Trump assassination attempt, Secret Service failure, Inside the RNC, VC liquidity problem

00:00:00.000 | All right, Traumath, apparently the Rain Man, David Sacks, is now the architect.

00:00:03.680 | I think he's been working behind the scenes, according to a bunch of the news stories.

00:00:08.240 | I like Puppet Master.

00:00:09.520 | The Puppet Master? Okay, well, let's cut.

00:00:10.880 | Geppetto. We should call Sacks Geppetto.

00:00:12.800 | Let's cut. We're going live now to the RNC in Milwaukee and live coverage.

00:00:17.600 | Sith Lord, David Sacks, are you there?

00:00:20.400 | Oh, there he is. It's Palpatine. Tell us about your new empire.

00:00:26.640 | The center of Palpatine.

00:00:29.280 | Everything has proceeded as I have foreseen.

00:00:32.000 | Obviously, Sacks, Trump makes his own decisions.

00:00:53.040 | You're getting a little bit too much credit, I think.

00:00:55.200 | Yeah, absolutely. No, I mean, I'm mocking, I'm satirizing the New York Times and Business

00:01:00.800 | Insider and all these publications that are giving me all this credit.

00:01:03.120 | Listen, the president obviously makes the decision.

00:01:05.440 | He solicits feedback from lots of people.

00:01:07.760 | I was probably one of a thousand people or at least hundreds of people who offer my opinion.

00:01:12.160 | Obviously, I'm a big fan of J.D. Vance, but I think it's just giving me way too much credit.

00:01:17.600 | In all seriousness, Sacks, you're there, and obviously, you know President Trump.

00:01:22.960 | How is he doing? How's he feeling in the wake of this absolute tragedy?

00:01:27.520 | I think he's doing well. He was in great spirits, I think. But let's,

00:01:31.040 | maybe we should get into the assassination attempt. That's really the thing to talk about here.

00:01:34.240 | All right, everybody, welcome back to Episode 188 of the All In Podcast. We have a full

00:01:41.120 | docket to get through today. We are here on July 18th on the taping of this,

00:01:46.880 | and it is five days after an assassination attempt on the former president of the United

00:01:53.360 | States and the likely 47th president of the United States, obviously President Trump.

00:01:58.000 | We're going to start with what we know. It's five days later. We're a bit in the

00:02:01.040 | fog of war as it is, and there are all the breaking news caveats that you can put on this,

00:02:06.720 | but I want to recap what we know now about this assassination attempt and get everybody's

00:02:12.240 | feedback on it. Last Saturday at a rally in Pennsylvania, 20-year-old named Thomas Matthew

00:02:18.240 | Crooks fired eight rounds with an AR-15 at the former president. One bullet nicked Trump's right

00:02:24.560 | ear. This was confirmed by the president on Truth Social, and a Trump supporter tragically in the

00:02:30.560 | crowd, Corey Comparatore, was killed while protecting his family from gunfire. Two others

00:02:36.560 | were critically injured. Crooks was killed by the Secret Service's counter-sniper team 26 seconds

00:02:41.280 | after he fired the first shot. He didn't have a criminal record. He was not known to the FBI

00:02:46.080 | or Secret Service. He was a registered Republican, but also donated $15 to a progressive PAC,

00:02:51.680 | and the motive is not known, so we'll just wait for that. There were some leaks from a Senate

00:03:00.160 | briefing. I don't know if you gentlemen have heard those. That just came out,

00:03:04.400 | and it was reported that Crooks wrote on July 13th on Steam, that's a gaming platform,

00:03:11.600 | "July 13th will be my premiere watch as it unfolds." He had a second phone. He had a

00:03:18.480 | detonation device in his pocket, or a bomb, or some sort of explosive device in his car. We'll

00:03:23.040 | get details of that, I'm sure. And now we are in the phase of how the hell did this happen?

00:03:29.600 | Here's a picture of the rooftop. The closest rooftop was not secured, and it was 130 yards

00:03:37.040 | away. The head of the Secret Service said they didn't put anybody on the rooftop because

00:03:41.040 | of its sloped surface. Obviously, this is being mocked on social media and questioned by journalists

00:03:50.080 | and anybody with any IQ points. The most disturbing part of all of this, aside from somebody wanting

00:03:56.880 | to murder the president, is the timeline. So ABC News is reporting on the following timeline,

00:04:02.000 | gentlemen. 5.10 p.m., Crooks was first identified as a POI, person of interest, 5.30. He's spotted

00:04:09.360 | with a rangefinder, 5.52. He's spotted on a roof by the Secret Service. 6.02, Trump takes the stage.

00:04:15.840 | 6.12 p.m., he fires his first shot. We'll get into some clips and everything, but let me just stop

00:04:23.600 | here and get everybody's reaction to this tragedy. Chamath, your thoughts?

00:04:29.920 | It's absolute insanity. I actually just, I had just woken up because I was flying back to the

00:04:37.840 | United States for a board meeting. And so as I was boarding and on the way, I was just on my way to

00:04:44.800 | the airport reading it, mostly from our group chat. And I was, I couldn't, I couldn't believe

00:04:50.880 | it, to be totally honest with you. I thought this made, I thought this was, this is not possible in

00:04:56.000 | this day and age. And part of why I thought it was not possible was because I had elevated in my mind

00:05:02.960 | who the Secret Service were and that the job they did or that they're supposed to be doing is just

00:05:11.360 | so sacrosanct to the well-functioning of America that you only have the absolute best people doing

00:05:19.120 | that job. And that job is to protect these handful of individuals in America, most importantly being

00:05:26.560 | the United, the President of the United States, who are just critical to the functioning of the

00:05:31.040 | most important country in the world. And when you see the level of negligence and incompetence,

00:05:41.360 | you know, my mind started racing, how is it even possible? And

00:05:46.720 | I guess the the only thing that I can come up with is that we need to figure out where

00:05:56.160 | incompetence ended and negligence began in all of this, because I think that's what's

00:06:00.640 | going to be the most critical. And we need to figure out the totality of what happened. And,

00:06:07.520 | you know, if there were other people that supported this guy trying to do this,

00:06:12.320 | and then the second, I'll just say is Trump is an absolute legend. What a boss.

00:06:16.880 | Okay, Freeberg, where were you when the news broke? And what are your general thoughts here

00:06:21.680 | five days after this occurred? We'll get into political ramifications and everything else,

00:06:25.600 | but just on the event that occurred and your takeaways from it.

00:06:28.880 | I was with a group of people drinking beer outside. We were on our fourth beer.

00:06:34.320 | And I thought it was a joke. I think the first thing I thought after I saw the video and saw

00:06:39.280 | that he was okay, and that his ear was bleeding was that's it, it's over. Trump's won. It was

00:06:44.240 | probably one of the most iconic patriotic visuals I think any of us have seen. And here's the image

00:06:52.240 | Nick's pulling up. What a photo. This is the AP photographer. And I think it's really,

00:06:57.040 | it was so striking. You see this photo, which didn't come out right away. But some of the

00:07:02.480 | imagery that came out right away with him pumping his fist was like, okay, that's it. Trump's won.

00:07:06.000 | It's over. Second thing I thought was, this could trigger a lot of violent counter reactions.

00:07:12.640 | If Trump doesn't lead well here, and I think he prevented that in his statements. And from the

00:07:19.600 | other side. Third thing I thought is it doesn't matter if Biden drops out now, because it's over.

00:07:24.080 | Biden could stay in, he could leave. This just feels like a lot of momentum.

00:07:29.440 | And then the fourth thing I thought was this, to Chamath's point, I think we've all been around

00:07:32.720 | Secret Service people in our lives and in our careers and in meetings and interactions we've

00:07:37.360 | had, it really was amazing that the Secret Service let this happen. And if you see,

00:07:41.360 | you know, all the data and the stuff that's coming out now about how the Secret Service

00:07:47.440 | managed this, it seems pretty scary that this was so botched. Certainly, the dust has settled

00:07:53.600 | five days later. And it seems like they're back into the conversation about let's remove Biden and

00:07:58.000 | figure out who can run against Trump. Although there is conflicting polling data, which I know

00:08:01.920 | we're going to get to. Let's get Sax's reaction. Sax, where were you when this occurred? And your

00:08:06.480 | thoughts on the event itself? And obviously, there's tons of conspiracy theories going around

00:08:13.360 | right now. Obviously, there is some negligence that occurred here. I don't think there's any

00:08:18.800 | doubt about that. There's a DEI angle. There's a ton of angles here. But where were you when you

00:08:25.920 | saw this happen? And what was your immediate thought?

00:08:28.880 | Yeah, well, let me answer your first question. First, I think this was one of those events where

00:08:32.560 | you'll always remember where you were. And I was just working in my office in Los Angeles. I was

00:08:38.080 | going to fly to the Republican Convention in Milwaukee a few hours later. And so, someone

00:08:42.400 | texted me the President's been shot, Trump had been shot. And my heart sank. I immediately went

00:08:46.560 | online to see the video. And I think I saw in almost real time him go down. And then when he

00:08:54.480 | stood back up and faced the crowd and told the Secret Service, wait, wait, he didn't want to just

00:09:00.000 | let them kind of drag him away. He turned to face the crowd and exposed his face. Who knows if

00:09:05.600 | there'd been another shooter? Who knows if that shooter was really down. But in that moment, he

00:09:10.480 | wanted to let the crowd know that he was fine. We were one inch away from the President of the

00:09:13.840 | United States having his head shot. You know, he's got grandkids, he's got a wife, he's got kids,

00:09:20.400 | he's got friends, however you feel about the individual, his head was almost shot on television

00:09:26.000 | in front of thousands, hundreds, maybe thousands of people on live television.

00:09:29.520 | And the gravity of this, I think, is very significant. And I think we've, in this media

00:09:34.560 | saturated environment, we've processed it too quick, which is why on the docket, I wanted to

00:09:38.080 | slow down here and just take in what happened. You know, one other very important detail for

00:09:43.520 | me is that, you know, my father-in-law was actually at that rally in Butler, at Butler Farm.

00:09:49.040 | Really? Yeah, he was there, and he saw everything that happened. And when we saw there was a

00:09:53.040 | shooting there, we were trying to get a hold of him, and the cell reception had been shut down,

00:09:56.080 | and we couldn't get a hold of him for a couple hours. And obviously, we found out later that he

00:09:59.120 | was fine. But what he described is that when the shots rang out, the President went down,

00:10:05.120 | there was really a feeling of bedlam and pandemonium in the crowd. The crowd was afraid

00:10:10.560 | that the President had been shot. And so when he stood back up and faced the crowd and then,

00:10:14.880 | you know, said, "Fight, fight, fight," it created this huge sense of relief. It was like palpable

00:10:21.200 | that he was fine. And then the part that I don't think has been well-reported is that the crowd

00:10:26.560 | started chanting, "USA, USA, USA." So they responded with this unity. It's been well-reported

00:10:33.840 | that, you know, that Trump said, "Fight, fight, fight," but I don't think it's been well-reported

00:10:37.840 | that the crowd started cheering, "USA, USA, USA." So I think that the crowd turned from fear to

00:10:45.760 | unity and strength and patriotism, reflecting what they saw from the President.

00:10:51.680 | - Yeah, it's well said, yeah.

00:10:53.520 | - This is one of these things that's unbelievable. And the whole world, I think,

00:10:56.240 | has just seen how iconic it is. I saw there's a video online even, and I think kids in Uganda

00:11:01.680 | were actually reenacting the assassination attempt. That's how iconic it was. Trump's

00:11:07.040 | like a global legend for that. And again, there's just no way to fake what he did in that moment,

00:11:11.680 | right? Where, again, he... I mean, the bullet missing him was either luck or hand of God or

00:11:19.520 | destiny, whatever you wanna call it, but him telling the Secret Service to stop, to face the

00:11:23.920 | crowd, to basically show that he was unharmed and that he was determined and he was defiant in the

00:11:30.320 | face of an assassin's bullet, that's courage that nobody can fake. And I've seen people online

00:11:35.280 | talk about how soldiers under fire, they've described how when they've been under fire,

00:11:39.840 | obviously, they hit the deck, they don't stand back up. Even soldiers don't do that.

00:11:44.960 | - His composure is incredible.

00:11:46.480 | - Yeah, he just rose to the occasion in just such an incredible way that I think it's inspired

00:11:51.840 | the whole country and the whole world. There's just no way, again, to fake something like that,

00:11:56.480 | even though some people like Reid Hoffman's political hack was actually claiming that it

00:12:02.080 | was all staged, which is just unbelievably ridiculous. But I think the rest of the world

00:12:07.760 | knows that he just showed unbelievable courage in that moment and rose to the occasion and I

00:12:12.000 | think made the entire country proud. - It certainly was an amount of bravery

00:12:17.120 | and a bold response. I do think the next phase of this is sort of figuring out what happened with

00:12:24.640 | the Secret Service, as brave as it was for him to stand up. That was a crazy thing to do. I can't

00:12:29.440 | believe the Secret Service allowed him to get back up because there could have been a second

00:12:32.880 | shooter. And although we heard radio chatter that the shooter was down, I mean, how did you know in

00:12:38.000 | a situation like this what's actually happening? They could have gotten a second shot off on the

00:12:42.720 | president. Maybe they don't miss by an inch that time and then they hit it. So we got a lot of

00:12:47.920 | questions that need to be answered here. Thank God he's okay. And I think, I guess,

00:12:53.040 | now it's time to talk about rhetoric. And I think that's actually, from my perspective,

00:12:59.760 | the next thing that has to happen here in terms of leadership, when something this tragic happens,

00:13:04.240 | everybody's looking at the other side's rhetoric here, whether it's putting Trump on a magazine

00:13:10.400 | cover as Hitler, or they're saying you gotta fight like hell, or the Oath Keepers and all this

00:13:15.680 | January 6th nonsense and beating up cops. I think we have to put both of these things aside and the

00:13:20.400 | leadership, Trump and Biden, should be saying right now that, and leadership does start at the top,

00:13:27.520 | this rhetoric is not to be done anymore. People have to tone things down. You could be passionate

00:13:33.600 | about politics, but using violent language, there are sick people in the world and this kid, I think

00:13:38.000 | it will ultimately turn out like all the other assassins we've seen or these celebrity killings

00:13:44.000 | that occur, John Lennon, et cetera, it's usually a mentally ill person. Likely what happened here,

00:13:48.320 | we don't know yet. They interpret violent language differently than a normal person.

00:13:54.560 | So we could say fight like hell, or target, or you gotta fight for your country, whatever it is,

00:14:00.320 | and we would take it a certain way. Sick people take it a different way and they need to put out

00:14:04.240 | a joint statement and just say, anybody on our teams who uses violent rhetoric is no longer on

00:14:10.000 | our teams and they haven't done that. So I think there's more work to be done here in terms of

00:14:13.680 | leadership. - I think it's more precise than that. I think it's way more precise than this. I don't

00:14:18.240 | think that this is like years of Donald Trump using violent rhetoric. I think this is years of-

00:14:24.320 | - Oh, both sides. - No, I don't. You cannot both

00:14:26.320 | sides this. I think this is years- - Of course you can. I just gave you

00:14:29.200 | examples of it. - I think what it is,

00:14:31.440 | is that we have gone through years and years of literally the words that the former president

00:14:37.280 | has said being perverted, and misconstrued, and chopped up into soundbites that advance

00:14:44.880 | the mainstream media's agenda to try to vilify a person. And I think that that's an important

00:14:51.600 | thing to take a step back. I think we have to understand that the mainstream media has really

00:14:59.040 | gone out of their way to amplify violent rhetoric and to actually associate violent rhetoric as a

00:15:08.480 | tolerable reaction. And I think that that is the thing that we need to now

00:15:13.360 | completely get rid of in our society. I saw so many reactions to the former and probably

00:15:23.040 | future president of the United States getting shot, which was along the lines of basically

00:15:29.200 | hoping that that person hadn't missed, and/or justifying that violence on Donald Trump was

00:15:35.440 | somehow justified. That's insane. Now that person could only have gotten that idea because the media

00:15:42.080 | fed them that language and that idea. And I think that that's extremely scary because I don't think

00:15:49.040 | you actually see Republicans necessarily saying that about Joe Biden. They may think that Joe

00:15:56.160 | Biden is feeble and mentally incompetent, but nobody's calling for the death of Joe Biden.

00:16:04.720 | So I think that that's a very scary place where you have one group of people who are being fed

00:16:10.400 | this extremely toxic narrative. And I think that that part of what you're saying, Jason, I agree

00:16:14.720 | with, but I really disagree with the other part, which is, and this is someone again, as as someone

00:16:20.480 | who was a former Democrat, I can observe this and be relatively rational here. I didn't see that

00:16:25.280 | from the other side. Okay, well, you know, the media is reflecting what is said by both candidates

00:16:30.800 | and both sides, and they both use very targeted language. I'll put a couple of links in the show

00:16:35.360 | notes of both sides doing this, and you can make your own decision as the audience. But I do think

00:16:40.000 | leadership would be both of them saying, "Stop this violent language," and both sides do it.

00:16:46.720 | I'd like to address that, too.

00:16:48.000 | Yeah, sure. Go ahead.

00:16:49.120 | Just days before the shooting, Peter Thiel and Reid Hoffman had an exchange

00:16:54.320 | at Allen & Company that was publicly reported in which Peter said that Reid had turned Trump into

00:17:00.640 | a martyr by funding lawfare. And Reid responded, "I wish I had turned him into an actual martyr."

00:17:06.720 | Okay, that's wishing for someone's death. When the news of the assassination attempt came online,

00:17:13.200 | I don't think it was Jack Black himself, but a member of his band said, "That's too bad.

00:17:17.920 | The shot missed." There are other people on the Democrat side who expressed similar sentiments.

00:17:22.800 | They were disappointed that the assassination attempt had failed. Now, I don't think those

00:17:28.640 | people are mainstream political leaders.

00:17:30.720 | Yeah, that's just a distinction I wanted to make here. There's no political leader who said that.

00:17:36.000 | I'm not going to try and hang that around Joe Biden. However, Biden himself, days before the

00:17:40.080 | shooting, said that it was time to put Trump in the bullseye. That's what he said. And his defense

00:17:45.280 | for that rhetoric was, "Well, I didn't say crosshairs." Well, I think bullseye means the

00:17:48.640 | same thing. Now, even that, I'm willing to basically forgive because I don't think Biden

00:17:55.520 | meant it in a literal sense. I think he was speaking rhetorically about, say, campaign ads,

00:18:00.960 | things like that. I wouldn't necessarily say that was violent rhetoric, okay? I'm not going to try

00:18:04.880 | and pin that on President Biden. But the thing I do think was unacceptable by President Biden

00:18:11.680 | and the Democrats is the level of demonization and the level of vitriol that they have pursued

00:18:17.440 | against President Trump, not as a one-off statement, but as a campaign strategy. Again,

00:18:23.440 | they have said over and over again, "This man is Hitler. This man is a fascist. This

00:18:27.600 | man is a threat to democracy. If he wins, it is the end of democracy." They have repeatedly gone

00:18:33.360 | there and repeatedly used... They've tried to Hitlerize him. Now, if you're saying that this

00:18:39.920 | man is Hitler, where else is there to go rhetorically? That's the worst thing you could

00:18:44.880 | ever say about somebody. And quite frankly, if he is Hitler, why would you be offering him thoughts

00:18:51.200 | and prayers after he gets shot? I mean, wouldn't it be a good thing to shoot Hitler? And so,

00:18:57.360 | I do think that if we think about the contribution of political rhetoric to what could have happened

00:19:01.840 | here, I'm not going to try and blame anybody for these one-off poor choices of language that could

00:19:06.880 | be interpreted as violent. What I will blame them for is taking the demonization up to 11,

00:19:13.200 | taking the vitriol up to 11, because that could poison the mind of someone who's already mentally

00:19:20.000 | disturbed and say, "Okay, well, wait a second. If he is Hitler, why wouldn't I be Colonel Van

00:19:24.480 | Stauffenberg for assassinating him? Wouldn't I be a hero for trying to eliminate this man?"

00:19:29.920 | And that's the thing that I think is really unacceptable. And I do think the Democrats

00:19:34.400 | should be blamed for that because, again, they made it a campaign strategy. Their entire argument

00:19:39.440 | against Donald Trump is not about issues. It's about this man being Hitler. And I think it's

00:19:44.720 | ridiculous. It's inflated. It's hyperbole, to be sure. And I think that we don't know yet

00:19:51.120 | about the mind of this shooter, this Brooks. But if anything contributed to the shooting, it was

00:19:56.960 | that. Jay D. Vance referred to him as Hitler as well. Other people inside the Republican

00:20:01.440 | Party have referred to him as Hitler and a threat to democracy. So, there's plenty of

00:20:05.120 | blame to go around to, correct, Sax? That happened over eight years ago as, like,

00:20:09.040 | part of a text message exchange. It wasn't a public rhetoric as a campaign strategy. I'm

00:20:14.400 | talking about a systematic strategy that gets amplified. Look at the cover of "The New Republic."

00:20:19.920 | They literally turned Donald Trump's face into the face of mashup of him and Adolf Hitler. And it's

00:20:26.720 | been amplified and repeated over and over and over again on MSNBC, on CNN, on all these liberal

00:20:33.840 | channels, okay? This is coordinated political rhetoric as a campaign strategy. It's not a

00:20:38.960 | one-off. I'm not gonna blame anybody for a one-off that could be misinterpreted. But when you do this

00:20:44.000 | as a systematic campaign strategy, and, in fact, you base your entire campaign around the idea

00:20:50.320 | of this man as a threat to democracy and a fascist, this is the language they used. Like I said,

00:20:54.640 | there's nowhere else to go after that. Where else do you go?

00:20:57.440 | Jay: Threat to democracy, I think, is a valid criticism of Trump calling him Hitler. Probably

00:21:04.960 | insightful. So, yeah, I think reasonable people can parse this. And it is something that has

00:21:10.880 | occurred on both sides. It's well documented. And both parties can do better.

00:21:14.960 | Alex: I think, like, one thing that when the investigation happens into what happened here,

00:21:20.720 | and we really figure out what happened in the Secret Service, how many examples do we need

00:21:26.880 | of institutions where we put in our trust just, like, letting us down? And they just seem to be

00:21:33.520 | piling up. And it's independent of administration. And at some point, I think we have to, like,

00:21:38.560 | really check ourselves and say, what has happened here? Like, how do we objectively measure the

00:21:44.000 | quality of the people that are supposed to be working in these organizations? And how do we

00:21:47.680 | make sure that they are actually competent in doing their job?

00:21:50.160 | Jay: I think this is the key point, Srimath, is the outcome. You know, how do we judge people?

00:21:55.680 | Outcomes. And if you look at the outcome, how the Secret Service director hasn't resigned now. I

00:22:00.960 | mean, I know she's had a storied career, and she's probably a good person who's done plenty of great

00:22:05.600 | things in her career. I don't know the details of it. But if the outcome of what you've done results

00:22:10.800 | in something this tragic, and that could have been avoided, the proper thing is ownership

00:22:15.760 | and resignation, and or the people who run this organization or the answer to being fired. And so

00:22:21.360 | this absolute acceptance of mediocrity is something that has to change.

00:22:25.600 | Srimath: Is it an acceptance of mediocrity? Or is it that they just got completely distracted on

00:22:32.080 | things that are not germane to doing your job? So, you know, if it was we need

00:22:37.840 | a diverse Secret Service, or we need to have inclusion, all of those things have nothing to

00:22:45.680 | do in my mind about protecting somebody, there are characteristics, and I suspect that there are

00:22:49.680 | women that embody these characteristics as much as men that embody these characteristics.

00:22:53.600 | But why isn't there a psychographic way of determining who the best people are that have

00:22:58.240 | the protective instinct to protect the most important people that run our country?

00:23:02.160 | There's a very simple test here. The job of the Secret Service is to jump in front of a bullet,

00:23:06.320 | as we witnessed, in order to jump in front of a bullet, you have to be bigger than the target,

00:23:10.560 | right? You have to be so a six foot two woman who's four feet wide, just as qualified as a

00:23:15.120 | man who's six foot two, four feet wide. For that job description, you have to be brave enough to

00:23:18.880 | jump in front of a bullet. I don't know if you guys saw but there was like a thing where and

00:23:22.880 | I feel bad for this woman who's being derided as being totally incompetent, the one in the field,

00:23:27.920 | but there was a David Attenborough voiceover of her trying to put her gun back in the holster.

00:23:32.480 | Yeah, I mean, my gosh. Apparently, I think Eric Trump said she's incredible.

00:23:36.320 | Have you seen the DEI Another Day memes? Yeah, this is just sad.

00:23:40.640 | I mean, look, it's a very unfortunate video. Didn't Eric Trump say that she's like the best

00:23:44.240 | person ever? I think he was trying to support her. She may have just had a bad moment, who knows? I

00:23:48.480 | mean, it did look pretty bad that she was having trouble holstering her weapon. I mean, you know,

00:23:53.040 | not that I'm a gun expert. A lot of adrenaline running at that moment in time.

00:23:56.080 | But I mean, look, it's what's known as an outside the waistband holster, which is the

00:23:59.840 | easiest type of holster to use because you don't have to tuck it into your pants or anything like

00:24:03.440 | that. And I got to say, it does look pretty bad that she was having so much trouble just

00:24:11.120 | trying to holster her weapon. But look, I think this is only one of a number of questions that

00:24:16.800 | I think have been legitimately raised about the Secret Service performance. And we need

00:24:22.160 | a full investigation to figure out what happened. And let me just, you know, let me just run off a

00:24:27.760 | list of questions that I would like to see answered. So number one is how did they fail

00:24:32.000 | to cover that roof? It was the most obvious shooting spot in that entire Butler Farm area,

00:24:37.280 | and it was not properly covered. And then the Secret Service releases the statement that they

00:24:42.240 | didn't cover it because it was a sloped roof, which is the most ridiculous cover story ever

00:24:47.200 | because they did have snipers on another roof that was more sloped.

00:24:50.560 | And that's like five times more slope. Right, right. So that sounds like a lie.

00:24:54.080 | So once you put out that, that cover story, which is basically a lie, you only make the situation

00:25:00.640 | worse. And it only makes the question even more poignant of how do you fail to cover that roof?

00:25:05.520 | Okay, well, did you see the picture of Secret Service on top of the White House roof, which

00:25:09.280 | is extremely even more sloped than the I mean, it's just pretty good. And the Secret Service

00:25:14.400 | director Cheadle said that on ABC. Okay, so right there, she should be fired because she's lying to

00:25:20.320 | us at a moment where she should be cooperating and doing a full investigation. Okay, so isn't

00:25:24.800 | it true that they were inside the the structure was air conditioned inside the building outside

00:25:30.480 | it was. Okay, but that's just question number one. Okay. Question number two is, like you said,

00:25:35.680 | he was a person of interest an hour before the shooting. And no one went to go resolve that

00:25:41.120 | situation. Moreover, they see him with a rangefinder. Okay, what the hell do you use a

00:25:46.400 | rangefinder for? I mean, he's scoping out the target with a rangefinder. And they let the

00:25:52.000 | president go out there. Okay, while they stole a person of interest out there, this guy has a

00:25:56.800 | rangefinder, he has a ladder, he has a backpack, and he was never intercepted. He was never stopped,

00:26:01.680 | even though they had identified him, and they let the president go out there. So clearly,

00:26:05.360 | there was a huge failure of communication between the Secret Service and the Trump campaign. How

00:26:09.440 | did that happen? How was there no agent stationed at the fence, such that they had to ram it with an

00:26:15.040 | SUV for the Secret Service to get through? I don't know if you guys knew about that part of it. Okay,

00:26:18.800 | there was no agent stationed at the fence. Okay, so in order to get there, they rammed the fence

00:26:25.760 | with an SUV. So the Secret Service quickly get through. Oh, my gosh. Okay, that's insane.

00:26:31.120 | And what harm would have come from just taking a half hour and have Trump have a cup of coffee

00:26:37.760 | and then go make sure that this person is not exactly like exactly. I'm just thinking judgment

00:26:42.960 | wise. Listen, I understand they're in the field. I understand they have. I understand if like they

00:26:46.640 | were concerned, maybe that's one of our snipers on the roof. Like maybe there was a moment like

00:26:51.520 | a 30 second moment. Like, I'm trying to give them the benefit of the doubt here. But it's hard to

00:26:56.000 | the Secret Service sniper who did an incredible job taking out the shooter in one shot. Okay,

00:27:02.000 | he had that person lined up. So again, you know, why haven't they released that the audio,

00:27:07.920 | there must be an audio recording of all the chatter on their earpieces, their communication.

00:27:12.080 | A hundred percent.

00:27:12.800 | That sniper must have identified, you know, Crooks as a potential target and had him lined up,

00:27:18.080 | which is how he's able to take him out very quickly. But what was the chain of command

00:27:23.520 | there in terms of him seeking authorization? Hey, who is this person? Why wasn't everything

00:27:27.600 | stop while they go to figure out what this person is doing on the roof there? Okay. And then once,

00:27:32.080 | once the shots rang out and, and Trump gets shot, why did it take him so long to get him in the car

00:27:38.880 | to get the convoy off to a hospital? There was a long delay in terms of getting him out of there.

00:27:43.680 | So they clearly weren't prepared for that. The whole thing, it just, you know, reeks of,

00:27:48.800 | of incompetence.

00:27:50.480 | Yeah. And they don't have a great track record of being honest about what's going on. They don't

00:27:54.400 | remember not to bring up January 6th again, but they deleted all their texts from January 6th.

00:27:59.200 | Like they do not, they circle the wagons. They do not want people criticizing. I doubt we're

00:28:04.080 | even going to get that audio. I wonder if that audio is going to come out.

00:28:07.840 | But they don't have the right in a democracy to basically investigate themselves and say,

00:28:12.000 | oh, we're good. No, that's not how it works. The people of this country need accountability.

00:28:17.040 | I mean,

00:28:18.640 | the once and likely future president came within millimeters, centimeters of being

00:28:24.480 | assassinated. And this whole country could have been plunged into a whole different type of

00:28:28.400 | situation. We need answers to these questions. And this director Cheadle is obviously in the way

00:28:34.080 | and putting out nonsense, putting out spin at a time when we need a proper investigation.

00:28:40.960 | That needs to happen immediately. Cheadle should resign. We need to have agents, okay? Secret

00:28:45.920 | service agents need to be offered up to testify on Capitol Hill with no fear of reprisal from the

00:28:51.680 | Biden administration. Okay. And all the information needs to be made available.

00:28:55.440 | The first person that needs to talk that needs to speak

00:29:00.000 | in a congressional hearing is the sniper himself.

00:29:02.880 | Did you guys see there was coverage yesterday that showed there's actually two snipers?

00:29:06.560 | Yeah, there's two.

00:29:07.360 | Well, no, sorry. There's two sets of snipers. There's four snipers.

00:29:11.440 | The one set of snipers that you see the video of where he does that,

00:29:14.560 | there's a tree blocking their ability to see crooks. The other set of snipers are the ones

00:29:20.800 | that apparently took the fatal shot. And they had a line of sight, but they're not on camera.

00:29:25.520 | So you don't actually see what's going on with them. That's the current reporting I've seen on

00:29:30.160 | it. So I don't want to, like jump to conclusions, given that there's now seeming to be...

00:29:34.560 | There's no excuse here, because let me just say...

00:29:37.040 | If they saw the guy on the roof, and they let the president on the stage,

00:29:40.480 | someone effed up. That doesn't seem appropriate.

00:29:42.400 | Why not have a delay? Not the end of the world.

00:29:45.040 | If we can put that bird's eye view of Butler Farm on the screen. I don't know, Nick,

00:29:49.680 | if you have that.

00:29:50.400 | Nick, pull it up where it shows the line of sight with the tree as well, so you can see it all.

00:29:53.920 | Yeah, there it is.

00:29:54.720 | But look at the shooter's position and look at Trump's position, okay? And I've seen

00:29:59.760 | broader bird's eye views of Butler Farm. Without knowing anything about marksmanship,

00:30:05.360 | it's just obvious that that roof is the most... If you could set yourself up anywhere as a sniper...

00:30:10.960 | Yeah, it's the number one location.

00:30:12.080 | ...to assassinate the president, it's the number one most obvious location.

00:30:14.800 | Furthermore, let me just say that when Chamath and I hosted that dinner for President Trump,

00:30:19.040 | we worked with the Secret Service advance team, and they were excellent. They were really great.

00:30:24.560 | And I saw just a little bit of their process. And they went through the house, they mapped

00:30:28.720 | out the entire house, the entire property. Then they asked, "Well, where's the president

00:30:32.800 | gonna be sitting at dinner?" They wanted to know who's to his right, who's to his left.

00:30:36.240 | They looked at the window coverage of that room, and they said, "Okay, whose house is that? That

00:30:41.280 | neighbor's house." And they went to go check it out. Every single movement by the president was

00:30:46.560 | mapped out. Every angle on the president was basically mapped out and explored.

00:30:51.520 | What happened here then? That's the crazy part.

00:30:53.920 | It was actually amazing to watch. I thought they did a great job.

00:30:56.480 | It was really amazing.

00:30:57.200 | And so this is why, how could this ever have happened, where the most obvious shooting angle

00:31:01.920 | on the president was not properly covered? It just makes no sense.

00:31:05.840 | You can put two blues up there. Just two beat officers on there would have solved the whole

00:31:09.840 | problem. If you don't have enough Secret Service agents. I was at a Clinton benefit one time,

00:31:15.680 | and I got detained in the Secret Service and went into secondary screening.

00:31:19.840 | The reason given, I had two cell phones on me. They thought it was peculiar that I had

00:31:23.600 | two cell phones. They kept me for 15, 20 minutes in a side room, and they literally took my phone

00:31:28.480 | apart in front of me, took all the batteries out, went through every bag. They frisked me.

00:31:32.880 | I mean, wanded me. Three guys around me. They take this incredibly seriously.

00:31:37.440 | Yeah. Normally, they're very thorough, and they're very serious. I mean, look,

00:31:40.400 | even at the dinner that we hosted, they wanted to know what kind of steak knives we were using.

00:31:43.680 | Literally, they wanted to make sure that that was safe. And this is why they were so interested in

00:31:50.160 | knowing who was to the president's right and to his left, because they want to think through every

00:31:55.840 | possible angle of attack on the president.

00:31:58.160 | There was some breakdown here.

00:31:59.200 | And in this case, something very strange happened.

00:32:02.960 | And of course, as I was just sort of alluding to early, if this person looked like a SWAT member,

00:32:10.240 | which apparently he did, fatigues, rangefinder, all that stuff, I'm guessing that maybe those

00:32:16.080 | snipers from the Secret Service thought those were friendlies. That's the only possible

00:32:20.240 | explanation of why they paused.

00:32:21.760 | Yeah, but he wasn't dressed that way. He wasn't wearing a costume, or he wasn't impersonating.

00:32:27.440 | I thought he had fatigues. But even still, a person laying there...

00:32:30.480 | The photo I saw, he was wearing a t shirt.

00:32:33.680 | The great fear you have as a police officer is shooting another police officer. So I

00:32:37.360 | think that...

00:32:38.000 | Dude, he was not in a uniform.

00:32:39.440 | From whatever number of feet away, maybe that's what they thought.

00:32:41.840 | Can I ask a technical question?

00:32:43.360 | Yeah.

00:32:44.000 | Are you telling me in 2024, that when you show up at an event to protect a VVVIP,

00:32:52.960 | like the President of the United States,

00:32:55.280 | that SWAT and other people aren't given some kind of like, little pin that has an NFC chip

00:33:03.360 | or something where everybody knows who everybody is so that it's very clear very quickly when

00:33:08.320 | somebody in a position of risk is not on the home team?

00:33:13.040 | They do have ways of doing that, right? There is a when you're undercover...

00:33:17.600 | Like are you telling me, for example, like President Trump's pin or Barack Obama's pin

00:33:21.760 | or Joe Biden's pin doesn't actually have something in it? I would be shocked if the

00:33:27.760 | answer is it's just a pin.

00:33:29.280 | Well, this is a report that they're investigating that the delay in shooting the sniper might have

00:33:35.280 | been that they thought it was friendly. So this theory is out there now. And it's part

00:33:39.120 | of the investigation. It is a potential one. You know, I can tell you that that would be

00:33:43.440 | the nightmare scenario for the Secret Service is to shoot the local cop.

00:33:47.440 | Honestly, guys, I hate to be the one to say this, but we've just, our institutions are

00:33:52.880 | incompetent.

00:33:53.760 | There's a lot of incompetence.

00:33:54.720 | Absolutely. It's just like the Afghanistan withdrawal. Remember that? No heads rolled,

00:33:58.400 | there was no proper investigation of why so many people died unnecessarily in that Afghanistan

00:34:03.120 | withdrawal.

00:34:03.520 | Nobody's fired for anything anymore. It's just ridiculous. Like, and there's no resigning,

00:34:08.000 | obviously, nobody resigns, nobody gets fired.

00:34:09.920 | Why would anybody so if this was a company, this would be a failing company? Why would you not

00:34:17.120 | strip it down from top to bottom and rebuild it?

00:34:19.360 | Well, exactly. And I tweeted this counterfactual, which is imagine if Elon had bought Twitter,

00:34:24.640 | but he wasn't allowed to fire anybody. Do you think he would have been able to restore free

00:34:28.800 | speech? Do you think he'd be able to restore innovation? No. If you're running an institution,

00:34:33.360 | you have to be able to fire people when they don't perform. But we have lost that ability

00:34:39.360 | of our federal government. So there's something that's very, very broken here. When people fail,

00:34:45.360 | they have to be held accountable or you don't get good performance.

00:34:47.680 | Right? When institutions fail, there needs to be a question on why are we funding those

00:34:52.480 | institutions?

00:34:52.960 | Nobody gets fired.

00:34:54.640 | Why would you give more money to a failing company? You'd never do it.

00:34:58.160 | This is the comment I put in the letter that I sent to that senior democrat back in October.

00:35:02.800 | I don't see any accountability with respect to the programs that you pass bills to fund.

00:35:07.760 | You pass bills to fund these programs, you stand up new institutions. And then there is never a

00:35:12.320 | retrospective postmortem or review on the performance of those institutions or the

00:35:16.400 | objective of those programs. And yet we keep funding them and asking for more money.

00:35:20.320 | And eventually you end up with a decaying empire. Like we've seen in history, we need to have a

00:35:25.200 | series of actions that drive accountability in federal programs, and then a review on the

00:35:30.960 | intention of those programs, and make sure that they still hold. And then we can move forward

00:35:35.360 | with new programs.

00:35:36.480 | Sachs is really right. Like you cannot have the Secret Service investigate themselves on this one.

00:35:40.640 | Of course not. And they deleted all their text messages and did a major

00:35:43.440 | cover-up the last time around. So you cannot trust them to investigate themselves. No.

00:35:47.040 | Did you see all those senators chasing them up the stairs yesterday?

00:35:50.080 | You see that?

00:35:50.560 | I did see that. It didn't say which senators it was. I don't know if that was confirmed.

00:35:54.640 | It was, yeah.

00:35:54.960 | Marcia Blackburn.

00:35:56.000 | What happened?

00:35:56.480 | So a bunch of the senators confronted the head of the Secret Service. Cheetle is her name, right?

00:36:02.000 | Yeah.

00:36:02.480 | And they confronted her and there was someone's video of the whole thing on their iPhone

00:36:06.080 | of them saying, "We need answers. Why did you let this happen?"

00:36:08.960 | Here it is.

00:36:09.280 | Here's the video. Nick can show it. Here, just watch it.

00:36:11.680 | This was an assassination attempt. You owe the people answers. You owe President Trump answers.

00:36:22.400 | My gosh.

00:36:23.440 | That's a bad video because what it does not show is the start and the end.

00:36:26.640 | At the start, they were all standing around her having a conversation. And then they started to

00:36:31.200 | press her and she said, "Now's not the time. This isn't the forum." Then she took off. They

00:36:35.200 | followed her. And then she went into the Secret Service secure room upstairs and blocked all the

00:36:40.560 | senators from coming into the room. Her Secret Service staff blocked them. So all the guards

00:36:44.800 | said, "No, you can't come in." So they all got blocked out. So the senators were pushing her

00:36:48.960 | for some feedback, for conversation, for dialogue, and she wouldn't engage.

00:36:52.640 | Yeah.

00:36:52.800 | Oh, my gosh.

00:36:53.760 | I've seen enough. Resign now. Get out of the way so a proper investigation can be done.

00:36:59.280 | Total, total, total.

00:37:01.120 | Okay. Let's talk about the RNC. A friend of ours gave a talk and the VP was selected.

00:37:08.800 | You did a great job, Bestie.

00:37:10.080 | Thank you.

00:37:11.440 | What was it like to get on that stage? I have a bunch of questions about-

00:37:16.880 | Yeah. What was it like?

00:37:18.160 | It seemed like people are not sitting in chairs, right? They're just mulling about. Tell us-

00:37:22.400 | Give us the behind the scenes.

00:37:23.760 | Yeah.

00:37:24.160 | And what was it like getting prepped and doing all the prep work?

00:37:27.920 | Did you have to review your speech? Tell us all the details.

00:37:30.480 | Well, let's see. I mean, I started working on this about, I don't know, a week before

00:37:33.680 | the convention and they sent me some ideas for remarks and then I completely rewrote it with my

00:37:40.000 | research assistant/writer and then sent it to them and there was some back and forth. But by and

00:37:44.400 | large, they let me do what I wanted to do.

00:37:46.880 | Did they give you a time?

00:37:48.800 | Yeah. The one thing that was kind of set was the time and they correlated the time with a number

00:37:56.640 | of words. So they said, "You've got six minutes," which is 600 words. And so that's what we worked

00:38:01.920 | towards. And then the big thing I had to learn was just how to use the teleprompter. So they had

00:38:07.120 | these rooms set up where there were teleprompters and I could do some training on how to read a

00:38:14.560 | speech using a teleprompter.

00:38:16.560 | What is that like? Like you'd say?

00:38:18.560 | It's just a matter of knowing where to look and trying to stay natural, but also using

00:38:24.000 | the prompter as a mnemonic device.

00:38:26.400 | And does the prompter stop when you stop or how does that work?

00:38:30.080 | There is actually somebody in the room who is physically advancing the words as you're

00:38:34.000 | speaking. And so there's someone who's actually working the prompter and they will go out-

00:38:38.080 | So if you give big applause, they'll pause it for you and you don't have to try to keep up.

00:38:42.240 | Exactly. So that was probably the biggest thing to learn. And then the other thing about it is

00:38:48.320 | that you're speaking to a huge convention hall. And so you feel like you really want to project

00:38:54.240 | in order to reach people. But at the same time, you're really speaking on TV. As you guys know,

00:39:00.240 | you'll come across as being kind of insane if you start yelling into a TV set. So finding

00:39:06.160 | the right balance between speaking to people in the auditorium and speaking to people watching

00:39:10.400 | from home, that's kind of tricky. And I'm reasonably happy with it. And the most important

00:39:15.360 | thing is I got to say the substance of what I said.

00:39:17.920 | Not universally popular, right? I mean, you basically called for an end to the conflict

00:39:23.600 | in Ukraine and to stop funding Ukraine's defense against Russia. And that's not a popular opinion

00:39:30.400 | in the Republican Party. Is that right? Well, I went further than that. I said that

00:39:34.080 | this was not an unprovoked war. It was a provoked war. I said the Biden administration provoked the

00:39:38.240 | war with talk of NATO expansion. You can disagree with that if you want. I think there's plenty of

00:39:42.560 | evidence for it. That's what I believe. I feel like you went out on a limb more than most other

00:39:46.640 | speakers who kind of had a lot of good laudatory comments and promoted Trump.

00:39:52.640 | Yeah, you could have pandered. Yeah, you actually went out with a strongly held opinion

00:39:56.720 | that is, you know, fairly contrarian, right? Well, I think that most of the people in the

00:40:02.720 | Republican Party, including most people on the floor, actually agreed with me. I think it took

00:40:06.720 | them a second to process what I had said. And so, you know, what I saw when I was up there is I said

00:40:13.520 | that, you know, Biden provoked, yes, provoked the war. And I think it was such a shocking statement

00:40:19.680 | to a lot of people because we've heard the whole unprovoked invasion narrative so many times that

00:40:24.240 | there were like murmurs, and then people got it and they started applauding. I never actually

00:40:28.080 | intended it to even be an applause line. I just thought it was an important thing to state the

00:40:31.520 | truth as I see it on the record at the Republican convention. And that line did actually get

00:40:37.120 | applause. Now, a bunch of Ukraine stans were predictably outraged by what I said, and they

00:40:42.640 | were trying to claim online that somehow I'd been booed or something like that. There were absolutely

00:40:45.920 | no boos. There were actually people applauding. And then, you know, as I got deeper and deeper

00:40:50.000 | into the speech, people applauded it more and more. It was very much a speech that attacked

00:40:54.000 | the forever wars. It attacked the warmongers and complimented President Trump for keeping us out of

00:40:59.600 | wars and complimented him for being strong, but also having the savviness and the ability to

00:41:06.800 | negotiate with our adversaries to keep us out of wars. And I think that's now a position that's

00:41:11.120 | very popular within the Republican Party. But it's a process. It's evolving.

00:41:16.240 | This is a perfect segue because there are reports that friend of the pod Tucker Carlson

00:41:21.040 | had a big impact on talking to Trump about his selection of JD Vance and said, "Don't pick a

00:41:26.000 | neocon. That'll get you assassinated." That was one report. That was advice that came before the

00:41:31.600 | assassination attempt, obviously, so conspiracy theorists are kind of losing their minds over

00:41:35.760 | this. But let's talk about the selection of JD Vance because that is a big surprise, I think,

00:41:42.240 | in many quarters. Tell us about JD Vance. You're friends, yeah?

00:41:47.120 | I mean, I'm friends with him and I very much supported his selection for VP.

00:41:52.480 | Why is he the best pick in your mind?

00:41:54.480 | Well, there's a couple of things. So JD Vance represents a couple of very interesting

00:41:59.120 | characteristics. On the one hand, he's from this poor region of Appalachia that really represents

00:42:05.840 | the forgotten man or the forgotten cities and towns in America. You could call it the MAGA

00:42:12.720 | heartland. And so MAGA really likes him. At the same time, he's worked in tech. He was a venture

00:42:17.680 | capitalist. He understands the future and he's popular in tech. So it's very unusual to get

00:42:22.960 | somebody who has MAGA plus tech on their side together. So that's one almost contradiction,

00:42:29.680 | you could say, that JD represents. Here's another one. JD Vance was in high school

00:42:34.640 | when the Twin Towers came down. And then we invaded Iraq and he was gung-ho to serve and

00:42:42.000 | to go exact retribution and justice on America's enemies. And he enlisted in the Marine Corps and

00:42:48.240 | he went off to serve in the Iraq War. Subsequently, he realized that we had all been lied to about the

00:42:54.560 | Iraq War and that it was a gigantic mistake. And moreover, the forever wars were a huge mistake.

00:43:00.000 | And to me, this is something that I really appreciate about him. And this is a quality

00:43:04.880 | that I really want at President Trump's side, which is he's an American patriot. He had the

00:43:10.240 | courage to serve, to go serve in America's wars, but he has the wisdom and the judgment

00:43:15.760 | to want to avoid those wars when we don't need to fight them. And there's way too many of,

00:43:20.320 | like you said, Jason, these neocons, these warmongers in the party, who've never ever

00:43:24.880 | acknowledged their mistake in the Iraq War and all the forever wars. And they seem on virtually a

00:43:30.560 | daily basis to want to plunge us into the next forever war. So this is, I think, a quality that's

00:43:36.720 | of paramount importance to have in our commander in chief and in the person who would be next in

00:43:41.920 | line to be commander in chief. So for these reasons, I very much support J.D.

00:43:46.800 | All right. So let me get some feedback from the rest of the panel. I'll just give you a

00:43:50.160 | couple of bullet points about him. For those of you who don't know J.D. Vance, yeah, he worked at

00:43:54.640 | Peter Thiel's mythical capital and Steve Case's revolution. And so he worked for a Republican and

00:43:59.840 | a Democrat. And Steve Case started his own farm called Naria Capital. And he went to Ohio State,

00:44:07.840 | graduated Yale, was actually classmates with Vivek. We talked about that. He's only 39 years

00:44:12.720 | old. So he's half the age of Trump. As you mentioned, combat correspondent for six months

00:44:16.160 | in Iraq in 2005, 39 years old. And Thiel backed him with, I think, the largest Senate race donation

00:44:23.360 | in history, 15 million. And so this is quite a ascension chamath from a venture capitalist to

00:44:31.600 | potentially vice president and obviously, potentially president. He's in the second

00:44:37.120 | spot. So were you a proponent of the J.D. Vance as well? He's superb. The press says you lobby

00:44:43.840 | Trump as well. Is that true? He's superb. I cannot say enough good things about this guy.

00:44:49.600 | He's superb. Why is he superb? He is a, he's a bit of an enigma, I think, as Sak said, because he,

00:44:59.200 | his views are so unique. And he comes from a background that is very similar to mine. So I

00:45:08.080 | have tremendous loyalty for the path that he had to navigate to get out just to get out. And I think

00:45:15.280 | that that, you know, I really care for people like that. And then he's done really good things with

00:45:23.360 | the resources that he's been given, and the relationships that he's built. And I really

00:45:28.960 | respect that, too. We all read Hillbilly allergy. I don't know if we talked about it on this pod

00:45:33.760 | years ago, but you and I certainly talked about it a bunch of months. And, you know, he came from

00:45:40.160 | nothing, less than nothing, less than nothing addicts, less than nothing. And he talks a lot

00:45:46.240 | in his book, I don't know if you remember this about social capital, and the fact that he didn't

00:45:50.160 | understand by the name of the firm is social capital, people know the reference that he just

00:45:54.400 | didn't have the social capital to even understand that a lawyer went to law school. Totally. And,

00:45:59.440 | you know, he is an enigma. His positions don't align with Trump's in every case,

00:46:04.880 | but they have quickly become aligned with Trump's. He's an incredible pick now. Yeah,

00:46:09.920 | I thought he was an incredible pick before his speech last night. And he even exceeded my

00:46:14.480 | expectations in that speech. I just thought it was truly an incredible speech. First of all,

00:46:19.440 | the introduction by his wife, Usha was really, you know, incredible. I thought she did a fantastic

00:46:24.640 | job. And then he got up there and I had a friend text me, he's not really that into politics. He's

00:46:30.240 | just like, this guy seems so normal. He's happy. He's normal. He seems competent. There was one

00:46:35.200 | commentator, I think on one of the cable shows, who I think meant this as an insult,

00:46:40.160 | but it actually was positive. He said that when you're at like a fast food restaurant,

00:46:44.480 | something and need to ask for the manager, JD advances, the person you hope is the manager,

00:46:49.920 | you know, he comes out, he's friendly, he's competent, he's reasonable.

00:46:53.920 | He knows how to get stuff done. I'm not sure if that was meant as an insult or a compliment.

00:46:57.920 | I can tell you. Yeah, but I think it's a compliment, right? And he's just so normal.

00:47:03.760 | He's gonna be very hard to demonize. Obviously, they're trying to do it on cable news. They're

00:47:07.040 | somehow trying to portray him as an extremist or a racist, even though he has a mixed race family.

00:47:13.600 | The tent of the Republican Party at this RNC sacks is the most wide open tent I've ever seen

00:47:19.840 | in politics. They had Amber Rose and people were criticizing Amber Rose. She was excellent.

00:47:24.000 | She was excellent. She was fantastic. I thought she was excellent. She knocked the ball out of

00:47:27.200 | the park and she's she looked absolutely radiant. She's a feminist. She was beautiful and she

00:47:31.840 | crushed it. I thought her speech was effective. I thought it was authentic. And it would describe

00:47:36.480 | her red pilling. Basically, she said it described her evolution and her journey from someone who

00:47:41.120 | believed the media's lies about Trump thinking that he was a racist to actually meeting the man

00:47:45.760 | herself, realizing that the way they had portrayed him was basically a slander and how she became

00:47:53.360 | friends with President Trump. I thought it was an incredibly effective speech. But look, there

00:47:57.520 | was very few people who didn't like it. There was this one post by Matt Walsh online, and he was

00:48:03.360 | roundly denounced for what he said. I mean, he kind of engaged in this pearl clutching that they'd

00:48:08.320 | allowed Amber Rose to speak because of her value judging. And it's like, who's Matt Walsh to judge?

00:48:13.600 | It felt like a part of the Republican Party that's on its way out, you know,

00:48:18.400 | this pearl clutching social conservatism. In any event, it was it was really an opportunity,

00:48:23.040 | I think, for people to disavow his criticism and support her.

00:48:26.960 | Yeah, and that was my point here is what, you know, they've done a really great job of. And

00:48:32.320 | Vape did a wonderful job in his talk. I want to give him a shout out of just saying, hey, listen,

00:48:36.880 | everybody can be part of this party. I think there's a lot of notes the Democrats could take

00:48:40.480 | from what they saw at the Republican National Convention. These are people

00:48:43.680 | who would have been at the DNC, but you know, one election cycle ago, but because of this purity

00:48:49.360 | test, you can't even, you know, win with them. Let's take the obvious, we're trending into a

00:48:54.320 | direction right now, where based on Donald Trump's pick for the Vice President, and some of the other

00:49:01.440 | surrogates like Vivek, if Donald Trump were to win, what you're going to see is a very youthful

00:49:08.320 | cabinet of a lot of 30 somethings and 40 somethings. And I think that that's a really

00:49:15.440 | important thing to consider versus a bunch of 60 70 and 80 year old career politicians.

00:49:21.440 | Correct. Absolutely.

00:49:22.720 | Youth and vigor. And again, this new direction, you know, a lot of people were commenting

00:49:26.480 | about JD speech that large parts of it could have been given by Bernie Sanders, or, you know,

00:49:32.160 | it's it's this populist message that

00:49:34.960 | Well, let me ask you that. Yes, axis, he, he's had a position of breaking up big tech,

00:49:40.720 | and being pro union. How do you reconcile all that? And this new Republican Party? Yeah,

00:49:48.080 | address those two, because that seems to be a big discussion to discussion topics.

00:49:51.920 | Yeah, I think that it's definitely a new emergent Republican Party where this is, I think this is

00:49:59.360 | Donald Trump's Republican Party. This is the MAGA wing, the America first wing of the Republican

00:50:04.240 | Party, we're moving from a party of basically the Chamber of Commerce, you know, business roundtable,

00:50:10.640 | a bunch of oligarchic fat cats to being a populist party that actually represents the people.

00:50:16.240 | And I think it's a very, I think, and they had the teamsters up there. Yeah. And I think it's

00:50:21.280 | a very welcome change. And the part of JD speech that I like the best is when he described that,

00:50:26.640 | hey, I went off and many other people went off to fight in these forever wars,

00:50:30.960 | risking our lives or giving our lives, we come back to our home communities. And what do we find,

00:50:35.760 | we find them hollowed out, the jobs have all been exported, the factories have shut down.

00:50:40.240 | And instead, the town has been poisoned by fentanyl. That is a message that you have not

00:50:45.280 | heard in the Republican Party, except for Donald Trump, and that new part of the party. And I think

00:50:50.320 | that Donald Trump choosing JD Vance was so important to cement this new vision of the Republican Party.

00:50:56.240 | It was a legacy pick, because it means that this America first MAGA message is going to continue

00:51:02.080 | into the future, many years into the future. And let me just tell you, as I listened to that

00:51:06.720 | speech, I hearken back to another speech at a public convention I heard 32 years ago. I'm sorry

00:51:14.640 | to say I'm old enough to actually remember these things. And I remember Pat Buchanan's speech in

00:51:19.040 | 1992. And after Pat described the factory workers who lost their jobs, I just wanted to read you

00:51:26.640 | what he said. And I want you to think about what JD said. So what Buchanan said was, "My friends,

00:51:32.800 | these people are our people. They don't read Adam Smith or Edmund Burke, but they come from the same

00:51:38.320 | schoolyards and the same playgrounds and towns as we come from. They share our beliefs and

00:51:43.200 | convictions, our hopes and dreams. They are the conservatives of the heart. They are our people,

00:51:47.680 | and we need to reconnect with them. We need to let them know we know how bad they're hurting.

00:51:52.160 | They don't expect miracles of us, but they need to know we care." And I think that for too long,

00:51:56.960 | Republican leaders ignored that advice. They didn't connect with everyday Americans.

00:52:02.560 | They were foolishly willing to cut programs like Social Security or Medicare, saying that we had to

00:52:08.400 | cut the deficit while at the same time funding forever wars. So they're totally not credible.

00:52:14.720 | And the party was basically led by warmongers like Dick Cheney or Mitch McConnell or soulless

00:52:20.880 | bean counters like Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan. And I think Vance really broke with all of that.

00:52:27.840 | And I think he represents the future of the party. He trashed the Iraq War. He promised no more

00:52:33.760 | foreign interventions. He railed against policies that benefit multinational corporations at the

00:52:39.200 | expense of workers. And I think it's no wonder that the neocons lobbied so hard against his

00:52:46.080 | selection. But I think... Yeah. Freeberg? Let's get you on that.

00:52:49.120 | I think those days are over. And I think that, just let me just say at this end with this,

00:52:53.120 | that I think that Donald Trump and J.D. Vance represent a conservatism of the heart

00:52:58.240 | that we haven't seen before. And I think this is the future of the Republican Party.

00:53:02.720 | Freeberg, does J.D. Vance being selected tip your vote towards Trump?

00:53:07.680 | Vance. I think he's gonna do well for Trump.

00:53:10.800 | I think if he... Who were his other options?

00:53:15.920 | Nikki Haley. I mean, there were pressure for him to go after a lot of the neocons, right?

00:53:22.960 | Sachs and get the never-Trumper contingent. Wasn't that like a lot of the pressure?

00:53:26.960 | Absolutely. I mean, I think there was Doug Burgum,

00:53:30.320 | who was... That was your favorite, no, Freeberg?

00:53:34.160 | Not my favorite. I met him. Seemed like a really thoughtful guy. He's done an incredible job

00:53:39.840 | managing the state of North Dakota, but he's got some social policy issues that I think are

00:53:45.920 | gonna rub people the wrong way. And I think to Sachs' point, he's more in the camp of supporting

00:53:52.480 | Ukraine, which it seems like some part of the party are starting to come around and say no.

00:53:57.920 | So it seems like he wasn't a great fit ultimately. Yeah. By the way, I met Doug Burgum the other

00:54:03.120 | night and he's a very nice man who I think could play a very important role, very nice guy who I

00:54:08.080 | think can play a major, major role in the party. Built an incredible business, sold it to Microsoft.

00:54:12.960 | Yeah. There's nobody who understands, I think, energy better and all the regulations that have

00:54:16.880 | gotten in the way of making America energy independent and tapping our vast energy

00:54:21.520 | reserves. So I found him very, very impressive on that. But at the end of the day, it's just not

00:54:27.920 | the kind of pick that J.D. is. I remain a moderate undecided voter. I love J.D. Vance. I think it's

00:54:34.240 | an inspired choice. I know, Sachs, where you're voting. I'll take some guesses on you Chamath,

00:54:39.200 | but Freeburg, where are you standing right now? I'm very happy that RFK Jr. was not selected as

00:54:45.120 | the VP to be on the ticket. I think RFK would have been a challenging partner for Trump and

00:54:53.040 | it would have led to a lot of disagreements. And I think that RFK has some policy perspectives that

00:54:59.280 | I don't agree with, particularly as it relates to health, energy, agriculture. And so there are some

00:55:07.680 | disagreements I have with respect to his view of the world. I will say J.D. seems like a pragmatist.

00:55:14.240 | He seems highly intelligent. He seems highly competent. And I know that he has not been in a

00:55:20.960 | governing position before. So this is really critical to note. This is a training job for him

00:55:27.040 | in a large way. He's been a senator and he's been an investor. And he's been an individual contributor

00:55:33.600 | as an investor. He's built his own firm, but it's not a scaled firm. So this is going to be a really

00:55:40.640 | interesting kind of process to watch unfold. But I think from a policy and a strategy perspective,

00:55:47.200 | he can have a really positive impact on the direction of the things that we talked about

00:55:51.600 | earlier, which is accountability and government programs, having a clear set of objectives,

00:55:56.720 | making sure that we focus on those objectives and don't spend time and resources on things

00:56:01.760 | that are fluff, and perhaps aren't really meeting the objectives. And I think that he'll have the

00:56:08.640 | thing I do have concern about, I think that the nationalist agenda, the nationalism and the

00:56:13.440 | isolationism agenda is counter to global trade, which can be deeply inflationary. And that is one

00:56:21.440 | concern I do have, which is the ability for the US to export and import with other trade partners

00:56:28.560 | around the world, I think is critical for us to continue to grow our economy and keep inflation

00:56:33.440 | down. So if we take policy action, that limits our ability to import because we impose tariffs

00:56:40.800 | on other countries, goods and services, it can be inflationary makes things more expensive for

00:56:45.600 | Americans, everyday Americans to buy. When everyday Americans go into Walmart,

00:56:50.080 | and they buy products, a lot of those products are shipped from China. So if there's a tariff

00:56:55.040 | on those products, and the price of those products now goes up by 30 40%. That can be a real burden

00:57:00.640 | that drives inflation. That's the point about the nationalism on manufacturing and inputs.

00:57:05.440 | So freeburg, you're pretty convinced at this point that the reciprocal trade agreement

00:57:10.640 | would cause inflation, hyperinflation?

00:57:14.720 | No, no, I think I think that the idea that the general statement, which I don't think is

00:57:18.480 | necessarily how this is being executed, I just want to make sure that we're all cognizant of the

00:57:21.360 | point that if you introduce and if you introduce tariffs on imports, it will drive prices up. Now,

00:57:28.720 | that may be the right thing to do from a policy perspective, as we heard from, from President

00:57:33.520 | Trump, when we interviewed him, his belief is that this is an important security state that

00:57:39.040 | we use it to drive reciprocity, and we use it to hold China in check. And so that may be a more

00:57:45.200 | important strategic priority over the increase in the price of certain goods. The problem that will

00:57:50.160 | arise and this is this happened during the last Trump administration, if China then responds with

00:57:55.600 | tariffs on the export of US agricultural products, or our biggest buyer of agricultural products

00:58:01.040 | today is China. And then China put tariffs on our export, or they stopped buying from the US and

00:58:07.280 | they started buying from Brazil. Instead, the farmers are hurt. And when the farmers are hurt,

00:58:13.040 | the Trump administration had to spend money to support farmers 10s of billions of dollars.

00:58:18.160 | Yeah, they subsidized it.

00:58:19.200 | They subsidize they paid farmers in a way. And so the federal government then has to step in

00:58:24.800 | to meet the gap that arises from what will end up becoming an escalating tariff problem or

00:58:30.800 | escalating purchasing problem. So global trade allows the economy to grow gives everyone a

00:58:35.920 | market, you can start to trade. But there's also the security issues. I do think it's important

00:58:40.560 | that we onshore a lot of manufacturing, I think it's important, but there's going to be a period

00:58:44.560 | of pain, there's going to be an investment needed. And it's not going to be simple and easy. And we

00:58:49.280 | may face quite a bit of inflation on the path to doing that.

00:58:52.000 | Give us an update here at the end of the show free bird on scholarships and what people have

00:58:55.680 | been asking for their own summit.

00:58:56.640 | So this week, we are opening up scholarship applications, you can go to summit.all in

00:59:03.840 | all in podcast.co. And we have a very, very, very limited number of scholarship tickets that we hold

00:59:10.720 | for the summit, like we did the last two years, the applications are open now, please get your

00:59:16.080 | application and right away because we expect that will be completely overbooked almost immediately.

00:59:21.040 | And some of those scholarships are going to be sponsored by athletic growing companies. So thank

00:59:24.480 | you to athletic growing company for paying for a lot of our scholarship recipients to go to the

00:59:28.160 | online summit this year, really exciting programming coming together, we have more details to share in

00:59:32.400 | the next couple weeks. And we do, we do have one more last block of ga tickets that we're going to

00:59:38.240 | release, get your application in on the website, summit.all in podcast.co for a ga ticket for the

00:59:45.360 | last block. Thank you.

00:59:46.480 | All right, let's just do one quick business story here. Since we spent the bulk of the episode

00:59:50.000 | talking about politics and current events, exits creeping back, Sequoia is doing a secondary sale

00:59:57.600 | of their Stripe investment, one of the greatest investments of the last decade. And Google is

01:00:03.200 | in talks to acquire Wiz. And this is absolutely amazing news for the industry, which has been

01:00:12.240 | suffering from a lack of distributions. As you can see in this chart, Chamath after 2021,

01:00:17.120 | exit values just plummeted. And there are some signs of life now. Let's start with Sequoia

01:00:25.600 | buying back some Stripe shares from its own LPs. Sequoia Capital has invested 517 million in Stripe.

01:00:31.360 | That's currently worth about 10 billion. 20X, Michael Moritz, led the seed in Series A.

01:00:38.240 | Sequoia offered to buy back 860 million in Stripe shares from LPs and its legacy funds. Those are

01:00:45.120 | the funds between 2009 and 2012. Sequoia is using capital from their newer funds,

01:00:51.280 | like its Evergreen Fund that was formed in 2021, the Heritage Fund, that's their wealth management

01:00:55.760 | team, to give the legacy funds some liquidity. It's not normal that a company stay private this

01:01:02.400 | long. It is the exception to the rule, but it has happened. It actually happened with Uber to a

01:01:07.680 | certain extent. So legacy fund LPs have the choice to hold, sell some, or sell all of their Stripe

01:01:15.600 | shares. Here's the quote from the note. "Sequoia personnel and associated persons will not be

01:01:20.320 | offered the option to sell Stripe shares previously received as carried interest distributions from

01:01:23.920 | the legacy funds." And they are offering $2,750 a share, which is pretty generous, $70 billion

01:01:28.960 | valuation. As you may know, Stripe has hit as high as $100 billion in market cap in the private

01:01:38.320 | markets. So this will be from the seed, which was a 20 million post, 3,500X for those LPs.

01:01:47.600 | And for the Series A, it is a $100 million post, which is 700X for those people who don't know.

01:01:54.400 | I think it was Sam Altman who actually did that investment as a Sequoia scout in the same fund

01:01:58.320 | that I did the Uber investment. So still the number one and two investments there.

01:02:03.280 | Your thoughts, Jamal, on this unique opportunity and device to sell early shares from the same

01:02:10.080 | venture fund? I have two thoughts. The first is that it's interesting to see that they

01:02:16.880 | mark the valuation up to $70 billion. So that's a good sign for Stripe.

01:02:22.160 | But the second thing is, I was a little kind of puzzled by this whole thing.

01:02:27.040 | It's a very complicated thing when you're buying old stakes into a new fund and crossing funds.

01:02:34.400 | It's sort of like actually one of those things that are supposed to be verboten.

01:02:38.000 | And when you're trying to build a good fund with great governance,

01:02:41.840 | this is actually at the top of the list of the things that you're never supposed to do.

01:02:46.720 | Which is to provide liquidity to a group of LPs via another fund that you control.

01:02:53.840 | But I think this actually shows what may be going on behind the scenes. So I don't want to be

01:02:59.040 | conspiratorial or anything, but it would be a great way for the GPs to get liquid to meet their

01:03:06.800 | capital calls here without having to pay capital gains tax. And that makes a lot of sense for the

01:03:12.160 | GPs themselves. And so I suspect that that probably... Well, they did say that the GPs

01:03:17.760 | aren't going to get to liquidate anything. So they did put that note in there. So they've

01:03:22.320 | anticipated that. Right, so you can provide... No, but what that means is you can provide liquidity,

01:03:27.040 | you don't get to pull the money out, that's fine. But then now you can use it to fund capital calls.

01:03:30.400 | But I don't like it. I don't like these kinds of things where one fund is basically scratching

01:03:35.760 | the back of another fund. It always tends to be the case that this stuff on the surface

01:03:41.440 | looks a little smelly, and can be a little unseemly. And this is why you're not supposed

01:03:47.600 | to do it. You're supposed to go and get some other random fund to buy these things. And I think it's

01:03:53.120 | generally a much cleaner thing to do. And the hygiene of it is clearly what we see SACs in

01:03:59.520 | that documentation, giving people choices, you can make your own choice. We're not taking carry,

01:04:04.480 | we're not selling our shares, and we're only selling 10%. So they did go to extreme measures,

01:04:09.840 | I guess, to outline that. But your thoughts on this type of sale? It happens in private equity

01:04:15.680 | all the time, I understand. But we don't see an adventure all that often. What are your thoughts

01:04:19.360 | on this providing liquidity to the 14-year-old funds? Well, first of all, there's a Kid Rock

01:04:24.240 | concert going on behind me. Sorry if that's distracting for you. No, no, it's going to be

01:04:29.280 | lit. That's all I can say. If he's introducing President Trump, it's going to be pretty baller

01:04:33.760 | tonight. We're taping on Thursday, obviously. This episode will probably come out tomorrow.

01:04:38.560 | But in any event, with respect to the Sequoia thing, look, I think there's this overarching

01:04:44.560 | issue of the fact that VC funds are classically designed to be 10-year funds. The money is called

01:04:52.400 | over time, usually over the first few years, it's invested, and then you don't get liquidity. I mean,

01:04:57.680 | it's not like a mutual fund where you can take your money out. You get liquidity if and when

01:05:02.080 | the fund gets liquidity. And these funds are meant to be long-term illiquid vehicles. So like I said,

01:05:07.520 | 10 years. And typically, you can get two one-year extensions to the funds.

01:05:11.760 | So then the question is, what do you do at year 12 if you still got positions in those funds?

01:05:16.640 | Well, I think a pretty good solution is what I think Sequoia is doing here and what I've heard

01:05:20.880 | other people do, which is if you have a security that's not public yet but is semi-liquid because

01:05:26.560 | it's a very late-stage private company, then what you can do is spin those shares into an SPV or to

01:05:33.520 | some other vehicle. And you let new investors come in and buy those shares at some price,

01:05:40.960 | and then you give the option to your old investors, "Do you want to sell or do you

01:05:45.760 | want to roll into the new vehicle?" So nobody is forced to give up their ownership position,

01:05:50.480 | but if they want to get liquidity and there's sufficient demand on the buy side that you can

01:05:55.440 | get them that liquidity, it's a really elegant solution. I can't say I know exactly all the

01:05:59.760 | details of what Sequoia is doing because they've got this two-tier fund structure that makes it a

01:06:03.600 | little different. But I have seen in other cases, people have distributed shares into an SPV,

01:06:09.120 | and then new buyers come in, participate, and then the old investors get to decide

01:06:14.800 | whether they roll or sell. So it's a pretty good way of handling this 12-year limit.

01:06:20.960 | Just to... Sorry, I didn't clarify this. Valuation is based on the last 409A, so...

01:06:25.440 | That's the one thing about Sequoia that's a little different is, remember,

01:06:28.000 | it's their global mega fund that's buying the shares as opposed to an SPV. Normally,

01:06:33.280 | what would happen in terms of figuring out the price is you'd want to use some sort of

01:06:38.240 | validated secondary price, but obviously, it'd have to be a market-clearing price

01:06:42.720 | where new money wants to come in at that price. And this is a little bit different because it's

01:06:48.160 | their pre-existing fund that's buying at that price. And so how do you sanity check the valuation?

01:06:55.920 | And I guess I would just want to make sure that that valuation is a secondary... Yeah,

01:07:02.960 | it's like the secondary clearing price. That's what it's trading at in secondary

01:07:05.280 | markets, and that's what the 409A is. So I guess that would be the hygiene there,

01:07:08.960 | but it's certainly unique, and I guess great for those LPs.

01:07:12.800 | That's a word for us. Well, I mean, we had a similar thing happen with Uber where they did

01:07:19.360 | the secondary and they had Masayoshi-san come in and do an IPO, essentially.

01:07:26.560 | That's entirely different.

01:07:27.760 | Yeah, you had new money coming in, to your point. So here is the second story related to DPI

01:07:34.080 | and VCs getting cash out. Google's an advanced stocks acquirer whiz for $23 billion, according

01:07:39.360 | to the Wall Street Journal. It's an Israeli-American cybersecurity startup that was founded only in

01:07:43.600 | 2020. Backed by Sequoia Index, Insight, and Treason and others. One of the fastest growing

01:07:49.200 | startups ever, reaching 500 million in ARR in 4.5 years. Google would be paying 46x forward revenue.

01:07:56.800 | They think they'll have a billion in ARR sometime next year. And what are our thoughts on this in

01:08:06.160 | terms of M&A?

01:08:07.440 | You saw it on this AT&T hack of Snowflake. But cloud security is a really big deal. The more

01:08:15.680 | cloud services you have, the more difficult it is to lock these things down. And so whether it's

01:08:21.440 | Google or Amazon or Azure, they each have a really big problem on their hands, which is that if all

01:08:27.840 | these customers are convinced to move these workloads into the cloud, but then you can't

01:08:31.600 | secure it, and you get hacked, that ends the business. So whiz is an incredible testament to,

01:08:37.920 | I guess, engineering prowess. I don't exactly know, to be honest with you, the quality of the

01:08:41.680 | product. Obviously, I don't interact with those kinds of products every day. But the fact that

01:08:45.920 | they're willing to pay such a premium means A, the product is good, but more importantly, B,

01:08:50.640 | in the absence of cloud security, these cloud vendors are going to be constrained in how fast

01:08:58.800 | they can grow. So what an incredible market. What an incredible, incredible market.

01:09:04.320 | I have to say these two things have really helped the climate in the LP community. This past week,

01:09:10.560 | a lot of chatter about IPOs that are getting filed and that we could be ending the drought

01:09:17.760 | and people were feeling very, very pessimistic about venture as a category. And I think these

01:09:24.480 | two things have changed a lot of people's feelings on that. So good work there. And I think it also

01:09:32.480 | signals maybe some regime change expectations, Sax. Yeah, Lena Kahn, maybe getting booted when

01:09:39.440 | this regime change occurs next year, and then maybe more M&A would occur. What's Trump's and

01:09:46.000 | J.D. Vance's position, in your mind, on M&A and Lena Kahn, Sax, if you had to interpret it?

01:09:53.920 | Well, something that's very interesting is that J.D. Vance has been relatively positive

01:09:58.960 | towards Lena Kahn. He's one of Lena Kahn's few Republican fans. And the reason for that is

01:10:06.240 | because Lena Kahn, for all of her faults, and we've described them here, has been willing to

01:10:10.240 | take on big tech. The fact of the matter is that the top handful of tech companies, the Microsofts,

01:10:15.840 | the Googles, Amazon, these are big tech monopolies. There's just no way around that fact. And they do

01:10:22.480 | need to be closely watched and supervised and regulated with respect to their market power.

01:10:28.800 | And I do think they use their market power in inappropriate ways, as we've discussed on this

01:10:32.240 | podcast. I sometimes think that Lena Kahn, in her approach, has been a little bit more of a cleaver

01:10:37.920 | when she needed to use a scalpel. I don't think that she should stop some of these, what I would

01:10:41.760 | call R&D acquisitions, from taking place, where there's no accretion of market share, but rather

01:10:48.880 | starts being bought because they contribute a useful piece of technology. I don't think you

01:10:52.880 | want to shut down that part of the market. Lord knows we don't have enough exits as it is, like

01:10:57.520 | we were just talking about. So I think it would be great if we can kind of massage Lena Kahn's

01:11:03.440 | approach a little bit. But I think that it is a good thing that she's not willing to just roll

01:11:08.240 | over and let the big tech companies do whatever they want. And I think JD Vance appreciates that

01:11:12.480 | about her. So look, I don't think that Lena Kahn is going to be running that agency in a second

01:11:19.520 | Trump administration, but I think there's going to be a... How much of the problem with Republicans,

01:11:23.360 | though, Saks, is the freedom of speech issue and Republicans being banned on the social platforms?

01:11:30.720 | Absolutely. Including it up to Trump. I mean, if that issue wasn't there, I think you would

01:11:35.040 | probably see maybe a different approach, yeah? Well, I think it's a huge issue because the fact

01:11:39.680 | of the matter is you've got these tech monopolies who are using their monopolistic market power

01:11:44.240 | to put their thumb on the scale of our political discourse in favor of one side versus the other.

01:11:50.480 | So obviously if you're on that side of the aisle, you're going to be up in arms about that. You're

01:11:54.880 | not going to be happy about that. And I do think that given their market power, they have an

01:11:59.600 | obligation not to distort our democracy by artificially suppressing one side of the debate.

01:12:06.560 | So I think that, yes, Republicans should be up in arms about that and they should be resisting

01:12:12.000 | censorship. And J.D. Vance specifically mentioned censorship in his speech.

01:12:17.120 | That seems to be his main issue. I think we'll see under Trump a lot more mid-market M&A. If I were

01:12:23.040 | to, let's call it under $100 billion, $100 billion acquisition would be fine with me, under $100.

01:12:29.040 | Well, I really liked the part of his speech where he said that in a healthy democracy,

01:12:33.040 | we debate ideas and that's good. We even have debates in the Republican party and that's good.

01:12:36.480 | The last thing we want to do is censor the marketplace of ideas. Gosh, I mean, are we

01:12:41.440 | going to hear anything like that from the Democrats when they do their convention?

01:12:44.000 | Well, in breaking news, as we wrap up this program, the hot swap summer will continue. Apparently,

01:12:49.520 | Biden is predicted to resign this weekend. We'll see if it happens. Speedrun primary,

01:12:55.200 | Nostradamus is predicting it happens.

01:12:58.240 | Nostracanus.

01:12:58.960 | I'm going to stick with my, Nostracanus, sorry.

01:13:00.400 | Nostracanus, get it straight.

01:13:02.320 | Nostracanus will keep his position. The hot swap is coming.

01:13:05.920 | Well, Jake, at this point, I think you were right about Biden stepping aside. I thought he was out

01:13:12.080 | of the woods. He did that press conference, that NATO press conference, where he did make that one

01:13:17.120 | mistake, that senior moment where he actually-

01:13:19.360 | That Trump was his VP?

01:13:20.480 | Yeah.

01:13:20.980 | Oops.

01:13:22.160 | But that was the kind of thing where he got his name mixed up. But otherwise,

01:13:25.600 | he sort of seems to be finding his footing in terms of talking about policy. And the brush fire

01:13:30.880 | was sort of put out, right? But then for some unknown reason, he goes on and does that Lester

01:13:38.320 | Holt interview. I don't know why they were still letting him do interviews. He should only be

01:13:41.680 | reading from a teleprompter. And he mixes up, he forgets the name of his Secretary of Defense,

01:13:46.880 | Lloyd Austin, and he just refers to him as the black man.

01:13:49.920 | The BET, yeah.

01:13:51.520 | As a BET interview. So he did the Lester Holt interview, which was not good. And then he did

01:13:55.040 | the BET interview, which was a disaster.

01:13:56.160 | Well, the money dried up, right, Chamath? So once the money goes, it's over.

01:13:59.920 | Well, yeah. And he also did a horrible one with 360 with Speedy, Speedy Mormon. And that was

01:14:06.000 | a train wreck. There was a couple moments there that are just total gaffes.

01:14:08.880 | They say Pelosi and Schumer told him it's over. And I guess that means... And Katzenberg.

01:14:16.160 | You're right, Jason. When the big money is gone and they make the call,

01:14:18.640 | it's done.

01:14:21.600 | It's done.

01:14:22.160 | Isn't that amazing what we've learned about the Democratic Party? The coup

01:14:27.120 | de grace was basically Katzenberg going in there saying, "Yeah, I can't raise any money for you."

01:14:30.800 | And then boom, he's out.

01:14:32.960 | I am shocked that any political party would be swayed in any way by political donations.

01:14:38.080 | Enjoy the RNC, Sax.

01:14:40.320 | I love you guys. I got to go to dinner.

01:14:42.960 | Love you guys. Talk to you soon.

01:14:44.080 | For the Chairman Dictator, the Architect David Sax, and your Sultan of Science who

01:14:49.920 | ducked out a little bit early, I am the world's greatest moderator.

01:14:54.560 | We'll see you next time. Bye-bye.

01:14:55.920 | Love you guys. Bye-bye.

01:14:58.800 | We'll let your winners ride.

01:15:00.000 | Rain Man David Sax.

01:15:02.880 | And instead, we open-sourced it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it.

01:15:10.000 | Love you, Wesley.

01:15:10.560 | Ice Queen of Quinoa.

01:15:13.040 | We'll let your winners ride.

01:15:15.040 | We'll let your winners ride.

01:15:17.040 | We'll let your winners ride.

01:15:18.800 | Besties are gone.

01:15:19.840 | That is my dog taking a notice in your driveway, Sax.

01:15:24.000 | Oh, man.

01:15:27.280 | My avatar will meet me at Plains.

01:15:29.200 | We should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy because they're all just useless.

01:15:33.120 | It's like this sexual tension that they just need to release somehow.

01:15:36.000 | What are the beat?

01:15:39.120 | What are the beat?

01:15:40.720 | We need to get merch.

01:15:43.360 | Besties are gone.

01:15:45.360 | [music]

01:15:55.360 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

Trump assassination attempt, Secret Service failure, Inside the RNC, VC liquidity problem

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