This Week in Tech 1037 Transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show

00:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's time for TWIT this week in tech. What a great show ahead for you. Amanda Sibberling is here from TechCrunch, jason Calacanis from the All In podcast and Father Robert Ballasir. We'll talk about artificial intelligence. We'll talk about cameras everywhere and the future of humanity. It's all ahead. Next on TWIT Podcasts you love.

00:24 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
From people you trust. This is twit this is twit this week in tech, episode 1037, recorded sunday, june 22nd 2025 teach amanda fish.

00:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's time for twit this week in tech, the show we cover the week's tech news. Get ready, it's Sunday, june 22nd 2025. Teach a man to fish. It's time for Twit this Week in Tech, the show where we cover the week's tech news. Get ready, it's going to be a barn burner. Ladies and gentlemen, father Robert Balassaire is here, from high above Vatican City. Hello, father Robert.

00:58 - Padre (Guest)
Greetings from my barn on top of St Peter's Barn burner.

01:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, you were probably pretty busy over the last few months it's been.

01:07 - Padre (Guest)
It's been a time. Actually, I was supposed to be back in the United States at the end of April and then many, many things happened and because of that my schedule got compressed. I was keynote speaker at a bunch of AI conferences in Budapest, the New York, then Los Angeles Wow. But because everything got compressed, instead of going from Rome to Budapest to New York to Los Angeles, I went Rome to Las Vegas to Budapest, of Vegas to New York to Vegas to Los Angeles, to Vegas to Rome.

01:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, of course, vegas is where your mom and dad are, and right now you're right, which is very hot, by the way, I don't know if you know this, but it's hot in the united states, right, the whole country is burning up, except for california, which usually it's the other way around, uh, but we're getting a relatively uh cool snap. That's amanda silverling from tech crunch. She's their culture senior culture writer. It's great to see you, amanda. Om O-M-G-L-O-L.

02:03 - Amanda Silberling (Guest)
That is a URL that I own, but I'm not on top of any historic sites, I am simply just in Philadelphia.

02:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Nice.

02:14 - Amanda Silberling (Guest)
Historic site in itself.

02:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's pretty warm in Philadelphia. I see that clock is melting behind you. Oh, yeah, yeah it's crazy.

02:20 - Amanda Silberling (Guest)
It's within my apartment it's hot enough to melt.

02:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh geez Well, it's within my apartment. It's hot enough to melt. Oh geez Well, if you want a spritz or something, just go ahead and do that, don't hold back. Also, here he's out of doors because beautiful Los Angeles, the weather is fine Mr Jason Calacanis, the host of the hottest podcast in the world right now. All in, hello, jason, it's good to be home. Nice to see you, lou. Nice to see you Always. Nice to see you Always. A pleasure to see, jason. This is not really home. You live in Austin now, though, right.

02:50 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
I live in Austin. I'm in LA. We just had the launch of the all-in ultra-premium tequila last night. You?

02:58 - Amanda Silberling (Guest)
had to do it.

02:59 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
I kid you not, you had to do it. It. I mean, this is david sacks. He's a tequila guy, so he launched a brand of tequila.

03:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So now I'm out there hawking tequila worse could be a gold phone, so I think the tequila is probably the better way to go absolutely yeah, the better way to go, so that's hysterical it's pretty hilarious every celebrity has a tequila.

03:15 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
There must be a significant profit margin in tequila I, I guess I you know it's uh, these are, these are 1200 a bottle, uh, of tequila. It's, it's very tasty. I'll tell you that.

03:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is there gold?

03:28 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
flakes in it. What is going on with it? It's a hand-painted, gorgeous bottle. Oh, that's nice. It's like a what's the site?

03:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Allincom? I don't know if it's on the oh, it's on the podcast.

03:39 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's a spinoff from the podcast, because the podcast has no advertising on it, and so, as a concept, yeah, it's not there Well geez, you just missed a huge opportunity, but it will be available soon.

03:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
A huge opportunity.

03:55 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Yeah, no, it's going to sell out either way. Yeah, I guess.

03:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And does it sell to fans.

04:00 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Is that the deal? Yeah, you know the podcast has gotten pretty big. Yeah, you know the podcast has gotten pretty big yeah.

04:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It doesn't hurt the connections to the Trump administration with David Sachs.

04:12 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Yeah, David Sachs is in the White House On the weekends. It goes to the top 10 on the Apple podcast list, which is a little bit surreal, having been in podcasting with you. Getting my start really here on twit um, for, like gosh, getting close to 20 years now 15 it is.

04:26
It's over 20 years, yeah here for you and 15 for me or so or something um and um. Yeah, it's really interesting to watch how popular it's got. It's crossed over. And the other top one, two percent of the audience is, you know, leaders in tech.

04:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh or leaders. That's why you want this podcast right, because this is, this is hugely influential it's pretty, yeah, it's pretty weird. It looks like pretty good parties as well parties are great.

04:51 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Yeah, it did, it's nuts, but uh, you know it's. It's very weird because you know, when we all started podcasting, leo, and you had us all on, you know me, kevin rose I was listening to an old show that you were on.

05:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it was at your house and you were about to do another show and Kevin Pollak was there.

05:09 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Oh, yeah, kevin Pollak. I taught him how to podcast and he did a show for a while. Yeah, bunch of people.

05:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Now Mark Maron is abandoning his podcast WTF.

05:17 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
He decided to retire. Well, if you think about it like ripples, you started all this and then Kevinvin rose. Myself, I don't think I started it. Well, I mean, adam started adam curry and, uh, those guys all like it all kind of like a bunch of ripples in in the water and then subsequent podcasts etc.

05:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They all it's taken off as a medium. Yeah, it's all taken off as a medium, as as as has you're still doing this week in startups, I know yeah, three days a week me and alex wilhelm do it, and that's really a niche podcast focused just on startups.

05:48 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
We will delve into big tech, like you do here, but we only talk about it in relation to startups.

05:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So, robert, you were saying that you've been going to AI conferences. Is this in your capacity as the digital Jesuit, or what's the deal?

06:03 - Padre (Guest)
Yeah, so with the new Pope choosing the name Leo, by the way thank you for you.

06:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Probably put a little bug in his ears. Suggested that would be a good name.

06:14 - Padre (Guest)
Well, I mean. The reason for that is because the previous Pope Leo was the one who promulgated the encyclical Rerum Novarum Now little history lesson. Specifically. Rerum Novarum was Now little history lesson. Specifically. Rerum Novarum was the start of Catholic social teaching. It was a document that was against the dehumanization of the Industrial Revolution.

06:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It was, he was the Pope at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.

06:37 - Padre (Guest)
That's correct and he was the one who promulgated the document. That's the document, that's the basis for the church's response to AI. So AI is, it's, it's not. It's not a buzzword around here, it's a thing. It's going to be a signature, signature, part of Pope Leo's papacy.

06:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Tech Crunch says Pope Leo makes AI's threat to humanity a signature issue absolutely, absolutely and okay.

07:01 - Padre (Guest)
So there's going to be people who are going to take this story and they're going to run with it into thinking that, oh, the Catholic church, they're taking the Luddite position. No, no, no, no, no, no. In the internal conversations and in these conversations that we've been having at the start of this process, there is a recognition of some of the wonderful things that AI has been able to do. We've been using it to combat human trafficking, to do, uh, we've been using it to combat, uh, human trafficking. Uh, we've been using it to look at deep patterns of deforestation. So there are things that we would really like to encourage, but there is something very similar to what was happening during the industrial revolution. When we're talking about the ai revolution and that's what the catholic church wants to be involved with we are uniquely positioned because this is what we've been doing. We the the things that people are complaining about ai, those are the issues that we've had for the last almost 200 years. Uh, so, yeah, it's.

07:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's sort of all hands on deck for ai it ties in very well to the piece you just published at substack. Uh, jason, yeah, why we don't talk about job destruction, but we must.

08:08 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
It's. This is a very interesting thing. You and I have been in tech our whole careers me 30, and you've been in it, I guess since the 80s. I was listening to your episode.

08:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You can say 50, it's okay, Whatever I mean.

08:18 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
But since the 80s and you know, listen, I remember reading John Dvorak and I heard you on another I'm not sure which show on the network it was, but you were talking about Ziff and you know all the other publications.

08:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And when you got started, when you wrote your first article I think your first article is Atari- I wrote about Ataris back in the 70s and then I wrote one of the very first Macintosh reviews for Byte Magazine in 84. So, yeah, I've been covering this 50 years. Yeah, and I got the.

08:47 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Atari 2600 in 1977, the Sears model, and then I used to get Bite Magazine. So you were a kid, though, right, I was born in 1970. So I was 78 years old.

08:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
My dad got me the Atari 2600.

09:00 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
And that really set me on a career IBM PC junior and for much of my career, you know in in as an adult. The last 35 years or so in tech we had um, I was kind of indoctrinated into the tech's going to happen, so we might as well build it and society will figure out a way. It's this inevitability of tech right, so we just might as well accelerate into it.

09:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think that's still, at least in the tech industry, that's still the general belief.

09:32 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Like I would say that you could try to stop it, but why it's going to happen, whether you want to or not. Yeah, and I was at a conference this week and I've been, you know, since I'm on the inside now as an investor. I started as a journalist entrepreneur and then became an investor, so I went from an outsider trying to figure out what was going on inside the room to being inside the room where they make the decisions of who to give a check to and what to bet on, and that starts the whole process of building this technology. So what I realized is I think the job displacement this time will be different.

09:59
Everybody tries to make an analogy towards the industrial revolution and stopping farming and only 1% of people work in agriculture today. But when I started doing the back of the envelope math and I started looking at how quick this displacement is happening, I've come to the conclusion that in the next 10 years we're going to see serious job displacement. And we were talking about this prior to chat, gpt being lost and you might remember Sam Altman doing, when he was at Y Combinator, a study on universal basic income that he funded and everybody talked about it constantly very publicly, and the last few years that's kind of been the antidote to job losses.

10:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh well, don't worry, because there's going to be so much surplus thanks to technology that we'll be able to pay everybody a universal basic income.

10:42 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Yes, there's really like two or three different solutions to the job destruction problem. We can get into that.

10:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It always seemed to me kind of a little hand wavy, because where's all that money going to come from?

10:54 - Padre (Guest)
It's extremely hand wavy.

10:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Who's paying for this UBI? Is it the federal government?

10:59 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
I mean, we have UBI today in the form of a lot of different programs. We have Entitlements.

11:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, If you took in the form of a lot of different programs. We have Entitlements, yeah.

11:06 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
If you took all the entitlements together and you just wrote people a check and there's people who have theorized just doing this, but how big a check would it be? Actually, you could do the math. I think it would probably be low thousands per month for people who are at the bottom of the income ladder.

11:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So you can't even pay rent in Petaluma for $1,000 a month, let alone eating.

11:26 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
It would be like unemployment or food stamps and these kinds of things. Yeah, it would be subsistence. So the question is will we create enough new jobs to make up for the ones that are lost, right? So the typing pool went away, the mailroom went away, photocopy room went away. We've watched all these jobs go away over time. This time, I just think we have to be a little more thoughtful about it, because today Tesla launched their Austin self-driving. I got to drive last week in one of those prototypes.

11:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, wow, yeah, and immediately, by the way, the state of Texas passed a law saying you got to have a permit to do that.

12:00 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Yeah, so people are-.

12:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Obviously aimed at Elon. I mean, elon does have a safety driver still, which lets him off the hook for a while.

12:08 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
But yeah, I think they have a safety operator. It's interesting. It's in the passenger side, but oh, he's not in front of the wheel. Not in front of the wheel, but there's a stop, oh that's not encouraging it's. It's kind of like right in between. What waymo did? There's a big stop button and a pullover button on the dashboard, so if something happens and they're going only low speed in a small area and then I was talking to Zipline, which is doing deliveries Before you move on.

12:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
how was that ride, was it? I know? You're friends with Elon? Yeah, I'm still friends. Are you still buddies?

12:35 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Yeah, oh yeah, still best friends. Yeah, I have the latest hardware for Tesla Juniper Model Y and I've put a couple hundred miles on it doing self-driving. I think the cyber cabs, the robo taxis, have a little bit of a better version of that. It feels a little more aggressive and confident, that's Elon.

12:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, yeah, it was doing rolling stops, it was doing California stops for a while and somebody said well, that's because Elon trained it.

13:09 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
And that's how Elon drives drives. Well, it is a neural net. That's how it drives, so it's studying humans. I, I do think that this technology is here and it works. It should just be very regulated and you should have to have a safety driver for the first 10 000 miles or 10 000 rides, maybe a million, some number.

13:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So gm gave up on cruise cruise and basically dissolved the division. Google's going ahead with Waymo big time. You can't go around San Francisco without seeing a thousand Waymos. A Waymo every other car. Yeah, Elon wants to get into this business, but he's not alone. This is one of the hot businesses right now is robo taxis.

13:42 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
There'll be many winners. Volkswagen has a very competitive product. There's coming to pony. Ai, there's we ride. So amazon has zooks, zooks.

13:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, there, there, there are in the united states oh well, we'll never know what we'll have in the united states.

14:01 - Padre (Guest)
Jason, you know one of the things when you work outside these technologies are taking the low-hanging fruits of the gig economy, which is one of the few things.

14:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
that is actually which is sad.

14:12 - Padre (Guest)
Yes, it's sad, but and I know people have alluded to this before but essentially the key to driving this with capitalism is that it's replacing the most expensive and least efficient part of the capitalist system, which are the people, which sounds great, and it will increase your profits short term until there's no one who can afford to buy your goods and services.

14:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The people are now out of work. I think that I remember reading an estimate there was something I think 14 million truck drivers in the united states and, of course, trucks are one of the very first things that will go autonomous. Absolutely so in his article. We'll get back to it when jason comes back but he talks about three solutions the ubi, new job creation, which is, all you know, often the response to industrial disruption or technological disruption. Uh, it was in the industrial era. People, you know, stopped making buggy whips but found oh, this is his laptop, overheated in the sun oh, welcome to los angeles uh.

15:13
And then his third solution he says his favorite is ai vacation. Uh, which surprises me, coming from jason. I'll have to ask him about this. Uh, he's also talking about andy jassy at amazon.

15:26 - Padre (Guest)
Uh, saying get ready because we're going to replace a lot of executives okay, so a couple of trends that I've seen at these conferences that I've been doing. First, everyone loves to talk about ai, but almost everyone doesn't think that their job can be done by ai, which I always have to.

15:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This way, you couldn't have an ai podcaster, could you?

15:45 - Padre (Guest)
Right, and it's also like no, absolutely can't.

15:48
I think Google already does yeah yeah, but one of the other issues has also been that they're thinking of this as an overlay on top of the existing system. We can fix it with X, y and Z, universal basic income, et cetera, et cetera. Social services increase X, y and Z, universal basic income, et cetera, et cetera. Social services increase. But what we're going to have with the coming of AI, as it gets perfected, it's not just the changing of the economic structure of the society, it's going to change society itself. We could actually see the reversal of what we saw, starting with the industrial revolution, where population centers rushed to the cities. If we're all on UBI and if most of those repetitive jobs are now being done by AI, there's no reason to stay in expensive city centers.

16:30
So what happens when your population disperses? Well, it changes the way that people relate to one another. It changes the way that communities are built. It changes the way that demographics are handled. You start seeing balkanization of communities, because why not live with the people that you like if you no longer have to live in big cities? So these are. These are all the concerns that are being brought up right now. In the Vatican, just a couple of yards away, there are high level discussions about who do we bring in to have these conversations? Not just universal basic income, not just economists, but you have to bring in sociologists, you have to bring in psychologists, you have to bring in experts in AI. It's basically going to touch every part of every human society across the planet.

17:14 - Amanda Silberling (Guest)
I just fundamentally don't trust the tech industry to make changes to people's jobs in the way they have in the past. Like you could say that amazon and amazon warehouses have created as many jobs as amazon took away, but I don't think that people working in amazon fulfillment centers is a sustainable job and well, good, let the robots have that one.

17:44
In fact, amazon's moving rapidly in that direction I mean, yeah, I mean, but I mean, I just, I think I mean even like, as in jason's article it says, for 24 hours a day. These ten thousand dollar robots will get the job done without bathroom breaks or threatening a union drive. They cost less than one dollar an hour and like, yeah, that's like. This is what the tech companies want, because you can abuse robots in a way that you can't get away with abusing humans.

18:11 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Yeah, humans have, sorry about that, my laptop. He's in the shade now. If everybody's going to have to have radical self-reliance, amanda, you, this idea that, like the corporation, is there for you and you're going to be a corporate person for X number of years, that's gone and you know that's moving in that direction for a while and that's where we started Right, like there was no concept that the corporation would be with you for your entire life.

18:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, there was feudalism, I guess, yeah.

18:42 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
And. But now you know, self-reliance is going to be what it's all about and these are going to be complicated issues. Andy Jassy wrote a piece this week and when a CEO writes a manifesto and publishes it to everybody you know in the company and then publishes it publicly before it gets leaked to Amanda and TechCrunch, you know it's important and he goes through this and there's about two dozen examples of AI and what they're working on, and in that story he mentions towards the end that there will be a different footprint of the company. And in my piece that I wrote on my Substack, I explained and I haven't written a piece in a long time years, but I felt like I needed to bring this up because, to your point, amanda, the tech industry we just build the most efficient companies with the highest profits that lower the prices for consumers. That's called capitalism and it's the best system in the world for creating abundance, but it's the most imperfect one. It's just the best one we figured out so far, out so far. And you know, when he writes a story like that on the Amazon website, I think this is a way of him preparing investors for higher profits and employees for less jobs.

20:01
This is a high and low situation. Leo, you know you are seeing it in white collar jobs doing chores. So if you were at a company and your job consisted of chores, which is anything other than the core product? So on a podcast there's somebody who's, you know, the host and they edit it. That's like the core product. But everybody around it, you know, if there's an accountant, a lawyer, an operations person, most of those jobs which are would be defined as chores, things necessary to produce the main thing those are all going away.

20:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And so, and they're going to go away, the radical independence or self-sufficiency doesn't answer the question of well, but how am I going to pay the rent and make a living? I agree, you know a lot of people do jobs they hate, they don't like, that are demeaning. There isn't a lot of dignity in a lot of jobs, but at the same time people need to eat.

20:53 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Yeah, this is my big concern. I think there's a number of people in the tech industry who have hit peak employment, In other words, their job at Google or Amazon that they had for $300,000 a year or something amazing. They may not be able to find that job as a middle manager, and if you look at companies like Uber, Google, Microsoft, they have less employees now than they did three or four years ago and they're making twice as much money.

21:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well that end up being. All of this really looks like it's not to make society better, but to enrich a small number of people uh the executives, the ceos, the investors and it's just going to drive incoming inequality crazy, and I don't think that that's a sustainable way for a society. It's not to be run.

21:46 - Padre (Guest)
It's not every time we've seen that in the past there's been a guillotine involved well, the thing is, when you hear, when you hear tech execs talking about radical self uh Reliance and I understand that. I understand that need that. The problem is they think that only applies to the people. If we move into what looks to be the final destination of AI, corporations will need radical self-reliance in the sense that they will no longer be able to judge the profitability quarter to quarter as the success metric for their companies. If you no longer have the same massive pool of consumers to consume your products and goods, it no longer becomes whether or not you're providing services that people want. It's do you provide services for the good of that society.

22:32
It changes the rules entirely and they're not looking at that part.

22:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think they should also be worried about a vast and growing underclass that is not happy, precisely.

22:42 - Padre (Guest)
You know what happens when people can't affordber driver afford to eat yeah, there's no.

22:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So I mean, jason you, you say you like the third choice, which is ai vacation. What does that mean?

22:52 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
well, yeah, and if you look at the end of my story I show the way mo's burning and I make I make father's point here yeah which is, you know, in los angeles. They riot 10 times a year. Anything lakers win, right. Any excuse to right to riot, in my experience, having lived here for 10 years. But this time they didn't burn the police cars, they summoned the Waymos to their death.

23:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Isn't that interesting.

23:14 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
I think this is like a-.

23:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's telling.

23:16 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
It's telling and I like to think that I'm able to pick up on nuance when the Waymos are being called to their death. That is a moment in time, and today the introductory price of the Tesla robo taxis is $4. I think it might be $4.20, actually as a joke Of course it is.

23:41
Yeah, so the price is like $4 for a ride is like a third of what it should cost. So we are going to see prices come down Prices for food, prices, for everything, just like we've watched cables and clothes and sneakers, prices come radically down, so there is something for that.

23:59 - Amanda Silberling (Guest)
Is that sustainable pricing, though? Because I've taken Waymos in San Francisco and I've been there and it seems like they ended up being more expensive than Ubers. But is it going to be a similar situation where, like, the price of stuff, of stuff is artificially lower to get people to use it and then, like, cause you can't? Keep doing 420 forever, right?

24:17 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
No, no, I think the prices of these cars, uh, the, the, the cyber cab, which is the two door one, I think they will get that down to $20,000, $25,000 per car and that's going to be $2, $3, $4 for an Uber ride that would normally cost $15 or $20. So, yes, that will happen. Absolutely, those rides will be that cheap. What we should start thinking about is, as a society is creating more jobs in places where we need them, and those will be the most human jobs. So one suggestion I have is we go to a four-day work week for a lot of jobs like, say, teachers or healthcare. If you go to a four-day work week, that fifth day means you just need 20% more employees, right? If you do more professional training, if we went to a six-week, if we had six week vacations here in the United States versus, you know, two weeks or three weeks, whatever the standard is, that would create more jobs. So I do think we will get through this, but this is going to be one of the. I think this will be the biggest challenge of our lifetime. You know, everybody on this call, what we're going to see in the next 10 years will be the biggest challenge of our lifetime.

25:24
We will see Waymo's burned. We will see protests in the streets over this issue. Where's my jobs and the people? It's happening in China and I was talking to an executive from one of the I'll just say top 10, but it's probably even higher public companies over there and he said they are slow, rolling self-driving there. They're only allowing it in a couple of cities and testing it because the number one job for young men who are 18 to like 25 is driving cabs in many of those cities and other people work in factories. Obviously, when you have 18 to 25 year olds unemployed, if you go, look at Greece, they're the ones who riot, they riot.

26:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, so society will self-correct for this it's going to be. It's unemployed. Uh, if you go look at greece.

26:04 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
They're the ones who riot. They riot, yeah. So society will self-correct for this.

26:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's going to be so, but does it look like we're gonna, uh, do anything about it? Hold on, it, doesn't some?

26:13 - Benito (Announcement)
real, real quick context first, real quick. This is benito, by the way. Hello everybody uh for burning the philippines we're bringing the way most down in la isn't because that their ai are taking away jobs. It's because they share data with the lapd.

26:25 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
That's why they burned way most oh, interesting yeah uh, I, I think there's also, though, but you know, would you not?

26:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
would you not disagree that there is a anti-big tech sentiment as well?

26:34 - Benito (Announcement)
there is, but the reason they they burned way most specifically is because they shared data with the government. But it's the same, but they were calling them over yeah, but the reason why they were doing that was because Waymo was sharing data with the LAPD.

26:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Remember, in San Francisco there were protests against the Google buses and they were they were vandalizing the Google buses. I think there's a lot of. This is a deep resentment not just of AI, but of big tech, and I think it's you know, look, we've been covering tech my whole life, practically. I think something has changed in the point of view and you say this yourself about yourself uh, jason, yeah, you used to be an optimist and I, and I still am, and I think we will navigate this.

27:15 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
But if you bring up these concerns in my community, like inside the tent, people are like let's not want you to talk about it. No, no, no or worse. That's because they don't have a solution by the way. That's not talk about it.

27:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They don't want you to talk about it. No, no, no, or worse. That's because they don't have a solution. By the way, there's no answer to it.

27:30 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
And it's not there, there will be answers to it. It just won't be provided by these companies and they don't see it as their role to solve the problem.

27:49 - Padre (Guest)
Their role is to make the best technology better, faster, cheaper. Better, faster, cheaper. It needs to be their role to solve the problem because right now they can put a finger on the scale right now, so they can have input into what a reformed society looks like that has AI that has replaced most human jobs. It will get to the point and this will be after a few quarters of record profits at which they will no longer have that ability to put that finger. That's when we get into actual violent revolution.

28:08
I mean, that used to be a theoretical, that was somewhere down the line, but you can see it now. Yeah, and to have a tech bro, a wealthy tech bro, tell me oh, don't worry, we're going to make sure that prices stay low enough so that you can still afford to live when you're living on universal basic income. That's, that is not a promise, that's's a threat. That's them telling me at any point, I can take away your ability to live, and that is not a solution. That is 1984. That is a dystopia that people can see a mile away.

28:36 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Well, this is where Radical Software Alliance comes in, and I think startups as crazy as it sounds will be the solution here. So I've been talking to entrepreneurs in our accelerators and pre-accelerator about imagine a world where there were tens of thousands of people who are no longer driving Ubers or doing DoorDash. What could you do with that surplus of individual time, creativity, et cetera. And we've seen that over and over again. In fact, the whole gig economy came as a way for people who had to work shift work, and Uber got a lot of criticism for this. I know because I was the third investor and I was right there on the front lines having to answer it constantly and I said to people you don't understand. This is not a replacement for the eight hour shift or 10 hour shift at Walmart or Amazon factory. This is for somebody who's dropping their kids off at school, wants to do three or four rides, then pick them up and have dinner with them and take them to soccer. They want to work this way and they will not take these jobs if the other jobs are better. And there's just a natural correcting force, which is what we've seen right, the whole discussion of like oh my God, Uber drivers and door desk drivers don't make enough money. Now people are looking at those and Walmart, Target, Starbucks have had to raise the salaries to compete with people who take those jobs.

29:47
So I think there'll be a cognitive and physical world surplus. What can we do with the surplus? That's the optimist in me. What products or services can we create? And one of them is going to be an aging population, and so you could have young people working to make people who are in retirement their lives more rich. We could have twice as many doctors, three times as many teachers. We could have afterschool programs, so there'll be all these other opportunities and people will find them. Really, the transition is what concerns me, and I'm also concerned that people are trying to shut this conversation down. So at least you have one tech bro, father, who is bringing it up. Just a couple.

30:26 - Padre (Guest)
Mark Cuban. Mark Cuban has actually said some absolutely right things.

30:30
We actually want to invite him over here to be one of our speakers, and I like the way that you're phrasing it. I would take a slightly different approach and say you have to change the conversation from we're going to make sure that you have enough to live on, because that will be provided by UBI, and instead make it a conversation about are we, can we provide you with a more satisfactory, a happier lifestyle, a way of you actually taking pride in the type of work that you do, because those are the jobs that we want humans to have. I I want you to feel good about the thing that you are creating.

31:09
Going back to the catholic social teaching, if we believe in the innate goodness of work, then let's actually give people the ability to feel good about the work that they're doing and it no longer becomes about making enough money to survive. It now becomes making a career out of something that you love doing. Now, I know that sounds very hippy-dippy and I know that the tech community won't buy into that, but that's going to lead to a far more satisfied society than we will. Make sure you don't starve. We make sure that you don't starve is not something that's hopeful, that's serfdom.

31:44 - Amanda Silberling (Guest)
You don't starve we make sure that you don't starve is not something that's hopeful, that's surfed.

31:47
I think that promise has already been broken and that, if you look at like people that are working full-time as uber drivers, like even if the intention is that people will give three or four rides in the middle of the day if they want to make a little bit of extra money people are having to do gigs like uber and instacart full-time because they aren't able to find other jobs, and then those jobs become very difficult because then you have to pay for your car, you have to pay for your gas, you have to pay for your car upgrades, and I think there's already been a lot of discontent around people trying to turn gig work that isn't meant to be full-time work into full-time work, and so I think now that when people see Waymo and self-driving vehicles encroaching on territory that already was encroached on, I think that does drive some of the anger, because I don't think the public has trust that there will be these new jobs created for them, because then again it's like people that are working in an Amazon warehouse are being tracked every second of every day.

32:54
If they take one second too long of a lunch break, they can get fired. There's Advil machines in the warehouses because people are working themselves so hard in a way that is like not sustainable and like yes, they have options for insurance and they pay more than minimum wage, but like I think the cost of these jobs is still like people are discontent because yeah, and all that fulfillment, well, and all that will, uh, those jobs are going to be going away.

33:28 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
So all this complaining and hand-wringing, oh my god, uber so terrible. Amazon, these jobs are so terrible. Oh my god, these bosses have been so, you know, uh, intense, or what you know, or whatever the claims are, and they and they could be true, um, and everybody wants a higher salary. That's true as well. You know, up and down the stack, we're going to look back and be like, oh my God, we had it so good. You could just turn on an app and work and make 20 bucks an hour, 30 bucks an hour and not have a boss.

33:52 - Amanda Silberling (Guest)
That's what's concerning though.

33:54 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Well, and here's. This is why I keep bringing up radical self-reliance. Yes, your cost of living is going be responsible, and, Amanda, you see that, working for a private equity firm that owns TechCrunch, they are going to flip and flip and flip, shut things down and sell them, and you cannot rely on your employer for your permanent sustenance. In this world. You're going to have to be self-reliant, and you see people doing that now, especially journalism such a great category. For it, you see so many people saying you know what I can make more just doing a sub stack. All I need is a thousand real fans to pay me a hundred a year. I think I have a thousand real fans somewhere out there.

34:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
People can do that, though. I mean, is it education? What do you need to do to make that more realistic? A better education system, a free education free?

34:42 - Padre (Guest)
training. There's a couple of different ways.

34:46 - Benito (Announcement)
Free healthcare all that stuff.

34:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I do want to make one, one point of clarification which were, by the way, you don't want every reason we're going backwards on those things, but go ahead.

34:54 - Padre (Guest)
I don't want this to be a hate fest on tech pros. This trend predates the tech boom. This was McDonald's back when I was growing up, where you had jobs that were supposed to be temporary. These were for high school students. This was just for your first job. That became permanent, that became the breadwinning job for adults. So that may have been accelerated by the tech boom, but that by no means was created by the tech boom.

35:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it's been going on for my entire life. Let me take a break and we will come back. There's lots more to talk about. These are good subjects. This is a deep stuff that we do need to talk about and uh, and we need to address and solve, and we need to do it pretty damn quickly, because I have a feeling we're not headed in the right direction. Jason's always great to see you. Jason calacanis is here from the all-in podcast. He's slumming, it's okay. It's okay, we'll accept him. I'm home. I'm home. He's home.

35:49 - Benito (Announcement)
We'll accept it he has to stay out of the sun yes, his

35:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
laptop is a good irish boy. He's got to stay out of the sun. Father robert balacere, he's in the dark because it's late night. In uh, in, uh, italy, what time is it? Uh, 11 51 pm. Well, we'll get you out of here by three or four in the morning, I promise yeah. And amanda soberling, who is in philly, senior culture writer of the tech. Are you an eagles fan?

36:15 - Amanda Silberling (Guest)
yeah, I mean I'm more of a baseball person, like I'm a big phillies fan, and then I feel like the eagles, like I've never been a huge football person, but living in philadelphia, it's like you start you have to be knowing things like when jason was talking about rioting in la.

36:29
I was thinking after the eagles won the super bowl they greased the telephone poles downtown so people wouldn't climb up them yeah, but then there was a festival recently in the italian market area of philly where they have like all like the local vendors and stuff out. But then one of the parts of the festival was that they greased a pole and had a pole greased climbing contest yeah, well, you gotta train.

36:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You gotta train if you're gonna be ready for the next super bowl.

36:55 - Amanda Silberling (Guest)
You gotta train, great to have all three of you.

36:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We appreciate it um, our show today, brought to you by spaceship. This is I don't know, jason, you probably don't know about this company. It is very, very cool. Why do you assume? Why does one assume? Why do we assume that simple and affordable has to mean basic and only for beginners? Geeks, tech professionals want to save time and money too. Right, spaceship is the looking most sophisticated domain and web platform out there. Take a look at the website. It takes the pain out of choosing, purchasing and managing domain names and web products. I mean, they've got it all shared hosting, virtual machines, business email.

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38:36
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39:59
a good idea leo's great idea it was like four dollars.

40:02
I couldn't believe it and yeah, it's it's, it's because I control the dns right. It proves that I own that, so it's totally secure. It's a brilliant idea. Anyway, spaceshipcom twit me. Thank them so much for their support of this week in tech.

40:21
Well, in case you didn't notice, there's a little bit of a, a little bit of a kerfuffle going on in the middle east, uh, right now, and our thoughts and prayers go out to, uh, golly and others of our family who are in the middle east. Golly is in, I think, tel aviv uh right now, which means she's being bombarded as we speak. Uh, but the war is not just kinetic. It is, in fact, the first real cyber war. Israel this is from Wired Andy Greenberg writing Israel-tied predatory sparrow hackers are waging cyber war on Iran's financial system.

40:59
They actually were able to attack the CEPA bank and destroy 90 million dollars at an iranian crypto exchange, nobitex. In fact, it got so bad iran actually took itself off the internet because they couldn't thwart these attacks. This, this might. I mean we've seen certain amounts of cyber warfare in the past. This might be the real the the first time that we're seeing the real deal. Iran has restricted internet access to ward off those attacks. People in the country are having difficulty accessing websites and messaging apps. This is the problem now. I mean, warfare has changed very much and technology is being used in new and different uh, ways.

41:48 - Padre (Guest)
I guess there's not much to say about it except except that it's a good thing that we hot, we fired uh the most competent professional in the cyber industry uh from his government job, took away his security credentials so that he can't consult, and made sure that any of his work was deleted. You're talking about christopher krebs? Yeah, that was smart.

42:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah well, and cso is underfunded. Now, uh the uh and uh, apparently, uh, nobody can present uh somebody that trump likes for a director of the nsa, so there is no director of the nsa well, maybe he'll find a grocer or another gardener to put in position it's not. It's not good, uh, it does. It puts us a little bit vulnerable right. And, by the way, uh, the chinese are still in our telecom system and our major telecom carriers say, yeah, yeah, we can't do anything about it well, it's a forklift.

42:42 - Padre (Guest)
It would be a forklift upgrade, you know, yeah, this is not a software patch. You'd have to rip out, yeah, billions of dollars worth of hardware which was not designed to be ripped out. You'd have to redo infrastructure and you'd have to do it in such a way that there's no advanced, persistent threats left behind. I, I mean we. We did a session on this at defcon last year and we couldn't come up with even a theoretical way to do this cleanly the telecom people say we would have to take the entire American telecom system down for a day or two.

43:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Imagine the chaos to make these fixes um, but that'd be a great day for America though, can you imagine?

43:20 - Amanda Silberling (Guest)
without cell phones it might change some habits.

43:22 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Yeah, please, can we do it for 48 hours?

43:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
they'd have to shut the market. They'd have to shut the market down right, because nobody can trade weekend, let's go.

43:30 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
I'm here for it. I'm going whitewater rafting um uh, over the summer and I do it every year and I was like, should I get bring the starlink mini? I was like, no, no, no, this is when the kids are offline. Disconnect, disconnect.

43:46 - Padre (Guest)
Disconnect. You remember, every year I disconnect for eight days.

43:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Nothing. There's no, but you have to. That's part of your calling, right, yeah?

43:54 - Padre (Guest)
Yeah, and the first day I it's. It's like going through withdrawals, it's like being a junkie. I'm just, I'm always reaching for my phone and realize, oh, I don't have it. I don't have a have it, I don't have a connect, I don't have wife, I don't have a laptop. But by day three I'm thinking why in the world am I going to reconnect this? It's so much better, I have so much less stress. And then I get to the end of the retreat and I go I let's find out what's happening on Netflix well, that ties to the next story, which is streaming is now the king of TV For the first time ever.

44:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
last month, more Americans watched streaming than cable and network television combined.

44:35 - Padre (Guest)
Wow, I'm actually only surprised that we didn't hit that point a while back. I mean, I guess it was the older generations that was that were keeping the average on the on the connected side, but the, the, the uh, the, the cord cutter generation arrived in force a long, long time ago. That's all I've got we, this house. Right now we have no cable, we have no satellite. Everything is delivered over the internet yeah, the same.

45:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Same for us too. We we disconnected the. Unfortunately it's still cable, because comcast is the only provider we can get.

45:11 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
This is just about boomers. Right like this is about the paradigm shift because, yeah, you know if you're locked into direct tv or you know my parents, whatever it's like to get them on youtube tv or hulu, whatever solution it is. I have actually both of those now because when I was traveling, I'm trying to VPN in to watch the Knicks game and I had to figure out how to VPN into my home in Texas so that I could trick these folks into thinking that I was watching it.

45:41 - Padre (Guest)
I'm home, man, I'm home. Oh, we all love that cat and mouse game. Right come on. Yeah, the geo restricted content travel.

45:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it's so it's so tail scale, baby. That's the solution. There you go uh, youtube.

45:53 - Padre (Guest)
My 80 year old parents cut the cord this year. Oh wow, I never thought it would happen. If they are completely off now, the downside is um, they, uh, they really got down the rabbit hole on YouTube with the fake videos. They because because where they live, they get pitched all the time. So I actually had to turn on. Don't tell them this, family control so I could ban those artificially. Jet those AI slop channels because they just keep running. They keep running, yeah.

46:26 - Benito (Announcement)
There's also Gen X here, by the way. Like a lot of Gen X, the older Gen X are stuck on cable. Like my mom cut her cord before my sisters did.

46:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, isn't that interesting. Yeah, Older viewers. This is from the New York Times. It's no surprise that younger viewers are the first to jump to streaming. Another group has made the leap as well Viewers over the age of 65. Older viewers watch a lot of television more than any other group. One third of all viewing comes from people over 65. And they've been moving to streaming in droves over the last few years. Since 2023, viewers over 65 are the fastest growing age group for watching YouTube on the TV Not on a phone or on a computer, but on the television yeah, that's what changed it for my mom.

47:11 - Benito (Announcement)
I taught her how to stream it through a comcast, through a chromecast, and it blew her mind and, like that, changed everything for her.

47:17 - Padre (Guest)
Oh this is all I need. The only reason why my parents didn't cut the cord five years ago was because my mom is addicted to jeopardy and nbc has very wisely made it impossible to subscribe to something that will give you live jeopardy. But then I I wrote a script to to download all those those freely uploaded jeopardy episodes so she can watch them when she wants I watch jeopardy on peacock without the ads. I love it that was for you too, amanda jeopardy oh yeah, um yeah.

47:48 - Amanda Silberling (Guest)
Well, uh, don't tell the google overlords, but you can share a youtube tv account. So I have a youtube tv account shared among like five people, so I pay that's family, they're the family yeah they don't have to be living with you to be your family all right family's okay yeah, I mean I still I.

48:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I was kicked off of the family netflix, so oh, my daughter, my 32 year old daughter, is still on the family netflix yeah, I, I finally I don't have the heart to fire her.

48:21 - Amanda Silberling (Guest)
Maybe I should make my well I?

48:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I was fired from it by netflix oh, netflix, the password sharing thing they caught on.

48:29 - Amanda Silberling (Guest)
Huh yeah, because they're like you you live in a different state than your parents. Why are you?

48:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
on. That's a problem, and I'm like I.

48:37 - Amanda Silberling (Guest)
I guess I I can be a big girl and pay for my own netflix, but but no I. So I never had cable like as an adult. But I tried getting one of those little cable box things that like gets the satellite, but I don't, I don't know how that kind of stuff works, but the hd broadcast yeah yeah, I tried getting one of those specifically because I wanted to watch jeopardy, but then, um, it did not work very well. And then my friends were like what if we split a YouTube TV?

49:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
account. There you go.

49:08 - Amanda Silberling (Guest)
Now I watch Jeopardy, I watch the Phillies. I have the TV viewing habits of a middle-aged man. It's great.

49:17 - Padre (Guest)
I had to set up a dual connection at my parents' house because I also I have monitoring devices in case they have a fall and it always makes sure that I can get in. The problem is, every once in a while the primary connection, which is, I think, spectrum link, goes down and it switches over to the backup link, and every time it does that their Netflix account thinks that they're sharing from a different house, so then I have to go back in. So yeah, that's not seamless, but it works kind of well.

49:45 - Amanda Silberling (Guest)
Netflix is tearing families apart it's not just jeopardy.

49:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You ever hear a man of a show called gun smoke? No but featuring a young clint eastwood as rowdy yates. Uh, it is a western. It premiered before I was born in 1955, went off the air in 1975. It is, according to the new york times, making regular appearances in nielsen's most watched streaming series over the last few months. I would think it would be bonanza instead of guns oh, gun smoke's much better than bonanza, as long as it's not little house on the prairie, I'm okay, you can get, uh, the the detective show.

50:23 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
You know my wife, you can get the detective show.

50:24 - Amanda Silberling (Guest)
You know my wife.

50:25 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
You can get the one with the guy who smokes the cigar in the trench coat.

50:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, declare has collected me. Rowdy Yates was on Rawhide, gunsmoke was a different.

50:34 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Columbo is so great, columbo is excellent they had like a whole series of Columbo's like into the 80s, early 90s, where you know he would do these like specials. It wasn't like a series, it was, like you know, short series. You know one and a half hour, one hour, 20 minute episodes and they all are around. They pivot around new technologies in society. So one of them was pivoted around the fax machine the fax machine.

51:00
One of them was a pager, so they literally had one where a guy had bought his wife a pager. He had a pager, I won't spoil it. And another one was based on speeding cameras and the speeding camera they had featured in it used actual film. So the film was developed and they're showing this camera. It was almost like they went to CES and went to the back for all the Taiwanese small boots are and the writers were like, let's make a show about that, the speeding camera is going to be huge. It's hilarious.

51:31 - Padre (Guest)
Jason, if you like Columbo, you have to watch a movie from the 80s called Strange Vibes that had Peter Fogg, it had Jeff Goldblum and it had Cyndi Lauper.

51:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, perfect what.

51:42 - Padre (Guest)
That's a movie. It's a horrible movie, but it's kind of fun.

51:46 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
That's all you need. Cindy Lauper in her network debut, in her movie debut.

51:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All right, we better take another break before this gets out of hand. Great to have all three of you. More news coming up. You're watching this Week in Tech, brought to you by US Cloud. They are the number one microsoft unified support replacement uh-huh. And when I first talked to them, I've been we've been doing the ads now for a while, so I I think most of you are probably familiar with this. When I first talked to them, I said what do you do? Are you a cloud company? No, we're the global leader in third-party microsoft support, for they support 50 of the Fortune 500.

52:26
And there's a good reason for it, because switching to US Cloud can save your business 30 to 50% over Microsoft Unified and Premier support. Now, that wouldn't be any good if it were just less expensive. It's better as well. In fact, twice as fast average time to resolution versus Microsoft, and they've got SLAs to back that. And it turns out their name isn't so confusing, because now US cloud is going to do something Microsoft would never do help you save money on Azure. They have an Azure cost optimization service. Now this is, I think, pretty common. Certainly has been my experience.

53:03
When was the last time you evaluated your Azure usage Right? Do you really think about it? If it's been a while, you probably have what we call in the business little Azure sprawl, a little spend creep going on. Well, the good news is, thanks to US Cloud, saving on Azure is is easier than you think. Us Cloud offers an eight. It's powered by VBox and what it'll do is identify key opportunities to reduce costs across your entire Azure environment. And, by the way, you're going to get expert guidance from US Cloud senior engineers the best in the business, an average of over 16 years with Microsoft products. At the end of the eight weeks, your interactive dashboard will have big, bold letters rebuild and downscale opportunities, unused resources, and now you can reallocate those precious IT dollars towards things you really need. Or, if you want to keep the savings going, you could invest your Azure savings in US Cloud's Microsoft support and keep saving. There's an idea completely eliminate your Microsoft unified spend.

54:07
I think that's what Sam did. He's the technical operations manager at Bede Gaming B-E-D-E. He gave US Cloud five stars and this quote quote "'We found some things that had been running "'for three years, which no one was checking. These VMs were, I don't know 10 grand a month not a massive chunk in the grand scheme of how much we spend on Azure. But you know, once you get to 40 or $50,000 a month, it really starts to add up Really. It's simple Stop overpaying for Azure, identify and eliminate Azure creep and boost your performance all in eight weeks with US Cloud.

54:41
Visit uscloudcom and book a call today to find out how much your team can save. That's uscloudcom to book a call today and get faster Microsoft support for less. Better too. Uscloudcom. Book a call today. Faster Microsoft support for less. Thank you, us Cloud, for your support of our program. For uh, for your support of our program. Uh. Jason calacanis, father robert balisier and amanda silberling all three of you have gone through some changes. Amanda jason was referring to this earlier. Tech crunch has a new owner. Yep, how's that been for you? It's okay, you can talk. They're not listening. They're not listening.

55:28 - Amanda Silberling (Guest)
I let me, it's a trap.

55:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Let me quote jason's uh let jason's co-host on the uh twist, alex wilhelm. He said I didn't want to talk about this, but let me tell you. I mean, he uh, he was glad, he's glad he's out of tech grunge, isn't he, jason?

55:45 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
I think, think TechCrunch has got a great legacy. Things trade in the market like brands like that, and every brand has a season and some owners new owners cherish the brand and invest in it. Other ones don't. We've seen a bunch of the Ziff titles PC Magazine, oh yeah.

56:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is the way of the world, isn't it?

56:07 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Yeah, and then just publishing is one of these very unique things. You need to have an impresario, a person who actually cares you know, mike errington a mike errington, a leo laporte, whatever it happens to be somebody who actually just wants to be the steward of the brand and say this brand stands for this, this is what we cherish, as opposed to just the bean counters. And you know that's always the challenge when things-.

56:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, especially when private equity comes in, because basically, by definition, aren't they bean counters? I mean, isn't that exactly what they are?

56:37 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Literally, the job of private equity is to buy something at a low price, race down the costs and race up the revenue as much as you can, put some debt on it and then sell it, and you know it's somebody else's problem. You know, of course. Then you know if you have great writers or great talent. You know they are just cogs in the wheel, right. This is why I always think you know when I'm talking to individual contributors like amanda or alex wilhelm build a brand, self-reliance radical self-reliance, you know yeah, it is a slightly refined version of the old corporate raiders from the 80s.

57:14
It's totally yeah it's the same theory. Go to spaceshipcom and you know and get yourself a domain and set it up and get your own landing page.

57:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What is it, amanda? Omg, lol, I love it.

57:25 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Yeah, I mean thunderbolt, whatever it is.

57:28 - Amanda Silberling (Guest)
Yeah, yeah, yeah I mean I think this is kind of like a a weird place to be in in journalism where, like you have people like alex wilhelm, who works with jason now, who is like doing his own thing, but like I mean radical self-reliance.

57:47
But I'm like when I started in tech journalism, alex wilhelm was already like alex wilhelm, right. So I'm kind of like you sort of need or maybe not need. But I guess the way I see it is like people know my writing because I write for tech crunch and then you sort of have to build a brand off of that and like build a readership off of that. And I it would be cool if one day people wanted to read my writing enough that they would pay specifically for my writing. But I guess for now the private equity overlords are somehow making my paychecks and I yeah, I mean it is kind of something that you I mean it's been this way in journalism forever where, like I don't know where I'm going to be working in five years and I would hope that it's still TechCrunch, if that's still a job that is available. But yeah, I mean you always kind of have to think about like building your own sort of brand and like IP and, like I have a podcast that I do, that's like separate from TechCrunch.

58:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What's that Tell us about?

58:57 - Amanda Silberling (Guest)
that? Wow. If True, it is an internet culture podcast that I host with my friend, isabel Kim, who is a sci-fi author, and we talk about generally just internet culture how the internet is impacting our lives, and it's similar to my beat at Tech Crunch, but a lot sillier and off the cuff. More so, but-.

59:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
More personal right. No, yeah, which is good.

59:25 - Amanda Silberling (Guest)
Which, yeah, so it's, I it's. I mean, yeah, I mean I feel like that's kind of why a lot of people, even if they haven't made the full jump to being independent or like honestly, like I don't think I could do that yet, although maybe I'm not being radically self-reliant enough, but hopefully one day. But I think a lot of people kind of are like laying the groundwork for in case this like new ownership doesn't work out. Do I have something of my own that I can try to like keep doing what I'm doing?

01:00:00 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
It's not as scary as it might seem. There's a really brilliant guy, Kevin Kelly.

01:00:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Love him.

01:00:06 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Yeah, he's really thoughtful and he wrote the thousand true fans concept and that always stuck with me from.

01:00:13
I don't know, he maybe wrote it 20 years ago. I put the link in the chat room there for when he wrote it down, but he was talking about it long before he wrote it. And it's a very simple concept. You have your podcast, are you collecting emails, phone numbers, do you know those people? Do you reply to them? And so, over time, if you have those thousand true fans and the concept is pretty simple, you know, if you're a comedian and you have a thousand true fans, a hundred will show up for you and you can make a living, you can pay your rent, and so, again, we can sit here and hand ring about. You know how dynamic the world is and how fast the pace is changing, but we have to give advice to people. So, as a you know somebody who is your senior journalist, who started in the 90s and Leo, who started in 1937, 30s he was. He was doing it on tablets. Actually, him and Moses were doing the top 10 news stories on tablets.

01:01:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's just like it. This just in the wheel has been invented in Hungary.

01:01:10 - Padre (Guest)
I don't know. This is why so many journalists end up doing in-house communications for large tech companies because they go to the dark side, they go to PR. Don't do it, that's why I'm going to go work for the in-house communications department at Intel. I've heard that's got a future.

01:01:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Not a good idea, no, no, no. Not a good idea.

01:01:30 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
There's a new cruise line where I think you could do better, it's the Titanic.

01:01:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a year back and forth. It does great. It's got great service. I hear they're unsinkable.

01:01:39 - Padre (Guest)
Yeah Well, just today, right, because they announced that they're going to destroy the in-house, they're removing the in-house communications team and they're going to move everything to Accenture and AI. So it's like, oh right, well, yeah.

01:01:52 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Every job, I'm working with founders, and so every time there's an innovation or a change like this, it's an opportunity. Chaos is a ladder right. The chaos that we're experiencing is the opportunity. Now, somebody with a big heart and who's thoughtful, like father here, is always going to think about the meek, the poor, like that is what we do as Christians correct yeah, because not everybody can become a brand right.

01:02:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No but by the way, if everybody became a brand, the brand would be meaningless.

01:02:20 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Well, but everybody can learn incremental skills right, and that's what we have to do is start empowering people and giving them that motivation to try to learn something right and teach a man to fish right, not just give them a fish. And so I think this is the high order bit and what I see in startups because startups are resource constrained and my day job is not all in it's investing in 100 companies a year. Startups in the first year of their existence. We call it year zero and we are seeing them do with three people what startups used to do with 12. So a modern app company if you were launching the Calm app Is that?

01:02:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
because of.

01:02:57 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
AI, yes, so a lot of the functions that you would hire now are available either as abstracted SaaS products or services. They're available through Fiverr or some other service, and all those services are abstracted away and cheaper because of massive competition. Cloud hosting, domain names, like we're hearing here support all of those things are examples of better, cheaper, faster. So the cost is just coming down so fast and you're able to do so much more with less. I think we'll see. I know this sounds crazy, but you know, perhaps in the next 10 years, you know 20 times the number of startups formed because so many people are going to get out of school not be able to have a job, but they will have skills say well, what do we do?

01:03:43
And in the past it was start a rock band, start a zine, put up a website, start a consulting firm, an agency. That radical self-reliance is going to become more and more necessary. Two or three of your friends with skills start something. You did it, amanda, with a podcast. Now what you have to do with that podcast is just collect emails. Once you've collected emails, then you just have to say we're looking for a hundred patrons to put in a hundred dollars each to do this special series and just get one or two of those per week each with your co-hosts and it will.

01:04:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
People are talking about this solo unicorn. Yeah, you think there's gonna. There hasn't been one yet, has there?

01:04:17 - Amanda Silberling (Guest)
there is arguably one well, no it's gonna be you, amanda, it's a dual unicorn.

01:04:22 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
You actually could say joe rogan, you know who has a small number of employees is is maybe the first one trending towards that um there's a company called distro kid um that my friend phil kaplan did, which was only a handful of people, and pudd yeah from f to come. He was always lazy pudd, yes, pudds, pudds.

01:04:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, I remember pudd telling me whatever you do, make a website that you can walk away from and it'll continue to make incremental income forever yeah. He's the guy who did F'd Company and that was a good little moneymaker for some time yeah.

01:04:55 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
DistroKid lets you upload your album, if you're not signed by a label, and then get it onto Spotify and other places and it's just a monthly subscription and it's something everybody needs. Who's a musician? And there's a lot more musicians a long tail of them.

01:05:07
So again back to self-reliance. You look at what's happening on Patreon. You look at what's happening on YouTube. People are able to make small amounts of money and growing. Now, not everybody's gonna be a content creator, but I do think there'll be a lot of interesting opportunities there for small business creation.

01:05:26 - Benito (Announcement)
This doesn't super sound like self-reliance, though, because you're relying on Patreon, you're relying on Google, you're relying on these giant corporations. Well, you know what those are empowering technologies that make it possible.

01:05:37 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Yeah, and there are so many options.

01:05:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You're not wandering off into the desert and making a living without any help of any kind. It's not.

01:05:45 - Padre (Guest)
The paradigm of teaching Amanda fish. Naturally, I'm going to be a big fan of that, Amanda do you know how to?

01:05:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
fish Not that, amanda, we're telling people to teach.

01:05:55 - Padre (Guest)
We're telling that we're going to teach people how to fish while the wealthy are in the same waters with fishing trawlers. I mean, it's like that's a good point.

01:06:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah.

01:06:07 - Padre (Guest)
Radical self-reliance works as long as everyone's got their own little palm.

01:06:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But we don't so doesn't it rely on a certain amount of scarcity too. You can't have everybody be a success, or can you? Could you have a million?

01:06:21 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
creators a billion define success. You know like it's success being able to pay your rent and raise your family and have a six-week vacation. For many people it is, and I think that is an important question for each person to ask them what is success for me? And so I think people are a little caught up in the outliers of success, seeing people become billionaires, et cetera. It becomes people's obsession when really their obsession should be what skills do I have? What unique ideas do I have? What can I build? And having that self-reliance and motivation to learn new skills. Every skill is available to be taught to you on the internet by YouTube, ai, free courseware.

01:07:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's true, it's a lot easier than it used to be. You need only have the motivation. Yeah, my son taught himself to cook from YouTube. Only have the motivation. Yeah, my son uh taught himself to cook from youtube. He watched youtube cooking videos, you know, religiously growing up. Yeah, and of course that's what he's doing.

01:07:14 - Benito (Announcement)
So many see this is and this is. This is, I think, a fallacy, though, like he didn't teach himself, all those people on youtube taught him well, yeah, but we're no, we're not proposing that you live in a vacuum we are still in a society.

01:07:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I, I think it's a look. I understand there are going to be people who, for whatever reason you know, we call them, uh, nine to fivers. We, you know, there are people in the world who just want a job. They can work nine to five. They don't want investment in it, they don't want to invest any extra effort into it, they just want to go make a paycheck and come home. I would guess that's probably the majority of people. Are you saying that that class of worker is is out of luck?

01:07:53 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
no, uh, yes can't be well, I think they are happy that's a bad, that's a bad sign, I mean that's. I think they're gonna have a worker is out of luck that society crumbles.

01:08:03 - Padre (Guest)
eventually it has to happen. So you need to be able to develop a society that can both allow that nine to fiver who just wants to be able to kick back with a brew on the weekend, to live a comfortable life and, at the same time, inspire people who maybe not for the profit but want to do something wonderful.

01:08:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it's good advice to say you know if you can don't be a nine fiver, but yeah, not everybody uh has the capability or even the desire uh to do that. The motivation's the key there.

01:08:33 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
You know, I think some people are like you're saying they want to work nine to five. They're not motivated to do a lot of people, most of the people I know are very happy to you know, be a mailman or whatever.

01:08:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I agree that work, uh, it gives you dignity. That work gives your life meaning, that your work should be something that is meaningful to you. But not everybody has that luxury. That seems like a I mean, look, it's what I taught my kids. Is what I did? Is I always pursued meaning and satisfaction, not money, and it worked out okay for me. But I don't think it's gonna always work out that way for everybody. I was. I have a very privileged background. You know, if you come from privilege, it's not such a stretch to say you know, okay, you're gonna make it.

01:09:19 - Amanda Silberling (Guest)
You know I had a good education.

01:09:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I had parents who were supportive. I didn't have trauma in my youth. There's a lot of people who don't have that luxury the majority, I would guess.

01:09:28 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Everybody starts at a different starting line, right?

01:09:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right.

01:09:32 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Some people further back than others.

01:09:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
One of the reasons TechCrunch got sold is, according to the register, the apocalypse, or they call it, the AIpocalypse is here. For websites, search referrals are plummeting and this is thanks to the. I would say to people like me who don't use google search anymore, I use perplexity, I think, ai search. That's why google added these ai overviews, um based on a data from 70 individuals that kevin indig study. He writes about seo. He said outbound click rates uh, when ai overviews are absent on google, outbound click rates go up by a significant portion. But as soon as google pushed out AI overviews, clicks went down about 35%. This is credit a h refs, an SEO site.

01:10:32
Similar web reported that search referrals to top US travel and tourism has fallen 20% year-over-year. News and media sites traffic dropped 17% year-over. E-commerce down 9%. Finance 7%. Food drink 7%. Lifestyle fashion 5%. This isn't because we're not going to these sites. Well, it is because we're not going to these sites. It's because we're reading AI overviews instead of going to these sites. We're getting their information, but it's been scraped from them, you agree.

01:11:14 - Amanda Silberling (Guest)
Yeah, I mean internally scraped from them, you agree. Yeah, I mean internally, like we do see this reflected in at least how our own uh traffic is going. But I think this is also why in this day and age in journalism, you can't really just be like a website that publishes stuff, because if you are relying specifically on the one stream of income of I want people to click on this article because then they'll see an ad that's displayed alongside it and then the advertisers will be happy and give me money. That like that's just one way of making money and it's one that tends to be volatile. So I don't know, I mean, maybe one of the reasons that tech crunch is still hanging in there is because we do have an events business. But I mean, I think this is also why we've seen a lot of uh like publications try doing subscription models.

01:12:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But jason, would you start weblogs inc today?

01:12:13 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
yeah, I would. I'm a glutton for punishment. I love content, but uh, you know this is going to be for those who don't know, jason.

01:12:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Jason created weblogs inc. Uh, originally what it was? The? Uh, what was it called the reporter? The?

01:12:25 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
uh, not silicon valley called the reporter the not Silicon Valley, silicon Alley, yeah, and then in gadget, auto blog, joystick, all those you know the. The search referral traffic was a major part of everybody's business and it's how people discovered stuff. It was your number one way to get traffic. There are going to be a lot of settlements here. Disney is suing one of the image companies.

01:12:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Mid-Journey. Mid-journey New York Times is suing Because they've got Darth Vader in there. Open AI.

01:12:53 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
And so these I'll tell you the content companies are going to win these suits. I'm going to guarantee you think so A hundred percent. I hope so. Yeah, no, it's a hundred percent.

01:13:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know if I hope so. I hope so for the content companies, but on the other hand, I think there's also a First Amendment right to read. We've talked about it on this show before. Are the AIs doing anything different than you or I would be? Let's say, I, as somebody who loves Star Wars, looked at a lot of Star Wars and started drawing pictures of Darth Vader.

01:13:22 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Yeah, in a non-commercial way. You doing that personally is a non-issue, but when you're a company charging a subscription, it is an issue, that's what makes it different?

01:13:29
Because that's the difference and the opportunity to create derivative works lies with the IP holder, not some third party. Therefore, if Disney were to open up in Disney Plus the ability to Jedi me and make you into a Jedi character now, they would be able to say hey, midjourney is taking our business and they will launch that product. New York Times will have an AI chatbot soon, I understand, and they can then make that direct correlation Look.

01:13:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But does it? So? Here's my and Sam Altman, I think, said this if you only allow AIs to train on public domain information, you're not going to get very good AIs.

01:14:07 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
And that's their challenge. That is not the fault of the New York Times or any content creator. They still have the sovereignty to do what they want with their data and the way this will all work out here in the West. In China, there'll be a free-for-all, but we invested in a company called Created by Humans I put it into the Zoom chat if you want to see it and there are going to be clearinghouses and what these clearinghouses will do is you'll be able to take the Twit archive and everything on the network and say, hey, and you might have to look for like createdbyhumansai, and so createdbyhumansai is going to.

01:14:45
You could put Twit into there and say these are what you can do, you can train and this is the cost, and there'll be a robottxt version that will be robotaitxt, right, robotaitxt. And the industry will soon have its own standards of what you can train on, what you can't and what the costs are. Just like Creative Commons has many different licenses, there'll be an ai license for training and this could work for both sides it won't be so prohibitively expensive ais could afford it.

01:15:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And uh, because we, I want, look I. I think an ai should be trained on every published work. I think ai should be trained in the new york times. It should be trained on everything. That's how an ai becomes useful. I understand the rights holders don't like it. The New York Times is claiming you can reconstruct the New York Times. That nobody will read the New York Times because OpenAI ingested them. That's not the case.

01:15:32 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Well, here's the opportunity, leo. What if ChatGPT, which just gave $6.5 billion to Johnny Ive, what if they said we're going to give 10% of our yearly revenue, which at this point would be a billion dollars, and we're going to share it with content creators, and we're just asking content creators to give us a direct feed and they'll get a fee, and then we'll have the exclusive to it? So when you go to perplexity, it'll say oh, you want New York Times, we don't have the license for that. And then when you go to chat GPT, in their marketing they'll say with the New York Times, with the Wall Street Journal, with Disney, and you'll pick. Now, that will be a bummer in some ways because it'll be balkanized, but this could totally and I predict it will reinvigorate the industry.

01:16:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So Creative by Humans is working with the Authors Guild. So you're basically trying to get these kinds of licensing rights for books.

01:16:21 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Yeah, and then it will go to the next thing, to the next thing, to the next thing, to the next thing, podcasts, et cetera. And there'll be many clearinghouses. You'll be able to pick them, just like ASCAP.

01:16:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It seems sensible. Actually it seems like a good solution and it's an opportunity for people.

01:16:31 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
It's an opportunity to differentiate their products.

01:16:50 - Padre (Guest)
no-transcript now in the UK. This is the use and uh access bill that they're debating, and basically the only argument that they can make pro-ai is to say AI can't properly develop if you don't just let them have access to everything which is not. That's not an argument, that's a whine. That's basically saying well, you know what? It would be a lot easier for me, as a real estate developer, to make money if you just gave me the land for free.

01:17:19 - Benito (Announcement)
Yeah, but no.

01:17:23 - Amanda Silberling (Guest)
I just hope that people are able to have the option of deciding if they want to license their works or not, which is, I mean, I am just looking at this created by humans for the first time. But yeah, I mean, if if somebody wants to license their works and they can get compensated for it, then that's great, they can get compensated for it, then that's great. But as it stands right now, people are having their books being used as training data and getting no compensation at all, which I think is where a lot of the angst is coming from yeah, mastodon has updated its terms to prohibit uh people from training ai models on mastodon.

01:18:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh x is x. Is uh automatically using your tweets for grok right for x? I would think so and I think it has the right.

01:18:12 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
So any, any community you're part of, you're going to have to make that decision if you want to give them a worldwide perpetual license to your content, and that's like the deal you have to make. Some people don't want to put their content on youtube because they don't want to give them a license to use it, et cetera. But the problem with the training is, once you give the license, cat's out of the bag. You can't really rip it out that easily is the problem.

01:18:35
But all these people will be sued, and they will be sued successfully.

01:18:39 - Padre (Guest)
Just FYI, one of the things that we've been doing is we've been looking at the sources, the high quality sources, so published sources, that the Catholic church controls across our universities, and the history in the archives. It comes up to about four exabytes. Wow, holy cow, that would be a fantastic cash on which to train an AI, an LLM. With access to that much high quality, vetted and peer reviewed sources would actually make for a really really good LLM. Just saying, just want to put that out there, absolutely.

01:19:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Let's take a break. More to come. This is a very smart panel. It's nice to have you, and I'm glad that you're going to teach Amanda to fish. I think that's really good, father Robert.

01:19:24 - Amanda Silberling (Guest)
Thank you. We're all going to go on a nice fishing trip after we're done recording.

01:19:29 - Padre (Guest)
I just throw a stick of dynamite into the pond.

01:19:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's like shooting a fish in a barrel with dynamite.

01:19:36 - Amanda Silberling (Guest)
It's what I do in the Zelda games, but that's not real life.

01:19:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh don't say that hey did you get the Switch 2, miss Zelda fan. Are you going to miss zelda fan? Are you gonna upgrade?

01:19:45 - Amanda Silberling (Guest)
I haven't bought it yet, but I'm kind of like, on one hand I don't immediately need it, but I know I'm gonna buy it eventually. So I'm like shouldn't I just get it like, yeah, it's not gonna go down in price.

01:19:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't think. I think this is yeah, yeah, I mean thank you to my private equity overlords.

01:20:02 - Amanda Silberling (Guest)
I do have the five hundred dollars, but I'm I don't know. I feel like I know I'm gonna buy it at some point, so I'm like it doesn't really matter.

01:20:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Everybody at tech crunch a nintendo switch fund, so everybody can get one they should. I mean, you know, I'll tell you my switch switch ubi covid. I was animal. Ice animal crossing saved my life during covid, that's.

01:20:25 - Padre (Guest)
UBC Universal Basic Console. Is that what we're doing? Yeah, that's it. Ubc.

01:20:29 - Amanda Silberling (Guest)
Yeah, I'm down UBC. I did get to test the Switch 2, but they don't let you take those home at the Nintendo events. But at least I have played it.

01:20:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Nice.

01:20:40 - Amanda Silberling (Guest)
Which is not as impressive anymore now that it is a publicly released item.

01:20:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, not everybody has one.

01:20:47 - Padre (Guest)
I keep going into the stores looking for them, but well, over here we have some good family men who ran across a truck of 4 000, so I mean it fell off a truck.

01:20:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What do you want? Uh, I got a good deal on them. Uh, does it come with mario world? Though, that's the thing need that this episode of this Week in Tech brought to you by. Oh, this cool little thing. My camera's off so I can't show you, but it's the coolest little thing ever. It's my Thinks Canary.

01:21:16
What it is is a honeypot. So I remember talking to Bill Cheswick, who wrote the first honeypot, and he said these are really hard to implement. It's hard to implement a honeypot that fools hackers, that is legit, that doesn't let hackers get out of the honeypot, into your stuff, uh, and it doesn't provide become, in other words, a security risk. Well, these guys at things canary have done it all for you. They uh, for years, trained companies and governments how to break into systems. They know exactly what hackers are looking for. So they've created a honeypot that can impersonate almost anything, easy to set up. You can deploy in minutes.

01:21:53
I'm right now on the thinks canary uh configuration site, so I'll show you I could right now. It's a windows server. This little box it's about the size of an external usb drive is a windows server. But look what I. But look what I can turn it into. I can make it an IAS server. I can make it a Linux server, centos Linux or Oracle Enterprise server. I can make it a Mac OS X file share. But you can even make it kind of a Dell switch, a FortiGate router. You can make it a MicroTik router. You can even make it a SCADA device. I'm going to turn mine into a Hirschman RS20 industrial switch.

01:22:31
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01:23:09
If someone's accessing these lure files or brute forcing your fake I don't know, it's making an internal SSH server or something like that you're going to immediately get a notification from your things canary that says you've got a problem. There's somebody in your network doing stuff. You don't want them to do. No false alerts, just the alerts that matter. In any way. You want got a problem. There's somebody in your network doing stuff. You don't want them to do. No false alerts, just the alerts that matter in any way. You want text message, email, slack, web. They support web hooks. They have an api, syslog, of course. So you get any way you want. I never get alerts. When I do, though, that is a sign that something's going on. Just choose a profile for your things canary device register with a hosted console for monitoring and notifications, and then you just you sit back, relax.

01:23:52
Now, how many things canaries you get really depends on the size of your operation. Some big banks might have hundreds of them scattered all over the network. You don't want just one, you want one in every kind of segment, everywhere, every little nook and cranny that a hacker might be looking around in Small business like ours, maybe a handful of them. I'll give you an example. If you go to canarytools slash, twit, let's say you want five fixed canaries 7,500 bucks a year for the whole year, you get your own hosted console, upgrade, support, maintenance and if you use the code twit in the how did you hear about Us box, 10% off that price, and not just for the first year, but for as long as you have your Canaries. You can also and if you have any trepidation at all, you can always return your Thinks Canaries. They have a two-month money-back guarantee for a full refund. I do have to tell you, during all the years TWIT has partnered with Thinks Canary, their refund guarantee has never been claimed.

01:24:47
Visit canarytools. Slash twit. Enter the code twit in the how did you hear about us box. As soon as you get these Thinks Canaries in your operation, you're going to say how did I live without them? Sure, you can have all the defenses in the world, but, as you know, security is a layered process and one of the most important layers is detection, because, on average, companies take 91 days before they know they've been breached. That's three months for a bad guy to wander throughout your network. Place little time bombs. Exfiltrate all that information.

01:25:19 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
It's so affordable too. I mean, I was looking at the pricing and I was like this is super affordable For this kind of security. Yes, 20 years ago, this would be like hundreds this kind of security yes, 20 years ago, this would be like hundreds of thousands of dollars at a minute and these guys really know their stuff.

01:25:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They've made an appliance that is absolutely hardened. It's absolutely secure, so you don't ever have to worry about putting this on your network. We've had things canaries, as I said, for eight years. Don't forget. Canarytools twit. Put twit in the how did you hear about us? Box to get 10 off for as long as you have your canaries. Canarytools slash twit. Yeah, these, these guys are great. I really, uh, I really like what they do.

01:25:57
For the first time, social media we're talking about trends has overtaken tv as america's top news source. Is that good if you're getting your news from blue sky or x? Is that a good thing? This is according to oxford's reuters institute for the study of journalism. Their digital news report came out on monday for 2025. They survey a hundred thousand people in 48 countries, so this is global via a yougov survey traditional news sources losing influence in the united states. Actually, this is also part of the trend of people watching streaming instead of tv. Look what warner just did. They said we're going to keep the studios, we're going to keep the streaming channels and we're going to let you guys have the, the cable channels, cnn and discovery spun off, and you have to think that's basically the lifeboats you know.

01:26:59 - Padre (Guest)
Goodbye do you remember how I told you that I I've uh, I've been using the family controls to block the AI slop from my parents' YouTube account? The AI slop is mostly AI-generated. Text-to-speech with AI-generated images off of Reddit, directly off of Reddit, and that stuff is so wildly inaccurate and yet they're treating it as it is an authoritative source. Yeah, so no, this is not good.

01:27:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is horrible, this is terrible the number one place people use social media for their news. Norway interesting 76 percent. Norway, then the uk I thought you were better than that. Germany us is a mere 60 percent. Uh, people that prefer to read, watch or listen to online news. The problem with that also is it's not just ai slop, it's also filter bubbles, it's also you get the news that confirms your bias. You know that's the.

01:27:55 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
That's the thing I'm concerned about, because I on x it's super right wing, you know conspiracy theory free for all. You know, freedom of speech is the defining characteristic, and when I'm on there I had to put my replies because I don't know if I'm close to a million followers now. My replies were just crazy and so I put it on subscription and I said I'm going to donate $3 a month to reply and I'm going to donate it all to charity. So every month I donate 5K to charity and I only get the small group of people replying. People still pay to reply to you. 1500 people are paying $3 a month and it's better for me. I just did that for my own sanity and my own time, because getting 500 or a thousand replies and it's from crypto people in this and the MAGA people, whatever but then I go over to blue sky or I go to threads and it's like all the left-leaning people, right left x and I come over.

01:28:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're like just as the country is divided, we've divided yeah they yell at me.

01:28:52 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
They're like get out of here. You're friends with sax and elon. And they start yelling at me and I'm like okay, but I'm still friends with you guys, right? They're like no, you can't be friends with us, go back over there.

01:29:01 - Amanda Silberling (Guest)
Like people have been mad at mark cuban on sky.

01:29:05 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Yeah, it's like. This is. This is a crazy thing, you know, like as crazy as the MAGA folks are, like in their own unique way. I don't know if you guys know horseshoe theory, which is like the crazy people you know on both sides just come really close like a horseshoe and then the rest of us are in this big uh shaking our heads going have to be.

01:29:26
This way we could actually talk to each other. Yeah, um, but they, yeah, they, they, they. The best hope the democratic party has, or one of the best hopes, is that people like joe rogan, who were part of the democrats, like mark cuban, rogan's not a democrat. What are you? He was his whole life, he was, he endorsed trump, but yes, recently, but before that he was a bernie bro.

01:29:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He was a bernie bro, that's because he just whatever the last person who said something to him he goes.

01:29:50 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Yeah, that sounds pretty good there's a lot of people on the left elon, you know. Uh, elon is on the left. He was a huge left-wing guy his whole life. Obama, hillary, he supported all those people. They, you know, when you take all the business people, what happened? They all got red pilled. Basically, what happened was, when you take all the business people, what happened? They all got red pilled.

01:30:07
Basically, what happened was when you went as a business person and tried to communicate with the Biden administration, they wouldn't talk to you. And then they just kept adding regulations like, hey, maybe this isn't the best interest of the country, can we have a conversation? But they refused to talk to you. So then Trump was like oh, they won't talk to you, I'll talk to you Come tomorrow. Yeah, let's talk for days. And you know it's putting judgments aside If one group says we're not even willing to talk to you and you can't come to the EV summit, you can't do all this. And then the other group is like we'd love to talk to you. Oh, we have like tons to talk to them, and wants to hear their issues.

01:30:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Zuckerberg is a great example of it. That is a very strange interpretation of what's happening. I think the water is flowing to the power.

01:30:53 - Padre (Guest)
I don't think it has anything to do with who's listening to who.

01:30:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think it's very clearly that people say, well, I guess we got to get in the pocket of the guy who's got all the power.

01:31:02 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
I'm talking about before he had the power. You know when that preference act moved, I was watching it was prior to the election.

01:31:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Prior to the election, yeah, but people sensed. I think they sensed what was happening, I don't know. So what did happen to mark zuckerberg he is? There are those at meta who say, uh, it was his. Any liberalism?

01:31:19 - Amanda Silberling (Guest)
you saw, mark was very a thin veneer on the surface I think he's a weather vane he's a weather vane yeah yeah, it seems like a lot of people have been saying that he sort of is a moth flying to the light and the light is whatever.

01:31:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'd say the light is how can I get the richest possible? That he has a very clear north star and the north star is money growth yeah well, yeah, growth's another way of saying it.

01:31:47 - Benito (Announcement)
Yeah, um which maybe it's not just growth's a better way of saying it's not just money, it's also power, it's also cultural access significance.

01:31:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Access to markets as growth is is a better way to say it. But but it all comes down to his own personal uh value, right I?

01:32:06 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
think this whole. There's a lot of cynics out there. Listen, I know the guy, not personally, but you know everybody around him all this like he's become a brawler testosterone machismo so what financials time said, how mark zuckerberg unleashed his inner brawler yeah, no, they fell for. They fell for the campaign. The whole PR campaign is. He has more testosterone in his system. He's doing jujitsu. That's why he loves UFC. He put the UFC guy on the board. Trust me, if Kamala had won, he would have been singing kumbaya and drinking soy milk lattes.

01:32:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's exactly my point. He's a weathervane. Yeah, but power draws all of these people because ultimately their goal is to share in the money.

01:32:48 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
There are some people who are you know, knowing them, who are very principled and they make the decisions based on principle.

01:32:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Are they less successful? You think because of it.

01:32:59 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Yeah, you could be. Both models actually work, you could be extremely principled.

01:33:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's what you define as success, I guess Right. Models actually work. You could be extremely pretty. That's what you define as success, I guess right, you would say you're successful in, in, in a way, by following your, your beliefs, your, your principles, your.

01:33:14 - Padre (Guest)
I, I would, I would push back against principled or non-principled, because you can be a principled person, just not have my principles. If Mark believes, truly believes, that growing Facebook is the best way that he can contribute to society, it protects his employees I think he does, by the way Then those are principles. Those are not my principles. Very, very against my principles. But I would hesitate calling him a weathervane, because we don't know what his metrics are, we don't know what success looks like for him. Now, if he were to say oh, it's just money, I don't say that's unprincipled, I just say that's a horrible principle.

01:33:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right.

01:33:57 - Amanda Silberling (Guest)
I just think it's nice that he has a hobby. Everyone needs a smoke in those meats.

01:34:04 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
It's just, you know, like the three old men are total cynics on this show.

01:34:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's just like Because we've been around the block, that's why? Yeah, we've seen this movie before.

01:34:13 - Amanda Silberling (Guest)
You can do the like sleeping in your office, but I'm like, hey, you know, at least he's UFC fighting or whatever, at least he has a hobby.

01:34:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's a good point. At least he has a hobby. It's a nice way to look at it.

01:34:32 - Padre (Guest)
You're very, very nice person, amanda, very kind, very generous uh, trump has extended the tick tock ban for another 90 days. That's the third time. I'm expecting that it will be extended at the end of his term. Uh, it will just keep doing it.

01:34:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's never gonna. Yes, but but why is? Why is it that they're having a hard time finding finding a buyer? Is it what we're talking about? Is it untenable that the chinese communist party is not going to allow them to sell the algorithm?

01:34:58 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
this tells you everything you need to know. If the if this wasn't a strategic asset for the chinese, then it would have been sold a long time ago they would have taken it so yeah, this is their secret weapon. This is a way to influence culture in the united states it's one of them.

01:35:11
I don't think it's their only one not the only, but I do think it's, I think it's top five for them, like this is in terms of soft power influence data. I mean, if we could have like I don't know how many americans are on it, maybe 100 million americans If we could have one out of every three Chinese people in a database and their movements and their IDs we'd be pretty down with that.

01:35:32
In fact, we might have certain things like that just not done with TikTok. So there's plenty of. We've had three incredible IPOs recently. Coreweave went out and it tripled. We had Circle with USDC, the stablecoin company. We've had these great IPOs of late in the market. Tiktok would be one of the great IPOs in history because it's got such a popular base of people addicted to it.

01:35:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, the fact that it's not happened is a sign that it can never happen. Is that what you're saying? We have to actually shut it down to. Can never happen. Is that what you're saying?

01:36:06 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
We have to actually shut it down to make it happen. We have to call their bluff, and that's a tough thing to do as a politician. Since it's so popular, he's got 15 million followers on TikTok.

01:36:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He's not shutting it down.

01:36:19 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Well, and in Korea they tried to shut down crypto a couple of times, if you remember, over the years, and the public wanted it so bad that they were like you can't shut this down and no politician will get in office, so he's got to call their bluff, he's not going to call their bluff.

01:36:33
He's using it as part of the trade. So now this has been rolled into the tariff discussion and that's now become a cudgel or a lever for him with that discussion. So I think those things will be resolved. At the same aren't the discussions with china?

01:36:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
over, didn't we finally settle on 45, and that's that? I think there's going to be a grand um. Last time you were on, yeah, you said, and you were right in the short term. Anyway, don't worry this was just back down, it'll go back down.

01:37:03
This was just before liberation day, because trump always chickens out. And actually you said and I think you were right he cares a lot more about public opinion, sure, and if the market's telling him no, no, no, no, these tariffs aren't any good, he's going to back down, but they're still pretty high I.

01:37:21 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
I think they'll just wind up being reciprocal. I I now come up with a new term. I try to help my friends with tDS because I'm a moderate.

01:37:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't get affected by this as much as I'm. A Trump derangement syndrome yes.

01:37:31 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
And then I have, on the other side of my friend group, trump dedication syndrome, where they just repeat everything he says as if it's the gospel no offense, father, forgive me, it's not the literal gospel and so I always tell folks the 72-hour rule wait 72 hours. Whatever he says, is he still even talking about it? Half the time? He's not even talking about it.

01:37:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, I thought that with bombing Iran, but apparently that wasn't-.

01:37:56 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
And this is my new one shock and bore. He does something shocking and then it winds up being very boring. Terrorists with shock and bore. I predict this Iran thing will be like this crazy shock and then it's going to be we're out of this, we're not going to do anymore.

01:38:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I hope to God you're right, because it could go very, very wrong and in the meantime, iran has shut down the Strait.

01:38:18 - Padre (Guest)
So they're not done, they say they want to.

01:38:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They haven't done it yet. They say they want to, uh, but there is a lot of argument that they can't or won't. Can't because they don't have the means. Won't because it would cost them dearly as well. Uh, but it would.

01:38:33
This is where something like 20 or 30 percent of the world's oil goes through the straits of hormuz shutting it down would have a massive impact on a global economy, but I I don't think they even have the means to do it. To be honest with you, I think trump probably. I think we're veering away from our mandate to talk about tech, but as long as we're here, trump probably sensed that they just they couldn't fight back at this point they don't need I hope he's right, they just need the threat right any sort of uncertainty in that market it's got to be credible massive fluctuations yeah, it's got to be a credible threat, and I don't know if it's credible at this point.

01:39:09
I don't know. We're all just my breath's been held. I don't know what's going on here.

01:39:14 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
We don't have complete information, so people are trying to get me to pick a side and I just said listen, hey, we're five war, you know, and that was his big promise no more wars.

01:39:24
We won't go to war and then people are like oh well, you know, this is a just war. This isn't a just war and I'm like I didn't give an opinion, I'm just making a statement. We're five months in, we're out of, we're in a war, and they're like it's not a war, I'm like we just bombed them, that's a war you know about.

01:39:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know about chekhov's gun right, the chekhov's gun theory oh no he has a narrative principle he was a playwright, Russian playwright that if a gun is shown hanging on the wall in the first act, it has to be fired by the end of the play, by the third, by the third act. Yeah, that makes sense. As soon as I saw this military parade to me this was Chekhov's gun. There was no way that Donald Trump wasn't going to get so overwrought and excited by the idea of having the strongest, most powerful military in the world that he would not use it.

01:40:11 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Yeah, and that's what scares me way more exciting than that parade just just gonna the parade was not exciting the two things I noticed about this, you know, is one I feel like they were goading him on, like whatever the military industrial complex was really high pressure to do. Well, and BB, netanyahu and BB, and if you look at the two things that I was like, wait a second, where have I seen this movie before? They're like, oh, they tried to assassinate Trump twice. And then, you know, you're like, wait a second, wasn't that what they did with Bush? Didn't they tell him that they wanted saddam hussein, wanted to assassinate him, you know, as this, uh, you think that's what's going on. Well, no, it just it. Just, it's a, you know, history rhymes kind of situation. And then the other thing that rhymed for me, where they were like, well, they've got weapons of mass destruction and it's imminent yeah, that sounded just kind of familiar oh where have I heard these?

01:41:00
two yellow cake yeah yeah, it's like both things again and and it just feels like oh no, number three, what's number three?

01:41:08 - Padre (Guest)
Oh, the Iranian people would welcome the liberators from this regime change. Oh right, we're going to regime change. So that's number three. Yeah.

01:41:14 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
So it's like I keep hearing these three trends. Thank you, father. That was a great punch up. And you're like, does it matter who's in office? Because we still go $2 trillion in debt and we still go into the Middle East and go on some crazy war that doesn't seem like it's going to be solvable. Can we just stop doing both of these things? And see how it works for 10 years maybe.

01:41:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, through this show, Jason, you've espoused a fairly progressive agenda of more education. Yeah, you know, I mean you sound like a progressive. You got to be careful, Jason.

01:41:49 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
You could be blue-pilled, I vote. If you look at my track record, two out of three times I voted blue. One out of three times I voted red. I'm a first principle guy and just try to solve these problems. And also the game changes on the field, doesn't it? We might not have been able to afford universal healthcare for some period of time in a country country, and now it's pretty clear we can and must and should and and it would be better, it's better, so sometimes it's better for business, why is business shouldering the cost right?

01:42:17
and then people won't leave one job.

01:42:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, amanda might have her that's the only great benefit to business.

01:42:21 - Benito (Announcement)
That's right and then leaving our health insurance is being independent, you can't leave.

01:42:26 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Oh, is it changing, for the better or worse?

01:42:32 - Amanda Silberling (Guest)
I am paying more, I will say yeah.

01:42:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, we all are. I mean, healthcare is soaring.

01:42:38 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
But the fact that it's tied to your requirement.

01:42:40 - Padre (Guest)
I was a super conservative for most of my life, really, and one of the principles of that super conservatism was oh, any universal healthcare is bad, it's evil, it's terrible. And then I live in a place with universal healthcare. It ain't so bad. Oh my God, it is so much better than mobile.

01:42:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's no death panel.

01:42:55 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Why is it better Explain to people who are religious about?

01:42:58 - Padre (Guest)
this issue. Let me give you two examples. One there's a certain medication that I have to use. It's just a foam for my skin because my skin gets attacked by my immune system, and so on and so forth. Here, it costs me five euro a bottle. If I buy it in the United States, it costs 1500. It's exact same medication.

01:43:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's not like, by the way, Italy is so rich that they're subsidizing this.

01:43:21 - Padre (Guest)
It's true, but that subsidy comes from our taxes. That's what we pay into the system. It's just baked in. Before I left the United States, I had to have a surgical procedure. I had no idea how much it would cost. I had no idea who the stakeholders were. All I knew is that when I received the bill, it was $72,000. Now the various insurance companies, the hospital and the doctor they argued all with themselves.

01:43:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They did their dance and they finally got down to 2900, which is still a lot. I had the exact same procedure, uh, done again in italy. It cost me 28 euro.

01:43:58 - Padre (Guest)
Yeah, and I know but did you have to wait? Were there long weights or I had to wait? Seven months in the united states, that was fast.

01:44:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I waited three days in italy what's happened to our health care system in the us is somewhat shocking. Uh, I don't know what the forces are. The economic forces?

01:44:14 - Amanda Silberling (Guest)
are. Yeah, I mean, when you talk about it with people that don't live in the us, they're like what do you mean that?

01:44:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
we pay more than any other country for care. That is 27th. It's because the of the middle.

01:44:26 - Benito (Announcement)
There's the middlemen that take all the money, the insurance companies they take all the money, yeah, which is pretty simple.

01:44:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a pretty simple treatment.

01:44:34 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Well, there is a I was bringing up self-reliance, radical self-reliance, earlier, I think in healthcare it's starting and I, because I get a front row with being involved in startups to seeing this. Education, jobs and healthcare these three things are controlled by the state, in the United States at least, or deeply impacted by them, and they have the hyper, hyper hyperinflation. When there's hyperinflation for college degrees, when there's hyperinflation for healthcare and real estate and education, all these things you then have, people start to roll their own. They take control of their destiny.

01:45:09
I recently did that with my health care. I used to have concierge doctors, fancy doctors. We would pay I don't know, $25,000 or $50,000 to a year to have the ability to have a doctor come by the house anytime we wanted. And then I started self-directing and I used something called superpowercom that takes your blood every year, puts it into an interface. There's another one called function health and then people are starting to take control of their healthcare, find the pricing, do it themselves. Another one is we have a startup that's doing different surgeries and cosmetic surgeries. They're a marketplace for this. Different places are becoming better at providing these and the cash cost of getting veneers and doing dental surgery in Mexico is cheaper In South Korea, cheaper for rhinoplasty or breast augmentation, for hair transplants in Croatia, and so yeah, this is superpowercom.

01:46:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's incredible and so Is this one of your investments or just something you use? I'm not an investor.

01:46:09 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
I just use it and since I fell in love with it, I bought it for some of my employees 500 bucks a year.

01:46:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm thinking I should probably do this.

01:46:17 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
You just get a blood work done every year. They put it into a system and then you have a concierge you can talk to like a coach.

01:46:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is how medical has changed, which is we used to think doctors were gods and we put all our trust into the doctor and, and, and we've started to realize they're not, and they're, they're a little bit on your own.

01:46:36 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Yeah they're, they're googling stuff just like us, right? Yeah? Yeah, now, if you have an llm, I think we're. We're probably at the point right now. We're putting your symptoms and your blood work into an LLM.

01:46:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I did that with perplexity before I went to my doctor. I did the new deep research thing, Got a great thing, brought it into him, said hey, doc, this is what.

01:46:55 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
I want, and how much better was the discussion. It was great. I think right now the average doctor is probably below the service level because they're under so much pressure to get you out of there kaiser has working with my dog, has 5 000 patients.

01:47:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Now what, oh my god, he's? That's ridiculous, because kaiser and a lot of it is not kaiser's desire, but that but doctors are leaving and this goes to our conversation.

01:47:22 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
We've been having father. Um, you know when, do you for father or padre? What is the? Uh, sorry, I've used both. Okay, I like father because that's how I grew up. Father, when we you know, we were talking before about self-reliance and the cost of things going down. Look at this, like you know, it's so expensive for health care and then you can use these services. Now, five hundred dollars a year. They do your blood work, they normalize it, they show the changes over time, llms being able to coach you. I think these combination of things will be cheaper, amanda, than the healthcare you're paying for out of pocket. And at a certain point, people are going to start getting catastrophic healthcare which is over $10,000 or something, and then you can utilize it and then just using, using, quantify itself and rolling their own, because the rolling of your own will be better experience. It's just my gut is telling me that as an investor in technology companies.

01:48:13 - Padre (Guest)
But we're getting close rolling your own works if you've got some savvy right. Most of the population doesn't, though. In the united states, I, I know, and I know this figure is disputed. I think the figure that I trusted the most is about 42% to 47% of US healthcare costs go into overhead. It's a ridiculous number. Just because, with all of the different levels of insurance and going back and forth, so much money gets spent on that, relatively little gets actually to the doctors or the hospitals. You look at a system like Italy and even though, yes, I'm not saying it's perfect, it does have issues that overhead percentage is something like five, maybe six. So when you're talking about radical self-reliance, I would also think that includes examining the systems that are providing you these services and saying where is their waste? I mean, you talk about government efficiency. Don't should have been looking at the health care industry, and all the different levels that are are only there to sap their percentage yeah, opting out is the way to.

01:49:19 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
You know, what I find is, as people opt out of certain things, uh, then those folks are forced to innovate, and we see that in technology all the time. Where people are like this solution is not working for me, I'm out, I don't want to buy client service software, I'm going to use some open source software. And then it makes the price come down or people get sharper, that competition. It's hard for it to happen, but it typically happens slowly than all at once.

01:49:44 - Padre (Guest)
And I feel like I don't disagree with you. Yeah, I don't disagree with you. Yeah, I don't disagree with you, but in my profession I'm also looking out for the people who can't do that.

01:49:51 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
This is what I love about talking to you, Father.

01:49:52 - Padre (Guest)
Somebody has to.

01:49:53 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
I love being on the show with you because you start with the meek and the poor.

01:49:57
Yeah, it is such an important thing to do, I think radical self-reliance and deep empathy. I always like when I'm on the show with you, leo, to think about what we talked about after the show, and I take a bunch of notes because I get great ideas, and I think the theme for me is adding deep empathy, radical empathy, to radical self-reliance, because not everybody can be motivated, not everybody knows about superpower, not everybody has the desire to start their own career, right. And then somebody like Amanda might be actually juggling that Like, oh my God, do I have the radical self-reliance or am I too reliant on my employer, right? And I think this is really the future of Americans. We have to think about these things very deeply. It's one of the things I don't like about this administration is the cruelty that they exhibit and I don't want to go off topic here, leo, but the cruelty and the sadistic nature of some of the things they do is a real turnoff for me and I think we should be thinking with much more empathy.

01:50:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah.

01:51:00 - Benito (Announcement)
See he's gone to church again.

01:51:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's what's happened. He's gone back to church.

01:51:04 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Man, you don't know how many Hail Marys I'm going to need to do. It's been a long time Father since my last confession.

01:51:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Sorry, amanda, I didn't mean to interrupt. Go ahead.

01:51:12 - Amanda Silberling (Guest)
No, I mean, I think that when we talk about these things, we're fundamentally coming at it from places of privilege where, like, even if I talk about like, I can entertain the thought of what would my career look like if I quit my job, because I have the savings from working this job.

01:51:31
I don't have any children I don't have like relatives I'm in charge of caring for, but I feel like things like health care. I don't think we should have to be radically self-reliant to get good healthcare. I think I wish this was something that is just baked in, where the majority of people are trying to like get food on the table for their kids and then go to work and like take care of their families and don't have the time to like reinvent the healthcare system for themselves. And maybe that'll change in the future, but I think for right now, with all of these technological changes, we're sort of stuck in this moment where we're in the middle and what's happening right now is that people aren't going to the doctor because they don't want to spend the money, because it's so expensive, and then people get sicker and they can't work and it just keeps compounding we're one of the few countries where we have medical bankruptcies, and widespread.

01:52:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean that doesn't happen here.

01:52:41 - Padre (Guest)
I mean I like that. That does not happen in italy, and I did. I didn't realize that's actually a thing that could happen, but no, it totally works.

01:52:49 - Amanda Silberling (Guest)
Yeah, I have money set aside knowing that I have a weird tooth thing and later in my life I know I'm going to need an implant and I know that's going to be thousands and thousands of dollars and that is built into my mind of this is money I don't actually have. That I know I'm going to have to spend later on and like it, it's just it's not great to, I think this is one of the great shames of this country is that 60 of bankruptcies or medical bankruptcies is ridiculous, shameful.

01:53:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It just just shouldn't be happening in the richest country in the world. It just shouldn't.

01:53:25 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
You know, and we also can't over index with our, you know, largely white privilege, or you know, california privilege, new York, coastal society, elitist privilege, that people are helpless because I, you know, living in Texas. Now I'm watching. I see people like one of the great trends is chicken coops I know this sounds silly. As an example, yeah, no, no, no, yeah, chicken coops are booming across the country and it is a tiny, you know. But yet another little hash mark in my self-reliance trend box there's a company called Coop. They make a smart chicken coop. I have it and I watch these startups and the smart chicken coop is, you know, unnecessarily sophisticated. It opens and closes with sunrise. It's got cameras.

01:54:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it's great if you got you know, what you really need with a smart chicken coop is one that moves around so that the chicken poop doesn't focus. They have in, yes, they literally have, can we just?

01:54:21 - Padre (Guest)
make smarter chickens because they are. Yeah, so I have this coop.

01:54:25 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
It's hilarious.

01:54:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So like. But we have six chickens now and we'll get more, but people all over this is not a good solution to the food shortage crisis in this country.

01:54:38 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Actually, it is.

01:54:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I take the other side Victory gardens. We all need victory gardens.

01:54:42 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
There are people who are now. You think about communities, you think about sources of food. There are people doing this in major ways and at churches, here, they will put out baskets of eggs and just say take them. Because, people have so many chickens, so many eggs and chickens. They just breed and you become again back to radical self-reliance. People can learn anything on the internet. You can learn how to take care of chickens, just like your son with his sandwich shop, learned how to make the best beef au jus.

01:55:11 - Benito (Announcement)
Yeah, wait, wait. That is kind of the opposite of radical self-reliance, because you're giving away your eggs so you're taking eggs from somebody else that's the opposite. That's called community, Jason. That's called community.

01:55:20 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
That's my point is that people have become self-reliant, and then they have abundance and they give it to everybody else, so we, you know. I think one of the problems is elite, rich people think that poor people have no self-reliance and no ability to move up. They do, they're very creative, they're, they're, they have great.

01:55:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And they work really hard.

01:55:39 - Amanda Silberling (Guest)
And they work really hard. Immigrants are doing this.

01:55:42 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
So, uh, I, I, I, I want to be careful we don't actually underestimate people who are on the bottom rung jobs too, that they're just paralyzed and they can't possibly ever ascend, when all of us did.

01:55:56
Everybody here ascended, over generations, I'm sure, with all kinds of things that were wind at our backs, and sometimes our forefathers and mothers had maybe some wind in their faces too. I know mine did. But you know people who are on the up and coming and who have those, you know, low rungs on the ladder. They wind up learning skills. Those skills are available. You can learn them on YouTube. So don't underestimate the meek or the poor is the other thing I would say.

01:56:25 - Padre (Guest)
The only people in the United States who are actually self-reliant are the people who know how to grow their own food. We have to be really careful with this term self-reliant.

01:56:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And have the land to do it.

01:56:34 - Benito (Announcement)
Yeah that's exactly what I'm talking about. When you say self-reliance, it's like that means something totally different to me.

01:56:40 - Padre (Guest)
Just because you're rich, you're not self-reliant. If the systems that you rely on to spend your wealth on, to keep you alive and in the lifestyle of comfort that you desire, fall apart, you are not self-reliant. If you do not know how to grow your own food and it's not easy, it's not easy To grow enough food to actually keep you and your family alive then you're not self-reliant.

01:57:02 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
I'm getting close. No one's self-reliant.

01:57:06 - Amanda Silberling (Guest)
We live not self-reliant.

01:57:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm getting close self-reliant we live in a society. I got the chicken, so I got no one in the society self-reliant. I got the water where the water comes from. I have two wells. Oh okay, wells, I know how to do. Somebody did you dig them?

01:57:15 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
uh, no, somebody can't be dug okay. Well, we live in a society when I say self-reliant too, I mean the ability that when bad things happen, you can recover from them and you have this ability to say I'm not going to just lay down and take this leg off, you know? Good thing to espouse.

01:57:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I agree 100. We're going to take a break because I have to. I don't. I can't dig a well, I don't have chickens, but you can't read a mean ad I can read a good ad.

01:57:41
This is my self-reliance baby. Absolutely, uh, we will continue. You're watching this week in tech with j Jason Calacanis, Father Robert Ballasare, Amanda Silberling from TechCrunch. Great to have all three of you. Great to have you too. Our Club Twit members especially Thank you for the support. It's been a big, big year for Club Twit. 25% now of our operating costs come from the club. Thank you. If it weren't for you, we'd have to cut back on shows, We'd have to cut back on staff and instead we're expanding in the club. We're doing more in the club than ever before. It really is nice to have that support. If you're not a member of Club Twit, consider it. We'd love to have you. Just to find out more at twittv slash club twit. It's the best club ever I like it club ever.

01:58:25
I went in there and uh, that discord is a great hang.

01:58:29 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
I love it I was on the message board replying to some of the things because when I was on last time people were oh yeah, you were in the twit.

01:58:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You were in our uh uh forums.

01:58:37 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Yeah, I was in the forums and people were like oh my god, there's a one of the panelists is in the forums yeah, and I'm like yeah, you guys can't just talk ish about me and not get a reply no, you responded Because somebody was upset about something I think it was the Jaro stuff or whatever, and I mixed it up with them. It's like top 1% of Twit listeners are in there discussing the topics from the show. It's a great place to hang, but I gotta the Discord is great.

01:58:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, I'll send you an invite.

01:59:00 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Oh no, I am on the.

01:59:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Discord.

01:59:01 - Benito (Announcement)
Yeah, yeah, I thought you were.

01:59:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We also do special events for the club. For instance, my old friend, norman Maslow, has a YouTube channel called Mazzy's Music all about vinyl vinyl records. So I thought we'd have some fun and get Mazzy on to talk about vinyl, and then in the hour before that we're going to talk about the rise of the mp3 and digital music. So with a guy who just wrote a book about it, we we're going to have a lot of fun. This is friday, june 27th. This friday one, it's going to start at noon pacific. We'll get the other one in there, noon pacific. Uh, we've got our ai users group, which has become really, really fun. Next one is july 11th. We do our photo show with chris marquardt every month. Quirky photos, start taking them. Micah's Crafting Corner was great this week. I hope you participated. If you didn't, another one's coming up.

01:59:50
Wow, these are great community events yeah this is stuff we can do thanks to the club members, who are really fantastic.

01:59:56 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Which, by the way, I mean I signed up for the year like seven ten bucks a month. Like seven ten bucks a month, like what a deal if you get one, like interesting conversation or tip or a thing that makes your life better.

02:00:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It pays for itself. Yeah, it's nice to have a social network where they're good people too. I go to the movies.

02:00:11 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
It costs two hundred dollars. Yeah, this is a lot of a movie.

02:00:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a lot of movie like that is true. Uh, anyway, thank you twittv slash club to it. We appreciate it. Our show today, brought to you by Storyblock. This is a sponsor that's doing something very interesting and something I really deeply appreciate and support the idea of a headless CMS, so the front end can be anything you want. The back end is reliable, secure and offers an incredible user interface.

02:00:48
You know, if you've ever worked at somewhere like I don't know TechCrunch, you probably experienced some of these legacy CMSs. A lot of marketing companies have to deal with them. They promise enterprise-grade features, but you get this slow, clunky system and if you want to make a change, you got to put in a ticket. You got to get a developer supporting you and when you're trying to move fast, that is a nightmare. Well, storyblock is the opposite. Unlike those monolithic content management systems, storyblock is headless. It completely decouples your backend from your frontend. So, developers, you get to work in any framework you like React, astro, vue, whatever. Marketers, you get an intuitive visual editor to create and update content without filling out dev tickets. You get autonomy. You get the power to make what you need and, by the way, storyblock scales. Whether you're a freelancer or part of a global enterprise. They have a global CDN, aws data centers in the US, in Europe, in Asia. It's built for performance at scale all over the globe. And man is it? Enterprise ready Built-in comes with role-based access control, enterprise SLAs, top tier security the stuff Fortune 500s demand.

02:01:57
One big global e-commerce giant switched to Storyblock and cut their content update cycles from weeks to hours. You can read about it on the storyblock site. Another major brand empowered marketing to launch campaigns independently, bring up the devs for bigger projects. This is this is it's actually what we did with our website an api first approach, which means your content loads fast anywhere in the world. It means better ux, it means higher engagement, improved seo and they have the best real-time visual editors. So, for instance, if you're a marketer, you're going to see exactly what your content is going to look like before you publish it. And and if you want to move something, four pixels to the right, no more endless back and forth thing over minor tweaks. The devs they get fewer interruptions. Marketers, you get more autonomy. It's a win-win. If you're an agency oh, you got to look at Storyblock. They have multi-client workspaces, flexible permissions, seamless collaboration tools. Storyblock makes it easy to manage multiple projects without disrupting development workflows. So it doesn't matter whether you're a startup, an enterprise, an agency juggling multiple clients, storyblock gives you the power and flexibility you need.

02:03:08
Try it today at storyblockcom slash twittv-25 and use code twit25. Twit listeners get 20% off for three months on growth and growth plus plans. That's storyblockcom slash twittv-25. We'll go to twitt25 for 20% off the first three months on growth and growth plus plans. S-t-o-r-y-b-l-o-kcom slash twittv-25. We'll go twitt25, twitt25. You got to try. Try this at least. Go to the website, take a look. Storyblockcom slash twit tv dash 25. We thank him so much for supporting this week in tech.

02:03:52
Uh, this kind of a sad story. But it underscores where we have perhaps not done the right thing thing in Congress. The suspected Minnesota killer, uh lawn, you know, at the of the of the two members of the house, one was shot, one was murdered. Their spouses were also shot. Uh, he had a notebook, which authorities confiscated, filled with addresses for people search sites, aka data brokers. That's how he found people, that's how he was able to put together this list of people that he was stalking and eventually murdering.

02:04:33
And it's because in the united states we still have no comprehensive privacy protection. These data brokers are out there. We've always said, you know, it's a problem for privacy, it's a problem for security, for harassment, but now it's also a problem for murder. Um, it was 1994 that Congress created the driver's protection Privacy Act. This was after a stalker hired a private investigator who'd get the address of a actress who was killed. You may remember, um, that's the last they did. That was the last. That was the last time. Uh, now, data brokers can sell any bit of information about you, including your social security number, absolute, with absolute impunity. He had all these sites.

02:05:20 - Amanda Silberling (Guest)
I mean, there was a dozen different uh sites yeah, there's a service called delete me that a lot of journalists use, which is basically just like an automated service that goes through all of the data we use it and they're a sponsor, amanda.

02:05:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yep see, totally support them totally support them, but it's a shame we have to do that.

02:05:45 - Amanda Silberling (Guest)
No, yeah, I mean it's terrible, and I mean even just sticking with the radical self-reliance theme. I mean, like a big benefit that I've had not being independent was that when I was a bit greener than I am now, I had a situation where I had, like an alt-right activist found, found my address and was like mailing stuff to my house and thankfully, uh, when we were owned by yahoo at the time and they have a security team of people that are specifically trained for doing security for journalists, and like when you are in those moments, you kind of need help from people that have gone through that before to like tell you what to do to keep yourself safe, but like it like this is like an occupational hazard for journalists that you have to understand anybody in the public eye, and but even if you're not in the public eye, you know um it's.

02:06:48
It's not so hard to track you down, and it's um people shouldn't be able to find my address because they know my first and last name.

02:06:57 - Padre (Guest)
But you can yeah, I've been swatted. I've had the front of our house set on fire, what I've had my car defaced. Yeah, I mean, this was when I was at Twit. It was just. It's like that's par for the course, that's table stakes. You got to admit that that's going to happen at some point.

02:07:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And, unlike Yahoo, we're such a small operation. We don't have a security team that can swoop in and protect you protect you.

02:07:22 - Amanda Silberling (Guest)
I'm sorry, robin, that's terrible. It's like there. There's only so much they can do like it's not, like they're not gonna like station, like a yahoo guy outside of my apartment or whatever.

02:07:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But not exactly the secret services yeah, the secret yahoo service.

02:07:31 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
But yeah, like I gotta do that delete me. I know you've had them as an advertiser before. Does that actually work, like in getting yourself out of some of these things?

02:07:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it does I mean honestly, it does work, uh, you have to keep doing it because these guys there's new data brokers all the time, even though these guys are supposed to delete your stuff and you can't do it manually, but there's, there's hundreds of them, so it's not practical yeah, they don't really adhere to the rules, they'll rebuild your dossier. It's a. It's like a whack-a-mole. It's terrible.

02:08:00 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
I get a overzealous person every couple of years. Yeah, they're usually like mentally ill super fan.

02:08:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Or they're suffering from mental illness. Yeah, that's exactly what it is.

02:08:11 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
You know they usually just really care. You know they hear your opinion. They're a fan. You know they just don't know how to express it. Or you know something's going on and you know going on, and we really have a mental health crisis in this country, I think, and that's something we need to work on that's related to healthcare.

02:08:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a good interpretation, though, jason.

02:08:33 - Padre (Guest)
The sad part is the people who have wished me the most harm and the people who have caused me the most grief started out as super fans, right.

02:08:40 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Yes, yes, and you disappointed them at some point in their mind and so when I almost when I get the the most vitriol. You know. You know I'll be on this podcast. I'll be like oh my god, it's all for lions. You're ridiculous, like you don't know. Everything's stacked against whatever, and I'm like I really appreciate the feedback. Robert and I put their name in it and they write back. I could have said that kinder, I'm sorry I was having a bad day.

02:09:05
And when I say their name back to them and I just treat them with a little bit of grace, a little bit of humanity, it is absolutely dissipates that energy. And it's a very easy Jedi technique, which is assume some good faith here or assume the person's having a tough day. You know like everybody gets in a fight with their spouse or stubs their toe or anything in between. So if you assume what's the worst possible day this person had in their life and am I interacting with them, Well, if you have some notoriety, that's going to happen frequently and you just have to understand that's part of this micro fame or, you know, celebrity or notoriety that you're going to have. Now there are sick people and there are evil people too. Evil exists in the world as a concept as well. Uh, at least as catholics we believe that.

02:09:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
so also from 404 media which, by the way, knocking it out of the park on these.

02:10:03 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
They do a good job. What's their amazing? I mean, I know what a 404 is like, so the story was these guys were at motherboard.

02:10:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's a small group. Uh, they were at motherboard and, uh, like, um, a lot of other people vice shut down motherboard, right, and so they these are the guys, jason Keebler and so they went off and did their own thing Samantha Cole, jason Keebler, joseph Cox, emanuel Myberg and they said, well, radical self-reliance. There you go, we're going to create our own site. But what's good is they're very good investigative journalists. Jason was the editor-in-chief at Motherboard six years, did so much good work there, um, and so they've basically put together a group of people who are really effective. I don't know if it's a good business. I hope it is, because we cover their almost every episode. We have a this is the second story in a row from them 40 000 cameras, from bird feeders to baby monitors, are wide open on the internet. Uh, we talked about it on security.

02:11:13 - Padre (Guest)
Security now expect this by default now, yeah, I just I. I assume any camera that streams to the internet is compromised yeah, right I do yeah um cyber security risk intelligence company.

02:11:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Bit site was able to access and download content from thousands of these systems, including domestic and commercial webcams, baby monitors, office security, pet cameras, bird feeder. You know, the big thing now is bird feeder cameras.

02:11:40 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
I've got got one yes.

02:11:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, they're cool.

02:11:44 - Padre (Guest)
I got it from my mom. She loves watching the birds.

02:11:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, and so do the hackers across the world. The most concerning examples Bitsight says we found were cameras in hospitals or clinics monitoring patients.

02:11:57 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Yeah, good.

02:11:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It doesn't take elite hacking to access these cameras. In most case, regular, regular web browser and a curious mind are all it takes.

02:12:06 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
So these 40 000 cameras probably just the tip of the iceberg this is what happens when you also buy um some of these um commodity products on amazon yeah because they're not, they're just like together.

02:12:22
There's nobody in the United States who's going to get sued when these things happen, and that's as bad as this ambulance chasing suing thing we have in the United States is, it does put people at the top of their game on a security basis and responsibility basis, because you could have the risk of ruin, your company, could go out of business, and this is where using a Google webcam or whatever professional webcam is out there I'm not sure who makes the best ones these days that's good. The other thing about privacy I've been thinking about is I went to dinner with somebody and they had an AI pendant on.

02:12:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh yeah, I ordered that one.

02:13:00 - Benito (Announcement)
Limitless, yeah, I have this one.

02:13:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This's the uh, the b.

02:13:05 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
I wear this all the time, so yeah, so somebody had one of these at dinner and I look at it and it's glowing yeah, and I said, well, what's that?

02:13:12
and they said, oh, it's my ai thing. And I'm like is it recording us right now? It's like everything, yeah. And I'm like he's like is that a problem? I'm like, no, only if you want to maintain your friendship with me yeah, and he was if you want to get invited back to dinner. And he's like, oh, you know, you're the only person who ever really had a problem with that. I'm like do you ask everybody before you record?

02:13:29 - Amanda Silberling (Guest)
them, because you know, like I don't know.

02:13:31 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
People don't know and I really think we have to think through these glasses and those pendants and what is social norms on? I assume I'm being recorded all the time as a notable person in the world. I'm assuming people are recording me all the time, but I was particularly disturbed by this, because it was a friend of mine who really didn't think that having an AI summary of our dinner, more and more people are going to do that.

02:13:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's going to be universal. I don't want to live in this world. This thing records, makes a transcript, then sends an ai analysis along. So it's just the notes, uh, the action items, things we talked about what is that? But I'll make sure this is b dot computer. I've been wearing this since january. They showed this to cs.

02:14:16 - Padre (Guest)
I do have a button I could press that will turn it off, but it's on by default so if you get to start using those during confessions, yeah oh no, you should not, no, no, no. An ai summary would be perfect, right it?

02:14:28 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
keeps. I'm going to give you my notes. I'm going to give you an ai summary of my 10 our fathers and my 15th let me just give you the bullet points.

02:14:35 - Padre (Guest)
Okay, just the bullet points hot place very soon, you know? It's just that, yes, hot place very soon.

02:14:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, it's just that yes, so no, we, I mean I guess we kind of need, you're right, absolutely right. Uh, and in fact in many cases, certainly in california, that's a two-party state the law requires that you get permission before you record. But I think we are increasingly living in a world where we are being surveilled by cameras everywhere.

02:15:06 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Just assume you're being surveilled.

02:15:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The minute something happens, everybody whips out their phones and starts shooting. It right.

02:15:13 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
That's a very weird dystopian thing, isn't that strange? I saw a video online. You know it's. One of the things I don't like about social media is like these crazy moments that I don't want to see and have in my brain.

02:15:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's all it is.

02:15:26 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Yeah, Somebody tried to sneak into a Disneyland kind of thing in China and they hopped over the fence in the lion enclosure.

02:15:37 - Amanda Silberling (Guest)
Not a good idea.

02:15:38 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Yes, yes and literally you see the video and the person pans across and there's a hundred people holding up their phones, not saving the guy no taking pictures of it eaten by three lions and all people can think of is well, I gotta document this or live stream it and I'm just saying, oh my god, this is so dystopian like put your phones down and help we.

02:15:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We live in the views. They're about to go viral. The likes. Everybody's doing it for the likes and it's kind of creepy as hell yeah.

02:16:08 - Amanda Silberling (Guest)
Well, I guess a small bit of good news is that that was going on where they had given footage to uh police because they were trying to investigate something and that is kind of a surveillance issue. But I looked it up and apparently, as of last year, ring will no longer share uh not automatically.

02:16:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
If you have a a warrant, they yeah, I get it I mean, you know, my neighbor came down the street said my house got tp'd last night. Do you have any video? And I said, well, yeah, I have cameras everywhere, let me just. I sent him the video from that time period, yeah, and did catch the guy. I don't think it was because of my video, but he's gone down the street. Every single person on the street either had a ring or some other surveillance camera.

02:17:00 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
So the high school graduated and people got TP'd. It's a tradition, it's normal.

02:17:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But now you can't get away with it.

02:17:06 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
You can't even TP.

02:17:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You can't even TP a person's house.

02:17:09 - Benito (Announcement)
What's going on in this?

02:17:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
world. There's recordings.

02:17:11 - Benito (Announcement)
Well, come on TP and eggs these days are way too expensive to spend on throwing at houses. Yeah who?

02:17:16 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
can afford it. Yeah, no, and you have your own chicken coop. There's a really interesting that's the reason to have your own chicken coop Absolutely, you can egg your neighbors. Oh my God, there's a very cool company called Flock Safety. I think Flock Safety. I looked at it as a potential investment and I missed the window. This company for communities and again, this is like one of these double-edged swords they record all the license plates coming in and out of your oh god, no, yeah, flock and I know about this is a big story because flock is being used by law enforcement.

02:17:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
For instance, your own texas law enforcement used data from nationwide data flock from flock yeah to try to track down a woman who had left the state to get an abortion oh, I didn't know about that.

02:18:02 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
That's horrific so here we go is a flock is a real.

02:18:06
I'm glad you'd invest in them well, the, the, the pro I was. You know that that's obviously terrible. The pro I was pitched on it is like um, this is a way to maintain privacy. You're not taking people's pictures, but you get the license plates. You keep them for a certain number of days. If something happens in your, you can find the license plate numbers that aren't for people who live in the community. You don't have to have a gated community anymore and keep people out. But if somebody gets robbed, okay, here are a bunch of the license plate numbers that were in your community during this period when the home break-in occurred. So you know, again, this is something we're going to navigate.

02:18:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a little dystopian too.

02:18:44 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
I mean, it's basically yeah not a little.

02:18:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It is a nationwide surveillance network.

02:18:52 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Private surveillance network, basically, but they don't take videos of people's faces.

02:18:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That was no just the license plate.

02:18:56 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
the license plate so just the metadata which people are and they keep it for some time. But people are also in communities doing facial recognition and taking all the people coming in and out of the community and facially recognize them.

02:19:11 - Amanda Silberling (Guest)
So you know there's pros and cons here of like, what are the possible solutions? Yeah, with this kind of footage and how it's used by law enforcement, because also we know that there are uh, there, there is ai that has biases based on the training data, where it might be more likely to flag, like a black person, as having done a crime, and that's been my experience with uh, with people with biases too, but it's like that's been my experience.

02:19:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What is that? What is that? Social network is a neighborhood where almost all the neighborhood next door. That's it, next door almost all the next door posts are like there's a black guy wandering around the neighborhood, do you?

02:19:57 - Amanda Silberling (Guest)
know? Yeah, I just so racist, it's so bad. Yeah, I worry that this kind of tech is just going to make racism worse, which is already obviously a huge issue with law enforcement.

02:20:08 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
But yeah, I mean you're going to hear about the edge cases here, like this one, which is terrible, that you're showing.

02:20:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Texan authorities in May performed a nationwide search of more than 83,000 automatic license plate reading cameras to locate a woman they believe to have a self-administered abortion cameras to locate a woman they believe to have a self-administered abortion. They even, uh, they, they tried, they illegally accessed illinois data to locate this woman, and it was.

02:20:30 - Padre (Guest)
It was flock and it's more than that illinois allowed them to access, in violation of their own state laws. Yeah, yeah, yeah, this is good that.

02:20:37 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Yeah, so this is good that the system worked to find out that people did this illegally and catch.

02:20:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The Police did not have a A warrant. They should have had a warrant, right yeah.

02:20:49 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
And this is a dubious law as well. But yeah, this is dark.

02:20:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is black mirror stuff. Yeah, but that's what you get, right? That's inevitable.

02:20:57 - Padre (Guest)
This is what Palantir does. It allows them to bypass all that because it's not the government collecting the information. It Palantir does. It allows them to bypass all that because it's not the government collecting the information. It's not the government analyzing the information, it's a third private company and therefore you don't have to worry about things like civil rights, because it's not the government doing it. And on Twit, we've been screaming about this for 15 years now and it's here. It's now happening. They have a massive contract.

02:21:21 - Benito (Announcement)
And this is the technology, by the way, that they're using to pick up immigrants.

02:21:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right, this is, this is the stuff they're using.

02:21:29 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Oh yeah absolutely Palantir, in fact is doing that specifically, are they?

02:21:32 - Padre (Guest)
was the uh the parade reported yeah, yeah, all the banners uh are Palantir. Did you see that? The the advertising support for the the parade well, sure why?

02:21:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
not. I think there was also a coin.

02:21:42 - Benito (Announcement)
I think there was also a coin base or something yeah, there was.

02:21:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There was a big coin base on the on these podium. I was brought to you by and petscom hey, what is the story with, uh, these um stable coins? Uh, we just we just passed the genius act. Yeah, uh, in the United States. Uh, a stable coin is a cryptocurrency pegged to the value of the dollar.

02:22:06 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
It doesn't appreciate. It's just one for one. It lets you transfer for no cost or close to no cost.

02:22:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What's the interest in doing this?

02:22:15 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
So when you do money transfer between banks, you pay fees and these make it very cheap to move. So Stripe bought a stablecoin infrastructure company. Circle just went public. They provide stablecoins, so it's a way to move money around without having to pay fees. You can't make interest on them. So that was the interesting thing in this Genius Act, because the small banks were concerned. Okay, people aren't going to deposit dollars. And then there are offshore companies like Tether, and Tether has had a bunch of really back to the dark world like dark stuff, like human trafficking, and it's an offshore stable coin that has over $100 billion in assets. What they're doing with this is saying you can have stable coins in America. What they're doing with this is saying you can have stable coins in America. They're legal, they're regulated. You have to prove that you have the one for one reserve, so you have to buy 100% reserve Wow.

02:23:13
You have to yeah.

02:23:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Because banks are only required to have a small percentage in reserve.

02:23:23 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
So this is the expectation by the public is, if I buy these stable coins from USDC and I move money around, it's backed.

02:23:26
When people were doing this with Tether, there were moments in time where Tether it was questioned whether Tether actually had the money in the bank, basically, and that there could be a bank run and they were doing attestations which, not to get accounting technical is like okay, can you show me a bank account with a certain amount of money in it, as opposed to an audit where it's like show me all the transactions and we're going to put KPMG's name on or Ernst Young's name on it.

02:23:53
So this onshores stable coins in the United States. And then really, the reason the government's into this is because you have to buy treasuries, which is good for our sovereignty and keeping the dollar, you know, the global currency of the world, as opposed to people maybe using Tether as the global currency of the world to do trades, and then they don't have to buy treasuries right, they can buy whatever they want. So it's ultimately, you know, a good thing to have this stuff on short and regulated. The only bummer is, if you were to put $100,000 into stable coins, you make no interest, so you'd want to put that into a savings bearing account where you can get 5% today, you know, on different-.

02:24:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So the entire benefit of stable coin is low cost interbank transfers.

02:24:40 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Yeah, or between us.

02:24:41 - Padre (Guest)
Yeah, transport layer. Yeah, think of it as a transport layer. That's all it is.

02:24:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a tool for transporting currency between different systems it's probably good that there be some regulation of it. The senate passed the genius bill. It goes to the house, but the house has its own stable bill, so I guess we're stable geniuses. Uh, we'll see what happens. Um, every everybody and their brother, including amazon and others are are rolling out, uh, stable coins of some kind bank of america uh, deutsche bank.

02:25:14 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Yeah, think about the three percent we all pay on transfer fees etc. Just imagine, so I would.

02:25:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I would what I would buy some stable coins. Send this to somebody. It might be in your wallet.

02:25:26 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
It might be in your Coinbase, your Robinhood, your PayPal and you know, instead of paying very large transfer fees, you would pay very small ones.

02:25:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Who makes money on this?

02:25:36 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
So these services are cheaper to run and then they get the float. So if you're Circle and you have $50 billion, I think that might be they have tens of billions of Circle, the float.

02:25:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They make money on the float, which is the amount of time they hold that cash.

02:25:49 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Correct Now in a high interest rate environment like we're in, it's really juicy. So I think Tether's making like over $10 billion a year right now or something crazy. Now if interest rates go back down, which people suspect, then it will not be as great of a business and it will go up and down like that, but it's going to create more efficiency and you know, if you think about what a drag on the economy fees are from credit cards, from bank transfers, et cetera, all that will go to the bottom line. So when you run a conference, uh, or you're running club twit and you know you have some millions of dollars or hundreds of thousands of dollars, you look at those fees and you're like, wow, those fees.

02:26:27 - Benito (Announcement)
Yeah.

02:26:28 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
You sell $10 million in something and you're paying 3%. You're like $300,000 went to or $400,000?.

02:26:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So is it credit cards and banks that are fighting it.

02:26:37 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
It could, yeah. So if you were at some point, people will sign up for Club Twit for a hundred bucks and not use a credit card. They'll use their stable coins in their wallets.

02:26:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Because of lower transaction fees Quick question.

02:26:49 - Padre (Guest)
Has there been any work done on the floor? So how big do you need your stable coin to be in order to be able to survive something like a low interest environment? How balkanized can stable coins get before you have so many players that it's just not viable to be in the market anymore?

02:27:05 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Yeah, it might be one of these things where there'll be a top. 90% of the coins in stablecoins will be held by via power law. 90% of the coins will be held by the top five players and there'll be a long tail, kind of like you have for credit cards. You might have, like, diners club still exists, you know, it's visa, mastercard world. Do you have a diners club card? I don't, uh, but I do you know?

02:27:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it's the first. I think it was the first credit card, but it was it was.

02:27:35 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
It was like a really kind of elite thing to do over advantage what? I do now is I. I am really into bookmarking on t and Instagram and other places these food curators who say this is the best sandwich here, this is the best pizza slice here, this is the best ramen. And then when I go to a city I pull that out and then I compare it to other sources of information. I find like these influencers do a really good job of discovering.

02:28:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Are you helping me plug my son? Is that what this is all about? I teed it up for you.

02:28:06 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
I just teed it up for you, boom.

02:28:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's synergy here.

02:28:09 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Leo, I'm looking for a sandwich and I'm walking around the village.

02:28:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
If you're looking for a good prime rib in the West Village, a good French dip, I can tell you. I can tell you where it's, right next to john's pizza. All right, we're gonna take a break. Thank you, jason. That was a long way to go. I don't know how you got from there, from stablecoin to that, but you did it.

02:28:31 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
You did it. It's beautiful. It's a work of art.

02:28:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, good on this, good on the pick and roll last break here we're gonna have a bunch of silly stories and then we'll wrap things up with a great panel, amanda silverling from tech crunch, where she covers culture, culture, internet culture, senior culture, right also. Uh, now amandaomglol on blue sky the best handle, the best blue sky handle. Uh, jason calacanis, uh, host of all in. Do you do that every week, now, once a week? Yeah, every time. How do you get those guys together?

02:29:00 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
you know that was the secret to the pod is uh, they were like how, how do you become successful at podcasting? And remember what peter rojas told me just show up every day, like just be consistent that's all you have to do and you know, here we are on, you know, episode 1000, something of twit, right?

02:29:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
oh, yeah, yeah yeah, well, I guess that's consistency. Either that or laziness, I don't know. Stupidity, I don't know that's consistency. I mean, it's it really does they used to call uh walter cronkite, old iron butt, because he could sit in the chair for hours talking about nothing. I think I'm his spiritual successor. Also father robert balisar, the digital jesuit who it's getting late. We're going to let you.

02:29:41 - Padre (Guest)
We're going to let you go to bed anyway although I I am going to have a request for you, leo. I was hoping I could be on twit in 20 episodes. Yeah, for 10 57, because I want to be on the lost episode. Okay, please speak, yeah 10, 10 5, 7 lost okay deal, benino.

02:30:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
make a note of that. Ask your AI to put that in the book. No, we always love having all of you on, all three of you. And Amanda's a regular every month on our Tech News Weekly show too. That's true, in fact, I think you hosted it. Did you host it recently? No, it's every once in a while. Micah goes away and goes away, and then they make you guys do the job, but I wasn't you no, can't do without micah, I mean I know I could, but I know it's hard find out.

02:30:29
I've not it might have been, uh, jennifer pattison too, I'm not sure who. Anyway, great to have all three of you our show today brought to you by zip recruiter. Oh yeah, the easiest way to hire, let me tell you, summer's here, you know. That means seasonal businesses are hiring up those Dune brothers there with the clam cakes in Rhode Island man, they got a staff up right now, everything from mule packers to drama camp leaders. Yes, those are actual jobs. This means that people with these very highly specific skills are in high demand, but they're not easy to find. So, whether you're hiring for one of these roles or any other role, how do you find the top talent before the competition gets to them? Ziprecruiter, and right now you can try ZipRecruiter for free at ZipRecruitercom. Slash twit. Ziprecruiter's powerful matching technology does a deep dive to identify top talent for your roles Immediately after you post your job. Ziprecruiter's powerful matching technology does a deep dive to identify top talent for your roles. Immediately after you post your job, ziprecruiter's smart technology starts showing you qualified people for it. Gear up for summer with ZipRecruiter's high-speed hiring tools. See why four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. Just go to this exclusive web address right now to try ZipRecruiter for free. Ziprecruitercom slash twit Again. That's ZipRecruitercom slash T-W-I-T. Ziprecruiter the smartest way to hire. Thank you, ziprecruiter. Longtime sponsors of our shows, we really appreciate it.

02:32:04
I thought a good interview with Pavel Durov in Le Point, a French publication. Of course he was a. He's a shared citizenship with France and Dubai. I think he talked about his arrest in France. I think he defended himself quite well against accusations of kind of fostering terror and drug abuse. He says any platform like Telegram is going to have that kind of thing. We get rid of it when we can.

02:32:36
He feels like he was perhaps being prosecuted. He said the charges were totally absurd. Just because criminals use our messaging service, among many others, doesn't make those who run it criminals. Nothing has ever been proven showing that I am even for a second guilty of anything. He also admits I thought this was kind of interesting to having 100 children. Now, before you go crazy, this is not an elon musk situation here. He has, he has, uh children, a handful of children in the in the normal way, but he is apparently a donor to a sperm bank but he's keeping track of the children spawned from that sperm bank and he says he is going to pretty much vast fortune to all of them. That's wild. Huh, that was my reaction, amanda. That's wild.

02:33:29 - Benito (Announcement)
Wait, is that even illegal? Can he find out?

02:33:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
who? Well, apparently he's got some sort of deal going. Let me see if I can find that.

02:33:38 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Well, I mean it would have to be opt-in right.

02:33:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They would have to want to take the money and I guess whatever clinic is doing this insemination and and provided, I decided my children would not have access to my fortune until a period of 30 years has elapsed starting from today, so it won't be until 2055. Okay, I want them to live like normal people smart, build up themselves alone, radical self-reliance, to learn to trust themselves, to be able to create, not to be dependent on a bank account, he says. I want to specify I make no difference between my children. There are those who are conceived naturally and then who? Those who come from my sperm donations? They are all my children and would all have the same rights. Wow, he said six of whom I am the official father. The others come from my anonymous donation. The clinic where I started donating sperm 15 years ago to help a friend told me that 100 babies that can be conceived this way in 12 countries he then says that he does 300 push-ups in a row and 300 squats every morning he's very, very fit this is not a chill dude.

02:34:44 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
I don't smoke.

02:34:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I stay away from sugar Anything that can make you dependent. I like being in cold water.

02:34:53 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
This guy sounds like a party.

02:34:55 - Padre (Guest)
How secure is the network of this sperm bank?

02:34:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Because I mean, I'm just I'd like to get involved.

02:35:03 - Amanda Silberling (Guest)
This is a very wide ranging interview.

02:35:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It was fascinating. I found it actually and maybe this is contrarian a little bit, but I found him kind of charming and I was somewhat impressed by him.

02:35:18 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
It's certainly interesting.

02:35:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I always worry about folks from russia creating anonymous apps and wondering like hmm but he says I left russia because with he created v contact, which is the facebook of russia. Uh, he says putin's uh government wanted me to give information about my users to them. I refused. Uh, they forced the sale of v contact and I left russia it just always like anybody making a pit stop in russia. Starting ending he does go back because his family's hanging out there for too long it just makes me, you know, a little nervous I.

02:35:54 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
It just makes me want to double click and figure out is there still some deep connection or relationship there?

02:36:02 - Padre (Guest)
yeah, I'm still not using it. Yeah, I don't use telegram, I don't use whatsapp. I, you know, I, I am, I am on signal I and I'm. Did you see that?

02:36:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
whatsapp is adding ads now. Yeah, this was the thing that, uh, the founders were very concerned about was that facebook would, would, do this didn't they originally charge one dollar per year?

02:36:24 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
I thought, that was like the greatest business model ever, like just make a billion dollars from one one use it one dollar per year.

02:36:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it was genius. Uh, meta bought them, as you may remember, for a billion dollars in 2014. Oh no, it wasn't a billion dollars. That was insta billion, I think it ended up being. Because it was, it was a lot of money. Yeah, 19 billion, I think it was 19.

02:36:45
Yeah, maybe even more, because as meta stock went up, it became oh, it's up 20 x since then, probably yeah, so um meta made more than 160 billion in ad revenue across facebook and instagram in 2024, but had not, at that, to this point, put ads in WhatsApp. Uh, it says it's going to put them in the updates tab where you'll see sponsored some sponsored status updates. It's got to be bugging Mark.

02:37:12 - Padre (Guest)
He's got this gold mine ads are irresistible because we have made them irresistible we don't push back yeah, Amazon ads ads. Okay, we'll shrug Netflix adds ads on paid accounts. We'll shrug Disney, Paramount Plus, Until the users of these services finally say I'm just not going to use your service anymore. They know that they might get some pushback initially, but that's more than made up by the amount of cash that's going to come in.

02:37:39 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
I keep trying to pay for no ads on Hulu and stuff like that and I keep seeing, seeing them every time they give me. It's hard to do I know?

02:37:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I know, I had the same thing. I had to cancel my account and join through disney and pay more and I finally got ad free hulu. It was so frustrating so hard I get. I have it for the nba I pay, like they want to show you ads, however much you pay them.

02:38:00 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
the problem is, you know, I was just talking to somebody from Facebook like a very high level person and he said listen, if you, if we let you pay to take out the ads, the only people would pay are the most valuable people to the ones we want to advertise to. Oh, you know, it's like the only company that really does have integrity about this, I think, is Apple to a certain extent.

02:38:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, you know, you see ads in the app store yeah, but they largely failed. Remember they had they were going to sell ads and it failed. So they made a virtue out of a necessity and said, oh well, now we're the privacy company I would love to pay oh sorry oh sorry.

02:38:37 - Amanda Silberling (Guest)
Do you think that like does google lose money on something like youtube premium, where you're paying a? Subscription, but you're not seeing the ads, I guess I don't know it's getting pretty popular.

02:38:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, um, oh, you'd have to be crazy not to pay for youtube premium those is the greatest product ever. Well, only because there's so many ads on youtube.

02:38:56 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
I think that's how they do. It is that's how they. That's how they get you. They get you with the bread. That's how they get you. I'm just gonna go back to torrenting everything I mean I did.

02:39:04 - Padre (Guest)
They made it so easy to not torrent, but now I'm just uh, it's a matter of protest, I think trust.

02:39:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No one in our discord says apple doesn't have ads, but have you seen what they charge for ram? That's the other thing. Yeah, so have you seen the new dig? Has anybody seen the new dig?

02:39:22 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
yet I haven't. I'm an advisor to the company officially, so I have to, and you don't, and you you?

02:39:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
did you give them the five bucks to be part of the advisory?

02:39:30 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
board.

02:39:30 - Benito (Announcement)
Yeah, all right yeah, I think it's gonna be great tech crunch sarah perez writing a tech crunch.

02:39:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
here's your first look at the rebooted dig. As you may remember, kevin rose, who started dig, bought it back. Yep, and he and his arch rival, the founder of Reddit, alexis Ohanian now are going to bring Digg back together. They say that AI moderation will be the key. Digg, of course, immediately got gamed and that's what brought Digg down. It was just that, and Reddit I love a revenge startup.

02:40:04 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
I love this like going back to the old brands, bringing them back, seeing if you can get like, bring me the magic back. It's like a very retro thing, you know, and uh, I think it's gonna work I think brought back dignation too, which is smart right well, if you think about uh, we were just talking about. Uh, what do we call it? The garbage internet or something where everything's trash and everything's.

02:40:24 - Padre (Guest)
Ai produced the inshittification of the internet.

02:40:27 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Yeah, there's that, uh, yeah, and but there's. There's something about, like, um, how polluted it is with ai spam, I think, taking these old trusted brands back, bringing the original founders back and saying, hey, there's got to be a better way. Pay us, us five bucks a month or whatever, and try to make a clean, human version.

02:40:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The textpocalypse, textpocalypse, ai apocalypse.

02:40:50 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
No, it's just there is a lot of junk. I noticed in my replies on X slash Twitter before I put them on subscription mode that a lot of them seemed to be coming in too fast Automated. Yeah, yeah, they were coming in too fast from the same accounts and they were clearly somebody had a prompt and they were, yeah, trying to snipe people with big followings replies, because people who are in my replies get a couple of thousand views on their replies. So I think it's a better strategy to be a reply guy.

02:41:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think there's going to be an AI backlash. I really do. I think. As much as I am an accelerationist and I love AI and I'm very excited about it, I'm starting to see that there's going to be a big backlash. People are not happy with the enshitification, the AI apocalypse, it's just. It's getting worse and worse.

02:41:42 - Padre (Guest)
But they can only have a backlash if they know what to look for. Yeah, if you don't get out, you don't know it's a I'm thinking of my parents yeah, they didn't know that 50 of the stuff they watch was AI slop, and it wasn't until I actually started going through and hand curating the stuff that makes it to their feed that they started realizing, oh yeah, those were really bad quality sources.

02:42:01 - Amanda Silberling (Guest)
Yeah, yeah, I think people also just don't have a good handle on what is or isn't AI if it's not advertised as AI. So, like this is something I've thought about, where in my friend groups, like, we will make a lot of stickers with the iOS like sticker thing, where it cuts out the background and then the subject can be turned into a sticker and that's using AI to detect where the edges are of what you're making a sticker. But then if you use the like gen emojis that make AI emojis, that's like not acceptable. But both are AI and yeah, it's. I feel like this is going to be sort of a similar issue where people don't know what they're looking for.

02:42:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And it's an opportunity, have you seen I bet your parents saw this the AI support kangaroo which looks like a woman getting onto an airplane. I did support, well, let's say it's a I've seen it, yeah, but it's. But support, Well, it's AI, but it's Actually it's pretty obvious.

02:43:08 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
It's holding its own boarding pass.

02:43:10 - Amanda Silberling (Guest)
I mean we all know it would have a QR code and a smartphone. It looks too cute to be a kangaroo.

02:43:18 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Yeah.

02:43:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Everybody's doing video now. Midjourney's doing video and it's all very good. It's very hard. Mid Journey's doing video and it's all very good. It's very hard. This is from Mid Journey. Very hard to distinguish between this and reality. This is all AI generated.

02:43:33 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
It's across the uncanny valley. I mean we're sitting here debating.

02:43:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We were debating the Irishman and Luke Skywalker what Scorsese did with De Niro? Yeah, and you could tell it was fake, but this looks so real.

02:43:47 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Not only can you tell it. Ted Sarandos said that cost like $30 or $40 million to do in that film.

02:43:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That wasn't even that long ago.

02:43:54 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
And that was five years ago. Then Luke Skywalker on the Mandalorian was like three years ago, and now the consumer grade can do it for low hundreds of dollars.

02:44:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is mid-journey.

02:44:04 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Yeah, you know, but each of these is an opportunity. I remember, like I always remember, the cantina scene when they said you know your droids aren't welcome here. You know, leave them outside. Chess solved AI chess solved chess a long time ago. Got more people playing chess than ever. Queen's Gambit Chesscom is a huge subscription business people playing chess than ever. Queens Gambit chesscom is a huge subscription business.

02:44:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think it's got 10 million members or something crazy like that.

02:44:28 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
It's very successful, very successful, and chess is more popular now than ever, even though it's a finite game. That has been solved, why People like playing it and they like learning it, and it's interactive and it's fun. So I think this becomes um, guaranteeing all human interaction. Music became very easy to produce uh, electronic music, et cetera and now what do people like? We had this moment where uh MTV did Unplugged it was the most popular CDs in the CD era became MTV Unplugged and it was just amazing to see that Nirvana could do an unplugged.

02:45:05
They were actual musicians or Oasis could do it. That was my favorite, yes, and people at that time were like, oh, we had these highly produced records by Dire Straits. They were Brothers in Arms was a phenomenon, but what people really wanted with Dire Straits was to see them live, because they were actually better live. They did a better job live. They were better musicians live than even on those record-breaking CDs. That's what's going to happen with AI. People are going to be like you know what I want to see? You make me a Star Wars film like Andor, where you use real sets, not the one where you do it on the background.

02:45:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Not the volume.

02:45:40 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
They did the volume stuff for the Obi-Wan show and the Obi-Wan show was canned and the Andor one was loved. Why, I think? The realism and the grittiness of models.

02:45:50 - Padre (Guest)
You just brought up one of the things that I'm responsible for doing over here, which is leaning into the Vatican's AI effort of trying to remind people of what an actual relationship with another person looks like. As, as there are those who are saying, oh well, ai can solve the mental health crisis and ai can solve the loneliness crisis, we're trying to say, hey, how about actually learning how to have a real healthy relationship with another person or several other people? Because, as silly as that sounds to people who grew up before the internet, there's generations right now they don't know that world and they don't know that there's a possibility of having those kinds of healthy relationships and they don't know that those kinds of healthy relationships bring all sorts of wonderful benefits that they've never experienced before that's why I go every monday afternoon to play chess at the local coffee shop with actual people are you one of those chess hustlers, leo?

02:46:44
yeah, do you really go to the cafe and do that?

02:46:46 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
yeah, that's great. It's great for neuroplasticity.

02:46:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I keep your brain I have over here a chess board that I can play on chesscom never have to see a human. It tells me what their moves and all that stuff. But I'd much rather go down to the cafe, absolutely, and I played one game with with Leo and he destroyed me and never again.

02:47:05 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
No, it's great. I deal with a lot of young founders and they will become depressed and anxious because of so much pressure from running these companies. And I said when's the last time you went out with like five founders, cracked open a bottle of wine and had dinner and talked about your challenges and they were like I don't know how to do that. So I started a thing where I bring founders together to have dinner.

02:47:28
And I. Just what we do is we go around the table and I say give us your rose and thorn, give us your biggest win, and what you're struggling with is a safe environment and it's transformed people's lives.

02:47:37 - Padre (Guest)
That's my job. That's what I'm doing.

02:47:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You're taking my job, father Jason, father, that's my job, that's what I'm doing. You're taking my job, father jason, father, j cal him right now. One of the things that kind of still gives me hope is that, even if things are going in a direction we don't like, there's very often the pendulum swings the other way, there's a backlash and that maybe all of this ai slop will encourage us to become more human and spend more time with humans and make us value humans even more. We value music made by humans, art made by humans, writing made by humans.

02:48:14 - Benito (Announcement)
I think what you're really talking about, leo, is craft, like people's. Yeah, people like to learn and to do their craft, so, like, and I will never play chess as well as even the dumbest chess game on my iphone.

02:48:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, no, there are dumb ones, but like a decent chess they're. They're better than grandmasters, even on my phone. That's not why I play chess. I don't play chess so that I can be smarter than a machine. I play just because it's fun. Calculators are much better at arithmetic than I will ever be, but that's not. That's not a bad thing. It's just. If I want to play chess, I'm going to play chess. If I want to make music, I'm going to make music. Uh, great fun to have all of you on here and to cheer us up as things seem to be spiraling in the wrong direction. Just remember, you know there's, there is hope. Jason calacanis, you always give me hope. It's always a great pleasure to see you. The all-in podcast, uh, this weekend, startups without jason everywhere.

02:49:10
Yeah, it's great to see you what a view I love your view yeah father robert has a great view, but he he can you have the camera? Can you show us what the vatican looks like tonight?

02:49:20 - Padre (Guest)
well, it's so outside of this, is that, oh wow, that's a what that's that's actually so if I, if I open up this curtain right here, this, this is a huge picture window. That's. It's the vatican behind that's the view god I know that looks like a postcard.

02:49:38 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
I know that's like my apple tv has that same thing in full. Yeah, it's like when it's trying to show off. Yeah, it's a screensaver.

02:49:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Wow, Brother Robert digitaljesuitcom. He's on Blue Sky. His Padre is Jay. You got anything you want to plug?

02:49:54 - Padre (Guest)
Nothing that I can talk about. Yet we finished everything up with the funeral of Pope Francis and the conclave, and there's a lot of things in the works. Right now. Very exciting stuff in the works, but nothing that's public good.

02:50:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, the best to you and to uh the holy father, and uh to a great. He's my age, you know. So now it's going to be a it's race. It's a race basically to see whether I'll see another pope or not. You know, it's going to be very interesting. I think he looks pretty healthy.

02:50:22 - Padre (Guest)
Unfortunately, I mean, if you, if you come back to rome, I'll get you into an audience. If you want, really, you could, yeah, really, yeah, I'd love to meet him just another leo right.

02:50:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Thank you, robert, great to see you. Amanda silberling, you can catch her on tech news weekly every month and, of course, all the time you write several times file several times a day on tech grunge culture. Writer there. It's always a pleasure to have you on. What's your view? You have a view you could share with us?

02:50:47 - Amanda Silberling (Guest)
No, me neither. Well, outside my window there's just another brick building, so I'm really slacking out of the group, but brick buildings in Philadelphia they have history.

02:50:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's your kitchen. That's a good view. It's great to see you. Thank you, kitchen. That's a good view. It's great to see you. Thank you, amanda. Uh, what's the name of your podcast? Again, wow, if true. Wow, if true, subscribe, where you get your podcasts. What a great idea for a show. Thank you, amanda. Thanks to all of you for joining us.

02:51:16
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