H-1B 大改、坎摩尔道歉、自闭症成因与加州仇恨言论法

Jason Calacanis (00:00:00): Alright, everybody. Welcome back to the number one podcast in the world, the all in podcast. We're back. We're back. We got the original crew here. It's a tight foursome with me again. He's returned from, I believe, The UAE and MENA, the one, the only, your chairman, your dictator, Chamath Palihapitiya. He puts the dick in dictator. That's what they all say. How are doing? Good. You? So you went and you got that, oh, what's that beautiful ailment that we all take to the region? Chamath Palihapitiya (00:00:31): Emirates first class. Yeah. Oh, Emirates first class cabin. It's insane. Jason Calacanis (00:00:36): With the wine? Take everybody in. Because I do business class for 14 dimes round trip. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:00:41): Emirates is unbelievable. But the problem is there's, like, literally a thousand movies. A thousand. So you have to, like, favorite out 30 or 40 of them. There was, like, 95 different menu choices. I had probably 8,000 calories. Jason Calacanis (00:00:56): Oh, really? And that was just the wine, I take it. Yeah. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:00:59): By the way, the wine is incredible. The wine list, like, 1996 Montrose, and I was like, is this an air I had never seen an airline wine list. It was pretty strong. David Friedberg (00:01:10): Did you Jason Calacanis (00:01:10): bring your sommelier Josh? Was he in the cabin next to you in Chamath Palihapitiya (00:01:13): his own? I didn't need it. No. I didn't need it. Jason Calacanis (00:01:15): I like that. I like that. And, of course, you're sultan of science. You got a great docket for him. It's kinda like the Super Bowl for sultan fans this week because David Friedberg (00:01:24): yeah. I hope I deliver, bro. I mean Well, Trump, autism, Jason Calacanis (00:01:28): and you're gonna comment on David Friedberg (00:01:29): it. This is a Jason Calacanis (00:01:29): pretty big deal. It's a pretty big deal. Speaker 4 (00:01:33): We'll let your winners ride. Rain man gave it silence. And I said we open source it to the fans, and they've just gone crazy Chamath Palihapitiya (00:01:44): with it. Love you, West. Queen Speaker 4 (00:01:45): of quinoa. Going all in. Jason Calacanis (00:01:48): And then, of course, the one, the only. He puts the bizarre and czar. David Sarrak's calling in from his Chamath Palihapitiya (00:01:59): his self directed David Sacks (00:02:00): soul from the zar. Words. It's it's you put the czar and bizarre, not the bizarre Jason Calacanis (00:02:04): and czar. Yeah. I kinda was I'm playing with it. I'm workshopping. It's I've been trying both ways. But yes. And you're calling in. You're echoing, which is great. David Sacks (00:02:14): I'm on the road. Jason Calacanis (00:02:15): You're on the road between meetings? David Sacks (00:02:17): Well Yeah. Basically. Exactly. Jason Calacanis (00:02:19): Are you in a motorcade? David Sacks (00:02:21): No. No. Jason Calacanis (00:02:22): Okay. Listen. The topic of the week, h one b visas are being overhauled. Trump administration announced a new $100,000 fee for all future h one b applications. It's a onetime fee. There's been a little confusion about it, and the details, but, you know, that's how they they do things in the forty seventh. Just some excitement, big announcement, and then we we figure out the details. Lutnick originally said it would be a 100,000 a year, but then the White House clarified it will be a onetime fee. This is a huge jump. The current fee is nothing. It's like 2 to 5 k that you pay to the government. You might pay a lawyer, you know, double that or triple that to to do the work for you if you're a big corporation. But, you know, this this hits on a lot of the Trump campaign promises, tougher on immigration, looking out for US workers. We've talked before here about the abuse, in the h one b system. I'll give some of my personal, you know, insights in that after I maybe I throw to you, Chamath. And before I do, they had an interesting poly market. Will courts block Trump's 100 k h one b by September 30? 3% chance in that happening. So it looks like everybody's kind of aligned with them with this program. Alright, Saks. I know you're on the road, but you your your your fans demand to hear your take on this. What what's what's your take? David Sacks (00:03:41): I think it's a good idea to have this $100,000 fee. And I'll tell you the reason why is because right now, there's something like five times as many H1B applications as there are slots. So I think they grant about 85,000 H1Bs a year, and many more apply for it. And as a result, they have a lottery where they just kind of, I guess, they randomly choose who the winners are going to be. And if you look over the past decade, roughly half the H-1Bs go to these IT consulting firms. Jason Calacanis (00:04:15): Yes. David Sacks (00:04:16): And the average salary is, like, $65,000 a year. So it kinda puts the lie to this idea that you hear that H-1Bs are for, like, high skilled engineers, AI researchers, things like that. That's not in practice what happens. In practice, what happens is you have this lottery, and a huge chunk of them end up going to low end IT jobs. And I think by putting this $100,000 fee on it, you encourage the applications to go to the actual higher skilled, higher paid jobs where there's actually a shortage of Americans. And you encourage US companies to try to fill those jobs with Americans first. And so I think, you know, putting aside some of the details, I think the big picture here is that they're using market forces to put some scarcity around the H-1B application. And I think what that's gonna do is encourage applicants to to actually be these higher paid, higher skilled jobs that the program is supposed to be for instead of these lower end IT shop shops. Jason Calacanis (00:05:19): Yeah. These are supposed to be for highly specialized workers. I can tell you, you know, when I was in IT in the early nineties, the abuse was happening all the time, and it was indentured servitude. It was disgraceful. The IT people would hire, typically Indians, and they would say stuff to the effect of these guys are gonna work for half as much and twice as long, and they can't say no. That's the best part of it. They can't say no when we put them on weekend coverage. They can't say no if we wanna do a build out and they have to work ten days in a row because we can kick them out of the country, and they have thirty days to find a new job. And so it's it's a giant scam on the bottom half of these. I witnessed it firsthand. Every discussion I've ever had about h one b's, you know, in relation to IT and consulting has always been about saving money. And the truth is, it's been abused. And I talked about this in 2015 on CNBC, Chamath, when Trump first started to talk about it. He's been on this for a while, and it's just great to see them. I I had suggested 20 k a year, and that's kinda where they wound up. I additionally think they should do an auction for one third of these. Let all these big tech companies that are truly trying to get in very unique PhDs from Oxford in AI, man, let them just put out how many they wanna buy and at what price, do a reverse auction, and fill one third of them with, I don't know, maybe OpenAI or XAI or Microsoft jumps the fence and pays a 100 k, 200 k per person. What do you think, Chamath, just broadly speaking on this and, the policy, the abuse, everything? Chamath Palihapitiya (00:06:57): I came to The United States initially on a TN visa, which is the NAFTA visa between Canada and America. And then I switched to an h one b, and then I got my green card and my citizenship in the early two thousand tens. Elon came in on an h one b. Sundar Pachaya came on an h one b. Satya Nadella came in on an h one b. There's a lot of folks that have done a lot of good things that have used this specific visa. That being said, I think Saxe is right that people have found an end around and had been abusing this h one b system. There was an incredibly exhaustive thread by Robert Sterling, I think it was about a year ago, but I wanted to use that as a jumping off point to explain a couple of reasons why I think that there's been rampant abuse. The first thing is the h one b program is supposed to be 85,000 visas a year. But here is the data. And so what you see is that in many years, including the last several, it's been upwards of 10 times that number. And so there are a lot of people that are getting shoehorned into this program. And when you see this, you can start to see why a lot of people are saying that there is wage suppression and that it's taking away from American jobs. Because if the program was meant to be for 85,000, you would think, well, listen, that's a drop in the bucket. Nobody would feel that in the American economy. But when you start talking about almost a million people a year, 600,000 to a million a year, that starts to be perceptible, and that is absorbing a lot of revenue and wages that would otherwise go to domestic born and legal immigrants that are already here. So that's thing number one. Thing number two is there was a myth that these h one b's were these extremely highly skilled people. And what Robert found out in the data is that actually, no. It's not really that case. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:09:04): And so I think the average salary, I just wanna get this exactly right, it's slightly under $120,000. Now if you started to tell me that these were the best in class PhDs in all of these whiz bang industries where the companies are raising billions and billions of dollars, you guys already know that this salary would not pass the smell test. Most executive assistants at tech startups make more than $119,000 a year. So the idea that some qualified grad is making this should already sort of set off alarm bells that maybe where there's smoke, there's fire. So that's the second thing. So number one, we've been over allocating by five to 10 x. Number two, these salaries aren't these incredible salaries that you think of, which tends to mean that there is the potential, as Jason, you said, in some form of indentured servitude and wage suppression. That's not good. And then the third thing is you would ask the question, well, who gets these things? And it turns out, as Sacks said, a large plurality of these visas don't actually go to American companies that are looking to hire talent to make this American business do better. These are foreign companies that are arbitraging labor and bringing people in. Jason Calacanis (00:10:25): So crazy. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:10:26): Cognizant is not an American business. Tatah. Infosys is not an American business. Tata, Wipro. It's not to say that that in and of itself is wrong, but you need to find the right visa class to do this under. Jason Calacanis (00:10:38): Yeah. They're hacking it. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:10:40): And so when you put all of this together, I think the sort of broad takeaway is from where this started and what it was intended to do, we've deviated pretty wildly. And I think that this is a very important reset. Now the last comment I wanna make is about the people that say, hold on. We are gonna cut our nose off to spite our face, and it's gonna stop an inflow of incredible talent. And what I would just remind people is that it is really important to remember that when you are in The United States for a master's or PhD, you already get an automatic visa. It's called OPT. So you have multiple years when you graduate from a useful degree program in The United States to find a job. I have several of these folks that work for me at 80, 90. These are incredible grads from Carnegie Mellon. They are off the chart smart. But because they did a master's or a PhD, they come with a couple of years, and you can oftentimes extend that. And that will give us a very good amount of time to figure out how exceptional they are. And then quite honestly, I would gladly pay the 100,000 to get these guys on an h one b program. So I think if we're gonna try to return this to what it was meant to be, which is to help American companies excel, get the best of the brightest, these changes, I think, are very good measures to course correct and get us towards that. Jason Calacanis (00:12:06): And to just give people the history of this, this was something that was started after World War two to get really specialized people like Polish and German, like geniuses building out rockets. And I had a really interesting discussion, if you could pull this tweet up. There's another sinister wrinkle to this. I had, this gentleman, Colin on, and he went to apply for a product manager. I had him on this week at Starter, that's my other podcast. And he applied and sent a resume with the reference number to the specific job, Friedberg, that he wanted at a company New Relic. And he did this because in order to have an h one b visa, you have to put the job in a newspaper. Right? So what these companies allegedly are doing is putting these jobs in these like obscure newspapers so that Americans don't see them. They're not putting them in places, you know, that you might see them. And there's a group of Americans who are going and finding these jobs and saying to Americans, go ahead and apply. Here's the shadow jobs, I think is what they call them. And so he put the reference number in there, and they wouldn't even interview him. And I talked to him, and he's kind of crest falling. He's like, you know, I'm I would like to apply for this job, but it's obvious that I can't get into it. This is like I think just shows the entitlement of these tech companies, and I don't know New Relic's position on this. They they can email us, and I'll I'll give it in the next episode. But they're basically listing fake jobs. And, somebody, Abby, from people ops over there just kinda doesn't even let him interview for the job. The whole thing is just really dirty at the at the low end. And at the high end, it's under monetized. So, Freiburg, your thoughts on this. I know you have a lot of friends. You're an immigrant yourself. I'm not sure how you got here and and what visa you came under, but I think it came when you were a kid. Jason Calacanis (00:13:55): Right? I'm not sure what your parents came under, but what are your thoughts on this and the impact it might have? David Friedberg (00:14:00): Well, I think there should be two separate programs for what we could call highly skilled workers. What you were referring to, at the end of World War two, there was a secret US operation called Operation Paperclip where we tried to recruit German scientists and engineers. Between 1945 and 1959, America recruited, I think, 1,600 of these scientists. So it was both, call it, disabling to an American rival or adversary, but also expansive because that was when the nuclear industry was growing and much of nuclear science was being pioneered in the earlier days in Germany. And so the kind of American workforce expanded, but more importantly, a new industry was able to be enabled and unlocked and grown in The US. And then the the German state was disabled by losing these scientists. One could make the case that a similar sort of scenario should exist today, that we should have a second operation paperclip. And perhaps it should be a continuing process rather than necessarily kind of this laissez faire process that we have today where we identify some of the top industries and the top scientists and the top top domains and go after those scientists proactively with government action, government support in partnership with private industry. If you look at papers being published across mainstream scientific journals, the majority of papers today across nearly every scientific domain are being published out of China. And this ranges from physics to chemistry to material science to biotech. And there's a real case to be made that perhaps those scientists would be better off and America would be better off if they were doing their research, pioneering here rather than there. Yeah. So I think that there's a very good strategic case to be made that perhaps like a more directed, high energy, high effort kind of operation paperclip be undertaken again around the world. The h one b program, I do agree, has been heavily abused as a way of kind of compensation arbitrage. And, you know, if you find a high highly qualified excellent talent, as we all know, for a high skilled laborer in engineering or science today, that person, if you amortize the h one b over seven years at a 100 k, that application fee, that's 15 ks a year, call it, that certainly seems worth it for the right sort of talent. David Friedberg (00:16:27): And it forces the question about can this person be found in The United States or not? The alternative would be to force a higher salary range such that you as a company are now basically being forced to pay a higher salary, which means you have to justify that this person is worth it to bring them in from an ex US and you can't find the talent locally. I'll tell you a program where we do this where it doesn't work in The US is called the h two a program. This is the immigrant farm worker program that we use for temporary labor on farms. And the way that program is set up today is you have to pay the farm worker that comes in on an h two a some amount over minimum wage. And the amount that you have to pay over minimum wage is a function of the average wage in that state across all industry. In the case of Florida, they're paying 5 to $10 over minimum wage for farm workers, and they cannot get any Americans to work on the farm. And they're being forced to pay 5 to $10 overage. And by the way, these farmers and these farm businesses are being heavily subsidized by the government. One way to think about the ridiculousness of what's going on is The US taxpayer is paying a premium salary to foreign workers. What we should be doing is enabling when there's no workers available in The US, we should be enabling a free flow of labor, but only in the case where there's no workers available in The US. But there is a downside to that model as we're now seeing in the in the ag industry. Farmers are losing money across the board, and they're having to pay a premium for foreign workers to come and work on the farm, and they can't get US workers. There's two sides to the sword on this is my point. But I do think this operation paperclip notion should be taken on as a separate kind of strategic mandate. Jason Calacanis (00:18:07): Yeah. And that was a a lot of the Jewish scientists had already fled Germany. My understanding paperclip was for the Nazis, the former Nazi scientists. And they were working on some pretty dark and cutting edge stuff in chemical and biological. It just wasn't rockets. Right? David Friedberg (00:18:24): Well, it was everything. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:18:25): It was everything. David Friedberg (00:18:25): Remember, at this era, we were just developing quantum theory, and quantum theory led to nuclear science, which led to the development of the atomic bomb. So, yeah, I think Operation Paperclip was pretty far reaching. But today, as an American, you really want all of the cutting edge research in material science, in physics, in chemistry, etcetera, to accrue to China? Or should we be thoughtful about it's talent that's making these breakthroughs. It's not necessarily institutional capacity. It's not like they have better institutions per se than we do. We have amazing institutions, amazing capacity, amazing place to live, and so on. So there's a real kind of mandate that we should probably think about undertaking here, not just for extension of our industry base, industrial base, but also for disabling what we would consider rivals or what American might consider rivals. David Sacks (00:19:10): Just on this Operation Paperclip point, it's interesting that China, the Chinese government, took away the passports of the engineers at DeepSeq after the launch of that model, or at least it was publicly reported. I can't attest to this from firsthand knowledge, but there are definitely a lot of reports about this. And you can see why. I mean, if we could recruit or snap up a few 100 or at most a couple of thousand of these top AI engineers, that'd be a game changer David Friedberg (00:19:44): Totally. David Sacks (00:19:44): In the AI race. So China will start to see those people as a strategic asset, and they're not gonna let them immigrate, I don't think. But it it would be something for us to think about. Similarly, on the chip design front, there's probably just a few thousand people. That's all we're talking about. That would be a game changer on that side. Although they're largely in Taiwan, not China. And again, I don't think the Taiwanese government's gonna be too excited for us to snap them all up and move them to America. But in both these fields, there are a relatively small number of people kinda like in the space race who, if they were all in America, be a huge game changer. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:20:21): Here's the thing. We do have a really rich diversity of people from all around the world in higher ed institutions in The United States getting masters and getting PhDs. We just need to be better organized about what to do with them. And we need to sort of reach out to those people, build relations with them, take advantage of OPT, and then we can always create a different class of visa for them. We have the ability to do these things called national interest waivers. So all of the infrastructure exists. And I think that if we can clean the decks on the h one b stuff, it'll give people a lot more incentive to support the national interest waiver concept. I think the reason why people don't believe in this entire immigration conversation is on every part of the distribution of immigration, people see problems. They see an open border on the one side. David Sacks (00:21:17): It's gonna be abused. Yeah. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:21:18): Exactly. Exactly. Jason Calacanis (00:21:19): Yeah. It's abuse, and and it feels terrible. David Sacks (00:21:21): There's been too many of these horror stories where an American is told to train their h one b replacement who's making 25% as much. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:21:30): Look. I shouldn't even tell this story, but it was told to me yesterday. And I don't know this to be true, so I don't wanna fan the flames of speculation here. But what I was told is that in certain countries, there are these puppy farms that essentially get these kids onboarded into US colleges. They're not the great colleges, but they are decent enough in all far flung corners of America. Get them into master's programs, they pay for their school, and then these folks have to then send money back to pay off their degree. So if that's happening, then these kids are being abused as well. Right? So the whole thing has just completely run amok, and I think we need to clean it up. At that point, we have the chance of rebuilding trust where then we can propose what Friedberg talked about, and everybody would be supportive because they see that the system works as intended. Jason Calacanis (00:22:21): I think closing of the border, I think, has made people feel a lot better about it because that was so abused that people just look at immigration in one bucket, and they don't separate it into multiple buckets. There's compassionate, you know, people who are true dissidents who we want to show compassion for. It's a small number of people. Then you have all these folks who were being taken with mules and coyotes over the border and then using that same compassionate designation and abusing that. And and when you do see that abuse, I think people, when they hear Trump come on here, and when he was a presidential candidate, president Trump came on and said, hey, we're gonna staple a green card right to those degrees. And then he immediately got backlash. Well, now I think if things have calmed down, and now president Trump and the administration have the high ground, they could say, look, we closed the border. Now we should have a really thoughtful discussion. We're giving these people American educations. They wanna start companies. Wanna build our companies. They wanna build products and services. Those products and services are gonna create more jobs. And look, we're at 4% unemployment, four point x. You know, we're we're in good shape because we closed the border, and that's where you had millions of people coming in. And that was the true problem, and this isn't the actual skip problem. David Friedberg (00:23:31): You make a really great point, Jakob. I mean, using the one word immigration to wrap up all of people that are coming to The United States, I think masks the real series of things or set of things that are underlying people seeking asylum, people in need, but then also people that we wanna go attract and bring here actively. And it's not probably not the right term to use just the word immigration. The word you probably use is It should have a qualifier and a qualifier for every term. You know? Jason Calacanis (00:23:58): Yeah. The term is recruitment, what you described, the paper clip mode. That's recruitment. Then you have dissidents, and that is compassion for true dissidents. And then there's And family, David Friedberg (00:24:09): and family. Jason Calacanis (00:24:09): And family. Great. So you have compassionate dissidents and family members. And then you have this big thing in the middle, which is everybody in the world wants to live here. Everybody can't, that's immigration. And so just put it in three buckets, and then our leaders need to have discussions, three different discussions, and have it in a thoughtful way, not muddy the waters and politicize this. That's what's been causing such a big problem. Both sides of this argument have been so charged. Hopefully, now that the biggest one has been deathly done by Trump. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:24:38): Trump said it at the UNGA. He said, you know how many people have crossed the border since since I came into office? He said, exactly zero. Yeah. Yeah. That's incredible. Jason Calacanis (00:24:49): I mean, we have the greatest military in the world. We can't close the border to people who are coming on, you know, with backpacks across the border. Like, we should be able to secure the border with drones and cameras. David Sacks (00:25:02): It was done deliberately. They opened the border, and you know that. Of course. Because remember when Texas tried to put up barbed wire Yeah. They did. Enforce their own border. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:25:12): That's right. David Sacks (00:25:12): The Biden controlled border patrol, got rid of it. They removed it. Jason Calacanis (00:25:18): That was a tell. David Sacks (00:25:18): So this this was done deliberately. Jason Calacanis (00:25:20): Yeah. That was a perfect tell. Like, I remember when I remember when we covered that last year. That was the total tell. Okay. Freiburg, some major news, in science this week. Let's talk about autism and the press conference that happened this week with Bobby Kennedy and president Trump. Here is the chart. Autism has increased dramatically over the years. There's a big debate of what's causing this, and there's obviously correlations. There's causations. There's the testing of this, and maybe we're just testing a little bit too loosely around this. But we went from one in ten thousand in 1970 to one in a thousand in 1995 to one in thirty two in 02/2022. The press conference, Freeburg, was a little spicy and unique, performative maybe, were some of the criticisms. But there's a real issue here. And why don't you take us through it and educate us so we can kinda get to reality? Because the press is having a field day with this, obviously, on both sides. David Friedberg (00:26:17): I think autism, just like Alzheimer's, there may be several underlying conditions that lead to what we would call the phenotype of autism. That is what we all observe as autism. You know, it's considered a spectrum disorder. There's many different variations of it. There may actually be many different underlying conditions or underlying drivers, biological drivers that are causing it. One of the drivers that came up during the press conference and in the subsequent interviews that Marty Makary, head of the FDA has done, is that they've identified and shared papers that have been out for some time that there is a receptor that absorbs folate, a type of vitamin B, and that that folate receptor may be attacked by the immune system. And as a result, you can't really uptake vitamin B. And so those cells dysfunction. And when those cells are dysfunctional, you end up having what looks like what we call autism. And so one of the things that they announced is they're gonna work on getting the label updated for leucovorin, which will resolve for many people the folate receptor issue. The other thing they they brought up is a paper that was done by Andrea Baccarelli, who's dean of the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health. This paper is is a bit old where he took several studies and analyzed them and showed that across 46 studies, nine of them showed no association with acetaminophen, the main active ingredient Tylenol. Four showed a negative association, meaning it was actually protective and good for the fetus. And 27 had a slightly positive association, which means that it was having some contributory effect to both ADHD and autism spectrum disorder when women would take acetaminophen while pregnant. And Nick, if you want to just pull up that image from the paper, this is the original paper that was published by, Baccarelli. David Friedberg (00:28:12): So again, he didn't do any primary research. He didn't actually go and study patients. He took the data from 46 other studies, and then he added it all together to run this kind of macro analysis. And you can see here that he showed some risk. There's no specific way to quantify that risk, but there's some increased risk of having attention deficit hyperactivity or autism as a result of taking acetaminophen while pregnant. Now I think autism again, one of the underlyings might be this autoimmune condition associated with the folate receptor. What causes autoimmunity is a whole another conversation, and we can get into the vaccine stuff if you guys want to because there's, obviously a lot of conversations going on right now about the immune system being primed to have kind of an auto antibody response. But, there may be other things contributing to it. So I think it's pretty clear that our modern world in the last couple of decades, there's a cumulative effect of environmental exposures that children are getting, whether it's microplastics, whether it's chemicals in the food, whether it's just the environmental exposure in the air related to small molecules, whether it's related to other things we're putting in our body, every one of these things, the way to think about it is maybe if it has a positive effect, it might increase your chance of autism by zero point zero five percent. And then another thing might increase your chance by zero point zero seven percent, and so on and so forth. And so when you add up all the things in our environment, there may be a cumulative effect that has a result in different underlying conditions in our body that may result in what looks like things that we call autism. And so none of these are very specific. There's one shot and one path and one specific thing. And I think that's very important. Jason Calacanis (00:30:00): Yeah. Let me just, ask two clarifying questions, really lightning round for you, Freiberg. Number one, for the audience, how is autism diagnosed in these studies? Is there a blood test, a genetic test, Or is it just a bunch of questions? I know the answer, but I wanted you to clarify it for everybody. And then how does this the geographical differences in autism, just like we saw with trans kids. You know, there's many in certain cities and none in others. So maybe you could talk a little bit about those two issues, which I think many people have been talking about. So I don't think David Friedberg (00:30:37): that there's one specific diagnostic test for autism as if it was one disease. Again, these are phenotypes. These are behaviors that are being measured that people call autism spectrum disorder. And so the diagnostic criteria falls under a set of screening and behavioral tests that go on. And, you know, one of the things survey. There there's a survey, there's an observation, and there's a bunch of things that get back Is Yeah. It a So it's there's a scoring system. Exactly. And so Chamath Palihapitiya (00:31:04): then there's different levels. What did you and SAC score? Jason Calacanis (00:31:07): Yeah. Where are you guys? Because we could we could bet hold on. Before you tell us, Jamath and I are gonna bet on it, I'm gonna say that Speaker 6 (00:31:13): Sax needs be great price. 16 points. Make it over under. Jason Calacanis (00:31:17): Over under? I think these guys are well, what's who's got who's highest on the spectrum? Chamath Palihapitiya (00:31:22): Well, Sax may have gotten him a ninetieth percentile. Jason Calacanis (00:31:24): He's definitely in the ninetieth percentile. How could we break up this Chamath Palihapitiya (00:31:26): Saxony market? We What need a David Friedberg (00:31:29): did Saxony put on the squat. By by the way, just to go back on the acetaminophen study. Jason Calacanis (00:31:35): So great. Speaker 6 (00:31:36): There's the emotional detachment. Go ahead, Jason Calacanis (00:31:38): Freepers. Go ahead. No reaction. You're laughing. David Friedberg (00:31:41): Well, I mean, I I I'm making an active choice not to engage. But the Jason Calacanis (00:31:46): I am making an active choice to repress my emotions. David Friedberg (00:31:50): One thing to note and and one of the controversies about all of this, the paper that was published by this guy, Baccarelli, from, I don't know if I'm pronouncing his name right, from Harvard. It's actually been challenged because in 2023, he was called as an expert witness in a lawsuit against the maker of Tylenol. And in that lawsuit, the judge threw out his testimony as unreliable because he was being paid a $150,000 to give the the expert testimony to work on the case. And so because of the payment that Jason Calacanis (00:32:18): he side was he on? David Friedberg (00:32:19): So this is the guy who published the paper that linked that showed an increase in Jason Calacanis (00:32:24): expert testimony. Was he pro Tylenol or or anti David Friedberg (00:32:27): Anti Tylenol. So he was he was an expert witness for the lawyers that were filing the claim against Tylenol. I will say in the last couple of days since this press conference, he has publicly said that we are not yet certain or sure about the link. And I wanna remind everyone that this association study indicates an increased risk, but that doesn't mean that if you take Tylenol, your child is gonna have autism. That doesn't mean that there's a determinism here. There is a statistical chance that there is a slight increase, and the more acetaminophen you take Well, no. No. No. The chance. And that's what the paper showed. Let let me let Chamath Palihapitiya (00:32:59): me take let me take the other side of this. Here's what we know. We know for sure that there is this potential autoimmune issue that you, as the mother, can express as an antibody. There's an antibody test for it. We also know that the child can be tested for it. So at a minimum, we're now at a point where we can create a very thorough, well funded study to get to the core of this issue. Separately, to the extent that you do test positive, there will be some doctors and some parents that may decide to take leucovarine prophylactically and then also to administer it to the child before it's clear whether they do or do not have autism. I have several friends who have kids on the spectrum. I talk to them about leucovarine. What they say is that when you have extreme autism, the drug is very effective. But when you have kids that are more sort of mild on the spectrum, then there's a lot of benefit from behavioral modifications and behavioral training and that it's not clear how effective that drug is. But in in one specific case, one of my friends is considering it for their child. Here's the point, though. I think the point is that we need to test for this, and I think that some combination of governments and industry should come together. Beyond that, the point that I wanna make, though, is and I think, Friedberg, I don't think you're adding to the conversation when you say that there's no determinism. Because on the off chance that there is, I would say that we don't know yet. When you see women taking acetaminophen in this performative art way, basically, to, like, try to, like, pwn Donald Trump, and it's all over TikTok and it's all over x, I just think it's reckless. And I think it solves nothing. You're supposed to go talk to your doctor about it in all weather conditions anyways. But then when you transform it into some sort of, like, protest vote without really knowing, I think is really dumb. David Friedberg (00:35:01): Yeah. And this this test, by the way, Shimab, I'll say this folate receptor anti autoantibody, there has been a test available, I think, since 2012. This has been around for some time. In fact Can the patients take this test? Of course. Because And there there was a there was a paper published on this. I'm trying to find this paper. I I'm not sure how much follow-up there's been. This is a SUNY paper where these guys went and found folks that were scored very high in the autism spectrum disorder diagnostic test, and they found a highest prevalence Over seventy percent had this folate receptor autoantibody. This was one paper, so I wanna I don't wanna give it, like, a ton of credence. There's a lot of follow-up that's happened since then, and I'm not an expert in this space. But I did kind of do some research on what the history is of this. And so this is a very well known kind of correlative effect, and it could be a very big contributor. But obviously, like, no one should feel like, hey, if I don't have autoantibodies, then my kid is fine. That doesn't necessarily mean the case. Again, there may be several paths to autism. The thing about acetaminophen, just like, hey, have a drink or smoke a cigarette, the more you do, the higher the risk. This is the case with anything we put in our body. And I think that's the point about, like, what they've identified in paper that was published regarding acetaminophen. And so there's still a lot to be kind of determined on how they're gonna provide guidance to women that are pregnant on do you have a fever? Do you take it for pain? What's the right criteria? Chamath Palihapitiya (00:36:23): I'll say we we all agree. Medicating yourself to make a political point Jason Calacanis (00:36:27): is Hilarious. What are we doing? David Friedberg (00:36:30): That can't be true. It's absolutely idiotic. Jason Calacanis (00:36:32): Absolutely happy. This is true David Friedberg (00:36:33): with the sworns. It's Yeah. David Sacks (00:36:37): I think for his next trick, president Trump should warn people not to snort rat poison. Jason Calacanis (00:36:41): Yes. Also not a good idea. David Sacks (00:36:43): Somebody was tweeting, next president Trump's gonna recommend not using, toasters while you're in the bathtub Yeah. Just to see what people do. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:36:53): My fellow Americans, in light of recent studies, I wanted to warn against the use of toasters in your bathtub or your shower. Jason Calacanis (00:37:02): Don't do it. Don't put the toaster in the David Sacks (00:37:05): You know people are gonna do it if he tells them not to. Jason Calacanis (00:37:07): Exactly. Exact I mean, I have such an inappropriate joke right now. I'm not gonna say it. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:37:11): Let's take Friedberg's math when I saw that, and you think maybe there's a point 05% chance. Well, guess what? If you stack that up and it actually turns out to be true across the thousands of women that then performatively did this idiotically, you could actually have an extra kid or two with autism that didn't need to have it. What what is going on in America? David Sacks (00:37:34): Well, look. I think there there are a lot of people who instantly had a snarky reaction because it was Trump and Bobby Kennedy making these claims about Tylenol, and the media played into that. And look. I don't know what the truth of it is, but there are David Friedberg (00:37:51): Even Tylenol tells you to not take it. They say call your doctor. David Sacks (00:37:54): Yeah. Exactly. There are David Friedberg (00:37:55): How stupid are these people? David Sacks (00:37:57): There are plenty of articles establishing this risk. There's a paper from Johns Hopkins from 2019 called taking Tylenol during pregnancy associated with elevated risk for autism and ADHD. David Friedberg (00:38:10): Pull this up. This is to your point. This is CNN's coverage on when these acetaminophen studies came out historically. And you can see that when, it was announced at the Trump conference yesterday, they said Trump links autism to acetaminophen use during pregnancy despite decades of evidence it's safe. And then if you read back so this is twenty seventeen, twenty sixteen. Acetaminophen during pregnancy may increase risk of hyperactivity. Studies link acetaminophen in pregnancy Jason Calacanis (00:38:37): during pregnancy. Says it. David Friedberg (00:38:38): So when Trump says it Take the name. In the headline in that no. In the headline, they dismiss it. But every other time every other time, they've taken the paper and they've published a news article on the paper itself. I just couldn't believe this all this, like, CNN. Yeah. David Sacks (00:38:52): They ignore all their previous reporting on the subject. I mean, that's that's what's kinda crazy about it. Jason Calacanis (00:38:57): This supercut was hilarious. Check out the, this is the supercut of Trump saying Tylenol. It was hilarious. Speaker 7 (00:39:04): Don't take Tylenol. Don't take it. With Tylenol, don't take it. Don't take it. Don't use Tylenol. Don't take Tylenol. Don't take Tylenol. Fight like hell not to take it. I think you shouldn't take it. Jason Calacanis (00:39:17): It's just hilarious how he presents information. Just don't take Tylenol. Don't take Tylenol. Great week for Motrin, though. So I heard sales are up for them. David Friedberg (00:39:25): No. Because it's also been established Chamath Palihapitiya (00:39:27): for a very long time. David Friedberg (00:39:28): You don't take ibuprofen, asthma. You definitely don't take ibuprofen. Even worse. Yeah. Yeah. Ibuprofen is terrible if you're pregnant. So wait minute. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:39:35): Why why is it is it specifically that this one mechanism of action was completely inoculated and every other mechanism of action for things like pain relief and headaches are known to be pretty bad for women and babies? Come on, David Friedberg (00:39:48): guys. Jason Calacanis (00:39:48): Yeah. Friedberg, explain to us the disparity in different regions of the world and autism. Would you think that's the surveys and maybe people in The United States are a little more? David Friedberg (00:40:02): Again, I'm not an expert in this stuff, J. K. L. I I can opine on kind of what I've read and I've done some study. But think about my, like, level of knowledge being in the range of hours compared to years, which Jason Calacanis (00:40:13): Oh, well, no. David Friedberg (00:40:14): Which I yeah. But I would say, Jason Calacanis (00:40:15): like expert on this because I've watched all seasons of love on the spectrum. And I love that show. Yeah. Have you you seen that Shabbat, love on the spectrum? Chamath Palihapitiya (00:40:24): What is it? Jason Calacanis (00:40:25): Oh, watch it with Nat. It's she'll love it. It's great. David Friedberg (00:40:29): I do agree with the general notion that we have a cumulative effect. Like, many studies that are done, by the way, are very organized around short duration, high exposure when it relates to novel molecules in the environment and how they're and how we're exposed to them. Yeah. The cumulative long term effect of these things, as we learned recently with respect to like the amount of microplastics and the endocrine disrupting nature of microplastics where they can actually bind to specific receptors and as a result block expression or binding of other proteins, which can have a systemic kind of effect on you. We didn't realize that until recently after we've been making plastics for seventy years. And then we didn't realize these plastics were breaking down and cumulatively kind of, you know, growing in our environment, in our water supply, our food, in our balls, in our brains, in our hearts. And so what are these molecules doing as they accumulate in our body? And that now needs to be studied and understood. And then we have this big challenging industrial question of what do we do about it. But that's true for nearly every novel molecule we've developed over the past hundred years on Earth. Some of them, by the way, we could make the case. We can show deterministically they break down, they don't persist, they're fine. And then some of them we could say like, look, there's a cumulative effect. As more of these molecules enter our body and some of them stay in our body, they over time increase the probability of things like DNA breaks resulting in cancer or things like endocrine disruption resulting in metabolic effects, or things like we might be seeing now with folate receptor autoantibody presentations that drive autism spectrum disorder. So I think that there's a lot to be said, generally speaking, about the cumulative effect about a lot of the stuff we put in our environment. David Friedberg (00:42:10): And as much as I could disagree with things that Bobby Kennedy might say, I can tell you asking these questions is critically important. As scientists, we have to constantly interrogate, and this cannot be just a political point. I'm not, like, gonna sit here and say, I agree with the statements that might be made by the president when he says never take acetaminophen. I think it's little more nuanced than that, frankly. But I do think that the idea that we should be asking the questions and interrogating for answers is very, very important. And so I Jason Calacanis (00:42:35): think that's an important takeaway because if you talk to people who have been impacted by this and people in the community, the reaction was, we're glad we're getting a lot of attention. Yeah. That was some weird press conference on the margins, but we're glad that this is a focus now. And I think people are also glad about vaccines. Again, I don't think we should be banning vaccines, but but I do like the idea that we're questioning all these things, and we're not just giving the medical industrial complex a complete pass on this and that we're spending money and investing in it. So let's go on to our next story around censorship. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:43:07): How much money do you think is spent in The USA annually on autism? Gosh. Do you think it's enough to fund a longitudinal Jason Calacanis (00:43:16): trial? Yeah. I mean, that's I I don't have the data to know. And then I guess you would on a societal basis, you would be thinking, is there a better use of capital? Right? We but we're a rich country. We have the ability to fund some of the stuff, and there's private companies who probably would fund this too. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:43:33): I bet you we're wasting money in all kinds of random places where Yeah. Finding a few billion dollars to run this trial is a good thing. Jason Calacanis (00:43:41): Yeah. That probably makes sense. Alright. We've got a lot of news in the censorship space. So this is This Week in Censorship. So much to talk about. First story up, Jimmy Kimmel is back on the air. Earlier this week, Disney announced that ABC would resume airing Kimmel's show. And I think that was Tuesday night. Disney explained why they suspended Kimmel last week to avoid further inflaming a tense situation at an emotional moment for our country, and they call Kimmel's comments ill timed and thus insensitive. He came back and had a massive amount of reach. But Nexstar and Sinclair's affiliates, they decided to not air it, and that was 60% of the market. So interesting. Polymarket had Jimmy Kimmel canceled by September 30. It was nearly 80% after Kimmel was suspended last week, but that's plummeted to 1% since then. It was quite emotional. I'm guessing everybody watched it and I did not I did not watch it. Oh, you didn't watch it? Okay. Well, we'll play a clip here. It was I felt You David Friedberg (00:44:46): should watch you should watch what felt. Jason Calacanis (00:44:47): And yeah. It was incredibly heartfelt and deft in terms of its execution. It was sincere. And here it is. Jimmy Kimmel (00:44:54): I don't think what I have to say is gonna make much of a difference. If you like me, you like me. If you don't, you don't. I have no illusions about changing anyone's mind. But I do wanna make something clear because it's important to me as a human, and that is you understand that it was never my intention to make light of the murder of a young man. I I don't I David Sacks (00:45:16): don't think there's anything funny about it. I Jimmy Kimmel (00:45:18): I posted a message on Instagram on the day he was killed, sending love to his family, and asking for compassion, and I meant it. I still do. Nor was it my intention to blame any specific group for the actions of what it was obviously a deeply disturbed individual. That was really the opposite of the point I was trying to make. But I understand that to some that felt either ill timed or unclear or maybe both. And for those who think I did, point a finger, I get why you're upset. If the situation was reversed, there's a good chance I'd have felt the same way. I have many friends and family members on the other side who I love and remain close to even though we don't agree on politics at all. I don't think the murderer who shot Charlie Kirk represents anyone. This was a sick person who believed violence was a solution, and it isn't. It ever. Jason Calacanis (00:46:11): Yeah. And he references later in this apology of sorts. I think it was pretty pretty clear he was apologizing his own faith, his Christianity, and just how beautiful it was that the widow of Charlie Kirk had forgiven the shooter. And he got broken up about that as well. He then went on to do a bunch of jokes and have a normal show. It was massive ratings. Obviously, everybody was tuned into it. David Friedberg (00:46:35): And we'll see He didn't apologize. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:46:37): I didn't hear an apology. Okay. Did he apologize? Do you know do know what that means Jason Calacanis (00:46:45): in in Chamath Palihapitiya (00:46:46): the English language? My understanding, if you look at Twitter and stuff, was that there was not technically an apology. Okay. David Sacks (00:46:53): He didn't apologize, and he didn't say what he had done wrong. I guess what he said is that I didn't mean to make light Chamath Palihapitiya (00:46:59): of Wasn't my intent. Jason Calacanis (00:47:00): Yeah. It wasn't his intent. Explanation more than an apology? Okay. David Sacks (00:47:05): Nobody was accusing him of making light of the murder. What he did and what people were upset about is that he lied and said that the shooter was Maga, and he did not hit the nail on the head in terms of addressing that. And he's being called out for that. Now look. I still think that his statement there, let's call it an apology, was constructive and positive because at least he is showing empathy towards the other side. He obviously feels bad for Erica Kirk and for Charlie Kirk. And in the current overheated political environment, just expressing empathy for the other side is a positive statement. And I think he definitely brought the temperature down. And I think later in the statement, he also makes an important point about he says, you know, just selfishly, I have threats on me. And what he's basically saying is, look. We don't wanna get into a civil war here. We don't want to get into a cycle of tit for tat retaliation. Let's not play Hatfields and McCoys. This is my words. He didn't say this, but that was sort of the intimation of what he was saying. And I think that is a good thing to say. I mean, no one here should want a civil war, and this thing can go off the rails really badly. So, look, I think that his statements were positive and and and welcome, and they showed empathy for the other side. But he did not fess up to what he really did wrong here, which was to claim that the shooter was MAGA. That was the thing that was deeply offensive. Jason Calacanis (00:48:41): That's yeah. David Sacks (00:48:42): And hold on. And and the reason why he did that is he was not the only one doing it. In the early days of this shooting, this assassination, it was a talking point on the left that the shooter could be right wing. And the reason why people on the left were saying that is it was exculpatory. It was basically to put the blame on the other side instead of looking in the mirror and popping to the fact that there is this rise of left wing political violence and assassination culture. As we demonstrated on the pod last week, by looking at all the data and all the numbers, there really is this poisonous ideology that is on the left. And, yes, there's some of it on the right, but way more of it on the left that political violence can be used to solve problems. And the left really does need to look in the mirror and rid itself of that ideology. And by not admitting that this assassin was motivated by that ideology, they are ignoring that opportunity for self reflection and for progress. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:49:43): That last part is important. I think the point is that when you say that somebody is mentally deranged, what most normal people do is then say, oh, it was an aberration. It was an outlier. And I think that that is a dangerous way to try to sweep under the rug what is something that's more virulent and is increasingly acceptable in society. David Sacks (00:50:06): This guy might have been crazy in the sense that he was willing to use murder to achieve his objectives. I think we can all say on some level, that's crazy. Doesn't mean he wasn't animated by ideology that lots of people believe. And I think the proof of this was the celebratory reaction to the assassination of Charlie Kirk. You saw it on TikTok. You saw it on Blue Sky. You saw it on these corners of social media. You definitely saw it on Reddit where you had thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of people celebrating the death of Charlie Kirk and basically buying into this idea of political violence as a solution to their problem and to the idea that it was acceptable to use violence against people they hated. And so, again, this is the problem with the random nut theory is that it really ignores all the evidence we have about the larger reaction to the Charlie Kirk assassination. And this is a thing that the left really doesn't wanna confront. It does not wanna look in the mirror here and say that we have a problem on the left with this assassination culture. And we talked about this last week. And if you look at polling, they just did polling around this, and there's still millions of people on the left who believe that the shooter was MAGA. And Jimmy Kimmel helped foster that belief with this disinformation that he put out there. And he really should have hit the nail on the head in terms of saying that he got that wrong, that it was wrong to say that, and he he could have been a little bit clear about that. I'm not dismissing the positive things he said because I do think it was good for him to show that I mean, I'm gonna give him credit for getting emotional. I know I know a lot people on the right think that it wasn't sincere. I think that it probably was sincere. I'm gonna give him credit for that. I think his comments were constructive, but he did not apologize for the thing he actually did wrong. David Sacks (00:51:57): And in fact, he just replaced that original eye with a new form of left wing spin, which was the random nut theory. And I think yeah. Let me stop there. But the but the point is that, really, we need to come to grips with the fact that there is this toxic political ideology now that's mostly on the left that does need to be confronted. Jason Calacanis (00:52:18): I'm gonna go ahead and say, you know, we we should clean up a little bit here, or I'm gonna clean up. He should have, I think, made it clear that this wasn't a MAGA person, but I'm just gonna repeat the quote. We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to swear political points from it. Now he should have said that turned out not to be true. It was actually a liberal. And I think it was not that he said the guy was MAGA. He said people were speculating he was MAGA. That actually was true. So just to be clear here, he never said the person was MAGA. David Sacks (00:52:57): Wait. Who is speculating? The MAGA people never speculating on Charlie Kirk's fans, his loved ones, his coworkers weren't speculating about this. No. On the left. Hold on. People on the left, of which Jimmy Kimmel was one, were trying to plant the story that this assassin could be MAGA. Jason Calacanis (00:53:18): Well, mean, this is and this is the problem. David Sacks (00:53:20): Deliberately hold on. That was done deliberately as disinformation to take the blame off of the political ideology. Jason Calacanis (00:53:26): Yeah. I don't I don't think anybody no. David Sacks (00:53:28): And the culture of political assassination that's been rising on the left. Jason Calacanis (00:53:32): Okay. So over that weekend, there was definitive speculation that this might be a groiper, one of Nick Fuentes' fans. There was also significant speculation, and this is why people shouldn't speculate in a breaking news environment because you'll frequently get it wrong. And people had gotten it wrong because they assumed that this individual was MAGA because his parents were. And then when it turned out it wasn't true, that's when the record got corrected. But this was one of these instances where people actually were speculating, and they were wrong. And that's why you should always wait in a breaking news environment. David Sacks (00:54:08): Well, you're using a lot of passive tense in order to avoid who said what. Jason Calacanis (00:54:14): How so? David Sacks (00:54:15): You said there was a lot of speculation. Jason Calacanis (00:54:17): No. There was social media speculate. David Sacks (00:54:19): There was an effort to create a narrative, a false narrative, that somehow MAGA was to blame for this. And Jimmy Kimmel was one of the leading people who did that. We covered last week the rundown, the timeline of what was known at the time that Jimmy Kimmel said that. And Meg and Kelly did an excellent job summarizing everything we knew. We knew what was written on the bullet casings. We knew what the parents had said. We knew what the friends had said. Megyn's tweet on this is very exhaustive. So you're acting like there was a legitimate basis for Jimmy to say what he said, and there wasn't. And I don't know why you're covering for him. Jason Calacanis (00:54:55): Right? No. No. I'm not covering for anybody. I'm clarifying a factual error. He did not say the person was Magna. He said there was speculation that weekend, which that weekend, there was speculation that this was a groiper and that his family was Magna. And I'm just on social media, everybody was speculating about this. That's and I think the the problem here is that we're saying that the left wants to assassinate people. The left has assassination culture. I know many people on the left. I don't know anybody. I haven't talked to a single person on the left who is in favor of what happened or in any way supports it. And it's quite the opposite. Every single person I know on the left, every single person, you know, who is a high profile person on the left with the exception of maybe one or two really dark people, they have all said that this is horrible and tragic, and there is no place in civil society for violence. So I'm trying to actually balance this down and say, this wasn't the left. This is not the left strategy. The strategy does not want to murder people. That that is absolutely false. And the left is not pro assassination culture. All the leadership on the left David Sacks (00:56:06): You certainly changed your tune because last week, we showed you plenty of data showing that there was three times as many people on the left who are celebrating or endorsing political violence. You didn't object to that then. You didn't show me data on the opposite. You're just saying that no one you know. Well, I'm glad that no one you know is celebrating political murder. Only first time Jason Calacanis (00:56:30): I and the only leader I saw was Ilhan Omar, who was just saying, like, Charlie Kirk's got a terrible legacy, etcetera. Like, inappropriate comments there, obviously, but every other person uniformly condemned this. Now I know there's tons of surveys out there. And I think if we're gonna talk about political violence, the right also has a political violence problem and that they need to do. We saw on January 6, MAGA and all of these people beat police officers and destroy the capital. That is also political violence. It's not an assassination. It's obviously distinctly different, but they were beating cops. Okay? And the price they paid for that was they were all given pardons for beating police officers. Okay? So there needs to be better leadership from the Democrats and the right on this. And everybody needs to calm this down and say, this is not acceptable. Whether you're beating cops up on January 6, assassinating somebody, threatening people to that they have to fight, This is all terrible. Everybody has to calm everything down. And that's an example I'm trying to make here on this program is to have productive dialogue even though we disagree about things. Every person I know who's on the left, every person I know was absolutely believes this is abhorrent, and they would never condone it. Period. Full stop. And every leader with the exception of, like, one or two people who I don't understand why they would ever criticize, you know, a Christian who was murdered in cold blood. I I'm sorry. It's that's totally unacceptable. But anyway, that's my position on it. David Sacks (00:58:03): Look, I understand this is a heated issue. Let me just make one final point. I I know that both sides have their quote, unquote, nut cases, violent extremists who engage in horrific crimes, and they should all be denounced equally. The difference here that I think we saw with the Charlie Kirk assassination is that you saw thousands, maybe even upwards of a 100,000 people on the left, social media, rejoice and celebrate his assassination or downplay it and minimize it on the grounds that somehow he deserved it for the things he said. And I just have to say, I don't think we've seen that behavior before on the part of the right. Whenever there's been some horrific crime, I don't remember anyone on the right ever celebrating that. It was not something that was mainstream discourse by any means. I certainly do not see thousands of videos and Reddit posts celebrating that. And I think what you see in the polling data is that, yes, there are some people on the right who feel that political violence is acceptable or a solution, but that number is three times greater on the left. I'm glad J doesn't know any of those people. That's reassuring. But nonetheless, it's there in large amounts of data. And I think that we need to address that problem without minimizing it or both sidesing it, or else we're never gonna make progress as a country. David Friedberg (00:59:21): Okay. Jay Kal and Chamath both had to run. We started late today, and we ran a little bit too long for both of them. Saxe and I are gonna wrap it up with a quick conversation on AI. Saxe, I don't know if you saw, but there were two papers that were published this week, each of which on their own, I would say, were were pretty kind of important. I'll highlight the first one. And, Nick, if you could just pull this first one up. This is the MIT paper. So this paper is called teaching LLMs to plan. And, effectively, what this, team did and, again, they were out of MIT in collaboration with a scientist at Microsoft AI in Mountain View. They basically created an instruction tuning framework that teaches LLMs to do symbolic planning, which basically means that the LLMs think about step by step or chain of thought in a smarter way by making them generate explicit state action state chains, and then they trained that model by giving them feedback with an external plan validator, which is effectively gonna be a human or or a software tool that says, did this series of steps make sense to do the thing you're trying to do? If not, here's what you did wrong. Here's what you should have done better. And they were able to achieve planning accuracy of up to 94% on some standardized benchmarks that are used for chain of thought reasoning and planning using LLMs. This is a 66 absolute improvement over baseline models. And so this is pretty substantial. They took LAMA three, and they were able to increase the performance from 1% to 64%. The outcome of this basically is that this sort of a system can be used to train LLMs to do better reasoning and better chain of thought in such a dramatic way that LLMs will look like they are starting to reason. And so by training them effectively on the steps in planning on how to reason, the LLMs get better at looking like they're doing reasoning using this kind of symbolic planning method that they then built a tuning framework around. That sounded a little bit complicated, but I think ultimately what it translates to is they figured out a method to get AI to act in a more reasoned way in developing step by step plans and execute against those plans. David Friedberg (01:01:39): And the results and the benchmarks are incredible. So this was a big breakthrough, I would say, this week, Sax. I don't know if you spent any time looking at this paper from MIT or talked to your team about it. David Sacks (01:01:48): I haven't seen it. But what what exactly is the symbolic framework they're talking about? Exact you know, what what exactly is that that I mean, I understand chain of thought, but what is it that that improves accuracy? David Friedberg (01:01:59): There's an old language called PDDL or planning domain definition language. PDDL is kind of a an attempt to standardize AI planning languages. So it's been around for a long time. I think it's been around since, like, the late nineties. And it's effectively a series of symbols that define planning. What they were then doing is basically using PDDL to try and set a series of steps that the LLM would use to reason and get to an answer on doing a task or or running an action. And then they tuned the PDDL using this tuning framework that they developed, giving it feedback. And then they also fed it good plans and bad plans and said, this is a good plan. This is a bad plan. And so overall, the LLM was then run-in such a way that it actually had a better set of steps that it would use to solve a particular problem. And so this can then lead to all of the underlying machinery of an LLM being better utilized to solve a bigger problem, to solve kind of a a chain of thought or to solve some reasoning problem that requires several steps or planning. I think it was a very good breakthrough. The the benchmark data that they shared was pretty impressive, and it's getting quite a bit of attention this week. That was one, I think, really interesting paper that came out this week. The other one and, Nick, maybe you can pull this one up. So this one's really impressive, Sachs. This comes from a team in Germany. This paper was published in the journal Nature Computational Science. These folks took a GPU. And for each token, typically, you'll have the entire key value chain transferred from high bandwidth memory to cache memory. So this means that you're moving a lot of data between one type of memory and another type of memory. And what they were able to do is they were actually able to reduce the physical memory size that's needed to run the attention window. As a result, the energy and the total token cost to run inference went down significantly. I'm trying to simplify this down as best I can, but what matters is the the end data that they provided. Their architecture led to a speed up of 7,000 x compared to the NVIDIA Jetson Nano, 300 x compared with NVIDIA RTX forty ninety, and then a 100 x compared to the NVIDIA h 100. David Friedberg (01:04:21): And the energy was reduced by 40,000 x compared to Jetson Nano, 90,000 x compared to RDX forty ninety, and a 70,000 x energy reduction for the same outcome over an h 100. So I think that this mechanism, if it scales, this new kind of technique can have a pretty dramatic effect on the energy consumption needed to run AI. And importantly, because you need far less memory, you can actually move a lot of AI inference to the edge of the network, meaning you could put, for example, a very high powered LLM model that could be run-in a robot or in a piece of equipment or in a computer or on your phone that historically you'd need to run-in a data center because you needed a very high powered GPU chip stack. And so this architecture, I think, could be one of these big architectural breakthroughs. We've spoken with Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt and Sundar and Demis about the big architectural breakthroughs that are coming in AI that could ultimately lead to many orders of magnitude reduction in the energy cost needed to run inference and to run AI models. Again, if the scales, then all of our assumptions about the data center, about the energy can start to kind of be thought about under this new kind of architectural framework, which might naturally result in much, much lower need states. We'll see. But it was a really, I think, important paper, and folks are gonna look up this paper and say, this could be a pivot point in how we think about the energy and infrastructure needs to support AI. I don't know if you and your team have reviewed it, but it's definitely worth spending some time on. David Sacks (01:06:01): Yeah. Look. I think the writing was on the wall that models are going to get smaller and smaller and more efficient to the point where they can run on the edge on local devices. I mean, that was one of the implications of DeepSeek. But if you look more recently at, I think, the launch of Llama four, their smallest model, I think it's called Scout, runs on a single GPU. Jimmy Kimmel (01:06:28): Right. David Sacks (01:06:28): So I think we're gonna have a whole range of smart devices that will have a single GPU running a pretty decent AI model. And, I mean, obviously, your phone will have one too. Probably a much better one. David Friedberg (01:06:44): Have you and your team talked about, like, what the energy demand curve looks like as these better architectures? Like, if we're talking 10,000 x reduction in energy to run a token, have you guys thought about, well, you know, does energy scale as we've projected it to scale? Does data center need scale like we've projected it to? Or do you think that because they're more efficient, we'll actually have more demand? David Sacks (01:07:03): That just sounds a little too good to be true right now. David Friedberg (01:07:05): Right. David Sacks (01:07:06): As between papers and products, I pay a lot of attention to the launch of products. I don't pay a lot of attention to papers. David Friedberg (01:07:13): Right. David Sacks (01:07:13): I know that some papers end up being really important. For example, the paper on the transformer architecture back in 2017 turned out to be enormously important. But I think that a lot of papers don't really go anywhere for whatever reason. Maybe they're hard to reproduce, so they don't scale, what have you. So I just don't really pay that much attention to the academic literature. I do pay a lot of attention to product launches. And when someone launches something revolutionary, then it immediately gets everyone's attention because you don't have to speculate about whether a proof of concept's gonna be possible or not. You actually see it. I guess what I'm saying is that the proof of the pudding is in the eating. David Friedberg (01:07:51): Right. David Sacks (01:07:52): I think we're gonna need a lot more power, a lot more electricity. I think that's pretty well known. We haven't even gotten to the robot revolution yet. If that's coming in the next five years, that's gonna be energy intensive. So David Friedberg (01:08:04): If this thing's even close to being correct, then you could run the most kind of sophisticated LLMs in a robot without it needing to be run out of a data center going forward, And the robots can simply make a request for information from the Internet that they need, but all of the actual computation, the reasoning, all of the base knowledge would sit locally in that device. It's really incredible to think about. Like, we are gonna end up with these, like, robots. It's amazing. David Sacks (01:08:33): Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think that's right. I mean, I think that self driving wouldn't work if you had to run all the inference on the cloud. I mean, it's run locally, right, by powerful AI chips. And then, obviously, it can connect when it needs to. But, no, I I would expect that robots are gonna have a local AI model. David Friedberg (01:08:53): Yeah. Okay. Cool. Well, that's it. I mean, those were the two papers I thought were really pretty impressive this week. David Sacks (01:09:01): Hey, Friedberg. What exactly happened with YouTube? Do you have an update on what happened with our episodes from All In Summit that appear to be Shadowbanned? Yeah. Tell us what happened there. David Friedberg (01:09:11): Okay. So thank you to the folks at YouTube. They actually worked all weekend to help us figure out what happened, and there was nothing nefarious. There was no shadow banning going on. What happened was, you guys may recall, a couple of months ago, we stopped bleeping out curse words in our episodes, and we muted them instead. And when we muted them, the YouTube algorithm still thought that we were saying the curse word quietly, and it still showed up in the YouTube transcript. When you have a curse word in a video, YouTube marks it as restricted. So it's kind of not age appropriate, and so that's why it was getting the restricted mark. When we went back, the episodes that did get restricted all had a curse word in them, and we understand clearly what happened. So going forward, we are gonna use the bleeping again instead of just muting. It was very benign, not nefarious. YouTube did a great job supporting us. We went back and fixed all the old episodes. They're all out of restricted mode, and we started reposting all of our summit videos again. So, yeah, I mean, conspiracy corner is closed on that one. David Sacks (01:10:10): Well, hold on. Do creators know about this, that if you have f bombs in your show that you go on to restricted mode? David Friedberg (01:10:18): You know, that's a great question. There's no and we were talking to the YouTube product team about this. There's no easy way for YouTube creators to see that a video has been tagged as restricted. And so they need to fix that. They're going to fix that, they told us. And so I think we should all kind of continue to hold them to that because it's important that creators don't know why. One of the questions we had for them, which we thought was a theory, was if people report your video, does it automatically go into restricted mode? And the answer is no. So the reporting triggers a review separately, but the restricted mode algorithm is distinct. But when it comes to this, like, restricted mode being triggered, you don't know that it happened. You don't get a notice. You're not aware of it, and they need to address that, obviously. David Sacks (01:11:04): They need to have, like, a dashboard that shows you any kind of restriction on your videos and a reason code for why. David Friedberg (01:11:11): That's right. And specific time stamps because they their engineers were able to pull it up for us, look at the time stamps, point us to them, and we could see what happened. That should be apparent. Like, they should present that to the creators. They know why they got restricted. Think I part of the argument was like, well, restricted mode in YouTube isn't a big deal. It turns out it is a big deal. We saw it in our traffic. We had big drop off because a lot of network administrators, so the people that run the Wi Fi at Starbucks or on your public bus and subway or in your, you know, office, they have a network setting that's called safe mode. And safe mode was originally designed to block porn or other not safe for work content at work, but it also triggers the restricted mode being blocked on YouTube. And so if you're in one of those public networks and you're trying to access YouTube and you're in a restricted video, you lose that entire audience. So it turns out, I think it actually is a bigger deal than folks realize that videos are getting tagged as restricted mode, at least I think it is. And they should do a better job kind of surfacing things, and then people should be able to go back in, creators, and correct any issues that might be causing that to be restricted. Yeah. But I don't feel like the policy itself was bad. I think there was an algorithm problem where their software didn't pick up that we had muted bad words, and it was more apparent previously when we bleeped them. So we're gonna go back to bleeping until they find someone. David Sacks (01:12:30): Was there any weaponized reporting of content, or we just don't think that was a thing? David Friedberg (01:12:34): No. We know that to not be true. Checked that. I checked that at the high level, and the answer is no. And I think we feel very good about that. There's no, like, mechanism either that if people do blast reporting or they try and, you know, as we used to joke, brigadoon you, it doesn't actually trigger anything. So David Sacks (01:12:52): Got it. And speaking of YouTube, there was a really important report out this week where I think we kinda knew this, but YouTube acknowledged that during the Biden administration, I think this was, like, roughly 2019 or 02/2022, that time frame, that they censored, I think, something like a million videos at the behest of the Biden administration. I guess that would have started in 2021. And they admitted that they were pressured by the administration. Zuckerberg had said the same thing about Meta, and the Twitter files informed us about the same thing. But now YouTube has finally acknowledged that, And and there's a big release on that. David Friedberg (01:13:32): I'll tell you my view on this. I think that the censorship that happened during that era is very important to have happened because it has brought a light to it in a way that now there's a hypersensitivity to it not happening again. And I actually think that that's very good. So the fact that it happened has now created a real sense that going forward, the policy limits, the boundaries are now more clear than they ever were. It's not just about the Trump admin, which think a lot of mainstream media tries to make it about, but it really is about the importance of free speech and and and censorship and who decides what's objective truth or not. I mean, going back to all of the COVID era discussions, not allowing people to have discussions clearly is a problem. And and speaking of this topic, I don't know if you saw this, but there is this kind of hate speech bill that passed out of the assembly and the senate in California that's now on Gavin Newsom's desk to sign, which basically would find social networks that allow content to show up on their social network that the state of California deems to be hate speech. And so whatever language or terms the state of California calls hate speech, and you could see how this could become a very slippery slope very fast, they can now find a social media company millions of dollars, which in and of itself could actually propagate a whole new censorship regime where people that are using certain terms that in that era are considered bad terms or hate speech terms, they're afraid that they don't wanna get fined tens of millions of dollars, so they block all that content. And I do think that if this gets signed by governor Newsom, it could trigger a whole new kind of censorship battle in the months and years ahead. We'll see. David Sacks (01:15:12): Well, I think that's exactly right. I think the bill you're referring to is s b seven seven one, and it is an EU style suppression of, quote, unquote, hate speech on social networks. The problem is that there is no definition of hate speech. That's not a category that exists. It's just whatever the people in power say it is. David Friedberg (01:15:31): That's right. David Sacks (01:15:31): And so there is no constitutional exception for hate speech under the First Amendment. David Friedberg (01:15:38): They reference in the bill, the California bill, because I read it, civil rights statutes, which speak to certain types of discrimination, certain types of hate speech. But to your point, those words are not defined. And so what ends up happening is you could say, well, using that word is discriminatory to this group in some way or using that word is hateful because it offends another group. And suddenly you start to blur the line between what the average person might call hate speech and what perhaps some people in an administrative body are calling hate speech. And suddenly, it becomes more like, hey. Is this really a civil rights violation, or is it just offensive content? And it's a very slippery slope that offensive content suddenly can get wrapped up and be called hate speech. And then the government starts to tell us all what we are and aren't allowed to see it say. And we're obviously seeing the repercussions of that in The UK right now where the police are knocking down doors to arrest people for, putting stuff on, on Twitter. David Sacks (01:16:40): The direction I thought you were going in a minute ago was that it it sounded like you were saying that it's good that we've learned all these lessons from this COVID period where YouTube That's right. And Chamath Palihapitiya (01:16:51): though I changed my Yeah. David Sacks (01:16:53): And I I think that's exactly right. I don't see any evidence that the I'd say especially the political left has learned its lesson. You got Gavin Newsom now trying to ban hate speech in California. By the way, he also signed that bill, was it, like, a year ago, banning parody. Remember that? Parody videos? David Friedberg (01:17:13): I do remember that. Yeah. Political political AI. It was, like, political AI videos. Yeah. Yeah. David Sacks (01:17:18): Because it was in the wake of the of a humorous fake advertisement for Kamala Harris. Then you've got these folks who on the left are already saying that Sinclair and Nextel need to be punished for not putting Jimmy Kimmel back on the air. So in other words, the same people who are saying a week ago that the Trump administration jawboned ABC Disney that that was fascism, but if they jawboned Nextel and Sinclair, that's democracy. I mean, it's completely hypocritical. I'm not convinced anyone's learned a lesson from this. And just to be clear, I don't think Jimmy Kimmel should be taken off the air or censored or whatever. I'm pretty sure that his show is not gonna be back next year because it's got such low ratings. I don't think there's really a need to censor him. It is true that there is a public interest requirement for using public spectrum, but nobody seems to agree anymore on on what's in the public interest. David Friedberg (01:18:14): So I completely agree with what you said last time. We just got an auction off that spectrum. I don't think we don't need that spectrum. We have the thing called the Internet now, and so we no longer need broadcast television. And there there shouldn't be a government regulated Right. Broadcast television system where they're deciding what is and isn't appropriate content and in the public interest. That just doesn't make sense for the government to do in a market that's supposed to fully support free speech. David Sacks (01:18:40): Yes. David Friedberg (01:18:40): And I agree. I agree. I think I think the Jimmy Kimmel issue should be up to the people that are spending their money to put Jimmy Kimmel on the air, and they can decide what they wanna do with you know, if no one watches it, they'll take them off. And if people watch it, they'll keep them on. That's that's their decision. We shouldn't you know, I don't think that it makes sense to, quote, cancel, or ban someone for saying something that's offensive. And I think that if you do it on, one side, eventually, it'll happen on the other side. That but that's a tried and true point in free speech advocacy, obviously. David Sacks (01:19:10): Yeah. I mean, look. You could definitely argue that throughout history, both the right and the left have sought to censor inconvenient speech when they've been in power. But, again, I just think this is one of those issues where just because both sides have done it throughout history doesn't mean that in the present day, one side isn't a lot more guilty of it than the other. And you see this with whether it's Scott Weiner and Elizabeth Warren, Jawboning Sinclair, and Nextel to to keep Jermaine Kimmel on the air or whether it's Gavin Newsom possibly signing this bill to ban hate speech in California. David Friedberg (01:19:45): Well, do you think he'll sign it? David Sacks (01:19:46): I don't know. David Friedberg (01:19:47): If he does not sign it, if he vetoes it, will you give him credit? David Sacks (01:19:50): Yeah. For sure. That'd be a good sign. David Friedberg (01:19:53): Yeah. Like, when he vetoed that AI bill, I thought that was fantastic, and I give him a lot of credit for that. Yeah. I think he's look. He's not a completely unreasonable person. There's points when when he he realizes things have crossed the line. David Sacks (01:20:06): Yeah. David Friedberg (01:20:06): Which by the way, is scary because then I think about who's the next governor. You know, these things pass out of the senate and the assembly, and he's the only thing standing in the way. Scary. David Sacks (01:20:16): Gavin Newsom isn't even the craziest person on the left. I think we can all agree on that. Yeah. I'm not a fan, but there are way crazier people. But let's see. I I suspect he will sign it Mhmm. Because I think the left very much likes this sort of thing. You see it in Europe. You saw it in the Twitter files. You it in these acknowledgments that YouTube has just made. You see it in what Zuckerberg told Rogan about the censorship that Meta was pressured to do. I think there is a clamoring on the part of the left to silence speech that they don't agree with. And they do call it hate speech. It's speech they hate. And the right, in a fit of pique when they're angry about the assassination of one of their heroes, are they capable of saying that Jimmy Kimmel should be taken off the air? Yeah. But is that something that's been broadly acted upon on the part of the right? No. It's not. The left is the one that's engaged in massive amounts of speech suppression over the last few years. It's not a both sides problem. So I hope I hope Nussbaum veto that bill, but let's see what happens. David Friedberg (01:21:17): I hope he vetoes it. I think it would be an incredible statement if he did. But if he doesn't, I could see why this creates effectively a free option for him, for the democrats, for whoever's in charge with administering California statute, giving themselves basically a free option on whether or not to enforce it and how to enforce it. It it creates a mechanism. And I don't I just don't like that mechanism existing, obviously, but I could see how a system in power can find this to be a good mechanism for maintaining power and influence or at least influence over speech. David Sacks (01:21:50): I think Newsom's gonna have to sign it into law because that's what his base wants, and he intends on running for president in a few years. And it's not just the California base. It's the overall base of the Democrat party. I don't think he's gonna wanna risk alienating them. And even if he harbors some qualms, which I'm not sure he does, he probably realizes he's got the supreme court to back him up in the sense that they're probably gonna find this unconstitutional. They're gonna throw it out, but he can still send a message to the left that he's with them, that he wants to suppress conservative speech just like they do. So I suspect he'll sign it. David Friedberg (01:22:25): Well, we'll see. Alright. Thanks, everyone. Saks, have a good drive wherever you're going. Thank you guys for joining us. Sorry we lost our other besties. This has been your favorite podcast, the All In podcast. I am your closing host, Dave Friedberg, joined by David Saks. Goodbye to Chamath, Polly Hopatia, and Jay Kal. We'll miss you guys. Are back. Bye bye. Speaker 4 (01:22:47): We'll let your winners ride. Rain man David Saks. And it said We open sourced it to the fans, and they've just gone crazy with it. Speaker 9 (01:23:19): We should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy because they're all just useless. It's like it's like sexual tension that they just need to release somehow.