You cannot pitch your way onto the All-In podcast. Not in the way you would pitch a business show with a guest form and a booking producer. All-In is four friends talking about the week, and the “besties” format is the product. A guest in the main chair is the exception, and the exceptions have names like Donald Trump, Vivek Ramaswamy, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
That sounds like bad news if you searched for how to get on the All-In podcast. It is better news than it looks. The show has other ways in, and they reward a different kind of effort than a cold email. This piece maps them.
How the All-In Podcast Works
All-In launched on March 19, 2020, in the first weeks of the COVID-19 lockdowns, with episodes recorded remotely. The four hosts have not changed since.
Jason Calacanis is an entrepreneur and angel investor who moderates most episodes. Chamath Palihapitiya is the founder and CEO of Social Capital. David Sacks is a former PayPal executive and general partner at Craft Ventures. David Friedberg is the founder and CEO of The Production Board, a holding company focused on food, agriculture, and life sciences.
Sacks’s role has shifted, and it is the kind of detail that ages fast, so check it before you cite it. He was named the White House AI and crypto czar at the start of President Trump’s second term in 2025. On March 27, 2026, The Hill reported that he had used up the 130 days a special government employee can serve in a 12-month period, and that he was moving to co-chair the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology with Michael Kratsios. If you are reading this months from now, confirm his current title.
The weekly episode runs on a docket: a loose list of the week’s stories in markets, tech, AI, and politics that the four hosts argue through. There is no guest slot in that structure. When someone else joins, the episode is usually billed as “In conversation with” a single guest, and those are rare enough to feel like events.
The audience is large and influential. Wikipedia’s entry on the show, updated in 2026, puts its YouTube following above one million subscribers, and the listener base skews toward founders, investors, and operators. The show also runs side businesses that show how much its brand is worth. In June 2025 it launched The Besties All-In Tequila, a five-year extra añejo with 7,500 numbered bottles at $1,200 each, which sold out within 48 hours according to that same entry.
Why a Cold Pitch Goes Nowhere
Think about the show from the hosts’ side. Four people with full-time jobs running funds and companies record a weekly conversation with each other. They do not need guests to fill time. They do not run a public guest form. Their personal networks already include most of the founders, investors, and officials they would want to talk to.
Look at who got the chair. Presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy sat with the hosts in 2023 for episode 138. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. appeared in an “In conversation with” episode alongside Reid Hoffman. Donald Trump joined for episode 184, released June 20, 2024, and Bloomberg reported the next day that Sacks and Palihapitiya had hosted a Trump fundraiser earlier that month that raised $12 million. Those bookings came through relationships at the very top of politics and business, not through an inbox.
So a pitch from a publicist reading “my client would be a great guest” lands in the least useful place possible. It asks four busy principals to do work for a stranger with no upside to them.
That does not mean your effort is wasted. It means you are aiming at the wrong door. Founders who figure out how to get on the All-In podcast in any form tend to come in sideways: through the live events, through a relationship that leads to a conversation, or by doing something the hosts decide to talk about on their own.
We call this the Side Door Map. It has three doors. The first is the Summit stage. The second is the Interview chair. The third is the Docket. Each has a different price of entry and a different payoff, and most founders have a real shot at only one of them.
Side Door One: The All-In Summit Stage
The All-In Summit is where the show opens its doors wider than anywhere else. The first one ran May 15 to 17, 2022, at the New World Symphony in Miami Beach, with about 700 attendees chosen through an application process. Elon Musk, Bill Gurley, and Flexport’s Ryan Petersen spoke.
From 2023 the summit moved to Los Angeles, at Royce Hall on the UCLA campus. The 2023 edition ran September 10 to 12 with Musk, Ray Dalio, and Brian Armstrong. The 2024 edition ran September 8 to 10 with Musk, Peter Thiel, and JD Vance, and Wikipedia’s entry on the show reports about 1,950 attendees paying $7,500 each. The 2025 summit, held September 7 to 9 in Los Angeles, featured YouTube CEO Neal Mohan, Alibaba chairman Joe Tsai, and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff.
The show also stretched the format. On July 23, 2025, All-In co-hosted a “Winning the AI Race” summit in Washington, D.C., with the Hill and Valley Forum. Trump gave the keynote, and the event was released as a special episode.
Why this is a door: summit sessions get released on the podcast feeds. A speaking slot at the summit is a slot on the All-In channel, with the same audience, framed by the hosts.
Be honest about the bar. The speaker list is chosen from CEOs of global companies, top investors, and senior officials. If you are not in that tier, the stage is not your door this year. But the room still is. Attending puts you in hallway range of the hosts, their portfolio founders, and the investors who listen every week. Several founders treat a summit ticket as a networking budget line rather than a media buy, and that framing is the right one. Check the summit’s official site for current dates, pricing, and the application process, since all three change each year.
Side Doors Two and Three: The Interview Chair and the Docket
The Interview chair is the “In conversation with” episode. It is the closest thing to a traditional guest booking, and it is reserved for people whose names already carry news value: heads of state, presidential candidates, cabinet officials, and founders of the companies the hosts discuss every week. If you can reach that chair, you do not need this article. You need a relationship with one of the four hosts, and the path to that runs through their day jobs. Craft Ventures, Social Capital, The Production Board, and Calacanis’s angel investing each have their own networks of founders, co-investors, and limited partners. Being useful inside one of those networks for a few years is the only reliable route, and it is not a media tactic.
The Docket is the door most founders overlook, and it is the most realistic one for an ambitious company that is not yet famous. Every week the hosts pick stories to argue about. Many are about companies: funding rounds, product launches, earnings, regulatory fights, technical breakthroughs. If your company makes news that fits the show’s obsessions, the hosts can discuss you without you ever being in the room.
Getting on the Docket is earned media in its purest form. The hosts read the same outlets their audience does, and they react to data, contrarian takes, and stories that touch AI, markets, energy, science, or policy. A founder who publishes a striking data set, wins a notable fight with a regulator, or ships something that changes an industry’s cost curve has a real chance of becoming a topic. One who sends a press release about a new hire does not.
The practical work is the same work that gets you into the outlets the hosts read. Build a story with a number in it. Place it with reporters who cover your sector. Make sure the coverage is easy to find when someone searches your name, because the producers and hosts will check. If you need a refresher on the mechanics, our guide on how to distribute a press release covers the distribution side.
There is a second benefit to Docket coverage. When four well-known investors discuss your company on a major show, that transcript becomes a source AI assistants can cite when someone asks about your space. We cover how that works in AI search and podcast content.
What to Do This Quarter if You Still Want In
If you came here asking how to get on the All-In podcast, start by placing yourself on the Side Door Map. If you lead a company whose name already makes headlines, your door is the Interview chair, and your work is relationship building with the hosts’ firms. If you are a senior executive at a large company, your door is the Summit stage, and your work is getting your name in front of the people who program it. If you are everyone else, which is most founders reading this, your door is the Docket, and your work is making news worth arguing about.
Then build toward that door instead of the main entrance. For the Docket, that means one strong, data-backed story per quarter, placed with credible outlets, and kept consistent across your site and profiles. For the Summit, it means attending, meeting people, and becoming known in the room before you ask for anything. For the Interview chair, it means time and usefulness, measured in years.
Do not pay anyone who promises a guaranteed All-In booking. The show does not sell guest slots the way some business podcasts do, and no outside agency controls who gets the chair. Treat any such promise as a red flag.
Finally, keep a parallel track. While you build toward All-In, appear on smaller shows that do take guests. Each appearance sharpens your story and creates proof that the people around the hosts can find. If you want a home base for that work, our guide to creating a thought leadership podcast shows how founders turn their own show into a steady source of credibility.
The founders who end up mentioned on All-In rarely set out to get on the All-In podcast. They set out to do something the hosts could not ignore. So here is the question worth sitting with before you send a single pitch: if Chamath, Jason, Sacks, and Friedberg spent four minutes on your company next week, what would they be arguing about?