Behind the scenes at the ALL-IN AI SUMMIT w/ POTUS, JD Vance, Jensen Huang, Lisa Su, and more… | E2156

Today's show: Jason's back and filling us in on his experiences in Washington DC, at the All-In AI Summit, including getting a Trump shoutout from stage, debating immigration with VP Vance, and calling out Sec. Wright for dismissing solar power. THEN Jason and Alex talk about the immense promise of open-source robotics and check out Hugging Face's Reachy…PLUS picking apart the White House's new AI-related executive orders, why Jason is afraid of China repeating its Huawei success, a free exchange about tariffs vs. free trade, AND a pressing query from a founder on Reddit: how bad is it to add AI to your product too early? Timestamps: (0:00) INTRO, Alex updates Jason about all this week's TWiST 500 interviews (03:33) Inside Jason's experiences at this week's All In AI Summit with POTUS! (05:33) Jason's back and forth on solar power with US Energy Sec. Chris Wright (09:56) Inbound - Use code TWIST10 for 10% off your General Admission ticket at [https://www.inbound.com/register](https://www.inbound.com/register.) (Valid thru 7/31) (11:02) Promo end (16:54) Jason asks AMD CEO Lisa Su about reaching "superintelligence" and whether it could trigger an unemployment crisis (19:51) Bolt - Don't be left behind. Build apps quickly without knowing how to code with Bolt.new. Try it free at https://www.bolt.new/twist. (20:44) Promo end (23:42) Jason says… any time you have to wait days or weeks for a service or product, there's a MASSIVE opportunity. (26:16) What do Trump's new AI executive orders actually say? (27:27) Which EO's are red meat for Trump's base, and which ones are likely to become laws and have real impact? (29:50) Public - Take your investing to the next level with Public. Build a multi-asset portfolio and earn 4.1% APY on your cash—with no fees or minimums. Start now at https://public.com/twist. (31:05) Promo end (35:17) How Huawei went worldwide and why Jason doesn't want that to happen again with AI. (38:32) Jason and Alex have a little tariff vs. free trade debate. (47:03) VP Vance complained about US tech companies laying off Americans, then hiring immigrants; Jason gives his take (53:35) Jason answers a Reddit question: Is adding AI to your product too early a TRAP? Check out the TWIST500: https://www.twist500.com Subscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp Thank you to our partners: (09:56) Inbound - Use code TWIST10 for 10% off your General Admission ticket at [https://www.inbound.com/register](https://www.inbound.com/register.) (Valid thru 7/31) (19:51) Bolt - Don't be left behind. Build apps quickly without knowing how to code with Bolt.new. Try it free at https://www.bolt.new/twist. (29:50) Public - Take your investing to the next level with Public. Build a multi-asset portfolio and earn 4.1% APY on your cash—with no fees or minimums. Start now at https://public.com/twist. *Disclaimer:All investing involves the risk of loss, including loss of principal. Brokerage services for US-listed, registered securities, options and bonds in a self-directed account are offered by Public Investing, Inc., member FINRA & SIPC. Public Investing offers a High-Yield Cash Account where funds from this account are automatically deposited into partner banks where they earn interest and are eligible for FDIC insurance; Public Investing is not a bank. Cryptocurrency trading services are offered by Bakkt Crypto Solutions, LLC (NMLS ID 1890144), which is licensed to engage in virtual currency business activity by the NYSDFS. Cryptocurrency is highly speculative, involves a high degree of risk, and has the potential for loss of the entire amount of an investment. Cryptocurrency holdings are not protected by the FDIC or SIPC. Alpha is an experimental AI tool powered by GPT-4. Its output may be inaccurate and is not investment advice. Public makes no guarantees about its accuracy or reliability—verify independently before use. Rate as of 7/18/25. APY is variable and subject to change.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Jason Calacanis?

  Here's the thing about H1B visas versus American college graduates. H1B visa are going to get paid 30, 40% less. And because you have, they essentially become indentured servants. If they don't find a new job within 30 days of being laid off, they're kicked out of the country with their family. It's incredibly cruel and unnecessary. They should have at least six months to find a new job. A minimum, minimum. Like ridiculous. So the people I know who are abusing the H1B visa system and other systems like this, I have heard people explicitly in my career say, we're going to get these people because we can work them harder and they don't have any recourse.

• 0:44Jason Calacanis?

  To call them indentured servitude or slaves may be a little bit hyper, it's obviously hyperbolic, but they are less empowered workers.

• 0:55Jason Calacanis?

  And I would say significantly cheaper and less empowered. So JD makes a good point.

• 1:03Speaker 01

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• 1:47Speaker 01

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• 2:00Jason Calacanis?

  All right, everybody. Welcome back to This Week in Startups. Alex Wilhelm, Jason Calacanis here on the ones and the twos. I just got back from DC after being in New York. We're supposed to have a little vacation, see my family, and then my friends decided 10 days ago during the middle of my New York vacation to see the family that the president needed to do a summit with All In, and we had to actually make some big announcements. So we'll start with that, I think, talk about those executive orders, I'll give you some behind the scenes, of course, and then there's a ton to talk about. And we've got a lot of great founder questions and stories to process because, hey, I haven't been here for two days or for two shows. You did six excellent interviews.

• 2:45Jason Calacanis?

  Which was the highlight of the interviews?

• 2:47Speaker 01

  I think extropic. Now, Jason, you're familiar with the Twitter account Based Jeff, Based Jeff Bezos, whatever that guy. He's the founder. So we had him on and we got to talk about thermodynamic computing, future of AI chips and power. It was just one of those interviews in which I didn't know much about the deep science, but I got to learn a lot. So it was just an absolute treat.

• 3:09Jason Calacanis?

  We're trying to make these 20-minute interviews not like to take up a ton of your time, but you need to know about these companies and get the update. They're also very busy. So three 20-minute interviews, and we want to get into the business models and looking at these through the business lens. You know, companies can spin what they're doing, their mission, all that. I want brass tacks included in these. They can give this spiel about their mission and... All right, let's get to work here. I think, I don't know if you got to catch all the announcements, but it was a pretty exciting day. Many of you may have seen, the president gave a talk. He went massively off script. It was a very interesting surreal moment to be in the first row.

• 3:53Jason Calacanis?

  First time I've met the president, took a picture with him, got to see J.D. Vance onstage. We did a little round two on our immigration debate. He loves to debate, so that was awesome. We went a little off script, you know, going into the immigration stuff was tangentially involved with it. But he wanted to have a freewheeling. He decided at the last minute, he just is a fan of All In. So he wanted to come and just, you know, chew the fat with the team. And that was a lot of fun. Had a little debate about energy, which got a little spicy, which was great. Spicy moments can kind of give you the roadmap to what's important. For folks who are wondering, like, All In is not endorsing Trump. All In is a podcast with four members. Each person has a different opinion. I would say three of the four people are very much in the Trump camp and

• 4:37Jason Calacanis?

  super big supporters. And then you have one moderate moderator, me, who, you know, as I've said many times, I think whoever wins, I want to root for them. And I will give my exact percentage of agreement with this administration every week. If you all want it right now, I'm about 80% in agreement with them. Which until the Democrats or an independent puts up a better product that I can agree with half of what they're saying. Hey, I got no choice but to support this administration. And what they're doing with AI and crypto is a lot more than the last administration, which wouldn't even meet with us. So important note for the Democrats, you might want to meet with the business leaders in the world and at least give them a seat at the table. And this was an unprecedented seat at the table, I will say that.

• 5:21Jason Calacanis?

  Lisa from AMD showed up. And we also had Jensen from Nvidia. I mean, this was big guns came out and it was quite surreal. Where do you want to start? I'm sure you have questions for me.

• 5:33Speaker 01

  All right. So we are going to watch a video here. This is with the Energy Secretary Wright with Jason debating solar power intermittency and kind of the future of the grid. Let's take a listen.

• 5:44Speaker 02

  And just a crazy love affair with intermittent unreliable energy sources.

• 5:50Jason Calacanis?

  You're talking about solar. Why are you so down on solar? This is the cheapest thing you can install. Batteries are here and they're being produced at an incredible rate. Why are we so anti-solar? Well, why are you so anti-solar?

• 6:02Speaker 02

  Oh, I'm not anti-solar.

• 6:03Jason Calacanis?

  Well, why do you keep saying then that like this unreliable solar? If you put batteries on it, it's totally reliable.

• 6:09Speaker 02

  If you take all the batteries in the United States, you could store five minutes of power. Five minutes.

• 6:14Jason Calacanis?

  Of the entire country, but if we've had many days in California and in Texas where solar's been the majority of it. So why are you so down on solar?

• 6:22Speaker 02

  It can be the majority on a sunny day in the summertime.

• 6:25Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 6:25Speaker 02

  That's not what matters. You, in PJM where we are right now, at peak demand this year, 97% of electricity, wind, solar, and batteries delivered 3%. That's when it matters. If you're 20% on average...

• 6:40Jason Calacanis?

  Wait, you're cherry picking DC?

• 6:42Speaker 01

  All right. So, this is so interesting to me because it feels like you're making a very obvious point, which is during the daytime, there's sun.

• 6:51Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 6:52Speaker 01

  We can collect that power. We can put it into a thing called a battery.

• 6:54Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 6:54Speaker 01

  And then we can use it later on.

• 6:56Jason Calacanis?

  Yep.

• 6:58Speaker 01

  This is basic stuff. And the response from this guy is, well, currently it doesn't power DC, therefore? That's just, that to me is not...

• 7:05Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I think in fairness to him, he was probably expecting no pushback. Uh, and that maybe he would just be able to give, you know, a standard spiel. Um, but you know, I'm paying attention and I wasn't trying to be super adversarial here. Uh, but he wasn't expecting the pushback. You know, I'm not saying my job at all is to give pushback, but the spirit of the podcast is free dialogue, unconstrained. We're gonna mix it up. And so whenever I hear somebody like with a little too much spin, and I felt like if you're gonna give solar this big dig, without actually saying why? I need to know why. The audience is wondering why. So we had to get into it. He says later, he circled back around later, as you may have seen, and said, "I just want to let everybody know, I'm not anti-solar.

• 7:50Jason Calacanis?

  Um, these guys are just, I think, very pro, uh, fossil fuels." And so we probably had too much emphasis and too much, um, of the government, for many people's taste, spending money massively on solar and wind, and not doing enough drilling. And now we're kind of got the other group in office. They're gonna be like trying to get more gas out of the ground, et cetera, and... It's all of the above. Let's call it what it is. We need all of it. If you're going to look for this from first principles, solar is the best solution for the short and the midterm. Nuclear and eventually, you know, fusion is the like

• 8:33Jason Calacanis?

  the 10 year, five, 10 years from now, we might have more nuclear online. For now, you do need nat gas for sure, and you do need a lot more solar and solar, you can just lay solar panels on the ground. And when you need more power, you lay more on the ground and you don't need to put them on roofs in a, as long as you're not in a populous city where there's no space, it is the best solution. It's obviously the best solution. If you look at the cost to install coal, even and clean coal is, I think, a significant premium on top of coal or to do nat gas, those new plants are much more expensive than solar.

• 9:13Speaker 01

  And worse for the environment.

• 9:14Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. You know, if you bring up environment, I think you have to bring up two different pieces because it is a trigger. Some people don't believe in global warming. So if we just take the global warming debate out of it, right? Let's say for argument's sake that there was this grand conspiracy and global warming is a non-issue and it was a, the just, it was, the whole thing was made up. Okay. Now, I certainly think it's been exaggerated. I don't think it's made up, you know, like you can see the global warming, but we can have that debate. But if you put the debate on the side, nobody wants to live next to a coal plant. That's not good for your lungs, your kids. Nobody wants to rip the environment apart. Of course not. But we do want to compete with China and other places.

• 9:58Jason Calacanis?

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• 10:39Jason Calacanis?

  like Victor Riparbeli of Synthesia, HubSpot founder Dharmesh Shah, my favorite guy, and many others, we're going to see you there. Inbound 2025, it's all happening, September 3rd to 5th, in my old stomping ground where I am right now, San Francisco. Use the promo code TWIST10 at checkout for 10% off your GA ticket at inbound.com/register. Inbound.com/register. And so pollution is the better way to say it. So if you just say pollution, forget about the word environment triggering for people. On a pollution basis, you, nobody, 100% of people, don't want to pollute. So that's, I think, the way to frame this. There's pollution and there's global warming. I just say, take global warming off the table.

• 11:21Jason Calacanis?

  We're going to solve it with technology and we're well on our way. And the people who have to solve it frankly is not the United States because we have great standards, whether it's Democrats, Republican standards, or somewhere in between the two. It's India and China. That's the, no matter what we do in the United States, it'll have zero impact on this long term if China and India don't get their stuff together. And they, they're going big time solar in China and big time nuclear. So they have already got the memo. So this was, I think, just a little bit of a political statement from him. I think this administration is anti renewables. Generally speaking, they don't want to give them subsidies. Okay, fine. Don't give them subsidies.

• 12:02Jason Calacanis?

  Solar still wins. Now, wind, you do have a pretty good case for, wind is not actually very efficient. It's very expensive. You have to maintain these things. It does kill birds. It is a eyesore. Nobody wants to live next to a wind farm. I get it. Yeah, you do.

• 12:17Speaker 01

  I do. Yeah. Hell, yeah. I think wind turbines are gorgeous.

• 12:20Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, really?

• 12:20Speaker 01

  I think they're fantastic. Yeah.

• 12:21Jason Calacanis?

  Aesthetically, if I'm driving over like the rolling hills of Northern California, I don't want to see a bunch of windmills. I don't mind it in the desert, I suppose. Yeah, I don't think they're good looking. But just cost wise, everything comes down to dollar and cents. Solar's already one. It's a meaningless debate. But I'm glad we had it because it kept people very entertained during a very boring panel. Let's be honest. Energy can be very boring. A lot of people came up to me and said, hey, thanks. Thanks for, you know, making that interesting and speaking up about that. And you know what? It builds their credibility. So whenever the administration faces some good fastballs,

• 12:54Jason Calacanis?

  Which, you know, I think I'm uniquely qualified to do. I have my background in journalism and also I'm not part of either party. I'm a moderate. I'm an independent. I'm not a Democrat. I'm not a Republican. I am a full on independent moderate. So.

• 13:08Speaker 01

  So a couple of notes about this. One, if you go back to May 13th, 2025 to Twist, episode 2125, we had the CEO of TerraBase on TerraBase is a company that's helping people do mass solar installs. And if memory serves Jason, they built a onsite robotic factory to actually finish the construction of these panels. So you can do even faster, even cheaper updates to them. So that's one thing. So cool companies are out there are working on this now. And just on the count of, you know, people that want to drill more, the market is talking right now. The market is saying that what we are not going to do is keep drilling at the pace we have been. This is a chart from Y charts, and it shows just the number of oil rigs that are currently active. And as you can see, it peaked in 23. And then this is not a regulatory point because this is 2025 starting here and it's been dropping pretty quickly.

• 13:58Speaker 01

  So I think.

• 13:59Jason Calacanis?

  I wonder what the driver of that is. Is it? I guess it's just the economics. If you have, if oil goes down below $60 a barrel, it's not worth activating certain mines or certain plots because or rigs, because it's just more expensive to clean it, et cetera. That's where like the oil sands come in in Canada, Canada, just too expensive.

• 14:19Speaker 01

  Oil sands is very expensive and the direct opposite of that is what Saudi Arabia has had, which I believe is light sweet crude. That essentially if you stuck a straw in the ground, it just came shooting out. So it wasn't hard to produce, as they say. Anyways, all this is a that I think you're dead right about solar. And I thought that was a funny clip. And I was like, why are we arguing with the past? This is a thing about the future.

• 14:38Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, you know, it's, we live in contentious times and I look at how it's all framed and what is the truth? You know, I think as a person listening to this podcast, we're all in. Just go to ChatGPT, go to Grok, go to Gemini and just say, what is the cost of a solar installation? And what you'll see is solar installs now are so much cheaper than coal to install a new plant, that even the retrofitting of an existing coal plant is more expensive. And you can ask Producer Claude, and he'll tell you, she'll tell you, they'll tell you. Producer Claude, they will tell you, they'll tell you.

• 15:14Speaker 01

  Assign a gender, they're gonna call us and be like, what's that?

• 15:18Jason Calacanis?

  No, it's them, it's they. Producer Claude is a they. And they will tell you very clearly that, you know, unless you're right on top of the gasoline, you know, right on top of the nat gas, much better to just install solar. There is, you know, a challenge with who makes the solar panels, and that's China. So there is a little geopolitics sprinkled in here, I think. Sometimes you gotta tease this out. There could be many things at work. There could be lobbyists who want more natural gas. There could be people who want to stop the subsidies. Okay, they feel like the left went too far. But, end of the day, we have

• 15:58Jason Calacanis?

  a ton of oil, but we need more demand, and we're gonna need all sources. The biggest win, and I'll say, listen, you could give Trump the Nobel Peace Prize, or whatever prize you want to give him. I told some of the folks who I met in the agencies when I was there, and some people working on nuclear, I said, if you guys stand up a nuclear reactor before he's out of office, or within a couple of years, or, you know, he wants to do dozens. I was talking to Lutnik, who spoke at the event, and I was talking to him offline, he said they're going all in on nuclear, they want to get dozens. So if they do that, I gotta tell you, that makes them heroes to me. Because if we can get more nuclear on, oh my lord, that's gonna be amazing for the abundance of this country in the AI race. Okay, moving on.

• 16:43Speaker 01

  Hard agree with that. You did mention two CEOs that dropped by, Jason, both Jensen and Lisa. Do you wanna take a look at those clips real quick?

• 16:51Jason Calacanis?

  Sure, yeah, queue us up, whatever you got.

• 16:53Speaker 01

  All right, so we are going to hear from Lisa Su. She is the leader over at AMD. And then we're going to talk about the potential for AGI. Jason, this clip is about one minute, and let's give it a listen.

• 17:08Jason Calacanis?

  The best case scenario for this technology and this trajectory on, which is accelerating, and you're enabling, what could the world look like in 10 years? We, let's say, it's pretty obvious we're hitting artificial general intelligence at this moment. I think we'd all agree, we're starting to see that. But superintelligence can't be far behind that. I assume you agree with that. Soon we hit that superintelligence, what would the world look like in 10 years? In the most optimistic scenario, if we do this right?

• 17:35Speaker 03

  Well, I think the exciting part about it, and you know, I can say this very sincerely. I mean, this is the most transformational technology sort of in our lifetimes. I mean, that's the way we should think about it. Orders of magnitude. Orders of magnitude. And the reason is, it's not just going after one aspect, right? You can actually take AI and make science better. You can take AI and make medicine better. You could take AI and make manufacturing better. You can take AI and make every aspect of your business better. And so, you know, in my mind, 10 years from now, we'd like to believe that we are really leveraging it to solve some of the world's most important problems. I like to say, like, you know, AMDers get up in the morning and they say, you know,

• 18:18Speaker 03

  how can I use technology to solve some of the most important challenges in the world? And, you know, AI is really our mechanism for doing that. I have a business strategy question. If we went back 20 years and we were...

• 18:31Speaker 01

  Okay, so I think that's very optimistic, because she's drawing a very wide picture, Jason, of where AI could impact.

• 18:37Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, you know, this is the natural tension of any discussion with AI. We're in the industry, I think, we have a bias in the industry towards having seen almost every technology make the world better. On the margins, you know, how people use technology is up to them. So we are now at the lowest unemployment of our lifetime.

• 18:58Jason Calacanis?

  While people have become more efficient. So in my 50 years on the planet, 54, unemployment's at the lowest. And I, I remember every discussion about, oh, my God, job displacement, job displacement. Microsoft Office, the internet, bike messengers were going away. FedEx was going away. The mailroom was going away. Operators on the phone. You know, every career you could imagine was going away. Yet here we are with the most unbelievable, robust employment of our lifetimes. I know that's unpopular for people to recognize that. So then we're left with the discussion. You know, is there going to be job displacement? That came up a bunch of times.

• 19:42Jason Calacanis?

  I do think everybody agrees there'll be displacement. And I don't think anybody, you know, knows if it's going to be comparable or not.

• 19:52Jason Calacanis?

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• 20:36Jason Calacanis?

  Try Bolt new for free at Bolt dot new slash twist. That's right. Bolt dot new slash twist.

• 20:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, I want to just underscore your point, Jason, because I think this is actually a useful thing for people to see kind of in chart form. So if you're on the audio version, what I have here is a historical unemployment chart from the United States, tracking the unemployment rate over time. And if you're looking at the video version, the shaded areas are recessions. And so if you take a look at this, Jason, here is the, um, the 90s and the first internet boom and personal computing. Unemployment went down and then we here have the

• 21:11Jason Calacanis?

  Cold War.

• 21:11Speaker 01

  Post Great Financial Crisis.

• 21:13Jason Calacanis?

  Great Financial Crisis.

• 21:13Speaker 01

  Following. This unemployment spike was the pandemic to your point. And now we're back down to 3.635. But it doesn't matter what era of the country's economic change you look at. We get back down to 3, 4% unemployment. And the only thing that really spikes it is a recession. So I think you're correct in saying that, yeah.

• 21:32Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 21:32Speaker 01

  All this time, we have seen consistently a return to full employment. It would be a change in historical patterns to actually end up with mass unemployment from AI. So I'm long-term bullish, short-term scared.

• 21:44Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I mean, if you look at self-driving and you look at humanoid robots in factories. I gave a statistic and people ask me, where'd you get that statistic from? And I said, well, I did it in my head. For every robotaxi on the road, which will work 20, 22 hours a day.

• 22:06Jason Calacanis?

  That's basically two shifts, isn't it? Two eight-hour shifts, maybe two and a half shifts. In New York City, the taxi drivers rent taxis for 12 hours. That's why they're so exhausted and on the margins. Sometimes they're a little cantankerous. You can give them some grace and empathy. A 12-hour shift in a New York City taxi in traffic. I mean, come on, give these people a break. It's a hard, hard job. But if we think of like a basic 10-hour shift, there's two shifts there. That means there's seven shifts a week. That's 14 shifts. It's basically three jobs, three full-time jobs, right? 15 shifts, five shifts, eight, 10 hours each. Okay. Each robotaxi takes three full-time drivers' jobs. Now, most people drive halftime for Uber or Lyft.

• 22:49Jason Calacanis?

  So it's taking six-gig economy jobs, three full-time equivalents. Now you go to a factory, you can't work somebody 12 hours in a factory. It's just too much. It's eight hours, maybe they get seven hours out of them, you know, with breaks or whatever. So now you're talking about three shifts of hard labor times seven is 21. It's really four jobs. So humanoid robots will take four jobs when they hit scale. And they're like in an Amazon facility, sorting packages or delivering them. Self-driving car, let's put it at three. So maybe it's like, you know. It's gonna happen fast, folks. I think it'll be slowly then fast. And if that is the case, you're gonna see millions of factory workers, drivers,

• 23:34Jason Calacanis?

  and maybe some painful chore jobs come on the market. Those people will be able to be deployed into other jobs very easily, I believe. Construction, we need more homes. Education, we need more teachers. Healthcare, we need more nurses, doctors, orderlies, EMTs, you know, just pick anybody at a hospital. Anywhere, I had this epiphany, Alex, during the programming. Anywhere you have a wait time in weeks, days to weeks, is an incredible opportunity. So just think that through. When's the last time you had to wait two weeks, three weeks for an appointment?

• 24:17Jason Calacanis?

  When's the last time it took two or three days to get through to somebody? Healthcare, education, construction, renovating your home, you know, pick one of those categories. That means there's demand. You try to get a plumber to redo your hot water heater, you know, they might say, "Check with me in two weeks. I might be able to fit you in in August, end of August," right? That's where all those jobs are gonna emerge. And those, by the way, super high-paying jobs, super well-paying jobs. So how quickly can somebody learn to put up drywall if they were working in a sorting facility? If they're driving an Uber or a taxi, how long before they could work as a nurse or an orderly in a hospital? I mean, I don't think these are terribly different jobs.

• 25:02Jason Calacanis?

  I think they're well within people's capabilities, so then it just becomes reeducation and training. All right. And so at the AI summit, we also had, I think, three things got passed. Maybe we can just get into, before we wrap up here, we can get into the details of what the administration's proposing. Some of it I agree with, some of it I'm unsure of, and some of it I definitely don't agree with. So I can get into all of those points. And by the way, I had no idea what the platform would be. I mean, I know David's positions, David Sacks or AI cryptos are. I know some of his positions on this because we've debated them before, like training data, states' rights, training data, woke AI.

• 25:44Jason Calacanis?

  And yeah, so maybe we'll get into an executive order, by the way, you know, presidents give these things all the time, then they have to somehow go become law. And so I was talking to somebody who's on the inside of all this and they were like, by the way, it's like, that's the starter's pistol. That's like somebody doing a spec and saying like, okay, now you guys have to do a ton of work. So some of these executive orders never materialize into law or into a policy. This one is going to. This is, I think, signature legislation. So let's get into it.

• 26:16Speaker 01

  All right. So there were three executive orders that came out, Jason. In the order from our notes, the first one is preventing woke AI in the federal government. I gave this a read and it essentially sets rules for AI models procured by the federal government to not include or not focus on certain things. Just keep in mind, this is not saying that you can't make an AI model to your own spec. It's just that if you're selling to the federal government, these are the policies that they are going to put into place. This is the one that I was most curious about how they were going to phrase it. And just to cite the actual text a little bit here, in the, one of the most pervasive and destructive of these ideologies is so-called diversity, equity, inclusion, DEI. In the AI context,

• 26:59Speaker 01

  DEI includes the suppression or distortion of factual information about race or sex, manipulation of racial or sexual representation in model outputs. And this is the part that really threw me. Incorporation of concepts like critical race theory, transgenderism, unconscious bias, intersectionality, and systemic racism. And to me, incorporation is a weird word to turn on. So I'm curious if you can elucidate what they're trying to say here.

• 27:27Jason Calacanis?

  I don't know. I didn't talk to them about this. I think this is the least important part of all this. I think this is just red meat for the base. Let's call it what it is. When, you know, politicians get elected, they have a base, right? And the base helps them get the nomination. We all know the horseshoe theory, two extremes, woke lunatics on one side, MAGA lunatics on the other, socialist communists on one side, we're going to have breadlines and we're going to have, you know, whatever Mam Donnie is talking about with like supermarkets. Like, that's an example of feeding the base. When he goes into office, you always move to the middle, right? And the middle is like, uh, maybe we can create more housing supply.

• 28:11Jason Calacanis?

  Maybe we can make it more affordable to take the subway, right? There are things you can do that are easier to execute. So I see like, whenever they do the ICE raids in Los Angeles, that's performative. It's not productive. This is another example of, I think, performative as opposed to productive. I don't think any of the folks who are in, who are building these models are saying, "How do I sneak in, you know, gender, identity, politics? And by the way, you can prompt them." So I could put a prompt into any of these large language models, say, "My politics are X, Y, and Z."

• 28:54Jason Calacanis?

  You can just put all that, your crazy ideology, whatever you like. "I think that Mexican food is better than Japanese food." It's not. It's not.

• 29:02Speaker 01

  True. No, it absolutely is.

• 29:03Jason Calacanis?

  No. See? And here we go. So that's your, you could put in your model that I think the seven, the same five ingredients mixed 20 different ways is an incredible cuisine? And I can say, "You know what? I want toro. I want incredibly refined uni and vive la difference." So a person could tell their AI to do this. You could tell it to be woke, you could tell it to be anti-woke. So it's kind of all meaningless. So let's put that one on the side. I think it's performative, it's for the MAGA base, it's like the ICE raids at Home Depot, it's performative, and it's, you know, not like the real thing, which is closing the border and having and not letting criminals into the country. Everybody agrees on that?

• 29:48Jason Calacanis?

  What else is in there that we should discuss?

• 29:53Jason Calacanis?

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• 31:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, so the next one is, quote, "Accelerating federal permitting of data center infrastructure." This is kind of meat and potatoes. Three things that I think really matter, Jason. There's work inside of this to ease regulations. The quote here is that the EPA shall, quote, "assist in expediting permitting on federal and non-federal lands by developing and modifying regulations, promulgated under the Clean Air Act, the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act, and the Toxic Substances Control Act." Then they also want to make federal land available for construction, essentially opening up public land for data center build-outs. And then there's also, and this surprised me, the potential for subsidy from the public purse. So the text reads that the Secretary of Commerce, who you were speaking to,

• 31:49Speaker 01

  "shall, quote, 'provide financial support for qualifying projects, which could include loans and loan guarantees, grants, tax incentives, and offtake agreements.'" So essentially, we're going to cut the red tape. We're going to let you use federal land, and we may even subsidize it.

• 32:02Jason Calacanis?

  Great. Let me think that through. Is there any, if we believe, if you believe AI is a race and America needs to win it, then using some federal land and subsidizing it is what China is already doing. So this is all us versus China, let's be honest. China is pulling out all the stops. If you want to build like next to this hydro dam, they will block, you know, the equivalent of what's the most important river in the United States, like.

• 32:36Speaker 01

  The Colorado, sorry.

• 32:38Jason Calacanis?

  They would literally, in China, block the Colorado River and be like, sorry, we need to win AI and put all that power into a giant data center that ran across the most important wetlands for any creature. So we're not going to do that here, but easing up the regulations is probably a good idea. Devil's in the details. And I think probably a decent amount of what's hidden in there that's important is AI data centers in the short term are going to use natural gas. There's no way around it. There's just not enough time to get solar batteries, nuclear and other sources on, and they have to be off grid. You're going to have to bring your own power.

• 33:21Jason Calacanis?

  You're going to have to move your data center to where the power is. And so that seems to me to be wise. And I do think we have to win this race. I do think there'll be many winners and so, and I don't think there should be any, by the way, I'll just say one final thing on that. I don't think you should give grants to anybody. Everything should be in the form of a loan. It should be a senior debt device. The taxpayers get paid back before anybody else, plus they get warrants. So whatever amount of money you take from the government, 10% of that amount should be given to you in warrants. So if we have a billion dollars to OpenAI or Google to build a data center, they should pay market rate or some percentage of market rate for the loan. It could be half market rate, it could be 1%. Who cares?

• 34:06Jason Calacanis?

  The interest isn't the thing. They should give, if it was a billion dollars, they should give 20%, 200 million in options. How's this for a framework? Then if OpenAI goes from 350 billion valuation to 3 trillion, which it probably will or could.

• 34:23Jason Calacanis?

  Then we would 10x that 200, we would get 2 billion back, plus the original billion plus some interest. That means it would be profitable for the American taxpayer.

• 34:34Speaker 01

  I just, I get a little heebie jeebie about using public funds to support these companies. Cause I feel like, putting aside all the worries about government intervention in the market and all that, I just don't want to cement the current winners as the governmentally selected long-term winners. Because if there's a company that's going to come next year and builds me that blows OpenAI out of the water, I don't want OpenAI to be able to lean on the fact that the government gave them cheap land, regulatory credits and whatever to build out their data centers and then use that to quash other competitors.

• 35:05Jason Calacanis?

  Sure. And so that's where the details come in. It's a great punch up. Again, executive orders are the starting pistol. It's not even the RFP. So here we go. I think we're in alignment. Let's keep going.

• 35:17Speaker 01

  All right. The next one is the promoting the export of the American AI technology stack. What this does is quote, "Build an American AI exports program." And this is a package of things like AI hardware, AI models that you can sell as a unit to countries around the world that we are friendly with. There is a little bit of public money here as well. The EO says that the Economic Diplomacy Action Group, didn't know we had one, quote, "Shall coordinate mobilization of federal financing tools in support of priority AI export packages." So essentially if, I don't know, Ukraine wants to buy the American AI stack, we might subsidize that by offering a loan in some capacity. That's more of an import-export action. So I'm a little bit less worried about use of public funds there.

• 36:01Speaker 01

  But to me, this makes pretty good sense, Jason. Let's create a unit we can sell out to other countries. Cause not everyone's going to have, you know, the kingdom's budget.

• 36:09Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, this all comes back to Huawei. If you look at Huawei, which is a company that builds like 5G infrastructure, infrastructure telecom.

• 36:20Jason Calacanis?

  They are a Chinese brand. They went around the world and they were really cheap. And countries, you know, China, UAE, Africa, Latin America, and even in Europe, a lot of countries use Huawei's 5G. This is a significant issue because the Chinese are, don't have everybody's best interest at heart. And you can be sure, every piece of Huawei equipment has a backdoor for the Chinese government. So if you are Germany, Italy, Spain, like, and you're using this stuff for your infrastructure, well, you are basically saying, please spy on us. And if you don't, then you're naive. So I think America, this is the equivalent

• 37:05Jason Calacanis?

  that could happen with AI. We don't want to see all of Europe using Huawei chips, Huawei AI models, because then all of that power would accrue to the Chinese Communist Party, not United States. So that's really what we're talking about here. And it starts in China. If China has an incentive to make, you know, chips that compete with Nvidia and AMD, and we don't let them on those, and we don't let them have access to this technology, they will. So we want our platforms to win, but we don't want to give them the latest and greatest. And as Howard Lutnick said, you know, part of this like, negotiation that they're doing is like, oh, well, give us your top hypersonic missiles, China. China's

• 37:49Jason Calacanis?

  like, are you crazy? Like, we're not giving you our best hypersonic. Oh, just sell us like 10 of them so we can deconstruct them, you know?

• 37:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. And every time China wants to open a business in the US, they should have to form a JV entity and only own up to 49% of it and commit to technology transfer. Oh, they don't want to do that?

• 38:03Jason Calacanis?

  Exactly. So I mean, just reciprocity is what we're looking for here. It's a no brainer. I've had this conversation 100 times here and on All In. The tariff concepts that the Trump put out there to begin with were shock and awe. And right now, the ones that are being executed on by Lutnick. And Besse and the whole crew over there are boring and mundane and effective and in America's best interest. So.

• 38:32Speaker 01

  You're a tariff guy now?

• 38:34Jason Calacanis?

  No, I'm a reciprocity. I've always been a reciprocity guy. I'm not like we should do.

• 38:38Speaker 01

  Oh, are you referring to China in particular or the overall package of tariffs around the world?

• 38:41Jason Calacanis?

  Pick the top 10 countries that we trade with. They equal 99% of the issue. It's a major power law here. It's a big Pareto principle. We just have to work it out with the top trade imbalance folks. And even Trump during his speech, he conceded that. He's like, I don't know if we need to do with many more of these. Like, I don't know if the 108th country, which I don't know the name of and I've never heard of, we need to have a trade agreement with. So again, how Trump does business, just boom, explosive, crazy. Everybody covers it. And then, you know, whatever, 72 hours later, it doesn't seem as crazy. And then six months later, the people who are executing it

• 39:20Jason Calacanis?

  are going to execute it in a very mundane, realistic fashion, which is reciprocity. That's where we found out. So again, you you may not like the style, but at the end of the day reciprocity.

• 39:33Speaker 01

  No, no, I don't agree with that.

• 39:35Jason Calacanis?

  You don't agree with reciprocity?

• 39:37Speaker 01

  No, I'm a Chicago School of Economics guy. I'm a free trader.

• 39:40Jason Calacanis?

  Okay. I mean, if you, so you think they should be able to put 100% tax on cars going into Japan or China and Korea? And then we allow their cars here with no strings attached?

• 39:51Speaker 01

  If they want to have a less effective trade policy than free trade, sure, they're willing to, they're able to hurt themselves. But if you want to think about why you might want to agree with me here is that Millet down in Argentina had made very compelling arguments before he was elected president, discussing why protective tariffs for domestic industries lead to more poverty in your nation. So no, I'm going to stick to the current Silicon Valley favorite outside of the United States, Millet, and state my free trade principles.

• 40:17Jason Calacanis?

  Okay. Yeah, I just, if they're going to put this huge tax on cars coming in to China, Japan and Korea, I think they should face, whatever they give us, just we'll do the same thing, you know? And that's why if you look at Japan, or you've been to Korea, or even China, like, there's nobody buying American cars, except once in a while you'll see it. I saw like three Teslas in Japan. You know, this is years ago. And it was just rich people who paid, I don't know, what is, what was the current tariff on American cars in Japan? 50%?

• 40:49Speaker 01

  It's very high, yes.

• 40:51Jason Calacanis?

  I think it might be 50. So just. How do you ever compete because you've got to ship the car there too? There's like that cost and there's like the, you know, maintenance of the car. So who buys when I was in Singapore? Like who buys American cars there? Somebody was showing me their Jeep and their, and I was like, oh, you have a Jeep? And I said, yeah, you know, it cost me like $150,000 to have this tricked out Jeep Wrangler. I'm like, a Jeep Wrangler is like a $50,000 car in the United States. Tricked out 70,000. So there you have it. Okay. Anything else in there? I think the only thing I can remember is the content in the training one. Yeah.

• 41:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's exactly where I was going. Um, this was not in one of the EOs, but it was in Trump's speech. And, uh, we don't spend a lot of time on this, Jason. We've talked about it a lot on the show, but a couple of quotes from the Trump riff on this. Quote, "You can't be expected to have a successful AI program when every single article, book, or anything else that you've read or studied, you're supposed to pay for." Skipping ahead a little bit, um, "When a person reads a book or an article, you've gained knowledge. That does not mean you're violating copyright laws and have to make deals with every content provider. China doesn't do that." And I really kind of, I don't think Trump actually has a viewpoint on this. I think this is what his speechwriters have put together for him. And so this to me is, uh, one industry setting the rules for everybody here.

• 42:07Jason Calacanis?

  So let's break down the statement, right? Let's break down the statement nice and slow. So first he said, "When a human being reads a book," right? Uh, they don't, they're not breaking copyright if they learn from it. Okay, that's true. And China doesn't respect IP. Also true. What's not true is what's not said in there. What AI is doing is taking somebody's book and then making it so nobody ever has to buy it again and that they can make money from it. That's what's left out of it and that, and that they didn't have permission. And when OpenAI was stolen by DeepSeek, Sam Altman was not happy.

• 42:49Jason Calacanis?

  And you can be sure anybody who has their IP stolen, if you were Google and your algorithms were stolen, you might not be too happy about it and you might file a lawsuit. So. Uh, we need to look at this issue and say, this is something new. So how do you solve something that's new? Very simple. You come up with a new, uh, plan. And the new plan that I put out is super simple. If you want to explicitly use somebody's content, make a deal with them. And then you can have it be an exclusive deal or not. And you can very easily have somebody authenticate their New York Times subscription when you log into any of the, uh, any of the different language models, right?

• 43:32Jason Calacanis?

  You already, they already asked you to log in with Google. And they already asked you to log in with Google so you can search your Gmail. So why can't I log in with my New York Times or my Disney Plus account? And then it says, okay, you have a Disney Plus account? Now you can make Jedis. Now you can do generative art, right? And so we all agree on the output. So that's good. I always look for where we have consensus. We all agree on the output. You don't get to make Disney characters if you're not Disney. You don't get to leverage, you don't get to take my entire book or this podcast and republish it. Okay, so then what could you do? You could talk about what we talked about on the show. Uh, but I don't think you can make a super clip of it or use the entire archive.

• 44:14Jason Calacanis?

  So, but if somebody said, hey, this week in startups is gonna get paid. Uh, they have a subscription program. It's a subscription podcast. Great, pay for it. I pay for Financial Times, I pay for The Economist. Yep. I would love to be able to go to The Economist and have The Economist say, login with Grok, login with ChatGPT, login with Claude. Can you imagine if I could login with my Claude account to those services? And then use Claude against the FT and E? Then that's really actually where this will wind up. And the people who do that in a reasonable way will have an advantage against the people stealing. That means it's an opportunity. It's a business opportunity for everybody.

• 44:55Jason Calacanis?

  That means the Financial Times and The Economist, Disney can invest more in content and get more out of it. And so that, and that's where we'll wind up. Another option is, what I asked to have him on, what's CloudFlare? Is not letting you crawl? I don't know if you saw this story.

• 45:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, Paper Crawl is the new CloudFlare.

• 45:17Jason Calacanis?

  Is his new concept. And he came out and said he's against what Trump is proposing with the administration, I should say, we should just say the administration, because this is a full effort. The administration's position, he disagrees with. And he's going to block crawlers. And he's going to have them pay. And the crawl is going to be in there as well. And these two ideas, what's the guy's name? Prince? Is it Matthew Prince?

• 45:39Speaker 01

  Matthew Prince.

• 45:40Jason Calacanis?

  Matthew Prince's idea can stand alongside mine. Which is, you could have your website. I could take the This Week in Startups website. You could take cautious optimism, you could put on there. You can crawl this. It's a dollar a page. Every time you come, it's a dollar a page. That's it. And they might say, well, we're not crawling under a dollar. But if it's somebody with a $200 account, paying $2,400, they could say, yeah, we'll crawl up to X amount. And now you've got a royalty system. So I call bullshit on 100% that this is not technologically possible. It is 100% technologically possible. And is it possible to unravel it and beat China? No.

• 46:22Jason Calacanis?

  So since that's also true, that you can unravel it, and that you have to beat China, then that means we all have to work together, not run over each other.

• 46:31Speaker 01

  Let's move on to how to sell your company. Or, Jason, as I like to put it, how not to sell your company. Do you recall the Windsurf, OpenAI fiasco that turned into the Google buying part of Windsurf and leaving the Ashes behind?

• 46:44Jason Calacanis?

  We should do the one thing. Was the, JD and I, JD and I talked about immigration. I don't know what's worth covering here. Was there any piece of it that was worth covering? About it, oh, we did get into Microsoft. Let me just, I'll just tee it up. I don't know if you have that there, the Microsoft discussion.

• 47:03Speaker 01

  I don't have that clip.

• 47:04Jason Calacanis?

  So there was a moment where I was talking to JD about like, hey, let's put the border aside. We all agree on that. We're never going to agree about dragging 20-year immigrants out of the country that were let in here under Bush or Clinton. Like, I'm going to hold the line on that. They should be given a path to citizenship. Sorry, we brought them in here. We had a bunch of joking. But the one where we had like an interesting debate was, well, what about recruiting talent here? And JD made a very good point. Hey, I was, I got wind of like, this company laying off thousands of people, like 9,000 people. And I was like, oh, that's Microsoft he's talking about. And then they're also filing for a bunch of like, high skilled immigration visas? What's going on here? I need to look into

• 47:48Jason Calacanis?

  it. So he, he didn't say he had it all wrapped up. Of course, Microsoft's layoffs were across a number of countries. It wasn't just America. It wasn't just high skilled. It was salespeople, right? Product managers. So it's not necessarily high skilled, but he does make a great point. And it goes back to the static team size or doing more with less. If you're laying people off, do you really have the ability to then lobby for high skilled immigration? I do think that's a valid point, even though I believe in recruiting the most high skilled people here. What did you think of that moment? I don't know if you saw it or not.

• 48:22Speaker 01

  I think the important thing to keep in mind, because I've seen people make that point, both online and of course, at the AI summit. I think these are not one-to-one replacements for the people that were laid off. These are often an H1B being re-upped for another term. So it's not like Microsoft is out there being like, we're going to fire 9,000 people and bring in 9,000 other people that we can pay less. But I do think this conversation is becoming toxic enough for Microsoft's brand that Satya Nadella, the CEO, had to yesterday put out a memo entitled, "Recommitting to Our Why, What, and How." And in this, he discusses this exact thing. So I think they're getting beat up pretty badly in the media, in political circles for being so.

• 49:01Speaker 01

  What would we call it? They're just shedding people as they make record amounts of money.

• 49:07Jason Calacanis?

  And here's the interesting quote. You see some Silicon Valley technology firms, especially the big firms, this is JD, say that they're desperate for workers, they can't find workers, that they have to use overseas visa programs to find workers, and yet at the same time, the college-educated employment rate for STEM graduates in this country seems to be declining. Oh, wait a second. If you're not hiring American workers coming out of colleges for these jobs, then how can you say you have a massive shortage in these jobs? And by the way, you see some of these tech companies where they'll lay off 9,000 workers and then they'll apply for a bunch of overseas visas. It doesn't make sense to me. That displaces, that displaces it, and that math worries me a bit. He makes a good point here, and I wonder, and I kind of know from being an insider

• 49:46Jason Calacanis?

  for so long, here's the thing about H1B visas versus American college graduates. H1B visa are going to get paid 30, 40% less. And because you have, they essentially become indentured servants. If they don't find a new job within 30 days of being laid off, they're kicked out of the country with their family. It's incredibly cruel and unnecessary. They should have at least six months to find a new job. A minimum. Minimum. Like, it's ridiculous. So, the people I know who are abusing the H1B visa system and other systems like this, I have heard people explicitly in my career say, "We're going

• 50:27Jason Calacanis?

  to get these people because we can work them harder and they don't have any recourse." You know, to call them indentured servitude or slaves may be a little bit, it's obviously hyperbolic, but they are less empowered workers. And I would say significantly cheaper and less empowered. So, JD makes a good point.

• 50:53Speaker 01

  I would say that there was a, there was an interesting interview on a show called All In, back before the election. And one of the hosts, I forget who it was, asked the then presidential candidate, what should we do about high school immigration? And I think the thing was, I'm going to staple a green card to everyone's diploma. That is my, my vision. Yeah, now, I know that that has not yet manifested in current policy, but I think that you're right. I think it's, everyone that I've talked to who hires people, or who has been an H1B worker, because I have a lot of friends that have had those visas, confirms what you say. So what's the solution? Well, take away the stick that companies hold over these people's heads, and give them more ability to come here, work at a fair market rate and stay. Because I think we should have every frickin' smart person in the world here. And that's, that's my policy.

• 51:38Speaker 01

  So I think JD here makes what I would call a classic JD point of not actually saying we shouldn't have H1B visas, not actually saying Microsoft is bad, but appearing like a populist that won't actually do anything once in office. Because he's currently the vice president, baby. Do something, if you don't like this.

• 51:55Jason Calacanis?

  You know, the vice president is, as we've seen, it's hard to, you're not the show, but we'll see. I think he's gonna be, I think he'll be president. You have influence.

• 52:06Speaker 01

  You had him on, you had him out for a reason. You didn't invite a nobody onstage.

• 52:10Jason Calacanis?

  I'm sure he wanted to come. I think he asked to come, if I, if I understand correctly. I think he's like, hey, you guys are in town, can I come on and we'll talk, you know, and continue the discussion? I think, but I wasn't involved in the invite.

• 52:22Speaker 01

  I just, I don't like it when the, the problems and inequities in the H1B visa program become a cudgel to, to argue that we should restrict high school immigration in general to this nation.

• 52:32Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 52:32Speaker 01

  Because I think we should not. That's, but again, my personal politics, yours, everyone listening may be, may be different.

• 52:37Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I mean, probably 90, 80% or 90% of the country agree on immigration. We just don't talk about it in buckets. If you said, "We're going to bring 25,000 high school people here a year who start companies, and if they don't start a company and create 10 jobs, then within two years, they lose their visa, their golden visa, and it had that condition on it," you'd be like, "Okay, sounds reasonable." And if I said, "Hey, we should close the border so coyotes are not, you know, sending bad guys and charging people $10,000 and, you know, all this horrible stuff that happens," you'd probably say, "Okay." And that'd be 90% of the country. And if I said, "Hey, you want to deport the, like, felons from the country who are here illegally?" But yes, I agree. So there you go.

• 53:22Jason Calacanis?

  Like, it's like 80, 90% agreement on 99% of the issue. And the only disagreement is on what to do with people who've been here for over five or 10 years and have made a life here. And that's probably 50/50.

• 53:34Speaker 01

  So, from our friends over on the startups subreddit, which I read each and every single day, this is a question from a person who has worked at a couple of early-stage companies, and they want to know, "Is it possible that adding AI to your startup too early actually slows you down?" And they write that having worked at a couple of companies that rushed to add an AI feature, either to attract investment or just to stay current with trends, but it actually slowed them down. So product decisions became more slow, MVPs became bloated, and I think that this question boils down to, Jason, when should you add something hot, in buzzword terms, to your startup to ensure that you maintain your place in the conversation and at the investor

• 54:17Speaker 01

  tables, but also avoid wasting your time and shoehorning in crap you don't need?

• 54:21Jason Calacanis?

  Couple of different pieces here that are important. One of them is, should I frame my company as an AI company? Should I market it? Should I pitch it as an AI company? Well, absolutely, because VCs are looking at the market and they're saying, you know, "These are the companies that are growing the fastest." Now, if it's just AI dressing, if you're AI greenwashing, then, and there's no substance to it, well, you won't actually get the gains. Therefore, why are you doing it? It doesn't make any sense. So you should authentically be thinking about that. And if you're, if you have a previous company that was a SaaS-based company and you were

• 55:01Jason Calacanis?

  pitching it as such, reframing it and in fact figuring out how AI would disrupt you and, you know, going there, not a bad idea. Let me give an example. Let's say you had a sales automation tool, Salesforce, HubSpot.

• 55:16Jason Calacanis?

  Something that does marketing and sales in a company. Well, you go and try to raise money for that concept. People are going to go, well, that exists already and it's going to get disrupted by AI. And they say, well, how is it going to get disrupted by AI? And you say, well, I'm an investor. It's your job. You're the founder. Tell me. So they have 10 people coming to them saying, we're going to do to Salesforce and HubSpot what they did to legacy client server enterprise software before that. We're going to make a better version of that than the perceived model. Here's how it works. So you should absolutely be thinking about that. Take your legacy product, making $5 or $10 million a year. Let it cook. You don't have to change it. But then you launch the AI interface, the version, et cetera, in parallel, and you start

• 56:01Jason Calacanis?

  marketing that immediately. Which, by the way, is all Benioff's doing. All Benioff does is go on TV and talk about agents and how, you know, a third of the work at Salesforce is being done by agents. There is some truth that AI is not ready to do certain job functions. We saw that with, I think it was Klarna that said they were getting rid of all their customer support going 100% AI and 600 or 700 people were losing their jobs. And it was incredible. And then they said, oh, you know what? We need to have some humans in the loop here. So you can jump the gun on it. And that's your responsibility as a founder is to actually assess if the technology's ready. I looked at a lot of these AI solutions to make versions of podcasts in different languages. Not ready.

• 56:44Speaker 01

  To translate essentially to us to Swahili or German.

• 56:48Jason Calacanis?

  Not ready. You could do it as a proof of concept. It's, I don't think it's ready yet. I don't think the people listening to us in Japanese as done, auto dubbed, is ready yet. Now, it might be ready later this year, but it wasn't ready last year when I took the pitches. I don't know where it is now.

• 57:04Speaker 01

  That's such an interesting idea. I love that.

• 57:06Jason Calacanis?

  Who doesn't love it? Like, we should have a, we should have a this week in startups in the top 10 languages.

• 57:13Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 57:13Jason Calacanis?

  And they should automatically, and you can be sure YouTube, I know they are working on it. YouTube already dubs. If you go and type in Mr. Beast in Spanish, you can find the dubbed version of Mr. Beast officially done by YouTube. People don't know this, but YouTube is doing that for Mr. Beast. I don't have any inside information here. I just have what some YouTubers were telling me. So maybe I do have inside information.

• 57:37Speaker 01

  What?

• 57:38Jason Calacanis?

  Some YouTubers were telling me that they were not using AI for this. They were using voice actors. Now, I don't know if that's true or not, but let's play it and see if you found it. Did you find it?

• 57:46Speaker 01

  So, yeah, so this is Mr. Beast in Espanol.

• 57:50Jason Calacanis?

  And how did you find it, by the way? Is it on the YouTube Espanol site? Or is it in the dropdown menu and you just changed the language?

• 57:57Speaker 01

  So I literally just said Mr. Beast in Spanish.

• 58:00Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 58:00Speaker 01

  And this was the first thing that came up. And it's completely translated. So the description's in Spanish. This, this is, I lived underground for 50 hours and listened to. Yeah.

• 58:25Speaker 01

  So this is not just a translation. I don't think, Jason, this does feel more like voice acting to me.

• 58:29Jason Calacanis?

  It's voice acting. So they got, that's how big of a franchise Mr. Beast has is that YouTube is apparently paying for this experiment. And I guess for YouTube, it's super important for their growth in those countries. Therefore, and type Mr. Beast in Japanese, Mr. Beast in French. I wonder if that even exists, if they're up to Japanese and French, because those would be culturally very different markets and much smaller markets, sub 100 million or way under 100 million, because it would be the subset of people in those countries is 100 million people in Japan and France might be 70 million French speakers.

• 59:02Speaker 01

  I don't see anything similar for French or Japanese. I think it's just because Spanish is such an enormous language.

• 59:09Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. So I don't know if it's public or not, but there you have it, folks. So. To this person's back to this great question, you could look at the solution from first principles, test it with customers and then just decide, right? You can just decide if the market is ready for that feature. I do think there's another point he alludes to here, which is distraction. As this AI comes in, it is so distracting because an intelligent person can look at what's happening and very easily extrapolate that it will work. The way I got to podcasting early, the way I got to blogging early, the way I got to zines early, and the way I got to angel investing early and syndicates early in my career is

• 59:53Jason Calacanis?

  that when presented with a new idea, and this is my big unlocker hack for people, sometimes I just say yes to an opportunity and I assume it's going to work. Now, I said yes to FriendFeed. I spent a lot of time on FriendFeed by Paul...

• 1:00:08Speaker 01

  Brett Taylor.

• 1:00:10Jason Calacanis?

  No, Paul Bouche, Boukay, like Bouhite, Bouhite, thank you, like Fahrenheit. Paul Bouhite, who created Gmail, worked at Y Combinator, he created FriendFeed, he sold it to Facebook. It was like Ajax, the page would automatically be updating as you would be posting to it. I spent like a ton of time on that for a year. I did a ton of time on Google Plus. As those things grew, they fizzled out, they didn't work. Google Buzz, I spent a lot of time on that. Google Buzz could have beat Facebook if they weren't so concerned about the privacy issues and they were a little more freewheeling Google, but they folded because they got too many privacy issues and Zuckerberg didn't care about privacy. The people at Google rightfully were like, oh yeah, this is crazy.

• 1:00:54Jason Calacanis?

  There's all these fringe problems with Google Buzz. And so you just have to think these things through, but if you assume something's going to work, you could hit, but most times you won't. AI presents the ability for you to believe anything is possible. We're sitting here talking about these robots, like are those robots going to go pick up your lunch and bring it back to your house right now? If you said, I want a nice coffee, that robot you were showing earlier, the $5,000 one, is that going to go get it and successfully do that? No.

• 1:01:25Speaker 01

  Not this year, but...

• 1:01:27Jason Calacanis?

  But you immediately assume next year it would, but it might be five years from now. So the timing for entrepreneurs is so critical. Is it one year? Is it five? Can your company survive for five years? Oh, by the way... Scholarships are open. A lot of people have been asking me to come to the All In Summit. As is tradition, I set up the scholarship program in the early years and the team agreed to keep doing it. You can go to the website and apply for one. If you're one of my founders and you know me, I might have a little juice and be able to help a friend or two get their scholarships approved. It's probably a 1 in 10 chance that your scholarship gets approved because there's a limited number of those tickets. But if you are one of my peeps and you did apply for one and you can't afford the full price ticket,

• 1:02:09Jason Calacanis?

  I might be able to help. So if you're one of my founders, go ahead and apply for a scholarship and let me know you did.

• 1:02:14Speaker 01

  What is the scholarship? Is it like 80%?

• 1:02:17Jason Calacanis?

  I think it's like 80% off. I think it might be $1,500 instead of 7,500. So the event loses money on the scholarships because I think, yeah.

• 1:02:29Speaker 01

  No, I'm not surprised, but it's profitable overall. You and I know the events game and this is probably an overall good event for the business.

• 1:02:35Jason Calacanis?

  All In Summit has been profitable since year one and it's significantly profitable. And then All In plus the tequila, plus the other events you see us doing. We don't have advertising on it, but it's a significant business and This Week in Startups. And I'm going to probably do two more podcasts on the This Week in Startups brand in the next year. So stay tuned for that, folks. He's cautiously optimistic. Cautiousoptimism.substack.com?

• 1:03:05Speaker 01

  Dot news.

• 1:03:05Jason Calacanis?

  Dot news. Oh, you have your own domain name?

• 1:03:07Speaker 01

  Yes, sir.

• 1:03:08Jason Calacanis?

  And you're still on Substack, not Beehive?

• 1:03:10Speaker 01

  I am on Substack for a little bit, but I'm working on some cool stuff behind the scenes. So that might change in the next couple of months.

• 1:03:15Jason Calacanis?

  What? I mean, you're thinking of your own platform or being part of something?

• 1:03:20Speaker 01

  Let me sign, let me sign some contracts first.

• 1:03:22Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:03:22Speaker 01

  Then I'll tell you.

• 1:03:24Jason Calacanis?

  Excited for you. There you go. Sign up. It's a hundred bucks a year. You can come and support. Let's get him a hundred.

• 1:03:28Speaker 01

  Or it's free if you want to just not pay.

• 1:03:30Jason Calacanis?

  I think you should make it not free. I think you should just make it only pay because you've got good insights. And it's better to have a thousand people paying a hundred bucks than to have 10,000 people paying nothing and, you know, whatever.

• 1:03:41Speaker 01

  Stay tuned.

• 1:03:42Jason Calacanis?

  Stay tuned. We'll see you next time. Bye-bye. X.com slash Alex, X.com slash Jason, X.com slash TWS Startups. Bye-bye.