奥特曼与监管者对弈、AI 的「核」潜力、大药企捆绑销售

Jason Calacanis (00:00:00): I have a little surprise for my best news. Everybody's been getting incredible adulation. People have been getting incredible feedback on the podcast It is a phenomenon as we know, and I thought it was time for us to do performance reviews of each bestie. Now I, as executive producer, am not in a position to do your performance reviews. I too need to have a performance review. So I thought I would let the audience do their performance reviews. So we went and we're debuting a new feature today. At this very moment, it's called Reddit performance reviews. Oh god. Queue some music here, some graphics, ready performance reviews. And so we'll start off With you, David Friedberg, Chamath Palihapitiya (00:00:41): this proves why you haven't been successful in life so far. Jason Calacanis (00:00:44): I haven't been Speaker 3 (00:00:46): You're kidding me. I'm not trying Chamath Palihapitiya (00:00:47): to build a successful enterprise, instead of keeping the judgment to yourself, which is what all elite performers do Jason Calacanis (00:00:52): -- Yes. -- Chamath Palihapitiya (00:00:53): you turned it over to a bunch of mid on Reddit Jason Calacanis (00:00:56): -- Speaker 3 (00:00:56): Yes. -- to tell you that we're already doing it. They were already doing it. We just collected it. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:01:00): What elucidation were you gonna get from Reddit? David Sacks (00:01:02): Yeah. Really. Jason Calacanis (00:01:03): Let's not ruin the bit. David Sacks (00:01:04): Do you think Elon does 360 performance reviews. Jason Calacanis (00:01:07): I've read it. I've read it of all things. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:01:09): You know how many 360 performance reviews I've done in my life? 0. Of course. Jason Calacanis (00:01:14): And that's why this would be so entertaining. David Friedberg (00:01:16): Okay. Go go. Start off with me. Let's see. Here's how Jason Calacanis (00:01:19): it's gonna work. You are going to be presented with the candid feedback you've gotten in the last 30 days on Reddit. But for the first time, and you have to read it out loud to the class. Friedberg, you'll go first Here's your first piece of candid feedback in your 360 from the Reddit in cells. David Friedberg (00:01:36): Go ahead, Friedberg. Jason Calacanis (00:01:37): Read it out loud. David Friedberg deserves more David Friedberg (00:01:38): Friedberg. He and the others have made it their mission to convince us that reforming social security is the only way forward to survive. He hides behind this nerdy, a persona and then goes hard right out of nowhere. The exact fear mongered about the deficit as an excuse to restructure entitlement programs, we would see that as the partisan right wing take it is. When Friedberg does it, We're supposed to act like he has no skin in this game. He's just the science guy. No. He's a rich guy who would rather work your grandparents to death than paying to 5% tax. Jason Calacanis (00:02:15): Alright. There's your review. Very good. I think you took it well, and you don't have to respond now. Don't be defensive. Just take it out. Just to David Friedberg (00:02:21): counter briefly, I have highlighted multiple times, I think we're going to 70% tax rates. But, hey. You know? Alright. To each their own. Everyone's got an opinion. David Sacks (00:02:30): That won't generate more revenue. Yeah. The history is gonna guide. Jason Calacanis (00:02:33): Yeah. Well, the audience has been waiting for this. David Sachs has never taken a piece of feedback. And the feedback he has gotten, he hasn't taken well, So here we go, David. Here's your performance for you. Go ahead. I was David Sacks (00:02:43): supposed to read this. Jason Calacanis (00:02:44): Go with the bit. Come on. It's a little feedback for you. Come on. Alright. And I'm gonna do this too, and I haven't seen mine. Oh, Nick Poldies? Nick Poldies. This is not very cringe. He's right here. Speaker 3 (00:02:55): These are actual pieces of real feedback. David Friedberg (00:02:58): fired. That's it. Get out of here. Speaker 3 (00:03:00): Go ahead, Zach. David Sacks (00:03:02): The thing about David Sachs, if he wasn't rich, everyone would dismiss him as stupid and boring. And the secret to his wealth is just followed Peter Taylor House since college. It's like if turtle from on track pretend to be a public in shorter. That's Speaker 3 (00:03:16): great. Oh, this is where it's coming Jason Calacanis (00:03:17): up here. Okay. So the dictator -- -- great. -- has never had a 360 review. He informs us And I think his staff, you know, for all the people at social capital, David Friedberg (00:03:26): you can get in on Jason Calacanis (00:03:27): this by just posting to Reddit since he won't do 360 reviews at social capital. Go ahead. Let's pull up Jamontz. feedback for the quarter? Go ahead. Jamal here's your feedback. -- Chamath Palihapitiya (00:03:34): is the biggest self serving leach as long as he can make a dollar trade on it. he will burn anything down to the ground. Fuck the consequences to society Jason Calacanis (00:03:44): or anyone else. This was actually the good part of the 360. Those are the positive. Those are the pros? Yeah. David Sacks (00:03:49): Why do you give is a good review. Speaker 3 (00:03:50): That was the proof. David Friedberg (00:03:51): That's not Jason Calacanis (00:03:52): the truth. It is the truth. Oh, yeah. Speaker 3 (00:03:55): I gotta read mine. I haven't seen this. I'm embracing for impact here on Jason Calacanis (00:03:59): -- Chamath Palihapitiya (00:03:59): What's the peek exactly. Jason Calacanis (00:04:00): What did you Chamath Palihapitiya (00:04:01): say? What is the critique from all those David Friedberg (00:04:02): designs? -- improve from that. I mean, that's like accolades. Jason Calacanis (00:04:05): Pretty accurate. Yeah. Okay. Alright. Here we go. I gotta read mine. Okay. I can't wait for AI to replace Jay Gal. Speaker 3 (00:04:11): Jay Gal is the least skilled knowledge worker on the show. Jason Calacanis (00:04:15): I think he has about 3 shows left before AI replaces his hosting skills. and ability to trick dentists into investing in hype. Speaker 3 (00:04:26): That's pretty good. David Sacks (00:04:26): That last part, man. Jason Calacanis (00:04:28): Woah. Woah. Woah. Woah. Someone accurate. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:04:30): I do have a Jason Calacanis (00:04:31): lot of dentist friends in the funds. Okay. I'm gonna pay for a lot of kids then to school. David Friedberg (00:04:35): Great idea. Great idea, J. Kelle, to give us -- Yeah. David Sacks (00:04:37): What a great bit. Jason Calacanis (00:04:38): It's just one group 1. Just one for the whole group. This is a group survey. This is our Group 360. Vote to rename the podcast. The vote is binding, then the podcast will be renamed. 3 billionaires in Jay Cal, 3 kinda David Sacks (00:04:48): smart guys in Jay Cal. Jason Calacanis (00:04:52): 3 David Sacks (00:04:52): assholes and free bird. Speaker 3 (00:04:54): That's a pretty good survey. That was pretty good. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:04:56): Yeah. That's a good one. Well, Jason Calacanis (00:04:59): winners ride. Brain man, David Saxon. We open David Sacks (00:05:07): Alright, everybody. Jason Calacanis (00:05:15): Welcome to the all in. podcasts were still here episode 129, all in sum at 2023 general admissions sold out. Too many people apply for scholarships. That's on pause. And there's a couple of VIP tickets left. Get them while they're hot. Just search for all in summit. Friedberg anything to add? We'll just get through the Chamath Palihapitiya (00:05:32): GIF real quick here in Jason Calacanis (00:05:33): the beginning. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:05:34): No. It's good. Did I get Jason Calacanis (00:05:35): it alright? That was it? Yeah. David Friedberg (00:05:36): I mean, just more demand than we predicted. We looked a bigger venue. You couldn't find one. We're we're we're I think we're excited about Royce Hall. It's still, as you pointed out, two and a half times the size of last year, so we wanna make sure it's quality event, but, unfortunately, way too many folks wanna go, so we have to kinda pause ticket sales. Jason Calacanis (00:05:53): What's my wine budget? $300 per person per night, a $1000 per VIP per event. Thank you. Speaker 3 (00:06:00): Okay. I Chamath Palihapitiya (00:06:01): will handle it from here. Jason Calacanis (00:06:03): there's 750 of them, so I think you have $750,000 in wine budget. Thank you. I don't Speaker 3 (00:06:09): I mean, I just can't believe I just gave It's Chamath 700 and 50 to buy wine. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:06:15): Hi, guys. I'm gonna curate an incredible wine here. Jason Calacanis (00:06:18): -- David Friedberg (00:06:18): here today, by the way. He's Jason Calacanis (00:06:20): Oh. He's David Friedberg (00:06:20): doing a Chamath Palihapitiya (00:06:21): similar job? David Friedberg (00:06:22): Yeah. It's an LA job. Jason Calacanis (00:06:23): Summer. Hey, Josh. David Friedberg (00:06:24): Alright. Let's get to work. Jason Calacanis (00:06:25): Let's get to work. Okay. The Senate had a hearing this week. for AI. Sam Waltman was there as well as Gary Marcus, a professor from NYU, That's an overpriced college in New York City. Anne Christina Montgomery, the chief privacy and trust officer from which had Watson before anybody else was in the AI business. And I think they deprecated it or they stopped working on it. It was just quite paradoxical. There were a couple of very interesting moments. Sam claimed the US should create a separate agency to oversee AI, I guess, is in the Chamath camp. He wants the agency to issue licenses to train and use AI models, a little regulatory capture there as we say in the biz. He also claims and this was interesting dovetailing with Elon's CNBC interview with, I think, Dave Farber, which is very good, that he owns no equity in OpenAI whatsoever and was, quote, doing it because he loves it. Any thoughts, Chamath, you did say that this would happen 2 months ago and here we are 2 months later and exactly what you said would happen? is in the process of happening. Regulation licensing and regulatory capture. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:07:40): Sam went a little further than I sketched out a few months ago, which is that he also said that it may make sense for us to issue licenses for these models to even be compiled and for these models Jason Calacanis (00:07:54): to Chamath Palihapitiya (00:07:54): actually do the learning. And I thought that that was really interesting because what it speaks to is a form of KYC. Right? Know your customer. And, again, when you look at markets that can be subject to things like fraud and manipulation, right, where you can have a lot of bad actors, banking is the most obvious one. We use things like KYC to make sure that money flows are happening appropriately and between parties that where the intention is legal. And so I think that that's actually probably active that he is adding as somebody right in the middle of it, which is that you should apply to this agency to get a license to then allow you to compile a model. And I think that that was a really interesting thing. The other thing that I said and I said this in my in a tweet just a couple days ago is I'm really surprised actually where this is the first time in modern history that I can remember, where we've invented something, we being Silicon Valley, And the people in Silicon Valley are the ones that are more circumspect than the folks on Wall Street or other areas. And if you see, if you gauge the sentiment, the hedge funds and family offices right now are just giddy about AI. And it turns out if you look at their 13 f's, they're all long NVIDIA and AMD. But if you actually look get the other side of the coin, which is the folks in Silicon Valley that's actually making it, the rest of us are like, hey. Let's crawl before we walk before we run. Jason Calacanis (00:09:29): Yeah. Let's think about guardrails. Let's be thoughtful here. And so the the big money people are saying, let's place bets and the people building in are saying, hey, let's be thoughtful, Saks -- Which Chamath Palihapitiya (00:09:39): is the opposite to what it's always been, I think. Jason Calacanis (00:09:41): Right. We're like, hey. Let's let's run with this, and Wall Street's like prove it to me. Sachs, you are a less regulation guy. You are a free market monster. I've heard you've been called you don't believe that we should license this. what do you think about what you're seeing here? And there is some cynical thoughts about what we just saw happen in terms of people in the lead wanting to maintain their lead by creating red tape. What are your thoughts? David Sacks (00:10:10): Yeah. Of course. I think, you know, Sam just went straight for the end game here, which is regulatory capture. Normally, when a tech executive goes and testifies, at these hearings, they're in the hot seat and they get grilled. And that didn't happen here because, you know, Sam Ollman basically bought into the narrative. of these senators. And he basically conceded all these risks associated with with AI. He talked about how Chamath style models if unregulated could increase online misinformation, bolster cybercriminals, even threatened confidence in election systems. So he basically bought into the senators narrative. And like you said, agree to create a new agency that would license models and can take licenses away. He said that he would create safety standards, specific tests that the model has to pass before it can be deployed. He says you would require independent audits who can say the model is or isn't in compliance. And by basically buying into their narrative and agreeing to everything they want, which is to create all these new regulations in a new agency. I think that Sam is pretty much guaranteeing that he'll be one of the people who gets to help shape the new agency and and the rules they're gonna operate under and what these independent audits are gonna how they're gonna determine what's in compliance. So he is basically putting a big moat around his own incumbency here. Jason Calacanis (00:11:35): And So, David Sacks (00:11:36): yes, it is a smart strategy. for him. But the question is do we really need any of this stuff? And, you know, what you heard at the hearing is that just like with just about every other tech issue, the senators on the judiciary committee didn't exhibit any real understanding of the technology. And so they all generally talked about their own hobby horses. So, you know, you heard from Senator Blackburn. She wants to protect songwriters. Holly wants to stop anti conservative bias. Klobuchar was touting a couple of bills that have her name on them once called the JCPA journalism competition preservation. Jason Calacanis (00:12:10): What does Bernie Sanders wanna do? He wants to protect the 1% of the 1%? David Sacks (00:12:14): Durbin hate section 230,000. a hobby horse he was riding. And then Senator Blumenthal was obsessed that someone had published deep fakes of himself. So, you know, all of these different senators had different theories of harm that they were promoting. And they were all basically hammers looking for a nail. You know, they all wanted to regulate this thing. And they didn't really pay much, if any, attention to the ways that existing laws could already be used -- Absolutely. Jason Calacanis (00:12:40): -- David Sacks (00:12:40): to to stop any of these things. Jason Calacanis (00:12:41): If you commit a crime with AI, there are plenty of criminal laws. David Sacks (00:12:44): Every single thing they talked about could be handled through existing law. if they amount to being harmed at all. Yeah. But they wanna jump right to creating a new agency and your regulations. And Sam, I think, did the you know, expedient thing here, which is basically buy into it in order Chamath Palihapitiya (00:13:00): to -- This Jason Calacanis (00:13:01): was a chess game. -- insider. If this was a chess game, Sam got to the mid game. He traded all the pieces and went right to the end game. Let's just try to checkmate here. I've got the lead. I got the 10,000,000,000 from Microsoft. Everybody else get a license and try to catch up, Friedberg. We have Chamath Pro regulation licensing, I think, or just being pretty thoughtful about it there. You got Saks being typically a free market monster, let the laws be what they are, but these senators are gonna do regulatory capture. Where do you as a sultan of science stand on this very important mission? David Friedberg (00:13:32): I think there's a more important kind of broader set of trends that are worth noting and that the folks doing these hearings and having these conversations are aware of. which implies why they might be saying the things that they're saying. That's not necessarily about regulatory capture. And that is that a lot of these models can be developed and generated to be much smaller. We're seeing, you know, models that can effectively run on an iPhone. We're seeing a number of open source models that are being published now. There's a group called MosaicML. Last week, they published what looks like a pretty good quality model that has, you know, a very large kind of token input, which means you can do a lot with it. And that model can be downloaded and used by anyone for free, you know, really good open source license that they've provided on that model. And that's really just the tip of the iceberg on what's going on. which is that these models are very quickly becoming ubiquitous, commoditized, small, and effectively are able to move to and be run on the edge of the network. As a result, that means that it's very hard to see who's using what models how behind the products and tools that they're building. And so, if that's the trend, then it becomes very hard for a regulatory agency to go in and audit every server or every computer or every computer on a network and say, what model are you running? Is that an approved model? Is that not an approved model? It's almost like having a regulatory agency that has to go in and audit and assess whether a Linux upgrade or some sort of, you know, open source platform that's that's being run on some server is appropriately vetted and checked. And so it it's almost like a fool's errand. And so if I'm running one of these companies and I'm trying to, you know, get congress off my butt, get all these regulators off my butt, I'm gonna say, go ahead and regulate us. Because the truth is, there really isn't a great or easy path or ability to do that, and there certainly won't be in 5 or 10 years. once these models all move on to the edge of the network, and they're all being turned around all the time every day, and there's a great evolution underway. David Friedberg (00:15:39): So I actually take a a point of view that it's not just that this is necessarily bad, and there's cronyism going on. I think that the point of view is just that this is gonna be a near impossible task to try and track and approve LOMs and audit servers that are running LLS and audit apps and audit what's behind the tools that everyday people are using. And I wish everyone the best of luck in trying to do so, but that's kind of the joke of the whole thing. It's like, let's go ahead and paddle these congress people in the shoulder and say, you got it. You're right. Jason Calacanis (00:16:12): There you have it, folks. Wrong answer, Shamophisax. Right answer, Friedberg. If you were to look at hugging face, if you don't know what that is, it's a basically an open source repository of all of the LOMs. The cat is out of the bag. The horses have left the barn. If you look at what I'm showing on the screen here, this is the open LLM leaderboard. It's kind of buried on hugging face. If you haven't been to hugging face, this is where developers show their work. They share their work. And they kinda compete with each other in a social network showing all their contributions. And what they do here is, and this is super fascinating, They have a series of tests that will take an LLM, the language model, and they will have it do science questions that would be for grade school. They'll do a test of mathematics, US history, computer science, etcetera. David Friedberg (00:16:59): There's a jeopardy test too. Jason Calacanis (00:17:01): I don't know if it's David Friedberg (00:17:01): on here, but the jeopardy test is really good. It's straight up Jeopardy trivia and see if it can answer your questions. Yeah. Jason Calacanis (00:17:06): Which actually, Friedberg was actually his high school Jeopardy championship 3 years in a row. But, anyway, on this on your part, you can see the language models are outpacing what OpenAI did I'm sorry, closed AI is what I call it now because they're closed source. Closed AI and barred have admitted that internal person at Bard said the language models here are now outpacing what they're able to do with much more resources many hands makes for light work. The open source models are gonna fit on your phone or the latest, you know, Apple Calacanis. So I think the cat's out of the bag I don't know how they pull it David Sacks (00:17:44): up. -- incompatible about that what Friedberg just said with what I said. In fact, Freeberg's point bolsters my point. It's highly impractical to regulate open source software in this way. Also, when you look at that list of things that people are doing on hugging face, there's nothing nefarious about it. Yeah. And all the harms that were described are already illegal and can be prosecuted. David Friedberg (00:18:03): Exactly. Gonna David Sacks (00:18:04): need some special agency, you know, giving its seal of approval. Again, this is gonna replace permissionless innovation, which is what has defined the software industry and especially open source, with the need to develop some connection or relationship in lobbying in Washington to go get your project approved. Jason Calacanis (00:18:22): And David Sacks (00:18:22): there's no really good reason for this except for the fact that the senators on the judiciary committee and all of law really wants more control so they can get more donations. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:18:31): Sachs, I have a question. Do you think that creating the DMV and requiring a driver's license limits the ability for people to learn how to drive. David Sacks (00:18:40): The DMV is like the classic example of how government doesn't work. I don't know why you'd wanna make that your example. I mean, people have Chamath Palihapitiya (00:18:47): to spend all day waiting in line. Jason Calacanis (00:18:49): He sends people to it. He's got a VIP person who's waiting all the time. -- David Sacks (00:18:52): day waiting in line to get your photo taken insane. I mean, everyone has a miserable experience with it. No. But it it's highly relevant because you're you're right. If you create an agency, where people have to go get their permission. It's a licensing scheme. You're gonna be waiting in some line of untold lengths. It won't be like a physical line. the DMV building. It's gonna be a virtual line where you're in some queue where there's probably gonna be some overwork regulator who doesn't even know how they're supposed to approve your project. they're just gonna be trying to cover their ass because if the project ends up being something nefarious, then they get blamed for it. So that's what's gonna end up happening. Let David Friedberg (00:19:27): me also highlight something that I think is maybe I think the gut -- A little bit misunderstood. But you know, an AI model is an algorithm, so it's a it's a piece of software that takes data in and spits data out. And, you know, we have algorithms that are written by humans. We have algorithms that have been, you know, written by machines. These are machine learn models, which is what a lot of what people are calling AI today is effectively an extension of and out of. And so the idea that a particular algorithm is differentiated from another algorithm is also what makes this very difficult because these are algorithms that are embedded and sit within products and applications that an end user and end customer ultimately uses. And I just sent you guys a a link to the you know, the EU has been working towards passing this AI app. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:20:19): Here we go. David Friedberg (00:20:19): They're a couple of weeks ahead of these conversations in the US. But, I mean, as you read through this AI act and the proposal that it's that it's put forth, it almost becomes the kind of thing that you say, I just don't know if these folks really understand how the technology works because it's almost as if they're gonna audit and have you know, an assessment of the risk level of every software application out there and that the tooling and the necessary restructure to be able to do that just makes no sense in the context of open source software, in the context of an open Internet, in the context of how quickly app software and applications and tools evolve, and you make tweaks to an algorithm, and you gotta resubmit it for authorization reauthorization. Jason Calacanis (00:21:04): -- sure their number one job, Friedberg, is going to be to protect jobs. So anything there that in any way fringes on somebody's ability to be employed in a position, whether it's an artist or a writer or a developer, they're gonna say, You can't use these tools or they're gonna try to follow them to try to protect jobs because that's their Chamath Palihapitiya (00:21:23): number one job over there. Jason Calacanis (00:21:24): -- Chamath Palihapitiya (00:21:25): all three of you. Do you guys think that this was Sam's way of pulling up the ladder behind him? Jason Calacanis (00:21:29): of course, 100%. Just like -- No. -- it absolutely it is, and it's because -- No. -- you can you can prove it. He made OpenAI, closed AI, by making it not open source. David Friedberg (00:21:39): If you're Sam, you're smart enough to know how quickly the models are commoditizing and how many different models there are that, you know, can provide similar degrees of functionality as you just pointed out, JKAL. So I don't think it's about trying to lock in your model I think it's about recognizing the impracticality of creating some regulatory regime around model auditing. And so you're very so the it it may in that world, in that scenario where you have that vision, you have that foresight, do you go to Congress and tell them that they're dumb to regulate AI, or do you go to Congress and you say, great. You should regulate AI. Knowing that it's like, hey, yeah, you should go ahead and stop the sun from shining. You know, like, it it's just yeah. Jason Calacanis (00:22:17): So basically, he's telling him to do that. because he knows they can't. No. Therefore, he gets all the points, all the joy points, all the social credit, I don't wanna say virtual signaling, But he gets all the credit, relationship credit with Washington for saying what they wanna hear, reflecting back to them. Even though he knows they can't compete with Facebook's open model, which is number 1. David Friedberg (00:22:38): Yeah. There is historical precedent -- Interesting idea. Jason Calacanis (00:22:41): -- David Friedberg (00:22:41): for companies that are facing congressional scrutiny. to go to Congress and say go ahead and regulate us as a way of -- We're premium relief. Yeah. And I think that it doesn't necessarily mean you're gonna get regulated. But it's a way of kind of creating some relief and getting everyone to take a a breather and a sigh of relief and be like, okay. The industry is with us. You know, Jason Calacanis (00:22:58): they're -- Gardette. It's not gonna -- David Friedberg (00:22:58): What do you think of Superdeck Chamath Palihapitiya (00:23:00): as you try to cheat? Jason Calacanis (00:23:01): Sachs, the Gardes strategy he's pulling here. David Sacks (00:23:03): Miss Gardes. Jason Calacanis (00:23:04): I think that's in chess when you are gonna take the queen. What? It's like a anyway, so what do you think his chest movements. I can David Sacks (00:23:10): guarantee you that's not a strategy in chest. So I think it is a chest move. nonetheless. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:23:17): Is he pulling up the ladder sets or no? David Sacks (00:23:19): I don't think that's his number one goal, but I think it is the result. And so I think the the goal here is I think he's got to pass in front of it when you go to testify like this. You can either resist and they will put you in the hot seat and just grill you for a few hours, or you can sort of concede and you buy into their narrative. And then you kinda get through the hearing without being grilled. Jason Calacanis (00:23:44): And so I think on that level, it's preferable David Sacks (00:23:44): just to kinda play ball. And then The other thing is that by playing ball, you get to be part of the insiders club that's gonna shape these regulations. And that will I wouldn't say it's a ladder coming up. I think it's more of a moat where because it's not that the latter comes up and nobody else can get in, but the regulations are gonna be a pretty big moat around major incumbents. who know they qualify for this because they're gonna write these standards. So at the end of the day, if you're someone in Sam's shoes, you're like, why resist and and make myself a target, or I'll just buy into the narrative and help shape the regulations, and it's good for my business. Jason Calacanis (00:24:24): I like the analysis, gentlemen. This is a perfect analysis. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:24:26): Let me ask Timothe David Friedberg (00:24:27): a question. Timothe, what is the commercial incentive from your point of view to ask for regulation and to be pro regulation? Your pro regulation, can you just highlight for me at least what you think, you know, the the the commercial reason is to do that. You know, how do you benefit from that? Like, not you personally, but generally, like, where does benefit arise? Chamath Palihapitiya (00:24:48): I think that certain people in a sphere of influence and I would put us in that category have to have the intellectual capacity to see beyond ourselves and ask what's for the greater good I think Buffet is right 2 weeks ago. He equated AI to nuclear weapons. which is an incredibly powerful technology whose genie you can't put back in the bottle, whose 99.9 percent of use cases are Generally quite societally positive, but the point 1 percent of use cases destroys humanity. And so I think you guys are unbelievably naive on this topic. And you're letting your ideology fight your common sense. The reality is that there are probably Jason Calacanis (00:25:39): 95,000,000,000,000,000 Chamath Palihapitiya (00:25:41): trillion use cases that are incredibly positive. But the 1000 negative use cases are so destructive, and they're equally possible. And the reason they're equally possible, and this is where I think there's a lot of intellectual dishonesty here, is we don't even know how transformers work. The best thing that happened when Facebook open source Chamath was also that somebody stealthily released all the model weights. David Friedberg (00:26:03): Yeah. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:26:04): Okay. So explain a little Jason Calacanis (00:26:06): bit for a neophy what what we're talking about here. So there's the model and there's the weights Chamath Palihapitiya (00:26:11): Think about it as it's a solution to a problem. The solution looks like a polynomial equation. Okay. Let's take a very simple one. Let's take pythagorean theorem, you know. x squared+ysquaredqualz squared. Okay? So if you wanna solve an answer to a problem, you have these weights. You have these variables. and you have these weights associated with it. The slope of the line, y equals mxplusb. Okay? What a computer does with AI is it figures out what the variables are. and it figures out what the weights are. The answer to identifying images flawlessly turns out to be 2x+7, where x equals this thing. David Friedberg (00:26:47): Now take that example and multiply it by Jason Calacanis (00:26:47): 500,000,000,000 Chamath Palihapitiya (00:26:53): parameters. and 500,000,000,000 weights, and that is what an AI model essentially gives us as an answer to a question. So even when Facebook released Chamath, what they essentially gave us was the equation but not the weights. And then what this guy did, I think it was an intern apparently or somebody. He just nicked the weights so that we immediately knew what the structure of the equation looked like. So that's what we're basically solving against, but we don't know how these things work. We don't really know how transformers work. And so this is my point When I think you guys are right about the overwhelming majority of the use cases, but there will be people who can nefariously create havoc and chaos. And I think you got to slow the whole ship down to prevent those few folks. Okay. Jason Calacanis (00:27:43): -- Chamath Palihapitiya (00:27:43): ruining it for everybody. David Friedberg (00:27:44): Jemat, in in in Jason Calacanis (00:27:45): hold on. Hold on one moment. Let me just talk David Friedberg (00:27:46): with Shamat about this. Jason Calacanis (00:27:47): I haven't had a chance to chime in on my position, so I'd like to just move on David Sacks (00:27:50): by May. Nobody cares. David Friedberg (00:27:52): Okay. Jason Calacanis (00:27:52): Well, I do. I think, actually, I split the difference here a little bit. I don't think it needs to be an agency in licensing. I do think we have to have a commission And we do need to have people being thoughtful about those 1000 Chamath or things that we cannot anticipate, and then number 2, for the neophyte with the 1600 rating on chest.com sacks, Gardez, an announcement to the opponent that their queen is under direct attack similar to the announcement of check. The warning was customary until the early 20th century. So since you do not know the history of check, Now you've learned something here today. -- David Sacks (00:28:25): 20th century. Okay. Well, since I've only played chess in the 20th 21st centuries, I'm unaware of that. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:28:30): Jake Allen, French is Brown's David Friedberg (00:28:36): Go ahead, Frank. In the context of what we're talking about that models are becoming smaller and can be run on the edge, and there's obviously 100 and 1000 of variants of these open source models that have, you know, good effect. and perhaps compete with some of these these models that you're mentioning that are closed source. How do you regulate that? How do you and then they sit behind an application, and they sit behind to it. Yeah. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:29:02): I think in order for you to be able to compile that model to generate that initial instantiation, you're still running it in a cluster of 1000 of GPUs. David Friedberg (00:29:11): But let's say we're past that. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:29:13): You can't be past that. We're not past that yet. Okay? We don't have 5,000,000 models. We don't have all kinds of things that solve all kinds of problems. We don't have an open source available simulation of every single molecule in the world including all the toxic materials that could destroy humans. We don't have that yet. So before that is created and shrunk down to an iPhone, I think we need to put some stage gates up to slow people down. David Friedberg (00:29:36): What do you mean by those stage gates? Yeah. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:29:38): I think you need some form of KYC. I think before you're allowed to run On a massive cluster to generate the model that then you try to shrink you need to be able to show people that you're not trying to do something absolutely chaotic. or have it creating? That I don't think that that could be as simple Jason Calacanis (00:29:54): as putting your driver's license in your Social Security number that you're working on an instance in a cloud. Right? It could be your putting your name on your work. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:30:02): It becomes slightly more nuance in that. It's like I think that Jake, that's probably the simplest thing for AWS, GCP and Azure to do. which is that if you want to run over a certain number of GPU clusters, you need to put in that information. I think you also need to put in your tax ID number. So I think if you want to run a real high scale model that's still going to run you tens or 100 of Jason Calacanis (00:30:22): 1,000,000 Chamath Palihapitiya (00:30:23): of dollars. I do think there aren't that many people running those things and I do think it's easy to police those and say, what are you trying to do here? David Friedberg (00:30:30): So let me just push back on that because Mosaic ML published this model that is let me I can pull up the the performance Charter, Nick, maybe you can just find it on their website real quick with the new model they published. Chamath, they trained this model on open source data that's publicly available, and they spent $200,000 on a cluster run to build this model and look at how it performs compared to some of the top models that are closed source. Jason Calacanis (00:30:56): Just say it for the people who are listening. David Friedberg (00:30:58): Yeah. So for people that are listening, basically, this model is called MPT 7 b. That's the name of the AI model, the LLM model that was generated by this group called Mosaic ML. And they spent $200,000 creating this model from scratch And the data that they trained it on is all listed here. It's all publicly available data that you can just download off the Internet. Then they score how well it performs on its results. against other big models out there like Chamath 7b, BTG. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:31:28): I know, but I don't exactly know what the actual problems they're trying to ask it to compare. David Friedberg (00:31:33): Right? So the the but the point is that this model theoretically could then be applied to a different dataset once it's been, you know, built. I don't think so. I I just wanna use your point earlier about toxic chemistry because models were generated and then other data was then used to tune those models and deliver an output. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:31:52): Hold on a second. Like, those answers were to specific kinds of questions. If you wanted to all of a sudden totally orthogonal thing of that model, that model would fail. You would have to go back and you'd have to retrain it. That training does cost some amount of money. So if you said to me h moff, I could build you a model, trained on the universe of every single molecule in the world, And I could actually give you something that could generate the toxic list of all the molecules and how to make it for Jason Calacanis (00:32:19): $200,000, Chamath Palihapitiya (00:32:20): I would be really scared. I don't think that that's possible today. So I don't understand these actual tests, but I don't think it's true that you could take this model and these model weights, apply it to a different set of data and get useful answers. David Friedberg (00:32:33): But let's let's assume for a minute that you can, in fact, take $200,000 worth of Chamath Palihapitiya (00:32:38): GPU buses. Here's my point. I want to tell you what's happening right now, which is that's not possible. So we should stop so that then I don't have to have this argument with you in a year from now which is like hey some Jack jerkoff just created this model. Now the cat's out of the bag so let's not do it. Jason Calacanis (00:32:54): Yeah and Chamath Palihapitiya (00:32:55): And then what's going to happen is like some chaotic seeking organization is going to print one of these materials and release it into the wild to prove it. Jason Calacanis (00:33:03): But here's the point for the audience. we are at a moment in time where this is moving very quickly, and you have very intelligent people here who are very knowledgeable talking about to the degree to which this is gonna manifest itself, not if it will manifest. You are absolutely 100% certain, Freeport. That somebody will do something very bad in terms of the chemical example as but one, if we're only determining here what level of hardware and what year that will happen, Chamath saying. we know it's gonna happen, whether it's 2 or 10 or, you know, 5 years, let's be thoughtful about it. And I think this discussion we're having here, I think, is is super relevant. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:33:40): On a spectrum, it's this is a unique moment where the most knowledgeable people Across every single political spectrum, persuasion, for profit, nonprofit, Democrat, right? Elon and Sam will just use those as the 2 canonical examples to demonstrate are pro regulation. And then the further and further you get away, the less technically astute you are, the more anti regulation and like pro market you are. And all I'm saying is I think that should also be noted that That's a unique moment that the only other time that that's happened was around nuclear weapons. And, you know, that's when Burton also went through. I actually -- Well, show me the David Friedberg (00:34:19): I think it's politically incorrect to be anti regulation right now. I think because of what you're saying well, just give me a second. I think because of what you're saying, Everyone on the left and the right, it's it's become popular to be pro regulation on AI and say that AI is gonna doom the world. And it's unpopular and Chamath Palihapitiya (00:34:34): it's politically incorrect. Sam. I'm saying you wanted Sam up for real. -- my point of David Friedberg (00:34:38): view on Sam. Elon's different, but I think, like, it I think it's become politically incorrect to stand up and say, you know what? This is a transformative technology for humanity. I don't think that there's a real path to regulation. I think that there are -- Totally. -- laws that are in place that can protect us in other ways with respect to privacy, with respect to fraud, with respect to biological warfare, and all the other things that we should worry about. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:34:59): Elon has said pretty clearly, he doesn't give a shit about what it does to make money or not. He cares about what he thinks. So all I'm saying is that's a guy that's not trying to be politically correct? David Sacks (00:35:07): Elon has a very specific concern, which is AGI. He's concerned that we're on a path to a digital superintelligence, singularity, and if we create the wrong kind of artificial general intelligence that decides that it doesn't like humans, that is a real risk to the human species. That's the concern he's expressed. But that's not what the hearing was really about, and it's not what any of these regulatory proposals are about. The reality is none of these centers know what to do about that. Even the industry doesn't know what to do about the long term risk. of creating an AGI. Jason Calacanis (00:35:44): Nobody knows. David Sacks (00:35:44): Nobody knows. And so and so I I actually I disagree with this idea that Chamath early earlier you said that There's a 1000 use cases here that could destroy the human species. I think there's only one. There's only one species level risk. which is AGI. But that's a long term risk. We don't know what to do about it yet. I agree we should have conversations. What we're talking about today is whether we create new licensure regime in Washington so that politically connected insiders get to control and shape the software industry. And that's a disaster. Let me give you another detail on this. So in one of the check groups I'm in, there was somebody who just got back from Washington. I wanna say who they are. It's not someone who's famous outside the industry, but they're kind of like a tech leader. And what they said is they just got back from Capitol Hill and the White House. And I guess there's like a White House summit on AI. You guys know about that. Jason Calacanis (00:36:40): Yep. David Sacks (00:36:40): So what this person said is that the White House meeting was super depressing. Some smart people were there to be sure, but the White House and VP's teams were rabidly negative. No real concern for the opportunity or economic impact just super negative. Jason Calacanis (00:36:58): Of course. David Sacks (00:36:58): Basically, the mentality was that tech is bad. We hate social media. This is the hot new thing. we have to stop it. Jason Calacanis (00:37:05): Of course. David Sacks (00:37:05): That basically is their attitude. They don't understand the technology. Jason Calacanis (00:37:08): about the White House. Yeah. The White House. David Sacks (00:37:10): Yeah. And the VP specifically because she's the now the AIs are. Jason Calacanis (00:37:13): To put Kamala Harris in charge of this makes no sense. I mean, does she have any background in this? Like, it just shows like a complete utter, lack of awareness. Where is the Megan Smith? or somebody like a CTO to be put in charge of this. Remember Megan Smith with CTO under, I guess, Chamath? Like, you need somebody with a little more of experience here, like, hopefully -- And then you are you guys Chamath Palihapitiya (00:37:33): been saying your your pro regulation depending on who's in charge? Jason Calacanis (00:37:36): Well, I'm prothoughtfulness I'm prothoughtfulness. David Sacks (00:37:39): I'm illustrating that, really, this whole new agency that's being discussed is just based on vibes. Jason Calacanis (00:37:45): You're not down with the vibes on vibes. Are these vibes -- The vibe is -- bumming you out. David Sacks (00:37:49): The vibe is that a bunch of people watch and don't understand technology and they're afraid of it. Is there anything you're afraid of, you're gonna wanna Jason Calacanis (00:37:56): these are socialists, David. They're socialists. They hate progress. They are stare to death that jobs are gonna collapse. They're socialists. They they're union leaders. this is their worst nightmare because the actual truth of this technology is 30% more efficiency, and it's very mundane. This is the true fear. I think that representatives have. 30% more efficiency means Google, Facebook, and many other companies, finance, education, They do not add staff every year. They just get 30% more efficient every year. And then we see unemployment go way up, and Americans are gonna have to take service jobs and white collar jobs are gonna be refined to, like, a very elite few people who actually do work in the world. there is absolutely David Sacks (00:38:40): a lot of new companies. If if humans can become if knowledge workers can become 30% more productive, there'll be a lot of new companies. Absolutely. And the biggest shortage are economy is coders. Jason Calacanis (00:38:48): Right. And we're gonna have an unlimited number of them now. They're all gonna go together. I don't David Sacks (00:38:51): know if it's unlimited, but, yes, it's a good thing if you give them superpowers. We've talked about this before. Jason Calacanis (00:38:55): Yeah. Yeah. David Sacks (00:38:56): So I think it's too soon to be concluding that we need to stop job displacement that hasn't even occurred yet. Jason Calacanis (00:39:02): I'm I'm not saying it's actually gonna happen. I do agree there'll be more startups. I'm seeing it already. I just think that's what they fear. That's their fear is and that's the fear of the EU. The EU is gonna be protectionists, unionists, ProtectPro workers, which is fine. -- David Sacks (00:39:15): aren't gonna be affected because these are not blue collar jobs we're talking about. These are knowledge workers. Jason Calacanis (00:39:19): There's white collar unions out. All the media companies created unions. And look at them. They're all going circling all these media companies are circling the training going out of business. David Sacks (00:39:26): But that's on the margins. I mean, that's not -- They're trying to start tech unions. They're trying to start them. But when we think of unionized workers, you're thinking about factory workers, and these people are not affected. Jason Calacanis (00:39:36): Okay. This has been an incredible debate. This is why you tune into the pod. A lot of things can be true at the same time. I really think the analogy of the the atom bomb is really interesting because What Elon is scared about with general artificial intelligence is nuclear holocaust the whole planet blows up. Between those two things, are things like Nagasaki and Hiroshima or a dirty bomb and many other possibilities with nuclear power you know, Fukushima, you know, etcetera. So let's That's in Hiroshima. Not yet. Right. And, you know, the the question is, is a three mile Calacanis, is a Fukushima, is a Nagasaki. Are those things probable? And I think We are all looking at this saying, there will be something bad that will happen. There will be the equivalent. Alright. Let's we need to check. David Sacks (00:40:21): JBT string together and these large language models string together words in really interesting ways and they give computers the ability to have a natural language interface. That is so far from AGI. I think it's a component. auto. Jason Calacanis (00:40:32): I think it's a component. David Sacks (00:40:33): Hold on. I think it's a comp obviously, the ability to understand language and communicate in a natural way is a component of a future AGI. But by itself, these are models for strain together language. Jason Calacanis (00:40:45): AutoGPT where these things go out and pursue things without any interference. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:40:49): I would be the first one to say that if you wanted to scope models to be able to just do human language back and forth, on the Broad Open Internet? You know, there there's probably a form, David, where these chat GPT products can exist. I don't I think that those are quite benign. I agree with you. But I think what Jason is saying is that every week, you're you're taking a leap forward and already with auto GPTs, you're talking about code that runs in the background without supervision. It's not a human interface that's like, hey, show me how to color my cookies green for Saint Patty's Day. It's a sad When Jason Calacanis (00:41:26): I trip to Italy? Yeah. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:41:27): Yeah. It's not doing that. So I just think that there's there's a place well beyond what you're talking about and I think you're minimizing the problem a little bit by just kind of saying the whole class of AI is just Chamath GPT and asking kid asking it to help it with its home. Jason Calacanis (00:41:41): This example, I hate to say it out loud, but somebody could say, here is the history of financial crimes that were committed and other hacks please, with their own model on their own servers, say, please come up with other ideas for hacks, be as creative as possible, and steal as much money as possible and put that in an auto GPT, David, and study all hacks that occur in the history of hacking, and it could just create super chaos around the world. And you can make David Sacks (00:42:06): sure -- -- history is gonna regret buying into this narrative because the members of the judiciary committee are doing the same playbook they ran back 2016, after that election, they ran all these hearings on disinformation, claiming that social networks have been used to hack the election. It was all a phony narrative Hold on. That they got Jason Calacanis (00:42:21): -- What happened -- -- that they got David Sacks (00:42:23): tech companies to buy into -- -- Biden. Jason Calacanis (00:42:24): They the Russians hacked to who went to right David Sacks (00:42:26): after that? Stop. They they got got all these tech CEOs to buy into that phony narrative. Why? Because it's a lot easier for the tech CEOs just to agree and tell the centers what they wanna hear to get them off their backs. And then what did that lead to? A whole censorship industrial complex. So we're gonna do the same thing here. We're gonna buy into these phoneme areas Jason Calacanis (00:42:45): here to Chamath Palihapitiya (00:42:45): get the David Sacks (00:42:46): centers off our backs, and that's gonna create this giant AI industrial complex that's gonna slow down real innovation and be a burden on North. Jason Calacanis (00:42:55): Okay. Lightning round. Lightning round. We gotta move on. 3 more topics I wanna hit. Let's keep going. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:42:59): If honored to become an evil, more evil. Yeah. what is it called? An evil comic book character? Jason Calacanis (00:43:05): A supervillain. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:43:06): A supervillain? If Jason Calacanis (00:43:07): you wanted to be an even more loathsome supervillain continue. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:43:11): I would take every single Jason Calacanis (00:43:13): -- Mhmm. -- Chamath Palihapitiya (00:43:14): virus patch that's been developed and publicized, learn on them, and then find the next 0 day exploit on a whole bunch of stuff. I mean, it's like Jason Calacanis (00:43:21): -- -- even bullish that idea. Please don't I mean, I'm I'm I'm worried about publishing that idea. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:43:25): That's not an intellectual leap. I mean, you have to be a dollar Jason Calacanis (00:43:29): -- -- obvious. Okay. Let's move on. Another great debate, Elon hired a CEO for Twitter Linda Yacarino. I'm hoping pronouncing that correct. Was the head of Ad at NBCUniversal. She's a legend in the advertising business. She worked at Turner for 15 years before that. She is a workaholic is what she says. She's gonna take over everything but product and CTO. Elon's gonna stick with that. She seems to be very moderate and she follows people on the left or right. People are starting the character assassination and trying to figure out her politics. that she was involved with the W World Economic Forum, which anybody in business basically does. But your take Saks on this choice for CEO and and what this means just broadly for the next 6 months because we're sitting here at 6 months almost exactly since Elon took over. Obviously, you and I were involved in month 1, but but not much after that. What do you think the next 6 months holds? And what do you think her role is gonna be? Obviously, some precedent this for this with you know, who are not as basic. David Sacks (00:44:33): Listen, I think this choice makes sense on this level. Twitter's business model is advertising. Elon does not like selling advertising. She's really good at selling advertising. So he's chosen a CEO to work with who's highly complementary to him. in their skill sets and interests. And I think that makes sense. I think there's a lot of logic in that. What Elon likes doing is the technology and product side of the business. He actually doesn't really like the let's call it the standard business chores and especially related to, like we said, advertising, and he loves to upload that stuff. Jason Calacanis (00:45:10): Average. So he wants to offer it. -- Speaker 3 (00:45:12): advertisers that make us his personal nightmare. David Sacks (00:45:14): Right. So I think the choice makes sense on that level. Now -- Yeah. Jason Calacanis (00:45:17): -- David Sacks (00:45:17): instantly, you're right. Her hiring led to attacks from both the left and the right, the right you know, pointed out her views on COVID and vaccines and her work with the WEF. And then on the left, I mean, the attack is that she's following libs at TikTok, which you're just not allowed to do apparently. Jason Calacanis (00:45:35): A follow is not an endorsement. David Sacks (00:45:37): Well, if you're just following Libs at TikTok, they wanna say some crazy right wing or no? Jason Calacanis (00:45:40): Well, she also follows David Sacks. So that does mean that she's pretty that that is a signal. But the truth is if you Sacks me if I'm wrong here or trim off maybe I'll send it to you. If you pick somebody that both sides dislike or are trying to take apart, you probably pick the right person. Yeah. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:45:56): Here's what I think. Okay. Go ahead. We're not gonna know how good she is for 6 to 9 months. But here's what I took a lot of joy out of Here's a guy who gets attacked for all kinds of things now. Right? He's an antisemite, apparently. And then he had to be like, I'm very proseemite. He's a guy that all of a sudden people think is a conspiracy theorist. He's a guy that people think is now on the raging right. All these things that are just like inaccuracies, basically fire bombs thrown by the left, But here's what I think is the most interesting thing. For a guy that theoretically is supposed to be a troll and everything else, he has a Female Chairman at Tesla, a female CEO at Twitter, and a female president at SpaceX. Jason Calacanis (00:46:42): Of course, it's a great insight. It's the same insight I think a lot of these virtue signaling lunatics on the left. Virtu signaling mids. They're all mids. And you know what? Like, you you have Elizabeth Warren and and and Bernie Sanders, giving, you know, the CEO of Starbucks a hard time when he doubled the pay of the minimum wage, gave them health care. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:47:06): said, Frebert, you love Mid. Right? Jason Calacanis (00:47:08): That's a great service, isn't it? Everybody is so big. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:47:10): these fucking mids. Jason Calacanis (00:47:12): And I paid for the college tuition. What gives you the right at Starbucks to pay for college tuition and double the minimum wage? That's hot. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:47:20): So so mid. I don't Jason Calacanis (00:47:21): know why it's so funny Chamath Palihapitiya (00:47:22): to me. Isn't it so great? Like, can you just pick as you can picture them? When I say that these are these mid feverishly typing on their keyboards, their virtue signaling nonsense. Sex's wrapping it up. David Sacks (00:47:33): Yeah. Look. Like you said, Elon has worked extremely well with Winshotlow, who's the president of SpaceX for a long time. And I think that relationship shows the way to make it work here at Twitter, which is they have a very complementary skill set. I think my understanding is, like, when folks is on the business side and the sales side of the operation. Elon focuses on product and technology. She lets Elon be Elon. I think if Linda tries to rein Elon in, tell him not to tweet or tries to meddle in the free speech aspects of the business, which is the whole reason he bought Twitter, which I think what Jason Calacanis (00:48:07): you -- -- end of it. Yeah. David Sacks (00:48:08): Yeah. That's right. That's when it will fall apart. So My advice would be let Elon be Elon. You know, he bought this company to make it a free speech platform. Don't mess with that. And I think it could work great. Jason Calacanis (00:48:20): And a free speech platform it is. When you are saying anything about COVID, and I and I really don't even wanna say it here because I don't want our to even say the word COVID or vaccine means that this could get tagged by YouTube and b d, you know, the algorithm could could could d I don't know what they call it. Deprecate this. And and when we don't show up and people don't see us because we just said the word COVID. I mean, the censorship built into these algorithms is absurd. By speaking of absurd, Lena Kahn, who has been the least effective FTC chair, I think started out pretty promising with some interesting ideas. She's now moved to block a major farm a deal, and December Amgen agreed to acquire Dublin based Horizon Therapeutics for 27,800,000,000. This is the largest pharma deal announced in 2022. FTC has filed a lawsuit in federal court seeking and junk that would prevent the deal from closing, the reasoning is the deal would allow Amgen to entrench the monopoly positions of Verizon's eye and gout drugs The agency said that those treatments don't face any competition today and that Amgen would have a strong incentive to prevent any potential drivers from introducing similar drugs. Chymov, the pharmaceutical industry is a little bit different than the tech industry. Insanity. Explain why, and then Saks will go to you on the gout stuff because I know that personally impacts you. Go ahead, Chamath. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:49:40): I think that this is a little, like, scientifically illiterate. to be honest. Unpack. The thing is that you want drugs that can get to market quickly, but at the same time you want drugs to be safe and you want drugs to be effective. And I think that the FDA has a pretty reasonable process. And one of the direct byproducts of that process is that if you have a large indication that you're going after say diabetes, you have to do an enormous amount of work. It has to be run on effectively thousands of people You have to stratify it by age, you have to stratify it by gender, you have to stratify it by race, you have to do it across different geographies, right? The bar is high. But the reason the bar is high is that if you do get approval, these all of a sudden become these blockbuster Jason Calacanis (00:50:25): 10, 20, $30,000,000,000 Chamath Palihapitiya (00:50:27): drugs. Okay? And they improve people's lives and they allow people to live, etcetera, etcetera. What has happened in the last 10 or 15 years because of Wall Street's influence inside of the pharma companies is that what pharma has done a very good job of doing is actually pushing off a lot of this very risky r and d to young early stage biotech companies. And they typically do the first part of the work. They get through a phase 1. They even may be able to sometimes go and start a phase 2 trial, a 2A trial. And then they typically can get sold to pharma. And these are like multibillion dollar transactions. And the reason is that the private markets just don't have the money to support the risk for these companies to be able to do all the way through a phase 3 clinical trial because it would cost On some cases, Jason Calacanis (00:51:23): 5, 6, 7, $8,000,000,000. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:51:25): You've never heard of a tech company raising that much money except in a few rare cases. In far in in biotech, it just doesn't happen. So you need the M and A machine to be able to incentivize these young companies to even get started in the first place. otherwise what literally happens is you have a whole host of diseases that just stagnate. Okay? And instead what happens is a younger company can only raise money to go after smaller diseases, which have smaller populations, smaller revenue potential, smaller costs because the trial infrastructure is just less. So if you don't want industry to be in this negative loop where you only work on the small diseases and you actually go and tackle the big ones, you need to allow these kinds of transactions to happen. The last thing I'll say is that even when these big transactions happen, half the time they turn out to still not work. There is still huge risks. So don't get caught up in the dollar size You have to understand the phase it's in. And the best example of this is the biggest outcome in in biotech private investing in Silicon Valley was this thing called STEM Centrix, and that thing was a $10,000,000,000 dud. Right? But it allowed all these other companies to get started after SemcentriX got bought for Jason Calacanis (00:52:37): 10,000,000,000. Friedberg, I want to get your take on this, especially in light of maybe something people don't understand, which is that the amount of time you get to actually exclusively monetize a drug because my understanding, you correct me if I'm wrong. You get a 20 year patent. It's from the date you file it, but then you're working towards getting this drug approved by the FDA. So by the time the FDA approves the drug, this 20 year patent window, how many years do you actually have supposedly to monetize that drug and then your wider thoughts on this FDA? David Friedberg (00:53:07): Yeah. I'm not going to answer that question right now because I do want to kind of push back on the point. I I'm generally pretty negative on a lot of the comments, Lena Khan's made and her positioning. And, obviously, as you guys know, we've talked about it on the show. But I read the FTC filing. It's in federal court. And if you read the filing let me just start company that Amgen's try to buy is called Horizon Therapeutics, which is a company that's doing about 4,000,000,000 in revenue a year, about a 1,000,000,000 to a 1,500,000,000 in EBITDA. So it's a it's a business that's got a portfolio of orphan drugs, meaning drugs that treat orphan conditions that aren't very big blockbusters in the in the pharmaceutical drug context. And so it's a it's a nice portfolio of cash generating drugs. Amgen, buying the business, gives them real revenue, real EBITDA, and helps bolster a portfolio that, you know, is aging. And I think that's a big part of the strategic driver for Amgen to make this massive Jason Calacanis (00:54:03): $28,000,000,000 David Friedberg (00:54:05): acquisition. The FTC's claim in the filing, which I actually read, and and I was like, this is actually a pretty good claim. is that the way that Amgen sets the prices for their pharmaceutical drugs is they go to the insurance companies, the payers, and the health systems, and they negotiate drug pricing. and they often do both multiproduct deals. So they'll say, hey, we'll give you access to this product at this price point, but we need you to pay this price point for this product. And over time, that drives price inflation. It drives costs up, and it also makes it difficult for new competitors to emerge because they tell the insurance company you have to pick our drug over other drugs in order to get this discounted price. And so it's a big part of their negotiating strategy that they do with insurance companies. So the FTC's claim is that by giving Amgen this large portfolio of drugs that they're buying from Verizon, it's gonna give them more negotiating leverage and the ability to do more of this drug blocking that they do with insurance companies and other payers in the drug system. So they're trying to prevent pharmaceutical drug price inflation, and they're trying to increase competition in their lawsuit. So I felt like it was a fairly kinda compelling case. I'm the lawyer on antitrust and monopolistic practices in the Sherman Act. But this was not sorry. Let me just say this was an early stage biotech risky deal that they're trying to block. It's actually a mature company with 4,000,000,000 in revenue and a 1,500,000,000 in EBITDA. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:55:27): I understand. And I read it too. But two comments. It is because the people that traffic in these talks are the same ones that fund these early stage biotech companies. And I talked to a bunch of them, and they're like, if these guys block this kind of deal, we're gonna get out of this game entirely. So just from the horse's mouth, what I'm telling you is you're gonna see call come over the early stage venture financing landscape because a lot of these guys that are crossover investors that own a lot of these public biotech stocks that also fund the private stocks will change their risk posture if they can't make money. That's just the nature of capitalism. The second thing is Lina Kahn did something really good about what you're talking about this week actually, which is she actually went after the PBMs. And if you really care about drug inflation and you follow the dollars, the real culprits around this are the pharmacy benefit managers and she actually launched a big investigation into them. But this is what speaks to the 2 different approaches. In seems that unfortunately for the FTC, every merger just gets contested for the sake of it being contested. Because I think that if you wanted to actually stop price inflation, there are totally different mechanisms because why didn't you just sue all the PBMs? Well, there's no merger to be done. But you can investigate, and then you could regulate. And I think that that's probably a more effective way. And the fact that she targeted the PPM says that somebody in there actually understands where the price inflation is coming from. Mhmm. But I don't think something like an Amgen horizon because what I think will happen is all the folks we'll then just basically say, well man, if if if these kinds of things can't get bought, then why am I funding these other younger things? David Friedberg (00:57:01): Yeah. But you know what? We're not yeah. We're just not seeing a lot of the younger stuff get get blocked. I I don't think we've seen any attempts at blocking speculative portfolio acquisitions or speculative company acquisitions. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:57:13): So I think these guys are getting caught up in the dollar number. You know? Jason Calacanis (00:57:16): Yeah. So I Chamath Palihapitiya (00:57:17): think the problem is they see 28,000,000,000. They're like, we need to stop it. Jason Calacanis (00:57:20): You know what's amazing? I'll just wrap on this because it's a it's a good discussion, but I think we gotta keep moving here. Is I took the PDF that you shared, and I put it into Chamath now. Oh, wow. And you don't need to upload the PDF anymore. You could just say summarize this and put the link, and it did it instantly. And it did. Really? David Sacks (00:57:39): Are you using the browsing plug in? Or Jason Calacanis (00:57:41): -- I just use chat to beep. No. It's not the browser plug in. I just did this is the -- David Friedberg (00:57:44): You gave a 3.5 model. Jason Calacanis (00:57:46): I just gave you a link, and it pulled the link. in the GPT 3.5 model. Does anyone know it could do that? That's new. David Sacks (00:57:53): They must add a browser in the background. Jason Calacanis (00:57:55): Yeah. We're just pulling a They did today, by the way. Woah. David Sacks (00:57:58): They did it today? David Friedberg (00:57:59): They did it today. Yeah. David Sacks (00:58:00): Well, remember last week, we said that they had to build browsing into the actual product like Bard. Right? Otherwise, it Jason Calacanis (00:58:05): could be QR. I gotta say -- -- today. Yeah. Open closed AI closed AI is on the top of their game. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:58:10): The app is available in the apps right now, right, as of today? Jason Calacanis (00:58:13): No. they they had a test app. I was on the test flight. No. No. No. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:58:16): They just launched the app today. Jason Calacanis (00:58:17): They did. Yeah. Oh, that's game over, man. If this thing is an app form, that's gonna 10x the number of users, and it's gonna 10x the amount of usage. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:58:23): By the way, it's the same David Friedberg (00:58:24): thing for Bard. We should compare the 2, but Bard -- Amazing. Jason Calacanis (00:58:27): -- David Friedberg (00:58:27): pretty good as well. Yeah. Jason Calacanis (00:58:29): Yeah. Well, I'm Chamath Palihapitiya (00:58:29): breaking the world. Jason Calacanis (00:58:30): -- Chamath Palihapitiya (00:58:30): hard to actually compare its summary with Chamath GPT summary? Jason Calacanis (00:58:34): Or is it just a deal? Tell us which one's better. Alright. This is some interesting news here. You know, we speaking of platform shifts -- David Sacks (00:58:41): Do I have to get my view on the Lena Con thing? Jason Calacanis (00:58:44): Oh, right. Well, yes. But first start with that I I didn't wanna this was getting Chamath Palihapitiya (00:58:49): a little it was getting Jason Calacanis (00:58:50): a little personal here, David, and I didn't I didn't wanna trigger you. I know you've been struggling with the gout. because of your lifestyle choices, the alcohol, the the foie gras, everything. But no. No. You've lost a lot of weight to give you a lot of credit. Tell us, what do you think about the bundling we're seeing here? because it does seem Microsoft asked with the operating system. David Sacks (00:59:07): Yeah. It's very similar. Jason Calacanis (00:59:07): And what David Sacks (00:59:08): I said in the context of tech is that we should focus on the anti competitive tactic and stop those rather than blocking all mergers. And I think the same thing is happening on the pharma space. If bundling is the problem, focus on bundling. The problem when you just block m and a is that you deny early investors one of the biggest ways that they can make a positive outcome. Jason Calacanis (00:59:29): And what's the downstream effect of that? David Sacks (00:59:31): Yeah. Exactly. Look. It is hard enough to make money as either a former investor or as a VC. that there's only 2 good outcomes. Right? There's IPOs, there's m and a. Everything else basically goes everything else is good. It's a 0. It goes bankrupt. So if you take m and a off the table, you really suppress the already Chamath returns of of Venture Capital. Jason Calacanis (00:59:52): Yeah. Well said. Well said. David Sacks (00:59:54): And you're right. You mentioned earlier that we were willing to give Lena Con a chance. We thought that some of our ideas were really interesting because I think there are these huge tech companies that do need to be regulated. These big tech monopolies, basically, that you have the mobile operating system duopoly with Apple and Google. Yes. And you've got Chamath. You've got Microsoft. And there is a huge risk that those companies are preferring their own applications over downstream applications or using these bundling tactics. Jason Calacanis (01:00:21): Yes. David Sacks (01:00:22): If you don't put some limits around that, that creates, I think, an unhealthy tech ecosystem. Jason Calacanis (01:00:27): This is the insight, and I think it's exactly correct, Saks. for Lena Con, and she listens to the pod, Helena. You wanna go after tactics, not acquisitions. So if somebody buys something, and they lower prices and increase this consumer choice, that's great. If it encourages more people to invest more money into innovation, that's great. But if the tactics are, we're gonna bundle these drugs together to keep some number of them artificially high or reduced choice, or if we're gonna bundle features into the, you know, suite of products and we do anticompetitive stuff, you have to look at the tactics on the field. Are people cheating? And are they using the monopoly power to force you to use their App Store? just make Apple have a second app store. That's all we're asking you to do. There should be an app store on iOS that doesn't charge any fees or charges 1% fees, break the monopoly on the App Store. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:01:21): Saks is so right. Perfectly said. she actually did issue compulsory orders to the PBMs. So to your point, Saks, the FTC has been worried that what Friedberg said had is been happening But the real sort of middlemen manipulator in this market are the pharmacy benefit managers. And so this week, she actually issued compulsory orders to the PBMs and said turn over all your business records me, I'm gonna look into them. That makes a ton of sense. But then on the same hand, it's like you see merger and you're like, no. It can't happen. It just doesn't speak to a knowledge of the market. Jason Calacanis (01:01:53): We should have Lina on. With the hey, Lina. I know you listen to the pod. I've heard the back Chamath just come on the pod. She would be a good guess. Right? We would have a good conversation with her, I think. Yeah. 100%. Open invite. Nikki Helly's coming on the pod. David Friedberg (01:02:03): By the way, you have homework to do for the summit, which is to see if you can get Donald Trump to come on to the summit. Jason Calacanis (01:02:08): Okay. -- Love Jacob. Love all in. Goodbye. Okay? huge ratings. Okay. Not as good as the practice book clubs. Okay. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:02:19): Great. As you your mannerisms are unbelievable. How did you practice it? Jason Calacanis (01:02:23): did. I did a little bit Speaker 3 (01:02:24): only because I like to troll people and trigger them. I'm gonna really Jason Calacanis (01:02:27): dial in my Trump in the coming weeks. Alright. Here we go. Apple's long pated AR headset. That stands for augmented reality, which means VR. You can't see the real world. You're just in a in a virtual world. AR lets you put digital assets on the real world so you can see what's happening in the real world, but you can put graphics all around. That's expected to be revealed as early as June, the projected cost is gonna be around $3000 of wind shipping to the fall. This is a break from Apple's typical way of releasing products, which is to wait till it's perfect and to wait until all consumers can afford it. is a different approach. They're gonna give this out to developers early. And Tim Cook is supposedly pushing this. There was another group of people inside of Apple who did not want to release each month But there is some sort of external battery pack. It seems like a bit of a Franken product, Franken site kind of project here. that, you know, perhaps Steve Jobs wouldn't have wanted to release, but he needs to get it out, I think, because Oculus is making so much progress, the killer app. Supposedly is a FaceTime like live chat experience. That seems interesting. But they look like ski goggles. your thoughts, Shamalff, on this as the next compute platform if they can get it, you know, to work. Would you wear these Would they have to be Prada? What what what's the story? Chamath Palihapitiya (01:03:49): No. No. Does this seem like David Friedberg (01:03:50): a weird conversation? because none of us fucking know none of us have seen this product, and none of us have used it. Jason Calacanis (01:03:54): So, like -- -- the position Pomber Lucky, friend of the Bob Pomber Lucky says it's incredible. David Friedberg (01:03:58): So what? That's just like commenting on one guy's 5 letter five word tweet. Jason Calacanis (01:04:02): Let's just talk let's David Sacks (01:04:03): Palmer knows. I mean, Palmer invented Oculus. Jason Calacanis (01:04:05): Great. But what David Friedberg (01:04:06): are we talking about? We have nothing to say about that. Jason Calacanis (01:04:08): Well, no. We know about it. Okay. I'll form a really good question here. Do you believe this is gonna be a meaningful compute platform in the coming years because Apple is so good at product? David Friedberg (01:04:17): How do we know till we see it? We gotta see it. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:04:19): I think it's Facebook. Jason Calacanis (01:04:20): Of course, they're of course, they're good at product. David Friedberg (01:04:22): Let's let's see the product, though. Jason Calacanis (01:04:23): Like -- Alright. Fine. Sacks, what are your thoughts? David Sacks (01:04:25): I think it's a good thing that they're launching this like you said, it is a deviation for what they've normally done. They normally don't release a product unless they believe the entire world can use it. So their approach has been only to release mass mass market products and have a very small portfolio of those products. But when those products work, they're you know, billion user home runs. This obviously can't be at a $3000 price point and it also seems like it's a little bit of a early prototype where the batteries are like in a Fannie pack around your waist, and there's a ways to go around on this. But I I I give them credit for launching what is probably gonna be more of an early prototype so they could start iterating on it. I mean, the reality is the Apple watch, the first version kinda sucked and Jason Calacanis (01:05:06): Ugh. First five versions. David Sacks (01:05:08): Yeah. Now they're on one that's pretty good, I So look, I think this is a cool new platform. They get knocked on for not innovating enough. I think, good. Let them try something new. I think this will be good for Meta to have some competition. Jason Calacanis (01:05:20): Yeah. It's great. David Sacks (01:05:21): Having 2 major players in the race, maybe it actually speeds up the innovation. Maybe we get somewhere. Jason Calacanis (01:05:27): Chamath say about here? Chamath Palihapitiya (01:05:29): I mean, I I think they should have done something in cars. I I what what Jason Calacanis (01:05:35): should they do in cars? Well, if you were gonna talk about the car, what would it be? Tell me what you think would be the right approach. You you were gonna do the Facebook phone. That could have changed the entire destiny of Facebook. They should Chamath Palihapitiya (01:05:44): have bought Tesla when they could have had the chance for 4 or 5,000,000,000 could have bought it for 10,000,000,000, 20,000,000,000. It's Jason Calacanis (01:05:49): only when it got to 5060 that it got out of reach. What do you think the car should David Sacks (01:05:53): have bought it at a They Chamath Palihapitiya (01:05:55): could've bought a 100,000,000,000. Tim Cook famously wouldn't take the meeting. Elon said it. He wouldn't he wouldn't meet. Jason Calacanis (01:05:59): Lazar. David Sacks (01:06:01): Maybe they missed an opportunity there, but I do think the end game with the AR headset or glasses. Right? Yes. Where you get the screens and you get the Terminator mode and in con is that what is that? Jason Calacanis (01:06:12): These are just glasses that -- David Sacks (01:06:14): Oh, okay. You're acting like they were, like, fancy technology Jason Calacanis (01:06:16): or something. This this size glasses is what you're talking about. David Sacks (01:06:20): When you have, like, a little camera built in and and in conjunction with AI, then it gets really interesting. So that that's the end game here. Jason Calacanis (01:06:27): Give the audience an example of what this combination of AI plus AR could do. David Sacks (01:06:31): When you're walking around, it could layer on intelligence about the world. When you meet with somebody and I can remind you of their name and the last time you met with them and give you a summary of what you talked about, what action items there are, You Jason Calacanis (01:06:43): could be walking in the city and it could tell you it knows you like peeking Duck. It could show you, hey. There's a peeking Duck place over here. Some reviews have it. It just knows you and it's customized in the world. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:06:52): What about for people that do the same routine 99 percent of the time? How does it can help you then? Jason Calacanis (01:06:57): It could tell you your steps every day. It could tell you incoming messages so you don't have to take your Chamath Palihapitiya (01:07:02): phone out. Jason Calacanis (01:07:02): 3 $1000 on that? No. But you would spend people spend Plus Chamath Palihapitiya (01:07:06): your people spend 400 on your notifications on your wrist. Why do you want it on your eyes for Jason Calacanis (01:07:11): 3000? I would love this. David Sacks (01:07:12): maybe I just do, like, a lot of meetings or I'm at events where people are coming up to me, and I've met him, like, once a year before. Like, it would be really helpful to kind of have the terminate remote? Jason Calacanis (01:07:21): Let's be honest though, the terminate emerged for you to be able to be present with your family and friends but be playing chess with Peter Till on those glasses. That's your dream come true. You and Peter in AR playing chess all day long. Throw up the picture. Sachs beating Peter Thiel. Speaker 3 (01:07:39): I watched the clip from the earlier all in episodes when we discussed you beating Peter Thiel. What a great moment it was for you. Jason Calacanis (01:07:45): Alright. Listen. Let's wrap up with this Gallup survey. The number of Americans who say it's a good time to buy a house has never been lower. 21% say it's a good time to buy a house down 9% from the prior low of a year ago Friedberg to 2022, 50% or more consistently. I thought it was a good time to buy significantly significantly fewer expect local housing prices to increase in the year. Hey, Saks. Is this like a predictive of a bottom? And pure capitulation, and then that means maybe it is in fact a good time. How would you read this data? David Sacks (01:08:18): I don't see it as a bottom necessarily. The way I read the data is that the spike in interest rates have made it very unaffordable to buy a house right now. You've got -- Yep. Jason Calacanis (01:08:26): -- David Sacks (01:08:26): you know, the the mortgages are what, like, 7% interest rate or even slightly higher. So people just can't afford the same level of house that they did before. I mean, mortgages were at 3, three and a half percent, like a year and a half ago. Now I think what's kinda interesting is that even in the 19 eighties, the early 19 eighties, when interest rates were at, like, 15%, you still had 50% thought it was an okay time to buy a house or an attractive time to buy a house. So for the number to be this low, tells me that it's not just about interest rates. I think consumer confidence is also plummeting, and people are feeling more insecure. So I think it's just another economic indicator that things are looking really shaky right now. And I'll tell you one of the the knock on effects of this is gonna be that people can't move. Because in order to move, you have to sell your current house and then buy a new one. And you're not gonna wanna sell your current house when prices are going down. And then for the new one, you're gonna lose your 3% mortgage. You have to get a new one at 7%, So Jason Calacanis (01:09:31): you're David Sacks (01:09:31): not gonna be able to buy anything like the house Jason Calacanis (01:09:33): -- Freases the market. David Sacks (01:09:34): Freases the market. It freezes mobility. I think over the last few years, during COVID, you saw tremendous movement between states. I think that's gonna slow down a lot now because people just can't afford to trade houses. So as a result of that, I think discontent is gonna rise because I think one of the ways that you create a pressure valve is when people are unhappy in a state, they just move somewhere now they're not gonna be able to Jason Calacanis (01:09:57): do that. Well, you can also move to a better opportunity for you and your Chamath, whether that's schools, taxes, a job, lifestyle, yeah, you can you're getting you're gonna reduce joy in the country. And it also it screws with price discovery, doesn't it, Jamovi. If you if you don't have a fluid market here, then how does anybody know what their house is worth? And and this just, again, creates more, I think, of a frost. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:10:18): I think Friedberg has said this a couple times Friedberg, you can correct me if I'm wrong. But Like, the the home is, like, the disproportionate majority of most Americans wealth. Right? David Friedberg (01:10:28): Uh-huh. It's all Jason Calacanis (01:10:30): their wealth. All their wealth. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:10:31): Yeah. So, I mean, there's Jason Calacanis (01:10:34): that factoid. Yeah. And then what does that do for -- I was Chamath Palihapitiya (01:10:38): there -- -- paying attention Jason Calacanis (01:10:39): to savings or whatever. Yeah. It's okay. And you got incoming what's going on? They're bringing you your lunch? Chamath Palihapitiya (01:10:43): No. I was looking I was looking at -- Where Jason Calacanis (01:10:45): are you looking to be honest? -- Chamath Palihapitiya (01:10:46): mansion that's for sale. Jason Calacanis (01:10:50): It's like a $175,000,000, Chamath Palihapitiya (01:10:52): but they just got the price to 1.40. So I'm just taking a little gamble. Jason Calacanis (01:10:55): I mean, there There's David Sacks (01:10:56): gonna be a lot of in the market soon. I'm predicting a lot of distress. Actually, can we shift to the commercial side for a second? I just -- Sam Zell Chamath Palihapitiya (01:11:03): passed away. Yeah. Jason Calacanis (01:11:04): Sam Zell passed away? today? Oh, wow. David Sacks (01:11:07): Rest in peace. Yeah. Jason Calacanis (01:11:08): Rest in peace. Chicago. Yeah. Crazy -- David Sacks (01:11:12): But speaking of Jason Calacanis (01:11:12): -- -- bombastic interesting guy. David Sacks (01:11:14): Yeah. But speaking of the real estate market, so I wanna get an update on San Francisco CRE. I was talking to a broker the other day. Jason Calacanis (01:11:21): Mhmm. David Sacks (01:11:22): And So here here are the stats that they gave me. So it was a local broker that someone from Blackstone and their fans of the pod and just came up to me. We talking about what was happening in San Francisco. Jason Calacanis (01:11:32): Did you take a photo? David Sacks (01:11:33): Shout out shout out to them. Didn't take a didn't take a photo. But but in any event, they're they're fans of the pod, so we started talking about what's happening in San Francisco. real estate. So the s f office market is just a level set is 90,000,000 square feet. They said the vacancy rate is now Jason Calacanis (01:11:48): 35% David Sacks (01:11:49): So that's over 30,000,000 square feet vacant. And vacancy is still growing as leases end and companies shed space because some of that space that they're not using is not up for sublease. Everyone says, what about AI? Is AI gonna be the savior? The problem is that AI companies are only that's only about a million square feet of demand. So 1,000,000 out of Jason Calacanis (01:12:09): 30,000,000. David Sacks (01:12:10): That's gonna be absorbed by AI. And and then, you know, maybe that number grows over time over the next 5, 10 years as as we create some really big AI companies, but this is not gonna bail out San Francisco right now. The other thing is that, you know, VC's back startups are very demanding in terms of their tenant improvements, and landlords don't really have the capital right now to put that into the buildings. And startups just are not the kinda credit worthy tenants that landlords really want. So this is not gonna bail anybody out there. They said there are a ton of zombie office towers, especially in Soma. And all these office towers are eventually gonna be owned by the banks, which you're gonna have to liquidate them. And then we're gonna find out that these loans that they made are gonna have to be written off because the collateral that they thought was blue chip that was backing up those loans is not so blue chip anymore. So I think we've got not just a huge commercial real estate problem, but it's gonna be a big banking problem. As basically people stop pretending, you know, right now they're trying to restructure loans. It's called pretend and extend. you reduce the rate on the loan but add term to it. But that only works for so long. If this keeps going, if the market looking like this, I think you were gonna have a real problem, and and that will be a problem in the banking system. Now San Francisco is the worst of the worst, but they said that New York is similar And all these other big cities with empty office towers are directionally Jason Calacanis (01:13:30): sustained. -- New York right now for the site connections conference and It is packed. The city is packed. Getting anywhere. There's gridlock. You can't walk down the street. You gotta walk around people. Every restaurant it is dynamic. And then I talked to people about offices, and they said people are staying in their houses in their tiny little New York apartments. Instead of going three train stops to their office, They go to the office 1 or 2 days a week. Unless you're like JPMorgan or some other places that's they drop the boom. But There's a lot of people still working from home. The finance people have all gone back. Media people are starting to go back. So there there are 3 to 5 days here. and the city is booming. Contrast that has spent the last 2 weeks in San Francisco walking from Soma to the Embarcadero back. dead. Nobody in the city. It, like, literally a ghost town. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:14:21): It's a real shame. Jason Calacanis (01:14:22): It's a real real shame. And I I wonder if these this is the question I have for you, Saks. Can they cut a deal? Can they go to, like, month to month rand sublets? you know, loosey goosey, just give people any dollar amount to convince them to come back. Is there any dollar amount? because I'm looking for a space for the incubator, in San Mateo, I've been getting a ton of inbound, but their prices are still really high. And I'm like, how do I cut a deal here? Because shouldn't people be lowering the prices dramatically? Or are they all just pretending? Or or will I get a lower Rents David Sacks (01:14:55): are definitely coming down big time, especially for space that sort of commodity and not that desirable. But what's happening is, according to the people I talked to, is that the demand Jason Calacanis (01:15:04): -- Mhmm. -- the David Sacks (01:15:04): people who actually are looking for new space They only wanna be in the best areas, and they wanna be in the newest buildings that have the best amenities. And so that sort of commodity office tower where there's barely anybody ever there. Like, no one wants that. Mhmm. Jason Calacanis (01:15:18): So I David Sacks (01:15:18): think people would rather pay a higher rent. I mean, it the rent will still be much lower, probably half the price of what it used to be. But they'd rather pay a little bit more for that than get like a zombie office tower. Jason Calacanis (01:15:28): We can't talk about all this without talking about two cases tragically, a shop lifter, a criminal who was stealing from a drugstore in San Francisco, I got shot. And the video was released. I'm sure you've seen in Saks. And then here in New York, everybody's talking about this one instance of a marine. trying to subdue a violent homeless person with 2 other people. And it's on everybody's mind Sierra, and Brooke Jenkins is not prosecuting in San Francisco, the shooter. They look like you know, a a clean shoot as they would say in the police business and appropriate, and and it's tragic to say this. But the person did charge The security guard, the security guard did fear for their life and shot them, so Brooke Jenkins is not gonna pursue anything. But in New York City, they're be they're pursuing manslaughter for the person did seem a bit excessive from the video. It's hard to tell what the reality is in these situations. Any thoughts on it, David, these two cases in two cities tell 2 cities. David Sacks (01:16:31): Yeah. Look. I mean, the only time you can get a source d a excited about prosecuting someone is when they act in self defense or defense of others. I mean, this marine, I guess Daniel Penney is his name. He was acting in defense of others. The person who he stopped was someone with an extensive criminal record who had just recently engaged in a attempt at kidnapping, who had punched elderly people, had David Friedberg (01:16:58): dozens of David Sacks (01:16:59): arrests. In fact, people on Reddit were talking about how dangerous this person was. Apparently, a dozen years ago or so, he was seen as more of, like, a quirky, like Michael Jackson impersonator. Jason Calacanis (01:17:13): Street performer. David Sacks (01:17:14): Street performer. But something happened this is according to a Reddit post that I saw where something happened and there's some sort of psychological break. And then since then, he's had dozens dozens of of crimes, and they just keep letting him loose through this revolving door of a justice system we have. And now look, no one likes to see him basically dying. And, yes, too bad. It's horrible that that happened. Jason Calacanis (01:17:39): Tragic. David Sacks (01:17:39): I don't know though that if you're trying to stop someone. I don't know how easy it is to precisely control whether you use too much force or not. So I think Daniel Penney has a strong case that he was acting in self defense and defense of others. And Jason Calacanis (01:17:55): there were 2 other people, by the way, who were holding this person down. David Sacks (01:17:58): There were 3 of them restraining him. Jason Calacanis (01:17:59): And what universally New York has said to me of all different backgrounds was this is not a race issue. The other I think 1 or 2 of the other people were people of color was not a race issue, and they're trying to make it into a race issue in both these cases. And it's this is literally what happens. It just having been through this in New in the seventies eighties. When you do not -- Chamath Palihapitiya (01:18:19): Who's they? Who's they when you say trying to make a nervous decision? Jason Calacanis (01:18:22): -- a bunch of protests on the street both in San Francisco and New York, people protesting these as, you know, justice issues. The fact is if you do not if you allow lawlessness for too long a period time, you get a Bernie gets situation. And Bernie gets, people can look it up in the eighties. I was a kid when it happened. But they tried to mug somebody. He had a gun. He shot him. And, like, this is what happens. If you allow lawlessness for extended periods of time, It's just you're basically gambling -- Chamath Palihapitiya (01:18:52): And what happened to Bernie Getz. Jason Calacanis (01:18:54): He got -- David Sacks (01:18:54): Knock guilty. Jason Calacanis (01:18:54): -- the case he got not guilty, but I think he had an illegal gun, so he was guilty of that. The Bernie gets thing was really crazy because at the time, the climate in New York in this 1984 shooting. He there was a portion of people who, I don't wanna say they made him a hero, but they made it a c. This is what happens. If you allow us to be assaulted forever, we're gonna fight back at some point. was the vibe in New York when I was a child. That was fourteen, fifteen years old when this happened. He was charged with attempted murder assault. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:19:27): Jason, what was the name of that vigilante group that used to walk the street the something angels? Jason Calacanis (01:19:32): That was the Guardian angels. Guardian angels. So it was so bad in the eighties. And I actually almost signed up for the Guardian angels. I went to their headquarters because I was martial arts, and I thought I would check it out. And they had their office in house kitchen. I didn't wind up joining. But what they would do is they would just ride the subway. They would wear a certain type of hat and wear a guardian angel shirt. And all they did was they just ride the subways a red beret, and they would just ride the subways, And you felt like Chamath Palihapitiya (01:19:59): martial arts were you taking? Jason Calacanis (01:20:00): Take 1 do. I was in take 1 do. Yeah. This is before mixed martial arts, but They just rode the subways. And, honestly, I've been on the subways with them many times. You felt safe. And it wasn't vigilantes, They were garden angels. They used that term. And many times, they would do exactly what this marine did, which is try to subdue somebody who's committing crime. I was I had 2 distinct instances where people tried to mug me, you know, riding the subways in New York and the eighties. 2 distinct times. And one was a group of people and one was one person. Like, it it was pretty scary. Both times, I navigated it, but it was Yeah. Not pleasant in the eighties in New York. Can I David Sacks (01:20:38): say one more thing about this Daniel County door Neely case? So look. At the end of the day, this is gonna be litigated. I don't know all the details. They're gonna have to litigate whether Daniel Penney's use of force was was excessive or not. But but here's the thing is that the media has been falsely representing Jordan Neely by only posting ten year old photos of him and leaving out crucial information. This was a a press report. So, again, this is why I the whole Michael Jackson impersonator thing is that the media keeps retrained nearly as this innocent, harmless guy who is this, like, delightful Michael Jackson impersonator in truth, he hasn't done that in more than a decade because, again, he had some sort of mental break. And since then, he's been arrested over forty times including for a attempting to kidnap a seven year old child. And so the media is not portraying this case I think in an accurate way. And I think as a result of that, it leads to pressure on the DA to prosecute someone who has, I think, a strong self defense claim. Or, you know, maybe the DA just wants to do this anyway, and it gives the DA cover to Jason Calacanis (01:21:42): do this. Soros is I mean, I know that we have this back and forth Chamath Palihapitiya (01:21:46): with this. But why is CNN being inaccurate? Do you think sex? David Sacks (01:21:49): They're basically cooperating with Alvin Bragg's interpretation of the case, and they're trying to make the case against Penny look as damning as possible. Jason Calacanis (01:21:57): Yeah. Why don't they just take it straight down the middle? It's a tragedy. We have a screwed up situation here. We got a mental health crisis. and it's a tragedy for everybody involved. On the Bernie Get stuff, he served 8 of a 12 month sentence for the firearm charge, and he had a massive $43,000,000 civil judgment against him in 1996. Decade letter, it's just David Sacks (01:22:17): this this is a little different than the the gets thing because pulling out a gun and shooting somebody Jason Calacanis (01:22:22): Well, yeah. No. That's deadly intent. Yeah. David Sacks (01:22:24): Yeah. That's that's a good escalation here. Whereas, Penny He's he's a trained marine. Right? Jason Calacanis (01:22:29): He's trying to immobilize him. David Sacks (01:22:30): He has to believe that he he's just trying to subdue -- Yes. -- nearly. And so -- He's still trying -- -- using a choke hold to kill him, that's an unfortunate consequence of what happened, but he was trying to restrain the guy. As far as we know. Right? As far as we know. Jason Calacanis (01:22:45): Yeah. I mean, tragedy is all around. We gotta have law and order. I I we did. Like, I don't know why we still have the post office. Maybe we can make that, like, once a week and redo all of that space and allow every American who's suffering from mental illness to check-in to what used to be the post office, you know, maybe, like, once a week. And, obviously, you can give those people very gentle landing spot. I don't think we need postal service more than once or twice a week. and then let you know, let's reallocate some money towards mental health in this country where anybody who's sick who feels like they're violent or feels like they're suicidal can just go into a publicly provided facility and say, I'm a sick person. Please help me. This would solve a lot of problems in society We've got a mental health crisis. We should provide mental health services to all Americans. And it's an obviously easy thing for us to afford to do. David Sacks (01:23:32): And if we had done that, then this never woulda happened. Jason Calacanis (01:23:35): Exactly. I mean, literally, you have Saks who wants to balance the budget saying, hey. This is something worth spending on. We can all agree on this. David Sacks (01:23:41): Compared to the impact on society, I don't think it'd be a huge expense Jason Calacanis (01:23:44): We would save money. We'd save money because a city like San Francisco could become quite livable or New York if and then this you've god forbid these terrible school shootings. You know, if you avoid even one them. It's 30 people's lives or 10 people's lives. So it's -- So, Jake, yeah, we really want to David Sacks (01:23:59): convert post offices. What we need to do is stand up scaled shelters, and it doesn't need to be done on the most expensive land in a given city. Jason Calacanis (01:24:06): Do it outside of cities? See, why does this there is no expectation in Europe for, like, Paris or London to be affordable or Hong Kong to be affordable. There are affordable places, 30 minutes outside of those places where you could put these facilities. I just wanna ask one question to Saks. because I don't know, and I know Saks is a little bit deeper into this than I. What is George Soros's motivation for putting in these lawless insane DAAs. Like, I understand that he was able to buy them. They're low cost. There's not a lot of money in them. Okay. I understand that. That's table stakes. But what is his actual motivation for causing chaos in cities? David Sacks (01:24:42): Listen. We can't know exactly what his motivation is, but what he did is he went into cities where he doesn't live and flooded the zone with money to get his preferred candidate elected his DA. Now the reason he did that was to change to the law. and the way that he changed law was not through legislatures, the way you're supposed to operate, but rather by abusing prosecutorial discretion. So in other words, once he gets his Soros DA elected, they can change the law by deciding what to prosecute and what not to prosecute. Jason Calacanis (01:25:10): Right. And David Sacks (01:25:10): that's why there is so much lawlessness in these cities. Jason Calacanis (01:25:12): But the there's a better path you're saying. David Sacks (01:25:14): Yeah. Better this is not the only way that Soros has, I'd say, imposed his values on cities that he doesn't even live in. Jason Calacanis (01:25:24): Where does he live? David Sacks (01:25:25): I think he's a New York guy, but I'm not sure. But but he's gone far beyond that, obviously. And these elections. But also, he's done this across the world. Sorez has this thing called the Open Society Foundation, which sounds like spreading democracy and liberal values, but in fact, is fomenting regime change all over the world. And he's been sponsoring and funding evolutions all over the world. Now if you like some of the values he's spreading, then maybe you think that's a good thing. But I can tell you that the way this is perceived by all these countries all over the world is it creates tremendous dissension and conflict. And then they look at America, and they basically say, know, this American billionaire is coming into our country and he's funding regime change. And it makes America look bad. Now he's doing this, I think, with the cooperation of our state department in a lot of cases. And maybe the CIA, I don't know. But this is why America frankly has hated all over the world. As we go running around meddling in the in the internal affairs of all these countries. Jason Calacanis (01:26:26): -- too. Is this guy all there? Like, I that was the other thing I heard is that he's not all there and the people around him are doing these kind of things in his organizations. David Sacks (01:26:33): I something similar is that it's the idiot son, Alexander, who's really now pulling the strings Jason Calacanis (01:26:38): off of the the fortunate. Would you would you allow Sura to speak at a loan summit? Would you interview? Sure. Yeah. Let's have Soros or a son, and they could explain themselves. If they're so proud -- Well, David Sacks (01:26:46): really, there is an article that Alexander Soros has visited the White House, like, 2 dozen times during the Biden presidency. This is an extremely powerful and connected person. Jason Calacanis (01:26:54): I mean, I'm sure he listens to Pod. Yeah. Okay. We'll see you all next time, this is episode 129 of all in. We'll see you in episode 130. Bye bye. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:27:03): We love you. Bye bye. Jason Calacanis (01:27:06): We'll let your winners ride. Rainman, David Saffens. I'm going home. David Sacks (01:27:13): And it said open source it to the fans, and they've just gone crazy lately. Jason Calacanis (01:27:22): like, white hair winter's ride. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:27:26): Besty's our car. Go to thirteen steps. Jason Calacanis (01:27:29): That is my dog to give it. I was driveway. We should all just get a room and have one big huge order because they're always useless. It's like it's like sexual tension, but we just need to release them out. What? You're the bee What? You're a fee. What? Where did you get Mercies are back?