E170: Tech's Vibe Shift, TikTok ban debate, Vertical AI boom, Florida bans lab-grown meat & more

(0:00) Bestie Intros! (1:02) Friedberg's newest family members (7:13) Tech's vibe shift: More candidness, less PR-speak from top CEOs (22:47) OpenAI CTO slips up on training data: did OpenAI train Sora on YouTube videos? (28:58) Vertical AI startups flourishing: Cognition launches Devin, what will this do to startups? (40:38) TikTok debate: Is the new bill to ban or force a sale of TikTok fair or potentially overreaching due to its vagueness? (1:22:10) Florida on the verge of banning lab-grown meat Follow the besties: https://twitter.com/chamath https://twitter.com/Jason https://twitter.com/DavidSacks https://twitter.com/friedberg Follow the pod: https://twitter.com/theallinpod https://linktr.ee/allinpodcast Intro Music Credit: https://rb.gy/tppkzl https://twitter.com/yung_spielburg Intro Video Credit: https://twitter.com/TheZachEffect Referenced in the show: https://twitter.com/RachaelRad/status/1767612555063955891 https://twitter.com/iamtomnash/status/1768135725403226256 https://twitter.com/CollinRugg/status/1752749485070156025 https://futurism.com/video-openai-cto-sora-training-data https://twitter.com/tsarnick/status/1768021821595726254 https://www.harvey.ai https://www.abridge.com https://www.taxgpt.com https://sierra.ai https://twitter.com/cognition_labs/status/1767548763134964000 https://twitter.com/heyBarsee/status/1767934812315062646 https://sourcegraph.com/cody https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/27/vertical-ai-the-next-logical-iteration-of-vertical-saas https://vator.tv/news/2018-02-05-when-paypal-was-young-the-early-years https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/03/13/tiktok-ban-passes-house-vote https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/tiktok-bill-ban-house-vote-af4d0800 https://rollcall.com/2024/03/14/schumer-signals-slower-pace-on-tiktok-measure-in-the-senate https://twitter.com/rabois/status/1768107160662421772 https://www.linkedin.com/posts/vivekgramaswamy_were-literally-addicted-to-china-they-push-activity-7060229302633521152-k0g3 https://time.com/6900348/tiktok-ban-donald-trump-congress https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-03-13/who-is-jeff-yass-15-billion-tiktok-fortune-at-stake-as-ban-passes-house-vote https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/7521/text https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_foreign_adversaries https://twitter.com/davidfrum/status/1753878721163882676 https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1985-09-04-mn-23112-story.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/22/technology/byte-dance-tik-tok-internal-investigation.html https://www.cnbc.com/2024/03/14/tiktok-ban-china-would-block-sale-of-short-video-app.html https://www.fastcompany.com/91056837/ron-desantis-and-the-florida-legislature-turn-their-anti-woke-agenda-on-lab-grown-meat https://standingstonefarms.com/pages/microbial-rennet-what-is-it-and-how-important-is-it https://twitter.com/Teslaconomics/status/1768395010507182252 https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/1768267464062943676 https://twitter.com/Andercot/status/1768328460622299424

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Why do you always go Christopher Walken whenever you do these outros? Why do you do that?

• 0:04Jason Calacanis?

  Thanks for listening to the All In Podcast. Wow. David Sacks, poignant points about regulatory capture. Friedberg loves mock meats. Not for me, Chamath. Everyone loves a great dictator.

• 0:25Jason Calacanis?

  See you next time. All In Podcast. Wow.

• 0:31David Friedberg?

  Love you boys. So good.

• 0:33Jason Calacanis?

  Those are your better impressions.

• 0:34David Friedberg?

  That is so good.

• 0:35Jason Calacanis?

  Better than Trump, I would say.

• 0:37David Friedberg?

  Everyone's got their superpower. That's your superpower.

• 0:39Jason Calacanis?

  It's a very nasty, nasty J. Cal. Don't ruin it. Don't ruin it. I'm coming on. I'm coming on, All In.

• 0:58David Friedberg?

  Love you, Westy.

• 1:03Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Hey, Friedberg, you want to tell them about your new family members?

• 1:06David Friedberg?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:07Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Did he get more dogs? Is he trying to Dave Portnoy this again?

• 1:10Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, Miss Peachy.

• 1:12David Friedberg?

  So I'm like, working all day Friday. I'm like wiped out. I'd been in, 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 two new dogs. And I'm like, what the are you talking about? We didn't get two new dogs. What are you saying? Mommy's got two new dogs. And then mommy took him to the vet. She'll be back in a few minutes. I'm like, no way. And I had some friends coming over for dinner. They walk in the house.

• 1:53David Friedberg?

  The kids are jumping up and down. Two minutes later, walks in the house. These two dogs that 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. They're our dogs now. These are the best dogs. So now we have four dogs.

• 2:20Jason Calacanis?

  And which was the vet bill?

• 2:21David Friedberg?

  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 poo and hay. And there's clowns and children running around. And I live in.

• 2:48Jason Calacanis?

  Did I ever tell you the, the story of Chuck Norris, the Chihuahua?

• 2:52David Friedberg?

  No, no, no.

• 2:54Jason Calacanis?

  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 eight lane boulevard, whatever. And I'm like, oh my God. 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 ducks, 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 get in the car. I said, let's just take it to a vet or whatever. And I'm saying goodbye to the dog.

• 3:39Jason Calacanis?

  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 was like, got this big heart, uh, 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 vet, sitting with this dog, waiting for it to die in hospice.

• 4:01David Friedberg?

  Oh my God.

• 4:03Jason Calacanis?

  The dog doesn't die. The dog survives.

• 4:05David Friedberg?

  Sorry.

• 4:06Jason Calacanis?

  Now it's Monday. And I get the alert on my credit card. Twelve thousand dollars.

• 4:13Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 4:16Jason Calacanis?

  Twelve.

• 4:17Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 4:17Jason Calacanis?

  Thousand dollars 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 this stuff, but you know, he's generally, the dog's alive. So 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.

• 4:41Jason Calacanis?

  Some of these rich people in San Francisco, living on like a certain street. Uh, Broadway or something like that. Turns out they're like.

• 4:51Jason Calacanis?

  Their heirs to something famous. They live in like three states. They got a private jet, all this nonsense. They say, we'll take the dog. They're friends with a couple of our mutuals. So I'm like, this is great. I'm gonna get the 12 grand from them. Cause.

• 5:11Jason Calacanis?

  Cause I look these people up. They got a private jet. I don't got a private jet. They got three 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 dollar bill? Maybe they'll pick it up. Or we can. It's like a Larry David.

• 5:31Jason Calacanis?

  And my wife is like, if you bring that up with them, I'm divorcing you. We have to pay the 12,000. So I pay the 12,000. 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 paid 12 grand to save this.

• 5:48Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Free bird told me this 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 Puerto Rico, I mean Joker. Had like Jardia, so he was just everywhere. And you know, we got through it. And then. Three 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, 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, 17K.

• 6:27Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But ever since he came back, he's been completely incontinent. So I was telling Reaper 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 have to go and find, where did he take his [BLEEP]? Let's go clean it up. And the worst one was, he once pooped through one of the grates with this really bad poo. And I had to go and just fetch it all out. It was just disgusting.

• 6:56Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, right in the grates. Fantastic.

• 6:57Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Right in the grates.

• 6:58Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, so there you have it, folks. Go adopt a pet. There's your ringing endorsement. Four to $17,000 in veterinary bills and cleaning up [BLEEP] 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, or I'm proposing a new category. We'd love to hear 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 there seems to be a bit of a vibe shift happening in tech. During peak Zerp and cancel culture, 2019 to 2021 era, it seemed like CEOs were a little vigilant about what they would say,

• 7:41Jason Calacanis?

  you know, the Tim Cooks, 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. Chenchen Wong, the CEO of Nvidia, had this awesome clip when speaking at Stanford's Graduate School of Business.

• 7:58Speaker 03

  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 success. I don't know how to teach it to you except for, I hope suffering happens to you. To this day, I use the word, the phrase, pain and suffering, inside our company with great glee. Boy, this is going to cause a lot of pain and suffering. And I mean that in a happy way. Because you want to train, you want to refine the character of your company. You want greatness out of them. And greatness is not intelligence. Greatness comes from character. And character is informed out of smart people. It's formed out of... People who suffered.

• 8:37Jason Calacanis?

  And then next up, Palantir CEO Alex Karp called out the coked up short sellers on CNBC.

• 8:46Speaker 04

  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 it just love pulling down great American companies so that they can pay for their coke. And 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.

• 9:14Speaker 05

  Surely all short sellers.

• 9:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, you know, go ahead, do your thing, we'll do our thing.

• 9:19Jason Calacanis?

  There you have it, folks. Of course, 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 based. He did a whole video about how the Apple Vision Pro was [BLEEP] when compared to Meta's Quest 2. He's getting a little frisky on the social media. Friedberg, is the vibe shift real?

• 9:49David Friedberg?

  It seems like a lot of people are less worried about cancel culture as they were three 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.

• 10:08David Friedberg?

  Which is, yeah, I think obviously positive and refreshing.

• 10:12Jason Calacanis?

  Sax, you're a big fan of freedom of speech. Your thoughts on this vibe shift? Is this related to cancel culture kind of ending and journalists just not being able to cancel people because they misspoke or were a little spicy in their takes?

• 10:28David Sacks?

  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. And in each of these cases, I kind of 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 sacred 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 as 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 X.

• 11:11David Sacks?

  I mean, Elon, I think, has taken some real risks 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 Karp made a colorful joke at the expense of short traders. I agree, but it's not really a risky remark. Jensen Wang is giving some tough love to Stanford students. He's giving them, I think, a good lesson of stop being so entitled.

• 11:57David Sacks?

  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 want to compare it to Elon, taking a really dangerous political stance. In fact, remember when Zuckerberg got dragged to Capitol Hill and gave that testimony and they demanded that he give that apology? He did it. I mean,

• 12:29Jason Calacanis?

  Be genuflected.

• 12:30Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I thought that word was banned on this pod.

• 12:32Jason Calacanis?

  The only one applied to me.

• 12:35Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, anybody else could be genuflected. I mean, I, I thought he was just showing some humanity, which is, you know, kind of paradoxical.

• 12:42David Sacks?

  Look, I, I get it in that moment, but I'm just saying that, like, if you want to 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 of these people by trying to score political points. So anyway,

• 13:02Jason Calacanis?

  That would have been super based, yeah.

• 13:04David Sacks?

  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?

• 13:18Jason Calacanis?

  Your thoughts, Chamoff, on based CEOs?

• 13:22Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Well, I think, Jason, 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 scramble 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.

• 14:06Chamath Palihapitiya?

  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 multi-year 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 Elon than closer to a politician.

• 14:42Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, it's, I loved Wong's comments just about his secret weapon is he has incredibly low expectations.

• 14:49Chamath Palihapitiya?

  If you had said, if you 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 happen to me. And it's not that those people don't have valid claims, but they would have aired it in a way that tried to get him canceled effectively.

• 15:09Jason Calacanis?

  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 does he know?

• 15:16Chamath Palihapitiya?

  In fairness, I bet you there are people that felt that way even today when listening to his clip. 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 100% awesome.

• 15:30Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I mean, finally, candid advice. 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 going to be sad. And if you keep your expectations low and reality is, you know, okay or good, yeah, 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's seat. How's that been going for you, generally speaking? How hard is it compared to being a capital allocator? Curious. I was going to talk to you about that offline, anyway.

• 16:15David Friedberg?

  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 your unconscious tends to want to 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 himself through. I think it's a requisite 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

• 17:00David Friedberg?

  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 Y, maybe Z, maybe 100 other things that'll smack you in the face.

• 17:41David Friedberg?

  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 actually very happy in the work I'm doing right now.

• 18:13Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I I think that resonates a lot with me and all the entrepreneurs that I back. 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 with

• 18:54David Friedberg?

  How do you reconcile that statement, Jason? With the proposition that people should become entrepreneurs generally? I think that this really challenges me. Whenever people say, I'm thinking about 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. The notion that everyone should be encouraged to start a company and entrepreneurism is a career choice, I think is a false notion. I think that most people are not psychologically equipped for being successful in entrepreneurship.

• 19:33Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, you're 100% right. And I've gotten in my later years, as we run like Found University and 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 co-founder? 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 is can you convince two or three people to go on this crazy journey with you? Because it's important and without money. And you know, people expect, oh, you're going to 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 startup? Do you sell the product? Do you build the product?

• 20:13Jason Calacanis?

  And a lot of people do not have the wherewithal to add a skill that the world needs. Being a developer, a UX designer, 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 will and opening up YouTube, which really isn't that 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 video, some podcast. So just learn some marketable skills that a startup needs.

• 20:57Jason Calacanis?

  And if you can't do that, you shouldn't be a founder.

• 21:00Chamath Palihapitiya?

  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 cut out for it.

• 21:23David Friedberg?

  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 cold called college kids, I cold called alumni, I cold called CEOs. I had three 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. Teachers, I did 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 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

• 22:06David Friedberg?

  traits I had to develop before I was even ready to start a company, because all that's happening every day is failure.

• 22:12Jason Calacanis?

  When I had my first magazine, I didn't understand. I had just printed photocopies of them. I had like 2,000 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 little 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 at cafes 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. All right, everybody, let's get to our second topic, a mini topic, but did OpenAI just get caught with their hand in the cookie jar or the training data cookie jar?

• 22:56Jason Calacanis?

  OpenAI's 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 OpenAI 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.

• 23:19Speaker 05

  What data was used to train Sora?

• 23:21Speaker 07

  We used publicly available data and licensed data.

• 23:26Speaker 05

  So videos on YouTube?

• 23:29Speaker 07

  I'm actually not sure about that.

• 23:33Speaker 05

  Okay. Videos from Facebook, Instagram?

• 23:38Speaker 07

  You know, if they were publicly available, available, publicly available to use, there might be the data, but I'm not sure. I'm not confident about it.

• 23:52Jason Calacanis?

  Let me start with you, Chuma. What are your thoughts here?

• 23:57Jason Calacanis?

  Just her not being super prepared there to answer a question, or is this a cookie jar situation? What do you think?

• 24:03Chamath Palihapitiya?

  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.

• 24:13David Sacks?

  My interpretation of that answer is that she is hesitating because she doesn't want to make a statement against interest.

• 24:20Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Right. I want to 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 ChatGPT and if you go into the microphone, but you say nothing, so you 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.

• 24:56Jason Calacanis?

  Hmm.

• 24:56Chamath Palihapitiya?

  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.

• 25:35Jason Calacanis?

  Faber, your thoughts?

• 25:36David Friedberg?

  I, I think it's fine. I don't know why this is a controversial thing.

• 25:40Jason Calacanis?

  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 CYA.

• 25:48David Friedberg?

  I mean, YouTube is public, so what's wrong with watching YouTube to teach a model stuff?

• 25:55Jason Calacanis?

  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 with the New York Times and they failed to negotiate their license, so.

• 26:05David Friedberg?

  I think the assumption is they're making a derivative work.

• 26:08Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I mean, they've licensed other people's data, right?

• 26:12David Friedberg?

  Yeah, to get access to it that's not publicly available. You can go to 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, I made this point a couple of 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. I don't 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 that's 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 position.

• 26:51Jason Calacanis?

  And that's a position that OpenAI has taken, the other side of that position, because they're going around licensing data. Sax, any other thoughts here about this cruffle?

• 26:59David Sacks?

  Well, look, I kind of agree with both you and Friedberg. In terms of the part 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 internet. I agree with Friedberg that fair use doctrine should be applied to that. I know that you have a different point of view on that, J Cal. I don't know if we need to rehash that. I understand that you don't think fair use should apply. In any event, I think it's pretty clear that OpenAI trained Sora using, you know, available data on the internet, and that probably included YouTube. The part where I agree with you, J Cal, is that, I don't know if I would say that she's

• 27:43David Sacks?

  lying per se, but I think she's probably concerned that if she comes right out and answers the question as directly as she could, that it could be a problem for them in 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.

• 28:09Jason Calacanis?

  It's going to be pretty clear, Chamath, 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 works? Should it be Sora or should it be Disney itself? And so I think... The journalists know full well what they're doing and how the journalists have their hooks into this for a very real reason. The journalists are also content creators. So now we're going to have this, you know, two sides forming journalists.

• 28:42Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I just 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 going to understand the nuances of this to make a, to make a call on this?

• 28:53Jason Calacanis?

  Or the jury. It's going to be a big education process. Yeah.

• 28:56Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah, or the jury. Yeah.

• 28:58Jason Calacanis?

  Speaking of AI, vertical AI startups are starting to make some noise. We all know about large language models. We've talked about them here. If you listen to this program, you know about OpenAI, Google's 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 yeah, 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

• 29:40Jason Calacanis?

  bridge is doing an AI note taker for doctors, saves them hours a day, according to them. TaxGPT is an AI tax assistant, and Sierra's AI for customer support. That's Brett Taylor's new startup. This week, a startup called Cognition debuted a tool called Devon. They're calling it an AI software engineer. The demos went viral on X. You've probably seen them all over the place and in the news. If you watch it, you can see Devon fixing bugs in real time, fine tuning an AI model, building apps end to end. And people are speculating Devon was built on GPT-4 from OpenAI. That's not confirmed. But according to the CEO, Devon was built by tweaking reasoning and long-term planning into an existing LLM. Here's how it

• 30:25Jason Calacanis?

  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. Kind of makes sense. Shmatz, 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?

• 30:51Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Oh, I think this is so powerful. I mean, It's incredible because we're measuring this progress in like, what, week over week?

• 30:58Jason Calacanis?

  Feels like that, yeah.

• 31:00Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think the point that you should take away is that the

• 31:05Chamath Palihapitiya?

  most of these very difficult, impenetrable job types for the average person, if you said to them, "Hey, become a developer," that's like a complicated journey, right?

• 31:19Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It's just gonna be now like

• 31:23Chamath Palihapitiya?

  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 in code. I mean, I just, I think it's really, really special.

• 32:01Jason Calacanis?

  Zach, you've been on copilots 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 one copiloting to, "Okay, now they're the pilot and we're sitting in the copilot seat watching them fly the plane."

• 32:28David Sacks?

  Yeah, well, look, first of all, everyone's working on autonomous coding 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 there's still a long way to go, but the potential is clearly there. So a lot of companies are working on some variation of this idea.

• 33:03David Sacks?

  Devin is, I guess you could call it an 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 codebases. And just to talk my own book for a second, we're an investor in a company called Sourcegraph. They have a product called Cody and their whole approach is context-first as opposed to agent-first. It's all about getting the copilot to work inside of existing codebases. 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 codebase more useful.

• 33:43David Sacks?

  Whereas Devin, again, is starting with, I think, net new codebases, but that's going to demo really well. And so that's what you're seeing is like these really cool demos. In any event, the larger picture here is that we are going to get better and better at coding autonomously, I guess you could say. And I don't know if it gets, ever gets to 100% where you don't need coders anymore, but it's going to make coders much more productive over time. You're going to get this huge multiplier effect on the ability to write code. And that's really exciting for a bunch of obvious reasons.

• 34:16Jason Calacanis?

  Freebro, we've been tracking this evolution from Gmail, guess the next word, guess the next phrase, guess the next sentence, to Copilots. 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?

• 34:38David Friedberg?

  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

• 35:21David Friedberg?

  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 one set of core human services, like being a lawyer, being an accountant, you know, being an artist in whatever way, and that that ends up being the specific vertical tool that 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.

• 36:03David Friedberg?

  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.

• 36:10Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I think it's pretty obvious where this is going. You got co-pilots assisting a developer or a lawyer, then the next or a writer, then they got the next phase. Okay, you've got a peer. So you're doing peer programming or somebody's kind of working alongside you, you're checking their work. Hey, 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 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 five people. Now imagine how that changes startups when you as an individual have a conductor working with you and says, you know what?

• 36:55Jason Calacanis?

  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 and we don't even have to file taxes in this area. It's going to get really interesting next year when they have a conductor.

• 37:15David Friedberg?

  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.

• 37:32Chamath Palihapitiya?

  True.

• 37:33David Friedberg?

  Because you 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.

• 37:52Chamath Palihapitiya?

  In this phase, the, the OpEx of companies will probably be cut in half.

• 37:58Chamath Palihapitiya?

  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. So you won't have these engineering people. That person should be running their own company. And so you'll just have millions and millions and millions 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 said, you know?

• 38:33David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 38:33Chamath Palihapitiya?

  That's gonna be really interesting.

• 38:34Jason Calacanis?

  The solo entrepreneur movement of the last couple of years, there were all these kind of like independent hackers building one item, like Phil Kaplan did with DistroKid. He just had like two or three people working on that, got very big. You know, I was telling you guys about that Slopes app I showed you. I, I reached out to the founder of that and I was like, hey, tell me about the business. Like, it's 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, you know, it makes what, half a million a year, three million a year, whatever? It's enough to support one, two, three people working on it. But previously, you know, you'd be going to the venture community, like, oh, what did it take a modern app company, Saks, to kind of build an Android and an iOS app?

• 39:17Jason Calacanis?

  Just, you know, five, 10 years ago, if we were funding one 10 years ago, what would the footprint look like for, you know, a consumer app company?

• 39:26David Sacks?

  If you're gonna go all the way back to like the late 90s during the dot com era, I remember that. With PayPal, just to launch, really what was an MVP, we had, I'd 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 us distracted away with AWS. Then you move to the mobile era, and the app stores provide, there's just a lot more developer tools.

• 39:52Jason Calacanis?

  Distribution.

• 39:53David Sacks?

  A lot more APIs. Yeah, as well as distribution. But it's far easier to code these apps. 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.

• 40:08Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 40:09David Sacks?

  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 going to need a small team of developers and a couple million bucks to get you started.

• 40:24Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. It used to be a rule of thumb, I think, 12 people for an app company. You get two or three working on each platform, a couple designers, a couple of testing and design UX. You get to 10, 12 people to run a modern one. All right, everybody, next issue. The House just passed a bill that would either ban TikTok or force a sale. Talked about this bill being proposed last week, and things had moved really slowly on the TikTok ban. Now they're moving really fast. On Wednesday, the House passed the bill with a bipartisan vote of 352 to 65, making this one of the few subjects that members of Congress can agree on. Biden has also signaled his intent to sign the bill

• 41:06Jason Calacanis?

  into law should it pass the Senate. Passing the Senate, that could be an obstacle. Democratic Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has signaled a lack of interest in the subject, and said he'll review the bill with committee chairs before deciding on the path forward. Arguments for and against the bill 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

• 41:50Jason Calacanis?

  anti-Israel discourse, which seems to flourish on TikTok versus other platforms coincidentally.

• 41:56Jason Calacanis?

  Joe Biden launched a TikTok account last month and his comments were instantly flooded with pro Palestinian remarks, some calling him genocide Joe. Third argument, overreach, some. Sax, 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 Raboy argued with you Sax on this on X. And then there are guys like Trump and Vivek, who I believe are flip flopping based on securing bags. Vivek called TikTok digital fentanyl and Trump issued an executive order calling for ByteDance to divest TikTok in 2020.

• 42:41Jason Calacanis?

  Now they're both opposing the ban. And interestingly, both Trump and Vivek have ties to the Republican mega donor Jeffrey Yass, who is a major shareholder in ByteDance with a reported 15 to 30 billion dollar stake. He gave Vivek five million bucks. Who knows what Trump's gotten, but they said they're back in love. Sax, you had this big back and forth with Keith Raboy on X. Are you in support of the divestiture or not? I haven't been able to track exactly where you're at with this.

• 43:16David Sacks?

  Well, I think my take on this, and I'm going to have to revise and extend 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 a significant risk of being Patriot Act 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 up 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

• 44:01David Sacks?

  a lot. And Keith, by the way, is a very talented lawyer in addition to other things, being a successful founder and.

• 44:09Jason Calacanis?

  Investor.

• 44:10David Sacks?

  An investor. And then, you know, I saw that Sagar 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 kind of 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

• 44:55David Sacks?

  is a foreign adversary? There are four 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. 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 the 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 a foreign adversary means with respect to a covered company, that such company or

• 45:36David Sacks?

  entity is, and then there's three categories. The first category is a foreign person, which can also mean a foreign corporation, that's domiciled in, or is headquartered, or has its 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, let's say you had a US company, but 20% of the company was owned by, I don't know, Chinese VCs, or by ByteDance. Okay? That would also be a controlled by a foreign adversary. Then you get

• 46:18David Sacks?

  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 vague. And a creative prosecutor, a 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

• 46:58David Sacks?

  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, but the entire Republican Party that works for Trump is under the direction.

• 47:20Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, that's like a partisan hack, though. That's not like actual factual in a court, right? So this would have to be proven factual in the court.

• 47:27David Sacks?

  Okay.

• 47:28Jason Calacanis?

  Do you think or no?

• 47:29David Sacks?

  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, i.e. 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 agent, they could be forced to divest the company or to to have it be banned.

• 48:11David Sacks?

  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.

• 48:34Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, tighten it up.

• 48:34David Sacks?

  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 applications, which also, like I said, includes websites. And 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.

• 49:08Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, it's easy enough to tighten it up. And if it was tightened up, you'd be in favor of the TikTok ban, I take it, Zach? Or divestiture, I should say. I keep saying ban. You would still want the Chinese government to not have control of this or ByteDance. Yeah.

• 49:21David Sacks?

  I still have very mixed feelings about the idea of just the TikTok ban. Because, look, you're talking about an app that 100 million 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 hard proof that this app is under the control of CCP. I mean, I know that allegation is made. I can understand why people make it.

• 49:45Jason Calacanis?

  And they spied on journalists already. Yeah.

• 49:47David Sacks?

  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, I'm deeply ambivalent about that.

• 50:06Jason Calacanis?

  Chamath, 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 Zach said, Americans are enjoying this in a massive way, 100 million 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, etc. We have rules against that already. So are you in favor of this TikTok divestiture? Yes or no?

• 50:43Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. Okay. You have it. Friedberg, would love to have you.

• 50:49David Sacks?

  I'd like to hear, I'd like to hear him expand on that.

• 50:53Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I'll tell you, before I tell you why, I'll tell you a quick story. Two or three 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 this 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 would, that I would cut up. And I would always complain to them. I'm like, I hate peeling these apples or whatever, slicing them and taking the core out. 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 XYZ food service.

• 51:38Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And she would just get plastered with these ads. And it was just a reminder to me that these apps 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.

• 52:13Chamath Palihapitiya?

  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, I would have 15, 20 minutes where I would decompress. It's super fun. It's a great app. I have to be honest with you. I love it. But as a consumer,

• 52:32Chamath Palihapitiya?

  that was a decision I made. As a business person, what I'll say is,

• 52:37Chamath Palihapitiya?

  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 identifying that this is probably David Sacks and this is Chamath and this is Freebirth. 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 residences of the White House.

• 53:21Chamath Palihapitiya?

  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.

• 53:29Chamath Palihapitiya?

  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.

• 53:41David Friedberg?

  Completely reasonable, I think. I'm going to disagree. I think a couple of points.

• 53:47David Friedberg?

  I don't believe in the notion of like reciprocity for reciprocity's sake. 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.

• 54:25Chamath Palihapitiya?

  What about spying apps?

• 54:27David Friedberg?

  So that's 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.

• 54:36Chamath Palihapitiya?

  We're not talking about Rice Noodles over here. You know, we're talking about spying.

• 54:40David Friedberg?

  And so I think 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 separate the entity, force a sale, you know, like 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 into being captured. I do believe that citizens and people should have the right to decide if they want to 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

• 55:22David Friedberg?

  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 transparency and make a decision about whether or not they want to participate in that.

• 55:36Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I don't think citizens have the sophistication to understand what foreign adversaries, again, we only have four, so they were named there for a reason, 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 going to happen.

• 56:13David Friedberg?

  Well, look, I think we can have audit rights and we can have rights to protect our citizens. I think that that's appropriate. I'll also say, 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 going to benefit Meta, it's going to benefit Instagram, it's going to benefit a few other, you know, social networks, it's going to benefit Elon at Twitter. There's a few folks that are going to benefit pretty significantly if TikTok is banned, because all those users are going to 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.

• 56:54Jason Calacanis?

  And 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 first principles here, why wouldn't they divest? Why would the CCP keep this? The reason is, this is an 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 want to 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.

• 57:38Jason Calacanis?

  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.

• 58:14Chamath Palihapitiya?

  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 that theoretically, over long periods of time, aren't necessarily beneficial. They've act, they're smart enough to actually blunt.

• 58:35Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, and they don't let their kids play video games or use TikTok.

• 58:38Chamath Palihapitiya?

  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 three hours a week and certain kids and 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 going to 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.

• 59:20Chamath Palihapitiya?

  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 apps. 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 million people that are being observed, you're going to get also the, the 1,000 or 10,000 that are super important. And you're going to catch stuff that you're not allowed to know.

• 1:00:03Jason Calacanis?

  And they're already doing this. Pull up the article, Nick. TikTok has already 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. Citizenship.

• 1:00:34Chamath Palihapitiya?

  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 base to really know that there aren't any Easter eggs in here and there aren't real backdoors.

• 1:00:47Jason Calacanis?

  And they won't let us.

• 1:00:48Chamath Palihapitiya?

  This is my point. I think divestiture should not be allowed. I actually just think unfortunately this app should just be shut down. And the people will migrate to Instagram and the people will migrate to YouTube.

• 1:00:58Jason Calacanis?

  Or new products.

• 1:00:59Chamath Palihapitiya?

  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.

• 1:01:12Jason Calacanis?

  Sax, your thoughts?

• 1:01:13David Sacks?

  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?

• 1:01:22Jason Calacanis?

  No, they banned TikTok there because it's harmful.

• 1:01:24Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, they have complete control over TikTok.

• 1:01:26Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, 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, Sax. They are spying on their population. No, they have banned TikTok.

• 1:01:43Chamath Palihapitiya?

  They have a different version called Douyin.

• 1:01:44Jason Calacanis?

  They have a different version. And in that version, there are limits and they push math.

• 1:01:50Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Douyin's 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 is a board, 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.

• 1:02:35Chamath Palihapitiya?

  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 and obviously foreign controlled. And I don't think that if you tried 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.

• 1:03:12David Sacks?

  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.

• 1:03:21Chamath Palihapitiya?

  David, you and I know what that means. Like, could you imagine a migration like that? Who is gonna look at every single endpoint, every single line of code? That is a joke that's meant to allay people who are not technical.

• 1:03:32David Sacks?

  Right.

• 1:03:32Jason Calacanis?

  Yep.

• 1:03:33David Sacks?

  Yeah, I kind of agree with them.

• 1:03:35Jason Calacanis?

  All right. It seems like we're, I don't know if we're 2v2 here, but are you banned or not banned, Sax? If the language is corrected, are you banned or divested or what?

• 1:03:44David Sacks?

  I'm ambivalent about it because I'm open to the idea of banning a 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 Uyghurs at concentration camps and 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.

• 1:04:22Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I agree with Sax.

• 1:04:23David Sacks?

  Yeah. So that's number one, is I'm open to this idea, but I want to see hard proof. Number two is...

• 1:04:29Chamath Palihapitiya?

  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 subcommittee that's probably been written, but I can guarantee you the American public will not get written on what...

• 1:04:40Jason Calacanis?

  And Manchin 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.

• 1:04:49David Sacks?

  But these guys have lied so many times about so many things. I mean, I just think the public has a right to know. Look, if 100 million Americans are gonna be deprived of using an app they love, why can't we get a little bit more information on exactly what that app has done wrong?

• 1:05:03Chamath Palihapitiya?

  They're saying it. They're saying it's in control, it's, it's being controlled by a foreign adversary. They are saying it. The bill says it.

• 1:05:11Chamath Palihapitiya?

  What is debatable? They're telling you-

• 1:05:12David Sacks?

  All that means, all that means is that the app is owned by ByteDance, which is-

• 1:05:17Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Here's what's unique about this bill-

• 1:05:19David Sacks?

  Which is incorporated in China.

• 1:05:20Chamath Palihapitiya?

  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 happen, but it's going to get largely overwhelmingly approved there as well.

• 1:05:36David Sacks?

  Just like the Patriot Act.

• 1:05:38Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Hold on, it's a very unique moment in time where you see in today's political landscape,

• 1:05:45Chamath Palihapitiya?

  such uniformity. And again, I'm not going to 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.

• 1:06:22David Sacks?

  Okay, so-

• 1:06:22Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It could have been 49 to 1, David. You know what I mean? Let me ask you another question.

• 1:06:25David Sacks?

  Hold on, one second. I want to respond to that.

• 1:06:27Chamath Palihapitiya?

  If it's ideological, 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.

• 1:06:37David Sacks?

  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 says 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.

• 1:07:08Jason Calacanis?

  Four countries, North Korea, Russia, China.

• 1:07:09David Sacks?

  I said a foreigner from one of those countries.

• 1:07:11Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, no, I'm trying to make sure it's clear for the audience.

• 1:07:13David Sacks?

  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.

• 1:07:21Jason Calacanis?

  What would be the proper route if a US platform was in fact compromised by the Chinese, North Koreans, or Iran? What would be the proper path in your mind? Wouldn't that concern you?

• 1:07:33David Sacks?

  If an app is sharing US data in a way that it shouldn't, then why wouldn't it just be prosecuted?

• 1:07:40Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, which is what this is saying, right? The AGs would go after them.

• 1:07:43David Sacks?

  No, it's not. It's banning TikTok, okay, subject to maybe divestiture happens, but there's a lot of people who think that the six 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 precedent that creates. So again, look.

• 1:08:01Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think you're answering 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. 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 détente 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

• 1:08:41Chamath Palihapitiya?

  their own personal political aspirations, there's probably more that we're not, that we don't know.

• 1:08:48David Sacks?

  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 uniparty, is when the national security state wants some new power.

• 1:08:58Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I agree with you. That's what I'm saying.

• 1:09:00David Sacks?

  This is how we got into the Iraq war, basically almost unanimous. This is how we got into the Patriot Act.

• 1:09:04Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I'm not saying it's right. I'm not saying it's right.

• 1:09:07David Sacks?

  Every dumb idea that gives the federal government more power.

• 1:09:11David Sacks?

  Ends up being almost unanimous in Washington.

• 1:09:13Chamath Palihapitiya?

  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 uniparty on this topic. We are never going to get, and I'm just, you know, responding to Friedberg, we're never going to get read in.

• 1:09:26David Sacks?

  We, the people, because of this like phony concern about, they always like classification when they don't want the public to know something.

• 1:09:32Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Now, by the way, the good news is...

• 1:09:33David Sacks?

  Something this important shouldn't be secret.

• 1:09:34Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, but by the way...

• 1:09:35David Sacks?

  Give us the proof. Why can't they give us the proof?

• 1:09:37Jason Calacanis?

  I don't think it needs to be proof. It's the potential damage here that they're saying is the problem, Sax. 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.

• 1:10:22Jason Calacanis?

  It is the potential harm here, Sax, 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 allow North Korea or Iran to own this app in the United States, Sax?

• 1:10:41Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, of course he wouldn't.

• 1:10:42David Sacks?

  I think my, my point would be the same, which is, I want to see some proof, hold on, let me make a couple of points. Number one, I want to see some proof that this is actually spyware. That, to me, has been alleged, and if it's as such a slam dunk case as you say, why is there no proof of this? So that's point number one. And by the way, if if the phone is just sitting there passively listening to you and that's the spyware, Apple should really address that because App shouldn't be able to do that.

• 1:11:09Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Right.

• 1:11:10David Sacks?

  So that's like Apple's problem. With respect to the data supposedly being leaked to the Communist Party, again, I want to 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 about users.

• 1:11:31Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I don't think that's what it is. These these microphones are on 24/7. These apps are allowed to passively listen in the background.

• 1:11:37David Sacks?

  Then why don't we just tell Apple not to allow that?

• 1:11:41Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Think that that could be a partial solve too? Well, what about Android?

• 1:11:44David Sacks?

  Your phone should not be passively listening to you. You should have to like stick it in your face and talk to it if you want to activate the microphone.

• 1:11:49Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But the problem is when you download these apps, you create these settings and so you try to you have to try to convince 100 million people that, hey, you shouldn't do that. Maybe 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, ah, default on.

• 1:12:05David Sacks?

  Look, what I'm saying here is that the way the microphone should work

• 1:12:10David Sacks?

  on Apple products is that.

• 1:12:13Jason Calacanis?

  I think it does work that way.

• 1:12:15David Sacks?

  Yeah, it should.

• 1:12:15Jason Calacanis?

  I think it does work that way. I don't know if that's the listening in is like the key issue here. Well, I mean, who knows what's possible in terms of hacking and spyware? You know, those are all, you know, unknowns, so.

• 1:12:29David Sacks?

  Okay, so so one by one, we're kind of knocking knocking out all these issues. It's not passively listening. The data that is collecting doesn't seem.

• 1:12:37Jason Calacanis?

  We don't know.

• 1:12:37David Sacks?

  Doesn't seem that important. With respect to steering, I agree, I guess that's a theoretical problem, but you could say that about any of these apps 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.

• 1:12:53Jason Calacanis?

  All right.

• 1:12:53David Sacks?

  So that's a problem. And then and then I look and then one final point about the reciprocity argument is if you want to make this about reciprocity, then put it in a trade bill.

• 1:13:06David Sacks?

  That's where you deal with reciprocity is you say, okay, these products from China get to play in US markets, our products from the United States get to 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.

• 1:13:23Jason Calacanis?

  Friedberg, 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?

• 1:13:32David Friedberg?

  I don't know about divestiture. Until to Sax's point, I just, 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. 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. And I'm not, to Sax's 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 think people should have choice to

• 1:14:15David Friedberg?

  use what they want to use, provided that there is no spying. If there's spying, I want to know that they're spying and how it's happening. We need to technically fix that. If someone can passively turn on a microphone on an app and listen to people in a room. Yes, they can.

• 1:14:28Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Pretty smart scientists.

• 1:14:29David Friedberg?

  We've proven that it's possible.

• 1:14:30Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And they can also.

• 1:14:31David Friedberg?

  We should fix that. That should be fixed.

• 1:14:32Chamath Palihapitiya?

  They can also know your location.

• 1:14:33David Sacks?

  That's a bigger problem.

• 1:14:34Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Then you 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 the software from them. Okay, they, they will help you do this. So I'm sorry, guys.

• 1:14:46David Friedberg?

  But that's not a TikTok problem.

• 1:14:48David Sacks?

  Apple needs to patch it. That's exactly right. That's an Apple problem.

• 1:14:51David Friedberg?

  It doesn't solve the problem.

• 1:14:52David Sacks?

  I don't want a domestic app to be able to do that to me.

• 1:14:54David Friedberg?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:14:55Chamath Palihapitiya?

  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 has and 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 this is something Apple can fix. I think that a small, talented team of hackers,

• 1:15:41Chamath Palihapitiya?

  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. So

• 1:15:49David Sacks?

  But then we're screwed anyway, because all the data is already out there.

• 1:15:52Chamath Palihapitiya?

  So I think the point is, so knowing that if you want to 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.

• 1:16:06David Sacks?

  Okay.

• 1:16:07Chamath Palihapitiya?

  If you want to just open the door to it, keep it around.

• 1:16:10David Sacks?

  Look, 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 going to lead to weaponization. And I don't trust the government to define new categories of foreign controlled applications and websites.

• 1:16:37Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think you're probably right, which is the unfortunate part. But I do think that there's enough of these folks that have been read into something that we're not being told.

• 1:16:46David Sacks?

  And I have zero faith in that.

• 1:16:49Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah, I'm not, I'm not going to say that it's accurate or not, but I'm saying I suspect that some body of work from a three-letter agency has made its way to enough of these people under confidentiality where they've all agreed.

• 1:17:05David Sacks?

  The national security state has a secret reason for wanting to expand its powers. That just doesn't fill me with any confidence. Again, Patriot Act 2.0, that's where I started with this.

• 1:17:15Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I don't think this is the Patriot Act because the Patriot Act was like, I'm going to 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

• 1:17:25David Sacks?

  But it's not focused on TikTok. It's focused on, again, first

• 1:17:30Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, no, what I'm saying is, what I'm saying is

• 1:17:32David Sacks?

  Foreign adversary controlled applications, which includes websites.

• 1:17:34Chamath Palihapitiya?

  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, but that's very different than the Patriot Act, which was very aggressive.

• 1:17:56Jason Calacanis?

  All right. So they have, folks, two people, looks like, agree with the divestiture. Two people have a difference of opinion.

• 1:18:05Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, I don't agree with the divestiture. I think it should be shut down.

• 1:18:08Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, shut down, yeah. So shut down divestiture, looks like.

• 1:18:10Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Lots of opinions, that's good.

• 1:18:12Jason Calacanis?

  Lots of opinions, that's good. Okay.

• 1:18:14David Sacks?

  I think we just had more debate over this than the entire US Congress did.

• 1:18:17Jason Calacanis?

  Perhaps. I mean, I think that's why people listen to this program is because we're literally getting into the absolute finest details and asking really probing questions, Sacks, that you love.

• 1:18:27David Sacks?

  A hundred million people are soon going to be asking, when TikTok gets shut down, a hundred million people who used it every day are going to be like, why did this happen?

• 1:18:35Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I'm going to say something about that. One of my kids, and I'm not going to say who it is, we recently had them tested for ADHD. They weren't 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.

• 1:18:55Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And what we did was, we took away their iPad, and we completely deprived them of all these apps and video games. I cannot describe to you the magnitude of the turnaround in this kid.

• 1:19:11Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Grades, incredible, where they were getting sixty percents and seventy percents, now getting ninety percents. Totally engaged, interesting, charming kid that had lost a little bit, and I think that there was a little bit of a daze. And I just want to 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.

• 1:19:42Jason Calacanis?

  This is a known fact, actually, Chamath, 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 inattention and hyperactivity and impulsivity. So whether you think ADHD is a real diagnosis or not, it's inducing those symptoms.

• 1:20:04Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I'm willing to say that my child probably had 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.

• 1:20:18Jason Calacanis?

  Alerts.

• 1:20:19Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Alerts, all this. Anyways, went to zero. Not like you can have a little bit here or there, zero. And the transformation in this last month and a half, two months has been incredible. I don't know if other parents are dealing with this, but what I'll tell you is Veep's apps 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 want to deal with it.

• 1:20:50Jason Calacanis?

  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 this stuff, anxiety in kids is correlating with too much screen time. You can do your own research, folks.

• 1:21:10David Sacks?

  Maybe it correlates with prescription of SSRIs. Maybe it.

• 1:21:15Jason Calacanis?

  Well, no, that is part of it.

• 1:21:17David Sacks?

  With schools going totally woke and bananas. I call it a lot of things.

• 1:21:22Jason Calacanis?

  Covid definitely exacerbated. Covid exacerbated it when you look at the, the trend lines for sure. And the SSRIs and those kinds of things being prescribed is probably as a result of these ADHD symptoms coming from screen time and then it's probably unnecessary.

• 1:21:41David Sacks?

  I think people just got a lot more prescription happy. Like they're just.

• 1:21:45Jason Calacanis?

  There's definitely that. Over prescriptions is nuts.

• 1:21:47David Sacks?

  Kids on drugs for, I mean, you talk about ADHD for young boys. That's kind of like disnormal behavior.

• 1:21:55Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, no, absolutely. Like, kids running around outside and having energy. If I had to pick an age, I would say 16, 17, 18 years old for social media. And for phones, I would say 15 or 16, you know, with a very controlled phone. So that's just one person's opinion. All right, Florida is on the verge of banning lab-grown meat. Friedberg, can you tee this up for us?

• 1:22:15David Friedberg?

  Yeah, so Florida's been debating a bill in their state legislature since November, and it just passed, the House and the Senate, a vote of 86, 27 in the House, 28, 20 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 kind of highlight a little bit of the motivation and some of the technical background and my point of view on it, if that's okay.

• 1:22:52Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Friedberg, do you see him eating the meat while you're talking about it? Did you see him eating the meat?

• 1:22:57Jason Calacanis?

  I'm paying attention, unlike you guys.

• 1:22:59David Sacks?

  He's got this, like, Flintstone-sized...

• 1:23:02Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Ham hog.

• 1:23:02Jason Calacanis?

  Well, listen, go ahead.

• 1:23:03David Friedberg?

  It feels like a non-issue to folks who eat meat and don't care. But I just want to 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...

• 1:23:19Chamath Palihapitiya?

  What is the reason to...

• 1:23:20David Sacks?

  I agree with you.

• 1:23:21Chamath Palihapitiya?

  What is the reason to ban lab-grown meat?

• 1:23:24David Sacks?

  They love to ban [BLEEP] in Florida.

• 1:23:26David Friedberg?

  The motivation is that Florida ranchers felt threatened...

• 1:23:29David Sacks?

  Wait, wait, wait. The guy who just has been advocating for banning TikTok this whole [BLEEP] show is now accusing Florida of being into banning. Are you [BLEEP] kidding me? Your boy Ron DeSantis loves to [BLEEP]. I'm the only person on this pod, who, actually, Friedberg is too, who are skeptical of, like, does knee-jerk banning everything? Ban everything. I would not ban this.

• 1:23:47Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I didn't say to ban everything. Where's that coming from?

• 1:23:50David Sacks?

  We're just joking. We're joking.

• 1:23:52Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Don't label me with your J Cal brush. I'm not saying bad everything.

• 1:23:58David Friedberg?

  It's definitely becoming 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 billion-dollar 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 tried 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 use got banned because it could put traditional automotive manufacturers out of business.

• 1:24:40David Friedberg?

  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 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 going to work. The truth is, there are federal regulatory bodies that have oversight on this sort of thing. Twenty years ago, almost all the cheese that we ate in the United States was made from rennet. Rennet is an enzyme that converts the protein in milk into cheese. We got rennet from the stomach of calves.

• 1:25:24David Friedberg?

  We would scrape it out and sell rennet, 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 unlocked the opportunity to make rennet more affordably. So rather than go and slaughter calves and get the rennet 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 rennet industry is recombinantly-produced rennet. 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. Turned out, it was a lot cheaper to make enzymes using the same process I just described instead of making animal fat.

• 1:26:09David Friedberg?

  And now, all of our laundry detergent is recombinant enzymes. So I think like, this notion that we're going to 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 costs down, to bring new innovation to market. And to try and stall that innovation is going to leave the state or this country

• 1:26:33Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You're right.

• 1:26:33David Friedberg?

  in a real kind of challenge compared to other countries. I just think it's wrong. I think it's really

• 1:26:37Chamath Palihapitiya?

  On this topic, you are 100% right.

• 1:26:41Chamath Palihapitiya?

  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. That's different than a listening device.

• 1:26:53David Friedberg?

  Or cheaper or whatever.

• 1:26:55Jason Calacanis?

  Friedberg, is the criticism of this, that it's regulatory capture? Or it's part of like this anti-woke kind of vibes in Florida?

• 1:27:04David Friedberg?

  There's a conservative movement in Florida, which has taken hold, which I think this is key to.

• 1:27:10David Friedberg?

  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 ability to kind of obfuscate the two, that, oh, you know, transgenderism in schools, in elementary schools is the same as the woke leftists from California making, you know, lab-grown meat, and they all get kind of 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,

• 1:27:53David Friedberg?

  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's done this, I guarantee you're going to 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 believe that they're under threat. And, you know, it just creates like a lot of unnecessary chaos, so.

• 1:28:31Jason Calacanis?

  Sax, what is DeSantis's beef with fake meat?

• 1:28:35David Sacks?

  I don't know. I don't know. I don't know what he's gonna do in this case. 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 into some sort of bogeyman.

• 1:28:54Jason Calacanis?

  But enough about TikTok.

• 1:28:55David Sacks?

  Right, but exactly. But enough about TikTok.

• 1:28:57Jason Calacanis?

  I can see that one coming around the corner from a mile away.

• 1:28:59David Friedberg?

  That's why I wanted to talk about this, because I think the two are so similar.

• 1:29:02Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah, they're not similar at all.

• 1:29:05David Friedberg?

  Well, they're not similar.

• 1:29:06Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Go ahead, Zach.

• 1:29:07Jason Calacanis?

  Regulatory capture is regulatory capture, but this is a far.

• 1:29:09Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah, but that's just, that's just a term of art. We're just, you can't just.

• 1:29:12David Friedberg?

  Fair enough. Yeah, yeah, we disagree on, yeah, that's fine. Fair enough.

• 1:29:15Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think you guys have to have the intellectual honesty to say these are different issues. One is lab-grown meat versus ranchers in America. This is typical corruption and cronyism. Fine, whatever. Okay?

• 1:29:25David Sacks?

  Oh, yeah, but you don't think, you don't think that the, um, the other tech companies that compete with TikTok are secretly banding together to basically gin up this bill?

• 1:29:35Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I don't think they're secretly, I don't think they're secretly banning. I think that they're being overt, they're overtly organizing.

• 1:29:41David Sacks?

  Yeah, just like the ranchers.

• 1:29:43Chamath Palihapitiya?

  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.

• 1:29:51Jason Calacanis?

  I just want to say one thing.

• 1:29:52David Friedberg?

  I can acknowledge the differences and I can acknowledge the similarities.

• 1:29:56Jason Calacanis?

  I think, I just want to 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 you just don't hear this anywhere else. So I just want to give myself and the rest of the crew a pat on the back.

• 1:30:10David Friedberg?

  You just want to masturbate.

• 1:30:11Jason Calacanis?

  I just, yeah, I just want to, yeah. No, I, I mean, we really did get in a, pretty in the weeds here.

• 1:30:16David Friedberg?

  J. Cal, do you agree that the Florida bill is ridiculous? And that it sets a terrible precedent?

• 1:30:21Jason Calacanis?

  Uh, I didn't read it, but I would think that.

• 1:30:25David Friedberg?

  That's exactly what we said. There's, there's nothing special about it.

• 1:30:27Jason Calacanis?

  I can't imagine why somebody would want to ban mock meat other than crony capitalism, of course. And my question to you is, when is this gonna taste good? When are you gonna make this mock meat?

• 1:30:38Chamath Palihapitiya?

  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 Friedberg, you've said this many times, like, we are so, like, orders of magnitude away from it being...

• 1:30:56David Friedberg?

  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, 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 and 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." We don't know, and they tried, and 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 shit that takes us backwards.

• 1:31:41Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You just had the key word, "we," us, America.

• 1:31:44David Friedberg?

  America.

• 1:31:45Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Back to the TikTok thing, that's not an us thing, that's a Chinese thing.

• 1:31:49David Friedberg?

  I get the point. I'm not like, I'm not pro CCP, but yeah, I get the point.

• 1:31:54Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Anything American, God bless us.

• 1:31:56Jason Calacanis?

  Let's go, American exceptionalism. No, I saw the headlines. I think CNBC reported that the rocket blew up on entry, re-entry. The, I think finally...

• 1:32:05David Friedberg?

  They didn't say that, did they?

• 1:32:07Jason Calacanis?

  I saw one headline where they had to put a little nag in the end of the sentence.

• 1:32:10David Friedberg?

  They were starling, starling video for like an hour. It's nuts.

• 1:32:14Jason Calacanis?

  The video was so crystal clear, it was like HD of this rocket coming back down to Earth. It was bonkers, so congrats to E.

• 1:32:22Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Can I show you guys the most incredible tweet related to this? I'm just gonna send this to you, Nick.

• 1:32:28Jason Calacanis?

  Friendly reminder that Google's annual catering budget is 72 million, about twice the cost of Sharsh.

• 1:32:36Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Today, today Elon made the entire human race multi-planetary.

• 1:32:43David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:43Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And it costs half as much as what Google spends on food.

• 1:32:49David Friedberg?

  That's incredible.

• 1:32:50Jason Calacanis?

  It does seem like

• 1:32:51David Friedberg?

  It doesn't seem like a lot of money to spend on food. I don't know.

• 1:32:54Jason Calacanis?

  It does seem like these rockets take two or three, the new, each time there's a new platform, it seems to take Elon exactly like two or three to nail it. And here we are again, you know, you know, congrats to our boy. Great job.

• 1:33:06David Friedberg?

  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, et cetera, et cetera. 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 that was, I think, marks 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,

• 1:33:51David Friedberg?

  but I think this is a new era. It's really incredible.

• 1:33:54Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think this was like five or six years ago. I got cleared to basically fly and hug Riedenberg when they were doing a launch. And so I was able to see it as of the thing like, kind of like, tried to approach Max Q. It's one of the most incredible things I've ever done. So.

• 1:34:14Jason Calacanis?

  I think we made some progress. If you look at the Google News links, a lot of praise for this launch. So.

• 1:34:22Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, looks like people are kind of 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

• 1:34:33David Friedberg?

  The Starship?

• 1:34:34Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I've been inside. I was inside the first one they built. It is so large. The capacity of this thing is like, I think it could fit like three, four, 500 human beings inside of it.

• 1:34:44David Friedberg?

  Maybe when we do our Austin Poker Night, we can stop over and see it. It'd be really fun.

• 1:34:49Jason Calacanis?

  It's bonkers. And when you see it stacked, the height is like, it almost feels like you're looking at CGI in the real world. It is incredibly tall, like incredibly tall. All right, listen, this is your favorite podcast in the world, episode 170 of the All In Podcast. We never ask for this, but if you have a chance, we do the show on video. So if you're listening to audio, just type in All In Podcast in YouTube. And you can see the four 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. All right, four, David Sacks, the Rain Man, David Friedberg, your Sultan of Science, Chamath Palihapitiya, Chairman Dictator.

• 1:35:33Jason Calacanis?

  I am the world's greatest moderator, as David Sacks will attest with all those incredibly sharp questions.

• 1:35:40David Friedberg?

  Why do you always go Christopher Walken whenever you do these outtakes? Why do you do that?

• 1:35:44Jason Calacanis?

  Thanks for listening to the All In Podcast. Wow. David Sacks, poignant points about regulatory capture. Friedberg loves mock meats. Not for me. Chamath, everyone loves a great dictator.

• 1:36:06Jason Calacanis?

  Next time, All In Podcast. Wow.

• 1:36:12David Friedberg?

  Love you boys. So good.

• 1:36:14David Sacks?

  Those are your better impressions.

• 1:36:16David Friedberg?

  So good.

• 1:36:16David Sacks?

  Better than Trump, I would say.

• 1:36:18David Friedberg?

  Everyone's got their superpower. That's your superpower.

• 1:36:20Jason Calacanis?

  Very nasty, nasty J. Cal.

• 1:36:22David Sacks?

  Don't ruin it. Don't ruin it.

• 1:36:23Jason Calacanis?

  I'm coming on. I'm coming on All In. All right, Sacks, Saxipoo invited me.

• 1:36:28David Sacks?

  I'd say you're Walken's better than your Trump.

• 1:36:31Jason Calacanis?

  I gotta work on. I turned the Trump off for three years. Give me a break. I'm gonna

• 1:36:34David Friedberg?

  Can you do a Joe Pesci?

• 1:36:35Jason Calacanis?

  Can you do a Joe Pesci? Do I have a Joe Pesci?

• 1:36:40David Friedberg?

  I feel like you do a good Joe Pesci.

• 1:36:42Jason Calacanis?

  I do. I'll bring you a Joe Pesci next. I take requests. I'll do a Joe Pesci. Sure, why not?

• 1:36:46David Sacks?

  He only does the Pesci involuntarily when he gets upset.

• 1:36:49Jason Calacanis?

  Get in the chopper, everybody.

• 1:36:50David Friedberg?

  You got a shorts on?

• 1:36:51Jason Calacanis?

  I'm running for, I'm running for president. You got to change the laws.

• 1:36:58Jason Calacanis?

  Trump, you have to change it so a German can be president. Austrian. Austrian. Austrian, yeah. Alright, what's next? Oh, yeah, rate and subscribe and all that other bullshit if you want. Bye bye, girls. Bye bye.

• 1:37:44Chamath Palihapitiya?

  We should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy because they're all just useless. It's like this like sexual tension that they just need to release somehow.

• 1:37:52David Sacks?

  What you're the bee? What you're a bee? What? We need to get merge.

• 1:37:58Jason Calacanis?

  Besties are back.