“Let’s wait until after the election to run this.”
That was a New York Times editor, burying a story about riots in Kenosha. He was afraid the report could hurt Joe Biden.
It’s bias like that which led Bari Weiss to leave the Times and start her own site, The Free Press.
In a frank conversation at the All-In Summit, Weiss explains how the media became left-wing advocates and what she’s doing to get back to facts.
Mainstream Media Is Preaching to the Choir
Mainstream media used to make its money from advertising. Big advertisers like Procter & Gamble spent a fortune on ads. Even more poured in from the classifieds.
Today, advertising has moved online. The classifieds are dead, replaced by Craigslist.
This cost the media a fortune in revenue.
Papers like the Times and The Washington Post found a new model: charge readers. Both have major subscription businesses.
But when you rely on subscriptions, you have an incentive to tell readers what they want to hear. And for papers like the Times, the readers want to hear a left-wing message.
If you run anything that challenges that worldview, people will cancel their subscriptions.
It’s a viable economic model. But it’s not a viable model for finding facts.
Building a New Type of News Organization
Weiss left the Times in 2020. In 2022, she launched The Free Press.
Weiss’s goal with The Free Press is to report facts. Not opinions, not political talking points.
I think there’s a huge appetite for this. And sure enough, The Free Press has grown substantially, employing 50 people today.
However, Weiss is subject to the same incentives as big media orgs like the Times. Much of The Free Press’s revenue comes from subscriptions.
Its coverage tends to question left-wing ideas like giving sex changes to children. If Weiss reported a story that could be seen as favorable to the far left, subscribers might flee.
For now, The Free Press seems pretty straight down the middle. I hope it can stay that way.
How Sacks Read the News
Sacks shares Weiss’s concerns about media bias. And he offers a nice little trick to figure out who to listen to.
Sacks looks at how well a journalist predicts the future. If they do it well, he pays more attention to them. If they don’t, he unfollows them.
I love this approach!
Too often, we accord respect to any talking head. I often wonder, do these people actually know any more than I do?
Here’s how I find facts: stick to wire services and financial publications.
Wire services like AP aren’t supported by subscribers. And financial publications like Bloomberg or The Wall Street Journal have a stronger incentive than most to get facts straight. Their readers need accurate information on which to trade!
Wrap-Up
I’m glad that someone from inside the media is speaking out. A lot of what I see is blatantly biased to the left.
I stopped reading the Times years ago. And NPR, I’m tellin’ ya, you’re on thin ice.
I hope that journalists start more media organizations like The Free Press. A lot of Americans want the facts, no matter what the Times may think.
“Most people come because they have lost someone.”
That’s Waymo Co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana. At the All-In Summit, she explains how her company created its incredible autonomous driving system and where they’re headed next.
The Most Exciting Tech in the World Today
Don’t get me wrong, I love Elon’s rockets. But I’m not going to ride in a rocket any time soon.
So for me, self-driving cars are the coolest tech around today. I can’t wait to ride in a Waymo!
One of Mawakana’s goals is to open up mobility for people who can’t drive. This is something my mom and I have dreamed of since I was a kid.
My mom was born blind in one eye, which makes driving impossible. For a long time, we relied on buses and the one rotten cab company in the small town where I grew up.
The arrival of Uber and Instacart changed my mom’s life. But a self-driving car would be even better!
In time, she’ll be able to buy a car equipped with Waymo’s self-driving tech. The company eventually plans to offer its technology in any car you like.
This means coming and going as she pleases, like anyone else. And I can finally get the self-driving, matte black Cybertruck of my dreams!
But Is It Safe?
The big barrier to autonomous driving is safety. Can we trust a computer with our lives?
So far, Waymo has driven about 2 million miles without a single fatality. But that’s not enough to prove it’s safer than a human driver.
There are around 1.33 traffic fatalities for every 100 million miles driven overall. So, Waymo will need to do several orders of magnitude more rides before we know for sure it’s safe.
However, people who have ridden in Waymo’s say the autonomous driver is incredible. It’s unfailingly safe and defensive.
This is a lot more than I can say for some of the Ubers I’ve taken!
Why Waymo Can Win
Waymo offers a chance to end traffic deaths. For many Waymo employees, it’s a way to prevent what happened to their family from happening to someone else.
These are highly talented engineers. They could be at Facebook, Apple, wherever.
But those companies don’t share Waymo’s mission.
With employees that motivated, Waymo can win the self-driving race. Indeed, they’re the only company doing 100% autonomous rides on public roads, 24/7.
If Waymo does as well as I think it will, it could be a trillion dollar, standalone company.
Wrap-Up
Growing up with a mom who can’t drive, I’ve been a pedestrian all my life. I’ve been hit by an SUV and had countless close calls, including one just this Sunday.
Human drivers are horrible. They’re distracted, aggressive and drunk.
I hope that in the future, no human drives a car. I’ll take my chances with the robots any day.
At $242 billion, Salesforce is one of the largest software companies on earth. Founder Marc Benioff is betting its future on a single product.
That product is called Agentforce. In a conversation with David Sacks at the All-In Summit, Benioff explains why this new AI tool is the greatest opportunity in his career.
Making AI Reliable
Benioff boasts that Agentforce is 90-95% reliable. He’s purged most hallucinations from the model, a task that has eluded other AI companies.
Kaiser Permanente is using Agentforce to schedule patient appointments and analyze medical records. So far, the results have been encouraging.
If Kaiser can use AI successfully, any organization can.
Kaiser is a huge enterprise chock full of the most sensitive data on earth. Leadership can be a little conservative, with good reason.
I actually did some work for Kaiser in the mid 2000’s when I was at Epic, the medical software company. The folks who worked at Kaiser were kind and dedicated.
I’m very happy to see them master this new technology. It just might be the efficiency boost healthcare has needed for decades.
How Agentforce Works
Agentforce doesn’t just push queries to OpenAI. Salesforce has created its own models and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) techniques to produce more accurate outputs.
Agentforce doesn’t just answer questions. It does tasks like writing documents and handling e-commerce returns.
Chatbots to replace Google are great — I use Perplexity all the time. But AI tools that can actually do my tasks for me will have a way bigger impact.
Yesterday, I researched some startups and booked a trip home for Christmas. In time, AI may do those tasks for me, letting me just sign off on the results.
Wrap-Up
For 20 years, much of SaaS has been glorified spreadsheets. With Agentforce, Benioff is building something truly different.
This is software that takes the boring parts of our jobs and automates them. We keep the creative and interesting pieces — silicon does the rest.
We spend half our waking hours at work. AI can make that time more efficient, making us richer. It can also make it a lot more fun.
I can’t wait to see what Benioff cooks up next!
How do you think AI will affect SaaS?
“This is the greatest opportunity in the history of enterprise software…”
That’s Jeffrey Sachs at the All-In Summit. In a fascinating panel, he and John Mearsheimer break down the war in Ukraine, the rise of China and why the United States can’t seem to stay out of war.
The Deep State Uniparty
“There’s one deep state party…”
Jeffrey Sachs
The Iraq War defined my youth. After freshman year, my college roommate went to fight. I stayed home.
Thankfully, he came back okay.
The left criticized Bush for getting us into war. But they were right there with him, voting to authorize the war by huge margins.
Both parties agree on war because of the “deep state,” according to Sachs and Mearsheimer.
When a president wins election, a group of wise men take him aside. They explain how the world “really works.”
And time after time, the president caves.
Trump may be the one man who can change that. For all his faults, he questions the Washington war consensus.
I only hope he has a chance to crush the deep state once and for all.
Risking World War III in Ukraine
“My view is a little bit of prudence could save the whole planet.”
Jeffrey Sachs
As I write this, American weapons are being used to invade Russia. Bit by bit, we keep escalating this conflict.
We don’t know where Russia’s red line is. But once we cross it, it may be too late.
We are risking a nuclear war that could destroy human civilization completely.
Biden justifies this war by saying that Russia is a threat to all of Europe, and to the United States.
But as Mearsheimer and Sachs point out, Russia is a weak country. They have thousands of nukes, but not much else.
Russia has barely been able to take a sliver of Ukraine after 2.5 years. Meanwhile, it’s losing its own territory to the Ukrainians!
If we pull out of Ukraine, America won’t be under threat. In fact, we’ll be safer because Russia will no longer feel the need to resort to nukes.
The China Threat
“The South China sea is a very dangerous place. We could wind up in a war for sure.”
John Mearsheimer
When we look to Asia, we usually expect a war over Taiwan. But Mearsheimer says that a war in the South China Sea is far more likely.
China’s navy routinely harasses ships from the Philippines and other nearby countries. China claims sovereignty over almost the entire sea, right up to the coastlines of several other countries.
I don’t think it’s worth going to war over the Philippines. However, we may be able to use our navy to promote freedom of navigation in the area without getting into a full-scale conflict.
Meanwhile, China’s provocations are turning the rest of Asia against China. This plays right into our hands.
Wrap-Up
I loved hearing Mearsheimer and Sachs’s perspective. They’re not idealists talking about “spreading democracy.” They see the world for what it is, and try to find ways for America to prosper in it.
We prosper when we defend our territory and live in peace. That’s the future I want to see.
What do you think of relations with Russia and China?
“I keep thinking that AI in 2023, 2024 is like the internet in 1999.”
That’s Peter Thiel at the All-In Summit. In a frank conversation with the besties, Thiel digs into the election, our confrontation with China, and the future of AI.
The Election
Silicon Valley has shifted rightward in recent years. Thiel was well ahead of the curve, backing Trump in 2016. And as usual, he has a contrarian take.
Despite media predictions, Thiel thinks the election will not be close. He points out that most presidential elections break decisively one way or another.
Nate Silver is predicting a decisive win as well. He has Trump up by double digits in his forecast.
Time will tell who’s right.
The Showdown with China
Whoever wins the election will face China’s Xi Jinping.
China has held more and more drills near Taiwan since the spring. Thiel thinks that China will eventually try to take Taiwan.
If it does, Thiel is against the US joining the war.
Such a conflict could spiral into World War III. Thiel thinks a war over Taiwan just isn’t worth it, and I agree.
What we need most from Taiwan is advanced chips. But we can learn to make them ourselves. In fact, we’re already beginning to do so.
The Future of AI
Playing with ChatGPT in the fall of 2022 reminded me of using the first search engines in the mid 90’s. Thiel’s analogy with the early internet is spot on.
Despite all AI can do, Thiel doesn’t think it will cause widespread unemployment. After all, the Industrial Revolution didn’t put humans out of work.
Thiel is right on the money here.
Human creativity is limitless. We will create new jobs we cannot imagine today.
When I was a kid, there were no yoga instructors, spinning coaches, or Tik Tokers. Today, countless people are making their living in those fields.
Human innovation is not going to stop.
The Higher Education Bubble
If the jobs of the future will be a lot different from today, how should young people prepare?
Thiel is skeptical of college. In 2011, he started the Thiel Fellowship, a program that gives $100,000 to talented kids to skip college.
Thiel notes that student debt has spiraled out of control, reaching nearly $2 trillion. The median 2009 graduate actually had more debt 12 years later, held back by a weak job market and high interest rates.
I think college is worthwhile, especially if you’re not sure what you want to do. But avoid student debt!
Get scholarships and consider state school. Major in STEM.
When it comes to the job market, a Comp Sci major with a 3.9 from Rutgers will beat a theater major from Brown any day.
Wrap-Up
Thiel has a way of predicting the future. And although his delivery is restrained, he actually paints a very bright future for the United States.
He sees us decoupling from China and reaping massive benefits from AI. The future America will stand atop the technological heap, proud and alone.
“That’s when they went in for the kill. I just couldn’t hang. Bottom line, I just couldn’t hang.”
That’s Travis Kalanick at the All-In Summit. Right after his mother’s death, his investors pushed him out of the company he built from nothing. In this talk, Travis tells us how he came back.
Losing the Company He Loved
It was right before Christmas. Travis’ mother had just died. And he was about to lose everything he’d built.
For months, Uber’s investors had been trying to push Travis out.
They complained that he had created a “toxic culture,” whatever that means. The media piled on — anything for clicks, right?
For a long time, Travis resisted. But having just lost his dear mother, he just couldn’t fight anymore.
He stepped aside. The Uber board replaced him with Dara Khosrowshahi, the former CEO of Expedia.
Don’t Call It a Comeback
Travis wasn’t out of the game for long. He invested in an obscure company called City Storage Systems.
Shortly thereafter, he took over as CEO. That company is now known as Cloud Kitchens.
Travis’ vision for it might be even crazier than Uber. He wants to make delivered restaurant food cost competitive with cooking at home.
“If that happens, you do to the kitchen what Uber did to the car.”
To get there, Cloud Kitchens is using robots to handle almost all the food prep. In time, Travis wants to get the ingredients and deliver the meals using autonomous vehicles, cutting costs further.
I never do food delivery. It’s slow, cold when it arrives, and incredibly expensive.
But if Travis can get me a beautiful pasta meal for the same cost as cooking, delivered fast and hot by a robot, I’m in! If he succeeds, this could be even bigger than Uber.
A Role Model for Investors
If it weren’t for his investors, Travis might still be at Uber. It’s incredible — a man does this much for you, and you push him aside at the worst moment in his life?
When business operates this way, it’s disgusting and I want nothing to do with it. I’d rather hang it up and lay on a beach.
But you don’t have to be that kind of investor. Jason Calacanis, who interviewed Travis at the Summit, stuck by him.
When Travis got choked up talking about his mother’s death, Jason put a hand on his knee to comfort him. You can tell that Jason got teared up too.
For JCal, this is clearly a lot more than dollars and cents. That’s the kind of investor I want to be.
Wrap-Up
“Would you consider doing what Steve Jobs did and coming back and merging Cloud Kitchens with Uber?”
Jason couldn’t help but ask. And while Travis didn’t answer him directly, he didn’t rule it out.
If Travis came back, Uber would be a trillion dollar company and Jason would be a billionaire. As a fan of technology, I’d love to see it.
Travis shows the resilience it takes to be one of the great entrepreneurs of a generation. I only hope that some day, I can find my Travis.
“As a computer scientist, I’ve never seen anything as exciting as all of the AI progress the last few years.”
That’s Google founder Sergey Brin at the All-In Summit. In a candid talk with David Friedberg, Brin gave his insights on the future of AI and where the company he founded is headed.
Coming Out of Retirement
It takes a lot to bring a man worth $121 billion out of retirement. But last year, after four years away from Google, Brin came back.
It reminds me of the action movies where the hero comes back “for one last job.” And in this case, it could be the biggest job of Brin’s career.
What brought Brin back was the massive opportunity in AI. I agree with Brin that this is the biggest thing I’ve seen since the internet.
All week, I’ve been meeting with AI companies currently in YC. The stuff they’re doing is nuts — finding minerals 10x faster, controlling robots without code, and a lot more.
We will be taking diamonds out of this mine for the rest of our careers. And like Brin, I’m really excited to be a part of it.
The Future of Google
The potential of AI is limitless. But will Google be one of the winners?
Brin and Friedberg tell an interesting story that shows what has gone wrong at Google.
Engineers had built a tool to write code with AI. But they were afraid to push it to production, worried it would make mistakes.
Brin told them to take it live. This is one of those moments where founder authority is all-important.
Google leads in countless technologies. They invented transformers, the technology behind LLM’s.
But they did nothing with it.
If Google can drop this conservatism, it could still be an incredible growth business. It’s Google Cloud AI service has more inbound than they can handle. Alpha fold is widely used by biologists to model protein folding, which is critical for developing new drugs.
They’ve got the tech. Now they just have to get out of their own way!
Wrap-Up
Brin’s talk really got my juices flowing this morning.
Here’s a man who’s seen everything and done everything. He’s at the pinnacle of success.
And he’s back in the office grinding it out. Not for money, but for the love of this incredible technology.
“Increasingly, Republicans are the party of working and middle class people.”
That’s J.D. Vance at the All-In Summit this week. Vance laid out a compelling vision of less regulation and greater prosperity.
Cutting Regulations to Benefit Average Americans
“…we’ve massively overregulated the real world.”
Vance points out that America innovates in software, but almost nowhere else.
That innovation benefits places like New York and SF. But it doesn’t do much for his constituents in Ohio, or for most Americans.
Vance traces that lack of innovation in the real world to regulation.
Software is new, so regulation is minimal. But in the older industries where most Americans make their living, regulation is crippling.
The way regulation leaves Silicon Valley alone and cripples Middle America is a point I’ve never heard anyone else make. It’s quite insightful.
Imagine if we could get construction, manufacturing and medicine to move at the speed of a Silicon Valley tech startup. Our economy would grow like never before.
Becoming a Trump Supporter
J.D. Vance was once a “Never Trump” guy. Now he’s Trump’s running mate.
What’s changed?
Over time, Vance realized that most of what the media says about Trump is untrue. Meanwhile, America performed better under Trump that it has in decades. We were at peace and the economy was strong.
I can definitely relate to Vance’s evolution. I campaigned for Hillary in 2016 and voted for Biden in 2020.
This year, I’m supporting Trump.
The Biden-Harris administration’s record is one of failure, inflation and war. Meanwhile, the more I listen to Trump, the more I realize the media has mischaracterized him.
I imagine the views of many other Americans are shifting as well.
Restoring Order on the Border
Vance wants to seal the border. He also wants to deport illegals who are already here, starting with violent criminals.
That’s hard to argue with. If we don’t have law and order, what do we have?
Vance and Trump are tough on illegal immigration. But they’re for high skilled immigrants coming here legally. As a former VC, Vance understands the importance of getting the smartest people here now.
This is the right policy for America. We need basic law and order, and we also need talent.
Where I Disagree with Vance
Host Jason Calacanis repeatedly asked Vance if he would’ve certified the electors in 2021, as Pence did. Vance’s answer was oblique — he said he would’ve asked the states to submit alternative slates of electors.
In essence, this means that Vance would not have certified the election. I disagree with Vance here.
We don’t have good evidence that the 2020 election was fraudulent. So, Pence was right to certify the results.
I want to see Trump win fair and square. Let’s can the tricky electoral tactics.
Wrap-Up
Vance did a good job of answering difficult questions clearly. He’s obviously an intelligent man, and he overcame very long odds to be sitting on that stage.
When Americans look at Vance, they’ll see their dreams: a poor kid who made it.
Vance also has a wonderful vision for the nation. Lower regulations, higher growth, and a secure border is a plan I can get behind.
“The price of freedom of speech isn’t cheap, is it?” “I think it’s like $44 billion, something like that.”
That’s Elon yesterday at the All-In Summit.
In a live appearance, Elon and the besties dug into the future of robotics, how Elon wants to transform government, and more.
A Robot In Every Home
“I think the number of robots will vastly exceed the number of humans.”
To me, the most fascinating part of Elon’s talk was when he dug into robotics. Elon plans to offer the Optimus android for $10-20,000 within the next 5-6 years.
An affordable android would truly transform the world.
In Elon’s vision, every human would have one. Many more would work in factories and on Mars.
With AI driving its brain, the robot would be able to do anything we can do. The economy could grow infinitely since the supply of labor would be infinite.
Let’s assume we get our in-home robot. We could have it doing housework during the day then working the night shift at a factory. After all, it never gets tired!
Its factory wages could pay for the robot lease. Voila, free robot!
I love the Elon image in the leather jacket and gold chain at his new Department of Government Efficiency (D.O.G.E.). But D.O.G.E. isn’t just a meme — Elon could use this agency to transform government.
“If Trump wins…we do have an opportunity to do kind of a once in a lifetime deregulation and reduction in the size of government.”
Elon might be the only person better than Trump at firing people. He took out 75% of Twitter and the site actually got better!
Overregulation is one of the most critical problems of our time. It’s the reason we can’t even build housing, much less high speed rail.
The accumulation of regulations over time mean that eventually, everything becomes illegal. We cannot remain #1 in the world that way.
Getting rid of regulations will let the economy rip. And once the regs are gone, we won’t need the bureaucrats that used to enforce them.
Elon is the best man in America for this job. I just hope he gets it.
The Government Spending Crisis
“The government is the DMV at scale…how much do you want to scale it?”
Scale it we have. The federal government spent $6.13 trillion last year.
Much of that spending is funded by borrowing at increasing interest rates. We’re adding a trillion dollars to the debt every 90 days.
There’s some line where when we exceed it, we spark a financial crisis. That crisis will make 2008 look like a tea party.
We don’t know where that line is. And we darned sure don’t want to find out.
Cutting spending under a Trump administration would help us edge away from the brink. Less government spending will also allow that money to go into the private sector, which is far more efficient.
Wrap-Up
I loved Elon’s talk at the Summit. He presents an ambitious vision for technology and for America.
I look forward to seeing him at his desk at the D.O.G.E., staring down the bureaucrats.
What did you think of Elon’s talk?
“I think we will have a golden age in this country.”
Tremendous 