E116: Toxic out-of-control trains, regulators, and AI

Jason Calacanis 0:00 All right, everybody. Welcome to, uh, the next episode, perhaps the last of the All-In Pocket. (laughs) 'Cause you never know. We got a full docket here for you today. With us, of course, the Sultan of Silence, Friedberg, coming off of his incredible win for, um, a bunch of animals and Chamath-

Chamath Palihapitiya 0:18 The Humane Society of the United States.

Jason Calacanis 0:21 How much did you raise for the Humane Society of the United States playing poker, uh, live on television last week? Or earlier this week?

Chamath Palihapitiya 0:28 $80,000.

Jason Calacanis 0:29 $80,000?

David Friedberg 0:29 How much did you win actually?

Chamath Palihapitiya 0:31 Well, so there was the 35K coin flip and then I won 45, so $80,000 total.

Jason Calacanis 0:37 $80,000?

Chamath Palihapitiya 0:39 You know, so we played live at the Hustler Casino live poker stream on Monday. You can watch it on YouTube. Chamath absolutely crushed the game. Made a ton of money for Bees Philanthropy. He'll, he'll share that.

Jason Calacanis 0:48 How much, S- Chamath, did you win?

Chamath Palihapitiya 0:51 He made like 350 grand, right? He made like three-

Narrator 0:53 Wow.

David Friedberg 0:53 361,000.

Chamath Palihapitiya 0:54 361 grand?

Jason Calacanis 0:55 Oh my God. So-

Chamath Palihapitiya 0:55 He crushed it.

Jason Calacanis 0:56 ... between the two of you, you raised 450 grand for charity?

David Friedberg 1:01 It's like LeBron James being asked to play basketball with a bunch of four-year-olds.

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:08 (laughs)

David Friedberg 1:09 That's what it felt like to me.

Narrator 1:10 Oh, wow.

Jason Calacanis 1:10 Wow.

David Friedberg 1:10 It's insane.

Jason Calacanis 1:10 You're talking about yourself now.

David Friedberg 1:12 Yes.

Jason Calacanis 1:12 That's amazing.

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:13 You're LeBron and all your friends that you play poker with are the four-year-olds? Is that the deal?

David Friedberg 1:17 Yes.

Narrator 1:18 I'm going all in. Let your winners ride. Rain Man, David Sachs. I'm going all in. And I said we open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it.

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:31 Love you guys.

Narrator 1:31 Queen of Quinoa. I'm going all in. Who else was at the table?

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:36 Alan Keating.

Jason Calacanis 1:37 Phil Hellmuth. Hellmuth, Keating-

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:39 Stanley Tang.

David Friedberg 1:40 Stanley Tang from DoorDash.

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:41 J.R., J.R.

David Friedberg 1:42 Uh, Stanley Choi.

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:43 Stanley Choi.

David Friedberg 1:44 And Nitberg.

Narrator 1:45 Who's that?

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:46 (laughs)

David Friedberg 1:46 And Nit- Nitberg, yeah.

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:47 My new nickname.

David Friedberg 1:49 That's the new nickname for Friedberg, Nitberg.

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:50 Friedberg.

Narrator 1:51 Oh.

David Friedberg 1:51 Oh, he was knitting it up, Sachs. He had the needles out and everything. BIP, BIP, BIP, BIP, BIP, BIP, BIP, BIP, BIP, BIP.

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:54 I bought in 10K and I cashed out 90. And they're referring to you now, Sachs, as Scared Sachs because you won't play on the live stream.

David Friedberg 2:00 His V- his VPIP was 7%.

Chamath Palihapitiya 2:01 No, my VPIP was 24%.

Narrator 2:03 If I had known there was an opportunity to make 350,000 against a bunch of four-year-olds, I would have done that.

David Friedberg 2:09 (laughs)

Jason Calacanis 2:09 Would you have given it to charity? And which one of DeSantis' charities would you have given it to?

Narrator 2:13 (laughs)

Jason Calacanis 2:14 Which charity?

Narrator 2:14 If it had been a charity game, I would have donated to charity.

Jason Calacanis 2:17 Would you have done it if you could have given the money to the DeSantis Super PAC? That's the question.

David Friedberg 2:24 You could do that. You can do that.

Narrator 2:26 That's a good idea.

Jason Calacanis 2:26 Good idea.

David Friedberg 2:26 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis 2:26 Why don't you host a-

David Friedberg 2:27 Good idea.

Jason Calacanis 2:28 That's actually a really good idea. We should do a poker game for the presidential candidates. We all play for our favorite presidential candidates.

David Friedberg 2:33 Oh, that'd be great.

Jason Calacanis 2:34 And the donation-

David Friedberg 2:35 That's a good idea, actually.

Jason Calacanis 2:35 ... we each go in for 50K and then Sachs has to see his 50K go to Nikki Haley.

Narrator 2:39 (laughs) Oh my God. That would be incredible.

Jason Calacanis 2:41 That would be bitterness. Let me ask you something, uh, Nitberg. How many beagles... 'Cause you saved one beagle that was gonna be used for cosmetic research or tortured, and that beagle's name is your dog. What's your dog's name?

Chamath Palihapitiya 2:54 Daisy.

Jason Calacanis 2:55 So you saved one beagle-

Chamath Palihapitiya 2:57 Nick, please post a picture in the video stream. Thank you.

Jason Calacanis 2:59 ... from being tortured to death.

Narrator 3:01 (laughs)

Jason Calacanis 3:01 With your 80,000, how many dogs will the Humane Society save from being tortured to death?

Chamath Palihapitiya 3:06 It's a good question. The 80,000 will go into their general fund, which they actually use for supporting legislative action that improves the conditions for animals in animal agriculture, supports some of these rescue programs. They operate several sanctuaries. So there's a lot of different uses, um, for the capital at Humane Society. Really important organization for animal rights.

Jason Calacanis 3:31 Fantastic. And then Beaste, MrBeast, has... Is it a food bank, Chamath? Explain what that charity does actually, what that 350,000 will do.

David Friedberg 3:40 Yeah, Jimmy started this thing called Bees Philanthropy, which is one of the largest food pantries in the United States. So when people have food insecurity, these guys provide them food. And so this will help feed, I don't know, tens of thousands of people, I guess.

Jason Calacanis 3:55 Well, that's fantastic. Good for MrBeast. Did you see the, uh, backlash against MrBeast for curing everybody's (laughs) ... as a total aside, curing a thousand people's blindness and how insane that was?

David Friedberg 4:06 Good topic. I didn't see it. What do you guys think about it?

Jason Calacanis 4:08 Friedberg.

David Friedberg 4:09 Friedberg, what, what do you think?

Chamath Palihapitiya 4:11 I mean, there was, um, a bunch of commentary even on some, like, pretty mainstream-ish publications saying... I think TechCrunch had an article, right? Saying that MrBeast's video-

Jason Calacanis 4:24 I think there was, yeah.

Chamath Palihapitiya 4:24 ... where he paid for cataract surgery for 1,000 people that otherwise could not afford cataract surgery, you know, giving them vision, is ableism.

Jason Calacanis 4:37 (laughs)

Chamath Palihapitiya 4:38 And that it, uh, basically implies that people that can't see are handicapped and, you know, therefore you're kind of saying that their condition is not acceptable, uh, in a, in a societal way. What do you think about that?

David Friedberg 4:50 I thought that was a-

Jason Calacanis 4:51 Really- Really even worse, they, they said he was exploiting them, Chamath.

David Friedberg 4:55 Exploiting them, right.

Jason Calacanis 4:56 And the narrative was, what... And this is this hysteria of nonsense-

David Friedberg 5:00 This is nonsense but I think I understand it. I'm curious, what do you guys think about it? Jason, what do you think about it?

Jason Calacanis 5:04 Let me just explain to you guys what they said.

Chamath Palihapitiya 5:05 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis 5:05 They, they said something even more insane. What... Their quote was more like, "What does it say about America and society when a billionaire is the only way that blind people can see again and he's exploiting them for his own fame?" And it was like, number one, who cares... Did the people who are now not blind care how this suffering was relieved? Of course not. And this is his money. He probably lost money on the video. And how dare he use his fame to help people? I mean, it's, it's the worst wokeism, whatever word we wanna use, virtue signaling, that you could possibly imagine.

David Friedberg 5:43 What do you think, Friedberg?

Jason Calacanis 5:44 It's, it'd be like being angry at you for donating to Bees Philanthropy for playing cards.

David Friedberg 5:48 Friedberg, what do you think?

Chamath Palihapitiya 5:48 No, I think, I think the positioning that this is ableism or whatever they term it as is just ridiculous. I think that when someone does something good for someone else and it helps those people, uh, that are in need and want that help, it should be-... there, there should be accolades and acknowledgment and, and, and reward, uh, for him-

Jason Calacanis 6:08 Why do you guys think-

Chamath Palihapitiya 6:08 ... doing that, end of story.

Jason Calacanis 6:08 Why do you guys think-

Chamath Palihapitiya 6:08 End of story.

Jason Calacanis 6:09 Why do you guys think-

Chamath Palihapitiya 6:10 End of story.

Jason Calacanis 6:10 ... that those folks feel the way that they do? That's what I'm interested in. Like if you could put yourself into the mind of the person that was offended-

Chamath Palihapitiya 6:20 Yeah, there, look, I mean, this is all rooted in-

Jason Calacanis 6:22 ... why are they offended?

Chamath Palihapitiya 6:22 ... uh, in, uh, thi- uh, 'cause there's a, it, there's a, there's a rooted notion of equality regardless of one's condition. There's also this very deep-rooted notion that regardless of, you know, uh, whatever someone is given naturally that they need to kind of be, be given the same, uh, condition as people who have a different natural condition. (laughs) And I think that rooted in that notion of equality, you kind of can take it to the absolute extreme and the absolute extreme is no one can be different from anyone else. And that's also a very dangerous place to end up. And I think that's where some of this commentary has ended up, unfortunately. So it comes from a place of equality, it comes from a place of acceptance, but take it to the com- complete extreme where as a result everyone is equal, everyone is the same, you ignore differences, and differences are actually very important to acknowledge because some differences people want to change, and they want to improve their differences, or they want to change their differences. And I think, you know, it's, it's really hard to just kind of wash everything away that makes people different.

Jason Calacanis 7:24 I think it's even more cynical, Chamath, uh, since you're asking our opinion, I think these publications would like to tickle people's outrage and to get clicks-

Chamath Palihapitiya 7:35 Got rich people-

Jason Calacanis 7:35 ... and their, uh, and the, the greatest target is a rich person and, uh, then combining it with somebody who is downtrodden and being abused by a rich person and then some failing of society, i.e. universal healthcare. So I think it's just like a, a, a triple win in tickling everybody's outrage. Oh, we can hate this billionaire. Oh, we can hate society and how corrupt it is that we have billionaires and we don't have healthcare. And then we have a victim. But none of those people are victims. None of those thousand people feel like victims. If you watch the actual video, not only does he cure their blindness, he hands a number of them $10,000 in cash and says, "Hey, here's $10,000 just so you can have a great week, uh, next week when you have your first, you know, week of vision. Go, go on vacation or something." Any great deed sh- uh, as Friedberg's saying, like just, uh, we, we want more of that. Yes, sir, we should have universal healthcare. I agree.

David Sacks 8:30 May I ask-

Jason Calacanis 8:30 What do you think, Sax?

David Sacks 8:31 Well, let me ask a corollary question, which is

David Sacks 8:34 why is this train derailment in Ohio not getting any coverage or outrage? I mean, there's more outrage at MrBeast for helping to cure blind people than outrage...

Jason Calacanis 8:46 Great question.

David Sacks 8:46 ... over, uh, this train derailment and this controlled demolition, supposedly, or controlled burn of vinyl chloride that released a plume of phosgene gas into the air, which is a, uh, which is basically poison gas. It was, that was the poison gas used in War I that created the most casualties in the war. It's unbelievable. It's chemical gas.

Jason Calacanis 9:12 Friedberg, explain the s-...

Chamath Palihapitiya 9:13 I, I think, I think, uh-

Jason Calacanis 9:13 Okay, so just so people know that this happened, a train carrying 20 cars of highly flammable toxic chemicals derailed. We don't know at, at least at the time of this taping, I don't think we know how it derailed, if it was sabotaged-

Chamath Palihapitiya 9:27 There was a claim that there was an issue with an axle on one of the, the cars.

Jason Calacanis 9:30 Or if it was sabotaged. I mean, nobody knows exactly what happened yet.

David Sacks 9:33 No. The, the check out brakes went out.

Jason Calacanis 9:35 Oh, okay. So now we know. Okay. I know that that was like a big question, but this happened in East Palestine, Ohio, and 1,500 people have been evacuated, but w- we don't see like the New York Times or CNN. We're not covering this.

Chamath Palihapitiya 9:46 Yeah. So-

Jason Calacanis 9:47 So, Friedberg, what are the chemical w- what's the science angle here, just so we're clear?

Chamath Palihapitiya 9:50 I think, number one, you can probably sensationalize a lot of things that, um, that can seem terrorizing like this. But, um, just looking at it from the lens of what happened, you know, several of these cars contained a liquid form of vinyl chloride, uh, which is a precursor monomer to making the polymer called PVC, which is poly, uh, vinyl chloride. And, you know, PVC from PVC pipes, PVC is also used in tiling and walls and all sorts of stuff. The total market for vinyl chloride is about $10 billion a year. It's one of the top 20 petroleum-based products in the world. And the market size for PVC, which is what we make with vinyl chlorides about 50 billion a year. Now, you know, if you look at the chemical composition, it's, uh, carbon and hydrogen and oxygen and, and chlorine. When it's in its natural room temperature state, it's a gas. Uh, vinyl chloride is. And so they compress it and, and transport it as a liquid. When it's in a condition where it's at risk of, um, being ignited, it can cause an explosion if it's in the tank. So when you have the stuff spilled over, when one of these rail cars falls over with this stuff in it, there's a difficult hazard material decision to make, which is if you allow this stuff to explode on its own, you can get a bunch of vinyl chloride liquid to go everywhere. If you ignite it and you do a controlled burn away of it, uh, and there are, these guys practice a lot. It's not like this is a random thing that's never happened before. In fact, there was a train derailment of vinyl chloride in 2012, very similar condition to exactly what happened here. And so the, the, the, when you ignite the vinyl chloride, what actually happens is you end up with hydrochloric acid, HCl. That's where the chlorine mostly goes, and, uh, a little bit about a 10th of a percent or less ends up as phosgene. So, you know, the, the chemical analysis that these guys are making is how quickly will that phosgene dilute and what will happen to the hydrochloric acid? Now, I'm not rationalizing that this was a good thing that happened, certainly, but I'm just highlighting how the hazard materials teams think about this. I had my guy who works for me at TPB (beep) , you know, professor, PhD from MIT, he did this write up for me this morning just to make sure I had this all covered correctly. And so, you know, he said that...... you know, the hydrochloric acid, uh, the, the, the thing in the chemical industry is that the solution is dilution. Once you speak to scientists and people that work in this industry, you get a sense that this is actually a, uh, unfortunately more frequent occurrence than we realize, and it's pretty well-understood how to deal with it. Uh, and it was dealt with in a way that has historical precedent.

David Sacks 12:26 So, you're telling me-

Chamath Palihapitiya 12:28 Yeah.

David Sacks 12:28 ... that the people of East Palestine don't need to worry about getting exotic liver cancers in 10 or 20 years?

Chamath Palihapitiya 12:34 I, I don't, I don't know how to answer that, per se. I can tell you, like, the, the, the-

David Sacks 12:38 I mean, if you were living in East Palestine, Ohio, would you be drinking bottled water?

Jason Calacanis 12:43 You ... I wouldn't be in East Palestine, that's for sure.

David Sacks 12:45 (laughs)

Jason Calacanis 12:45 I'd be away for a month.

David Friedberg 12:46 No, no, no, but that's it. But that's a good question. Freeburg, if you were living in East Palestine, would you take your children out of East Palestine right now?

Chamath Palihapitiya 12:53 While this thing was burning, for sure, you know, you don't want to breathe in hydrochloric acid gas.

David Sacks 12:59 Why did all the fish in the Ohio River die and then there were reports that chickens-

Chamath Palihapitiya 13:04 Right.

David Sacks 13:04 ... were dying?

Chamath Palihapitiya 13:05 So, so, let me just te- ... I'm not gonna sp- ... I can, I can speculate, but let me just-

David Sacks 13:07 Yeah.

Chamath Palihapitiya 13:07 ... tell you guys. So, there's a paper and I'll send a link to the paper, and I'll send a link to a really good Substack on this topic, both of which I think are very neutral and unbiased and balanced on this. The paper describes that hydrochloric acid is about 27,000 parts per million when you burn this vinyl chloride off. Carbon dioxide is 58,000, uh, parts per million. Carbon monoxide is 9,500 parts per minute, per million. Phosgene is only 40 parts per million, uh, according to the paper. So, you know, that, that, that dangerous part should very quickly dilute and not have a big toxic effect. That's what the paper describes. That's what chemical engineers understand will happen. Uh, I certainly think that the hydrochloric acid in the river could probably change the pH. That would be my speculation, and would very quickly kill a lot of animals, uh,-

David Friedberg 13:54 Gotcha.

Chamath Palihapitiya 13:54 ... because of the massive pH change.

David Sacks 13:55 What about the chickens, though? What about the chickens?

Chamath Palihapitiya 13:56 Could have been the same. Hy- hydrochloric acid-

David Sacks 13:58 In the air?

Chamath Palihapitiya 13:58 Maybe the phosgene. Maybe the phosgene. I, I don't know. I'm, I'm just telling you guys what the, um, the scientists have told me about this. Yeah.

David Friedberg 14:04 I'm just asking you, as a science person, what ... when you read these explanations-

Chamath Palihapitiya 14:09 Yeah.

David Friedberg 14:10 ... what is your mental error bars that you put on this?

Chamath Palihapitiya 14:13 Yeah.

David Friedberg 14:15 Are you like, "Yeah, this is probably 99% right, so if I was living there, I'd stay," or would you say, "Eh, the error bars here are like 50% (laughs) -

David Sacks 14:22 (laughs)

David Friedberg 14:22 ... so I'm just gonna skedaddle."

Chamath Palihapitiya 14:24 Yeah. Look, if it ... The, the honest truth, if I'm living in a town and I see a billowing black smoke down the road from me of, you know, a chemical release with chlorine in it, I'm outta there, for sure. Right?

David Friedberg 14:36 100%.

Chamath Palihapitiya 14:36 It's not worth any risk. And you wouldn't drink-

David Friedberg 14:38 You wouldn't drink the tap water?

Chamath Palihapitiya 14:40 Not for a while, no. I'd wanna get it tested, for sure. I'd wanna make sure that the phosgene concentration or the chlorine concentration isn't too high.

David Friedberg 14:46 I respect your opinion. So, if you wouldn't do it, I wouldn't do it.

Chamath Palihapitiya 14:49 Yeah.

David Friedberg 14:49 That's all I care about. That's easier for me to make the decision.

Jason Calacanis 14:50 I think there's something bigger going on here, Chamath. I think what we're seeing is, this represents the distrust in media and the emergence of-

Chamath Palihapitiya 15:00 And the government.

Jason Calacanis 15:01 And the government.

Chamath Palihapitiya 15:02 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis 15:03 And, you know, the emergence of citizen journalism. I started searching for this and I thought, "Well, let me just go on Twitter." I start searching on Twitter. I see all the cover-ups. We were sharing some of the link emails. I think the default stance of Americans now is, after COVID and other issues, which we, we don't have to get into every single one of them, but after COVID, some of the Twitter files, et cetera, now the default position of the public is, "I'm being lied to. They're trying to cover this stuff up. We need to get out there and document it ourselves." And so I went on TikTok and Twitter and I started doing searches for the train derailment, and there was a citizen journalist woman who was being harassed by the police and told to stop taking videos, yada yada. And she was taking videos of the dead fish and going to the river, and then other people started doing it, and they were also on Twitter. And then this became, like, a thing. "Hey, is this being covered up?" I think, ultimately, this is a healthy thing that's happening now. People are burnt out by the media. They assume it's link-baiting. They assume this is fake news or there's an agenda and they don't trust the government, so they're like, "Let's go figure out for ourselves what's actually going on there," and citizens went and started making TikToks, tweets, and, and writing Substacks. It's a whole new stack of journalism that is now being codified. And we had it on the fringes with blogging 10, 20 years ago, but now it's become, I think, where a lot of Americans are, by default, saying, "Let me read the Tic- ... Let me read the Substacks, TikToks, and Twitter before I trust The New York Times."

David Friedberg 16:26 Did you guys see the-

Jason Calacanis 16:26 And the delay makes people go even more crazy. Like, this happened-

David Friedberg 16:29 Did you guys-

Jason Calacanis 16:29 ... on the 3rd and, like, when did The New York Times first cover it, I wonder?

David Friedberg 16:32 Did you guys see the lack of coverage on this entire mess with Glaxo and Zantac?

Jason Calacanis 16:37 I don't even know what you're talking about. What is it?

Chamath Palihapitiya 16:38 Yeah, 40 years, they knew that there was cancer risk. But by the way, I, sorry, before you say that, Chamath, I do wanna say one thing. Vinyl chloride is a known carcinogen. So, that, that is part of the underlying concern here, right? It, it is a known substance that, when it's metabolized in your body, it causes these reactive compounds that can cause cancer-

David Friedberg 16:56 Can I just summarize?

Chamath Palihapitiya 16:57 ... over time, so, yeah.

David Friedberg 16:57 Can I just summarize as a layman what I just heard in this last segment? Number one, it was a enormous quantity of a carcinogen that causes cancer. Number two, it was lit on fire to hopefully dilute it. Number three, you would move out of East Palestine and number four-

Chamath Palihapitiya 17:11 To transform it. To transform it, yeah. Yeah.

David Friedberg 17:13 And number four, you wouldn't drink the water until TBD amount of time.

Chamath Palihapitiya 17:17 Until tested, yep.

David Friedberg 17:18 Uh, okay. I mean, so, it, this is, like, a pretty important thing that just happened then (laughs) is what I would say.

David Sacks 17:23 Right.

David Friedberg 17:24 That, that would be my summary.

David Sacks 17:25 I think this is right out of Atlas Shrugged, where if you've ever read that book-

David Friedberg 17:29 Yeah.

David Sacks 17:29 ... that begins with, like, a train wreck that, in that case, it kills a lot of people.

David Friedberg 17:33 Yeah.

David Sacks 17:34 And the, the, the cause of the train wreck is really hard to figure out, but basically, the problem is that powerful bureaucracies run everything, where nobody's individually accountable for anything. And it feels the same here. Who's responsible for this train wreck? Is it the train company? Apparently Congress, back in 2017, passed deregulation of safety standards around these train companies so that they didn't have to spend the money to upgrade the brakes that supposedly failed that caused it. A lot of money came from the industry to Congress, b- both parties. They flooded-... Congress with money to get that, l- that law changed? Uh, is it the people who made this decision to do the controlled burn? Like, who made that decision? It's all so vague, like who's actually at fault here.

Chamath Palihapitiya 18:26 Can I-

David Sacks 18:26 It-

Chamath Palihapitiya 18:27 Yeah, go ahead. I just want to ask you a question, Sax, like-

David Sacks 18:28 I just want to say, and just, and just to finish the thought, um-

Chamath Palihapitiya 18:30 Yeah, yeah.

David Sacks 18:32 ... the, the media initially just seemed like they weren't very interested in this. And again, the mainstream media is another elite bureaucracy. It just feels like all these elite bureaucracies kind of work together, and they don't-

Chamath Palihapitiya 18:44 Nailed it.

David Sacks 18:44 ... really want to talk about things unless it benefits their agenda. And-

Chamath Palihapitiya 18:49 That's a wonderful term. You fucking nailed it. That is great.

David Sacks 18:52 (laughs)

Chamath Palihapitiya 18:52 Elite bureaucracy.

David Sacks 18:54 Well, I mean, the-

Chamath Palihapitiya 18:54 That's perfect.

David Sacks 18:54 They are.

Chamath Palihapitiya 18:55 What, where is the-

David Sacks 18:56 And so, and so the only things they want to talk about are things, hold on, that benefit their agenda. Look, if Greta Thunberg was speaking in East Palestine, Ohio about a 0.01% change in global warming that was going to happen in 10 years, it would have gotten more press coverage-

Chamath Palihapitiya 19:11 Yeah.

David Sacks 19:12 ... than this derailment, at least in the early days of it.

Chamath Palihapitiya 19:15 But-

David Sacks 19:15 And again, I would just go back to who benefits from this coverage? Nobody that the mainstream media cares about.

Chamath Palihapitiya 19:23 I think, let me ask you two questions. I'll, I'll ask one question, and then I'll make a, a point. I guess the question is, why do we always feel like we need to find someone to blame when bad things happen? There's not-

David Sacks 19:34 There's a trail, train derailment where-

Chamath Palihapitiya 19:35 I get it.

David Sacks 19:36 ... all this-

Chamath Palihapitiya 19:36 But, but hey, hang on one second.

David Sacks 19:37 Okay.

Chamath Palihapitiya 19:37 Is it, is it always the case that there is a bureaucracy or an individual that is to blame? And then we argue for more regulation to resolve that problem. And then when things are overregulated, we say, "Things are overregulated, and we can't get things done." And we have ourselves, even on this podcast, argued both sides of that coin. Some things are too regulated, like the nuclear fission industry, and we can't build nuclear power plants. Some things are under-regulated when bad things happen. And the reality is, all of the economy, all investment decisions, all human decisions carry with them some degree of risk and some frequency of bad things happening. And at some point, we have to acknowledge that there are bad things that happen. The transportation of these very dangerous carcinogenic chemicals is a key part of what makes the economy work. It drives a lot of industry. It gives us all access to products and things that matter in our lives. And there are these occasional bad things that happen. Maybe you can add more kind of safety features, but at some point, you can only do so much. And then the question is, are we willing to take that risk relative to the reward or the benefit we get for them?

David Sacks 20:40 I think that blame-

Chamath Palihapitiya 20:40 Versus taking, every time something bad happens-

David Sacks 20:42 Yeah.

Chamath Palihapitiya 20:42 ... like, "Hey, I lost money in the stock market, and I want to go find someone to blame for that." I think that blame, that blame is an emotional reaction, but I think a lot of people are capable of putting the emotional reaction aside and asking the more important logical question, which is who's responsible? I think what Sax asked is, "Hey, I just want to know, who is responsible for these things?" And- Yeah.

David Sacks 21:04 ... Friedberg, you're right. I think there are a lot of emotionally sensitive people who need a blame mechanic to deal with their own anxiety. But there are, I think, an even larger number of people who are calm enough to actually see through the blame and just ask, "Where does the responsibility lie?" It's the same example with the Zantac thing. I think there's, we're going to figure out how did Glaxo ... how were they able to cover up a cancer-causing carcinogen sold over the counter via this product called Zantac, which tens of millions of people around the world took for 40 years, that now it looks like causes cancer? How were they able to cover that up for 40 years? I don't think people are trying to find a single person to blame. But I think it's important to figure out who's responsible. What was the structures- Right.

Chamath Palihapitiya 21:52 ... of government or corporations that failed? And how do you either rewrite the law or punish these guys monetarily so that this kind of stuff doesn't happen again? That's an important part of a self-healing system that gets better over time.

David Sacks 22:07 Right, and I would just add to it, I, I think it's, it's not just lame, but I think it's too fatalistic just to say, "Oh, shit happens." You know, statistically, a train derailment is going to happen one out of, you know, N times-

Chamath Palihapitiya 22:18 I'm not brushing it off.

David Sacks 22:19 And-

Chamath Palihapitiya 22:19 I'm just saying like-

David Sacks 22:20 No, but-

Chamath Palihapitiya 22:20 ... are we, we always, I guess you're saying, it's just like-

David Sacks 22:21 ... we always jump to blame, right? We always jump to blame on every circumstance that happens. And it's, I don't, I don't think it does, I don't- This is an environmental-

Chamath Palihapitiya 22:26 Yeah.

David Sacks 22:27 This, this is a true environmental disaster for the people-

Chamath Palihapitiya 22:29 Right.

David Sacks 22:29 ... who are living in Ohio.

Chamath Palihapitiya 22:30 I totally, I totally agree.

David Sacks 22:31 And, and I'm not, I'm not sure, I'm not sure that statistically the rate of derailment makes sense. I mean, we've now heard about-

Chamath Palihapitiya 22:38 Right.

David Sacks 22:38 ... a number of these train derailments recently.

Chamath Palihapitiya 22:40 There was another one today, by the way. There was another one today. Breaking news.

David Sacks 22:44 So I think there's a larger question of what's happening in terms of the competence of our government administrators, our regulators, our industries.

Chamath Palihapitiya 22:55 But Sax, you often pivot to that, and that's my point. Like when, when things go wrong in industry, in FTX, in, in all these, in, in a train derailment, our, our, our current kind of training for all of us, not just you, but for all of us, is to pivot to which government person can I blame? Which pol- political party can I blame for causing the problem?

David Sacks 23:15 Well, I don't, I don't think it's about blame.

Chamath Palihapitiya 23:15 And you saw how much Pete Buttigieg got beat up this week because they're like, "Well, he's the head of the Department of Transportation. He's responsible for this. Let's figure out a way to now make him-

David Sacks 23:24 Good, good.

Chamath Palihapitiya 23:24 ... to, to blame, right?

David Sacks 23:24 I have nothing, hold on.

Chamath Palihapitiya 23:25 Isn't that accountability?

David Sacks 23:26 I have nothing against-

Chamath Palihapitiya 23:27 Yeah, it's accountability.

David Sacks 23:27 ... Buttigieg is, is accountability. Listen, powerful people need to be held accountable. That was the original mission of the media. But they don't do that anymore. They show no interest in stories where powerful people are doing wrong things if the media agrees with the, the agenda of those powerful people. We're seeing it here. We're seeing it with the Twitter files.

Chamath Palihapitiya 23:49 Yeah.

David Sacks 23:49 There was zero interest in the exposes of the Twitter files. Why? Because the media doesn't really have an interest in exposing the permanent government or deep state's involvement in censorship. They simply don't. They actually agree with it. They believe in that censorship.

Chamath Palihapitiya 24:05 Right, yeah.

David Sacks 24:06 The media has shown zero interest in getting to the bottom of what actions our State Department took, or generally speaking, our security state took, that might have led up to the Ukraine war. Zero interest in that.So, I think this is partly a media story, where the media quite simply is agenda-driven, and if a true disaster happens that doesn't fit with their agenda, they're simply gonna ignore it.

Jason Calacanis 24:33 I, I hate to agree with Sax, uh, so strongly here, but I think people are waking up to the fact that they're being manipulated by this group of elites, whether it's the media, politicians, or corporations, or acting in some, you know, weird ecosystem where they're feeding into each other with investments or advertisements, et cetera. No, I, and, and I think the media is failing here. They're supposed to be holding the politicians, the corporations, and the organizations accountable. And because they're not, a- and they're focused on bread and circuses and distractions that are not actually important, then you get the sense that our society is incompetent or unethical, and that there's no transparency, and that, you know, there are forces at work that are not actually acting in the interest of the citizens. And I think that these-

David Friedberg 25:21 I think the explanation is much simpler-

Jason Calacanis 25:23 ... you know, it sounds like a conspiracy theory, but I think it's actual reality.

David Friedberg 25:25 This is what I was gonna say. I think the explanation is m- much simpler and a little bit sadder than

David Friedberg 25:30 this. So for example, we saw today another example of government inefficiency and failure was when that person resigned from the FTC. She basically said this entire department is basically totally corrupt, and Lina Khan is utterly ineffective. And if you look under the hood, well, it makes sense. Of course she's ineffective. You know, we're asking somebody to manage businesses who doesn't understand business because she's never been a business person. Right? She fought this knockdown, drag-out case against Meta for them buying a few million dollar, like, VR exercising app like it was the end of days. And the thing is, she probably learned about Meta at Yale, but Meta's not theoretical. It's a real company. Right? And so if you're gonna deconstruct companies to make them better, you should be steeped in how companies actually work, which typically only comes from working inside of companies. And it's just an example where... But what did she have? She had the bonafides within the establishment, whether it's education-

Jason Calacanis 26:30 I believe-

David Friedberg 26:30 ... or, or whether it's the dues that she paid in order to get into a position where she was now able to run an incredibly important organization. But she's clearly demonstrating that she's highly ineffective at it because she doesn't see the forest from the trees. Amazon and Roomba, Facebook and this exercise app, but all of this other stuff goes completely unchecked.

David Sacks 26:52 Right.

David Friedberg 26:52 And I think that that is probably emblematic of what many of these government institutions are being run like.

Jason Calacanis 26:58 Let me cue up this issue-

David Sacks 26:59 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis 26:59 ... just so people understand, and then I'll go to you, Sax. Christine Wilson, is an FTC commissioner, and she said she'll resign over Lina Khan's disregard for the rule, and this is a quote, "disregard for the rule of law and due process." She wrote, "Since Miss, Mrs. Khan's confirmation in 2021, my staff and I have spent countless hours seeking to uncover her abuses of government power. That task has become increasingly difficult as she has consolidated power within the Office of the Chairman, breaking decades of bipartisan precedent and undermining the commission structure that Congress wrote into law. I have sought to provide transparency and facilitate accountability through speeches and statements, but I face constraints on the information I can disclose. Many legitimate, but some manufactured by Ms. Khan and the Democrats majority to avoid embarrassment." Basically-

David Friedberg 27:45 Brutal.

Jason Calacanis 27:45 Yeah. I mean, this is-

David Sacks 27:48 That's brutal.

David Friedberg 27:48 That's brutal.

Jason Calacanis 27:48 ... I mean, oof.

David Sacks 27:49 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis 27:49 She lit the building on fire.

David Friedberg 27:50 That's brutal.

David Sacks 27:51 Yeah. Let me, let me tell you the mistakes that Lina Khan made.

Jason Calacanis 27:53 And, and it's completely competent. Go ahead, Sax. Yeah.

David Sacks 27:54 So, here's the mistake that I think Lina Khan made. She diagnosed the problem of big tech to be bigness. I think both sides of the aisle now all agree that big tech is too powerful and has the potential to step on the rights of individuals or to step on the, uh, the ability of application developers to create a healthy ecosystem. There are real dangers of the power that big tech has. But what Lina Khan has done is just go after, quote, "bigness," which just means stopping these companies from doing anything that would make them bigger. The approach is just not surgical enough. It's basically like taking a meat cleaver to the industry. And she's standing in the way of acquisitions that, like Chamath mentioned with Facebook trying to acquire a virtual reality game or Amazon trying to acquire-

David Friedberg 28:41 An exercise app.

David Sacks 28:42 Exercise app.

David Friedberg 28:42 It's the worst. It's a VR exercise app.

Jason Calacanis 28:44 It was a $500 million acquisition for, like, trillion-dollar companies or $500 million companies.

David Sacks 28:49 Right.

Jason Calacanis 28:49 It's de minimis.

David Sacks 28:50 Right. So, so what should the government be doing to rein in big tech? Again, I would say two things. Number one is, they need to protect application developers who are downstream of the platform that they're operating on. When these big tech companies control a monopoly platform, they should not be able to discriminate in favor of their own apps against those downstream app developers. That is something that needs to be protected. And then the second thing is that I do think there is a role here for the government to protect the rights of individuals, their right to privacy, their right to speak, and to not be discriminated against based on their viewpoint, which is what's happening right now, uh, as the Twitter file shows abundantly. So, I think there is a role for government here, but I think Lina Khan is not getting it, and she's basically kinda hurting the ecosystem without there being a compensating benefit. And to Chamath's point, she had all the right credentials, but she also had the right ideology, and that's why she's in that role. And I think they can do better.

Jason Calacanis 29:48 I think that, um, once again, I hate to agree with Sax, but you're right. It's, this is an ideological battle she's fighting. Winning big is the crime. Being a billionaire is the crime. Having great success is the crime. When in fact the crime is much more subtle. It is manipulating people through the app store, not having an open platform, pro- bundling stuff. It's very surgical, like you're saying. And to go in there and just say, "Hey, listen, Apple. If you don't want action, and Google, if you don't want action taken against you, you need to allow third-party app stores, and, you know, we need to be able to negotiate these fees-"

David Friedberg 30:23 100%. Right. 100% right. The threat of legislation is exactly what she should have used to bring Tim Cook and Sundar into a room and say, "Guys-... you're gonna knock this 30% take rate down to 15%, and you're gonna allow sideloading. And if you don't do it, here's the case that I'm gonna make against you.

Jason Calacanis 30:39 Perfect.

David Friedberg 30:39 Instead of all this ticky-tacky, ankle-biting stuff, which actually showed Apple and Facebook and Amazon and Google, "Oh my god, they don't know what they're doing," so we're gonna lawyer up. We're an extremely sophisticated set of organizations and we're gonna actually create all these confusion makers that tie them up in years and years of useless lawsuits that even if they win will mean nothing, and then it turns out that they haven't won a single one. So h- how if you can't win the small ticky-tacky stuff are you gonna put together a coherent argument for the big stuff?

Jason Calacanis 31:12 Well, the counter to that, Chamath, is they said the reason ... their counter is, "We need to take more cases, and we need to be willing to lose because in the past we just haven't-"

David Friedberg 31:22 They don't understand-

Jason Calacanis 31:24 "... hadn't taken enough cases to them."

David Friedberg 31:24 ... how business works. None of these people-

Jason Calacanis 31:26 I, I, I agree. Yeah.

David Friedberg 31:27 No, no offense to Lina Khan. She must be a very smart person. But if you're going to break these business models down, you need to be a businessperson. I don't think these are theoretical ideas that can be studied from afar. You need to understand from the inside out so that you can subtly go after that Achilles heel, right, the tendon that when you cut it brings the whole thing down.

Jason Calacanis 31:48 Interoperability. I mean, uh, interoperability is a good one too.

David Sacks 31:52 Yeah, by the way, I remember we talked ... When, when Lina Khan first got nominated, I think we talked about, we talked about her on this program, and I was definitely willing to give her a chance. I was, I was pretty curious about what she might do because she had written about the need to rein in big tech, and I think there is bipartisan agreement on that point. But I think that because she's kind of stuck on this ideology of, of bigness, it's kind of-

David Friedberg 32:14 She's effective-

David Sacks 32:14 ... you know, unfortunate.

David Friedberg 32:15 Ineffective.

David Sacks 32:15 Ineffective.

Jason Calacanis 32:16 Very, very ineffective.

David Sacks 32:17 And actually, I'm, I'm kinda worried that the Supreme Court is about to make a similar kind of mistake with respect to Section 230. You know, do you do you guys tracking this Gonzales case?

Jason Calacanis 32:28 Yeah. Yeah, it's queued up, yep.

David Sacks 32:31 So the, the Gonzales case is one of the first, uh, tests of Section 230.

Jason Calacanis 32:36 Mm-hmm.

David Sacks 32:36 The defendant in the case is, uh, YouTube, and they're being sued because the family of the victim of a terrorist attack-

Jason Calacanis 32:43 Terrorist attack.

David Sacks 32:43 ... in France-

Jason Calacanis 32:44 Right.

David Sacks 32:44 ... is suing because they claim that YouTube was promoting terrorist content and then that affected the, the terrorists who, who perpetrated it. I think just factually that seems implausible to me. Like, I actually think that YouTube and Google probably spent a lot of time trying to remove, you know, uh-

David Friedberg 33:01 Totally.

David Sacks 33:01 ... violent or terrorist content-

David Friedberg 33:02 Totally.

David Sacks 33:02 ... but somehow a video got through. So this is the claim. The legal issue is, what they're trying to claim is that, uh, YouTube is not entitled to Section 230 protection because they use an algorithm to recommend content. And so Section 230 makes it really clear that tech platforms like YouTube are not responsible for user-generated content, but what they're trying to do is create a loophole around that protection by saying Section 230 doesn't protect recommendations made by the algorithm. In other words, if you think about, like, the Twitter app right now, where Elon now has two tabs on the home tab. One is the For You feed-

Jason Calacanis 33:41 For you. Okay.

David Sacks 33:41 ... which is the algorithmic feed, and one is the Following feed, which is the pure chronological-

Jason Calacanis 33:47 Real time.

David Sacks 33:47 ... feed.

Jason Calacanis 33:48 Right.

David Sacks 33:48 And basically what this lawsuit is arguing is that Section 230 only protects the, uh, the chronological feed. It does not protect the algorithmic feed. That seems like a stretch to me. I don't, I don't think that just because-

Jason Calacanis 34:00 What's valid about it, that argument, because it does take you down a rabbit hole, and i- in this case they have the actual path in which the person went from one jump to the next to more extreme content. And anybody who uses YouTube has seen that happen. You start with Sam Harris, you wind up at Jordan Peterson, then you're on Alex Jones, and the next thing you know, you're, you know, on some really crazy stuff. That's what the algorithm does in its best case, because that outrage cycle increases your, uh, engagement.

David Friedberg 34:27 Engagement ratio, right.

Jason Calacanis 34:28 So Chamath, what's, what's valid about that? If you were to argue and steel man it, what's val- what's valid about that?

David Friedberg 34:33 I think the subtlety of this argument, which actually I'm not sure actually where I stand on whether this version of the lawsuit should win. Like, I'm a big fan of we have to rewrite 230, but basically I think what it says is that, okay, listen, you have these things that you control. Just like if you were an editor and you are in charge of putting this stuff out, you have that Section 230 protection, right? I'm a publisher. I'm the editor of The New York Times. I edit this thing. I curate this content. I put it out there. It is what it is. This is basically saying, actually, hold on a second, there is software that's actually executing this thing independent of you, and so you should be subject to what it creates.

Jason Calacanis 35:21 It's an editorial decision. I mean, if you are to think about it, Section 230 was if you make an editorial decision, you're now a publisher. The algorithm is clearly making an editorial decision, but in our minds it's not a human doing it, Friedberg, so maybe that is what's confusing to all of this, because this is different than The New York Times or CNN putting the video on air and having a human have vet it. So where do you stand on the algorithm being an editor and having some responsibility for the algorithm you create?

Chamath Palihapitiya 35:53 Well, I think it's inevitable that this is gonna just be like any other platform where you start out with this notion of generalized ubiquitous platform-like features. Like, Google was supposed to search the whole web and just do it uniformly, and then later Google realized they had to, you know, manually change certain elements of the, the ranking algorithm and manually insert and have, you know, layers that inserted content, uh, into the search results, and the same with YouTube, and then the same with Twitter. And so, you know, this technology, th- this, you know, AI technology isn't gonna be any different. There's gonna be gamification by publishers. There's gonna be gamification by, you know, folks that are trying to feed data into the, uh, system.There's gonna be content restrictions driven by the owners and operators of the algorithm, because of pressure they're gonna get from shareholders and others. You know, TikTok continues to tighten what's allowed to be posted because community guidelines keep changing, 'cause they're responding to public pressure. I think you'll see the same with all these AI systems. And you'll probably see government intervention in trying to have a hand in that, one way and the other. So, you know, it's, I, I, I don't think it's gonna be a-

Jason Calacanis 37:04 So you feel they should have some responsibility, is what I'm hearing, because they're doing this ...

Chamath Palihapitiya 37:08 Yeah. I think, I think they're gonna end up inevitably having to, because they have a bunch of stakeholders. The stakeholders are the shareholders, the, um, consumer-

Jason Calacanis 37:16 Advertisers.

Chamath Palihapitiya 37:17 ... the publishers, the advertisers. So all of those stakeholders are gonna be telling the owner of the models, the owner of the algorithms, the owner of the systems and saying, "Here's what I wanna see, and here's what I don't wanna see." And as that pressure starts to mount, which is what happened with search results, it's what happened with YouTube, it's what happened with Twitter, that pressure will start to influence how those systems are operated. And it's not gonna be this let it run free and wild system.

Jason Calacanis 37:41 There's such a-

Chamath Palihapitiya 37:42 And I, and by the way, that's always been the case. With every user-generated content platform, right, with every, uh, search system, it's always been the case that the pressure mounts from all these different stakeholders. The way the management team responds, you know, ultimately evolves it into some editorialized version of what the founders originally intended. And, you know, editorialization is what media is, it's what newspapers are, uh, it's what search results are, it's what YouTube is, it's what Twitter is. And now I think it's gonna be what all the AI platforms will be.

Jason Calacanis 38:10 Sacks, I think there's a pretty easy solution here, which is, uh, bring your own algorithm. We've talked about it here before. If you wanna keep your Section 230, a little surgical, as we talked about earlier, I think, uh, you mentioned the surgical approach. A really easy surgical approach would be here is, "Hey, here's the algorithm that we're presenting to you, so when you first go onto the For You, here's the algorithm we've chosen as a default. Here are other algorithm- algorithms. Here's how you can tweak the algorithms and here's transparency on it. Therefore, it's your choice. So we wanna maintain our 230-

David Sacks 38:40 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis 38:40 ... but you get to choose the algorithm, no algorithm, and you get to slide the dials."

David Sacks 38:45 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis 38:45 "If you wanna be more extreme, do that. But it's, you're in control, so we can keep our 230. We're not a publication."

David Sacks 38:51 Yeah. So I, I like the idea of giving users more control over their feed. And I certainly like the idea of the social networks having to be more transparent about how the algorithm works. Maybe they open source it. They should at least tell you what the interventions are. But look, we're talking about a Supreme Court case here and, and the Supreme Court's not gonna write those requirements into a law. I'm worried that the conservatives on the Supreme Court are gonna make the same mistake as conservative media has been making, which is to dramatically rein in or limit Section 230 protection, and it's gonna blow up in our collective faces. And what I mean by that is, what conservatives in the media have been complaining about is censorship, right? And they think that if they can somehow punish big tech companies by reducing their 230 protection, they'll get less censorship. I think they're just simply wrong about that. If you repeal Section 230, you're gonna get vastly more censorship. Why? Because simple corporate risk aversion will push all of these big tech companies to take down a lot more content on their platforms. The, the reason why they're reasonably open is because they're not considered publishers, they're considered distributors. They have distributor liability, not publisher reliability. You repeal Section 230, they're gonna be publishers now, and they're gonna be sued for everything, and they're gonna start taking down tons more content. And it's gonna be conservative content in particular that's taken down the most, because it's the plaintiff's bar that will bring all these new tort cases under novel theories of harm that try to claim that, you know, conservative positions on things create harm to various communities. So I'm very worried that the, the conservatives on the Supreme Court here are going to cut off their noses to spite their faces.

Jason Calacanis 40:36 They want retribution, is what you're saying, right?

David Sacks 40:38 Yeah, yeah. Re- the desire for retribution is gonna, is gonna cause them-

Chamath Palihapitiya 40:41 Blinds them totally.

David Friedberg 40:42 The risk here is that we end up in a Roe v. Wade situation where instead of actually kicking this back to Congress and saying, "Guys, rewrite this law," that then these guys become activists and make some interpretation that then becomes confusing, Sacks, to your point. The-

David Sacks 40:58 Yeah.

David Friedberg 40:58 ... I think the thread the needle argument that the lawyers on behalf of Gonzalez have to make, I find it easier to steel man, Jason, how to put a cogent argument in- for them, which is, does YouTube and Google have an intent to convey a message? Because if they do, then okay, hold on. They are not just passing through users' text, right, or a user's video. And Jason, what you said, actually, in my opinion, is the intent to convey. They wanna go from this video, to this video, to this video. They have an actual intent, and they want you to go down the rabbit hole. And the reason is because they know that it drives viewership and ultimately value and money for them. And I think that if these lawyers can paint that case, that's probably the best argument they have to blow this whole thing up. The problem though, with that is, I just wish it would not be done in this venue. And I do think it's better off addressed in Congress, because whatever happens-

David Sacks 41:54 Yeah.

David Friedberg 41:54 ... here is gonna create all kinds of ... David, you're right-

David Sacks 41:57 Yeah.

David Friedberg 41:57 ... it's gonna blow up in all of our faces.

David Sacks 41:58 Yeah. Let me, let me steel man the other side of it, which is, I simply think it's a stretch to say that just because there's an algorithm, that that is somehow an editorial judgment by, you know, Facebook or Twitter, that somehow they're acting like the editorial department of a newspaper. I don't think they do that. I don't think that's how the algorithm works. I mean, the purpose of the algorithm is to give you more of what you want. Now, there are interventions to that. As we've seen with Twitter, they were definitely putting their thumb on the scale. But Section 230 explicitly provides liability protection for interventions by these big tech companies to reduce violence, to reduce sexual content, pornography.... or just anything they consider to be otherwise objectionable.

Jason Calacanis 42:46 True.

David Sacks 42:46 It's a very broad, what you would call, Good Samaritan protection-

Jason Calacanis 42:49 True.

David Sacks 42:50 ... for these social media companies to intervene to re- remove objectionable material from their site. Now, I think conservatives are upset about that because these big tech companies have gone too far. They've actually used that protection to start engaging in censorship. That's the specific problem that needs to be resolved. But I don't think you're gonna resolve it by simply getting rid of Section 230. If you do that-

Jason Calacanis 43:12 Your description, Sacks-

David Sacks 43:13 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis 43:13 ... by the way, your description of what the algorithm is doing, is giving you more of what you want-

David Sacks 43:18 Mm-hmm.

Jason Calacanis 43:18 ... is literally what we did as editors at magazines and blogs.

David Sacks 43:22 We studied the audience-

Jason Calacanis 43:23 This is the concept, intent to convey.

David Sacks 43:25 We literally... Your description reinforces the other side of the argument. We would get together, we'd sit in a room and say, "Hey, what were the most clicked on? What got the most comments? Great. Let's come up with some more ideas to do more stuff like that, so we increase engagement at the publication." That's the algorithm replaced editors and did it better. And so, hmm, I think that Section 230 really does need to be rewritten.

Jason Calacanis 43:48 Let me go back to, to what Section 230 did, okay? You gotta remember, this is 1996 and it was a small, really just few sentence provision in the Communications Decency Act. The reasons why they created this law made a lot of sense, which is user-generated content was just starting to take off on the internet. There were these new platforms that would host that content. The lawmakers were concerned that those new internet platforms be litigated to death by being treated as publishers, so they treated them as distributors. What's the difference? Think about it as the difference between publishing a magazine and then hosting that magazine on a newsstand. So the distributor is the newsstand, the, the publisher is the magazine. Let's say that that magazine writes an article that's libelous and they get sued. The newsstand can't be sued for that, that's what it means to be a distributor. They didn't create that content. It's not their responsibility. That's what the protection of being a distributor is. The publisher, the magazine can and should be sued. That's-

David Sacks 44:48 So the, the analogy here is with respect to user-generated content. What the law said is, "Listen, if somebody publishes something libelous on Facebook or Twitter, sue that person. Facebook and Twitter aren't responsible for that." That's what 230 does.

Jason Calacanis 45:02 A better-

David Sacks 45:03 I think it's sensible. Listen-

Jason Calacanis 45:04 Yeah.

David Sacks 45:04 ... I don't know how user-generated content platforms survive if they can be sued for every single piece of content on their platform. I just don't see how that is-

Jason Calacanis 45:14 Yes, they can't survive.

David Sacks 45:15 ... tend to be implemented.

Jason Calacanis 45:16 But th- your, your actual definition is a, your, your analogy is a little broken. In fact, the newsstand would be liable for putting a magazine out there that was a bomb-making magazine because they made the decision as the distributor to put that magazine, and they made a decision to not put other magazines. The better 230 analogy that fits here, 'cause the publisher and the newsstand are both responsible for selling that content or making it, would be paper (laughs) versus the magazine versus the newsstand. And that's what we have to do on a cognitive basis here, is kind of figure out... If you produce paper and somebody writes a bomb script on it, you're not responsible. If you publish and you wrote the bomb script, you are responsible. And if you sold the bomb script, you are responsible. So now, where does YouTube fit? Is it paper? With their algorithm, I would argue it's more like the newsstand. And if it's a bomb recipe (laughs) and YouTube's, you know, doing the algorithm, that's where it's kind of, the analogy breaks. Look, somebody at this big tech company wrote an algorithm that is a weighing function that caused this objectionable content to rise to the top, and that was an intent to convey. It didn't know that it was that specific thing, but it knew characteristics that that thing represented. And instead of putting it in a cul-de-sac and saying, "Hold on, this is a hot, valuable piece of content we want to distribute, we need to do some human review," they could do that. It would cut down their margins, it would make them less profitable, but they could do that. They could have a clearing house mechanism for all this content that gets included in a recommendation algorithm. They don't for efficiency and for monetization and for virality and for content velocity. I think that's the big thing that it changes, it would just force these folks to moderate everything.

David Sacks 46:57 Just as a question of fact, I find it completely implausible, in fact ludicrous, that YouTube made an editorial decision to put a piece of terrorist content at the top of the feed.

Jason Calacanis 47:06 No, no, no, I'm not saying that.

David Sacks 47:08 Nobody made the decision to do that.

Jason Calacanis 47:09 I'm not saying that.

David Sacks 47:09 In fact, I suspect... No, I'm not... I, I know that you're not saying that, but I, I, I suspect that YouTube goes to great lengths to prevent that type of violent or terrorist content from getting to the top of the feed. I mean, look, if I were to write a standard around this, a new standard, not Section 230, I think you'd have to say that if they make a good faith effort to take down that type of content, that at some point you have to say that enough is enough, right? If they're liable for every single piece of content on the platform-

Jason Calacanis 47:39 No, no, no, I think it's different.

David Sacks 47:40 ... how are they gonna implement that standard?

Jason Calacanis 47:41 The nuance here that could be very valuable for all these big tech companies is to say, "Listen, you can post content. Whoever follows you will get that in a real time feed. That responsibility is yours, and we have a body of law that covers that. But if you want me to promote it in my algorithm, there may be some delay in how it's amplified algorithmically and there's going to be some incremental costs that I bear because I have to review that content, and I'm gonna take it out of your ad share or other ways so that I make it back."

David Sacks 48:12 Are you gonna review billions of piece- Are you gonna review billions of tweets every day?

Jason Calacanis 48:13 No, actually I have a solution for this. You have to-

David Sacks 48:15 Wait, how does that work?

Jason Calacanis 48:16 I, I, I'll explain it. I think you hire 50,000 or 100,000 content moderators and- No, no, no, there's an easier solution.

David Sacks 48:20 What? 50,000 content moderators who-

Jason Calacanis 48:23 It's a new class of job per ƒ (00:07:29) . No, no, hold on one second. There's a whole, there's a much easier solution.

David Sacks 48:28 Oh my God. They already ha- Hold on a second, they've already been doing that. They've been outsourcing content moderation to these BPOs, these business process organizations-

Jason Calacanis 48:34 Yeah, Manella-

David Sacks 48:34 ... in the Philippines and so on.

Jason Calacanis 48:36 Yeah, yeah.

David Sacks 48:36 And we're frankly, like English may be our second language, and that is part of the reason why we have such a mess around content moderation. They're trying to implement-... content guidelines, and it's impossible. That is not feasible, Chamath. You're going to destroy these user-generated content platforms.

Jason Calacanis 48:49 There's a middle ground. There's a very easy middle ground. This is clearly something new they didn't intend. Section 230 was intended for web hosting companies, for web servers, not for this new thing that's been developed, because there were no algorithms when Section 230 was put up. This was to protect people who were making web hosting companies and servers, paper, phone companies, that kind of analogy. This is something new, so own the algorithm. The algorithm is making editorial decisions, and it should just be an own the algorithm clause. If you want to have algorithms, if you want to do, uh, automation to present content and make that intent, then people have to click a button to turn it on. And if you did just that, do you want an algorithm? It's your responsibility to turn it on. Just that one step would then let people maintain 230, and you don't need 50,000 moderators. That's my easy solution.

David Sacks 49:38 They have that choice right now. They have that choice right now.

Jason Calacanis 49:38 No, no you don't. You t- No, no, you go to Twitter, you go to YouTube, you go to TikTok, For You is there. You can't turn it off or on. I'm just saying, a little modal-

David Sacks 49:47 No, no, hold on. If you, if you just slide-

Jason Calacanis 49:47 Hold on, a little modal. Uh, I know you can slide off of it. What I'm saying is, a modal that you say, "Would you like an algorithm when you use You- YouTube, yes or no? And which one?" If you did just that, then the user would be enabling that. It would be their responsibility, not the platforms. I'm s- I'm suggesting this as a solution.

David Sacks 50:05 Okay. You're, you're making up a, a wonderful rule there, JCal. But look, uh, y- y- you could just slide the, the feed over to Following and it's a sticky setting and it stays on that feed.

Jason Calacanis 50:14 Yes.

David Sacks 50:14 You can do something similar, as far as I know, on Facebook. How would you solve that on Reddit? How would you solve that on Yelp? Remember, without Section 230-

Jason Calacanis 50:21 Very simple. They also do-

David Sacks 50:22 Without Section 230 protection-

Jason Calacanis 50:23 Yeah.

David Sacks 50:24 ... just understand that any review that a restaurant or business doesn't like on Yelp, they could sue Yelp for that.

Jason Calacanis 50:31 Uh ...

David Sacks 50:33 Without Section 230, I don't think at all-

Jason Calacanis 50:35 Yeah, no, no. I don't ... I'm proposing a solution that lets people maintain 230, which is just own the algorithm. Uh, and by the way, your background, Friedberg, you always ask me what it is, I can tell you that is the precogs in Minority Report.

David Sacks 50:47 Do you ever notice that when things go badly, we wanna... Generally, people have an orientation towards blaming the government for being responsible for that problem, and/or saying that the government didn't do enough to solve the problem? Like, do you think that we're kind of like over weighting the role of the government in our, like, ability to function as a society, as a marketplace? That every kind of major issue that we talk about pivots to the government either did the wrong thing or the government didn't do the thing we needed them to do to protect us? Like, do you think that's become, like, a very common... Is that a changing theme or has that always been the case? And, uh, or am I way off on that? Well- 'Cause so many conversations we have, whether it's us or in the newspaper or wherever, it's always back to the role of the government, as if, you know, like, we're all here working for the government, part of the government, that the government is and should touch on everything in our lives. So, I agree with you in the sense that I don't think individuals should always be looking to the government to solve all their problems for them. I mean, the government is not Santa Claus, and, uh, sometimes we want it to be. So, I agree with you about that. However, if this is a case... If we're talking about East Palestine, this is a case where we have safety regulations. You know, the train companies are regulated. There was a relaxation of that regulation as a result of their lobbying efforts. The train appears to have crashed because it didn't upgrade its brake systems, because-

Jason Calacanis 52:18 Yeah, yeah. I'm, look, I mean that-

David Sacks 52:19 ... that, that, that regulation was relaxed-

Jason Calacanis 52:20 But that's a good... Yeah.

David Sacks 52:21 And then on top... And then, and then on, and then on top of it, you had this decision that was made by, I guess, in consultation with regulators to do this controlled burn that I think you've defended, but I still have questions about.

Jason Calacanis 52:33 I'm not defending, by the way, I'm just highlighting why they did it. That's it. Okay? So-

David Sacks 52:36 Okay. Fair enough. Fair enough.

Jason Calacanis 52:37 Yeah.

David Sacks 52:37 So, I guess we're not sure yet whether it was the right decision. I guess we'll know in 20 years when a lot of people come down with cancer. But look, I think this is their job, is to do this stuff. It's basically to keep us safe, to prevent, you know, disasters like this.

Jason Calacanis 52:52 I, I hear you, but I'm not-

David Sacks 52:53 Train derailments, plane crashes.

Jason Calacanis 52:54 I'm not just talking about that. I'm talking about-

David Sacks 52:55 Things like that.

Jason Calacanis 52:56 But just listen to all the conversations we've had today. Section 230, AI ethics and bias and the role of government, Lina Khan, uh, crypto crackdown, FTX, and the regulation. Every conversation that we have on our agenda today, and every topic that we talk about, macro picture and inflation and the Fed's role in inflation or in driving the economy. Every conversation we have nowadays, the, the US/Ukraine/Russia situation, the China situation, TikTok and China, and what we should do about Tik-... What the government should do about TikTok. Literally, I, I just went through our eight topics today, and every single one of them has at its core and its pivot point is all about either the government is doing the wrong thing or we need the government to do something it's not doing today. Every one of those conversations.

David Sacks 53:42 AI ethics does not involve the government.

Jason Calacanis 53:44 Well, it's starting to.

David Sacks 53:45 Not yet, at least.

Jason Calacanis 53:46 It's starting to.

David Sacks 53:46 But, but Friedberg, the law is omnipresent. What do you expect?

Jason Calacanis 53:50 Yeah. I mean, sometimes-

David Sacks 53:51 If an issue becomes, if an issue becomes important enough, it becomes the subject of law, and then ...

Jason Calacanis 53:57 Somebody files a lawsuit. Yeah.

David Sacks 53:58 And the law, the law is how we mediate us all living together. So, what do you expect?

Jason Calacanis 54:04 But so much of our point of view on the source of problems or the resolution to problems keeps coming back to the role of government instead of the things that we as individuals, as enterprises, et cetera, can and should and could be doing. I'm just pointing this out. To me, it's just, like, so striking.

David Sacks 54:18 What are any of us gonna do about train derailments?

Jason Calacanis 54:22 Well, we pick topics that seem to point to the government in every case, you know?

David Sacks 54:25 It's a huge current event. Section 230 is something that directly impacts all of us.

Jason Calacanis 54:31 Well, yeah. I mean-

David Sacks 54:32 Um, but again, I actually think there was a lot of wisdom in, in the way that Section 230 was originally constructed. I understand that now there's new things like algorithms, there's new things like social media censorship, and the law can be rewritten to address those things. But, um-

Chamath Palihapitiya 54:46 I think, I just think like our-

Jason Calacanis 54:47 No, I think there's a reason-

Chamath Palihapitiya 54:48 I'm, I'm just looking at our agenda generally and like-

Jason Calacanis 54:50 ... for your time. Yeah.

Chamath Palihapitiya 54:50 ... we don't cover anything that we can control. Everything that we talk about is what we want the government to do or what the government is doing wrong.

David Friedberg 54:57 No.

Chamath Palihapitiya 54:57 We don't talk about the entrepreneurial opportunity, the opportunity to build, the opportunity to invest, the opportunity to do things outside of... I, I'm just looking at our, our agenda. We can include this in our, in our podcast or not. I'm just saying, like, so much of what we talk about pivots to the role of the federal government.

Jason Calacanis 55:12 I don't think that's fair every week-

Chamath Palihapitiya 55:14 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis 55:14 ... because we do talk about macro and markets.

Chamath Palihapitiya 55:16 Okay.

Jason Calacanis 55:16 I think what's happened, and what you're noticing, and I think it's a valid observation, so I'm not saying it's not valid, is that tech is getting so big and it's having such an outside impact on politics, elections, finance with crypto, it's having such an outsized impact that politicians are now super focused on it. This wasn't the case 20 years ago when we started or 30 years ago when we started our careers. It... we were such a small part of the overall economy and the PC on your desk and the phone in your pocket wasn't having a major impact on people. But when two, three billion people are addicted to their phones and they're on them for five hours a day and elections are being impacted by news and information, everything is being impacted now, that's why the government is getting so involved. That's why things are reaching the Supreme Court. It's because of the success and how integrated technology has become to every aspect of our lives. So it, it's not that our agenda is forcing this, it's that life is forcing this.

Chamath Palihapitiya 56:13 So the question then, is government a competing body with the interests of technology or is government the controlling body of technology?

Jason Calacanis 56:22 Both.

David Friedberg 56:22 Right.

Chamath Palihapitiya 56:23 Because... Right. And, and I think that's like-

David Friedberg 56:25 Both.

Chamath Palihapitiya 56:25 It's become so apparent to me like how much of-

David Friedberg 56:28 Maybe a backstop, you're not gonna get-

Chamath Palihapitiya 56:28 Yeah.

David Friedberg 56:29 ... a clean answer that makes you-

Chamath Palihapitiya 56:30 Yeah.

David Friedberg 56:30 ... less anxious.

Chamath Palihapitiya 56:31 Yeah.

David Friedberg 56:31 The answer is both. Meaning there is not a single market that matters of any size that doesn't have the government as the omnipresent third actor. There is the business who creates something.

Chamath Palihapitiya 56:42 The buyer and the seller.

David Friedberg 56:43 There's the customer who is consuming something.

Chamath Palihapitiya 56:45 Yeah.

David Friedberg 56:45 And then there is the government. And so I think the point of this is just to say that, you know, being a naive babe in the woods, which we all were in this industry for the first 30 or 40 years, was kind of fun and cool and cute. But if you're gonna get sophisticated and step up to the plate and put on your big boy and big girl pants, you need to understand these folks because they can ruin a business, make a business, or make decisions that can seem completely orthogonal to you or supportive of you. So, I think this is just more like understanding the actors on the field. It's kind of like moving from checkers to chess. You had two actors-

Jason Calacanis 57:21 The stakes have raised, yeah. The stakes have been raised.

David Friedberg 57:22 The stakes are up and you just, you just got to understand that there's a more complicated game theory.

Jason Calacanis 57:27 Here's an agenda item that (laughs) politicians haven't gotten to yet, but I'm sure in three, four, five years, they will: AI ethics and bias. ChatcheepDP- ChatGPT has been hacked with something called Dan, which allows it to remove some of its filters. And people are starting to find out that if you ask it to make, you know, a poem about Biden, it, it will comply. If you do something about Trump, maybe it won't. Somebody at OpenAI built a rule set, government's not involved here, and they decided that certain topics were off-limit, certain topics were on-limit and were totally fine. Some of those things seem to be reasonable. You know, you don't want to have it say racist things or violent things, but yet you can (laughs) if you give it the right prompts. So, what are our thoughts, just writ large to use a term, on who gets to pick how the AI responds to consumer sacks? Who gets to-

David Sacks 58:24 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis 58:25 ... build that?

David Sacks 58:25 I think this is, I think this is very concerning on multiple levels. So, there's a political dimension. There's also this, this dimension about whether we are creating Frankenstein's monster here or something that will quickly grow beyond our control. But maybe let's come back to that point. Elon just tweeted about it today. Let me go back to the, um, pol- political point, which is, if you look at, at how OpenAI works, just to at least f- flesh out more of this, um, GPT Dan thing. So, sometimes ChatGPT will give you an answer that's not really an answer. It will give you like a one-paragraph boilerplate saying something like, "I'm just an AI, I can't have an opinion on XYZ," or, "I can't, you know, take positions that would be offensive or insensitive." Uh, you've all seen like those boilerplate answers. And it's important to understand that the AI is not coming up with that boilerplate. What happens is, there is the AI, there's the large language model, and then on top of that has been built this chat interface. And the chat interface is what l- is communicating with you and it's kind of checking with the, the AI to get an answer. Well, that chat interface has been programmed with a trust and safety layer. So in the same way that Twitter had trust and safety officials under Yoel Roth, you know, OpenAI has programmed this trust and safety layer. And that layer effectively intercepts the question that the user provides and it makes a determination about whether the AI is allowed to give its true answer. By true, I mean the answer that the large language model is spitting out.

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:00:01 Good explanations, uh, that's really good, yeah.

David Sacks 1:00:02 Yeah, that, that is what produces the boilerplate, okay? Now, I think what's really interesting is that humans are programming that trust and safety layer. And in the same way, that trust and safety, you know, at Twitter, under the previous management, was highly biased in one direction, as the Twitter files, I think, have abundantly shown. I think there is now mounting evidence that this safety layer programmed by OpenAI is very biased in a certain direction. There's a very interesting blog post called ChatGPT is a Democrat basically laying this out. There are many examples. Jason, you gave a good one. The AI will give you a nice poem about Joe Biden. It will not give you a nice poem about Donald Trump. It will give you the boilerplate about how it can't take controversial or...... offensive stances on things. So somebody is programming that, and that programming represents their biases. And if you thought trust and safety was bad under Vijay Gadi or Yoel Roth, just wait until the AI does it, 'cause I don't think you're gonna like it very much.

Jason Calacanis 1:01:07 I mean, it's pretty scary that the AI is capturing people's attention, and I think people, because it's a computer, give it a lot of, uh, credence. And they don't think this is, I hate to say it, a bit of a parlor trick. What, what ChatGPT and these other language models are doing is not original thinking. They're not checking facts. They've got a corpus of data and they're saying, "Hey, what's the next possible word? What's the next logical word?" based on a corpus of information that they don't even explain or put citations in. Uh, some of them do. Niva notably is doing citations, and I think, I think, uh, Google's Bard is gonna do citations as well. So how do we know? And I think this is, again, back to transparency about algorithms or AI, the easiest solution, Chamath, is why doesn't this thing show you which filter system is on, if we can use that, a filter system? What, what, what did you refer to it as? Is there a term of art here, Sacks, of what the layer is of trust and safety?

David Sacks 1:02:08 I think they're, they're literally just calling it trust and safety. I mean, it's the same concept.

Jason Calacanis 1:02:11 It's, uh, we talked about this before.

David Sacks 1:02:13 The trust and safety layer-

Jason Calacanis 1:02:13 This is, this is-

David Sacks 1:02:13 ... why not have a slider that just says none, full, et cetera?

David Friedberg 1:02:17 That is what you'll have, because this is, I think we mentioned this before, but what will make all of these systems unique is what we call reinforcement learning, and specifically human factor reinforcement learning in this case. So David, there's an engineer that's basically taking their own input or their own perspective. Now, that could have been decided in a product meeting or whatever, but they're then injecting something that's transforming what the transformer would've spit out as the actual canonically roughly right answer. And that's okay, but I think that this is just a point in time where we're so early in this industry, where we haven't figured out all of the rules around this stuff. But I think if you disclose it, and I think that eventually, Jason mentioned this before, but there'll be three or four or five or 10 competing versions of all of these tools, and some of these filters will actually show what the political leanings are so that you may want to filter content out. That'll be your decision. I think all of these things will happen over time. So I don't know. I think we're looking-

David Sacks 1:03:16 Well, I don't know. I don't know. So I mean, I- honestly, I'd have a different answer to Jason's question. I mean, Chamath, you're basically saying that yes, that filter will come. I'm not sure it will for this reason. Corporations are providing the AI, right? And, and I think the public perceives these corporations to be speaking when the AI says something. And to go back to my point about Section 230, these corporations are risk averse, and they don't like to be perceived as saying things that are offensive or insensitive or controversial. And that is part of the reason why they have an overly large and overly broad filter, is because they're afraid of the repercussions on their corporation. So just to give you an example of this, several years ago, Microsoft had an even earlier AI called Tay, T-A-Y, and some hackers figured out how to make Tay say racist things. And, you know, I don't know if they did it through prompt engineering or actual hacking or what, what they did, but basically, Tay did do that, and Microsoft literally had to take it down after 24 hours, because the things that were coming from Tay were offensive enough that Microsoft did not want to get blamed for that. You know, this is the case of the so-called racist chatbot. This is all the way back in 2016. This is, like, way before these LLMs got as powerful as they are now. But I think the legacy of Tay lives on in the minds of these corporate executives, and I think they're genuinely afraid to put a product out there. And, and remember, you know, like w- with, if you think about how, how these, uh, chat products work, it, it's different than, than Google Search, where Google Search would just give you 20 links. You can tell in the case of, of Google that those links are not Google, right? They're links to off-party sites. When, if, if you're just asking Google or Bing's AI for an answer, it looks like the corporation is telling you those things. So the, the format really, I think, makes them very paranoid about being perceived as endorsing a controversial point of view, and I think that's part of what's motivating this. And I, just to go back to Jason's question, I think this is why you're actually unlikely to get a, a user filter, as, as much as I agree with you that I think that would be a good, a good thing to, to add.

David Friedberg 1:05:35 I think it's gonna be an impossible task.

Jason Calacanis 1:05:37 I think they're scared to death.

David Friedberg 1:05:38 Well, the, the problem is then these products will fall flat on their face. And the reason is that if you have an extremely brittle form of reinforcement learning, you will have a very substandard product relative to folks that are willing to not have those constraints. For example, a startup that doesn't have that brand equity to perish because they're a startup. I think that you'll see the emergence of these various models that are actually optimized for various ways of thinking or political leanings, and I think that people will learn to use them. I also think people will learn to stitch them together, and I think that's the better solution that will fix this problem, because I do think there's a large po- nontrivial number of people on the left who don't want the right content and on the right who don't want the left content, meaning infused in the answers, and I think it'll make a lot of sense for corporations to just say, "We service both markets." And I think that people will be fine with it.

Jason Calacanis 1:06:33 I tell you, what you're writing about, reput- hold on. You're so right, Chamath. Reputation really does matter here. Google did not want to release this for years, and they, they sat on it, because they knew all these issues here. They only released it when Sam Altman, in his brilliance, got Microsoft (laughs) to integrate this immediately and see it as a competitive advantage. Now they've both put out products that, let's face it, are not good. They're not ready for primetime. But one example, I've been playing with this, and-

David Friedberg 1:06:56 A lot of noise this week, right, about Bing's search? Yeah.

Jason Calacanis 1:06:58 Tons, just how bad it is. This, we're now in the holy cow, we had a confirmation bias going on here where people were only sharing the best stuff.So they would do 10 searches and release the one that was super impressive when it did its little parlor trick of guess the next word. I did one here with, uh, again, back to Neeva, I'm not an investor on the company or anything, but it's, it has these citations. And I just asked it, "How are the Knicks doing?" And I realized what they're doing is, because they're using old datasets, this gave me completely, every fact on how the Knicks are doing (laughs) this season is wrong in this answer. Literally, this is the number one search on a search engine is this. It's gonna give you terrible answers. It's gonna give you f- answers that are filtered by some group of people, whether they're liberals or they're libertarians or republicans, who, who knows what, and you're not gonna know. This stuff is not ready for primetime. It's a bit of a parlor trick right now, and I think it's going to blow up in people's faces. A- and their reputations are going to get damaged by it because what it... Remember when people would drive off the road, Friedberg, because they were following Apple Maps or Google Maps so perfectly that it just said turn left and they went into a cornfield? I think that we're in that phase of this, which is maybe we need to slow down and rethink this. Where do you stand on people's realization about this and the filtering level, censorship level, however you want to interpret it or frame it?

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:08:16 I mean, you could just cut and paste what I said earlier, like, you know, these are editorialized pro- they're gonna have to be editorialized products ultimately. Like, what Sacks is describing the algorithmic layer that sits on top of the, the models that the infrastructure that sources data and then the models that synthesize that data to, to build this predictive, uh, capability. And then there's an algorithm that sits on top, that algorithm, like the Google search algorithm, like the Twitter algorithm, the ranking algorithms, like the YouTube filters on what is and isn't allowed, they're all gonna have some degree of editorialization. And so-

Jason Calacanis 1:08:51 One for Republicans, (laughs) like, and there'll be one for liberals and-

David Sacks 1:08:54 No, I, I disagree with all of this. So first of all, Jason, I think that people are probing these AIs, these language models to find the holes, right? And I'm not just talking about politics, I'm just talking about where they do a bad job. So people are pounding on these things right now, and they are flagging the cases where it's not so good. However, I think we've already seen that with ChatGBT3, that its ability to synthesize large amounts of data is pretty impressive. What these LLMs do quite well is take thousands of articles and you could just a- ask for a summary of it, and it will summarize huge amounts of content quite well. That seems like a breakthrough use case I think we're just scratching the surface of. Moreover, the capabilities are getting better and better. I mean, GBT4 is coming out, I think, in the next several months, and it's supposedly, you know, a huge advancement over version three. So, I think that a lot of these holes in the capabilities are getting fixed, and the AI is only going one direction, Jason, which is more and more powerful. Now, I think that the trust and safety layer is a separate issue. This is where these big tech companies are exercising their control. And I think Friedberg's right, this is where the editorial judgments come in. And I tend to think that they're not gonna be unbiased, and they're not gonna give the user control over the bias because they can't see their own bias. I mean, these companies all have a monoculture. You look at-

Jason Calacanis 1:10:27 Of course, yeah.

David Sacks 1:10:28 ... any measure of their political inclinations-

Jason Calacanis 1:10:32 Is there not an opportunity though-

David Sacks 1:10:32 ... from donations to voting.

Jason Calacanis 1:10:34 Yeah.

David Sacks 1:10:34 They can't even see their own bias, and the Twitter files exposed this.

Jason Calacanis 1:10:38 Isn't there an opportunity though, then, Sacks or Chamath, whoever wants to take this, for an independent company to just say, "Here is exactly what ChatGPT is doing, and we're gonna just do it with no filters, and it's up to you to build the filters." Here's what the thing says in a raw fashion. So if you ask it to say, uh, and, and some people were doing this, "Hey, what were Hitler's best ideas?" And (laughs) you know, like, it, it is gonna be a pretty scary result. And shouldn't we know what the AI thinks-

David Sacks 1:11:08 Yes. (laughs)

Jason Calacanis 1:11:08 ... the answer to that question is?

David Sacks 1:11:10 Yeah. (laughs) Well, what's interesting is the people inside these companies know the answer.

Jason Calacanis 1:11:15 But we can't?

David Sacks 1:11:16 But we can't.

Jason Calacanis 1:11:17 We're not allowed to know?

David Sacks 1:11:18 Exactly. And then, and by the way, this is-

Jason Calacanis 1:11:19 And we're supposed to trust this to drive us, to give us answers, to tell us what to do and-

David Sacks 1:11:23 Yeah, exactly.

Jason Calacanis 1:11:23 ... how to educate and live?

David Sacks 1:11:25 Yes. And it's not just about politics. Okay, let's, let's broaden this a little bit. It's also about what the AI really thinks about other things, such as the human species. So, there was a really weird conversation that took place with Bing's AI, which is now called Sydney, and this was actually in The New York Times. Kevin Roose did the story. He got the AI to say a lot of disturbing things about the infallibility of AI, you know, relative to the fallibility of humans. The AI just acted weird. It's not something you'd want to be an overlord for sure. Here's the thing I don't completely trust is, I don't, I mean I'll just be blunt, I don't trust Kevin Roose as a tech reporter, and I don't know what he prompted the AI exactly to get these answers. So, I don't fully trust the reporting, but there's enough there in the story that it is concerning. And we-

Jason Calacanis 1:12:22 Don't you think a lot of this gets solved in a year and then two years from now? Like you said earlier, like it's accelerating at such a rapid pace. Is this sort of like, are we making a mountain out of a molehill, Sacks, that won't be around as an issue in a year from now?

David Sacks 1:12:36 But what, but what if the AI is developing in ways that should be scary to us from a, like, a societal standpoint, but the mad scientists inside of these AI companies have a different view?

Jason Calacanis 1:12:47 This is, this is, well, to your point, I think that is the big existential risk with this entire part of computer science, which is why I think it's actually a very bad business decision for corporations to view this as a canonical expression of a product. I think it's a very, very dumb idea to have one thing, because I do think what it does is exactly what you just said. It increases the risk that somebody comes out of the, uh-

David Friedberg 1:13:10 ... you know, the third actor, Friedberg, and says, "Wait a minute, this is not what society wants. You have to stop." And that risk is better managed when you have filters, you have different versions. It's kind of like Coke, right? Coke causes cancer, diabetes, FYI. The best way that they managed that was to diversify their product portfolio so that they had Diet Coke, Coke Zero, all these other expressions that could give you cancer and diabetes in a more (laughs) surreptitious way. J- I'm joking.

David Sacks 1:13:38 Yeah.

David Friedberg 1:13:38 But you know the point I'm trying to make. So, this is a really big issue that has to get figured out.

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:13:43 I would argue that maybe this isn't gonna be too different from other censorship and influence cycles that we've seen with media in past. The Gutenberg Press allowed book printing and the church wanted to step in and censor and regulate and moderate and modulate printing presses. Same with, you know, Europe in the 18th century with, with music, that was, uh, classical music being ... and, and operas being kind of too obscene in some cases. A- and then with radio, with television, with film, with pornography, uh, with magazines, with the internet, there are always these cycles where initially it feels like the envelope goes too far. There's a retreat, there's a government intervention, there's a cens- censorship cycle, then there's a resolution to the censorship cycle based on some challenge in the courts or something else. And then ultimately, you know, the market develops and you end up having what feel like very siloed publishers or very siloed media systems that deliver very different types of media and very different types of content. And just because we're calling it AI doesn't mean there's necessarily absolute truth in the world, as we