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

hold on guys I gotta get into founder mode oh wow founder mode if he founder modes I'm I'm Inna founder mode I got a Founder mode too where's J oh let's go freeberg let's get this smarted baby come on podcast number one podcast in the world here we go okay okay guys let's start the show you are a Founder moting Jacob if you founder mode anymore you're going to get pneumonia all right sax is like the '90s again back at Stampers this is the funniest cold open we've ever done oh my God I got Belgian waffle mix everywhere you got it's right here Jak you got a bunch of founder mode right there I got a little founder mode there thanks for looking out let your winners [Music] ride David and instead we open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with love you 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 Troth poopaa how you doing buddy have you acclimated now you're 15 days back on American soil how are you how you adjusting uh I'm doing well I uh turned 48 two days ago oh I know the big 50th it's coming I've already called dibs on chering your 50th so so we will uh be certainly getting arrested in 24 months save up your bell money boys fredberg 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 gonna do to blow up but I think we're almost there so we're super excited um we have uh speaker names going out today so talk a little bit about who the speakers are you guys know your bestie Elon will be there oh third year in a row okay third year in a row he's the only uh repeat this year we've got Mark Benny off joining us oh okay for a conversation about the future of Enterprise we've got Barry Weiss from the Free Press we've got Arizona senator Kirsten Cinema we have John Mir shimer and Jeffrey saaks to talk about geopolitics with David saaks saxs on Sachs ncash aora what about Peter my guy I Haven interview Peter in a decade he's amazing we've got the legend the legend from La Michael loitz joining us love that we're gonna get into some really cool uh Tech we have have you guys have you guys read Michael litz's book oh it's yeah it's incredible it's really incredible it's a great book man 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 E companies Joby Archer and whisk and their CEOs are going to be there uh gecko robotics so we've got Jake coming from gecko to actually do a really cool product demo we have the CEO of weo uh Teedra maakana joining us uh talk about autonomous driving Juan Carlos bonti talking about age reversal uh from altto Labs probably the most funded private company in history and also uh ingo's coming out from Europe uh from ad Yen CEO uh of aen 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 Aden 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 uh aboard the ISS his experience is he gonna talk about his experience at Uranus hey and captaining the uh the crew Dragon capsule back to Earth from Uranus and the future of space flight and Uranus yes thank you to Uranus thank you everyone anyway 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 you know what happened J it's like me and my guy Draymond 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 uh on Twitter or something but I did the zoom with Woody got to know him hang hung out with him since he's been back great guy so you left out the number one one host on the internet and broadcast uh or news on YouTube Megan Kelly will be joining Megan Kelly the phenomenal Megan kelly didn't she call you a prick Jal did she call me a prick why she be any different yeah oh I can't wait for this fire what do T beautiful intelligent women call historically what do they call you they call you is that your mom they don't exactly they're like out of the way where's J they're like can you park my car their keys and then really excited to have Thomas lefant 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 gonna be push of co-founder of CO2 oh sorry co-founder of CO2 Y and so a lot of the content we're gon to be pushing out on YouTube uh as quickly as we can obviously some of the more timely newsly stuff will get out first and then as we did in the last two years material will roll roll out in the days and weeks that follow we do not do sponsors here on the Allin podcast but the Allin Summit does have sponsors so a huge shout out which we would never otherwise do Partners to uh Excel events hexclad merch.com athletic Brewing the ridge the greatest Law Firm on Earth kolie 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 yeah each each startup founder each startup yeah so pretty I would I would have send all my companies to exactly you pay 7500 for a ticket you get 350 in credit sh 350 Grand of credit that's incredible for Google Cloud it is up to 350 and Google Cloud credits for eligible AI startups which they can use over two years um comes with a bunch of other benefits so it's pretty awesome really glad they're doing this and they're going to have a set most lukewarm ad read I've ever heard do you want me to do that for you and get people can you guys Theo on it how about you guys the on this go 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 uh credit and that that's real money that you would have spent otherwise so a great from our friends at Google Cloud wait 350,000 just for startups whose Founders come to our Summit yes yeah for AI startup Founders uh 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 per business 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 $2.3 million of credits and I'm going to sell them on eBay for 500k you can't do that get in terms thank you to our friends at Google we did get a funny note from jcal this morning asking if his remaining friends in family tickets could be sold off so he could grift himself some money off of our fre like hey what could these go for on I'm just thinking if it's sold out these aren't worth 7500 each what's it worth if you can't get in yeah I'm sure you'd find that out pretty quickly yeah yeah I mean who's gonna stop me um the corner trying to scalp the remaining tickets I I know give them to my brother Josh if you want to get into the for 10K cash will be at the load we're to see a couple of Cal's Brothers on the sidewalk outside the conference holding a sign you know tickets available ticket one down of the Mongolian barbecue joint West listen if you uh if you have 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 uh was to hire good people and give them room to do their jobs he says he took that advice and the results were a disaster so he studied how Steve Jobs ran after and according to PG Paul gram that is a bunch of very successful Founders in the audience kind of nodded their head and said hey that is uh similar to my experience PG uh defines the world now in two ways two philosophies for running a company manager mode versus founder mode in manager mode 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 they tell your direct reports what to do they figure it out you don't micromanage uh peaches says it doesn't give too many specifics about founder mod he kind of says hey we got to figure out what this thing is so in some ways this blog post jth was a way of starting the conversation but he said things like less delegation and more Hands-On and uh if you haven't heard of it skip level meetings this is where the CEO will meet not with their manager or direct report but maybe a group of people who report into that manager without the manager in the room it's a notable and well-known management technique need to kind of get information to the CEO a little bit faster and um what do you think CH chamus 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 you know will have such a person for example at the all in Summit if you look at what Nikes Aurora was able to do at Paulo Alto networks it's it's incredible I mean in 8 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 shant narian how has he built Adobe saan Adella 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 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 sa did you read the piece um you clearly saw all the uh memes and you know I guess kudos for the piece on X uh this past weekend what are your thoughts on it generally speaking anything that you took from it that was notable or is this just some obvious stuff yeah I mean my reaction to it was that this is hardly new I mean I remember way back in the PayPal days over 20 years ago we had a rule that we weren't wouldn't hire mbas we had a no MBA hiring rule and the reason was because we figured out pretty early on that NBAs were bringing more of attritional management toolkit that seemed less applicable at a startup subsequent to that obviously Elon has taken a very Hands-On Approach at his companies that Walter Isaacson described in his book as demon mode and so that's been described Ben harest did a very interesting series of blog posts about management and addressed the topic of my mom management years ago and so he's written extensively about it and put a lot of substance behind it Ben Drew attention to a book by Andy Grove that came out 40 years ago called high output management that also addressed this problem in significant detail and this 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 to look at the output of their team so therefore you ask what's going to maximize the output of that that team or that org and you know obviously if the CEO tries to do everything and make every decision probably that's not going to result in the maximum output conversely if you delegate everything I call it the problem of infinite deleg ation where CEO delegates to VP VP delegates to director director delegates to manager manager uh delegates it 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 gross principle of maximizing the output of the team or the organization and we've seen in some of the big comp 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 swap of people at Facebook or Google or Microsoft right the company seemed to work better because you're taking out a layer of overpaid took out a huge amount of middle management and it and it didn't seem to harm the performance performance got better and again you can apply gross principle look at what happens to the aggregate output so this topic has been addressed at length and I think has been understood for for decades maybe the only new thing here is a little bit of branding around founder mode versus manager mode the the problem with that branding is I think it's an overly simplistic and mannequin view of the world where it kind of fits into really all of the the PG essays and and the YC model which is Founders always right and everybody else in the ecosystem especially traditional managers they're they're either Liars or fakers and that basically has been the mannequin model that Paul gron pumping out for decades and is there something wrong with that model you're you're kind of looking at it 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 the whole ecosystem in Silicon Valley exists to help make founder successful I mean I was a Founder myself now I'm a investor there's also Talent who don't found companies themselves want to join them the whole thing is organized to make Founders successful and the whole idea that people are out to get the founder I mean this is a really Antiquated idea there was some truth to it in the 1990s uh by 2002 or 2003 when Peter teal created Founders fund he called it that to emphasize that you know Founders should be in charge I'd say by the mid to late 2000s no one really disagreed with that anymore 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 Comin A's marketing wouldn't you say is like to kind of put themselves next to the founder and say hey we're the only ones who really care about Founders everybody else is out to get them kind of yeah I mean look there was some truth to it you know i' would 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 Le 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 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 is always right there's less incentive to do that I think it's a wonderful rack 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 an a way to externalize their frustration and have an excuse I have never seen a person build a successful company unless they understood intimately the core amount of value that their company created and knew how to balance getting into the weeds with scaling through other people I've never seen a good example of of a great CEO that didn't do that well 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 yeah I mean sometimes the Founder's job is to get in the weeds of something that's broken in a company and get down in micro manag 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 in your company is probably going to fail freeberg you're back in the founder seat after a uh 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 says to the people that report to them what do you guys going to do and then the the people they go down to the people that report to them and they say what 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 OB itive 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 goop 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 chat's point SAA Adela Sundar nikesh Tim you can kind of Tim Cook a great example there are some really great leaders that have run organizations that are already scaled and then taken them to an order of magnitude or two orders of magnitude Beyond where they were when they step in so I don't think that there's 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 has run that necessarily you could have cut and pasted it to the other companies and have it worked so it requires a smart individual who understands their company and their human capital intimately well and their business model by the way what's important about what you just said chth 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 cut or repeat that that doesn't really work because every business if it's going to be successful it has to be unique and so the ability to actually think uniquely and identify from first principles the means necessary to achieve the mission of the organization I think is a critical critical leadership uh trait 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 naivity and so they if they knew too much they would never do it that I don't think necessarily means that the entire set of all of those people are actually great first principles thinkers the first principles is required after product Market fit what's required before product Market fit is risk-taking curiosity Relentless iteration and those are a very different set of characteristics is it true that subf 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 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 and 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 commoditized 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 firsttime founder 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 ladder and vice versa so if you're a Google or a Facebook and you run into some problem typically the solution is you can engineer around it because ultimately your product is free and there's a different way to scale and grow and create feature value because those are also incrementally free if you look at a company like Airbnb and if you look at the last six months in the stock what is it telling you it's telling you that the people that own it have realized that it's less of a technology business and it's more of a cyclical business that es 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 es 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 jcal you've 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 what if you have a general kind of theistic for the difference between success and not success it's very different in the the place where Paul Graham and I invest year zero year one of a company and chafu alluded to this in that time period going from zero to one from no customers to One customer it's about you know really having a team of Builders people who can actually build a product and have what's called Product velocity in the industry the ability to iterate and then how much time do they spend with 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 rackliff defines it which is the market is seeking your product out because of word of mouth and because they need it which Airbnb and Uber would fall into now the difference between those two moments in time and who's good at it is is pretty different to your point jamat 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 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 neopit come out the vertical so if you look at the companies mentioned here Airbnb Uber and then SpaceX and Tesla you you just look at those four companies they had no experience zero in space in travel in transportation Hospitality you know or any of the uh the success they had or electric cars but to actually scale those companies that does require a lot of lot of expertise a lot of tactics and you know people who can focus in a way on very narrow things and that sometimes Founders who are in that first group they can't have that focus on but one tiny little thing they just get bored with it and so they have to learn to have really great people recruit really great people and actually yes delegate to them to run a department and say hey I we the goal of this organization and you saw this chamath when you were at Facebook I think you've told me so many stories about you know you're focused on one thing the 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 with equal success and then Zuckerberg yourself and those ear that early crew were able to obsess over those so maybe you could talk about Zuckerberg's ride to to getting the first you know whatever 10 million people on the product but then 10 million to a billion 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 you know Mark and Cheryl's job would be to clean up the broken glass of everybody else saying there's these halves and have knots 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 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 it's well said there's another good book before we go on to our next subject Patrick lanon 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 just I think I high recommend the book because it really talks about this sort of fear of conflict and avoidance of accountability and inattention to results which is kind of the underpinnings of I think what Paul was getting to with founder mode okay great discussion everybody let's uh speaking of founder mode I mean this story keeps coming back r and breslo is back in the news we talked about this company before breslo is a founder of a company called bolt that's a payment startup and I have to set the story up in in a couple of Acts here saak and I have been following it for a while bolt was a payment startup they did one-click checkout products if you don't know the oneclick Amazon had a patent for this for a while it came out of um it came out of patent protection everybody sort of jumped on it they're shopay by Shopify you probably have experience you you buy something at one store and then uh you log into another store with your phone number it has all your credentials you've been cookied and that basically takes out the friction and allows you to make a purchase at another vendor without having to put in all your credentials and credit card and everything so bolt makes that through an API for different shops online they generated 27 million in revenue on a $300 million loss last year they get 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 breslo made waves on Twitter by calling shrip and YC the mob bosses of Silicon Valley he alleged they were kind of acting in cahoots to keep people from using bolt and 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 breslo 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 uh the story had ended in until just last week when an insane story came out that Bolt's interim CEO not brlo 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 breslo 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 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 doll valuation would be 500 times Revenue jamath I'm not sure who would pay for that deal but this deal is uh unique in that it's called pay to play if you don't know that term it basically means if you're an existing investor if you don't invest in this round you're going to lose your existing shares or have them diluted massively so so uh some Investment Bank out of the sells which is that tiny Island in Africa that rich people go on vacation was supposed to put in 200 million that firm was called silverbear the other 250 million would come from a firm called the London firm in marketing capital and credits on a venture investing platform so anyway there's a ton of carve outs here and other stuff I'm going to stop there at the notes and just Sachs this is the craziest story sorry took so long to get here what what are your thoughts on what we're seeing here in this drama and this Zer valuation yeah look uh Ryan has been right before he's been right in the past but in this case it looks like he's clearly over his skis and if the reporting is correct it looks like he's trying to drum up interest in a financing round by representing things that aren't true or haven't happened yet saying that certain investors aren't bored and those investors are coming out and saying that they're not the question I I think that's relevant and that relates back to our previous topic is this founder mode 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 uh branding exercise let me give you a more mundane example I was in a board meeting the other day and I complimented the team on how they had uh gotten their burndown substantially since the last word meeting and somebody joked one of the founders said founder mode 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 funing round faster found a road to me find down that's found Mo baby let's go let's so so when you start branding these Concepts without putting any substance behind them and quite frankly you've never been an operator yourself you've never actually created a unicorn company but you're representing yourself as a unicorn Whisperer like you're a guru in something you've never really done before then it just allows people who want to justify bad behavior to basically get away with doing whatever they want and that's what you're seeing with founder mode now Jak the reason why that joke is funny you're doing your Tony Montana bit is because you can justify any bad behavior as founder mod yes and I think that's what all the memes are about right now is that founder mod become a joke because there's no substance to it and 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 ladder you're gonna fail instead of founder mode why don't we call it founder responsibility like what other respons too I mean founder found Authority founder responsibility Steph Curry is not the founder of the Warriors but he's the lynchpin okay my point is teams teams need winning players and then you need to put together your own game plan for winning but the goal should be winning if you are not winning you are a loser and what does winning have really talented really driven people in different positions who understand their position are held accountable for La 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 never scaled a unicorn company yet they're pretending to be a unicorn whisper who's telling Founders how to behave and the question you to ask is this at the end of the day helpful or not I mean we all want to exalt and celebrate Founders I want to I want to win exactly but we all want to win and you know James Madison said that you know men are not not Angels what do you do about those cases rare I think they're pretty rare where the founder is just wrong about something where they're like representing that investors are going to do something they're not going to do or Elizabeth Holmes represents that she's got a product that she doesn't have 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 you actually need to have some objective standard of behavior that's not just oh Founders is always right traditional managers are always wrong because that's just not nuanced enough to account for what it's actually gonna take to win well I mean if Adam Newman had listened to a lot of the smart people he had hired at Wei work he might not have signed leases that were so high priced and gotten away from the Playbook that worked when they started that business which was find the cheapest real estate charge the highest price you can for it by making it you know a community and and really nice as opposed to hiring the class A getting the class a space and then charging a b price to your point like a senior real estate executive would have put together a forecast of cash flows yeah 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 Naval gazing aside and can you make good smart decisions when you're ask 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 it's a intellectual and psychological archetype yeah I mean in my experience the founders that are highly successful are the ones that that are Hands-On they've got a strong vision and they pursue it and they're constantly learning and leveling up and they're going to learn wherever they can they're going to learn from other Founders they're going to learn from Executives they may have hired who maybe do have more attritional 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 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 this is something they learned we use the word reer write a lot right but it's this idea of constantly reer what the conditions on the field are so you know what you need to do in that moment to maximize your chances of success have the perfect example of this when I was running webblogs Inc we were going to raise a round of funding Mark cubin had given us the first 300 and Mark andreon was going to give us 500k for our blogging company that didn't Gadget Etc 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 SE I said I was gonna be in Seattle next week for the whole week would love to catch up with you I wasn't planning on being in Seattle I made that story up just to make it convenient for him and uh he said sure come by on Tuesday or whatever I come by on Tuesday I sit with Jeff Bezos as my partner Brian alv 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 how 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 commentator so we look at the great comments and then we hire them and then I watched in Amazon they started hiring the people writing great reviews for their review team and I was like oh wow he he really is taking notes on this and your point point saxs or maybe TR you made this point in terms of hiring one of the great techniques Bezos had is uh a concept called bar raisers and a bar raiser in Amazon is somebody you hire for your team who is so good that they raised 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 technique here in very specific ways to attract talent to your startup that will become you know do you guys remember reason why YC and Founders fund and andreon took this path was to try to Corner seoa because seoa 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 consumate incredible winners and So what seoa 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 culdesac and just needed to get replaced and again they were operating from a first principal's 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 995 plus percent of our companies in our efforts end up with nothing to show at the end of it freberg to bring you 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 ad adult in the room who's done this before and they found Eric Schmidt who had run Noel 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 Schmid roll at Google well Eric Schmid came into Google through his relationship with John door and John door as a mentor delarian sergean investor and 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 never worked anywhere they had never had a job they had never had experience I think similarly Cheryl Sandberg as a partner to Zach ultimately helped him level up and obviously chth and others prior to that but these firsttime 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 Reigns back to Larry and um as Cheryl did and ultimately Zuck continue to kind of lead the company have been really powerful enabling forces but chamat 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 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 yeah so we're like decades into this and that's what kind of feels an acronis stic 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 is quite the contrary they can do almost anything and the the question is how do you help them level up and at some point if you're constantly just saying that well Founders know everything Founders always right is that actually helping them or is it actually reinforcing a mentality that oh I don't have have to learn anything because that all the great Founders have been learning machines but if they had been told throughout that you're always right don't worry about it then they may not have learned the same way did you say you met with Eric Schmidt recently shiman well I had a meeting with Eric Schmidt a few weeks ago which blew my mind and I 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 is you have this thing called cuda in the middle of it which is owned by Nvidia and and I think that over time that's problematic so the long-term solution is you need a functional transpiler that can take Cuda littered code but be able to compile it without losing performance to any hardware so Amazon Hardware Google TPU Etc so Eric and I sat down we were together for a couple days when we were in Europe and we had a like a hour 90minut meeting the level of technical detail and Mastery that he had blew me away and he asked hundreds of very very very specific questions some of which I knew the answers to some of which I didn't I was able to ask him what he thought he was able to go into the weeds in an enormous amount of detail and what I thought was where is he finding the time to know as much as he does about compilers and the specifics of AI at this level of detail and and the story of telling you this example is just more that that is a kind of person that is just rare and unique you can't put a label on that person and you just want that person near you because he has the ability to help you in a way that most other people just do not irrespective of whatever their title is so it it just goes to say like you 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 EXP exploring now with this goal that if one of them pens out I'll go back to Eric and say look we tried these things this is working this is not working what do you think and it was an incredibly helpful meeting to me and he just offered that time to me and so I 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 learn 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 ideal all right here we go a panel of California judges has ruled that section 230 does not protect Tik tok's algorithm in the case of the death tragically of a 10-year-old girl we've talked about section 230 and uh legislation to protect algorithms or to make algorithms more editorial we'll get to that in a second but let me just queue up the story and then we'll play a clip from episode 99 of Allin podcast in late 2021 a 10-year-old Pennsylvania girl accidentally killed herself while participating in a Blackout Challenge she saw on Tik Tok 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 uh the child's mother sued Tik Tok 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 community decency act just break this down very simply if you're section 230 that grants internet platforms featuring user generated content immunity from being sued over content published by those users on their platform so YouTube Tik Tok Twitter you know a blogging platform Etc so because of 230 you're technically not supposed to be able able to go after something like Tik Tok because a random user posted crazy videos like this but an appeals court shth has reversed that ruling with the judge arguing that Tik tok's algorithm represents a unique quote unquote expressive product which communicates to users through a curated stream of videos the judge claims Tik tok's algorithms ref reflect editorial judgment so here's the interesting legal detail the new ruling specifically cites the Supreme Court's recent decision Moody versus Net choice in which the Court ruled unanimously to vacate that Florida law we talked about here that ban tech companies from platforming political officials so that was viewed as a big win for speech protection Sachs and moderation rights in big Tech but this is all super ironic because the same ruling that affirm 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 chamoff 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 Ed of the New York Times yeah and I think it's a fig Lea to say that because there is not an individual person who writes 0. 2 in front of this one variable and 08 in front of the other that all of a sudden that this isn't editorial decision- making is wrong we need to understand the current moment in which we live which is that these computers are thinking actively for us and that is just true and so I think we need to acknowledge that because I think it allows us at least to be in a position to rewrite these laws through the lens of the 21st Century there's such an easy way to do this if you're Tik Tok if you're YouTube if you want section 230 if you want to have common carrier and not be responsible with 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 shamat that was uh your take on it and here we are what are your thoughts on on Section 230 and algorithms today should if you use an algorithm should that nullify void your section 230 protection I think it is a fig Lea to say that we've 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 does it mean that they don't support it it 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 where section 230 yeah you're right I'll just say it again we're not writing deterministic code anymore it doesn't say if this then that show them the blackout video there is no piece of code anywhere but it's it's kind of a fig Leaf to say that that isn't the intention of the way that the new form of software is written yes correct sax your thoughts here on balancing 230 with the fact that I think we all agree that these algorithms are the new modernday 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 the um legal precedent here last year there were two Court decisions addressing this very issue of whether algorithms basically obviated 230 protection and the court found that they didn't there were a couple of cases involving in users who basically went down a rabbit hole of like terrorist videos and got recruited by ISIS remember this yes and 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 L 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 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 oped page from the news page because it seems like that publication is so biest 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 prot Trump content if you're Pro KLA Harris you'll see more Harris content in other words X or whatever the platform is isn't supposed to be taking an editorial position on whether it supports Trump or Harris but rather it's giving you more of what you want Elon recently spoke to this that he had a a tweet recently where he talked about hey people were coming to him saying hey I'm I'm seeing all these like offensive things in my feed why is this well it turns out that they had been sharing those posts that were offensive to them and so they were 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 Fally different thing than what a publisher does I have a third View and I'll bring you in on this discussion here freedberg is that these algorithms have come become so powerful they are even better than editors at catering to users needs because they're obviously uh onetoone 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 Tik Tok 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 stopping at increasing the session because if you want to increase a session all you have to do is keep showing more rage and getting people more upset and that leads to division in society and all kinds of weird things that can occur and so empowering users and having more transparency would be a great way for the government uh for individuals who are frustrated with this and the platforms to find some common ground and involved what do you think think of this possibility freedberg of maybe you come to YouTube and instead of shutting down to the and causing chaos to your point sacks which I I agree with that it would cause chaos and more censoring just saying to people hey welcome to YouTube here are three ways you can view your content by default you can pick our algorithm you can pick an education leaning algorithm you can pick a music leaning algorithm or you could have no algorithm at all and you'll just be faced with a directory what do you think of that as a maybe a middle ground here 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 uh 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 the behavior the crazy thing about social media or digital media firstly is that the cycle the feedback cycle is much faster used to be that you put out a book you wouldn't get the results on how the book sold and how many people liked it and how many people read it till a year later and then with movies you get results in a weekend but with social media you 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 I'm not sure that there's really this like simple solve where let me show you something that's like less inciting at the end of the day if it's something that's horrific or something that's romantic or something that's inspiring if it's emotionally uh kind of activating enough you're going to be happy watching the next one you're going to keep watching you're going to keep watching it I think there's a there is a relatively easy solve which is you could simply open source the algorithm like X has done so we can see is it messing with your mind or not is it actually biased are they actually inserting editorial opinions into the algorithm and so if you open source it people can see what it's doing I actually I I hear this point of view a lot that social media is only praying 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 argument I don't think that the algorithm is only reacting to outrage or incitement I think quite the contrary what I've seen on my exfeed is that it's showing me more stuff that I like and I'm that's right I mean the algorithm's gotten so good yeah like if you go on YouTube I got I I love watching uh like videos of mountain biking and I see like all these crazy mountain biking videos now and I'm I love watching I'm like dude this is awesome it's I don't not making me angry I hear what you're saying but I would just I would offer something slightly different which is I think that these algorithms focus on momentum so meaning if freeberg 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 archit detected 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 solve the problem today is airing 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-old shouldn't be allowed to use Tik Tok 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 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 sacks 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 you been insane you've been lost your mind mind you need a detox you need a detox anyone who disagrees with you is like on Putin's payroll now my friend comrade Sach you're like The Reincarnation of Joe mccarth da da I agree yes since you want to go into Russia here we go it's 50 days before the election 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 s just rolled his eyes it's so funny H this is just great okay the predicted there's gonna be another Russia gate host just in time for the election here we are and by the way there's breaking news more Russia 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 syndrome let's get to the story here uh comrade 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 just charged two Russian media operatives with infiltrating podcasts yes to push Pro Kremlin talking points this was a wild drop on Wednesday jth the doj charged two Russian media operatives as part of an alleged wait for it propaganda and misinformation scheme according to the charges the these two employees of the state run Russia Today Outlet RT funnel $10 million into a Tennessee based media company to influence public opinion and SE social divisions the wire transfers happened between October of last year and 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's called tenant media founded in 2023 by Lauren Chen a conservative commentator and their personalities included Tim P 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 do runs us the ground and and gets and gets Justice served what I would say generally is the most incredible decision we ever made is to not have ads it has been the single biggest clarifying function for our ability to maintain our own opinions and be credible it's allowed us to change our minds it's allowed us to evolve if if we were sort of characters in a movie we we will have gone through different transitions frankly as 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 yes so this is just yet another example of your immediate 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 yep on a whole host of topics okay and just to be I mean is that do we all agree with that or not I agree it was a great move to not have advertising sure because it yeah there zero pressure from anybody calling us saying we're going to pull our ad spots and also makes the PO easy to listen to mean none of us need the money these personalities Tim P Benny Johnson Dave ran and 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 Wheats 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 Sachs for you is mischaracterizing this how what what what what was mischaracterized I would never mischaracterize this and I literally would never I have no horse in the race here there's no reason for me to mischaracterize it so what am I miss what am I get you do have a horse in the race you believe r hoax for many years and you want to basically try and restart that whole thing that's not true you can ask me I I think Russia I've told this to you many times Russia's sole goal is to do is to sew 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 begin okay it's been my I have said since the beginning that the kgb's technique in America is to sow division that's their sole goal they don't care who wins they just want us to not pay attention to what they're doing in Ukraine or what's happening in Russia that's Putin's goal so so I think the place to start is with asking the question who is Lauren Chen and what is tenant media and what has been their objective or what's their agenda and their agenda now for months has been what's called division grifting inside the conservative movement Lauren Chen's been put 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 stclair and Mike cernovich who said something's not right here this seems like an OP like these positions don't really make any sense it seems like she's just causing Mischief so the place to start here is to recognize that if the Russians were paying tenant media to put out content that content was actually anti-trump it was trying to get people to vote against Trump so I think the place you have to start is by asking the question why would Vladimir Putin want to get kamla Harris elected in fact Putin just came out today and announced his endorsement of K haris 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 jcal yeah I and I think the sewing cernovich this point like that they just want to sew Division and cause chaos is the key point I don't think that Putin cares who wins I think he just wants chaos here and he wants distraction so whether he flips he wants Kamala he wants killary you know he wants Trump I think he just wants and that's what the KGB does that's what the KGB has always done is try to get people to not believe reality and and that is their playbook for all history they want to demoralize a population to not believe in their institutions to not believe facts and if it seems like there 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 KLA Harris nobody accuses her of collusion or being a puppet of Russia they just say it's about sewing division but somehow op you just did that right now no no what op happened with Cala I'm not aware was there an op the with tenant media it's benefiting her I just explain how oh yeah the four people are super an there's a double standard there's a double standard in the coverage here and how it's interpreted when the op 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 four front of people saying that Trump himself was compromised now I never said Trum no no I have to correct you 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 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 s how many times have 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 interfering in our elections or causing Division and we're not going to make this political look jcal this is the third straight election in America in which we've been led to believe that there's 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 steel dossier which hatched the whole Russia gate hoax we subsequently found out that Hillary's campaign freed the steel dossier and then that was taken up by the Deep State they basically did a investigation of the Trump campaign they went to the fisa court they lied to the fisa court and we had a 2-year independent Council 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 Bay's laptop was Russian disinformation that turned out to be a total lie the laptop was authentic that was just a madeup story that the Russians were involved after that let's not forget there was newsguard and Hamilton 68 which were two bogus media Watchdog groups that were deep State Ops that were designed to get conservative content censored as Russian disformation so now after all of these Ops in which 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 KLA 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 uh who was the National Security adviser uh pled guilty to lying to the FBI in 2017 about his contacts with the Russians Paul manfor 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 uh later pardoned by Trump like Michael Flynn was pardon Rick Gates who was the de Deputy chairman uh he worked closely with Paul maniford 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 witnessing in 2019 so have I was literally drop off 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 despite the fact that for years that's what Democrats maintained my maintaining is once again fourth time is that the the Russians are trying to cause division in America and we shouldn't all fall for it hey fredberg I think we shouldn't fall for Hamilton 68 I think we shouldn't have fallen for News Guard I think we shouldn't have fallen for the steel dossier I think we shouldn't fall for the Russia gate hoax jcal stop falling for all these that's why we should be United let's be United freeberg you've got some passionate thoughts on Cala 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 pass no passionate thoughts Jake did any of you guys see that video I sent you of kamla's campaign speech in New Hampshire yesterday so basically 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 uh amount of commentary about being anti- bus 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 uh 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 uh 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 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 by 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 tax ation 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 bus 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 chth I hand it over to you I think that this is all the tactics leading to the debate on September the 10th I think I think that a lot of this polling you're 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 KLA 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 Nota 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 T 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 I 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 shamat 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 to the general election you kind of come towards the middle and we said on this very podcast and I I gave a couple of disclaimers as the moderator here hey we don't know these are commulist 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 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 you can you can make whatever digs you want to her style and that's valid you can make whatever digs you want to Trump style what I'm talking about is said principles yeah well from her first principles ask her writers are giving her new talking points okay listen can you stop with the personal attacks on people and just personal ATT he's a candidate for the presidency of the United States he's actually answering your question he's answering your question jcal he's saying that they're not real policy they not let me finish my thought and then you can and then you can deride her style I'm trying to have something about J 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 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 JD Vance that his position on wanting a National Abortion ban has nothing to do with trumps 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 wealth tax and this you know 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 I'm giving what I'm hearing from the left this isn't necessarily my position sacks this is what I'm hearing from the people around kamla Harris okay let me tell you what's really going on here long okay here we go the long time Democratic pundit Roy tashera 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 KLA Harris will say whatever she needs in order to win but the 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 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 Pelosi machine in sanan Francisco she then Rose to the Senate she was voted by GV track 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 GNA get a continuation 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 to that you know don't don't people adap their position based on winning I mean I think he's done a master class in changing his position in J he 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 Comm 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 he didn't just say that it's always been his position he's always been a moderate on the issue jcal yeah he's against a 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 is because there's so many States including the one I'm living in where women can't get an abortion okay they're gonna have to cross the state line you're right that's an issue so I mean I I think women feel differently about it than you know you brushing it aside they feel that Trump I'm not brushing aside I'm just stating what the truth the issue is yeah no no I'm just saying the truth for women 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 and that's the point I'm bringing up is I think States the evangelicals are really upset about him 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 your business UPF 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 for 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 freeberg you excited here for the team J it's a team it takes 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 going to cut it for the summit or you just wow he's going big and the ar welcome to 48 welcome to 48 the architect David Sachs my bestie welcome toter welcome see you on Twitter sxy welcome to 48 welcome to 48 I think you st making a fo of yourself on Twitter going I think yes and you should do another 30 tweets a day about UK we'll see you all next time everybody byebye let your winners ride Rainman David and instead we open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it love [Music] you besties are that's my dog taking driveways oh man oh man myit meet me we should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy cuz they're all just useless it's like this like sexual tension that they just need to release somehow we need to get merch [Music] our I'm going in 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 thee all inpod Tik Tok the all inpod Instagram the all in pod LinkedIn search for all in podcast and to follow chth he's x.com chth sign up for his weekly email what I read this week at chat. substack docomo . gro.com and see what all the excitement is about follow saxs at x.com davidx and sign up for glue at glue. follow freedberg x.com freedberg and ohal is hiring click on the careers page at ohal genetics.com I am the world's greatest moderator Jason cakenis if you are a founder and you want to come to my accelerators and my programs founder. University lunch. closeapply to apply for funding from your boy jcal for your startup and check out Athena wow this is the company I am most excited about at the moment Athena wow.com to get a virtual assistant for but $3,000 a month I have two of them thanks for tuning in to the world's number one podcast you can help by telling just two friends that's all I ask forward this podcast to two friends and say this is the world's greatest podcast you got to check it out it'll make you smarter it'll make you laugh laugh while learning we'll see you all next time bye-bye