All-In PodcastGrok 4 Wows, The Bitter Lesson, Third Party, AI Browsers, SCOTUS backs POTUS on RIFs
EVERY SPOKEN WORD
150 min read · 30,352 words- 0:00 – 3:02
The Besties welcome Travis Kalanick and Keith Rabois!
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
I have a very funny story to tell you, Jason.
- JCJason Calacanis
Where have you been? I've been trying to text you, you've been offline.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
(laughs)
- JCJason Calacanis
What's going on? Where have you been?
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
I've been working feverishly, but-
- JCJason Calacanis
Mm-hmm.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
... yesterday I had to go to prepare for some meetings that I have on Sunday, which I can't tell you about, but-
- JCJason Calacanis
Can't tell us any-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
... Nat and I, Nat and I went to Passalacqua, which is in Lake Como, which is an inc- I mean, it's stunning. The, the grounds are stunning, the hotel is stunning.
- JCJason Calacanis
Beautiful. Wow.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
If you have a chance to go to Lake Como... Anyways, this is us at Passalacqua.
- JCJason Calacanis
Who's the beautiful-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
But we-
- JCJason Calacanis
... woman there? Is that the, uh, woman who owns it or something?
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
That's, uh, that's not.
- JCJason Calacanis
Is that the queen?
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
No, that's not. But the best part is-
- JCJason Calacanis
Oh, that's not. Sorry.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
... we had such a good time. You know how they have, like, a registry book to leave a message?
- JCJason Calacanis
Sure.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
So I, I left a message. (laughs)
- JCJason Calacanis
Here we go. What a truly-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
(laughs)
- JCJason Calacanis
... magnificent place. Above and beyond any expectation we had.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
(laughs) Go below, go below, that's not from me. That's from me. (laughs)
- JCJason Calacanis
Thank you. We took everything to Free- (laughs)
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
(laughs)
- JCJason Calacanis
We took everything to Freeburg.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Oh my gosh.
- JCJason Calacanis
Great, awesome.
- 3:02 – 18:51
Travis on Pony.ai / Uber and the state of Cloud Kitchens
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
can you tell us what you're doing with this Pony.AI th- Or not? Not to speculate, sorry.
- TKTravis Kalanick
Uh, look, you know, obviously as autonomy, as we, i- i- you know, in the US, we have, of course-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Wait, do you wanna just frame for people that don't, that may not be up to speed, what was announced? Or at least-
- TKTravis Kalanick
Why don't you frame it?
- JCJason Calacanis
I'll frame it.
- TKTravis Kalanick
Why don't you frame it?
- JCJason Calacanis
So, Pony.AI is, um, an autonomous company doing self-driving. It's one of the few, uh, players that actually have r- uh, cars on the road. They're based in China, they've got a lot of operations in the Middle East. They've got a deal with, um, a livery company called Uber, which you might be familiar with.
- TKTravis Kalanick
(laughs) Uh, okay, so look-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Well, the deal was basically that you would partner with Uber, license in the Pony technology, and essentially s- start a competitor, I guess, to Waymo and Tesla?
- TKTravis Kalanick
Let me work on this one. Okay, so, so in the US we have Waymo. We see the Waymos in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Austin, coming soon to Miami, coming soon to Atlanta, coming soon to DC. They're even talking about New York. Tesla's sort of like the, you know, they're doing it the hard way, you know? Classic Elon style, like let's, let's do this sort of in a fundamental holy shit, let's go all the way kinda, kinda approach. Uh, and it's unclear when it gets over the line. Of course, he, he launched sort of a, a semi, semi-pilot of sorts in Austin recently. But there's no other alternatives. So what happens is, is some of the folks who are interested in making sure there are alternatives have reached out. They, they've reached out to me, and there are different discussions that get going, because they're like, "Travis, you did autonomy way back in the day, got the Uber Autonomous stuff going in 2014." Uh, maybe there's something to do here to create optionality, like maybe like, I'm of course very interested on the food side. I talk about autonomous burritos being a big deal, because if you can automate the kitchen, the production of food, and then you can automate the sort of, uh, logistics around food, you take huge amount of cost out of the food, out of what's going on in food. And that's, of course, near and dear to my heart. There's folks, of course, that want to see autonomy in mobility. That's a real thing. It, it may be that, or I would say i- if you get the autonomy problem right, you can use it to apply to both problems. So there's a lot of folks interested in moving things, moving food, moving people, and if there is some kind of autonomous technology that maybe I get involved in, it might apply to a bunch of different things. And so I've got some inbound, let's just put it that way. There's no, there's no real deal right now, but there is definitely some inbound, and I think there are some news about some of that inbound that may or may not be occurring.That's probably the best way to put it.
- JCJason Calacanis
Nice.
- TKTravis Kalanick
It, it, that was long-winded. I'll try to tighten that up next time.
- JCJason Calacanis
No, no, I think it's great to get the overview here first on-
- TKTravis Kalanick
Yeah.
- JCJason Calacanis
... uh, all in-
- TKTravis Kalanick
Yeah.
- JCJason Calacanis
... thank you for sharing it with us. And everybody knows you have been doing a bowl builder.
- TKTravis Kalanick
Yeah.
- JCJason Calacanis
Um, Lab 37, I think it's called. We can throw it up on the screen.
- TKTravis Kalanick
Yeah.
- JCJason Calacanis
I'm not sure what the status of it is, and then I'll let you go Chamath with your follow-up question. But I, I think there's a pretty interesting concept here of the bowl getting built and then put into a self-driving car. (laughs)
- TKTravis Kalanick
Now that machine looks huge, but it's actually 60 square feet.
- JCJason Calacanis
Okay.
- TKTravis Kalanick
That picture makes it look monstrous. It's a 60-square foot machine. Like, uh, imagine running like a Sweetgreen-like brand or a Chipotle-like brand and just keeping, making it so it comes to life for people who, who, you know, are like, "Hey, what is this thing?" Imagine you just order online exactly the kind of bowl you want, and actually this machine could run like many brands at the same time and, and, and does. You build the bowl you want, whatever ingredients. Uh, it sort of... I- I- if you look at that bottom, you see those little white bricks at the bottom? That's what-
- JCJason Calacanis
Yeah.
- TKTravis Kalanick
... carries the bowl underneath dispensers. It fills up. The machine puts, uh, uh, it sauces the, the bowl, then it puts a lid on it. It takes the bowl, puts it in a bag, uh, puts utensils in the bag, seals the bag, and the bag goes down a, a conveyor belt where then another machine, uh, uh, it's, uh, what we would call an AGV, takes the bowl to the front of house. The bowl gets put into a locker. The courier, be it DoorDash, Uber Eats courier, will wave their app in front of a camera and it will open up the locker that has the food that they're supposed to pick up. So it just... It takes out a lot of what we would call the, the cost of assembly, um, which is more than-
- JCJason Calacanis
It reduces mistakes, right?
- TKTravis Kalanick
Reduces mistakes.
- JCJason Calacanis
It's harder for it to make a mistake, yeah.
- TKTravis Kalanick
We know exactly how many grams of every ingredient are put in. That's exactly what you're supposed to get.
- 18:51 – 40:36
xAI launches Grok 4
- JCJason Calacanis
Grok-4 Wednesday night. Two versions, base model and a heavy model. 30 bucks a month for the base, $300 a month for this heavy model, which has a very unique feature. You can have a multi-agent feature. I got to see this actually when I visited xAI a couple of weeks ago, where multiple agents work on the same problem than they... And they do that simultaneously, obviously, and then compare each other's work. And it gives you, kind of like a study group, the best answer, uh, by consensus. Really interesting. According to Artificial Analysis benchmarks, you can pull that up, Nick, Grok's 4-based model has surpassed OpenAI's o3 Pro, Google Gemini's 2.5 Pro as the most intelligent model. This includes, like, seven different industry standard evaluation tests. You can look it up, but reasoning, math, coding, all that kind of stuff. This is, you know, book smarts, not necessarily street smarts, so it doesn't mean that these things can reason. And obviously there was a little, um, there was a little kerfluffle on, um, X, formerly known as Twitter, where xAI got a little frisky and was saying all kinds of crazy stuff and needed to, uh, maybe be red teamed a little bit more decisively. Many of you know, Grok-4 was trained on Colossus. That's that giant data center that Elon's been building. And we showed the chart here. Chamath, you sent us a link to The Bitter Lesson by, uh, Rich Sutton in the group chat. That's the 2019 blog post. We'll pull it up here for people to take a look at, and we'll put it in the show notes. Maybe just generally-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Yeah, um-
- JCJason Calacanis
... your reaction to both how quickly Elon has... and that chart showed it, how quickly Elon has caught up. And I don't think people expected him to take the lead, but here we are.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Before we start, Nick, can you please show Elon's tweet about how they did on the AGI benchmark? It's absolutely incredible. Two things. One is, how quickly starting in March of 2023, so we're talking about less than two and a half years, what this team has accomplished and how far ahead they are of everybody else as demonstrated by this. But the second is a fundamental architectural decision that Elon made, which I think we didn't fully appreciate until now, and it maps to an architectural decision he made at Tesla as well. And for all we know, we'll figure out that he made an equivalent decision at SpaceX. And that decision is really well encapsulated by this essay, The Bitter Lesson by Rich Sutton. And Nick, if you, you can just throw this up here. But just to summarize what this says, it basically says in a nutshell that you're always better off, when you're trying to solve an AI problem, taking a general learning approach that can scale with computation, because it ultimately proves to be the most effective and the alternative would be something that's much more human labored and human involved that requires human knowledge. And so the first method, what it essentially allows you to do is view any problem as an endless scalable search or learning task. And as it's turned out, whether it's chess or Go or speech recognition or computer vision, whenever there was two competing approaches, one that used general computation and one that used human knowledge, the general computation problem always won. And so it creates this bitter lesson for humans that want to think that we are at the center of all of this critical learning and all of these leaps. In more AI-specific language, what it means is that a lot of these systems create these embeddings that are just not understandable by humans at all, but it yields incredible results. So, why is this crazy? Well, he made this huge bet on this 100,000 GPU cluster. People thought, "Wow, that's a lot. Is it gonna bear fruit?" Then he said, "No, actually I'm scaling it up to 250,000." Then he said, "It's gonna scale up to a million." And what these results show is a general computational approach that doesn't require as much human labeling, can actually get to the answer and better answers faster. That has huge implications because if you think about all these other companies, what has Lama been doing? They just spent 15 billion to buy 49% of Scale AI. That's exactly a bet on human knowledge. What is Gemini doing? What is OpenAI doing? What is Anthropic doing? So all these things come into question. And then the last thing I'll say is, if you look back, he made this bet once before, which was Tesla FSD versus Waymo. And Tesla FSD only had cameras, it didn't have LiDAR, but the bet was, "I'll just collect billions and billions of driving miles before anybody else does and apply general compute and it'll get to autonomy faster than the other more laborious and very expensive approach." So, I just think it's an incredible moment in technology where we see so many examples. Travis is another one, what he's just talked about. You know, the bitter lesson is...You could believe that, you know, food is this immutable thing that's made meticulously by hand by these (laughs) individuals, or you can take this general purpose computer approach, which is what he took, waited for these cost curves to come into play, and now you can scale food to every human on earth. I ju- I just think it's, uh, it's so profoundly important.
- DFDavid Friedberg
One thing I'll throw out there, Chamath, is the Tesla approach for autonomy is taking human knowledge. In fact, the whole idea is to approximate human, human driving, right? The... Is the whole damn thing. Now, depending on your approach and the technology, you can do, like, what's called an end-to-end approach or you can look at, okay, perception, prediction, planning, uh, and control, which are like these four modules that sort of y- you, you sort of engineer, if that makes sense. But it's approximating human driving to do it. The difference is that, you know, I- I think Elon's taken a, a hu- a- almost a more human approach, which is like, "I've got two eyes. Why can't my car? Why can't my car do it like a human? Like, I don't have any LIDAR spinning around on my head as a human. Why can't my car?" So, it's kinda interesting. He's sort of taking what you're saying, Chamath, on the computation side because Hardware 5 is coming out on Tesla probably next year-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Mm-hmm.
- DFDavid Friedberg
... which is gonna make a big difference in what FSD can do. That's the compute side you're talking about, but then he is approximating human-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Yeah, I just meant that-
- DFDavid Friedberg
... in, in driving.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
... you know, other than the first versions of FSD, which I think Andre talked about, Andrej Karpathy talked about, you know, they're not really so reliant anymore on human labeling per se, right? So that's-
- DFDavid Friedberg
Respect. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
... that inter- yeah, that- that interference.
- DFDavid Friedberg
Yeah.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
And then-
- DFDavid Friedberg
Yeah.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
... the other crazy thing that he said, subsequent versions of Grok are not gonna be trained on any traditional dataset that exists in the wild. (laughs)
- KRKeith Rabois
The cumulative sum of human knowledge has been exhausted in AI training. That happened basically last y- last year. And so the only way to then supplement that is with synthetic data where the AI creates... Well, it'll sort of write an essay or it'll come up with, with a thesis and then it will grade itself, um, and, and, and, and sort of go through this process of self-learning with synthetic data.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
He said that he's gonna have agents creating synthetic data from-
- DFDavid Friedberg
Yeah.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
... scratch that then drive all the training, which I just think is... It's crazy.
- JCJason Calacanis
Just explain this concept one more time in the better lesson. Hand coding heuristics into the computer and saying, "Hey, here is specific openings in chess." Can you take-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Yeah, like use, yeah, use chess, right? Like, let's just say-
- JCJason Calacanis
Yeah, so you're hand coding specific examples of openings in there, endgames, et cetera, versus just saying, "Play every possible game and here's every game we have." And you-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
So here's the-
- JCJason Calacanis
Yeah.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Yeah, so he... The two approaches would be, let's say like Travis and I were building competing versions of a chess solver. And Travis's approach would say, "I'm just gonna define the chessboard. I'm gonna give the players certain boundaries in which they can move," right? So the bishop can only move diagonally and there's a couple of boundary conditions. "And I'm gonna create a reward function, and I'm just gonna let the thing self-learn and self-play." That's his version. And then what happens is when you map out every single permutation, when you go and play Keith, who's the best chess player in the world, what you're doing at that point is saying, "Okay, Keith made this move." So you search for what Keith's move is, and you have a distribution of the best moves that you could make in response or vice versa. That was the cutting edge approach. The different approach, which is more, you know, what people would think is more "elegant" and less brute force would be, Jason, for you and I to sit there and say, "Okay, if Keith moves here, we should do this."
- JCJason Calacanis
Mm-hmm.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
"We should do this specific variation-"
- JCJason Calacanis
Yeah.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
"... of the Sicilian Defense," and, and it's too much human knowledge. And I think what, what it turned out was there was a psychological need for humans to believe we were part of the answer. But what this is showing is because of Moore's law and because of general computation, it's just not necessary. You just have to let go, give up control. And that's very hard for some people, and for others, it's not.
- 40:36 – 46:27
How Grok can catch ChatGPT in usage, OpenAI's product excellence
- TKTravis Kalanick
- DFDavid Friedberg
Let me ask you a question. Keith, Travis, Jason, if you guys were running Grok-4...
- TKTravis Kalanick
That'd be so much fun.
- DFDavid Friedberg
... how do you judo flip OpenAI? Because they are marching steadfastly towards a billion MAU, then a billion DAO. It's a juggernaut. So how do you use the better product in a moment to judo flip the less better product?
- TKTravis Kalanick
Look, yeah, I mean, here's the thing, right? So you do the Elon way. So you ha- you get a bunch of missionary, like, full on missionary engineers that work twice as hard, and you have a culture that is ultra fierce truth-seeking and you don't, you don't get caught up in politics, bureaucracy, BS, and you just, you go for it. And, and I think, you know, the, that's where, you know, and then you go, wow, scientific breakthrough, scientific method. Like, you start winning on truth. And that will start, I believe, that will start to give the product awesomeness of OpenAI a run for its money.
- DFDavid Friedberg
Mm-hmm.
- TKTravis Kalanick
But, like, the product of OpenAI, the product department, those guys are crushing.
- DFDavid Friedberg
They're cracked. Mm-hmm.
- TKTravis Kalanick
They're really good. They're not only ahead of the game, but they feel like it just, they're just leading in a lot of different ways. But if you are better at truth, you will eventually, you'll eventually have an AI product manager.
- JCJason Calacanis
Yeah. And on a tactical basis too, people forget how good Elon is at factories and physical real world things.
- TKTravis Kalanick
Mm-hmm.
- JCJason Calacanis
Uh, what he did standing up Colossus made, like, Jensen Huang was like, "How is this possible that you did this?" Right? So pressing that, his ability to build factories, and he said many times, like-... the factory is the product of Tesla. It's not the cars that come out of the factory or the batteries, it's the factory itself. So if he can keep solving the energy problem with solar on one side and batteries, and standing up, y- you know, colossus two, three, four, five, he's gonna have a massive advantage there on top of Travis, you know, the missionary individuals which, by the way, was what he backed before Sam Altman corrupted the original missionary basis of OpenAI and made it closed AI in a... You know, this is nothing derogatory towards him, but he did hoodwink and stab-
- DFDavid Friedberg
Yeah.
- JCJason Calacanis
... Elon in the back, and it's not, nothing personal. I mean, he just screwed him over and-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Would you say he bamboozled him?
- JCJason Calacanis
Bamboozled him, screwed him, hoodwinked him. You know-
- DFDavid Friedberg
Hoodwinked? (laughs)
- JCJason Calacanis
... you can pick your term here. (laughs) But, uh-
- DFDavid Friedberg
(laughs)
- JCJason Calacanis
... he did him- he did him dirty. The original mission was to be a missionary-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
You're like a 1,000 years old.
- JCJason Calacanis
... and open source all this content.
- DFDavid Friedberg
(laughs)
- JCJason Calacanis
That's the other piece I think is a wild card. And I'll, and then I'll, uh, I'm interested in Keith's position. But open sourcing some of this could have profound ramifications. I think open sourcing the self-driving data could have a really profound impact. Elon wanted to do something really disruptive, like he opened sourced his patents for s- you know, um, charging. If you open source the dataset in self-driving, does anybody have the ability to produce robo-taxis at the scale he can do it? I don't think so. So maybe-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Well, if Travis's hypothesis is true, then y- everybody will.
- JCJason Calacanis
Well, it'll just get-
- DFDavid Friedberg
Everybody will what? Sorry, everybody will what, Chamath?
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
If you have access to the money that buys the compute, everyone could solve that problem.
- JCJason Calacanis
But the hardware piece, I'm talking about.
- DFDavid Friedberg
Which pro- which pro- which problem?
- 46:27 – 58:01
Perplexity and OpenAI building AI-native browsers and taking on Chrome
- DFDavid Friedberg
- JCJason Calacanis
I don't know if you guys have seen this. Uh, in related news, OpenAI and, uh, Perplexity are going after the browser. Perplexity launched Comet for their $200 a month tier. I actually downloaded it. I'll show it to you in a second. But this is, um, a really interesting category. It's something developers can do already, and they do it all the time, you know, but having your browser, uh, connected to agents lets you do really interesting things. I'll show you an example here that, uh, I just fired off while we were talking. So I just asked it, "Hey, give me the best flights from, um, United Airlines and, uh, business class from New York City, from San Francisco to New York City." It does some searches, but what you see here is, it's popped up a browser window, and it's actually doing that work. And you can see the steps it's using. And then I can actually open that browser window and watch it do that. This is just a screenshot of it. And it will open multiple of these. So you could, I was doing a search the other day saying like, "Hey, tell me all the autobiographies I haven't bought on Amazon, put them into my, you know, shopping cart, and summarize each of them." 'Cause I like biographies and I, I like, um, doing it here. And when it did this last time, it put my flight into like, uh, and I was logged in under my account, and it basically put it into my account in the checkout. So again, this isn't like if you're a developer, you do this all day long. But this really seems to be a new product category. I'm curious if you guys have played with it yet, and then what your thoughts are on having an agentic browser like this available to you to be doing these tasks in real time. You can also connect obviously your Gmail, your calendar to it. So I did a, a, a search, "Tell me every restaurant I've been to and then put it by city." And then I was gonna open my OpenTable and then pull that data as well. What's interesting about this, Keith, and I, I know you're a product guy and you've done a lot of product work, I'm curious your thoughts on it, is you don't have to do this in the cloud. You're authenticated already into a lot of your accounts, nor do you have to worry about being blocked by these services because it doesn't look like a scraper or a bot. It just, it's your browser doing the work. Your thoughts on this? Have you played with it at all?
- DFDavid Friedberg
Yeah. I think it's a great Hail Mary.... attempt by Perplexity. I think after seeing something like this, Perplexity's toast. Like for the stat about ChatGPT going to a billion users, like it's becoming the verb, you know, that the way you describe using AI for a normal consumer. There's nothing left of Perplexity if they can't pull this off. So it's a great idea because li- the history of like consumer technology (laughs) companies is whoever's up has uphill ground, like in a military sense, whoever's first has a lot of control. This is actually what Google should be doing, truthfully. Like I think Google's also, Google Search, qua search, is toast. And since they have Chrome (laughs) and they theoretically have a, a quality team in Gemini, they should be putting these two things together and hoping to compete with ChatGPT. They're gonna lose the search game. Like the assets that are best at Google right now have nothing to do with search. It's every other product is the only thing that's gonna save that company if they can put, figure out how to use them.
- TKTravis Kalanick
Hm.
- JCJason Calacanis
Travis, your thoughts on this category? Anything come to mind for you in terms of, you know, feature sets that would be extraordinary here? I, I know you, you like to think about products and the consumer experience.
- TKTravis Kalanick
I mean, it's really interesting. So, you know, I've been spending ... Yeah, as you guys know, I've been spending (laughs) my time on real estate and construction and robotics, and so it's, I've been outta the, this kind of consumer software game for a long time. But it's super interesting over the last six months, there have been a, a number of consumer software CEOs, like when I hang out with them or whatever, they're like, "Yo, how are we gonna, how are we gonna keep doing what we do when the agents take over?" Yeah.
- JCJason Calacanis
The paradigm shift is so profound that the idea that you would visit a web page goes away and you're just in a chat dialogue.
- TKTravis Kalanick
Yeah, yeah. You have an agent-
- JCJason Calacanis
Yeah.
- TKTravis Kalanick
... that's just taking care of your flights for you.
- JCJason Calacanis
Hm.
- TKTravis Kalanick
So I, I kinda, I, I think there's a leapfrog over that. I think it's just like you tell something, "Yo, I wanna go to New York. Can you, you know, I'm sorta looking at this time range. Can you just go find something I'm probably gonna like and give me a couple options?"
- JCJason Calacanis
Yeah.
- TKTravis Kalanick
And it's just a whole ... You, you have an interface and then, you know, is Perplex- is this thing that you just showed on Perplexity, is that the interface? Or do I just have an agent that just goes and does everything for me, and is this the start of that? I, you know, I just haven't spent enough time. I, I do know that every consumer software CEO that has an app in the App Store is trippin'. They're trippin' right now.
- JCJason Calacanis
Yeah.
- TKTravis Kalanick
And I mean big boys. I mean guys with real stuff. And sometimes I, I'm doing like a, almost like therapy sessions with them. I'm like, "It's gonna be fine." (laughs) You actually-
- JCJason Calacanis
(laughs) It's gonna be okay.
- TKTravis Kalanick
You actually have stuff, you have a mo-, you have real stuff that's of value they can't replace it with an agent. And they're, and they're like-
- JCJason Calacanis
So you're lying to them. You're doing hospice care and you're telling-
- TKTravis Kalanick
(laughs)
- JCJason Calacanis
... them everything's gonna be okay? But the patient's not mismanaging
- NANarrator
No, there's certain things-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
He's analyzing options on Robinhood while he's like, "Yeah, yeah. Tell me more. Tell me more." (laughs)
- JCJason Calacanis
Yeah. (laughs)
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
He's sorting all these things. (laughs)
- TKTravis Kalanick
No, guys. There's certain-
- JCJason Calacanis
No.
- TKTravis Kalanick
... things that are protected and there's certain not, things that aren't. That's all. Simple as that.
- JCJason Calacanis
Well, Chamath, let's talk about that, because the, you and I are old enough to remember, uh, General Magic. This vision was out there a long time ago with personal digital assistants, and you would just talk to an agent, it would go do this for you. This feels like a step to that, where it does all the work for you, presents you the final moment, and says, "Approve." Almost like a concierge-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
So look, I think you're-
- 58:01 – 1:13:12
third party
- JCJason Calacanis
(laughs) Is now the right time for a third party? Elon seems to think so. Last week, he announced that X, he would be creating a po- a new political party. I'll let you decide who daddy is in this one.
- TKTravis Kalanick
(laughs)
- JCJason Calacanis
Uh, (laughs) he said, quote, "When it comes to bankrupting our country with waste and graft, we live in a one-party system, not a democracy." He's not yet outlined a, uh, a platform for the American Party. We talked about it here last week. I listed four core values which seemed to get a good reaction on X. Fiscal responsibility/DOGE, sustainable energy and dominance in that, manufacturing in the US, which Elon has done, uh, single-handedly here. Pro-natalism, which I think is a passion project for him. And Chamath, you punched it up with the fifth, technological excellence. According to Polymarket, 55% chance that Elon registers the American Party by the end of the year. And, you know, one thing I was trying to figure out is just how unpopular are these candidates and, uh, these political parties? This is a very interesting chart that I think we can have a, a great conversation around. It turns out we used to love our presidents. If you look here from Kennedy at 83% is the highest approval rating. His lowest was 56%. That was his lowest approval rating. So he operated in a very high band. Look at Bush 2. During, after 9/11, 92% was his peak. His lowest was 19, right? Wartime president. But then you get to Trump 1, Biden and Trump 2, historically low high approval. Their high watermark, 49 for Trump 1, 63 for Biden, one of one (laughs) and then 47 for Trump 2, and their lowest, 29, 31, 40. So maybe it is time for a third-party candidate. Let's discuss it, boys.
- TKTravis Kalanick
I have no idea how to read this graph. I have zero idea.
- JCJason Calacanis
This is the worst.
- TKTravis Kalanick
I'm like, "What is happening here?"
- JCJason Calacanis
This is the worst formatted chart. This is a confusing chart. But, well, th- the reason I'm putting it up is for debate.
- TKTravis Kalanick
Oh. (laughs)
- JCJason Calacanis
So you should be saying thank you for creating great debate-
- DFDavid Friedberg
Yeah, we're debating that it's sh-
- JCJason Calacanis
... and why did you put it up?
- DFDavid Friedberg
We're debating why did you put it up.
- JCJason Calacanis
Here's another one. Gallup poll-
- DFDavid Friedberg
(laughs)
- JCJason Calacanis
... Americans desire for a viable third party, 63% in 2023. So it's, it's, it's bumping along an all-time high.
- TKTravis Kalanick
Okay. I'm really concentrating on this one.
- JCJason Calacanis
Okay. Anyway, I'm gonna stop there.
- TKTravis Kalanick
(laughs)
- DFDavid Friedberg
What's the gray?
- JCJason Calacanis
I'm gonna let you-
- DFDavid Friedberg
Oh, okay.
- TKTravis Kalanick
Yeah. Okay, got it. I got it.
- JCJason Calacanis
Those are the different percents-
- TKTravis Kalanick
I got it.
- DFDavid Friedberg
Got it.
- JCJason Calacanis
... during that time period and how popular the parties were.
- TKTravis Kalanick
Okay. Okay, I got it.
- JCJason Calacanis
Let's stop here. This is a good, this is a good place to stop. Keith, your thoughts on-
- TKTravis Kalanick
I just blew a GPU.
- DFDavid Friedberg
Yeah. Look, a couple points.
- 1:13:12 – 1:20:00
SCOTUS decision
- JCJason Calacanis
SCOTUS made a big decision here. This is a really important, uh, decision. Uh, they've sided with Trump for plans for federal workforce RIFs, Reductions in Workforce, for those of you who don't know. As you know, Elon, Trump, they wanted to, you know, downsize the three million people who are federal employees. This is just federal employees we're talking about. We're not talking about military and we're not talking about state and city. That's tens of millions of additional people. If you remember, Trump issued this executive order back in February when he got in office implementing the president's Doge Workforce Optimization Initiative and he asked all the federal agencies, "Hey, just prepare a RIF for their departments consistent with applicable laws," was part of this EO. Okay. In April, the American Federation of Government Employees, AFGE, sued the Trump administration saying the President must consult Congress on large-scale workforce changes. This is a key debate because the Congress, as you know, has power of the purse. They set up the money. But the President and the executive branch, they have to execute on that, and that's what the key is here. So, they accused Trump of violating the Separation of Powers Under the Constitution Act. AFGE has 820,000 members. In May, a San Francisco-based federal judge sided with the unions, blocking the executive order. The judge, who was appointed by Clinton, said any reduction in the federal workforce must be authorized by Congress. This is a key issue, and the White House submitted an emergency appeal, yada yada. Eight of nine Supreme Court justices sided with the White House in overturning this block. And so the reasoning, it's very likely the White House will win the argument of the executive order. They have the right to prepare a RIF. The question is can they actually execute on that RIF and who has that power, Chamath? Does the power reside with the President to make large-scale, or, you know, RIFs, or do they have to consult Congress first? Your thoughts on this issue?
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
It's an incredibly important ruling, incredibly right. I think President Trump should have absolute leeway to decide how the people that report to him act and do their job. If you take a step back, Jason, there are more than 2,000 federal agencies. Employees plus contractors, I think number almost three million people. If you put three million people into 2,000 agencies and then you give them very poor and outdated technology, which unfortunately most of the government operates on, what are you gonna get? You're gonna get incredibly slow processes. You're going to get a lot of checking and double-checking. And you're going to ultimately just get a lot of regulations because they're trying to do what they think is the right job. So since 1993, what have we seen? Regulations have gotten out of control. It's like 100,000 new rules per some number of months. Like it's just crazy. So eventually we all succumb to an infinite number of rules that we all end up violating and not even know it.
- JCJason Calacanis
Hm.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
So if the CEO of the United States, President Trump, isn't allowed to fire people, then all of that stuff just compounds. So I think that this is a really important thing that just happened. It allows us to now level set how big should the government be. But more importantly, the number of people in the government are also the ones that then direct downstream spend that make net new rules and if you can slow the growth of that down, you're actually doing a lot. In many ways, I wish Elon had come in and created Doge now.
- JCJason Calacanis
Hm.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Like could you imagine if Doge was created the day after this Supreme Court ruling? It would have been a totally different outcome, I think, because with that Supreme Court ruling in hand, these guys probably would have been like a hot knife through butter.
- JCJason Calacanis
Travis-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
So I- I think it's a big deal.
- DFDavid Friedberg
Except that ruling doesn't happen without Doge, that Doge caused that ruling to occur.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
True.
- DFDavid Friedberg
Yeah.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Well the EO did. You could have passed later but you triggered the lawsuit.
- JCJason Calacanis
Right, right, but it was all, that was all Doge style though, you know what I'm saying?
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Yes.
- JCJason Calacanis
Yeah.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
It was, it was related.
- JCJason Calacanis
If they, if they wasn't firing people, yeah, they probably wouldn't felt the need, to your point Travis, to actually file this. But Travis, if you are living in the age of AI, efficiency right now, operations of companies is changing dramatically, can you imagine telling somebody, "You can be CEO but you can't change personnel."
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Hm.
- JCJason Calacanis
That's the job. You get to be CEO but you just can't change the players on the team. You can buy the Knicks but you can't change the coach and you can't change the players-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Well- You can grow it, you just can't shrink it.
- JCJason Calacanis
Yeah, so-
- DFDavid Friedberg
It's like a- it's like running a unionized company which actually does exist are large-
- JCJason Calacanis
Yeah.
- DFDavid Friedberg
... unionized companies where you can't do any of these things.
- JCJason Calacanis
Right. Do they- do they still exist or are they all gone? (laughs)
- DFDavid Friedberg
I think they still ex-
- JCJason Calacanis
They're going quickly. (laughs)
- DFDavid Friedberg
Yeah, probably.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
I think this just gets back to what- what is actually Congress authorizing when a bill occurs and there's certain things that are specific and certain things that aren't. And I don't- I'm not sure that in- and a lot of these bills, it's not very specific about exactly how many people must be hired. And so if it's- I- I'm just doing the common man's sort of approach to this which is like if- if the law says you have to hire X number of people, then that is what it is. If the law says you- here's some money to spend, here are the ways in which to spend it but it's not specific about how many people you hire, then that is different.
- JCJason Calacanis
Yeah, it should be outcome based. "Hey, here's the goal. Here's the- the key objectives," right?
Episode duration: 1:30:49
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