This Week in Startups
00:12:45 · Lon Harris, Jason Calacanis
[00:12:45] S2: for a month, and this is Jason Coffeezilla talking about his new meme coins. [00:12:50] S0: Oh, Coffeezilla. Shout out. Yeah. Yeah. Here's a spicy take. Trump shouldn't have launched meme coins because my belief is we went from a too restrictive crypto space with Gary Gensler, too restrictive. I'm gonna make two very important points. Okay. Number one, this mess can be easily solved. Number two, the people who are charged with fixing the mess should not punch me in coins in the interim while we're cleaning it up. So there's an easy solution, and I wanna walk through that. But then second, if you're a leader like Trump, or I guess maybe Eric Trump is the person doing this inside the family running... There's an organization which is their crypto thing. And it's fine. If Eric Trump wants to be the crypto king, if he wants to be the crypto prince of the Trump empire, that's totally cool. He's a civilian. He can go do whatever he wants, but he does have the Trump name. Yeah. And you're just becoming president and you've got a mandate. And there's a set of things that you were sent to Washington to do. The Trump family was not sent to Washington to launch a meme coin. [00:14:07] S2: You know, just like it feels very prescient now to look back. It's like two years ago, you were saying like... And then corruption ends up at the exit polls being, you know, one of the main things that drove people to come out. [00:14:18] S0: Is it really? Yeah. I I I haven't been on top of all the things people are saying coming out of the exit polls.
00:14:18 · Jason Calacanis, Lon Harris
[00:14:18] S0: Is it really? Yeah. I I I haven't been on top of all the things people are saying coming out of the exit polls. [00:14:25] S2: Iran war seems pretty strongly to be number one, that that was a thing that really struck people that, like, he promised directly no new wars, and here's this new forever war. Nobody... Americans really don't feel like they wanna be in. AI data centers definitely was up there. People really don't like AI, and that was on the ballot in so many places. It really brought out the anti AI sentiment. And then, yeah, I would say number three from what I've seen is this perception that the government is corrupt, Republicans are corrupt, kick the bastards out, new... Faces. We're tired of this old bunch of cronies. That was the vibe I
00:15:02 · Jason Calacanis, Lon Harris
[00:15:02] S0: was getting. Cost of living, that was number one. Clearly, affordability on people's minds. Sure. The war is dovetailing with that. Right. The state of the democracy, that's right up there. Peep... That's another way of saying corruption, or grifting that people are really concerned about. So, yeah. I mean, the the grifting, if that's what happened... And, I I hold out, I don't prejudge any of these situations. I basically say, okay. Let the investigation happen, and and we'll find out what the details are. If Trump put all his money in a trust and there's somebody trading his stocks, I'll give him the benefit of the doubt. If they're making a lot of trades and then it comes out that he was... His money manager sitting next to him in meetings Mhmm. And making the trades, you know, like, he's at Mar A Lago and, like, you know, Trump is, like, holding up, like, the iPhone and going, buy Apple. Like, it's totally different. Right? Like, he shouldn't be using his inside track, to make trades. So it's supposed to be arm's length. Let's keep going. [00:16:08] S2: Alright. We could do another one. This one is from, 05/14/2025. This was you talking about how the tariff situation seemed to be getting out of hand. And just generally, I think what we would consider, like, Trump chaos. Okay. So this was when it started to become clear, like, he's he's governing in a very chaotic way that the markets don't like and that Americans don't like. Let's take look. [00:16:31] S0: Gecko look. Yeah. Let's take a look. [00:16:33] S2: A little bit. Yeah. This wasn't the plan?
00:16:33 · Lon Harris, Jason Calacanis
[00:16:33] S2: A little bit. Yeah. This wasn't the plan? [00:16:35] S0: No. I think he was doing a ton of trial balloons and floating things. But wasn't well thought out. Because if it was well thought out, I think what you would have said is we have a 150 trading partners. We can put them into these three buckets. These ones are inconsequential because we don't do a lot of trade with them. These five are 90% of it. It's a Pareto principle. It's the power law. These five are the ones that matter, and then these are the ones in between. So I've told Bessent to do this group of people who are important, and then I'm putting Sachs and Elon or this person, that person, Lutnick on these ones, And here's the strategy we're gonna pursue. It's gonna be pretty aggressive. There's gonna be some pain. Here's what you can expect. Instead, it was like, oh, you put it at 50? I'm making it one fifty. And it was this Yeah. Attention seeking, crazy [00:17:22] S2: Yeah. Shake the globe thing.
00:17:24 · Jason Calacanis
[00:17:24] S0: Shake the globe thing. You know, I I had a nickname for Trump in the first presidency, which was captain chaos. Yeah. And he... You can be right about something, but you could execute in the wrong way. He was right about tariffs. We were getting screwed. Tariffs are an important part of, you know, not getting, abused in trade. You have a country like Japan, South Korea. You know, we're not allowed to bring our cars into South Korea. Why? You know, are we bringing Hyundai's into this country? Okay. There's some imbalance there. Let's talk about it. Let's figure out why this exists, and and there's a way to do it without Trump's chaotic insulting, bravado, and taking up all the news. I thought they should have all been done in closed rooms. They should have said, hey. We're in open negotiations. This is the tariff level, and then we expect negotiations to end here, the end, and stop talking about it. But, you know, Trump can't help himself. He loves to talk. He's a great communicator, and he knows how to fill the press cycle. He needed to have people around him who told him, hey, boss. And I I mentioned this on all in one time when I was like, hey, guys. You know, the the problem with Trump is he he has too many sycophants around him who are afraid to tell him the truth. And if you tell him the truth, he kicks you out of the circle. Right. And and then you don't get your goodies. You don't have access to power. And and, you know, that's true of anybody powerful. I have to be careful about that. I'm not, like, super powerful, but people will tell me what I wanna hear in my own company, my own venture company when we're doing deals, and I need a little bit of dissent. And I have to encourage it because it doesn't happen naturally. You have to be self aware of that. Somebody should have said him. Bessent,, hey, boss. We're making great progress here. We have the upper ground. This is gonna be great. We're gonna get you a billion dollars in tariff revenue. Let's get congress involved. Let's do it with them. And then you wouldn't have them all get overturned. So again... And the way I knew this was correct, Lon, was I was talking to our founders. I think I had Cuts Clothing CEO on I remember that, speak in Startups.
00:19:22 · Lon Harris, Jason Calacanis
[00:19:22] S2: Yeah. From Cuts And [00:19:23] S0: he explained to us in detail how this was affecting his business. So while people were telling me, my Republican friends were telling me, oh, you're anti Trump. You have TDS. You don't know what you're talking about. They mocked me. My... I was getting brigaded in the comments. Jason's low IQ. He's mid. No. I'm incredibly high IQ. I'm off the charts, in fact, according to the tests I've taken. Don't [00:19:49] S2: let [00:19:49] S0: the Brooklyn accent, you know, fool you. And I'm smart enough to know when I don't know about a topic to talk to people who are experiencing it and get firsthand experience. That was my journalism training. You can again criticize, oh, you're a journalist. That's a journalist in you. You know, when people criticize that, I grew up in an era when journalism was done in a very tight fashion and was a great vocation, a great education for how to assess the truth in the world. And the way you assess the truth in the world is when you hear those tariff claims, you don't listen to politicians or talking heads. Talk to the people who are impacted from it. I went directly to the source. And Ad[00:20:21] S2: and stupid. Ad[00:20:21] S0: That's why I was able to stand my ground, Lon, under mass pressure. Remember the pressure three on one on the podcast? Oh, you're a mid. Oh, you're stupid. Ad[00:20:29] S2: Yeah. No.