TWiT 1026: I Know of BigBalls - TWIST Takeover

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Apr 7th 2025

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

00:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's time for Twit this Week in Tech. Wow, all I can say is wow, this is going to be an interesting show. Our old friend Alex Wilhelm is here. He, of course, used to be at TechCrunch. He now has his own excellent newsletter and he's a regular on this Week in Startups, hosted by our other guest, jason Calacanis. It is a this Week in Startups takeover. We have lots to talk about, starting off with how you like your boy now Podcasts you love. From people you trust.

00:39 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
This is Twit.

00:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is TWIT this Week in Tech, episode 1026, recorded April 6th 2025. I know of big balls. It's time for TWIT this Week in Tech, tech, the show. We get together and talk about the week's tech news. And there is some news this week and I thought, wow, I had an idea. I had a crazy thought that we do it this week in startups takeover. Oh, how do you like that? Jason calacanis is here, the man in charge of twists and of the now number one podcast in the world. Well, it's close to it All In Podcast. It's good to see you, jason. It's great to see you, Leo.

01:32 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Thank you for having me, Pat.

01:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's been a long, long time, far too long. Jason thinks he's at a rally. He's got an American flag and a Texas flag behind him.

01:43 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Absolutely from the great state of Austin, Austin, the People's.

01:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Republic Yep Also with us. His co-host from time to time on Twists, mr Alex Wilhelm, the guy behind the Cautious Optimism newsletter, cautiousoptimismnews, and Jason had to kind of strong arm you into being here today. So thank you, jason, I appreciate it.

02:04 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
I think he just volun-told me like hey, by the way, I was talking to leo and I hear we're both going to be on twist and I told my wife I'm like well, all right, bad news, honey, you're doing bedtime yourself on sunday because I'm going on another show I was sitting here a couple weeks ago doing, I think, windows weekly and I got a text from jason and I thought wow, there, wow there's a name I haven't heard in a long time Much more civilized weapon.

02:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, but Jason's a longtime friend of the show, and the last time you were on actually was during I have a t-shirt that says it the run on Silicon Valley bank. Yes, that was the last time you were on the show. Yeah, we survived that, though, didn't we?

02:46 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
that didn't turn out to be the mess that it looked like it was going to be thank goodness they backstopped the deposits because they were fdic did yeah, because you know there's like this weird thing you get the first I guess 250k in a fdic account is protected, but then after that you're on your own and Silicon Valley Bank is kind of hated. It's Silicon Valley, it's rich people, but it's actually for people who live in the Bay Area, like your school and your mom and pop dry cleaner might use it and then, like two other banks, had a run. That was a very scary time. I didn't have a problem with Silicon Valley Bank necessarily going out of business for making you know having some poor management there, but gosh, you know the deposits in the bank accounts. That could have been a really cataclysmic situation.

03:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, we're all these days very tied together, aren't we? And one bank goes's, so goes the nation.

03:48 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
So, uh, you know it, and it turned out not to be the cataclysm that looked like it was going to be, so I think because of how fast it was yeah, over that weekend and you know, I mean, I know regulators are kind of a bad word in america right now, but shout out to that team at the time for being quick, solving the issue, getting confidence back in the system. And that's why, leo, we look back and we're like what year was that? Well, it turns out it was 2023. It was two years ago.

04:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What a year it's.

04:12 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
What a year that was that wasn't that I feel like we're living in doggyish, how it's like every week, it's like seven weeks, oh my god I mean we're 70 days into Trump's second term and it feels like we're on the third term already.

04:27 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
I've aged 75 years in 70 days it just takes over everything too, you know.

04:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think there is a perception in the world, jason, because of your friendship with Elon, that you perhaps are a friend of the administration, but you are an independent right.

04:42 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
I've always been independent. I always vote for the best candidate. I think I'm best described as like a Clinton Democrat fiscally I'm conservative and then socially I'm incredibly liberal, and so you know who shrunk the government, last time Bill Clinton, yeah, yeah, I mean it's quite a bit by attrition and retirement and so forth.

05:05
I think we all agree. We want to get rid of waste and fraud and abuse and we want an efficient government that we get the services that we pay for. I think people don't like the way they're going about it. It feels too violent, too fast. And you know we live in a pretty polarizing time. My philosophy has always been whoever wins, support the president. And you know we live in a pretty polarizing time. My philosophy has always been whoever wins, support the president as best you can. And then there's a very weird thing that happened. All my Democratic friends are now part of the administration, around the administration. So I find myself in a very weird situation as a never Trumper, to be supporting the good things they're doing, but I feel obligated to call out the terrible things horrible things I think they're doing or the mistakes they're making. So I'm calling balls and strikes. And we survived one Trump presidency. I think we'll survive this one.

06:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think we'll survive this one. One of the things you texted me when you sent the text a couple of weeks ago is I like how you've been inched to dodge politics on the show. We're not going to do a lot of dodgeball today because I think the liberation day on Wednesday could be disastrous for Silicon Valley. So my real, my real, I guess, and Alex, please jump in. But. But my question for Jason right up front, is Silicon Valley wanted this president right? At least part of Silicon Valley did I think yeah. Are they happy? This is the 404 media story. Big tech backed Trump for acceleration. They got a D cell president instead.

06:50 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
I think Trump winning is as much about the Democrats losing, and you know how they handled their, how they handled their presidential candidate and their campaign, because Trump was pretty easy to defeat it should have been easy to defeat.

07:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, he was. I'll agree with you on that.

07:12 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
I was talking to somebody who is in and around the administration and I won't say who. I don't have any trust. They said the fact that the Democrats have figured out a way to make Trump look like the better choice is astounding to them. They just couldn't believe that that's actually the turn of events.

07:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, but what was it that made Trump look like the better choice? Because to some of us it looks like the fact that Democrats picked a black woman as their candidate, and in this country that was two strikes. Maybe Asian American was a third strike that disqualified her even though she was fully qualified to do the job.

07:53 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
I think that's an interesting question. I'll tell you what people said to me in private in the back channel. This isn't what I think. I think there were a lot of people who were very upset about the sort of woke politics, dei, trans, stuff with kids, you know all all of that kind of, because that was what the president promoted in his ad campaigns, right? Uh the most effective congratulations.

08:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know you don't have to worry about trans men in women's sports, but maybe you want to worry a little bit more about a few other things that are going to hell in a handbasket and I think they were really disturbed by like by a lot of the democrats were really disturbed by the transition from biden and the hot swap yeah, it was a bit of a hot swap, yeah yeah, and I called out the hot swap.

08:45
It was pretty obvious it might have been a disadvantage too, because she didn't have a full primary campaign to run and to introduce herself to america was banging that drum at the time.

08:54 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
I wanted a mini primary.

08:56 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Yeah, my what I told democrats, because I find myself like all of a sudden, because of all, in getting so prominent, you know featuring two mega.

09:08
I would say you know one person who's MAGA sacks, I think Chamath is obviously flipped over and he re underwrote Trump. And then Freeberg is. You know, he kind of dances a line where you don't actually know his politics all that much, I, and he tries to keep himself out of it or stay neutral, but I think he's probably, you know, more in favor of the administration than not just based on what he said on the show publicly. But you know I don't like to speak for anybody but myself. What I'll say is you know, I told the Democrats because I became friendly with Dean Phillips and some of the folks and I don't really get involved in politics or donate I told them do a speed run primary.

09:47
You'll take over the entire media for the summer. Three weeks, start with eight candidates. Whoever gets the most votes go down to four, have another debate in the second week, then go down to two and then promise everybody whoever gets the most votes in that three-week speed run primary will be number one and number two. In other words, they don't pick their VP, they just go with it. It would have taken over people's imagination and it would have been an easy victory for the Democrats.

10:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And it's easy though. I mean, this is Monday morning quarterbacking. But again to get to the question is Silicon Valley now disappointed having chosen Trump as an accelerationist, somebody who would support cryptocurrency, who would support AI, who would build the economy, that, in fact, these tariffs are going to hit them very hard?

10:36 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
I think most people believe in the first cohort of topics you said, and then they believe that the tariffs are a negotiating tactic that it's going to go away and it's going to go away in two weeks the stock market clearly doesn't yeah, they've voted that this is going to be cataclysmic.

10:53 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
Yeah, yeah, and uh besant was talking about that today. On the uh, the ai versus crypto front label, I think it's pretty easy to say that the trump administration has been about as crypto friendly as you can hope for. I mean, we're talking about pardons, lack of regulation, a cessation.

11:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, they pardoned Nikola's CEO, who committed fraud.

11:11 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
That's not crypto, that's a different fraud. You gotta keep fraud separate, my friend. Okay, okay, sorry, don't inflate the fake trucks with the fake money. And I say that You're right. You're right, that was a different kind of fraud, you're right. That was a different kind of fraud. I own a little Bitcoin and the family retirement account, so I just want to point that out. But I mean, if you were hoping for someone to take the heat off of crypto, I don't think you could.

11:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, that's true, and he campaigned. You know he was at the Bitcoin convention saying fire Gary Gensler and they cheered. So he said it again. He got a standing ovation. So clearly that was in the card. So was that. But the question is, is that enough to justify everything else?

11:48 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
Think about it through the lens of Andreessen Horowitz. They are a venture capital firm and they're politically active to some degree, and we all know that Mark Andreessen, via reporting, has been helping to staff the administration.

11:57
Now as Jason and I could tell you, the Andreessen Horowitz crypto venture firm has put together, I think, the largest funds ever in the space, jason. So I think from that perspective they're probably quite happy. But Marc Andreessen in his techno-optimist manifesto and his discussion about how there's a great coiled spring in the American economy, well, if you look at FedNow predictions from I forget which Federal Reserve bank it is, but one of them we're looking at potentially a pretty sharp decline in uh in economic activity. So I think from that side, no, and I also think that and we'll talk about it later in the show according to the notes but people are concerned that even though there's an exemption for chips in the tariffs, uh, that that won't actually obviate or even get entirely rid of the economic pain that the tariffs overall will bring to chips, which will retard and slow AI progress here domestically.

12:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So yeah, well, look what Apple did. Apple thought oh, we're gonna be, uh, we're gonna be cagey, we're gonna move production to uh away from China to. India, vietnam and Brazil. Whoops, vietnam tariff is 49 percent, of course, china is 52. So maybe they that was a net gain of three percent, I guess. Um, that much there are this is going to cost. Is this going to? Uh, you know, from the point of view of the technology user, is this going to mean the iphone is up now 50 percent?

13:17 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
I don't think so. I I think the most likely situation is trump is doing this to make everybody come to mar-a-lago in the white house and negotiate and cut a deal with him.

13:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He says Vietnam has called him immediately and said well, let's make a deal. And Trump has said if it's a, what was the word he used? He had an interesting description of the kinds of deals he's looking for Phenomenal, if he gets a phenomenal offer.

13:42 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Tremendous.

13:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's going to be the biggest offer incredible.

13:46 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
You know they were. They're very tough negotiators. Now, tremendous deal we did. Every country has called us a little country known as vietnam. Okay, you may have heard of it.

13:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Um, I think all of this but isn't that kind of uncertainty also bad for the market, like if he relents in two weeks, nobody's going to say, oh good, it's over.

14:11 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Which is what he wants. He wants everybody on edge. He wants to be the main character. I think he's addicted to doing that and I think they want to. This is the prominent theory. They have to redo a bunch of these high-priced interest payments that the government has and so over time, if they can what's the term? Refinance a lot of this debt. So when they refinance this debt, they're trying to crash the stock market, get the 10-year lower than 4% and they're going to refinance it. They're going to force Powell to cut rates and then the economy is going to roar into the midterms. This is the 4D chess as explained by the administration. I think it's pretty simple. I think he wants everybody to genuflect. He wants everybody to come to Mar-a-Lago. The White House cut a deal. Everybody to genuflect. He wants everybody to come to Mar-a-Lago. The White House cut a deal and if we see the market crash tomorrow Monday we're taping on Sunday obviously he will start that relenting process real fast. I don't think he wants to be this unpopular and lose the midterm elections, which I think right now they're in really bad shape if the economy crashes. So I think we'll see him relent.

15:28
I always have this like 72 hour rule with Trump. Whatever he says, wait 72 hours and then see what still applies. And so they did this on Wednesday. We're here, you know, whatever? Four days later and already he's starting to say oh well, vietnam has come around, these people are coming around. So that's the most likely scenario. But I do think that this is like doing a very high risk maneuver, you know, in a passenger plane, like you're a thousand feet off the ground and you decide you want to barrel roll the passenger plane. This is crazy I think it's the only way to describe it, and I don't think it's crazy like a Fox. I'll be totally honest. I think it's the only way to describe it and I don't think it's crazy like a fox. I'll be totally honest, I think it's reckless.

16:06 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
Yeah, I agree. A couple of data points. One I just went back to Apple's latest earnings report. Their gross margins are about 47%, so they do have so they could absorb it.

16:16
A little bit. But keep in mind that most companies have higher margins in the tech space because they're software companies. Apple is a majority hardware company, so there's a little bit less to play with there. And they're going to fight for it because Tim Cook does not F around, and so I don't know how much of this is going to hold in. And I've heard some people say that Apple has not raised prices on iPhones for some time, maybe a cycle or two, so they may have some consumer goodwill as well to lean on there. I don't know, we'll have to see.

16:43
But on the tariff front, the latest report from CNBC, published 28 minutes ago, commerce Secretary Lutnick doesn't back down in the face of market sell-off Quote. The tariffs are coming Now again. Could be 5-7 to 19 DHS, who knows. But at a minimum the jawboning coming from the administration today, on Sunday, after two days of chaos, is continuance. So he's a true believer in tariffs, guys. I mean I don't know why. I feel like we're building more of a mental model around this than we have to. Trump has been in favor of tariffs for decades.

17:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is no surprise. He's wanted to do this. He said these countries are ripping us off for 30 years, so he's done what he always wanted to do.

17:24 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Yeah, I think the execution matters in this case and I think even the people who are ardent trump supporters and voters um, they don't believe this was executed well. I I would have a hard time finding any. I think you'll have a hard time finding anybody who believes this was executed well they should have, except for peter navarro.

17:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Let me, are you still buddies with elon, do you? Do you stay? In touch, yeah, yeah, we're great friends. So elon is now in a fight with trump's uh trade. Uh, oh yeah, minister whatever I don't know what you call him uh, peter navarro, because navarro says he's trump, these tariffs are great. And elon says, and I think quite rightly we want free trade, we don't with Europe, we don't want any tariffs in either direction.

18:08 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Yeah, that would be Trump's original position, which is reciprocity and having reciprocal trade. So I don't think that's not in agreement with Trump. Trump said you know he's going to do what the other trading partners do, so if France wants to charge us to bring cheddar cheese there, and we's going to do what the other trading partners do, so if France wants to charge us to bring cheddar cheese there and we're going to charge for brie cheese to come here.

18:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The tariff he imposed had nothing to do with counter tariffs. It had to do with the trade deficit. He took the trade deficit, divided it in half and said that's the tariff. It isn't related to the tariffs in the other direction I don't think it's intellectually consistently so.

18:47 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
I think I think what you're trying to say is what's the through line here? And the answer is they're drawing squiggles. Yeah, I mean, and that's and that's okay. By the way, I looked it up, there's a reason why you couldn't recall what peter navarro's title is.

18:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's because you don't recall the senior counselor to the president for trade and manufacturing there you go, that's his real title A second time around, by the way, doing that I don't get why they keep bringing the same people who don't understand global trade or economics.

19:13 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
I mean no offense to the world, but go read a textbook. This is not super impossible stuff. Comparative advantage yields benefits to both nations who are trading. I think the problem is Elon probably is a free trader at heart because he has business around the world and ship stuff right, so he probably wants fewer trade barriers. That's just smart, but he also is Go for it.

19:32 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
No, I was just saying there's good reasons to have tariffs on things that we need to produce here for national security. So, if you think about pharmaceuticals, if you think about ships, weapons, bullets, bombs, there are some things, things we should have in our supply chain, obviously, so that makes sense. Then you look at the next group of things Well, if people are charging us and we can't sell our cars in Korea and Japan, okay, well, maybe there's something there. But this across the board tariffs is just chaotic and it's not the way to execute. And this is what you get when you vote for Captain Chaos.

20:08
Trump is a chaotic actor. I call him Captain Chaos and here we are. He's going to do things that most Americans want. 80% of Americans don't want to see, or even 90% don't want to see illegal immigration. They want to see legal, you know, responsible, reasonable immigration, right, so you know they feel good about Trump doing that. I think most people now they they also want to see criminals deported, but they don't want to see the lack of due process. So you have to look at each of these issues and you have to parse them, I think, intelligently, and I think that's like the role of podcasts, like we're doing here is to unpack them and in the case of tariffs, you know, yeah, well, I mean, in case of tariffs, you really want to make sure we can make pharmaceuticals here.

20:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right, and make ships Most of our pharmaceuticals come from China, don't they?

20:58 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Yeah, it's a decent number of them do, including ones that we don't want to have here, like fentanyl and the precursors to fentanyl, so yeah, but I think people do seem to like Ozempic a lot. I mean it's worked well for me. I'm a big fan. Are you, are you?

21:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
a Zempite, ah, interesting.

21:14 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
You look great.

21:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You're much thinner.

21:16 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
I'm 40 pounds from my peak and what happened was our friend Kevin Rose, on his random show with Tim Ferriss, talked about Ozempic three or four years ago and I had been doing intermittent fasting and lost like maybe 15 pounds and then I had like 30 to go and I did Ozempic and then Wagovi and now I just take like a little Monjarno every X number of days as like a maintenance and yeah, it was life-changing for me. Talk to your doctor if you're interested. There's some things to be thoughtful about, but I believe it's going to really change the world.

21:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And, to be fair, it's made in Denmark, it's not made in China, but a lot of your especially your generic medications are made in China. Yeah.

22:00 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
As long as we can still make them here. You know, there's no problem with having the most efficient place in the world make and the best craftsmanship. You know, depending on what you're going for, you know, make your car, make your cheese, make your medicine unless you can't get those things because you become too efficient. And that's what we saw during COVID. Right, we didn't realize exactly how dependent we were on China, specifically for PPE, and I think that's why Tim Cook said you know what? We're too dependent on China? Iphones are critical for people. Let's make them in India and they're making. I think I know they were making 15 in India, I'm not sure if they're making 16.

22:45 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
The more modern, higher-end ones them in India and they're making. I think I know they were making 15 in India. I'm not sure if they're making 16. They're making the more modern, higher end ones down in India. I don't know if they're actually doing the iPhone Pro Max super duper, but yeah, they've been moving up the value chain.

22:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But the tariffs are in India too. I mean, you know, the way Tim Cook got out of this last time in 2017 was he went to trump and said hey, you're going to give samsung a huge advantage, so don't tariff us, bro. Uh. But but the truth is uh, south korea has been heavily tariffed as well, so trump could now go back to cook and say, hey, look what I did for you. Uh, samsung no longer gains an advantage. Apple stock tanked. I mean. Clearly, apple stockholders see this as a problem absolutely, but I would.

23:30 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
Can I go back, leo, just for a second? Sure, the idea about building ships and so forth in the united states. One thing that I'm a little bit read up on is how many submarines we can build, because I live in rhode island and we have ship building here and it's like there's billboards like come, build submarines. There's a great headline from the National Interest that came out last year and it says can the US Navy really build three submarines per year, because previously we could only build two. So I want to point out that a lack of national capacity for certain critical things is, I think, at a point of absolute panic. And there are some companies that Jason and I talk about over on Twist that are pushing, I would say, forward to build better weapon systems more cheaply and more quickly, and that's good.

24:11
But it does feel like we were just getting on the upward slant towards a more nimble, industrial complex future for the military and then we threw the global supply chain into chaos. So it does feel self-defeating. But I would say that, even though we didn't have tariffs on ships in the way that trump might want to, we still didn't have the industrial base that we've needed, because but we can never build iphones in the us and even if we do, we'll be outsourcing a lot of the parts to asia yeah, this is all going to be resolved, I believe this week or it's just not going to be an issue because he's just going to back down.

24:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He.

24:42 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
He's going to back down. Yeah, I'm 80% certain of that, that's interesting yeah. Because, I mean, he really cares about how people perceive him and the stock market is the scorecard. We were talking in the pregame before the show about all these protests going on. I think these protests, as you pointed out, I think correctly, leo, is some percentage of people going out there are saying, hey, my 401k is borked, this is not cool. Hey, you know these. Yeah.

25:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I was OK with you deporting the father because of his rose tattoo, but damn it, don't hit my 401k.

25:19 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
You know, and everybody's got issues or people might look at and say, oh, you know, the next shoe to drop is going to be layoffs. By the way, people seem to forget. I'm terrified. You know, recession you could have, we had a very slow period.

25:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Covid killed our business, as you know. We shut down the studio, we laid off a lot of people, cut back on shows At the end of last year. It was a desert and for some reason that I at least neither Lisa nor I could figure out, advertising is we're practically sold out very solid missing, yeah, but well, yeah, good news now. But I'm terrified that these companies, all software companies, are almost entirely right. Yeah, uh, not hardware companies, so they're not going to be hit by tariffs, but I think their customers might be. And I am just waiting for the other shoe to drop and for these companies to say, oh, wait a minute. Uh, we got to cancel those ads because, uh, the economy or something. So I'm I'm hoping that there is a course correction quickly. Uh, because it impacts all of us, from running shoes to korean makeup influencers, uh, to iphone users and to laptop makers. Apple moved its laptop manufacturer to vietnam. That didn't save it. It's 49 tariff out of vietnam forget my 401k.

26:40
I'm really concerned about the price of uh south korean um skincare products because it's become a key pillar of the american economy if you like snail mucus, you're gonna love south korea.

26:50 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
No, I mean, like we, we joke, but it just goes to show how interconnected the world is. I mean, we've always thought well, not always, but in my lifetime I've always considered the united states to be such a net exporter of culture and business. But one thing we've seen in the last five or 10 years is a growth in the popularity of Japanese and South Korean products, culture, shows, movies, et cetera here in the United States. And it's been a lot of fun because we have huge immigrant populations from around the world and I love that. But it's such a bummer that if we're going to see a more diverse you know, internal national cultural economy to slap, slap trade barriers on it and so we joke about south korean skincare products.

27:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But I do think it's actually indicative of the changed world it's huge better and disappointment it's also good for peace because if, uh, even if, a mortal enemy is a big trade partner, I think they're less you know, china holds a lot of our paper I think they're a lot less likely to attack us and our allies if we are tied, if we are economically intertwined. But let me, you guys are financial wizards. I am not, um, but so let me, let me ask you um, the, really the, the? The big question which is is this is this, in the long run, going to improve the US economy If Trump backs down? Have we damaged our relationship with Europe to the point where it won't matter? Leave your Swiss chocolates at home.

28:18 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
I think that's a reasonable question to ask, because if you were, let's say, germany, or you know, india, they need energy, as but one example of inputs they need. And what did Germany do previously? Well, they built the Nord Stream and they had no problem buying oil and gas from Putin, russia. Yeah.

28:43
India. When all these trade wars and sanctions happened, they were like we'll buy that we're an independent, sovereign country. That's cheap, we need it, and so you might be driving the EU into the arms of Putin and into the arms of China, because Africa into China South. America to China Exactly. Miraculously, we figured out a way to have people pick Xi Jinping and Putin. These are really bad hombres. These are bad actors and dictators in the world, and we're going to drive people, democracies and our partners to partner with them. It's really about soft power.

29:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know we've had this sort of parody and soft power, the chinese belt and road initiative versus our us aid efforts, uh, but if we withdraw unilaterally from that kind of soft power, um, that leaves a vacuum which will be filled.

29:39 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Yeah, I mean, yeah, it's. And also people are going to do what's in the best interest of their citizens. So, if you're Canada and you believe the US and Trump and the administration are not good actors, and you need energy, or you need cars, or you need medicine or whatever, you need employees, citizens, to import into your country to maintain growth, that's what's going to happen and so, yeah, I think that should be definitely a major concern. People have. It should be, and so, yeah, I think that is, uh, that should be definitely a major concern. People have.

30:06 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
It should be. And also I want to say that I read a lot of the um, the subreddits for different nations and national blocks that focused on kind of like um Leo, we still can't swear on on Twitter, right?

30:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, please don't, although, if you do, I have, I have buttons. I'll spell it out, swear, and I will just press a button.

30:24 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
Okay, I'm just trying to save the editing team time. Anyways, I read a lot of SHIT posting subreddits for these groups and it is amazing how mad the Canadians are with the United States. I am not, yeah.

30:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I made a joke a few weeks ago about the 51st state and I got a lot of irate email, not not popular, and also, and believe me, I love canada. I've spent time there, I've worked there. I am by descent french canadian. I had made no, I had no interest in offending canada. I love canada.

31:00
I think it's a sad state of affairs when we uh, our natural partner in the world, uh, we turn against them. Uh, and Mexico too. Frankly, yeah, I want to take a break. We gotta take a break, I.

31:12
I do want to come back because one of the things I've been reading and I'm curious if you guys have read it I'm very interested in the position Alex Karp is taking in his new book, the technological Republic. He, of course, the founder and CEO of Palantir, and I was prepared to really hate him and this book and I found it very persuasive. And he does, in fact, talk about hard power, soft power, and says this 21st century is going to be the, not the century of kinetic war, as it has been, but the century of software, and that software is going to be the dominant force in the world politics. So I want to talk about that in a little bit. Give you a chance to think about it. It's really nice to see you again, jason. A lot of people said calacanis what? But, jason, have I always been friends, off and on, you know, and little bumps in the road.

32:06
I really appreciate you as a human, yes, and appreciate having you on. Whether we agree politically or not is completely secondary to it, so I'm just glad to see you again. Good to be here, and if I had, I wish to hell I had an Audible ad for you.

32:21 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Oh, Audible. Well, what do you got? We got a LinkedIn.

32:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing. You want to get into?

32:28 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
are you a?

32:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
linkedin.

32:29 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Uh, you like want to go all out on linkedin these days I love linkedin because, um, I don't know if you're screaming, does he not?

32:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
sound every once in a while like christopher walk. I love link.

32:38 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
You do a good walking I just built an incredible profile at LinkedIn. I'm getting so many jobs.

32:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Somebody asked Walken why he talks like that.

32:51 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
He says everybody talks like that where I'm from and you're kind of from a nearby area. English talking English, it's a great language Wow.

33:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Every once in a while, a little squeak comes out of. Jason that says, oh, there's a walking in there, Are you? What part of New York are you from?

33:08 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
I'm from Brooklyn, brooklyn Specifically Bay Ridge, which is the last exit on the R train. I am from the uncool part of Brooklyn and when I left Brooklyn it became cool. It's cool now. It's cool now I. Just so we're clear, I leftlyn became cool well, I know, exactly correlated.

33:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know if they're related, but uh, yeah. No, it's great to have you on and, of course, alex will help, my dear friend who lives in my childhood home did you know that?

33:35 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
jason, by the way he literally lives in your childhood home or town.

33:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's the world's weirdest home house building that I grew up in no, yep, I sleep in leo's parents bedroom are you kidding me?

33:49 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
what are the chances of that?

33:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
well, it was one of the chances of our discovering it. It was just a weird his. At the time fiancee liza was visiting and I grew up in providence. She lives in providence. I said's cool when? She told me the street. I said, oh, I used to live on that street. Where what? And she told me the address. I said that's my house. So if you go to the backyard and you go five feet back, alex is in my backyard.

34:19 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Just go to the fourth floor board.

34:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Open that up that. Oh, there's stuff in there is leo's gold bouillon that's right he stored my bitcoin in the backyard no, it's better than that.

34:29 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
We planted a tree there is a we planted a pin oak.

34:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It was a little. It was a pin oak, aptly named because it was about this thick. Uh, when was that? That must have been 1969, 70. It is now 55 years old and it is a big oak, isn't?

34:45 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
it. Yes, it's large.

34:47 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Well, I mean we could literally do the chances of this. There are how many single family homes in the United States? It's pretty small. There's got to be 75 million freestanding single family homes. So and yeah, it's all right.

35:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is not an interview for a tech job, don't worry, you don't have to do the math. How many ping pong balls can fit in the pool house? Do you ask to factor in?

35:10 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
how many different hosts we have on the show too. Right, there's a large, it's like the birthday paradox, because yeah. Yes, a lot of hosts.

35:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm pretty sure Jason does not live in a home I've ever lived in, In fact I know it.

35:23 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Let me catalog my homes. When did you move to Austin? I moved to Austin last year, yeah, and you like it. I love it. I mean, I've always loved this town. It's a great town. It's a great town and it reminds me a lot of California when I moved here 20, when I moved to California like 25 years ago or 23 years ago.

35:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I love Austin yeah.

35:43 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
It's got that pioneering spirit and I live on a horse ranch, um, you know, over 30 acres in the hill country and um do you play polo. No, I mean it's. This is like a literal horse ranch like, not like an elite one, like oh, but I don't have horses yet, but the girls are taking horseback riding. So three daughters oh, that's good yeah that's good there's like a. The sense of space is very weird. You know everybody's like, oh my god, it's getting so crowded they go yeehaw I'll wear you.

36:09
I'll wear the hat, I'm all hat no horses, but getting from petaluma to san francisco is an hour right solid hour. Yeah, and you know. Getting from the hill country to downtown austin is roughly 20 miles, 30 minutes, but there's great barbecue on the way I might add I live near the Salt Lick. Oh man and I go to the Salt Lick and, oh, my Lord, that bison rib and that that's incredible.

36:34 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
Thank God for.

36:35 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Ozempic. Well, I mean, and you wouldn't believe-.

36:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I have good impulse control now.

36:40 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
yeah, you wouldn't believe the number of people moving here. It's always been like 3% growth here, but it's growing faster and they let people build. So, compared to San Francisco, housing prices have gone down two years in a row. It's the third year they're going down. If you want to own a home and you come here, it's pretty amazing how affordable it is, and so I think it's the future of startups. All these young startups I invest in, they all want to move here because you know they can actually buy a startup home for 250 K, you know, or an apartment, and the cost of living is half or a third of what it is in the Bay area.

37:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And there's no state income tax which I can tell you right about now.

37:19 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
I would like to not have a state, oh, I mean, I did not talk about about taxes, I'm still well, uh, it will add up.

37:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I am going to take a little break at some point. I wouldn't mind talking. There was a really interesting article about the secondary effects of osempic and semi-glutides. Have you talked about that? On, all in, it's a really interesting subject.

37:39 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
It is because it people with uh, alcohol or gambling, a lot of these dependencies they're finding Impulse control, impulse control yeah, that's wild.

37:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's going to change our economy, however.

37:52 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
AA is going to have to rebrand because it's just going to become like a dispensary for GLP-1s.

37:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right yeah, unfortunately, I think I probably can't get on it because my doctor will say you're too old to take that stuff. Nonsense, nonsense. All right, we are not going to do an ad for a Zempik right now. Our show today, brought to you by Drada you may know this company. It's actually a solution that a lot of your startups should probably be finding out about.

38:21
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39:30
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39:49 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
And you know what, if you use these services and you get SOC 2 compliant, you get your GDPR, all that stuff, then you can get the lighthouse customers, many of the top customers you want to get as a startup. You will not land them if you don't have this. So it does become a blocker for startups, especially when they get to like year, two or three.

40:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
they got to get this dialed in, got to solve it. It's a chore.

40:12 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
It's a chore, and if you want help with your chores, you should go to dradacom.

40:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Jason, you really are so good at this. You don't have to do it, but you're so good at it. Thank you it, but you're so good at it.

40:22 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Thank you, I love reading ads. I also think it's great that people support independent media, like this week in tech I agree.

40:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I I played it before the show began. I maybe we could drop it in at the end. Actually, benito put it in at the as like a blooper at the end stinger. Yeah, uh, an amazing support job by jason calacanis for the audible ad. There's actually quite a few of them. You were really back in the day, you were really good. You would just sing its praises.

40:51 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
Love water. Can I throw in one little thing here about Drada Jason? Guess what is a Twist 500 company?

40:58 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Oh, are they a Twist 500 company? They are there you go. I don't know what that means, but it sounds like a good thing we're cataloging the 500 most valuable interesting private companies in the little index. For us to talk about the business of Starbucks, and so they made the list. It's pretty hard.

41:14 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
I'm proud of myself that I knew that Leo was going to talk about them, so I can give him an extra plug.

41:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You put them in. Yeah, I'm just curious what. I have, a few things, a few sound effects from you. I think I have even one that's even more effusive. Oh about, yeah, I think you.

41:31 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
Actually that's what you sounded like I can't swear, but you guys can do that on air.

41:44 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Yeah, yeah, all right, well, we'll save that for another time For the stinger Reason to finish the show, folks.

41:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So have either of you read the Technological Republic.

41:56 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
I haven't read it, but I know of what he speaks and you know Palantir is a very he's a very interesting CEO. Palantir is a very interesting company's a very interesting CEO. Palantir is a very interesting company. We've talked a lot about how Palantir became a meme stock and their valuation. The company people don't know this at one point their price to sales ratio, the amount of revenue they make to their sales. What did it hit, alex? Like 60, 70, 80 at one point. Oh no, it was higher than that. I'll pull it up Even higher 70, 80 at one point oh no, it was higher than that. I'll pull it up even higher. Oh my god. I mean, it's a real company with real growth.

42:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, it made alex carp a billionaire for sure, funded, financed by peter teal. A lot of people don't like the idea of ai in defense and that's what palantir does, although in the book, uh, carp uh talks about how Palantir AI was used to predict the placement of IEDs, uh, during the uh war. I guess it was in Afghanistan, one of the probably the single most dangerous element of the war, um for American troops and save lives. His position in the book and I think it's really you know, I'm going to try to get to get them on one of our intelligent machines show because I really want to talk about her position uh, his position in the book is that america in the 20th century benefited from a, a partnership between silicon valley and government for things like the internet, nasa, of course, the Manhattan Project, where engineering talent was not unwilling to work with the government in our national interest, but that, unfortunately, what's happened in the 21st century is that companies have kind of embraced the free market to the degree that the same engineering talent is now creating better ways to advertise, to surveil, to share silly videos and is not contributing to the overall well-being of the country, and that it's time for us to really sit back and think and this is, by the way, obviously this is his belief when he founded palantir, because that's what palantir is all about yeah, uh.

44:05
And he thinks that silicon valley needs to readjust its values, that we need to start, that it's okay to say we want to protect america, we want to protect american values, uh. And he says, he quotes uh, economist thomas schelling, who says uh, you know, diplomacy starts at the you know barrel of a gun. That it's. You can only be diplomatic through military strength. But military strength in the 21st century is not going to be about kinetic war, it's not going to be who has the biggest gun or the stealthiest submarine. It's going to be software bit driven, it's going to be ai based.

44:41 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
I thought it was a very.

44:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a very interesting thesis.

44:45 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
I don't know when that I think it was really at Google that we saw for the first time a group of people you know, and their employees are encouraged to bring their whole self to work. And if your whole self is you're a pacifist and you don't want to work on weapons technology, you know that's completely understandable and you're right, and so everybody gets to make those individual decisions here in America. That's one of the great things about our democracy and if you want to make weapons technology, if you feel patriotic and that's your duty great, I'm of the belief that if you're going to benefit from capitalism and democracy, you should be willing to defend it. It's not like anybody is being drafted here to go work on the front lines, but I do think it's important because if you look at Russia's invasion of Ukraine and that battle, it's largely been drones and information satellites, starlink all these things are playing a very prominent role and we really need to upgrade our capabilities in that regard.

45:50
When we see the next you know, actual you know when Americans go to war, we're going to really going to be looking at this going. Yeah, we need some robotic dogs with AK-47s and military weapons on them. We're going to need drone technology. That can you know. Counter these drones and God forbid. You know terrorism here in the United States, that you know the next terrorist attack. I don't remember the New Jersey drone phenomenon that occurred that we still haven't gotten great answers.

46:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, I think we've decided. I think every administration, even the biden administration, said it's consumer drones, it's aircraft, it's nothing you should be worried about and that made everyone stop worrying.

46:37 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
Well, I mean, who knows?

46:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, are people still worried about new Jersey drones? It seems to have left the headlines.

46:42 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
We have real problems now, if it was if those were, let's say, russian or Chinese drones or American drones doing some sort of surveillance, like the actual thing the government would say is oh, don't worry about it, it's conspiracy. Well, that's true. So I don't want to. I don't, I mean, that's the problem, that's always defensive conspiracy theories.

47:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, that's exactly what you'd expect them to say, so I don't. I don't want to delve into that, although carp does, in the book, mention that the chinese have created drone swarms that can be used to hunt. That's my point. Soldiers in forests, yes, and very difficult. There is completely autonomously, uh, the shelling quote that he has in the book is this the power to hurt is bargaining, power to exploit it is diplomacy, vicious diplomacy, but diplomacy, uh.

47:28
And you, you talk about Google. Yeah, the Google engineering team signed a petition saying we don't want to work, we will not work on Project Maven, which was a defense department project to uh, make drone imagery more useful, not to kill people. Necessarily. It wasn't autonomous, anything, it was about analyzing drone imagery, and google backed down. Microsoft's done something similar. Um, his point is that maybe we shouldn't be so quick to abandon defense of this country, and I'm you know, I'm a pacifist. I do believe that soft power, economic power, cultural hegemony all of these things can promote peace. But at the same time, if you have a Putin who wants to take Ukraine back, or, uh, xi Jinping who wants to take Taiwan back, you probably ought to have some hard power as well.

48:25 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
Yes, yeah, no, I think that's dead on, leo. I also would say that it seems that the Pax Americana has come to an end, and I do think that the current administration is moving us towards a multipolar world versus a one superpower world, which I do think is going to open up more shooting conflicts around the world, be it people with guns or drones or Jason's robot dogs with AKs, whatever it is, I don't think we can afford right now to back off of defensive work, as we might call it, and the thing about the examples of Google and Microsoft and Project Maven and going over these relatively important historical moments is I don't think they matter because startups, smaller companies, are going hell to the bells to build this stuff. We're talking to companies on twist.

49:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, interesting around, so so this this message has been received in other words, oh, received, funded, accelerated, bought into and certainly carp and teal have made a lot of money on palantir, so you know there is a model can I, can I confess something here on the show?

49:21 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
I've read palantir's website. I've've read their earnings. I've had AI summaries. I have tried to figure out what the hell they do.

49:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No one knows what they do. No, I'm with you. I'm with you, in fact, I'm glad to hear you say that it's fairly opaque. They're not, and probably for good reason.

49:36 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
Yeah, I don't have to fear the unknown, but I do think that the argument about if american technology companies will participate in defense has been answered with a yes by the market. And some of my friends on the left, I'll say, are going to make a lot of noise about it and I think that's a good note to have in the conversation in the broader symphony, but it's certainly not the leading melodic line. Currently we're making guns like uh, jason, we had um well, that's what I'm.

50:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The reason I brought that up is should we worry about being able to make three submarines instead of two? Maybe submarines aren't what we need to be defocusing on right now?

50:09 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
I think we are moving away from essentially what I would call the aircraft carrier model. Like it used to be a mark of national pride to be able to field an aircraft carrier, very few nations could do it. Russia's keep lighting on fire, china has two, one they bought from, bought from scrap. I think we have like seven, right, and that was this big point of pride. But do you really want an aircraft carrier if it's going to be a drone-based forest war? Well, maybe, but certainly it won't be as impactful as it was back in, like World War II. So I think that it's probably more important today that we're building cheaper UAVs, cheaper underwater UAVs, drone jamming technology and so forth, than building 30 submarines as opposed to three, though I do think three is still too few even given that context.

50:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah, we haven't completely abandoned kinetic war, obviously.

50:55 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
No, I mean we've got tanks running all across Ukraine right now because we're fighting over essentially warm water, ports and grain, I mean, like those are.

51:03 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
but ukraine's a good example because this has become a lab for drone warfare, uav warfare, um all kinds of new technologies, many of which are software driven absolutely yeah, and in the, the component parts are a key part of this because, you know, dgi out of china makes a lot of these parts and what was Chris Anderson's company that was out in Berkeley was making, you know, roll your own drones. You could buy the rotors, you could buy the different components you know individually and the whole drone thing when we were talking about it here on Twit 10 years ago was a, you know, a hobbyist, build your own, uh kind of concept and interesting the outcome.

51:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think uh, it's been said, I think it's true of apple's financing of chinese manufacture, because by creating such volume in china, these manufacturers were able to perfect processes and technologies things like accelerometers that were later then applied to drone manufacture in China, and that's why all the best drones are made in China. They're not made in the US anymore.

52:15 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Which goes back to tariffs, which goes back to supply chains, and do we want to have one place in the world be able to make those components if that becomes the theater in which future wars are fought? So we obviously need to be able to make drone technology here and the components that are in it, or at least have a diversity of places we could get it from.

52:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So people have brought this up in terms of chip fabs and of course, tsmc and other companies are building fabs in Arizona and the United States. Tsmc has not been able to make a fab that can do the two nanometer and three nanometer UV process that they do in Taiwan, because they can't get the labor to do it. The PhDs who are doing it in Taiwan are getting paid $50,000, $60,000 a year. You can't get a PhD and that's why, by the the way, they're bringing in chinese, taiwanese I'm sorry, excuse me taiwanese uh phds to run those factories, because you can't get american phds to work for those prices and I suspect in in the long run they're not going to get the taiwanese phds to work for those prices either in the united states it's pretty cool to live in the united states where there's tons of room.

53:22 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
Maybe they're happy.

53:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, maybe they're happy yeah, but the point is, the long-term point is it's difficult for us to duplicate these manufacturing capabilities in the united states. It's not impossible.

53:32 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
You know, if you've ever been to, you know one of elon's factories and I've been to. You know most of them here in the us. You know in nevada the battery one and then the Gigafactory here in Texas. You know, independent of how you feel about his politics, he is probably one of the top three or four most knowledgeable factory builders in the world today and things can be built here. If you look at your Model Y being built here, it is a phenomenal vehicle. It's the best-selling vehicle, I think, in the world, or one of them.

54:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Not anymore, but it was. It was yeah, but that's not for a technical reason, that's for other reasons.

54:13 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
And so you know we can build these things here. There has to be the wherewithal. This is why I think long-term will be just fine in terms of this multipolar world, entrepreneurship, capitalism independent again of how you feel about it or wealth polarization and all these valid issues. The reason we'll beat China, the reason we're beating Russia, is because of entrepreneurship, because people in this country have an incentive and a drive to build new companies. And what does Xi Jinping do? Or Putin or any dictator or despot? They will get jealous of entrepreneurs and send Jack Ma to go take painting lessons or, you know, just turn off investment in technology companies in China, which is what they did. We're going to win, I think, ultimately because of that entrepreneurial spirit. We have to celebrate it while doing things that make the country feel fair to everybody. This is why I'm a huge fan of providing healthcare to everybody in the country.

55:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Which is, by the way, also very good for these startups, because that's a massive cost. It's a big cost for us.

55:24 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
It's a huge cost and then it also creates I don't know if you've experienced this where you'll have a team member who can't leave jobs.

55:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it's bad for the workers.

55:33 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Exactly, they're locked in, they're locked in and so you know, oh, alex technically works for me, but he's got a sub stack which you can go subscribe to's. He's kind of independent and he and he's got a lot of options. But imagine a situation where you know we weren't getting along or something. And he does. He's not enjoying his job, but he's gonna stay there stuck.

55:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's uh, sir, it's sir. Yeah, sorry, alex, you're stuck uh, it's good.

55:55 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
My wife has amazing health care, so anytime.

55:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, that's right, never mind, I'm out no, you know, renee ritchie was on mac break weekly for a long time. Uh, love him right. He, uh, was working for um I'm more, a magazine publication, which is no longer so. It's a good thing he left. But he, when he left to go independent much like you did, alex wilhelm leaving tech crunch uh, he said I can do it because I'm in canada and my health care is covered. Uh, I am free to do this. It's a lot easier to do this and I agree with you, jason. I think one of the real strengths we're seeing in media anyway, of this country is the ability to go out on your own and create something, and I did it 20 years ago.

56:35 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
And you were the pioneer.

56:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, yeah, it's a great thing for people, my son's doing it right now, and it's a great thing for people, my son's doing it right now, and, uh, it's a great thing for people. I wonder, though, do we have the, the know-how to replace these, uh, overseas factories, or you think we can? Yeah, we can build these, we can.

56:53 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
We just need to have the will. And also regulations are the big issue. When you talk to folks from tsmc or you know anybody trying to build something here, they will point you to regulations. And when Elon was at the All In Summit last year, I asked him I had had conversations with him about this previously where would you be at with building the Gigafactory which is in Texas, if you were trying to build it in California, which is where he originally tried to build it? He said I would still be in environmental review, in protests, et cetera. And then he built it here in Austin, literally in like 18 months.

57:33
If you put too much regulation around entrepreneurs, if you slow them down too much, then we will lose. One of the great features of the United States is that we have 50 states in competition with each other. That's actually a great feature. It turns out Now you can pick, as an entrepreneur, as a business leader or as a citizen, which regime you want to work under. If you live in Texas, your neighbor can build a cafe next door to you. Now if you live in petaluma or san francisco, your neighbor can't build a shed or an adu without having like all this red tape and they've had to literally make laws.

58:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's a middle ground, though. I mean I've walked around in in some countries where the building laws are somewhat lax and they collapse look what happened in myanmar. I mean tragic. But uh, so there is a middle ground. Regulations aren't inherently bad.

58:37 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
I agree, you can over regulate yeah, leo, I'll put it this way. I lived in san francisco for a very long time and I lived in a rent control department, so I have lived the lefty West Coast dream of-.

58:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a problem, isn't it?

58:50 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
In a rent control department and let me tell you so here, I still view myself as a Californian living in Rhode Island to some degree, but I got to say I have been so incredibly impressed by watching Austin's real estate prices and rental prices drop Like that. I have been so incredibly impressed by watching Austin's real estate prices and rental prices drop like that. It is such a clarion call to stop beating ourselves in the head with a shovel and build some more stuff and get rid of some of these rules that are done usually in good faith but have added up to an absolute level of friction that makes it impossible to live and thrive.

59:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, that would be an argument, though, for electing a non-medieval governor and attorney general. I would not want to be a woman in texas at this point I'd not disagree with that.

59:31 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
Where is the pro-build democrats? Where the frick are they like?

59:36 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
I feel like that's reclines big, you know tour right now with his book is like hey, you know, we did this to ourselves in california. Look at the high speed rail. You know, I was just in japan, uh, skiing, which I try to do every year or two, and they're building a high speed rail to get to niseko and, and you know, the ski resorts there in hokkaido, um what?

59:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
happened in california. Why? Why is the high speed rail so over budget and?

01:00:01 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
corruption and regulations.

01:00:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, that's it we don't have a monopoly on corruption in california.

01:00:09 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
I don't believe yeah, it's just, it's pretty acute.

01:00:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know you live in rhode island alex, yeah, I'm like we have like a living the land of buddy cnc.

01:00:19 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
You can't tell me my my in-laws live near Buddy Cianci's old house. I can't go home from their house from dinner without driving by it.

01:00:26
There's a text on your bagels you're not even aware of. I mean, my parents, when they lived here in the 70s, described a very different state than the one that we live in. Just before we get back to this important conversation, I do want to say that we now have futures data for early stock market trading. For tomorrow, I'm going to guess down 4%. Give me a Dow Jones point number, jason.

01:00:48 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Dow Jones. I'm going to say 2% down. What is the?

01:00:53 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
Dow Jones. I've led you astray. The Dow Jones is off 4% or 1531 points.

01:00:57 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
I said the four was my first guess.

01:01:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I know I went down to two, so that's the market saying this whether, whatever trump does this week, it doesn't matter well, no, it could. I mean like it could come back if trump turns it around.

01:01:10 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
You don't get trust back. You don't get your friend. That's the problem.

01:01:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But you could look, if I'm a manufacturing uh ceo and I have to get steel from canada or I have to buy hardwood, I am not going to count on anything, right? No?

01:01:26 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
This is the issue you brought it up earlier when you were lamenting what happened during COVID. I had the same thing happen, like you this week, in startups was sold out for a decade and then all of a sudden, we had three or four cancellations or postponements and I was like what's happening here? This is crazy for cancellations or postponements. And I was like what's happening here? This is crazy. And if you can't plan for the future and you have uncertainty, what businesses do is they pause, they just pause. And that's what's going to happen right now. Everybody's on pause, which means should I build a factory? Okay, yeah, if it's going to be tariffs, I should start making Nikes in America or you know somewhere closer that has better agreements. But firing up a factory is not like ordering DoorDash, you know it's a little more complex than that, right.

01:02:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It takes billions to build a fab and a decade and you can't. You can't start that project unless you think there's a market for it at the other end. Look what happened to Intel Right.

01:02:22 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
My belief is this is all gonna get washed out. I think the I would say the the the pain threshold is when you get past 20, which we've all experienced multiple times is correction territory, right um so it's such a, it's such an anodyne word for such a bad thing that's just a correction.

01:02:44 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
10 percent's a correction, 20 percent's a bear market, 30 is when you close your lap. What's a crash that's.

01:02:50 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
I don't think there's a number such a really interesting. Alex and I were talking about this last week on the pod the 1929 great uh market crash was 12.8, I think that's eighth, that's one in every eight dollars. Well, I think yeah, that was one day.

01:03:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's in one day, that's October 29th.

01:03:09 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
You have to put together, because I think the following Monday was even worse.

01:03:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah.

01:03:14 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
And then when we had Black Friday, I think the Monday, tuesday were worse, so you have to put like a five day together. If this gets to like 30%, 40%, it's going to become very acute, very, very quickly, and I think it's already happened. I think they're going to just pile together 10 wins tomorrow and trot them out one after the other Vietnam, india, singapore, whatever it is and then the final boss will be China and we're going to do some great reconciliation with china that will include tiktok, um a one let's get to tiktok.

01:03:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
actually, I want to take a break and we'll get to tiktok and knock. I am knocking on wood. I hope, jason, that you are right because, uh, the alternative is not good. You're watching, we got a little political. I guess we're a little, but we're not. We're talking. I think we're talking about facts as opposed to politics or opinion, or we're certainly not ad hominem at this point, and I want us to keep it that way and I think that that's valuable. And you know we've avoided this topic, as you pointed out in your texts to me, jason, for a long time, but these tariffs absolutely impact, uh, every product you're buying, including all the technology you're buying and so no way to avoid it and very interested in.

01:04:35
You know the outcome. Now, one thing I do know about advertising that we've always said this to our advertisers the time you should advertise is when the times are tough. That is when things, that's when opportunity exists right, especially for the kind of advertisers we have, who are almost all security companies. I'll give you an example. This is our sponsor for this segment of the show the thinks canary, canary. And I have my Thinkst Canary right here. This is such a cool product. This, it looks like it's about here. I put it next to my iPhone. It's about the size of an eye. You know, an external hard drive Plugs into the wall, plugs into the ethernet. This thing is a honeypot. Oh my God, is this a useful tool?

01:05:21
Anybody who has perimeter defenses protecting your company needs to think about what happens if somebody penetrates them. And you might say, oh, it'll never happen, except it's happening again and again and again. Breaches are multiplying upon breaches. It's just one phishing email and boom, it's over. So how do you know if a bad guy is inside your network or a malicious insider is wandering around your network looking at things, exfiltrating embarrassing emails or customer information? The best way is this the thinks canary. It's a honeypot that's actually easy to deploy. In fact, my things canary right now, I think, is a Windows server, but I could change this kind of on a day-to-day basis. It's really kind of fun.

01:06:08
Things Canary sits on your network. You might have one. You might have a dozen Depends on. You know your size of your business. It also can create this is actually really cool. It can also create um files, lure files, trip files that will sit around on your network looking like pdfs or excel spreadsheets or word documents might have a.

01:06:31
I don't think I'm giving anything away. Uh, you guys aren't going to try to break into my network, right? Well, if somebody does, I have an excel spreadsheet called employee informationxls. Oh, uh-oh. If that is ever touched, I'm going to immediately get an alert. Just no false alerts, just the alerts that matter. Whether it's a fake internal SSH server in this case, for a long time it was a Synology NAS and, by the way, when they're it can be a SCADA device. When they're impersonating a hardware device, the Mac address is correct, the login looks like the real thing. It is completely, completely invisible to a bad guy, but when they attack it you're going to get an alert. Just the alerts that matter. I'll show you.

01:07:17
I have my Fingst Canary right here. It's a Windows Server 2019 Office File share here I'll put this up on the screen. Genius, is this brilliant? I can make it be iis. I can have a centos server. Mac os 10 file share, canon image runner I don't even know what that is. I can make it a hershman rs20 industrial switch for crying out loud. It'll have the correct mac address.

01:07:44
This windows server looks like an hp server. That's why it has that mac address and it just sits there. I can have it say notify me if there's a port scan. I can turn on whatever services I want. You can make it a christmas tree and turn them all on, or you could just turn on a few little services. Maybe we'll turn on a web server and an ssh server. I find as soon as I put an ssh server out in the public, it gets it immediately. So I'm going to save oops, let's save those changes down here and now I have, while doing a commercial ladies and gentlemen, reconfigured my things.

01:08:19
Canary, this is such a cool product.

01:08:22
I I've also created Canary tokens. All you do is you choose a profile for your Canary and, as you can see, it's easy enough. You could change it anytime you want. Register it with the hosted console. That's what I'm in right now and it does all the monitoring and notifications. You can be notified any way you want Text message, email, slack. They support webhooks. They have an API syslog. So you set it up, then you wait, you put your hands behind your head and you wait.

01:08:47
Chances are like on this you're never going to hear anything because you're secure. But as soon as somebody breaches your network or a malicious insider starts looking around, they will make themselves known by accessing the Thinks Canary. It doesn't look vulnerable, it looks valuable, right, right. It is an incredible device. Everybody needs this. It is part of your layered security strategy. On average, companies who are breached don't know for 91 days. That's 91 days. A bad guy can wander around, do all sorts of damage.

01:09:20
You need this canarytool tw. I'll give you a pricing example For $7,500 a year you'd get five of them. Sprinkle them around as many tokens Canary tokens as you want. You get your own hosted console, you get upgrades, you get support, you get maintenance and, by the way, if you use the offer code twit in the how'd you hear about us box, you're going at 10% off the price for life.

01:09:43
There's one other data point. I know sometimes people hear this and they go. I don't know, there's no risk. You can always return your things to Canaries within their two-month money-back guarantee window two months and you'll get a full refund. So there is zero risk. I should point out that we have been doing these ads for eight years now and all this time that refund has never once been claimed. Because once people get it and they see it and they realize what it can do, you're going to always want to have one, more than one visit canarytools twit. Don't forget the offer code twit in the how did you hear about us box. Canary dot tools slash twit. This is a really. I just bookmarked that canary dot.

01:10:22 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Oh yeah, if you have a, if you have a network, slash twit is a really.

01:10:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I just bookmarked that canary dot. Oh yeah, if you have a, if you have a network, slash twit. Yeah, you gotta put this on. Thank you, what a genius idea.

01:10:29 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Well, no, I mean think about the cost of a breach at your company. Would be a lot more as an ounce of prevention here absolutely on security.

01:10:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Now we were talking a couple of weeks ago. A company did all the right things. They uh, they had good perimeter defenses. They even had defenses internally making sure that a bad guy couldn't install malware on anything. And yeah, well, they missed one thing. There was a camera in the operation, a security camera that's running linux. Oh no, the bad guys. There was enough cpu, cpu and enough memory on that thing to put malware on the camera Worse and ransomware the whole thing. They encrypted all the data. It's unbelievable.

01:11:13 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
It happened to me one time. Somebody got on a VAR. Well, yeah, a couple of companies ago, somebody got into the network server with the storage array and I'm like what? And they encrypt know. Like they encrypt it and they want to ransom really smart backup. But I mean, they're, they're really smart and they're looking for weakness in this.

01:11:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
you know, we'll let you know if they're, if they've got in, which is great, jason, I'm still not going to pay you to do anymore than I'm already paying you, which, as you pointed out last time, is nothing so well, you doubled my rate my weekly appearance fee is 0.0 dollars.

01:11:48 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
so all these years I haven't been getting paid to come on twit you know, I actually negotiated with canary a um, a uh, a affiliate deal now. So now I also get zero dollars. Oh great, that's zero dollars use jason's special link.

01:12:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Thanks, twit, slash, check out slash, all in, do you?

01:12:08 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
have ads on all in this famously no ads on all I thought I've never heard is like literally leaving tens of millions of dollars a year. And all these sponsors want to do it. I'm begging my my co-hosts to do it. They don't care because everybody's they're all wealthy. It's the billionaire we've all done very well and just a little feedback the only negative when I listen to it.

01:12:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The only negative when we went down to gestad. I've got to tell you the best place to go in gestad to get your it was like. It was like um, it kind of is a little bit like rich guy show. So I mean, there he is with his cigar, yeah yeah, see, it's the only negative. I mean, what's great about it?

01:12:55
you got david sacks, you got you got really good people on and it's a very interesting show and when you started it, none of them were rich or famous. It's amazing, none of them were rich or famous.

01:13:03 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
It's amazing. None of them were famous. They had all come on. I mean, in some ways, leo, I hate to tell you this, but you taught me so much and obviously you know the name of my show this week in startups was a tribute to what you did here with this week in tech and yourself which is, by the way, a tribute to Mel Allen and this week in baseball.

01:13:25
So if I, by the way, a tribute to mel allen, and this week in baseball. So if I owned it I would have kept it, but I couldn't. Well, and here's here's the great thing, you know um that, uh, yourself, I think um dave weiner creating the rss attachment and then, of course, the podfather curry um, you know, all these people were inspirations for an entire generation.

01:13:41
And if you look at Kevin Rose myself, alex Molly Wood, you trained all of us on how to do this. You did this before podcasts existed, and all in would never have existed if it wasn't for that. And then I don't think President Trump would have been elected if it wasn't for all.

01:13:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, my God.

01:13:57 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
In many ways. Is this the blame Leo portion? Absolutely, absolutely, leo. The dominoes have fallen. It's my fault, you literally got trompe l'oeil. Is this the blame Leo portion of this? Absolutely, absolutely.

01:14:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, I mean people you started so well, jason. Absolutely and then you just you know, you just had Went right off a cliff.

01:14:15 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
Yeah there you go Apparently. Leo pushed us off the cliff.

01:14:30 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
So, leo, how does it feel to have crashed the, the global economy? Absolutely, yeah, no, these tariffs are actually leo. No, all in, and its name implies, was a bunch of poker buddies, right, well, yeah, the origin story is I had had sax and chamath on this week and started up so many times. Chamath was coming out of a cnbc hit and he was like let's do a podcast together. You know like I couldn't get my point across. You know cnbc goes so quick.

01:14:45
Um, it was very frustrating to like talk about what we're doing at his venture firm and I was like, sure, come on this week and start up some fridays. No, no, I want to do a new thing. I'll interview you about your startup investments. You asked me about my series, a investments, yada, yada, and I said, okay, great, let's call it all in. I produced it internally for two years and then it became so big that we hired a CEO that I begged my partners. We wound up having Saks and Freeburg on the next episode because we were talking about COVID and we couldn't play poker. We couldn't see each other, so it was like a COVID baby, basically. Yeah.

01:15:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, like a lot of podcasts.

01:15:16 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Yeah, like a lot of podcasts, because we had nothing to do, we couldn't see each other. I mean God, it's so weird to think about those days when we were locked down here in California or when I was in California.

01:15:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Five years ago.

01:15:27 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Was it five years ago?

01:15:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
March 17th 2020. And we still don't know what happened.

01:15:31 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
I mean, this is so infuriating, I don't want to go down that rabbit hole, but you know it's. And then I asked him like hey, let's do a conference, guys, a conference. Guys. They're like I don't want to do a conference. Then the conference basically becomes bigger than ted. Or you know the? What was the? There was an all-in conference. We have an all-in summit that makes large amounts of money, tens of millions of dollars.

01:15:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Now, that's why I don't know about it, because I can't afford it.

01:15:54 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Well, it's 7500 a ticket. But then we do scholarships for the fans. You guys are both invited. I have a. I have an allocation of tickets if you want to come and that's.

01:16:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't want to be your charity case, jason, I know right. No, no, I said yes, you'll be a vip guest. Do I get a special gray badge? Oh yeah you get a gray hair like me yeah, you and I with a charity case over there you see, no, no, we'll put you in the vip without all the other ceos anyway, congratulations, because it's really uh, it's really great to see that success of that and it is it's one of the top 10 podcasts in the world now.

01:16:24 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
Yeah, people, people, when they, when they asked me about my job you know co-hosting twist with with Jason, they often bring up all in and I'm like it is really crossed over, I think, into very strange the public consciousness in a way that I would not have expected for a show that that nerdy.

01:16:40 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
And I say that with nothing but love and respect because I I dig the nerd stuff, sorry sorry, and I learned my moderation skill in many ways from you know my time here on on twit with leo and then also uh mclaughlin group, which I you know which I copied my whole life.

01:16:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's all I've ever done is copy john mclaughlin no, you're being yes, bye bye. I love wrong, wrong. I loved that show the first. I did a pilot for cena when cena was first starting. I was the third employee and I had dvorak on, uh fred davis, stewart alsop and uh gina smith, and it was a copy of the mclaughlin group. Yes, and basically I've had the same idea for the other 30 years.

01:17:24
It's pretty never stopped because I loved that he was a jesuit. You know my, my friend will hurst was his student. He was a very smart professor of the pope?

01:17:35 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
yeah, yeah, they were known. Um I, I went to a severian brother high school severian high school in brooklyn, new york and bear ridge, and then I went to fordian brother high school Severian high school in Brooklyn, new York and Bay Ridge. And then I went to Fordham, a Jesuit school.

01:17:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
My dad went to Regis and Fordham.

01:17:49 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Well, that is the path. If you were a Catholic? If you were, you would want to go to a good Jesuit school. Yeah, yep, and Regis was a good Catholic school.

01:17:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We have a regular Jesuit on the who is right now living in the vatican where he is. Uh, he is kind of I you know. Really he won't say this, but he's a special counselor to the, the popes. He set up the. He got the pope on skype and zoom scope, that has to be the most insane job like you're sitting there with, like the holy father himself.

01:18:20 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
You know the vicar of christ and earth. He tells stories and you're like unmute Pope, unmute.

01:18:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He talks about going down into the catacombs under St Peter's. Wow, and there's a table of cardinals sitting around playing D&D.

01:18:34 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Really Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. Yes, and they ask him to join.

01:18:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know the Pope comes over to the house on weekends to watch the soccer games. Not lately the Holy Father's not feeling well, but it's wonderful to have an inside. I feel like it's the same with you, jason. It's an inside. Look at the rooms where it happens, you know.

01:18:55 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Yeah, absolutely.

01:18:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
TikTok.

01:18:57
Oh God don't stop TikTok. Tiktok, you know, honestly, even though my son and I always have to make this disclaimer uh made his bones on tiktok, became a tiktok star, you know, has a cookbook. Now he's a restaurant he's opening on bleaker street. Got to get over there in uh, next to john's pizza in manhattan but it all started on tiktok for him, like Like a lot of people, tiktok got people started. Then, in 2017, trump said it's a Chinese tool. We're getting rid of it.

01:19:33
The Biden administration and Congress passed a ban, a law, a law against TikTok said sell it by January 19th, the day before inauguration day, or we will shut you down. Apple and Google went along with it. They took it out of the store and then Pam Bondi, the attorney general, wrote him a note saying don't worry about it. President Trump extended it by 75 days. He's looking for some sort of deal. It looks like Larry Ellison, according to the New York Times, has the inside track with Oracle. The ban ran out Saturday. The 75 days uh pause ran out on Saturday. Uh, trump announced a second 75. What happened? Did tick tock stop being an enemy of the people? Or did Jeff, yes make a call to President Trump?

01:20:23 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
I think Trump realized that tick, that TikTok, was good for his reelection chances, so he 180'd on that. Much like he 180'd on crypto. I mean, this has been his MO.

01:20:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He 180's all the time.

01:20:34 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Yeah, I mean, one of the things he does particularly well is find a trend, insert himself into it and bring those people into the tent Something the Democrats should think about.

01:20:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, he's kind of a genius at that. I will give him credit for that he's.

01:20:47 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
He has a couple of things he's like and in this case, leo, he realized to Alex's point. There's a lot of young people who love this and so, and there's a lot of Gen Xers and in between who love podcasts. There's a lot of people who love crypto. I'm just going to grab each of those constituents, one by one, and figure out what is it that they want. Okay, they want to get rid of Gary Gensler. They want to trade meme coins Great, I'm in. Oh, they want to have TikTok and they want to figure out how to do it Great, I'm in. And what he's going to do with TikTok? I have some inside information here. It's not a public company, so I can say that is, you know, it's going to get sold, they're negotiating it.

01:21:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
China has to agree to that, is that not right?

01:21:32 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Well, they have to agree to a sale, of course, because they're on the board of the company. If you have a Chinese company, all the data and the control of the company, in fact the company itself, belongs to the Chinese government there the control of the company.

01:21:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
In fact, the company itself belongs to the Chinese government. There's no way around that. Although, because of Project Texas, american TikTok data has been stored on Oracle servers in Texas for some time now. Right, allegedly, allegedly. Yes, yeah, we don't know what access.

01:21:52 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Yeah, yeah, so there's some of that occurring. What's going to happen is it will either get shut down because of the tariff issues, so these two things are being dovetailed. Um, because of the tariff issues, so these two things are being dovetailed. China's not happy about the tariffs. Obviously trump is. They will use tiktok as a bit of a cudgel right, trump says I'm considering if china lets us buy tiktok, then I'm considering lowering tariffs.

01:22:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That is the silliest thing I have ever, the most trivial possible reason to lower tariffs, absolutely so.

01:22:24 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
This is where, like trying to understand the logic of all this beyond, trump likes to be the main character. Trump wants to negotiate a deal. That's his identity, that's what he wants to do. So this is all going to be a grand reconciliation with china, taiwan, tiktok, tariffs the three.

01:22:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That would be interesting if he could strong arm china into making some concessions on taiwan.

01:22:47 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Yes, you think that's what's going to happen I think we're going to go back to we'll go back to what I don't.

01:22:53 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Let you go after this, alex you can't sell out taiwan, alex. We're so dependent on china it's going to be back to the one china policy which was right. China, it was kind of don't say, don't tell basically exactly what it was. Just like you could be gay in the military, just right, you know, don't, don't you know uh don't.

01:23:11
Don't hit on your supervisor, superior, just keep it low-key, everybody, it's fine, um, and so that's what's going to happen here. I think they'll. They'll work out the small tariff issues over the coming weeks. Stock market comes back and then they will work out the small tariff issues over the coming weeks. Stock market comes back and then they will work on the grand reconciliation. But it has to be spun out because it is too much of a dependency in terms of spying on Americans, which they've been caught doing. It's too much of a dependency and it's a law now, and, alex, you were looking into this last week. For us, I mean it's a law now, and, alex, you were looking into this last week. For us, I mean, it's a law.

01:23:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So trump doesn't get to break the law, as well but at some point seems to have a habit of breaking the law. But because nobody can enforce the law and congress won't enforce it and the courts are being ignored, I mean, yes, he doesn't care about the law.

01:24:05 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
I think Gruber John Gruber from Daring Fireball actually had the best bit of text about this. I can't improve on it, so I'm just going to read Gruber's point. He says there is no mechanism in law for the president to issue any such extension. What he's saying is what he said last time. He's instructing AG Pam Bondi not to enforce the law and last time he's instructing ag pam bondi not to enforce the law and pinky's swearing that us companies that are breaking the law to keep tiktok available won't be held responsible for it. It'sa complete abdication of the law. You cannot just not do things. At last it turns out you can't, which is blowing my mind. If I speed, I get a ticket. I know if trump breaks literally the law that he doesn't matter previously in favor of apparently we just go, doesn't matter. What can we do?

01:24:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
court can order him to do things doesn't matter unless they're willing to send the military force in doesn't matter.

01:24:52
So here's the bigger question is really tick tock more of a threat, I mean, than facebook and xcom? Uh, chinese propaganda and russian propaganda all over both sites. This week facebook abandoned is is implemented its new uh uh, xcom style community notes. Yeah uh, in favor of moderation, um there, and if chinese government wants information about american citizens, they can buy it on the open, freaking market, because we have no privacy laws in this country, right I mean data brokers will sell my social security number to ping the minute he asks the what about?

01:25:38 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
what about ism uh argument?

01:25:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
um can be made convincingly, um and so it's sticking your finger in the dike when the whole thing is falling apart.

01:25:48 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
It's, it's totally valid, except um, here in the dike when the whole thing is falling apart. It's totally valid, except here in the United States if Zuckerberg or somebody were to do abusive things, or certainly in the EU if you were to abuse your data power. There are ramifications. We can argue. If they're speeding tickets and the fines aren't too much In the EU?

01:26:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yes, Not here.

01:26:07 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Well, and so in the West, broadly, we have control over these companies. We can tighten screws. We can vote for people who want to tighten the screws. The problem with a Chinese company is they can spy on Americans. They can spy on the kids who live with their parents, who are in our government, or whose parents are in the Secret Service, the CIA, whatever it is, or whose parents are in the Secret Service, the CIA, whatever it is, and so there is a distinct material difference between a Chinese company having access to 100 million phones and Zuckerberg.

01:26:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So well. I appreciate people. Instagram is the beneficiary of this right, obviously.

01:26:43 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
I think Amazon's going to win it. I think I can Amazon. Oh, wait a minute.

01:26:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Hold on. Is this your inside scoop? Yes, so everybody thought Larry Ellison and Oracle had the inside track. Here's Amazon putting a last minute bid. You think Bezos is going?

01:26:58 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
to get it. I'll tell you my game theory here Jassy, yeah.

01:27:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, no, no, no. Wait a minute, wait a minute. Jassy is the CEO, who owns?

01:27:05 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
Amazon. Actually who owns Amazon. We do via our index funds.

01:27:12 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
So here's why Amazon wins it. This is, I think, the likely 80% scenario. Bezos, as you saw, his fiance and Bezos were at the inauguration. They're getting married.

01:27:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Congratulations on the nuptial. They're going to have Princess Di style wedding. Yeah, fantastic, great, he deserves it.

01:27:29 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
He's done such have princess dye style wedding yeah, fantastic Great. He deserves it. He's done such a great job with Amazon. We all benefit from it?

01:27:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is he kind of dialed out from Amazon now? Does he not really have anything to do with it?

01:27:37 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
I think he's enjoying his life and he's got other pursuits, but you know, I a great time being Jeff Bezos, but here's why I think he wins. Trump likes to have deep relationships with successful people and he likes to build consensus with them. He's got that with so many people around him, from Jeff Yoss who's the major investor in TikTok, et cetera, and Bezos owns the Washington Post. Bezos has a house.

01:28:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know that he bought he's been kissing up to Trump. There's no question about that.

01:28:14 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
He's been making some donations and getting involved in politics, and AWS had a very big contract with the government that got canceled, if you remember, so it would be great for their relationship. It would also make the most sense because it doesn't give Zuckerberg a run of the table. There's really only one independent, viable social network outside of the meta collection, which is Twitter X and TikTok, and if TikTok went to Amazon, that would balance the table a bit.

01:28:48 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
What about Twitch and Discord? Do those count? I'm not trying to nitpick here, I'm actually losing my bit. Amazon, that's true. What about Twitch and Discord? Do those count? I'm not trying to nitpick here, I'm actually listening. Amazon owns Twitch. Discord is still independent.

01:28:57 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Yeah, they're too small. We're talking about tens of millions of people and TikTok.

01:29:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They don't. The Chinese government has already said it will not sell the algorithm. You think that that's? They don't need it. They don't need it.

01:29:07 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Yeah, I mean, if you were to look at it, All you really want is the users. I think two years ago. Yeah, you need the algorithm. If you look at the progress that X, Instagram and basically everybody's making on the algorithm, I think they're within 90% of spitting distance of whatever TikTok's doing with the algorithm. I mean, Instagram's been basically ruined by it. I mean, if I open Instagram, it's all bulldogs now in barbecue. It's horrible. Yeah, and.

01:29:35
I'm like I came here to see my friends and curate this list and you've. Now I gotta go deep into the settings, because Zuckerberg loves to bury stuff deep in the settings, but I gotta find somewhere in the settings to go back to what I want, which is my friends. It's giving me every. I'm getting white Lotus actors. I mean it's brutal, but I will say Amazon is the is the lead candidate here, Um, and if they do get it, that'd be pretty great because what about Larry?

01:30:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
is, uh, Alison? Um, I mean, he's not going to be happy if he doesn't get it.

01:30:05 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
I don't think it makes sense, for I mean, if he gets it great, then you have an independent company. You know, and I don't know if that really balances things doesn't it. Yeah, I think he would make it an independent spin out. That's the other possibility to just take the thing public. The really interesting thing that's going to happen is we'll have a sovereign wealth fund with at least 25 to 50 percent of these shares. That's what Trump is really negotiating. Trump loves the idea he wants the us government cashing up.

01:30:35
He loves the idea of us owning, like, let's say, this becomes a trillion dollar company, which it could, and the us government owns 250 billion dollars and he can that's funny money the government. That would be pretty great for his legacy. I don't know how it's legal. I've never heard of a government.

01:30:55 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
The law says you can't do a deal that doesn't involve the transfer of the algorithm.

01:30:57 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
It's just a license. We have a new license. It's called TikTok license. Who wants an algorithmic?

01:31:03 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
license Choke on my keyboard.

01:31:05 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
It's a new license to print money. It's called a social media license license to print money.

01:31:11 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
It's called a social media license.

01:31:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Why do? We have Congress, like what? No, no, we don't have Congress.

01:31:15 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
That was your mistake.

01:31:16 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Here's what you have to do Put up reasonable candidates and win an election. And that's what's going to happen, don't you?

01:31:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
think Trump thinks that the clock is ticking.

01:31:29 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
He has till 2026 to get this done. He knows it, he knows that, yeah, he knows. Uh, I think, especially if you take the economy, because that's all.

01:31:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
People vote their wallets.

01:31:32 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
That's uh, it's the economy right, yeah, that's your boy james carvel yeah, he talks like john c devora.

01:31:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He's getting more and more. He's getting more and more. I don't know what that is just going on there I want to make a point I'm I'm a wits end here with the republicans and the democrats senior citizens home.

01:31:53 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
What's going on here? All right, put the cigar down and listen for a second it's not lit.

01:31:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Ladies and gentlemen, not lit yet it's his house, he can do. Is it a cohiba? It looks like a cohiba. What do you got there?

01:32:05 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
uh, this is um. I have a brand I like, el rey de mundo, oh yeah I've smoked it's.

01:32:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's really nice, really nice.

01:32:11 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
They come with a paper wrapper and they do what's called a rectangular, which is a square cigar, where they make it in a press box.

01:32:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Very, very. I neither smoke nor drink anymore, but when I did smoke cigars I used to love them. The best cigar I ever had was hand rolled in the window of somewhere in the Dominican and the hand rolled in the window of the somewhere in the Dominican and the draw was perfect.

01:32:34 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
You can have a cigar once a quarter my kids won't let me and. I honor you and I go for a little walk and talk. Okay, a little walk.

01:32:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The problem the only problem is you can't stealth smoke a cigar you come back, you're gonna smell for days, days my my wife used to make me take my clothes off and leave them on the porch.

01:32:55 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Yes, yeah, which basically was coming back from any bar in the 80s and 90s.

01:33:01 - Benito (Announcement)
Remember how you would smell after you came back from a bar yeah yeah, that was terrible.

01:33:05 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Okay, go ahead, alex.

01:33:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh yeah did you have something you wanted to say?

01:33:08 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
I had a point 20 minutes ago Sovereign Wealth Fund, trump, tiktok. Let's say it's worth $500 billion. Let's be generous here. Currently, over the past year, as of March 2025, the national debt has risen by $4.87 billion per day. So that would give us less than two months of equivalent wealth. So to me, the entire idea of sovereign wealth fund, tiktok, etc. Is pretty much a a complete waste of time and air. So I know that jason's right.

01:33:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Trump wants to do it he looks at saudi arabia and looks how they throw that money around and he says why, why not us?

01:33:47 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
well, because we're not a theocratic monarchy Nor are we protected? On a single source of national law.

01:33:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So is this the dynamic of twist? Is that Jason tells you to look something up? Yeah, you tell him what the law is, and then he says, yeah, but that doesn't matter, is that the dynamic.

01:34:05 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
I think we're going to see these things will pile up Like. This is my prediction. They're going to see these things will pile up. This is my prediction they're starting to.

01:34:12
Yeah, these things start to pile up and then, like last time, people will be like, oh, it's lawfare. And like, yes, there has been lawfare on both sides, obviously, but then there's breaking the law, and then there's the fair execution of laws, and I think Trump is once again building up a bunch of resentment and a bunch of problems and that one or two of these cases will stick. And I think this deportation of people without deportation, without due process which they don't have but it would be common sense to do as Americans and then this case where, like you have to apply the law, there's going to be judges, uh, who will stick it to him, and these cases will start to stick, and then we're going to really be in a weird position again well, you understand the.

01:35:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The fear uh of uh liberals like me is that uh liberals like me is that uh trump will ignore judicial orders. In fact, he's already doing constitutional crisis and that's a constitutional crisis, and there we go. That doesn't end well on any. In any case, in any situation, bless you, alex, let's take a little break. Uh, we do have I think we have a uh in our contracts with our sponsors a no politics, no sneezing and no sex clause. So, alex, I'm going to have to throw you off the show now.

01:35:39 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
I fully understand.

01:35:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, no, no, no, no. I'm kidding, I'm kidding. Stay right here. We got a little more to talk about. We're not done. We're not done. It's great to have alex wilhelm here. Uh, his newsletter must subscribe newsletter cautiousoptimismnews anything with the word optimism in it. You got me because I am not really. I'm kind of I'm teetering on the on the brink of despair. So anything that you can do to bring optimism into my life, I'm gonna be happy about can I?

01:36:10 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
can I brag for a second? I?

01:36:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
have the world's tiniest brag.

01:36:13 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
Cautious optimism is on sub stack, and they rolled out some new like charts for who's doing the best. And cautious optimism is number 60 on the technology right. Wow, yeah, the top 200 of technology sub stacks by revenue. Oh okay, uh, it's slow growth, but I'm having a lot of fun. Basically, I don't have an editor, apart from my friend who takes out the commas, and so I get to kind of go wild every morning and then I go work with Jason, so it's a nice life.

01:36:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I just read something that what was it? Somebody who had been working at Amazon went to work somewhere else and he said Amazon always took the adverbs out of all my memos, which was the right thing to do, by the way.

01:36:49 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
Yeah, it is. But I mean at 7.30 in the morning when I'm writing my newsletter, I think that I'm a literary genius, and then no one actually agrees with me.

01:36:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, and comma blunder was what my English professor used to call it Comma blunder Too many commas, not enough commas.

01:37:05 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
We need more em dashes.

01:37:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Cautious optimism. How much does it cost to subscribe?

01:37:09 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
It's free or you can give me about 100 bucks a year for all of it, but it's about 80% unpaywalled.

01:37:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's really great. I highly recommend it. And I'm not logged in because, by the way, I wish Substack could figure this out. I can never log into Substack because I subscribe to one and then I did it because I don't use the same email all the time. Right, don't use the same email all the time, right, and it doesn't work very well if you have a custom email for everything you subscribe to.

01:37:34 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
That is um for us old school people who like to use the plus and uh, yeah, our email, so people don't sell our emails or whatever. Yeah, it's a problem. I have to say the platform is really advancing over at um substack and they should sponsor this program because everybody who's on the program down you know why?

01:37:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
oh no, yeah, because some of our hosts think they're nazis.

01:37:57 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Oh stop you have to get control of the radical folks who are dictating what happens on twit. That's not their choice.

01:38:05
They're not nazis, stop they just because they haven't, they had a bunch of white supremacist yes, so does the internet so does the internet so does reddit, I mean it's kind of my attitude too, yeah but they were paying the money no, I think they were letting them publish and then they weren't choosing to pay the money they didn't subsidize them at front no, oh, definitely not, definitely not. I think this is the problem is we've gotten to a point where people who disagree with each other can't we're all so sensitive everybody's so sensitive like I.

01:38:36
I just my message to people is we survive. Trump one will survive trump two. You will survive this. Don't have despair. Take action. If you really are upset about what trump is doing, it's very simple. Or you're upset about what Trump is doing, it's very simple. Or you're upset about what Elon's doing or what I'm doing or anybody else. You have the right to change the channel. You can have an upside down dumb Trump thing. You could have 10 of these. You could be Bob Dylan in Subterranean Homesick Blues, leo's in the basement.

01:39:06 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
All of that's great, but do you know who sells the ads and runs the business of Twit? It's his wife, my wife. So it's not an employee.

01:39:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
She has no, no no, no, she doesn't have an opinion on Substack. She'd take anything. No you Substack, I like Substack. I subscribe to many Substack newsletters.

01:39:25 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Yeah, listen, and you know what. And if you don't like Substack, there's Beehive.

01:39:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I use Beehive. I love.

01:39:29 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Beehive too. Beehive is great. Beehive is great, fantastic, and then, by the way, if you don't like either of those, there's an open source project, Ghost. You can roll your own if you want and put up your own server. This is America, folks. You get to choose posts everywhere.

01:39:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh really, yeah, it's great wait, is microbog a paid service? What is this? Because I need a solution. Oh, you're looking for a solution. At least check it out it is. Uh, the whole idea is indie web right, so it is posse, which is post on your own site and syndicate everywhere that's what I need yeah, micro dot blog. Uh, it's a really uh great project and uh, I've been very happy leo dot fm my blog is hosted there and you can do your short post Now.

01:40:13
The only thing, Jason, you should know it does not post to X for some reason. I think that's because Elon cut off the API.

01:40:20 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Yes, the API access. Yes, he's doing the Facebook thing, he's doing the, but it does post to LinkedIn.

01:40:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it posts to Mastodon. It posts to Blue Sky, I think. It posts to Threads. It posts everywhere. I'm signing up. I really like it. Take a look at it. I pay $10 a month. You can go to it for $5 a month, but I want to support yeah.

01:40:39 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
I love this new.

01:40:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Manton Reese is the guy behind that I don't know how you feel about this.

01:40:46 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Move to a point where a significant number of people are comfortable contributing to the media they want to see, even if maybe we have to yeah, Because if you want to see it exist and it doesn't have to be everybody who does these contributions, but it's super helpful because you know you, you want to. Um, if you want to see content today, you know, become a twit club member, go to club twit. Thank you, you know about that well, I'm a member and if you go, oh jason, I had no idea.

01:41:17
That's very nice it's only seven bucks a month, but you want to see it and you know what I'm on youtube and the algorithm this is. You know you were doing your programming. You had like your gray beard programming show and there's like 12 people watching. I'm one of the 12. This thing can't exist.

01:41:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Gray beards I love you, jason, you are so sweet if you don't pony up isn't he the best? The world's best suck up, he really is good I like to give credit where credit's due people don't even know.

01:41:48 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Podcasting was created by you three. If it wasn't for you and dave and for adam curry, this would not exist dave and adam deserve the credit.

01:41:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There were a number of other shows, uh, that were around. Uh. I came a little later to the game like uh, yeah, but you had the first web october 2004. So it was pretty close to the beginning, but still you were the first web show, though I mean like was pretty close to the beginning, but still you were the first web show, though.

01:42:11 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
I mean, like, maybe think about it and I think also, maybe when did dignation start?

01:42:16 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
no, man, it's such a good show it's back, by the way kevin, I know, and alex brought it back.

01:42:21 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
They were at south by I spoke at the south by event, it was fun did you at the, at the dignation I went to the dignation. It was fun it's great. It was kind of interesting, like generationally, to see you know all these folks, we're all old now, right yeah? Well, I mean, I think they were 20-somethings.

01:42:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They were old. It was so funny. I was old when they started.

01:42:40 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Exactly Well. Kevin Rose was like. I remember being at the last Dignation. And Kevin Rose, I said stopping this, you're peaking.

01:42:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And he said, oh um well you know um, I don't want to be like a 50 year old guy drinking beers on a couch with alex.

01:42:56 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
I want to get married and have kids, and you know what they're back, but now they're drinking wine are they the beer from japan?

01:43:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
and they only do a show every few weeks. They're not.

01:43:04 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
It's a nice, relaxed schedule yeah, they're not doing it for the money.

01:43:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Obviously it's not a business, but it's fun no, yeah, uh, anyway, great to have uh both you and alex on the show and I and it is nice to see you again, jason, I missed you. You're a great guy and uh, everybody said what are you gonna do? You crazy, you're putting calacanis on there. What do you people?

01:43:22 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
associate me with this administration. It makes me crazy because people think you're mega. They really think I'm ag'm MAGA and I'm like guys, the all in audience, like half of them, hate me because they think I'm a lib or whatever, and then everybody who's?

01:43:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
on the left hates me and they think I'm.

01:43:39 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
MAGA and I'm like guys. I've always been independent. I will remain independent, and if they do something stupid like let Biden go out to a debate when he's debilitated, I will call that out it wasn't good it wasn't good. And if they deport people without due process and send them to a sadistic prison, really I'm going to speak up at that.

01:43:59
My friends are very upset at me for saying the word sadistic. I'm like how would you describe a prison with 300 people per cell without beds, where they get to go outside for 30 minutes? I don't care how terrible, you know the crimes they committed are? Um, you don't want a person who's you know especially without due process looped into them without due process it cost us nothing to put these people who were deporting in a way station.

01:44:29
you can put them in Gitmo, like for 30 days and just make sure they have a chance to not send somebody's dad to a a sadistic, crazy prison in El Salvador. That's pitched for its sadism Right. It's pitched as a deterrent.

01:44:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The most appalling thing I ever saw was Christie. No, I'm standing in front of. That was gross.

01:44:50 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
I mean, that's the that's going to. This is what I tell my friends on the right. The things that are going to make this administration derail and you're going to lose the midterms is this constant sadistic trolling Like people don't like it. I don't like it, you don't like it Nobody's not good.

01:45:11
The only people it works for is like the 30 or maybe even 10 of like the most hardcore mega people like they might love it. Nobody else does. Yeah, it just seems uncouth and it's cruel and nobody likes cruelty. I I just I really gets my ire up. I completely agree with the human rights stuff.

01:45:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It really pisses me off, yeah and uh, and I mean I'm not laughing at this. It's a serious thing, very serious. But alex wilhelm keeps saying do the ad do the ad okay.

01:45:38 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
So who's the ad for?

01:45:40 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
yeah, I don't know anymore, I don't know and leo keeps going, we're gonna take a break. Oh, by the way, jason, have you heard?

01:45:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I am so bad about this 30 minutes leo and I get together the show goes bad, it goes right down, it goes right to the 10.

01:45:53 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
It's a great show. I just don't want to forget to actually make the money.

01:45:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know. Thank you and Lisa. Thanks you also, Alex. I appreciate it. Our show today brought to you by you. I know you guys know this, coda.

01:46:11 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
Oh, c successful startups run on coda, turning your back. Yes, there you go. See, there's somebody right there. Coda loves 500 that we mentioned earlier runs entirely on coda. Let me tell you what coda is leo.

01:46:20 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Yeah, which is? You ever use a wiki and you're like this is great, I got all my documents in one place. Then you ever use a database and you're like, this is great, I got everything organized. And then I date nice database. Then you use, use some scripting to connect them and do interesting workflow and you're like oh, lotus Notes, this is incredible. Imagine it was all one product and you paid once a very reasonable fee, I might add, and then you don't have to buy other SaaS products. You want to do your OKRs, you want to do project management, you want to build a database. You want to do your OKRs, you want to do project management. You want to build a database. You want to do show notes for your podcast. It's all in one place and you log into one place and it just works. And they have a template library to do everything. Somebody pull up the template library. You would need a template. You type in Coda templates. It's amazing.

01:47:05
It's amazing, everything's been done for you, yeah. And then I have young people on my team, like two or three of the people on my team on my venture firm. They are so good at listening to a process we do that takes 20 minutes and that's done a hundred times a week, and then they use Coda and then it's now automated, and then we don't make mistakes. We have one source of truth and your business, your life, will run efficiently. I love Coda.

01:47:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It launched in beta five years ago. In fact, it started as a napkin sketch. Right Now, you can take your napkin sketch and put it into Coda and, like 50,000 other startups, get your startup off the ground. Teams all over the world working on the same page. It's the flexibility of docs, the structure of spreadsheets, the power of applications, the intelligence of AI all built for enterprise. Coda's seamless workspace facilitates deeper collaboration and greater creativity, giving you more time to build. If you're a startup team looking to increase alignment and agility, Coda can help you move from planning to execution in record time. But you do have to do this. For me, you have to go to the website codaio slash twit. Remember that that slash twit's very important. If you go there today, you'll get six months free of the team plan for startups. C-o-d-a dot I-O slash twit. Get started for free and get six free months of the team plan. I can't imagine why anybody wouldn't do this. Coda dot I-O slash twit. You could use Coda as an individual, couldn't you? I mean, you don't have to be a team.

01:48:43 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Well, I was about to say if you want to get a job, no-transcript up twist500.com. You will see. Alex and my team are in this twist500.com. I said I want to build this list of the top 500 companies. This site is built in Coda.

01:49:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So you can publish from.

01:49:29 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Coda to the public web. Yes, can use wow your own domain name. So this is our domain name and that's cool. You can now go here and this is updatable for you easily, this table yes that's very cool and if you click on it, you can open up the record of those companies. So what we're trying to do here is I I I said to uh hey, let's make a database of the top 500 companies that are private. This is a great idea.

01:49:53
So we can track them, and you're a fan of this kind of stuff. I was going to hire a developer for like $150,000 a year to do this project. Instead, I used the code scudaio slash twit and I got it for six months for free, and now the next six months I'm paying. No, you didn't use the code, come on. No, I didn't. I'm paying.

01:50:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm paying since day one, but I have to tell you like I think you should pay for stuff like this, yeah, but if you're a startup and money's tight, take advantage of that. Six months free codaio, slash twit I. You know what. They are missing such a bet by not having ads on all in. I don't understand. Or you should just do a show jason calacanis pitches and you just pitch stuff I mean, I love doing it.

01:50:34 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
I literally got my you're really good at it well, I oh, the secret is, like you, I only do ads. It's genuine promotion for white listed companies. It's only if we like the company right and that makes it so easy. I turn down like I agree, I turn down so many sponsors like you, I know you do this as well. I'm not going to say any sponsors names or potential sponsors names, but if I see that they have bad reviews on Reddit or people are complaining about the product, we're just like yeah, it's not a fit. And I have like maybe a half dozen folks who every year try to buy ads from us and I know you do too who you just say you know what it's not worth All the time. Yeah, it's not worth having my listeners complain when they sign up for the service and they're getting billed for something they don't like.

01:51:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Our club a twit discord suggesting that a new show for you and Alex call this weekend pump and dump.

01:51:26 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
Oh, where I pump one advertiser and then we dump the bad ones. Exactly. I love it. It's all very white, but jason does need a ski house in niseko, so if we're going, to do another show stop I was watching the f1 race in japan this morning.

01:51:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh and suzuka love it terrible race. It was terrible race, the most boring ever. The the goddamn grass wouldn't even catch on fire.

01:51:52 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
I was hoping something would happen I know, bring back qualifying when at least the grass was doing something interesting.

01:51:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Every year they have this problem the grass catches on fire at suzuka.

01:52:01 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
I don't understand why it's the only track riding on grass, no, no, they go off track, sometimes by accident. Oh, and they like the grass, the grass. The car sends sparks. Now I want to watch it, I mean, actually I kind of like this the race was terrible Lewis didn't do well Alex we're doing all in at this Miami F1.

01:52:18 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Is that a bit major? F1?. Yeah, if you guys want to come, you'll be my guest. We eventually have our best. Don't say that if you don't mean it. No, no, I have like 10 vip tickets. We have the number one. Overlook, you guys are my guests if you want to come, you got you gotta. You gotta get your own flights I'm not putting you up or anything.

01:52:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But if you want to show up, I got the vip tickets last year to vegas fun and it was the most expensive thing I have ever done. Well, here you're free, you're on the arm it was outrageous, and it wasn't even good seats, because if you're in the, have you ever been to an F1 race?

01:52:52 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
Alex, I know you're a fan no. I was going to go to Austin this year with my dad, but I'm not quite sure if I'm child available.

01:52:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Don't get. Don't get the grandstand seats, because we're sitting on. I thought, hey, this is going to be great. We're on the strip, it's the fastest part of the track. It's going to be amazing. Yeah, it's the fastest part of the track. Boom, that's it.

01:53:12 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Boom, boom boom, that's it. We have like a viewing platform. That's the curve or something.

01:53:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I have learned there are better places to sit than the grandstand seats on the strip because they're going 200 miles an hour. It's great to go once because you hear it and feel it. You don't see that on tv, you don't get it on tv. I'm fascinated. I can't wait to go. If you go, you're gonna start looking into the technology of it. Jason, it's kind of my, it's.

01:53:38 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
That's what got me. I actually have been looking at this racing technology, got invited to go like, do some track racing. And then, um, I was looking at the new corvettes. I used to own a c6 corvette which I loved, and these new ZR1 is going to be the greatest Corvette sports car ever made. And then there's an E-Ray which is like half electric, half um half uh, you know combustion engine like a hybrid, losing their minds over it. Yeah, the amount of horsepower it's just. It's crazy what's happening with sports cars.

01:54:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, don't tell Lisa, she really wants a vet, she loves vets, she deserves a vet.

01:54:13 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
You know, there's like 5,000 C8s on, because I've been deep in this rabbit hole. Right now there are like 5,000 of them. They overbuilt and so she can get a great deal. You can get like into a C8 now like a slightly used one for 60K. What like a slightly used one for 60k? What one for like 70?

01:54:32 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
or 80. Yeah, at least you should get one immediately. Oh man, don't tell me that life is short. I'm due for a midlife crisis.

01:54:35 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
It's not a midlife crisis. The greatest sports car ever made. Literally people are like this thing is better and holds its value more than the ferraris and the lamborghinis right now it's. They changed this as mid-engine. Now, right, yeah, it's mid-engine it's all-wheel drive. The e-ray version is all-wheel drive, which is controversial. And then they're coming out with the zr1, which is a thousand horsepower. Now that one's 200k that's like, but it's better than like a bugatti or what's your daily driver, jason?

01:55:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
you still drive a model y.

01:55:04 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
I have a model y, yeah, I mean I the self-driving is really hard to beat, um, because if you are listening to a podcast and you want to change it, or you know a text comes in and you want to glance down and you want to change your GPS, I just feel like it's so bulletproof.

01:55:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
My i5 yells at me. It says distracted driver, you're not paying attention. Yeah, so does the Tesla Pay attention, and it's right you should. It relates to this.

01:55:30 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
It relates to the next story on the docket, actually, because I feel like the arc of self-driving which we've been talking about here for over 10 years, since the DARPA challenge. We're kind of getting into the final innings. We're probably in the seventh.

01:55:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Or is it like Zeno's paradox, where we never quite get that last 10%? Oh, no we.

01:55:46 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
Oh no we're in the seventh inning, seventh or eighth inning. Do you know why Jason's right? Why? Because they're finally taking Waymo to DC and you do not take a regulatory risk to the capital, where the regulators sit Good point. Unless you are confident. Great insight. Good point.

01:56:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And it's also I'll tell you, though if a Waymo could drive Boston, then I'd be impressed, yeah.

01:56:06 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
No, the real, yeah, those Boston people are horrible. Providence is pretty bad too. Prove it here. Come, come, drive me, please, god.

01:56:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's these old New England towns that were built in the 18th century and they don't you know.

01:56:18 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
And think about the customer base they're going to. They'll flip those things over outside of Wrigley Field or wherever I know what's in Boston. What are those?

01:56:32 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
Those Red Sox fans are terrible.

01:56:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The Celtics fans don't burn them. It's never going to Philadelphia then, because the Eagles fans will put them on top of a roof. They had to grease the poles when the Eagles won the Super Bowl. They had to grease the poles downtown so they wouldn't climb up the light poles.

01:56:43 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Yeah, they're going to have to grease the way most.

01:56:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's your title folks Grease the way most. That's the solution. So you're talking about the robots now. This is another thing that alex carp's talking about uh, and a lot we do. A we took this week in google and made it an ai show. It's called intelligent machines and it seems to be that 2025 is going to be the year of robots, and, and what carp and his co-authors say in their book is, and I believe this ai has consumed everything it can on the internet. It's consumed all the data that's out there.

01:57:16
What's missing is one thing that's critical to our intelligence is an understanding of physics that if you drop a ping pong ball it will hit the ground, and how fast they can understand intellectually, but they need to have a sensorium. They need to get out into the world, and everybody this year is working on robots. Yes, the story uh from uh china is chinese engineers are creating humanoid robots. That uh, they, uh. They are terrifying the way. Here's one doing acrobatics. We've saw these at Boston Dynamics, right, and it's not just for factories, though. They're thinking they want to get these robots out into the real world, and that might be critical in advancing AI. Is this experience of the world that we have that, robots do not nvidia is going to play a major role here.

01:58:17 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
They're, I think, building their own models of the real world.

01:58:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And well, you saw what jensen brought on stage with him the disney designed robot, which is pretty darn cool, but I don't know if it's useful.

01:58:28 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
There are 10 different ways to sort of solve this. And Boston Dynamics and these other robots. They've built the actuators, they've built the hardware out. It's understanding the real world, the physics of the real world, how to navigate the real world. And these general purpose robots are very different than the arms you see, like at one of our investments, cafe X, making coffee, instead of using, like a closed room, a closed factory with an arm that does something very specific. Over and over and over again.

01:58:59
These would be general interests, so they can walk around your home and if there was something on the floor they would know oh, that's a, you know one of the chew toys for the dog, or that's a scorpion, you know proceed, you know as directed for those two different possibilities. Or that's spilt milk and here's how to mop it up. And these are like self-driving. You're starting to see demonstrations of them and I think this is like a 10-year arc to a toyota prius model 3 moment where we will we'll be sitting here 10 years from now on on twit and there'll be one of them walking behind you or cleaning shelves.

01:59:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It actually may be in a robot. My yes just pour my mind into one absolutely that. That part scares me quite a lot, but I was with you up until that point, um did you see the sunday times, kate mex metz had a uh, he's great invasion of the home. Humanoid robots yeah, um, and it's one of those digital stories that times does. Uh so well. Here here, kate is shaking the hand of what looks like kind of a buff guy in a canvas body suit with a very small head actually that's not kate, that's no, that's the founder of burnish and neo the company's humanoid robot.

02:00:18 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Yeah that's 1x. 1x is the first to, I think, get one of these robots available for sale. Um, and this would be like buying. I don't know, leo, what was like the first? Like a roadster before the roadster it was like buying the roadster? Yeah, like a kit car, right. So this would be the equivalent of that yeah, um, or like in the pc space or the I don't want this in my home no, neither do I, yeah okay, but but the thing is, it's not just china that are building these.

02:00:49 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
Here in the US we have Figure 1X, agility Robotics and a number of other companies.

02:00:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, this is an American robot.

02:00:56 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
Yeah, yeah, so the story that we have in the show notes today is very much predicated on. Look how quickly China is taking advantage of its factory base and its ability to manufacture cheaply and so forth. But the pace we're seeing in AI model development and human robotics domestically and also in Europe, I think is actually very encouraging. So I think here it's easy to frame this as a here comes China story, but instead I really do think that it's actually kind of a here comes the world and everyone wants to solve this problem, because paying humans to do stuff, especially very physical, manual things, is hard on humans and their bodies and also expensive.

02:01:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So I think think isn't Elon working on this uh?

02:01:32 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
yeah, he's got the Optimus and, um, you know he's obviously far behind a bunch of people but catching up quickly, um, you know he's not uh on it again how do you feel about?

02:01:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
politics. He's busy with some other things. Well, he kind of got a black mark because, uh, first he showed a robot that was turned out to be a human, in a suit that danced, and then yeah, that was the most recent event, the robots were controlled by humans, the robot bartenders.

02:01:55 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Which is how these, which is, by the way, how you know. My understanding is how waymo and cruise that there is a safety driver that's how they started them. That's how they started. I think. I think that's still how most of these self-driving companies are working.

02:02:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They may say that's not true, that seems to be the dirty little secret of Waymo and others is that when something happens unexpected, a human back at the home office takes over. There's an intervention specialist.

02:02:22 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
They have fancy terms for it and I think there's going to be intervention specialists. I think there's going to be intervention specialists and the question is, how many cars or robots do they intervene with and at what pace? There was a really interesting story that Alex and I covered where a store in New York a chicken store, a chicken sandwich shop or something had a cashier who took your orders on Zoom and they were like this company that I'm an investor in Athena. They had somebody in Manila on a Zoom taking your orders and I saw that and I was like this is fascinating. It's an arbitrage using technology. If you didn't have Zoom, which is essentially free, and you didn't have bandwidth, which is essentially free, and you didn't have bandwidth, which is free, you couldn't have a $1 an hour, $2 an hour cashier in New York City For a job that Americans just let's be candid we have the lowest unemployment of our lifetime they won't take that job.

02:03:25
They don't want them. They don't want that job. And that's this whole tariff thing and reshoring stuff. That's the whole part that breaks in the logic for me. Nobody wants these jobs. Like how many people?

02:03:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
are like raising their hands. I want to build sneakers. Is immigrants um, often, often, uh, undocumented, but that's who's doing those jobs?

02:03:43 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
if we, to the extent we're making clothing in factories in la still, which we have, some it is illegal immigrants. So then you have to say well, where's the logic in this? We're, we're not allowing immigration and we want to create factories with jobs that americans are, let's just call it what it is too rich to take. They don't want to take those jobs, so it makes no sense.

02:04:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And then, at the same time, let's also be those jobs don't pay enough for you to live.

02:04:12 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
No right. No, they pay double minimum wage or whatever 15, 20 bucks an hour, which you know in New York, when they can't rent an apartment you can't live on that, and then you have to take an hour and a half commute to somewhere with a cheap apartment. It just doesn't work, yeah, and those commutes increase depression, suicide, alcoholism.

02:04:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So they don't want them because they're not good jobs. Basically, they're jobs you can't live on.

02:04:39 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
They're kind of both. They are entry-level, first-run jobs, and so then you have to decide does any of this make sense to move jobs to the developed world, where people don't want to take them and they're too expensive, when there are people who these jobs in their region are incredible middle class jobs? So the logic kind of breaks down. But these things are going to change everything in seven to ten years benito, uh gonzalez, our producer and technical director is from the philippines.

02:05:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yep, um, what do you think, benito?

02:05:17 - Benito (Announcement)
oh, he's, he's silent he maybe just took a job about what would you work for?

02:05:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
one dollar an hour producing podcasts is it exploitative of us in the developed world to use people in the third world to do the jobs we don't want to do for a low amount of money?

02:05:36 - Benito (Announcement)
I mean kind of, but also not really. I mean, it really depends.

02:05:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
If you can live on that wage in the Philippines.

02:05:47 - Benito (Announcement)
Like Alex said, some of those wages here are unlivable, but over there, yeah, that's a decent middle class wage because the standard of living there is like it's so much cheaper to live there.

02:05:57 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
It's just so much cheaper. So yeah, that money goes a lot further.

02:06:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So initially these robots will be telerobotics. They will be operated by humans.

02:06:05 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
I think in some cases, yes, they'll certainly be supervised by humans and they're deploying them in factories right now, so in very constrained environments doing very constrained tasks. When they get to your home, there is a possibility that you could literally hire somebody for one to $3 an hour to actually be the robot, like telepresence, oh my God, that seems so awful to me.

02:06:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't it seems like a black mirror episode yeah, in a way, unless that person has no job prospects, and it lets them feed their family well, and this is why free trade to me and I agree with elon, zero tariffs, free trade. This works itself out better if we can do that, plus establishes interdependence. That is, in the long run, good for our for world peace. To be blunt, uh, who's the? Is one x? Uh, a big content? This is the one that the times article is all about. One x, is that a big?

02:07:06 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
yeah they're legit legit.

02:07:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's eve. That's their robot on wheels.

02:07:10 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
Super legit, yeah and right now they're doing very, very basic things, but I think they'll move. They'll move up the complexity chart and speed. The thing about trade is that countries should not move backwards in terms of how much value add they do in manufacturing. So china started off doing quite a lot of relatively low value add stuff garment manufacturing and so forth and moved up the value chain to creating the world's electronics and so forth, and a lot of the cheaper stuff moved to other countries like Bangladesh.

02:07:36
Why would we wanna go backwards Like? I just don't think that people understand that the margins on labor for making leggings for the little lemon are not similar to what we can do here in the United States currently with our economy. So to me it's just very backwards to think that we should do the lowest tier of manufacturing domestically. It's very very silly to me.

02:07:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I wanna we're gonna take another break. I do wanna ask you guys about AI, because I'm curious what your take is on the future of AI, agi, super intelligence and safety Something we talk a lot about on intelligent machines, but I don't get to talk to you guys as much, so I'd like to get your take. You're watching this Week in Tech with Alex Wilhelm Great to have you from his fabulous newsletter, cautiousoptimism News, and of course, he's a regular on this Week in Startups along with Jason Calacanis, who started that some year. How long has it been? 15, 10 years.

02:08:28 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
It's been like, yeah, 12 or 14 years I've done over 2,000 episodes. I started like basically I was on maybe the first 50 episodes of Twit. Yeah, you were on a lot of the early ones, a lot of the early ones, and when I would come on, you would ask me about startups. And then I asked you like, hey, would it be okay if I did this this week in startups thing, where I just talked only about startups? And you know, it's really a tribute to the mentorship you gave me.

02:08:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Thank you. Yeah, next week is our 20th anniversary, this week in tech.

02:08:59 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
We have to have a party. That's incredible.

02:09:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We are having a party, but so we did our thousandth episode and we invited some of the old timers on. One of the reasons I was happy to get you on, jason, is because you're one of them. Uh, next week, uh, we are going to ask our audience to uh weigh in. We're getting videos, poems, songs, pictures of how you watched, how you discovered twit, um, and it's been really fun looking at those. We'll have some of those on the show next week. Who's on the show, though?

02:09:30
uh, benito, have we uh, still only one confirmed just one person so far alan malvatano is confirmed okay, alan malvatano, also a long time member of the team he used to co-host to this week in computer hardware. Um, I would try to get kevin rose.

02:09:46 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
He's not answering my calls so I don't I don't know, he's busy, right now he's busy getting drunk with uh alex, I mean it should just be like they should surprise you and just send the link to everybody and just show up a little bit of a maybe let's not book anybody.

02:10:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Benito, maybe somebody will show up, like bob hope used to show up on the tonight show. He I was across the way and I thought I'd just stop by.

02:10:07 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
We're talking a lot.

02:10:10 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
Never happened. Old timey accent. I freaking love it oh yeah, yeah, he called me.

02:10:16 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
I was in the studio head's office and he told me we're celebrating. I came back.

02:10:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I'm glad you're here. I hope you're glad you're here too. I love it. Alex and Jason's lovely having you on our show today. Brought to you by now. This is a startup I don't think you know about. Okay, hit me.

02:10:34
Maybe you do. Okay, our friends at OutSystems. They are the leading AI-powered application and agent development platform. You know it's a classic conundrum for every enterprise Build or buy. You create your own software. It's great. It's very expensive. You just mentioned $150,000 a year to hire an engineer and that's just one person. Build it yourself, but then it's exactly what you want. Or do you outsource it? You go buy some SaaS solution. That's not a perfect fit and it's a tough decision.

02:11:05
For over 20 years 20 now, as long as we've been around the mission of OutSystems has been to give every company the power to innovate through software. It teams typically have two choices. As I mentioned, you could buy off the shelf SaaS products for speed, but you lose flexibility. You also lose differentiation, right. Or you can build custom software, costing time and resources, but thanks to AI, there's a new way, a third path the fusion of AI, low-code and DevSecOps automation into a single development platform. That means your team can build custom applications.

02:11:42
It's this new thing, right, this new partner coding with AI agents as easily, as quickly as affordably as buying generic off-the-shelf sameware, and flexibility, security and scalability. They come standard with OutSystems. I think this is a really interesting third way. With AI-powered low code teams can build custom future-proof applications at the speed of buying, with fully automated architecture. Security. You've got integrations, data flows, permissions it's all built in. Outsystems is the last platform you need to buy, because then you can use it to build anything and customize and extend your existing core systems to Build your future without systems. This is a really clever idea.

02:12:27 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Go ahead. The thing that's really interesting I'm looking at their website is you can build AI agents which are agentic and that is going to be the future is.

02:12:37
You know? Let's say you're trying to do the scheduling for Twit and you've got like, hey, here's the whitelist and the Google sheet of like people we like to have on. You can build a script that says hey, you know, we're going to. These are the open slots. If you want them, click here to be added and have that agent go and if somebody cancels, automatically go to the list.

02:12:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But we would never do that, benito, don't worry. Outsystemscom slash Twit learn more. My experience has always been that these AI assistants are great in conjunction with humans. That's when they really sing out systems. That is the sweet spot. Yeah, I agree. Out systemscom slash twit. Thank you. Out systems we brand new sponsor. We're thrilled to have you coming out right very interesting stuff, yeah it is, it is the third way in the build versus by conundrum absolutely.

02:13:23 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
I mean, there's a whole thing going on. I don't know if you heard about vibe coding, but I've been talking about vibe coding.

02:13:29
It's hysterical. It's hysterical but it's kind of like you're not going to be production ready anytime soon. It's going to be years before we, as English speakers, can say I need this tool, but it's going to be possible to make 80% of it. It's going to be possible to make 80% of it, and that's where a partner like outsystemscom, slash twit would come in to help you do that final 20, 30% and make sure it works and it's stable and secure.

02:13:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, the problem with vibe coding in jet. So this is interesting because Andre Karpathy, who's the guy who coined this term in an ex post, really didn't imply that it was for people who couldn't code. That's kind of been the meaning that it's taken, but he said it would be a great thing for a weekend project. In other words, somebody's already a coder could use it to build stuff. Because the problem if you don't know how to code, you can't vet what the ai is giving you, nope, and there's all sorts of you know pitfalls down the road. If something doesn't work, how do you know how to fix it?

02:14:34 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
or like let's say you go tax your servers and then all of a sudden you get an aws or a you know oracle cloud or a google cloud aws bill for ten thousand dollars because it went rogue. Like you, you can make some serious mistakes here. I was vibe coding just a couple of days ago because I had bought this domain name a long time ago annotatedcom and I paid like 20 grand for it but I never used it. I wanted to make a service for myself where you could highlight a paragraph in a news story with a toolbar, press the button and it would make a new landing page with that quote or like a clip from Twit and let you comment on it. Right, you'd annotate that original piece of thing. And then I remembered I had the domain name. I was like maybe I could vibe code this myself, but I can't.

02:15:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's clear I can't. I can make a proper concept. Look, I think that it's interesting because I mean, uh, mark zuckerberg said that a meta will this year replace some engineers with ai and a lot of people the, the ceo, a founder of replet says you're not going to be writing code. I love that guy yeah well, he said, don't teach your kids how to code, because there's not going to be any jobs in a few years. You guys buy that no All right.

02:15:54 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
What do you think, Alex?

02:15:55 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
I think there's two different conversations going on here, because there's deep systems level programming that is not going to be replicated by AI, because that's more of a, I think, a software architecture point. But I do think there's quite a lot of low-level development that is going to get absolutely obviate. And one example of this Amazon said in the last six months that they were doing a bunch of, I think, refactoring and they used AI for it and they saved thousands and thousands and thousands of developer hours. So I think that there will always be a section of development that will be reserved for humans at the wheel, if you want because they need to make big long-term decisions.

02:16:34
But quite a lot of stuff that is done today by humans simply doesn't need to be done by humans. Think of it as like the first industrial revolution for the process of software development. We still had humans working, but we also had big machines doing a lot of the repetitive heavy lifting. So that's what I think we're going to see this year. So, mark's point about some percentage of Meta's code being written by AI this year sure, will AI replace all of their developers in the next five years? No, but I bet you they stop hiring at some point in time and let natural attrition kind of weed out what they don't need.

02:16:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So I think it does make sense that that's the one thing a computer would be good at is writing code for computers, right? I mean, it's this native language no-transcript.

02:17:36 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Now, I bought everybody and I'm not going to make this commercial for Grammarly, but which is owned by Coda, by the way. They merged.

02:17:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is it owned by or owns Coda? I was confused. Coda, I think.

02:17:46 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Grammarly bought Coda. That's what I heard. I think Grammarly bought Coda and I had to see it go on. So it's now one thing, but Grammarly is such a powerful tool and I just pay for it for my entire team, strictly, so that the people don't come to me and say, can you edit this? Right Before I had Alex and you know now everybody-.

02:18:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Can you take the commas out of this? Well, here's the thing.

02:18:05 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Everybody who is a bad writer, which is most people are bad writers, right, and some people are okay writers. Bad writers became good writers. Okay, writers became good, sometimes great writers. But you're not going to be exceptional, have a point of view and be an elite writer because of any piece of software. I don't believe it's the same thing with coding. You're still going to need elite coders, but there's some things that are very easy for AI to do, so everybody just moves up the stack, and this is like if you look at deep research on Gemini, which I pay for and is really powerful. The idea of paying a researcher to go do a research of the human robotic companies we just did is ridiculous. If you could just do a deep research in four minutes, it gives you an entire overview.

02:18:55
And it's 90,. I would say it's 95%, as good as the best researcher I ever hired. No hallucination problems. I mean on the margins. But if you tell it to give citations and you're paying for deep research.

02:19:10
It will do that for you and then you can take the report. If it really is that important, put the report into another. You can put it into Grok or ChatGPT and say take this report and make it better and check every fact, and it will do that for you. So that's the eventuality. Is multiple language models kind of checking each other's work and then show your work? If you know how to prompt and you tell it to show your work, you're going to get much less hallucinations.

02:19:40 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
Okay, and this is the two-sided coin of AI, because, on one hand, jason's dead on. It can replace quite a lot of what human researchers do today that they get paid to do. What does that mean? It means everyone now has a researcher in their pocket for 20 bucks a month or whatever it costs. Fantastic Levels, the playing field, makes the world a more interesting, faster, more economically viable place, or vital place. At the same time, it deletes early level jobs or entry level jobs, and I just I wonder what we're going to do as an economy when we take out baby lawyers, baby consultants, baby this, baby that, and we replace them with AI systems. How are we going to have people move up the human value chain If? There's no place to start.

02:20:19
That is a challenge. I'm worried about it.

02:20:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All right, I'm going to hit the third rail of this show. Oh no, is it the power? All right, and you just tell me to stuff it if you don't want to talk about it. Okay. Doge has proposed recoding the social security cobalt database and their mama database using ai. They say they. The social security administration looked at it a few years ago said it would take, I think, five years. They say they could do it in six months.

02:20:50 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Yes, of course I mean upgrade every system, the, the. The thing that's being uh a bit hyperbolic here is that this administration wants to take away people's social security. They don't want to do that.

02:21:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They might want to take away some medicaid though.

02:21:07 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
I don't think so.

02:21:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, I hope not.

02:21:10 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
These are the things that lose you elections, yeah, and so self-preservation for any politician is to stay away from those two items and, if not, expand them.

02:21:21 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
I would love to see them raise the age of like when you get Social Security and I would love to see them— Remember what happened, toron, when he proposed that run out of town, okay, but I mean differently than we protest here in the united states and the germans and this and and spain, like they'll, they'll, they'll, hang you up and quarter you.

02:21:41 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Um, I do think, um, upgrading all these systems is going to be awesome, and there's so many games, I mean nobody would be against modernizing it.

02:21:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think that's reasonable. But there is this genuine concern that this do you know, these doge kids have you?

02:21:57 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
are you familiar with any? I know some of the people involved, like obviously elon and my friend antonio gracias. Do you know big? Balls I, I, I know, I've I know of big balls. I don't have a personal relationship with big balls, do you?

02:22:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
think that they are good coders, that they're trustworthy, reliable. I think these are elite people. They're elite.

02:22:19 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
I mean, that's what they are billed as Trust me, they're elite, these are elite individuals.

02:22:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Elon wouldn't bring them in unless they were really good.

02:22:29 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
The talent level around Elon is scary. The people who are drawn to work with him are self-selecting for two things hardcore and extremely good at their skill. Whatever it is Now you may not like the politics. You could have personal issues with Elon et cetera, Totally fine. One thing you will not be able to say is these are not the most elite technical people in the world. He is a magnet for those people, so period full stop.

02:23:00
That's a very interesting point, jason. Their communication I will say and I've talked to them about this and then I'll leave it at that and get your take, alex is their communication of what they're doing has not been a 10 of 10. It's like a seven of 10. And so I've told them keep unpacking what you're doing with data, statistics et cetera. And then when they say there's so much fraud and there aren't people going to jail, well, we have a justice system. It takes time, so there's inefficiency I think they're hitting that pretty hard.

02:23:35
I think if there is in fact fraud and the fraud is independent of party, by the way, I'm sure there's Republicans, democrats and independents committing fraud in the system or taking grift, you know, across the board. We've seen that, obviously before. So that will take time, but, yeah, they're going to do a great job in upgrading the systems. They also have Joe Jebbia, who's a friend of mine, so I actually know a third person very well, the co-founder of Airbnb, who's a design genius, literally created the design of Airbnbbnb. So don't be surprised if government systems start to have incredible ux and are fast and efficient, like other countries in the world have yeah, I mean everybody agrees we need that.

02:24:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, they're just concerned that there might be a little move fast and break things mentality about how we're going about it.

02:24:28 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Yeah, and there is and that's a fair criticism yeah A lot of mistakes being made.

02:24:33
A lot of mistakes, I mean if you want to go this fast, you're going to make mistakes. I was with Elon for and I don't want to overstate it, but I was with Elon for when he took over Twitter and if you remember, then they were like, oh my God, twitter's going to go down. Twitter never went down. He's like the guy can land two rockets and catch giant rockets on their own. That's not going to be the issue. You may not agree with how Twitter's being run and the trolling on it and freedom of speech comes with and anonymity comes with a bit of chaos, but he was able to. When he took that over and I was there for a little bit of it in the early days he was able to very quickly figure out who was the most effective person and who was necessary, and that's the rubric in which he does these exercises.

02:25:21
We made an XY quadrant and on one quadrant we put extremely good at their job and incompetent, and then on the other quadrant we put absolutely necessary and completely unnecessary, irrelevant, like you don't need this person in the company. And the top quadrant is where you want to really focus your effort people who are extremely qualified and the job is essential. Now, if the person's extremely qualified and their job isn't essential. Well then, you have a little conundrum, you've got a bounty. This is an incredibly effective person, but we don't need them. Okay, well, maybe we could find something for them to do. But when you have unqualified people which, shockingly, you might find some in our government who've been there for a long time, who are actually not good at their jobs and their jobs are not necessary?

02:26:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think that's kind of what you go for first is that bottom left quadrant. I'd be more sanguine about it if they didn't keep firing and rehiring people.

02:26:20 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
That's part of the process. Yeah, and that was my point, is that the necessary part of the process, you could do it differently. But if they're on a time constraint to the midterm elections, maybe they they see that as they're trying to do it all in two years.

02:26:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Trying to do it in maybe two years, maybe in 12 months, that the press could be getting this completely wrong. But Elon is not getting very kind treatment in the press. He's coming across as kind of outpaced, overmastered by the situation that he's in, uh. He's coming across as very arrogant, uh. But but you know him and and I trust you, yeah. So is this a problem of appearances or is there another problem?

02:27:08 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
I would say the communication could be better, right. And then, on top of that, you have the polarization. So, you know, my handicapping of it would be half the people in the country have it out for this administration, just like the MAGA folks hated Biden and Kamala, right, so you have the polarization in our society. That's like the foundation of this is happening. And then you have an extreme, shocking approach to cutting costs and firing people and downsizing, which is a painful thing to do, which I think is probably why you're seeing this tension. And you know, yeah, his reputation is getting torched torched, you know, in some cases because he's doing this work, uh, and you see that with, literally, you know sadly, tesla's being lit on fire.

02:27:58
This is scary stuff, um, and, yeah, I mean obviously nobody thinks that's, nobody wants that yeah, just don't buy the car if you just that's unlawful.

02:28:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, and there are people who own teslas uh, who are not maga, but like teslas um it's scary to drive a cyber truck, that's for sure. If you're driving a cyber truck, it's like my neighbor has a cyber truck and I'm just he keeps it in the garage now. He used to keep it out front it's probably for a good reason.

02:28:24 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Yeah, somebody you car some interest. Listen, I think all this will pass. You know the the um if we can survive it.

02:28:32
I think that'll be nice yeah, I think we'll survive it. I think we'll come to the other end of it and people will go. The government is half the size it was, or a third less, just like clinton did. You might not like how it's been done, but you might like the outcome. For the people who don't like how it's being done, they might very much like the outcome. Outcome and a more efficient government with less waste and spend is going to be absolutely fantastic and I think they will accomplish that. I think I'm actually not worried about is Doge. The thing I am worried about, you know, is the tariffs and the deportations, like those things, I think. And the rule of law, right, like, is he going to listen to judges? To judges, as we said earlier.

02:29:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Those are the things I worry about and I'm not a fan of there's a lot of things to worry about, as I saw a sign at the protest yesterday. So many things to complain about, so little cardboard it's? Uh, there are. There are an almost infinite number of things to be concerned about. I would love not to be worried about doge. Um, I'm not sure I share your opinion of elon. You do know him, I do not.

02:29:35 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Uh, he's um, yeah, I would say misunderstood would be an understatement and incredibly effective I'm very curious about how this all works with the big cobalt databases, because uh, you know, yeah I read a lot of developer.

02:29:48 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
I read a lot of developer forums and there has been widespread developer skepticism about doge's ability to rewrite.

02:29:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
For instance, the lack of a date field in kobol and being misinterpreted as people 185 years old in the database is a good example that does not inspire. Inspire confidence, but it means they don't understand what they're looking at and you don't want to mess with a code base that a lot of people rely on if you don't understand it.

02:30:14 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
You know. Ok, I'm going to take the opposite of what I think here and make it make an argument in favor of trying to fix this now with this little window of time, Even though personally I'm kind of on your side of this debate. If we tried to do this under a democratic administration, how long would it take?

02:30:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
clinton took eight years, but he did it yeah, but that wasn't.

02:30:37 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
I think things ran a bit better in the 90s before we had as much gerrymandering, so I think at least we're trying something. Maybe that's a bad way to look at it, but I'm I'm a little bit skeptical of this being a possible project to take on under a different administration and, uh, I'm more on your side of things mostly than than jason's on this particular doge question, leo, but I I do think at least we're taking a shot at the goal.

02:31:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah just for people who don't know the history of it. Uh was able to cut 400 000 jobs out of the government yeah, this will be more.

02:31:13 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
I think I'll give you one thing to feel better about, because I'm I'm talking to some folks in the um in the youtube chat room on the this week in tech uh youtube channel, which has been growing quite nicely, by the way. Um, I know you guys are really um experimenting with it. Um, if you look at the people around Trump this time last time he had a bunch of neocon, old school Republicans and he lost to Democrats and he got trounced. To win back the White House, he surrounded himself with a bunch of moderate, socially liberal, fiscally conservative Democrats. Liberal, fiscally conservative Democrats Besant, lutnick, elon, joe, rogan, chamath go down the list of all the supporters and or people in the administration. They're all Clinton Democrats. That's what they have in common.

02:32:02
And in order to get this stuff done, trump didn't go to the Republican Party. There's no Mitt Romney in here. It's all socially liberal, fiscally conservative Democrats. Almost, like I would say, the majority, 60% or 70% of the people around him fall into that, including Trump himself, who is a lifelong Democrat, who just selected the Republican Party as the vehicle that would get him elected to the point at which, like he had hillary clinton at his wedding. Uh, and they were this.

02:32:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We can just look at it, but nobody would democrat call anybody at the heritage society or the people behind project 2025 clinton democrats no, no, no. These are the hardest conservatives out there, and this is the agenda that has been set for the trump administration now we're veering into politics, so I I don't want to get into that. That's something reasonable.

02:33:00 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
People can disagree let's just say this there's a lot of big projects being taken on by the technical arm of the government, now partially run by someone that we know and let's see how they do, because they're talking a big game and we don't have a choice.

02:33:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We don't have a choice, alex. We're gonna have to see how they do we're in the car, so I'm in the back seat.

02:33:19 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
I'm in the back seat yeah, programmed off my body and, uh, let's hope we don't crash because, at a minimum, uh, elections have consequences, as they love to say yeah put this energy into the midterms, folks.

02:33:29 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
I think I don't like to see either party control all three.

02:33:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, there's an opportunity, yeah, huge opportunity.

02:33:37 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
There's going to be a throttle.

02:33:38 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Yeah, uniparty rule bad, we all agree yeah.

02:33:41 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
No, I think actually there's not that much difference between the three of us on these issues, because we're all optimistic and hopeful for a high functioning economy, a high functioning society and a strong vision, so like we're just trying to discuss the best way to get there at the fastest possible speed it is really interesting that this is happening at a time when ai is exploding, and I do think there is an opportunity, absolutely, uh, if ai is more than just junk and that, by the way, that's unclear also at this point.

02:34:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
uh, I'm I'm a mixed opinions on that, but if agi really is real and super intelligence really is real, or at least if these ais and they seem to be become more and more useful tools, there is a big opportunity right now, especially if an administration recognizes that. Now your friend David Sachs is the AI czar. Yeah, tell me what his point of view is in all of this.

02:34:39 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
I think he wants to see America win.

02:34:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We're all in favor of that. I agree.

02:34:45 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
And I think David is one of the smartest, most considered people I've met in my life, also one of the most effective operators, like maybe behind in Silicon Valley, sheryl Sandberg, as like a chief operating officer. So he's a true winner and I think America will win in AI and AGI is a very interesting concept because the goalposts keep moving. Like you have the Turing test. You have there's like a half dozen interesting tests. The test I use is is this AI smarter than any living human being? If we have an AI that's smarter than every living human being, then I think we've hit AGI. So what would define that? Well, not just playing chess or not just writing code, but operating in the real world with maybe these robots that we talked about earlier general purpose robots. So you have a general purpose robot out in the world able to solve a problem better than any human.

02:35:49
So I think we will hit that in our lifetime, maybe in less than 10 years, and if we do, we're going to start solving problems that humans are not designed to solve, like cancer. It's pretty hard for us to get to Mars or cure cancer. There's going to be problems we probably just haven't gotten around to that. It's going to as it scurries around, you know, the crevices of information and logic and research. It's going to solve things that we forgot, like maybe we should solve, and that's going to be pretty amazing. And humans always find more work to do.

02:36:28
I believe that, and then abundance will be here. And so you know, we live in a time where, if I were to ask people what they're in the modern world, like you know, how much are they paying for water? Or, you know, are they worried about shelter? In the United States, it's really hard to find somebody who's actually worried about food, shelter, water. We're worried about existential things. We're worried shelter water. We're worried about existential things. We're worried about our fame. We're worried about our kids. You know we're not worried.

02:36:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You operate in some pretty rarefied circles, Jason.

02:36:59 - Benito (Announcement)
I don't know if I would agree with any of that.

02:37:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's a guy right out the door here who's living on the street. Maybe he's doing it because of choice, I don't know.

02:37:08 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Probably addiction and mental illness. So we worry about those things. So, exactly to my point, you know, when I lived in San Francisco and I looked at and I talked to people in the homeless industrial complex, there were more beds than homeless people. There was more food available. They were dumping food in the garbage. It really is an addiction problem. So we have a massive amount of empathy in this country. We have surplus empathy and we have surplus calories and we have surplus beds. Now we may not have an affordable home in every state, you know we might not have, but we have the lowest unemployment of our lifetime. Yeah.

02:37:42
And so we really don't celebrate how great we have it here, and it's a uniquely American trait to be obsessed with what we haven't solved yet, and that's what AI is pretty good at too. So unlimited energy leads to unlimited water, like desalinization is an energy problem and unlimited energy water means unlimited calories. Because agriculture is a function of those two previous things, we're going to live in an incredible time of abundance that exceeds the abundance we have even today. That we don't appreciate. I am incredibly optimistic about this technology's ability to lower suffering, to lower healthcare costs, to lower housing costs. There's a company here in Austin that is making 3D printing cement homes and I had dinner with the founder, jason, recently. Really interesting cat. I forgot the name of the company right now, alex. We'll look it up real quick because he's so good at that. But this 3D printing cement company is extraordinary. They're building like dozens of homes for-.

02:38:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I've seen videos of it. It is remarkable.

02:38:47 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
I thought they were ugly. And then I saw them and I was like I want one.

02:38:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're really like and they're very practical in a lot of ways for heat and so forth.

02:38:57 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
I mean, adobe homes were, like some of the best homes ever made. So this company.

02:39:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You always cheer me up a little. It's all right Be optimistic.

02:39:06 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Yeah, you always cheer me up.

02:39:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You're an optimist and I appreciate that.

02:39:10 - Benito (Announcement)
Okay, wait, wait, wait. Surplus of empathy, though, I think, is going a little too far.

02:39:15 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
That's your title for the show surplus empathy.

02:39:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We need more empathy, for sure.

02:39:20 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Okay, we could use more, didn't Elon say empathy is a disease.

02:39:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Didn't Elon say that's what's wrong with the world is?

02:39:26 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
empathy. He said you could have toxic empathy.

02:39:28 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
All right, all right, guys, let's stop talking about Elon and the government for a minute and bring this back to AGI, because I can hear the screaming from the club to a chat room and they're going oh my God, get back to technology. So I want to make a point about AGI, because I think people get the definition a little bit confused. So I pulled up Google's definition of this and they say that AGI possesses, in theory, human-like intelligence and can perform any intellectual task that a human can. Fair enough, artificial superintelligence is when it surpasses human intelligence and can solve problems that we can't currently solve. I think quite often in the discussion of AGI people conflate it with ASI and have higher expectations for what it is than is reasonable for the near term. So I would say that agi should be possible under jason's time frame, if not a little bit faster, given what we're seeing around the world. Asi, god knows, put it 20 years out in the future, but I just want to make that point. That's by the way.

02:40:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think we had ray kurzweil on intelligent machines a couple of weeks ago. That's exactly what he said 20 years out that's always the number he said it's always 20 years. No, he's been saying 2045 consistently for quite some time yeah, and he said 2029 for agi. Uh consistently, he said it to. He told me that 30 years ago uh icon buildcom slash homes.

02:40:44 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
I mean this is no longer. The 3d printed homes is no longer a very cool project. They're literally on east 17 street in austin. If you go to the east side, which was a place where they told us during southwest 20 years ago, don't go there, you'll die there's now. These are beautiful. Look at them 3d printed homes and they're being built for a fraction of the cost and these things are going to. And if you look at the inside of them, they're gorgeous. Um, this is going to change everything in the world.

02:41:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Um, and this is basically concrete.

02:41:19 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
It's. Yeah, they use a 3d printer to make those ribbons of concrete and if you, if you get to one of the close-ups of the walls, you'll see like, um, it has a very 70s not the brutalist, uh, architecture, but it has like a very beautiful there's a curve to it yeah curves really nice it's like that.

02:41:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, it's like that flintstones house you used to drive by on a 280.

02:41:44 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Uh, yes, on the 280 by the uh yeah, black mountain yeah, yeah yeah, it's exactly like that one. It's it's very interesting.

02:41:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, let me turn off the sound so we can, yeah, watch these guys build a house. I'm going to take our last break, uh, but thank you for cheering me up, jason. I don't know if I buy it, but it's come join me in the delusion despair is never a good place to be so and I do in the long run, I have a lot of faith in this country and the people in this country, I think and technology.

02:42:17
And I do believe in technology, I wouldn't be doing this show, or this is my lifetime, my life work, so I must believe it in a little bit. I just I worry, I'm a worrier, that's all. I'm just a worrywart Jason, I just I worry, I'm a worrier, that's all, I'm just a worrywart. Jason Calacanis is here. Great to have him back visiting the show from his he's slumming really from his hit podcast All In and, of course, this week in Startups Twist, where he is joined by Alex Wilhelm. How are you?

02:42:45 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
on every week.

02:42:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, you're on once in a while.

02:42:47 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
No, Alex is on every show now.

02:42:48 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
Yeah, week. No, you're on once in a while. No, he, alex, is on every show now. Yeah, every day of the week monday, wednesday, friday we do a lot of shows and we have a lot of fun.

02:42:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
How come, uh, how come your kids keep you from doing this show, but not?

02:42:57 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
uh, because if my nanny was here on sunday evenings then it wouldn't be an ah, we need to get you a better.

02:43:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You need a robot, nanny.

02:43:05 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
That's what you need absolutely one x figure, or one of the chinese companies, come on y'all get us that robot nanny from the jetsons, because then I would have so much.

02:43:13 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Oh, then I could go shopping and like need to make baby stop crying. Parsing language model how to make baby stop crying give bottle or put in closet no milk?

02:43:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
okay, turn baby into paper clips babies are in closet our show today. Kinsta, not robots by kinsta, but this is great hosting that you will love to create your website, whether you run an online business which, by by the way, as you know, can be very challenging manage the web hosting while juggling all those other things. You don't want to worry about your web hosting. Kinsta offers managed WordPress hosting. That's the gold standard course. It has an expert team that handles everything for you.

02:44:06 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Do you know about Kinsta too? It turns out I do, because with WordPress, you know it's an open source project, which is fantastic. Yes, and everybody goes through this experience. You decide, oh, I can do it myself.

02:44:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, no, no, Managed Got to go managed.

02:44:20 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
And then what happens? You forget to upgrade it, you get hacked. You then find your entire life is every 16 weeks, 20 weeks having to deal with some software bug. Or you could use Kinsta and they solve all those problems for a very low, reasonable fee. Yeah.

02:44:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think many of us went through that stage of doing your own, rolling your own WordPress. I did many times, don't do it.

02:44:44 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Don't do it. I mean it's open source, which means you can change it. And that's a great possibility if you have a full-time developer team Right.

02:44:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Kinsta's bundled up all the things you need, all the essentials to make your site stress-free, with speeds that wow your visitors. That's important, right? Security that never sleeps you really need that. And a dashboard so easy to use, so intuitive you'll wonder why life isn't this easy. When you hit a snag, good news you'll talk to real humans 24-7, 365 days a year. In short, kinsta has perfected, perfected hosting for those who want a professional result without needing a technical background. They don't just host WordPress websites, they deliver blazing speed. In fact, your site could run up to 200% faster. Ironclad security, reliability and don't worry about moving if you're on another place. No, no, no. They will migrate your entire website for free and you get a 30-day money-back guarantee, so there's no risk. When it comes to security, kinsta is in a league of its own. It's one of the few wordpress hosting providers that backs its promises with multiple enterprise certifications, and I I was so impressed by the custom control panel at kinsta. Of course, if you need help, they've got wordpress pros not ai chatbots, but real humans who will respond in minutes and tackle even the trickiest problems.

02:46:09
Who uses kinsta? I'll just give you a three, but there's lots. Trip advisor uses kinsta. Nasa you ever hear of them? The national aeronautics and space administration? Yeah, they use kinsta, indeed uses kinsta. 120 000 businesses trust kinsta with their wordpress websites one of my investments does comcom.

02:46:31 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Yeah, they've been using it for a long time and you know that the key thing is um that they have that migration team. So whatever service you're on, you know how hard it is to migrate.

02:46:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Leo, that's like it's a miserable, miserable thing miserable I have lost, they have so much content from my website as I have moved from one to another yeah, by hand myself. And there's.

02:46:51 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
You know, it's just not good, kinsta has a swat team waiting to do your mind. Calmcom uses kinsta, they do, and that is a big site. You know that's a huge site.

02:47:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, and by the way if you're trying to be calm. If the site is slow, that is gonna raise your blood pressure. So calm has to have good Calm down.

02:47:10 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Calm down everybody. Use Kinsta, You'll be calm like calm. K-i-n-s-t-acom slash twit.

02:47:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
If you're tired of being your own website support team, switch your hosting to Kinsta. Get your first month free and don't worry about the move. They're going to handle the whole transition for you. No tech expertise is required. Kincom twit get started right now. It really works. K-i-n-s-t-a dot com slash twit no tech expertise necessary. Look at if it's good enough for calm.

02:47:40 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
It's good enough for you and the rocket scientists that nasa have, and nasa and indeed, indeed, indeed they do. Indeed you can stay calm at nasa when you're under a ton of pressure yes, that's right in mind.

02:47:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There you go, my great can you be on every show from now on? You need to be my hype man, jason.

02:47:59 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Well, you know, the funniest was it was so funny I remember one time I would say who, but a guest who is, let's just say, very anti-DRM.

02:48:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes.

02:48:09 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
And I got into it.

02:48:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, I know exactly who you're talking about.

02:48:13 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
I'm not going to use honorable because it has DRM and I was like listen, I'm an author, you're an author, you know a little DRM is like what's required by the publishing industry. So just pay the 10 bucks. You don't need to have the drm. It's a reasonable thing and if you really want to, you could buy the book, get a tape recorder and record it yourself and then you publish it without us.

02:48:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
we got into it he still, by the way, does not use audible and he's going to be on intelligent machines on wednesday, but we won't say who we won't say who, but he has a new book out and he does have a new book out, Picks and Shovels. It's quite good. You should read Picks and Shovels you should.

02:48:48 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
I think he's a great thinker. I'm glad he exists in the world.

02:48:51 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
But you know, not good for an audible ad reader, he doesn't agree. This is who we're talking about.

02:48:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He's got very strong beliefs about the DRM, strong beliefs and I love him for that. Oh, by the way, highly recommend. Ars Technica had a very good piece today talking about Butch and Sunni. Remember, butch and Sunni were the astronauts who got stuck on the ISS. It turns out that Boeing Starliner wasn't that good at all to begin with. They, they, uh, so the uh, the pieces by eric berger, who is, it turns out, a friend, uh of uh butch's uh. There's butch willmore getting welcomed back because they got home thanks to, thanks to your buddy elon, whose starliner took them home. Yeah, uh, but the boeing craft that brought them not so hot. The story is incredible. Highly recommended. It's at Ars Technica, I guess because they're friends. Berger got Butch to talk about the real issues that happened. They lost thrusters.

02:50:02 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
That's not good.

02:50:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They were thrusters. That's not good. They were sitting there and, in fact, nasa's rules at one point. They're sitting within feet of the International Space Station but their thrusters have gone out. Nasa's rules were you come back home. If you lose this many thrusters Four thrusters you come back home. And they decided to stay and they were able to maneuver it and get docked, but it was pretty hairy.

02:50:30
And one thing butch wilmore said which I think really is important is the heroes at nasa's mission control. Now, this is a was a boeing launch, but they agreed to contract uh mission control at johnson space center Center in Houston to fly a Starliner. So flight director Ed Van Sise, it's 15 years. He's been Capcom or, I'm sorry, flight director for NASA.

02:50:55
Wilmore said thankfully, these folks are heroes and please print this what do heroes look like? Well, heroes put their tank on and they run into fiery buildings and pull people out of it. That's a hero. Well, heroes put their tank on and they run into fiery buildings and pull people out of it. That's a hero. But heroes also sit in their cubicle for decades studying their systems and knowing their systems front and back. And when there is no time to assess a situation and go and talk to people and ask what do you think they know their system so well? They come up with a plan on the fly and that is a hero, and there are several of them in mission control. Wow, um, really amazing story. Uh, I, I won't, I won't, uh, I won't um spoil it for you, but I highly recommend it. Uh, fantastic interview.

02:51:39 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Uh, eric berger got it uh for, uh, ours good reminder for people that competition, um, amongst these providers to our government is a great thing. You know, having a single provider means complacency. You know, uh and um. You know that's the thing that's really changed. We talked about weapons systems earlier. The providers would just do overruns because they get paid what's called cost plus. They get paid a certain amount to. You know, whatever the cost of it is to build plus a little extra, that doesn't lead to the best outcomes. Capitalism, all of this competition and having multiple vendors, that's so critical although I'm just gonna say it.

02:52:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, your pal elon has just done some big contracts. Spacex is now the military's top launch provider, and this is where you know it might have been better if elon hadn't been so involved in government, because then you could say, oh, congratulations, well done, you earned this Well he does, who else is going to? Do it.

02:52:53 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
It's 90 percent cheaper now. That's true.

02:52:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And Bezos isn't going to do it, even though Blue Origin is starting to move in that direction and obviously Boeing is the wrong.

02:53:02 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
You know who we gave our money to previously.

02:53:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah.

02:53:05 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
For SpaceX.

02:53:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Russia. Yeah, that's right.

02:53:07 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
That's right, we were dependent on Putin before this, I'm going to go down with the SpaceX ship because I really love the company, because it's lowering the price of me getting to space at some point in time. You want to go Really? Oh, strap me with duct tape, let's freaking go to space.

02:53:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, duct tape, let's freaking go to space. Okay, but I saw that you're starving and you're eating candy now, so I just want to suggest stop reading the chat, get used to space food. Okay before you what are you eating?

02:53:34 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
don't eat that these are gonna make you even hungrier these are trader joe's peanut eminem knockoffs that I'm waiting to eat when the shows are okay, you can eat.

02:53:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We're we're on our last story, so start eating your peanut evidence.

02:53:47 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
I want to go back to the point about SpaceX.

02:53:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, good.

02:53:49 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
Because I think that there is a lot of things we can criticize Doge about. It doesn't matter your politics, you can talk about it however you want, but when it comes to American space dominance, there's one name. Right now, I can't wait until jeff bez's company is competing with elon, launch for launch, dollar for dollar, a kilogram for kilogram. Bring it on at that point I'll worry about it. But right now there's one company in the world that is shooting up what jason's like 80 of all rocket launches right now spacex. Of course they're going to get the contract. Who else is doing it?

02:54:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
and I guess you're right, there is.

02:54:20 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
No one has squandered decades of public and private largesse, with incompetence and mismanagement. And so if we, if elon makes an extra 50 bucks because bo no, that's a good point. Yeah, what are we gonna do? Cry about it? We're gonna throw the rockets up with our arms. No, we're gonna where are you?

02:54:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
are you gonna go to mars? Where do you want to go?

02:54:42 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
you tell me where what seats you pick a rocket?

02:54:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm. You wouldn't be satisfied just riding jeff bezos's penis right. You want to go beyond the stratosphere? Well, it looks all right. What do you call it?

02:54:55 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
it's a rocket. Rockets are phallic because of you know gravity and whatnot yeah, but his is more phallic than most it is. It is more phallic than most. This is twit after hours it is um, this is.

02:55:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is twit after hours. That's right, it is, we are.

02:55:15 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
Neptune, mercury, mars, anywhere you'll go anywhere, rocket. I am a science fiction nerd in my DNA. I have been reading about this since I was tiny. I want to go, I don't care where, I don't even I'll go on a boeing rocket. Let's go. I'll blow up, let's do it all right, I'm sorry, I said that about it's okay.

02:55:35 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
This is means we're an hour three it's very long, it's very big.

02:55:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It is yes um, do you tell me what you know about the word buffer bloat? Does that? Does that ring a bell at all?

02:55:48 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
I'm. I mean, I could take a guess at it, but I've never heard that term believe it or not, you you?

02:55:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
you owe a debt of gratitude to a man named dave todd, who passed away uh yesterday. One of the unsung heroes of the internet. This is eric s raymond writing on x. Uh. Dave, known on x as m tot t m t a h t because his birth name was michael, a true hacker of the old school who touched the lives of everybody using x. His work on mitigating buffer bloat improved practical tcpip performance tremendously, especially around video streaming and other applications requiring low latency. Without him, netflix and similar services might still be plagued by glitches and stutters. The problem occurred because RAM got so cheap that router manufacturers started building in extra memory into their routers, which had, unfortunately, uh the, the consequence of slowing routers down. Dave discovered this. He called it buffer bloat. He even wrote a tool that let people find out how much buffer bloat their router had, and was able to convince router companies. You need to fix this.

02:57:05
Raymond says Dave should have been famous. He should have been rich. If he had a cent for every dollar dollar value he generated in the world, he probably could have bought the entire country of nicaragua and had enough left over to finance a space program. He joked about wanting to do the latter, but I don't think he was actually joking, alex. But he wasn't elon musk when he wasn't eric s raymond, he but he wasn't Elon Musk and he wasn't Eric S Raymond. He didn't want to run a business and he didn't want the crap that came from being Mr Famous Guy, so a beautiful, I thought, eulogy to a man that probably many people never heard of and they may not even have heard about Buffer Blow. They would have if Dave Todd hadn't fixed it. Uh, for us all. Um, david todd passed away.

02:57:48 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
Uh, this week they all stand on the shoulders of giants who built things and maintained them and often gave them away for free. It's true? Yeah, shout out to everyone who builds open source anything just yeah yeah I'm very grateful yeah, we all should be.

02:58:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I, I agree, and maybe that is the thing that. Um, here's a picture of dave playing his guitar. He was famous for he would write songs about spacex, actually, just in case case you're curious, it's all come full circle yeah, yeah, um, he founded the buffer bloat project with jim gettis ran a couple of uh projects around. It refereed the buffer bloat mailing list a great mailing list, by the way, only 59.

02:58:31 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
yeah, he was a young guy man yeah, so yeah, he fixed it.

02:58:34 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
somebody we, our, our grandparents and their parents, like would die at age, and now we see somebody pass away at 59, and we're like, oh my God, so young, isn't it amazing?

02:58:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah.

02:58:49 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
Well, we stopped smoking inside. Back to your earlier point about cigars. Turns out that and no lead in gasoline.

02:58:55 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Just think about what technology has done for mitigating cancer. I mean, cancer was just a death sentence. But 50 years ago, and now.

02:59:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's now I think we're going to cure cancer in my lifetime. My God, I hope so. We've certainly mitigated it, I tell you that and these GLPs, if you look at the what do they call it?

02:59:12 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
The four horsemen of the apocalypse, or whatever it is. It's like diabetes, you know, and heart disease and everything, and obesity, like it's really having a dramatic impact on all of that.

02:59:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So of that, so can you talk to my doctor and ask him to write me a prescription for oh?

02:59:29 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
even better than oh, oh, oh oh. Zempic is compounding pharmacy compounding.

02:59:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You can't do that anymore because the fda said there's no shortage of ozempic anymore you can get monjarno.

02:59:41 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
You can get it all. I get it from a compounding pharmacy. It's unbelievable, yeah him.

02:59:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Stock tumbled when the fda said, yeah, you can't compound it anymore, but there are compounding pharmacies that make semi-glutide glp-1 antagonists all of these seem to.

02:59:55 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
I've done four different ones now.

02:59:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I am super did they all work. So there's ozempic manjaro. So there's Ozempic Manjaro Wegovi.

03:00:04 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Wegovi Manjaro. I think is like in escalating steps, and then there's the new ones RETA, R-E-T-A something, and they all do they all have the same?

03:00:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You've done them all. Do they all have the same effect? Are they party?

03:00:16 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
drugs? Do you go to raves? Absolutely Just everybody like you buy a bunch of donuts and then you take osempic and you just look at him and go, I'm not interested I wish I could find this.

03:00:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think it was a sub stack uh post, yeah. But he said look, the widespread use now of these glp-1 uh drugs is doing more than just helping with diabetes and weight loss. It is actually getting rid of impulse buys and it's going to dramatically change our economy, because so much of our economy is based on late night purchases on Instagram.

03:00:51 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
That really- and late night eating.

03:00:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, that was my and late night eating.

03:00:54 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
When I look back on how I gained all the weight. I would just do these late Smoking addiction yeah, all the good stuff.

03:01:01
And it definitely does change your brain where I didn't realize the amount of food noise I was experiencing. I thought about food constantly. I loved food. I thought about it constantly. Now I think about it once in a while, but I could eat four or five slices of pizza. Now I'm just like I eat a slice of pizza and I don't even look at the second one, which is crazy for a kid from Brooklyn who, like I, was in a war to see how many slices of pizza I could eat before my brothers got in there.

03:01:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We would like be attacking, but you can't ever go off it now, right, Jason?

03:01:32 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
I have gone off of it multiple times. I cycle on and off and I always the same thing. I gained back two to seven pounds, but I don't gain back 40 or 50. So I do think it is.

03:01:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
One of the reasons it's not recommended for people over 65, which include me, and I am a type two diabetic, so I would love to do this is thyroid problems, heart issues, that kind of thing.

03:01:53 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
I think you have to. What I did was I balanced, being obese, which I had tipped over into shockingly for somebody who ran marathons my whole life and that versus.

03:02:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That just shows you, exercise does not fix this problem.

03:02:07 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
I think at a certain point, if you've gained so much weight like when you get past 30, 40, 50 pounds it's just too hard to get it off. And that was the problem I had. And then what I found was, once I had gotten off the first 20, I started to want to work out more. My sciatica down, my leg went away, my sleeping got better, my you know, everything just got better. And then I started skiing again. And then I started doing 10 days of skiing, 20, 30, 40 days of skiing a year. And you know, here I am, and now I like to lift weights and I don't feel the need to eat as much food.

03:02:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You look great, you look fantastic.

03:02:43 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
What's most important is how I feel. I feel better. You know, I feel a lot better. I sleep better. I don't have to say Attica, I feel better about myself when I see myself on camera. I'm just like you know what. I feel better and I don't think you have to have too much pride about it, like, oh, I have to do it, naturally.

03:03:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It turns out some people just have more this glp. It's pretty hard in their system.

03:03:08 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
It's very hard and, yeah, the whole system's. I spent my whole life dieting. Yeah, I know you have you and I both have had conversations about this so many times.

03:03:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I, I think, a low dose plus, now that I'm making bagels every week, I'm really. I did see that you're in your sourdough. I have. I have figured out how to make a perfect new york bagel. What, and that is not a good thing, that's dangerous well, I mean how many be?

03:03:26 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
honest how many bagels in a sitting do you eat, are you? No?

03:03:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
no, I never eat more than one, but the problem is it makes it, doesn't. Fortunately I found takers and if you guys live nearby I would. I know I would, but you're in providence, I can't have you heard of fedex leo? It exists yeah, I was thinking of fedexing my mom some, so maybe I send you both what did you make?

03:03:46
an egg bagel you make pop, I make a standard sourdough bagel, but the key you got to boil it and I've tried, you know, I've tried different the official ways to boil it in lye, what uh? Which is? So? I bought a bottle of food grade lye which is also labeled drain opener uh and it has a big skull and crossbones on it and you have to wear eye protection when you use it. But you don't use very much. You use five, five grams per liter of water and that's how pretzels and bagels get browned. By the way, they're boiled in lye, but my preference is to boil it in um malt barley syrup, which is sweet and delicious and it browns it guys, what happened to the show?

03:04:31 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
what are we? Oh, the show.

03:04:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm sorry, I love you guys. Thank you so much for being here, jason, I miss you will you come back soon.

03:04:40 - Benito (Announcement)
I know you're a big star and everything but whatever come on.

03:04:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
our advertisers are demanding that you show up for every show now. Host of the All In podcast. He's an angel investor, of course, this weekend's startups. What else do you want to promote? Anything else?

03:04:55 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
No, that's it. I mean, I'm really proud of the work Alex is doing on this weekend's startups. The audience loves them and it just creates a. You know, just a. It's great to have a great point guard, you know he's just so good at, on the fly, having all the facts together.

03:05:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He does that what Joe Rogan's producer does, right? Joe will say hey, what is that?

03:05:19 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
And plus, plus, plus, you know, I think, having somebody who can lay the foundation for you and set the play up and then let you freestyle. It's kind of like, you know, when you're a broadcaster, you have the person who's calling the game and they have the color commentary.

03:05:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He's your color guy. No, I'm the color guy, he's the guy who sets it up Like hey, we're on the court.

03:05:32 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Here we are, and then he sets the pick for me and then I can shoot the ball and it takes a lot of load off of me. You know you do both here. You give your commentary I need it.

03:05:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I need a, I need a point guard, I need somebody. I need somebody to do the rebound.

03:05:45 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
We get older, it's. It's hard to tee up every story, isn't it yeah?

03:05:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, it's hard to tee up every story jamie vernon is young jamie on joe rogan, and so, alex, you're his young jamie. Yeah, I did, because I don't listen, uh, so I just want to be very clear about that. I have no idea what happens on the joe rogan he's.

03:06:06 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
When he has comedians on, it's great. Yes, well, he's a comedian.

03:06:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes yes my son loves him people, young men, love him. He's in the man of the what is it called the man of manosphere, manosphere. I am in the non-manosphere, yeah, along with this wonderful guy right here, mr alex wilhelm, who is a daddy, a husband and a great writer. How's it? Are you glad you're not at tech crunch now that they're owned by somebody who bought them? Somebody else bought?

03:06:36 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
them?

03:06:36 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
oh, it's some private equity they own zd net and all those collection of assets from the yeah, which I think means this thing is going to die a slow death it's so sad yeah, it sucks. Yeah, and they didn't. Yahoo didn't sell in gadget. I'm trying to talk to jim linzone about selling it back to me that's right.

03:06:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They bought web weblogs inc. From you, didn't they?

03:06:58 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
they bought aol did. Then aol got bought by yahoo or merged with yahoo in this private equity firm my friend jim lenzone, who ran cena for many years. He was running it, but for some reason I guess they were just fed up with tech crunch I think like would you buy because to manage, because because kevin bought, dig back would?

03:07:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
you buy?

03:07:15 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
back in gadget 100, I would buy it back.

03:07:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, um wow yeah, how about tiktok? How do you feel about tiktok? That's a little bit.

03:07:25 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
If you buy Jason, if you buy Engadget, can I run it? Yes, 100%.

03:07:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Why would you want to get into a dying business, Jason?

03:07:31 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Well, no, what I would do is I would reconceptualize it around the new mediums that are out there. Yeah, it's a great brand. It means a lot to people it does. But you'd have to think how would young people consume Engadget today, which means probably shorts. And if you look at what Marquez does, I think he is what Marquez does on his YouTube channel Marquez Brownlee yeah. Yeah, he's kind of like one of the kids of Engadget. Right, he grew up on Engadget.

03:08:03
That's right, that's right, and I grew up on you and Dvorak and PC magazine, so we're all not that young, I think I'm 10 years younger than you, and then he's 20 years younger than both.

03:08:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I guess it's the next generation, isn't it? You kind of are the next generation.

03:08:19 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
So you got to think, well, where do? Where do they hang out? They hang out on TikTok and Instagram and YouTube and stuff.

03:08:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There seems like somebody like you, somebody sharp, who's really thinking about what is happening with media, should be owning some of these properties and steer them in the right direction.

03:08:35 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
There's two ways to go. You either have to reinvent them or you're just going to grind them out to get like whatever. Well, that's what the private equity guys do. And that's what they're doing. The private equity guys are just grinding them down and like that's what the private equity guys and that's what they're doing. The private equity guys are just grinding them down and like.

03:08:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's why you see on their red I call it red lobstering them yes, you know you.

03:08:52 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
You basically have to lower the costs and then you have to increase the revenue, and then what that means is the soul is kind of wrung out of it, like they're going to wring the soul out of it, and that's the problem with media is with media is you need to have an impresario who cares about it. You need to have Peter Rojas, you need to have Leo Laporte, you need to have you Alex. On cautious optimism, you need to have somebody who actually cares and is the standard bearer for the brand promise. And what private equity does is they just say lower the costs and ring every dollar out, which means that what they're going to do is put like here are the top 10 waffle makers on TechCrunch to get the affiliate link. You see how many people are like top 10 waffles.

03:09:32
And that was great for Wirecutter, but that wasn't in Gadgets Everybody's done it now.

03:09:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Everybody's done it now.

03:09:38 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
It just becomes an affiliate.

03:09:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Plus, they're all copying each other's articles. Jeff Jarvis makes this point all the time. If you do a search for an article, it's all the same article reproduced in a hundred tech meme. You know. You look at the headline and then there's 50 other publications of the same article.

03:09:53 - Jason Calacanis (Guest)
Yes, and it's just a race to the bottom. And what happened at Engadget was people would reblog us and they would not have to do the original reporting and then they could spend more time on seo, right? So then they would beat us and it was like, oh my god, how do I beat this?

03:10:11 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
and it was by having a soul no, have a soul people will come to the original because they want the real, authentic, uncompromised thing right, that's what I think the verge's paywall is going to work, because the verge does have a soul. They have a raft of people, that people, really they have neil I, that's really.

03:10:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's the story there.

03:10:29 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
Yeah, an absolute cornerstone of the verge. Yeah, but uh, I should go check on, uh, make sure all the kids been down. Go have some. Go have some, there's two, go have some chocolate covered peanuts.

03:10:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All right, well, I will thank you. Jason alex love you, we'll see you soon, thank you all for joining us. We do Twit every. You guys can leave now while I do the business. Part of the show Take care guys.

03:10:52
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Apr 6 2025 - I Know of BigBalls
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