Silicon Valley Podcast Hosts Try to Understand Why Regular People Are Mad

If you want to watch four billionaire/billionaire wannabes cope with the election results, you could watch the absolutely dreadful hosts of All-In talk across a livestream and a follow-up podcast for four hours, or you could just watch the Lucille Bluth “What could a banana cost, Michael,” clip on repeat until your eyes and ears bleed. Throughout their post-election breakdown podcast episode released over the weekend, the All-In bros seem to be on the verge of grasping why Americans are so mad and who they’re mad at, but are still trying to find the guy who did this . They appear to finally grasp that Americans are mad at something called “oligarchs” but largely do not seem to know who they are (it’s them). Populist anger at the oligarchs is a “perception” or “narrative” problem. The four hosts — David Sacks, Chamath Palihapitiya, Jason Calacanis, and David Friedberg— spend much of the episode considering whether they are out of touch, or whether the children are wrong. Let’s see how they did. “We lost all the podcast bros,” David Sacks, a Trump sycophant billionaire most famous for leading anti-DEI witch hunts against college administrators and writing interminable, book-length tweets, said on the most recent episode. “We lost a huge part of our base. The Republicans in particular are dependent on the podcast circuit. Let’s call it alternative media. Why? Because the mainstream media hates us. Legacy media hates us.” “And they’re 90 percent left, so it is what it is,” Jason Calacanis, a man who seems singularly focused on discussing how he moved away from California three years ago to move to now-Blue Texas , responds. “Without them, we don’t have any media that supports us,” Sacks says, seemingly unaware of the existence of Fox News, CBS News and 60 Minutes under Bari Weiss, the Paramount-Skydance (and CNN) merger, Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post, the concept of Elon Musk’s X , to say nothing of Democratic pseudo-scandals being ginned up by the New York Times. The podcast, like their election night coverage last week (which features, among other guests, Ted Cruz and the CEO of Polymarket explaining at length how little he knows about elections), goes on and on like this. In the aftermath of last week’s election, the schadenfreude of watching right-wing figures crash out as they realize just how unpopular Trump’s policies have become has been particularly satisfying. But there’s something special about watching smarmy Silicon Valley weirdos who sound like they haven’t spoken to anyone who hasn’t founded a startup in several decades advance their theory of the case about what just happened, and what Trump could do next to “save his legacy.” Calacanis, for example, suggested a policy of “no taxes on people under a certain revenue, uhh, income threshold.” He catches himself, perhaps realizing that most people don’t think of their paychecks as their “revenue” because they are not businesses. Palihapitiya says something must be done to “allow the wage earning class to feel more ownership of the United States economy.” Calacanis has come to the realization that “the bottom half of non-equity holders” are mad about the state of the country. Sacks says the wave happened because of “this narrative around affordability plus the perception of the lack of affordability” that has put the public “in a very ornery mood.” “It doesn’t matter how good the economy actually is,” he says. “It matters how good people perceive it to be,” adding that “the economy is not that bad. I mean, in fact it’s quite good.” In fact, data shows this is deeply out of touch with what people across the country are experiencing: More than half of Americans can’t afford to have an emergency fund or save for the future, and most Americans report having to cut back on their lifestyles to afford to live. Housing affordability is at crisis levels .