Charlie Kirk Murder, Assassination Culture in America, Jimmy Kimmel Suspended, Ellison Media Empire

1. 0:00 – 15:27

   Reacting to Charlie Kirk's death: impact, legacy, and what's wrong in America

   1. JCJason Calacanis0:00

      Okay, everybody. There's no easy way to start today's show. Eight days ago, Charlie Kirk was savagely murdered while doing what Americans love to do, debate. And when someone is senselessly killed like this, especially at a young age and at the hands of another human, try to make sense of it. That's only natural. And, uh, it's hard to imagine anything worse than a young father of two, just 31 years old and entering the best and most productive years of his life, being killed by a 22-year-old who's barely out of adolescence. Our hearts go out to the Kirk family, his friends, his fans, and every American who understands that no one should be killed for expressing their beliefs. That's the core of the great American experiment. So, let's keep that experiment alive today and the memory of Charlie Kirk by continuing the great debate. Besties, there's a lot to process here as a community, a country, a society, and, uh, I just wanna check everybody's temperature at the top of the program. We're obviously not gonna do a cold open here because that would be inappropriate. But Chamath, how are you processing the last eight days?

   2. DSDavid Sacks1:06

      I actually wrote down something as well, which I normally don't do. I just like to kind of react, but let me just read that and then maybe we can just talk from there. So, to me, what Tyler Robinson illustrates is the emergence of a lost generation that was shaped by COVID. I see years of isolation, a reliance on screens, and an immersion in online subcultures that have created a vacuum where some young men are drifting in without any grounding. No institutions, no friends, no communities, no family. And out of that void, I think what comes out can, at best, only be called ideological incoherence. Somebody used the word salad bar extremism. These individuals are not clearly aligned with any one ideology completely, but they seem to be assembling fragments of memes, of conspiracies, of cultural signals into an unstable identity and in some cases now, it's exploding into violence. I think the most troubling consequence isn't just the facts themselves, which is abhorrent and I, and I feel incredibly bad for all of Charlie's friends and his family and his children, obviously himself. But beyond the act itself, there's an enormously chilling effect, I think, on public discourse. When you express an idea, it cannot be that then you risk becoming a target. Because the ultimate outcome of that is fewer people will then enter the public debate. And then what happens is the range of acceptable dialogue really narrows, and it only leaves space then for the most benign voices in the public square. And if you have that kind of anodyne discussion, I just think you have very bad outcomes for society. I've watched a lot of his content since he was murdered, and I'm still trying to grapple with why people could not shout the man down if they disagreed with him and instead shot the man down. And I think that that is a completely unacceptable response for what he thought. That's what I think.

   3. JCJason Calacanis3:46

      That's well said. Uh, Freeburg? Your...

   4. DFDavid Friedberg3:49

      I think it wasn't his controversy. It was his effectiveness. He was too smart, too open, too honest, too willing to engage in discourse, too willing to debate. He was too effective in changing people's minds, and I think that's why he became such a cultural threat. And it wasn't necessarily the things he said, because there are people out there who say far more controversial things than Charlie. It's that he sounded sensible and he changed people's minds through his discourse. And as he changed people's minds, I think he became a real threat to the ideologies that he spoke up against. And I think that's why he was targeted. And it's obvious that if he wasn't as effective as he is, if he wasn't as smart, as empathetic, as optimistic, as honest, as direct as he was, he wouldn't have been a target perhaps. And it was very sad. One of the things that we've seen is the power of going direct, sort of like what we did with this podcast. He went direct. He went to college campuses, but he also recorded it and put it on the internet and millions of people saw it. And that new form of media, that new form of communication where someone can actually have a town square, the internet, that they can stand at and speak their mind and be heard. There's no longer these filters and these controlling powers of influence that decide what we get to know and not know and what our opinions need to be. The media and the traditional kind of systems are being degraded. I think it's important to continue that, and I think one of the things that I've been optimistic about, I was very sad and angry the day this happened. I called Chamath. I was actually tearful that day. But since that time, I think it's been amazing to see the optimism, not just from one side, but from a lot of different people from different backgrounds standing up and saying discourse is so important and re-underwriting this American process. So, I'm very sad, but I'm very hopeful that people take this as a sign of how important this discourse is.

   5. JCJason Calacanis5:57

      Saxe. I, I don't know if you knew him, but obviously, uh, he was instrumental, I think, in, um, the MAGA movement, the conservative movement, and moving so many young people over to it.Did you know him? Uh, did you interact with him? What was he like and, and, and how are you feeling, uh, eight days into this? I know this is the second assassination attempt, third actually, in this recent political season, two on Trump and now this one, so this feels, um, pretty dark. How are you feeling?

   6. CPChamath Palihapitiya6:31

      Yes, Jason, I knew him and I considered Charlie a friend. I started doing his show, his radio show a few years ago. He invited me on and I came on his show and he proceeded to have me back. I mean, I think I went on the show about half a dozen times. It was always on a, a wide range of issues, but usually when I was on his show, we talked about tech, we talked about things like censorship, we talked foreign policy. He was extremely versatile in the issues he could speak about. And you see that when he was speaking on campuses, he would really take on all comers and every possible issue would be thrown at him and he'd always have a well-thought-out response. But in any event, I always tried to say yes to him, I always moved things around my schedule when he asked me to come on the show. I just felt that he was a very positive person, very upbeat about the future. I think that he engaged in a very respectful type of debate with people. You see this on college campuses. He saw every opponent as someone that he could potentially persuade and convince to convert to his side. You know, there are clips of him going around where he explains that we all have to engage in dialogue in a democracy because the alternative when we stop talking is that we become enemies and eventually it leads to violence. And he was very concerned about the rise of assassination culture. He wrote about this months before his death. And so in a way, he almost... I don't think he saw his own death coming, but he definitely saw this disturbing rise of violence as the alternative to free speech and, and open discourse. And he dropped out of college when he was 18 to start Turning Point. I mean, he was sort of a force of nature, he put together this organization from scratch, and he would go on these college campuses and kind of put down his, his soapbox or tent and chair under a banner that said, "Prove me wrong," and he would engage people in conversation. Liberals like to use this term platforming, it's usually the prelude to, you know, justifying why someone needs to be denied the opportunity to speak on a tech platform. But Charlie wasn't platformed by somebody else, he created his own platform. You know, he created this organization from scratch. And he was platforming liberals or leftists or woke or whoever. He was giving them the opportunity to debate with him and his crowds got larger and larger. People liked to see him speak and engage in these debates, and he was platforming the other side and giving them the opportunity. But like Freeburg was saying, the more he did it, the more it became clear that his views were very well thought out and oftentimes the other sides weren't. And if one side became hysterical, it was always the other side, it was never Charlie. He was always sort of cool, calm, and collected. And he was winning the debate. He was winning the debate very effectively. And I think he was revealing, in a lot of cases, that these woke students had these very strongly held views, but they couldn't really explain beyond the level of cliches why they believe what they believe. I mean, when he would just start to Socratically ask them questions, it was rare that you'd get someone on the other side who could go multiple questions deep with him and, and debate him with the, the level of knowledge that he had. And so I think that that, fundamentally, is why he was winning the debate and that's why I think that so many people of his generation and younger were really paying attention, is because he was offering them something that they weren't getting elsewhere. They weren't getting it through the school system. The school systems were kind of drilling at their heads this sort of woke catechism about what they're supposed to believe, and he was actually offering them critical thinking and dialogue and debate. And I think it's why young people were flocking to him in, in droves. And I do think that ultimately the reason why he was killed is because he was so effective at engaging in this kind of debate. And we have it in the killer's own words. I mean, the killer signed this very detailed confession, I should say texted it, to his alleged roommate, lover about why he did it, and he said that in his view, Charlie represented something hateful and then I think the key thing he said right after that was, the killer said, "I had enough of his hatred. Some hate can't be negotiated out."

   7. JCJason Calacanis10:42

      Hmm.

   8. CPChamath Palihapitiya10:42

      So in other words, there's no imperative to engage in dialogue or debate or discourse with people who disagree with you, countering their arguments with better ones. They just need to be silenced by any means necessary.

   9. JCJason Calacanis10:53

      Mm-hmm.

   10. CPChamath Palihapitiya10:53

       That's basically... The killer described his own motive as that he essentially just thought that there are views that just have to be silenced with extreme violence, with murder, and that that was justifiable. And I think th- this is what, I think, hit a nerve for the whole country, I mean, beyond those of us who knew Charlie and considered him a friend and how much sadness and grief that we have over losing him and for his wife and, and for his kids who are gonna grow up fatherless now. I think that we all felt that this was a huge invasion of the town square, of the marketplace of ideas. This happened on a college campus, which is supposed to be the ultimate marketplace of ideas. It's supposed to be the place where people engage in reasoned discourse to work out our differences. And so it felt like an assault on the citadel of democracy.

   11. JCJason Calacanis11:43

       Freeburg, you set up this amazing panel we just released, which I think we all agree was kind of a sleeper panel at the, at the summit with two of the heads of colleges, and we talked deeply at the summit about dialogue and freedom of speech, uh, and, and nurturing that. Um, your thoughts on sort of college campuses and the free expression of ideas.

   12. DFDavid Friedberg12:06

       Well, look, whe- whether it's the college campus or whether Charlie Kirk and that genre...... moves people via the internet. One of the things we talked about, with the head of Berkeley and the head of Dartmouth is that college needs to be a place that teaches kids how to think, not what to think. And I think that was one of the things that Charlie exemplified better than anyone in this kind of modern media genre, is showing people that you can have a discourse, you can have a debate, you can have a dialogue. In the same way that as a group we've had fights, we've had disagreements, we've had different points of view that we challenge each other on. One of the things early on when we started doing this podcast was people telling me that they, they thought it was so cool to see friends argue like this, and have discourse, and have debate, and we still do it. And I think Charlie exemplified that. And that teaches people how to think, and it allows them to form their own point of view. I do not believe in this notion that some system or some institution should be telling us what the truth is, or what to believe, or what reality needs to be. They can present us with the facts and the evidence that they've sourced, and they can give us a recommendation, but ultimately, we need to have agency as individuals to form our own belief systems, to form our own opinions, to make our own decisions. And I think what made Charlie so powerful was his ability to teach people how to do that, how to have a discourse and reason your way to an opinion. And I think that's one of the things that's changed so much in the last 20 years is just this idea that, you know, there's truth and there's not truth, and whatever one institution tells you is truth, and the other institution tells you is not truth, as opposed to giving ourselves individual agency.

   13. JCJason Calacanis13:54

       I wasn't his target audience and so I was aware of Charlie Kirk, but I, I had only seen, you know, flipping through social media once in a while, some of the clips, so I took the time to, knowing we were gonna talk about it here, watch at least 40 or 50 of these interactions, listen to a couple of his podcasts, and, you know, my takeaway from it was, to your point, Sax, he was incredibly respectful to people he disagrees with, certainly more respectful than you at times, Sax... (laughs) when we have debates.

   14. DFDavid Friedberg14:21

       (laughs)

   15. JCJason Calacanis14:22

       And he, uh, he was actually playful. He was gregarious with these kids when they didn't understand something. Um, and there's a lotta talk right now, people trying to, you know, point out where he was wrong. By the way, (laughs) you don't get to murder somebody because you believe they're wrong. And I know this sounds like, uh, the most obvious statement in the world, but what I came away with was he reminded me of all the Catholics my family members I grew up with. He was for family values. He was against abortion. He had specific feelings on affirmative action or DEI that we all might agree with. He might have said them, at times, in a spicy way or in a, in a really full contact debate, but these were the same conversations I had with e- you know, growing up. And, you know, this is, this is a, you know, a situation where I'm just perplexed. And I guess it goes back to where you started, Chamath, that there are some number of people who are sick right now in our society, and it seems to be young men. It seems to be the COVID generation.

2. 15:27 – 30:37

   Assassination culture in America, online radicalization

   1. JCJason Calacanis15:27

   2. DSDavid Sacks15:27

      How does a person that is seemingly a 4.0 student, on the right track, getting a scholarship, how do you so severely go off the rails? And then how do you end up in a place where you believe that something like this is even tolerated or justified? How can a person that's that seemingly intelligent get to that place?

   3. JCJason Calacanis15:51

      From a conservative family, for, uh, it seemed like he had his whole life ahead of him and was on a right track at a certain age.

   4. DSDavid Sacks15:56

      And if he's capable of it, how many other people are going to end up in that place? So what is, what is happening that basically allows these young men to become so unmoored?

   5. JCJason Calacanis16:09

      I think a lack of socialization. Again, I, we don't know in this case, but I, I have very deep concerns about these SSRIs, Adderall. These kids have all kinds of mental health issues, and then they get put on a lot of different prescription drugs. We don't know if that's the case here, so I'm, I'm not speculating about that, but just talking about this generation in general. You know, if they are permanently online, they're part of these subcultures, if they are being, you know, having their brain scrambled with all these different drugs, many young people are on two or three different medications, and I'm not necessarily anti-them, but I do have a concern of them being massively oversubscribed.

   6. DSDavid Sacks16:49

      His entire justification for this, beyond the fact that it's completely abhorrent and unacceptable, is also completely all over the place. I actually asked my team, "Explain to me the things that this guy wrote down. Like, where did they come from?" One of it is from a video game called Hell Drivers 2. Another one is from the furry subculture. Another one is a fascist theme from a Netflix show. What is going on?

   7. JCJason Calacanis17:15

      Yeah.

   8. CPChamath Palihapitiya17:16

      Well, look, I mean-

   9. DSDavid Sacks17:17

      I mean, it's-

   10. CPChamath Palihapitiya17:17

       ... we know some things about the killer's ideology from what his family said, from what other people who knew him said, and, and from what he put in his own text messages explaining why he perpetrated this murder. And I think a big part of it was that, in his view, the basically mainstream conservative views that Charlie was discussing were, in his view, they were hateful and they were, they were fascist. I think on one of the bullet casings, he etched, "Catch this fascist." He had this view that, first of all, that violence is justified as a way to end a political debate, and that relatively mainstream conservative thought was so hateful and beyond the pale that it needed to be stopped. And I'd like to say that those views are so unusual that nobody else has them, but the truth is, if you look at the data, if you look at polling, you see that there's been a huge rise...... on the part of young people, and particularly on the left, although there's some on the right, but it's mostly on the left. They believe now that political violence can be-

   11. JCJason Calacanis18:27

       This is normal.

   12. CPChamath Palihapitiya18:28

       ... justified.

   13. JCJason Calacanis18:29

       Yeah.

   14. CPChamath Palihapitiya18:29

       And so you look, I mean, there's, there's been many different, uh, ways of, of getting at this. There was a study, I guess Rutgers University, the Social Perception Lab, they asked about whether the murder of Donald Trump or Elon Musk could be justified. And-

   15. JCJason Calacanis18:46

       This is insane.

   16. CPChamath Palihapitiya18:48

       ... 50% of leftist center said yes, 14% of rightist center said yes. Even that number's shocking to me.

   17. JCJason Calacanis18:55

       H- how could it be 1%, I mean-

   18. CPChamath Palihapitiya18:56

       But obviously it's, it's three times greater on the left. Then they asked about destroying Tesla dealerships in protests, whether that could be justified, and roughly 60% of leftist center said yes, and 23% of right of center said yes. So there is, I think, an increasing view on the part of young people, and this also coincides with similar declines in respect for the value of free speech. They've been polling people of all different age groups and different political parties for m- many, many years on whether they believe in free speech, and those numbers have been on the decline, again, particularly among young people, and particularly on the left. And so you see it now in the data that there is a generation of young liberals, I mean, obviously not all to be sure, but a sizable contingent who believe that the other side is so hateful that it's okay to use violence against them.

   19. JCJason Calacanis19:55

       And then-

   20. CPChamath Palihapitiya19:56

       And-

   21. JCJason Calacanis19:56

       You... Yeah?

   22. CPChamath Palihapitiya19:57

       That is a huge societal problem, because democracy ends when we can't debate ideas.

   23. DSDavid Sacks20:04

       What's at the root of it?

   24. JCJason Calacanis20:06

       I, I have two things I think are at the root of this. I mean, I talked a little bit earlier about the medication, uh, that they're putting all these kids on, and I'm gonna keep talking about it because we're talking about, you know, upwards of 20% of kids have been on SSRIs or on Adderall or, or some stimulant right now. And it's not possible that all these kids need this and there is many other solutions to it. And then I'll add the algorithms, not that an algorithm is responsible for the murder, but we are taking people down rabbit holes online. And in fact, Charlie's content was exceptional at engaging people, right? Short form, you know, really interesting debates and all that kind of stuff. And that combination of being online too much, being over-medicated, being isolated, you put all that together, Chamath, and I think that's what leads to these kind of extreme-

   25. DSDavid Sacks20:58

       Uh, it doesn't.

   26. JCJason Calacanis20:59

       ... uh, theories and disconnects from reality. But we could also be dealing with somebody who is severely mentally ill-

   27. DSDavid Sacks21:03

       There-

   28. JCJason Calacanis21:04

       ... and we're trying to understand a severely mentally ill person's-

   29. CPChamath Palihapitiya21:07

       Well, hold, hold on a second.

   30. JCJason Calacanis21:07

       ... you know.
3. 30:37 – 49:11

   Jimmy Kimmel suspended indefinitely by ABC

   1. JCJason Calacanis30:37

      here but...

   2. DFDavid Friedberg30:37

      Did you see the Jimmy Kimmel comments, and should we play those and talk about it?

   3. JCJason Calacanis30:42

      Yeah. I guess it's a pretty good segue here. Um, so, uh, political di- discourse adjacent, related, uh, the fallout from the murder of Charlie Kirk is gonna stay with us for some time here. ABC has suspended Jimmy Kimmel from Jimmy Kimmel Live indefinitely after he made the following remarks, and pressure from the FCC and the affiliates of ABC. Here is the 15-second clip.

   4. NANarrator31:08

      (laugh track) We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it. In between the finger-pointing, there was, uh, grieving-

   5. JCJason Calacanis31:22

      And he goes on to show a clip of Trump.

   6. CPChamath Palihapitiya31:26

      Yeah. But I think you, you also left out that sentence right after that where he says, "Yeah, there was grieving, but it was like a four-year-old grieving the death of a goldfish."

   7. JCJason Calacanis31:34

      Yeah. So, um, yeah. Pretty inappropriate comments, I think. And here's the, uh, timeline of it. So, 'cause there was some thinking this could have been a MAGA person because the parents were conservatives and during that breaking news, you know, maybe that first sentence wouldn't be as off-putting or inaccurate as it seems to be. But he said it Monday night, and this was three days after we knew about the anti-fascist bullet casings that Chamath was referencing, "Hey, fascist catch," et cetera. And this was one day after Utah's governor was very clear that this was a murderer who had leftist ideology and one day after it was disclosed that Robinson had been living with a trans partner, which may or may not turn out to be relevant. Uh, you could totally have, be gay or have a trans part or any of that and m- may have nothing to do with this, or it could have everything to do with this. So, we'll have to wait and see.

   8. CPChamath Palihapitiya32:32

      And, J- JCal, wasn't the, the, um... weren't the text messages out by then at the... as well?

   9. JCJason Calacanis32:36

      Well, the text message was part of this very good. The- those were actually released on Tuesday after the show aired, and they usually tape in the afternoons for those nightly shows, just so people know that. So, there was enough information here that, you know, he was inaccurate or spinning the story, however you want to phrase it. It was clumsy.

   10. CPChamath Palihapitiya32:55

       Megyn Kelly put out a very long description of everything that was known prior to Jimmy Kimmel's remarks-

   11. DFDavid Friedberg33:00

       Yeah.

   12. CPChamath Palihapitiya33:01

       ... and there was a huge amount of information to indicate that this was someone who was in the grips of a radical leftist ideology and no evidence to suggest that they were somehow part of MAGA. And what Jimmy Kimmel did there was viciously lie, I think, implying or stating outright that, effectively, Charlie Kirk was, was killed by one of his own, by a MAGA person, thereby, I think, diminishing the crime-

   13. DFDavid Friedberg33:30

       Yeah, it's hard. It was so awkward the way he said it, "We hit some new-"

   14. CPChamath Palihapitiya33:30

       ... to somehow imply maybe that he deserved it. And then he diminished the sincere grief and outrage that millions of people are feeling. You know, beyond those of us who are friends with Charlie and knew Charlie-

   15. DFDavid Friedberg33:42

       Yeah, but, but, but that is-

   16. CPChamath Palihapitiya33:42

       ... but millions of people-

   17. DFDavid Friedberg33:44

       But that is okay. You know, in, in free speech, Sax, that statement, that's his choice. He might lose audience over it, but free speech protects him doing that. The challenge was, did he say something that he knew to be not true and declare it as fact, and did that re- kind of-

   18. CPChamath Palihapitiya34:02

       He didn't.

   19. DFDavid Friedberg34:02

       ... was the reaction that he got?

   20. CPChamath Palihapitiya34:04

       Yeah. Yeah.

   21. DFDavid Friedberg34:04

       Yeah, and so if he said something that he kne-

   22. CPChamath Palihapitiya34:06

       How do you know that?

   23. JCJason Calacanis34:06

       Well, just reading his sentence, you know, he was saying, "We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them." So, he's referencing the weekend. So, he... You, know you could say he's being disingenuous here, but I think he's not being factually inaccurate.

   24. CPChamath Palihapitiya34:24

       It's not even funny. He's supposed to be a late-night comedian. It is, it is-

   25. JCJason Calacanis34:27

       Not funny.

   26. CPChamath Palihapitiya34:27

       ... inaccurate. It's highly inaccurate. It's a lie and it's a vicious lie.

   27. JCJason Calacanis34:31

       I'm not defending it, but it was not inaccurate that people were doing that speculation. During a podcast on Tuesday, FCC Chair Brendan Carr, who we all know, said the FCC would look into revoking the broadcast license of ABC affiliates because Jimmy Kimmel, Kimmel was engaging in "news distortion" by falsely claiming Tyler Robinson was MAGA. On Wednesday, Nexstar, one of ABC's affiliates, uh, that has 28 local stations, said it would be replacing Kimmel's show with different programming. And there's now this backstory that Nexstar is buying a rival for $6 billion, so the speculation is, like the CBS and Paramount situation where they fired Colbert on July 17th, that they don't want to get caught up in, uh, having the 47th Administration gumming up their M&A activity. And then ABC, after all that, pulled Jimmy Kimmel indefinitely. So, I guess the question here, Sax, what's the heart of this?

   28. DFDavid Friedberg35:28

       I'll say, I'll say this. Pull up the ratings. Pull up the ratings over time.

   29. JCJason Calacanis35:30

       Oh.

   30. DFDavid Friedberg35:30

       Just pull up that chart.
4. 49:11 – 1:01:09

   The Ellison Media Empire: Paramount, Warner Bros Discovery, TikTok

   1. JCJason Calacanis49:11

      Let's talk about Larry and David Ellison. They're making massive media moves both in legacy and social media. Let's talk about the legacy stuff first. Paramount Skydance merger is basically a month old and already CEO David Ellison, that's Larry Ellison's son, is looking to acquire Warner Brothers Discovery. As you probably know, they're run by David Zaslav. They own CNN, HBO, DC Comics, Discovery, a bunch of other brands. And that would put the Ellisons in charge of not just CBS News, which owns 60 Minutes, they would also own CNN. As everybody knows, Larry Ellison, big GOP donor in the past, and there also are reports, interestingly, that David Ellison wants to buy The Free Press from Bart Weiss for 200 million and put her in charge of CBS and 60 Minutes, that would be seismic in the news business. If you put those assets together, 200 million paid subs, HBO Discovery, 120 million paid subs right now, CBS reaches 80 million paid with Paramount Plus, and The Free Press is obviously niche and brand new, uh, but they're growing. They got a 136,000 paid subscribers and, you know, almost a million followers across their social media. The second piece to this puzzle that's super interesting is social media. Oracle is now the heavy favorite to acquire TikTok, and, uh, Trump said that was gonna happen as part of the US and China negotiations that are ongoing for trade. So what are your thoughts here, Friedberg? You wanted to talk about this. There's an interesting collection of assets coming under the Ellison umbrella. Is this strategic? Is this vanity? Is it a nepo baby with a huge pa- you know, blind checkbook? What, what, what are we seeing here and what do you think?

   2. DFDavid Friedberg50:54

      I mean, what do you do when you're worth a couple 100 billion dollars and you're 81 years old and you're thinking about what legacy you want to leave behind, except to perhaps empower your kid to build the largest, most influential media company in history?

   3. JCJason Calacanis51:09

      Hm.

   4. DFDavid Friedberg51:09

      And I think that's the story that's unfolding in front of us. Not to mention, I think that the TikTok deal and Ellison's role in TikTok is gonna be instrumental in realizing potential future distribution. So, if you think about the way media has evolved, it used to be kind of centralized studio based production models, the old Paramount, the old Warner Brothers, et cetera, and then there's been a lot of streamers that have come on that started to syndicate that content and contract for production of content like Netflix, and obviously Paramount Plus and HBO Max have their own streaming services to deliver their own content. But at the end of the day, there's kind of two big behemoths that each come at it from a different place. One is YouTube and the other one is Netflix. Netflix has historically been in the kind of scripted production or contracted production side, and YouTube in the social production side. The alternative to that might be this consolidated merger and TikTok, and now Larry Ellison's going to have a hand in both. And so there may be, and I do think that there's going to be this convergence between this kind of socially generated content platform, like a YouTube, like a TikTok, and the high value produced content, like the studios like Netflix has been doing. And the reason is, Netflix has had to compress margins on the content creators. And we talked about this at our summit last week, where a lot of the creators now that went to Netflix to get good deals or went to Amazon, they're all finding that the budgets are getting cut and that the only way these folks are going to get paid is like cost of production plus 10%, with cost of production getting squeezed and budgets getting squeezed by Netflix. So as a creator, you may actually make more money by taking your content to a bigger audience with sponsors or advertisers on YouTube. And so a lot of big time creators... By the way, the audience at YouTube is over 10X bigger than it is on Netflix. So Netflix is only paying to retain subscribers now. You know, subscriber growth has kind of slowed down a bit. At the end of the day, Netflix is just spending money on content to keep people on the platform. So if you take the incredibly rich content and production capabilities of HBO and all the Warner Brother Discovery media properties and production houses underneath this combined company, and you combine that with the direct to consumer distribution of TikTok, there may in the future be a merger between this media company and TikTok or a deep commercial relationship where imagine going on TikTok and you can now get premium content for 10 bucks a month or two bucks an episode and watch all of your HBO shows in the TikTok app, or watch all of the Discovery shows or all of the other content that's available. So I do think that the distribution that has been dr- delivered by this kind of social media model, like YouTube and TikTok, combined with the premium model, may end up creating a real category killer that can challenge both YouTube and Netflix. And so I would kind of look at this story as like a beginning of an unfolding of something that may rewrite the entire media landscape.

   5. JCJason Calacanis54:07

      I mean, when you look back on it, Friedberg, Katzenberg had... was maybe ahead of his time with Quibi. He wanted to try to make this bridge between the two, the... and, and he just might have been too early or just didn't execute-

   6. DFDavid Friedberg54:19

      Well, think about-

   7. JCJason Calacanis54:20

      ... the network-

   8. DFDavid Friedberg54:20

      I mean, think about the network effects. What made TikTok so big and what made YouTube so big is the long tail of user generated content, and that's what drove the audience, and that's what built the- the platform-

   9. JCJason Calacanis54:30

      And clicks for mainstream, right?

   10. DFDavid Friedberg54:32

       And yeah, well, then you can do the, the, the premium stuff on top of it.

   11. JCJason Calacanis54:35

       Yeah.

   12. DFDavid Friedberg54:35

       But when you try and create premium content in a small way like Katzenberg tried to do, it's very hard to build the audience to make the economics make sense.

   13. JCJason Calacanis54:42

       Yes.

   14. DFDavid Friedberg54:43

       And the economics are really challenging already with premium content in the big players, as you can see with Netflix-... they're, they're compressing budgets.

   15. JCJason Calacanis54:50

       Hmm.

   16. DFDavid Friedberg54:50

       So I would, I would argue that you really need to have them both to make the model work now, because the audience is so attuned to user-generated content.

   17. JCJason Calacanis54:57

       Here's what our partner, Polymarket, shout out to my guy, Shane, 84%, Larry Ellison or Oracle, kind of the same thing here, they put a slash, acquired TikTok. That's up over 20 percentage points in the last couple of days. What do you think all this means? The, the divestiture of TikTok, Larry Ellison getting it, as opposed to Google, Apple, Microsoft? I mean, there are so many people, maybe even Elon, who might have wanted TikTok. What do you think of this divestiture? And then, uh, our government gets the golden vote now. I understand that the US government will have a seat on the board of, uh, TikTok. So, the Chinese have given it up, except for the algorithm. What are your thoughts?

   18. DFDavid Friedberg55:37

       Remember, it's TikTok, it's TikTok US.

   19. JCJason Calacanis55:39

       Yeah, of course.

   20. DFDavid Friedberg55:40

       It's only 5% of the over- it's only 5%, five to 8% of the overall TikTok business.

   21. JCJason Calacanis55:45

       Yeah.

   22. DFDavid Friedberg55:45

       So TikTok US is what's being spun out.

   23. JCJason Calacanis55:47

       Yes, correct. Chamath, what do you, what do you think here?

   24. DSDavid Sacks55:50

       I think there's two things that are important. The first is that in the future, and this may sound very dystopian, but he who controls the algorithm will control what people think. And if you think about it in that context, you need, as you've said before, a marketplace of very different approaches and algorithms that are essentially fighting for mindshare. If you don't have that, you'll have a massive zombie groupthink culture.

   25. JCJason Calacanis56:19

       Hmm.

   26. DSDavid Sacks56:19

       So from that perspective, you have to put TikTok into the hands of a completely different owner than any of these other social media sites so that they are motivated to compete against each other. That's one. The second thing is, there's been a lot that has been said about the TikTok algorithm, called Monolith, and a bunch of it has been already put out openly and TikTok was very transparent and they published a paper, you can find it on arXiv, you can show the link to it, Nick, maybe in the show notes, but it's an incredible paper that describes a very simplistic approach to essentially moving people into different directions of thought. So if you put all of these ideas together, I think where we are, maybe all the way coming back to where we started this discussion about Charlie Kirk, it is increasingly important to make sure that the overwhelming majority of how people get ideas is understood by the rest of the people. Because if you start to go down these rabbit holes in ways that are algorithmically programmed, in models that you don't understand that then push you into extremism, you will end up in a very, very, very bad place, as will society. And then the, the outcomes of that are completely avoidable, as we're seeing.

   27. JCJason Calacanis57:37

       Yes.

   28. DSDavid Sacks57:37

       So, I think that the TikTok thing is going to be one of these important moments where we shine a light on the importance of these algorithms. It's poorly understood. It's not well talked about. But I think what the Trump administration doing is important to keep it away from everybody else so that there's more competition.

   29. JCJason Calacanis57:56

       Yeah. I'm gonna, um, strongly agree. I think the Trump administration did a great job on this one, just calling balls and strikes of not making sure Meta got it, or somebody who has already a lot of algorithmic control over what society's seeing. And back to the algorithms-

   30. DSDavid Sacks58:10

       By the way, sorry, just, just on this.
5. 1:01:09 – 1:06:23

   Besties discover their recent YouTube videos have been flagged as "Restricted"

   1. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:01:09

      hey, let me just... Did someone mention that our Tulsi video from All In Summit has been-

   2. DFDavid Friedberg1:01:13

      Yeah, I can confirm-

   3. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:01:14

      ... partially censored on YouTube?

   4. DFDavid Friedberg1:01:16

      So what happened-

   5. JCJason Calacanis1:01:17

      Yes.

   6. DFDavid Friedberg1:01:17

      ... is I was, I was at my office yesterday and I open up our YouTube channel 'cause Nick had sent out a link that something new had posted, so I went to go see what had posted that day. So I pull it up and I saw the Summit videos and I saw that Tulsi wasn't there. I'm like, "Wait, didn't we post Tulsi?" And I looked for it and I couldn't find it. So I text Nick and he says it is there. And then I, I clicked on the thing and it said, "Safe Search is on." What does that mean? I searched and apparently, if your network administrator on your enterprise, 'cause I was at my office, we had like our network set restricted mode it's called. In restricted mode, people can't like look at adult content on the network and that kinda stuff. And when you have restricted mode on, YouTube turns off anything that would fall under mature audiences. So here it is, activate restricted mode. So it prevents others-

   7. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:02:04

      That's a huge number of people.

   8. JCJason Calacanis1:02:05

      Huge number of people.

   9. DFDavid Friedberg1:02:06

      And, and yeah, and so basically-

   10. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:02:07

       That's a huge number of people.

   11. DSDavid Sacks1:02:07

       So this would be, this would've been the second most viewed video, I guarantee you, after the Elon video.

   12. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:02:13

       It's a great discussion.

   13. DSDavid Sacks1:02:13

       Maybe, and maybe the most viewed. And I was shocked, I said, "How is it possible that this video is struggling to be in the top half?" And this is why.

   14. DFDavid Friedberg1:02:24

       And you can't even see it, so then when you op-

   15. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:02:25

       So they're being shadow banned. They're being shadow banned.

   16. DFDavid Friedberg1:02:26

       When you open up... Well, it's unclear, so certain videos then get tagged as being for mature audiences-

   17. DSDavid Sacks1:02:32

       By who?

   18. DFDavid Friedberg1:02:32

       ... and they don't show up in restricted mode. By the algorithm on YouTube.

   19. JCJason Calacanis1:02:36

       Oh, so it's the algorithm did it again. It wasn't people reporting it?

   20. DFDavid Friedberg1:02:39

       And, and I'll give you guys my theory. My theory is because she used, the term Russiagate comes up and those sorts of terms-

   21. JCJason Calacanis1:02:44

       Ah, Russiagate.

   22. DFDavid Friedberg1:02:45

       And I think those terms are triggers, if they're in the transcript, they're triggers to be under kind of safe mode.

   23. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:02:49

       Just debunking Russiagate.

   24. DFDavid Friedberg1:02:51

       Right, but I don't think the algorithm could-

   25. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:02:52

       Do you, do you think if it was a video-

   26. DFDavid Friedberg1:02:54

       ... need that.

   27. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:02:54

       ... uh, espousing and promoting the Russiagate hoax that it would've gotten censored this way?

   28. DFDavid Friedberg1:02:59

       That's a good question. I don't know. Yeah, I don't know.

   29. JCJason Calacanis1:03:01

       I mean, we can test that by looking for other people discussing it. I mean, you mentioned Scott Adams early talks about it 17 times in episodes-

   30. DFDavid Friedberg1:03:09

       By the way, this is a government official in the White House who is the Director of National Intelligence who is providing an interview on national intelligence and is being filtered out as being for adults only.
6. 1:06:23 – 1:19:05

   All-In Summit recap

   1. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:06:23

      filtered.

   2. JCJason Calacanis1:06:23

      All right, listen. Great segue here because, uh, we didn't get to recap the summit, and we had... quite paradoxically, we had a real discussion about the importance of debate, friendship, and you know, the, the process we try to do here and at the summit which is let a lot of people speak and debate important issues of which the Tulsi and the college university heads discussions, so many of these were important discussions. But people didn't see our recap, but just going around the horn here, great moments you felt were important or enlightening to you-Chamath, did you have a moment at the summit that, you know, one of your amazing insights that you felt were particularly insightful-

   3. DFDavid Friedberg1:07:12

      (laughs)

   4. JCJason Calacanis1:07:12

      ... that you wanna share with the audience-

   5. DFDavid Friedberg1:07:14

      I think the most important-

   6. JCJason Calacanis1:07:14

      ... amongst your insights?

   7. DFDavid Friedberg1:07:15

      (laughs)

   8. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:07:15

      I think the most important conversation there was the one with Tulsi. I really do. I mean, I think at a very basic level, why does America go to war? Why do we fight wars? Why are men and women being killed? Why? And it, it just... It's the same thing with Charlie Kirk. I just get so agitated with this idea that a human being believes that they have the judgment to take somebody else's life, to me, is incomprehensible. It's just so wrong. It's so immoral. It's just so wrong. And what she talked about and what she's exposing is the cascade of lies that causes an entire generation to lose tens of thousands of their brothers and sisters, to lose your, your son and your da-... I... So yeah, it's, um... That was the most important conversation we had by a country mile.

   9. JCJason Calacanis1:08:10

      Freeberg, do you have a moment for you that was either entertaining, enlightening, or important? I'll, I'll let you take any angle on it.

   10. DFDavid Friedberg1:08:19

       I would recount our wrap-up that we did at the end of day two. When we first started planning the content for the summit this year, I was actually thinking about trying to get a bunch of American speakers for day one and then a bunch of international speakers for day two, where we could kind of contrast the American perspective from the global perspective, and hear how does the rest of the world view the world and, and view America and how does America view America and view the world. And it was hard to kind of get the scheduling right. So the way things kind of ended up getting scheduled out, we, we tried to cluster the conversations into different themes, but I didn't feel like we were gonna get the orientation I was hoping for. And so we ended up having just a bunch of conversations. But what was really powerful for me was that the similarity we saw with Elon, with Tucker and Mark Cuban, with Alex Karp. We brought it up I think also with Eric Schmidt, is this idea that much of what we see in terms of the evolution of society in the West can be viewed through a lens of suicide, that the West may be committing suicide financially in our deficit spending, in terms of birth rate decline. So we're, we're kind of destroying our dollar, we're destroying our headcount because of the birth rate decline. And then this immigration policy issue where we're potentially destroying cultures, which was a topic that came up a few times. And perhaps even thinking about the Tulsi comments, destroying ourselves by, by thrusting ourselves into war and chopping our heads off. And then we heard a lot of optimism. We heard a lot of technologists, we heard a lot of folks talk about the options and the choice we have, and that we have a choice to kind of reverse these trends and kind of change how we're behaving as a society. And so it all came together as one long string, and we ended it with this idea that there's choice, and you have a choice to kind of go forward or you have a choice to commit suicide. And then what really hit me was then we walk out and then the Charlie Kirk murder happened. And so it created this emotional wrapper for me on the conversations we had, that there are a lot of people that are gonna make different choices.

   11. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:10:31

       Mm-hmm.

   12. DFDavid Friedberg1:10:31

       And so I, I just wish we could do a summary of what it was like at the summit instead of each one of these talks standing on their own. They work well on their own. But I think that that whole kind of set of conversations leading to that point of view was really important and poignant for me.

   13. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:10:44

       Did we end up publishing our final, like, wrap-up conversation?

   14. JCJason Calacanis1:10:47

       Not yet.

   15. DFDavid Friedberg1:10:48

       I want to. We have not done it. What I wanna do is I wanna do that with the summary video at the end of the summary video. So I wanna be like, "Here's the- a couple of key points from the, the talks," once we get all the talks out, and then our wrap-up conversation, which I think we should do.

   16. JCJason Calacanis1:11:01

       Sacks, you were incredibly engaged in this summit. You showed up, you were engaged. Were there moments that you found particularly enlightening, inspiring, fun for you?

   17. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:11:15

       Oh my gosh, we just found out that the Karp interview has also been censored on safe mode on YouTube.

   18. JCJason Calacanis1:11:21

       (sighs)

   19. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:11:21

       So wait, basically the three talks were Tucker, Tulsi, and Karp, which by the way, I think if you had the audience vote on what the most engaging and interesting talks were- Those were the three best.

   20. JCJason Calacanis1:11:33

       Those are up there.

   21. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:11:33

       Yeah. And by the way-

   22. JCJason Calacanis1:11:34

       Yeah. They're shorter.

   23. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:11:34

       ... there are a lot of other really good ones, but those ones I think were the most captivating. I think the audience you could see was like really engrossed.

   24. JCJason Calacanis1:11:43

       Animated.

   25. DFDavid Friedberg1:11:43

       It could be because of Jason's point, which is that if enough people click report an issue, it gets put into that out- that part of the algorithm, so-

   26. JCJason Calacanis1:11:49

       Yeah, we're gonna have to give a little grace to Neil here. We obviously concerned with-

   27. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:11:53

       Oh, so who's the, who's the one who's doing all the reporting here? Who's weaponizing the YouTube re- reporting system? It's a bunch of tolerant liberals.

   28. JCJason Calacanis1:12:00

       Yeah. Could be... It could be Putin. You never know. (laughs) Sacks, do you have a moment's-

   29. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:12:05

       We don't need the Russians doing this to us when we're doing it to ourselves.

   30. DFDavid Friedberg1:12:08

       (laughs)

Episode duration: 1:22:21