The Bulwark Podcast - Jason Calacanis: The Silicon Valley Vibes Are Still Pro-Trump

Episode Date: June 9, 2026

Trump's approval rating may be near record lows, but tech tycoons and powerhouse CEOs are still all-in with bending the knee to Trump and bearing him gifts. If he turned America into an oligarchy, they'd be OK with that too. Anything to gut regulations and keep their taxes low—even if regular Americans might soon be looking for a pitchfork. Jason tries to explain the view from the tech world to the rest of us. Plus, AI job displacement, Elon's IPO grift, and a counterfactual had Kamala been president.Jason Calacanis joins Tim Miller show notes Jason's "All-In" podcast  Jason's company, Launch  Get 20% off when you go to trustandwill.com /BULWARK

Hey, everybody, a few notes before the pod today. I taped yesterday afternoon with Jason Callicanus, because I'm about to hit a plane to my father's retirement party, which we're excited about. For the newbies, Jason is a little bit of a departure from our usual material here on the Buller podcast. He has a podcast for his own called the All In podcast. And his colleagues, two of them were very active Donald Trump supporters. One of them, David Balsacks, ended up going into the podcast. He has a podcast for his own called the All In podcast. And his colleagues, two of them, two of them were very active Donald Trump supporters, one of them, David Ballsax, ended up going into the, the administration. And then another one is kind of a, it was Trump curious. Jason was the most middle of the road of the crew. And we did our first interview, God, a couple years ago now, before the 2024 election and I've done a check-in every, you know, six, nine, 12 months. So we did one of those check-ins today. We talked a bunch of out the stuff that he really knows about, which is Silicon Valley and VC world, and then talked about what the vibe shift is looking like on Trump. It's not shifting as much as we would like. A little spoiler alert. So that's what's on this podcast. We also have the next level podcast. So if you're looking for just a politics fix,

you can just pop on over to the next level feed, me, Sarah, and JVL, as we do every Tuesday. So go give that a listen, download it if you're not subscribed to the next level feed. I guess one more thing before we get to this show, Jason's a big Knicks fan. So we discussed the potential of a Trump curse. And he was worried about a Trump curse. It turned out that he was right. Trump showed up to the game, made it a massive hassle for everybody in Midtown, New York, salted the vibes, fell asleep. Trump actually fell asleep for a little while. He rested his eyes, lengthy rest, about a 22-second eye rest during the third quarter and then he left early. So as a result, the next 13-game winning streak is over. Don't know who else to point to on that, except for Donald

Trump would really be something if the whole series, the whole vibe of New York, the whole, you know, the whole trajectory of society shifts because Donald Trump decided he was a 12-year-old and wanted to do, what is Jay Mark calling it, the make-a-wish presidency, the big presidency. You guys remember the movie Big? The Big Presidency, where he gets to be a little boy that does fun stuff with all the grown-ups. So that's what happened last night. I'm enjoying it. I've got some buddies who are listeners who are next fans. I'm sorry that Trump hexed you, but hard not to enjoy it. So anyway, stick around for me and J-Cal. It gets a little hot

in the second half. So hopefully I'll give you something to get your dander up. And if not, go check us out on the next level. And we'll be back tomorrow with our regularly scheduled programming. Appreciate you. Welcome to the Bullwark podcast. I'm your host Tim Miller. Happy to welcome back to the show, a journalist and entrepreneur turned angel investor. He's the co-host the All In podcast. He's the best of the four, not really a competitive category. He just hosted the Liquidity Summit, a private investor summit for LPs, fund managers, and elite entrepreneurs.

That's fancy. It's Jason Calacanus. What's up, man? How you doing, brother? Big fan of the show. Nice to be here for my second appearance. After five, you get the Blazer. Yeah.

Isn't it a third? I think it's third. I don't know. I think you should make it five. It is your third appearance. Is it my third? Okay, sure. Well, you know, I'm a big fan.

I went back and check the archive. Good. Your last appearance was at the six-month mark of Trump's turn. And we did a little check-in. Now, like a year in six months, almost. It hasn't been quite a year. So we'll do a little update. We'll get to that.

But first, I just for some people know, we're taping this Monday afternoon. And so this is a week Tuesday show. So we don't know if the Knicks of One Game 3 tonight. I'm surprised to see you at your home studio, because I've seen you not quite courtside, like, you know, row two, row three, semi-courtside. I had courtside.

for the wrap-up game in Atlanta, the massacre. Yep. And I flew there with my brother. I went to Philly with Ben Stiller, my friend, a fellow name. We were courtside for the Philly game. They tried to block us. I was at two of the MSG games, but like you said, third row, because even with my incredible micro celebrity,

and you understand micro podcast celebrity, you just did a tour. You leverage it a little better than me. Your shamelessness, I have to give you. And you're out there on X just being like, has court side for me. I don't have to, I don't have to share. Well, I mean, I pay for them to be, to be honest, but even still. Yeah, but I do use the power. I mean, if you, what's the point of having a million followers on Twitter if you can't just use it for customer support? I agree with that. That's fair. Like if something's not wrong. And then, um,

Cleveland, they blocked us from getting courtside. So I had third row. And I went to the spurs, both games. I am going to predict tonight the Knicks are going to win. And I think they're going to demolish them by 15 points, 20 points. Why are you not going? You're scared of Donald Trump. You don't want to deal with the hassle. You're worried he's hexing your squad. There's some bad juju here with Trump going.

There is some bad juju. It's bad juju. He should not have done this. You should not make the fans show up three hours early. And he got rid of the watch party, which has become this huge tradition. Yeah. So listen, he's the president. He can do what he wants.

But I would have preferred he didn't do it. I was going to come in for it. But I've decided I'll just come in for game four. And it's kind of a dick move. Yeah. I mean, and he's even a fan. Like, do you think he can name anyone for the 1999 team? I mean, I guess you ain't.

He used to go to games, but I don't know if he went to the games primarily because he was friends with J.D. Or if he went because it was a celebrity thing to do. But he has not been going since. So I don't put him in the Timothy Chalameh. No. Spike Lee. He's not part of our group. And I put myself into that group just based on fandom, not celebrity, to be clear.

Well, based on your strong prediction on the Knicks, I'm going to fade you based on some of the predictions you've made that we're going to get into from the Trump term. Okay, here we go. Yeah. I'm fading on the, I'm not going to Spurs tonight. Are you a Pelicans fan or something? I'm nuggets.

I'm nuggets. I'm not getting for nuggets. And, yeah, rough playoffs for us. But I'll bet on the Spurs tonight, modest wager on draft kings. And we'll see. The listeners will know who's right. Before we get to Trump, you know, because who knows how that'll go. I want to kind of get into your main area of expertise.

first. We want to talk kind of what's happened in Silicon Valley World AI. I don't know if you'll take this as a compliment or an insult. I feel like you're a fair arbiter of conventional wisdom on like where the Valley investor class is on things, like how things are going. Yeah. And so rather than putting on your Jason hat, I just want to start there. Like where is the Valley right now on the economy broadly and also the AI stuff in particular? Let's start with AI. AI is like every previous technology wave put together and then times 10 in terms of the impact, the opportunity, and just the capabilities of what's happening. Last time I was on the show, or maybe it was two times ago, we had a clip go viral where I said, listen, Amazon is going to be lights out in their factories. It's all going to be robotics.

And they have Zooks, so they're going to be delivering packages. And the idea that a human would touch a package between, like, you clicking order on Amazon and it's showing up your doorstep, that will be insane or farcical in but, you know, three, four, five years. That went crazy. Shortly after that, Andy Jassy wrote a memo saying, hey, we're going to be going all in on AI. We're going to have a different staffing level.

He laid off a bunch of people. And then the secret memo got leaked that they weren't going to hire 600,000 jobs. And the PR team is like, How do we deal with the fact that we're not going to be hiring humans anymore? Maybe we should give money to toys for tots. I don't know if you saw this. Not cars for kids, notably, given some of their baggage. There it could be, yeah.

And then if you watch, there was the figure robotic company, also doing humanoid robots, had like a telethon where they had one of their robots sort packages. And so this timeline is increasing. So it is a huge opportunity. and the tokens, which equal intelligence, are so compelling for people to use that people are spending too much money on them. They're like going crazy using them, and you've had to reign in employees. For every story you hear that this technology is going to change everything, you'll have people who don't know how to apply it. But we use two terms in the industry, AGI and then super intelligence.

to keep it super simple. AGI means the artificial intelligence is as smart as the smartest human being. Super intelligence means it's smarter than all collective human intelligence for all time, and it will solve problems we can't even think about, like we can't even conceive of. The race is really for super intelligence. AGI is like a little waypoint along the way. And that waypoint prints money.

It prints money. And we have this grand debate on All In all the time. publicly about job displacement, job destruction, universal basic income. And people in our industry have delusions of grandeur because we've done big things, right? So you do have this God complex amongst the anthropic people or, you know, Sam, Alton, Elon, the whole group really has done some things that have changed the world dramatically. And then some of them are drama queens. and both and some are both some are both yeah

some fit both okay so I was listening to one of your debates maybe from two weeks ago on the show where you were more concerned about job displacement than some of your co-panel's I was talking a little bit of Derek Thompson last week smart cap

yeah really smart what he was basically saying it's like I don't know he's like I know that's not what I'm supposed to do because I'm supposed to do an explainer podcast and he's like I hear compelling arguments for the fact that you know, AI is going to, you know, actually create so many efficiencies and so many potential opportunities that there'll be job growth. And he's like, I see the apocalyptic version as well, you know, where there's huge displacement. Obviously, there'll be displacement in certain types

of industries no matter what. But, you know, the question is how is it on balance? I find it interesting that like there was a lot of, I feel like, conversation about this over the last year. There continues to be, but like feeling like it was imminent. And I don't know, I sense a little bit of a vibe shift where like maybe it's maybe this stuff isn't happening as imminently as people thought what do you make of that yeah so multiple things can be occurring like a storm right you can have multiple components of this weather pattern and some people it's going to flood you know their neighborhood and other people it's going to the weather in san francisco might be more like los angeles eventually right in l.a might turn into a hellscape and be like far too hot so the weather system is very

complex. And so Derek's right, hard to predict. So what do we know? What are CEOs of companies and what's their behavior? It's always helpful to just look from first principles like a game on the field. You had Jack at square, block, just cut the team in half. Now, in technology, we always bloated these companies. Why? There were two reasons. One of them, strategic, one of them sinister. The strategic reason was, let's hire people, because we're continuing to grow. for a year or two from now. If we hire ahead, then we'll be able to move faster. Okay, that's strategic.

Every company's been doing it for 30 years. The sinister one is what Google did early in the days, and I literally had this conversation with the principals there, Sergey and Larry, many times. They would hire people based on intelligence, pedigree, Stanford, Harvard, MIT. Hort them. And they would hoard them.

They would hoard talent. But it was not just so they could use it. It was so those people didn't create a competitive company to Google. Right. So it was a blocker strategy in addition to, hey, we have this natural resource. Pretty sinister. Now, with AI, you can get rid of middle management. What is the job of middle management?

It's to set up meetings, keep people on track, provide TPS reports, project updates, all that stuff is being done perfectly and better and more consistently by AI. the number of note takers that pop off when you start a meeting on Zoom now, like Notion has one, Zoom has one, Granola. It's like how many versions of this meeting do we have to have records of? So that whole job slice is going to be gone. Then you take self-driving, that's going to be gone, truck driving, that's going to be gone. Factory workers, that's going to be gone.

You know, simple food production, making bowls, slop bowls at whatever bowl place you like to order from, that's going to be all robotic. the writing is on the wall. The Starbucks has come back. Starbucks is kind of a countervailing story to that narrative because they got rid of... There is going to be what makes us uniquely human. We might drive more human experiences. So that would be the addition.

So, hey, this thing is so profitable. Maybe we should add some services or add some people. There's nothing more compelling to a chief operating officer or a VP of ops than the ability to replace humans with technology. They love it. They love it. How do I know this? Because for the past 10 years,

I have invested in and been pitched on companies explicitly. Explicitly. Tim, our company gives you the ability to get rid of all cashiers

at your quick serve restaurant. Our technology allows you to get rid of the person making french fries at your restaurant. Over and over again, that's been the pitch in Silicon Valley for decades.

and it has increased massively. So when technology people say it's not happening, or they say all jobs are going away, they're talking about two different things. One is trying to protect Donald Trump from supporting AI relentlessly and that job displacement happening, which liberals and America First people are not buying for good reason.

And on the other side, it's unrealistic to think that an AI first employee can't get a job. If you're an AI first employee and you know how to deploy these tools, you will get many jobs. So long term, I think will be okay. Short term, you could see a lot of blue-collar jobs,

a lot of middle management jobs, get retired. And that's going to cause chaos. Okay, my last thing on this, the other thing that people worry about is the new jobs, like new out of college. I know that you have a big internship program. I was just talking to some interns here

about this question. It was funny. I saw this Bill Mark clip. I kind of hate to hand it to Bill Mark because he's had some, he's had some misses lately, particularly in the war. But he had this funny bit about what's happening in colleges right now, which is that like college papers have just become a circle jerk. It's like a computer circle jerk, the circle jerk of nonsense,

where the AI is writing the paper and then AI is grading the paper. So it's like two computers talking to each other. No one's actually learning anything. No one's getting real feedback. It's a very dystopian concept. He made the joke. I asked a couple, you know, recent college grads about it. And they were like, yeah, oh, yeah, that's exactly what's happening.

And this is why they're booing at commencement speeches when you evoke AI. This is the first generation that hacked their way through school and felt like they didn't learn anything because they were just using AI tools. And they felt their teachers were using the same AI tools to teach a lesson plans. And so they're like, yeah, my whole college experience was AI slop. They got a reason to boo. And if you're running a company right now, the concept of training somebody for two years to be productive or a year to be productive eventually when you could train an AI to do that, Toby from Shopify is a good friend said anytime anybody wants to do a hire and they put it in a request, they have to prove that they haven't tried to do that job with AI first. Very logical approach for a company, but devastating for those first two or three rungs.

of the latter. That's why this feels a lot different than, you know, minimum wage debates, which we can get into. This feels a lot difference than immigration and people working illegally because elite people who racked up 150, 250K in debt now can't get the first rung of the ladder. That's going to cause a whole different level of hand-wringing here. Yeah. Their parents are going to be mad. Talk about who, you know who votes? the 55-year-old parent of a 22-year-old who just spent $150,000 on college and their kid can't get a job. Infuriating. That is a person that fucking votes and donates and who...

They're vocal. Yeah, and who's vocal. So anyway, that'll be interesting to see all that play out. I guess one more thing on this, on the politics, speaking about the vocal pushback, the other area is the data centers. Where do you fall down on this? Yeah. On the great data center debate.

Just so people understand my politics, my contemporaries on the podcast like to paint me as a LibTard. And it's kind of like a straw man thing. But you voted for Trump this last time. I never said who I voted for it because I'm trying to remain independent. You strongly alluded to the fact that you were interested. You're Trump curious. So you're the live on the pod and you were Trump curious. We'll get into.

I'm a moderate. And have always been an independent moderate. I voted 60% Democrat and 40% Republican in my career. I just vote for the best person. If you were to tell me I could vote for who is the private equity Republican that everybody hated so long. Romney? Romney. I would like vote for Romney in a heartbeat right now to have like a centrist.

I might even vote for Pence to have a right-wing conservative, but who's normal. I would, I'm voting for normal. That's what I would like to have. So just so people understand my politics coming into this, I'm an independent and pick people generally that way. But your question is. Obviously, the big tech people are, you know, make very passionate arguments about all these data centers are needed. They're needed to fund all that compute that you were talking about. earlier, there's high demand for these tokens.

You know, they are creating jobs in the communities. Within the communities themselves, there's just been a lot of pushback about, you know, environmental concerns, displacement, electrical costs, et cetera, et cetera. I'm just wondering where you think that's headed. It's a great debate filled with a lot of fud, fear, uncertainty, and doubt by one side. And then, you know, it is essential for our industry to get these things up and running and to get them up quick. Because it turns out when you put a lot of this hardware on a problem, it can, in fact,

solve it. So sometimes the brute force of it does work and the demand is off the charts for access to more tokens and to lower the price of tokens. As you know, everybody talks about Jevin's paradox, which basically means if you make something cheaper, people use it more. If you want an example of that, like you expand the 405 freeway by two lanes, all of a sudden traffic moves quicker for like two months and then people move a little further out and it gets, it induces more traffic. It induces more On the data center side, my politics are very much in favor of state rights and local rights. I like the fact that if people in Maine or New Hampshire have a problem with this, the folks in Pennsylvania might seize that opportunity or Texas. Texas wants every data center you can build.

We have the largest install base of solar and wind outside of China. I mean, this place loves energy, and they don't care where it comes from oil, gnat gas. They're indifferent solar. As long as it makes a buck, that's all they care about is. This is an economic positive. The thing about water is a fake news story. The thing about energy and infecting the grid is a real story in some cases.

So you have to kind of parse that. The water thing is fake because all these systems use closed loop, which basically means the water goes in a pipe. and it evaporates a little bit, but it uses much less than the almonds or golf courses in the country. Yeah, the fucking almonds. The fucking almonds.

If you're out there drinking almond milk. It's a mid-nut anyway. I'll go pistachio all day. It's true. Who's eating all these. Cachews are incredible. You put a cashew with the date. You're in good shape.

But anyway, so the water is a fake issue. I like the fact that people are competing for these. Let the states and the people who don't want it, ban it. Let the states that do want it benefit from it. That's one of the great reasons why the United States is so successful is because we have an AB testing process. We can multivariate test something. And what they're doing now is the data center folks are chasing power. And they're chasing power

that doesn't impact locals. So if you go to the Permian Basin and you get some gnat gas there and some solar and battery, you're not harming anybody. And great, you can build it to the cows, come home and putting them in space is the next thing. The third one you haven't heard about, but that you will is people are going to start giving free batteries and solar to people's homes. And then in the rack where the batteries are, they're going to put 10 of these Nvidia servers. So imagine I offered you for your home, hey, would you like solar and would you like battery? And would you like a free electricity bill? And you'd be like, yeah, what's the catch?

And it's like the catch is we're putting a mini data center on the side of your house. It's the same size as your, you know, existing HBAC. Water cooler or whatever. Water cooler. And that's going to be a real thing. And I think that'll be the bridge between now and space. So it's kind of a, it's kind of a non-issue. It's an interesting flag. That's a little dystopian. To be continued. Estate planning. Not that fun to think about. And easy to put off. You have to deal with lawyers and think about what would happen in the case of the worst. But it's one of those tasks that's hard to start. But gives you a peace of mind when you get it done. And our friends at Trust and Will make it easy. Trust and Will offers affordable. Attorney designed estate plan.

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Trust and will. Affordable estate plans. Priceless peace of mind. Go to trustinwill.com slash bulwark and get 20% off. That's trust and will.com slash bulwark to get your 20% off trust and will.com slash bulwark. I want to do Elon stuff for you into Trump. Here at Elon, buddy. or relatively buddy, just in the issue of transparency. Yeah, friends for, very close friends for a very long period of time.

So there's been a lot of critiques here at the bulwark over the manner in which the SpaceX IPO is going to happen, in part because of the fast tracking of the NASDAQ, breaking the traditional rules of how, you know, a new IPO gets into the NASDAQ. Also, I mean, Kara, your friend Kara Swisher was on last two couple weeks ago. She hates me. Karen Swisher is very angry. She is so angry. But I think on this case, right, which kind of got the valuation of the company being kind of absurd.

You know, there's like really one good company, which is the satellite business. And then you have like two not that profitable companies. One of them actually a shit company kind of tied on to the satellite business. And it's sort of absurd what the valuation is. Like what's the case for the Elon Nasdaq? Case one has never bet against Elon because he manifest things in the world. He's done pretty well betting against him on the process of cutting government funding through the Doge process because he totally failed at that.

And has inspired another round of it that looks like it's going to be quite successful. Well, I don't think Eli can get credit for all of government cuts everywhere. The program that he was in charge of fails. I think he did inspire it and put it in front of him. So did it work perfectly? But I think he inspired people to make a top political issue. We're talking about this 30 years ago. So I don't, you know.

And did they make any progress, I guess, is the question. But now you have people taking. it up realizing it's an important issue to Americans. But anyway, let's put that aside. Your question is about SpaceX. There's an incredible business in Starlink. Starlink has over 10 million people subscribing. That will wind up being the largest subscription business in the history of humanity.

Probably double what you see from Netflix. Why? Because they're going to go directly to your phone eventually. If you've seen the Starlink Mini, if you've seen the progress, they're putting it on boats. Most people are putting it on their houses who can afford to as a. a backup to their cable modem. Like if you're a broadcaster from home,

you might have Starlink as your backup. I assume you do. I don't, but I've been considering it reluctantly. Well, think about this. For $1,000 or less, you can have a backup and you make $20,000, $40,000 per podcast. How could you not have it as a backup? And you can get this router from Unify

that just automatically switches over. Putting that aside. I'm in Hurricane Country, so it would be wise. It would be very wise for you to get a battery pack that. I'll send you a link to the router that does the hot swapping. Okay. Thanks. Do you have a promo code at Jason? I don't for it. I have one for Roco if you want a GLP. If I could interest you in a GLP, yes. Here's the good news. That business alone will support the valuation.

The second business is... We'll support the $2 trillion valuation. Yeah, 1.75. For sure, for sure. Yeah. It's not inconceivable. 500 million to a billion people will have one of those. In other words, they'll be one for every 10 people on the planet, ballpark. That gets you to 700 million subscriptions. If you think that's crazy, just look at Netflix. They provide a service, Verizon gets past 100 million, and it's quite disruptive when it starts going to your phone.

I don't know if you've ever had to use the satellite version that's in the iPhone and you can get text messages. Their version of that's going to be much better, much, much better. And it's going to be sold to every phone. every phone on the planet will wind up paying a dollar a month to solving. Just to give a baseline. I hear you. It starts a great business.

I agree. But just to give a baseline on your honesty, do you think that Tesla is appropriately valued? All of Elon's companies get valued like venture capital businesses. Venture capitalists invest in like what is the next business that's going to drop, five years out, six years out, seven years out. Most public companies get valued on their existing performance. How much did you just sell this quarter, et cetera?

So if you look at Palantir, if you look at SpaceX and you look at Tesla, yes, they're essentially valued like a VC business, which means they're fully valued. And you can wait. You don't have to buy these stocks in the public market. You can short them. There are many devices for you to not participate in this. The reason why Tesla is doing particularly well and has kept its value is because of optimist and full self-driving. Optimus will be what that company will be remembered for. Huge opportunity. So what he keeps doing is. is he keeps building the future and then people value it as a venture business. So you're right. As a public company, the valuation doesn't match. For venture capitalists, it does match. It matches

what we do. What about the NASDAQ fast track part of us? Because this feels ridiculous. And those of us who are invested into index funds, we're forced to support Elon's grift. We don't like that. You do not need to be in index funds. And if it is unsustainable, a lot of people are in index funds. Well, I mean, if people really do have a problem with it, you could make a synthetic index fund without them in it. And if people do feel it's that way, Vanguard will take them out. It's still unfair, though. I mean, if you and I were starting a business and did an IPO, Aztec wouldn't change the rules for us. I'd be totally honest.

I don't know exactly how it came about. But I do think it's a distinct possibility that the company will trade at, you know, $2.5 trillion and then come back down to $1.2 trillion. Many people I talk to say it's undervalued at a trillion. They say it's overvalued at $2 trillion. So we're in the general neighborhood of where this will be valued properly. If it trades at $1 trillion, it's undervalued. If it trades at $2 trillion, most sharps, people who are in this business who I talk to, you mentioned the liquidity conference.

Most folks believe $2 trillion would be overvalued $1.4, 1.5, like probably appropriately valued. while we're in Elon world, I want to talk about X and the kind of Echo Chamber that has gotten created there. We have this very prime example of it this week with the Spencer Pratt mayor race. Everybody on X. We went to a period of time where the critique. It's really quick. This is why I said it up, just because the original critique of X, I think, from Elon, part of it was a free speech element that people were getting silenced.

And then another part of it was that it was as liberal echo chamber. It was not really the public square. and when he took it over, a lot of people, like yourself and others, like, were arguing for it because we want, like, a public square that is without influence. And now it kind of feels like we've just depend on the switch the other way. And now we have kind of a right,

a center-right echo chamber to write echo chamber depending on the topic. And I think the Spencer Prack case is like a prime example. That's like, if you only consume that race through Twitter, you'd have thought he ran the best campaign that's ever been run in the history of politics. He ends up underperforming Trump in Los Angeles. And now everybody on there is, like, thinking that's a conspiracy theory that he lost when he just lost. Yeah, so two separate issues.

On the issue of the breakup of X, where blue sky is falling threads and the libs all went, you know, to those places. And then what remains is anonymous, based, right, MAGA, America first, and then business leaders, I would say, is the other piece. That's still very tight over there. It's kind of a bummer. It was kind of magical to have everybody sparring in one arena, as opposed to multiple arenas. I go over to blue sky and like, you know, it's kind of the opposite mirror world,

right? It's two bizarre worlds. Over there, they think, like, Trump's about to get arrested for, you know, some grand conspiracy and he's dying and he's going to have this, like, heart attack any day now. Like, it is very weird. And, yeah, I kind of miss when everybody was on one platform. You could have a more reasonable discussion. I mean, the four you pages, the thumbs on the scale, though, I mean, obviously. For you, you can just look at the data about, like, which accounts. He's the only person. He's the only person who has open source the algorithm.

And so you can go load the algorithm. You can point to the GitHub where it is. And you can say, please tell me how to perform better with this. I did it. My team did it. And it will explain to you exactly how to do it. So I think what it is is when you perceive the thumb on the scale, is that if you take out all the libs,

and Karen Swisher's not there and Prov G's given up on it and, you know, they don't want to participate. Well, then what does the algorithm have left? It's only got the Spencer Pratt, like, you know, there got homeless people who were given crack and meth to sign their account. I mean, is elevated. It's a little bit of elevated and like the amount of people would say, any, whatever.

Well, he was always the number one or number two user, him and Obama, where the neck and neck for the number one and two. I will say this is my one compliment of the new 4-U page is if you get out of politics space where I think it's pretty obvious that the thought is on the scale of which kind of stuff is being elevated. I'm trying to think about an example of something recently where I was interested in a niche topic. It was a foreign something that was happening overseas. I forget what it was.

And I searched for a couple things and I clicked on it. And the 4-U page all of a sudden started giving me quite valuable stuff. Instantly. Yeah, it is quite good on that. It's almost too powerful. I find like, you know, you're like, oh, I'm interested in this Jalen Brunson, you know. And then all you're getting is Jailen Brunson. And I'm like, okay, guys, I do want to know outside of the Nix what's going on in the world.

Like, I could use 15% non-Nix content or whatever. But it is pretty powerful. But, you know, I wish everybody, TikTok and Facebook, Instagram would release their algos as well. And eventually, you know, I've talked to Elon about this a bunch. And I think he's probably going to go in this direction, which, you know, which is B-Y-O-A, bring your own algorithm and an algorithm store. So imagine when you loaded it, it said, hey, you're currently using the default algo.

Would you like an algo that is 50% the most important news in the world as determined by this intellectual AI that was written by this person? And then 50% your stuff and a slider that you can pick. Like those kind of options, I think, will eventually be available on X. Americans are carrying over a trillion dollars in credit card debt at rates north of 23%. That is more than $200 billion a year in interest paid mostly by households who happen to be sitting on the largest pool of untapped home equity in U.S. history. Think about that for a second.

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Terms and Conditions Apply, subject to credit and property approval, visit Avan.com for more details. So there was somebody that posted about you the other day and how you are a representative of the change in the Elon Algo. And I have to admit it was pretty compelling, multiple screenshots. So I want to give you a chance to weigh in. The first post was a tweet you sent, I don't know what, about six years ago. take the R pledge, please. I know it was a funny word from our childhood, but it causes folks a lot of pain

and we need to retire it. That was September 2020. June 26, Jason posted the following. Stop being retarded. Start retard maxing. Being retarded means you are ruminating and overthinking. Retard max means you're making decisions based on your gut instinct. Stop being retarded.

Start retard maxing. So in six years, you went from saying, take the R pledge, don't say this, to doing a post that has the word in, like nine times. Do you feel like you've been manipulated by the algorithm? No, you know, when I grew up in Brooklyn, that's all we called each other. Sure.

Then for a period of time, it was like, it was hurting people's feelings. And I felt like maybe this is probably not a good idea to do this because I have a friend who's got a mentally challenged brother. And I felt bad about doing it. And now I just think, I noticed you didn't call the brother the R word. No, obviously not. Now I think it's now people have put the word into the proper context that like we're not talking about people who have Down syndrome. We're just talking about the actual inherent nature of the word.

And then on top of that, there's a new trend, which is retard maxing, which means just going with your instinct. And if you haven't seen the guy who does these, he sits on his back deck and smokes a cigar and just talks about using your instinct to enjoy life and not ruminate, which I kind of believe rumination is the, path to unhappiness in life. Like too much rumination, not good. So I'm a big fan of the retard maxing. Well, balance in all things. I think zero rumination is maybe the path. Introspection, okay.

Socioopath. Okay. Interspection, okay, on the margins. But rumination is when you just take introspection to a level of like OCD, is I think. But yeah, sure. I've changed my position on it three times in my life. Just culturally, though, like, I don't know. I don't actually care that much about the specific of this word. I think the people should use words.

Speaking of using the art word, I think that like voting for Donald Trump to be the president of the United States because you wanted to say retarded has to be the most retarded thing that a person could possibly do. Yes, that is completely retarded. The president has all of these like very important goals

and like whether or not you can say a word without being criticized is really not that important. I think it was more symbolism of like, of the overreach of cancel culture would be how they would say it is like word policing. And I think it's just a overall debate about the Overton window. Like, are we allowed to talk about certain topics or not? I mean, I look at the 2020, Jason, and I don't know, you're showing empathy.

Like, someone in your life has pain is feeling pain and you don't want them to feel pain. And like, don't you think that's a good instinct? Isn't it bad that now we've gone to a place where people are like, oh, it's cucked if you care about somebody else's pain. It's based to just make fun of people and be a dick as much as possible. Like that's bad, right? Yeah, I can hold these conflicting thoughts in my mind, which is one, I'm not responsible for the Overton window opening and closing. And if people want to say that's gay to mean like that's dumb or they want to say that's retarded,

that's out of my control, Tim. I don't know what you say is in your control, though. It is in my control. And I think if the public vernacular is we can separate the intent of the word retarded and say like, that means you're not thinking in a crisp way and people say it in a jovial way. I think we can separate that from the use of it. Like, I would like to make fun of this person went down syndrome, like, and make them feel as bad as possible. Speaking of the R word, let's get to Donald Trump's management of the economy and the country.

Oh, it's lately. When you're on with your six-month assessment, when we're on last, what prompted our last visit, just kind of set the parameters of conversation, was there was a video that had been posted on Dax that was of your colleague on the All-On podcast, David Friedberg, talking positively about the Trump administration to date and you kind of jibing him a little bit, giving him a little trouble. And then you posted the link to that video by saying, you know, we're six months in and your assessment is that it's been pretty solid. He still has work to do. I want to listen to the original video just so we can have a baseline. Let's look at. Tim's got receipts. But what better team has ever been put together? It is a cabinet of C-South. It is a cabinet of managers and people who know how to get done. And every time I go there, I'm impressed by this cabinet.

I pull my hair out when I meet your pro-Trump. I support my president. I support the president. Okay. So you voted for him? You voted for him and you left Trump. I love what he's doing. Okay.

Your colleague loves what he's doing. He's in the administration now. He's in that science group that Sachs is running. I forgot the name of the P-Cast. So Friedberg said, I love what Trump's doing. You said at the time, he was, pretty solid. You both agreed that the cabinet was strong. Sure. How do you feel a year later?

There are a series of things that are complete, unmitigated disasters, and there is consensus, I think, from all Americans, when you look at his historically low popularity, that none of us wanted to get into an endless war in the Middle East. That was like top of the reasons to vote for Trump. And now that has made... Have you heard of it? to be duped by him, yeah, sure.

I have to say, you know, he made a pretty convincing argument because he didn't start any wars in his first term, because you had people who were hawks on both sides who very much wanted to engage in, you know, maybe being a little more active in Ukraine and a lot more active in the Middle East on both sides, right? Whether it was Nikki Halley or was Hillary Clinton, they wanted to go hardcore into Iran.

So he actually made a very convincing argument. Now, why did he switch his position completely? I think Marco Rubio said it the first time, and the first time was the correct take. They got dragged into it by Israel because they said they're going to go anyway, and he decided to do it. Huge mistake. Terrible, terrible decision. I think the ice stuff was incomprehensibly cruel and poorly executed.

And you heard me give J.D. Vance, when he was a candidate, a hard time about that at one of our events. I said to him, hey, you can't drag 20. million hardworking Americans who just happened to not be legal yet out of this country. People are going to take their phones up and record you dragging their nanny, their handyman, this dishwasher. Americans are not going to go for that. And I was exactly right about that one. He plummeted in his approval rating because of those two things.

The tariff stuff was poorly executed, but the right idea. We should rebalance trade like that. He just did it in his normal yodel. low nature. So if I were to put together the biggest disasters since we've last spoken, Iran is just an unmitigated disaster and it's going to kill his presidency. I think there's consensus about that, right? I'm not like in politics all day long. But there is strong consensus that that was the biggest mistake he could possibly have made. He cannot get out of it reasonably. And he lost Tucker, Meg and Kelly, Steve Bannon, everybody in his group because of it. Yeah? Yeah. I mean,

I mean, I guess I do wonder what, and this is something we spent a lot of time on last time, is like, what I never understood about why CEOs got behind him in the first place and why smart people would get behind him, is that like, it's just the risk. He was erratic. His whole career has been erratic. He bankrupted casinos. He bankrupted an airline. Like, he's posting late into the night. I think what we did last time we were on is I was like, if you're, if you were doing a VC vet of a CEO, you would never invest in a company that had this person as a CEO because he's just a total.

like erratic shit show. But it's a binary choice. And if the choice was Kamala, after what Biden did to the economy and after what Biden did to M&A, if you talk to any CEO, they need to have, you know, low taxes and high M&A. And they are pragmatists. They represent their shareholders, their employees, et cetera. And they looked at the option of Kamala. But they do risk analysis, though, as well, right?

They're aware of risk analysis, I believe. Okay. It sounds like they did it perfectly. People would say I was ridiculous. They came on and I was like, I don't know. Trump could get us into a nuclear war. Kamala's not. And like here we are.

Like I don't know if we're not on the cusp of a nuclear war, but like we're on a custom of a total unpredictable disaster that like is way worse than what. I mean, Kamala would never have done anything that stupid. It would have been just status quo. For sure. With Iran? You think Kamala would have gone to war with Iran? Absolutely.

100%. Why? Why? Nikki Halle, Kamala, all of them would have. They're not the same. Kamala is a Democrat. Nicky Haley's a neocon hawk, Republican. They both are very pro.

You think the Harris Walls administration was going to do a war of choice in Iran? Yeah, for sure. Joe Biden didn't go to war in Iran. Barack Obama didn't go to war in Iran. Bill Clinton didn't. Why would Kamala Harris have? I think because the timing was there and Israel was going to do it anyway, which is what they said, the reason they did it.

Oh, I think if Israel was going to do it, they would have followed them. That's just my gut. And I had Conflous foreign policy guy Phil Gordon on this pot. I asked him that exact thing. And then they all said, I just don't know why you wouldn't take them at their word. I don't, Joe Biden was in that. So back to your question about CEOs, though, and why would they pick this person? If their main goal was to do commerce, do they have access to this administration?

Yes. Do they have lower taxes? Yes. Are their stocks at record highs? Yes. So in their minds, as hard as it is for you to believe, This has worked out perfectly on those three things. M&A is back on the menu after years.

IPOs are going to be happening, lower tax, lower regulation, and the stock market's at an all-time high, and employment is at an all-time low for all-lifetime. So they're looking at that business game on the field, and they're not thinking about ICE, they're not thinking about the conflict in Iran. Yeah, sure. Well, what about the tariffs, though?

And you say their taxes are down, but most of those companies, not all of them. Inconsequential. Some of them Donald Trump stole from. He stole from them. How is that more inconsequential than their personal tax rates? They already were treating the tax code anyway. Capital gains, everything.

And the corporate tax rate went down a couple points. You asked me why they would make this decision. They make an economic, rational decision. And this is what the Democrats need to learn for the next cycle, is to embrace business leaders and to bring them into the... Okay. Let me give your counter take, though. This is how they think. And they've won big.

I understand. I understand, but this is where I think the Democrats are in a real conundrum, because I want to give you a counterfactual. Kamala Harris did win, okay? She gets in there and she puts an illegal tax on the Silicon Valley companies, unilateral. It doesn't go through Congress, puts a tax on them. It's not legal, but she just does it. She says it's an emergency. I've decided I have the right to do, you know, whatever, windfall profits tax on all of these companies.

She's got, I'm going to do that. And then she garnishes money from the CEOs. She makes them come to her and beg her for absolution to get around it. Sometimes she grants it. Sometimes she doesn't kind of based on whim, kind of based on whether Doug is friends with the person, kind of based on whether they've given money to her. And then the Supreme Court comes back and says, no, actually you've got to give the money back to the companies.

And she says, no, actually don't want to. I'm not going to do that. In fact, I'm going to threaten them. And maybe I might actually take a percentage. Donald Trump just suggests I might take a percentage of the company for the government, I think. If Kamala Harris had said that, you and all your Silicon Valley buddies and the Wall Street Journal would be losing their minds. And it would, communism. So you're making this analogy to tariffs, obviously.

This is what Trump's is doing with tariffs and with taking a percentage of Intel, he's suggesting he's going to take a percentage of AI companies. He tariffed them illegally. He made them come in and beg for their lunch. Yeah, sure. That's like, that's left wing autocratic politics is what he's doing. Yeah, I can, I can educate you as to why they don't have a problem with it and why you do. Okay.

You are looking at it from a moral perspective and from a logic perspective of like, well, if you were okay with one side doing it, not okay with the other side doing, this doesn't make intellectual sense to you. It doesn't. Totally understand where Tim Miller is coming from. This intellectually does not make sense. Let me tell you on a business level what this means. The tariffs were when they're under 15% when they actually hit are easily absorbed in one side or the other. The folks who are selling items or the folks who are providing those, they each make a bit of a concession. And maybe you raise the cost of something a little bit, but it's not as dramatic as the left feels it is.

It was chaotic, but when it actually hit the ground, it made no difference to these businesses. So a lot of hand-wringing for not a lot of impact. And you find it offensive, reasonably so, that people have to go bend the knee and bring a gold bar and wait in line in South Park, you know, did a whole send-up of it, that you have to bend the knee and make your donation.

That's what business people like. They like transactions. You may not like it. who may think it's wrong. Business people love to have a coin-operated situation. I guess. But like the Democrats also this wife, but this whole Biden thing is crazy.

He didn't even raise taxes on them. Trump has raised taxes. You can tell me that fine, the tariff thing is inconsequential, et cetera. Okay, fine. But the last federal corporate tax hike was in 93. All they've gotten is cuts from Obama, from Biden. Like they haven't faced a corporate tax hike in 30 years.

more? Why are they so upset about the Biden situation? Because Biden didn't return their calls. So the tariff isn't a big deal. The phone call us. That's fine. All right. Actually, it is. You're brushing that off. And this is where you have a blind spot, Tim, respectfully. You have a blind spot. If you can get in the room with the person, if you can get in the room with the administration, and then you can shape policy and you can say, hey, here's what we're trying to accomplish. And, hey, can you help us with this and this regulation doesn't make sense. That actually is a preferable situation to not getting your phone call returned. And if what you have to pay for it, I'm not saying this is my belief, you have me on here to explain Silicon Valley and the business side. I'm explaining

it to you. Yeah, no, I hear you. They much prefer bending the knee, having to show up for the Melania documentary. Tim Cook's like, I got to show up for a documentary that sucks. I got to bring a gold bar. I'll do whatever it takes to keep selling iPhones. I got to keep this. supply chain open. Yeah, okay. But he just retired. I don't know. We'll see how that goes if President Osloff gets in there and he decides that he wants to,

he decides that he's going to put an actual tax hike on these guys, but he's going to return their calls. We'll see what they say about that. I don't think that they'll be that happy. I think that there's an imbalance. I want to play Howard Lutnik with your colleague. That's another thing that's like you guys just keep being wrong about how good Trump is for the kind of.

I mean, not you personally, but I just mean, the people that make the case that Trump was going be better for business. Well, which far of the economy is the question. Yeah. Chamath interviewed for your show, Howard Lutnik. This was January of this year. I wasn't on this one. You weren't on it. You weren't, but it's an interesting time capsule from January this year. Let's listen. You're going to see fives in the greatest economy in the world. You're going to see five. And people think you can't, you can't. I mean, five percent GDP on a base this big is just, it's enormous. We have a 30 trillion dollars. So five percent is one $2.5 trillion in growth. And if we cut rates, you'll see six. Six. And people do not,

would never, before Donald Trump walked into that office, they would don't think that's possible. Yeah, we wouldn't think that's possible because I was insane. We're looking at maybe 2% economic growth, GDP growth this year. They were close to those numbers, by the way. If they hadn't done the year on more, they would have hit 4%. And they would have had potentially some cuts. But if you start a war and you do a supply chain shock with energy, you essentially take the Trump 2.0 agenda and you torture it, which is what's happened. Why haven't more people come around on that? And again, I would think that Chamath, for example, I know you don't like to speak for your guys. In theory, if you had a VC and you brought a CEO in and they're like, hey, man, you invest in me right now. You get behind me, we're going to have 6% growth this year.

and then six months later, they like stuck their dick in the fax machine and like screwed everything up. And now they're at 2% growth with maybe negative with maybe going down from there. Quite a visual. Yeah. You'd be like, okay, well, see, turns out we need a new, we need some new leadership. I'm calling the board here. I have some concerns. Yeah.

Why isn't that happening? Why aren't people like, we're calling the board here? Oh, very simple. Very simple. Trump demands complete fidelity. I'm not speaking about Shemafia or anybody specific. But we all know, in order. order to be in the Trump circle, you have to have complete utter fidelity to him.

He's a genius. So it's North Korea. We're in North Korea. Basically, I think he's... Which it doesn't feel like, again, like a capitalist system. It doesn't feel like a capitalist system, yeah. Well, it's... I can't critique the president.

Capitalist slash, you know, if you told a bunch of business leaders, this could become oligarchic. They would be like, sign me up. Hell yeah. Sounds great. Oligarchy sounds pretty great to a capitalist for a short period of time. Can we agree for a second? That's why we're fucked.

This is why we're not going to get, you said you wanted normal. I'm sure you and I disagree on the margins and what the marginal tax rate should be for the top tax bracket or whatever. But like, maybe not. Maybe we wouldn't. I don't know. But we're not going to get normal because these guys have decided that they want to go on with oligarchy. They decided that it's cool for Elon to become a trillionaire. They decided that they can't abide any.

even tiny tax hike on capital gains rates or corporate. So what they're going to get is pitchforks and socialism. That's what they're going to get now. I do think they're driving the socialist movement. And I've talked very broadly about how to reverse that. I think we need to have a very open discussion about minimum wage. I had a fair free market version of minimum wage for a long time. But then I started studying what happened in New Zealand, Australia,

and Norway, Denmark, you know, these are obviously slightly different than the United States. But if we want to correct the socialist movement, which is gaining steam, and someone like Bernie Sanders saying, hey, listen, they stole all the content from us and the knowledge, and then we should get half the company. I mean, they did. They did. Yes, of course. And some of it is legal.

Some of it's not legal. If you buy the book, you're actually allowed to train on it according to the courts. But if you steal the book, you're not putting all that aside, it is a great salespig. from Bernie. When I saw that, I was like, oh, man, this is going to play. This will play in 26 and into 2028. What I think we need to do as a society is look at that K-shaped recovery, and it's like, you know, one group's going down, one group's going up. Invest America, the Trump accounts, is a great step in the right direction. Adding a dollar to the minimum wage for each of the next seven years and getting it to $15. It might seem performative, but it would actually be

performative in a good way. It would say, hey, everybody on the tops, do we really well with equities. Let's get these people to move up and let's look at that. Then I think universal health care is like another easy way to kind of bridge this gap between capitalism and socialism. And we do have to have, you know, some kind of grand bargain that occurs because I do think the country's on the verge of just splitting into states that are going to be like Nevada, Texas, and Florida, and states that are going to be like New York and. California. Maybe, yeah, I don't know. I think that, and that's why I like having this discussion, and I wish some of them would come on and we could talk about it. But this is what I think that the

CEO class and the elite VC class and Silicon Valley needs to realize that if they don't change the way they talk about the stuff and change the, these things are regulated, that the pitchforks are coming for them hard. I mean, there's been a noticeable pivot, not really. And there's been a, this pivot that continues in Trump 2.0 about like, oh, giving money away is for suckers. Like, The whole Bill Gates vision, he's got his own issues. Vision of the world is like different. We want no regulation. We want to stop, you know, doing charity.

All that stuff is happening. People are aware of this issue. You know, when Sam Waltman's house got firebombed and then shot up by two different people in a 10-day period, trust me, that was talked about a lot by the same CEOs and elite venture capitalists you're talking about. Then there's the folks at Anthropic who are saying like, all jobs are going to go away. to contain this. So the industry has done a terrible job of communicating why AI is good for society and the good that could come out of it. And we have not done productive things like, say, the giving pledge. The giving pledge, again, super performative when it came out, but saying, hey, the majority of my wealth is going to be given away upon my desk. Virtue signaling is good,

though. It made people feel like, hey, maybe we're all in this together. And what Michael Dell did when he gave $7 billion or whatever it was, these Invest America accounts, that needs to happen 10 more times. Yeah, but maybe next time without getting a $9 billion deal from the Department of War two weeks later. And this is the thing. Like these guys, I hear what you're saying, that they like it. They're happy with oligarchy.

They're happy to deal with Trump. But like, some on the left listening to this will probably be like, look, capitalism has always been fake. There's always been, you know, crony capitalism. Like, Tim, you are sold a bill of goods, maybe. But, like, when there was a period of time where people did the performance, you're formative part of it, whether it was the giving pledge, whether it was like actually committing to a real free market where there's competition, that created an environment, you know, where the capitalist

system could thrive. And they have now gone all in with somebody, no pun intended, that is an assault on it. He's like, I'm just going to do deals with rich people to buy me off. And I'm telling you, the reaction to that is not going to be, hey, let's go back to more friendly relations with with the corporate leaders from the Democratic class. The reaction is we're going to do the same thing. We're going to use our power to bully these guys the way he did, and you're not going to like it. That's what's going to happen.

That is concerning the lawfare that, you know, keeps getting escalated. What we really need to start thinking about is, you know, the Democrats winning the midterms. And I guess if they win the House, they get subpoena power back. If they win the Senate, then they can do hearings and a little bit more. And stop appointments. Yeah. So some of these appointments were ludicrous, you know, Pam Bondi, Christy Neum.

Pete Hagseth, Noam, yeah. Yeah, I mean, some of these are quite embarrassing. And, you know, he's given them promotions, I guess. Can never make a mistake, but they promoted them, gave them a better window seat. There needs to be checks and balances. That's the other thing that's kind of broken here, both on the Republican side. And I guess they did break the Republicans' brains with this slush fund. for the $1.7 billion.

So maybe that's a sign that the Trump era is ending and Republicans are going to take the party back. Either way, this thing's over in two years, right? So we're going to have to start thinking about a post-Trump world and hopefully having more moments. Your skiing buddy Tucker might run. Yeah, I think he's probably more interested in getting ratings for the show. I think he likes doing his show.

If you look at all of those performative folks, I think it's just about ratings, whether it's him or Karen Swisher or... You're really going after. Megan Carey. I think they just want ratings, you know. I have two more things for you that unless you go. Three more things. We'll go rapid fire.

Rapid fire. Here we go. Zoran, you have to look at that and been like, that's not as bad as you thought. No? I mean, Zoran's been pretty good.

In what way? Certainly. Look, we're six months in. You did a six-month Trump assessment. I look at Zoran and I think he kept the police chief. Crime rates are down in New York. People were worried that he would go in and it would be, you know,

he would be on the side of the criminals and they would like give out hugs instead of having cops in the subway and like none of that happened. He's gotten rid of some of the red tape around building. They're planning to, they're planning to build. Yeah. The budget they got balanced, he had to kind of deal with Hockel to deal with that.

He did the kind of performative populist left thing going after your boy at Citadel for having a, for having a Pietitare in New York. Yeah, that was not good. That's kind of fine populism. That's fine. No, I'll tell you why. This is where you have another, this is another blinds population.

If you don't live in New York, you have a Pietitare. You should pay. Totally fine with the Pietitare. tax if you want to do that. It's fine. Like I said, local communities can do what local communities want to do. If they want flock because they want to have a secure community or they don't want flock and they want to ban it. That's like a local community's decision. Let them do it. What is, and you should be appalled by and you should speak out about, is when he picks a specific person and puts a target on their back. We just talk about Sam Altman having a fire bomb and

them shooting at his house with his kids in the house. Then you do this to the Citadel founder. That's the kind of stuff that gets people killed. And, you know, it's not cool to do that for a politician to say, hey, this person is the reason why the city sucks. This person owns a penthouse. You don't. That's going to get him shot because there's a lot of crazy people out there. Mandami should have apologized for that. He should have said, this is a great New Yorker.

I think he did say he's like, we want him here or whatever. But that was completely disgratsia. And it's discratiade. If you don't call it out, everyone should be calling out any time you single one of these people out. I call out violence, but I don't know, man. I think that it's okay. You don't see the problem with pointing to his... I wouldn't have a problem with pointing to his house.

I don't think I would have done in front of his house. Of course you wouldn't have. You're a decent human. And I don't think Mondami would have... I think that it's fair to do some populace, eat the rich stuff. I mean, people are mad for good reason, right? Be careful. And Ken Griffin can afford it.

Yeah, but you don't want to incent... So, again, two different topics. Are we targeting individuals and sending crazy people to murder them? Obviously, no. That's insane. Obviously. And then that's the problem with singling anybody out. You start singling people out and you're saying,

this is the reason why you're suffering. Don't be surprised when the United Health Care CEO gets shot. I mean, the president, you know, we could just do this. Oh, no, the president doesn't. You will not get me here defending. No, rich people get mad at him. So again, that's just when I'm like, the crocodile tears about Zoron going after Ken Griffin, it's tough because, you know, Donald Trump does it all the time.

And they don't do that because, oh, they're scared. You can't be mean to Trump because we're a fake capitalism. So, okay, I'm doing this. I swear not to pick on you, but because it illustrates a point. But people have been making fun of you someone, social media because of an email you sent to Jeffrey Epstein, and then the Epstein files and said, hey, pal, running out to a kid's birthday party, we'll dig up their info. He was trying to connect you.

And to me, I thought this was an instructive exchange because you're not involved in any of the Epstein stuff. All that was happening was you guys were, he was a networker, he was a power networker. You're a power networker. Sure. But I think that one of the reveals from the Epstein files is that. that people in elite circles are too lax about going along with and taking favors from people to do bad things. Or vetting people.

Or vetting or things that are a suspect, right? You know, it's one of these things where it's like, look, if I heard that one of the other parents on my kid's basketball team was a pedo, I think, you know, I'd keep my distance and have my kid keep my distance, such as possible. Sure. If I heard that, if you hear that about somebody. What's the question? No, I'm getting to it. If you hear that about somebody that can help you get a job or can help you get access to capital,

then all of a sudden it's like, well, whatever, who cares? We'll do a little deal with him. And in retrospect, don't you feel like that maybe a lesson from the Epstein thing is that people should use more judgment in this sort of circle? Well, I mean, in hindsight, of course. Here, I'll give you the complete background to it. My book agent, John Brockman, ran something called edge.org. We're all scientists got together. And I would go to the TED conference.

He was there. He was giving donations to everybody. And I wasn't following it. I wasn't following his career or anything like that. My book agent said, you know, Epstein, and I wasn't following his case, to be totally honest, that first case in Palm Beach, I guess, had happened. And he said, hey, Epstein, who you've met at like Ted twice, and he was going to invest in your magazine.

I had one meeting with him about that back in the day. He said, hey, he wants to meet those guys who are on your podcast. They're doing that Bitcoin thing. And I was like, yeah, sure. And I say, hey, pal to everybody. That's like a New Yorker thing. Hey, pal, sure. Thanks, pal. I mean, I'll say it to the valet. It's not like you can read into that anything. Of course, the Epstein file people do. And he was like, would you mind introducing Epstein because he wants to invest in these founders? My business is connecting, as you said, capital to founders. I wasn't really even tracking what he was doing. And in fact, I went back and I did some research on it. The way it was framed to New Yorkers when he came back from, that Palm Beach sentence he had was that he was framed.

He got a massage. The girl had like a fake ID and the Palm Beach person let him work from home and he had to report to jail at night. And it was just like trumped up fake charges. But like I said, I wasn't even following it. So sure, you got me. No, no, this is not a got you. This is a serious question.

And we'll just end with us. And you can give a next prediction. We can end with that. But it's kind of related to the retard maxing thing, Which is like, I feel like that as a culture, like that maybe we should be valuing, particularly people in elite circles, like, you know, valuing judgment, valuing character, you know, and instead, I do feel like we're creating a culture where people are like, you know, it's actually, it's actually cool to, you know,

signal that you're a little bit of a dick. and if somebody that you do business with is slimy, it's like, who cares as long as you get yours? No, I don't, that's not my belief, but maybe it's some people's belief. I walk away from many deals based on character. I just wasn't happy to following that one. Yeah, but you don't feel like that is, you know,

something that is pervasive now, particularly. If you look at Elon's feed from day to day, people mock the notion that, you know, we should be, you know, caring more about character and virtue. and I don't know, does not the Epstein thing reveal that like maybe we should all be a little more judicious about all this rather than the opposite? I mean, trust me, I've thought about it since this happened and like, oh my God, is there anybody else in my circle who has this going on? Or like even when I take selfies now, like, you know, you get stopped now for selfies. You on your tour probably took a thousand selfies.

One of them is a serial killer, Tim. Do you endorse serial killing? No. And so. But the Epstein story was a lot of people that were like going to, this isn't you, but it was a lot of people going to fancy, going to these dinners. And it's like, hey, do you want to come to this dinner? Woody Allen's going to be there. And so and so is going and Howard Luckn't know, Howard Luckn'tnex going to be there? Do you want to come? And there's this instinct that people would be like, hell yeah, I want to go. I want to network. And shouldn't we be trying to model an instinct. It's more like, you know, maybe I should value character. I've always valued these things. So you're preaching to the choir on. this one. Do you think I have walked away from many ideas? I don't speak for Elon. I mean, every time I'm here you do this.

He's so prominent. What is Elon think? What is Chamon think? I don't know what these guys think. I'm not asking what he thinks. You're going to ask him. Elon is like it is a walking vice signal. He's basically,

he basically makes fun of anybody that tries to, to offer that to care about virtue. Have him on the program and you can go through his 40. Do you have a comment on that, though? You don't, you don't have a comment on that. I'm not following his 40 tweets every day. I don't know which one. you're referring to. All I know is genius and an incredible, you know, business person.

But I don't have like every mistake he's made. But you don't think this is a cultural problem then. Like people. In our culture, I think the, I think, you know, if we do have a cultural problem right now, is that we don't have people working together collaboratively in our government anymore. And that that needs to come back in more moderation and working together. I hope that when Trump is out of office and in this midterm, we can return some balance to the various branches of government

and get out of this partisanship. That's what I hope. Yeah. Well, I agree with that. Nixon four or five, six? I'm really concerned about this President Trump, Juju. You know, I'm like a pretty superstitious guy when it comes to the Knicks because I've suffered since the 90s over this team.

I'm a little worried about him showing. up and then the chaos that's going to ensue. I don't know why he's doing this, but I still think my original prediction was Nixon 6, and having been at the first two of the games, I'm now at Nixon 5. I do think it'll be a gentleman sweep. In San Antonio.

It would be convenient for me. How do you recover if you're Wemby? I mean, that game 2, that was about the worst thing I've seen since Chris Weber called the timeout in college in 1993. Yeah, throws the ball on his back. But, you know, the Knicks built up a 12-point lead. They have an

young squad. Their guards have been incredible on Jalen Brunson. They're beating the hell out of them and they're letting them play. So you can't argue about calls here, but the Knicks are a team of destiny and it shows what happens when you just have a very deep team that's healthy going into the playoffs. Last couple of years, we weren't healthy. Tibs didn't develop the bench at all. And now you just look at like bridges and deuce and Hart and Jose. Like we have this long tale of incredible players. And everybody's healthy. It really is like getting to the finals and winning is about how healthy your squad is at this elite level. But yeah, Wembe is not ready for it. He will be, but he's not ready for it now. And man,

the fact that Carl Anthony Towns owns him and then, you know, Mitch Robinson has been doing a tremendous job on him. I kind of feel like he's on par with Mitch and I think cats dominating him. So total advantage gone the guards have been playing great what do you think what's your prediction six I don't it's I mean the Knicks have been even when the Knicks were losing in the first quarter of the game on game two

I was texting my friends and I was like they just seem better like they're getting better shots they just weren't you know it just took a little bit for them to get in so it's kind of hard for me to see the Knicks losing the series but there's a part of me with my trump derangement syndrome that does want to see four straight spurs

wins, like just to have the Juju get totally stopped. Oh, so brutal. How dare you? And I do love Dylan Harper. I bought my daughter, Dylan Harper Jersey during game one because he did that guy is such an all. It's unbelievable. He's 20 years old. 20 years old and he's the second best player on the team. He's just, he's so fun to watch. So anyway, that's where we're at. I forgot. I forgot to ask you about crypto stuff, so we'll have to do it again another time. Yeah, I'll come on again. That's Jason. And tell your, you know, tell Chimath and Freebrook, you have, you keep taking it for the team. okay like no i like talking to you i know but tell them to get out of their cozy little bubble you know

i don't bite here's the thing you you you have to understand like i said earlier like if you're it's a tribal sport now you cannot break once you join the team yeah whether it's trump or the other side if you have trump derangement syndrome you can't break from the team if you have trump dedication syndrome you cannot break from the team i've never joined either team i had the opportunity to be on both teams, I politely declined. I like to be independent. You have, what do we have? Two years and seven months left

to just fully come on board. The door is always open. Which group? There's no hope to go on to the Trump dedication team. It's all getting it worse from here. So if one morning you wake up and you're like, you know what, this is this little tinkerbell inside me the whole time that knew,

that wanted to be with Tim, that knew Trump was terrible, but I just, I couldn't quite get all the way there. I like Rahm Emanuel. Yeah, there you go. You like Rom Emanuel. I've been texting with Rahm Emanuel. Have you? I like Josh Shapiro.

Yeah. Well, I think that Rahm Emanuel's message would go over a lot better if it was coming out of the body of someone besides Ram Emanuel. It was a good, who I don't have anything against personally, but I just, I think that the Democrats are going to be desperate for somebody outside of their, there's not been part of the kind of Clinton. Biden Harris era. I just think they're ready to move forward.

You think they're going to just go full AOC, Mondami? I don't know. It could be AOC or it could be somebody else from the center. I just think that it's more like they don't want the baggage. I don't think Democratic voters want to move forward and wash away this 12 years, this 12 year horror show that they've gone through. And I just find them very hard to imagine that the voters are like, you know what, let's give somebody from the Clinton era a try.

I think that they want a fresh start. So that's my thing. I think he's super competent. That's the thing I like about him. He's super competent. I would like to have a competent, moderate on either side. All right, brother. We'll welcome on board.

That's Jason Cald-Kanis. Everybody else will see you back here tomorrow for another edition of the podcast. Peace. The Borg podcast is brought to you. Thanks to the work of lead producer Katie Cooper, Associate Producer Ansley Skipper, and with video editing by Katie Lutz, and audio engineering and editing. by Jason Brown.