All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg - E170: Tech's Vibe Shift, TikTok ban debate, Vertical AI boom, Florida bans lab-grown meat & more
Episode Date: March 15, 2024(0:00) Bestie Intros! (1:02) Friedberg's newest family members (7:13) Tech's vibe shift: More candidness, less PR-speak from top CEOs (22:47) OpenAI CTO slips up on training data: did OpenAI train Sor...a on YouTube videos? (28:58) Vertical AI startups flourishing: Cognition launches Devin, what will this do to startups? (40:38) TikTok debate: Is the new bill to ban or force a sale of TikTok fair or potentially overreaching due to its vagueness? (1:22:10) Florida on the verge of banning lab-grown meat Follow the besties: https://twitter.com/chamath https://twitter.com/Jason https://twitter.com/DavidSacks https://twitter.com/friedberg Follow the pod: https://twitter.com/theallinpod https://linktr.ee/allinpodcast Intro Music Credit: https://rb.gy/tppkzl https://twitter.com/yung_spielburg Intro Video Credit: https://twitter.com/TheZachEffect Referenced in the show: https://twitter.com/RachaelRad/status/1767612555063955891 https://twitter.com/iamtomnash/status/1768135725403226256 https://twitter.com/CollinRugg/status/1752749485070156025 https://futurism.com/video-openai-cto-sora-training-data https://twitter.com/tsarnick/status/1768021821595726254 https://www.harvey.ai https://www.abridge.com https://www.taxgpt.com https://sierra.ai https://twitter.com/cognition_labs/status/1767548763134964000 https://twitter.com/heyBarsee/status/1767934812315062646 https://sourcegraph.com/cody https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/27/vertical-ai-the-next-logical-iteration-of-vertical-saas https://vator.tv/news/2018-02-05-when-paypal-was-young-the-early-years https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/03/13/tiktok-ban-passes-house-vote https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/tiktok-bill-ban-house-vote-af4d0800 https://rollcall.com/2024/03/14/schumer-signals-slower-pace-on-tiktok-measure-in-the-senate https://twitter.com/rabois/status/1768107160662421772 https://www.linkedin.com/posts/vivekgramaswamy_were-literally-addicted-to-china-they-push-activity-7060229302633521152-k0g3 https://time.com/6900348/tiktok-ban-donald-trump-congress https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-03-13/who-is-jeff-yass-15-billion-tiktok-fortune-at-stake-as-ban-passes-house-vote https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/7521/text https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_foreign_adversaries https://twitter.com/davidfrum/status/1753878721163882676 https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1985-09-04-mn-23112-story.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/22/technology/byte-dance-tik-tok-internal-investigation.html https://www.cnbc.com/2024/03/14/tiktok-ban-china-would-block-sale-of-short-video-app.html https://www.fastcompany.com/91056837/ron-desantis-and-the-florida-legislature-turn-their-anti-woke-agenda-on-lab-grown-meat https://standingstonefarms.com/pages/microbial-rennet-what-is-it-and-how-important-is-it https://twitter.com/Teslaconomics/status/1768395010507182252 https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/1768267464062943676 https://twitter.com/Andercot/status/1768328460622299424
Transcript
Discussion (0)
Why do you always go Christopher Walken whenever you do these outros? Why do you do that? Thanks for listening to the all-in podcast Wow
David Sachs
poignant points about
regulatory capture
Friedberg loves mock meets not for me
Everyone loves
Everyone loves a great detail. Next time.
Oh, podcast.
Wow.
Love you boys.
So you're better.
Impressions.
Everyone's got their superpower.
That's your nasty nasty.
J. Cal.
Don't ruin it.
Don't ruin it.
I'm coming on. I'm coming on.
Rain Man David's
Hey, freeburg, you want to tell them about your new family members? Oh, my God, did he get more dogs? Is he trying to date for it? No, this again? Oh, Miss Peaches.
So I'm like working all day Friday. I'm like wiped out. I'd been in I can't remember. Oh,
yeah, I was in Santa Cruz. I made it all the way back up through the traffic. I get up
to the house. I've been texting and calling all afternoon, no response.
I'm like, what the is going on?
Normally she'll text me like, just walk through the door,
open the door to my car, every little thing.
So for her to not be calling me back as something's up,
I walk in the house, the kids are there.
They're jumping up and down.
Daddy, daddy, we got two new dogs.
And I'm like, what the are you talking about?
We didn't get two new dogs.
What do you say?
Mommy's got two new dogs.
And then mommy took him to the vet.
Took him back in a few minutes.
I'm like, no way.
And I had some friends coming over for dinner.
They walk in the house.
The kids are jumping up and down.
Two minutes later walks in the house.
These two dogs that someone found in a parking lot
in San Jose and they couldn't find a home for these dogs.
And they were like, the dogs don't have a home. Decided I'll take them into my home.
And I'm like, this is why you didn't call me.
You didn't text me.
I walked out the room.
I'm like, it's over.
It's been nice knowing you.
The kids are screaming,
daddy, you can't get rid of the dogs.
They're our dogs now.
These are the best dogs.
So now we have four dogs.
And which was the vet bill?
And then I come down that night,
huge in the dining room,
like multiple diarrhea,
plopped all over the floor.
I walked downstairs, the whole house was smelling of poop.
My house has become like, you know,
those carnival trains that used to go from city to city
back in the 19th century.
If one of those trains like fell over and spilled open,
that's basically what my house has become.
It just smells like poo and hay,
and there's clowns and children running around. And I live in
I ever tell you the story of Chuck Norris, the Chihuahua?
No, no, no. So I'm going to a wedding. I'm in like, Arizona.
I'm driving like on one of these giant, like Arizona streets and
a Chihuahua runs across this like eight lane
Boulevard, whatever. And I'm like, Oh my god, I'm like dodging
around it. And it goes into the other side of traffic and I see
a car. And he just the dog ducks, he misses the car. I'm
like, Oh, thank God. My wife is screaming her head off. The dog
gets whacked by another car and he goes rolling down the
highway. I make a u turn, I block it. The dogs knocked out on the side of the highway. I make a U-turn, I block it.
The dogs knocked out on the side of the road.
I run up to the dog, I pick it up.
I'm like, this dog's gonna die.
You know, and I get in the car.
I said, let's just take it to a vet or whatever.
And I'm saying goodbye to the dog.
The dog's like looking up at me.
It's bad shape.
We go to a vet.
I give it to the vet. We go to the wedding, my wife who was like, got this big heart.
decides she's gonna stay with the dog. So I go to the wedding, I go to the you know, opening night party. She's with she's at the 24 hour event sitting with this dog waiting for it to die in hospital. Oh my god. The dog doesn't die. The dog survives. Sorry. Now it's
Monday. And I get the alert on my credit card. $12,000. Yeah, yeah. Well, yeah, $1,000 on this
dead dog. I'm like, the dog survives. I bring the dog back to the Bay Area. The dogs find I can't believe it but you know
it's got like a broken leg all this stuff but you know he's generally the dogs alive.
So I put him on social media like anybody want Chuck Norris a dog that cannot die.
This is like the toughest Chihuahua you ever seen. Some of these rich people in San Francisco
living on like a certain street. Broadway or something like that turns out
they're like, they're heirs to something famous. They live in
like three states, they got a private jet, all this nonsense,
they say we'll take the dog, they're friends with a couple of
our mutuals. So I'm like, this is great. I'm going to get the
12 grand from them.
Because you have to They're friends with a couple of our mutuals. So I'm like, this is great. I'm going to get the 12 grand from them. Because
they got a private jet. They got three houses. So they come down to pick up the dog with their driver and everything. And we're
delivering the dog. And I tell Jade, Hey, can we let them know
about the $12,000 bill?
Maybe they'll pick it up. Or we can spend it like a Larry David moment. And my wife is like, if you bring that up with them, I'm divorcing you, we have to pay the 12,000. So I pay the 12,000.
They proceed to then send us pictures of Chuck Norris on private jets, you know, for years to
this day, Chuck Norris living this life, and I paid 12 grand to save
this.
Freebird told me this story, I found it so hilarious. But I
told him, you know, after we got Joker when Jason when you came
to visit us in fourth of the anatomy, Joker had like Jardia.
So he was just everywhere. And you know, we got through it. And then three months ago,
when you guys were at my house for poker,
Sean made octopus and left some raw octopus
in a garbage bag outside and Joker ate it.
And he got such terrible poisoning,
we had to take him to the emergency animal hospital
where he stayed for like a week.
That was by the way, 17K.
But ever since he came back,
he's been completely incontinent.
So I was telling Reaper that Nat and I now just wake up
half an hour early.
And what we do now from 6.30 to usually 6.45
is we're cleaning up some form of feces
that he's left somewhere in the house.
We have to go and find where did he take his his let's go clean it up. And the worst
one was he once pooped through one of the greats with this
really bad poo and I had to go and just fetch it all out. It
was just this
Oh, right in the greats. Fantastic. Right. Yeah. So there
you have it, folks. Go adopt a pet. There's your endorsement
for to $17,000 in veterinary bills and cleaning up all day
long and replacing carpets. Listen, we got a big docket today. I know it's a bit early
in the year, but I am going to add a new category where I'm proposing a new category. We'll
love to hear your feedback on it for the 2024 besties. Most based CEO, lots of options to choose from
right now, which we'll get into in a minute. But there seems to be a bit of a vibe shift happening
in tech during peak Zerp and cancel culture 2019 to 2021 era seemed like CEOs were a little vigilant
about what they would say, you know, the Tim Cooks, the Sundars, but something has clearly changed. Tech CEOs have gotten radically candid and fired their comms group.
Two great examples this week that we were talking about.
Jensen Wong, the CEO of Nvidia, had this awesome clip when speaking at Stanford's Graduate
School of Business.
I think one of my great advantages is that I have very low expectations.
And I mean that.
Most of the Stanford graduates have very low expectations. And I mean that. Most of the Stanford graduates have very high expectations.
People with very high expectations have very low
resilience.
And unfortunately, resilience matters in success.
I don't know how to teach it to you except for I hope
suffering happens to you.
To this day, I use the phrase pain and suffering inside our
company with great glee.
Boy, this is going to cause a lot of pain and suffering.
And I mean that in a
happy way, because you want to train you want to refine the
character of your company, you want greatness out of them. And
greatness is not intelligence as greatness comes from character
and character is informed out of smart people is formed out of
people who suffered.
And then next up Palantir CEO Alex Karp called out the coked
up short sellers on CNBC.
I love burning the short sellers.
Like almost nothing makes a human happier
than taking the glides of cocaine
and away from these short sellers
who like are going short on a truly great American company,
not just ours, but it just love
pulling down great American companies
so that they can pay for their Coke.
And the best thing that could happen
To them is we will provide we will lead their coke dealers to their homes after they can't pay their bills
Surely all short sellers. Yeah. Well, you know, go ahead and do your thing. We'll do our thing. Hey, have it folks, of course
We had
Elan's great
good for you at some New York Times conference always candid
and even Zuckerberg he's been getting a little based. He did a
whole video about how the Apple Vision Pro was when compared to
Metis Quest two. He's getting a little frisky on the social
media.
Freberg is the vibe shift real?
It seems like a lot of people are less worried about cancel culture as they were three years ago.
So I don't know if it's just in Silicon Valley, broadly in media, and broadly culturally, there
seems to be a move away from cancel culture mentality and people are speaking their mind more, which is, yeah, I think obviously positive and refreshing.
Sacks, you're a big fan of freedom of speech.
Your thoughts on this vibe shift?
Is this related to cancel culture kind of ending and journalists just not being able
to cancel people because they misspoke
or were a little spicy in their takes. Well, I like the fact that these CEOs are all being
colorful in their remarks and candid and interesting and that that's always a good thing.
In each of these cases, I kind of like what they had to say. But I think that you might or we
collectively might be reading a little bit
too much into this.
I mean, at the end of the day, what secret cows are they really challenging?
What real dangerous truths are they speaking?
What real risks are they taking?
I just don't put any of the things that they're saying or doing in the same category as say
what Elon has been doing in terms of taking on
the powers that be, in terms of rolling back censorship and promoting free speech on X.
I mean, Elon, I think, has taken some real risks in doing that.
And you see that he's paying the price with all these government investigations and the
voiding of his compensation package, that I think is just in a slightly different category
of true risk taking by speaking truth to power
or allowing the masses to speak truth to power
compared to what these other guys are doing.
And I'm not disparaging any of them,
but look at them one by one.
I mean, Alex Karp made a colorful joke
at the expense of short traders.
I agree, but it's not really a risky remark.
Jensen Wang is giving some tough love to Stanford students.
He's giving them, I think, a good lesson of stop being so entitled, go get some real life
experience, be resilient.
Okay, great message.
I saw the Zuckerberg clip liked it as well. He's basically
speaking from a place of passion about his own product and comparing it to Apple. Okay, great.
That's what he's supposed to do. I don't see any of those CEOs take, again, if you want to compare
it to Elon, taking a really dangerous political stance. In fact, remember when Zuckerberg got
dragged to Capitol Hill and gave that testimony and
they demanded that he give that apology.
He did it.
I mean, you know, I thought that word was banned on this pod.
Not only one applied to me.
Anybody else can be genuine.
I mean, I thought he was just showing some humanity, which is, you know, kind of paradoxical.
Look, I get it in that moment, but I'm just saying that,
if you want to put it in the same category as Elon,
the thing to do would have been to punch back.
And I think in that moment it was who?
It was Josh Hawley?
The thing to do would have been to say, no,
it's you who are exploiting the misery and suffering
of all of these people by trying to score political points.
So anyway, I don't want to pick on-
That would have been super based, yeah.
Yeah, that would have been super based. So all I'm saying is that it's one thing for
these founders and CEOs to be colorful and candid or whatever. That's all great,
but have they really taken political courage?
Your thoughts, Chamath, on based CEOs?
Well, I think, Jason, the takeaway, I think you're almost on the right point, but not
quite. I don't think this is based or not based. I think the point is, everybody is exhausted with
the multiple layers of word scrambled gymnastics that people have had to play. And they're like,
enough's enough. I think the more interesting way to look at this
is that there was a few year period
where a lot of companies were under a lot of pressure
and folks felt that they couldn't say what was on their mind
to really fix the problems that they saw.
Now you have, you know, both of the companies
and the CEOs you pointed out are firing on all cylinders
as far as anybody can tell from the outside. And there's a certain level of political capital
that comes with that. And they're choosing to spend it. And I think that's the interesting
takeaway, which is, as these companies become successful again, as tech re-emerges again from
this multi-year malaise, are folks going to find their voice or not? And I think that's the big point,
which is that it seems at least that we can see this next generation of winning companies
seems to have CEOs that will take a different path. They'll be maybe closer to Elon than
closer to a politician. Yeah, it's I loved Wong's comments just about his secret weapon
as he has incredibly low expectations.
By the way, if you had said that comment a few years ago,
the whole pain and suffering thing,
somebody would have said, I felt triggered,
it touched my childhood trauma, you know,
I had X, Y, and Z happened to me.
And it's not that those people don't have valid claims,
but they would have aired it in a way that tried to get him
canceled, effectively.
Yeah, he would be out of touch.
He would be talking down to people,
he'd be a billionaire telling people to suck it up.
What does he know?
And by the way, in fairness, I bet you
there are people that felt that way, even today
when listening to his clip.
The thing that is different, though,
was the rest of us, who also have had pain and suffering in our lives, retweeted it and was just like this is 100% awesome.
Yeah, I mean, finally, candid advice. Elon used to always say, happiness equals this was his happiness formula happiness equals expectation reality minus
expectations. And so if your expectations are really high, and
reality doesn't hit it, you're going to be sad. And if you keep
your expectations low and realities, you know, okay, or
good. Yeah, you could be happy in life. But Freiburg, I just
love of those quotes, maybe some thoughts about suffering and how
hard it is you're back in the CEO seat. How's that been going for you?
Generally speaking, how hard is it compared to being a capital
allocator? Curious, I was going to talk to you about that
offline anyway.
I probably have an unhealthy affinity for suffering. I think
for suffering. I think that if you come from certain backgrounds, you're sort of trained that that's the place that you're unconscious tends to want to be.
And I think that that also, some people call it chips on shoulders.
Some people call it motivation.
I mean, look at your friend, Elon, how much suffering he puts his himself through.
I think it's a requisite to greatness is you have to really find ways to sacrifice.
Now, if I've said this a lot, there's a reason a lot of people that have had
success in their career don't end up being great entrepreneurs, because as soon
as you're faced with failure for the first time, it doesn't
pattern match to what's happened to you historically.
I go to a good school, I get good grades, I go to Stanford, I get a degree.
Everything about every step you do, you're told if you do X, you will get Y.
And then you do X and you get Y and you repeat.
And at some point you're considered successful in your education, in your career and so on.
If you then decide that entrepreneurship
is the path for you, you realize that entrepreneurship
is that there is no if X then Y.
There is if X, maybe Y, maybe Z,
maybe a hundred other things that'll smack you in the face.
And that experience is shockingly different
for people that have historically followed a path of success,
of what's defined as success culturally, socially.
And I think that that's really what he's speaking to.
If you've grown up where all of your expectations
have not been met, or many of the expectations
have not been met, you realize that persistence,
grit, perseverance, relentlessness,
these are the necessary traits to be successful
in entrepreneurship.
And I think that I find myself much happier in that condition than in any other condition. And it's why I'm actually very happy in the work I'm doing right now.
Yeah, I think that resonates a lot with me and all the entrepreneurs that I back,
they all have that chip. And you got to be careful not to get caught up in the trappings
and really focus on solving problems. If you think to be careful not to get caught up in the trappings and really focus
on solving problems. If you think about what a CEO does all day, you hire the smartest team you know,
you give them the biggest challenges, as much autonomy as you can. And then they return back
to you with all the problems, the smartest people you could find to join your team can't fix.
So then your life becomes essentially, you know, what's left over that is the most brutal to solve. And you know,
there's only a certain percentage of people who can do
that day in and day out just relentlessly before you
reconcile. How do you reconcile that statement, Jason, with the
proposition that people should become entrepreneurs generally,
I think that this really, this really challenges me whenever people say,
I'm thinking about starting a company. My first response is no, don't.
Like you have to be told over and over again to not start a company,
to test if they actually have the resilience and grit necessary just to take
the first step of starting the company.
I have gotten that everyone should be encouraged to start a company and
entrepreneurism is a is a
career choice. I think is a false notion. I think that most
people are not psychologically equipped for being successful
in entrepreneurship.
Yeah, you're 100%. Right. And I've gotten in my later years,
as we run like founding university, these programs, when
people are applying, and we only accept 10% into the programs,
and then only invest in 10% of those. So are net net like less than 1% get funded. You
know, I'll ask them, they're like, Oh, can you give us money
so I can get a co founder? And I'm like, you know what you
failed the first test of being an entrepreneur. You know, the
first test of being an entrepreneur is can you convince
two or three people to go on this crazy journey with you?
Because it's important. And without money. And you know,
people expect, oh, you're going to just give them the money because they have an interesting idea.
And then I asked them, what's your skill? What do you do at the startup? Do you sell the product?
Do you build the product? And a lot of people do not have the wherewithal to add a skill that
the world needs. Being a developer, a UX designer, a salesperson, whatever it is, right, they don't have any skill. And then they also have no ability to convince somebody else with skills
to start a company. If you can't have marketable important skills yourself, that you taught
yourself on your own, through sheer force of motivation and well and opening up YouTube,
which really isn't that hard people,
like anybody can learn to code to be a UX designer to be a salesperson, all this is
on some online course, some book, some YouTube video, some podcast, I just learned some marketable
skills that a startup needs. And if you can't do that, you shouldn't be a founder.
I think the point is that everybody's capable of being a founder and anybody can and should
start a company. It's just that very few can finish a company. And that is the resilience part
where there's just so many ups and downs, and you have to be able to roll and survive. And you have
to just problem solve constantly. And yeah, there are very few people that are cut out for it.
You have to be comfortable with failure.
You have to be comfortable with expectations not being met.
That's the important point that he's making.
I can't tell you how important it was early in my career.
I had several cold calling jobs where I cold called college kids, I cold called alumni,
I cold called CEOs.
I had three different cold calling jobs and getting rejection after rejection, failing
in my life.
I didn't get into any schools except for Berkeley because Berkeley didn't take
teacher recommendations to be teachers.
I did not do well in school.
And then playing poker taught me a lot because playing poker, you lose hands,
you lose hands, you lose hands, you lose hands.
You have to just make sure that you're making the right decisions.
And over time, the money will come to you.
The positive EV will be there, but failure and persisting through failure,
I think was one of the most important traits I had to
develop before I was even ready to start a company. Because all
that's happening every day is failure. But I have my first
magazine, I didn't understand I had just printed photocopies up
and I had like 2000 copies of this magazine, Silicon Island
reporter, and I didn't know how to get them in people's hands.
So I just got a luggage cart, like a little luggage cart, I put them in the luggage cart, and I didn't know how to get them in people's hands. So I just got a luggage cart, like a
little luggage cart, I put them in the luggage cart, and I walked around lower Manhattan. And I
just dropped them off at internet companies, and I dropped them off at cafes. And then I went to
all the village voice boxes, and I just slotted them in, in between the village voice. And
miraculously, people found it, and then they would subscribe. And you know, whatever it took was the
approach. All right, everybody, let's get to our second topic,
a mini topic, but did opening I just get caught with their hand
in the cookie jar or the training data cookie jar. Open
AI CTO was interviewed by the Wall Street Journal this week.
During the interview, you probably saw this if you're on
x it trended, she was asked what data did opening I use to train
Sora if you don't know what story is we talked about it here.
It's that incredible. You know, video create, you know, type in
a text prompt, get a video back model and let's watch this clip
and then discuss it.
What data was used to train Sora?
We used publicly available data and
licensed data. So videos on YouTube? I'm actually not sure
about that. Okay. Videos from Facebook, Instagram? You know,
if they were publicly available, available, publicly
available to use, there might be the data, but I'm not sure I'm
not confident about it.
Let me start with you, Chema. What are your thoughts here? And
just her not being super prepared there to answer a
question? Or is this a cookie jar situation? What do you think?
I mean, you got to think the CTO of an organization that whose job it is to build models based on
training data knows where the training data is from. My interpretation of that answer is that she
is hesitating because she doesn't want to make a statement against interest.
Right. I want to show you guys something. I had a friend of mine, somebody we all know, who's deep in the heart of this AI stuff.
He came to my office and he showed me this one really interesting thing, which is when you launch
Chad GPT and if you go into the microphone, but you say nothing, so you just wait a few seconds,
turn on the microphone, wait a few seconds and turn it off.
I'll just do it right now just to show you. It comes back and it says, thank you say nothing. So just wait a few seconds, turn on the microphone, wait a few seconds and turn it off. I'll
just do it right now just to show you. It comes back and it
says thank you for watching, which is typically what it
shows you when you auto watch a bunch of YouTube videos. Now,
why is that interesting? Well, if you say nothing, right, the
model has clearly then is guessing that whenever you see you hear silence, that probabilistically,
the next best thing to translate that into is thank you for
watching, which would mean that the training happened on a
bunch of content where thank you for watching was the next
obvious thing. So that when there's silence, and the most
obvious place where that happens is in YouTube. I don't know, I
thought that was an interesting little thing that he pointed out to me.
I don't know if anybody's actually explored this, but
if it is true and Google decides they have an issue with it, that's not good for these folks.
Friberg, your thoughts?
I think it's fine. I don't know why this is a controversial thing.
Well, I mean, it's obvious she's kind of lying on camera.
She definitely knows where the training data came
from. And it feels like see, see why I mean, I mean, what
YouTube is public. So what's wrong with watching YouTube to
teach a model stuff? Well, you'd have to get a license to make a
derivative work. As we've seen, open AI has been doing that.
They're in a lawsuit right now with the New York Times. And
they failed to negotiate their license. So I think the assumption is they're making a lawsuit right now with the New York Times. And they failed to negotiate their license. So
I think the assumption is they're making a derivative work.
Yeah, I mean, they've licensed other people's data, right?
Yeah, to get access to it, that's not publicly available. You
can go to YouTube downloader and download all this data. You know,
it's crazy. I heard from someone at Google that under the terms of
service, Google is not allowed to train on YouTube data. Remember,
my I made this point a couple
weeks ago about how important YouTube data is. I think there
would be this really ironic handicap that Google's done to
itself, where anyone else can access and download and watch
YouTube data to train models. But Google cannot. I don't know
if there's any clarity on that. But it's a pretty crazy fact
pattern. But yeah, YouTube's on the internet. And I feel like
anything that's on the open internet
should be watchable by these models.
I don't consider training models
to be generation of derivative work.
That's my position.
And that's a position that OpenAI
has taken the other side of that position
because they're going around licensing data.
Sax, any other thoughts here about this Crefluffle?
Well, look, I kind of agree with both you and Freeberg.
In terms of the part that I agree with Freeberg,
I think that this issue is kind of more of the same
of what we've been talking about for a while,
which is clearly OpenAI trained its model
on publicly available data
that was available on the internet.
I agree with Freeberg that fair use doctrine
should be applied to that.
I know that you have a different point of view on that,
Jay Kalanath, we need to rehash that.
I understand that you don't think fair use should apply.
In any event, I think it's pretty clear that OpenAI trained Sora using available data on
the internet and that probably included YouTube.
The part where I agree with you, J Cal, is that I don't know if I would say that she's lying per se, but I think she's probably
concerned that if she comes right out and answers the question as directly as she could,
that it could be a problem for them in all these lawsuits that they're now facing.
Again, I think that I would take the side in those lawsuits that fair use should be allowed,
but I think that probably she
is being careful here, because they are facing so many lawsuits about this training data.
It's going to be pretty clear, Chamath, I think what the courts will decide here,
which is whose opportunity is it to make a Sora in the world? If Disney owns a massive collection
of IP, and somebody should be able to use that IP to make derivative works. Should it be Sora or should it be Disney itself?
And so I think the journalists know full well what they're doing and how the
journalists have their hooks into this for a very real reason.
The journalists are also content creators.
So now we're going to have this, you know, two sides forming journalists.
I just worry that these folks are not technical enough to make this decision.
And, you know, when it goes into a court, how is a judge really going to understand the
nuances of this to make a call on this?
Or the jury.
It's going to be a big education process, yeah.
Yeah, or the jury.
Yeah.
Speaking of AI, vertical AI startups are starting to make some noise.
We all know about large language models. We've talked about them here. If you
listen to this program, you know about opening i googles, Gemini
previously known as Bard and proper Claude all this stuff.
Their general purpose they've been trained on the open
internet as we were just discussing, so they can answer
questions about almost anything. And yeah, sometimes it's
correct. Sometimes they're incorrect, but it's showing
promise. There is a
another school of thought here that's emerging in startups
vertical AI. These companies are kind of taking a job title, a
role in society and they are building vertical apps. Harvey
is AI for lawyers, a bridge is doing an AI note taker for
doctors, save some hours a day, according to them.
TaxGPT is an AI tax assistant,
NCR is AI for customer support,
that's Brett Taylor's new startup.
This week, a startup called Cognition
debuted a tool called Devon.
They're calling it an AI software engineer,
the demos went viral on X,
you've probably seen them all over the place
and in the news.
If you watch it, you can see Devon fixing bugs in real
time fine tuning an AI model building apps and and and people
are speculating Devon was built on GPT four from open AI that's
not confirmed. But according to the CEO Devon was built by
tweaking reasoning and long term planning into an existing LLM.
Here's how it ranks against other major models on coding benchmarks, they're building all these benchmarks to test each language model. And as you can see, it's, according to this chart, and according to their data, doing much better than just a generic language model kind of makes sense. Jamal, did you see these demos this week? I think I saw you on the group chat talking about it.
And what was your take on these role based vertical startups?
Oh, I think this is so powerful. I mean, it's incredible,
because we're measuring this progress in like what week over
week.
Feels like that. Yeah.
I think the point that you should take away is that the
I think the point that you should take away is that most of these very difficult, impenetrable job types, for the average person, if you said to them, hey, become a developer, that's like a command line interface where you just kind of
describe in English what you want to do. And all of this
stuff will just happen behind the scenes and it'll be totally
automated. So that'll grow the number of people that can use
these tools. At the same time, it'll make the developers I
think even more valued because you're going to need people in
the guts of these models and in the code that it generates because it's
not always going to work perfectly. There's always going
to be some kind of hallucination, some stuff is
not going to compile. Now, the demos that they did, though,
were incredible. They were able to find errors, they were able
to remediate errors in code. I mean, I just I think it's
really, really special. So you've been on co pilots for the
past year talking about that.
This is slightly different.
We're moving from, Hey, here's a co-pilot, somebody helping a developer to, Hey,
here's a developer working and now they have a supervisor.
So what do you think of these sort of role-based agents and how quickly we went
from year one co-piloting to, okay, now they're the pilot
and we're sitting in the co-pilot seat
watching them fly the plane.
Yeah, well, look, first of all,
everyone's working on autonomous coding
or working towards that.
This is like one of the core most obvious use cases of LLMs
because code is text
and it can also be run through a compiler to debug it.
So you can also get to,
in theory, you can get to high levels of accuracy yet, although
in the example that you gave, Jason, this new product was only at 13%.
So there's still a long way to go, but the potential is clearly there.
So a lot of companies are working on some variation of this idea.
Devon is, I guess you could call it an agent first approach.
And I think that's very cool for generating new software projects.
But where I think this gets much trickier and is much more difficult is when
you're working in existing code bases.
And just to talk my own book for a second, we're an investor in a company called
Sourcegraph, they have a product called Codi and their whole approach is context first as opposed to agent first.
It's all about getting the copilot to work inside of existing code bases. So different
companies are coming at this from different approaches. GitHub copilot I think is kind
of more like Codi where it's all about making an existing code base more useful. Whereas
Devon again is starting with I think net new code bases, but that's
going to demo really well.
And so that's what you're seeing is like these really cool demos.
In any event, the larger picture here is that we are going to get better at
better at coding autonomously, I guess you could say.
And I don't know if it ever gets to 100% where you don't need coders anymore,
but it's going to make coders
much more productive over time, you're gonna get this huge
multiplier effect on the ability to write code. And that's really
exciting for a bunch of obvious reasons.
Freebird, we've been tracking this evolution from, you know,
Gmail, guess the next word, guess the next phrase, guess the next
sentence to co pilots. Now we have these role based agent
based solutions that startups are pursuing. What's next? If we
follow this thread, what would the next evolution here be?
Well, the big push has been for this notion of AGI to replace a human. And I think what we're seeing is.
Software that replaces a specific human doing a specific thing, like being a
lawyer, being an accountant, being an art director, if you think about the internet
when the internet, which was like networking software and the capabilities that arose from the connection of all these computers during the internet
era, the innovation was everyone tried to create a business model, which was how do
you take an existing vertical business and put it on the internet?
I think what we're seeing in this era is everyone's taking a vertical human and creating a vertical
version of a human in the AI era.
And so I think like the success will probably accrue
to one company that replaces one set of core human services,
like being a lawyer, being an accountant,
being an artist in whatever way,
and that that ends up being the specific vertical tool that people will use
to automate and scale up their ability to do that task in an automated way.
Because I think that there's like a great deal of capability that emerges in the fine tuning and
the unique data that certain people may have to make that one tool better than the rest.
And therefore everyone will end up using this one lawyer service,
or this one accounting service or what have you. So I definitely
think that's kind of what we're seeing.
I think it's pretty obvious where this is going. You got
co pilots assisting a developer, or a lawyer, then the next
writer, then they got the next phase. Okay, you've got a peer
so you're doing peer programming, or somebody's kind
of working alongside you, you're checking
their work, hey, maybe they're even checking your work, seeing
if you have bugs, where this is going to be next year is there's
going to be a conductor, there's going to be somebody who has a
role or a piece of software has a role, where you say, hey,
you're a CEO of a company, you're a founder, a product
manager, here's your lawyer, here's your accountant, here's
your developers, here's your designer, and's your developers, here's your designer.
And now you will coordinate those five people.
Now imagine how that changes startups when you as an individual have a conductor working
with you and says, you know what, I don't know if I agree with this legal advice that's
coming in, in relation to the tax advice.
And maybe we should not even add this feature to the program.
Let's talk to the product manager, the agent product manager about taking that feature out
so we don't have these downstream legal issues
and we don't even have to file taxes in this area.
It's gonna get really interesting next year
when they have a conductor.
The other way it may go, Jason,
is you have a lawyer that has 50 associates working for them
through the AI.
So you don't replace the lawyer,
you don't replace the software engineer, the software
engineer levels up.
And now the software engineer has 50 engineers available, 50 agents running, doing tasks
for them.
You do still need humans with domain expertise and creativity to think through architecture,
to think through process and to make sure that the AI agents are doing their job.
So I think what it creates is extraordinary leverage for
people and organizations, which is why generally economic
productivity goes up, people don't lose jobs, they level up.
In this phase, the the op ex of companies will probably be cut
in half. At the limit, I think Jason is actually absolutely
right. I think you find that there'll be millions of companies with one
person and then a whole layer of software and conductors and agents and bots. That's the future.
Yeah.
So you won't have these engineering people. That person should be running their own company. And
so you'll just have millions and millions and millions and maybe billions of companies. And
I think that that's really exciting. Not all of them will work. Many of them will fail.
And a few of them will be ginormous.
And it'll be up to the person who can navigate
and be a conductor, as you said, you know?
That's gonna be really interesting.
The solo entrepreneur movement of the last couple of years,
there were all these kind of like independent hackers
building one item like Phil Kaplan did with DistroKid.
He said like two or three people working on that got very big.
You know, I was telling you guys about that slopes app I showed
you I reached out to the founder of that I was like, Hey, tell me
about the business like it's enough of a business to support
one person or two people like there will be a lot of these
apps or services one conductor. And yeah, it makes what half
million a year three million a year, whatever it's enough to
support 123 people working on it. what half million a year, three million a year, whatever, it's enough to support 123 people working on
it. But previously, you know, you'd be going to the venture
community like, Oh, what did it take a modern app company, sacks
to kind of build an Android and an iOS app, just, you know, five
10 years ago, if we were funding one 10 years ago, what would
the footprint look like? For, look like for a consumer app company?
If you're going to go all the way back to the late 90s during the dot com era, I remember that with PayPal, just to launch really what was an MVP, we had, I'd say a dozen developers and it was pretty expensive and we had to set up our own colo.
There was all this infrastructure that all got abstracted away with AWS.
Then you move to the mobile era
and the app stores provide,
there's just a lot more developer tools.
There's a lot more APIs.
Yeah, it was well as distribution,
but it's far easier to code these apps.
So definitely things have gotten easier and easier.
That's the trend, if that's the point you're trying to make.
It's certainly never been easier to get started in creating something if you're a solo developer.
Yeah.
That being said, I think that depending on what you're trying to do, it's still usually
the case that if you're trying to do something interesting and profound, you're going to
need a small team of developers and a couple million bucks to get you started.
Yeah. It used to be a rule of thumb thumb, I think 12 people for an app company,
get two or three working on each platform, a couple designers, a couple of testing,
and design, UX, you get to 10, 12 people
to run a modern one. Alright everybody, next issue,
the house just passed a bill that would either ban
TikTok or force a sale. sale talked about this bill being proposed
last week and things had moved really slowly on the TikTok man.
Now they're moving really fast. On Wednesday, the house passed
the bill with a bipartisan vote of 352 to 65 making this one of
the few subjects that members of Congress can agree on. Biden has
also signaled his intent to sign the
bill into law should it pass the Senate passing the Senate that
could be an obstacle Democratic jury leader Chuck Schumer has
signaled a lack of interest in the subject and said he'll
review the bill with committee chairs before deciding on the
path forward arguments for and against the bill have centered
around a few main points reciprocity we talked about that
here. You can't use Instagram x or
any of our domestic social networks in China. And if they won't allow us in their country,
why should we give them unrestricted access to ours stifling debate, progressive sphere.
This isn't really about national security. Their position is mainstream politicians are hoping to
shut down political discourse, particularly among
the youth who are mostly on TikTok, particularly pro Palestinian and anti Israel discourse,
which seems to flourish on TikTok versus other platforms.
Incidentally, Joe Biden launched a TikTok account last month, and his comments were
instantly flooded with pro Palestinian remarks, some calling him
Genocide Joe.
Third argument overreached some.
Sax, I think you've pointed out that the language in this law is a bit vague.
It needs to be tightened up.
Maybe the president could go after companies supposedly aligned with foreign interests
who aren't.
Our esteemed patriot and friend Keith Raboy argued with you sax on this on X. And then there are guys like Trump and
Vivek, who I believe are flip flopping based on securing bags. Vivek called TikTok digital
fentanyl. And Trump issued an executive order calling for bite dance to divest TikTok in
2020. Now they're both opposing the ban. And interestingly, both Trump and Vivek have ties to the Republican
megadonna, Jeffrey Yass, who is a major shareholder in
ByteDance with a reported 15 to $30 billion stake he gave Vivek
5 million bucks. Who knows what Trump's gotten. But they said
they're back in love. Saks, you had this big back and forth
with Keith Raboy on X.
Are you in support of the divestiture or not?
I haven't been able to track exactly
where you're at at this.
Well, I think my take on this,
and I'm gonna have to revise and extend my remarks
from last week,
because I didn't know as much about the bill.
I hadn't actually read the language yet, and now have. My take on this is that the bill poses a significant
risk of being Patriot Act 2.0. In other words, a threat to the security of the United States
is basically hyped up. Some part of it may be real, some of it may be threat inflation.
Then we give the intelligence community
and the government new powers, which can then be abused.
And that's exactly what happened with the Patriot Act.
They ended up spying on Americans.
Now, what is the potential abuse here?
This is the thing that I've debated with Keith.
And there's also other people who I respect a lot.
And Keith, by the way, is a very talented lawyer
in addition to other things being a successful
founder and investor, and investor. And then you know, I
saw that cigar and Jenny whose show I was just on thinks that
the bill is just fine. So look, there are people, very legit
people who disagree with me about this. But I went last
night, I read this bill like four times to try and like parse the language.
And I've just come away concluding there's no, the way I see it, there's no way to argue
that this language isn't vague and could invite abuse.
And you really have to dig into it.
But let me just kind of walk you through, I think, a key part of it.
So first of all, this bill doesn't just ban or force the divester of TikTok.
It goes after what it calls foreign adversary controlled applications.
Now, what is a foreign adversary?
There are four countries that are defined as foreign adversaries.
It's basically Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea. I'm not super worried
about that list of foreign adversaries growing because that does take a bunch of procedural
hoops to go through it. What I am concerned about is when the bill talks about what makes
a company controlled by a foreign adversary. If you go to that language, which is then
definition. What frequently happens with
these bills is that a lot of the meat is actually in the definitions.
You have to look at this very carefully.
It says here, the term controlled by foreign adversary means with respect to a covered
company that such company or entity is, and then there's three categories.
The first category is a foreign person, which can also mean a foreign corporation that's
domiciled in or is headquartered entity where 20% of the ownership group is in that foreign
person category.
So that would be like, let's say you had a US company, but 20% of the company was owned
by a Chinese company.
So that would be like a foreign company.
So that would be like,
let's say you had a U S company, but 20% of the company was owned by,
I don't know if Chinese VCs or by bite dance. Okay.
That would also be a controlled by a foreign adversary.
Then you get to the provision that I think is the most problematic,
which is it's a person subject to the direction or control of a foreign
person or entity.
The novel language here is where it says subject to the direction of.
It's not just saying under the control of, it's saying subject to the direction of.
In my view, that's very vague.
And a creative prosecutor, a creative attorney general could try to say, well, wait a second,
if Elon has a major Tesla factory in Shanghai, is he subject to the direction of the Chinese
Communist Party because they could influence him, they could leverage him?
If Donald Trump is accused on virtually a daily basis of being a Russian asset, is
he subject to the direction of Vladimir Putin?
David Frum just tweeted very recently that he said that not only Trump, but the entire
Republican Party that works for Trump is under the direction of Russians.
That's like a partisan hack, though.
That's not like actual factual in a court, right?
So this would have to be proven factual in the court.
Okay.
Do you think or no?
Well, the AG could open an investigation based on the theory that for example, Trump owns
true social and Trump is under the direction of a foreign adversary, i.e. Putin, because
the mainstream media continues to normalize
this idea and spread this idea on virtually a daily basis.
The point is that, look, first the AG would open an investigation.
You think about the sledgehammer type of remedy here that an Elon or a Trump or a, you take
Rumble, for example, which is also accused of being a Russian agent
They could be forced to divest the company or to have it be banned
So it gives huge I think new powers
to the
Executive branch to pursue political opponents and political enemies
Whether they actually win in a court of law down the road is kind of secondary because
they can vex and harass their political enemies using this power. So my point is that at a minimum,
I think this language needs to get cleaned up. It is way too vague. And you still have the issue of
whether it's a good idea or not to force the banning or divestiture of TikTok. But this bill goes way
beyond it. Again, it creates this novel category of foreign adversary controlled applications,
which also, like I said, includes websites. And that means not just foreign companies,
but domestic companies as well that are set to be under the direction of a foreign actor.
So again, I don't know how anyone can look at this language and not say
it's too vague.
Yeah, it's easy enough. Tighten it up. And if it was tightened
up, you'd be in favor of the tick tock man. I take it sex or
divestiture. I should say I keep saying ban you would still want
the Chinese government to not have control this or or bite
dance. Yeah.
I still have very mixed feelings about the idea of just the TikTok ban, because look,
you're talking about an app that 100 million Americans use for something like 90 minutes
a day.
So people obviously get a lot of value out of this.
I've yet to see the hard proof that this app is under the control of the CCP.
I mean, I know that allegation was made.
I can understand why people make it.
And they spied on journalists already.
Yeah.
But it's very unclear to me
that they have the goods on that.
And I do think that depriving Americans of the right
to use this app that they clearly enjoy and love
based on a threat that has yet to be proven,
that makes me, I'm deeply ambivalent about that.
Chamath, if we were to look at, say,
media channels, newspapers,
there's been rules about foreign ownership of those.
Do you believe TikTok kind of falls into that?
As Zach said, Americans are enjoying this in a massive way,
100 million plus, 90 minutes a day,
the statistics are crazy.
That actually, I think, argues argues for you know, not having a
foreign adversary own this or have access to it, we wouldn't
allow them to own CNN, Fox, New York Times, Washington Post,
etc. We have rules against that already. So are you in favor of
this tick tock divestiture? Yes or no? Yeah. Okay. You have it.
Freyberg, we'd love to have you.
I like to hear him expand on that.
I'll tell you, before I tell you why,
I'll tell you a quick story.
Two or three months ago, after Joker was sick,
we started to make his own dog food, right?
So to have like a super bland diet,
and we had this service that was sending us food and we got rid of it, we started to make his own dog food, right? So to have like a super bland diet,
and we had this service that was sending us food
and we got rid of it and we would just make it ourselves.
And part of the meal was like some raw apples and carrots
that I would cut up.
And I would always complain to them.
I'm like, I hate peeling these apples or whatever,
slicing them and taking the core out.
Just said that. For the next month and a half, all I got was apple coring utensils on TikTok.
And she was like, oh, you know, we should get rid of XYZ food service. And she would just get
plastered with these ads. And it was just a reminder to me that these apps are constantly
listening. Now that's a benign example. But my
phone is on my desk when I'm talking about some really
important stuff. Again, important related to me, both
personal and professional, where there's lots of money on the
line. There's moments where, for certain parts of my business,
like with crypto, we have like 19 layers of people that
have to, you have passwords upon passwords upon passwords to do stuff.
The phone is always there.
It was just a reminder to me.
So I deleted TikTok.
It's gone, which sucks because I would relax with that app at night.
Like you know, I would have 15, 20 minutes where I would be depressed.
It's super fun.
It's a great app. I have to be
honest with you. I love it. But as a consumer, that was the
decision I made as a business person. What I'll say is it is
inconceivable to me that our voice signatures aren't being mapped
and there isn't a massive sort of file and repository
that is understanding what we're all saying.
And it's then further inconceivable to me
that there isn't a service that's in identifying
that this is probably David Sachs,
and this is Chamath, and this is Freiburg.
And we're not really all that important. But let's
take a better example. This is Elon Musk, this is the
President of the United States, this is, or the waiter that
works for the president who has his phone in his pocket while
he's sitting inside the, you know, the the the residences of
the White House. So I think it's happening. I think they're not
the only one though, I think there's happening. I think they're not the only one, though. I think there's American
companies that are doing it too. And so I think that we need to start somewhere. Until we can
have our apps in a market, they shouldn't have their apps here. And I think that should be the
end of it. Completely reasonable. I think I'm going to disagree. I think a couple points.
I don't believe in the notion of like reciprocity for reciprocity sake.
China blocks access to US content.
Does that mean the US government should block access to international content?
I think the answer is no, because this country is different than China.
We have afforded ourselves
freedoms and liberties that don't exist in other countries, freedom of choice, freedom of speech,
freedom of the press, and so on. So I don't think that the government should be restricting access
to content, because another country restricts access to our content. I think that we should
make decisions based on what's right for the citizens, what's right for the country, what's
right for national security. What about spying apps?
So that's my next point. So I do think that if there is a case to be made that there is spying
or data acquisition that's going on through these apps. We're not talking about rice noodles over
here. You know, we're talking about spying apps. Yeah. And so I think if that's true, then I would
imagine that there are multiple paths
to alleviate that, like move all the servers to the US and separate the entity, force a
sale. I don't think that it's necessarily appropriate to say that there aren't other
courses or other options available to try and prohibit what should generally be prohibited,
which is spying on American citizens and
capturing data that people, you know, haven't opted into being captured.
I do believe that citizens and people should have the right to decide if they
want to have their data used to be able to access an app.
I actually am not a big believer that we should be paternalistic in the
government sense and saying, having the government come in and say, here's an
app and we have determined that it is not good for you because this data is being used in a manipulative
way against you. I think that citizens should be afforded transparency and make a decision about
whether or not they want to participate in that. I don't think citizens have the sophistication
to understand what foreign adversaries, again, we only have four, so they were named there for a
reason, are doing with our data.
And I don't think that they should have to be forced to choose. I think that, you know,
this is not dissimilar to how the FDA says, you're not qualified to decide whether this drug is good,
we will tell you. And people are okay with that because you are saying this is part of
the government infrastructure that's full of experts who know the totality of a subject.
And so the problem is in order for anybody to make a reasonable decision, you'd have to share so much
as to just completely blow up a bunch of national security, which is not going to happen.
Well, look, I think we can have audit rights and we can have rights that protect our citizens. I
think that that's appropriate. I'll also say my final point on this, I think that whether it's
intentional or not, this sort of action leads to inevitable
cronyism and regulatory capture. Who does this benefit? If TikTok gets banned in the
US, it's going to benefit Metta. It's going to benefit Instagram. It's going to benefit
a few other social networks. It's going to benefit Elon at Twitter. There's a few folks
that are going to benefit pretty significantly if TikTok is banned because all those users
are going to migrate. I will also say, by the way, that many thousands of people make their living
on TikTok, like it or not, it's a big income stream for a lot of people in the US, and a really
important part of their livelihood. And just to be clear here, this is not about banning TikTok,
this is about divestiture. Then if it's not divested, then it gets banned. So if you just
think from first principles here, why wouldn't they divest? Why? Yeah, this
happens all the time. Keep this. The reason is, this is a
incredibly powerful tool under no circumstances, would the
Chinese government ever allow us to have this kind of reach into
their populace. And if you want to judge a person, you can just
look at their behavior. Citizens in China live either in a complete police state where
everything they do is tracked every transaction, facial
recognition, every step they take, every purchase they make
is tracked, or you're in a literal concentration camp.
That's how the people of China live today. We are their
adversary, they have noted that we're their adversary. Under what circumstance would you think
they would treat us any differently than they treat
their own citizens? It is absolutely insane that anybody
would take the side of the CCP on this. You are asking them to
divest, you're not asking them to shut it down. That is a
partisan sort of angle on this. And there's a lot of partisanship going on,
on the edges on this. But what we have to realize is they would never allow us to do this to their
citizens. And how they treat their citizens is obvious. As an example, we've tried, you know,
we tried to export sugar via McDonald's and Coke. And actually, they have domestic brands that they
were able to support and prop up. So they have more control of that too. So even, even, even our downstream attempts to actually send products
that theoretically over long periods of time, aren't necessarily beneficial. They've act,
they're smart enough to actually blunt. Yeah. And they don't let their kids play video games
or use Tik Tok. Well, even video games, they saw video games are bad. It's not like they're like,
Oh, Activision, come on in. The doors are open. They're like, you can use it an hour. No, I think it's like three hours a week. And certain kids,
and on the weekends, and certain kids are totally banned. They have an ability to make strategic
decisions that benefit their population. And I think that we have never attempted to. I'm not
saying that this law is going to be great, but you'd have to be extremely naive to assume that
there is nothing bad going on here with this app. It doesn to assume that there is nothing bad going on here with this app.
It doesn't mean that there's nothing bad going on with all the other apps.
I am assuming that all these apps have foreign actors that have infiltrated them.
I think that's the right posture to have.
I don't have Instagram on my phone. I don't have Facebook on my phone.
I don't have TikTok anymore on my phone. The only thing that's left is X. And at some point,
if those apps can prove that there's a chain of custody. So for example, you know, one thing that
I thought of you could do is you could put some kind of like ITAR regulations around this so that
only US citizens could work on these apps. Any app that is ambiently observing you, I think the overwhelming majority of people,
it's very benign implications.
But the whole point is that if you have 300 million people
that are being observed,
you're gonna get also the 1,000 or 10,000
that are super important,
and you're gonna catch stuff that you're not allowed to know.
And that's not right.
And they're already doing this.
Pull up the article, Nick.
TikTok has already admitted to and been caught with their hand in the cookie jar spying on
journalists.
We know that they're doing this already.
And we know their track record for spying on their own people.
This is the no-brainer of no-brainer decisions.
Just divest.
And if they won't divest, it tells you everything you need to know.
This is super valuable to them. And that algorithm is so
valuable that they know they can program the US citizenry.
I think the other problem is, I'm not sure that the people
with the technical sophistication will have the
time to then actually go and audit the code base to really
know that there aren't any Easter eggs in here. And there aren't real backdoors. And they won't let us. So this is my point. I think
divestiture should not be allowed. I actually just think, unfortunately, this app should just be shut
down and the people will migrate to Instagram and the people migrate to YouTube and new products.
And or new products. And the thing there is that at least these are American controlled. And are
there data leaks happening in those apps? Probably. But it's at least not so brazenly obvious.
Sacks your thoughts. I'm a little confused here. Are you guys saying that the Chinese government
uses to talk to spy on its own population or they ban it because they think it's harmful?
No, they ban TikTok there because it's harmful. No, they have complete control over TikTok.
Yes, and they control that.
In their country, they use camera sacks,
and you know this full well,
on every single corner with facial recognition,
and every one of their phones is tracked.
You know this full well, sacks.
They are spying on their populace.
Do they allow TikTok or not?
No, they have banned TikTok.
They have a different version called Dooyan.
They have a different version. Andyin. They have a different version.
And in that version, there are limits.
And they push math.
Douyin's algorithms are very different.
They push educational content.
So basically, on the bike dance board,
what happened with this whole thing is
the CEO and the founder had to step down effectively.
They brought in effectively new management.
And in that, the CCP is a board of board director and has what's called the golden vote. So
they effectively decide. And so what you saw were the algorithms morph over time from pure
entertainment to things that pushed a lot of educational content. They also then imposed broadly speaking, limits on content that they didn't like,
they would only allow in other apps, experiences where they
also have a board seat now and a golden vote. As Jason said,
games can only be played in certain apps for certain
amounts of time. So they've made their own decisions about what's
good for their own population. The flavor of the app that's here, my biggest point is that, again, you have to pick the lesser evil.
I think it's pretty reasonable to assume that all these apps are infiltrated.
But this one is more brazen because it is really the only one that's completely and obviously
foreign control. And I don't think that if you try to divest it,
you will get any assurance that that code is reliable.
And so you'd have to build the whole thing from scratch all over again.
For what it's worth, the company has said that they're willing to move
all of their hosting in the US to Oracle data centers in the US.
David, you and I know what that means.
Could you imagine a migration like that? Who is going to look at every single
endpoint, every single line of code? That is a joke that's
meant to allay people who are not technical.
Right? Yeah, I kind of agree with that.
All right. It seems like we're I don't know if we're 2v2 here.
But look, are you banned or not banned, Sachs? The language is
corrected? Are you banned or divest or what?
I'm ambivalent about it, because I'm open to the idea of banning
the foreign app in this way. But the reason why I'm a little bit
ambivalent about it is because a I think that what they're doing
has to be proven as opposed to just a bunch of hand waving over
it. And when you start talking about what's
happening to the Uyghurs at concentration camps
and spying that has nothing to do with this particular app,
and in fact, you've revealed this app doesn't even
function in China, I think there's just a lot of hand
waving going on, not a lot of hard proof.
And I don't think that one little story in the New York
Times I would consider hard proof.
I agree with Sax.
Yeah.
So that's number one, is I'm open to this idea,
but I want to see hard proof.
Number two is.
I don't think you're going to get it.
I think the NSA and the CIA will read in the Intelligence
Committee.
And there's a subcommittee that's probably been read in.
But I can guarantee you the American public will not
get written on what we're reading.
And Manchin said on CNBC Today, by the way,
that he has, based on his information,
he believes strongly that they should divest, whether it's to his group or another group.
But these guys have lied so many times about so many things.
I mean, I just think the public has a right to know.
Look, if 100 million Americans are going to be deprived of using an app they love, why
can't we get a little bit more information on exactly what that app has done wrong?
They're saying it.
They're saying it's in control. It's being controlled app has done wrong. They're saying it. They're saying it's in control.
It's it's being controlled by a foreign advocacy. They are saying it.
The bill says it.
What is debatable? They're telling you.
That means all that means is that the app is owned by ByteDance, which is.
Here's what's unique about this.
Which is incorporated in China.
Here's what here's what's unique about this bill.
It got out of committee 50 to 0. It was overwhelmingly
approved by both sides of the house and it looks like in the Senate, there may be some
refinements that happen, but it's going to get largely overwhelmingly approved there as well.
It's a very unique moment in time where you see in today's political landscape,
time, where you see in today's political landscape, such
uniformity, and again, I'm not going to go and defend these folks, but except to say that where there's smoke, there's
probably fire. And I think that in this specific narrow case,
again, we're not talking about food stuffs or lumber, right,
we're talking about a technological application that
is observing
a lot of people on a continuous 24 by 7 basis. I suspect this law would not have gotten out of
committee 50 to 0 had they not been read in by the NSA and the CIA. And that will never see
the light of day because we will never be disclosed that information. It could have been 49 to 1,
David. You know what I mean?
Let me ask you another question.
No, no, no, I wanna respond to that.
If it's ideological, I could see it being 40 to 10.
If it's ideological, I could be seeing it 35 to 15, 48 to two.
It was 50 to zero.
So was the Patriot Act.
Look, there's an old saying in Washington
that the worst ideas are bipartisan.
These guys were all being stampeded into this act. They brought it up and
passed it with hardly any debate. I've already shown you
how the language of the bill is overly broad. It's not just a
tick tock ban. It says that any app or website, did you know
that any app or website domestically, that's subject
subject to the direction of a foreigner.
No, no, these countries, North Korea, Russia, China, I said a
foreigner from one of those countries. Yeah, no, try to be
clear for the audience. All you got to do is make that argument.
If you're an AG who wants to go after one of our domestic
platforms, that's all you got to do to bring them under your
thumb.
What would be the proper route if a US platform was in fact
compromised by the Chinese, North Koreans or Iran?
What would be the proper path in your mind?
Wouldn't that concern you?
If an app is sharing US data in a way that it shouldn't,
then why wouldn't it just be prosecuted?
Yeah, which is what this is saying, right?
The AGs would go after this.
No, it's not.
It's not even, it's banning TikTok. OK, subject to maybe divestiture happens.
But there's a lot of people who think that the six months they're giving for this is it's not going to work.
And the Chinese government may not go for the idea of allowing TikTok to be bought by an American company
because they may not like the precedent that creates. So, again, I think you're answering your own question.
I think you're making a very important and good point, which is there's so much body of business law here, and there's so many state AGs
who would want to make their bones. And you see the state AGs trying to build their credibility
going after Facebook for sexual exploitation and all of this stuff. To your point, David,
there is such a body of lawsuits and law and precedent that TikTok
could have been prosecuted under. It's very odd and rare that there's been a complete detente
where this thing came on from up above and everybody just got on board. And all I'm saying is,
in these very rare and unique instances where somebody shelved their own personal political
aspirations, there's probably more that we don't know. My alarm bells go off. where somebody shelled their own personal political aspirations.
No, I think I think it's quite the opposite that we don't know.
My alarm bells go off when DC acts with this kind of unanimity, because the only time they ever do that, when they become a unit party is when the national security state wants some new power.
I agree with you. That's what I'm saying.
This is how we got into the Iraq war.
Yeah, it's good to be vigilant.
Basically almost unanimous. This is how we got into the Patriot Act.
I'm not saying it's right. I'm not saying it's right.
Every dumb idea that gives the federal government more power
ends up being almost unanimous. You're absolutely right. And I'm
agreeing with you. They were read in at a national security level that got them to become a uniparty
on this topic. We are never going to get, and I just you know, responding to freeburg, we're never going to get read in
we the people because of this like phony concern about you,
they always like classification when they don't want the public
to know something. Now, by the way, this important should be
secret. But by the way, it was the proof. Why can't they give
us a proof?
I don't think it needs to be proof. It's the potential damage
here that they're saying is the problem. Sachs, they could wake
up this algorithm at any point in time. And they could steer
people's thinking they have already steered it. Your party
has talked incessantly about how tick tock has steered cultural
issues in a certain direction, thus libs of tick tock, all
this kind of stuff. There is ample evidence that these social
networks and these videos do influence young
people. So if young people are addicted to this, which they clearly are, and if young
people are influenced by this, which they clearly are, those are just facts that are
indisputable, the Chinese could wake this up at any time and steer political issues
left right center cause chaos, it is the potential harm here, sacks, that is the concern. It's not just that
they're doing it now, it's that they could do it in the future.
And if you were to take this and you were to put, let's say this
was North Korea or Iran, would you would you allow North Korea,
or Iran to own this app in the United States? Of course, he
wouldn't. I think my point would be the same, which is I
want to see some proof. Hold on. Let me make a couple of points. Number one, I want to see some
proof that this is actually spyware. That to me has been alleged. And if it's as such a slam dunk
case, as you say, why is there no proof of this? So that's point number one. And by the way, if
the phone is just sitting there passively listening to you, and that's the spyware, Apple should really address that because the app shouldn't be able to do that.
So that's like Apple's problem with respect to the data supposedly being leaked to the
Communist Party. Again, I want to see what data are we talking about? Like what TikTok videos I like,
what's important about that data.
There are bundles of data that are available
on the open market that they can buy it about users.
I'm sure.
I don't think that's what it is.
These microphones are on 24 seven.
These apps are allowed to passively listen in the background.
Then why don't we just tell Apple not to allow that?
Think that that could be a partial solve too?
What about Android?
Your phone should not be passively listening to you should
have to like stick it in your face and talk to it if you want
to activate the microphone. The problem is when you download
these apps, you create these settings. And so you try to you
have to try to convince 100 million people that hey, you
shouldn't do that. Maybe you should only do it when you use
the app in a specific way, and it kills the usability. And so
people get lazy. And they're like, default on
look, what I'm saying here is that the way the microphone
should work on Apple products is that
I think it does work that way. Yeah, it shouldn't.
I think it does work that way. I don't know that. Okay,
listening in is like the key issue here. Well, I mean, who
knows what's possible in terms of hacking and spyware.
You know, those are all unknowns. So, okay. So, so one by one, we're kind of knocking, knocking out all these issues. It's not passively listening. The data that is collecting doesn't
seem important with respect to steering. I agree. I guess that's a theoretical problem,
but you could say that about any of these apps
and you're on a slippery slope to basically
a First Amendment problem because they're not letting users
get the content that they actually want.
All right, I guess we're really disagree on this one.
And then, look, and then one final point
about the reciprocity argument is
if you want to make this about reciprocity,
then put it in a trade bill.
That's where you deal with reciprocity is you say, okay, these products from China gets
to play in US markets, our products from the United States gets to play in Chinese markets.
You do it through a trade bill.
This is not a trade bill.
This gives a new power to the government to define foreign adversary controlled applications
and websites.
Faber, I just wanted to give you a chance to answer the two questions.
Are you in favor of divestiture?
If it was Iran who owned the app, would you feel differently?
I don't know about divestiture until to Sachs's point.
I just, I haven't heard a clear point of view or clear, like, piece of information
about what this app uniquely
does that other apps don't do that creates a threat. It's just not clear to me. So in
general, I'm not in fan of like forcing companies to divest and forcing things to be shut down
and taking away human consumer choice. I just don't think those are good things generally.
And I'm not to sexist point, I'm just not compelled that there's something here
based on what I've seen. And then like if Iran owned tick tock, I don't care
who owns it based on my prior statement, I think people should have choice to
use what they want to use, provided that there is no spine. If there's spying, I
want to know that there's spying and how it's happening. We need to technically
fix that if someone can passively turn on a microphone on an app and listen to people in a room. Yes, they can. We're
scientists. We've proven that it's possible. They can also we should fix that. That's
we can also know your location. That's a bigger problem. Then you need to shut down all the
iPhones we have with there's an Israeli software company. We all know what it's called. We all
can go and license the software from them. Okay, they they will help you do this. So yeah, I'm sorry, guys. But that's not an Apple
should patch up. Apple needs to patch it. That's exactly right.
That's how it doesn't solve the problem. I don't want a domestic
app to be able to do that to me. Yeah, exactly. It is happening.
And it hasn't been fixed. And it's not that it hasn't been
fixed. The point is, when you have a large technical surface
area, you guys know this, there are bugs all the time. Like we deal with, for example, threat vectors all the time into like, Microsoft
has dealt with these for 50 years, right? Every new update of Windows, every little
thing has all of these little back doors and little threads that weren't cleaned up properly.
So this is an ongoing whack-a-mole problem. And the reality is that a very small technical team has and
always been able to stay a few steps ahead of Apple and many of these apps.
And all I'm saying is you should just not be so naive as to assume that this
Apple is something that this is something Apple can fix. I think that a
small talented team of hackers, whoever they work for, will always be able to
find these back doors in every single new release of every single operating and they will be a few steps ahead. So if you have to- But then we're screwed anyway, because all the data is already out there.
So I think the point is, so knowing that,
if you want to maybe minimize the surface area
of how bad this data leaks to just the foreign actors
that have infiltrated our American companies,
you can ban TikTok.
Okay.
If you want to just open the door to it,
keep it around.
If you want to just open the door to it,
keep it around. So you can't just say, I'm going torated our American companies, you can ban TikTok.
OK.
If you want to just open the door to it, keep it around.
Look, like I said at the beginning,
I'm ambivalent about this because if you can prove to me
that there's really a national security threat
and that your remedy for dealing with it is narrowly tailored,
then I'm potentially on board with this.
But I don't believe the threat has been proven,
and I certainly don't think the remedy is narrowly tailored. In fact, it's expansive, and it's
going to lead to weaponization. And I don't trust the government to define new new categories of
foreign controlled applications and websites. I think you're probably right, which is the
unfortunate part. But I do think that there's enough of these folks that have been read into something that we're not being told.
And I have zero faith in that.
Yeah, I'm not I'm not going to say that it's accurate or not. But I'm saying, I suspect that somebody of work from a three letter agency has made its way to enough of these people under confidentiality, where they've all agreed.
The national security state has a secret reason for wanting to expand its powers.
That this doesn't fill me with any confidence.
Again, Patriot Act 2.0.
That's where I started with this.
I don't think this is the Patriot Act because the Patriot Act was like, I'm going to have
now a broad license to probe anything I want.
This is about saying this thing that is here can no longer be here. So that's different.
It's not focused on TikTok. It's focused on, again, first
paragraph, foreign adversary people's applications, which
includes websites.
The Patriot Act was about the government being able to go
proactively wherever they wanted when they weren't allowed. That
is not what this bill says. This bill is more reactive and saying,
okay, you out, out of the sandbox.
And all I'm saying is you're right that that could be abused,
but that's very different than the Patriot Act,
which was very aggressive.
All right, so there you have it, folks.
Two people, looks like, agree with the divestiture.
Two people have a difference of opinion.
Let's go on. No, I don't agree with the divestiture. Two people have a difference of opinion.
Let's go on.
No, I don't agree with the divestiture.
I think it should be shut down.
Okay, shut down.
Yeah.
So shut down divestiture.
Looks like two of us.
Lots of opinions.
That's good.
Lots of opinions.
That's good.
Okay.
I think we just had more debate over this than the entire U.S. Congress did.
Perhaps.
I mean, I think that's why people listen to this program is because we're literally getting
into the absolute finest details and asking really probing questions, Sax, that you love.
A hundred million people are soon going to be asking when TikTok gets shut down, a hundred
million people who used it every day are going to be like, why did this happen?
I'm going to say something about that.
One of my kids, and I'm not going to say who it is, we recently had them tested for ADHD.
They weren't doing particularly great in school.
The response by some of the folks in the school was,
oh, there's meds for that.
We're like, no meds.
And what we did was we took away their iPad
and we completely deprived them of all these apps and video games.
I cannot describe to you the
magnitude of the turnaround in this kid. Grades, incredible, where they were
getting 60% and 70% now getting 90%. Totally engaged, interesting,
charming kid that had lost a little bit,
and I think that there was a little bit of a daze.
And I just want to say that in general as a parent,
whether the app is banned or not, who cares?
My lived experience right now is that video games
and these apps are horrible for kids.
This is a known fact, actually, Jamath,
I looked into this as well.
It turns out students who used iPads in digital media
many times a day, they show the exact signs of ADHD,
inattention and hyperactivity and impulsivity.
So whether you think ADHD is a real diagnosis or not,
it's inducing those symptoms.
I'm willing to say that my child probably had
a very light form of it.
Maybe it was exacerbated by these video games and the iPad
and these apps and you know,
they were getting all the TikTok content,
but they were getting it on YouTube.
Alerts.
Alerts all of a sudden.
Anyways, went to zero.
Not like you can have a little bit here or there zero and the transformation in this
last month and a half two months has been incredible. I don't
know if other parents are dealing with this. But what I'll
tell you is the apps are not good. So this whole consumer
choice thing, I think my view is a little tainted because I get
agitated as a responsible parent, I'm like, just get this
app out of here. And I already know that I'm addicted to it.
And it's not good for me. I have no idea what it's doing to my my kids. And I just don't
want to deal with it. If you if you look at the correlation between all of these symptoms showing
up in kids, it's basically the introduction of the iPhone. And so people are kind of reaching
consensus that the iPhone and distraction ADHD, spiking depression, all this stuff anxiety and kids is
correlating with too much free time. You can do your own
research, folks.
Maybe it correlates with prescription of SSRIs. Maybe it
will know that is part of it.
Where with schools going totally woke and bananas, I call it a
lot of things.
The COVID definitely exacerbated COVID exacerbated it when you
look at the the trend lines for sure. And the SSRIs and those
kind of things being prescribed is probably as a result of these
ADHD symptoms coming from screen time. And then it's probably
unnecessary.
I think people just got a lot more prescription happy. Like they're just over prescription. Kids on drugs for I mean, you talk about ADHD for
young boys. That's kind of like this normal behavior. Yeah, no, absolutely. Like kids running
around outside and having energy. If I had to pick an age, I would say 16, 17, 18 years old for
social media. And for phones, I would say 15 or 16, you know, with a very
controlled phone. So as this is one person's opinion, right,
Florida is on the verge of banning lab grown meat.
Freiburg, can you tee this up for us?
Yeah, so Florida has been debating a bill in their state
legislature since November. And it just passed the House and the
Senate, a vote of 8627 in in the House, 28-20 in the Senate,
to prohibit the manufacturing, sale, holding,
or distribution of cultivated meat.
And it basically makes the sale or ownership
of cultivated meat a second degree misdemeanor.
This is lab-grown meat.
And this bill is now on DeSantis desk for signing.
You know, I'll kind of highlight a little bit of the motivation and, and, and some of the technical background and my point of view on it, if that's okay.
But do you, do you see him eating the meat while you're talking about it?
Did you see it?
I'm paying attention.
Unlike you guys.
He's got this like Flintstone size.
Ham hog.
We're all listen good.
It feels like a, like a non-issue to folks who eat meat and don't care.
But I just want to point out how much of this is generally a challenge to.
Enabling choice in new innovative technology, which, you know, we've
seen attempts at this in the past, but what is the reason to ban lab grown meat?
They love to ban shit in Florida.
The motivation is that Florida ranchers felt threatened.
The guy who just has been advocating for banning TikTok,
this whole show, is now accusing Florida of being into banning.
Are you fucking kidding me?
Your boy, Ron DeSantis, loves to ban shit.
I'm the only person on this pod, who actually Fieberg is too,
who are skeptical of, like, does knee jerk ban everything?
Ban everything.
I would not ban this.
I didn't say to ban everything.
Where is that coming from?
We're joking.
Don't label me with your J Cal brush.
I'm not saying ban everything.
It's definitely becoming a minority position to be against government intervention in free
decision making and commerce by individual
citizens. Florida ranchers felt that their livelihood was threatened. They have a billion
dollar ranching business a year in Florida. Good for them. They should go ahead and compete
with whatever new technology is emerging. I would say try a little role reversal. Imagine
if governments and states tried to ban the use of the tractor for fear of putting
agricultural workers out of business, or software companies that did accounting software got banned
because it could put accountants out of business, or electric car production and use got banned
because it could put traditional automotive manufacturers out of business. You could go down
the list and you could create this position on nearly any new or emerging technology that feels threatening to an incumbent industry.
And ultimately, it really only yields to regulatory capture and to a lack of choice and opportunity
for new innovation and for consumers to make decisions about what they want.
And the irony here is that so much of what's being consumed in the market space today,
part of their rationalization
is, oh, well, it's new technology. We don't know if it's good for you. We don't know if
it's going to work. The truth is there are federal regulatory bodies that have oversight
on this sort of thing. 20 years ago, almost all the cheese that we ate in the United States
was made from rennet. Rennet is an enzyme that converts the protein and milk into cheese.
We got rennet from the stomach of calves. We would scrape it out and sell rennet and it would be used to make cheese.
Then recombinant engineering where we could get bacteria or yeast cells to make proteins.
This technology unlocked the opportunity to make rennet more affordably.
So rather than go and slaughter calves and get the rennet out of their stomach, we engineer
the bacteria or the yeast cell to make the exact same protein.
And that is now the entirety of the rennet industry is recombinantly produced rennet.
And the entirety of cheese that we all consume is made using this genetically modified yeast
that makes this enzyme that converts milk into cheese.
The same is true across other industries.
We used to use animal fat for laundry detergent.
Turned out it was a lot cheaper to make enzymes using
the same process I just described instead
of making animal fat.
And now all of our laundry detergent
is recombinant enzymes.
So I think this notion that we're going to ban this stuff
is a regulatory capture, incumbency moment.
It's totally wrong.
It denies consumers choice.
And frankly, it flies in the face of what has historically
been a real economic opportunity to bring costs down,
to bring new innovation to market,
and to try and stall that innovation is gonna leave
this state or this country in a real kind of challenge
compared to other countries.
I just think it's wrong.
I think it's really-
On this topic, you are 100% right.
You're right.
This is a dumb thing to legislate,
and it is meaningless and unimpactful and people should just decide based on what tastes better.
That's different than a listening device or cheaper or whatever.
Freeburg, is the criticism of this that it's regulatory capture or it's part of like this anti-woke kind of vibes in Florida?
There's a conservative movement in Florida which has taken hold, which I think this is key to.
Now in some ways I would argue that conservative movement has really important sociological points of view.
In other cases, I think it denies necessary innovation, it denies necessary advancement
to move industry forward versus social change.
And I think the ability to obfuscate the two, that, oh, transgenderism in schools and elementary
schools is the same as the woke leftists from California making lab-grown meat, and they
all get kind of jammed together as one big tribal group, and therefore we should ban
it all.
What will likely end up happening here is this will find its path to federal preemption. Historically when we've
seen states try to impose these sorts of bans, the companies that are ultimately affected,
the innovators that are affected, go to the federal government and they try and legislate
for a bill that says this stuff is legal and should be broadly available. That federal
preemption then stops states' rights on having a ban in place. And so it's very likely that we'll end up seeing
some legislation here over the next couple of years if this technology is ultimately
beneficial. The problem is now that Florida has done this, I guarantee you're going to see Texas,
which is a huge ranching state, and many other states step up to do it. It creates a really
bad precedent for all other disruptive kind of industries to be blocked by their local
economies that believe that they're under threat. And it just creates a lot of unnecessary chaos.
So...
Sacks, what is DeSantis's beef with fake meat?
I don't know.
I don't know what he's going to do in this case.
But let me state clearly what I think, which is I think it's really terrible when a bunch
of incumbents in an industry get together
and try to shut out the innovative solution
by inventing some unproven threat
that they turn into some sort of bogeyman.
But enough about TikTok.
Right, but exactly.
But enough about TikTok.
I can see that one coming around the corner
from a mile away.
That's why I wanted to talk about this
because I think the two are so similar.
And I- They're not similar at all.
Well, go ahead, Zach.
Regulatory capture is regulatory capture,
but this is a foreign adversary.
That's just a term of art.
We're just, you can't just-
Fair enough, fair enough.
Yeah, yeah, we disagree on, yeah, that's fair enough.
I think you guys have to have the intellectual honesty
to say these are different issues.
One is lab-grown meat versus ranchers in America.
This is typical corruption and cronyism.
Fine, whatever. Okay.
Oh yeah, but you don't think that the other tech companies that compete with TikTok
are secretly banning together to basically gin up this bill?
I don't think they're secretly banning. I think that they're overtly organizing.
Just like the ranchers.
But again, that typically still always gets cut on partisan lines.
And what I'm saying is this is totally different than lab grown mead versus ranchers.
I just want to say one thing.
The intellectual differences and I can acknowledge the similarities.
I think I just want to make a point here.
I think the intellectual discourse on this program is second to none.
I mean, we are getting into the most refined details of this issue. And you just don't hear
this anywhere else. So I just want to give myself and the
rest of the crew a pat on the back. You just want to
masturbate. I just want to know I mean, it really did get in a
pretty in the weeds here.
J. Cal, do you agree that the Florida bill is ridiculous? And
that it sets a terrible precedent?
I didn't read it. But I would think that's exactly what we said. There's nothing special
about it. I can't imagine why somebody would want to ban mock
meat other than crony capitalism, of course. And my
question to you is, when is this going to taste good? When are
you gonna make this mock meat?
Well, by the way, this makes no sense. Because the only reason
they would do it is if they were afraid that the lab grown meat
was just so much cheaper and frankly,
so much tastier than what they make.
And Freeberg, you've said this many times,
like we are so like orders of magnitude away from it being.
Yeah, we're 10 years out.
But by the way, why try and stop it from competing?
Let the VCs that wanna throw money at it,
throw money at it, let the scientists pursue it.
Let the thing that's made America so successful be successful.
By the way, imagine Elon got the Starship up today.
You guys saw this thing, it went into orbit.
It was incredible.
Imagine if Boeing and a bunch of defense contractors
got together 10 years ago and said,
we got to stop SpaceX.
These guys are trying to do stuff in an unsafe way.
We don't know. And they tried and they tried we got to stop SpaceX. These guys are trying to do stuff in an unsafe way. We don't know.
And they tried and they tried and they will keep trying.
And the freedom that we afford people and businesses
in the United States of America is what allows us
to have our unique edge and our unique ability
to create progress that you don't see anywhere else
on planet earth.
And this is the sort of that takes us backwards.
You just had the key word, we, us, America.
America.
Back to the TikTok thing.
That's not an us thing.
That's a Chinese thing.
I get the point.
I'm not like, I'm not pro CCP, but yeah, I get the point.
Anything American, God bless us.
Let's go, American exceptionalism.
No, I saw the headlines.
I think CNBC reported that the rocket blew up on reentry.
No, I mean, they-
By the way, they didn't say that that did they? I saw one headline where
they had to put a little nag in the end of the sentence. They were starling starling video for
like an hour. It's not video was so crystal clear. It was like HD of this rocket coming back down to
Earth. It was bonkers. So congrats to E. Can I show you guys the most incredible tweet related to this?
I'm just going to send this to you, Nick.
Friendly reminder that Google's annual catering budget is 72
million, about twice the cost of our ship.
Today, today, Elon made the entire human race
multi planetary. Yeah.
And it costs half as much
as what Google spends on food.
That's incredible. It does seem like a lot of money to spend on
food. I don't know. It does seem like these rockets take two or
three, the new each time there's a new platform, it seems to take
you on exactly like two or three to nail it. And here we are
again, you know, you know, congrats to our boy.
Great job. This is going back full circle, the persistence and the resilience that was needed to get this thing to happen. It's just like 20 years of step by step iterative, nothing about the
initial kind of instantiation or concept of, you know, what SpaceX needed to walk to get here was
right. Everything had to change along the way.
Starlink came along, et cetera, et cetera.
And here he is at the end of this period of time
with this incredible craft,
the largest object to ever fly in outer space.
It really is like an incredible moment in human history.
And it took the degree of persistence, resilience,
that was, I think, marks what makes
American entrepreneurship so powerful.
It really is an incredible day.
It was an amazing thing to watch.
I don't know if any of you guys have ever gone to watch and watch any of the old Saturn launches on YouTube,
but I think this is a new era.
It's really incredible.
I think this was like five or six years ago.
I got cleared to basically fly and hug Vredenberg when they were doing a launch. And so I
was able to see it as the thing like kind of like, try to
approach Max Q. It's one of the most incredible things I've ever
done. So I think we made some progress. If you look at the
Google News links, a lot of praise for this launch soon.
Yeah, looks like people are kind of getting it.
Yeah, just incredible. I mean, this thing is so huge. I don't know if you've ever been inside of one of these things. But the
the starship Yeah, I've been inside I was inside the first
one they built it. It is so large. The capacity of this
thing is like, I think you could fit like three, four or 500
human beings inside of it.
Maybe when we do our our Austin poker night, we
can stop over and see it. Be really walkers. And when you see
it stacked, the height is like, it almost feels like you're
looking at CGI and real in the real world. It is incredibly
tall, like incredibly tall. All right, listen, this is your
favorite podcast in the world episode 170 of the all in podcast. We never
asked for this. But if you have a chance, we do the show on
video. So if you're listening to audio, just type in all in
podcast in YouTube. And you can see the four of us I don't know
if that's a bonus feature or not. But we do all the graphs and
the charts and everything here. All right, for David sacks, the
rain man. David Freib, you're a Sultan of
Science. Jamal Polly, Hi, Patia, Chairman Dictator. I am the
world's greatest moderator as David sacks with
tasks with incredibly sharp
ways go Christopher Walken whenever you do these. Why do
you do that?
go Christopher Walken whenever you do these articles. Why do you do that?
Thanks for listening to the all in podcast. Wow. David Sachs poignant
points about regulatory capture. Freedberg loves mock meets. Not for me. Everyone loves a great detail.
Everyone loves a great detail. See you next time.
Oh, podcast. Wow.
Love you boys. So you're better.
Impression is good.
Everyone's got their superpower.
That's your very nasty nasty J.
Cal. But I'm coming on.
I'm coming on.
Saxon by saxophone invited me. Very nasty, nasty J Cal. But I'm going to come on. Don't ruin it. I'm coming on.
I'm coming on Arlen.
All right, Saxon, Saxapool invited me.
I say you're walking is better than your Trump.
I got to work on.
I turned the Trump off for three years.
Give me a break.
I'm going to do a Joe Pesci.
Can you do a Joe Pesci?
Do I have a Joe Pesci?
I feel like you do a good Joe Pesci.
I do.
I'll bring you a Joe Pesci next.
I take requests. I'll do a Joe Pesci next. Sure, why I'll bring you a Joe Pesci next. I take requests.
I'll do a Joe Pesci.
Sure.
Why not?
He only does the Pesci involuntarily when he gets upset.
Get in the chopper, everybody.
You got a short tonight?
I'm running for, I'm running for president.
You got to change the laws.
You have to change it so a German can be president.
Austrian.
Austrian.
Austrian.
Yeah. All right. We'll see you next time. Oh yeah. John and can be president Austrian Austrian yeah all right what's next oh
yeah rate and subscribe and all that other bullshit you want bye bye And it said we open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it Love you Westy
The queen of Kenwa
I'm going all in What, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, Oh man! My avid Asher will meet me at the end of the day We should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy cause they're all just useless
It's like this sexual tension that they just need to release somehow
What? Your? The? Be? What? Your? Be?
What?
We need to get merch
The keys are back
I'm doing all in
I'm going all in I'm going all in