CEOInterviews.AIThe Real Reason Silicon Valley Won't Criticize Trump (Jason Calacanis)

T

Tim Miller0:00

Iran is just an unmitigated disaster and it's going to kill his presidency. There is strong consensus that that was the biggest mistake he could possibly have made. He cannot get out of it reasonably and he lost Tucker, Megan Kelly, Steve Bannon, everybody in his group because of it. Yeah.

Hey everybody, a few notes before the pod today. I taped yesterday afternoon with Jason Calacanis because I'm about to hit a plane to my father's retirement party which we're excited about. For the newbies, Jason is a little bit of a departure from our usual material here on the Bullworth podcast. He has a podcast of his own called the All-In podcast. And his colleagues, two of them were very active Donald Trump supporters. One of them, David Balsac, ended up going into the administration. And then another one is kind of a was Trump curious. Jason was the most middle of the road of the crew. And we did our first interview, God, a couple years ago now, before the 2024 election. And we've done a check-in every 6 to 12 months. So we did one of those check-ins today. We talked a bunch about the stuff that he really knows about, which is Silicon Valley and VC World, and then talked about what the vibe shift is looking like on Trump. It's not shifting as much as we would like. A little spoiler alert. So that's what's on this podcast. We also have the Next Level podcast. It's already out. It's out earlier than usual. So if you're looking for just a politics fix, you can just pop on over to the Next Level feed, me, Sarah, and JBL as we do every Tuesday. So go give that a listen. Download it if you're not subscribed to the Next Level Feed. And I guess one more thing before we get to this show. Jason's a big Knicks fan, so we discussed the potential of a Trump curse, and he was worried about a Trump curse. It turned out that he was right. Trump showed up to the game, made it a massive hassle for everybody in Midtown New York, salted the vibes, fell asleep. Trump actually fell asleep for a little while. He rested his eyes. A lengthy rest, about a 22 second eye rest during the third quarter and then he left early. So as a result the next 13 game winning streak is over. Don't know who else to point to on that except for Donald Trump. Would really be something if the whole series, the whole vibe of New York, the whole trajectory of society shifts because Donald Trump decided he was a 12-year-old and wanted to do what J. Mark is calling it the Make-A-Wish presidency. The Big Presidency. You guys remember the movie Big? The Big Presidency where he gets to be a little boy that does fun stuff with all the grown-ups. So that's what happened last night. I'm a little, I'm enjoying it. I know I've got some buddies who are listeners who are Knicks fans. I'm sorry that that Trump hexed you, but hard not to enjoy it. So anyway, stick around for me and Jal. It gets a little hot in the second half. So hopefully that'll give you something to get your dander up and if not go check us out on the next level and we'll be back tomorrow with our regularly scheduled programming. Appreciate you.

Hello and welcome to the Bullwork Podcast. I'm your host Tim Miller. Happy to welcome back to the show a journalist and entrepreneur turned angel investor. He's the co-host of the All-In podcast. He's the best of the four. Not really a competitive category. He just hosted the liquidity summit, a private investor summit for LPs, fund managers, and elite entrepreneurs. That's fancy. It's Jason Calacanis. What's up, man?

J

Jason Calacanis3:52

How you doing, brother? Big fan of the show. Nice to be here for my second appearance. After five, you get the blazer. I understand.

T

Tim Miller3:58

Yeah. Isn't it third? I think it's third.

J

Jason Calacanis3:59

I don't know. I think you should make it five.

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Tim Miller4:01

It is third. No, it's your third appearance.

J

Jason Calacanis4:03

It is my third? Okay, sure.

T

Tim Miller4:06

You know, I'm a big fan. I went back and checked the archive. Your last appearance was at the six month mark of Trump's term and we did a little check-in now like a year and six months almost. Hasn't been quite a year. So we'll do a little update. We'll get to that. But first, just for so people know, we're taping this Monday afternoon and so this will be Tuesday's show. So we don't know if the Knicks have won game three tonight. I'm surprised to see you at your home studio because I've seen you not quite courtside like row two, row three, semi courtside. I had courtside for the wrap-up game in Atlanta, the massacre.

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Jason Calacanis4:41

Yeah, and I flew there with my brother. I went to Philly with Ben Stiller, my friend. We were courtside for the Philly game. They tried to block us.

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Tim Miller4:53

I was at two of the MSG games, but like you said, third row because even with my incredible micro celebrity, you understand micro podcast celebrity, you just...

J

Jason Calacanis5:03

You leverage it a little better than me. Your shamelessness I have to give you. You're out there on X just being like give me a get, who has courtside for me? I don't have the power.

T

Tim Miller5:11

I mean, I pay for them to be honest. But even so,

J

Jason Calacanis5:14

Yeah, but I do use the power. I mean, what's the point of having a million followers on Twitter if you can't just use it for customer support?

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Tim Miller5:22

I agree with that.

J

Jason Calacanis5:23

Yeah. Like if something's not right. And then Cleveland, they blocked us from getting courtside. So I had third row and I went to the Spurs both games. I am going to predict tonight the Knicks are going to win and I think they're going to demolish them by 15 points.

T

Tim Miller5:40

Well, tomorrow why are you not going? You're scared of Donald Trump. You don't want to deal with the hassle. You're worried he's hexing your squad.

J

Jason Calacanis5:48

There was some bad juju here with Trump going.

T

Tim Miller5:51

It's bad juju. He should not have done this. You should not make the fans show up 3 hours early. And he got rid of the watch party which has become this huge tradition. So listen, he's the president. He can do what he wants, but I would have preferred he didn't do it. I was going to come in for it, but I've decided I'll just come in for game four. And it's kind of a dick move. Yeah. I mean, and is he even a fan? Like, do you think he can name anyone from the 1999 team? I mean, I guess you...

J

Jason Calacanis6:16

He used to go to games, but I don't know if he went to the games primarily because he was friends with JD or if he went because it was a celebrity thing to do. But he has not been going since. So I don't put him in the Timothy Chalamet, Spike Lee. He's not part of our group and I put myself into that group just based on fandom, not celebrity to be clear.

T

Tim Miller6:37

Well, based on your strong prediction on the Knicks, I'm going to fade you based on some of the predictions you've made that we're going to get into from the Trump.

J

Jason Calacanis6:44

Okay, here we go.

T

Tim Miller6:45

I'm fading you. I'm betting on the...

J

Jason Calacanis6:48

What's your team, by the way? Were you a Pelicans?

T

Tim Miller6:50

I'm Nuggets. I'm Nuggets. I'm Nuggets.

J

Jason Calacanis6:51

Oh, Denver Nuggets. Yeah. And rough playoffs for us, but I'll bet on the Spurs tonight. Modest wager on DraftKings and we'll see. The listeners will know who's right. Before we get to Trump, because who knows how that'll go. I want to get into your main area of expertise first. Want to talk about what's happened in Silicon Valley world AI. I feel like I don't know if you'll take this as a compliment or an insult, but I feel like you're a fair arbiter of conventional wisdom on where the valley investor class is on things, how things are going. And so rather than putting on your Jason hat, I just want to start there like where is the valley right now on both where the economy broadly and also the AI stuff in particular.

Yeah. So let's start with AI. AI is like every previous technology wave put together and then times 10 in terms of the impact, the opportunity, and just the capabilities of what's happening. The last time I was on the show, or maybe it was two times ago, we had a clip go viral where I said, 'Listen, Amazon is going to be lights out in their factories. It's all going to be robotics and they have Zoox, so they're going to be delivering packages. And the idea that a human would touch a package between you clicking order on Amazon and it showing up at your doorstep will be insane or farcical in three, four, five years.' That went crazy. Shortly after that, Andy Jassy wrote a memo saying, 'Hey, we're going to be going all in on AI. We're going to have a different staffing level.' He laid off a bunch of people. And then this secret memo got leaked that they weren't going to hire 600,000 jobs. And the PR team is like, 'How do we deal with the fact that we're not going to be hiring humans anymore? Maybe we should give money to Toys for Tots.' I don't know if you saw this.

T

Tim Miller8:45

Not Cars for Kids, notably given some of their baggage.

J

Jason Calacanis8:49

There it could be. Yeah, so essentially and then if you watched, there was the Figure robotic company also doing humanoid robots had like a telethon where they had one of their robots sort packages.

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Tim Miller9:02

Okay.

J

Jason Calacanis9:03

And so this timeline is increasing. So it is a huge opportunity and the tokens which equal intelligence are so compelling for people to use that people are spending too much money on them. They're going crazy using them and you've had to rein in employees. For every story you hear that this technology is going to change everything, you'll have people who don't know how to apply it. But we use two terms in the industry: AGI and then super intelligence. To keep it super simple, AGI means the artificial intelligence is as smart as the smartest human being. Super intelligence means it's smarter than all collective human intelligence for all time and it will solve problems we can't even think about, we can't even conceive of. The race is really for super intelligence. AGI is a little waypoint along the way and that waypoint prints money. It prints money and we have this grand debate on All-In all the time. We have it publicly about job displacement, job destruction, universal basic income and people in our industry have delusions of grandeur because we've done big things right. So you do have this god complex amongst the Anthropic people or Sam Altman, Elon, all the whole group really has done some things that have changed the world dramatically and then some of them are drama queens.

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Tim Miller10:33

And both, and some are both.

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Jason Calacanis10:37

Some are both. Yes.

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Tim Miller10:37

Okay. So, I was listening to one of your debates maybe from two weeks ago on the show where you were more concerned about job displacement than some of your co-panelists, I guess. And I was talking a little bit with Derek Thompson last week. Smart.

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Jason Calacanis10:54

Yeah. Really smart. And he was basically saying is like I don't know. He's like I know that's not what I'm supposed to do because I'm supposed to do an explainer podcast. And he's like, I hear compelling arguments for the fact that AI is going to actually create so many efficiencies and so many potential opportunities that there'll be job growth. And he's like, I see the apocalyptic version as well, where there's huge displacement. Obviously, there'll be displacement in certain types of industries no matter what, but the question is how is it on balance?

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Tim Miller11:26

I like it. I find it interesting that there was a lot of conversation about this over the last year. There continues to be, but feeling like it was imminent and I don't know. I sense a little bit of a vibe shift where maybe this stuff isn't happening as imminently as people thought. What do you make of that?

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Jason Calacanis11:47

Yeah. So, multiple things can be occurring like a storm, right? You could have multiple components of this weather pattern and some people it's going to flood their neighborhood and other people it's going to extend the weather in San Francisco might be more like Los Angeles eventually, right? And LA might turn into a hellscape and be far too hot. So the weather system is very complex. And so Derek's right, hard to predict. So what do we know? What are CEOs of companies and what's their behavior? It's always helpful to just look from first principles like a game on the field. You had Jack at Square/Block just cut the team in half. Now in technology, we always bloated these companies. Why? There were two reasons. One of them strategic, one of them sinister. The strategic reason was let's hire people because we're continuing to grow for a year or two from now. If we hire ahead, then we'll be able to move faster. Okay, that's strategic. Every company's been doing it for 30 years. The sinister one is what Google did early in the days, and I literally had this conversation with the principles there, Sergey and Larry, many times. They would hire people based on intelligence, pedigree, Stanford, Harvard, MIT, and they would hoard them. They would hoard talent. But it was not just so they could use it. It was so those people didn't create a competitive company to Google.

T

Tim Miller13:15

Yeah.

J

Jason Calacanis13:16

So it was a blocker strategy in addition to hey we have this natural resource. Pretty sinister. Now with AI you can get rid of middle management. What is the job of middle management? It's to set up meetings, keep people on track, provide TPS reports, project updates. All that stuff is being done perfectly and better and more consistently by AI. The number of notetakers that pop off when you start a meeting on Zoom now, Notion has one, Zoom has one, Granola, it's like how many versions of this meeting do we have to have records of. So that whole job slice is going to be gone. Then you take self-driving, that's going to be gone. Truck driving, that's going to be gone. Factory workers, that's going to be gone. Simple food production, making bowls, slop bowls at whatever bowl place you like to order from, that's going to be all robotic. The writing is on the wall.

T

Tim Miller14:11

So Starbucks has come back. Starbucks has kind of a countervailing story to that narrative because they got...

J

Jason Calacanis14:17

There is going to be what makes us uniquely human. We might drive more human experiences. So that would be the addition.

T

Tim Miller14:24

So hey this thing is so profitable maybe we should add some services or add some people.

J

Jason Calacanis14:30

There's nothing more compelling to a chief operating officer, a VP of ops than the ability to replace humans with technology. They love it. They love it. How do I know this? Because for the past 10 years, I have invested in and been pitched on companies explicitly. Explicitly, Tim, our company gives you the ability to get rid of all cashiers at your quickserve restaurant. Our technology allows you to get rid of the person making French fries at your restaurant over and over again. That's been the pitch in Silicon Valley for decades and it has increased massively. So when technology people say it's not happening or they say all jobs are going away, they're talking about two different things. One is trying to protect Donald Trump from supporting AI relentlessly and that job displacement happening which liberals and America first people are not buying for good reason and on the other side it's unrealistic to think that an AI first employee can't get a job. If you're an AI first employee and you know how to deploy these tools you will get many jobs. So long term I think we'll be okay. Short term you could see a lot of blue collar jobs, a lot of middle management jobs get retired and that's going to cause chaos.

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Tim Miller15:57

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Okay, my last thing is the other thing that people worry about is the new jobs like new out of college. I know that you have a big internship program. I was just talking to some interns here about this question. It was funny. I saw this Bill Maher clip. I kind of hate to hand it to Bill Maher because he's had some misses lately, particularly in the war, but he had this funny bit about what's happening at colleges right now, which is that college papers have just become a circle jerk.

J

Jason Calacanis17:40

It's like a computer circle jerk. The circle jerk of nonsense where they're like the AI is writing the paper and then AI is grading the paper. So, it's like two computers talking to each other. No one's actually learning anything. No one's getting real feedback. It's a very dystopian concept. You made the joke. I asked a couple recent college grads about it and they were like, 'Yeah, oh yeah, that's exactly what's happening.' And this is why they're booing at commencement speeches when you evoke AI. This is the first generation that hacked their way through school and felt like they didn't learn anything because they were just using AI tools and they felt their teachers were using the same AI tools to teach their lesson plans. And so they're like, 'Yeah, my whole college experience was AI slop.' They got a reason to boo. And if you're running a company right now, the concept of training somebody for 2 years to be productive or a year to be productive eventually when you could train an AI to do that. Toby from Shopify who's a good friend said anytime anybody wants to do a hire and they put in a request, they have to prove that they haven't tried to do that job with AI first. Very logical approach for a company but devastating for those first two or three rungs of the ladder. That's why this feels a lot different than minimum wage debates which we can get into. This feels a lot different than immigration and people working illegally because elite people who racked up 150 to 250k in debt now can't get the first rung of the ladder. That's going to cause a whole different level of hand wringing here.

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Tim Miller19:18

Yeah. Their parents are going to be mad. Talk about who do you know who votes? The 55-year-old parent of a 22-year-old who just spent $150,000 on college and their kid can't get a job. That is a person that votes and donates and who is vocal. Yeah. So anyway, that'll be interesting to see that all play out. I guess one more thing on this on the politics. Speaking of the vocal push back, the other area is the data centers. Where do you fall down on this on the great data center debate?

J

Jason Calacanis19:46

Just so people understand my politics, my contemporaries on the podcast like to paint me as a libtard.

T

Tim Miller19:53

And it's kind of this last time you were a Trump...

J

Jason Calacanis19:56

I never said who I voted for because I'm trying to remain independent.

T

Tim Miller20:01

You strongly alluded to the fact that you were interested. You're Trump curious. So you're the lib on the pod and you're Trump curious in...

J

Jason Calacanis20:07

A moderate and have always been an independent moderate. I voted 60% Democrat and 40% Republican in my career. I just vote for the best person.

T

Tim Miller20:15

There you go.

J

Jason Calacanis20:16

If you were to tell me I could vote for...

T

Tim Miller20:20

Who was the private equity Republican that everybody hated for so long?

J

Jason Calacanis20:24

Robbie? I would vote for Romney in a heartbeat right now to have a centrist.

T

Tim Miller20:30

I might even vote for Pence to have a right-wing conservative but who's normal.

J

Jason Calacanis20:34

I would vote for normal. That's what I would like to have. So just so people understand my politics coming into this, I'm an independent and I pick people generally that way. But your question is...

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Tim Miller20:47

Just on the data center, I'm just curious, you know, there's been a lot of obviously the big tech people make very passionate arguments about all these data centers are needed. They're needed to fund all that compute that you were talking about earlier. There's high demand for these tokens. You know, they are creating jobs in the communities. There's just been a lot of push back about environmental concerns, displacement, electrical costs, etc., etc. I'm just wondering where you think that's headed.

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Jason Calacanis21:10

It's a great debate filled with a lot of FUD, fear, uncertainty, and doubt by one side and then, it is essential for our industry to get these things up and running and to get them up quick because it turns out when you put a lot of this hardware on a problem, it can in fact solve it. So sometimes the brute force of it does work and the demand is off the charts for access to more tokens and to lower the price of tokens. As you know, everybody talks about Jevons paradox which basically means if you make something cheaper, people use it more. If you want an example of that, you expand the 405 freeway by two lanes, all of a sudden traffic moves quicker for like two months and then people move a little further out and it induces more traffic. On the data center side, my politics are very much in favor of state rights and local rights. I like the fact that if people in Maine or New Hampshire have a problem with this, the folks in Pennsylvania might seize that opportunity or Texas. Texas wants every data center you can build. We have the largest install base of solar and wind outside of China. I mean, this place loves energy. And they don't care where it comes from. Oil, natural gas, they're indifferent. Solar as long as it makes a buck. That's all they care about is this is unit economic positive. The thing about water is a fake news story. The thing about energy and impacting the grid is a real story in some cases. So you have to kind of parse that. The water thing is fake because all these systems use closed loop which basically means the water goes in a pipe and it evaporates a little bit but it uses much less than the almonds or golf courses in the country.

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Tim Miller23:01

The almonds. That one's fake.

J

Jason Calacanis23:02

The almonds. They're taking almonds. If you're out there drinking almond milk anyway. I go pistachio all day. I mean, eating all these...

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Tim Miller23:10

Cashews.

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Jason Calacanis23:12

Oh, cashews are incredible. You put a cashew with a date, you're in good shape. But anyway, so the water is a fake issue. I like the fact that people are competing for these. Let the states and the people who don't want it ban it. Let the states that do want it benefit from it. That's one of the great reasons why the United States is so successful is because we have an A/B testing process. We can multivariate test something. And what they're doing now is the data center folks are chasing power and they're chasing power that doesn't impact locals. So if you go to the Permian Basin and you get some natural gas there and some solar and battery, you're not harming anybody. And great, you can build it till the cows come home and putting them in space is the next thing. The third one you haven't heard about, but that you will, is people are going to start giving free batteries and solar to people's homes. And then in the rack where the batteries are, they're going to put 10 of these Nvidia servers. So, imagine I offered you for your home, 'Hey, would you like solar and would you like battery and would you like a free electricity bill?' And you'd be like, 'Yeah, what's the catch?' And it's like, 'The catch is we're putting a mini data center on the side of your house. It's the same size as your existing HVAC water cooler, and that's going to be a real thing.' And I think that'll be the bridge between now and space.

T

Tim Miller24:30

So, it's kind of a non-issue.

J

Jason Calacanis24:33

It's an interesting flag. It's a little dystopian. And I think it's, I understand that we're used to it as an issue. I don't think it's going to be a big political issue locally, but to be continued.

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Tim Miller24:40

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I want to do Elon stuff and then into Trump. We've had a lot of, you're an Elon buddy. Or relatively buddy, just in this year transparency.

J

Jason Calacanis26:26

Yeah, friends for over, very close friends for a very long period of time.

T

Tim Miller26:31

So there's been a lot of critiques here at the Bullwork over the manner in which the SpaceX IPO is going to happen. In part because of the fast tracking of the NASDAQ breaking the traditional rules of how a new IPO gets into the NASDAQ. Also I mean Cara, your friend Cara Swisser was on that a couple weeks ago.

J

Jason Calacanis26:52

She hates me. Cara Swisser is very angry. She is so angry. And I think on this case she was right about the valuation of the company being kind of absurd. There's really one good company which is the satellite business and then you have two not that profitable companies, one of them actually a ship company kind of tied onto the satellite business and it's sort of absurd what the valuation is like.

T

Tim Miller27:18

What's the case for the Elon route?

J

Jason Calacanis27:25

Case one is never bet against Elon because he...

T

Tim Miller27:28

Well, manifest things betting against him on the process of cutting government funding through the DOGE process because he totally failed at that.

J

Jason Calacanis27:36

And has inspired another round of it that looks like it's going to be quite successful and Ro Khanna is doing it in his state as well and it's become...

T

Tim Miller27:44

I don't think Elon can get credit for all of government cuts everywhere. His program that he was in charge of...

J

Jason Calacanis27:49

He did inspire it and put it in front of a, so did it work perfectly? But I think he inspired people.

T

Tim Miller27:56

We were talking about this 30 years ago so I don't know.

J

Jason Calacanis27:59

And did they make any progress I guess is the question. But now you have people taking it up realizing it's an important issue to Americans anyway. Let's put that aside. Your question is about SpaceX. There's an incredible business in Starlink. Starlink has over 10 million people subscribing. That will wind up being the largest subscription business in the history of humanity, probably double what you see from Netflix. Why? Because they're going to go directly to your phone eventually. If you've seen the Starlink Mini, if you've seen the progress, they're putting it on boats. Most people are putting it on their houses who can afford to as a backup to their cable modem. Like, if you're a broadcaster from home, you might have Starlink as your backup. I assume you do.

T

Tim Miller28:41

I don't, but I've been considering it reluctantly.

J

Jason Calacanis28:44

Well, think about this. For $1,000 or less, you can have a backup and you make 20, 30, $40,000 per podcast, how could you not have it as a backup? And you can get this router from UniFi that just automatically switches over. It would be very wise for you to get a battery pack and I'll send you a link to the router that does the hot swapping.

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Tim Miller29:06

Thanks. Do you have a promo code Jason where I get a big?

J

Jason Calacanis29:09

I don't for that, but I have one for Roku if you want a GLP-1 if I can interest you in a GLP-1. Yes. Here's the good news. That business alone will support the valuation.

T

Tim Miller29:22

Will support the $2 trillion valuation.

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Jason Calacanis39:31

States has all of these very important goals and whether or not you can say a word without being criticized is really not that important. I think it was more symbolism of the overreach of cancel culture, how they would say it is word policing. I think it's just an overall debate about the Overton window, like are we allowed to talk about certain topics or not?

T

Tim Miller39:52

I'm with you on that, but wasn't your instinct? I mean, I look at the 2020 Jason, and I don't know, you're showing empathy like other someone.

J

Jason Calacanis39:59

I do have a life as is feeling pain and you don't want them to feel pain. Don't you think that's a good instinct? Isn't it bad that now we've gone to a place where people are like, 'Oh, it's cucked if you care about somebody else's pain. It's based to just make fun of people and be a dick as much as possible.' Like, that's bad, right?

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Tim Miller40:18

Yeah. I can hold these conflicting thoughts in my mind, which is one, I'm not responsible for the Overton window opening and closing. And if people want to say that's gay to mean that's dumb or they want to say that's retarded, that's out of my control, Tim. I don't have the ability you say is in your control.

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Jason Calacanis40:37

It is in my control. And I think if the public vernacular is we can separate the intent of the word retarded and say that means you're not thinking in a crisp way and people say it in a jovial way, I think we can separate that from the use of it like I would like to make fun of this person with Down syndrome and make them feel as bad as possible. But yeah, it's...

T

Tim Miller41:03

Well, speaking of the r-word, let's get to Donald Trump's management of the economy and the country lately. When you were on with your six-month assessment, when we were on last, actually I want to play this. What prompted our last visit just to set the parameters of the conversation was there was a video that had been posted on X that was of your colleague on the All-In podcast, David Friedberg, talking positively about the Trump administration to date, and you kind of jing him a little bit, giving him a little trouble. Then you posted the link to that video by saying, 'We're six months in and your assessment is that he's been pretty solid, he still has work to do.' I want to listen to the original video just so we can have a baseline. Let's listen to it.

J

Jason Calacanis41:51

Okay, here we go. Baseline it.

T

Tim Miller41:53

What better team has ever been put together? It is a cabinet of CEOs. It is a cabinet of managers and a cabinet of people who know how to get things done. And every time I go there, I'm impressed by this cabinet. I pull my hair out when I admit that you're pro-Trump.

J

Jason Calacanis42:06

I support my president. I support the president.

T

Tim Miller42:08

Okay. So, you voted for him. You voted for him. And you love Trump.

J

Jason Calacanis42:12

I love what he's doing.

T

Tim Miller42:13

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

J

Jason Calacanis42:31

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

T

Tim Miller42:57

If you wanted to be duped by him. Yeah, sure. I have to say, he made a pretty convincing argument because he didn't start any wars in his first term because you had people who were hawks on both sides who very much wanted to engage in maybe being a little more active in Ukraine and a lot more active in the Middle East on both sides, right? Whether it was Nikki Haley or Hillary Clinton, they wanted to go hardcore into Iran. So, he actually made a very convincing argument. Now, why did he switch his position completely? I think Marco Rubio said it the first time and the first time was the correct take. They got dragged into it by Israel because they said they're going to go anyway and he decided to do it. Huge mistake. Terrible, terrible decision. I think the ICE stuff was incomprehensibly cruel and poorly executed. And you heard me give J.D. Vance when he was a candidate a hard time about that at one of our events. I said, 'How are you possibly...' and you can put that clip in post if you want to, but I said to him, 'Hey, you can't drag 20 million hardworking Americans who just happen to not be legal yet out of this country. People are going to take their phones up and record you dragging their nanny, their handyman, their dishwasher. Americans are not going to go for that.' And I was exactly right about that one. He plummeted in his approval rating because of those two things. The tariff stuff was poorly executed, but the right idea. We should rebalance trade like that. He just did it in his normal YOLO nature. So, if I were to put together the biggest disasters since we've last spoken, Iran is just an unmitigated disaster and it's going to kill his presidency. I think there's consensus about that, right? I'm not in politics all day long, but there is strong consensus that that was the biggest mistake he could possibly have made. He cannot get out of it reasonably and he lost Tucker, Megan Kelly, Steve Bannon, everybody in his group because of it. Yeah.

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

J

Jason Calacanis45:46

But it's a binary choice and if the choice was Kamala after what Biden did to the economy and after what Biden did to M&A, if you talk to any CEO, they need to have low taxes and high M&A and they are pragmatists. They represent their shareholders, their employees, etc. And they looked at the option of Kamala versus...

T

Tim Miller46:09

They do risk analysis though as well, right? They're aware of risk analysis.

J

Jason Calacanis46:14

One of the risks I think people would say I was ridiculous if they came on and I was like, 'I don't know, Trump could get us into a nuclear war. Kamala is not.' And here we are. We're not on the cusp of a nuclear war but we're on the cusp of a total unpredictable disaster that is way worse than what... I mean Kamala would never have done anything this stupid. We would have just started the war for sure.

T

Tim Miller46:35

With Iran? You think Kamala would have gone to war?

J

Jason Calacanis46:37

Absolutely, 100%. Nikki Haley, Kamala, all of them. The same. Nikki Haley's a neocon hawk Republican.

T

Tim Miller46:46

They both are very pro... I think you think the Harris-Walz administration was going to do a war of choice in Iran.

J

Jason Calacanis46:53

Yeah, for sure.

T

Tim Miller46:53

I mean, Joe Biden didn't go to war in Iran. Barack Obama didn't go to war in Iran. Bill Clinton didn't. Why would Kamala Harris have?

J

Jason Calacanis47:02

I think because the timing was there and Israel was going to do it anyway, which is what they said, the reason they did it. I think if Israel was going to do it, they would have followed them. That's just my gut.

T

Tim Miller47:13

I asked Phil Gordon on this spot. I asked them that exact thing and then they all said, 'I just don't know why you wouldn't take them at their word.' I don't... back to your question about CEOs though, and why would they pick this person?

J

Jason Calacanis47:27

If their main goal was to do commerce, do they have access to this administration? Yes. Do they have lower taxes? Yes. Are their stocks at record highs? Yes. So, in their minds, as hard as it is for you to believe, this has worked out perfectly on those three things. M&A is back on the menu after years, IPOs are going to be happening, lower tax, lower regulation, and the stock market's at an all-time high and employment is at an all-time low for our lifetime. So, they're looking at that business game on the field. They're not thinking about ICE. They're not thinking about...

T

Tim Miller48:05

You say their taxes are down, but most of those companies, not all of them, some of them are being tariffed. Some of them Donald Trump stole from. He stole from them. How is that more inconsequential than their personal tax rate? They already were treating the tax corporate and personal and...

J

Jason Calacanis48:20

The corporate tax rate went down a couple points.

T

Tim Miller48:23

It's all... you ask me how why they would make this decision.

J

Jason Calacanis48:26

Yeah. No, they make an economically rational decision and this is what the Democrats need to learn for the next cycle, is to embrace business leaders.

T

Tim Miller48:36

Okay, let me give you a...

J

Jason Calacanis48:37

To bring them into the...

T

Tim Miller48:38

No, no, but this is how they think.

J

Jason Calacanis48:42

But this is where I think the Democrats are in a real conundrum because I want to give you a counterfactual.

T

Tim Miller48:49

Okay.

J

Jason Calacanis48:49

Kamala Harris did win. Okay. She gets in there and she puts an illegal tax on the Silicon Valley companies unilaterally. It doesn't go through Congress. Puts a tax on them. It's not legal, but she just does it. She says, 'It's an emergency. I've decided I have the right to do a windfall profits tax on all these companies.' She's going to do that. And then she garnishes money from the CEOs. She makes them come to her and beg her for absolution to get around it. Sometimes she grants it, sometimes she doesn't. Kind of based on whim, kind of based on whether Doug is friends with the person, kind of based on whether they've given money to her. And then the Supreme Court comes back and says, 'No, actually you've got to give the money back to the companies.' And she says, 'No, actually I don't want to. I'm not going to do that. In fact, I'm going to threaten them and maybe I might actually take a percentage.' Donald Trump just suggested you might take a percentage of the company for the government. I think if Kamala Harris had said that, you and all your Silicon Valley buddies and the Wall Street Journal would be losing their minds and it would be communism.

T

Tim Miller49:56

So you're making this analogy to tariffs.

J

Jason Calacanis49:58

This is what Trump is doing with tariffs and with taking a percentage of Intel, taking... he's suggesting he's going to take a percentage of AI companies. He tariffed them illegally. He made them come in and beg for their lunch. That's left-wing autocratic politics.

T

Tim Miller50:15

Yeah. I can educate you as to why they don't have a problem with it and why you do.

J

Jason Calacanis50:19

Okay.

T

Tim Miller50:20

You are looking at it from a moral perspective and from a logic perspective of, 'Well, if you were okay with one side doing it and not okay with the other side doing this, it doesn't make intellectual sense to you.'

J

Jason Calacanis50:31

Totally.

T

Tim Miller50:33

I understand where Tim Miller is coming from. This intellectually does not make sense.

J

Jason Calacanis50:38

Yeah.

T

Tim Miller50:39

Let me tell you on a business level what this means. The tariffs, when they're under 15% when they actually hit, are easily absorbed on one side or the other. The folks who are selling items or the folks who are providing those, they each make a bit of a concession and maybe you raise the cost of something a little bit, but it's not as dramatic as the left feels it is. It was chaotic but when it actually hit the ground, it made no difference to these businesses. So, a lot of hand-wringing for not a lot of impact. And you find it offensive, reasonably so, that people have to go bend the knee and bring a gold bar and wait in line. And South Park did a whole send-up of it that you have to bend the knee and make your donation. That's what business people like. They like transactions. You may not like it. You may think it's crumb. Business people love to have a coin operating situation.

I guess. But the Democrats also... this whole Biden thing is crazy. It's like the Democrats... he didn't even raise taxes on them. Trump has raised tax. You can tell me that the tariff thing is inconsequential, etc. Inconsequential. Okay, fine. But the last federal corporate tax hike was in 93. Like they haven't... all they've gotten is cuts from Obama, from Biden. They haven't faced a corporate tax hike in 30 years. So, why do they care? Why are they so upset about the Biden situation?

J

Jason Calacanis52:16

Because Biden didn't return their calls.

T

Tim Miller52:20

So the tariff isn't a big deal. The phone call is. That's fine. All right.

J

Jason Calacanis52:24

No, it actually is. You're brushing that off. And this is where you have a blind spot, Tim. Respectfully, you have a blind spot. If you can get in the room with the person, if you can get in the room with the administration, then you can shape policy and you can say, 'Hey, here's what we're trying to accomplish and can you help us with this and this regulation doesn't make sense?' That actually is a preferable situation to not getting your phone call returned. And if what you have to pay for it... I'm not saying this is my belief. You have me on here to explain Silicon Valley and the business side. I'm explaining it to you. They much prefer bending the knee, having to show up for the Melania documentary. Tim Cook's like, 'I got to show up for a documentary. That sucks. I gotta bring a gold bar. I'll do whatever it takes to keep selling iPhones. I got to keep this supply.' I don't know. We'll see how that goes. If President Oaf gets in there and he decides that he's going to put an actual tax hike on these guys and that he's going to return their calls, we'll see what they say about that. I don't think that they'll be that happy. I think that there's an imbalance. I want to play Howard Lutnick with your colleague. This is another thing that's like you guys just keep being wrong about how good Trump is for the economy. Not you personally, but I mean the people that make the case that Trump was going to be better for business.

T

Tim Miller53:42

Well, which part of the economy is the...

J

Jason Calacanis53:44

Well, here's... I just... Chamath was on with Howard Lutnick, or Chamath interviewed for your show. Howard Lutnick. This was January of this year.

T

Tim Miller53:52

I wasn't on this one.

J

Jason Calacanis53:53

You weren't on it. You weren't. But it's an interesting time capsule from January this year. Let's listen.

T

Tim Miller53:57

You're going to see fives in the greatest economy in the world. You're going to see fives. And people think you can't... 5% GDP on a base this big is just... we have a 30 trillion. So 5% is 1.5 trillion in growth. And if we cut rates, you'll see six. And people would never before Donald Trump walked into that office, they wouldn't think that's possible.

J

Jason Calacanis54:30

Yeah, we wouldn't think that's possible because that was insane. We're looking at maybe 2% economic growth, GDP growth this year.

T

Tim Miller54:35

They were close to those numbers. By the way, if they hadn't done the Iran war, they would have hit 4% and they would have had potentially some cuts. If you start a war and you do a supply chain shock with energy, you essentially take the Trump 2.0 agenda and you torch it. Correct, which is what's happened.

J

Jason Calacanis54:58

But why haven't more people come around on that? And again, I would think that Chamath, for example, I know you don't like to speak for your colleague, but in theory, if you had a VC and you brought a CEO in and they're like, 'Hey, man, you invest in me right now, you get behind me, we're going to have 6% growth this year.' And then six months later, they stuck their dick in the fax machine and screwed everything up and now they're at 2% growth with maybe negative, maybe going down there.

T

Tim Miller55:25

Yeah. You'd be like, 'Okay, well, see, turns out we need some new leadership. I'm calling the board here. I have some concerns.'

J

Jason Calacanis55:33

Yeah. So, why isn't that happening? Why aren't people like, 'We're calling the board here.'

T

Tim Miller55:36

Very simple. Very simple. Trump demands complete fidelity. And I'm not speaking about the mafia or anybody specific, but we all know in order to be in the Trump circle, you have to have complete utter fidelity to him. He's a genius.

J

Jason Calacanis55:53

So, it's North Korea. We're in North Korea basically.

T

Tim Miller55:56

Which doesn't feel like a capitalist system. It doesn't feel like a capitalist system.

J

Jason Calacanis56:02

Yeah, it's...

T

Tim Miller56:03

I can't critique the president.

J

Jason Calacanis56:05

Capitalist slash... if you told a bunch of business leaders this could become oligarchic, they'd say, 'Yeah, sign me up.'

T

Tim Miller56:14

Hell yeah. Sounds great.

J

Jason Calacanis56:16

Oligarchy sounds pretty great.

T

Tim Miller56:17

This is why we're fucked.

J

Jason Calacanis56:19

For a short period of time.

T

Tim Miller56:20

Can we agree for a second? This is why we're fucked. This is why we're not going to get... You said you wanted normal. I'm sure you and I disagree on the margins and what the marginal tax rate should be for the top tax bracket or whatever, but we're not going to get normal because these guys have decided that they wanted to go on with oligarchy. They decided that it's cool for Elon to become a trillionaire. They decided that they can't abide any even tiny tax hike on capital gains rates or corporate. So, what they're going to get is pitchforks and socialism. That's what they're going to get now.

J

Jason Calacanis56:51

I do think they're driving the socialist movement. I've talked very broadly about how to reverse that. I think we need to have a very open discussion about minimum wage. I was a free market... had a fair free market version of minimum wage for a long time. But then I started studying what happened in New Zealand, Australia, Norway, Denmark. These are obviously slightly different than the United States, but if we want to correct the socialist movement, which is gaining steam, and someone like Bernie Sanders saying, 'Hey, listen. They stole all the content from us and the knowledge and then we should get half the company.'

T

Tim Miller57:34

They did. Yes, of course. And some of it is legal, some of it's not legal. If you buy the book, you're actually allowed to train on it according to the courts, but if you steal the book, you're not.

J

Jason Calacanis57:43

Putting all that aside, it is a great sales pitch from Bernie. When I saw that, I was like, 'Oh man, this is gonna play. This will play in 2026 and into 2028.' What I think we need to do as a society is look at that K-shaped recovery. One group's going down, one group's going up. Invest America, the Trump accounts, is a great step in the right direction. Adding a dollar to the minimum wage for each of the next seven years and getting it to $15. It might seem performative, but it would actually be performative in a good way. You would say, 'Hey, everybody on the top's doing really well with equities. Let's get these people to move up and let's look at that.' Then I think universal health care is another easy way to bridge this gap between capitalism and socialism. We do have to have some kind of grand bargain that occurs because I do think the country is on the verge of just splitting into states that are going to be like Nevada, Texas, and Florida and states that are going to be like New York and California.

T

Tim Miller58:48

Maybe. Yeah. I don't know. I think that and that's why I like having this discussion and I wish some of them would come on and we could talk about it. But this is what I think that the CEO class and the elite VC class in Silicon Valley needs to realize that if they don't change the way they talk about this stuff and change the way that these things are regulated, that the pitchforks are coming for them hard. I mean, there's been this pivot that continues in Trump 2.0 about giving money away is for suckers. The whole Bill Gates vision of the world is different. We want no regulation. We want to stop doing charity.

J

Jason Calacanis59:26

People are aware of this issue. When Sam Altman's house got firebombed and then shot out by two different people in a 10-day period, trust me, that was talked about a lot by the same CEOs and elite venture capitalists you're talking about. And then there's the folks at Anthropic who are saying all jobs are going to go away. We need to contain this. So the industry has done a terrible job of communicating why AI is good for society and the good that could come out of it. And we have not done productive things like the Giving Pledge. The Giving Pledge, super performative when it came out, but saying the majority of my wealth is going to be given away upon my death actually made people feel like, hey, maybe we're all in this together. And what Michael Dell did when he gave $7 billion or whatever it was to these Invest America accounts, that needs to happen 10 more times.

T

Tim Miller1:00:18

Yeah, maybe next time without getting a $9 billion deal from the Department of War two weeks later. And this is the thing, like these guys, I hear what you're saying that they like it. They're happy with oligarchy. They're happy to deal with Trump. But maybe some on the left listening to this will probably be like, 'Look, capitalism has always been fake. It's always been crony capitalism.' Like Tim, you were sold a bill of goods maybe. But when there was a period of time where people did the performative part of it, whether it was the Giving Pledge, whether it was like actually committing to a real free market where there's competition, that created an environment where the capitalist system could thrive. And they have now gone all in with somebody, no pun intended, that is an assault on it. He's like, 'We're just going to do deals with rich people to buy me off.' And I'm telling you, the reaction to that is not going to be, 'Hey, let's go back to more friendly relations with the corporate leaders from the Democratic class.' The reaction is we're going to do the same thing. We're going to use our power to bully these guys the way he did, and you're not going to like it. That's what's going to happen.

J

Jason Calacanis1:01:29

That is concerning. The warfare, the lawfare that keeps getting escalated. What we really need to start thinking about is the Democrats winning the midterms. I guess if they win the House, they get subpoena power back. If they win the Senate, then they can do hearings and a little bit more...

T

Tim Miller1:01:50

Stop the appointments. They could stop any appointment. If some of these appointments were ludicrous, Pam Bondi, Christy Noem, Pete Hegseth. Yeah.

J

Jason Calacanis1:02:02

Yeah. I mean, some of these were quite embarrassing and he's corrected. He's given them promotions. I guess can never make a mistake, but they promoted them, gave them a better window seat. There needs to be checks and balances. That's the other thing that's kind of broken here both on the Republican side and I guess they did break the Republicans' brains with this slush fund for the $1.7 billion. So maybe that's a sign that the Trump era is ending and Republicans are going to take the party back. Either way, this thing's over in two years, right? So we're going to have to start thinking about a post-Trump world.

T

Tim Miller1:02:40

Yeah, I think he's probably more interested in getting ratings for the show. I think he likes doing his show. If you look at all of those performative folks, I think it's just about ratings. Whether it's him or Karen Swisher or Kelly, I think they just want ratings.

J

Jason Calacanis1:02:56

Okay. I don't... That's not what we're doing. I have two more things for you.

T

Tim Miller1:02:59

Three more things. We'll go rapid fire. Three more things. Rapid fire.

J

Jason Calacanis1:03:02

Zoran. Zoran can't. You have to look at that and be like, that's not as bad as you thought.

T

Tim Miller1:03:07

No.

J

Jason Calacanis1:03:08

I mean Zoran's been pretty good.

T

Tim Miller1:03:11

In what way?

J

Jason Calacanis1:03:12

Look, we're six months in. You did a six-month Trump assessment. I look at Zoran and I think he kept the police chief. Crime rates are down in New York. People were worried that he would go in and it would be, you know, we'd be on the side of the criminals and they would give out hugs instead of having cops in the subway. None of that happened. He's gotten rid of some of the red tape around building. They're planning to build. He did cut the budget. They got balanced. They had to cut a deal with Hochul to deal with that. He did the kind of performative populist left thing going after...

T

Tim Miller1:03:44

And now he's more centrist. Your boy at Citadel for having a pied-à-terre and...

J

Jason Calacanis1:03:49

Yeah, that was not good. But was it though? That's where you have another blind spot.

T

Tim Miller1:03:57

They should pay more. If you don't live in New York, you have a...

J

Jason Calacanis1:04:00

I'm totally fine with the pied-à-terre tax if you want to do that. It's fine. Local communities can do what local communities want to do. If they want flock because they want to have a secure community or don't want flock and they want to ban it, that's a local community's decision. Let them do it. What you should be appalled by and you should speak out about is when he picks a specific person and puts a target on their back. We just talked about Sam Altman having a firebomb and them shooting at his house with his kids in the house. Then you do this to the Citadel founder. That's the kind of stuff that gets people killed. And it's not cool to do that for a politician to say, 'Hey, this person is the reason why the city sucks. This person owns a penthouse. You don't.' That's gonna get him shot because there's a lot of crazy people out there. Adams should have apologized for that. He should have said, 'This is a great New Yorker.' I think he did say he's like, 'We want him here or whatever.' But that was completely disgraceful and it's disgraceful if you don't call it out. Everybody should call out anytime you single out one of these people.

T

Tim Miller1:04:57

I call it violence, but I don't know, man. I think that it's okay.

J

Jason Calacanis1:05:01

You don't see the problem with saying...

T

Tim Miller1:05:03

I wouldn't have a problem pointing to his house.

J

Jason Calacanis1:05:06

I don't think I would have done it in front of his house.

T

Tim Miller1:05:08

Of course you wouldn't have. You're a decent human. And I don't think Adams would have.

J

Jason Calacanis1:05:13

I mean, he has... I think that it's fair to do some populist eat the rich stuff. I mean people are for good reason, right?

T

Tim Miller1:05:22

Yeah, but you don't want to...

J

Jason Calacanis1:05:24

Can afford it.

T

Tim Miller1:05:26

Again, two different topics are retargeting individuals and sending crazy people to murder.

J

Jason Calacanis1:05:30

I don't want to do that. Obviously, that's obviously not...

T

Tim Miller1:05:32

Obviously. And that's the problem with singling anybody out. You start singling people out and you're saying this is the reason why you're suffering. Don't be surprised when the... we could just do this all day and the president...

J

Jason Calacanis1:05:44

Oh no, the president does it. I'm not... you will not get me. No rich people get mad at him. So again, that's just why I'm like the crocodile tears about Zoran going after Ken Griffin. It's tough because Donald Trump does it all the time and they don't do that because they're scared. You can't be mean to Trump because we're in afraid capitalism.

T

Tim Miller1:06:00

Okay, I don't want to. Okay.

J

Jason Calacanis1:06:02

I'm doing this. I swear not to pick on you, but I want to because it illustrates a point. But people have been making fun of you some on social media because of an email you sent to Jeffrey Epstein and then the Epstein files and said, 'Hey pal, running out to a kid's birthday party, will dig up their info.' He was trying to connect you. And to me, I thought this was an instructive exchange because you're not involved in any of the Epstein stuff. All that was happening was you guys were... he was a networker, he was a power networker, you're a power networker.

T

Tim Miller1:06:28

Sure. But I think that one of the reveals from the Epstein files is that people in elite circles are too lax about going along with and taking favors from people that do bad things or that are suspect, right? It's one of these things where it's like, look, if I heard that one of the other parents on my kid's basketball team was a pedo, I think I'd keep my distance and have my kid keep my distance as much as possible. If I heard that about the question...

J

Jason Calacanis1:07:03

No, I'll get a job. If you hear that about somebody that can help you get a job or can help you get access to capital, then all of a sudden it's like, 'Well, whatever, who cares? We'll do a little deal with him.' And in retrospect, don't you feel like the lesson from the Epstein thing is that people should use more judgment in this?

T

Tim Miller1:07:21

I mean in hindsight, of course. Here, I'll give you the complete background to it. My book agent, John Brockman, ran something called Edge.org where all scientists got together and I would go to the TED conference. He was there. He was giving donations to everybody. And I wasn't following it. I wasn't following his career or anything like that. My book agent said, 'Epstein...' and I wasn't following his case to be totally honest. That first case in Palm Beach I guess had happened. And he said, 'Hey, Epstein, who you've met at TED twice and he was going to invest in your magazine.' I had one meeting with him about that back in the day. He said, 'Hey, he wants to meet those guys who are on your podcast. They're doing that Bitcoin thing.' And I was like, 'Yeah, sure.' And I say, 'Hey, pal' to everybody. That's like a New Yorker thing. 'Hey, pal. Sure. Thanks, pal.' I mean, I'll say it to the valet. And it's not like you can read into that anything. Of course, the Epstein file people do. And he was like, 'Would you mind introducing Epstein because he wants to invest in these founders?' My business is connecting, as you said, capital to founders. I wasn't really even tracking what he was doing. And in fact, I went back and I did some research on it. The way it was framed to New Yorkers when he came back from that Palm Beach sentence he had was that he was framed, he got a massage, the girl had like a fake ID, and the Palm Beach person let him work from home and he had to report to jail at night and it was just like trumped up fake charges. But like I said, I wasn't even following it. So, sure, you got me.

J

Jason Calacanis1:08:59

No, no, this got you. This is a serious question and we'll just end with this and you can give a Knicks prediction. We can end with that. But it's more like it's kind of related to the fuckmaxing thing, which is like I feel like that as a culture, maybe we should be valuing, particularly people in elite circles, valuing judgment, valuing character. And instead, I do feel like we're creating a culture where people are like, you know, it's actually cool to signal that you're a little bit of a dick. And if somebody that you do business with is slimy, it's like, who cares as long as you get yours?

T

Tim Miller1:09:42

No, I don't. That's not my belief, but maybe it's some people's belief. I walk away from many deals based on character. I just want to following that one.

J

Jason Calacanis1:09:50

Oh, yeah. But you don't feel like that is something that is pervasive now, particularly in kind of... if you look at Elon's feed from day to day, you mock... like there's... not you personally, people mock the notion that we should be caring more about character and virtue. And doesn't the Epstein thing reveal that maybe we should all be a little more judicious about all of this rather than the opposite?

T

Tim Miller1:10:17

And I've thought about it since this happened and like, 'Oh my god, is there anybody else in my circle who has this going on?' Or even when I take selfies now, you get stopped for selfies. You on your tour probably took a thousand selfies. One of them's a serial killer, Tim. Do you endorse serial killing? No. And so it's just...

J

Jason Calacanis1:10:39

The story was a lot of people that were like... this isn't you, but it was a lot of people going to these dinners and it's like, 'Hey, do you want to come to this dinner? Woody Allen's going to be there and so and so is and Howard Lutnick's going to be there. Do you want to come?' And there's this instinct that people have to be like, 'Hell yeah, I want to go. I want to network.' And shouldn't we be trying to model an instinct that's more like, maybe I should value character more. Maybe I should value virtue more.

T

Tim Miller1:11:05

Character. I've always valued these things. So, you're preaching to the choir on this one. I have walked away from many.

J

Jason Calacanis1:11:13

Look at Elon. Every time I'm here, you do this like, 'What does Elon think? What does Chamath think?' I don't know what these guys think. I'm not asking you what he thinks. I'm saying look at his social media. Elon is like a walking vice signal. He basically makes fun of anybody that tries to offer to care about virtue.

T

Tim Miller1:11:33

Have him on the program and you can go through his 40...

J

Jason Calacanis1:11:36

You don't have 40 tweets a day.

T

Tim Miller1:11:38

You don't... I'm not following his 40 tweets every day. I don't know which one you're referring to. All I know is he's an incredible business person, but I don't have every mistake he's made.

J

Jason Calacanis1:11:51

But you don't think this is a cultural problem then that people in our culture...

T

Tim Miller1:11:56

I think if we do have a cultural problem right now, it's that we don't have people working together collaboratively in our government anymore and that needs to come back. More moderation and working together. I hope that when Trump is out of office and in this midterm, we can return some balance to the various branches of government and get out of this partisanship. That's what I hope.

J

Jason Calacanis1:12:24

Yeah. Well, I agree with that. Knicks in four or five, six... going to take...

T

Tim Miller1:12:29

I'm really concerned about this President Trump juju. I'm like a pretty suspicious guy, a superstitious guy when it comes to the Knicks because I've suffered since the 90s over this team. I'm a little worried about him showing up and the chaos that's going to ensue. I don't know why he's doing this, but I still think my original prediction was Knicks in six and having been at the first two games, I'm now at Knicks in five. I do think it'll be a gentleman sweep in San Antonio.

J

Jason Calacanis1:13:00

How do you cover if you're Wemby? I mean that game two, that was about the worst thing I've seen since Chris Webber called the timeout in college and throws the ball on his back. But the Knicks built up a 12-point lead. They have an incredible young squad. Their guards have been incredible. Jalen Brunson, they're beating the hell out of him and they're letting them play. So you can't argue about calls here. But the Knicks are a team of destiny and it shows what happens when you just have a very deep team that's healthy going into the playoffs. Last couple years we weren't healthy. Thibs didn't develop the bench at all. And now you just look at Bridges and Deuce and Hart and Jose. We have this long tail of incredible players and everybody's healthy. It really is like getting to the finals and winning is about how healthy your squad is at this elite level. But yeah, Wemby is not ready for it. He will be, but he's not ready for it now. And man, the fact that Karl-Anthony Towns owns him and then Mitch Robinson has been doing a tremendous job on him. I kind of feel like he's on par with Mitch and I think KAT's dominating him. So, total advantage gone. The guards have been playing great. What do you think? What's your prediction? I mean the Knicks have been... even when the Knicks were losing in the first quarter of game two, I was texting my friends and I was like they just seem better. They were getting better shots, they just weren't... it just took a little bit for them to get in. So it's kind of hard for me to see the Knicks losing the series. But there's a part of me with my Trump derangement syndrome that does want to see four straight Spurs wins. Just to have the juju get totally stopped in its tracks. How dare you? And I do love Dylan Harper. I bought my daughter a Dylan Harper jersey during game one because that guy is unbelievable. He's 20 years old.

T

Tim Miller1:14:57

20 years old and he's the second best player on the team.

J

Jason Calacanis1:15:02

He's so fun to watch. So anyway, that's where we're at. I forgot to ask you about crypto stuff, so we'll have to do it again another time.

T

Tim Miller1:15:08

Come on again.

J

Jason Calacanis1:15:08

That's that, Jason. And tell your... you know, tell Chamath and Friedberg... you keep taking it for the team. Okay. Like tell them to get out of their little... I like talking to you.

T

Tim Miller1:15:17

I know. But tell them to get out of their cozy little bubble. I don't bite.

J

Jason Calacanis1:15:20

Here's the thing. Like I said earlier, it's a tribal sport now. You cannot break once you join the team. Whether it's Trump or the other side, if you have Trump derangement syndrome, you can't break from the team. If you have Trump dedication syndrome, you cannot break from the team. I've never joined either team. I had the opportunity to be on both teams. I politely declined. I like to be independent.

T

Tim Miller1:15:47

We have what, two years and seven months left to just fully come on board to just say, 'Jay, just come on. The door is always open.'

J

Jason Calacanis1:15:58

Which group? There's no hope to go on to the Trump dedication team. It's only going to get worse from here. So, if one morning you wake up and you're like, 'You know what, there was this little angel, this little Tinkerbell inside me the whole time that knew that wanted to be with Tim, that knew Trump was terrible, but I just couldn't quite all the way get there.'

T

Tim Miller1:16:19

I like Rahm Emanuel. I like Rahm.

J

Jason Calacanis1:16:23

There you go. You like Rahm?

T

Tim Miller1:16:24

I've been texting with Rahm Emanuel. I like Josh Shapiro.

J

Jason Calacanis1:16:28

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

T

Tim Miller1:16:52

You think they're going to just go full AOC?

J

Jason Calacanis1:16:54

It could be AOC. It could be somebody else from the center. I just think that they don't want the baggage. I think Democratic voters want to move forward and wash away this 12-year horror show that they've gone through. And I just find it very hard to imagine that the voters are like, 'You know what, let's give somebody from the Clinton era a try.' I think that they want a fresh start. So that's my...

T

Tim Miller1:17:18

I think he's super competent. That's the thing I like about him. He's super competent. I would like to have a competent moderate on either side. All right, brother. Hope you're on board. That's Jason Calacanis. Everybody else will see you back here tomorrow for another edition of the podcast. Peace.

The Real Reason Silicon Valley Won't Criticize Trump (Jason Calacanis) | Bulwark Podcast

About Jason Calacanis