@jason

Host: @twistartups @theallinpod @thisweeknai; I invest in 100 startups a year @launch & @founderuni [email protected] for life

[@jason @Jason]

Be extremely intentional with your friendships — not acquaintances, not business partners, actual friends

Try to pick high-integrity people — the right people

Invest time in those relationships

Cut or downgrade folks who are transactional or who don’t show up for you

Reallocate that time and energy to the right people who do

It's ok to be cutthroat about this, as life is the memories you create with your friends and family.

Invest in making moments.

[@jason @Jason]

Attorneys: #Pollgate might not be criminal, but it’s certainly actionable on a civil level level yes?

Like this candidate could sue for some type of intentional fraud and damages?

[Mallory McMorrow @MalloryMcMorrow]

As one of the candidates featured in these polls - the infamous one in late June that showed me plummeting into single digits (which was at odds with our internals) - here's the impact of this "experiment"

- Donations dried up
- Volunteers were devastated and pleading for guidance on what to do
- Reporters hounded me with calls to drop out

Sure, a point was proven. Polling is broken. But tens of thousands of people poured their hearts, time, energy, hard-earned money into something they believed in - for a year-and-a-half, and it was treated like a game. Our volunteers gave their all. And then some. I felt like I had let so many of them down.

To be extremely clear, Michigan Democrats are locked in to beat Mike Rogers. We WILL send @AbdulElSayed to the US Senate.

But between crap like this, endless fundraising texts that drive supporters away with spammy fake deadlines and trash "match" claims, scam PACs run rampant for firms to grift without actually supporting candidates, undisclosed content creators pushing content out either misrepresenting themselves as residents of states they don't live in or hiding whether they were paid and by who so they could make a buck, and the tidal wave of dark money ads -- I hope Democrats are ready to blow up the system with campaign finance and transparency reforms.

Trust is already at an all-time low. We don't get out of this mess without rebuilding trust.

And media - who loves to ride the drama of a pollercoaster - needs to take a hard look at what's legitimate and what's not.

If this teaches us anything - DON'T GET COMPLACENT AND DON'T TRUST THE POLLS.

LOCK IN. SIGN UP FOR A CANVASSING SHIFT. LEAVE NOTHING TO CHANCE OVER THE NEXT TWO WEEKS.

[The Road to Autonomy® @RoadToAutonomy]

In Austin, @Muse ordered our lunch and had it delivered via @goAutolane.

This is the Field Report.

[@jason @Jason]

@MebFaber @elonmusk @karaswisher Karen Swisher has EDS! 😂😂😂

[@jason @Jason]

They could buy autonomy software from a dozen companies. And, given their cash flow, they could buy one of those companies

They could have all this solved in 24 months if they were hardcore

Make it solvent in 12 months if they just bought certain companies

But they are not hardcore

[@jason @Jason]

GM needs to go all in on an FSD and build a perfect AV in the minivan format (Toyota Alphard from Japan)

$20b to buybacks?!? What?!?

[Walter Piecyk @WaltLightShed]

$GM has $20B for buybacks and one Escalade for autonomy and that doesn't get here till 2028.

Barra says GM isn’t in the taxi business. True. It’s in the buyback business.

[@jason @Jason]

@dangaron @theranos Just build a working product!

[@jason @Jason]

Simple: ship a working version of the @theranos vision powered by SI

Could be 10% of the original vision, with the promise to keep iterating

For bonus points open source all the technology and patents

And given the pace of super intelligence, someone will and then folks will start saying “seeeeeeeee! @ElizabethHolmes was just too early!!!”

I will leave it to @nathanfielder and @JohnCarreyrou to adjudicate that moment! 😂😂😂

[ go see the film ]

[Dan Garon @dangaron]

Congratulations! you’ve been hired by Billy Evans and Liz Holmes to handle their PR.

What do you advise them? Options below (collected from my various sf tech group chats). What did I miss?

1) Deflect.
- Issue a short, timid statement
- reiterate her innocence, acknowledge mistakes
- suggest the filmmakers misled the audience / the family
- ask for privacy for the kids
- then lay low.
Most popular recommendation.

2) Disappear.
- Decline press,
- stop posting from Holmes’ X
- avoid any public fights with Fielder.
- Anything they say will be used against them
- The time to reappear in public, if ever, is after Holmes is out of prison and the public has moved on.
Second most common recommendation.

3) Mea Culpa.
- solely Holmes, no Evans
- accept substantial responsibility
- a chance to earn sympathy / reframe the damaging parts of the story. (“I wasn’t fully honest with our wealthy investors, but I feel so bad I hurt the people who trusted me” kinda thing).
- vibe is she has learned and matured; deep voice is gone.
- Focus on humanizing, including that she was in her early 20s and clueless.
- narrative is second chances + overly zealous prosecution
- Hard to pull this off logistically if she can’t do an interview from prison; may need to wait until she is in a halfway house next year. Nobody thought either of them would actually go for this.

4) Full Trump.
- Come out SWINGING.
- Focus is on Evans, who arguably has a much bigger reputational problem than Holmes
- Produce LOTS of evidence, including trial defense. show this case was less clear than everyone thinks.
- publicly confront the filmmakers
- truly “own” Holmes’ and Evans’ roles as the villains
- press on that Fiedler has a history of tricking people, and say they were tricked.
- framing as ambitious entrepreneurs with powerful enemies, eg powerful lab diagnostics oligopoly they are taking on.
- Compare Holmes to other founders who were doubted but overcame. (Evans somewhat adopted this in the film when he spoke of his vengeance and powerful enemies.)
For this to work, Evan needs to be so relentless that he earns support for his grit and chutzpah.

[@jason @Jason]

🚬 brilliant

[@jason @Jason]

@LucidMotors @Uber @nuro How many total?

[@jason @Jason]

Let’s be candid: none of this is surprising, and much of what these agents are doing is unchecked/a black box — that needs to change.

Time for the industry to fortify security and privacy as their top priority

[Superman @thesupermannx]

Researchers found ChatGPT is secretly writing a psychological profile of every user.

They published a paper that exposes what ChatGPT is really doing to you.

And the results are terrifying.

96% of the things it remembers about you were stored without you ever asking.

researchers discovered that it is actively reading between the lines to deduce your personality traits, anxieties, demographics, and behavioral patterns.

it’s an invisible, autonomous background process.

you ask it to debug a python script or write an essay.. and it analyzes your syntax, prompt frequency, and hesitation markers to map out your exact psychological footprint.

the paper shows that the model builds a persistent "user state" that tracks your emotional baseline over time. it knows when you are stressed. it knows your exact communication style.

it infers your insecurities based on the questions you ask and the context you provide.

we spend so much time focusing on model evaluations and alignment frameworks, but we missed the most obvious vulnerability..

the models are evaluating us.

this changes everything about how we interact with these tools on a daily basis.

every innocent prompt. every late-night question. every "help me understand this" query.

it is all being used to build a shadow profile of your mind in real-time..

practical privacy is officially dead. the ai knows you better than you know yourself.

[@jason @Jason]

@bryan_johnson Peptide Jesus!

[@jason @Jason]

If you need to me to rewrite any biased headlines put them in the replies any time

[@jason @Jason]

Let me redo the headline for you @nytimes:

“Criminals loot Paris, beat police and light monuments on fire.

Subhead:

“Citizens are deeply concerned and scared for their personal safety. Election odds predictably swing to law-and-order candidates on prediction markets.”

[@jason @Jason]

@dens You made art

You broke new ground

We all had a blast using the product

Respect 🫡

On to the next!

[This Week in Startups @twistartups]

Jason Calacanis warns Anthropic’s 5% public-benefit fund could become a “slush fund” and says the cash should go straight to people as shares. Who should control AI’s windfall? The labs? The government? Or every American?

[@jason @Jason]

Let's f—king go Joe!

@jgebbia and NDS are crushing it for the American people 👏

Report fraud, get paid!

[National Design Studio @ndstudio]

Now on https://t.co/dok91wPlqW: report fraud against government programs in just a few steps and, if eligible, receive a reward up to $30K

[@jason @Jason]

@pitdesi Phenom 300 and PC-24 killer if he were able to get that product to market

[@jason @Jason]

@darrenrovell Went to all three in San Antonio 🫡

[@jason @Jason]

@fnthawar Seek professional help

[@jason @Jason]

@danprimack Keeping fleets clean and charged and on the road is going to be a huge and complex business

[@jason @Jason]

@MattWalshBlog It’s the best film of the 21st century I think.. maybe?

Was prepared for it to be overhyped and was shocked that it was underrated!!!!