About Jason Calacanis
Jason Calacanis, co-host of the All-In podcast and founder of LAUNCH, has been active on his podcast and at events discussing investment strategy, the technology industry, and political dynamics. In October 2024, he outlined his investing philosophy, emphasizing backing a team's vision over hype and dollar-cost averaging into companies one believes in. He described Elon Musk as having a gift for pursuing multiple visions concurrently and argued that criticism of valuation hand-wringing stems from an inability to tolerate ambiguity across multiple business lines. In mid-2026, Calacanis moderated the All-In Liquidity Summit in Napa Valley, describing it as an event for the "top 0.1%" of the podcast's audience, with 550 capital allocators representing $7 trillion in capital present. He stated that the event was part of a broader community-building effort and that his philosophy for events is that attendees return if they make a great contact, have a great experience, or learn something.
Calacanis has also commented on the current tech boom, which he attributed to AI, noting that companies like xAI, OpenAI, and Anthropic are going public. He described seeing "a Cambrian explosion in startups" and said he personally invests in roughly 100 new companies per year through his fund LAUNCH and a program called Founder University. In a May 2026 appearance on the Bulwark Podcast, Calacanis discussed why some in Silicon Valley have been reluctant to criticize President Trump, arguing that access to the administration to shape policy is preferable to not having one's phone calls returned. He also described former President Trump's handling of Iran as "an unmitigated disaster" and said he believed it would "kill his presidency." Additionally, Calacanis has been publicly critical of Mark Zuckerberg, stating that the Meta CEO has "damaged the reputation of the industry" by repeatedly prioritizing self-interest over what Calacanis described as the right thing for humanity, including in matters of privacy and content moderation.
Source: AI-verified profile updated from Jason Calacanis's recent appearances.
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✨ AI-enhanced transcript with speaker attribution
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Jason Calacanis0:01
Who reviewed the deck and said, 'I have a great idea'? While we're being investigated for young women having body issues and getting anorexia and bulimia and depression and anxiety from Instagram, I have a great idea to caress in our new product. Let's get young men to be influenced by living in a virtual world version of Grand Theft Auto where you murder and beat people and run them over with stolen cars. Are you people insane? The answer is they're not insane. They are capitalists and they are just absolutely interested in the stock price going up and to the right. They do not care about society. They are liars. They care about making money. And let's face it, Grand Theft Auto where you get to be in an immersive world and beat people up and murder them and drive over them is going to be the dystopian insane running man future that will print money. That's why they're doing it. And somebody over there in comms needs to be fired for not sitting Zuckerberg down and saying, 'Are you crazy? You literally want to tell people when we're launching this new vision that Grand Theft Auto is a key piece of it, and you think this is the best idea?' Would Tim Cook do this? Would Jeff Bezos do this? Would Steve Jobs do this? No. They would literally say, 'We're trying to make people think this is good for society.' Grand Theft Auto is a parent's nightmare. Why on earth would we feature that? And you notice they didn't show any highlights from GTA because it would have been somebody like literally beating up a postman or running over, you know, a baby carriage. Oh my lord, it's... I mean, you can't make this stuff up.
Zuck also talks about open standards in the metaverse, which is even more funny to me because he has been on a jihad for decades to reverse all open standards and to steal and close off and destroy open source and open standards by forcing people to use his login and by not supporting open standards. Here's 51 seconds of an absolutely delusional and unself-aware, clueless Zuckerberg explaining open standards to us, the industry that was built on open standards, who absolutely hates and despises what Zuckerberg has done to open standards. Play the 51 seconds.
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Mark Zuckerberg2:34
Teleporting around the metaverse is going to be like clicking a link on the internet. It's an open standard. In order to unlock the potential of the metaverse, there needs to be interoperability, and that goes beyond just taking your avatar and digital items across different apps and experiences, which we are already building an API to support. You want to know that when you buy something or create something, that your items will be useful in a lot of contexts and you're not going to be locked into one world or platform. You want to know that you own your items, not a platform. The metaverse isn't something we're building so much as it's something we're building for. Across the industry, we need to bring that same imagination and commitment to building for interoperability, openness, safety, and privacy as we do for all the other product aspects of the metaverse. These have to be fundamental building blocks.
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Jason Calacanis3:25
Oh my god, it's so ridiculous. This is like the guy who just robbed your house telling you you don't need to lock your door. Are you people crazy? You literally stole everybody's data. You then let Cambridge Analytica and everybody else on the inside use that data. You pulled the rug out from under people who bought pages and spent money building their follower count and then you deprecated their follower count. You made people use your own cryptocurrencies, you deprecated your own e-coins back in the day, mana in games, and then you had an app developer program which you shut off and screwed all these app developers. Do you think we don't remember what you did to app developers for the first five years with the Facebook platform? Can somebody please pull up the videos of Zuckerberg saying this exact thing and then pull up the headlines after that point and do a supercut of all the developers he destroyed, Zynga and everybody else who he put the screws to and screwed? If you partner with Zuckerberg, you will get screwed. Do not believe him. And if he was absolutely committed to this, why isn't he doing it in Instagram and Facebook and WhatsApp right now? Why are those not open source? Why is your data not portable? Why are the login systems not standard? He's a liar. Basically, he's a liar and he is now trying to convince us that this time it will be different. When somebody shows you who they are, believe them. That's it, that's simple. He has screwed over every partner he has worked with and even the people he bought companies from, and he made billionaires hate him. Instagram founders, WhatsApp founders, the list goes on and on. They all despise Zuckerberg. Can you imagine making people billionaires and making them tens of billions of dollars and they still hate you? There's a reason people don't trust Zuckerberg. It's because he has not earned trust. And then he's here telling us that this time it's going to be different and this time the metaverse is going to be open. Sorry, you can say you had some big giant come-to-Jesus moment about open standards, and now he's trying to flip the script and kind of say Apple is the closed system. This is all like a high-level game of poker that Zuckerberg is just not good at. We all see what you're doing, Zuckerberg. You're trying to put these digs into Apple for charging a whole bunch because they blocked you from tracking users and you can't make as much money with app installs. We see it from a mile away. If the metaverse is going to be the next platform, it's essential that Facebook not control it. If you're a developer, you should not support this. If you're a user, you should not support this. If you're an entrepreneur, you should not work for his platform. DAOs should only support open standards in this regard. And I think this is the area where cryptocurrency, distributed systems, and DAOs and other non-controlled open source communities with financial incentives built into them can really shine, if this is in fact the future, which is a big question. We can't let Zuck win. We need to #boycottMeta at all costs. And if you're a developer, why would you work to make Zuckerberg richer when you can work on the open source projects, own the cryptocurrencies, own the real estate, own the NFTs? If you do believe this is going to happen, and that's not guaranteed, why would you go work and be a peasant to Zuckerberg's 50 billion dollars when you could go make 10 million dollars being an open source developer and just picking which currencies and real estate you want to buy in the metaverse? It's a terrible decision for any developer to go to work for Zuckerberg as opposed to an open metaverse project.
