E157: Epic legal win, OpenAI licensing deals, FCC targets Elon, Alex Jones reinstated & more

(0:00) Bestie intros: Mullets! (2:56) Recapping Friedberg's holiday party (9:29) Jury rules in favor of Epic Games over Google: How to handle the app store duopoly? (23:21) OpenAI inks deal with Axel Springer (35:02) FCC cancels Starlink subsidy, dissenting FCC Commissioner says federal agencies are targeting Elon Musk on Biden's orders (58:25) Alex Jones reinstated on X (1:22:59) Sacks receives an unlikely apology (1:27:32) Besties take two questions from the audience 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://www.theverge.com/23994174/epic-google-trial-jury-verdict-monopoly-google-play https://www.theverge.com/23959932/epic-v-google-trial-antitrust-play-store-fortnite-recap https://www.wsj.com/tech/google-loses-antitrust-case-brought-by-epic-games-651f5987 https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answer/112622 https://twitter.com/openai/status/1734940445824937993 https://www.ap.org/ap-in-the-news/2023/chatgpt-maker-openai-signs-deal-with-ap-to-license-news-stories https://www.axios.com/2023/12/13/openai-chatgpt-axel-springer-news-deal https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/four-factors https://twitter.com/Jason/status/1730035957850833023 https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/12/23999070/spacex-starlink-fcc-rural-digital-opportunity-fund-fcc-rejected https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-399068A1.pdf https://twitter.com/HansMahncke/status/1735003655697244308 https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/13/us/politics/hunter-biden-impeachment-testimony.html https://twitter.com/BrendanCarrFCC/status/1734780816599703983 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1733529033575465381 https://twitter.com/DrJBhattacharya/status/1602052936921939968 https://medium.com/craft-ventures/section-230-mend-it-dont-end-it-e33799a43a5f https://twitter.com/TheChiefNerd/status/1733496554701365582 https://twitter.com/Mark60480727/status/1735335623207038994 https://twitter.com/Jason/status/1735164131806986441 https://twitter.com/MomCooksFS/status/1735341157800915278

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

• 0:00Jason Calacanis?

  We're going mullet this week in honor of your, your closest to mullet right now, Sacks. I see you trying to tuck the lettuce in. It's not gonna work. We see it back there.

• 0:10David Sacks?

  Well, I need the ponytail.

• 0:11Jason Calacanis?

  Wow, you went full knot?

• 0:13David Friedberg?

  Where is this photo from? Do you have like a secret camera in his room? What is this?

• 0:17David Sacks?

  No, my kids took it.

• 0:20Jason Calacanis?

  Are you really doing a douche knot?

• 0:22David Sacks?

  One of my daughters is playing with my hair. She wants to see if she can make a ponytail with it. So she made a ponytail and then took a photo. So we sent it into ChatGPT to ask who it looked like and it said Thomas Jefferson.

• 0:32Jason Calacanis?

  Just a serious question. Did you do a fit check with Tucker on that? Did you send him that and say fit check?

• 0:37David Sacks?

  Yeah, not everything has to do with Tucker, J. Cal. The joke's gonna hold.

• 0:40Jason Calacanis?

  Look at this smile. If you guys don't know what a fit check is, ask your daughters.

• 0:44David Sacks?

  Oh, wait, what, what check?

• 0:45Jason Calacanis?

  A fit check. A fit check. You take a picture of yourself, you send it to your friends, you say fit check, and then they tell you if you look good for the day.

• 0:51David Sacks?

  Oh, okay. It's kind of like, it's kind of like a wellness check, but for how you look for fashion. Oh, okay.

• 0:56Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, it's like when Friedberg sends you, I'm having anxiety about this, and then we do a wellness check on Friedberg, see if he's gonna show up for the show.

• 1:03David Sacks?

  Or we do a wellness check on you when Alex Jones comes back to Twitter.

• 1:07Jason Calacanis?

  I'm putting it out there right now. And Alex Jones is on the back half of the show, just to tease it, just like I'm gonna tease these photos. I pulled the archives and here I am in 1984 with my mullet. That's a J. Cal mullet from 1984 in Staten Island on the way to a Boy Scout trip, but I thought we would have a little fun. Sacks actually has been working. He's got his hairstylist. Yeah, well, the gray.

• 1:32David Friedberg?

  He looks like a Lord of the Rings character, like an elfin warrior.

• 1:35Jason Calacanis?

  No, he looks like the elfin warrior. Exactly. So we'll punch that up, but your mom actually, surprisingly, surprisingly good in the mullet.

• 1:45David Friedberg?

  I can't look.

• 1:46David Sacks?

  That's horrible.

• 1:47Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, Friedberg, you're not getting away untouched. Here it is. Friedberg looks. Like a Berkeley.

• 1:54Chamath Palihapitiya?

  He looks like Orlando Bloom in Lord of the Rings, right?

• 1:57David Sacks?

  Actually, it looks like more like that vampire movie. What was it that?

• 2:00Jason Calacanis?

  He does look like Interview with the Vampire or he looks like he's teaching gender studies at Berkeley and is nine non-binary. So if you want to take understanding, non-binary, ethnic gender studies 101, it's coming this spring. Friedberg's going to be teaching on his alma mater. Well done.

• 2:18David Friedberg?

  I'll find you guys a photo. I'll send it to you as mine. I did have a ponytail. I sported it from about age 16 to 19. When I smoked cigarettes too, and I've got photos with the ponytail and the trench coat, smoking cigs. So it fits the, fits the mold.

• 2:30Jason Calacanis?

  All right. So in the spirit of mullets, let's go business first and we will go to the party at the end. Let's get started, boys.

• 2:56Jason Calacanis?

  With me again today here on the All In Podcast, the king of, we've retired queen of Kenwa. Because David Friedberg is CEO of a startup.

• 3:05Chamath Palihapitiya?

  He can still be the queen.

• 3:06David Sacks?

  Is the main product Friedberg?

• 3:08Jason Calacanis?

  No, it's, so he's the king of beep.

• 3:11David Sacks?

  He's the king of vegetables.

• 3:12David Friedberg?

  Off the record.

• 3:13David Sacks?

  Wait, wait, is classified what crop you're working on?

• 3:15David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 3:16Jason Calacanis?

  Absolutely. Absolutely. It's a SaaS company, like a SaaS company wants to keep it on the DL, which vertical they're going after finance or sales, whatever. He's got to keep those. It could be carrots. You never know. It could be Captain Carrots. You never know.

• 3:28David Sacks?

  Just not beets. Okay, Friedberg, we don't need more beets in the world.

• 3:32Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I'm going to say no fennel.

• 3:33Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Dude, beets are delicious. Beets are delicious.

• 3:35David Sacks?

  Yeah, you're right.

• 3:36David Friedberg?

  No more beets.

• 3:37Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Beets with some feta cheese, delicious.

• 3:39David Sacks?

  Yeah, you're right.

• 3:40Jason Calacanis?

  All right, I'll go with that.

• 3:41David Sacks?

  Brussels sprouts can be very good, you know, saute them. Look, you caramelize the Brussels sprouts.

• 3:48Jason Calacanis?

  I'm with you.

• 3:48David Sacks?

  Very good. Let's make those cheaper, Friedberg.

• 3:51Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, bigger and cheaper and more tasty.

• 3:53Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You know, you know what people, people, people dunk on, but it's a great vegetable is cabbage.

• 3:58David Friedberg?

  I like cabbage.

• 3:59Chamath Palihapitiya?

  If you like shred cabbage into a salad and you put a little olive oil, little lemon, little salt.

• 4:05Jason Calacanis?

  Chinese chicken salad, like Chin Chin in LA, that's nice.

• 4:08David Friedberg?

  Exactly, yeah.

• 4:09Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Sax, did you like Friedberg's Christmas party last week? How was it? Did you enjoy it as much as we did?

• 4:14Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, it was great. Oh, right. Sax didn't show up.

• 4:16David Sacks?

  Did I miss the party?

• 4:17Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, you did, David.

• 4:18David Sacks?

  Who does a Christmas party first week of summer?

• 4:21David Friedberg?

  Before you tell your story, a very kind gentleman rings the door to my gate. I open the gate. The guy drives in. He gets out. He's like a big guy, kind of says, Mr. Friedberg. And I'm like, what am I getting served? And he goes to the backseat and I'm like, oh my God, I'm gonna get shot. He reaches in and he pulls out a beautifully wrapped gift. He's like, this is from Mr. Sax, Mr. Friedberg. Um, uh, happy holidays. And then he gave me like a touch on the shoulder or like he does this thing where he goes like this, do a little bow. He got back in his car and he drove away.

• 4:48Chamath Palihapitiya?

  He's gonna bow. What is he, a shirt butler?

• 4:50David Friedberg?

  It was like when you go to an Aman resort, he did the Aman thing that they do.

• 4:53Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, right. That, no, no, that wasn't his butler. That was his valet. That's his valet. He stole the valet from the Aman. The Aman is looking for valets.

• 5:00David Friedberg?

  It was the most thoughtful no-show I've ever had. I will say Sax, so thank you.

• 5:03David Sacks?

  Okay, well, I'm glad to hear that. I'm glad to hear that. Well, what's funny is I just checked my inbox and my invitation from you is sitting in there. Cause I've been meaning to go, but I didn't realize it was so soon. So I'm just looking at the date. It was December 9th. I didn't realize it was five days ago. Sorry about that.

• 5:20David Friedberg?

  Someone in your household did, so we appreciate it. Thank you.

• 5:22David Sacks?

  Someone new.

• 5:23Jason Calacanis?

  I went, but this is my, this is my second or third year going, so I pre, I pre-gamed it. I went and I got protein and meat. I got meat. I ate a bunch of steak and a burger. And then I went and sure enough, I talked to the staff and the staff said, after much debate and haranguing with Friedberg, he allowed cheese this year. He allowed cheese.

• 5:46David Friedberg?

  No sushi. We had a whole sushi platter thing.

• 5:47Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, stop. You didn't have sushi. Okay, now it's my turn to tell the truth.

• 5:51Jason Calacanis?

  Go ahead. Tell the truth, Chamath.

• 5:52Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I get in the car to drive 90 minutes, 90 minutes to Friedberg's house.

• 5:56David Friedberg?

  90 minutes for bad sushi. That's the poker trip for me, by the way. But yeah.

• 6:00Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And I Nat texts Allison and David. We're on our way. Chamath wants to know, will there be meat? Cause I'm driving, so I can't text. And Ally says, oh yeah, don't worry, there'll be sushi. And then Nat texts back, okay, we just got off the highway. We're going home. We'll see you later, cause we don't believe. Says there's gonna be fish. Fine, I get there. Haven't eaten a thing. I am starving.

• 6:24Jason Calacanis?

  Ravenous.

• 6:25Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I start, I start to work my way through the appetizers. There's like sliced green peppers and red peppers. There's like some falafels. Then there was a Spanish omelet. Felt pretty decent, okay? And I'm like, where's the sushi? And so Phil Deutsch says, a thousand bucks, there's no sushi. And I said, no, there's. Friedberg texted me. He said, I've asked all the people working here. They say there's no sushi. So I bet him a thousand dollars. I go outside to where the sushi is. And you know how we used to make fun of Sky for having the filler fruit at the poker game?

• 6:58Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 6:59Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Like cantaloupe and honeydew, and that's all there was?

• 7:02Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 7:02Chamath Palihapitiya?

  There was no sushi, but there was two or three rolls with

• 7:06Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 7:07Chamath Palihapitiya?

  four pieces of salmon strategically cut, just laying over. I won the bet. I was so hungry. I was like, what do I eat? I'm starving. So I keep eating the omelet. I keep eating the vegetarian food. And then I see these brownies. And I'm like, I'll just have a brownie. Then I had two brownies. And then I was like, okay, I need to stop. I can't, I can't have this. I'm, and I'm still so hungry. I walk outside J Cal where I saw you. We're having a cup of coffee. And you know what I I ate five baklava. And then I was like, this is disgusting. I've had no protein. I've had no carbohydrates. I've had no fiber. I've had a fucking 3,000 calories of sugar. I grabbed Nat and I charged home. I was so mad.

• 7:48Jason Calacanis?

  He did. He Irish. I didn't see him say goodbye. Irish goodbye.

• 7:51Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Friedberg and I talked about it yesterday. We talked it out.

• 7:53Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I was.

• 7:55Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I, I must have had 6,000 calories at his Christmas party.

• 7:59David Friedberg?

  I'm coming over to Chamoff tonight. Yeah, it's only gonna be tri-tip the whole night, I'm sure. Not a single visible inside.

• 8:04David Sacks?

  It sounds like J Cal preloaded the meat. He, uh, he got ready.

• 8:08Jason Calacanis?

  I, on the way, no, seriously, after last year, last year I left that party and I just typed in, I just said to my, my dad.

• 8:15Chamath Palihapitiya?

  To go to Popeyes?

• 8:16Jason Calacanis?

  Closest In-N-Out Burger. And I literally got a double double. And then I just had a second one. On the way up this time, I literally had a steak for dinner and then I went and then I too had some.

• 8:26Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Have you guys ever had Popeyes?

• 8:28David Sacks?

  Of course.

• 8:29Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I had never had it. My son asked to get it last week, last weekend. I'd never had it. Can you believe it?

• 8:35Jason Calacanis?

  Here we go.

• 8:36Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It is the most incredible thing I've ever tasted, these Popeyes sandwiches.

• 8:40Jason Calacanis?

  Wow. Wait for the out of touch YouTube comments.

• 8:44David Sacks?

  The problem is not the eating of it. It's how you feel two hours later.

• 8:47Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But I mean, I've had Chick-fil-A, you know, I've done the chicken sandwiches at other places, never Popeyes is incredible. Incredible. So then I had Nat almost on the edge of convincing her to go to Popeyes on the way home. But we missed the closing time, so we couldn't get it.

• 9:06Jason Calacanis?

  I got, go to Starbird or Bonchan. Those are two other elite.

• 9:09Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, bro, not, not, I'm not talking fancy chicken. I've had like the fancy chicken sandwiches. I'm saying Popeyes is incredible.

• 9:16Jason Calacanis?

  I like it. I like it. Austerity, Chama. Here we go. Have you had a fly of fish? All right, let's get the show started here. Of course, with me again, the king of beep, the dictator and the rain man. Let's get to work. All right, everybody. Epic, the makers of Fortnite, just won a huge case.

• 9:34Jason Calacanis?

  With Google over the Play App Store on Android phones. For those of you don't know, app stores have become an absolutely huge business for Apple and Google. Google App Store generates $50 billion of revenue a year now. That's about 17% of Google's total revenue. Apple's App Store and Services, 85 billion in annual revenue. These are on top of their franchises of hardware and search. The jury in San Francisco unanimously found that Google violated California's federal antitrust laws through sweetheart deals. And annoying workarounds that stifled competition. For example, Google got

• 10:11Jason Calacanis?

  spooked that other game developers would follow Epic's lead and launch their own app stores or route people directly to their websites to avoid the 30% take rate. Some might call that a tax. Google calculated they would lose 2 billion to 3.5 billion in revenue annually if the other major game developers followed Epic. So they created a program. Codename Project Hug, where they basically paid out bribes or incentives to discourage large developers from building their own competitive app stores. They also gave Spotify a sweetheart deal of 0% and Google paid Activision $360 million to keep them in the Play Store. And the discovery in this case was absolutely wild.

• 10:56Jason Calacanis?

  According to testimony in the trial, Google had deleted some employees' chat logs and the judge told the jury to assume that the deleted information wouldn't have been favorable to Google. Jury only deliberated a few hours and Google plans to appeal the verdict, obviously. Epic isn't seeking damages. They just want Google to change their practices. They want to basically let people plug in their own billing system to avoid the 30% tax. We'll see what happens next. Friedberg. These stores clearly have monopolistic characteristics, but... And Google actually allows for third-party app stores. Maybe you can explain why you think Apple won their case against Epic, but Google lost?

• 11:37David Friedberg?

  These are pretty different cases. The Apple case was a judge. This one was a jury of citizens in federal court. I think it's worth just backing up a minute and talking about the history of like apps on phones and how Android came to be. Prior to Google acquiring Android, you guys may remember, there were a few companies that were the dominant OS providers, operating system providers to mobile phones. There was Nokia, there was Microsoft, there was Apple, and there was also BlackBerry. And at the time, a lot of the telcos, the Verizons and AT&Ts of the world, prior to this, were trying to make money by charging for people to install apps on phones.

• 12:19David Friedberg?

  So that was the first business model in the mobile internet, was the telco would make money and everyone fought against it. All the open internet providers said, "This is ridiculous." And it was clear that that was not going to be allowed. So ultimately, these operating systems became the play. And which operating system was on which mobile phone? And what did that operating system then allow to control what apps were allowed and so on? So the reason Google bought Android is they wanted to make an open-source alternative to all of these closed app and closed systems. So Google bought Android 2005. Made a huge investment in growing the team and allowed anyone to use the Android OS, fork it, make their own versions of it, install it on their own hardware, run it however they wanted.

• 13:00David Friedberg?

  Meanwhile, Google made an internal version of Android that could be used on any mobile handset company's phone as a pre-installed OS. Now, why did Google want to do this? They wanted to do this, number one, to make sure that the Internet was still open and it wasn't going to end up being closed from a user's perspective. And number two, so that anyone can install any app they wanted. And the commercial interest for Google, which is number three, is so that Google could make search, Google search the default search engine on that phone and have YouTube installed and all these other tools that Google makes money on, including their own App Store. Now, in Android, anyone can install any app they want on the phone. And so there's no restrictions, unlike in Apple. In the iOS, if you try and download an app off the Internet and install it, it has to

• 13:45David Friedberg?

  go through the App Store, it has to be Apple verified in order to be allowed on the phone. So the whole point of Android was that it could be open, anyone could install anything. What Epic claimed in this case was that Google's Android OS gave people security warnings. So if you ever have tried this, you download an app from a website on Android, it says, "Warning, warning, this may cause a virus on your phone. Are you sure you want to do this? This app hasn't been verified by Google," et cetera, et cetera. So it gives these warnings that scare consumers off of doing that. So Epic can, you can install Fortnite direct on your Android phone today, and you can do it by downloading it from Epic's website. You don't have to go through the Google Play Store, and you can enter your credit card and you can pay for stuff. So it is, it is an open system that allows that. What these guys are claiming is that because Google can default the Google Play Store on

• 14:30David Friedberg?

  the phone, it's basically what most consumers are going to use anyway. And so they're saying it's not fair, and because they also have influence over the OS and they're putting these security warnings, it's inappropriate because now it's scaring people from downloading stuff off the Internet. So that's the big claim Epic's making. So Google has already said they're going to appeal this case because fundamentally, again, if this were really true and there really was deep anti-trust issues with this, you would likely have seen a federal agency come after Google, not a private company suing them in a civil case. This would have been a much more significant action if there really was anti-trust behavior. But it's a lot easier to win a jury trial, party to party, where Epic can go to a court and say, "Hey, let's go after Google, they're awful, we make Fortnite," and all this sort of stuff. So they do have a bias in that sense of being able to do this.

• 15:12David Friedberg?

  Google's going to appeal, they feel very strongly they'll win an appeal, and the markets obviously did a... You know, voted with the fact that Google's stock didn't really move anywhere. And the market said, hey, this is a, this is a nothing burger. Google's 40 billion in annual Play Store revenue. Worst case scenario, like you said, if it gets impacted by $2 billion. That's 2 billion out of 300 overall. Doesn't really matter. And likely they're going to win on appeal anyway. So, you know, I think the saga will continue. But I think Google's got a pretty strong case on appeal. And it seems like, you know, it's going to be very hard to kind of see a massive change in app store behavior as a result of this case, even though it's been hyped up to be that. That's my take on it.

• 15:49Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, great take. Chamath, what do you think about this jury shopping? And maybe the fact that this isn't Lina Khan, this isn't the FTC. You know, it's company to company. Do you think that the claims here were valid? Do you think the jury shopping impacted this in a significant way?

• 16:05Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Probably. I guess the simple thought exercise is what do we think the outcome would have been had this trial happened in Dallas, Texas? Probably different. And so I think Friedberg is right. What does it materially prove? Nothing with respect to the body of law. It just goes to show that if you pick the right place to convene these trials in the right format, you can give yourself a slightly better probability of winning. But the question is, what will you win? It's not clear to me what happens now. Is there going to be a damages portion now of this trial? Is that what happens next?

• 16:42Jason Calacanis?

  They're not seeking damages. They want changes to how they operate.

• 16:45David Friedberg?

  They're trying to get a settlement and they want Google to settle out with changes to the app store policies. That's what they're asking for.

• 16:51Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And then what about the Epic versus Apple lawsuit? Is it being done in the same way?

• 16:56Jason Calacanis?

  No, they lost.

• 16:57David Friedberg?

  They lost and they appealed. And there's one element that's being appealed to the Supreme Court now, but basically they lost and that's over.

• 17:03Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And was that convened in California in a jury trial as well in San Francisco?

• 17:07David Friedberg?

  No, that, that was not a jury trial. It was a judge.

• 17:11Jason Calacanis?

  But it was California.

• 17:13Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It was a bench trial in California.

• 17:14David Friedberg?

  Yeah, it was also in Northern California. That's right.

• 17:17Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 17:18Jason Calacanis?

  So Sax, let me bring you in on this. Do you think that these stores are monopolies? And do you think if they change their behavior, especially Apple, you know, allow other third-party stores? What impact would that have on the startup ecosystem? Because the 30% tax is significant and we see that every day with our startups. I mean, if you have to give away 30% of your revenue to Google and Apple, it's brutal. And then you're advertising on Apple and Google and Facebook. That's another 30% of your revenue or 50% of your revenue.

• 17:47David Sacks?

  Yeah, no, I agree with that. So first of all, these app stores are absolutely monopolies within their ecosystem. And Apple and Google Android are absolutely a duopoly within the mobile space. My experience with these types of monopolies or gatekeepers is that they exercise more and more control and extract more and more of the value over time. It's an iterative process in which they just keep, you know, extracting, keep taxing, keep imposing more rules on the ecosystem for their benefit and to the detriment of innovators. And so I do think they have to be controlled and I think Epic is doing the ecosystem a favor. For example, on this 30% rake that you're talking about, J Cal,

• 18:29David Sacks?

  that level of rake might have been appropriate for certain types of apps, like a hobbyist app where it's literally 100% margin. Okay, you pay 30% to the app store. It doesn't work for SaaS companies. I mean, I can tell you that. I mean, this would be like half of their gross margin or something like that. It doesn't work for a lot of companies that spend a lot of money on content creation, like Epic, which spends a lot of money in R and D to create a game like Fortnite.

• 18:54Jason Calacanis?

  Netflix, Spotify.

• 18:55David Sacks?

  Exactly.

• 18:56Jason Calacanis?

  Break their models immediately.

• 18:57David Sacks?

  Or Amazon with Kindle. And so what happened is, it used to be the case that Amazon could have a link in their app, at least directing the user to go to the amazon.com website and you could buy the book there and you could circumvent the rake in the app. And it was inconvenient for the user, but at least there was a way around it. Then Apple banned those links, then they banned the ability for the app to even message to the user what was happening. So if, for example, if you use the Kindle app on iOS, which I do all the time, you can't buy a book in it. And the reason why is because Amazon doesn't want to pay the 30% rate, but they can't even tell you that. It just looks like it's broken functionality. So those of us who know, go to amazon.com through the browser

• 19:41David Sacks?

  and we buy the book there and then it magically appears in the Kindle app. We've all had that experience. So I just think that these duopolies have to be controlled. I think that it'd be good if the government could figure out better ways to do it. I don't think M and A is the right way to do it. We've talked about this before. I think that restricting anti-competitive tactics is really the way to stop it. And like I said, I can't speak to the details of Epic's case, but I do think they're doing the ecosystem a favor here by pushing back on these monopolies and helping to keep them under control.

• 20:12Jason Calacanis?

  I 100% agree with you, Sax, in your take. And I think actually other people should join them and the industry should really force this issue because you are absolutely correct that they're boiling the frog. Now, they did make some cuts under a million. I think they charged 15% on the first million. So they try to be nice to the smaller developers.

• 20:27David Friedberg?

  No, no, pull it up. That's not, look, it's actually the larger ones too. Pull up the, the link I just said. So you'll see here, Google charges through the Play Store. If you doubt, if you want to have distribution, I mean, think about the Play Store as being like a retailer. You make clothing, you need to have a retail store that someone can go to and buy stuff. The retail store has to make money. You're not going to have a retail store that's free. So how does the retail store make money? Well, they charge 98% of apps, as you can see here, are free because, you know, they, they don't make any money on that. But then if you start to charge subscriptions, it's 15% take on automatically renewing subscriptions where it's easier for the

• 21:00Jason Calacanis?

  In the second year. Yeah.

• 21:01David Friedberg?

  Yeah, it's easier. No, each year. Look at the second

• 21:03Jason Calacanis?

  No, no, no, it's for renewing. So I know this because of com. So in the first year

• 21:08David Friedberg?

  It's for renewing subscriptions, subscription products. So all subscriptions that have an automatic renewal feature to them are instantly at 15%. And as a result, you know, you can think about the, what is it worth to get a user to not have to enter their credit card info, you know, plus the credit card fees. It's like 15%. Not too crazy. Honestly, I'm just, you know, I'm not trying to be a super Google advocate, but I'm just saying like, I don't think that's too crazy. And then they've got this like negotiated tier where if you are a very large app developer and you want to go and negotiate with Google, they have a biz dev team like Spotify and others get where they'll negotiate fees down and you can actually go and like argue for better economics. So they've tried to be commercial, which I'm guessing is probably why Lina Khan and others haven't gone after them for antitrust and monopolistic behavior because they've tried

• 21:53David Friedberg?

  to find the comfortable place where it's not going to be too crazy. At least that's my read on what's gone on because otherwise, I mean, obviously folks would be all over them, you know, if it really was monopolistic.

• 22:01Jason Calacanis?

  But the boiling of the frog issue is the one for me because then they want to charge you now for placement in the App Store and get revenue from you there.

• 22:09David Friedberg?

  Oh yeah, I mean, that's Amazon too. Amazon's got that. Like everyone's gotten squeaked. Every D to C company in the last five years has gotten obliterated. Their unit economics are upside down now. And we've talked about this, both Google's taken out the margin, but Amazon forces you to buy ads in order to get product placement. Yeah. And then they force you to pay all the extra fees for inventory. Amazon squeezed everyone way more than any of these digital app stores.

• 22:31Jason Calacanis?

  This is the perfect place for Lina Khan to get active, I think. And the settlement's super easy. The entire industry should come at them in unison, tons of lawsuits, group lawsuits, until they allow, when you turn on your Apple phone, the ability to load Amazon's App Store, Epic's App Store, whoever else wants to have an App Store. That should be your right. If you buy a hardware device, it should be your right to load these and they shouldn't be anchored in any way. And that's the other thing. Android does all kinds of anchoring to make those with those pop ups and hey, this isn't safe, et cetera. They should have a verified App Store program. Amazon's App Store, Epic's App Store, they should be verified or something and maybe they pay 5% to have a verified App Store. But yeah, this is a, this is going to be an ongoing issue and we'll see more of it,

• 23:15Jason Calacanis?

  I think. So let's go on. Anybody else have thoughts on it?

• 23:19David Friedberg?

  No.

• 23:20Jason Calacanis?

  Okay. So in other news, OpenAI is starting to cut licensing deals. If you remember, we had a big debate about this back on episode 115 in February.

• 23:32Jason Calacanis?

  And I was saying, hey, this content is owned and the opportunity to create LLMs or derivative products, you know, is the right of the people who make that content. Sax, you told me I was gonna get rolled over, but here we are.

• 23:46David Sacks?

  I wouldn't say I said you're gonna get rolled over. What I said is the ecosystem's gonna figure this out.

• 23:50Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, let's play the tape. If ChatGPT takes a Yelp review and a, you know, a Conde Nast traveler review and they re-present it based on the best content that's out there, that they've already ranked because they have that algorithm with PageRank or Bing's ranking engine, and then they republish it, and then that jeopardizes those businesses. That is profoundly unfair and not what we want for society. And they are interfering with their ability to leverage their own content. It's profoundly unfair. And those magazines and newspapers need to... What's up?

• 24:21David Sacks?

  You're gonna get steamrolled.

• 24:23Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, there it is.

• 24:25David Sacks?

  Man, is my hair worse now or then?

• 24:27David Friedberg?

  Yeah, your hair was undercut back then. I think you were like post-COVID back then.

• 24:31Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah, I think you look much better right now. That looked like a toupee. Nick, can you just show us a picture of that?

• 24:37David Friedberg?

  Yeah, you're in the Common Era. That was like a, like an early AD. This is like the Common Era now.

• 24:43Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You know, that's a toupee. That's a toupee.

• 24:46Jason Calacanis?

  It does look like a toupee. It looks like a raccoon.

• 24:49David Friedberg?

  Okay, J Cal, I got some comments on this because I think you're...

• 24:52Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Your fluffer has fluffed too much on the upper parts and unfluffed the bottom parts, which I think never works.

• 24:59Jason Calacanis?

  Don't criticize him. When he was in an in-between phase, we all go through an in-between phase with our hair. It's part of the process.

• 25:05David Sacks?

  Now I know why we're talking about this topic, J Cal, because you think you, it's a total non-story. Or it's, I shouldn't say it's a non-story.

• 25:11Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, well, let me finish. Let me finish it off. So just so we know what's going on here, OpenAI announced a licensing deal with Axel Springer to bring real-time news from Politico and the fake news from Business Insider to ChatGPT.

• 25:24David Friedberg?

  You literally sound like Alex Jones. I mean, Tucker.

• 25:27Jason Calacanis?

  Thank you.

• 25:27David Friedberg?

  You complain all your...

• 25:30Jason Calacanis?

  I got one thing right. As part of the deal, Axel Springer can use ChatGPT to improve their products, includes other European sites. This is on top of the deal that OpenAI did with the Associated Press, but most importantly, I'm going to throw it to you in a second. Most importantly, when ChatGPT relies on these sources, it'll include a summary and a link back. Other examples of licensing are happening all over the industry. Adobe is using stop images for theirs and stable diffusion, as you know. That brazenly used Getty's images are being sued. So Friedberg, you thought this was unrealistic, but here we are.

• 26:09David Friedberg?

  No, I don't agree with your framing, and I think that I think it's unrealistic for you to frame this as validating or justifying the fact that these companies won't be able to access and utilize open data under fair use to train models. So that's what's gone on historically, right? So the open web, you know, we talked a little bit about where folks can get content from the open web. You can browse the internet and you can download all this content. It's all freely available. It's readily available. It's in it's in the open domain. And then you can train models and then the models can ultimately make stuff based on all that training data. What this deal is, is it's actually a content integration deal. And I'll read this with the partnership, ChatGPT users around the world will receive summaries

• 26:52David Friedberg?

  of selected global news content from Axel Springer's media brands, including yada yada, including otherwise paid content. So what ChatGPT is doing is they're accessing content behind a paywall. And they're be able and instead of training models on it, they're able to fetch that data as a retrieval aspect of the ChatGPT service. So now you as a user want an update on, hey, what's going on with Donald Trump? It can search not it can not just use its training data, but it can recognize that, hey, there's a current event news question embedded in this query. And I can go fetch that current event news answer from this content that I've now paid for. So it's not a training data set that that's now being unlocked, which is what the complaint was before,

• 27:32David Friedberg?

  that all the open web data was being used for training, but it's behind paywall data that can now be fetched and integrated. And I think it's more interesting because. It really speaks to a new model for how the Internet will work, which we've talked about, which is that there may be these sort of new chat interfaces that cannot just send you to another page and link you over somewhere, but can fetch data for you and present it to you in an integrated way in the response it's providing. And these services have to pay for access to that. So Chat, you know, OpenAI, it's a three-year deal. They're paying tens of millions of dollars to Axel Springer to access their closed content and present it to the user. So I think it's quite a bit different than, you know, using training data, which is what, you know, the complaint was the first time around. And it's more of like a really interesting front-end feature for what ChatGPT is becoming.

• 28:16Jason Calacanis?

  Sax, you wanted to add to that?

• 28:19David Sacks?

  And I don't really have a lot to add to that. I think Friedberg did a great job explaining that issue. I mean, look, I think, Jake, how you've had a little bit of obsession with this copyright issue.

• 28:28Jason Calacanis?

  Well, protecting rights holders I do believe in.

• 28:31David Sacks?

  I don't know. But I think Friedberg makes a really great point, which is there's a difference between copying somebody's copywritten work, which would be a violation of copyright, and using content that's available on the open web to train a model to create entirely new content. And I do think that AI models should be able to use the content that's available on the web

• 28:56David Sacks?

  under a fair use doctrine to train their models for the benefit of consumers. And I don't see a reason to try and tie that up in a bunch of copyright lawsuits. If ChatGPT is producing a plagiarized result, then you may have grounds for a copyright infringement claim.

• 29:11Jason Calacanis?

  So what I would say is, you know, when you look at that fair use doctrine, I've got a lot of experience with it, having done this in blogs and other content companies. You know, the fourth factor test, I'm sure you're well aware of this, is the effect of the use on the potential market and the value of the work. And if you look at the lawsuits that are starting to emerge, it is Getty's right to then make derivative products based on their images. I think we would all agree. Stable diffusion, when they use these open web, that is no excuse to use an open web crawler to avoid getting a license from the original owner of that. Just because you can technically do it doesn't mean you're allowed to do it. In fact, the open web projects that provide these say explicitly. We do not give you the right to use this.

• 29:55Jason Calacanis?

  Uh, you have to then go read the copyright laws on each of those websites. And on top of that, if somebody were to steal the copyrights of other people, put it on the open web, which is happening all day long. You still, if you're building a derivative work like this, you still need to go get it. So it's no excuse that I took some site in Russia that did a bunch of copyright violation and then I indexed them for my training model. So I think this is going to result.

• 30:20Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Hey Free Bird, Free Bird, can you shoot me in the face and let me know when this segment's over?

• 30:24Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 30:26Jason Calacanis?

  All right, so the segment is now over. I was about to throw it to you.

• 30:30Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Good lord, I mean, like, stop with this navel gazing nonsense. We're in inning one and nobody knows anything. And the most important thing is that this will get sorted out through trials. That's where you are right, Jason. It's going to go to court and it's, and I think we should just not opine on this stuff because it's esoteric at best and it's kind of like, whatever.

• 30:53Jason Calacanis?

  Well, it, some of it will go to court. Other ones will be done in the free market like we see here. Uh, another thing.

• 30:58David Sacks?

  Jake, how you care about this more than most people because you're a journalist and you think this is going to put people out of work.

• 31:03Jason Calacanis?

  I am a content creator. I'm also an author, as you know, and a podcaster and I create all kinds of content. I do think that you should get permission before you leverage people's work to create derivative products, correct? And actually you're starting to see this in, uh, Dolly and ChatGPT seems to be getting ahead of this because of all the, the incoming lawsuits. Check this out. I started asking Dolly to make me Star Wars characters of Bulldogs. And I said, make a Jedi Bulldog. It did that, no problem. Then I asked it to make a version of this using, uh, and make a Darth Vader. And it said, I'm unable to generate images based on your request due to our content policy. If other ideas and concepts you'd like to blow, feel free to share. So I said, make me a Sithboard cat and it basically made me Darth Vader. And so it's very clear that.

• 31:48Jason Calacanis?

  The team over at OpenAI is now taking-

• 31:51Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You're prompt engineering. You're like a clever prompt engineer then.

• 31:54Jason Calacanis?

  Well, yeah, I got a round copyright here, right? And so it's very clear-

• 31:57David Sacks?

  But this shows how silly like all of this stuff is. This is just a drag coefficient on development of AI because- and on users, because now you've got to like word your prompt exactly the right way.

• 32:08Jason Calacanis?

  Well, I think what they're doing is they know that Marvel and all the Disney characters, all the Star Wars characters, they're very protective of their IP. Disney is going to launch their own Dolly-type stable diffusion product. We can do this. Put yourself on a Star- make a Star Wars character-

• 32:21David Sacks?

  Disney's not gonna be any good at this.

• 32:22Jason Calacanis?

  It doesn't matter if they're good or not. It's their IP. And so-

• 32:25David Sacks?

  I mean, look, fans can create their own artwork that's in the vein of like a Darth Vader image.

• 32:31Jason Calacanis?

  They can, but they can't do it commercially. And what ChatGPT and OpenAI here is commercial because I pay 20 dollars a month to ChatGPT. So that's what you're missing. A fan, of course, can make a Jedi cat or whatever.

• 32:41David Sacks?

  All I know is you played this like way back video from episode 15 or something.

• 32:46Jason Calacanis?

  No, no, no. It was still in the 1900s.

• 32:48David Sacks?

  Okay, from episode 115 as if you had a dunk on me.

• 32:50Jason Calacanis?

  I know you guys never want to think I'm right.

• 32:52David Sacks?

  And it turns out that Friedberg totally blew up your case.

• 32:55Jason Calacanis?

  He didn't blow up my case. I will be right and continue to be right. Okay. Now, let's go to something we can all agree-

• 33:00Chamath Palihapitiya?

  We're definitely not striking this segment. I liked it. Let's go.

• 33:02Jason Calacanis?

  No, no, no, no. Spicy. We like a little spicy here.

• 33:04David Sacks?

  I didn't even have to refute you. Friedberg just did it. It was beautiful.

• 33:07Jason Calacanis?

  Well, I mean, listen, okay.

• 33:08David Sacks?

  You came in, you thought you had the goods. Admit it.

• 33:11Jason Calacanis?

  No.

• 33:12David Sacks?

  He's like playing this way back video from like 45 episodes ago. I finally got him. I finally got socks. I was finally right about something.

• 33:19Chamath Palihapitiya?

  If you hadn't claimed you never used the word steamroll, I would have never played the clip.

• 33:23David Sacks?

  Oh, my God.

• 33:24Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I have some live footage. I just want to go through it and just talk about it.

• 33:26Jason Calacanis?

  I strike it. I strike it.

• 33:29Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Anyways, yeah, so guys, there's this copyright thing I want to- okay, hold on. Let me, let me just reframe. Let me just start that again.

• 33:36Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 33:36Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You know, copyright issues are- okay, wait, hold on a second. Well, listen, there's this thing I want to talk about copyright, which-

• 33:45Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Who are you doing? Oh, these are- oh, it's a super-

• 33:48Jason Calacanis?

  Guys, copyright isn't a dunk in the NBA last year.

• 33:50Chamath Palihapitiya?

  When you do a deal for- okay, hold on. When you write something and you want to get- okay, hold on.

• 33:57Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Everybody that writes gets a chance- okay, hold on a second.

• 33:59Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, if I could get up that high, I would miss the dunk and still be happy about it.

• 34:02Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You can't just say content-

• 34:04David Sacks?

  He's about to steamroll.

• 34:06Jason Calacanis?

  Thank you. I strike.

• 34:09David Sacks?

  I strike everything. You can't strike everything. Come on. Jake Al, you teed up the way back clip of yourself. You teed up the way back clip of yourself. So you brought this on yourself. I knew you were gonna deny it and I just waited for you to deny it. Yeah, but you tried to dunk and it didn't work.

• 34:25Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, okay, okay. Every bit has to take the piss out of me. I don't know, I'm seeing a trend.

• 34:29David Sacks?

  No. No, no, don't bring up the way back clips unless you have a clean dunk.

• 34:35Jason Calacanis?

  All right, here we go.

• 34:36David Sacks?

  Don't bring it to the hoop and then break it. Break it. Break it.

• 34:41Jason Calacanis?

  He had a receipt. It turned out the credit card was stolen. Okay, here we go. That's pretty good. All right, here we go.

• 34:52David Sacks?

  You know who actually deserves credit for admitting that he was wrong?

• 34:56Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, we'll get to it. We'll get to it. You'll get your flowers. Okay, hold on. Your red meat's coming. Here we go. Red meat's coming.

• 35:01David Sacks?

  Great transition. Great transition.

• 35:03Jason Calacanis?

  Great transition. Here we go. Elon versus the FCC. Another government agency is now targeting Elon. This is a little bit complicated, but let me explain. On Tuesday, the FCC rejected Starlink's application for 900 million in subsidies for rural broadband. Starlink originally won these back in 2020 when they agreed to provide high-speed internet to 640,000 rural homes across 35 states. Funding would have come from the RDOF, Rural Digital Opportunity Fund. I guess the government is paying for expanding broadband services in rural areas. And Starlink, obviously, is perfect for that. It's actually the only solution for this, really. She can't run fiber to these locations.

• 35:44Jason Calacanis?

  So the FCC found that Starlink, quote, "had failed to meet its burden to be entitled to those funds." And here's the quote. FCC has a responsibility to be a good steward of limited public funds meant to expand access to rural broadband, not fund applicants that fail to meet basic program requirements. Brendan Carr, one of the FCC's commissioners, dissented from the agency's decision, and he did not hold back. Last year, this is a quote, "After Elon acquired Twitter, President Biden gave federal agencies a green light to go after him. Today's decision certainly fits the Biden administration's pattern of regulatory harassment."

• 36:23Jason Calacanis?

  This is a decision that cannot be explained by any objective application of law, facts, or policy. Carr went on to explain how his decision was made and why it's unprecedented. Instead of applying the traditional FCC standards to the record evidence, which would have compelled the agency to confirm Starlink's $885 million award, the FCC denied it on the grounds that Starlink is not providing high-speed internet service to all these locations today. As noted, the FCC's milestone does not kick in until 2025. Let me toss to you, Sax, thoughts on the Biden hit squad going after E.

• 36:56David Sacks?

  I mean, I can't remember anything quite like this. This is absolutely extraordinary. I mean, you have a sitting member of the FCC telling us that the FCC is engaging in political retaliation. He sits on the board of the five commissioners of the FCC. They just canceled an $885 million contract to Starlink. What was that contract for? To provide rural internet service. Starlink is the only company that has that capability today. It's the only one that has that capability if you look forward a few years. It is by far the best at providing broadband from space, which is the best way to get into these rural areas. So what did the commission do? Well, they cherry picked, they took speed test snapshots from two cherry pick moments in time.

• 37:38David Sacks?

  And so even that probably was not an accurate reflection of where Starlink is today. But they then said, based on those snapshots, that Starlink would not be able to meet the standards in three years. So remember, the requirements that they're saying that Starlink violated don't even have to be met for three years. So somehow they're saying that Starlink will not get there in three years. They're preemptively judging the service to meet a standard that is not even required to meet today. And nobody else is even close to meeting the standard. So Elon's response to this was, guys, okay, if you're going to cancel the contract for us, like, just save the money because the competitors that you're giving it to have even less of a service than we do.

• 38:20Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 38:21David Sacks?

  So just like save the taxpayer the money. But they're not doing that. So this is really remarkable. And what Carr said here is that the Biden administration's choosing to prioritize its political and ideological goals at the expense of connecting Americans, we can and should reverse course. This is now part of a pattern of the federal government harassing Elon and his companies. And it all stems from Biden at that press conference saying, we got to look at this guy. You know, like Tony Soprano, yeah, we got to look at this guy, you know, whatever. I mean, it was like, and so since the That's a nice restaurant you got there. It'd be terrible if anything ever happened to it. Yeah, Jake, how you do the impression. I can't do it. Any event. So Biden says

• 39:04David Sacks?

  in this press conference, we got to look at this guy. And since then, they've investigated Tesla for supposedly building a glass house, which I didn't know was a crime. That's amazing. Yeah. SpaceX, which is partially a defense contractor, was sued by the DOJ because they were hiring too many Americans and didn't, they weren't hiring enough refugees into sensitive national security roles that they would surely be sued for doing if they was the other way. Yeah. And now they're, they've canceled a contract for SpaceX, having the best service in the space, but somehow missing a goal that they're not required to meet for three years. This is harassment. It's transparent. Yeah. And the question I have is, do we want to live in a country where the government

• 39:48David Sacks?

  can engage in this kind of naked political retaliation against its critics? And I have to say, you know, there was a, there was a time in America where, you know, Nixon was roundly attacked for having this quote unquote enemies list, where supposedly, you know, he had made a list of all his enemies and the IRS was auditing them. Okay, we are so far beyond that point and the media isn't interested at all. And no one's really interested unless you like what Elon's doing. But if you don't, you know, if you're on the opposite side of the political spectrum as Elon, you don't care. And there's nobody who's willing to say in a neutral way that political retaliation should not be part of our system.

• 40:27Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, we have a presidential candidate running specifically saying, I am your retribution. I mean, this is something that has to stop across all of politics. Nobody should be using their political power to do any retribution against anybody. They should be operating the government efficiently in the best interest of all Americans.

• 40:44David Sacks?

  I mean, to be honest, okay, so maybe I don't like that rhetoric from Trump. I don't think it's helpful, but what did Trump ever do that's in this league? I mean, everything they accused Trump of doing, the fascism, the retribution, all that kind of stuff. Seems to me the Biden administration is doing here.

• 40:59Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, well, I mean, he says he's gonna do it. He says that the first thing he's gonna do is go after journalists and.

• 41:03David Friedberg?

  Do you think Trump did no retribution when he was in office?

• 41:07Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, I have to look through every single issue that he's ever done.

• 41:12David Sacks?

  Yeah, you can't name one.

• 41:12David Friedberg?

  It's interesting, right?

• 41:13Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I know, I mean, one doesn't come off the top of my head. I'm trying to remember if he ever said, I'm gonna go after this person or that person. I don't remember an instance of him saying.

• 41:20David Sacks?

  He said, lock her up. That was, and he never did it. Trump was all talk in this respect. He didn't actually do it.

• 41:26Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, this is what Peter Thiel said, like, you know, his great quote about him, like, just look at his actions, not at what he says. He saber rattles and he says he's gonna do retribution against everybody, but, you know, then he doesn't. So, Chamath, you know.

• 41:37David Sacks?

  Look, even talking about Trump in this context is a deflection, Jake Al. The action is being taken by the Biden administration. They've now weaponized multiple federal agencies to go after Elon on these cases that seem transparently trumped up. A glass house, not hiring enough refugees to national security roles.

• 41:53Jason Calacanis?

  It's obvious what's happening.

• 41:54David Sacks?

  And now canceling a contract for Starlink, which is by far the best rural internet service. How do you even justify it? These cases on their face are absurd.

• 42:03Jason Calacanis?

  I'm not justifying, I'm in 100%, I'm in 100% agreement.

• 42:05Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You think there's, this is politically motivated harassment of Elon by the Biden administration?

• 42:10Jason Calacanis?

  100%, he said it. He said it, and he didn't invite him to the EV summit. So you just take Biden at his actions? If you don't invite, if you don't invite Elon to the EV summit, it's obvious that he's got it in for this guy. And now it's obvious he's told people to, you know, investigate him and harass him. It's obvious.

• 42:27Chamath Palihapitiya?

  So why do you think they don't like him? Why do you think Biden doesn't like him?

• 42:32Jason Calacanis?

  Why doesn't Biden like him? Because he's non-union. It's obvious. That's the beginning and end of it.

• 42:36David Friedberg?

  It's the union.

• 42:37Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, I'm sure the freedom of speech things and, you know, Twitter doesn't help, but this predates. Biden is a union guy and he will not have non-union people. He will not support non-union people. He is bought and sold by the unions. That's 100%. And Elon said that.

• 42:51David Sacks?

  That may be how it started, but I think you're underrating the free speech aspect.

• 42:55Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, I said it could have to do with that, but it's definitely, that's the number one issue.

• 43:00David Friedberg?

  And more importantly, Sacks, more importantly, you're saying enabling dissenting voices, strongly dissenting voices.

• 43:04David Sacks?

  Absolutely. I think, I think that from the get-go, they have sought to exercise control over the Twitter, formerly Twitter, now X platform, because it is the town square for political speech in America.

• 43:18Jason Calacanis?

  They succeeded. The FBI, everybody.

• 43:20David Sacks?

  They had total control of it until Elon somehow bought the company, which was not in their plans. Frankly, that was just a fluke. I mean, that was something that Elon did out of the blue because he cares a lot about free speech. And he opened up the Twitter jails and, you know, stopped the censorship and opened up the Twitter files. We found out that this was not just a private company acting on its own.

• 43:40David Sacks?

  It was being directed or encouraged by agencies of federal government.

• 43:46Jason Calacanis?

  They were giving them a list of tweets saying, hey, these tweets probably violate your terms of service. Yeah.

• 43:51David Sacks?

  You know, and the FBI acting as the quote-unquote belly button of the whole federal government, directing all these takedown requests, totally un-American.

• 43:58David Friedberg?

  I think that the pattern of actions, more than anything, mandates that Biden and his team actually have to address publicly why it is not retribution. The absence of doing that, the absence of doing that at this point is going to be more damaging to them than just letting things go on and claiming down the road, hey, this is all part of the normal course of business. Now, the guy does.

• 44:20David Sacks?

  Why, why, why would they address it? Why do they have to address it? The media doesn't hold them accountable. The media doesn't report it. The media pretended like the Twitter files never even happened. Remember that? Zero mainstream media coverage of the Twitter files.

• 44:32David Sacks?

  Zero mainstream media coverage of these retaliatory lawsuits. Why would the Biden administration need to explain itself? Why would they even talk about it? The fix is in.

• 44:40David Friedberg?

  Well, I mean, now the question is being, I think.

• 44:42David Sacks?

  The mainstream media are stenographers from one side of the political spectrum, which is precisely the reason.

• 44:48Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Did you guys see this thing?

• 44:49David Sacks?

  It's precisely the reason why they're so upset with Elon with opening up free speech on Twitter because they had total control of the public discourse until he did that.

• 44:59Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Did you see that thing this morning where somebody called out the New York Times for selectively editing what Hunter Biden said to make it more?

• 45:07Jason Calacanis?

  Broad.

• 45:08Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Broad? Did you see that, Jason?

• 45:10Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, he basically said, my father has not financially been involved in my businesses. And the New York Times took out the word financially to make it more broad to say he's not been involved in my business. He obviously was involved in his businesses.

• 45:23David Friedberg?

  Really?

• 45:23Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 45:24Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 45:24Jason Calacanis?

  There's a clip where they show the article.

• 45:27David Friedberg?

  What?

• 45:27Jason Calacanis?

  And then they show, and then they show his interview and the interview is very clear. He says it, but the New York Times headline emits the word and doesn't, doesn't put it in a bracket so that it shows that it was edited. It shows that that was the quote.

• 45:39David Friedberg?

  Can you pull it up? Do you have, do you have that thing? It's so crazy. And let me find it. That's crazy.

• 45:44Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, I would like to think there's a possibility this was a mistake, but man, it's pretty bad. I mean, this is really bad by the New York Times. And they got to figure out who actually took that word out because it's pretty clear Biden was very involved in Hunter's businesses. And that's why he put that word financially in there. Because he was on, I think he's on all the documents as being part of it and he's in the emails and so.

• 46:10David Sacks?

  He was the brand, J. K.

• 46:11Jason Calacanis?

  Ah, there it is. Thank you, Nick. You're very good at finding these things. There it is. So if you look on the left, that's the article in the New York Times.

• 46:20Jason Calacanis?

  And it's clear that that was the quote. And then if you play it on the right, it's actually what he said.

• 46:28Speaker 04

  My father was not financially involved in my business.

• 46:31Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Wow.

• 46:32Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. And then the quote says, let me stay as clear as I can. My father was not involved in my business. Now, if in journalism, you could put an ellipsis after involved, you know, three dots, but why would you do that? This is like breaking very basic journalistic standards.

• 46:49Chamath Palihapitiya?

  This is my point. There's like a format, right? When you edit out a word like that?

• 46:52Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. You would only edit out a word if it was superfluous and you wanted to have a tighter quote. You know, if the person said, mm, ah, you can take that out. And if you were taking out a long quote, you put three dots and then you, it would show that you cut the quote. There was something in between and then you went to that.

• 47:07Chamath Palihapitiya?

  That is crazy.

• 47:08Jason Calacanis?

  In the case of something this important, you would never take out a key word like that. That, this is just journalism 101. So, I mean, if this happened, man, it is, it's the key word in the sentence. By the way.

• 47:20Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It's the key word in the sentence.

• 47:21Jason Calacanis?

  It is the key word in the sentence. So if the person took it out, man, who took it out? And this is the problem with the New York Times is they bury their corrections. They need to, and this is back to accountability. You're saying, Friedberg, the Biden administration has to explain why they excluded Elon from the EV summits. And the New York Times needs to explain why they did this. Or else, you know, the mind wanders that there's some conspiracy going on here or targeting. And I wonder if they changed it. Well, here's the live story. Has it changed in the story? Did they, they change it yet? Luke Broadwater, I mean.

• 47:52Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Luke Broadwater, is that a name from Central Casting? That's not a real name, is it?

• 47:56Jason Calacanis?

  I don't know.

• 47:56David Sacks?

  Well, it looks like they posted a correction.

• 47:58Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, here we go. Correction. An earlier version of this article misquoted Hunter Biden. He said, my father was not financially, it was not my father. So the only room I have here is if the person was live transcribing it, maybe, and they left it out. But this is too important to not have a fact checker go through it. And to have to get called out on it to fix it, it just shows how far the New York Times has gone.

• 48:18Chamath Palihapitiya?

  This is the equivalent, though, Jay Calle, putting on the front page, I did not kill that person. And then a day later, it buried in page 812, I actually did kill that person.

• 48:28Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, if you, the correction at the bottom of the story is good.

• 48:31Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Everybody sees the front page. Very, very few people, you would agree with me, very, very few people see the correction.

• 48:37Jason Calacanis?

  In the old days, they would put the correction on like A2, A3 of the paper, and it would be small and be at the bottom. In the digital age, you put the correction at the bottom of the article. So it's a little bit better. But the truth is, most people don't go to the bottom of the article. So there's an argument to put corrections at the top of the article. But journalists don't want to admit when they're wrong.

• 48:55Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think the I saw I saw a list of all of the organizations investigating Elon. And what was surprising was how broad some of these organizations

• 49:08Chamath Palihapitiya?

  felt that they had a mandate to look into him. So there was like, I want to say, Nick, maybe you can find this on Twitter, but they had a list of them. And it was like, the Bureau of Land Management had an investigation. I mean, it just makes no sense. Like, it just does not smell right.

• 49:24Jason Calacanis?

  In fairness, Elon is involved in many, many very important projects. So there would be a lot of agencies that speaks to overregulation. And then you have to drill down and say, OK, when are they actually targeting him? And so that's going to be a lot of parsing.

• 49:37Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Fish and wildlife, you know, health and human housing. I mean, the list goes on.

• 49:42David Sacks?

  He was fishing somewhere, he fished in the wrong pond or what?

• 49:46Jason Calacanis?

  No, I think my understanding of it is, you know, at Starbase, there are some estuaries or something. And there was a lot of

• 49:55David Sacks?

  Estuaries?

• 49:56Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, yes, we protect animals and whatever. This is something that happens all over the country. Where and California is actually probably the leader in this, but I think some crabs might have got burned. Not in a barbecue, but by the rocket. I mean, literally that. And then this is this this speaks to what risk are we willing to take to make progress as humanity? Friedberg, remember we had this discussion about self-driving cars?

• 50:21Jason Calacanis?

  Like, if getting to Mars and being multi-planetary kills some crabs, I think we should be OK with that. In fact, if it decimated, I mean, it's not decimated, but let's just say 100 square miles got decimated by getting to Mars on planet Earth. Well, you'd make that trade off, right?

• 50:37David Friedberg?

  Yeah, it's a I mean, this is the same standard, I think, I feel around if there's a mouse infestation in my house, I'm not going to let the mice live in my house, even though I'm completely ethically against killing animals, killing animals to eat when I have other options, I'm against. And I think animal testing and medical applications, I have a totally different standard than I think what is standard in the market today. So for me, it's like a pretty sensitive topic because my ethics are don't kill animals unless absolutely necessary. And the question is, what is necess what is the definition of necessary? And so these sorts of points that you're making about, you know, if it gets all humans to Mars, that might be a trade off worth making for some of the crabs. I don't, you know, it's like

• 51:18David Sacks?

  I'm having a hard time understanding the analogy here. Are you saying that Elon's the mouse?

• 51:23Jason Calacanis?

  The rocket may have killed the mouse.

• 51:25David Sacks?

  The regulators own the house. Wait, what's the, who's the mouse and who's the house?

• 51:29Jason Calacanis?

  The house is the rocket ship.

• 51:31David Friedberg?

  Clearly the regulators think he's the mouse in the house, right?

• 51:34Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 51:34David Sacks?

  Yeah. Let's pull up this quote from Brendan Carr as the FCC commissioner. I thought this was amazing.

• 51:39Jason Calacanis?

  This list is incredible.

• 51:41David Sacks?

  This is the FCC commissioner. He said, he said the DOJ, FAA, FTC, NLRB, SDNY and FWS, and I guess that's Fish and Wildlife have all taken action. The FCC now joins them. Man.

• 51:54Jason Calacanis?

  That's incredible.

• 51:55David Friedberg?

  Yeah, it's a little bit nuts.

• 51:57David Sacks?

  Look at that Biden quote where I didn't actually know about the second part. I knew about the first part where he says, we got to take a look at this guy. But then he was asked how?

• 52:05Jason Calacanis?

  This guy.

• 52:06David Sacks?

  President Biden responded, there's a lot of ways.

• 52:07Jason Calacanis?

  There's a lot of.

• 52:08David Sacks?

  You know, you know what else he said?

• 52:09Jason Calacanis?

  Ways. There's a lot of ways to get to somebody.

• 52:12David Sacks?

  Yeah, it's like Tony Soprano.

• 52:13Jason Calacanis?

  To you, you might be able to get to me. I might be able to get to you and, uh, you know, maybe you watch it back, uh, you know?

• 52:20David Sacks?

  You know what else Biden said? There's a lot of ways is when he was talking about the, the Nord Stream pipeline. And he said, that pipeline's not going to move forward. And then they said, yeah, but the press said to him, yeah, but that's, that's like a German Russian project. Like how, what's your involvement?

• 52:38Jason Calacanis?

  Let's just say it might not.

• 52:39David Sacks?

  He said, we got ways. There are a lot of ways. We got ways. Wow.

• 52:43Jason Calacanis?

  Ouch.

• 52:44David Friedberg?

  Okay. So on the counterpoint, obviously Elon has several pretty sprawling businesses. He has self-driving cars. Right. And they pushed, right? They pushed the envelope on, you know, where there's an existing regulatory framework, same with going to Mars, right? Same with transmitting internet services, wireless communications. Like, you know, there is a regulatory framework for all of these businesses and he's on the bleeding edge and typically beyond the framework to some degree. So I think it's like worth acknowledging at least that there's a necessity of scrutiny and involvement in these agencies, given that they do have regulatory authority and, and responsibility over these various businesses. And he's well beyond where anyone else is in each of them. So I just want to acknowledge that.

• 53:23David Sacks?

  Hold on, let me respond to that.

• 53:25David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 53:26David Sacks?

  He's well beyond where other people are in his industry in terms of innovation. He's the first to acknowledge, because I've heard him say this many times, that he's in highly regulated industries. And they've got, you know, massive compliance programs at Tesla and SpaceX and all these different companies. What we're judging these regulatory agencies on is not that there's a need to regulate Elon's companies within the framework of their industries, but rather the specific actions that are being brought. Remember DOJ suing SpaceX for not hiring enough refugees.

• 54:00Jason Calacanis?

  Right.

• 54:01David Sacks?

  Tesla being sued on this glass house business, whatever that is.

• 54:04Jason Calacanis?

  Right.

• 54:05David Sacks?

  And now FCC. FCC cancelling a contract.

• 54:09Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 54:10Chamath Palihapitiya?

  The actions speak volumes.

• 54:11David Sacks?

  Yeah, exactly. Three years before, they even need to judge that contract, whether that contract's been met.

• 54:18Jason Calacanis?

  Hundred percent.

• 54:18Chamath Palihapitiya?

  The other thing that happened this week, which I think is important along this vein, is that the IRS is in charge of making sure that you can claim the $7,500 EV tax credit for cars. And a lot of us that have been looking at this issue, the way that they break the EV tax credit is in half. And part of it is about where the material is sourced and part of it has to do with the total sum of certain components of the car and how much of those are made in the US, et cetera. Okay? And it was presumed, just based on the trend, that Tesla would lose half the credit, keep half the credit. And in a bit of a surprising move, they, the IRS came out and said the whole thing, we're not going to acknowledge anymore.

• 55:01Chamath Palihapitiya?

  So Tesla had to go and put on the website that the credit ends as of December 31st. So I would add the IRS to this, to this list as well.

• 55:11David Sacks?

  That's so crazy.

• 55:12Jason Calacanis?

  So all got to be investigated. I like Friedberg's suggestion that prove to us that you're not doing this at this point. Because it's pretty clear that it is happening.

• 55:23Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And it's just

• 55:24David Sacks?

  Well, good luck, good luck getting them to do that. Just on the, um, on that EV subsidy. You know, one of the perverse things about this is that the administration is putting the thumb on the scales against Elon in favor of these less innovative competitors who have worse products. So like Elon said, if you want to cancel our contract for Starlink to provide this rural broadband, that's fine to save taxpayers the money. But by all means, don't then give the money to these other services I can't deliver. What's the point of that? And same thing on the electric cars. I mean, the subsidy is going to these other car companies that make worse products.

• 56:00Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, totally. This is the key point. The, the fact is all of those people who just had their Starlink canceled through the government, I guarantee you they will buy Starlink because it's the best product. So irony of ironies, they're just gonna go spend 60, 70, 80 bucks a month to put their own Starlinks in. Like everybody else around the world who lives rurally. I have Starlink.

• 56:21Chamath Palihapitiya?

  One more thing to add. They, under pressure from regulators, they announced a recall on Tuesday of 2 million cars to, to fix some of the autopilot software.

• 56:32Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, but that's an over the air update. So the press went crazy about that, right?

• 56:35Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, no, no. What I'm saying is if you read the, if you read the article, that over the air update is specifically because of, again, how it's written, regulatory pressure to change how the software behaves, some tuning and some edge cases. My point is that one could guess that there is an attempt here to kind of do the death by a thousand cuts approach, right? So the drip, drip water torture of just like a thing over here, a thing over here, a thing over here, a thing over here. Eventually companies can get distracted and misfire. And so the question I do think is like, you know, does it make us better off if all of these little ticky tacky footfalls are?

• 57:17Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Enforced by the government? I think, I think we all know what the answer is. No.

• 57:21Jason Calacanis?

  We have an example of that. Microsoft got so distracted by their court cases that the company went sideways for a decade.

• 57:26David Sacks?

  Well, but that, I mean, I think there was a lot of good basis for that particular anti-trust. That was an anti-trust case and Microsoft clearly had a monopoly. Just on the recall thing, I did see that story at the top of Drudge or whatever last week, whereas it said, every Tesla has to be recalled. And when I see the word recall.

• 57:44Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 57:45David Sacks?

  I think that means you got to bring it to the dealership and get like some part swapped out, but that's not what happened.

• 57:50Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, well, so what's so interesting is they refuse in these articles, I can show you the New York Times version of it, they refuse to write that it's actually an OTA update.

• 57:57Jason Calacanis?

  And breaking news, I don't know if you guys saw this, but a billion five iPhones were just recalled for the 17.2 update. So everybody's gonna have to bring their iPhones in. 1.5 billion iPhones recalled.

• 58:08David Sacks?

  I gotta bring it to the store?

• 58:10Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, you gotta bring it to the store and then they give you this new journal app. I don't know if you got it in the latest update, but Apple made a journaling app so that you can have more synchronicity.

• 58:18David Sacks?

  Yeah, it's a recall.

• 58:19Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, that's the recall. Yeah, it's total recall. All right, listen, now we keep the red meat going. Sacks is cooking with oil. Alex Jones, the controversial conspiracy commentator of Infowars fame, is back on Twitter after Elon did a poll. He got 2 million people to respond, asking if he should be reinstated. 70% said yes. Of course, Jones encouraged his fans to vote in this poll, so I'm not sure how scientific it is. For background, Twitter permanently banned Jones in 2018 after accusing him of posting direct threats of violence and hate speech. He had already received bans from Apple, Facebook and YouTube. Is pretty much the, the number one person to be deplatformed, as you know. Jones was ordered to pay 1.5 billion dollars to the families of eight Sandy Hook victims.

• 59:05Jason Calacanis?

  This is across two cases in Texas and Connecticut. And here is Jones in his own words on the Sandy Hook parents.

• 59:11Speaker 05

  Sandy Hook, it's got inside job written all over it. Sandy Hook is a synthetic, completely fake with actors, in my view, manufactured. I couldn't believe it at first. The Newtown kids, oh, they take them, put them in our face, tell us their names, who they were. I heard an ad this morning on the radio Bloomberg paid for locally going I dropped Billy off and watched him go around the corner and he never came back all because of the guns won't you just turn your guns in for my son why'd you do it to him gun owners

• 59:48David Friedberg?

  forgive my language but that guy okay there it is folks we have a that guy but let me censor him unfortunately not but I absolutely cannot stand that that is just like heart wrenching like evil awful spewing out of his mouth and he still you know should have a right to speak but man that guy

• 1:00:11Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I was never a big crier part of it was just my defense mechanism and I remember Sandy Hook because I had just become a parent I had I think two kids by that point and I was uncontrollably crying when that happened and it was the first time I realized how you change as a parent and you just develop this empathy and then you realize how precious kids lives are and I've become more and more of a crier as my kids have grown older and I really appreciate that what my kids have done for me so when I hear him talk like

• 1:00:52Chamath Palihapitiya?

  that I yes he has a right to say what he wants but he is a complete piece of

• 1:00:59Jason Calacanis?

  yeah okay so let's get into this very difficult question in fact I don't want to force you to defend you know one of those horrible humans I think we can all agree

• 1:01:10David Sacks?

  well my my position is pretty similar with the other guys said which is what he said was odious however that doesn't necessarily mean he should be censored we have standards we have first amendment standards around this stuff

• 1:01:20Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I agree with that

• 1:01:21David Sacks?

  so first of all me back up I mean I didn't even really know who Alex Jones was I mean I only knew him because of the controversy I've never actually listened to a show I'm not really interested in what he has to say

• 1:01:33David Sacks?

  I do think that if you're gonna play this clip of his mistake going back many years, you should supplement it by playing a clip of what he says now. And what he says now is, he's apologized, he's admitted he made a mistake. He basically bought into a conspiracy theory. But it wasn't just him saying it. Apparently, he had some people on the show who, I don't know if they were purported experts or what, but they were making a case that the whole Sandy Hook thing was a hoax and it was being done to basically, you know, get people's guns. I mean, look, it's nutty stuff. I'm not defending it in any way, but he explained that he bought into that into that theory or hoax or whatever. And he thinks it's a terrible mistake and he's

• 1:02:14David Sacks?

  apologized for it. And the question is, are you gonna have a lifetime ban on somebody for saying things that were wrong and odious when they have now apologized? And for me, it's not about Alex Jones. It's about censorship. Remember, when this case happened way back in 2018, it was really hard to defend keeping this guy on the platform in light of what he had said and done, because everyone's reacting very emotionally to it. And it was people like defenders of free speech, like Glenn Greenwald, who said that, listen, if you take Alex Jones out now, if you have a permanent ban, it will basically be a slippery slope and it will create a precedent and other

• 1:02:57David Sacks?

  people will get banned. And sure enough, just two years later, Twitter was banning people like Jay Bhattacharya, Stanford doctor, for saying dissident things about COVID that turned out to be completely correct. Marie authored the Great Barrington Declaration, talking about how lockdowns wouldn't work and so on. And so even within two years of this decision around Alex Jones, the censorship was totally out of control. And so I think the people who warned us that Alex Jones would become a slippery slope ended up being completely correct. To me, that's the symbolism of the restoration of Alex Jones's account. It's not endorsing what he did. It's not saying that what he said wasn't odious. I mean, look, again, I have zero interest even listening to

• 1:03:41David Sacks?

  the guy. But the point is that free speech does require us to put up with people who are wrong, people who are even hateful sometimes.

• 1:03:53David Friedberg?

  And stating misinformation.

• 1:03:54David Sacks?

  People who put out misinformation.

• 1:03:58David Sacks?

  That's what free speech requires us to do. And if you want a different standard, it's going to become a precedent for a lot of censorship that you don't like.

• 1:04:05David Friedberg?

  I agree with Sacks. The only place where I disagree with Sacks is on Twitter not having a right to do this. As a private enterprise, I think Twitter had a decision to make on what kind of editorialization they wanted to do with the content on their platform, on their product. And they made a choice. I don't think that, I think it was the wrong choice personally. And we've talked about this in the past. I think, you know, it's, it's great that Elon's making a different choice and catering to a, you know, a different audience perhaps with a different product that has more open speech. But that's not, you know, a government free speech mandate. That's a private enterprise mandate. And I do believe in the right to free speech.

• 1:04:45David Friedberg?

  I think it's a little bit ironic to say that it's inappropriate when someone says something that is misinformation because it's incorrect or unprovable. When we have an entire group of people that believe in something called religion, and much of religion is based on this concept of faith and belief without necessarily hard proof or evidence. And we allow religion, religious speech, you know, in, in many forums without saying, hey, that's misinformation, or hey, it's not true, or hey, it doesn't meet the standards of X or Y or Z's scientific assessment or understanding. And so I think it's just worth acknowledging that this whole concept that someone has

• 1:05:27David Friedberg?

  to ultimately be the police of the truth and the police of fact and the police of information is going to lead to a bad place. And I'd rather have more free speech with people saying misinformation and saying awful putrid things than one where a few people get to decide what everyone gets to hear. So as much as I absolutely despise this guy.

• 1:05:42David Sacks?

  Free bird, you, you may be right that Twitter as a private company had the, the right, as our laws currently exist, to decide who they were going to suspend and ban from the site. However, once that censorship power was created, it attracted powerful entities from our government who wanted to co-opt and use that power. That's what we saw in the Twitter files with the 80 FBI agents sending takedown requests. That's what happens is when you create the censorship power.

• 1:06:09David Friedberg?

  People will abuse it.

• 1:06:10David Sacks?

  People will abuse it, but, but more to the point. It's such a tempting power to use by people in authority, right? It's like the ring of power. Those tools that Twitter created, it's like they released a pheromone or something that attracted all these powerful, shadowy actors from the federal government, in the FBI and all these agencies. And so that is why I think it's just very dangerous for even private companies to create these censorship regimes is that they can be co-opted and abused.

• 1:06:42David Friedberg?

  Being co-opted and abused is the issue. I don't think that the issue is their choice in what kind of content they want to put out. You can go to the Netflix kids version of Netflix and kids, they control what content is on Netflix and they provide a different version than what they provide to adults. And I think like editorializing the content platform that you're making available, whether it's user-generated or paid for or whatever, is a totally reasonable like approach to running a business, a content business. The point you're making is the right one, which is the point at which you allow government agencies to intervene and have control and manipulation over private citizens, user-generated content is where I think it crossed the line. So I don't disagree with you on that point.

• 1:07:23Jason Calacanis?

  May I ask two clarifying questions here because I'm curious how you would handle this? If you were the CEO of X, formerly known as Twitter, would you have reinstated Alex Jones? Yes or no? And then number two, if Alex Jones then, as a new member of the community who's been reinstated and forgiven because he apologized, and then he did this again, this exact same thing again, with another school shooting with parents, would you remove him for the platform?

• 1:07:50David Sacks?

  I don't know that these are yes or no questions. What I would say is that I've written what I think should be a speech policy for social media platforms in a blog post I did several years ago. And what I said is that I would take First Amendment case law and operationalize it for social media platforms. There are nine categories of speech that the Supreme Court has said are not protected speech because they're dangerous in some way. So for example, incitement to violence is one of them. You know, harassment is one of them. So I would use-

• 1:08:23Jason Calacanis?

  Well, this clearly falls under those two.

• 1:08:26David Sacks?

  Well.

• 1:08:26Jason Calacanis?

  People, his fans went and knocked on the doors of his parents.

• 1:08:29David Sacks?

  His fans did. So as I understand the whole Sandy Hook thing, what happened is he said the whole thing was a hoax that obviously wasn't true. He paid a huge price for that. His fans then, some of his crazy fans went and harassed the parents, which obviously is not right, but according to him, he didn't, and I, I don't know that anyone's shown that he did that. I don't think he encouraged that. It just happened.

• 1:08:53Jason Calacanis?

  By the nature.

• 1:08:54David Sacks?

  Apparently he's got some unhinged fans.

• 1:08:56Jason Calacanis?

  Well, of course he does. It's a conspiracy show. So knowing it's a conspiracy show, knowing that incitement to violence is one of your criteria, if his fans, after him saying it's fake, then went to the house, knocked on the door and asked the parent to see little Suzie because you know she's alive, would you kick him off the platform?

• 1:09:16David Sacks?

  Listen, the Barrington Declaration.

• 1:09:19Jason Calacanis?

  That's what happened.

• 1:09:20David Sacks?

  The Barrington Declaration was declared to be a conspiracy show. The idea that COVID originated in a lab is considered a conspiracy show. I don't think you can prejudge in advance that a show is quote unquote.

• 1:09:34Jason Calacanis?

  Dangerous.

• 1:09:35David Sacks?

  Factually wrong conspiracies. As I understand it, again, I haven't watched the show, but I did watch a clip by Joe Rogan, who provided something of a character reference for Alex Jones. I don't know if Nick can find that and play that. It was actually quite good. What Rogan said is, look, I've known Alex Jones for like 30 years. He's had problems with alcohol abuse, substance abuse, whatever. He's had mental health issues that he's acknowledged and sometimes he goes off the rails. At the same time, he's also been way ahead of the curve on certain things. For example, he told me about the Epstein island like 10 years before the story broke. I don't know how he figured that out, but somehow he did. Now that was a conspiracy theory until it was proven true. And it probably would have been a good thing for the public if that story had come out a lot sooner so that it

• 1:10:20David Sacks?

  could have been shut down a lot sooner. So I don't think you can just judge in advance that somebody is a conspiracy theorist and basically blackball them from the internet. One other data point I want to bring up is that, is something that Elon mentioned, is that. He looked at the Twitter tools, the admin tools, to see, to look at Alex Jones's account. And the third strike he received that, that caused him to be banned from the Twitter platform by the former management, was he actually insulted a reporter, which was a very borderline case. So, you know, the things that you're saying that he was banned for weren't even the reason he was banned.

• 1:10:58Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, no, that's true. I think, yeah, so that's why I was framing it to you as, you know, and this is the issue that I think, and maybe what some people are missing here. A mentally ill person like himself, if he's admitted to mental illness and substance abuse, when they do this real, when they, when they go on these tirades, or they go off their meds, or whatever it is, or they're just evil, and they do this for ratings to make money, it starts to cause real world harm. People start showing up on these people's doorsteps. And so then, are you going to wait 10 years for the courts to do this $1.5 billion judgment, and then make the decision while real world harm is occurring? And if you own the platform, my belief is you have a higher standard. I obviously believe in freedom of speech. He can make his own website. But if you own the platform, and the platform

• 1:11:41Jason Calacanis?

  enables him to reach a large number of people, and those people are being harmed, and parents' doors are being knocked on, demanding to see their children, because Alex Jones said, that child is still alive, and they're trying to take our guns, and he knows his fans are crazy. There's responsibility that comes from it, and there's responsibility that comes with owning a platform like this. I know Elon's going full freedom of speech, but I would be very careful about this.

• 1:12:02David Sacks?

  Steve Scalise, the House Republican whip, was shot by a crazy Bernie Sanders supporter. Does that blame go to Bernie Sanders?

• 1:12:09Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:10David Sacks?

  I think you have to separate.

• 1:12:10Jason Calacanis?

  If Bernie Sanders.

• 1:12:11David Sacks?

  There is, hold on, there, there is a legal standard for incitement.

• 1:12:15Jason Calacanis?

  Right.

• 1:12:16David Sacks?

  Okay. There's a legal standard for judging that. You're saying that these crazy people were incited, but there is actually a legal way of determining that. I don't think that's been proven.

• 1:12:25Jason Calacanis?

  I would do a common sense one, which is, do we see real world happening? I would just use common sense. Do we see real world happening? Okay, real world is happening. We own the platform. We need to stop this, which is what happened. That's a judgment standard, right? Yeah, I would, I would make the judgment. If I was the CEO, I'd make the judgment. And I would make the judgment based on, you know, the courts are going to take years to adjudicate this, and it's my platform. I don't want this happening.

• 1:12:49David Sacks?

  I would operationalize a content moderation policy based on first moment case law. You're right that you can't always wait for the courts to adjudicate it. There's going to be judgment calls.

• 1:12:59David Sacks?

  I would have been fine, I think, with the suspension of Alex Jones in that context, because it does seem pretty egregious and he's apologized for it. The question is whether there should be lifetime bans. And I'm pretty much, I think I'm against lifetime bans. I'm okay with timeouts. I'm okay with suspensions for egregious behavior. When somebody has apologized, they've, I mean, had to pay, I mean, I think he's been bankrupted. He's had to pay all these fines. I think he's paid his price to society, so to speak, and he's admitted he was wrong. The question is, do you still have the lifetime ban? It seems to me he's acknowledged his mistake. If he does something like this again, then you can suspend him, maybe you do the ban.

• 1:13:41David Sacks?

  But I do believe in giving people second chances, and I'm just sort of viscerally against the lifetime banning people.

• 1:13:48David Friedberg?

  I don't like the standard of what can be deemed dangerous speech, because I think that, as Sacks said, there's a clear way to measure whether someone's inciting violence or inciting harm versus saying speech that can be deemed dangerous in some contexts and then not be deemed dangerous after the fact. Covid vaccine conversations are the perfect example. Telling people that there's health risks associated with taking a vaccine in the period when everyone was worried about a pandemic killing us all was deemed too dangerous to allow, and after the fact, it wasn't dangerous because there was suddenly clear evidence that there may be some costs and benefits associated with the vaccines. And so I really don't like this standard of dangerous speech.

• 1:14:31David Friedberg?

  In fact, I think that the biggest changes that are necessary in society initially start as dangerous speech, and then they eventually become true, and then they become a standard, and then things change. My, my repeated calls for reduction in fiscal spending at the federal level and lack of accountability in fiscal spending at the federal level, by some measure, could be deemed dangerous speech and an incitement against the government. But really, my point is to call out the importance of this, like, issue, and after the fact, I may be right, I may be wrong, and I need to be able to say that. I think it's critically important to say those sorts of things, and I think that other people in their own domains will find other things that are critically important to say, and that would be deemed by some standard to be dangerous at the time.

• 1:15:15David Friedberg?

  So as much as I have great disdain for, you know, certain people and certain things that they may say, I do think that what might be deemed dangerous speech is a critical element of the, the kind of...

• 1:15:27Jason Calacanis?

  Progressivism that's allowed the United States to prosper.

• 1:15:30David Sacks?

  I think it was dangerous speech to promulgate the false conspiracy theory that Trump was an agent of Putin. I mean, that was in the Steele dossier. They basically said that Putin had compermat on Trump and Trump was basically working for the Kremlin. I mean, he was a traitor. I mean, what if there were people out there who tried to assassinate the president on the grounds that we can't have a traitor in the White House?

• 1:15:54Jason Calacanis?

  That was a private document, right? That wasn't like a public talk show.

• 1:15:57David Sacks?

  No, the Steele dossier was absolutely leaked during the campaign.

• 1:15:59Jason Calacanis?

  You're making my point. Exactly. It's leaked, right? So there's like a private document by somebody.

• 1:16:03David Sacks?

  But then it was printed by BuzzFeed. And then, once it was in the echo chamber, it was endlessly repeated by the mainstream media. So the idea that, like, only people like Alex Jones promote conspiracy theories, the mainstream media promotes a lot of conspiracy theories, and some of those theories, if acted upon by crazy people, would be just as dangerous as the things that Alex Jones has said.

• 1:16:25Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, we're in hypothetical land. But actually, I think you and I are not too far apart. You wanting to take these harms and operationalize them is sort of what I'm saying. And in each of these cases, it's a judgment call. And this is where I think, you know, in many ways, I'm proud of what Elon is doing and saying, like, freedom of speech is an absolute thing, and that's what the platform's gonna be. His right to do it, it's his platform. And so I'm fine with that. I would do something different if it was my platform. Everybody's different, you know? Everybody can take their stance. I would have some basic humanity as my stance, and I would be willing to give up a little freedom of speech in my restaurant, in my cafe, in order to have it be more delightful for everybody there. I wouldn't go as far as banning people talking about COVID. But yeah, if somebody

• 1:17:08Jason Calacanis?

  was trying to claim that parents who murdered children were liars and actors, that would be fine for me to say, yeah, no good. And then, of course, there's Kanye. So, you know, Elon banned Kanye. That was under his realm. And this is what Kanye said. And I think this falls into hate speech and real world harm. I'm a bit sleepy tonight, but when I wake up, I'm going death, death. Con three on Jewish people. The funny thing is I actually can't be antisemitic because black people are actually Jew. Also, you guys have toyed with me and tried to blackball anyone, whoever opposes your agenda. So when you see this tweet, would you have banned him sex?

• 1:17:41David Sacks?

  Not a lifetime ban. I might have given him a timeout. I think his family wanted him to get a timeout because he was having an episode. I certainly wouldn't give him a lifetime ban.

• 1:17:49Jason Calacanis?

  Give him a year or something.

• 1:17:50David Sacks?

  Look, I don't really know this Alex Jones guy. I certainly don't know him in person. I don't even listen to him. It's not a show I'm interested in even now. I only know him because of the controversy.

• 1:18:00Jason Calacanis?

  And you love a good conspiracy theory.

• 1:18:01David Sacks?

  I like knowing the truth. I like hearing facts and I don't believe that factional formation, like the lab leak theory, should be censored by labeling it a conspiracy theory.

• 1:18:12Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:13David Sacks?

  For example, but what I would say about Alex Jones is there is some humanity in allowing him, a forum, to apologize for what he did and acknowledge his mistake and explain why he thought what he did and why he was wrong. And that's what he did on X.

• 1:18:31Jason Calacanis?

  And I went on the Twitter Spaces and I asked him a follow-up question, which he wouldn't answer. I said, how have you changed your behavior?

• 1:18:37David Sacks?

  Yeah, but honestly, Jake, that's because you came

• 1:18:38Jason Calacanis?

  Recording the next one and he wouldn't answer it.

• 1:18:39David Sacks?

  You came bounding in in the last five minutes, asking him a bunch of questions about what he did when it had already been covered at the top of the pod.

• 1:18:46Jason Calacanis?

  And I re-listened to it and he had not answered the question, how has your behavior changed? And so he doesn't want to talk about it. That might be for legal reasons.

• 1:18:53David Sacks?

  He spent the first half hour relitigating Sandy Hook and you weren't aware of that.

• 1:18:56Jason Calacanis?

  It was the first

• 1:18:57David Sacks?

  He didn't want to go over it again.

• 1:18:58Jason Calacanis?

  10 minutes. But he, he won't answer questions on how he would change his behavior. And so I think that's one of the things I would want to see from him. How have you changed your behavior and how you, you know, do shows? And I don't think he's answered that question. Anyway, we're going to disagree on this one. Any final thoughts, Chumap, as we wrap here on this, on this issue?

• 1:19:14Chamath Palihapitiya?

  The free speech litmus test is, is very simple. It's this exact thing. It's when the person that you dislike says the thing that you find very displeasing. What do you do? And I am a free speech absolutist on this. I just think it's a very slippery slope and I don't think we're very Capable of making these delineations and so I agree the right solution are timeouts. But lifetime bans, I think, again, go down this path where human judgment gets involved and then it's about the person in charge and then it becomes a power play and then it eventually always gets corrupted.

• 1:19:51Chamath Palihapitiya?

  So I can hold two thoughts in my head. One, Alex Jones should be able to say what he thinks and two, it was disgusting and he should be ashamed of what he said.

• 1:20:01Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, you know, the bans doubling every time is probably a good precedent as well.

• 1:20:05Chamath Palihapitiya?

  So I mean, we should do it like we do at our poker game. The fines go up.

• 1:20:08Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:09Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Phone penalty doubles.

• 1:20:11David Sacks?

  Exponential back off.

• 1:20:13Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, you're gonna, you're gonna put your phone down and play the goddamn game if it gets to 800 or 1600 because that stings a little bit. So there it is.

• 1:20:20Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah, it totally does. But maybe that's the right solution, Jason. It's like you have a finding mechanism somehow and it just like it increases. And so there's a financial penalty of nothing else as well as a timeout when you violate these laws. At least that's a scalable way to solve the problem in a way that's hard to corrupt in game. But if it goes down to the person, to an individual or a group of people's judgments, as we saw with the previous management of Twitter, I think it's going to be a very difficult problem. I don't think that those were bad people, but I think that they were led astray.

• 1:20:51David Sacks?

  Yeah, I mean, Nick, do you have that clip from Rogan? Because when I listened to this clip from Rogan, it did have an impact on what I thought because

• 1:21:00Jason Calacanis?

  They've been friends for like 20 years.

• 1:21:02David Sacks?

  It does show the human complexity. And again, you're judging him based on the worst thing he ever did and Rogan presents a more balanced viewpoint about this guy. Again, I have no dog in this hunt. I don't really care about Alex Jones, but I'm just saying that if we're gonna sit in judgment of people, I think maybe we should have a more balanced view because, I mean, it does bias the conversation to play the clip of the worst thing he ever did. Let's, let's play Rogan for a second. I think it's interesting.

• 1:21:28Speaker 06

  Look at the way people look at Alex Jones now because Alex Jones has been on my podcast a few times. The people that have watched those podcasts think he's hilarious and they think that he definitely [__] up with that whole Sandy Hook thing. But he's right more than he's Wrong and he's not an evil guy. He's just a guy who's had some psychotic breaks in his life. He's had some genuine mental health issues that he's addressed. He's had some serious bouts of alcoholism, some serious bouts of, you know, substance abuse. And they've contributed to some very poor thinking. But if you know the guy, if you get to know him like I have, I've known him for more than 20 years.

• 1:22:09Speaker 06

  And if you know him on podcasts, you realize like he is genuinely trying to unearth some things that are genuinely disturbing for most people. Like, is the guy that was telling me about Epstein's, uh, island decade ago, at least.

• 1:22:28Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. I mean, this platforming mentally ill people during an episode is a whole nother can of worms. I mean, I told this to Lex Friedman when he had Kanye on during that episode. I said, I think it's a very bad idea to spend two hours with somebody who's having an episode. And sure enough, what did he do? More anti-Semitic insanity on his podcast. And I just told him, Lex, like, leave the guy alone. It's not worth it. Let him get help.

• 1:22:53David Sacks?

  Look, I think, I think you have a point there, but, um, you know, that, that would be an argument for a temporary suspension, not a ban, in my opinion.

• 1:22:59Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. All right, uh, Sax, in other news, something insane has happened on the internet. It's never happened before, but somebody has apologized for getting something wrong. This is breaking news. We're in year 34 of the internet and somebody says they had.

• 1:23:14Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Is it my wife?

• 1:23:15Jason Calacanis?

  Is it my wife? Did she admit she did something?

• 1:23:17Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Okay.

• 1:23:17Jason Calacanis?

  She's never gotten anything wrong. I've, listen, I've been there for this whole relationship. She has been a hundred out of a hundred times correct.

• 1:23:24Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Frustrating. It's so frustrating.

• 1:23:27Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, she makes a mistake, we'll know, but it hasn't happened yet. It's actually paradoxically same with my wife. She's been right for 22 years.

• 1:23:33Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, my wife has been wrong four times and I've gotten three. On Voice Memo, I taped them. I pull out the phone and I'm like, hold on, I need you to say it again.

• 1:23:42Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:43Chamath Palihapitiya?

  So I've gotten three on Voice, but that's because it's been only three.

• 1:23:46Jason Calacanis?

  Did those three have something to do with deciding to marry you? Or to move in with you and make children and start a life together?

• 1:23:53Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It's so frustrating. How can one person be so wrong, i.e. me, all the time?

• 1:23:58Jason Calacanis?

  Well, I mean, at least you're self-aware. Everybody loves self-aware ch- chama.

• 1:24:02Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It is, uh, it's a new trend in the world.

• 1:24:05Jason Calacanis?

  But yes, Nassim Taleb publicly admitted, we're gonna pull it up here, Sax, here we go. He publicly admitted that techno-watermelon, that's your name Sax.

• 1:24:15David Sacks?

  That was his insult. I don't really understand the insult. I never did. I never understood it either.

• 1:24:18Jason Calacanis?

  I think he's saying your head is the size of a watermelon and that you're involved in technology. That's my, was my interpretation. I don't think you have a melon head.

• 1:24:25David Sacks?

  Or does it mean like I'm green on the outside and red on the inside or something like somehow I'm supporting communism? Or I don't, I don't really understand it, but.

• 1:24:32Jason Calacanis?

  That has come up. Um, well, listen, it's better than mine. I'm a psychotic ignoramus, so.

• 1:24:37David Sacks?

  And you know, he hasn't attracted that for some reason.

• 1:24:39Jason Calacanis?

  Not yet, not yet, but I, it will have, uh, at some point, I'm sure he will. Uh, but here it is, folks.

• 1:24:44David Sacks?

  Well, he just said, I can see that David Sax is correct about the relative strength of the parties in the Ukraine war. And I was wrong, all caps. Russia is not as weak as it seemed. It has staying power. This means a settlement is likely outcome. Anyway, um, it's so rare on the internet for anyone to admit they were wrong. And what they usually do is just memory hole it, which is why, you know, I always like to produce receipts. I only do that for the people who strongly denounce me about something and then I end up being right. They never can see, it's not just about the fact that I was right, it's about the fact that they attacked me personally. And they never come back and apologize or, or correct the record and Taleb did that, so kudos to him. I mean, I admit when I read this, I was like.

• 1:25:31David Sacks?

  You know, like I said, you're, yeah, I'm like, okay, what's the gotcha?

• 1:25:34Jason Calacanis?

  It's coming. Wait for it. Tweet, follow up tweet.

• 1:25:38David Sacks?

  I thought a trap door is going to open under my feet. I thought a cartoon piano was going to fall on my head. I just, I thought this can't be it. And, but no, that was it. So.

• 1:25:47Jason Calacanis?

  That was it. All right. Well, there it is. Kudos.

• 1:25:49David Sacks?

  But by the way, just, I mean, the reason why I understood what was going to happen in this, you know, counteroffensive of why the war is not going to go as well as people thought. It's not because I purport to be some sort of Ukraine expert or foreign affairs expert. I mainly just spent the time to figure out who the real experts were. And the real experts are never the people who the media tells you. You actually have to spend the time to look at people's track records, what they said in the past. Did it come true or not? You know, it's, it's basically a falsifiability standard. Look at what they predicted. Look at what actually happened. And you can figure out who the real experts are. And that's what I did in the case of Ukraine. It was possible to figure out

• 1:26:33David Sacks?

  who are the foreign policy scholars who got this right? Who were the military bloggers who are accurately reporting information? And who are the ones who are basically putting out propaganda? If you spend the time to do that on virtually any issue, you can effectively become an expert.

• 1:26:48Jason Calacanis?

  It's a great point, Seth. Really good point. Yeah. Well, you have to, you have to find your own process of finding the truth today because I don't think you can trust the journalists out there to do it.

• 1:26:56David Sacks?

  No, you definitely can't. Hundred percent. And, and by the way, as a VC, people say, well, what is a VC thing? You know, in a way, like what VCs do is when you get interested in a topic, you kind of go deep. You're trying to accumulate a lot of information. You try to figure out who are the real experts in the space. So that those are the people I should listen to. And then you develop a take. It's not the worst skill set in the world for doing a pod or tweeting out hot takes on, on Twitter. Again, I'm not saying I'm an expert. I'm just somebody who is independent minded enough to get to the bottom of an issue without disrelying on what I'm supposed to believe. And I just try to figure out who the real experts are.

• 1:27:32Jason Calacanis?

  All right. Producer Nick, are you there? You did a tweet about questions. That people might want to have to ask the besties here as we wrap this up. So we'll take two, your two favorite questions, producer.

• 1:27:41Speaker 07

  Thoughts on the Harvard board standing behind President Gay despite her transgressions?

• 1:27:44Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, that's a good question.

• 1:27:46Speaker 07

  That's a great question.

• 1:27:46Chamath Palihapitiya?

  That's a good one for Chima. Here's what I'll say. I think that the Harvard board was probably in a really difficult position in the following way. You know, when you hire somebody and you realize that that person has some faults, you have three choices, right? One is to fire them. Two is to be unequivocal in their support. And three is to basically give a milquetoast CYA kind of a statement to give yourself time.

• 1:28:27Chamath Palihapitiya?

  The reason why I think that President Gay wasn't fired was probably because the board, for whatever reason, didn't want to seem like they were kowtowing to Bill Ackman and all the other people that were asking for her resignation.

• 1:28:41Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But what they didn't do is equally important. They may not have fired her, but what they also didn't do was come out with an unequivocal statement of support. I think it was kind of a little bit wishy washy in acknowledging her mistakes, which seems to be a setup to allow her to basically make a couple more mistakes so that then they can fire her and they can all seem like they did the right thing. So I suspect that that's what happens. She probably won't be in that job in a year from now. Or, you know, she kind of bottles along and in two or three years she quote unquote retires to spend more time with her family.

• 1:29:15Jason Calacanis?

  Anyone else want to get in on this, Sax?

• 1:29:16David Sacks?

  Yeah, I mean, I think this university presidents debate has been a little bit of a Rorschach test. And I've seen people that I generally agree with fall into one of two camps. Some see it as a free speech issue. Other people see it as a kind of woke double standards or DEI issue. I think for those who see it as a free speech issue, they're emphasizing the motivations of people like Elise Stefanic, the person who asked the university presidents the question in saying when she said, basically, the question was, does your code of conduct allow calls for genocide of Jews? And their argument is that's a loaded question because there is not an epidemic on campus of people calling for genocide of Jews. And so this is basically all kind of

• 1:30:01David Sacks?

  an invented hysteria and the purpose of it is to suppress debate about this Israel Hamas war in Gaza. And it's designed to expand campus speech codes so that it's harder for Palestinian supporters to protest in favor of their cause. So that's one way of looking at it. My view on that is if it ends up being the case that campus speech codes get expanded in that way, that'd be a bad thing. I don't think we need to restrict speech on campus. So I agree with them on that point. However, there is a different way of looking at this, which is the motivations of the university presidents in answering that question. And

• 1:30:44David Sacks?

  yes, it was a loaded question, but they flubbed the answer. And the question is why? Because as we talked about last week, if they were asked about calls for the murder of any other group, a racial group or trans people or something like that.

• 1:30:59Jason Calacanis?

  Asian people.

• 1:31:00David Sacks?

  Again, I don't think their answer would have been the same. And I do think that that comes back to the fact that they have a preconceived notion of which groups deserve protection and which ones don't. And that is a double standard. And I think anything we can do to get rid of that poisonous ideology that wants to treat people differently on campus, I think is a good thing. And so I support what Bill Ackman is doing on that basis. But if Bill Ackman goes too far and demands restrictions on the ability of students to protest, then I think it would be a bad thing and that's going too far. So this would be a great thing to ask him, like what his motivations are, that, you know, if he comes on the pod.

• 1:31:38Jason Calacanis?

  The thing that's crazy is just the crazy hypocrisy. Like, these are the same people who were firing people or not letting them speak on campus if they had a, you know... A microaggression where they didn't, they misgendered somebody, or they used a different pronoun, or they had a different feeling about what defines a woman versus a man, or, you know, gender differences, whatever. Their massive intolerance and the crazy hypocrisy which you're alluding to here, Sax, is the thing that I think has broken everybody's brain. Like, this is bizarre. And the DEI stuff is a road to nowhere. I tweeted today about the absolute grift that was going on in tech not long ago, which was, call out a company, venture firm, whatever it is, for their DEI stats. Then quietly contact them

• 1:32:22Jason Calacanis?

  after you've done this briga-dooning of them, and say, hey, we can solve your problem. Hire us as consultants and speakers to come in and fix your DEI and tell you what you've done wrong, and then publicly come out. And I saw this happen. Publicly come out, and then tell the same group, hey, this person's now an ally. Rinse and repeat. It was a crazy grift, and it's all coming out now, and there's a...

• 1:32:43Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah, that, that Bill Ackman thing, J. Cal, that you retweeted is crazy, that story.

• 1:32:48Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, so, we could just go down this rabbit hole forever, but I think you call it a cul-de-sac, I call it a road to nowhere, a dead end. Identity politics and DEI, it's just a dead end. When you start judging people based on, you know, any criteria other than their character and performance in the world.

• 1:33:04Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Do we know if there was a response by...

• 1:33:08Jason Calacanis?

  MIT is this one?

• 1:33:09Chamath Palihapitiya?

  MIT, yeah.

• 1:33:10Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I don't, I don't think yet there has been. So, anyway, we'll, we'll cover that story next week for sure.

• 1:33:15David Sacks?

  I think what Bill Ackman is doing is brave, because he is taking on DEI. And that is, or historically, that's been one of the most dangerous things you can do. I mean, that is what people get canceled for. Now, I know, there are, there are people who I am fans of, like, like Glenn Greenwald, who's been very critical of Ackman, because he thinks that Ackman's trying to restrict free speech and prevent, again, the pro-Palestinian cause from protesting or saying, it's peace.

• 1:33:44David Sacks?

  And I guess Bill can clarify that, but I think this issue is less about foreign policy and more about domestic policy, these DEI policies. And finally, we have someone who's willing to take it on and challenge it, challenge it at an ideological level and then challenge it at like a just grift level.

• 1:34:03Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. Shout out to Brian Armstrong. He got this right and he went right up the hill and took the arrows for it. And I think we've turned a corner. If you, the tweet I did today, I would not have done two years ago because I just didn't want to, you know, risk my firm or the companies I work with, you know, to kind of expose that grift because it could blow back on people. So, but now I feel totally comfortable doing it. So.

• 1:34:25Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Uber's at 70.

• 1:34:27Jason Calacanis?

  Well, that also, Uber going to 76 puts me in I don't care mode. That's for sure.

• 1:34:33David Sacks?

  He's got F you money now.

• 1:34:34Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Ackman's got a lot of firepower, you know, that bond call was totally right. You know, the 10 years now sub 4%.

• 1:34:40Jason Calacanis?

  I will say, yeah, I will say that does, your, your bank account does give you the ability to, okay, final question, please, we have, we must wrap, we must have a final question and please throw it to Friedberg first. I got Friedberg involved early on offense today. It's a great show.

• 1:34:55Speaker 07

  From Mom Cooks Fast and Slow on X, for Friedberg, I guess, what is the correct way to hire kids out of school now that an elite university degree tells you very little about the applicant? And will you follow this path in your own companies?

• 1:35:08Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Oh, I have a great answer for that.

• 1:35:10David Friedberg?

  Timon, go ahead.

• 1:35:11Jason Calacanis?

  No, please let Friedberg.

• 1:35:13Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Co-op, you gotta go to the schools with co-op. Why? Because it allows you to evaluate these kids in C2 on a real time basis without an obligation to hire. You can find the ones that can really do the work, have the energy.

• 1:35:26Jason Calacanis?

  Explain co-op programs, please. It's for people who don't know.

• 1:35:28Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I went to a co-op school, University of Waterloo in Canada. The way that it works there, not, not everywhere, but there at least, is you go to school for the first eight months and then you never get a break. You're either in working for four months or you're in school for four months and you go back and forth until you graduate. So instead of graduating in four years, you graduate in five, but you graduate with, with basically two full years of work experience. And depending on the employers that you work at, you typically get two to three job offers from those folks if you do a good job. When I.

• 1:36:06Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Was helping to build Facebook. We went there. We had never hired an intern before and we started to hire people. And I think now, it happened in Microsoft, it happened at Google, I think it's happened at Facebook. If you look at the number of kids that work at those schools now from co-op schools, they're higher than any other school. There's a bunch of schools in the United States that have co-op, but I would go and find those schools and hire those kids.

• 1:36:32Jason Calacanis?

  Friedberg, any thoughts? You're now running a company. You're back in the saddle. How are you going to hire people? And tell everybody the name of the company again?

• 1:36:40David Friedberg?

  It's called Ohalo.

• 1:36:42Jason Calacanis?

  Ohalo, not Mahalo, Ohalo. And you're hiring.

• 1:36:47David Friedberg?

  Mahalo was taken. Who owns that domain name now?

• 1:36:49Jason Calacanis?

  I still have it. Yeah. If somebody wants to make an offer. I have Mahalo and I have Kukua. Happy to sell it to somebody if they want to. But tell us, how are you, what's your hiring criteria? And how do you think about this now?

• 1:37:00David Friedberg?

  I'd like to start an enterprise software business called Kukua.

• 1:37:03Jason Calacanis?

  It means to help or to guide in Hawaiian. So probably the third or fourth most important word. Yeah. Go ahead, Friedberg, please.

• 1:37:11David Friedberg?

  I have criteria around raw horsepower, skills or experience, and then motivation. And I have systems for how we try and assess those. And then matching our principles is kind of the fourth bucket of things. Horsepower you can test. Skills is based on experience and fits the role and the need. But motivation is one that there's a lot of question marks around.

• 1:37:34David Friedberg?

  Does this person, have they demonstrated that they've had a, not just a desire, but an action that they've taken that has pushed them beyond the limits of the systems that they've operated in. And that's what I would typically look for regardless of the schooling background, the education background is some demonstration of that because that's necessary in business building. So that's my framework for hiring. We call it, you know, smarts or horsepower, skills, motivation, and then principles. And we score each one of those and then try and come up with hiring.

• 1:38:06Jason Calacanis?

  You started to do that with the CEO candidates. I got that email from you and I was very intrigued. So I like that. All right, everybody. This has been another amazing episode of the All In Podcast for the king of beep and the dictator and the Rain Man himself. I'm your boy, Jake How. We'll see you next time. Bye bye.

• 1:38:24Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Love you guys. Bye bye.

• 1:38:34David Sacks?

  And instead, we open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it. Love you, S. I. The queen of Kinoah.

• 1:38:47David Sacks?

  Besties are gone.

• 1:38:50David Friedberg?

  That is my dog taking a licking at your driveway.

• 1:38:57Chamath Palihapitiya?

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

• 1:39:05David Sacks?

  What your... B. What your... What your feet? B. What? We need to get merch. Besties are back.