Socialists Sweep NYC, China Catches Up in Coding, AI Memory Crunch, Micron's Blowout Quarter

All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg

The podcast discusses the Democratic Socialists of America's (DSA) sweeping victories in NYC's congressional primaries, linking them to broader political shifts, AI's role in economic inequality, and the growing influence of progressive movements. The hosts debate the implications of these wins, the future of AI, and the state of political discourse.

Key takeaways

DSA candidates won key NYC primaries, signaling a progressive takeover of the Democratic Party.
AI is seen as a potential economic equalizer but is undermined by poor messaging and misinformation.
Young, educated, high-income voters are driving support for progressive policies.

Transcript preview

All In the One Podcast, Welcome Back to the Number One Podcast in the World, the All In Podcast, episode 278. And Freiburg, he took a mental health day today after the socialist sweep in New York City. So we invited two guests, they both said yes. Travis Kalinik is here from Adams, how you doing brother? I'm good, I'm good to see you. Good to see you. Good to see you. And after a triumphant week at Starbase, the one the only. his favorite, Gavin Baker of Attreaties. Management, how are you doing, Gavin? Great, man, thanks for having me. You're still floating on Cloud 9 after the SpaceX IPO? Yeah. That was a very special moment and it was a culmination of, you know, decades of hard work. But man, to quote Bill Bellcheck, on to Cincinnati. Yeah, yeah, exactly right. Yeah. Zero, zero is, that how the Nick's talked about the next game in every series. They're like it's zero zero we come into this as if it's like the first game of the series even if we're up two games or three games but socialists have swept New York in the congressional Democratic primaries on Tuesday New York City Mayor Mondami went three for three in the candidates which he endorsed and they all won their primaries 10th district leader Brad Lander defeated two-term incumbent Dan Goldman 10th is one of New York's richest districts includes the West Village all won their primaries Dumbo, Cobble Hill, Carroll Gardens, Park Slope. That's some weird geography put together there. In New York's 13, Chevalier beat a five-term incumbent who is backed by House Speaker Hakim Jeffries, and apparently the socialists are coming for him. 13 is one of the poorest districts, Harlem and the West Bronx, the Boogodown Bronx. She's a 32-year-old Democrat socialists with a history of spicy remarks. District, Claire Valdez, won the open seat over the hand-picked successor, the incumbent. Seven is a DSA stronghold, Bushwick, Williamsburg, Long Island City, Greenpoint, known as the Kami Corridor. A lot of hipsters and baristas with suspenders in that neighborhood. According to our partners, Polymarket, this was a pretty big upset, the Mondami Suite, chances were just 26 before election day. Yeah, that would be like the trifecta there. if you were gambling. These candidates, just like Mondami, did a lot better with younger college educated and high-income folks, the folks who can afford to be socialists. And these are all safe Democratic seats. The DSA will very likely win. So the DSA caucus. That's the best what you just said. People who can afford to be socialists. It's always the rich poor. They're rich, they're rich, you know, they're rich, but they pretend to be poor. It's perfect. I mean this is the history of our country, from the 30s, the 30s, the 30s, the 50s, the 50s, the 50s, the 50s, Basically, if you're intelligent and you get into business, you become a capitalist, if you're super intelligent and you go into academia, eventually you have the luxury belief that socialism is awesome. What's your take here, Chamoth, and then I'll go to you Saxe-Pil? Because I know I can see you're chomping on something over there. You're just ready to go. Honesty, I think AI is a very good prism into this problem. And part of it is because we've been our own worst enemy. I think AI is the greatest economic leveler will ever find in our lifetime. I think it's the thing that can create the greatest amount of equality. I think that it can even the starting line for every single person on earth. But we've done such a poor job in representing it, in bringing it to market, in talking about it. We've let all of our own personal trials and tribulations and in insecurities and fights spill out into the open. As a result, Silicon Valley has lost even more. credibility with the people at large. And in that vacuum, what other people can paint is a picture of how anything other than what capitalism looks like today is a better version of what they see. And this is why you're seeing, I think, a lot of these people get a lot of momentum. I think if you look at some of the key congressional races, they were a referendum on AI. And the good news is we were able to hold the line in some of these key places, but just barely. and in New York there was a couple of very important races where it was essentially an propic funded anti-a-i groups which is again insane against in some ways open-a-I funded pro-a-i groups and the pro-a-i groups won you just explain that it's a great leveler can you give a couple of examples and just expand on that briefly how is it a great leveler I mean I know but for the audience is say you've said this a couple of weeks now so I think you've said this a couple of it is I think that the first real major unlock of economic productivity was when the internet and specifically Google went and harvested and collected all the world's knowledge and all the world's information and they made it available via search. What we figure out though 25 years later, despite the fact that they built a great business, is what was missing was then being able to take that knowledge and information. What we figure out though 25 years later, despite the fact that they built a great business, is what was missing was then being able to take that knowledge and transform it into expertise and intelligence. And that's effectively what AI does. It takes that world's knowledge and it allows you to act upon it so that every single man, woman and child has an equivalent Travis Kalinik in, you know, as his co-founder, a super founder, this brilliant person that can think through all your problems, can out engineer people, can outthink people, and they sit beside you and you have that. And there is no gatekeeping that can prevent you from having them. And so now you're only as good as your ability to direct that energy into something productive that you value. That is an incredibly powerful thing. And instead we've gotten caught up in doomerism and jobs being lost and, you know, water being consumed, all of which are lies, all of which are complete fabrications and misinformation. And these have been created in order to specifically help one small set of actors inside the AI race. it's been fed and funded by those folks. So in this vacuum, Jason, we've allowed all these other people to paint the other version. And right now, the other version looks way more compelling than the current version, because the current version has very poor brand ambassadors. Sacks, what's your take on this? I guess some people are looking at this as the left's version of the populist takeover that Trump did over the last 10-plus years. What's your take on what we're seeing here with socialism and it's amazing appeal and it's winning at the election box? I think there is some truth to that. I mean I think the choices of the future are gonna be communism or if you want to call it socialism of the Democrat Party or nationalism in the Republican Party I mean that is where we're headed those are the two populist directions but let's look at what these DSA candidates stand for. their platform is. They actually say they want to abolish the Senate. They want to abolish the carceral state. That means basically police forces and prisons. They want to abolish ICE and grant amnesty for all. They do not support any deportations whatsoever. They want to replace the president and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary that is chosen by and subordinate to Congress, which basically now I guess this means this house. with respect to House elections, they want to abolish the electoral college, they want to replace the two-party system with a multi-party democracy, and they want to expand the House of Representatives, implement proportionate representation, and rank choice voting in all elections. So this would be a total makeover of our constitutional system. They want to free Palestine. They want public ownership of major corporations. They want to defund the Department of War. This is a very radical organization. And you would laugh at a lot of these types of these types of people. proposals, but you can't really laugh at it anymore because these guys are taking over the Democratic Party. And you can see the Democratic establishment is in complete panic right now because they have lost control of the party to Zoram, Mam-Dani, and his allies. So Jason, like you said, I mean, let's take this one race here. New York 13, you've got this ally of Hakim Jeffrey's longtime incumbent congressman Espalot, I guess is his name. is the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and he was defeated by an unemployed 32 year old PhD candidate she's never had a job she's been in college for 10 years I guess writing this PhD thesis and I think even by DSA standards she might be kind of a lunatic so she has declared that she wants to end Western civilization she wants to eradicate Western civilization wait a second what she's so she's soaking in it She used the American flag as a napkin to clean her hands. She attended a rally one day after October 7th celebrating the slaughter of Israeli civilians. I mean she's very pro-Palestine but even to the point of celebrating Israeli civilian deaths. She calls white women ugly colonizers. She's called for the complete defunding the police and abolishing all prisons and borders. Doesn't want a single deportation. hates the police. He hates the police. on social media before, calls US service members war criminals and says the US is a disgrace of a country. She's written favorably about communism and seizing the means of production and on and on. So this is basically the new Democratic Party. It's going to be even if the Democrats do take the House in November and Hakim Jeffries become Speaker, this is going to prove to be a huge headache for him managing all these new DSA members. establishment wing at the Democratic Party as an ally. They see it as an obstacle. This is the DSA co-chair Josh Block said we're using the Democratic Party as a ballot access vehicle. Oh my God. Not because we share its goals. We build our own organization, get elected under the Democratic label, caucus with Democrats when it's useful, and push our own agenda from the inside. We see the Democratic establishment as an obstacle, not a home. So the DSA is coming from the Democratic Party. controls the base now, it's where all the energy is. I think this takeover will continue. I think the DSA will gradually take over more and more of the Democratic Party. And all I can say to these establishment Democrats is play stupid games, win stupid prizes. You supported this open border policy that brought in this wave of mass migration. That is a huge part of the base of this new DSA wing. Mam Donnie would not have won the mayoral election in New York if it had just been native. New Yorkers voting. It was the mass migrant vote in York that swung it to Mam Donnie. It's not exclusively the DSA base. It's the migrants plus these over-educated white progressives who I say over-educated because they're more downwardly mobile they end up going to work in academia or NGOs that kind of thing. They're hard left-wing. They're kind of the Vanguard and it's this combination of these, you know, recent college graduates who are kind of the organizers and this migrant movement who are really taking over the Democratic Party. But again, this all goes back to Democratic Party policies. They may not have intended for the staff and they may not have intended for them to lose control, but it was their open border policy. It was also the fact that they have cracked the melting pot and the policy we had for many years in America of assimilating migrants, right, immigrants. Yep. That all got cracked by multiculturalism and wokism and wokism. don't really do that anymore. So now you've got these candidates like Chevalier openly declaring they're not just anti-American, they're post-American, they don't have any respect for the American system, our constitutional order, our free enterprise system. They want to introduce something in much different and it's going to look a lot like the countries where these migrants are coming from. Yeah. So again, if you import massive numbers of migrants, don't assimilate them into our system. And then you have these Marxist leaders, you're going to end up with the American system coming to resemble the countries from which. It's really interesting. You mentioned like how she wants to get rid of all of these, you know, delete all of these units. It's very similar to Trump's, you know, he wanted to delete a separate set of things like the IRS and USAID, Department of Education, EPA, they each use that playbook as well. Like, hey, we're going to delete some of this stuff. Travis, you, you famously had the fountain head head. U.S. Constitution. No, definitely not. Travis, you're used to... Slight difference. I agree. He didn't want to delete Western culture. I don't think he wants to delete Western culture. No. You might want to delete USAID because it was a festering, it was basically a front for all these NCOs. And CIA. Yeah. By the way, you may have noticed that in South America we've had seven elections where the countries have swung to the right. And I think a big part of the reason why might be why might be why might be you don't the USAID there conducting all these left-wing regime change operations. Payola disappeared. Yeah, totally. And the incentives disappeared with it. Travis, you famously had the Fountainhead, and Ran's novel as your Twitter avatar for a decade or two. I don't can ask you your take. No, they've been writing about it for a decade or two. This is like a six month thing where I would read a book and then rotate at my avatar. Hamilton for a while, I had Enders game for a while, but yeah, it became a thing. Yeah. Having known you for a while, I think, believe in the individual and their exceptionalism and trying to have a little ruggedness there. This is obviously the exact opposite. What's your take on what's happening in these pockets? Because it's not national yet, but it's definitely notable. All right, I've got, I've got sort of two aphorisms for us. Okay, first is truth and justice is the immune system for society. When the immune system is suppressed, all the social ills flare up. Okay, so if you're seeing us losing truth like social media, mainstream media, whatever you call it, like that's an early indicator for bad things happening in society. not just like social media, mainstream media, it's just everything around us. And the same on the justice side too. If people commit crimes and there's no consequences, it's a nice early indicator. So you can kind of watch, you can watch these things and say, is truth winning today or is it losing? Is justice winning today or is it losing? And what is the trajectory will tell you, are we going to get worse or are we going to get better? Right. COVID makes, and the Fauchy case, now we're seeing a lot more information come out. We have a really hard time getting the truth and maybe we'll get justice eventually. It seems like we're getting a little more truth five years later, but it's like a perfect example of what you're discussing. Yeah. There's a lot packed into that, but you can unpack it if we had a lot of time we could unpack it. But those become the sort of atomic things that you look at. And then the other thing I'd say, and some people get a little surprise, communism is in our blood as humans and people go what the hell are you talking about you're crazy what do you mean I'm like well have you have you ever in your life been lazy and everybody's like yes I've been lazy in my life before I said have you ever in your life wanted something for nothing yeah the difference is do you make that a way of life and that essentially allow you to do both of those things without consequence, those ecosystems get a critical mass and start taking hold. And I think that's what we're seeing. Well said. Yeah, I think it's well said. Gavin, I know you, I don't know you to talk too much about politics, but talk about markets, but these two things do relate, I think. So give us the economic perspective here on why this is happening. Because obviously, different generations have had different economic experiences. I don't want to lead the witness here but I have had conversations with you about this before. Yeah, well, so I do think, I was, obviously AI is I think going to be the defining political issue of the midterms and for sure the next presidential election. But I feel like what is going on with the DSA is really a fusion of two things. So the Democratic Party, I was a Democrat for most of my life. And it was the party of the working class people that was trying to create opportunity. you know maybe level out equality you know help black Americans help Hispanic Americans and you know you can agree or disagree with their methods but I think those are all noble goals and to a large extent none of those are really present in the DSA none of them if you look at who voted for which candidate The voting base of the DSA are relatively wealthy, white liberals who are downwardly mobile. They're losing votes with working class people. They're losing votes with poor people. They're losing votes with black Americans. They're losing votes with Hispanic Americans. And those, you know, the people that the Democratic Party, I think, for a long time tried and whether they failed to succeed it is up to try to represent and give a voice to, they are not of interest to the DSA. And I think the DSA is dangerous. It's tragic that we are electing profoundly anti-American candidates who in some cases have called for violence to eradicate America. And I just think there's a whole class of people who went to an elite school. They grew up in really nice circumstances. And instead of going into industry, they went into this kind of giant NGO nonprofit machine. And their outcomes have been very different from people who did productive things for the world. You know, I've said on the show many times, Elon has done more to decarbonize the planet than every activist combined. Yeah, time sent. times 10. And I think these NGOs and the fact that the government is increasingly outsourcing a lot of funding to them is a really big part of this problem. And they are pursuing policies, you know, I think we talked maybe talked about it last time, but the curly effect, a mayor of Boston, you pursue policies that you know are going to be disastrous for this, your constituents, but they drive out your rivals. And then you can give jobs $600,000 a year jobs, running an NGO that does nothing productive to your friends and allies. And it's really organized corruption happening at a massive scale. You know, the one thing, whatever you want to say about the Trump administration, a lot of people are up in arms about this, you know, new plane he's getting from Qataris. Well, one, sounds like we needed a new plane, but two, there for you to see. I think there are tens of billions, maybe hundreds of billions of these payments flowing to these NGOs. And if you look in California and New York, it's like I think the per capita spending on homelessness has more than doubled and it's all gone to NGOs and outcomes have gotten worse. And California, it's like quadrupled and outcomes have gotten worse. So I think this is, is this is dangerous and I hope that the mainstream Democrats can find a compelling candidate because I think the reason that the DSA is increasingly ascendant is not because of their ideas. I think their ideas appear to this appeal to this very narrow subset, doubly mobile, rich white people who increasingly maybe live in quasi-gentile poverty because they're not doing productive things. They may be well attention, but they're not doing productive things. They may be well attention, but they're not doing productive things. They may well attention, but they're not doing productive things, they're well attention, but they're not of things and can find a compelling candidate because I think the reason their ascendant is Zoran Madani. I think he is one of the most talented politicians I've ever seen in my lifetime. You know he can give a great speech he's good in an interview he can tap into all of this. He's kind of a chameleon who can shift. But I think he is a singularly talented politician and he is the reason that the DSA is a send not dissatisfaction with AI, but it's him. And there is no one else in the Democratic Party. I used to think AOC was by far the most talented Democratic politician. That was the warm up, yeah. She was talented. She's nothing like Zoran from a political topic. Clearly. And if you combine his charisma and ability to communicate with generations, like we're now like F2 of these lost generations that feel like. they're going to do worse than their parents and if you look at housing and college debt, health care, they don't believe that they can participate in the system. They feel the system's rigged and if somebody comes along who speaks to them and they have no conception of socialism and what happened in Germany or during the Red Scare, they have no idea what socialism or communism is. They have this incredible rapper they've put around this which is, you know, they're democratic socialists. It's like it's. It's the Coke Light. It's a Coke Zero of socialism. It's actually just communism. They want to literally seize people's assets. They want to seize half of these company's stock. They want to seize their wealth. They just want to take from the people who have made stuff, as we talked about last week. And we've done nothing to change their mind. We haven't made more houses. We haven't made college more affordable. Healthcare is a disaster. Inflation is a disaster. And starting pointless wars, Israel is somewhere in here as part of all this. Yeah, sure, of course. Yeah. I was on Megan Kelly yesterday and I had this theory that I've been kind of working through and I'll just share it with you guys because I'd love your reaction. If you look at the scourge of socialism, if you take the rhetoric away and you actually look at the outcomes, there are three countries that I think have veered far towards socialism well before the United States. the UK and Australia. And I think when you look at any sort of reasonable measure of their progress, it's been an unmitigated disaster. So all of the virtue signaling on social issues, all of the virtue signaling on immigration and open borders, all of the virtue signaling on climate change, has left each of those three countries in some state of disrepair with enormous amounts of infighting, tremendous political instability. They are all of sort of powder kicks. And there's an interesting thing that happened in each of those three countries that I think has the potential to turn the tide and it speaks to what Gavin said. Each of those three countries now have banned social media when you're 16 and under. And I think it's sort of like making sure the kid doesn't get addicted to the drug too early. And when you look at somebody like Zoran Mumdani, I think Gavin is right. I'll go even further. He, AOC, the lady that just won. Chevalier. Let's just break it down. They're all good looking. They're all charismatic. They have their pulse on the, the Gestalt of the moment. They know how to use social media and they are essentially curating an army. Now, if you cut the legs off by saying young people should actually age into social media, I suspect that the most important channel, of information consumption, being taken away from them actually starts to give them the opportunity and the rest of us, quite honestly, because we have to deal with kids who are just really fucking stupid, constantly asking for this stuff. The chance to actually show you how a balanced diet actually allows you to be much healthier in your later life. And I think as relates to information consumption, I think you are going to see, I suspect, a far less radicalized youth aging into. the voting roles in those three countries. And I suspect if