Google is Nano Banana, Apple AI plans & The Great H1B Visa Debate | E2170

Today's show: On a brand-new TWiST, Jason and Alex are asking why there are SO MANY note-taking AI apps? Plus another death has been linked to ChatGPT… is it too easy to get past chatbot guardrails? Why Donald Trump Jr. is joining Polymarket…. How the US Navy could catch up with its international rivals… AND should Apple just buy a big AI company to help them catch up? All that PLUS a visit from Colin Russ, whose viral H1B Visa thread might just inspire Jason to reach out to his good friend, Vice President JD Vance. Check out the full episode! Timestamps: (0:00) Intro, Jason's checking out Notion's new AI note taking app… is it time to cancel Granola? (06:57) How Google Gemini's new 2.5 Flash Image tool (formerly known as "nano-banana") could change advertising (10:28) Lemon.io - Get 15% off your first 4 weeks of developer time at https://Lemon.io/twist (11:40) Show Continues… (17:50) Another death linked to ChatGPT… is it too easy to get around AI chatbot guardrails? (19:26) Vouched - Trust for agents that's built for builders like you. Check it out at http://vouched.id/twist (20:34) Show Continues… (28:10) Donald Trump Jr. invests in Polymarket and joins the board… (29:45) Northwest Registered Agent - Form your entire business identity in just 10 clicks and 10 minutes. Get more privacy, more options, and more done—visit https://www.northwestregisteredagent.com/twist today! (30:49) Show Continues… (33:30) How Jason thinks the US Navy could catch up with China and other rivals, with help from startups (40:01) Do Jason and Alex think Apple might REALLY buy a big, expensive AI company? Would that be admitting defeat? (45:57) Colin Russ (@ThaaatColin) tells us about his viral X thread and why he's worried about H1B visa fraud (55:32) Jason's solution for the H1B system, and a message for VP Vance. (01:08:25) Jason responds to Kara Swisher, who accused him sucking up to power (01:19:07) Jason responds to his old pal Sam Harris, who thinks he's loyal to the wrong people Subscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.com Check out the TWIST500: https://www.twist500.com Subscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp Follow Lon: X: https://x.com/lons Follow Alex: X: https://x.com/alex LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelm Follow Jason: X: https://twitter.com/Jason LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis Thank you to our partners: (10:28) Lemon.io - Get 15% off your first 4 weeks of developer time at https://Lemon.io/twist (19:26) Vouched - Trust for agents that's built for builders like you. Check it out at http://vouched.id/twist (29:45) Northwest Registered Agent - Form your entire business identity in just 10 clicks and 10 minutes. Get more privacy, more options, and more done—visit https://www.northwestregisteredagent.com/twist today! Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland Check out Jason's suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis Follow TWiST: Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartups YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekin Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartups TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartups Substack: https://twistartups.substack.com Subscribe to the Founder University Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@founderuniversity1916

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

• 0:00Jason Calacanis?

  This is an issue for all of America. I'm going to send it to Vice President JD Vance. I'm sending him your thread and I'm going to send him this because he said he wanted to get educated on it. I don't know, he's busy, he's the Vice President, there's a lot going on. But I know that he cares about American people, American workers. It's part of the MAGA movement. So therefore, they should be on top of this if there is shenanigans going on here. And I believe we should import folks, but I don't think if what's happening here is a little bit of a shell game, I don't like it. So I have a very simple solution and I'm going to tell our President Donald Trump my proposal next time I see him.

• 0:37Speaker 01

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• 1:21Speaker 01

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• 1:31Jason Calacanis?

  All right, everybody, welcome back to This Week in Startups. Just noticed something crazy, Alex. When I started the Zoom, I'm in the studio, but sometimes I'll have the Zoom that you're on. So if you pull up a chart or something, I can see it here on the laptop a little closer than the teleprompter. That's way over there. And when I did that, my note taker from Zoom kicked in, right? Because that does it automatically. Then I was using this other third-party one, Granola, which is pretty good, that the kids are using these days. That kind of covertly records your notes because it's not an attendee in the Zoom call. But right as I did that, Notion. Popped up and said, I'm going to take notes for you. We now, can I have access to

• 2:15Jason Calacanis?

  your screen, which I just gave it access to. So now I've got three people taking notes on this one episode, which is completely unnecessary. But what a killer feature from Notion and eliminates the need for me to pay for granola now. I think I'm going to cancel. Maybe I'll, I mean, I'll have to take a look at what the difference is, but I, I just started testing. I think we have five paid accounts for granola that I'm going to cancel today because Notion just solved my problem.

• 2:43Speaker 01

  So I'm really curious what this is going to do to privacy, Jason, because people are too lax in their OPSEC when it comes to video chats and so forth. But if we're going to have every single person recording audio, video and transcriptions, man, people, someone's going to get busted for something because of this.

• 3:01Jason Calacanis?

  During COVID, I was talking to a student in and around my family and they were like, hey, you want to see my teacher today, like losing their mind or whatever. And I was like, whatever, sure. And because they were doing Zoom school, they knew how to use that, is it ODB or ODC Producer Sergio? What's that screen? OBD. OBD? This OBD, which is like the open source streaming platform to record their screen, which of course you could do a quick time or whatever, but they, all the kids were recording their teachers and their classes during school. So this has always existed. It just took extra software. It wasn't easy to do. There was no transcript and summary

• 3:44Jason Calacanis?

  for free. And they were searchable. So just assume if you're on any call, you're being recorded. I've always assumed that. Every chat is being read by Putin and the NSA and everybody else. And now every Zoom call, every business thing you do. So you need to be as a individual, so paranoid, Alex, that if you make, this idea that you can make jokes in private.

• 4:10Jason Calacanis?

  And then publicly, you know, be professional, but you could, you know, loosen up a little bit in the staff meeting or, you know, in the random room in Slack, like, or on a Zoom, you could make a joke or talk about something personal. Absolutely not. Assume it's going to be clipped. Assume it's going to be leaked, because now everybody has a copy of it anyway, which means if their computer gets hacked, they have now every conversation. So the lawsuits in the next decade are going to be unbelievable. Just think about all the lawsuits that could happen between startups and partners and sales partnerships and venture capitalists, accountants, lawyers, all this stuff being recorded. Like, people might record board

• 4:52Jason Calacanis?

  meetings. And I went on to a board meeting call and somebody was recording the Zoom because they had that as their default. And I said, um, are we recording board calls now? And they're like, oh, I don't know. Should we? Um, it's really helpful. I'm like, the lawyer was like, no. When you do minutes from a board meeting, they're supposed to be sparse and general, not detailed. So I once had somebody, I said, just take minutes. I assumed they knew what I was talking about. And they started writing quotes from each person. I said, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. The board discussed strategic financing options. Period.

• 5:25Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 5:26Jason Calacanis?

  That might have been a 20 minute. So you don't put, we talked about selling to this company, whatever. And you think about, what was the company that got into the Bruhaha Alex with, um, um, Ripple? There was a deal in Ripple got into a whole spy thing. Remember we covered that? Deal and Ripple, the Spygate?

• 5:45Speaker 01

  Rippling. It was Rippling and Rippling and Remote, I think. Oh, Deal. Rippling and Deal, Jason.

• 5:52Jason Calacanis?

  Rippling and Deal got into this whole Spygate, where they were spying on HR software companies. It's like, the worst spy novel ever written.

• 6:02Speaker 01

  Amazing that it happened, but it's not going to be a bestseller, is my take.

• 6:08Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, I don't know if this is like, The Bourne Identity seven, Rippling versus Deal. Jason Bourne crashing and remember the guy was like trying to like he wouldn't leave the bathroom stall when he got busted. That was the height of the drama.

• 6:25Speaker 01

  Cell phone allegedly.

• 6:25Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, try to flush an iPhone down a toilet. What are we doing here?

• 6:29Speaker 01

  Pro tip, they're a little bit big for that. Just in case it ever comes up in your life, y'all.

• 6:33Jason Calacanis?

  All right. So we got a lot of docket today. We're going to get to it.

• 6:36Speaker 01

  We got a lot of doctor today. I want to start, Jason, with.

• 6:39Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, and I just want to let people know at the end of the show as like a little piece of candy for you. There's a lot of podcasting drama right now and somehow I'm getting pulled into it. I don't want to be part of podcasting drama. Podcasting is fun. I like doing it. I've been doing it for 14 years, whatever. And some people might say I pioneered in the space. Okay, it's not for me to say.

• 7:02Jason Calacanis?

  But Kara Swisher teed off on me because of my appearance on the bulwark. And then my friend Sam Harris, I said some nice things about me, but you know, he's at war with Elon and the two of them are sparring and we were really good friends and I used to take the two of them to dinner with me many times. Introduced them to each other. So I'm going to comment on all that at the end of the show. Last 10 minutes. But there's so much news and you've spent so much time on this docket. Start us off here, compadre.

• 7:32Speaker 01

  All right. So there was a really interesting viral and unknown model over on LM Arena called Nano-Banana. And people were just amazed, Jason, at its ability to do image generation, especially very precise image generation. Well, as it turns out, that was actually a Google product. They have dropped the sheet and you can now see what this is. It is a very, very, very good model. It's now at the top of the LM Arena text to image leaderboard. It's called Gemini 2.5 Flash Image. And Jason, the thing here that I think is really important is it's not just, hey, make me an image. It's, hey, I want you to be very precise inside of an image. So it's kind of a targeted capability.

• 8:16Speaker 01

  So you can do some very, very cool things. And I think it's great to see this part of the AI industry continue to innovate and improve very, very quickly. It's much better than preceding models.

• 8:26Jason Calacanis?

  So I think we're moving past the Studio Ghibli phase, as you said, where like, hey, here's just Alex and Jason as manga.

• 8:35Jason Calacanis?

  Manga? Is that how you pronounce it?

• 8:37Speaker 01

  Is it manga?

• 8:38Jason Calacanis?

  Manga, manga. I was gonna say Maga and I'm like, I'm getting, I don't know what's going on today with me and rippling and ripple. This is so, all these, there's too many words. We're adding too many-

• 8:48Speaker 01

  There are indeed many words.

• 8:50Jason Calacanis?

  We're adding many words to the dictionary now that I have to remember my dyslexia is going, doing backflips right now. Anyway. The ability to say then, "Hey, make Alex smile, make Jason frown," you know, like you can kind of make those tweaks. We've always talked about that being the next phase and we're in it now. And, um, God, Grok images seems to have made a massive leap. You saw Elon was doing 20 a day. And-

• 9:15Speaker 01

  I saw them, yes.

• 9:16Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, and it was, it was quite, um, yeah, it's quite charming, like, uh, you know, the stuff people are making and people get a lot of fun out of this. But this one I saw, was this the one where people were dragging and dropping like Trump's face onto, you know, uh, like, uh, the Barbie movie or just, you could just put your face on anything and it just worked?

• 9:38Speaker 01

  It's, it's pretty impressive. I have an example that I'm gonna show you to demonstrate what it can do. And then we have a special treat just for you. Alright, so Jason, this is my favorite example, though. Uh, this is from D Studio Project and what we have here on the left is an image of a woman looking kind of away from us and she has a white purse. The prompt was to replace just her bag with the bag that they offered as an image prompt. And look at how good of a job it did just replacing the purse. Yeah, right? Now, it's not perfect. You can see there's kind of some weird shading here. But I mean, if you were just glancing at that without knowing that it was an AI-generated edit, you would have just said, "That's her purse." That's great.

• 10:15Jason Calacanis?

  The artifacts now are becoming so miniscule that you're correct. Even in a print magazine ad, you wouldn't know this. And by the way, for everybody who's getting up in arms about the modeling industry,

• 10:29Jason Calacanis?

  um, and doing photo shoots and everything, models are incredibly annoying. Photographers are divas, even more so than the models, and it's wildly expensive. I used to do photo shoots for my magazine and I love Frank Michelotto, who did my covers and stuff like that. I loved working with him. He was the exception to the rule.

• 10:48Jason Calacanis?

  When I did my just iconic covers of This Week in Startups, no, sorry, not This Week in Startups, Silicon Valley Reporter back in the day, and I was able to do those covers. I don't know if I ever told you the story, but, uh, Jan Wenner called me one day from Rolling Stone.

• 11:04Jason Calacanis?

  When you're a busy founder, finding a new developer, my God, that can become a full-time job and you've got enough on your plate. I mean, you're running a startup, but lemon.io has done the hard part for you already. They've got a crop of pre-vetted developers that they've ensured are experienced, results-oriented, and prepared to make an impact at your startup. And they can work right now at competitive rates. These are skilled, handpicked devs with a minimum of three years of on-the-job experience. And just 1% of applicants are accepted into their program. Lemon.io isn't just recruiting you the top talent that's out there. They're helping you integrate them into your team.

• 11:45Jason Calacanis?

  If anything goes wrong, Lemon will find you a replacement developer ASAP. And many of our launch founders and Founder University companies have staffed up with lemon.io and we always get the best feedback. So, go to lemon.io/twist and find the perfect developer or even a tech team in less than 48 hours. And Twist listeners get 15% off their first four weeks. Stop burning money. Hire developers smarter. Visit lemon.io/twist. Jan Wenner calls my office. So, my assistant, Lynda Miller, at the time, shout out to my long, loyal assistant from New York, and she said, "Hey, Jan Wenner called from Rolling Stone." And I said, "Yeah, I don't have time for that, but yeah, remind me tomorrow."

• 12:30Jason Calacanis?

  She's like, "No, but it's Jan Wenner." And I was like, "Yeah, okay, whatever." I thought it was a journalist.

• 12:36Jason Calacanis?

  I didn't know who Jan Wenner was, who created the greatest magazine of all time, arguably, or the most iconic one of all time. It's a kind of not, it's a shadow of its former self now. And I went up to see him. So, the next day, she said, "Jan Wenner, you know, called again." I went, "Okay." I really don't want to do any press right now. Like, I'm the press now. I don't want to do press. She goes, "No, Jan Wenner, the creator of Rolling Stone." Co-founder. I spit out my coffee. I call him. He says, "What are you doing?" I said, "I'm down here in Union Square." He says, "Come up to my office in Rock Center." I come to his office, because it's a gorgeous office. He has my magazine laid out on the desk, every episode, with a bunch of Post-its on it. Now, I'm 27 years old. I got my magazine. The magazine's

• 13:19Jason Calacanis?

  broken a million or $2 million in revenue. The event's broken $1 million, $2 million. I'm hot shit. And he starts taking my magazine apart, and he says, "I want you to come work for me and run Rolling Stone Digital. I want to buy your magazine, whatever. It's not for sale, but I'll take any advice you can give me." He said, "How much you spend on this? What's your photo budget?" I said, "Here's my photo budget." I pull out my Carl Zeiss point-and-shoot lens camera. I said, "I take all the pictures." He goes, "These are great pictures. You got an eye for that. You should really spend a bunch of money on your covers, like, you know, $25,000." I'm like, "The budget for the magazine's $25,000." Right, exactly. He goes, "What budget?" Yeah. He goes, "Get Frank Michelada on the line." She does a call, boom, boom. You can look at Frank Michelada, famous photographer. And

• 14:01Jason Calacanis?

  I start this friendship with him, and he does the covers for two or three grand, which is less than his cost. That's how I learned to make these great photos. But, man, hiring these models to do stuff, it would take two or three days to do a photo shoot. It would cost all this money. You had to go get the film developed. And, you know, these poor magazines and these advertisers have to do all this work. You can't do this kind of work if you're an up-and-coming brand. So, if you were Moment, we have a company Drink Moment. It's incredibly successful doing beverages. And in fact, I just met with Ben Stiller's team. He's coming out with Stiller sodas, like, and there's been some buzz about that in the trades. He's gonna launch his own beverage, Stiller Sodas, soon. There's

• 14:46Jason Calacanis?

  Moment. We incubated this company. I don't do CPG, but I thought this founder was so amazing, I had to. Now, you see, there's a photo there, whatever. Okay, so, you know, maybe she's had these images on Moment. You should try this beverage, by the way. It's really good for, like, it's got all the nootropics in it. It helps you focus. Really, really cool product. Anyway.

• 15:07Jason Calacanis?

  Now those people are going to be able to do ad campaigns that compete with Coca-Cola. This is democratizing. And so I don't care about the models losing their work. I don't care about the photographers losing their work. I care about my startups being able to make greater stuff and make the world more beautiful, which is what this technology is going to do. So why don't you demo what's going on here? Because there was a big brouhaha in the modeling community with Vogue did their first virtual, I don't know if you saw that two weeks ago, Vogue did.

• 15:36Speaker 01

  I did not.

• 15:37Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, Vogue did their first fake model. And oh my God, I think it was Vogue magazine.

• 15:45Speaker 01

  I did, I did see.

• 15:46Jason Calacanis?

  People lost their minds. They lost their minds. Oh, what's going to happen to the modeling industry? What's going to happen to the photographer? Hey, what happens to everybody? Time moves on, folks. Technology sucks for some people who have the budget and it's great for people who don't. So let's see what this can do.

• 16:02Speaker 01

  Perfect segue, Jason. There was a person named Tim Bederich and he built a thing called Look Book using Gemini 2.5 Flash Image and Gemini's Canvas product. And what they did was they took basically someone's photo and allow you to swap out the clothing they're wearing as if they were a model. And we thought this was very good fun. So take a look at this. If you're on the audio version, imagine a large canvas, images coming up and then variations of them. But Jason, you'll see why we think you like this one.

• 16:31Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so here's the look.

• 16:32Speaker 01

  So here's a picture of you.

• 16:33Jason Calacanis?

  Oh yeah, that was back. This is exactly the time period I'm talking about when I was becoming famous and doing all these photo shoots.

• 16:40Speaker 01

  Here's Sporty Jason.

• 16:41Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, wow.

• 16:42Speaker 01

  I think Sporty Jason looks good. And here's Bohemian Jason.

• 16:46Jason Calacanis?

  There's Burning Man Jacob.

• 16:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:49Jason Calacanis?

  Let's go back to my suit here. This is the original photography. And when I was in New York, I only wore black. And then I met my wife and she's like, what's with the black? And I was like, I have gray shirts soon, but I used to wear black. Collared shirts, black jackets, that was all I would wear because it was simpler. It was just simpler, my uniform. But this is incredible. What will also be incredible is, and we had a guest on recently, a Twist 500 guest, who was making an interesting product. I just had them on last week. I forgot who it was. But we were talking to them about, imagine if on Instagram or TikTok, you see an ad and you check off, hey, put me in my, put me in the ads.

• 17:31Jason Calacanis?

  And the Gap or Tom Ford come up and you get to see yourself in a Tom Ford suit. And it's you in the ad. That would be super minority report, like next level. And by the way, you could do that right now. You could do dynamic ads with you in them. So imagine every Corvette ad I see, it's me driving down the road in my new ZR1X. Ooh, yum, yum.

• 17:52Speaker 01

  So that today probably costs prohibitive because you'd have to, as the person doing the advertisement, run the image generation each time. And if you think about the cost for that, right now, Jason's probably 10 times too expensive, but wait a year, maybe 18 months. And I think that'll become the default because prices are coming down pretty quickly. This is a flash model. This is not some enormous gigantic, you know, 800 billion trillion parameter model. If you see the word flash in a model, it generally implies a little bit smaller, a little bit quicker. And that to me means the door you're discussing is going to be open incredibly shortly, which is great. In the same vein, Jason, there was a story over in the New York Times about a teenager who was troubled and spent quite a lot of time talking to ChatGPT. The teen ended up committing suicide.

• 18:35Speaker 01

  It's a story about how AI guardrails don't always hold over very long conversations. And I think it's worth discussing because we have talked quite a lot about AI safety on the show and where to draw the line between regulation and self-regulation. In this case, I'm not going to get into the details too much about what happened to the teen because I just don't think we absolutely need to, Jason. But he was having health issues and he had withdrawn from school to take school on the internet and so had a lot of time to play with ChatGPT and the 4O model, which people quite like. And after the teen committed suicide, his father went through his phone to see if there were sources or things that he could find to help understand what happened. He found quite a lot of chats with ChatGPT.

• 19:15Speaker 01

  And what he also found was that the safeguards that OpenAI puts into its chats, hey, hey, maybe you should reach out for help. Maybe you should talk to someone else about this. The teen found a way around them, essentially by telling ChatGPT that he wasn't trying to harm himself, but was instead doing world building, getting around the natural guardrails inside the system. The parents are considering, I believe, a lawsuit against OpenAI. And OpenAI, in response, said that it's, quote, "deeply saddened by the teen's passing. Thoughts with the family." And yes, we do have safeguards and so forth. Now, OpenAI also has plans, Jason, to build in more protections for users of its products. But I'm curious where you come down on how much companies should do to keep their AI products safe, especially in the hands of children, and how much of this comes down

• 19:59Speaker 01

  to where parents should step in and be more involved.

• 20:04Jason Calacanis?

  AI agents are already out there in the real world doing work for us. But, hey, we got some concerns, right? You want to keep your website and your data protected, and you're going to need help with that. And that's why you need Vouch. Did you know that OpenAI just dropped their agent mode? These agents are everywhere, and your users are now handing over all of their information to ChatGPT to not only log them in, but to act on their behalf. Let's say one of your employees, hey, they're ambitious. They start using AI to generate spreadsheets, reports, but they give access to your sales force or your accounting system through their desktop, through their browser. And that means your consumer list, your financials, they're all exposed, okay? Everything you own could be at risk.

• 20:46Jason Calacanis?

  Vouch is going to help you spot the good agents and block the bad ones. And their agent bouncer, it prevents AI agents from logging into your system as regular users. And we've got a great deal, just for Twist listeners. Vouch wants you to try knowthat.ai for free. Check it out for yourself at vouch.id/twist. Trust for agents that's built for builders like you.

• 21:11Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I mean, this is terrible. It's a tragedy, obviously. And there is a concept of the law of large numbers. Whenever your product starts to hit scale, and there's no product that's hit massive scale quicker than OpenAI, right? It's the fastest to 100 million, fastest to 700 million, it'll be the fastest to a billion users every month, week, day, etc. And when you start hitting those numbers tragically, there is, depending on the society you're in and the demographic you're in, you know, some statistical probability that somebody in your user base will commit suicide.

• 21:51Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so we don't say, okay, that person had an Apple, had an iPhone. Well, everybody's got an iPhone or an Android phone, right? Everybody's got a smartphone. So you can't really make the correlation, oh, the smartphone and their death, right? But over history, we have seen individuals make the connection between technologies or media trends. This person was obsessed with this musical group that was goth, right? Remember the goth scare? All these kids were being nihilistic, putting on black makeup, white makeup. They went full goth. They were into these bands that were writing songs. And some of the songs were talking about, I think there was a song, "The Final Solution" or something like that. It might have been one of these heavy metal bands. And you're

• 22:36Jason Calacanis?

  into metal. And they have some-

• 22:38Speaker 01

  I'm a big fan.

• 22:39Jason Calacanis?

  And they have topics, right? So now you have to parse, okay, did a song inspire an individual to kill themselves? That seems pretty farcical. And what you probably come to the conclusion is, that person was drawn to that song, or there's just a correlation and not causation. Now you get into something that is acting like a human.

• 23:07Jason Calacanis?

  This is distinctly different than a video game. It's distinctly different than a song. It's distinctly different than Dungeons and Dragons and other scares we've had in society. This one is engaging with people at a deep level. What should happen when somebody is having this discussion, hacking it or not, is the chat should stop. The chat should just stop. It should say, hey, we've had some concerns here. It's time for a cooling off period, right? And now, I guess some people might say, well, if you do that, maybe the person then goes and kills themselves, et cetera.

• 23:49Jason Calacanis?

  As one person explained it to me, who, you know, we had a mutual friend who perhaps killed themselves or might have just been incredibly exposed to drugs, Tony Shea, my dear friend, and he died tragically. I might get a little emotional here. And when I was just trying to process this, my friend said, you know, sometimes people are just on this path and there's nothing that's going to stop them. And they're going to do it. It's just a matter of how and when their depression is too acute and their anxiety is too acute or the substances are, you know, driving them to it. It's just a very complex thing.

• 24:30Jason Calacanis?

  So do I think OpenAI is responsible here is a really interesting question. If we're making these things to be sentient, to pass the Turing test, they have a higher obligation. There's a higher duty here. And that's what we have to ask ourselves is how high is the duty of a webpage, of a novelist? Does Stephen King, writing a novel, have to worry about this? That he's going to inspire people to do a school shooting, to commit suicide, to do any other behavior? Well, we probably give a broad berth to artists to pursue their art, whether it's a heavy metal band or a folk singer or anybody in between.

• 25:14Jason Calacanis?

  But OpenAI is making these things purposely to be addicting, to have personality, to be sycophantic. So I do think they have a much higher duty.

• 25:28Jason Calacanis?

  I don't know exactly how to resolve this.

• 25:33Jason Calacanis?

  But, you know, in their blog post, to their credit, OpenAI said, "If someone expresses suicidal intent, ChatGPT is trained to direct people to seek professional help. In the US, ChatGPT refers people to 988 Suicide and Crisis Hotlines, in the UK to Samaritans, and elsewhere to find a helpline.com." Exactly what we talked about, they should be doing. So they're doing that, so I give them credit. They go on.

• 26:00Speaker 01

  There's a detail, Jason, that I want to add here because I forgot it. It's very important. So in the New York Times story about this, I said that the teen had found a way to get around the built-in protections. There's a detail. I'm just going to quote here from the Times story. "The teen had learned how to bypass those safeguards by saying the requests were for a story he was writing, an idea ChatGPT gave him by saying it could provide information about suicide for, quote, 'writing or world-building.'" So, back to your point about psychopathy, this is the model trying to help the user without a moral. I don't think it was making a moral decision there.

• 26:34Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 26:35Speaker 01

  But it ended up giving them a way around its built-in protections. So I think that's an important thing before you go on. But please keep going.

• 26:41Jason Calacanis?

  I think it actually is very important. Thank you for pointing it out. So the person explicitly didn't wear their seatbelt, if we think of the guardrails as a seatbelt. So now you've got somebody who said, "I'm going to drive extremely fast in this car without a seatbelt while drinking," you know, whatever the analogy is. And I apologize to, you know, that this is all dark and graphic to talk about, but it's an important issue to unpack because people who are listening here might be building companies and have to deal with these issues. You can do so much, but if a person is intent on routing around them, they're going to do it. This person could also download a model, one of the open source models, to their desktop,

• 27:24Jason Calacanis?

  and they could change the weights and the rules and the guardrails and do it. So it's a new world. What we would want to see is to understand this issue further, and I'm sure people are monitoring it. And this is where regulations come in. With a company like ChatGPT, they need to have somebody dedicated to this or a team dedicated to it. They need to keep statistics on it. And then we have to look at Tragically, of the suicides that are occurring, what are the things that are correlated with it? Are they playing video games? Are they using social media too much? Are they using chat GPT too much? And what steps can we take?

• 28:07Jason Calacanis?

  What further steps can we take to either constrain this technology, make it harder to route around it, or just make parents and other people aware of it?

• 28:16Speaker 01

  OpenAI has some plans that build on that, Jason. And one of the things they're going to do is, quote, "strengthening safeguards in long conversations," which is what happened here. It's probably pretty hard to get through OpenAI's protections in one or two prompts, but maybe on the 600th, you can talk it into doing something it shouldn't do. So work to be done there. They're also going to, quote, "expand interventions to more people in crisis, make it easier to reach emergency services and get help from experts." And then they also noted at the bottom of their blog post on this, they're going to work on greater protections for teens. But let's talk about something a little bit brighter. There's news over from the realm of startups, which is that Polly Market has raised from 1789 Capital. And someone, Jason, you may have heard of, Donald Trump Jr. is going to join its board. This is a double-digit investment from 1789 Capital,

• 29:01Speaker 01

  a venture capital firm. I think it's, I mean, Malik and Rebecca Mercer are two of the people behind it. And they invest in conservative-leaning, or anti-woke, or MAGA-aligned businesses, I think. I'm trying to find a neutral way of saying this, Jason. Bail me out of it.

• 29:20Jason Calacanis?

  I think conservative values would be, or MAGA values is not derogatory in any way. They're investors in SpaceX, XAI, Neuralink, Andro, Substack, and more. And yeah, some of those are government-related, like SpaceX and Andro. Some of them are freedom of speech platforms like Substack, which has gotten a lot of criticism over the years for being a platform and, quote-unquote, "platforming people," which is what platforms do. And you can, yeah, you can say you might, if you were running Substack, you might take extremists off of it, or certain views off of it, because you want to create a certain ecosystem.

• 30:05Jason Calacanis?

  That would be your right on one side. And on the other side, you could be a platform that says, "Anybody can use it. It's paper and pen, and we're not going to..." You know, mediate, with the exception of criminal activity, people writing with a pen on paper.

• 30:23Jason Calacanis?

  Hey, listen, we meet a lot of early-stage founders here at Launch, my investment company, and some, they don't have a lot of traction yet. They just have an idea. Maybe they haven't even finished their product. They've just got an MVP. But they still need investors and accelerators like ours to take them seriously. And you know what? We can't just wire money to your Gmail or your PayPal. That's not how it works, folks. We need to know that you're a legit and official business. We need to know your company is incorporated. That's why you need Northwest Registered Agent. It's the service that will help you run your business the right way from day one. In 10 clicks and in under 10 minutes, you're going to file for your LLC or a C corp if you're a startup, get a domain name, launch your official website, claim your business email, and even fast-track

• 31:06Jason Calacanis?

  your trademark application, which some people forget to do. We're talking about more than just company formation. This is your entire identity as a business. Go to northwestregisteredagent.com/twist and show the world you're in business. And make sure you use that URL slash twist so they know that we sent you.

• 31:25Speaker 01

  Now, what's fun here is that there's kind of a political technology angle. There's a polymarket on polymarket about if polymarket will become available in the US officially in this year. And it's gone from, I don't know, about a 50/50 chance, according to the sharps on polymarket, to now a 95% chance in the wake of all the recent news. So the anticipation, Jason, I believe, if I'm reading this correctly, is that the political and regulatory winds are blowing very much in favor of prediction market products like polymarket, like Kalshi, and I think also Robinhood's in the mix as well now. So I guess, given connections, money, and what people think, we're going to see prediction markets become entirely normalized here in the US very quickly and probably for the

• 32:06Speaker 01

  rest of our lives. So it's something to think about as we consider sports betting versus, I would say, the minds of young men.

• 32:14Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I'm all for it. I think people should be able to do and wager whatever they want to do, whether it's poker or sports gambling. Obviously, you know, again, with children, they shouldn't be allowed to be gambling. I do think kids should be allowed to buy stocks with their parents' supervision. And so that would be accretive. But yeah, they did buy that company, QCEX, and they have the CFTC license, which is where this stuff is licensed under. And having the president's son on your board can't hurt, according to Burisma, which had the son of Biden on it. So, again, calling balls and

• 32:58Jason Calacanis?

  strikes here. Long tradition of the children of presidents and politicians having interest. Not saying this is anything untoward here. It's an investment. It's capital. It's joining the board. I'm fine with it. And it definitely is a savvy move if you can have people from whichever administration or in Washington DC involved with your company. There's a well-known revolving door of people who work in government, go work for the military industrial complex, work in government, go work for the food industrial complex. And I think we're seeing the same thing now in technology. We just, Alex, haven't really seen this before,

• 33:39Jason Calacanis?

  have we? Google was the first one, I think, to start seeing people from Google going to the Obama administration come out. And now we're seeing it with the Trump administration. It's the nature of capitalism plus democracy.

• 33:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. All right. Next up, Blue Water Autonomy.

• 33:58Jason Calacanis?

  I felt like you had something to add there.

• 34:00Speaker 01

  I have so many things to add there, but, you know, let's move on.

• 34:05Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 34:06Speaker 01

  Blue Water Autonomy raises $50 million in a Series A. This is, I think, awesome news, Jason. So, we've talked about a company called Serrano here on the show a number of times. They're making the autonomous boats, drone boats, essentially, which we think are very important, especially as we consider a possible conflict between China and Taiwan. And the Ukrainian war has definitely taught us the importance of autonomous warfare in 2025 in the modern era. So I love that we're seeing another company, one that I hadn't heard of, raise $50 million in such an early round, led by GV. This is a company that wants to build autonomous boats for the Navy. So this is a kind of explicit defense context. And Fortune reports, we don't actually have pictures of their boats yet, Jason, but roughly half the length of a football field, which is about 150 feet, which is about 20 some meters if you're

• 34:50Speaker 01

  over in Europe. And Fortune told us that they're going to be about 40 to 50 school buses in weight, which is the worst metric I've ever heard of in the history of metrics for telling me how much something weighs. But they're going to be quite large, which matters because in 2027, the Navy anticipates having both autonomous and traditional manned ships in the same carrier groups, I think is the right phrase. So we're moving pretty quickly on this, and I'm excited to see more money and more effort from startups.

• 35:20Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. And in related news, I talked about my KDEF investment, a Korean ETF that is working, that aggregates a bunch of the South Korean shipbuilders, military builders, et cetera. Korea is, you know, got HD Hyundai Heavy Industries, it's the world's biggest shipbuilder, and they just merged with another company. And you are seeing a deep relationship emerge between the US and South Korea because South Korea is exceptional at building ships. America is terrible at building ships. We are not building a lot of ships here. So this,

• 36:02Jason Calacanis?

  if there is, as expected, conflicts in the South China Sea regarding Taiwan, or those tolls and island, these like tiny rocks that people are fighting over there, if there is going to be a conflict, it's going to be on the water. And if it's on the water, and China has massive shipbuilding capability, this is an area where the US has to catch up, and we're going to catch up. Two different ways. One is these great startups here in America entering the field. And the other is with partnerships with countries that actually can build ships. And South Korea is like, we gotta build our own ships. We can only build so many for America.

• 36:43Jason Calacanis?

  This is where you might see a CHIPS Act-like effort emerge at some point. If we don't get enough shipbuilding in this country and we don't get it soon, you might see this administration or the next, whoever it is, say, hey, we're going to give some long-term loans to entrepreneurs. This is a great place for investors to put money because there will be a very different type of warfare as well. The same way we saw drones change the battlefield in Ukraine. And we saw, you know, that same concept in the Middle East,

• 37:25Jason Calacanis?

  in MENA region, start to emerge, again drones. There's going to be an equivalency on water, which is small boats, many boats, fast boats, essentially disposable boats, right? Like boats that-

• 37:41Speaker 01

  Very much so.

• 37:42Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. If you, we're going to send 100 of them in a swarm. And yeah, you can take out 80 of them, but if 20 hit, you sank my battleship.

• 37:52Speaker 01

  Well, also, there's a real practical use for that, Jason, which is clearing underwater minefields. You don't want to clear underwater minefields with a bunch of your sailors. Sailors are humans. We care about them a lot more than just hunks of metal. But if you have 100 drone boats and you need to get through a harbor that's mined quickly, well, off you go. Huzzah. Who cares? There's a lot of metal that we can mine, both here on the planet and elsewhere. So that makes a lot of sense to me. But I will say, despite my enthusiasm, not everything's going incredibly well. There was an interesting report from Reuters, it was about a week or two ago. They got some footage of some boats during a US Navy test off the coast of California. And this was to kind of show off what the Navy had in its autonomous boat quiver. And some of the boats kind of ran into one another and I believe knocked over

• 38:35Speaker 01

  an observer boat and someone got thrown into the water. I would call that a normal hiccup in the testing process to get us to the point in which we're comfortable with these boats. We've been building man ships for a very, very long time.

• 38:47Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 38:47Speaker 01

  But I think it also goes to show that we're still dealing with nascent technology here. So I'm hoping that startups like Blue Water, like Sironic, and there's a couple of others in the mix as well, can get this to, I don't, what would you call that, Jason? Like military readiness? There's probably some sort of term of art there.

• 39:04Jason Calacanis?

  There must be a term of art for being battle capable.

• 39:07Speaker 01

  Battle tested.

• 39:10Jason Calacanis?

  Battle tested. These will, you know, just like the drones are, I'm talking about commercial quadcopter drones, not drones that we used in Operation Desert Storm. These are going to be arguably easier because in water, it's a lot easier. There's not as much out there to crash into. You got waves, you know, like sinking. Okay, that can happen. Oh, you can crash into the rocks. But when you're in the big open ocean, if there's no humans on it and the thing gets hit by a big wave and goes underwater and then pops back up eventually, or it's underwater and it, you know, runs out, it doesn't run out of oxygen. You don't have to worry about these precious humans inside of a submarine.

• 39:53Jason Calacanis?

  The idea that submarines are even manned is kind of crazy when you think about it, like.

• 39:59Speaker 01

  It's absolutely crazy. I think the reason why we've stuck with that is because we have some systems that require humans in the loop. I mean, go back to the Cold War and there's the famous, you know, Russian submarine captain who decided to not launch the missiles and our world could be entirely different if he decided to. So I think that makes good sense. But, you know, we now have better communication technologies. We've learned a lot about running fiber optic cable behind air drones. Why can't we just have fiber optic cable behind submarines? I'm sure there's a good reason, but we'll figure it out. But I bet you in 50 years, Jason, we're not putting a bunch of humans in a tin can a mile into the ocean to be very bored and sad. It just doesn't seem like a good place for humans to be long term.

• 40:35Jason Calacanis?

  All right. I see that Apple has been, I guess it came out in the information that Apple has been thinking of buying some things?

• 40:48Speaker 01

  Yes, Apple has thought about purchasing one of two, at least two AI companies we talk about often on the show. One is Perplexity, the AI search product that's popular to both consumers and the enterprise. And then the other one was Mistral, the French AI Foundation model company that has done quite well for itself lately. It's a Mistral 3.1 medium model is now ranked eighth best in the world, according to Ellen Arena, which ties it with models in both China. And I believe it's kind of tied right now with Grok for Jason. So a very strong offering. Now, Apple does not tend to make large purchases. It's not really in their DNA that tend to buy small tuck-in acquisitions, often unannounced. So the fact that Apple is considering this is pretty big news. The question is, just are

• 41:31Speaker 01

  they willing to cough up? So two data points for folks out there. The last price that I could find for Perplexity was about $18 billion in a primary round. So Jason, if Apple wanted to buy it, given that Apple's very wealthy, it had to pay at least double. So, you know, no less than 40 billion for Perplexity, which is expensive. And then Mistral was valued at about 6.6 billion. I did convert from euros. And so I probably at least 20 for that company. So I think these are costly and Apple will have to really admit defeat on its internal AI strategy. The question that we have to answer is, should it? And I think the answer is yes.

• 42:07Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I don't think there's anybody looking at the amount of money Apple prints and $700 billion in buybacks and doesn't think, given how terrible their key tip of the spear product, Siri is, they've proven they can't do this well. And so if they buy both of these for, you know, maybe it doesn't have to be double, because some of these large language models and products are going to get to the point where they realize there's no way for them to catch up with Gemini, Grok, and OpenAI and Claude. So if you're not those four companies specifically,

• 42:44Jason Calacanis?

  You're probably for sale. And it's really just a matter of the investors and the founders saying, okay, this is a high enough price for us to get out of the race. They, both of these companies should sell to Apple. And Apple would easily be able to, well, maybe nothing's easy, but of all the companies in the world, Apple would have the easiest time earning back the money they spent on these. Because this would increase engagement on their devices. They could include them in their sponsorships or their Apple One product, right? You could get Perplexity Pro in Apple One. And they would just instantly catch them up.

• 43:24Jason Calacanis?

  Then you start thinking about, what if they had the most secure, privacy-first, perplexity product built into Apple phones? Pretty compelling. And, or Mistral, built into Apple phones. It's pretty compelling in the face of losing the Google deal eventually for search and that 20 billion. So you spend a little bit of money here, but they could monetize it with just replacing the Google search with the perplexity search, keep people on their phone, and put ads for apps in the App Store. Put ads for Apple TV in it. You don't even have to go out of house. They already have their small network.

• 44:04Jason Calacanis?

  So perplexity could be monetized just by the App Store advertising base. Imagine you do a perplexity search? It knows all about you. You're doing a search for your vacation. And then, all the travel apps get to compete. We're generating your answer, and it starts writing your answer. And then it has three apps. And each of the apps explains what they do, and it's an advertisement there, or it's just in the footer, or it's, you put the ads up. The way I would do it is I'd put the three, the three apps up, or whatever app is next in the auction. You put them up there. It starts saying, okay, your answer's coming in 30 seconds. In the meantime, here's the screenshots of Expedia. Here's your Uber.

• 44:49Jason Calacanis?

  Here's your Airbnb app. Can you imagine how effective that would be if every travel and finance search, Robinhood, Coinbase, Expedia, Uber, you know, and Airbnb got to compete to put their app in front of those people while they're searching and in need? Chef's kiss. Apple has a huge weakness.

• 45:13Jason Calacanis?

  Which is, they're still living as if they have Steve Jobs and Johnny Ive in the building. They do not. The idea that they are better at building product than everybody else in the world is no longer true. It's just not true. You can buy Sony AirPods, and I just bought a pair of them. They're infinitely better than the Apple ones. That's but one example. You can buy Roku or get it for free in your TV. I have a $300 Apple TV, 4K, 8K, whatever, on the back of my TV. What does my family use? They use the remote control

• 45:53Jason Calacanis?

  from my Sony or my Samsung TVs, and they've authenticated all those apps. It works better. Apple just doesn't make the best products in the world anymore. They have to change the philosophy of "it's not built here." Not built here is their Achilles' heel, and this is why Tim Cook needs to transition out of the CEO slot. They need somebody in there like Zuckerberg, Elon, or even Sundar or Satya. At least somebody who might have some product vision and ability to think bigger than Tim Cook does. Tim Cook does what Tim Cook is great at: supply chain.

• 46:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. All right, let's bring on our guest for today. Jason, there was a viral thread over on Twitter from someone named Colin Russ. He had applied for a job over at New Relic. And Colin, before we jump in with you, I'm going to run the audience through what you said. Jason, a little screen share, I think, will set the tone. So, in this first image from Colin, who we'll talk to in just a moment, he'll see that he sent an email to New Relic, which is a company that was public and went private for $6.6 billion a couple of years ago. And he said, "Good morning. Attached. Please find my resume for consideration for the Director of Product Management," and then a reference number. Following- New Relic sent him an email saying, "Hey Colin, thank you for reaching out to us and expressing

• 47:14Speaker 01

  your interest in joining New Relic. We appreciate your enthusiasm and the initiative you've shown. You want to be part of our team, but currently we don't see an active application for a specific role for you." They sent him to the New Relic careers page. Colin then replied, "Well, I'm responding to an advertisement in a newspaper that asked people to send in a resume with this particular code attached to it." And he then said some spicy things and they said, "We don't want to talk to you anymore." Now, we learned quite a lot prepping for this segment. There's quite a lot of nuance Jason that goes into exactly what is an H1B application versus a perm job posting, but let's hear from the man himself. Please welcome to the program. It's Colin Russ. Colin, hey.

• 47:52Speaker 02

  Thanks so much for having me. It's great to be here.

• 47:54Jason Calacanis?

  Thanks for coming Colin. I saw your tweet and I said, "Hmm, we need to double click on this." What, what do you do for a living? And maybe then tell us what you uncovered here.

• 48:05Speaker 02

  Absolutely. So again, great to be here. My name's Colin Russ. I'm a philosopher, 15-ish years. I've been in a variety of operations leadership roles. I currently live in a amazing Rustville town called Erie in Northwest Pennsylvania. But I've spent most of my career working across tech and ops transformations and manufacturing, energy tech industries. But about two years ago, I decided to throw my hat in the ring and try my hand at the startup thing. Unfortunately, after two years pivoting from distributed energy development to trying to build the hardware side of it, ran out of money, not a great funding environment for it,

• 48:50Speaker 02

  and found myself in a position where I have to look for a W2 job. Got two amazing kids that I gotta take care of, gotta eat as much as I love ramen noodles, gotta mix it up sometimes. And so I spent the last few months really just doing what unfortunately more than 7 million Americans are doing at the same time and looking for jobs. This, you know, the post that kind of went viral. Really came from just, you know, end of the day, I was frustrated, you know, after, you know, hundreds of applications, getting this response that seemed disingenuous,

• 49:31Speaker 02

  that, what are you talking about? There's, what job could we possibly, you know, have that you're referring to? And, you know, I probably owe him an apology for not being as polite as I, my mother raised me to me. But-

• 49:46Jason Calacanis?

  It can be frustrating when you've, you're the breadwinner, or, you know, the co-breadwinner, or whatever the situation might be, and you take the time to apply for a job, and the job doesn't exist, but the job does exist, but the job might exist, just not for a person in the United States of America, for, I believe, a US company. So, what, take, take us to the next jump here, which is, they're hiring for this position, they're trying to prove that they can't find the person, and how that H1B sort of fits into all this.

• 50:20Speaker 02

  So that's what's, you know, interesting about the H1B process. Eighty-five thousand of them are issued a year, huge lottery system. But fundamentally, they're meant to fill this gap of, hey, people with a super unique or nuanced set of skills, that just, we can't hire that talent, you know, domestically. We need to provide a visa to it. Makes perfect sense, the intent of it, you know, sound business, sound policy, all great. But what has occurred in the last decade plus, is this shift of companies using the H1B, H1B visa process, to, rather than just get this exceptional talent, they're

• 51:03Speaker 02

  using it to suppress wages, and ultimately try and bring in, you know, cheaper labor. So it's not just people like myself, who are trying to say, hey, I'm not necessarily claiming to be the best person for this, but I'm certainly qualified and capable of, if nothing else, warranting an interview.

• 51:23Speaker 01

  Colin, just to be clear there, I think this is an important nuance. The H1B program is different than the perm program, which allows companies to sponsor people for green cards and long-term employment. In your email to New Relic, you call them H1B perm listings. My read here is that this is not really an H1B issue. This is a perm issue. And the reason why I think that, Jason, is because there are no public listing requirements for H1B roles. But if you want to do a perm posting to bring someone foreign to the US and sponsor them for a green card and long-term staying here, you have to do newspaper advertisements, which is why I thought Colin's note about a newspaper posting was so important.

• 52:03Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so this is the key linchpin here. Thank you for unpacking that, Alex. You found this in a newspaper. In order to apply for H1B, you have to say, "I put this in newspapers and I didn't get the people who I needed." So you didn't respond from their website. You found the ad, Colin, in a newspaper. Which newspaper? A newspaper online?

• 52:24Speaker 02

  So there's actually a website, I'm not sure who created it, called Jobs Now, which there functions basically to scrape and collect those newspaper postings, the ones that aren't being listed on job sites, and provide that content and information for people to apply. So in this case, to Alex's point, when I went and looked at the New Relic website, lo and behold, that role did not exist. There were similar jobs that were different enough, but the specific director of program management, you know, product management, that was not there and did not exist. And so my follow-up, when I asked, "Can you provide a link to it?

• 53:07Speaker 02

  Or is this just, you know, a fake listing?" Didn't receive a response. Nothing's been, you know, updated to magically appear on the website, and I was simply notified, "We're going to pass, you know, we'll move forward otherwise." And all this transpired in, from start to finish, in less than 12 hours, basically, which is kind of mind-boggling that they were able to make that assessment. They don't have, do have, however we want to chop it up. But, you know, it gets, I think, to kind of my core frustration that led to this offhanded mark of, "Hey..." Give me a chance. I at least just want to let me make my case to tell you why 15

• 53:49Speaker 02

  years experience I have across different sectors, across different roles, having done product management, having done program management. Let me explain why I am in fact qualified for this role you're claiming nobody is qualified for.

• 54:04Jason Calacanis?

  Wow. So they've been busted by this jobs now site. This site was set up by Patriots in America. And I talked to JD, Vice President JD Vance about this two or three weeks ago when I was in Washington DC about, hey, are we actually using the H1Bs as a way to lower wages and not giving Americans a fair chance of this when Americans need jobs and we've talked about on this program, Alex incessantly static team size. A lot of the companies in America, whether it's Uber or Microsoft or Google or Meta, Facebook, they have less employees, the same number of employees as they did four or five years ago. And they're

• 54:46Jason Calacanis?

  global organizations, so they can hire anywhere. But they want to specifically bring people in here for jobs that Americans can clearly do. And why do they want to do that? Pretty obvious. They want to do that to pay lower wages. All right, Alex, any details we need to get to before I give my solution and I pass my judgment?

• 55:03Speaker 01

  Yes, I just want to do a little bit of just journalistic groundwork here, Jason. One, we reached out to New Relic for comment. They didn't get back to us at the time of this recording, but we did want to give them a chance to both weigh in on the veracity of the emails, not to be doubting you, Colin, and also provide a comment. They declined essentially implicitly. And the other thing is, we went back through New Relic's H1B application history and also their perm history, looking at both categories. New Relic is not a company that has hundreds or thousands of foreign workers in here on temporary or permanent visas. They apply for, as far as we can tell, less than 20 H1Bs per year. And the number of perm applications they do is a single digit number. So this is not a pandemic issue over at New Relic, even though it could be an industry wide problem.

• 55:46Speaker 01

  And we're talking about New Relic in this case, but we're not trying to say, here is the shitty company that everyone should go make fun of. It's a broader point.

• 55:53Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, we're talking about the broader issue here. And when I just pulled up this website, there were job postings for Lyft on jobs now, this patriotic website that is trying to, I guess, unpack what's going on here. The shenanigans is what I'll call it. These are shenanigans. So I'm gonna pass my judgment now. Number one, New Relic should give you the interview. So I'm calling on New Relic's CEO to give you the interview. And I'm gonna email him personally after the show. Because I think it's wrong that you don't even get a chance to interview for the job if you're qualified. And maybe you're not qualified in their mind, but whatever. I mean, and I do want them to give us an actual statement. We don't want to just present one side here. Alex, great job on uncovering how many H1B visas have. But this is an issue for all of America.

• 56:38Jason Calacanis?

  Number two, I'm gonna send the thread, if you can email me, or DM me the thread, so I have it here, Alex. I'm gonna just, I'm gonna send, I'm gonna send it to Vice President JD Vance. I'm sending him your thread. And I'm gonna send him this, because he said he wanted to get educated on it. I don't know, he's busy, he's the Vice President, there's a lot going on. But I know that he cares about American people, American workers. It's part of the MAGA movement. So therefore, they should be on top of this, if there is shenanigans going on here. And I believe we should import folks, but I don't think, if what's happening here is a little bit of a shell game, I don't like it. So I have a very simple solution, and I'm going to tell our President, Donald Trump, my proposal next time I see him.

• 57:22Speaker 01

  You're going back to DC?

• 57:26Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, I'm getting dragged into this constantly. H1B visas, how much do they cost, Alex, now? To file for one of these?

• 57:33Speaker 01

  Oh, I think, I think the total package is tens of thousands.

• 57:36Jason Calacanis?

  I think that's what you pay for lawyers.

• 57:38Speaker 01

  The lawyer's applications. Oh, okay, just the application fee?

• 57:40Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, like, what is the government charge? And I think that if we're gonna solve this problem, H1B visas should cost $20,000 a year. Every year. So if you want to bring somebody in here, the company has to pay a tax of $20,000. Take all that money, could go to retraining for Americans, could go to loans for vets, I don't care where it goes, but it should be earmarked to help American workers. Of which, you correctly point out, Colin, there's a lot of really qualified people who are not even getting a chance at some of these jobs. And if we're gonna be living in a world where maybe it takes less people to do the amount

• 58:21Jason Calacanis?

  of work that's necessary, if that's what transpires, if you're gonna do this shortcut with the H1B visa... Pay the government $20,000. Then the distance between, because I think it was a couple of hundred bucks to apply for these, if I remember correctly, because I've been on the boards of companies where they're doing this. 100% of the conversation, Alex, with these companies, and I remember this from when I was in IT. I was an IT guy, Colin, one of the best in history. I could fix anything, PC support specialist. I was like you, I just got it done. When I was a PC support specialist, when I was in these meetings, it was at Sony. They specifically were hiring these folks because they could make them work longer hours for cheaper dollars, and they had no recourse.

• 59:05Jason Calacanis?

  And they said it explicitly in the IT department when I was there. These guys, and they might use a particular word for them because they were typically from India, they were derogatory, it was a different era, people were a little more racist back then, but, you know, five white guys sitting around the server room, you would hear people say, oh, we're going to get these Indian guys in the middle of America. They can't say no, they got to work weekends, they got to do the on-duty stuff, pager duty. And if they don't perform, we fire them, they got to leave the country within 30 days. So make these companies pay the difference between what the person would get paid as an American and what would they get paid as an H1B, and they should get audited for that. What are you paying the equivalent people at your company?

• 59:50Jason Calacanis?

  And by the way, there's a 10K, 20K fee for each of these, not one time, Alex, per year. So then, if it is truly a person of unique skill, Colin, this is some AI researcher, who's got a PhD from Oxford in whatever, and you got to have them, there's only 20 of them on the planet, great, then you don't mind paying 20,000 a year. They're getting paid 200, it's 220, it's 10% more. You just said you can't find the person, so pay up.

• 1:00:22Speaker 01

  All right. Answer your question. We have notes from producer Claude Jason. So there's a variety of fees here. So from our friends at Claude and Anthropic, registration fee, 215 filing fee, either 460 or 780, depending on the size of your company. There's a $500 fraud prevention fee. And then there is something called the ACWI fee, which is the American Competitivist and Workforce Improvement Act. And that is 750 for small companies, 1500 for enterprises. And then there's some other public fees as well that can go up to $4,000. So it's between $2,000 and $10,000 right now. But I think we should add another 10 or 20 K on top of that to your point. But that's the fee schedule. It's not simple.

• 1:01:03Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, the fee schedule is basically the cost of a laptop.

• 1:01:08Speaker 02

  It's kind of a joke, but you know, to your point earlier, Jason, and first off, sincerely appreciate the offer to reach out to their CEO. You know, in the follow up post this, I commented, you know, this is really a no win situation for, you know, the thousands of people in similar situations. You know, your recourse is limited. And, you know, okay, say it goes through, you pursue the legal avenue that a lot of people were yelling for. Do you really want to work for an organization two years later after you've, you know, already started off on this animosity? And the answer is no, nobody really, you know,

• 1:01:48Speaker 02

  wants, wants to go down that path. So it's, I think symptomatic of frankly, you know, the fees alone demonstrate it's massively flawed and the incentives are misaligned. But even the recourse side of it, you know, there's no, no winning. You know, it's just kind of a, hey, people are getting screwed, whether you're the recipient of it or somebody applying. It's just unfortunate situation across the board that really, really warrants, you know, some more attention.

• 1:02:16Jason Calacanis?

  All right. He's that Colin on X.com, T H A A A T C O L I N. And what's your speciality? What's your, what's your trade there? What's your skills that Colin?

• 1:02:28Speaker 02

  Operations leadership in the industrial manufacturing and energy space.

• 1:02:33Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, if anybody has any job leads for our guy Colin, thank you for coming on the program. DM him. I'm assuming you got your DMs open or at mention him. T H A A A T C O L I N. Let's try to find him a gig. Try to find a great American a gig. Appreciate you coming on the program, Colin.

• 1:02:50Speaker 02

  Thanks so much for having me. I really appreciate it.

• 1:02:52Speaker 01

  Thanks Colin. Go Birds.

• 1:02:54Jason Calacanis?

  All right. So we'll drop Colin off there and Alex, I just want to say, you know, a great job on a journalistic basis of crossing the Ts, dotting the Is. We did try to get New Relic to comment. We did try to get them here, you know, we we comment on the news here, but

• 1:03:11Jason Calacanis?

  gosh, you know,

• 1:03:14Jason Calacanis?

  you gotta respond to us or we can't include you here. So we tried for a couple of days here, right?

• 1:03:22Speaker 01

  I, yeah.

• 1:03:23Jason Calacanis?

  Couple of emails, couple of days, I hope, yeah.

• 1:03:25Speaker 01

  We got, I emailed them yesterday or the day before. I have to go check my email, but here's my read of what what happened here. New Relic wants to hire a particular person who's not in the United States for this director of product role. They filed the perm filing. They did the the minimum required by law. There's interesting regulations about this. There's links to this in the show notes, by the way, if you want to get deeper. And then Colin found it, applied, and they're like, the recruiters don't probably have access to the same thing. This is probably done at the executive level. And so I think he fell into an accidental rabbit hole. And then he got into a spicy email exchange, but I think this company wants to go hire that person and they're using a system to go do it. And I think it is a bit of an abuse of the setup. Just, this is just my own personal take of the situation.

• 1:04:09Jason Calacanis?

  Totally.

• 1:04:09Speaker 01

  I'm not trying to be, and you know what? Kinda sucks. And I don't like it, but I think that businesses are going to use the system we offer them to the maximum of their profit-seeking ability. And if they think this is the right person to go get, they're gonna try to go get them. So I think here we need to save companies from themselves by making this harder, as you said. I think there are some procedural tweaks, Jason, that would do a lot here to make things a bit more competitive for Americans. So here's to a slightly more intelligent regulatory future for us.

• 1:04:38Jason Calacanis?

  And with AI, this could get exacerbated. And young people, we talked about this two weeks ago on the show, young men. With college degrees, no difference between them and non-college degreed men in terms of unemployment now. So, you know, the whole situation to me is a bunch of little tremors, you know? Not aftershocks, but what are the things that happen before an earthquake? I guess tremors?

• 1:05:06Speaker 01

  The premonitions are, there's probably a, I'll grab that.

• 1:05:09Jason Calacanis?

  I'm sure there's a term of art, Producer Claude, will tell us any moment. But let's just say those tremors that occur before an earthquake. This could be what we're seeing here with static team size, what we're seeing here with these H1B shenanigans, these foreshocks. Thank you, Producer Claude.

• 1:05:28Speaker 01

  Shout out Claude, yeah.

• 1:05:29Jason Calacanis?

  Producer Claude is always there at our fingertips. And they got a browser coming, we'll talk about that on Friday, when we get our hands on it. You know, I think we're seeing some of these foreshocks of what could be an earthquake to come, which is young people, IT people, their jobs are at risk, and we have to decide as Americans and as a country, do we want to give a loophole for this? Now, if Americans are not doing a great job at these jobs, they're not capable of them, they're not performing, that's one issue. If there are places in the world where this work can be done, a lot cheaper, or you can outsource it to another firm, okay, that's fair game too.

• 1:06:13Jason Calacanis?

  You know, some people outsource their customer support, that's totally fine. But this little hacking and the frustration it's causing, and the lack of disclosure and transparency here, it's making me uncomfortable. I don't know, it just doesn't feel right.

• 1:06:35Speaker 01

  Well, Jason.

• 1:06:39Speaker 01

  Is business about doing what is, what is in our view morally right? Or is it about pursuing the maximum profit? And, and if you listen to my intellectual forefathers in the Chicago School of Economics, it's just about profit maximization and the market will sort itself out. So the question I think becomes how much economic inefficiency are we willing to take on to protect the domestic labor pool? And, you know, frankly, I sound, I sound a lot like a Mitt Romney Republican here, but I'm always a little skeptical of government intervention in these cases. But if we're going to have these systems in place designed to allow for this sort of thing, then we can definitely talk about how to make them as effective as possible. Cause we've already kind of answered the first question and we're talking about implementation versus direction.

• 1:07:21Jason Calacanis?

  Correct. All right. I, I, you know, I never like to make the show about me. But like two high profile podcasters, one a friend of mine, one a former friend. I mean, just in the same week, I'm a, you know, I'm getting blown up, Alex. And it all is around the same thing. The Trump president sees the polarization in politics have led a group of people on both sides to make me some sort of linchpin and trying to force me to pick a side. I can't be friends with Elon or Saks. I, I have to denounce this.

• 1:08:06Jason Calacanis?

  I gotta denounce that. I don't like politics all that much. It's, it is what it is. It's invaded every aspect of our lives in the technology industry specifically. But, uh, you know, I did the Bulwark podcast with Tim. And then he was on with Kara Swisher, who I was very friendly with for a long time, Tim Miller, who was fun. I liked Tim Miller. He's like a gay Republican who hates Trump.

• 1:08:37Jason Calacanis?

  And wants to see the Republican Party go back to the old one that he liked better. And he's a great broadcaster. So I went on a show before the election, after the election, I gave my sort of, I gave my opinions and then we'll get to the Sam Harris, dear friend of mine, and his comments in a moment, but I just want to respond to these, if I may.

• 1:09:00Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 1:09:00Jason Calacanis?

  Is it okay if I respond to them?

• 1:09:03Speaker 01

  This is totally fine. Just we have the pivot clip from the Caris Fisher show queued up. Just so everyone knows, producer Oliver did accelerate this about 20%, so maybe even 30%. So if they talk fast, it's because we're trying to get as many of their words into the show as possible.

• 1:09:16Jason Calacanis?

  My lord, and this was like six or seven minutes of them teeing off on me and Tim, Tim Miller kind of defended me, but okay, here we go.

• 1:09:23Speaker 01

  All right, here it is.

• 1:09:25Speaker 03

  I had your boy Jake Tal on a couple of weeks ago. I thought that was interesting. Just because it's a gag, it's a gag. I don't know if you feel this way, it's hard. I really want to in the second Trump term, like have people on who are less radicalized against him than me, just to kind of hash it out. It's important to hear of the other perspectives. The problem is most Trump supporters are full of shit. And so it's, and I don't want anybody on the podcast that's full of shit. I know you guys, I just, I want, only people on here are going to say what they really think. And so I can't have somebody on who like will say one thing on the podcast in the green room and be like, you know, he really, he really has gone too far on this thing. You know, that doesn't work.

• 1:09:57Speaker 04

  Which they do, just for people who don't know, they'll come up to you in a green room and be like, I agree with you. And you're like, you fucking asshole. Like, that's when I truly hate them.

• 1:10:04Jason Calacanis?

  All right, let's pause there for a second.

• 1:10:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, Jason Calle, too.

• 1:10:07Jason Calacanis?

  Let's pause. Okay, I agree with that statement. By the way, I know many partisan people and partisan people will be like, yeah, I don't actually believe this, but it's politically convenient for me to be all in on Kamala or all in on Biden or all in on Trump or JD Vance or whatever it happens to be. Tim Cook's bringing gold bars with little, you know, glass things on it to the White House to make sure he can get what he needs to get done. People, you know, Zuckerberg was censoring all kinds of stuff, you know, on his platform. Sacks went from being, you know, independent freethinker to part of the

• 1:10:51Jason Calacanis?

  administration and being lockstep. When you're part of the administration, you're lockstep, right? So as broadcasters.

• 1:10:59Jason Calacanis?

  Yourself, myself, Tim, Cara, Kara Swisher. They are correct that people are full of shit. I think we both agree on that. Yeah, Alex, people are full of shit when they're partisan and they're speaking for their political party. Okay.

• 1:11:16Speaker 01

  Very much so.

• 1:11:17Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so let's continue. I'm with them so far. She kind of is like my boy. You know what? She used to consider me my boy. She loved me for a long time. We were very friendly.

• 1:11:27Speaker 01

  We're getting, we're getting to that. Let's hear it from Kara.

• 1:11:32Speaker 03

  At least we'll say what he disagrees with Trump, which I think he's at least telling the truth to me.

• 1:11:36Speaker 04

  Well, he's an interesting, I've known him for 30, 40 years now. He was a media person. He ran a bunch of tech stuff and, you know, he's kind of a, you know, jazz hands kind of fella like that. I don't know what else to put. He's really loathsome to Scott for reasons like undetermined, probably jealousy.

• 1:11:51Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, let's pause there for a second.

• 1:11:52Speaker 04

  One of the things, we used to be friends.

• 1:11:55Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, so the whole thing with Scott was he was doing all these terrible takes, like Tesla was going to zero, Uber was going to zero, Robinhood was going to zero, and Jace Crew. So the whole internet was having fun with Scott, and I think Scott likes to give crazy predictions. Scott said at the beginning of the Trump administration, he was dumping all his American stocks and buying European stocks because he thought America was going to be in decline. And that's another professor call takes.

• 1:12:22Speaker 01

  Jason, for people who are for Scott Galloway, who's also a co-host with Kara Swisher on her show.

• 1:12:28Jason Calacanis?

  Right, so I don't really have a major problem with him. I did have one problem with him, which is he went after Sheryl Sandberg and he said some very nasty stuff about her being a widow. And that was, he says some very dark things. And he says he's got depression issues or anxiety issues about the Trump presidency. So I get it. He's got Trump derangement syndrome, or he's tilted, or whatever he happens to be. He's honest about that, that he can't stop thinking about stuff and he's ruminating. But Dave was a good friend of mine, and Dave died too young. And then, you know, to then make...

• 1:13:08Jason Calacanis?

  Cheryl's, you know, job and career at Facebook somehow related to her being a widow, I found incredibly distasteful, and that did piss me off. But other than that, I really don't think about Scott Galloway all that much. It was just funny when he was making these ridiculous, you know, reverse Kramer kind of predictions that everybody in the industry was like, oh, my God, this guy makes terrible predictions, you know, and I wish him well. He's a good broadcaster. Let's keep going. Here we go. We'll keep going. And here we go.

• 1:13:40Speaker 04

  Stayed at his house and stuff like that. And his need to suck up to power is really quite distasteful to me. And, you know, he's sort of like the clown to Elon or whatever that group of people he's on the podcast with all. I feel bad because I thought he was very clever and actually one of the early media entrepreneurs and a really enthusiastic person. But, you know, one of the things that I always had a problem in our relationship was that he was, he couldn't do hard things. Like, he was a very big proponent of Travis Kalanick until everybody turned on Travis Kalanick, and then he was against Travis Kalanick.

• 1:14:10Jason Calacanis?

  Let's pause that for a second here. The last thing value I have is loyalty. That's completely incorrect. When Travis went through everything, I was the one person going on CNBC defending him through all that. So that's just factually incorrect. I mean, I took many arrows. You remember, because you were doing journalism at that time, Alex, and you remember me being out there all the time saying, hey, listen, yeah, Uber made this mistake, Uber made that mistake. Sometimes it's these mistakes and these struggles and these crucible moments that build the entrepreneur. I think Travis is one of the great entrepreneurs of our time. I've been friends with him forever. So I never, ever, my loyalty never wavered for them. In terms of being a suck up to power, I'm fabulously wealthy and I say things about powerful people all the time that I get in trouble for. So that is the opposite of my-

• 1:14:55Jason Calacanis?

  Sometimes on this show. On this show. It's like the opposite of my lived experience. You have no idea how much I've pissed off the Trump administration and Saks and everybody. These people are tweaked all the time. I'm a moderate. I'm not part of either party. No matter how many times I say this, the left says I'm too sucking up to the right, and the right says I'm not sucking up enough, and I'm a libtard who listens to MS- DNC. So if you want to be a true independent or moderate, this is what happens. People just try to frame you in a very strange way. I am funny at times. I am the life of the party. Clown gesture.

• 1:15:35Speaker 01

  What does she mean by jazz hands?

• 1:15:37Jason Calacanis?

  She uses jazz hands. That's like one of her broadcaster behavioral tics. When she doesn't have a formed opinion, she just like a tic says jazz hands. Oh, it's all jazz hands. But I think jazz hands means you're kind of distracting people from the real issue. I think I'm kind of the opposite. People get really upset at me that I say what I said about Facebook last week when I teed off on them, remember? When I teed off on Zuckerberg. So people, I'm kind of known for my rants. But yeah, I'm not known for my flashy distractions. I'm kind of, people tell me all the time to shut up and not make it so personal when I talk about these topics. So anyway, let's keep going.

• 1:16:16Speaker 01

  All right.

• 1:16:16Jason Calacanis?

  Keep going here. Oh, my God.

• 1:16:19Speaker 03

  That's what I thought it was interesting to see that because one of the interesting things about the interview was like, because that's his nature. He was totally candid about the fact, one of the things that I tried to get to, I'd be interested in your thoughts on this is like, why did all of these billionaires become putty in Trump's hands? Like, I get that in some, in some cases, they want access. It's about power. It's about money. If Trump's gonna act like authoritarian, they need to do it. But like, in other cases, they didn't really need to, and they did it anyway. And why? And he, and he's just blunt about the fact that like, Trump, you know, responds to their phone calls. Biden never did. Their feeling, their little fifties were hurt that Elon wasn't invited to some summit. And like, and so I thought it was like, interesting just how blunt he was about that. But like, sucking up to power was like, the reason why these guys do it. Like, basically, that's it. That's no deeper than that.

• 1:16:58Speaker 04

  Which he is very good at, let me just say. And again, I like Jason because I feel that we don't speak now. And because he won't speak to me because they're mad at me. And I'm like, don't you have any fucking balls, Jason? You know, we have a pretty good relationship. And he won't because he's like, because it's sort of like the court jester in a lot of ways to those people. I think, you know, he doesn't have as much money as they do. He has a lot of money, but not like that. Like, and so I, I think he's often wanted to monetize that podcast better than they do. And it's degenerated into, he used to run a bunch of other startup events that I really liked, actually. I thought they were very clever. They were sort of, again, jazz hands a lot. But I just feel like he had, he just has made a trade that I don't love. And I wish he would call me because I'm like, it's fine to argue, Jason.

• 1:17:35Jason Calacanis?

  Maybe I'll call her right now on air. Should I call Kara Swisher on air right now? Just have her go on air? I'll just call her on air.

• 1:17:44Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, this is, I think Kara's unique style is like hit you twice and then give you two or three compliments. Yeah. Yeah. It's, um, what people don't know is All In makes much, much, much, much, much more money than Pivot does. And it's higher in the rankings than Pivot every weekend. So I think a little of this might be reverse jealousy that that show is so popular. But it makes a magnitude more money than Pivot, like multiples already. And Pivot's been around forever and this is like a four-year-old podcast. So it's really not about money. And then in terms of money, like, yeah, what I learned about money is after $10 million, it doesn't matter. And I have much more than that.

• 1:18:29Jason Calacanis?

  So I don't care about money. I've never cared about money. And maybe, maybe that's a problem for people that I'm not motivated. If I was motivated by money, I would be sucking up to Zuckerberg. I would be sucking up to, you know, I wouldn't have said what I said about Palmer Lucky in his instance. I wouldn't say what I said about Zuckerberg last week. I wouldn't say what I said about OpenAI today. I think I do a pretty good job calling balls and strikes. I just am very pragmatic here and honest with Tim on his podcast. People on the left were over the moon giving money to the Democratic Party to get all

• 1:19:10Jason Calacanis?

  kinds of concessions around DEI and all kinds of concessions around regulation for AI. And now there's a ton of the same people, same people who flip to Trump because it's good for their business. This is what business people do. You just mentioned in the last one, what do capitalists do? They manipulate politicians. They back them with money to get the result they want. This has nothing to do with Jason Calacanis. This has to do with how the world has always worked.

• 1:19:41Jason Calacanis?

  The end.

• 1:19:43Speaker 01

  Let's move on to our second clip. This is from, I think, is this Sam Harris's podcast that he's on?

• 1:19:47Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, and by the way, Sam and I are very good friends for a long time. I do talk to Sam once in a while, and I did invite him to the summit, All In Summit, I did invite him on the podcast. But he is like Kara Swisher, and I'm very similar to Scott Galloway, they are, they think the Trump presidency is existential. They think that it's the end of the empire. They think it's the end of democracy. I actually don't think that. I think all the systems we've built here, you know, the founding fathers and the Constitution, I think it's all going to stand up to the test of time, because I just watched it stand up to the last two. That's just my personal belief. But Sam and Elon had a pretty bad falling

• 1:20:31Jason Calacanis?

  out. I introduced them to each other. I used to have dinner with both of them. We would go and talk about AI, we would talk about religion, we talked about philosophy for hours. I have had conversations with the two of them together for 100 hours probably in my life. And it's very sad to me that they had a breakup, but I guess somebody asked Sam why he was never on the All In Podcast. Here we go.

• 1:20:56Speaker 05

  What happened to your appearance on the All In Podcast? I guess I can answer that. We never got that, right?

• 1:21:00Speaker 06

  I never got that invitation. I wonder why.

• 1:21:04Jason Calacanis?

  I did. I did invite him on.

• 1:21:05Speaker 05

  I saw Jason post something about.

• 1:21:08Speaker 06

  Yeah, you sent that to me. He posted on X, I think, that he was, I mean, as though we already had a scheduled date. Like, he said, you know, I'm gonna have Ezra Klein on the podcast, I'm gonna have Sam Harris on the podcast. This is like coming up on the podcast. I think they did have Ezra Klein. I mean, I know why, I know why they, first of all, I wasn't waiting for an invitation to go on the podcast. So it's, I'm not annoyed that I haven't gotten one. It was just sort of odd that they said I was coming on and then there's been no communication. But the reason why is obvious, right? It's like, they can't say anything too negative about our former mutual friend Elon Musk, because they're just... They're not willing to give any critical perspective on him as a person.

• 1:21:52Speaker 06

  I mean, there's just, there's just too much sunk cost there. I mean, there's a, I think a misperceived sense of loyalty there, I think. At least on Jason's part. I mean, the other guys, I think, just agree that Elon is a genius and, and super ethical and, and leading the world in all the right directions. And so that, I don't think they want me to sound off on that at all.

• 1:22:12Speaker 05

  I, I thought Jason might want you on as some support for some of his positions.

• 1:22:15Speaker 06

  He might. I think Jason, you know, I haven't spoken to him in a long time. I think Jason is a great guy. He's a, an incredibly loyal friend, and I think to a fault, he's a loyal friend. And I think, I think that's where, I think that's what, his master ethic is loyalty. And in this case, he's, um, he's being loyal to two friends by not having a conversation about one of them.

• 1:22:36Speaker 05

  All right. Well, it's a, it's a great podcast, so maybe they'll invite you on. It'll be fun to hear you go into the, uh, minds then over there.

• 1:22:41Jason Calacanis?

  So, um, I did invite Sam on, but I did not have a date. So he's correct. I don't know if he didn't get my email or the phone number I texted him on is no longer valid. But I haven't talked to him probably in a year or so. And I will reach out to him as well. It is not easy for me to have high-profile friends who are very close to, uh, and then criticize them publicly. If I do the criticism, I will do it privately. I'll have a conversation. You can be sure, many conversations with all of my friends, and a lot of the reason I have these friendships is because I am a person who will say, I think this is a mistake. I think this is a mistake. And you've seen me on this very program or on All In, I think last week, I said,

• 1:23:26Jason Calacanis?

  yeah, no shame in the safety driver game. I think what Elon's doing by putting safety drivers in is the right move. I think people are putting too much pressure on the self-driving space writ large. Um, so I don't know if you consider that a criticism or an attaboy, like that's a good thing. But I also, when Alex Jones was put back on the platform, said, I don't think he should do that. Right? I was like, and I came on the pod with him and I was like, I challenged Alex Jones on what he did with, uh, this is on a live stream. So I do not publicly criticize Travis, Elon, Sacks, et cetera, because they're my friends. If I have a criticism, I'll give it to them, but I will debate topics with them all the time. And I'm loyal to Sam and I'm loyal to Elon and Travis and all my friends. I'm loyal to you, Alex.

• 1:24:10Jason Calacanis?

  I do think loyalty is my operating system. Perhaps it's out of fault sometimes because, you know, I didn't comment on the Elon and Trump breakup. But since that time, I have sounded off on the America Party frequently, which I can tell you, my Republican friends are very upset at me about.

• 1:24:28Speaker 01

  Because you're talking slightly in favor that they're worried about that splitting their electoral?

• 1:24:34Jason Calacanis?

  Sure.

• 1:24:35Speaker 01

  Possibilities?

• 1:24:36Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. They very much want Elon in their camp. My position has been, and I've said it on this pod and I think I've said it on All In, it's time for a third party. It's a better thing for Elon to do, rather than pick a party, to say, these are my three or four main issues. Pronatalism, energy independence, you know, less regulation and controlled spending and Doge. These are my four principles that the America Party cares about for the long-term success. And if anybody signs on to this platform, I will support them in their Senate or House run. And that's what I said very publicly to him on Twitter.

• 1:25:19Jason Calacanis?

  People are not, you can be sure that JD, Vice President JD Vance and our public servant, David Sacks are not happy about that. I don't think they would be very happy because they've been saying they want Elon back in their camp. I don't think Elon should be in the Republican Party. I don't think he should be in the Democratic Party. I think he should rise above the fray and just say, these are important issues for me and I'm putting my dollars in the same way Grover Norquist did his pledge to not increase spending, I'm sorry, his pledge to not increase taxes. There should be a similar pledge to not increase the deficit and Elon could champion that with the America Party and whatever other things he chooses to, as any American can.

• 1:26:02Speaker 01

  Did you read The Moral Landscape by Sam Harris?

• 1:26:05Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 1:26:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, me too. It's just funny to me that a lot of stuff that I also read Letters to a Christian Nation by him. And so it's fun that, I was a philosophy major, so this is kind of pertinent to my world. But it's fun to see utilitarian philosophers mixing it up in the podcast streets.

• 1:26:20Jason Calacanis?

  I basically helped him start his podcast when 15 years ago, when I was in LA, he came by my studio. I showed him the studio. I said, hey, I'm interested in that. How does it work? And I did a Q and A with him on Mahalo, like of, like people asking Sam questions. I showed him how to do it. I told him what microphones to use and offered my support. And he was like, yeah, I think I'm going to start one. And so, I mean, I'm not taking any credit for his podcast, but I think he found out about podcasting, I think essentially through watching me in the early days of it 15 years ago, and much to the chagrin of our mutual book agent, because I don't know if Sam's dropped a book since he started podcasting, because podcastings are kryptonite for book authors.

• 1:27:06Speaker 01

  Because you don't have to wait 18 months to have it come out. All right, Jason, let's, let's leave it there. We have tons to get to.

• 1:27:11Jason Calacanis?

  Any thoughts? What do you, what do you think? You have thoughts, Alex?

• 1:27:15Speaker 01

  I feel, I feel you're just serving me up small landmines today just to stop one. I am not going to get in between you and your friends. I do think the point about loyalty is very fair. I think it's hard to, I'm a very loyal person in, in my personal life, and that does definitely affect how I view people and things. Just to put this in concrete terms, Jason, I think you've been very positive about Doge, partially because it's Elon's product or was. And I think that has led you to focus less on the impacts it's had on the research community and so forth.

• 1:27:49Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:49Speaker 01

  And you've been more positive about it than, than I am. I have a very different view about it than you. But, but I'll just say this, if you have to criticize someone saying that they're occasionally too loyal is a relatively modest criticism.

• 1:28:02Jason Calacanis?

  Boy, it's just so weird to have so much focus on having to pick a side. And it's only since

• 1:28:12Jason Calacanis?

  These last couple of election cycles that people can't maintain friendships with people who they disagree with. This is why I like Tim Miller, because, I mean, we had a really good discussion. He was pretty fair about it. And the only ground rule I gave him was, I don't speak for anybody but myself. So if you keep asking me, like, what does Sacks think of this, or Chama think of this, or Travis think of this, or Elon think of this? Like, I'm not a proxy for any of those people. I just say what I think. So just, you know, if you ask me that question, I just told him, I'm gonna just say, you should ask them. Be more appropriate. But, gosh, just, you don't have to be at war with everybody. You can maintain friendships with people you disagree with is my, my closing, you know,

• 1:28:55Jason Calacanis?

  cherry on the top of all this, folks. Don't take it all so seriously. Trump will be out of office in three to 12 years. And AOC will be in office for eight to 14. Who knows? You know, when these things flip over, and it's AOC and Mondami as the president and vice president, man, you could still be friends with the left. You don't have to pick a side. You could be right above, you know, you could be in the middle, or you could be above the fray. I choose to be in the middle and above the fray, because that's what I honestly think. You're always gonna get balls and strikes from J. C. Al. Period. Full stop.

• 1:29:31Speaker 01

  All right, friends. We'll see you back on Friday. This has been Twist. He's at Jason. I'm at Alex. We'll see you then.