E170: Tech's Vibe Shift, TikTok ban debate, Vertical AI boom, Florida bans lab-grown meat & more

1. 0:00 – 1:02

   Bestie Intros!

   1. JCJason Calacanis0:00

      Why do you always go Christopher Walken whenever you do these outros? Why do you do that?

   2. CPChamath Palihapitiya0:04

      Thanks for listening to-

   3. JCJason Calacanis0:05

      (laughs)

   4. CPChamath Palihapitiya0:05

      ... the All-In Podcast. Wow! David Sacks-

   5. JCJason Calacanis0:09

      (laughs)

   6. CPChamath Palihapitiya0:09

      ... poignant points about regulatory caption.

   7. JCJason Calacanis0:14

      (laughs)

   8. CPChamath Palihapitiya0:14

      Friedberg loves mock meats. Not for me.

   9. JCJason Calacanis0:19

      (laughs)

   10. CPChamath Palihapitiya0:19

       Chumash, everyone loves a great dictator.

   11. JCJason Calacanis0:23

       (laughs)

   12. DSDavid Sacks0:24

       (laughs) That's so good.

   13. CPChamath Palihapitiya0:26

       See you next time on the All-In Podcast. Wow!

   14. JCJason Calacanis0:31

       (laughs) I love you voice. It's so good.

   15. DSDavid Sacks0:33

       That was one of your better impressions as well.

   16. JCJason Calacanis0:35

       That is so good.

   17. CPChamath Palihapitiya0:36

       That is so good.

   18. DSDavid Sacks0:36

       Better than Trump, I would say.

   19. JCJason Calacanis0:36

       That's your prime talent. Everyone's got their superpower. That's your superpower.

   20. CPChamath Palihapitiya0:39

       You're very nasty, nasty J-Cal. But I'm gonna come up-

   21. DSDavid Sacks0:42

       Don't ruin it. Don't ruin it.

   22. CPChamath Palihapitiya0:43

       ... I'm coming on, I'm coming on all in.

   23. DSDavid Sacks0:44

       I'm going all in. Don't let your winner slide. Rain man, David Sacks. I'm going all in. And I said we open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it.

   24. JCJason Calacanis0:58

       Love you, SI.

   25. DSDavid Sacks0:59

       Queen of quinoa. I'm going all in.

2. 1:02 – 7:13

   Friedberg's newest family members

   1. DSDavid Sacks1:03

   2. JCJason Calacanis1:03

      Hey, Friedberg, you wanna tell them about your new family members?

   3. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:06

      Oh my God.

   4. JCJason Calacanis1:06

      Oh, no.

   5. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:07

      Did, did he get more dogs? Is he trying to Dave Portnoy this again? "Oh, miss Peaches."

   6. DFDavid Friedberg1:12

      So I'm, like, working all day Friday, I'm, like, wiped out. I'd been in, like... I can't remember. Oh, yeah, I was in Santa Cruz. I made it all the way back up through the traffic. I get up to the house. I'd been texting and calling (beep) all afternoon. No response. I'm like, "What the (beep) is going on?" Normally she'll text me like, "Just walk through the door. Open the door to my car." Every little thing. So for her to not be calling me back is... Something's up. I walk in the house, the kids are there. They're jumping up and down. "Daddy, Daddy, we got two new dogs." And I'm like, "What the (beep) are you talking about? We didn't get two new dogs. What are you say..." (laughs) "Mommy's got two new dogs." And then, "Mommy took 'em to the vet. She'll be back in a few minutes." I'm like, "No (beep) way." And I had some friends coming over for dinner. They walk in the house. The kids are jumping up and down. Two minutes later, (beep) walks in the house. These two (beep) dogs that sh- someone found in a parking lot in San Jose.

   7. JCJason Calacanis2:00

      (laughs)

   8. DFDavid Friedberg2:00

      And they couldn't find a home for these dogs. And they were like, "The dogs don't have a home." (beep) decided, "I'll take them into my (beep) home." And I'm like, "You... This is why you didn't call me, you didn't text me." I walked out the room. I'm like, "It's over. It's been nice knowing you." The kids are screaming, "Daddy, you can't get rid of the dogs. They're our dogs now. These are the best dogs." So now we have four (beep) dogs.

   9. CPChamath Palihapitiya2:20

      How much was the vet bill?

   10. DFDavid Friedberg2:21

       And then I come down that night. Huge (beep) in the dining room.

   11. JCJason Calacanis2:24

       (laughs)

   12. DFDavid Friedberg2:24

       Like, multiple diarrhea (beep) plopped all over the floor.

   13. JCJason Calacanis2:28

       That's great. (laughs)

   14. DFDavid Friedberg2:28

       The... I walk downstairs, the whole house was smelling of poop.

   15. JCJason Calacanis2:30

       (laughs) Oh my God.

   16. DFDavid Friedberg2:31

       My house has become like... You know those carnival trains that used to go from city to city back in the 19th century? If one of those trains, like, fell over and spilled open, that's basically what my house has become.

   17. JCJason Calacanis2:41

       (laughs)

   18. DFDavid Friedberg2:41

       It just smells like poo and hay, and there's clowns-

   19. JCJason Calacanis2:45

       (laughs)

   20. DFDavid Friedberg2:45

       ... and children running around. And I live in-

   21. CPChamath Palihapitiya2:48

       Did I ever tell you the story of Chuck Norris, the chihuahua?

   22. DFDavid Friedberg2:53

       No.

   23. JCJason Calacanis2:53

       No.

   24. CPChamath Palihapitiya2:53

       No. So I'm going to a wedding. I'm in, like, Arizona. I'm driving, like, on one of these giant, like, Arizona streets and a (beep) chihuahua runs across this, like, eight-lane boulevard, whatever. And I'm like, "Oh my God." And I'm, like, dodging around it and it goes into the other side of traffic and I see a car and he just... The dog ducks. He misses the car. I'm like, "Oh, thank God." My wife is (beep) screaming her head off. The dog gets whacked by another (beep) car and it goes rolling down the highway.

   25. JCJason Calacanis3:23

       Oh, no.

   26. CPChamath Palihapitiya3:23

       I make a U-turn, I block it. The dog's knocked out on the side of the road. I run up to the dog, I pick it up. I'm like, "Ah, this dog's gonna die." You know, and I, I get in the car and I said, "Let's just take it to, uh, a vet or whatever." And I'm saying goodbye to the dog. The dog's, like, looking up at me. It, it's in bad shape. We go to a vet, I give it to the vet. We go to the wedding. My wife, who is, like, (beep) got this big heart, uh, decides she's gonna stay with the dog. So I go to the wedding, I go to the, you know, opening night party. She's with... She's at the 24-hour vet sitting with this dog, waiting for it to die in hospice.

   27. JCJason Calacanis4:01

       Oh my God.

   28. CPChamath Palihapitiya4:03

       The dog doesn't die.

   29. JCJason Calacanis4:04

       (laughs)

   30. CPChamath Palihapitiya4:04

       The dog survives.
3. 7:13 – 22:47

   Tech's vibe shift: More candidness, less PR-speak from top CEOs

   1. CPChamath Palihapitiya7:13

      today. I know it's a bit early in the year, but I am going to add a new category, or I'm proposing a new category, uh, would love to hear your feedback on it, for the 2024 Besties Most Based CEO. Lots of options to choose from right now, (laughs) which we'll get into in a minute. But there seems to be a bit of a vibe shift happening in tech. During peak ZIRP and cancel culture 2019 to 2021 era, it seemed like CEOs were a little vigilant about what they would say, you know, the Tim Cooks, the Sundars. But something has clearly changed. Tech CEOs have gotten radically candid and fired their comms group. Two great examples this week that we were talking about, (laughs) Jensen Huang, the CEO of NVIDIA, had this awesome clip when speaking at Stanford's Graduate School of Business.

   2. JHJensen Huang7:58

      I think one of m- my great advantages is that I have very low expectations, and I mean that. Most of the Stanford graduates have very high expectations. (door slams) People with very high expectations have very low resilience. And unfortunately, resilience matters in success. I don't know how to teach it to you except for I hope suffering happens to you. To this day, I use the word, the phrase pain and suffering inside our company with great glee. Boy, this is gonna cause a lot of pain and suffering. And I mean that in a happy way, because you wanna train, you wanna refine the character of your company. You want greatness out of them, and greatness is not intelligence. It's greatness comes from character, and character is informed out of smart people, is formed out of people who suffered.

   3. CPChamath Palihapitiya8:37

      And then next up, Palantir CEO Alex Karp called out the coked-up short sellers-

   4. AKAlex Karp8:43

      (laughs)

   5. CPChamath Palihapitiya8:43

      ... on CNBC.

   6. AKAlex Karp8:46

      I love burning the short sellers.

   7. CPChamath Palihapitiya8:47

      (laughs) Sure you do.

   8. AKAlex Karp8:47

      Like, almost nothing makes a human happier than taking the lines of cocaine and, uh-

   9. CPChamath Palihapitiya8:53

      (laughs)

   10. AKAlex Karp8:53

       ... away from these short sellers who, like, are going short on a truly great American company, not just ours, but I just love pulling down great American companies so that they can pay for their coke. And, uh, the best thing that could happen to them is we will provide, we will lead their coke dealers to their homes after they can't pay their bills.

   11. CPChamath Palihapitiya9:12

       (laughs)

   12. JHJensen Huang9:12

       (laughs)

   13. AKAlex Karp9:13

       And that, that's, like, one of my-

   14. DSDavid Sacks9:14

       Surely all short sellers.

   15. AKAlex Karp9:15

       Yeah, well, you know, go ahead.

   16. DSDavid Sacks9:17

       ... Coke hey, man.

   17. AKAlex Karp9:17

       Do your thing. We'll do our thing.

   18. CPChamath Palihapitiya9:19

       There you have it, folks. Of course, we, we, uh, had Elon's great good for you at, uh, some New York Times conference, always candid. And even Zuckerberg, he's been getting a little based. He did a whole video about how the Apple Vision Pro was (censored) when compared to Meta's Quest 2. He, he's getting a little frisky on the social media. Freeberg, is the vibe shift real? It seems like a lot of people are less worried about cancel culture as they were three years ago. So I don't know if it's just in Silicon Valley. Broadly in media and broadly culturally, there seems to be a move away from cancel culture mentality, and people are speaking their mind (laughs) more, which is, yeah, I think, obviously positive and refreshing. Sacks, you're a big fan of, uh, freedom of speech. Your thoughts on this vibe shift? Is it, is this related to cancel culture kind of ending and journalists just not being able to cancel people because they misspoke or were a little spicy in their takes?

   19. DSDavid Sacks10:28

       Well, I like the fact that these CEOs are all being colorful in their remarks and candid and interesting, and that, that's always a good thing. And in each of these cases, I kinda liked what they had to say. But I think that you might or we collectively might be reading a little bit too much into this. I mean, at the end of the day, what sacred cows are they really challenging? What real dangerous truths are they speaking? What real risks are they taking? I just don't put any of the things that they're saying or doing in the same category as, say, what Elon has been doing in terms of taking on the powers that be, in terms of rolling back censorship and promoting free speech on, on X. I mean, Elon, I think, has taken some real risks in doing that. And you see that he's paying the price with all these government investigations and the voiding of his compensation package. Th- that, I think, is just in a slightly different category of true risk-taking by speaking truth to power or allowing the masses to speak truth to power compared to what these other guys are doing. And I'm not disparaging any of them, but, you know, look at them one by one.

   20. CPChamath Palihapitiya11:40

       Yeah.

   21. DSDavid Sacks11:40

       I mean, Alex Karp made a colorful joke at the expense of short traders. I agree, but it's not really a risky remark.

   22. CPChamath Palihapitiya11:48

       Yeah.

   23. DSDavid Sacks11:48

       Jensen Huang is giving some tough love to Stanford students. He's giving them, I think, a good lesson of stop being so entitled, go get some real life experience, be resilient. Okay, great message. I saw the Zuckerberg clip, liked it as well. He's basically speaking from a place of passion about his own product and comparing it to Apple. Okay, great, that's what he's supposed to do. I don't see any of those CEOs take... Again, if you wanna compare it to Elon-... taking a really dangerous political stance. In fact, remember when Zuckerberg got dragged to Capitol Hill and gave that testimony, and they demanded that he give that apology. He didn't. I mean, you know-

   24. CPChamath Palihapitiya12:29

       He genuflected.

   25. JCJason Calacanis12:30

       I thought that word was banned on this pod.

   26. DFDavid Friedberg12:32

       (laughs)

   27. CPChamath Palihapitiya12:32

       That only applied to me. (laughs)

   28. JCJason Calacanis12:34

       Okay, got it. Yeah.

   29. CPChamath Palihapitiya12:36

       He gene- anybody else can be genuflecting.

   30. JCJason Calacanis12:38

       (laughs) .
4. 22:47 – 28:58

   OpenAI CTO slips up on training data: did OpenAI train Sora on YouTube videos?

   1. CPChamath Palihapitiya22:47

      All right, everybody, let's get to our second topic. It's a mini-topic, but did OpenAI just get caught with their hand in the cookie jar or the training data cookie jar? OpenAI's CTO was interviewed by the Wall Street Journal this week. During the interview, you probably saw this if you're on X, it trended. She was asked, "What data did OpenAI use to train Sora?" If you don't know what Sora is, we talked about it here, it's that incredible, you know, video create, you know, type in a text prompt, get a video back model and, uh, let's watch this clip and then discuss it.

   2. DSDavid Sacks23:19

      What data was used to train Sora?

   3. MMMira Murati23:22

      We used publicly available data and licensed data.

   4. DSDavid Sacks23:27

      So, videos on YouTube?

   5. MMMira Murati23:32

      I'm actually not sure about that.

   6. DSDavid Sacks23:34

      Okay. Videos from Facebook, Instagram?

   7. MMMira Murati23:39

      You know, if they were publicly available, um, available, yeah, publicly available to use, um, there might be the data, but, um, I'm, I'm not sure.

   8. DSDavid Sacks23:51

      Yeah.

   9. MMMira Murati23:51

      I'm not confident about it.

   10. CPChamath Palihapitiya23:53

       Let me start with you, Chamath. What are your thoughts here and just her not being super prepared there to answer a question or is this a cookie jar situation? What do you think?

   11. JCJason Calacanis24:03

       I mean, you gotta think the CTO of an organization that, whose job it is to build models based on training data knows where the training data is from.

   12. CPChamath Palihapitiya24:12

       (laughs)

   13. DSDavid Sacks24:13

       My interpretation of that answer is that she is hesitating 'cause she doesn't wanna make a statement against interest.

   14. JCJason Calacanis24:21

       Right. I wanna show you guys something.

   15. DSDavid Sacks24:22

       Yeah.

   16. JCJason Calacanis24:22

       I had a friend of mine, somebody we all know who's deep in the heart of this AI stuff.He was... He came to my office and he showed me this one really interesting thing, which is when you launch ChatGPT, and if you go into the microphone, but you say nothing, so you just wait a few seconds, turn on the microphone, wait a few seconds and turn it off. I'll just do it right now just to show you. It comes back and it says, "Thank you for watching," which is typically what it shows you when you auto-watch a bunch of YouTube videos.

   17. CPChamath Palihapitiya24:56

       Hmm.

   18. JCJason Calacanis24:56

       Now, why is that interesting? Well, if you say nothing, right, the model has clearly then is guessing that whenever you see, you hear silence, that probabilistically the next best thing to translate that into is, "Thank you for watching," which would mean that the training happened on a bunch of content where, "Thank you for watching," was the next obvious thing. So that when there's silence, and the most obvious place where that happens is in YouTube. I don't know, I thought that was an interesting little thing that he pointed out to me. I don't know if anybody's actually explored this, but if it is true and Google decides they have an issue with it, that's not good for these folks.

   19. CPChamath Palihapitiya25:35

       Freeberg, your thoughts?

   20. DFDavid Friedberg25:37

       I, I think it's fine. I, I don't know why this is a controversial thing.

   21. CPChamath Palihapitiya25:41

       Well, I mean, it's obvious. She's kind of lying on camera. She definitely knows where the training data came from, and it feels like C- CYA. I mean...

   22. DFDavid Friedberg25:48

       I mean, I, I... What... YouTube is public, so what's wrong with watching YouTube to teach a model stuff?

   23. CPChamath Palihapitiya25:55

       Well, you'd have to get a license to make a derivative work. As we've seen, OpenAI has been doing that. They're in a lawsuit right now with The New York Times, and they failed to negotiate their license. So, it does seem-

   24. DFDavid Friedberg26:05

       I think the assumption is they're making a derivative work. I think they're creating a model.

   25. CPChamath Palihapitiya26:09

       Yeah, I mean, they, they've licensed other people's data, right?

   26. DFDavid Friedberg26:12

       Yeah, to get access to it that's not publicly available. You can go to YouTube Downloader and download all this data. You know what's crazy? I heard from someone at Google that under the terms of service, Google's not allowed to train on YouTube data. Remember my... I made this point a couple weeks ago about how important YouTube data is. I think there'd r- be this really ironic handicap that Google's done to itself, (laughs) where anyone else can access and download and watch YouTube data to train models, but Google cannot.

   27. CPChamath Palihapitiya26:38

       Hmm.

   28. DFDavid Friedberg26:38

       I don't know if there's any clarity on that, but it's a pretty crazy fact pattern. But yeah, YouTube's on the internet, and I feel like anything that's on the open internet should be watchable by these models. I don't consider training models to be generation of derivative work. That's my position.

   29. CPChamath Palihapitiya26:51

       Yeah. And that's a position that OpenAI has taken, the other side of that position, 'cause they're going around licensing data. Sacks, any other thoughts here about this kerfuffle?

   30. DSDavid Sacks27:00

       Well, look, I kind of agree with both you and Freeberg. Uh, in terms of the part that I agree with Freeberg, I think that this issue is kind of more of the same of what we've been talking about for a while, which is, clearly OpenAI trained its model on publicly available data that was available on the, on the internet. I agree with Freeberg that, uh, fair use doctrine should be applied to that. I know that you have a different point of view on that, JCal. I don't know if we need to rehash that. I, I understand that you don't think fair use should apply. In any event, I think it's pretty clear that OpenAI trained Sora using, you know, available data on the internet, and that probably included YouTube. The part where I agree with you, JCal, is that... I don't know if I would say that she's lying per se, but I think she's probably concerned that if she comes right out and, and answers the question as directly as she could, that it could be a problem for them in all these lawsuits that they're now facing. You know, again, I think that I would take the side in those lawsuits that fair use should be allowed, but I think that probably she is being careful here, because they are facing so many lawsuits about this training data.
5. 28:58 – 40:38

   Vertical AI startups flourishing: Cognition launches Devin, what will this do to startups?

   1. JCJason Calacanis28:58

   2. CPChamath Palihapitiya28:58

      Speaking of AI, vertical AI startups are starting to make some noise. We all know about large language models. We've talked about them here if you listen to this program. You know about OpenAI, Google's Gemini, previously known as Bard, Anthropic, Claude, all this stuff, they're general purpose. They've been trained on the open internet, as we were just discussing, so they can answer questions about almost anything. And yeah, sometimes it's correct, sometimes they're incorrect, but it's showing promise. There is another school of thought here that's emerging in startups, vertical AI. These companies are kinda taking a job title, a role in society, and they are building vertical apps. Harvey is AI for lawyers. Abridge is doing an AI note-taker for doctors, saves them hours a day, according to them. TaxGPT is an AI tax assistant. NCR has AI for customer support. That's Bret Taylor's new startup. This week, a startup called Cognition debuted a tool called Devin. They're calling it an AI software engineer. The demos went viral on X. Uh, you've probably seen them all over the place and in the news. If you watch it, you can see Devin fixing bugs in real time, fine-tuning an AI model, building apps end-to-end. And people are speculating Devin was built on, uh, GPT-4 from OpenAI. That's not confirmed. But according to the CEO, Devin was built by tweaking reasoning and long-term planning into an existing LLM. Here's how it ranks against other major models on coding benchmarks. They're building all these benchmarks to test each language model. And as you can see, it's, according to this chart and according to their data, doing...... much better than just a generic language model, which kind of makes sense. Chamath, did you see these demos this week? I think I saw you on the group chat talking about it. And what was your take on these role-based vertical startups?

   3. JCJason Calacanis30:51

      Oh, I think this is so powerful. I mean, it's incredible because we're measuring this progress in, like, what? Week over week, you know?

   4. CPChamath Palihapitiya30:58

      It feels like that, yeah.

   5. JCJason Calacanis31:01

      I think the point that you should take away is that the most of these very difficult, im- impenetrable job types, for the average person, if there's, if you said to them, "Hey, become a developer," that's like a complicated journey, right? It's just gonna be now, like, a command line interface where you just kind of describe in English what you want to do, and all of this stuff will just happen behind the scenes and it'll be totally automated. So, that'll grow the number of people that can use these tools. At the same time, it'll make the developers, I think, even more valued because you're gonna need people in the guts of these models and in the code that it generates because it's not always gonna work perfectly. There's always gonna be some kind of hallucination. Some stuff is not gonna compile. Now, the demos that they did, though, were incredible. They were able to find errors. They were able to remediate errors in code. That's, I mean, I just, uh, I think it's really, really special.

   6. CPChamath Palihapitiya32:02

      Sachin-

   7. JCJason Calacanis32:02

      Super cool.

   8. CPChamath Palihapitiya32:02

      ... you've been on copilots for the past year, talking about that. This is slightly different. We're moving from, hey, here's a copilot, somebody helping a developer, to, hey, here's a developer working, and now they have a supervisor. So, what do you think of these sort of role-based agents and, and how quickly we went from year one copiloting to, okay, now they're the pilot and we're sitting (laughs) in the copilot seat, watching them fly the plane?

   9. DSDavid Sacks32:29

      Yeah. Well, look, fir- first of all, everyone's working on autonomous coding, or working towards that. This is, like, one of the core, most obvious use cases of LLMs because code is text, and it can also be run through a compiler to debug it. So, you can also get to, in theory, you can get to high levels of accuracy yet, although in the example that you gave, Jason, this new product was only at 13%. So, there's still a long way to go, but the potential is clearly there. So, a lot of companies are working on some variation of this idea. Devin is, I guess you could call it an agent-first approach, and I think that's very cool for generating new software projects. But where I think this gets much trickier and is much more difficult is when you're working in existing code bases. And just to talk about my own book for a second, we're an investor in a company called Sourcegraph. They have a product called Codey, and their whole approach is context-first as opposed to agent-first. It's all about getting the copilot to work inside of existing code bases. So, different companies are coming at this from different approaches. GitHub Copilot, I think, is kind of more like Codey, where it's all about making an existing code base more useful. Whereas, Devin, again, is starting with, I think, net new code bases. But that's gonna demo really well.

   10. CPChamath Palihapitiya33:49

       Hm.

   11. DSDavid Sacks33:49

       And so that's what you're seeing is, like, these really cool demos. In any event, the larger picture here is that we are gonna get better at, better at coding autonomously, I guess you could say. And I don't know if it gets, ever gets to 100% where you don't need coders anymore, but it's gonna make coders much more productive over time. You're gonna get this huge multiplier effect on the ability to write code, and that's really exciting for a bunch of obvious reasons.

   12. CPChamath Palihapitiya34:16

       Frayber, we've been tracking this evolution from, you know, Gmail, guess the next word, guess the next phrase, guess the next sentence, to copilots. Now we have these role-based, agent-based solutions that startups are pursuing. What's next? If we follow this thread, what would-

   13. DFDavid Friedberg34:37

       Yeah.

   14. CPChamath Palihapitiya34:37

       ... the next evolution here be?

   15. DFDavid Friedberg34:38

       Well, the big push has been for this notion of AGI, to replace a human. And I think what we're seeing is software that replaces a specific human doing a specific thing, like being a lawyer, being an accountant, being an art director. If you think about the internet, when the internet, which was like networking software and the capabilities that arose from the connection of all these computers during the internet era, the innovation was everyone tried to create a business model, which was how do you take an existing vertical business and put it on the internet? I think what we're seeing in this era is everyone's taking a vertical human and creating a vertical version of a human, um, in the AI era. And so, um, I think, like, the, the success will probably accrue to one company that replaces one set of core human services, like being a lawyer, being an accountant, you know, being an artist i- in whatever way. And that that ends up being the specific vertical tool that people will use to automate and scale up their ability to do that task in an automated way, because I think that there's, like, a great deal of capability that emerges in the fine-tuning and the unique data that certain people may have to make that one tool better than the rest. And therefore, everyone will end up using this one lawyer service or this one accounting service or what have you. So, I definitely think that's kind of what we're seeing.

   16. CPChamath Palihapitiya36:10

       Yeah, I think it's pretty obvious where this is going. You got copilots assisting a developer (laughs) or a lawyer, then the next, or a writer. Then they got the next phase. Okay, you've got a peer, so you're doing peer programming or somebody's kind of working alongside you. You're checking their work. Hey, maybe they're even checking your work, seeing if you have bugs. Where this is gonna be next year is there's gonna be a conductor. There's gonna be somebody who has a role or a piece of software has a role where you say, "Hey, you're a CEO of a company, you're a founder, a product manager. Here's your lawyer, here's your (laughs) accountant, here's your developers, here's your designer."

   17. DFDavid Friedberg36:44

       Well, Jason, I-

   18. NANarrator36:44

       Yeah.

   19. CPChamath Palihapitiya36:44

       And now you will coordinate those five people. Now imagine how that changes startups when you, as an individual, have a conductor working with you and says, "You know what? I don't know if I agree with this legal advice that's coming in, in relation to the tax advice and maybe we should not even add this feature to the program. Let's talk to the product manager, the agent product manager about taking that feature out so we don't have these downstream legal issues of... and we don't even have to file taxes in this, you know-

   20. NANarrator37:11

       Yeah.

   21. CPChamath Palihapitiya37:11

       ... area." It's gonna get really interesting next year when they have a conductor.

   22. DFDavid Friedberg37:15

       The other way it may go, Jason, is you have a lawyer that has 50 associates working for them through the AI. So, you don't replace the lawyer, you don't replace the software engineer. The software engineer levels up and now the software engineer has 50 engineers available, 50 agents running, doing tasks for them.

   23. CPChamath Palihapitiya37:32

       Tuning apps.

   24. DFDavid Friedberg37:33

       'Cause you do still, you do still need humans with domain expertise and creativity to think through architecture, to think through process, and to make sure that the AI agents are doing their job. So, I think what it creates is extraordinary leverage for people and organizations, which is why generally economic productivity goes up. People don't lose jobs, they level up.

   25. JCJason Calacanis37:52

       In this phase, the, the OpEx of companies will probably be cut in half.

   26. DFDavid Friedberg37:57

       Mm-hmm.

   27. JCJason Calacanis37:58

       At the limit, I think Jason is actually absolutely right. I think you find that there'll be millions of companies with one person and then a whole layer of software and conductors and agents and bots. That's the future.

   28. CPChamath Palihapitiya38:11

       Yeah.

   29. JCJason Calacanis38:11

       So, you won't have these engineering people. That person should be running their own company. And so you'll just have millions and millions and millions and maybe billions of companies, and I think that that's really exciting. Not all of them will work, many of them will fail, and a few of them will be ginormous, and it'll be up to the person who can navigate and be a conductor, as you said, you know?

   30. CPChamath Palihapitiya38:33

       Yeah, and you think about-
6. 40:38 – 1:22:10

   TikTok debate: Is the new bill to ban or force a sale of TikTok fair or potentially overreaching due to its vagueness?

   1. CPChamath Palihapitiya40:38

      one. All right, everybody. Next issue, the House just passed a bill that would either ban TikTok or force a sale. Talked about this bill being proposed last week, and things had moved really slowly on the TikTok ban. Now they're moving really fast. On Wednesday, the House passed the bill with a bipartisan vote of 352 to 65, making this one of the few subjects that members of Congress can agree on. Biden has also signaled his intent to sign the bill into law should it pass the Senate. Passing the Senate, that could be an obstacle. Democratic majority leader Chuck Schumer has signaled a lack of interest in the subject and said he'll review the bill with committee chairs before deciding on the path forward. Arguments for and against the bill have centered around a few main points. Reciprocity, we talked about that here. You can't use Instagram, X, or any of our domestic social networks in China, and if they won't allow us in their country, why should we give them unrestricted access to ours? Stifling debate, progressives fear this isn't really about national security. Uh, their position is mainstream politicians are hoping to shut down political discourse, particularly among the youth who are mostly on TikTok, particularly pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel discourse, which seems to flourish on TikTok versus other platforms. Coincidentally, Joe Biden launched a TikTok account last month, and his comments were instantly flooded with pro-Palestinian remarks, some calling him Genocide Joe. Third argument, overreach. Some... Sax, I think you've pointed out that the language in this law is a bit vague, it needs to be tightened up. Maybe, uh, the president could go after companies supposedly aligned with foreign interests who aren't. Our esteemed patriot and friend Keith Raboy argued with you, Sax, on this on, uh, X. And then there are guys like Trump and Vivek, who I believe are flip-flopping based on securing bags. Vivek called TikTok digital fentanyl, and Trump issued an executive order calling for ByteDance to divest TikTok in 2020. Now, they're both opposing the ban, and interestingly, both Trump and Vivek have ties to the Republican mega-donor Jeffrey Yass, who-... who is a major shareholder in ByteDance with a reported 15 to $30 billion stake. He gave Vivek five million bucks. Who knows what Trump's gotten, but they said they're back in love. Sachs, you had this big back and forth with Keith Raboy on X. Are you in support of the divestiture or not? Uh, I haven't been able to track exactly where you're at with this.

   2. DSDavid Sacks43:16

      Well, I think my take on this, and I'm gonna have to revise and extend my remarks from last week, 'cause I didn't know as much about the bill. I hadn't actually read the language yet, and now I have. And my take on this is that the bill poses a significant risk of being Patriot Act 2.0. So in other words, you know, a threat to the security of the United States is basically hyped up. Some part of it may be real, some of it may be threat inflation, and then we give the intelligence community and the government new powers which can then be abused, and that's exactly what happened with the Patriot Act. They ended up spying on Americans. Now, what is the potential abuse here? This is a thing that I've debated with Keith, and there's also other people who I respect a lot. And Keith, by the way, is a very talented lawyer in addition to other things, being a successful founder and...

   3. CPChamath Palihapitiya44:09

      Investor.

   4. DSDavid Sacks44:10

      And investor. And then, you know, I saw that Segar and, and Jetty, whose show I was just on, thinks that the bill is just fine. So look, there are people, very legit people, who disagree with me about this. But I went last night, and I read this bill, like, four times to try and, like, parse the language, and I've just come away concluding there's no... Uh, uh, the way I see it, there's no way to argue that this language isn't vague and could invite abuse. And you really have to dig into it, but let me just kinda walk you through, I think, a key part of it. So first of all, this bill doesn't just ban or force the divestiture of TikTok. It goes after what it calls foreign adversary-controlled applications. Now, what is a foreign adversary? There are four countries that are defined as foreign adversaries. It's basically Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea. I'm not super worried about that list of foreign adversaries growing, because that does take a bunch of procedural hoops to go through it. What I am concerned about is when the bill talks about what makes a company controlled by a foreign adversary. And if you go to that language, which is in the definitions, so you know, what frequently happens with these bills is that a lot of the meat is actually in the definitions, so you have to look at this very carefully. It says here, "The term 'controlled by a foreign adversary' means, with respect to our covered company, that such company or entity is..." And then there's three categories. The first category is a foreign person, which could also mean a foreign corporation, that's do- domiciled in or is headquartered or has its principal place of business or is organized under the law of a foreign adversary country. So that would be like ByteDance, okay? ByteDance is a Chinese company, okay? Then it says or it can be an entity where 20% of the ownership group is in that foreign-person category. So that would be like u- let's say you had a US company, but 20% of the company was owned by, I don't know, Chinese VCs or by ByteDance, okay? That would also be a controlled by a foreign adversary. Then you get to the provision that I think is the most problematic, which is it's a person subject to the direction or control of a foreign person or entity. The novel language here is where it says "subject to the direction of," okay? It's not just saying "under the control of." It's saying "subject to the direction of." In my view, that's very vague, and i- a creative prosecutor, a creative attorney general could try to say, "Well, wait a second. If Elon has a major, uh, Tesla factory in Shanghai, is he subject to the direction of the Chinese Communist Party because they could influence him, they could leverage him? If Donald Trump is accused on virtually a daily basis of being a Russian asset, is he subject to the direction of Vladimir Putin?" David Frum just tweeted the- very recently that he said that not only Trump, but the entire Republican Party that works for Trump is under the direction of Russia.

   5. CPChamath Palihapitiya47:20

      Yeah, that's, like, a partisan hack though. Like, that's not, like, actual factual in a court, right? So this would have to be proven factual in a court?

   6. DSDavid Sacks47:27

      Okay.

   7. CPChamath Palihapitiya47:28

      Do you think, or no?

   8. DSDavid Sacks47:29

      Well, the AG could open an investigation based on the theory that, for example, Trump owns Truth Social and Trump is under the direction of a foreign adversary, i.e. Putin, because the mainstream media continues to normalize this idea and spread this idea on virtually a daily basis. So the point is that, look, first the AG would open an investigation. You think about the sledgehammer type of remedy here that an Elon or a Trump or a, uh, you take Rumble, for example, which is also accused of being a Russian agent, they could be forced to divest the company or to, to have it be banned. So it gives huge, I think, new powers to the executive branch to pursue political opponents and political enemies. Whether they actually win in a court of law down the road is kind of secondary, because they can vex and harass their political enemies using this power. So my point is that at a minimum, I think this language needs to get cleaned up.

   9. CPChamath Palihapitiya48:34

      Yeah, it's gotta get done.

   10. DSDavid Sacks48:34

       I think it is w- way too vague. And you still have the issue of whether it's a good idea or not to force the banning or divestiture of TikTok, but this bill goes way beyond it. Again, it creates this novel category of foreign adversary-controlled applications which also, like I said, includes websites, and that means not just foreign companies, but domestic...... companies as well, that are said to be under the direction of a foreign actor. So, again, I- I don't know how anyone can look at this language and not say it's too vague.

   11. JCJason Calacanis49:08

       Yeah, it's easy enough to tighten it up. And if was tightened up, you'd be in favor of the TikTok ban, I take it, Sachs? Or divestiture, I should say. You kee- I keep saying ban. You would still want the Chinese government to not have control of this or- or ByteDance, yeah.

   12. DSDavid Sacks49:21

       I still have very mixed feelings about the idea of just the- the TikTok ban, because, look, you're talking about an app that 100 million Americans use, uh, for something like 90 minutes a day, so people obviously get a lot of value out of this. I've yet to see the- the hard proof that this app is under the control of the CCP. I mean, I know that allegation was made. I can understand why people make it.

   13. JCJason Calacanis49:44

       Yeah, they spied on journalists already, yeah.

   14. DSDavid Sacks49:47

       But, uh, it's- it's very unclear to me that they have the goods on that. And I do think that depriving Americans of the right to use this app that they clearly enjoy and love based on a threat that has yet to be proven, that makes me... I- I'm deeply ambivalent about that.

   15. JCJason Calacanis50:06

       Chamath, if we were to look at, say, media channels, newspapers, there's been rules about foreign ownership of those. Do you believe TikTok kind of falls into that? As Sachs said, Americans are enjoying this in a massive way, 100 million-plus, 90 minutes a day, the statistics are crazy. That actually, I think, argues for, you know, not having a foreign adversary own this or have access to it. We wouldn't allow them to own CNN, Fox, New York Times, Washington Post, et cetera. We have rules against that already. So, are you in favor of this TikTok divestiture, yes or no?

   16. DFDavid Friedberg50:43

       Yeah.

   17. JCJason Calacanis50:44

       Okay. There you have it. Uh, Freiberg-

   18. DSDavid Sacks50:47

       (laughs)

   19. JCJason Calacanis50:48

       ... uh, would love to have you-

   20. DSDavid Sacks50:48

       Ho- hold on, I'd like to hear, I'd like to hear him expand on that. (laughs)

   21. JCJason Calacanis50:52

       (laughs) Um, I'll- I'll tell you, before I tell you why, I'll tell you a quick story. Two or three months ago, after Joker was sick, we started to make his own dog food, right? So to have like a super bland diet. And we had this service that was sending us food, and we got rid of it, and we would just make it ourselves. And part of the meal was like some raw apples and carrots that I- that I would cut up, and I would always complain to Nat. I'm like, "I hate peeling these apples or whatever, slicing them and taking the core out." Just- just said that. For the next month and a half, all I got was apple coring utensils on TikTok. And she was like, "Oh, you know, we should get rid of XYZ Food Service," and she would just get plastered with these ads. And it was just a reminder to me that these apps are constantly listening. Now, that's a benign example, but my phone is on my desk when I'm talking about some really important stuff, again, r- important related to me, both personal and professional, where there's lots of money on the line. There's moments where, for certain parts of my business, like with crypto, we have like 19 layers of people that have to... you have passwords upon passwords upon passwords to do stuff. The phone is always there. It was just a reminder to me, so I deleted TikTok. It's gone. Which sucks, because I would relax with that app at night. Like, you know, it w- I would have 15, 20 minutes where I would decompress- It's fun.

   22. DFDavid Friedberg52:24

       It's super fun. It's a great app, I have to be honest with you. I love it. But as a consumer, that was the decision I made. As a business person, what I'll say is, it is inconceivable to me that our voice signatures aren't being mapped and there isn't a massive sort of file and repository that is understanding what we're all saying. And it's then further inconceivable to me that there isn't a service that's then identifying that this is probably David Sachs, and this is Chamath, and this is Freiberg. And we're not really all that important, but let's take a better example. This is Elon Musk, this is the President of the United States, this is... or the waiter that works for the president who has his phone in his pocket while he's sitting inside the r- you know, the- the- the residences of the White House. So, I think it's happening. I think they're not the only one, though. I think there's American companies that are doing it too. And so, I think that we need to start somewhere. Until we can have our apps in a market, they shouldn't have their apps here, and I think that should be the end of it.

   23. JCJason Calacanis53:41

       Completely reasonable, I think.

   24. DFDavid Friedberg53:43

       I'm gonna disagree, I think, a couple points. I don't believe in the notion of like reciprocity for reciprocity's sake. China blocks access to US content. Does that mean the US government should block access to international content? I think the answer is no, because this country is different than China. We have afforded ourselves freedoms and liberties that don't exist in other countries. Freedom of choice, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and so on. So I don't think that the government should be restricting access to content because another country restricts access to our content. I think that we should make decisions based on what's right for the citizens, what's right for the country, what's right for national security.

   25. JCJason Calacanis54:25

       What about spying apps?

   26. DFDavid Friedberg54:27

       So that's a- that's- that's my- my next point. So I do think that if there is a case to be made that there is spying or data acquisition that's going on through these apps-

   27. JCJason Calacanis54:36

       We're not talking about rice noodles over here, you know? We're talking about (laughs) spy apps.

   28. DFDavid Friedberg54:40

       Yeah, and so I think if- if that's true, then I would imagine that there are multiple paths to alleviate that, like move all the servers to the US and separate the entity, force a sale. You know, like, I- I think, I- I don't think that it's necessarily appropriate to say that there aren't other courses or other options available to try and prohibit what should generally be prohibited, which is spying on American citizens and capturing data that people...... you know, haven't opted in to being captured. I do believe that citizens and people should have the right to decide if they wanna have their data used to be able to access an app. I actually am not a big believer that we should be paternalistic in the government sense and saying, having the government come in and say, "Here is an app and we have determined that it is not good for you because this data is being used in a manipulative way against you." I think that citizens should be afforded transparency and make a decision about whether or not they want to participate in that.

   29. JCJason Calacanis55:35

       I don't- I don't think, I don't think citizens have the sophistication to understand what foreign adversaries, again we only have four so they were named there for a reason, are doing with our data. And I don't think that they should have to be forced to choose. I think that, you know, this is not dissimilar to how the FDA says, "You're not qualified to decide whether this drug is good, we will tell you." And people are okay with that because you are saying this is part of the government infrastructure that's full of experts who know the totality of a subject. And so the problem is, in order for anybody to make a reasonable decision, you'd have to share so much as to just completely blow up a bunch of national security which is not gonna happen.

   30. DFDavid Friedberg56:13

       Well look, I think we can have audit rights and we can have rights to protect our citizens. I think that that's appropriate. I- I- I'll also say, my- my final point on this, I think that whether it's intentional or not, this sort of action leads to inevitable cronyism and regulatory capture. Who does this benefit? If TikTok gets banned in the US, it's gonna benefit Meta, it's gonna benefit Instagram, it's gonna benefit a few other, you know, social me- it's gonna benefit Elon at Twitter. There's a few folks that are gonna benefit pretty significantly if TikTok is banned because all those users are gonna migrate. I will also say, by the way, that many thousands of people make their living on TikTok. Like it or not, it's a big income stream for a lot of people in the US and a really important part of their livelihood.

Episode duration: 1:38:11