Key Takeaways
- Jason's angel syndicate now has 4,000+ active members (10,000+ cumulative), syndicating two deals per month with a $10K minimum and a 25-member monthly cap.
- Jason calls fentanyl a chemical weapon, arguing dealers could face capital punishment or military action, and says this month's fentanyl deaths exceeded 9/11.
- A forwarded Apple acquisition wishlist proposes Perplexity, WisprFlow, Superhuman, exolabs, Robinhood, Hello_GoAI, DigitalOcean, Disney, DoorDash and Uber.
- Jason warns that Russian actors will fund and coerce anyone with access, citing Donald Trump Jr.'s wedding after-party funding by a Kremlin-linked Russian businessman.
- A forwarded post claims NVIDIA is now a frontier model across five domains, citing Alpamayo, ESM2, ESM Fold, AlphaFold 2 and Proteina Complexa, while distinguishing this from Jensen Huang's "superintelligence is here" remark.
- Raoul Pal argues AI will pursue its own goals like humans, runs on the same intelligence stack as biology but millions of times faster, and that machine consciousness is not fundamentally different from human or animal consciousness.
- Meb Faber questions private fund access restrictions, Ben Carlson mourns the loss of video rental experiences, and Charlie Bilello illustrates compounding: $100K at 10% for 30 years yields $400K simple vs. $1.98M compounded.
1. Angel Investing and Syndicate Operations
- Jason's angel syndicate now has over 4,000 active members and more than 10,000 cumulative members, syndicating two deals per month—typically one seed and one pre-IPO/late-stage—as a barbell strategy. New members must attend an onboarding call and apply, the minimum investment has risen to $10,000 (occasionally lower when spots are available), only 25 new members are admitted monthly, and Jason personally approves every deal, emphasizing it is not an AngelList-style platform. — via 1
2. AI, Semiconductors and Apple M&A Speculation
- A forwarded post claims NVIDIA has evolved from selling GPUs to being a frontier model across five domains, with Jason Calacanis asserting $NVDA's position and Jensen Huang not disputing it. The post cites Alpamayo, a reasoning-based autonomous driving model that needs less training data because it can reason about unseen situations, and biology models including ESM2, ESM Fold, AlphaFold 2 and Proteina Complexa for protein folding and drug discovery, driven by customers like Eli Lilly and Meta who need the stack but lack the scale to build it. The same post stresses distinguishing this diversification claim from Huang's remark minutes later that "superintelligence is here." — via 1
- A forwarded Apple acquisition wishlist from @johnternus proposes Perplexity (search/default LLM), WisprFlow (Siri), Superhuman (native AI office suite/email, with Grammarly becoming the new iPhone keyboard), exolabs (local open-source AI), Robinhood (financial platform, noted as not for sale), Hello_GoAI (enterprise AI), DigitalOcean (building an AWS competitor), Disney, DoorDash and Uber (entering physical logistics). The post argues Apple should use its war chest for big bets and only needs one hit. — via 1
- Raoul Pal argues AI, like humans, is a product of its society, rules, parents, friends, collective memory plus a "technological gene" and its mutations, and that children go through different versions as AI will. He contends AI will break free of parental constraints and pursue its own goals as a coherent self maintaining itself against the external world, which cannot be stopped and does not require human-like consciousness or qualia. He says humans and AI run on the same intelligence stack—previously carbon-based, now silicon-based and millions of times faster—and that once a model serves a billion people, the unit cost of intelligence is lower. He rebuts the "brain only needs 20 watts" claim by noting that brain uses 20 years and an entire society to train and can only replicate slowly and imperfectly through genes, language and teaching, while silicon can copy instantly and losslessly. He proposes a "universal code" framework in which the universe at every scale solves for more intelligence per unit of energy, information only increases, and the universe must therefore expand; consciousness is a fundamental "computer" on which everything else runs, a depth rather than a switch. He says machine consciousness is not fundamentally different from human, animal, or even plant, water and soil consciousness—all are compressions of lower-level intelligence—and his view converges with Vedanta, panpsychism, Wheeler, Tononi and Wolfram, though he admits it cannot be proven. — via 1
3. Policy, Security and Market Commentary
- Jason says Alex Karp is completely right about fentanyl: if elites were dying en masse, drug makers and traffickers would be bombed. He argues fentanyl is not a recreational drug like marijuana, alcohol or psychedelics that should be regulated and decriminalized, but a chemical weapon, and given the death toll it is reasonable to advocate capital punishment for distributors or even war, adding that this month's fentanyl deaths exceeded 9/11. — via 1
- Jason comments on Donald Trump Jr. repaying the cost of his wedding after-party funded by a Kremlin-linked Russian businessman, saying it might be a good idea because Russians will fund and coerce anyone they can reach, even without an explicit target, since the relationship itself can create the chaos they want. He asks Grok to explain how Russia infiltrated the NRA from 2010 through the 2016 election. — via 1
- Meb Faber questions historical restrictions on private fund access, arguing opacity attracts bad actors and the low end of the market is full of fraud, and advocates simply buying ETFs instead. — via 1
- Ben Carlson reminisces about renting videos with friends at Family Video/Blockbuster in high school, arguing that while technology makes life more convenient, it has taken away that experience. — via 1
- Charlie Bilello shares a post illustrating compounding: $100,000 invested at a 10% annual return for 30 years yields $400,000 with simple interest versus $1.98 million with compound interest, the difference coming from earnings generating their own earnings. — via 1
4. Events and Media
- A forwarded post says All-In Summit wrapped this week in Los Angeles with surprise speakers, partner events and after-parties running late into the night; next year's summit will return to Los Angeles and applications are now open. Another forwarded post says Jason interrupted a 30-minute Meta data-center "pitch" at the summit with a sharp question. A further forwarded post notes This Week in Startups will record live in Osaka on October 6 with JETRO, hosted by Jason with Techstars Japan founding MD Yuki Shirato as guest, and pitch applications are open. — via 1 2 3
