I have a little surprise for my besties. Everybody's been getting incredible adulation. People have been getting incredible feedback on the podcast. It is a phenomenon as we know. And I thought it was time for us to do performance reviews of each bestie. Now I, as executive producer, I'm not in a position to do your performance reviews.

I too need to have a performance review. So I thought I would let the audience do their performance reviews. So we went and we're debuting a new feature today. This very moment. It's called Reddit performance review. God cue some music here, some graphics, Reddit performance reviews. And so we'll start off with you, David Friedberg.

This proves why you haven't been successful in life so far. You kidding me? I'm trying to build a successful enterprise instead of keeping the judgment to yourself, which is what all elite performers do. Yes. You turned it over to a bunch of mids on Reddit. Yes. Tell you, they were already doing it.

They were already doing it. We just collected it. What elucidation were you going to get from Reddit? Yeah, really? Let's not ruin the bit. Do you think Elon does 360 performance reviews? On Reddit? On Reddit of all things? You know how many 360 performance reviews I've done in my life?

Zero, of course. And that's why this will be so entertaining. Okay, go go start off with me. Let's hear it. Here's how it's gonna work. You are going to be presented with the candid feedback that you've gotten in the last 30 days on Reddit. But for the first time, and you have to read it out loud to the class, Friedberg, you'll go first.

Here's your first piece of candid feedback in your 360 from the Reddit in cells. Good Friedberg read it out loud. David Friedberg deserves more hate. He and the others have made it their mission to convince us that reforming social security is the only way forward to survive. He hides behind this nerdy a political persona, and then goes hard right out of nowhere.

exact fear mongered about the deficit as an excuse to restructure entitlement programs, we would see that as the partisan right wing take it is when Friedberg does it. We're supposed to act like he has no skin in this game. He's just the science guy. No, he's a rich guy who would rather work your grandparents to death and pay an extra 5% tax.

All right, there's your review. Very good. I think you took it well. And you don't have to respond now. Don't just take it just to counter briefly, I have highlighted multiple times. I think we're going to 70% tax rates. But hey, you know, right there on everyone's got an opinion that won't generate more revenue.

Yeah, history's any guide? Yeah. Well, the audience has been waiting for this. David Sachs has never taken a piece of feedback and the feedback he has gotten he hasn't taken well. So here we go, David. Here's your performance. Go ahead. I just read this go with the bit. Come on.

It's a little feedback for you. Come on. All right. And I'm gonna do this too. And I haven't seen mine. Oh, Nick pulled these. Nick police. This is not these are actual pieces of real feedback. Fire. That's it. Get out of here. Good sex. The thing about David Sachs, if he wasn't rich, everyone would dismiss him as being both stupid and boring.

The secret to his wealth is just follow Peter Thiel around since college. It's like if turtle from Entourage pretend to be a public intellectual. Okay, so the dictator has never had a 360 review. He informs us and I think his staff you know, for all the people at social capital, you can get in on this by just posting to Reddit since he won't do 360 reviews at social capital guy.

Let's pull up two months. Feedback for the quarter. Is the biggest self serving leech. As long as he can make a dollar trade on it. He will burn anything down to the ground. Fuck the consequences to society or anyone else. This was actually the good positive Why'd you give him such a good review?

That's the truth. I got to read mine. I haven't seen this. I'm bracing for impact here. Oh, no. What's the critique exactly? What is the critique from all these proof from that? I mean, that's like, pretty accurate. Okay. All right, here we go. I got to read mine. Okay.

I can't wait for AI to replace Jake. Jake is the least skilled knowledge worker on the show. I think he has about three shows left before AI replaces his hosting skills. And ability to trick dentists into investing in high last part. I do have a lot of dentist friends in the funds.

Okay, I'm gonna pay for a lot of kids dentist school. Great idea. Great idea. J. Kelton give one group one, this is one for the whole group. This is a group survey. This is our group 360 vote to rename the podcast. The vote is binding and the podcast we renamed three billionaires and J.

Kel three kind of smart guys and J Cal three assholes and freebird. That's a good one. All right, everybody, welcome to the all in podcast. We're still here episode 129. All in summit 2023. General Admission sold out. Too many people apply for scholarships that's on pause. And there's a couple of VIP tickets left get them while they're hot.

Just search for all in summit freeberg. Anything to add? We'll just get through the grift real quick here. No, it's gonna get it all right. That was it. Yeah, I mean, just more demand than we predicted. We look for a bigger venue couldn't find one. We're I think we're excited about Royce Hall.

It's still as you pointed out two and a half times the size of last year. So we want to make sure it's a great quality event. But unfortunately, way too many folks want to go so we have to kind of pause ticket sales. What's my wine budget? $300 per person per night $1,000 per VIP per event.

Thank you. Okay, I will handle it from here. So there's 750 of them. So I think you have $750,000 in wine budget. I just can't believe I just gave him 750 by wide by guys, I'm going to curate an incredible here today, by the way, he's Oh, doing some way.

Yes, no, he Josh, some way Josh. All right, let's get to work. Let's get to work. Okay, the Senate had a hearing this week for AI. Sam Altman was there as well as Gary Marcus, a professor from NYU. That's an overpriced college in New York City. And Christina Montgomery, the chief privacy and trust officer from IBM, which had Watson before anybody else was in the AI business.

And I think they deprecated it or they stopped working on it, which is quite paradoxical. There were a couple of very interesting moments. Sam claimed the US should create a separate agency to oversee AI, I guess he's in the Chamath camp. He wants the agency to issue licenses to train and use AI models, a little regulatory capture there, as we say in the biz.

He also claims, and this was interesting dovetailing with Ilan's CNBC interview with I think Dave Farber, which is very good, that he owns no equity in open AI whatsoever, and was quote, doing it because he loves it. Any thoughts, Chamath, you did say that this would happen two months ago.

And here we are two months later. And exactly what you said would happen is in the process of happening. regulation, licensing and regulatory capture, Sam went a little further than I sketched out a few months ago, which is that he also said that it may make sense for us to issue licenses for these models to even be compiled.

And for these models to actually do the learning. And I thought that that was really interesting, because what it speaks to is a form of KYC, right? Know your customer. And again, when you look at markets that can be subject to things like fraud and manipulation, right, where you can have a lot of bad actors, banking is the most obvious one.

We use things like KYC to make sure that money flows are happening appropriately and between parties that were the intention is legal. And so I think that that's actually probably the most important new bit of perspective that he is adding as somebody right in the middle of it, which is that you should apply to this agency to get a license to then allow you to compile a model.

And I think that that was a really interesting thing. The other thing that I said, and I said this in my in a tweet just a couple days ago is I'm really surprised actually, where this is the first time in modern history that I can remember, where we've invented something we being Silicon Valley, and the people in Silicon Valley are the ones that are more circumspect than the folks on Wall Street or other areas.

And if you see if you gauge the sentiment, the hedge funds and family offices right now are just giddy about AI. And it turns out if you look at the 13 Fs, they're all long NVIDIA and AMD. But if you actually look at the other side of the coin, which is the folks in Silicon Valley, that's actually making it the rest of us are like, hey, let's crawl before we walk before we run.

Yeah, let's think about guardrails. Let's be thoughtful here. And so the big money people are saying, let's place bets. And the people building in are saying, Hey, let's be thoughtful sack, which is opposite to what it's always been, I think, right? We're like, hey, let's let's run with this.

And Wall Street's like, prove it to me. sacks, you are a less regulation guy. You are free market monster. I've heard you've been called. You don't believe that we should license this. What do you think about what you're seeing here? And there is some cynical, cynical thoughts about what we just saw happen in terms of people in the lead, wanting to maintain their lead by creating red tape.

What are your thoughts? Yeah, of course. I think, you know, Sam just went straight for the endgame here, which is regulatory capture. Normally, when a tech executive goes and testifies at these hearings, they're in the hot seat, and they get grilled. And that didn't happen here. Because, you know, Sam Allman basically bought into the narrative of these senators.

And he basically conceded all these risks associated with with AI talked about how chat GPT style models, if unregulated, could increase online misinformation, bolster cyber criminals, even threaten confidence in election systems. So he basically bought into the senators narrative. And like you said, agree to create a new agency that would license models and can take licenses away.

He said that he would create safety standards, specific tests that the model has to pass before it can be deployed. He says he would require independent audits who can say the model is or isn't in compliance. And by basically buying into their narrative and agreeing to everything they want, which is to create all these new regulations and a new agency, I think that Sam is pretty much guaranteeing that he'll be one of the people who gets to help shape the new agency and the rules they're going to operate under and what these independent audits are going to how they're going to determine what's in compliance.

So he is basically putting a big boat around his own incumbency here. And so yes, it is a smart strategy for him. But the question is, do we really need any of this stuff? And you know, what you heard at the hearing is that just like with just about every other tech issue, the centers on the judiciary committee didn't exhibit any real understanding of the technology.

And so they all generally talked about their own hobby horses. So you know, you heard from Senator Blackburn, she wants to protect songwriters. Holly wants to stop anti conservative bias. Klobuchar was touting a couple of bills that have her name on them once called the JCP a journalism competition preservation Bernie Sanders want to do he wants to protect the 1% of the one Durbin hate section 230.

That was the hobby horse he was riding and then Senator Blumenthal was obsessed that someone had published deep fakes of himself. So you know, all of these different senators had different theories of harm that they were promoting. And they were all basically hammers looking for a nail. You know, they all wanted to regulate this thing.

And they didn't really pay much of any attention to the ways that existing laws could already be used. Absolutely. To stop any of these things. If you commit a crime with AI, there are plenty of criminal laws, every single thing they talked about could be handled through existing law, if they're not doing harms at all.

Yeah, but they want to jump right to creating a new agency and regulations. And Sam, I think did the, you know, expedient thing here, which is basically buy into it in order to was a chance to be an insider. If this was a chess game, Sam got to the mid game, he traded all the pieces and went right to the end game.

Let's just try to checkmate here. I've got the lead. I got the 10 billion from Microsoft. Everybody else get a license and try to catch up Friedberg. We have Chamath pro regulation licensing, I think, or just being pretty thoughtful about it. There you got sacks being typically a free market monster, let the laws be what they are.

But these senators are going to do regulatory capture. Where do you as a sultan of science stand on this very important issue? I think there's a more important kind of broader set of trends that are worth noting and that the folks doing these hearings and having these conversations are aware of, which implies why they might be saying the things that they're saying.

That's not necessarily about regulatory capture. And that is that a lot of these models can be developed and generated to be much smaller. We're seeing, you know, models that can effectively run on an iPhone, we're seeing a number of open source models that are being published. Now there's a group called mosaic ml.

Last week, they published what looks like a pretty good quality model that has, you know, a very large kind of token input, which means you can do a lot with it. And that model can be downloaded and used by anyone for free, you know, really good open source license that they've provided on that model.

And that's really just the tip of the iceberg on what's going on, which is that these models are very quickly becoming ubiquitous, commoditized, small, and effectively are able to move to and be run on the edge of the network. As a result, that means that it's very hard to see who's using what models how behind the products and tools that they're building.

And so if that's the trend, then it becomes very hard for a regulatory agency to go in and audit every server, or every computer or every computer on a network and say, What model are you running? Is that an approved model? Is that not an approved model? It's almost like having a regulatory agency that has to go in and audit and assess whether a Linux upgrade or some sort of, you know, open source platform that's that's being run on some server is appropriately vetted and checked.

And so it's almost like a fool's errand. And so if I'm running one of these companies, and I'm trying to, you know, get Congress off my butt and get all these regulators off my butt, I'm going to say, go ahead and regulate us. Because the truth is, there really isn't a great or easy path or ability to do that.

And there certainly won't be in five or 10 years. Once these models all move on to the edge of the network, and they're all being turned around all the time every day. And there's a great evolution underway. So I actually take a point of view that it's not just that this is necessarily bad.

And there's cronyism going on. I think that the point of view is just that this is going to be a near impossible task to try and track and approve LLM and audit servers that are running LLM and audit apps and audit what's behind the tools that everyday people are using.

And I wish everyone the best of luck in trying to do so. But that's kind of the joke of the whole thing is like, let's go ahead and paddle these Congress people on the shoulder and say you got it. Right? There you have it, folks. Wrong answer. shamatha sacks.

Right answer. Friedberg. If you were to look at hugging face, if you don't know what that is, it's a basically an open source repository of all of the LLM. The cat is out of the bag, the horses have left the barn. If you look at what I'm showing on the screen here, this is the open LLM leaderboard kind of buried on hugging face.

If you haven't been to hugging face, this is where developers show their work, they share their work. And they kind of compete with each other in a social network showing all their contributions. And what they do here is and this is super fascinating. They have a series of tests that will take an LLM language model and they will have it do science questions that would be for grade school.

They'll do a test of mathematics, US history, computer science, etc. There's a jeopardy test to I don't know if it's on here, but the jeopardy test is really good. It's like straight up jeopardy trivia and see if it can answer the questions. Yeah, which actually, Friedberg was actually his high school jeopardy championship three years in a row.

But anyway, on this leaderboard, you can see the language models are out pacing what open AI did. I'm sorry, closed AI is what I call it now because they're closed source, closed AI and Bard have admitted that internal person at Bard said the language models here are now outpacing what they're able to do with much more resources.

Many hands makes for light work, the open source models are going to fit on your phone or the latest, you know, Apple silicon. So I think the cat's out of the bag. I don't know how they pull something incompatible about that. What Friedberg just said with what I said, in fact, freeberg's point bolsters my point, it's highly impractical to regulate open source software in this way.

Also, when you look at that list of things that people are doing on hugging face, there's nothing nefarious about it. Yeah, and all the harms that were described are already illegal and can be prosecuted. Exactly. Some special agency, you know, giving it seal of approval. Again, this is going to replace permissionless innovation, which is what has defined the software industry and especially open source with the need to develop some connection or relationship and lobbying in Washington to go get your project approved.

And there's no really good reason for this, except for the fact that the senators on the judiciary committee and all of Washington really wants more control. So they can get more donations. Saks have a question. Do you think that creating the DMV and requiring a driver's license limits the ability for people to learn how to drive the DMV is like the classic example of how government doesn't work.

I don't know why you'd want to make that your example. I mean, people have to spend all day waiting in line. He sends people to it. He's got a VIP person waiting in line to get your photo taken. It's insane. I mean, everyone has a miserable experience with it.

No, but it's highly relevant because you're right. If you create an agency where people have to go get their permission, it's a licensing scheme. You're gonna be waiting in some line of untold length. It won't be like a physical line at the DMV building, it's gonna be a virtual line where you're in some queue, where there's probably gonna be some overwork regulator who doesn't even know how they're supposed to approve your project.

They're just gonna be trying to cover their ass because if the project ends up being something nefarious, then they get blamed for it. So that's what's gonna end up happening. Let me also highlight something that I think is maybe I think the gut a little bit, maybe a little bit misunderstood.

But, you know, an AI model is an algorithm. So it's a it's a piece of software that takes data in and spits data out. And you know, we have algorithms that are written by humans, we have algorithms that have been, you know, written by machines, these are machine learn models, which is what a lot of what people are calling AI today is effectively an extension of an out of.

And so the idea that a particular algorithm is differentiated from another algorithm is also what makes this very difficult, because these are algorithms that are embedded and sit within products and applications that an end user and end customer ultimately uses. And I just sent you guys a link to the you know, the EU has been working towards passing this AI.

Here we go. There are a couple of weeks ahead of these conversations in the US. But I mean, as you read through this AI act, and the proposal that it's that it's put forth, it almost becomes the kind of thing that you say, I just don't know if these folks really understand how the technology works, because it's almost as if they're going to audit and have, you know, an assessment of the risk level of every software application out there.

And that the tooling and the necessary infrastructure to be able to do that just makes no sense. In the context of open source software in the context of an open internet, in the context of how quickly software and applications and tools evolve, and you make tweaks to an algorithm, and you got to resubmit it for authorization, or you can be sure their number one job Friedberg is going to be to protect jobs.

So anything there that in any way infringes on somebody's ability to be employed in a position, whether it's an artist or a writer, or a developer, they're going to say, you can't use these tools, or they're going to try to throttle them to try to protect jobs, because that's their number one job.

All three of you. Do you guys think that this was Sam's way of pulling up the ladder behind him? Of course, 100% just like, Oh, absolutely. It's and it's because no, you can, you can prove it. He made open AI closed AI by making it not open source. If you're Sam, you're smart enough to know how quickly the models are commoditizing and how many different models there are, that, you know, can provide similar degrees of functionality, as you just pointed out, J.

Cal. So I don't think it's about trying to lock in your model. I think it's about recognizing the impracticality of creating some regulatory regime around model auditing. And so you're very so that in that in that world, in that scenario, where you have that vision, you have that foresight, do you go to Congress and tell them that they're dumb to regulate AI?

Or do you go to Congress and you say, Great, you should regulate AI? Knowing that it's like, hey, yeah, you should go ahead and stop the sun from shining. You know, like, it's just Yeah, so basically, he's telling them to do that. Because he knows they can't. Therefore, he gets all the points, all the joy points, all the social credit, I don't wanna say virtual signaling, but he gets all the credit relationship credit with Washington for saying what they want to hear reflecting back to them.

Even though he knows they can't compete with Facebook's open model, which is number one. Yeah, there is historical precedent interesting for companies that are facing congressional scrutiny, to go to Congress and say, go ahead and regulate us as a way of preemptively. Yeah. And I think that it doesn't necessarily mean you're going to get regulated.

But it's a way of kind of creating some relief and getting everyone to take a breather and a sigh of relief and be like, okay, the industry is with us, you know, they're guard. What do you think of the strategy? Saks the guard as strategy he's pulling here? Let's guard as I think that's in chess when you are going to take the queen.

What's like, anyway, what do you think of his chess? That's not a strategy in chess. So I think it is a chess move. Nonetheless, is he pulling up the ladder sacks or no, I don't think that's his number one goal. But I think it is the result. And so I think the the goal here is I think he's got to pass in front of him when you go to testify like this, you can either resist, and they will put you in the hot seat and just grill you for a few hours, or you can sort of concede and you buy into their narrative.

And then you kind of get through the hearing without being grilled. And so I think on that level, it's preferable just to kind of play ball. And then the other thing is that by playing ball, you get to be part of the insiders club that's going to shape these regulations.

And that will I wouldn't say it's a ladder coming up, I think it's more of a moat, where because it's not that the ladder comes up and nobody else can get in. But the regulations are gonna be a pretty big moat around major incumbents who know they qualify for this because we're gonna write these standards.

So at the end of the day, if you're someone in Sam's shoes, you're like, why resist and make myself a target, or I'll just buy into the narrative and help shape the regulations. And it's good for my business. I like the analysis, gentlemen, this is a perfect analysis. Let me ask you a question tomorrow.

What is the commercial incentive from your point of view, to ask for regulation and to be pro regulation, your pro regulation? Can you just highlight for me at least what you think? You know, the commercial reason is to do that? You know, how do you benefit from that? Like, not you personally, but generally, like, where does benefit arise?

I think that certain people in a sphere of influence, and I would put us in that category, have to have the intellectual capacity to see beyond ourselves and ask what's for the greater good. I think Buffett is right. Two weeks ago, he equated AI to nuclear weapons, which is an incredibly powerful technology whose genie you can't put back in the bottle, whose 99.9% of use cases are generally quite societally positive, but the point 1% of use cases destroys humanity.

And so I think you guys are unbelievably naive on this topic, and you're letting your ideology fight your common sense. The reality is that there are probably 95 billion trillion use cases that are incredibly positive. But the 1000 negative use cases are so destructive. And they're equally possible. And the reason they're equally possible.

And this is where I think there's a lot of intellectual dishonesty here is, we don't even know how transformers work. The best thing that happened when Facebook open source llama was also that somebody stealthily released all the model weights. Yeah. Okay, so I don't think that a little bit for a neophyte what we're talking about.

So there's the model and there's the weights, think about it as it's a solution to a problem. The solution looks like a polynomial equation. Okay, let's take a very simple one. Let's take Pythagorean theorem, you know, x squared plus y squared equals z squared. Okay. So if you want to solve an answer to a problem, you have these weights, you have these variables, and you have these weights associated with it, the slope of a line y equals mx plus b, okay, what a computer does with AI is it figures out what the variables are.

And it figures out what the weights are the answer to identifying images flawlessly turns out to be 2x plus seven, where x equals this thing. Now take that example and multiply it by 500 billion parameters, and 500 billion weights. And that is what an AI model essentially gives us to it as an answer to a question.

So even when Facebook released llama, what they essentially gave us was the equation, but not the weights. And then what this guy did, I think it was an intern, apparently, or somebody, he just left the weights, so that we immediately knew what the structure of the equation look like.

So that's what we're basically solving against. But we don't know how these things work. We don't really know how transformers work. And so this is my point, when I think you guys are right about the overwhelming majority of the use cases, but there will be people who can nefariously create havoc and chaos.

And I think you got to slow the whole ship down to prevent those few folks from ruining it for everybody. Let me just talk with you. I haven't had a chance to chime in on my position. So I'd like to just make my mind. Nobody cares. Okay, well, I do.

I think actually, I split the difference here a little bit. I don't think it needs to be an agency and licensing. I do think we have to have a commission. And we do need to have people being thoughtful about those 1000 use cases chamath because they are going to cause societal harm or things that we cannot anticipate.

And then number two, for the neophyte with the 1600 rating on chess.com sacks, Gardez, an announcement to the opponent that their queen is under direct attack similar to the announcement of check the warning was customary until the early 20th century. So since you do not know the history of check, now you've learned something early 20th century.

Okay, well, since I've only played chess in the 20th and 21st centuries, I'm unaware of that. Jekyll and Francis Brown's got the girl they play man if he got the go ahead free bird in the context of what we're talking about that models are becoming smaller and can be run on the edge.

And there's obviously hundreds and thousands of variants of these open source models that have, you know, good effect, and perhaps compete with some of these, these models that you're mentioning that are closed source. How do you regulate that? How do you and then they sit behind an application? I sit behind tooling?

Yeah. I think in order for you to be able to compile that model to generate that initial instantiation, you're still running it in a cluster of 1000s of GPUs. But let's say we're past that. You can't be past that. We're not past that yet. Okay, we don't have 5 million models, we don't have all kinds of things that solve all kinds of problems.

We don't have an open source available simulation of every single molecule in the world, including all the toxic materials that could destroy humans. We don't have that yet. So before that is created, and shrunk down to an iPhone, I think we need to put some stage gates up to slow people down.

What do you mean by those stage gates? Yeah, I think you need some form of KYC. I think before you're allowed to run a massive cluster to generate the model that then you try to shrink, you need to be able to show people that you're not trying to do something absolutely chaotic, or have it creating that I don't think that that could be as simple as putting your driver's license and your social security number that you're working on an instance in a cloud, right?

It could be you're putting your name on your work, it becomes slightly more nuanced than that. It's like, I think that J Cal, that's probably the simplest thing for AWS GCP and as you're to do, which is that if you want to run over a certain number of GPU clusters, you need to put in that information.

I think you also need to put in your tax ID number. So I think if you want to run a real high scale model, that's still going to run you 10s or hundreds of millions of dollars. I do think there aren't that many people running those things. And I do think it's easy to police those and say, what are you trying to do here?

So let me just push back on that. Because mosaic ml publish this model that is, let me I can pull up the performance chart or Nick, maybe you can just find it on their website real quick at the new model they published to mock bait, trained this model on open source data that's publicly available.

And they spent $200,000 on a cluster run to build this model and look at how it performs compared to some of the top models that are closed source. Just say it for the people who are listening. Yeah. So for people that are listening, basically, this model is called mpt seven B.

That's the name of the AI model, the LLM model that was generated by this group called mosaic ml. And they spent $200,000 creating this model from scratch. And the data that they trained it on is all listed here. It's all publicly available data that you can just download off the internet, then they score how well it performs on its results against other big models out there like llama seven B.

Yeah, but he I know, but I don't exactly know what the actual problems they're trying to ask it to compare. Right. So the but the point is that this model theoretically could then be applied to a different data set once it's been, you know, built. I don't think so.

I just want to use your point earlier about toxic chemistry, because models were generated, and then other data was then used to fine tune those models and deliver an output. Hold on a second, like those answers were to specific kinds of questions. If you wanted to all of a sudden ask totally orthogonal thing of that model, that model would fail, you would have to go back and you'd have to retrain it.

That training does cost some amount of money. So if you said to me, h math, I could build you a model trained on the universe of every single molecule in the world. And I could actually give you something that could generate the toxic list of all the molecules and how to make it for $200,000.

I would be really scared. I don't think that that's possible today. So I don't understand these actual tests. But I don't think it's true that you could take this model and these model weights, apply it to a different set of data and get useful answers. But let's let's assume for a minute that you can, in fact, take $200,000 worth of I don't want to assume it.

Here's my point. I want to tell you what's happening right now, which is that's not possible. So we should stop so that then I don't have to have this argument with you in a year from now, which is like, hey, some jack jerk off just created this model. Now the cat's out of the bag.

So let's not do it. Yeah. And, and then what's going to happen is like some chaotic seeking organization is going to print one of these materials and release it into the wild to prove it. But here's the point for the audience. We are at a moment in time where this is moving very quickly.

And you have very intelligent people here who are very knowledgeable. Talking about the degree to which this is going to manifest itself, not if it will manifest, you are absolutely 100% certain freeberg that somebody will do something very bad in terms of the chemical example as but one, it we're only determining here what level of hardware and what year that will happen to Martha saying, we know it's going to happen, whether it's two or 10, or, you know, five years, let's be thoughtful about it.

And I think, you know, this discussion we're having here, I think is on a spectrum. It's this is a unique moment where the most knowledgeable people across every single political spectrum persuasion for profit, nonprofit, Democrat, Republican, right, Elon and Sam, I'll just use those as the two canonical examples to demonstrate our pro regulation, and then the further and further you get away, the less technically astute you are, the more anti regulation and like pro market you are.

And all I'm saying is, I think that should also be noted that that's a unique moment that the only other time that that's happened was around nuclear weapons. And you know, that's when I actually think, I think it's politically incorrect. Right now, I think because of what you're saying, just give me a second, I think because of what you're saying, everyone on the left and the right, it's it's become popular to be pro regulation on AI and say that AI is going to doom the world.

And it's unpopular. And I'm saying, no, I'm saying, I've explained my point of view on Sam, Elon's different, but I think like it, I think it's become politically incorrect to stand up and say, you know what, this is a transformative technology for humanity. I don't think that there's a real path to regulation.

I think that there are totally there are laws that are in place that can protect us in other ways, with respect to privacy, with respect to fraud, with respect to biological warfare, and all the other things that we should worry about. Elon has said pretty clearly, he doesn't give a shit about what it does to make money or not.

He cares about what he thinks. So all I'm saying is that's a guy that's not trying to be politically correct. Elon has a very specific concern, which is a GI, he's concerned that we're on a path to a digital super intelligence singularity. And if we create the wrong kind of artificial general intelligence that decides that it doesn't like humans, that is a real risk to the human species.

That's the concern he's expressed. But that's not what the hearing was really about. And it's not what any of these regulatory proposals are about. The reality is none of these centers know what to do about that even the industry doesn't know what to do about the long term risk of creating an AGI.

Nobody knows. Nobody really. And so and so I actually I disagree with this idea that tomorrow, the early earlier you said that there's 1000 use cases here that could destroy the human species. I think there's only one, there's only one species level risk, which is AGI. But that's a long term risk.

We don't know what to do about it yet. I agree, we should have conversations. What we're talking about today is whether we create some new licensure regime in Washington, so that politically connected insiders get to control and shape the software industry. And that's a disaster. Let me give you another detail on this.

So in one of the chat groups, I'm in, there was somebody who just got back from Washington, I won't say who they are. It's not someone who's famous outside the industry, but they're kind of like a tech leader. And what they said is they just got back from Capitol Hill and the White House.

And I guess there's like a White House summit on AI. You guys know about that? Yeah. So what this person said is that the White House meeting was super depressing. Some smart people were there to be sure, but the White House and VPS teams were rapidly negative, no real concern for the opportunity, or economic impact just super negative.

Of course, basically, the mentality was that tech is bad. We hate social media. This is the hot new thing. We have to stop it. Of course, that basically is their attitude. They don't understand the technology White House. Yeah, the Y and the VP specifically, because she's the now the AI is our to put Kamala Harris in charge of this makes no sense.

I mean, does she have any background in this? Like it just shows like a complete utter lack of awareness. Where's the Megan Smith, or somebody like a CTO to be put in charge of this? Remember, Megan Smith was CTO under, I guess Obama, like, you need somebody with a little more depth of experience here, like hopefully, then you guys then saying you're you're pro regulation, depending on who's in charge.

Well, I'm pro thoughtfulness. I'm pro thoughtfulness. I'm illustrating that really, this whole new agency that's being discussed is just based on vibes. You're not down with the vibes. The vibes are the vibes, the vibe is that a bunch of people in Washington don't understand technology, and they're afraid of it.

So anything you're afraid of, you're gonna want to control these are socialists, David, they're socialists. They hate progress. They are scared to death that jobs are going to collapse. They're socialists, they, they're union leaders. This is their worst nightmare. Because the actual truth of this technology is 30% more efficiency, and it's very mundane.

This is the truth here. I think that representatives have 30% more efficiency means Google, Facebook, and many other companies, finance, education, they do not add staff every year, they just get 30% more efficient every year. And then we see unemployment go way up, and Americans are going to have to take service jobs.

And white collar jobs are going to be refined to like a very elite few people who actually do work in the world. There is absolutely a lot of new companies. If humans can become if knowledge workers can become 30% more productive, there'll be a lot of new companies. And the biggest shortage our economy is coders, right?

And we're going to have an unlimited number of them. Now. They're all going to go. Yeah, I don't know if it's unlimited. But yes, it's a good thing. If you give them superpowers. We've talked about this before. Yeah. So I think it's too soon to be concluding that we need to stop job displacement that hasn't even occurred yet.

I'm not saying it's actually going to happen. I do agree, there'll be more startups. I'm seeing it already. I just think that's what they fear. That's their fear is and that's the fear of the EU, the EU is going to be protectionist unionist, protect pro workers, which is fine, they're gonna be affected because these are not blue collar jobs we're talking about.

These are knowledge. There's white collar unions that all the media companies created unions and look at them. They're all going circling all these media companies are circling the training going. But that's on the margins. I mean, that's not just trying to start tech unions. Sure, they're trying to start them.

But when we think of unionized workers, you're thinking about factory workers, and these people are not affected. Okay, listen, this has been an incredible debate. This is why you tune into the pod. A lot of things can be true at the same time. I really think the analogy of the the atom bomb is really interesting, because what you want is scared about with general artificial intelligence is nuclear holocaust, the whole planet blows up.

Between those two things are things like Nagasaki and Hiroshima or a dirty bomb and many other possibilities with nuclear power, you know, Fukushima, you know, etc. So let's send no Hiroshima. Not yet. Right. And you know, the question is, is a three mile island is a Fukushima is a Nagasaki are those things probable.

And I think we are all looking at this saying there will be something bad that will happen. There will be the equivalent. All right. It strings together and these large language models string together words in really interesting ways. And they give computers the ability to have a natural language interface that is so far from AGI.

I think it's a component. Hold on, I think it's a obviously the ability to understand language and communicate in a natural way is a component of a future AGI. But by itself, these are models for stringing together auto GPT, where these things go out and pursue things without any interference, I would be the first one to say that if you wanted to scope models to be able to just do human language back and forth on the broad open internet, you know, there's probably a form David where these chat GPT products can exist.

I don't I think that those are quite benign. I agree with you. But I think what Jason is saying is that every week you're you're taking a leap forward. And already with auto GPT is you're talking about code that runs in the background without supervision. It's not a human interface that's like, hey, show me how to color my cookies green for St.

Patty's Day. It's a plan my trip to Italy. Yeah, yeah, it's not doing that. So I just think that there's there's a place well beyond what you're talking about. And I think you're minimizing the problem a little bit by just kind of saying the whole class of AI is just chat GPT and asking, kid asking it to help it with its home.

This example, I hate to say it out loud. But somebody could say here is the history of financial crimes that were committed and other hacks, please with their own model on their own server, say, please come up with other ideas for hacks, be as creative as possible and steal as much money as possible and put that in an auto GPT, David, and study all hacks that occur in the history of hacking.

And it could just create super chaos around the world. And you can be sure history is going to regret buying into this narrative because the members of the Judiciary Committee are doing the same playbook they ran back in 2016. After that election, they ran all these hearings on disinformation, claiming that social networks been used to hack the election.

It was all a phony narrative. Hold on that. What happened? They got tech companies to buy into Biden, they Russians hacked Hunter right after that. Stop, they got they got all these tech CEOs to buy into that phony narrative. Why? Because it's a lot easier for the tech CEOs to agree and tell the senators what they want to hear to get them off their backs.

And then what does that lead to a whole censorship industrial complex. So we're going to do the same thing here. We're going to buy into these phony narratives to get the senators off our backs. And that's going to create this giant AI industrial complex that's going to slow down real innovation and be a burden on entrepreneurs.

Okay, lightning round lightning round. We got to move on three more topics I want to hit. Let's keep going. If honored to become an evil more evil. Yeah. What is it called an evil comic book character? A supervillain, a supervillain. I would you want to be an even more loathsome supervillain continue, I would take every single virus patch that's been developed and publicized, learn on them and then find the next zero day exploit on a whole bunch of stuff.

I mean, it's like even publish that idea. Please don't I mean, I'm worried about publishing that idea. That's not an intellectual leap. I mean, you have to be an hour. Obvious. Okay, let's move on. Another great debate. Elon hired a CEO for Twitter. Linda yakarino. I'm hoping pronouncing that correct was the head of ad sales at NBC Universal.

She's a legend in the advertising business. She worked at Turner for 15 years before that she is a workaholic is what she says she's going to take over everything but product and CTO Elon's gonna stick with that. She seems to be very moderate and she follows people on the left or right people are starting the character assassination and trying to figure out her politics.

She was involved with the WF World Economic Forum, which anybody in business basically does. But your take sacks on this choice for CEO and what this means just broadly for the next six months because we're sitting here at six months almost exactly since you on took over obviously you and I were involved in month one but but not much after that.

What do you think the next six months holds and what do you think her role is going to be obviously some precedent this for this with you know, when at SpaceX? Listen, I think this choice makes sense on this level Twitter's business model is advertising. Elon does not like selling advertising.

She's really good at selling advertising. So he's chosen a CEO to work with who's highly complimentary to him in their skill sets and interests. And I think that makes sense. I think there's a lot of logic in that what Elon likes doing is the technology and product side of the business.

He actually doesn't really like the let's call it the standard business chores. And especially related to like we said advertising and he loves to offer that stuff. Advertisers make is his personal nightmare. Right? So I think the choice makes sense on that level. Now. Instantly, you're right, her hiring led to attacks from both the left and the right the right, you know, pointed out her views on COVID and vaccines and her work with the WF.

And on the left, I mean, the attack is that she's following lives at Tick Tock, which you're just not allowed to do apparently, a follow is not an endorsement. Well, if you're just following lives to tick tock, they want to say you're some crazy right winger now. Well, she also follows David Sachs.

So that does mean that she's pretty that that is a signal. But the truth is, if Sachs correct me if I'm wrong here, or trim off, maybe I'll send it to you. If you pick somebody that both sides dislike or trying to take apart, you probably picked the right person.

Yeah. Here's what I think. Okay, go ahead. We're not going to know how good she is for six to nine months. But here's what I took a lot of joy out of. Here's a guy who gets attacked for all kinds of things now, right? He's an anti Semite, apparently.

And then he had to be like, I'm very pro Semite. He's a guy that all of a sudden people think is a conspiracy theorist. He's a guy that people think is now on the raging right, all these things that are just like inaccuracies, basically firebombs thrown by the left.

But here's what I think is the most interesting thing for a guy that theoretically is supposed to be a troll and everything else. He has a female chairman at Tesla, a female CEO at Twitter, and a female president at SpaceX. Of course, it's a great insight. It's the same insight.

I think a lot of these virtue signaling lunatics on the left virtue signaling mids. They're all nice. And you know, like, you have Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, giving, you know, the CEO of Starbucks a hard time when he doubled the pay of the minimum wage, gave them a free bird.

You love mid right? That's a great term, isn't it? These fucking meds and I paid for the college tuition. What gives you the right at Starbucks to pay for college tuition and double the minimum wage? That's so so mad. I don't know why it's so funny to me. Isn't it so great?

Like, you can picture them when I say that these are these mids feverishly typing on their keyboards, their virtue signaling nonsense, sex wrapping it up. Yeah, look, like you said, Elon has worked extremely well with when shot well, who's the president of SpaceX for a long time. And I think that relationship shows the way to make it work here at Twitter, which is they have a very commoner skill set.

I think my understanding is that when focuses on the business side and the sales side of the operation, Elon focuses on product and technology. She lets Elon be Elon. I think if Linda tries to reign Elon in, tell him not to tweet, or tries to meddle in the free speech aspects of the business, which is the whole reason he bought Twitter, which is the beginning and end of it.

Yeah, that's right. That's when it will fall apart. So my advice would be let Elon be Elon. You know, he bought this company to make it a free speech platform. Don't mess with that. And I think it could work great. And a free speech platform. It is when you are saying anything about COVID.

And I really don't even want to say it here, because I don't want our to even say the word COVID or vaccine means that this could get tagged by YouTube and be D. You know, algorithm, the algorithm could could could D. I don't know what they call it deprecate this and when we don't show up and people don't see us because we just said the word COVID.

I mean, the censorship built into these algorithms is absurd. But speaking of absurd, Lena Khan, who has been the least effective FTC chair, I think, started out pretty promising with some interesting ideas. She's now moved to block a major pharma deal. In December, Amgen agreed to acquire Dublin based horizon therapeutic for 27.8 billion.

This is the largest pharma deal announced in 2022. FTC has filed a lawsuit in federal court seeking an injunction that would prevent the deal from closing. The reasoning is the deal would allow Amgen to entrench the monopoly positions of horizons I and gout drugs. The agency said that those treatments don't face any competition today and that Amgen would have a strong incentive to prevent any potential rivals from introducing similar drugs.

Chamath the pharmaceutical industry is a little bit different than the tech here insanity. Explain why and then sacks will go to you on the gout stuff. Well, I know that personally impacts you. Go ahead. I think that this is a little like scientifically illiterate, to be honest. Unpack the thing is that you want drugs that can get to market quickly.

But at the same time, you want drugs to be safe, and you want drugs to be effective. And I think that the FDA has a pretty reasonable process. And one of the direct byproducts of that process is that if you have a large indication that you're going after, say diabetes, you have to do an enormous amount of work, it has to be run on effectively 1000s of people, you have to stratify it by age, you have to stratify it by gender, you have to stratify by race, you have to do it across different geographies, right?

The bar is high. But the reason the bar is high is that if you do get approval, these all of a sudden become these blockbuster 1020 $30 billion drugs, okay. And they improve people's lives, and they allow people to live, etc, etc. What has happened in the last 10 or 15 years, because of Wall Street's influence inside of the pharma companies, is that what pharma has done a very good job of doing is actually pushing off a lot of this very risky R&D to young early stage biotech companies.

And they typically do the first part of the work, they get through a phase one, they even may be able to sometimes go and start a phase two trial to a trial. And then they typically can get sold to pharma. And these are like multi billion dollar transactions. And the reason is that the private markets just don't have the money to support the risk for these companies to be able to do all the way through a phase three clinical trial because it would cost on some cases 5678 billion dollars.

You've never heard of a tech company raising that much money except in a few rare cases. In far in biotech, it just doesn't happen. So you need the M&A machine to be able to incentivize these young companies to even get started in the first place. Otherwise, what literally happens is you have a whole host of diseases that just stagnate.

Okay. And instead, what happens is a younger company can only raise money to go after smaller diseases, which have smaller populations, smaller revenue potential, smaller costs, because the trial infrastructure is just less. So if you don't want industry to be in this negative loop, where you only work on the small diseases, and you actually go and tackle the big ones, you need to allow these kinds of transactions happen.

The last thing I'll say is that even when these big transactions happen, half the time they turn out to still not work, there is still huge risk. So don't get caught up in the dollar size. You have to understand the phase it's in. And the best example of this is the biggest outcome in in biotech private investing in Silicon Valley was this thing called stem centric.

And that thing was a $10 billion dud, right. But it allowed all these other companies to get started after some centric Scott bought for 10 billion. Freiburg, I want to get your take on this, especially in light of maybe something people don't understand, which is that the amount of time you get to actually exclusively monetize a drug, because my understanding you correct me if I'm wrong, you get a 20 year patent, it's from the date you file it, but then you're working towards getting this drug approved by the FDA.

So by the time the FDA approves the drug, this 20 year patent window, how many years do you actually have exclusively to monetize that drug? And then your wider thoughts on this? FTA? Yeah, I'm not going to answer that question right now. Because I do want to kind of push back on the point I'm generally pretty negative on a lot of the comments Lena contemade and her positioning.

And obviously, as you guys know, we've talked about it on the show. But I read the FTC filing written federal court. And if you read the filing, let me just start the company that am gens trying to buy it's called horizon therapeutics, which is a company that's doing about 4 billion in revenue a year about a billion to a billion and a half in EBITDA.

So it's a it's a business that's got a portfolio of orphan drugs, meaning drugs that treat orphan conditions that aren't very big blockbusters in the in the pharmaceutical drug context. And so it's a it's a nice portfolio of cash generating drugs. And Jen, buying the business gives them real revenue really, but and helps bolster a portfolio that you know, is aging.

And I think that's a big part of the strategic driver for am Jen to make this massive $28 billion acquisition, the FTC is claim in the filing, which I actually read and I was like, this is actually a pretty good claim is that the way that am Jen sets the prices for their pharmaceutical drugs is they go to the insurance companies, the payers and the health systems, and they negotiate drug pricing.

And they often do bulk multi product deals. So they'll say, hey, we'll give you access to the product at this price point, but we need you to pay this price point for this product. And over time, that drives price inflation, it drives costs up. And it also makes it difficult for new competitors to emerge.

Because they tell the insurance company, you have to pick our drug over other drugs in order to get this discounted price. And so it's a big part of their negotiating strategy that they do with insurance companies. So the FTC is claim is that by giving am Jen this large portfolio of drugs that they're buying from horizon, it's going to give them more negotiating leverage and the ability to do more of this drug blocking that they do with insurance companies and other payers in the drug system.

So they're trying to prevent pharmaceutical drug price inflation, and they're trying to increase competition in their lawsuit. So I felt like it was a fairly kind of compelling case. I'm no lawyer on antitrust and monopolistic practices and the Sherman Act. But this was not sorry, let me just say this was not an early stage biotech risky deal that they're trying to block.

No, it is a mature company with 4 billion in revenue and a billion and a half in EBITDA. I understand. And I read it too. But two comments. It is because the people that traffic in these stocks are the same ones that fund these early stage biotech companies. And I talked to a bunch of them.

And they're like, if these guys block this kind of deal, we're going to get out of this game entirely. So just from the horse's mouth, what I'm telling you is you're going to see a Paul come over the early stage venture financing landscape, because a lot of these guys that are crossover investors that own a lot of these public biotech stocks that also fund the private stocks will change their risk posture if they can't make money.

That's just the nature of capitalism. The second thing is Lena Khan did something really good about what you're talking about this week, actually, which is she actually went after the PBMs. And if you really care about drug inflation, and you follow the dollars, the real culprits around this are the pharmacy benefit managers.

And she actually launched a big investigation into them. But this is what speaks to the two different approaches. It seems that unfortunately, for the FTC, every merger just gets contested for the sake of it being contested. Because I think that if you wanted to actually stop price inflation, there are totally different mechanisms.

Because why didn't you just sue all the PBMs? Well, there's no merger to be done. But you can investigate, and then you could regulate. And I think that that's probably a more effective way. And the fact that she targeted the PBM says that somebody in there actually understands where the price inflation is coming from.

But I don't think something like an Amgen horizon, because what I think will happen is all the folks will then just basically say, Well, man, if if, if these kinds of things can't get bought, then why am I funding these other younger things? Yeah, but you know, yeah, we're just not seeing a lot of the younger stuff get get blocked.

I don't think we've seen any attempts at blocking speculative portfolio acquisitions or speculative company acquisitions. So I think these guys are getting caught up in the dollar number. You know, yeah. So I think the problem is they see 28 billion, they're like, we need to stop it. You know, it's amazing.

I'll just wrap on this, because it's a good discussion. But I think we got to keep moving here is I took the PDF that you shared. And I put it into chat GPT now. Oh, and you don't need to upload the PDF anymore. You could just say summarize this and put the link.

And it did it instantly. Are using the browsing plugin or I just use it. No, it's not the browser plugin. I just did. This is the game. But 3.5 model, I just gave it a link and it pulled the link in the GPT 3.5 model does know we could do that.

That's new. They must add a browsing in the background. Yeah, or just pulling it. They did today, by the way. Whoa. They did it today. Yeah. Well, remember last week, we said that they had to build browsing into the actual product like bard, right? Otherwise, it can move. And I got to say, closed AI closed AI is on the top of their game.

The app is available in the apps are now right as of today. No, they they had a test app. I was on the test. No, no, no, they just launched the app. Today. Oh, that's game over, man. If this thing is an app form, that's going to 10 x the number of users and it's going to 10 x the amount of usage.

The same thing for bard, we should compare the two but bard bard is pretty good as well. Yeah. Yeah. Well, bring you out to actually compare its summary with chat GPT summary. Tell us which one's better. Right? This is some interesting news here. You know, we speaking of platform shifts, do I get to give my view on the Lena con thing?

Oh, well, yes. But first, I don't want to read this was getting a little, it was getting a little personal here, David. And I didn't I didn't want to trigger you. I know you've been struggling with the gout. Because of your lifestyle choices, the alcohol, the foie gras everything, but now you've lost a lot of way to give you a lot of credit.

Tell us what do you think about the bundling we're seeing here? Because it does seem Microsoft s with the operating system. Yeah, it's very similar. And what I said in the context of tech is that we should focus on the anti competitive tactics and stop those rather than blocking all mergers.

And I think the same thing is happening now in the pharma space. If bundling is the problem focus on bundling. The problem when you just block M&A is that you deny early investors, one of the biggest ways that they can make a positive outcome. And what's the downstream effect of that?

Yeah, exactly. Look, it is hard enough to make money as either a pharma investor or as a VC, that there's only two good outcomes, right? There's IPOs, there's M&A, everything else basically goes, everything else is a zero goes bankrupt. So if you take M&A off the table, you really suppress the already challenged returns of venture capital.

Yeah, well said well said. And you're right, you mentioned earlier that we were willing to give Lena Khan a chance. We thought that some of our ideas were really interesting, because I think there are these huge tech companies that do need to be regulated these big tech monopolies, basically that you have the mobile operating system duopoly with Apple and Google, you've got Amazon, you've got Microsoft, and there is a huge risk of those companies preferring their own applications over downstream applications or using these bundling tactics.

Yes. If you don't put some limits around that, that creates I think, an unhealthy tech ecosystem. This is the insight. And I think it's exactly correct sex. For Lena Khan, and if she listens to the pod, hey, Lena, you want to go after tactics, not acquisitions. So if somebody buys something, and they lower prices and increases consumer choice, that's great.

If it encourages more people to invest more money into innovation, that's great. But if the tactics are we're going to bundle these drugs together to keep some number of them artificially high or reduced choice, or if we're going to bundle features into the you know, suite of products, and we do anti competitive stuff, you have to look at the tactics on the field are people cheating?

And are they using the monopoly power to force you to use their app store? Just make Apple have a second app store. That's all we're asking you to do. There should be an app store on iOS that doesn't charge any fees or charges 1% fees. Break the monopoly on the app store.

Saks is so right. Perfectly said, she actually did issue compulsory orders to the PBMs. So to your point, Saks, the FTC has been worried that what freeberg said has been happening. But the real sort of middleman manipulator in this market are the pharmacy benefit managers. And so this week, she actually issued compulsory orders to the PBMs and said, Turn over all your business records to me, I'm going to look into them.

That makes a ton of sense. But then on the same end, it's like you see merger and you're like, No, it can't happen. It just doesn't speak to a knowledge of the market. We should have Lena on with the Halina. I know you listen to the pod. I've heard the back channel just come on the pod.

I should be a good guest, right? We would have a good conversation. I think. Yeah. Open invite Nikki Halley is coming on the pod. By the way, you have homework to do for the summit, which is to see if you can get Donald Trump to come on to the summit.

Okay, huge. Love J. Cal. Love all in great. Okay. Cute. Okay, not as good as apprentice but class. Okay, great. As your your mannerisms are unbelievable. How did you practice it? I did I did a little bit only because I like to show people and trigger them. I'm going to really dial in my Trump in the coming weeks.

All right, here we go. Apple's long anticipated a our headset that stands for augmented reality, which means VR, you can't see the real world, you're just in a virtual world AR lets you put digital assets on the real world. So you can see what's happening in the real world.

But you can put graphics all around that's expected to be revealed. As early as June, the projected cost is going to be around $3,000. It won't ship into the fall. This is a break from Apple's typical way of releasing products, which is to wait till it's perfect and to wait until all consumers can afford it.

This is a different approach. They're going to give this out to developers early. And Tim Cook is supposedly pushing this there was another group of people inside of Apple who did not want to release a Chema. But there is some sort of external battery pack, it seems like a bit of a Franken product Frankenstein kind of project here.

That, you know, perhaps Steve Jobs wouldn't have wanted to release but he needs to get it out. I think because Oculus is making so much progress to killer app supposedly is a FaceTime like live chat experience that seems interesting, but they look like ski goggles. Your thoughts Chamath on this as the next compute platform if they can get it, you know to work would you wear these?

Would they have to be Prada? What's the story? No, no, this seemed like a weird conversation because none of us fucking know none of us have seen this product and none of us have used it. So like, this is just lucky friend of the pot poma. Lucky says it's incredible.

So what that's just like commenting on one guy's five letter five word tweet. Let's Palmer knows I mean, Palmer invented Oculus. Great. What are we talking about? We have nothing to say to that. I'll a form of really good question here. Do you believe this is going to be a meaningful compute platform in the coming years because Apple is so good at product?

How do we know till we see it? We got to see it. I think on Facebook, of course, they're of course they're good at product. Let's let's see the product though. Like, all right, fine. Saks, what are your thoughts? I think it's a good thing that they're launching this.

Like you said, it is a deviation for what they've normally done. They normally don't release a product unless they believe the entire world can use it. So their approach has been only to release mass mass market products and have a very small portfolio of those products. But when those products work, they're, you know, billion user home runs.

This obviously can't be at a $3,000 price point. And it also seems like it's a little bit of a early prototype where the batteries are like in a fanny pack around your waist. And there's a ways to go around this, but I give them credit for launching what is probably going to be more of an early prototype so they can start iterating on it.

I mean, the reality is the Apple watch the first version kind of sucked and first five versions. Yeah, now they're on one that's pretty good, I think. So look, I think this is a cool new platform. They get knocked on for not innovating enough. I think good, let them try something new.

I think this will be good for meta to have some competition. Yeah, it's great. Having two major players in the race, maybe it actually speeds up the innovation. I mean, we get some work. She wants any of that here. I mean, I think they should have done something in cars.

I agree with David, like they do in cars. Well, if you were going to talk about the car, what would it be? Tell me what you think would be the right approach you were going to do the Facebook phone that could have changed the entire destiny of Facebook, they should have bought Tesla when they could have the chance for four or $5 billion.

They could have bought it for 10 billion 20 billion. And when it got to 5060 that it got out of reach. What do you think the car should know they could have bought it at 100 billion. It could have bought 100 billion Tim Cook famously wouldn't take the meeting.

Elon said it he wouldn't he wouldn't meet was our bizarre. Maybe they missed an opportunity there. But I do think the end game with the AR headset or glasses, right? Yes. Where you get the screens and you get the Terminator mode. And in is that what is that? These are just glasses that were like fancy technology.

This this size glasses is what you're talking about. Yeah, like a little camera built in and conjunction with AI, then it gets really interesting. So that that's the end game here. I think give the audience an example of what this combination of AI plus AR could do when you're walking around, it could layer on intelligence about the world or you meet with somebody and it can remind you of their name and the last time you met with them and give you a summary of what you talked about.

What action items there are. You can be walking in a city and it could tell you it knows you like Peking duck, it could show you Hey, there's a Peking duck place over here. Some reviews have it just knows you and it's customized in the world. What about for people that do the same routine 99% of the time how does it can help you that it could tell you your steps every day could tell you incoming messages so you don't have to take your $3,000 on that.

No, but you would spend people spend plus your people spend $400 on notifications on your wrist. Why do you want it on your eyes for 3000? I would love this. Maybe I just do like a lot of meetings or I'm at events where people are coming up to me and I've met him like once a year before.

Like it would be really helpful to kind of have the term. Let's be honest, though, the terminated mode for you to be able to be present with your family and friends, but be playing chess with Peter Thiel on those glasses. That's your dream come true. You and Peter in a are playing chess all day long.

Throw up the picture of sacks beating Peter Thiel. I watched the clip from the early all in episodes when we discussed you beating Peter Thiel. What a great moment it was for you. All right, listen, let's wrap up with this gallop survey the number of Americans who say it's a good time to buy a house has never been lower 21% say it's a good time to buy a house down 9% from the prior low of a year ago prior to 2022 50% or more consistently thought it was a good time to buy significantly significantly fewer expect local housing prices to increase in the year.

Hey, sacks is this like a predictive of a bottom and pure capitulation and then that means maybe it is in fact a good time. How would you read this data? I don't see it as a bottom necessarily the way I read the data is that the spike in interest rates have made it very unaffordable to buy a house right now you've got you know, the mortgages are what like 7% interest rate or even slightly higher.

So people just can't afford the same level of house that they did before. I mean, mortgages were at three, three and a half percent like a year and a half ago. Now I think what's kind of interesting is that even in the 1980s, the early 1980s, when interest rates were at like 15%, you still had 50% thought it was an okay time to buy a house or attractive time to buy a house.

So for the number to be this low tells me that is not just about interest rates, I think consumer confidence is also plummeting, and people are feeling more insecure. So I think it's just another economic indicator that things are looking really shaky right now. And I'll tell you one of the the knock on effects of this is going to be that people can't move.

Because in order to move, you have to sell your current house, and then buy a new one. And you're not going to want to sell your current house when prices are going down. And then for the new one, you're going to lose your 3% mortgage and have to get a new one at 7%.

So you're not gonna buy anything like the house. So it freezes the market, it freezes mobility. I think over the last few years, during COVID, you saw tremendous movement between states, I think that's gonna slow down a lot now, because people just can't afford to trade houses. So as a result of that, I think discontent is going to rise.

Because I think one of the ways that you create a pressure valve is when people are unhappy in a state, they just move somewhere else. Well, now they're not going to do that. Well, you can also move to a better opportunity for you and your family, whether that schools, taxes, a job, lifestyle.

So yeah, you can you can, you're going to reduce joy in the country. And it also, it screws with price discovery, doesn't it? Your mouth if you if you don't have a fluid market here, then how does anybody know what their house is worth? And this just, again, creates more, I think, frost, I think Friedberg has said this a couple times, Friedberg, you can correct me if I'm wrong.

But like the the home is like the disproportionate majority of most Americans wealth, right? It's all their wealth. All their wealth. Yeah. So I mean, there's that factoid. Yeah. And then what does that do for their attention savings or whatever? It's okay. You got incoming what's going on? They're bringing you lunch?

No, I was looking I was looking at a mansion that's for sale. Like $175 million, but they just got the price to 140. So I'm just taking a little again. I mean, there's gonna be a lot of distress in the market soon. I'm predicting a lot of distress. Actually, can we shift to the commercial side for a second?

I just passed away. Yeah. Sam Zell passed away. Today. Oh, wow. Rest in peace. Yeah. Rest in peace. Chicago. Yeah, crazy. But speaking of bastic, interesting guy. Yeah. But speaking of the real estate market, so I want to give an update on San Francisco, Siri, I was talking to a broker the other day.

And so here are the stats that they gave me. So it was a local broker than someone from Blackstone. And they're fans of the pod and just came up to me, we started talking about what's happening in San Francisco. Shout out to them. Didn't take a didn't take a photo.

But But in any event, they're they're fans of the pod. So we started talking about what's happening in San Francisco, real estate. So the SF office market is just a level set is 90 million square feet, they said the vacancy rate is now 35%. So that's over 30 million square feet vacant, and vacancy still growing as leases end, and companies shed space because some of that space that they're not using is not for sublease.

Everyone says what about AI is AI going to be the savior? The problem is that AI companies are only that's only about a million square feet of demand. So 1 million out of 30 million is going to be absorbed by AI. And you know, maybe that number grows over time over the next 510 years as we create some really big AI companies, but it's just not going to bail out San Francisco right now.

The other thing is that, you know, VC backed startups are very demanding in terms of their tenant improvements, and landlords don't really have the capital right now to put that into the buildings. And startups just are not the kind of credit worthy tenants that landlords really want. So this is not going to bail anybody out there.

They said there are a ton of zombie office towers, especially in Soma. And all these office towers are eventually gonna be owned by the banks, which you're gonna have to liquidate them. And then we're gonna find out that these loans that they made are gonna have to be written off.

Because the collateral that they thought was blue chip, that was backing up those loans is not so blue chip anymore. So I think we've got not just a huge commercial real estate problem, but it's gonna be a big banking problem as basically people stop pretending, you know, right now, they're trying to restructure loans, it's called pretend and extend, you reduce the rate on the loan, but add term to it.

But that only works for so long. If this keeps going, if the market keeps looking like this, I think you're gonna have a real problem. And that will be a problem in the banking system. Now, San Francisco is the worst of the worst. But they said that New York is similar.

And all these other big cities with empty office towers are directionally. I'm in New York right now for the side connections conference. And it is packed, the city is packed, getting anywhere, there's gridlock, you can't walk down the street, you got to walk around people every restaurant, it is dynamic.

And then I talked to people about offices. And they said, people are staying in their houses and their tiny little New York apartments, instead of going three train stops to their office, they go to the office one or two days a week, unless you're like JP Morgan, or some other places that's the drop the boom.

But there's a lot of people still working from home, the finance people have all gone back media people are starting to go back. So there are three to five days here. And the city is booming. Contrast that I spent the last two weeks in San Francisco, walking from Soma to the Embarcadero back dead, nobody in the city.

It's like literally a ghost town. It's a real shame. It's a real, real shame. I wonder if these this is the question I have for you, Saks. Can they cut a deal? Can they go to like month to month ran sub lats? You know, Lucy, Lucy, just give people any dollar amount to convince them to come back?

Is there any dollar amount because I'm looking for a space for the incubator in San Mateo, I've been getting a ton of inbound, but the prices are still really high. And I'm like, how do I cut a deal here? Because shouldn't people be lowering the prices dramatically? Or just pretending or will I get a lower rates are definitely coming down big time, especially for space that sort of commodity and not that desirable.

But what's happening is, according to the people I talked to is that the demand, the people who actually are looking for new space, they only want to be in the best areas. And they want to be in the newest buildings that have the best amenities. And so that sort of commodity office tower where there's barely anybody ever there, like no one wants that.

So I think people would rather pay a higher rent. I mean, the rent will still be much lower, probably half the price of what it used to be, but they'd rather pay a little bit more for that than get like a zombie office tower. We can't talk about all this without talking about two cases.

Tragically, a shoplifter, a criminal who was stealing from a drugstore in San Francisco, I got shot. And the video was released, I'm sure you've seen it sacks. And then here in New York, everybody's talking about this one instance of a marine trying to subdue a violent homeless person with two other people.

And it's on everybody's minds here. And Brooke Jenkins is not prosecuting in San Francisco, the shooter, they look like, you know, a clean shoot, as they would say in the police business, and appropriate. And it's tragic to say it is, but the person did charge the security guard, the security guard did fear for their life and shot him.

So Brooke Jenkins is not going to pursue anything. But in New York City, they're pursuing manslaughter for the person who did seem a bit excessive from the video, it's hard to tell what the reality is in these situations. Any thoughts on it, David, these two cases in two cities, tell us.

Yeah, look, I mean, the only time you can get a source da excited about prosecuting someone is when they act in self defense or defensive others. I mean, this marine, I guess Daniel penny is his name, he was acting in defense of others, the person who he stopped was someone with an extensive criminal record, who had just recently engaged in a attempt at kidnapping who had punched elderly people had dozens of arrests.

In fact, people on Reddit were talking about how dangerous this person was, apparently, a dozen years ago or so he was seen as more of like a quirky like Michael Jackson impersonator, street performer, street performer, but something happened. This is according to a Reddit post that I saw where something happened.

And there was some sort of psychological break. And then since then, he's had dozens and dozens of crimes. And they just keep letting him loose through this revolving door of a justice system we have. And now look, no one likes to see him basically dying. And yeah, it's too bad.

It's horrible that that happened. Tragic. I don't know, though, that if you're trying to stop someone, I don't know how easy it is to precisely control whether you use too much force or not. So I think Daniel Penny has a strong case that he was acting in self defense and defensive others.

And there were two other people, by the way, who are holding this person down. There are three of them restraining him. And what universally New Yorker said to me of all different backgrounds was this is not a race issue. The other I think one or two of the other people were people of color.

It was not a race issue. And they're trying to make it into a race issue in both these cases. And it's this is literally what happens. It just having been through this in New York in the 70s and 80s when you do not say who's they when you say trying to make a bunch of protests on the street, both in San Francisco, and New York people protesting these as you know, justice issues.

The fact is, if you do not, if you allow lawlessness for too long a period of time, you get a Bernie gets situation. And Bernie gets people can look it up in the 80s. I was a kid when it happened. But they tried to mug somebody, he had a gun, he shot him.

And like, this is what happens if you allow lawlessness for extended periods of time. It's just, you're basically gambling. And what happened to Bernie gets he got not guilty, the case, he got not guilty, but I think he had an illegal gun. So he was guilty of that. The Bernie gets thing was really crazy.

Because at the time, the climate in New York, and this 1984 shooting. There was a portion of people who I don't want to say they made him a hero, but they made it a see, this is what happens if you allow us to be assaulted forever, we're going to fight back at some point.

That was the vibe in New York when I was a child. I was 1415 years old when this happened. He was charged with attempted murder assault. Jason, what was the name of that vigilante group that used to walk the streets to something angels that was the guardian angels guardian angels.

So it was so bad in the 80s. And I actually almost signed up for the guardian angels. I went to their headquarters because I was practicing martial arts. And I thought I would check it out. And they had their office in Hell's Kitchen, I didn't wind up joining. But what they would do is they would just ride the subway, they would wear a certain type of hat, and wear a guardian angel shirt.

And all they did was ride the subways, a red beret, and they would just ride the subways. And you felt like martial arts were you taking? Taekwondo? I was in Taekwondo. Yeah, this is before mixed martial arts, but they just rode the subways. And honestly, I've been on the subways with the many times you felt safe.

And it wasn't vigilantes. They were guardian angels, they use that term. And many times they would do exactly what this Marine did, which is try to subdue somebody who was committing crime. I was, I had two distinct instances where people tried to mug me, you know, riding the subways in New York in the 80s.

Two distinct times. And one was a group of people and one was one person like it was pretty scary. Both times I navigated it, but it was Yeah, not pleasant in the 80s in New York. I say one more thing about this. Danny's honey, Jordan Neely case. So look, at the end of the day, this is gonna be litigated.

I don't know all the details, they're gonna have to litigate whether Daniel pennies use of force was was excessive or not. But But here's the thing is that the media has been falsely representing Jordan Neely by only posting 10 year old photos of him and leaving out crucial information.

This was a press report. So again, this is why I mentioned the whole Michael Jackson impersonator thing is that the media keeps for training Neely as this innocent, harmless guy who is this like delightful Michael Jackson personator. In truth, he hasn't done that in more than a decade, because again, he had some sort of mental break.

And since then, he's been arrested over 40 times, including for attempting to kidnap a seven year old child. And so the media is not portraying this case, I think in an accurate way. And I think as a result of that, it leads to pressure on the DA to prosecute someone who has I think, a strong self defense claim.

Or you know, maybe the DA just wants to do this anyway. And it gives the DA cover to do this Soros is I mean, I know that we had this back and forth with us. Why is CNN being inaccurate? Do you think sex? They're basically cooperating with Alvin Bragg's interpretation of the case.

They're trying to make the case against penny look as damning as possible. Why don't they just take it straight down the middle? It's a tragedy. We have a screwed up situation here. We got a mental health crisis. And it's a tragedy for everybody involved on the Bernie get stuff.

He served eight of a 12 month sentence for the firearm charge. And he had a massive $43 million civil judgment against him. In 1996. Decade later, it's just this is a little different than the gets thing because pulling out a gun and shooting somebody. Yeah, that's deadly intent. Yeah, that's that's a huge escalation.

Whereas penny, he's a he's a trained Marine, right? He's trying to immobilize him. He has to believe that he's just trying to subdue. Yes, nearly. And so still using a chokehold to kill him. That's an unfortunate consequence of what happened. But he was trying to restrain the guy. As far as we know, right, as far as we know.

Yeah, I mean, tragedies all around. We got to have law and order. I tweeted like, I don't know why we still have the post office, maybe we can make that like once a week, and redo all of that space and allow every American who's suffering from mental illness to check in to what used to be the post office.

You know, maybe like once a week, and obviously give those people very gentle landings, but I don't think we need postal service more than once or twice a week. And then let you let's reallocate some money towards mental health in this country where anybody who's sick, who feels like they're violent or feels like they're suicidal can just go into a publicly provided facility and say, I'm a sick person, please help me this would solve a lot of problems in society.

We've got a mental health crisis, we should provide mental health services to all Americans. And it's obviously easy thing for us to afford to do. And if we had done that, then this never would have happened. Exactly. I mean, literally, you have sacks who wants to balance the budget saying, Hey, this is something worth spending on.

We can all agree on this compared to the impact on society. I don't think it'd be a huge expense. We would save money. We'd save money because a city like San Francisco could become quite livable or New York if and then you've got forbid these terrible school shootings, you know, if you avoid even one of them, it's 30 people's lives or 10 people's lives.

So it's convert post offices, what we need to do is stand up scale shelters, and it doesn't need to be done on the most expensive land in a given city outside of cities. Why does this? There is no expectation in Europe for like Paris or London to be affordable or Hong Kong to be affordable.

There are affordable places 30 minutes outside of those places where you could put these facilities. I just want to ask one question to sacks because I don't know. And I know sacks is a little bit deeper into this. And what is George sources motivation for putting in these lawless insane da is like, I understand that he was able to buy them.

They're low cost. There's not a lot of money in them. Okay, I understand that that's tablestakes. But what is his actual motivation for causing chaos in cities? Listen, we can't know exactly what his motivation is. But what he did is he went into cities where he doesn't live and flooded the zone with money to get his preferred candidate elect his da.

Now, the reason he did that was to change the law. And the way that he changed law was not through legislature is the way you're supposed to operate, but rather, by abusing prosecutorial discretion. So in other words, once he gets his Soros da elected, they can change the law by deciding what to prosecute and what not to prosecute.

Right. And that's why there is so much lawlessness in these cities. But there's a better path you're saying? Yeah, but this is not the only way that Soros has, I'd say, imposed his values on cities that he doesn't even live in. Where does he live? I think he's a New York guy, but I'm not sure.

But but he's gone far beyond that, obviously, in these elections, but also, he's done this across the world. Soros has this thing called the Open Society Foundation, which sounds like it's spreading democracy and liberal values, but in fact, is fomenting regime change all over the world. And he's been sponsoring and funding color revolutions all over the world.

Now, if you like some of the values he's spreading, then maybe you think that's a good thing. But I can tell you that the way this is perceived by all these countries all over the world is it creates tremendous dissension and conflict. And then they look at America and they basically say, you know, this American billionaire is coming into our country, and he's funding regime change.

And it makes America look bad. Now he's doing this, I think, with the cooperation of our State Department, a lot of cases, and maybe the CIA, I don't know. But this is why America, frankly, is hated all over the world as we go running around meddling in the internal affairs of all these countries.

Two is this guy? Well, they're like, that was the other thing I heard is that he's not all there. And the people around him are doing these kind of things in his organization. I heard something similar is that as the idiot son, Alexander, who's really now pulling the strings.

Would you would you allow Soros to speak at all and summit? Would you enter? Sure. Yeah, let's have Soros or a son and Nick and explain themselves if they're so proud. Well, apparently, there was an article that Alexander Soros has visited the White House like two dozen times during the Biden presidency.

This is an extremely powerful and connected person. I mean, I'm sure he listens to pod. Okay, we'll see you all next time. This is Episode 129 of all in we'll see you in Episode 130. Bye bye. Love you. Bye bye. Let your winners ride. Rain Man David we open sources to the fans and they've just gone crazy.

Love you. Queen of besties are dog taking a driveway. We should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy because they're all just like this like sexual tension that they just need to release. What you're about to be your fee. Good. Good. We need to get murkies are ♪ I'm doing all in ♪ ♪ I'm doing all in ♪ You