitiya (00:15:11): And then all in annual dinner party there. We'll have an all in gala at the David Sacks (00:15:17): Yeah. Anyway, it's gonna be a big upgrade. So anyway, he he took us on a little tour of that, and then he presided over the conversation. First, he gave some remarks, and he spoke to the whole group. And then he started calling on people to give their opinion. And and so he he always moderates these things. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:15:34): And then challenging? Did you have a challenging moment where you kinda went at somebody, a follow-up question, anything like that? David Sacks (00:15:40): Well, he just kinda asked people what they think and there's a follow-up. And then we had a a breakout session of the six frontier model companies in the Roosevelt Room, I believe. And that's where we kinda hammered out the the Accord. Although, it already Chamath Palihapitiya (00:15:56): When you're hammering out that accord, are you literally there typing it in Google Docs? And and who's responsible for this typo? There was a typo in the in the tweeted version that Speaker 6 (00:16:05): became I don't wanna say who's responsible for that. But David Sacks (00:16:08): but if that's if that's the only thing people can find to object to, that's not so bad. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:16:12): Was Satya in Microsoft Word and he just had... He was typing too fast? David Sacks (00:16:16): Yeah, I don't know. But basically, what happened is Zuck and Jensen talked through some of the high level principles in the main luncheon. And then Mike Johnson, the speaker of the house, actually had a copy, and he read the whole thing. And then we discussed it, there was general agreement and accord with it. And then we did the breakout session and there was some wordsmithing. Not much, though, to be honest. Everyone was good with it. Now we had... I mean, the White House had a statement that had been circulated to their groups in advance that it was a couple of paragraphs. But frankly, this other statement had more meat on the bone. The original statement had the statement of responsibility, and it had the creation of a working group to discuss safety issues on an ongoing basis and share best practices. But the new part were the internal controls, the external audits, the committee of the board. And I think it's been publicly reported now, so not really giving anything away, that Zuckerberg and then Jensen, I think, had kinda come forward with that idea, and everyone was good with it. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:17:21): Any notable moments where somebody was like, hey. I need a comma here or I wanna put an end here. I wanna add something to this. Any notable edits? David Sacks (00:17:30): I mean, like I said, I mean, people are generally good with it. And they read it, and everyone's like, yes. You know, Elon Chamath Palihapitiya (00:17:35): Which part do you think has the most teeth will be the most effective at making things more secure? Which... If The David Sacks (00:17:41): external audits. The external audits. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:17:43): Who's gonna do an external audit then, I guess? Is it is it gonna be an Ernst and Young type thing? PricewaterhouseCoopers or KPMG? Speaker 6 (00:17:49): Or It might be they should David Sacks (00:17:50): be professional auditors, not these NGOs. That... That's my view. Jason Calacanis (00:17:53): You're gonna see in short order here or down something. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:17:57): And, Friedberg, when you look at this in terms of the speed and velocity it happened, and you're, I guess, on the president's science and technology council now, maybe you could speak to, you know, how quickly this is all occurring and what the impact might be in terms of America's competitiveness because you've had concerns. Hey. Maybe slowing down here means China catches up. So maybe you could talk a little bit to your prediction, if any, of the alignment here of all of the companies. Also of note, just for the audience, people are like Sam Altman's not there. His partner Greg was there. So Sam was doing, I guess, the launch of some new products they had. But OpenAI was obviously represented. So maybe you could talk a little bit about what you think impact... The impact this will have on maybe the American public and their view of AI. David Friedberg (00:18:45): I mean, look. I think we are... We always assumed in the sci fi novels that we would be in an era of having robot wars. And I think we fail to recognize that the software came first, and we are actually having the AI wars. And there's a war that I think we're in the middle of right now where there's kind of one side that wants to centralize, control, manage, regulate, whatever the term of the day might be, the technology. And there's another side that I think is cognizant of the reality of the technology, which is that it is effectively ubiquitous. We talked about this in the past due to open source, open weight models proliferating. The fact that you can run models on small local machines, that you don't need large clusters to do things, and that we're seeing model after model come out now that are not under the jurisdiction of some centralized system or agency. Therefore, it becomes very hard and practically impossible to actually regulate the development of the software. That's the truth. It is what it is. You may not like it, but it is what it is. And those two sides are gonna continue to fight. I think that the risks will rise. And as that happens, I'm gonna make two predictions to your question. The first one is that I think we will see a massive rise in defense systems. There is no turning off the open source, open weight models, shutting down all the data centers, or centralizing command and control. There are a 197 countries on Earth. They each have sovereignty. There's energy everywhere. They're all connected to the Internet. Data centers will exist all over the world. So the attempt to try and centralize and manage the control of the software, I think, is a fool's errand. But I do think that it's gonna mandate, because the risks will rise, an increased amount of defense. And so I think, you know, companies like Palo Alto Networks, I think the investment in this space... David Friedberg (00:20:55): What I heard in DC this week was some Fortune 50 CEOs are very worried about cyber defense. That means they're gonna start to make this their number one priority to address at the board level. That means the budgets for cyber defense are gonna go through the roof. Now let me ask you a question. When you have to do cyber defense in an era of AI, are you gonna use old school software or are you gonna use AI? Obviously. You're gonna use AI. And because of that, because cyber defense is going to need to grow, The US is going to need to provide competitive AI for cyber defense. It is a classic arms race scenario. And so The US cannot simply step back and pause and turn off AI. It is already everywhere in the world. Therefore, the risks are rising. Therefore, we need to increase our investment in AI to maintain our cyber defense capabilities, both at the enterprise level and at the government level and potentially even at the civilian consumer level. So I think that the cyber defense necessity actually mandates that we continue to build out data centers to support it. The second prediction I'll make is I think twelve to eighteen months from now, we're gonna shift away from this conversation about managing models, regulating models, controlling models, estimating models, scoring models, all this sort of stuff that's going on. Because like we mentioned last week, every eleven days, we're seeing new models get published now. It is unbelievable. And this week, Google released their new model that also seems to be more performant than any other model. And every couple days, we're seeing a new one come out. So the model control systems are not gonna solve any problems. What I think is gonna end up happening, and this is a prediction no one may like, but I do think we're gonna end up in a world where governments are gonna regulate data center access and usage. They're gonna say the data centers are here, but in order to maintain defense capabilities, we are going to decide who gets allocated a certain number of GPUs, certain amount of inference, a certain number of chips, a certain number of servers. Because at the end of the day, one of the key metrics of cyber defense is going to be how many machines do you have allocated to defend your systems against how many machines are coming after your systems. And it is, again, a classic arms race scenario. Assuming model convergence and even, you know, if models have slight advantages over others, it seems to be the case that we will maintain pacing. David Friedberg (00:23:14): And if we're maintaining pacing, then the number of machines allocated to a specific task is gonna be a key measure of how well it performs in that task relative to another set of machines doing the same task. You're just gonna need to allocate more machines to it. So if you're gonna allocate more machines to it, you're gonna end up having the government say, wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. We need the US financial services system to get x percent of the GPUs in America. We need to make sure that y percent go to defense. We need to make sure that z percent Jason Calacanis (00:23:42): You're saying it's all gonna get nationalized and allocated top down? David Friedberg (00:23:45): I think that's where the regulators are gonna end up having to play a role. You can kinda think about data centers becoming the utility, which is the clouds, the neo clouds. Effectively, the government will end up saying, wait a second. We're not allocating enough to JPMorgan. We're not allocating enough to the financial services system. And ultimately, the number of machines that are allocated David Sacks (00:24:03): take care of that. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:24:04): Yeah. It's an opportunity to sell into the government. Now Google and Amazon Web Services, Crusoe, whoever can just sell more servers. And the government then can say, hey. It is now SAC's national security that we build more data centers, and we're going to clear the road for based on that alone. David Friedberg (00:24:22): Yeah. Is inevitable. David Sacks (00:24:23): Yeah. Here... Here's the part that I agree Chamath Palihapitiya (00:24:25): blocking a data center if we need it. That'd be like blocking tanks being built during World War two. Right? I mean David Sacks (00:24:30): Yeah. Here... Here's the part I agree with is it's not just about the capability of the model. It's about how much compute you have to run it. And we want to have more compute than our adversaries. And if we continue with this anti data center crusade, we're going to be at a severe disadvantage. We already know that the precursor for data centers is power generation. And China's doubling their grid every decade, and we've been flat for about twenty five years. That's a huge problem. Now I went back and looked. Throughout the course of the twentieth century, The United States was on a pace to double its electrical grid every decade. That's what we did. We actually grew power generation enormously. And those were in the days when America was a great industrial empire and basically dominated the world in manufacturing and industry. We did not have a problem doing this. We found ways to do it. Obviously, power generation plants, the power plants were being built somewhere, and they found places to put them where they didn't encounter too much nimby opposition. They figured out a way to do it. Think about that. Every decade of the twentieth century until starting around the 1970s, when it slowed a bit, they were doubling the grid every decade. '70s, it started slowing, but the growth continued. And it wasn't until the early 2000s that basically we flatlined. Why is that? Because of deindustrialization, globalization. We shipped all those manufacturing jobs overseas, and then people went to work in offices, so we didn't need as much power. Efficiency played a little bit of a part in it as well. But we kind of lost that muscle of how do we basically keep doubling our power grid every decade. We have to get that back. And again, this anti data center witch hunt that I'm seeing going on, it's so misguided. Look, data centers have been around for a long time. David Sacks (00:26:17): Data centers serve the internet. They serve all the mobile applications on your phone. They serve now AI. But they serve all the uses of computers that we use. And to blame them for any specific application just seems totally misguided. If you have concerns about things like surveillance or privacy, by all means, like strengthen the privacy laws. Right? All in favor of that. But just trying to ban the data center seems insane. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:26:45): Sacks, what everybody wants to know, you have been, pretty critical of the Anthropic Computer Corporation and specifically Dario and the leadership there. He was at the event. You guys met, I think, perhaps for the first time. Tell us about Dario's participation there. And did you guys talk a little bit about your criticism of him specifically, of the organization specifically, and all of this doomerism and effective altruism and all this, or did it not come up? David Sacks (00:27:13): No. I mean, look. I think that Dario was a good sport. It's true. That's the first time I met him in person. I talked to him on the phone before. But, look, he was a good sport throughout the event. It was not adversarial or hostile. Obviously, he has his own views, and he represented them. But, fundamentally, everybody got on the same page and signed this Chamath Palihapitiya (00:27:30): Did you shake hands with Dario? David Sacks (00:27:32): Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He joked. He said, oh, my nemesis. You know, he sort of joked. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:27:36): Oh, really? David Sacks (00:27:36): Yeah. Yeah. Now we So it's kinda funny. Yeah. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:27:38): But you can invite him on the pod. David Sacks (00:27:40): I forgot to invite him on the pod, but he's walking Do you have Chamath Palihapitiya (00:27:43): his phone number, and are you gonna invite him on the pod? The world wants to know. David Sacks (00:27:46): If you want me to. But look. I think it's good that he talked to the president and had dinner with the president. I think the president should talk to all the major players in the space. He should hear the full spectrum of views, and I trust the president's gonna, you know, arrive at the right policy and solution. So I think it's good for him to hear Dario. I mean, look. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:28:05): I think insight into what happened at that dinner. What was president Trump's view of Dario? He said he's an interesting guy. There were some interesting quotes, and he he dragged him from the back of the group in the presser and threw him out front. I saw you were right behind him. Zucker's right behind him. You guys had a little chuckle at the president pushing him forward David Sacks (00:28:22): to No. We weren't. We actually... I forgot exactly what... No no one was making fun of Daria. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:28:27): So you what I mean? Were were David Sacks (00:28:28): We not. Mean, you know fuck that's from. Going on. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:28:31): Grabbed him from the back and said, you have to speak. That... I think that was kind of a acute moment. It was an affectionate... I saw it as an affectionate moment that he wanted Dario to be part of the group and speak on behalf of the group. I saw it as the opposite. David Sacks (00:28:43): Yeah. He gave him a pat on the back. Exactly. And look, I think, listen, Dario is a very special person. I didn't fully appreciate it till we're all in that room together. There's obviously a wide spectrum of views in that room. There's different levels Spectrum's a good word. David Friedberg (00:29:00): Spectrum's a David Sacks (00:29:00): good There's there's an autism spectrum. There's a there's a spectrum of autism spectrum in that room. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:29:06): You felt very comfortable, Zax. David Sacks (00:29:08): Well, I mean, you guys call me the rain man, but, I mean Chamath Palihapitiya (00:29:12): You're rain man light. Jason Calacanis (00:29:13): You're I see this really dysfunctional. Speaker 6 (00:29:15): They're gonna Jason Calacanis (00:29:15): be functional. David Sacks (00:29:15): As an insult, but, you know, Daria is sort of the Dustin Hoffman in that room, and then Tom Brown's like the Tom Cruise character who's trying to, like, translate him. They weren't wearing the same suit or anything. Trump's like Hey. I'm not cut Chamath Palihapitiya (00:29:26): China, Russia, beat my mutants. Okay? I'm forming like the X Men here. Okay? These are brainiacs. They're a little bit weird on the margins, but they're getting done for America. Chamop, you certainly must have had an interesting time there. Tell us a little bit more of the the palace entry. What what was president Trump's vibe? He seemed he was incredibly engaged and excited. And I just wanna say, listen. You don't have to be a fan of president Trump or a republican to appreciate what happened here and compare it to when Biden excluded Elon from the EV summit. You need to, as the president of The United States, be bipartisan and include everybody in these things. We're all part of the same team. It's called team America. And I thought this was a great juxtaposition of that. You had a lot of people who are extremely critical of the administration who were there to make America stronger, to make America win the AI race, the superintelligence race. Jason Calacanis (00:30:22): Most people have said this at this point, so this is sort of beating a dead horse, but he is a generational political athlete. I mean, I don't think we've seen anybody like him. And so he's extremely comfortable around all kinds of people with all kinds of differing views, and he's conscientious. And so when he notices things are not right, he sets them right, and he talks to as many people. And I think you have to be really impressed with that. Like, this is a... An incredible pattern that I hope outlives him, which is this idea that when you have very complicated problems, when you use industry to be a sounding board and then you sit with industry in real time and then you craft these accords in real time, And when that industry represents the entire political spectrum, as you said, Jason, some who are with you and some who are against you and some who are in the middle, that is the right way to govern in my opinion because you have the best chance of doing something that's sustainable and that's realistic. And that comes back to this point that is getting lost, which is whoever wins superintelligence wins. And I think if we just keep that in mind, this is the pattern that hopefully outlives the president, which is that whenever you run into any other thorny issue... And I would say this to whoever's gonna be president '28 and beyond, democrat, republican, it doesn't matter. Get the smartest people from that industry in a room. Make sure that that's filled with both people that support you as well as may not necessarily support you, and then hash it out in the room and force a set of realistic principles that everybody can then build a business around. That is very smart politics and governance. I just wanted to go back to something you said before because I was having this conversation with Phil Deutsch. This is about the data center thing. Jason Calacanis (00:32:09): He made this point to me, which I think is really important. When you look at the impact that the Iran war had on the price of oil, the most interesting takeaway was actually how little the price of oil moved during all of these blockages in hormones. Because what really happened was there was a lot of supply and generation shifting that occurred. Right? We were able to shape in real time, Jason, how to generate energy. And the real takeaway from my perspective is that the generation of electrons is actually the critical thing, not necessarily the generation of energy as we've classically thought about it. Now why that's important is the data center now becomes the critical symbol of national security. Because the ability to generate electrons and then the ability to make sure that we can compute the resources that we need to run our economy is gonna start from those things. And so domestic energy production, I think, also is this hugely important thing that is gonna move from a domestic policy issue to a national security issue. And that's why I think the data center thing and and sort of why I I disagree with Friedberg. I understand where he's coming from because this is why the data center will get so much scrutiny. But I also think the opposite will happen, which is more of the SACS idea of the free market because it is so critical, similar to how we responded after the Persian Gulf War and how we responded after the Grebel war on terror. What do we do? We doubled and tripled down on nat gas and domestic oil production. Similarly, I think the domestic production of electrons become so critical because the the data center becomes this national security infrastructure that's so important. David Friedberg (00:33:50): Yeah. There was this great video from years ago, where Milton Friedman was at a law school. And he was asked a question by this kid about when do we have a responsibility to act to save someone's life? And can the government mandate that I do that? And doesn't that take away my freedom in a free society? And the way the kid asked it, Milton Friedman responded by saying, hey. You started out talking about your responsibility in society. And by the end of it, you were telling me about what government needs to do. And he's like, I would argue that those two things are not the same. And that the point you should take note of is that you don't need government to solve your problems when society is giving you a clear signal of what the right and wrong thing is to do. That people collectively can and will solve their problems, take their actions, choose the right path, do the right things, and businesses can and will respond accordingly when the market is telling them something, when society is telling them something. They don't need the government to be responsible for executing the actions and taking regulation onto its shoulders for them. And I think we saw that this week with NVIDIA's launch, and OpenAI was very declarative about how they're being more precautionary before they release models. But this morning, Google also launched Synth ID. And Synth ID is a system for watermarking proteins that are produced with AI. So the sequence, the DNA sequence that codes for the protein will actually now have a watermark in it, and it's being broadly adopted. And the protein itself, the three-dimensional construct of the protein will actually have an embedded watermark in it as well. This is actually a pretty amazing technology that Google developed for creating watermarking and defense systems in AI bio. And I think we are starting to see the market respond actively to what society is saying and not need these government people to come in and take over, and in the process, put everything at risk. Jason Calacanis (00:35:50): By the way, I saw that clip. It was going viral as well. I thought that Speaker 6 (00:35:54): what it was? The young I guy David Friedberg (00:35:54): don't know why I watched it. Jason Calacanis (00:35:55): Yeah. He was a law school kid. The young guy was articulate. Milton Friedman was unbelievably articulate as always. But, Jay Kalb, what was what was your view? I'm curious what's your view just seeing it happen real time. What were you thinking? Chamath Palihapitiya (00:36:08): Yeah. Well, I was actually ironically invited to come down to the White House for the first time, my friend Joe Jebbia, who launched america.gov this week, which was a spectacular launch. We were making the American government as efficient as private industry. He's the cofounder of Airbnb. Cofounder of Airbnb and an incredible designer went to RISD with his partners. And so just shout out to him. If you haven't seen america.gov, it's stunning. Was there. David Friedberg (00:36:36): I spoke on a panel with Brooke Rollins and Sean Sankar at the event. It was an incredible event. The whole cabinet showed up. The president signed the EO. Yeah. And even guys like Andrew Ross Sorkin gave this, like, standing monologue on why it was so incredible for America to see this. It was not partisan at all. It was just upgrade America's technology infrastructure for the citizens, and it was fantastic. Yeah. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:36:57): So And David Friedberg (00:36:58): by the way... And sorry, Jacob. I'm sorry to interrupt you, but I just wanna give a shout out to Joe because he did that work with his own money. People think that this was, like, some big government investment. Joe and others aware Chamath Palihapitiya (00:37:08): of that. Wow. David Friedberg (00:37:09): Joe and others put up personal funds and gave up their personal time despite their success in their private careers to step in and do this work for America. And I just think it was an incredible rally and cry for all of these technologists to get together and build something great together for America. And it was a really beautiful day. It was great to be there. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:37:28): Sorry. Go ahead. You know, it's fine. From the outside, it was incredible. Just awesome to see the power of all these, American industry together. Not a critique, but an end to add to it. I think the next piece of this puzzle is to start to include Americans in this, the bottom half of the k shaped recovery. Where's the teacher? Where where's the teenager going into college and all of this? Where's the, you know, American tool belt worker or the plumber, etcetera? You know, it looks from the outside, I think, from... To a lot of Americans that this is still a bit scary. So there's more work to do there. I was on a flight on Delta, and the the flight attendants asked me what I did, and I was talking to them. And they said, I'm so scared of this AI stuff. I'm so glad I'm retiring because I I don't wanna lose my job, etcetera. Americans are still petrified of this technology. They still think they're losing their jobs. They still think it's dangerous. So I thought this was, a great first step, but there's more work to do to pull Americans back off that ledge. And we need to, and I think this is where the president or the next president could have a really major impact, is to start forcing American companies to not just thinking about how they make more money, how they get more green lights for their data centers, how they get less regulation and more free markets. But how does this impact education? How does this lower the cost of education? How does this build more homes? How does this help health care? How did people get more health care, you know, at a lower price? That... None of that was addressed. That doesn't mean I'm I'm giving any criticism of this event, but that's the next piece. The next time president Trump brings together this many powerful people, they should talk about the American public, not just the data centers. Jason Calacanis (00:39:02): So a couple of things. He did ask for people to do just that and actually showcase some of these things, and he was very specific. He did that, and he also said, you need to show direct positive impact in the local communities in which you do business. He was very direct. That was super blunt and one of the first few things he said. I wanted to build on your By Chamath Palihapitiya (00:39:21): the way, that did not come across at all. The the the real critique from the public that I think is valid here is it looks like we're just helping Jason Calacanis (00:39:29): I wanna talk to the you Chamath Palihapitiya (00:39:32): the doomber. Something... The billionaires and the companies. I don't speak to sound like Bernie They need to address this themselves. It would be great if they started saying like Facebook did with the with the free tool belt stuff and the training. We need to see more of that. And I think housing, education, health care is where Americans will start to appreciate this. Jason Calacanis (00:39:48): I told you that right after the White House luncheon, I flew to Orlando because the... Or it's... Chamath Palihapitiya (00:39:55): I'm still young. Jason Calacanis (00:39:56): Yeah. Two day off-site for all their partners. Okay. But listen to this. I'm not gonna say this person's name, but this person is a very well known Democratic person. They were on stage, and they have this whole riff about doomerism. And they're so cavalier about it, they actually included the people in the room as part of the claim that they're all gonna be out of jobs. And I'm standing there backstage, and I'm like, what are you talking about? It's not rooted in details. It's not rooted in data. It's not rooted in fact. This is a very well known person, very grounded theoretically in what the data should show. David Friedberg (00:40:29): Shame and name. Jason Calacanis (00:40:31): But what you realize... Well, I mean, I'll say it to you, but maybe Speaker 6 (00:40:33): we bloop it up. But it's Jason Calacanis (00:40:35): And I was like, what the... What is going on? And so to your point, Jason, it is very partisan. And I said this last time on the pod. There's an incredibly important incentive for folks that are not in the power structure today, I. E. Democrats, to take up the doomerism call to action because it is a very straightforward way to whip up fear and to then catalyze that to power in the midterms and then in '28. So you're gonna see Chamath Palihapitiya (00:41:03): win you vote for sure. Yeah. Jason Calacanis (00:41:04): No. When I went on stage, the first thing I did was I was like, she's wrong. And that's not true. And in fact, everything tells us, all the data up until now, that there will be more jobs and more to do. And I said the people in this room will be making more money in the next four years and five years than less money. There will be more work to be done, more judgment, more taste to be imposed. And so I have a real issue with this narrative because I think it's just fundamentally wrong, and it does not come from a place of data driven fact. It comes from a decision that the political calculus is the doomerism is a way to foment distrust and displeasure and then to use that at the polls. And I understand that as a political tactic, but I think it's important to call it up. David Friedberg (00:41:53): This is why I say we're in the AI wars. I mean, this is the actual war. There won't be a robot war. It's this battle right now about who's actually gonna have the technology and the progress and who's not. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:42:04): Well, who's gonna benefit from Freeburg? Who's gonna benefit from it? Right? Rich people or poor people? Middle class? David Friedberg (00:42:11): People don't know what open source is. No one knows what an open weight model means. No one understands any of this stuff, and they're looking at the rich guys at the White House. And I agree with you, J Cal. I think the public perception and the public narrative on this thing is I don't get it. I see a bunch of wealthy people kind of hanging out with the president at lunch, making a bunch of decisions that I don't have a voice around. I don't even know what's going on. I don't even know what they're doing. And then I turn on the news. I turn on the TV. I look at my Instagram, and everything's about the end of tomorrow. And so I'm all about shutting it down. No problem. This is why I think it's important to have the conversation that we're having about why does open source and open weight AI benefit everyone because there's no company that's charging you a toll for this digital technology. It's just like the internet. We maintained an open internet. It was a huge fight. People forget the fight that we had for the internet. When the internet was first starting out, there were all these efforts to privatize the internet, to create gatekeepers. There were these efforts by all the telcos that they were gonna be the gatekeeper to the Internet and charge you different amounts of money to access different websites. You weren't gonna a... Be able to just go to Yahoo or AOL if you didn't pay a fee to your telco to be allowed to access Yahoo or AOL. And we made it illegal. And we made it an open Internet. And I think the same is happening right now with AI. People don't see the fight, the war that's going on. But there is a contingent of people that, to Chamath's point, recognize the political value of regulatory control and capture, and they are fighting to create gates and to create systems of control and ultimately new power Chamath Palihapitiya (00:43:46): structures. This is where, like, you solve the David Friedberg (00:43:47): whole We fighting. The other side is actually fighting for openness with AI. Jason Calacanis (00:43:52): And it's well organized. Like, it... I'm like, when you go to these places and you realize that these extremely successful people are being deployed with very tightly scripted talking points that all point to doomerism, you realize that this is like extremely designed. And then, you know, the rest of us who are working in this arena and actually can see that there are more positive benefits than negative, and that there are more people making more money than before up and down the income spectrum, we are not as organized as they are. That's what I will say for sure. And I think that the positive message of superintelligence and the economic upside is not nearly as well trafficked as the downside doomer message because that goes from top to bottom in an extremely organized, repetitive way. And that's why Jason, the flight attendant, has the talking point. So they are winning. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:44:42): And by the way, the talking point was given to them by Dario. The talking point was given to them by Elon when he said, we're... You're not gonna need to have a job. Those talking points were handed out. Now they're being reversed. Still work to be done. I think next time, best piece of advice, save three seats, Saxe. Bring a Salcon. Bring somebody representing, like, teachers. Bring somebody representing health care. Bring somebody thoughtful, non business person who could represent other constituents in this. Save a seat at the table for people who, you know, the every man and woman of America can relate to says, hey. Yeah. This... Maybe this will help my kid, you know, when I get a personal tutor for them, like Sal Khan would be the perfect example of Khan Academy. Sach, you got any final thoughts here David Sacks (00:45:24): as well? I mean, I kind of wanted to broaden out this conversation to the economy as a whole because I do think that the doomerism is affecting people's perception of the economy. Speaker 6 (00:45:33): That's why Chamath Palihapitiya (00:45:33): I'm bringing it up. David Sacks (00:45:34): Yeah, and I think that actually there's been a tremendous amount of economic data in just last week or two showing that the economy is much stronger than people are giving it credit for. I mean, yes, I know that diesel prices are too high and rates are high. But those are the only two variables that you ever hear about. Let's look at some of the other numbers that have just come out, because I think it's pretty extraordinary. So first of all, Q2 GDP was revised up to 2.2%, up from 1.5%. So that's basically a 50% increase. Economists had expected no revision. Q1 was also revised up to 2.5% from 2.1%. And if you look at the Q3 growth, it's tracking well above that. The Atlanta Fed GDP now is showing around 3.7 as of late last week. August payrolls just came out plus 162,000. The consensus was only 55,000, so it's a beat of about 107,000 jobs. June and July were also revised up by a combined 55,000. So unemployment is still near record lows at 4.1%, even though labor participation rose 0.2% to 61.6%. So good news on the jobs front, good news on the GDP front. The economy is running hot. And then there was also some good news on inflation. We saw that core PCE just came in at 3.0% versus 3.3% expected. So inflation is still a bit too high, but actually it is cooling and beating expectations. And then finally, you look at manufacturing, we're seeing a huge wave of re industrialization in this country. A couple of the measures are the Chicago PMI and then ISM manufacturing. They both are well into expansion territory and beating forecasts. Just one last point, let's talk about poverty for a second, because I want to address the idea that this is just a K shaped recovery. So if you look at US household income, it's now at record high. The median household income in $20.25 dollars is almost $90,000 And after tax household income is growing again in the second Trump term. David Sacks (00:47:50): It's averaged 3.1 a year in Trump 'forty seven. It was 3.9% in Trump '45, and it was minus 1.2% in Biden's term as a four year average. So we're seeing that after tax household incomes have risen by 3.1% just in 2025. And the poverty rate in The US has fallen to its lowest level in history, 10.2%. So the poverty rate, the child poverty rate, these are all at historic lows. The average household's real income after inflation, after taxes, is increasing for the first time in years. So there is a lot of strong economic data out there. And I think that this is why, I was to guess, I actually think that the Republicans are going to do better in the midterms than some of these polls are predicting because I think the press around the economy has been very negative. I think people are starting to feel that the economy is accelerating. And that was actually a headline in The Wall Street Journal just last couple of days that the economy is accelerating right now. So again, you've got this AI boom or SI boom. You've got the infrastructure build out that, again, The Wall Street Journal said is bigger than the railroads, the canals, and the electric grid combined. And all these things are basically fueling strong growth in the economy. And again, I would just dispute the K shaped narrative because the poor are benefiting and the average household are benefiting as well. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:49:16): They don't feel that way, but I guess either... David Sacks (00:49:19): I get the sentiment, I agree with you. The sentiment has not caught up with the economic reality, but I think it will. David Friedberg (00:49:27): We've got a a rate problem in the last thirty days or so. Right? We've seen short term rates on treasuries climb by 60 basis points. That's a pretty consequential climb. I think we haven't seen a short term yield this high since going back to 2002. And so this massive increase in rates is obviously gonna impact people's ability to refinance their home, buy a new car, purchase things on credit, and that's the majority of Americans fall under that umbrella. And I think there's also kind of an economic challenge ahead with the rate problem. And I I would argue, as I always do, that the rate problem is fundamentally rooted in the federal government and the insane spending. And if you look at the impact that this rate is gonna have on banks, I worked with ChatGPT, my my trusted analyst, my financial analyst in my office here, to help kind of figure out what's the impact of these rates actually gonna be on banks and what the impairment would be. There's 4,295 banks that have positive equity that report FTIC, their balance sheets every month. Based on the actual reported balance sheet of these banks, about 95 banks are gonna see an impairment of more than 20% of their equity in the last thirty days or so. And those reports start to come out on October 30. So the thing I worry a lot about is on October 30, we're going to kind of see all these financial reports coming out from all the banks, all the lending institutions. And there's about 95 of them that are gonna say, hey, we've got more than 20% impairment charge on our equity. That's gonna be a massive kind of shock. And then what are the implications of that? And that's where we're gonna start to wake up to the fact that the rate problem isn't just a purchasing problem for consumers, but it may actually have a bit of a rippling effect here in the economy, starting with the financial institutions. So they publish their next monthly reports on the September 30 ending period on October 30. And unfortunately, it coincides right with the election cycle. So there's gonna be all this noise about, hey. David Friedberg (00:51:22): How bad are things looking while we're trying to go through this election? So, Sax, I don't know, like, you know, if there's any view on how we fix this rate problem, but it's pretty nasty, and it's gonna have David Sacks (00:51:32): some kind effect. I I concede it upfront that we have two issues the economy that are negative. We have diesel prices and rates. But then I went on to lay out the case for why there's so much other positive economic news that's not really being covered. Look, if you compare rates to the nominal growth rate of the economy, and those two things are highly correlated over time you can see the economy is running really hot right now. And that is part of the reason why rates are going up is because you have to compensate people for a real return. And if you've got inflation in the 3s, and then you've got GDP growth at 3.7%, then rates are going to be high as well. Look, I think this all comes back to price of diesel because that obviously has a lot to do with not just fuel's price at the pump, but also diesels and industrial input. And the transportation costs get baked into all these goods. I think if we can just solve that problem, then gas prices come down, inflation comes down, we can get rate cuts on that basis. So I think that's the last piece here. I think the economy is already doing, again, very well. 2.5% in Q2, 3.7% in Q3. But if we just get that last piece, I'm not saying there's not a little bit of work to do there, I think the economy will take off like a rocket. David Friedberg (00:52:45): Yeah. I think the conditions are right. You're right. I think the federal spending problem is still persisting, though. It's almost like pouring acid on everything. Like, you've got all this great stuff growing, and then you just have all this federal spending, which is you and I both know is, like, negative productivity spending. And it's, creating fake employment, and it's doing all sorts of bad things. But, man, if we don't get spending, you know, as Scott Besson has talked about, to 3% deficit as a percent of GDP, these rates are only gonna get worse, and that could basically just shoot us in the foot. It's it's Well, almost like David Sacks (00:53:15): know, we we all agree about spending as a as a long term problem, and and it's a bipartisan problem. We have to fix it. I would just say that... Look. I would say about six months ago, people said that if we get a spike in gas prices, we're gonna have 1970 style stagflation. That has not happened. Instead, we're seeing a super hot economy. And yet, gas prices are a little high. But by the way, during the Obama presidency, we had over three hundred days of Brent crude over $100 a barrel. So people forget that we've had the economy do well over large stretches of time with gas prices at these levels. It's just the diesel prices are a little bit high, and that has to do with refineries. Frankly, it'd be good if Zelensky stopped hitting Russian refineries. That hasn't helped the the problem. But look, so we just have that one that one issue, and I think we can resolve it. There was a report this week, I think it was in the Guardian, which is not a pro Trump publication, saying that more oil got out of Hormuz this week than since the beginning of the war. So I think we need to kind of wrap up that issue. Gas prices come down, and then I think that means inflation will come down. It's already coming down more than expected. But then we can get a rate cut. I think actually right now, no one's pricing in the potential for rate cuts here. It's all rate increases. So if we could get some relief there, get rate cuts, I mean, again, the economy is going to rocket even more. Jason Calacanis (00:54:41): We have two tricky auctions that are coming up, and I think treasury will be able to navigate those well just because I think Scott has such a good handle on how to do this and, frankly, how to do the job. But once we get past those two auctions, I'm leaning more in the SACS camp. I kind of tend to agree with you. There's gonna be some growing evidence about what to do based on what happens from Europe as well. I don't know if you guys have been tracking this, but France is going through a really complicated budget negotiation right now. And they're about to shrink the budget by probably $5,075,000,000,000 dollars, which you can imagine in France, that's like ground zero for... It's a one way ratchet to debt to GDP going through the roof. And so when the French start to make cuts... And it's what Friedrich has been saying. It's... Why were they forced to capitulate? Because of long rates. So that's happened. Andy Burnham, who, you know, bumbled his way into the prime ministership of The UK, presented his policy platform yesterday for an hour. It's truly insane what he's saying. This is an extremely muscular form of socialism that he intends to impose on The United Kingdom and then to remerge back into Europe. And so he's gonna try to undo Brexit. He's gonna try to double and triple the size of government. Not a mention of growth, like how do you grow the private economy. Insane. So what you're gonna see from both of those two places over the next year is, I think, gonna tell us what we're gonna have to do in The United States. But I tend to think that we're gonna see a little bit more growth than that is expected. I tend to think we're gonna probably see a little bit more revision. And I think that people are sleeping on the fact that we are not nearly as dependent on oil the way that we used to be. And so even though we used to breathlessly look at Brent crude and WTI and all this stuff, I don't think it matters nearly as much as it used to. Jason Calacanis (00:56:43): And I think that's crazy because, like, the paradigm of rates and the paradigm of currencies and the petrodollar, all these intermingled things that used to drive the global economy are now getting rewired in ways that I don't think anybody fully understands. And that's very good for The United States. So I think David Friedberg (00:56:59): we have track that in as well. Jason Calacanis (00:57:01): Like, the the one David Friedberg (00:57:01): problem is we we do have gas prices at the pump are up 50% since the Iran war started, and that hurts the everyday consumer significantly. It may not drive the the GDP numbers down super aggressively because of the industrial, but the the actual cost of living for the Jason Calacanis (00:57:16): average person can I can I say something? Yeah. I... I've looked at those numbers. The prices, and they're terrible, and I feel bad for people that have to bear that cost. But I think it's also important to say that is not an input issue. That is a refining issue. For decades and decades, we turned off the refining infrastructure that The United States could have used. Okay? And so we now need, as Sax said, the Russians, the Chinese, we need as much refining capacity as possible to take all of this oil and to get it into usable forms. So I hear you, but I think it's also important to acknowledge where the constraint is. The constraint is not the oil. Yeah. The constraint is it over Chamath Palihapitiya (00:57:57): decades and decades of oil. Jump in for a second. I hate to, you know, put a little rain on this Hopian parade here, but two important charts as we go into the midterms. Here is Trump's... Well, I... And my core belief is not enough has changed. And so the American people... You pull up the first chart, Nick. If we look at just since Trump's been in office, I think the challenge is nothing's changed. If you look at unemployment, hasn't changed. It's about the same. And then if you look at inflation, it's still sustained at that high threes, sometimes dipping into four, sometimes as low as 3.2, but never into the twos. And GDP is, you know, something that the American people just don't feel. And if you look at this chart, these are Trump's biggest strengths. So you have to ask yourself, how did this administration go from an incredibly positive feeling when Trump two point o came out to having just a net negative on immigration, trade, the economy, and inflation? And people's perception is their own reality, and the perception right now is that Trump and this administration cares about foreign wars and it cares about industry much more than it cares about the average American. And that is the exact opposite of what Trump promised his own constituents. And this... What you see here in these results is he's lost all those independents he won with the promise of Trump two point o, and he's obviously never gonna win over, Democrats, and he's starting to lose his base. And the base, you know, now fleeing and saying, hey. You promised us you were gonna deport 20,000,000 people, something I don't agree with. But that didn't happen. So now he's losing all those core positions, the things that were supposed to be his strengths. And that's where you have to wonder what is going on in this administration that they just can't even talk about the issues that the American people care about. And, obviously, the war just destroyed this administration's popularity with their own bait... Chamath Palihapitiya (00:59:58): With their own base. They're gonna get shellacked in the midterms according to all polls. And, of course, Trump... If anybody's gonna pull a rabbit hat, it would be Trump because he has beaten the polls before. But this is not looking good, gentlemen. And, you could spin sacks the last couple of quarters, but Will David Sacks (01:00:16): it correspond to this? Chamath Palihapitiya (01:00:18): Absolutely. You can... Speaker 5 (01:00:19): By the Chamath Palihapitiya (01:00:19): way, this is... I wish it was different. I wish we had two percent inflation right now. Jason Calacanis (01:00:24): Yeah. What is your prediction? What do you think I Chamath Palihapitiya (01:00:27): I I just look at poly market honestly and pull up the poly market here. Think it's about 80% that the the democrats sweep both. David Friedberg (01:00:34): By the way, over the next week, the four of us are gonna have a squad on poly market where we're gonna make all of our predictions, And then the audience can kind of follow along and see how we all do on our predictions, which will be kind of interesting. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:00:45): Yeah. Don't... Jamath, I I am not an expert on polling. But I do think starting with the the people actually betting money and 63% chance the Democrats take the senate, 93%. They take the house and if you put those together, there's a chance they sweep both. You know, who knows with these polls? I do think I would look at polymarket first. And if you could zoom in there, the chances they take both is at what now? Sweep. 64% that they sweep. So David Sacks (01:01:11): Okay. Let me tell you what I think is wrong with this analysis. David Friedberg (01:01:14): Okay. Go ahead. David Sacks (01:01:15): So... Okay. Look. So so I... Look. I made this mistake in 2022. Like, I was sure there was gonna be a red wave in 2022. This is when Biden was president and this was his midterms. Okay? Now... And it ended up being like a red trickle. I mean, it was very disappointing to Republicans that, you know, they made gains, but it was not a shellacking. So what was the mistake that I made? It was that I was only looking at perception, and I wasn't looking enough at reality, and I wasn't balancing the reality. So for example, Biden's polling was in the 30s. He was very low back then. And inflation was 9%. But if you looked at GDP growth and unemployment, those numbers were actually pretty strong. So there was a lot of talking down the economy based on one variable, which was inflation, and it was too high, and it was a problem. But there were other variables that were actually quite good. So the reality that people were feeling wasn't as bad as this super hyperbolic view that, again, all the pollsters have an incentive to kind of exaggerate this stuff, and all the political operatives always freak out. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:02:19): It's good for ratings. David Sacks (01:02:20): Yeah. But, yes, it's good for ratings. But the reality is the American people... Look. They went red. Don't get me wrong. But it wasn't the massive wave that everyone was expecting. It was more like a red trickle. I think here, don't think we're gonna get a blue wave. I think we might get like a blue spritz. I mean, listen. Think Jason Calacanis (01:02:39): Blue that spritz. David Sacks (01:02:40): Listen. Biden wishes that back in 2022 I'm saying that back in 2022, Biden would have wished for the economy that Trump has now. Okay? Yeah. Yes. We have 3% inflation. It's not 9% like Biden had. Jason Calacanis (01:02:55): Oh, okay. David Sacks (01:02:56): Yes. Gas prices are a little bit high. But GDP growth is great. It's accelerating. Unemployment's great. Labor participation's great. Poverty poverty Chamath Palihapitiya (01:03:04): What's your line prediction? Senate and House. David Sacks (01:03:06): I think the Republicans are going to surprise people and keep the Senate. And I think, you know, most people think the Republicans lose the House. I guess that's probably consensus, but it's not gonna be this gigantic wave. I think it'll be narrow if the Democrats win, and I think it'll be a real headache for Hakim Jeffries to keep all of these DSA Democrats in line. If you remember, when Kevin McCarthy had the house, he had a very thin majority, and he lost his speakership because he couldn't quite keep the Freedom Caucus in line. I think Hakim Jeffries is gonna have very similar problems if the Democrats take the house. So look, I even noticed Mark Halpern's been predicting a blue tsunami for last month, but he's starting to hedge that. So I think the pro Democrat, pro blue sentiment peaked, I think, about two weeks ago. And since then, it's been very positive economic numbers for the president. The Republicans need to go out there and tell that story. You know, can't have all this doomer stuff. We gotta turn this around. I think we just neutralized this whole AI safety issue at the White House. So I think that the next month actually Chamath Palihapitiya (01:04:09): If there had to be a war, what do you think the situation would be? David Sacks (01:04:12): Well, look, I mean, you know, again, I said that the one missing piece here is diesel prices. So you get the price of diesel down, that'll be the last remaining unlock on inflation that'll bring rates down, and the economy is gonna hit 5% GDP growth. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:04:26): So without the war, you think the Republicans could have swept? David Sacks (01:04:29): Or there's ways of solving that problem with diesel. Mean... And and look, in the last week... I mean, this is the news report. Okay? You know, I don't know the reality of what's happening in Hormuz. But according to all the publications, they just got a record amount of oil out of Hormuz. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:04:45): And they're doing night shipping with the lights off kind of situation? Yeah. Interesting. So, Chamath, do have a prediction that's gonna happen? David Sacks (01:04:50): We can just wrap that... Look. I'm in favor of wrapping it up. Don't get me wrong. But, I I think the president says... Indicate he'll do that. He doesn't wanna be pressured into doing it before the election. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:05:00): You said that very clearly. What do you think is gonna happen here? Prediction for the election. We're a month out. Jason Calacanis (01:05:05): From the numbers that I'm looking at, the senate, I think, is very much a toss-up, but I think can remain republican. And I think the democrats are gonna have a slim majority in the house. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:05:18): Okay. Same as Sacks. Jason Calacanis (01:05:19): Yeah. And I think the way that the president can seal the deal, so to speak, is I think you have to focus on the economic gains, and you have to dispel the doomer narrative. And I think if you can stay focused on that for the next month, I think the Republicans have a pretty decent shot. Now the other side is also true. If you can distract people and focus on the one or two things that are still problematic like gas prices and continue to reinforce the doomer narrative, you have a chance to overachieve if you're the democrats. So I think this is how it's gonna come down, Jason. Can you focus on a few issues like gas prices, or do you look at a broad based look at the economy? That's on one side. And do you look at superintelligence as a constructive force of GDP growth, or do you buy the boomer narrative? And I think what we're gonna see is who is better organized and who gets that message out the cleanest. And whoever does that, for sure, wins the house. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:06:22): Yeah. I think the doomerism, Friedberg is, like, not a huge winning issue. All I have to say is Trump promised not to start a war. He did. He promised to solve inflation. He didn't. The end. And I think the democrats sweep. What's your take on what's gonna happen, Freebert? Do you have any insights for Freebert? David Friedberg (01:06:42): Yeah. I think the more important question is what happens between '26 and '28. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:06:48): Go ahead. Take that one. That was my follow-up. David Friedberg (01:06:50): I mean, I think that's Chamath Palihapitiya (01:06:51): What do you think happens between '26 and '28, you know, whether we split, sweep, either way? David Friedberg (01:06:58): Yeah. I I think that those are kind of like a consequence, and and it's not just split or sweep. I think what happens between '26 and '28 is how far left do the Democrats go and how much does that get hardened, And then how much do the Republicans splinter into this kind of populist thing and do the populist kind of fuse? And then we end up in this kind of socialist takeover of America. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:07:23): The America First movement, I think you're referring to, the Tucker Carlson. Speaker 5 (01:07:27): Know. I David Friedberg (01:07:27): I actually don't know if that's even... Like, you know, remember there was a tea party? Like, there's a whole bunch of manifestations of these social emotions, these kind of public emotions. They all kind of, like, fuse into different words and different parties and different groups. Who know? Who knows where it goes? It's certainly unlikely that the first manifestation is the one that sticks and holds and becomes the biggest one. I mean, look, I would argue the tea party was sort of seeded MAGA years later. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:07:52): Yes. Of course. David Friedberg (01:07:54): Yeah. But this kind of populist movement does not... Like, if you look at the first derivative of it, it's still positive. Like, the populist sentiment is still growing in America. And that's what I really care about the most because I do think that that's where individual liberties get destroyed as, you know, populism effectively mandates a bigger kind of government to solve our individual problems. And I worry that we've got some looming crises, looming crisis number one being social security, looming crisis number two being where rates are and the impact that's gonna have on affordability. Looming crisis number three being that this idea of an asset tax is actually gonna solve any problems where the truth is, like I've said in the past, if you took a 100% of the net wealth of all the billionaires in The United States as a tax, a one time tax, and took a 100% of their net worth, it would fund one year of the federal government. All the billionaires money combined is one year of federal government spending. It doesn't really move the needle to do an asset tax. That there's a fundamental restructuring of how we tax and how we spend that's gonna be necessary. You either need to tax the middle class, which is where a 160,000,000,000,000 of America's $183,000,000,000,000 net worth sits, or you've gotta cut spending massively, or you've gotta completely restructure these entitlement programs, all of which are deeply unpopular. All three of those paths are deeply unpopular. So when something deeply unpopular starts to kind of be the only path, what happens? And that's what I worry most about. And I think that's all gonna kinda come to a head between '26 and '28. I I think it's gonna frame the political calculus going into '28. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:09:26): It's gonna be fascinating, and we'll be here for it. I don't know if you guys, had time when you were busy here, but there was a hijacking that occurred slash terrorist attack, I think is the only way to describe it. Fly Dubai flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv. David had a 174 passengers on board. An Omani copilot apparently stabbed the captain and tried to crash the plane in a 09:11 style attack. Passengers bravely, subdued him, and there were off duty pilots on the plane, miraculously. I mean, what are the chances? And, they somehow, during this terrorist trying to down the plane, Friedberg, were able to not only remove him, but get these off duty pilots into the cockpit, level the plane, and land it safely. One of the most amazing acts of bravery with this copilot who fought off, the terrorist, and then three or four passengers were able to get into that cockpit, drag the... This terrorist out, and, yeah, land the plane. Your thoughts, Freebird? David Friedberg (01:10:43): Well, I mean, the eyewitness accounts came out pretty fast and furious because these guys had Internet access as soon as they were able to land in Saudi Arabia, and they started to provide their reports. But what really I thought was the most striking aspect of all of this despite the... What I thought was incredible heroism and bravery and just a true kind of showing of human spirit was how the media covered it. And I was deeply saddened because I remember nine eleven. I remember the shock and the anger and the stories coming out during that day. I remember the media, the news channels were my source of truth, and I watched it all day. And then yesterday, this happened. And and so here... Here's an example. This is the New York Times cover the day after nine eleven. Hijacked jets destroy twin towers and notice this and hit Pentagon in day of terror. And it really was a day of terror. It was a truly tragic event in human history. Regardless of your political or social beliefs then or now, the loss of life, in this case, the loss of life in conflicts that followed, the loss of life in conflicts around October 7 and that followed that is all tragic, and it's all terror, and it's all awful. And the reporting yesterday on this event, which I found to be kind of emotionally distressing, was almost like a a strange casting of the experience as being one of a fight between two buddies that weren't getting along in the cockpit of this Chamath Palihapitiya (01:12:26): a... Yeah. Got into a scuffle. The the original reporting. Yes. David Friedberg (01:12:30): The first one was New York Times come... Came out and said it was an altercation. And then the journal called it a struggle. The BBC called it a fight between pilots. Sky News called it a brawl between pilots. AFP called it, you know, said they were fighting. Even CNN said it was a altercation. And there were direct eyewitness reports coming out at this time about this guy tried to take over the plane and crash it. And this was clearly a terror event. And we've stopped using this word terror for some reason because when we use terror, it doesn't allow us to politicize and create sides of a story and a long form narrative that I believe so much of the media is trying to portray. And I'm not gonna try and say what their narrative is and who's trying to do it. But here's the next day on the New York Times website. So this is the day after when all the facts of the case have come out. What happened? This is the front page of the New York Times today, a day after with all of the witnesses, with all of the journalism that would allow you to validate multiple witnesses on what happened on this flight, that investigators seek to establish a motive. The story is that the guy tried to crash a plane full of passengers. He took over the plane. He tried to do it. Number one bullet point, seven thirty seven sustained the enormous stress. Number two, investigators seek to answer the motive. And in bullet point number three, Israeli politicians use the attack to try to score points in this month's election. And so I just kind of lost faith yesterday and today in how the media is kind of characterizing facts on the ground that there is human tragedy, that there is terror, and that from their view, from their writing, this ends up becoming a place to kind of sell, I think, unfortunately, a narrative that is all too popular and is what's gonna sell them. And they don't wanna lose people by saying the wrong thing, and they wanna say what they think is right. And I don't know who the individuals are behind all of it. But I just found it to be pretty shocking for me that twenty five years ago to today how much has changed in the landscape of the people that we trust, that we call journalists to tell us the truth of what's going on and to try and recharacterize such horrific events because it doesn't quite conform to a specific narrative that they've been trying to sell for some time. David Friedberg (01:14:43): So I was deeply upset about the whole thing, and I wanted to bring it up. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:14:46): Yeah. Mean, reasonably upset. David Friedberg (01:14:50): Two different big shout out to the pilot. Unbelievable. If you read the reports, he wouldn't go to the bathroom because he had suspicions that his copilot was going to do something. He called for an emergency urinary bag and he stayed in the cockpit to pee in his urinary bag. That's when the guy tried to kill him. He fought the guy off. He was... While he was stabbed and bleeding out to death, heroically opened up the cockpit door and screamed for passengers to come and help. And then several heroic souls stepped up and saved the day and saved a 170 some odd lives. That's the story. It's a story of terror. It's a story of human heroism. I don't care where these people are from. I don't care what religion anyone is. I don't care what political interests anyone might have. This is the story that needs to be told, and it is being kind of bull recast by the media about Israeli politicians trying to score points is what the New York Times is trying to sell on their cover page today Yeah. As opposed to the story of what really took place here. And then the New York Times, you know, got so much over it that they started... And, J. C. I, you can cover this. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:15:50): But Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And the New York Times communications account says... Based on the the early tweet, which was, hey. There there was an altercation. Quote, our headlines and live coverage contain all the facts we're able to confirm as we confirm them. Unlike activists and partisans, we don't publish speculation or unverified information. Here's a gift link to follow along to our reporting yada yada. So I guess two topics there, Sachs. You have the real time issue, which is certainly very different than nine eleven. And that was an attack where people took credit pretty quickly if I... If my memory serves me correctly. And in this case, we're left to wonder lone wolf coordinated attack, etcetera. But certainly strange the next day's coverage, I think, at a minimum that they can't call this a terrorist attack, a little bit odd. Your thoughts, thanks. David Sacks (01:16:44): Well, I think we can probably infer what the motive here was. I mean, it was terrorism. This was a Dubai airline, but I think all the passengers were Israeli. Yeah. One of the detail I thought was interesting was that when the pilot yelled for help, I guess, then a few other passengers stormed the cockpit. The terrorist was yanked out of there by an Israeli plumber. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:17:08): Love it. Yeah. David Sacks (01:17:11): He ends I up don't think that's like CIA plumber. I think that was... I think he's like a real plumber. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:17:15): Yeah. This guy has David Sacks (01:17:16): Those those Israelis are tough. I gotta say. They're they're quite tough. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:17:20): And the bravery to jump in the cockpit like that, and then I just... I mean, how... The the fortuitous and I guess conspiracy theorists are now losing their minds, but to to be able to have two pilots who were able there and get get this landed, absolutely fantastic. And so glad people's lives have been saved. And I'll save the false flag nonsense and and whatever for a conspiracy show. Somebody else can handle that issue. Shammoth, listen. It... We've we've said a lot here about it. Glad everybody's safe. Any final thoughts as we wrap? Jason Calacanis (01:17:54): A Omani national stabbed an Indian pilot and then tried to down a plane full of Israelis. That is what happened. And any attempt to try to cover up any of those facts is cowardly. I've worked in Israel. I've had some incredible memories there. I think at some point, we all just need to take a step back and realize what happened October 7 was horrible. What's happened in Palestine, also horrible. But you cannot now see these kinds of things and look past them because you care more about a narrative than what the facts are. Those were a 150, 170 earnest, normal people living lives. Yeah. Fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, kids. They didn't deserve to get plunged into the ground and die. So I think this idea that you can now whitewash what happens enough is enough. And I think we need to find a way to actually tell the truth for what things are. So I was really, really, really disappointed in how the media handled it. David Friedberg (01:19:23): And I think Jason Calacanis (01:19:23): it's and I think it's dangerous. And I think it's yet another demonstration that these people have absolutely no moral authority left in society. They're just pathetic, putrid, and they're... And by the way, they're coordinated. When you see the words, the same words over and over, altercation, altercation, altercation, it's very powerful. It means that it starts from one place. And I think that, you know, if you believe that you are reading this stuff and you're getting the facts, you're just not. And so David Friedberg (01:19:52): Well, it implies that one guy did something wrong to the other guy and they got in a fight. That's not what happened. That's what Chamath Palihapitiya (01:19:57): it implies. I I... I'm trying to have the most charitable interpretation here like Jason Calacanis (01:20:04): Lie. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:20:05): To steel man it. So in the moment, if you didn't know what happened, but then, you know, after it happened, you would just very easily be able to say potential Jason Calacanis (01:20:14): terrorist attack footage coming from the airplane. David Friedberg (01:20:19): Of course. And how do you describe it as a suicidal Yeah. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:20:23): That's that's my point. In the moment, you could you could give them a, hey. You don't know what's happening. You wanna be cautious here if it's a suicide, if it is an actual fight, or if it's a terrorist attack. Okay. Fine. I I could have a little bit of room there to be like, okay. But then after it, like, how could you not say this is an apparent terrorist attack or a mentally ill person? Those are the two possibilities here, period. Full stop. And then you really have to get into what what is the motivation here. David Sacks (01:20:50): Yeah. Look. I think the moral principle here is that all attacks on civilians are wrong. And that's what this was. And it was, I mean, pretty clearly an act of terrorism. And regardless of who's doing it, that's the thing we have to denounce. David Friedberg (01:21:05): That's right. David Sacks (01:21:05): Is even when there's a military conflict taking place, attacks on civilians are wrong. Yeah. That's a war crime. You know, there's there's a lot there's a lot of that happening. So it's not the only case. But all that needs to stop. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:21:18): Alright. That's your all in episode two ninety one for 10/02/2026. We'll see you all next week. Bye bye. Jason Calacanis (01:21:28): Bye bye. David Sacks (01:21:30): We'll let your winners ride. Speaker 5 (01:21:33): Rain man David Sacks. I'm going home. Speaker 6 (01:21:37): And it said we open sourced it to the fans, and they've just gone crazy with it. David Friedberg (01:21:55): We Speaker 5 (01:22:01): should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy because they're all just useless. It's like it's like sexual tension that they just need to release somehow.