Exclusive preview: David Sacks Part II

The Callin Saga

Putting out another one of these, since I can’t seem to stop going off on tangents in my writing. This is an excerpt from my profile of David Sacks, covering Sacks use of his new social media platform to promote his message. I think this by itself is longer than the first part at this point. I would also like to acknowledge that a lot of the work on this topic in particular was done by Jacob Silverman for The New Republic, who wrote an excellent article about Sacks as a political actor entity, and how he used his new platform to advance his agenda.

The following is how David Sacks made in roads to the ‘post-left’, and got a roster of several prominent journalists under his thumb using cold, hard cash.

On September 2nd, 2021, Callin launched on the Apple app store. Funded by Sacks’ own VC firm, Craft Ventures, it was one of many new tech companies created in a pandemic/post-pandemic tornado of low interest rate cash. The idea behind this was essentially to create a platform for independent podcasters to start their shows with as little overhead as possible. It could be done from one’s phone or laptop, broadcasted live, and the episode would be published on the app afterwards. It’s a pretty novel idea, similar to other platforms like Clubhouse or Twitter’s new Spaces, but with a particular focus on podcasting as opposed to the more communal feel of its competitors [45]. You may have noticed that the name is one letter off from Sacks’ own podcast, All-In, which was the inspiration for the platform itself. “It was my own experience with the All-In Podcast that gave me the idea for Callin”, Sacks said in May of 2023. Podcasts were experiencing growth as a medium since the start of the pandemic, and a startup that lets hobbyists break into the industry more easily is a solid idea. But Callin had another purpose, a more personal one. It was Sacks’ way to control political discourse with more than just money or using someone else’s platform. Finally, after so many years, he was the one pulling the strings. 

David Sacks had different ways to pull these strings, some more obvious than others. When launching in early September of 2021, Sacks was focused on two things: Callin and the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. You might have expected Newsom to reappear as a topic of discussion on the new platform, but Sacks was cutting his losses at this point. Like any good empire builder, David Sacks saw opportunity in Afghanistan. The ongoing American withdrawal was the subject of the first Callin podcast episode, which was posted August 22nd… on YouTube [46]. 

The show was an hour long conversation between Sacks and journalist Glenn Greenwald about the withdrawal, moving on to the topic of propaganda and the media’s role in it. Throughout the episode, Sacks and Greenwald share talking points in a manner that doesn’t cut too deep, but rather covers a broad range of subjects to catch the audience up. Both Sacks and Greenwald share their skepticism of American involvement in the first place. The whole discussion manages to straddle the line between socially conscious anti-interventionism and libertarian pragmatism. I don’t think there was anything inherently malicious about this first demonstration of what Callin was. No positions are being forced and the two speakers are observers of events outside their control. I will note that there is a part where Greenwald says that the media has turned on Biden because they like the war, after which he notes that the media is in favor of liberal politicians and especially social liberalism. Still, diagnosing anything Glenn Greenwald says as having a definitive agenda is extremely difficult, and I’d rather not do more armchair psychology than I have to.

If you don’t see what Sacks’ strategy is, it’s probably because that’s the point, if you do see what his strategy is, it’s probably because you’re already aware of either Sacks’ or Greenwald’s political convictions. For the uninitiated, it might seem strange, David Sacks was trained to be a political pundit in the waning years of George. H. W. Bush administration. He even interned for Christopher Cox, a Reagan White House official that was recently elected to Congress. Glenn Greenwald was known for being an outspoken critic of both Republicans and Democrats who made those criticisms from the left of even the Democrats. So why is the billionaire, David Sacks, promoting someone known to be critical of people like him? 

Instead of approaching politics head on with his libertarian conservative beliefs like he did against Newsom, Sacks began to cultivate a network of contrarian outsiders to attack his opponents in the liberal media. The traditional conservative approach of poaching a mediocre racist stand up comedian to shove into the machinery of talk radio and Fox News could have worked, but Sacks had a different idea. The Callin line up would have a line up of anti establishment and left wing pundits sharing their opinions on the platform. Even if these pundits theoretically disagreed with Sacks on most other things, it never seemed to bother him. Nor should it have, because David Sacks had the ultimate trump card to stop these pundits from getting out of line, he was paying their bills.