2026 Election Night Livestream with the Besties!

0:00To split the difference. Not really the issue, honestly. The issue is not about giving up money or paying taxes. The issue is about creating the idea that people can get taxed on their assets after they've paid income tax or illiquid assets before they've paid income tax because it creates a mechanism that I think ultimately leads to ruin and socialism that makes it very hard for anyone in the country to progress individually. And I think the lack of progress that arises from these sorts of structural tax systems are what will be the ruin of Silicon Valley, the ruin of California, and potentially the ruin of the country. So that's what I'm most worried about. Okay. And that is an important issue.

0:39Looks like Steve Hilton was trending not so great, Cham Chamath on Polymarket, like a 2% chance last time I checked. And we'll pull that up in a second. Unfortunately, more of the same for California in terms of putting unqualified people in positions of power to run the state into the ground. I, of course, fled three years ago. How are you feeling tonight, Chamath? What are your thoughts? Generally speaking, you chose to stay in California and fight. To be honest, I stayed for my family and to keep building the businesses that I'm involved in. And if I have to pay the tax, I'll pay the tax and I'll move on. But I do think it has a pretty negative slippery slope for the incentives to build here. And I think that that's

1:27not going to have some cataclysmic overnight effect, but I think it's going to cause the slow burn and decay of the state. So I'm hoping that Prop 40 fails, and I hope Propositions 41 and 42 pass. And if those don't happen, we'll absorb the consequences. But I do think it has a really bad impact on Silicon Valley and then broadly America. And then more generally, I'm really surprised at where the betting markets and where the polls and the exit polls and um are putting this election it is uh if it stands again i don't know if it stands uh because most of the polls haven't closed yet but if it stands it is um it's a pretty enormous shift in the sentiment of the country and i think that it's going to take a little while for us to unpack why and what that means. Yeah. And we're going to do that tonight. We've got an incredible lineup of guests,

2:29and we'll bring our first one on in a moment. It is 7.04 p.m. in the great state of Texas, which means it's 5 p.m. on the left coast and 8 p.m. on the right coast. Polls have closed in more than a dozen states, Georgia, Virginia, Florida, Ohio, North Carolina. They're counting their votes. Still early, but it does not look like this will be a blue spritz, looking like it's going to be a blue tsunami, as some people predicted. Let's pull up the balance of power here, 2026 midterms on polymarket. Just in the last hour, if we were looking at in the last hour, gentlemen, an hour ago was looking like low 80s, 83, 84, even as low as 82% for the sweep. Sweep chances now 93%. And these tend to be, I think we all agree, if we can't trust the polls as much

3:31as we used to, and for any number of reasons, whether it's biases or their methodologies, Friedberg, when people do put large amounts of money in the volume on this one that we're looking at is $68.7 million. When you get to that level, you are talking about a pretty significant amount of money. And here to talk about it with us is the sitting senator from the great state, now my state, the great state of Texas, my guy, Ted Cruz. The senior senator. Yes, senior senator. Ted, how are we feeling tonight? You were caught on some microphones. I don't know if it was public statements or not. They were framing it as you were. This was leaked audio. I don't think it was leaked. You had concerns about tonight.

4:23And are those concerns realized? Well, I will say I was amused when it was characterized as leaked audio because it's what I said on my podcast I do every week, Verdict with Ted Cruz. So it's like saying your comment on the All In podcast was leaked. It was leaked from Apple Podcasts and Spotify. They both were involved in this leak. So listen, I am very worried about tonight. It's early still. There's still people voting, but we have polls closed on the East Coast. The early votes we've seen all over the country, the Democrats have had a sizable advantage. I can tell you in Texas, if the election had closed yesterday, we would face devastation in Texas. The early vote, the Democrats had a big advantage.

5:07That's true in most states across the country. Now, there are good news and bad news from that. If you look at how you analyze elections, typically, you break voters down on the Republican side into what are called four R's, three R's, two R's, and one R's. A four R is someone who's voted in four of the last four Republican primaries. A three Rs, two Rs and one Rs. A four R is someone who's voted in four of the last four Republican primaries. A three R obviously is three of the last four, et cetera. The Democrats do the same thing. If you look at early votes in Texas, you had about three fourths of the four Ds and three Ds had voted early in Texas. And about half of the four Rs and three Rs had voted early in Texas.

5:44So there was a big differential. So if you ended it there, we were facing a bloodbath. That's the bad news. The good news, Republicans have a lot more outstanding votes that were available to come in on election day. There were a lot more three Rs and four Rs that hadn't voted than there were three Rs, three Ds and two Ds. The question that I don't know sitting here just eight minutes after polls closed in most of Texas is what turnout was on election day. To win, we need a big, big Republican turnout. That's true in Texas. That's true in most states. And by the way, as we get further west for the folks still voting and their congressional races in particular in California where turnout is going to matter. And so even if we're looking at a really nasty

6:31election on the East Coast, and we might be, I mean, right now, Florida is basically tied, the governor's race and the Senate race. I think we'll win both of those, but they're neck and neck. It's not encouraging. Georgia, the Senate race, it should have been our best pickup opportunity this cycle. They called it at 7.02 PM Texas time, about an hour after the Georgia polls closed. That ain't good. But I will say for everyone where polls are still open, if you are Republican, if you're libertarian, if you're independent, if you're just a normal common sense person, please come out and vote anyway, because it can still make a difference while the polls are open. Ted, what do you think about the comment that this makes about specifically the president

7:17and the economy versus what has been a pretty consistent behavioral pattern in many elections before this, which is you tend to keep the balance of power by flipping. And so how do you apportion what is happening here? What is the signal that the observer should take away? Yeah, look, there is a structural dynamic that typically the party out of power gains seats in and off your election. And there are a couple of reasons for that. One, the party out of power, they're usually angry, they're pissed off and they're unified. In this case, if you are a left wing voter, you hate Donald Trump with a fury that could ignite a thousand suns. That hate motivates a lot of people to go online and get money

8:04and it motivates a lot of people to show up and vote. And so the left is all unified. And even the differences among the left, hatred of Trump manages to paper over that. On the right, look, right now Republicans have control over the White House, the Senate, and the House. The danger is A, that our people are complacent. They say, gosh, things are pretty good. I don't need to show up. And B, that we're divided, that you have different factions of folks in the middle and right that are upset at one thing or another. So in Texas, you have conservatives who are mad that Congress hasn't passed the Save America Act. I'm mad that Congress hasn't passed the Save America Act. I've been fighting hard for it. We haven't had the votes. We haven't had 50 votes in the Senate. But I understand that frustration, but that may well have kept some conservatives at

8:49home. In Texas, you've got moderates, some at least, who are mad that John Cornyn lost the primary. And if conservatives stay home and moderates stay home, very quickly you start running out of votes. That happens in most elections, so I wouldn't necessarily over read it. I will say, I appreciate the president went all in. I mean, he was on the road for the last month. He was doing rallies all over the country. I did a bunch with him. Part of the reason my voice is so weak, I did 17 rallies in nine states in the last 14 days. I can barely speak. But as we sit here right now, we don't know if that was effective turning people out or not. And if folks stayed home, this night has the potential to be a really, really bad night. Senator, what's the setup if the Democrats

9:38sweep the House and the Senate for legislative process going into next year? You know, what's going to happen and how are things going to get done or what's not going to get done? Are we going to face a big shutdown? Maybe talk through some of the big moments that are ahead here. Yeah, look, I think if Democrats take one or both houses of Congress, and tonight that is looking very, very likely, we will see almost total legislative gridlock. Remember, this is a party that's animated by hatred for the president. So I don't think we're going to see our Democrat colleagues come in and want to do much productive, actually want to do much legislating. So I think most legislation will grind to a halt.

10:17We'll name a few post offices. We'll do a few things that are not terribly consequential. But I don't expect major legislation to move if the Democrats take one or both houses. If the Democrats take the Senate, that's not the only thing that halts. I think confirmations grind to a halt. If we have cabinet vacancies, I think those cabinet vacancies stay open. We have sub-cabinet vacancies where the president has not nominated. I think those stay open, that the president will no longer be able to put his team in place in the executive branches. And I believe Chuck Schumer, if he's got a majority, will stop judicial confirmations as well. That's never happened. In the past, when you had a president of one party

10:57and a Senate of the other, you move forward with judicial nominations, it moderated some. So the nominations would be less extreme if you had dividing control. I think Schumer and the Democrats will just halt all judges, which means if we have a Supreme Court vacancy, I think they'll keep the vacancy open for two years. I don't think they care because their base is that radicalized. I think we will also see two years of relentless impeachment. I believe the House will impeach Donald Trump if they have the House. They may impeach him multiple times. We will see subpoenas. We will see investigations. I think they will go after President Trump. I think they will go after his family. I think they will go after cabinet members. I expect in the lame duck we will see an

11:43impeachment of Pete Hegseth. I think they're eager to go forward with that. And so I think it's just all out partisan war. And the problem is if tonight is a really good night for the Democrats, it encourages the crazies in their party. It encourages the open communists. It encourages the open Islamists. And I will say for the topics you guys focus on, which is tech and AI, if tonight is a big night for the Democrats, it is a very bad night for the economy in this country and in particular for AI and data centers. Because the Democrats have decided that AI writ large and data centers in particular are the devil. And I think you're going to see if they have one or both houses of Congress, a relentless assault on both AI and data centers,

12:33which will be a massive contribution, an in-kind contribution to communist China, because they'll do everything they can to slow America down, which as you know, if we halted all data center construction in America, that would likely put the American economy into a recession. Unfortunately, the Democrats would celebrate that and they would blame it on Trump and say, see how bad Trump is? Now we're in a recession. I think they're going to do everything they can to try to make that happen. Well, to your point, I think the game theory, we talked about this, Ted, on our pod last week, which is exactly what you said, which is if you have majority control of both houses, the democratic agenda would be to subpoena everybody, get as many documents as possible,

13:20either release those documents or leak the documents so that you create as much FUD around all of these folks as much as possible. And then to the extent that you can actually get something to the president's desk, you're going to do things that are so counter to what they would logically want to have happen that it forces the president somehow to veto them if possible. And so the setup is to almost push uncertainty into the marketplace, specifically the capital markets. And that freezes the markets. And if you freeze the market, to your point, you do induce a recession. And that's probably the best setup for a Democrat to run. There was an interview that Peter Thiel did, Ted, I don't know if you saw it, but he said that if there was a blue tsunami, it actually unshackles

14:09the Democrats to run their most extreme candidate because they would view this as legitimization of the far left edges of the platform. Do you agree with that? And how do you see that playing out into 28 if you do? Yeah, I think that is very likely correct. One of the states that I campaigned, barnstormed the whole state with is Michigan. I don't know what the results are going to be in Michigan, but I think the two most dangerous Democrat candidates this cycle are Abdul Al-Sayed in Michigan and James Tallarico in Texas. And I think if one or both of them wins, I said this on the trail, if Al Syed wins in Michigan, I think it makes it much, much more likely that AOC is the Democrat nominee for president in 2028. Because I think she's already one of the top

14:59three contenders. I think AOC, Gavin Newsom, and probably John Ossoff are the top three right now. The main knock against AOC in a Democrat primary is she's too extreme to win the general. If you get Al-Sayed winning in Michigan, the quintessential swing state, I think they say, look, it doesn't matter. You can go full on crazy and win anyway. I think that's bad for the country, but I do think it makes the Democrat Party more extreme. I will say also, look, the Democrats have already foreshadowed that if they have one or both houses, they're going to use subpoenas to go after business executives who've worked with the president, to go after Elon Musk. They've already declared they intend to engage in lawfare and in open attacks.

15:51Bernie Sanders has suggested nationalizing, seizing SpaceX and Starlink. I mean, this is stuff out of like Fidel Castro's Cuba that they're talking about. Alyssa Slotkin in Michigan, who styles herself a moderate, has said they have a whole strategy of targeting business leaders who worked with the president and worked with the administration and also targeting young people like a 25 year old who goes and works for the federal government. They want to go persecute those young people to disincentivize anyone working with Republicans. I mean, it is twisted and cynical. You can say it, Senator Ted. They're going to go after big balls. It's clear. Oh yeah. Yeah. And's clear. Oh, yeah. Yeah. They're going after big balls. Here's the Texas Senate election winner. Wow. Don't blame me. I

16:33just got here. And I was told to, when I go vote, to just go straight red and don't bring blue to Texas. I'm wearing my red tie right now. I can assure you I have not brought California to Texas. But it's time right now, I think, Ted, maybe for a little reflection on why people are so charged up about what happened over the last two years. I'm sure many people are listening right now saying, hey, these guys aren't even doing any kind of self-reflection. What do you think the Republicans can learn from tonight's shellacking? Are there things in the first two years of this president, I know we're not allowed to criticize President Trump and everybody has to be in line and the criticism has to be very moderate, but you are an independent thinker and you have broken ranks

17:22with President Trump. Why is he getting such a strong reaction here if you had to list two or three things he should have done better in the first half to avoid this what would they have been senator ted cruz well listen i i don't want to overreact until we see all of the results tonight there are a lot of signs that indicate it is bad but but but elections i want to wait till all the votes are counted okay but but it's clear uh the warning signs there are a lot of people that are unhappy. One of the real drivers that makes so many elections bumpy is rural voters, farmers and ranchers are really unhappy. And that's made a big difference, particularly right up the middle of the country. So it's a big factor in Texas. It's a factor in

18:00states like Kansas and Nebraska and Iowa and Michigan, states where you've got big ag communities. And farmers and ranchers, they're frustrated. They're frustrated because diesel's six or seven bucks a gallon. They're pissed off because fertilizer has gotten really, really expensive. And the impact of tariffs has really impacted them. And so you've got a lot of farmers that are historically, they show up in big numbers for Republicans, both in turnout and margin. And one real possibility, we'll find out after election days, if a bunch of those farmers stayed home, if a bunch of those ranchers stayed home, or if they voted Democrat, even worse, that could lead to a terrible outcome. You've also got suburban voters who have been a swing vote.

18:48Where suburban voters ended up this cycle, I don't know. You look at a state like Georgia or a state like Arizona, where just a few years ago, Georgia and Arizona were bright red. They've now turned purple at best, if not blue, because suburban voters in Atlanta and Phoenix turned against the president. And so in Texas, I am worried, we're going to see the numbers, but you look at Hispanic voters, particularly Hispanic voters in South Texas. So in my reelect just two years ago, I won statewide by nine points. I won by a million votes. And what I was most proud of is I carried Hispanics across the state of Texas by six points. I won by a million votes. And what I was most proud of is I carried

19:25Hispanics across the state of Texas by six points. And that's never happened. That is unprecedented. No Republican Senate candidate has done that. And the Rio Grande Valley, which has been bright blue for a hundred years, we flipped it red. And I carried the valley and Trump carried the valley. Now, what I don't know, but I'm quite concerned about. And I carried the valley and Trump carried the valley. Now, what I don't know, but I'm quite concerned about is those voters in the valley who came out for the first time and pulled the lever Republican in 2024. Did they stay home or did they switch back to what they and their parents and grandparents had been doing for 100 years, which is voting Democrat? And that's going to be something people are going to look at farmers and ranchers and ag voters. They're going to look at blue

20:08collar voters. They're going to look at Hispanic voters, which have a heavy overlap with blue collar voters. And they're going to look at suburban voters. And if we're having losses with all of them, that leads to a wave, if not a tsunami. Yeah, and that means it's an opportunity, work to do winning those folks back. Same way Trump won a lot of moderates. A lot of moderates were Trump 2.0 curious. So you got a lot of work on your hands, Ted, as an elder statesman in the party. Thank you for coming as always. We appreciate you here in the great state of Texas. Thank you, Senator. Okay, now from the other side of the aisle, and we have an update here, 42 Senate results right now, 42 Democrat, 31 Republican, according to New York Times. A long way to go.

20:56I don't think it's going to be 11 people as the Delta, but with us now from the other side of the aisle, or straight down the middle, is a friend of yours, Dave Friedberg. Rahm Emanuel is joining us, former ambassador to my favorite country, Japan, former mayor of Chicago, and Obama, President Obama's chief of staff. Welcome to the all-in election night coverage for 2026, Rahm Emanuel. Okay. Now we have a little technical difficulties there. Freeberg, your thoughts while we wait for Rahm here on Ted's comments there, especially towards the end, lessons in what happened over the last few years. He mentioned tariffs. He mentioned diesel, which obviously goes to the last few years. He mentioned tariffs. He mentioned diesel,

21:45which obviously goes to the war, obviously. Any thoughts there while we kill up Ron? I'll just reiterate what he said about farmers, because I work in the agriculture industry. Ninety-eight percent or 97 percent of farms lose money now. They can't make a profit. We lost our biggest customer, China, to our ag export. The U.S. is the world's largest exporter of agricultural products. China, our biggest buyer, disappeared. And the fertilizer cost, which is the number one input cost for farming row crops, the prices doubled. So structurally, farmers cannot make a profit. So they've received multiple government checks, ad hoc payments over the last two years to try and keep them afloat. So it's a crisis in agriculture right now. And I think we're seeing that play out in these rural

22:35states in the results. Yeah. Okay. I believe we have Rahm Emanuel with us. Rahm, are you here? I'm here. How are you? I'm great. You remember your good friend, Dave Friedberg. Great to see you, Rahm. You guys had a wonderful chat. Thanks for coming back. You're always welcome, Rahm. And meet my good friend, Chamath Palihapitiya, part of our quartet here. David Sachs couldn't make it. Rahm, we have what looks to be, right now now 43 Democrats, 31 Republicans on the Senate. I think this is looking like the tsunami shellacking that was predicted. The polls seem to have been correct. And certainly, polymarket correct. Rom, what do you take away from tonight? And then what can we expect from the Dems if they do sweep the House and the Senate?

23:26Look, I mean, a couple of things. One is I think you're going to see Dems all over the country win. I think that the truth is it will be that the Republicans lost. It was a repudiation, but that's an opportunity for Democrats to solidify this coalition. And we've got to be clear that we can make this the winning coalition of strong Democratic turnout, what I call non-MAGA Republicans or John McCain, Mitt Romney Republicans who voted for Democrats in larger share in places like South Carolina, Kansas, and other congressional districts, and independents, we got to make this election not transactional, but transformational. Things on ethics, do things on tariff relief, do things on a minimum wage that makes bills

24:17not only that we down pays on the change they voted for, and also builds and rebuilds the trust uh and doesn't don't just spend it on our version of donald trump's hunger games the democratic version actually do the work and i always use this out on the campaign trail uh you know the kids on the abraham uh lincoln aircraft carrier were at sea for 322 days straight. Bathrooms didn't work. It was food. The Congress was in session for just shy of 100 days. Why don't you show up like the kids on the Abraham Lincoln? Pass a comprehensive ethics bill that affects all three branches of government. Ban stock trading, ban participation in prediction markets for the executive branch, ban mandatory blind trust if you make over a million dollars,

25:10mandatory term limits or age out, I'd say 75, the fifth, what I call the Jared Kushner rule. You can't be in government and taking foreign money, and when you get out, you have a two-year hiatus before you can take any foreign investment. So to me, that would be a way to establish that you actually heard the voters and are going to do the work. The other thing is, look at Florida, look at Texas, look at North Carolina, and look at South Carolina. In each of those states, Senate-wise, Donald Trump picked the candidate. We had very good candidates. And I always said this when I was chair 20 years ago in 2006 for the Democratic efforts to take the House. Quality of candidates in the end of the day is very, very important and is underappreciated.

26:00And I think the president interjecting in South Carolina, picking Darlene Graham, a place we had no right to compete. We had a great candidate there, Annie. Tallarico versus Paxson, as opposed to incumbent Senator Cornyn. Marshall, North Carolina, kind of chasing Tillis out, giving Governor Cooper a real chance. And he, I think, just got called from what I said. So in each of these cases, the president being involved, Georgia is another example. Ossoff was supposed to be a battleground. He just cleaned clock on Collins. Again, a candidate picked by the president in a crowded primary. I think that is a message as it relates to how the president got in the middle of primary, selected a candidate, and put the weakest foot

26:45for the Republicans forward. Chamath, maybe you have a question here. Yeah, you had a really interesting strategy, which I just want to double click on. Your perspective, I just want to make sure I represent it accurately, is you think that these guys with majorities in both houses should be legislating and actively have an agenda that they can kind of come together, caucus on, agree on, and then start pushing forward legislation in these two periods versus what a lot of people think happens in a moment like this, which is a lame duck two years, everybody focuses on 28, people kind of run to the exits. Can you just explain why that's so important? Well, let me walk through a couple things. One is everyone I picked would unite Democrats and divide Republicans. That's on the

27:29political level. And that's important to 2028. And B is I don't want to go in and having just rented the voters in 2026. A lot in a lot of states, independ what i call non-mega republicans are going to do something they don't normally do which is vote democrat affirm that vote don't just use it and dump it what does that mean i'm all for hearings on follow the money. I want to know where the Venezuela money is. I want to know what deal was cut as it related to the Qatar giving that plane. Follow the money. But if you end up going impeachment versus ethics reform, impeachment Republicans will solidify. On ethics reform, you're going to get half the Republican caucus to vote with you. And you're going to make a difference. And you're going to clean up the Supreme Court,

28:29the federal branch, the executive branch, the cabinet, and the House and the Senate. It's not like only one branch of government needs a good cleaning here. And so to me- Do you think that the ethics- Oh, sorry, go ahead. My point is, in that case, when you have that kind of big bipartisan vote, you'll affirm that you're governing. The same thing with the raising the minimum wage. You're going to get a lot of Republican votes. Tariff relief, a lot of Republican votes. And the Democrats will be united in that effort. And so to me, in each of those cases, you know, and I draw a piece of history. In 1991, George Mitchell sent George Bush 41 a tax and budget bill. And the president broke his pledge, ended up getting Papuacana in the primary,

29:19and Bill Clinton was set up in 92 one year later. In 2007, we send George Bush 43 a kid's health care bill, and 60 Republicans voted with us. It becomes the second bill that Barack Obama signs into law as president, and 60 Republicans voted with us when George Bush vetoed it. So to me, what unites Democrats, what divides Republicans? And how do you make progress in telling the voters that took a lark on you? Are you aligned with the Democratic establishment on ethics reform? Or do you think that this is going to be a situation where, you know, it's I mean, you're an elder statesman of the party suggesting something that in practice, it doesn't seem like either side wants a lot of for example like the stock bands and whatnot no i think there's no

30:10way when you look at the left first of all somebody who on a separate as a client's podcast december of 2024 literally 22 months ago the headline of that podcast with me was it's the corruption stupid i said that corruption is going to be the major issue because Donald Trump was very clear that this was going to be a 10 year of greed, grievance, and grandeur. And he's fulfilled exactly what he was going to do. And the greed is, and I'm from Chicago. I got a high standard. I've never seen corruption like this and it's blatant. And he tells you, I never got credit for what I did in the first term. Forget about it. And they've just been going to town now freeberg i you got a question yeah oh okay yeah let me go let him finish okay go ahead go finish i just want to run out of time

30:54i think you can't the democrats ran on the closing three weeks 70 if my math is right of the ads were about corruption. If you do nothing about it, you're going to have, in my view, wasted this second look that the public is giving you. You cannot spike the ball as a party on the 20-yard line. If you do this, as I kind of say, tonight, the Republicans are going to get a shellacking. They're going to lose. What we do in 2027 will determine whether we won. What do you think needs to be done to help the American people? Chasing the corruption helps with the politics of the governing of the people, but the cost of living, the lack of wage growth, the challenges that the everyday American is facing right now, the reason that people are

31:51so angry and feel so left behind, what can be done if this legislative structure causes what Ted Cruz calls a gridlock? What do you think can be done? How would you advise the party leadership going into this next cycle to actually solve the American people's problems? You're making it as if the corruption is over here and the cost of living is over here. They're actually heads and tails of the same coin. By way of example, president gets a $450 million Qatari gift at Air Force One and you get four bucks and 50 cents a gallon of gas. He's fixated on his arch, and your family can't afford a meal at the Golden Arches. Don't think for a moment that corruption is some common cause, Harvard, good government, and has nothing to do with the economy. The American people think the

32:39reason they can't afford it is because everybody's making money. And this election, unlike 06, has a level of anger towards the president because he promised money in your pocket, and they watch him every day putting money in his own pocket. So don't separate. Now, to your longer-term problem, while a lot of the media focuses appropriately on gas, groceries, et cetera, the number one issue that's driving Americans on inflation is health care costs. 40 million Americans put health care costs on their credit card. It's the number one reason for personal bankruptcy. And you have premiums going up at double digits and incomes are stagnant. Right. Not counting utility rates, not counting gas prices, everything else that's piling on.

33:31Healthcare costs are the, when you think, if you go talk to people, which I have been in all corners of this country, healthcare costs is what is top of mind. And it's, and look, I'm going to going to be somebody that's taken on the insurance companies in the health care industry twice, one for kids health care under President Clinton and then an ACA for President Obama. The insurance company's business model is literally structured around the word no. And your payments on premiums is based on the premise of yes, there's a mismatch here. Right. 25% of all hospital costs are driven over administration of insurance claims. The system needs a good restructuring to align people's interest towards better health care coverage, better health care results, and more importantly, where the kind of cadence of the street.

34:26Can both parties align on that? I mean, I do think intuitively I've heard both sides speak in the same vein as you're speaking. Knowing that the insurance business model and health insurance is to take a percentage of the cost ultimately. So as costs go up, if you're taking a percentage of the cost, you make more profit profit so the insurance business model is fundamentally aligned with getting everything to be more expensive and i would also argue that there's a role that inefficient government services play in this but we can have that debate another time but like yeah we have that conversation but can't can't can't they get aligned on this? I mean, what do you think happens on this? Well, let me look.

35:05By way of reference, the insurance claim area is $1.5 trillion. I think every one of you who are business people, taking 10% out of that, $150 billion, is really not hard. You can almost do it almost on just the pre-approval area and again 25 cents out of every dollar for the hospitals is dedicated to administrating administrative costs which is all around insurance compliance. There's a mismatch in economics. You can get consensus also in and around. I would do it on reimportation, pharmaceutical, both drugs and prices. So there's greater competitiveness. There's greater things you can do on transparency. In a sense, the hospital costs that are driving the insurance numbers and the hospital numbers are directly related to insurance.

36:04So those are examples of what you could do and i think like i say this i took on the insurance companies to get 10 million kids health care for president clinton obviously did what i did for president obama through aca there's a place here you could try to do medicare for all that means nothing else will happen. I don't think it will happen. Or do what I think are very doable bipartisan things that get at the cost structure and allow you to get better coverage. Ron, can I ask you a technical question? I got to get going, but yes, you can get one or two more. Go. Would you advise the Senate to eliminate the filibuster well I'm the wrong guy since I'm a former House member and anybody knows anything anybody from the house thinks the Senate

36:54is a constitutional mistake look I would not do that but I'd be I know I wouldn't do that and that's not for me but would say no, but you have a lot to prove. Otherwise we're going to start carving things out on the filibuster, meaning things that you can't filibuster around. So you have a chance to govern. Rob, let me ask you a final question here, since I know you have to go. There's a large number of moderates. I think you're obviously in that group. I think most of the people on this podcast are as well. I don't speak for them, Nick Fuentes, that whole cohort. And then in the Democratic Party, we now have these socialists and then also anti-Semitism and all kinds of ugly stuff. Is there a way to get people back to the center and working together on these?

38:00You've obviously done that in the past yourself, but how do we get the country back there? My post-Trump world. Right. My general view is to seek common ground, but I also know how to hold my ground. So my attitude, and I did this when I was mayor, when I was negotiating, tell me what you want to do here. I'm going to tell you what I want to do. You tell me what you can live with. I'm going to tell you what I can live with. I'm going to tell you what I'm not going to live with. And we'll compromise on this. That's my general approach. Do I think it doesn't mean that it's moderate. It means you're hearing, listening and where you can. Accommodating. OK, but there are certain things you won't go towards.

38:37Now, look, by way of reference, I think what Gingrich did in the government shutdown in 95, absolute mistake. Three years later, we got to a balanced budget agreement. So things were, you know, hold your ground, but then seek common ground. And that's what we did for Bill. Okay, guys. Thank you, Rahm Emanuel. I'm sure we'll be hearing more from Rahm in the future. He hasn't announced yet Friedberg, but based on your encouragement, I'm sure he's thinking about it. You two guys have had some great moments here on the show already. Hey, really excited for our next guest to jump on. Do we have? Oh, we don't? Not yet? Okay. So let's get an update here. 43-32 for the Senate. We'll pull that up again.

39:28North Carolina looks like it is going to the Democrats. Cooper has won. And what are your thoughts here, Chamath, on the never-ending lawfare between these two parties? Obviously, there were a bunch of cases last time when Trump was running for a second term. They targeted him. You could argue some of the cases, you know, he maybe had stepped in it or made a couple of mistakes, but it was pretty obvious that a number of the cases were specific because they wanted to stop him from running for president. President Trump, he's then gone out and done a bunch of law for himself, going after the people who went after him. And now there's this expectation in this interim second half of President Trump's the 47th term here

40:18that it's all gonna start all over again. And this is something I don't think any American wants to see. Is there any off road for these two parties to stop fighting each other and get back to work for the American people? What are your thoughts? I mean, I hope that they would find a way to take the high road and start to focus on 28. I think if what Rahm says is actually quite smart for the Democrats, and I hadn't considered that option, which is you want to reward the swing voters that came over to you by actually legislating along the lines of what the candidates have asked for. The thing that I struggle to understand though, is the candidates are of such a wide spectrum on the Democratic side. It's not clear what the actual legislative through line is through all of them. But if they can caucus and figure that out, I had not considered that as a viable option. approach, which is just to try to slow the president down and to put a scarlet letter

41:27on as many people around so that they are almost in a very difficult position and not in a position to run effectively in 28. Again, that's what I thought that their strategy would be. I think that there's a version of this maybe where the president in focusing on his legacy can maybe negotiate some sort of an understanding, which is there's a set of concepts that are maybe down the middle and most people would agree with and that gives the Democrats win, but it also gives the president to win. Maybe that's, Jason, how you negotiate an off-ramp. I think it's going to be very dynamic in these next six months because you're going to see the tenor of what the goal is. I think the Democrats have to come

42:15together though and coherently develop a strategy. What is it that you want to accomplish? Is it the scorched earth path or is it the reward the swing voters path going into 28? I don't think you can do both because I think the legislative horsepower that's required for one doesn't leave much room for the other. Yeah, I think you got to go with the latter. As you're saying, one of the things the socialists and a lot of the folks on the left have done really well is to say, hey, it's about affordability and stopping foreign wars and increasing the minimum wage and just getting really focused on affordability and saying that over and over and over again. Freeberg, the last time the Democratic Party tried to put Trump in jail, all they did was

42:58make him a superhero and a martyr. And everybody came out on force to say, hey, this is unfair. We got to vote this guy back in. So you'd think the Democrats would have learned their lesson that being the anti-Trump party and not having ideas would be a mistake. What's your take on how these two parties move on and maybe start working for the American people and if there's even a chance of that? Vis-a-vis lawfare, et cetera. You think there's no hope? I don't know if there's like a working together thing that's going to happen. I think the next year, Rahm is right, is going to be quite instrumental in figuring, and Ted said the same thing. I think 2027 is the year where the Democratic nominee is selected for president. They're going to just try and hold on. I think the Democrats are going to be very calculating and thoughtful going into 28 because they're going to want to make sure that the people continue to view them as the

44:06antidote to their anger. And they're going to try and find someone that's going to be angry and that's going to be strong and that's going to speak up for everyone that feels unheard. And going into 2028, I think that's who they're going to pick is that person. That's why I've said for a long time, I think AOC is going to end up on that ballot. I'd be disastrous for them. I don't know. I don't know if that's true. You could have said the same about El-Sayed two years ago. You could have said the same about a lot of these candidates that are winning tonight. I don't think that that's true. I think that the tides have turned. I will argue once again that the cost of living in this country has gotten too high,

44:45primarily as a function of the government being too high a percentage of our GDP and our spending. And I think it's very hard to get out of that cycle of inflation and that cycle of stagnant wages. And I think that the economy is stalling out for the majority of people, and they're seeing their assets decline, and they can't afford health care, and on and on and on. And I don't think that there's a good alternative to socialism for the majority of Americans today. I think that that's the view. And I think that because there isn't a good alternative, I think that the sweeping up moment starts to happen in 27. I've given them my advice. Very simple. Uh, take a look at what Trump did. He created

45:26a huge tent. He invited everybody to Washington, DC business leaders, et cetera, celebrities. You got to have a big tent and you got to try to win that middle. And he can do that by just inviting Tim Cook, inviting Elon Musk, inviting, uh, anybody who wants to support America in this next presidency in the 48th term, you should just invite everybody to be part of it. And the Democrats had that purity test. They kicked everybody out of the party. They were super critical and they lost and they kept losing. Maybe they take the note that they don't have to agree with everybody on every issue in their party and just start recruiting people to join forces with them. Next up on the all-in election night live stream, our guy, Shane.

46:11Shane, are you here? There he is. Hey, Shane, how are you? You're on mute. Shane Copeland is here, the founder of Polymarket, our special guest. Shane, are you there? Testing one, two. Okay, thanks for having me. Oh, okay. Well, we got to get it out of the way. Shane has the technical skills of his grandfather. Can't unmute the Zoom. Nick's in five, Shane. How are you feeling after the Knicks win? How are you feeling after the big Knicks win? Incredible. It was incredible. We logged out to San Antonio twice. Yes, we did. I saw you there. You were able to get on the floor. I was, uh, three rows back, but I saw you were able to get on the floor and celebrate with the champions. I had a long time to save up for that moment. Yes, it was quite, quite amazing. Uh,

46:57so Shane, tell us what's it like tonight at the desk at Polymarket. This must be a lot of volume to deal with and a lot of pressure. There was a lot of talk, and let's just get right to it, the hardest issue. Are these markets, are prediction markets being manipulated in order to benefit certain parties? In other words, could the Russians create a bunch of accounts and start betting on one party, create momentum and get people to not turn out in that state? What is the way that you deal with these kind of possibilities? I don't know if they've been tried. Have people tried to swing and create fear, uncertainty and doubt for one political party with the platform? And how do you protect the platform against that kind of abuse? Yeah, it's a good throwback. I would say that, obviously, in the early days

47:50with polymarket and prediction markets, it was always like the most vocal criticism was, hey, someone just put a ton of money on one side. And I'm sure as you guys all remember, the last round about two years ago, there was always the big story that Trump's price was being inflated. I think the thing people miss is that a polymarket, when you look at these markets, they're basically shares of candidates. And the share becomes worth a dollar if that candidate wins. And what that means is that at any given moment, it trades not too dissimilar to a stock where people are buying and selling it. And the price, let's say it's trading at 25 cents. It's implied that it's 25% likely to happen because it's trading at 25 cents to win a dollar.

48:36And you can map 25 cents to 25.25, and you can map $1 to one. So that's the probability. And I think the biggest misconception with pie market is that it's sort of like a seesaw of how much money is on either side. What it actually is, is it trades like a stock where when you're buying someone else has to be selling. So what we've seen is anytime someone has said, Hey, we can go and push the price high or something like that, especially for these types of markets where there's like, it's, there's not someone who knows what the answer is gonna be, right? Like there's a lot of data, everyone's going and trying to make their best, their best, you know, like prognosis of what's gonna happen, how likely they think it is to happen.

49:17And the whole thing is that if someone's trying to push the price up, what they're basically saying is they're trying to pay more than market price for the share. So you can just think like, hey, if you've got a marketplace and there's tons of people, there's pro traders, there's market making firms, there's people who are political analysts who really believe in their sort of models of who's likely to win. If someone's like, hey, I have a ton of money and I'm just going to pay above market price, there's usually this flood on the other side once they notice and they they can notice damn near instantly, to go and take the other side of that trade. So the market rebalances is the- Rebalances basically instantly. And what people said about prediction markets when they were

49:58talking more about them abstractly, before this idea was really practical, was that the more people try to manipulate the market, the more of an incentive it is for the market to become more accurate, because there's more financial incentive for people who can price it correctly to come on board and go and book the trade, so to speak. So I think that there was this cycle of every time there was a big election, whoever was losing, I got a lot of hate messages from. And, you know, I had to kind of give this spiel. And at this point, you kind of don't hear it as much anymore. Because I think so many people, you know, whatever your political affiliation is, like, you've kind of been on either side of the polymarket coin, where it's like one is

50:38polymarket is favoring your candidate, and you love it, and you look at it, and the price is going up, and you feel good. And the inverse is, hey, this thing can't be right. And I think that we've built up enough credibility over time that, you know, polymarket's right. What happened with the LATAM elections? So there was a number of polymarkets that ended up being on the wrong side of those trades. Shane, do you have a view on, you know, where those participants were, why they bet the way they did relative? I mean, poly market has been quite predictive in the past, but it was pretty wrong consistently in these elections that happened in the South. Yeah. Well, for the Brazilian election, which is I'm sure we were talking about a week ago,

51:24you know, when it says someone has a higher price than the other person, it is I'm sure we were talking about a week ago, you know, when it says someone has a higher price than the other person, it doesn't mean it's like a lock that that's what's going to happen. So in polling, if you hear that someone's going to get, you know, 70% of people of people like one candidate, and that's what you're supposed to believe, that's indicative of that, that candidate is going to run away with it. But 70% likely means that if you go and flip the coin 10 times, three times, the other candidate's going to win. And what's cool about Polymarket is not that whoever has the higher price always wins, right? Because that's just not how it works. When you go in and you look at the odds of anything,

52:00when you look at the odds of the game, the underdog wins, you know, it happens all the time. That doesn't mean that the market was priced inaccurately. And, and I think that the thing that we saw with Brazil that was so interesting was everyone was looking at it the night of, and then there was this extension. And again, I'm not going to be one to opine on Brazilian politics, because what do I know? But there was this extension by the Supreme Court and everyone who was Brazilian, because everyone I know who was Brazilian was sending me Polymarket screenshots all the night. They're like, everyone's looking at Polymarket, etc, etc. And the moment that the Supreme Court extended, you saw Bolsonaro's odds just tank, because the

52:42market was basically interpreting this extension as like, oh, something funky is about to happen. What it is that happens above my pay grade. But I looked at it more as a real time barometer of the interpretation of what was going on at that point. And it's so hard to distill the signal from the noise, especially, you know, for for people like me. I know you guys are all your, your own political experts, but like, for me, I just, I kind of just want to know what's going to happen. So I can just look at the site and see things change in real time. And yeah, you know, like the odds of Bolsonaro, it said he was likely to win. And then before you knew it, it was swinging in response very explicitly to this progress.

53:27And at that point, people realized, oh, shit, this is really material. What do you think has surprised you the most about markets that are trading actively in the last, call it year or two, since you've been on the show? I mean, we always see examples of markets that are surprisingly deep, a lot of activity happening on random stuff. I mean, what's been most interesting to you that surprised you? Well, I think the coolest thing is when you think about these global markets, like you look at oil and there's just, when oil, the other day, oil went down a ton and you're like asking people, why is oil down? You ask five people who are really smart, they'll all most likely give you different answers or you'll get two or three

54:13different answers. And what it really is, is a ton of people who have their own poly markets in their head about these different topics. And they're ascribing their own probabilities of what they think the likelihood of these different things are. And from that, they're deducing what they think the price should be, and they're all trading on that. And by letting people go and trade the market, as well as look at the price of the market for the actual important inputs that go into the price of such a big market like oil, It just goes and one leads to better price discovery for the underlying asset and help people understand better what's likely to happen and what are the moving levers in terms of why the price of the overarching asset is fluctuating the way that it is.

55:00But secondly, the other thing is just like these things are already implicitly being traded and priced. But there hasn't really been a venue that's been able to aggregate that and have the right distribution on the demand side and the supply side. So it's been cool that we've been able to do that and become sort of a marker for a lot of these topics, especially with geopolitics. And like just what's a chain? What the deal with lebron what are you guys doing with lebron uh you know he's uh he's he's a partner of ours and he's he's been in ads and um you know whenever he comes to this comes to the garden i'm never going to cheer for him because i'm a knicks fan but uh you know he's the Yeah, it's kind of hard for Knick fans.

55:45After the decision, that was so heartbreaking for us. We never forgave him. But he is, you know, he's the GOAT after Michael Jordan. He's your one or two. I don't know exactly what Shane was thinking. No, I mean, for Shane's generation. No, Shane didn't get to see Michael Jordan. How old were you when Jordan was playing in the guard? Did you ever see him in the guard in Shane? No, of course not. Yeah, it was too young. I used to just go on StubHub, man, and just scroll through the tickets and just be like, man, one day. Exactly. And then Shane scored. Listen, Shane, continued success. Thanks for everything you do at Polymarket. It certainly has made the world much more interesting. And I think it's fantastic that people get to have this resource.

56:30It really has changed everything in the media space and for people trying to make crisp decisions in the world. We'll drop Shane off. By the way, speaking of Polymarket, in the last 40 minutes, 30 minutes, Texas governors just flipped to Gino. No, we're not going to have Abbott? Oi. Greg Abbott on his way out. I looked at the district. Oh, no. Districting is all the blue districts have reported. Oh. I don't think that this holds. But if it were to hold, I just want to be very clear. Remember I told you guys, there's only one thing that sinks the US economy. It's the data centers. AI trade. And the only way to sink the AI trade is to sink the data centers. And the only way to sink the data centers is to sink the power. Oh, Lord. Here we go. We just threw the baby

57:18out with the bathwater. And all the power that matters right now is in West Texas. Oh, my God. Get your checkbooks out, though. I don't know, man. I may need to go to Singapore or Tokyo. Hey, guys, I know you didn't want him on the program. I know you guys banned our next guest, Chamath. You guys refused to have him on. But as the world's greatest moderator and executive producer for life, I went over your heads and I invited sloppy Steve Bannon to come on. Here he is, the one, the only sloppy steve bannon steve bannon how are you doing brother you know i'm excited because this is the last time i'm gonna see you guys before you're brought in before a tribunal i mean this is the end of the road for you guys

58:00number one pockets in the world scam it's's been a good scam. It's gone on for years, more than we got a lot of money. But you are going in front of a tribunal and you're going to have to account for your crimes. Let's be honest. It's unbelievable. It's time to to pay the piper and to account for the criminal behavior. Tim, tell us what happened. What is happening? Yeah. Well, what is happening? I don't know. One of Donald Trump's biggest supporters, Tucker Carlson, came out two days ago and said he's considering nuking Iran. That's happening. No, no, no. What I mean very precisely is like, what is this? Is this a vote for Democrats? Is this a vote against Trump? Is it a vote against the cost of living?

58:48Is it, how do you interpret it? It's been said before, we have an economic war that's disguised as a culture war, meaning that I think people that don't have the confidence in their economic standing, their are attaching meaning to a lot of things culturally where there is none. And I think it's a vote against the cost of living. I think it's a vote against, in some ways, the corruption that people see is inherent in the system right now that Donald Trump won claiming that he was going to correct. I think it's a vote against, you know, what Donald Trump unfortunately has become, which is the system. This is a vote against the system. The same people that elected Trump because they wanted cheaper gas,

59:53cheaper groceries. They didn't want to go to war with Iran. This was nobody wants. Nobody wanted that. Ten people wanted it and they gave Trump a lot of money, but nobody wanted this. I think it's a vote a little bit against people's circumstances, their economic circumstances. And that's why people vote. And that's why I think you're going to have a massive shift to the Democrats. Any concerns on the Democratic side? You see the sort of socialism. You see some of the radicalism over there as well, kind of brewing up the same way we see on the other side, the America First movement, which are, what's your take on the shoe horseshoe theory? You've talked about it before. And essentially, I think you've talked a little bit about, you know,

1:00:38the, the, the end of the empire here, is there a way to turn it around? And what do you think about the extremes in this country at this point? If people can't own a house, get married, have children, live, they're going to become radicalized in some way to some end of the political spectrum. I mean, that's obvious. The people that voted for Mamdani were four-year college graduates who took out a lot of student loans. They're living in a very expensive city. They feel like they are losing ground. And they were incredibly excited to vote for somebody who is going to restore some type of balance, whether that happens or not, whatever. But that's what motivated people to get out there. You're not talking only about the poor people or the

1:01:36working poor or even the working class. There's a lot of white collar college graduates that are voting for the DSA candidates because they're mired in debt. They don't own anything and they don't feel like they ever will. And Trump was supposed to address those concerns. And if he doesn't, somebody else will. Yeah. And so I know what you guys think. Let's just build another data center on top of all of those people that are angry. Yes, they could work in the data center. Put another data center. I know it's always the data centers with you guys. It never ends. It never ends. We were thinking Central Park, Tim. You would do it. It's so central. I know you're kidding about putting a data center in Central Park, but there was a sparkle in Chamath's eye when you said that.

1:02:32That cannot be faked. I mean, here's what I will say. And I've said this before. If you go back to the Gilded Age, and I agree with you, Tim, at some point, the leading oligarchs of that era sat around in a table and they allocated responsibility for societal good. And they understood that unless you created economic gains that were far felt, nobody wins. And so you dispatch Rockefeller, you dispatch Carnegie, you dispatch JP Morgan, and all these folks had to do stuff. If you compare that moment to this moment, to your point, you have these symbols of a handful of companies, which really means a handful of thousands of individual employees winning these totems. I think that's what Freiburg called it, which I think is very accurate.

1:03:26And you don't see any broad-based gains. And it's clearly catching up with everybody, where I think at first they thought that President Trump was the antidote. And maybe now what they're saying is the other side is the antidote. And they're going to keep looking for the more extreme version until they break the system. Do you buy that or no? Yeah, I mean, I think that's absolutely true. I think that if one party does not address these concerns, another party will. And that's the entire story of tonight is if you're a Republican strategist you had nothing to sell you know you what were you selling i mean that's the reality like two years into this administration what are you selling to people and the democrats in my estimation lost two years ago because they were selling um you know this very kind of you know it was all

1:04:33about democracy it was very symbolic the democrats were selling symbolism if democracy was on the ballot they were saying all of these things but they weren't addressing those core concerns the republicans are now in the same position where they're selling symbolism but people are going to fill up their car they're going to the grocery store they're going in you know to pay their rent because they're not paying a mortgage and that's the Republicans don't have a coherent message two years in. And a lot of people are drawing a line between what seems to be this misadventure in Iran and the rising costs at home. And when you have the Pentagon going, we could have a wave of cyber attacks and bases need to be

1:05:30self-sufficient for 90 days. And you have Europe, and I know this isn't directly, you know, necessarily American, but you have Europe telling people you should stockpile food. I mean, this doesn't fill people with overwhelming confidence. What we're making people extremely uncomfortable with these predictions that you're going to lose your jobs the robots are coming i i gotta get into what's happening in comedy circles i know you're on all the group chats tim you're with all the great comedians i love how much you guys love comedy it's so wild to me it's the best it's the best it's unbelievable how much it's like we're your subs, it's so funny. We're your subs. You can dime us anytime. We are your stans.

1:06:12We are your hues. I love that it's like, they just came out, Palmer Luckey's going to have genetically engineered robot dogs, and you're like, what's going on in the comedy circles? Yes. Well, no, here's my specific question. The Overton window is about to close a bit. What's going to happen at the mothership when Tony Hinchcliffe, you know, and Joe Rogan can't use the word retard anymore? What's going to happen in circles when this closes a bit? I think they'll be all right. You know, I'm a survivor. You know, truly, I am a survivor. I'll throw on a burqa tomorrow and I'll do what needs to be done. Yes. You'll wear the burqa. I'll be in Minnesota with a burqa on, with Abdul Sheikh Mohammed bin Salim,

1:06:52whatever his name is, I don't even care. I will be there doing everything I have to do. What the hell do I care? I'm a survivor, baby. I've been in this business a long time. And I will get out there in sub 45 degree weather with 15 Somalis and we will do a daycare, comedy benefit because I don't give a shit. You need to get that. You got to keep those corporate gigs alive. Have you done a corporate gig at a mosque? Have you done that yet? Where do you draw the line? I was fired from Saudi Arabia because I offered a defense of their indentured servitude program, which I think was productive for them. And they fired me. I was fired. Not for being gay. They were fine with gay. They were fine with that. Fine with it. Hey, Tim, just before we get away too far from comedy, I just want to ask one more question around what you're seeing on this this night and what else you've seen.

1:07:55Is there an alternative that you've seen that sells well, that isn't socialism? What is out there that that that doesn't taste and look and smell like socialism that seems to be a shot at working? Nazism. Oh, my God. it working nazism oh my god i mean i i mean i don't i i'm just saying that's if you want if you look on the internet those are the things that are set i mean uh no that's what's taken off what listen here's what's always going to sell i don't think americans are ideologues and i don't believe they are i don't believe that i think they're pragmatic a lot of americans are pragmatic not all of them. The more money you have, ironically, the more ideological you become and the more you want to remake everything and, you know, reengineer everything and revolutionize everything.

1:08:39I think what sells really well is I think Tallarico is probably going to have a good night in Texas. Maybe I'm wrong. No, he's winning. Yeah. What's selling to me is sort of a economically populous, culturally moderate Democrat right now. Somebody who's not annoyingly woke, who's not going to, you know, be put, put the trans child issue front and center. Somebody who's economically popular, socially moderate, which by the way, was Donald Trump. So that seems to be where a lot of the country is, because I think a lot of people feel that, again, we've covered the economics of it, but culturally, they want to raise their children. They have values and they want to try to give their values to their children. And they don't want to feel like they're in a tug

1:09:36of war with the school system or the state when it comes to what their children are learning. So I think the Democrats that pivot to economics and start talking about health care, start talking about jobs, don't only talk about illegal immigrants, don't only talk about the cultural issues. If you can talk about the working class, talk about health care, talk about jobs. That was how Bill Clinton got eight years in office. Barack Obama had eight years in office with those messages. If you pivot back to that, that while not being inherently socialist, like get rid of prisons and get rid of cops. Yeah. Yeah. But I think people will follow that message. Speaking of no longer annoyingly woke, Taylor Lorenz is with us. How are you, Taylor? Nice to see you.

1:10:34I took a little joke there, Taylor. Come on. You are so based now. Woke is back. You guys are going to be crawling in woke. You're going to have the pronouns in bio by the end of the night. Will we have laser eyes and pronouns in bios? Taylor, Tim, Tim, Taylor. Taylor, in the group chats, let me be honest with you, you have become suddenly very based. You seem annoyed with the woke bullshit. You seem to be dunking on people for ridiculousness. Everybody seems to think that you have a Republican boyfriend, a hidden Republican boyfriend, and that you have become based for some reason. I didn't say this. It's a theory that's out there. Is something happened that triggered you to have had enough

1:11:16of the woke nonsense? What's going on here? I love the woke nonsense. I love it. I live for it. You know, why not? Let's get woke again. And people are so, no one gives a shit about any of this. Like, it's all vibes. The Republicans are losing. I'm not going to get on board with a bunch of losers at the 12th hour when they're getting on board with the Republicans in 2026, not a winning move. Yeah, I mean, I care more about policies than parties. I don't really affiliate with either party. And I haven't for a very, very long time. But now what's going on in all seriousness, and you're such a good sport, and we all love to have you on. And you have good insights into younger generations. You may have heard Tim Dillon

1:12:00talking, hey, housing, and maybe your degree was a little too expensive. You got a bunch of people who feel like maybe the government isn't working for them. What's the vibes, as the kids say? Because the vibes are no longer immaculate, from what I understand on the interweb. So the vibes are no longer immaculate. What are they? What's the vibes? Yeah, I think Tim is like 100% correct on his read that people care about there's this economic populism. Obviously, Trump, you know, it was very sort of wielded effectively by Trump for years. Now you see the Democratic Socialists sort of wielding that. People care about improving their material conditions. People don't want to hear about culture war bullshit. They really want to know,

1:12:45like, am I going to be able to, you know, is my groceries going to cost more? Can I afford a house? Are we going to send all of our money to Iran? Hopefully not. You know, I, am I going to be able to, you know, is my groceries going to cost more? Can I afford a house? Are we going to send all of our money to Iran? Hopefully not. You know, I'd like to keep some of my paycheck. So I think, yeah, I mean, I just think Tim's read on it all is correct. And I think neither party has, I mean, Trump has been able to effectively wield that. And now you're seeing the Democratic socialists feed into that type of language. You know, but the Democratic establishment hates that and the Democratic establishment

1:13:11has not done a good job of speaking to average, you know, working people. OK, most importantly, we need to know, is Tim Dillon unk? And is unk, is he going into his unk era? Is Tim got that unk vibe about him now? What is unk? What is that? It's going to be explained. Tim, you want to explain unk as you understand it. You've been called Unk now at airports or at the FBO. It's shortened for Uncle? Correct. Yes. Someone who's wise. Cool. Someone who has age, wisdom. Somebody who has... By the way, I completely agree with Taylor Lorenz. I never thought I'd say that in my life. Here we are in 2027. Taylor Lorenz for the win. I have no problem being Ankh. I'm proud. Is Ankh Taylor... Actually, Jason, hold on.

1:14:03Sorry, let's get back to something normal. I have a question. Jason's lost the mic. Mute him. I want to know from Tim and from Taylor, if you guys had to pick not just a Democrat, but then the Republican candidate that you think best has a chance of taking that platform, who do you think it is? Maybe start with Taylor, both sides. Oh God. Well, I mean, I think like Cruz and Rubio are sort of like the front runners on, you know, the Republican side. I guess Vance is in there, too. I don't know who's going to sort of be able to see like when Trump Trump's such a singular figure. I don't know that anybody can speak to sort of speak in that rhetoric the way that Trump has and build the base in a way that he has. So I don't know on the Democrat side.

1:14:53I don't know. I don't think it's AOC. I know that people want, I know that like certain factions of the party want her, maybe it's her. I, but she's not like, I don't know. She doesn't have that Bernie energy. You know, like Bernie really was the soul of that sort of like socialist, like left movement. And I think he's tried to kind of seed the torch to AOC, but I just don't think she can beat. I don't know. She's not a crotchet old man. I don't know, but she, yeah, I don't know. I don't, I don't think anybody, Ro Khanna is trying. He's trying. What's your take on Ro Khanna, Taylor? You know. Is he actually appealing broadly? Because to me, he comes off as he just doesn't seem appealing to anyone.

1:15:37I don't get it. He says a lot of things that he thinks are going to work, but then it just doesn't really land. It's like a bad comedian, Tim. It's like he gets up there and it's like says all these great jokes that other people have written and then no one laughs. Yeah. My issue is the flip-flopping and all over the place right i think i like listen he did something that a lot of democrats uh don't do which is he leaned into digital early he was going on twitch streams and stuff years ago he was on hassan pikers stream tonight uh which i'm sorry to report is modding your stream a little bit in terms of viewership but no judgment pikers is yeah because we're only 50 000 what is he 500 by the way it's only beating them in viewership

1:16:13until they're arrested live on stream if the democrats get enough clips you're gonna see them perp walked live on youtube and then we're gonna crush piker stream when they are perp walked out yeah they're going to jail the people on the stream are going to crush Pankhurst Green when they are walked out. They're going to jail. The people on the stream are going to jail and it doesn't mean they're not good people and it doesn't mean that they're not fun. Tim, what are your candidates of choice? Well, number one, Ted Cruz is not going to be the president. Let's just say that. Ted Cruz will never be the president. His family won't vote for him um uh marco rubio will probably run for the republicans vance is

1:16:56is you know poor vance i mean what are we gonna do uh god bless him in a dumbledore costume that's not gonna happen john ossoff will be the next president i'm putting my money on it right here polymarket or whatever uh john is he's the guy he's the guy yeah he has like that he has the the hype he has the momentum and he's able to kind of speak to the the progressive wing like they like him but he's also centrist enough to like appeal to the normies also he's just a generic guy. You know what I mean? There's nothing he doesn't have like controversies around him. There's nothing. I don't think he's ever done anything too extreme that would raise, you know, I'm sure there's going to be off on him. But yeah, I agree with him.

1:17:41I mean, what do you guys think happens? This is more related to the earlier question. But what do you think happens in terms of the temperature to be able to say the things? One of the things that I think President Trump kind of ushered in was this freedom where, you know, everybody did it. And Tim, you know, you were able to really open up and let loose and said whatever you wanted. Now, you probably did before as well, but it was probably much more visible than Taylor. You did it as well. Does that change now? Do you guys think that people start to self-censor a little bit more? Do you think that it's important now to watch what you post, watch what you say? Do you think that there is that element of potential? Well, let's not act like it's been free speech.

1:18:23I think both parties have embraced censorship and both parties have embraced policies of censorship from the top. Look at the few pieces of bipartisan. The only bipartisan tech regulation we're getting is this bullshit, you know, save all the children stuff by, you know, banning all the bad misinformation from the internet, ban all the bad words, you know, that we don't like from the internet. I'm very disappointed that obviously Ted Cruz and Wyden have had the Jawbone Act, a great piece of legislation that would prevent a government overstepping, you know, pressuring these tech companies to just regulate and censor content and, you know, basically do whatever the government wants. Nobody's getting on board with that because they love wielding government pressure to censor

1:19:04speech. And look at what's happening in Europe. I mean, it's terrifying. I think we should look at what's happening in Europe in terms of the tech policies that's getting through and the censorship that's happening over there in places like the UK. And it should terrify anybody here. And there is no political faction that is fighting this stuff. It's literally no one. The leftists love it. And the right has gotten on board with it. So both parties want to come forward. What do you guys think is the right solution for oligarchy inside the United States? What's the right thing to do about it? What is the right thing to do around the concentration of wealth? And what is the right thing to do about the responsibility of folks with extreme wealth on behalf of the American citizenry?

1:19:47Tim, do you want to start? Well, I think you're going to have to look at the way that we tax certain kinds of income, specifically investments. And we're going to have to balance that more with how we tax work. I think, you know, this is something that's been talked about, never fully addressed. I think there's a lot of people that, you know, the asset owning class has done very well, but people that work at wage jobs have not. And if, and that's because I think we have a, an incentive structure for people to invest money, which is good. You need that to a certain degree. However, I think you need to tax some of that money the way that you would tax somebody who's working as an EMT or a firefighter or a cop or a teacher. And I think you have to restore some balance to that unless you are going to get

1:20:54people that are taxing everybody at very high rates. If you don't restore balance to the way that you tax certain income, whether it's capital gains, whether it's dividends, you have to, whether it's, I know wealth taxes are not popular, but at a certain level of extreme wealth, they're pretty understandable to most people. And I think if you don't do that, you're going to have a world that people don't want. I will say though, on the last question, the enduring legacy of Trump, when all said and done, if, you know, we don't get into a nuclear war, the good thing will be he did open up the channels. I think he put a lot of pressure on tech to make it easier to say what you want online. And I think you need free speech for any democracy to

1:21:52work. And I think that will be an enduring part of his legacy is that because he, you know, himself said anything he wanted to, he sort of opened the floodgates for good and for bad but i do think before you know it was a lot harder the policies of a lot of how can you say that when brendan carr like i mean he wants like is threatening ever trying to regulate social media in these same ways like i mean i agree with you like there's some good things that Trump has done in that area. And I think, like, you know, he's sort of like spiritually, like, been, you know, sort of maybe moved the sort of guardrails in terms of what you can say. But I don't know. I mean, ultimately, I don't think he's done anything to ensure that Meta censors less.

1:22:43Meta is only getting more and more censorious, especially with these, you know, stupid settlements that they keep signing with all the state attorney generals. Why are they stupid? Explain your position here on people having to register with the social networks age gating, you have a very, I think, insightful or a great insight here. Yeah, I mean, it's just a racket. I think that the state attorney generals have just realized that they can get good headlines by going after META for these nonsense claims of social media addiction, child harm, or whatever. And I'm not arguing that they're perfect platforms that you should let your 12-year-old on, no, take some parental responsibility. But what is ultimately

1:23:22happening is these regulators and these state-level lawmakers are ushering in these systems of national ID, of mass surveillance. You're not going to be able to get online without your government ID. You're not going to be able to post anonymously. How can you say that Trump is bringing back free speech when it's harder and harder? It's harder to post anonymously online today than it was five years ago. You know, these are problems. I would agree with you. By the way, I don't like that the Ellison's own everything in America and I don't like the consolidation of media. Of course, I would just say that the instances of people getting kicked off YouTube for speculating that a virus that originated in China might have originated in

1:23:59China. I do think that, as you said, the word spiritually, the Overton window did shift under Trump, Trump second term to where you did. YouTube is less censorious than they were. Elon bought X. I disagree with Elon on a lot of things, but he did bring freedom of speech to that platform. And I don't know Meta as much in terms of like what they are censoring and what they're not censoring. But I do know that there was an Overton window that opened up for more speech in America. But I don't like the consolidation of media under Trump. And I think that's going to be a huge problem. And we're going to have to probably look at some anti-monopoly legislation there, too, if you want to talk about oligarchy and what we should do about it, I don't think that you can have one family owning like 20 media outlets.

1:25:00Yeah, it is pretty clear that the consolidation on that side is pretty fast and furious. But Tim, you know, I'm a big fan of your show and on the YouTube. And I think the stuff you're doing the past six months has been so off the rails, unbridled, going for it. I don't think you would have been allowed to do that four years ago. I agree with you. I think you would have been kicked off by now. I agree with you. I don't think you're going to be able to do it two years from now. They passed the Kids Online Safety Act and all this other, the Screen Act and all the other bullshit that they're trying to force through in Congress. I mean, I'm terrified at what happens when, you know, obviously Trump goes

1:25:40out of office. I don't think he cares as much about this stuff. But let's look at the 2028 candidates. Who's focused on free speech on the internet? Who's focused on protecting free expression? I don't see anyone across the board that's made that a central point. And that's really scary. Yeah, we definitely need to move that up on the agenda. Listen, great job, Taylor. Great job, Tim. Wonderful to have you here on the live stream. Thank you guys. I'm voting for Barry Weiss. I will be voting for Barry Weiss. I will be leaving the studio and voting for barry weiss i will be voting for barry weiss i will be leaving the studio and voting for barry weiss and i voted for vivek ramalama ding dong illegally because he paid me to

1:26:19and i used the names of dead children and i voted for him you did you voted illegally multiple times by the strangled children of that woman who strangled her own kids. You were paid to do that by the vet. Come visit us at the pen. Yes. Is it true that you will be directing along with Nathaniel the Freedberg Penitentiary documentary? By the way, you guys are so much fun and you'll do well in prison. And you know you will. We'll do well. Funny's a do well in prison. And you know, you will. We'll do well. We'll do what funny is a good thing in prison. I mean, listen, Elizabeth Holmes seemed to be doing wonderful in prison. What did you think guys of the, I'll leave you guys with this. What did you think of you can see everything, uh, Tim Dillon, and then we'll go to you.

1:27:04Tell her. I thought it was great. Yeah. Did you have a favorite moment from Billy Evans? You know, Freeberg has a deep, meaningful relationship with Billy Evans. He got the exclusive interview at the All-In Summit. Tim, did you have a favorite Billy Evans? And what's your take on Billy Evans there in the documentary? I haven't seen the documentary. Oh, okay. So you loved it. You have strong opinions. I haven't seen it yet, but I love the idea of it. I'm sure it's great. I have not seen it. I can't commit three hours to it, but I will loved it. You have strong opinions. I haven't seen it yet, but I love the idea of it. I'm sure it's great. I have not seen it. I can't commit three hours to it,

1:27:33but I will see it. Okay, well, listen, next time you're on tour in a city, you should go see it. You must see it. Best, needs to win best picture. Best movie alive, Lance Oppenheim is a genius. Nathan's a genius. Extremely good. Tim, I'm with you. I was like three hour documentary. Absolutely not. I saw it in a place that I could leave to potentially go to the mall and actually i was glued to my chair it was so good it's so good you weren't on social media during it really i was off my phone unplugged locked in everybody go see it yeah it's a great movie all right there you have it tim dillon taylor lorenz thank you guys goats two of the done. All right. Let's bring in our fifth bestie. I think our fifth bestie is here. Speaking of, oh, look at this guy.

1:28:15Where are you? Are you in Ukraine? In a palace? Where are you? You're in Ukraine in a palace? Is that the opera? Put the tie on. Are you in Croatia? What's going on here? You know, I'm celebrating a gigantic Democrat victory tonight. You do have your blue tie on. You have your blue tie on. I am at an event in San Francisco with Jensen. And I can report to you that, you know, life marches on, notwithstanding the fact that AI stocks have had a 10% reversal in the last hour as the market now appears to be a blue tsunami. Oh, really? Is that you're not making a joke here. The markets are showing Robinhood, whatever, whoever has after market a 10% dip for AI stocks. Is that correct? Well, so I would say I would say here's where my eyes are on. If you

1:29:10look at overseas stocks, so these are overseas trading in Japan, Korea, et cetera, they've had about a 5% to 10% reversal in the last two hours on the news. Mostly the big fear here, of course, and I think it's overblown, but the big fear is that in a blue tsunami, particularly in the state of Texas, you have Hinojosa who will issue a moratorium on new data centers, may make it difficult for the existing data centers to get permitted. If you recall, at the All In Summit, we highlighted this as a risk to markets. And so if you look at pre-market now or after hours on NVIDIA and CoreWeave, NVIDIA is down 2 percent. CoreWeave is down 6 percent. You know, so this we showed this slide. But if you go to the next one, Lisa, which is,

1:29:58you know, we said this is the flight path for the balance of 2026. At the time, the Nasdaq was up 15 percent. Now it's up 11 percent. And we pointed out that the election and regulation associated with that really was a risk. And it looks like if we just opened where the market is down right now, the NASDAQ would be up 8% for the year. So, you know, on this flight path, we said it could give up 10% of that 15, take us down to five. Now we're going to be at eight tomorrow. Could be worse by the time it's done. So we may test taking the NASDAQ all the way back to flat for the year and giving up a lot of returns that were baked into the cake. Brad, I was telling these guys how bad it would be for markets

1:30:40if specifically and narrowly Hinojosa wins in Texas. Yeah. It is, it's probably the single most effective way to slow the AI trade down. Yeah, I can tell you downstairs where I was with a lot of folks, you know, who are in AI, you know, they're lamenting this. But the reality is Republicans really struggle with the messaging and not just in the last three months ahead of this election. I think I think the AI community and Republicans have struggled with the messaging over the course of the last 18 months. They've been on their heels. Now, of course, it's about affordability. It's about anxiety for people's lives and their kids as associated. No, but what I mean is what happens, how many megawatts or gigawatts are taken offline that are in everybody's models?

1:31:25Meaning, for example, do you have a model where you've sensitized megawatts and gigawatts pulled through in a democratic governorship? Where, for example, narrowly what happened was Greg Abbott introduced this moratorium via TCEQ, which is the – think of that as like California CEQA, where you can just kind of slow things down and have all this access permitting requirements. The expectation was he will win, he lifts the moratorium, everybody kind of goes back to building. Now, if he doesn't win, that moratorium could stay. Other regulations may come on top. The re-underwriting would change right how much less compute is available to ai to ai in a world where the democrats win the governorship of texas do you

1:32:19have a model about that well i would say not specifically on the gigawatts in texas but what i said at the all-in summit the consensus forecast, which we'll call the semi-analysis Dylan Patel forecast for next year, is a total of 43 gigawatts coming online in 2027. Now, just to put that in perspective, the total gigawatts online at the end of 26, the cumulative in the United States is about 38. So the consensus forecast is we're going to bring online more next year than all of the compute that we've had, we built to date. I said on stage, and it got a lot of blowback on Twitter at the time, that we may end up building half of that, bringing half of that online in 2027. And part of what I was concerned about

1:33:07was the growing backlash, even from guys like Greg Abbott. But now with this blue wave, I think it'll slow it down even more. So I think we could see at least 10 to 15 gigawatts of the expected build not come online, which, you know, that's why I think it's going to be really challenging for the AI infratrade. We have the dollars to pay for it, but I think that, you know, imagine what we're going to hear, Chamath, for the next two weeks out of the governors, out of, you know, a speaker, Hakeem Jeffries, or a leader, Schumer. They ran on slowing down AI. That was their principal agenda. And so they have to deliver that, you know, to folks. And by the way, it turns out they were more in tune with America

1:33:56than Republicans on this issue and on the issue of affordability. That's why we're seeing the results that we're seeing tonight. And so, you know, I don't think this at the end of the day is going to cause America to retreat from AI. This is a global race. We need to win. We need to innovate. But in the short run, it's going to be, I think, choppy for markets. Brad, the Republican Party embraced the technology industry like it never had before, brought everybody to the White House, built a very big tent. It didn't matter if you were in a company, Apple, Google, that was 96% Democratic, or it were people who had given tens of millions of dollars previously to the Democratic Party, they pulled them in. Is that not what needs to happen with the technology industry and the

1:34:46Democrats on both sides? Do we not need to maybe embrace the Democratic Party? That's one now. Some of those key players and say, hey, we're supporting Trump, of course, but we'll support you as well. And we'd love to have you be part of this, whether it's Invest America. Do we need to kind of bridge both sides as the industry? And as you pointed out, we kind of did the damage ourselves, telling people that it was a 10% chance of everybody dying, telling people that 50% of people are losing their jobs. I mean, we created half of this problem. And so what's your advice then for our industry, for the capitalists amongst us, for pulling the Democrats back in to the industry? Because right now it is a standoff.

1:35:30Yeah. The great news is I think that most of the people who are winning, I think they're center left. I don't think this is DSA shut down all of AI. I think these are folks that want to be at the table and they're saying, hey, we want to have input to the AI regulation, the conversation that was going on around the table. And frankly, I think the White House and the president is open to that. He demonstrated that, you know, at that table at the start of the day, he said, we got Democrats around the table, Republicans around the table, but I think Democrats by virtue of winning, they're going to be more around the table and they're going to have more input as, you know, as the voters have now, you know, said they should into these issues. And I think it would

1:36:08be in the White House's best interest. And listen, the one thing to understand about this president is he's a deal maker in chief, right? He's described himself as a deal junkie. So what do you think he's going to do? He's going to invite the Democrats to the White House, right? He's going to figure out whether or not there are deals to be made on things like data center, like AI regulation, et cetera. I think that's the right thing to do. Nothing's going to get done in Washington, right, without bipartisanship. And I still think there are issues you can move ahead. I know we have a lot of bipartisan agreement, Jason, you mentioned Invest America Act. There's a bunch of stuff that we want to

1:36:43want to do to make this even more favorable to newborns in America. And I know there's, you know, goodwill on both sides of the aisle. I saw Senator Warner one tonight, Senator Booker once, and I have huge supporters of the Invest America Act. I think there are things that, you know, that can be pulled forward. But to be sure, it's going to require, you know, we've for the last few years, it's been Republicans kind of jamming things, you know, their way. And I think now it's going to be, you know, Democrats sitting at the leadership table and you're going to have to find bipartisan agreement. Yeah. Which is ultimately probably a good thing, at least in my mind, when you have the split government, people are forced to sit

1:37:17down and great to not have a clean sweep, you know, independent of this, although I'm a little concerned about taxes turning into California. Go ahead, Freeberg. Yeah. What's going to happen with this anthropic IPO, Brett? Yeah. Does it get repriced? Like it still goes, but it gets repriced or? Yeah, I mean, listen, everything weighs in at the end of the day to price. You got to clear the market. I think they're going to go either way. I think there's a lot of demand for this. And by the way, I think you can differentiate these two layers, right? Intelligence doesn't require that much compute remember they generated 100 billion of revenue run rate revenue this year with two gigawatts of compute right the amount of compute they dedicated to inference generating revenue was

1:38:01probably like 500 megawatts so you know yes they want to bring on a lot of compute but if you slow down the rate at which compute comes online, I'm not sure that's a big problem for the labs. They may actually benefit in some ways from that happening. So, you know, I think it's a problem for the infrastructure trade. I'm not sure it's a problem for the anthropic IPO. But listen, overall sentiment in the market will be, you know, I think less euphoric. So it will probably, you know, this pushes it a little bit more to the lower end of the range, wherever it was going to price. But I'll tell you, there is pretty, pretty, pretty serious demand for the offering. I know our enthusiasm for it hasn't

1:38:42changed. You know, we hope to be one of the largest buyers in the IPO. And so I can bifurcate those two things, David, I can say the infrastructure trade is challenged, but I still think, you know, the raw intelligence and the acceleration we're seeing in their revenues in October and, you know, into November, I think will continue. Take into account all the data you have in this very moment, close your eyes, and don't be too precise, but tell me an exact number, impact on GDP growth over the next 12 months by this election tonight? I would say if you look at it this year, about 75% of GDP growth I think came from AI infrastructure. And so if we slow it down by 50%, you could have a 50 basis point headwind to GDP growth next year.

1:39:3150 basis point you said? Yeah, 50 basis point slowdown to GDP. next year. 50 basis point, you said? Yeah, 50 basis point slowdown to GDP. Only half a point, huh? Yeah, I mean, listen, I- You think things just keep on rolling? Well, I mean, no. Like I'm saying, if you build 27 gigawatts, remember, 27 gigawatts is about as much as all the total compute we have in the United States for AI today. So it's still an enormous amount. And I think we probably get past 30. I just don't think you're going to hit the United States for AI today. So it's still an enormous amount. And I think we probably get past 30. I just don't think you're going to hit the higher end of those estimates. David, have you guys talked about Prop 40 yet? We've not because California's polls don't close

1:40:01for an hour and 15 minutes. So are we not allowed to talk about it? No, no. We don't have any data. Do we have exit polling? Do you have started the show. Yeah. I mean, I would, I would say what, one thing that will be the most interesting thing I'm watching tonight, because around the country, we're seeing a referendum on AI, right? And you would think in that scenario that there is no way that prop 40, right, would fail. You would think that that would win by, you know, it's a tax on billionaires. You would think that that would win by, you know, it's a tax on billionaires. You would think that that would win going away. My prediction is that, you know, Prop 40 is going to fail in California. And I think if that happens in California at the same time you're seeing this

1:40:41blue tsunami, like it's a really interesting juxtaposition and shows how particularly bad, you know, voters view an asset seizure tax. If it can't win in California in the year of a blue tsunami, like it can never win in America or in other states. All right. That's our guy, Brad Gerstner. Looking good. Enjoy the opera. Get back to the opera. Have fun at the opera tonight. Good luck at the opera. I'm not at the opera. What are you talking about? I know. I was invited to. He invited all of us Enjoy the opera. Get back to the opera. Have fun at the opera tonight. Good luck at the opera. I'm not at the opera. What are you talking about? I know. I was invited to. He invited all of us to the opera.

1:41:15You're at a food bank. You're at the opera. We know. We were all invited. Okay, great job, everybody. We'll, yeah. Freeberg, I know you missed the opera tonight as well to be on the live stream. Any regrets there? You would have liked to see Matter and Butter uh any regrets there you would have liked to see madame butterfly huh you would have loved to see it is that the only opera you know that's probably the only opera you know right i've been to a bunch of puccini um in my day i've been to a bunch of puccini um i you know i've been to some what else what else besides what else have you seen here yeah what other joseph and the technolor Dreamcoat? That's not an opera. No, I'll tell you what I used to do.

1:41:52Here's how it used to work. Let me tell you my strategy. When I was at Ford, I went to Lincoln Center. You don't answer the question. They would give you, I saw tons of things. I don't remember. This was 30 years ago. I was broke and, you know, trying to, you know, ask girls on a date. And I would buy, they would have student tickets, five or 10 bucks to go to the opera at Lincoln Center. But it was like, yeah, same day or day before I would just buy the tickets. And I tried to get a date with a girl and I'd be like, Hey, I know this was kind of last minute, but I got these things. And they'd be like, you're asking me to go to the opera. Absolutely. Speaking of opera and musicals, our friend Ben Shapiro is here. He is a fan of musicals. People don't know

1:42:32this, Ben, but you are a huge fan of musicals. What is your favorite opera and musical at the moment right now? Do you have a preference? Sure. My favorite opera is either Comrade and Magic Flute. And my favorite musical of all time is probably West Side Story or 1776. But boys, I got to tell you, I picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue. This is not an evening to remember over here. I'm happy to talk about you want to do musicals for the next few minutes. I will be a happy Oklahoma. Great. Ben, Ben, what what what happened in your estimation? I mean, I think that honestly, the president said going in that the election was going to be a referendum on him, act like he's on the ballot. And I think that, you know,

1:43:15the president was kind of on the ballot. If this were just the case of a few outstandingly bad Republican candidates losing, like Paxton in Texas, for example, or if it were just a matter of an outstanding Democrat candidate winning somewhere, like Josh Hurrick in Iowa, which again, we'll see what happens in Iowa still. But the fact that South Carolina is going and just basically have an empty suit in South Carolina losing, or the fact that Florida, again, Florida stayed red, but very, very, very closely. I mean, Angie, that's my home state. So I know that state really well. Angie Nixon is a full-scale nutcase and Angie Nixon is gonna lose that senatorial race by about two points. David Jolly, who spent, I think, one seventhseventh of what Byron Donald spent in that race,

1:43:53is going to lose by a couple of points. I mean, it's a wipeout for Republicans. And there's no way to sugarcoat that. And again, if you're looking at it across the map, that bodes pretty ill for 2028. And I got to say that it's just, I think it's a stacking function. There are a bunch of things. Is it a platform repudiation? Is it a character repudiation? Is it a strategy repudiation? Is it all of the above? Like, what do Republicans do to retool that? Or personality repudiation of personality. I think it's an all of the above, honestly. I think that if you look at the presidential approval ratings, which moved lockstep with Republican approval ratings more broadly here, the president's approval ratings were in the 50s when he first started,

1:44:32and then Liberation Day hit, and you can see it's basically an arithmetic decline in his approval rating, obviously exacerbated a little bit by the Iran war, but it looks kind of like a straight line with very few step functions in the decline of the approval rating. I think the basic sense that most American voters have of this stuff, I think that all of us who watch politics or the economy really closely, we tend to get pretty granular on the specific policies that are alienating people. I think most people in America tend to vote based on a sort of gestalt of what's happening. And I think the American people believe that the president is disconnected from their sort of everyday concerns.

1:45:04And whether that gets undermined by the tariffs or by the Iran war or by the reflecting pool, if they feel like the president is not looking at the thing they're looking at and that he's distracted by a bunch of other things, and then you add on top of that corruption issues and all the rest of it, I mean, none of that is going to line up particularly well for Republicans. Now again, I think that there are two things Republicans can do to fix that. I mean, there are a few things they can do politically to focus in on things that the American people care more about. I think one is that they can end the Iran war successfully. I emphasize successfully because Americans don't like losing, as Joe Biden saw in Afghanistan.

1:45:35They can end that successfully. I think the president of the United States can refocus on economic growth, which again, I think he's done a pretty good job on that. But I think that he can obviously moderate away from a tariff regime that I think has been largely unsuccessful and unpopular. And then I think that he's got to actually look at the imagistic problems of apparent corruption within his administration. It's like the top issue in some of the Fox News exit polling in this election cycle for a lot of people. I think that's going to be required because I'm looking at this electoral map tonight and I'm looking forward to 2028. And I was counting it up. I mean, if you're looking at the vulnerable Republican states, you know, places that could go blue, if that now includes, say, Texas, if that now includes places like Ohio, and now you're talking about all the swing states plus those, you're talking about a potential map for Democrats that runs in the range of 382 electoral votes and basically 150-some Republican votes that are kind of guaranteed.

1:46:27That's a heavy hill for them to have to climb going into 2028 if things don't change. Ben, if we hadn't had the tariff chaos, which people felt was pretty chaotic, and you referenced that, if we hadn't had the ICE situation, which people reference, hey, maybe we want to close the border, but we don't want to see masked agents being violent in the streets. And then, of course, the war. And the war obviously exacerbated inflation, but it's probably a secondary downstream effect. But just those first three, if you eliminate two out of those three, all three of those or one of those three, what would tonight have looked like in your estimation? I think it would look like some moderate Republican losses, but not the complete

1:47:06wipeout that you're looking at. I think that, you know, the American people can take a certain amount of, you know, President Trump's sort of chaotic online behavior if they feel like everything else is sort of smooth sailing. But I think that combining all of that when they already have a bit of heartburn is not going to help things. So I think that when you look at, you know, sort of what has happened over the course of the last couple of years, I think the biggest mistake that gets made in politics, and we see this in a bunch of midterm elections at this happened over the course of the last couple of years. I think the biggest mistake that gets made in politics, and we see this in a bunch of midterm elections

1:47:32at this point over the course of the last 20 years, is that somebody gets elected, and the first thing they think is it's time to do world-breaking change. And you know what the American people generally are not in favor of? World-breaking change. The American people generally just want some sense of normality and predictability, maybe a certain level of incremental change, maybe get rid of a few of the really outlying issues, like, for example, just shut the southern border. But, you know, don't put out memes on Studio Ghibli of ICE, you know, arresting illegal immigrants. Trolling their ribs backfired, yes. Yeah, I do think that. I mean, I think that if you look at tonight's result, there are only

1:48:03two things that really explain it. Well, three. One is Democrats, all the Democrats showed up to vote, obviously, like huge Democratic turnout. Two is independents who did show up to vote voted against the president. And three is there was some Republican, again, dyspepsia with the president's performance. You combine all of that and you end up with this extraordinary down ballot effect. But I do think that the trollery goes over okay when the rest of America's, you know, when everything seems to be going okay in your life, you know, when you're concerned about affordability and the president is doing his last day talking about the grouting at the reflecting pool, you know, you can get the sense that maybe he's disconnected.

1:48:36It seems a little unfocused. Handicap 2028 for us. On the Democratic side, on the Republican side, J.D. Vance, Marco Rubio, other. On the left, Rahm Emanuel, A AOC the other Shapiro obviously I don't think you're running you enjoy running a media company so or wildcards you know a lot of other wildcards your friend Tucker you're starting his third party I mean that listen Tucker Tucker had a great night he was rooting very hard for some of the Democratic candidates who won so yeah good for him but as far as some some of the other people who you're talking about, I think, look, Vance is the primitive frontrunner until declared otherwise. I think that, frankly, there are some Republicans who might have thought about jumping in the field and now are looking at this like,

1:49:20am I going to walk directly into a buzzsaw if I do? You know, that means that Vance has, you know, a real, as we say, a hill to climb. And I'll be interested to see how he tries to build a coalition that is different from President Trump's coalition. Because I think that what this election shows is that if you take the Trump coalition, then you shrink it by 20 percent, you end up with what you have today. If you take the Hispanic vote and you drop that from 48 percent of the Hispanic vote down to the 20s, then you end up with losing all of South Texas and all of those various districts. If you take the blue-, the blue collar white vote, and you reduce that by 15, 20%, you end up with what you're seeing right now in Kansas

1:49:55or South Carolina or Ohio. So, can J.D. Vance just sort of copy paste Trump's coalition? Trump couldn't even copy paste Trump's coalition in this particular election cycle. So he's gonna have to build something new. As far as the Democrats, again, I think the Democrats have the whip hand going into 2028. But I think that some of the names that are being mentioned right now are probably not going to be it. I do not think that AOC, for example, is kind of the foregone conclusion as a candidate. I don't think Gavin Newsom is the guy either. I look at the Democratic electoral map. I think Wes Moore is being widely underrated. He just won heavy re-election tonight, like big numbers over in Maryland. Obviously, that's expected. But if you look at the early

1:50:36Democratic voting states, those are states that are disproportionately black. Those states tend to favor black candidates who last that long. Kamala Harris didn't last that long in 2020, or 2020, and in 2024, obviously, she was sort of slotted in. So, yeah, if I had to sort of, if I were going, if I were on the prediction markets, I would buy low on Wes Moore. I think that there's some move there. Yeah, free to burn. Ben, let me ask you a slightly, oh, sorry, go ahead. Yeah, let me get free to burn again. Based on who won tonight, you know, there's not a lot of DSA chatter in the winners thus far. How far has the party moved towards that DSA end of the spectrum? Are we starting to fall down the socialism well?

1:51:18And what's your view on the quality of the candidates that won on the blue side tonight? I think you can kind of pick your own adventure for the Democrats here, right? If you want to say that Democratic moderates are doing well tonight, then you could theoretically point at maybe Tallarico in Texas, maybe Josh Trick in Iowa, depending on how that race moves. The candidate Hamilton in Kansas. If you want to make the DSA case, you're going to point to El-Sayed over in Michigan, who did not moderate one iota on any of his third-worldist and quasi-socialistic policies, not one iota, and is going to win, it appears pretty handily, over Mike Rogers in Michigan. I think that the Michigan story is fascinating, less because El-Sayed won in a state that, again, he's filling a Democratic seat,

1:51:59it's an off-year election, more interesting because of the rabid response of Democrats to Haley Stevens saying she wasn't going to vote for him. That part is, I think, should be disturbing to people of moderate or independent bent. The fact that Haley Stevens was ripped harder by the Democrats for saying that she was going to vote for El-Sayed's opponent than El-Sayed was ever ripped anywhere during this campaign for saying a wide variety of extraordinary things is amazing. In a Democratic majority in the House and a Democratic majority in the Senate, what does it mean for Israel? Listen, I think that it obviously means questions about funding, which is, I think, why the president and Prime Minister Netanyahu already sort of announced that they were coming

1:52:39to an early end to the memorandum of understanding between the United States and Israel as far as military aid. I think the Israelis already know that. They know the direction the Democratic Party is moving. And so I think that the Israelis are already preparing for that. This is, I think, less of a shock and more of just an acceleration of a trend that was already occurring. And then second question, it's back to the first one. If you had to sort of look at candidates that were outside the normal political bent, like maybe, you know, like the Donald Trump-like character that comes from the outside in, are there people that you're looking at, both on the left or the right, that kind of like catch

1:53:14your eye and catch your attention that you think we should be looking at them? It's a great question. I really have not seen anyone who has the sort of magnetic effect that Trump had. And I think that, you know, this sort of mistake that people make of like, who's going to be the next Trump? There is no next Trump, just like there was no nextack obama and so i think that it's very likely that you know for for the next couple of rounds anyway most of the candidates are going to be inside the sort of elected official box and not the celebrity boxing and trump is one of one and i think that that anyone who tries to imitate him tends to fall short uh and and you know at a certain point maybe the act wears thin

1:53:48and the american people get upset about it but but i i don't see somebody you know, at a certain point, maybe the act wears thin and the American people get upset about it. But I don't see somebody, you know, running. I don't see Mark Cuban running in from the wings and seizing the Democratic nomination by storm. And, Ben, we didn't see any January 6 election interference nonsense tonight. And you don't see that happening, nor do you see Trump doing the ban and trying to get the third term. All those things the Dems were hand-wringing about, that's off the table. Yeah. Yeah, that's total nonsense. The president is perfectly happy, I think, to finish his second term. He was already talking about this yesterday. I mean, he said he'll basically

1:54:17become a veto machine, and then he'll end up cutting whatever deals he can with Democrats. And then he'll do what presidents since Barack Obama have done. He'll rely on his pen and his phone, which unfortunately is the way we now do governance in this country. I mean, the reality is we have not passed a single major bill in the United States absent reconciliation or a supermajority since the Bush administration. I mean, it really has been that long. All right. Ben Shapiro, our guy. Thank you so much for joining us. Thanks, Ben. Thanks, I appreciate it. Back to the meth over here. Yes. And I'll see you in a little bit.'m going to jump up and stream in a little and talk uh talk it up with him gentlemen what a great stream uh we hit 400 or 500 000 uh to hassan

1:54:57piker and nick fuentes is 100 and 200 000 so we mogged him we we mog streamed them all we live mogged him uh any thoughts here as we wrap on the stream and on the guests that we had here what a great flow of guests do you feel any surprise tonight you guys? I do, I think that I didn't understand personally how disconnected I was to certain races where I just thought that there was an entrenched, established pattern that I think was reliable. You know, going into the Ohio governorship race, Ohio was Republican plus 10. That was not a purple state by any means for the last two, three election cycles. That looks like it's flipping. Texas looks like it's flipping in the Senate and also the governorship.

1:55:59So for me, I have to go back and look at my priors. And I think that the very most important takeaway for me is it's always about the economy. And it's always specifically not about GDP, which I think I get caught up in too much, but it is about fundamental W-2 wage growth. And I think that I probably explained away too much of it. And so that's an important thing that I have to go and completely relearn and figure out how to reestablish a sense of what's actually going on and what's important. That's incredibly insightful, Chamath. I think that's some great self-reflection there. You know, my feeling on this, and I got a lot of hate in the comments from our viewership over the last year when I started to point out, hey, the tariffs don't seem to be going too well,

1:56:57could be executed a little better. The ICE stuff really is rubbing Americans the wrong way. And hey, obviously, we all know Americans have absolutely no desire to be in a foreign, endless war in the Middle East. You put those three things together and the ICE stuff on top of it, which I was very passionate about. I could feel people were getting upset about this, especially people who were really sold on the Trump 2.0 agenda. And honestly, I really wanted to see Trump succeed into this and to keep the mandate going. And I think this was self-inflicted. And it is the economy every time, Chamath. That is always the lesson. People feel the economy. I'll finish. We're going to get cut. It's OK. I feel the economy is the most important part about this.

1:57:43And Freeberg, what's your final thoughts? I'm just going to say, guys, that's it. We're done with the all-in coverage the coverage will continue over on the polymarket app thank you guys all right thank you to our friends over at polymark and check out the dc navy yard they're having a crazy party over there i don't know who's getting more drunk the dams or the republic