This Week in Tech 1037: Teach Amanda Fish

Summary

This Week in Tech 1037: Teach Amanda Fish Released: June 23, 2025

Hosts and Guests:

• Leo Laporte – Host of This Week in Tech
• Father Robert Balisar – Digital Jesuit from Vatican City
• Jason Calacanis – Host of All In podcast
• Amanda Silberling – Senior Culture Writer at TechCrunch

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1. Introduction

In episode 1037 of This Week in Tech, titled "Teach Amanda Fish," Leo Laporte engages in a profound discussion with tech luminaries Father Robert Balisar from the Vatican, Jason Calacanis of the All In podcast, and Amanda Silberling from TechCrunch. The conversation delves deep into the pervasive influence of artificial intelligence (AI) on society, the future of work, cybersecurity, and the evolving landscape of journalism.

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2. AI's Societal Impact and Future

Job Displacement and Universal Basic Income (UBI): Jason Calacanis raises concerns about the rapid pace at which AI is displacing jobs across various sectors. He states, "[...] I think the job displacement this time will be different. In the next 10 years, we're going to see serious job displacement." (09:25) Calacanis argues that traditional solutions like UBI may be inadequate, highlighting the underwhelming support systems currently in place. Father Balisar echoes these sentiments, emphasizing that AI will not only alter the economic structures but also fundamentally transform societal relationships and community dynamics.

Autonomous Vehicles: The conversation shifts to autonomous vehicles, with discussions about Tesla's self-driving cars and their implications for employment, particularly for truck drivers. Calacanis shares his personal experience, noting, "I have the latest hardware for Tesla's Model Y, and I put a couple hundred miles on it doing self-driving." (12:57) The group debates the efficacy and safety of these technologies, underscoring the regulatory challenges they present.

Social Changes: Father Balisar introduces a thought-provoking perspective on how AI could reverse urbanization trends initiated during the Industrial Revolution. He suggests that widespread job automation might lead to a dispersal of populations away from expensive city centers, fostering more isolated and potentially fragmented communities. This societal shift could have profound implications for how individuals interact and build communities.

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3. The Changing Landscape of Journalism

AI and Content Consumption: Jason Calacanis discusses his article on AI and job destruction, questioning the sustainability of job creation in the face of technological advancements. He mentions, "As an investor in technology companies, I believe that we will see radical self-reliance become more and more necessary." (20:53) Amanda Silberling expresses skepticism about the tech industry's ability to responsibly manage job transitions, noting the precarious nature of gig economy roles like those at Amazon fulfillment centers.

TechCrunch Ownership: The episode touches upon the recent sale of TechCrunch to private equity, with Calacanis and Silberling sharing their experiences. Calacanis remarks, "Private equity overlords... making my paychecks," (55:19) highlighting concerns about the potential erosion of editorial independence and the shift towards profit-driven motives.

Self-Reliance for Journalists: Amanda emphasizes the importance of journalists building personal brands and diversifying income streams to safeguard against corporate instability. She states, "I have a podcast that I do that's separate from TechCrunch... laying the groundwork in case new ownership doesn't work out." (57:54) This aligns with the broader theme of radical self-reliance discussed throughout the episode.

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4. Cybersecurity and Surveillance

Data Breaches and Cyber Warfare: Father Balisar provides insights into the Vatican's involvement in AI conferences and the global discussions on AI's role in society. The conversation briefly touches upon cyber warfare, referencing the cyber attacks on Iran's financial system and the broader implications for global security. Calacanis points out the vulnerabilities in the US telecom infrastructure, emphasizing the colossal challenges in eliminating advanced persistent threats without massive infrastructural overhauls.

Surveillance Cameras and Privacy: The panel discusses the proliferation of surveillance cameras, from baby monitors to bird feeders, and their susceptibility to hacking. Leo Laporte highlights a concerning trend, stating, "These 40,000 cameras are probably just the tip of the iceberg." (131:07) Amanda raises ethical concerns about AI's role in analyzing surveillance footage, particularly regarding biases in facial recognition technologies that disproportionately affect marginalized communities.

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5. Financial Technology and Stablecoins

Introduction of Stablecoins in the US: Jason Calacanis introduces the concept of stablecoins, cryptocurrencies pegged to the US dollar, and discusses their potential to revolutionize financial transactions by reducing transfer fees. He explains, "Stablecoins are a tool for transporting currency between different systems." (142:47) Calacanis advocates for regulated onshore stablecoins, contrasting them with offshore counterparts like Tether, which have faced scrutiny over transparency and regulatory compliance.

Impact on Banking and Transfers: The discussion covers how stablecoins can enhance financial efficiency, citing examples like reduced transfer costs for businesses. Calacanis envisions a future where mainstream financial activities leverage stablecoins for seamless and cost-effective transactions, potentially disrupting traditional banking models.

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6. Health Care and Radical Self-Reliance

The Cost of US Healthcare: The panel critically examines the exorbitant costs of healthcare in the United States compared to other countries. Father Balisar shares his personal experience, highlighting the stark differences in treatment costs between the US and Italy. He states, "In Italy, it cost me €28, whereas in the US, the same procedure cost $72,000." (103:15) This disparity underscores the urgent need for healthcare reforms and the exploration of self-directed health solutions.

Alternative Health Care Solutions: Jason Calacanis discusses emerging startups that empower individuals to take control of their healthcare through services like annual blood work and personalized health coaching. He remarks, "We are seeing people start to take control of their health care and find ways to manage costs independently." (104:33) This aligns with the broader theme of radical self-reliance, advocating for innovative approaches to mitigate the systemic inefficiencies in the US healthcare system.

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7. Streaming vs. Traditional TV

Shift in Viewership Trends: Leo Laporte highlights a significant shift in media consumption, noting that streaming services have surpassed traditional cable and network television in viewership for the first time. This transition reflects changing consumer preferences and the growing dominance of on-demand content platforms. The panel discusses the implications of this trend for advertisers, content creators, and the future of television broadcasting.

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8. Concluding Thoughts

Radical Self-Reliance and Empathy: The episode concludes with a deep reflection on the balance between individual self-reliance and societal empathy. Jason Calacanis advocates for combining radical self-reliance with deep empathy to address the multifaceted challenges posed by AI and technological advancements. He emphasizes, "Radical self-reliance and deep empathy will be essential for navigating the biggest challenges of our lifetime." (110:27)

Optimism Amid Challenges: Despite the daunting discussions, the panel remains cautiously optimistic. Father Balisar envisions a future where humanity leverages technology to foster more meaningful and satisfying relationships, countering the isolating tendencies exacerbated by AI. Leo Laporte emphasizes the enduring human spirit, stating, "There is hope. We have to give advice to people and empower them to learn something new." (162:21)

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Notable Quotes:

• Jason Calacanis (09:25): "I think the job displacement this time will be different. In the next 10 years, we're going to see serious job displacement."

• Father Robert Balisar (06:33): "AI is not a buzzword around here. It's a thing. It's going to be a signature part of Pope Leo's pap."

• Amanda Silberling (17:14): "I just fundamentally don't trust the tech industry to make changes to people's jobs in the way they have in the past."

• Jason Calacanis (20:53): "Radical self-reliance is going to become more and more necessary."

• Leo Laporte (131:07): "These 40,000 cameras are probably just the tip of the iceberg."

• Jason Calacanis (142:12): "Stablecoins are a tool for transporting currency between different systems."

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Conclusion

Episode 1037 of This Week in Tech offers a comprehensive exploration of AI's multifaceted impact on modern society. From job displacement and the future of autonomous vehicles to the ethical dilemmas in journalism and cybersecurity, the panelists provide insightful perspectives on navigating the rapidly evolving technological landscape. The recurring theme of radical self-reliance, coupled with a call for deep empathy, underscores the necessity for both individual empowerment and collective responsibility in shaping a sustainable and equitable future.

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This summary captures the essence of the discussions held in the episode, providing a coherent and engaging overview for those who haven't listened to the full podcast.

Transcript

[Leo Laporte]

It's time for Twitt this Week in Tech. What a great show ahead for you. Amanda Siberling is here from TechCrunch, Jason Calacanis from the all in podcast, and Father Robert Balaser. We'll talk about artificial intelligence. We'll talk about cameras everywhere and the future of humanity. It's all ahead next on TWIT. Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is TWIT. This is TWIT. This Week in Tech, episode 1037, recorded Sunday, June 22, 2025. Teach Amanda Fish. It's time for TWIT this Week in Tech, the show. We cover the week's tech news. Get ready. It's gonna be a barn burner. Ladies and gentlemen, Father Robert Ballisar is here from high above Vatican City. Hello, Father Robert.

[Father Robert Balisar]

Greetings from my barn on top of St. Pet Bon.

[Leo Laporte]

Ben. Yeah, you were probably pretty busy over the last few months.

[Father Robert Balisar]

It's been. It's been a time, actually. I was supposed to be back in the United States at the end of April, and then many, many things happened, and because of that, my schedule got compressed. I. I was keynote speaker at a bunch of AI conferences in Budapest, then New York, then Los Angeles.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow.

[Father Robert Balisar]

But because everything got compressed, instead of going from Rome to Budapest to New York to Los Angeles, I went Rome to Las Vegas, to Budapest, to Vegas, to New York, to Vegas to Los Angeles to Vegas to Rome.

[Leo Laporte]

Of course, Vegas is where your mom and dad are, and I know you.

[Father Robert Balisar]

Which is very hot, by the way. I don't know if you know this, but it's hot in the United States right now.

[Leo Laporte]

The whole country is burning up, except for California, which usually it's the other way around, but we're getting a relatively cool snap. That's Amanda Silberling from TechCrunch. She's their culture senior culture writers. Great to see you, Amanda. Omglol.

[Amanda Silberling]

That is a URL that I own. I'm not on top of any historic sites. I am simply just in Philadelphia. Nice historic site in itself.

[Leo Laporte]

It's pretty warm in Philadelphia. I see that clock is melting behind you.

[Amanda Silberling]

Oh, yeah, yeah. It's crazy. It's within my apartment. It's hot enough to melt.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, geez. Well, if you want a spritz or something, just go ahead and do that. Don't hold back. Also here, he's out of doors because beautiful Los Angeles, the weather is fine. Mr. Jason Calacanis, the host of the hottest podcast in the world right now. All in. Hello, Jason.

[Jason Calacanis]

It's good to Be home. Nice to see you, Lew.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice to see you. Always a pleasure to see Jason. This is not really home. You live in Austin now though, right?

[Jason Calacanis]

I live in Austin. I'm in la. We just had the launch of the all in ultra premium Tequila last night. I kid you not.

[Leo Laporte]

Do it.

[Jason Calacanis]

I mean, this is David Sacks, he's a tequila guy. So he launched a brand of tequila. So now I'm out there hawking tequila.

[Leo Laporte]

Could be worse, could be a gold phone. So I think the tequila is probably the better way to go.

[Jason Calacanis]

Absolutely. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

The better way to go. That's his.

[Jason Calacanis]

Pretty hilarious.

[Leo Laporte]

Every celebrity has a tequila. There must be a significant profit margin in tequila.

[Jason Calacanis]

I guess. You know, it's. These are, these are $1,200 a bottle of Tequila. It's very, it's very tasty, I'll tell you that. But what is it?

[Amanda Silberling]

Is it.

[Leo Laporte]

Is there gold flakes in it? What is going on with it?

[Jason Calacanis]

It's a hand painted, gorgeous bottle. Oh, that's, you know, it's like a site.

[Leo Laporte]

So I want to.

[Jason Calacanis]

All in dot com. I don't know if it's arm.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, it's on the. It's on the podcast.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's. It's, you know, it's like a. It's a spin off from the podcast because the podcast has no advertising on it and so as a concept. Yeah, it's not there.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, geez, just missed a huge.

[Jason Calacanis]

Will be available soon.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, a huge opportunity.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, no, it's going to sell out either way.

[Leo Laporte]

But yeah. And is it still the fans? Is that the deal?

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, you know, the, the podcast has gotten pretty big and yeah, let's say that doesn't.

[Leo Laporte]

Doesn't hurt the connections to the Trump administration with David Sachs.

[Jason Calacanis]

David Sachs is in the White House, you know, and the. Yeah, it's on the weekends. It goes to the top 10 on the Apple podcast list, which is a little bit surreal having been in podcasting with you, guiding my. Getting my start really here on Twitter for like, gosh, getting close to 20 years now. 15 it is.

[Leo Laporte]

It's over 20 years. Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

Here for you and 15 for me or so or something. And yeah, it's really interesting to watch how popular's got its crossed over. And the other top 1 2% of the audience is, you know, leaders in tech or leaders.

[Leo Laporte]

That's why you wrote this podcast, right? Because this is, this is hugely influential.

[Jason Calacanis]

It's pretty. Yeah, it's pretty weird.

[Leo Laporte]

It looks like pretty good parties as well.

[Jason Calacanis]

Parties are great. Yeah, it's nuts. But, you know, it's. It's very weird because, you know, we all started podcasting, Leo, and you had us all on. You know, me, Kevin Rose, I was.

[Leo Laporte]

Listening to an old show that you were on. It was at your house, and you were about to do another show, and Kevin Pollock was there, and.

[Jason Calacanis]

Oh, yeah, Kevin Pollock. I taught him how to podcast and he did a show for a while.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah. Bunch of people. Now Marc Maron is abandoning his podcast. Wtf?

[Jason Calacanis]

He decided to retire. Well, if you think about it like ripples, you started all this. And then Kevin Rose, myself, I don't.

[Leo Laporte]

Think I started it.

[Jason Calacanis]

Well, I mean, Adam Curry, John, she and those guys all like it all kind of like a bunch of ripples in. In the water. And then subsequent podcasts, et cetera, they.

[Leo Laporte]

All kind of taken off as a medium. Yeah, it's all taken off as a medium. As, as. As. As has. You're still doing this week in startups. I know.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah. Three days a week. Me and Alex Wilhelm do it. And that's really a niche podcast focused just on startups. We will delve into big tech, like you do here, but we only talk about in relation to startups.

[Leo Laporte]

So, Robert, you were saying that you've been going to AI conferences. Is this in your capacity as the digital Jesuit, or is. What's the deal?

[Father Robert Balisar]

Yeah. So with the new pope choosing the.

[Leo Laporte]

Name Leo, by the way. Thank you. He probably put a little bug in his ear, suggested that would be a good name.

[Father Robert Balisar]

Well, I mean, the reason for that is because the previous Pope Leo was the one who promulgated the encyclical Rerum Navarum. Now, little history lessons. Rerum Navarre was the start of Catholic social teaching. It was a document that was against the dehumanization of the Industrial Revolution.

[Leo Laporte]

It was. He was the Pope at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. And.

[Father Robert Balisar]

That's correct. And he was promulgated the document. That's the document that's the basis for the Church's response to AI. So AI is. It's not a buzzword around here. It's a thing. It's going to be a signature part of Pope Leo's pap.

[Leo Laporte]

TechCrunch says Pope Leo makes AI's threat to humanity a signature issue.

[Father Robert Balisar]

Absolutely. Absolutely. And, okay, so there's going to be people who are going to take the story and they're going to run with it into. Into thinking that, oh, the Catholic Church, they're taking the Luddite position. No, no, no, no, no, no. In the Internal conversations. And in these conversations that we've been having at the start of this process, there is a recognition of some of the wonderful things the. That AI has been able to do. We've been using it to combat human trafficking. We've been using it to look at patterns of deforestation. So there are things that we would really like to encourage. But there is something very similar to what was happening during the Industrial Revolution. When we're talking about the AI revolution and that's what the Catholic Church wants to be involved with, we are uniquely positioned because this is what we've been doing. The things that people are complaining about AI, those are the issues that we've had for the last almost 200 years. So, yeah, it's sort of all hands on deck for AI.

[Leo Laporte]

It ties in very well to the piece you just published at Substack, Jason, why we don't talk about job destruction, but we must.

[Jason Calacanis]

This is a very interesting thing. You and I have been in tech our whole career as me 30. And you've been in it, I guess since the 80s. I was listening to.

[Leo Laporte]

You can say 50, it's okay, whatever.

[Jason Calacanis]

I mean, but since the 80s. And you know, listen, I. I remember reading John Dvorak and I heard you on another. I'm not sure which show on the network it was, but you were talking about Ziff and you know, all the other publications and when you got started, when you wrote your first article, I think your first article is Atari or something.

[Leo Laporte]

I wrote about Ataris back in the 70s and then I wrote one of the very first Macintosh reviews for bite magazine in 84. And so, yeah, I've been covering this, yeah, 50 years. Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

And that's. I got the Atari 2600 in 1977. Eight. The Sears model. And then I used to get Byte magazine.

[Leo Laporte]

So when you were a kid though, right?

[Jason Calacanis]

I was, yeah, it's born in 1970, so I was seven, eight years old. My dad got me the Atari 2600 and that really set me on a career. IBM PC Junior. And for much of my career, you know, in. In as an adult, the last 35 years or so in tech we had. I was kind of indoctrinated into the tech's gonna happen, so we might as well build it and society will figure out a way. It's this inevitability of tech. Right. So we just might as well accelerate into it and everybody's gonna benefit.

[Leo Laporte]

At least in the tech industry. That's still the general belief, like I would say that you could try to Stop it. But why? It's gonna happen whether you want to or not. Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

And I was at a conference this week and I've been, you know, since I'm on the inside now as an investor. I started as a journalist, entrepreneur and then became an investor. So I went from, you know, an outsider trying out what was going on inside the room to being inside the room where they make the decisions of, you know, who to give a check to and what to bet on. And that starts the whole process of building this technology. So what I realize is I think the job displacement this time will be different. Everybody tries to make an analogy towards the industrial revolution and us stopping farming. And only 1% of people work in agriculture today. But when I started doing the back of the envelope math and I started looking at how quick this displacement is happening, I've come to the conclusion that in the next 10 years, we're going to see serious job displacement. And we were talking about this prior to ChatGPT being lost. And you might remember Sam Altman doing, when he was at Y Combinator, a study on universal basic income that he funded. And everybody talked about it constantly, very publicly.

[Leo Laporte]

And the last year that's kind of been the antidote to job losses. Oh, well, don't worry, because there's going to be so much surplus thanks to technology that will be able to pay everybody a universal basic income.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yes. There's really like two or three different solutions to the job destruction problem. We can get into that.

[Leo Laporte]

It always, it always seemed to me kind of a little hand wavy because where's all that money going to come from?

[Father Robert Balisar]

Yeah, it's extremely hand wavy.

[Leo Laporte]

Who's paying for this ubi? Is it the federal government?

[Jason Calacanis]

I mean, we have a. We have UBI today in the form of a lot of different programs. We have. So.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

If you took all the entitlements together and you just throw people a check and people who have, you know, theorized just doing this.

[Leo Laporte]

But how big a check would it be?

[Jason Calacanis]

You know, we actually could do the math. I think it probably be low thousands per month for people who are at the bottom of the.

[Leo Laporte]

You can't even pay rent in Petaluma.

[Jason Calacanis]

You would you. It would be like, let alone eating, it would be like unemployment or food stamps and these kind of.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it would be subsistence.

[Jason Calacanis]

So, you know, the question is, will we create enough new jobs to make up for the ones that are lost? Right. So the typing pool went away, the mail room went away, photocopy room went away. You know, we've watched all these jobs go away over time. This time I just think we have to be a little more thoughtful about it because, you know, today Tesla launched their Austin self driving. I got to drive last week in one of those prototypes.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, wow. Yeah. And immediately, by the way, the state of Texas passed a law saying you got to have a permit to do that.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah. So people are.

[Father Robert Balisar]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

But obviously aimed at Elon. I mean. I mean, Elon does have a safety driver still, which lets him off the hook for a while.

[Jason Calacanis]

But, yeah, I think they have a safety operator. Interesting. It's in the passenger side, but.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, he's not in front of the wheel.

[Jason Calacanis]

Not in front of the wheel, but there's a stop.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's encouraging.

[Jason Calacanis]

It's. It's kind of like right in between what Wayo did, there's a big stop button and a pullover button on the dashboard. So if something happens and they're going only low speed in a small area. And then I was talking to Zipline.

[Leo Laporte]

Which is before you. Before you move on. How was that ride? Was it. I know you're friends with Elon.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Are you still buddies? Yeah. Oh, yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

Still best friends. Yeah. I have the latest hardware for Tesla Juniper Model Y, and I put a couple hundred miles on it doing self driving. I think the cyber cabs, the robo taxis, have a little bit of a better version of that. It feels a little more aggressive and confident, I still think.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, yeah, and it was doing rolling stops, it was doing California stops for a while. And somebody said, well, that's because Elon trained it and that's how Elon drives.

[Jason Calacanis]

Well, it is a neural net. That's how it's driving. So it's studying humans. I do think that this technology is here and it works. It should just be very regulated and you should have to have a safety driver for the first 10,000 miles or 10,000 rides. Maybe a million. Some number.

[Leo Laporte]

So GM gave up on cruise and basically dissolved the division. Google's going ahead with Waymo big time. There's. You can't go around San Francisco without seeing a thousand Waymos a Waymo every other car.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Elon wants to get into this business, but he's not alone. This is the. The. One of the hot businesses right now is robo taxis.

[Jason Calacanis]

There'll be many winners. Volkswagen has a very competitive product. There's a company pony, AI. There's. We ride.

[Leo Laporte]

So Amazon has Zooks.

[Jason Calacanis]

Zooks.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

There, there. There are. In the United States.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, well, we'll never know what will have in the United States.

[Father Robert Balisar]

Jason, you know, one of the things when you work outside these technologies are taking the low hanging fruits of, of g of the gig economy, which is one of the future.

[Leo Laporte]

Which is sad, actually.

[Father Robert Balisar]

Yeah, it's sad, but yeah. And I know people have alluded this before, but essentially the key to driving this with capitalism is that it's replacing the most expensive and least efficient part of the capitalist system, which are the people. Which sounds great. And it will increase your profits short term until there's no one who can afford to buy your goods and service.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, the people are now of work. I think that I remember reading an estimate, there was something, I think 14 million truck drivers in the United States. And of course, trucks are one of the very first things that will go autonomous.

[Father Robert Balisar]

Absolutely.

[Leo Laporte]

So in his article, we'll get back to it when Jason comes back. But he talks about three solutions. The UBI new job creation, which is often the response to industrial disruption or technological disruption. It was in the industrial era, people, you know, stopped making buggy whips but found. Oh, it says his laptop overheated in the sun.

[Father Robert Balisar]

Oh, welcome to Los Angeles.

[Leo Laporte]

And then his third solution, he says his favorite is a vacation, which surprises me coming from Jason. I'll have to ask him about this. He's also talking about Andy Jassy at Amazon saying get ready because we're going to replace a lot of executives.

[Father Robert Balisar]

The. Okay, so a couple of trends that I've seen at these conferences that I've been doing. First, everyone loves to talk about AI, but almost everyone doesn't think that their job can be done by AI, which.

[Leo Laporte]

You couldn't have an AI podcaster, could you?

[Father Robert Balisar]

Right. You know, and it's always like, I.

[Leo Laporte]

Think Google already does.

[Father Robert Balisar]

Yeah, yeah, but, but one of the other issues has also been that it they're thinking of this as an overlay on top of the existing system. We can fix it with X, Y and Z, Universal basic income, etc. Etc. Social services increase. But what we're going to have with the coming of AI as it gets perfected, it's not just the changing of the economic structure of the society, it's going to change society itself. We could actually see the reversal of what we saw starting with the industrial revolution where population centers rushed to the cities. And if we're all on UBI and if most of those repetitive jobs are now being done by AI, there's no reason to stay in expensive city centers. So what happens when your population disperses? Well, it changes the way that people relate to one another. It changes the way that communities are built. It changes the way that demographics are handled. You start seeing balkanization of communities because why not live with the people that you like if you no longer have to live in big cities? So these are, these are all the concerns that are being brought up right now in the Vatican just a couple of yards away. There are high level discussions about who do we bring in to have these conversations. Not just universal basic income, not just economists, but you have to bring in sociologists, you have to bring in psychologists, you have to bring in experts in AI. It's basically going to touch every part of every human society across the planet.

[Amanda Silberling]

I just fundamentally don't trust the tech industry to make changes to people's jobs in the way they have in the past. Like you could say that Amazon and Amazon Warehouses have created as many jobs as Amazon took away, but I don't think that people working in Amazon fulfillment centers is a sustainable job and.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, good, let the robots have that one. In fact, Amazon's moving rapidly in that direction.

[Amanda Silberling]

I mean, yeah, I mean, but I mean, I just, I think, I mean even like as in Jason's article, it says for 24 hours a day these $10,000 robots will get the job done without bathroom breaks or threatening a union drive. They cost less than $1 an hour. And like, yeah, that's like this is what the tech companies want. Because you can abuse robots in a way that you can't get away with abusing humans.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, humans have. Sorry about that. My laptop over.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, he's in the shade now.

[Jason Calacanis]

In the shade. You know, you're. If everybody's going to have to have radical self reliance, Amanda, you. This idea that like the corporation is there for you and you're going to be a corporate person for X number of years, that's gone.

[Leo Laporte]

And you've been moving in that direction for a while.

[Jason Calacanis]

And that's where we started. Right. Like you, you. There was no concept that the corporation would be with you for your entire.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, there was feudalism, I guess. Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

And. But now, you know, self reliance is going to be what it's all about. And these are going to be complicated issues. Andy Jassy wrote a piece this week and when a CEO writes a manifesto and publishes it to everybody you know, in the company and then publishes it publicly before it gets leaked to Amanda and TechCrunch, you know, it's important. And he goes through this and there's about two dozen examples of AI and what they're working on. And in that story, he, he mentions towards the end that there will be a different footprint of the company. And you know, in my piece that I wrote on my substack, I, I explained and I haven't written a piece in a long time, years. But I felt like I needed to bring this up because to your point, Amanda, the tech industry, we just build the most efficient companies with the highest profits that lower the prices for consumers. That's called capitalism. And you know, it's the, the best system in the world for creating abundance, but it's the most imperfect one. It, the best one we figured out so far. And you know, when he writes a story like that on the Amazon website, I think this is a way of him preparing investors for higher profits and employees for less jobs. And this is a high and low situation, Leo. You know, you are seeing it in white collar jobs doing chores. So if you were at a company and your job consisted of chores, which is anything other than the core product. So on a podcast there's somebody who's, you know, the host and they edit it, that's like the core product, but everybody around it. You know, if there's an accountant, a lawyer, an operations person, most of those jobs which are, would be defined as chores, things necessary to produce the main thing, those are all going away. And so. And they're going to go away.

[Leo Laporte]

Radical independence or self sufficiency doesn't answer the question of but how am I going to pay the rent and make a living? I agree. You know, a lot of people do jobs they hate, they don't like, that are demeaning. There isn't a lot of dignity in a lot of jobs. But at the same time, people need to eat.

[Jason Calacanis]

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

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that's the other side of this. And I think the real issue might end up being all of this really looks like it's not to make society better, but to enrich a small number of people, the executives, the CEOs, the investors. And it's just going to drive incoming inequality crazy. And I don't think that that's a sustainable way for a Society to be run. It's not every time we've seen that in the past there's been a guillotine involved.

[Father Robert Balisar]

Well, the thing is, when you hear tech execs talking about radical self reliance and I understand that, I understand that need, the problem is they think that only applies to the people. If we move into what is what looks to be the final destination of AI, corporations will need radical self reliance in the sense that they will no longer be able to judge the profitability quarter to quarter on as the success metric for their companies. If you no longer have the same massive pool of consumers to consume your products and goods, it no longer becomes whether or not you're providing services that people want. It's. Do you provide services for the good of that society? Yeah, it changes the rules entirely and they're not looking at that part.

[Leo Laporte]

I think they should also be worried about a vast and growing underclass that is not precisely, you know, what happens if you're that Uber driver afford to eat. Yeah, there's no. So I mean Jason, you, you say you like the third choice, which is AI vacation. What does that mean?

[Jason Calacanis]

Well, yeah, and if you look at the end of my story, I show the Waymos burning and I make father's point here.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

Which is, you know, in Los angeles they riot 10 times a year. Anything Lakers win, any excuse to riot in LA, in my experience, having lived here for 10 years. But this time they didn't burn the police cars. They summoned the Waymos to their death.

[Leo Laporte]

Isn't that interesting?

[Jason Calacanis]

I think this is like telling. It's telling. And you know, I like to think that I'm able to pick up on nuance when the Waymos are being called to their death. Like that is a moment in time. And you know, today the Uber, the, the introductory price of the Tesla robo taxis is $4. I think it might be 420 actually as a joke. So.

[Leo Laporte]

Of course it is.

[Jason Calacanis]

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

[Amanda Silberling]

Though, because I don't even just. I've taken Waymos in San Francisco and I've like been there and it seems like they ended up being more expensive than Ubers. But is it going to be a similar situation where like the price of stuff. Of stuff is artificially lower to get people to Use it and then like. Because you can't keep doing 420 forever, right?

[Jason Calacanis]

No, no. I think the prices of these cars, the, the, the Cyber cab, which is the two door one, I think they will get that down to 20,000, 25,000 per car and that's going to be, you know, two, three, four dollars for an Uber ride that would normally cost 15 or 20. So yes, that will happen. Absolutely. Those rides would be that cheap. What we should start thinking about is as a society is creating more jobs in places where we need them. And those will be the most human jobs. So one suggestion I have is we go to a four day work week for a lot of jobs like say teachers or healthcare. If you go to a four day work week, that fifth day means you just need 20% more employees. Right. If you do more professional training. If we went to a six week, if we had six week vacations here in the United States versus, you know, two weeks or three weeks, whatever the standard is, that would create more jobs. So I do think we will get through this. But this is going to be one of the, I think this will be the biggest challenge of our lifetime. You know, everybody on this call, what we're going to see in the next 10 years will be the biggest challenge of our lifetime. We will see waymos burned. We will see protests in the streets over this issue. Where's my jobs and the people? It's happening in China and I was talking to an executive from one of the, you know, I'll just say top 10, but it's probably even higher, you know, public companies over there and he said they are slow rolling, self driving there. They're only allowing it in a couple of cities and testing it because the number one job for young men who are 18 to like 25 is driving cabs in many of those cities and other people working factories. Obviously when you have 18 to 25 year olds unemployed, if you go look.

[Leo Laporte]

At Greece, they're the ones who riot, they ride.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah. So society will self correct for this. It's going to be so.

[Leo Laporte]

But does it look like we're going to do anything about it?

[Benito]

Real quick, context first, real quick. This is Benito by the way. Hello everybody.

[Leo Laporte]

For burning the Philippines.

[Benito]

We're burning the waymos down in LA isn't because that their AI are taking away jobs. It's because they share data with the lapd. That's why they burned waymos.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, interesting.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I think there's also Benito. Would you not, would you not disagree that there is anti big Tech sentiment as well.

[Benito]

There is, but the reason they, they burned Waymos specifically is because they shared data with the government.

[Leo Laporte]

But it's the same. But they were calling them over.

[Benito]

Yeah, but the reason was, the reason they were doing that was because Waymo was sharing data with the lapd.

[Leo Laporte]

Remember in San Francisco there were protests against the Google buses and they were, they were vandalizing the Google buses. I think there's a lot of. This is a deep resentment, not just of AI, but of big tech. And I think it's, you know, look, we've been covering tech my whole life practically. I think something has changed in the point of view. And you say this yourself about yourself, Jason.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

You used to be an optimist and.

[Jason Calacanis]

I, and I still am, and I think we will navigate this. But if you bring up these concerns in my community, like inside the tent, people are like, listen, I don't want.

[Leo Laporte]

You to talk about it.

[Jason Calacanis]

No, no, no. Or worse.

[Leo Laporte]

That's because they don't have a solution, by the way. That's not. But there's no answer to it.

[Jason Calacanis]

And it's not there, there, there will be answers to it. It just won't be provided by these companies. And they don't see it as their role to solve the problem. Their role is to make the best technology better, faster, cheaper, better, faster, cheaper.

[Father Robert Balisar]

See, it needs to be their role to solve the problem because right now they can, they can put a finger on the scale right now so they can have input into what a reformed society looks like that has AI, that has replaced most human jobs. It will get to the point, and this will be after a few quarters of record profits at which they will no longer have that ability to put that finger. That's when we get into actual violent revolution. And I mean, that used to be a theoretical, that was somewhere down the line, but you can see it now.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah.

[Father Robert Balisar]

And to have a tech bro, a wealthy tech bro, tell me, oh, don't worry, we're going to make sure that prices stay low enough so that you can still afford to live when you're living on universal basic income. That's, that is not a promise, that's a threat. That's, that's them telling me at any point I can take away your ability to live. And that is not a solution. That is 1984. That is a dystopia that people can see a mile away.

[Jason Calacanis]

Well, this is where radical self reliance comes in. And I think startups, as crazy as it sounds, will be the solution here. So I've Been talking to entrepreneurs in our accelerators and pre accelerator about imagine a world where there were tens of thousands of people who are no longer driving Ubers or doing doordash. What could you do with that surplus of individual time, creativity, et cetera? And we've seen that over and over again. In fact, the whole gig economy came as a way for people who had to work, shift work. And Uber got a lot of criticism for this. I know because I was the third investor and I was right there on the front lines having to answer it constantly, you know, and I said to people, you don't understand, this is not a replacement for the 8 hour shift or 10 hour shift at Walmart or Amazon Factory. This is for somebody who's dropping their kids off of school, wants to do three or four rides, then pick them up and have dinner with them and take them to soccer. They want to work this way and they will not take these jobs if the other jobs are better. And there's just a natural correcting force, which is what we've seen, right? The whole discussion of like, oh my God, Uber drivers and doordash drivers don't make enough money. Now people are looking at those. And Walmart, Target, Starbucks have had to raise the salaries to compete with people who take those jobs. So I think there'll be a cognitive and physical world surplus. What can we do with the surplus? That's the optimist in me. What products or services can we create? And one of them is going to be an aging population. And so you could have young people working to make people who are in retirement their lives more rich. We could have twice as many doctors, three times as many teachers, we could have after school programs. So there'll be all these other opportunities and people will find them. The really the transition is what concerns me. And I'm also concerned that people are trying to shut this conversation down. So at least you have one tech bro father who is bringing it up.

[Father Robert Balisar]

Just a couple. Mark Cuban. Mark Cuban has actually said bringing it up. Yeah, absolutely right things. We actually want to invite him over here to be one of our speakers. And I like the way that you're phrasing it. I would take a slightly different approach and say you have to change the conversation from we're going to make sure that you have enough to live on because that will be provided by UBI and instead make it a conversation about can we provide you with a more satisfactory, a happier lifestyle, A way of you actually taking pride in the type of work that you do, because those are the jobs that we want humans to have. I want you to feel good about the thing that you are creating. Going back to the Catholic social teaching, if we believe in the innate, innate goodness of work, then let's actually give people the ability to feel good about the work that they're doing. And it no longer becomes about making enough money to survive. It now becomes making a career out of something that you love doing. Now I know that sounds very hippie dippy and I know that the, the, the tech community won't buy into that, but that's, that's going to lead to a far more satisfied society than we will. Make sure you don't starve. We make sure that you don't starve is not something that's hopeful.

[Leo Laporte]

That's serfdom.

[Amanda Silberling]

I, I think that promise has already been broken and that if you look at like people that are working full time as Uber drivers, like even if the intention is that people will give three or four rides in the middle of the day if they want to make a little bit of extra money, people are having to do gigs like Uber and Instacart full time because they aren't able to find other jobs. And then those jobs become very difficult because then you have to pay for your car, you have to pay for your gas, you have to pay for your car upgrades. And I think there's already been a lot of discontent around people trying to turn gig work that isn't meant to be full time work into full time work. And so I think now that when people see like Waymo and self driving vehicles encroaching on territory that already was encroached on, I think that does drive some of the anger because I don't think the public has trust that there will be these new jobs created for them. Because then again, it's like people that are working in an Amazon warehouse are being like tracked every second of every day. If they take like one second too long of a lunch break, they can get fired. There's like Advil machines in the warehouses because people are working themselves so hard in a way that is like not sustainable. And like, yes, they have options for insurance and they pay more than minimum wage. But like, I think the cost of these jobs is still like people are discontent because yeah, all that fulfillment, well.

[Jason Calacanis]

And all that will, those jobs are going to be going away. So all this complaining and hand wringing, oh my God, Uber's so terrible. Amazon, These jobs are so terrible. Oh my God, these bosses have been so, you know, intense or what you know, or whatever the claims are. And they, and they could be true. And everybody wants a higher salary. That's true as well. You know, up and down the stack. We're going to look back and be like, oh my God, we had it so good. You could just turn on an app and work and make 20 bucks an hour, 30 bucks an hour and not have a boss. Well, and here's. This is why I keep bringing up radical self reliance. Yes, your cost of living is going to go down, but you are going to be responsible. And Amanda, you see that working for a private equity firm that owns tech, they are going to flip and flip and flip. Shut things down and sell them. And it's. You cannot rely on your employer for your permanent sustenance in this world. You're going to have to be self reliant. And, and you see people doing that now, especially journalism, such a great category for it. You see so many people saying, you know what, I can make more just doing a substack. All I need is a thousand real fans to pay me a hundred a year. I think I have a thousand real fans somewhere out there.

[Leo Laporte]

People can do that, though. I mean, is there, is it education? What do you need to do to make that more realistic? Better education system, free education, free training.

[Father Robert Balisar]

There's a couple of different ways. Health care, all that stuff. I do want to make one, one point of clarification, which in every respect.

[Leo Laporte]

We'Re going backwards on those things, but go ahead.

[Father Robert Balisar]

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

[Leo Laporte]

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

[Jason Calacanis]

I'm home, I'm home.

[Leo Laporte]

He's home. We'll accept it.

[Father Robert Balisar]

He has to stay out of the sun. His laptop will open.

[Jason Calacanis]

Irish.

[Leo Laporte]

He's a good Irish boy. He's got to stay out of the sun. Father Robert Ballis there, he's in the dark because it's late night in. In Italy. What time is it? 11:51pm well, we'll get you out of here by 3 or 4 in the morning, I promise.

[Father Robert Balisar]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And Amanda Silberling, who is in Philly, senior culture writer of the TechCrunch. Are you an Eagles fan?

[Amanda Silberling]

Yeah, I mean, I'm more of a baseball person. Like, I'm a big Phillies fan. And then I feel like the Eagles. Like I've never been a huge football person, but living in Philadelphia, it's like you start knowing things.

[Leo Laporte]

Like when Jason was talking about rioting in la, I was thinking, after the Eagles won the super bowl, they greased the telephone poles downtown so people wouldn't climb up them.

[Amanda Silberling]

Yeah. But then there was a festival recently in the Italian market area of Philly where they have like all like the local vendors and stuff out. But then one of the parts of the festival was that they greased a pole and had a pole greased. Climbing contest.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Well, you gotta train. You gotta train if you're gonna be ready for the next super bowl. You gotta tr. Great to have all three of you. We appreciate it. Our show today, brought to you by Spaceship. I don't know, Jason, you probably don't know about this company. It is very, very cool. Why do you assume. Why does one assume. Why do we assume that simple and affordable has to mean basic and only for beginners? Geeks, tech professionals want to save time and money too, right? Spaceship is the best looking, most sophisticated domain and web platform out there. Take a look at the website. It is. It takes the pain out of choosing, purchasing and managing domain names and web products like Share. I mean, they've got it all. Shared hosting, virtual machines, business email. With Spaceship, you not only enjoy intuitive domain management, but you also benefit from substantial savings on renewal fees. They actually have below market prices on domains. You, you transfer your domain to Spaceship, you don't have to wait for expiration. And once the transfer is complete, one year is automatically added to your current registration so you don't lose time and you save money. And by the way, they make it, you know, whenever somebody says, oh, just move your domain. I go, oh, no, I've done that before. No, they make it easy. The transfer process is straightforward. You can complete it within 30 minutes. In many cases. Plus, you're going to get that complimentary one year subscription to Space Mail, providing you with a professional business email address as well. So they've got below market prices for domain registrations and renewals. They also have some pretty fresh ways to make life easier, even for us geeks. For instance, Unbox for connecting your Spaceship products to your domain and configuring it all in just a few steps. One of the really cool features Spaceship just added is the ability to do secure messaging where your login isn't your phone number or some name, it's a domain. So I registered LEOs [e-mail] by the way. It was four bucks. And then with Unbox it was automatically immediately connected to the messaging system. You can message me with thunderboltios im, which is about the coolest thing ever. In fact, a couple people have done it lately. That is really neat. And Unbox made it very simple. Now if you want to do something a little more complicated, they've got alf, who is not an alien, but your own AI assistant for making life easy. The ALF can do domain transfers, update DNS records, all ALF loves the stuff you probably do not. I know how to do it, but boy, it's sure nice to let ALF do it. They also, and this is how Thunderbolt came about, they have a roadmap where you can go, you can explore their potential future customers in the tech community, get what they really need and you get to participate. To discover how much you can save compared to your Current Registrar, visit Spaceship.com TWIT and follow the link at the top of the page. Ready to switch and save. Transfer your domain to Spaceship today. Spaceship.com TWIT Tell me how you like it. You can use Thunderbolt to message me securely, by the way, end to end. Encrypted@LeosIM.

[Jason Calacanis]

Good pricing.

[Leo Laporte]

Isn't that a good idea? Leo's I am Great idea. It was like $4. I couldn't believe it. And yeah, it's because I control the DNS, right? It proves that I own that. So it's totally secure. It's a brilliant idea anyway. Spaceship.com Twitter we thank them so much for their support of this week in tech. Well, in case you didn't notice, there's a little bit of a little bit of a kerfuffle going on in the Middle east right now. And our thoughts and prayers go out to Gali and others of our family who are in the Middle East. Gali is in, I think Tel Aviv right now, which means she's being bombarded as we speak. But the war is not just kinetic. It is, in fact, the first real cyber war. Israel. This is from Wired. Andy Greenberg writing. Israel tied predatory sparrow. Hackers are waging cyber war in Iran's financial system. They actually were able to attack the SEPA bank and destroy $90 million at an Iranian crypto exchange, Nobitex. In fact, it got so bad, Iran actually took itself off the Internet because they couldn't thwart these attacks. This, this might. I mean, we've seen certain amounts of cyber warfare in the past. This might be the real. The, the first time that we're seeing the real deal. Iran has restricted Internet access to ward off those attacks. People in the country are having difficulty accessing websites and messaging apps. This is the problem now. I mean, warfare has changed very much, and technology is being used in new and different ways. I guess there's not much to say about it, except.

[Father Robert Balisar]

Except that it's a good thing that we. We fired the most competent professional in the cyber industry from his government job, took away his security credentials so that he can't consult, and made sure that any of his work was deleted.

[Leo Laporte]

You're talking about Christopher Krebs.

[Father Robert Balisar]

Yeah. That was smart.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well. And CISO is underfunded. Now, the. And apparently nobody can present somebody that Trump likes for director of the nsa, so. There is no director of the nsa.

[Father Robert Balisar]

Well, maybe he'll find a grocer or another gardener to put in position.

[Leo Laporte]

It's not good. It does. It puts us a little bit vulnerable. Right. And by the way, the Chinese are still in our telecom system, and our major telecom carriers say, yeah, yeah, we can't do anything about it.

[Father Robert Balisar]

Well, it's a forklift. It would be a forklift upgrade. This is not a software patch you'd have to rip out.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Father Robert Balisar]

Billions of dollars worth of hardware which was not designed to be ripped out. You'd have to redo infrastructure, and you'd have to do it in such a way that there's no advanced persistent threats left behind. I mean, we. We did a session on this at DEFCON last year, and we couldn't come up with even a theoretical way to do this cleanly.

[Leo Laporte]

The telecom people say we would have to take the entire American telecom system down for a day or two. Imagine the chaos to make these fixes.

[Jason Calacanis]

But maybe a great day for America, though. Can you imagine a day without cell phones?

[Father Robert Balisar]

It might change some habits. Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

Please, can we do it for 48 hours?

[Leo Laporte]

They'd have to. They'd have to Shut the market down. Right. Because nobody can trade.

[Jason Calacanis]

Long weekend. Let's go. I'm here for it. I'm going whitewater rafting over the summer, and I do it every year. And I was like, should I get. Bring the Starlink mini? I was trying to get one of those, and everybody was like, no, no, no. This is when the kids. Disconnect, disconnect, disconnect.

[Father Robert Balisar]

You remember every year I disconnect for eight days. Nothing. There's no.

[Leo Laporte]

But you have to. That's part of your. That's part of calling, right? Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah.

[Father Robert Balisar]

And the first day, I. It's. It's like going through withdrawals. It's like being a junkie. I'm just. I'm always reaching for my phone and realize, oh, I don't have it. I don't have a connect. I don't have WI Fi. I don't have a laptop. But by day three, I'm thinking, why in the world am I going to reconnect this? It's so much better. I have so much less stress. And then I get to the end of the retreat and I go, let's find out what's happening on Netflix.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that ties to the Next Story, which is streaming is now the king of tv. For the first time ever, last month, more Americans watch streaming than cable and network television combined.

[Father Robert Balisar]

I'm actually only surprised that we didn't hit that point a while back. I mean, I guess it was the older generations that was. That were keeping the average on the. On the connected side.

[Leo Laporte]

But.

[Father Robert Balisar]

The cord cutter generation arrived in force a long, long time ago. That's all I've got. This house right now. We have no cable, we have no satellite. Everything is delivered over the Internet.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, same for us, too. We disconnected the. Unfortunately, it's still cable because Comcast is the only provider.

[Jason Calacanis]

This is just about boomers, right? Like, this is about the paradigm shift. Because, you know, if you're locked into DirecTV or, you know, my parents, whatever it's like to get them on YouTube, TV or Hulu, whatever solution it is. I have actually both of those now because I, you know, when I was traveling, I'm trying to VPN in to watch the Knicks game, and I had to, like, figure out how to VPN into my home in Texas so that I could trick these folks into thinking that I was watching it, you know, I'm home, man. I'm home.

[Father Robert Balisar]

Because we all love that cat and mouse game, right? Come on.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, the geo travel. Yeah, it's so.

[Leo Laporte]

It's so Tail scale, baby. That's the solution.

[Jason Calacanis]

There you go.

[Father Robert Balisar]

YouTube. My 80 year old parents cut the court this year.

[Jason Calacanis]

Oh wow.

[Father Robert Balisar]

I never thought it would happen. They are completely off now. The downside is they, they really got down the Rabbit hole on YouTube with the fake videos. They. Because. Because where they live they get pitched all the time. So I actually had to turn on. Don't tell them this family control on their accounts so I could ban those artificially those AI slop channels because they just keep running. They keep running.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. The.

[Benito]

There's also Gen X here, by the way. Like a lot of Gen X, the older Gen X are stuck on cable. Cut her cord before my sisters did.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Isn't that interesting? Yeah. Older viewers. This is from the New York Times. It's no surprise the younger viewers are the first to jump to streaming. Another group has made the leap as well. Viewers over the age of 65. Older viewers watch a lot of television more than any other group. One third of all viewing comes from people over 65. And they've been moving to streaming in droves over the last few years since 2023. Viewers over 65 are the fastest growing age group for watching YouTube on the TV. Not on a, not on a phone or on a computer, but on the television.

[Benito]

Yeah, that's what changed it for my mom. I taught her how to stream it through a comcast, through a Chromecast and it blew her mind. And like that changed everything for her.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, this is all I need.

[Father Robert Balisar]

The only reason why my parents didn't cut the cord five years ago was because my mom is addicted to Jeopardy. And NBC very wisely made it impossible to subscribe to something that will give you live Jeopardy. But then I, I wrote a script to, to download all je. Those. Those freely uploaded Jeopardy. Episodes so she can watch them when she wants.

[Leo Laporte]

I watch Jeopardy. On Peacock. Without the ads. I love it.

[Father Robert Balisar]

That was for you too, Amanda. Jeopardy.

[Amanda Silberling]

Oh, yeah. Um, yeah. Well, don't tell the Google overlords, but you can share a YouTube TV account. So I have a YouTube TV account shared among like five people. So I pay.

[Leo Laporte]

That's family. They're the family. They don't have to be living with you to be your family.

[Jason Calacanis]

Modern Family's okay.

[Amanda Silberling]

Yeah, I mean I still, I, Yeah, I was kicked off of the family Netflix, so.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, my daughter, my 32 year old daughter is still on the family Netflix.

[Amanda Silberling]

Yeah, I, I finally.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't have the heart to fire her.

[Amanda Silberling]

Maybe I should make money. Well, I was fired from it by Netflix.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, Netflix. The password sharing thing. They caught on, huh?

[Amanda Silberling]

Yeah, because they're problems with Netflix. You live in a different state than your parents. Why are you on?

[Leo Laporte]

That's a problem.

[Amanda Silberling]

And I'm like, I, I guess I, I can be a big girl and pay for my own Netflix. But, but I, so I never had cable like as an adult, but I tried getting one of those little cable box things that like, like gets the satellite. I don't, I don't know how that kind of stuff works.

[Father Robert Balisar]

The HD broadcast tv.

[Amanda Silberling]

Yeah, yeah, I tried getting one of those specifically because I wanted to watch Jeopardy. But then it did not work very well. And then my friends were like, what if we split a YouTube TV account? Now I, I watched Jeopardy. I watched the Phillies. I have the TV viewing habits of a middle aged man.

[Jason Calacanis]

It's great.

[Father Robert Balisar]

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

[Amanda Silberling]

Netflix is tearing families ap.

[Leo Laporte]

It's not just Jeopardy. You ever hear Amanda of a show called Gunsmoke? No, but featuring young Clint Eastwood as Rowdy Yates. It is a western. It premiered before I was born in 1955, went off the air in 1975. It is, according to the New York Times, making regular appearances in Nielsen's most watched streaming series over the last few months.

[Father Robert Balisar]

I would think it would be Bonanza instead of Gutsmith.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, Gun Smoke's much better than Bonanza. As long as it's not Little House on the Prairie, I'm okay.

[Jason Calacanis]

You can get the detective show, you know, my wife. You can get the one with the guy who smokes the cigar in the trench coat.

[Leo Laporte]

Claire's collected me. Rowdy Yates was on Rawhide. Gunsmoke was a different.

[Jason Calacanis]

Colombo is so great.

[Leo Laporte]

Colombo's excellent.

[Jason Calacanis]

They had like a whole series of Colombos like into the 80s, early 90s where you know, he would do these like specials. It wasn't like a series. It was like, you know, short, serious, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Jason Calacanis]

One and a half hour, one hour, 20 minute episodes. And they all are around, they pivot around new technologies in society. So one of them was pivoted around the fax machine. The fax machine. One of them was a pager. So they literally had one where a guy had bought his wife a pager. He had a pager. I won't spoil it. And another one was based on speeding cameras. And the speeding camera they had featured in it, like used actual film. So, like it would. The film was developed and they're showing like this camera. It was like, it was almost like they went to CES and were like, went to the back. Taiwanese small boots are. And they're like, the writers are like, let's make a show about that. The speeding camera is going to be huge. It's hilarious.

[Father Robert Balisar]

Jason, if you like Columbo, you have to watch a movie from the 80s, okay. Called Strange Vibes. That had Peter Fogg, it had Jeff Goldblum, and it had Cyndi Laupra.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, perfect.

[Jason Calacanis]

What?

[Leo Laporte]

That's a movie.

[Father Robert Balisar]

Horrible movie, but man, kind of fun.

[Leo Laporte]

That's all you need.

[Jason Calacanis]

Cyndi Lauper in her network debut. Her movie debut.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, we better take another break before this gets out of hand. Great to have all three of you. More news coming up. You're watching this week in Tech brought to you by US Cloud. They are the number one Microsoft Unified support replacement. Ah. When I first talked to them, we've been doing the ads now for a while, so I think most of you are probably familiar with this. When I first talked to them, I said, what do you do? Are you a cloud company? No, we're the global leader in third party Microsoft support for enterprises. They support 50 of the Fortune 500. And there's a good reason for it, because switching to US Cloud can save your business 30 to 50% over Microsoft Unified and Premier support. Now that wouldn't be any good if it were just less expensive. It's better as well. In fact, twice as fast. Average time to resolution versus Microsoft. And they've got SLAs to back that. And it turns out their name isn't so confusing because now US Cloud is going to do something Microsoft would never do. Help you save money on Azure. They have an Azure cost optimization service. Now this is, I think, pretty common. Certainly has been my experience. When was the last time you evaluated your Azure usage? Do you really think about it? If it's been a while, you probably have what we call in the business little Azure sprawl, a little spend creep going on. Well, the good news is, thanks to US Cloud, saving on Azure is easier than you think. US Cloud offers an eight week Azure engagements powered by VBox and what it'll do is identify key opportunities to reduce costs across your entire Azure environment. And by the way, you're going to get expert guidance from US Cloud senior engineers, the best in the business. An average of over 16 years with Microsoft products. At the end of the eight weeks, your interactive dashboard will have big, bold letters. Rebuild and downscale opportunities, unused resources. And now you can reallocate those precious IT dollars towards things you really need. Or if you want to keep the savings going, you could invest your Azure savings in US Cloud's Microsoft support and keep saving. There's an idea. Completely eliminate your Microsoft unified spend. I think that's what Sam did. He's the technical operations manager at Bed Gaming. B E, D E. He gave us Cloud 5 stars. And this quote, we found some things that have been running for three years which no one was checking. These VMs were, I don't know, 10 grand a month. Not a massive chunk in the grand scheme of how much we spent on Azure. But, you know, once you get to 40 or $50,000 a month, it really starts to add up. Really, it's simple. Stop overpaying for Azure, identify and eliminate Azure creep, and boost your performance all in eight weeks. With US Cloud, visit uscloud.com and book a call today to find out how much your team can save. That's uscloud.com to book a call today and get faster Microsoft Support for less better, too. USCloud.com, book a call today. Faster Microsoft support for less. Thank you, US Cloud, for, for your support of our program. Jason Calacanis, father Robert Balisair and Amanda Silberling, all three of you have gone through some changes. Amanda, Jason was referring to this earlier. TechCrunch has a new owner.

[Amanda Silberling]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

How's that been for you? It's okay. You can talk. They're not listening. They're not listening. I. Let me.

[Father Robert Balisar]

It's a trap.

[Leo Laporte]

Let me quote Jason's. Jason's co host on the twists, Alex Wilhelm. He said, I didn't want to talk about this, but let me tell you, I mean, he, he was glad. He's glad he's out of TechCrunch, isn't he?

[Jason Calacanis]

Jason, I think, you know, TechCrunch has got a great legacy. You know, things trade in the market like brands like that. And, you know, every, every brand has a season and some owners, you know, new owners cherish the brand and invest in it. Other ones don't. We, you know, we've seen a bunch of the Ziff Titles, PC Magazine.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah. This is the way of the world, isn't it? Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

And then, you know, just publishing is one of these very unique things. You need to have an impresario, a person who actually cares, you know, Mike Arrington, a Mike Arrington, a Leo Laporte, whatever. It happens to be somebody who actually just wants to be the steward of the brand and say, this brand stands for this. This is what we cherish as opposed to just the bean counters. And you know, that's always the challenge when things.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, especially when private equity comes in because what. Basically by definition, aren't they bean counters? I mean, isn't that exactly what they are?

[Jason Calacanis]

Literally, the job of private equity is to buy something at a low price, race down the costs and race up the revenue as much as you can, put some debt on it and then sell it it and, you know, it's somebody else's problem, you know, of course, then, you know, if you have great writers or great talent, you know, they are just cogs in the wheel. Right. This is why I always think, you know, when I'm talking to individual contributors like Amanda or Alex Wilhelm, build a brand.

[Leo Laporte]

Self reliance. Radical self reliance, you know. Yeah.

[Father Robert Balisar]

It is a slightly refined version of the old corporate raiders from the 80s. It's. It's totally. Yeah, yes. The same theory.

[Jason Calacanis]

Go to spaceship.com and you know, twit and get yourself a domain and set it up and get your page.

[Leo Laporte]

What? What is it? Amanda? Omg. Lol.

[Jason Calacanis]

I love it, whatever it is.

[Amanda Silberling]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I think this is kind of like a. A weird place to be in. In journalism where like, you have people like Alex Wilhelm who works with Jason now, who is like, like doing his own thing, but like, I mean, radical self reliance. But I'm like, when I started in tech journalism, Alex Wilhelm was already like Alex Wilhelm.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Amanda Silberling]

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

[Leo Laporte]

What's that tell us about that?

[Amanda Silberling]

Wow. If true, it is an Internet connection culture podcast that I host with my friend Isabelle Kim, who is a sci fi author. And we talk about generally just Internet culture, how the Internet is impacting our lives. And it's similar to my beat at TechCrunch, but a lot sillier and off the cuff. More so, but more personal.

[Leo Laporte]

Right? No, which is good.

[Amanda Silberling]

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

[Jason Calacanis]

Not as scary as it might seem. There's a really brilliant guy, Kevin Kelly.

[Leo Laporte]

Love him.

[Jason Calacanis]

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

[Leo Laporte]

This just in the wheel has been invented in Hungary. I don't know.

[Father Robert Balisar]

This is gonna cost journalist. So many journalists end up doing in house communications for large tech companies because.

[Leo Laporte]

They go to the dark side. They go to.

[Father Robert Balisar]

That's why I, I'm gonna go work for the in house communications department at Intel. I've heard that's, that's got a few.

[Leo Laporte]

Not a good idea.

[Jason Calacanis]

No, no, no.

[Leo Laporte]

Not a good idea.

[Jason Calacanis]

There's a new cruise line where I think you could do better. It's the Titanic back and forth. It does a great, it's got great service.

[Leo Laporte]

I hear they're unsinkable.

[Father Robert Balisar]

Yeah, just today, right, because they, they announced that they're, they've bas. They're going to destroy the in house. They're removing the in house communications team and they're going to move everything to a center and AI. So it's like.

[Jason Calacanis]

Oh right. Well yeah, every job, you know, I'm working with founders and so you know we're, every time there's an innovation or a change like this, it's an opportunity. Chaos is a ladder, right? The, the chaos that we're experiencing is the opportunity. Now somebody with a big heart and who's thoughtful like father here is always going to think about the meek, the poor. Like that is what we Christians.

[Leo Laporte]

Correct. Because not everybody can, can become a brand, right? No, but by the way, if everybody became a brand, the brand would be meaningless.

[Jason Calacanis]

Well, but everybody can learn incremental skills, right? And that's what we have to do is start empowering people and giving them that motivation to try to learn something. Right. And teach a man to fish. Right. Not just give them a fish. And so I think this is the high order bet and what I see in startups because startups are resource constrained and my, my, my day job is not all in. It's investing in 100, you know, startups in the first year of their existence. We call it year zero and we are seeing them do with three people what startups used to do with 12. So a modern app company, if you were launching the.

[Leo Laporte]

Com app, has an AI.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yes. So a lot of the functions that you would hire now are available either as abstracted SaaS, products or services. They're available, you know, through Fiverr or some other service. And all those services are abstracted away and cheaper because of massive competition. Cloud hosting, domain names like we're hearing here support all of those things are examples of better, cheaper, faster. So the cost is just coming down so fast and you're able to do so Much more with less. I think we'll see. I know this sounds crazy, but, you know, perhaps in the next 10 years, you know, 20 times the number of startups formed because so many people are going to get out of school, not be able to have a job, but they will have skills and they're going to sit there and say, well, what do we do? And in the past it was start a rock band, start a zine, put up a website, you know, start a consulting firm and agency. That radical Self reliance is going to become more and more necessary. Two or three of your friends with skills start something. You did it, Amanda. With a podcast. Now what you have to do with that podcast is just collect emails. Once you've collected emails, then you just have to say, we're looking for a hundred patrons to put it a hundred dollars each to do this special series and just get, get one or two of those per week each with your co hosts and it will.

[Leo Laporte]

People are talking about this solo unicorn.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

You think there's gonna. There hasn't been one yet, has there?

[Jason Calacanis]

There is arguably one.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, it's gonna be you, Amanda.

[Amanda Silberling]

It's a duo unicorn.

[Jason Calacanis]

You actually could say Joe Rogan, you know, who has a small number of employees, is, is maybe the first one trending towards that. There's a company called Distrokid that my friend Phil Kaplan did, which was only a handful of people. Pud. Yeah. From F'd Company.

[Leo Laporte]

He was always lazy. Pud.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

I remember Pud telling me, whatever you do, make a website that you can walk away from and it'll continue to make incremental income forever.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

He's a guy who did F'd Company and that was a good little moneymaker for some time.

[Jason Calacanis]

Distrokid lets you upload your album if you're not signed by a label and then get it onto Spotify and other places. And it's just a monthly subscription and it's something everybody needs who's a musician. And there's a lot more musicians, a long tail of them. So again, back to Self Reliance. You know, you look at what's happening on Patreon, you look at what's happening on YouTube, you know, people are able to make small amounts of money and growing. I now not everybody's going to be a content creator, but I do think there'll be a lot of interesting opportunities there for small business creation.

[Benito]

This doesn't super sound like Self reliance though, because you're relying on Patreon, you're relying on Google, you're relying on these giant corporations.

[Leo Laporte]

Well that, you know what, those are empowering technologies that make it possible.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah. You're not. And there's so many actually. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

You're not wandering off in the desert and making a living without any help of, of any kind.

[Father Robert Balisar]

It's not the paradigm of teaching a man to fish naturally. I'm going to be a big fan of that.

[Leo Laporte]

That's Amanda, do you know how to fish?

[Father Robert Balisar]

We're telling people to teach. We're telling that we're going to teach people how to fish while the wealthy are in the same waters with fishing trawlers. I mean it's like.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a good point. Yeah.

[Father Robert Balisar]

Radical self reliance works as long as everyone's got their own little palm. But we don't.

[Leo Laporte]

Doesn't it rely on a certain amount of scarcity too? You can't have everybody be a success. Or can you? Could you have a million creators?

[Jason Calacanis]

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

[Leo Laporte]

That's true.

[Jason Calacanis]

It's a lot easier to only have the motivation.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. My son taught himself to cook from YouTube. He watched YouTube cooking videos, you know, religiously growing up.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And of course that's what he's doing.

[Jason Calacanis]

So many.

[Benito]

But see this is, and this is, this is I think a fallacy though. Like he didn't teach himself. All those people on YouTube taught him well.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, but we're nowhere. We're not proposing that you live in a vacuum. We are in a society. I think it's a. Look, I understand there are going to be people who for whatever reason, you know, we call them nine to fivers. There are people in the world who just want a job. They can work 9 to 5. They don't want investment in it. They don't want to invest any extra effort into it. They just want to go make a paycheck and come home. I would guess that's probably the majority of People, Are you saying that that class of, of worker is out of luck?

[Father Robert Balisar]

No.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yes.

[Father Robert Balisar]

Can't be.

[Jason Calacanis]

Well, I think they are.

[Father Robert Balisar]

Can't be.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a bad sign. I mean, that's.

[Jason Calacanis]

I think they're gonna have challenges.

[Father Robert Balisar]

Worker is out of luck, that society crumbles eventually. It has to happen. So you need to be able to develop a society that can both allow that nine to fiver who just wants to be able to kick back with a brew on the weekend to live a comfortable life and at the same time inspire people who maybe it's good advice, but want to do something wonderful.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's good advice to say, you know, if you can, don't be a nine to fiver. But yeah, not everybody has the capability or the. Even the desire to do that.

[Jason Calacanis]

The motivation's the key there. You know, I think some people are like, you're saying they want to work nine to five, they're not motivated to do.

[Leo Laporte]

A lot of people, most of the people I know are very happy to, you know, be a mailman or whatever. I agree that work gives you dignity, that work gives your life meaning. Meaning that your work should be something that is meaningful to you. But not everybody has that luxury. That seems like a. I mean, look, it's what I taught my kids is what I did is I always pursued meaning and satisfaction, not money. And it worked out okay for me, but I don't think it's going to always work out that way for everybody. I have a very privileged background. You know, if you come from privilege, it's not such a stretch to say, you know, okay, you're going to make it. I had a good education. I had parents who were supportive. I didn't have trauma in my youth. There's a lot of people who don't have that luxury. The majority, I would guess everybody starts.

[Jason Calacanis]

At a different starting line, right? Some people further back than others.

[Leo Laporte]

One of the reasons TechCrunch got sold is, according to the Register, the apocalypse, or they call it the AI pocalypse is here for websites. Search referrals are plummeting. And this is thanks to the. I would say to people like me who don't use Google search anymore, I use perplexity. I think AI search. That's why Google added these AI overviews based on data from 70 individuals that Kevin Indig studied who writes about SEO, he said outbound click rates. When AI overviews are absent on Google, outbound click rates go up by a significant portion. But as soon as Google pushed out AI overviews clicks went down about 35%. This is according to Ahrefs and SEO site SimilarWeb reported that search referrals to top US travel and tourism has fallen 20% year over year. News and media sites traffic dropped 17% year over year. E commerce down 9%. Finance, 7%. Food drinks, 7%. Lifestyle fashion, 5%. This isn't because we're not going to these sites. Well, it is because we're not going to these sites. It's because we're reading AI overviews instead of going to these sites. We're getting their information, but it's been scraped from them. You agree?

[Amanda Silberling]

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

[Leo Laporte]

Jason, would you start Weblogs Inc. Today?

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, I would. I'm a glutton for punishment. I love content. But, you know, this is going to be solid.

[Leo Laporte]

For those who don't know, Jason created Weblogs Inc. Originally, what it was the, what was it called? The reporter. The not Silicon Valley, Silicon Alley reporter.

[Jason Calacanis]

Weblog gadget, Autoblog, Joy Sig, all those, you know, the, the search, referral traffic was a major part of everybody's business then. It's how people discovered stuff. It was your number one way to get traffic. There are going to be a lot of settlements here. Disney is suing one of the image companies, Journey, New York Times, they've got.

[Leo Laporte]

Darth Vader in there.

[Jason Calacanis]

And so these, I'll tell you, the content are going to win these suits. I'm going to guess.

[Leo Laporte]

You think so?

[Jason Calacanis]

100%.

[Amanda Silberling]

I hope so.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah. No, it's 100%. You're not allowed.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know if I hope so. I hope so for the content companies. But on the other hand, I think there's also a first Amendment right to read. We've talked about it in this show before. Are the AIs doing anything different than you or I would be? Let's say I as somebody who loves Star wars, looked at a lot of Star wars and started drawing pictures of Darth Vader.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, in a non commercial way. You doing that personally is a non issue. But when you're a company charging a subscription, it is an issue.

[Leo Laporte]

That's what makes it different.

[Jason Calacanis]

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

[Leo Laporte]

But does it? But does it. So here's my. And Sam Altman, I think said this. If you only allow AIs to train on public domain information, you're not going to get very good AIs.

[Jason Calacanis]

And that's their challenge. That is not the fault of the New York Times or any content creator. They still have the sovereignty to do what they want with their data. And the way this will all work out here in the west, in China, there'll be a free for all all. But we invested in a company called Created by Humans. I put it into the, the Zoom Chat if you want to see it. And there are going to be clearing houses. And what these clearing houses will do is you'll be able to take the twit archive and everything on the network and say hey, and you might have to look for like Created by Humans AI. And so Created by humans AI is going to. You could put twit into there and say these are what you can do, you can train and this is the cost. And there'll be a robot txt vers that will be robo AI txt. Right. Robot AI txt. And the industry will ha. Will soon have its own standards of what you can train on, what you can't and what the costs are. Just like Creative Commons has many different licenses, there'll be an AI license for training.

[Leo Laporte]

And this could work for both sides. It won't be so prohibitively expensive. AIs could afford it. And because we. I want, Look, I, I think an AI should be trained on every published work work. I think AI should be trained on the New York Times. It should be trained on everything. That's how An AI becomes useful. I understand the rights holders don't like it. The New York Times is claiming you can reconstruct the New York Times, that nobody will read the New York Times because OpenAI ingest. That's not the case.

[Jason Calacanis]

Well, here's the opportunity, Leo. What if chat GPT that we just gave $6.5 billion.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

To Johnny. I've. What if they said we're going to give 10% of our yearly revenue. Revenue, which at this point would be a billion dollars, and we're going to share it with content creators and we're just asking content creators to give us a direct feed and they'll get a fee and then we'll have the exclusive to it. So when you go to Perplexity, it'll say, oh, you want New York Times? We don't have the license for that. And then when you go to Chat GPT in their marketing, they'll say, with the New York Times, with the Wall Street Journal and with Disney, and you'll pick. Now, that will be a bummer in some ways because it'll be Balkanized, but this could totally, and I predict it will reinvigorate the industry.

[Leo Laporte]

So Creative by Humans is working with the Authors Guild. So you're basically trying to get these kinds of licensing rights for books.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah. And then it will go to the next thing. To the next thing, to the next thing. Podcasts, et cetera. And there'll be many clearinghouses. You'll be able to pick them just like ascap.

[Leo Laporte]

It seems sensible, actually. It seems like a good solution.

[Jason Calacanis]

And it's an opportunity for people. It's an opportunity to differentiate their products.

[Leo Laporte]

It doesn't solve the search engine problem, but it does solve the ingesting.

[Jason Calacanis]

Do you know what it would do for TechCrunch if they made $10 million a from licensing? That's literally 100 journalists getting paid. 100.

[Leo Laporte]

Reddit's been doing that. Reddit's been selling off its.

[Jason Calacanis]

And Quora. And Quora making big money. I understand Reddit's making big money. This will be the future.

[Father Robert Balisar]

I mean, they're legislating this right now in the uk. This is the use and access bill that they're debating. And basically the only argument that they can make pro AI is to say, well, I can't properly develop if you don't just let them have access to everything.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Father Robert Balisar]

Which is not. That's not an argument. That's. That's a want fine. That's basically saying, well, you know what? It would be a lot Easier for me as a real estate developer to make money if you just gave me the land for free.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Amanda Silberling]

But no, yeah, I just hope that people are able to have the option of deciding if they want to license their works or not, which is, I mean, I, I am just looking at this created by humans for the first time. But yeah, I mean, if somebody wants to license their works and they can get compensated for it, then that's great. But as it stands right now, people are having their books being used as training data and getting no compensation at all, which I think is where a lot of the angst is coming from.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Mastodon has updated its terms to prohibit people from training AI models on Mastodon. X is X is automatically using your tweets for Grok, right?

[Jason Calacanis]

For X, I would think so. And I think Reddit has the right. So any, any community you're part of, you're going to have to make that decision if you want to give them a worldwide perpetual license to your content. And that's like the deal you have to make. Some people don't want to put their content on YouTube because they don't want to give them a license to use it, you know, et cetera. But the problem with the training is once you give the license, cats out of the bag, you can't really rip it out that easily.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Jason Calacanis]

Is the problem. But all these people will be sued and they will be sued successfully.

[Father Robert Balisar]

Just, just FYI, one of the things that we've been doing has been looking at the sources, the high quality sources. So published sources that the Catholic Church controls across our universities and the history in the archives, it comes up to about 4 exabytes.

[Amanda Silberling]

Wow.

[Father Robert Balisar]

That would be a fantastic cache on which to train an AI. An LLM with access to that much high quality vetted and peer reviewed sources would actually make for a really, really good LLM. Just saying. Just want to put that out there.

[Jason Calacanis]

Absolutely.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's take a break. More to come. This is a very smart panel. It's nice to have you. And I'm glad that you're going to teach Amanda to fish. I think that's really good, Father Rob. Thank you.

[Amanda Silberling]

We're all gonna go on a nice fishing trip after we're done recording.

[Father Robert Balisar]

I just, I just throw a stick of dynamite into the pond.

[Leo Laporte]

It's like shooting fish in a barrel with dynamite.

[Amanda Silberling]

That's what I do in the Zelda games, but that's not real life.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, did you get the Switch 2, Ms. Zelda fan? Are you gonna upgrade?

[Amanda Silberling]

I haven't bought it yet, but I'm kind of like on one hand, I don't immediately need it, but I know I'm going to buy it eventually. So I'm like, shouldn't I just get it?

[Leo Laporte]

Like, it's not going to go down in price, I don't think. I think this is. Yeah.

[Amanda Silberling]

I mean, thank you to my private equity overlords. I do have the $500, but I don't know, I feel like I know I'm going to buy it at some point. So I'm like, doesn't really matter.

[Leo Laporte]

Everybody at TechCrunch a Nintendo Switch fund, so everybody can get one.

[Amanda Silberling]

They should.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, you know, I'll tell you, my Switch Switch UBI is Animal crossing. Saved my life during COVID That's ubc, Universal Basic console.

[Father Robert Balisar]

Is that where we're doing it?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's it. UBC.

[Amanda Silberling]

Yeah, I'm down. UBC. I did get to test the Switch 2, but they don't let you take those home at the Nintendo events. But at least I have played it nice, which is not as impressive anymore now that it is a publicly released item.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, not everybody has one. I keep going into the stores looking for them, but.

[Father Robert Balisar]

Well, over here we have some good family men who ran across a truck of 4,000 switch.

[Leo Laporte]

So, I mean, it fell off a truck. What do you want? I got a good deal on them. Does it come with Mario World, though? That's the thing. I need that. This episode of this Week in Tech brought to you by. Oh, this cool little thing. My camera's off, so I can't show you, but it's the coolest little thing ever. It's my thingst Canary. What it is, is a honeypot. So I remember talking to Bill Cheswick, who wrote the first honeypot, and he said, these are really hard to implement. It's hard to implement a honeypot that fools hackers, that is legit, that doesn't let hackers get out of the honeypot into your stuff. And it doesn't provide become, in other words, a security risk. Well, these guys at Thinks Canary have done it all for you. They for years trained companies and governments how to break into systems. They know exactly what hackers are looking for. So they've created a honeypot that can impersonate almost anything. Easy to set up. You can deploy it in minutes. I'm right now on the ThinksCanary configuration site, so I'll show you. I could. Right now, it's a Windows server. This little box is about the size of an external USB drive is a Windows server. But look what I can look what I can turn it into. I can make it an IAS server, I can make it a Linux server, Centos Linux or Oracle Enterprise Server. I can make it a Mac OS X file share, but you can even make it kind of a Dell switch, a Fortigate router, you can make it a Microtik router, you can even make it a SCADA device. I'm going to turn mine into a Hirschman RS20 industrial switch. Ladies and gentlemen, whatever it is you want to make, it sits there and is completely indistinguishable from the real thing. It's got the right Mac address, it's got the right login. The other thing you can do with your Things Canary is create these Canary tokens. These are files that you can distribute anywhere. These tokens can be anything. An AWS API key, a Word document, a wireguard VPN configuration. You can even make it a credit card and then put it on your Google Drive or somewhere. The minute somebody access it it they don't get access to your bank account, they let you know they're in your system. If someone's accessing these lure files or brute forcing your fake, I don't know, it's making an internal SSH server or something like that, you're going to immediately get a notification from your thinkscanary that says you got a problem, there's somebody in your network doing stuff you don't want them to do. No false alerts, just the alerts that matter in any way you want. Want text message, email, Slack Web, they support webhooks, they have an API syslog, of course. So you get any way you want. I never get alerts. When I do though, that is a sign that something's going on. Just choose a profile for your Things Canary device, register it with a hosted console for monitoring and notifications. And then you just. You sit back, you relax. Now, how many thinks canaries you get really depends on the size of your operation. Some big banks might have hundreds of them scattered all over the network. Network. You don't want just one. You want one in every kind of segment, everywhere, every little nook and cranny that a hacker might be looking around in small business like ours, maybe a handful of them. I'll give you an example. If you go to Canary Tools Twit, let's say you want five things to canary. 7,500 bucks a year for the whole year. You get your own hosted console, upgrade, support, maintenance and if you use the code Twit in the how did you hear about us? But 10% off that price, and not just for the first year, but for as long as you have your canaries, you can also. And if there's any, if you have any like trepidation at all, you can always return your Thinks canaries. They have a two month money back guarantee for a full refund. I do have to tell you, during all the years Twit has partnered with Thinks Canary, their refund guarantee has never been claimed. Visit Canary Tools Twit Enter the code TWIT in the how did you hear about us Bot? As soon as you get these things canaries in your, in your operation, you're going to say, how did I live without them? Sure, you can have all the defenses in the world, but as you know, security is a layered process. And one of the most important layers is detection. Because on average companies take 91 days before they know they've been breached. That's three months for a bad guy to wander throughout your network, place little time bombs, exfiltrate all that information.

[Jason Calacanis]

It's so affordable too. I mean, I was looking at the pricing and I was like, this is.

[Leo Laporte]

Super affordable for this kind of security. Yes.

[Jason Calacanis]

20 years ago this would be like hundreds of thousands of dollars at a minimum.

[Leo Laporte]

And these guys really know their stuff. They've made an appliance that is absolutely hardened, is absolutely secure. So you don't ever have to worry about putting this on your network. We've had Things Canaries, as I said, for eight years. Don't forget Canary Tools slash Tool Twit. Put Twit in the how did you hear about us box to get 10% off for as long as you have your canaries. Canary Tools slash Twit. Yeah, these, this, these guys are great. I really, I really like what they do. For the first time, social media we're talking about trends, has overtaken TV as American's top news source. Is that good? If you're getting your news from, from Blue sky or X, is that a good thing? This is according to Oxford's Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. Their digital news report came out on Monday for 2025, they survey 100,000 people in 48 countries. So this is global via a YouGov survey. Traditional news sources losing influence in the United States. Actually, this is also part of the trend of people watching streaming instead of tv. Look what Warner just did did. They said, we're going to keep the studios, we're going to keep the streaming channels and we're going to let you guys have the cable channels, CNN and Discovery spun off. And you have to think that's basically the lifeboats, you know, Goodbye.

[Father Robert Balisar]

Remember how I told you that I've been using the family controls to block the AI slow slop for my, my parents YouTube account? The AI slop is mostly AI generated text to speech with AI social media images off of Reddit, directly off of Reddit. And that stuff is so wildly inaccurate and yet they're treating it as, as it is an authoritative source.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Father Robert Balisar]

So no, this is not good. This is horrible. This is terrible.

[Leo Laporte]

The number one place people use social media for their news, Norway.

[Jason Calacanis]

Interesting.

[Leo Laporte]

76% Norway. Then the UK Norway.

[Father Robert Balisar]

I thought you were better than that.

[Leo Laporte]

Germany. US is a mere 60% people that prefer to read, watch or listen to online news. The problem with that also is it's not just AI slop, it's also filter bubbles. It's also you get the news that confirms your bias.

[Jason Calacanis]

That's the thing I'm concerned about because on X it's super right wing, you know, conspiracy theory, free for all. You know, freedom of speech is like the defining characteristic when I'm on there. I had to put my replies because I, I don't know if I'm close to a million followers now. My replies were just crazy. And so I put it on subscription and I said I'm going to do $3 a month to reply and I'm going to donate it all to charity. So every month I donate 5k to charity and I only get the small group of people replying.

[Leo Laporte]

People still pay pay to reply to you.

[Jason Calacanis]

1500 people are paying $3 a month and it's better for me. I just did that for my own sanity and my own time because getting 500 or a thousand replies and it's from crypto people and this and the MAGA people, whatever. But then I go over to Blue sky or I go to Threads and it's like all the left leaning people, left acts and I'm like, just as.

[Leo Laporte]

The country is divided, we've divided. Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

They yell at me, they're like, get out of here, you're friends with Sachs and Elon. And they start yelling at me and I'm, I'm like, okay, but I'm still friends with you guys, right? They're like, no, you can't be friends with us. Go back over there.

[Amanda Silberling]

Like people have been mad at Mark Cuban on Blue Sky.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah. It's like this is, this is the crazy thing you know, like, as crazy as the MAGA folks are, like, in their own unique way. I don't know if you guys know horseshoe theory, which is like the crazy people, you know, on both sides just come really close like a horseshoe, and then the rest of us are in.

[Leo Laporte]

This big, shaking our heads, going, shaking.

[Jason Calacanis]

Our head, saying, like, it doesn't have to be this way. We could actually talk to each other. Yeah, but they, yeah, they, they, they, they. The best hope the Democratic Party has, or one of the best hopes is that people like Joe Rogan who were part of the Democrats, like Mark Cuban.

[Leo Laporte]

Rogan's not a Democrat. What do you.

[Jason Calacanis]

He was his whole life. He wasn't. He endorsed Trump, but. Yes, recently. But before that he was a Bernie bro. He was a Bernie bro.

[Leo Laporte]

That's because he just, whatever. The last person who said something to him, he goes, yeah, that's, that sounds pretty good.

[Jason Calacanis]

Anyway, there's a lot of people on the left. Elon, you know, Elon is on the left. He was a huge left wing guy his whole life. Obama, Hillary. He supported all those people that, you know, when you take all the business people, what happened?

[Leo Laporte]

They all got red pilled.

[Jason Calacanis]

Basically what happened was when you went as a business person and tried to communicate with the Biden administration, they wouldn't talk to you. And then they just kept adding regulations. You're like, hey, maybe this is in the best interest of the country. Can we have a conversation? But they refused to talk to you. So they, so then Trump was like, oh, they won't talk to you. I'll talk to you. Come to Mar a Lago. Yeah, let's talk for days. And you know, it's putting judgments aside. If one group says, we're not even willing to talk to you and you can't come to the ev summit, you can't do all this. And then the other group is like, we'd love to talk to you. Oh, we have like tons to talk about. How can we help then? Of course people are going to flow like water to the group that, you know, wants to talk to them and wants to hear their issues. Zuckerberg is a great example that, that.

[Leo Laporte]

Is a very strange interpretation of what's happening. I think the water is flowing to the power. I don't think it has anything to do with who's listening to who. I think it's very clearly that people say, well, I guess we gotta, we gotta get in the pocket of the guy who's got all the power.

[Jason Calacanis]

I'm talking about before he had the power, you know, when that preference stack moved, I was watching it.

[Leo Laporte]

It was prior to the election.

[Jason Calacanis]

Prior to the election, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

But people sensed. I think they sensed what was happening. I mean, it was. So what did happen to Mark Zuckerberg? He is. There are those at Meta who say, oh, it was his. Any liberalism you saw in Mark was very. A thin veneer on the surface.

[Jason Calacanis]

I think he's a weather vane. He's a weather vane. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Amanda Silberling]

It seems like a lot of people have been saying that he sort of is a moth flying to the light. And the light is whatever is.

[Leo Laporte]

I'd say the light is. How can I get the richest possible. That. He has a very clear North Star. And the north star is. Is money.

[Jason Calacanis]

Growth. Growth, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, yeah. Growth's another way of saying it. Maybe it's not. Growth's a better way of saying. Because it's not just money, it's also power. It's also cultural significance. Access to markets is. Growth is a better way to say it. But it all comes down to his own personal value. Right.

[Jason Calacanis]

I think this whole transformation.

[Leo Laporte]

There's a lot of cynics out there. There.

[Jason Calacanis]

I. Listen, I know the guy. Not personally, but, you know, everybody around him, all this, like, he's become a brawler. Testosterone machismo.

[Leo Laporte]

So at financials, times said how Mark Zuckerberg unleashed brawler.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, no, they fell for. They fell for the PR campaign. The whole PR campaign is. He has more testosterone in his system. He's doing jiu jitsu. That's why he loves ufc. He put the UFC guy on the board. Trust me, if Kamala had won, he would have been singing Kumbaya and drinking soy milk.

[Leo Laporte]

That's my point. That's exactly.

[Jason Calacanis]

He's a weather vane. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. But power draws all of these people because ultimately their goal is to share in the.

[Jason Calacanis]

There are some people who are, you know, knowing them, who are very principled, and they make the decisions based on principle. And, you know, you can.

[Leo Laporte]

Are they less successful, you think, because of it?

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, you could. You could be both. Both models actually work. You could be extremely principal.

[Leo Laporte]

That's what you define as success, I guess. Right. You would say you're successful in. In. In a way by following your. Your beliefs, your. Your principles. Here I. I would.

[Father Robert Balisar]

I would push back against principled or non principled because you can be a principled person. Just not have my principles. If Mark believes, Truly believes that growing Facebook is the best way that he can contribute to society, it protects his employees.

[Leo Laporte]

I think he does. By the way.

[Jason Calacanis]

Way.

[Father Robert Balisar]

Then that. Those are principles. Those are not my principles.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Father Robert Balisar]

Very, very against my principles. But I would hesitate calling him a weathervane because we don't know what his. His metrics are. We don't know what success looks like for him now, if. If he were to say, oh, it's. It's just money, I don't say that's unprincipled. I just say that's a horrible principle.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Amanda Silberling]

I just think it's nice that he has a hobby.

[Father Robert Balisar]

Everyone needs to smoke in those.

[Amanda Silberling]

It's just, you know, like, the three.

[Jason Calacanis]

Old men are total cynics on this show.

[Amanda Silberling]

There's just like.

[Leo Laporte]

Because we've been around the block. Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

We've seen this movie before. You can.

[Amanda Silberling]

You can do the, like, sleeping in your office. But I'm like, hey, you know, at least he's UFC fighting or whatever. At least he has a hobby.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a good point. At least he has a hobby. Hobby. It's a nice way to look at it. You're a very, very nice person, Amanda.

[Jason Calacanis]

Very kind.

[Leo Laporte]

At least. Trump has extended the TikTok ban for another 90 days. That's the third time.

[Father Robert Balisar]

I'm expecting that it will be extended at the end of his term. We'll just keep doing.

[Leo Laporte]

It's never gonna. Yes, but. But why is. Why is it that they're having a hard time find. Finding a bottle? Is it. This what we're talking about? Is it untenable that the Chinese Communist Party is not going to allow them to sell the algorithm?

[Jason Calacanis]

This tells you everything you need to know. If the. If this wasn't a strategic asset for the Chinese, then it would have been sold a long time ago. They would have taken it. So this is their secret weapon. This is a way to influence culture in the United States.

[Leo Laporte]

It's one of them. I don't think it's their only one.

[Jason Calacanis]

Not the only, but I do think it's. I think it's top five for them. Like, this is in terms of soft power, influence data. I mean, if we could have, like, I don't know how many Americans are on it. Maybe 100 million Americans. If we could have one out of every three Chinese people in a database.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

And their movements and their. We'd be pretty down with that. In fact, we might have certain things like that just not done with TikTok. So, you know, there's plenty of. We've had three incredible IPOs recently. Core Weave went out and it tripled. We had circle with USDC. The the stablecoin company. We've had these great IPOs of late in the market. TikTok would be one of the great IPOs in history. It would. Because it's got such a popular base.

[Leo Laporte]

Of who wouldn't want it.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, yeah. So, and, and the reason, the fact.

[Leo Laporte]

That it's not happened is a sign that it, it can never happen. Is that what you're saying?

[Jason Calacanis]

We have to actually shut it down to make it happen. We have to call their bluff. And, you know, that's a tough thing for, for, that's a tough thing to do as a politician since it's so popular.

[Leo Laporte]

He's got 15 million followers on Tick Tock. He's not shutting it down.

[Jason Calacanis]

Well, and in Korea, they tried to like shut down crypto a couple times, if you remember, over the years. And the public wanted it so bad that they were like, you can't shut this down and no politician will get in office. So he's got to call their bluff.

[Leo Laporte]

But he's not going to call their bluff.

[Jason Calacanis]

He's using it as part of the trade. So now this has been rolled into the tariff discussion and that's now become a cudgel or a lever for him with that discussion. So I think those things will be resolved.

[Leo Laporte]

At the same time, aren't the discussions with China over? Didn't we finally settle on 45% and that's that?

[Jason Calacanis]

I think there's going to be a grand.

[Leo Laporte]

Last time you were on, you said, and you were right in the short term anyway. Don't worry. This was just, it'll go back down. This was before Liberation Day because Trump always chickens out. And actually, you said, and I think you were right, he cares a lot more about public opinion.

[Jason Calacanis]

Sure.

[Leo Laporte]

And if the market's telling him, no, no, no, no, these, these tariffs aren't any good, he's going to back down. But they're still pretty high.

[Jason Calacanis]

I, I think they'll just wind up being reciprocal. I now come up with a new term. I try to help my friends with TDS because I'm a moderate. I don't get affected by this as much.

[Leo Laporte]

Derangement syndrome. Yes.

[Jason Calacanis]

Well, and then I have on the other side of my friend group, Trump dedication syndrome, where they just repeat everything he says as if it's the gospel. No offense, Father, forgive me. It's, you know, not the literal gospel. And so I always tell folks the 72 hour rule. Wait 72 hours. Whatever he says is still even. Is he still even talking about it? Like half the time he's not even talking about it.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, that. With bombing Iran, but apparently that wasn't.

[Jason Calacanis]

And this is my other. My new one, Shock and bull war. He does something shocking and then it winds up being very boring. Tariffs with shock and bore. I predict this Iran thing will be like this crazy shock, and then it's going to be, we're out of this, we're not going to do anymore. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

I hope to God you're right, because it could go very, very well.

[Father Robert Balisar]

And in the meantime, the Iran has shut down the strait. So they're not.

[Leo Laporte]

Say they want to. They haven't done it yet. They say they want to. But there is a lot of argument that they can't or won't. Can't, because they don't have the means. Won't, because it would cost them dearly as well. But it would. This is where something like 20 or 30% of the world's oil goes through the Straits of Hormuz. Shutting it down would have a massive impact on a global economy. But I don't think they even have the means to do it, to be honest with you. I think Trump probably. I think we're veering away from our mandate to talk about tech. But as long as we're here, Trump probably sensed that they just, they couldn't fight back at this point.

[Father Robert Balisar]

They don't need. They just need the threat.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Father Robert Balisar]

Any sort of uncertainty in that market.

[Leo Laporte]

It'S got to be credible.

[Father Robert Balisar]

Massive fluctuations.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's got to be a credible threat. And I don't know if it's credible at this point. I don't know. We're all, we're all just. I don't know what's going on.

[Jason Calacanis]

We don't have complete information. So people are trying to get me to decide. And I just said, listen, hey, we're. This is. We're five months into Trump's second term and we're at war, you know, and that was his big promise, no wars, we won't go to war. And then people are like, oh, well, you know, this is a just war. This isn't a just war. And I'm like, I didn't give an opinion. I'm just making a statement. We're five minutes in, we're out of. We're in a war. And they're like, it's not a war. I'm like, we just bombed them. That's a war.

[Leo Laporte]

You know about. You know about Chekhov's gun, right? The Chekhov's gun theory.

[Jason Calacanis]

Oh, no. Explain it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, he has a Narrative principle. He was a playwright, Russian playwright, that if a gun is shown hanging on the wall in the first act, it has to be fired by the end.

[Father Robert Balisar]

Of the play, by the third.

[Leo Laporte]

By the third act.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, that makes sense.

[Leo Laporte]

As soon as I saw this military parade, this was. To me, this was Chekhov's gun. There was no way that Donald Trump wasn't going to get so overwrought and excited by the idea of having the strongest, most powerful military in the world that he would not use it.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And that's what.

[Father Robert Balisar]

Way more exciting than that parade. Just.

[Leo Laporte]

Just going to the parade was not exciting.

[Jason Calacanis]

The two things I noticed about this, you know, is. Is one, I feel like they were goading him on, like, whatever. The military industrial complex was really high pressure to do well.

[Leo Laporte]

And BB Netanyahu and bb.

[Jason Calacanis]

And if you look at the two things that I was like, wait a second, where have I seen this movie before? They're like, oh, they tried to assassinate Trump twice. And then, you know, you're like, wait a second, wasn't that what they did with Bush? Didn't they tell him that they were. They wanted. Saddam Hussein wanted to assassinate him, you know, as this.

[Leo Laporte]

You think that's what's going on on?

[Jason Calacanis]

Well, no, it just. It's just a. It's a, you know, history rhymes kind of situation. And then the other thing that rhymed for me, where they were like, well, they've got weapons of mass destruction and it's imminent.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that sounded kind of familiar.

[Jason Calacanis]

Oh, where have I heard these two.

[Leo Laporte]

Yellow cake. Yeah, yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

It's like both things again. And it just feels like whoever we put.

[Father Robert Balisar]

Number three.

[Leo Laporte]

Number three.

[Father Robert Balisar]

Oh, the. The Iranian people would welcome the liberators.

[Jason Calacanis]

Oh, right. We're going. Regime change and. Yeah. So it's like, I keep hearing these three trends. Thank you, Father. That's a great punch up. And you're like, does it matter who's in office? Because we still go $2 trillion in debt and we still go into the Middle east and go on some crazy war that doesn't seem like it's going to be solvable. Can we just stop doing both of these things and see how it works for, you know, 10 years maybe?

[Leo Laporte]

You. You know, through this show, Jason, you've espoused a fairly progressive agenda of more education and. Yeah, you know, I mean, you sound like a progressive. You got to be careful, Jason. You could.

[Jason Calacanis]

I've always been a.

[Leo Laporte]

You could be blue pill.

[Jason Calacanis]

I vote. You know, if you look at my track record, two out of three Times I voted blue. One out of three Times I voted red. I'm first principal guy, you know, and like, just try to solve these problems. And also the. The game changes on the field, doesn't it? Like, we might not have been able to afford universal health care for some period of time in a country, and now it's pretty clear we can. And. And it would be better. It's better.

[Leo Laporte]

So sometimes it's better for business. Why is business shouldering the cost? Right.

[Jason Calacanis]

And then people won't leave one job. You know, Amanda might have her. That's the only benefit Crunch.

[Leo Laporte]

That's right.

[Jason Calacanis]

Leaving and being.

[Leo Laporte]

You can't leave.

[Jason Calacanis]

Oh, is it changing? Well, for the better or worse or.

[Amanda Silberling]

Sorry, I am paying more. I will say, yeah, we all are.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, health care is soaring, but.

[Jason Calacanis]

The fact that it's tough.

[Father Robert Balisar]

You know, I was a super conservative for most of my life. Really, one of the principles of that super conservativism was, oh, any universal health care is bad, it's evil, it's terrible. And then I live in a place with universal health care.

[Leo Laporte]

It ain't so bad.

[Father Robert Balisar]

Oh, my God, it is so much better.

[Leo Laporte]

There's no death panel.

[Jason Calacanis]

Why is it better? Explain to people who are religious about this issue.

[Father Robert Balisar]

Let me give you an example. Two examples. One, there's a certain medication that I have to use. It's just a foam for my skin because my skin gets attacked by my immune system and so on, so forth. And here it cost me five euro a bottle. If I buy it in the United states, it costs 1500. It's exact same medication.

[Leo Laporte]

It's not like, by the way, Italy is so rich that they're subsidizing this.

[Father Robert Balisar]

It's true there is subsidy, but that subsidy comes from our taxes. It's what we pay into the system. It's just baked in. Before I left the United States, I had to have the surgical procedure. I had no idea how much it would cost. I had no idea who the stakeholders were. All I knew is that when I received the bill, it was $72,000. Now, now the. The, the various insurance companies, the hospital and the doctor, they argued all with themselves. They did their dance and it finally got down to 2900, which is still a lot. I had the exact same procedure done again in Italy. It cost me €28.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Father Robert Balisar]

And I.

[Leo Laporte]

But did you have to wait? Were there long waits or.

[Father Robert Balisar]

I had to wait seven months in the United States. That was fast. I waited three days in Italy.

[Leo Laporte]

What's happened to our healthcare System in the US is somewhat shocked, Shocking. I don't know what the forces are. The economic forces are.

[Amanda Silberling]

Yeah, I mean when you talk about it with people that don't live in the US they're like, what are you doing?

[Leo Laporte]

We pay more than any other country for care that is 27.

[Benito]

It's because the middle, there's the middlemen that take all the money. The insurance companies, they take all the money.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah.

[Father Robert Balisar]

Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

Well I, you know, there is a, the, the, I was bringing up self reliance, radical self reliance earlier. I think healthcare, it's starting and I, I, because I, I get a front row with, you know, being involved in startups to seeing this. Education, jobs and healthcare.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep.

[Jason Calacanis]

These three things are controlled by the state in the United States at least and or deeply impacted by them. And they are have the hyper, hyper, hyperinflation. When there's hyperinflation for college degrees, when there's hyperinflation for healthcare and real estate and education, education, all these things, you then have people start to roll their own. They take control of their destiny. I recently did that with my healthcare. I used to have concierge doctors, fancy doctors. We would pay, I don't know, 25 or $50,000 to a year to have like the ability to have a doctor come by the house anytime we wanted. And then I started self directing and I use something called superpower.com that takes your blood every year, puts it into an interface. There's another one called function health. And then people are starting to take control of their health care. Find the pricing, do it themselves. Another one is we have a startup that's doing different surgeries and cosmetic surgeries. They're a marketplace for this. Different places are becoming better at providing these. And the cash cost of getting veneers and doing dental surgery in Mexico is cheaper in South Korea, cheaper for rhinoplasty or breast augmentation, for hair transplants in Croatia. And so yeah, this is superpower.com it's incredible.

[Leo Laporte]

And so is this at one of your investments or just.

[Jason Calacanis]

I'm not an investor, I just use it and since I fell in love with it, I bought it for some of my employees. 500 bucks a year.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm thinking I should probably do this.

[Jason Calacanis]

You just get a blood work done every year, they put it into a system and then you have a concierge you can talk to like a coach.

[Leo Laporte]

This is how now medical has changed, which is we used to think doctors were gods and we put all our trust into the doctor and we've started to realize they're not. And they're googling stuff a little bit on your own.

[Jason Calacanis]

They're googling stuff just like us right now. If you have an LLM. I think we're probably at the point right now where putting your symptoms and your blood work into an LLM.

[Leo Laporte]

I did that with perplexity before I went to my doctor. I did the new deep research thing, got a great thing, brought it into him, said hey doc, this is what I want.

[Jason Calacanis]

And how much better was the discussion?

[Leo Laporte]

Was great.

[Jason Calacanis]

I think, I think right now the average doctor is probably below the service level because they're under so much pressure to get you out of there.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Kaiser has been working with my doctor. 5,000 patients now.

[Jason Calacanis]

What? Oh my God.

[Leo Laporte]

He's. That's ridiculous. Because Kaiser. And a lot of it is not Kaiser's desire. But the, but doctors are leaving and.

[Jason Calacanis]

This goes to our conversation we've been having. Father, you know, when do you find Father or padre? What is the. Sorry.

[Father Robert Balisar]

I've used both.

[Jason Calacanis]

Okay. I like father because that's how I grew up. Father, when you know, we were talking before about self reliance and the cost of things going down. Look at this like, you know it's so expensive for health care and then you can use These services now, $500 a year, they do your blood work, they normalize it, they show the changes over time and then LLMs being able to coach you. I think these combination of things will be cheaper, Amanda, than the healthcare you're paying for out of pocket. And at a certain point people are going to start getting like catastrophic health care which is like over $10,000 or something. And then you, you, you can utilize it and then just using quantify itself and rolling their own. Because the rolling of your own will be better experience. It's just my gut is telling me that as an investor in technology companies. But we're getting close to close.

[Father Robert Balisar]

Rolling your own works if you've got some savvy.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Father Robert Balisar]

Most of the population doesn't though in the United States. I know and I know this figure is disputed. It's. I think the, the figure that I trusted the Most is about 40, 42 to 47% of US healthcare costs go into overhead. It's, it's a ridiculous number. Just because with all of the different levels of insurance and going back and forth forth, so much money gets spent on that very relatively little gets actually to the doctors or the hospitals. You look at a system like Italy and even though. Yes. I'm not saying it's perfect. It does have issues. That overhead percentage is something like five, maybe six. So when you're talking about radical self reliance, I would also think that includes examining the systems that are providing you these services and saying where is there waste? I mean you talk about, about government efficiency. Doge should have been looking at the healthcare industry and all the different levels that are, are only there to SAP their percentage.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah. Opting out is the way to, you know what I find is as people opt out of certain things, then those folks are forced to innovate. And we see that in technology all the time where people are like, this solution's not working for me, I'm out. I don't want to buy client service software. I'm going to buy, you know, some, I'm going to use some open source software and then it makes the price come down or people get sharper that compet, you know, it's hard for it to happen, but it typically happens slowly than all at once. And I feel like.

[Father Robert Balisar]

I don't disagree with you. Yeah, I don't disagree with you.

[Jason Calacanis]

I.

[Father Robert Balisar]

But in my profession, I'm also looking out for the people who can't do that.

[Jason Calacanis]

This is what I love about talking somebody. I love being on the show with you because you know, you start with, you know, the meek and the poor. Yeah. It is such an important thing to do. I think radical self reliance and deep empathy. You know, one of the. I always like when I'm, when I'm on the show with you, Leo, to think about what we talked about after the show and I take a bunch of notes because I get great ideas and I think the theme for me is adding like deep empathy, radical empathy to radical self reliance. Because not everybody can be motivated. Not everybody knows about superpower. Not everybody, you know, has the desire to start their own career.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Jason Calacanis]

And then somebody like Amanda might be like you know, actually juggling that like oh my God, I'm, am I, do I have the radical self reliance or am I too reliant on my employer? Right. And I think this is really the future of Americans. We, we have to think about these things very deeply. It's one of the things I don't like about this administration is the cruelty that they exhibit. I don't want to go off topic here, Leo, but you know, the, the cruelty and the, the sadistic nature of some of the things they do is a real turn off for me. And, and I think we should be thinking with much more empathy. Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, see, he's gone to church again. That's what's happened. He's gone back to church.

[Jason Calacanis]

Man. You don't know how many Hail Marys I'm going to need to do because it's been a long time, Father, since my last confession.

[Leo Laporte]

Sorry, Amanda, I didn't mean to interrupt. Go ahead.

[Amanda Silberling]

No, I mean, I think that when we talk about these things, we're fundamentally coming at it from places of privilege where like even if I. Yeah, exactly. I can entertain the thought of what would my career look like if I quit my job? Because I have the savings from working this job. I don't have any children, I don't have like relatives I'm in charge of caring for. But I feel like things like health care, I, I don't think we should have to be radically self reliant to get good health care. I think, I wish this was something that is just baked in where, where the majority of people are trying to like get food on the table for their kids and then go to work and like take care of their families and don't have the time to like reinvent the healthcare system for themselves. And like, maybe that'll change in the future. But I think for right now it's like we're with all of these like technological changes. Like we're sort of stuck in this moment where we're in the middle. Middle. And what's happening right now is that people aren't going to the doctor because they don't want to spend the money because it's so expensive. And then people get sicker and they can't work and it just keeps compounding.

[Leo Laporte]

We're one of the few countries where we have medical bankruptcies and widespread.

[Father Robert Balisar]

I mean that doesn't happen here, that does not happen in Italy. And I did, I didn't realize that's actually a thing that could happen. But no, it totally works.

[Leo Laporte]

Works.

[Amanda Silberling]

Yeah. I like have money set aside knowing that like, like I have like a weird tooth thing and later in my life I know I'm gonna need an implant and I know that's gonna be like thousands and thousands of dollars and like that is built into my mind of like this is money I don't actually have that I know I'm going to have to spend later on and like it, it's just, it's not great to go to the.

[Leo Laporte]

This is one of the great shames of this country is that 60% of bankruptcies are medical bankruptcies is ridiculous. Shameful. It just, just shouldn't be happening in the richest country in the world.

[Jason Calacanis]

It just shouldn't, you know and we also can't over index with our you know, largely white privilege or you know, California privilege, New York coastal society elitist privilege that people are helpless because I, you know living in Texas now, I'm watching, I, I see people like one of the great trends is chicken coops. I know this sounds silly as an example.

[Father Robert Balisar]

Yeah, no, no, no.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

Chicken coops are booming across the country and it is a tiny, you know, but yet another little hash mark in my self reliance trend box. There's a company called Coop. They make a smart chicken coop. I have it and I watch these startups and the smart chicken coop is you know, unnecessarily sophisticated. It opens and closes with sunrise, it's got cameras. It's great if you got, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

What you really need with a smart chicken coop is one that moves around so that the chicken poop doesn't focus.

[Jason Calacanis]

They have, yes, they literally have.

[Father Robert Balisar]

Can we just make smarter chickens? Because they are dumbass.

[Jason Calacanis]

So I have this coop, it's hilarious. So like but we have six chickens now and we'll get more but people.

[Leo Laporte]

All over not a good solution to the food shortage crisis.

[Jason Calacanis]

You know what country actually it is.

[Leo Laporte]

I take the other victory gardens. We all need victory gardens.

[Jason Calacanis]

There are people who are now you think about communities, you think about sources of food. There are people doing this in ways and in, at churches here they will put out baskets of eggs and just say take them. Because people have so many chickens, so many eggs and chickens they just breed and you become again back to radical self reliance. People can learn anything on the Internet. You can learn how to take care of chickens just like your son with his sandwich shop learned how to make the best beef. You know, ooo.

[Benito]

That is kind of the opposite of radical stuff for life reliance because you're giving away your eggs so you're taking eggs from somebody else. That's the opposite. That's called community. No, no, that's called community.

[Jason Calacanis]

That's my point is that people have become self reliant and then they have abundance and they give it to everybody else. So we, you know I think one of the problems is elite rich people think that poor people have no self reliance and no ability to move up. They do, they're very creative. They're, they're, they have great and they work really hard and they work really hard. Immigrants are doing this. So yeah, I, I, I, I, I want to be careful we don't actually underestimate you know, people who are in the bottom rung jobs too, that they're just paralyzed and they, and they can't possibly ever ascend. When all of us did, you know, everybody here ascended, you know, over generations, I'm sure, with all kinds of things that were wind at our backs and sometimes, you know, our forefathers and mothers had maybe some wind in their faces too. I know mine did. But you know, people who are on the up and coming and who have those, you know, low rungs on the ladder, they, they wind up learning skills. Those skills are available. You can learn them on YouTube. So don't underestimate the meek or the poor. Is the other thing I would say.

[Father Robert Balisar]

In the United States who are actually self reliant are the people who know how to grow their own food. We have to be really careful with.

[Leo Laporte]

And have the land do it.

[Benito]

Yeah, that's exactly what I'm talking about. When you say self reliance, it's like that's a totally different. That means something totally different to me.

[Father Robert Balisar]

Just because you're rich, you're not self reliant. If the systems that you rely on to spend your wealth on to keep you alive and in this lifestyle of comfort that you desire fall apart, you are not self reliant. If you do not know how to grow your own food and it's not, it's not easy, it's not easy to grow enough food to actually keep you and your family alive, then you're not self reliant. Reliant.

[Jason Calacanis]

I'm getting close.

[Leo Laporte]

Self reliant, getting close.

[Jason Calacanis]

I got the chicken, so I got the well. I got the water. I have two wells. Two wells. I know how to do somebody.

[Leo Laporte]

Did you dig them?

[Jason Calacanis]

No, somebody came and dug them. But we do live in a society. When I say self reliant too, I mean the ability that when bad things happen, you can recover from them. And you have this ability to say, I'm not going to just lay down and take this leg off, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

Good thing to espouse. I agree 100%.

[Father Robert Balisar]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

We're going to take a break because I have to. I don't. I can't dig a well. I don't have chickens.

[Jason Calacanis]

But you can read a mean ad.

[Leo Laporte]

I can read a mean.

[Jason Calacanis]

You can read a good ad.

[Leo Laporte]

This is my self reliance, baby.

[Father Robert Balisar]

Absolutely.

[Leo Laporte]

We will continue. You're watching this Week in Tech with Jason Calacanis. Father Robert Ballis there. Amanda Silberling from TechCrunch. It's great to have all three of you. Great to have you too. Our club TWIT members especially. Thank you for the support. It's been a bit big, big year for Club Twit. 25% now of our operating costs come from the club. Thank you. If it weren't for you, we'd have to cut back on shows, we'd have to cut back on staff, and instead we're expanding in the club. We're doing more in the club than ever before. It really is nice to have that support. If you're not a member of Club twit, consider it. We'd love to have you just find out more at TWiT TV. Club TWiT. It's the best club ever. Ever.

[Jason Calacanis]

I like it. I went in there and that Discord.

[Leo Laporte]

Is a great hang. I love it.

[Jason Calacanis]

I was on the message board replying to some of the things because when I was on last time, people were.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah, you were in the twit. You were in our forums. Yeah, the tw.

[Jason Calacanis]

I was in the forums and people were like, oh, my God, there's a. One of the panels is in the forums.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

I'm like, yeah, you guys can't just talk is about me and not get a reply. Somebody was upset about something. I think it was the gyro stuff. Whatever. I mixed it up with them. It's like, top 1% of TWIT listeners are in there discussing the topics from the show. It's a great place to hang, but I gotta get on the Discord.

[Leo Laporte]

The Discord is great. Well, I'll send you an invite.

[Jason Calacanis]

Oh, no, I am on the Discord.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, Yeah, I thought you were. We also do special events for the club. For instance, my old friend Norman maslov has a YouTube channel called Mazzy's Music, all about vinyl, Vinyl records. So I thought we'd have some fun and get Mazzy on to talk about vinyl. And then in the hour before that, we're going to talk about the rise of the MP3 and digital music. So with a guy who just wrote a book about it, we're going to have a lot of fun. This is Friday, June 27th. This Friday, it's going to start at noon Pacific. We'll get the other one in there. Noon Pacific. We've got our AI users group, which has become really, really fun. Next one is July 11th. We do our photo show with Chris Marquardt. Every month, Quirky photos. Start taking them. Micah's crafting corner was great this week. I hope you participated. If you didn't, another one's coming up.

[Jason Calacanis]

Wow, these are great community Events.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, this is stuff we can do. Thanks to the club members who are really fantastic.

[Jason Calacanis]

Which by the way, I mean I signed up for the year, like seven, ten bucks a month. Like what a deal if you get one, like interesting conversation or tip or thing that makes your life better, it pays for itself.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's nice to network where they're good people too.

[Jason Calacanis]

I go to the movies. It costs 200.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, this is a lot going to a movie.

[Jason Calacanis]

It's a lot.

[Leo Laporte]

Is true. Anyway, thank you, Twit TV Club Twit. We appreciate it. Our show today, brought to you by Storyblock. This is a sponsor that's doing something very interesting and something I really deeply appreciate and support. The idea of a headless cms. So the front end could be anything you want. The back end is reliable, secure and, and offers an incredible user interface. You know that if you've ever worked at somewhere like, I don't know, TechCrunch, you probably experienced some of these legacy CMSs. A lot of marketing companies have to deal with them. They promise enterprise grade features, but you get this slow, clunky system and if you want to make a change, you got to put in a ticket, you got to get a developer supporting you. And when you're trying to move fast, that is a nightmare. Well, StoryBlock is the opposite. Unlike those monolithic content management systems, StoryBlock is headless. It completely decouples your backend from your front end. So developers, you get to work in any framework you like, React, Astro Vue, whatever marketers, you get an intuitive visual editor to create and update content without filling out dev tickets. You get autonomy, you get, you know, the power to make what you need. And by the way, storyblocks scales, whether you're a freelancer or part of a global enterprise, they have a global cd, aws, data centers in the us, in Europe, in Asia. It's built for performance at scale all over the globe. And man is it enterprise ready. Built in comes with role based Access control, Enterprise SLAs top tier security, the stuff Fortune 500s demand. One big global e commerce giant switched to StoryBlock and cut their content update cycles from weeks to hours. You can read about it on the Storyblock site. Another major brand empowered marketing to launch campaign independently, freeing up the devs for bigger projects. This is, this is, it's actually what we did with our website. An API first approach which means your content loads fast anywhere in the world. It means better ux, it means higher engagement, improved SEO and they have the best real time visual editors. So for instance, if you're a marketer, you're going to see exactly what your content is going to look like before you publish it. And if you want to move something four pixels to the right, right? No more endless back and forthing over minor tweaks. The devs, they get fewer interruptions. Marketers, you get more autonomy. It's a win win if you're an agency, oh, you got to look at StoryBlock. They have multi client workspaces, flexible permissions, seamless collaboration tools. StoryBlock makes it easy to manage multiple projects without disrupting development workflows. So doesn't matter whether you're a startup, an enterprise, an agency juggling multiple clients, StoryBlock Block gives you the power and flexibility you need. Try it today at storyblock.com twitTV25 and use code TWIT25. TWIT listeners get 20% off for three months on growth and growth plus plans. That's storyblock.com twitTV 25 with code TWIT25 for 20% off the first three months on growth and growth plus Plans. S-T O R Y B L O K.com Twitter25 with code TWIT25 TWIT25 you got to try this at least. Go to the website, take a look. Storyblock.com twittv-25 we thank him so much for supporting this week in tech this kind of a sad story, but it underscores where we have perhaps not done the right thing in Congress. The suspected Minnesota killer law. You know, at the, of the, of the two members of the House, one was shot, one was murdered, their spouses were also shot. He had a notebook which authorities confiscated filled with addresses for people, search sites, AKA data brokers. That's how he found people, people. That's how he was able to put together this list of people that he was stalking and eventually murdering. And it's because in the United States we still have no comprehensive privacy protection. These data brokers are out there. We've always said, you know, it's a problem for privacy, it's a problem for security, for harassment. But now it's also a problem for murder. It was 1994 that Congress created the Driver's Protection Privacy Act. This was after a stalker hired a private investigator who get the address of an actress who was killed. You may remember that's the last they did. That was the last time. Now data brokers can sell any bit of information about you, including your Social Security number, without absolute impunity. He had all these sites. I mean, it was a dozen different sites.

[Amanda Silberling]

Yeah, there's a service called Delete Me that a lot of journalists use, which is basically just like an automated service that goes through all of the data brokers.

[Leo Laporte]

We use it and they're a sponsor. AMANDA Y. Well, see, totally support them.

[Amanda Silberling]

As good as Jason.

[Leo Laporte]

Totally support him. But it's a shame we have to do that. That.

[Amanda Silberling]

No, yeah. I mean, it's terrible. And I mean, even just sticking with the. The radical self reliance theme, I mean like a big benefit that I've had not being independent was that when I was a bit greener than I am now, I had a situation where I had like an alt right activist found. Found my address and was like mailing stuff to my house. And thankfully when we were owned by Yahoo at the time and they have a security team of people that are specifically trained for doing security for journalists. And like when you are in those moments, you kind of need help from people that have gone through that before to like tell you what to do to keep yourself safe. But like, it, like this is like an occupational hazard for journalists that you.

[Leo Laporte]

Have to understand anybody in the public eye and. But even if you're not in the public eye, you know, it's. It's not so hard to track you down. And it's.

[Amanda Silberling]

People shouldn't be able to find my address because they know my first and last name. But you can.

[Father Robert Balisar]

Yeah, I've been swatted. I've had the front of our house set on fire. I Hard to face.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Father Robert Balisar]

I mean, this was when I was at Twitt. It was just, it was. It's like that's par for the course. That's table stakes. You got to admit that that's going to happen at some point.

[Leo Laporte]

And unlike Yahoo. Such a small operation, we don't have a security team that can swoop in and protect you. I'm sorry, Robin.

[Amanda Silberling]

It's like there, there's only so much they can do. Like, it's not like they're not going to like station like a Yahoo guy outside my apartment or whatever.

[Leo Laporte]

Not exactly the Secret Services.

[Amanda Silberling]

Yeah, this the secret Yahoo Service.

[Jason Calacanis]

But yeah, like I got to do that. Delete me. I know you've had them as an advertiser before. Does that actually work? Like in getting yourself out of some of these things?

[Amanda Silberling]

It does work.

[Leo Laporte]

You have to keep doing it because these guys, there's new data brokers all the time. Even though these guys are supposed to delete your stuff and you can't do it manually. But there's. There's hundreds of them, so it's not practical. Yeah, they don't really adhere to the rules. They'll rebuild your dossier. It's a. It's like a whack. A mole. It's terrible.

[Jason Calacanis]

I get a overzealous person every couple years. Yeah, they're usually like mentally ill superfan, so. Or they're suffering.

[Leo Laporte]

That's exactly.

[Jason Calacanis]

Mental illness and.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's exactly what it is. Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

You know, it's, it's. They usually just really care, you know, they hear your opinion, they're a fan, you know, and they just don't know how to express it or, you know, something's going on. And, you know, it's. We really have a mental health crisis in this country, I think, and that's something we need to work on. That's, you know, it's related to health care.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a good interpretation, though.

[Father Robert Balisar]

The sad part is the case.

[Leo Laporte]

It's not.

[Father Robert Balisar]

The people who have wished me the most harm and the people who have caused me the grief started out as superfans, right?

[Jason Calacanis]

Yes. And you disappointed them at some point in their mind.

[Leo Laporte]

Exactly.

[Jason Calacanis]

And so when I almost, When I get the, the most vitriol, you know, you know, I'll be on this podcast, I'll be like, oh, my God, self reliance. You're ridiculous. Like, you don't know. Everything's stacked against whatever. And I'm like, I really appreciate the feedback, Robert. And I put their name in it and they write back. I could have said that kinder. I'm sorry, I was having a bad day.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

And when I say their name to back. Back to them, and I just treat them with a little bit of grace, a little bit of humanity, it is absolutely dissipates that energy, you know, and it's, it's a very easy Jedi technique, which is, you know, assume some good faith here or assume the person's having a tough day.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Jason Calacanis]

You know, like everybody gets in a fight with their spouse or stubs their toe or anything in between. So if you assume what's the worst possible day this person had in their life? Life. And am I interacting with them? Well, if you have some notoriety, that's going to happen frequently. And you just have to understand that's part of this micro fame or, you know, celebrity or notoriety that you're going to have. Now. There are sick people and there are evil people, too. Evil exists in the world as a concept as well. At least as Catholics, we believe that.

[Leo Laporte]

So also from 404 Media, which, by the way, knocking it out of the park on these.

[Jason Calacanis]

They do a good job. What's the story with 404? I mean, I know what a 404 is like.

[Leo Laporte]

So the story was these guys were at Motherboard. There's a small group. They were at Motherboard. And like a lot of other people, Vice shut down Motherboard.

[Jason Calacanis]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

And so they, these are the guys. Jason Keebler. And. And so they went off and did their own thing. Samantha Cole, Jason Keeble, Keeler, Joseph Cox, Emmanuel Myberg. And they said, well, radical self reliance, there you go. We're going to create our own site. But what's good is they're very good investigative journalists. Jason was the editor in chief at Motherboard for six years. Did so much good work there. And so they've basically put together a group of people who are really effective. I don't know if it's a good business, this. I hope it is because we cover their. Almost every episode. We have a, A. This is the second story in a row from them. 40,000 cameras from Bird feeders to baby monitors are wide open on the Internet. We talked about it on security Security.

[Father Robert Balisar]

Now expect this by default now. Yeah, I just, I, I assume any camera that streams to the Internet is compromised. Yeah, right.

[Jason Calacanis]

I do, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Cyber security risk intelligence company Bitsite was able to access and download content from thousands of these systems, including domestic and commercial webcams, baby monitors, office security, pet cameras, bird feeder. You know, the big thing now is bird feeder cameras.

[Father Robert Balisar]

I've got one.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yes.

[Father Robert Balisar]

Yeah, they're cool.

[Jason Calacanis]

I, I got it from my mom.

[Father Robert Balisar]

She loves watching the birds.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, well. And so do the hackers across the world. The Most concerning examples BitSight says we found were cameras in hospitals or clinics monitoring patients.

[Jason Calacanis]

Not good.

[Leo Laporte]

It doesn't take elite hacking to access these cameras. In most case, a regular web browser and a curious mind are all it takes. So these 40,000 cameras, probably just the tip of the iceberg.

[Jason Calacanis]

This is what happens when you also buy, buy some of these commodity products on Amazon. Yeah. Because they're not, they're just like thrown together. There's nobody in the United States who's going to get sued when these things happen. And that's, you know, as bad as this ambulance chasing, suing thing we have in the United States is it does put people at the top of their game on a security basis and responsibility basis, because you could have the risk of ruin. Your company could go out of business. And, and you know, this is where using a Google Webcam or what? You know, professional webcam is out there. I'm not sure who makes the best ones these days. It's good. You know, the other thing about privacy I've been thinking about is I went to dinner with somebody and they had an AI pendant on. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah, I ordered that one.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Limitless. Yeah, I have this one. I have. This one's. The. The bee. I wear this all the time. So.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah. So somebody had one of these at dinner. And I look at it, it's glowing.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

And I said, said, what's that? And they said, oh, it's my AI thing. And I'm like, is it recording us right now?

[Leo Laporte]

I was like, everything.

[Jason Calacanis]

And I'm like. He's like, is that a problem? I'm like, only if you want to maintain your friendship with me.

[Father Robert Balisar]

Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

And he was like, if you want to get invited back to dinner. And he's like, oh, you know, you're the only person who ever really had a problem with. I'm like, do you ask everybody before you record them?

[Amanda Silberling]

Because, you know, like, don't know.

[Jason Calacanis]

People don't know. And I really think we have to think through these glasses and those pendants and what is social norms on. I assume I'm being recorded all the time, as, you know, a notable person in the world. I'm assuming people are recording me all the time. But I was particularly disturbed by this because it was a friend of mine who really didn't think that having an AI summary of our dinner, more and.

[Leo Laporte]

More people are going to do that. That's going to be Universal script. Yeah. I want to live in this world now. This thing records words, makes a transcript, then sends an AI analysis along. So it's just the notes, the action items, things we talked about.

[Jason Calacanis]

What is that?

[Leo Laporte]

But I'll make. This is B dot computer. I've been wearing this since January. They showed this to ces. I do have a button I could press that will turn it off, but it's on by default.

[Father Robert Balisar]

So if we get into those during confessions.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, no, you should not. No, no.

[Father Robert Balisar]

An AI summary would be perfect. Right. It keeps. I'm going to give you my notes.

[Jason Calacanis]

I'm going to give you an AI summary of my 10 our fathers and my 15 year olds.

[Leo Laporte]

Let me just give you the bullet points. Okay. Just the bullet points place very soon.

[Father Robert Balisar]

You know, it's just that. Yes.

[Jason Calacanis]

So.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, no, we. I mean, I guess we kind of need. You're right. Absolutely right. And I affect. In Many cases. Certainly in California, it's a two party state. The law requires that you, you get permission before you record. But I think we are increasingly living in a world where we are being surveilled by cameras everywhere.

[Jason Calacanis]

Just assume you're being surveilled.

[Leo Laporte]

The minute something happens, everybody whips out their phones and starts shooting it. Right.

[Jason Calacanis]

That's a very weird dystopian thing.

[Leo Laporte]

Isn't it? Strange.

[Jason Calacanis]

I saw a video online. You know, it's one of the things I don't like about social media is like, like these crazy moments that I don't want to see and have in my brain. But somebody tried. Yeah, somebody tried to sneak into like a Disneyland kind of thing in China. And they hopped over the fence in the lion enclosure. Like, yeah, bad.

[Leo Laporte]

Not a good idea.

[Father Robert Balisar]

Yes, yes.

[Jason Calacanis]

And literally this, you see the video and the person pans across and there's a hundred people holding up their phones.

[Leo Laporte]

Not saving the guy.

[Jason Calacanis]

No.

[Leo Laporte]

Taking pictures of it.

[Jason Calacanis]

Eaten by three lines. And all people can think of is, well, I got to document this or live stream it. And I'm just saying, oh my God, this is so dystopian. Like, put your phones down and help.

[Leo Laporte]

We live the views.

[Father Robert Balisar]

They're about to go viral.

[Jason Calacanis]

The likes.

[Leo Laporte]

Everybody's doing it for the likes. And it's kind of creepy as hell.

[Amanda Silberling]

Yeah. Well, I guess small bit of good news is that I was going to say that the Amazon Ring cameras were coming with law enforcement because I remember that was something that was going on where they had given footage to police because they were trying to investigate something. And that is kind of a surveillance issue. But I looked it up and apparently as of last year, Ring will no longer share.

[Jason Calacanis]

Automatically.

[Leo Laporte]

Not automatically. If you have a warrant, they will get it. I mean, you know, my neighbor came down the street, said, my house got TP'd last night. Do you have any video? And I said, well, yeah, I have cameras everywhere. Let me just. I sent him the video from that time period.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And did catch the guy. I don't think it was because of my video, but he'd gone down the street. Every single person on the street either had a ring or some other high.

[Jason Calacanis]

School graduated and people got TP'd. It's a tradition, it's normal.

[Leo Laporte]

But now you can't get away with it.

[Jason Calacanis]

I can't even tp.

[Leo Laporte]

You can't even TP be a person's house recordings.

[Benito]

Well, come on. TP and eggs these days are way too expensive to spend on.

[Leo Laporte]

You can afford it.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah. No, the eggs. Unless you're self reliant and you have your own chicken coop. There's a really interesting.

[Leo Laporte]

That's the reason to have your own chicken co.

[Jason Calacanis]

Absolutely. You can egg your next. There's a very cool company called Flock Safety. I think Flock Safety, I looked at it as a potential investment. I missed the window. This company, company for communities and like again, this is like one of these double edged swords. They record all the license plates coming in and out of your.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, God, no. Yeah, Flock. I know about Flock. This is a big story because Flock is being used by law enforcement. For instance, your own Texas law enforcement used data from nationwide. Data Flock from Flock.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

To try to track down a woman who had left the state to get an abortion.

[Jason Calacanis]

Oh, I didn't know about that. That's horrific. So here we go.

[Leo Laporte]

Flock is a real. I'm glad you invested in them.

[Jason Calacanis]

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

[Leo Laporte]

It's a little dystopian too. I mean it's basically.

[Father Robert Balisar]

Yeah, not a little.

[Leo Laporte]

It is a nationwide surveillance network, private surveillance network, basically.

[Amanda Silberling]

I do.

[Jason Calacanis]

But they don't take videos of people's faces. That was.

[Leo Laporte]

No, just the license plate.

[Jason Calacanis]

Just the license plate.

[Leo Laporte]

So just the metadata data, which people are.

[Jason Calacanis]

And they keep it for a certain amount of time. But people are also in communities doing facial recognition and taking all the people coming in and out of the community and facially recognize them. So, you know, there's pros and cons here of like, what are the possible solutions. Yeah, yeah.

[Amanda Silberling]

And I, I do worry about how AI will interact with this kind of footage and how it's used by law enforcement. Because also we know that there are, there, there is AI that has biases based on the training data where it might be more likely to flag like a black person as having done a crime. And that's been my experience with people with biases too.

[Leo Laporte]

But it's like, that's been my experience. What is that? What is that? Social network is a neighborhood where almost all the neighborhoods next door. That's it, next door. Almost all the next door posts are like, there's a black guy wandering around the neighborhood.

[Amanda Silberling]

Do you know I just.

[Leo Laporte]

So racist. It's so bad.

[Amanda Silberling]

Yeah. I worry that this kind of tech is just going to make racism worse, which is already obviously a huge issue with law enforcement.

[Jason Calacanis]

But yeah, when you get to hear about the edge cases here like this one, which is terrible that you're showing.

[Leo Laporte]

Texan authorities in May performed a nationwide search of more than 83,000 army automatic license plate reading cameras to locate a woman they believe to have a self administered abortion. They even, they, they tried, they illegally accessed Illinois data to locate this woman. And it was, it was flock.

[Father Robert Balisar]

And it's more than that. Illinois allowed them to access in violation of their own state laws.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, yeah, this is good that, yeah, so this is good that the system worked to find out that people did this illegally and catch the police.

[Leo Laporte]

Did not have warrant.

[Jason Calacanis]

They should have had a warrant. Right? Yeah, yeah. And this is a dubious, you know, law as well. But yeah, this is dark. This is dark. This is black mirror stuff.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, but that's, but that's what you get. Right. That's inevitable.

[Father Robert Balisar]

This is what Palantir does. It allows them to, to bypass all that because it's not the government collecting the information. It's not the government analyzing the information. It's a, it's a third private industry company.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Father Robert Balisar]

And therefore you don't have to worry about things like civil rights because it's not the government doing it. And with. We've been on twit. We've been screaming about this for 15 years now. And it's, it's here, it's now happening. They have a massive contract.

[Benito]

And this is the technology, by the way, that they're using to pick up immigrants.

[Leo Laporte]

Right?

[Benito]

This is, this is the stuff they're using.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh yeah, absolutely. Paler in fact is doing that specifically.

[Jason Calacanis]

Are they the parade reported? Yeah, yeah.

[Father Robert Balisar]

All, all the banners are Palantir. Did you see that? The, the advertising support for the, for the parade?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, sure, why not?

[Benito]

I think there was also a coinbase or something.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, there was, there was a big coinbase on the, on the podium that was brought to you by and peto.com hey, what is the story with these stablecoins? We just passed the Genius act in the United States. A stablecoin is a cryptocurrency Pegged to the value of the dollar in this.

[Jason Calacanis]

Sense, it doesn't appreciate appreciate. It's just one for one. It lets you transfer for no cost or close to no cost.

[Leo Laporte]

So what's the interest in doing this?

[Jason Calacanis]

So when you do money transfer between banks, you pay fees. And these make it very cheap to move. So Stripe bought a stablecoin infrastructure company. Circle just went public. They provide stablecoins. So it's a way to move money around without having to pay fees. You can't make interest on them. So that was the interesting thing in this genius act, because the small banks were concerned, okay, people aren't going to deposit dollars. And then there are offshore companies like Tether. And Tether has had a bunch of really back to the dark word, like dark stuff like human trafficking. And you know, it's an offshore stablecoin that has over $100 billion in assets. What they, what they're doing with this is saying you can have stablecoins in America. They're legal, they're regulated. You have to prove that you have the one for one reserve. So you have to buy 100% reserve.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow.

[Jason Calacanis]

You have to. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So because banks are only required to have a small percentage in reserve.

[Jason Calacanis]

So this is, you know, the expectation by the public is if I buy these stable coins from USDC and I move money around, it's backed. When people were doing this with Tether, there were moments in time where Tether, it was questioned whether Te Tether actually had the, the, the, the, the money in the bank basically and that there could be a bank run. And they were doing attestations which, you know, not to get accounting technical is like, okay, can show me a bank account with a certain amount of money in it as opposed to an audit where it's like, show me all the transactions. And we're going to put KPMG's name on or Ernst and Young's name on it. So this onshore stablecoins in the United States and then really the, the reason the government's into this is because you have to buy treasuries, which is good for our sovereignty and keeping the dollar, you know, the global currency of the world, as opposed to people maybe using tether as the global currency of the world to do trades. And then they don't have to buy Treasuries. Right. They can buy whatever they want. So it's ultimately, you know, a good thing to have this stuff, stuff onshored and regulated. The only bummer is if you were to put a $100,000 into stable coins, you make no interest. So you'd want to put that into a savings bearing account where you can get 5% today, you know, on, on different.

[Leo Laporte]

So the entire benefit of stablecoin is lowcost interbank transfers.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah. Or between us. Yeah. Transport layer.

[Father Robert Balisar]

Yeah, it think of it as a transport layer. That's all it is. It's a tool for transporting currency between different systems.

[Leo Laporte]

It's probably good that there be some regulation of it. The Senate passed the genius bill, it goes to the House. But the House has its own stable bill. So I guess we're stable geniuses. We'll see what happens. Everybody and their brother, including Amazon and others are rolling out stablecoins of some kind. Bank of America, Deutsche Bank.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah. Think about the 3% we all pay on transfer fees, etc. Just imagine.

[Leo Laporte]

So I would, I would what? I would buy some stable coins, send this to somebody.

[Jason Calacanis]

It might be in your coinbase, your Robin Hood, your PayPal.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Jason Calacanis]

And you know, instead of paying very large transfer fees, you would pay very small ones.

[Leo Laporte]

Who makes money on this?

[Jason Calacanis]

So these services are cheaper to run and then they get the float. So if you're circle and you have $50 billion. I don't, I think that might be. They have tens of billions the float.

[Leo Laporte]

They make money on the float which is.

[Jason Calacanis]

They make money on the float.

[Leo Laporte]

The amount of time they hold that correct.

[Jason Calacanis]

Now in a high interest rate environment like we're in, it's really juicy. So I think tether's making like over $10 billion a year right now or something crazy. Now if interest rates go back down, which people suspect then it will not be as great of a business and it will go up and down like that. But it's going to create more efficiency and you know, if you think about what a drag on the economy, economy fees are from credit cards, from bank transfers, etc, all that will go to the bottom line. So when you run a conference or you're running Club Twit and you know you have some millions of dollars or hundreds of thousands of dollars, you look at those fees and you're like wow.

[Leo Laporte]

It does add up.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, you sell $10 million in something and you're paying 3%, you're like $300,000 went to or 400,000.

[Leo Laporte]

So is it credit cards and banks that are fighting?

[Jason Calacanis]

It could, yeah. So if you want to or at some point people will sign up for Club Twit for a hundred bucks and not use a credit card. They'll use their stable coins and their.

[Leo Laporte]

Wallets because of lower question.

[Father Robert Balisar]

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

[Jason Calacanis]

More. Yeah, it might be one of these things where, you know, there'll be a top 90% of the coins in stable coins will be held by. Via power law, 90% of the coins will be held by the top five players. And, you know, there'll be a long tail, kind of like you have for credit cards. You know, you might have like Diners Club still exists, but you know, it's Visa, MasterCard World.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you have a Diners Club card?

[Jason Calacanis]

I don't, but I do.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, it was the first. I think it was the first credit card, but it was, it was.

[Jason Calacanis]

It was like a really kind of thing to do. What I do now is I. I'm really into bookmarking on TikTok and Instagram and other places. These food curators who say, this is the best sandwich here, this is the best pizza slice here, this is the best ramen. And then when I go to a city, I pull that out and then I compare it to other sources of information. I find. Find like these influencers do a really good job of discovering.

[Leo Laporte]

Are you helping me plug my son? Is that what this.

[Jason Calacanis]

I teed up for you. I just teed it up for you. Boom.

[Father Robert Balisar]

There's energy here, Leo.

[Jason Calacanis]

I'm looking for a sandwich. Walking around.

[Leo Laporte]

If you're looking for a good prime rib in the West Village, a good French dip, I can tell you, I could tell you where it's right next to John's Pizza. All right, we're going to take a break. Thank you, Jason. That was a long way to go. I don't know how you got from there. It's stablecoin to that, but you did it. You did it. It's beautiful. It was a work of art.

[Jason Calacanis]

Get on the Pick a roll.

[Leo Laporte]

Last break here. We're gonna have a bunch of silly stories and then we'll wrap things up with a great panel. Amanda Silberling from TechCrunch where she covers culture, culture, Internet culture. Senior culture writer also now, Amanda. Omg. LOL on bluesky. The best handle. The best blue sky handle. Jason Calacano Dennis, host of All In. Do you do that every week now?

[Jason Calacanis]

Once a week, yeah, every Friday.

[Leo Laporte]

How do you get those guys together?

[Jason Calacanis]

You know, that was the secret to the pod is they were like, how. How do you become successful at podcasting? And I remember what Peter Rojas told me, just show up every day. Like, just be consistent.

[Leo Laporte]

That's all you have to do.

[Jason Calacanis]

And, you know, here we are on, you know, episode 1000 something of twit, right?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

Here we are.

[Leo Laporte]

I guess that's consistency. Either that are laziness, I don't know. Stupidity, I don't know.

[Jason Calacanis]

That's consistency. I mean, it's. It really does.

[Leo Laporte]

They used to call Walter Cronkite Old Iron Butt because he could sit in the chair for hours talking about nothing. I think I'm his spiritual successor. Also Father Robert Balis, the digital Jesuit, who. It's getting late. We're going to let you. We're going to let you go to bed any minute.

[Father Robert Balisar]

Although I. I am going to have a request for you, Leo. I was hoping I could be on. On twit in 20 episodes.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Father Robert Balisar]

For 1057. Because I want to be on the Lost episode.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Father Robert Balisar]

Lead speak.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. 1057. Lost. Okay. Deal. Bonito. Make a note of that. Ask your AI to put that in the book. No, we always love having all of you on. All three of you. And Amanda's a regular every month on our tech news weekly show too. In fact, did you. I think you hosted it. Did you host it recently? No. So every once in a while, Michael goes, Micah goes away, and they make you guys do the job. But I wasn't you.

[Amanda Silberling]

No. Can't do it without Micah. I mean, I know I could, but.

[Leo Laporte]

I know it's hard.

[Amanda Silberling]

Find out. I've not found out yet.

[Leo Laporte]

It might have been Jennifer Pattison Tuohy. I'm not sure who. Anyway, great to have all three of you. Our show today, brought to you by Zoom Zip recruiter. Oh, yeah. The easiest way to hire, let me tell you. Summer's here, you know, that means seasonal businesses are hurrying up. Those dune brothers there with the clam cakes in Rhode island, man, they gotta staff up right now. Everything from mule packers to drama camp leaders. Yes, those are actual jobs. This means that people with these very highly specific skills are in high demand, but they're not easy to find. So whether you're hiring for one of these roles or any other role role, how do you find the top talent before the competition gets to them? ZipRecruiter. And right now you can try ZipRecruiter for free at ZipRecruiter.com TWIT ZipRecruiter's. Powerful matching technology does a deep dive to identify top talent for your roles. Immediately after you post your job, ZipRecruiter smart technology starts showing you qualified people for gear up for summer with ZipRecruiter's high speed hiring tools. See why 4 out of 5 employers who post on ZipRecruiter Recruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. Just go to this exclusive web address right now to try ZipRecruiter for free. Ziprecruiter.com TWIT again that's ZipRecruiter.com TWIT ZipRecruiter the smartest way to hire. Thank you ZipRecruiter longtime sponsors of our shows. We really appreciate it. I thought a good interview with Pavel Durov in Le Point, a French publication. Of course he's a shared citizenship with France and Dubai. I think he talked about his arrest in France. I think he defended himself quite well against accusations of kind of fostering terror and drug abuse. He says any platform like Telegram program is going to have that kind of thing. We get rid of it when we can. He feels like he was perhaps being prosecuted. He said the charges were totally absurd. Just because criminals use our messaging service among many others, doesn't make those who run it criminals. Nothing has ever been proven showing that I am even for a second guilty of anything. He also admits I thought this was kind of interesting to having 100 children. Now before you go crazy, this is not an Elon Musk situation here. He has children, a handful of children in the normal way, but he is apparently a donor to a sperm bank. But he's keeping track of the children spawned from that sperm bank. And he says he is going to distribute his pretty much vast fortune to all of them.

[Jason Calacanis]

That's wild, huh?

[Leo Laporte]

Huh huh. That was my reaction Amanda.

[Jason Calacanis]

That's wild, huh?

[Benito]

Wait, is that even illegal? Can he find out who is that?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, apparently he's got some sort of deal going. Let me see if I can find that.

[Jason Calacanis]

Well, I mean if the it would have to be opt in right? They would have to want to take the money and they whatever clinic is doing this insemination and and providing I.

[Leo Laporte]

Decided my children would not have access to my fortune until a period of 30 years has elapsed starting from today. So it won't be until 2055. Okay. I want them to live like normal people. Smart, build up themselves alone, radical self reliance to learn to trust themselves, to be able to create, not to be dependent on a bank account. He Says I want to specify I make no difference between my children. There are those who are conceived naturally and then those who come from my sperm donations. They are all my children and would all have the same rights.

[Jason Calacanis]

Wow.

[Leo Laporte]

He said. Six of whom I am the official father. The others come from my anonymous donation, the clinic where I started donating sperm 15 years ago to help a friend told me that 100 babies can be conceived this way in 12 countries.

[Amanda Silberling]

He then says that he does 300 pushups in a row and 300 squats every morning.

[Leo Laporte]

He's very fit.

[Jason Calacanis]

This is not a chill, dude.

[Father Robert Balisar]

This is not a chill, dude.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't smoke. I stay away from sugar. In short, anything that can make you dependent. I like being in cold water.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, this guy sounds like a party.

[Father Robert Balisar]

How secure is the network of this sperm bank?

[Leo Laporte]

Because I mean, I'm just, I'd like to get involved.

[Amanda Silberling]

This is a very wide ranging interview.

[Leo Laporte]

It was fascinating. I found it actually, and maybe this is contrarian a little bit, but I found him kind of charming and I was somewhat impressive, impressed by him.

[Jason Calacanis]

It's certainly interesting. I, I always worry about folks from Russia creating anonymous apps and wondering like.

[Leo Laporte]

But he says I left Russia because with. He created V Contact, which is the Facebook of Russia. He says Putin's government wanted me to give information about my users to them. I refused. They forced the sale of VContact and I left Russia. Russia.

[Jason Calacanis]

It just always like anybody making a pit stop in Russia, starting, ending, he.

[Leo Laporte]

Does go back because his family's hanging.

[Jason Calacanis]

Out there for too long. It just makes me, you know, a little nervous. I, it just makes me want to double click and figure out is there still some deep connection or relationship there.

[Father Robert Balisar]

Yeah, I'm still not using it. Yeah. I, I don't telegram, I don't use WhatsApp. I, you know, I, I am, I am on media, social signal and I'm.

[Leo Laporte]

Did you see that WhatsApp is adding ads now?

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

This was the thing that the founders were very concerned about was that Facebook would, would do this.

[Jason Calacanis]

Didn't they originally charge $1 per year? I thought that was like the greatest business model ever. Like just make a billion dollars from.

[Leo Laporte]

$1 one use $1 per year.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, it was genius.

[Leo Laporte]

Meta bought them, as you may remember, for a billion dollars in 2014. Oh no, it wasn't a billion dollars. That was instability. A billion. I think it ended up being. Because it was a lot of money. Yeah, 19 billion. I think it was 19, maybe even more. Because as Meta stock went up, it.

[Jason Calacanis]

Became oh, it's up 20x since then.

[Leo Laporte]

Probably Meta made more than 160 billion in ad revenue across Facebook and Instagram in 2024. But had not at that to this point put ads in WhatsApp app. It says it's going to put them in the updates tab where you'll see sponsored some sponsored status updates. It's got to be bugging Mark. He's got this gold mine.

[Father Robert Balisar]

Ads are irresistible because we have made them irresistible. We don't push back.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Father Robert Balisar]

Amazon ads ads. We just. Okay. W Shrug. Netflix ads. Ads on paid accounts. W Shrug. Disney, Paramount plus Until the the users of these services finally say I'm just not going to use your service and anymore they know that they might get some pushback initially, but that's more than made up by the amount of cash that's going to come in.

[Jason Calacanis]

I keep trying to pay for no ads on like Hulu and stuff like that. And I keep seeing them every time they give me.

[Leo Laporte]

It's hard to do. I know, I know. I had the same thing. I had to cancel my account and join through Disney and pay more and I finally got ad free Hulu. It was so frustrating.

[Jason Calacanis]

So hard. I have it for the NBA.

[Leo Laporte]

I pay like I want to show you ads. However much you pay, pay them.

[Jason Calacanis]

The problem is, you know, I was just talking to somebody from Facebook like a very high level person and he said, listen, if you, if we let you pay to take out the ads, the only people would pay are the most valuable people to the app, the.

[Leo Laporte]

Ones we want to advertise to.

[Jason Calacanis]

So you know, I was like the only company that really does have integrity about this I think is Apple. To a certain extent. You see ads in the App Store.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

But they largely failed.

[Leo Laporte]

Remember they had an. They were going to sell ads and it failed. So they made a virtue out of a necessity and said, oh well, now we're the privacy company.

[Jason Calacanis]

I would love to pay. Okay. Sorry.

[Amanda Silberling]

Oh, sorry. Do you think that like, does Google lose money on something like YouTube Premium where you're paying us?

[Leo Laporte]

That's a good question.

[Amanda Silberling]

Seeing the ads, I guess, I don't.

[Jason Calacanis]

Know, it's getting pretty popular. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, you'd have to be crazy not to pay for YouTube Premium.

[Jason Calacanis]

Those are the greatest product ever.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, only because there's so many ads on YouTube.

[Jason Calacanis]

I think that's how they do it, is. That's how they, that's how they get you. They get you with the bread. That's how they get you.

[Father Robert Balisar]

I'm just going to go Back to torrenting everything. I mean, they made it so easy to not torrent, but now I'm just. It's a matter of protest, I think.

[Leo Laporte]

Trust no one in our discord. Says Apple doesn't have ads, but have you seen what they charge for ram?

[Jason Calacanis]

That's the other thing. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So have you seen the new dig? Has anybody seen the new Dig yet?

[Jason Calacanis]

I haven't. I'm an advisor to the company officially, so I have to and you don't.

[Leo Laporte]

And did you give him the five bucks to be part of the advisory board?

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

All right.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, I think it's going to be great.

[Leo Laporte]

TechCrunch Sarah Perez writing a TechCrunch. Here's your first look at the rebooted dig. As you may remember, Kevin Rose, who started Digg, bought it back and he and his arch rival, the founder of Reddit, Alexis Ohanian, now are going to bring Dig back together. They say that AI moderation will be the key. Dig, of course, immediately got gamed and that's what brought Dig down, was just, you know, that and Reddit, I love a revenge startup.

[Jason Calacanis]

I love this, like going back to the old brands, bringing them back, seeing if you can get like bring the, the magic back. It's like a very retro thing, you know, and I think it's gonna work.

[Leo Laporte]

I think brought back dignation too, which is smart, right?

[Jason Calacanis]

Well, if you think about, we were just talking about, what do we call it, the garbage Internet or something where everything's trash and everything's AI produced.

[Father Robert Balisar]

The insidification of the Internet.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, there's that. Yeah. And, but there's, there's something about like how polluted it is with AI spam. I think taking these old trusted brands back, bringing the original founders back and saying, hey, there's got to be a better way. Pay us five bucks a month or whatever and try to make a clean.

[Leo Laporte]

Human version text apocalypse. AI. AI apocalypse.

[Jason Calacanis]

No, it's just there is a lot of junk. I, I started, I noticed in my replies on X Twitter before I put them on subscription mode that a lot of them seemed to be coming in too fast.

[Leo Laporte]

Automated.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, yeah, they were coming in too fast and from the same accounts and they were clearly somebody had a prompt and they were. Yeah. Trying to snipe people with big followings replies because people who are in my replies get a couple of thousand views on their replies. So I think it's a better strategy to be a reply guy.

[Leo Laporte]

I think there's going to be an AI backlash. I really do. I think as Much as I am an accelerationist and I love AI and I'm very excited about it, I'm starting to see that there's going to be a big backlash. People are not happy with the insidification, the AI apocalypse. It's just. It's getting worse and worse.

[Father Robert Balisar]

Course, but they can only have a backlash if they know what to look for.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. If you don't, you don't know it's AI.

[Father Robert Balisar]

Speaking of my parents.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Father Robert Balisar]

They didn't know that 50% of the stuff they watch was AI slop. And it wasn't until I actually started going through and hand curating the stuff that makes it to their feed that they started realizing, oh, yeah, those were really bad quality sources. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Amanda Silberling]

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

[Jason Calacanis]

And it's an opportunity.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, I bet your parents saw this. The AI support kangaroo, which looks like a woman getting onto an airplane with a support port. Well, let's say it's AI but it's. But it's actually, it's pretty obviously AI.

[Jason Calacanis]

Is holding its own boarding. Obviously. I mean, we all know it would have a QR code and a smartphone. Not.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

Giveaway.

[Amanda Silberling]

Nobody cute to be a kangaroo.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Everybody's doing video now. Mid Journey is doing video. And it's all very good. It's very hard. This is from Mid Journey. Very hard to distinguish between this and reality. This is all AI generated.

[Jason Calacanis]

It's crossed the uncanny valley. I mean, we're sitting here dating. We were debating the Irishman and. Oh, yeah, Skywalker.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And you could tell it was fake, but this is. This looks so real.

[Jason Calacanis]

Not only can you tell it, Ted Sarando said that cost like 30 or 40 million dollars to do in that film.

[Leo Laporte]

Just it wasn't even that long ago.

[Jason Calacanis]

And that was five years ago. Then you, Luke Skywalker on the Mandalorian was like three years ago and now the consumer grade can do it for low 100.

[Leo Laporte]

This is mid journey. Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

You know, but each of these is an opportunity. I remember like I always remember the cantina scene when they said, you know, your droids aren't welcome here. You know, leave them outside. Chess solved AI Chess solved chess a long time ago. Got more people playing chess than ever. Ever queens gambit chess.com is a huge subscription business got. I think it's got 10 million members or something crazy like successful, very successful. And chess is more popular now than ever. Even though it's a. It's a finite game that has been solved. Why People like playing it and they like learning it and it's you know, interactive and it's fun. So I think this becomes the opportunity guaranteeing all human interactions. Action music became very easy to produce electronic music etc and now what do people like? We had this moment where MTV did Unplugged. It was the most popular CDs in the CD era became MTV Unplugged. And it was just amazing to see that Nirvana could do an Unplugged. They were actual musicians. Or Oasis could do it.

[Father Robert Balisar]

That was my favorite.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yes. And people at that time were like, oh, we had these highly produced records by Dire Straits. They were Brothers in Arms was a phenomenon. But what people really wanted with Dire Straits was to see them live because they were actually better live. They did a better job live. They were better musicians live than even on those record breaking CDs. That's what's going to happen with AI people are going to be like, you know what? I want to see you make me a Star wars film like andor where you use real sets.

[Leo Laporte]

Not interesting.

[Jason Calacanis]

The one where you do it on the back. They did the volume stuff for the Obi Wan show and the Obi Wan show was canned and the andor one was Loved One. Why? I think the realism and the grittiness of models.

[Father Robert Balisar]

You just brought up one of the things that I'm responsible for doing over here which is leaning into the Vatican's AI effort of trying to remind people of what an actual relationship with another person looks like. As there are those who are saying, oh well, I can solve the mental health crisis and I can solve the loneliness crisis. We're trying to say, hey, how about actually learning how to have a real, real healthy relationship with another person or several other people? Because as silly as that sounds to people who grew up before the Internet, there's generations right now. They don't know that world. And they don't know that there's a possibility of having those kinds of healthy relationships. And they don't know that those kinds of healthy relationships bring all sorts of wonderful benefits that they've never experienced before.

[Leo Laporte]

That's why I go every Monday afternoon to play chess at the local coffee, coffee shop with actual people.

[Father Robert Balisar]

Are you one of those chess hustlers, Leo?

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah. Oh, do you really go to the cafe and do that, Leo?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

That's great. It's great for neuroplasticity.

[Leo Laporte]

I have over here a chess board that I can play on chess.com never have to see a human. It tells me what their moves and all that stuff. But I'd much rather go down to the cafe.

[Jason Calacanis]

Absolutely.

[Father Robert Balisar]

And I played one game with Leo and he destroyed me and never again.

[Jason Calacanis]

No, it's great. You know, like, I, I, I, I deal with a, a lot of young founders, and they will become depressed and anxious because of so much pressure, you know, from running these companies. And I say, when's the last time you went out with like five founders, cracked open a bottle of wine and had dinner and talked about your challenges? And they were like, I don't know how to do that. So I started a thing where I bring founders together to have dinner and I just. What we do is we go around the table and I say, give us your rose and thorn. Give us your biggest win. And what you're struggling with, it's a safe environment and it's transformed people's lives. It releases job.

[Father Robert Balisar]

That's what they're taking my job.

[Leo Laporte]

Father Jason.

[Jason Calacanis]

Father J. Cal him. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

No, I think one of the things that kind of still gives me hope is that even if things are going in a direction we don't like, there's very often the pendulum swings the other way. There's a backlash, and that maybe all of this AI slop will encourage us to become more human and spend more time with humans and make us value humans, humans even more. We value music made by humans, art made by humans, writing made by humans.

[Benito]

I think what you're really talking about, Leo, is craft. Like people like to learn and to do their craft.

[Leo Laporte]

And I will never play chess as well as even the dumbest chess game on my iPhone. Well, no, there are dumb ones, but like a decent chess, they're better than grandmasters, even on my phone. That's not why I play chess. I don't play chess so that I can be smarter than a machine. I play chess because it's fun, Calculators. Are much better at arithmetic than I will ever be. But that's not a bad thing. It's just. If I want to play chess, I'm going to play chess. If I want to make music, I'm going to make music. Great fun to have all of you on here and to cheer us up as things seem to be spiraling in the wrong direction. Just remember, there is hope. Jason Calacanis, you always give me hope. It's always a great pleasure to see you. The all in podcast this week in startups. Jason everywhere. Yeah, it's great to see you. What a view. Love your view. Yeah, Father Robert has a great view, but he. He. Can you have the camera? Can you show us what the Vatican looks like tonight?

[Father Robert Balisar]

Well, it's so outside of this. Is that.

[Jason Calacanis]

Oh, wow.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a view.

[Father Robert Balisar]

That's the.

[Leo Laporte]

That's actually.

[Father Robert Balisar]

So if I, If I open up this curtain right here. This. This is a huge picture window. Window. That's. It's the Vatican behind me.

[Leo Laporte]

That's the view. God, I know.

[Jason Calacanis]

That looks like a postcard.

[Leo Laporte]

I know.

[Jason Calacanis]

That's like my Apple TV has that same thing. Wow.

[Leo Laporte]

Brother Robert, digital jesuit.com. he's on Blue Skies. Padre. SJ, you got anything you want to plug?

[Father Robert Balisar]

Nothing that I can talk about yet. We just. We finished everything up. Up with the. The funeral of Pope Francis and the conclave, and there's a lot of things in the works right now. Very exciting stuff in the works, but nothing that's public good.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, the best to you and to the Holy Father and to a great. He's my age, you know, so now it's going to be. It's race. It's a race basically, to see whether I'll see another Pope or not. You know, it's going to be very interesting. I think he looks pretty healthy, unfortunately.

[Father Robert Balisar]

I mean, if you, if you come back to Rome, I'll get you into an audience if you want.

[Leo Laporte]

Really? You could really. I'd love to meet him. Just another Leo, right? Thank you, Robert. Great to see you. Amanda Silberling. You can catch her on Tech News Weekly every month. And of course, all the time you write several times file several times a Day on TechCrunch. Senior culture writer there. It's always a pleasure to have you on. What's your view? You have a view you could share with us? No. Me neither.

[Amanda Silberling]

Well, outside my window, there's just another brick building. So I'm really slocking out of the. The group.

[Leo Laporte]

But brick buildings in Philadelphia, they have history. There's your kitchen. That's a good view. It's great to see you. Thank you. Amanda, what's the name of your podcast again?

[Amanda Silberling]

Wow if True.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow If True. Subscribe where you get your podcasts. What a great idea for a show. Thank you Amanda. Thanks to all of you for joining us. We do TWIT every Sunday evening, 2 to 5pm Pacific, 5 to 8 Eastern, 2100 UTC. We stream it live in a variety of places. If you want to watch live, you don't certainly don't have to, but if you'd like to chat with us while you're watching the show, best place to do that, of course in the club Twit Discord. But there's also free ways to watch YouTube.com, twitch, TikTok, Facebook, LinkedIn, x.com kick. We stream on all of them between those hours, 2 to 5pm Pacific. Afterwards you can get a copy of the show at our website TWiT TV. Or you can watch it on YouTube. A great way to share clips. If there's something you particularly thought a friend or family member would love to see, just clip it out on YouTube and they can watch it that way. It also helps spread the word. Best thing to do subscribe and your favorite podcast client. There are audio and video versions of every show and if you subscribe, do us a favor. Leave us a five star review. Let the world know that you are proud to be a twit. Thank you everybody. I know I am. After 2020 years, we're still doing it. And as I have been saying for the last 20 years. Thanks for joining us. We'll see you next week. Another TWIT is in the can Amazing.

[Jason Calacanis]

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[Father Robert Balisar]

You were made to have strong opinions about sand. We were made to help you and.

[Jason Calacanis]

Your friends find a place on the.

[Father Robert Balisar]

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