All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg - E157: Epic legal win, OpenAI licensing deals, FCC targets Elon, Alex Jones reinstated & more

Starting point is 00:00:00 We're going mullet this week in honor of your, your closest to mullet right now, sex. I see you trying to tuck the lettuce in. It's not going to work. We see it back there. Well, I need the ponytail. Wow. You went full-knock. Where is this photo? Do you like a secret camera in his room? What is this? No, my kid's took it. Are you really doing a douche-naught? One of my daughters is playing with my hair. She wants to see if she can make a ponytail with it. So she made a ponytail and then took a photo. So we started into a chat GPT to ask who it looked like. And it said Thomas Jefferson.

Starting point is 00:00:32 The first question. Did you do a fit check with Tucker on that? Did you send him that and say, fit check? Yeah, not everything has to do with Tucker, Jake. Hell, the joke's going to be a lot worse. Well, look at this. If you guys don't know what a fit check is, as your daughter's. Oh, wait.

Starting point is 00:00:44 What check? A fit check. A fit check. You, look at this smile. If you guys don't know what a fit check is, as your daughter's. Oh, wait, what check? A fit check. A fit check. You take a picture of yourself, you send it to your fans, you say fit check. And then they tell you if you look good for the day. Oh, okay. It's kind of like, it's kind of like a wellness check, but for how you look for fat. Yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 00:00:57 Yeah, it's like, no freebergs. Send you, I'm having anxiety about this. And then we do a wellness check on freeberg. See he's going to show up for the show. Or we do a wellness check on you when Alex Jones comes's gonna show up for the show. Or we do a wellness check on you when Alex Jones comes back to Twitter. I'm putting it out there right now. And Alex Jones is on the back half of the show,

Starting point is 00:01:10 just to tease it. Just like I'm gonna tease these photos, I pulled the archives. And here I am in 1984 with my mullet. That's a J. Calm mullet from 1984. In Staten Island, on the way to a Boy Scout trip. But I thought you'd have a little fun. Sats actually has been working.

Starting point is 00:01:28 He's got his hairstyle list. Oh. Yeah, well, the gray looks like a Lord of the Rings character. Like an Elfin Warrior. No, he looks like the Elfin Warrior. Where's my golden arrow? Exactly. So we'll punch that up, but you're not actually surprisingly.

Starting point is 00:01:43 Surprisingly, I can't look. That's horrible. Oh, freebear, you're surprised. Surprise. I can't look. Oh, free bird. You're right. I'm talking to you. Here it is. Free bird looks like a birdie. He looks like Orlando Bloom in Lord of the Rings, right?

Starting point is 00:01:57 Actually, it looks like more like that vampire movie. What was it on? He does look like interview with the vampire. Or he looks like he's teaching gender studies that Berkeley and his nine non-binary so if you want to take understanding non-binary as their gender studies 101 it's coming this spring free bird should be teaching on his alma mater well done. I'll find you guys a photo. I'll send it to you as my I did have a ponytail. I sported it from about age 16 to 19 when I smoked cigarettes to and I've got photos with the ponytail and the

Starting point is 00:02:27 French coat smoking six. So it fits the, fits the mold. All right. So in the spirit of Mollets, let's go business first, and we will go to the party at the end. I'm going to win. I'm going to win. I'm going to win. I'm going to win. I'm going to win. I'm going to win. I'm going to win. I'm going to win. I'm going to win. I'm going to win.

Starting point is 00:02:51 I'm going to win. I'm going to win. I'm going to win. I'm going to win. I'm going to win. With me again today here on the All in Podcast, the King of ****. We've retired Queen of Kenwa because David Freiberg is CEO of a startup. He could still be the queen. This is the main product, Freiberg. No, it's

Starting point is 00:03:09 So he's the king of beef. He's the king of vegetables. Off the record. Wait, wait, is class five what crop you're working on? Yeah, absolutely. Okay. Absolutely. It's a SaaS company. Like a SaaS company wants to keep it on the DL Which vertical they're going after finance or sales or whatever. You've got to keep those, it could be carrots. You never know. You could be Captain Carrots, you never know. Just not beats. Okay. Freeberg, we don't need more beats in the world.

Starting point is 00:03:31 Yeah, I'm going to say no, panel. Dude, no delicious. No delicious. Beats are delicious. Yeah, you're right. No more beats. Beats with some fetishies, delicious. Yeah, you're right.

Starting point is 00:03:39 You're more beats when you're more cheese. Yeah, you're right. You're more beats when you're more cheese. Yeah, Brussels sprouts can be very good. If you're sharp, saute them. Look, you caramelize the Brussels bitch. Brussels sprouts can be very good. You know, if you're a girl, saute them. Look, you caramelize the Brussels sprouts. I'm with you. Very good.

Starting point is 00:03:50 Let's make those cheaper, freeberg. Yeah, bigger and cheaper and more tasty. You know what people, people, people dunk on, but it's a great vegetable is cabbage. I like cabbage. I like cabbage. I like cabbage. You like shred cabbage into a salad and you put a little

Starting point is 00:04:03 oil, little lemon, little salt, change the salad, like a chinchin in LA. That's nice. Exactly. Yeah. Saks, did you like Friedberg's Christmas party last week? How was it? Did you enjoy it as much as we did? Oh, it's great. All right, Saks didn't show up. Do I miss the party? I thought it was next week. Who does a Christmas party first week? Jamon, before you tell your story, a very kind gentleman rings the door to my gate.

Starting point is 00:04:26 I open the gate. The guy drives in. He gets out. He's like a big guy. He kind of says Mr. Friedberg and I'm like, what am I getting served? And he goes to the back seat and I'm like, oh my God, I'm going to get shot. He reaches in and he pulls out a beautifully wrapped gift. He's like, this is from Mr. Sacks, Mr. Friedberg.

Starting point is 00:04:42 Happy holidays. And then he gave me like a touch on the shoulder or or like he does this thing, or he goes like this, do a little bow, he got back in his car, and he drove away. Did a bow. What is he sure about? Yeah. It was like when you go to an online store. For a wallet?

Starting point is 00:04:52 He did the amount thing that they do. He should have called right. No, that wasn't his wallet. That was his valet. That's his valet. He stole the valet from the amount. The amount is looking for valet. It was the most thoughtful no-show I've ever had.

Starting point is 00:05:02 I will say sex. Okay, well, I'm glad to hear that. I'm glad to hear that. Well, what's funny is I just checked my inbox and my invitation from you is sitting in there because I've been meaning to go, but I didn't realize I was so soon. So I'm just looking at the date. It was December 9th. I didn't realize it was five days ago. Sorry about that. Someone in your household did, so we appreciate it. Okay, someone knew. I went, but this is my, this is my second or third year going. So I pre, I pre-gamed it. I went and I got protein, pre-gamed. I got meat, a bunch of steak,

Starting point is 00:05:33 and a burger. And then I went and sure enough, I talked to the staff. And the staff said, after much debate and haranging with Freeberg, he allowed cheese this year. No, sushi. We had a whole sushi platter thing. No, stop. I didn't have sushi. Okay, so now that's my turn. To tell the truth. Go ahead. Tell the church more. I get in the car to drive 90 minutes. 90 minutes to free. 90 minutes for bad sushi. Okay, that's the poker trip for me by the way. Yeah, I am. And I, Nattex, Allison, and David, we're on our way. Chmoth wants to know will there be meat?

Starting point is 00:06:07 Cause I'm driving to like, I can't test them. Will there be meat? And Ali says, oh yeah, don't worry, they'll be sushi. And then Nattex back, okay, we just got off the highway, we're going home, we'll see you later, cause we don't believe. Says there's gonna be fish, fine, I get there.

Starting point is 00:06:21 Have an eating the thing, I am starving. Ravani. I start to work my way through the appetizers. There's like sliced green peppers and red peppers. There's like some falafels. Then there was a Spanish omelet. Not pretty decent. Okay. And I'm like, where's the sushi? And so Phil Doich says a thousand bucks. There's no sushi. And I said, no, there's free bird texted me. He said, I've asked all the people working here. They say there's no sushi. So I bet I'm a thousand dollars. I go outside to where the sushi is. And you know how we used to make fun of sky for having the filler fruit. Yeah. Cannello, like cannello and honeydew. And that's all there was. Yeah. There was no sushi, but there was two or three rolls

Starting point is 00:07:06 with four pieces of salmon, strategically cut, just laying over. I won the bet, I was so hungry, I was like, what do I eat? I'm starving. So I keep eating the omelette, I keep eating the vegetarian food, and then I see these f***ing brownies.

Starting point is 00:07:23 And I'm like, I'll just have a brownie. Then I had two brownies. And then I was like, okay, I need to stop. I can't, I can't have this. I'm still so hungry. I walk outside, Jay Cal where I saw you. We're having a cup of coffee and you know what I I f***ed it? I ate five buckle of ah. And then I was like, this is disgusting. I've had no protein. I've had no carbohydrates. I've had no fiber. I've had a fucking 3,000 calories of sugar, I grabbed that and I charged home. I was so mad. He did. He Irish mad. I didn't see him say about Irish goodbye. Free burger, I talked about it yesterday, we talked it out. I must have had 6,000 calories at his Christmas party. I'm coming over to Timoth tonight. It's only going to be tried to the whole night, I'm sure. Not a simple

Starting point is 00:08:03 one. It sounds like Jake helped reload at the meat. He got ready. Absolutely. On the way, after last year, I left that party and I just typed in, I just said to my auntie, you got a Popeye? Closest in an outburst and I literally got a double, double and then I just had a second one. On the way at this time, I literally had a steak for dinner and then I went and then I two had some bon appetit.

Starting point is 00:08:26 Have you guys ever had Popeye's? Of course. I had never had it. My son has to get it last week, last weekend. I'd never had it. Can you believe it? Here we go. It is the most incredible thing I've ever tasted.

Starting point is 00:08:39 It's a Popeye sandwich. Wow. Wait for the out of touch, you two comments. What's your mom's gonna say to Popeye? The problem is not the eating of it. It's how you feel two hours later. But I mean, I've had Chick-fil-A, you know, I've done the chicken sandwich

Starting point is 00:08:51 that other places never have. Popeye's is incredible. Mm. Mm. Incredible. So then I had Matt almost on the edge of convincing her to go to Popeye's on the way home, but we missed the closing time

Starting point is 00:09:05 so we couldn't get it. I got go to starboard or bonchan. Those are two other elite. No bro, not not. I'm not talking fancy chicken. I've had like the fancy chicken sectors. I'm saying Popeye's is incredible. I like it. I like it. I'll start it. Chema. Here we go. Have you had a play of fish? All right. Let's get the show started here. Of course with me again. The King of Beep, the dictator and the rainman. Let's get to work. All right, everybody. Epic, the makers of Fortnite just won a huge case with Google over the Play App Store on Android phones.

Starting point is 00:09:36 For those of you who don't know, App Store has become an absolutely huge business for Apple and Google. Google App Store generates $50 billion of revenue a year. Now that's about 17% of Google's total revenue. Apple's App Store and services 85 billion in annual revenue. These are on top of their franchises of hardware and search. The Juran San Francisco unanimously found that Google violated California's federal antitrust laws through sweetheart deals and annoying workarounds.

Starting point is 00:10:08 That's type of competition. For example, Google got spooked that other game developers would follow Epic's lead and launch their own app stores or route people directly to their websites to avoid the 30% take rate. So Michael attacks. Google calculated they would lose 2 billion to 3.5 billion in revenue annually if the other major game developers followed Epic. So they created a program. Codename project hug where they basically pet up bribes or incentives to discourage large

Starting point is 00:10:40 developers from building their own competitive app stores. They also gave Spotify a sweetheart deal of 0% and Google paid activation $360 million to keep in the play store. And the discovery in this case was absolutely wild. According to testimony in the trial, Google had deleted some employees' chat logs and the judge told the jury to assume that the deleted information wouldn't have been favorable to Google Jury only deliberated a few hours and Google plans to appeal the verdict obviously Epic isn't seeking damages. They just want Google to change their practices They want to basically let people plug in their own billing system to avoid the 30% tax. We'll see what happens next freeburg

Starting point is 00:11:27 These stores clearly have monopolistic characteristics, but in Google actually allows for third party half stores. Maybe you can explain why you think Apple won their case against Epic, but Google lost. These are pretty different cases. The Apple case was a judge. This one was a jury of citizens in federal court. I think it's worth just backing up a minute and talking about the history of apps on

Starting point is 00:11:52 phones and how Android came to be. Prior to Google acquiring Android, you guys may remember there were a few companies that were the dominant OS providers, operating system providers to mobile phones. There was Nokia, there was Microsoft, there was Apple, and there was also Blackberry. And at the time, a lot of the telcos, the Verizon's and AT&T's of the world, prior to this, were trying to make money by charging for people to install apps on phones. So that was the first business model in the mobile internet. Was the telco would make money and everyone fought

Starting point is 00:12:25 against it. All the open internet providers said this is ridiculous and it was clear that that was not going to be allowed. So ultimately these operating systems became the play and which operating system was on which mobile phone and what did that operating system then allowed to control what apps were allowed and so on. So the reason Google bought Android is they wanted to make an open source alternative to all of these closed app and closed systems. So Google bought Android 2005 made a huge investment in growing the team and allowed anyone to use the Android OS,

Starting point is 00:12:56 fork it, make their own versions of it, install it on their own hardware, run it however they wanted. Meanwhile, Google made an internal version of Android that could be used on any mobile handset company's phone as a pre-installed OS. Now why did Google want to do this? They wanted to do this number one to make sure that the internet was still open and it wasn't going to end up being closed from a user's perspective. And number two, so that anyone can install any app they wanted. And the commercial interest for Google, which is number three, is so that Google could

Starting point is 00:13:24 make Google search the default search engine on that phone and have YouTube installed and all these other tools that Google makes money on, including their own App Store. Now, in Android, anyone can install any app they want on the phone. And so there's no restrictions unlike in Apple. In the iOS, if you try and download an app off the internet and install it, it has to go through the App Store, it has to be Apple verified in order to be allowed on the phone. The whole point of Android was that it could be open, anyone could install anything. What Epic claimed in this case was that Google's Android OS gave people security warnings.

Starting point is 00:13:58 If you ever have tried this, you download an app from a website on Android. It says warning warning, this may cause a virus on your phone. Are you sure you want to do this? This app hasn't been verified by Google, et cetera, et cetera. So it gives these warnings that scare consumers off of doing that. So Epic can install Fortnite direct on your Android phone today.

Starting point is 00:14:16 And you can do it by downloading it from Epic's website. You don't have to go through the Google Play Store. And you can enter your credit card, and you can pay for stuff. So it is an open system that allows that. What these guys are claiming is that because Google can default the Google Play Store on the phone, it's basically what most consumers are going to use anyway. And so they're saying it's not fair and because they also have influence over the OS and they're putting the security warnings, it's inappropriate because now it's scaring people

Starting point is 00:14:40 from downloading stuff of the internet. So that's the big claim epic making. So Google has already said they're going to appeal this case because fundamentally, again, if this were really true and there really was deep antitrust issues with this, you would likely have seen a federal agency come after Google, not a private company suing them in a civil case. This would have been a much more significant action if there really was antitrust behavior. But it's a lot easier to win a jury trial, party to party where Epic can go to a court and say, hey, let's go after Google, they're awful, we make Fortnite and all this sort of stuff. So they do have a bias in that sense of being able to do this. Google's going to appeal. They feel very strongly they'll win on appeal.

Starting point is 00:15:15 And the market obviously did a, you know, voted with the fact that Google stocked in really move anywhere. And the market said, hey, this is a, this is a nothing burger. Google's 40 billion in annual Play Store revenue. Worse case scenario, like you said, if it gets impacted by $2 billion, that's $2 billion out of 300 overall. Doesn't really matter. And likely they're going to win on appeal anyway. So, you know, I think the saga will continue. But I think Google's got a pretty strong case on appeal. And it seems like, you know, that's going to be very hard to kind of see a massive change in App Store behavior as a result of this case, even though it's been hyped up to be that. That's my take on it.

Starting point is 00:15:49 Yeah, great take. Chimoff, what do you think about this jury shopping and maybe the fact that this isn't Lena Conn, this isn't the FTC, you know, it's company to company. Do you think that the claims here were valid? Do you think the jury shopping impacted this in a significant way? Probably. I guess the simple thought exercises. What do we think the outcome would have been had this trial happened in Dallas, Texas? Probably different. And so I think

Starting point is 00:16:16 Freeberg's right, what does it materially prove? Nothing with respect to the body of law. It just goes to show that if you pick the right place to convene these trials in the right format, you can give yourself a slightly better probability of winning. But the question is, what will you win? It's not clear to me what happens now. Is there going to be a damages portion now of this trial? Is that what happens next?

Starting point is 00:16:41 They're not seeking damages. They want changes to how they operate. And they're trying to get a settlement. And they want people to settle out with changes to the absolute policy. That's what they're asking for. And then what about the epic versus apple lawsuit? Is it being done in the same way? No, they lost.

Starting point is 00:16:56 They lost. And they appealed. And there's one element that's being appealed to the Supreme Court now. But basically, they lost and that's over. And was that convened in California in a jury trial as well in San Francisco? No, that was not a jury trial. It was a judge. But it was California.

Starting point is 00:17:13 It was a bench trial in California. Yeah, it was also in Northern California, that's right. Yeah. So, Zach, let me bring you in on this. Do you think that these stores are monopolies? And do you think if they change their behavior, especially Apple, you know, allow other third party stores, it would impact that with that have on the startup ecosystem, because the 30% tax is significant. And we see that every

Starting point is 00:17:34 day with our startups. I mean, if you have to give way 30% of your revenue to Google and Apple, it's brutal. And then you're advertising on Apple and Google and Facebook. That's another 30% of your revenue or 50% of your revenue. Yeah, no, I agree with that. So first of all, these app stores are absolutely monopolies within their ecosystem. And Apple and Google Android are absolutely a duopoly within the mobile space. My experience with these types of monopolies or gatekeepers is that they exercise more and more control and extract more and more of the value over time. It's an iterative process in which they just keep extracting, keep taxing, keep imposing more rules on the ecosystem for their benefit and to the detriment of innovators. And so I do think they have to be controlled and I

Starting point is 00:18:22 think Epic is doing the ecosystem of favor. For example, on this 30% rate that you're talking about, to you, Cal, that level of rate might have been appropriate for certain types of apps, like a hobbyist app, where it's literally 100% margin. Okay, you pay 30% to the app store. It doesn't work for SaaS companies. I mean, I can tell you that.

Starting point is 00:18:42 That mean this would be like half of their gross margin or something like that. It doesn't work for a lot of companies that spend a lot of money on content creation, like Epic, which spends a lot of money on R&D to create. It gives life for a nice Netflix. Exactly. You're going to break their models immediately. Or Amazon with Kindle. And so what happened is it used to be the case that Amazon could have a link in their app,

Starting point is 00:19:05 at least directing the user to go to the amazon.com website and you could buy the book there and you could circumvent the the the rake in the app and it was inconvenient for the user but at least there was a way around it. Then Apple banned those links, then they banned the ability for the app to even message to the user what was happening. So if, for example, if you use the Kindle app on iOS, which I do all the time, you can't buy a book in it. And the reason why is because Amazon doesn't want to pay the 30% rate, but they can't even tell you that. It just looks like it's broken functionality. So those of us who know go to Amazon.com through the browser and we buy the book there and then it magically appears in the Kindle app. We've all had that experience.

Starting point is 00:19:46 So I just think that these do-op please have to be controlled. I think that it'd be good if the government could figure out better ways to do it. I don't think M&A is the right way to do it. We've talked about this before. I think that restricting anti-competitive tactics is really the way to stop it. And like I said, I can't speak to the details of Epic's case, but I do think they're doing the ecosystem a favor here by pushing back on these monopolies and helping to keep them under control.

Starting point is 00:20:12 A hundred percent agree with you, Sacks, and your take. And I think actually other people should join them and the industry should really force this issue because you are absolutely correct that they're boiling the frog. Now they did make some cuts under a million. I think they charge 15% on the first million. So they try to be nice to the smaller developer. But it'll pull it up. That's not, look, it's actually the larger ones, too. Pull up the link I just said.

Starting point is 00:20:32 So you'll see here, Google charges through the Play Store, if you want to have distribution. I mean, think about the Play Store as being like a retailer. You make clothing. You need to have a retail store that someone can go to and buy stuff. The retail store has to make money. You're not going to have a retail store that's can go to and buy stuff. The retail store has to make money. You're not going to have a retail store that's free.

Starting point is 00:20:47 So how does the retail store make money? Well, they charge 98% of apps, as you can see here are free because they don't make any money on that. But then if you start to charge subscriptions, it's 15% take on automatically renewing subscriptions where it's easier for the- It's a second year. Yeah. Yeah, it's easier.

Starting point is 00:21:03 No, each year. Look at the second time. No, no, no, it's for renewing. So, right, I know this because of calm. So in the first year of calm, it's for renewing subscriptions, subscription products. So all subscriptions that have an automatic renewal feature to them are instantly at 15%. And as a result, you know, you can think about the, what is it worth to get a user to not have to enter their credit card info? You know, plus the credit card fees, It's like 15% is not too crazy. Honestly, I'm just, you know, I'm not trying to be a super Google advocate, but I'm just saying like, I don't think that's too crazy.

Starting point is 00:21:32 And then they've got this like negotiated tier where if you are a very large app developer and you want to go and negotiate with Google, they have a biz dev team like Spotify and others get where they'll negotiate fees down and you can actually go and like argue for better economic. So they've tried to be commercial, which I'm guessing is probably why Lena Khan and others haven't gone after them for antitrust and monopolistic behavior because they've tried to find the comfortable place where it's not going to be too crazy. At least that's my read on what's gone on because otherwise, obviously folks would be

Starting point is 00:21:59 all over them. You know, if it really was monopolistic. But the boiling of the frog issue is the one for me because then they want to charge you now for placement in the app store and get revenue from you there. Oh, yeah. That's Amazon too. Amazon's got that. Like, everyone's gotten, every D to C company in the last five years has gotten obliterated.

Starting point is 00:22:16 Their unit economics are upside down now. And we've talked about this. Both Google's taken out the margin, but Amazon forces you to buy ads in order to get proper placement. Yeah. And then they force you to pay ads in order to get to the right place. If you want to write a placement. Yeah. And then they force you to pay all the extra fees for inventory. Amazon squeezed everyone way more than any of these digital apps.

Starting point is 00:22:31 This is the perfect place for LUNICON to get active, I think, and the settlement's super easy. The entire industry should come at them in unison, tons of lawsuits, group lawsuits, until they allow, when you turn on your Apple phone, the ability to load Amazon's App Store, Epic's App Store, whoever else wants to have an App Store, that should be your right. If you buy a hardware device, it should be your right to load these and they shouldn't be angled in any way. And that's the other thing. Androids does all kinds of angling to make those with those pop-ups and hey, this isn't safe, etc. They should have a

Starting point is 00:23:01 verified App Store program. Amazon's App Store, app X app store, they should be verified or something and maybe they pay 5% to have a verified app store. But this is going to be an ongoing issue and we'll see more of it I think. So let's go on, anybody else have thoughts on it? No. Okay. So in other news, OpenAI is started to cut licensing deals. If you remember, we had a big debate about this back on episode one, 15 in February. And I was saying, hey, this content is owned and the opportunity to create LLMs or derivative products, you know, is the right of the people who make that content. Sacchew told me I was going to get rolled over. But here we are. Iacks You Join Me, I was gonna get rolled over.

Starting point is 00:23:45 But here we are. I wouldn't say I said you were going to rolled over. What I said is the ecosystem's gonna figure this out. Okay, let's play the tape. If ChatGPT takes a Yelp review and a, a Condaness Traveler review and they represent it based on the best content that's out there that they've already ranked

Starting point is 00:24:02 because they have that algorithm with PageRank or Bing's ranking engine. then they've republished it and then that jeopardizes those businesses that is profoundly unfair and not what we want for society and they are interfering with their ability to leverage their own content is profoundly unfair and those magazines and news by person need to what's up? You're not getting a steamroll too. Okay, there it is. Man, is my hair worse now or then? Yeah, I think it's bad cut back then.

Starting point is 00:24:29 I think you were like post COVID back then. Yeah, I think it looks much better right now. My hair looks like a toupee. Nick, can you just show us a picture of that? It looks like a toupee. You get a par with a common era. That was like an early AD. This is like the common era now.

Starting point is 00:24:43 You know what I'm saying? That's a toupee. That's a toupee. It does look like a toupee. It looks like an early AD. This is like the common area now. You know what I'm saying? That's a two pay. That's a two pay. It does look like a two. It looks like a raccoon. Okay, J.Kale, I'll get some comments on this because I think your fluffer has fluffed too much on the upper parts and unfluffed the bottom parts,

Starting point is 00:24:58 which I think I'm gonna listen. Don't criticize him when he was in an in-between phase. We all go through an in-between phase with our hair. It's part of the process. Now I know what we're talking about this topic, could J.K an in between phase with our hair, it's part of the process. Now I know why we're talking about this topic, at J.Cowell's, because you think you, it's a total non-story, or I shouldn't say it's a non-story. Okay, well, let me finish.

Starting point is 00:25:12 Let me finish it off our topic. Okay. So just so we know what's going on here, OpenAI announced a licensing deal with Axel Springer to bring real-time news from Politico and the fake news from Business Insider to Chappy Tuti. Thank you. You literally sound like Alex Jones. I mean, thank you. Thank you for playing all your fake news from business insider to Chappie TT. You literally sound like Alex Jones.

Starting point is 00:25:26 I mean, thank you for playing all your fake news product. That is actually great. He is right about that. I got one thing right. As part of the deal, Axel Springer can use Chattche PTA to improve their products, includes all their European sites. This is on top of the deal that Open Eye did with the associated press, but most importantly, the most just most importantly, I'm going to throw it in a second.

Starting point is 00:25:48 Most importantly, when chat GPT relies on these sources, it'll include a summary and a link back. Other examples of licensing are happening all over the industry. Adobe is using stop images for theirs and stable diffusion, as you know, that brazenly used Getty's images are being sued. So freeberg, you thought this was unrealistic, but here we are. No, I don't agree with your framing.

Starting point is 00:26:11 And I think that I think it's unrealistic for you to frame this as validating or justifying the fact that these companies won't be able to access and utilize open data under fair use to train models. So that's what's going on historically, right? So the open web, you know, we talked a little bit about where folks can get content from the open web.

Starting point is 00:26:31 You can browse the internet and you can download all this content. It's all freely available. It's readily available. It's in the open domain. And then you can train models and then the models can ultimately make stuff based on all that training data. What this deal is is it's actually a content integration deal, and I'll read this with the partnership

Starting point is 00:26:48 ChatGPT users around the world will receive summaries of selected global news content from Axel Springer's media brands, including Yadda Yadda, including otherwise paid content. So what ChatGPT is doing is they're accessing content behind a paywall, and instead of training models on it, they're able to fetch that data as a retrieval aspect of the chat GPT service.

Starting point is 00:27:10 So now you as a user want an update on, hey, what's going on with Donald Trump, it can search not just use its training data, but it can recognize that, hey, there's a current event news question embedded in this query, and I can go fetch that current event news answer from this content that I've now paid for. It's not a training data set that's now being unlocked, which is what the complaint was before,

Starting point is 00:27:32 that all the open web data was being used for training. But it's behind paywall data that cannot be fetched and integrated. I think it's more interesting because it really speaks to a new model for how the internet will work, which we've talked about, which is that there may be these sort of new chat interfaces that cannot just send you to another page and link you over somewhere, but can fetch data for you and present it to you in an integrated way in the response it's providing. And these services have to pay for access to that. So, you know, open AI, it's a three-year deal.

Starting point is 00:28:00 They're paying tens of millions of dollars to Axel Springer to access their close content and present it to the user. So I think it's quite a bit different than, you know, using training data, which is what, you know, the complaint was the first time around. And it's more of like a really interesting front-end feature for what chat GPT is becoming. –Saxch, you wanted to add to that?

Starting point is 00:28:19 –I don't label lots after that. I think Fiber did a great job explaining that issue. I mean, look, I think Jake, how you've had a little bit of a session to add to that. I think Fribert did a great job explaining that issue. I mean, look, I think Jake, how you've had a little bit of a session with this copyright issue. And- Well, protecting rights holders, I do believe in, I don't know, some sessions.

Starting point is 00:28:32 Fribert makes a really great point, which is there's a difference between copying somebody's copyright and work, which would be a violation of copyright and using content that's available on the open web to train a model to create entirely new content. And I do think that AI models should be able to use the content that's available on the web under a fair use doctrine to train their models for the benefit of consumers.

Starting point is 00:29:02 And I don't see a reason to try and tie that up in a bunch of copyright lawsuits. If chat UBT is producing a plagiarized result, then you may have grounds for a copyright infringement claim. So what I would say is, you know, when you look at that fairiest doctrine, I've got a lot of experience with it, having done this in blogs and other content companies. Here to the fourth factor test, I'm sure you're well aware of this, is the effect of the use on the potential market and the value of the work. And if you look at the lawsuits that are starting to emerge, it is Getty's right to then

Starting point is 00:29:33 make derivative products based on their images. I think we would all agree. Stable diffusion, when they use these open web, that is no excuse to use an open web crawler to avoid getting a license from the original owner of that. Just because you can technically do it, doesn't mean you're allowed to do it. In fact, the open web projects that provide these say explicitly, we do not give you the right to use this.

Starting point is 00:29:56 You have to then go read the copyright laws on each of those websites and on top of that, if somebody were to steal the copyrights of other people, put it on the open web, which is happening all day long, you still, if you're building a derivative work like this, you still need to go get it. So it's no excuse that I took some site in Russia that did a bunch of copyright violation and that I indexed them for my training model. So I think this is going to result. Freebr.

Starting point is 00:30:20 Freebr, can you shoot me in the face and let me know in the segment. Okay. All right. free bird. Free bird, can you shoot me in the face and let me know in the segment. All right, so the segment is now over. I was about to throw it to you. Code now is, I mean, like stop with this naval gazing nonsense. We're in inning one. And nobody knows anything. And the most important thing is that this will get sorted out through trials. That's where you are right, Jason. It's going to go to court. And I think we should just not opine on this stuff because it's esoteric at best and it's kind of like whatever. Well, some of it will go to court. Other ones will be done in the free market. Like we see here, another thing.

Starting point is 00:30:59 You care about this more than most people because you are a journalist and you think this is going to put people out of work. I am a content creator. I'm also an author, as you know, and a podcast or any kind of content. I do think that you should get permission before you leverage people's work to create derivative products correct. And actually, you're starting to see this in Dolly. And chat GPT seems to be getting ahead of this because of all the incoming lawsuits. Check this out. I started asking Dolly to make me star wars characters of Bulldogs and I said make a Jedi Bulldog. It did that no problem.

Starting point is 00:31:29 Then I asked it to make a version of this using and make a Darth Vader. And it said, I'm unable to generate images based on your request due to our content policy for other ideas and concepts you'd like to fulfill free to share. So I said, make me a sick board cat, and it basically made me Darth Vader. And so it's very clear that the team over at OpenAI is now taking prompt engineering. You're like a clever prompt engineer, though. Well, yeah, I got a round copy right here, right? And so it's very clear. But this shows how silly like all of this stuff is.

Starting point is 00:31:59 This is just a drag coefficient on development of AI because and on users, because now you've got to like word you're prompt exactly the right way. Well, I think what they're doing is they know that marvel and all the Disney characters, all the Star Wars characters, they're very protective of their IP. Disney is going to launch their own Dolly type

Starting point is 00:32:17 stable diffusion product where you can do this, put yourself on a Star Media Star Wars character. Does it make any good at this? It doesn't matter if they're good or not, it's their IP. And so, open-air. I mean, let's say carried out. It's not really good at this. It doesn't matter if they're good or not, it's their IP. And so open hands can create their own artwork. That's in the vein of like a Darth Vader, Amos. They can, but they can't do it commercially.

Starting point is 00:32:33 And what Chatchy PT and Open Eye here is commercial because I pay 20 bottles a month to Chatchy PT. So that's what you're missing. A fan of course can make a Jedi cat. Well, all I know is you played this like way back video from episode 15 or something. No, no, no, Kat. Well, all I know is you played this way back video from episode 15 or something. No, no, no. It's the worries.

Starting point is 00:32:48 Okay. From episode 115, as if you were done. I know you guys never want to think of it. I know you guys never want to think of it. I mean, it turns out that Freeberg totally blew up your case. He didn't blow up my case. I will be right and continue to be right. Okay.

Starting point is 00:32:59 Now, let's go to something we can all agree. We're definitely not striking the segment. I liked it. Let's go. No, no, no, no, no, it's spicy. We like a little spicy here. I didn't even have to refute you. Freeberg just did it. Let's go. No, no, no, no, no, Spice, we like a little spicy here. I didn't even after a few you freeberg just data. Well, beautiful. No, I mean, listen, okay. You came in, you thought you had the goods. I admit it. No. He's like playing this way back video from like 45 episodes ago. I finally got him.

Starting point is 00:33:16 I finally got that. I was finally right about something. You hadn't claimed you'd never used the right steamroll. I would have never played the clip. Oh my God. I have some life footage. I just want to go through it and just talk about it. I just try to get my strength. Anyways, yeah. So guys, there's this copyright thing. I want to, I, okay, hold on. Let me, let me just reframe.

Starting point is 00:33:34 Let me just start that again. Okay. You know, copyright issues are, okay, hold on. Hold on. Hold on. Well, listen, there's this thing I want to talk about. Copyright, which, hold on. Hold on. Hold on. Hold on. Oh, these are these are these are these are these are these are these are these are these are these are these are these are these are these are these are these are these are these are these are these are these are these are these are these are these are these are these are these are these are these are these are these are these are these are these are these are these are these are these are these are these are these are these are these are these are these are these are these are these are these are these are these are these are these are these are these are these are these are these are these are these are these are these are these are these are these are these are these are these are these are these are these are these are these are these are these are these are these are these are these are these are these are these are these are these are these are these are these are these are these are these are these are these are these are these are these are these are these are these are these are these are these are these are these are these are these are these are I could get up that high. I would miss the dunk and still be missing about it. You can't just see how dense he's about to steam roll.

Starting point is 00:34:06 Thank you. Let's keep it. Let's try everything. You can't destroy everything. Come on, Jake, how you teed up the way back clip of yourself. You teed up the way back clip of yourself. So you brought the deny it and I just brought this on yourself. Yeah, but you try to dunk in it didn't work.

Starting point is 00:34:25 Okay, okay, okay. Every bit has to take the piss out of me. I don't know, I'm seeing a trend. No, that's the thing. Oh, don't bring it up the way that lips. Unless you have a clean dunk. All right, here we go. Don't bring it to the hoop and then break it.

Starting point is 00:34:38 Break it. Break it. Break it. Get it to receipt. It turned out the credit card was stolen. Okay, here we go. Ah, it's. He turned out the credit card was stolen. Here we go. Here we go. You know who actually deserves credit for admitting that he was wrong. Oh, we'll get to. We'll get to. You'll get your flat.

Starting point is 00:34:57 We'll get your flat. Okay. Transition to come. Your bed needs coming. Here we go. Red needs coming. Great transition. Great transition. Great transition. Here we go. Elon versus the FCC. Another government agency is now targeting Elon. This is a little bit complicated, but let me explain. On Tuesday, the FCC rejected Starlink's application for 900 million in subsidies for rural broadband.

Starting point is 00:35:19 Starlink originally won these back in 2020 when they agreed to provide high-speed internet to 640,000 rural homes across 35 states. Funding would have come from the RD OF, rural digital opportunity fund. I guess the government is paying for expanding broadband services in rural areas and Starlink obviously is perfect for that. It's actually the only solution for this really. She can't run fiber to these locations. So the FCC found that Starlink, quote, had failed to meet its burden to be entitled to those funds.

Starting point is 00:35:51 And here's the quote, FCC has a responsibility to be a good steward of limited public funds meant to expand access to rural broadband, not fund applicants that failed to meet basic program requirements. Brendan Carr, one of the FCC's commissioners, dissented from the agency's decision, and he did not hold back last year. So to quote, after Elon acquired Twitter, President Biden gave federal agencies

Starting point is 00:36:15 a green light to go after him. Today's decision certainly fits the Biden administration's pattern of regulatory harassment. This is a decision that cannot be explained by any objective application of law, facts or policy, car went on to explain how his decision was made and why it's unprecedented. Instead of applying nutritional FCC standards to the record evidence, which would have compelled the agency to confirm Starlinks $885 million award. The FCC denoted on the grounds that Starlink is not providing high-speed internet service to all these locations today.

Starting point is 00:36:48 As noted, the FCC's milestone does not kick in until 2025. Let me toss to you, SACs. Thoughts on the Biden. It's what going up to me. I mean, I can't remember anything quite like this. This is absolutely extraordinary. I mean, you have a sitting member of the FCC telling us that the FCC is engaging in political retaliation. He sits on the board of the five commissioners of the FCC. They just canceled an $885 million contract to Starlink. What was that contract for to provide rural internet service? Starlink is the only company that has that capability today. It's the only one that has that capability, if you look forward a few years. It is by far the best. I'm providing broadband from space, which is the best way to get it to these rural areas. So what did the commission do? Well, they cherry picked, they took speed test snapshots from two cherry pick moments in time. And so even that probably was not an accurate

Starting point is 00:37:41 reflection of where Starlink is today, but they then said based on those snaps, that Starlink would not be able to meet the standards in three years. So remember, the requirements that they're saying that Starlink violated don't even have to be met for three years. So somehow they're saying that Starlink will not get through in three years. So preemptively judging the service to meet a standard that is not even required to meet today. And nobody else is even close to meeting the standard. So Elon's response to this was, guys, okay, if you're gonna cancel the contract for us,

Starting point is 00:38:14 like just save the money because the competitors that you're giving it to, have even less of a service than we do. Yeah. So just like save the taxpayer the money, but they're not doing that. So this is really remarkable. And what Kars said here is that the Biden administration is choosing to prioritize its political

Starting point is 00:38:33 ideological goals at the expense of connecting Americans. We can't it should reverse course. This is now a part of a pattern of the federal government harassing Elon and his companies. And it all stems from Biden at that press conference saying, we gotta look at the sky. You know, like Tony Soprano, yeah, we gotta look at the sky, you know what I'm saying? I mean, it was like, and so since the...

Starting point is 00:38:56 That's a nice restaurant, you got to be terrible if anything ever happened to it. Yeah, Jake, how you do the impression? You can't do it. And even. So Biden says in this press conference, we got to look at this guy. And since then, they've investigated Tesla

Starting point is 00:39:08 for supposedly building a glass house, which I didn't know was a crime. That's amazing. SpaceX, which is partially a defense contractor, was sued by the DOJ because they were hiring too many Americans and didn't, they weren't hiring enough refugees into sense of national security roles that they would surely be sued for doing if they were

Starting point is 00:39:29 the other way. And now they've canceled a contract for SpaceX having the best service in the space, but somehow missing a goal that they're not required to meet for three years. This is harassment, it's transparent. And the question I have is do we want to live in a country where the government can engage in this kind of naked political retaliation against its critics. And I have to say, you know, there was a time in America where Nixon was roundly attacked for having this quote-unquote enemies list where supposedly, you know, he had made a list of all his enemies and IRS was auditing them. Okay, we are so far beyond that point and the media isn't interested at all and no one's really interested unless you like what Elon's doing. But if you don't,

Starting point is 00:40:17 you know, if you're on the opposite side of the political spectrum as Elon, you don't care. And there's nobody who's willing to say in a neutral way that political retaliation is not be part of our system. I mean, we have a presidential candidate running specifically saying, I am your retribution. I mean, this is something that has to stop across all of politics. Nobody should be using their political power to do any retribution against anybody. They should be operating the government efficiently and the best interests of all Americans. I mean, to be honest, Okay, so maybe I don't like that rhetoric from Trump I don't think it's helpful, but what did Trump ever do that's in this league?

Starting point is 00:40:51 I mean everything they accused Trump of doing the fascism the retribution and all that kind of stuff It seems to me the Biden administration is doing here. Yeah, well, I mean he says he's gonna do it He says that the first thing is gonna do is go after journalists and do you think Trump did no retribution when he was in office, I mean, he says he's gonna do it. He says that the first thing he's gonna do is go after journalists and... Do you think Trump did no retribution when he was in office? I mean... We have to look through every single issue. You can't do it. You can't do it.

Starting point is 00:41:13 It's interesting, right? I mean, one doesn't come off the top. I had, I'm trying to remember if he ever said, I'm gonna go after this person or that person. I don't remember an instance of him saying... He said lock her up, that was in the end, he never did it. Trump was all talk in this respect. He didn't actually do it.

Starting point is 00:41:26 Yes. This is what Peter Tiel said, like, you know, his great quote about him, like just look at his actions, not what he says. He say buraddles and he says he's going to do retribution against everybody, but you know, then he doesn't. So, Tom, I'm even talking about Trump in this context as a deflection, Jake Cal. The action is being taken by the Biden administration. They've now weaponized multiple federal agencies to go after Elon on these cases that seem transparently

Starting point is 00:41:48 trumped up a glass house, not hiring enough refugees to national security roles. And now, it's obviously a contract for Starlink, which is by far the best rule internet service. How do you even justify it? These cases on their face. I'm not just absurd. I'm not 100% I'm in a 100% agreement.

Starting point is 00:42:05 You think there's this is politically motivated harassment of Elon by the Biden administration? 100% he said it. He said it and he didn't invite him to the EV summit. So you just take Biden at his actions. If you don't invite if you don't invite Elon to the EV summit, it's obvious that he's got it in for this guy. And now it's obvious he's told people to you know, investigate him and harass him. It's obvious that he's got it in for this guy. And now it's obvious he's told people to investigate him

Starting point is 00:42:26 and harass him. It's obvious. So why do you think they don't like him? Why do you think Biden doesn't like him? Why doesn't he like him? Because he's non-union, it's obvious. That's the beginning and end of it. I'm sure the freedom of speech things and Twitter

Starting point is 00:42:40 doesn't help, but this predates. Biden is a union guy, and he will not have non- union guy and he will not have non-union people. He will not support non-union people. He is bought and sold by the unions. That's 100% and Elon said that. That may be how it started, but I think you're underwriting the free speech aspect. Oh, I said it. It could have to do with that, but it's definitely, that's the number one issue.

Starting point is 00:43:00 And more importantly, you're saying enabling dissenting voices, strongly dissentant voices. Absolutely. I think that from the get go, they have sought to exercise control over the Twitter, formerly Twitter now, X platform, because it is the town square for political speech. Oh, they succeeded. They succeeded. The FBI, everyone, they thought you had to hold control of it until Elon somehow bought the company, which was not in their plans.

Starting point is 00:43:24 Frankly, that was just a fluke. I mean, that was something that Elon did out of the blue because he cares a lot about free speech. And he opened up the Twitter jails and you know, stopped the censorship and open up the Twitter files. We found out that this was not just a private company acting on its own.

Starting point is 00:43:40 It was being directed or encouraged by... Yeah, they were giving him list of tweets. They were by the list of tweets. They were giving them list of tweets saying, hey, these tweets probably by the way you're trying to serve us. Yeah. And the FBI acting as the quote unquote belly button of the whole federal government directing all these

Starting point is 00:43:56 takedown requests, totally on America. I think that the pattern of actions more than anything mandates that Biden and his team actually have to address publicly why it is not retribution. The absence of doing that at this point is going to be more damaging to them than just letting things go on and claiming down the road, hey, this is all part of the normal course of business. Now, the guy does. Why would they address it?

Starting point is 00:44:22 Why do they have to address the media as a whole and accountable? The media is a reporter. mechanical media as a reporter the media Pretend like the Twitter files never even happened remember that zero mainstream media coverage of the Twitter files Zero mainstream media coverage of these retaliatory lawsuits. Why would the Biden administration need to explain itself? Why would they even talk about it? The fix is in well? I mean now the question is being I think the mainstream media are Well, I mean, now the question is being, I think this mainstream media are stenographers for one side of the political spectrum, which is precisely the reason why I see this thing. It's precisely the reason why there's so upset with Elon with opening up free speech on Twitter, because they had total control of the public discourse until he did that.

Starting point is 00:44:59 Did you see that thing this morning where somebody called out the New York Times for this morning where somebody called out the New York Times for selectively editing what Hunter Biden said to make it more broad. Broad, did you see that Jason? Yeah, he basically said, my father has not financially been involved in my businesses. And the New York Times took out the word financially to make it more broad to say he's not been involved

Starting point is 00:45:20 in my business. He was involved in businesses. Really? Yeah, and there's a clip where they show the article and then they show his interview and the interview is very clear. He says it, but the New York Times headline emits the word and doesn't put it in a bracket so that it shows that it was edited. It shows that that was the quote. Can you pull it out? Do you have that thing? It's so crazy. Let me find it. That's crazy. I mean, I would like to think there's so crazy. Let me find it. That's crazy.

Starting point is 00:45:45 I mean, I would like to think there's a possibility. This was a mistake, but man, it's pretty bad. I mean, this is really bad by the New York Times. And they got to figure out who actually took that word out because it's pretty clear Biden was very involved in Hunter's businesses. And that's why he put that word financially in there because he was on, I think he's on all

Starting point is 00:46:05 the documents as being part of it and he's in the emails. So he was a brand J.K. Oh, there it is. Thank you. Nick, you're very good at finding these things there. Okay. So if you look on the left, that's the article in the New York Times. And it's clear that that was the quote.

Starting point is 00:46:22 And then if you play it on the right, it's actually what he said. Let me state as clearly as I can. My father was not financially involved in my business. Wow. Yeah. And then the quotes of my state is clear as I can. My father was not involved in my business. Now, if in journalism you could put an ellipsis

Starting point is 00:46:42 after involved, you know, three dots, but why would you do that? This is like breaking very basic journalistic standards. This is my point. There's like a format, right, when you edit out a word like that. Yeah. You would only edit out a word if it was superfluous and you wanted to have a tighter quote. You have the person said,

Starting point is 00:46:58 mmm, ah, you can take that out. And if you were taking out a long quote, you put three dots and then you, it would show that you cut the quote. There was something in between and then you went to that. In the case of something this important, you would never take out a keyword like that. This is just journalism 101. So, I mean, if this happens, man, it is, it's the keyword in the sentence, by the way. It's the keyword in the sentence.

Starting point is 00:47:21 It is the keyword in the sentence. So if the person took it out, man, who took it out? And this is the problem with the New York Times is they bury their corrections. They need to, and this is back to accountability, you're saying, Freeberg, the Biden administration has to explain why they excluded Elon from the EV summits. And the New York Times needs to explain why they did this.

Starting point is 00:47:40 Where else, you know, the mind wanders that there's some conspiracy going on here or targeting. And I wonder if they changed it. Well, here's the live story. It's a change in the story. Did they change it yet? Look, broad water. I mean, look, broad water. Is that a name from central casting? That's not a real name, is it? I don't know. Let's say they post a correction. Oh, here we go. Correction. In earlier version of the article, misquoted Hunter Biden, you said, my father was not financial. I was not my father. So the only room I have here is if the person was live transcribing it maybe, and they left it out,

Starting point is 00:48:10 but this is too important to not have a fact checker go through it. And to have to get called out on it to fix it, he just shows how far this is. This is the equivalent though, Jake Hella, putting on the front page. I did not kill that person. And then a day later, it buried in page 812. I actually did kill that person and then a day later it buried in page a 12. I actually did kill that person.

Starting point is 00:48:27 I mean if you- Question at the bottom of the story is good. Everybody sees the front page, very, very people. You would agree with me, very, very few people. See the correction. In the old days, they would put the correction on like a two, a three of the paper and it would be small and be at the bottom. In the digital age, you put the correction at the bottom of the article, so it's a little bit better, but the truth is, most people don't go to the bottom of the article, so there's an argument to put corrections at the top of the article. But journalists don't want to admit when they're wrong.

Starting point is 00:48:55 I think that I saw a list of all of the organizations investigating Elon and what was surprising was how broad some of these organizations Felt that they had a mandate to look into him. So there was like I want to say Nick Maybe you can find this on Twitter But they had a list of them and it was like the Bureau of land management Investigation, I mean it just makes no sense like it just does not smell right. In fairness, Elon is involved in many, many, very important projects. So there would be a lot of agencies that speaks to over-regulation

Starting point is 00:49:32 and then you have to drill down and say, okay, when are they actually targeting him? And so that's gonna be a lot of partying. Fishing wildlife, you know, health and human housing. I mean, it's a list goes on. You might be able to see some orientation. Efficient in the wrong pond or what? What's it or what? No, I think my understanding of it is, you know, at starbase, there's some estuaries or something. And there was a lot of...

Starting point is 00:49:54 Asteroids. I mean, yes, we protect animals and whatever. This is something that happens all over the country. And California is actually probably the leader in this, but I think some crabs might have got burned, not in a barbecue, but by the rocket. I mean, literally that, and then this is, this speaks to what risk are we willing to take to make progress as humanity?

Starting point is 00:50:17 Freeberg, remember we had this discussion about self-driving cars? Like, if getting to Mars and being multi-planetary kills some crabs, I think we should be okay with that. In fact, if it decimated, I mean, it's not decimated, but let's just say, a hundred square miles got decimated by getting to Mars on planet Earth. But you'd make that trade off, right? Yeah, it's a, I mean, this is the same standard I think I feel around.

Starting point is 00:50:41 If there's a mouse infestation in my house, I'm not going to let them I live in my house, even though I'm completely ethically against killing animals, killing animals to eat when I have other options, I'm against. And I think animal testing and medical applications, I have a totally different standard than I think what is standard in the market today. So for me, it's like a pretty sensitive topic because my ethics are, don't kill animals unless absolutely necessary. And the question is what is the definition of necessary?

Starting point is 00:51:09 And so these sorts of points that you're making about, if it gets all humans to Mars, that might be a trade-off worth making for some of the crabs. I don't, you know, it's like, probably a probably hard to understand the analogy here. Are you saying that Elon's the mouse? The rocket may have killed the mouse. The regulator is on the house. Wait, who's the mouse and Elon's the mouse? The rocket may have killed the mouse. The regulator is on the house.

Starting point is 00:51:26 Wait, who's the mouse and who's the house? The house is the rocket ship. Clearly the mouse is the key to the mouse in the house, right? Yeah. Let's pull up this quote from Brendan Carr is the FCC commissioner. I thought this was amazing. This list is incredible. This is the FCC commissioner.

Starting point is 00:51:42 He said, he said the DOJ FAA FTC NLRB SDNY and FWS, as I guess that's fisher wildlife, have all taken action. The FCC now joins them. Man, that's incredible. Yeah, it's a little bit nuts. Look at that Biden quote, where I didn't actually know about the second part. I knew about the first part where he says we got to take a look at this guy, but then he was at how? And President Biden responded, there's a lot of ways. There's a lot of ways. You know, there's a lot of ways.

Starting point is 00:52:10 There's a lot of ways to get to somebody. Yeah, that's like 20s or so. I can get to you. You might be able to get to me. I might go a bit to you. And you know, maybe you watch it back. Yeah. You know what else Biden said?

Starting point is 00:52:21 There's a lot of ways is when he was talking about the Nord Stream pipeline, and he said that pipeline is not going to move forward. And then they said, yeah, but the press said to him, yeah, but that's like a German Russian project, like how what's your involvement? Let's just say in my life, we got ways. There are a lot of ways. We got ways. Wow. Okay, so on the counterpoint, obviously Elon has several pretty sprawling businesses. He has self-driving cars. Right, and they push, they right, they push the envelope on, you know, where there's an existing regulatory

Starting point is 00:52:56 framework, same with going to Mars, right, same with transmitting internet services, wireless communications, like, you know, there is a regulatory framework for all of these businesses, and he's on the bleeding edge and typically beyond the framework to some degree. So I think it's like worth acknowledging at least that there's a necessity of scrutiny and involvement in these agencies given that they do have regulatory authority and responsibility over these various businesses and he's well beyond where anyone else is in each of them. So I just want to acknowledge that.

Starting point is 00:53:24 Hold on, let me respond to that. Yeah. He's well beyond where other people is in each of them. So I just want to acknowledge that. Hold on, let me respond to that. Yeah. He's well beyond where other people are in his industry in terms of innovation. He's the first to acknowledge, because I've heard him say this many times that he's in highly regulated industries and they've got massive compliance programs

Starting point is 00:53:38 at Tesla and SpaceX and all these different companies. What we're judging these regulatory agencies on is not that there's a need to regulate Elon's companies within the framework of their industries, but rather the specific actions that are being brought. Remember, DOJ suing SpaceX for not hiring enough refugees. Tesla being sued on this glass house business,

Starting point is 00:54:04 whatever that is right now, those are voluntary actions in a FCC canceling a contract. Yeah. Three years. Three years. Three years before, they even need to judge that contract, whether that contract has been met. 100% of things that happen this week, which I think is important along this vein, is that the IRS is in charge of making sure that you can claim the $7,500 EV tax credit for cars. And a lot of us that have been looking at this issue, the way that they break the EV tax credit is in half. And part of it is about where the materialist source and part of it has to do with the total sum of certain components of the car and how much of those are made in the

Starting point is 00:54:45 U.S. etc. Okay? And it was presumed just based on the trend that Tesla would lose half the credit, keep half the credit. And in a bit of a surprising move, the IRS came out and said the whole thing, we're not going to acknowledge anymore. So Tesla had to go and put on the website that the credit ends as of December 31st So I would add the IRS to this to this list as well. That's so crazy. So I got to be investigated I like Freiburg's suggestion that prove to us That you're not doing this at this point because it's pretty clear that it is happening

Starting point is 00:55:22 And it's just lucky Yeah, well good luck. Good luck getting them to do that. Just on the, on that EV subsidy, you know, one of the perverse things about this is that the administration is putting the thumb on the scales against Elon in favor of these less innovative competitors who have worse products.

Starting point is 00:55:42 So like Elon said, if you want to cancel our contract for Starlink to provide this rural broadband, that's fine. To save taxpayers the money. But by all means, don't then give them money to these other services I can't deliver. What's the point of that? And same thing on the electric cars. I mean, the subsidy is going to these other car companies that make worse products. Yeah, totally. This is the key point. The fact is, all of those people who just had their Starlink canceled through the government, I guarantee you they will buy Starlink because it's the best product. So irony of ironies, they're just going to go spend 60, 70, 80 bucks a month

Starting point is 00:56:16 to put their own Starlinks. And like everybody else around the world who lives rural, I have Starlink. One more thing to add, they under pressure from regulators. They Announced a recall on Tuesday of two million cars to to fix some of the autopilot software Yeah, but that's an over-the-air update so the press went crazy about that right? No, no, no What I'm saying is if you read the if you read the article that over-the-air update is specifically because of Again, how it's written regulatory pressure to change how the software behaves. Some tuning in some edge cases.

Starting point is 00:56:49 My point is that one could guess that there is an attempt here to kind of do the death by a thousand cuts approach, right? So the drip, drip water torture of just like a thing over here, a thing over here, a thing over here, a thing over here. Eventually companies can get distracted and misfire. So the question I do think is, does it make us better off if all of these little tiki-taki foot faults are enforced by the government? I think we all know what the answer is.

Starting point is 00:57:20 No. We have an example. Microsoft got so distracted by their court cases that the company went sideways for a decade. Well, but I think there was a lot of good basis for that particular entity, that was an entity trust case and Microsoft clearly had a monopoly.

Starting point is 00:57:34 Just on the recall thing, I did see that story at the top of Drudge or whatever last week, whereas it said, every Tesla has to be recalled. And when I see the word recall, I think that means you gotta bring it to the dealership and get like some part swapped out. But that's not what happened.

Starting point is 00:57:50 No, well, so what's so interesting is they refuse in these articles, I can show you the New York Times version of it, they refuse to write that it's actually an OTA update. To your brain. And breaking news, I don't know if you guys saw this, but a billion five iPhones were just recalled for the 17.2 update. So everybody's gonna have to bring their iPhones in.

Starting point is 00:58:06 1.5 billion iPhones were called. I'm gonna bring it to the store. Yeah, you got to bring it to the store and they'll make you this new journal app. I don't know if you got it in the latest update, but Apple made a journaling app so that you can have more. That's a recall. Yeah, that's a recall. Yeah, it's a total recall.

Starting point is 00:58:21 All right, listen, now we keep the red meat going. Sax is cooking with oil. Alex Jones, the controversial conspiracy commentator of Info It's total recall. All right, listen, now we keep the red meat going. Sax is cooking with oil. Alex Jones, the controversial conspiracy commentator of Info Wars fame, is back on Twitter after Elon did a poll. He got too many people to respond, asking if he should be reinstated. 70% said yes. Of course, Jones encouraged his fans to vote in this poll.

Starting point is 00:58:40 So I'm not sure how scientific it is. For background, Twitter permanently banned Jones in 2018 after accusing him of posting direct threats of violence and hate speech. It already received bands from Apple, Facebook, and YouTube is pretty much the number one person to be de-platformed, as you know, Jones was ordered to pay $1.5 billion to the families of eight Sandy Hook victims. This was across two cases in Texas and Connecticut. And here is Jones and his own words on the Sandy Hook parents. Sandy Hook, it's got inside job written all over it. Sandy Hook is a synthetic, completely fake with actors in my view manufactured. I couldn't believe it at first. The new town kids. Oh,

Starting point is 00:59:26 they take them, put them in our face, tell us their names, who they were. I heard an ad this morning on the radio Bloomberg paid for locally going, I dropped Billy off and watched him go around the corner. And he never came back all because of the guns. Won't you just turn your guns in from a son? Why'd you do it to him, gun owners? Forgive my language, but f*** that guy. Okay, there it is folks. That guy. We have a f*** that guy, but let me out.

Starting point is 00:59:55 That's not being censored, right? Unfortunately not, but I absolutely cannot stand that. That is just like heart wrenching, like evil, awful, spitting out of his mouth. And he still, you know, should have a right to speak, but man, f*** that guy.

Starting point is 01:00:11 I was never a big cryer. Part of it was just my defense mechanism. And I remember Sandy Hook because I had just become a parent. I had, I think, two kids by that point. And I was uncontrollably crying when that happened. And it was the first time I realized how you change as a parent and you just develop this empathy. And then you realize how precious kids' lives are. And I've become more and more of a cryer as my kids have grown older. And I really appreciate that what my kids have done for me. So when I hear him talk like

Starting point is 01:00:52 that, I, yes, he has a right to say what he wants, but he is a complete piece of ****. Yeah. Okay. So let's get into this very difficult question and sack. I don't want to For sure to defend, you know one of those horrible humans. I think we can all agree Well, my my position is pretty similar with the other guy's said, which is what he said was ODS However, that doesn't necessarily mean he should be censored. We have standards But we have first amendment standards around the stuff I agree with that so first told me back up I mean, I didn't even really know who Alex Jones was. I mean, I only knew him because of the controversy.

Starting point is 01:01:27 I've never actually listened to a show. I'm not really interested in what he has to say. I do think that if you're going to play this clip of his mistake going back many years, you should supplement it by playing a clip of what he says now. And what he says now is he's apologized. He's admitted he made a mistake. He basically bought into a conspiracy theory, but it wasn't just him saying it.

Starting point is 01:01:50 Apparently he had some people on the show who, I don't know if they were purported experts or what, but they were making a case that the whole Sandy Hook thing was a hoax and it was being done to basically, you know, get people's guns. I mean, look, it's not a stuff. I'm not defending it in any way, but he explained that he bought into that theory or hoax or whatever, and he thinks it's a terrible mistake

Starting point is 01:02:14 and he's apologized for it. And the question is, are you gonna have a lifetime ban on somebody for saying things that were wrong and odious when they have now apologized. And for me, it's not about Alex Jones. It's about censorship. Remember, when this case happened way back in 2018, it was really hard to defend keeping

Starting point is 01:02:38 this guy on the platform in light of what he had said and done, because everyone's reacting very emotionally to it. And it was people like defenders of free speech like Lengrenwald who said that, listen, if you take Alex Jones out now, if you have a permanent ban, it will basically be a slippery slope and it will create a precedent and other people will get banned. And sure enough, just two years later, Twitter was banning people like Jay Baudachariya, Stanford doctor, for saying dissident things about COVID that turned out to be completely correct. Marie authored the Great Barrington Declaration, talking about how lockdowns wouldn't work

Starting point is 01:03:14 and so on. And so, even within two years of this decision around Alex Jones, the censorship was totally out of control. And so I think the people who warned us that Alex Jones would become a slippery slope ended up being completely correct. To me, that's the symbolism of the restoration of Alex Jones's account.

Starting point is 01:03:32 It's not endorsing what he did. It's not saying that what he said wasn't odious. I mean, look, again, I have zero interest even listening to the guy. But the point is that free speech does require us to put up with people who are wrong, people who are even hateful sometimes. And stating misinformation.

Starting point is 01:03:54 People who put out misinformation, that's what free speech requires us to do. And if you want a different standard, it's gonna become a precedent for a lot of censorship that you don't like. I agree with SACs. The only place where I disagree with SACs is on Twitter not having a right to do this as a private enterprise.

Starting point is 01:04:14 I think Twitter had a decision to make on what kind of editorial lization they wanted to do with the content on their platform, on their product, and they made a choice. I don't think that I think it was the wrong choice personally. And we've talked about this in the past. I think that you know it's great that Elon's making a different choice and catering to a you know a different audience perhaps with a different product that has more open speech. But that's not you know a government free speech mandate. That's a private enterprise mandate, and I do believe in the right to free speech. I think it's a little bit ironic to say that it's inappropriate when someone says something

Starting point is 01:04:52 that is misinformation because it's incorrect or unprovable when we have an entire group of people that believe in something called religion. And much of religion is based on this concept of faith and belief without necessarily hard proof or evidence. And we allow religion, religious speech, you know, in many forums without saying, hey, that's misinformation or hey, it's not true or hey, it doesn't meet the standards of exorwire, z's, scientific assessment or understanding. And so I think it's just worth acknowledging that this whole concept that someone has to ultimately be the police of the truth and the police of fact

Starting point is 01:05:30 and the police of information is going to lead to a bad place. And I'd rather have more free speech with people saying misinformation and saying awful, putrid things than one where a few people get to decide what everyone gets to hear. So as much as I absolutely despise this guy. Trevor, you may be right that Twitter as a private company had the right as our laws currently exist to decide who they were going to suspend in ban from the site. However,

Starting point is 01:05:53 once that censorship power was created, it attracted powerful entities from our government who wanted to co-opt and use that power. That's what we saw on the Twitter files with the 80 FBI agents sending take down requests. That's what happens is when you create the sensitive power, people will abuse it. People will abuse it, but more to the point, it's such a tempting power to use by people in authority, right? It's like the ring of power. Those tools that Twitter created, it's like they released a fair amount or something that attracted all these powerful shadowy actors from the federal government in the FBI and all these agencies. And so that is why I think

Starting point is 01:06:36 it's just very dangerous for even private companies to create these censorship regimes is that they can be co-opted and abused. Being co-opted and abused is the issue. I don't think that the issue is their choice in what kind of content they wanna put out. You can go to the Netflix kids version of Netflix and they control what content is on Netflix and they provide a different version

Starting point is 01:06:56 than what they provide to adults. And I think like editorializing the content platform that you're making available, whether it's user generated or paid for or whatever, is a a totally reasonable approach to running a business, a content business. The point you're making is the right one, which is the point at which you allow government agencies to intervene and have control and manipulation over private citizens' user-generated content is where I think it crossed the line. So I don't disagree with you on that point.

Starting point is 01:07:23 May I ask to clarify in question, sir? Because I'm curious how you would handle this. If you were the CEO of X, formerly known as Twitter, would you have reinstated Alex Jones, yes or no? And then number two, if Alex Jones, then as a new member of the community who's been reinstated and forgiven, because he apologized. And then he did this again, this exact same thing again, with another school shooting with parents. Would you remove him for the platform? I don't know that these are yes or no questions. What I would say is that I've written what I think should be a speech policy for social

Starting point is 01:07:57 media platforms in a blog post I did several years ago. What I said is that I would take first moment case law and operationalize it for social media platforms. There are nine categories of speech that the Supreme Court has said are not protected speech because they're dangerous in some way. So for example, in slightly violence is one of them, you know, harassment is one of them. So I would use this clearly falls under those two Well, people his fans went and knocked on the door his fans his fans Yeah, so as I understand the whole thing and he hooked thing what happened is he said the whole thing was a hoax Obviously wasn't true. You paid a huge price for that his fans then

Starting point is 01:08:40 Some of his crazy fans went and harassed the parents, which obviously is not right, but according to him, he didn't, and I don't know that anyone's shown that he did that. I don't think he encouraged that. It just happened. I barely got some of my fans. Well, of course he does. It's a conspiracy show. So knowing it's a conspiracy show, knowing that incitement of violence is one of your criteria,

Starting point is 01:09:03 if his fans, after him saying it's fake Then went to the house knocked on the door and asked the parent to see little Susie because you know she's alive Would you kick him off the platform? listen The baron That's what happened the baron's in declaration was declared to be a conspiracy show the idea that on the Burnt and Declaration was declared to be a conspiracy show. The idea that COVID originated in a lab was considered a conspiracy show.

Starting point is 01:09:27 I don't think you can pre-judge in advance. That a show is, quote unquote, dangerous. Factually wrong conspiracies. As I understand it, again, I haven't watched this show, but I did watch a clip by Joe Rogan, who provided something of a character reference for Alex Jones. I don't know if Nick can find that and play that. It was actually quite good.

Starting point is 01:09:46 What Rogan said is, look, I've known Alex Jones for like 30 years. He's had problems with alcohol abuse, substance abuse, whatever. He's had mental health issues and he's acknowledged and sometimes he goes off the rails. At the same time, he's also been way ahead of the curve on certain things. For example, he told me about the Epstein Island, like 10 years before the story broke. I don't know how he figured that out, but somehow he did. Now that was a conspiracy theory until it was proven true. And it probably would have been a good thing for the public if that story had come out

Starting point is 01:10:18 a lot sooner so that it could have been shut down a lot sooner. So I don't think you can just judge in advance that somebody is a conspiracy theorist and basically blackball them from the internet. One other data point I wanna bring up is that, something that Elon mentioned is that he looked at the Twitter tools, the admin tools, to seek to look at Alex Jones' account. And the third strike he received

Starting point is 01:10:42 that caused him to be banned from the Twitter platform by the former management was he actually insulted a reporter, which was a very borderline case. So, the things that you're saying that he was banned for a war and even the reason he was banned. Yeah, no, that's true. I mean, I think, yeah, so that's why I was framing it to you

Starting point is 01:11:02 as, you know, and this is at the issue that I think, and maybe what some people are missing here. A mentally ill person like himself, if he's admitted to mental illness and substance abuse, when they go on these tirades or they go off their meds or whatever it is, or they're just evil, and they do this for ratings to make money, it starts to cause real world harm. People start showing up on these people's doorsteps. And so then, are you going to wait 10 years for the courts to do this $1.5 billion judgment and then make the decision while real-world harm is occurring? And if you own the platform, my believe is you have a higher standard, obviously believe

Starting point is 01:11:37 in freedom of speech, you can make your own website. But if you own the platform and the platform enables them to reach a large number of people and those people are being harmed. And parents' doors are being knocked on demanding to see their children because Alex Jones said that child is still alive and they're trying to take our guns and he knows his fans are crazy. There's responsibility that comes from it and there's responsibility that comes with owning a platform like this. I know Elon's going full freedom of speech, but I would be very careful about this. Steve Scalise, the House Republican whip was shot by a crazy birdie Sanders supporter

Starting point is 01:12:06 Does that blame go to Bernie Sanders? I think we have to separate you have there is hold on there. There is a legal standard for incitement Okay, there's a legal standard for judging that you're saying that these crazy people were incited But there is actually a legal way of determining that. I don't think that's been proven I would do a common sense one which is do we see real world happening? people were excited, but there is actually a legal way of determining that. I don't think that's been proven. I would do a common sense one, which is, do we see real world happening? I would just use common sense. Do we see real world happening? Okay, real world is happening. We own the platform. We need to stop this, which is what happened. That's a judgment standard, right? Yeah, I

Starting point is 01:12:39 would make the judgment. If I was to see how I'd make the judgment, and I would make the judgment based on, you know, the courts are are gonna take years to adjudicate this, and it's my platform, I don't want this happening. I would operationalize a content moderation policy based on first-moment case law. You're right that you can't always wait for the courts to adjudicate it. There's gonna be judgment calls.

Starting point is 01:12:58 I would have been fine, I think, with the suspension of Alex Jones in that context, because it does seem pretty agreed, just needs to apologized for it. The question is whether there should be lifetime bands. And I'm pretty much, I think I'm against lifetime bands. I'm okay with timeouts, I'm okay with suspensions for egregious behavior. When somebody has apologized, they've, I mean had to pay, I mean, I think he's been bankrupted.

Starting point is 01:13:23 He's had to pay all these fines. I think he's paid his price to society, so to speak, and he's admitted he was wrong. The question is, do you solve the lifetime ban? It seems to me he's acknowledged this mistake. If he doesn't like this again, then you can suspend him. Maybe you do the ban, but I do believe in giving people second chances, and I'm just sort of viscerally against the lifetime banning people. I don't like the standard of what can be deemed dangerous speech, because I think that, as SAC said, there's a clear way to measure whether

Starting point is 01:13:57 someone's inciting violence or inciting harm versus saying speech that can be deemed dangerous in some contexts, and then not be deemed dangerous after the fact. COVID vaccine conversations are the perfect example, telling people that there's health risks associated with taking a vaccine in the period when everyone was worried about a pandemic, killing us all was deemed too dangerous to allow. And after the fact, it wasn't dangerous because there were suddenly clear evidence that there may be some costs and benefits associated with the vaccines. And so I really don't like this standard of dangerous speech. In fact, I think that the biggest changes that are necessary in society

Starting point is 01:14:35 initially start with dangerous speech, and then they eventually become true, and then they become a standard, and then things change. My repeated calls for reduction in fiscal spending at the federal level and lack of accountability and fiscal spending at the federal level, by some measure, could be deemed dangerous speech and an incitement against the government. But really, my point is to call out the importance of this issue and after the fact,

Starting point is 01:15:01 I may be right, I may be wrong and I need to be able to say that. I think it's critically important to say those sorts of things. And I think that other people in their own domains will find other things that are critically important to say. And that would be deemed by some standard to be dangerous at the time. So as much as I have great disdain for certain people and certain things that they may say, I do think that what might be deemed dangerous speech is a critical element of the kind of progressivism

Starting point is 01:15:28 that's allowed the United States to prosper. I think it was dangerous speech to promulgate the false conspiracy theory that Trump was an agent of Putin. I mean, that was in the steel dossier. They basically said that Putin had compromise on Trump and Trump was basically working for the Kremlin. I mean, he was a trader.

Starting point is 01:15:47 I mean, what if there were people out there who tried to assassinate the president on the grounds that we can't have a trader in the White House? That was a private document, right? That wasn't like a public talk show. No, the state was absolutely leaked during the campaign. You making my point exactly, it's leaked, right? So this is like a private document by somebody.

Starting point is 01:16:02 But then it was printed by BuzzFeed. And then once it was in the echo chamber, it was endless. You're repeated by the mainstream media. So the idea that like only people like Alex Jones promote conspiracy theories, the mainstream media promotes a lot of conspiracy theories and some of those theories if acted upon by crazy people would be just as dangerous as the things that Alex Jones has said. You're in hypothetical and but actually I think you and I are not too far apart. You wanting to take these harms and operationalize them is sort of what I'm saying.

Starting point is 01:16:33 And in each of these cases, it's a judgment call. And this is where I think, you know, in many ways I'm proud of what you want is doing and saying like freedom of speech is an absolute thing and that's what the platform is going to be. His right to do it, it's his platform. And so I'm fine with that. I would do something different if it was my platform. Everybody's different, you know, everybody can take their stance. I would have some basic humanity as my stance. And I'll be willing to give up a little freedom of speech in my restaurant, in my cafe,

Starting point is 01:17:02 in order to have it be more delightful for everybody there. I wouldn't go as far as banning people talking about COVID, but yeah, if somebody was trying to claim that parents of murdered children were liars and actors, that would be fine for me to say, yeah, no good. And then, of course, there's Kanye. So, you know, Elon banned Kanye. That was under his realm. And this is what Kanye said.

Starting point is 01:17:21 And I think this falls into hate speech and real world harm. I'm a bit sleepy tonight, but when I wake up, I'm going death, death, con three on Jewish people. The funny thing is I actually can't be anti-Semitic because black people are actually Jew. Also, you guys have toy with me and tried blackball anyone who ever opposes your agenda. So when you see this tweet, would you have banned him sex?

Starting point is 01:17:41 Or is that for a long time? I'm not a fan. I'm not a given him a timeout. I think his family wanted him to get a time out because it was having an episode I certainly wouldn't give him a lifetime ban give me your something look I don't really know this Alex Jones guy. I certainly don't know my person. I don't even listen to him It's not a show I'm interested in even now. I only know you look I like knowing the truth

Starting point is 01:18:02 I like hearing facts and I don't believe that factual information like the lab leak theory should be censored by labeling it a conspiracy theory. For example, but what I would say about Alex Jones is there is some humanity in allowing him a forum to apologize for what he did, acknowledge this mistake and explain why he thought what he did and why he was wrong. And that's what he did on X. And I went on the Twitter spaces and I asked him a follow-up question which he wouldn't answer. I said, how have you changed your behavior? Yeah, but honestly, Jake, I was going to ask you this.

Starting point is 01:18:38 You can't answer it. You came bounding in in the last five minutes. I didn't get that. I'm asking him a bunch of questions about what he did when it had already been covered at the top of the pod. And I listen to it and he had not answered the question, how is your behavior changed? And so he doesn't want to talk about it. And that might be for the least,

Starting point is 01:18:53 but the first half hour of relitigating Sanihook and you weren't aware of that even more ago over it again. 10 minutes. But he wouldn't answer questions on how he would change his behavior. And so I think that's one of the things I would want to see from him, how have you changed your behavior and how you, you know, do shows?

Starting point is 01:19:08 And I don't think he's answered that question anyway. We're going to disagree on this one. Any final thoughts to Mapa as we wrap here on this issue? The free speech litmus test is very simple. It's this exact thing. It's when the person that you dislike says the thing that you find very displeasing. What do you do? And I am a free speech absolutist on this. I just think it's a very slippery slope and I don't think we're very

Starting point is 01:19:34 capable of making these delineations. And so I agree the right solution are time outs. But lifetime bands, I think again, go down this path where human judgment gets involved and then it's about the person in charge and then it becomes a power play and then it eventually always gets corrupted. So I can hold two thoughts in my head. One, Alex Jones should be able to say what he thinks and two, it was disgusting and he should be ashamed of what he said.

Starting point is 01:20:01 Yeah, you know, the bands doubling every time is probably a good precedent as well. So I mean, we should do it like we do at our poker game that finds go up. Yeah, phone penalty doubles. Expansible back off. I mean, you're gonna you're gonna put your phone down and play the goddamn game if it gets to 800 or 1600 because that's things a little bit. So there it is. Yeah, it totally does.

Starting point is 01:20:21 But maybe that's the right solution Jason. It's like you have a finding mechanism somehow, and it just like it increases. And so there's a financial penalty of nothing else as well as a time out when you violate these laws. At least that's a scalable way to solve the problem in a way that's hard to corrupt and gain. But if it goes down to the person to an individual or a group of people's judgments

Starting point is 01:20:42 as we saw with the previous management of Twitter, I think it's going to be a very difficult problem. I don't think that those were bad people, but I think that they were led astray. Yeah, I mean, Nick, do you have that clip from Rogan? Because when I listen to this clip from Rogan, it did have an impact on what I thought because it does show... They've been friends for like 20 years, yeah. It does show the human complexity. And again, you're judging him based on the worst thing he ever did and Rogan presents a more balanced viewpoint about this guy.

Starting point is 01:21:11 Again, I have no dog in this hunt. I don't really care about Alex Jones, but I'm just saying that if we're going to sit in judgment of people, I think maybe we should have a more balanced view because I mean, it does bias the conversation to play the clip of the worst thing you ever did. Let's play Rogan for a second. I think it we should have a more balanced view because I mean it does buy us the conversation to play the clip at the Worsey ever did this play rugged for a second. I think it's interesting look at the way people look at Alex Jones now Because Alex Jones has been on my podcast a few times the people that have watched those podcasts think he's hilarious And they think that he definitely fucked up with that whole sandy hook thing But he's right more than he's wrong.

Starting point is 01:21:45 And he's not an evil guy. He's just a guy who's had some psychotic breaks in his life. He's had some genuine mental health issues that he's addressed. He's had some serious bouts of alcoholism, some serious bouts of substance abuse, and they've contributed to some very poor thinking. But if you know the guy, if you get to know him, like I have, I've known him for more than 20 years, and if you know him

Starting point is 01:22:10 on podcasts, you realize like he is genuinely trying to unearth some things that are genuinely disturbing for most people. Like is the guy that was telling me about Epstein's island decade ago, at least. Yeah, I mean, this platforming mentally ill people during an episode is a whole nother can of worms. I mean, I told this to Lex Reed when he had Kanye on during that episode. And I said, I think it's a very bad idea to spend

Starting point is 01:22:41 two hours with somebody who's having an episode and sure enough, what did he do? More anti-Semitic insanity on his podcast. And I just told Lex, leave the guy alone. It's not worth it. Let him get help. I think you have a point there, but that would be an argument for a temporary suspension on a ban in my opinion.

Starting point is 01:22:59 Yeah. All right, SACs. In other news, something insane has happened on the internet. It's never happened before. right, uh, sacks in other news, something insane has happened on the internet. It's never happened before, but somebody has apologized for getting something wrong. This is breaking news. We're in year 34 of the internet. And somebody says, is it my wife? Is it my wife?

Starting point is 01:23:15 Did she admit she's never gotten anything wrong? I've listened. I've been there for this whole relationship. A hundred out of a hundred times correct. So you know, it's frustrating. It's so frustrating. I mean, she makes a mistake. in there for this whole relationship. She has been 100 out of 100 times correct. On social issues. Frustrating. It's so frustrating. I mean, she makes a mistake, well, no,

Starting point is 01:23:29 but it hasn't happened yet. Actually, paradoxically, same with my wife. She's been right for 22 years. No, my wife has been wrong four times, and I've gotten three on voice memory. I taped them. I pull out the phone and I'm like, hold on, I need you to say it again.

Starting point is 01:23:42 Yeah. So I've gotten three on voice, but it's because it's been only three. Did those three have something to do with deciding to marry you or to move in with you and make children and start a life together? It's so frustrating. How can one person be so wrong? I mean, all the time. Well, I mean, at least you're self-aware.

Starting point is 01:24:00 Everybody loves self-aware, John. John. It is. Oh, God. It's a new trend. It's new trend. But yes a new trend we're on. But yes, Nassim Taleb, public he admitted, we're going to pull it up here, Saks. Here we go.

Starting point is 01:24:11 He publicly admitted that techno watermelon, that's your name, Saks. That was his insult. I don't really understand the insult. I never understood either. I think he's saying your head is the size of a watermelon and that you're involved in technology. That's my, it was my interpretation. I don't think you have a melon head. Or does it mean like I'm green on the outside and

Starting point is 01:24:28 right on the inside or something like somehow I'm supporting how I mean the summer. I don't, I don't really understand it, but that has come up. Well listen, it's better than mine. I'm a psychotic ennuramous. So he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he some point I'm sure he, but here it is folks. Well, you just said I can see that David Sacks is correct about the relative strength of the parties in the Ukraine war and I was wrong, all counts. Russia is not as weak as it seemed to have staying power. This means the settlement is likely outcome. Anyway, it's so rare on the internet for anyone to admit they were wrong. And what they usually do is, does memory hole at which is why,

Starting point is 01:25:08 you know, I always like to produce receipts. I only do that for the people who strongly to announce me about something. And then I end up being right. They never can see. It's not just about the fact that I was right. It's about the fact that they attacked me personally. And they never come back and apologize or correct the record and Taleb did that. So kudos to him. I mean, I met when I read this. I was like, you know, like a senior. Yeah, I'm like, okay, what's the gotcha?

Starting point is 01:25:34 It's going way for it. I thought I thought a trap door is going to open under my feet. I thought a cartoon piano was going to follow my head. I just, I thought this can't be it. And, but no, that was it. So, good. That was it, amen. Well, there it is, kudos.

Starting point is 01:25:49 But by the way, just, I mean, the reason why I understood what was gonna happen in this, you know, counteroffensive and why the war is not gonna go as well as people thought, it's not because I purport to be some sort of Ukraine expert or foreign affairs expert. I mainly just spent the time to figure out who the real experts were and the real experts are never the people who the media tells you. You actually have to spend the time to look at people's track records. What they said in the past, did it come true or not? You know, it's basically a falsifiability standard. Look at what they predicted, look at what actually happened, and you can figure out who the real experts are.

Starting point is 01:26:30 And that's what I did in the case of Ukraine. It was possible to figure out who were the foreign policy scholars who got this right, who were the military bloggers, who were accurately reporting information, and who were the ones who were basically putting out propaganda. If you spend the time to do that on virtually any issue, you can effectively become an expert. It's a great point, Seth, really good point. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:26:51 Well, you have to find your own process in front of the truth today, because I don't think you can trust the journalists out there to do it. You definitely can. 100%. And by the way, as a VC, people say, well, what does a VC think?

Starting point is 01:27:02 You know, in a way, like what VCs do, is when you get an incentive topic, you kind of go deep, you're trying to simulate a lot of information, you're trying to figure out who are the real experts in the space, so that those that people I should listen to, and then need to develop a take. It's not the worst skill set in the world for doing a pod or tweeting out hot takes on Twitter. Again, I'm not saying I'm an expert, I'm just somebody who is independent minded enough

Starting point is 01:27:24 to get to the bottom of an issue without disrelying on what I'm not saying I'm an expert. I'm just somebody who is independent minded enough to get to the bottom of an issue without disrelying on what I'm supposed to believe. And I just try to figure out who the real experts are. All right. Producer Nick, are you there? You did a tweet about questions that people might want to have to ask the besties here as we wrap up this up. So we'll take two.

Starting point is 01:27:40 You're two favorite questions, producer Nick. The law is on the Harvard board standing behind President Gay despite her transgressions. Okay. That's a good question. That's a very good question. question that's a good one for you mom here's what I'll say I think that the Harvard board was probably in a really difficult position in the following way you know when you hire somebody and you realize that that person has some faults. You have three choices, right? One is to fire them. Two is to be unequivocal in their support. And three is to basically give a milk toast,

Starting point is 01:28:21 CYA kind of a statement to give yourself time. The reason why I think that President Gay wasn't fired was probably because of the board for whatever reason didn't want to seem like they were a cowtowing to Bill Ackman and all the other people that were asking for her resignation. But what they didn't do is equally important. They may not have fired her, but what they also didn't do was come out with an unequivocal statement of support. I think it was kind of a little bit wishy-washy and acknowledging her mistakes, which seems

Starting point is 01:28:54 to be a set up to allow her to basically make a couple more mistakes so that then they can fire her and they can all seem like they did the right thing. So I suspect that that's what happens. She probably won't be in that job any year from now. Or she kind of bottles along and in two or three years, she quote unquote retires to spend more time with her family. Anyone else want to get it on this? Yeah, I mean, I think this university president's debate has been a little bit of a Rorschach

Starting point is 01:29:19 test. And I've seen people that I generally agree with fall into one of two camps. Some see it as a free speech issue, other people see it as a kind of woke double standards or DEI issue. I think for those who see it as a free speech issue, they're emphasizing the motivations of people like Elise Stefanoek, the person who asked the University Presidents the question in saying when she said, basically, the question was, does your code of conduct allow calls for genocide of Jews? And their argument is that's a loaded question because there is not an epidemic on campus

Starting point is 01:29:57 of people calling for genocide of Jews. And so this is basically all kind of an invented hysteria and the purpose of it is to suppress debate about this Israel-Hamos war in Gaza and it's designed to expand campus speech codes so that it's harder for Palestinian supporters to protest in favor of their cause. So that's one way of looking at it. My view on that is, if it ends up being the case that campus speech codes get expanded in that way, that'd be a bad thing. I don't think we need to restrict speech on campus. So I agree with them on that point. However, there is a different way of looking at this, which is the motivations of the University Presidents in answering that question. And yes, it was a loaded question,

Starting point is 01:30:46 but they flubbed the answer. And the question is why? Because as we talked about last week, if they were asked about calls for the murder of any other group, a racial group, or friends, people, or something like that. Asian people. Again, I don't think their answer would have been the same.

Starting point is 01:31:01 And I do think that that comes back to the fact that they have a preconceived notion of which groups deserve protection and which ones don't think their answer would have been the same. And I do think that that comes back to the fact that they have a preconceived notion of which groups deserve protection, and which ones don't, and that is a double standard. And I think anything we can do to get rid of that poisonous ideology that wants to treat people differently on campus, I think is a good thing. And so I support what Bill Ackman is doing on that basis.

Starting point is 01:31:24 But if Bill Ackman goes too far and demands restrictions on the ability of students to protest Then I think it would be a bad thing and that's going too far. So this would be a great thing to ask him Like what his motivations are The you know if he comes on the pod I think that's crazy is that just the crazy hypocrisy like these are the same people who were firing people or not letting them speak on campus. If they had a, you know, a microaggression where they didn't, they missed gender at somebody or they used a different pronoun or they had a different feeling about what defines a woman

Starting point is 01:31:56 versus a man or, you know, gender differences, whatever. Their massive intolerance in the crazy hypocrisy which you're alluding to here, Saks, is the thing that I think has broken everybody's brain. This is bizarre. And the DI stuff is a road to nowhere. I tweeted today about the absolute grift that was going on attack not long ago, which was call out a company venture firm,

Starting point is 01:32:17 whatever it is for their DEI stance. Then quietly contact them after you've done this break a dooning of them and say, hey, we can solve your problem. Higher us as consultants and speakers to come in and fix your DEI and tell you what you've done wrong. And then publicly come out and I saw this happen, publicly come out and then tell the same group,

Starting point is 01:32:38 hey, this person's now an ally. Rinsen repeat, it was a crazy grip and it's all coming out now and there's a, yeah, that deal, I can think, Jake. Calvert, you retreated is crazy. That's story. Yeah, so we could just go down this rabbit hole forever, but I think you call it a cul de sac. I call it a road to nowhere or dead end identity politics and DEI, it's just a dead end.

Starting point is 01:32:58 We just start judging people based on, you know, any criteria other than their character and performance in the world. Do we know if there was a response by MIT? Is this one? MIT, yeah. Yeah, I don't think yet there has been. Anyway, we'll cover that story next week for sure. And that's what Bill Aquaman is doing is brave because he is taking on the EI.

Starting point is 01:33:20 And that is, historically, that's been one of the most dangerous things you can do. I mean, that is what people get canceled for. Now, I know there are people who I am fans of, like, like, Ling Rienwald, who's been very critical of Ackman because he thinks that Ackman's trying to restrict free speech and prevent, again, the propel-student cause from protesting or saying its piece. And I guess Bill can clarify that, but I think this issue is less about foreign policy and more about domestic policy, these DEI policies. And finally, we have someone who's willing to take it on

Starting point is 01:33:56 and challenge it at an ideological level and then challenge it at like a, does a grift level. Yeah, shout out to Brian Armstrong. He got this right and he went right up the hill and took the arrows for it. And I think we've like a just griff level. Yeah, shout out to Brian Armstrong. He got this right and he went right up the hill and took the arrows for it. And I think we've turned a corner. The tweet I did today, I would not have done two years ago because I just didn't want to risk my firm

Starting point is 01:34:16 or the companies I work with to kind of expose that grift because we could blow back on people. So, but now I thought totally comfortable doing it. So, Uber's at 70. Well, that all started. Uber got 76 points. Me and I don't care about Uber. That's for sure.

Starting point is 01:34:33 I mean, he's got FU money now. Atman's got a lot of firepower, you know, that bond call was totally right. You know, the 10 years now, so four percent. I was gonna say, yeah, I will say that does, your bank account does give you the ability to go. Okay, final question. Please, we have what we must wrap.

Starting point is 01:34:48 We must have a final question. And please throw it to Friedberg. First, I got Friedberg involved early on offense today. It's a great job. From mom cooks fast and slow on X for Friedberg, I guess, what is the correct way to hire kids out of school now that an elite university degree tells you very little about the applicant and will you follow this path in your companies? Oh, I have a great answer from that. Tim, go ahead.

Starting point is 01:35:11 No, go. Please, lift, free, bro. Go ahead and go. We got to go to the schools with co-op. Why? Because it allows you to evaluate these kids in C2 on a real-time basis without a obligation to hire. You can find the ones that can really do the work, have the energy, and then hire them.

Starting point is 01:35:26 Explain how our programs place, it's for people to know. I went to a co-op school, University of Waterloo in Canada, the way that it works there, not everywhere, but there at least is you go to school for the first eight months, and then you never get a break. You're either in working for four months, or you're in school for four months, and you go back and forth until you graduate. So instead of graduating in four years, you graduate

Starting point is 01:35:50 in five, but you graduate with basically two full years of work experience. And depending on the employers that you work at, you typically get two to three job offers from those folks if you do a good job. When I was helping to build Facebook, we went there. We had never hired an intern before and we started to hire people. And I think now, it happened in Microsoft, it happened in Google, I think it's happened in Facebook. If you look at the number of kids that work at those schools now from co-op schools, they're higher than any other school. There's a bunch of schools in the United States that have co-op, but I would go and find those schools and hire those kids.

Starting point is 01:36:32 Freeberg any thoughts? You're now running a company. You're back in the saddle. How are you going to hire people? And tell everybody the name of the company again. It's called O'Holo. O'Holo. Not Mo. O'Holo. O'Holo. And you're a Hollywood. moho, hollo. And you're hollo. Mohollo was taken. Who owns that domain name now? I still have it. Yeah. If somebody wants to you have it, I have Mohollo and I have Kukua. Happy to sell it to somebody if they want to. But

Starting point is 01:36:57 tell us, how are you, which are hiring criteria? And how do you think about this now? Just like to start an enterprise software business called Kukua. It means to help or to guide in Hawaiian. So probably the third or fourth most important word. Yeah. Go ahead. Freeber, please. I have criteria around raw horse power skills or experience and then motivation. And I have systems for how we try and assess those and then matching our principles. I it's kind of the fourth bucket of things.

Starting point is 01:37:24 Horsepower you can test skills is based on experience and fits the role in the need. But motivation is one that there's a lot of question marks around, does this person have they demonstrated that they've had a not just a desire but an action that they've taken that has pushed them beyond the limits of the systems that they've operated in. And that's what I would typically look for, regardless of the schooling background, the education background is some demonstration of that because that's necessary in business building. So that's my framework for hiring.

Starting point is 01:37:58 We call it smarts or horsepower skills, motivation and principles. And we score each one of those and then try and come up with hiring. You started to do that with the CEO candidates. I got that email from you and I was very intrigued. So I like that. All right, everybody. This has been another amazing episode of the All in Podcast four, the king of beep and the dictator and the rain man himself.

Starting point is 01:38:22 I'm your boy, Jacob. We'll see you next time. I love you guys. Bye bye. We'll see you next time. Bye bye. I'm going on a leave Besties are gone, go thrifty That's my dog taking a wish to drive away So, wait a minute, I'll get it Oh man, I'm a disaster when we be at police station We should all just get a room and just have one big hug or something It's like this like sexual tension that we just need to release them out.

Starting point is 01:39:20 I'm doing all the good

All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg - E157: Epic legal win, OpenAI licensing deals, FCC targets Elon, Alex Jones reinstated & more

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