The Fight Over Open Source AI, Anthropic's $1.5B Payout, NYC Socialists: Evictions = Violence?

1. 0:00 – 0:18

   Bestie intros!

   1. JCJason Calacanis0:00

      All right, everybody. Welcome back. Episode 282 of the world's greatest podcast. It's your podcaster's favorite podcast. It's your mom's favorite podcast. It's the All-In podcast. With me again, David Sacks from Palihapitiya, David Friedberg. It was a big week. It was a big week. Uh, the

2. 0:18 – 27:38

   The fight to save open source AI: Kimi K3 panic, Anthropic/OpenAI regulatory capture

   1. JCJason Calacanis0:18

      continuing number one story in the world is Kimi K3. It sparked a debate about banning Chinese open source models here in the United States, and it's gone all the way to the White House last Friday. We talked about it here. China's Moonshot AI released Kimi K3 open source model, obviously. Performance on par. On par. Not six months behind, not 12 months behind, but now on par with models like Opus 4.8 and GPT 5.6, which in and of itself is extraordinary, but about 50% cheaper. And, uh, this has created a bit of a panic similar to the DeepSeek moment that we had here back in early 2025. The White House, David Sacks, has gotten involved. Michael Kratsios, friend of the show, said, quote, "We have information that Moonshot AI distilled Anthropic's fable for the development of its K3 model." Here's how the Trump administration has reacted so far. Monday, Axios reported the White House was considering banning Chinese open source models. A couple of weeks ago, David, I, I think it was three weeks ago, I, I gave that to you as a hypothetical, and here we are. On Wednesday, Wired reported that Howard Lutnick from our Commerce Department, friend of the show, does not want to ban Chinese models. So apparently, palace intrigue, there might be different opinions inside Trump's White House. And instead, they want to incentivize more US frontier labs to develop better open source models. Polymarket says 45% chance US government bans an open source model in 2026. Uh, that was a brand-new market, started just... It was at 22% a couple of days ago. Sacks, um, you called it two months ago, our first victory fap of the episode.

   2. DSDavid Sacks2:04

      I think where it's all leading to is an effort to ban open source models. There's a lot of breadcrumbs leading here. You look at a lot of the rhetoric around how models need to have guardrails and that with open source models, the guardrails can be removed, and therefore they're dangerous. You see this rhetoric already in Anthropic's blog posts. Any threat that they describe, they kind of go out of their way to take that shot at open source models. I think, again, they're trying to create ideas or put predicate facts in the public record to justify an action later on. I think it's just a matter of time before they feel like they're at a position where maybe they can push for that type of ban directly.

   3. JCJason Calacanis2:44

      All right. There it is, Sacks. What's going on at the White House? What is the administration's position here? Why are we getting multiple... Is the White House testing and, and probing to figure out what their position is here, or is it just this is a super dynamic situation? What's going on?

   4. DSDavid Sacks3:04

      Well, look, I mean, I have it on good authority that there is no decision by the White House to ban open source models, and I think they want that known. I think there's an ongoing conversation happening around what to do about Chinese distillation, and we should talk about that, but no decision has been made. And, uh, the president listens to a chorus of voices. He wants to get advice from as many people as possible, and I'm confident that if everybody weighs in, that the president will make the right decision, as he always has with these tech issues. I think his instincts have been absolutely impeccable on this, and he's always supported a, let's say, lighter regulation, more open approach, and that's why I think the US is winning the AI race. So I think that's kind of where, where things stand. Um, I think it's imp-

   5. JCJason Calacanis3:52

      Where do you stand? Where do you stand, Sacks? That's what everybody wants to know.

   6. DSDavid Sacks3:55

      Yeah. I think it's important for me to make my opinion known in the spirit of, again, contributing my voice so the president hears all perspectives and then can make the best decision. Look, I think it would be a tragic mistake if the government were to take action against the open source ecosystem. That would do nothing but hurt America's position in this AI race. It would backfire badly. And I think that the key point here is that regardless of what you think about distillation, you cannot punish American developers for it. So, you know, you can't say that American companies and American developers can't use Chinese contributions to the public domain. That's just cutting off our nose to spite our face. I mean-

   7. JCJason Calacanis4:41

      Yes

   8. DSDavid Sacks4:41

      ... obviously, American companies have to be able to use everything that's in the public domain because the rest of the world will be using those things. And let me just say, I've said for a while that Anthropic is guilty of regulatory capture, of attempts to seek government protection. This is a company that is the fastest-growing tech company at scale in history. They started the year at 10 billion of ARR. They're now over 70 billion of ARR. This is not a company that needs government protection. This is not-

   9. JCJason Calacanis5:08

      No

   10. DSDavid Sacks5:08

       ... a company that is under threat from competitors or, or whether they're Chinese or otherwise. And yet they have been very successful at trying to panic everybody into thinking that they need some sort of government protection. And the tell on this, the way that you know that this whole distillation thing is fake, is because if stopping distillation was their primary objective, Anthropic would push to ban Chinese access to American models, not American access to Chinese models.

   11. JCJason Calacanis5:39

       Yes. They could, and that is, that is achievable. They could block it, so.

   12. DSDavid Sacks5:43

       They're the ones in the best position to block it.

   13. JCJason Calacanis5:46

       Yeah.

   14. DSDavid Sacks5:46

       If distillation, if industrial scale distillation is a national security threat, they're the ones who need to stop it because that is the place where distillation occurs. You have to stop it at the source. Once you allow Chinese companies to distill, the horse is out of the barn.

   15. JCJason Calacanis6:01

       Yeah.

   16. DSDavid Sacks6:01

       And the reality is that I think that what's happening here is that in their lust for growth Anthropic has done a very poor job at stopping distillation. I mean, they're saying that distillation is occurring at industrial scale. Okay, if it's industrial scale, it must be pretty obvious to see.

   17. JCJason Calacanis6:21

       Yeah.

   18. DSDavid Sacks6:21

       So why aren't you stopping it?

   19. JCJason Calacanis6:22

       The way it's happening is waves of accounts being created by students rolled up and sold on the dark web, you know, in, in those kind of channels. So you got people in Manila, in the Philippines, I understand, and India, signing up for all those accounts and then sending them to the dark web and selling them using IP addresses from America. Yeah, so that, that's how it occurs.

   20. DSDavid Sacks6:41

       Sure. But the more, the more industrial scale it is, the more obvious it is to see.

   21. JCJason Calacanis6:46

       Absolutely.

   22. DSDavid Sacks6:46

       And Chamath has been saying for a while, "Why don't you KYC your customers?"

   23. JCJason Calacanis6:50

       Exactly.

   24. DSDavid Sacks6:50

       Well, they know that if they KYC their customers, it'll slow their growth. So instead what they're saying is, "Hey, ban our competitors." Well, that's ridiculous. I mean, they're in the best position to stop the distillation. I think that they're negligent about doing that. Or, I mean, if they really think it's that big a threat, they should use a few points of their 90% gross margins to do that. What you don't do is then say that American developers cannot use everything that's in the public domain. So it seems, it seems to me that this debate is all backwards, that the question should be on Anthropic to explain why it's doing such a bad job-

   25. JCJason Calacanis7:27

       All right

   26. DSDavid Sacks7:28

       ... not on the whole American open source ecosystem to be punished for Anthropic's failure.

   27. JCJason Calacanis7:34

       All right. Friedberg, I have a, a really good question for you, but before we do that, Chamath, can you give me maybe a little bit of what you're hearing on your sales calls for 80 90? You're talking to enterprises. They're hearing all these reports, whether it's you, Dario, this pod, other places talking about, "Hey, open source is ready. This is the moment. Get control, AI sovereignty, et cetera." They must be calling you up and saying, "Hey, w- okay, we're ready. Like, how do we get these things on-prem? How do we do it?" So what's the... What's happening on those calls you're doing with the enterprise? And then can you maybe give people an idea of what distillation is, just, and, and why it's so important here?

   28. CPChamath Palihapitiya8:13

       Let's start with the second thing. Distillation is when you fire up a model, and you ask it a question, and you observe it, and you take its output, and you use that in training of your own model. Now multiply that behavior by tens of millions, and what you exfiltrate is essentially trillions of questions and answers. And Sacks is right. If you really care about distillation, you implement KYC. You force people to make an account, not just with a username and a password, but with some form of identification, maybe with a bounded credit card. There's all kinds of steps that you can take that would frankly slow things down in terms of revenue traction but would solve the distillation problem on its face. So that isn't really a thing. It's a bit of a red herring. The other thing on distillation is everybody has at some point distilled. The question is, who is distilling from whom? And it looks like that funny meme where there's like nine Spider-Men all pointing at each other. That's what this is because Anthropic has distilled from all of these publishers. They just pay a $1.5 billion fine. Apparently, OpenAI distilled from The New York Times. There's still an ongoing lawsuit. The Chinese labs have distilled from Anthropic.

   29. JCJason Calacanis9:46

       It's wholesale stealing everywhere. Yeah.

   30. CPChamath Palihapitiya9:48

       Well, I don't wanna call it stealing because it's not clear who actually owns the copyright in the first place, but here should be the important observation. These models are getting commoditized much faster than anybody thought, and how do we know this? Because there is no meaningful sustained advantage once a model publishes their performance criteria. What you see is literally within weeks other models, some open, some closed, some open weight, who are able to match and in some cases exceed the performance. So I think what's happening here is a handful of American companies have realized, "Whoa, this value that we are seeing today may not be sustainable in a five and 10-year period." And when you go and present a business model to Wall Street, you need to have that certainty, otherwise it impacts your valuation. And so I think a lot of what's happening right now, Jason, is a valuation preservation game by the closed frontier labs. Because if you actually understood how commoditized these things are becoming and the velocity at which it's happening, you see that the real business model is not in the foundational model anymore. It's at the application layer above, and it's in the infrastructure below, whether that's the cloud or whether that's chips. And so I think in the absence of regulatory intervention and in the absence of the United States government stepping in to put their thumb on the scale, what will happen is that as people learn about how value is changing, they're going to put more value in the application layer and more value in the infrastructure layer. That is bad for closed frontier labs, especially when they're mispriced 25 to 50X the open alternative. And so this is an attempt to stop a competitor that is of the same quality but just much cheaper. Now, there's another important thing here, which is if the United States government intervenes, it will tank the stock market.
3. 27:38 – 48:29

   Anthropic/OpenAI historic growth rates, China's long game

   1. JCJason Calacanis27:38

      Where, where's this going, Sacks? Is, is it both open, we're gonna just see a proliferation? I mean, as far as I'm concerned, there is an unlimited appetite for on-demand intelligence, and there's going to be. I don't think there's an upper bound for how much intelligence you can tap as long as it's continues to get bet- better, which then the thesis would be, yeah, it's a commodity and, and the prices keep going down, but consumption keeps going up. What's your thoughts on-

   2. CPChamath Palihapitiya28:01

      You have to assume that this is exactly the example that you guys used. It's a web browser. And in a web browser, it's a mechanism to get to a place, and so the apps that are actually the places are where the value is captured. And I think if you assume for a second that intelligence becomes completely ubiquitous, it's widely available, the marginal cost of it is effectively zero, the energy to generate it is effectively zero, which I think is an accurate assumption, it's very hard to make the case of why this isn't like the browser.

   3. JCJason Calacanis28:35

      And it becomes, just gets subsumed into the Amazon Web Services cloud businesses, Elon's web service, et cetera. Sacks, w- w- where do you think this is going?

   4. DSDavid Sacks28:43

      Yeah, look-

   5. JCJason Calacanis28:43

      And then we're gonna go to our second story, which is the IP story. Third story is gonna be the markets and Google specifically and Tesla and SpaceX.

   6. DSDavid Sacks28:49

      Look, there's been a lot of violent agreement on this show so far, so let me just make the counterargument. I think that both open source and closed source will be big winners in this. I think the market is huge, and they each serve their purpose. What happened is with y- the introduction of Kimi K3, there was a little bit of a panic in which everybody said, "Oh my God, all the Chinese models have caught up, and they're giving them away for free, and they're gonna destroy our leading American frontier labs." And Anthropic and OpenAI are running around saying, "Listen, we can't continue to invest billions of dollars if Chinese companies can just steal our weights," right? So that's the argument that they're making that government officials are responding to. The truth of the matter is that, look, when Kimi K3 first launched, I was concerned about it 'cause I was like, "Oh, has China caught up? Are they now able to produce a much cheaper frontier model?" Then the details started coming out. So Ben Thompson on his blog went through some of the cost numbers, and it turns out that Kimi K3 is not that much cheaper to run. There's not a significant cost advantage to it. So that was, that's point number one. Point number two is that China has not caught up. It's true that Kimi K3 scored really well on the arena battleground for front-end coding for web development, but that's just one test. That's just one dimension. There are areas where it scores really well, but there's lots of other areas where it doesn't score that well. So it is not a clear advance or a clear catch-up to the leading American models. Moreover, you still have stuff in the labs by Anthropic and OpenAI that is way ahead of this, and the reports are that Sam is going to Washington over the next week to go talk about GPT 6.0, which is blowing the doors off. So I don't believe that China has really caught up. I think there's, you know-

   7. JCJason Calacanis30:38

      Sam's gonna go see Daddy, and what is he gonna ask for?

   8. DSDavid Sacks30:41

      I think there's incredible unreleased models in the pipeline, and we need to let our horses run here and not slow them down with a bunch of unnecessary hoops. And if we do that, I think we're gonna be just fine. I don't believe that China has caught up. I still think we are six months ahead. And then just the final point on this, if you look at revenue, which is the test of real usage in the real world, Anthropic and OpenAI are blowing the doors off. They are by far the fastest-growing tech companies at scale that we've ever seen. Jason, you showed this chart that supposedly shows a hiccup in Anthropic. Listen, their internal forecast was to 10X this year from 10 to 100. We're in the middle of the year, they're already over 70 billion of ARR.

   9. JCJason Calacanis31:22

      They're doing great.

   10. DSDavid Sacks31:23

       They're easily gonna get to 100 billion. And we don't really know what this little blip is here. I think one thing it might be is that OpenAI, if you superimpose the OpenAI chart on this, they have re-accelerated over the past month. So I think that if you were to add OpenAI and-

   11. CPChamath Palihapitiya31:39

       Yeah, Codex is excellent. Codex is excellent.

   12. DSDavid Sacks31:41

       Codex is excellent, and I think they're taking a little bit of share. And Sam is out there tweeting that, "We've got our mojo back." And they're taking their forecasts up. I think they were expecting to end the year at 60 billion of ARR, and I think they're forecasting more like 75 billion of exit ARR. So my guess is that if you were to superimpose OpenAI and Anthropic and looked at them together, and you were basically just to say that, you know, let's call it the frontier model duopoly in the US, you do not see any slowdown.

   13. JCJason Calacanis32:09

       Yeah.

   14. DSDavid Sacks32:09

       You don't see any blip. They're taking their forecasts up. And the reality is that if distillation is going on, it's been a thing for... You know, again, I pointed it out back in January of 2025 with DeepSeek. So it's been a thing this entire time that they've been growing exponentially. So I just don't believe that these guys are actually suffering in any way. I don't think they need government protection. I think they're growing exponentially still. This is a little bit of a case of, um, you know, what do you call it, uh, in basketball when a player flops? You know, that you do-

   15. JCJason Calacanis32:40

       A flop. You're flopping.

   16. DSDavid Sacks32:40

       A foul.

   17. JCJason Calacanis32:41

       Yeah. You're trying to draw a foul.

   18. DSDavid Sacks32:42

       A foul flop or whatever.

   19. JCJason Calacanis32:42

       Yeah, it's a flop. Yeah.

   20. DSDavid Sacks32:44

       Well, or you, you basically act super dramatic after a foul-

   21. JCJason Calacanis32:47

       Oh

   22. DSDavid Sacks32:47

       ... in order to draw the charge.

   23. JCJason Calacanis32:49

       Okay, that's- you're foul baiting when you're trying to-

   24. DSDavid Sacks32:50

       Yes

   25. JCJason Calacanis32:50

       ... get a foul, and then you're flopping, which is just about making like an exaggerating-

   26. DSDavid Sacks32:54

       Yes

   27. JCJason Calacanis32:54

       ... like LeBron does. Yeah.

   28. DSDavid Sacks32:55

       And that's exact- Yes, it's a LeBron-

   29. JCJason Calacanis32:57

       [laughs] LeBron. LeBron.

   30. DSDavid Sacks32:58

       It's a flare flop. You know, where-
4. 48:29 – 1:07:12

   Anthropic's $1.5B piracy settlement and the great IP theft hypocrisy

   1. JCJason Calacanis48:29

      has settled their AI copyright lawsuit for 1.5 billion, billy, on Monday. Largest copyright settlement, Friedberg, in the history of the United States of America. First major AI trading lawsuit to settle. There are many more in the pipeline. Anthropic downloaded seven million books from pirated websites to train Claude and- That alone, it may or may not be a crime. This has been adjudicated a little bit in the courts. They had ruled previously that AI on copyrighted books is legal under fair use, but there's gonna be some future cases. So this is a settlement. They didn't go to the bat. Lawyers getting $101 million, authors get $3,000 a book. 500,000 books were covered in it thus far. 91% of the covered authors have claimed their share. Tons of other ones are on the way. And here's your second victory pa- fap of the episode. Content providers as a group need to get together and fight for their rights in unison.

   2. DSDavid Sacks49:32

      You are nuts.

   3. JCJason Calacanis49:32

      New York Times, Meta, Credit-

   4. DSDavid Sacks49:33

      Fight for their right to party? [laughs]

   5. JCJason Calacanis49:34

      No, fight for their right to get paid and to survive.

   6. DSDavid Sacks49:37

      [laughs]

   7. JCJason Calacanis49:37

      They need to go to ChatGPT and say, "As a group, either give us these terms or don't index us." They are interfering with their ability to leverage their own content. It is profoundly unfair, and those magazines and newspapers need to-

   8. DSDavid Sacks49:51

      You're gonna get steamrolled is my prediction, J Cal.

   9. JCJason Calacanis49:51

      What's that?

   10. DSDavid Sacks49:52

       You're gonna get steamrolled.

   11. JCJason Calacanis49:53

       It's possible. YouTube is a great example. That's what's gonna happen here.

   12. DSDavid Sacks49:57

       [laughs]

   13. JCJason Calacanis49:57

       There'll be a settlement where they are going to be able to claim their content.

   14. DSDavid Sacks50:01

       Exactly. There will be no moaning. No moaning. I will bet anything. I will bet any amount against your-

   15. JCJason Calacanis50:03

       Let's go. Let's get a bet going

   16. DSDavid Sacks50:03

       ... against your, your, your premonition here, J Cal. This is like the opposite of No-

   17. JCJason Calacanis50:06

       Okay, let's make a bet. Propose a bet

   18. DSDavid Sacks50:08

       ... Prop Bet.

   19. JCJason Calacanis50:08

       I am gonna go with for my biggest winner of 2024-

   20. DSDavid Sacks50:10

       Now 2024

   21. JCJason Calacanis50:11

       ... training data owners like The New York Times, Reddit, X, Twitter, YouTube, et cetera. I think what we learned in 2023 was that the language models are starting to hit parity very quickly and that the real value is gonna be in, and it may, may even become commodities and open source may win the day. So then I think the winner is folks who have the training data.

   22. DSDavid Sacks50:34

       You know, the best thing about this-

   23. JCJason Calacanis50:35

       Oh, my gosh. Oh, my God

   24. DSDavid Sacks50:35

       ... is watching Jason's reaction to Jason, where he's sitting there-

   25. JCJason Calacanis50:39

       I just love it. You should do a picture, a picture of me just being like, "Ooh, go J Cal."

   26. DSDavid Sacks50:42

       Oh, my God.

   27. JCJason Calacanis50:42

       Uh, Friedberg, did we make a bet here? Did we make a bet? I don't know. [laughs] He's gone. Um-

   28. DSDavid Sacks50:47

       Well, actually, this settle-

   29. JCJason Calacanis50:48

       Yeah

   30. DSDavid Sacks50:49

       ... I'm ... This settlement I don't think quite proves exactly what you want it to prove, J Cal.
5. 1:07:12 – 1:17:19

   Google and Tesla stocks tank on surging AI capex

   1. JCJason Calacanis1:07:13

      capital expenditures. Google blew the doors off of their, um-

   2. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:07:18

      Blew the doors off. I mean-

   3. JCJason Calacanis1:07:19

      It was insane and, uh-

   4. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:07:22

      Outrageous

   5. JCJason Calacanis1:07:23

      ... outrageous, and they were down like 7% to 10%. Google Cloud growing-

   6. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:07:27

      Because of their cash flow numbers

   7. JCJason Calacanis1:07:28

      ... 82%-

   8. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:07:28

      Because, because of their cash flow numbers

   9. JCJason Calacanis1:07:29

      ... year over year. Yeah, because of the cash flow numbers, and now is on $100 billion runway. That's but one business. Tesla's capex surged 140% year over year, and they expect $25 billion in capex. Google's capex forecast from $195 to $205 billion this year. So next year will be even higher. Tesla down 14, Google down 7% at our taping. Who knows? Um, but both reported negative free cash flow. In other words, the amount of cash in the bank went down instead of up, and for Google, that was the first time ever. IPO update, uh, SpaceX down 30% from its day-one closing price, now trading $1.5 trillion. A lot of pressure on the stock. We'll talk about that as well. Obviously, they went public at $2 trillion, got a big pop, uh, the Elon pop, and, um, there could be, uh, more downward pressure, or it could have found a bottom. You know, you never know with these things. This is unprecedented territory. We've never had an IPO this big, but some lock-ups. Uh, here's the chart. Bunch of lock-ups are, are happening at different staged intervals. So let's, um, Chamath talk a little bit. Here's your SpaceX. I guess capex, Chamath, is being built out obvious for AI, and there is the case of OpenAI spending on capex in order to provide their service, but then there's also Google, which is making these capex investments to resell it as part of Google Cloud, incredible product, and then on the other side, they're using it for their own, obviously, infrastructure, and their business is just growing like crazy, whether it's YouTube or Google Cloud or even Search is still growing. So I looked at this and I said, "Well, this seems like a really good use of capital." Instead of just giving dividends, like building out this infrastructure to me sounds like an investment in the future. Seems like a buy signal to me, but the market is obviously disappointed. Why is the market disappointed? Is it a buy signal for you? Does it make you more, uh, excited about management a- and what Sundar and, and Sergey are doing over there, or does it make you concerned?

   10. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:09:31

       I'll go back to-

   11. JCJason Calacanis1:09:31

       Yeah

   12. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:09:32

       ... I'm more bullish.

   13. JCJason Calacanis1:09:34

       Me too.

   14. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:09:34

       Do you know what Google's 25-year average return on invested capital has been since going public? Take a guess, everyone.

   15. JCJason Calacanis1:09:43

       That's right.

   16. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:09:43

       I mean-

   17. JCJason Calacanis1:09:43

       17%.

   18. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:09:44

       No.

   19. JCJason Calacanis1:09:47

       21%.

   20. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:09:48

       No.

   21. JCJason Calacanis1:09:49

       23%.

   22. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:09:51

       No.

   23. JCJason Calacanis1:09:52

       29%.

   24. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:09:53

       N- Keep going.

   25. JCJason Calacanis1:09:53

       What is this, the [beep] Price Is Right?

   26. DFDavid Friedberg1:09:55

       35%.

   27. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:09:56

       32%.

   28. JCJason Calacanis1:09:58

       Jesus [beep] Christ.

   29. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:09:58

       Okay, this is, when you are a machine and a group of people and a business model that compounds money at 32% over a 20-year average, you give these guys the benefit of the doubt. These are not people that are flying fast and loose. They are methodically investing in their edge, and this is, I go back to the first conversation. They are going to get massively rewarded. You know, there was a lot of Twitter chatter or X chatter about Gemini usage, and was it real or was it not real, and is their revenue growth really coming from AI-enabled workflows? It's all malarkey. Google has an incredible search experience. They've seemed to be navigating this transition to use AI. It's been done very well. They have an incredible cloud business, and they have an incredible silicon business. The best thing that can happen to them is 500 different models proliferate, and they support all of them because they will make so much money at the silicon layer, they'll make so much money as the cloud provider, and they'll find a bunch of apps, including YouTube and other things, to make money from because you use the AI to target ads better or to help make better content, et cetera, et cetera.

   30. JCJason Calacanis1:11:11

       Fragmentation's good for them.
6. 1:17:19 – 1:33:40

   Socialism Corner: "Evictions = Violence" and the threat to private property rights

   1. JCJason Calacanis1:17:19

      Friedberg. Every week, there's more news coming out of Socialism Corner. Uh, producer Nick-

   2. DFDavid Friedberg1:17:23

      Why don't you show my, uh, my videos on socialism going back six years?

   3. JCJason Calacanis1:17:26

      Let's add to the Friedberg socialism rants. Earlier this month, New York City dictator/mayor, Zohran Mamdani-

   4. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:17:35

      [laughs] Jake, don't, don't misuse that term, please. Come on.

   5. DFDavid Friedberg1:17:38

      Jason and his standard-

   6. JCJason Calacanis1:17:39

      Posted a rental rip-off hearing at New York City's Tenement Museum. After the hearing, he introduced a rental rip-off report passed, bars landlords from charging applications for credit checks. [laughs] It's gonna let landlords require a credit check or the 40x rent income standard but not both, legally recognizes tenant unions and more. He's obviously for- frozen the rent for a year. At the hearing, an activist, uh, wore a COVID mask and referred to evictions as the violence of evictions. Here's your 20-second clip.

   7. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:18:10

      The Mamdani administration is emboldening us- [laughs] ... so that we no longer tolerate the violence of evictions- [laughs] ... as a matter of business as usual. [laughs]

   8. JCJason Calacanis1:18:19

      [laughs] What the... What were we just watching? Is that the... Sacks, do you remember the guy from Fat Albert who had the hat like that?

   9. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:18:27

      [laughs]

   10. JCJason Calacanis1:18:28

       Can we pull that guy up from... [laughs] You remember the guy from Fat Albert who had the hat? What's his name? Oh, my God. He had-

   11. DFDavid Friedberg1:18:36

       Yeah, is COVID still happening? I thought COVID was over anyway.

   12. JCJason Calacanis1:18:39

       No, no, she just got a booster.

   13. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:18:40

       I mean, that was like a, that was like a super-duper mask. That was a super-duper mask.

   14. DFDavid Friedberg1:18:44

       Yeah, I know. That was like-

   15. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:18:44

       That just wasn't, like, a little cloth one. That was one of these-

   16. JCJason Calacanis1:18:46

       Whoa

   17. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:18:46

       ... those big ones.

   18. JCJason Calacanis1:18:48

       I mean, combined with the hat, it was, uh... That was pretty... [laughs] There it is. I remember that guy from, uh... [laughs] What is going on? Um-

   19. DFDavid Friedberg1:18:57

       Wait, let's, uh, we're gonna give Friedberg a chance to do a rant 'cause-

   20. JCJason Calacanis1:18:59

       Yes. Yes

   21. DFDavid Friedberg1:19:00

       ... I mean, I could do a, I could do a rant on this if you want.

   22. JCJason Calacanis1:19:01

       No, no, let's give Friedberg his r- this is Friedberg rare meat. Friedberg, what are your thoughts?

   23. DFDavid Friedberg1:19:05

       In 1787, in 1787, John Quincy Adams-

   24. JCJason Calacanis1:19:09

       [laughs] Here he goes

   25. DFDavid Friedberg1:19:10

       ... published a work called A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America, and in that work he had a comment, "The moment the idea is admitted into society that property is not as sacred as the laws of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it- Anarchy and tyranny commence. And then in 1791, he made the statement publicly, "Property must be secured or liberty cannot exist," in an essay series.

   26. JCJason Calacanis1:19:42

       Can you unpack it and explain why he said that, do you think?

   27. DFDavid Friedberg1:19:45

       Fundamental to the foundation of the United States of America was this idea of private property rights. Because if you think about where everyone that came to America was coming from, there were these tyrannical governments, monarchies or whatever, where some overlord or some cabal could decide at any point to take the things that you have. You had no private property rights as an individual. They could come in, they're like, "That farm is my farm. You're actually a serf. I'm the lord. That thing is my thing. You have a right to use it because I vest you that right to use it. I am the all-powerful. I am the tyrannical overseer of these lands." And it was that stasis that drove so many to come to the United States and say, "We want a place where individuals, one person, can say I own something and no one can take it from me." Private property rights are the foundations of liberty in America. This idea that you can then claim acts of violence, that you can then claim circumstances of, of extraordinary extravagant wealth and say to that individual, "I now have a right, the government now has a right to take your private property," ultimately leads to this tyrannical form. And it starts out as being an- anarchic because... And remember, anarchy is a temporary state. It's always in between one state and another. All anarchies end up in tyranny. Groups of people fight each other. They're all stealing [beep] from each other. Everyone just goes and takes and gets what they want, and eventually people coalesce. They form groups, and those groups become the more powerful groups, and the powerful groups end up winning, and they become the tyranny over the mass. And that is why all anarchies eventually evolve into tyranny. So anarchy and tyranny are one in the same. And fundamentally, what's going on with these socialist principles is that we are taking your private property, and you no longer have rights on your private property. Whether you are a landlord or whether you are a wealthy person that we've d- deemed to have too much wealth, we now will have the rights to come in and take your property and control it and take it from you. And it always starts with this framing of moralistic intent. We are good, you are bad for the following reasons. You have committed violence against the people that live in your building. You have taken too much wealth, and none of us have wealth. We have a right to go and take your wealth from you. It has always started from this point of view that you are bad. So the first framing is that the private property owner is evil, and that the private property owner has committed an act of injustice against those who don't have the private property, and that is the justification for taking away their private property rights. And it is the beginning of this transition towards a tyrannical system, which will ultimately be what I call this kind of great American Politburo or whatever socialist framework gets set up by the, the cabal of the socialists and, and what they're trying to put together. So all of these little acts, while seeming ridiculous and insane and inappropriate, in aggregate are the same thing. They're a transition away from private property rights, which is the foundation of the United States of America. That's why I think we should all be so shocked. And to John Quincy Adams' point, we need to vehemently defend those rights. As soon as those rights start to slip away, even in the tiniest way, it is a cascading effect, and everything will become tyrannical, and it will be very ugly in the United States of America.

   28. JCJason Calacanis1:22:55

       Sacks, uh, what are your thoughts here on, um, Comrade Mondame?

   29. DSDavid Sacks1:23:00

       Yeah, I just want to add a, a layer to this, this idea. You know, the, these DSA socialists say that evictions are, are violence, and they basically want to stop them. I think Friedberg's making the point that this deprives the landlord of their property, and that's true. But I think we also have to stop and consider what this means for the other residents in these buildings. I mean, first of all, if the landlords aren't making income because they got a bunch of delinquent tenants in the building, they can't now pay for upkeep and maintenance. And so these buildings become more dilapidated, and that affects the, the other tenants. But also, I have a friend who manages these apartment buildings, and he makes the point that it's often these squatters, these delinquent tenants who should be evicted but can't, who make the worst neighbors. So when you think about the problems in a, in an apartment complex where you've got people creating noise at night, maybe they're playing loud music, or you have people punching walls, or there's disgusting smells coming from apartments, or they're misusing [laughs] common areas, or you have drunken and disorderly behavior. I mean, this is all the kind of stuff that happens in these rent-controlled apartment buildings. And you have to remember that there's longstanding residents, a lot of old people, who can't afford to find a new place. They depend on the rent control. And when you can't evict that unruly tenant, yes, it, it affects the landlord, but it affects the neighbors even more because now they're stuck in a downward spiral. And I think this is a problem with the progressive mindset a- across the board, is that these DSA types are always these, like, highly educated and often affluent types, and they can afford to have luxury beliefs about public spaces because they never use them, right? They don't use the bus or the subway-

   30. JCJason Calacanis1:24:51

       Yes

Episode duration: 1:33:43