Trump’s Super Intelligence Summit, AI Safety Accord, GDP Beats, Midterm Predictions

Another huge shout-out to Starlink. How good do I sound right now?

It's actually great.

It's flawless. It's flawless.

Yeah, it's shocking. It's amazing.

Nick, show the behind-the-scenes shot of what it took to get us going. Starlink is bananas. Look at this.

That's amazing. Do you guys want to know something about the Starlink network that I think is just coming out now? Basically, because the Starlink network puts out radio waves and can pick up radio waves, and you've got so many of them, you've basically got a phased-array telescope looking down on the Earth.

Uh—

And you can pick up what would otherwise be stealth aircraft from above.

So this is a UFO detector, you're saying?

It's a stealth-airplane detector.

It's a UFO detector.

Basically, with Starlink, it could be a UFO detector. The Starlink network basically becomes this incredible radar system that sits above the Earth to look down on things that would normally be stealth from the surface of the Earth.

So does this mean we don't have to do a science corner today, because you just did it?

Yeah. Great to see you, Sacks.

As one of the architects of Bretton Woods 2.0, Sacks is on a high. He's coming in hot.

You let your winners ride.

Rain Man, David Sacks.

Instead, we open-source it to the fans, and they've just gone crazy with it.

Love you, S.I.G.

Queen of quinoa.

All right, everybody, welcome back to This Week in AI. Sorry, All-In podcast, and we've got a ton of news to get to on the docket.

You're such an idiot. You're an idiot.

Well, I mean, it's just AI on top of AI on top of AI every week.

You have a show called This Week in AI, and you cover nothing about AI.

No, no, we cover AI, but thank you for the plug. thisweekinai.ai, sign up for the newsletter.

This Week in Superintelligence.

I'm going to change the name. This Week in ChatDJT.

What you should say is, “We have 4 superintelligences here.”

We have 4 superintelligences here. To superintelligence, the week's news.

To intelligently discuss—

The news, yes—

—superintelligence.

1. The White House Accord

What a week it was. We were sitting here just a couple of weeks ago—or sitting in Los Angeles, I should say—and there was a bit of a chaotic moment. Hey, should we be, should we be auditing or de-selling with all this AI? And 3 weeks later, President Trump held a superintelligence summit in D.C. Many of the besties were there—or 3 of 4, I should say.

On Tuesday, President Trump convened the biggest names in AI: Elon, Jensen, Zuck, Dario, Sundar, Satya, yada, yada, yada, all the way down the line, and everybody from the government as well. I could ramble on about this, but Sacks, I have a feeling you were instrumental in setting this up, so maybe I'll just hand it off to you. Tell us how this went down so quickly, and then what the outcome is of this superintelligence summit.

The reason it happened so quickly is because President Trump convened all of these people to the White House, and I think he's the only person who could get all the CEOs of all these companies in 1 room. These are the leading companies in the world across data centers, chips, hyperscalers, and obviously frontier models, and many of them, frankly, don't like each other. They have disputes with one another.

Yeah.

We all know this. They may have lawsuits with one another. All of that didn't matter because President Trump called them to the White House for this conversation, and I've called it the Bretton Woods of Superintelligence. This was the first gathering of really all the critical players across the entire stack of the industry, and I think we had a really good, open, and honest conversation about both the opportunities and the risks of superintelligence.

As a result of that meeting—and during the meeting—we worked out this agreement that has come to be known as the White House Accord on Superintelligence. It was then signed by the 6 major frontier-model companies, and I think it will now apply a new rigor, a new set of controls, to the development of superintelligence so that the public can be more confident that this will be done safely.

If I could just highlight a few of the key features: First of all, the companies who are developing these products acknowledge that they are responsible. They have to be the responsible actors. Let's not deflect it onto someone else or anthropomorphize the models or talk about the United Nations. These companies accept responsibility, number 1.

Number 2, they agree to have internal controls and to have those internal controls verified by an internal team. But we don't just leave it to, quote-unquote, “self-policing.” It starts there, but then you have external auditors who will validate and verify that the internal controls are working. These companies will set up an independent committee of the board to receive those reports.

As Gavin Baker pointed out this morning, when the board receives a report from an external auditor, you can't disregard that. It's not optional. The board has a massive fiduciary duty to act on that. Otherwise, their D&O policy can get canceled, right? So now the board is going to receive the report of the external auditor, and they have to make sure, as a board, that they're providing oversight to make sure that the frontier development is happening safely.

Finally, sitting behind all of that, you still have the FTC and the SEC, which have the ability and the responsibility to enforce the public commitments of these companies. So although this agreement was entered into voluntarily, the governance that follows from it is not voluntary. It is now de facto required.

It's fiduciary. This is a critical point.

It becomes fiduciary.

Because it's an audit—

Right.

—because—and D&O, for people who may not be familiar with it, is directors-and-officers liability insurance that the board of directors has in case something goes wrong. So this—

Right.

—has teeth to it.

Yes, and—

Even though it was voluntary—

Yes, so—

—it has deep, deep hooks into the board of directors.

That's right. Just 1 final point on this: Again, this White House Accord on Superintelligence was convened by the president. It was the result of that discussion and conversation. We got the major companies to sign it, and I think everyone in the room was basically in consensus around it. These controls can now be implemented immediately, or very, very quickly. It doesn't require new legislation, and it certainly doesn't require some new international agreement. That's never going to happen.

Yeah.

So this is something that can be done right away. I think it's a credit to the president, and I think this should, in large part, address many of the concerns that the public has about the safe development of superintelligence.

Absolutely, and—

I think there are a lot of Democrats right now who don't want to give the president credit for this because they want to keep using it as a campaign issue. But the reality is that I think the president dealt with it swiftly, sensibly, and practically. This is way more practical than trying to declare a pause on frontier development that China would never go along with, or creating some DMV for models—

Yes.

—that, again, would slow us down to the point where China just wins. So this is very practical, and it's immediate, and the president deserves credit even though the Democrats won't give it to him.

But I'll note that even Jacob Coxon[?]—in a way, you could say that this whole—

The whistleblower, quote-unquote—

The so-called—yeah, I would call it—

Who rage-quit after 6 weeks, who was working—

Yeah.

—with the PR firm for these—

Yes. Yes. I would call it a fake whistleblower because he was working with the PR firm the whole time, even though he said he wasn't.

Artificial whistleblower.

Or the artificial whistleblower. But look, even he said that he was happy to read this. He was giving credit to the president, so maybe everybody else should as well.

2. Dario Gets a Seat

I mean, even the most cynical person, Chamath, looking at this would say, “Great first step,” right? If you just wanted the global United Nations of AI, this would be a great precursor to that—a first step where everybody's opting in to be regulated, to regulate themselves, as we discussed on this very podcast with the MPAA analogy. Here we are 3 weeks later.

Take us behind the scenes. There was 1 notable addition to the group of AI executives. Dario from Anthropic is obviously very anti-Trump. He has never shown up for these things. The organization is 96% anti-Trump, left-leaning, et cetera. But he participated. So how did Dario wind up participating in this? How did he wind up doing dinner 1-on-1 with the president? Take us to the palace intrigue here. Dario was a conscientious objector. He did not want to participate in any of this, and now he was front and center.

I can tell you what I heard, and I just think it speaks to how conscientious and gracious the president is.

I think there were a couple of previous events. He noticed that Dario wasn't invited and actually just called and said, “You know, this was an oversight,” and invited him to dinner. I think that's how it started, and they had dinner, I think, 2 nights before. That was widely reported. And then he stayed, and he was at the dinner. So I think it's just a very smart strategic thing to do.

It was also a very conscientious and very polite thing to do, just to make sure that this was a broad coalition of people who were included. And I think that's sort of been the general pattern that the president has exhibited.

Let me give you a couple of other things that happened at the luncheon that had an impact on me. The first sounds like a very simple statement, but the gravity of it has built in my mind as I thought about it. He says, “Whoever wins superintelligence wins,” and then he just stopped talking. That was the first line of his prepared remarks, and then he said it again.

When you think about it, he's completely right. There is no world in which you're going to have this multinational corps of people trying to allocate wins and losses on this thing. This is on the order of the Industrial Revolution. In fact, Sacks had some really nice comments at the luncheon, which framed it as even bigger than the Industrial Revolution. He went through the numbers, and it's bigger than the Industrial Revolution and 3 or 4 other things all added up together. This thing is still bigger.

The railroads, the canals, and the electrical grid combined.

Yeah, and the pyramids and the Great Wall of China too.

Exactly.

That was in The Wall Street Journal last week.

When you think about it that way, it's very important that we win, and so he started by setting the stage that way. He had a couple of other specific things. It's really important that the extremely positive use cases that exist out of AI and now ASI are demonstrated, and he said, “You have a responsibility to lead with the benefits.”

Then he said, “You also have a responsibility to impact the local communities in which you operate,” and he pointed at Meta as an example of a company doing really good things with teacher bonuses and hospitals. We heard about that from Dina at the All-In Summit. And he said, “You need to continue to do these things. But meanwhile, we have to have the checks and balances to trust and verify.”

3. Auditing Superintelligence

After the luncheon, I had to fly to Orlando because we at 8VC have a long-term partnership with Ernst & Young, and I was speaking to their 3,400 partners. One of the things that Ernst & Young and 8VC were doing was building an entire audit infrastructure for superintelligence. What's so cool is that we had been building it for EY as our first customer. But on the heels of this, I think we're gonna be able to take that infrastructure and roll it out to everybody, as Sacks said, because everybody's gonna need it.

There are really 3 things that you're gonna need in an age of superintelligence so that boards are protected, CEOs have visibility, and all of the other compliance infrastructure and governance infrastructure of a company, like D&O insurance and all these other things, are kept in place. The first is end-to-end traceability, right? Which is to say, when you deploy superintelligence, you need to know what's going on. You need to map it to the policies so that you understand what the risks are.

All companies have standard operating procedures, but you need to know exactly, when you're deploying superintelligence, how that builds on top of your standard operating procedure. So you need to map policies to risk. And then the third is you need to have auditable evidence, which is your way of showing all of your downstream ecosystem, “Here's what I've done.”

If anybody taps you on the shoulder, whether it's a lawyer, whether it's an auditor, whether it's a regulator, whether it's in a lawsuit, or whether it's a customer—“Hey, how did this happen?”—you can present something. So these are very practical, sane things, and you can expect folks like EY now to deploy this broadly and quickly to all of the companies that they work with. This is just one extra step.

But if you think about how fast this happened, this is like 3 weeks, and you have this solution, where the alternative was to hit pause on trillions of dollars of GDP so that we could sort this out in a multinational body. The alternative was crazy, so I think what happened was historic and important.

Was there any pushback on the doomerism narrative? Take us behind the scenes.

Jensen was really powerful. He said something to the effect of, “Alarmism without solutions is unproductive.”

Hmm.

Which I thought was helpful grounding. But he said alarmism with solutions is helpful. Everybody had the same perspective in the room, to be honest.

Was that directed at Dario, that comment?

It was just generally said, but I think, if we had to guess who it was directed at, it would be a good guess.

Yeah.

Did Dario respond after that?

Susie and I were sitting right across from him, so it was very fun just to watch his reactions in general.

Please unpack it. What was his reaction to that comment?

No, he listened.

Got it. Who moderated the discussion, Sacks? How was this moderated? Were you the moderator? I noticed I didn't get an invite. The world's greatest moderator wasn't there, but Trump's a pretty good moderator himself. Who moderated the discussion?

No, the President moderates it.

The President actually actively moderated it?

Oh, yeah.

Give an example of his moderation. I would like to take some notes here. I'm interested.

Well, first, when we got there, this was in the East Room of the White House, I believe, and through the back of the East Room, you get to where this new corridor—

Hmm.

—to the ballroom is going to be. And so we did a quick tour out there, and he showed us what they're building, and it's really amazing. And I predict that when it's—

This is the new ballroom?

The new ballroom and the new East Wing of the White House.

Did you have to wear hats?

No.

And you went into the construction zone? You were on the periphery.

Yeah, we walked out there, and the cranes were out there.

What's the status of the ballroom foundation? Where are we at?

They are making record progress. The thing is 7 stories. So the ballroom itself is 2 stories, but it goes 5 stories down.

Oh, wow.

So there's all sorts of stuff that they're building there for the—

The bowling alley, the sauna—

No, for the military.

I know.

There are all sorts of vaults that they want. But in any event, he's gonna have it done in, like, a year, under budget and on schedule.

Hmm.

By the way, when it's done, I predict that it'll be so nice that all future presidents will really wanna use it. It's something the White House has needed for a long time. They're gonna look back and say, “Why did they give him such a hard time doing this?”

Yeah, so it's just a distraction too, by the way.

The fact that we had a builder in the White House who just enjoys doing it and is so good at it—I mean, why wouldn't you take advantage of those skills? In any event—

All-In annual dinner party there. We'll have an All-In gala at the—

Yeah. Anyway, it's gonna be a big upgrade. He took us on a little tour of that, and then he presided over the conversation. First he gave some remarks, and he spoke to the whole group, and then he started calling on people to give their opinion.

Hmm.

He always moderates these things. And then what happened is—

What was the most challenging? Did he have a challenging moment where he went at somebody with a follow-up question, anything like that?

Well, he just asked people what they think.

Hmm.

There was a follow-up. And then we had a breakout session of the 6 frontier-model companies in the Roosevelt Room, I believe. And that's where we hammered out the accord. Although it had already—

You know, when you're hammering out that accord, are you literally there typing it in Google Docs? And who's responsible for this typo? There was a typo in the tweeted version that freaking bothers me.

I don't want to say who's responsible for that.

Uh-oh.

But if that's the only thing people can find to object to—

Yes.

—that's not so bad.

Was Satya in Microsoft Word, and he just had a—he was typing too fast?

Yeah, I don't know. But basically, what happened is Zuck and Jensen talked through some of the high-level principles in the main luncheon.

Hmm.

And then Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House, actually had a copy, and he read the whole thing. Then we discussed it, and there was general agreement and accord with it.

And then we did the breakout session, and there was some wordsmithing. Not much, though, to be honest, and everyone was good with it. The White House had a statement that had been circulated to the groups in advance. It was a couple of paragraphs.

Hmm.

But frankly, this other statement had more meat on the bone.

Hmm.

The original statement had the statement of responsibility, and it had the creation of a working group to discuss safety issues on an ongoing basis and share best practices. But the new parts were the internal controls, the external audits, and the committee of the board. And, yeah, I think it’s been publicly reported now, so I’m not really giving anything away—

No. Yeah.

—that Zuckerberg and then Jensen, I think, had come forward with that idea, and everyone was good with it.

Any notable moments where somebody was like, “Hey, I need a comma here,” or, “I want to put an end here. I want to add something to this”? Any notable edits?

I mean, like I said, people were generally good with it.

Hmm.

And they read it, and everyone was like, “Yeah, it’s, you know, Elon—”

Which part do you think has the most teeth, will be the most effective at making things more secure? Which, if you—

The external audits.

The external audits.

The external audits.

Who’s going to do an external audit, then, I guess? Is it going to be an Ernst & Young-type thing, PricewaterhouseCoopers, or KPMG? Or who does that?

In my view, they should be professional auditors, not these NGOs.

Got it.

That’s my view.

You’re going to see EY, in short order here, announce something.

And Friedberg, when you look at this in terms of the speed and velocity at which it happened, and you’re, I guess, on the President's Science and Technology Council now, maybe you could speak to how quickly this is all occurring and what the impact might be in terms of America’s competitiveness, because you’ve had concerns: Maybe slowing down here means China catches up. So maybe you could talk a little bit to your prediction, if any, of the alignment here of all of the companies.

Also of note, just for the audience, people are like, “Sam Altman’s not there.” His partner, Greg, was there, so Sam was doing, I guess, the launch of some new products they had. But OpenAI was obviously represented. So maybe you could talk a little bit about what impact this will have on the American public and their view of AI.

I mean, look, I think we always assumed in the sci-fi novels that we would be in an era of having robot wars, and I think we failed to recognize that the software came first, and we are actually having the AI wars. There’s a war that I think we’re in the middle of right now, where there’s one side that wants to centralize, control, manage, regulate—whatever the term of the day might be—the technology. And there’s another side that I think is cognizant of the reality of the technology, which is that it is effectively ubiquitous. We talked about this in the past, due to open-source, open-weight models proliferating.

The fact that you can run models on small local machines, that you don’t need large clusters to do things, and that we’re seeing model after model come out now that are not under the jurisdiction of some centralized system or agency means it becomes very hard, and practically impossible, to actually regulate the development of the software. That’s the truth. It is what it is. You may not like it, but it is what it is. And those 2 sides are going to continue to fight.

4. The AI Arms Race

I think that the risks will rise, and as that happens, I’m going to make 2 predictions to your question. The first one is that I think we will see a massive rise in defense systems. There is no turning off the open-source, open-weight models or shutting down all the data centers or centralizing command and control. There are 197 countries on Earth. They each have sovereignty. There’s energy everywhere. They’re all connected to the internet. Data centers will exist all over the world.

So the attempt to try and centralize and manage the control of the software, I think, is a fool’s errand. But I do think that it’s going to mandate, because the risks will rise, an increased amount of defense. And so I think companies like Palo Alto Networks, I think the investment in this space—what I heard in DC this week was that some Fortune 50 CEOs are very worried about cyber defense. That means they’re going to start to make this their number 1 priority to address at the board level. That means the budgets for cyber defense are going to go through the roof.

Now let me ask you a question: When you have to do cyber defense in an era of AI, are you going to use old-school software, or are you going to use AI?

Obviously AI.

You’re going to use AI. And because of that, because cyber defense is going to need to grow, the US is going to need to provide competitive AI for cyber defense. It is a classic arms race scenario. And so the US cannot simply step back and pause and turn off AI. It is already everywhere in the world, therefore the risks are rising. Therefore, we need to increase our investment in AI to maintain our cyber defense capabilities, both at the enterprise level and at the government level, and potentially even at the civilian consumer level.

So I think that the cyber defense necessity actually mandates that we continue to build out data centers to support it. The second prediction I’ll make is I think 12 to 18 months from now, we’re going to shift away from this conversation about managing models, regulating models, controlling models, estimating models, scoring models—all this sort of stuff that’s going on.

Because, like we mentioned last week, every 11 days we’re seeing new models get published now. It is unbelievable. And this week Google released their new model that also seems to be more performant than any other model, and every couple of days we’re seeing a new one come out. So the model control systems are not going to solve any problems.

What I think is going to end up happening—and this is a prediction no one may like—is that I do think we’re going to end up in a world where governments are going to regulate data center access and usage. They’re going to say, “The data centers are here, but in order to maintain defense capabilities, we are going to decide who gets allocated a certain number of GPUs, a certain amount of inference, a certain number of chips, a certain number of servers.”

Because at the end of the day, one of the key metrics of cyber defense is going to be how many machines you have allocated to defend your systems against how many machines are coming after your systems. And it is, again, a classic arms race scenario. Assuming model convergence, and even if models have slight advantages over others, it seems to be the case that we will maintain pacing.

And if we’re maintaining pacing, then the number of machines allocated to a specific task is going to be a key measure of how well it performs in that task relative to another set of machines doing the same task. You’re just going to need to allocate more machines to it.

So if you’re going to allocate more machines to it, you’re going to end up having the government say, “Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. We need the US financial services system to get X percent of the GPUs in America. We need to make sure that Y percent go to defense. We need to make sure that Z percent—”

You’re saying it’s all going to get nationalized and allocated top-down?

I think that’s where the regulators are going to end up having to play a role. You can kind of think about data centers becoming the utility, which is the clouds, the neoclouds. Effectively, the government will end up saying, “Wait a second, we’re not allocating enough to JPMorgan. We’re not allocating enough to the financial services system.” And ultimately, the number of machines that are being allocated—

Why doesn’t the private market take care of that?

Yeah, it’s an opportunity to sell into the government. Now Google and Amazon Web Services, Crusoe, whoever, can just sell more servers. And the government then can say, “Hey, it is now, say, national security that we build more data centers, and we’re going to clear the road for it based on that alone.”

That is correct.

Yeah, hear, hear—

So it’s inevitable.

Yeah, here’s the part that I agree with—

Good luck blocking a data center if we need it. That’d be like blocking tanks being built during World War II, right? I mean—

Yeah, here’s the part I agree with: It’s not just about the capability of the model. It’s about how much compute you have to run it, and we want to have more compute than our adversaries. And if we continue with this anti-data-center crusade, we’re going to be at a severe disadvantage.

We already know that the precursor for data centers is power generation, and China’s doubling their grid every decade, and we’ve been flat for about 25 years. That’s a huge problem. Now, I went back and looked. Throughout the course of the 20th century, the United States was on a pace to double its electrical grid every decade. That’s what we did. We actually grew power generation enormously, and those were the days when America was a great industrial empire and basically dominated the world in manufacturing and industry.

We did not have a problem doing this. We found ways to do it. Obviously, the power generation plants, the power plants, were being built somewhere, and they found places to put them where they didn’t encounter too much NIMBY opposition.

They figured out a way to do it. Think about that. Every decade of the 20th century, until around the 1970s, they were doubling the grid every decade. In the '70s, it started slowing, but the growth continued, and it wasn't until the early 2000s that we basically flatlined.

Why is that? Because of deindustrialization and globalization. We shipped all those manufacturing jobs overseas, and then people went to work in offices, so we didn't need as much power. Efficiency played a little bit of a part in it as well, but we lost that muscle—how do we basically keep doubling our power grid every decade? We have to get that back.

And, again, this anti-data-center witch hunt that I'm seeing going on is so misguided. Look, data centers have been around for a long time. Data centers serve the internet. They serve all the mobile applications on your phone. They serve AI now, but they serve all the uses of computers that we use. To blame them for any specific application just seems totally misguided. If you have concerns about things like surveillance or privacy, by all means, strengthen the privacy laws, right?

Sure.

I'm all in favor of that, but just trying to ban—

Sacks, you know—

—the data center seems insane.

5. Sacks Meets Dario

Sacks, what everybody wants to know: you have been pretty critical of the Anthropic Computer Corporation, and specifically Dario and the leadership there. He was at the event. You guys met, I think, perhaps for the first time. Tell us about Dario's participation there. Did you guys talk a little bit about your criticism of him specifically, of the organization specifically, and all of this doomerism and effective altruism, or did it not come up?

No, look, I think that Dario was a good sport. It's true—that's the first time I met him in person. I'd talked to him on the phone before. But look, he was a good sport throughout the event. It was not adversarial or hostile. Obviously, he has his own views, and he represented them, but fundamentally, everybody got on the same page and signed this accord.

Did you shake hands with Dario?

Yeah.

Did you—

Yeah, he joked. He said, “Oh, my nemesis.” He joked.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

Yeah, now we're cooking.

So it's funny. But look, I think—

Did you invite him on the pod?

I forgot to invite him on the pod, but he's welcome anytime.

Do you have his phone number, and are you going to invite him on the pod? The world wants to know.

If you want me to. But look, I think it's good that he talked to the president and had dinner with the president. I think the president should talk to all the major players in the space. He should hear the full spectrum of views, and I trust the president is going to arrive at the right policy and solution. So I think it's good for him to hear Dario. I mean, look, I think—

Any insight into what happened at that dinner? What was President Trump's view of Dario? He said he was an interesting guy. There were some interesting quotes, and he dragged him from the back of the group in the presser and threw him out front. I saw you—

Yeah.

—you were right behind him. Zuck was right behind him. You guys had a little chuckle at the president—

Well, we weren't—

—pushing him forward to speak—

No, we weren't. We actually—I forgot exactly what. No, no one was making fun of Dario. Just so you're clear.

No, I wasn't implying that.

We were having—

But I mean, the fact that Trump—

Yeah.

—grabbed him from the back and said—

Yeah.

—“You have to speak,” I think that was a cute moment. It was an affectionate moment. I saw it as an affectionate moment: he wanted Dario to be part of the group—

Yeah.

—and speak on behalf of the group. I saw it as the opposite, yeah.

Yeah, he gave him a pat on the back.

Exactly.

And—

Yeah.

Look, I think—listen, Dario's a very special person. I didn't fully appreciate it until we were all in that room together. There's obviously a wide spectrum of views in that room. There's different levels of—

Spectrum's a good word.

Yeah.

Spectrum's a good word.

There's an autism spectrum. There's a spectrum of autism spectrum in that room.

So you felt—

And—

—you felt very comfortable, Sacks.

Well, you guys call me the Rain Man, but I mean—

You're Rain Man light.

Like—

I mean, you're—

Yeah, you're pretty functional.

I don't mean this as an insult, but Dario's sort of the Dustin Hoffman in that room, and then Tom Brown's like the Tom Cruise character who's trying to translate him. They weren't wearing the same suit or anything, but—

Trump's like—

But it's an interesting—

—“Hey, America, China, Russia—meet my mutants, okay? I'm forming the X-Men here. These are brainiacs. They're a little bit weird on the margins, but they're getting it done for America.”

Yeah.

Chamath, you certainly must have had an interesting time there. Tell us a little bit more of the palace intrigue. What was President Trump's vibe? He seemed incredibly engaged and excited, and I just want to say, listen, you don't have to be a fan of President Trump or a Republican to appreciate what happened here. Compare it to when Biden excluded Elon from the EV summit. You need to, as the president of the United States, be bipartisan and include everybody in these things. We're all part of the same team. It's called Team America, and I thought this was a great juxtaposition of that. You had a lot of people who are extremely critical of the administration who were there to make America stronger, to make America win the AI race, the superintelligence race.

Most people have said this at this point, so this is beating a dead horse, but he is a generational political athlete. I don't think we've seen anybody like him, and so he's extremely comfortable around all kinds of people with all kinds of differing views. He's conscientious, and when he notices things are not right, he sets them right. He talks to as many people as possible, and I think you have to be really impressed with that.

This was an incredible pattern that I hope outlives him, which is this idea that when you have very complicated problems, when you use industry to be a sounding board, and then you sit with industry in real time, and then you craft these accords in real time, and when that industry represents the entire political spectrum, as you said, Jason—some who are with you, some who are against you, and some who are in the middle—that is the right way to govern, in my opinion.

Because you have the best chance of doing something that's sustainable and realistic, and that comes back to this point that is getting lost, which is whoever wins superintelligence wins.

Yes.

And I think if we just keep that in mind, this is the pattern that hopefully outlives the president. Whenever you run into any other thorny issue—and I would say this too to whoever's going to be president in '28 and beyond, Democrat or Republican, it doesn't matter—get the smartest people from that industry in a room. Make sure that it's filled with both people who support you as well as people who may not necessarily support you, and then hash it out in the room.

Force a set of realistic principles that everybody can then build a business around. That is very smart politics and governance.

I just wanted to go back to something you said before, because I was having this conversation with Phil Deutch. This is about the data-center thing. He made this point to me, which I think is really important. When you look at the impact that the Iran war had on the price of oil, the most interesting takeaway was actually how little the price of oil moved during all of these blockages in Hormuz.

Because what really happened was there was a lot of supply and generation shifting that occurred, right? We were able to shape in real time, Jason, how to generate energy. The real takeaway from my perspective is that the generation of electrons is actually the critical thing, not necessarily the generation of energy as we've classically thought about it.

Now, why that's important is the data center now becomes the critical symbol of national security. The ability to generate electrons, and then the ability to make sure that we can compute the resources that we need to run our economy, is going to start from those things. So domestic energy production, I think, also is this hugely important thing that's going to move from a domestic policy issue to a national security issue.

That's why I think the data-center thing—and why I disagree with Friedberg. I understand where he's coming from, because this is why the data center will get so much scrutiny. But I also think the opposite will happen, which is more of the Sacks idea of the free market.

Because it is so critical, similar to how we responded after the Persian Gulf War and how we responded after the global war on terror, what did we do? We doubled and tripled down on natural gas and domestic oil production.

Similarly, I think domestic production of electrons becomes so critical because the data center becomes this national security infrastructure that's so important.

Yeah, there was this great video from years ago where Milton Friedman was at a law school. He was asked a question by this kid about when we have a responsibility to act to save someone's life, whether the government can mandate that I do that, and whether that takes away my freedom in a free society.

The way the kid asked it, Milton Friedman responded by saying, “Hey, you started out talking about your responsibility in society, and by the end of it you were telling me about what government needs to do.” He said, “I would argue that those two things are not the same, and that the point you should take note of is that you don't need government to solve your problems when society is giving you a clear signal of what the right and wrong thing is to do. People collectively can and will solve their problems, take their actions, choose the right path, do the right things, and businesses can and will respond accordingly when the market is telling them something, when society is telling them something. They don't need the government to be responsible for executing the actions and taking regulation onto its shoulders for them.”

I think we saw that this week with NVIDIA's launch, and OpenAI was very declarative about how they're being more precautionary before they release models. But this morning, Google also launched SynthID, and SynthID is a system for watermarking proteins that are produced with AI. The DNA sequence that codes for the protein will now actually have a watermark in it, and it's being broadly adopted. The protein itself, the three-dimensional construct of the protein, will actually have an embedded watermark in it as well.

This is actually a pretty amazing technology that Google developed for creating watermarking and defense systems in AI bio. I think we are starting to see the market respond actively to what society is saying and not need these government people to come in and take over and, in the process, put everything at risk.

By the way, I saw that clip. It was going viral as well.

Is that what it was?

He was a law school kid. The young guy was articulate. Milton Friedman was unbelievably articulate, as always. But J-Cal, what was your view? I'm curious—seeing it happen in real time, what were you thinking?

Yeah. I was, ironically, invited to come down to the White House for the first time. My friend Joe Gebbia launched America.gov this week, which was a spectacular launch. We're making the American government as efficient as private industry. He's the co-founder of—

Airbnb.

He's an incredible designer. He went to RISD with his partners, so shout-out to him. If you haven't seen America.gov, it's stunningly gorgeous.

I was there, Al. No, I spoke on a panel with Brooke Rollins and Shaun Sankar at the event. It was an incredible event. The whole Cabinet showed up. The president signed the EO. And even guys like Andrew Ross Sorkin gave this standing monologue on why it was so incredible for America to see this. It was not partisan at all.

It was about upgrading America's technology infrastructure for the citizens, and it was fantastic.

And by the way, sorry, J-Cal, I'm sorry to interrupt you, but I just want to give a shout-out to Joe because he did that work with his own money. People think this was some big government investment. Joe and others—

What?

Joe and others put up personal funds and gave up their personal time, despite their success in their private careers, to step—

Amazing.

—in and do this work for America, and I just think it was an incredible rallying cry for all of these technologists to get together and build something great together for America. It was a really beautiful day. It was great to be there. Sorry, go ahead.

Yeah, and just—

Yeah.

—it's fine. From the outside, it was incredible. Just awesome to see the power of all of this American industry together.

6. AI Must Reach Americans

Not a critique, but an addendum to it: I think the next piece of this puzzle is to start to include Americans in this, the bottom half of the K-shaped recovery. Where's the teacher? Where's the teenager going into college in all of this? Where's the American tool-belt worker or the plumber, et cetera?

It looks from the outside, I think, to a lot of Americans that this is still a bit scary, so there's more work to do there. I was on a flight on Delta, and the flight attendants asked me what I did. I was talking to them, and they said, “Oh, I'm so scared of this AI stuff. I'm so glad I'm retiring because I don't want to lose my job,” et cetera.

Americans are still petrified of this technology. They still think they're losing their jobs. They still think it's dangerous. So I thought this was a great first step, but there's more work to do to pull Americans back off that ledge.

I think this is where the president or the next president could have a really major impact: start forcing American companies to not just think about how they make more money, how they get more green lights for their data centers, how they get less regulation and more free markets, but how this impacts education. How does this lower the cost of education? How does this build more homes? How does this help healthcare? How do people get more healthcare at a lower price?

None of that was addressed. That doesn't mean I'm giving any criticism of this event, but that's the next piece. The next time President Trump brings together this many powerful people, they should talk about the American public, not just the data centers.

So, a couple—

Yeah.

—of things. He did ask people to do just that and actually—

Great.

—showcase some of these things, and he was very specific. He did that, and he also said, “You need to show direct positive impact in the local communities in which you do business.” He was very direct. That was super blunt and one of the first few things he said.

I wanted to build on your other thing—

But that, by the way, did not come across at all. The real critique from the public that I think is valid here is it looks like we're just helping billionaires—

I want to talk to you about—

—and companies. Yeah.

I want to talk to you about the doomer—

That is something the billionaires and the companies—I don't mean to sound like Bernie Sanders—

Hold on.

—they need to address this themselves. It would be great if they started saying, like Facebook did with the free tool-belt stuff and the training, that we need to see more of that. I think housing, education, and healthcare are where Americans will start to appreciate this.

I told you that right after the White House luncheon, I flew to Orlando because the Earthstone has a—

Earthstone Young, yeah.

—two-day offsite for all their partners. Okay, but listen to this. I'm not going to say this person's name, but this person is a very well-known Democratic person. They were on stage, and they had this whole riff about doomerism. They were so cavalier about it, they actually included the people in the room as part of the claim that they're all going to be out of jobs. And I'm standing there backstage, and I'm like, “What are you talking about?”

Hmm.

It's not rooted in details. It's not rooted in data. It's not rooted in fact. This is a very well-known person, very grounded theoretically in what the data should show.

Name and shame.

But what you realize—I mean, I'll say it to you, but maybe we bleep it out, but it's [inaudible]. And I was like, “What the—what is going on?” So, to your point, Jason, it is very partisan, and I said this last time on the pod. There's an incredibly important incentive for folks that are not in the power structure today, i.e., Democrats, to take up the doomerism call to action because it is a very straightforward way to whip up fear and then catalyze that into power in the midterms and then in 2028. So you're going to see it.

Oh, it's going to win you votes for sure. Yeah.

When I went on stage, the first thing I did was say, “She's wrong, and that's not true.” In fact, everything tells us—all the data up until now—that there will be more jobs and more to do. I said, “The people in this room will be making more money in the next 4 or 5 years, not less money. There will be more work to be done, more judgment, more taste to be imposed.”

I have a real issue with this narrative because I think it's just fundamentally wrong, and it does not come from a place of data-driven fact. It comes from a decision that the political calculus is that doomerism is a way to foment distrust and displeasure and then use that at the polls. I understand that as a political tactic, but I think it's important to call it out.

This is why I say we're in the AI wars. I mean, this is the actual war. There won't be a robot war. It's this battle right now about who's actually going to have the technology and the progress and who's not.

Well, who's going to—

And we're fighting it.

…benefit from it, Friedberg? Who's going to benefit from it, right? Rich people, poor people, middle class?

7. The Doomerism Political Fight

People don't know what open source is. No one knows what an open-weight model means. No one understands any of this stuff, and they're looking at the rich guys at the White House. I agree with you, J-Cal. I think the public perception and the public narrative on this thing is, “I don't get it. I see a bunch of wealthy people hanging out with the president at lunch, making a bunch of decisions that I don't have a voice in. I don't even know what's going on. I don't even know what they're doing. And then I turn on the news, I turn on the TV, I look at my Instagram, and everything's about the end of tomorrow.” And so I'm all about shutting it down. No problem.

This is why I think it's important to have the conversation that we're having about why open-source and open-weight AI benefit everyone, because there's no company charging you a toll for this digital technology. It's just like the internet. We maintained an open internet. It was a huge fight. People forget the fight that we had for the internet. When the internet was first starting out, there were all these efforts to privatize the internet and create gatekeepers. There were these efforts by all the telcos to be the gatekeeper to the internet and charge you different amounts of money to access different websites.

You weren't going to be able to just go to Yahoo or AOL if you didn't pay a fee to your telco to be allowed to access Yahoo or AOL. We made it illegal, and we made it an open internet. I think the same is happening right now with AI. People don't see the fight, the war that's going on, but there is a contingent of people that, to Chamath's point, recognize the political value of regulatory control and capture, and they are fighting to create gates and systems of control and, ultimately, new power structures. We are fighting. The other side is actually fighting for openness with AI. And it's well organized.

When you go to these places and realize that these extremely successful people are being deployed with very tightly scripted talking points that all point to doomerism, you realize that this is extremely designed. The rest of us who are working in this arena and can actually see that there are more positive benefits than negative, and that there are more people making more money than before up and down the income spectrum, are not as organized as they are. That's what I will say for sure.

I think that the positive message of superintelligence and the economic upside is not nearly as well trafficked as the downside doomer message, because that goes from top to bottom in an extremely organized, repetitive way. That's why Jason, the flight attendant, has the talking point. So they are winning. And by the way, the talking point was given to them by Dario. The talking point was given to them by Elon when he said, “You're not going to need to have a job.” Those talking points were handed out. Now they're being reversed. Still work to be done.

I think next time, the best piece of advice: save 3 seats, Sacks. Bring a Sal Khan. Bring somebody representing teachers. Bring somebody representing healthcare. Bring a thoughtful, non-business person who could represent other constituents in this. Save a seat at the table for people who the everyman and everywoman of America can relate to, who says, “Hey, yeah, maybe this will help my kid when I get a personal tutor for them.” Sal Khan would be the perfect example of Khan Academy. Sacks, you got any final thoughts here as we move on?

Well, I wanted to broaden out this conversation—

Sure.

—to the economy as a whole, because I do think that the doomerism is affecting people's perception of the economy.

Yeah, that's why I'm bringing it up.

And I think that there's been a tremendous amount of economic data in just the last week or 2 showing that the economy is much stronger than people are giving it credit for. Yes, I know that diesel prices are too high and rates are high, but those are the only 2 variables that you ever hear about. Let's look at some of the other numbers that have just come out, because I think it's pretty extraordinary.

First of all, Q2 GDP was revised up to 2.2%, up from 1.5%, so that's basically a 50% increase. Economists had expected no revision. Q1 was also revised up to 2.5% from 2.1%. If you look at Q3 growth, it's tracking well above that. The Atlanta Fed GDPNow is showing around 3.7% as of late last week.

August payrolls just came out: plus 162,000. The consensus was only 55,000, so it was a beat of about 107,000 jobs. June and July were also revised up by a combined 55,000. Unemployment is still near record lows at 4.1%, even though labor participation rose 0.2% to 61.6%. Good news on the jobs front, good news on the GDP front. The economy is running hot.

There was also some good news on inflation. Core PCE just came in at 3.0% versus 3.3% expected. Inflation is still a bit too high, but it is cooling and beating expectations. Finally, you look at manufacturing. We're seeing a huge wave of reindustrialization in this country. A couple of the measures are the Chicago PMI and ISM Manufacturing. They are both well into expansion territory and beating forecasts.

Just one last point: let's talk about poverty for a second, because I want to address the idea that this is just a K-shaped recovery. If you look at US household income, it's now at a record high. The median household income in 2025 dollars is almost $90,000. After-tax household income is growing again in the second Trump term. It's averaged 3.1% a year in Trump 47. It was 3.9% in Trump 45, and it was minus 1.2% in Biden's term as a 4-year average.

We're seeing that after-tax household incomes have risen by 3.1% just in 2025, and the poverty rate in the US has fallen to its lowest level in history, 10.2%. The poverty rate and the child poverty rate are all at historic lows. The average household's real income, after inflation and taxes, is increasing for the first time in years.

There is a lot of strong economic data out there. If I was to guess, I actually think that the Republicans are going to do better in the midterms than some of these polls are predicting, because I think the press around the economy has been very negative. But I think people are starting to feel that the economy is accelerating, and that was actually a headline in The Wall Street Journal just the last couple of days: that the economy is accelerating right now.

Again, you've got this AI boom. You've got the infrastructure build-out that, again, The Wall Street Journal said is bigger than the railroads, the canals, and the electric grid combined. All these things are fueling strong growth in the economy. Again, I would dispute the K-shaped narrative, because the poor are benefiting, and the average household is benefiting as well.

They don't feel that way.

I get the sentiment. I agree with you. The sentiment has not caught up with the economic reality, but I think it will.

8. The Rate Shock Ahead

We've got a rate problem. In the last 30 days or so, we've seen short-term rates on Treasuries climb by 60 basis points. That's a pretty consequential climb. I think we haven't seen a short-term yield this high since going back to 2002. This massive increase in rates is obviously going to impact people's ability to refinance their home, buy a new car, and purchase things on credit, and the majority of Americans fall under that umbrella.

I think there's also an economic challenge ahead with the rate problem, and I would argue, as I always do, that the rate problem is fundamentally rooted in the federal government and the insane spending. If you look at the impact that these rates are going to have on banks, I worked with ChatGPT, my trusted analyst, my financial analyst in my office here, to help figure out what the impact of these rates is actually going to be on banks and what the impairment would be.

There are 4,295 banks that have positive equity and report their balance sheets to the FDIC every month. Based on the actual reported balance sheets of these banks, about 95 banks are going to see an impairment of more than 20% of their equity in the last 30 days or so. Those reports start to come out on October 30. The thing I worry a lot about is that on October 30, we're going to see all these financial reports coming out from all the banks, all the lending institutions, and about 95 of them are going to say, “Hey, we've got more than a 20% impairment charge on our equity.” That's going to be a massive shock.

Then what are the implications of that? That's where we're going to start to wake up to the fact that the rate problem isn't just a purchasing problem for consumers, but it may actually have a bit of a rippling effect here in the economy, starting with the financial institutions. They publish their next monthly reports for the period ending September 30 on October 30.

Unfortunately, it coincides right with the election cycle. So there’s going to be all this noise about, “Hey, how bad are things looking?” while we’re trying to go through this election. So, Sacks, I don’t know if there’s any view on how we fix this—

Yeah.

—rate problem, but it’s pretty nasty, and it’s going to have some impact.

Well, look, I conceded up front that we have 2 issues in the economy that are negative. We have diesel prices and rates. But then I went on to lay out the case for why there’s so much other positive economic news that’s not really being covered.

Look, if you compare rates to the nominal growth rate of the economy, and those 2 things are highly correlated over time, you can see the economy is running really hot right now. That is part of the reason why rates are going up, because you have to compensate people for a real return. If you’ve got inflation in the 3s and GDP growth at 3.7%, then rates are going to be high as well.

Look, I think this all comes back to the price of diesel because that obviously has a lot to do with not just people’s price at the pump, but diesel is an industrial input, and the transportation costs get baked into all these goods. I think if we can just solve that problem, then gas prices come down and inflation comes down. We can get rate cuts on that basis.

So I think that’s the last piece here. I think the economy’s already doing, again, very well: 2.5% in Q2, 3.7% in Q3. But if we just get that last piece—I’m not saying there’s not a little bit of work to do there—I think the economy will take off like a rocket.

Yeah. I think the conditions are right. You’re right. I think the federal spending problem is still persisting, though. It’s almost like pouring acid on everything. You’ve got all this great stuff growing, and then you just have all this federal spending, which, as you and I both know, is negative-productivity spending, and it’s creating fake employment and doing all sorts of bad things.

But, man, if we don’t get spending, as Scott Bessent has talked about, to a 3% deficit as a percent of GDP, these rates are only going to get worse, and that could basically just shoot us in the foot.

Well, look, we all agree about spending as a long-term problem, and it’s a bipartisan problem. We have to fix it. I would just say that about 6 months ago, people said that if we got a spike in gas prices, we were going to have 1970s-style stagflation. That has not happened. Instead, we’re seeing a super-hot economy, and yet gas prices are a little high.

By the way, during the Obama presidency, we had over 300 days of Brent crude over $100 a barrel. So people forget that we’ve had the economy do well over large stretches of time with gas prices at these levels. It’s just the diesel prices are a little high, and that has to do with refineries. Frankly, it would be good if Zelensky stopped hitting Russian refineries. That hasn’t helped the problem.

But look, we just have that 1 issue, and I think we can resolve it. There was a report this week, I think it was in The Guardian, which is not a pro-Trump publication, saying that more oil got out of Hormuz this week than at any point since the beginning of the war. So I think we need to wrap up that issue. Gas prices come down, and then I think that means inflation will come down. It’s already coming down more than expected.

But then we can get a rate cut. I think, actually, right now no one’s pricing in the potential for rate cuts here. It’s all rate increases. So if we could get some relief there and get rate cuts, the economy’s going to rocket even more.

We have 2 tricky auctions that are coming up, and I think Treasury will be able to navigate those well, just because I think Scott has such a good handle on how to do this and, frankly, how to do the job. But once we get past those 2 auctions, I’m leaning more in the Sacks camp. I kind of tend to agree with you. There’s going to be some growing evidence about what to do based on what happens from Europe as well.

I don’t know if you guys have been tracking this, but France is going through a really complicated budget negotiation right now, and they’re about to shrink the budget by probably $50 billion to $75 billion, which you can imagine, in France, that’s like ground zero for—

Totally.

And so when the French start to make cuts—and it’s what Friedberg has been saying—why were they forced to capitulate? Because of long rates. So that’s happened.

Andy Burnham, who bumbled his way into the prime ministership of the UK, presented his policy platform yesterday for an hour. It’s truly insane what he’s saying. This is an extremely muscular form of socialism that he intends to impose on the United Kingdom and then remerge back into Europe. He’s going to try to undo Brexit. He’s going to try to double and triple the size of the government. Not a mention of growth—how do you grow the private economy? Insane.

So what you’re going to see from both of those 2 places over the next year is, I think, going to tell us what we’re going to have to do in the United States. But I tend to think that we’re going to see a little bit more growth than is expected. I tend to think we’re going to probably see a little bit more revision.

And I think that people are sleeping on the fact that we are not nearly as dependent on oil the way that we used to be. Even though we used to breathlessly look at Brent crude and WTI and all this stuff, I don’t think it matters nearly as much as it used to.

I think that’s crazy because the paradigm of rates, the paradigm of currencies, and the petrodollar—all these intermingled things that used to drive the global economy—are now getting rewired in ways that I don’t think anybody fully understands, and that’s very good for the United States. So I think we have to factor that in as well.

Well, Chamath, the 1 problem is that gas prices at the pump are up 50% since the Iran war started, and that hurts the everyday consumer significantly. It may not drive the GDP numbers down super aggressively because of the industrial side, but the actual cost of living for the average person—

But can I say something?

Yeah.

I’ve looked at those numbers, the prices, and they’re terrible, and I feel bad for people that have to bear that cost. But I think it’s also important to say that this is not an input issue. That is a refining issue.

For decades and decades, we turned off the refining infrastructure that the United States could have used, okay? And so we now need, as Sacks said, the Russians, the Chinese—we need as much refining capacity as possible to take all of this oil and get it into usable forms. So I hear you.

Yeah.

But I think it’s also important to acknowledge where the constraint is. The constraint is not the oil.

Yeah. I—

The constraint is, over decades and decades, all of this—

Let me jump in for a second.

Electricity.

I just want to—I hate to put a little rain on this hopium parade here, but there are 2 important charts as we go into the midterms. My core belief is that not enough has changed. You can pull up the first chart, Nick.

If we look at just the time since Trump has been in office, I think the challenge is that nothing’s changed. If you look at unemployment, it hasn’t changed. It’s about the same. And then if you look at inflation, it’s still sustained in the high 3s, sometimes dipping into 4, sometimes as low as 3.2, but never into the 2s.

And GDP is something that the American people just don’t feel. If you look at this chart, these are Trump’s biggest strengths. So you have to ask yourself: How did this administration go from an incredibly positive feeling when Trump 2.0 came out to having just a net negative on immigration, trade, the economy, and inflation?

People’s perception is their own reality, and the perception right now is that Trump and this administration care about foreign wars and care about industry much more than they care about the average American. That is the exact opposite of what Trump promised his own constituents.

What you see here in these results is that he’s lost all those independents he won with the promise of Trump 2.0. He’s obviously never going to win over Democrats, and he’s starting to lose his base.

The base is now fleeing and saying, “Hey, you promised us you were going to deport 20 million people”—something I don’t agree with—but that didn’t happen. So now he’s losing all those core positions, the things that were supposed to be his strengths. That’s where you have to wonder: What is going on in this administration that they just can’t even talk about the issues that the American people care about?

Obviously, the war just destroyed this administration’s popularity with their own base. They’re going to get shellacked in the midterms, according to all polls. Of course, Trump—if anybody’s going to pull a rabbit out of the hat, it would be Trump, because he has beaten the polls before. But this is not looking good, gentlemen. And you could spin, Sacks, the last couple of quarters, but—

Wait, can I respond to this?

Absolutely, you can.

Okay. Look, so you think—

And by the way, I wish it was different.

Okay.

I wish we had 2% inflation right now. Yeah.

Jason, what is your prediction? What do you think is going on?

I would just look at Polymarket, honestly, and pull it up here. I think it's about 70% to 80% that the Democrats sweep both. By the way, over the next week, the 4 of us are going to have a squad on Polymarket where we're going to make all of our predictions.

Oh.

Then the audience can follow along and see how we all do on our predictions, which will be interesting.

Yeah, I mean, it's—

But yeah.

I don't know. Chamath, I am not an expert on polling, but I do think you should start with the people actually betting money: a 63% chance the Democrats take the Senate, 93% they take the House, and if you put those together, there's a chance they sweep both. Who knows with these polls? I would look at Polymarket first. If you could zoom in there, the chance they take both is at what now?

The chance of a sweep is 64%, so—

Okay, let me tell you what I think is wrong with this analysis.

Okay, go ahead, please.

Look, I made this mistake in 2022. I was sure there was going to be a red wave in 2022. This was when Biden was president, and these were his midterms, okay?

Mm-hmm.

It ended up being a red trickle. It was very disappointing to Republicans. They made gains, but it was not a shellacking.

So what was the mistake that I made? I was only looking at perception, and I wasn't looking enough at reality or balancing the reality. For example, Biden's polling was in the 30s. He was very low back then, and inflation was 9%. But if you looked at GDP growth and unemployment, those numbers were actually pretty strong.

There was a lot of talking down the economy based on 1 variable, which was inflation. It was too high, and it was a problem, but there were other variables that were actually quite good. The reality that people were feeling wasn't as bad as this super-hyperbolic view. Again, all the pollsters have an incentive to exaggerate this stuff, and all the political operatives always freak out.

It's good for ratings. Yeah.

It is good for ratings. But the reality is, the American people went red. Don't get me wrong, but it wasn't the massive wave that everyone was expecting. It was more like a red trickle.

I don't think we're going to get a blue wave here. I think we might get a blue spritz.

Oh, a spritz?

Biden would have wished for the economy that Trump has now back in 2022.

Yeah.

Yes, we have 3% inflation. It's not 9% like Biden had.

Oh, no.

Yes, gas prices are a little bit high, but GDP growth is great. It's accelerating. Unemployment is great. Labor participation is great. Poverty—the poverty line—is great.

What's your prediction for the Senate and House?

I think the Republicans are going to surprise people and keep the Senate.

Okay.

Most people think the Republicans lose the House. I guess that's probably the consensus, but it's not going to be this gigantic wave.

Hmm.

I think it will be narrow if the Democrats win, and I think it will be a real headache for Hakeem Jeffries to keep all of these DSA Democrats in line. If you remember, when Kevin McCarthy had the House, he had a very thin majority, and he lost his speakership because he couldn't quite keep the Freedom Caucus in line. I think Hakeem Jeffries is going to have very similar problems if the Democrats take the House.

I even noticed that Mark Halperin has been predicting a blue tsunami for the last month, but he's starting to hedge that. I think the pro-Democrat, pro-blue sentiment peaked about 2 weeks ago, and since then, we've had very positive economic numbers for the president.

Hmm.

The Republicans need to go out there and tell that story. They can't have all this doomer stuff. We've got to turn this around. I think we just neutralized this whole AI safety issue at the White House. So I think the next month, actually, I think that—

If there hadn't been a war, what do you think the situation would be?

Look, again, I said the 1 missing piece here is diesel prices. You get the price of diesel down, and that will be the last remaining unlock on inflation. That will bring rates down, and the economy is going to hit 5% GDP growth.

So without the war, you think the Republicans could have swept?

There are ways of solving that problem with diesel.

Yeah.

In the last week, this is the news report: I don't know the reality of what's happening in Hormuz, but according to all the publications, they just got a record amount of oil out of Hormuz.

Yeah, they're doing night shipping with the lights off, kind of that situation. Interesting.

Chamath, do you have a prediction? What's going to happen?

Look, if we can just wrap that up—I'm in favor of wrapping it up, don't get me wrong—but I think the president has indicated he'll do that. He doesn't want to be pressured into doing it before the election.

Yes.

You said that very clearly. Chamath, what do you think is going to happen here? What's your prediction for the election? We're a month out.

From the numbers that I'm looking at, the Senate is very much a toss-up, but I think it can remain Republican. I think the Democrats are going to have a slim majority in the House.

Okay, same as Sacks. Yeah.

The way that the president can seal the deal, so to speak, is by focusing on the economic gains and dispelling the doomer narrative. If you can stay focused on that for the next month, I think the Republicans have a pretty decent shot.

The other side is also true. If you can distract people and focus on the 1 or 2 things that are still problematic, like gas prices, and continue to reinforce the doomer narrative, you have a chance to overachieve if you're the Democrats.

Hmm.

I think this is how it's going to come down, Jason. Can you focus on a few issues, like gas prices, or do you take a broad-based look at the economy? That's 1 side. And do you look at superintelligence as a constructive force for GDP growth, or do you buy the doomer narrative?

I think what we're going to see is who is better organized and who gets that message out the cleanest. Whoever does that for sure wins the House.

I think the doomerism, Friedberg, is not a huge winning issue. All I have to say is, Trump promised not to start a war. He did. He promised to solve inflation. He didn't. The end. I think the Democrats sweep.

What's your take on what's going to happen, Friedberg? Do you have any insights, Friedberg?

I think the more important question is what happens between 2026 and 2028.

Go ahead, take that one. That was my follow-up.

I think those are kind of a consequence, and it's not just split or sweep. I think what happens between 2026 and 2028 is how far left the Democrats go and how much that gets hardened, and then how much the Republicans splinter into this kind of populist thing. Do the populists kind of fuse, and then do we end up in this kind of socialist takeover of America?

The America First movement, I think you're referring to—the Tucker Carlson group. Yeah.

I don't know if that's even it. Remember, there was a Tea Party. There's a whole bunch of manifestations of these social emotions, these public emotions. They all kind of fuse into different words, parties, and groups.

Yeah.

Who knows where it goes? It's certainly unlikely that the first manifestation is the one that sticks, holds, and becomes the biggest one. I would argue that the Tea Party seeded MAGA years later.

Yes, of course. Yeah.

But this kind of populist movement does not—if you look at the first derivative of it, it's still positive. The populist sentiment is still growing in America, and that's what I really care about the most because I do think that's where individual liberties get destroyed, as populism effectively mandates a bigger kind of government to solve our individual problems.

I worry that we've got some looming crises. Looming crisis number 1 is Social Security. Looming crisis number 2 is where rates are and the impact that's going to have on affordability. Looming crisis number 3 is whether this idea of an asset tax is actually going to solve any problems.

The truth is, as I've said in the past, if you took 100% of the net wealth of all the billionaires in the United States as a 1-time tax and took 100% of their net worth, it would fund 1 year of the federal government.

All the billionaires' money combined is 1 year of federal government spending. It doesn't really move the needle to do an asset tax; there's a fundamental restructuring of how we tax and how we spend that's going to be necessary. You either need to tax the middle class, which is where $160 trillion of America's $183 trillion net worth sits, or you've got to cut spending massively, or you've got to completely restructure these entitlement programs, all of which are deeply unpopular. All 3 of those paths are deeply unpopular.

So when something deeply unpopular starts to be the only path, what happens? And that's what I worry most about, and I think that's all going to come to a head between '26 and '28. And I think it's going to frame the political calculus going into '28.

9. The Plane Hijacking Story

It's going to be fascinating, and we'll be here for it. I don't know if you guys had time when you were busy here, but there was a hijacking that occurred—terrorist attack, I think is the only way to describe it—on a flydubai flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv. David, it had 174 passengers on board. An Omani co-pilot apparently stabbed the captain and tried to crash the plane in a 9/11-style attack.

Passengers bravely subdued him, and there were off-duty pilots on the plane, miraculously. I mean, what are the chances? And somehow, while this terrorist was trying to down the plane, Friedberg, they were able to not only remove him but get these off-duty pilots into the cockpit, level the plane, and land it safely. It was one of the most amazing acts of bravery, with this co-pilot who fought off the terrorist, and then 3 or 4 passengers were able to get into that cockpit, drag this terrorist out, and land the plane. Your thoughts, Friedberg.

Well, the eyewitness accounts came out pretty fast and furious because these guys had internet access as soon as they were able to land in Saudi Arabia, and they started to provide their reports. But what I thought was the most striking aspect of all of this, despite the incredible heroism and bravery and just a true showing of human spirit, was how the media covered it.

I was deeply saddened because I remember 9/11. I remember the shock and the anger and the stories coming out during that day. I remember the media—the news channels—were my source of truth, and I watched it all day. And then yesterday, this happened.

Here's an example. This is The New York Times' cover the day after 9/11: “Hijacked jets destroy Twin Towers and hit Pentagon in day of terror.” And it really was a day of terror. It was a truly tragic event in human history, regardless of your political or social beliefs then or now. The loss of life in this case, the loss of life in conflicts that followed, and the loss of life in conflicts around October 7 and what followed are all tragic. It's all terror, and it's all awful.

The reporting yesterday on this event, which I found to be emotionally distressing, was almost like a strange casting of the experience as being one of a fight between 2 buddies who weren't getting along in the cockpit of this airplane.

The pilots got into a scuffle—

So the first—the original—

—was the original reporting, yes.

The first one was The New York Times, which came out and said it was an altercation, and then the Journal called it a struggle. The BBC called it a fight between pilots. Sky News called it a brawl between pilots. AFP said they were fighting. Even CNN said it was an altercation.

There were direct eyewitness reports coming out at this time that this guy tried to take over the plane and crash it, and this was clearly a terror event. We've stopped using this word, terror, for some reason, because when we use terror, it doesn't allow us to politicize and create sides of a story and a long-form narrative that I believe so much of the media is trying to portray. And I'm not going to try to say what their narrative is or who's trying to do it.

Here's the next day on The New York Times' website. This is the day after, when all the facts of the case have come out. This is the front page of The New York Times today, a day after, with all of the witnesses and all of the journalism that would allow you to validate multiple eyewitnesses on what happened on this flight: “Investigators seek to establish a motive.”

The story is that the guy tried to crash a plane full of passengers. He took over the plane and tried to do it. Number 1 bullet point: 737 sustained enormous stress. Number 2: investigators seek to answer the motive. Number 3: Israeli politicians use the attack to try to score points in this month's election.

I just kind of lost faith yesterday and today in how the media is characterizing facts on the ground: that there is human tragedy, that there is terror, and that, from their view and from their writing, this ends up becoming a place to sell, unfortunately, a narrative that is all too popular and that is what's going to sell them. They don't want to lose people by saying the wrong thing, and they want to say what they think is right. I don't know who the individuals are behind all of it.

But I found it to be pretty shocking for me, from 25 years ago to today, how much has changed in the landscape of the people that we trust, that we call journalists, to tell us the truth of what's going on, and to try to recharacterize such horrific events because they don't quite conform to a specific narrative that they've been trying to sell for some time.

Yeah.

So I was deeply upset about the whole thing, and I wanted to bring it up.

Yeah, reasonably upset. 2 different responses.

And I do think a big shout-out to the pilot.

Unbelievable pilot.

If you read the reports, he wouldn't go to the bathroom because he had suspicions that his co-pilot was going to do something. He called for an emergency urine bag, and he stayed in the cockpit to pee in his urine bag. That's when the guy tried to kill him. He fought the guy off.

While he was stabbed and bleeding out to death, he heroically opened up the cockpit door and screamed for passengers to come and help. Then several heroic souls stepped up and saved—

Right.

—the day and saved 170-some-odd lives. That's the story. It's a story of terror, and it's a story of human heroism. I don't care where these people are from. I don't care what religion anyone is. I don't care what political interests anyone might have. This is the story that needs to be told, and it's being recast by the media as Israeli politicians trying to score points.

That's what The New York Times is trying to sell on their cover page today—

Yeah.

—as opposed to the story of what really took place here.

And then your—

And then The New York Times got so much heat over it that they started—and, J-Cal, you can cover this—but—

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

And the New York Times communications account says, based on the early tweet, which was, “Hey, there was an altercation.” Quote: “Our headlines and live coverage contain all the facts we're able to confirm as we confirm them. Unlike activists and partisans, we don't publish speculation or unverified information. Here's a gift link to follow along to our reporting,” yada, yada.

So I guess 2 topics there, Sacks. You have the real-time issue, which is certainly very different from 9/11. That was an attack where people took credit pretty quickly, if my memory serves me correctly. In this case, we're left to wonder: lone wolf, coordinated attack, et cetera. But certainly, the next day's coverage was strange. I think, at a minimum, it's odd that they can't call this a terrorist attack. Your thoughts, Sacks?

Well, I think we can probably infer what the motive here was. I mean, it was terrorism. It was a Dubai airline, but I think all the passengers were Israeli.

Yeah.

One other detail I thought was interesting was that when the pilot yelled for help, I guess a few of the passengers stormed the cockpit. The terrorist was yanked out of there by an Israeli plumber.

Love it. Yeah, he was a hero.

And I don't think that's, like, a CIA plumber. I think it was—I think it's a real plumber. Those Israelis are tough, I have to say. They're quite tough.

This guy had the bravery to jump in the cockpit like that. And then—I mean, how fortuitous. I guess conspiracy theorists are now losing their minds, but to be able to have 2 pilots who were able to be there and get this landed, absolutely fantastic. I'm so glad people's lives have been saved.

I'll save the false-flag nonsense and whatever for a conspiracy show. Somebody else can handle that issue. Chamath, listen, we've said a lot here about it. Glad everybody's safe. Any final thoughts as we wrap?

An Omani national stabbed an Indian pilot and then tried to down a plane full of Israelis. That is what happened. Any attempt to cover up any of those facts is cowardly.

I've worked in Israel, and I've had some incredible memories there. I think at some point we all just need to take a step back and realize what happened on October 7 was horrible. What's happened in Palestine is also horrible. But you cannot now see these kinds of things and look past them because you care more about a narrative than what the facts are.

Those were 150, 170 earnest, normal people living lives.

Humans. Yeah.

Fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, kids. They didn't deserve to get plunged into the ground and die. So I think this idea that you can now whitewash what happened—enough is enough. And I think we need to find a way to actually tell the truth for what things are. So I was really, really, really disappointed in how the media handled it.

Yeah.

And I think it's dangerous. And I think it's yet another demonstration that these people have absolutely no moral authority left in society. They're just—

Pathetic, putrid. And by the way, they're coordinated. When you see the same words over and over—“altercation, altercation, altercation”—it's very powerful. It means that it starts from one place. And I think that if you believe that you're reading this stuff and getting the facts, you're just not. And so, at some point—

Yeah, I don't understand—

Well, it implies that one guy did something wrong to the other guy and they got in a fight. That's not what happened. That's what it implies.

I'm trying to have the most charitable interpretation here, to steelman it. So in the moment, if you didn't know what happened, but then after it happened, you would just very easily be able to say, “Potential terrorist attack” or “apparent—”

There was lots of footage, I mean, from the airplane.

Of course. But how do you describe it as a suicidal per—

And that's what I showed the day after, J-Cal. I showed—yeah.

That's my point. In the moment, you could give them a, “Hey, you don't know what's happening. You want to be cautious here if it's a suicide, if it is an actual fight, or if it's a terrorist attack.” Okay, fine. I could have a little bit of room there to be like, okay. But then after it, how could you not say this is an apparent terrorist attack or a mentally ill person? Those are the 2 possibilities here, period, full stop. And then you really have to get into what the motivation is here. Yeah.

Look, I think the moral principle here is that all attacks on civilians are wrong.

Sure.

And that's what this was, and it was pretty clearly an act of terrorism. And regardless of who's doing it, that's the thing we have to denounce—

That's right.

—even when there's a military conflict taking place, attacks on civilians are wrong.

That's right.

And it's a war crime.

That's right.

And there's a lot of that happening, so this is not the only case.

That's right.

But all that needs to stop.

All right. That's, uh, your All In episode 291 for October 2nd, 2026. We'll see you all next week. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Let your winners ride.

Rain Man David Sacks.

And it said, "We open source it to the fans," and they've just gone crazy with it.

Love you, Wes. Peace.

Ice Queen of Ken Law.

Let your winners ride. Let, let your winners ride. Let your winners ride.

Besties are back.

It's called Gold 13.

That is my, uh, dog taking a piss in your driveway, Sacks.

Oh, yeah. Oh, man.

My habitat. Sure, we'll meet me at Blinks.

We should all just get a room and just have one big, huge orgy because they're all just, it's this, it's like this, like, sexual tension that they just need to release somehow.

Wet your feet. Wet your feet.

The feet. Wet your feet.

Wet your feet. Wet your-

That's gonna be our... We need to get merch.

Besties are back.

I'm going all in. I'm going all in.