This Week 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.
00:20:29 · Jason Calacanis
Ad[00:20:29] S0: They Oh, and the comments, Jason interrupts too much, everybody ganging up. And I I just said to myself, no. I'm right. I'm right. I'm right about the meme coin. I'm right about the tariffs, and let me go do my homework and make sure I understand what I'm talking about. And I go do a couple hours of research. I ask intelligent people, people far smarter than me. And that's how you learn in the world. Yeah. And it's an important lesson for everybody. Under pressure in a social group, you need to have, you know, the, your own conviction. You have to have the strength of your own convictions. You also have a... Have to have a process, for getting to the truth. I don't accept what the media tells me. I don't accept what the politicians tell me. I go right to the source. It's so easy to do. No matter how polished or well designed your app might be, every once in a while, something is gonna go wrong in production. Right? Even if you're a perfect UX designer and you know what you're doing. But that doesn't mean your team has to waste an entire day just to locate the source of the problem, the bug, the issue. We got Sentry now, everybody. And what I love about Sentry is that it gives you total visibility into your app in one place. This is not separate tools or endless context switching. No. Just your errors, traces, replays, and logs all linked together in one connected timeline. Right? You can actually play the timeline. So when there's an issue, you can see exactly where it started and what triggered it, and debugging these things is critically important because SEER, s e e r, is Sentry's AI debugging agent. It's got an agent. It's gonna take over this problem and unpack why the issue happened, point to the code that's responsible for the issue, draft a fix on its own, and even flag when your PR is about to cause a problem. In other words, it's gonna anticipate problems so you don't have them. This is what you need, folks. This is the perfect use of super intelligence. Go to sentry.io and check out their free dev plan. Plus, our listeners can use the code TWIST 26 for $240 in Sentry credits. That's sentry.io.
00:22:29 · Lon Harris
[00:22:29] S2: Yeah. I I think Steven is an interesting case too because he's a he's a diehard Trump fan. If you follow him on x, he's always praising Trump. So this is the guy to talk to. If he's coming to you and he's not... He doesn't have TDS. He's not like some crazed, you know, like, communist who's just trying to bring down the system. He's a guy who liked Trump who presumably voted for him, and now he's got this, you know, unique perspective on what's going wrong with the policy. Why wouldn't you listen to a guy like
00:22:54 · Jason Calacanis
[00:22:54] S0: that? Never felt more pressure in my life than the pressure I received over these last couple of years to join the Trump, cobble, to be Sure. Even to be involved in the administration and to spend time there and to be part of Doge or other things. It was a lot of pressure on me, and a lot of my best friends or best colleagues were pushing me to do it. I said, you know, not for me. I I don't enjoy politics. I don't wanna I don't wanna focus on that. It's not a focus area for me. I don't care about power. I don't care about going to the White House. We had all those jokes. I care about the truth. Yeah. Honestly, maybe it sounds like maybe it makes me sound corny, but I actually care about the truth. Always have. And I'm a truth sinking missile. And so if you want to understand why for the last two years, everybody got it wrong and I nailed it, it's very simple. I just always go look for the truth, and I am humble in my approach to that. I'm not gonna come out and tell you you're wrong. I'm gonna say, hey. I'm investigating this. Here's where the... What the facts say. And and that's why I was pro Trump on some things, and I just gave him an a plus on data centers because I investigated it, and it was very clear to me that people are spinning the data center story. Nothing wrong with data centers. People want them. Only thing that's wrong with them is when they pollute and you put them too close to people's houses. Okay. Let's keep going. By the way, just so people know, the reason I'm doing this is not to take a victory lap. It's because so many people are asking me my opinion on everything, and I just wanna put it out there and have a place to point to to just say, here's We talk
00:24:18 · Lon Harris
[00:24:18] S2: about it on the show. Alright. MCP 2292 from May third of this year twenty twenty six. This is you. I thought this was really prescient as well. This is you talking about sort of the civil war within the Republican Party and within the Trump administration about AI, about tech that was kind of driving the administration apart. And when you look back at it today, that clearly was creating a wedge among Republicans that even drove some people maybe from participating. Let's take a look at this clip.
00:24:48 · Jason Calacanis
[00:24:48] S0: I haven't reviewed any of these. Parts. These are all becoming one issue. Polarization of wealth. Okay. We now have a couple of trillion dollar companies with these AI tokens. We have jobs being retired at an alarming rate. And is every truck driver gonna lose their job? Is every cab driver gonna lose their job? Is every delivery driver gonna lose their job? Every factory worker, everybody at Amazon gonna lose their job? The answer is yes. All those jobs are gonna go away, or the majority of them will go away, and those people will have to be redeployed in some intelligent fashion. You combine that with, hey. The intelligence wants this and America first. This is really about the civil war inside of the Trump administration and the Republican Party. The civil war in that party is people's jobs, America first, and these tech oligarchs, as they call them, are they running away with this and stealing everybody's money, quote unquote, and is it just gonna create a permanent underclass that always loses their jobs? This is what Bannon, Fuentes, Tucker, they've all departed. They've... Meg and Kelly, they're all leaving the Trump camp or trying to put pressure on the Trump camp to stop kowtowing in their minds to big tech, to oligarchs. Trump loves money. Nailed it again, I guess. Yeah. I mean Very captain obvious on that one.