E99: Cheating scandals, Twitter updates, rapid AI advancements, Biden's pardon, Section 230 & more

**David Sacks** (0:00)
We're seven minutes in, and we've produced absolutely nothing that will go in the show.

**Jason Calacanis** (0:04)
Here comes Sacks, waking up with his commentary.

**Jason Calacanis** (0:08)
When Friedberg is criticizing you for being too negative, you're in a dark place, Sacks.

**Jason Calacanis** (0:12)
I'm actually angry at Sacks for not publishing my AMA from the other night.

**David Sacks** (0:15)
It's coming, it's coming.

**Jason Calacanis** (0:16)
While he publishes an Evolves content. His app crashed.

**David Sacks** (0:18)
We had such a crowded room. We had over 2,000 people in the room for like four hours.

**Jason Calacanis** (0:23)
It was crazy. It was like the original days of Clubhouse.

**Jason Calacanis** (0:26)
Everyone I know that was trying to get in was texting saying they couldn't get in. So it definitely capped out, right?

**David Sacks** (0:31)
I know. Well, we hit some scalability.

**Jason Calacanis** (0:33)
You may want to buy an extra server, Sacks. Cheap.
Weren't you the same guy who was responsible for scaring PayPal?

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (0:38)
No, that was somebody else. That was eBay.
They sold it before it scaled.

**David Sacks** (0:42)
No, that's not true. We had huge scalability challenges at PayPal, too.

**Jason Calacanis** (0:46)
It seems like a theme.

**David Sacks** (0:48)
Yeah, the theme is when you have an app that's breaking out, you hit scalability challenges. It's called a high class problem.

**Jason Calacanis** (0:53)
2,000 people is not a high class problem. It's a trickle. It's 2022

**David Sacks** (0:59)
2,000 people participating in the conversation is a challenge.

**Jason Calacanis** (1:02)
I haven't written code in 20 years. Here's what you do. When you get to 1,000 people coming to the room, that's a lie. Everybody else is in passive mode.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (1:09)
You've never written code ever.

**Jason Calacanis** (1:10)
Of course I have.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (1:11)
Of course I have. That's a lie. Come on, be honest.

**Jason Calacanis** (1:13)
Oh, yeah, it's actually been 25 The last time I wrote code was Lotus Notes.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (1:16)
Yes, it's true.

**Jason Calacanis** (1:34)
There have been three cheating scandals across poker chess and even competitive fishing. I don't know if you guys saw the fishing one, but they found weights and fillets during a fish weigh-in, and then everybody wants us to check in on the chess and the poker scandals.
chess.com just released their report that this grandmaster has been suspended. They have evidence he cheated basically in a bunch of tournaments that were in fact for money. He denied that he had done that, but he had previously cheated as a kid. They now have the statistical proof that he was playing, essentially, perfect chess, and they have outlined this in hundreds of pages in a report. Sacks, what are your thoughts on this scandal in chess?

**David Sacks** (2:21)
Magnus Carlsen finally came out and explained why he thought Hans Nieman was cheating. Basically, he got the strong perception during the game that Hans wasn't really putting in a lot of effort, that he wasn't under a lot of stress.
It's his experience that when he's playing the top players, they're intensely concentrating.
Hans Nieman didn't seem to be exerting himself at all. His hackles were raised and got suspicious.
He has had this meteoric rise, the fastest rise in classical chess rating ever. I guess he had gotten suspended from chess.com in the past for cheating. On this basis, and maybe other things that Magnus isn't telling us, Magnus basically said that this guy is cheating. I think that maybe the interesting part of this is that there's been a lot of analysis now of Hans Nieman's games. And I just think the methodology is kind of interesting. So what they do is they run all of his games through a computer and they compare his moves to the best computer move. And they basically assign a percentage that Hans matches, a correlation matches the computer move. And what they found is there were a handful of games where it was literally 100%. That's basically impossible without cheating. I mean, you look at the top players who through an entire career have never had a 100% game. You know, chess is so subtle that the computer can now see so many moves into the future that nailing the best move every single time for 40, 50, 100 moves is just...

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (3:46)
And in chess, which a human really can't do that well, is that there are positional sacrifices that you will make in short lines that pay off much, much later in the future, which is impossible for a human to calculate. And so, you know, and you saw this, by the way, when I think it was the Google AI, the DeepMind AI that also played chess. So, the idea that this guy could play absolutely perfectly, according to those lines, is only possible if you're cheating.