"Founder Mode," DOJ alleges Russian podcast op, Kamala flips proposals, Tech loses Section 230?
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Hold on, guys. I got to get into founder mode. Oh, wow. Founder mode. If he founder mode, so I'm going to founder mode. I got a founder mode too.

Where's J. Cal? Oh, shit. Let's go, Freeberg. Let's get this fucking started, baby. Come on, podcast. Number one podcast in the world. Here we go. Okay, guys, let's start the show. You are founder-moding. J. Cal, if you founder-mode anymore, you're going to get pneumonia. All right, Sax is like the 90s again. Back at Stanford.

This is the funniest cold opening ever done. Sorry. Oh my God. I got Belgian waffle mix everywhere. You got, it's right here, Jacob. You got a bunch of founder mode right there. I got a little founder mode there. Thanks for looking out. Rain Man, David Sack. And it said, we open sourced it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it. Love you guys. Queen of Kisses.

We're going all in. Founder mode, baby. Let's go. All right, everybody. Welcome back to the number one podcast in the world. With me again, the chairman dictator, Chamath Palihapitiya. How you doing, buddy? Have you acclimated? Now you're 15 days back on American soil. How are you adjusting? I'm doing well. I turned 48 two days ago. Oh, I know. The big 50, it's coming. I've already called dibs on

charrying your 50th. So we will be certainly getting arrested in 24 months. Save up your bail money, boys. Friedberg, you look...

Like you have had a record number of panic attacks in the last 48 hours. How is summit planning going? Are you okay, buddy? You took this responsibility on. Are you okay? I'm hanging in there. I'm just waiting for the shoe to drop, J. Cal, on what you're going to do to blow shit up. But I think we're almost there. So we're super excited. We have speaker names going out today. So we'll talk a little bit about who the speakers are. You guys know your bestie Elon will be there. Oh, 30.

Third year in a row. Okay. Third year in a row. He's the only repeat this year. We've got Mark Benioff joining us for a conversation about the future of enterprise. We've got Barry Weiss from the Free Press. We've got Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema.

We have John Mearsheimer and Jeffrey Sachs to talk about geopolitics with David Sachs, Sachs on Sachs. Nick Asherora. Nick Asherora. What about Peter Thiel? My guy. I haven't interviewed Peter Thiel in a decade. He's amazing. We've got the legend, the legend from LA, Michael Ovitz joining us.

Love that book. We're going to get into some really cool tech. Have you guys read Michael Ovitz's book? Yes. It's incredible. It's really incredible. It's a great book. Michael's incredible. It's a great book. What a playbook. It's a really interesting mix. We've also got some cool panels on tech and robotics. So we're doing all three of the big eVTOL companies together.

Joby, Archer, and Wisk, and their CEOs are going to be there. Gecko Robotics. So we've got Jake coming from Gecko to actually do a really cool product demo. We have the CEO of Waymo, Takedra Mawakana, joining us to talk about autonomous driving. Juan Carlos Belmonte talking about age reversal.

from Altos Labs, probably the most funded private company in history. And also Ingo's coming out from Europe, from Adyen, CEO 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. I mean, Adyen, I think, is the first and really only company that's implemented AI in production at scale.

It'll be really interesting to understand where that's gone in the last year. Great topic to talk about. And huge shout out to my boy, Woody Hoberg, US astronaut, joining us to tell us about his months aboard the ISS, his experience. Is he going to talk about his experience at Uranus? Yeah.

and captaining the Crew Dragon capsule back to Earth. From Uranus. And the future of spaceflight and Uranus, yes. To Uranus. Thank you, everyone. I love how he's like my guy, the astronaut, as if like Freeberg and an astronaut have the same life experience, you know? You know what happened, J. Cal? It's like me and my guy Draymond, you know, champions. Did I tell you, you know how I met Woody? He's a huge fan of the pod.

And then he, NASA astronauts, which I follow on Twitter, DM'd 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 Twitter or something, but I did the Zoom with Woody, got to know him, hung out with him since he's been back. Great guy. So you left out the number one host ever.

On the internet and broadcast or news on YouTube, Megan Kelly will be joining us. Megan Kelly. The phenomenal Megan Kelly. Didn't she call you a prick, J. Cal? Did she call me a prick? Why should she be any different? Yeah.

Oh, I can't wait for this fireworks. What do tall, beautiful, intelligent women call me historically? What do they call you? They call you, is that your mom? They don't. Exactly. They're like, get out of the way. Where's your mom? They're like, can you park my car? That's what they normally say. And then 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 going to share. So a lot of the content from the summit, we're going to be pushing out. Co-founder of Co2. Oh, sorry. Co-founder of Co2. Yep. And so a lot of the content we're going to be pushing out on YouTube

as quickly as we can. Obviously, some of the more timely news 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. So a huge shout out, which we would never otherwise do, partners to Excel Events, Hexclad, Merch.com, Athletic Brewing, The Ridge, The

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 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. Wait, what? So thanks. Yeah. Each startup founder? Each startup, yeah.

- I would have sent all my companies to this. - Exactly. - You pay 7,500 for a ticket, you get 350 in credit. - 350 grand of credit, that's incredible. - For Google Cloud, it is up to 350 in Google Cloud credits.

for eligible AI startups, which they can use over two years. It comes with a bunch of other benefits. So yeah, it's pretty awesome. Really glad they're doing this and they're going to have a big setup. You're the most lukewarm ad read I've ever heard. Do you want me to do that for you and get people right? Yeah, go for it. Can you guys Theo Vaughn it? How would you guys Theo Vaughn this? Go ahead. And Google Cloud is giving an amazing offer to everybody who comes to the summit. Wait till you hear the sacks. $350,000 for AI startups.

And that's real money that you would have spent otherwise. So a great gift from our friends at Google Cloud. Wait, $350,000 just for startups whose founders come to our summit? Yeah, for AI startup founders, they can sign up for Google Cloud. They get 350,000 credits that they can use in over two years. Total.

across all the founders who are no no no no no per business per business oh my gosh yeah so if you're spending 10k a month i have seven friends and family tickets left i'm starting seven companies in the next half hour they're all going to the summit i'm going to clear seriously 2.3 million dollars of credits and i'm going to sell them on ebay for 500k you can't do that

It's against the terms of service. Oh, you can't do that? Thank you to our friends at Google. 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 off of our free allocation. I was like, hey, what can these go for on this? I'm just thinking if it's sold out, these aren't worth $7,500 each. What's it worth if you can't get in? Yeah, I'm sure you'd find that out pretty quickly. Yeah. I mean, who's going to stop me? Sorry.

I did give one away for free. Trying to scalp the remaining tickets. No, I'm going to give them to my brother, Josh. If you want to get into the summit for $10,000 in cash, Josh will be at the loading dock. We're going to see a couple of Calcanis brothers on the sidewalk outside the conference holding a sign. You know, tickets available. Need one. Down at the Mongolian BBQ joint in Westwood. Listen, if you...

If you've ever been to Madison Square Garden, you just hold up the number one and somebody will come talk to you. Somebody will come talk to you. All right. We've gotten through all the great housekeeping. And 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 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 similar to my experience. PG defines the world now in two ways, two philosophies for running a company, manager mode versus founder mode. In manager mode, that'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. PG says,

He doesn't give too many specifics about Founder Mode. He kind of says, hey, we've got to 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 if you haven't heard of it, skip level meetings. This is where the CEO will meet not with their manager, a direct report, but maybe a group of people who report into that manager without the manager in the room. It's a notable and well-known thing.

management technique to kind of get information to the CEO a little bit faster. And what do you think? Chamath has got a lot of attention on a Sunday. Did you have any takeaways from it? 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.

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 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 Narayan, 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. Sacks, did you read the piece? You clearly saw all the memes and, you know,

I guess, kudos for the piece on X 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? 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 wouldn't hire MBAs. We had a no MBA hiring rule. And the reason was because 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 was

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 just to 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 VP or what have you, the way you, again, measure their output is just look at the output of their team. So therefore,

you ask what's going to maximize the output of that team or that org. And, you know, obviously if the CEO tries to do everything and make every decision, probably that's not going to result in the maximum output.

And 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 delegates to the summer intern. Yeah. 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 going to work either. Yeah. So again, you're going to have to find the right balance. And again, the way that you figure out

What the balance is, is to apply Gro's principle of maximizing the output of the team or the organization. And we've seen in some of the big company 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, the company seemed to work better. Yeah, great point. Because you're taking out a layer of overpaid people. And it just took out a huge amount of middle management 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 and I think has been understood for decades. Maybe the only new thing here is a little bit of branding around founder mode versus manager mode. 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 PGSAs and the YC standards.

model, which is founders always right. And everybody else in the ecosystem, especially traditional managers, they're either liars or fakers. And that basically has been the mannequin model that Paul Graham's been pumping out for decades. Is there something wrong with that model? You're kind of looking at it and I'm kind of hearing a little bit of a tone there. Maybe I'm reading into it that that doesn't match reality.

Well, sure. I mean, look, the whole ecosystem at Silicon Valley exists to help make founders successful. I mean, I was a founder myself. Now I'm an 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. By 2002 or 2003, when Peter Thiel created Founders Fund, he called it that to emphasize that founders should be in charge.

I'd say by the mid to late 2000s, no one really disagreed with that anymore. Yeah. 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. Kind of why commoners 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.

Yeah, I mean, look, there was some truth to it, you know, I'd say in the 1990s, 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. 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 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. 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, 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 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 great CEO that didn't do that well. Yeah.

Yeah, everyone has to figure this out. And there is no word salad that explains this. It's incredibly unique to every single company. And so there is no panacea here. I mean, sometimes the founder's job is to get in the weeds of something that's broken in a company. For sure. And get down to my firm manager. Other times, you want to step back and let the sales team cook because they're crushing it. 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. 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. Freeberg, you're back in the founder's seat after a brief sojourn as an investor. Any of this ring true to you or obvious? Did you read the essay? Any thoughts on it? The reaction to it?

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 even saw this a lot at Monsanto, the manager is

says to the people that report to them, what are you guys going to do? 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, a 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 gobbledygook. As companies scale and they bring in these quote professional managers, they're typically kind of looking down and saying, hey, what are we going to do? What's going to 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, Tim Cook, a great example of

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 necessarily a founder. 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

a smart individual who understands their company and their human capital intimately well and their business model. 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 trait. Maybe that, yeah, that leader can come from a founder or not. But this ability to kind of, yeah, ignore convention, ignore comparables and think for yourself. 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 principle 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 sub 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. 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 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. 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.

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. 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. J. Cal, you've interviewed thousands of founders, CEOs you've seen successful, unsuccessful. Do you have a point of view on whether this concept applies and if you have a general kind of

heuristic for the difference between success and not success? It's very different in the place where Paul Graham and I invest, year zero, year one of a company. And Chamath, you alluded to this. In that time period, going from zero to one, from no customers to one customer, it's about 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 pretty different to your point, Shamath. 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 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 SpaceX and Tesla, 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 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 in a way on very narrow things. And that's 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, 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 signup 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 that early crew were able to obsess over those. So maybe you could talk about Zuckerberg's ride to getting the first, you know, whatever, 10 million people on the product, but then 10 million to a billion. 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, 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 a 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 Mark and Cheryl'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? Because 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 or 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.

Yeah, I think it's well said. There's another good book before we go on to our next subject. Patrick Lanzioni, 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 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. Speaking of founder mode, 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 couple of acts here. Saxon and I 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 it came out of patent protection, everybody sort of jumped on it, their shop pay by Shopify, you probably have experience, you buy something at one store. And then 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 2% 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 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.

And then their valuation was slashed 97% to $300 million earlier this year. That's where 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 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 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. That firm was called Silver Bear.

The other $250 million would come from a firm called The London Farm in marketing capital and credits on a venture investing platform. So anyway, there's a ton of carve-outs here and other stuff. I'm going to stop there at the notes and just, Sax, this is the craziest story. Sorry it took so long to get here. What are your thoughts on what we're seeing here in this drama and this Zerp valuation?

Yeah, look, 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 are important and those investors are coming out and saying that they're not.

The question, I think that's relevant. And that relates back to our previous topic. Is this founder mode? 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 more mundane example. I was in a board meeting the other day, and I commented to the team on how they had 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 going to try and cut burn. We're going to put the pedal to the metal and accelerate the business and spend a lot more because somehow it's going to get us to the next funding round faster. Founder mode. Founder mode. Hold on. Let me find out.

Oh, that's founder more baby. Let's go. 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 and 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, Jake. The reason why that joke is funny, you're doing your Tony Montana bit, is because you can justify any bad behavior as founder mode. And I think that's what all the memes are about right now, is that founder mode has 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. - How about slightly differently? There are stupid outcomes and smart outcomes.

And there are all 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 going to fail. Instead of founder mode, why don't we call it founder responsibility? Like, what are the responsibilities? Founder authority is good too. I mean, founder authority is good. Founder authority, founder responsibility. Steph Curry is not the founder of the Warriors, but he's the linchpin. Okay? My point is, teams need winning players. Right.

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. And what does winning have? Really talented, really driven people in different positions who understand their position. You got to win. Are held accountable for their positions. Winning, winning. If you're not winning, you're losing. Yeah. To be frank, there's a certain kind of con man who represents themselves as a guru, even though they've never done the thing that they pretend to have done.

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, is this, at the end of the day, helpful or not? I mean, we all want to exalt and celebrate founders. I want to win.

Exactly. But we all want to win. And, you know, James Madison said that, you know, men are not angels. What do you do about those cases? Rare. I think they're pretty rare where the founder is just wrong about something. Exactly. Where they're like representing that investors are going to do something that they're not going to do. Or Elizabeth Holmes represents that she's got a product that she doesn't have. Exactly. Or you have a founder breaking a regulatory requirement that actually is necessary that they comply with. What do you do in all those cases? Exactly.

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 going to take to win. Well, I mean, if Adam Newman 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 a community and really nice.

As opposed to hiring the class A, getting the class A space and then charging a B price. To your point, like a senior real estate executive would have put together a forecast of cash flows 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 listen to that and then manage 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, navel 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 were employee zero or employee 20. It's an intellectual and psychological archetype.

Yeah. I mean, in my experience, the founders that are highly successful are the ones 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 going to learn wherever they can. They are going to learn from other founders. They're going to learn from executives they may have hired who maybe do have more of a traditional background. They're going to figure out what works for them, and they're going to discard

the parts that don't work for them, and they're going to 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. That's actually the most important thing 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. I have the perfect example of this. When I was running Weblogs Inc., we were going to raise a round of funding. Mark Cuban had given us the first 300, and Mark Andreessen

was going to give us 500K for our blogging company that did Engadget, et cetera. And I had met Jeff Bezos and I told him, I'm in Seattle this week. Would love to catch up with you. I wasn't in Seattle. I said, I was going to 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 he said, sure, come by on Tuesday or whatever. I come by on Tuesday. I sit with Jeff Bezos, my partner, Brian Alveai. And the intellectual curiosity he took

on taking a part in gadget 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. 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 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 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 going to add somebody to this team, they're going to be the 10th person, you'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 there are techniques here and very specific ways to attract talent to your startup.

Do you guys remember part of the reason 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 again, it's just a reminder, like there is no easy answer here. It is so hard. That is why 95 plus percent of our companies and our efforts end up with nothing to show for it at the end of it. There was, Brieberg, 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 going to 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, etc. What were your thoughts on Silicon Valley in that transition time and Eric Schmidt's role at Google? 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. They'd never had a job. They had never had experience. I think similarly, Sheryl Sandberg as a partner to Zuck ultimately helped him level up and obviously Chamath and others 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 as Cheryl 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 by kind of novel independent thinking leaders, not necessarily bringing in experienced managers to scale up a known business model. Right. And just, 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. 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 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 always right, is that actually helping them? Or is it actually reinforcing a mentality that, oh, I don't really have to learn anything? Because 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. Did you say you met with Eric Schmidt recently, Shema? Well, I had a meeting with Eric Schmidt a few weeks ago, which blew my mind. And I think I called Freeberg 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 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 were together for a couple of days when we were in Europe, and we had like an 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 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 just goes to say, like, you got to 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 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 of what they're doing, what their title is. Get them on your team. Learn from them as much as you can. And hopefully you get one step closer to winning. And get them on your team if possible. Yeah. Ideally. All right.

Here 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 legislation to protect algorithms or to make algorithms more

More editorial, we'll get to that in a second, but let me just cue up the 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. Oh, my God. Yeah, this is terrible. What? 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 to 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 platform. So YouTube, TikTok, Twitter, you know, a blogging platform, etc. So,

Because of 230, you're technically not supposed to be 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 reflect editorial judgment. So...

Here's the interesting legal detail. The new ruling specifically cites the Supreme Court's recent decision, Moody v. Net Choice, 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 protection sacks.

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? 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. You're talking about the front page editor of the New York Times. Yeah, and I think it's a fig leaf to say that because there is not an individual person who writes 0.2 in front of this one variable and 0.8 in front of the other variable,

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. 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 your take on it. And here we are. What are your thoughts on

Section 230 and algorithms today, if you use an algorithm, should that nullify, void your Section 230 protection? I think it is a fig leaf to say that there's a level of abstraction 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 lightnings in a bottle and spread them around. And so I think we just need to have a more intelligent discussion about how responsibility should be shared in a world where everybody

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 kind of a fig leaf to say that that isn't the intention of the way that the new form of software is written.

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. I don't agree. I have a very different opinion on this than you guys do. And I always have. Well, first of all, let me just speak to the 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 users who basically went down a rabbit hole of like terrorist videos and got recruited by ISIS. Remember this? Yes. 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. 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 regular feed, you know, just a chronological feed.

And what Section 230 says is that you can only hold the user liable. We're going to treat social networks as distributors, not publishers, for the purpose of user-generated content.

I've long held the view that if you want to make online platforms liable as publishers for every piece of user-generated content, then you're going to have very little free speech left. Because I just think that corporate risk aversion is going to force these guys to become even more censorious than they already are. Every piece of content that could potentially lead to a lawsuit,

is going to 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 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 is giving you more of what you want. Elon recently spoke to this.

He had a tweet recently where he talked about, hey, people are coming to him saying, hey, I'm seeing all these 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 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 want to be outraged, stop interacting with outrage porn and you'll see less of it. 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. Yes. 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. I have a third view, and I'll bring you in on this discussion here, Friedberg, is that these algorithms have become so powerful, they are even better than editors at catering to users' needs because they're obviously 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? Because they are powerful. And what responsibility do they take? Is the responsibility stomping 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, for individuals who are frustrated with this, and the platforms to find some common ground and involve. 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 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 maybe a middle ground here? I'm not sure that giving people a choice of an algorithm is going to work. Consumers just want to 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 behave.

interact with the world around them. When something is emotionally inciting, you want more of it and you get more of it. And that that creates the dopamine and that drives 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

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 kind of 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 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 kind of activating enough, you're going to be happy watching the next one. You're going to keep watching and you're going to keep watching it. I think 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 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 want to regulate it more and they want more censorship. And that's why they're making that kind of

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. That's right. I mean, the algorithm has gotten so good. Yeah, like if you go on YouTube, I got...

I love watching videos of mountain biking. I see all these crazy mountain biking videos now, and I love watching them. I'm like, dude, this is awesome. It's exciting for me. I don't think it's about making me angry. I hear what you're saying, but I would offer something slightly different, which is I think that these algorithms focus on momentum. Meaning, if Freeburg 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. There's a decay function. That's right. Yeah. 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. And I think that's what needs to be addressed. And maybe 10-year-olds shouldn't be allowed to use TikTok without any supervision. Maybe that's a better answer. That could be a better answer, too. 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 and 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 doom scrolling does. That's why we lost you, Sax, to the poker game. You're too busy doom scrolling and you got addicted to it and you don't come to poker anymore. But this is what we need to do. As a society, these phones are destroying everybody's lives. They're killing friendships. They're

killing these poor kids who are sitting there like zombies. The algorithm is just too good. We have now the snake. 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. Yes. That's my excuse too. If I didn't have this pod, maybe I could just stop using it. That'd be great. I'd love to have that time back and just read more books. I'm you know what?

I'm going to do it with you. We're going to go on a little social media diet, you and I. From now on, we're going to go for sushi, maybe some sky. You've been acting insane. You have lost your mind. You need a detox. No, you need a detox. Anyone who disagrees with you is like on Putin's payroll now. Okay, that's me, Dania, my friend, Comrade Sax. You're like the reincarnation of Joe McCarthy. Da, da, da. I agree, yes.

since you want to go into Russia, here we go. It's 50 days before the election. You're the one with Russia on the brain. And as predicted, we're 50 days before the election and who shows up? Putin. This is the greatest story ever. For those of you listening, Sax just rolled his eyes. It's so funny. This is just great. Okay.

Who would have predicted there's going to be another Russiagate hoax just in time for the election? You did. You did. Here we are. And by the way, there's breaking news. More Russian stuff has dropped while we're on the pod. There's a lot of people who started with Trump derangement syndrome, and then they held Putin responsible for Trump getting elected. So the TDS became PDS, and they got Putin derangement syndrome. Let's get to the story here, the comrades.

I think this whole story is such a waste of time. We shouldn't even waste time on it. Well, we're going to do it anyway. So here we go. The DOJ discharged 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 misinformation scheme. According to the charges, these two employees of the state-run Russia Today 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 December.

as 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 is called Tenant 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, Tenant has posted 2,000 videos, which collectively had 16 million YouTube views, according to the DOJ Charges.

Looks like the Russian operatives were coordinating with the founders. Jason, let's say the quiet part out loud, okay? 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. Now, in this specific case, I hope the DOJ runs us to ground 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 we were sort of characters in a movie, we will have gone through different transitions, frankly, as these last four years have gone by. I think that that would have been much harder to do if we had people paying us money. 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 on a whole host of topics. Okay. And just to be clear- I mean, do we all agree with that or not? I mean, I agree. It was a great move to not have advertising. Sure.

Because there's zero pressure from anybody calling us saying we're going to pull our ad spots and also makes the pod easy to listen to. And none of us need the money. These personalities, Tim Pool, Benny Johnson, Dave Ruhman, 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. What pressure techniques? 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-Russian.

So that's in the indictment. So I guess the question then, Saks, for you is- You're totally mischaracterizing this. 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 getting wrong? You do have a horse in the race. You've believed in the Russiagate hoax for many years, and you want to basically try and restart that whole thing.

That's not true. You can ask me. I think Russia, I've told this to you many times, Russia's sole goal 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. They do it on all sides. They get Green Party people. They get Democratic people. That's been my story from the beginning. You've changed your story a little bit.

Okay. 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 Putin's goal. So I think the place to start is with asking the question, who is Lauren Chen and what is Tenet Media and what has been their objective or what's their agenda? Yeah.

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, 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. 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 reaction to that, J. Kel. Yeah, and 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 Hillary, you know, he wants Trump. I think he just wants chaos. 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 that is their playbook for all history. They want to demoralize a population to not believe in their institutions, to not believe facts. And it seems like it's working pretty well here in the United States. I think that.

This is all wildly overstated, but to the extent we're going to 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 you just did that right now. No, no. What happened with Kamala? I'm not aware.

I'm just saying that with tenant media, it's benefiting her. I just explained how. Oh, yeah. The four people are super anti-Kamala. What I'm saying is there's a double standard. There's a double standard in the coverage here and how it's interpreted. When the alleged op benefits Harris, it has nothing to do with Harris. When the alleged op benefits Trump, Trump must be a Russian agent, must be a Russian puppet. There must have been collusion. And you were among the forefront of people saying that

Trump himself was compromised. Now, I never said no, no, I have to correct that. I've never said Trump was compromised. I said the people around him were compromised because they kept taking meetings and money from the Russians. And this is the Russian playbook. No, I believe you never believed in Russia. Putting a words aside and claims like this. And you're telling me what I think. You can ask me what I think. And I can tell you very clearly again that

that I think their plan is to find simple-minded people to give them money and to cause chaos and division in our country. I don't think that they got to Trump. I think they got to...

almost everybody around him. And if you look at those people who show up at Putin dinners and you look at who takes money, it's all around Trump. And the Russians are experts at this. And they did it to the Green Party. They just sprinkle money around people to cause this type of chaos. That's the goal, Sacks. How many times do I got to say this to you clearly? I don't have a horse in this race. I think all Americans, I'll say it again so that you can understand it and the audience can understand my position very clearly.

Their goal is to get us to fight with each other so we don't look at their invasion of Ukraine or what's happening with the suffering of the Russian people. And we as Americans should not be partisan on this issue. We as Americans should all come together, you, Sax, me, and everybody else, and say, we don't want the Russians involved.

interfering in our elections or causing division, and we're not going to make this political. Look, J. Cal, this is the third straight election in America in which we've been led to believe that there is essentially massive Russian interference in our election. But I think we should ask, what did we learn since the last two elections? In 2016, okay, we had the Steele dossier.

which hatched the whole Russiagate hoax. We subsequently found out that Hillary's campaign freighted the Steele dossier, and then that was taken up by the deep state. They basically did an investigation of the Trump campaign. They went to the FISA court. They lied to the FISA court. And we had a two-year independent counsel investigation based on a piece of opposition research that turned out to be completely phony.

But we heard every day on cable news for years that the Russians had somehow interfered in that election. Never proven. In 2020, we heard that the Russians again were interfering because you had those 51 security state operatives say that Hunter Biden's laptop was Russian disinformation. That turned out to be a total lie. The laptop was authentic. That was just a made-up story that the Russians were involved. After that, let's not forget, there was NewsGuard and Hamilton 68 reporting

which were two bogus media watchdog groups that were deep state ops that were designed to get conservative content censored as Russian disinformation. So now, after all of these ops in which it was

It was alleged that the Russians interfere in our elections, and those stories turned out to be completely bogus. We now have this new one about tenant media, and I don't know the truth of this story. I can't say one way or another whether it's accurate or not, but what I've learned is not to take these things at face value. And if we are to take it at face value, tenant media was working against Trump's interests, so apparently the Russians don't want Trump

to win the presidential election. They want Kamala Harris. Yeah. And I agree that Trump was not compromised by the Russians, just the people around him. And to recap for people, since maybe they don't remember, Michael Flynn, who was the national security advisor, pled guilty to lying to the FBI in 2017 about his contacts with the Russians. Paul Manafort, who was the campaign chairman for Trump,

had ties to pro-Russian figures in the Ukraine and shared polling data with the Russian associates during the campaign. He was convicted of tax and bank fraud in 2018, later pardoned by Trump, like Michael Flynn was pardoned. Rick Gates, who was the Deputy Chairman, he worked closely with Paul Manafort. He pled guilty to conspiracy and lying to investigators. George Papadopoulos, I won't bring up because he was kind of a joke. And then Roger Stone was investigated for all his contacts

With WikiLeaks, he was convicted of obstruction, lying to Congress and witness tampering in 2019. So we have all of these folks being convicted. That's four people convicted. I don't know what the point of bringing up all these investigations are when you said the most important thing, which is you do not believe that Trump was a Russian agent. Despite the fact that for years, that's what Democrats maintained.

My maintaining is, once again, fourth time, is that the Russians are trying to cause division in America and we shouldn't all fall for it. Hey, Friedberg. I think we shouldn't fall for Hamilton 68. I think we shouldn't have fallen for NewsGuard. I think we shouldn't have fallen for the Steele dossier. I think we shouldn't fall for the Russiagate hoax, J. Cal. Stop falling for all these Russian hoaxes. We shouldn't fall for anything. I agree. That's why we should be united. Let's be united. Friedberg, you've got some passionate thoughts on Kamala Harris pivoting a little bit around her economic policies in the last week or two.

Let's wrap with that. What are your thoughts? No passionate thoughts, J. Cal. Did any of you guys see that video I sent you of Kamala's campaign speech in New Hampshire yesterday? So basically- Summarize it for the audience, yeah. She fundamentally pivoted from a lot of the statements she made a few weeks ago that I think caused a resounding amount of commentary about being anti-business, anti-economic prosperity. A lot of people called these comments socialist in nature. And apparently-

She heard the feedback and is now pivoting the message and pivoting the policy. So, you know, I think the one question to understand is how real is the pivot and how much is this about getting elected?

She made a couple of key announcements at this campaign speech yesterday. The first one is that she started out saying that small businesses are the lifeblood of our economy. She's proposing that we increase the startup tax deduction from $5,000 to $50,000. If you start up a new business and you're generating profitable income, you can deduct up to $50,000 on the year that you start the company up.

She made an emphasis on getting rid of red tape and deregulating a lot of aspects that make it hard to start companies. She talked a lot about the importance of venture capital and venture dollars, and that there's a goal to spur 25 million new SBA loan applications by the end of her term. So in the next four years, which would be a massive increase in government lending to small businesses.

She also stepped back the capital gains tax proposal that was made under the Biden administration that she previously said was her policy as well.

and is now proposing a 28% capital gains tax instead of the 40 something percent that I think was the previous proposal. So a 28% capital gains tax only applied to households with a net worth greater than a million dollars. But towards the end of her speech, she still talked a lot and got a lot of cheers around the idea that billionaires and big corporations need to pay their fair share and that there needs to be methods of increasing the taxation of

of billionaires and big corporations as they're kind of classified by her and some of the other Democrats. So I don't know, is the pivot real? Is she becoming more pro-business? Is she responding to the critical feedback she's received over the last few weeks? Or, you know, is this just about getting elected? Is this going to persist? Is this a change in policy, Chamath? I hand it over to you.

I think that this is all the tactics leading to the debate on September the 10th. I think that a lot of this polling, you're seeing the sugar high fade on both sides. And I think what we can acknowledge is that the setup going into this debate is eerily reminiscent of the setup going into the first debate between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.

which was a very profound sensation that there was a popular vote advantage to the Democratic candidate, Hillary then, Kamala now. But what everybody got wrong last time, and now what people are doing a much more refined job, other than Nate Silver, this time around,

is then being able to do a more nuanced look at the electoral college probability, which is in the opposite direction, favoring Donald Trump and not Kamala. So I think that the Democrats have realized that the sugar high isn't going to win the election. They need to be specific in ways that gets moderates. And the only way to do that is to tack to the middle.

Because a lot of these other trial balloons were kind of nutty. And those people are not going to win them the election in the key states that matter. Again, you know, it's what we've said before. Five things in five states, right? That's what it's going to come down to. It's also, I think you've made this point, Shamath, as well, which is when you're running for the primaries, and I think Dean Phillips, when he was on the program, talked about this.

you've got one agenda. And that tends to be a bit extreme because you're trying to get those extreme people in primaries to come out. Then when you get to the general election, you kind of come towards the middle. And we said on this very podcast, and I gave a couple of disclaimers as the moderator here, hey, we don't know these are common list policies because A, she's not talking to anybody. B, she hasn't released any. So maybe, you know, she's taking feedback. I have some inside information on this, which is there are people in our circles,

who are sitting with her saying, these things are crazy, and maybe pointing to our podcast and other reactions online. And maybe we should really think, what do you want to do, potentially, Madam President, when you're president, if you do win? And I think she's starting to think from first principles, hey, what is actually good for the countries? That would be a very honest way of looking at this. She's not thinking from first principles, are you kidding? She's reading from a teleprompter.

No, no, I'm talking about in her policies. I mean, you can make whatever digs you want to her style, and that's valid. You can make whatever digs you want to Trump's style. What I'm talking about is she got thrown— You said she's thinking from first principles. Yeah, well, from her first principles as to what— Her writers are giving her new talking points. Okay, listen, can you stop with the personal attacks on people and just maybe have an intelligent— It's not a personal attack. She's a candidate for the presidency of the United States.

He's actually answering your question. He's answering your question, J. Cal. He's saying that they're not real policy. They're not policy points. Let me finish my thought and then you can, and then you can deride her style. I'm trying to have something about substance. It's not a style point, Jason. It's a substance point. Okay, let me finish my point and then you can talk about substance or style. I think what happened here is she was put into the position as president of

And had to, in a very short period of time, come up with what her positions would be, because everybody knows when you're the vice president, your positions are what the president thinks. We've made that point about J.D. Vance, that his position on wanting a national abortion ban has nothing to do with Trump's and Trump's wins in that situation. So here we are. I think it's a similar situation. Biden might have been captured and wanted to do this crazy thing.

wealth tax and this seizure of people's assets, whereas maybe she actually is much more moderate. And that's what people around her have always said, is that she's more moderate and that she's coming to actually form her own platform. And she just needed time to do that. I'm giving what I'm hearing from the left. This isn't necessarily my position, Sax. This is what I'm hearing from the people around Kamala Harris.

Okay. Let me tell you what's really going on here. The long time Democratic pundit Roy Tashara just had a piece out called Vince Lombardi Democrats, where he quoted Vince Lombardi saying, winning isn't everything. It's the only thing.

And so obviously what's happening now is that Kamala Harris will say whatever she needs in order to win. But the question that voters should be asking, who is this person really? Because obviously what she's going to do once you give her the keys to the government is going to be different than whatever she's saying right now. And we do have a lot of background on this person. She came up through the San Francisco political machine. She was a product of the progressive movement.

Pelosi machine in San Francisco. She then rose to the Senate. She was voted by GovTrack as the most liberal member of the Senate. And just a few weeks ago, when she first announced her economic proposals, they were all this super far left stuff like the unrealized gains tax and a 44% cap gains rate.

So that's where her instincts were. That was what was in the Biden-Harris budget. That was in her campaign platform. And that was in her economic policy speeches. And then what happened is there was a huge negative reaction to all of that. So now she's changing her talking points. But it's obvious what's going on. She's going to say whatever is necessary to win the election. But you're a fool and kidding yourself if you think you're going to get something really different after the election. You're going to get a continuation of

of the Biden, Harris, Elizabeth Warren economic program that we've had for the last four years. How would you say Trump's position on abortion relates to that? Don't people adapt their position based on winning? I mean, I think he's done a masterclass in changing his position in J.D. He's never changed his position. You don't seem to understand how that issue works. He was in favor of returning it to the states.

He's been completely consistent on that. And I don't know why you keep bringing it back to that always. Whenever Kamala Harris isn't doing well, it's always about abortion for you. Well, no, I think it's a great example of a politician moving to the center on the issue. He just said this week that he wants more than six weeks. Right. And so he's moving towards that. He didn't just say that. It's always been his position. He's always been a moderate on the issue, J. Cal. Yeah. He's against the national abortion ban. He's always been in favor of returning to the states.

I don't even understand how this is like, you're still talking about this. Well, the reason I talk about it is because there's so many states, including the one I'm living in where women can't get an abortion.

Okay, they're going to have to cross the state line. You're right. That's an issue. So, I mean, I think women feel differently about it than, you know, you brushing it aside. They feel that Trump took away their right. I'm not brushing it aside. I'm just stating what the truth of the issue is. Yeah, no, no. I'm just saying the truth for women that I talk to. Hold on a second. If you want to vote on that issue, that's your right. Go for it. All I ask is that you correctly state Trump's position on that issue, which he stated on our own podcast. Yeah, no, and that's the point I'm bringing up. It's up to the states. The evangelicals are really upset about him saying,

in their perception, changing his mind. And women, their view of it is, he took away their right in the states where, like the one I live in, you can't get an abortion. Okay, everybody, this has been an amazing episode of the All In Podcast. We got to business up front, great discussion, politics that got super toxic at the end. It's the mullet that you love, business, and then political parties at the back. Four.

the Sultan of Science, who did an amazing job setting up all these amazing speakers and doing all the work on the All In Summit taking place next week. We thank you for your efforts. Sultan of Science, David Friedberg. You excited? I'm here for the team, J. Cal. It's a team sport. I love it. It's a team sport. That's right. For the chairman dictator, look at that. Look at that silver fox. Look at him with that great hair. When is it going to stop?

You're going to cut it for the summit or you're just, wow, he's going big. And the architect. Welcome to 48. Welcome to 48. The architect, David Sachs, my bestie. Welcome to 48. I'll see you on Twitter. Welcome. See you on Twitter, Sachs. Welcome to 48. Welcome to 48. I think you should stop making a fool of yourself on Twitter. It's going old. I think, yes. And you should do another 30 tweets a day about Ukraine. We'll see you all next time, everybody. Bye-bye. Rain Man, David Sachs.

and instead we open source it to the fans love you besties queen of kin what what your winners why besties are gone oh i'm thinking i know this is your driveway we should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy because they're all just useless it's like this like sexual tension but they just need to release somehow

And now the plugs. You can subscribe to this show on YouTube. Yes, watch all the videos. Our YouTube channel has passed 500,000 subscribers. Shout out to Donnie from Queens. Follow the show, x.com slash the all in pod. TikTok, the all in pod. Instagram, the all in pod. LinkedIn, search for all in podcast.

And to follow Chamath, he's x.com slash Chamath. Sign up for his weekly email, what I read this week, at chamath.substack.com. And sign up for a developer account at console.grok.com and see what all the excitement is about. Follow Sacks at x.com slash davidsacks. And sign up for Glue at glue.ai. Follow Friedberg, x.com slash friedberg. And Ohalo is hiring. Click on the careers page at

OhaloGenetics.com. I am the world's greatest moderator, Jason Calacanis. If you are a founder and you want to come to my accelerators and my programs, founder.university, launch.close.apply to apply for funding from your boy, JCal, for your startup. And check out AthenaWow.com. This is the company I am most excited about at the moment. AthenaWow.com to get a virtual assistant for about $3,000 a month. I have two of them.

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