科技圈风向转变、TikTok 禁令之争、垂直 AI 崛起、佛州禁售实验室培育肉

Chamath Palihapitiya (00:00:00): Why do you always go Christopher walking whenever you do these out drills? Why do you do that? Jason Calacanis (00:00:04): Thanks for listening to the all in podcast. Wow. David Sacks, poignant points about regulatory captions, Friedberg, gloves, mock meets, not for me. Shamal, everyone loves a great dictator. See you next time. Oh, in podcast. Wow. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:00:31): Lovey, boys. It's so good. That David Sacks (00:00:33): is your better impression. David Friedberg (00:00:35): Good. Better. That's what I David Sacks (00:00:37): would say. David Friedberg (00:00:37): Everyone's got their super power. It's your super power. Jason Calacanis (00:00:40): Nasty nasty Jake have, but I'm Speaker 5 (00:00:42): gonna Don't Jason Calacanis (00:00:42): ruin it. David Sacks (00:00:42): Don't ruin it. Jason Calacanis (00:00:43): I'm coming on. I'm coming on. Speaker 5 (00:00:47): The leggard winner's ride. Rainman David Sanders. And I Jason Calacanis (00:00:51): said we Speaker 5 (00:00:55): open Hey, Freeburg. You Chamath Palihapitiya (00:00:58): wanna tell them about your new family members? David Friedberg (00:01:06): Oh my god. Jason Calacanis (00:01:07): Did David he get more dogs? Is he trying to date Fortnoy this again? Oh, miss Peaching. David Friedberg (00:01:12): So I'm, like, working all day Friday. I'm, like, wiped out. I've been in I I can't remember. Oh, yeah. I was in Santa Cruz. I made it all the way back up through the traffic. I get up to the house. I've been texting and calling all afternoon. No response. I'm like, what the is going on? Normally, she'll text me, like, just walk through the door, open the door to my car, every little thing. So for her to not be calling me back as something's up, I walk in the house. The kids are there. They're jumping up and down. Daddy, daddy, we got 2 new dogs. I'm like, what the fuck are you talking about? We didn't get 2 new dogs. What do you say? Mommy's got 2 new dogs. And then mommy took him Jason Calacanis (00:01:47): to the vet. She said, David Friedberg (00:01:48): I need a few minutes. I'm like, no way. And I had some friends coming over for dinner. They walk in the house. The kids are jumping up and down. 2 minutes later walks in the house. These two dogs that shit someone found in a parking lot in San Jose, and they couldn't find a home for these dogs. And they were like, the dogs don't have a home decided I'll take him into my home. And I'm like, you this is why you didn't call me. You didn't text me. I walked out the room. I'm like, it's over. It's been nice knowing you. The kids are screaming. Daddy, you can't get rid of the dogs. There are dogs now. These are the best dogs. So now we have 4 dogs. Jason Calacanis (00:02:20): And which was the vet bill? David Friedberg (00:02:21): And then I come down that night. Huge in the dining room, like multiple diarrhea plopped all over the floor. I walked downstairs. The whole house was smelling of poop. My house has become like, you know, those carnival trains that used to go from city to city back in the 19th century? If one of those trains, like, fell over and spilled open, that's basically what my house has become. It just smells like who and hay and there's clowns and children running around. And I live in Can Jason Calacanis (00:02:48): I ever tell you the the story of Chuck Norris, the Chihuahua? Chamath Palihapitiya (00:02:52): No. No. Jason Calacanis (00:02:53): No. So I'm going to a wedding. I'm in, like, Arizona. I'm driving, like, on one of these giant like Arizona streets and a chihuahua runs across this, like, 8 lane Boulevard, whatever. And I'm like, oh my god. And I'm like dodging around it, and it goes into the other side of traffic. And I see a car. And he just the dog Sacks, he misses the car. I'm like, oh, thank god. My wife is screaming her head off. The dog gets whacked by another car, and it goes rolling down the highway. I make a u-turn. I block it. The dog's knocked out on the side of the road. I run up to the dog. I pick it up. I'm like, oh, this dog's gonna die. You know, and I I'm getting the car. I said, let's just take it to, a vet or whatever. And I'm saying goodbye to the dog. The dog's, like, looking up at me. It's in bad shape. We go to a vet. I give it to the vet. We go to the wedding. My wife who's like about this big heart decides she's gonna stay with the dog. So I go to the wedding. I go to the, you know, opening night party. She's with she's at the 24 hour event. Sitting with this dog waiting for it to die in hospice. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:04:01): Oh my god. Jason Calacanis (00:04:03): The dog doesn't die. The dog survives. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:04:06): Sorry. Now Jason Calacanis (00:04:06): it's Monday. And I get the alert on my credit card. $12,000. Yeah. Yeah. 12 Yeah. $1000 on this dead dog. I'm like, the dog survives. I bring the dog back to the bay area, the dog's fine. I can't believe it. But, you know, it's got like a broken leg, all the stuff, but, you know, he's generally he's the dog's alive. I put him on social media. I'm like, anybody want Chuck Norris, a dog that cannot die. This is, like, the toughest chihuahua you ever seen. Some of these rich people, in San Francisco living on, like, a certain street, on Broadway or something like that. Turns out there, like, They're heirs to something famous. They live in, like, 3 states. They got a private jet, all this nonsense. They say, we'll take the dog. Their friends with a couple of our mutuals. So I'm like, this is great. I'm gonna get the $12 from them. David Friedberg (00:05:07): Because You're asking for they're more critics. Towards the top. Speaker 5 (00:05:10): It's good. Thank you. David Friedberg (00:05:11): Because I looked the corners a lot. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:05:12): They got a private jet. David Friedberg (00:05:13): I didn't get a private jet. Jason Calacanis (00:05:14): They got 3 houses. So they come down to pick up the dog with their driver and everything, and we're delivering the dog. And I tell Jade, hey. Can we let them know about the $12,000 bill maybe they'll pick it up. Or we could say it's Speaker 6 (00:05:28): like a Larry David moment. Jason Calacanis (00:05:30): And my wife is like, if you ring that up with them, I'm divorcing you. We have to pay the 12,000. So I pay the 1000, they proceed to then send us pictures of Chuck Norris on private jets, you know, for years to this day, Chuck Norris living this life, and I pay $12 to save this. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:05:48): Friedberg told me the story. I found it so hilarious. But I told him, you know, after we got Joker, when Jason, when you came to visit us in part to the academy, Joker had like jardiance. So he was just everywhere. And, you know, we got through it. And then 3 months ago, when you guys were at my house for poker, Sean made octopus and left some raw octopus in a garbage bag outside and Joker and Joker ate it. And he got such terrible poisoning. We had to take him to the, to the emergency animal hospital where he stayed for like a week. That was, by the way, 17 k. But ever since he came back, he's been completely incontinent. So I was telling people that Nat and I now just wake up half an hour early And what we do now from 6:30 to usually 6:45 is we're cleaning up some form of feces that he's left somewhere in the house. I'll have to go and find, where did he take a Let's go clean it up. And the worst one was he once pooped through one of the grates with his really bad poo, and I had to go and just fetch it all out. It was just disgusting. Jason Calacanis (00:06:56): Oh, right in the grass. Fantastic. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:06:57): Right in the grass. Jason Calacanis (00:06:58): Yeah. So there you have it, folks. Go adopt a pet. There's your ring endorsement for the 17th dollars in veterinary bills and cleaning up all day long and replacing carpets. Listen. We got a big docket today. I know it's a bit early in the year, but I am going to add a new category. We're proposing a new category. We'll love to your feedback on it for the 2024 besties. Most based CEO. Lots of options to choose from right now, which we'll get into in a minute, but they're seems to be a bit of a vibe shift happening intact during peak, syrup, and cancel culture, 2019 to 2021. Era seemed like CEOs were a little vigilant about what they would say, you know, the Tim Sacks, the Sundars, but something has clearly changed. Tech CEOs have gotten radically candid and fired their comms group. Two great examples this week that we were talking about. Jason Wong, the CEO of Nvidia had this awesome clip in speaking at Stanford's Graduate School of Business. Speaker 7 (00:07:58): I think one of my great advantages is that I have very low expectations. And I mean that most of the Stanford graduates have very high expectations. People with very high expectations have very low resilience. And, unfortunately, resilience matters in Sacks. I don't know how to teach it to you except for, I hope suffering happens to you. To this day, I used the word the phrase pain and suffering inside our company great glee. Boy, this is gonna cause a lot of pain and suffering. And I mean that in a happy way because you wanna train, you wanna refine the character of your company. You want greatness out of and greatness is not intelligence as greatness comes from character and character is informed out of smart people. It's formed out of people who suffered. Jason Calacanis (00:08:37): And then next up, Palantir CEO, Alex Karp, called out the coked up short sellers on CNN. Speaker 8 (00:08:45): I love burning the short sellers. Like almost nothing makes a human happier than taking the lines of cocaine and, away from these short sellers who, like, are going short on a truly great American company, not just ours, but just love pulling down great American companies so that they can pay for their coke. And I the best thing that could happen to them is we will provide we will lead their coke dealers to their homes after they can't pay their bills. Speaker 5 (00:09:12): That that's a great surely all Jason Calacanis (00:09:14): short sellers. Speaker 8 (00:09:15): Yeah. Well, you know, go ahead. Do your thing. We'll do our thing. Speaker 6 (00:09:19): There you have it, folks. Jason Calacanis (00:09:20): Of course. We we, had Elon's great Good for you at, some New York Times conference, always candid. And even Zuckerberg, he's been getting a little base He did a whole video about how the Apple Vision Pro was when compared to Meta's Quest too. He he's got a little frisky on the social media. Friedberg is the 5 shift real. David Friedberg (00:09:48): It seems like a lot of people are less worried about cancel culture as they were 3 years ago. So I don't know if it's just in Silicon Valley, broadly in media, and broadly culturally, there seems to be a move away from cancel culture mentality and people are speaking their mind more, which is, yeah, I think, obviously, positive and refreshing. Jason Calacanis (00:10:12): Sacks, you're a big fan of, freedom of speech. Your thoughts on this vibe shift Is is this related to cancel culture kind of ending in journalists just not being able to cancel people because they misspoke or were a little spicy in their Sacks? David Sacks (00:10:28): Well, I like the fact that these CEOs are all being colorful in their remarks and candid and interesting, and that that's always a good thing. In in each of these cases, I kinda like what they had to say, but I think that you might or we collectively might be reading a little bit too much into this. I mean, at the end of the day, what Sacks cows are they really challenging? What real dangerous truths are they speaking? What real risks are they taking? I just don't put any of the things that they're saying or doing in the same category say what Elon has been doing in terms of taking on the powers that be in terms of rolling back censorship and promoting free speech on on Sacks. I mean, Elon, I think, has taken some real risk in doing that, and you see that he's paying the price with all these government investigations and the voiding of his compensation package, that I think is just in a slightly different category of true risk taking by speaking truth to power or allowing the masses to speak truth to power compared to what these other guys are doing. And I'm not disparaging any of them, but, you know, look at them one by one. I mean, Alex Park made a colorful joke at the expense of short traders. I agree but it's not really a risky remark. Jason Wang is giving some tough love to stand for students. He's giving them, I think, a good lesson of stopping so entitled. Go get some real life experience. Be resilient. Okay. Great message. I saw the Zuckerberg clip liked it as well. He's basically speaking from a place of passion about his own product and comparing it to Apple. Okay. Great. That's what he's supposed to do. I don't see any of those CEOs take, again, if you wanna compare it to Elon, taking a really dangerous political stance. In fact, remember when Seconderer got dragged to Capitol Hill and gave that testimony, and they demanded that he give that apology. He did it. I mean, Jason Calacanis (00:12:29): the gen you collected? Chamath Palihapitiya (00:12:30): I thought that word was banned on this pud. Jason Calacanis (00:12:32): No. It went applied to me. Speaker 5 (00:12:33): Yeah. Okay. Got it. Speaker 6 (00:12:35): Yeah. Anybody else could be genuine, but I mean, I Jason Calacanis (00:12:38): I thought he was just showing some humanity, which is, you know, kind of paradoxical. David Sacks (00:12:43): Look, I I get it in that moment, but I'm just saying that like, if you wanna put it in the same category as Elon, the thing to do would have been to punch back. And I think in that moment, it was who it was Josh Hawley. The thing to do would have been to say, no. It's it's you who are exploiting the misery and suffering of all these people by trying to score political points. So, anyway I don't David Friedberg (00:13:02): want it supervised. Yeah. David Sacks (00:13:04): Yeah. That would have been super based. So all I'm saying is that it's one thing for these founders and CEOs to be colorful and candid or whatever. That's all great, but have they really taken political courage? Jason Calacanis (00:13:18): Your thoughts, Shamoff, on based CEOs. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:13:21): Well, I think, Jason, the the takeaway, I think you're almost on the right point, but not quite. I don't think this is based or not based. I think the point is everybody is exhausted with the multiple layers of word scrambled gymnastics that people have had to play, and they're like enough's enough. I think the more interesting way to look at this is that there was a few year period where a lot of companies were under a lot of pressure. And folks felt that they couldn't say what was on their mind to really fix the problems that they saw. Now you have, you know, both of the companies and the CEOs you pointed out are firing on all cylinders as far as anybody can tell from the outside. And there's a certain level of political capital that comes with that. And they're choosing to spend it. And I think that's the interesting takeaway, which is as these companies become successful again, as tech reemerges again from this multiyear malaise, are folks going to find their voice or not. And I think that's the big point, which is that it seems at least that we can see this next generation of winning companies seems to have CEOs that will take a different path. They'll be maybe closer to an Elon than closer to a politician. Jason Calacanis (00:14:42): Yeah. It's I loved Wong's comments just about his secret weapon, and he has incredibly low expectations. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:14:49): If you had said had said that comment a few years ago, the whole pain and suffering thing would somebody would have said I felt triggered. It touched my childhood trauma. You know, I had X, Y, and Z happened to me. And it's not that those people don't have valid claims, but they would have errored it in a way that tried to get him canceled effectively. Jason Calacanis (00:15:09): Yeah. He would be out of touch. He would be talking down to people to be a billionaire telling people, like, to suck it up. What is Chamath Palihapitiya (00:15:16): he doing? In in fairness, I bet you there are people that felt that way even today when listening to a script. The thing that is different though was the rest of us who also have had pain and suffering in our lives. Retweeted it and was just like, this is a 100% awesome. Jason Calacanis (00:15:30): Yeah. I mean, finally, candid advice Yeah. Elon used to always say happiness equals. This was his happiness formula. Happiness equals Expectation reality minus expectations. And so if your expectations are really high and reality doesn't hit it, you're gonna sad. And if you keep your expectations low and realities, you know, okay or good, yeah, you you could be happy in life. But, Friedberg, I just love of those quotes, maybe some thoughts about suffering and how hard it is. You're back in the CEO seat. How's that been going for you? Generally speaking, how hard is it compared to being a capital allocator? I'm curious. I was gonna talk to you about that offline anyway. David Friedberg (00:16:15): I probably have an unhealthy affinity for suffering. I think that if you come from Certain backgrounds, you're sort of trained that that's the place that you're Unconscious tends to wanna be. And I think that that also some people call it chips on shoulders, Some people call it motivation. I mean, look at your friend, Elon, how much suffering he puts his himself through, I think it's a requisite to to greatness is you have to really find ways to sacrifice. Now if I've said this a lot, There's a reason a lot of people that have had success in their career don't end up being great entrepreneurs because as soon as you're faced with failure for the first time, it doesn't pattern match to what's happened to you historically. I go to a good school. I get good grades. I go to Stanford. I get a degree. Everything about every step you do, you're told, if you do x, you will get y. And then you do x and you get y and you repeat. And at some point, you're considered successful in your education, in your career, and so on. If you then decide that entrepreneurship is the path for you, you realize that entrepreneurship is that there is no if x then y. There is if x, maybe one maybe z, maybe a 100 other things that'll smack you in the face. And that experience is shockingly different for people that have historically followed a path of success. Of what's defined as success culturally, socially. And I think that that's really what he's speaking to. If you've grown up where all of your expectations have not been met or many of the expectations have not been met, you realize that persistence, grit, perseverance, relentlessness, these are the necessary traits to be successful in entrepreneurship. And I think that I find myself much happier in that condition than in any other condition, and it's why I'm I'm actually very happy in the work I'm doing right now. Jason Calacanis (00:18:13): Yeah. I I think it resonates a lot with me and all the entrepreneurs that I Sacks, they all have that chip. And you gotta be careful not to get caught up in the trappings and really focus on solving problems. If you think about what a CEO does all day, you hire the smartest team, you know. You give them the biggest challenges as much autonomy as you can, and then they return back to you with all the problems. The smartest people you could find to join your team can't fix. So then your life becomes essentially, you know, what's left over that is the most brutal to solve. And, you know, there's only a certain percentage of people who can do that day in and day out. Just relentlessly be faced. David Friedberg (00:18:54): Reconcile how do you reconcile that statement, Jason, with the proposition that people should become entrepreneurs generally. I think that this really res this really challenges me. Whenever people say I'm thinking that starting a company. My first response is, no, don't. Like, you have to be told over and over again to not start a company to test if they actually have the resilience and grit necessary just to take the first step of starting the company. I have caution that that everyone should be encouraged to start a company and entrepreneurism is a is a career choice. I think is a false notion. I think that most people are not psychologically equipped for being successful in entrepreneurship. Jason Calacanis (00:19:33): Yeah. You're a 100%. Right? And I've gotten in my later years as we run, like, found university in these programs when people are applying and we only accept 10% into the programs and then only invest in 10% of those. So net net, like, less than 1% get funded. You know, I'll ask them. They're like, oh, can you give us money so I can get a cofounder. And I'm like, you know what? You failed the first test of being an entrepreneur. You know, the first test of being an entrepreneur Can you convince 2 or 3 people to go on this crazy journey with you because it's important and without money? And, you know, people expect, oh, you're gonna just give them the money because they have an interesting idea. And then I asked them, what's your skill? What do you do at the start up? Do you sell the product? Do you build the product? And a lot of people do not have the wherewithal to add a skill that the world needs being a developer, a design or a salesperson, whatever it is. Right? They don't have any skill. And then they also have no ability to convince somebody else with skills to start a company. If you if you can't have marketable important skills yourself that you taught yourself on your own, through sheer force of motivation and well and opening up YouTube, which really is not hard people. Like, anybody can learn to code, to be a UX designer, to be a salesperson, all this is on some online course, some book, some YouTube David, some podcast. So just learn some marketable skills that a startup needs. And if you can't do that, he shouldn't be a founder. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:21:00): I think the point is that everybody's capable of being a founder, and anybody can and should start a company. It's just that very few can finish a company. And that is the resilience part where There's just so many ups and downs, and you have to be able to roll and survive, and you have to just problem solve constantly. And, yeah, there are very few people that are caught up for it. David Friedberg (00:21:23): You have to be comfortable with failure. You have to be comfortable with expectations not being met. That's the important point that he's making. I can't tell you how important it was early in my career. I had several cold calling jobs where I called called college kids, I called called alumni, I called called CEOs. I had 3 different cold calling jobs and getting rejection after rejection, failing in my life. I didn't get into any schools except for Berkeley. Because Berkeley didn't take teacher recommendations to be teachers. I David not do well in school. And then playing poker taught me a lot because playing poker, you you lose hands. You lose hands. You lose hands. You lose hands. You lose hands, you have to just make sure that you're making the right decisions. And over time, the money will come to you. The positive EV will be there. But failure and persisting through failure, I think, was one of the most important traits I had to develop before I was even ready to start a company because all that's happening every day is failure. Jason Calacanis (00:22:12): When I had my first magazine, I didn't understand. I hadn't just printed photo copies up, and I had, like, 2000 copies of this magazine, Silicon Valley reporter. And I didn't know how to get them in people's hands. So I just got a luggage cart. Like a literal luggage cart. I put them in the luggage cart, and I walked around Lower Manhattan, and I just dropped them off at internet companies, and I dropped them off cafe is, and then I went to all the village voice boxes, and I just slotted them in in between the village voice. And miraculously, people found it, and then they would subscribe. And, you know, whatever it took was the approach. Alright, everybody. Let's get to our second topic, the mini topic, but did OpenAI just get caught with their hand in the cookie jar the training data cookie jar. OpenAI CTO was interviewed by the Wall Street Journal this week. During the interview, you probably saw this. If you're on X, it trended. She was asked, what data did OpenEI use to train Sora? If you don't know what Sora is, we talked about it here. It's that incredible you know, video, create, you know, type in a text prompt, get a video back model, and, let's watch this clip and then discuss it. What data was used to train Sora? Speaker 9 (00:23:22): We used publicly available data and licensed data. Jason Calacanis (00:23:27): So videos on YouTube? Speaker 9 (00:23:32): I'm actually not sure about that. Jason Calacanis (00:23:34): Okay. Videos from Facebook, Instagram. Speaker 9 (00:23:39): You know, if they were publicly available, available, yeah, publicly available to use. There might be the data, but, I'm I'm not sure. I'm not confident about it. Jason Calacanis (00:23:53): Let me start with you, Chima. What are your thoughts here? And just her not being super prepared there to answer question, or is this a cookie jar situation? What do you think? Chamath Palihapitiya (00:24:03): I mean, you gotta think the CTO of an organization that whose job it is to build models based on training data knows where the training data is from. David Sacks (00:24:13): My interpretation of that answer is that she is hesitating because she does wanna make a statement against interest. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:24:20): Right? I wanna show you guys something. I had a friend of mine Somebody we all know who's deep in the heart of this AI stuff. He was he came to my office and he showed me this one really interesting thing, which is when you launch chat GPT and if you go into the microphone, But you say nothing, so just wait a few seconds. Turn on the microphone. Wait a few seconds and turn it off. I'll just do it right now just to show you. It comes back and it says, thank you for watching. Which is typically what it shows you when you auto watch a bunch of YouTube videos. Now why is that interesting? Well, If you say nothing, right, the model has clearly then is guessing that whenever you see, you hear silence, that probabilistically, the next best thing to translate that into is thank you for watching, which would mean that the training happened on a bunch of content where Thank you for watching was the next obvious thing so that when there's silence and the most obvious place where that happens is in YouTube. I don't know. I thought that was an interesting little thing that he pointed out to me. I don't know if anybody's actually explored this, but if it is true and Google decides they have an issue with it, that's not good for these folks. Jason Calacanis (00:25:35): Frederick, your thoughts. David Friedberg (00:25:36): I I think it's fine. I I don't know why this is a controversial thing. Jason Calacanis (00:25:41): Well, I mean, it's obvious she's kind of lying on camera. She definitely knows where the training data came from, and it feels like c c y a. I mean, I David Friedberg (00:25:48): I would YouTube is public. So what's wrong with watching YouTube to teach a model stuff? Jason Calacanis (00:25:55): Well, you'd have to get a license to make a derivative work. As we've seen, OpenAI has been doing that. They're in a lawsuit right now at the New York Times, and they failed to negotiate their license. So the David Friedberg (00:26:05): assumption is they're making a derivative work. Jason Calacanis (00:26:09): They've licensed other people's data. Right? David Friedberg (00:26:12): Yeah. To get access to it that's not publicly available, you can go to a YouTube downloader and download all this data. You know what's crazy? I heard from someone at Google that under the terms of service, Google's not allowed to train on YouTube data. Remember my I made this point a couple weeks ago about how important YouTube data is? I think there'd be this really ironic handicap that Google's done to itself where anyone else can access and download and watch YouTube data to train models but Google cannot. Speaker 5 (00:26:38): I don't David Friedberg (00:26:38): know if there's any clarity on that, but it's a pretty crazy fact pattern. But, yeah, YouTube's on the internet, and I feel like anything on the open internet should be watchable by these models. I don't consider training models to be generation of derivative work. That's my decision. Jason Calacanis (00:26:51): And that's a position that OpenAI has taken the other side of that position because they're going around licensing data. Sacks, any other thoughts here about this cuff level? David Sacks (00:27:00): Well, look, I kind of agree with both you and Friedberg. In terms of the parts that I agree with Friedberg, I think that this issue is kind of more of the same of what we've been talking about for a while, which is clearly OpenAI trained its model on publicly available data that was available on the on the internet. I agree with 3 Burke that, fair use doctor should be applied to that. I know that you have a different point of view on that, Jake. I don't know if we need to rehash that. I I understand that you don't think fair use should apply. In any event, I think it's pretty clear that OpenAI train story using you know, available data on the internet, and that probably included YouTube. The part where I agree with you, Jay Cal, is that I don't know if I would say that she's lying per se, but I think she's probably concerned that if she comes right out and and answers the question as directly as she could, that it could be a problem for them and all these lawsuits that they're now facing. You know, again, I think that I would take the side in those lawsuits that fair use should be allowed, but I think that probably she is being careful here because they are facing so many lawsuits about this training data. Jason Calacanis (00:28:09): It's gonna be pretty clear, Shamoff, I think, what the courts will decide here, which is whose opportunity is it, to make a Sora in the world. If Disney owns a massive collection of IP and somebody should be able to use that IP to make derivative Sacks, Should it be Sora, or should it be Disney itself? And so I think the journalists know full well what they're doing. And now the journalists have their hooks into this for a very real reason. The journalists are also content creators. So now we're gonna have this You know, two sides forming journalists. I just Chamath Palihapitiya (00:28:42): worry that these folks are not technical enough to make this decision. And, you know, when it goes into a court, How is a judge really gonna understand the nuances of this to make a to make a call on Jason Calacanis (00:28:53): this? For the jury. It's gonna be a big education process. Yeah. Yeah. Or the jury. Yeah. Speaking of AI, vertical AI startups are starting to make some noise. We all know about large language models, talked about them here. If you listen to this program, you know, about OpenAI, Google's Gemini, Gemini previously known as Bard, anthropic, Claude, all this stuff. Their general purpose. They've been trained on the open internet as we were just discussing so they can answer questions about almost anything and Sometimes it's correct. Sometimes they're incorrect, but it's showing promise. There is another school of thought here that's emerging in startups, Vertical AI, these companies are kind of taking a job title, a role in society, and they are building vertical apps. Harvey is AI for lawyers, a bridge is doing an AI notetaker for doctors Sacks some hours a day according to them. A tax GPT is an AI tax assistant. NCRS AI for customer support. That's Brent Taylor's new startup. This week, a startup called Cognition debuted a tool called David, They're calling it an AI software engineer. The demos went viral on X. You've probably seen them all over the place Jason in the news, if you watch it, You can see David fixing bugs in real time fine tuning an AI model, building Sacks, end to end, and people are speculating David was built on a GPT 4 from OpenAI. That's not confirmed. But according to the CEO, David was built by tweaking reasoning and long term planning into an existing LLM, here's how it ranks against other major models on coding benchmarks. They're building all these benchmarks. To test each language model. And as you can see, it's, according to this chart and according to their data, doing much better than just a generic language model. Kinda makes sense. Jamaz, did you see these demos this week? I think I saw you on the group chat talking about it. And what was your take on these role based vertical startups? Chamath Palihapitiya (00:30:50): Oh, I think this is so powerful. I mean, It's incredible because we're measuring this progress in, like, what week over week. You know? Jason Calacanis (00:30:59): Yeah. I Chamath Palihapitiya (00:31:01): think the point that you should take away is that the most of these varied difficult in impenetrable job types for the average person if the if you said to them, hey. Become a developer. That's like a complicated journey. Right? It's just gonna be now like a command line interface where you just kind of describe in English what you want to do and all of this stuff will just happen behind the scenes and it'll be totally automated. So that'll grow the number of people that can use these tools. At the same time, it'll make the developers, I think, even more valued because you're gonna need people in the guts of these models and in the code that it generates because it's not always gonna work perfectly. There's always gonna be some kind of hallucination. Some stuff is not gonna compile. Now the demos that they did though were incredible. They were able to find errors. They were able to remediate errors and code. As I mean, I just I I think it's really, really special. Jason Calacanis (00:32:02): Sacks, you've been on co pilots for the past year talking about that. This is slightly different. We're moving from Hey, here's a copilot, somebody helping a developer to, hey, here's a developer working, and now they have a supervisor. So what do you think of these sort of role based agents and how quickly we went from year 1 co piloting to Okay. Now they're the pilot, and we're sitting on the co pilot seat watching them fly to plane. David Sacks (00:32:28): Yeah. Well, look, first of all, everyone's working on autonomous coating. Or working towards that. This is like one of the core most obvious use cases of LLMs because code is text And it can also be run through a compiler to debug it. So you can also get to, in theory, you can get to high levels of accuracy yet, although in the example that you gave Jason, this new product was only at 13%. So this is a long way to go, but the potential is clearly there. So a lot of companies are working on some variation of this idea. David is, I guess you could call it Jason agent first approach. And I think that's very cool for generating new software projects, but where I think this gets much trickier and is much more difficult, is when you're working in existing code Jason. And just to talk to my own book for a second, we're an investor in a company called Source Graph. They have a product called Cody. And their whole approach is context first as opposed to agent first. It's all about getting the co pilot to work inside of existing co basis. So different companies are coming at this from different approaches. GitHub Copilot, I think, is kind of more like Cody, where it's all about making an existing code base. More useful, whereas David again is starting with, I think, net new code Jason, but that's gonna demo really well. And so that's what you're seeing. It's like these really cool demos. In any event, the larger picture here is that we are gonna get better and better at coding autonomously, I guess you could say. And I don't know if it gets ever gets to a 100% where you don't need coders anymore, but it's gonna make coders much more productive over time. You're gonna get this huge multiplier effect on the ability to write code, and that's really exciting for a bunch of obvious reasons. Jason Calacanis (00:34:16): Fairburn, we've been tracking this evolution from you know, Gmail, guess the next word, guess the next phrase, guess the next sentence, to co pilots. Now we have these role based agent based, solutions that startups are pursuing. What's next if we follow this thread What would the next evolution here be? David Friedberg (00:34:38): Well, the big push has been for this notion of AGI to replace a human. And I think what we're seeing is software that replaces a specific human doing a specific thing. Like being a lawyer, being an accountant, being an art director. If you think about the internet, when the internet which was like networking software and the capabilities that arose from the connection of all these computers during the internet era. The innovation was everyone tried to create a business model which was how do you take an existing vertical business and put it on the internet? I think what we're seeing in this era is everyone's taking a vertical human and creating a vertical version of a human, in the AI era. And so, I think like the the success will probably accrue to one company that replaces 1 set of core human services, like being a lawyer, being an accountant, you know, being an artist Speaker 5 (00:35:39): in whatever way and that that ends up being the specific vertical tool that David Friedberg (00:35:40): people will use to automate and scale up their ability to do that task in an automated way because I think that there's like a great deal of capability that emerges in the fine tuning and the unique data that certain people may have to make that one tool better than the rest. And, therefore, everyone will end up using this one lawyer service or this one accounting service or what have you. So I definitely think that's kind of what we're seeing. Jason Calacanis (00:36:10): Yeah. I think it's pretty obvious where this is going. You got co pilots assisting a developer or a lawyer. Then the next war writer Then they got the next phase. Okay. You've got a peer. So you're doing peer programming or somebody's kinda working alongside you. You're checking their work. Maybe they're even checking your work seeing if you have bugs where this is going to be next year is there's going to be a conductor. There's going to be somebody who has as a role or a piece of software has a role where you say, hey. You're a CEO of a company. You're a founder, a product manager. Here's your lawyer. Here's your accountant. Here's your developers. Here's your designer. And now you will coordinate those 5 people. Now imagine how that changes start ups when you as an individual have a conductor working with you and says, you know what? I don't know if I agree with this legal advice that's coming in in relation to the tax advice and maybe we should not even add this feature to the program. Let's talk to the product manager, the agent product manager about taking that feature out so we don't have these downstream legal issues. We don't even have to file taxes in this, you know, area. It's gonna get really interesting next year when they have a conductor. David Friedberg (00:37:15): The other way it may go, Jason, is you have a lawyer that has 50 associates working for them through the AI. So you don't replace the lawyer. You don't replace the software engineer the software engineer levels up. And now the software engineer has 50 engineers available, 50 agents running, doing tasks for them, Jason Calacanis (00:37:32): because you David Friedberg (00:37:33): do still you do still need humans with domain expertise and creativity to think through architecture, to think through process, and to make sure that the AI agents are doing their job. So I think what it creates is extraordinary leverage for people and organizations, which is why generally economic productivity goes up, people don't lose jobs. They level up. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:37:52): In this phase, the the OpEx of companies will probably be cut in half. Mhmm. At the limit, I think Jason is actually Absolutely right. I think you find that there'll be millions of companies with one person and then a whole layer of software and conductors and agents and bots. That's the future. Yeah. So you won't have these engineering people. That person should be running their own company. And so you'll just have 1,000,000 and 1,000,000,000 and 1,000,000,000, and maybe billions of companies. And I think that that's really exciting. Not all of them will work. Many of them will fail, and a few of them will be ginormous. And it'll be up to the person who can navigate and be a conductor, as you David. You know? Jason Calacanis (00:38:34): This solo entrepreneur movement of the last couple of years, there were all these kind of like independent hackers building one item like Phil Caplan did with, distrokid. He just had, like, 2 or 3 people working on that. Got very big. You know, I was telling you guys about that slopes app I showed you. I I I've reached out to the founder of that. I was like, hey. Tell me about the business. Enough of a business to support one person or two people. Like, there will be a lot of these apps or services, one conductor, And, yeah, it makes about a half 1,000,000 a year, 3,000,000 a year, whatever. It's enough to support 1, 2, 3 people working on it. But previously, you know, you'd be going to the venture community, like, oh, what, what did it take a modern app company, Sacks, to kinda build an Android and, an iOS app just, you know, 5, 10 years ago, if we were funding 1 10 years ago, what would the footprint look like for, you know, a consumer app company? David Sacks (00:39:25): If you're gonna go all the way back to, like, the late nineties during the dotcom era, I remember that with PayPal, just to launch Really, what was an MVP, we had, let's say, a dozen developers, and it was pretty expensive. And we had to set up our own colo. There was all this infrastructure. That all got distracted away with AWS. Then you moved to the mobile era, and the app stores provide There's just a lot more developer tools. There's a lot more APIs. Yeah. It was as well as distribution, but it's just it's far easier to code these Sacks. So definitely things have gotten easier and easier. That's the trend if that's the point you're trying to make. It's certainly never been easier to get started in creating something if you're a solo developer. Yeah. That being said, I think that depending on what you're trying to do, it's still usually the case that if you're trying to do something interesting and profound, you're gonna need a small team of developers and a couple million bucks to get you started. Jason Calacanis (00:40:24): Yeah. It used to be rule of thumb, I think. Twelve people for an app company. You got 2 or 3 working on each platform, couple designers, couple of testing, and, design, UX, you know, you get to 10, twelve people to to run a modern one. Alright, everybody. Next issue, the house just asked a bill that would either ban TikTok or forced to sell. We talked about this bill being proposed last week, and things had moved really slowly on the TikTok men. Now they're moving really fast. On Wednesday, the house passed the bill with a bipartisan vote of 352 Sacks, making this one of the few subjects that members of Congress can agree on. Biden has also signaled his intent to sign the bill into law should it pass the senate passing the Senate. That could be an obstacle, democratic julia leader Chuck Schumer has signaled a lack of interest in the subject and said he'll review the bill with committee chairs before signing on the path forward. Arguments for and against. Bell have centered around a few main points reciprocity. We talked about that here. You can't use Instagram X or any of our domestic social networks in China. And if they won't allow us in their country, why should we give them unrestricted access to ours stifling debate, progressives fear. This isn't really about national security. Their position is Mainstream politicians are hoping to shut down political discourse, particularly among the youth who are mostly on TikTok, particularly pro Palestinian and anti Israel discourse, which seems to flourish on TikTok versus other platforms, coincidentally, Joe Biden launched a TikTok account last month, and his comments were instantly flooded with pro Palestinian remarks. Some calling him genocide, Joe. 3rd argument overreach some. Sex, I think you've pointed out that the language in this law is a bit vague. It needs to be tightened up. Maybe, the president could go after companies supposedly aligned with foreign interests who aren't our esteemed patriot and friend Keith Reboy argued with you, Sacks, on this, on, X. And then there are guys like Trump in Vivek who I believe are flip flopping based on securing bags. Vivek called TikTok Digital Fentanyl. Jason Calacanis (00:42:36): And Trump issued an executive order calling for ByteDance to divest TikTok in 2020. Now they're both opposing the ban. And interestingly, both trump and Vivek have ties to the Republican Megadona Jeffrey Yas. Who is a major shareholder in ByteDance with a reported 15 to $30,000,000,000 stake. He gave Vivek 5,000,000 bucks. Who knows what Trump's gotten but they said they're back in love. Sacks, you had this big back and forth with Keith Bourboi on X. Are you in support? Of the divestiture or not, haven't been able to track exactly where you're at with this. David Sacks (00:43:16): Well, I think my take on this, and I'm gonna have to revise and accept my remarks from last week, because I didn't know as much about the bill. I hadn't actually read the language yet, and now I have. And my take on this is that the bill poses significant risk of being Patriot Sacks 2.0. So in other words, you know, a threat to the security of the United States is basically hyped up. Some part of it may be real. Some of it may be threat inflation. And then we give the intelligence community and the government new powers, which can then be abused. And that's exactly what happened with the Patriot Act. They ended spying on Americans. Now what is the potential abuse here? This is a thing that I've debated with Keith And there's also other people who I respect a lot. And Keith, by the way, is a very talented lawyer in addition to other things being a successful founder and investor. An investor. And then, you know, I saw that Sagar and and Jetty whose show I was just on thinks that the bill is just fine. So, look, there are people, very legit people who disagree with me about this. But I went last night, and I read this bill, like, four times, to try and, like, parse the language. And I've just come away concluding there's no, the way I see it, there's no way to argue that this language isn't vague and could invite abuse. And you really have to dig into it, but let me just kinda walk you through, I think, a key part of it. So first of all, This bill doesn't just ban or force the divestiture of TikTok. It goes after what it calls foreign adversary controlled applications. Now what is a foreign adversary? There are 4 countries that are defined as foreign adversaries. It's basically Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea. I'm not super worried about that list of foreign adversaries. Growing because that does take a bunch of procedural hoops to go through it. David Sacks (00:45:12): What I am concerned about is when the bill talks about what makes a company controlled by a foreign adversary. And if you go to that language, which is then definition, so, you know, What frequently happens with these bills is that a lot of the meat is actually in the definitions. You have to look at this very carefully. It says here the term controlled by foreign adversary means respect to a covered company that such company or entity is, and then there's 3 categories. The 1st category is a foreign person, which can also meet a foreign corporation, that's domiciled in or is headquartered or has his principal place of business or is organized under the law of foreign adversary country. So that would be like ByteDance. Okay. ByteDance is a Chinese company. Okay? Then it says, or it can be an entity where 20% of the ownership group is in that foreign person category. So that would be like you let's say you had a US company, but 20% of the company was owned by I don't know if Chinese VCs or by ByteDance. Okay? That would also be a controlled biopharma adversary. Then you get to the provision that I think is the most problematic, which is it's a person subject to the direction or control of a foreign person or entity. The novel language here is where it says subject to the direction of Okay? It's not just saying under the control of. It's saying subject to the direction of. In my view, that's very Jason. And a creative, prosecutor, creative attorney general, could try to say, well, wait a second. If Elon has a major Tesla Factory in Shanghai, is he subject to the direction of the Chinese Communist Party because they could influence him. They could leverage him. If Donald Trump is accused on virtually a daily basis of being a Russian asset, is he subject to the direction of Vladimir Putin? David Frum just tweeted very recently that he said that not only trump at the entire Republican Party, that works for Trump is under the direction. Jason Calacanis (00:47:20): Yeah. That's like partisan hack, though. That's not like actual factual in a court. Right? So This would have to be proven factual in the court. David Sacks (00:47:27): Okay. Jason Calacanis (00:47:28): Do you think or no? David Sacks (00:47:29): Well, the AG could open an investigation based on the theory that, for example, Trump owns true social and Trump is under the direction of a foreign adversary, IE Putin, because the mainstream media continues to normalize this idea and spread this idea on virtually a daily basis. So the point is that, look, first, the AG would open an investigation. You think about the sledgehammer type of remedy here that an Elon or a trump or a, you take rumble, for example, which is also accused of being a Russian Jason, they could be forced to divest the company or to to have it be banned. So it gives huge, I think, new powers to the executive branch to pursue political opponents and political enemies, whether they actually win in a court of law down the road is kind of secondary because they can vex and harass their political enemies using this power. So my point is that at a minimum, I think this language needs to get cleaned up. I think it is way too vague. And you still have the issue of whether it's a good idea or not to force the banning or divestiture of TikTok, but This bill goes way beyond it. Again, it creates this novel category of foreign adversary controlled David Friedberg (00:48:50): applications, which David Sacks (00:48:50): also, like I said, includes websites Jason that means not just foreign companies, but domestic companies as well that are set to be under the direction of a foreign actor. So, again, I I don't know how anyone can look at this language and not say it's too vague. Jason Calacanis (00:49:08): Yeah. It's easy enough to tighten it up. And if it was tightened up, you'd be in favor of the TikTok man. I take it, Zach. Or divestiture, I should Jason. Keep I keep saying BAN. You would still want the Chinese government to not have control of this or or by dense. Yep. David Sacks (00:49:21): I still have very mixed feelings about the idea of just the the TikTok ban because, look, you're talking about an app that a 100,000,000 Americans use. For something like 90 minutes a day. So people obviously get a lot of value out of this. I've yet to see the the hard proof that this app is under the control of the CCP. I mean, I know that allegation is made. I can understand why Jason Calacanis (00:49:44): people get journalists already. David Sacks (00:49:46): Yeah. But it's it's very unclear to me that they have the goods on that, and I do think that depriving Americans of the right to use this app that they clearly enjoy and love based on a threat that has yet to be proven, that makes me indeedly ambivalent about that. Jason Calacanis (00:50:06): Shmoth, if we were to look at, say, media channels, newspapers, there's been rules about foreign ownership of those. Do you believe TikTok kind of falls into that? As Sacks said, Americans are enjoying this in a massive way, 100,000,000 plus 90 minutes a day, the statistics are crazy, that actually, I think, argues for you know, not having a foreign adversary, own this or have access to it, we wouldn't allow them to own CNN, Fox, New York Times, Washington Post, etcetera. We have rules against that already. So are you in favor of this TikTok divestiture? Yes or no? Chamath Palihapitiya (00:50:43): Yeah. Jason Calacanis (00:50:44): Okay. You have it. Friedberg, Speaker 5 (00:50:47): would Jason Calacanis (00:50:48): love to have you David Sacks (00:50:49): I like to hear I like to hear him expand on that. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:50:53): I'll I'll tell you before I tell you why, I'll tell you a quick story. 2 or 3 months ago, after Joker was sick, we started to make his own dog food, right? So to have like a super bland diet and we had the service that was sending us food and we got rid of it and we would just make it ourselves. And part of the meal was like some raw apples and carrots that I that I would cut up. And I would always complain to that. I'm like, I hate peeling these apples or whatever, slicing them and taking the core up. Just just said that. For the next month and a half, all I got was apple coring utensils on TikTok. And she was like, oh, you know, we should get rid of X Y Z food service, and she would just get plastered with these ads. And it was just a reminder to me that these app are constantly listening. Now that's a benign example, but my phone is on my desk when I'm talking about some really important stuff. Again, important related to me, both personal and professional, where there's lots of money on the line. There's moments where for certain parts of my business, like with crypto, we have, like, 19 layers of people that have to You have passwords upon passwords upon passwords to do stuff. The phone is always there. It was just a reminder to me, so I deleted TikTok. It's gone. Which sucks because I would relax with that app at night. Like, you know, it I would have 15, 20 minutes where I would be progress. It's super fun. It's a great app. I have to be honest with you. I love it. But as a consumer, That was the decision I made. As a business person, what I'll say is it is inconceivable to me that our voice signatures aren't being mapped, and there isn't a massive sort of file and repository that is understanding what we're all saying. And it's then further inconceivable to me that there isn't a service that's in identifying that this is probably David Sacks, and this is Chamath, and this is Friedberg. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:53:04): And We're not really all that important, but let's take a better example. This is Elon Musk. This is the president of the United States. This is or the waiter that works for the president who has his phone in his pocket while he's sitting inside the, you know, the the the residences of the White House. So I think it's happening. I think they're not the only one though. I think there's American companies that are doing it too. And so I think that we need to start somewhere until we can have our apps in a market. They shouldn't have their apps here. And I think that should be the end of it. Jason Calacanis (00:53:41): Completely reasonable. I think David Friedberg (00:53:43): I'm gonna disagree. I think a couple points I don't believe in the notion of, like, reciprocity for reciprocity's Sacks. China blocks access to US content. Does that mean the US government should block access to international content? I think the answer is no because this country is different than China. We have afforded ourselves freedoms and liberties that don't exist in other countries, freedom of choice, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and so on. So I don't think that the government should be restricting access to content because another country restricts access to our content. I think that we should make decisions based on what's right for the citizens, what's right for the country, what's right for national security. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:54:25): What about spying apps? So that's David Friedberg (00:54:28): a that's that's my my next point. So I do think that if there is a case, to be made that there is spying or data acquisition that's going on through these apps. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:54:36): We're not talking about rice noodles David Friedberg (00:54:38): over here. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:54:38): You know, we're talking about And David Friedberg (00:54:40): so I think if if that's true, then I would imagine that there are multiple paths to alleviate that, like, move all the servers to the US and set the entity, force a sale, you know, like, I I think I I don't think that it's necessarily appropriate to say that there aren't other courses or other options available to try and prohibit what should generally be prohibited, which is spying on American citizens and capturing data that people you know, haven't opted in to being captured. I do believe that citizens and people should have the right to decide if they wanna have their data used, to be able to access an app. I actually am not a big believer that we should be paternalistic in the government sense and saying, having the government come in and say, Here's an app, and we have determined that it is not good for you because this data is being used in a manipulative way against you. I think that citizens should be afforded parent and make a decision about whether or not they wanna participate in that. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:55:35): I don't think citizens have the sophistication to understand what foreign adversaries. Again, we only have 4, so they were named there for a Jason, are doing with our data. And I don't think that they should have to be forced to choose. I think that, you know, this is not dissimilar to how the FDA says you're not qualified to decide whether this drug is good. We will tell you. And people are okay with that because you are saying this is part of the government infrastructure that's full of experts who know the totality of a subject. And so the problem is in order for anybody to make a reasonable decision, you'd have to share so much as to just completely blow up a bunch of national security, which is not gonna happen. David Friedberg (00:56:13): Well, look, I think we can have audit rights and we can have rights that protect our citizens. I think that that's appropriate. I I I'll also say my my final point on this. I think that Whether it's intentional or not, this sort of action leads to inevitable cronyism and regulatory capture. Who does this benefit? If TikTok gets banned in the US, it's gonna benefit Meta. It's gonna benefit Instagram. It's gonna benefit a few other social network is gonna benefit Elon at Twitter. There's a few folks that are gonna benefit pretty significantly if TikTok is banned because all those users are gonna migrate. I will also say, by the way, that many thousands of people make their living on TikTok, like it or not, it's a big income stream for a lot of people in the US. And a really important part of their livelihood. And Jason Calacanis (00:56:54): just to be clear here, this is not about banning TikTok. This is about divestiture. Then if it's not divested, then it gets banned. So if you just think from 1st principles here, why wouldn't they divested? Why would the CCP keep this The reason is this is a incredibly powerful tool under no circumstances would the Chinese government ever allow us to have this kind of reach into their populace. And if you wanna judge a person, you can just look at their behavior. Citizens in China live Either in a complete police state where everything they do is tracked. Every transaction, facial recognition, every step they take, Every purchase they make is tracked, or you're in a literal concentration camp. That's how the people of China live today. We are their adversary. They have noted that we're their adversary. Under what circumstances would you think they would treat us any differently than they treat their own citizens. It is absolutely insane that anybody would take the side of the CCP on this you are asking them to divest. You're not asking them to shut it down. That is a partisan sort of angle on this. And there's a lot of partisanship going on on the edges on this, but what we have to realize is they would never allow us to do this to their citizens and how they treat their citizens is obvious. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:58:14): As an example, we've tried, you know, we tried to export sugar via McDonald's and Coke. And actually, they have domestic brands that they were able to support and prop up. So they have more control of that too. So even, even, even our downstream attempts to actually send products over long periods of time aren't necessarily beneficial. They've act they're smart enough to actually blunt. David Friedberg (00:58:35): Yeah. And they don't let their Jason Calacanis (00:58:35): kids play video games or use TikTok. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:58:38): Well, even video games, they saw video games are bad. It's not like they're like, oh, Activision come on in. The doors are open. They're like, you can use it an hour. No. I think it's like 3 hours a week. And on the weekends Jason Calacanis (00:58:48): and Chamath Palihapitiya (00:58:48): on the weekends, and certain kids are totally banned. They have an ability to make strategic decisions that benefit their population. And I think that we have never attempted to. I'm not saying that this law is gonna be great, but you'd have to be extremely naive to assume that there is nothing bad going on here with this app. It doesn't mean that there's nothing bad going on with all the other apps. I am assuming that all these apps have foreign actors that have infiltrated them. I think that's the right posture to have. I don't have Instagram on my phone. I don't have Facebook on my phone. I don't have TikTok anymore on my phone. The only thing that's left is X. And at some point, if those apps can prove that there's a chain of custody. So for example, you know, one thing that I thought of you could do is you could put some kind of like ITAR regulations around this so that only US citizens could work on these Sacks. Any app that is ambiently observing you, I think the overwhelming majority of people there's it's very benign implications. But the whole point is that if you have 300,000,000 people that are being observed, you're gonna get also the the 1000 or 10,000 that are super important, and you're gonna catch stuff that you're not allowed to know. Jason Calacanis (01:00:03): And therefore already doing this. Pull up the article, Nick. Tiktok has 40 admitted to and been caught with their hand in the cookie jar spying on journalists, we know that they're doing this already, and we know their track record for spying on their own people. This is the no brainer of no brainer decisions. Just divest. And if they won't divest, it tells you everything you need to know. This is super valuable to them and that algorithm is so valuable that they know they can program the US citizenry. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:00:34): I think the other problem is I'm not sure that the people with the technical sophistication will have the time to then actually go and audit the code to really know that there aren't any Easter eggs in here and there aren't real backdoors. Jason Calacanis (01:00:47): And they won't waste. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:00:47): So this is my point. I think divestiture should not be allowed. I actually just think, unfortunately, this app should just shut down. And the people will migrate to Instagram and the people will migrate to YouTube. And Or new products. And or new products. And the thing there is that at least these are American controlled. And are there data leaks happening in those apps? Probably but it's at least not so brazenly obvious. Jason Calacanis (01:01:12): Sacks your thoughts. David Sacks (01:01:13): I'm a little confused here. Are you guys saying that the Chinese government uses TikTok to spy on its own population, or they ban it because they think it's harmful? Jason Calacanis (01:01:22): No. They ban TikTok there because it's harmful. No. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:01:24): They complete control over TikTok there. Yes. Jason Calacanis (01:01:26): And they control that In their country, they use camera Sacks, and you know this full well, on every single corner with facial recognition, and every one of their phones is tracked. You know this full well, Sacks. They are spying. David Sacks (01:01:39): Do they allow TikTok or not? Jason Calacanis (01:01:41): No. They have banned TikTok. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:01:43): They have a different version called David. Jason Calacanis (01:01:44): Different version. And in that version, there are limits. And they push Mac. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:01:50): Dewians algorithms are very different. They push educational content, There's so basically, like, on the on the ByteDance board, what happened with this whole thing is the the CEO and the founder had to step down effectively, right? They brought in effectively new management. And in that, the CCP hat is a board of a board director and has what's called the golden vote. So they effectively decide. And so what you saw were the algorithms morph over time from pure entertainment to things that pushed a lot of educational content. They also then imposed broadly speaking limits on content that they didn't like. They would only allow in other apps experiences where they also have a board seat now and a golden vote as Jason said, games can only be played in certain apps for certain amounts of time. So they've made their own decisions about what's good for their own population. The flavor of the app that's here, my my biggest point is that, again, you have to pick the lesser evil I think it's pretty reasonable to assume that all these apps are infiltrated. But this one is more brazen because it is really the only one that's completely in foreign control. And I don't think that if you try to divest it, you will get any assurance that that code is reliable. And so you'd have to build the whole thing from scratch all over again. David Sacks (01:03:12): For what it's worth, the company has said that they're willing to move all of their hosting in the US to Oracle data centers in the US. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:03:21): David, you and I know what that means. Like, could you imagine a migration like that? Who is gonna look at every single endpoint? Speaker 5 (01:03:28): Right. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:03:28): Every single sign of code. That is a joke that's meant to allay people who are nontechnical. David Sacks (01:03:32): Right. Right. Yeah. I kind of agree with that. Jason Calacanis (01:03:35): Alright. Well, seems like we're I don't know if we're 2v2 here, but David Sacks (01:03:38): Look. I I Jason Calacanis (01:03:39): Are you better or not Sacks, Sachs? If the language is corrected, are you a ban or a divest or what? David Sacks (01:03:44): I'm ambivalent about it because I'm open to the idea. Of banning the foreign app in this way, but the reason why I'm a little bit ambivalent about it is because a, I think that what they're doing has to be proven as opposed to just a bunch of hand waving over it. And when you start talking about what's happening to the Uighurs, the concentration camps, And it's spying that has nothing to do with this particular app. And in fact, you've revealed this app doesn't even function in China. I think there's just a lot of hand waving going on. Not a lot of hard proof. And I don't think that one little story in the New York Times, I would consider hard proof. David Friedberg (01:04:22): I agree with Sacks. David Sacks (01:04:23): Yeah. So that's number one is I'm open to this idea, but I wanna see hard proof. Number 2 is Chamath Palihapitiya (01:04:28): I don't think you're gonna get it. I think the NSA and the CIA will read in the intelligence committee. And there's a sub committee that's probably been read in, but I can guarantee you the American public will not get written on what Jason Calacanis (01:04:40): and Mansion said on CNBC today, by the way, that, you know, he has based on his information, he believes strongly that they should divest. Whether it's to his group or another group, David Sacks (01:04:49): but these guys have lied so many times about so many things. I mean, I just think that the public has a right to know. Look, if a 100,000,000 Americans are gonna be deprived of using it after they love, why can't we get a little bit more information? Chamath Palihapitiya (01:04:59): Well, they're not I think they're saying that. David Sacks (01:05:02): Has done wrong. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:05:03): They're saying it. They're saying it's in control. It it's being controlled by a foreign adversary. They are saying it. The the bill says it. What is debatable? They're telling you David Sacks (01:05:13): means all that means is that the app is owned by ByteDance, which is Chamath Palihapitiya (01:05:17): here's what's unique about this bill, David Friedberg (01:05:19): which is David Sacks (01:05:19): incorporated in China. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:05:20): Here's what here's what's unique about this bill. It got out of committee 50 to 0. It was overwhelmingly approved by both sides of the house, And it looks like in the senate, there may be some refinements that happened, but it's going to get largely overwhelmingly approved there as well. It's a very Hold on. It's a very unique moment in time where you see in today's political landscape. Such uniformity. And again, I'm not gonna go and defend these folks, but except to say that where there's smoke, there's probably fire. And I think that in this specific narrow case, again, we're not talking about food stuffs or lumber, Right? We're talking about a technological application that is observing a lot of people on a continuous 24 by 7 basis I suspect this this law would not have gotten out of committee 50 to 0. Had they not been read in by the NSA and the CIA? And that will never see the light of day because we will never be disclosed that information. David Sacks (01:06:22): Okay. So Chamath Palihapitiya (01:06:22): It could have been 49 to 1, David. You know get another because I'm not on one second. David Sacks (01:06:26): I wanna respond to that. Jason Calacanis (01:06:27): I wanna talk to that. Speaker 5 (01:06:27): I wanna Chamath Palihapitiya (01:06:28): talk to that. I could see it being 40 to 10. If it's ideological, I could be seeing it 35 to 15. 48 to 2. It was 50 to 0. David Sacks (01:06:37): So what's the patriot act? Look, there's an old saying in Washington that the worst ideas are bipartisan. These guys were all being stampeded into this act. They brought it up and passed it with hardly any debate. I've already shown you how the language of the bill is overly broad. It's not just a TikTok ban. It Sacks that any app or website. Did you know that? Any app or website domestically that's subject subject to the direction of a foreigner from one of these countries. Jason Calacanis (01:07:07): 4 countries. North Korea, Russia, China. David Sacks (01:07:09): I said a foreign from one of those countries. Yeah. No. David Friedberg (01:07:11): I just wanna make sure I'm Jason Calacanis (01:07:12): clear for the audience. David Sacks (01:07:13): All you gotta do is make that argument. If you're an AG who wants to go after one of our domestic platforms, That's all you gotta do to bring them under your thumb. Jason Calacanis (01:07:21): What would be the proper route if a US platform was in fact compromised by the Chinese, North Koreans, for Iran. What would be the proper path in your mind? Wouldn't that concern you? David Sacks (01:07:33): If an app is sharing US data in a way that it shouldn't, then why wouldn't it just be prosecuted? Jason Calacanis (01:07:40): Yeah. Which is what this is saying. Right? The Jason would go David Friedberg (01:07:42): after that. David Sacks (01:07:43): It's not it's not even it's banning TikTok okay, subject to maybe divestiture happens, but there's a lot of people who think that the 6 months they're giving for this is just not gonna work. And the Chinese government may not go for the idea. Of allowing TikTok to be bought by an American company because they may not like the president that creates. So, Chamath Palihapitiya (01:08:01): again, I think you're your own question, I think you're making a very important and good point, which is there is so much body of business law here. And there's so many state AGs who would want to make their bones. And you see the state AGs trying to build their credibility going after Facebook for sexual exploitation and all of this stuff. There to your point, David, there is such a body of lawsuits and law and precedent that TikTok could have been prosecuted under. It's very odd and rare that there's been a complete deterrent where this thing came on from up above and everybody just got on board. And all I'm saying is in these very rare and unique instances where somebody shelved their own personal political aspirations, No. David Sacks (01:08:45): I think I think we're not the Jason Calacanis (01:08:47): sis that we don't know. David Sacks (01:08:48): My alarm bells go off when DC acts with this kind of unanimity because the only time they ever do that when they become a unit party is when the national security state wants some new power. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:08:58): I agree with this. Jason Calacanis (01:08:59): That's what David Sacks (01:08:59): I'm saying. This is how we got into the Yeah. Jason Calacanis (01:09:00): It could be vicious. Yeah. David Sacks (01:09:01): Almost unanimous. This is how we got into the Patriot Act. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:09:04): I'm not saying it's right. I'm not saying Jason Calacanis (01:09:06): it's right. David Sacks (01:09:07): Dumb idea that gives the federal government more power ends up being almost unanimous in Washington. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:09:13): You're absolutely right, and I'm agreeing with you. They were read in at a national security level that got them to become a uni party on this topic. We are never gonna get and I'm just, you know, responding to framework. We are gonna get read in. David Sacks (01:09:26): We, the people, because of this, like, phony concern about they always like classification when they don't want the public to know something. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:09:32): Now, by the way, the good news David Sacks (01:09:33): is secret. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:09:34): Yeah. But by the way, give David Sacks (01:09:35): us the proof. Why can't they give us the proof? Jason Calacanis (01:09:37): I don't think it needs to be proof. It's the potential damage here that they're saying is the problem, Sacks. They could wake up this algorithm at any point in time, and they could steer people's thinking. They have already steered it. Your Party has talked incessantly about how TikTok has steered cultural issues in a certain direction, thus, libs of TikTok, all this kind of stuff. There is ample evidence that these social networks and these videos do influence young people. So if young people are addicted to this, which they clearly are, and if young people are influenced by this, which they clearly are, those are just facts that are indisputable. The Chinese could wake this up at any time and steer political issues, left, right, center, cause chaos. It is the potential harm here, Sacks, That is the concern. It's not just that they're doing it now. It's that they could do it in the future. And if you were to take this and you were to put let's say this was North Korea or Iran. Would you're would you allow North Korea or Iran to own this app in the United States via Sacks Chamath Palihapitiya (01:10:41): course, he wouldn't. David Sacks (01:10:42): I think my my point would be the same, which is Okay. I wanna see some proof. Hold on. Give me a couple of points. Number 1, I wanna see some proof that this is actually spyware. That to me has been alleged. And if it's as such a slammed on case as you say, why is there no proof of this? So that's point number 1. And and by the way, if if the phone is just sitting there passively listening to you, and that's the spy where Apple should really address that. Because I shouldn't be able to do that. Jason Calacanis (01:11:09): Right. David Sacks (01:11:10): So that's like Apple's problem. With respect to the data supposedly being leaked to the communist party, again, I wanna see what data are we talking about? Like like what TikTok videos I like? What what's important about that data? There are bundles of data that are available on the open market that they can buy it about users. I don't David Friedberg (01:11:31): think that's Chamath Palihapitiya (01:11:31): what it is. These these microphones are on 247. These apps are allowed to passively listen in the background. David Sacks (01:11:37): Don't want me to just tell Apple not to allow that. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:11:40): I think that that could be a partial solve to. What what what answer is? David Sacks (01:11:44): Should not be passively listening to you. You should have to, like, stick in your face and talk to it if you wanna activate the microphone. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:11:50): The problem is when you download these apps, you create these settings. And so you try to you have to try to convince a hundred million people that, hey, you you shouldn't do that. Maybe it it you should only do it when you use the app in a specific way, and it kills the usability. And so people get lazy and they're like, default on. David Sacks (01:12:05): Look. What what I'm saying here is that the way the microphone should work on Apple products is that Jason Calacanis (01:12:13): I think it does work that way. David Sacks (01:12:15): Yeah. It should Jason Calacanis (01:12:15): it should work that way. I I don't know if that's the listening is, like, the key issue here. Well, I mean, who knows what's possible in terms of hacking and spyware? You know, the those are all, you know, unknowns. So David Sacks (01:12:29): Okay. So so one by one, we're kinda knocking knocking out all these issues. It's not passively listening. The data that it's collecting doesn't Chamath Palihapitiya (01:12:37): seem we Jason Calacanis (01:12:37): don't know. It doesn't seem that important. David Sacks (01:12:39): With respect to steering, I agree. I guess that's a theoretical problem, but you could say that about any of these Sacks, and you're on a slippery slope to basically a first amendment problem. Because they're not letting users get the content that they actually want. Jason Calacanis (01:12:53): Alright. I guess that's a problem. David Sacks (01:12:55): And then and then I look then one final point about the reciprocity argument is if you want to make this about reciprocity, then put it in a trade bill. That's where you deal with reciprocity is you say, okay. These products from China get to to play in US markets. Our products for the United States gets play in Chinese markets. You do it through a trade bill. This is not a trade bill. This gives a new power to the government to define foreign adversary controlled applications and websites. Jason Calacanis (01:13:23): Frederick, I just wanted to give you a chance to answer the two questions. Are you in favor of divestiture? If it was Iran who owned the app, would you feel differently? David Friedberg (01:13:32): I don't know about divestiture until to Saks's point. I just I I haven't heard a clear point of view or clear, like, piece of information about what this app uniquely does that other apps don't do. That creates a threat. I it's just not clear to me. So in general, I'm not in fan of, like, forcing companies to divest and forcing things to be shut down and taking away human consumer choice. I just don't think those are good things generally. Speaker 5 (01:14:02): Okay. Jason Calacanis (01:14:02): And I'm David Friedberg (01:14:03): not to Sacks point, I'm just not compelled. That there's something here based on what I've seen. And then, like, if Iran owned TikTok, I don't care who owns it based on my prior statement. I I I think people should have choice to use what they wanna use, provided that there is no spying. If there's spying, I wanna know that there's spying and how it's happening. We need to technically fix that someone can passively turn on a microphone on an app and listen to people in a room, yes, they can. Smart scientist. We've proven that it's positive. Jason Calacanis (01:14:30): They can also And we should fix David Sacks (01:14:31): that That's a bigger problem. Speaker 5 (01:14:34): Then you Chamath Palihapitiya (01:14:34): need to shut down all the Iphones. We have there's an Israeli software company. We all know what it's called. We all can go and license a software from them. Okay. They they will help you do this. So Yeah. I'm sorry, guys. David Sacks (01:14:46): But that's not a problem. Apple needs to patch That's exactly right. That's not the problem because I don't want a domestic app to be able to do that to me. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:14:54): Yeah. Exactly. It is happening, and it hasn't been fixed. And it's not that it hasn't been fixed. The point is when you have a large technical surface area, you guys know this. There are bugs all the time. Like, we deal with, for example, Threat vectors all the time into, like, Microsoft has dealt with these for 50 years. Right? Every new update of windows, every little thing has all of these little backdoors and little threads that weren't cleaned up properly. So this is an ongoing whack a mole problem. And the reality is that a very small technical team hasn't always been able to stay a few steps ahead of Apple and many of these apps. And all I'm saying is you should just not be so naive as to assume that this apple is something that that this is something apple can fix. I think that a small talented team of hackers Whoever they work for will always be able to find these backdoors in every single new release of every single operating system, and they will be a few steps ahead. David Sacks (01:15:49): So but then we're screwed anyway because all the data is already out there. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:15:52): So I think the point is so knowing that if you wanna maybe minimize the surface area, of how bad this data leaks to just the foreign actors that have infiltrated our American companies, you can ban TikTok. David Friedberg (01:16:06): Okay. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:16:07): If you wanna just open the door, do it. Keep it around. David Sacks (01:16:10): Look, I like I said at the beginning, I'm ambivalent about this because if you can prove to me that there's really a national security threat and that your remedy for dealing with it is narrowly tailored, then I'm potentially on board with this. But I don't believe the threat has been proven. And I certainly don't think the remedy is narrowly tailored. In fact, it's expansive, and it's gonna lead to weaponization, and I don't trust the government to define new new, categories of foreign controlled applications and websites. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:16:37): I think you're probably right, which is the unfortunate part, but I I do think that There's enough of these folks that have been read into something that we're not being told. David Sacks (01:16:46): And I have zero faith in that. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:16:49): Yeah. I'm not I'm not gonna say that it's accurate or not, but I'm saying I suspect that somebody of work from a 3 letter agency has made its way to enough of these people under confidentiality where they've all agreed. David Sacks (01:17:05): The national security state has a secret reason for wanting to expand his powers. That just doesn't fill me with any confidence. Again, Patriot Sacks 2.0. That's why I started I Chamath Palihapitiya (01:17:15): don't think this is the Patriot Act because the Patriot Act was like, I'm gonna have now a broad license to probe anything I want. This is about saying this thing that is here can no longer be here. So that's just David Sacks (01:17:25): It's not it's not focused on TikTok. It's focused on, again, first Chamath Palihapitiya (01:17:30): paragraph, foreign David Sacks (01:17:31): unrestrained publications, which includes websites. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:17:34): The the Patriot Act was about the government being able to go proactively wherever they wanted when they weren't allowed. That is not what this bill says. This bill is more reactive in saying, oh, okay. You out out of the sandbox. And all I'm saying is you're right that that could be abused that's very different than the Patriot Act, which was very aggressive. Jason Calacanis (01:17:56): Alright. So there you have it, Sacks. Two people Sacks like, agree with the divestiture. 2 people have a difference of opinion. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:18:05): Well, I agree with the divestiture. I I think it should be shut down. Jason Calacanis (01:18:08): Okay. Shut down. Yeah. So shutdown divestiture looks like David Friedberg (01:18:10): lots of opinions. That's good. Jason Calacanis (01:18:12): Lots of opinions. That's good. Okay. David Sacks (01:18:14): I think we just had more debate over this than the entire US Congress did. Speaker 6 (01:18:17): Perhaps. I mean, I think that's why people listen to Jason Calacanis (01:18:20): this program is because we're literally getting into the absolute finest details and asking really probing questions, Sacks. That you love. David Sacks (01:18:27): A 100,000,000 people are soon gonna be asking when TikTok had shut down, a 100,000,000 people who used it every day are gonna be like, why did this happen? Chamath Palihapitiya (01:18:35): I'm gonna say something about that. One of my kids, and I'm not gonna say who it is. We recently had them tested for ADHD, were doing particularly great in school. The response by some of the folks in the school was, oh, There's meds for that. We're like no meds. And what we did was we took away their iPad. And we completely deprive them of all these apps and video games. I cannot describe to you the magnitude of the turnaround in this kid. Grades. Incredible where they were getting 60% 70% now getting 90%. Totally engaged, interesting charming kid. That had lost a little bit, and I think that there was a little bit of a days. And I just wanna say that in general, as a parent, Whether the app is banned or not, who cares? My lived experience right now is that video games and these apps are horrible for kids. Jason Calacanis (01:19:42): This is a known Sacks. Actually, it's a month I looked into this as well. It turns out students who use iPads and digital media many times a day they show the exact signs of ADHD in attention and hyperactivity and impulsivity. So Whether you think ADHD is a real diagnosis or not, it's inducing those symptoms. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:20:04): I'm willing to say that my child probably had a a very light form of it. Maybe it was exacerbated by these video games and the iPad. And these apps and, you know, they were getting all the TikTok content but they were getting it on YouTube. Alerts. Alerts. All those. Anyways, one to 0. Not like you can have a little bit here or there. 0. And the transformation in this last month and a half, 2 months has been incredible. I don't know if other parents are dealing with this, but what I'll tell you is Veeeps Sacks are not good. So this whole consumer choice thing, I think my view is a little tainted because I get agitated as a responsible parent. I'm like, just get this app out of here. And I already know that I'm addicted to it, and it's not good for me. I have no idea what it's doing to my, my kids, and I just don't wanna deal with it. Jason Calacanis (01:20:50): If you, if you look at the correlation between all of these symptoms showing up in kids, it's basically the introduction of the iPhone. And so people are kind of reaching consensus that the iPhone and distraction, ADHD, spiking, depression, all of the stuff anxiety in kids is correlating with too much green time. You can do your own research Sacks. David Sacks (01:21:10): Maybe it correlates with prescription of SSRIs. Maybe it Jason Calacanis (01:21:15): Well, no. That is part Speaker 5 (01:21:16): of it here. David Sacks (01:21:17): There's schools going totally woke and bananas. I call this a lot of things. Jason Calacanis (01:21:22): The co COVID definitely exacerbated. David exacerbated it when you look at the the the trend lines, for sure, And the SSRIs and those kind of things being prescribed is probably as a result of these ADHD symptoms coming from screen time. And then it's probably unnecessary. David Sacks (01:21:41): I think people just got a lot more, prescription happy. Like, they're Jason Calacanis (01:21:45): just They're definitely not over prescription. They're willing to David Sacks (01:21:47): put kids on drugs for I mean, you talk about ADHD for young boys. That's kinda like this normal behavior. Jason Calacanis (01:21:55): Yeah. No. Absolutely. Like, kids running around outside and having energy. If I had to pick an age, I would say sixteen, seventeen, eighteen years old for social media. And for phones, I would say 15 or 16, you know, with a very controlled phone. So as this is one person's opinion. Alright. Florida is on the verge of banning lab grown meat. Fraybar, can you tee this up for us? David Friedberg (01:22:15): Yeah. So Florida's been debating a bill in their state legislature since November. And it just passed the house and the senate, vote of 8627 in the house, 2820 in the senate, to prohibit the manufacturing sale holding or distribution of cultivated meat, and it basically makes the sale or ownership of cultivated meat a second degree misdemeanor. This is lab grown meat. And this bill is now on DeSantis's desk for signing you know, I'll kinda highlight a little bit of the motivation and and and some of the technical background of my point of view on it, if that's okay. But Do Chamath Palihapitiya (01:22:52): you do you see him eating the meat while you're talking about that you see meetings of each. Jason Calacanis (01:22:57): I'm paying attention. Unlike you guys. David Sacks (01:22:59): He's got this, like, Flintstone size. Jason Calacanis (01:23:02): Ham hog. Wearless and good. David Friedberg (01:23:04): It feels like a, like a non issue to folks who eat meat and don't care, but I just wanna point out how much this is generally a challenge to enabling choice in new innovative technology, which, you know, we've seen attempts at this in the past, But what is the reason to Chamath Palihapitiya (01:23:21): what is the reason to ban lab grown meat? Jason Calacanis (01:23:24): They love to ban Florida. David Friedberg (01:23:26): The motivation is that Florida ranchers the David Sacks (01:23:29): guy who just has been advocating for banning TikTok. This whole show is now accusing Florida being into banning Are you your boy, Speaker 6 (01:23:37): honey, daddy's loves to bitch. David Sacks (01:23:38): I'm the only person on this pod who actually Friedberg is too, who are skeptical of, like, this knee jerk banning everything. Jason Calacanis (01:23:45): Ban everything. David Sacks (01:23:46): I would not ban this. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:23:47): I didn't say to ban everything. Where where is that? Jason Calacanis (01:23:50): We're just joking. We're joking. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:23:52): Don't label me with your Jay Cal brush. David Friedberg (01:23:55): I'm not saying bad, everything. I just it's definitely becoming just a minority position to be against government intervention in free decision making and commerce by individual citizens. Florida ranchers felt that their livelihood was threatened. They have a $1,000,000,000 ranching business a year in Florida. Good for them. They should go ahead and compete with whatever new technology is emerging. I would say try a little role reversal. Imagine if, you know, governments and states try to ban the use of the tractor for fear of putting agricultural workers out of business, or, you know, software companies that did accounting software got banned because it could put accountants out of business or electric car production and used got banned because it could put traditional automotive manufacturers out of business, you could go down the list and you could create this position on nearly any newer emerging technology that feels threatening to an incumbent industry. And, ultimately, it really only yields to regulatory capture and to a lack of choice and opportunity for new innovation and for consumers to make decisions about what they want. And the irony here is that so much of what's being consumed in the market space today part of their their their rationalization is, oh, well, it's new technology. We don't know if it's good for you. We don't know if it's gonna work. The truth is there are federal regulatory body of oversight on this sort of thing. 20 years ago, almost all the cheese that we ate in the United States was made from Rent it is an enzyme that converts the protein and milk into cheese. We got Renet from the stomach of calves. We would scrape it out and sell Renet, and it would be used to make cheese. Then recombinant engineering where we could put we could get bacteria or yeast cells to make proteins this technology unlock the opportunity to make rent it more affordably. So rather than go and slaughter cabs and get the rented out of their stomach, We engineer the bacteria or the yeast cell to make the exact same protein, and that is now the entirety of the rented industry is recombinantly produced And the entirety of cheese that we all consume is made using this genetically modified yeast that makes this enzyme that converts milk into cheese. The same is true across other industries. We used to use animal fat for laundry detergent. David Friedberg (01:26:03): Turns out it was a lot cheaper to make enzymes using the same process I just described instead of making animal fat. And now all of our laundry detergent is recombinant enzymes. So I think, like, this notion that, we're gonna ban this stuff is a regulatory capture incumbency moment. It's totally wrong. It denies consumers choice. And frankly, it flies in the face of what has historically been a real economic opportunity to bring cost down, to bring new innovation to market, and to try and stall that innovation is gonna leave this state or this country, you're Speaker 5 (01:26:33): right, David Friedberg (01:26:33): in a real kind of challenge compared to other countries. I just think it's wrong. I think it's really Chamath Palihapitiya (01:26:37): On this topic, you are a 100% right. You're right. This is a dumb thing to legislate, and it is meaningless and unimpactful, and people should just decide based on what tastes better. Is this That's different than a listening device. David Friedberg (01:26:53): Yeah. Or cheaper than average. Yeah. Jason Calacanis (01:26:55): Freeburn is it? Is the criticism of this that it's regulatory capture or it's part of like this anti woke kind of vibes in Florida? David Friedberg (01:27:04): There's a conservative movement in Florida. Which has taken hold, which I think this is key to. Now, in some ways, I would argue that conservative movement has really important sociological points of view. In other cases, I think it denies necessary innovation. It denies necessary advancement to move industry forward versus social change. And I think the the the ability to kind of obfuscate the 2 that, oh, you know, train genderism in schools, in elementary schools is the same as the woke leftists from California making, you know, lab grown meat, and they all get kinda jammed together as one big tribal group, and therefore, we should ban it all. What will likely end up happening here is this will find its path to federal preemption. Historically, when we've seen states try to impose these sorts of bans, the companies that are ultimately affected, the innovators that are affected, go to the federal government and they try and legislate for a bill that says this stuff is legal and should be broadly available. That federal preemption then stops states rights on having a ban in place. And so it's very likely that we'll end up seeing some legislation here over the next couple of years. If this technology is ultimately beneficial, the problem is now that Florida has done this, I guarantee you're gonna see Texas, which is a huge ranching state and many other states step up to do it. It creates a really bad precedent for all other disruptive kind of industries to be blocked by their local economies that that believe that they're under threat. And, you know, it just creates like a lot of unnecessary chaos. So Jason Calacanis (01:28:31): Sacks, what is DeSantis's beef with fake meat? I don't David Sacks (01:28:35): know. I don't know. I don't know what he's Jason Calacanis (01:28:37): gonna do in this case, David Sacks (01:28:38): but let me let me state clearly what I think, which is I think it's really terrible. When a bunch of incumbents in an industry get together and try to shut out the innovative solution by inventing some unproven threat that they turn it to some sort Jason Calacanis (01:28:53): of punk event. David Sacks (01:28:55): Right. But, exactly. But, anyway, that's what about. I can Speaker 6 (01:28:57): see that one coming around the corner from David Friedberg (01:28:59): the bottom. Wanted to talk about this because I think the 2 are so similar. And I I they're not similar at all. Well, they're not go ahead, Zach. Yeah. Regulatory captures regulatory capture, but this is a foreign exchange. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:29:10): That's just the term of art. We're just, you know, David Friedberg (01:29:11): fair enough. Yeah. Yeah. We disagree on, yeah, that's fine. Fair enough. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:29:14): I think you guys have to have the intellectual honesty to say these are different issues. 1 is lab grown meat versus ranchers in America. This is typical corruption in cronyism. Fine. Whatever. Okay. David Sacks (01:29:25): Oh, yeah. But you don't think you don't think that the, the other tech companies that compete with TikTok are secretly banning together to basically gin up this bill. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:29:35): I don't think they're I don't think they're secretly banning. I think that they're being over they're overtly organizing. Jason Calacanis (01:29:41): You David Sacks (01:29:41): know, just like the ranchers. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:29:43): But, again, that typically still always gets cut on partisan lines. And what I'm saying is this is totally different than lab grown meat versus Ranchers. Jason Calacanis (01:29:51): I just wanna say one thing. David Friedberg (01:29:52): The intellectual discourse on this program. Jason Calacanis (01:29:56): I think I just wanna make a point here. I think the intellectual discourse on this program is second to none. I mean, we are getting into the most refined details of this issue and that you just don't hear this anywhere else. So I just wanna give myself and the rest of the cooler pat on the back. You just David Friedberg (01:30:10): wanna ask a bit. I just, yeah, Jason Calacanis (01:30:12): I just wanna yeah. David Friedberg (01:30:13): No. I I mean, it really Jason Calacanis (01:30:14): did get an pretty in the weeds here. David Friedberg (01:30:16): Jay Kal, do you agree that the Florida bill is ridiculous and that it sets a terrible precedent? Jason Calacanis (01:30:22): I didn't read it, but I would think that David Friedberg (01:30:25): It's exactly what we're saying. There's there's nothing special that I Jason Calacanis (01:30:28): can't imagine why somebody would wanna ban mock meat other than crony Calacanis. Of course. And my question to you is, when is this gonna taste good? When are you gonna make this mock me? Chamath Palihapitiya (01:30:38): Well, by the way, this still makes no sense because the only reason they would do it is if they were afraid that the lab grown meat was just so much cheaper and frankly so much tastier than what they make. And, yeah, Friedberg, you've you've said this many times, like, We are so, like, orders of magnitude away from being David Friedberg (01:30:56): Yeah. We're 10 years out. But but by the way, why try and stop it from competing? Let the VCs that wanna throw money at it, throw money at it, let the scientists pursue it, let the Speaker 5 (01:31:05): I think. David Friedberg (01:31:05): Let the thing that's made America so successful, be successful. By the way, imagine Elon got the starship up today. You guys saw this thing. It went into orbit. It was incredible. Imagine if Boeing and a bunch of defense contractors got together 10 years ago and said, we gotta stop SpaceX. These guys are trying to do stuff in an unsafe way. Jason Calacanis (01:31:24): We don't try it. David Friedberg (01:31:25): And they Friedberg they tried, and they will keep trying. And the freedom that we afford people and businesses in the United States of America is what allows us to have our unique edge and our unique ability to create progress that you don't see anywhere else on planet Earth. And this is the sort of that takes us back away. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:31:41): You just you just have the keyword, we, us, America. David Friedberg (01:31:45): America. Sacks Chamath Palihapitiya (01:31:45): to the TikTok thing. That's not an us thing. That's a Chinese thing. David Friedberg (01:31:49): I I kept the point. I'd I'm not like I'm not pro CCP, but, yeah, I get the point. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:31:54): Anything American? God bless us. Jason Calacanis (01:31:56): Let's go. American Exceptionalism. No, I I saw the headlines. I think CNBC reported that, the rocket, blew up on entry reentry. No. I mean, the the David Friedberg (01:32:04): By the way, they didn't they didn't say that. Did they? Jason Calacanis (01:32:07): I saw one headline where they had to put a little nag in the end of the sentence. David Friedberg (01:32:10): They were starling starling video for, like, an hour. It's not The Jason Calacanis (01:32:14): video was so crystal clear. It was like HD of this rocket coming back down to Earth. It was bonkers. So congrats to E Chamath Palihapitiya (01:32:22): Can I show you guys the most incredible tweet related to this? I'm just gonna send this to you, Nick. Jason Calacanis (01:32:28): Friendly, we're that Google's annual catering budget is 72,000,000, about twice the cost of. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:32:37): Today today, Elon made the entire human race. Multiplanetary. Yeah. And it costs half as much as what Google spends on food. That's incredible. Jason Calacanis (01:32:50): It does seem like it doesn't seem David Friedberg (01:32:52): like a lot of money to spend on food. I don't know. Jason Calacanis (01:32:54): It just seem like these rockets take 2 or threes. The new each time there's a new platform, it seems to take Elon exactly like 2 or 3 to nail it. And here we are again. You know, you know, that's a congrats to our boy. Great job. This David Friedberg (01:33:06): going back full circle, the persistence and the resilience that was needed to get this thing to happen, It's just like 20 years of step by step iterative. Nothing about the initial kind of instantiation or concept of, you know, what SpaceX needed to walk to get here was right. Everything had to change along the way. Starlink came along etcetera, etcetera. And here he is at the end of this period of time with this incredible craft, the largest object to ever fly in outer space It really is like an incredible moment in human history. And it took the degree of persistence, resilience. It was, I think, Sacks what makes American entrepreneurship. So powerful. It really is an incredible day. It was an amazing thing to watch. I don't know if any of you guys have ever gone to watch and watch any of the old Saturn launches on YouTube but I think this is a new era. It's really incredible. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:33:54): I think this was, like, 5 or 6 years ago. I got cleared to basically fly and hug Friedberg when they were doing a launch. And so I was able to see it as of the thing, like, kind of like, Friedberg to approach Sacks queue. It's one of the most incredible things I've ever done. So Jason Calacanis (01:34:14): I think we made some progress. If you look at the Google news Sacks, lot of praise for this launch soon. Yeah. Looks like people are kinda getting it. Yeah. Just incredible. I mean, this thing is so huge. I don't know if you've ever been inside of one of these things, but The David Friedberg (01:34:33): The start shift? Jason Calacanis (01:34:34): Yeah. I've been inside. I was inside the first one they built it. It is so large. The capacity of this thing is like, think you could fit, like, 3, 4, 500 human beings inside of it. David Friedberg (01:34:44): Maybe when we do our our often poker night, we can stop over and see it. Be Chamath Palihapitiya (01:34:48): really fun. Jason Calacanis (01:34:49): It's bonkers. And when you see it stacked, the height is like it it almost feels like you're looking at CGI in real in the real world, it is incredibly tall, like, incredibly tall. Alright. This is is your favorite podcast in the world episode 170 of the all in podcast. We never asked for this, but if you have a chance, we we do show on video. So if you're listening to audio, just type in all in podcast in YouTube, and you can see the 4 of us. I don't know if that's a bonus feature or not, but we do all the graphs and the charts and everything here. Alright. For David Sacks, the rain man, David Friedberg, your assaulted of science, Shamoff Palihapitiya, chairman dictate, I am the world's greatest moderator as David Sachs will attest, but all David Friedberg (01:35:38): those incredibly sharp ways. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:35:40): Go Christopher Walker whenever you do these outfits. Jason Calacanis (01:35:42): Why do Chamath Palihapitiya (01:35:42): you do that? Jason Calacanis (01:35:44): Sacks for listening to the all in podcast. Wow. David Sacks, poignant points about David caption, freedburg, wolves, Speaker 5 (01:35:53): mock meats, not to Jason Calacanis (01:35:54): me, Shamal, everyone loves a great detainer. See you next time. It's all in podcasts. Wow. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:36:12): Love you, boys. It's so good. Those David Sacks (01:36:14): are your better impressions. Jason Calacanis (01:36:15): That is your David Friedberg (01:36:15): fault, dude. Jason Calacanis (01:36:16): Because I David Friedberg (01:36:16): think that's right. I would say. Everyone's got their superpower. It's a Jason Calacanis (01:36:19): very nasty nasty j cal, but I'm Don't rum it. David Sacks (01:36:23): Don't rum it. Jason Calacanis (01:36:23): I'm coming on. I'm coming on, Ollie. Alright. Saks and Sacks invited me David Sacks (01:36:28): I've seen all the logins better than your trump. Jason Calacanis (01:36:31): I gotta work home. I I turned the trump off for 3 years. Give me a break. I'm gonna can you Speaker 5 (01:36:34): do a David Friedberg (01:36:34): Joe Apache? Speaker 5 (01:36:35): Can you Chamath Palihapitiya (01:36:35): do a Joe Pesci? Jason Calacanis (01:36:36): To have a Joe Petchen, David Friedberg (01:36:40): I feel like you do a good Joe Pesci. Jason Calacanis (01:36:41): I do a I do a I'll I'll bring you a Joe Pesci next. I take request. I'll do Joe Pesci. Sure. Why not? David Sacks (01:36:46): He only does the pesky involve terribly when it gets It's Jason Calacanis (01:36:49): in the chopper, everybody. David Friedberg (01:36:50): You gotta sort that out? Jason Calacanis (01:36:51): I'm running for I'm running for president. You got to change the laws. Crop, you have to change it so a gentleman can be president. Austrian. Austrian. Austrian. Yeah. Alright. Let's Speaker 6 (01:37:05): Thanks. Oh, yeah. Jason Calacanis (01:37:07): Rate and subscribe and all that other bull you want. Bye Chamath Palihapitiya (01:37:09): bye, girls. Speaker 5 (01:37:13): To let your winter's ride. Rainman, David Sachs. And it said, we open source it to the fans Uh-uh. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:37:43): We should all just get a room and have one big huge order because they're all just useless. It's like it's like sexual tension that they just need to release somehow. Jason Calacanis (01:37:53): Feet.