Is anybody else seeing a half a second lag with J-Cal?

Like a second lag?

Test, test, test.

One, two, one, two.

From like the way his mouth moves?

Well, that always happens.

Oh God, here it comes.

His mouth never stops moving.

Relax, Sax.

Relax, Sax.

Are we going?

Are we recording?

Are you ready to go?

Don’t lose this.

Don’t lose this.

It’s A-plus material.

Are we going in hot sacks?

All right, let’s go.

This is Chappelle at the punchline.

Let’s go.

Let’s go.

I’m ready to go.

We’ll let your winners ride.

Rain Man David Sax.

I’m going all in.

And instead, we open sourced it to the fans

and they’ve just gone crazy with it.

Love you, S-I-C.

Queen of Quinoa.

I’m going all in.

All right, everybody, welcome to episode 111

of the World’s Greatest Podcast,

according to Slate,

the podcast that shall not be mentioned

by the press, apparently.

No, what do you mean?

They put a profile on us.

Well, they did.

This is the conundrum.

It’s so much of a phenomenon

that we’re the number one business

and the number one tech podcast in the world, hands down,

that the press has a hard time giving us any oxygen

because they want to hate us.

They want to cover it.

You’re saying they take the ideas, but not the…

They don’t want to cite it.

They don’t want to cite it.

They don’t want to cite it.

But anyway, shout out to Slate.

Yeah, what I thought was interesting

was the guy pointed out that

we don’t want to subject ourselves

to independent journalists asking us independent questions.

Therefore, we go direct.

And that’s kind of the thing nowadays.

When everyone says they want to go direct,

it’s because they don’t want to be subject

to independent journalists.

Well, one might ask themselves

why subjects don’t want to go direct.

Yeah, exactly.

You mean don’t want to go to journalists?

Yeah, because there’s a specific reason

why principals, the subject of stories,

do not want to have the press interpret

what they’re saying.

It’s because they don’t feel they’re getting a fair shake.

They feel like the words are being twisted.

Right, but the challenge is that then

we avoid independent scrutiny

of our points of view and our decisions.

No, we don’t.

They’re constantly writing hit pieces about us.

The question is, when we want to present our side of it,

do we need to go through their filter or not?

Why would you go through their filter

when it’s always going to be a hit piece?

Right.

I mean, they have a class hatred

of basically of technology entrepreneurs

and investors.

I think it’s just your sex.

I think it’s just your sex.

You’re right, Jake, how they don’t hate you

because you genuflect to their political biases.

You see, if you do what SPF did,

which is basically agree with all of their biases,

then yes, they’ll treat you better.

That’s the deal.

That’s how it works.

And when you say they,

you’re referring to specific large media outlets,

right, Sax?

They all think the same way.

He’s not referring to Fox or Tucker.

No, but he, there we go.

Okay, you can name one.

I’ll tell you what,

I’ll trade you Fox for MSNBC and CNN

and the New York Times,

the Washington Post and the Atlantic Magazine

and on and on and on.

You get a lot of mileage out of being able to name Fox.

The fact of the matter is-

Megyn Kelly.

That’s a podcaster.

She’s independent now.

That’s true.

You can name one.

I mean, literally one outlet

that is not part of this mainstream media.

And they all think the same way.

There are very small differences in the way they think.

It’s all about clicks.

It’s all about clicks at this point.

And it’s all about-

Not just about clicks.

And advocacy.

It’s that combination.

What you’re calling advocacy is bias and activism.

It’s activism.

That’s what I’m talking about.

Activism journalism, yes.

I think Draymond also highlights a really important point,

which is, you know, he started his podcast.

It’s become one of the most popular forms of sports media.

And he can speak directly without the filtering

and, you know, classification that’s done by the,

you know, journalist.

And it seems to be a really powerful trend.

The audience really wants to hear direct

and they want to hear unfiltered, raw points of view.

And maybe there’s still a role for,

I think, the journalism separate from that,

which is to then scrutinize and analyze and question and-

It’s not journalism, this is activism.

They’re just activists.

Look, why does anybody-

There are also journalists out there, Sax, right?

So-

Actually, well, it depends what the topic is

and what the outlet is.

Right.

Fair enough.

But actually, I would argue

that most of these journalists are doing

what they’re doing for the same reason

that we’re doing what we’re doing,

which is they want to have some kind of influence

because they don’t get paid very much, right?

But the way they have influence

is to push a specific political agenda.

I mean, they’re activists.

They’re basically party activists.

It has become advocacy journalism.

Yes, that’s the term I coined for it.

It’s advocacy journalism.

Did you guys see this brouhaha

where Matt Iglesias wrote this article

about the Fed and about the debt ceiling?

And through this whole multi-hundred word,

thousand word tome,

he didn’t understand the difference

between a percentage point and a basis point

and then he didn’t calculate the interest directly?

Yeah.

Yeah, I did see that.

Wow.

So wait a second.

You’re saying the Fed’s raising 25%?

Yeah.

I think that’s a big difference.

That’s a huge difference between a-

My mortgage is going up 25%.

Between a principal and an outside analyst, right?

Like a principal has a better grasp,

typically, of the topics and the material.

But, you know, the argument from a journalist,

the argument from a journalist-

But he’s considered, he’s considered,

within the journalist circle,

he’s considered the conventional wisdom.

I get it, but the argument from a journalist

is that by having that direct access,

that person is also biased.

Because they’re an agent,

because they’re a player on the field,

they do have a point of view

and they do have a direction they want to take things.

So it is a fair commentary

that journalists can theoretically play a role,

which is they’re an off-field analyst

and don’t necessarily bring the bias.

I would argue they’re less educated

and more biased than we are.

That may or may not be true,

what the two of you guys are debating,

which is a very subjective take.

But the thing that is categorical,

and you can’t deny,

is that there is zero checks and balances

when something as simple as the basis point,

percentage point difference,

isn’t caught in proofreading,

isn’t caught by any editor,

isn’t caught by the people that,

you know, help them review this.

And so what that says is,

all kinds of trash must get through.

Because there’s no way for the average person on Twitter

to police all of this nonsensical content.

This one was easy

because it was so numerically illiterate

that it just stood out.

But can you imagine the number of unforced errors

journalists make today in their search for clicks

that don’t get caught out,

that may actually tip somebody to think A versus B?

That’s, I think, the thing that’s kind of undeniable.

You only need to,

there’s a very simple test for this.

If you read the journalists writing about a topic

you are an expert on,

whatever the topic happens to be,

you start to understand,

okay, well, on that story I’m reading,

that they understand about 10 or 20 or 30%

of what’s going on.

But then when you read stories that you’re not involved in,

you know, you read a story about Hollywood or,

I don’t know, pick an industry or a region

you’re not super aware of,

you’re like, okay, well, that must be 100% correct.

And the truth is, journalists have access to five to 20,

there is a name for it, yeah.

It’s called the Gell-Mann amnesia effect.

You just plagiarized Michael Crichton

who came up with that.

Yeah, so you, yeah.

But no, he’s exactly right.

But I think it’s worse than that.

It’s because now the mistakes aren’t being driven

just by sloppiness or laziness or just a lack of expertise.

I think it’s being driven by an agenda.

So just to give you an example on the Slate thing,

the Slate article actually wasn’t bad.

It kind of made us seem, you know, cool.

The sub headline was,

a close listen to all in the infuriating,

fascinating safe space for Silicon Valley’s money men.

Okay.

But the headline changed.

So I don’t know if you guys noticed this.

The headline now is Elon Musk’s inner circle

is telling us exactly what it thinks.

First of all, like they’re trying to-

It’s Elon for clicks.

Yeah, it’s Elon for, so they’re trying way too hard

to like describe us in terms of Elon,

which, you know, is maybe two episodes out of 110.

But before inner circle, the word they used was cronies.

And then somebody edited it because I saw cronies

in like one of those tweet, you know, summaries,

you know, where like it does a capsule or whatever.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And those get frozen in time.

So, you know, they were trying to bash us even harder

and then somebody took another look at it

and toned it down.

Well, here’s what happened.

I’ll tell you what happens in the editorial process.

Whoever writes the article, the article gets submitted.

Maybe it gets edited, proofread, whatever.

Maybe it doesn’t even in some publications

that don’t have the time for it

because they’re in a race.

Then they pick, there’s somebody who’s really good

at social media.

They picked six or seven headlines, they AB test them.

And they even have software for this

where they will run a test.

Sometimes they’ll do a paid test.

They put $5 in ads on social media,

whichever one performs the best,

that’s the one they go with.

So it’s even more cynical.

And because people who read the headlines,

sometimes they don’t read the story, right?

Obviously most people just see the headline,

they interpret that as a story.

That’s why I told you

when they did that new Republic piece on you

with that horrific monstrous monstrosity of an illustration,

don’t worry about it.

People just read the headline.

They know you’re important.

Nobody reads the story anyway.

But it wasn’t a bad article actually.

It was well-written actually, I was in shock.

I was like, who is this writer

that actually took the time to write some prose

that was actually decent?

Yeah, he had listened to a lot of episodes clearly.

That was a really good moment actually.

That was great advice because you gave it to him

and you gave it to me

because both of us had these things

and Jason said the same thing.

Just look at the picture.

And if you’re okay with the picture, just move on.

And I thought, this can’t be true.

And it turned out to mostly be true.

Yeah, but my picture was terrible.

Yeah, but it’s close to reality, so.

I mean, it’s kind of, I mean, oh, geez.

I mean, the person who did the worst there was Peter Thiel.

Poor, poor Peter.

Yeah, but that just shows how ridiculously biased it is,

right?

My picture wasn’t so bad.

Hugh Grant.

Elon, let’s pull that up one more time here.

Elon looks like Hugh Grant.

I just kind of- Yeah, he does.

He does. Kind of not bad.

Kind of looks like Hugh Grant in like, Notting Hill.

I knew that article was gonna be fine

when the first item they presented

as evidence of me doing something wrong

was basically helping to oust Chesa Boudin,

which was something that was supported

by like 70% of San Francisco,

which is a 90% Democratic city.

So not exactly evidence of some, you know,

out of control right-wing movement.

Look at the headline.

The Quiet Political Rise of David Sachs,

Silicon Valley’s Prophet of Urban Doom.

I’m just letting you know,

people don’t get past the sixth word in the image.

It’s 99% of people were like, oh my God,

congrats on the, you know, Republic article.

It could have literally been Laurel,

what do they call them?

Laurel Ipsums, you know?

Like it could have just been filler words

from their second graph down and nobody would know.

Yeah.

But now apparently if you notice

that San Francisco streets look like, you know,

walking dead that apparently you’re a prophet of urban doom.

I mean, people are so out of touch.

I mean, they can’t even acknowledge

what people can see with their own eyes.

That’s the bias that’s gotten crazy.

And I don’t know if you guys saw this

really horrible dystopian video of an art gallery owner

who’s been dealing with owning a storefront

in San Francisco, which is challenging,

having to clean up feces and, you know,

trash and whatever every day.

And I guess the guy snapped and he’s hosing down

a homeless person who refuses to leave

the front of his store.

Oh, I saw that.

I saw that.

Just like the humanity in this is just insane.

Like really like you’re hosing a human being down.

It’s terrible.

Who is obviously not living a great life

and is, you know, in dire straits.

I can feel for both of them, J. Cal.

I can feel for both of them.

I agree that it’s not good to hose a human being down.

On the other hand, think about the sense of frustration

that store owner has,

because he’s watching his business go in the toilet

because he’s got homeless people living in front of him.

So they’re both like being mistreated.

The homeless person is being mistreated.

Say more about the store owner.

Say more.

The homeless person is being mistreated.

The store owner is being mistreated

by the city of San Francisco.

Yeah.

Say more about the store owner.

That person’s not in a privileged position.

The store owner, the store owner,

he’s probably fighting to stay in business.

I’m just saying, I’m not saying that’s right,

but I think-

No, no, I’m just, I’m laying the rope.

No, I mean, look, I’m just saying,

no, what you’re trying to do,

what you’re trying to do is,

oh my God, look at this homeless person

being horribly oppressed.

No, that store owner is a victim too.

Yeah, there’s no doubt.

It’s horrible to run a business.

What is that person supposed to do?

No, wait, this is symbolic of the breaking down

of basic society.

Like, both of these people are obviously like,

it’s just a horrible moment to even witness.

It’s like, oh, it’s like something-

Jason, do you have equal empathy for the store owner

and the homeless person or no?

Under no circumstances should you hose a person down

in the face who is homeless.

Like, it’s just horrific to watch.

It’s just inhumane.

This is a human being.

Now, but as a person who owns a store,

yeah, my dad grew up in the local business.

If people were abusing the store

and you’re trying to make a living

and you’ve got to clean up, you know,

whatever, excrement every day,

which is horrific, yes.

And this thing is dystopian.

In that moment, the empathy is not equal.

I think you have more empathy, obviously,

for the person on the receiving end of that hose.

Okay, but in general,

our society has tons of empathy for homeless people.

We spend billions of dollars trying to solve that problem.

You never hear a thing about the store owners

who are going out of business.

So on a societal level,

you know, not in that moment, but in general,

the lack of empathy is for these middle-class store owners

who may not even be middle-class, working class,

who are struggling to stay afloat.

And you look at something like, what is it,

like a quarter or a third of the storefronts

in San Francisco are now vacant?

The city has destroyed these businesses.

The shocking thing is like,

this person is running an art gallery storefront

in San Francisco.

Like, why would you even bother?

Why would you bother to have a storefront in San Francisco?

I mean, everybody’s left.

It’s just-

What do you mean, why do you bother?

If you’ve opened a store,

what are you supposed to do,

start to code all of a sudden?

Well, no.

I mean, you would shut it down at some point

and find an exit.

And do what?

Yeah, but a store has large fixed costs, right?

So that may be an investment he made 10 years ago.

Exactly.

At some point,

you have to shut down your store in San Francisco

the second you can get out of the lease.

The solution to everything, J. Cal,

isn’t go to coding school online

and then, you know, end up working for Google.

Oh, I didn’t say it was, I’m just…

But moving to another city is a possibility.

So true.

A lot of folks in Silicon Valley,

I think, in this weirdly fucked up way,

do believe the solution to everything is learn to code.

Or become an Uber driver.

Or become a masseuse.

Get a gig job.

Get a gig job.

Or the guy spent years building his retail business.

I mean, the thing is-

And then a homeless person camps in front,

and he calls the police.

The police don’t come and move the homeless person.

The homeless person stays there.

He asks nicely to move.

Customers are uncomfortable going in the store as a result.

Yeah, I stopped going to certain stores in my neighborhood

because of homeless tents being literally fixated

in front of the store.

And I’d go to the store down the road

to get my groceries or whatever.

Like, I mean, it’s not a kind of uncommon situation

for a lot of these small business owners.

They don’t own the real estate.

They’re paying rent.

They’ve got high labor costs.

You know, everything’s inflating.

Generally, city population’s declining.

It’s a brutal situation all around.

I think if everybody learns to code or drives an Uber,

the problem is that in the absence of things

like local stores and small businesses,

you hollow out communities.

You have these random detached places

where you kind of live,

and then you sit in your house,

which becomes a prison while you order food

from an app every day.

I don’t think that is the society that people want.

So I don’t know.

I kind of want small businesses to exist.

And I think that the homeless person should be taken care of,

but the small business person should have the best chance

of trying to be successful,

because it’s hard enough as it is.

The mortality rate of the small business owner

is already 90%.

It’s impossible in San Francisco, let’s just be honest.

So stop genuflecting, Jay Cowell.

I’m not genuflecting.

Listen.

Yeah, you are, because here’s-

Wait, how am I genuflecting?

I’m saying the guy,

I’m just shocked that the guy even has a storefront.

I would have left a long time ago.

You’re showing a tweet that’s a moment in time,

and you’re not showing the 10 steps that led up to it.

Oh, 1,000 steps.

The five times he called the police

to do something about it.

I framed it as dystopian from the get.

The lost customers.

The stuff that Freeberg and Chamath

were just talking about.

Or maybe there was physical conflict

that we didn’t see in that,

you know, and he’s resolving it.

I don’t know, who knows, man.

It’s really hard to look at these videos

and know what’s going on.

It’s awful to see, but man, we don’t know.

It’s awful.

And actually, you want to know another reason

why we can’t solve this problem?

It’s just the language we use around it.

The fundamental problem here is not homeless.

No, it’s addiction.

It’s addiction, and it’s mental illness.

Schellenberger’s done the work.

It’s like he said, 99% of the people he talks to,

it’s either mental illness or addiction.

But we keep using this word homeless

to describe the problem.

But the issue here is not the lack of housing,

although that’s a separate problem in California,

but it’s basically the lack of treatment.

Totally.

So we should be calling them treatmentless.

And mandates around this because-

Well, and enforcement.

You cannot have a super drug be available

for a nominal price and give people,

you know, a bunch of money to come here

and take it and not enforce it.

You have to draw the line at Fentanyl.

I’m sorry, Fentanyl is a super drug.

There’s three alternatives.

There’s mandated rehab, mandated mental health,

or jail, or, you know, housing services.

If you’re not breaking the law, you don’t have mental illness,

you don’t have drug addiction.

And then provide, those are the four paths

of outcome here of success.

And if all four of those paths were both mandated

and available in abundance,

this could be a tractable problem.

Unfortunately, the mandate, I mean,

you guys remember that Kevin Bacon movie

where Kevin Bacon was locked up in a mental institution,

but he wasn’t like, he wasn’t mentally ill.

It’s a famous story.

It’s a famous- Footloose?

What’s that?

Footloose.

No.

It’s a famous story.

I think you guys, someone’s probably gonna

call me an idiot for messing this whole thing up.

But I think there’s a story

where mandated mental health services,

like locking people up to take care of them

when they have mental health issues like this,

became kind of inhumane.

And a lot of the institutions were shut down

and a lot of the laws were overturned.

And there are many of these cases that happened

where they came across as like torturous

to what happened to people that weren’t mentally ill.

And so the idea was like,

let’s just abandon the entire approach.

One flew over the cuckoo’s nest?

You think about one flew over the cuckoo’s nest?

Yeah.

Well, that’s another one, right?

And it’s unfortunate, but I think that there’s some,

you know, we talk a lot about nuance and gray areas,

but there’s certainly some solution here

that isn’t black or white.

It’s not about not having mandated mental health services,

and it’s not about locking everyone up

that has some slight problem,

but there’s some solution here that needs to be crafted

where you don’t let people suffer

and you don’t let people suffer

both as the victim on the street,

but also the victim in the community.

You’re talking about a 51-50, I think,

like when people are held because they’re a danger

to themselves or others kind of thing.

Right, but Jacob,

let’s think about the power of language here.

If we refer to these people as untreated persons,

instead of homeless persons,

and that was the coverage 24-7 in the media

is this is an untreated person.

The whole policy prescription would be completely different.

We’d realize there’s a shortage of treatment.

We’d realize there’s a shortage of remedies

related to getting people in treatment

as opposed to building housing, but why-

And laws that mandate it, that don’t enable it,

because if you don’t mandate it,

then you enable the free reign

and the free living on the street

and the open drug markets and all this sort of stuff.

There’s a really easy test for this.

If it was yourself and you were addicted,

or if it was a loved one,

it’s one of your immediate family members,

would you want yourself or somebody else

to be picked up off the street

and held with a 51-50 or whatever code

involuntarily against their will

because they were a danger?

Would you want them to be allowed to remain on the street?

Would you want yourself if you were in that dire straits?

And the answer, of course,

is you would want somebody to intervene-

But what’s the liberal policy perspective

on this, J. Cal?

So let me ask you as our diehard liberal on this show-

No, I’m not a diehard liberal, no.

No, he’s an independent and only votes for Democrats.

Please get it right.

75% of the time I voted Democrat, 25% Republican.

Independent votes for Democrats, okay.

25% Republicans.

Is it not that your individual liberties

are infringed upon if you were to be,

quote, picked up and put away?

You know, my position on it

is if you’re not thinking straight

and you’re high on fentanyl,

you’re not thinking for yourself

and you could lose the liberty

for a small period of time, 72 hours a week.

You know, especially if you’re a danger to somebody,

you know, yourself or other people.

And in this case, if you’re on fentanyl,

if you’re on meth, you’re a danger to society.

I mean, I think if more people had that,

if more people had that point of view

and had that debate, as Saxe is saying,

in a more open way,

you could get to some path to resolution on-

Just not in San Francisco.

It’s not how it happens.

So you guys know this, we won’t say who it is,

but someone in my family

has some pretty severe mental health issues.

And the problem is,

because they’re an adult,

you can’t get them to get any form of treatment whatsoever.

Right, right.

You only have the nuclear option.

And the nuclear option is you basically

take that person to court

and try to seize their power of attorney,

which is essentially saying that, you know-

Individual liberties are gone.

Yeah.

And by the way, it is so unbelievably restrictive

what happens if you lose that power of attorney

and somebody else has it over you.

It’s just a huge burden that

the legal system makes extremely difficult.

And the problem-

Well, that’s why the law is a backstop.

You know, if the person’s committing something illegal,

like camping out or doing fentanyl, meth, whatever,

you can use the law as the backstop, you know,

against personal liberty. You can’t use the law.

All that person can do is really get arrested.

Even that is not a high enough bar

to actually get power of attorney over somebody.

The other thing that I just wanted you guys to know,

I think you know this,

but just a little historical context,

is a lot of this crisis in mental health started

because Reagan defunded all the psychiatric hospitals.

He emptied them in California and that compounded,

because for whatever reason,

his ideology was that these things

should be treated in a different way.

And when he got to the presidency,

one of the things that he did was

he repealed the Mental Health-

I think it’s called the Mental Health Systems Act, MHSA,

which completely broke down

some pretty landmark legislation on mental health.

And I don’t think we’ve ever really recovered

in that we’re now 42 years onward from 1980,

but, or 43 years onward.

But just something for you guys to know that that’s-

Well.

Reagan had a lot of positives,

but that’s one definitely negative check in my book

against his legacy is his stance

on mental health in general

and what he did to defund mental health.

Well, let me make two points there.

So, I’m not defending that specific decision.

There were a bunch of scandals in the 1970s

and epitomized by the movie,

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest with Jack Nicholson,

about the conditions in these mental health homes.

And that did create a groundswell

to change laws around that.

But I think this idea that somehow Reagan is to blame

when he hasn’t been in office for 50 years,

as opposed to the politicians

who’ve been in office for the last 20 years,

I just think it’s letting them off the hook.

I mean, Gavin Newsom, 10, 15 years ago,

when he was mayor of San Francisco,

declared that he would end homelessness within 10 years.

He just made another declaration like that as governor.

So, I just feel like-

I’m not saying it’s Reagan’s fault.

I’m just saying-

Well, I just think it’s interesting historical moment.

I think it’s letting the politicians off the hook.

Society needs to start thinking about changing priorities.

We didn’t have this problem

of massive numbers of people living on the streets

10, 15 years ago.

It was a much smaller problem.

And I think a lot of it has to do with fentanyl.

The power of these drugs has increased massively.

There’s other things going on here.

So, in any event, I mean,

you can question what Reagan did

in light of current conditions,

but I think this problem really started

in the last 10, 15 years.

It’s like in an order of magnitude bigger way.

These are super drugs until people realize

like these are a different class of drugs

and they start treating them as such.

It’s gonna just get worse.

There’s no path.

Oh, as far as I know,

Reagan didn’t hand out to these addicts $800 a week

to feed their addiction

so they can live on the streets of San Francisco.

That is the current policy of the city.

I hear you.

All I just wanted to just provide

was just that color that we had a system of funding

for the mental health infrastructure,

particularly local mental health infrastructure.

And we took that back and then we never came forward.

And all I was saying is I’m just telling you

where that decision was.

I think that’s part of the solution here is,

we’re gonna have to basically build up shelters.

We’re gonna have to build up homes.

And to support your point,

the problem now, for example,

is Gavin Newsom says a lot of these things

and now he’s gone from a massive surplus

to a $25 billion deficit overnight,

which we talked about even a year ago

because that was just the law of numbers

catching up with the state of California.

And he’s not in a position now to do any of this stuff.

So this whole problem may get worse.

Well, they did appropriate,

I forget the number,

it’s like 10 billion or something out of that,

huge budget they had to solve the problem of homelessness.

I would just argue they’re not tackling it in the right way

because what happened is there’s a giant special interest

that formed around this problem,

which is the building industry

who gets these contracts to build the quote,

affordable housing or the-

Homeless industrial complex is insane.

They end up building 10 units at a time on Venice beach,

like the most expensive land you could possibly build

because you get these contracts from the government.

So there’s now a giant special interest in lobby

that’s formed around this.

If you really want to solve the problem,

you wouldn’t be building housing on Venice beach,

you’d be going to cheap land just outside the city

and you’d be building scale shelters.

I mean, shelters that can house 10,000 people,

not 10, and you’d be having treatment services.

But they also have to get treatment, yes.

But with treatment built into them, right?

You’d be solving this problem at scale

and that’s not what they’re doing.

By the way, do you guys want to hear this week in grift?

Sure, we’re all in.

That’s a great example of grift.

I read something today in Bloomberg that was unbelievable.

There’s about $2 trillion of debt

owned by the developing world

that has been classified by a nonprofit,

the Nature Conservancy in this case,

as eligible for what they called nature swaps.

So this is 2 trillion of the umpteen trillions of debt

that’s about to get defaulted on by countries like Belize,

Ecuador, Sri Lanka, Seychelles, you name it.

And what happens now are the big bulge bracket,

Wall Street banks and the Nature Conservancy

goes to these countries and says, listen,

you have a billion dollar tranche of debt

that’s about to go upside down

and you’re gonna be in default with the IMF,

we’ll let you off the hook.

And we will negotiate with those bondholders

to give them 50 cents on the dollar.

But in return, you have to promise

to take some of that savings and protect the rainforest

or protect a coral reef or protect some mangrove trees.

All sounds good.

Except then what these folks do

is they take that repackaged debt,

they call it ESG, they mark it back up

and then they sell it to folks like BlackRock

who have decided that they must own this in the portfolio.

So it literally just goes from one sleeve of BlackRock,

which is now marked toxic emerging market debt,

and then it gets into someone’s 401k as ESG debt.

Is that unbelievable?

So you convert your signal and buy some ESG

to make yourself feel good, yeah.

$2 trillion of this paper.

Here’s all you have to know about ESG

is that Exxon is like the number seven,

like top ranked company according to ESG

and Tesla is even on the list.

Disastrous.

Right.

How crazy is that?

It’s a complete scam.

All of those, we’ve said this many times,

but each of those letters individually mean so much

and should be worth a lot to a lot of people.

But when you stick them together,

it creates this toxic soup

where you can just hide the cheese.

Yeah, I mean, governance is important in companies.

Of course, the environment is important.

Social change is important.

I mean, but why are these things grouped together in this?

It just perverts the whole thing.

It’s an industry, J. Cal.

It’s an industry of consultants.

Absolutely.

All right, speaking of grifts,

Microsoft is going to put $10 billion or something

into chat GPT.

Degenerate AI, as I’m calling it now,

is the hottest thing in Silicon Valley.

The technology is incredible.

I mean, you can question the business model maybe,

but the technology is pretty.

So what I’d say is $29 billion for a company

that’s losing a billion dollars in Azure credits a year.

That’s one way to look at it.

That’s also a naive way to look at a lot of other businesses

that ended up being worth a lot down the road.

Sure.

You can model out the future of a business like this

and create a lot of really compelling big outcomes.

Potentially, yeah.

So Microsoft is close to investing 10 billion in open AI

in a very convoluted transaction

that people are trying to understand.

It turns out that they might wind up owning 59% of open AI,

but get 75% of the cash and profits back over time.

49%.

49%, yeah, of open AI.

But they would get paid back the $10 billion

over some amount of time.

And this obviously includes Azure credits and chat GPT.

As everybody knows, this just incredible demonstration

of what AI can do in terms of text-based creation

of content and answering queries

is taking the net by storm.

People are really inspired by it.

Sax, do you think that this is

a defensible, real technology,

or do you think this is like a crazy hype cycle?

Well, it’s definitely the next VC hype cycle.

Everyone’s kind of glomming onto this

because VC really right now needs a savior.

Just look at the public markets,

everything we’re investing in is in the toilets.

So we all really wanna believe

that this is gonna be the next wave.

And just because something is a VC hype cycle

doesn’t mean that it’s not true.

So as I think one of our friends pointed out,

mobile turned out to be very real.

I think cloud turned out to be, I’d say, very real.

Social was sort of real in the sense

that it did lead to a few big winners.

On the other hand, web three and crypto

was a hype cycle and it’s turned into a big bust.

VR falls into the hype cycle.

I think VR is probably a hype cycle so far.

No one can even explain what web three is.

In terms of AI, I think that if I had to guess,

I would say the hype is real

in terms of its technological potential.

However, I’m not sure about how much potential

there is yet for VCs to participate

because right now it seems like

this is something that’s gonna be done

by really big companies.

So open AI is basically a,

it looks like kind of a Microsoft proxy.

You’ve got Google, I’m sure will develop it

through their DeepMind asset.

You know, I’m sure Facebook

is gonna do something huge in AI.

So what I don’t know is, is this really a platform

that startups are gonna be able to benefit from?

I will say that some of the companies we’ve invested in

are starting to use these tools.

So I guess where I am is,

I think the technology is actually exciting.

I wouldn’t go overboard on the valuations.

So I wouldn’t buy into that level of hype.

But you think there could be hundreds of companies

built around an API for something like ChatGPT, Dolly?

Maybe, yeah.

I don’t think startups are gonna be able

to create the AI themselves,

but they might be able to benefit from the APIs.

Maybe that’s the thing.

That’s the thing that has to be proven out.

There’s a lot of really fantastic machine learning

services available through cloud vendors today, right?

So Azure has been one of these kind of vendors

and obviously OpenAI is building tools

a little bit further down on the stack.

But there’s a lot of tooling that can be used

for specific vertical applications.

Obviously the acquisition of InstaDeep by BioNTech

is a really solid example.

And most of the big dollars

that are flowing in biotech right now

are flowing into machine learning applications

where there’s some vertical application

of machine learning tooling and techniques

around some specific problem set.

And the problem set of mimicking human communication

and doing generative media is a consumer application set

that has a whole bunch

of really interesting product opportunities.

But let’s not kind of be blind to the fact

that nearly every other industry

and nearly every other vertical is being transformed today

and there’s active progress being made in funding

and getting liquidity on companies

and progress with actual products being driven

by machine learning systems.

And there’s a lot of great examples of this.

So the fundamental capabilities of large data sets

and then using these kind of learning techniques

in software and statistical models

to make kind of predictions and drive businesses forward

in a way that they’re not able to

with just human knowledge and human capability alone

is really real and it’s here today.

And so I think let’s not get caught up in the fact

that there’s this really interesting

consumer market hype cycle going on

where these tools are not being kind of validated

and generating real value

across many other verticals and segments.

Chamath, when you look at this Microsoft OpenAI deal

and you see something that’s this convoluted,

hard to understand, what does that signal to you

as a capital allocator and company builder?

I would put deals into two categories.

One is easy and straightforward.

And then two is, you know, cute by half

or, you know, the two hard bucket.

This is clearly in that second category,

but it doesn’t mean that-

Why is it in that category?

Well, it doesn’t mean that it won’t work.

In our group chat with the rest of the guys,

one person said, there’s a lot of complex law

when you go from a nonprofit to a for-profit,

there’s lots of complexity in deal construction.

The original investors have certain things

that they want to see.

There may or may not be, you know, legal issues at play here

that you encapsulated well in the last episode.

I think there’s a lot of stuff we don’t know.

So I think it’s important to just like,

give those folks the benefit of the doubt.

But yeah, if you’re asking me,

it’s in the two hard bucket for me to really take seriously.

Now, that being said, it’s not like I got shown the deal.

So I can’t comment.

Here’s what I will say.

The first part of what Zach said,

that I think is really important

for entrepreneurs to internalize,

which is where can we make money?

The reality is that, well, let me just take a prediction.

I think that Google will open source their models

because the most important thing that Google can do

is reinforce the value of search.

And the best way to do that

is to scorch the earth with these models,

which is to make them widely available

and as free as possible.

That will cause Microsoft to have to catch up.

And that will cause Facebook

to have to really look in the mirror

and decide whether they’re going to cap

the betting that they’ve made on AR VR

and reallocate very aggressively to AI.

I mentioned this in the, I did this Lex Friedman podcast,

but that should be what Facebook does.

And the reason is if Facebook and Google and Microsoft

have roughly the same capability and the same model,

there’s an element of machine learning

that I think is very important,

which is called reinforcement learning.

And specifically it’s reinforcement learning

from human feedback, right?

So these RLHF pipelines,

these are the things that will make your stuff unique.

So if you’re a startup,

you can build a reinforcement learning pipeline.

How?

You build a product that captures a bunch of usage.

We talked about this before.

That data set is unique to you as a company.

You can feed that into these models,

get back better answers.

You can make money from it.

Facebook has an enormous amount

of reinforcement learning inside of Facebook.

Every click, every comment, every like, every share.

Twitter has that data set.

Google inside of Gmail and search.

Microsoft inside of Minecraft and Hotmail.

So my point is David’s right.

The huge companies, I think, will create the substrates.

And I think there’ll be forced to scorch the earth

and give it away for free.

And then on top of that is where you can make money.

And I would just encourage entrepreneurs to think,

where is my edge in creating a data set

that I can use for reinforcement learning?

That I think is interesting.

That’s kind of saying,

I buy the ingredients from the supermarket,

but then I can still construct a dish that’s unique.

And the salt is there, the pepper is there,

but how I use that will determine

whether you like the thing or not.

And I think that that is the way

that I think we need to start thinking about it.

Interestingly, as we’ve all pointed out here,

OpenAI was started as a nonprofit.

The stated philosophy was this technology is too powerful

for any company to own.

Therefore, we’re going to make it open source.

And then somewhere in the last couple of years,

they said, well, you know what?

Actually, it’s too powerful

for it to be out there in the public.

We need to make this a private company,

and we need to get $10 billion from Microsoft.

That is the disconnect I am trying to understand.

That’s the most interesting part of the story, Jason.

I think if you go back to 2014,

it’s when Google bought DeepMind.

And immediately, everyone started reacting

to a company as powerful as Google,

having a toolkit and a team as powerful

as DeepMind within them.

That sort of power should not sit in anyone’s hands.

I heard people that I’m close with

that are close to the organization and the company

comment that they thought this is the most

kind of scary, threatening, biggest threat to humanity

is Google’s control of DeepMind.

And that was a naive kind of point of view,

but it was one that was deeply held by a lot of people.

So Reid Hoffman, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk,

a lot of these guys funded

the original kind of OpenAI business in 2015.

And here’s the link.

So I’m putting it out here.

You guys can pull up the original blog post.

Do all those people who donated get stock in OpenAI?

So what happened was it was all in a nonprofit.

And then the nonprofit owned stock

in a commercial business now.

But your point is interesting,

because at the beginning, the idea was

instead of having Google own all of this,

we’ll make it all available.

And here’s the statement

from the original blog post in 2015.

OpenAI is a nonprofit AI research company.

Our goal is to advance digital intelligence

in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity

as a whole, unconstrained

by a need to generate financial return.

Since our research is free from financial obligations,

we can better focus on a positive human impact.

And they kind of went on and the whole thing

about Sam, Greg, Elon, Reid, Jessica,

Peter Thiel, AWS, YC are all donating to support OpenAI,

including donations and commitments of over a billion

dollars, although we expect that to only be

a tiny fraction of what we will spend

in the next few years,

which is a really interesting kind of,

if you look back historical perspective

on how this thing all started seven years ago,

and how quickly it’s evolved, as you point out,

into the necessity to have a real commercial alignment

to drive this thing forward without seeing

any of these models open sourced.

And during that same period of time,

we’ve seen Google share AlphaFold

and share a number of predictive models

and toolkits and make them publicly available

and put them in Google’s cloud.

And so there’s both kind of tooling and models

and outputs of those models that Google has open sourced

and made freely available.

And meanwhile, OpenAI has kind of diverged

into this deeply profitable, profit-seeking

kind of enterprise model.

And when you invest in OpenAI in the round

that they did before, you could generate

a financial return capped at 100X,

which is still a pretty amazing financial return.

You put a billion dollars in,

you can make a hundred billion dollars.

That’s funding a real commercial endeavor at that point.

Well, and then to-

It is the most striking question about this whole thing,

about what’s going on in our AI.

And it’s one that Elon’s talked about publicly

and others have kind of sat on one side or the other,

which is that AI offers a glimpse

into one of the biggest

and most kind of existential threats to humanity.

And the question we’re all gonna be tackling

and the battle that’s gonna be happening politically

and regulatory-wise, and perhaps even between nations

in the years to come, is who owns the AI?

Who owns the models?

What can they do with it?

And what are we legally gonna be allowed to do with it?

And this is a really important part of that story, yeah.

To build on what you’re saying,

I just put in PyTorch, for people who don’t know,

that’s another framework, P-Y-T-O-R-C-H.

This was, you know, largely built inside of Facebook.

And then Facebook said,

hey, we want to democratize machine learning.

And they made, and I think they put a bunch of executives,

they may have even funded those executives

to go work on this open-source project.

So they have a huge stake in this,

and they went very open-source with it.

And then TensorFlow, which you have an investment in,

Chamath, TensorFlow was inside of-

No, no, I don’t have an investment in TensorFlow.

We built-

No, no, TensorFlow, the public source,

came out of Google,

and then you invested in another company.

Well, we’re building Silicon for machine learning.

That’s different.

Yes, right.

But it’s based on TensorFlow.

No, no, no, no, the founder of this company

was the founder of TensorFlow.

Oh, got it, okay.

Sorry, not of TensorFlow, pardon me, of TPU,

which was Google’s internal Silicon

that they built to accelerate TensorFlow.

Right.

If that makes sense.

And so that’s the, you know,

I don’t mean to be cynical about the whole project or not,

it’s just the confounding part of this

and what is happening here.

It reminds me, I don’t know if you remember this,

Chamath, and we were on AOL.

The biggest opportunity here is for Facebook.

I mean, they need to get in this conversation, ASAP.

I mean, to think that, like, look,

PyTorch was like a pretty seminal piece of technology

that a lot of folks in AI and machine learning

were using for a long time.

TensorFlow before that.

And what’s so funny about like Google and Facebook

is they’re a little bit kind of like,

they’re not really making that much progress.

I mean, Facebook released this kind of like

rando version of AlphaFold recently.

It’s not that good.

I think these companies really need to get these products

in the wild as soon as possible.

It cannot be the case that you have to email people

and get on some list.

I mean, this is Google and Facebook, guys, come on.

Get going.

This is the, I think the big innovation of OpenAI,

SACS, to bring you in the conversation.

They actually made an interface

and let the public play with it

to the tune of $3 million a day in cloud credits or costs.

Which, you know.

By the way, just on that, my son was telling me,

he’s like, hey, dad, do you want me to tell you

when the best time to use chat GPT is?

I’m like, huh?

He’s like, yeah, my friends and I have tried,

we’ve been using it so much.

We know now when we can actually get resources.

Oh, wow.

And it’s such an interesting thing

where like a 13-year-old kid knows, you know,

when it’s mostly compute intensive that it’s unusable

and when to come back and use it.

It’s incredible.

When’s the last time SACS, the technology,

became this mainstream

and captured people’s imagination this broadly?

Let’s check GPT is.

It’s been a while.

I don’t know.

Maybe the iPhone or something.

Yeah, look, it’s powerful.

There’s no question it’s powerful.

I mean, I’m of two minds about it

because whenever something is the hype cycle,

I just reflexively want to be skeptical of it.

But on the other hand,

we have made a few investments in this area.

And I mean, I think it is powerful

and it’s going to be an enabler

of some really cool things to come.

There’s no question about it.

I have two pieces of more insider information.

One, I have a chat GPT iOS app on my phone.

One of the nice folks at OpenAI

included me in the test flight.

And it’s the simplest interface you’ve ever seen,

but basically you type in your question,

but it keeps your history.

And then you can search your history.

So it looks, SACS, like you’re in iMessage, basically,

and it has your threads.

And so I asked him,

hey, what are the best restaurants in Yawnville,

in a town near Napa?

And then I said, which one has the best duck?

And it literally like gave me a great answer.

And then I thought, wait a second,

why is this not using a Siri or Alexa-like interface?

And then why isn’t it, oh, here’s a video of it.

I gave the video to Nick.

By the way, Jason, this, what you’re doing right now

is you’re creating a human feedback

reinforcement learning pipeline for chat GPT.

So just the fact that you asked that question,

and, you know, over time,

if chat GPT has access to your GPS information

and then knows that you went to restaurant A versus B,

it can intuit, and it may actually prompt you to ask,

hey, Jason, we noticed you were in the area.

Did you go to Bottega?

If you did, how would you rate it one through five?

That reinforcement learning now allows the next person

that asks, what are the top five restaurants,

to say, well, you know,

over a thousand people that have asked this question,

here’s actually the best answer

versus a generic rank of the open web,

which is what the first data set is.

That’s what’s so interesting about this.

So this is why, if you’re a company

that already owns the eyeballs,

you have to be running to get this stuff out there.

Well, and then this answer, you know, cited Yelp.

Well, this is the first time

I’ve actually seen chat GPT cite,

and this is, I think, a major legal breakthrough.

It didn’t put a link in,

but if it’s gonna use Yelp’s data,

I don’t know if they have permission from Yelp,

but it’s quoting Yelp here,

it should link to French Laundry Bottega and Bouchon.

Bouchon actually has the best duck confit for the record,

and I did have that duck,

so I asked this afterwards to see,

you know, in a scenario like this,

but it could also, if I was talking to it,

I could say, hey, which one has availability this afternoon

or tomorrow for dinner,

and make the phone call for me like Google Assistant does,

or any number of next tasks.

This was an incredibly powerful display in a 1.0 product.

I was thinking about what you said last week,

and I thought back to the music industry

in the world of Napster,

and what happened was there was a lot of musicians,

I think Metallica being the most famous one,

famously suing Napster because it was like,

hey, listen, you’re allowing people to take my content,

which they would otherwise pay for.

There’s economic damage that I can measure.

That legal argument was meaningful enough

that ultimately Napster was shut down.

Now, there are other versions of that

that folks created, including us at Winamp.

We created a headless version of that,

but if you translate that problem set here,

is there a claim that Yelp can make in this example

that they’re losing money?

That, you know, if you were going through Google

or if you are going through their app,

there’s the sponsored link revenue

and the advertising revenue that they would have got

that they wouldn’t get from here.

Now, that doesn’t mean that Chad GPT can’t figure that out,

but it’s those kinds of problems

that are gonna be a little thorny in these next few years

that have to really get figured out.

This is a-

If you are a human reading every review on Yelp about duck,

then you could write a blog post in which you say

many reviewers on Yelp say that Bouchon is the best duck.

So the question is like, is GPT held to that standard

or is it- Yeah, exactly.

Or something different?

And is linking to it enough?

This is the question that I’m asking.

I don’t know.

It should be.

I’ll argue it should be

because if you look at the four-part test for fair use,

which I had to go through

because blogging had the same issue.

We would write a blog post

and we would mention Walt Mossberg’s review of a product

and somebody else’s.

And then people would say,

oh, I don’t need to read Walt Mossberg’s

Indiana Wall Street Journal subscription.

And we’d say, well, we’re doing an original work.

We’re comparing two or three different,

you know, human is comparing two or three different reviews

and we’re adding something to it.

It’s a, you know, it’s not a,

it’s not interfering with Walt Mossberg’s ability

to get subscribers in the Wall Street Journal.

But the effect on the potential market

is one of the four tests.

And just reading from Stanford’s quote on fair use,

another important fair use factor

is whether your use deprives the copyright owner of income

or undermines a newer potential market

for the copyrighted work.

Depriving a copyright owner of income

is very likely to trigger a lawsuit.

This is true even if you are not competing directly

with the original work.

And we’ll put the link to Stanford here.

This is the key issue.

And I would not use Yelp.

In this example, I would not open the Yelp app.

Yelp would get no commerce and Yelp would lose this.

So ChatGPT and all these services must use citations

of where they got the original work.

They must link to them and they must get permission.

That’s where this is all going to shake out.

And I believe that’s-

Well, forget about permission.

I mean, you can’t get a big enough data set

if you have to get permission in advance, right?

You have to go out and negotiate.

It’s going to be the large data sets.

Quora, Yelp, the App Store reviews, Amazon’s reviews.

So there are large corpuses of data that you would need.

Like Craigslist has famously never allowed anybody

to scrape Craigslist.

The amount of data inside Craigslist,

but one example of a data set,

would be extraordinary to build ChatGPT on.

ChatGPT is not allowed to,

because as you brought up robots.txt last week,

there’s going to need to be an AI.txt.

Are you allowed to use my data set in AI and under,

and how will I be compensated for it?

I’ll allow you to use Craigslist,

but you have to link to the original post

and you have to note that.

The other gray area that isn’t there today,

but may emerge is when section 230 gets rewritten.

Because if they take the protections away

for the Facebook and the Googles of the world,

for the basically for being an algorithmic publisher

and saying an algorithm is equivalent to a publisher.

What it essentially saying is that an algorithm

is kind of like doing the work of a human

in a certain context.

And I wonder whether that’s also an angle here,

which now this algorithm, which today,

David, you said the example,

I read all these blog posts, I write something.

But if an algorithm does it, maybe can you then say,

no, actually there was intent there that’s different

than if a human were to do it.

My point is very complicated issues

that are going to get sorted out.

And I think the problem with the hype cycle

is that you’re going to have to marry it

with an economic model for VCs to really make money.

And right now there’s just too much betting on the come.

So to the extent you’re going to invest,

it makes sense that you put money into open AI

because that’s safe.

Because the economic model of how you make money

for everybody else is so unclear.

No, it’s clear, actually, I have it for business.

I just signed up for ChatGPT Premium.

They had a survey that they shared on their Discord server

and I filled out the survey

and they did a price discovery survey, Friedberg.

What’s the least you would pay, the most you would pay,

what would be too cheap of a price for ChatGPT Pro

and what would be too high of a price?

I put in like 50 bucks a month would be what I would pay.

But I was just thinking, imagine ChatGPT allowed you,

Friedberg, to have a Slack channel called Research

and you could go in there or anytime you’re in Slack,

you do slash chat or slash ChatGPT

and you say slash ChatGPT tell me,

you know, what are the venues available in,

which we did this actually for,

I did this for Venues for a Long Summer.

I can say, what are the venues

that seat over 3000 people in Vegas?

And it just gave us the answer.

Okay, well, that was the job of the local event planner.

They had that list.

Now you can pull that list

from a bunch of different sources.

What would you pay for that?

A lot.

Well, I think one of the big things that’s happening

is all the old business models don’t make sense anymore

in a world where the software is no longer

just doing what it’s done for the last 60 years,

which is what is historically defined

as information retrieval.

So you have this kind of hierarchical storage of data

that you have some index against

and then you go and you search and you pull data out

and then you present that data back to the customer

or the user of the software.

And that’s effectively been how all kind of data

has been utilized in all systems

for the past 60 years in computing.

Largely, what we’ve really done

is kind of built an evolution of application layers

or software tools to interface with the fetching

of that data, the retrieval of that data

and the display of that data.

But what these systems are now doing,

what AI type systems or machine learning systems now do

is the synthesis of that data

and the representation of some synthesis of that data

to you the user in a way that doesn’t necessarily

look anything like the original data

that was used to make that synthesis.

And that’s where business models like a Yelp, for example,

or like a web crawler that crawls the web

and then presents webpage directories to you.

Those sorts of models no longer make sense

in a world where the software,

the signal to noise is now greater.

The signal is greater than the noise

and being able to present to you a synthesis of that data

and basically resolve what your objective is

with your own consumption and interpretation of that data,

which is how you’ve historically used these systems.

And I think that’s where there’s,

going back to the question of the hype cycle,

I don’t think it’s about being a hype cycle.

I think it’s about the investment opportunity

against fundamentally rewriting all compute tools.

Because if all compute tools ultimately can use

this capability in their interface and in their modeling,

then it very much changes everything.

And one of the advantages that I think

businesses are gonna latch onto,

which we talked about historically,

is novelty in their data in being able to build new systems

and new models that aren’t generally available.

Example?

In biotech and pharma, for example,

having screening results from very expensive experiments,

and running lots of experiments,

and having a lot of data against those experiments,

gives a company an advantage

in being able to do things like drug discovery,

and we’re gonna talk about that in a minute,

versus everyone using publicly known screening libraries

or publicly available protein modeling libraries,

and then screening against those,

and then everyone’s got the same candidates

and the same targets and the same clinical objectives

that they’re gonna try and resolve from that output.

So I think novelty in data

is one way that advantage kind of arises.

But really, that’s just kind of, where’s there an edge?

But fundamentally, every business model can

and will need to be rewritten

that’s dependent on the historical,

on the legacy of kind of information retrieval

as the core of what computing is used to do.

Saks, on my other podcast,

I was having a discussion with Molly

about the legal profession.

What impact would it be if ChantGPT took every court case,

every argument, every document,

and somebody took all of those legal cases

on the legal profession,

and then the filing of a lawsuit,

the defending of a lawsuit,

public defenders, prosecutors,

but what data could you figure out?

Like, just to think of the recent history,

look at Chesa Boudin.

You could literally take every case,

every argument he did, put it through it,

and say, you know, versus an outcome in another state,

and you could figure out what’s actually going on

with this technology.

What impact did this have on the legal field?

You are a non-practicing attorney.

You have a legal degree.

I never practiced, other than one summer at a law firm.

But no, I think-

Did you pass the bar?

What’s that?

I did pass the bar.

Yes.

First try.

Yes, of course.

First try?

Of course, yeah, come on, man.

You gotta be kind of dumb to fail the bar exam.

Look at Saks rolling his eyes.

Yes, I went to Stanford, dude.

I’m rated 1800.

It took two days of studying, come on.

I may not have passed the bar, but I know a little shit,

enough to know that you can’t legally-

No, look, I would be curious in terms of-

Coach a lot?

A very common question

that an associate at a law firm would get asked

would be something like, you know,

summarize the legal precedence in favor of X, right?

And that, you could imagine GPT doing that, like, instantly.

Now, I think that the question about that,

I think there’s two questions.

One is, can you prompt GPT in the right way

to get the answer you want?

And I think, you know, Chamath,

you shared a really interesting video

showing that people are developing some skills

around knowing how to ask GPT questions in the right way.

Exact prompt engineering.

Why?

Because GPT is a command line interface.

So, if you ask GPT a simple question

about what’s the best restaurant in, you know, Napa,

it knows how to answer that.

But there are much more complicated questions

that you kind of need to know

how to prompt it in the right way.

So, it’s not clear to me that a command line interface

is the best way of doing that.

I could imagine apps developing

that create more of like a GUI.

So, we’re an investor, for example, in Copy AI,

which is doing this for copywriters and marketers,

helping them write blog posts and emails.

And so, you know, imagine putting that, like, you know,

GUI on top of Chad GPT.

They’ve already been kind of doing this.

So, I think that’s part of it.

I think the other part of it is on the answer side,

you know, how accurate is it?

Because in some professions,

having 90 or 95 or 99% accuracy is okay.

But in other professions, you need six nines accuracy,

meaning 99.9999% accuracy, okay?

So, I think for a lawyer going into court,

you know, you probably need, I don’t know.

I mean, it depends on the brief, on the question.

Versus a murder trial is two very different things.

Yeah, exactly.

So, is 99% accuracy good enough?

Is 95% accuracy good enough?

I would say probably for a court case,

95% is probably not good enough.

I’m not sure GPT’s at even 95% yet.

But could it be helpful?

Like, could the associates start with Chad GPT,

get an answer, and then validate it?

Probably, yeah.

If you had a bunch of associates

bang on some law model for a year,

again, that’s that reinforcement learning

we just talked about.

I think you’d get precision recall off the charts,

and it would be perfect.

By the way, just a cute thing.

I don’t know if you guys got this email.

It came about an hour ago from Reid Hoffman.

And Reid said to me,

Hey, Chamath, I created Fireside Chatbots,

a special podcast miniseries

where I will be having a set of conversations

with Chad GPT.

So, you can go to YouTube, by the way,

and see Reid having,

and he’s a very smart guy,

so this should be kind of cool.

And by the way, Chad GPT will have an AI-generated voice

powered by the text-to-speech platform Play.ht.

Go to YouTube if you want to see Reid

have a conversation with Chad GPT.

I mean, Chamath, we have a conversation

with the two Davids every week.

What’s the difference?

We know how this is going to turn out.

Hey, but actually, so synthesizing Chamath’s point

about reinforcement learning

with something you said, Jkal, in our chat,

which I actually thought was pretty smart.

Well, that’s a first.

Yeah, so I’m going to give you credit here

because I don’t think you’ve said it on this episode,

which is you said that these open AI capabilities

are eventually going to become commoditized

or certainly much more widely available.

I don’t know if that means

that they’ll be totally commoditized

or there’ll be four players,

but there’ll be multiple players that offer them.

And you said the real advantage will come from

applications that are able to get ahold

of proprietary data sets

and then use those proprietary data sets

to generate insights.

And then layering on what Chamath said

about reinforcement learning,

if you can be the first out there

in a given vertical with a proprietary data set,

and then you get the advantage,

the moat of reinforcement learning,

that would be the way to create,

I think, a sustainable business.

Just to build on what you said,

this week is the JP Morgan conference.

Freeberg mentioned it last week.

I had dinner on Wednesday

with this really interesting company based in Zurich.

And what they have is basically a library of ligands, right?

And so these ligands are used as a substrate

to deliver all kinds of molecules inside the body.

And what’s interesting is that they have a portfolio

of like a thousand of these,

but really what they have

is they have all the nuclear medicine

about whether it works.

They target glioblastoma, glioblastoma.

And so all of a sudden they can say,

well, this ligand can actually cross the blood-brain barrier

and get to the brain.

They have an entire data set of that

and a whole bunch of nuclear imagery around that.

They have something for soft cell carcinoma.

So then they have that data set.

So to your point, that’s really valuable

because that’s real work that Google or Microsoft

or OpenAI won’t do, right?

And if you have that and you bring it to the problem,

you can probably make money.

There’s a business there to be built.

Just building on this conversation,

I just realized like a great prompt engineer

is gonna become a title and an actual skill,

the ability to interface with these AIs.

Here you go, coding school 2.0.

Well, no, a prompt engineer,

somebody who is very good at talking to these instances

and maximizing the result for them

and refining the results for them,

just like a detective who asks great questions,

that person is gonna be 10 or 20 times more valuable.

They could be the proverbial 10X engineer

in the future in a company.

And as we talk about austerity and doing more with less

and the 80% less people running Twitter now

or Amazon laying off 18,000 people,

Salesforce laying off 8,000,

Facebook laying off 10 and probably another 10,000,

what catalytic effect could this have?

We could be sitting here in three or four or five years

and instead of running a company like Twitter

with 80% less people,

maybe you could run it with 98% less people.

Look, I think directionally, it’s the right statement.

I mean, I’ve made the statement a number of times

that I think we move from this idea of creator economy

to narrator economy,

where historically it was kind of labor economy,

where humans use their physical labor to do things.

Then we were knowledge workers.

We used our brains to make things.

And then ultimately we kind of, I think,

resolve to this narrator economy

where the way that you kind of can state intention

and better manipulate the tools

to drive your intentional outcome,

the more successful you’re gonna be.

And you can kind of think about this

as being the artist of the past.

Da Vinci was, what made him so good

was he was technically incredible

at trying to reproduce a photographic like imagery

using paint.

And there’s these really great kind of museum exhibits

on how he did it using these really interesting

kind of like split mirror systems.

And then the artist of the 21st century,

the 20th century was the best user of Adobe Photoshop.

And that person is not necessarily the best painter.

And the artist of the 22nd century

isn’t gonna look like the Photoshop expert.

And it’s not gonna look like the painter.

It’s gonna look like something entirely different.

It could be who’s got the most creative imagination

in driving the software to drive new outcomes.

And I think that the same analogy

can be used across every market and every industry.

However, one thing to note, Jekyll,

it’s not about austerity

because the Luddite argument is

when you have new tools

and you get more leverage from those tools,

you have less work for people to do

and therefore everyone suffers.

The reality is new work emerges

and new opportunities emerge

and we level up as a species.

And when we level up,

we all kind of fill the gaps

and expand our productivity and our capability set.

I thought what Jekyll was saying was more that

Google will be smaller,

didn’t mean that the pie wouldn’t grow.

It’s just that that individual company is run differently,

but there will be hundreds of more companies

or thousands more, millions more.

Yeah, that’s sort of,

I have an actual punch up for you.

Yeah.

Instead of narrative, it’s the conductor economy.

It’s you’re conducting a symphony.

Ooh, a punch up.

Punch up there.

But I do think like we’re gonna,

there’s gonna be somebody who’s sitting there like,

remember Tom Cruise in Minority Report as a detective

was moving stuff around with a interface,

with the gloves and everything.

This is kind of that manifested.

You could, even if you’re not an attorney,

you could say,

hey, I wanna sue this company for copyright infringement.

Give me my best arguments.

And then on the other side say,

hey, I wanna know what the next three features

I should put into my product is.

Can you examine who are my top 20 competitors?

And then who have they hired in the last six months?

And what are those people talking about on Twitter?

You can have this conductor,

you know, who becomes really good at that.

Well, the leveling up,

massive amounts of tasks.

Yeah, the leveling up that happens

in the book Ender’s Game,

I think is a good example of this

where the guy goes through the entire kind of ground up.

And then ultimately he’s commanding armies

of spaceships in space.

And his orchestration of all of these armies

is actually the skillset that wins the war.

Yeah.

You predicted that there would be like all these people

that create these next gen forms of content.

But I think this Reid Hoffman thing could be pretty cool.

Like what if he wins a Grammy

for his computer created podcast miniseries?

That’s really cool.

The thing I’m really excited about,

when’s the first AI novel gonna get published

by a major publisher?

I think it happens this year.

When’s the first AI symphony gonna get performed

by a major symphony orchestra?

And when’s the first AI generated screenplay

get turned into an AI generated 3D movie that we all watch?

And then the more exciting one I think

is when do we all get to make our own AI video game

where we instruct the video game platform

what world we wanna live in?

I don’t think that’s happening

for the next three or four years,

but when it does, I think everyone’s got

these new immersive environments that they can live in.

I have a question.

When-

When I say live in, I mean video game wise.

Yeah, sorry, go ahead.

When you have these computer systems,

just like to use a question of game theory for a second,

these models are iterating rapidly.

These are all mathematical models.

So inherent in, let’s just say the perfect answer, right?

Like if you had perfect precision recall,

if multiple models get there at a system-wide level,

everybody is sort of like,

they get to the game theory optimal.

They’re all at Nash equilibrium, right?

All these systems working at the same time.

Then the real question would then be,

what the hell do you do then?

Because if you keep getting the same answer,

if everybody then knows how to ask the exact right question

and you start to go through these iterations

where you’re like, maybe there is a dystopian hellscape

where there are no jobs.

Maybe that’s the Elon world,

which is you can recursively find a logical argument

where there is no job that’s possible, right?

And now I’m not saying that that path is the likely path,

but I’m saying it is important to keep in mind

that that path of outcomes is still very important

to keep in the back of our mind

as we figure these things out.

Well, Freeberg, you know, you were asking before about this,

like, you know, will more work be created?

Of course, artistic pursuits,

podcasting is a job now, being an influencer is a job,

yada, yada, new things emerge in the world.

But here in the United States in 1970,

I’m looking at Fred, I’m looking at the St. Louis Fed,

1970, 26.4% of the country was working in a factory,

was working in manufacturing.

You want to guess what that is in 2012?

Sorry, what percentage?

It was 26% in 1970.

And in 2015, when they stopped the percentage

in manufacturing in the United States,

they discontinued this, it was a 10.

So it’s possible we could just see, you know,

the concept of office work, the concept of knowledge work

is going to follow, pretty inevitable,

the path of manufacturing.

That seems like a pretty logical theory or no?

I think we should move on, but yes.

Okay, so how would we like to ruin the show now?

Should we talk about Biden and the documents

and ruin the show with political talk?

Or should we talk about,

since it’s been such a great episode so far,

what do we want to talk about next?

I’ll give you a couple of choices.

Well, I know what you don’t want to talk about.

You guys are talking about productivity.

Give it to him, give it to him, give it to him.

We all know, we all know,

Hold on a second.

We all know, J. Cal, that according to you,

when a president is in possession of classified documents

in his home that apparently have been taken

in an unauthorized manner, basically stolen,

he should have his home raided by the FBI.

Almost, close, close.

So anyway, Biden, as of the taping of this,

has now said there’s a third batch of classified documents.

This group, I guess there was one at an office,

one at a library,

now this third group is in his garage with his Corvette.

Certainly not looking good and independent.

They say that in his defense,

they say the garage was locked,

meaning that you could use a garage door opener

to open and close it.

It was locked when it went closed.

So pretty much as secure as the documents at Mar-a-Lago,

same equivalency.

No, no, no.

Actually, I mean, just to be perfectly fair,

the documents at Mar-a-Lago were locked in a basement.

The FBI came, checked it out,

said, we’d like you to lock those up.

They locked them up.

A little safer than being in a garage with a Corvette,

but functionally the same.

Functionally the same.

The only difference here would be what,

Sachs, when you look at these two cases?

Well, that in one case,

Merrick Garland is appointed an independent counsel

to investigate Trump,

and there’s no such a special counsel

or investigator appointed to investigate Biden.

I mean, these things are functionally the same.

Didn’t he put somebody on it, though?

Wait, did he put somebody on it?

I don’t think they’ve appointed a special counsel yet.

No, they did.

As of an hour ago, a special counsel was appointed.

Okay.

Did that just happen?

Yeah, one hour ago.

Robert Herr is his name.

Okay.

I guess there are real questions to look into here.

The documents apparently were moved twice.

Why were they moved?

Who ordered that?

What was a classified document doing

in Biden’s personal library?

What do the documents pertain to?

Do they touch on the Biden family’s business dealings

in Ukraine and China?

So there are real things to look into here,

but let me just take a step back.

Now that the last three presidential candidates

have been ensnared in these classified document problems,

remember, it’s Biden now, and then Trump,

and Hillary Clinton before Trump,

I think it’s time to step back and ask,

are we over-classifying documents?

I mean, are we fetishizing these documents?

Are they all really that sensitive?

It seems to me that we have an over-classification problem,

meaning that ever since FOIA was passed,

the Freedom of Information Act,

the government can avoid accountability and prying eyes

by simply labeling any document as classified.

So over-classification was a logical response

by the permanent government

to the Freedom of Information Act,

and now it’s gotten to the point

where just about everything handed

to a president or vice president is classified.

So I think I can understand

why they’re all making this mistake.

And I think a compounding problem

is that we never declassify anything.

There’s still all these records

from the Kennedy assassination

that have never been declassified.

And they’re supposed to have declassified these.

The CIA keeps filibustering

on the release of the JFK assassination documents,

and they’ve been told they have to stop

and they have to release them,

and then they keep redacting stuff

and not releasing them.

I hate to be a conspiracy theorist here,

but what are they trying to cover up?

I mean, this is a long time ago.

That’s the only way to interpret it.

But even for more mundane documents,

there are very few documents

that need to be classified after even, say, five years.

You could argue that we should be

automatically declassifying them after five years,

unless they go through a process to get reclassified.

I mean, I’d say, just you guys in business,

I know it’s not government, in business,

how many of the documents that you deal with

are still sensitive, are trade secrets, five years later?

I would say almost none of them.

Certainly 20 years later, they’re not, right?

Like in almost all cases.

No, but I would even say like five years.

I mean, the only documents-

The Coca-Cola formula.

The only documents in business

that I think I deal with that you could call sensitive

are the ones that pertain to the company’s future plans,

right?

Because you wouldn’t want a competitor-

Cap table.

To get those.

Yeah, cap table.

There’s a handful of things, right?

Legal issues, yeah.

Even cap table is not that sensitive

because by the time you go public,

it’s legally has to be public.

Yeah, so at some point-

It’s on Carta, like there’s 100 people who have that.

I mean, it’s-

Exactly.

So like in business, I think our experience has been

there’s very few documents that stay sensitive,

that need to remain secret.

Now look, if Biden or Trump or whoever,

they’re reviewing the schematics

to the Javelin missile system or to, you know,

how we make our nuclear bombs or something,

obviously that needs to stay secret forever.

But I don’t believe our politicians

are reviewing those kinds of documents.

Well, I mean, we both-

I don’t really understand what it is that they’re reviewing-

Why are they keeping them-

That needs to be classified five years later.

And why are they keeping them

was the issue we discussed previously.

We actually agreed on that.

I think they’re just keeping mementos.

I think there’s a simple explanation

for why they’re keeping them, Jason,

which is that everything is more classified

and there’s a zillion documents.

And if you look, like both Biden and Trump,

these documents were mixed in

with a bunch of personal effects and mementos.

My point is, if you work in government

and handle documents, they’re all classified.

So I mean-

And if the National Archive asks for them back,

or you find them, you should just give them back.

I mean, that’s going to wind up being the rough years.

Trump didn’t give them back and Biden did.

So that’s the only difference here really.

Well, no, no, no, hold on.

The FBI went to Trump’s basement.

They looked around.

They said, put a lock on this.

They seemed to be okay with it initially.

Then maybe they changed their minds.

I don’t know.

I’m not defending Trump, but-

No, it’s pretty clear that he wouldn’t give them back in.

That was the issue.

The point I’m making is that now that Biden, Trump,

and Hillary Clinton have all been ensnared in this,

is it time to rethink the fact

that we’re over-classifying so many documents?

I mean, just think about the incentives

that we’re creating for our politicians.

Okay, just think about the incentives.

Number one, never use email.

Remember Hillary Clinton and the whole email server?

Yeah.

You gotta be nuts to use email.

Number two, never touch a document.

Never touch a document.

Never let anyone hand you a document.

Flush them down the toilet.

Never let anyone hand you a document.

I mean, if you’re a politician, an elected official,

the only time you should ever be handling anything

is go into a clean room, make an appointment,

go in there, read something, don’t take notes,

don’t bring a camera, and then leave.

I mean, this is no way to run a government.

It’s crazy.

Who does this benefit?

Who does this benefit?

It doesn’t benefit our elected officials.

It makes it almost impossible

for them to act like normal people.

That’s why.

It benefits the insiders, the permanent government.

You’re missing the most important part about the SACs.

This was, if you wanna go into conspiracy theories,

this was a setup.

Biden planted the documents

so that we could create the false equivalency

and start up Biden versus Trump 2024.

This ensures that now Trump has something

to fight with Biden about and this is gonna help Trump.

You’re saying, because they’re both tainted,

equally tainted from the same source.

They are equally tainted now, but I-

It puts Trump in the new cycle.

No, I think it’s the opposite.

I think Merrick Garland now is gonna have to drop

the prosecution against Trump for the stolen documents,

or at least that part of what they’re investigating him for.

They might still investigate him

over January 6th or something.

They can’t investigate Trump over documents now.

Those two seems more sticky, yeah.

I agree with that, actually.

I think it’s gonna be hard to do.

But my point is, like, just think about, look,

both sides are engaged in hyper partisanship.

The way right now that the conservatives on the right,

they’re attacking Biden now for the same thing

that the left was attacking Trump for.

My point is, like, just take a step back

and again, think about the incentives we’re creating

about how to run our government.

You can’t use email and you can’t touch documents.

And everything’s an investigation

the second you get out of the office.

And by the way, don’t ever go into politics

if you’re a business person,

because they’ll investigate every deal you ever did

prior to getting into politics.

I mean, just think about the incentives we’re creating.

So what are you gonna do when you try to get

your treasury position?

What’s gonna happen?

You gotta be nuts.

You gotta be nuts to go into government.

So you’re not gonna take a position

in DeSantis’ cabinet?

My point is that the Washington insiders,

by which I mean the permanent Washington establishment,

i.e. the deep state, they’re creating a system

in which they’re running things

and the elected officials barely can operate

like normal functioning humans there.

Interesting.

That’s what’s going on.

I heard a great rumor.

This is total gossip mongering.

Oh, here we go.

That, you know, one of Ken Griffin’s best out

is to get DeSantis elected

so that he can become treasury secretary.

I mean, Ken Griffin would get that if he wanted it.

And then he would be able to divest

all of Citadel tax-free.

So he would mark the market like $30 billion,

which is a genius way to go out.

Now, then it occurred to me, oh my God,

that is me and Sachs’ path too.

I’d love with a lot less money, but let’s say path.

Wait, why would it be tax-free?

When you get appointed to those senior posts,

you’re allowed to either stick it in a blind trust

or you can sell with no capital gains.

What?

Yeah.

What?

Well, because they want you to divest anything that can.

Yes, anything that presents a conflict,

they want you to divest.

And so the argument is, if you’re forced to divest it

to enter a government, you shouldn’t be forcibly taxed.

Wait, if I become mayor of San Francisco or Austin,

I can enter a federal government.

When you become secretary of transportation,

J. Cal, you can do that.

Oh, I’m qualified for that.

I’d take the bus.

I got an electric bike.

To answer Freebrook’s point, I think Citadel securities,

there’s a lot of folks that would buy that

because that’s just a securities trading business.

And then Citadel, the hedge fund,

probably something like a big bulge bracket bank

or Blackstone.

Probably Blackstone, in fact,

because now Blackstone can plug it

into a trillion dollar asset machine.

I think there would be buyers out the door.

This is an incredible grift.

Now I know why Sachs-

It’s not a grift at all, but it’s an incredible-

Oh, come on, man.

A cabinet position for no cap gains?

Well, that’s not a grift.

That’s like, those are the laws.

They force you to sell everything.

It feels grifty to me.

And then you do public service.

I think you’re misusing the word

to continue to genuflect to the left-leaning media.

No, I’m not genuflecting.

I think you’re being a little defensive

because you see this as a bad-

Then that or you’re dumb.

Pick one.

I’m not stupid, man.

I don’t-

You don’t even grift when I see it.

You take a cabinet position.

Sachs, would you take a cabinet position?

You don’t pay cap gains?

Would you be secretary of the country?

Where does that exist?

Yeah, Sachs, if you were asked to serve-

Look, any normal person who wants to serve in government,

you can’t use email and you can’t touch a document

and every deal you’ve ever done gets investigated.

That’s a yes.

Why the hell would you want to do it?

That’s a yes.

Why would you want to do it?

I mean, offsetting that, you get to divest tax-free.

Methink thou doth protesteth too much, David Sachs.

The fact that you two know this rule

and Freeberg and I don’t.

No, I know it.

It’s like a well-known-

I’m the only person who doesn’t know

this rich people knowledge.

I looked up grift.

It means to engage- Everyone knows this.

It means that to engage in a petty or small-scale swindle.

I don’t think selling a $31 billion entity

to a combination of BlackRock and Blackstone

would be considered a petty small-scale swindle.

Did any of you guys watch the Madoff series on Netflix?

No.

Was it good? No.

Oh my God, it is so depressing.

I gotta say, just that Madoff series,

there is no glimmer of light or hope or positivity

or recourse.

Everyone is a victim.

Everyone suffers.

It is just so dark. So gross.

Don’t watch it.

It’s so depressing.

The Madoff one.

The Madoff one is so depressing.

It’s so awful.

Yeah, they all kill themselves and die.

Everyone’s a victim.

One guy died of cancer.

Irving Picard.

I didn’t realize all this.

The trustee that went and got the money.

He went and got money back from these people

who were 80 years old and retired

and had spent that money decades ago.

And he sued them and took their homes away from them.

And no one, and they had no idea

that they were part of the scam.

No one won.

It was a brutal, awful whole thing, yeah.

By the way, that’s going to be really interesting

as we enter this SBF trial, because that is the trial.

That is what happens if you got-

And that’s why the Southern District of New York

said that this case is becoming too big for them

because all the places that SBF sent money,

all those PACs and all those political donations,

they have to go and investigate where that money went

and see if they can get it back.

And it’s going to open up an investigation

into each one of these campaign finance and election

kind of interfering actions that were taken.

ProPublica, sorry, ProPublica.

On the other end of the spectrum,

I did watch this weekend, Triangle of Sadness.

Have you guys seen that?

I watched it too, it was great!

Oh my God, Triangle of Sadness is great.

It’s so dark.

To the Davids, listen, this is one of the,

I thought it was, it didn’t pay off the way I thought,

but this is one of the best setups you’ll see in a movie.

So basically it’s a bunch of people on a luxury yacht.

So you have a bunch of rich people as the guests.

Then you have the staff that interacts with them.

And this is like mostly Caucasian.

And then in the bowels of the ship,

what you see are Asian and black workers

that support them, okay?

So in some ways,

it’s a little bit of a microcosm of the world.

Oh, I thought you were gonna say

a microcosm of something else.

And then what happens is

there’s like a shipwreck basically, right?

Oh, don’t spoil it, come on.

Okay, and so, but no, but I’ll just say it.

So the plot is you have this Caucasian patriarchy

that then gets flipped upside down

because after the shipwreck,

the only person who knows how to make a fire

and catch the fish is the Filipino woman

who was in charge of cleaning the toilets.

So she becomes in charge.

So now you flip to this immigrant matriarchy.

It’s a pretty great meditation on class and survival.

It’s pretty well done.

It didn’t end well, I thought.

I thought it could.

Well, it’s hard to wrap that one up.

Well, you know what they say, boys.

Steal a little and they throw you in jail.

Steal a lot and they make you king.

Famous Bob Dylan quote.

There you go.

All right, well, it’s been a great episode.

Great to see you besties.

Austerity menu tonight.

Chamath, what’s on the austerity menu tonight?

What are we doing?

Salad, some tuna sandwiches.

No, I think Kirsten is doing,

I think durad.

Durad, yeah, that’s, yeah.

That’s a good fish.

Jake and I once had a great durad in Venice.

In Venice.

In Venice.

The durad from Venice.

That’s one of the best meals we’ve ever had.

Am I right?

So good, I agree.

When it’s done well, the durad kicks ass.

There’s only one way to cook a durad.

Do you know what that is?

You gotta, it’s the way they did in Venice.

You gotta cook the whole fish.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, she’s doing that.

And then after you cook the fish,

then you debone it and yeah, that’s the way to do it.

That was back when Saxon and I

used to enjoy each other’s company.

Before this podcast made us into mortal enemies.

Jake, I’m a little disappointed

you couldn’t agree with my take on this document scandal.

Instead of dunking in a partisan way,

I tried to explain why it was a problem

of our whole political system.

I like your theory.

I think, you know, you keep making me defend Biden.

I think Biden’s a grifter.

I told you these guys are grifting.

Just think you’re,

I just think your party grifts a little bit more.

But yeah, compare your grift.

Are we going to play Saturday after the wildcard game?

Are you guys interested in playing Saturday as well?

Cause I got the hall pass.

I can do a game on Saturday.

I don’t know.

I have to check with my boss.

Who’s going to the, are you guys all going?

Sax, are you going to come to play poker

at that live stream thing for the day, LA?

I doubt it, no.

He doesn’t want to interact with humans.

That does not play well in confirmation hearings.

No.

The last time I did one of those,

Alan Keating destroyed me on camera.

I like, I had like, I had two left feet

and every time he bluffed, I folded.

Every time he had the nuts, I called.

It was brutal.

That’s true, that’s true.

Now you do get shellacked, a shellacking,

a classic Sax shellacked.

So it’s an edge saving thing.

Is that what’s going on here?

No, no.

Preserving, okay.

No, it has to do with the cabinet positions.

He doesn’t need to be seen recklessly gambling.

It’s a bad look.

If you could pick any cabinet position, Sax,

which one would it be?

State.

Treasury.

State’s a lot of travel.

State’s a lot of travel.

You never stay at home.

You’re always on a plane.

I’ll tell you, I don’t know.

That’s what he’s looking for.

I don’t know that those like cabinet positions

are that important.

I mean, they run these giant bureaucracies

that again are permanent.

You can’t fire anyone.

So if you can’t fire a person,

do they really report to you?

Right.

I mean, only ceremonial.

Trump’s idea was like, put a bunch of hardline,

CEO type people in charge,

have them blow up these things

and make it more efficient.

It didn’t really work, did it?

Yeah.

Well, you know why a CEO is actually in charge?

Like Elon, he walks in,

if he doesn’t like what you’re doing,

he’ll just fire you.

You can’t fire anyone.

How do you manage them

when they don’t have to listen to anything you say?

That’s our whole government right now.

Our cabinet heads are figureheads

for these departments,

for these giant departments.

Is that a no?

Or is that a yes you’d still take state?

Look at that.

I think I have another theory.

I think he’s going for the ambassadorship first.

What is the best ambassadorship?

Well, you can’t divest everything with no cap.

Historically, you can tell which ambassadorship

is the best one based on how much they charge for it.

Yeah.

So that’s not an issue for you.

I think London is the most expensive.

I think that one’s 15 million.

It’s 10 million for London, 10 to 15.

Yeah, 10, 15 million, yeah.

10, 15 million?

That’s what Sachs’ fourth least expensive home cost.

No, no, no, you have to spend that

every year to run it, Jason.

You only get-

That’s nothing for him.

You could be the ambassador to Guinea

or the ambassador to the UK.

You get the same budget.

Actually, what’s kind of funny is

I know two people who served as ambassadors under Trump

and it was really cheap to get those

because no one wanted to be part

of the Trump administration.

Oh, they were on fire sale, two for one.

They were on fire sale after because of Trump.

Who wants to be tainted?

But by the way, one of them,

and you can just bleep out the name,

was telling me it was the best thing

because he ended up selling.

They already dipped the all-time highs to take the job.

He was like, I got to get out of all of his stuff.

No, but listen, let me tell you, the ambassadorships,

it was a smart trade by those guys

because ambassador’s a lifetime title.

So your ambassador, whatever,

no one remembers what president when you were ambassador.

No one cares.

So you are going for the ambassador.

So Steve, I think it’s fair to say.

I think he’s going ambassadorship.

I’m not interested in ceremonial things.

I’m interested in making an impact.

The problem with all these positions,

I mean, being a cabinet official

is not much different than being an ambassador.

So you’re going to enlist in the Navy?

No.

What has a bigger impact?

Being on all in pod or being an ambassador?

Who’s more influential?

Sax on the all in pod or beep as the ambassador of Sweden?

Being on all in pod actually.

All in pod is more impactful.

By the way, this is why I take issue

with your statement about the term mainstream media,

because I think you have become the mainstream media

more than most of the folks that-

No, we’re independent media.

We’re independent media.

Trust me, it’s independent.

This thing’s hanging on by a thread.

And stop genuflecting.

No, it’s independent.

Who knows if this thing’s going to last

another three episodes.

I just like saying the word genuflect.

You like genuflecting, I know.

That is the top word of 2023 so far for me.

Oh, is that, is somebody doing an analysis

with Chad Chappity of the words used here?

No, but Sax brought that word up.

It’s a wonderful word.

It’s not used enough.

All right, everybody, we’ll see you next time

on the all in podcast.

Comments are turned back on.

Have at it, you animals.

Love you guys.

Enjoy, bye-bye.

Love you, besties, bye.

♪ I’m going all in ♪

We’ll let your winners ride.

Rain Man, David Saxon.

♪ I’m going all in ♪

And instead, we open source it to the fans

and they’ve just gone crazy with it.

Love you, Wesley.

I’m the queen of quinoa.

♪ I’m going all in ♪

Let your winners ride.

Let your winners ride.

Besties are gone.

I hope they’re dead.

That’s my dog taking a notice in your driveway.

Sax.

Wait, no, no, no.

Oh, man.

My avatars will meet me at place.

We should all just get a room

and just have one big huge orgy

because they’re all just useless.

It’s like this like sexual tension

that they just need to release somehow.

Let your, the, be.

Let your, be.

Let your, be.

Be.

We need to get merch.

Besties are back.

♪ I’m going all in ♪

♪ I’m going all in ♪