All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg - Dario Defends Himself, Datacenter Panic, AI Doomer Trap, Senate Toss-Up

Episode Date: August 21, 2026

(00:00) Besties are back! (00:13) Dario's two-part essay: regulatory capture, doomerism, and the data center backlash (10:25) FINRA for AI vs. MPAA for AI: SROs, thinking tokens, and the "DMV for AI" (30:12) Is an open source ban coming? Harnesses, FDI, jobs, and recursive self-improvement (56:33) a16z under DOJ investigation over "interlocking directorates" (1:01:15) Midterms: broken polls, the socialism surge, and CATO's DSA price tag   Come hang with the Besties at the All-In Summit | September 13-15: ⁠http://theallinsummit.com⁠ ⁠#AllInSummit⁠ Follow the besties: https://x.com/chamath https://x.com/Jason https://x.com/DavidSacks https://x.com/friedberg   Follow on X: https://x.com/theallinpod Follow on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theallinpod Follow on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@allin Follow on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/allinpodIntro   Music Credit: https://rb.gy/tppkzl https://x.com/yung_spielburgIntro   Video Credit: https://x.com/TheZachEffect   #allin #tech #news

All right, everybody. Welcome back to the number one podcast in the world, your favorite podcast, the O'LN podcast. We've got a huge, huge docket with me again, the core for Chumath, Freiburg, Sachs, and your boy, Jake Halth. Topic one. Topic one. Let's get right to. No small talk, boys. Dario has spoken. Apparently, he listens to the All-Lend podcast, and he was compelled to respond to Gavin Baker's little discussion last week that many people inside or some people, allegedly, maybe inside of Anthropic belief, quote, that they will be the only private company in the world at some point. Some folks from Anthropic, Sholto Douglas fired back, completely false, whoever told Gavin this is lying. And Dario decided he would come out of hiding. And he entered the chat with an epic two-part essay on regulation sacks. He said, quote, I know the Silicon Valley a shorthand where regulation equals regulatory capture equals concentration of power. But I've always found this to be an overly simplified picture. On messaging, he said, quote, you do not agree.

My messaging has been disproportionately negative. It has been about equally balanced between risks and benefits. It took a little responsibility, quote, by far the most accurate criticism of AI companies, including Anthropic, is that we haven't yet delivered on our big promises to benefit the world. That is totally on us. Most quoted line, the thing that will work is actually curing cancer, not glitzy marketing questions. Sacks, you've been talking about Anthropic for a year and a half. He never responded.

Gavin comes out and he suddenly is very talkative and responds. What do you take from the fact that he never responded to you? And then he responded to Gavin and then we'll get into the details. Does he not want to spar with you? In fairness, J. Cal, he did respond to me. I mean, I don't want to center myself, but the reality is he did not respond to what Gavin said. He easily could have said that what Gavin said he said is untrue, like Shalto did. He did not weigh in on that issue.

Instead, he really weighed in on the regulatory capture issue. So that's the thing that I think drew him out here is I think he is a little bit irked by the fact that we keep accusing him of regulatory capture capture. And this is something I've been saying since last year that they were engaged in a sophisticated regulatory capture scheme based on fear models. And those are the points he's really responding to. And I think the thing that he doesn't like about it is that he feels like it impugns his motives, that he's not pure and pursuing all these regulations for the right for the right reasons. And my response to that is, look, there's no question that Anthropic has been extremely aggressive about seeking to implement its preferred regulatory frameworks at both the state and federal level. That is regulatory capture. Now, look,

I think that Dario may be sincere in his beliefs. I'm not saying he's doing this for pecuniary reasons. Nonetheless, he is seeking to capture the machinery of the state on behalf of his political agenda. It's just there's not much to debate there, I don't think. There's a few other things to say about this. So let me go to point number two first. He says that he's not responsible for the negativity around AI, that he's been balanced in his portrayal of AI. Oh, really? Do you expect us to have amnesia about the fact that just

about a year and a half ago, you said very specifically that within one to five years, 50% of entry-level knowledge workers would lose their jobs. And this was not just some sort of idle speculation on a podcast. This was something that they engineered and amplified into a full-fledged media campaign. You may recall that President Obama even retweeted this. And many other Democratic Party officials did the same thing. Moreover, this pattern repeats itself with the whole anthropic blackmail study. Remember, he's got a team at the company. They're supposedly studying alignment. They create this highly contrived study where they prompt this model over 200 times until they finally get the headline grabbing result that they wanted. And again, my point here is that

this is not just someone just riffing on a podcast about the alignment risk of AI. This is them actually creating a study, engineering that study, and then pumping it to create the headlines they wanted. And Dario and his sister, who's the president of the company and other executives, went on 60 minutes and breathlessly pumped this thing. And since that study has come out, a lot of people looked at it and said, look, this thing is highly contrived, including the UKAI Safety Institute basically said that this thing was created under highly pressurized conditions, and they engineered the result. So these guys have great. created campaigns to make people fear AI.

Why is the public so afraid of AI? They think it's going to take their jobs. They think it's become the Terminator. It's exactly the fears that Anthropic has put in the media bloodstream. And no company, and you have to say, therefore, no founder, CEO has done more to promote these fears and pump these fears and amplify these fears than Dario has. And the fact that he can't see that either makes him, I'd say disingenuous or delusional. I'm going with the latter.

So that's point number one. And I really think that almost everybody who read that who's been paying attention felt the same way. It's like, Darya, you really have a blind spot with respect to your own behavior. By the way, can we talk about that one for a second or no? Yeah, let's do it. Just to build on what you're saying, the issue that we have right now is actually pretty problematic. If I had to take three different vectors of actions and now put them together, you've had a very disjointed, disorganized, and frankly,

a pearl-clutching, disingenuous AI doom narrative. And it's actually seeded. And now it's growing. And as a result, what's happening? I was really shocked when I saw Governor Abbott of Texas put down this executive order around Texas data centers and limiting its growth. Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania just did the same thing.

Axios reported that the GOP party sent out a memo to the executives at the various AI companies essentially saying, hey, stop rage baiting people because we're about to lose this critical GOP Senate race in Ohio, largely around this issue. So you have dumerism, and then you now have mainstream political pushback from both sides of the aisle, which I think is extremely dangerous. And then the third leg of the stool is rising yields. By the way, the Treasury Department just doubled its bond buying. If you put all of these things together, as just a casual observer, what I would say is we have made some really stupid, unforced errors in the United States. And the CODA to all of this is if you put all of these things together, rising yields constrains the money supply in terms of how people want to invest in risk-seeking assets, because the risk-free rate just keeps going up.

That causes people to be less likely to invest in all the data centers. Data centers themselves are being shut down. Where does that leave frontier model companies? They're the most at risk. Why? Because they're not investment grade. They're in the worst position in terms of their balance sheets. They're not in a position to then get access to the compute.

They need to be successful. So even as you grow, you're actually making your problem worse in the sense that you need more and more capacity to sustain that growth that you can't fund because all the negativity has turned people against you. So all roads lead to a big question mark and a head scratching moment for me where I'm like, how did we end up in this situation? But whether it was accidental or whether it was well-intentioned risk management, whatever it was, we are now in a very precarious situation that we could have frankly avoided. Totally agree. Freebert, your thoughts on this anti-data center movement or on Dario's going direct and writing the double missive.

Do you think he's sincere, delusional, some combination? Why don't we steal man it? Yeah. And if we put ourselves in the shoes of a frontier lab leader, and the leader is seeing capabilities of models that perhaps we don't see because we're working day-to-day in enterprise settings, making stuff, doing things in a benign, non-nefarious way. And they're sitting there and they're pressure testing models. And they figure out, hey, there's ways you can jailbreak models to get them to do things

that they're not supposed to do. And then you can use them to do things like design bio-weapons, make viruses, make infectious diseases that don't exist today. You could use them to design cyber weapons to get them to go and do things online, like break into bank accounts and take people's money and all these sorts of things. And you can prompt them to do things that could broadly influence society by creating fake media, fake videos, fake images, propagate them through social media, hack the algorithms. I mean, X's algorithm is public, so theoretically an agent could read it,

copy it, understand it, and figure out a way to manipulate the broad public. And so you realize that as you're building these tools, where there's a lot of benign, positive, world leading, progressive kind of applications, you see all the bad stuff that could happen with it. And you can keep trying to build systems and keep trying to build ways to stop it from doing that. You can build all your own code that reviews every prompt that comes in, that reviews every API call. And yet somehow a network of agents can be used to do things. and they can start to do things that we don't want them to do. And so let's assume that you're sitting there and you're the executive of the company building this great technology.

You believe fully in its capabilities and its benefits to society, its benefits to the economy. But you can't get a grip on how to keep it under control and how to stop social engineering, bio weapons and cyber weapons. What do you do differently? Okay. So you're bringing up, it's an exceptional, going down an exceptional path. I love this. There is one thing that you must do. if you believe that this is true, to further steal man this thing. You cannot obfuscate the thinking tokens of a model then.

What do I mean? If you just compare open source models versus the closed frontier models, there is no way for us to understand what the thinking tokens are, meaning you give it a prompt, you get back something, but all of the stuff in the middle is obfuscated. Claw obfuscates it. So do the open AI models. And I would say, if I was really afraid,

the first thing I would do is try to find a way to unobfuscate these thinking tokens so that you could have a third party actually legitimize what you're saying. Because what's interesting to me is I haven't seen the same dumerism from any open source model company, including NVIDIA. And the thing with the open source models is you can actually see it thinking

so you can see its misalignment in real time. And so instead, we have to basically agree to their interpretation of tokens that we can't see, that only they can see, that they can interpret how they want. And without judging, whether it's right or wrong,

I would say, give them the benefit of the doubt that they're trying to do the right thing. Make the bloody thing available to other people then. Let somebody else with some amount of judgment as well, sit in the room and steal man it with you. So then let me make this point. So, Sachs, there was this argument that Demas put out for a FINRA-style regulatory system

where industry participants that understand technology move quickly and are aligned with commercialization, actively review each other's systems and each other's models via an industry consortium that hires and assign scientists to work on this stuff and they're just doing it versus having it be owned and managed by the government and create some regulatory capture scheme. But then this week, you were pretty against the FINRA system and your tweets. You seem to be supportive of it the first time around when Demis originally published it. It seems to me that the proposal from Demas that Dario signed up to, Sam signed up to, Elon all signed up to, you're now against, but that could be a solution to, if there is

genuine concern here, given Chimov's points. Let me clarify. Let me clarify that. I think designing a new regulatory agency for AI that's designed after FINRA, which is a pretty sleepy regulatory agency that writes rules for stockbrokers in a fairly mature industry that's not dynamic at all is a horrible idea. And by the way, FINRA is widely perceived as just protecting incumbents and talk to any startup founders had to deal with them. They view FINRA as existing to protect the big banks from disruption. It's just not a good model to base regulation. Perhaps the NFA, the National Futures Association, which is also one of these self-regulatory organizations in the financial markets, is a better alternative because that's a pretty dynamic market.

Okay. So now what you're saying is very interesting, which is you mentioned the term self-regulatory organization or SRO, and there's many different models. And one of them may work. And that's been my point. The one I think is the most appropriate for this circumstance to be something like the MPAA. which does not report to the government at all, and was formulated by the motion picture industry in response to the Hays Code. And what the government said is, get your act together, guys, or we're going to have to do it for you. And what the NPA did then was promote standards that then forestalled more intrusive, heavy-handed government action. So that is basically the model that I said I could get behind. But is that the model that Dario supports?

No. Dario and I think Demas wants a FINRA, which is basically this rulemaking regulatory agency that would not only promulgate standards, but also do pre-release model testing, okay? And it would then report into the government and then officially be enshrined in law. And the reason why everyone says, well, Elon's behind her. I've talked to Elon about this. Elon does not support a FINRA for AI. What he could get behind is an MPAA for AI.

And that's my point is Demis wrote something very high level. That's what I've been saying on this podcast, Sacks, since the beginning. I have been saying MPA self-reguling. I get it. But look, here's my point. Demis wrote something very high level. And so when you say something like, well, everyone supports Demis's idea, there's many versions of Demis's idea.

Yes. Some of them could be okay. And some of them are bad. And what I'm saying is if it's a FINRA model, that will not work. Having spoken to Demis at length about this, I think that the general framework is, SRO in the right structure. However, FINRA is often used as the example of an SRO simply because it is the most well-known SRO.

But you are correct. I think that there's a mechanism by which this thing needs to operate that is distinct from any other SRO, but the idea being the industry gets together and to Chimov's point, they get to look at each other's models, they get to police it, they get to have independence, but they don't get to be controlled by government. And that might solve the problem. And just to be clear, this FINRA for AI idea, Dario is behind the Demasus behind. Just call it an SRO for AI.

SRO. It's not an SRO because it's not self-regulating. It's a regulatory organization and the S part is a total fig leaf designed to hide the fact that this is a new regulatory agency that reports in the government that does pre-release, testing, and approval of models. I call it a DMV for AI because I think what's going to happen is all these models are going to get lined up in a queue waiting to get their test done and then. released and it's going to slow us down horribly. Have you ever been to the game way down to kill? It's a terrible idea and it's just a repackaging of what Dario has always wanted, which is an FDA for AI.

Now he's saying it's an FAA for AI. You know how long the FAA and the FDA take to approve new products? Yeah, we mentioned it last week. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. China's advantage. Yeah, exactly.

China's going to win if we do this. And it will become pure regulatory capture. You should look at China's rocket that they landed yesterday. You know, it's completely steel. and there's a good analysis that was done on how quickly they were able to do it from the last time they had an explosion of this. Then they got full steel done. And Elon's still waiting for FAA approval on his steel starship. You could actually watch it playing out in China where their regulatory agencies are allowing them to move much more quickly. And as a result, they're starting to

gain real traction in the space race. And then separately, a lot of biotech has moved offshore from the U.S. for the same reason that you're pointing out, which is the FDA approval cycle. is so long and the stage has slowed people down so much. And China's completely revamped their rules for getting to clinicals and getting to phase three and then completing that all the biotech investing in the world is now moving to China. The fact that Dario could want and has called for, including in very recent blogs, a regulatory apparatus modeled after the FAA and that that is the right model for AI, in my view, is completely discrediting.

And yes, we will get smoked by China because, they will not subject all their companies to these constraints. Now, let's play this out. Let's play this out. Go back to your Steelman for a second. Just because I believe that we should not have a DMV for AI does not mean that I'm against AI safety. So let's talk about some of the things that can be done.

So first of all, I think it's good that these frontier labs take safety seriously. Sam just came out with a post, I believe, yesterday saying that actually they're going to slow down the release of some of their frontier models, because. they felt that their safety stack was not keeping it with the capability. Okay, that's responsible. By the way, do you know why I think they're doing that? Because they have huge and ample liability to take responsible steps. Because if they don't, they're going to be subjected to all sorts of product liability lawsuits. Look at what's happening to meta right now. They're getting sued because supposedly their product led to social media addiction and they're being sued for over a trillion

dollars right now. And this comes on the heel of them losing a $6 million jury trial in Los Angeles where a plaintiff sued them for creating her body image issues. So we are seeing massive product liability lawsuits against big tech companies like meta and Google. And if OpenAI and Anthropic are and I think they are, they do not want to be next. So these companies have ample reasons for liability protection, not to just race out their product. Safety is part of what they have. to get right. Now, how should the industry coordinate with each other? There are tried and true ways of doing this. Companies in the industry published papers, they publish technical papers, they publish blogs. These are good ways of sharing best practices. They attend symposia and conferences,

and they present at these things. They do request for comments as part of open standard setting exercises. There are ways of the industry collaborating on safety in very productive ways. but what is the common denominator of everything I just said? They are all open. They are not in secret. And that makes those judgments contestable to the point that Jamath made earlier about we need to see the thinking behind this. And what I'm against is these companies meeting in secret, whether it's part of some sort of like FINRA or otherwise, to set standards that are not transparent, that are uncontestable. And you know what's going to come out of that?

Regulatory capture and anti-competitive behavior. So there are ways of doing this that will protect the public that are open and transparent. That is what we should lead towards. You will not see it happen. And I'll tell you why. Just again, the technical details matter. If all of a sudden, competitor A, B, and C could see every single trace and span that your model generated as an artifact of going from input tokens to output tokens, you're essentially giving away a lot of your recipe.

and I just don't think that if Anthropic isn't willing, even if I'm an API customer, to share my thinking tokens from my company with me, they're sure not going to share it with Open AI and anybody else in a room. Okay? And let's just do one more steel man. So let's say that Dario is successful. And J-Cal, I'll ask you the question,

because I've taken over as moderator of this second. Go ahead. No, I mean, no, Sacks has, this is Sacks as, Real House. I wanted to hear it. Let's just, let's just say, this is Saxon Will House. I wanted to hear your whole position. Let's just say that Dario is successful. There's some regulatory scheme that's created that does in fact, this access point, slow down the industry, slow down model development. And China's frontier labs make significant progress and they start to leap ahead. And they get this RSI, this recursive self-improvement going. And their models become the best in the world and they only get better and better and better. Chek-Cat will start with you. Okay. And then we'll go around the horn. Okay, world's greatest moderate.

What is the implication for the American worker, for the American business, and for the American consumer in a world where China just has the best AI and they have all the data center? What happens in our world? What is the consequence? Because everyone keeps hearing, oh, China will win, China will win. Who cares? What does that actually mean? I don't think China is going to win. I think it will be, you know, there's not going to be one person who takes the whole prize.

I think it's going to be incremental improvement. So I don't think that that matters. I've been thinking about why this backlash is happening, actually, for the data centers. And it was kind of shocking to see Abbott come out and Shapiro come out because those two people were the most pro data centers, right? And if you kind of double-click on it, they just want to make sure you're not tapping into the grid and, you know, the water concern, which we've talked about here is not too serious. But I think it was very performative. And I think you and I were talking about this on the back channel is they both. are doing this because their constituents, the people who vote for them, really care about

these data centers and they want to stop them. So then you have to work backwards. Why do they want to stop data centers so much? Why are Americans so opposed to AI right now? And the perception of AI was already pre-baked with science fiction, of course. So we needed to work to get past the Skynet Terminator vision. But Dario told everybody, we're going to lose our jobs. said, you're not going to have to work. It was a more world positive view, but he did say that.

Sam Waltman did, you know, studies on universal basic income. And he told everybody, you're not going to have to work. You know, have UBI. Saying that kind of stuff to people who have to work for a living and who have no savings and who are watching, you know, in administration after administration, not be able to tame inflation, whether they're Democrats or Republicans, and then watching the minimum wage, just stay the way it is and barely move while the same. stock market hits records, and then all of us, all of us being tech executives, get super rich. And you wonder why people now are embracing socialism and why you have Abbott and Shapiro saying, you know what? And Roe Conner, worst of all, saying, I have to be anti-capitalistic.

I have to be a decel. I have to decelerate. It's because, you know, they were supposed to see some relief, and they haven't. And then what do people do who do not feel they have any power? They look to find power. And if you look at that, they look at that. what's happened, they are sharpening the guillotine. And, you know, that metaphor should wake people up, whether it's, you know, the United Health Care CEO getting killed or people firebombing Sam Altman's house. We need to wake up and look at why are people so upset? It's because they can't survive. They're having a hard time with affordability, with their wages. And what two things can they do? They can vote for socialists and they can actually stop data centers. And that's what

this is about. Nobody, no regular rank and file American cares about AI safety. That's not the discussion for them. The discussion for them is, why am I not getting rich and everybody else is? I would tune your argument by one degree. I really think you're onto something, but the one degree shift is, I don't think they think about it entirely that way. I actually think they think about it as if I think about who has won over the last decade, this generation of tech oligarchs who of one are pretty displeasing. They're not aspirational. And they're not the people that one would look up to. They're not Steve Jobs by any stretch of the imagination. And now they look at this other next generation and they're like, wait, we're going to go from billionaire, deca billionaire,

to now trillionaire. And it's those guys, those guys are even worse than the last crop. That's exactly what's happening. And so I don't think it's as specific as what you're saying, Jason. I think it's vibes. And the vibes are terrible. And they're looking around, they're like, If we can just slow this down, maybe another batch of people will show up and they will actually mean to do the right thing and will make me at least feel better. And I won't be so begrudgingly hating the fact that you're about to make a trillion dollars. It is precisely that sensation. And the folks that are at the front of the show on this are not trustworthy. That's what it is.

Let me ask you my question. And I just, I need to hear someone answer this question. Okay, but I'll answer your question. I'd like that. Yeah. So my question again, if there is a regular case. slowdown with AI development in the U.S. and China races ahead.

What are the implications for American business, for American consumers? How does this actually affect? They will win. What does that mean? What does that mean? Help people understand. So like if I'm sitting at home,

I work and jobs. Okay. Let me give you like a counterfactual. Imagine if China had won the internet. Imagine if all the major internet companies were Chinese right now. I need you to imagine for me. Give me a scenario of what this means. So imagine that instead of,

I know people don't like big tech, but imagine if Google and Microsoft and meta and all these companies were actually, it was Baidu and Alibaba and Tencent and all the rest of them, instead. I mean, obviously, that would be way worse for the United States. Our economy would not be as vibrant. It would not be as cutting edge. And all that wealth would have gone into China. There are also military or dual-use applications of this technology, especially with AI, the algorithms, power, all sorts of weapons, drones, things like that. So we'll be behind them.

I mean, look, America is not going to be the number one country in the world economically and militarily if we lose AI. It's just that simple. Toma, do you agree? Like, what's your view of the world, the U.S., business, consumer, individual in a world where China has one quote in AI? I don't know what it means. What do you mean by one? I don't know what it means. Okay. So what I'm trying to get to the implications. If you could refine that, it'd be easier to answer. implications of regulatory slowdown. So if we do slow down AI, what are the implications for people? How do people understand tangibly what that means? Yeah, unless we actually go and ban, and I don't even know how one would implement a ban, so I think it's just a worthless exercise.

Ban open source, I think we're going to be just fine. I think the consumer is going to win. I think American companies will win, and I think the American economy will win. And the reason why it will win is that what we are finding, I'll give you an example of a really interesting insight. And this is about closed versus open, okay? Three years ago, all there ever were were models. Yeah? And you would look at some benchmark and there would be a score of Freedberg and you would say,

wow, the one with the higher score is better. And then in the last few years, what's emerged is what's called a harness, right? And a harness just wraps the model, right? Like Codex or Quad Code or Hermes or OpenClaw, these are harnesses. You know what the interesting thing about open source versus closed source models? When you take a closed source model, it does really well on a benchmark. When you wrap it in its own harness, it decays in capability. When you take an open source model and you use any other open source model, it improves in capability.

What is that trying to tell you? What I think we are finding out, and this data is just going to be a tsunami over the next year, is there are all kinds of ways of using open source technologies that are meaningfully more performant and dramatically cheaper than the closed source alternative. Unless America stops us, us being consumers, business owners, from using the cheapest, fastest, best thing, unless they stop us from doing that, we will win. What we are debating at this point is which private American company will win or lose. I go back to the previous argument, I don't think Americans care that much whether any of these

closed source companies win or lose. And I think you're seeing that in the policy. So Freeberg, my explicit answer to you is as long as we don't do some draconian thing like trying to stop open source, the American consumer will win. I got bad news for you, Jamath. An open source ban is coming. They're not going to call it that. You know what they're going to say?

they're going to say that we simply have to apply the same standards to open models that we apply to close. Okay, here's how they do it step by step. Let me explain how regulatory capture actually works. So first of all, you got to get this regulatory apparatus, okay? Daria wants an FDA for AI, but he doesn't have enough political support for that. So instead, they do this Trojan horse of a FINRA for AI. They call itself regulating. It's not really.

But anyway, that gets them off the ground. Now they've created the standard setting organization. Now they've got pre-release model testing. Then the pressure grows to codify that in law. So that happens next. And then what they do is they say, look, all these standards need to apply equally to all models. But here's the problem with that. Open models and closed models, as you know, are technologically different.

Go back to Dario's Senate testimony in, I think it was 2023, where he said that open models, if sufficiently advanced, are dangerous. And why are they dangerous? Because they cannot be centrally monitored and controlled. and rolled back and withdraw, hold on, like a closed service, like the one he hosts. Okay. I understand, David. But hold on, hold on.

Let me just finish the point. Please, let me just finish the point. Then you can, you can respond. Dario basically says that open models are dangerous because of these characteristics they have. And those characteristics are immutable. They're technologically, they can't be changed. Once you release an open model into the world, you can't roll it back and you can't monitor exactly how people are using it because they run it on their own hardware. Dario says this is what

makes open models dangerous. So what they're going to do is they're going to have the standard setting body say, well, we have to set the standards for AI safety. By the way, Dario and Open AI, they're going to fund the whole thing. They're going to contribute all the compute. They're going to be behind it. They're going to be the ones coordinating with the government officials because, frankly, people in government have no idea how to monitor and control and set standards for AI safety. Technologically, this is way beyond them. So they're going to go to these companies. and say, tell us how to do it. And so what will happen is the standards will get set, and then it'll be a very simple matter

of fairness to say that the standards need to apply to open as well as closed models. The open models cannot comply in the same way, and gradually they will be shut out. I understand, but the American economy would cripple overnight. So what? You're saying regulators have never done things that are quickly. Okay, let's show up. Let's draw up. So let's take, again, I'll use the example of Coca-Cola. Coca-Cola is an extremely profitable, cash-generative, well-run business. It has existed for, I don't know, 100-plus years. At this point, it will exist for many hundreds more if left to their own devices. It is a global business, right? Take Pfizer. Same situation. Well-run business, global business. And now what you will tell them is, unless you tell them, hey, anywhere you operate, you need to follow American rules. Okay.

that's one thing. Or it'll say, inside of America, you need to follow our rules and other governments will have different rules. Now, what is Coca-Cola to do? Run the slower, more costly, less effective, less valuable model in the United States? Sure, they'll do that. And their U.S. business will cripple. They will have a better flourishing business abroad. They will invest abroad. And what you will see as FDI, foreign direct investment in the United States, go off of a cliff. And what you will see is direct investments into other countries of the world rise. You've seen this, by the way, in China. When China made all these moves to cripple the Chinese tech companies, I think this is the best analogy. There was a moment where China was at a fork in the road where the large oligopolis

there, the large tech oligarchs, were trying to seize power. And the tip of that sphere was when Jack Ma gave that very famous speech on the eve of the IPO of Ant Financial. What happened? Xi Jinping cracked down. They took complete control. They said, we are now operating together. Everybody that is worth anything will have a representative from the Chinese government on their board.

We have the golden vote. We're going to work together. When you look at what happened to foreign direct investment and you look at what happened in their economy, it fell off of a cliff. That will happen here if this happens. So they can try and everybody will say, okay, and what the Coke CEO will do is redirect all of his capital allocation to outside of America. So will Pfizer, so will I, so will anybody. And then what are you going to do? Take away our passport so you can't travel.

So I think it will be a very visible way of just destroying the United States. And you can do that if you want to, but you will see it play out almost instantaneously in the equity markets and in the capital allocation of them. I agree with you about all the negative consequences if we ban open models, but that doesn't mean it can't happen. Look at all the negative consequences of banning data centers. Data centers are going to be 3% of GDP. It's basically creating all the gains in the stock market. But they're not voting against that. They're voting against two people that they deeply dislike becoming trillioners. That's what they're voting against. That's a big part of it. Jake,

what do you think? Well, I was just going to add to this. We already know what would happen with AGI Freeberg, because your original question of like trying to explain to Americans what happens when China wins, we already know what happens when they win. Products get cheaper and you get more access to them. If they solve cancer, what are they going to do with that solution? They're going to just keep it for themselves? No, they're going to sell it to Americans, just like they sell phones cheaper, just like they sell cars cheaper, and we try to block them. And then what Americans are going to do, we're going to lose our jobs to them. And so that would be the way, I think, to explain it to them. But if we want to turn this around, this really is just about convincing Americans that they're going to have jobs and that this is going to benefit them.

The American people are scared of losing their livelihoods. That's the beginning and end of it. And, you know, the place where I have some expertise is in having invested in Zipline and Uber and a bunch of self-driving companies. And that's where they're being poor. The money's not the issue here. But the thing that I think is, you know, where this is going to play out is really on the, autonomy and those jobs. Zipline just did a partnership with Uber. I'm investors in both of those companies, obviously, and they are going to do a million deliveries a day. Then you'll look at

just massive progress by Waymo. They're doubling the number of cars on the road like every six months or so. Tesla is about to go cyber camp. And what people are perceiving is in their community that you're not going to have any money staying in their community. Because those drivers, you know, as much as hand-wringing as occurred, that money at least stayed in the community. Oh, they weren't making enough. Oh, they're only making $18, $16 hours, $21 an hour, whatever it is. But now we're taking that away from them. And then where does that money go?

Where does the money for a Robotaxi, Waymo ride, Zipline? Where does it all go? It goes up into the cloud and then comes back down into Silicon Valley, polarizing more wealth. And that's where you're going to see, I will predict it now. They're going to ban Waymo's in New York, Boston. DC and they're going to limit them with licenses. We must figure out how to explain to Americans that we're going to raise the minimum wage, something that when I say we should raise the minimum wage and focus on that, people are like, that's crazy. But when we talk about an experimental tax cut,

people are like, oh, yeah, we do an experimental tax cut, we'll change the cost basis of capital gains. Great, let's try and see what happens. But nobody wants to try to raise the minimum wage. Nobody wants to give people an explanation of where their job will be in the future. And that's where, you know, whoever is making the point, I think was Jutramath, about, like, who are the spokespeople here. We need spokespeople who are saying this technology will empower you to get a great job. Paradoxically, the guy who did the best job explaining this, or the two guys were Jensen, obviously, who said, you're not going to get replaced by AI.

It's going to be somebody who works with AI. And then Zuckerberg, who said, I'm going to give you a bunch of free tools in his manifesto going direct. to you. It was like, I'm going to give you free tools. I'm going to empower you. You're going to get agents. Your life's going to get better. Dario and Sam have not done that. Meta actually did a really great thing. Zuck did a really great thing, which is he created this new program or it's almost like a training school for it's like a trade school for people to go and learn how to get these various kinds of jobs laying fiber doing these new blue collar construction jobs, which we have a huge shortage of. And that's why it actually is hard to build your

salary or something. It's a great focus. Yeah. I mean, that we need more of. And so how is Zuckerberg all of a sudden the best spokesperson for our industry? It's a very low bar. I mean, I guess that's it. I mean, this all goes back to the fact that Dario, not exclusively, but again, he was the one who put the most specific numbers on it and therefore made it the most tantalizing and salacious for the media. 50% of entry-level knowledge workers going to lose their job, not in the distant future as soon as one year. We're now past that one year, Mark, by the way. Has he updated? Has he said I was wrong? Not really. Sam did, by the way, to his credit. Sam Waltman and Dario should start talking about jobs. No, but Sam actually came out and said I was too negative. I was wrong. He did. Dario has doubled

down. As far as I know, he's never recanted. He's an idiotic. So, but, I mean, to your whole point, yes, I agree with you that the animus and anger towards data center flows out of the fears about job, as well as other fears about AI, but it's the job loss that is the main concern. And there is no evidence of that. We're now years into the AI boom. And there's no evidence of that we only see net job creation. Exactly. It's only been the opposite. I mean, listen, I was, I had, I had massive concerns about it. And I'll also say something else. Business opportunity is so great. I got seven job opening. So I keep saying, hold on, hold on. This is important. Hold on, Jake has got an important announcement here.

No, listen, what I've discovered is that if you can convince your team to embrace the tools, so many business opportunities emerge that you wind up hiring people to work for the people in your organization who embrace the tools. So we have become so fast at building the syndicate, building our programs that I'm like, you know, we need to add a couple people. So I thought we were going to automate them away and we're adding. I'll just say another general point. Silicon Valley has completely lost what made it great. It was a place for weirdos, for people at the

fringes, for people that really were idealistic. And it has become something that's far from that now. It is the equivalent of what Harvard used to be. It's a credentialing place. It's a place you come to say, oh, I came to Silicon Valley. I worked at a startup. You know, I got into YC. You know, when we came we used to aspire to meet the Bill Campbells of the world, Mike Moritz's, John Doors. Those folks are gone. We used to aspire to work for Steve Jobs. He's not here. And in that breach, all we have done is focused on making money in every single way that we can.

Hand over fist. And I think, again, there's nothing wrong with that, except now is a point where we need to do a better job of acknowledging it and trying to do a little bit better. And every time we don't, and we're given a chance to be better and we're not, the hatred builds. The animus, as you said, David, builds. And that's what we're seeing now. Yeah, there's no question about that. But can I defend, Aria? Let me just say something in his defense.

I'm sorry. My headphone went out. You said you want to defend, Dario? I actually think he is very idealistic. I don't think money is his main motivation. It's just what are his ideals. He wants to bring forth this new superintelligence machines of loving grace that are going to apportion all the resources of society while humans twiddle their thumbs. It's not a vision that the average person believes in or is attracted to.

In fact, it's dystopian. And that's why a lot of their messaging is dystopian. And because of that vision, no matter how idealistic his motives, it is why he does not inspire trust. I mean, I actually, I don't think he's lying to us and what he's really trying to do here is capture all the wealth for himself. I actually think he's trying to bring forth this future, but it's not a future that I think the American public wants. And by the way, he should have to defend that. I mean, if you think you are bringing about the singularity, and let's face it, he probably is in the lead to do that, to bring about recursive self-improvement, he should defend this future. I see all these people simping on X. I'm like, oh, my God, Dario, thank you.

for coming forth. Thank you for coming down from Mount Olympus and slumming it with the rest of us on X and finally engaging on social media. And it's like, no, he should have to do that. If you're going to put yourself in the lead to bring about this crazy future, you should tell us why you're doing that. Well, and he should speak more. I think this is a key point. And to your point about it's not about money for him, the seven co-founders of, this is my understanding. It's been documented, I think, in a bunch of press reports, but they never talk about it. They donated 80% of their shares. So like 10% of anthropics in some sort of trust, which at two or three trillion, you know, 10% of that's going to be the largest. It's going to be the largest democratic pact.

It's going to be the largest. However they use it, but why aren't they talking about the largest DSA? A trillion dollars to EA causes. What could go wrong? Well, I mean, let's hope they put it towards something that actually is humanity positive. But they, they only, they all own only like 1.8% each. That's a term of art. Yeah. Well, and then I do think going direct is something, you just, I think we can move on after this is critically important.

What have you got to learn? You got an AI to talk. No, no, no. You got to, the playbook is very simple. You got it, number one, you got to write it all yourself, which he clearly did. And, you know, Jensen's been doing. Are you sure about that? I think so. It felt like it was him.

It felt very Claude liked to me. You know the Claude voice? I mean, he is the father of Floyd. That's true, actually. Claude could sound like him rather than vice versa. It could be the other way. It was Asian correlation. But what he did is he did the exact playbook, which is you have to exhaust the audience.

You have to go thousands of words like Zuck did. And then you have to get ahead of problems. That's where the leadership is breaking down. You have to talk about what's coming next. And then never, ever. apologize or give an inch. Just attack whoever's attacking you, fake news. Right now, I don't think he can win the argument by being transparent because what he's

selling is fear in order to motivate the government to give him control to bring about this dystopian future that he believes in. At least that's my distillation of his approach. Create a program for toolbell generation. Come up with ideas like that. Do more of that. Freiburg, you get the last, last, last, last. go. I think that it's worth having a view on whether or not you believe in recursive self-improvement.

And recursive self-improvement is this theory that at some point, an AI model can spin up a whole bunch of agents to do a bunch of work, and they can work together to make a new AI model. And the new AI model is better than the last AI model. And at some point, this all becomes effectively fully automated. and self-evolutionary. The AI is now improving itself continuously. And that is this idea that you have the singularity, as some people would call it, or you have the ASI, the artificial superintelligence that arises from this capacity. But the capacity is recursive self-improvement RSA. Anthropic has stated they're not sure if it's going to happen, but it could, and they're working towards it, and they expect that there's a path to get there. I happen to believe, having looked at this and thought about it, I think that it is possible.

I think it is likely to happen soon. People I've talked to in industry do think it's real. And there is this kind of philosophical debate because companies have a different view on the path forward where it really needs to be human constructed, human designed, and there isn't this like, let it all go, let humans detach from the AI and let the AI evolve. And this is really like out of the movie, Her, or the thing just takes off and it evolves. But if it does happen, and if RSI is a real construct, then you're almost fighting, it's like a fool's errand. And it's a fool's errand in the sense that like all this idea that you've got human intervention in the stages of model development.

You're scaring people again. Well, no, I actually, no, this is my point. If RSI is a thing, and by the way, RSI doesn't lead to some dystopian outcome. It just means that the models improve faster and faster. Without humans. Without humans necessarily constructing architecting and designing the next evolution. And then you don't necessarily have space for, oh, we just did one big model run every six months. We're going to go to the government regulator.

We're going to go somewhere and get it approved. There's just this continuous policing and monitoring service that needs to take place at some point. And the truth is that all that you need to pull this off is you don't need governments in the U.S. to say yes. Or governments in China to say yes. Or governments anywhere to say yes. You're going to say you need satellites in space. You need some sovereignty, some space where you can. And I don't know if it's in space.

I don't know if it's with Bologi and the deal he just did in Kazakhstan and you've got some unique geography. It could be in Iceland. It could be wherever. People are floating it. It could be in the ocean. The point is if RSI is a thing, you don't have a human process where you're stepping in to run this thing.

So you don't necessarily have a cohort, a frontier lab. scientists running it, theoretically, an individual that's smart enough or a group of individuals that smart enough can go spin up an RSI factory anywhere in the world or anywhere in space. And your attempts to ban the data centers or the attempts to ban or to create a regulatory body, that's why I call it a fool's errand. Because the thing with the open internet and the thing with compute is all that it needs is the chips and the power and a connection. And if it's got the chips and the power and a communication connection, it can run. And I'm not painting a dystopian view. I'm just saying practically, pragmatically, the labs are all talking about RSI. And so if RSI is

where this goes, then the labs can go and set up data centers in Iceland, in China, in wherever. Whoever will give them the freedom. Wouldn't we be better off? Wouldn't we be better off having systems where we actually have those labs based, where we have those data centers based in the US, where we have jurisdiction over them, where we have capacity to monitor and control and police them rather than just have them sprung up in some random country or some random territory. So I guess my point is we should be attracting and retaining the frontier labs, not trying to chase them up. And then here's the famous Wait But Why image of a human progress going on a nice clip and then

recursive self-improvement and it just goes out of control. I'll tell you why I think RSI is a legitimate concept. How close are we to it? That's like I think what people would want to know. How close to people? You know, honestly, there's a massive problem with time dilation and AI model development. And what I mean by that is we would typically consider some sort of thing that takes a linear amount of time as a certain amount of compute to get somewhere.

There are changes that happen that are non-predictable. You don't actually know what the next phase, what the next step change takes in terms of time. The time models change a lot in terms of AI model development. And that's what's so crazy to make it so hard to predict, which is why no one's really good at predicting. When is the AGI happening? When's the next breakthrough happening? And then all of a sudden, everyone's like, oh my God, we're in the singularity.

They just solved eight unproven math theorems in a week off of some model that's barely cutting edge. It's now going to be the second cutting edge model. So it's moving very quickly. But a lot of the models are this mixture of experts concept where you've got these kind of smaller models that call each other to do things. And then you wrap it up and you call it a big model. And those smaller models, it seems over time, look a lot more like you see in biology where you have genes. a gene makes a protein and proteins interact in really complicated ways that we don't fully grok.

Networks of proteins do things. And then they complete tasks. And I think the same evolution is likely to happen with the models where they break down into smaller models and that makes them so much more efficient and that makes them so much more performance. And we're seeing a lot of this in how a lot of the models are evolving. We call it a model, but it's actually many models underneath it that work together. And so if the models actually do evolve this way, then RSI is the perfect system.

for figuring out the right path, which is how many sub models are there? What does each sub models functions look like? How do they call each other? That evolution is likely going to happen without a human architect behind it. It's going to be developed through a test and deploy system, and it's going to be fully automated.

And that's why this approach to actually solving that problem ends up becoming the future of how model development takes off, which is why I think RSI is probably the future. And when that happens, again, It's just wherever the data center and the power is. I remember a few years ago, everyone was like, oh, AGI is imminent, AGI is imminent, and then where is it? I mean, maybe we're already...

I think we're soaking in it. Okay, fine, but did it turn out to be the Terminator? No, that would be superintelligence. I mean, artificial general intelligence is like as smart as any human. Super intelligence is like you're getting towards what... Freeberg is talking about. That's far off. Do I think RSI could possibly happen?

Yes. I think there's lots of black swans. that could happen. It's very hard to assess the probability of those things. What I do know is, like you're saying, I don't think some new government regulatory agency will stop it if that's the thing, because it won't be technically sophisticated enough. All it will do actually is concentrate power around that thing. It'll limit the options. You know, when it comes to age, let me talk about AI. We just want to have that technology in this country is my point. And I just want to go back to the, to the point I was asking earlier, why do we not want China to win? Because we want the best labs. We want

the first breakthrough system to be here, not to be there. Dario made the argument. Dario actually made this argument in the context of trying to ban export of chips, which is one of his hobby horses. Anthropic has really been behind a lot of the political activity to restrict NVIDIA's sales internationally. And the argument was that we want to have a data center full of geniuses in the U.S. And that eventually, you know, what AI is going to be used for is you're going to be able to create all these agents that are basically nobody.

all prize winning level scientists. And if we have thousands or millions of those and China has only dozens or 100, whatever, then we're going to win everything. And that was the whole argument. But now we're basically banning the data centers. We're not going to have those data centers full of geniuses. And he's done his best to restrict sale of chips to our allies as well. So I guess our allies aren't going to have the data centers either. So we are totally shooting ourselves in the foot. And probably it would be a good thing. If Dario really does believe in the data centers full of genius's idea that he was arguing for last year, he should come forward and say, we're making a big mistake by over-regulating data centers. Here's how we should do it.

I haven't heard him step up in that way. And it makes you kind of question, do you only fight for the Dumer side of the argument? Or are there versions of the positive side that you're willing to fight for politically? Now, Freibor, just one last point about RSI. I think this is really important is, look, again, Black Swan, very hard to say if it's going to happen. I do think that we're headed for AGI or ready in AGI or whatever. But the most important thing about AGI is that we have choice. Like, I'd much rather have multiple AGIs than just one, right? So, for example, Elon says that the way to keep AI or AGI aligned is to make it maximally

truth-seeking. I kind of like that, right? That's the way to prevent it from becoming woke. What Anthropics says is the way to keep it aligned is to have this clawed constitution that is full of liberal values and you train it on that and they've kind of got this EA ethicist or whatever who's writing these things. So there's different approaches. I kind of want all them to produce sophisticated AI to keep checks and balances to keep these

things. What I don't want is just a sky net or like a woke sky net is sort of the worst possible outcome. And if we're going to go like sci-fi for a set, second year, there was like a Terminator TV show. Yes, that was pretty good. They stopped. It was pretty good. It got canceled.

This was like years and years ago. But anyway, what they figured out in the show, like the plot was that the way they finally defeated Skynet was they created a good AGI to take on Skynet. They realized like humans just couldn't do it by themselves. So they created a choice. Maximally good. Yeah, they trained it to be more benevolent, you know, benevolent towards humans. So in any event, and if you're going to get like really sci-fi about it, I look, I think choice

has to be our hallmark. Competition has to be our hallmark. We want multiple winners here. We don't want a small number of elites guard railing this thing. And that is what you will get if you head in this FAA FINRA direction. Breaking Friedberg, new nickname club. Just drop. There it is. This is what you sounded like, Freedberg. Doc Brown, Marty, your future's not predetermined. You can make your own future, you can use RSI. Talk for how next topic. I'm not trying to be an advocate for RSI. I'm trying to be pragmatic about it. You've seen the future. You're back. If RSI is the way things are going to go, you definitely don't want to be trying to regulate AI to stall out because someone else will win

it. And then you're literally handing the keys to RSI to them because they're suddenly going to be able to get there faster. And you don't want to be in the data centers because then they're going to be off site. All right. There is a peculiar story this week. And Drason Horowitz is allegedly being investigated. This is all according to a Bloomberg report, that they're being investigated by the Department of Justice for over a year, this is all according to Bloomberg, under something called Section 8 of the Clayton Antitrust Act. This is a 1914 law.

It's like over 100 years old prohibiting interlocking directorates, which I guess is like old-timey English for directors, like board of directors. And the conflict seems to stem from Ben Horowitz being on Databricks board while a Another partner from Andresen Horowitz, Martin Casado sits on five trains board. I don't know what if you guys have heard about this story. It was like one of the top stories this week. Obviously, Andreessen and Ben Horowitz have been all in with Trump and big, big donators. Put that into the mix, as you will.

Why is this happening now? I can tell you. Enemy of Andresen Horowitz, jealous of their returns, says, What are we talking about? Do they not understand how venture works? Like, is it like you invest in one company, you can invest in another? I don't understand. What did Bloomberg say?

They said they've been under investigation for this conflict as described between these two companies. Which means that an enemy reported them to the DOJ and then said to Bloomberg, they're under investigation. Well, that's why I bring it up is like it seems so odd. Which to me, likely seems, I will make a speculative guess. The CEO of one of these companies is pissed off that the other partners on the other board and reported it to the DOJ and reported it to Bloomberg at the same time. Interesting.

All right. Well, there you have it, folks. Moving on in the docket. I think we made quick work of that one. Let me, let me just say, you know, you've been seeing like the distribution of like cursor and then SpaceX. Andries and Horowitz is on fire. They are crushing. So,

they've had two. Congrats to them. It's the last few weeks. I mean, my God. Congrats to them. Did they make? How many billions did they make on?

Goal. Well, it's cursor and didn't they make a lot of money off? And SpaceX original. Open router just went out for seven. Yeah, but open router was like an emu's boost. It was like six or seven hundred million.

The cursor was decent. It was like an appetizer, but SpaceX was the main course. That's like 1517 billion. Yeah. Just by the way, even if you want to say that VC firms should not invest in competitors, the reality is that startups exist in a very dynamic environment. They frequently pivot and change their business models.

And two companies that start off in totally different spaces can end up competing with each other. So now these are different board members and they can probably set up a firewall between them. Yes. Very easily. Sorry, these are not filing companies. What confidential information do any of these private business? businesses have. And by the way, Indrisen Horowitz could also just put an independent director in there and just

be done with it. So, like, if this was some tickey, tacky, very important thing, I don't know why the DOJ is on this. Freebrook is right. No, because when you make a claim to the DOJ, they technically, if they open a file, you are technically under investigation. So then you can report that to a buffoon reporter who doesn't know shit from Shynola, and they'll just repeat it. It means nothing. All right. And then the DOJ doesn't tell you that you're under investigation, and they also don't tell

you when it's closed. Same as the SECC. So it's just a one-way PR ratchet for an enemy to exact some sort of chaos. A.H. is crushing it. God bless him. Godspeed to them. It is interesting that there is even this rule, but we had some fun with it. So let's keep moving.

I want you, Breber, to join me and Sats, Bestie Chimoff at the All-in Summit happening September 13th, 14th, 15th in Los Angeles. All Serena has been announced. And hey, guess who's headlighting the party? The same guys who sell out Madison Spurr Garden. I know that Freiburg has a personal relationship. Go ahead, tell everybody who's going to be a musical guest this year. Which is going to be awesome.

So we'll have them at the closing party. It's going to be great. And then we're also doing another, wow, full takeover at Universal Studios. So we got a whole party at Universal, which was awesome last year. where Sax and I were with Diplo on stage. Jake Al, you were there, too. That was great. Yeah, I was on stage, Dancin.

Who's Diplo? Diplo's great at the DJ. Diplo. Your kids probably love Chimplow. They should come to that concert. We have other special unannounced guests that we're not going to announce. So this is it. We're done making announcements.

All right. We know the Democrats have been favored to take the House in the midterms, which are just around the corner. Polymark has them at 88% favorites. But Polly Market now has. the Dems at 52% basically a toss-up, current balance of power, GOP, 53 seats, Dems, 47, which means I guess the Dems have to flip four of those without losing any. 35 seats are up in 2026.

There are some special elections going on in Florida and Ohio. 23 of those 35 seats are held by Republicans, big races to watch, Alaska, Maine, North Carolina, and Ohio. On February 25th, the day before the Iran War, started, GOP was favored 60 to 41. It's been as high as 70%. Here's your polymarket. Sacks, what do you take from this? Why are the Republicans set to get trounced in the midterms? Well, first of all, polls are notoriously wrong in the summer before an election. And there's some data on this. So we should just, if you're going to cite polls, let's just actually talk about the topic of whether political polls are even accurate at this point.

These are our polls. This is polymark, just to be clear. The polls are slightly different. Yeah, I get it. But the polls are shaping public opinion right now. So political scientists, Patrick Grafini, analyzed over 3,000 polls over the last four election cycles every two years since 2018. And what he saw is that there is a huge bias. The preponderance of polls in all four cycles favored the Democrats.

And the average polling error across all the polls was depleted. plus 3.7 relative to the election outcome. And I think this polling problem has become even worse recently, and you see it where there seems to be an oversampling of young progressives in these polls, because it's not just the fact that the polls favor Democrats over Republicans. They also favor the DSA Democrat over the more moderate or centrist Democrats. And you've seen this in a few elections where the DSA candidate was supposed to win by a lot, and then they basically eeked it out or actually lost, like in Wisconsin. So in any event, I just think that the polls are very unreliable at this time of the year. And a lot of the polls have, they're actually created as

internals by campaigns to motivate their donors. So basically people are upset. Then they throw people out of office. That's just the trend. And that's what happened over and over again. Yeah. No, I just think that the polls somehow are oversampling Democrats and progressives and have a bias. That's what the data is showing. So I just wouldn't read too much into this right now. I do think that the Democrats, I think it is legitimate to say that they are a favor to win the House. I think the Senate right now is a toss-up. And I would say that the Republicans will ultimately keep it if I had to predict right now. And I just think that when you get back from Labor Day, that's when the campaign for the midterms really starts. And I I think that Republicans need to focus on the right messages in this campaign. And I think there are plenty of good ones. They just have to remind him. What are they? What are they?

What would you say the top three they should focus on there? Well, look, everyone's been over-indexing on the war, and that's been the focus of the news. And hopefully the kinetic phase of that is over and doesn't restart. And assuming that's the case, I think the Republicans can remind the electorate of everything that's happened over the last couple of years. I think there is a good story to tell. So first of all, remind people that the border has been sealed to the last year and a half. We haven't just slowed Biden's invasion.

We've stopped it completely. Contacts at the border have fallen off a cliff to the lowest level in 50 years. Illegals aren't even really trying to cross the border anymore. It's been so successful. Second, sealing the border and deporting hundreds of thousands of the worst criminals has actually made the country much safer. Murders have dropped around 20% year over year, and the murder rate is the lowest in 70 years. So that's number two. Third, deaths from drug overdoses have dropped 20%. Again, thanks to tougher

border enforcement. Fourth, Americans saw a 17% increase in tax refunds, thanks to the president's no tax on tips and no tax on overtime and no tax on Social Security. So these are real increases in take-home pay as a result of those tax cuts. Also, the tax provisions in Big Beautiful Bill incentivized new equipment buying. We talked about the accelerated depreciation. And perhaps that's why small business optimism just reached its highest level in nearly a year. And more small businesses are saying they plan to hire in the months ahead. So I think we do have a strong economy. Prescription drugs and auto insurance costs both fell last year after increasing a lot during the Biden administration. I think prescription drugs has had their steepest annual decline since

1963. So there are positive things to talk about there. Everyone made a big deal of the surge and egg prices at the start of the administration, but few have bothered to note that there's now been a 39% decrease year over year in July. So look, there are many good things I think for Republicans to talk about. They just have to kind of remember everything that's happened in the last two years. Okay. Freiburg, you have thoughts on what is going to happen this midterm and what people are speaking their decisions based on. Things are expensive. People can't afford housing, health care or education and are leaning towards this DSA concept. There was a frightening statistic on young conservatives embracing socialism.

Really? Wait, the conservatives like MAGA folks you're saying are embracing socialist tendons. How do they conservatives then? Well, I guess ostensibly they're flipping or they're changing the composure of the issues they care about in some way? Fifty-three percent of self-identified conservatives under 40 support government-run grocery stores. Not Democrats, conservatives. Take that in. First line of this Wall Street Journal article. July 26, Fox News poll found that 61% of Republicans view capitalism favorably down from 72% in 2019, while the share who feel strongly favorable has fallen from 54 to

41%. The share who say the system is rigged towards the wealthy has climbed from 30% in 2018 to 42% amongst Republicans. So I don't think that this is a principled line in the sand anymore. I think that the problem with unaffordability, which I would argue continuously, and I've argued it since the first day of the show, is a function of government spending. The more government spends on education, health care, and housing, the more expensive those things get, rather than the opposite. They're supposed to be able to provide access to those things. But when the government intervenes in those markets, those things get more expensive.

And no one wants to kind of acknowledge or admit that in either party. And I've been to D.C. enough now to know that no one actually acknowledges or cares about this point that they all think that their job is to get more money out of the government for their constituents, every single person in every party. There's very few principled conservatives. Many of them are conservatives by title, by party affiliation, but they're not conservatives by principle in the traditional sense, small government, free markets, et cetera. And I think that this is the motivating factor.

I would argue if you take the look at the macro cycle, the macro cycle being we've printed so much money, we've got so much debt, the 30 year is now at 5.3% this week. It continues to hit new 20-year records every day. We, I think, are going to continue to face a problem of unaffordability. And ultimately, there is going to be some sort of big movement towards more socialist policies that we're going to see play out between now and 2028. It's why I continue to believe, I think someone like an AOC becomes president, I think there's going to be a wave this year, and then there's going to be a bigger push in

2028 because I don't see the arithmetic or the fiscal situation changing to actually alter the affordability landscape. I just don't. I don't know what you could do from a policy perspective, and I don't hear either party talking about actual solutions to solve this affordability problem between now and 2028. And then the other kind of big problem that I've talked about is assets. Middle class people, people that worked in private companies, people that don't depend on social security or public pension funds, they've all had 401Ks and owned homes. So they have seen their net worth climb with asset inflation. Surge. So the top 50% of Americans have $178 trillion of net worth. And the bottom 50% of Americans have $6 trillion of net worth. It's not the billionaires.

It's the whole middle class. The middle class has all the wealth in the United States. And that's because they've owned assets. They've owned houses and they've owned stocks. Houses and stocks have surged in value. And so if you don't own a house and you don't own stocks, you were left behind. And so I don't see how from a public policy perspective, we don't find ourselves walking down this very nasty, winding dark path of socialism because the alternative policies that could be put in place to solve these problems are not being put forth by either party right now.

So I do think that there's going to be a big socialist embrace. I've said this, obviously, for a number of years. And I think we're going to see this play out in this midterm. And that's going to create the momentum going into 28. And look, I mean, this polling data is very worrying. It's not just the Democrats. It's not just a party-based system. It's the horseshoe.

It's the 63% of Americans that are living paycheck to paycheck that can't afford that's the Americans that are going to vote for this system. And it doesn't matter what party it is. They're just going to vote for it. Chabah, 20 cents. the dollar going to our interest approximately on the federal side. Inflation, we thought we would get there. It's been three or four percent for the whole year, haven't been able to get down to two.

And the GDP concept, which we talked about here, getting to growth again. And if we can get it, we can grow our way out of it. That hasn't happened as well. Obviously, the war, big disappointment for many folks in both parties who were promised no war. And here we are six months into it. What do you think is going to happen over the next, through the midterms and then into 2028 and to Freebird's point, any way to get out of this? Is this a death spiral or is this something we can course correct out of in your mind?

I think that we can't course correct. I just think it takes will. And I think that we need corporate America to step up and do their part of the job. and we need governments mostly to get out of the way and not have any hairbrain schemes on new inventive legislation that they think can solve the problem. I don't trust any polls. Just to be clear, I don't believe this polling data. And I think that we've gotten into a very dangerous point, which we already got into with

the media, where the media lies, we all now know that the media lies and the media can't be trust it. I would like to now go out on a limb. I don't think it's much of a limb, though. Holsters line. And I don't think you can trust them either. And I think that the media acts in concert with pollsters to find the data that allows them to write the headline that hopefully allows them to get the clicks. So I would just start there. Polsters, trash. media trash. So what is really happening on the ground? I don't know, but I don't trust what this data tells me.

Now, what do I know is helping and hurting the incumbent sitting president? I think that if we, as in corporate America, get ourselves in a position to actually present the better face of capitalism, we allow the system as it stands to continue to work. And I think all of these things, if we don't wake up, are telling us that corporate America is not trustworthy anymore. Corporate America is not aspirational. Corporate America does not do the things that engender some amount of trust and respect. And specifically in Silicon Valley, we've completely lost. the script because we've gotten to the far, far, far end of that. And everybody is in it for themselves

to such a degree that it's either pearl clutching on the one hand or getting your hand caught in the cookie jar on the other. I mean, I posted the cookie jar thing that Anthropic did on the healthcare side. Cookie jar. Why are we in this? I mean, it's just so avoidable. Those are headwinds for the incumbent president. Even if he has nothing to do with it, what is a tailwind? I think getting out of the Iran war can be a massive tailwind. I think structurally solving energy on behalf of American citizens can be a tailwind. I think making sure that all of the long-term and media term investments of GDP can actually come and bear fruit can be a tailwind. All of those things, there are still a lot of levers to be pulled between now and November.

And so those can create pretty meaningful tailwinds. But the headwinds, unfortunately, are pretty strong. And it requires some real coordination that the White House is going to have to do. To get a bunch of these corporate CEOs in the room, to get a bunch of these Silicon Valley CEOs in the room, and to tell them, guys, enough of this bullshit, play nice in the sandbox, because you're about to lose the standard operating procedure that allowed you to exist in the first place.

Yeah. And they need to get this message clearly. Yeah, and I can tell you the exact reason democratic socialism is going to win, continue to win, and these far-left Democratic candidates are going to dominate. And it's, you know, it's the Republicans' fault. They had all three branches of government here really tightly in their control. And if you look at what the podcast bros and the podcast referencing stack is responding to, and I listen to them, you know, not every episode, but I, I,

a dip in and out of Tucker, who is now making his own political party, Joe Rogan, Tim Dillon, you know, all these folks who were all in for Trump, they cite Epstein investigation, which, okay, whatever, I don't think it's particularly material, but it is to them. The Iran War is obviously top of what they believe is the problem here, because they were promised that wouldn't happen. And then it's, to your point, Freeberg, this inflation thing has not been solved and it just keeps going. And we're going to be sitting here, I think, in another six months or 12 months talking about, my lord, every investigation possible into the Trump administration. And we need to start looking at what would be things, to your point,

Shama, and I thought you summarized some of the broken parts of capitalism, I think, well, but we got to get granular about it. And I brought up last week, just the edge behaviors in capitalism where we over-optimized. I felt the delivery providers in Saxon, I had a pretty party debate about it last week, were just being too clever, squeezing too much out of the last mile, quite literally, on Amazon's part. How we treat the people who are at the bottom of the employment stack

is what's causing this. And not being able to solve the cost of homes and not making that a focus, not being able to solve the cost of child care, not being able to move the minimum wage. I think we have to look at all of these things and say that's or Trump should look at all those things and he should build the second half of his term just around those things. No more crypto stuff, no more wars, no more attacking our allies, all of this performative stuff and just mistakes.

They got to go away and we got to focus on what he sold people on. People feel they were sold that this would be a populist presidency that took care of the working man and woman in this country. And it has been the opposite. Sax, I'm sure you have some thoughts. And we'll give you the final word. On the inflation thing, because you talked about it and Freeberg's talked about it. I mean, basically you're saying the cost of living is going to drive everyone to socialism. I agree there's some risk of that.

But let's break it down into a little bit more nuance here. If you look at where the most inflation has occurred, it's always in those sectors. the economy that the government's most involved. So health care and colleges, where an housing, where the government has massive amounts of subsidies and regulation, it only seems to make the problem worse. It kind of makes sense that if the government's paying for something, then the providers have a huge incentive to charge as much as possible. And in fact, a lot of them engage in fraud as well. So we know these areas are rife with abuse. But those are the areas that are most inefficient and where you see the price going through the roof. I mean, hospital services,

man, that's like just exponential just about. And then if you look at the areas where we've had not just no inflation, but actually prices have come down. It's in all the tech areas. It's basically TVs or computer software, cell phones, things like that. The prices have come down a lot. By the way, this chart is showing all the way from 2000 to 2026. So it's a 26-year timeframe, and during that time, overall inflation went up 96%. So the price level almost doubled in that 26-year period. Fortunately, on average. On average, that's right. But like I said, with certain things like healthcare becoming 300% almost more expensive, whereas computer software went down by 67% in real dollars. Meanwhile, the average hourly wage grew 135%. So at least the average hourly

wage grew by about 40% more than the inflation level, but obviously it's still bites that you have all this inflation. I guess my point is just how do you solve it? We know that you bring prices down through vigorous competition, not through more government interference in these markets. And unfortunately, what happens is that socialism causes the problem. And then what happens is that groups like the DSA argue that the way to solve the problem is through more socialism. So It's a disease that claims to be a cure, and then people take it and they take more of it and the disease gets worse and worse. And that is the spiral that I think we risked being in.

We are in a socialist debt spiral now. All this spending now is going to be... We're not in a death spiral. We're not in a death spiral. No, I mean, it's great for you to say because it sounds like really like we got some real hot take. We're not there. America is doing fine. we are cranking, the economy is great. There are things that need to be fixed. I would say start

with corporate America. Let's get our act together and let's start doing things that are honorable, interesting, and aspiration. Yeah, I think you totally missed the point. I think the real point here is if he hadn't started the war, we wouldn't have the same inflation issues, we wouldn't have the same expense issues, and this would be a totally different picture. And it was his job sacks. When he promised the American people, he would focus on affordability, and he had control of both houses and the presidency, and he's willing to do any executive order on crypto, on wars, on anything, but he didn't do any executive orders on affordability. And that's the failure of this presidency. Maybe you missed the point where Tomas said it would be a tail win to get out of this war.

I think the kinetic part's already over, by the way. So it's just a lot of it's hope. I mean, it just should never have been started. But in any event, look, the president passes the economic program last year on Big Beautiful Bill. And I think it's working. We're seeing a huge investment boom. We're seeing small business confidence rise to its highest level. in a long time. They are saying they're going to create more jobs over the next year. I think the economy is doing pretty well. I mean, we do have these issues. I'm not saying we don't. And spending is a longstanding problem. Can't disagree with you there. However, I don't think Democrats have the solution of the problem. And the Democratic socialists definitely don't have the solution to the problem because

that's my point to the end. I mean, by the end, we are now incentivizing young people in the Republican Party to embrace socialism. Moderates are embracing socialism. They're all looking at it saying, well, that sounds better. If Trump won't be a populist, maybe these people are the populist. And that's what I mean by the death spiral, because they're going to just keep spending money. They're going to increase the velocity of spending in aOC. You may be right, which is scary. By the way, that's what I don't think we're like in it now. We're kind of, we're risking going just one last point. They did a cost estimate of the policy platform proposed by the DSA. Remember, we've talked about that before. And the estimate is that it would project new federal

spending of between $71 trillion and $21212 trillion over a 10 year of rise? Under all the cops and the prisons. By the way, total network, there's no cops. There's no cops. The entirety of the American population, 182 trillion. 182 trillion. Okay, but I'm just saying that's how much the DSA program would cost. If you guys believe that the root of our problems is overspending and basically too much government,

unfortunately, this is not the medicine. going to. No, but here's what's going to happen. And let me just walk through the sequence of events. Sequence one, they enact a policy starting in 2028 with Comrade AOC in charge and the Politburo, Rokana, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, and the rest of the Pollock Bureau organizing themselves to launch these new programs. Those new programs get launched and costs balloon.

The bond market sells off 30 years. And so now the 30 year yield spiked 7%, 8%, maybe. maybe more, things become more unaffordable. So then the question is, okay, well, we can't bridge it from a fiscal perspective. We can't just get the Fed to start buying bonds. There's not enough buying power there to bring rates down, to bring inflation down. So we need more income. So now we need to pass a national asset seizure tax.

And there's not enough money in the billionaire class or the 50 millionaire class. The total net worth of all people that are worth over $50 million is only 23 trillion. You could take 10% of their net worth and it would only cover three months of fiscal spending. Today's fiscal spending. So at the end of the day, the only way to get there is to start doing massive taxation. Seizures. And so seizures. So this just came out this week by Cato. By the Cato Institute. And again, it shows the low end of the DSA spending is 71 trillion. The high end is 21 trillion. Now, you compare that to things like corporate profits or private sector wealth. Corporate profits are only $35 trillion.

The Forbes 400, all the wealth of the Forbes 400 is only $6.6 trillion. So it's less than 10% of the low end of DSA spending. I keep telling you, this is not about mathematical realism. This is about anger towards a class of people that are increasingly odious in this process. But people also can't afford to buy a house. People are 35 years old with roommates. And people go to the grocery store and they're shocked at the fact that they have to spend an entire paycheck or a third of a paycheck to buy groceries. It's not that it's not that people want to buy a yacht.

It's that the yacht class are just despicable. Well, no, I mean, look, in every socialist revolution, every revolution we've seen historically around this, there is always an elite frontch of society. and they're typically classified different ways. It's wealth, it's Jews, it's some race, it's immigrants. There's some organizational assignment, some identity assignment that says this is the cause of unaffordability. At the end of the day, the dysfunction of the relationship between government and all the other

organizations that make up that society, those organizations can be states, they can be private companies, they can be the NGOs. It is the dysfunction of the government's relationship with the other organizations that fundamentally causes things to become more expensive and dysfunctional, and the actual market for getting access to things for the individual fails. And at that point, you have to identify. And you don't identify the government because the government is the aggregate of all the people. No, of course.

And remember, the government is the system, the means of action. So for the people to organize, they have to organize the government to go, and then they have to have an alternative system to go and destroy. You have to point the finger and you have to point the finger at somebody. And if you're going to scapegoat somebody in 2026, the best class of people to scapegoat are the billionaires. And frankly, even better than them. The trillions is the end of the day, it's all tech, right? The data center is the temple where the billionaires and trillionaires pray.

It's where they go to make their sacrifices. It is their gathering spot. So I think the data center is this like, you know, temple on the mount. It's the avatar. And so that's why I think the data center gets tied up in all of this. There's no rational discourse about data centers. It's like, no, no, look, if you take it through the Renee Gerard lens, everything maps. It's like the billionaires will be scapegoated and the trillionaires will be, I mean, even worse.

And because that will allow the catharsis that will allow society to reset and realize, wait a minute, oh my gosh. Yeah, there's a generation of that, though. There's a generation ahead. And only then, it is a long process. Here's an idea. Next president or Trump in his second half, just putting it out there, do an executive order that you're going to build. like a million homes, two million homes. If you can have executive orders, if you can start wars without the approval of Congress, go. What's that? You know that that's not how it works,

right? There are local laws. He pulled out all of the stops. Of course, but he pulled out all the stops for getting data centers green lit. We know that. And he worked with the state governments. I'm talking about him coming on saying, you know what, we did a great job for the data centers. We did a great job for the crypto industry. And now we're going to do two great things. The different and better answer. We're going to do two great things. We're going to make trade shows. We're going to make trade schools and we're going to make affordable homes.

I'm just going to make that the next 24 months. We're going to figure out a way to mobilize the private sector, mobilize the public sector. We're going to make more homes and we're going to get you a great education that turns into a job. That would be a great thing for Trump to do. The federal government does control the largest amount of land in the United States. So it could do something on federal land without the need for a bunch of other state and local gobbledico. So there is. Freddie May, Freddie Mac.

Now, it may not be located in places that actually make sense for commerce and for people to live or that are already living there because I don't think it really abuts, you know, most cities. So unfortunately, it's not in his control, even if you wanted to just kind of say, let's make this happen. I think if the president can go spend a couple hundred billion on this war, he can go spend a hundred couple billion on homes that are affordable. And maybe he can't put him in Manhattan, but he can't.

put them other places and he should fight for the regulations to get. Just like he fought for the regulations on data centers and energy, he made an appoint on this very podcast at the AI summit, hey, we're going to clear all the pathways to nuclear to NAC gas. We're going to beautiful clean coal. It's called federal. Which is great. And I give him credit for that.

Now do it. Now do it for homes. Let me see you do it for homes, Trump. Use that same energy. Well, they just passed a housing bill. They just passed a housing bill. When's the last time we heard Trump? Unfortunately, it was written by Elizabeth Warren,

so I don't know how good it is. But yeah. Anyway, I'm just giving him the solution to save his legacy. All right, everybody. As always, you're looking out for everybody. I'm looking out for everybody. I'm looking out for the audience. No stracanis.

Thank you. No, Tracanis is also looking out for you. Okay, rap. I got to go. Come on. All right, everybody. It's been another amazing episode. Love you, boys.

Nice to be back. Good time for Quartet back. Let's go. Bye-bye. Sats out. Corset to the fans and they've just gone crazy with them. Love you, Ski. Queen of Kinner.

Merchies are back.