This Week in Startups - Google is Nano Banana, Apple AI plans & The Great H1B Visa Debate | E2170

Episode Date: August 27, 2025

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 peopleSubscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.comCheck out the TWIST500: https://www.twist500.comSubscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcpFollow Lon:X: https://x.com/lonsFollow Alex:X: https://x.com/alexLinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelmFollow Jason:X: https://twitter.com/JasonLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanisThank 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 McFarlandCheck out Jason’s suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanisFollow TWiST:Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartupsYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekinInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartupsTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartupsSubstack: https://twistartups.substack.comSubscribe to the Founder University Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@founderuniversity1916

This is an issue for all of America. I'm going to send it to Vice President J.D. 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. This week in startups is brought to you by Northwest Registered Agent. Starting your business should be simple. With Northwest Registered Agent, you can form your entire business identity in just 10 clicks and 10 minutes. From LLCs to trademarks, domains to custom websites, they've got you covered.

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at lemon.io slash twist. 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 your screen, which I just gave it access to? So now I've got three people taking notes on this one episode and just 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 have to take a look at what the difference is, but 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. 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, someone's going to get busted for something because of this. 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. 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 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 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 could make jokes in private 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 attack, 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 capitalist, accountants, lawyers, all this stuff being recorded. Like people might. record board 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, are we recording board calls now? And they're like, oh, I don't know, should we? 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 assume they knew what I was talking. And they started writing quotes from each person. It's, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. the board discussed strategic financing options, period. Yes. That might have been a 20 minute to say, 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 Ripple. There was a deal in Ripple, got into a whole spy thing. Remember we covered that? Deal and Ripple, the spy game. Rippling.

It was Rippling and remote, I think. Oh, deal. No, Ripling and Deal, Jason. Rippling and Deal got into this whole spy gate where they were spying on HR software companies. It's like the worst spy novel ever written. Coming to Netflix. Amazing that it happened, but it's not going to be a bestseller, is my take. I mean, I don't know if this is like the Bourne Identity 7.

Rippling versus Deal. Jason Boyd comes 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. A cell phone allegedly. Yeah, I try to flush an iPhone down a toilet. What are we doing here?

Pro tip, they're a little bit big for that. Just in case that ever comes up in your life, y'all. All right. So we got a lot of docket today. We're going to get to it. We got a lot of doctor today. I want to start, Jason, with Google. 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'm doing it for 14 years, whatever. And some people might say I pioneered in the space. Okay. It's not for me to say. But Karas 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

were sparring. And we were really good friends. And I used to take the two of them to dinner with me. many times. Now introduce them to each other. So I'm going to comment on all that at the end of the show. The last 10 minutes. But there's so much news and you spent so much time on this docket, start us off here, compadre. All right.

So there was a really interesting viral and unknown model over on LM Arena called Nano-Banana. And people were just amazed 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 Jimini 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 just being very precise inside of an image. So it's kind of a targeted capability. 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. So I think we're moving past the studio jibbley phase, as you said,

where like, hey, here's just Alex and Jason as manga. Manga. Is that how you pronounce it? Manga. Manga. I was going to say maga. And I'm like, I don't know what's going on today with me and Rippling and Ripple. There's too many words.

There's too many words. There are indeed many words. We're adding many words to the dictionary now that I have to remember my dyslexia is 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 God, Grock images seems to have made a massive leap.

you saw Elon was doing 20 a day. And I saw them, yes. Yeah. And it was, it was quite, yeah, it's quite charming, like, 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, like the Barbie movie or just you could just put your face on anything and it just worked? It's pretty impressive. I have an example that I'm going to show you to demonstrate. what it can do. And then we have a special treat just for you.

All right. So, Jason, this is my favorite example, though. 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 this kind of some weird shading here. But I mean, if you were just glancing at that without knowing that it was

an AI generated an edit, you would have just said, that's her purse. That's great. The artifacts now are becoming so minuscule 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 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 McAulata who did my covers and stuff like that. I loved working with him. He was the exception to the rule when I did my just iconic covers of This Week in Startups, not sorry, not The Sweet Startups, Silicon Allie 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 Jan Wenner called me one day from Rolling Stone. When you're a busy founder, finding a new developer, my God, that can become a full-time job.

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These are skilled, hand-picked 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. 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 slash twist and find the perfect developer or even a tech team in less than 48 hours. And Twist listeners get 15% off their first weeks. Stop burning money. Higher developers smarter. Visit lemon.i.o slash twist. Jan Wenner calls my office. So my assistant, Linda Miller at the time, shout out to my long, loyal assistant from New York. And she said, hey, John Wenner called from Rolling Stone. And I said, yeah, I don't have time for that, but remind me tomorrow. She's like, no, but

it was John Wenner. And I was like, yeah, okay, whatever. I thought it was a journalist. 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 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. And 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. I said, what? I spit out my coffee. I call him. He says, what are you doing? And I said, I'm down here in Union Square. He says, oh, come, to my office, I'm 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 broken a million or two million dollars in revenue. The event's broken a million and two dollars. 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 she 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 my Carl Zeiss, uh,

point and shoot lens camera. I said, I take all the pictures. He goes, these are great pictures. You got an eye for, you know, um,

you should, um, 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.

He goes, all right. Exactly. He goes, get, get Frank Mcalotta on the line. She does a call, boom,

you can look at Frank McAlaude, a famous photographer. And, uh, 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 a 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 Soders, like, and there's been some buzz about that in the trades. He's going to launch his own beverage, Stiller Sodor soon. There's 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 new tropics in. It helps you focus. really cool product. Anyway, 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. I did not. Yeah, Vogue did their first fake model. And oh my God. I think it was Vogue magazine.

I did see. 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.

It 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. Perfect segue, Jason. There was a person named Tim Bederidge, 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. Okay. So here's the look. So here's a picture of you. Oh yeah. That was back. This is exactly the time period I'm talking about when I was becoming famous, uh, and doing all these photo shoots.

Here's sporty, Jason. Oh, wow. I think sporty Jason looks good. And here's bohemian, Jason. Okay. A little bit less. Yeah. Burning Man Jacob. Let's go back to my, my suit here. Let's, this is the original photography. And when I was in New York, I only wore black. And then I met my wife. And, uh, she's like, what's with the black? And I was like, I have gray shirts to. But I used to wear black collared shirts, black jackets. That was all I would wear because it was simpler, which is simpler. 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 the ads 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 can do dynamic ads with you in them. So imagine every Corvette ad I see. It's me driving down the road and my new ZR1X. Ooh, yum, yum. So that today probably cost 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 Chad GPT. The teen ended up committing suicide. 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 team 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 chat GPT and the 4-0 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 chat GPT. 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 ChatGPTx. 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 Open AI 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, Open AI 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 product safe, especially in the hands of children, and how much of this comes down to where parents should step in and be more involved. 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 vouched. Did you know that Open AI just dropped their agent mode? These agents are everywhere, and your users are now handing over all of their information to chat GPT to not only log them in, but to act on their behalf. 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. 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, know that.aI for free. Check it out for yourself at vouch. ID slash twist. Trust for agents that's built for builders like you. 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 Open AI, 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, et cetera. 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. Okay. So we don't say, Okay, that person had an Apple, they 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 one of these heavy metal bands.

And you're into metal, and they have some... I'm a big fan. 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 is just a correlation and not causation.

Now you get into something that is acting like a human. 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. 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, 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 or, you know, driving them to it. It's just a very complex thing. 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 web page 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 birth to artists to pursue their art, whether it's a heavy metal band or a folk singer or anybody in between. 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. I don't know exactly how to resolve this. But, you know, in their blog post to their credit, OpenAI said, If someone expresses suicidal intent, Chat Chepti is trained to,

direct people to seek professional help. In the U.S., chat GPT refers people to 98 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. There's a detail just 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 time story. The teen had learned how to bypass those safeguards by saying the requests were for a story he was writing. An idea chat GPT gave him by saying it could provide

information about suicide for quote writing or world building. So back to your point about sycophoncy, this is the model trying to help the user without a moral, I don't think it was making a moral decision there. Yeah. 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. 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, 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 Chat Chapt-G-T, 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-GTP-T too much? And what steps can we take?

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. Open AIA 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 Open AIS protections in one or two prompts, but maybe on the 600th, you can talk it into doing something they 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 polymarket 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. 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 is... I'm trying to find a neutral way of saying this, Jason. Bail me out here.

I mean, I think conservative values would be, or MAGA values is not derogatory in any way. They're investors in SpaceX, XAI, Neurrelink, Andrel, Substack, and more. and yeah, some of those are government-related like SpaceX and Andrel. 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. 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. 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 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 Northwest Registeredagent.com slash 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. 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 U.S. 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 Colchie, and I think also Robin Hood'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 U.S. very quickly and probably for the 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. 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 parent supervision. And so that would be accretive. But yeah, they did buy that company QCEX. And they have the CFTC license, which is where the 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 strikes here. Long tradition of the children of presidents and politicians having interest, not saying there's anything untoward here.

It's an investment. It's capital. It's drawing 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, D.C., 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, have we? Google was the first one, I think, to start seeing people from Google, go into the Obama administration come out. And now we're seeing it with the Trump administration. It's the nature of Capitalism plus democracy. Yeah. All right. Next up, Blue Water Autonomy. I felt like you had something to add there.

I have so many things to add there, but, you know, let's move on. Okay. 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 Serronic 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 there was being another company, one that I hadn't heard of, raised $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 over in Europe. and Fortune told us that they're going to be about 40 to 50 school buses in wait, which is the worst metric I've ever heard of in the history of metrics for telling me how much of me weighs. But they're going to be quite large, which matters because in 2007, the Navy anticipates having both autonomous and traditional manships 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. Yeah. And in related news, I talked about my K-Deft investment, a Korean ETF that is working, that, you know, aggregates a bunch of the South Korean shipbuilders, military builders, et cetera. Korea has, 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. emerged between the U.S. and South Korea because South Korea is exceptional at building ships. America is terrible building ships. We are not building a lot of ships here. So this, if there is, as expected, conflicts in the South China Sea regarding Taiwan or those atolls 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 U.S. 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've got to build our own ships.

We can only build so many for America. 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, 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... Very much so. Yeah, if you, we're going to send a hundred of them in a swarm. And yeah, you can take out 80 of them. But if 20 hit, you sank my battleship. 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 U.S. 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 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 manned ships for a very, very long time. Yeah. 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 Serronic, and there's a couple of others in the mix as well, can get this to, I don't know, what would you call that, Jason, like military readiness? There's probably some sort of term of art there. There must be a term of art for being battle capable. Battle tested. Battle tested. These will, you know, just like the drones are, I'm talking about commercial quadcopter drones,

not drones that we used in the 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. The idea that submarines are even manned is kind of crazy when you think

about it. 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, he 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. All right. I see. see that Apple has been, I guess it came out in the information that Apple has been thinking of buying some things? 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 with 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 Ellum Arena, which ties it with models in both China, and I believe it's kind of tied right now with Grock 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 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 at, you know, no less than $40 billion for perplexity, which is expensive. And then Mestral was valued at about $6.6 billion. I did convert from euros. And so I'd 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. 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 series, 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. up with Gemini, GROC, and Open AI, and Claude. So if you're not those four companies specifically, 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. 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. 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 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. Here's your Airbnb app. Can you imagine how effective that would be if every travel and finance search, Robin Hood, Coinbase, Expedia, Uber, you know, and Airbnb got to compete to put their app in front of those people while they're searching in a need? Chef's Kiss. Apple has a huge weakness,

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, AK, whatever, on the back of my TV. What does my family use? They use the remote control 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, you know, or even, you know, a Sundar or Satya, you know, at least somebody who might have some product vision and ability to think bigger than Tim Cook does. does what Tim Cook is great at. Supply chain.

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 expressing your interest in joining New Relic. We appreciate your enthusiasm

and the initiative you've shown and you want to be part of our team, but currently we don't see an active application for our specific role for you. They sent him to the New Relic, Rear's 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 H-1B application versus a perm job posting. But let's hear from the man himself. Please welcome to the program. It's Colin Ross. Colin, hey.

Thanks so much for having me. It's great to be here. Thanks for coming, Colin. I saw your tweet and I said, hmm, we need to double click on this. What do you do for a living? And maybe then tell us what you uncovered here. Absolutely. So again, great to be here. My name's Colin Russ for the last 15-ish years. I've been in a variety of operations leadership roles. I currently live in an amazing Russville town called Erie in northwest Pennsylvania. But I was spent most of my career working across tech and ops transformations in 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, you know, ran out of money, not a great funding environment for it and, you know, found myself in a position where I, you know, have to look for W-2 job. Got two amazing kids that, you know, got to take care of. You know, got to eat as much as I love ramen noodles. Got to get mixed up sometimes.

And so I spent the last few months really just, you know, doing what unfortunately more than seven million Americans are doing at the same time and looking for jobs. this you know the post that kind of went viral um 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 that what are you talking about there's what job could we possibly you know have that you're referring to um and you know i probably own my apology for you know not being as polite as i My mother raised me to me. It can be frustrating when you're the breadwinner or, you know, the co-bred winner,

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 U.S. company. So 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 H-1B sort of fits into all this. So that's what's, you know, interesting about the H-1B process.

You know, 85,000 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. 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 visa process to rather than just get this exceptional talent,

they're 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 and 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. Colin, just to be clear there, I think this is an important nuance. The H-1B program is different than the Perm program, which allows companies to sponsor people for green cards

in long-term employment. In your email to Norellic, you call them H-1B-Perm listings. My read here is that this is not really an H-1B issue. This is a perm issue. And the reason why I think that, Jason, is because there are no public listing requirements for H-1B roles. But if you want to do a perm posting to bring someone foreign to the U.S. and sponsor them for a green card and long-term staying here, you have to do newspaper advertisements, which is why I thought Collins noted about a newspaper posting was so personally. 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? So there's actually a website.

I'm not sure who created it called Jobs Now, which their function is basically to scrape and collect those newspaper postings, the ones that aren't being listed on. on job sites and provide that content information for people to apply. So in this case, to Alex's point, when I went and looked at the new Ralph 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? 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. You know, and all this transpired in from start to finish and less than 12 hours, basically, which is kind of mind-boggling that they're able to make that assessment. They don't have, do have, whatever, you know, however we want to chop it up. But, it gets, I think, to kind of my core frustration that led to this off-handed mark of, hey, give me a chance. I at least just want to, you know, let me make my case to tell you why, you know, 15 years' experience I have across different sectors, across different roles,

having done, you know, 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. Wow. So they've been busted by this jobs. Now site. This site was set up by Patriots in America. And I talked to J.D. Vice President, J.D. Vance, about this two or three weeks ago when I was in Washington, D.C. about, hey, are we actually using the H-1Bs as a way to lower wages and not giving an 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 their global organization 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? It's 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. 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 the by doubting you, Colin, and also brought a comment.

They declined essentially implicitly. And the other thing is, we went back through New Relics H-1B 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. 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. 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 going to pass my judgment now. Number one, New Relic should give you the interview. So I'm calling on New Relic CEO to give you the interview. And I'm going to 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 H-1B visas have. But this is an issue for all of America. Number two, I'm going to send the thread. If you can email me, or DM me the thread, so I have it here, Alex. I'm going to just, I'm going to send, I'm going to send it to Vice President J.D. 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. You're going back to D.C.? I mean, I'm kind of getting dragged into this constantly. H-1B visas. How much do they cost Alex now?

Do you file for one of these? I think the total package is tens of thousands. I think that's what you pay for lawyers. Applications. Oh, okay, just the application fee? Yeah, like what is the government charge? And I think that if we're going to solve this problem, H-1B 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 going to be living in a world where maybe it takes less people to do the amount of work that's necessary, if that's what transpires. If you're going to do this shortcut with the H-1B 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, and 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.

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, pay your duty. And if they don't perform, we fire them. They've 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 H-1B. And they should get audited for that. What are you paying the equivalent people at your company? And by the way, there's a 10K, 20K, a 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. We've got a PhD from Oxford and 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. All right. Answer your question. We have notes from producer Claude, Jason. So there's a variety of fees here. So from our friends of 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 ACWIA fee, which is the American Competitivist and Workforce Improvement Act. And that is $750 for small companies, $1,500. 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 20K on top of that to your point.

But that's the fee schedule. It's not simple. Yeah. The fee schedule is basically the cost of a laptop. 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. the CEO, you know, in a 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, wants, wants to go down that path. So it's, I think, symptomatic of, frankly, you know, the fees alone demonstrated it's massively flawed and the incentives are misaligned. But even the recourse side of it, you know, there's no winning. You know, it's just kind of a, hey, people are getting screwed, whether you're the, you know, recipient of it or somebody applying. It's just an unfortunate

situation across the board that really, really warrants, you know, some more attention. All right. He's that Colin on X.com, T-H-A-A-A-A-A-T, C-O-L-I-N. And what's your speciality? What's your trade there? What's your skills to get, Colin? Operations leadership in the industrial manufacturing and energy space. Okay. If anybody has any job leads for our guy, Colin, thank you for coming on the program. DM him. I'm assuming you get your DM's 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.

I appreciate you coming on the program, Colin. Thanks so much for having me. I really appreciate it. Thanks, Colin. Go birds. 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 T's dot in the eyes.

We did try to get new relic to comment. We did try to get them here. You know, we comment on the news here. But, gosh, you know, you got to respond to. us or we can't include you here. So we tried for a couple of days here, right? I, yeah. A couple emails, a couple of days, I hope, yeah. We got, I emailed them yesterday the day before. I have to go check my email. But here's my read of 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 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.

This is just my own personal take of the situation. Totally. I'm not trying to be. And you know what? Kind of 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 going to 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. 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 degree in 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 happened before an earthquake? I guess tremors. The premonitions are, there's probably a, I'll grab that term. 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 H-1B shenanigans,

these four shocks. Thank you, producer Claude. Scott. Is always there at our fingertips. And they've 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 four shocks of what could be earthquake to come, which is young people, IT people, they're just, 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. 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. Well, Jason. is business about doing what is what is in our view morally right or is it about pursuing the maximum you know profit and and if you listen to my intellectual forefathers in the Chicago School of economics uh 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 ronnie 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. Because we've already kind of answered the first question, and we're talking about implementation versus direction. Correct. All right. I never like to make this show about me. But like two high-profile podcasters, one a friend of mine, one of former friend, I mean, just in the same week, 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 lynchpin and trying to force me to pick a side. I can't be friends with Elon or Sacks. I have to denounce this. I got to denounce that. I don't like politics all that much. It is what it is.

It's invaded every aspect of our lives in the technology industry specifically. But, you know, I did the Bullwark podcast with Tim. And then he was on with Kara Swisher, who I was very friendly with for a long time, Tim Miller, who is fun. I like Tim Miller. He's like a gay Republican who hates Trump 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.

Absolutely. Is it okay if I respond to them? This is totally fine. We have the pivot clip from the Carousel 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. My Lord, I mean, this was like six or seven minutes of them teeing off on me. And Tim Tim Miller kind of defending me. But okay, here we go. All right, here it is. I had your boy Jake Tow on a couple 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, have people on who are less radicalized against him than me just to kind of hash it out. It's important to hear the other perspectives. The problem is most Trump supporters are full of shit.

And I don't want anybody in the podcast it's full of shit. I know you guys do too. I want only people on who are going to say what they really think. And so I can't have somebody on who, like, we'll say one thing on the podcast in the green room. He really has gone too far on this thing. You know, that doesn't work. Which they do.

Just for people who don't know, they'll come up to you in a green robe and be like, I agree with you. And you're like, you fucking asshole. Like that's when I truly hate the- All right. All right. All right. Let's pause there for a second. Yeah.

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 J.D. 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 free thinker to part of the administration and being locked step. When you're part of the administration, you're a lockstep, right? So as broadcasters, yourself, myself, Tim, Kara, 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. Very much so.

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.

We're getting to that. Let's hear her from Kara. Like, as he at least, we'll say when he disagrees with Trump, which I think he's at least telling the truth to me. 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, I don't know what else to put it. He's really low-s him to Scott for reasons I'm undetermined, which probably jealousy. Okay, let's pause there for a second. One of the things, we used to be friends. 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, Robin who 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. Jason. Yeah. For people who are, Scott Galloway, who's also for a co-host with Keras, which are on her show. Right.

So I don't really have a major problem with him. I did have one problem with him, which is he went after Cheryl 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 to run. arrangement 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 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 got away 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. He did 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 men. 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, 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 Travels Kalanek, and then he was against Travis Kalanik. And then when he came back, he was 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, I took, took many hours. 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 them forever. So I never, ever, my loyalty never wavered for them. In terms of being a suckup 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. 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 Sacks 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. The right says I'm not sucking up enough and I'm a LibTard who listens to MSDNC. 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. A clown gesture. What does you mean by jazz hands?

She uses jazz hands. That's like one of her broadcaster behavioral ticks. When she doesn't have a formed opinion, she just like a tick 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. All right. Back to it. Oh, my God. That's what God is interesting to say that because one of the interesting things about the

was like, because that's his nature, he was totally candid about the fact, like, one of the things that I try to get to, I'd be interested in your thoughts on this, is like, why did all these billionaires become putty in Trump's hands? Like, I get that in some cases, they want access, it's about power, it's about money, if Trump's an act like authoritarian, they need to do it. Like, in other cases, they didn't really need to, and they did it anyway, and why? And he's just blunt about the fact that, like, Trump, you know, responds to their phone calls, Biden never did.

They're feeling their little fifies were hurt that Elon wasn't invited to some summit. Right. And so I think that was 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. Which he is very good at, let me just say. And, again, I like, 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 them. And so I think he's often wanted to monetize that podcast better than they do. And it's degenerate it 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 just has made a trade that I don't love. And I wish you would call me because I'm like, it's fine to argue, Jason. 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. I mean, this is, I think, Cara's unique style is like hit you twice and then give you two or three compliments.

Yeah. Yeah. It's what people don't know is all in makes much, much, much, much, much, 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. So I don't care about money. I've never cared about money. And maybe that's a problem for people that I'm not motivated. him. 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 opening eye today. I think I do a pretty good job calling Boston 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 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 it in the last one.

What do are capitalists do? they manipulate politicians. They back them with money to get the result they want. This has nothing to do with Jason Gallicata. It has to do with how the world has always worked. The end. Let's move on to our second clip. This is from, I think, is this Sam Harris' podcast that he's on here?

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. Well, in Summit, I did invite him on the podcast. But he is like Karaswisher, as 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, the, 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 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.

What happened to your appearance on the All-In podcast? I guess I can answer that. I never got that. I never got an invitation. I wonder why. I did. I did invite him on. I saw Jason post something about.

Yeah, you sent that to me. He posted on X, I think, that he was, as though we already had a scheduled date. Like, he said, you know, I'm going to have Ezra Klein on the podcast. I'm going to 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 they, I know why they, first of all, I wasn't waiting for an invitation. to go on the podcast.

So 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? I mean, 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.

I mean, there's just too much sunk cost there. I mean, there's a, I think I'm 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 super ethical and leading the world in all the right directions. And so I don't think they want me to sound off on that at all. I thought Jason might want you on as some support for some of his positions. He might.

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 an incredibly loyal friend, and I think to a fault, he's a loyal friend. I think that's what his master ethic is loyalty. And in this case, he's being loyal to two friends by not having a conversation about one of them. Well, it's a great podcast. So maybe I'll invite you on.

It'll be fun to hear. You go and get me. All right. So 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.

Well, it is not easy for me to have high-profile friends who are very close to 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, 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. So I don't know if you consider that a criticism or an add-a-boy. 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 them. And I was like, I challenged Alex Jones on what he did with the, 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. 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. Because you're talking slightly in favor of it, and they're worried about that splitting their electoral? Sure, possibilities. Yeah. They very much want Elon in their camp. My position has been, and I set it on this pod, and I think I set 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, just say these are my three or four main issues, pro-natalism, energy independence, you know, less regulation and controlled spending in 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. people are not, you can be sure that J.D., Vice President J.D. Vance and our public servant, David Sachs, 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 you should be in the Democratic Party. I think it 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 Norquess 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. Did you read the moral landscape by Sam Harris?

Yes. 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 mean, 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 street. I basically helped him start his podcast when 15 years ago when I was in L.A., 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&A with him on Mahalo, 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, 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. Because you don't have to wait 18 months to have it come out. All right, Jason, let's leave it there. We have tons to get you on Friday. What do you think? You have thoughts, Alex.

I feel you're just serving me up small landmines today, just to step 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 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 that's had on the research community and so forth. Yeah. And you've been more positive about it 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. Boy, it's just so weird to have so much focus on having to pick a side. And it's only since these last couple of election cycles that people can't maintain friendships with people who they disagree with. 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 them, I'm going to just say you should ask them. It would be more appropriate. But gosh, just, you know, you. You don't have to be at war with everybody. You can maintain friendships with people you disagree with as my closing, you know, 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 8 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 it's what I honestly think. You're always going to get balls and strikes from J-Cal. Period, full stop. 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.