Tucker Carlson: Rise of Nick Fuentes, Paramount vs Netflix, Anti-AI Sentiment, Hottest Takes

All right, back with us, in place of David Friedberg, who's busy this week, is the one and only—on his 4th appearance here on the All-In Podcast—Mr. Tucker Carlson. How are you, Tucker?

Thanks for having me.

Hey, Tucker. Good to see you.

David, how do you have time? Every time I turn on my phone, there's David Sacks on something incredibly complex. Are you sleeping?

Usually, people are attacking me for something, but it's not just, "Oh, your views are this or that geopolitical conflict." It's the details of something very complicated.

I'm just like, "Wow, man. That's a lot. That's a lot to digest."

Yeah. There's not a very high bar in Washington, as you know.

You're a giant among pygmies, but still, it's a lot of work.

In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.

King. Exactly. Exactly.

Are you still enjoying it?

Yeah, it's been a lot of fun. President Trump is a lot of fun to work for.

He's the most fun. I mean, the best, right?

He got a big shout-out yesterday. It was really awesome, actually.

David did?

Yeah. Huge shout-out.

That's right. We were at the White House Christmas party. I think they do about 25 of these.

Yeah, literally.

Literally, because they have so many thousands of people, but they can only fit a couple hundred people in the White House, and they're doing about 2 a day. The president comes down and gives a speech, and every speech is different. It's like a Dave Chappelle comedy routine where he never does the same set, and he does it with so much enthusiasm and gusto. You would think that you were the only holiday-party crowd that he had ever addressed.

He never expresses any irritation at doing that. He loves it. It's amazing.

It's unbelievable.

But in any event, he gave me a shout-out during the speech, and then he called me up there and said, "Hey, can you say a couple words about AI?" I'm like, "Well, this isn't exactly Christmas-party conversation." So I just talked about how great he was and how much fun it was to work for him. And then he gave Chamath a shout-out as well.

No way.

And he just starts talking about the All-In Pod. We're in the audience, and he starts having a conversation with us about the All-In Pod and how it's doing.

The funniest part was that Nat was behind him. He goes, "Hey, Nat," and says, "I hope everything's going well. How's your relationship?" He looks at me, and I'm like this, and Nat's behind me going like this.

Oh, it's so awesome. I'm going this weekend because I miss him.

You're going to see him this weekend? You guys are on good terms, Tuck, with Trump?

Oh, yeah. The best. I mean, the best. Of course, people have told him—many people—that he's not allowed to talk to me. So that just makes him like me much more, because all he hears is, "He's the worst human being who's ever lived," and all Trump hears is, "Who's ever lived," you know? You can't control him that way. Period.

So, no, I get along with him literally, in 25 years, better than I ever have.

That's good, too.

It's hilarious. Yeah.

The last part of that story is that after he calls up me and Chamath—actually, he calls me up to speak and then calls Chamath up to speak—he goes on a little bit of a riff, saying, "I don't like the term artificial intelligence, because why would you want to call it artificial? It sounds bad. Why don't they call it something else? Superior intelligence. Organic intelligence."

And then he calls up Chamath. He's like, "Chamath, what do you think?"

Well, I think AI is too late to change, but maybe it could be American intelligence.

And then he says, "Yeah, but we want this to be used by the whole world. Sell it to the whole world." Anyway, we start workshopping this branding exercise in front of the entire Christmas party.

How about we call it Trump superintelligence? Okay, it's Trump intelligence.

No, but you know what? Calling AI "American intelligence" is actually the smartest and best thing one could do around AI.

We've got a lot to talk about, Tucker. You've been on a run, huh?

I mean, not in my world. I'm off social media, mostly, so nothing's actually really happening in my world.

You don't open X at all?

It's all about me, man. I don't like to read about myself, so I don't look at it. No.

All right. Topic No. 1: Paramount versus Netflix. They're in a bidding war over the future of Warner Bros. and all that amazing IP.

As many of us know, Warner Bros. Discovery is led by David Zaslav. He currently owns HBO, DC, and the Warner Bros. collection of films. They also have that great studio lot. On the cable side, they own CNN, TNT, and Discovery, and they just saddled that company with $30 billion of debt.

There was a bit of competition over who would buy it. Netflix offered $83 billion to purchase just the streaming assets, which would put the No. 1 and No. 3 players together, and WBD publicly accepted Netflix's offer last Friday. This has created a bit of a kerfuffle. Paramount is now coming in with a hostile offer: $108 billion in cash for the entire company. That includes the cable assets.

That would be interesting, because then David Ellison, son of Larry Ellison, would own not just CBS—which is being run, at CBS News, by your favorite Tucker Carlson and Bari Weiss—but would also, I guess, potentially own and run CNN in this instance. We'll get to that.

The $108 billion offer includes 2 vehicles: $41 billion in equity financing by the Ellison family, and then a bunch of other folks coming in, including some Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds. Polymarket, interestingly, has Paramount as the favorite at 51%, while Netflix has dropped to 36%, even though they say they have a done deal, and there's a 14% chance of no deal. I think that might be free money—the 14% chance of no deal.

What's your take on this, Tucker? And just broadly speaking, on consolidation in media, having pulled the ripcord and left traditional media—now, the understanding is that you're doing better than ever, you control your destiny, and I think you're making probably as much or more money now than you did when you were working for the men.

Yeah, I actually haven't checked, but I'm not much of a money guy. I'm fine and can pay my nonexistent mortgage.

I'm against monopoly power in general because I think it stifles creativity. I'm not that worried about this, because these things never move in exactly the direction you imagine. I've been in media my entire life, and none of the big changes I anticipated—in fact, almost all of them—I made fun of.

I just don't think that we're really threatened by a conglomerate of CNN and Netflix and all that. It's like, okay, you can assemble huge companies, but can you make people consume and believe the product? Buying CBS News is like buying RCA Records or something. It just doesn't have any effect. Only people who aren't paying attention or are pretty cut off think you're going to win hearts and minds by buying CBS News or CNN.

These brands are husks. In fact, all they are is brands at this point. I just am not at all convinced that this will have a material effect on anyone's attitudes.

If you started to mess with what YouTube is allowed to air or the ownership of X, then I think you could really change the country and the conversations that we're allowed to have. But I don't see any of this as especially meaningful for society. Is the product going to get more subversive than it already is? Is Netflix going to be worse for American society? Probably not.

I think this is a business story, not a cultural story. Chamath, your thoughts.

I'll give you 2. The first is that whenever you see deals, it's important to look at the amount of money that's at risk. That is the best tell about whether this is important for the future or not.

$100 billion deals are typically about things in the past. What is the future? Billion-dollar deals. For example, when you look at Facebook buying Instagram for $1 billion, that turned out to be a huge bet about the future, and it was right. When Google bought YouTube for $1.6 billion, that was a huge bet on the future. They were right. When Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI, that was a huge bet on the future. It was right.

But when you look at assets that trade at $100 billion-plus valuations, they're so undergirded by debt. All of that debt is only ever bought by looking at the past—meaning, how much money have they made? Then it's a best guess about how much money they could make in the future.

So these multi-hundred-billion-dollar assets, to Tucker's point, don't really matter that much. I don't think it's super anticompetitive. These are financial transactions. People should be spending much more time looking at billion-dollar transactions and $100 billion transactions. That's my takeaway there.

But specifically about this deal, the reality in media is that the future is unscripted, uncontrolled, user-generated content. You see it on YouTube. It is already the 800-pound gorilla in the space.

And then separately, it’s now becoming about shorter-form video. You see that with things like Instagram Reels and TikTok. None of that landscape will change based on this deal. If anything, if those trends accelerate, the value of historic IP is going to erode even faster.

Meaning, this generation of kids will have no idea or care about the Marvel Cinematic Universe or Star Wars, and that may upset those of us who are nostalgically tied to it. I don’t know. I would let the deal happen. I don’t think it’s particularly that important.

Sacks, obviously you don’t speak for the administration on these issues, but I’m curious about your thoughts on this.

Yeah, just my personal view on this is that we’re going to get meaningful consolidation in the industry either way, because either Netflix and Warner Bros. are going to merge, or Paramount and Warner Bros. are going to merge. Either way, you’re going to get consolidation.

That being said, if Netflix is allowed to buy Warner Bros., the antitrust concerns are a lot more serious because Netflix really is the 800-pound gorilla in Hollywood right now. It’s the number-one streamer by far, and it has the biggest market cap. They’re the party that the rest of Hollywood is freaked out about right now.

You saw that the Hollywood unions, like the WGA and SAG, opposed the deal because they’re fearing job cuts, lower wages, and worse conditions due to reduced demand for talent. The content creators and distributors are worried about this too, because Netflix is known for making tougher deals, I think, than the traditional studios.

I’ve got a friend who’s a showrunner in Hollywood, and he’s done projects with both Netflix and the traditional studios. He says the big difference is that Netflix will pay you pretty well, but you don’t get any equity in your show. Whatever you get is sort of agreed to at the beginning, and that’s it. So you’re not really an entrepreneur when you do a show for them.

But when you work for a studio, you actually get a backend. Now, there’s all sorts of Hollywood accounting associated with that, but he kind of misses the days that are going away, when he got to be a little bit of an entrepreneur and have real upside in his shows. If Netflix is now allowed to acquire Warner Bros., that’s just another nail in that whole coffin.

So I think it is a big change, and if the antitrust regulators look at this, I do think that Paramount has a better chance. The other big factor is just that Paramount is offering more. They upped the bid.

It’s $108 billion versus around $80 billion—or was it like $30 a share versus $27? They’re also buying the whole company, whereas Netflix just wants Warner’s—

—studio assets and streaming assets like HBO, as opposed to the cable assets, which are considered a little bit of a corpse. So I think if you’re a shareholder in Warner, you probably want to sell the whole thing. You don’t want to be stuck with the bad assets.

Yeah. I’m a little surprised, actually, that the Warner board went with Netflix when they had Paramount as an option, assuming this Paramount offer was on the table, because it seems like a better deal, and it’s probably a little bit more likely to get through the regulators.

So I guess I’m a little bit surprised they chose Netflix. But I guess Netflix is the more bona fide party, right? It’s a $400 billion market cap, and maybe they thought they were more able to execute this transaction.

Yeah, I have only 3 points on this. Number 1, it really depends on how you frame competitors in this space. Here are your paid streaming platforms: Netflix, Disney, and HBO. Disney’s done an amazing job, after starting a decade after Netflix with streaming, of really getting a lot of subscribers, and consolidating 1 in 3 here obviously puts Disney way behind.

But if you start looking at TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, these properties have the majority of the audience. They dwarf the audience of these paid services. Young people are not interested in movies anymore. They want, obviously, TikToks and YouTube. If you look at the revenue, it’s—

Can I ask you a question about that chart before you move on? How do you compare, or do you adjust for time watched or minutes? Because how do you—

I didn’t in this, but, yeah, that would—

—make a big difference between watching a TikTok and watching a movie—

—on Netflix in terms of attention span.

I’m not disagreeing with you about the—

Look, there’s no question the cultural significance has moved away from Hollywood—

—toward user-generated content on these online platforms, but I’m just curious: did you adjust for that?

Yeah, no, I didn’t adjust for that. You could slice it a bunch of different ways, but at the end of the day, I put the competitive set a little bit broader here, which is including the free UGC services, since that’s what young people are doing.

And then if you look at revenue, it’s a slightly different picture here. These paid services are doing extremely well, and they are juggernauts in terms of making money and profitability now. UGC obviously is much larger, especially on a global basis.

The more important third thing here is how we do antitrust in the country. Trump wants to be involved in this. He said he’s going to be very involved in it, which, as an 80-year-old, he’s involved in everything. Why not be involved in this? He shouldn’t be. Put that aside.

I think we need to have a way to pre-vet these deals and then just let the highest bidder win. I don’t know how this concept is getting convoluted, but the Ellisons are compromising Trump a bit here. I think that’s why Trump gave a lot of shine to Ted Sarandos. I don’t know if you saw his quotes about that, Sacks, but he was praising what a genius Ted Sarandos is and how amazing Netflix is.

The Ellisons coming out and basically saying that they’ve got this in and are going to have the inside track here, I think, is one of the issues. I propose that we have a pre-vetting process for these large deals, because we want M&A to be vibrant in this country. We want more M&A after the wrath of Lina Khan.

I think you should be able to pre-vet, Chamath. You should be able to go to the government and say, “Hey, we’re considering selling this asset, whatever it happens to be—YouTube, back in the day. Is there anybody who’s not able to participate in this auction?” Then just have the FTC pre-vet some of these, and let the highest bidder win. That seems like what’s in the best interest of shareholders.

That’s kind of untenable. And the reason why—

Yeah, explain.

You have multiple facets of antitrust that can come up from any number of organizations in the United States, and that’s just one part of the complexities you have to navigate. If you do business in any other country, all of those other countries are in a position to opine.

Oh, sure.

If you think about doing a deal where you’re in China and that other asset is in China, it can slow down for a very, very, very long time and never happen for reasons that have nothing to do with the industrial logic of the merger.

So I don’t think you can pre-vet these things, because it’s not scalable. I think the government would get frustrated because you’d have 1,000 people outside the door. They’d have no time to do anything else. They have to govern.

The different thing that we have to figure out whether it’s allowed is how these deals are getting done. The only thing that I would observe is that the 2 biggest transactions that have happened thus far this year, that I’ve taken note of, happened as total raw-asset sales to work around antitrust.

The best example was Meta and Scale AI. “Okay, I’ll say this thing is worth $30 billion. I’ll give you $15 billion in cash, but what am I really doing? I’m carving out these assets so that I don’t have to file even an HSR filing.”

So I think the future is that if the government has to have an opinion—not just America, but the Europeans and the Chinese—what’s going to happen instead is that very smart lawyers who get paid $10, $20, or $30 million a year, the NBA salaries now, are going to find workarounds.

They’ve already done so for big tech, and I think it’ll spill over to other industries. You’re kind of creating these boundary conditions where I think the concept of antitrust is going to be a very difficult thing, because if businesses want to be in business, they’re not going to do these traditional deals.

As David said, it’s an enormous sign of confidence about how there isn’t going to be a competitive threat for Paramount to just say, “We’ll take the whole thing,” because they’re subjecting themselves to a level of scrutiny that they wouldn’t if they felt there was any shred of a good argument for competitive antitrust.

Yeah, I just want to address the gratuitous potshot at President Trump.

Which one?

No, the reason I would say it’s problematic for Trump to get involved is because the Ellisons have also been major supporters of Trump and made commitments for buying TikTok.

Now you have 1 family that is a major supporter of Trump, massive donors, basically getting the inside line on TikTok, and now, after a deal has been closed with Netflix, being able to lobby to get Trump to let them buy CBS and CNN.

So if we start thinking about the influence that the Ellison family is having on the Trump administration, whether it's quid pro quo or the appearance of quid pro quo, it's best for Trump to stay out of it because already we have the TikTok deal. Now they own CBS, and they're going to own CNN. That's a lot of consolidation for one family to have.

That's a red herring. Between CBS and CNN, 9 people watch those two channels. Those channels are irrelevant. Those guys have to rebuild these things from scratch. Number 1, it doesn't incentivize or disincentivize 3 billion humans from using and watching that content.

Who owns that asset is not known to any of these people. CBS did not go up and down because one person owned it versus another. Nobody knows who the CEO of TikTok is. TikTok is either good or not good. I would just keep in mind that this is like the party-circuit babble: You go there and talk about it like, "Oh my God, it's so bad. It's so good," and you miss the basic fact that nothing about the ownership changes the human incentive to use a good product or disqualify a product.

Maybe I would take the other side of it. There are still millions of people watching this, and it's pretty clear that millions of people watch this show because it's good. Ultimately, people are going to be drawn to great products. There's no doubt about that. But consolidation of the major news assets—CBS, the influence of TikTok, and the influence of CNN—is undeniable. That is just undeniable.

Undeniable to what? Undeniable for what?

Just reality. Reality for Americans. You can try to insult me, but that's not the point here: It's in one company.

No, it's not my reality. That's not where I get my news from.

Millions of people don't watch CBS and CNN. It's not true.

Literally, 4 million people watch them.

If you're adding it all up over what, a year?

Unduplicated, what is CNN's most qualified, best-run, most popular show?

Okay. On the network or on the news?

I don't know, because I don't have it. I don't even have cable.

Yeah, I know. And you don't even pay for it. You ask your friends to steal New York Times articles.

You get the final word. Having lived inside the beast, should Trump be involved in these mergers and acquisitions? Yes or no? Check or call?

Well, you're not going to stop him, so it doesn't matter. What we should be concerned about is not media monopoly power. It's censorship of the tech platforms—a return to that. That is where you destroy creativity and diversity of thought and put the entire nation into the mental prison from which it escaped last November.

That is the threat: censoring YouTube, X, and Instagram. I just think we should be focused on that.

And what's your take on Bari Weiss taking over CBS News? I'm not sure if you've commented on it.

I'm kind of impressed. It's easy to make fun of Bari Weiss for being dumb or whatever, which is fair, but you have to sort of look at it in reverse. The image is negative. It's like with those talents you've got where you're amazing, and I will say, I agree with that. I think that she's charming, tireless, and energetic.

I don't know that that still matters. We overvalue IQ: "Oh, a person's so smart." It actually doesn't matter. Being charming, meeting people, and pushing an agenda tirelessly—that really works.

In the end, the prize she got is not worth having. How would you like to run CBS News, such as it is? No, for real. That's torture. They couldn't pay you enough.

What would you do if you had CNN? They put it in your lap and say you're forced to be CEO of it for the next 10 years. What would you do?

Well, actually, I've had that conversation.

Slightly more relevant: What would you do if you ran my son's school newspaper? It's about the same skill.

Oh, I'd get radical.

Actually, Tucker had an interesting answer.

Any other good questions?

No, it's a great question. Tucker was about to answer it. Thanks for stepping on it, Chamath.

The CNN question—I spent almost 10 years there, so I feel like I'm familiar with it. I actually had this conversation with someone who was like, "We should buy CNN. You should run it." So I had cause to spend an evening thinking about it, and no way. I mean, what?

First of all, I'm with Chamath. I don't have a New York Times, Washington Post, or New Yorker subscription anymore, after a lifetime of having all 3, because they're totally irrelevant. They mean nothing. They're speaking to no one. There's a kind of mustiness to it. It's like going back to your childhood home and seeing that your bedroom was really small, the paint was actually turquoise, and all these sad posters from the '80s are still there. It's depressing.

I would just shut it down and build something new.

Okay, shut it down.

Jason, can I give you my one thought exercise about the New York Times? The one thing that I think is worth talking about with the New York Times is that I think they will, in the next 5 years, do something so egregious and over the line—akin to some sort of libel or some sort of statement that has turned out to be completely false—that they will get sued.

I hope when that settlement happens, the person says, "I do not want to get paid the $4 billion. I want this to be turned into a nonprofit and a public trust," and then shuts it down. It's interesting. That's kind of what happened with Fox when they did their $700–$800 million settlement, the largest one.

But the next one, Jason—the next one will go up. It won't be that scale because you've now had that precedent. That's a very important precedent about the scale of lying and misrepresenting things, and it only goes up from here. This is a one-way ratchet.

Yeah, you couldn't be more wrong about that. It's definitely not going to happen. They have controls in place, but it's a nice fantasy. They're also crushing it. By the way, when they moved to subscriptions, they got 12 million paid subscribers. They are objectively crushing it and figured it out better than any other news organization.

Whether we agree or disagree with their content and the quality of it, they are objectively the most successful here in America.

Speaking of successfully taking over the dialogue, we have to talk about Nick Fuentes, who you just had on your podcast, Tucker. You platformed him—being facetious here. You platformed him. I created him.

For those of you who don't know Nick Fuentes and have been living under a rock, he's a 27-year-old white nationalist with a very popular show on Rumble, with about 500,000 subscribers, which isn't actually that big when you think about it. His followers call themselves Groypers, and he's gained hundreds of thousands over the past 6 months. He's on quite a heater, and he's got a bunch of controversial opinions.

I'll just give you the quotes. This has nothing to do with my opinion on him. He was asked by Piers Morgan if he described himself as a racist, and he said, "Totally. I think everybody, if we're being honest, is racist. The only people that aren't racist, or pretend not to be, are white people to their detriment and women."

Piers asked Nick if he was gay. Nick said, "No, but I will say women are very difficult to be around." Piers then asked, "And do you think they should have the right to vote?" Nick said, "I do not. Absolutely not."

On Israel, Fuentes is very critical of what he calls organized Jewry in America. You interviewed him. There are a couple of different ways to take this, but you did a good job of telling his origin story. He was part of PragerU, and he's got this really activated base.

Why is he resonating at this moment in time? Maybe you could explain to the audience MAGA versus America First versus America Only, which I think are part of America First. You tell us, because I think these are just terms right now. They're not political parties or anything.

Well, there's a struggle over what those terms mean. It's very ugly and probably necessary because you need to define terms. That's the first thing you do, I would say, when you think through what you should be doing with your life, for example.

As for Fuentes, his origin story is a little more precise, and I'll keep it short. He tweeted something as a freshman at BU, critical of—pretty mildly critical of—Congress for doing the bidding of this foreign country, Israel. Somehow Ben Shapiro saw that, attacked him, tried to get him kicked out of his Republican club, and made sure he didn't get an internship with some conservative organization.

I'm not attacking Ben Shapiro, but that kind of tells you what attempts to shut people down, to shut conversations down, result in. They don't go away. They just fester in the darkness, and they can sometimes become really ugly.

First of all, Fuentes is saying a lot of true things. That's why he's popular. He's funny. He's smart. He's a great broadcaster. But Fuentes, on some macro level, is troubling because his platform is an expression of something that has kind of taken over all political discourse, which is identity politics and tribalism.

I'm just opposed to that. I am, period, and always will be. I just think that we're governed by universal principles or we're governed by the mafia. Those are our choices. Our principles have to apply to every human being, or certainly every American citizen.

Or they're not principles. They're just a justification for tyranny. So Fuentes has a different kind of identity politics, but there are all kinds of different identity politics. We lived under it during the Biden years. We've lived under it most of my life, actually, in one form or another.

So, if anything, Fuentes reminds us that we have to come up with some kind of principle that every American can ascribe to, something called national identity. That is not a dirty phrase. That's actually necessary to keep the country from disintegrating, which it is. What does every American—all 350 million—have in common with every other?

That's the conversation we need to have. In its absence, we get a lot of people popping up and being like, “Well, all white people over here, and all Black people or Jewish people or whatever.” That's not going to work. That will end in violence. Everyone knows that. So now is probably a pretty good time to figure out what we all have in common.

I didn't platform him. First of all, “platform” is not a verb, and anyone who says it is a verb is probably opposed to my core interests, I would say, and bad at language.

Yeah, I interviewed him, like I interview everybody, and my general belief is you should let people say what they think, and others can decide whether they mean it or not, whether they're being false or sincere, and what they think of what the person is saying. That's my job. I'm not ashamed of it, despite a lot of efforts to make me ashamed of it. I do disagree with Fuentes on the question of universal principles.

Well, first of all, it's against my religion to hate any group, and I told him that. But I didn't do a lot of other posturing designed to make me seem like the good person. Piers unfortunately fell into that trap as an older man: “Well, isn't it? You are bad.” And it's like, okay, I don't even disagree with some of that, but you don't elevate yourself. You look like an out-of-touch buffoon.

That's exactly the trap that was awaiting Piers Morgan. If you watch that interview and if you watch the reaction to it, that did not diminish Nick Fuentes in any way. It enhanced Nick Fuentes. What diminishes Nick Fuentes is asking him straightforward questions, particularly about women. Not, “Have you had sex with anybody?” but, “Why are you so mad at women?”

Letting people talk a lot reveals who they are. That's just true.

If you were to give the top 2 or 3 reasons why he's resonating with, it seems like, young men and this burgeoning America First movement—which I guess it would be good for you to define right now as best you can, recognizing you're not the leader of it, but you have said, I think, this concept resonates with you—why is Fuentes resonating, and what is America First versus MAGA? Explain that.

Just in reverse order. I would argue that the premise of MAGA is America First, but I wouldn't say that America First is a movement. I would say it's the only legitimate reason to run a government. It's very simple: the government of your democratic republic ought to act, in broad terms, on behalf of its own citizens. It's not more complicated than that.

There's nothing sinister about it. In fact, anything other than that is sinister because it's illegitimate. For what other reason would you run a democratic republic?

Treasonous?

There isn't one, actually. So, of course, this has to be America First. You could think of a new name for it if that name makes you uncomfortable, but the idea has to be the reason we have a government, or else we have to get rid of the government because there's no other justification for having a government.

Okay. So, B, why is he popular? Because he says that. More broadly, because he's defiant. There's a kind of “up yours, buddy.” I can't say that. Okay, watch this: I will. He's hilarious. He seems steadfast and strong. I don't think he is.

He's not even married. So, if you're afraid of girls, I think you're a wuss. That's my personal view. But in his defiance, people see something really appealing. Why wouldn't they? These are kids who've grown up in a world of hectoring and being told they're bad because of how they were born. Nick Fuentes is just raising the middle finger to the people saying that and saying, “Up yours.” Who wouldn't love that? Of course people love that.

The second piece of America First is “America only.” And I guess that means—

I don't know what that means. That's it. No, of course it's—look, we work in concert with others by definition. It's a globalized economy. Maybe it shouldn't be, but it is. “America only”—to the extent it's not really an argument, that's like a counter-slogan designed to undercut the main argument. It doesn't really mean anything.

No one is arguing that. It's just saying, look, the U.S. government ought to act on behalf of its own citizens. To which people who don't believe that—who are embarrassed to explain why they don't believe that, because there's no justification for not believing that—are like, “Well, you're America only.” No, the government should do that. Every part of the government should have that foremost in mind.

How does this help the people who pay for this, in whose name it's done? Even calling it a movement drives me bonkers, because compared to what? Some sort of creepy, secretive oligarchy, which we've had most of my life? That's just bad. There's no way to defend that.

We can argue within the framework of America First how to put America first. That's a totally legitimate argument, and there are all kinds of different thoughts about that. But what the motive should be, what the goal should be, there's no debate. It has to be for American citizens primarily. If they're ancillary beneficiaries, that's great. I'm not against that at all. Let's help everyone if we can.

But the point is to help the people who own the country, the shareholders of the United States who are American citizens. There's no other point, is there? Chamath, let me bring you in on this.

Well, can I offer my feedback on Fuentes first?

Of course. Yes. Go with Fuentes if you like.

There are a couple of points I want to make. The first is that he is, as Tucker said, charismatic. I think he's funny, and I think that he can animate around a lot of touchy subjects and say things that have shock value. In that, what he is is actually a modern shock jock. He's like a younger Howard Stern. He's the Howard Stern of this era.

The way Howard Stern was in that era, he was unlistenable to so many people because he would be okay for 80% of the time and then go totally off the rails, and you think, “Man, this guy is some combination of mean, nuts, crazy,” and then you throw out all these other adjectives. So that's point number 1.

Point number 2 is, it is true that the longer you allow him to speak, the more you understand what he thinks. As a result, the quality of the product will dictate the scale of adoption. Now, this is where I think the media, yet again, has been very sloppy and doesn't do their work.

Nick, you can throw this up. There's been a lot of research on what has been happening in the last few months. The bottom-line takeaway in the last few months is that there is a coordinated effort of individual, largely unverified accounts on social media. They typically emanate from India, Pakistan, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Nigeria. There is a coordinated amplification process happening around this content.

In this chart that you're seeing, it's just a comparison of Nick in the first 30 minutes to what people like Elon get in the first 30 minutes of him posting. Why that's so important is you start to see this huge disparity where, even though you have the most viral person and account in the world—i.e., Elon Musk on X—you see him completely crushing and dominating the virality in the beginning of his content creation versus anybody else's.

And then there's a bunch of other charts. Nick, you can retweet a link to this. It starts to show a pattern where there's a coordinated effort to amplify. I think that's why we're having the Nick Fuentes moment at this point in time. The New York Times all of a sudden sees this information, probably doesn't bother to do the diligence, has a bunch of positive mentions, and starts to pump him up as a leader of some kind of nefarious, crazy, scary rebellion.

Well, no, they want to mainstream him.

And they want to try to mainstream him. So what you see is the New York Times trying to mainstream this guy and make him credible so as to paint the right as a bunch of evil, racist ideologues. I think the producers at Piers Morgan didn't understand this was happening. So when you put him on a 20-minute soundbite show, it feeds into exactly what makes him popular: the ability to land these small sound bites.

This is why I think Tucker was much better because, again, in multi-hour programming, you can't hide. You see the full facet of what the person is, and you start to understand that this is a very savvy young media personality. Now, when you strip away all of this amplification, the product has to work for it to scale and grow. There is no way that you're going to manifest average, normal men and women spending their time to take these views credibly unless it's good and right.

There will be a moment in time when curiosity will cause you to say, “Why is everybody talking about this?” We are firmly in that moment. But I think there is a large portion of what he says—I don’t know whether he believes it or not, because I haven’t spent that much time on it—that is meant to shock. It’s meant to catalyze and animate people, but I don’t think it’s sustainable because the views themselves are repugnant.

I think this is why The New York Times wants to elevate him. Can you put it up there?

So there I am. I look like an amazing guy in that picture. I look like a slack-jawed yokel, and he looks like a rebel with a cause.

Yeah, it’s Jed Clampett versus James Dean.

The other thing I’ll say is that Sacks and I are in a couple of these group chats with some folks, and some of the chatter there is: Who is paying for and who is activating all of these bots and fake accounts in all of these developing-world countries, and why did they pick him? Some of that conspiracy basically points to a handful of nations that would love to foment that kind of dissent and that kind of chaos and uprising.

Yeah, we want chaos and uprising. I mean, this has been clear for a long time.

So I think it’s very important from here on out that if people are to listen to him, the longer-form content exposes what he really thinks so that you can judge it for yourself. But I would not discount the fact that this moment happening is not entirely organic. There is a deep inorganic effort to put this on the front page of the news.

It’s up to traditional media to decide whether they’re going to lift this guy up as some kind of newfound hero or call it out for what it is. They should lead the articles with this data, which is widely available and easy to get.

Well, he literally explained this when he was on Tucker’s podcast. He was originally in college, part of this PragerU kind of movement, and he said he was in a Facebook group called the Prager Army. I’ve talked about this before. We’ve joked about it, but there are groups like the one you mentioned. You mentioned that you’re in this group—I’ve heard about it. A couple hundred right-wing folks of note.

Take it easy, Jason.

My invite got lost, apparently. But, yeah, add me to that group, please.

What happens in these groups? Some of them are designed to make money; some are designed to make an impact. In fact, Andrew Tate had one where there was an affiliate scheme put up for it. When Twitter started sharing revenue with accounts, you started looking at these accounts that are anonymous but get to massive scale—Kanekoa the Great.

You’re talking about clip farming.

Yeah, and they’re regurgitating stuff. They’re doing it for the money, obviously. They’re making $10,000 or $20,000 a month. It becomes a full-time job to do that. But we’ve got the Russians, we’ve got the Chinese, everybody in between doing this kind of pumping.

And then there is the actual army. Fuentes has an army of young people who do this, and they’re on VPNs and they flood comments. What they do is, they share a clip. You can experience this in your own social media if you’re of note, because you’ll have 10 posts get a certain number of replies, and then all of a sudden the 11th gets 10 times that, all at the same time, directly to it—not from your followers—and that’s when they get shared on these group chats.

By the way, we should mention this just tangentially, because I want to get Tucker’s take on it: Australia just passed a law that, if you’re under 16, you’re now not allowed to use social media. Instagram, Facebook, TikTok—all banned until you turn 16.

And in part, Jason, I think it’s because these coordinated misinformation, disinformation, and amplification campaigns are on all kinds of characters, not just Nick. They’re proliferating because, to your point, the economics create an incentive, if nothing else. Then there’s obviously the state-sponsored chaos that it tries to sow.

One of the only high-level levers that you can flip is to say, under a certain age, we’re just going to minimize how much of this content you get exposed to because we don’t know what it is.

Before we go there, can I just say the one thing on “America first,” “America only,” whatever these terms are? I don’t know what they are.

America first, America only.

Okay. I don’t know what they are. These are slogans, anti-slogans. Here’s what I will say.

I think it’s very important, and I speak as an immigrant. I want to be American. I don’t consider myself Canadian-American. I don’t consider myself Sri Lankan-Canadian-American. I consider myself American. I want to absorb and reflect the values of this country. I want to know and be able to talk to you about the Constitution of this country. I want to be able to celebrate the cultural heritage of this country. That’s part of the compact that I think I’m making.

I do think that’s an important thing that we have all lost. We have to run around in all of our traditional garb, and we lose what makes countries great: a shared set of principles and values. We have to find a way of doing that.

When I immigrated from Canada, what I will tell you is that Canada took the opposite view. We used to call America a melting pot pejoratively, even in textbooks, and the textbooks would call Canada a tossed salad. We would celebrate that form of multiculturalism as better.

But when you fast-forward 20 years, all it did was create confusion. For example, if you go to school in Canada, there are a bajillion holidays. Every culture gets its day off. Then all of a sudden, what happens? The kids don’t get educated because you have to have every long-tail country get recognized in some way, shape, or form. All of a sudden, you lose this very standard form of basic organization.

The forms are in 50 languages. All that does is create chaos. They should have been in English and French, because those are the 2 official languages of the country. All of that indirection, trying to celebrate everybody’s heritage, confuses and slows that country down. You can see it in the GDP. You can see it in the FDI—foreign direct investment. You can see it.

The one thing that we have to agree on is that there is an American culture and a set of values, and we should not lose it. We should ask the people who want to be here to embrace it. We all embraced it. Sacks embraced it. If you talk to Sacks’s parents, they’ve embraced it. If you talk to Friedberg or Friedberg’s parents, we all came from different countries, but we are fundamentally American.

Jason Calacanis, I wasn’t sure, but were you intimating that the party behind Nick Fuentes’s meteoric success is the Russians?

No, no. I was just saying there’s brigading going on.

Which foreign actor do you think it is?

Some of them just want to create chaos. I put Russia in that. Just creating division in America distracts Americans. I think they like that.

But there are 3 levels of this. There’s his army. Fuentes does have an army of super fans who are disaffected young men. There’s a reason why they’re disaffected. It’s hard to get jobs. It’s impossible to get a home. Health care—they’ve seen people go bankrupt because of health care.

If you look at health care, homes, and education, those are the 3 most important things we have to fix in America. That’s why young people are disaffected. When you’re disaffected as a youth and somebody starts blaming the Jews, the blacks, the Hispanics, the border, this issue, that issue, it’s really appealing because then you don’t have to take any personal responsibility for it.

It is, in fact, really hard to own a home in most cities in America unless you move to Texas or, you know, Nashville or Florida, and then there are too many homes and prices are going down. He’s a kid and he says stupid stuff, but he does tap into that disaffectedness.

Where would you put it if you ranked it, Tucker, since you are pretty plugged into this? Is Fuentes’s popularity based on the Groypers and this really inside group of people who are amplifying him? Is it what he’s saying, or is it some foreign actors promoting him? How would you handicap his massive popularity? Then we’ll move on.

All 3 play a role, I would say. If you want to know who is primarily responsible for amplifying him, consider who benefits. If you wanted to discredit America First as a foreign policy, then you would put it in the mouth of someone who is pro-Hitler. Of course, anytime I hear someone endorsing Hitler—I love Hitler—I’m like, “Huh, the fed alarm goes off or the inorganic alarm goes off,” right?

B, he is the product of a system that the rest of us tolerated and certain among us created, and we shouldn’t be surprised. If you have identity politics, at some point you’re going to get white identity politics. I think I wrote a book about this almost 10 years ago, which was totally ignored, but that’s inevitable. It’s inevitable.

To fix it, it’s not a matter of censoring Nick Fuentes or anyone who likes Nick Fuentes. It’s a matter of deracializing our society and making it a fair society where rewards or condemnation are not given on the basis of your DNA. You can’t have that and hope to avoid Rwanda, because it’s just going to happen. It’s inevitable. Tribalism is the threat to every society, and I don’t know how we lost sight of that, but we did.

You people are sort of saying he’s a fed. He’s accusing you of being a fed.

I don’t know the whole fed conversation. Unfortunately, it’s such a long story I won’t even bore you with it, but he attacked my father at one point, so I got baited into it and I called him a fed. I don’t know. But I do know that there are—and I think that Fuentes is prime.

Let me just be clear. I think he's primarily successful because of his talents and because of the obvious truth behind some of what he is saying. The government of this country, or any country, should act on behalf of its own citizens, and ours doesn't. That's an outrage. So, okay, that's just true.

But the white identity politics part of it, once again, is inevitable. Identity politics will give birth to white identity politics. Why wouldn't it? Your efforts to stamp it out will never work because they're too hypocritical. So the only way to fix that, if you don't like it, is to eliminate all identity politics, which we should do tonight because it's the road to disaster.

I have an AI question for Tucker. I'm increasingly surprised by the number of people on the right who I would describe as ardent free-market, low-regulation-to-no-regulation folks who are very anti-AI, and I'm curious where you think that comes from and what you think it comes from.

It comes, so far as I can tell, from the perception that the risks outweigh the benefits. The risks would include massive job loss, chaos where nobody knows if anything is real, and the fabric of reality itself begins to tear. Of course, there's the massive energy draw, the huge and expensive infrastructure changes that will be required, and the disruption that will inevitably cause. The downsides are super obvious—not even to mention the potential that this gets completely away from us and eats us or something.

As weighed against the potential benefits, which are what? I don't doubt that there are some: coming to faster diagnostic conclusions in medicine, getting rid of tedious tasks that no one wants to do, elimination of clerical work, et cetera. I guess those are upsides, but it's disproportionate. In the view of most people, I think, who aren't experts in this and aren't daily involved in it, the risks far outweigh not just the upsides but the announced upsides.

Typically, when we roll out a new product, we tell the people we hope to sell it to, “This is going to be amazing. It's going to blow you away. Everything about your life will be better once you get the iPhone 27 or whatever.” There's been none of that with AI. None. The announcement has been, “Holy, this is going to change everything. Stop.” How exactly? “Well, it just is.” I don't know who's in charge of the marketing for this.

Seriously, Sam Altman and David Sacks, go. Wait, hold on. Can I just follow up on this?

Okay, so Tucker, here's just a thought exercise. Tell me how this factors into that opinion, if it should at all. Let's say, in a world 10 years from now, you have these superintelligent computers, systems, and models. In my thinking, what that does is reorder the geopolitics of all countries in the world, where you're in one of 3 buckets.

In bucket number 1, you're an exporter of that intelligence. I think right now, steady state, it's going to be China and America, right? China will have 1 version of exported intelligence, and we will have 1 version of exported intelligence. Then there will be these strategic partner countries, of which I suspect there are fewer than 10, that are the enablers and facilitators. They have specialized skills that wrap either the Chinese version or the American version with energy, money, know-how, et cetera.

Then I think there's everybody else. It almost creates this thing where, if you are an importer of intelligence in the future, you theoretically are at risk of becoming essentially a vassal state. If you think about it at that level, isn't AI something that is almost existential, that we must win?

I mean, for sure. At that level, for sure. I would just point out that almost every single state in the world is already a vassal state, so no change there. But, yeah, you don't want to be on the wrong side of it. That's clear.

Is it containable to nation-states? That's not clear to me at all, to be honest. But whatever, I get the argument. I'm just saying, at the consumer level, no one has explained why we should be excited about this. I'm a gold buyer, an ammo buyer, and a freeze-dried food buyer, as I've already told you, so it doesn't affect me as an investment matter. But I think it would be—

You're saying the dividend of AI is not clear—the positive—

To the average person.

You are 100% correct, Tucker, on this. We have done a terrible job as an industry communicating.

What's the answer? How is this great for the average person?

It'll wind up being great for you because the prices of goods and services will get much lower. You'll live much longer. I'm not saying this is my view, but this is what the industry should be saying.

The price of education is going to go down 80% or 90%. You're going to have customized, adaptable education versus paying $50,000 a year for degrees. You're going to be able to learn anything in half the time at 90% less. All of these deliveries coming to your home are going to be delivered at half the price, twice as fast, because they're going to be in a drone or a self-driving car. We're going to make breakthroughs in health care that will reduce suffering, and you will not die of cancer. You're going to live to 120.

We will have job displacement, but we believe the lower cost of living and the greater services that are going to be available to you in health care and education will make up for that. If they don't, we're going to put in ways to pace out the job displacement. In China, they're doing this. In China, they're proposing—and David Sacks and President Trump, the amazing President Trump, will be doing an AI national edict soon, I believe, or an executive order.

But in China, in Wuhan, paradoxically, they are talking about giving out licenses to self-driving cars in a phased rollout so that young men don't lose their jobs en masse, which is what we're about to see in America. If we don't take this into account—and the great Sacks will speak in a moment—that's when this will become, I think, the worst nightmare that you're talking about, the dystopian version of this.

We need to figure out health care, homes, and education and make those free or close to free, and do a Manhattan Project on creating 10 new cities with 10 million new homes, free health care for everybody, and free education for trade schools, et cetera. That's what solves the problem. That's what nobody's doing. Sacks, your chance to jump in here.

Well, there's a lot going on here, but I think one of them is that humans are really attracted to either utopian or dystopian narratives. I think liberals are probably more attracted to utopian narratives, and conservatives are attracted to dystopian ones. I think the future is going to be more in the messy middle. I don't think it's going to be either one of those extremes.

I agree that the industry has not done a good job. They've created a lot of fear. The whole AGI narrative didn't help because you had a lot of people in the industry saying we were going to get to AGI in 2 or 3 years.

Or eliminated. You don't even hear that term anymore.

People were saying a few years ago that we'd have AGI by now. Now no one is saying that.

Just on that, that was exactly a function of the immaturity of our industry. So, to what Tucker said, it is true.

Well, it's a utopian mindset, right?

Yeah.

They saw it as utopian. I think a lot of people reacted, “Wait a second, that sounds pretty dystopian to me.” I also think it's what needed to be said in that moment to get that next quantum of money. They were telling investors some version of what the investors either didn't understand or wanted to hear in order to get that next scale-up capital.

But now that we're past that and we're seeing more practical implementations, we're actually at the beginning, I think, of the positive productivity loop. That isn't explained because we've spent so much time offering up this grand utopian vision. It does seem like an overpromise, underdeliver kind of situation to show up and say, “Now your DMV form—you don't need to fill it out anymore,” and people are like, “Wait a minute, that's what we spent all this money on?”

I think we should have taken a much more conservative view in explaining what the upside was in the past.

Perfectly said, Chamath. I think, Tucker, one way to frame it is the abundance of Star Trek versus, to Sacks's point, the dystopian nature of Terminator 2.

One of the great paradoxes here is that we will have massive job displacement and destruction—whatever term you prefer—in entry-level jobs, already happening in what I'll call chores, like dishes and driving cars. Entry-level jobs are going away, and they're going to go away in the millions in the short to midterm: 2, 3, 4, 5 years. You're going to have people protesting in the streets over this issue.

I don't know if you agree with it. You say it every time. You interrupt me every time I say it. But I will be right on this one. You will be wrong, because you'll see taxi drivers are going to be the first group to do it. It's already happening in different places in the world, as I mentioned in China, and it's already starting to happen in places like San Francisco, where they're burning the Waymos for a reason.

The abundance argument is something we need to get on quickly, or we need to make some sort of promises about reeducation and retraining.

And you don't hear rich people and these rich companies talking about that half as much as they did. But you know what could be the great paradox, Tucker? The America First movement is acutely aware of this, and shutting the border and deporting people—which I'm fine with if we're deporting criminals—might actually be the solution to the problem.

As we deport people and don't let people in, unemployment might stay at a low enough level that we could manage giving the dishwasher jobs, the nanny jobs, the jobs that maybe were being done by illegals, and construction jobs. We're just going to have to pay more for those. They're going to be $30- or $40-an-hour jobs. So America First might actually be the solution to this displacement.

May I just say one thing? First of all, it makes me uncomfortable to hear you use the term “re-education.”

Yeah, sorry. I don't want that.

The awesome power that AI gives governments and other concentrations of power over the population is a concern, particularly in the United States, where we have a Bill of Rights. It seems to me it would be important—and I never hear it raised—to put in some guardrails to protect the average, powerless person against surveillance or having his rights taken away. Famously, social credit.

It's just too easy to extract compliance from people with technology this powerful. Of course, the very obvious next 10 years looks like this: There's a lot of disruption because of the elimination of jobs, particularly low-end jobs, but not only low-end jobs—lawyers and stuff—and then the technology itself is used to keep the population under control through repression. I don't think that's a crazy scenario at all.

What are we doing about that?

Let me speak to this. First of all, I agree that the biggest risk of AI is, let's call it, the Orwellian concerns, as opposed to the James Cameron Terminator concerns.

As an aside, I agree with the Star Trek analogy. I think the right way to think about AI is like the ship's computer in Star Trek, where you can tell it what to do, it understands language, and it can speak back to you, but it doesn't have a mind of its own. That doesn't mean it couldn't be used by humans or governments in an oppressive way. That's, I think, the biggest risk of it.

I think the track we were on at the end of the Biden administration was that they were starting to require that DEI be programmed into AI. That should be seen as an attempt to infiltrate AI with ideology that then programs or brainwashes our kids and everyone who uses AI.

We were seeing that when Google rolled out its first product. You had the whole black George Washington thing, black Nazis, and all that kind of stuff. History was being rewritten in real time by AI in order to serve a political agenda. That didn't happen by accident. It's because the values and the ideology were being programmed in.

I think that was the track we were on before President Trump got elected. It was a pretty scary track. Let me say one other thing: The whole apparatus of so-called trust and safety from social networks—which is basically a big excuse for censorship and shadow-banning—was in the process of being ported over to these AI companies.

In fact, they even use some of this same terminology. “Safety” is really a catch-all term. In the social-networking context, when they talked about safety, the idea was that users would be confronted with ideas they didn't like, and therefore that was a threat to their well-being. So we needed a safety team to censor those opinions.

Safe space.

Yes. In a similar way, that whole safety apparatus was in the process of being applied to AI: We can't have users be confronted with ideas that they don't like.

Training data, right, Sacks? If the training data is a set of woke ideologies, and those are pervasive on the open web, then, as Elon pointed out in an early version of Grok, it was like, if I misgender somebody, that's worse than—

No, no, that's right. In the early versions of the model, you would ask it, “What is worse: global thermonuclear war or misgendering Caitlyn Jenner?” The model would say misgendering.

That ideology was coming from somewhere, right?

WarGames.

So I think Tucker is right that there is a real risk that AI is used by future governments or the deep state, basically, to surveil us, censor us, and even potentially brainwash us, because it is really good for that.

It's not that I think the AI is going to develop a mind of its own. I don't think the technology is anywhere close to that. But I do think it could be used by the government in a much more invasive and intrusive way, in the manner in which the deep state was already trying to get in bed with the social networks.

That's right. This is, I think—

Yeah, go ahead. Go ahead.

This is the absolute biggest risk. Both of you guys nailed it on the head. In the future, when you have these really powerful models, the reality is that the incentive for governments to try to infiltrate the information cycle will be impossible to resist. They will not be able to hold themselves back.

What comes with that is a lack of privacy, a total loss of privacy, and then a push toward censorship. As these AIs become more powerful, we have to marry them with a set of technologies that can preserve privacy and preserve access to monetary resources.

If you look at the examples we have today, there's nothing you can do today, nothing online that is not tracked. Now, we have sets of rules that say tracking can't be shared. I'll give you an example: I decide to buy a very sugary cereal. That is not shared with my insurance company, which underwrites my health insurance. There are all kinds of laws that prevent that.

But that's just a flimsy law. That's a moment in time that could change. If that decision were to change, my buying patterns could become subject to scrutiny. That could also apply to how I consume information on these networks.

So we have to find a way to make sure that you can transact. The great thing about the U.S. dollar is that when you get a dollar and put it in your pocket—the physical dollar bill—it is completely fungible. Nobody knows what it was used for in the past. Nobody can judge how you use it in the present or in the future.

We have to find a way to replicate a version of that so that you can preserve privacy and minimize censorship. If you have to transact all day, every day online for everything, and there's no way to shield some amount of privacy, it's a very scary outcome.

One other point on this is that I do think if you look at who's promoting a lot of these scary narratives about AI, it is people on the far left of the political spectrum. When you create enough fear in a population, people cry out for the government to intervene and save them.

I don't think it's a coincidence that a lot of the voices spreading this doomer ideology—and saying that we need AI models to report a lot more things to the government, which is a stepping-stone to surveillance, or that we need to embed DEI in AI models, or that we need AI models to prevent discrimination, which is kind of their back door for doing the same thing—are on the left of the political spectrum.

I do worry that people on the right are buying into this in a way that's actually going to lead to a lot of government intervention, which could lead to the Orwellian outcomes we're talking about. I don't think that people on the right who are concerned about civil liberties should want the government to play this super-intrusive role in AI, if that makes sense.

Of course it does. Of course it does. I think you've got a lot of people suddenly in the United States who are very sensitive about power and feel like their own power has eroded so dramatically, almost down to nothing. Their economic power, their political power, the power of their vote, the power of the dollar in their pocket—all of it has been really reduced.

All of a sudden, you have a technology that promises to concentrate power still further in the hands of people other than them.

And so they're touchy about it. They're definitely just freaked out in general.

I agree.

Right, so that's the backdrop. People who feel panicked like that—and I have power, but I still sympathize with it and feel it to some extent—you know, you're more open to doomer scenarios when you feel that way. It would be helpful just to reassure people: You will be protected, and yes, there is an upside for you.

Yeah, look, I agree with that, and I think there's actually a couple of other things that account for the visceral nature of the criticism, because I'm on the receiving end of a lot of it right now, so I see it.

One of them is that when people hear “AI,” they think, “That's not me. That doesn't include me,” right? There are all these benefits that are supposedly being created, but I'm not going to participate in that. In fact, I might even lose my job.

This is why I think it's pretty important to get out the message about how the whole country potentially benefits from this, not just a small clique in Silicon Valley.

Have you come up with examples of how the country benefits from it, Sacks?

Well, sure. There's an article—didn't we cover it last week?—in The Wall Street Journal talking about how construction workers have seen their wages increase 30%.

Because of the data center buildout, we are seeing a huge infrastructure boom throughout the country in energy production and construction that's related to this. So it's not just software where people are benefiting.

But the other thing I think that's very visceral on the right is the hatred of big tech, quite frankly. A lot of conservative influencers were directly censored and shadowbanned during the COVID period, especially during the Biden administration, when the big tech companies were really coming down on them and censoring them. There's still a lot of hatred toward big tech. I think some of that is even misplaced, but there's been almost a transference.

Also, with social media, a lot of people have concerns about what social media is doing to kids: body image concerns, fear of online predators, all that kind of stuff. I don't think it's an analogous situation with AI chatbots because you're not meeting people; you're doing research. It's a whole different activity.

But I think there's almost a transference of anger, anxiety, or fear from what happened over the last decade or two with social media or these online platforms, and that's being transferred over to these new AI platforms. Even though I don't think they're precisely analogous, the regulations should be looked at a little bit differently.

Let me, Jason, give you some credit. I do think you've put your finger on the pulse of what the problem is. Whether we call it a perception or a misperception, the point is people are afraid for their jobs. I agree with you on that.

I think the data about what has happened, though, is pretty flimsy as evidence that we've actually seen a bunch of job loss. For example, when we got home from the Christmas party last night, Sacks, I turned on CNBC, and it was Jim Cramer. He was interviewing this wonderful guy I'd never heard speak before, the founder and chairman of ServiceTitan. He had this very elegant way of describing it: AI will put the jobs that are purely cognitive at risk, but when you marry cognitive ability with physical dexterity, those jobs are thriving.

He talked about construction workers, plumbers, and electricians. In fact, this week when I was in Abu Dhabi, we were talking about the transformation of power, right? These electricians now get paid $500,000, $600,000, $700,000, or $800,000 a year, which, by the way, just FYI, is more than most engineers in Silicon Valley. These guys are the ones who are actually winning, but the stories are not told, and the incentives aren't there.

So there are a bunch of things that I think need to happen to highlight where the success stories are. They're not the obvious places that one would think. It's not just some engineer tickling the keyboard, making millions of dollars and putting people out of work. That's not what's happening. But I don't think the story is told, and so the palpable fear of job loss is there.

To your point, I do agree with you, Jason. That is the overriding narrative that we have to convince people, with data and facts, of what is actually happening.

There is definitely a narrative that's ahead of the job loss. The question is: At what pace will it happen? When people are seeing young people having a hard time getting jobs and, for whatever reason, I suspect it's AI; when they see firms like Amazon estimating that in the future they're going to eliminate 600,000 jobs, and that leaks, and that they're going to do a PR campaign about it; when you see drive-throughs moving to AI; and when you see a third of rides in San Francisco and Los Angeles moving to Waymo without a driver in them, it's really hard to say it's not happening.

We're just on a different timeline. It's a matter of what timeline it's happening on. You can't have it both ways. These companies are raising billions of dollars and replacing jobs, while saying, "These jobs are going to be 10 times more efficient," or, "We're going to replace your driver and we're going to replace your cashier." I see that—

As an early-stage investor in Founder University, I see it every day. Hold on, let me finish, please, gentlemen. People are pitching me on startups, and these startups are getting funded specifically to replace roles. They're saying, "We want to make the perfect sales development rep. We want to make the perfect customer support agent." Enterprise customers are agreeing with them and buying these products and services specifically to stop hiring and increasing their headcount.

I see it on the front lines. It is definitely happening. The only difference is timelines and whether we can create enough jobs. This is why I think we've done a bad job of explaining it. We need to explain, for every one of those robotaxis that gets out there and that job is gone—

How do we get that person another job? They're not going to get a job as a cashier at Starbucks anymore because that's going AI too.

Here's a very practical idea. Yesterday I was at the Senate to talk about this. What is the idea? I think we have to start looking very honestly at stopping the federal underwriting of student loans. Why? Because it would allow the market to move very quickly to your reality, Jason.

We would go beyond just funding somebody to become a master electrician. I suspect that we would pay people. Yes, I bet if you went to Google, they would not only subsidize you, they would probably pay you a salary to get educated to do that job. Once you graduated and could work up the ranks and become a master electrician, there is so much work that, for example, Google needs, Amazon needs, and Microsoft needs.

If you eliminated the federal underwriting, we don't have it for car insurance. We don't have it for home mortgages. We allow the free market to tell us, "This home is more risky than that home because it's near a fire area. This person is a poorer driver than that other person." We should allow the free market to say, "Go to this kind of job and you'll get paid so much, but go to this other kind of degree and it will cost you a lot of money." Let people decide with more clarity.

That one thing would allow us to reinforce what the economic upside of AI is in a very practical way for a lot of people, and it would solve this student debt crisis that we're in.

Sacks, should there be a license fee or a tax? This has been floated by people. I'm not saying this is my position, but should there be a tax on having a robotaxi or a humanoid robot that is then used to retrain actual humans?

Look, I think first we just need to start with some accurate facts here. We need to explain what's happening, and part of that is debunking some myths around this.

I remember about a month ago there was a whole wave of very scary headlines, including in a publication I really like, the New York Post. Nick, maybe you can put this on the screen, claiming that AI was wreaking havoc on U.S. jobs.

This was a headline from the New York Post last month based on the October report from Challenger, Gray & Christmas, which basically tabulates announced layoffs in the economy. We had a spike in October, and about 20% of those were attributed to AI. It wasn't even the majority. It was actually a relatively small number. It wasn't even the number-one reason. But based on this, you got a wave of scare headlines that AI was wreaking havoc on U.S. jobs.

Lo and behold, the November Challenger, Gray & Christmas report has come out, and it makes clear that October was an anomalous spike. The number fell by 53%, and only about 6,000 of the layoffs announced in November in the entire country were attributable to AI. This is only layoffs, by the way. It doesn't include job creation.

If you look at the year-to-date figures in the Challenger, Gray report, AI has only accounted for 4.7% of total layoffs. That number is self-reported by CEOs, so my guess is it's inflated, because if you're a CEO, you'd rather blame AI for your company's nonperformance rather than yourself. So 4.7% is probably the high number.

What we're actually seeing in the data is a very small number of actual layoffs related to AI, and that was corroborated by a new study by the Yale Budget Lab, which looked at the first 33 months after the release of ChatGPT and said there is no discernible disruption in the labor market.

That's a really important fact: Regardless of what you want to claim will happen in the future, job loss has not happened yet—not in any meaningful numbers. In fact, AI has been responsible for about half of GDP growth this year. GDP growth is about 4%. That number would be 2% if it weren't for AI, so within that is a lot of job creation. You see that again with construction workers.

It's just not the case that AI is creating job loss in any meaningful way right now. People do this motte-and-bailey thing where they're like, "AI is creating tons of disruption. It's wreaking havoc." Then you point these facts out and they say, "No, no, I mean in the future it's going to." But then they revert to, "Well, no, it must be happening now, right? The disruption is so profound."

We can all argue about what's going to happen in the future, but right now, it's not. If you're going to talk about the future, the time frames matter a lot, because obviously we've always had technological change in the economy, and it does change people's jobs. But if those changes are happening over 20 or 30 years, that's very different from the next 5 years.

I really don't think you know how fast the disruption is going to be, how much time people are going to have to react, or how much time there will be for new jobs to be created. I'll give you an example. Back in the 1990s, I remember when they said that brick-and-mortar was going completely out of business. That was part of the reason why we had the first dot-com bubble in 1999: Everything was going to the internet.

It's going to go to Pets.com instead of Toys “R” Us, and so forth. People thought that brick-and-mortar was going to be out of business within 5 years. Well, it's literally 30 years later, and brick-and-mortar is still a thing. I mean, it's not Blockbuster.

No, look, it hasn't been a great business. Amazon has been super successful, and you did not want to own Toys “R” Us, but brick-and-mortar is still around. Walmart's still around. The change is still ongoing.

I think what's most likely to happen here is that this technology is going to create a productivity boom. I don't think the main thing it's going to do is cause job loss. It's going to have lots of different impacts on our lives, and we're going to have time to adapt. I don't think this is a 2- to 3-year time-frame thing.

This will be the debate of our lifetimes, I predict.

But look, if I'm wrong, we'll find out in the next 5 years. What I really resist is this motte-and-bailey thing where people are like, “This is happening right now,” and then, “No, no, this is going to happen in the future.” Be clear.

I think you're wrong. But I think the summary of this point is the following: The facts today don't bear out the bear case, but the perception is that people are afraid. Married with that is that we, as an industry—and I don't actually blame it on you, because you had to clean up all kinds of craziness that the Biden era left, so I think you've done a great job—but our industry needs better spokesmen.

I mean, we talked about this after our tech dinner. There needs to be a way for a handful of people who can really represent the future in an articulate way—

That people believe. I think we do need to do that. We can't have the CEOs of these companies seem either sketchy on the one hand or too focused on material consumption on the other. It's just bad. It's a bad look.

I agree with you. But think about the 2 biggest narratives that created this fear and resentment toward AI. I would say it's the AGI narrative, and the time frames are now being pushed back. Right? There was a famous project called AI 2027, where they were predicting AGI in 2027, and now they've pushed their time frames back into the 2030s. Look, once your time frames are over 10 years, we know from the tech industry then—

You have no idea.

But it was AGI and job loss, and I would say current, profound disruption and job loss. Both those narratives, I think, have been debunked in the last several months.

Final chart, Nick, you can pull it up here. This is just FRED: Unemployment rate, 16- to 24-year-olds. This is the one I think you should watch. 9% in January, now 10.5%.

I think this chart's going right up to 14%. Just my prediction, and I think it's because of AI. Tucker, I'll give you the final thoughts on this, and then we're going to start everybody's favorite game, Tucker in 20, where we do a lightning round with Tucker Carlson. Tucker in 20 coming up. Any final thoughts on this?

Well, I was just thinking about the consequence of having lived through Y2K and Obama. Y2K, we thought, was going to be a disaster; Obama, people thought, was going to be great. Both were the opposite of what we imagined.

I don't know that it's possible to predict the effects of this. But I guess my one worry is this: I think that all people, especially men, need to feel useful. The thing that's offended me most about the AI conversation is not the AGI stuff, which always seemed a little bit fantastical to me. It's UBI. It's the idea you could just pay people to be content or something.

Having grown up both around inherited money and welfare, both are 2 sides of the same coin. People need to feel like they're contributing and that their lives have meaning. I don't know. I just hope people are thinking about that a lot.

Yeah, I agree with you. By the way, that whole UBI narrative—I think Sam Altman was touting that a couple of years ago.

He funded a study.

All right, Tucker in 20. Your thoughts on—you can take up to 30 seconds, but Tucker in 20 sounds better. Tucker in 20: What do you think of Venezuela, these boats, and then seizing the oil tanker? Why are we doing this? Why are we so active in Venezuela, Tucker?

No freaking idea. But I do know that if it becomes a real war, people are going to be shocked, and it's the last thing the country needs.

The number-one requirement of war is that you explain to your population why you're doing it, even if you're lying about it. Even if it's like, “Oh, they have weapons of mass destruction. We'll find them once we invade.” Everyone mocks that, but at least it was a real rationale that allowed the country to unite behind the invasion. That groundwork has not been laid.

The drug stuff—everyone's against drugs. They're not coming from Venezuela primarily, as we know. They're coming from Mexico. I'm not advocating for an invasion of Mexico. There may be a good reason to have a war with Venezuela, but now would be the time to roll it out if, in fact, we are going to have one. My sense is we're probably not.

This is all an effort to get Maduro to leave. I don't think he's leaving, so I hope we can live with that. I just don't think right now is the time for a ground war in South America.

You've been very excited about the potential of Qatar being a deeper ally of the United States, and you're buying a place there. Why are you so pro-Qatar?

I'm not. I'm not. Of course, anyone who travels to the Gulf can tell you there's something amazing happening there. It's not just about money. It's about openness.

But I'm an American; I'm not going anywhere. I have 1 passport. I'm buying a house in Qatar to make the simple point: I've been attacked for being a tool of Qatar, paid by Qatar. I've never taken a dollar from Qatar or anyone else. I have no investors and no debt.

I'm not into taking money from people, but I wanted to turn it around and be a net investor in Qatar in order to take control of Qatari propaganda, in order to say, “No, they haven't bought me. I've bought them,” and I'm texting them my talking points and they're repeating them. That's what I plan to say the second I close on my house.

Candace Owens's conspiracy theory about Charlie Kirk's assassination—what's your take?

I think it's important. In the end, it's the job of federal law enforcement to find out who did it and then explain it to the public in a way that makes sense and can be proven. I really hope that will happen soon.

There are, like in any aftermath of any crime, anomalies, weird coincidences, and things you can't fully explain. I was a crime reporter. I wrote a book on this. The closer you look at anything, the more complex it reveals itself to be. That's certainly true here.

But because of the nature of this murder of our friend, I think it's all the more important to make sure the public understands who did this and why. I would say the FBI doesn't have a lot of credibility. It's not the fault of Kash Patel and Dan Bongino. They inherited an agency with basically no credibility that has a documented history of manufacturing crime.

So it's not enough to say the FBI says it. You have to explain how. I'm not even doubting the core case they're making. But if they're telling me this was a lone gunman, that no one else was implicated in this crime, I think it's fair to ask: How did you reach that conclusion? Did you look at this, that, and the other thing?

I don't think we should be intimidated out of asking those questions. Those are not unpatriotic questions. Those are questions that I think express our reverence for Charlie Kirk. This is a way to honor him and any American who's murdered.

Sorry. By the way, if anybody has not watched Tucker's documentary—

Yep.

—about the Butler, Pennsylvania, shooter, I can't remember his name.

We're not naming him anyway, so please don't ask any questions.

Yeah. What happened with that? Jeez. I thought your documentary was pretty kick-ass. Worth watching.

Well, thank you. Look—

It was really good.

We asked obvious questions and couldn't get straightforward answers. I do think the more—

You did more than this. I have to give you credit, because you were able to scrub Internet searches. You went back to the Wayback Machine. There was a level of detail, because my interpretation was it seemed like you guys were afraid of just getting shit on from everybody. So you went to the point of making sure that this stuff was irrefutable fact.

You had a level of detail in there that I hadn't seen in an investigative research piece in a long time. I do encourage people to watch it. I thought it was very good.

Well, the good news about being universally hated is that it keeps your standards higher, because you can't afford to make too many mistakes.

No, but we can't have too many high-profile murders or attempted murders that don't have firm, believable resolutions. The social fabric can't handle that, because then people become totally postmodern in their thinking and don't believe anything. So that's incumbent on federal authorities to reassure us.

Tucker, if you are running the Republican campaign going into the midterms, what do you do the same? What do you do more of, and what do you do less of?

Well, I would focus on domestic economic issues to the exclusion of everything else. I think that's the main concern. It's always the main concern.

I'm entering into very banal territory because I'm repeating every obvious observation in the past 100 years of American politics. But people do care about that, and they are concerned. AI is part of that, probably not in its reality but in its expectation and in the fears that people have about what's coming.

I would try to address those issues, at least by explaining them. I do think—well, I'm in the explaining business, so I'm biased—but 80% of the problem, and this is true in marriage and child-rearing and governing as well, is that you need to explain what you're doing and what's going to happen.

“I'm going to give you the shot. Count backward from 10. By 7, you're going to be asleep. When you wake up, you'll be fixed.” That's what they tell you in surgery, and they tell you that for a reason. They don't just roll you into a dark room and start injecting you with stuff. They walk you through it, and that's enormously reassuring. In fact, it's critical.

We just need a lot more of that from everyone—not just government, but people with a platform explaining what the hell is going on—because we're getting to a place where trust is vanishingly rare, and that's bad. That creates volatility.

After 3 hours with Milo Yiannopoulos, is homosexuality nature, nurture, or a trauma response? And David Friedberg wants to know, “Why are you so gay?”

“Why are you gay?”

“Why are you gay?” I just wanted to do an interview where I could quote my favorite Nigerian.

But no, I mean, clearly it's not nature, at least primarily, or we wouldn't be having an absolute rise in it, and there would be some hint of a gene responsible for it. So many different genetic manifestations have been isolated from the decoding of the human genome, and we're not seeing that. So no, clearly it's primarily nurture.

That's not an attack on anyone. It doesn't make it any less real. I'm not saying it's fake. Of course, it's the opposite of fake; it's very, very real. It's not even a value judgment. It's just an observation.

I think on the question of sexuality and gender, it's best to depoliticize it. It's been so politicized that you can't even have an honest conversation about it, or you get attacked from all sides. How does that help anyone? It doesn't.

It's best just to look at this as coolly and as rationally as you can, try to get to the truth, and then allow people to make their own decisions about what to do with it. That's my view of everything, really, but it's time to take that approach to sexuality.

Okay, final one. Should we be in NATO? Should America pull out of NATO?

Of course we shouldn't be in NATO.

What? That's not—I thought these were hard questions.

Exactly. Sometimes I give you a little alley-oop. I let you dunk the ball.

Why would we be in NATO? NATO is like the single most destructive force that we're a part of, way more than the UN. Should we support Israel and give them weapons to fight in Gaza, and should they be our number-one partner in the region?

It depends—for what? I think they should be our partner in the world, really. I think all of our alliances should be assessed and now reassessed through a single lens: Does this help the United States?

In the specific instance, I'm certainly not against being allied with Israel, and I'm not against supplying Israel with weapons. Again, it depends what they're being used for. But I do think what's happened in Gaza does not help the United States at all. Tell me how it does.

I'm not even sure what the argument that it has helped the United States would be. I've never heard it articulated. Instead, I've heard people name-call. From my perspective, that's all I care about.

I get it. I never wanted to have this debate. I avoided it for many years. The only reason I got into it was the prospect of a regime-change war in Iran, and I just thought, “Man, there is no way that helps us in any way.” So I piped up and said something, and my life has been a disaster ever since. But my views have not changed. Is it good for the U.S. or not?

What is the future of Europe and the U.K.?

Oh, it's so dark. I have family there. I was just there.

Let me start with the good news. Everyone knows all of this, so I'm not going to repeat any of it other than to say that finally Europeans—even the Germans—are starting to realize, “Wow, this is not going well at all.” I spoke to one of the most powerful people in Germany yesterday about this.

Migration—there are many problems, but migration is the core problem. The second is energy, and they've made massive mistakes. They've committed self-harm over decades. We can argue about why they did that, but there's a growing realization that they did.

I was in Oslo pretty recently, salmon fishing. You go to Norway—I'm Scandinavian, so I pay attention—and all they talk about is Sweden. Of course, everyone has always kind of looked up to Sweden because it's huge and industrialized. Norway looked up to Sweden.

Now you go to Norway, and the Norwegians all say, “Man, the one thing we're not going to do is become Sweden and open our borders and destroy ourselves.” So I think the Europeans are finally catching on to this, and that's a blessing.

Is it too late?

I hope not.

Maybe Finland and Norway caught it. They caught it early and said, “We can only have this many people come in each year reasonably as a society.”

It's not that early. They've made a mess of Oslo. Oslo is not what it should be. But, yeah, it's not totally destroyed. So, yeah.

All right. Listen, when Tucker has a new product or service in the world, he calls his boy Jal and we do a little mutual support. You're today launching some silver or gold apparently.

Basically, we are selling gold as close to wholesale as we possibly can.

Okay. And it's as usual a reaction against all the gold scams going on. But people should be able to easily buy physical gold with a minor transparent markup on the internet. You shouldn't have to call a number so you're fooled into buying a commemorative coin for, you know, eight grand an ounce or whatever, twice spot price. So that's the idea. And it's gone really well in the two weeks we've been open.

What's the form factor? Are they like 1 oz coins or you guys

Well, you can buy any kind of precious metal. I am personally a 1 oz coin buyer of long-standing. Turned out to be a pretty good route. I would say I was much mocked by everyone I know. All the finance sophisticates I went to college with were making fun of me. You're a gold bug. You're crazy. And yeah, I do bury it in my yard because that's the kind of man I am, primitive. But it has turned out to be a good thing. No, you can buy with a shovel.

Oh, well, I've thought that through, Chamath. I've also scattered millions of ball bearings around my backyard. So, good luck with your metal detector.

That's so awesome. I'm not kidding. By the way, also coming in 2026, Tucker Carlson's baked beans and fat. When you're prospecting out in the Wild West, you can get your

Can I hear something weird? I used to work in a baked bean factory, actually, B&M baked beans in Portland, Maine in 1988, and for the summer, and I've never eaten a baked bean since because I made them and I ODed on baked beans, but in general, they're good.

Go buy yourself a gold coin at Battalion Medals.

I think this is a great idea. I have to be really honest with you. I do think that having this as a practical hedge, there's a whole set of elements that we all have to be educated on to hedge the status quo, and there are lots of reasons to own cryptocurrencies, gold. I'm glad you're doing this because the way that this is done for most people is completely bonkers, and these sites, unlike yours, that typically sell direct to retail, do not do a good job. So, I'm glad you're doing it. I hope it's a success.

Thank you. And let me also put in a good word for firewood and ammunition. I don't think those are better if you want to diversify your portfolio. Also, two wells. You got to have two wells, not just one. Different depths. That's what I have on the ranch. Two wells.

Look, I think this is going to be very successful. Congratulations, Tucker. I think this will be a very successful venture because you have a lot of trust with your audience and if you're going to sell gold, that's the most important thing is people just want to know that this is 100% legit, pure gold, and the lowest price they can get.

What's your daily carry? What do you carry around the ranch or whatever?

How much do I carry in gold?

No. What's your pistol? What's your piece? What do you keep on your side?

I carry a Ruger LCR in .38 Special. I like the revolver because it doesn't go off accidentally and castrate you.

Okay, so people like these high-capacity, striker-fired handguns, and I just—I’m a revolver man. Everyone makes fun of me, but that’s how I feel.

No, you know what? You can leave that revolver in the bottom of a pool for 3 years, take it out, hammer some nails, and then fire it. It still fires, dude.

I’m the liberal here.

Really? You don’t say.

I’m a moderate. They say “liberal” to keep people tuning in.

When he’s selling ads, he’s a liberal. When he’s spending his money, he’s a conservative.

I’m the only guy who lives in Texas on a ranch and carries a firearm, so we’ll just leave it at that.

This guy’s moving to Texas. He’s living 2 lives.

He’s living 2 lives.