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JA Jack Altman Jack Altman Investing at Alt Capital.

“I'm always a believer in the wisdom of crowds. And so when people dislike something in broad swaths, my reaction isn't, oh, they don't understand. It's, oh, there must be some threat or there must be some problem. … It drives me crazy when people in Silicon Valley are like, oh, people in the middle of the country don't understand. I'm like, no, screw you. I'm from the middle of the country.”

Uncapped with Jack Altman · Startups & Venture · November 2026

“I'm always a believer in the wisdom of crowds. And so when people dislike something in broad swaths, my reaction isn't, oh, they don't understand. It's, oh, there must be some threat or there must be some problem. … It drives me crazy when people in Silicon Valley are like, oh, people in the middle of the country don't understand. I'm like, no, screw you. I'm from the middle of the country.” — Jack Altman, Uncapped with Jack Altman

Context

The hosts had just cited a Gallup poll in which 93% in China said AI will mostly help people versus 36% in the US. Jack argues American distrust of AI is a rational reaction to how the industry has talked about jobs and data centers.

Transcript

Uncapped with Jack Altman Around 36:14 into the episode
Jack Altman

That's bad. That is not the situation we want to be in. No. There is no real reason for that discrepancy between the two. It is not going to impact the lives of one country that much differently than the other. That is sentiment and narrative.

Ev Randle

Yeah.

Jack Altman

And, you know, I'm always a believer in the wisdom of crowds. And so when people dislike something in broad swaths, my reaction isn't, oh, they don't understand. Yeah. It's, oh, there must be some threat or there must be some problem. There's some reason. There's a logical reason. And it drives me crazy when people in Silicon Valley are like, oh, people in the middle of the country don't understand. I'm like, no, screw you. I'm from the middle of the country. I understand what they're, you know, and it's like, it is rational and logical, but the truth is probably in the middle of these things. Like, there are ways in which AI can be a big problem for people. But to have 36% of the country thinking it can help, what that tells, when you have that juxtaposed with our day-to-day experience of seeing the potential for it to help, that tells you that…

Ev Randle

really critical geopolitical issue because. If we do think that having supremacy in AI is, I think, even today, you could say, given all the cyber attacks that are happening, but will increasingly become a massive, massive imperative from a geopolitical standpoint to have the best AI models. And if…

Jack Altman

Yes.

Ev Randle

And a lot of that is very worrying to me.

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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