
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Trump wins! How it happened and what's next
Fri, 08 Nov 2024
(0:00) Bestie intros! (4:55) Sacks recaps election night at Mar-a-Lago (8:28) Analyzing the results: how Trump won, why Kamala and the Democratic Party lost (25:55) The failing Democratic coalition, campaign spend disparity, Trump's advantage in earned media (37:59) What mattered most: Policy, Candidate, or Campaign? (50:44) GOP will likely win House and Senate, potential cabinet positions, avoiding neocons (1:10:42) Cabinet positions, shaking up the unelected bureaucratic branch (1:28:47) California rejects progressives (1:35:17) Abortion laws being settled around the US Get tickets for The All-In Holiday Spectacular!: https://allin.ticketsauce.com/e/all-in-holiday-spectacular Follow the besties: https://x.com/chamath https://x.com/Jason https://x.com/DavidSacks https://x.com/friedberg Follow on X: https://x.com/theallinpod Follow on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theallinpod Follow on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@theallinpod Follow on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/allinpod Intro Music Credit: https://rb.gy/tppkzl https://x.com/yung_spielburg Intro Video Credit: https://x.com/TheZachEffect Referenced in the show: https://x.com/twobitidiot/status/1854192602985255042 https://www.270towin.com/2024-election-results-live/president https://x.com/ChrisCillizza/status/1854515791690953066 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_e8-KX3XKL8 https://x.com/Jason/status/1854209590424121464 https://x.com/SawyerMerritt/status/1854045298475110779 https://x.com/DavidSacks/status/1854342908356297068 https://x.com/arifleischer/status/1854270972775305291 https://www.fec.gov/data/spending-bythenumbers/?office=P https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2024-11-01/16-billion-will-be-spent-in-the-2024-election-wheres-it-all-going https://x.com/DavidSacks/status/1829383729284067659 https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-very-fine-people https://x.com/TheRabbitHole84/status/1840977783247286429 https://www.cnn.com/election/2024 https://polymarket.com/event/house-control-after-2024-election https://x.com/MarioNawfal/status/1854536321282519396 https://www.instagram.com/p/DCFJ4mlsmEG/?hl=en https://x.com/DavidSacks/status/1854202717637411199 https://www.scotusblog.com/2024/06/supreme-court-strikes-down-chevron-curtailing-power-of-federal-agencies https://x.com/chamath/status/1854229735477551600 https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/la-district-attorney-progressive-loses-re-election-gascon-rcna175906 https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/11/05/us/elections/results-abortion.html
Well, let's just go around the horn. Who voted for Trump? Let's all raise their hands for those who voted for Trump. Ready? One, two, three, go. I voted twice. I voted twice. Me too. For me, it was so easy.
How many swing states did you vote in? I voted in four swing states. They sent multiple ballots to my house. I filled in all of them. Nick, cut this shit out.
Okay, let's start.
Let your winners ride. Rain Man, David Sackett.
Hey, everybody. Welcome back to my J. Cal impression. God, your energy is so dorky. Welcome, welcome. I'm Tim Waltz. I'm Tim Waltz of the All In Pod. Welcome, welcome, welcome.
Knucklehead? You're the knucklehead of the All In Pod.
I'm a knucklehead. Did you just sashay into your seat? I am right here. Show us your jazz hands.
By the way, that name, just enjoy that name, Tim Waltz, while you can, because you're never going to hear about that guy again. He's going to be more forgettable than Tim Kaine. They're going to be doing SNL skits on how forgettable he is.
That SNL skit was next level, I agree.
Okay, so today we are gonna cover the biggest- Anything in the news? Yeah, right. We'll start out with a little housekeeping and then we'll get into it. So like and subscribe on YouTube, youtube.com slash at all in. We're trying to hit a million subscribers. Don't forget the holiday party, allin.com slash events. It is Saturday, December 7th in SF.
We have a couple of great announcements for the holiday party. which I think we are spending way too much money on. Steve Aoki will be DJing.
Nice.
Andrea Botez will be there doing the opening DJ set, and her sister Alex will be joining us as well. Andrea and Alex will also be playing the Botez sisters. We're going to have a chess tournament during the party, which will be super fun. Sax, you can get in on that. Challenge Alex Botez or David Sax to chess. Gary Richards, also known as Destructo.
This is Alex's chance for a rematch. That's right. As I recall, I beat her last time.
Yeah, and we will have the board on screen.
You totally told me to go f*** myself and wouldn't give me any help.
I also blundered my queen and still won on time, which I will always hold dear in my heart.
She needed more time. If we had given her more time, that was a really tough situation.
She would have crushed all of us. 4v1, tough. But it's going to be a great show. Other guests to be announced in the future. VIP is almost sold out. We're doing like a special dinner after the live show. And then the party is going to be awesome. Casino games, food, drinks, DJs. This is just to have fun, guys. This is not meant to be. kind of like the summit type show.
We're going to just have a great time. So we hope everyone will join us. And if you've got startups that want to join, please come on by, buy some tickets.
How much is this costing us?
A million bucks.
A million bucks?
The odds are we're going to lose money on this.
How many tickets are we selling?
Not enough. Not enough. Yeah.
What's the total attendance size?
Saxon, you just won the White House. I think you're fine, bro.
Anyone can do this math. How big is the theater? And what are we charging for the tickets?
Well, it's not a theater. So the tickets are like 500 bucks, I think. I love you being the moderator and taking all the arrows. This is great. So you're never moderating again? Well, it's the PFA. Remember where they used to have the Exploratorium? That building where they built for the World's Fair or whatever? So it's in there and it's all empty. So we're kind of taking that.
We're building a stage inside. We're going to build all the set and everything. Yeah, it should be fun. I won't be there, but it sounds great. If you could take some pictures, Sachs would love to see what it looks like. Unless it's Mar-a-Lago, Sachs will not show up. I want to just congratulate.
It's like, oh, we're spending a million dollars? I won't be there. Thanks! Sorry, keep going.
I want to congratulate someone really special, without whom Trump would likely not have been elected president. So your bravery, your ingenuity, your creativity, you led the way and you brought millions of people the direct news they couldn't get anywhere else. Jason, congrats. Yes, thank you.
By putting the all in pod, you've inadvertently architected a system that's helped return Trump to the White House. And for that, many people are praising you today. Congrats, Jason. How does it feel to have finally accomplished your dream?
Feels great. Yeah.
Absolutely. Yeah. Big shout out to Jake.
I did see a tweet where somebody somebody gave me a lot of credit for moving the Overton window in Silicon Valley. And they said that Jason was indispensable as my foil. If I didn't have him to dunk on for four years with my political takes, it wouldn't have been nearly as effective.
So thank you for that. Yeah, my pleasure.
I am avid to your internal MSM debating partner.
We need someone to represent the legacy media point of view.
Absolutely. Absolutely.
Okay, so let's kick it off. Sax, you were at Mar-a-Lago on election night. I thought it'd just be great if you could tell us a little bit about what the scene was like. How was it? And when did you guys kind of know that Trump had kind of the victory in the bag? Was it pre the polls coming in because you had pollster data early?
Or, you know, tell us a little bit about the experience there and when it all kind of came together.
Yeah, I went over there, I guess, around 7.30, I want to say, Eastern Time. Tucker invited me to come on his show. Tucker was doing a live stream from the library at Mar-a-Lago. I'd actually never been over there before. There was also a dinner going on in the ballroom, which was, I think, primarily for Mar-a-Lago members. And there were some senators there, members of the campaign.
And then there was another room set up with a bunch of TVs for basically the staff to watch the results come in. When I first got there, people were kind of just watching, trying to find out the early results. I would say that the whispers were positive, but people didn't fundamentally know more than the rest of us. Everyone was kind of waiting for the results to come in.
I did get a chance to take a photo with the president. Actually, Elon came in separately around the same time, and we got a very memorable photograph here. When I shook the president's hand, I got to tell you, he was cool as a cucumber. He did not seem nervous at all.
Did he feel confident like he had it in the bag?
Yeah, I think he was confident, but I don't think he was acting like he had it in the bag or anything like that. They didn't know yet, but he was just super, super relaxed and calm and taking photos with everyone.
He was in a good mood. You remember the moment when his hand touched yours? Take us to that. I'm just saying that when I- Did he give you the shake? He gives that little shake to exert a little dominance. Did he give you the shake?
It was just a normal handshake. But my point is like I could detect no nervousness whatsoever on his part. And look, the rest of us were like nervous. We were wondering what was going to happen. The whole country was nervous. Yeah. Yeah.
And what were you guys doing? Just hanging out, having cocktails, having dinner? Just everyone was meandering, chilling? What's the scene like at Mar-a-Lago?
There's a dinner in the ballroom. Actually, I saw Jared there. Jared was very nice to me. He asked me, do you want to sit down at the dinner? And I could have joined him, but then I decided to do the live stream with you guys, and I pulled in Don Jr., and we did the live stream with Don Jr.
Are you officially a Mar-a-Lago member, by the way? No. 500 large? No. Oh, my Lord. Is that true? 500,000?
Well, that's what Don Jr. told us. But look, there's a process to get in. I mean, I don't live in Palm Beach. I think the Palm Beach community is members of Mar-a-Lago. Yeah. So I think that there were, you know, it wasn't a huge group of people at Mar-a-Lago and really all the supporters were convened at the convention center in Palm Beach. There were thousands of people there.
I think originally they had talked about doing a election night party at Mar-a-Lago, but it just got too big. So they moved it to the convention center. So I don't know, whatever it was that I dropped off the live stream with you guys, I then moved to the convention center, got back on with Newt. And then we were kind of waiting at the convention center.
We were all feeling good, increasingly so, throughout the night. I would say that when Pennsylvania finally got called, then I think everyone knew that it was in the bag at that point. And it was just a matter of time before the election got called for Trump.
And then, you know, at some point they kind of herded us downstairs into that large ballroom where Trump gave his victory speech with the rest of the campaign staff.
So the final tally, it looks like, is going to be 312 electoral college votes for President Donald Trump versus Kamala Harris's 226. Just for context, in 2016, Trump won with 304 electoral votes and Biden won in 2020 with 306. So it's a pretty sweeping victory. He won all the supposed swing states this year fairly resoundingly. There's no real super close calls.
There's some close calls, but pretty resounding victory. Chamath, what happened?
Wow, it's a really good question. I think that there's many layers of the answer. But I think in its most basic calculation, I think that the bottom fell out of the Democratic Party. And if you look at why, there's a simple explanation and then there's the more nuanced explanation. I think the simple explanation is like they just lost the script.
I think that there was so many people that just got really tired of being spoken at by and labeled misogynist, racist, fascist, transphobe, whatever it was. And there was just these litany of these judgmental labels that would come out instead of engaging on the topics at hand. So I think the Democratic Party played this game of trying to use
identities, genders, races, as a bid to basically get people that they thought should always vote in their direction to continue to support them. And instead what happened was people just started to think for themselves and say, hold on a second, I'm just a normal person that wants to be left alone. What matters to me?
And I think what Donald Trump spoke to was a desire for folks to have economic prosperity, a safe neighborhood, A predictable educational curriculum where these kids could go to school, not be indoctrinated and come out the other side and just know some useful skills so that they could get a good job and do better than they did. And all these basic truths ended up on the ballot.
And so it was a bunch of perception versus just a bunch of hard realities. And I think Trump stayed focused and ultimately made sure that people understood that that's what he was focused on. And I think the Democrats just went to this place of demagoguery and labels. And I think it was just a resounding defeat. And David, I just want you to like, just to put a pin on how resounding it is.
In California and New York, which I would say are the two most prolific bastions of elitist liberal thinking, Democrats won those states in some of the narrowest margins they've ever seen. I think in 2020, they won California by 29 points. It was barely half is what they won by this year. In New York, it shrunk to a 12-point margin. So what is this telling you?
It's telling you that the Democrats really need to retool and get back to first principles. It was a cataclysmic dismissal of wokeism, of cancel culture, of judgmentalism. It was a ringing endorsement of a meritocracy, of just plain, simple common sense, of talking with people and to people, being able to tolerate disagreements, remaining friends. All of those things were on the ballot.
And it was just an absolute resounding victory for just normalcy. That's what I think we saw. We saw a return to normalcy.
Jason, do you think that that message got across more clearly in this election than ever before, as some have claimed, because of the power of alternative media for reaching the audience, rather than having everything pushed through reporters and traditional legacy media? In this case, many of the candidates, particularly on the Republican side,
went direct to the audience through long form podcasts like ours, but also Joe Rogan, and Lex and many others. And did that move the needle for a lot of people in a way that won this? Or was it the policies and the difference alone?
Yeah, well, clearly, being on podcasts was a major part of Trump's strategy that people are starting to report on right now. And, you know, in media, you go where the audience is. And I think the Democrats just didn't get that. Now, stepping back, I think the number one problem here is the candidate that the Democrats put up. And probably the close number two is inflation.
And, you know, the economy, as you know, we all know it's the economy, stupid. If you were paying... $2 for a cheeseburger at McDonald's, and now it's $4. That's what people are going to remember. And the inflation that occurred over this last four years was huge. And people cited that over and over and over again. So there's probably three buckets you could put this conversation into.
There's the candidate. Kamala Harris was a terrible candidate. She was put in at the last minute and she was anointed and she didn't go through a proper primary. I think that's probably number one in this entire thing. It was a terrible candidate. You're saying number one is the candidate. I think number one is the candidate.
Number two, I think, because remember, Trump was incredibly unpopular as well. And all credit to Trump for winning and running an incredible campaign. I mean, just they crushed it on podcasts with J.D. Vance turned out to be spectacular on podcasts and really delivered the message. And, you know, the number two is obviously inflation in the economy.
And then I think number three is the bucket that Chamath started with, which is. The country really, really does not like being told that they're racist or sexist, et cetera, cancel culture. And you put those three things together.
one of the things that's coming out right now is some of the ads and we'll play an ad here i wanted you guys to see this i think this ad sums up exactly how bad kamala was and we'll combine this ad with just some of the statistics that have come out of how many people have gone right this is charlamagne the god from the breakfast club for those who don't know in a donald trump ad what taxpayer-funded sex changes for prisoners surgery
For prisoners.
For prisoners. Every transgender inmate in the prison system would have access.
Hell no, I don't want my taxpayer dollars going to that. Kamala supports transgender sex changes in jail with our money. Kamala even supports letting biological men compete against our girls in their sports. Kamala is for they, them. President Trump is for you. I'm Donald J. Trump, and I approve this message.
And so how does Kamala come back from this with black voters, with male voters, with people who are tired of having this agenda shoved down their throat? Obviously, it's going to be incredibly difficult. Plus, she was in charge of the border, claimed she wasn't. Plus, she was in charge of, you know, and Biden were in charge of the economy when inflation spiked.
Terrible candidate combined with a bad track record combined with a flawless campaign from Trump. I think easy victory. And, you know, if we pull up this FT chart, Nick, that I sent you ahead of time, and I tweeted this, you know, Americans love winners and innovation and they hate socialism and this woke nonsense. And if you look at how Trump's support increased, look at this, Chamath.
Every single demographic, Black, Asian, Hispanic, 18 to 29, 30, 30 to 34, female, white college men, except for two, 65-year-old plus, very moderately, very modestly went left. And white college women very modestly went left in terms of increasing support.
Otherwise, a hard shift right, including in some categories. Everybody went right. Yes. So the biggest shift right was in Hispanic and Asian populations. Right.
And these are groups of people, I think, who you can double click on young people, Hispanic and Asians. Asians believe in meritocracy, I think, is what most people have read into that dramatic swing. And Hispanics are anti... or more traditional family values, and that's probably what pushed that so far away.
But I wanted to just get your take on that chart, Shamab, in relation to your handicapping of the election, and then how much Kamala and how much the inflation played into it.
I think that there are three ways to kind of identify, and tell me if you guys think these are the wrong vectors. There's either the policies, the candidate, and the methods of the campaign. All of it, all three. Right, that's how I kind of break down what happened in this election cycle. There's a big difference between the candidates as people.
Some people cannot see past the fact that Kamala did not get any primary vote. Some people cannot see past The behavior of Donald Trump on Twitter and when he talks to people and how he has talked to people and perceived to be a bully and the felony conviction. And some people cannot get past other factors of those two candidates. And then some people can get past it.
I've been saying this since I'm blue in the face, but I'll try it again. I think that the mainstream media has been working hand in hand with the Democratic Party to propagate and move forward an agenda that tried to vilify Donald Trump. I did not know that when I initially encountered him in 2015 as a candidate.
But what you're supposed to do as an adult is once you start to see a pattern of behavior You know, this is for the safety, security of your family. This is about how you think about economically taking care of your family. Like you have to re-underwrite decisions from first principles. You must be prepared to change your mind when you see important information.
And I have said this till I blew in the face, but I'll say it again. If I think of all of the people in the political infrastructure of America that I have met and spent time with, from Bill Clinton on, I remember sitting and having dinner with Barack Obama the day of Brexit and getting a note that he read and he said, oh my gosh, and says, wow, the UK just pulled out.
I was sitting across from him that dinner. I've been with all of these people. The Democrats only come to me to ask me for money. The only politician that has ever called me just to have a conversation, just to say thank you and be kind, the only one has been Donald Trump. Isn't that incredible? Of all of the people, every other person has only ever called and asked me for money.
So what does that mean? I think what it means is that there has been a concerted effort to perturb the way that you interpret who he is. Separately, there's been a concerted effort to prop up whoever is sitting against him in opposition.
And I think this is an opportunity to finally acknowledge that if you trust these traditional legacy sources of helping you to get to a decision, you're going to get tricked. There's that old saying, you know, fool me once, shame on you. But fool me twice, shame on me. Because I am now allowing this to happen. And I think that for a lot of Americans, that is what happened.
I think it is really as simple as that. I think they were able to see through the veneer of an attempt to malign and corner somebody. And on the other side, an attempt to basically play on vibes and feelings and emotions. And I don't think that America wants that. That is not what they want in running the country.
They want somebody serious running the country where you can have disagreements with them and you can still find an opportunity to work together with those people. I think it's that.
Sacks, do you think about how important the policy versus the individual is? versus the way they ran the campaign, the media, and how they reached people as kind of three vectors? And if so, how would you kind of rank those three in importance? And what changed people's votes and got them to vote differently than they did in the last election?
Yeah, I think it's a pretty good framework. I mean, you have the message, you have the messenger, and I guess you have the campaign at a tactical level. I think it's a little bit unfair to blame this entire defeat on Kamala Harris being a bad messenger or candidate. It's true, she's not the greatest candidate. She has a lot of problems.
However, I don't think she was dealt a particularly strong hand. The fact of the matter is that we did have rampant inflation in this country that really hurt people in their pocketbooks every time they went to the grocery store. And that resulted from the trillions of spending that was agreed to by virtually the entire Democratic Party.
Remember, not only did they pass trillions in spending, they wanted $4.5 trillion more for Build Back Better. And the only reason that didn't happen is because Manchin and Sinema voted against it. Can you imagine how much worse inflation would have been? Manchin was driven into retirement, and Sinema was basically kicked out of the party. She effectively told us that at the all-in summit.
So this defeat is on the entire Democratic Party. The Democratic Party was in support of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris's agenda. They were in support of the de facto open border policies. They were in support of the soft-on-crime Soros DA decarceral policies. You can see that even in California. which is a deep blue state, there's a huge backlash. Huge.
This sort of insane, soft on crime agenda the Democrats have. 70% of California voted for Prop 36, which basically reversed the excesses of Prop 47, which a decade ago basically made shoplifting legal in California. You know who opposed Prop 36 despite its massive popularity? Gavin Newsom. Kamala Harris wouldn't say whether she supported it or not.
So what you see is that even in blue states, the Democratic Party elites are completely out of touch with what people want. And then finally, you've got foreign policy, where I think that the Democratic agenda basically wanting to engage in a proxy war with Vladimir Putin because he's the incarnation of all evil, that I think is blown up in the collective West face.
That has been a disaster that was supported by the entire Democratic Party. So on issue after issue that I think mattered in this election, you cannot just put the blame on Kamala Harris. It's got to be on the Democratic Party as a whole. And just to echo what Chamath said about the cultural stuff, they've talked down to us. They've lectured us. They've insulted us. They've censored us.
They've gaslit us. They've tried to cancel us. They've tried. to cancel us. They tried to punish dissent with lawfare. They turned Elon into an enemy, which was the single worst own goal in history. Remember, this wasn't just... And Joe Rogan. Don't forget. They kicked Joe Rogan out as well. Bernie supporter Joe Rogan.
But with Elon, it wasn't just disinviting him or never inviting him to the EV summit. It goes all the way back to Lorena Gonzalez's tweet telling him to F off and leave the state of California. So look, the Democratic Party as a whole has to own this, and they're not going to start winning elections again until they have an improvement in their agenda, not just their messenger.
So, Sax, is this the nature of democracy? That over time, when you have a two-party system and one party veers too far to the left or one party veers too far to the right, people jump ship to the other party and ultimately they pull the policies of the party that they left back to the middle. And that's the way democracy is supposed to work and has worked historically.
So is this the way it's supposed to go? And do we project that four years from now, the Democrats will need to be and need to adjust to the center and we'll see less of this extremism because of the way the voting turned out this election cycle?
I think that's a very interesting question, is whether the Democrats have the necessary introspection to learn from this loss. I would say that one of them does. If you look at Matt Iglesias, who's someone I've sparred with on TwitterX, who is a Democrat partisan, he basically tweeted a list of principles that he thought the Democrat party needed to adopt. I read it and retweeted it.
I said, laughing my ass off, this is a list of Republican principles. Yeah. It was all about opposing woke and being in favor of merit and innovation.
Tolerance, freedom of speech.
I'm like, great, look, you know what? If the Democratic Party wants to adopt these principles, that's a wonderful thing for the country. I hope that they do it, okay? But will they do it? I have my doubts. You look at this tweet by Ari Fleischer where he talks about who the Democratic Party now is.
Yeah, I think that this is a really important tweet because it sort of tells you, Sachs, who's going to be left in the room. And if these are the only people left in the room, the last thing they're going to do is admit defeat.
Right, exactly. So what you see is that the Democratic Party base is these very affluent, very overeducated, very non-religious types. And frankly, I wonder whether they're too out of touch to know they're out of touch. They're certainly very whiny and entitled. And I just don't think They're going to cede control of the party without a fight.
And frankly, they've disappeared so far up their own woke asses that I don't think they can find an electoral majority if they try. So if these people stay in control of the party, and these are the people who you're seeing having a mental breakdown on TikTok. They're posting all the videos. They're insulting the electorate. And let's face it, it's not just on TikTok. It's on the legacy media.
It's on MSDNC. It's basically the legacy media who are trying to diagnose a psychosis in the American electorate to explain why they were so wrong. If those people stay in control, I think that the Republicans could have an electoral majority as far as the eye can see.
I completely agree with you, and I'll go even further, which is I think that the Democrats will lose one of California or New York in the next eight years.
If they don't attack, right? So that's the key question.
They're not going to attack. If you think that the intelligentsia, quote unquote, the Bill Gates, Reid Hoffmans of the world that funds Dustin Moskovitz, that funds the Democratic apparatus at the highest level, if they can't change... What are the odds that the state infrastructure or the local infrastructure changes?
I think maybe on the margins, the local infrastructure can change more quickly and adeptly because it just costs a lot less money and it's much more concentrated. But I think the states are very laggard in that sense. And I think that they take the table scraps of what's left over.
So if you have the Democrats lead, there is no chance that unless they change the planks of their platform, that the state legislatures in New York and California are going to change what they believe.
Nick, pull up the link I just sent. So let me just underscore an important aspect for you guys on this, which is the amount that the Democrats spent in this campaign. And obviously they saw a significant negative return. They lost across the board, Senate majority, House majority, governorships, the White House, but they spent more.
Here you can see the difference between the Harris campaign and the Trump campaign spending. Harris campaign spent nearly $900 million. The Trump campaign, 350 million. If you look at the super PACs, the super PACs spent $1.4 billion on the Dem side, roughly, $400 million, $450 million on the Republican side.
And if you scroll down, in some of these key Senate races, the Dems far outspent the Republicans and still lost. The Ohio Senate race, Sherrod Brown, $58 million of spending. Bernie Moreno, $21 million, and Bernie Moreno had a resounding victory. John Tester, $84 million of spending. Tim Sheehy, $22 million. Tim Sheehy won. the election.
So across the board, the spending was greater, the return was negative.
Because money cannot overcome common sense.
So my question again is, does this not necessitate attack to the center for the Democrats? They want to see the party survive. And if they're going to continue to lose like this, they will not continue to maintain the same policy agenda that got them into this position in the first place.
J. Cal, do you think that the Democratic Party will need to attack to the center and that they're going to start to adjust because of this?
They started that process. They knew that going into this election and they started moving to the center. It was laughable in some cases because you have like Kamala talking about providing sex changes for prisoners and all of those receipts came out. So even as she started to try to get to the center, people didn't buy it. So of course they're going to.
But what's very interesting about Spen there and the genius of Trump is earned media. What's earned media? When you are trying to get hits in media, you will put them into two buckets, paid and earned. What you just showed was paid. Paid is considered what you do if you can't earn media. All In Podcast is an example of earned media. We do this every week. We earned our audience.
We didn't pay anybody for this audience. And I think that was, you know, what Trump did and J.D.
Well, unfortunately, someone that comes on the show earns that. Correct.
And so that's the piece of this that I think is so important. You don't have to pay to go on Joe Rogan. But the candidate that the Democrats put out there was so bad. that she could not even, and I think Sachs is master at setting people up here. The Democrats put up a horrible, horrible candidate. And I know Sachs is saying, oh, it's not Kamala's fault. Kamala could not go on
Joe Rogan, because they knew that it would be so embarrassing and that she would get so embarrassed that it would lose her votes. His doom loop observation from, I don't know, eight weeks ago you had that, Sax, was exactly correct. The more she spoke, the more she started going down. She was leading Trump at one point on polymarket in some of these places, and she absolutely proved
that she could not communicate well. And I just want to just circle back to the point about inflation. Here's the McDonald price increases that I was mentioning before. End of 2019, you could buy a McChicken for $1.29, and in mid-2024, it was $3.89. The majority of Americans wind up going to Taco Bell, McDonald's every week. some cases multiple times a week.
You cannot discount exactly how profound this cost of eating food and buying groceries had on this election. It is the number one issue, I think, this election. We can talk in our bubble about it, but it was about inflation.
This is what I mean by a return to normalcy. These are normal people problems. How much does it cost to put food on the table? How much does it cost to drive from point A to point B? I want to send my kid to a school where they go and they learn the ABCs and the one, two, threes because they're going to have to graduate and compete with India and China.
I don't want to worry about indoctrination and all this other stuff. Absolutely. Yeah.
So look, I did predict the doom loop for Kamala Harris two months ago because she is just not good at interviews or being off the cuff or being unscripted.
Not good is generous.
Yeah, Saxtradamus was right about that. Absolutely. However, and I would say the biggest problem in her campaign is that she would neither defend the Biden-Harris record nor say what she would do differently. The question you have to ask is why? And I think it's because she was in a really tough position that her own party put her in.
Which is, they said, you can't criticize Joe Biden because he's the sitting president. But at the same time, you can't defend him either because he's so unpopular. Well, what made him unpopular? Democratic Party policies. They should have, frankly, looking back, they should have just let Joe Biden defend his own record.
The old man must have been in the White House gnashing his teeth, saying, please put me in the game. Let me defend my own record. He at least believed in it. The Democrats wouldn't defend their own record because it was so bad. You have to put some blame for that, not just on Kamala. but on the entire party. That's my only point.
It's so obvious that that technique they used to defeat Trump in 2020 after those chaotic four years was, hey, do you want normalcy?
What technique is that? 15 million votes?
What's that? I didn't hear the joke. I said, what tactic was that? 15 million extra votes? Please don't start with the conspiracy theories.
We're really going to say that this has to be a conspiracy theory now?
Who's the chart from? Who's the chart from? What's the providence of the church?
Just so you know, the Y axis starts at 50 million. So don't be, you know, like a little too crazy.
Like they mailed out- Hold on, before we go down this rabbit hole, let me just finish my point. Then you guys can go to Conspiracy Corner and say the election was stolen. The point I'm making here is, obviously- Biden ran a very successful campaign against Trump based on vibes and based on his creating chaos in the country and most people's mind in this return to normalcy.
So that did work for them previously. It just didn't work this time because they had to defend their record on the border. They needed to defend their record on the economy. And Sachs is exactly right. They didn't touch that. And how do you not talk about their own record? And their record had some good bright spots to it. Record low unemployment, record high stock market, and we tamed inflation.
And they could have had a really great discussion about inflation and just said, hey, listen, both
of the last two terms there was a lot of spending and so inflation manifested during the last four years and uh hey we tamed it so here we are we still have record low unemployment we still have a record high stock market and we tamed inflation things are going to get better but she couldn't even communicate that i can communicate that better than the presidential candidate Come on.
She could have easily done that.
Freebird, let me just go back to your point about the money. It is true that the Democrats had roughly three times as much money as the Republicans did. The Democrats had something like a billion dollars for this campaign. The Republicans had 300 and something.
For the presidential campaign.
For the presidential campaign, exactly. The Republicans obviously still won in a landslide.
I'm sorry, that excludes the super PACs, which had additional funding that were going towards supporting the nominee. Fair enough.
My point is just the Democrats had a massive advantage on the money side. They also, I think, had a massive advantage on what you would call the legacy media side. I mean, I don't know how you put a value, a dollar value on what the legacy media has done, not just in this election cycle, but for the last eight or nine years. They have basically called Donald Trump a Nazi, a fascist, a traitor.
Did it work? Or did it blow up in their faces?
I'm about to get to that.
Yeah, it blew up in their faces. They called him an agent of Putin. They called him an insurrectionist. They called him a convicted felon. They called him a dictator. They've been yelling that at the top of their lungs now for at least four years. The country didn't believe it. I would just say that the legacy media spell is broken. Their credibility has been destroyed.
And I think that the repudiation of the legacy media is one of the most important results of this election. It just shows that the Democrats had, I don't know how you valued, a trillion dollar propaganda machine on their side, and Trump was still able to win.
And you have to, at the end of the day, say that that's a result not just of alternative media gaining steam and free speech on X. I think those were absolutely necessary enablers. It's also the fact that Trump has a trillion dollar personality and is a tremendously gifted communicator and politician in his own unique way. But finally, you have to say that the issues are on Trump's side.
Americans want the border to be sealed. They see that the spending and the bureaucracy in Washington are out of control. They do not want woke cancel culture anymore. They see America getting over-involved in foreign wars. They want the spending to be brought back home where it benefits them. These are the key points of the Trump agenda.
And at the end of the day, whatever you want to say about Trump, he ran a campaign based on issues. He talked about issues. What did Kamala Harris run her campaign on? vibes, celebrity endorsements, name calling, debunked hoaxes.
I just want to go around the horn real quick and ask each of you guys once again, I'm going to ask you one more question after this. What mattered most? Was it the policy sacks as you're proclaiming is what a lot of people voted on? Was it the issues with the candidate, the individual? Or was it the media or the campaign tactics?
So those three, what mattered most do you think in terms of moving votes? What moved the most votes?
Listen, I don't think you can separate the man from the message or the messenger from the message. Listen, if you had a conventional Republican out there, I don't think that they could have overcome the trillion dollar propaganda machine of the legacy media. That being said, I think if Donald Trump had been campaigning,
with Mitt Romney's message or Mitch McConnell's message, I don't think he would have gone anywhere. I don't even think he would have been the Republican nominee. You have to say that Trump, since 2016, has tapped into something very deep in the American electorate. And this is something we can get into.
But I think that if you look back now over the last 10 years, it's clear that he's the transformational figure in American politics. It's not Barack Obama, with all due respect.
It's Trump. J. Cal, your turn. The policies, the individual, or the campaign tactics?
It's very clearly this had to do, you know, primarily with Kamala. It is the candidate and how she was selected. Yeah, I mean, obviously, if you had the same track record.
It's interesting for you to say that as a Dem, right? Because I think that may have chased a lot of people. I'm a moderate. I'm not a Dem, by the way. I voted Republican one-third of the time.
Maybe even a little bit more recently.
But two thirds, two thirds, you voted them. So you were open to that. And I'm a left leaning moderate.
I mean, I've been very clear about that. My record's been very clear about that. It is clear that it was her because I will say if you had put up Friedberg, and I think it's great that you're forcing us to pick one of the three. And it's a hard thing to do. But if you had picked Dean Phillips and Shapiro, I think they would have beat Trump very easily.
Because remember, Trump was phenomenally unpopular. And I think the big question that's going to come out of this is how did Elon do getting young men and how did Joe Rogan and podcasts like ours do at getting young men to come out and vote? That's something we haven't talked about yet.
And I feel like that could be the one thing that comes out of this election over the coming years that we look at that'll be the sustainable change is that young men are now voting and they want to vote for something very different than white women or old people.
And Chamath, what is your read on what mattered most? Do you have one of those three? How would you weight?
I think the policies of the Democratic Party are fundamentally broken. they've become the exact opposite of where they were even 20 years ago. So the Democrats used to be the protector of free speech. Now they are pro-censorship. The Republicans are free speech. The Democrats used to be all about anti-war.
Now they are more likely to get mangled into all of these foreign misadventures in partnership with the military-industrial complex, whereas the Republicans have been a bulwark to war.
And they embraced the Cheneys, ultimate proof of that.
Oh, my gosh. I mean, that was the scariest and oddest turn of events. So I think that what happened is the policies, they just lost their way. Now, the question is, was it purposeful or was it by accident? And I think that belies the bigger question, which is just the people in charge of the Democratic Party, I think, to Sachse's point,
do they even have a sense of that they have to change or are they just so now fundamentally out of touch and they just believe what they believe so ferociously, they're going to have to go through maybe three or four or five more elections of just getting totally trounced in order to learn the lesson.
Okay, I'll wear my McLaughlin hat and say Chamath, right answer. Now, my next question back to you, Chamath, is I've had a lot of conversations in the last few days with good friends, with people I'm close with, with family and so on.
Hold on, Freebrook, what do you think before you ask the next question?
I think policy matters, but here's the stumbling block. If you talk to anyone that did not vote for Trump and voted for Kamala Harris, that is, you know, kind of reasonable people or what, you know, I don't want to kind of, classify people, but people that you would normally have decent long form conversations with. And you start talking about specific policy issues with them.
The conversation keeps coming back to Trump the person, in my experience. People can't see past a person who is a, quote, convicted felon, as they claim, who is taking away women's rights, who is a bully, who is mean. A lot of this is influenced by his past behavior and things he said and the way he's said things and done things on Twitter.
We can proclaim that there was a lot of misrepresentation about Trump in the legacy media, but there were a lot of tweets that Trump put out that were off-putting to a lot of people.
So I want you, Chamath, to speak to the many individuals out there who are good people, who feel disenfranchised, who are not like the funny people you can make fun of on libs of TikTok or what have you, but just everyday normal people that said, I really don't trust the guy. I really don't believe that this is a good person. And I think that the policies make more sense.
I agree with a lot of the policy issues, but frankly, the guy doesn't seem like the right guy for me. How do you kind of break through? Is that possible? And can you speak to that person to help them kind of see past the individual to the policies and have trust and faith that this individual can actually shepherd this nation forward?
There are so many very powerful examples of how the media colluded with the Democratic Party to fundamentally lie about things that actually happened when it relates to Donald Trump. One of the most simple and powerful was the lie about Charlottesville. When I process Charlottesville, I'm probably one of those people, David, that you talk about. I was just so scared and angry.
And I took at face value what the media said that Donald Trump said. And then I was really angry at Donald Trump until I saw the footage and saw that it was just a complete lie. And that is just an incredible shirking of responsibility that the media has undertaken. The deviousness, the dishonesty, it's really bad. And that's where I said, I have to stop. As a grown up rational man,
As the head of my family, I need to re-underwrite where I'm coming from. Well, head of my family with Nat, when she lets me be, but anyways.
She's kind of the head of my family. I can feel her. Come on, eh? You can be the head of the household, but you've got to listen to me.
I can feel that one line is going to come back to haunt me. Keep that line in, Nick. I am the head of my family. Okay, anyways. Guys, sorry. You can be the head of the family. Let's get back up. Okay, go back, go back, go back, go back.
But the thing is, I started to re-underwrite. And I do that every day in my day job. I'm running a company. Is 80-90 going well or not well? It depends on the conditions on the ground. When things are going well, I need to do more of those things. When things are not going well, I need to re-underwrite. Is it something that I'm in control of? Is it something that I've missed? How do I change it?
How do I get my team to be better? I live it every day. In investing, it's the same thing. There was periods where I was on top of the world and everything was working. Then there were waves where things were not working, but I still had to show up and do my job well. As it's turning out, in those darkest hours was when I probably have made some of my absolute best new investments.
That would not have happened if I did not keep my feet on the ground and constantly re-underwrite and try to challenge my biases. There are so many examples that have happened to Trump that when you actually unpack them, there was a concerted effort to lie. And that is why it's important for folks to be able to suspend that judgment.
The second thing I would say is then you saw four years of the man in office. And if you actually separate the interpretation by the media who frankly just hate him with what he actually did, you take a step back and you're like, man, these accomplishments were incredible. For example, let's look at what happened with the Abraham Accords.
We have never been closer to substantial and sustained peace in the Middle East in any era of government under any president than we were when Jared Kushner on behalf of Donald Trump negotiated those agreements. And look how far we have slipped since then. And all of that happened as a result of the incoming government wanting to undo what was so logically right in the first place.
And part of that was to feed a media cycle. So again, I just go back to David, all of these normal people, and I know a lot of them as well. Speak to them. Yeah. Like, I mean, yeah, you guys need to just take a step back and take a beat and just think about something for a second. How do so many normal, high functioning, well-intended people switch sides? How did that happen?
Now, J. Cal, let me ask you, the flip side of the coin, you have expressed publicly recently, even on a podcast yesterday, with Sachs in vigorous debate on the show many times, reservations about Trump and the character of Trump. Yeah. How do you feel, you obviously align with the policies that he's highlighted and indicated. You've said so.
Absolutely, yeah.
Do you see past the person or do you still have a strong degree of reservation about the individual? And do you see that playing out in your cohort, friends, family, what have you, that there's strong reservation because of the character?
Yeah, it's a great question. I think the thing we have to do now is come together as a country. He's the president. It's great that it was... not a debatable election, and we're not going to have riots at the Capitol and people beating up police officers. And now it's time to actually look at what Trump said. And then we will grade him on what he actually gets done.
And, you know, if he is able to hang out with the cohort of Elon and Chamath and Sachs and J.D. Vance, I feel a lot better about it. Now, there's a lot of people speculating he will turn on Chamath, he will turn on Sachs, he will turn on Elon, and that relationship will end in the next year or two. That's what I'm looking at. Will Trump actually do the things he says he's going to do?
And what did he say he was going to do? Well, he's not going to have a national abortion ban. He's not going to kick people out who get college degrees here. Remember, he said on the show he's going to staple the green card to it. And he said he's going to end the war in Ukraine on day one. So let's make a list of all the things he promised.
And like anybody else, let's judge him based on what he gets done. Now, some of the things he promised, like the mass deportation of 15 million people, I think a lot of people, even on this podcast, probably don't agree with. I don't think anybody here wants to see 15 million people
who came here to have a better life and who are working hard and who are productive members of our society literally get dragged out of here. The 500,000 that are criminals or a million, sure, nobody wants to see them get a free pass here, but You know, there's going to be some of the items on his agenda that are going to be very uncomfortable to see executed.
And some of them would be amazing and miracles. If he comes in and all of a sudden Ukraine war is settled, fantastic. If he starts dragging a million people every day, you know, two or three months out of the country, that could be absolutely disastrous and incredibly hard to watch happen in America. So we've got to judge him based on his actions. That's great. Let's give him the support he needs.
And I really hope, you know, the thing that gives me hope is the fact that Sachs, Chamath, Elon, and J.D.
Vance are by his side. So I'm going to move on to the rest of the election, the other races. So the presidency we've talked about, let's talk about the House and the Senate, Sachs. In the House, there's 37 races that have yet to be called, but it looks like the Republicans need about 12 more to be called to have a majority. It seems very likely.
I mean, according to PolyMarket, it's 99% that the Republicans will have the majority in the House. The Republicans have control of the Senate, and Trump is in the White House. What are the top policy items that the Republicans will pursue with this degree of legislative and executive control? What's number one, two, three on the list? What's top priority?
And how are they kind of getting together to figure out what and how to execute those items in the weeks and months after January 20th?
Well, so first of all, I think the Senate majority matters a lot in terms of Trump getting the appointments that he wants. Because if he was just at 51, let's call it, it would be quite hard. Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski tend to be very, very moderate Republicans and would oppose, I think, a lot of conservative appointments.
Trump's already at 53 senators, and there's two more that are still up for grabs and waiting to be counted. So you might get to 54 in the next week or so. It just means he's going to have a freer range on appointments. I think that'd be really good for Bobby Kennedy. I think it might be harder to get Bobby Kennedy confirmed for a major cabinet post with 51, with 53, 54. I think we get there.
I think that's a really great thing for the country. There's other appointments in a similar vein that I think will be easier for Trump to get through. In terms of the rest of the agenda, I mean, Trump clearly does want to end the war in Ukraine. Is he going to be able to do it on day one? No.
I mean, I don't think that's realistic because, frankly, the Ukrainians are not willing to make the concessions yet. They're not in a place where they're willing to make a deal. I still think that what Trump was saying during the campaign, if you look at his expression of his motivations and where his sentiments are coming from, they were good sentiments. But if he can't solve it on day one,
Because the Ukrainians don't want to make a deal, I can't really fault him for that. But I think he'll try. I think that on Doge, there's clearly a strong desire of many in the Republican Party and Elon and the people that Elon brought with him for major government reform. Much more efficiency, much less spending.
I think that we have to get as much of that passed as possible in the first, certainly the first year.
There's a necessity for legislative action to get all the cuts in federal spending that they're looking to cut. Is that right, Zach?
So if Elon's objective is cutting $2 trillion... There might be some things you can just do through executive orders, and they should do as much as they can. But I think you do need some congressional action as well. This is an area where it's just going to be really hard because spending is a bipartisan problem. And it's going to be really hard to jam through the type of
deep reform that we really should have at the federal level. But I think that now there's a shot because Trump does have majorities in the House and Senate that he can at least get something through. So at least we have a shot at getting something done there. Are we going to get $2 trillion in cuts like Elon wants? I would love that. I doubt you're going to be able to pass that through Congress.
But do you start with that number and then work your way down to a number that you can get both parties to support. Maybe that's possible. Hopefully.
I would have started with three then. I mean, that's just my tactic, but whatever.
But I think reforming the bureaucracy is just such a huge theme coming out of this election. And we just have to figure out how to get that done. Got the mandate. We have the mandate. That's Trump's mandate.
And the federal government is such a large sprawling. It is the largest organization on earth, except for maybe the CCP. And in that sense, you really have to have leverage in leadership to be able to realize that degree of action at that scale. So the cabinet positions matter a lot to realize that agenda. Is that fair to say, Chamath?
And maybe we can talk a little bit about who are the folks in the orbit of Donald Trump and the transition team that are being considered for different cabinet posts. And, you know, as an advisor, or as a, let's call you a theoretical advisor to the transition team, what are the kind of key posts that matter to you?
How would you kind of advise them who to look for that could really realize the outcome that the mandate is dictating?
Well, I have no influence on this process, so I'm just totally spitballing. But people who I think are who I think are excellent. I'm going to put Bobby Kennedy right at the top of the list.
I think that Bobby has an opportunity to allow the transparency of information that will allow folks to keep doing what we've done or to change course in a way that right now I think is a little bit more difficult than it needs to be. I think Vivek Ramaswamy is indefatigable. I think he's a
you know, if you remember back to the Republican primaries, there was only one person that did not attack Donald Trump and it was Vivek. I think he believed in what Donald Trump was doing and was willing to sort of embrace and extend this idea. So I think he'd be a really good proxy. I don't know what role that looks like, but I just think that he would be It'd be amazing.
There's some rumors that he's going to run for governor of Ohio, but he'd be amazing in the federal government. Tulsi Gabbard. We got to get Tulsi in there.
Yeah. Just to go through the list, I think Tulsi Gabbard is so awesome.
For what role? What would you put her in?
The rumor is veteran affairs.
Yeah. Veterans affairs, I think.
But hopefully it's at least that. Yeah. Yeah.
That's a cabinet position, right? Yeah.
You know, there's another race that's going on that's really below the surface but is extremely important, and that is the new Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell. Senate Majority Leader, yeah. Mitch McConnell says he's stepping aside. There's two major candidates.
It's John Thune versus Mike Lee. Yeah.
Well, it's John Thune versus Cornyn from Texas, and Mike Lee has been sort of agitating. It's not clear that Mike Lee will throw his hat in the ring. If he did, I would be all in favor of it. If Mike Lee, who is from Utah, doesn't, we should really go with whoever he recommends.
I really trust that Mike Lee will represent the MAGA agenda, whereas, quite frankly, the other candidates will be a continuation of Mitch. And this is Trump's moment to weigh in on that. He's basking in the glow right now. He is in the winner's circle. He can get anything through the Republican caucus.
And I think that he could weigh in right now in the Senate majority race and make sure the right person gets it. If you get a continuation of Mitch McConnell, you will not get real reform through the Senate. Look at what happened during Trump won. Mitch McConnell was one of Trump's biggest opponents. So there would be alternatives, but I think Trump would have to step in and act.
There's some talk about Rick Scott from Florida being a candidate. I think he'd be very good if he's still in the race. Or just go right over the top and go with a Mike Lee. This is your moment to basically put in a loyalist.
And then the big cabinet positions that are left, I think defense, probably somebody like Rick Grinnell, who's already worked for Trump and was the DNI right at the end, I think. And then in treasury, it's, you know, I think people say it's between Scott Besant and John Paulson. I'm not so sure. I don't know. If I had governor, I think it's like probably Haskell.
But then, you know, I saw like you saw Jerome Powell.
Jerome Powell this morning said he would not step aside if asked to resign by Donald Trump.
No, he's got two more years. So he's got until 26.
He's got until mid 26.
So, you know, I mean, the room, I don't want to say too much, but I think this is pretty much out there. I think we're now one state, not defense. I think that it's not to say he's going to get it. I don't know. But that's been out there for a long time.