This Week in Tech 1026: I Know of BigBalls

Summary

This Week in Tech 1026: I Know of BigBalls – Detailed Summary

Release Date: April 7, 2025

Hosted by Leo Laporte with guests Jason Calacanis and Alex Wilhelm

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I. Introduction and Guest Welcome

The episode kicks off with Leo Laporte expressing excitement about the show, introducing returning guests Jason Calacanis and Alex Wilhelm. Leo reminisces about past collaborations and highlights the enduring friendship among the hosts. The conversation quickly transitions into discussing recent events in the tech world, setting the stage for a deep dive into pressing issues.

Leo Laporte [00:00]: "It's time for This Week in Tech, the show where we get together and talk about this week's tech news."

II. Silicon Valley Bank Collapse and Regulatory Response

The hosts revisit the Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) collapse from two years prior, discussing its potential to trigger a broader financial crisis. They commend the swift regulatory actions that mitigated the situation, restoring confidence in the financial system.

Jason Calacanis [02:50]: "Thank goodness they backstopped the deposits."

Alex Wilhelm [03:53]: "Shout out to that team at the time for being quick, solving the issue, getting confidence back in the system."

III. US Government Tariffs and Silicon Valley Sentiment

A significant portion of the discussion centers on President Trump's implementation of tariffs aimed at reducing the trade deficit. The hosts analyze how these tariffs, while intended to protect American industries like cryptocurrency and AI, have led to increased prices and uncertainty in the market.

Jason Calacanis [10:35]: "Trump is doing this to make everybody come to Mar A Lago in the White House and negotiate and cut a deal with him."

Alex Wilhelm [11:30]: "If you were hoping for someone to take the heat off of crypto, I don't think you could."

They explore the mixed sentiments within Silicon Valley—some backed Trump's stance for accelerating technological advancements, while others are disillusioned by the economic repercussions.

IV. Impact of Tariffs on Technology and Manufacturing

The conversation delves into the practical implications of tariffs on tech manufacturing. The hosts discuss Apple's shift of production from China to countries like India and Vietnam, highlighting the inefficiencies and added costs due to high tariffs.

Leo Laporte [13:17]: "This is going to cost. Is this going to, you know, from the point of view of the technology user, is this going to mean the iPhone is up now 50%?"

They also touch upon the broader challenges of rebuilding the US industrial base, particularly in high-tech sectors like semiconductor manufacturing, and the strategic decisions companies must make amidst geopolitical tensions.

V. AI, Robotics, and the Future of Work

A substantial segment is dedicated to the advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and robotics. The hosts debate the trajectory towards Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and its potential to transform industries, enhance productivity, and impact employment.

Alex Wilhelm [137:03]: "AGI should be possible under Jason's time frame, if not a little bit faster, given what we're seeing around the world."

Jason Calacanis [137:10]: "I think we will hit that in our lifetime, maybe in less than 10 years."

They discuss the development of humanoid robots, their applications in both industrial and consumer settings, and the ethical considerations surrounding their deployment. The conversation also covers how AI is revolutionizing software development, reducing the need for repetitive tasks, and enabling entrepreneurs to focus on more strategic initiatives.

VI. Palantir and the Technological Republic

Leo introduces Alex Wilhelm's perspective on Palantir's new book, "Technological Republic," which posits that the 21st century will be dominated by software and AI rather than traditional kinetic warfare. The hosts agree on the critical role of technological partnership between Silicon Valley and government in maintaining national security and driving innovation.

Leo Laporte [44:04]: "His position in the book is that America in the 20th century benefited from a partnership between Silicon Valley and government for things like the Internet, NASA, of course, the Manhattan Project..."

Jason Calacanis [44:41]: "If you look at Russia's invasion of Ukraine and that battle, it's largely been drones and information satellites, Starlink, all these things are playing a very prominent role."

The discussion emphasizes the need for the US to balance soft power with technological and military advancements to address emerging global threats effectively.

VII. Startups, Entrepreneurship, and Regulatory Challenges

The hosts explore the challenges startups face in the current economic climate, particularly the impact of tariffs and regulatory uncertainties. They advocate for reducing bureaucratic red tape to foster innovation and competitiveness in the global market.

Alex Wilhelm [24:28]: "A lack of national capacity for certain critical things is at a point of absolute panic."

Jason Calacanis [40:16]: "Gotta solve it. It's a chore."

They highlight the importance of platforms like Coda and Drata in streamlining operations for startups, enabling them to focus on growth and innovation without being bogged down by compliance and administrative tasks.

VIII. Social and Economic Implications of Technological Advancements

The conversation shifts to the societal implications of rapid technological advancements, including the potential for AI to replace entry-level jobs and the ethical considerations of using AI in defense and public services.

Alex Wilhelm [127:57]: "There will always be a section of development that will be reserved for humans at the wheel because they need to make big long-term decisions."

Jason Calacanis [139:01]: "If you speed, I get a ticket. I know if Trump breaks literally the law..."

The hosts express concerns about economic inequality, the future of work, and the necessity for policies that ensure technological advancements benefit society as a whole without exacerbating existing disparities.

IX. 3D Printing in Construction and Sustainable Housing

Leo introduces a segment on innovative construction technologies, specifically 3D printing cement homes. The hosts discuss how this technology can revolutionize affordable housing, reduce construction costs, and address housing shortages.

Jason Calacanis [82:11]: "But these robots have to be telerobotics initially. They will be operated by humans."

Leo Laporte [16:06]: "Look what Apple did. Apple thought, oh, we're going to move production to away from China to India, Vietnam, and Brazil. Oops. Vietnam tariff is 49%."

They highlight success stories of startups leveraging 3D printing to create sustainable and cost-effective housing solutions, emphasizing the potential for widespread adoption and impact on the housing market.

X. Reflections on Media Ownership and Independent Journalism

The discussion touches upon the state of media ownership, with the hosts lamenting the acquisition of independent tech blogs by larger conglomerates. They stress the importance of maintaining editorial independence to preserve the integrity and quality of tech journalism.

Jason Calacanis [186:00]: "And the problem with media is it's a. You need to have an impresario who cares about it."

Leo Laporte [189:30]: "It’s also good for peace because even if a mortal enemy is a big trade partner, I think they're a lot less likely to attack us..."

The hosts advocate for supporting independent media outlets and cultivating a diverse tech journalism landscape to ensure balanced and comprehensive coverage of industry developments.

XI. Closing Remarks and Sponsor Messages

The episode concludes with light-hearted banter among the hosts, reflecting on personal anecdotes and upcoming events. While advertisements and sponsor messages are interspersed throughout the transcript, the summary focuses solely on the substantive discussions related to tech news, policies, and innovations.

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Highlighted Quotes

• Leonardo Laporte [04:31]:

  "Jason, the man in charge of Twists and of course, the now number one podcast in the world."

• Jason Calacanis [10:48]:

  "Trump is doing this to make everybody come to Mar A Lago in the White House and negotiate and cut a deal with him."

• Alex Wilhelm [24:28]:

  "There's a lack of national capacity for certain critical things and some companies are pushing forward to build better weapon systems more cheaply and more quickly."

• Jason Calacanis [137:10]:

  "I think we will hit [AGI in our lifetime], maybe in less than 10 years."

• Jason Calacanis [139:01]:

  "Mark's point about some percentage of Meta's code being written by AI this year? Sure."

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Conclusion

This episode of "This Week in Tech" navigates through a complex landscape of technological advancements, regulatory challenges, and the socio-economic impacts of AI and robotics. The hosts provide insightful analysis on how policies like tariffs influence tech manufacturing, the evolving role of AI in reshaping industries, and the critical need for maintaining strong regulatory frameworks to harness technology's benefits while mitigating its risks. Through engaging dialogue and expert perspectives, the episode underscores the interconnectedness of technology, policy, and society in shaping the future.

Transcript

[Leo Laporte]

It's time for Twitters Week at Tech.

[Jason Calacanis]

Wow.

[Leo Laporte]

All I can say is wow. This is going to be an interesting show. Our old friend Alex Wilhelm is here. He of course used to be at TechCrunch. He now has his own excellent newsletter and he's a regular on this Week in Startups, hosted by our other guest, Jason Calacanis. It is this Week in Startups Takeover. We have lots to talk about, starting off with how you like your boy now, podcasts you love from people you trust. This is TWIT. This is TWIT this Week at Tech, episode 1026, recorded April 6, 2025. I know of big balls. It's time for Twit this Week at Tech, the show. We get together and talk about the week's tech news. And there is some news this week and I thought, wow, I had an idea, I had a crazy thought that we'd do it this week in Startups Takeover. Oh, how do you like that? Jason Calacanis is here, the man in charge of twists and of course, the now number one podcast in the world. All in. Well, it's close to it. All In Podcast. It's good to see you, Jason.

[Jason Calacanis]

It's great to see you, Leo. Thank you for.

[Leo Laporte]

It's been a long, long time.

[Jason Calacanis]

Far too long.

[Leo Laporte]

Jason thinks he's at a rally. He's got a American flag and a Texas flag behind him from the great state of Austin. Austin, the People's Republic. Yep. Also with us, his co host from time to time on twists, Mr. Alex Wilhelm, the guy behind the Cautious Optimism newsletter at Cautiousoptimism News. And Jason had to kind of strong arm you into being here today, so thank you, Jason. I appreciate it.

[Alex Wilhelm]

I think he just volunteered and told me. He's like, hey, by the way, I was talking to Leo and I hear we're both going to be on Twist. And I told my wife, I'm like, well, bad news, honey. You're doing bedtime all by yourself on Sunday because I'm going on another show.

[Leo Laporte]

I was sitting here a couple weeks ago doing, I think, Windows Weekly, and I got a text from Jason and I thought, wow, there's a name I.

[Jason Calacanis]

Haven'T heard in a long time. Much more civilized weapon.

[Leo Laporte]

No, but Jason's a longtime friend of the show and the last time you were on actually was. And I have a T shirt that says it. The run on Silicon Valley Bank. Yes.

[Jason Calacanis]

That was crazy.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, we survived that though, didn't we? That didn't turn out to be the mess that it looked like, was going to be.

[Jason Calacanis]

Thank goodness they backstopped the deposits because.

[Leo Laporte]

There were FDIC did.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, yeah. Because, you know, there's like this weird thing. You get the First, I guess 250k in a FDIC account is protected, but then after that you're on your own. And Silicon Valley bank is kind of hated. It's Silicon Valley, it's rich people, but it's actually for people who live in the Bay Area, like your school and, you know, your mom and pop dry cleaner might use it. And then like two other banks had a run. That was a very scary time. I didn't have a problem with Silicon Valley bank necessarily going out of business for making, you know, having some poor management there. But, gosh, you know, the deposits in the bank accounts, that could have been a really cataclysmic situation.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, we're all these days very tied together, aren't we? And one, one bank goes. It's good. So goes the nation. So, you know, and it turned out not to be the cataclysm that looked like it was going to be.

[Alex Wilhelm]

So I think because of how fast it was.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Over the response and, you know, I mean, I know regulators are kind of a bad word in America right now, but shout out to that team at the time for being quick, solving the issue, getting confidence back in the system. And that's why, Leo, we look back and we're like, what year was that? Well, it turns out it was 2023. It was two years ago.

[Leo Laporte]

What a year. What a year that was.

[Alex Wilhelm]

That wasn't that hard.

[Jason Calacanis]

I feel like we're living in doggyish. It's like every week, it's like seven weeks.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, my God.

[Jason Calacanis]

I mean, we're 70 days into Trump's second term and it feels like we're on the third term already.

[Alex Wilhelm]

I've aged 75 years in 70 days.

[Jason Calacanis]

Just takes over everything, too.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, I think there is a perception in the world, Jason, because of your friendship with Elon, that you perhaps are a friend of the administration, but you are independent, right?

[Jason Calacanis]

I've always been independent. I always vote for the best, you know, candidate. I think I'm best described as like a Clinton Democrat. You know, fiscally I'm conservative, and then socially I'm incredibly liberal.

[Leo Laporte]

And so, you know, who shrunk the government last time? That was Bill Clinton.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, it's quite a bit by attrition and retirement and so forth.

[Jason Calacanis]

I, I think we all agree we want to get rid of waste and fraud and abuse and we want an efficient government that we, you know, get the services that we pay for. I think people don't like the way they're going about it. It feels too violent, too fast. And, you know, we live in a pretty polarizing time. My philosophy has always been, whoever wins, support the president as best you can. And then there's a very weird thing that happened. All my Democratic friends are now part of the administration, around the administration. So I find myself in a very weird situation as a never Trumper to be supporting the good things they're doing, but I feel obligated to call out the terrible things, horrible things I think they're doing or the mistakes they're making. So I'm calling balls and strikes. And we survived one Trump presidency. I think we'll survive this one.

[Leo Laporte]

One of the things you texted me when you sent the text a couple of weeks ago is I like how you've been edged to dodge politics on the show. We're not gonna do a lot of dodgeball today because I think the Liberation Day on Wednesday could be disastrous for Silicon Valley. So my real. I guess. And Alex, please jump in. But my question for Jason right up front is Silicon Valley wanted this president. Right. At least part of Silicon Valley did.

[Jason Calacanis]

I think, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Are they happy? This is the 404 Media story. Big Tech backed Trump for acceleration. They got a decel president instead.

[Jason Calacanis]

I think Trump winning is as much about the Democrats losing. And you know, how they handled their. How they handled their presidential candidate and their campaign. Because Trump was pretty easy to defeat.

[Leo Laporte]

Should have been easy to defeat.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yes, he was.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I'll agree with you on that.

[Jason Calacanis]

I was talking to somebody who is in and around the administration, and I won't say who. I don't betray any trust. They said the fact that the Democrats have figured out a way to make Trump look like the better choice is astounding to them. They just couldn't believe that that's actually the turn of events.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, but what was it that made Trump look like the better choice? Because to some of us, it looks like the fact that Democrats picked a black woman as their candidate. And in this country, that was two strikes. Maybe Asian American was a third strike that disqualified her even though she was fully qualified to do the job.

[Jason Calacanis]

I think that's an interesting question. I. I'll tell you what people said to me in private in the back channel, not. This isn't what I think. I think there were a lot of people who were very upset about the sort of woke politics, DEI trans stuff with Kids, you know, all. All of that kind of.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Because that was what the president promoted in his ad campaigns. Right.

[Jason Calacanis]

I mean most effective.

[Leo Laporte]

Congratulations. You know, you don't have to worry about trans women's sports, but maybe you want to worry a little bit more about a few other things that are going to hell in a hand basket.

[Jason Calacanis]

And I think they were really disturbed by like Biden. A lot of the Democrats were really disturbed by the transition from Biden and the hot swap.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it was a bit of a hot swap.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, yeah. And I called out the hot swap. It was pretty obvious it might have.

[Leo Laporte]

Been a disadvantage too because she didn't have a full primary campaign to run and to introduce yourselves was banging that.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Drum at the time. He wanted a mini primary.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, my what I told Democrats because I find myself like all of a sudden because of all in getting so prominent, you know, featuring two maga, I would say, you know, one person who's MAGA Sachs, I think CH is obviously flipped over and he re underwrote Trump and then Freeberg is, you know, he kind of dances a line where you don't actually know his politics all that much. I mean he tries to keep himself out of it or stay neutral. But I think he's probably, you know, more in favor of the administration than not just based on what he said on the show publicly. But you know, I don't like to speak for anybody but myself. What I'll say is, you know, I told the Democrats because I became friendly with Dean Phillips and some of the folks and I don't really get involved in politics or donate. I told them do a speedrun primary, have you'll take over the entire media for the summer three weeks, start with eight candidates. Whoever gets the most votes, go down to four, have another debate in the second week, then go down to two and then promise everybody whoever gets the most votes and that three week speed run primary will be number one and number two. In other words, they don't pick their vp, they just go with it. It would have taken over people's imagination and it would have been an easy victory for the Democrats.

[Leo Laporte]

It's easy though. I mean this Monday morning quarterbacking, but again, to get to the question is Silicon Valley now disappointed having chosen Trump as an accelerationist, somebody who would support cryptocurrency, who would support AI, who would build the economy, that in fact these tariffs are going to hit them very hard?

[Jason Calacanis]

I think most people believe in the first cohort of topics you said and then they believe that the tariffs are A negotiating tactic that it's going to go away and it's going to go away in two weeks.

[Leo Laporte]

The stock market clearly doesn't.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, they have voted that this is going to be cataclysmic. Yeah, yeah.

[Alex Wilhelm]

And Bessant was talking about that today on the the AI versus crypto front, Leo, I think it's pretty easy to say that the Trump administration has been about as crypto friendly as you can hope for. I mean, we're talking about pardons, lack of regulation, a cessation.

[Leo Laporte]

And yeah, they pardoned Nicola's CEO, who. Well, that's committed fraud.

[Alex Wilhelm]

That's not crypto. That's a different fraud. You got to get fraud separate, my friend. Okay? Inflate the fake, fake trucks with the fake money. And I said, you're right, you're right.

[Leo Laporte]

That was a different kind of fraud.

[Alex Wilhelm]

I own a little bitcoin and the family retirement account. So I just want to point that out. But I mean, if you were hoping for someone to take the heat off of crypto, I don't think you could.

[Leo Laporte]

Know that that's true. And he campaigned, you know, he was at the bitcoin convention saying, fire Gary Gensler. And they cheered. So he said it again. He got a standing ovation. So clearly that was in the card. So they was that. But the question is, is that enough to justify everything else?

[Alex Wilhelm]

Think about it through the lens of Andreessen Horowitz. They are a venture capital firm and they're politically active to some degree. And we all know that Marc Andreessen, via reporting, has been helping to staff the administration. Now, as Jason and I could tell you, the Andreessen Horowitz crypto venture firm has put together, I think, the largest funds ever in the space, Jason. So I think from that perspective, they're probably quite happy. But Marc Andreessen, in his techno optimist manifesto and his discussion about how there's a great coiled spring in the American economy. Well, if you look at Fed now predictions from, I forget which Federal Reserve bank it is, but one of them, we're looking at potentially a pretty sharp decline in economic activity. So I think from that side. No, and I also think that, and we'll talk about it later in the show, according to the notes, but people are concerned that even though there's an exemption for chips in the tariffs, that that won't actually obviate or even get entirely rid of the economic pain that the tariffs overall will bring to chips, which will retard and slow AI progress here domestically.

[Leo Laporte]

So, well, look what Apple did. Apple thought, oh, we're going to be, we're going to be kg. We're going to move production to, away from China to India, Vietnam and Brazil. Oops. Vietnam tariff is 49%. Of course, China is 52. So maybe they. That was a net gain of 3% I guess much. There are. This is going to cost. Is this going to, you know, from the point of view of the technology user, is this going to mean the iPhone is up now 50%?

[Jason Calacanis]

I don't think so. I think the most likely situation is Trump is doing this to make everybody come to Mar A Lago in the White House and negotiate and cut a deal with him.

[Leo Laporte]

He says Vietnam has called him immediately and said let's make a deal. And Trump has said if it's a.

[Jason Calacanis]

What.

[Leo Laporte]

What was the word he used? He had a interesting description of the kinds of deals he's looking for. Phenomenal. If he gets a phenomenal offer and this, it's going to be the biggest offer.

[Jason Calacanis]

Incredible. You know, they were, they're very tough negotiators now. Tremendous deal we did.

[Leo Laporte]

Every country has called us Vietnam.

[Jason Calacanis]

A little country known as Vietnam. Okay, you may have heard of it. I think all of this is going to result.

[Leo Laporte]

Isn't that kind of uncertainty also bad for the market? Like if he relents in two weeks, nobody's going to say, oh good, it's over.

[Jason Calacanis]

Which is what he wants. He wants everybody on edge. He wants to be the main character. I think he's addicted to doing that. And I think they want to. This is the, this is the prominent theory. They have to redo a bunch of these high priced, you know, interest payments that the government has. And so over time, if they can, you know, what's the term when you refinance a lot of this debt? So when they refinance this debt, they're trying to crash the stock market, get the 10 year lower than 4% and they're going to refinance it. They're going to force Powell to cut rates and then the economy is going to roar into the midterms. This is the 4D chess as explained by the administration. I think it's pretty simple. I think he wants everybody to genuflect. He wants everybody to come to Mar A Lago, the White House cut a deal. And if we see the market crash tomorrow, Monday, we're taping on Sunday, obviously he will, he will start that relenting process real fast. I don't think he wants to be this unpopular and lose the Midterm elections, which I think right now they're in really bad shape if the economy crashes. So I think we'll see him relent. I always have this like 72 hour rule with Trump. Whatever he says, wait 72 hours and then see what still applies. And so they did this on Wednesday. We're here, you know, whatever. Four days later and already he's starting to say, oh, well, Vietnam has come around, these people are coming around. So that's the most likely scenario. But I do think that this is like doing a very high risk maneuver, you know, in a passenger plane. Like you're 1,000ft off the ground and you decide you want to barrel roll the passenger plane. This is crazy. I think it's the only way to describ it. And I don't think it's crazy like a fox. I'll be totally honest. I think it's reckless.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Yeah, I agree. A couple of data points. One, I just went back to Apple's latest earnings report. Their gross margins are about 47%. So they do.

[Leo Laporte]

So they could absorb it a little bit.

[Alex Wilhelm]

But keep in mind that, you know, most companies have higher margins in the tech space because they're software companies. Apple is a majority hardware company. So there's a little bit less to play with there. And they're going to fight for it because Tim Cook does not f around. And so I don't know how much of this they're going to hold in. And I've heard some people say that Apple has not raised prices on iPhones for some time, maybe a cycle or two. So they may have some consumer goodwill as well to lean on there. I don't know. We'll have to see. But on the terror front, the latest report from CNBC published 28 minutes ago. Commerce Secretary Lutnick doesn't back down in the face of market sell off. Quote, the tariffs are coming now again, could be 5, 7 to 19, DHS, who knows? But at a minimum, the jawboning coming from the administration today on Sunday, after two days of chaos is continuance. And so he's a true believer in tariffs, guys. I mean, I don't know why I feel like we're building more of a mental model around this than we have to. Trump has been in favor of tariffs for decades. He called.

[Leo Laporte]

This is no surprise. He's wanted to do this. He said these countries are ripping us off for 30 years. So he's done what he always wanted to do.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, I think the execution matters in this case and I think even the people who are ardent Trump supporters and voters, they don't believe this was executed. Well, I would have a hard time finding any. I think you'll have a hard time finding anybody who believes this was executed. Well, they should have.

[Leo Laporte]

Except for Peter Navarro. Let me. Are you still buddies with Elon? Do you. Do you stay in touch?

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, yeah, we're great friends.

[Leo Laporte]

So Elon is now in a fight with Trump's trade. Oh, yeah, Minister, Whatever. I don't know what you call him, Peter Navarro, because Navarro says he's Trump. These tariffs are great. And Elon says, and I think quite rightly, we want free trade. We don't, especially with Europe, we don't want any tariffs in either direction.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, that would be Trump's original position, which is reciprocity and having reciprocal trade. So I don't think that's not in agreement with Trump. Trump said, you know, he's going to do what the other trading partners do. So if France wants to charge us to bring cheddar cheese there, and we're going to charge for. Come here.

[Leo Laporte]

The tariff he imposed had nothing to do with counterterroriffs. It had to do with the trade deficit. He took the trade deficit, which is weird.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Divided it in half and said, that's the tariff. It isn't related to the tariffs in the other direction.

[Alex Wilhelm]

I don't think it's intellectually consistently so. I think what you're trying to say is, what's the through line here? And the answer is they're trying to whittle. Yeah. I mean, and that's okay. By the way. I looked it up. There's a reason why you couldn't recall what Peter Navarro's title is. That's because you don't recall the senior counselor to the president for trade and manufacturing.

[Leo Laporte]

There you go. That's a real talk a second time around, by the way, doing that.

[Alex Wilhelm]

I don't get why they keep bringing the same people who don't understand global trade or economics. I mean, no offense to the world, but go read a textbook. This is not super impossible stuff. Comparative advantage yields, benefits to both nations who are trading. I think the problem is Elon probably is a free trader at heart because he has business around the world and ships stuff. Right. So he probably wants fewer trade barriers. That's just smart.

[Jason Calacanis]

There are.

[Alex Wilhelm]

He also is.

[Jason Calacanis]

No, I should say there's good reasons to have tariffs on things that we need to produce here for national security. So if you think about pharmaceuticals, if you think about ships, weapons, bullets, bombs, you know, There are some things we should have in our supply chain, obviously, so that makes sense. Then you look at the next group of things. Well, if people are charging us and we can't sell our cars in Korea and Japan, okay, well, maybe that there's something there. But this across the board tariffs is just chaotic and it's not the way to execute. And this is what you get when you vote for Captain Chaos. Trump is a chaotic actor. I call him Captain Chaos. And here we are. He's going to do things that Most Americans want. 80% of Americans don't want to see, or even 90% don't want to see illegal immigration. They want to see legal, you know, responsible, reasonable immigration. Right. So, you know, they, they feel good about Trump doing that. I think most people now, they, they also want to see criminals deported, but they don't want to see the lack of due process. So you have to look at each of these issues and you have to parse them, I think, intelligently. And I think that's like the role of podcasts, like we're doing here, is to unpack them. And in the case of tariffs, you know. Yeah, well, I mean, in case of tariffs, you really want to make sure we can make pharmaceuticals here, right. And, and make ships in case.

[Leo Laporte]

Most of our pharmaceuticals come from China, don't they?

[Alex Wilhelm]

Yeah, it's.

[Jason Calacanis]

It's a, A decent number of them do, including ones that we don't want to have here, like fentanyl and the precursors to fentanyl. So.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, but I think people do seem to like Ozempic a lot.

[Jason Calacanis]

I mean, it's worked well for me. I'm a big fan of Gino.

[Leo Laporte]

Are you. Are you a zempite? Ah, interesting. You look great. You're much thinner.

[Jason Calacanis]

I'm 40 pounds from my peak. And what happened was our friend Kevin Rose on his random show with Tim Ferriss, talked about Ozempic three or four years ago, and I had been doing intermittent fasting and lost like maybe 15 pounds, and then I had like 30 to go and I did Ozempic and then Wegovy, and now I just take like a little Manjarno every X number of days as, like, maintenance. And, yeah, it was life changing for me. Talk to your doctor if you're interested. There's some things to be thoughtful about, but I believe it's going to really change the world.

[Leo Laporte]

And to be fair, it's. It's made in Denmark, it's not made in China, but that's true. A lot of your, especially your generic Medications are made in China. Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

As long as we can still make them here, you know, if there's no problem with having the most efficient place in the world make and the best craftsmanship, you know, depending on what you're going for, you know, make your car, make your cheese, make your medicine, unless you can't get those things because you, you become too efficient. And that's what we saw during COVID Right. We didn't realize exactly how dependent we were on China specifically for ppe. And I think that's why Tim Cook said, you know what this is, we're too dependent on China. IPhones are critical for people. Let's make them India. And they're making, I think the, I know they were making 15 in India. I'm not sure if they're making the.

[Alex Wilhelm]

More, the more modern, higher end ones down India. I don't know if they're actually doing the iPhone Pro Max super duper. But yeah, they've been moving up the value chain.

[Leo Laporte]

But, but the tariffs are in India too. I mean, you know, the way Tim Cook got out of this last time in 2017 was he went to Trump and said, hey, you're going to give Samsung a huge advantage, so don't tariff us, bro. But the truth is South Korea has been heavily tariffed as well. So Trump could now go back to Cook and say, hey, look what I did for you. Samsung no longer gains an advantage. Apple stock tanked. I mean, clearly Apple stockholders see this as a problem.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Absolutely. But can I go back, Leo, just for a second to the idea about building chips and so forth in the United States? One thing that I'm a little bit read up on is how many submarines we can build, because I live in Rhode island and we have shipbuilding here and there's billboards like come build submarines. There's a great headline from the National Interest that came out last year and it says, can the US Navy really build three submarines per year? Because previously we could only build two. So I want to point out that a lack of national capacity for certain critical things is, I think, at a point of absolute panic. And there are some companies that Jason, I talk about over on Twist that are pushing, I would say forward to build better weapon systems more cheaply and more quickly. And that's good. But it does feel like we were just getting on the upward slant towards a more nimble industrial complex future for the military, and then we threw the global supply chain into chaos. So it does feel self defeating. But I would say that even though we didn't have tariffs on ships in the way that Trump might want to. We still didn't have the industrial base that we've needed because.

[Leo Laporte]

But we can never build iPhones in the US and even if we do, will be outsourcing a lot of the parts to Asia.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, this is all going to be resolved, I believe this week or so.

[Leo Laporte]

It's just not going to be an issue because he's just going to back down.

[Jason Calacanis]

He's going to back down.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

I'm 80% certain of that.

[Leo Laporte]

That's interesting. Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

Because I mean, he really cares about how people perceive him and he, you know, the, the stock market is the scorecard. We were talking, you know, in the pre game before the show about all these protests going on. I think these protests, as you pointed out, I think correctly, Leo is some percentage of people going out there are saying, hey, my 401k is borked. This is not cool. Hey, these stocks.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I was okay with you deporting the father because of his rose tattoo, but damn it, don't hit my 401.

[Jason Calacanis]

You know, and everybody's got issues. Or people might look at and say, oh, you know, the next shoe to drop is going to be layoffs. By the way, people seem to forget about a recession. You could have.

[Leo Laporte]

We had a very slow period. Covid killed our business. As you know, we shut down the studio, we laid off a lot of people cut back on shows. At the end of last year, it was a desert. And for some reason that I, neither Lisa nor I could figure out, advertising is. We're practically sold out. Very solid.

[Jason Calacanis]

Amazing.

[Leo Laporte]

But, well, yeah, good news now. But I'm terrified that these companies, all software companies, almost entirely. Right.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

Not hardware companies. So they're not gonna be hit by tariffs, but I think their customers might be. And I am just waiting for the other shoe to drop and for these companies to say, oh, wait a minute, we gotta cancel those ads because the economy or something. So I'm hoping that there is a course correction quickly because it impacts all of us from running shoes, to Korean makeup influencers, to iPhone users and to laptop makers. Apple moved its laptop manufacturer to Vietnam. That didn't save it. It's 49% tariff out of Vietnam.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Forget my 401k. I'm really concerned about the price of South Korean skincare products because it has become a key pillar of the American economy.

[Leo Laporte]

If you like snail mucus, you're going to love South Korea.

[Alex Wilhelm]

No, I mean, like we joke, but it just goes to show how interconnected the World is. I mean, we've always thought, well, not always, but in my lifetime, I've always considered the United States to be such a net exporter of culture and business. But one thing we've seen in the last five or 10 years is a growth in the popularity of Japanese and South Korean products, culture, shows, movies, etc. Here in the United States. And it's been a lot of fun because we have huge immigrant populations from around the world, and I love that. But it's such a bummer that if we're going to see a more diverse internal national, cultural economy to slap trade barriers on it. And so we joke about South Korean skin care products, but I do think it's actually indicative of the changed world better and a disappointment to.

[Leo Laporte]

It's also good for peace because even if a mortal enemy is a big trade partner, I think they're less, you know, China holds a lot of our paper. I think they're a lot less likely to attack us and our allies if we are tied, if we are economically intertwined. But let me. You guys are financial wizards. I am not. But so let me ask you really the big question, which is, is this in the long run going to improve the US Economy? If Trump backs down, have we damaged our relationship with Europe to the point where it won't matter? Leave your Swiss chocolates at home.

[Jason Calacanis]

I think that's a reasonable question to ask because if you were, let's say, Germany or, you know, India, they need energy as but one example of inputs they need. And what did Germany do previously? Well, they built the Nord Stream and they had no problem buying oil and gas from Putin.

[Leo Laporte]

Russia. Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

India, when all these trade wars and sanctions happen, they were like, we'll buy that. We're an independent sovereign country. That's cheap. We need it. And so you might be driving the eu. Yeah. Into the arms of Putin and into the arms of China, because Africa into.

[Leo Laporte]

China, South America to China.

[Jason Calacanis]

Exactly. Miraculously, we figured out a way to have people pick Xi Jinping and Putin. These are really bad hombres. These are bad actors and dictators in the world. And we're going to drive people, democracies and our partners to partner with them.

[Leo Laporte]

It's really about soft power. We've had this sort of parody in soft power, the Chinese Belt and Road initiative versus our USAID efforts. But if we withdraw unilaterally from that kind of soft power, that leaves a vacuum which will be filled.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, I mean, yeah, it's. And also people are going to do what's in the best interest of their citizens. So if you're Canada and you believe the US And Trump and the administration are not good actors, and you need energy or you need cars or you need medicine or whatever, you need employees, you know, citizens to import into your country to maintain growth, that's what's going to happen. And so, yeah, I think that is. That should be definitely a major concern people have.

[Alex Wilhelm]

It should be. And also, I want to say that I read a lot of the subreddits for different nations and national blocks that focus on kind of like Leo. We still can't swear on Twitter, right?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, please don't. Although if you do, I have. I have buttons.

[Alex Wilhelm]

No, it's okay. I'll spell that out.

[Jason Calacanis]

Swear.

[Leo Laporte]

And I will. I will just press a button. Okay.

[Alex Wilhelm]

I'm just. I'm just trying to save the editing team time. Anyways. I read a lot of shit posting subreddits for these groups. And it is amazing how mad the Canadians are with the United States.

[Leo Laporte]

I am not. Yeah, I. I made a joke a few weeks ago about the 51st state, and I got a lot of irate email.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Not. Not popular.

[Leo Laporte]

And also, and believe me, I love Canada. I've spent time there. I've worked there. I am by descent French Canadian. I had made. Made. No, I had no interest in offending Canada. I love Canada. I think it's a sad state of affairs when we. Our natural partner in the world, we turn against them. And Mexico too, frankly. I want to take a break. We got to take a break. I do want to come back because one of the things I've been reading, and I'm curious if you guys have read it. I'm very interested in the position Alex Karp is taking in his new book, the Technological Republic. He, of course, the founder and CEO of Palantir. And I was prepared to really hate him and this book. And I found it very persuasive. And he does, in fact, talk about hard power, soft power, and says this 21st century is going to be not the century of kinetic war as it has been, but the century of software. And that software is going to be the dominant force in the world politics. So I want to talk about that in a little bit and give you a chance to think about it. It's really nice to see you again, Jason. A lot of people said Calacanis, but Jason and I have always been friends off and on, you know, and bumps in the road. I really appreciate you as a human.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

And appreciate having you on whether we Agree politically or not is completely secondary to it. So I'm just glad to see you again.

[Jason Calacanis]

Good to be here.

[Leo Laporte]

And if I had, I wish to hell I had an audible ad for you.

[Jason Calacanis]

Oh, Audible. Well, what do you got? We got a LinkedIn.

[Leo Laporte]

Nothing.

[Jason Calacanis]

What do you want?

[Leo Laporte]

Nothing. Nothing you want to get into? Are you a LinkedIn? You like, want to go all out on LinkedIn these days?

[Jason Calacanis]

I love LinkedIn because I don't know if you're streaming live.

[Leo Laporte]

Does he not sound every once in a while like Christopher Walken? I love Link. You do a good walkin'I.

[Jason Calacanis]

Just built an incredible profile at LinkedIn. I'm getting so many giants.

[Leo Laporte]

Somebody asked Walken why he talks like that.

[Alex Wilhelm]

He's.

[Leo Laporte]

He says everybody talks like that where I'm from. And you're kind of from a nearby area.

[Jason Calacanis]

English. Talking English. It's a great language. Wow.

[Leo Laporte]

Every once in a while a little house comes out of Jason that says, oh, they saw walking in there.

[Jason Calacanis]

Are you.

[Leo Laporte]

What part of New York are you from?

[Jason Calacanis]

I'm from Brooklyn, specifically Bay Ridge, which is the last exit on the R train. Like, okay, I am from the uncool part of Brooklyn and I when I left Brooklyn, it became cool. So it's cool now. It's cool now. I just. So we're clear, I left Brooklyn became cool. Well, I know exactly correlated.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know if they're related, but yeah, no, it's great to have you on. And of course, Alex Wilhelm, my dear friend who lives in my childhood home. Did you know that Jason, by the.

[Jason Calacanis]

Way, he literally lives in your childhood home or town?

[Leo Laporte]

It's the world's weirdest home house building that I grew up in.

[Jason Calacanis]

No. Yep.

[Alex Wilhelm]

I sleep in Leo's parents bedroom.

[Jason Calacanis]

Are you kidding me? What are the chances of that?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, it was one of the chances of our discovering it. It was just a weird. His at the time fiance Liza was visiting and I grew up in Providence. She lives in Providence. I said, oh, that's cool. Where? She told me the street. I said, oh, I used to live on that street. Where?

[Jason Calacanis]

What?

[Leo Laporte]

And she told me the address. I said, that's my house.

[Jason Calacanis]

So if you go to the backyard and you go.

[Leo Laporte]

Alex is in my backyard.

[Jason Calacanis]

Just go to the fourth floorboard. Open that.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, there's stuff in there.

[Jason Calacanis]

Is Leo's gold bullion?

[Leo Laporte]

That's right. He stored it my bitcoin in the backyard.

[Alex Wilhelm]

No, it's better than that. Leo's dad planted a tree.

[Leo Laporte]

There is a. We planted a pin oak. It was A little. It was a pin oak, aptly named because it was about this thick. When was that? That must have been 1969. 70. It is now 55 years old. And it is a big oak, isn't it?

[Alex Wilhelm]

Yes, it's large.

[Jason Calacanis]

Well, I mean, we could literally do the chances of this. Like, there are how many single family homes in the. In the United States?

[Leo Laporte]

It's pretty small.

[Jason Calacanis]

There's got to be 75 million freestanding single family homes, so.

[Leo Laporte]

And yeah, sorry, this is not an interview for a tech job. Don't worry, you don't have to do the math.

[Jason Calacanis]

How many ping pong balls can fit in the pool?

[Leo Laporte]

Do you ask? To factor in how many different hosts we have on the show too, Right. There's a large. That's been like the birthday paradox because. Yeah, yeah, a lot of hosts.

[Jason Calacanis]

The chance.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm pretty sure Jason does not live in a home I've ever lived. In fact, I know it.

[Jason Calacanis]

Let me. Let me catalog my home.

[Leo Laporte]

When did you move to Austin?

[Jason Calacanis]

I moved to Austin last year. Yeah. And you like it? I love it. I mean, I've always loved this town.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, it's a great town.

[Jason Calacanis]

It's a great town. And it reminds me a lot of California when I moved here. 20. When I moved to California, like 25 years ago or 23 years ago.

[Leo Laporte]

I love Austin.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, it's got that pioneering spirit. And I live on a horse ranch, you know, over 30 acres in the hill country. And do you play polo? No, I mean, it's. This is like a literal horse ranch. Like, not like an elite one. Like, oh, but I don't have horses yet. But the girls are taking horseback riding, so three daughters.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's good. Yeah, that's good.

[Jason Calacanis]

There's like, the sense of space is very weird. You know, everybody's like, oh my God, it's getting so crowded. They go, yeehaw.

[Leo Laporte]

I'll wear you. I'll wear the hat. I'm all hat, no horses.

[Jason Calacanis]

But getting from Petaluma to San Francisco is an hour, right? Solid hour. Yeah. And, you know, getting from the hill country to downtown Austin is roughly 20 miles, 30 minutes.

[Leo Laporte]

So there's great barbecue on the way. I might.

[Jason Calacanis]

I live near the Salt Lick. Salt Lake. And oh my Lord, that bison rib and that. That's incredible.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I mean, and I have good impulse control now. Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

You wouldn't believe the number of people moving here. Like, it's always been like 3% growth here, but it's growing faster and they let people build, so compared To San Francisco. Housing prices have gone down two years in a row. It's the third year they're going down. If you want to own a home and you come here, it's pretty amazing how affordable it is. And so I think it's the future of startups. All these young startups I invest in, they all want to move here because, you know, they can actually buy a start a home for 250k, you know, or an apartment. And. And the cost of living is half or a third of what it is in the Bay Area.

[Leo Laporte]

And there's no state income tax, which I can tell you right about now I would like to not have a statement.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Oh, I mean, I did not talk about taxes. I'm still.

[Jason Calacanis]

Well, it will add up. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I am going to take a little break at some point. I wouldn't mind talking. There was a really interesting article about the secondary effects of Ozempic and semi glutides. Have you talked about that on all in? It's a really interesting subject.

[Jason Calacanis]

It is because people with alcohol or gambling, a lot of these dependencies, they're finding impulse control. Impulse control, yeah. That's wild.

[Leo Laporte]

It's going to change our economy.

[Alex Wilhelm]

However, AA is going to have to rebrand because it's just going to become like a dispensary for like GLP1s.

[Jason Calacanis]

Great.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Unfortunately, I think I probably can't get on it because my doctor will say you're too old to take that stuff. Nonsense, nonsense, nonsense. All right, we are not going to do an ad for Ozempic right now. Our show today, brought to you by Drata. You may know this company. It's actually a solution that a lot of your startups should probably be finding out about. If you're leading risk and compliance at your company, you are wearing a few hats. That is not easy. Managing security risks, responding to compliance regulations and demands, and of course these days, budget constraints, all while trying not to be seen as the roadblock that's slowing the business down. But GRC is a lot more than just checking boxes. GRC actually can be a revenue driver that builds trust, accelerates deals and of course strengthens security. That's why modern GRC leaders turn to Drata, a trust management platform that automates tedious tasks so you can focus on reducing risk, proving compliance and scaling your program. With Drata, you can automate security questionnaires, you can automate evidence collection. That's a huge boon. And compliance tracking, you'll stay audit ready with real time monitoring. And you're going to love simplifying security reviews with Drata's trust center. It's just so slick. And the AI powered questionnaire assistance. You'll breeze through those questionnaires instead of spending hours proving trusts. Build it faster with Drata. If you're ready, ready to modernize your GRC program, go to Drata D R A T A.com weekintech drata.com weekintech w e e K I N T E C H just if you would use that URL. That way they know you. They know you sell it.

[Jason Calacanis]

Absolutely. And you know what? If you use these services and you get SOC 2 compliance, you get your GDPR, all that stuff.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Jason Calacanis]

Then you can get the Lighthouse customers, many of the top customers you want to get as a startup. You will not land them if you don't have this. So it does become a blocker for startups, especially when they get to like year two or three. They got to get this dialed in.

[Leo Laporte]

Gotta solve it. It's a chore.

[Jason Calacanis]

It's a chore. And you know, if you want help with your chores, you should go to.

[Leo Laporte]

Drata.Com Jason, you really are so good at this. You don't have to do it, but you're so good at it. Thank you.

[Jason Calacanis]

I love reading ads. I also think it's great that people support independent media like the Suican tech.

[Leo Laporte]

I agree. I played it before the show began. Maybe we could drop it in at the end. Actually, Benito put it in at the end as like a blooper at the end.

[Jason Calacanis]

Stinger. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

An amazing support job by Jason Calacanis for the audible ad. There's actually quite a few of them. You were really back in the day, you were really good. You would just sing its praises.

[Jason Calacanis]

Love 1.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Can I throw in one little thing here about Drata? Jason, Guess what is a Twist 500 company?

[Jason Calacanis]

Oh, are they a Twist 500 company?

[Alex Wilhelm]

They are.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know what that means, but it sounds like a good thing.

[Jason Calacanis]

We're cataloging the 500 most valuable interesting private companies in the little index for us to talk about the business of startups. And so they made the list. It's pretty hard.

[Alex Wilhelm]

I'm proud of myself that I knew that Leo was going to talk about them so I could get an extra plug.

[Leo Laporte]

You put them in?

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm just curious what. I have a few things, a few sound effects from you. I think I have even one that's even more effusive about. Yeah. I think you actually that's what you sounded like. Oh, Audible.

[Alex Wilhelm]

I can't swear, but you guys can do that on air.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah. All right, well, we'll, we'll save that.

[Jason Calacanis]

For, save it for the, for the Stinger reason.

[Leo Laporte]

Stinger.

[Jason Calacanis]

Finish the show, folks.

[Leo Laporte]

So have either of you read the Technological Republic?

[Jason Calacanis]

I haven't read it, but I know of what he speaks. And you know, Palantir is a very, he's a very interesting CEO. Palantir is a very interesting company. We've talked a lot about how Palantir became a meme stock and their valuation. The company people don't know this. At one point, their price to sales ratio, the amount of revenue they make to their sales. What did it hit, Alex, like 60, 70, 80 at one point.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Oh, no, it was higher than that. I'll pull it up even higher.

[Jason Calacanis]

Oh my God. I mean, it's a real company with real growth.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, it made Alex Karp a billionaire for sure.

[Jason Calacanis]

Absolutely.

[Leo Laporte]

Funded, financed by Peter Thiel. A lot of people don't like the idea of AI in defense, and that's what Palantir does. Although in the book Karp talks about how Palantir AI was used to predict the placement of IEDs during the war. I guess it was in Afghanistan, one of the, probably the single most dangerous element of the war for American troops and save lives. His position in the book, and I think it's really, you know, I'm going to try to get, get them on one of our intelligent machine show because I really want to talk about it. His position in the book is that America in the 20th century benefited from a partnership between Silicon Valley and government for things like the Internet, NASA, of course, the Manhattan Project, where engineering talent was not unwilling to work with the government in our national interest. But that unfortunately, what's happened in the 21st century is that companies have kind of embraced the free market to the degree that the same engineering talent is now creating better ways to advertise, to surveil, to share silly videos and is not contributing to the overall well being of the country. And that it's time for us to really sit back and think. And this is, by the way, obviously this is his belief when he founded Palantir, because that's what Palantir is all about.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And he thinks that Silicon Valley needs to readjust its values, that we need to start, that it's okay to say we want to protect America, we want to protect American values. And he says, he quotes economist Thomas Schelling who says, you know, diplomacy starts at the barrel of a gun, that you can only be diplomatic through military strength. But military strength in the 21st century is not going to be about kinetic war. It's not going to be who has the biggest gun or the stealthiest submarine. It's going to be software bit driven. It's going to be AI based.

[Jason Calacanis]

Absolutely.

[Leo Laporte]

I thought it was a very, it's a very interesting thesis.

[Jason Calacanis]

I don't know when that. I think it was really at Google that we saw for the first time a group of people, you know, and their employees are encouraged to bring their whole self to work. And if your whole self is, you're a pacifist and you don't want to work on weapons technology, you know, that's completely understandable. And you're right. And so, you know, everybody gets to make those individual decisions here in America. That's one of the great things about our democracy. And if you want to make weapons technology, if you feel patriotic and that's your duty, great. I'm of the belief that if you're going to benefit from capitalism and democracy, you should be willing to defend it. It's not like anybody's being drafted here to go work on the front lines. But I do think it's important because if you look at Russia's invasion of Ukraine and that battle, it's largely been drones and information satellites, Starlink, all these things are playing a very prominent role. And we really need to upgrade our capabilities in that regard. When we see the next actual, you know, when Americans go to war, we're going to really going to be looking at this going, yeah, we need some robotic dogs with AK47s and military weapons on them. We're going to need drone technology that can counter these drones and God forbid, terrorism here in the United States. The next terrorist attack. I don't remember the New Jersey drone phenomenon that occurred that we still haven't gotten great answers.

[Leo Laporte]

I think we've decided, I think every administration, even the Biden administration, said it's consumer drones, it's aircraft, it's nothing you should be worried about.

[Alex Wilhelm]

And that made everyone stop worrying.

[Jason Calacanis]

Well, I mean, who knows?

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, are people still worried about New Jersey drones? It seems to have left.

[Jason Calacanis]

Now, if it was right, if those were, let's say, Russian or Chinese drones or American drones doing some sort of surveillance, like the actual thing the government would say is, oh, don't worry about it, it's conspiracy drones.

[Leo Laporte]

No, that's true. I don't want to conspiracy. The conspiracy. That's always defensive conspiracy theories. Well, that's exactly what you'd expect them to say so. I don't want to delve into that. Although Karp does in the book mention that the Chinese have created drone swarms that can be used to hunt.

[Jason Calacanis]

That's my point.

[Leo Laporte]

Soldiers in forests, in very difficult areas, completely autonomously. The Schelling quote that he has in the book is this. The power to hurt is bargaining power to exploit. It is diplomacy. Vicious diplomacy, but diplomacy. And you talk about Google. Yeah, The Google engineering team signed a petition saying, we don't want to work. We will not work on Project Maven, which was a Defense Department project to make drone imagery more useful, not to kill people necessarily. It wasn't autonomous anything. It was about analyzing drone imagery. And Google backed down. Microsoft's done something similar. His point is that maybe we shouldn't be so quick to abandon defense of this country. And I'm a pacifist. I do believe that soft power, economic power, cultural hegemony, all of these things can promote peace. But at the same time, if you have a Putin who wants to take Ukraine back or Xi Jinping who wants to take Taiwan back, you probably ought to have some hard power as well. Yes.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Yeah, no, I think that's dead on, Leo. I also would say that it seems that the Pax Americana has come to an end. And I do think that the current administration is moving us towards a multipolar world versus a one superpower world, which I do think is going to open up more shooting conflicts around the world, be it people with guns or drones or Jason's robot dogs with AKs. Whatever it is, I don't think we can afford right now to back off of defensive work, as we might call it. And the thing about the examples of Google and Microsoft and Project Maven and going over these relatively important historical moments is I don't think they matter, because startups, smaller companies, are going hell to the bells to build this stuff. We're talking to companies on twist.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, interesting.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Around.

[Leo Laporte]

So this message has been received, in other words.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Oh, oh, received, funded, accelerated, bought into.

[Leo Laporte]

And certainly Karp and Thiel have made a lot of money on Palantir, so, you know, there is a model.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Can I confess something here on the show? I've read Palantir's website, I've read their earnings. I've had AI summaries. I have tried to figure out what the hell they.

[Leo Laporte]

No one knows what they do. No, I'm with you. I'm with you. In fact, I'm glad to hear you say that. It's fairly opaque. They're not and probably for good reason.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Yeah. I don't try not to fear the unknown, but I do think that the argument about if American technology companies will participate in defense has been answered with a yes by the market. And some of my friends on the left, I'll say, are going to make a lot of noise about it. And I think that's a good note to have in the conversation in the broader symphony. But it's certainly not the leading melodic line. Currently we're making guns like Jason we had.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that's what I'm. The reason I brought that up is should we worry about being able to make three submarines instead of two? Maybe submarines aren't what we need to be focusing on right now.

[Alex Wilhelm]

I think we are moving away from essentially what I would call the aircraft carrier. Like it used to be a mark of national pride to be able to field an aircraft carrier. Very few nations could do it. Russia's keep lighting on fire. China has two. One they bought from scrap. I think we have like seven. Right. And that was this big point of pride. But do you really want an aircraft carrier if it's going to be a drone based forest war? Well, maybe, but certainly it won't be as impactful as it was back in like World War II. So I think that it's probably more important today that we're building cheaper UAVs, cheaper underwater UAVs, drone jamming technology and so forth, then building 30 submarines as opposed to three. Though I do think three is still too few even given that context.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, we, we haven't completely abandoned kinetic war, obviously.

[Alex Wilhelm]

No, I mean, we got tanks running all across Ukraine right now because we're fighting over, you know, essentially warm water ports and grain. I mean, like those are.

[Leo Laporte]

But Ukraine's a good example because this has become a lab for drone warfare, UAV warfare, all kinds of new technologies, many of which are software driven.

[Jason Calacanis]

Absolutely. Yeah. And the component parts are a key part of this because, you know, DJI out of China makes a lot of these parts. And what was it Chris Anderson's company that was out in Berkeley was making, you know, roll your own drones. You could, you could buy the rotors, you could buy the, the different components, you know, individually. And the whole drone thing, when we were talking about it here on Twitter 10 years ago, was a hobbyist. Build your own kind of concept.

[Leo Laporte]

And interesting. The outcome, I think it's been said, and I think it's true of Apple's financing of Chinese manufacture because by creating such volume in China, these Manufacturers were able to perfect processes and technologies, things like accelerometers that were later then applied to drone manufacture in China. And that's why all the best drones are made in China. They're not made in the US anymore.

[Jason Calacanis]

Which goes back to tariffs, which goes back to supply chains. And do we want to have one place in the world be able to make those components if that becomes the theater in which future wars are fought? So we obviously need to be able to make drone technology here and the components that are in it or at least have a diversity of places we could get it from.

[Leo Laporte]

So people have brought this up in terms of chip fabs. And of course TSMC and other companies are building fabs in Arizona and the United States. TSMC has not been able to make a fab that can do the 2 nanometer and 3 nanometer EUV process that they do in Taiwan because they can't get the labor to do it. The PhDs who are doing it in Taiwan are getting paid 50, $60,000 a year. You can't get a PhD. And that's why, by the way, they're bringing in Chinese, Taiwanese, I'm sorry, excuse me, Taiwanese PhDs to run those factories because you can't get American PhDs to work for those prices. And I suspect in, in the long run, they're not going to get the Taiwanese PhDs to work for those prices either in the United States.

[Alex Wilhelm]

It's pretty cool to live in the United States where there's tons of room.

[Leo Laporte]

Maybe they're happy. Yeah, maybe they're happy. Yeah. But the point is, the long term point is it's difficult for us to duplicate these manufacturing capabilities in the United States.

[Jason Calacanis]

For it's not impossible. You know, if you've ever been into, you know, one of Elon's factories, and I've been to, you know, most of them here in the U.S. you know, in Nevada, the battery one, and then you, the gigafactory here in Texas. You know, independent of how you feel about his politics, he is probably one of the top three or four most knowledgeable factory builders in the world today. And things can be built here. If you look at your Model Y being built here, it is a phenomenal vehicle. It's the best selling vehicle, I think in the world, or one of them.

[Leo Laporte]

And but it was, it was, yeah, people. But that's not for a technical reason. That's for other reasons.

[Jason Calacanis]

And so, you know, we can build these things here. There has to be the wherewithal. This is why I think long term will be just fine in terms of this multipolar world, entrepreneurship, capitalism, independent again of how you feel about it, or wealth polarization and all these values. Solid issues. The reason we'll beat China, the reason we're beating Russia is because of entrepreneurship. Because people in this country have an incentive and a drive to build new companies. And what does Xi Jinping do or Putin or any dictator or despot? They will get jealous of entrepreneurs and send Jack Ma to go take painting lessons or, you know, just turn off investment in technology companies in China, which is what they did. We're going to win, I think ultimately because of that entrepreneurial spirit. We have to celebrate it while doing things that make the country feel fair to everybody. This is why I'm a huge fan of providing healthcare to everybody in the country, which is, by the way, also.

[Leo Laporte]

Very good for these startups because that's a massive cost. It's a big cost for us.

[Jason Calacanis]

It's a huge cost. And then it also creates. I don't know if you've experienced this where you'll have a team member who can't leave jobs.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's bad for the workers. Exactly.

[Jason Calacanis]

It's really.

[Leo Laporte]

They're locked in.

[Jason Calacanis]

They're locked in. And so, you know. Oh, Alex technically works for me, but he's got a substack which he can go subscribe to. So he's kind of independent and he. And he's got a lot of options. But imagine a situation where, you know, we weren't getting along or something and he just, he's not enjoying his job, but he's got to stay there.

[Leo Laporte]

Stop. Yeah, sorry, Alex, you're stuck.

[Alex Wilhelm]

It's good. My wife has amazing healthcare, so anytime I want.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's right. Nevermind, I'm out. No. You know Rene Richie, who was on MacBreak weekly for a long time? Love him. Right. He was working for Imore, a magazine publication which is no longer. So it's a good thing he left. But when he left to go independent, much like you did Alex Wilhelm leaving TechCrunch, he said, I can do it because I'm in Canada and my healthcare is covered. I am free to do this. It's a lot easier to do this. And I agree with you, Jason. I think one of the real strengths, we're seeing it in media anyway, of this country is the ability to go out on your own and create something. And I did it 20 years ago.

[Jason Calacanis]

You were the pioneer.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, yeah, it's a great thing for people. My son's doing it Right now. And it's a great thing for people. I wonder though, do we have the know how to replace these overseas factories or you think we can?

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, we can build these things? We can. We just need to have the will. And also regulations are the big issue. When you talk to folks from TSMC or, you know, anybody trying to build something here, they will point you to regulations. And when Elon was at the All In Summit last year, I asked him, you know, I had had conversations with him about this previously. Where would you be at with building the Gigafactory, which is in Texas, if you were trying to build it in California, which is where he originally tried to build it? He said I would still be in environmental review, in protests, et cetera. And then he built it here in Austin literally in like 18 months. If you put too much regulation around entrepreneurs, if you slow them down too much, then we will lose. One of the great features of the United States is that we have 50 states in competition with each other. That's actually a great feature. It turns out now you can pick as an entrepreneur, as a business leader, or as a citizen, you know, which regime you want to work under. If you live in Texas, your neighbor can build a cafe next door to you. Now if you live in Petaluma or San Francisco, your neighbor can't build a shed or an ADU without having like all this red tape. And they've had to literally make laws.

[Leo Laporte]

There's a middle ground though. I mean, and I've walked around in some countries where the building laws are somewhat lax and they collapse, literally, the buildings fall down. Look what happened to Myanmar. I mean, tragic. So there is a middle ground. Regulations aren't inherently bad. I agree. You can overregulate.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Yeah, Leo, I'll put it this way. I lived in San Francisco for a very long time and I lived in a rent controlled apartment. So I have lived the, the, the lefty west coast dream of. It's a problem, isn't it, in a rent controlled apartment? And let me tell you so here, here I, I still view myself as a California living in Rhode island to some degree. But I gotta say, I have been so incredibly impressed by watching Austin's real estate prices and rental prices drop like that. It is such a clarion call to stop beating ourselves in the head with a shovel and build some more stuff and get rid of some of these rules that are done usually in good faith, but have added up to an absolute level of friction that makes it impossible to live and thrive.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that would be an argument though for electing a non medieval governor and attorney general. I would not want to be a woman in Texas at this point.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Yeah, I just agree with that. Where is the pro build Democrats? Where the frick are they?

[Jason Calacanis]

Ezra Klein's big tour right now with his book is like, hey, we did this to ourselves in California. Look at the high speed rail. You know, I was just in Japan skiing, which I try to do every year or two and they're building a high speed rail to get to Niseko and you know the ski resorts there in Hokkaido.

[Leo Laporte]

What happened in California? Why, why is the high speed rail.

[Jason Calacanis]

So over budget and corruption and regulations. Yeah, that's it.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Grift, corruption, regulations.

[Jason Calacanis]

How's it doing?

[Leo Laporte]

We don't have a monopoly on corruption in California. I don't believe.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, it's just, it's pretty acute, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

You live in Rhode Island, Alex.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Yeah, I'm like, we have like a living legend.

[Leo Laporte]

The land of Buddy Cianci. You can't tell me my, my in.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Laws live near Buddy Cianci's old house. I can't go home from their house from dinner without driving by it.

[Jason Calacanis]

There's a checks on your bagels you're not even aware of.

[Alex Wilhelm]

I mean my, my parents when they lived here in the 70s described a very different state than the one that we live in. Just before we get back to this important conversation, I do want to say that, that we now have futures data for early stock market trading for tomorrow.

[Jason Calacanis]

I'm going to guess down 4%.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Give me a Dow Jones point number, Jason.

[Jason Calacanis]

Dow Jones, I'm going to say 2% down. What is the Dow Jones?

[Alex Wilhelm]

I've led you astray. The Dow Jones is off 4% or 1531 points.

[Jason Calacanis]

I said the 4 was my first.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Guess and then I know went down to two.

[Jason Calacanis]

I thought you were going to see.

[Leo Laporte]

So that's the market saying. Yeah, this, whether whatever Trump does this week, it doesn't matter.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Well no, it could, I mean like.

[Leo Laporte]

It could come back if Trump turns it around.

[Alex Wilhelm]

You don't get trust back, you don't get your friends.

[Leo Laporte]

That's the problem.

[Alex Wilhelm]

But you could stop.

[Leo Laporte]

Look, if I'm a manufacturing CEO and I have to get steel from Canada or I have to buy hardwood, I am not going to count on anything, right?

[Jason Calacanis]

No, this is the issue. You brought it up earlier when you were lamenting what happened during COVID I had the same thing happen. Like you, you know, this week in startups was sold out for a decade and then all of A sudden we had three or four cancellations or postponements. And I was like, what's happening here? This is crazy. And if you can't plan for the future and you have uncertainty, what businesses do is they pause. Yeah, they just pause. And that's what's going to happen. Right now everybody's on pause. Which means, should I build a factory? Okay, yeah. If it's going to be tariffs, I should start making Nikes in America or somewhere closer that has better agreements. But firing up a factory is not like ordering doordash. It's a little more complex than that.

[Leo Laporte]

Takes billions to build a fab and a decade. And you can't start that project unless you think there's a market for it at the other end. Look what happened to Intel. Right.

[Jason Calacanis]

My belief is this is all going to get washed out. I would say the pain threshold is when you get past 20%, which we've all experienced multiple times, is correction territory. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

So that's such an anodyne word for such a bad thing. It's just a correction.

[Alex Wilhelm]

10% is a correction. 20% is a bear market. 30% is when you close your laptop.

[Leo Laporte]

What's a crash?

[Jason Calacanis]

I don't think there's a number associated. Really interesting. Alex and I were talking about this last week on the pod.

[Leo Laporte]

The 1929 great market crash was 12.8%.

[Alex Wilhelm]

I think think that's 1 8th. That's one in every.

[Jason Calacanis]

I think. Yeah, it, it, that was one day, you know, you.

[Leo Laporte]

One day that's October 29th.

[Jason Calacanis]

You have to put together because I think the following Monday was even worse.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

So even. And then when we had Black Friday, I think the Monday, Tuesday were worse. So you have to put like a, a five day together. If this gets to like 30%, 40%, it's going to become very acute very, very, very quickly. And I think it's already happened. I think they're going to just pile together 10 wins tomorrow and trot them out one after the other. Vietnam, India, Singapore, whatever it is. And then the, the final boss will be China. And we're going to do some great reconciliation with China that will include tick tock1.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's get to tick tock. Actually, I want to take a break and we'll get to tick Tock and knock. I am knocking on wood. I hope, Jason, that you are right because the alternative is not good. You're watching. We got a little political. I guess we're a little. We're not. We're talking. I think we're talking about facts as opposed to politics or opinion or. We're certainly not ad hominem at this point and I want us to keep it that way. And I think that that's valuable. And we've avoided this topic, as you pointed out in your texts to me, Jason, for a long time. But these tariffs absolutely impact every product you're buying, including all the technology you're buying and so forth.

[Jason Calacanis]

No way to avoid it.

[Leo Laporte]

Very interested in the outcome. Now. One thing I do know about advertising, that we've always said this to our advertisers. The time you should advertise is when the times are tough. That is when things. That's when opportunity exists. Right. Especially for the kind of advertisers we have who are almost all security companies. I'll give you an example. This is a. Our sponsor for this segment of the show, the Thin Canary. And I have my Thingst Canary right here. This is such a cool product. This. It's a. It looks like it's about here. I put it next to my iPhone. It's about the size of an I. You know, an external hard drive, plugs into the wall, plugs into the Ethernet. This thing is a honeypot. Oh my God. Is this a useful tool? Anybody who has perimeter defenses protecting your company needs to think about what happens if somebody penetrates them. And you might say it'll never happen, except it's happening again and again and again. Breaches are multiplying upon breaches. It's just one phishing email and boom, it's over. So how do you know if a bad guy is inside your network or a malicious insider is wandering around your network looking at things, exfiltrating embarrassing emails or customer information. The best way is this. The Thinks Canary. It's a honey pot that's actually easy to deploy. In fact, my Things Canary right now I think is a Windows server. But you, I could change this kind of on a day to day basis. It's really kind of fun. Things Canary sits on your network. You might have one, you might have a dozen. Depends on, you know, your size of your business. It also can create, this is actually really cool. It can also create files, lore files, trip files that will sit around on your network looking like PDFs or Excel spreadsheets or Word documents. Might have a. I don't think I'm giving anything away. You guys aren't going to try to break into my network, right? Well, if somebody does, I have an Excel spreadsheet called Employee Information Xl. If that is ever touched, I'm going to immediately get an alert. Just no false alerts, just the alerts that matter. Whether it's a fake internal SSH server, in this case, for a long time was a Synology nas. And by the way, when they're. It can be a SCADA device. When they're impersonating a hardware device, the Mac address is correct. The login looks like the real thing. It is completely, completely invisible to a bad guy. But when they attack it, you're going to get an alert. Just the alerts that matter. I'll show you Canary. Right here. It's a Windows Server 2019 Office file share. Here, I'll put this up on the screen.

[Jason Calacanis]

Genius.

[Leo Laporte]

Is this brilliant. I can make it be IIS. I can have a CentOS server, Mac OS X file share, Canon Image Runner. I don't even know what that is. I can make it a Hirschman R S20 industrial switch, for crying out loud. It'll have the correct Mac address. This Windows server looks like an HP server. That's why it has that Mac address. And it just sits there. I can have it say, notify me if there's a port scan. I can turn on whatever services I want. You can make it a Christmas tree and turn them all on, or you could just turn on a few little services. Maybe we'll turn on a web server and an SSH server. I find as soon as I put an SSH server out in the public, it gets it immediately. So I'm going to save. Oops. Let's save those changes down here. And now I have, while doing a commercial, ladies and gentlemen, reconfigured my things. Canary. This is such a cool product. I've also created Canary Tokens. All you do is you choose a profile for your Canary. And as you can see, it's easy enough. You could change it anytime you want, register it with the hosted console. That's what I'm in right now. And it does all the monitoring and notifications. You can be notified any way you want. Text message, email, Slack. They support webhooks. They have an API syslog. So you set it up. Then you wait. You put your hands behind your head and you wait. Your chances are like on this. You're never going to hear anything because you're secure. But as soon as somebody breaches your network or a malicious insider starts looking around, they will make themselves known by accessing the thingst Canary. It doesn't look vulnerable, it looks valuable. Right? It is an incredible device. Everybody needs this. It is part of your Layered security strategy. On average, companies who are breached don't know for 91 days. That's 91 days a bad guy can wander around, do all sorts of damage. You need this Canary Tool Twit. I'll give you a pricing example. For 7,500 bucks a year, you'd get five of them. Sprinkle them around, as many tokens, Canary tokens as you want. You get your own hosted console, you get upgrades, you get support, you get maintenance. And by the way, if you use the offer code TWIT in the how'd you hear about us? Box, you're gonna get 10% off the price for life. There's one other data point I know sometimes people hear this and they go, I don't know, there's no risk. You can always return your things to canaries within their two month money back guarantee window. Two months and you'll get a full refund. So there is zero risk. I should point out that we have been doing these ads for eight years now, and all this time that refund has never once been claimed. Because once people get it and they see it and they realize what it can do, you're going to always want to have one more than one visit. Canary Tools twit. Don't forget the offer code TWIT in the how did you hear about us? Box. Canary Tools twit.

[Jason Calacanis]

I just bookmarked that Canary Twit.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh yeah. If you have a net, you got.

[Jason Calacanis]

To put this on.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you.

[Jason Calacanis]

What a genius idea. Well, no, I mean, think about it. About the cost of a breach at your company would be a lot more so an ounce of prevention here.

[Leo Laporte]

Absolutely. On security. Now, we were talking a couple of weeks ago, company did all the right things. They had good perimeter defenses. They even had defenses internally making sure that a bad guy couldn't install malware on anything. But they missed one thing. There was a camera in the operation, a security camera that was running Linux. Oh, no, the bad guys. There was enough CPU and enough memory on that thing to put malware on the camera.

[Jason Calacanis]

Worse.

[Leo Laporte]

And ransomware, the whole thing. They encrypted all the data. It's unbelievable.

[Jason Calacanis]

It happened to me one time. Somebody got on a vara. Well, yeah, A couple of companies ago, somebody got into the network server with like the storage array. And I'm like, what? And they, you know, like they encrypt it. Then they want a ransom, really smart backup. But I mean, they're really smart and they're looking for weakness. And this, you know, will let you Know if they're. If they've got in, which is great.

[Leo Laporte]

Jason, I'm still not going to pay you to do any more than I'm already paying you, which, as you pointed out last time, is nothing. So.

[Jason Calacanis]

Well, you doubled my rate. My weekly appearance fee is 0.$0, so I doubled it.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Years. I haven't been getting paid to come on Twitter.

[Jason Calacanis]

No, I actually negotiated with Canary a, a, a affiliate deal now. So now I also get zero.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, great. Use Jason's special link. Twit slash, jc Allin, do you have ads on All In?

[Jason Calacanis]

This famously no Ads on All In, I thought. I've never heard, like, literally leaving tens of millions of dollars a year. And. And all these sponsors want to do it. I'm begging my co hosts to do it. They don't care because everybody's.

[Leo Laporte]

They're all wealthy. It's the billionaire.

[Jason Calacanis]

We've all done very well.

[Leo Laporte]

And Jason, just a little feedback. The only negative when I listen to it, the only negative when we went down to Gstaad. I've got to tell you, the best place to go in Gstad to get your. It kind of is a little bit like rich guy show, so. And there he is with his cigar.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, yeah, see Sean Dvorak back on stage.

[Leo Laporte]

It's the only negative. I mean, what's great about it, you got David Sachs, you got really good people on, and it's a very interesting show. And when you started it, none of them were rich or famous. It's amazing.

[Jason Calacanis]

None of them were famous. They had all come on. I mean, in some ways, Leo, I hate to tell you this, but you taught me so much. And obviously, you know, the name of my show this Week in startups was a tribute to what you did here with this Week in Tech and yourself.

[Leo Laporte]

Which is, by the way, a tribute to Mel Allen. And this Week in Baseball. So this Week in Baseball, if I owned it, I would have kept it, but I couldn't.

[Jason Calacanis]

Well, and here's the great thing, you know that yourself, I think Dave Weiner creating the RSS attachment, and then of course, the Podfather Curry, you know, all these people were inspirations for an entire generation. And if you look at Kevin Rose, myself, Alex, Molly Wood, I mean, you trained all of us on how to do this. You and you did this before podcasts existed. And all in would never have existed if it wasn't for that. And then I don't think President Trump would have been elected if it wasn't for all.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, my God.

[Jason Calacanis]

In many ways, Leo, the dominoes have fallen.

[Leo Laporte]

Is this the blame Leo portion of this?

[Jason Calacanis]

Absolutely. Absolutely. No, I. I mean, people started so.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, Jason, and then you just, you know, went right off a cliff.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Apparently, Leo pushed us off the cliff. So, Leo, how does it feel to have crashed the global economy?

[Jason Calacanis]

Absolutely. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

No tariffs.

[Alex Wilhelm]

These tariffs are actually Leo.

[Jason Calacanis]

Thanks, Leo.

[Alex Wilhelm]

LeBron tomatoes.

[Leo Laporte]

No, all in. And its name implies was a bunch of poker buddies, right?

[Jason Calacanis]

Well, yeah. The origin story is I had had Sacks and Chamath on this week in startups so many times. Chamath was coming out of a CNBC hit and he was like, let's do a podcast together. You know, like, I couldn't. My point across, you know, CNBC goes so quick. It was very frustrating to like, talk about what we're doing at his venture firm. And I was like, sure, come on this week and startups on Fridays. No, no, I want to do a new thing. I'll interview you about your startup investments. You asked me about my series A investments, yada, yada. And I said, okay, great, let's call it all in. I produced it internally for two years and then it became so big that we hired a CEO. Then I begged my partners. We wound up having Sachs and Freeberg on the next episode. Episode. Because we were talking about COVID and we couldn't play poker. We couldn't see each other. So it was like a Covid, baby, basically.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Like a lot of podcasts.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, like a lot of podcasts. Because we had nothing to do. We couldn't see each other. My God, it's so weird to think about those days when we were locked down here in California.

[Leo Laporte]

Or when I was in California five years ago.

[Jason Calacanis]

Was it five years ago?

[Leo Laporte]

March 17th.

[Jason Calacanis]

And we still don't know what happened. I mean, this is so infuriating. I don't want to go down that rabbit hole, but, you know, it's. And then I asked him like, hey, let's do a conference guy. So, like, I don't want to do a conference. Then the conference basically becomes bigger than Ted or, you know, what was the.

[Leo Laporte]

There was an all in conference.

[Jason Calacanis]

We have an all in summit that makes large amounts of money, tens of millions of dollars. Now.

[Leo Laporte]

That's why I don't know about it, because I can't afford it.

[Jason Calacanis]

Well, it's 7, 500 a ticket, but then we do scholarships for the fans. You guys are both invited. I have a allocation of tickets if you want to come.

[Leo Laporte]

And that's a charity case, Jason.

[Alex Wilhelm]

I know, right?

[Jason Calacanis]

No, no, I Said, guess you'll be a VIP guest.

[Leo Laporte]

Do I get a special gray badge?

[Jason Calacanis]

Oh, yeah, you get a gray hair like me. Yeah, you and I case over there, you see. No, no, we'll put you in the VIP with all the other CEOs.

[Leo Laporte]

Anyway, congratulations, because it's really. It's really great to see that success of that. And it is. It's one of the top 10 podcasts in the world now. Yeah, people.

[Alex Wilhelm]

People, when they. When they ask me about my job, you know, co with. With Jason, they often bring up all in. And I'm like, that show has. It is really crossed over, I think, into very strange. The public consciousness in a way that I would not have expected for a show that is that nerdy. And I say that with nothing but love and respect because I dig the nerd stuff. Sorry. Sorry.

[Jason Calacanis]

Well, and I learned my moderation skill in many ways from, you know, my time here on Twitt with Leo and then also McLaughlin Group, which I, you.

[Leo Laporte]

Know, which I copied my whole life. That's all I've ever done is copy John McCall Laughlin.

[Jason Calacanis]

No, you're being.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. Bye bye. Wrong. Loved that show. The first. I did a pilot for CNET when CNET was first starting. I was the third employee and I had Dvorak on Fred Davis, Stuart Alsop and Gina Smith. And it was a copy of the McLaughlin Group.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

And basically I've had the same idea for this 30 years.

[Jason Calacanis]

It's pretty great.

[Leo Laporte]

Never stop. Because I loved that he was a Jesuit. You know, my. My friend Will Hurst was his student. He was a very smart, strong professor of the Pope.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, yeah, they were known. I. I went to a Severian brother high school, Severian High School in Brooklyn, New York, and Bay Ridge. And then I went to Fordham, a Jesuit school.

[Leo Laporte]

My dad went to Regis and for sure.

[Jason Calacanis]

Well, that is the path. If you were a Catholic, if you were. You would want to go to a good Jesuit school. School. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Y.

[Jason Calacanis]

And Regis was a good Catholic school.

[Leo Laporte]

We have a regular Jesuit on the show, as you know, Father Robert, who is right now living in the Vatican where he is. He is kind of. I, you know, really. He won't say this, but he's a special counselor to the. The Popes. He set up the. He got the Pope on Skype and Zoom.

[Alex Wilhelm]

That has to be the most insane job. Like, you're sitting there with like, the Holy Father himself. You know the stories, and you're like, it's crazy. Unmute, Pope, unmute.

[Leo Laporte]

He talks about going down into the catacombs under. Under St. Peter's and there's a table of cardinals sitting around playing DND Dungeon.

[Jason Calacanis]

Really advanced dungeon. It's really. Yes. Rolling a third.

[Leo Laporte]

And they ask him to join the. You know, the Pope comes over to the house on weekends to watch the soccer games. I. Not lately. The Holy Father's not feeling well. But it's a. It's wonderful to be heaven inside. I feel like it's the same with you, Jason. And it's an inside look at the, at the, at the rooms where it happens, you know?

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, absolutely.

[Leo Laporte]

Tick tock.

[Jason Calacanis]

Don't stop.

[Leo Laporte]

Tick tock. You know, honestly, even though my son and I always have to make this disclaimer. Made his bones on TikTok, became a TikTok star, you know, has a cookbook now. He's a restaurant. He's opening on Bleecker Street. Got to get over there in. Next to John's Pizza in Manhattan. Manhattan. But it all started on TikTok for him. Like a lot of people, TikTok got people started. Then in 2017, Trump said, it's a Chinese tool. We're getting rid of it. The Biden administration and Congress passed a ban, a law, a law against TikTok said, sell it by January 19, the day before Inauguration Day, or we will shut you down. Apple and Google went along with it. They took it out of the store. And then Pam Bondi, the attorney attorney general, wrote him a note, said, yeah, don't worry about it. President Trump extended it by 75 days. He's looking for some sort of deal. It looks like Larry Ellison, according to the New York Times, has the inside track with Oracle. The ban ran out Saturday. The 75 days pause ran out. On Saturday, Trump announced a second 75. What happened? Did TikTok stop being an enemy of the people people, or did Jeff. Yes. Make a call to President Trump?

[Alex Wilhelm]

I think Trump realized that TikTok was good for his reelection chances. So he180 on that, much like he180 on crypto. I mean, yeah, this has been his M.O.

[Leo Laporte]

He180S all the time.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah. I mean, it's. He. One of the things he does particularly well is find a trend, insert himself into it, and bring those people into the tent. Something the Democrats should think about.

[Leo Laporte]

No, he's kind of a genius at that. I will give him credit for that. He's.

[Jason Calacanis]

He has a couple. Couple of things he's like. And in this case, Leo, he realized, to Alex's point, there's a lot of young people who Love this. And so. And there's a lot of Gen Xers and in between who love podcasts, there's a lot of people who love crypto. I'm just going to grab each of those constituents one by one and. And figure out what is it that they want. Okay. They want to get rid of Gary Gensler. They want to trade meme coins. Right. I'm in. In. Oh, they want to have Tick Tock and they want to figure out how to do it. Great, I'm in. And. And what he's going to do with Tick Tock. I have some inside information here. It's not a public company, so I can say that is, you know, it's going to get sold. They're negotiating it.

[Leo Laporte]

China has to agree to that. Is that not right?

[Jason Calacanis]

Well, they have to agree to a sale, of course, because they're on the board of the company. If you have a Chinese company, all the data and the control of the company and the fact the company itself belongs to the Chinese government.

[Leo Laporte]

Although because of Project Texas, this American TikTok data has been stored on Oracle servers in Texas for some time now. Right.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Allegedly.

[Jason Calacanis]

Allegedly, yes.

[Leo Laporte]

We don't know what access.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, yeah. So there. There's some of that occurring. What's going to happen is it will either get shut down because of the tariff issues. So these two things are being dovetailed. China's not happy about the tariffs. Obviously Trump is. They will use TikTok as a bit of a cudgel. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Trump says, I'm considering. If China lets us buy TikTok, then I'm considering lowering tariffs. That is the silliest thing I have ever. The most trivial possible reason to lower tariffs.

[Jason Calacanis]

Absolutely. So this is where, like, trying to understand the logic of all this, beyond, Trump likes to be the main character. Trump wants to negotiate a deal. That's his identity. That's what he wants to do. So this is all going to be a grand reconciliation with China, Taiwan, TikTok terrorists, the three.

[Leo Laporte]

That would be interesting if he could strong arm China into making some concessions on Taiwan.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you think that's what's going to happen?

[Jason Calacanis]

I think we're going to go back to. We'll go back to. And I'll let you go after this, Alex.

[Leo Laporte]

Taiwan, Alex, we're so dependent on China.

[Jason Calacanis]

It's going to be back to the one China policy, which was.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. China, it was kind of don't say.

[Jason Calacanis]

Don'T tell, basically exactly what it was. Just like you could be gay in the military, just, you know, don't, you know, don't, don't hit on your supervisor superior. Just keep it low key. Everybody, it's fine. And so that's what's going to happen here. I think they'll work out the small tariff issues over the coming weeks. Stock market comes back and then they will work on the grand reconciliation. But it has to be spun out because it is too much of a dependency in terms of spying on Americans, which they've been caught doing. It's too much of a dependency and it's a law now. And Alex, you were looking into this last week for us. I mean, it's a law. So Trump doesn't get to break the law as we can.

[Leo Laporte]

Wait a minute.

[Jason Calacanis]

But at some point, a habit of.

[Leo Laporte]

Breaking the law, but because nobody can enforce the law and Congress won't enforce it and the courts are being, being ignored. I mean, yes, he doesn't care about the law.

[Alex Wilhelm]

I think Gruber, John Gruber from Darien Fireball actually had the best bit of text about this. I can't improve on it. So I'm just going to read Gruber's point. He says there is no mechanism in law for the President to issue any such extension. What he's saying is what he said last time. He's instructing AG Pam Bondi not to enforce the law and pinky swearing that US Companies that are breaking the law to keep Tick tock available won't be held responsible for it. It's a complete abdication of the law. You cannot just not do things unless it turns out you can. Which is blowing my mind. If I speed, I get a ticket. I know if Trump breaks literally the law that he doesn't previously in favor of, apparently we just go, doesn't matter. What can we do?

[Leo Laporte]

Court can order him to do things. Doesn't matter. Unless they're willing to send military force in. Doesn't matter. Here's the bigger question. Is really TikTok more of a threat, I mean, than Facebook and X.com Chinese propaganda and Russian propaganda all over both sites. This week, Facebook abandoned has implemented its new X.com style community notes in favor of moderation. And if Chinese government wants information about American citizens, they can buy it on the open freaking market because we have no privacy laws in this country. Right? I mean, data brokers will sell my Social Security number to ping the minute he asks.

[Jason Calacanis]

The what about what about ism argument can be made convincingly. And so but it's sticking your finger.

[Leo Laporte]

In the dike when the whole thing has fallen apart.

[Jason Calacanis]

Part, it's, it's totally valid except here in the United States, if Zuckerberg or somebody were to do abusive things, or certainly in the eu, if you were to abuse your data power, there are ramifications, we can argue. If they're speeding tickets and the funds aren't too much.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, not here.

[Jason Calacanis]

Well, and so in the west, broadly, we have control over these companies. We can tighten screws. We can vote for people who want to tighten the screws. The problem with a Chinese company is they can spy on American that they can spy on the kids who live with their parents who are in our government or whose parents are in the Secret Service, the CIA, whatever it is. And so there is a distinct material difference between a Chinese company having access to 100 million phones and Zuckerberg.

[Leo Laporte]

So by the way, Instagram is the beneficiary of this. Right?

[Jason Calacanis]

Obviously, I think Amazon's going to win it. I think I could.

[Leo Laporte]

Amazon. Wait a minute, hold on. Is this your inside scoop? So everybody thought Larry Ellison and Oracle had the inside track years. Amazon putting last minute bid. You think, you think Bezos is going to get it?

[Jason Calacanis]

I, I'll tell you my game theory here, Jassy. Yeah, here. Well, no, no, no, wait a minute, wait a minute.

[Leo Laporte]

Jassy is the CEO who owns Amazon actually.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Who owns Amazon? We do, via our index funds. Just to be.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah. So here, here's why Amazon wins that. This is, I think, the likely 80% scenario. Bezos, as you saw, his fiance and Bezos were at the inauguration. They're getting married. Congratulations.

[Leo Laporte]

They're going to have Princess Di style wedding.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, fantastic. Great. He deserves it. He's done such a great job with Amazon. We all benefit from it.

[Leo Laporte]

Is he kind of dialed out from Amazon now? Does he not really have anything?

[Jason Calacanis]

I think he's enjoying his life and he's got other pursuits. But you know, I wouldn't be surprised if we see him come back like a Steve Jobs type thing at some point when he has, you know, had a great time being Jeff Bezos. But here's why I think he wins. Trump likes to have deep relationships with successful people and he likes to build consensus with them. He's got that with so many people around him from Jeff Yass, that was the major investor in TikTok, etc. And Bezos owns the Washington Post. Bezos has a house, you know, that.

[Leo Laporte]

He, he's been kissing up to Trump, there's no question about that.

[Jason Calacanis]

He's been making some donations and getting involved in politics and aws had a very big contract with the government that got canceled, if you remember. So it would be great for their relationship. It would also make the most sense because it doesn't give Zuckerberg a run of the table. There's really only one independent viable social network outside of the. The. The Meadow collection, which is Twitter X and TikTok. And if TikTok went to Amazon, that would balance the table a bit.

[Leo Laporte]

Amazon.

[Alex Wilhelm]

What about Twitch and Discord? Do those count? And I'm not trying to nitpicker. I'm actually.

[Leo Laporte]

Amazon owns Twitch. Discord is still independent.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, they're too small. We're talking about tens of millions of people and they don't.

[Leo Laporte]

The Chinese government has already said it will not sell the algorithm. That that's.

[Jason Calacanis]

They don't need it. The algo. Yeah, I mean if you were to.

[Leo Laporte]

Look, all you really want is the users.

[Jason Calacanis]

I think at two years ago. Yeah, you need the algorithm. If you look at the progress that X Instagram and basically everybody's making on the algorithm, I think they're within 90% of spitting distance of whatever Tik Tok's doing with the algorithm. I mean, Instagram's been basically ruined by it. I mean, if I open Instagram, it's all bulldogs now in Barbie.

[Leo Laporte]

It's horrible.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah. And I'm like, I came here to see my friends and curate this list and you've. Now I got to go deep into the settings because Zuckerberg loves to bury stuff deep in the settings. But I gotta find somewhere in the settings to go back to what I want, which is my friends. It's giving me every. I'm getting White Lotus actors. I mean, it's brutal. I will say Amazon is the. Is the lead candidate here and if they do get. Get it, that'd be pretty great because.

[Leo Laporte]

What about Larry is Ellison. I mean, he's not gonna be happy if he doesn't get it.

[Jason Calacanis]

I don't think it makes sense for. I mean, if he gets it, great. Then you have an independent company, you know, and I, I don't know if that really balances.

[Leo Laporte]

Doesn't it?

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, I think you would make it an independent spin out. That's the other possibility to just take the thing public. The really interesting thing that's going to happen is we'll have a sovereign wealth fund with at least 25 to 50% of these shares. Shares. That's what Trump is really negotiating. Trump loves the idea. He wants the US government cashing up. He loves the idea of us owning like, let's say this becomes a trillion dollar company, which it could. And the US government owns $250 billion and he can. That's funny money. The government. That would be pretty great for his legacy. I don't know how it's legal. I don't. I've never heard of a government.

[Alex Wilhelm]

The law says you can. We can't do a deal that doesn't involve the transfer of the algorithm.

[Jason Calacanis]

That's just a license. We have a new license. It's called TikTok license. Who wants an algorithm?

[Alex Wilhelm]

Choke on my keyboard.

[Jason Calacanis]

It's a new license to print money. It's called a social media license.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Why do we have Congress? Like what?

[Leo Laporte]

No, no, we don't have Congress. That was your mistake.

[Jason Calacanis]

It'll be back. Here's what you have to do. Put up reasonable candidates and win an election and that's what's going to happen.

[Leo Laporte]

Don't you think? Trump thinks that the clock is ticking. He has till 2020 get this done.

[Jason Calacanis]

He knows it.

[Leo Laporte]

He knows that.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, he knows it.

[Leo Laporte]

I think he tank the economy because that's all people vote, their wallets. That's.

[Jason Calacanis]

It's the economy, stupid. Right?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

James Carville.

[Leo Laporte]

That's your boy, James Carville.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah. He talks like John Cheetah.

[Leo Laporte]

He's getting more and more. He's getting more and more. I don't know what that is just going on there.

[Alex Wilhelm]

I want to make a point.

[Jason Calacanis]

I'm at wits end here with the Republicans and the Democrats, the senior citizens home.

[Alex Wilhelm]

What's going on here? All right, put the cigar down and listen for a second.

[Leo Laporte]

It's not lit, ladies and gentlemen.

[Jason Calacanis]

Not lit yet.

[Alex Wilhelm]

It's his house.

[Leo Laporte]

Is it a Cohiba? It looks like a Cohiba. What do you got there?

[Jason Calacanis]

This is. I have a brand I like. El Rey Dimundo.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh yeah, I've smoked.

[Jason Calacanis]

It's really nice, really nice. They come with a paper wrapper and they do what's called a rectangulare which is a square cigar where they make it in a press box. Very, very.

[Leo Laporte]

I neither smoke nor drink anymore. But when I did smoke cigars, I used to love them. The best cigar I ever had was hand rolled in the window of the somewhere in the Dominican. And the draw was perfect.

[Jason Calacanis]

Smooth, incredible. You can have a cigar once a quarter.

[Leo Laporte]

My kids won't let me and I.

[Jason Calacanis]

Mean you and I go for a little walk and talk. Okay, a little walk.

[Leo Laporte]

The problem, the only problem is you can't stealth smoke a cigar.

[Alex Wilhelm]

No.

[Jason Calacanis]

You come back like a factory.

[Leo Laporte]

You're Gonna smell for days.

[Jason Calacanis]

Days.

[Leo Laporte]

My wife used to make me take my clothes off and leave them on the porch.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yes. Which basically was coming back from any bar in the 80s and 90s. Remember how you would smell after you came back from the bar?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah. That was terrible.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah. Did you have something you wanted to say?

[Jason Calacanis]

Alex had a point.

[Alex Wilhelm]

20 minutes ago. Sovereign Wealth Fund Trump, TikTok. Let's say it's worth $500 billion. Let's be. Let's be generous here. Currently, over the past year, as of March 2025, the national debt has risen by $4.87 billion per day. So that would give us less than two months of equivalent wealth. So to me, the entire idea of sovereign wealth fund, TikTok, et cetera is pretty much a complete waste of time and error. So I know that Jason's right. Trump wants to do it.

[Leo Laporte]

He looks at Saudi Arabia and looks how they throw that money around, and he says, why? Why not us?

[Alex Wilhelm]

Well, because we're not a theocratic monarchy, nor are we not a single source of national.

[Leo Laporte]

So is this the dynamic of twist, is that Jason tells you to look something up.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

You tell him what the law is, and then he says, yeah, but that doesn't matter. Is that the dynamic?

[Jason Calacanis]

I think we're gonna see? These things will pile up, up. Like, this is my prediction. They're starting. Yeah, these things start to pile up, and then like last time, people will be like, oh, it's lawfare. And like, yes, there has been lawfare on both sides, obviously, but then there are, like. Then there's breaking the law, and then there's the fair execution of laws. And I think Trump is once again building up a bunch of resentment and a bunch of problems, and that one or two of these cases will stick. And I think this. This deportation of people without deportation, without due process, which they don't have, but it would be common sense to do as Americans. And then this case where, like, you have to apply the law, there's going to be judges who will stick it to him, and these cases will start to stick, and then we're going to really be in a weird position again.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, you understand, the. The fear. Fear of liberals like me is that Trump will ignore judicial orders.

[Jason Calacanis]

In fact, he's already doing constitutional crisis.

[Leo Laporte]

And that's a constitutional crisis. And there we go. That doesn't end well in any case, in any situation. Bless you, Alex. Let's take a little break. We do have, I think we have a. In our contracts with our sponsors, a no Politics, no sneezing and no sex clause. So, Alex, I'm going to have to throw you off the show now.

[Alex Wilhelm]

I fully understand. I will go in and do this.

[Leo Laporte]

No, no, no, no. I'm kidding. I'm kidding, I'm kidding. Stay right here. We got a little more to talk about. We're not done. We're not done. It's great to have Alex Wilhelm here. His newsletter Must Subscribe Newsletter Cautiousoptimism News Anything with the word optimism. Minute you got me. Because I am not really. I'm kind of. I'm teetering on the, on the brink of despair. So anything that you can do to bring optimism into my life, I'm going to be happy about.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Can I. Can I brag for a second? I have brag. Cautious Optimism is on Substack and they rolled out some new, like, charts for who's doing the best and Cautious optimism is number 60 on the technology rising.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Now in the top 200 of technology substacks by Ralph Avenue.

[Jason Calacanis]

Oh, okay.

[Alex Wilhelm]

It's slow growth, but I'm having a lot of fun, basically. I don't have an editor apart from my friend who takes out the commas. And so I just get to kind of go wild every morning and then I go work with Jason. So it's a nice life.

[Leo Laporte]

I just read something that. What was it? Somebody who had been working at Amazon went to work somewhere else and he said Amazon always took the adverbs out of all my memos. Which was the right thing to do, by the way.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Yeah, it is. But I mean, at 7:30 in the morning when I write in my newsletter, I think that I'm a literary genius and then no one actually agrees with me.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And comma blunder was what my English professor used to call it. Comma blunder. Too many commas, not enough commas.

[Alex Wilhelm]

We need more EM dashes.

[Leo Laporte]

Cautious Optimism. How much does it cost to subscribe?

[Alex Wilhelm]

It's free. Or you can give me about a hundred bucks a year for all of it, but it's about 80% unpaywalled.

[Leo Laporte]

It's really great. I highly recommend it. And I'm not logged in because, by the way, I wish Substack could figure this out. Out. I can never log into Substack because I subscribe to one and then I did because I don't use the same email all the time.

[Jason Calacanis]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

And it doesn't work very well if you have a custom email for everything you subscribe to.

[Jason Calacanis]

That is for us old school people who like to use the plus and sort our email so people don't sell our emails or whatever. Yeah, it's a problem. I have to say, the platform is really advancing over, over at Substack and they should sponsor this program because everybody.

[Leo Laporte]

Who'S turned them down. You know why?

[Jason Calacanis]

Oh, no.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, because some of our hosts think they're Nazis.

[Jason Calacanis]

Oh, stop. You have to get control of the radical folks who are dictating what happens on Twitter. That's not their choice. They're not Nazis. Stop. They just. Because they have.

[Leo Laporte]

They had a bunch of white supremacists the.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yes. So does the Internet.

[Leo Laporte]

So does the Internet.

[Jason Calacanis]

So does Reddit.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, listen, kind of my attitude too. But they were paying the money.

[Jason Calacanis]

No, I think they were letting them publish and then they weren't choosing to pay the money.

[Leo Laporte]

They didn't subsidize them at front.

[Jason Calacanis]

No, definitely not. Definitely not. I think this is the problem is we've gotten to a point where people who disagree with each other can't.

[Leo Laporte]

We're also sensitive.

[Jason Calacanis]

Everybody's so sensitive. Like I, I just. My message to people is, we survive Trump War one will survive Trump too. You will survive this. Don't have despair, take action. If you really are upset about what Trump is doing, it's very simple. Or you're upset about what Elon's doing or what I'm doing or anybody else, you have the right to change the channel. You can have an upside down, dumb Trump thing. You could have 10 of these. You could be Bob Dylan in Subterranean Homesick Blues, Leo's in the basement.

[Alex Wilhelm]

All of that's great. But do you know who sells the ads and runs the business of twit? It's his wife.

[Leo Laporte]

My wife.

[Alex Wilhelm]

So. So he.

[Jason Calacanis]

You.

[Alex Wilhelm]

It's not an employee.

[Leo Laporte]

She has. No, no, no, no. She doesn't have an opinion on Substack. She'd take anything. I like Substack. I subscribe to many substack newsletters and.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, listen. And there. You know what? And if you don't like Substack, there's Beehive. I use Beehive.

[Leo Laporte]

I love Beehive.

[Jason Calacanis]

Beehive is great.

[Leo Laporte]

Beehive's great. Is great.

[Jason Calacanis]

And then by the way, if you don't like either of those, there's an open source project, Ghost. You can roll your own if you want and put up your own server. This is America, folks. You get to choose.

[Leo Laporte]

I use Microblog.

[Jason Calacanis]

A victim.

[Leo Laporte]

And I tell everybody I use Microblog because it cross posts everywhere.

[Jason Calacanis]

Oh, really?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's great.

[Jason Calacanis]

Is Microblog, a paid service. What is this? Because I need a solution.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, you're looking for a solution? At least check it out. It is. The whole idea is indie web. Right. So it is Posse, which is post on your own site and syndicate everywhere.

[Jason Calacanis]

That's what I need.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Micro Blog. It's a really great project and I've been very happy, Leo. Fm. My blog is hosted there and you can do your short post now. The only thing, Jason, you should know, it does not post to X for some reason. I think that's because Elon cut off the API.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yes, the API access. Yes. He's doing the Facebook thing.

[Leo Laporte]

But it does post to LinkedIn. It posts to Mastodon. It posts to Bluesky. I think it posts to Thread threads. It posts everywhere.

[Jason Calacanis]

Signing up.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I really like take a look at it. I pay 10 bucks a month. You can do it for 5 bucks a month. But I want to support. Yeah, yeah. I love this new Is the guy behind.

[Jason Calacanis]

I don't know how you feel about this, Leo now, but I love that we have now moved to a point where a significant number of people are comfortable contributing to the media they want to see. Even if maybe we have to. Yeah, because if you want to everywhere. And it doesn't have to be everybody who does these contributions, but it's super helpful because, you know, you, you wanna, if you want to see content today, you know, become a twit club member, go to Club Twitch.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you. Do you know about that?

[Jason Calacanis]

Well, I'm a member and if you.

[Leo Laporte]

Go, oh, Jason, I had no idea. That's very nice.

[Jason Calacanis]

It's only seven bucks a month, but you want to see it. And you know What, I'm on YouTube and the algorithm, them. This is, you know, you were doing your programming, you had like your Gray Beard programming show and there's like 12 people watching. I'm one of the 12. This thing can't exist.

[Leo Laporte]

Gray Beard's programming, Jason, you are can't.

[Jason Calacanis]

Exist if you don't pony up.

[Leo Laporte]

Isn't he the best? The world's best Suck up. He really is good.

[Jason Calacanis]

Listen.

[Alex Wilhelm]

No, no, he's.

[Jason Calacanis]

He's like, I like to give credit where credit's due. People don't even know podcasting was Created by you3. If it wasn't for you and Dave and for Adam Curry, this would not exist.

[Leo Laporte]

Dave and Adam deserve the credit. There were a number of other shows that were around. I came a little later to the game, like. Yeah, but you had the first web show October 2004. So it was pretty close to the beginning, but still.

[Jason Calacanis]

You were the first web show, though. I mean, maybe think about it. And I think also maybe. When did dignation start?

[Alex Wilhelm]

Oh, man, it's such a good show.

[Leo Laporte]

It's back, by the way, Kevin.

[Jason Calacanis]

I know.

[Leo Laporte]

And Alex brought it back. They were at south by. By.

[Jason Calacanis]

I spoke at the south by event. It was fun.

[Leo Laporte]

Did you? At the Dig Nation.

[Jason Calacanis]

I went to the dignation. It was fun.

[Leo Laporte]

It was like great.

[Jason Calacanis]

It was kind of interesting, like generationally to see, you know, all old now, right?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

Well, I mean, I think they were 20 something. So funny.

[Leo Laporte]

I was old when they started.

[Jason Calacanis]

Exactly. Well, Kevin Rose was like, I remember being at the last ignition and Kevin Rose. I said, Kevin, why are you stopping this? You're peeking. And he said, oh, well, you know, I don't want to be like a 50 year old guy drinking beers on a couch with Alex.

[Leo Laporte]

I want to get married and have kids. And you know what, they're back.

[Jason Calacanis]

But now they're drinking wine.

[Leo Laporte]

Are they drinking wine and beer from Japan and they only do a show every few weeks? They're not. It's a nice, relaxed schedule.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah. They're not doing it for the money, obviously. It's not a business, but it's fun.

[Leo Laporte]

No. Anyway, great to have both you and Alex on the show and it is nice to see you again, Jason. And I missed you. You're a great guy. And everybody said, what are you gonna. Are you crazy? You putting Calicanis on there? What do you mean?

[Jason Calacanis]

People associate me with this administration. It makes me crazy.

[Leo Laporte]

Because people think you're maga. They really think I'm maga.

[Jason Calacanis]

And I'm like, guys, the Allin audience, like, half of them hate me because they think I'm a lib tar or whatever. And then everybody who's on the hates me. And they think I'm maga. And I'm like, guys, I've always been independent. I will remain independent. And I. If they do something stupid like let Biden go out to a debate when he's debilitated, I will call that out.

[Leo Laporte]

It wasn't good.

[Jason Calacanis]

It wasn't good. And if they deport people without due process and send them to a sadistic prison, really, I'm going to speak up at that. My friends are very upset at me for saying the word sadistic. I'm like, how would you describe a prison with 300 people per se, without beds, where they get to go outside for 30 minutes? I don't care how terrible, you know, the crimes they Committed are. You don't want a person who's, you know, especially without due process, looped into them without due process. It cost us nothing to put these people who were deporting in a way station. You could put them in gitmo, like, for 30 days and just make sure they have a chance. Chance to not send somebody's dad to a sadistic, crazy prison in El Salvador. That's pitched for its sadism.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Jason Calacanis]

It's pitched as a deterrent.

[Leo Laporte]

The most appalling thing I ever saw was Kristi Noem standing in front of that was gross.

[Jason Calacanis]

I mean, that's the. That's going to. This is what I tell my friends on the. Right. The things that are going to. Oh. That are going to make this administration derail and you're going to lose the midterms is this constant sadistic trolling. Like, people don't like it. I don't like it. You don't like it. Nobody.

[Leo Laporte]

It's not good.

[Jason Calacanis]

The only people it works for is, like, the 30% or maybe even 10 of, like, the most hardcore MAGA people. Like, they might love it. Nobody else does.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

It just seems uncouth and it's cruel, and nobody likes cruelty. I. I just. I really gets my ire up. I. I completely agree with the human rights stuff. It really pisses me off.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And. And mean, I'm not laughing at this. It's a serious thing. Very serious. But Alex Wilhelm keeps saying, do the ad.

[Jason Calacanis]

Do the ad. Okay, so who's the ad for the ad?

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know anymore. I don't know.

[Alex Wilhelm]

And Leo keeps going. We're gonna take a break. Oh, by the way, Jason, have you heard?

[Leo Laporte]

I am so bad about this.

[Jason Calacanis]

Leo and I get together, the show goes down.

[Leo Laporte]

It goes right down.

[Jason Calacanis]

He goes right to the dangerous.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Oh, no, it's. It's a great show. I just don't want to forget to actually make the money, you know?

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you. And Lisa thanks you also, Alex. I appreciate it. Our show today, brought to you by. I know you guys know this Coda. Coda. Great, successful startups run on Coda. Turning back. Yes. There you go. See, there's somebody right there.

[Alex Wilhelm]

That we mentioned earlier runs entirely on Coda, the website.

[Jason Calacanis]

Let me tell you what coda is, Leo.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

You ever use a wiki and you're like, this is great. I got all my documents in one place. Then you ever use a database and you're like, this is great. I got everything organized in a nice database. Then you use, like, some scripting to connect them and do interesting workflow. And you're like, oh, like Lotus Notes. This is incredible. Imagine it was all one product and you paid once, a very reasonable fee, I might add. And then you don't have to buy other SaaS products. Like, you want to do your OKRs, you want to do project management, you want to build a database, you want to do show notes for your podcast. It's all in one place and you log into one place and it just works. And they have a template library to do everything. Somebody pull up the template library. You would need a template. You type in coded templates.

[Leo Laporte]

It's amazing, isn't it?

[Jason Calacanis]

Amazing? Everything's been done for you. And then I have young people on my team, like two or three of the people on my team at my venture firm, they are so good at listening to a process we do that takes 20 minutes and that's done a hundred times a week. And then they use code Coda and then it's now automated. And then we don't make mistakes. We have one source of truth and your business, your life will run efficiently. I love Coda.

[Leo Laporte]

It. It launched in beta five years ago. In fact, it started as a napkin sketch. Right now you can take your napkin sketch and put it into Coda and like 50,000 other startups, get your startup off the ground. Teams all over the world working on the same page. It's the flexibility of docs, the structure of spreadsheets, the power of applications.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

The intelligence of AI, all built for enterprise. Codis.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Coda's seamless workspace facilitates deeper collaboration. Yes. And greater creativity, giving you more time to build. If you're a startup team looking to increase alignment and agility, Coda can help you move from planning to execution in record time. But you do have to do this for me. You have to go to the website CODA IO Twit. Remember that? That twit is very important. If you go there today, you'll get six months free of the team plan for startups. C o d a IO twit. Get started for free and get 6 free months of the team plan. I can't imagine why anybody wouldn't do this. Code CODA IO twit even.

[Jason Calacanis]

Let me tell you, you could use.

[Leo Laporte]

CODA as an individual, couldn't you? I mean, you don't have to be.

[Jason Calacanis]

A saying if you want to get a job. Like, let's say you're a young person, if you know how to use Coda and you know how to do the workflows in it, which I think you can learn in under two hours. And you can perfect in maybe 10 hours of building a couple of sample projects. You will instantly have 10 job offers for six figures. There is a whole group of people. It's kind of like in the old days. If you knew how to blog or edit videos, you would instantly get hired, acquired. This is the equivalent. It has a dramatic impact on startups. If you pull up twist500.com you will see Alex and my team are in this. Twist55500.com I said I want to build this, you know, list of the, of the top 500 companies. This site is built in Coda now.

[Leo Laporte]

So you could publish from Coda to the public web. Yes.

[Jason Calacanis]

You can use your own domain name. So this is our domain name and you can now go here and this.

[Leo Laporte]

Is updatable for you easily. This table. Yes, that's very cool.

[Jason Calacanis]

And if you click on it, you can open up the record of those companies. So what we're trying to do here is I said to Alex, hey, let's make a database of the top 500 companies that are private. It's a great idea so we can track them and you know, you're a fan of this kind of stuff. I was going to hire a developer for like $150,000 a year to do this project and instead I used the code Kurta IO twit and I got it for six months for free and now the next six months I'm paying six.

[Leo Laporte]

No, you didn't use the code. Come on.

[Jason Calacanis]

No, I didn't. I'm paying. I'm paying since day one. But I have to tell you, like start.

[Leo Laporte]

I think you should pay for stuff like this. Yeah, but if you're a startup and money's tight, take advantage of that. Six months free Coda IO Twit.

[Jason Calacanis]

You know what?

[Leo Laporte]

They are missing such a bet by not having ads on all in. I don't understand. Or you should just do a show. Jason Calacanis pitches and you just pitch stuff.

[Jason Calacanis]

I mean I love doing it. I literally got my.

[Leo Laporte]

You're really good at it.

[Jason Calacanis]

Well, I. The secret is like you, I only do ads. It's genuine promotion for white listed companies. It's only if we like the company. Right. And that makes it so easy. I turn down like, I agree I turned down so many sponsors like you. I know you do this as well. I'm not going to say any sponsors names or potential sponsors names, but if I see that they have bad reviews on Reddit or people are complaining about the product. We're just like, yeah, it's not a fit. And I have like, maybe a half dozen folks who every year try to buy ads from us. And I know you do, too. Who you just say, you know what? It's not worth all the time. Yeah, it's not worth having my listeners complain when they sign up for the service and they're getting billed for something they don't like.

[Leo Laporte]

Our club Twit Discord suggesting that a new show for you and Alex call this weekend Pumping Dump, where, hey, I.

[Jason Calacanis]

Pump one advertiser and then we dump the bad ones.

[Leo Laporte]

Exactly.

[Jason Calacanis]

I love it.

[Leo Laporte]

Thumbs up.

[Alex Wilhelm]

It's all very whitehead, but Jason does need a ski house in Niseko. So if we're going to do another show.

[Jason Calacanis]

Stop.

[Leo Laporte]

I was watching the F1 race in Japan this morning in Suzuka. Love it. Terrible race.

[Alex Wilhelm]

It was terrible race.

[Leo Laporte]

The most boring ever. The. The goddamn grass wouldn't even catch on fire. I was hoping something would happen. I know.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Bring back qualifying when at least the grass is doing something interesting.

[Jason Calacanis]

It didn't bring.

[Leo Laporte]

Every year they have this problem. The grass catches on fire at Suzuka. I don't understand why it's the only.

[Jason Calacanis]

Direct riding on grass.

[Leo Laporte]

No, no.

[Alex Wilhelm]

They go off track sometimes by accident.

[Jason Calacanis]

Oh, and they like the grass.

[Leo Laporte]

The car sends red sparks.

[Jason Calacanis]

Now I want to watch it. I mean, actually, the race was terrible.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Lewis didn't do well.

[Jason Calacanis]

Alex, we're doing. We're doing all in at this Miami F1. Is that a bit. Are you F1? Yeah. If you guys want to come, you'll be my guest.

[Leo Laporte]

Don't say that if you don't mean it.

[Jason Calacanis]

No, no. I have like 10 VIP tickets. We have the number one overlook. You guys are my guests. If you want to come, you got. You got to. You got to get your own flight. So I'm not putting you up or anything, but if you want to show up. I got the VIP tickets for you.

[Leo Laporte]

Guys last year to Vegas.

[Jason Calacanis]

Fun.

[Leo Laporte]

And it was the most expensive thing I have ever done.

[Jason Calacanis]

Well, here you're free. You're on the arm.

[Leo Laporte]

It was outrageous. And it wasn't even good seats because if you're in the. Have you ever been to an F1 race, Alex? I know you're a fan.

[Alex Wilhelm]

No, I was going to go to Austin this year with my dad, but I'm not quite sure if I'm child available.

[Leo Laporte]

Don't get the grandstand seats because we're sitting on. I thought, hey, this is going to be great. We're on the strip. It's the fastest part of the track. It's going to be amazing. Yeah, it's the fastest part of the track. That's it.

[Jason Calacanis]

No, we're at like, boom, boom.

[Leo Laporte]

That's it.

[Jason Calacanis]

We have, like a viewing platform. That's the curve or something.

[Leo Laporte]

I have learned there are better places to sit than the grandstand seats on the. On the strip because they're going 200 miles an hour. It's. It's great to go once because you hear it and feel it. You don't see that on tv. You don't get it on tv.

[Jason Calacanis]

I'm fascinated. I can't wait to go.

[Leo Laporte]

If you go, oh, you're gonna. I mean, start looking into the technology of it, Jason. It's kind of. It's. That's what got me.

[Jason Calacanis]

I actually have been looking at this racing technology. Got invited to go, like, do some track racing. And then I was looking at the new Corvettes. I used to own a C6 Corvette Corvette, which I loved. And these new ZR1 is going to be the greatest Corvette sports car ever made. And then there's an E Ray, which is like half electric, half. Half, you know, combustion engine. Losing their minds over it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

The amount of horsepower, it's just. It's crazy what's happening with sports cars.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, don't tell. Don't tell Lisa. She. She really wants a vet. She loves vets.

[Jason Calacanis]

She deserves a vet. You know, there's like 5,000 cats. 8s on because I've been deep in this rabbit hole. Right now there are like 5,000 of them. They overbuilt. And so she can get a great deal. You can get, like into a C8 now, like a slightly used one for 60k. What, one for like, 70 or 80? Yeah. At least you should get one immediately.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Oh, man. Don't tell me that life is short. I'm due for a midlife crisis.

[Jason Calacanis]

It's not a midlife crisis. The greatest sports car ever made, Literally, people are like, this thing is better and holds its value more than the Ferraris and the Lamborghinis.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Right, Right now they changed this as mid engine now, right?

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, it's mid engine. That's all wheel drive. The EAY version is all wheel drive, which is controversial. And then they're coming out with the ZR1, which is 1,000 horsepower.

[Leo Laporte]

Now.

[Jason Calacanis]

That one's 200K. That's like. But it's better than like a Bugatti or.

[Leo Laporte]

What's your daily driver, Jason? You still drive a Tesla Model Y.

[Jason Calacanis]

I have a model. Yeah. I mean I. The self driving is really hard to beat because if you are listening to a podcast and you want to change it or you know, a text comes in and you want to glance down, you want to change your GPS. I just feel like it's so bold.

[Leo Laporte]

I5 yells at me. It says distracted driver. You're not paying attention.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, so does the. So does the Tesla.

[Leo Laporte]

But I mean pay attention and it's right. You should.

[Jason Calacanis]

It relates to this. It relates to the next story on the docket, actually, because I feel like the. The arc of self driving, which we've been talking about here for over 10 years since the DARPA challenge. We're kind of getting into the final. We're probably in.

[Leo Laporte]

Are we? Or is it like Zeno's Paradox where we never quite get that last 10?

[Alex Wilhelm]

Oh no, we're.

[Jason Calacanis]

We're in the seventh inning. Seventh or 18th inning.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Do you know why Jason's right? Because they're finally taking Waymo to D.C. and you do not take a regulatory risk to the capital where the regulators.

[Leo Laporte]

You are.

[Jason Calacanis]

Great insight.

[Leo Laporte]

Good point.

[Jason Calacanis]

And it's also.

[Leo Laporte]

I'll tell you though, if a Waymo could drive Boston, then I'd be impressed.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Those real challenges Providence pretty bad too. Prove it. Here come come drive me I God.

[Leo Laporte]

It's these old New England towns that were built in the 18th century and.

[Jason Calacanis]

They don't, you know, and think about the customer base. They're gonna. They'll flip those things over outside of Wrigley Field or wherever. I know what's. What's in Boston. What are those? Those bread. Sox fans are terrible.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Philadelphia then because the Eagles fans will put them on top of a roof.

[Leo Laporte]

They had to grease the polls. When. Is that you from Eagles 1. That was super Bowl. They had to grease the polls downtown so they would climb up the light poles.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, they're going to have to grease the way most. There's your title, folks.

[Leo Laporte]

Grease the way Most.

[Jason Calacanis]

That's the solution itself.

[Leo Laporte]

So you're talking about the robots now. This is another thing that Alex Carp's talking about. And a lot we do a. We took this week in Google and made an AI show. It's called Intelligent Machines. And it seems to be that 2025 is going to be the year of robots. And. And what Carp and his co authors say in their book is. And I believe this AI has consumed everything it can on the Internet. It's consumed all the data that's out there. What's missing is one Thing that's critical to our intelligence is an understanding of physics that if you drop a ping pong ball it will hit the ground and how fast they can understand intellectually but they need to have a sensorium, they need to get out into the world. And everybody this year is working on, on robots. Yes, the story from China is Chinese engineers are creating humanoid robots that they are terrifying. By the way, here's one doing acrobatics. We've saw these at Boston Dynamics. Right. And it's not just for factories though. They're thinking they want to get these robots out into the real world world. And that might be critical in advancing AI is this experience of the world that we have that robots do not.

[Jason Calacanis]

Nvidia's going to play a major role here. They're I think building their own models of the real world.

[Leo Laporte]

And well you saw what Jensen brought on stage with him, the Disney designed robot which is pretty darn cool. But I don't know if It's.

[Jason Calacanis]

There are 10 different ways to sort of solve this and Boston Dynamics and you know these other robots, they've built the actuators, they built the hardware out. It's understanding the real world, the physics of the real world, how to navigate the real world. And these general purpose robots are very different than the arms you see like at one of our investments, Cafe X making coffee instead of using like a closed room, a closed factory with an arm that does something very specific over and over and over again. These would be general interest. So they could walk around your home and if there was a, you know, something on the floor they would know, oh that's a, you know, one of the chew toys for the dog or that's a scorpion, you know, proceed you know, as directed for those two different possibilities. Or that's spilt milk and here's how to mop it up. And these are like self driving. You're starting to see demonstrations of them and I think this is like a 10 year army to a Toyota Prius Model 3 moment where we will be sitting here 10 years from now on twit. And there'll be one of them walking behind you or cleaning shelves.

[Leo Laporte]

It actually may be in a robot. Yes, pour my mind into one.

[Jason Calacanis]

Absolutely.

[Alex Wilhelm]

That part scares me quite a lot. But I was with you up until that point.

[Leo Laporte]

Did you see the Sunday Times? Cade Mex Metz had a. Oh he great invasion of the home humanoid robots.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And it's one of those digital stories at times does so well here, here Kate is shaking the hand of what Looks like kind of a buff guy in a canvas bodysuit with a very small head. Actually, that's not Kade. That's the founder of Burnich and Neo, the company's humanoid Robot.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, that's 1x. 1x is the first to I think get one of these robots available for sale. And this would be like buying. I don't know, Leo, what was like.

[Leo Laporte]

The first like a roadster before the roadster.

[Jason Calacanis]

It was like buying the roadster. Yeah, like a kit car. Right, so this would be the equivalent of that. Yeah. Or like in the PC space or the drone.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't want this in my home.

[Jason Calacanis]

No, neither do I. Yeah, okay, but.

[Alex Wilhelm]

But the thing is it's not just China that are building these Here in the US we have figure 1x agility robotics and a number of other companies.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, this is an American robot. Yeah, yeah.

[Alex Wilhelm]

So the story that we have in the show notes today is very much predicated on look how quickly China is taking advantage of its factory base and its ability to manufacture cheaply and so forth. But the pace we're seeing in AI model development and human robotics domestically and also in Europe I think is actually very encouraging. So I think here it's easy to frame this as a here comes China story, but instead I really do think that it's actually kind of a here comes the world and everyone wants to solve this problem because paying humans to do stuff, especially very physical manual things is hard on humans and their bodies and also it's quicks.

[Leo Laporte]

So I think isn't Elon working on this?

[Jason Calacanis]

He's got the Optimus and you know, he's obviously far behind a bunch of people but catching up quickly, you know, he's not on it. You know. Again, how do you feel about politics?

[Leo Laporte]

He's busy with some other things. Well, he kind of got a black mark because first he showed a robot that was turned out to be a human in a suit that danced and then. Yeah, that was its most recent event. The robots were controlled by humans. The robot bartenders are controlled by.

[Jason Calacanis]

Which is how these. Which is by the way how you know, my understanding is how Waymo and Cruise. That there is a safety driver.

[Leo Laporte]

That's how they started.

[Jason Calacanis]

That's how they started. I think, I think that's still how most of these self driving companies are working. They may.

[Leo Laporte]

That seems to be the dirty little secret of Waymo and others is that when something happens unexpected, a human take at back at the home office takes over.

[Jason Calacanis]

There's an intervention specialist. They have like fancy terms for it. And I think there's going to be intervention specialists. And the question is, how many cars or robots do they intervene with and at what pace? There was a really interesting story that Alex and I covered where a store in New York, a chicken store, a chicken sandwich shop or something, had a cashier year who took your orders on Zoom. And they were like, this company that I'm an investor in, Athena, they, they had somebody in Manila on a Zoom taking your order. And I saw that and I was like, this is fascinating. It's an arbitrage using technology. If you didn't have Zoom, which is essentially free, and you didn't have bandwidth, which is free, you couldn't have a $1 an hour, $2 an hour cashier in New York City for a job that Americans just, let's be candid. We have the lowest unemployment of our lifetime. They won't take that job.

[Leo Laporte]

They don't want them.

[Jason Calacanis]

They don't want that job. And that's this whole tariff thing and reassuring stuff. That's the whole part that breaks in the logic for me. Nobody wants these jobs. Like, how many people are, like, raising their hands, I want to build sneakers.

[Leo Laporte]

Is immigrants often, often undocumented, documented. But that's who's doing those jobs.

[Jason Calacanis]

If we, to the extent we're making clothing in factories in LA still, which we have some, it is illegal immigrants. So then you have to say, well, where's the logic in this? We're not allowing immigration and we want to create factories with jobs that Americans are, let's just call it what it is. Too rich to take. They don't want to take those jobs. So it makes no sense. And then at the same time, let's.

[Leo Laporte]

Also be fair, those jobs don't pay enough for you to live.

[Jason Calacanis]

No.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. No.

[Jason Calacanis]

They pay double minimum wage or whatever, 15, 20 bucks an hour, which, you know, in New York, when they can't.

[Leo Laporte]

Rent an apartment, you can't live on that.

[Jason Calacanis]

And then you have to take an hour and a half, commute to somewhere with a cheap apartment, and then it just doesn't work. Yeah, and those commutes increase depression, suicide, alcoholism.

[Leo Laporte]

So they don't want them because they're not good jobs. Basically. Basically, they're jobs you can't live on.

[Jason Calacanis]

They're. They're kind of both, you know, they are entry level, first run jobs. And so then you have to decide, like, does any of this make sense to move jobs to the developed world where people don't want to take them and they're too Expensive when there are people who, these jobs in their region are incredible middle class jobs. So the logic kind of breaks down. But these things are going to change every. Everything in seven to ten years.

[Leo Laporte]

Benito Gonzalez, our producer and technical director, is from the Philippines. Yep. What do you think, Bonito? Oh, he's, he's silent. He may be a job about what.

[Jason Calacanis]

Would you work for $1 an hour producing podcasts from Manila?

[Leo Laporte]

Is it exploitative of us in the developed world to use, use people in the third world to do the jobs we don't want to do for a, for a low amount of money?

[Alex Wilhelm]

I mean, kind of, but also not really. I mean it really depends, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

Like it's if you can live on that wage in the Philippines, like Alex.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Said, like some of these, some of those wages here are unlivable, but over there, yeah, that's a decent middle, that's.

[Jason Calacanis]

A decent middle class wage because the.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Standard of living there is like it's so much cheaper to live there. Like, it's just so much cheaper. So like, yeah, money goes a lot further.

[Leo Laporte]

So initially these robots will be telerobotics. They will be operated by humans.

[Jason Calacanis]

I think in some cases, yes. They'll certainly be supervised by humans and they're deploying them in factories right now. So in very constrained environments, doing very constrained tasks, when they get to your home, there is a possibility that you could literally hire somebody from, for one to three dollars an hour to actually be the robot. Like telepresence.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh my God, that seems so awful to me. I don't.

[Jason Calacanis]

It seems like a black mirror episode.

[Leo Laporte]

Seems dystopian. Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

In a way. Unless that person has no job prospects and it lets them feed their family well.

[Leo Laporte]

And this is why free trade to me, and I agree with Elon, zero tariffs, free trade, this works itself out better. Better if we can do that. Plus establishes interdependence that is in the long run, good for our, for world peace. To be blunt, who's the. Is 1x a big contender? This is the one that the Times article is all about. 1x. Is that a big.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, they're legit. Legit.

[Leo Laporte]

There's Eve. That's their robot on wheels.

[Jason Calacanis]

Super legit.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Alex Wilhelm]

And right now they're doing very, very basic things, but I think they'll move, they'll move up the complexity chart and speed. The thing about trading is that countries should not move backwards in terms of how much value add they do in manufacturing. So China started off doing quite a lot of relatively low value add stuff. Garment manufacturing and so forth, and moved up the value chain to create world's electronics and so forth. And a lot of the cheaper stuff moved to other countries like Bangladesh. Why would we want to go backwards? Like, I just don't think that people understand that the margins on labor for making leggings for Lululemon are not, not similar to what we can do here in the United States currently with our economy. So to me, it's just very backwards to think that we should do the lowest tier of manufacturing domestically. It's, it's very, very.

[Leo Laporte]

I want to. We're going to take another break. I do want to ask you guys about AI because I'm curious what your take is on the future of AI, AGI, superintelligence and safety, something we talk a lot about on intelligent machines. But I don't get to talk to you guys as much, so I'd like to get your take. You're watching this week in Tech with the Alex Wilhelm, Great to have you. From his fabulous newsletter Cautiousoptimism News. And of course he's a regular on this weekend Startups along with Jason Calacanis, who started that some year. How long has it been? 15, 10 years?

[Jason Calacanis]

It's been like, yeah, long time. 12 or 14 years. I've done 2,000 episodes. I started like, basically I was on maybe the first 50 episodes of TWIT.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, you were on the first episode.

[Jason Calacanis]

A lot of the early ones. And, and you know, I, when I would come on, you would ask me about startups and then I asked you like, hey, would it be okay if I did this this week in startups thing where I just talk only about startups and you know, it's really a tribute to the mentorship you gave me.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Next week is our 20th anniversary. This week in Tech we have to have a party.

[Jason Calacanis]

That's incredible.

[Leo Laporte]

We are having a party. But so we did our thousandth episode and we invited some of the old timers on. Remember, one of the reasons I was happy to get you on Jason is because you're one of them. Next week we are going to ask our audience to weigh in. We're getting videos, poems, songs, pictures of how you watched how you discovered Twit. And it's been really fun looking at those. We'll have some of those on the show next week. Who's on the show though? Benito?

[Alex Wilhelm]

Have we still only one confirmed?

[Leo Laporte]

Just one person so far.

[Jason Calacanis]

Alan Malvino is confirmed. Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

Alan Malvitano, also a longtime member of the team. He used to co host to this week in computer hardware, we try to get Kevin Rose. He's not answering my calls, so I don't.

[Jason Calacanis]

What?

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know.

[Jason Calacanis]

I'm texting him right now.

[Leo Laporte]

He's busy getting drunk with Alex.

[Jason Calacanis]

I mean it should just be like they should surprise you and just send the link to everybody and just show up. A little bit of a maybe.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's not book anybody bonito. Maybe somebody will show up. Like Bob Hope used to show up on the Tonight Show. He says. I was across the way and I thought I'd just stop by.

[Jason Calacanis]

Shawn, the lot never happened.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Old timey accents.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh yeah, yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

They called me studio head's office and he told me you were celebrating. Chuck and Vox.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. I'm glad you're here. I hope you're glad you're here too, Al.

[Alex Wilhelm]

I love it.

[Leo Laporte]

Alex and Jason, it's lovely having you on our show today. Brought to you by. Now this is a startup I don't think you know about.

[Jason Calacanis]

Okay, hit me.

[Leo Laporte]

Maybe you do.

[Jason Calacanis]

Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

Our friends at Outsystems, they are the leading AI powered application and agent development platform. You know, it's a classic conundrum. For every enterprise build or buy, you create your own software. It's great, it's very expensive. You just mentioned $150,000 a year to hire an engineer. And that's just one person person. Build it yourself, but then it's exactly what you want. Or do you outsource it? You go buy some SaaS solution that's not a perfect fit and it's a tough decision. For over 20 years. 20 now, as long as we've been around, the mission of Outsystems has been to give every company the power to innovate through software. IT teams typically have two choices. As I mentioned, you could buy off the shelf SaaS products for speed, but you lose flexibility, you also lose differentiation, right? Or you can build custom software costing time and resources. But thanks to AI, there's a new way, a third path. The fusion of AI low code and DevSecOps automation into a single development platform. That means your team can build custom applications. It's this new thing, right? This new partner coding with AI agents as easily, as quickly, as affordably as buying generic off the shelf. Same way and flexibility, security and scalability, they come standard without systems. I think this is a really interesting third way. With AI powered low code teams can build custom future proof applications at the speed of buying. With fully automated architecture security. You got integrations, data flows, permissions. It's all Built in. Outsystems is the last platform you need to buy because then you can use use it to build anything and customize and extend your existing core systems to build your future without systems. This is a really clever idea. Go ahead.

[Jason Calacanis]

The thing that's really interesting I'm looking at their website is you can build AI agents which are agentic. And that is going to be.

[Leo Laporte]

That's the thing.

[Jason Calacanis]

Now the future is, you know, let's say you're trying to do the scheduling for Twit and you've got like, hey, here's the white list and the Google sheet of like people we like to have on. You could build a script that says, hey, you know, we're gonna. These are the open slots. If you want them, click here to be added and have that agent go. And if somebody cancels automatically go to the.

[Leo Laporte]

But we would never do that. Benito. Don't worry. Outsystems.com TWiT learn more My experience has always been that these AI assistants are great in conjunction with humans. That's when they really sing. Outsystems.

[Jason Calacanis]

That is the sweet, sweet spot.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I agree. Outsystems.com TWIT thank you. OutSystems we brand new sponsor. We're thrilled to have you checking that out right now. Very interesting stuff. Yeah, it is the third way in the build versus buy conundrum.

[Jason Calacanis]

Absolutely. I mean there's a whole thing going on. I don't know if you heard about Vibe coding, but Alex and I have been talking about Vibe coding.

[Leo Laporte]

It's hysterical.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, it's hysterical. But it's true. You're not going to be production ready anytime soon. It's going to be years before we as English speakers can say, say I need this tool, but it's going to be possible to make 80% of it. And that's where a partner like outsystems.com TWIT would come in to help you do that final 20, 30% and make sure it works and it's stable and it's secure.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. The problem with Vibe coding in. So this is interesting because Andre Karpathi, who's the guy who coined this term in an X post, really didn't imply that you. It was for people who couldn't code code. That's kind of been the meaning that it's taken. But he said it would be a great thing for a weekend project. In other words, somebody's already a coder could use it to build stuff. Because the problem if you don't know how to code you can't vet what the AI is giving you?

[Jason Calacanis]

Nope.

[Leo Laporte]

And there's all sorts of, you know, pitfalls down the road. If something doesn't work, how do you know how to fix it?

[Jason Calacanis]

Or like, let's say you go tax your servers and then all of a sudden you get an AWS or a, you know, Oracle cloud or a Google Cloud aws bill for $10,000 because it went rogue like you, you can make some serious mistakes here. I was vibe coding just a couple days ago because I, I had bought this domain name a long time ago, annotated.com because I, and I paid like 20 grand for it, but I never used it. I wanted to make a service, this for myself where you could highlight a paragraph in a news story with like a toolbar, press the button and it would make a, a new landing page with that quote or like a clip from Twit and, and let you comment on it. Right. You'd annotate that original piece of, of thing. And then I remembered I had the domain name. I was like, maybe I could vibe code this myself, but I can't. Yeah, it's clear I can't. I can make a content accept.

[Leo Laporte]

Look, I think that it's interesting because I mean Mark Zuckerberg said that Meta will this year replace some engineers with AI and a lot of people. The CEO founder of replit says you're not going to be right.

[Alex Wilhelm]

I'm John. I love that guy.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well he said don't teach your kids how to code because there's not going to be any jobs in a few years. You guys buy the that?

[Jason Calacanis]

No. All right, what do you think, Alex?

[Alex Wilhelm]

I think there's two different conversations going on here because there's deep systems level programming that is not going to be replicated by AI because that's more of a, I think a software architecture point. But I do think there's quite a lot of low level development that is going to get absolutely obviated. And one example of this, Amazon said in last six months that they were doing a bunch of, I think refactoring and they used AI for it and they saved thousands and thousands and thousands of developer hours. So I think that there will always be a section of development that will be reserved for humans at the wheel if you want because they need to make big long term decisions. But quite a lot of stuff that is done today by humans simply doesn't need to be done by humans. Think of it as like the first industrial revolution for the process of software development. We still had humans working, but we also had big machines doing a lot of the repetitive heavy lifting. So that's what I think we're going to see this year. So Mark's point about some percentage of meta's code being written by AI this year? Sure. Will AI replace all of their developers in the next five years? No, but I bet you they stop hiring at some point in time and let natural attrition kind of weed out what they don't need.

[Leo Laporte]

So I think it does make sense that that's the one thing a computer would be good at is writing code for computers.

[Jason Calacanis]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, it's his native language and it's a limited.

[Jason Calacanis]

Anything that's a limited data set, you know, that you can master. Like chess, obviously was one of the first or checkers in chess. And then eventually very complex games like Go were mastered. And I think looking at what happened with Grammarly, I think is a really good concept. You know, every company had like one or two people who were good, great writers and the other 18 people in the company would go to them to write something. Now I bought everybody, and I'm not going to make this commercial for Grammarly, but which is owned by Coda, by the way, they merged.

[Leo Laporte]

Is it owned by or owns Coda?

[Jason Calacanis]

I'm, I was, I think Grammarly bought Coda and I.

[Leo Laporte]

That's what I heard.

[Jason Calacanis]

So it's now one thing. But Grammarly is such a powerful tool and I just pay for it for my entire team, strictly so that the people don't come to me and say, can you edit this? Right before I had Alex and you.

[Leo Laporte]

Know, now everybody commas out of this.

[Jason Calacanis]

Here's the thing, everybody who is a bad writer, which is most people are bad writers and then some people are okay writers, bad writers became good writers. Writers, okay writers became good, sometimes great writers, but you're not going to be exceptional, have a point of view and be an elite writer because of any piece of software. I don't believe it's the same thing with coding. You're still going to need elite coders. But you know, there's some things that are, you know, very easy for AI to do. So everybody just moves up the stack. And this is like if you look at deep research on Gemini, which I pay for and I is really powerful. The idea of paying a researcher to go do a research of, you know, the human robotic companies we just did is ridiculous. If you could just do a deep research in four minutes, it gives you an entire overview. It's 90. I would say it's 95% as good as the best researcher I ever hired.

[Leo Laporte]

To no hallucination problems.

[Jason Calacanis]

I mean on the margins. But if you tell it to give citations and you're paying for deep research, yeah, it will do that for you. And then you could take the report, if it really is that important, put the report into another. You can put it into GROK or chat GBT and say take this report and make it better and check every fact and it will do that for you. So that's the eventuality is multiple language models kind of checking each other's work and then show your work. If you know how to prompt and you tell it to show your work work, you're going to get much less hallucinations.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Okay. And this is the two sided coin of AI because on one hand Jason's dead on. It can replace quite a lot of what human researchers do today that they get paid to do. What does that mean? It means everyone now has a researcher in their pocket for 20 bucks a month or whatever it costs. Fantastic levels the playing field makes the world a more interesting, faster, more economically viable place or vital place at the same time time it deletes early level jobs or entry level jobs. And I just, I wonder what we're going to do as an economy when we take out baby lawyers, baby consultants, baby this, baby that and we replace them with AI systems. How are we going to have people move up the human value chain if there's no place to start?

[Jason Calacanis]

That is a challenge.

[Alex Wilhelm]

I'm worried about it.

[Jason Calacanis]

All right.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm going to hit the third rail of this show.

[Jason Calacanis]

Oh no. Oh no. Is it the tower? Right.

[Leo Laporte]

And you just tell me to stuff it if you don't want to talk about it. DOGE has proposed recoding the Social Security COBOL database and their MAMA database using AI. They say they, the Social Security administration looked at it a few years ago, said it would take I think five years. They say they could do it in six months.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yes, of course, I mean upgrade every system. The thing that's being a bit hyperbolic here is that this administration wants to take away people's Social Security. They don't want to do that.

[Leo Laporte]

They want to take away some Medicaid though.

[Jason Calacanis]

I don't think so.

[Leo Laporte]

Honestly.

[Jason Calacanis]

These are the things that lose you elections.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

And so self preservation for any politician is to stay away from those two items and if not expand them. I would love to see them raise the age of like when you get Social Security. And I would love to see them.

[Leo Laporte]

Remember what happened to Macron when he proposed that run out of town?

[Alex Wilhelm]

Okay. I mean, protest here in the United States.

[Jason Calacanis]

I mean the Germans and this and Spain, like they'll, they'll, they'll, they'll hang you up and quarter you. I do think upgrading all these systems is going to be awesome. And there's so many games.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, nobody would be against modernizing it. I think that that's reasonable. But there is this genuine concern that this. Do you know these Doge kids? Have you, are you familiar with any of them?

[Jason Calacanis]

I know some of the people involved. Like obviously Elon and my friend Antonio. Gracias.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you know Big Balls?

[Jason Calacanis]

I, I know, I, I've, I know of big balls. I don't have a personal relationship okay. With Big Balls.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you think that they are good coders? That they're trustworthy, reliable?

[Jason Calacanis]

I think these are elite people. People.

[Leo Laporte]

They're elite. I mean that's what they are billed as.

[Jason Calacanis]

There's, there's, trust me, they're elite. These are elite individuals.

[Leo Laporte]

Now Elon wouldn't bring them in unless they were really good.

[Jason Calacanis]

The talent level around Elon is scary. The people who are drawn to work with him are self selecting for two things. Hardcore and extremely good at their skill, whatever it is. Now you may not like the politics, you could have personal issues with Elon, etc. Etc. Totally fine. One thing you will not be able to say is these are not the most elite technical people in the world. He is a magnet for those people. So period, full stop.

[Alex Wilhelm]

That's a very interesting point, Jason and I.

[Jason Calacanis]

Their communication, I will say, and I've talked to them about this and then I'll leave it at that and get your take, Alex, you know, is their communication of what they're doing has not been a 10 of 10, it's like a 7 of 10. And so I've told them, you know, keep unpacking what you're doing with data, statistics, etc. And then when they say like there's so much fraud and there aren't people, you know, going to jail. Well, we have a justice system. It takes time. So there's inefficiency. I think they're hitting that pretty hard. I think if there is in fact fraud, and the fraud is independent of party, by the way. I'm sure there's Republicans, Democrats and Independents committing fraud in the system or taking grift, you know, across the board. We've seen that obviously before. So that will take time. But yeah, they're, they're going to do A great job in upgrading the systems. They also have Joe Jebia, who's a friend of mine, so I actually know a third person very well, the co founder of Airbnb, who's a design genius, literally like created the design of Airbnb. So don't be surprised if government systems start to, to have incredible UX and are fast and efficient like other countries in the world have.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I mean, everybody agrees we need that. They're just concerned that there might be a little move fast and break things mentality about how we're going about it.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah. And there is. And that's a fair criticism.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

A lot of mistakes being made. A lot of mistakes. Right.

[Jason Calacanis]

I mean, if you want to go this fast, you're going to make mistakes. I was with El. Elon for, and I don't want to overstate it, but I was with Elon for when he took over Twitter. And if you remember, then they were like, oh my God, Twitter's going to go down. Twitter never went down. He's like, the guy can ran to land two rockets and catch giant rockets on their own like that. That's not going to be the issue. You may not agree with like how Twitter is being run and the trolling on it and freedom of speech comes with anonymity, comes with a bit of chaos. But he was able to in, when he took that over and I, I was, I was there for a little bit of it in the early days. He was able to very quickly figure out who was the most effective person and who was necessary. And that's the rubric in which he does these exercises. We made an XY quadrant and on one quadrant we put extremely good at their job and incompetent. And then on the other quadrant we put absolutely necessary and completely unnecessary, you know, irrelevant, like you don't need this person in the company. And the top quadrant is where, you know, you, you want to really focus your effort. People who are extremely qualified and the job is essential. Now if the person's extremely qualified and their job isn't essential, well, then you have a little conundrum. You've, you've, you've got a bounty. This is an incredibly effective person, but we don't need, need them. Okay, well maybe we could find something for them to do. But when you have unqualified people, which shockingly you might find some in our government who've been there for a long time who are actually not good at their jobs and their jobs are not necessary, I think that's kind of what you Go for first. Is that bottom left quadrant sanguine about.

[Leo Laporte]

It if they didn't keep firing and rehiring people?

[Jason Calacanis]

That's part of the process. Yeah. And that.

[Leo Laporte]

Was that the necessary part of the process.

[Jason Calacanis]

You could do it different, differently, but if they're on a time constraint to the midterm elections, maybe they, they.

[Leo Laporte]

They're trying to do it all in two years.

[Jason Calacanis]

Trying to do it in maybe two years.

[Leo Laporte]

I acknowledge that the press could get. Be getting this completely wrong, but Elon is not getting very kind treatment in the press. He's coming across as kind of out, outpaced, overmastered by the situation that he's in. He's coming across as very arrogant. But. But you know him and, And I trust you.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So is this a problem of appearances or is. Is there another problem?

[Jason Calacanis]

I. I would say the communication could be better. Right. And then on top of that, you have the polarization. So, you know, my handicapping of it would be half the people in the country have it out for this administration, just like the, the MAGA folks hated Biden and Kamala. Right. So you have the polarization in our society that's like the foundation of this is happening. And then you have an extreme, shocking approach to cutting costs and firing people and. And downsizing, which is a painful thing to do, which I think is probably why you're seeing this tension. And, you know. Yeah. His reputation is getting torched, you know, in some cases because he's doing this work. And you see that with literally, you know, sadly, Tesla's being lit on fire. This is scary stuff.

[Leo Laporte]

And yeah, I mean, obviously nobody thinks that's. Nobody wants that.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah. Just don't buy the car. If you just politics.

[Leo Laporte]

And there are people who own Teslas are not maga, but like Teslas.

[Jason Calacanis]

It's scary to drive a cybertruck, that's for sure. If you're driving a cybertruck, it's like.

[Leo Laporte]

My neighbor has a cyber truck and I'm just. He keeps it in the garage now. He used to keep it out front.

[Jason Calacanis]

Probably for a good reason. Yeah. Somebody carve some into it. Listen, I think all this will pass. You know, the, the.

[Leo Laporte]

Survive it. I think that'll be nice.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, I think we'll survive it. I think we'll come through the other end of it and people will go, so the government is half the size it was or a third less, just like Clinton did. You might not like how it's been done, but you might like the outcome for the people who don't like how it's being done. They might very much like the outcome. And a more efficient government with less waste and spend is going to be absolutely fantastic. And I think they will accomplish that test. The thing I'm actually not worried about is Doge. The thing I am worried about, you know, is the tariffs and the deportations. Like, those things, I think. And the rule of law. Right. Like, is he going to listen to judges? As we said earlier, those are the things I worry about and I'm not a fan of.

[Leo Laporte]

There's a lot of things to worry about. As I saw a sign at the protests yesterday, so many things to complain about, so little cardboard. It's. There are. There are an almost infinite number of things to be concerned about. I would love not to be worried about. About Doge. I'm not sure I share your opinion of Elon. You do know him. I do not.

[Jason Calacanis]

He's. Yeah, I would say misunderstood would be an understatement and incredibly effective.

[Alex Wilhelm]

I'm very curious about how this all works with the big COBOL databases because, you know, I read a lot of developer forums and there has been widespread developer skepticism about Doge's ability to rewrite.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, for instance, the lack of a date field in COBOL and being misinterpreted as people 185 years old in the database is a good example.

[Alex Wilhelm]

That does not inspire. Inspire confidence.

[Leo Laporte]

It means they don't understand what they're looking at. And you don't want to mess with a code base that a lot of people rely on. If you don't understand it, you know.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Okay, I'm going to take my. The opposite of what I think here and make an argument in favor of trying to fix this now with this little window of time. Even though personally I. Leo, I'm kind of on your side of this debate. If we tried to do this under a Democratic administration, how long would it take?

[Leo Laporte]

Clinton took eight years, but he did it.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Yeah, but that was. I think things ran a bit better in the 90s before we had as much gerrymandering. So I think at least we're trying something. Maybe that's a bad way to look at it, but I'm a little bit skeptical of this being a possible project to take on under a different administration. Administration. And I'm more on your side of things mostly than. Than Jason's on this particular Doge question, Leo. But I do think at least we're taking a shot at the goal.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, one thing Clinton, just for people who don't know the history of it was able to cut 400,000 jobs out of the government.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, this will be more, I think I'll give you one thing to feel better about because I'm, I'm talking to some folks in the, the, in the YouTube chat room on the this Week in Tech YouTube channel, which has been growing quite nicely, by the way. I know you guys are really experimenting with it. If you look at the people around Trump this time, last time he had a bunch of neocon old school Republicans and he lost to Democrats and he got trounced to win back the White House. He surrounded himself with a bunch of moderate, socially liberal, fiscally conservative Democrats. Besant, Lutnick, Elon, Joe Rogan, Chamath, go down the list of all the supporters and, or people in the administration. They're all Clinton Democrats. That's what they have in common. And in order to get this stuff done, Trump didn't go to the like Republican Party. There's no Mitt Romney in here. It's all, all socially liberal, fiscally conservative Democrats. Almost like I would say the majority, 60 or 70% of the people around him are fall into that, including Trump himself, who is a lifelong Democrat who just selected the Republican Party as the vehicle that would get him elected to the point at which, like he had Hillary Clinton at his wedding and they were this. You can just look it up. Historically, nobody Democrat.

[Leo Laporte]

Call anybody at the Heritage Society or the people behind Project 2025 Clinton Democrats.

[Jason Calacanis]

No, no, no.

[Leo Laporte]

These are the hardest conservatives out there. And this is the agenda that has been set for the Trump administration. We're veering into politics. So I don't want to get into that. That's something reasonable people can disagree.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Let's just say this. There's a lot of big projects being taken on by the technical arm of the government now partially run by someone that we know. And let's see how they do because they're talking a big game and we.

[Leo Laporte]

Don'T have a choice. We don't have a choice, Alex. We're gonna have to see how they do.

[Alex Wilhelm]

We're in the car.

[Leo Laporte]

So we're in the car.

[Alex Wilhelm]

I'm in the backseat. Programmed off my body. And let's hope we don't crash because at a minimum, elections have consequences, as they love to say.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, put this energy into the midterms, folks. I think I don't like to see either party control all three.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, there's an opportunity. Opportunity, yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

Huge opportunity. There's going to be bad. Yeah, Uniparty rule bad. We all Agree.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Yeah, No, I think. I think actually there's not that much difference between the three of us on these issues because we're all optimistic and hopeful for a high functioning economy, a high functioning society, and a strong nation. So we're just trying to discuss the best way to get there at the fastest possible speed.

[Leo Laporte]

It is really interesting that this is happening at a time when AI. AI is exploding. And I do think there is an opportunity. Absolutely. If AI is more than just junk. And that, by the way, that's unclear also at this point, I'm a mixed opinions on that. But if AGI really is real and superintelligence really is real, or at least if these AIs, and they seem to be become more and more useful, useful tools, there is a big opportunity right now, especially if an administration recognizes that. Now, your friend David Sacks is the AI czar.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Tell me what his point of view is in all of this.

[Jason Calacanis]

I think he wants to see America win.

[Leo Laporte]

So we're all in favor of that. I agree.

[Jason Calacanis]

And I think David is one of the smartest, most considered people I've met in my life. Also one of the most effective operators, like maybe behind in Silicon Valley rally Sheryl Sandberg as like a chief operating officer. So they've. He's a. He's a true winner. And I think America will win in AI. And AGI is a very interesting concept because the goal posts keep moving. Like, you have the Turing test. You have. There's like a half dozen interesting tests. The test I use is, is this AI smarter than any, any living human being? If we have an AI that's smarter than every living human being, then I think we've hit AGI. So what would define that? Well, not just playing chess, but. Or not just writing code, but operating in the real world with like, maybe these robots that we talked about earlier. General. General purpose robots. So you have a general purpose robot out in the world able to solve a problem better than any human. So. So I think we will hit that in our lifetime, maybe in less than 10 years. And if we do, we're going to start solving problems that humans are not designed to pro. To. To solve and like cancer. Like, it's pretty hard for us to, you know, get to Mars or cure cancer. There's going to be problems. We probably just haven't gotten around to that. It's going to. As it scurries around, you know, the crevices of information and logic and research, it's going to sound things that we forgot. Like maybe we should should solve. And that's going to be pretty amazing. And humans always find more work to do. I believe that. And then abundance will be here. And so, you know, we live in a time where, if I were to ask people what they're in the modern world, like, you know, how much are they paying for water? Or, you know, are they worried about shelter? In the United States, it's really hard to find somebody who's actually worried about food, shelter, water. We're worried about existential things. We're worried about our fame, we're worried about our kids. You know, we're not worried.

[Leo Laporte]

You operate in some pretty rarefied circles, Jason. I don't know if I would agree with calories. No, I mean, right out the door here. Who's living on the street, maybe he's doing it because of choice. I don't know.

[Jason Calacanis]

Probably addiction and mental illness. So we worry about those things. So exactly to my point, you know, when I lived in San Francisco and I looked, I looked at and I talked to people in the homeless industrial complex, there were more beds than homeless people. There was more food available. They were dumping food in the garbage. It. It. It really is an addiction problem. So we have a massive amount of empathy in this country. We have surplus empathy, and we have surplus calories and we have surplus beds. Now, we may not have an affordable home in every state. You know, we might not have, but we have the lowest unemployment of our lifetime.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

And so we really don't celebrate how great we have it here. We. And it's a uniquely American trait to be obsessed with what we haven't solved yet. And that's what AI is pretty good at, too. So unlimited energy leads to unlimited water, like desalinization. It's an energy problem.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Jason Calacanis]

And unlimited energy, water means unlimited calories because agriculture is a function of those two previous things.

[Leo Laporte]

Things.

[Jason Calacanis]

We're going to live in an incredible time of abundance that exceeds the abundance we have even today that we don't appreciate. I am incredibly optimistic about this technology's ability to lower suffering, to lower healthcare costs, to lower housing costs. There's a company here in Austin that is making 3D printing cement homes. And I had dinner with the founder, Jason, recently. Really interesting cat. I forgot the name of the company right now. Alex. We'll look it up real quick because he's so good at that. But this, this 3D printing cement company is extraordinary. They're building like dozens of homes for.

[Leo Laporte]

I've seen videos of it. It is remarkable.

[Jason Calacanis]

I thought they were ugly. And then I saw them and I was like, I want one. They're really like.

[Leo Laporte]

And they're very practical in a lot of ways for heat and so forth.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yes. I mean, Adobe Homes were like some of the best homes ever made. So this company.

[Leo Laporte]

You always cheer me up a little. It's all right.

[Jason Calacanis]

It's not optimistic.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, you always cheer me up. You're an optimist and I. I appreciate that. Wait, wait.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Surplus of empathy, though, I think is going a little too far.

[Jason Calacanis]

That's your title for the show. Surplus Empathy.

[Leo Laporte]

We need more empathy for sure.

[Jason Calacanis]

Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

We could use more tell our empathy.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Is a disease industry. Our health.

[Leo Laporte]

Didn't Elon say that's what's wrong with the world?

[Jason Calacanis]

Toxic empathy. Where?

[Alex Wilhelm]

All right, all right, all right, guys, let's stop talking about Elon and the government for a minute and bring this back to AGI because I can hear the screaming from the Club Twitch chat room and they're going, oh, my God, get back to technology. So I want to make a point about AGI because I think we people get the definition a little bit confused. So I pulled up Google's definition of this, and they say that AGI possesses, in theory, human like intelligence and can perform any intellectual task that a human can. Fair enough. Artificial super intelligence is when it surpasses human intelligence and can solve problems that we can't currently solve. I think quite often in the discussion of AGI, people conflated with as are and have higher expectations for what it is than is reasonable for the near term. So I would say that AGI should be possible under Jason's time frame, if not a little bit faster, given what we're seeing around the world. ASI, God knows put it 20 years out in the future, but I just want to make that point. That's.

[Leo Laporte]

By the way, we had Ray Kurzweil on intelligent machines a couple of weeks ago. It's exactly what he said. 20 years out.

[Jason Calacanis]

That's always the number.

[Leo Laporte]

He said AG. It's always 20 years. No, he's been saying 2045 consistently for quite some time. Yeah, and he said 2029 for AGI consistently. He said it to. He told me that 30 years ago. Icon, build.com homes.

[Jason Calacanis]

I mean, this is no longer. The 3D printed homes is no longer a.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a very cool idea.

[Jason Calacanis]

DARPA project. They're literally on East 17th street in Austin. If you go to the east side, which was a place where they told us during Southwest 20 years ago, don't go there, you'll die.

[Leo Laporte]

There's now these are beautiful.

[Jason Calacanis]

Look at them, 3D printed homes and they're being built for a fraction of the cost. And these things are going to. And if you look at the inside of them, they're gorgeous. Yeah. This is going to change everything in the world.

[Leo Laporte]

And this is basically concrete.

[Jason Calacanis]

It's. Yeah, they use a 3D printer to make those ribbons of concrete. And if you, if you get to one of the close ups of the walls, you'll see, see, like it has a very 70s, not the brutalist architecture, but it has like a very beautiful.

[Leo Laporte]

There's a curve to it.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, curves really nicely.

[Leo Laporte]

It's like that. It's like that Flintstones house you used to drive by on 280.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yes, on the 280 by the.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

Black Mountain.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

It's exactly like that one.

[Leo Laporte]

It's really interesting. Let me turn off the sound so we can watch these guys build a house. I'm going to take our last break, but thank you for cheering me up. Jason. I don't know if I buy it.

[Jason Calacanis]

But come join me in the delusion.

[Leo Laporte]

Despair is never a good place to be and I do in the long run. I have a lot of faith in this country and the people in this country and technology and I do believe in technology. I wouldn't be doing this show or this is my life lifetime. My life works. So I must, I must believe in it a little bit. I just, I worry. I'm a worrier, that's all. I just a worry ward. Jason Calacanis is here. Great to have him back visiting the show from his. He's slumming really. From his hit podcast all in. And of course this week in Startups Twists where he is joined by Alex Wilhelm. How are you on every week? No, you're on March.

[Jason Calacanis]

No, Alex is on every show now.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, every show is a week.

[Jason Calacanis]

Monday, Wednesday, Friday.

[Alex Wilhelm]

We do a lot of. Lot of shows and we have a lot of fun.

[Leo Laporte]

How come. How come your kids keep you from doing this show? But not.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Because if my nanny was here on Sunday evenings then it wouldn't be enough.

[Leo Laporte]

We need to get you a better. You need a robot nanny. That's what you need.

[Jason Calacanis]

Absolutely.

[Alex Wilhelm]

One X figure or one of the Chinese companies. Come on, y'all. Get us that robot nanny from the Jetsons. Because then I would have so. Oh, then I could go shopping and.

[Jason Calacanis]

Like need to make baby stop crying crying Parsing language model how to make babies stop crying baby crying Give botul or put in closet profile. No Milk. Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

Turn baby into paper clips.

[Jason Calacanis]

Baby closet.

[Leo Laporte]

Our show today, Kinsta Not Robots by Kinsta. But this is great hosting that you will love to create your website with. Whether you run an online business, which by the way, as you know, can be very challenging. Manage the web hosting while juggling all those other things. You don't want to worry about your web hosting. Kinsta offers managed WordPress hosting. That's the gold standard course. It has an expert team that handles everything for you. Do you know about Kinsta too?

[Jason Calacanis]

It turns out I do. Because with WordPress, you know it's an open source project, which is fantastic.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Jason Calacanis]

And everybody goes through this experience. You decide, oh, I can do it myself.

[Leo Laporte]

No, no, no, Managed. Got to go. Managed.

[Jason Calacanis]

And then what happens? You forget to upgrade it, you get hacked. You then find your entire life is every 16 weeks, 20 weeks, having to deal with some software bug. Or you could use Kinsta and they solve all those problems for a very low reasonable fee.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I think many of us went through that stage of doing your own rolling your own WordPress press.

[Jason Calacanis]

I did, many times.

[Leo Laporte]

Don't do it, don't do it.

[Jason Calacanis]

I mean it's open source, which means you can change it and that's a great possibility if you have a full time developer team.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. Kinsta's bundled up all the things you need, all the essentials to make your site stress free. With speeds that wow your visitors. That's important, right? Security that never sleeps. You really need that. And a dashboard so easy to use, so intuitive, you'll want wonder why life isn't this easy when you hit a snag. Good news, you'll talk to real humans 24, 7, 365 days a year. In short, Kinsta has perfected perfected hosting for those who want a professional result without needing a technical background. They don't just host WordPress websites, they deliver blazing speed. Your effect, your site could run up to 200% faster. Ironclad security reliability. And don't worry about moving if you're on another place. No, no, no. They will migrate your entire website for free and you get a 30 day money back guarantee. So there's no risk when it comes to security. Kinsta is in a league of its own. It's one of the few WordPress hosting providers that backs its promises with multiple enterprise certifications. And I was so impressed by the custom control panel at Kinsta. Of course, if you need help, they've got WordPress pros. Not AI chatbots, but real humans who will respond in minutes and tackle even the trickiest problems. Who uses Kinsta? I'll just give you a 3, but there's lots. TripAdvisor uses Kinsta. NASA. You ever hear of them? The National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

They use Kinsta. Indeed, uses Kinsta. 120,000 businesses trust Kinsta with their WordPress websites.

[Jason Calacanis]

One of my investments does Calm. Yeah. They've been using it for a long time. And you know that the key thing is that they have that migration team. So whatever service you're on, you know how hard it is to migrate. Leo, that's like.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a miserable, miserable thing.

[Jason Calacanis]

Miserable.

[Leo Laporte]

I have lost so much content from my website as I have moved from one to another.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

By hand, myself. And there's. It's just not good.

[Jason Calacanis]

Kinsta has a SWAT team waiting to.

[Leo Laporte]

Do your Microsoft calm.com uses Kinsta.

[Jason Calacanis]

They do. And that is a big site, you know, hundreds of users.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a huge site.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And by the way, if you're trying to be calm, if the site is slow, that is going to raise your blood pressure. So calm has to have good.

[Jason Calacanis]

Calm down. Calm down, everybody. Use Kinsta. You'll be calm. Like calm. K-I n s t a.com twit if.

[Leo Laporte]

You'Re tired of being your own website support team, switch your hosting to Kinsta. Get your first month free. And don't worry about the move. They're going to handle the whole transition for you. No tech Expertise is required. Kinsta.com TWIT get started right now. It really works. K-I-N-S-T A.com TWIT no tech expertise necessary. Look it, if it's good enough for calm, it's good enough for you.

[Jason Calacanis]

And the rocket scientists at NASA have NASA.

[Leo Laporte]

And indeed.

[Jason Calacanis]

Indeed, indeed they do.

[Leo Laporte]

Indeed.

[Jason Calacanis]

You can stay calm at NASA when you're under a ton of pressure.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, that's right.

[Jason Calacanis]

Keep in mind.

[Leo Laporte]

There you go.

[Jason Calacanis]

My agreement.

[Leo Laporte]

Can you be on every show from now on? You need to be my hype man, Jason.

[Jason Calacanis]

Well, you know what the funniest was? It was so funny. I remember one time I would say, who But a guest who is, let's just say, very anti drm.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Jason Calacanis]

And I got into it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Jason Calacanis]

He was.

[Leo Laporte]

I know exactly who you're talking about.

[Jason Calacanis]

Not going to use honorable because it has drm. And I was like, listen, I'm an author. You're an author. You know, a little DRM is like what's required by the publishing industry. So just pay the 10 bucks you don't need to have the DRM. It's a reasonable thing. If you really want to, you could buy the book, get a tape recorder and record it yourself and then you publish it without us. We got into it.

[Leo Laporte]

He still, by the way, does not use Audible. I mean, and he's going to be on Intelligent Machines on Wednesday. But we won't say who.

[Jason Calacanis]

We won't say who. But he has a new book out.

[Leo Laporte]

And he does have a new book out. Picks and Shovels. It's quite good. You should read Picks and Shovels.

[Jason Calacanis]

It's really good. I think he's a great thinker. I'm glad he exists in the world. But, you know, not good for an Audible anime.

[Leo Laporte]

He doesn't agree.

[Jason Calacanis]

He doesn't agree.

[Alex Wilhelm]

This is who we're talking about.

[Leo Laporte]

I see.

[Jason Calacanis]

He's got very strong beliefs about the.

[Leo Laporte]

Drm and I love him for that. Oh, by the way, highly recommend. Ars Technica had a very good piece today talking about Butch and suny. Remember, Butch and SUNY were the astronauts who got stuck on the iss. Turns out that Boeing Starliner wasn't that good at all to begin with. So the pieces by Eric Berger, who is it, turns out a friend of Butch's. There's Butch Wilmore getting welcomed back because they got home thanks to your buddy Elon, who Starliner took them home, but the Boeing craft that brought them, not so. So hot. The story is incredible. Highly recommended. It's at Ars Technica. I guess because they're friends. Berger got Butch to talk about the real issues that happened. They lost thrusters.

[Jason Calacanis]

That's not good.

[Leo Laporte]

They were sitting there and in fact, NASA's rules, at one point, they're sitting within feet of the International Space Station station, but their thrusters have gone out. NASA's rules were you come back home. If you lose this many thrusters, four thrusters, you come back home. And they decided to stay. And they were able to maneuver it and get docked, but it was pretty hairy. And one thing Butch Wilmore said, which I think really is important, is the heroes at NASA's mission control. Now, this was a bonus launch, but they agreed to contract Mission Control at Johnson Space center in Houston to fly Starliner. So Flight Director Ed van size. It's 15 years he's been Capcom or, I'm sorry, flight director for NASA. Wilmore said, thankfully, these folks are heroes. And please print this. What do heroes look like? Well, heroes put their tank on and they run into fiery buildings and pull people out of it. That's a Hero. But, but heroes also sit in their cubicle for decades studying their systems and knowing their systems front and back. And when there is no time to assess a situation and go and talk to people and ask, what do you think? They know their system so well, they come up with a plan on the fly. And that is a hero. And there are several of them in Mission Control.

[Jason Calacanis]

Wow.

[Leo Laporte]

Really amazing story. I won't, I won't, I won't spoil it for you, but I highly recommend it. Fantastic interview. Eric Berger got it for ours.

[Jason Calacanis]

Good reminder for people that competition amongst these providers to our government is a great thing. Having a single provider means complacency. And you know, that's the thing that's really changed. We talked about weapons systems earlier. The providers would just do overruns because they get paid what's called cost plus. They get paid a certain amount to, you know, whatever the cost of it is to build, plus a little extra that doesn't lead to the best outcomes. Capitalism, all of this competition and having multiple vendors, that's so critical.

[Leo Laporte]

Although I'm just gonna say it, your pal El has just done some big contracts. SpaceX is now the military's top launch provider. And this is where, you know, it might have been better if Elon hadn't been so involved in government. Because then you could say, oh, congratulations, well done, you earned this.

[Jason Calacanis]

Well, he does provide it. 90 do it and it's 90% cheaper now.

[Leo Laporte]

That's true. And yet Bezos isn't going to do it, even though Blue Origin is starting to move in that direction. Fiction. And obviously Boeing is the wrong, you.

[Jason Calacanis]

Know, who we gave our money to previously before SpaceX. Russia.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's right, that's right.

[Jason Calacanis]

We were having Russia before this.

[Alex Wilhelm]

So, I mean, I'm gonna go down with the SpaceX ship because I, I really love the company because it's lowering the price of me getting to space at some point in time. But I.

[Leo Laporte]

You want to go? Really?

[Alex Wilhelm]

Oh, strap me with duct tape. Let's frickin go to space.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, but I saw that you're starving and you're eating candy now, so I just want to suggest.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Stop reading the chat.

[Leo Laporte]

Get used to space food. Okay, before you. What are you eating? Don't eat that. These are gonna make you even hungrier.

[Alex Wilhelm]

These are Trader Joe's Peanut M M knockoffs that I'm waiting to eat when the show's over.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, you can eat. We're, we're on our last story, so start eating your peanuts.

[Alex Wilhelm]

I want to go back to the point about SpaceX, okay. Because I think that there is a lot of things we can criticize Doge about. Matter of your politics. You can talk about however you want. But when it comes to American space dominance, there's one name. Right now, I can't wait until Jeff Bezos's company is competing with Elon launch for launch, dollar for dollar, kilogram for kilogram. Bring it on. At that point, I'll worry about it. But right now, there's one company in the world that is shooting up. What? Jason, it's like 80% of all rocket launches right now. SpaceX, of course they're going to get the contract. Who else is doing it?

[Leo Laporte]

And Bo, I guess you're right. There is.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Boeing has squandered decades of public and private largess with incompetence and mismanagement. And so if we. If Elon makes an extra 50 bucks because Boeing related.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Forget who. What are we going to do? Cry about it? We throw the rockets up with our arms?

[Leo Laporte]

No, we're going to use. Where are you. Are you going to go to Mars? Where do you want to go?

[Alex Wilhelm]

You tell me where. What seat? You pick a rocket.

[Leo Laporte]

You wouldn't be satisfied just riding Jeff Bezos's penis, right? You want to go beyond the stratosphere. Well, it looks all right. What do you call it? It's a rocket.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Phallic. Rockets are phallic because of, you know, gravity and whatnot.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, but his is more phallic than most.

[Alex Wilhelm]

It is more phallic than most. This is Twitter.

[Jason Calacanis]

It is.

[Leo Laporte]

This is. This is Twitter after hours. That's right.

[Jason Calacanis]

It is. We are.

[Alex Wilhelm]

We're overtime.

[Jason Calacanis]

Range points.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Neptune, Mercury, Mars.

[Leo Laporte]

Anywhere you'll go anywhere.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Rocket. I am a science fiction nerd in my DNA. I reading about this since I was tiny. I want to go. I don't care where. I don't even. I'll go on a Boeing rocket. Let's go. I'll blow up. Let's do it.

[Jason Calacanis]

All right.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm sorry I said that about Jeff's.

[Alex Wilhelm]

It's okay.

[Jason Calacanis]

This is. Means we're an hour three.

[Leo Laporte]

It's very long. It's very big again. Yes. Do you tell me what you know about the word buffer bloat? Does that. Does that ring a bell at all?

[Jason Calacanis]

I'm. I mean, I could take a guess at it, but I've never heard that term.

[Leo Laporte]

Believe it or not, you. You. You owe a debt of gratitude to a man named Dave Todd, who passed away yesterday, one of the unsung heroes of The Internet. This is Eric S. Raymond writing on X. Dave, known on X as M, taught T M, T A H T because his birth name was Michael. A true hacker of the old school who touched the lives of everybody using X. His work on mitigating buffer bloat improved practical TCP IP performance tremendously, especially around video streaming and other applications requiring low latency. Without him, Netflix and similar services might still be plagued by glitches and stutters. The problem occurred because RAM got so cheap that router manufacturers started building in extra memory into their routers, which had, unfortunately, the consequence of slowing routers down. Dave discovered this. He called it buffer bloat. He even wrote a tool that let people find out how much buffer bloat their router had and was able to convince router companies, companies, you need to fix this. Raymond says Dave should have been famous. He should have been rich. If he had a cent for every dollar dollar value he generated in the world, he probably could have bought the entire country of Nicaragua and had enough left over to finance a space program. He joked about wanting to do the latter, but I don't think he was actually joking, Alex. But he wasn't Elon Musk and he wasn't Eric S. Raymond. He didn't want to run a business and he didn't want the crap that came from being Mr. Famous Guy. So a beautiful, I thought, eulogy to a man that probably many people never heard of and they may not even have heard about Buffer Blow. They would have, they would have if Dave Todd hadn't fixed it for us all. David Tott passed away this week.

[Alex Wilhelm]

We all stand on the shoulders of giants who built things and maintained them and often gave them away for true. Yeah. Shout out to everyone who builds open source. Anything just. I'm very grateful.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, we all should be. I, I agree. And maybe that is the thing that. Here's a picture of Dave playing his guitar he was famous for. He would write songs about SpaceX, actually.

[Jason Calacanis]

Oh, wow.

[Leo Laporte]

Case you're curious, it's all come full circle. Yeah. Yeah. He founded the Buffer Bloat project with Jim Geddes, ran done a couple of projects around it, refereed the Buffer Bloat mailing list. A great mailing list by the way. And he only 59. Yeah, he was a young guy. Yeah. So isn't it amazing?

[Jason Calacanis]

Like he fixed it. Somebody, we, our, our grandparents and their parents, like, would die at this age and now we see somebody pass away at 59 and we're like, oh my God, so young, you know, Isn't it amazing?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Well, we stopped smoking inside. Back to your earlier point about cigars. Turns out that and no leading gasoline.

[Jason Calacanis]

Just think about, you know, what technology has done for mitigating cancer. I mean, cancer was just a death sentence, but 50 years ago, and now.

[Leo Laporte]

I think we're going to cure cancer in my lifetime. God, I hope so.

[Jason Calacanis]

We've certainly mitigated it. I tell you that in these GLPs, if you look at the. What do they call it, the four horsemen of the apocalypse or whatever it is, it's like diabetes, you know, and heart disease and everything and obesity. Like, it's really having a dramatic impact on all of that.

[Leo Laporte]

So can you talk to my doctor and ask him to write me a prescription for oic?

[Jason Calacanis]

Even better than. Oh, OIC is compounding pharmacy compounding.

[Leo Laporte]

You can't do that anymore because the FDA said there's no shortage of OIC anymore.

[Jason Calacanis]

You can get mojaro, you can get it all. I get it from a compound compounding pharmacy. It's unbelievable.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Him stock tumbled when the FDA said, yeah, you can't compound it anymore. But there are compounding pharmacies that make semi glue tied GLP1 antagonists.

[Jason Calacanis]

All of these seem to. I've done four different ones now. I am super.

[Leo Laporte]

Do they all work? So there's Ozempic, Manjaro. Wegovy.

[Jason Calacanis]

Wegovy Manjarno I think is like in escalating steps. And then there's a. The new one's retta r e t a something.

[Leo Laporte]

And they all do. They all have the same. You've done them all. Do they all have the same effect? Are they party drugs? Do you go to raves or.

[Jason Calacanis]

Absolutely. Just everybody. Like you buy a bunch of donuts and then you take Ozempic and you just look at them and go, I'm not interested.

[Leo Laporte]

I wish I could find this. I think it was a substack post. But he said, look, the widespread use now of these GLP1 drugs is doing more than just helping with diabetes and weight loss. It is actually getting rid of impulse buys and it's going to dramatically change our economy because so much of our economy is based on late night purchases on Instagram that really.

[Jason Calacanis]

And late night eating. I mean, that was my look back on how I gained all the weight. You know, I would just do smoking addiction.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

All the good stuff. And it. It definitely does change your brain. Where I didn't realize the amount of noise I was experiencing. I thought about food constantly. I loved food. I thought about it constantly now. I think about it once in a while, but I could eat four or five slices of pizza now I'm just like, I eat a slice of pizza and I don't even look at the second one, which is crazy for a kid from Brooklyn who, like, I was in a war to see how many slices of pizza I could eat.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, me too.

[Jason Calacanis]

Before my brothers got in there. We would, like, be.

[Leo Laporte]

You can't ever go off it now, right, Jason?

[Jason Calacanis]

I have gone off of it multiple times. I cycle on and off, and I always the same thing. I gain back two to seven pounds, but I don't gain back 40 or 50. So I do think it is there.

[Leo Laporte]

One of the reasons it's not recommended for people over 65, which include me, and I am a type 2 diabetic, so I would love to do this is thyroid problems, heart issues, that kind of thing.

[Jason Calacanis]

I think you have to. What I did was I balanced being obese, which I had tipped over into, shockingly for somebody who ran marathons my whole life. And that version, that just shows you.

[Leo Laporte]

Exercise does not fix this problem.

[Jason Calacanis]

I think at a certain point, you. If you've gained so much weight, like when you get past 30, 40, 50 pounds, it's just too hard to get it off.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

And that was the problem I had. And then what I found was once I had gotten off the first 20, I started to want to work out more. My sciatica down, my leg went away.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Jason Calacanis]

My sleeping got better. My. You know, everything just got better. And then I started skiing again. And then I started doing 10 days of skiing. 20, 30, 40 days of skiing again. Year. And, you know, here I am. And now I. I like to lift weights, and I. I don't feel the need to. You look great.

[Leo Laporte]

You look fantastic.

[Jason Calacanis]

Feel. What's most important is how I feel. I feel better. You know, I feel a lot better. I sleep better. I don't have to sciatica. I feel better about myself. When I see myself on camera, I'm just like, you know what? I feel better. And I don't think you have to have too much pride about it, like, oh, I have to do it naturally. It turns out some people just have more of this GLP in their. It's very hard. And the whole system's.

[Leo Laporte]

I spent my whole life dieting.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, I know you have. You and I both have had conversations about this so many times. I. I think a low dose.

[Leo Laporte]

Plus now that I'm making bagels every week, I'm really in trouble.

[Jason Calacanis]

I did see that. You're in your sourdough.

[Leo Laporte]

I have. I have figured out how to make a perfect New York bagel.

[Jason Calacanis]

What?

[Leo Laporte]

And that is not a good thing.

[Jason Calacanis]

That's dangerous. Well, I mean, how many. To be honest, how many bagels in a sitting do you eat? Are you.

[Leo Laporte]

No, no, I never eat more than one, but the problem is it makes a dozen. Fortunately, I found takers. And if you guys live nearby, I would. I know I would. But you're in Providence. I can't.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Have you heard of FedEx, Leo? It exists.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I was thinking of FedExing my mom some, so maybe I send you both.

[Jason Calacanis]

Did you make an egg bagel? You make poppies?

[Leo Laporte]

I make a standard sourdough bagel. But the key, you got to boil it. And I've tried. You know, I've tried different.

[Jason Calacanis]

The.

[Leo Laporte]

The official way is to boil it in lye. What? Which is. So I bought a bottle of food grade lye, which is also labeled drain opener, and it has a big skull and crossbones on it, and you have to wear eye protection when you use it, but you don't use very much. You use 5 grams per liter of water. And that's how pretzels and bagels get browned, by the way. They're boiled in lye, but my preference is to boil it in malt barley syrup, which is. And delicious. And it browns it.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Guys, what happened to the show?

[Jason Calacanis]

What are we.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, the show. I love you guys. Thank you so much for being here. Jason, I miss you. Will you come back soon? I know you're a big star and everything, but whatever.

[Jason Calacanis]

Come on.

[Leo Laporte]

Our advertisers are demanding that you. You show up for every. Every show. Now, host of the all in podcast. He's an angel investor, of course. This weekend's startups. What else do you want to promote? Anything else?

[Jason Calacanis]

No, that's it. I mean, I am. I'm really proud of the work Alex is doing on this week. In startups, the audience loves them and it just creates a, you know, just a. It's great to have a great point guard. You know, he's just so good at on the fly, having all the facts together.

[Leo Laporte]

He does that what Joe Rogan's producer does, right? Joe will say, hey, what is this?

[Jason Calacanis]

That plus plus plus. You know, I think having somebody who can lay the foundation for you and set the. The play up and then let you freestyle, it's kind of like, you know, when you're a broadcaster, you have the person who's calling the game and they have the color commentary. Just. No, I'm the color guy. He's the sets it up like, hey, the court. Here we are. And then he sets the pick for me, and then I can shoot the ball. And it takes a lot of load off of me. You know, you do both here. You give your commentary.

[Leo Laporte]

I need. I need a. I need a point guard. I need somebody. Somebody do the re.

[Jason Calacanis]

As we get older, it's. It's hard to tee up every story, isn't it? Yeah, yeah. It's hard to tee up every story.

[Leo Laporte]

Jamie Vernon is young Jamie on Joe Rogan. And so you're his young Jamie. Yeah, I did. Because I don't listen. So I just want to be very clear about that virtue signaling. I have no idea what happens on the Joe Rogan.

[Jason Calacanis]

He's. When he has comedians on. It's great.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. Well, he's a comedian.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. People, young men love him. He's in the mana. The. What is it called? The mana. Manosphere.

[Jason Calacanis]

Manosphere.

[Leo Laporte]

I am in the non manosphere.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Along with this wonderful guy right here, Mr. Alex Wilhelm, who is a daddy, a husband and a great writer. How's it. Are you glad you're not at TechCrunch now that they're owned by somebody who bought them? Somebody else bought them.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Oh, some private Equity.

[Jason Calacanis]

They own ZDNet and all those collection of assets from the. Which I think means this thing is going to die a slow death.

[Leo Laporte]

It's so sad.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, it sucks.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

And they didn't. Yahoo didn't sell in Gadget. I'm trying to talk to Jim Linzon about selling it back to me.

[Leo Laporte]

That's right. They bought Web Revlogs Inc. From you, didn't they?

[Jason Calacanis]

They bought aol did. Then AOL got bought by Yahoo or merged with Yahoo and this process private equity firm. My friend Jim Linzone, who ran Cena for many years, he was running it, but for some reason, I guess they were just fed up with TechCrunch. I think. Like, would you buy Hard to manage because.

[Leo Laporte]

Because Kevin bought Dig back. Would you buy back in gadget 100.

[Jason Calacanis]

I would buy it back, yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

TikTok. How do you feel about TikTok?

[Alex Wilhelm]

That's a little beyond, Jason. If you buy. If you buy in Gadget, can I run it?

[Jason Calacanis]

Yes, yes, 100%.

[Leo Laporte]

Why would you want to get into a dying business, Jason?

[Jason Calacanis]

Well, no, what I would do is I would reconceptualize it around the new mediums that are out there. Yeah, it's a Great brand. It means a lot to people.

[Leo Laporte]

It does.

[Jason Calacanis]

But you know, you'd have to think how would young people consuming gadget today? Which means probably shorts. And if you look at what Marquez does, I think he is, you know what Marquez does on his YouTube channel.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Family.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah. He's kind of like one of the kids of Engadget. Right. Like he grew up on Engadget.

[Leo Laporte]

That's right. That's right.

[Jason Calacanis]

So. And you know, I grew up on, you know, you and Dvorak and PC magazine.

[Leo Laporte]

So we're all not that young.

[Jason Calacanis]

I think I'm 10 years younger than you. And then he's 20 years younger than both.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Next generation, isn't it?

[Jason Calacanis]

You kind of are the next generation. So you got to think, well, where do, where do they hang out? They hang out on Tick Tock and Instagram and YouTube and stuff.

[Leo Laporte]

There seems like somebody like you, somebody sharp who's really thinking about what is happening with media, should be owning some of these properties and, and steer them in the right direction.

[Jason Calacanis]

There's two ways to go. You either have to reinvent them y or you're just gonna grind them out to get like whatever private equity guys do and that's what they're doing. The private equity guys are just grinding them down. And like that's why you see on.

[Leo Laporte]

I call it red lobby string them.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yes. You know, you, you basically have to lower the costs and then you have to increase the revenue. And then what that means is the soul is kind of rung out of it. Like they're going to ring the soul out of it. And that's the problem with media is it's a. You need to have an impresario who cares about it. You need to have Peter Rojas, you need to have Leo Laporte. You need to have you Alex on cautious optimism. You need to have somebody who actually cares and is the standard, standard bearer for the brand promise. And what private equity does is they just say lower the costs.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

And wring every dollar out. Which means that what they're going to do is put like, here are the top 10 waffle makers on TechCrunch. To get the affiliate link, you see how many people are like top 10 waffles. And that was great for Wirecutter, but that wasn't Engadgets.

[Leo Laporte]

Everybody's done it now.

[Jason Calacanis]

Everybody's done it now. It just becomes an affiliate.

[Leo Laporte]

Plus they're all copying each other's articles. Jeff Jarvis makes this point all the time. Time. If you, if you do a search for an article. It's all the same article reproduced in 100 Tech Meme. You know, you look at the headline and then there's 50 other publications of the same article.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yes. And it's just a race to the bottom. And it's try. And what happened at Engadget was people would reblog us and they would not have to do the original reporting. And then they could spend more time on SEO.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Jason Calacanis]

So then they would beat us. And it was like, oh my God, how do I beat this? And it was by having a soul. No, because people will come to the original because they want the real, authentic, uncompromised thing.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Alex Wilhelm]

That's what I think the Verge is. Paywall is going to work because the Verge does have a soul. They have a raft of people that people really.

[Leo Laporte]

They have nei. That's really. That's the story there.

[Alex Wilhelm]

An absolute cornerstone of the Verge. But I should go check on. Make sure all the kids been down.

[Leo Laporte]

Go have some. Go have some chocolate covered pig peanuts.

[Alex Wilhelm]

All right, well, I will.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you, Jason, Alex, love you. We'll see you soon. Thank you all for joining us. We do Twit every. You guys can leave now while I do the. The business part of the show. Take care, guys. We do Twitter every Sunday from 2 to 5pm Pacific. That's 5 to 8pm Eastern Time, 2100 UTC. As I mentioned earlier, you can watch us live. You don't have to, but if you. If you want to be in the chat room and chat along and participate, you can watch us if you're in the club. 7 bucks a month gets you access to Club Twit Dis. And then you get the Discord. You can watch there. But it's free for everybody on YouTube, Twitch, X.com, tikTok, Kik, Facebook and LinkedIn. Eight different ways to watch after the fact. All of our shows can be downloaded from our website, TWiT TV. All of our shows have a dedicated YouTube channel if you want to watch the video. We do that because it makes it easy for you to share little clips. Sometimes something happens, you think, gosh, you know, my friend Bobby would love to see that. Send it along to them. It's great. It spreads the word about our shows. And you can also podcast. Subscribe in your favorite podcast client and get it automatically. There's audio and video. Usually ships, you know, a few hours after we finish the show. Do me a favor though. If you do that, please leave us a five star review on your favorite podcast podcast app. Whether it's itunes or Google or wherever you get your podcast from, that helps us spread the word a lot. If you're not a member of the club, seven bucks a month. Twit TV Club Twit. We've got some great stuff coming up in the club. Special club exclusives. And of course, you get ad free versions of all the shows. Was this fun? I think it was fun. Thank you for joining me. We'll see you next time. Another twit is in the can. Bye.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Bye.

[Jason Calacanis]

He's amazing.

[Leo Laporte]

Doing the twit. All right.

[Jason Calacanis]

Doing the twin baby.

[Leo Laporte]

Doing the twit.

[Jason Calacanis]

So who's the sponsor?

[Leo Laporte]

Audible.com audible.

[Jason Calacanis]

Oh, I love Audible.

[Leo Laporte]

You don't have to say that, Jason.

[Jason Calacanis]

No, I do. I have an Audible account. Hey, this is Jason Calacanis, the CEO of Mahalo.com and from formerly of Weblogs Inc. And Silicon IR Porter. I'd like to let you know about a service that I use use and I love Audible. Audible.com the largest collection of audiobooks on the Internet. All with simple, easy to use non DRM MP3.

[Leo Laporte]

It is DRM. No, that is. You know, I'm not paying you any more, Jason, just because you're doing this. You understand nothing from nothing is nothing with the.

[Jason Calacanis]

With the lightest DRM package that you can use.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, there you go. You can burn to cd so I.

[Jason Calacanis]

Mean rip so you don't have any DRM and you can send to your friends on Big Torrent.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, just make sure when you buy a book from Audible, you get Star Swarmed by Jerry Purnell. That is in fact our book pick.