Dario Defends Himself, Datacenter Panic, AI Doomer Trap, Senate Toss-Up

Welcome back to the number one podcast in the world, your favorite podcast, the All-In Podcast. We have a huge docket today with the core four back together again: Chamath, Freeberg, Sachs, and your boy J Cal. Topic one — let's get into it.

Dario has spoken. Apparently he listens to the All-In podcast, and he was compelled to respond to Gavin Baker's discussion last week, in which some people—allegedly, maybe—inside Anthropic were said to believe "that they will be the only private company in the world at some point." Some folks from Anthropic, Sholto Douglas among them, fired back: completely false—whoever told Gavin this is lying. And Dario decided to come out of hiding and enter the chat with an epic two-part essay on regulation.

He wrote: "I know the Silicon Valley shorthand where regulation equals regulatory capture equals concentration of power, but I've always found this to be an overly simplified picture." On messaging: "I do not agree my messaging has been disproportionately negative. It has been about equally balanced between risks and benefits." He took some responsibility too: "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." The most quoted line: "The thing that will work is actually curing cancer, not glitzy marketing."

Why Dario responded to Gavin but not Sachs

Sachs, you've been talking about Anthropic for a year and a half and he never responded. Gavin comes out and suddenly he's very talkative. What do you take from that—does he not want to spar with you?

He did respond to me. I 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 is untrue, like Sholto did. He did not weigh in on that issue. Instead, he really weighed in on the regulatory capture issue.

That's what drew him out, I think—he's a bit irked that we keep accusing him of regulatory capture. I've been saying since last year that they were engaged in a sophisticated regulatory capture scheme based on fearmongering, and those are the points he's really responding to. What he doesn't like about it, I think, is that it impugns his motives—that he's not pure in pursuing these regulations for the right reasons.

My response: there's no question Anthropic has been extremely aggressive about seeking to implement its preferred regulatory frameworks at both the state and federal level. That is regulatory capture. 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. There's not much to debate there.

The claim of "balanced" messaging

Second point: he says he's not responsible for the negativity around AI, that he's been balanced in his portrayal of it. Oh, really? Do you expect us to have amnesia about the fact that just about a year and a half ago, he said very specifically that within one to five years, 50% of entry-level knowledge workers would lose their jobs? And this was not idle speculation on a podcast—it was something they engineered and amplified into a full-fledged media campaign. President Obama even retweeted it, and many other Democratic Party officials did the same.

The pattern repeats with the whole Anthropic blackmail study. He has a team at the company supposedly studying alignment, and they created this highly contrived study where they prompted the model over 200 times until they finally got the headline-grabbing result they wanted. My point is that this isn't someone dishing on a podcast about AI alignment risk—this is them actually creating a study, engineering it, and pumping it to create the headlines they wanted. Dario, his sister—who's president of the company—and other executives went on 60 Minutes and breathlessly pumped this thing.

Since the study came out, a lot of people have looked at it and said it's highly contrived—including the UK AI Safety Institute, which basically said it was created under highly pressurized conditions and the result was engineered. These guys have 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 going to become the Terminator.

It's exactly the fears that Anthropic has put in the media bloodstream. No company—and therefore no founder-CEO—has done more to promote, pump, and amplify these fears than Dario has. The fact that he can't see that makes him either disingenuous or delusional.

I'm going with the latter.

That's point number one, and I really think almost everybody who read that and has been paying attention felt the same way: "Dario, 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 we have right now is pretty problematic. If I take three different vectors of action and put them together, you've had a very disjointed, disorganized, and frankly pearl-clutching, disingenuous AI doom narrative—and it's now seeded and growing.

As a result, I was really shocked when I saw Governor Abbott of Texas put down an executive order around Texas data centers limiting their growth. Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania just did the same thing. Axios reported that the GOP sent a memo to executives at 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 doomerism, and now you have mainstream political pushback from both sides of the aisle, which I think is extremely dangerous.

The third leg of the stool is rising yields—by the way, the Treasury Department just doubled its bond buying. Put all of these things together, and as a casual observer I'd say we've made some really stupid unforced errors in the United States.

The coda to all of this: rising yields constrain the money supply for investment in risk-seeking assets, because the risk-free rate keeps going up. That makes people less likely to invest in all the data centers, and data centers themselves are being shut down. Where does that leave frontier model companies? They're the most at risk, because they're not investment grade. They're in the worst position in terms of their balance sheets, and they're not in a position to get access to the compute they need to be successful.

So even as you grow, you're actually making your problem worse: you need more and more capacity to sustain that growth, which you can't fund because all the negativity has turned people against you. All roads lead to a big question mark and a head-scratching moment for me—"How did we end up in this situation?" Whether it was accidental or well-intentioned risk management, whatever it was, we are now in a very precarious situation that we could have frankly avoided.

Totally agree. Freeberg, your thoughts on this anti-data-center movement, or on Dario going direct and writing the double missive? Do you think he's sincere, delusional, some combination?

Why don't we steelman it? Put ourselves in the shoes of a frontier lab leader who is seeing capabilities of models that perhaps we don't see, because we work day-to-day in enterprise settings doing things in a benign, non-nefarious way.

They're sitting there pressure-testing models, and they figure out there are ways to jailbreak models to get them to do things they're not supposed to do. You can then use them to do things like design bioweapons—make viruses, make infectious diseases that don't exist today. You could use them to design cyber weapons to go do things online, like break into bank accounts and take people's money. And you can prompt them to do things that could broadly influence society by creating fake media—fake videos, fake images—propagating them through social media and hacking the algorithms. 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.

So you realize that as you're building these tools—which have a lot of benign, positive, world-leading, progressive applications—you see all the bad stuff that could happen with them. You can keep trying to build systems and ways to stop it: 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 we don't want them to do.

So assume you're the executive of the company building this great technology. You believe fully in its capabilities and its benefits to society and the economy, but you can't get a grip on how to keep it under control—how to stop social engineering and cyber weapons. What do you do differently?

Okay, so you're bringing up—

This is an exceptional path, and I love it. But if you believe all this, there is one thing you must do: you cannot obfuscate the thinking tokens of a model.

Compare open-source models with closed frontier models. With the closed ones, you give a prompt and get back a result, but everything in the middle is hidden — Claude obfuscates its thinking tokens, and so do the OpenAI models. If I were really afraid, the first thing I would do is find a way to unobfuscate those thinking tokens so a third party could actually legitimize what you're claiming. What's interesting is that I haven't seen the same doomerism from any open-source model company, including Nvidia — and with open-source models you can actually watch the model think and see misalignment in real time. Instead, we're being asked to accept the closed labs' interpretation of tokens we can't see and only they can read. Without judging whether they're right or wrong — give them the benefit of the doubt that they're trying to do the right thing — make the thing available to others. Let someone else with some judgment sit in the room and steelman it with you.

So, Sacks: Demis argued for a FINRA-style regulatory system, where industry participants who understand the technology, move quickly, and are aligned with commercialization review each other's systems and models through an industry consortium that hires and assigns scientists to do this work — rather than having it owned and managed by the government, creating a regulatory capture scheme. You seemed supportive when Demis first published it, but this week your tweets were against it. The proposal that Demis put out — and that Dario, Sam, and Elon all signed onto — you're now against, yet it could be a solution if there's genuine concern here, given Chamath's points, that the industry can police each other.

Let me clarify. Designing a new AI regulatory agency modeled on FINRA — a fairly sleepy agency that writes rules for stock brokers in a mature, non-dynamic industry — is a horrible idea. FINRA is widely perceived as protecting incumbents; talk to any startup founder who has dealt with them, and they'll tell you FINRA exists to shield the big banks from disruption. It's just not a good model for regulation.

The NFA, the National Futures Association — also a self-regulatory organization in the financial markets — is a better alternative, because that's a pretty dynamic market.

Now what you're saying is very interesting. You used the term "self-regulatory organization," or SRO, and there are many different models — one of them may work, and that's been my point. The one I think fits this situation best is something like the MPAA, which reports to the government not at all and was created by the motion picture industry in response to the Hays Code. The government's message was, "Get your act together, guys, or we're going to have to do it for you." The MPAA then promoted standards that forestalled more intrusive, heavy-handed government action. That's the model I said I could get behind. But is that the model Dario supports? No. Dario — and I think Demis — wants a FINRA: a rule-making regulatory agency that would not only promulgate standards but also do pre-release model testing, report into the government, and be officially enshrined in law. And as for why everyone says "Elon's behind it" — 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. That's my point: Demis wrote something—

—which is what I've been saying on this podcast since the beginning: MPAA, self-regulate.

I get it, but here's my point. Demis wrote something very high-level, so when you say "everyone supports Demis's idea" — there are many versions of Demis's idea. Some would be okay, and some are bad. What I'm saying is that if it's a FINRA model, it will not work.

Having spoken to Demis at length about this, I think the general framework is an SRO in the right structure. FINRA is often used as the example of an SRO simply because it's the most well-known one, but you're correct that there's a mechanism by which this needs to operate that is distinct from any other SRO. The idea is that the industry gets together and, to Chamath'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.

Well, here's what I think is important. And just to be clear, this FINRA-for-AI idea — Dario's behind the demonstration of that.

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 to the government and does pre-release testing and approval of models. I call it a DMV for AI, because what's going to happen is all these models are going to get lined up in a queue waiting to get their tests done and then released, and it's going to slow us down horribly. Have you ever been to the DMV in Arizona?

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? Years. Years.

Yeah, this is China's advantage, exactly.

China's going to win if we do this, and it will become pure regulatory capture.

You should look at the rocket China landed yesterday. It's completely steel, and there's a good analysis of how quickly they went from the last explosion to full steel — while Elon is still waiting for FAA approval on his steel Starship. You can actually watch it playing out in China, where their regulatory agencies allow them to move much more quickly, and as a result they're starting to gain real traction in the space race. Separately, a lot of biotech has moved offshore from the US for the same reason you're pointing out: the FDA approval cycle is so long and the stages slow people down so much. China has completely revamped its rules for getting to clinicals, getting to phase three, and completing that — and now all the biotech investing in the world is 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's 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.

Okay, so let's play this out.

Go back to your steel man for a second.

Just because I believe we should not have a DMV for AI does not mean I'm against AI safety. So let's talk about some of the things that can be done. 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 they're going to slow down the release of some of their frontier models because they felt their safety stack was not keeping up 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 reasons to take responsible steps — 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, for over a trillion dollars, and this comes on the heels of them losing a $6 million jury trial in Los Angeles where a plaintiff sued them for creating her body image issues. So we're seeing massive product liability lawsuits against big tech companies like Meta and Google, and if OpenAI and Anthropic are smart — and I think they are — they do not want to be next. These companies have ample liability-protection reasons 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 publish technical papers and blogs, which are good ways of sharing best practices. They attend symposia and conferences and present at them, and they issue requests for comments as part of open standard-setting exercises. There are productive ways for the industry to collaborate on safety. But the common denominator of everything I just said is that they are all open. They are not done in secret, and that makes those judgments contestable — which speaks to the point Jamath made earlier, that we need to see the thinking behind these decisions.

What I'm against is these companies meeting in secret — whether under something like FINRA or otherwise — to set standards that are not transparent and therefore uncontestable. And you know what will come out of that? Regulatory capture and anti-competitive behavior. There are ways of doing this that protect the public while remaining open and transparent, and that is what we should lean toward.

"You will not see it happen. And I'll tell you why: the technical details matter. If competitors A, B, and C could suddenly see every single trace and span 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 with me as an API customer — to share my company's thinking tokens with me, they're sure as anything going to share them with OpenAI or anyone else in a room."

Let's do one more steel man. Say Dario is successful and a regulatory scheme is created that, to Sachs's point, does slow down the industry and model development. And China's frontier labs make significant progress, start to leap ahead, get this RSI — recursive self-improvement — going, and their models become the best in the world and only get better. Jaq, I'll ask you, since I've taken over as moderator of this segment: what is the implication for the American worker, the American business, and the American consumer in a world where China just has the best AI and all the data centers? Everyone keeps hearing "China will win, China will win" — who cares? What does that actually mean?

"Okay, world's greatest moderator. But no — I don't think China is going to win. There's not going to be one player who takes the whole prize; I think it will be incremental improvement, so I don't think that scenario matters. I've actually been thinking about why this backlash against data centers is happening. It was kind of shocking to see Abbott and Shapiro come out against them, because those two were the most pro-data-center politicians. If you double-click on it, they just want to make sure you're not tapping into the grid, and the water concern we've discussed here isn't too serious — so I think it was very performative. As you and I were discussing on the back channel, they're both doing this because their constituents, the people who vote for them, really care about these data centers and 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? The perception of AI was already pre-baked by science fiction, so we needed to work to get past the Skynet–Terminator vision. But then Dario told everybody, "We're going to lose our jobs." Elon said, "You're not going to have to work" — a more world-positive view, but he did say that. Sam Altman ran studies on universal basic income and told everybody, "You're not going to have to work in a UBI."

Saying that kind of stuff to people who have to work for a living, who have no savings, and who have watched administration after administration — Democrat or Republican — fail to tame inflation, watched the minimum wage barely move while the stock market hits records, and watched all of us tech executives get super rich — and you wonder why people are embracing socialism, and why you have Abbott and Shapiro saying, "You know what?" — and Ro Khanna worst of all, saying, "I have to be anti-capitalist. I have to be a decel. I have to decelerate." It's because they were supposed to see some relief, and they haven't.

What do people do when they don't feel they have any power? They look to find power. And if you look at what's happened, they are sharpening the guillotines. That metaphor should wake people up — whether it's the United Healthcare CEO getting killed or people firebombing Sam Altman's house. We need to wake up and ask why people are so upset. It's because they can't survive; they're having a hard time with affordability and their wages. And what two things can they do? They can vote for socialists, and they can actually stop data centers. That's what this is about. No regular rank-and-file American cares about AI safety — that's not the discussion for them. Their discussion is, "Why am I not getting rich and everybody else is?"

"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 think they think about it as: who has won over the last decade? This generation of tech oligarchs who have won are pretty displeasing. They're not aspirational, they're not people one would look up to — they're not Steve Jobs by any stretch of the imagination. And now they look at this next generation and they're like, wait, we're going to go from billionaire, decabillionaire, centibillionaire to now trillionaire — and it's those guys? Those guys are even worse than the last crop. That's exactly what's happening. 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. They're looking around and thinking, if we can just slow this down, maybe another batch of people will show up who will actually mean to do the right thing and make me at least feel better, so I won't so begrudgingly hate the fact that you are about to make a trillion dollars. It is precisely that sensation. And the folks at the front of the show on this are not trustworthy. That's what it is."

"Zack, let me ask you my question, and I need to hear someone answer this. If there's a regulatory slowdown with AI development in the US and China races ahead, what are the implications for American business and American consumers?"

"They will win."

"What does that mean? Help people understand. If I'm sitting at home—"

"Okay, let me give you a counterfactual. Imagine if China had won the internet. Imagine if all the major internet companies were Chinese right now. I know people don't like big tech, but imagine if instead of Google and Microsoft and Meta, it was Baidu and Alibaba and Tencent and all the rest of them. 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'd be behind them. 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."

When asked whether he agrees, Chamath first pushes back on the framing: "I don't know what you mean by won. What do you mean by won?" The questioner clarifies that he's trying to get at the implications of a regulatory slowdown — if the US does slow down AI, what does that tangibly mean for people?

Chamath's answer: unless the US actually bans open source — which he doubts anyone could even implement, calling the idea a worthless exercise — "I think we're going to be just fine. I think the consumer is going to win. I think American companies will win. I think the American economy will win."

He offers an insight about closed versus open models. Three years ago, there were only models, and you'd compare benchmark scores and assume the higher score was better. In the last few years, a layer called a harness has emerged — wrappers around models like Codex, Claude Code, Hermes, or OpenClaw. The interesting difference: a closed-source model does well on a benchmark, but when wrapped in its own harness, its capability decays. An open-source model used with any other open-source model improves in capability.

What that suggests, he says, is that there are many ways of using open-source technologies that are meaningfully more performant and dramatically cheaper than the closed-source alternative — and data on this will be "a tsunami over the next year." As long as America doesn't stop consumers and business owners from using the cheapest, fastest, best thing, the US will win. What's actually being debated, he argues, is which private American company wins or loses — and he doesn't think Americans care much about that, which is visible in the policy. So his explicit answer: as long as nothing draconian like an open-source ban happens, the American consumer will win.

Another speaker disagrees: "I got bad news for you, Chamath. An open-source ban is coming. They're not going to call it that." Instead, he predicts, they'll say we simply have to apply the same standards to open models that we apply to closed ones. He begins walking through how regulatory capture works step by step: first you need the regulatory apparatus — Dario wants an FDA for AI, but he doesn't have one yet.

Dario doesn't have enough political support for an FDA for AI, so instead they do this Trojan horse of a FINRA for AI. They call it self-regulating — it isn't really — but that gets them off the ground. Now they've created the standard-setting organization, and with it pre-release model testing. Then the pressure grows to codify that in law, and that happens next. Then they say, "All these standards need to apply equally to all models."

But here's the problem: open models and closed models are technologically different. Go back to Dario's Senate testimony in, I think, 2023, where he said that open models, if sufficiently advanced, are dangerous. Why? Because they cannot be centrally monitored, controlled, rolled back, and withdrawn like a closed service like the one he hosts.

I understand, David, but—

Hold on, let me finish the point, then you can respond. Dario basically says open models are dangerous because of these characteristics, and those characteristics are immutable. 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 the standard-setting body will say, "We have to set the standards for AI safety" — and by the way, Dario and OpenAI will fund the whole thing. They'll contribute all the compute, they'll be behind it, and they'll be the ones coordinating with government officials, because frankly, people in government have no idea how to monitor, control, and set standards for AI safety. Technologically, this is way beyond them. So they'll go to these companies and say, "Tell us how to do it."

The standards get set, and then it becomes a very simple matter of fairness to say the standards need to apply to open as well as closed models. Open models cannot comply in the same way, and gradually they will be shut out of the market.

I understand, but the American economy would—

Overnight? Why and how?

You're saying regulators have never done things that are crippling.

Let's take the example of Coca-Cola. It's an extremely profitable, cash-generative, well-run business that has existed for 100-plus years and will exist for many hundreds more if left to its own devices — a global business. Pfizer is the same: well-run, global.

Now you tell them one of two things: either "Anywhere you operate, you need to follow American rules," or "Inside America, you need to follow our rules, and other governments will have different rules." 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 they'll have a better flourishing business abroad. They'll invest abroad, and you'll see foreign direct investment in the United States fall off a cliff, while direct investment into other countries rises.

You've seen this in China, which I think is the best analogy. There was a moment when China was at a fork in the road, where the large tech oligarchs were trying to seize power, and the tip of that spear was Jack Ma's very famous speech on the eve of the Ant Financial IPO. What happened? Xi Jinping cracked down. They took complete control: "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 to their economy, it fell off a cliff.

That will happen here if this happens. They can try, and everybody will say, "Okay" — and the Coke CEO will redirect all of his capital allocation outside of America. So will Pfizer. So will I. So will anybody. And then what are you going to do — take away our passports so we can't travel? I think it would be a very visible way of just destroying the United States.

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 companies.

"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 trillionaires. That's what they're voting against."

"That's a big part of it. Jacob, what do you think?"

"Well, I was just going to add to this. We already know what would happen with AGI, Freiberg, because your original question was 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? 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 are Americans going to do? We're going to lose our jobs to them. So that would be the way I would 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."

"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 this is going to play out: really on autonomy and those jobs. Zipline just did a partnership with Uber—I'm an investor in both of those companies—and they are going to do a million deliveries a day. Then you look at just massive progress by Waymo. They're doubling the number of cars on the road like every six months or so. Tesla's about to go cybercab. And what people are perceiving is that in their community, you're not going to have any money staying in their community. Because those drivers—as much hand-wringing as has occurred—that money at least stayed in the community. Oh, they weren't making enough. Oh, they're only making $18, $16 an hour, $20, $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 robo-taxi, 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—I will predict it now—they're going to ban Waymos 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—whoever is making the point, I think it was You Tur Off 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 guys who did the best job explaining this 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, he 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 and have done the exact opposite."

"Zuck did a really great thing, which is he created this new program—it's almost like a training school, 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."

"Yeah, which we have a huge shortage of. And that's why it's actually hard to build these data centers."

"It's a great program."

We need more programs like that. Which raises the question: how did Zuckerberg suddenly become the best spokesperson for our industry?

It's a very low bar.

This all goes back to Dario. Not exclusively, but he was the one who put the most specific numbers on it, which made it the most tantalizing and salacious for the media: 50% of entry-level knowledge workers will lose their jobs, not in the distant future, but as soon as one year. We're now past that one-year mark, by the way. Has he updated? Has he said he was wrong? Not really. Sam did, to his credit — Sam Altman actually came out and said he was too negative, that he was wrong. Dario has doubled down, as far as I know; he's never recanted. He's an ideologue.

But to your point, yes, I agree that the animus toward data centers flows out of fears about jobs, as well as other fears about AI. Job loss is the main concern, and there is no evidence of it. We're years into the AI boom and we only see net job creation.

Exactly. It's always been the opposite. I had massive concerns about it myself, and I had business opportunities so great I got seven job openings.

Hold on, this is important. J. Calacanis has an important announcement here.

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. We've become so fast at building the syndicate and building our programs that we need to add a couple of people. I thought we were going to automate them away, and we're adding.

Let me make 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 who were really idealistic. It has become something far from that now. It's the equivalent of what Harvard used to be — a credentialing place, somewhere you go to say, "I came to Silicon Valley, I worked at a startup, I got into YC." When we came, we used to aspire to meet the Bill Campbells, the Mike Moritzes, the John Doerrs. Those folks are gone. We used to aspire to work for Steve Jobs. He's not here. And in that breach, all we've done is focus on making money in every single way we can, hand over fist. There's nothing wrong with that, except that now we need to do a better job of acknowledging it and trying to do a little better. Every time we're given a chance to be better and we're not, the hatred and the animus builds. That's what we're seeing now.

There's no question about that. But can I defend Dario for a moment?

You said you wanted to defend Dario? Breaking news.

I actually think he is very idealistic. I don't think money is his main motivation. The question is, what are his ideals? He wants to bring forth this new superintelligence — "machines of loving grace" that will apportion all the resources of society while humans twiddle their thumbs. It's not a vision the average person believes in or is attracted to; in fact, it's dystopian, which is why a lot of their messaging is dystopian. And because of that vision, no matter how idealistic his motives, he does not inspire trust. I don't think he's lying to us or really trying to capture all the wealth for himself — I actually think he's trying to bring forth this future. But it's not a future the American public wants, and he should have to defend that. If you think you are bringing about the singularity — and let's face it, he's probably 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: "Oh my god, Dario, thank you for coming down from Mount Olympus and slumming it with the rest of us on X and finally engaging on social media." 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 it.

He should speak more, and that's a key point. On the question of whether it's about money for him: as I understand it, and as has been documented in a number of press reports, the seven co-founders never talk about the fact that they donated 80% of their shares—so roughly 10% of Anthropic sits in some sort of trust. At a two or three trillion dollar valuation, 10% of that would be enormous. It would be the largest Democratic PAC, the largest PAC, however they use it. So why aren't they talking about how they're using it? It could just become dollars to EA causes—what could go wrong? Let's hope they put it toward something that's actually humanity-positive. They each own only about 1.8%.

Going direct is critically important, and the playbook is simple. Number one, you have to write it all yourself—which he clearly did. Then you have to exhaust the audience: go thousands of words, like Zuck did. Then you have to get ahead of problems, because that's where leadership is breaking down. You have to talk about what's coming next, and then never 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 what I think he's doing.

Recursive self-improvement

It's worth having a view on whether you believe in recursive self-improvement (RSI). The theory is 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 that's better than the last one. At some point this becomes effectively fully automated and self-evolutionary: the AI is continuously improving itself. That's the idea some people call the singularity, or ASI—artificial superintelligence—arising from this capacity. Anthropic has stated they're not sure if it's going to happen, but it could, they're working towards it, and they expect there's a path to get there.

Having looked at this and thought about it, I believe it is possible and likely to happen soon. People I've talked to in industry do think it's real. There's a philosophical debate, because companies have different views on the path forward: some insist it really needs to be human-constructed and human-designed, while others say let it all go—detach humans from the AI and let it evolve, like the movie Her, where the thing just takes off.

But if RSI is a real construct, then human intervention in the stages of model development is almost a fool's errand. And by the way, RSI doesn't need to lead to some dystopian outcome—it just means the models improve faster and faster, without humans necessarily constructing, architecting, and designing the next evolution. You then don't necessarily have space for "we just did one big model run every six months, so we'll go to the government regulator and get it approved." Instead, there's a continuous policing and monitoring service that needs to take place at some point. And the truth is, to pull this off, you don't need governments in the US 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 do it. And I don't know if it's in space. I don't know if it's with Balaji and the deal he just did in Kazakhstan, where you've got some unique geography. It could be in Iceland. 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. You don't necessarily have a cohort of frontier lab scientists running it. Theoretically, an individual or a group of individuals 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 to create a regulatory body — that's why I call it a fool's errand. Because with the open internet and compute, all it needs is the chips, the power, and a connection. If it's got those three things, it can run. I'm not painting a dystopian view; I'm just saying practically, pragmatically, the labs are all talking about RSI. So if RSI is where this goes, the labs can set up data centers in Iceland, in China, wherever.

Whoever will give them the freedom. It's a great point.

Wouldn't we be better off having systems where those labs and those data centers are actually based in the US, where we have jurisdiction over them, where we have the capacity to monitor, control, and police them, rather than having them spring up in some random country or territory? So my point is, we should be attracting and retaining the frontier labs, not trying to chase them off.

Yes.

And then there's the famous Wait But Why image of human progress going on a nice clip, and then recursive self-improvement and it just goes out of control.

How close do people think it is to that? That's what people would want to know.

Honestly, there's a massive problem with time dilation in AI model development. What I mean is, we would typically consider something that takes a linear amount of time as a certain amount of compute to get somewhere. But there are changes that happen that are non-predictable — you don't actually know what the next step change takes in terms of time. The time models change a lot in AI model development, and that's what makes it so hard to predict. That's why no one is really good at predicting when AGI or the next breakthrough happens — and then suddenly everyone's like, "Oh my god, we're in the singularity. They just solved eight unproven math theorems in a week off of some fairly cutting-edge model." It's moving very quickly.

A lot of the models use this mixture-of-experts concept, where you've got smaller models that call each other to do things, and then you wrap it up and call it a big model. Over time, those smaller models look a lot more like what you see in biology, where a gene makes a protein, and proteins interact in really complicated ways that we don't fully grok. Networks of proteins do things and complete tasks. 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 performant. We're seeing a lot of this in how models are evolving: we call it a model, but it's actually many models underneath it that work together.

If the models actually do evolve this way, then RSI is the perfect system for figuring out the right path: how many sub-models are there, what does each sub-model's function look like, how do they call each other? That evolution is likely going to happen without a human architect behind it. It will be developed through a test-and-deploy system and fully automated. That's why this approach to 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.

AGI, RSI, and the Case for Choice

One speaker recalled that a few years ago everyone was saying AGI was imminent—and then asked where it is. The reply: "I don't think we're soaking in it." The distinction was clarified: AGI means as smart as any human, while superintelligence—something like the Terminator—is far off.

Could recursive self-improvement (RSI) happen? Yes, possibly. There are lots of black swans, and it's very hard to assess the probability of those things. What is known is that a new government regulatory agency won't stop it, because it won't be technically sophisticated enough. All regulation will actually do is concentrate power around the technology and limit the options.

The data centers full of geniuses argument

The counterpoint was that the goal is to have this technology in the United States: the best labs, and the first breakthrough system here, not in China.

Dario Amodei made this argument in the context of trying to ban chip exports—Anthropic has been behind much of the political activity to restrict Nvidia's international sales. The argument was that we want a data center full of geniuses in the US: AI agents that are basically Nobel Prize–winning level scientists, and if we have thousands or millions of them while China has only dozens or a hundred, we win everything.

But now we're essentially banning the data centers, so we won't have those data centers full of geniuses—and the chip restrictions have also targeted allies, meaning they won't have them either. We are totally shooting ourselves in the foot. If Dario really believes in the idea he was arguing for last year, he should come forward and say we're making a big mistake by over-regulating data centers, and propose how to do it right. He hasn't stepped up that way, which raises the question: does he only fight for the doomer side of the argument, or are there versions of the positive side he's willing to fight for politically?

Choice and competition as safeguards

On RSI: it's a black swan, very hard to say if it will happen, and we may be headed for AGI—but the most important thing about AGI is that we have choice. Multiple AGIs are far better than just one. Elon argues the way to keep AGI aligned is to make it maximally truth-seeking, which is a way to prevent it from becoming woke. Anthropic says alignment comes from its Claude constitution, full of liberal values, written largely by an EA ethicist. These are different approaches, and the speaker wants all of them producing sophisticated AI, to keep checks and balances. What he doesn't want is a single Skynet—or a woke Skynet, the worst possible outcome.

As a sci-fi aside, in the Terminator TV series (canceled years ago), the plot's resolution was that humans couldn't defeat Skynet alone, so they created a second, benevolent AGI to take it on—creating choice.

The conclusion: choice and competition must be our hallmark. We want multiple winners, not a small number of elites guardrailing the technology—which is exactly what you'd get heading in an FAA/Finra-style regulatory direction.

The segment closed with a joke about Friedberg's new nickname and a Back to the Future reference: "Marty, your future's not predetermined. You can make your own future. You can use RSI."

I'm not trying to be an advocate for RSI; I'm trying to be pragmatic about it. If RSI is the way things are going to go, you definitely don't want to be regulating AI to stall out, because someone else will win it — and then you're literally handing the keys to RSI to them, since they'll suddenly be able to get there faster. And you don't want to be in the data centers, because then they'll be offsite.

There was a peculiar story this week: Andreessen Horowitz is allegedly being investigated. According to a Bloomberg report, the Department of Justice has been investigating them for over a year under something called Section 8 of the Clayton Antitrust Act — a 1914 law, over 100 years old.

The Bloomberg report concerns Section 8 of the Clayton Antitrust Act, a 1914 law that's over 100 years old, prohibiting interlocking directorates — which is old-timey English for board of directors. The conflict seems to stem from Ben Horowitz sitting on Databricks' board while another Andreessen Horowitz partner, Martin Casado, sits on FiveTran's board.

Obviously Andreessen and Ben Horowitz have been all in with Trump as big donors — put that into the mix as you will. Why is this happening now?

Enemy of Andreessen Horowitz, jealous of their returns.

What are we talking about? Do they not understand how venture works? Like, you invest in one company so you can't invest in another? I don't understand.

Bloomberg said they've been under investigation for this conflict between the two companies. Which means an enemy reported them to the DOJ and then told Bloomberg they're under investigation. It seems so odd.

I'll make a speculative guess: the CEO of one of these companies is pissed off at the other partners on the other board, and reported it to the DOJ and to Bloomberg at the same time.

Quick work on that one. Just to note, with the distribution of Cursor and then SpaceX, Andreessen Horowitz is on fire — two wins in the last few weeks. Congrats to them. OpenRouter was more like an amuse-bouche, maybe 6 or 700 million; Cursor was decent, like an appetizer. But SpaceX was the main course — that's like 15, 17 billion.

Even if you want to say VC firms shouldn't invest in competitors, the reality is that startups exist in a very dynamic environment. They frequently pivot and change business models, and two companies that start in totally different spaces can end up competing. These are different board members, and they can probably set up a firewall between them. These aren't filing companies — what confidential information did any of these private businesses have? Andreessen Horowitz could also just put an independent director in there and be done with it. If this were some ticky-tacky very important thing, I don't know why the DOJ is on this.

When you make a claim to the DOJ, technically, if they open a file, you are under investigation. So you can report that to a buffoon reporter who doesn't know from Shinola and they'll just repeat it. It means nothing. The DOJ doesn't tell you when you're under investigation, and they also don't tell you when it's closed.

Same as the SEC. A PR ratchet for an enemy to exact some sort of chaos. A16z is crushing it. God bless them, godspeed.

It is interesting that there's even this rule, but we had some fun with that. Let's keep moving.

Of the 35 Senate seats up in 2026, 23 are held by Republicans, with special elections also underway in Florida and Ohio. The big races to watch are Alaska, Maine, North Carolina and Ohio. On February 25th, the day before the Iran war started, the GOP was favored 60 to 41, and it has been as high as 70%. Now Polymarket shows essentially a toss-up, with the Dems at 52%.

Sacks pushed back on the midterm pessimism. First, he argued, polls are notoriously wrong in the summer before an election. Political scientist Patrick Ruffini analyzed over 3,000 polls across the last four election cycles, every two years since 2018, and found a huge bias: the preponderance of polls in all four cycles favored the Democrats, with an average polling error of D plus 3.7 relative to the actual election outcome. Sacks believes the problem has gotten worse recently, with what looks like an oversampling of young progressives — the polls don't just favor Democrats over Republicans, they favor DSA Democrats over moderate or centrist Democrats. In several elections the DSA candidate was supposed to win by a lot and then barely eked it out or actually lost, as in Wisconsin. He also noted that many polls are actually created as internals by campaigns to motivate their donors.

When the host suggested the pattern was simply that upset voters throw the incumbent party out, Sacks disagreed: the data shows the polls are oversampling Democrats and progressives, so he wouldn't read too much into the current numbers. That said, he conceded it is legitimate to say the Democrats are favored to win the House; the Senate is a toss-up, though he would predict Republicans ultimately keep it. The real campaign starts after Labor Day, and Republicans need to focus on the right messages.

Asked for the top three, Sacks said everyone has been over-indexing on the war, and assuming its kinetic phase is over, Republicans can remind the electorate of the past couple of years — there is a good story to tell:

1. The border has been sealed for a year and a half — not just slowing "Biden's invasion" but stopping it completely. Border contacts have fallen to the lowest level in 50 years; people aren't even trying to cross anymore.
2. Sealing the border and deporting hundreds of thousands of the worst criminals has made the country much safer: murders are down about 20% year over year, and the murder rate is the lowest in 70 years.
3. Deaths from drug overdoses have dropped 20%, again thanks to tougher border enforcement.

Beyond those, he cited a 17% increase in tax refunds from no tax on tips, overtime, and Social Security — real gains in take-home pay. The tax provisions in the Big Beautiful Bill incentivize new equipment buying through accelerated depreciation, which may be why small business optimism just hit its highest level in nearly a year, with more small businesses planning to hire. Prescription drug and auto insurance costs both fell last year after rising sharply under Biden, with prescription drugs seeing their steepest annual decline since 1963.

Everyone made a big deal of the surge in egg prices at the start of the administration, but few have noted that egg prices are now down 39% year-over-year as of July. There are many good things for Republicans to talk about; they just have to remember everything that's happened in the last two years.

Freeberg, do you have thoughts on what will happen in the midterms and what people are basing their decisions on?

Things are expensive. People can't afford housing, health care, or education, and they're leaning toward this DSA concept. There was a frightening statistic on young conservatives embracing socialism.

Wait — MAGA conservatives embracing socialist tenets? How are they conservatives then?

Well, it's the name. In substance, they're changing the composition of the issues they care about. 53% of self-identified conservatives under 40 support government-run grocery stores — not Democrats, conservatives. That's the first line of a Wall Street Journal article. A July 2026 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 toward the wealthy has climbed from 30% in 2018 to 42% among Republicans. So I don't think this is a principled line in the sand anymore.

I've argued continuously, since the first day of the show, that unaffordability is a function of government spending. The more government spends on education, health care, and housing, the more expensive those things get — not the opposite. These programs are supposed to provide access, but when the government intervenes in those markets, prices rise. And no one in either party wants to acknowledge that. I've been to DC enough now to know that nobody actually cares about this point. They all think their job is to get more money out of the government for their constituents — every single person, in every party. There are very few principled conservatives; many are conservatives by title and party affiliation, but not by principle in the traditional sense — small government, free markets, and so on.

Looking at the macro cycle — we've printed so much money and accumulated so much debt; the 30-year is at 5.3% this week and keeps hitting new 20-year records daily — I think we'll continue to face unaffordability. Ultimately, there will be some big movement toward more socialist policies playing out between now and 2028. It's why I continue to believe someone like AOC becomes president. There will be a wave this year and a bigger push in 2028, because I don't see the arithmetic or the fiscal situation changing enough to alter the affordability landscape. I don't know what could be done from a policy perspective, and I don't hear either party talking about actual solutions to this problem between now and 2028.

The other big problem I've talked about is assets. Middle-class people — those who worked in private companies and don't depend on Social Security or public pension funds — have had 401(k)s and owned homes, so their net worth has climbed with asset inflation. The top 50% of Americans hold $178 trillion of net worth; the bottom 50% hold $6 trillion. It's not the billionaires — it's the whole middle class that holds the wealth in the United States, because they've owned houses and stocks, and both have surged in value. If you don't own a house or stocks, you were left behind. I don't see how, from a public policy perspective, we avoid walking down this nasty, winding, dark path of socialism, because the alternative policies that could solve these problems are not being put forth by either party right now. So I do think there's going to be a big socialist embrace.

I've said this for a number of years, and I think we'll see it play out in this midterm, creating momentum going into 2028. This polling data is very worrying. It's not just the Democrats, not just a party-based system—it's the horseshoe. It's the 63% of Americans living paycheck to paycheck who can't afford things. Those are the Americans who will vote for this system, and it doesn't matter what party it is. They're just going to vote for it.

Chubbs noted that roughly 20 cents on the dollar goes to interest on the federal side, that inflation has stayed at three or four percent all year without getting down to two, and that the GDP growth we discussed—growing our way out of the problem—hasn't happened either. And the war is a big disappointment for many in both parties who were promised no war, yet here we are six months into it. What do you think will happen through the midterms and into 2028? And to Freebird's point, is this a debt spiral, or is it something we can course correct?

I think we can course correct. I just think it takes will. We need corporate America to step up and do their part of the job, and we need government mostly to get out of the way and not pursue any harebrained schemes of new inventive legislation they think can solve the problem.

To be clear, I don't trust any polls. I don't believe this polling data. We've reached a very dangerous point, which we already reached with the media: the media lies. We all now know the media lies and can't be trusted. I'd like to go out on a limb—though I don't think it's much of a limb—pollsters lie too, and you can't trust them either. The media acts in concert with pollsters to find the data that lets them write the headline that hopefully gets the clicks. So start there: pollsters, trash. Media, trash. What's really happening on the ground? I don't know, but I don't trust what this data tells me.

What do I know is helping and hurting the incumbent sitting president? 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 keep working. But 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. It doesn't do the things that engender trust and respect. And specifically in Silicon Valley, we've completely lost the script because we've gone to the far, far, far end of that. Everybody is in it for themselves to such a degree that it's either pearl clutching on one hand or getting your hand caught in the cookie jar on the other. I posted the cookie jar thing that Anthropic did on the healthcare side.

Why are we in this? It's so avoidable. Those are headwinds for the incumbent president, even if he has nothing to do with them. What is a tailwind? Getting out of the Iran war can be a massive tailwind. Structurally solving energy on behalf of American citizens can be a tailwind. Making sure all the long-term and immediate-term investments of GDP actually come and bear fruit can be a tailwind. There are still a lot of levers to be pulled between now and November, and those can create pretty meaningful tailwinds. But the headwinds are unfortunately pretty strong, and it requires real coordination that the White House will have to do: get a bunch of these corporate CEOs and Silicon Valley CEOs in the room and tell them, "Guys, enough of this bull. Play nice in the sandbox, because you're about to lose the standard operating procedure that allowed you to exist in the first place." They need to get this message clearly.

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: it's the Republicans' fault. They had all three branches of government tightly in their control. If you look at what the podcast bros and the pro-podcast reference stack are responding to — and I do listen to them, not every episode, but I dip in and out of Tucker, who's now making his own political party, Joe Rogan, Tim Dillon, all these folks who were all in for Trump — they cite the 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 the problem is, because they were promised that wouldn't happen. And then, to your point, Freeberg, this inflation thing has not been solved, and it just keeps going. I think we're going to be sitting here in another six or twelve months talking about "my lord, every investigation possible into the Trump administration."

To your point, Chamath — and I thought you summarized some of the broken parts of capitalism well — we've got to get granular about it. I brought up last week just the edge behaviors in capitalism where we over-optimize. I felt the delivery providers — and Sachs and I had a pretty hearty 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 at the bottom of the employment stack is what's causing this. 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 — Trump should look at all of those things and build the second half of his term just around them. No more crypto stuff, no more wars, no more attacking our allies. All this performative stuff and mistakes has to go away, and we have to focus on what he sold people on. People feel they were sold a populist presidency that took care of the working man and woman in this country, and it has been the opposite. Sachs, I'm sure you have some thoughts, and we'll give you the final word.

On the inflation thing, since you and Freeberg both talked about it — 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 with a bit more nuance. Where the most inflation has occurred is always in the sectors of the economy where the government is most involved: healthcare, colleges, and housing, where the government has massive amounts of subsidies and regulation — and it only seems to make the problem worse. It makes sense that if the government is paying for something, providers have a huge incentive to charge as much as possible, and a lot of them engage in fraud as well. These areas are rife with abuse, they're the most inefficient, and that's where you see prices going through the roof — hospital services are just about exponential.

Meanwhile, the areas where we've had not just no inflation but actual price declines are all the tech areas: TVs, computer software, cell phones, things like that. This chart runs from 2000 to 2026, a 26-year time frame, and during that time overall inflation went up 96% — the price level almost doubled, on average. But certain things, like health care, became almost 300% more expensive, whereas computer software went down by 67% in real dollars. Meanwhile, the average hourly wage grew 135%, so it grew about 40% more than the inflation level — but obviously it still bites that you have all this inflation.

My point is: how do you solve it? Prices come down through vigorous competition, not through more government interference in these markets. Unfortunately, socialism causes the problem, and then groups like the DSA argue that the solution is more socialism. It's a disease that claims to be a cure—people take it, take more of it, and the disease gets worse and worse. That is the spiral I think we risk being in.

"We are in a socialist death spiral now. All this spending—" "We're not in a death spiral. Take it easy." "Our mayor 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 start doing things that are honorable, interesting, and aspirational."

"You totally missed the point. The real point is that if you hadn't started the war, we wouldn't have the same inflation issues or the same expense issues, and this would be a totally different picture. It was his job—he promised the American people he would focus on affordability. He had control of both houses and the presidency, and he was willing to issue executive orders on crypto, on wars, on anything, but he didn't do any executive orders on affordability. That's the failure of this presidency."

"You missed the point where Jamal said getting out of this war would be a tailwind. I think the kinetic part is already over, by the way." "Well, let's hope. It should never have been started." "In any event, the president passed his economic program last year—the big beautiful bill—and I think it's working. We're seeing a huge investment boom and small business confidence at its highest level in a long time, with owners saying they'll create more jobs over the next year. The economy is doing pretty well. I'm not saying we don't have these issues, and spending is a long-standing problem—I can't disagree with you there. However, I don't think Democrats have the solution, and the Democratic Socialists definitely don't, because they want even more spending."

"We are now incentivizing young people in the Republican Party to embrace socialism. Moderates are embracing socialism. They're all looking at it saying, 'That sounds better—if Trump won't be a populist, maybe these people are the populists.' That's what I mean by the death spiral: they'll just keep spending money, increasing the velocity of spending the way it was—" "You may be right, which is scary." "By the way, that's what I mean—I don't think we're in it now. We're risking going into it."

"Just one last point. There was a cost estimate of the policy platform proposed by the DSA—we've talked about that before—and it projects new federal spending of between 71 trillion and 212 trillion dollars." "By the way, total—" "There's no prison—" "—of the entirety of the American population, 182 trillion." "182 trillion, yeah. Okay, but I'm just saying that's how much the DSA program would cost. If you guys believe the root of our problems is overspending and basically too much government, unfortunately—" "This is not the—" "—the DSA is going to—" "No, but here's what's going to happen. Let me walk through the sequence of events. Sequence one: they enact the policy starting in 2028, with comrade AOC in charge and the Politburo—Ro Khanna as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, and the rest of the Politburo—organizing to launch these new programs. The programs get launched, then costs balloon. The bond market sells off 30 years, so the 30-year yield spikes to 7%, 8%, maybe more. Things become more unaffordable. Then the question is: we can't bridge it from a fiscal perspective, and we can't just get the Fed to start buying bonds—there's not enough buying power there to bring rates down and bring inflation down. So we need more income."

So now we need to pass a national asset seizure tax. But there's not enough money in the billionaire class or the 50-millionaire class: the total net worth of everyone worth over 50 million dollars is only 23 trillion. You could take 10% of their net worth, and it would only cover three months of today's fiscal spending. At the end of the day, the only way to get there is massive taxation—seizures.

A Cato Institute analysis just came out this week showing that the low end of DSA spending is 71 trillion, and the high end is 211 trillion. Compare that to corporate profits, which are only 35 trillion, or the Forbes 400, whose combined wealth is only 6.6 trillion—less than 10% of the low end of DSA spending.

I keep telling you, this is not about mathematical realism. This is about anger toward a class of people who are increasingly odious and misperceived.

But people often can't afford to buy a house. People are 35 years old with a roommate. They go to the grocery store and are shocked that they have to spend an entire paycheck, or a third of one, on groceries.

It's not that people want to buy a yacht—it's that the yacht class is disproportionately...

In every socialist revolution we've seen historically, there is always an elite branch of society, classified in different ways: wealth, Jews, some race, immigrants. There's some identity assignment that says, "This is the cause of unaffordability." At the end of the day, the real cause is the dysfunction in the relationship between government and the other organizations that make up society—states, private companies, NGOs. That dysfunction is what fundamentally makes things more expensive and dysfunctional, and the actual market for individuals to access things fails. At that point you have to identify a culprit—and you don't identify the government, because the government is the aggregate of all the people.

And remember, the government is the system, the means of action. For the people to organize, they have to organize the government to act, and then they need an alternative system to go and destroy.

You have to point the finger at somebody, and if you're going to scapegoat somebody in 2026, the best class to scapegoat are the billionaires—and frankly even better, the trillionaires.

At the end of the day, it's only tech, right? The data center is the temple where the billionaires and trillionaires pray, where they go to make their sacrifices, their gathering spot. That's why the data center gets tied up in all of this—there's no rational discourse about data centers.

If you take it through the René Girard lens, everything maps. The billionaires will be scapegoated, and the trillionaires even worse, because that will allow the catharsis that lets society reset and realize, wait a minute—

There's a generation ahead of that, though. 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 to build a million, two million homes. If you can have executive orders, if you can start wars without...

You know that's not how it works, right? There are local laws, there are state laws.

Of course, but he pulled out all the stops to get data centers greenlit—we know that—and he worked with state governments. I'm talking about him coming out and saying: 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. We're going to make trade schools and we're going to make affordable homes. Just make that the next 24 months.

We're going to figure out a way to mobilize the private sector and the public sector. We're going to build 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 a bunch of state and local gobbledygook. The problem is that land may not be located where it makes sense for commerce or for people to live — I don't think it really abuts most cities. So unfortunately, it's not in his control. Even if he wanted to just say, "Let's make this happen," he can't.

I think if the president can spend a couple hundred billion on this war, he can spend a couple hundred billion on affordable homes. He maybe can't put them in Manhattan, but he can put them other places, and he should fight to clear the regulations — just like he fought the regulations on data centers and energy. He made the point on this very podcast at the AI summit: "We're going to clear all the pathways to nuclear, to nat gas, to beautiful clean coal." 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 — that's what people want to see.

They just passed a housing bill. When's the last time we heard— Unfortunately, it was written by us with Warren, so I don't know how good it is.

Anyway, I'm just giving him the solution to save his legacy.

As always, you're looking out for everybody — for the audience. Nostradamus, thank you for watching. Nostradamus is also looking out for you.

All right, everybody, it's been another amazing episode of the All-In podcast. Good to have the quartet back. Let's go. Bye-bye.