All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg - Presidential Debate Reaction, Biden Hot Swap?, Tech unemployment, OpenAI considers for-profit & more
Episode Date: June 29, 2024(0:00) Bestie intros! (1:54) Debate recap and analysis: Hot swap incoming? (16:53) Subverting democracy, power grab, Democratic party shakeup (36:43) Why tech job postings are down significantly from ...pre-COVID levels (42:43) OpenAI considering for-profit conversion (54:11) The problem with safety-focused AI startups (1:03:20) EU charges Microsoft with antitrust violations for bundling Teams into Office Follow the besties: https://twitter.com/chamath https://twitter.com/Jason https://twitter.com/DavidSacks https://twitter.com/friedberg Follow on X: https://twitter.com/theallinpod Follow on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theallinpod Follow on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@all_in_tok Follow on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/allinpod Intro Music Credit: https://rb.gy/tppkzl https://twitter.com/yung_spielburg Intro Video Credit: https://twitter.com/TheZachEffect Referenced in the show: https://www.predictit.org/markets/detail/7057/Who-will-win-the-2024-Democratic-presidential-nomination https://polymarket.com/event/will-biden-drop-out-of-presidential-race?tid=1719589320811 https://youtu.be/R6hJh-OwoZw https://x.com/KellyO/status/1806505436457189594 https://x.com/WesternLensman/status/1806660589315658003 https://x.com/stoolpresidente/status/1806496453545586779 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPSOFTDEVE https://www.theinformation.com/articles/openai-ceo-says-company-could-become-benefit-corporation-akin-to-rivals-anthropic-xai https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-06-19/openai-co-founder-plans-new-ai-focused-research-lab https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMnkqY98Cyo https://x.com/benioff/status/1805664701298491623 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwQMMzoeH9s https://x.com/JoeBiden/status/1806739920255320347
Transcript
Discussion (0)
Alright, everybody, welcome back to the number one podcast in
the world. It's episode 185. And you're going to be delighted by
today's docket. If you're into politics, we move the taping
back a day gentlemen, because we knew there would be presidential
debate. So with me to discuss all things presidential debate
and the news finance markets, maybe even a little science from
our science boy David Freberg is the rain man. David Sacks. Yeah.
Probably have a tea is frozen or he's staring everybody down. How are you, sir?
We're about to enter the end game, Jason. Oh, the end game is here. Okay.
We're in the end game now.
And from a, we work in the home office in Pasadena is our friend,
the Sultan of science. He's back to work
He's in his cube. Did you get the TPS reports done? How you doing there?
We've heard the humble headquarters of Ohala genetics beautiful lab downstairs. I'll take you on a tour one day
Can't wait to hear my friends gloat and bloat themselves on the show today after the debate last night
It's gonna be insufferable.
I'm looking forward to it.
Okay, so you're building the next $10 billion company
and we don't get to invest, but we do get a tour.
Thank you, that's good to know.
Not that we're bitter.
We promote this shit every week.
If you guys wanna put money in,
I will open up the round again for you
and you guys can come in.
You said this three times.
When do we wet our beaks?
J. Cal's right about this actually. That's how you and you guys. You said this three times. When do we wet our beats? J. Cal's right about this actually.
That's how you know the winner.
The one he doesn't let us invest in is the winner.
It's the easiest way to sport.
Follow your nose.
He's like, Hey, can I, can I introduce you to a soda pop machine? Let your winners ride. Rain man David.
We open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy.
All right, everybody, let's get to the show here. Enough of the craziness last night was the first presidential debate. And
there's no easy way to put this it was an unmitigated disaster for the Democrats and President Biden.
Gosh, he looked confused. Lots of slips, lots of gaps if you are
under a rock, living in a cave without Starlink and you missed
it. Here's a couple clips. Everybody's talking about this
one where Biden lost his train of thought for I don't know,
close to 10 seconds.
Play the clip.
Making sure that we're able to make every single solitary person eligible for what I've
been able to do with the COVID, excuse me, with dealing with everything we have to do
with, look, if we finally beat Medicare.
Thank you, President Biden, President Trump.
Gosh, that was brutal. And the reaction from CNN, even MSNBC's
Joy Reid, as far left as you can go, was brutal and candid. And
here it is, the knives are out from the Democrats
for President Biden.
Right now, as we speak, there is a deep, a wide,
and a very aggressive panic in the Democratic Party.
It started minutes into the debate
and it continues right now.
It involves party strategists,
it involves elected officials, it involves fundraisers.
And they're having conversations
about the president's performance, which they think was dismal,
which they think will hurt other people
down the party in the ticket.
And they're having conversations
about what they should do about it.
Some of those conversations include,
should we go to the White House
and ask the president to step aside?
Other of the conversations are about,
should prominent Democrats go public with that call?
Because they feel this debate was so terrible.
That was painful.
I love Joe Biden. I work for Joe Biden. He did not do well at all.
And I think there's a lot of people who are going to want to see him consider taking a
different course now. There is time for this party to figure out a different way forward if
he will allow us to do that. I too was on the phone throughout much of the debate. My phone
really never stopped buzzing throughout and the universal reaction was
somewhere approaching panic. The people who were texting with me were very concerned about
President Biden seeming extremely feeble, seeming extremely weak.
This has been quite frankly a car accident in slow motion that we've seen over and in
building and questioning it.
And as has been pointed out, Joe Biden sought this debate at this remarkably early time
because he knew he was losing and he needed to change the narrative.
And he did change the narrative. He sunk his campaign to that.
All right, gentlemen, there is absolutely no way any of us could have predicted this.
Oh, wait, Nick, read the room. Democrats. You have put up a candidate that nobody wants. His policies on the border
and some other issues are not in sync with the majority of the country. At some point, the Democrats just have to
take a deep look in the mirror and say, we feel that a bad candidate who's too old and people don't believe will
stand up to scrutiny of like, say, being on the all in pot for two hours or in
the debates or with a hostile interviewer any of those possibilities and so I think if that's the
case we really need to have the Democrats think deeply about maybe fielding a different candidate
I believe that's what's going to happen in the next 30 to 60 days so I'm predicting there's gonna
be a switcheroo hundred percent I mean if you think there's gonna be a switcheroo? 100%. I mean, if you just look at the polls,
100% there'll be a switcheroo.
Who's the switcheroo?
I have no idea.
Could be Gavin, it could be anybody.
Anything's possible.
I think Trump's gonna demolish him in the debate.
I think he'll sink to 30% in the polls.
And then the Democrats will find a way
to give him a graceful out,
and then they'll field somebody else.
I think the Democrats, as cynical as this sounds,
we're waiting to see what happens
with this Trump trials conviction,
what you call lawfare,
what other people call fair use of the law.
And then they are gonna see how he does in the debates.
That's why they moved the debate up in June.
And I think they know to pull the plug on this
if it gets too far gone.
And they have the ability to do that
because all he's gotta say is, you know what?
I'm feeling old and I want us to win
and I'm gonna slot somebody else in.
All right, and to wrap this up,
prediction markets showing Biden has plummeted to,
let's check the number, oh yeah, 33% in the sharps,
as you've referred to them on the program,
are basically saying Biden's
going to drop out now.
44% chance over on the polymarket will Biden drop out of the presidential race and then
predicted another one of these prediction markets where you can actually bet real dollars.
It's not a plug for them or commercial.
Just those happen to be two of the bigger ones.
Newsom sits at 14% now.
Biden, 33%.
Trump at 58%. At the start of the evening before
the debate, Biden was at 47%. Post debate, Chema, we see
Biden 47% to 33%. There's nothing like this has happened
in modern politics. Your thoughts, Chamath Pali
Hapertia, and then Sax will give you the red meat. Let me just start by saying that President Biden
is a person that's given up his whole life to work on behalf of America in the best way that he
thought was possible. He's overcome a lot of tragedies. I think he's worked very hard. He's
diligently tried to do
what he thought was right on behalf of the people of Delaware and then the United States.
My honest takeaway is that that person though is no longer really in charge. And I think that that
was very troubling for me. And it actually makes the last sort of six months make a lot more sense.
So I thought the fact that we could not get a response from the White House to be – I took
it a little bit actually personally. I was wondering why for someone that had been such
an ardent supporter, I couldn't even get an email back when I was consistently asking them to be on the pod. And now I see that it
wasn't just one single act, it was part of a holistic strategy. It was the same strategy that
boxed RFK out of the Democratic primary. Because could you imagine if this event had happened when
he had to debate RFK in the Democratic primaries, it would have been exposed then. It's probably partly to explain how the law has been used in New York State, whether you
want to call it lawful or not, but it was a very directed partisan action.
And so all of these things are now three data points that are really important.
You will not come on an open format show like ours to just speak openly.
None of us were going to attack him or try to corner him or box him in.
You prevented other people from entering the room. format show like ours to just speak openly. None of us were going to attack him or try to corner
him or box him in. You prevented other people from actually challenging you and directly asking
questions of you in the Democratic primaries. And then you try to put political pressure on
your opponents. All of that is systematically about a group of people that are unelected,
who are trying to control democracy.
And I think that that's the most troubling takeaway from this.
I don't think that you should take away from last night
that Joe Biden had a bad debate.
I think what we should take away is that there is a person
who should be allowed to transition into the sunset
and be celebrated for what he's done.
And instead, there are people that frankly at the margins are
acting pretty unethically and at the limit is actually acting somewhat diabolically to prop
this person up so that they can keep power. For example, you've been in situations where you
would expect the team that runs a company to be able to stand up and say
the CEO is not in a position to run this company anymore. That's what you would expect if there's
good governance and honesty. You know, what was Ron Klain doing as an example when he was doing
debate prep? Did he legitimately believe that Joe Biden was prepared for this or mentally capable
of actually doing this? And the fact that they are allowing his legacy
to be destroyed after 50 years, I think is really tragic.
Yeah, well said by the way.
Jamoth, sacks your thoughts on what we witnessed last night
and the reaction to it.
Well, let me speak as a objective
and independent political observer.
Just as independent as
you, J. Cal.
Yes, let's do that.
Let's be independent today, Joe.
Yeah.
Look, anyone can have a bad night.
Absolutely.
Got the sniffles.
I think his campaign put out the word that he had a cold, and maybe he just had a bad
night.
I mean, after all, it was media people like Joe Scarsborough just saying a week ago that not only was
Biden cognitively fine, but in fact, he was the best Joe Biden he had ever seen.
Just a week ago, or two weeks ago, Reid Hoffman was saying that he had a two-hour lunch with Joe Biden
and Biden was regaling him with details of AI and Gaza, and he was good.
And so what we've heard from all of these highly reputable people is that Biden may not present
that well in public, but in private, he's just fine.
You're saying they're lying,
and they lied to the American people.
Well, I'm actually taking them at their word
because they seem like very trustworthy sources to me.
I see no reason to swap out this candidate. I think that anyone could have a bad night. And there's no reason whatsoever for the
media to be panicking like this. Satire socks. Satire socks. Satire socks is into the chat.
Satire socks is into the chat. Well, I mean, look, I just, I think that there's no reason for this kind of panic.
Still going.
I believe in democracy
and the Democratic primary voters have spoken.
This is the candidate who they voted for.
Okay.
And there is-
Stand by your man, you hear a message.
Stand by your man.
Stand by your man, stop being a wimp
just because your candidate had one bad night,
you don't stab him in the back like this.
Absolutely not.
Free the president.
And even I think Van Jones said that Republicans wouldn't do this if Trump had a bad night.
You know, he's like, why are we all stabbing Biden in the back?
So look, this is a candidate who you've been supporting for years.
This is a candidate who you rigged the primaries for.
You boxed out Bobby Kennedy, who I thought was a fantastic candidate. You basically boxed
out Dean Phillips. This is the candidate who you wanted. And who just days ago, you were
saying was completely mentally fit. In fact, the best he'd ever been.
Okay. So you made your bed.
So now-
You made your bed.
I'm sleeping.
Stop betraying your candidate like this. It's unseemly.
Okay. Satire sex. Stop betraying your candidate like this. It's it's unseemly.
Satire sex. Have some loyalty for God's sake. Okay.
Friedberg, you've heard from compassionate Chamath.
You got to hear from satire sex.
Now let's go to Friedberg. What do you got?
This morning you get to hear from Frank Friedberg.
Frank Friedberg. Talk to it, buddy.
Go for it.
The big loser of last night's debate was the American public.
The big winner of last night's debate
was probably Russia, China, Iran, maybe the Saudis,
licking their chops, watching the utter dysfunction
in the leadership of the party, in the leadership of the country
as it stands today.
A notable mention I will say was the debate format. I absolutely love the fact that there were no interruptions,
that the mics went mute, that there was no audience and the moderators didn't
kind of challenge back and forth and try and make themselves the show.
That was very unique in a presidential debate. So I actually liked the debate
format. They stopped interrupting me.
Thanks for the interrupting.
They stopped interrupting me.
Thanks for the interrupted.
I think that as Sachs points out, the biggest issue is that this was front and center Biden's decline in capacity and aptitude for quite some time.
I didn't tell you guys this before, but last October, a senior member of the Democratic Party reached out to me
for a quote meeting. I took the meeting in October. And of course, it turns out they were asking me
for money. Little did they know I don't give any money to politics ever. I never have never will.
So they're, they're handlers are morons for bringing this person in to come and talk to me.
In the meeting, I said, you cannot put Joe Biden forward as your candidate. What the hell are you guys thinking? He's like, no, he is completely
stable. He is as sharp as he's ever been. I sent him an email, and I'm going to read
you what I said to him. This was in the first second week of October. I said, Joe Biden
does not appear equipped to be president of the United States. I think the continued heralding
of democratic party leadership of the president's performance and ability to
continue to serve into the next term is mind boggling. His inability to conduct even a basic
interview or give a clear and concise statement in a candid setting highlights a clear and obvious
decline in function since he took office. It is important for Democratic leadership to find an
alternative candidate and message this soon. Doing so, I believe, will buoy fundraising efforts across yada, yada, yada.
I said I would feel uncomfortable with the democratic majority Senate had in house giving
a leader with declining aptitude nearly limitless effect.
So I sent this as my response to his follow-up request for money.
This was the second week of October.
And I wanted to pull up the date on this because it was so apparent back then what was going on.
So what's so striking is how long mainstream media and leadership in the Democratic Party
have tried to tell an alternative story that was so obviously revealed to be not true last night.
And that is the thing that I think makes me say America is losing, because there are a few people that are in charge of controlling
the narrative.
There are a few people in charge who decide
who gets to be the candidate.
And those few people are keeping democracy
from working effectively, because the raw data,
the direct data, the imagery, the video, the media content
that has come out of Biden over quite some period of time
made it so obvious that he was not in full capacity.
And so that was my biggest kind of takeaway is that there's something wrong with the way
things are running in this country.
You're saying the media and the Democratic Party leadership are lying to America.
Yeah.
Of course they are.
The fact that we all had this information, we've seen the videos, we've seen the interviews,
and every time a video or an interview comes out, it has been excused away as, oh, well,
he tripped or, oh, it wasn't well edited.
And every time there's a story, and then when it's fully exposed, it becomes like, well,
my God, the fact that they all flipped so quickly is what's so shocking because this
was there.
And if you're on Twitter, you can see these clips being talked about by millions
of people, but then media and democratic leadership won't acknowledge them.
The subversion of democracy is really the real threat to democracy.
To your point, you have the right to elect a person up or down.
None of us are choosing to elect a shadow cabinet of handlers to run America. That's not what any of us are signing up for.
And I think that's what we have the risk of having for another four years, if this lie isn't exposed.
What I find unbelievably shocking is all of these data points now just make so much sense,
because the through line is, as you said, a coordinated effort to kind of obfuscate his decline. Like if you thought about
this in a different way, if you took a 29 year old and a 32 year old, would you say that they're the
same? Absolutely, right? If you took a 39 and a 42 year old, they're the same. A 49 and a 52 year old,
they're the same. But the reality is a 79 and an 82 year old or a 78 and an 82 year old
are meaningfully different. And the reason is that because there is significant decline every year,
every month, every day, and you're seeing the impact of every week, day, and month, and year
as a president of the United States wear on an 82 year old body. And I'm not sure any of us would do much better.
But the reality is that when you're at that age, there's a level of transparency that's
required and we have the opposite.
So take Warren Buffett as the counterfactual to this.
Warren Buffett is in his early 90s.
But what does he do every year?
He marches tens of thousands of people into Omaha.
He sits them down.
He sits at the front of a dais
with Coca-Cola and Peanut Brittle
and speaks for six to eight hours.
And as sharp as a tack.
Well, the point is, if you decide after those six to eight
hours of fully transparent, unedited interaction
with Warren Buffett that you don't think
he's capable of leading Berkshire, you can sell the
stock, what they don't do is hide him behind the shadows,
propping them out and package interviews and all of this other
stuff. That is un-American and undemocratic. And you see why
because the importance as Friedberg said is so high, you
probably do have a lot of people outside the United States really questioning what is going on in the greatest
country in the world right now, that this can even happen. And the people that you thought
were so anti-Trump, right, that they would do anything to make sure that Donald Trump
was unelected? Well, they're actually not that anti Trump, they're
just pro power. Because the thing that they care more about
than their hatred of Donald Trump is their desire to stay
in power.
Yeah, I think these are all very well said, Frank Freeberg,
nicely done. I mean, how is anyone at this point in time
surprised? Like, we have been talking about his cognitive
ability for a couple of years here on this podcast,
everybody's been talking about it on Twitter, they've been talking about on social media, everybody's been talking about his cognitive ability for a couple of years here on this podcast, everybody's
been talking about it on Twitter, they've been talking about on social media, everybody's been
talking about it at every Christmas, every Thanksgiving for a couple of years right now.
And, you know, this long form discussion podcast test is the ultimate test. And I think people need
to take that to heart. If you look at the long form podcast, as I'm just saying this to toot
our own horn here, it could be Joe Rogan, it could be
Tim Ferriss, it could be whoever you want Lex Friedman, when you
saw RFK, the vac Trump, Chris Christie, Dean Phillips come on
this podcast talk for in some cases, two plus hours, it was
clear they were there. And this is completely selfish on the
part of Biden's family, the people around him to, you know,
stay in power. And the hot swaps coming, I just I'm telling you right now, he is not going to be
in this race in the next 30 days. The hot swap is going to create a free for all Jason, which is
better, better than running somebody who has a 30% chance of winning. And I'm going to take this
a step further. This is 25th Amendment territory,
this person is not fit to serve as president for the remaining of his term. What we saw last night
was incredibly troubling. He was not there. And I've been saying this till I'm blue in the face
for months. This is absolutely disgusting that they did this. This is elder abuse. I don't say that as a joke. I say
this sincerely. I remember when my dad had to take the keys away
from my grandfather, God rest his soul. My grandfather
wanted to drive that car, you know, the streets of Brooklyn,
his his station wagon. My dad at some point said this guy keeps
clipping other people's mirrors, we got to take the car away. So
you know what my dad did? He went to my grandfather, God rest his soul. And he said, Listen, the car was stolen. And I'm
sitting there as a seven year old next to my dad. And I'm like, wasn't stolen. And my dad said,
you know what the car was stolen, pop, we can't afford a new car. I'll lend you my car once in a
while. My dad then sold the car for 800 bucks and got out of there. That's what we need to do. You
got to take the keys away from Biden. He's not fit to finish the rest of his term. Period,
full stop. I'm glad everybody else now sees what you know,
half of us saw for the last year.
Saks has a rebuttal.
Well, look, who are you gonna believe the J Cal's uninformed
non expert opinion or the expert medical opinion of Dr. Joe Go ahead, Satana Sachs. Well, look, who are you gonna believe? The J-Cal's uninformed, non-expert opinion
or the expert medical opinion of Dr. Jill Biden
with her doctor in education?
Well, I mean, the bias is strong.
When you see that clip,
I mean, play the clip of Biden post.
These guys are so deranged.
These lunatics are so deranged.
They thought they won last night.
Here's a clip of Joe Biden.
Telling you, telling Biden, he did good.
Joe, you did such a great job.
You answered every question.
You knew all the facts.
Let me ask the crowd.
What did Trump do?
You're not running. Joe Biden's not running.
You are not running.
This is a farce.
And now the veil has been lifted.
He looks so happy in that moment, getting that approval.
I mean, give the man some milk and cookies.
I mean, he was delighted.
Literally let the man retire.
To your point, Chamath, compassionate Chamath said it great. Like the guy had his lifetime of service, let the man retire to your point, Chamath, compassionate Chamath said a great,
like the guy had a lifetime of service,
let the guy retire, let him spend time with his grandkids,
great grandkids, whatever he's blessed with.
And let's do the hot swap now.
It's incredible that not a single staff member has resigned.
Isn't that incredible?
Like where they see this Jason,
and they have the moral clarity to say,
hold on a second, this is really wrong. Not a single one. incredible. Like, where they see this, Jason, and they have the moral clarity to say, hold
on a second, this is really wrong. Not a single one. That is really scary.
It's a really good point. And actually, I thought one of Trump's best moments in the
debate, a line that I hadn't heard him say before, is that, Joe, you never fired anyone.
You know, and he was specifically talking about the Afghanistan withdrawal, but just more generally,
when have you ever fired anyone for getting anything wrong?
Whereas I, Trump, fired Comey, I fired other people, and I paid a political price for that,
but at least I was willing to fire people who do a bad job.
You're not.
Well, now we know the reason for that is because there is no Biden.
Biden is just the staff.
So why would the staff ever fire themselves?
And this is why it's actually
important to have a leader at the top, to have a commander in chief as opposed to just a shadow
government consisting of party aporachics. And that's what we have is when the problem is when
the staff gets something wrong, there's no one there to fire them.
How like how does somebody who's worked for Biden for 40 or 50 years, who sat in Camp David helping
to do debate prep, at no point have the compassion to say, sir, this is not work?
Because that would be firing themselves, Jamoth.
No, no, no.
The only reason they have a job.
It's a rhetorical question.
Yeah, exactly.
You want the power.
Actually, there is a more sinister reason.
And I think, Sachs, you're pointing it out there, which is they consider Trump such an
existential threat and they want to maintain power that they're willing to do anything to keep power, you know.
And, you know, listen, I don't want to get into Trump here, but he's got his own ways to stay in
power himself. This was an embarrassment for America, this debate, this the fact that these
are the two candidates is a complete embarrassment. Well, I think the real embarrassment for the media
was the fact that they were exposed.
The fact of the matter is for months, if not years, they've been saying that this candidate
is fine.
He is cognitively fit.
In fact, he's the best he's ever been.
I've had two-hour lunches with him.
He's wonderful.
That's what they've been telling us.
And the reason why their panic was so visceral last night in all these post-game wrap-up
shows is they saw their credibility going down the drain
They saw that they had been exposed. It wasn't just the fact that biden was exposed
They were exposed for putting out this north korea level propaganda for months and years
And everybody should understand these people were part of the cover-up
It wasn't just the biden team who wants to hold on to their jobs. It was the media, it was this entire Democratic Party apparatus.
They're all in on this giant con.
I wouldn't have a problem with this, Sax, if it was like Reagan where they were like,
oh, God, he's got 18 months left.
We're going to ride this thing out.
And yeah, maybe we let him have a quiet thing.
But to actually put them up for another four years is the issue here. If they just
said, Listen, we can 25th Amendment this guy or let him
finish the last six months. That's one thing. But to say we
want four more years of this. I mean, how much worse is it
going to get? Hey, what's going to happen right now? I guarantee
you is he's out, we're gonna have President Kamala, she's
going to get her flowers for four months as she gets to be
the first female President United States, then she steps out of the way she decides she's not going to get her flowers for four months as she gets to be the first female president of the United States.
Then she steps out of the way.
She decides she's not going to run because she's got things to do with her family.
And there will be two new people who will be moderates.
And then the real election starts in about 15 days.
I don't think you need to go into all of those mechanics to get the outcome of a new candidate.
All Joe Biden has to do is go into the Democratic convention and release the delegates.
Yes, of course.
Yes, technically.
But the problem with releasing the delegates is I do think it creates a free for all unless
the party then exposes this next facet of their plan, which is that they are so in control
that they only allow one candidate to go up there.
Oh, they've already got that.
Yeah, that's done.
And then I think what happens is depending on who
that person is, they'll either...
I think the Democratic Party is probably at risk
of a pretty meaningful reset.
And I think that these tactics, I think,
are very much seen and understood by the American people.
I think that people do not like this idea
that you vote for person A, but
instead you get persons B through Z.
I don't think that's what anybody thinks the election for the president
of the United States should be.
It should be two people independently.
And then when you see one person that's not really in a position to run
faithfully, I actually think that, you know, Donald Trump last night showed
tremendous restraint and compassion.
I think that is the right way to deal with this situation.
I think it's just acknowledging that President Biden is not altogether there.
So without making claims of a cold or anything else, this is the security and the well-being
and the economic prosperity of the most important country in the world.
Why are we messing around?
Let's just put it plainly.
The Democratic Party is a collection of interests who want to remain in power.
The Democratic Party is the party of government.
Its goal is to allocate money and power from the government to the collection of interests
who back the Democratic Party.
In other words, it's basically a collection of interests who want to loot the republic.
Well, obviously, no one's going to vote for that, so they have to make it about something else. They choose a figurehead. They talk about how this is
about saving democracy. They basically invent hoax after hoax, lie after lie to basically maintain
their power. And I think what's happened is the mask has come off. The whole shell game has been
revealed. It's obvious that Biden was always a puppet for these interests who were hiding behind him.
And now it's all being exposed.
This also goes all the way back to 2016,
because if you remember and you look at the real run-up
into the 2016 primary, you have to remember,
President Obama sat Joe Biden down and said,
you cannot run.
And the reason was to direct the Democratic party and establishment
and energy towards Hillary Clinton, who ultimately lost that election. There's a very important
question here, which is if Joe Biden had actually run in 2016, you may have actually had him beat
Donald Trump in 2016. And he probably would have continued into 2020. This would be a totally
different situation for the Democrats. So back to your point, David,
all of these backroom shenanigans and negotiating
and gerrymandering and politicking and power-broking
is not how democracy should work.
As messy as the Republicans are,
I have to give, you know, I tip my hat to them,
they run very straightforward, fair, visible, transparent faceoffs between people. And you may not like the
candidates, but the process is what it's supposed to be messy,
turbulent, but you see all sides. Whereas this tends to be
managed from the inside out. And I think that that is, as your
point being exposed. And I think that's what really has to stop
within the Democrats, they need to open the floodgates. A Bobby
Kennedy should have had the chance to run.
Dean Phillips should have actually had the chance to run,
but they were not and they were prevented.
And by the way, props to Dean Phillips,
who in a very respectful and compassionate way
was telling the truth from day one.
And he was essentially censored.
He was not allowed to basically tell you what he-
Ostracize, yeah.
He told everybody what he observed Ostracize, yeah.
He told everybody what he observed in front of his face.
Right.
And if people had listened a year ago to Dean Phillips, then the voters in the Democratic
primary could have made a different choice.
They could have maybe replaced Joe Biden, but the party elders and the powers that be
did not let that happen.
And now they're in a panic a year later
trying to do a hot swap because it's manifest to everyone,
to the American public that Joe Biden is not fit to serve.
But the real time to, hold on,
we need to speak to the hot swap for a second.
The time to do the hot swap was a year ago
when Democratic primary voters
could have voted for someone new.
The problem you have
now, J Cal, I actually think that on balance, the hot swap is not going to happen. Let
me just tell you why. I think you make a really good argument for it. Nonetheless, the reason
it's not going to happen is that Joe Biden and Jill Biden have come out this morning
and said there's no way that he's stepping down. It was just one bad night. He's fit
to serve. There is no mechanism to replace a nominee who's already won all the necessary primary votes without their
consent. So if the Bidens are saying we're not stepping down, there's no mechanism to force them
to step down. And that's the situation we're in right now. It's a very simple mechanism. He's
going to capitulate and you're going to have Obama's
going to give him a call. I guarantee you Obama's going to talk to him in the next 72 hours.
Guarantee the hot swap happens. I'm absolutely willing to make a bet with you right now on it.
Let me finish my point. They can pressure him and that's what you're talking about is they're
going to try and leverage him out. But the truth of the matter is that if they can't find the right
leverage points, he does not have to step down. The right leverage point is very simple. He's not going to get any
more donations. Last night, the Democrats who are donating all said no more money for Joe Biden.
So he's going to have no oxygen. You need money to run these things. But I looked at one other
final problem with the hot swap theory is not only is there no mechanism to force Biden to do it,
but I don't think there's a consensus right now on who the replacement would be.
The fact of the matter is that Kamala Harris is next in line and she polls even worse numbers
than Biden does.
So there's every reason to believe that she would do worse than Biden in the election.
And I think it's not going to be easy to basically shiv her and push her aside.
And so you can talk about Newsom, you can talk about Michelle Obama, you can talk about Hillary Clinton.
The fact of the matter is that I think
you're gonna have a big Kamala problem.
And because of that, there's no mechanism
and there's no clear replacement.
I think that although a lot of people
are gonna say what you said, Jay Kal,
about the hot swap being desirable,
I think at the end of the day, on balance,
probably not gonna happen,
although certainly I admit it could.
I'll bet you $10,000 right now to whatever charity you want that Biden will not be in
the nominee.
You could be right.
But they've got to work out those two problems.
They got to work out those two problems.
I'm just I'm just offering you a $10,000 bet and I'm not giving you any straight money.
I would not bet a lot of money on this because I'm not sure.
I'm just raising some problems with the hot swap theory.
Okay.
Freiburg, you have a, you've been a little bit silent here.
You want to wrap us out so we can get to the next topic?
I'll wrap us out.
I think I'll read the final paragraph of the email I sent to the Democratic Party leader
a few months ago as a coda to this conversation.
Here goes.
The United States is facing a fiscal crisis, the likes of which the world only sees every
few hundred years as world leading nation states overextend themselves, take on unaddressable
debt loads, increase social programming, and eventually collapse under these conditions.
The cost to service the interest alone on our federal debt is now greater than $1 trillion
per year.
This already exceeds the discretionary defense budget.
The debt service expense will only swell as interest rates are unlikely to decline back
to 0%. And I do not subscribe to the easy to refute economic arguments of modern
monetary theory. Simple arithmetic is all that's needed to discredit it. Furthermore,
I can identify dozens of federal programs sponsored by Democrats that are not achieving
their objectives, yet we continue to fund them as if they were performing exactly as
anticipated when originally
conceived. Every federal program should be held to account for performance every year.
If not, they should be defunded. Instead, I see the party pushing new programs that create new
expense burdens without first addressing programs that simply aren't working. Accountability is a
critical first step in reducing our federal deficit below 7% of GDP.
I believe our nation is facing financial and thus social peril.
I urge the party to become the, quote, party of reason and results, put forward leaders
that can lead, hold government programs that aren't working to account, make sure that
every dollar spent on social programming has a measurable impact, and if they fail to deliver
results, cut them.
The opportunity to be the party of reason and results is wide open.
Myself and many of my friends would scramble
for the opportunity to support that party.
That's the end of my statement.
And I think that-
Did you get a response?
Then a month later, the handler said,
so-and-so has this on their docket,
they're gonna call you, never gonna call.
Of course.
Yeah, cause you're not a donor.
They only care if you donate.
And you're not a donor.
No, because I donated, I donated, and I didn't you donate. And you're not a donor. No, because I donated.
I donated and I didn't get anything.
All I asked for was a chance to sit down
and talk to the president.
I think we know why Biden didn't come on the podcast.
I mean, he couldn't,
the debate format to your point, Freberg,
was like the easiest debate format ever.
And the greatest thing,
I think Dave Port and I pointed this out on Twitter,
like Trump's best strategy was to just let Biden talk,
like just get out of the way and let him talk. And there was one moment where he's like,
I'm sorry. I mean, Trump was pretty graceful here, which is a big statement. He like at
one point was like, I'm sorry, I don't understand what he just said. Like, I don't know how
to respond to something. I don't understand what his point was. Hot Swap's coming. And
I am an undecided voter. a big announcement sacks I have a big
announcement about my undecided vote you want to hear it yeah let's hear this is breaking news
I am not voting for Biden I've eliminated Biden this possibility I was waiting to see what happened
last night so I knew that no I never was clear about that I am also eliminated Trump you've also
eliminated Bobby Kennedy so you have not eliminated Trump or Biden Kennedy.
I said they were not my preferred Kennedy.
Can I introduce you to Jill Stein?
Maybe Cornel West?
Okay, let's move forward.
Let's move forward.
What's your point?
Here we go.
Who's left?
Bring anybody out.
It can't be Weekend at Bernie's part two.
I mean, the Weekend at Bernie's joke is real.
I mean, it's cruel and it's real.
And my Lord, get it together.
All right.
There's a really interesting trend going on
that I wanted to get everybody's thoughts on AI
and corporate efficiency killing tech jobs.
Let's pull up this chart.
Somebody shared in our group chat from Fred.
These are software developer job postings on Indeed
from early 2020, that's pre-COVID obviously, to this year.
Look at this, the number of job postings
for developers has absolutely come crashing down by 80%. This is below pre COVID numbers. In addition
to this, we talked about getting back to work, Penske and Dell saying you have to be back in the
office starting this fall four days a week or resignation accepted. What are you seeing in your portfolios? Any thoughts
on this trend of the major jobs, the high paying elite jobs, Chema maybe going away.
This is a trend we haven't seen in our lifetime. So there's always room for elites at elite
companies.
And now it seems the demand's gone.
What's going on here?
I just think that company formation has changed
after the end of ZERP.
And so I think that that chart speaks more
to a couple of things.
One is that where typically people
were hiring for software engineering roles, which
was a lot of SaaS businesses, contracted a lot.
And the net new amount of SaaS startups also, I don't think,
materially increased.
And so that was one big switch.
Second is you went through a whole bunch of layoffs
at the big cap tech companies as they
reestablished profitability.
I think when you layered those two things,
that explains that chart more than the emergence of AI tools.
Just practically what I see is all of these AI tools can add a 10 or 15% lift to an individual person if you are in a traditional organization.
I don't think these things are the panacea that they're marketed as being. These are not creating 10x engineers.
At some point, these tools will be good enough. And at some point, companies will get started from
scratch that use those tools and create a level of productivity
at one tenth of the workforce, but that hasn't happened yet. So
I think that that chart is more about layoffs and contraction
in tech more than anything else.
Yeah, and just to explain this chart a little bit more in
depth, the 100% number back in 2020, then boost up to two and a half times that amount and then comes back down to 60%
of that amount. So it's an index. We don't actually have the raw numbers here of the
number of developer jobs open or closed. Sax, your thoughts, what are you seeing in company
formation to Chamath's point? And overall, what do you think this means for the American elite workforce,
people with, you know, really high end degrees and really high end salary expectations?
Well, I agree with Chamath. It's just too soon for AI to be responsible for this. I mean, the
AI productivity gains are just starting and we're not really seeing job elimination yet or job
replacement. I think this is just a symptom of economic weakness.
And the main reason for the economic weakness is the rate hike cycle.
Remember, we went from practically 0% interest rates to 5.5% in one year.
And a lot of people were expecting that to cause a recession.
That's normally what happens when you get a very, very
rapid rate hike cycle is it sucks liquidity out
of the economy and it contracts economic activity
and you get a recession.
I was one of the people who thought that
and that didn't happen.
I think one of the reasons it didn't happen
is there was a huge backlog of jobs,
of sort of open job postings.
I think originally it started at 12 million open jobs.
Well, what's happened is the rise in rates
has created some economic weakness.
It's caused a reduction in liquidity and investment.
It's created more pressure on companies to be profitable.
And so all those things have cascaded through
and what it's doing is it's burning off this job backlog.
So we haven't necessarily seen unemployment yet, but we're seeing a reduction in the job postings.
And I think that's what's going on.
And I would just say that the economy may not be
in recession yet, but I just think it's weak.
And this is just one metric showing that.
Freiburg, you're running a company now,
you're doing hiring.
Qualitatively, what are you seeing in terms of hiring
from when you were running production board?
You had many companies,
people are fighting it out in the pig's Zerp era, you know,
and giving people incredible, incredible, you know,
compensation packets and packages. And then you also had like sort of
people trying to take talent and maybe talent hoarding was going on.
It seems to have dramatically switched.
We've been putting job postings out and seeing hundreds of people
apply for jobs that we would get dozens previously. What are you
seeing? What's the game on the field in terms of hiring?
I'm not really I don't really have a great perspective on
this where we hire very specialized people at Ohalo and
in the special specialty field we're in, we're the best in the
world. So everyone wants to work here.
Got it.
I'll answer your question, Jake. What I see from our portfolio companies is
hiring's got easier. It is way higher, much easier to hire devs right now,
software developers than two years ago. No question about it.
Yeah. And I think globalization also having a big impact here. I honestly, my theory on this is that
because there's not three competing offer sacks from big tech, when
you're a startup, you know, trying to land somebody and you're like, we have to beat
Uber or Airbnb or Coinbase, you know, like a mid market company, or the Google offer,
the Apple offer, the Amazon offer, typically, like a developer would have those three sets
of offers, here's a startup that's willing to give you 1% of the equity, here's a mid
market company and Uber and Airbnb, a
Coinbase that's offering you 300k and then here's the like
incredible $500,000 offer from Amazon or Google. Those offers
just aren't there. So then it makes for the ability for
startups to hire great talent. This is the best time possible
to be a startup. The talent on the field is incredible.
Opening I is considering a for-profit conversion, and that means possibly an IPO soon.
According to report, Sam Altman recently discussed this with major shareholders like maybe Microsoft,
and it's possible OpenAI will become a for-profit benefit corporation similar to Anthropic or
XAI.
If you don't know what a for-profit benefit corporation is, a benefit corporation or B Corp in the industry
means you have a stated mission that the board is responsible
for going after.
Save the whales, provide AI software for all of humanity,
whatever it is, in addition to the standard acting
in the interest of all shareholders.
And so this, of course, means Open EII,
which was valued at 86 billion could
IPO at some point. What are your thoughts on this? We saw the
revenue numbers are crushing it. Any thoughts Jamath on open AI
IPO? Is that a possibility in your mind?
I mean, it makes so much sense for them. So I think they should
do it as quickly as possible. We are in the first inning of what should probably be an enormous tectonic shift in technology.
And I think if anything, whoever wins in the first inning usually isn't the one that's winning by the ninth inning.
And so I would encourage anybody that's winning right now to monetize, get secondaries, take money off the table as fast as possible because the future is
unknown and the more disruptive the technology is, the more entropy there is, which means that
there's going to be more changes, not less. And again, I would just look at search as an example,
I would look at social networking as an example. When you look 20 years later, the people who
captured all the value were not the ones at the beginning who everybody thought was going to win.
And so I think if it plays out similarly, it's important for the people that are in
the lead today to recognize it's too early and they should monetize their perceived success
as quickly as they can to the largest magnitude possible.
In other words, you might be opening up the bag. You might be, you might be my space.
Yeah. Grab the bag. You can Grab the bag. What is it called?
Secure the bag, sorry, secure the bag.
Secure the bag, yes.
What are your thoughts here?
Secure the bag.
Sacks on a potential IPO by FAM and the team at OpenAI
and the impact that might have on the wider space.
Well, for a long time on this show,
I've been saying that you need to clean up that, you know,
convoluted Byzantine corporate structure
with all the line charts everywhere.
That structure is what created all the problems with this nonprofit board that
they had. You've got a for-profit entity reporting to a nonprofit board.
It created a culture clash. And as we've said before on the show,
it's not a good idea for a start-up to innovate on structure.
Using a tried and true C Corp is the way to go. You're ready for IPO. If you
ever get that far, you don't need to restructure the company. It was always funky and weird
that OpenAI had this nonprofit structure. And really, they should have fixed it years
ago. And like I said, given Elon his equity, given Sam his CEO package, and they didn't
do either one of those things and so now they're
left with this crazy org chart that's a mess and I don't even sure I mean I think it's
I think you would want to clean it up as soon as you can because I think my sense is that
the longer you wait on these things the harder it actually gets but yeah more calcified these
things get you know I'm not sure how easy it is to actually fix this thing, but yes,
they should fix it.
They should make it a standard C corp.
They should make things right with Elon because he provided the first 40
million of C capital.
They should make it right with Sam.
He should get his CEO comp and then they should IPO so that the public
actually has the ability to invest in this AI wave and ride this wave as, you know,
the same way they did with the whole dot-com boom
in the late 90s.
I mean, a lot of those dot-com companies didn't work out,
but some of them did.
Amazon, Google, and so on.
And the public had the opportunity to participate
in that huge wave of innovation.
And I think we could have something like that happen here.
We still need more public companies, right?
Freiburg, you got a thought here? before we go into super intelligence and Ilya's new
company?
I don't care if OpenAI is for-profit or non-profit.
Affects a few people that put money in and the employees doesn't affect anyone else.
Well, no, it will affect the public if they can buy shares and they get to participate.
You could say that about any business, right?
Yeah.
OpenAI is one of the leading companies of the AI wave. It is the company. It's the leading company.
They apparently raise money in an $80 billion valuation. So one could also argue that a
company doing 3 billion in revenue getting an IPO done at 120 billion market cap. Maybe the public
already missed the big wave. Well, no, I don't think so. I mean, we saw a lot of these companies
that you could have said that about Nvidia,
and it basically went up 30x.
Yeah, you could say that about any idea.
It could go up, it could go down.
But anyway, there's a bunch of people who put money in
who are gonna make a lot of money
if this thing gets to be for profit.
The trend line is it's doubling revenue, right?
Year over year, so yeah.
My argument is that it'd be good for OpenAI
to clean up its Byzantine cap table and structure. And it would be good
for the public to be able to have the opportunity to invest.
So it's a win win. I'm not saying they have to do it this
minute. I mean, I think that it does take time to get your
reporting to the level of maturity necessary to be a
public company. And you don't want your your earnings or your
revenue, you don't want your numbers to be volatile.
If you were an employee, Freiburg, and it went out at 120 billion, would you clear your
position? If you could, would you sell half your position?
I don't know enough. I don't know enough. I'm assuming most of those.
Sack, Tramath, anybody want to play along here?
Well, I've heard that they've had quite a bit of turnover because there's been pretty
good secondary market activity, which means a lot of the employees have cashed out and
they've made so much money. Just like what's happening at Nvidia now, there's very little
upside relative to how much money you've already made's happening at Nvidia now, there's very little upside relative
to how much money you've already made.
So at that point, a lot of the early people start to leave.
They gotta hire more to film.
Yeah, so they're trying to hire more people, it sounds like.
I heard 70% of employees at Nvidia are millionaires now.
That's a crazy number.
Go ahead, Zach.
Well, I was gonna say, you know,
that question that you asked
is really a highly personal question
because you could think that open AI is a great company that's going to be worth
a trillion dollars in the future, but it still makes sense for you to take chips off the
table because a hundred percent of your net worth is in that one company.
So let me ask it that way.
You got 90% of your net worth in Nvidia.
I'm sorry.
90% of your net worth.
You're a person that, uh, open AI sitting on $10 million in shares, do you sell half all
what would you do personally, sex?
I would take some chips off the table. I don't
if you were first if you're like this is 90% of your net worth
99% of your net well, I mean, you're an insider. So maybe you
have a lot of information. If you were really bullish on the
future of the company, maybe you take 10 or 20% of your chips off the table.
If you're less bullish, maybe it is 50%.
So I don't know, I'd be influenced by my perspective
on that, but I think that you could think
it's the greatest company in the world,
and still it would make sense for you
to take some chips off the table,
because you don't want all your eggs in one basket.
That's a personal diversification decision.
And if it was $120 billion valuation with 3 million in
revenue, Chamath, and you're trading a 40 X or whatever it
is times next year's revenue, let's assume they do 5 billion
next year, you're still looking at 30 X revenue, you would
clear
I think these multiples are not really what's going to drive
their behavior. I think OpenAI is running a very strategic game
plan to become part of the tech establishment as quickly as they
can so that they are on the inside looking out as opposed to the outside looking in. They
were able to add the former head of the NSA to their board of directors.
Yeah, what's your take on that by the way, Jim? That was interesting. People got pretty...
Well, it's how you become part of the establishment. Do you think the former head of the NSA
no longer has a security clearance or knows people in the NSA? No, of course not.
And I think that there is a group of people that want to make sure that these kinds of technologies
and capabilities are firmly within the hands of the United States apparatus and not anybody else. And so I think that that pulls them closer to the kinds of folks that
could otherwise give them a hard time, right, or regulate them, or etc., etc. So now what happens
is when you have Senate hearings about this stuff, it's more likely that it's confidential, behind
closed doors, it's under the purview of national security. All these things are beneficial to Open
AI. And then secondly, they were able to get Elon to drop his lawsuit. Conveniently,
I think it was like on the same day that the head of the NSA was added to the board with the former
head of the NSA. So the next logical step is now to create capital markets distribution,
which is really about syndicating ownership of the company to all the big deep pools of money
so that they are also growing in the same direction in support of open AI.
And so that's what a lot of people don't get.
It's not about valuations or this and that this is about creating a high level
game theory of how to create an international apparatus that supports your
corporate objectives.
There are a few companies that have done this well and they are now one of them.
The only thing left
is to get shares into the hands of the Black Rocks, the T-Rose, all the big mutual fund
apparatuses of the world that then syndicate to all the individual investors of the world.
And you have everything. You have government connections. You have no real legal overhang.
Then the likelihood that an IRS agent all of a sudden decides to audit OpenAI is basically
zero.
Okay.
So to summarize, bit cynical, but you're building an ally base that then makes it harder to
investigate the company, criticize the company or anything like that, right?
That's essentially what you're saying.
Well, I don't think it's cynical.
It's like a smart business strategy.
Strategy.
What's your take on that, Sax?
Well, yeah, they're borrowing their way into the deep state.
Okay, I mean, they're the quid pro quo is we will be your
vessel, we will be an arm of the intelligence community of the
deep state will give you access to whatever it is you're looking
for. And in exchange, you're gonna basically protect us and
allow us to get rich. And frankly, that's the deal
that all the big tech companies have made.
They are all in bed with the intelligence community.
And we saw this in the Twitter files,
where every week for the year before the 2020 election,
there were meetings between the trusted safety people,
the censorship division of Twitter
and the intelligence community.
So these people are working arm in arm,
and basically the big tech companies
have given themselves over in a way
to this powerful apparatus, the deep state,
in exchange for, they're willing to basically give up power
in exchange to be left unfettered to make their money.
I think it's a horrible development for the civil liberties of the ordinary
American, but I think that is the reality of what has transpired.
Yeah.
And the number of CIA, former CIA, former FBI, justice department, people working
at the Googles, Facebooks, Metas, Apples of the world is like a very large number.
I have family, as many of you know, in law of the world is like a very large number. I have family,
as many of you know, in law enforcement and in the deep state, I guess, as you call it, sex.
And they are constantly asking me about job offers they have from these companies and should, which one should they go to? This is after they've done tours in Afghanistan and, you know,
speaking many different foreign languages. And then all of a sudden they secure this incredible you know 3x salary bump by working in big tech so there is something to all
of this. Ilja announced his new startup finally it's called Safe Super Intelligence Inc or SSI.
He was obviously an OpenAI co-founder formerly their chief scientist and co-head of Super Alignment.
Last month he announced he was resigning from OpenAI after a decade with the company.
And you remember, he was on the board that helped orchestrate Sam Waltman's firing.
And then he reversed course a few days after and expressed regret in it.
Everybody was asking, where's Ilya doing all of this on Twitter.
The co-founders in SSI include Daniel Gross, a YC partner and Pioneer
Labs co founder and open AI engineer Daniel Levy. Company's
goal right now is in the title develop a safe super
intelligence. Here's what Ilya told Bloomberg the company is
special in that its first product will be the safe super
intelligence and it will not do anything else until then. Friedberg is this super
intelligence making safe super intelligence a great business
model? Or is this something else? It's a little bit
confusing to come into the market and compete with a
throttle or a governor, I guess, on your startup. At least
that's what some people are discussing.
So what are your thoughts?
I have no idea.
I don't know what these guys are doing.
Have you guys looked at this company?
I haven't seen anything.
Well, I mean, we're just basing it on reports.
I'll answer that question if you want.
Yeah, okay.
A free bird, another assist.
Okay, quick bounce pass to Zach.
Zach!
Yeah.
Give us your opinion.
Let me caveat what I'm about to say
by saying that I have not heard the pitch directly for
this company.
I've only read what you've read in the press.
What they're trying to do is the safe super intelligence.
I'm not bullish about that pitch because I think it makes the company a little bit schizophrenic.
It's working at cross purposes with itself.
On the one hand, you're a new company, which means you're behind.
You've got to catch up with OpenAI or Google,
these other companies that now have been creating,
you know, models for years.
So you've got to move very fast.
On the other hand, you're saying you're going to basically
make this very safe.
Well, to be frank, safety concerns are a brake pedal.
They don't help you move faster.
They make you move slower.
Yes, it's a governor, yeah. And in fact, I think that this is the main reason safety concerns are a brake pedal. They don't help you move faster. They make you move slower.
Yes, it's a governor, yeah.
And in fact, I think that this is the main reason
why Sam Altman either kicked these people out of the company
or starved their resources until they left.
Remember, when a bunch of these people left OpenAI,
they said that, hey, we were originally promised
30% of the computing resources by Sam,
and then he reneged on that promise
and give us what we needed so they all left.
Well, I think that wasn't by accident.
I mean, I think that Sam wants to win.
He wants to develop AI as quickly as possible,
specifically AGI.
And he had this group inside the company
that, frankly, was a lobby for moving slower.
So now they have their own startup.
He's on that group group and he kicked out.
Right, but I don't think that's the recipe for winning
because you're the guys who want to move slower.
It would be like taking the DEI group from Twitter
and having them start a new Twitter.
Well, I think that's a little bit harsh
because I do think that by all accounts,
Karpathy is like a top, top notch technologist
and he's one of the leaders in the space.
But I do think that he's gonna be hamstrung
by his own concerns about safety.
And I think this is maybe the tragic situation is
we're gonna have this competition
by all these different companies to advance AI
and the companies that care about safety more than others
are going to lose. And so you have this Darwinian effect going on where there's going to be a race
to AGI. And I think that is genuinely a little bit scary for where this all leads us. But
I tend to think that it's not going to be solved by trying to impose the safety governor, as you
said. I think maybe the best you can do is impose a truth governor.
So Elon says that we're going to make sure
that our model at XAI, the Grok model, is scrupulously honest.
It's not going to lie to you.
And I think maybe that's the best you can do,
is advance AI to be truthful.
But when you start injecting these other safety concerns,
I just think it slows you down and hamstrings you.
I think the best way to hit truth is to cite your sources.
I have been putting into, and I don't know if you've,
have you played with 4.0 yet or Claude's new sonnet,
Jamoth, have you? Yeah.
Have you, yeah, I mean, it is unbelievably good.
If you put, cite your sources,
it's really starting to understand what you're asking for. I don't know
if you've seen this, but I was asking it, like I'm hiring some
positions, give me the high low average of this position, give
me five sources of information, put it in a table, and then
average the high, low and median. And it came back to me
sacks with an incredible thread, Jamal, of this position, and
then source Glassdoor,
Indeed, salary.com, whatever it was.
And I was like, holy cow,
this is an hour or two of research work done instantly.
There's an important insight here
that I think people are missing,
which is that foundational models
are quickly becoming a consumer surplus.
Every model is roughly the same.
They keep getting better and better,
but they're also approaching these asymptotic returns.
What do you do when something approaches an asymptotic return?
You need to change a key underlying variable
that you use to build these models.
It looks like one of those variables that people are looking at is how
you basically take the Internet not as raw data,
but then you actually kind
of refine it and refine it some more and then use that as the
basis of learning. And what that does is it drives up model costs
to a degree that are probably untenable for most companies
except but for a few. So I think it was Dario Amadei, the CEO of
Anthropic, who said the cost of a good functional model today is in the billions,
but you know, by 2027, it could easily approach $100 billion. The problem that that represents
for Ilya's company, and I wish him the best of luck, but the reality is there isn't $100 billion
for him to have. Google will find it, Microsoft will find it, Facebook will find it.
Amazon is coming out with something. OpenAI will probably find it. Amazon will find it. But I
suspect that these other startups, there just isn't that
much money going into AI because the returns don't justify it.
So I think the bigger problem that you have is that it's
becoming an arms race. It's not dissimilar actually to ride
sharing. When people saw Uber's success, they thought, well,
this is simple. And it was, but you had to subsidize losses for decades before that company
was profitable. But meanwhile,
you had to starve all of these other companies that were funded to compete
with Uber until they ran out of money and died.
I think that you could make a claim that the AI foundational model market will
look similar to that. One startup can probably win,
but there will be a bunch of open source alternatives.
They're all asymptotically similar.
And so it's an arms race on cost and compute.
And I just don't see VCs having the temperament and the wherewithal to fund hundreds of billions of dollars into multiple companies to do that.
Freiburg, any thoughts on the latest models?
Have you played with them? I'm curious.
I have been having tremendous results.
There seems like there is, I don't know, I don't want to say a step function, but man, it's a lot better right now.
Have you used any of these models? And are you applying any of them inside of your company?
We're using a lot more models. And we're seeing them be very practically applied at the edge. So
you don't need to have large models running on a large compute cloud to get practical value. And this is definitely a big point in the industry
is that you're getting highly functional
application specific models that can be run
in a more local environment on the edge.
So they're not running the cloud on big compute clusters.
And there's incredible applications
in things like machine vision and control systems.
You can ultimately see this being,
I don't know if you guys saw that Chinese dog.
We never talked about this.
China basically ripped off Boston Dynamics,
or at least that's what it looks like.
And they created this military dog.
Nick, can you pull up the clip?
And then they put machine guns on the back of the dog's back.
The models are running locally in these devices. In
fact, I think we're gonna have a few demonstrations of this at
the at the all in summit. So the robotic applications are pretty
powerful. machine vision applications are very powerful.
And when you see this insane video from China, by the way,
this is a totally different topic. You guys seen this? I
have seen this. It's this thing goes autonomously into a
building, and it can then find its target and eliminate
its target with the machine gun on the back. Incredible. And you
can see this becoming like, let's say they build a assembly
line, and they put out 10 million 50 million of these
things. And these things can now go run autonomously in the
field. This is the dark side of small, highly performative application specific models
running in an embedded way.
Imagine those are amphibious.
And they could travel against,
they could travel across water
and wind up in another destination.
I don't know, where would a beach invasion occur?
Anyway, that was a very funky tangential aside.
All right, we've talked about Microsoft
and the bundling issues a number of times here.
Sanx, you had a spicy take on this. Well, the EU just charged Microsoft with antitrust
violations over how it bundles teams. They're quote unquote, slack killer into office. Here's
a quick chart. Microsoft teams obviously was bundled. Everybody has it automatically with
office. You don't get a choice and they rocketed to 75 million members.
In 2022, Slack's 12 million.
You've obviously got a lot of thoughts here, I'm sure, too, as well.
Two months since you were the early investor in this.
Looks like Salesforce just got a big win.
Benioff gave some commentary on X.
Microsoft excels with bundling.
It's not, it's their not so secret
weapon for dominating new markets. We know the playbook office plus teams, Windows plus explorer,
Azure plus Visual Studio 365 plus OneDrive and Xbox plus game Xbox plus game pass. Here's a
clip of Saks discussing this on episode 113 of your all in podcast. If Microsoft can basically clone the sort of the breakthrough
innovative product, you know, just to say they do one every
year, and then they put a crappy version of that in their bundle.
Yeah, 10% 20 or 50% worse, but they give it away effectively
for free as part of the bundle. And then they basically pull
the legs out from under that other company. So it can't be a
vibrant competitor. And then the next year, they'll just raise
the price of the bundle, right. And they've done that with
slack. They've done that with Okta. They've done that with
zoom, can we have a vibrant tech ecosystem, at least in B2B
software, if Microsoft can just keep doing that indefinitely.
All right, Sax, you heard your quote there. I'm guessing you're
not shocked by this action.
Well, I think the EU made the right decision here.
They basically sided with Salesforce
who made the complaint and said that Microsoft
was engaged in illegal bundling by combining Microsoft Office
and Teams.
And the reality is Microsoft Office
is a product that every company has to have,
certainly every enterprise has to have. And by bundling, it means that that enterprise
receives the Teams product for free until, of course, the price of the bundle goes up
the next year, which it has just about every single year. So what that does is when that enterprise is evaluating the choice of do we use Teams or do we use Slack or for example Glue
or some other tool, Teams on the margin appears to be free, whereas Slack is
something you have to pay for seats. And I think that is that is illegal bundling.
You know when you have a monopoly in one product and you systematically use it to keep adding new products
that again, on the margins appear to be free
because you've bundled them.
And I think the EU has done the right thing here,
which is push to end the bundling.
Every single product needs to have its own a la carte pricing.
And when you add together the a la carte prices,
it should equal the price of the bundle.
So in other words, you don't get anything on the
margin for free, the customer needs to have the discretion to
choose what it wants. If we don't do that, I do think that
Microsoft will use the power of the bundle to systematically
dominate enterprise software. And they won't take on everybody
at once. But like I said, they'll every year they'll add a
new product
to the bundle.
Jamath, what's the middle ground here
between the interest of consumers,
which is, hey, I'm getting free, a free version of Slack.
It's not free.
It appears to be free on the margins
because it's now part of the bundle,
but then they raise the price of the bundle the next year.
Correct, they boil the frog.
So once they've killed, once they've pulled the legs out, pull the rug out from under
their competition, and that competitor is no longer viable.
Now they can raise the price of the bundle.
Okay.
And so it's kind of like dumping in a way.
I mean, this is a very old antitrust argument.
When you would dump product in the market to kill a competitor, or you would price under
your cost to kill a competitor, right?
Yeah, you dump to basically drive a competitor
out of business because there's large costs of entry.
There's large capex required to create a new competitor.
And this is basically what they're doing
is they appear to give you the Slack clone or whatever
for free, but then once they pull the rug out,
they'll increase the price of the bundle.
So Chamath, what's the balance here between say,
I don't know, Apple giving away a free note-taking app
or a free journaling app to consumers,
saying, hey, consumers get this benefit of free product
versus the bundling concept here with,
hey, we'll give it to you for free,
but eventually we're gonna boil the frog. What's your thought of how to adjudicate this or to execute on it in the best
interest of consumers? Microsoft has been bundling products to kill competitors for 40 years.
The 10 years that they didn't do it was the 10 years when Steve Ballmer was in charge,
during which there was a legal document
between Microsoft and the Justice Department, a consent decree that prevented them from doing it.
That consent decree came to be because of this exact strategy. And the most famous example that
was the tail end of that process was when they used Internet Explorer and they bundled it with Microsoft Windows and they killed Netscape.
So there's umpteen examples of this. So I think that they've gone back to their old playbook.
It's a playbook that you have to remember the executives that run Microsoft have been there
for 30 and 40 years. They know this play and they know that it works and they've been rewarded
incredibly handsomely by the public markets. So they're going to keep doing it. Would Slack have sold to Salesforce? Now look, I'm not complaining.
It was a $27 billion acquisition. But the question is, if it were allowed to compete feature for
feature, could it have beat Teams? Possibly. Would the board have made, and I was on the board of
Slack, a decision to have tried?
Possibly, but none of those options were on the table.
Because when you see a product,
it doesn't matter how inferior it is, get bundled in,
it's kind of DOA, and then you're on a melting iceberg.
And so you have to make a very quick decision
to preserve enterprise value.
So I think what this comes down to is the FTC and the DOJ
need to dust off that old consent decree, read
it and figure out whether this makes sense again. It seems like folks in the EU have
more recently read that consent decree than American regulators have.
Look, what we've said all along is that the right approach to antitrust is to stop anti-competitive
tactics. Bundling is at the top of the list. Instead, what they've stopped is all M&A,
which is actually bad for the ecosystem
because you deny risk capital reward
and you need that reward in order to induce
the next stage of risk taking.
So again, I think this was a good decision
by the EU regulators and the competition authorities
in the US should actually be looking to this.
Again, it's a better approach than stifling M&A.
You are so right on this. We're so aligned. If you look at,
I've been talking to a lot of LPs and in talking to them,
they're looking at corporate credit and P&E deals because they
can get a return on those. And then they're looking at venture and they're saying,
Hey, why is there no M&A occurring? Where's our DPI? Can you guys sell some of these companies is like,
yeah, we can't sell them because Lena con is gonna scuttle this
M&A. And what that means is in a very real way, we have dollars
being taken out of innovation in early stage and being put into,
you know, privatizing SaaS companies, whatever real
estate deals. And this is really dangerous for America. We really need more of this.
Okay, I'll make one last wrap on this topic. I'll take the other side of bundling. Oh,
here we go. I think ultimately, if bundling benefits the consumer or the customer from
improved prices, I don't buy the antitrust
arguments on a lot of these cases.
I don't think that you're keeping competitive solutions in the market.
If the benefit of the lower cost product is actually there for the consumer, the customer,
supermarkets for example, do this, right?
So there's a lot of products in the supermarket like peanut butter, milk, eggs that have historically
been big loss leaders because they get people in the store. Once they get in the supermarket, like peanut butter, milk, eggs, that have historically been big loss leaders
because they get people in the store.
Once they get in the store-
They're not monopolies.
They're effectively-
Peanut butter's not a monopoly.
Monopoly, monopoly in what way?
The supermarket's not a monopoly.
It's fine to bundle commodities,
but when a product is a monopoly
and every enterprise must have it-
Commodities have finite shelf lives, right?
So you're talking about one week.
And Teams is not a monopoly, right?
A Microsoft offices.
No, but when you install it, Microsoft offices and 365
is versus you can't rip it up. You can't. There are other options. You have options. There's
plenty of options. And the whole benefit of SaaS is that you can switch all the time. Those options
are on market power. Of course they do. I can switch to Google Docs and save money. But in the
enterprise market. I don't have to buy it. I don't have to buy enterprise seat licenses for Office.
I can buy Google Docs. SMBs think that way, but't have to buy it. I don't have to buy enterprise seat licenses for office. I can buy Google Docs.
SMBs think that way.
But enterprises don't think that way.
Yeah.
I mean, every option to Google is competing effectively in the office space
against Microsoft Office.
You have to look at the duopoly.
Zoom is competing effectively against Teams.
Like none of these businesses have a monopoly.
Zoom, I would argue, is getting demolished.
Slack just stopped growing. What? Look, once they put Teams in the bundle, Slack stopped growing. Zoom's had the legs kicked out from under it. Yeah, Zoom, I would argue, is getting demolished. Slack just stopped growing.
Look, once they put teams in the bundle, Slack stopped growing.
What's the monopolistic lock-in?
The amazing thing about SaaS is that there's no switching cost.
There's no switching cost. What?
I don't think we're debating that.
I think what we're debating is the sales practice where Microsoft says,
well, you need Office, you need Windows, and you need 365, or sorry, Active Directory.
Well, if you'd like all of these things, we're going to give you this product for free as
well, and they're going to be tightly integrated.
Then when you go to Slack, you have to pay more.
And then you think to yourself, well, how do I go back to my CFO and say, I need an
extra $1.2 million a year for this enterprise license to Slack?
And then people say, well, it's-
That's my point. You're saving money if you stick with Microsoft, they're giving you a discount
because once they kill slack, they'll just raise the price of the bundle.
That's the point. That's a theory. And if that's true, that should be prosecuted.
I don't think that the ice was under the Microsoft Internet Explorer action.
Yeah. But that's the violating action. That's my point.
Why can't you just make Microsoft-
The idea of having a bundle
should not be a violating action.
No, all Microsoft has to do
is they've got a price to the bundle.
Allocate that price across all the components of the bundle
so people can buy each product à la carte.
That's all. Yes, yeah.
They can still sell a bundled offering.
If at the end of the day,
that sum is cheaper than you buying the alternative OLA cards
from third party vendors, that is a great deal for you as a customer.
It can be cheaper.
Yeah.
But the point is-
What we're talking about here is proactively keeping competition and I think that creates
a good competitive dynamic.
But maybe I'm thinking two first principles on this.
I think you're missing something here at Freeberg, which is like, what happens then when, let's
just say Slack, there wasn't a suitor for Slack.
Okay, let's take the internet browser example,
because I think it's better.
If you didn't have a multi-hundred billion dollar company
prop up a product because they just felt like it,
i.e. Chrome and Google,
you would have had Microsoft run away
with the core interface for the internet.
We don't know how that would have turned out.
So by luck, we've had some modicum of consumer choice,
but it's not as if Firefox did well.
Firefox went to basically irrelevancy.
Netscape went to zero.
So there are examples where when Microsoft has done this,
they can starve the market of choice
over long periods of time.
And I think if you're-
And they did that with Internet Explorer.
Hold on a second.
So if your whole point is,
well, let's just bet on the largesse
of other large companies,
that's a bad bet. But I will show you multiple
counter examples. Google Meet does not dominate market share.
You're talking about the largesse of companies. You're talking not about competitive practices.
Find me, venture funded people, risk taking people who need a return on investment. Google
is the worst example. They have the most indiscriminate forms of spending. I'm not saying that they shouldn't be allowed to.
But sorry, I'm just giving you a counter example to the point about bundling.
No, that's not a counter example.
Because when you have-
Google Wave or any of these other nonsense products that didn't work,
I'm not calling Google Meet a gun.
The point of a healthy product environment and market is not that one incumbent and another incumbent can create their
own crappy versions. It's that you could theoretically have an open market where somebody
can be funded with nominal amounts of capital and compete effectively. That isn't possible in many
markets and software because of these kinds of strategies. So what you're reduced to are these
huge companies with this product sprawl. I don't think those are good
products. And I think we're lying to ourselves to say that they are. Google Meet is a terrible
product. Okay. So whatever they're competing with is a terrible alternative. That's my point. And
they've lost market share. They have not won market share by bundling. And if you try to find a real
competitor to build an alternative to it, they're not able to get funded
because the venture investor says, no, I can't.
And that's the market power that stifles competition.
That's what this is about.
And if you, as an entrepreneur,
come up with a much better product than Google Meet,
a VC will say, wow, we can go
and blow up the side of the hall of that chip.
I totally disagree with you.
I don't think there's go after it.
I don't think there's a single person.
Microsoft bought Skype how many years ago for $8.5 million and then Zoom came around.
If left unchecked, Microsoft will-
Zoom is a standalone unbundled product and they totally dominated in the market while
everyone else has been doing bundling.
The bottom line is if left unchecked, you will see people abuse this.
It is not a big ass to have a la carte
pricing and that will make the playing field much, much more competitive.
The Zoom example is a terrible one. And the reason is that P&L would have a hole blown on the side
of it if they did not have 90% of their R&D and OPEX in China. But for the grace of God and Eric's
strategic thinking, they were able to survive.
But that is a perfect example of a company that would absolutely not have existed had
they not had a labor arbitrage.
That is not the basis of a competitive and fair market.
And you cannot expect people going off to all four corners of the world and trying to
do all these gymnastics to viably compete against the Microsoft and a Google.
I would argue that is not what's been Adobe. Adobe has a bundling solution. If you guys have
ever tried to sign up for Adobe or end your subscription, it's nearly impossible. They just
had action taken against them for that. They've got these insane practices. They make you buy
everything to get access to one thing. Well, then what they did comes along and Sigma,
Sigma kills the market. They come in and they're like, we're a better product.
Better markets do win even with bundling.
That's my argument.
I think the interesting thing with Adobe
is that they have a product suite
that's used in a narrow field.
I think what Saks is saying is,
Adobe is about a sort of vertical system of record.
I think the thing about Microsoft,
and you could probably say about Google,
but less so, but definitely for Microsoft,
is they are these very horizontal,
broad, amorphous systems of record
that you cannot easily replace.
There aren't people running around building
nine of the 19 things that Microsoft gives you
in the bundle.
That's the problem.
Okay, well the debate continues.
Well, furthermore, I mean, on this very show,
we are arguing that the figma acquisition should go through
Because it created a new market for web designers. Whereas Photoshop was basically
for
Graphics, it doesn't compete with Photoshop. It competes with some of their other design programs, but that's anyway
All right
We're not going to settle it here and there's a difference between a bundle in the suite suites are okay
bundling when you already have a monopoly
in the relevant part of the bundle, that's the problem.
Bundling is when you take a wrench
and a can of peanut butter and put them together.
Like here, you're gonna take them both.
You're like, well, I only need the wrench
while you're gonna take the peanut butter.
And they're like, well, I already have peanut butter,
so I don't need to buy new peanut butter.
I mean, we saw this in the cable providers
in DirecTV as well.
You know, just, you can't not pay for ESPN
even if you don't like sports. Alright, listen, another amazing
episode for compassionate Chamath, satire, sacks, and the
Frank.
So I thought your sex wants to say one more thing.
I just have a perfect wrap up. Okay, satire, sacks. Go ahead.
What's your
Here we go. Satire.
No, let's put this tweet by Joe Biden, President Biden.
Is the elder abuse?
No, I want to I want to compliment Joe Biden on
continuing to fight. You keep fighting Joe. Do not let the
media get you down. One bad night is not a reason to get out
of the race. All these people stabbing you in the back, they
are basically ingrates and backstabbers.
You're doing just fine.
All right, and from Candid Calacanis,
and from Candid Calacanis to the Democratic Party,
disgraciad, your disgrace,
what you did to the American people
with this rope-a-dope is ridiculous.
Disgraciad.
20, disgraciad!
25th Amendment, get this guy out of office. President Kamala hot swap it.
Dean Phillips. Let's go. We'll see you all next time on the all in podcast. Love you, boys.
Let your winners ride. Rain man, David.
Rain Man, David Saks I'm going all in
And instead we open sourced it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it
I'm going all in
What your winners line?
Besties are gone
That is my dog taking an audition for driveway sex
Oh man.
Oh man.
My avid Asher will meet me at the...
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? You're the bee.
What? You're the bee.
What?
We need to get merch.
The bees are back.
I'm doing all this. What? That's gonna be a... We need to get merch. The keys are back.