"Founder Mode," DOJ alleges Russian podcast op, Kamala flips proposals, Tech loses Section 230?

Jason Calacanis 0:00 Hold on, you guys. I gotta get into Founder Mode.

David Friedberg 0:03 Oh, wow. Founder Mode?

Chamath Palihapitiya 0:04 If he Founder Modes, I'm gonna, I'm gonna Founder Mode.

Jason Calacanis 0:06 (sighs) Shit.

David Friedberg 0:06 I gotta Founder Mode too.

Jason Calacanis 0:08 Ugh.

David Friedberg 0:08 Where's J Cal? Oh, shit.

Jason Calacanis 0:12 Okay. (laughs)

Chamath Palihapitiya 0:12 (laughs)

David Friedberg 0:12 What?

Jason Calacanis 0:13 Let's go, Freeburg. Let's get this fucking started, baby. Come on, podcast, number one podcast in the world. Here we go.

Chamath Palihapitiya 0:20 (laughs)

David Friedberg 0:20 Okay. Okay, guys, let's start the show. You are Founder Moding.

Chamath Palihapitiya 0:23 J Cal, if you Founder Mode anymore, you're gonna get pneumonia.

Jason Calacanis 0:26 (laughs) All right. Sachs is like '90s again.

Chamath Palihapitiya 0:29 (laughs)

Jason Calacanis 0:29 Back at Stanford.

Chamath Palihapitiya 0:31 (laughs) .

Jason Calacanis 0:31 (inhales deeply) This is the funniest cold open we've ever done. Sorry, guys. (laughs)

Chamath Palihapitiya 0:35 Oh my God.

Jason Calacanis 0:36 I got Belgium waffle mix everywhere.

Chamath Palihapitiya 0:39 You got... It's right here, J Cal. You got a bunch of Founder Mode right there.

Jason Calacanis 0:42 Oh. (laughs) I got a little Founder Mode there?

Chamath Palihapitiya 0:44 (laughs)

Jason Calacanis 0:44 Okay. Thanks for looking out.

David Sacks 0:46 I'm going all in. Don't let your winner slide. Rain Man, David Sachs. I'm going all in.

David Friedberg 0:55 And I said we open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it.

Chamath Palihapitiya 0:58 Love you, S. D.

David Sacks 0:59 West Side Queen of Kinwah. I'm going all in.

Jason Calacanis 1:03 Founder Mode, baby. Let's go.

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:05 Oh, man.

Jason Calacanis 1:05 All right, everybody. Welcome back to the number one podcast in the world. With me again, the chairman dictator, Chamath Palihapitiya. How are you doing, buddy? Have you acclimated? Now you're 15 days back on American soil. How are you, how are you adjusting?

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:20 Uh, I'm doing well. I, uh, turned 48 two days ago.

Jason Calacanis 1:24 Oh, I know. The big 50th is coming. I've already called dibs on chairing your 50th. So we will, uh, be certainly getting arrested in 24 months. Save up your bail money, boys. Friedburg, you look like you have had a record number of panic attacks in the last 48 hours. How is summit planning going? (laughs) Are you okay, buddy? You took this responsibility on. Are you okay?

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:49 I'm hanging in there. I'm just waiting for the shoe to drop, J Cal, on what you're gonna do to blow shit up. But I think we're almost there, so we're super excited. Um, we have, uh, speaker names going out today.

Jason Calacanis 1:59 Oh.

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:59 So we'll talk a little bit about who the speakers are. You guys know your bestie, Elon, will be there.

Jason Calacanis 2:04 Oh, third year in a row.

Chamath Palihapitiya 2:06 Mark-

Jason Calacanis 2:06 Okay.

Chamath Palihapitiya 2:06 Third year in a row. He's the only, uh, repeat this year. We've got Marc Benioff joining us-

Jason Calacanis 2:11 Oh, okay.

Chamath Palihapitiya 2:11 ... for a conversation about the future of enterprise. We've got Bari Weiss from the Free Press.

Jason Calacanis 2:16 Mm.

Chamath Palihapitiya 2:17 We've got Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema. We have, uh, John Mearsheimer and Jeffrey Sachs to talk about geopolitics with David Sachs. Sachs on Sachs.

Jason Calacanis 2:26 Nikesh Arora. We're gonna talk to him.

Chamath Palihapitiya 2:28 Nikesh Arora.

Jason Calacanis 2:29 What about Peter Thiel, my guy? I haven't-

Chamath Palihapitiya 2:31 Peter Thiel, your guy.

Jason Calacanis 2:32 ... interviewed Peter Thiel in a decade.

Chamath Palihapitiya 2:33 Peter Thiel.

Jason Calacanis 2:33 He's amazing.

Chamath Palihapitiya 2:34 We've got the legend, the legend from LA, Michael Ovitz, joining us.

Jason Calacanis 2:39 Love that book.

Chamath Palihapitiya 2:39 We're gonna get into some really cool, uh, tech. We have, uh... Have you guys read Michael Ovitz's book? Oh, it's incredible.

Jason Calacanis 2:45 Yes.

David Friedberg 2:45 Oh, yeah. Phenomenal.

Chamath Palihapitiya 2:46 Great book. It's incredible.

Jason Calacanis 2:47 Great book.

Chamath Palihapitiya 2:47 It's really incredible. It's a great book.

Jason Calacanis 2:49 Man, what a guy.

Chamath Palihapitiya 2:50 Michael's incredible.

Jason Calacanis 2:51 Yeah.

Chamath Palihapitiya 2:51 It's a great book.

Jason Calacanis 2:52 What a playbook.

Chamath Palihapitiya 2:53 It's a really interesting mix. We've also got some cool, uh, panels on tech and robotics, so we're doing all three of the big EVTOL companies. Joby, Archer & Whisk, and their CEOs are gonna be there. Uh, Gecko Robotics, so we've got Jake coming from Gecko to actually do a really cool product demo. We have the CEO of Waymo, uh, Tekeedra Mawakana joining us. Uh, talk about autonomous driving. Juan Carlos Belmonte talking about age reversal, uh, from Altos Labs, uh, probably the most funded private company in history. And also, uh, Ingo is coming out from Europe, uh, from Adyen, CEO, uh, of Adyen. You guys may not know this, but Ingo has never done a US conference before. So this is his first public speaking event at a US conference. He may be the first... Uh, I mean, Adyen, I think is the first and really only company that's implemented AI in production at scale. Yeah. It'll be really interesting to understand where that's gone in the last year.

Jason Calacanis 3:49 Yeah, great topic to talk about. And huge shout-out to my boy, Woody Hoburg, US astronaut, joining us to tell us about his months, uh, aboard the ISS, his experience captaining-

Chamath Palihapitiya 4:00 Is he gonna, is he gonna talk about his experience at Uranus? Hey. And captaining the, uh, the Crew Dragon capsule back to Earth. From Uranus? And the future of space flight and Uranus, yes. Thank you, Chamath. To Uranus. To Uranus. Thank you, everyone. (laughs) Anyway.

Jason Calacanis 4:14 I love how he's like, "My guy, the astronaut," as if, like, Freeburg and an astronaut have the same life experience, you know? (laughs)

Chamath Palihapitiya 4:21 Do you know what, do you know what happened, J Cal?

Jason Calacanis 4:23 It's like me and my guy, Dre-Mai.

Chamath Palihapitiya 4:24 He's... Well, did I, did I tell you-

Jason Calacanis 4:26 We're champions.

Chamath Palihapitiya 4:26 You know how I met Woody? He's a huge fan of the pod. And then he... Uh, NASA astronauts, which I follow on Twitter, DMed me and they're like, "Woody would like to meet." And I'm like, "What?" And then I get this message from Woody. I'm like, "Is this real?" He's like, "I'm on the ISS. I listen to the pod every week. I love the show. And you guys, you know, keep me entertained up here in space." And I'm like, "No way." So then he's like, "Can you do a Zoom?" And I'm like, "Sure." So we hop on Zoom. And I... You guys saw this thing. I put it out on, uh, on Twitter or something. But I did this Zoom with Woody, got to know him, hang- hung out with him since he's been back. Great guy, so-

Jason Calacanis 4:58 You left out the number one host on the internet in broadcast, uh, or news on YouTube. Megyn Kelly will be joining us.

Chamath Palihapitiya 5:07 Megyn Kelly.

David Friedberg 5:09 The phenomenal Megyn Kelly. Didn't she call you a prick, J Cal?

Chamath Palihapitiya 5:12 (laughs)

Jason Calacanis 5:13 Did she call me a prick?

Chamath Palihapitiya 5:14 She did. She did.

David Friedberg 5:14 I think she did.

Jason Calacanis 5:14 Why should she be any different?

Chamath Palihapitiya 5:16 (laughing) Yeah.

David Friedberg 5:20 Oh, I can't wait for this fireworks.

Jason Calacanis 5:21 Um, what, what do tall, beautiful, intelligent women call me historically? (laughs)

Chamath Palihapitiya 5:25 What do they call you? They call you, "Is that Chamath?"

Jason Calacanis 5:27 They don't. (laughs)

Chamath Palihapitiya 5:28 Exactly. They're like, "Get out of the way. Where's Chamath?"

Jason Calacanis 5:31 They're like, "Can you park my car and hand me their keys?"

Chamath Palihapitiya 5:33 That's what they, that's what they normally say. And then, uh, really excited to have Thomas LaFont come and give us a State of the Union on public market and private market tech investing. He's got a really interesting presentation he's gonna share. So a lot of the content from the summit, we're gonna be pushing out on YouTube. Co-founder of, co-founder of Coatue. Mm-hmm. Oh, sorry. Co-founder of Coatue, yep. And so a lot of the content we're gonna be pushing out on YouTube, uh, as quickly as we can. Obviously, some of the more timely and newsly stuff will get out first. And then, as we did in the last two years, material will roll out in the days and weeks that follow. We do not do sponsors here on the All-In Podcast, but the All-In Summit does have sponsors.

Jason Calacanis 6:06 Ah.

Chamath Palihapitiya 6:06 So a huge shout-out-

Jason Calacanis 6:07 Partners.

Chamath Palihapitiya 6:07 ... which we would never otherwise do, partners, to, uh, Excel Events, Hexclad, merch.com, Athletic Brewing, The Ridge.... the greatest law firm on earth, Cooley, Velocity Black, and our big enterprise software partnership sponsor, Google Cloud. Big shout-out and big thanks to Google Cloud for stepping it up in a big way. They have, uh, an incredible set of AI tools that they're making available to startups. Startup founders that are attending the summit get 350,000 bucks in Google Cloud credits.

Jason Calacanis 6:38 Wait, what?

Chamath Palihapitiya 6:38 So thanks. Yeah.

Jason Calacanis 6:39 Each, (laughs) each startup founder?

Chamath Palihapitiya 6:41 (laughs) Each startup, yeah. So it's pretty awesome.

Jason Calacanis 6:43 Well, I would, I would have sent all my companies to the, to the summit.

Chamath Palihapitiya 6:45 Exactly. (laughs)

Jason Calacanis 6:45 So yeah, you pay 7,500 for a ticket, and you get 350 in credit to-

6:49 350 grand of credit? That's incredible.

Chamath Palihapitiya 6:51 For Google Cloud, it is up to 350 in Google Cloud credits for eligible AI startups, which they can use over two years. Um, comes with a bunch of other benefits. So yeah, it's pretty awesome.

Jason Calacanis 7:00 Wow.

Chamath Palihapitiya 7:00 Really glad they're doing this. And they're gonna have a good setup and-

Jason Calacanis 7:03 Wow, they're the most lukewarm ad read I've ever heard. Do you want me to do that for you (laughs) and get people to go for it?

Chamath Palihapitiya 7:07 Yeah, yeah, yeah. (laughs)

Jason Calacanis 7:07 Yeah, can you theo- can you guys Theo Von it? How would you guys Theo Von this?

7:10 Go ahead.

Chamath Palihapitiya 7:11 (laughs)

Jason Calacanis 7:11 And Google Cloud is giving an amazing offer to everybody who comes to the summit. Wait till you hear this, Alex, $350,000 for AI startups, uh, credit. And that, that's real money that you would've spent otherwise, so great gift from our friends at Google Cloud.

David Friedberg 7:28 Wait, how does that get chopped up? Wait, $350,000 just for startups whose founders come to our summit?

Jason Calacanis 7:33 For in AI, yes.

Chamath Palihapitiya 7:33 Yeah, yeah. For, uh, AI startup founders, uh, they can-

Jason Calacanis 7:36 A lot of credits.

Chamath Palihapitiya 7:36 ... sign up for Google Cloud. They get 350,000 credits that they can use in, over two years.

David Friedberg 7:40 Total.

Chamath Palihapitiya 7:41 Yeah.

David Friedberg 7:41 Across all the founders who are at this summit?

Jason Calacanis 7:42 No, no, no, per business.

7:43 No, no, per business.

David Friedberg 7:45 Per business? Oh my gosh. Wow.

Jason Calacanis 7:46 Yeah, so if you're spending 10K a month...

7:48 I have seven friends and family tickets left. I'm starting seven companies in the next half-hour.

7:53 (laughs)

David Friedberg 7:53 (laughs)

Jason Calacanis 7:53 They're all going to this summit. I'm gonna clear-

David Friedberg 7:55 Seriously.

Jason Calacanis 7:56 ... $2.3 million of credits, and I'm gonna sell them on eBay for 500K.

8:00 You can't do that.

Chamath Palihapitiya 8:01 (laughs)

Jason Calacanis 8:01 It's against the terms of service.

8:02 Oh, you can't do that? Okay.

8:02 But thank you to our friends at Google.

Chamath Palihapitiya 8:03 We did get a funny note from JCal this morning asking if his remaining friends and family tickets could be sold off so he could grift himself some money-

Jason Calacanis 8:10 Yeah.

Chamath Palihapitiya 8:10 ... off of our free LTV check.

David Friedberg 8:11 (laughs)

Jason Calacanis 8:11 I was like, "Hey, what could these go for on the..." I'm just thinking if it's sold out-

Chamath Palihapitiya 8:15 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis 8:15 ... these aren't worth 7,500 each. What's it worth if you can't get in, maybe it's worth 20.

Chamath Palihapitiya 8:19 Yeah, I'm sure you'd find that out pretty quickly.

Jason Calacanis 8:21 Yeah.

Chamath Palihapitiya 8:22 Oh my God, JCal.

Jason Calacanis 8:22 I mean, who's gonna stop me? Um, uh, I did give one away for free.

David Friedberg 8:26 So y'all will be standing on the corner, trying to scalp the remaining tickets?

Chamath Palihapitiya 8:28 (laughs)

Jason Calacanis 8:28 I, I will, I know. I'm gonna give them to my brother Josh. If you want to get into the summit-

David Friedberg 8:32 Actually, Josh will do it, yeah.

Jason Calacanis 8:32 ... for 10K in cash, Josh will be at the loading dock.

Chamath Palihapitiya 8:34 He'll, he'll be hanging out.

David Friedberg 8:34 We're gonna see a couple of Calacanis Brothers on the sidewalk-

Chamath Palihapitiya 8:37 (laughs)

Jason Calacanis 8:38 (laughs)

David Friedberg 8:38 ... outside the conference holding a sign. You know, "Tickets available."

Jason Calacanis 8:43 Need one, need one.

Chamath Palihapitiya 8:44 (laughs) Chickens. Down at, down at the Mongolia barbecue joint in Westwood.

David Friedberg 8:47 (laughs)

Jason Calacanis 8:47 Listen, if you, uh, if you have ever been to Madison Square Garden, you just hold up the number one and then somebody will come talk to you. Somebody will come talk to you.

Chamath Palihapitiya 8:55 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis 8:55 All right. We've gotten through all the great housekeeping-

8:59 (laughs)

9:00 ... and,

Jason Calacanis 9:01 uh, it's time to talk about founder mode, founder mode. On Sunday, the Y Combinator founder, Paul Graham, published an essay titled Founder Mode. It was based on a talk that Airbnb CEO, Brian Chesky, gave to a group of YC founders last week where he said, "Hey, the advice I got on running a large company, uh, was to hire good people and give them room to do their jobs." He says he took that advice, and the results were a disaster. So he studied how Steve Jobs ran Apple, and according to PG, Paul Graham, that is, a bunch of very successful founders in the audience kind of nodded their head and said, "Hey, that is, uh, similar to my experience." PG, uh, defines the world now in two ways, two philosophies for running a company, manager mode versus founder mode. In manager mode, eh, it's just the conventional way of doing this, what you teach in business school. You hire good people, you give them room to do their jobs, you tell your direct reports what to do, they figure it out. You don't micromanage. Uh, PG says... He doesn't give too many specifics about founder mode. He kind of says, "Hey, we gotta figure out what this thing is." So in some ways, this blog post, Chamath was a way of starting the conversation. But he said things like, "Less delegation and more hands-on." And, uh, if you haven't heard of it, skip-level meetings. This is where the CEO will meet not with their manager or direct report but maybe a group of people who are reporting to that manager without the manager in the room. It's a notable and well-known management technique to kinda get information to the CEO a little bit faster. And, um, what do you think, Ch- Chamath? This got a lot of attention on a Sunday. Did you have any takeaways from it?

10:42 I was confused when I read it because everybody was breathlessly panting about how incredibly insightful it was. And when I read it, my first thought was, "Where's the second half that actually explains what this is so that you can have an opinion?" And then the next thing I thought was, "I don't really understand what any of this is all about." And I tweeted this. In a quarter century now in Silicon Valley, I think I've encountered two different kinds of people. One are the groups of people that can go right to the heart of issues because they can break things down and look at it from first principles and just ruthlessly attack what's not working with absolutely no nostalgia for people or sunk cost or tech debt. And then there's everybody else. And I think that that is an archetype that actually drives successful companies. It's not the case that those are only exhibited in founders. I think it's a psychological makeup of a person. And the people that have it tend to build good companies. You know, we'll have such a person, for example, at the All In Summit. If you look at what Nikesh Arora was able to do at Palo Alto Networks, it's re- it's incredible. I mean, in eight years, he's created $80 billion of value. How do you do that? I think it's important to understand how that happens. If you look at a whole bunch of other people that are managers, Shantanu Narayen, how has he built Adobe? Satya Nadella, how did he build Microsoft? These are all just like a handful of examples of people that have just...... tacked on, collectively, trillions of dollars of market cap, way more than all founders added together in most companies, but for one or two. So I think the takeaway is instead of looking for some label, I think you're going to have to do the really hard work if you want a successful business, which is when things are working, have the courage to change the few things that still need changing. And when things are not working, break it down to the studs. And most people don't have the courage to go through the glass eating that is required to get to the other side of that process.

12:59 Sacks, did you read the piece? Um, you clearly saw all the (laughs) uh, memes and, you know... I guess kudos for the piece on X, uh, this past weekend. What are your thoughts on it generally speaking? Anything that you took from it that was notable or is this just some obvious stuff?

David Sacks 13:17 Yeah, I mean, my reaction to it was that this is hardly new. I mean, I remember way back in the PayPal days over 20 years ago, we had a rule that we weren't, wouldn't hire MBAs. We had a no MBA hiring rule. And the reason was 'cause we figured out pretty early on that MBAs were bringing more of a traditional management toolkit that seemed less applicable at a startup. Subsequent to that, obviously, Elon has taken a very hands-on approach at his companies that Walter Isaacson described in his book as demon mode. And so that's been described. Ben Horowitz did a very interesting series of blog posts about management and addressed the topic of micromanagement years ago. And so he's written extensively about it and put a lot of substance behind it. Ben drew attention to a book by Andy Grove that came out 40 years ago called High Output Management that also addressed this problem in significant detail. And this, uh, boil it down into a nutshell for you, the way that Grove defines this problem is he says that the output of a manager is the output of that person's team. And whether that manager is the CEO or a team lead or a, a VP or what have you, the way you m- uh, again, measure their output is just to look at the, the output of their team. So therefore, you ask what's gonna maximize the output of that, that team or that org? And, you know, obviously if the CEO tries to do everything and make every decision, probably that's not gonna result in the maximum output. Conversely, if you delegate everything, I call it the problem of infinite delegation, where CEO delegates to VP, VP delegates to director, director delegates to manager, manager, uh, delegates to the summer intern-

Jason Calacanis 15:07 Yeah.

David Sacks 15:07 ... you know, and then all the most important work in the company gets delegated all the way down to the newest, most inexperienced people, that's not gonna work either.

Jason Calacanis 15:15 Yeah.

David Sacks 15:15 So again, you're gonna have to find the right balance. And again, the way that you figure out what the balance is, is to apply growth's principle of maximizing the output of the team or the organization.

Jason Calacanis 15:27 And we've seen in some of the big companies, Sacks, that they've cut out middle management because so much of the work was just being playing telephone and handing it to the next person that when you took out that swath of people at Facebook or Google or Microsoft-

David Sacks 15:40 Right.

Jason Calacanis 15:41 ... the company seemed to work better-

David Sacks 15:42 Yeah, great point.

Jason Calacanis 15:43 ... 'cause you're taking out a layer of overpaid people.

David Sacks 15:45 And it just took out a huge amount of middle management and it, and it didn't seem to harm the performance. Performance got better. And again, you can apply growth's principle. Look at what happens to the aggregate output. So this topic has been addressed at length.

Jason Calacanis 15:58 Mm-hmm.

David Sacks 15:58 And I think has been understood for, for decades.

Jason Calacanis 16:01 Yeah.

David Sacks 16:01 Maybe the only new thing here is a little bit of branding around founder mode versus manager mode. The, the problem with that branding is I think it's an overly simplistic and Manichaean view of the world where it kind of fits into really all of the, the, the PG essays and, and the YC model, which is founder's always right.

Jason Calacanis 16:26 Mm-hmm.

David Sacks 16:26 And everybody else in the ecosystem, especially traditional managers, they're, they're either liars or fakers. And that basically ha- has been the Manichaean model that Paul Graham's been pumping out for decades. And-

Jason Calacanis 16:38 Is there, uh, something wrong with that model? You're, you're kind of looking at it and I'm, I'm kind of hearing a little bit of a tone there, maybe I'm reading into it, that that doesn't match reality?

David Sacks 16:48 Well, sure. I mean, look, the, the whole ecosystem in Silicon Valley exists to help make founders successful. I mean, I was a founder myself. Now I'm a investor. There's also talent who don't found companies themselves but want to join them. The whole thing is organized to make founders successful. And the whole idea that people are out to get the founder, I mean, this is a really antiquated idea. There was some truth to it in the 1990s. Uh, by 2002 or 2003 when Peter Thiel created Founders Fund, he called it that to emphasize that, you know, founders should be in charge. I'd say by the mid to late 2000s, no one really disagreed with that anymore.

Jason Calacanis 17:25 Yeah. Very obvious.

David Sacks 17:25 So this whole idea that, like, people are out to get founders rather than make them successful is antiquated by at least 15 years, I would say.

Jason Calacanis 17:32 Kind of why Y Combinator is marketing, wouldn't you say, is like to kind of put themselves next to the founder and say, "Hey, we're the only ones who really care about founders. Everybody else is out to get them," kind of?

David Sacks 17:42 Yeah, I mean, look, it, there was some truth to it, you know, I would say in the 1990s.

Jason Calacanis 17:46 Yeah.

David Sacks 17:46 There was a prevailing view in Silicon Valley 30 years ago that once the company got to a certain level of size, you hire a professional manager. Subsequent to that, people figured out that the best performing companies are indeed the founder-led companies, the ones that keep the founder engaged for a long period of time.

Jason Calacanis 18:02 Yeah.

David Sacks 18:02 They tend to build the most value. Everybody understands that. Everyone wants the founder to be successful. The question is how do you make this founder successful? And I think there is a perverse dynamic where if you teach the founder that, "Hey, you're always right and everybody else is a liar and a faker," then that can create a, a distortion effect where founders don't feel the need to level up.... we all want the founder to level up. I mean, I would always rather invest in the founder who has vision over some professional manager, right? You want the visionary to succeed but you need them to level up and learn, you know, just basic management over time and if you're teaching them that, "Hey, founder's always right," there's less incentive to do that.

Jason Calacanis 18:44 I think it's a wonderful Rorschach test for basic intelligence. I mean, if you just read something and all of a sudden like, "That's my problem," hmm, it's probably not your problem. And so it's a great way to actually weed out the people that were just meant to fail anyways and just needed, uh, an, a way to externalize their frustration and have an excuse. I have never seen a person build a successful company unless they understood intimately the core amount of value that their company created and knew how to balance getting into the weeds with scaling through other people. I've never seen a good example of a, of a great CEO that didn't do that well.

David Sacks 19:24 Yeah, everyone has to figure this out.

Jason Calacanis 19:25 And there is no word salad that explains this. It's incredibly unique to every single company and so there is no panacea here.

19:34 Yeah. I mean, sometimes the founder's job is to get in the weeds of something that's broken in a company-

David Sacks 19:39 For sure.

Jason Calacanis 19:39 ... and get down to micro-manage it.

David Sacks 19:41 But wasn't this already understood?

Jason Calacanis 19:41 Other times, you wanna step back and let the sales team cook 'cause they're crushing it.

19:46 I would say it's their job to have the strategic wherewithal to understand what it takes to win and then win at all costs. That's their job.

19:54 Mm-hmm.

19:54 And if you cannot win and then you externalize your inability to win to an essay or something else, you're probably going to fail and your company's probably going to fail.

20:05 Friedberg, uh, you're back in the founder's seat after a, uh, brief sojourn as an investor. Any of this ring true to you or obvious? Uh, did you read the essay? Any thoughts on it, a reaction to it?

Chamath Palihapitiya 20:19 I mentioned this when we had our conversation in 2020 around governance and why governments seemed to not be able to synthesize different data to make decisions. They were being told what to do by their subordinates. The difference for me is leading versus managing, that a traditional manager... And I've seen this at a lot of companies, I, I even saw this a lot at Monsanto. The manager says to the people that report to them, "What are you guys going to do?" (laughs) And then the, the people, they go down to the people that report to them and they say, "What are you guys going to do?" And so you end up net-net developing this kind of bottoms-up model for the organization which is effectively driven with a diffusion of responsibility and as a result, the lack of vision. The leader says, "Here's what we are going to do and here is how we are going to do it." And then they can allocate responsibility for each of the pieces necessary. And the leader that's most successful is the one that can synthesize the input from the subordinates and take that synthesis to come up with a decision or a new direction rather than be told what's the answer by the subordinates. So leaders, I think, fundamentally are able to, number one, understand the different points of view of the people that report to them; number two, set a direction or set a vision, really clearly say, "This is where we are going"; and then number three, figure out how to allocate responsibility to the people that report to them to achieve that objective. Whereas a manager is typically being told what's going to happen in the organization like a giant Ouija board with 10,000 employees' hands on the writing thing that go around and try and write the sentences and ultimately you just get a bunch of gobbety-gook. As companies scale and they bring in these, quote, "professional managers," they're typically kind of looking down and saying, "Hey, what are we gonna do? What's gonna happen next?" And they're not actually setting a direction. Whereas someone who's a founder typically feels the authority to be able to set the direction. But to Chamath's point, Satya Nadella, Sundar, Nikesh-

Jason Calacanis 22:31 Tim Cook?

Chamath Palihapitiya 22:31 ... you know, you can kind of... Tim Cook, a great example. There are some really great leaders that have run organizations that are already scaled and then taken them to an order of magnitude or two orders of magnitude beyond where they were when they step in. So I don't think that there's an, necessarily a founder.

Jason Calacanis 22:48 And they each did it uniquely. I don't think there's a single way in which any one of those companies is run that necessarily you could have cut and pasted it to the other companies and have it worked. So it requires a smart individual who understands their company and their human capital intimately well and their business model.

Chamath Palihapitiya 23:07 By the way, what's important about what you just said, Chamath, is that that is effectively, I think, the definition of, like, being a successful founder, understanding from first principles. So these are leaders that can think from first principles, not necessarily from comparables. Most managers are taught in business school, "Here's how a business is run, here's how this person did it, here's how this company did it," and then they go and they try and cookie cutter repeat that. That doesn't really work because every business, if it's going to be successful, it has to be unique. And so the ability to actually think uniquely and identify from first principles the means necessary to achieve the mission of the organization I think is a critical, critical leadership, uh, trait-

Jason Calacanis 23:47 Maybe that le-

Chamath Palihapitiya 23:48 ... and that, that... Yeah, that leader can come from a founder or not, but this ability to kind of, ih- yeah, ignore convention, ignore comparables, and think for yourself.

Jason Calacanis 23:55 I don't see most founders starting a business because they've done some first principles analysis. I see most founders starting companies because they see a gap that they're pretty sure exists. But I think the biggest thing that founders have is this intersection of fearlessness and naivety. And so they... if they knew too much, they would never do it. That, I don't think, necessarily means that the entire set of all of those people are actually great first principles thinkers.... the first principles is required after product market fit. What's required before product market fit is risk-taking, curiosity, relentless iteration, and those are a very different set of characteristics. Is it true that some founders can then change their toolkit? Absolutely. But is it true that, quote, unquote, "Because you have a title, you have those things"? Absolutely not. Otherwise, we would have a much higher success rate in Silicon Valley than we do. There is a reason why 95% of these companies go to zero. It's because the ability to do the first thing is rare and then the ability to transition is even more rare.

Chamath Palihapitiya 25:02 Well, building a unique business, and I think if you look at Airbnb, and I'll give Brian Chesky incredible credit for this, you look at Uber, you look at how Steve Jobs built Apple, what every one of these businesses have in common is that they were all built in a unique way. And I think that's what makes great businesses, is that they identify their own path, their own unique path for how to operate a business to scale to achieve the mission of the organization. And I think that that's what's typically lacking in trained managers who use comparables and biases from their prior experience and what they've been trained and taught to use as a cookie-cutter type model, which doesn't create unique value. It makes your business look like the other and ultimately it commoditizes some aspect of the business to the point that the value of the business goes down. But to build something unique where you're constantly finding the unique path that gives you an advantage is what all of these companies have in common. Whether that unique path was made by a, an experienced hired person or a first-time founder, it's this ability to kind of build a unique competency that I think makes them all distinct as a group.

Jason Calacanis 26:03 I think that's a really good point. Like, if you look at some technology businesses, they start off looking like technology businesses and what they really are, are tech-enabled consumer businesses. Other businesses are pure technology companies. And why that distinction is important in this context is that there are certain kinds of challenges you have in the former that you just don't have in the latter and vice versa. So if you're a Google or a Facebook and you run into some problem, typically the solution is you can engineer around it because ultimately your product is free and there's a different way to scale and grow and create feature value because those are also incrementally free. If you look at a company like Airbnb, and if you look at the last six months in the stock, what is it telling you? It's telling you that the people that own it have realized that it's less of a technology business and it's more of a cyclical business that ebbs and flows with the ability to spend money on behalf of the consumer. So now all of a sudden, you're put into a different bucket and you grow as people's belief ebbs and flows about the amount of spending that consumers have. That is independent of your product quality. And what that means is that there's no amount of investment in technology that you can really make to change that. People need to have excess capital in order to spend on vacations, and then you can capture your fair share of that. But if we're in a recession, that company will be under pressure in a way that has nothing to do with the internal product quality that they exhibit. So these are just dimensionality. There's, it's just different kinds of problems that every single company faces that are totally unique to its own circumstances. So if you are trying to point to some label as the reason why your company is failing, I would just encourage you to not do that.

Chamath Palihapitiya 27:50 J Cal, you've in- you've interviewed thousands of founders, CEOs. You've seen successful-

Jason Calacanis 27:54 Yeah. (laughs)

Chamath Palihapitiya 27:54 ... unsuccessful. Do you have a point of view on whether this concept applies and what, if you have a general kind of heuristic for the difference between success and not success?

Jason Calacanis 28:05 It's very different in the, the place where Paul Graham and I invest, year zero, year one of a company. And, uh, Chamath, you alluded to this, i- in that time period, going from zero to one, from no customers to one customer, it's about, you know, really having a team of builders, people who can actually build a product and have what's called product velocity in the industry, the ability to iterate, and then how much time do they spend with customers understanding what those customers' problems are. And so what we'll see is when the professional managers try to do that, they try to get a product to market and achieve what's called product market fit, and then eventually maybe get product or get market pull, as Andy Ratcliffe defines it, which is the market is seeking your product out because of word of mouth and because they need it, which Airbnb and Uber would fall into now, the difference between those two moments in time and who's good at it is, is pretty different, to your point, Chamath. So to be able to win both those bets is hard. That's like a parlay in a way. Getting the product market fit requires this sort of relentlessness in innovation and trying things. If you have experience in that vertical, it works against you. So we were looking at a company today i- in our, in our firm that has a really good idea and it's people who are from the industry, but they have an okay idea. It's people from the industry, but they can't get the product built because they're senior managers who have 20 years experience in this particular vertical. You would much rather see neophytes come at the vertical. So if you look at the companies mentioned here, Airbnb, Uber, and then, uh, SpaceX and Tesla, you, you just look at those four companies, they had no experience, zero, in space, in travel, in transportation, hospitality, you know, or any of the, uh, the success they had, or electric cars. But to actually scale those companies, that does require a lot of expertise, a lot of tactics, and, you know, people who can focus i- in a way on very narrow things. And that sometimes founders who are in that first group, they can't have that focus on but one tiny little thing. They just get bored with it. And so they have to learn to have really great people, recruit really great people, and actually, yes, delegate to them to run a department and say, "Hey, uh, we, the goal of this organization..." And you saw this, Chamath, when you were at Facebook, I think. You've told me so many stories about, you know, you're focused on one thing.... the sign-up flow, getting people to add that second or third friend, getting them to fill out their profile. There were, like, key moments you determined would equal success, and then Zuckerberg, yourself, and those earl- that early crew were able to obsess over those. So, maybe you could talk about Zuckerberg's ride to, to getting the first, you know, whatever, 10 million people on the product, but then 10 million to a billion.

30:56 Well, I mean, Zuck, I think, did an incredible thing for me, which is he let my team cook. I don't remember having skip-level meetings, this, that, and none of this other nonsense. But at the same time, what he did was he created air cover for us, because, let's be honest, I was an immature executive at the time. So, I was still learning how to be part of a fabric of a group of people. I did not know how to do that. So, I was little bit of a lone wolf operator with my team, and I operated that way. You know, I would, "Hey, guys, we get to 100 million people, we're all going to Vegas," and the rest of the company would be upset. And, you know, Mark and Sheryl's job would be to clean up the broken glass of everybody else saying, "There's these haves and have-nots at Facebook." And in hindsight, who cares? 'Cause it all worked. In the moment, I could see why everybody else was a little bit upset with that. So, they did a wonderful job of letting this wonderful team of very curious iterators do their job, and they basically got out of the way, and I think that that's a wonderful thing. But is that repeatable? Not in any other company because that context and timing and moment was very unique. And again, my approach to the job was unique, not necessarily sustainable, not necessarily good nor bad, different, and we adapted to those boundary conditions to maximize how we could deliver, but it doesn't mean anything to any other company, in my opinion.

32:16 Yeah. I, I think it's, it's well said. There's another good book, uh, before we go on to our next subject, Patrick Lencioni. I'm sure some of you have read The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, but he kind of got into early this sort of ability to be unliked inside of a company. And I'll just... I think I highly recommend the book because it really talks about this sort of fear of conflict and avoidance of accountability and inattention to results, which is kind of the underpinnings of, I think, what Paul was getting to with founder mode. Okay, great discussion, everybody. Let's,

Jason Calacanis 32:52 uh, speaking of founder mode, (laughs) I mean, this story keeps coming back. Ryan Breslow is back in the news. We talked about this company before. Breslow is the founder of a company called Bolt. That's a payment startup, and I have to set the story up in a, in a couple of acts here. Sacks and I (laughs) had been following it for a while. Bolt was a payment startup. They did one-click checkout products. If you don't know the one-click, Amazon had a patent for this for a while. It came out of, um, it- it came out of p- patent protection. Everybody sort of jumped on it. Their Shop Pay by Shopify, you probably have experience. You, you buy something at one store, and then, uh, you log into another store with your phone number. It has all your credentials, you've been cookied, and that basically takes out the friction and allows you to make a purchase at another vendor without having to put in all your credentials and credit card and everything. So, Bolt makes that through an API for different shops online. They generated 27 million in revenue on a $300 million loss last year. They get two to 3% commission when they sell something. Anyway, we talked about Bolt back in January 2022 because they had raised at an extraordinary valuation, 355 million at an $11 billion valuation, 366 times revenue, Sacks. I, I guess we missed those. Then Breslow made waves on Twitter by calling Stripe and YC the mob bosses of Silicon Valley. He alleged they were kind of acting in cahoots to keep people from using Bolt, and he claimed YC was skewering rankings on Hacker News, all this other stuff. Anyway, it's been two and a half years since we talked about this craziness at Bolt, and Breslow stepped down as CEO after posting that thread. He was accused of overstating Bolt's customers and technical capabilities to investors while raising money. That got probed by the SEC. They didn't take any action, but then their valuation was slashed 97% to 300 million earlier this year. That's where, uh, the story had ended until just last week when an insane story came out that Bolt's interim CEO, not Breslow, had emailed investors informing them out of the blue that they were going to raise 450 million at a $14 billion valuation. This came as a surprise to investors. They didn't know this was happening, according to reports, and that this deal would put Breslow back in charge as CEO. It was confusing to all the investors, and they've all started to lawyer up and try to figure this out. Here's what we know so far. Bolt is on pace to generate 28 million in revenue this year, roughly the same as 2021, and so a $14 billion valuation would be 500 times revenue, Chamath. I'm not sure who would pay for that deal, but this deal is, uh, unique in that it's called pay-to-play. If you don't know that term, it basically means if you're an existing investor, if you don't invest in this round, you are going to lose your existing shares or have them diluted massively. So, uh, some investment bank out of the Seychelles, which is that tiny island in Africa that rich people go on vacation, was supposed to put in 200 million. It's a... That firm was called Silver Bear. The other 250 million would come from a firm called The London Firm in marketing capital and credits on a venture investing platform. So, anyway, (laughs) there's a ton of carve-outs here and other stuff. I'm gonna stop there at the notes, and just, Sacks, this is the craziest story. Sorry it took so long to get here. What, what are your thoughts on what we're seeing here in this drama and this ZIRP valuation?

David Sacks 36:35 Yeah, look, uh, r- Ryan has been right before. He's been right in the past. But in this case, it looks like he's clearly over his skis and, if the reporting is correct, it looks like he's trying to drum up interest in a financing round by representing things that aren't true or haven't happened yet, saying that certain investors aren't important, and those investors are coming out and saying that they're not. The question I- I think that's relevant, and that relates back to our previous topic, is this founder mode?

Jason Calacanis 37:05 Hmm.

David Sacks 37:05 I mean, what makes this not founder mode? And I think that this is where it'd be helpful to have a little bit more substance and not just a branding exercise. Let me give you a- a- a more mundane example. I was in a board meeting the other day and I commented to the team on how they had, uh, gotten their burn down substantially since the last board meeting and somebody joked, one of the founders said, "Founder mode," and it was kind of a joke. Okay, great, but then it got me thinking, what if in this board meeting it had gone the opposite way and the founders had taken the position, "You know what? We're not gonna try and cut burn. We're gonna put the pedal to the metal and accelerate the business and spend a lot more because somehow it's gonna get us to the next funding round faster."

Jason Calacanis 37:44 Founder mode.

David Sacks 37:45 Would that have been-

Jason Calacanis 37:45 Founder mode. (laughs)

David Sacks 37:46 Would that have been founder mode- mode two? Would that have been founder mode two?

Jason Calacanis 37:48 Hold on, let me find out. Ugh. Yeah, that's founder mode, baby. Let's go.

David Sacks 37:53 Exactly.

Jason Calacanis 37:53 Let's double the burn. (laughs)

David Sacks 37:55 So- so when you start branding these concepts without putting any substance behind them and, quite frankly, you've never been an operator yourself, you've never actually created a unicorn company, but you're representing yourself as a unicorn whisperer, like you're a guru in something you've never really done before, then it just allows people who want to justify bad behavior to basically get away with doing whatever they want. And that's what you're seeing with founder mode now, J Cal. The reason why that joke is funny, your doing your Tony Montana bit-

Jason Calacanis 38:24 Yeah.

David Sacks 38:24 ... is because you can justify any bad behavior as founder mode.

Jason Calacanis 38:27 Yes.

David Sacks 38:28 And I think that's what all the memes are about right now, is that founder mode's become a joke because there's no substance to it and it allows you to justify anything a founder wants to do. And I think a more honest way to approach this would be to define, here are the actual behaviors that make a founder successful, including when a founder is wrong.

Jason Calacanis 38:51 How about slightly differently? There are stupid outcomes and smart outcomes, and there are all-

David Sacks 38:56 Okay. (laughs)

Jason Calacanis 38:56 ... kinds of different people that can get to stupid outcomes and smart outcomes. And so you have to have the courage to say, "That was stupid. Don't ever do that again," and, "That was smart. Do more of that." And if you can't distinguish the two or you can't get to the latter, you're gonna fail.

39:09 Instead of founder mode, why don't we call it founder responsibility? Like, what are their responsibilities?

David Sacks 39:14 Or founder authority is good too. I mean, founder authority is good.

Jason Calacanis 39:15 Founder authority, founder responsibility.

39:17 Steph Curry is not the founder of the Warriors, but he's the linchpin, okay?

39:20 Yeah.

39:20 My point is-

39:21 He's a captain. Yeah.

39:22 ... teams- teams need winning players and then you need to put together your own game plan for winning, but the goal should be winning. If you are not winning, you are a loser.

39:31 And what does winning have? Really talented, really driven people in different positions who understand their position and-

39:37 You gotta win. You gotta win.

39:37 ... are held accountable for their positions.

39:39 Forget these labels. Winning.

39:41 Yeah.

39:41 Winning. If you're not winning, you're losing.

David Sacks 39:43 Yeah, to be frank, there's a certain kinda con man who represents themselves as a guru even though they've never done the thing that they pretend to have done.

Jason Calacanis 39:53 Interesting.

David Sacks 39:53 And... Yeah. And in this case, frankly, you've got someone promoting concepts about operating when they've never done that before. They've never scaled a unicorn company, yet they're pretending to be a unicorn whisperer who's telling founders how to behave. And the question you need to ask, is this, at the end of the day, helpful or not? I mean, we all wanna exalt and celebrate founders.

Jason Calacanis 40:15 I wanna... I wanna win.

David Sacks 40:16 Exactly, but we all wanna win. And, you know, James Madison said that, you know, men are not- not angels. What do you do about those cases, rare, I think they're pretty rare, where the founder is just wrong about something?

Jason Calacanis 40:27 Exactly.

David Sacks 40:28 Where they're, like, representing that investors are gonna do something that they're not gonna do or Elizabeth Holmes represents that she's got a product that she doesn't have or-

Jason Calacanis 40:37 Exactly.

David Sacks 40:37 ... you have a founder breaking a regulatory requirement that actually is necessary that they comply with. What do you do in all those cases? You actually need to have some objective standard of behavior that's not just, "Oh, founder is always right, traditional managers are always wrong," because that's just not nuanced enough to account for what it's actually gonna take to win.

Jason Calacanis 40:58 Well, I mean, if Adam Neumann had listened to a lot of the smart people he had hired at WeWork, he might not have signed leases that were so high priced and gotten away from the playbook that worked when they started that business, which was find the cheapest real estate, charge the highest price you can for it by making it, you know, a community and- and really nice, as opposed to hiring the class A, getting the class A space and then charging a B price.

41:24 To your point, like, a senior real estate executive would have put together a forecast of cash flows.

41:30 Yeah.

41:30 And it would have been a very boring meeting. But if you didn't have the intellectual wherewithal to realize that that was a critical meeting for a real estate business and then listened to that and then managed your burn appropriately, that was a huge mistake. So again, it just... It always comes down to, can you take all the labels and all of the, you know, naval gazing aside and can you make good, smart decisions when you're asked to run the play? That's your job at every level of a company. And a CEO that knows how to do that tends to helm winning companies. And I don't think that that is exhibited in whether you are employee zero or employee 20. It's- it's a intellectual and psychological archetype.

David Sacks 42:16 Yeah. I mean, in my experience, the founders that are highly successful are the ones that- that are hands-on, they've got a strong vision and they pursue it and they're constantly learning and leveling up. And they're gonna learn wherever they can. They are gonna learn from other founders. They're gonna learn from executives they may have hired who maybe do have more of a traditional background. They're gonna figure out what works for them and they're gonna discard the parts that don't work for them and they're gonna...... double down on the parts that do and the end result is going to be a style that works for them and there's not a one-size-fits-all to that, as we've seen.

Jason Calacanis 42:48 That's, that's actually the most important thing that, that I've heard in this whole discussion that we don't talk enough about. The people that win are deeply intellectually promiscuous. They're learning about many, many things, they're adapting things to their own playbook. The next day they may throw that piece away and take something else because it's something they learned. We use the word re-underwrite a lot, right? But it's this idea of constantly re-underwriting what the conditions on the field are so you know what you need to do in that moment to maximize your chances of success.

43:17 I have the, uh, perfect example of this. When I was running Weblogs, Inc., we were gonna raise a round of funding. Mark Cuban had given us the first 300 and Marc Andreessen was gonna give us 500K for our blogging company then did in Gadget, et cetera, and I had met Jeff Bezos and I told him, "I'm in Seattle this week. (laughs) Would love to catch up with you." I wasn't in Se- I said, "I was gonna be in Seattle next week for the whole week. Would love to catch up with you." I wasn't planning on being in Seattle. I made that story up just to make it convenient for him and, uh, he said, "Sure, come by on Tuesday," or whatever. I come by on Tuesday, I sit with Jeff Bezos, my partner, Brian Alvai, and the intellectual curiosity he took on taking apart Engadget and blogging as this new medium that was very disruptive at the time. "How do you pick the name of the blog? Tell me about the CMS. H- What is the publishing strategy? How do you hire people?" And I would say, "Oh, you know, we hire people. The best people are the great commentators so we look at the great comments and then we hire them." And then I watched in Amazon, they started hiring the people writing great reviews for their review team and I was like, "Oh, wow. He, he really is taking notes on this." And to your point, Sax, or maybe Chamath, you made this point, in terms of hiring, one of the great techniques Bezos had is, uh, a concept called bar raisers. And a bar raiser in Amazon is somebody you hire for your team who is so good that they raise the bar for the entire team. So when they would say, "Hey, we're gonna add somebody to this team, they're gonna be the 10th person," he'd say, "Are they better, at whatever dimensions, than the rest of the team and will they raise the bar for everybody here?" And then you think about some managers, they hire somebody who fits in. They hire somebody who doesn't rock the boat and, uh, there are techniques here and very specific ways to attract talent to your startup that will become, um-

45:02 You know, do you guys remember part of the reason-

45:04 ... catalyst for change. Yeah.

45:04 ... why YC and Founders Fund and Andreessen took this path was to try to corner Sequoia? Because Sequoia had this reputation in the '90s and early 2000s as somebody that would boot the founder. But when you look at Sequoia's returns, what their returns say is these guys are just winners. They're consummate, incredible winners. And so what Sequoia had the ability to do, clearly, looking backwards, is figure out which companies had people that were adapting themselves and scaling and people who were a little bit in a cul-de-sac and just needed to get replaced. And again, they were operating from a first principles perspective, in my opinion, and they were being pretty ruthless and acting with zero nostalgia. So it, again, it's just a reminder, like, there is no easy answer here. It is so hard. That is why 95-plus percent of, of our companies and our efforts end up with nothing to show for it at the end of it.

46:05 You know what was, Riberg, to bring you in on this discussion, there was a moment in time actually where this actually crossed over and you got to witness it, which was when Larry and Sergey were taking Google public. And before that they said, "You know, I don't know if the markets will let these two PhDs, as smart as they are, as driven as they are, with such a great product, I don't know if they're gonna buy the stock. Can we get an adult in the room who's done this before?" And they found Eric Schmidt, who had run Novell, and they brought him in as this, you know, third part of the triangle and then eventually he wound up leaving, et cetera. What were your thoughts on Silicon Valley in that transition time and Eric Schmidt's role at Google?

Chamath Palihapitiya 46:44 Well, Eric Schmidt came into Google through his relationship with John Doerr and John Doerr, as a mentor to Larry and Sergey and investor in Google, had suggested that they bring in a professional manager that can help them successfully scale the business. And John had this relationship with Eric and Larry and Sergey started to socialize with Eric and it was a very long process and they ultimately respected Eric because of his technical capabilities and technical background which was quite distinct from the other candidates that they had met during this process. But it was necessary. They were first time... They'd never worked anywhere. (laughs) They'd never had a job, they had never had experience. I think similarly, Sh- uh, Sheryl Sandberg as a partner to Zuck ultimately helped him level up and obviously Chamath and others, uh, prior to that. But these first time founders that haven't had any sort of work experience and have no concept of kind of organizational dynamics and the challenges that will arise as you try and build and scale a team to execute a mission typically need to have some degree of counseling, mentorship and support. And so bringing in that degree of experience with someone who's ready and willing to partner with the founders, meaning not necessarily direct them but partner with them and help them learn, as Eric did, and then ultimately handed the reins back to Larry and, um, as Sheryl did and ultimately Zuck continued to kind of lead the company, have been really powerful enabling forces. But Chamath is right. The early days of Silicon Valley venture capital were really framed around this concept where you find some smart technical founding team and then you bring in a professional manager, but that's because so much of the origin of technology in Silicon Valley was about selling technology into an enterprise. So there was kind of a bit of a tried and true business model and business structure that made sense. The new era, since the internet, has been quite different. Every business model imaginable has been reinvented in Silicon Valley. And so success, I think, has largely arisen in reinventing businesses, reinventing industries-

Jason Calacanis 48:43 Mm-hmm.

Chamath Palihapitiya 48:44 ... by kind of novel, independent thinking leaders, not necessarily...

Jason Calacanis 48:49 ... bringing in experienced managers to scale up a known business model.

David Sacks 48:52 Right. And just, I-I think the turning point was when Peter started Founders Fund, but that was over 20 years ago. In other words, Peter realized that that old approach in the '90s of bringing in the professional management had run its course, and that we needed to help founders level up and stay in the seat for as long as possible. That was 22 years ago that he created that firm.

Jason Calacanis 49:16 Yeah.

49:16 Mm-hmm.

David Sacks 49:16 So we're, like, decades into this, and that's what kind of feels anachronistic about this whole discussion, is it's almost like we're pretending like we're still in a world in which founders aren't celebrated and exalted. It's quite the contrary. They can do almost anything. And the-the question is, how do you help them level up? And at some point, if you're constantly just saying that, "Well, founders know everything. Founders are always right," is that actually helping them? Or is it actually reinforcing a mentality that, "Oh, I don't really have to learn anything"? 'Cause that, all the great founders have been learning machines. But if they had been told throughout that, "You're always right, don't worry about it," then they may not have learned the same way.

Jason Calacanis 49:58 Did you say you met with Eric Schmidt recently, Chamath?

50:01 Well, I had a meeting with Eric Schmidt a few weeks ago, which blew my mind. And I, I think I called Freberg right afterwards, but this is just an example of, like, there are just people that know how to win. He is one of those people. So as part of 8090, one of the things that we're doing is we're building a transpiler. You know, right now, everybody is very much fixated on PyTorch, and the problem with PyTorch and building to NVIDIA is you have this thing called CUDA in the middle of it, which is owned by NVIDIA. And, and I think that over time, that's problematic. So the long-term solution is you need a functional transpiler that can take CUDA-littered code but be able to compile it without losing performance to any hardware. So Amazon hardware, Google TPU, et cetera. So Eric and I sat down, we worked together for a couple of days when we were in Europe, and we had a, like, a hour, 90-minute meeting. The level of technical detail and mastery that he had blew me away, and he asked hundreds of very, very, very specific questions, some of which I knew the answers to, some of which I didn't. I was able to ask him what he thought. He was able to go into the weeds in an enormous amount of detail, and what I thought was, "Where is he finding the time to know as much as he does about compilers and the specifics of AI at this level of detail?" And, and the story of telling you this example is just more that that is a kind of person that is just rare and unique. You can't put a label on that person, and you just want that person near you because he has the ability to help you in a way that most other people just do not, irrespective of whatever their title is. So it, it just goes to say, like, you gotta focus on the actual meat of the problem. And in that specific case, he gave us two technical directions that my team and I are exploring now, with this goal that if one of them pans out, I'll go back to Eric and say, "Look, we tried these things. This is working, this is not working. What do you think?" And it was an incredibly helpful meeting to me, and he just offered that time to me. And so I'm, my point is, people like this exist, and I think that the whole goal, if you're trying to win, seek those people out independent-

52:17 Yes.

52:17 ... of what they're doing, what their title is.

52:18 Get them on your team.

52:19 Learn, learn from them as much as you can, and hopefully you get one step closer to winning.

52:24 And get them on your team, if possible, yeah.

52:26 Ideally.

52:26 All right, here

Jason Calacanis 52:28 we go. A panel of California judges has ruled that Section 230 does not protect TikTok's algorithm in the case of the death, tragically, of a 10-year-old girl. We've talked about Section 230 and, uh, legislation to protect algorithms or to make algorithms more editorial. We'll get to that in a second. But let me just queue up this story, and then we'll play a clip from Episode 99 of All-In podcast. In late-2021, a 10-year-old Pennsylvania girl accidentally killed herself while participating in a blackout challenge she saw on TikTok. That is a challenge that encourages viewers to choke themselves with objects like belts until they pass out. According to Bloomberg, this challenge has been linked with the deaths of 15 young people.

53:10 Oh, my God.

53:11 Yeah, this is terrible. Uh-

53:12 What?

53:13 ... the, the child's mother sued TikTok arguing that their algorithm served blackout challenge videos to her child, thus making them responsible. In the past, algorithmic decisions, as we've talked about here, were protected under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Just break this down very simply, if you're Section 230, that grants internet platforms featuring user-generated content immunity from being sued over content published by those users on their platforms. So YouTube, TikTok, Twitter, you know, a blogging platform, et cetera. So because of 230, you're technically not supposed to be able, able to go after something like TikTok because a random user posted crazy videos like this. But an appeals court, Chamath, has reversed that ruling with the judge arguing that TikTok's algorithm represents a unique, quote-unquote, "expressive product," which communicates to users through a curated stream of videos. The judge claims TikTok's algorithms refect, reflect editorial judgment. So here's the interesting legal detail, the new ruling specifically cites the Supreme Court's recent decision, Moody versus NetChoice, in which the court ruled unanimously to vacate that Florida law we talked about here that banned tech companies from deplatforming political officials. So that was viewed as a big win for speech protections acts and moderation rights in big tech, but this is all super ironic because the same ruling that affirmed big tech's First Amendment protections in content moderation may also have nullified the Section 230 immunity. So let's play this quick clip here. Chamath, this is a discussion you and I had about should algorithms be part of Section 230 back in 2022.

54:55 Let me break down an algorithm for you.Okay. Effectively, it is a mathematical equation of variables and weights. An editor 50 years ago was somebody who had that equation of variables and weights in his or her mind. And so all we did was we translated, again, this multimodal model that was in somebody's brain into a model that's mathematical, that sits in code. And-

55:21 You're talking about the front page editor-

55:22 ... and I think-

55:22 ... of The New York Times.

55:23 Yeah. And I think it's a fig leaf to say that because there is not an individual person who writes .2 in front of this one variable and .8 in front of the other, that all of a sudden that this isn't editorial decision-making is wrong. We need to understand the current moment in which we live, which is that these computers are thinking actively for us. And that is just true. And so I think we need to acknowledge that because I think it allows us at least to be in a position to rewrite these laws through the lens of the 21st century.

55:56 There's such an easy way to do this. If you're TikTok, if you're YouTube, if you want Section 230, if you want to have common carrier and not be responsible for what's there, when a user signs up, it should give them the option. Would you like to turn on an algorithm? Here are a series of algorithms which you could turn on. You could bring your own algorithm, you could write your own algorithm with a bunch of sliders, or here are ones that other users and services provide like an app store. So, Chamath, that was, uh, your take on it and here we are, what are your thoughts on Section 230 and algorithms today? Should, if you use an algorithm, should that nullify, void your Section 230 protection?

56:36 I think it is a fig leaf to say that we've, there's a level of distraction that should give us immunity. I think that these algorithms are taught to iteratively become better and better at hooking people on whatever is trending in that moment. And I think it's probably known to these companies at any given time what's trending. So, even though they're not literally going and changing something in the moment, doesn't mean that they don't support it and doesn't mean that they're not aware of it, and it doesn't mean that they haven't created a net to sort of catch these lightenings in a bottle and spread them around. And so, I think we just need to have a, a more intelligent discussion about how responsibility should be shared in a world where Section 230... Yeah, you're right. I'll just say it again. We're not writing deterministic code anymore. It doesn't say, "If this, then that. Show them the blackout video." There is no piece of code anywhere, but it's, it's kind of a fig leaf to say that that isn't the intention of the way that the new form of software is written.

57:44 Yes. Correct. Sax, your thoughts here on balancing 230 with the fact that I think we all agree that these algorithms are the new modern-day editors.

David Sacks 57:55 I don't agree. I have a very different opinion on this than you guys do and I-

Jason Calacanis 57:57 Oh, okay. Here we go.

David Sacks 57:58 ... and I always have.

Jason Calacanis 57:59 Let's hear it.

David Sacks 57:59 Well, first of all, let me just speak to the, the, um, legal precedent here. Last year, there were two Supreme Court decisions addressing this very issue of whether algorithms basically obviated 230 protection and the court found that they didn't. There were a couple of cases involving in- users who basically went down a rabbit hole of, like, terrorist videos and got-

Jason Calacanis 58:23 Yep.

David Sacks 58:23 ... recruited by ISIS. Remember this?

Jason Calacanis 58:25 Yes.

David Sacks 58:26 And they were sued by the families of victims, or at least the social networks were, and the argument was that they basically had been recruited into ISIS and committed the terrorism because of the algorithms and the social networks were liable for that. The Supreme Court found that they weren't, which is just to say that algorithms were not treated differently than if the content had been on a, a regular feed, you know, just a chronological feed. And what Section 230 says is that you can only hold the user liable. We're gonna treat social networks as distributors, not publishers, for the purpose of user-generated content. I've long held the view that if you wanna make online platforms liable as publishers for every piece of user-generated content, then you're gonna have very little free speech left, because I just think that corporate risk aversion is gonna force these guys to become even more censorious than they already are. Every piece of content that could potentially lead to a lawsuit is gonna get shut down, and I think that the net effect of that will be much more negative. Now, to the argument about aren't algorithms just the new editors, I don't, I don't think so. I think there's a fundamental difference between what an editor does and what an algorithm does. If you look at an editorial page of The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, it has a very specific point of view that it's promoting. In fact, sometimes you can't tell the op-ed page from the news page because it seems like that publication is so biased in favor of one point of view or another. An algorithm isn't supposed to do that. An algorithm is supposed to give you more of what you want. And so therefore, if you are pro-Trump, you'll see more pro-Trump content. If you're pro-Kamala Harris, you'll see more Harris content. In other words, X or whatever the platform is isn't supposed to be taking an editorial position on whether it supports Trump or Harris, but rather, it's giving you more of what you want. Elon recently spoke to this that he had a, uh, a tweet recently where he talked about, hey, people are coming to him saying, "Hey, I'm, I'm seeing all these, like, offensive things in my feed. Why is this?" Well, it turns out that they had been sharing those posts that were offensive to them and so they were-

Jason Calacanis 1:00:39 Yes.

David Sacks 1:00:39 ... seeing more of them. And that's a really good example of how the algorithm just gives you more of what you're interacting with, so don't interact with outrage porn. If you don't wanna be outraged, stop interacting with outrage porn and you'll see less of it.

Jason Calacanis 1:00:53 Mm-hmm.

David Sacks 1:00:53 I just think that is fundamentally different than having an editorial point of view. X does not have an editorial point of view that it wants you to see more of that outrage. It's simply the user is making clicks...... and, you know, clicking a share button in a way that it interprets it to be saying, "Oh, this user wants more of that content."

Jason Calacanis 1:01:12 Yes.

David Sacks 1:01:13 And so this is why I don't think that, all of a sudden, Section 230 protection should be voided. I just think it's a fundamentally different thing than what a publisher does.

Jason Calacanis 1:01:23 I have a third view, and, uh, uh, I'll bring you in on this discussion here, Friedberg, is that these algorithms have come- become so powerful, they are even better than editors at catering to users' needs because they're obviously, uh, one-to-one casting, right? And so this is a perfect opportunity not to get rid of 230 but to evolve it. And as I said in that previous clip, you know, there is a big issue as to who's making these algorithms, in the case of TikTok, the Chinese government's influence. And, you know, what is their intention and are they being thoughtful about it 'cause they are powerful? And what responsibility do they take? Is the responsibility stopping at increasing the session? Because if you want to increase a session, all you have to do is keep showing more rage and getting people more upset, and that leads to division in society and all kinds of weird things that can occur. And so empowering users and having more transparency would be a great way for the government, uh, for individuals who are frustrated with this, and the platforms to find some common ground and evolve. What do you think of this possibility, Friedberg, of maybe you come to YouTube and instead of shutting down 230 and causing chaos, to your point, Sax, which I-I agree with that, it would cause chaos and more censoring, just saying to people, "Hey, welcome to YouTube. Here are three ways you can view your content by default. You can pick our algorithm, you can pick an education-leaning algorithm, you can pick a music-leaning algorithm, or you could have no algorithm at all, and you'll just be faced with a directory." What do you think of that as a maybe a middle ground here?

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:02:59 I'm not sure that giving people a choice of an algorithm is gonna work. Consumers just wanna have stuff that incites emotion. There's a reason, you know, horror movies do well and also romantic comedies and also adventure films. Like, they're all emotive. At the end of the day, the more emotive something is, the more emotionally inciting it is, the more likely you are to kind of want to have something like that again. And so that's simply the nature of how, you know, humans, uh, interact with the world around them. When something is emotionally inciting, you want more of it and you get more of it, then that- that creates the dopamine and that drives the- the behavior. The crazy thing about social media or digital media firstly is that the cycle, the feedback cycle, is much faster. Used to be that you put out a book, you wouldn't get the results on how the book sold and how many people liked it and how many people read it till a year later. And then with movies, you get results in a weekend. But with social media, you get results instantly when a piece of content comes out online. You get an instant result. And then with the concept of a feed, where the next content is dynamically selected for you based on your reaction to the content prior to it, you kinda get this immediate feedback loop that then tunes and lines up the next thing, and now you're getting hundreds of iterations an hour. So I'm, I'm not sure that there's really this, like, simple solve where let me show you something that's, like, less inciting. At the end of the day, if it's something that's horrific or something that's romantic or something that's inspiring, if it's emotionally, uh, kind of activating enough, you're gonna be happy watching the next one. You're gonna keep watching and you're gonna keep watching it.

David Sacks 1:04:32 I think there's a, there is a relatively easy solve, which is you could simply open source the algorithm like X has done so we can see is it messing with your mind or not? Is it actually biased? Are they actually inserting editorial opinions into the algorithm? And so if you open source it, people can see what it's doing. I actually, I, I hear this point of view a lot that social media is only preying on negative emotions. That argument is made a lot by people who wanna regulate it more and they want more censorship, and that's why they're making that kind of argument. I don't think that the algorithm is only reacting to outrage or incitement. I think quite the contrary. What I've seen on my X feed is that it's showing me more stuff that I like, and I'm-

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:05:14 That's right.

David Sacks 1:05:15 I mean, the algorithm's gotten so good.

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:05:17 Yeah, like if you go on YouTube, I got... I, I love watching, uh, like videos of mountain biking (laughs) , and I see, like, all these crazy mountain biking videos now. And I'm- and I love watching them. I'm like, "Dude, this is awesome."

David Sacks 1:05:27 Right, so I don't think it's about making me angry.

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:05:29 It's like- it's exciting for me.

Jason Calacanis 1:05:29 I hear what you're saying, but I would just... I would offer something slightly different, which is I think that these algorithms focus on momentum. So meaning if Friedberg spends the next 15 minutes looking at mountain biking videos, the momentum shifts to mountain biking. If he then goes to surfing, the algorithm goes to that.

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:05:46 There's a decay function. That's right, yeah.

Jason Calacanis 1:05:48 And the reason is that the way that these... if you go back to the actual models themselves, the way that they're architected, right? Like, if you look inside of a transformer, what is it? There's a neural network part and then there's a self-attention part. What is the self-attention thing trying to do? It's trying to figure out the momentum and the importance of a given input. So the core structure of the way that, like, we've solved the problem today is erring towards a thing where if actors in the system wanted to create momentum in one direction versus the other, they can probably do it before they get caught because the algorithms will amplify that. And I think this is the whole point where these blackout videos, it's not as if somebody wanted to consume that per se, as much as there was a moment in time where the momentum was towards those videos, a large swath of people got it, and then the unfortunate tragedy is the very small percentage of people acted on it and were killed. This can happen over and over and over again on all kinds of different things.

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:06:56 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis 1:06:56 And I think that's what needs to be addressed.

David Sacks 1:06:57 Right, I agree.

Jason Calacanis 1:06:57 And, you know-

David Sacks 1:06:57 And maybe 10-year-olds shouldn't be allowed to use TikTok without any supervision. Maybe that's a better answer.

Jason Calacanis 1:07:02 That could be a better answer too.

1:07:04 I think, based on some of our discussions, you know, yeah, having kids not have these phones at school and putting them into the pouches and no social media until you're 16 or 17 because one of the other things that's happening here is these algorithms are so good...... that they are now causing a dopamine deficiency in children. It's causing depression because you can get desensitized and every time you swipe up, you get a dopamine hit and then your brain gets reset and you have less ability to get joy from having dinner with your family or playing cards with your friends or doing any other things, and that's what doomscrolling does. That's why we lost you, Sax, to the poker game. You were too busy doomscrolling and you got addicted to it and you don't come to poker anymore.

1:07:49 (laughs)

1:07:49 But this is what we need to do.

1:07:50 (laughs)

1:07:50 As a society, these phones are destroying everybody's lives. They're killing-

1:07:54 Boo.

1:07:54 ... friendships, they're killing these poor kids who are sitting there like zombies. The algorithm is just too good. We have now, the snake is eating its tail.

David Sacks 1:08:03 I, I will agree, I will agree with that to some degree that I waste way too much time using X but, I mean, I just do it to stay up on current events so I can do this pod.

Jason Calacanis 1:08:12 (laughs)

1:08:12 Yes, that's my excuse too.

David Sacks 1:08:14 I mean, if I didn't have this pod, maybe I could just stop using it. That'd be great.

Jason Calacanis 1:08:17 I-

David Sacks 1:08:17 I'd love to have that time back and just read more books.

Jason Calacanis 1:08:20 I'm, you know what? I'm gonna do it with you. We're gonna go on a little social media diet, you and I. From now on, we're gonna go for sushi, maybe some sushi.

David Sacks 1:08:26 Well, you've been acting insane. You've been acting totally insane.

Jason Calacanis 1:08:27 You have lost your mind.

1:08:29 (laughs)

David Sacks 1:08:29 No, you've lost your mind.

Jason Calacanis 1:08:30 It's all you. You need a detox. I'm gonna-

David Sacks 1:08:32 No, you need a detox.

Jason Calacanis 1:08:34 No, you need a detox.

David Sacks 1:08:34 Anyone who disagrees with you is, like, on Putin's payroll now.

Jason Calacanis 1:08:37 (laughs)

David Sacks 1:08:38 What's wrong with you?

Jason Calacanis 1:08:38 Okay, dasvidania, my friend, Comrade Sax.

David Sacks 1:08:41 You're like the reincarnation of Joe McCarthy-

Jason Calacanis 1:08:43 Da, da, da.

David Sacks 1:08:44 ... on X.

Jason Calacanis 1:08:44 Exactly,

Jason Calacanis 1:08:45 yes. Since you wanna go into Russia, here we go. (laughs) It's 50 days before the election-

David Sacks 1:08:50 You're the one with Russia on the brain.

Jason Calacanis 1:08:51 ... and as predicted, we're 50 days before the election and who shows up? Putin. This is the greatest story ever. Ah, I need-

1:09:01 For those of you listening, Sax just rolled his eyes.

1:09:03 (laughs) It's so funny. Ah, this is just great. Okay, the DOJ-

David Sacks 1:09:07 Who would've predicted there's gonna be another Russiagate hoax just in time for the election?

Jason Calacanis 1:09:10 You did, you did, and here we are.

1:09:11 (laughs)

1:09:11 And, and by the way, there's breaking news, more Russia am, stuff has dropped while we're on the pod.

David Sacks 1:09:16 There's a lotta people who started with Trump derangement syndrome and then they held Putin responsible for Trump getting elected, so the TDS became PDS-

Jason Calacanis 1:09:25 Mm-hmm, all right, well, let's get to the story.

David Sacks 1:09:26 ... and they got Putin derangement syndrome.

Jason Calacanis 1:09:27 Let, let's get to the story here, uh, comrade.

1:09:31 (laughs) Comrade.

David Sacks 1:09:31 I think this whole story is such a waste of time, we shouldn't even waste time on it.

Jason Calacanis 1:09:34 Well, we're gonna do it anyway, so here we go. The DOJ (laughs) just charged two Russian media operatives with infiltrating podcasts, yes, to push pro-Kremlin talking points. This was a wild drop on Wednesday, Chamath. The DOJ charged two Russian media operatives as part of an alleged, wait for it, propaganda and (laughs) misinformation scheme. According to the charges, these two employees of the state-run Russia Today, uh, outlet, RT, funneled $10 million into a Tennessee-based media company to influence public opinion and sow social divisions. The wire transfers happened between October of last year and recently, as last month. This included placing blame on Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine for its conflict with Russia. Interesting. Both Russians are charged with conspiracy to violate the Foreign Agents Registration Act and conspiracy to commit money laundering. They're looking at 20 years in jail. The indictment did not mention the company by name, but people quickly figured out who it was because of their location. The company's called Tenet Media, founded in 2023 by Lauren Chen, a conservative commentator, and their personalities included Tim Pool, Benny Johnson, Dave Rubin, and Lauren Southern. These are right-leaning podcasters. In the last year, Tenet has posted 2,000 videos which collectively had 16 million YouTube views according to the DOJ charges. Looks like the Russian operatives were coordinating-

1:11:00 Let's say the, Jason-

1:11:00 ... with the founders.

1:11:01 Jason, let's say the quiet part out loud, okay?

1:11:03 Mm-hmm.

1:11:03 We've heard this from Bobby Kennedy, we've heard this from a whole host of other people, we've now heard this from the DOJ. There is an inextricable link between the media and the people that pay for the media that want to influence what the media says. We know that to be true.

1:11:22 Mm-hmm.

1:11:22 Now, in this specific case, I hope the DOJ runs this to ground and, and gets, and gets justice served. What I would say generally is, the most incredible decision we ever made is to not have ads. It has been the single biggest clarifying function for our ability to maintain our own opinions and be credible. It's allowed us to change our minds. It's allowed us to evolve. If, if we were sort of characters in a movie, we wo- we will have gone through different transitions, frankly, as, as these last four years have gone by. I think that that would've been much harder to do-

1:12:03 Hm.

1:12:03 ... if we had people paying us money.

1:12:05 Yes.

1:12:05 So, this is just yet another example of your media diet, the more it can come from people who don't need to make money from this, the better off you will be because you will get earnest opinions. And what will happen is, whether it's large multinational corporations or foreign state actors, they are going to find unwitting people to take this money and blather on some set of talking points-

1:12:34 Yep.

1:12:34 ... on a whole host of topics.

1:12:36 Okay, and, uh, just to be clear-

1:12:38 Is that fair? I mean, is that-

1:12:38 Uh, we-

1:12:39 Do y'all agree with that or not?

1:12:40 I, my, I mean, I agree it was a great move to not have advertising, sure. 'Cause it, yeah, there's zero pressure from anybody calling us saying we're gonna pull our ad spots and also it makes the pod easier to listen to, I mean, none of us need the money. These personalities, Tim Pool, Benny Johnson, Dave Rubin, and Lauren Southern have, I think most of them have come out and said they didn't know. The indictment says that they didn't know, these podcasters, and the indictment also says they were paid huge sums of money, upwards of $100,000 per episode, to do this, and it's unclear what they were asked to do in the indictment, but there are some pressure techniques to produce tweets around certain things that the Russians wanted propagated-

David Sacks 1:13:22 What pressure techniques?

Jason Calacanis 1:13:24 They said in the indictment that they wanted more traffic because they weren't hitting their traffic numbers and to please amplify different videos and tweets that were pro-Russia. So that's in the-

David Sacks 1:13:37 No. No.

Jason Calacanis 1:13:37 ... indictment. So I guess the question then, Sax, for you is if-

David Sacks 1:13:40 They're totally mischaracterizing this.

Jason Calacanis 1:13:43 I'm... W- what, what, what was mischaracterized? I would never mischaracterize this. And I literally would never... I have no horse in the race here. There's no reason for me to mischaracterize it, so what am I mis- what, what am I getting wrong?

David Sacks 1:13:52 But I think you do ha- you do have a horse in the race. You believe in the Russia gate hoax-

Jason Calacanis 1:13:55 Zero horse.

David Sacks 1:13:55 ... for many years, and you want to basically try and restart that whole thing.

Jason Calacanis 1:13:59 That's not true. You can ask me. I, I think Russia... I've told this to you many times, Russia's sole goal is to do d- is to sow division between people in this country. I refuse to allow it to do so on this podcast or between you and I. The Russians just want to produce chaos.

David Sacks 1:14:16 (laughs)

Jason Calacanis 1:14:16 They do it on all sides. They get Green Party people-

David Sacks 1:14:19 You've changed your story.

Jason Calacanis 1:14:19 ... they get Democratic people. That's been my story from the beginning.

David Sacks 1:14:21 Uh, uh, you've changed your story a little bit. Okay.

Jason Calacanis 1:14:22 It's been my... I have said since the beginning that the KGB's technique in America is to sow division. That's their sole goal. They don't care who wins, they just want us to not pay attention to what they're doing in Ukraine or what's happening in Russia. That's-

David Sacks 1:14:36 Okay.

Jason Calacanis 1:14:36 ... Putin's goal.

David Sacks 1:14:36 So, so I think the place to start is with asking the question, who is Lauren Chen and what is Tenant Media and what has been their objective or what's their agenda? And their agenda now for months has been what's called division grifting inside the conservative movement. Lauren Chen's been putting out a lot of tweets explaining to people that they should vote against Trump. She's been saying that he has gone soft on issues like abortion, she's been pushing a very tough pro-life message, she's been promoting a, uh, I'd say strange and almost fanatical idea that we should repeal the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote. No one in the conservative movement seriously thinks this. And because of these positions, she was already being called out by people like Ashley St. Clair and Mike Cernovich, who said, "Something's not right here. This seems like an op, like these positions don't really make any sense. It seems like she's just causing mischief." So the place to start here is to recognize that if the Russians were paying Tenant Media to put out content, that content was actually anti-Trump, it was trying to get people to vote against Trump. So I think the place you have to start is by asking the question, why would Vladimir Putin want to get Kamala Harris elected? In fact, Putin just came out today and announced his endorsement of Kamala Harris. So perhaps the Russians have an agenda to get Harris elected. I could see why. She is the much weaker candidate. She's afraid to take questions on the tarmac. Trump is strong, he's authoritative, and I could see why they might prefer to have a President Harris than a President Trump. Let me just stop there and get your reactions to that, J-CAL.

Jason Calacanis 1:16:25 Yeah. I mean, I think the sowing, Cernovich's point, like that they just want to sow division and cause chaos is the key point. I don't think that Putin cares who wins, I think he just wants chaos here and he wants distraction. So whether he flips, he wants Kamala, he wants Killary, you know, he wants Trump. I, I, I think he just wants chaos-

David Sacks 1:16:45 But there is, there is a double standard here.

Jason Calacanis 1:16:45 ... and that's what the KGB does. That's what the KGB has always done, is try to get people to not believe reality. And, and that is their playbook for all history.

David Sacks 1:16:54 Well-

Jason Calacanis 1:16:54 They want to demoralize a population to not believe in their institutions, to not believe facts. And if... I- it seems like they're... it's working pretty well here in the United States.

David Sacks 1:17:05 I think that this is all wildly overstated, but to the extent we're gonna deal with it at all, I think it's really interesting how when the Russian operation benefits Kamala Harris, nobody accuses her of collusion or being a puppet of Russia. They just say it's about sowing division. But somehow when the op-

Jason Calacanis 1:17:24 When did that happen?

David Sacks 1:17:26 You just did that right now.