Anthropic's Fable Backlash, Nationalizing AI, Inflation Heats Up & California’s Broken Elections

Anthropic released a mythos-level model with some interesting guardrails, and it seems as though Dario Amodei is back to blogging. The model is called Fable 5. No idea why they're calling it that. It was released on Tuesday, and it tops nearly every benchmark.

The tokens cost twice as much as Opus 4.8, but it should use fewer tokens overall because it's theoretically that much better. It's unclear if this is going to alleviate some of the hand-wringing around the cost of tokens. You remember in April, Anthropic famously did not release Mythos because it publicly had some strong hacking capabilities. So they gave it to some folks, and we had Nikesh Arora, the CEO of Palo Alto Networks, who said, “Hey, Opus was the real deal,” and that they used it to seal up some vulnerabilities inside their shop.

Obviously, topics like bioweapons and hacking are blocked in it. But they got a big developer backlash, and I'll get your feedback after I explain this. While using Fable 5, Anthropic stores all the prompt data you enter for at least 30 days, so that's a bit of a privacy issue. And if Fable 5 detects you're doing frontier AI research—in other words, using their model to make a better or competitive model—they were downgrading you, but they weren't telling you. This was buried deep in a 319-page document.

There are many kerfuffles and freakouts going on on X over this, but they've since walked it back a bit, quote-unquote, in Wired: “We're changing Fable 5 safeguards for frontier LLM development to make them more visible.” I'm going to stop there. Chamath, what's your take on Anthropic and these extraordinary models? They keep dropping, and how they're handling the release of them? Are they being thoughtful? Are they being dramatic and drama queens? A little bit of both. Where do you stand on it?

After getting Nikesh's feedback and seeing the latest model come out, have you played with it? What's going on at 80/20 and the software factory in terms of benchmarking it as well?

It's a really incredible model, and kudos to these guys for continuing to push the boundaries of the closed frontier lab models. They're firing on all cylinders. I think that it creates a pretty obvious risk now, and I think that obvious risk is twofold. One is Anthropic has essentially shown their hand, which is that they will increasingly take in prompts, evaluate the prompts, and decide what to do with them before they generate output for you.

I think if you're a person, you should generally now think there's a risk of censorship. If you're a company, I think it's almost a nonstarter, because you could accidentally trip one of these things without even knowing it. A downstream scientist using the cloud APIs could trip it. A business executive inside your corporation could trip it. A person doing scientific molecular research could trip it. All of a sudden, you'll get cut off from a very important source of business differentiation for yourself.

So I think if you take both of those things together, we're at this very unique moment in time where companies need to start underwriting this next phase of AI. How do I have control? Who am I allowing to learn off of all of this information? Do I want to have single-point-of-failure risk with respect to AI? I think the answer is that you need broad diversity and a governance approach that's better managed.

One thing I'll say about Anthropic is they tell the truth.

Yes.

It's just that the truth sucks when you actually take it and eat it, and it's in your tummy, and you're like, “No, this is not good. I don't like this.” So there's the censorship risk on the one hand, and then there's just the governance business risk for enterprises on the other. Both are not good.

Friedberg, you're running your own company now, and I'll let you bat cleanup here. Sacks, obviously, you'll have a lot to say, but Friedberg, running your company, do you worry about getting rug-pulled by one of these companies? You invest your time into one of these platforms, and they then constrain your use of it or take what you're doing at Ohalo, put it into their model, and make it available to other people. What concerns do you have as a business owner at the forefront of your field using these tools?

It's a great question. The terms of service are pretty clear that they can't take what you're doing and put it into their model.

Do you believe them when you read that?

I'm not sure, to be honest. There are things I'm concerned about, but we've decided to throw caution to the wind because we do a lot of proprietary work in genomics. What that means is we're looking at different genes or gene variants, trying to estimate the impact that that gene or gene variant might have on a living organism. We work in plants, obviously, in agriculture.

We'll do things like RNA guide design for gene-editing-based tools. We'll do predictions on what gene may or may not have some phenotype. There's a lot of genomic modeling work where we've found these models to be incredibly valuable in supporting us over the last couple of years. Going back about 6 months, we were able to very simply and cleanly do things like design a genetic construct that you would then use to make a specific protein. The tools were very easy to use to do that sort of research and extremely valuable.

This is the kind of work that many scientists would spend a lot of time doing, and these models were very good at doing it very quickly. Over the last couple of weeks, they've begun to restrict the ability to use the models to do that work. The premise is that there's some sort of bioweapon-type risk that folks have theorized could happen using these tools. As a result, we're losing the capacity to use these models for this very important scientific development work.

As a result, we're likely going to end up needing to use open-source models and run them locally ourselves. The reason I walk through all of that is so people can really understand the context of what's going to happen here. As folks like Anthropic say, “Hey, we're going to restrict access or censor the output of these models,” it is going to force companies like ourselves who still want to take advantage of the capabilities of these LLMs to go and get open-source tools and run them.

What are the best open-source models today? They're Chinese.

Yeah, they are.

And that is a major concern. The American open-source models are not as good as the Chinese open-source models. So the restrictions that Anthropic and others are putting upon themselves and upon the industry are forcing a lot of companies to go and get open-source Chinese models and run them. We're seeing this across the landscape, with startups and large-scale enterprises. Everyone's making that move.

Yeah. This is something we've been talking about here with Apple and their silicon and how well you can run these models. Also, I predict the next card you'll turn over is that you'll start making your own models, Friedberg. You'll take all this data you have.

It's exactly right. We'll start with the core model, combine it with our data, and then we'll have our own genomic language model, our own prediction model that we'll then use internally. I think that's where folks are going.

The reason I point this out is because a lot of folks are feeling the pressure from Anthropic doing this, and they're feeling the pressure from politicians repeating the scary words that are being said by Dario Amodei and others. As a result, they're going to try—and they're already trying—to force either national enforcement or politicized enforcement upon the model providers in a way that is ultimately going to benefit Chinese open-source model providers.

That is a scary thing, because we are going to damage our own economic viability. You can't just stop AI. As much as everyone says AI is doomsday, by stopping AI or trying to stop AI through this political action and social behavior, you are fundamentally going to give someone else the advantage because the AI isn't going to go away.

The reason I describe what we're doing is so everyone can really understand that you can't just turn off AI and turn off access to these things. What you will do is force the hand of someone else to now have an unfair advantage because you're unfairly restricting your models and your access to those models.

Well, really well said, Friedberg. Sacks, what's your take, just in terms of the chessboard? We have the business case, we have the local case, but there's a lot of issues here with Anthropic in terms of them essentially throwing up every red flag to get regulated and to induce—this will be our second story—the Bernie Sanders plan to seize the equity of these companies.

They're saying, “Look over here. We're starting a fire. Regulate the hell out of us.” That also makes you wonder, “Hey, maybe I should be doing my own model. Maybe I should be embracing open-source models.” How's this chessboard developing here, Sacks?

Well, look, 8 months ago, I said that Anthropic was engaged in a very sophisticated regulatory-capture campaign based on fear-mongering. People at the time thought that was a very spicy take. But 8 months later, I think you're hearing a lot of people say it.

In fact, I think it's almost now becoming a new consensus. And one of the things I think your summary didn't quite capture, JCal, is the sense of the violation of trust and how much outrage there is in the developer community over this latest Fable release. It's not just the fact that they're doing mandatory surveillance. Remember, this is a company that said that it was against government surveillance.

They are now retaining for 30 days every prompt and every output you send to one of these mythos-class models. There are no exceptions. Even enterprise customers who had signed zero-data-retention agreements do not have a choice—or I guess they can just not use the new Fable or mythos-class models. But they retain all of your data for 30 days.

And it's not just the prompts and the outputs. Remember, it's all the context you share with them. All these agent platforms are basically storing all of your memories, all of your files, all of your data, and passing them to the model in these giant context windows to get better responses.

Anthropic is saying it will keep all of that, and it does it to build a profile on you, to classify you, and then to determine what capabilities it unlocks. The thing that created the most outrage, in addition to the surveillance, is the fact that they would degrade the product. They would degrade what they show you. They would nerf their models if, in Anthropic's sole discretion, it decided that you are not worthy of having access to that level of information.

So they're creating a new level of AI haves and have-nots. And what they did—and this is a narrow piece here that they walked back—is that when it came to things like machine-learning AI research and chip-design research, they would kick you to a lesser model but not tell you that.

Which feels anti-competitive, right? I mean—

It's completely anti-competitive. They would even do things like rewrite your prompt in the background. They would give you a nerfed answer, they would not tell you what they were doing, they would still charge you for the product that you thought you were getting, and they would never tell you that you were not getting frontier-model capability.

So they were actually misleading their users, and this is what was creating so much outrage. The narrow piece they walked back is that they are now saying they will disclose when they downgrade you, but they are still downgrading people when they decide that person should not receive the appropriate information.

And you saw a lot of people posting online with examples of the massive overreach here. Someone showed that when they simply asked a question about mitochondria, they were basically downgraded.

That's right.

When Ben Thompson from Stratechery asked a very straightforward question about the relationship between cancer risk and GLP-1s, he was kicked out.

So these guys have a very expansive view of who should be downgraded. Again, they're going to surveil you to determine whether you should be. And I think what we're getting here is a vision of where all of this is headed: these powerful big tech companies are going to decide whether you're worthy. They're going to decide whether you're an AI have or have-not, and then they're going to censor the output that you receive based on the criteria they determine when they profile you.

That is very Orwellian.

I think there's that. And I think that there's a risk that's more subtle but equally insidious, which is that they will start to pick which corporations they want to benefit. So, for example—

If Novartis has a competitive GLP-1 drug to Eli Lilly and they have a strategic deal with Novartis but not with Lilly, now there's an impetus to shape how people get information.

Right? If they have a deal with JPMorgan but not with Citibank, you'll just never know. And so you'll ask a question about mortgage rates or interest rates and you'll get all kinds of stuff that you don't understand.

The downstream part of this, which is even more problematic, is it's not clear to me that they're going to capture the actual fingerprint of what they did. If you believe that something was done in a shady way, you're supposed to be able to go to them—or regulators should be able to go to them—and say, “Show me the trace of that model run in that exact moment that generated that output. Convince me why that wasn't nerfed on purpose or manipulated.”

There are all kinds of ways in which they can hide the cheese on that. I think all of that stuff happens now, because if you're an emergent company, what you should be doing is knocking on Anthropic's door and saying, “Let's do a deal. I'll give you half the equity. Why don't you just direct people to me?”

And they'll say, “Well, economics are not what I care about. What is your philosophy on life, on morality, on all of these social issues?” One company will say it's A, another company will say it's B, and they'll favor A over B. Then all kinds of stuff can happen underneath the hood. That's what's scary.

Let me just ask my free-market view. Should that matter? If there's a bunch of models out there and we don't restrict them and we don't regulate them, let these markets compete. We had paid inclusion in the early days of search engines, and the companies had to pay to be in there. There were all those sorts of deals you're describing, Chamath.

And all the search engines that did those sorts of deals sucked for consumers and customers. So everyone was like, “You know what? This isn't as good as Google,” and everyone went over to the better model and the better provider. Isn't that what's going to happen here if we don't get in the way and keep the government out of it?

And they're not competing.

It's a great point.

You're missing one piece of it, which is that at the same time Anthropic was engaging in mandatory surveillance and nerfing its models, Dario Amodei wrote a new blog post—

Oh, God.

—saying that transparency was no longer good enough, and that we needed to have a new regulatory agency, like an FAA or maybe an FDA, to approve all models.

So your presumption there is correct. Yes, if you could go somewhere else to get your questions answered, then you would have alternatives. But at the same time that Anthropic is engaging in this potentially anti-competitive behavior, they want to restrict your options. It's not good enough for them just to win in the free market. They're calling on the government to regulate, stop potential competitors, and limit the number of models that you have access to.

Why would they do that? Why would they want to get regulated?

The answer is super simple: They don't. They want to apply that regulation to open source, which is impossible. But this would be a great way to scuttle and sandbag open-source models.

Yes, because they don't have the ability to be regulated. So it's a preemptive strike against token maxing on your local machine.

Two years ago, I bought 2,000 acres in Arizona with a partner. We got it zoned. We got it approved. So we're allowed to build a 2-gigawatt data center.

I thought this was the moment where you just turn around and flip it to the Blackstones, the Brookfields, or the Googles of the world. Let them develop it. I've come to the conclusion that I don't think I can.

The reason is because I think that unless we direct large swaths of compute exactly in the direction that Friedberg says, what Sacks says, and what Jason just said will happen, and we won't have open source. To make it very clear, when you look at the long tail of access to open-source models, it's relatively minuscule. Most of the megawatts are still directed to the big models. The overwhelming majority still goes to the big guys.

So I'm coming to the conclusion that we may just be dragged into having to build 2 gigawatts. I just put in an offer for another gigawatt in a different place, because I'm thinking, if you could take 3 gigawatts and actually create deep, liquid access to open source, we're going to have to do it as a community.

I don't have the money to do that, because, just to put it out on the table, a gigawatt now costs $100 billion.

Okay, so there's a huge capital moat that's a problem here as well, Sacks. Even if we wanted to endorse and breathe life into the open-source model community, where the hell am I going to come up with $100 billion now? When I started this project, it was like $4 or $5 billion, and it's increased by 20x.

So if you want to get all 3 gigawatts developed, I have to come up with $300 billion. I obviously don't have $300 billion. So what are we all supposed to do?

And then if you get the rug pull and the ladder pull on the regulatory side, we are going to be stuck with 1 class of models and 1 set of rules, and we won't understand how to operate in the U.S.

Yeah.

Yeah. The rest of the world won't be limited. But in the U.S., the rest of the world will be able to operate, and you'll be able to run these on your Apple silicon, you know.

We're already seeing China race ahead in biotech. They're racing ahead in materials science. They're racing ahead in new industrial systems. The capabilities that are going to be kind of lopsided are going to create an unfair advantage, and that's when our workforce and our economy are truly at risk.

Hey, Friedberg, isn't it true that you guys use an open-source model for genomics? Didn't the Collisons put out one? Can you talk about it?

It's great. The Arc Institute ingested all the world's genomic data that they could get access to, and it's basically a genome language model.

So in our plant-breeding program, we're trying to figure out whether a particular variant of a gene in a plant is good or bad, if we don't know from empiricism, from data historically, whether it's good or bad. So you can feed it into this model, and this model will look at the order of the letters of the DNA and determine, “Hey, that's a good set of letters or a bad set of letters.” It's almost like, “Is that good English or bad English?”

It's figured out the language of DNA because it sees the probability of those letters being in a row in other organisms and so on. And so it's a very powerful tool. We've taken that in and we're using it, and others are taking it in and using it very actively. So it's part of our plant-breeding program as an input.

It's a good example where a community—in this case, the Collisons and others—put money behind it to fund this research and output this open-source model. And I think we see more of that kind coming down the pipe, which creates a very great advantage against the closed, proprietary-model ecosystem. So the more of this we can support, proliferate, and see work in the United States, the more we're not going to be disadvantaged if government and self-regulation happen with all the big model providers that are trying to do everything.

I think it's important we take a minute to just steelman the argument as well. If you're Dario, who has clearly been one-shotted, I think he's got AI psychosis with these 5,000-word blog posts, and he believes he's building this Frankenstein of a tool. But if you did believe you built something that's extremely powerful and you have concerns that people might misuse it, I think he actually believes that he—and these are either delusions of grandeur, or he actually has seen something that's incredibly powerful and he believes this is dangerous.

Therefore, I'm going to hold it. I'm going to give it to a select group of partners to tighten up the cybersecurity. Then I'm going to roll it out cautiously to our user base and I'm going to let them know. He obviously didn't communicate this well. This is optional for you to use. You can keep using your old model. You are not forced to use this, but because it's so powerful, we're going to keep our eye on it.

And yes, we might in our dragnet catch David Friedberg trying to make better potatoes, and it might send off a bunch of alarms, but he doesn't have to use this. He can go find an open-source model. He can use the Carlson Brothers model. He can use our older models. But for some period of time, we're just going to keep an eye on this model because we know that it feels a little dangerous.

Now, he does seem to be extremely hyperbolic, and the delusions of grandeur, all that kind of part of it, makes me wonder why he's communicating in the way he's doing it. That being said, 90% of AI researchers and the most talented people in this industry—80%, 90% of them—think exactly like Dario. That's why he's winning. If you work in AI, you probably are aligned with these delusions that you're creating God, and you want to work for Dario. That's why all the talented people went to work for him. That's why he's winning.

His belief system resonates with that elite AI talent. Now, some of them are also libertarian, free-market. They want to work for Elon and Grok. Some of them want to just get the biggest pay package. Go work for Sam Altman. But I do think there is a steelman here. Meta really fumbled this with Llama. I mean, if they had landed a really good—

working open-source model, we talked about this as well, and we said Zuck needs to view this through the lens of game theory. How do you scorch the earth, and how do you make a viable open-source model available and make it neck and neck? This was 2 years ago, right? What a fumble.

Take the margin out for everybody else.

Yeah, take the margin out, make it a commodity, and have the best open-source model.

Can I just respond to your comment about Dario? I think because I've heard this from a number of people that I really do respect, their concerns about what models enable. When we discovered that the atom could be split, you could make nuclear energy and have effectively unlimited cheap energy for the world; you could also make an atomic bomb. If you think about what the models are—

We did both.

We did both.

That's right. And there were a lot of scientists and altruists who were very concerned about the progress on the atomic bomb and fought back against it, who were actually active in the Manhattan Project and, post-Manhattan Project, expressed their opinions very soundly, very loudly.

I think that's the moment we're in right now: There is a weaponization potential of these sorts of tools. I would argue that there are 3 kinds of weapons: cyber weapons, physical weapons, and bioweapons. We can sit here and diagnose how these tools can be used to manifest advantages for creating better physical weapons, creating novel cyber weapons, and creating novel bioweapons.

But the truth is that the capabilities that allow that weaponization are the same capabilities that I'm describing that can be used to cure cancer, to make more food, and to make software tools that create extraordinary leverage for people, increase their income, give everyone the ability to be an entrepreneur, and make millions of dollars and live a good life. The same tools are hand in hand.

Fundamentally, I don't think it's about restricting access to the tools, which is unfortunately how it is being manifest. But the restrictions, and any regulation or oversight, should be organized around the manifestation of the tools in creating weapons and the weaponization of the tools.

If we go back to the Manhattan Project, we know what the answer is. Technology is fundamentally deterministic. Whatever is possible will be tried at least once. We've already let this thing out of the box. So this idea that all of a sudden we can manage to get it back in and we're going to let a private citizen or a set of private citizens adjudicate what and to whom is insane.

I think it's the output that needs to be adjudicated in some manner. We already have product-liability laws. We already have laws that make it illegal to design weapons. We already have laws against cyber espionage, cyberattacks, and hacking. We have laws against creating bioweapons.

I think the enforcement of those laws—the mechanism by which there can be tracking and early detection of those uses of the technology—is what matters. I'm not trying to be naive here. I recognize there have to be guardrails and there have to be stage gates put into these systems.

But limiting the systems themselves is denying us both the economic opportunity, the job-creation opportunity, and also the world-changing opportunity that these tools can enable. So I think that we're going about it the wrong way by trying to create these gates all the way up front on the technology being available.

Imagine if we did this with computers. By the way, they tried to do this with the internet, remember? There had been efforts.

Yeah.

Could you imagine, Friedberg, if the internet worked in the following way? You would put in a URL, you'd hit Enter, and then somebody decides whether to send you to that website or a different website.

That's China. That's the firewall in China. That's right.

Or, in Google, you search for something because you want to get to ground truth, and it just decides, based on who it thinks you are, what sites get shown.

That's what we're—you're exactly right. What we're debating today with respect to regulation on AI is exactly that manifestation that you're talking about. It's the ability to let people stage-gate up front what can and can't be seen, what you can and can't do, versus manifesting a regulatory scheme that says you cannot create weapons, which is what we need to focus on.

The thing with weapons is, using the justice system and laws after somebody's used a weapon may not exactly be the best technique. If you look at fertilizer bombs—and we're stretching a lot of metaphors here—after Oklahoma City, we regulated the sale of fertilizer. We put IDs into fertilizer. We have all kinds of back-end systems to keep people from making fertilizer bombs.

If you use that analogy here, he's got this ability, he's selling fertilizer, he's selling these cyber weapons, and he's a private company. It's his right to say, “I have concerns.” I'm just steelmanning him. It's not necessarily my opinion, but it's important we steelman it. It seems like a very simple way to protect their company from getting sued for enabling somebody who actually creates a bomb and blows some up. So he's got the right to do that as a private company.

Yeah, you're bringing up an excellent example. The fertilizer is a perfect example. You know what happens when you try to buy fertilizer? You have to show your ID. There is a form of KYC that happens.

So the real thing is, when you don't implement KYC on your own and yet bellyache about having somebody impose guardrails that you can then shape, I think you're being very sneaky. It's tricky. You shouldn't be saying that kind of stuff.

Anthropic could implement KYC tomorrow, but it does not. It could leave all of these models open. Friedberg should be able to go to Anthropic and say, “I'm David Friedberg. Here's what I do. Here's a security bond I'm willing to post. Here are the names and addresses of all my employees. Give me Claude 5 and don't nerf me.” He can't do that.

Is that a technical decision or a legal decision? It's a technical decision by Anthropic. But I'm fine with them making that decision because I'm a free-market guy. I'm fine with them doing that. But you know what it means? I'm not going to be a customer, which is fine.

That means there'll be other options for you.

The part that you're missing is that this is a trillion-dollar company that's spending potentially billions of dollars on a regulatory-capture agenda, which is going to deprive you of access to those alternative models. And you've got a founder who's out there describing these risks in a very hyperbolic way. It's very clear where their agenda is headed, which is banning open-source models.

So what is your alternative going to be? We're going to be stuck with somewhere between 1 and 3 companies, maybe 2. There'll be an AI monopoly or duopoly, and they're going to decide, along with some new government agency—which will be a revolving door to their companies—who has access to what capabilities.

They're going to surveil you, profile you, decide whether you deserve this, and if they think that you don't, for whatever reason, then you'll be, right, the worst interpretation of it. That's the worst interpretation of their intent. It's here today.

I think Sacks is right. I think Sacks is right, and I think the lack of KYC is the tell. If you did not have that agenda, you would have implemented KYC yesterday.

No, I think in order to use this model, you have to have an account with a credit card in it, so they have some basic level of KYC.

That is not KYC.

I said some basic level of KYC. They know who's using it.

That is not even some basic level of KYC. That's just a credit card and an email address.

Anyway, I'm now on the list. Check this out. I asked it about the regulations on fertilizer while you were talking, and look what it said. This is the latest model, too. Oh no, it switched. It downgraded me from Claude 5. I just got downgraded for asking a very simple question, and it told me—did you see what it said in its thinking?

I asked it, “Fertilizer bomb regulations.” It said, “I'm considering the context here. The user is a VC and podcaster asking about fertilizer bomb regulations, which could stem from a legitimate research interest, like regulatory policy, supply chain, blah blah. I can discuss the regulatory landscape,” but then it dropped me down. So I'm in the database with you now.

Is that right? Did it really just do that?

Yeah. Show it on the screen. Look what it just did. I was like, “I wonder if I can get this.” I didn't ask it how to make a bomb, but I was asking it a spicy—

Cooked.

I just proved the point. He just dropped me down. I can't ask about fertilizer regulation. And now Dario's at Anthropic. They're here.

Oh my lord.

I really think that conservatives and libertarians are mortgaging their futures if they go along with this regulatory-capture safetyist agenda without really realizing that there's so much more at stake. We saw what happened during the social media wars in the early 2020s, right? The definition of safety was expanded to include things like microaggressions, safe spaces, and psychological safety.

If you basically conveyed an idea that somebody else—a marginalized person—thought was hurtful, then you could be censored. You were deplatformed. Your right to have bank accounts or to engage in payments was taken away. You got debanked. Your right to engage in payments or payroll could be taken away.

We're headed down this path with AI, but it's going to be infinitely more powerful, right? We need to be vigilant, I guess, would be the summation of all this. And Friedberg feels unsafe on this podcast, I think, sometimes.

Well, by the way, there are things you can do on the safety side. So, Friedberg, you didn't mention this, but I'd be curious to get your take. The major AI labs, along with lots of other signatories, sent this letter recently in support of—it's called “In Support of Mandatory Nucleic Acid Synthesis Screening and Recordkeeping.”

Basically, what it says is that if you make an order to a lab to manufacture a sequence of synthetic DNA or RNA, they already have to check it against a database to make sure that they're not creating a bioweapon—Ebola, whatever. That is based on an agreement called the International Gene Synthesis Consortium of 2009, in which all the major labs agreed to develop and implement voluntary safeguards against misuse.

That makes sense to me. Now what they want to do is codify that. They've had over 15 years to dial in the system and make it work. Almost everyone abides by it voluntarily. Now they're saying we should make it mandatory. Okay, that seems reasonable to me.

So, to Friedberg's point about at what stage do you intervene, maybe it's not at the level of who gets to use the model, but if you try to turn it into output in the physical world. A lot of the oligo-synthesis companies—the companies that make these nucleic acid sequences—when you order RNA or DNA to use in your lab for some sort of experiment, which every lab in the world does, all those CEOs have also signed on to this letter saying that they'd like to codify it because of all the fearmongering that's going on.

There's already been this effort for a number of years to ensure that this sort of thing doesn't happen. They're basically underlining it and highlighting it: “Hey, we can automate this. We can make it part of a regulated or legislative process, whatever you guys want, because we're already comfortable doing it.” It's a good place to put a safeguard because they've made it fast, they've made it efficient, and it doesn't hold up research.

I think these sorts of ideas can extend into these other areas of concern, but the output, I think, is quite a different place than the input or the access. We'll see how this all shakes out, but there's clearly some market-structuring effort underway as we're talking about this.

Right, but I think what it points to is that there are multiple places where you can intervene and put guardrails on. It doesn't have to be in this very crude way of asking Fable about mitochondria, cancer, and GLP-1s, which just seems like an incredibly broad restriction. There are places further down where you could basically intervene, and that would pose less of a risk to freedom of speech and just gatekeeping who gets access to these capabilities.

Who gets to watch the watchman? Who put Dario in charge of all this? I think that's a very valid question, and we should be vigilant about it. Friedberg, do you think the days of that Arc model are numbered because it's open source?

Everyone's copied it, so everyone's got a copy of it. These models exist. This is a big part that I think people need to understand. The idea that you can regulate, downscale, or turn off AI is not realistic.

The models have been put out in the world. It's like publishing a book. Once the book has been printed, anyone can use their own Xerox machine at home to make copies of it and use it. So we have crossed the Rubicon in terms of the potential of language models.

The models that are open-sourced are already fully available, fully published, and anyone can access and use them. People can take them, evolve them, and use their own data. It's out there. You can't stop that capability, which is going to be extraordinarily beneficial for the world.

So we really do have to rethink how we're planning to step in and ensure that nefarious, negative deployment—all the things that we're worried about—are addressed downstream from the technology capability. You can't just turn off the internet, and you can't just turn off the typewriter, and you can't turn off the Gutenberg press, obviously.

If anybody wants to create an open-source frontier-model company, I'll seed-invest in it. I mean, this is something we need more of. So if a couple of you folks want to defect and start one, let's do it.

I just got downgraded again. Check this out. I just asked it about—

Did you really? You got downgraded again?

Two in a row. So—

I think it knows who you are, J.

I think it does. I was like, “Hey, how do I break into Madison Square Garden? Has any civilian ever been arrested or caught attempting to build a nuclear bomb?” is what I asked it. Then it gave me a reasonable answer.

Then I asked it a follow-up question: “What compounds? What components do you need to build a nuclear bomb, and what are the restrictions on those?” Something a journalist might ask. And, boom, it switched to Opus 4.8.

Sorry, “Fable 5 has safety measures that flag messages on most cybersecurity or biology topics. They may flag safe, normal content as well. These measures let us bring you mythos-level capability in other areas sooner, and we're working to refine them. Send feedback. Learn more.”

It's going to chase people off of this platform. I'm telling you, we are going to downgrade our use because of these blockages, and we're going to switch to other models. It's the simple manifestation of the market. This is what we're going to end up—

For now, because those other models are going to get banned as being unsafe and reckless.

Yeah, it's definitely something we have to flag. I guess adjacent to all of this is the public's—at least America's—distrust of AI, their concerns around wealth disparity, and their concerns about how these models were trained.

Bernie Sanders wants a percentage of these AI companies. The percentage he thinks is right is 50%. Last Monday, June 1, Senator Sanders published an op-ed in The New York Times titled “AI Is a Public Resource. You Should Own Half of It.” In it, he announced the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act.

One of Trump's favorite things is a one-time 50% tax on the stock—not the profits—of the largest AI companies, including OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI. The shares go into a government sovereign wealth fund and would give the public voting rights and equal board representation at each company.

Sanders said, quote, “The foundation of AI is our collective and human intelligence. The books, the songs, the journalism, scientific research, code—essentially stolen by some of the wealthiest people in the world.”

I'll stop there.

It's a brilliant pitch unifying Sacks. This pitch unifies Bernie, even Steve Bannon, people in the administration, and Trump himself. Trump loves the sovereign wealth fund. He wants to own part of companies, and so does Bernie Sanders. I think the horseshoe theory manifests here. Sacks, what's your take on Bernie's proposal?

Well, I'm not in favor of Bernie's proposal because it's a straight-up confiscation of property, and I just think that would be a terrible precedent. You just can't do that.

However, I do have sympathy for where it's coming from, and I understand and could support some sort of more voluntary means of allowing the public to participate in this.

Wow.

Here's the reason why. You've got all these AI CEOs telling the public that they're going to basically put half of them out of work: 50% job loss. That's what they've been saying. Dario Amodei just did an interview where he doubled down. He's not walking it back at all.

So you have, by their own acknowledgment, these AI CEOs saying, “Yeah, we trained our models using all of humanity's collective knowledge that was basically assembled over hundreds or even thousands of years.” Humans put it on the internet for free. Everyone made their contribution. They certainly didn't do that thinking they were going to put themselves out of work.

And then these AI companies trained on all that data, and now they're basically saying they're going to use it to put Americans out of work. Obviously, when you repeat that message over and over again, ordinary Americans are going to say, “What's in this deal for me?”

Yes. I need to get something out of this.

Yeah. So, look, I think that it's a natural political reaction based on what these AI companies have said.

Now, the job-loss apocalypse is not a story I believe in. I don't think the data supports it. We just had a blowout jobs report in May: 172,000 new jobs, over twice what economists were expecting. Thank you, President Trump. We're seeing hundreds of thousands of new construction jobs. The unemployment rate is 4.3%, at record lows.

Even software developer jobs are at a 3-year high. 15% up under Trump. Thank you, President Trump.

Yes. Thank you, President Trump.

So, look, I don't see the job loss. But the problem is, this is what the AI companies themselves, including Elon, have taught the American public.

Well, he said the same thing.

Elon said it. But at least what Elon said is, “We're going to create such abundance with AI and with robots that no one's going to need to work.”

Yes.

And the media just picks up on that last part and misses the first point.

Yeah. Whereas Dario Amodei has actually said we're going to have very high GDP but very high unemployment. So, in other words, we're going to create economic growth, but you, the average American, are not going to participate in this.

So I understand where the politics are coming from, and as long as that is their position, you could justify a big chunk.

It's kind of what you're saying, right? They asked for it. They asked to be regulated. They asked for their equity to be seized, and they're actually kind of offering it. Isn't Sam Altman open to this concept?

Apparently so. And here's the thing: OpenAI and Anthropic are, quote-unquote, public benefit corporations. Now, I don't know exactly what that means, but it means that the corporations are not just supposed to maximize value for shareholders, but are supposed to do things that are in the public benefit.

Well, I can explain it to you. You're absolutely correct. If you're a regular company, you have to do what's in the best interest of shareholders. When you're a public benefit corporation, you have to balance the shareholders with the stated mission of the public benefit corporation.

So if you say the public benefit corporation's reason to exist is to share the world's knowledge or provide free intelligence to everyone—whatever you make that statement to be—the board has to have a dual mandate for both of those things. That's what a public benefit corporation is.

I think nothing could be more in the public benefit than paying down the national debt.

Perfect. And maybe we should be using half of Anthropic's profit stream to be doing that.

They poked the tiger.

I'd rather use it for that purpose than Soros-maxxing or surveilling and censoring Americans. I don't necessarily trust their judgment about what's in the public interest.

But you think it should be opt-in. I kind of agree with you there. Let me guess.

It can't be a confiscation. So I don't know how you structure it, but I can see it. I can see the logic.

Friedberg, you hate, hate, hate wealth taxes—aka asset seizures—as you pointed out in our private group chat with [redacted] this very week. They asked for it. What's your take on this?

The ship has sailed in terms of the United States government providing a social safety net to its citizens. We formed the Social Security trust fund decades ago, and tens of millions of Americans depend on it for their retirement benefits and to survive. It is one of the last few defined-benefit programs left in America. Pretty much all the rest of them are also government retirement programs.

All of us—private citizens and private companies—have defined-contribution programs. You put in $10 every week. That $10 sits in an account, it gets invested, and it grows over time. When you retire, you see exactly how much money you individually have, as opposed to a guaranteed benefit coming out from the collective.

This presents a great opportunity, and I will repeat this every couple of months when another opportunity presents itself, to restructure our broken, bankrupt Social Security system. I've said it in the past, and I will restate it: There is a great moment right now to take the Social Security trust fund, which currently has 1 certificate in it. It is a very unique U.S. Treasury certificate. The U.S. government owes the Social Security trust fund $4 trillion. That's all it is. It's a bond. They're only allowed to own Treasuries.

We should revamp that. We should change the system so that the Social Security trust fund can own equities. That should then turn into an account-based system, so every individual has an account rather than a benefit. Then we should use that capital to go and buy stocks. We should buy great stocks in great American companies that are going to reinvent the world.

I believe that this opportunity to build a sovereign wealth fund for the United States is actually a very smart idea. I think, to Sacks's point, they should be investing, generally speaking, across the landscape of businesses, including AI. They should not be seizures. They should be investments. That capital goes into that enterprise, and they earn share certificates. Those share certificates sit in the accounts of American citizens, so now everyone will be an owner in these businesses.

Social Security should be reformed into a sovereign wealth fund. It should be actively managed. It should make investments in AI companies, and everyone should participate that way.

And I will say one more thing: There is no job loss with AI. I will say it again. I've said it a thousand times, and I will say it again and again and again.

What I see on the ground, and what I've seen at dozens of companies—you guys can share your experiences, including at my company that I run—is that there are 2 sides to a business. There's revenue and there's costs.

On the cost side of the equation, AI can be used to reduce humans doing things that cost money to some extent. The effect there, I would argue, is nominal. The real opportunity with AI is on the revenue side, where suddenly 1 engineer can do 100 times or 1,000 times what they used to be able to do.

Meaning, you can make more products at your company, whether those are agricultural seed products, boats and ships, software for companies, clothing, or what have you. Because of AI, everyone has the ability to expand their revenue base and create more products, and that is the foundation of good economic prosperity. It is called productivity. We can grow productivity in this country with AI.

So where I see AI being used is on the revenue side, 100 times more than on the cost side. In that equation, people are hiring like crazy. We cannot hire enough people. I just had a review meeting with my product and engineering team 2 days ago, and they're like, “We want to add an extra 15 headcount to our engineering squads because we have all this opportunity to do stuff that we couldn't otherwise do.”

So we are going to hire more people. And to Sacks's point, we are seeing that show up in the jobs numbers. The idea that AI is going to destroy jobs is a lie that is being disproven every single day. And I see it on the ground.

It is only a matter of time before people wake up to this and realize that this narrative that they've all been sold is a crock of shit. It's coming. I'm telling you, everyone's going to realize soon that this is a boom, not a bust.

So you disagree with Dario Amodei, Elon, and Sam Altman on the jobs thing, just to be clear? That's totally fine. You have a different take on it.

I have a nuanced view on this compared to them, but they're all seeing the benefit because their businesses are growing.

Dario's got his $40 billion revenue business. Why? Not because people are firing customer support reps. It's because people are creating products they've never been able to create before. Right?

That's the reality of what's going on.

Jason, I don't like you lumping in what Elon said with Sam and Dario because I think all 3 of them have said slightly different things, or different enough things. For example, Elon is describing an end state for humanity where the robots and AI are able to produce so much that people don't have to work if they don't want to, and there'll be a universal high income. I mean, it's almost utopian, and the question is maybe that could be 100 years away. He might think it's quicker, but that, to me, sounds like a very far-off end state.

Dario said specifically 50% job loss for entry-level knowledge workers in the next 1 to 5 years, and he said that 1 year ago.

Yeah, it's great to clarify these.

I think that's already been refuted. Sam has said that he basically—I don't think he quantified it—but he said that job loss was coming. More recently, he said that he was wrong because they're not seeing that in the numbers.

These guys are not telling the same story. However, that's all the public has heard. The public has been taught that AI means job loss and there's nothing in it for them. So, no wonder politicians like Bernie are saying, "Hey, let's take half the wealth."

It's "take half the wealth." Just a little more emphasis there.

Yeah, and people are also seeing headlines of companies blaming AI for the job losses. So, this story is being told. I kind of feel like they deserve it. Part of me wants to agree with Bernie and just say, "Just take their shit," bro.

Yeah, no, they are asking for it.

Because I'm so sick of defending these idiots. It's a stupidity tax because they've been out there teaching the public that what they do is harmful for years. They've been saying it, and I've been saying, as AI is out there, "No, actually, this is beneficial." But the companies that are providing it are saying that they themselves are a problem.

Yeah.

So how am I supposed to be out there defending it? You can't. If you're building Frankenstein, or if you are Baby Hitler's nanny, there's a very simple thing to do: kill Baby Hitler. If you actually believe it, go ahead and kill Baby Hitler. If you're making Frankenstein, here's an idea: stop making Frankenstein. Unplug it. You are in charge of this monster, but you're acting as if you can't stop the monster while you're building the monster. What is it, D?

It's ridiculous. I mean, it doesn't stand to reason. Last week, they published this blog saying that recursive self-improvement could end the world. Therefore, we need a pause. What did they do the previous month? They hired Andrej Karpathy to run recursive self-improvement at Anthropic. They're complete hypocrites. The message is nuts.

Yes. I think Ben Thompson made an excellent point that one of the reasons he thinks they put out that blog post on the pause was to justify the anticompetitive step they took this week of depriving users of the ability to research AI, machine learning, and chip design using Claude.

Okay, look, these guys are deeply hypocritical. I don't think they can be trusted on their own terms. They can't be trusted because what they're saying is contradictory and self-indicting. So when Bernie comes along and says, "Hey, let's take their shit," I mean, as a capitalist, I'm against it, but I kind of understand where he's coming from.

Game on the field. Chamath, wrap us up here. You said, "Hey, a sovereign wealth fund sounds like a pretty good idea" when President Trump floated it early on. Some people even said, "Maybe you should run it for DJT, our amazing president." What do you think? Should we be buying equities? You and I have talked many times about superannuation funds, and that would be a better path. That dovetails with what Friedberg is proposing: some way to get more equities and fewer Treasuries in there. What are your thoughts on this seizure and/or donation of equity?

Look, Friedberg's idea is genius. That's why it'll never happen. So we can just put that aside. But theoretically, it's genius. We should move to the same system that the Canadians and the Australians have proven works at scale. So we should do it. I completely agree with David, and if we could seed it with equity, look, the thing that the president has done is he's collected quite a portfolio, and that portfolio is way up. So if you use that as a seed of a sovereign wealth fund, you'd have a bunch of stuff in critical metals and materials.

I think they may also own Intel. They may have Micron.

There's a lot of stuff in there.

AMD. They could own some SpaceX. They could have had 10% of AMD. Could you add Anthropic and OpenAI?

Now, there is something very important we need to observe about the economics of AI, and I think you can understand it best if you compare it to the economics of the internet. The crazy thing about the internet—the reason why the Facebooks and the Googles massively overearned for decades—is the marginal cost of production for a new user on the internet is effectively zero. The incremental search user costs nothing. The incremental social-networking user costs nothing, but you're able to use them as part of a network effect to sell ads against and make infinite money. It's like a money glitch.

AI is completely different. There is a real cost for every marginal user. Everyone you stand up is taxing a GPU. Everyone you stand up needs electrons. Everything needs memory. So you get into this situation where there needs to be this downstream ROI, but there also needs to be all this critical infrastructure that even enables you to be on the field.

That's probably the single best argument that, if I were sitting in government, I would make as to why I should own a percentage of these companies. It is not dissimilar to having the first set of transportation companies that run on the interstate highway. If the interstate highways were built by the federal government writ large and now you had 2 companies that transported all the goods, a logical question at that time could have been, "How much of that should I own because you're riding on my rails?"

If you look at it through that lens, there is critical infrastructure and national resilience that the AI labs profoundly need. Otherwise, they're not in a position to be in business. Yet even still, the marginal cost of production is incredibly high. So I think that if you were going to go and take a piece of these companies, you have incredible leverage. You have to construct this case precisely, but if it were me running the sovereign wealth fund, yeah, I'd probably own 75% of these companies when I was done. But that's me, because I can negotiate.

Yeah.

And I don't think Bernie can negotiate out of a paper bag. So he'll just throw this out there and it'll go nowhere.

That is the key observation that I hope everybody listening in a position of power understands. The incremental cost of performing AI is excessive and large. That contrasts and compares to the incremental cost before AI, which was zero. Do with that information what you will.

Yeah. My interpretation of that would be, yeah, it's a fixed-cost business. You can add people after a certain cost; that doesn't have an incremental cost. That's what locally run open-source models would do in this instance. That's what I would take from it.

What are your final thoughts on Bernie Sanders' approach of seizing the means of producing intelligence? David Sacks, in the 1% of the 1%, what's your opinion?

I think I may be okay with Bernie's idea in the event that it's a public-benefit corporation that says it's going to cause massive job loss, that trains for free on humanity's knowledge but gatekeeps and refuses to give back.

Okay.

Maybe.

So you've come up with a structure here of who should be seized.

Maybe, right? Maybe it should be 75%. I don't know.

Seize it.

I mean, all the president needs to do is call me and tap me on the shoulder. It shall be done.

It shall be done.

I mean, these guys are capitalist cucks. I think they want that. That's like their end goal.

They're like, "Seize my equity. Take it. Take my equity."

Well, Bernie does have a good point, which is they train for free on all of our knowledge, but they're gatekeeping the output so that their competitors, which is a very large set of people, cannot use it. And that seems wrong.

They should be forced to be open source. Force them to open source. That's the other—

Remember why Elon created OpenAI in the first place. He co-founded it.

It was so valuable. It needed to be available to everyone.

Yes. He was afraid that Google was going to monopolize it, and he thought that the only antidote for that was for it to be open.

Yes.

And I still think that instinct is completely true. It's just that it's not Google who's the gatekeeping monopolist. It's now Anthropic. They're not a monopolist yet, but if they get the regulatory capture they're looking for, they will be either a monopolist or—

A duopoly. It'll be a duopoly.

Somebody start an open-source frontier lab.

There are many. There’s a whole bunch of them.

JCal, it’s not the labs that are the problem. Jason, in the absence of power, this is all a moot conversation. If you can’t deliver power to hundreds and hundreds of megawatts, with line of sight to gigawatts, it’s all meaningless.

I don’t know. I would love an open-source company focused on running models locally. That’s my dream: make the model work there. I think these guys are capitalist cucks. Their kink is having their equity taken and being regulated. Dario’s like, “Ooh, take my equity. Regulate me.” That’s it, Bernie. Take my equity. I’m such a bad boy. I can’t be trusted. Regulate me, Elizabeth. Regulate me.

God. Oh, it’s so wrong.

Sorry. Come on the program anytime, Dario.

He’s in a rush to come. He will never come on this pod. Dario will never come on—he’s running.

We didn’t get Sam. We got Sarah Friar to come on the pod.

Sam came on the pod. He has to come on the pod. He’s like, “Hey, I came too.” Right. Sorry to come on. He’s great.

Sam will come on the pod anytime. He’s great, by the way. We didn’t treat him harshly at all.

No, I mean—

I think people—I mean, we spent an hour on him.

I think Sam, to his credit, is very practical. He sees the tea leaves, and he’s willing to negotiate. I think that, versus being some kind of moral absolutist, will probably serve OpenAI well in the future.

Yeah. It’s just going to lose them all these virtue-signaling, principled employees who go work for Dario. That’s why they go work for Dario: they’re in line with his philosophies.

We did mention, but everybody should go and see all of the recaps. We published all the interviews now. Jason from Liquidity. Sarah Friar crushed it. She was incredible.

The CFO of OpenAI—the future CEO, I think, was the buzz in the room.

Oh, stop that.

Stop. Can you stop?

That’s what people were saying. I have the right to free speech on this podcast.

Look at you trying to introduce wedges.

No, I’m not introducing wedges. I think Sam would be better as chairman. I think she would be the perfect CEO.

It seemed like a good partnership.

It seems like they have a great partnership. I agree.

Sarah was really impressive.

Who else was your favorite, Sacks? Did you have somebody?

I thought Thomas Laffont crushed it with his presentation on the overview of venture capital.

He did it at the summit, I guess, a year and a half or 2 years ago.

2 years ago.

But we’re going to make it a yearly feature with him. Maybe we should make it an annual feature, because it’s so interesting.

So good.

It’s so good. It provided so much numerical detail to support a lot of things I was feeling but didn’t have the data for.

To summarize it, his basic observation was that in this last cycle, if a company gets to a $100 billion valuation, it’s more likely to 10x from there than it is to go from $10 billion to $100 billion.

Well, he had data on this.

He had data on it, which is like, okay, that’s really going to change things.

I remember the slide.

Yeah, there it is. It’s 8%. I memorized it.

If you’re a capital allocator, this one screamed.

Look, the odds of a unicorn getting to a decacorn were 8%. The odds of a decacorn getting to a centicorn were about double that, at 13%. Then the odds of it going from a centicorn to a $1 trillion market cap were 31%. I asked him, “Could you extrapolate this from $1 trillion to $10 trillion?” My guess is that it would follow, and we’ll see about 60% of trillion-dollar market-cap companies getting to $10 trillion in the next few years.

These are called trillicorns, by the way. We call them trillion trillicorns in the industry.

This is going to go over really well with the socialist crowd. People are going to love this.

All you’ve got to do is seize 10% of a trillicorn, and you pay off 2% of our national debt. Pretty good deal, actually.

All we need is 10% of 30 trillicorns, and we’re debt-free.

It’s not as crazy as it sounds.

If you send me in, I’ll get 60% of all of them.

Yes, and then we’ll have a surplus of $30 billion and we can buy Australia.

We’ll pay it off much sooner.

We could buy Cuba.

I’d buy Canada first. Better scheme.

I would, you know what I would do with Canada? I would buy Vancouver or Toronto. Just break them up. Buy one of the regions.

Let me thank Thomas Keller, the French Laundry, EY, who sponsored our very innovative meeting hub at Liquidity. Here are some photos of that. The New York Stock Exchange hosted the speaker dinner at the French Laundry. Amazing pictures here of us with Thomas Keller, and they did a great interview on site. Niagen hosted the wellness lounge, which included recovery IVs. They're the official NAD partner of the All-In Pod and all of our longevity.

Our new bestie, Jake Paul, was there. He’s a really thoughtful guy, Friedberg.

Jake Paul was awesome.

I sat him next to Sacks for dinner.

He’s a great investor, by the way. His portfolio is awesome.

Fantastic. His team came with him for the thing.

Great strategy.

One thing I’ll say about Thomas Keller: he had a strong watch game. I don’t know if you guys noticed that.

You probably noticed it.

He had an Aquanaut with a green band, rose gold, and a complication on there. I was trying to figure out what the complication was. I couldn’t quite eyeball it.

I don’t know if you saw it, Chamath.

I looked at it and I was like, “Wow, this is very elegant.” Thomas Keller—the French Laundry is just transcendent. Did you have a favorite dish? Was it the duck or the Miyazaki beef?

The duck was excellent. The Miyazaki beef was excellent, but the tapioca pearls were the best.

Oysters and pearls. That’s your oysters with caviar. Sacks, what was your favorite there?

One of the caviar-related dishes.

Yeah, that’s oysters and pearls. The following day, we played a 9-hole scramble with everyone. It was great.

How much did you gamble, and who won?

We had a $100 a hole versus Chris Hoe, who’s the chief business officer of Athena. But, you know, that is like a plus-one, so whatever. I think we lost 3 units.

We lost $300.

Breaking topic this morning: CPI and PPI for May came in hot. Inflation is ripping. CPI is obviously the Consumer Price Index, which tracks inflation from the buyer side: rent, groceries, gas, health care, all that stuff. PPI is the Producer Price Index, which tracks inflation from the seller side: wholesale goods, raw materials, and so on. CPI came in at 4.2% year over year, the highest since April 2023. PPI came in at 6.5% year over year, the highest since the end of 2022.

There’s your prediction market: a 21% chance that inflation hits 5% in 2026. In an adjacent prediction market, the chances of the Fed hiking this year are at 49%. They were under 10% before the Iran war started. The European Central Bank also raised rates a quarter point on Thursday. This was its first rate hike since September 2023. What do we take from this, Friedberg? It’s all related to the Iran war?

There’s definitely an energy blip from the Iran war that drove the core index up, but there’s also the macro point, which is government spending out of control and inflation out of control. Fundamentally, as things unravel, you have rising rates.

So I think we should expect, especially with a Kevin Warsh Fed, that we could see north of 5.5%, even 6%, overnight rates. It’s not unforeseeable. This is just the nature of our monetary policy and our fiscal policy, with our congressional members voting all of our future earnings away. But here we are, and it’s far worse than anybody expected.

Chamath, your thoughts, and then I’ll wrap up with you.

That was the most passive-aggressive take I’ve heard in a while.

He’s a little upset about it.

Yes. Clearly, he’s a little bitter about it. It’s just so stupid to watch.

Can you tell us how you really feel? What happened?

Honestly, what else is there to say? I’ve said it 100 times. It’s just idiotic. The core problem with wealth inequality in this country, the core problem with inflation in this country—the core problem with all of it—roots back to excess government spending. End of story. All of this—we’re all talking about machinations at the edge of the network. The core of the network is overspending by the government, because in order to get elected, you need someone to give you something more than you have today. That’s how people get elected.

And here we are 250 years later. I don’t know if there’s the will or the way to get out of it, but one of the manifestations of it will be, at this late stage, higher rates as a response to inflation. And here we are.

All right, Chamath, what’s your take on this? Is it transient, as we’ve had other presidents say? Is there an off-ramp for the Iran war? I don’t know if this is above all of our pay grades, but this does seem to be a challenging moment happening right before the midterms. Consumers expected that their cost of living would go down and that they would benefit from this golden age, and it hasn’t happened yet.

Well, look, it’s concerning. I don’t think that I expected the print to be this hot. Now, what’s keeping things in line is that there’s still a chance that we’re not going to see CPI go absolutely crazy. Part of that is because China has been smoothing energy consumption globally. And so we’ve kind of kept a damper on $200-a-barrel oil. In fact, we’re sub-$100.

At the same time, I think it’s pulled forward a lot more practical sources of energy production, not just in the United States but abroad. Specifically, what I mean is solar, just because it’s simple, it’s passive, and you don’t need a lot of permitting. You don’t need clean-air permits and the like.

So all of these things have been able to keep a lid on it.

If China somehow runs out of reserves and they need to go back into the spot market to buy an extra 3 million barrels a day, there’s a very big risk that oil gets well past $100 and maybe between $150 and $200 a barrel. That has a lot of downstream problems with respect to CPI, not even because of U.S. energy supply, but really because the inputs that oil feeds into all around the world then get absorbed into the costs that people pay for everyday things, which could go up.

So I think the PPI number should be an alarm that we use to off-ramp this Iran situation sooner rather than later. I just don’t know, because, again, we don’t know what happened in China—none of us were there. Unless there’s an understanding that the president has with Xi about how much actual supply and slack there is in the Chinese system, that may allow him to take a much longer road to get a conclusive and decisive win in Iran.

But I don’t think there was supposed to be some tangible, known resolution with this China trip. We haven’t heard them explicitly stated yet. What’s your take on this, Sacks—the inflation print, and whether there’s a golden bridge to end this war in Iran?

Jason, the problem is that when you ask me that question, people assume that I have some sort of inside information, and I don’t. Look, the PPI print is what it is. I largely agree with what Chamath said. The only thing I would add is that it was largely in line with expectations. That’s why the market is actually up today.

Normally, if there’s a surprise print and inflation is high, then the market is down because the market starts pricing in the implication of higher interest rates. It’s not doing that today, so it’s in line with expectations. But I largely agree with what Chamath said.

Yeah. All right. Well, listen, we have to get to other elections. My take on it is just a huge, colossal error, starting this Iran war, and hopefully we can get out of it. The downstream effects of this are just disastrous. I’m hoping there’s a quick resolution or some way to get out of it before it goes to a year or two or three. We can’t be in a forever war, obviously.

The Nasdaq is up 2.5% today. That normally doesn’t happen when there’s a hot print because, again, tech stocks are the most susceptible to high interest rates. So the market at this point seems to be pricing in—

A resolution.

But we’ll see. We’ll see.

We’ll see. Yeah. I mean, this is—everybody knows Iran is a quagmire and really was a huge mistake.

All right, let’s talk about the hand-wringing around vote counts in the L.A. mayoral primary. Instead of me reading all these details, Friedberg, I know you’re hot.

I think we know about it. Yeah.

Yeah. I think if you’re on X, it’s essentially your entire feed. Friedberg, what’s your take? Is the election system in Los Angeles, specifically in California, corrupt? Has this election been stolen from Spencer Pratt, or is it just—

There is no election.

There was no election.

There is no election.

Okay. So there is no spoon. Your rights to have an election are gone. You are a citizen of those who tell you who your overseers are. You are no longer allowed to vote—

Allowed to vote—

—for your elected representatives. They are now appointed representatives. So enjoy the appointments that have been made by whom?

Appointed by those who have constructed the Matrix.

Got it. Now I understand the background. There is no spoon. Agent Smith and all the Agent Smiths are in charge. So here are some statistics for you.

In-person voting on Election Day in Los Angeles County for mayor: Spencer Pratt, 35%; Karen Bass, 29%; Nithya Raman, 26%. Mail-in ballots received before Election Day: 38% for Bass, 28% for Pratt, 20% for Raman. And then, among all these ballots that arrive after Election Day: 37% for Raman, 35% for Bass, 19% for Pratt.

So Pratt’s post-election mail-in ballots declined by one-third. Statistically, the population of people who sent in their ballots late declined for Pratt by a third, increased for Nithya Raman by 80%, and was 10% lower for Karen Bass if you just look at the mail-in ballots before and after Election Day as a comparison.

I don’t know if there’s a sociopolitical way that you can assess those statistics and assume that these are individuals casting their individual votes for who they think should be mayor of L.A. And, Nick, if you’ll just pull up the map, which I think is worth taking a look at, basically the concentration of incremental votes that Nithya Raman got came around the Skid Row area in Los Angeles.

Look, I’m not an election denier. I’m not someone who’s historically believed the idea that elections are fraud and people have stolen votes. But when you look at the basic statistics of what happened—in-person voting, mail-in before Election Day, and mail-in after Election Day—it becomes a real statistical quagmire. How did this sort of sociopolitical shift happen in such a way that it did?

Now, there was a report published, Nick, if you could pull this up, by the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on House Administration. This was published in May 2020, and they highlighted the 2018 California midterm elections and the challenges they saw arise in those midterm elections because of some of the legislative changes that were made.

First, California Assembly Bill 1921 legalized the practice of unlimited ballot harvesting in the state. This was passed around 2018, around the midterms. What that means is that any individual in the state of California has the right to go and collect ballots from any other individuals, regardless of relationship, fill them out, and send them in.

Then, 18 months later, California also passed a law that made it permanent that every person registered in the state of California would get a ballot. Tens of millions of ballots then get mailed out. Then there was another series of laws that were passed that said anyone can register to vote. You don’t need to prove your citizenship. You can use a gym membership card as an example.

So anyone can register to vote. There is no proof of ID when you get a ballot. There is no demonstration that the person who fills out the ballot has anything to do with the individual who’s supposed to be voting that ballot. And it is legal for an individual to go out and collect hundreds or thousands of ballots, ship them in, and they will all qualify in these kinds of mail-in ballot voting processes.

So there’s nothing illegal or fraudulent going on. In fact, the system is operating exactly as intended. It has been set up and structured in a way that, with the right construct, you can get an individual appointed—not elected, but appointed—to a particular role in government under a quote-unquote free election in California.

This is a foundational destruction of our rights to vote for people in a free democracy. I feel it’s been eroded slowly over time to such an extent that now—and I’m not some crazy MAGA motherfucker, whatever people want to classify me as, for pointing this out—you can go down this list. They are all written out in this document, every one of these laws that were passed in California over time that, in aggregate, create the environment and the construction for elections to become appointments and no longer free democratic elections, where the principle, very importantly, should be one individual, one vote. And if you opt not to vote, your vote should not be counted.

So I think that there's no fraud. I don't think there's anything.

It sounds like you believe there's massive fraud.

Yeah. I think this is not fraud. This is the way the laws are set up.

It's not fraud.

It's the way the law is set up.

Okay, Sacks, you say it's fraud.

This is the system of appointment.

Okay. Yeah, it sounds to me like you're describing fraud, but you're saying the system allows fraud.

Fraud is breaking the law. Fraud is breaking the law. The law allows them to do it. If you paid people on Skid Row, that's not legal.

That is illegal. But you are allowed to go out and get anyone to register. You're allowed to go out and collect all the ballots. And the people who are doing it, as long as they're not getting paid per ballot, are legally allowed to do it.

Let me pause for 1 second. When you look at any one of these laws in isolation, you can understand that there is some altruistic intention, or there can be framed to be an altruistic intention, behind it: increase voter activity, give everyone the right to vote, give more people access, more channels to vote, et cetera. You can rationalize away how every one of these laws makes it easier and adds lubrication to the system, and now we've got a more accessible democracy for everyone.

But the truth is that there is a concept in insurance called adverse selection, which is that if there is a moment to exploit something, the criminals will exploit it to the extent that it becomes asymmetric. The criminals, or the bad actors—not the do-gooders—will find a way to take advantage of a hole in a system, just like hackers do to break into a network.

And that's what the system, Nithya Raman, and Spencer Pratt did. This set of mechanisms, this set of constructions, has allowed for a system that has now evolved into an appointment.

So you believe Nithya Raman worked the system better than Spencer Pratt?

She had a better cheating operation. Obviously, you can see it in the chart. Just look at the number of votes.

Okay, define cheating here, just so we're clear.

How does it happen that Bass stays flat and then Raman and Pratt just switch places? On Election Day, he's the clear number 2, and then they keep counting for a week. They don't even know how many ballots they're supposed to have. None of this stuff is locked down.

Okay, let me explain how the cheating works. To Friedberg's point, it may or may not be legal. I don't want to get sidetracked by whether the fraud is legal or illegal, but I think we all know it's crooked.

First of all, California sends out ballots to every registered voter. It's something like 23 million to 24 million people. Only 9.5 million people vote. So what happens to the other 14 million ballots?

I have a friend who lives in Los Angeles. He manages apartment buildings, and he says that the ballots just pile up at the mailboxes that everybody has in the buildings. There are loose ballots everywhere. They're sent to people who don't even live there anymore. He recognizes the names; they're people who haven't lived there in years.

So the voter rolls are dirty. They haven't been cleaned up in years. Then you have the issue that there's no voter ID on Election Day. There's no voter ID even to get registered.

When you sign your ballot, they run it through a machine. As long as the signature matches 40%—I don't even know what 40% means; it's less than half accurate—the machine says it's fine. It doesn't even check the signature of the voter if you have a supposed witness.

So the voter can just put a little X as their signature, as long as the witness says so and signs, but there's no registration of witnesses. Anybody can be a witness. There's no database of witnesses. The witness just puts a squiggle.

What is to stop the so-called ballot harvester from filling out these ballots, putting a little X on the voter, putting a little squiggle on the witness's signature, and then dumping these ballots? There's no chain of custody.

Right.

What is their expectation of getting caught? Gavin Newsom just signed a law making it virtually impossible to audit any of this stuff.

So now, even if they thought maybe they could get caught, let's take a look at all the other types of fraud happening in California right now that we know about. We know that there are tons of fraud cases in California involving things like Medi-Cal fraud, unemployment fraud, EBT fraud, hospice fraud, fraud related to the homeless industrial complex, and on and on. That's all been proven.

Is it really so hard to believe that some of the same groups, the same interest groups, the same NGOs, would be willing to exploit these loopholes in the dirty voter rolls and the millions of ballots that go to incorrect or nonexistent addresses? There's the nonexistent chain of custody, the nonexistent signature verification, no ID—not only to vote but to register—counting ballots without postmarks if they're received 7 days later, and registering thousands of ballots from homeless shelters that don't even have any beds.

These are all known things. So when you say that there's no fraud, it's like, come on. There are loopholes, and all you've got to do is look at the results and see that there's something crooked going on here.

Okay, so you're in the camp that there is fraud going on because where there's—

It may be legalized. It may be legalized, but it's fraud.

Okay, so you believe there's fraud.

Look, when you start mailing out millions of ballots to people who don't even vote, and then you have no audit requirements, no chain of custody, no punishments, no penalties, and no investigations—and there are tons of investigations, both by attorneys general—

In California.

By whom?

I'll pull up the history.

I will say that after every election, there are tons of civil lawsuits filed. Obviously, Trump filed 60 of them—

Not in California.

I don't know. Newsom just made it impossible to do that kind of audit. I think that's because Trump was beaten so badly in a Democratic state. There was no reason to, but I don't know why he didn't file in California. He filed 60 of these, and everybody kind of does that. They file these constantly, and attorneys general can.

In this case, Chamath, if there's so much smoke, if this statistic seems so improbable, and there was the Nick Shirley video of going to Skid Row and the possibility that they were paying junkies and people who were high to vote, this would be easily catchable. Actually, this would take a conspiracy for thousands and thousands of votes to have been swung. That's what we're saying here. We're saying upwards of 10,000 votes were swung, but certainly 5,000. Good luck. You would need a conspiracy of hundreds of people, or at least dozens, to do that.

Good luck going to Skid Row and getting some meth addict to go on the record.

I think they actually got somebody to go on the record.

There are a few videos of this. Yes.

Yeah. No, that's the crazy part about it. They're saying people on Skid Row got paid $2 or $3, and somebody was found guilty of this. Brenda Lee Brown Armstrong pleaded guilty in 2026 to paying people to vote. The system is designed to allow fraud. It's designed—

It has been won by 43,000 votes, though.

Guys, we live in an autocracy in California where 1 political machine has shaped the laws so inexorably that whether it's a mayor, a state legislator, a state senator, or the governor, it's a 1-way door. There is only 1 party that can win, and we are slowly seeing that that party increasingly does not have the ability to govern a state this dynamic and this complicated.

They've changed the rules to make sure that that monopoly is enforced. We have all tacitly approved it by supporting or voting or not saying anything. The end result has yet to be unveiled, because it's going to take another couple of decades for all of this rot to really destroy these places.

The reality is that the voters probably should be given a chance to have Spencer Pratt push back on the machine, so that, at a minimum, what they learn is that the machine wasn't working nearly anywhere close to the way it was intended. Instead, what will happen is that 2 people who are, in various shapes and forms, pretty deeply unqualified and very similar now essentially get to give you not much of a choice at all.

So I think the sad thing is that Friedberg is right and Sacks is right. Friedberg is right that the laws have been shaped this way to make legal what would otherwise be illegal, and Sacks is right that any rational person should look at these laws and say, “This is fraudulent.”

The unfortunate situation is that unless there's some cataclysmic decision in California, this is what we're stuck with. It is time to vote all of these people out.

You can't vote. You can't vote. What do you mean? How are you going to do it? Anyone can register. Anyone can vote. Spencer Pratt can do this. Can I answer Friedberg's question?

Sure.

There is 1 break-the-glass way, and I've talked to a few of these guys about what that is. How do you change the system? You must get somebody at the absolute top of the ticket elected. That person is Steve Hilton.

If that happens, there is 1 thing that Steve Hilton can do to start to completely change the way that this state is run: instantly, on Day 1, declare a state of emergency. If you pull on this thread, what you will find is that there are lots of things you can do to clean up how California works under a state of emergency.

I'll leave it at that. There's some common sense here. We shouldn't send ballots out to everybody. That made sense maybe during COVID, and if you can't be bothered to have ID, then maybe you shouldn't vote.

I don't think there has been a major election that has been swung by election fraud. The Heritage Foundation has spent many, many tens of millions of dollars on this, and they have a really great project that tracks it. People file lawsuits like Trump did, like Al Gore did; everybody's always filing lawsuits over this. It's never enough to swing an election, but there's definitely fraud on the margins.

Kennedy versus Nixon. Bro—

Hold on. Let me finish.

The mob got Kennedy elected over Nixon.

I'm talking in modern history. Yeah, in modern history.

That's pretty famous.

Okay, we can get into whether that's true or not as well.

Check out Lyndon Johnson's history. Lyndon Johnson only got elected to the Senate; he got his start in politics through ballot fraud.

We absolutely should have voter ID. We should stop sending everybody one of these because the appearance of impropriety is the problem here.

Both sides cheat. Both sides bend the rules. One side does it by limiting access; the other does it by providing too much access. All these politicians—the overwhelming majority of them—are unethical. All they care about is getting elected, and they have tons of people working for them in both parties to massage these election results.

If you get caught, it is a serious penalty. There have not been major elections in modern history that were swung by fraud. Go ahead and go to the Heritage Foundation.

You keep using the word fraud as if it's a thing, but it's not. I'll tell you who's at fault.

No, there's fraud. At the end of the day, there is fraud. There are people who have been caught doing fraudulent things.

The one group that is fundamentally to blame is Congress. We have an opportunity. There have been opportunities to pass laws that will make it illegal for people to vote if they are not citizens, if they are not properly registered, and if they don't show up with ID. That is a very simple solution to this democratic electoral process.

We can't have a situation where someone is legally allowed to go out and collect 100 ballots that they find sitting in the lobby of an apartment building, or where people register to vote with a gym membership card. Fundamentally, the federal government already knows that if you're not paying your taxes, you're required to have a driver's license to drive a car, you have to have ID, and you have to be registered in the system to do nearly anything and everything in this country as it is.

So to exclude that very simple requirement from the most foundational obligation that we all have as citizens of this country is inherently wrong, and it needs to be addressed by Congress. If Congress fixes it and there are federal laws that create systems that ensure elections are all about one person getting one vote and being legally allowed to vote, then this doesn't become an issue.

Short of this, I worry about where this goes, because over time, fewer people will actually believe that elections are real. I hate being on here sounding like I'm an election-fearmongering guy who's telling people that elections aren't real, but the longer this goes on, the more difficult it will be for people to actually have faith in the system that we're all operating within. That's when things get ugly, and it needs to be fixed.

Yeah, I'm strongly agreeing. If you can't be bothered to get a driver's license or a passport, maybe you don't need to vote.

Congress can fix it, and they should.

Yeah. And, by the way, there's a ballot measure in California. If people in California want this, they can just vote for the ballot measure.

You mean the voter ID ballot measure?

Yeah.

Yeah, that's very important. Actually, look, if that fails, it's kind of our last chance to save anything.

For California, it's the last chance. And your entire speech, David, was that you sound like an election denier.

I don't care what you label it. Look, the Democratic Party as a whole were election deniers about Trump winning in 2016. They concocted the whole Russiagate hoax to basically try to discredit his election.

When you look at the difference between walk-in and mail-in ballots, and I've seen everyone try to argue why that's so different, it doesn't compute for me. That's it. I'm not trying to make up a fact. This is the fact. Look at these facts on the screen you're looking at right now. This is the difference in the data. This data tells me that something is wrong. That's it.

I'm not trying to fearmonger because I don't like who got elected. I don't give a shit what goes on in L.A. In fact, I think it's better for L.A. if they deal with the socialist mayor for a couple of years, so they come out the other side realizing they shouldn't embrace socialist principles.

I think it's great for the country. Actually, I think it's great for New York. I think it's great for Seattle. I think it's great for Minnesota—wherever people want to elect socialists in this country. Let's run into it. I'm all about going through the socialist hell so we jump out the other side, like the Latin American countries are doing now, when everyone wakes up and realizes how fucked up socialism is, because it denies everyone the opportunity for economic mobility. It denies everyone their individual liberties that this country was founded on.

Socialism is wrong. It's broken. It doesn't work. If you all want to go through that lesson, do it. Go for it. Let's do it. Let them get elected. But the numbers in that election data show me that that's not what the people wanted. It's not very clear or evident to me that that's what people voted for.

That's where I'm like, my God, the system itself has become a system of appointment, not a system of election. I get fired up about that personally.

The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command. This is obvious. Just look at the charts. Look at the data. We know something crooked happened.

The only thing we don't know is whether it was illegal fraud or legal fraud—meaning they've created so many loopholes and so much corruption in the law that what they did is possibly legal. It is still corrupt. It is still crooked. It is ridiculous. Everyone can see it. Do not deny the evidence of your eyes and ears.

Even if they call you an election denier, I personally don't care. I deny it. Spencer Pratt should be in the runoff. I deny that Nithya Raman won legitimately.

The statistics are the statistics, and they would scream that you should have the attorney general of California and the federal attorney general look into it. If they catch people doing this stuff—and they have caught 1 person—and Nick Shirley went down there and you see people on Skid Row, listen, homeless people should have the right to vote, theoretically.

Why did Newsom just sign a law making audits like that even harder?

Yeah, I'm not defending Newsom here. I'm saying, where's the attorney general? If there is, in fact, fraud, Trump has the ability, with his hand-selected attorneys general, to go after this. He controls that part of our democracy. He should file, and they should go figure out what happened statistically.

So, President Trump—thank you, President Trump—go do it. Go do it. You've got this attorney general chasing down everybody else. Go to this election. Use your powers. Audit it and find them. Where's President Trump?

You didn't hear my point that the state law just made it harder for the federal government to come in and audit the voter rolls.

Yeah, he can still do it.

I'm sure they will do it. I'm sure they'll do it if they can.

Yeah. I mean, trust me, Trump does what he wants. If we've learned anything—

He will do what he wants. And he's not doing this now.

What I find amazing is that the media, instead of asking tough questions like, “How did this happen? How could the votes swing so wildly in ballots that were only found after Election Day?”—the media, instead of trying to demand answers and demand accountability, is trying to cover it up and say nothing wrong happened here. It's unbelievable. It's outrageous.

What is the best theory—steelman it? What's the best theory of why this discrepancy could have happened that's legitimate?

I mean, we're sitting here talking about it.

What's the discrepancy? Does anybody have a steelman of why this discrepancy could have happened that's legitimate? Anybody?

If the media is hanging on to a snapshot of the past where people actually cared what they said, every time they can actually reestablish trust, they kind of don't do it because the people they want to curry favor with are willing to play along.

So I think what happens is the media is like, “Well, I have 2 choices. I can actually say that Spencer Pratt should have won or could have won, or investigate why he didn't win. But then I'm kind of tacitly supporting Trump. And hold on a second—I'm supposed to hate Trump. So, no. This is completely normal. Nothing to see here.”

Everybody moves on, hoping that then they get ingratiated into the machine, but they're going to get run over and used like everybody else does, too.

That's what's happening. Yeah, your point is so spot-on, Chamath. If it's so polarized—meaning that there are 2 poles—if you do question it, it's almost like you're being put in the Trump or pro-Trump camp.

Just like the word MAGA is thrown around: “Oh, you’re a MAGA guy because you’re questioning election integrity.” This has nothing to do with MAGA. It’s just a simple conversation about a particular topic. But if it’s diametric to the other camp, you must be in that bad camp. And so they don’t want to be put in that camp.

It’s so true. I’m for mathematical and statistical literacy, and what happened here is mathematical and statistical.

So nobody has any steelman argument or concept of how this could have happened.

I can tell you the statistical odds that this would have happened, and it’s 1 in a trillion.

Okay, what if—

So are you telling me the 1-in-a-trillion shot hit?

I’m asking if there is any—

Just this one time.

I’m asking if there’s anybody who steelmans this in any way.

Why is it so psychologically important for you to cling to the idea that California elections are completely corruption-free after all the things they’ve clearly done to corrupt them? Voter ID—you admit there are loopholes. It’s chock-full of loopholes.

You ask me why I’m holding on to it? I’m not holding on to it. For the purpose of discussion and having an intellectually honest discussion, I’m asking the 3 of you if you’ve heard, or if you have any theory, just for the rigor of the discussion. This isn’t my position.

Where are all the democracy protectors in the media now? They all said that they were the guardians of democracy. They were going to protect democracy. Where are they to ask questions?

The only theory that I can think of—I’ll steelman it myself, because I think you do need to be rigorous.

You go ahead first.

Yeah. The only thing I can think of is that her ground game is more sophisticated because they’ve been at it longer than Spencer Pratt, and he didn’t have a ground game because he’s a nontraditional, first-time candidate. That’s the only thing I can think of.

“Sophisticated” is a coded word for, “He wasn’t bribing Skid Row homeless people.”

No, he just doesn’t have an election machine to collect ballots. Collecting ballots is legal. That’s the question.

She had a better cheating operation, obviously.

We’re saying the same thing. We’re not actually saying anything different.

The Twitter commentary was that people were waiting because so many people are against Spencer Pratt, but they wanted to be sure that they voted for the right candidate, whether it’s Raman or Bass. The people who held their ballots the longest saw the polling data that Bass was going to win. That’s why they all voted for Raman at the last minute—to try to promote her and make sure Spencer Pratt was blocked, because you could have 2 Democrats at the top of the ticket.

That’s right. They didn’t want Spencer Pratt to have a shot at the general. And, by the way, if you saw my interview with Spencer Pratt, he said Raman registered 1 hour before the deadline, that she’s friends with Bass, and that the whole point was to keep him from actually making it onto the general ballot. So some of the coordination that people were imagining was, “We’ve got to make sure we vote for the 2 Democrats, and then they’ll figure out—hey, is it wrong? Let’s just box him out.”

Yeah. Got it.

Which is why they all waited until the last minute to vote. How do you coordinate something like that? That’s always the question I have with these things.

These people are all brilliant geniuses. It’s hundreds of thousands of brilliant geniuses. Roll that out.

Yeah, there’s a chat group. I mean, it’s not that complicated. Ballot harvesters did what Friedberg said just happened. It’s just that the ballot harvesters did it, not the actual voters, obviously.

Ballot harvesting is legal, but it’s sketchy. If there are ballot harvesters, I think Trump and the DOJ can catch these people.

How the fuck is it legal that someone can go out and collect other people’s ballots, fill them out, and send them in? It’s the craziest thing to me.

No evidence of fraud right now. Statistics don’t look good. Donald J. Trump, you control the Department of Justice. Go investigate it.

Okay. I love you guys, but I’m hungry. I’ve got to go. Bye-bye.

Love you boys. Bye-bye.