Keith Rabois
speaker
686 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Jul 2025
Keith Rabois’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
The scaffolding you had at Facebook Meta, obviously, or that Google uses, would catch some of the stuff, without a doubt, no doubt about it. You'd know that users are less thrilled, and they'd use things less, and you'd fix it. And maybe even you take that to an extreme, you never develop taste. I could argue that about Google or Meta. They don't really have taste.
But you could argue the paradigms. But fundamentally, if you don't have that backstop, if the taste subtracts even 10%, not all the way down, you're just not going to catch this stuff. And I think there's only... How many people in the world really have cutting edge technology user experience taste? I don't know too many. I would fund them right away.
It's an incredible... Brian Chesky might have it.
It's more predictable scale. It's certainly more scalable, right? Like you take Steve out, you don't need a dictator, but you do need a taste and taste is artistic. The same thing with venture, like, you know, like scaling venture funds is really, really challenging because early stage investing is more like taste than data driven. And later stage, you can use data and scale it and scaffolding.
So I think there's just fields. It's a little bit also, you see like these sports teams, like this happened at Stanford when Jim Harbaugh left and, It took years for the decay function for the next coaching regime to show they were completely incompetent. The next year, they were pretty good. The next year, they lost one more game than they should have.
The next year, they lost two more games than they should have, blah, blah, blah. And then eventually, they became horrible. And there's a decay function with an organization when you take out the person who is the original thinker or the leader or the dictator or whatever. And so I think some of this is showing up now.
And then playing on a field that's not favorable to them, which is there are advantages Apple has in AI. But there's some significant organizational structural disadvantages. And that's the field that people are going to be competing on for the next five years from a consumer perspective. And they're playing on a field where they don't have all the advantages in their favor.
You don't even have to have a conversation, in my view. TikTok is a threat. to the national security of the United States.
Why? So I think there's different dimensions. One of the problems is there's so many things wrong with TikTok that actually sometimes people get confused because there's not just one. It'd be easier sometimes if there's just one. So they are definitely using the app to track data about Americans. And there's evidence that regardless of what alleged protections exist,
There are people in China monitoring what certain people in the United States are doing. And the CEO lied under oath to congressional committees about this. And the evidence is now in the public domain. Hopefully, this Justice Department will prosecute him for lying under oath. I think setting a really good example that you cannot just perjure yourself before Congress.
So there are people in China who on the record have said they had access and had access to American user data, which he swore under oath to the Congress that they were storing the data in Texas somewhere. and that there's no possibility that Chinese nationals in China could access the data. There is now several instantiations of this in the public record, let alone what's privately available.
Then secondly, let me keep going here because it's worse. So there's a law. The fundamental problem is in China, there's a law that says if you're a Chinese company, upon request of the CCP, you must provide all user data. So any Chinese company is subject to that law, period. There's no court intervention. You don't need a subpoena, blah, blah, blah.
And so any Chinese, any executive at that company is subject to significant penalties. on the record for not providing any user data at the request of the CCP. So as long as that law exists, there's a real structural threat to the United States.
Now, then there's the, is the app being used, manipulated on a content basis to influence policy in the United States to disadvantage this or that or create hostilities? I don't really know the answer. I think there's been studies that suggest that and pretty rigorous methodologies, but that's a second level. And then third is there's the, why the hell are we allowing
Chinese companies to compete with us when no American content-based organization is allowed into the Chinese market, whether it's Meta, Google, X. There's a strong argument there that Reddit, if you don't allow our content or non-Chinese content into your market, why should we be enabling Chinese companies to be successful in quotes in the US market? And that's more of a fair trade, free trade
Yes. So my evidence for this that I believe is an interpolation of what's in the public domain is if you looked at that vote to ban TikTok, it was extremely bipartisan, despite controversy. And what happened was that vote was taken a week after there was an intelligence briefing to both the House and Senate intelligence committees. That's confidential.
And the votes, you know, all of a sudden flowed through. I think there's things that are not in the public domain about TikTok that spooked a lot of elected officials and led to this bipartisan consensus. How many bipartisan votes do we see on an allegedly controversial issue that, you know, basically the vote was like, you know, like not even close in either house. 360 to 58. Yeah.
When do you see a vote like that on something meaningful? Never.
On an app that's used by, you know, huge traction of the American public.
Arguably. Arguably. In theory, there's some risk. I can see that.
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