Why Crypto’s Thriving Post-SBF, Sports Betting Crisis Deepens, Jon Stewart vs. AI

Ranjan Roy from Margins is back for our weekly discussion of the latest tech news, with special guest Zeke Faux of Bloomberg News and Number Go Up fame. We cover 1) Why crypto is thriving after poster boy SBF was convicted and sentenced 2) The latest rise of memcoins including dogwifhat and NFTs like CryptoDickbutts 3) Is this evidence of a deeper societal problem or just gambling? 4) The resilience of crypto, including Tether 5) Zeke's reporting on pig butchering scams 6) The rise of Nudes In Bio scams on Twitter 7) Sports betting's deepening crisis 8) Louisiana bans prop bets on college players 9) Jon Stewart's position against AI 10) Is a broader societal backlash against AI coming. --- Enjoying Big Technology Podcast? Please rate us five stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ in your podcast app of choice. For weekly updates on the show, sign up for the pod newsletter on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/6901970121829801984/ Want a discount for Big Technology Premium? Here’s 40% off for the first year: https://tinyurl.com/bigtechnology Questions? Feedback? Write to: [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  Why is crypto thriving after SBF? The sports betting crisis is deepening and Jon Stewart comes out against AI. All that and more is coming up with special guest Zeke Fox, right after this. This episode is brought to you by Genesis. What does it actually take to put a Gentic AI to work across an entire enterprise? I recently spoke with Genesis chairman and CEO Tony Bates about why orchestration is emerging as a competitive advantage in customer experience and what companies need to get right in the AI era. Then I sat down with Adam Mitchell, head of enterprise business solutions at Voya Financial to go inside a large scale agentic CX transformation, including the business decisions, trade offs, and lessons along the way.

• 0:45Alex Kantrowitz?

  You can watch both conversations now on my YouTube channel today. It's never been more challenging to get frontier compute. How do you know where to look, who to trust, or how much to pay? Akash is an open cloud that provides easy access, flexibility, and peace of mind. That's how companies like Razor were able to cut their inference cost by 15 times. Visit akash.network/alex for free consultation. That's akash.network/alex for free consultation. Welcome to Big Technology Podcast Friday edition, where we break down the news in our cool-headed and nuanced format. We have quite a show for you today. We have Ranjan Roy here. Ranjan is back from France. Ranjan, welcome.

• 1:28Speaker 01

  I'm very excited about today. Number Go Up was one of my favorite books of last year.

• 1:33Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, this is another episode that's Ranjan-inspired. Ranjan, you kept shouting out Number Go Up on the show. I read it, definitely one of my favorite books as well. And we're so lucky to have the author here, Zeke Fox, who's the author of Number Go Up. He's also a reporter at Bloomberg. Zeke, welcome to the show.

• 1:49Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me on.

• 1:51Alex Kantrowitz?

  And I should, I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that it's Earthquake Friday here in New York. I know anybody listening to this show is probably over the long media cycle that New Yorkers have had over a manageable 4.8 magnitude earthquake, but I'm not. I mean, we just had the earth shake beneath our feet. Pretty cool stuff.

• 2:12Speaker 01

  We should continue talking about it for weeks on end as New Yorkers experiencing that. That's my platform.

• 2:19Alex Kantrowitz?

  We also have some, some big earth shaking developments. See, see what I did there? In the crypto world, including the fact that SBF has, is going away for 25 years, or at least that's the sentence. It will probably be less than that. Last week, we talked about the sentencing. This week, I want to talk really about the most confusing thing about all this, which is that SBF is gone, a 25 year sentence, yet Bitcoin is up 53% this year. Meme coins are proliferating, and it seems like crypto really hasn't lost a step. In fact, it's gaining. And, you know, Zeke, you have a story out in Bloomberg talking about how the fall of FTX wasn't the exception, or it wasn't just a good company that had some bad decisions. It was rotten to the core, and it's a warning to all of crypto.

• 3:04Alex Kantrowitz?

  So with that lens, I want you to explain to us why crypto continues, is having really a banner, banner year, when the warning signs are still ever present, and a lot of the problems that led to the downfall of FTX and a legion of other exchanges and banks, you know, they, they have not been fixed.

• 3:23Speaker 02

  One funny detail from that story is that apparently Sam Bankman Fried has been giving some trading advice to the guards at MDC Brooklyn, the prison where he's been confined since before the trial. And he told them that they should sell Ripple and buy Solana. And if they took his advice, you know, they probably like doubled their money.

• 3:49Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. It was excellent trading advice.

• 3:52Speaker 02

  Yeah. And, but, so all of crypto is back. But then the flip side is that we learned at this trial that if anything, FT, the FTX scam started really early. They were dipping into the customer fund. He was eyeing the customer funds before he even started the exchange and started dipping into them pretty much right away. And when you talk to crypto traders now, I mean, I've heard this from quite a few people. It's almost like they've dropped the pretense that they're creating the future of finance, that something cool is going on, and totally embraced number go up thinking. You don't hear people talking about DeFi.

• 4:36Speaker 02

  Talking about NFTs, I don't even really get the same chatter from like, normal people being excited about crypto. But they're buying just like ever stupider meme coins, and for now, they're, they're all going up. Uh, it's, it's truly unbelievable to me. I, I would be lying if I said I predicted this. But conveniently-

• 4:58Alex Kantrowitz?

  You did though, your book is- Your book is called Number Go Up, Zeke. You can't take, can't deny credit for what's happening right now.

• 5:04Speaker 01

  Take credit, this is your time. That, that was my, that is my favorite part of this entire cycle is that, yeah, exactly. The blockchain is not the key development. As you said, DeFi, it's not DAOs and decentralized communities. It's literally the price is going up and everyone is happy. But-

• 5:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:21Speaker 01

  But, but yeah, what, what are the mechanics behind here? Yeah. What, what do you think the mechanics are that are pushing this? It's, it's, if it's, if there's no underlying narrative, each previous hype cycle had, you know, a very clear narrative, then what is it?

• 5:37Speaker 02

  I would separate it into two categories. And category one is just like, gambling is fun. And people love playing the lottery, even though the odds of you winning are like 1 in 300 million. And so people want to play this meme coin game, or not everybody, but just some percentage of people find this game entertaining. And thus it continues. Um, I mean, one funny example of that is this guy, Machi Big Brother. I don't know if he already had the dog or acquired it for this purpose, but he got like a very cute dog. And then he posted his Solana address and said like,

• 6:20Speaker 02

  you know, if you send me money at to this address, I'm going to send you some dog tokens. I mean, it was, there was no formal setup. It was just like, here's my address, send money, the dog tokens will come. People sent like $40 million.

• 6:35Alex Kantrowitz?

  Is this Dog with Hat? Because Dog with Hat is my favorite of all the coins.

• 6:39Speaker 02

  Oh. Oh, no, this is like Dog with Hat is like a blue chip stock. It's kind of boring. People have moved on to like new, uh, new dog tokens and cat tokens.

• 6:51Alex Kantrowitz?

  I just love the way that journalists have to write about this. So this was on Yahoo Finance. It's talking about Dog with Hat. It says, based on the Solana chain, the token is based on a meme of a dog wearing a pink knitted hat, hat, a cap. So it makes sense that the project's headline is that it's literally just a dog with a hat. Despite its simplicity and lack of innovative ideas, the token has performed far better than anyone could have imagined. It began trading in 2024 for just seven cents, but quickly gained steam. By the end of February, the price surpassed $1. By the end of March, the price broke an all time high and reached $4.85, a gain of 7,000% in less than three months. Dog with Hat, telling you, there's something to it.

• 7:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, so this is just like, it's this sort of, it's like the meme stocks, like GameStop or AMC. And where it's just sort of, it's sort of this fun new game that didn't really exist in markets before. Where it's like, it's like a pump and dump scheme, but people are doing it to themselves. They're like, let's, let's all buy Dog with Hat. And if enough people buy it, it's going to go up and I'm going to get out before, I'm going to be one of the lucky ones who gets out before it all collapses. And I was trying to research like the psychology behind this. I was reading a 1936 book by John Maynard Keynes.

• 8:19Speaker 02

  And he said, uh, he compared the stock market to a game of musical chairs and said like, hey, people just, it's a game that we can, everyone still enjoys playing it. Even knowing that there are going to be like winners and losers. It's kind of like a zero sum game. So I think that explains a lot of the crypto activity. Then you've got Bitcoin, which is a little different, although maybe just sort of a more long-term version of the same thing where.

• 8:53Speaker 02

  People have sort of given up on this idea that Bitcoin is the future of finance, that it's good for transactions. But you see the price going up, you start to feel like, oh, man, wouldn't it be nice if I had some of that in my portfolio? I wish I had something that gained 50% this year. You buy, and that pushes the price up a little more. And so, also addressed by Keynes conveniently, we're all trying to guess, not like, do we think Bitcoin is good? But like, do we think that other people think that Bitcoin is good? Or do we think that, we're trying to guess, like, other people's opinions of this?

• 9:33Speaker 02

  And lately, everyone's opinions have been, "Look at the price going up, let's get in on it." And I keep coming back to this idea that, in the long run, value has to come from some sort of profitable use case.

• 9:50Alex Kantrowitz?

  Don't be ridiculous, Zeke. Come on.

• 9:53Speaker 01

  Number go up.

• 9:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:55Alex Kantrowitz?

  This is amazing.

• 9:56Speaker 01

  I like that we are bringing in Keynesian historical references, whereas, to me, the more interesting part was the psychological part of essentially a self-inflicted pump and dump. People want to pump and dump onto themselves, but in reality, that is what meme coin trading is.

• 10:16Alex Kantrowitz?

  This is from Molly White this week. She has this amazing story. "There is a project promising to rug pull, and it's raised almost $29,000." And this is what she says, "A project describing itself as the world's first meme coin pre-announced as a rug pull was explicit in its marking. Do not buy this coin, it will go to zero." Despite that, people sent the creator over 8.8 ETH, which is $29,000 approximately, during the project's pre-sale. I mean, does it get any dumber than this?

• 10:51Speaker 02

  You know, I feel like part of crypto is sort of a competition to come up with the dumbest ideas, so that everyone will be like, wow, this one really takes the cake. Let me invest in this one. There's this like kind of nihilistic attitude that dumber is better. And I thought, I had always admired the NFT collection Crypto Dick Butts. And do you remember this one?

• 11:18Speaker 01

  One of the greats, yeah.

• 11:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, so it was like butts, pixelated butts with penises growing out of them. And I thought, this is the dumbest one ever. I can see why this went to, you know, $5,000. And if I could think of something dumber, maybe I could be a billionaire. But I was never able to think of something dumber than that. But now, yeah, with the dog coins, people have topped it.

• 11:51Speaker 01

  Well, here's my theory on this is, is do you believe there is something more sophisticated? I don't want to use the word nefarious behind all of this, in the sense that one of the things that always I remember when Beeple sold the, I think it was $64 million digital art, it was essentially kind of like crypto NFT promoters who were buying that using crypto given gains. And then they were going to, like going on, once they create that hype cycle, to sell other tokens, try to make more money on top of it. So the initial ridiculousness, you know, the same way with the rug pull, maybe is the idea, put a little money, you

• 12:33Speaker 01

  put eight ETH in the dumbest thing out there, and then the thing you're selling to the market is actually not that dumb as, you know, the rug pull token. Like, are there, are there sophisticated ideas behind Crypto Dick Butt and the project Rug Pull?

• 12:49Alex Kantrowitz?

  That might be the best question ever asked on this podcast.

• 12:53Speaker 01

  I did it with a serious voice, too.

• 12:56Speaker 02

  I'm not gonna, I don't want to accuse Mr. Rugpole of anything. But I'm just gonna throw this out there as a possibility of something that, a scheme that one could do. I mean, I could announce, let's say we all teamed up. I could announce Rugpole token. And we, let's say we all have, we're all working together. And then you guys could send me, you know, seven ETH. And then the internet would see this and be like, oh, looks like Rugpole token's really taking off. It's collected seven ETH. Somebody else sends me one ETH. And we just made, I mean, it's very easy to make these tokens. We just made, you know, a one ETH profit. We could split it three ways.

• 13:39Speaker 02

  So, like, the people who are organizing these coins, it would not be difficult for them to rig it so that they were gonna profit no matter what happened. I'm not saying that they all are. But like, when you come in and like, you're sending some money in because you think it's funny on the internet, like, the odds are against you. The insiders, there's at least like, a possibility that they've rigged this in their favor. I mean, they didn't set it up just to laugh. I mean, you never know. Maybe they did, but there's some chance they didn't just set it up to laugh.

• 14:12Alex Kantrowitz?

  First of all, great business idea. We'll be in touch after the show. Second, is there something broader about our society right now? Where we have, for instance, potentially not given a large portion of a society a path to, you know, build wealth? Like, last week on the show, Reid Albergati and I were joking about like, you know, how difficult it is to build retirement savings? And is it that we've just created such a desperate moment in society that people decide that they need to go this route? I mean, there was a story that I read recently about people taking their student loans and putting them into sports betting. It's insane. But is there a broader commentary that we should be thinking about here? We talk about all this insanity.

• 14:56Speaker 02

  I totally think you're right. And I once had a really interesting conversation with a closet salesman at Ikea. And like, I chat everybody up about crypto. So we started talking crypto and meme stocks and he'd he'd lost some money on them. And I was telling him, I hope I wasn't being too obnoxious, but just trust me, this fit in the flow of conversation. I was telling him, you know, I just go with

• 15:26Speaker 02

  broad market ETFs and that historically, they've gone up, you know, eight or 10% a year. And I think it's kind of a fool's game to try and beat the market. And he was like, that might be well and good for you, person who's about to drop, you know, a thousand bucks on a closet. I work here. I don't have any extra money. I need 100x. Like, I'm gonna go buy the next crypto token and hope that it helps me get to my financial goals because 8 or 10% is not doing anything for me.

• 15:57Speaker 01

  I'll disagree with both of you here, though. I the narrative that, you know, after the financial crisis, people lost faith in traditional econ like the banks and infrastructure and obviously student loan weight and there are income inequality and these are things that are clearly, you know, ever present in society. But to me, this is more just a lack of regulation. It's a new type of technology. It's made for betting and it's fun. But but again, the idea that people have lost so much hope, how many people really paid attention to 8%, you know, returns over time, annualized, you know, will give me a help me

• 16:38Speaker 01

  achieve a financial goal. It's always been more fun to bet on crypto dickbutt or whatever the corollary was for time memoriam.

• 16:46Alex Kantrowitz?

  This was a family show up.

• 16:48Speaker 01

  You just weren't allowed to bet on crypto dickbutt in the past. Or you had no easy way to do it.

• 16:54Speaker 02

  That's that's what Warren Buffett said in his most recent annual letter. He was just like, you know, it was mostly about how much money he'd made on crypto dickbutts. But then there was like a sub, there was a footnote that

• 17:07Alex Kantrowitz?

  See Warren Buffett and his with his Omaha accent. Yeah, well, crypto dickbutt's been good to us.

• 17:14Speaker 02

  Um, he, he said, it's never been, the casino is in everybody's pocket. It's never been easier. And that may be what's driving this more volatile stock market and also these weird crypto things.

• 17:30Alex Kantrowitz?

  If this is a betting thing, then what do we think about the institutions that are trying to take advantage of the degens or degenerate gamblers? Who are putting all this money into crypto projects? And, you know, I'm going to point to like where this discussion initiated where I read your book and I was like, Zeke, why don't you come on the show? To help us review Chris Dixon's book, the Andreessen Horowitz venture capitalist who wrote Read, Write, Own. Who's been part of the institutional movement to try to get people, you know, it's not just the Bitcoin ETFs that I understand a little bit more, but like to, he's been investing in these projects, these web three quote unquote projects, which have been effective. Many of them effectively have been rug pulls for the, you know, degenerate gamblers who've gone in.

• 18:13Alex Kantrowitz?

  Meanwhile, it seems like Andreessen Horowitz has done quite well.

• 18:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I, that book, it was, it was shocking to me that this book was about the promise of web three, but it did not address the abject failure of so many of the projects that he had invested in. And in, in number go up, I investigated one of them, the game Axie Infinity. And this was like, if you're not familiar, it was kind of like a Pokemon-ish game where you assembled a team of monsters and battled other monsters. And what made it a crypto game was that you had to buy your monsters and you owned them. That's web three.

• 18:58Speaker 02

  And then when you battled, you would earn smooth love potions. And you might say like, well, why would you want smooth love potions? Well, you need them to buy your monsters. Why do you want the monsters? Well, you can earn smooth love potions. So, uh, it, it turned out that the way they set up the economics of the game, you could essentially earn like a five or 10% daily yield in smooth love potions by purchasing these monsters. So. People caught on to this and it took off. It was huge in the Philippines. There were like more than a million people playing it. And of course, Andreessen Horowitz invested in the company that created this.

• 19:43Speaker 02

  Their fund has great returns, but what naturally Smooth Love Potion prices collapsed, like this scheme was unsustainable. And I went to the Philippines and talked to people who had, you know, taken out loans, made, changed, altered their life plans, went into big debt to buy these Axie Infinity monsters and who are devastated when the price of Smooth Love Potions collapsed.

• 20:10Speaker 02

  So I think there's probably some argument you could make in favor of Web 3, but at least address how this was screwed up. Nobody has said sorry. You know, they keep, uh, nobody's really said like, oh, wow, like we really set up the economics wrong.

• 20:32Speaker 02

  So, yes, so I, I did find that surprising that he's, um, they've invested in some of these, in many failed projects and he just sort of hasn't changed his story about how Web 3 is the future.

• 20:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think Axie Infinity to me, and actually, I mean, in terms of one of the things Number Go Up, I think, did very well, was tell the human stories of the people who lost out. Because again, the only stories we traditionally hear are the people who won for short periods of time in order to get more people interested. But, you know, the stories of, because especially I remember Axie Infinity, when it launched and what really drove the hype was there are these viral videos of people in the Philippines finding economic empowerment through Smooth Love Potion and turning their lives around. And anyone I spoke to in crypto would point directly to that and say, look, we're already changing the world.

• 21:29Speaker 01

  And then, until they weren't. So, yeah, and I, I think that's important.

• 21:35Speaker 02

  I might be showing my age here, but I always thought of Axie Infinity as sort of being like the monorail episode of The Simpsons. You know, where the neighboring town is, this monorail salesman comes to Springfield and just like gives this whole pitch about how it's going to change the town to get this monorail. And then I think it's Marge goes to investigate and she goes to this neighboring town that got a monorail. And like the whole town is burned down for some, it's like this wasteland. And to me, Axie Infinity, it's like, this is where you tried your Web 3 plan and it totally sucked. You know, it's like our, a vision of our Web 3 future.

• 22:18Speaker 02

  And so, yeah, if you're still promoting that, you need to tell me why it makes more sense. And another one that, I mean, they were investors in, in Yuga, I think, didn't they invest in Yuga Labs? Were they, they invested in Bored Apes, right?

• 22:35Speaker 01

  Uh, yep, 450 million round led by A16Z.

• 22:40Speaker 02

  Yeah. So like, what were you thinking there, Chris Dixon? What was the logic behind the Bored Ape investment? Now those have become like a total laughing stock.

• 22:52Speaker 01

  Well, do you think there's that idea of no one has said sorry? That's something I've thought about a lot because even Sam Bankman Fried is heading to prison for 25 years and hasn't really said, I'm sorry. But, but do you think there's, needs to be some kind of compunction or recognition of what happened over the last four years? Or do you think, I mean, is the strategy, which it looks like it's happening, is to just triple down on, this is a future, we're going to make money again on the next cycle?

• 23:23Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, I was pretty shocked recently, it took, it took me a while to get around to it, but I, so Coinbase, Brian Armstrong, they've definitely been big on the message of like, It's safe for crypto now. The bad guys are gone. Let's get the next cycle going. And they have this new product called Base. It's their level two. And essentially, it's very easy to create your own coins that like live on this base network. And it's got lower transaction fees because it's sort of self-contained as opposed to like Ethereum, which has gotten very expensive to transact on. So I gave it a try the other day.

• 24:05Speaker 02

  I went on there to see like, okay, I'm all continually, my expectations are too high. And I'm like, well, if Coinbase is really pushing this, there must be some cool things on base. And I get on there to trade some like base coins. And all it is, is the same, it's like, I guess people associate blue with base because Coinbase, base is blue. So it's like blue dog with hat, blue cat with hat, blue Elon Musk, like literally.

• 24:34Speaker 01

  This is diversification of your portfolio. Dog with hat, blue dog with hat.

• 24:39Alex Kantrowitz?

  Got to have a little of each, that's for sure. So look, but as we're talking about this, I just want to say like, is it possible that this has more staying power than we're giving it credit for? Because Zeke, like the core of your book is investigating Tether, which has all sorts of shady things happening beneath it, which you were able to uncover. And a real questionable sort of provenance. However, Tether is still at a dollar, right? It's a coin that's just tethered to the US dollar, still at a dollar. None of these shocks have taken it down. Bitcoin is high. I mean, yes, there's going to be this like wacky movement on the, on the fringes. But does the crypto movement have a brighter future than perhaps we're giving it credit for right here?

• 25:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, right now, you know, you can, if you like crypto, you're thinking, this guy is so dumb and the market proves it. You know, his, his book title is dead wrong because it was intended to be a joke. It was not predicting the number would go up. But what I would, I think, this isn't like a real technical analysis. But I would look at, I would think hard about these bored apes. You know, why did they, as a sign of what might happen to the whole market? Like. For a while, I guess enough people thought they were cool somehow, but the price got very high. And now, since they don't do anything, and they aren't cool, the price is going down.

• 26:08Speaker 02

  So while you're out there promoting all these coins, they either have to be like fun and cool, or they have to do something. And if they don't meet either of those criteria, I think eventually people will lose interest and they might find something else to do. So I, I still am very negative on this, uh, long-term for those reasons. I just think if it's not, it hasn't found like a product that's got mainstream acceptance, it, it, the, just being gambling games is not enough.

• 26:43Speaker 01

  Do you think part of the recent rise of crypto, at least one of my theories is, uh, anytime hype returns to the market, even for a more fundamental reason, it will have, you know, trickle-down effects to, uh, Dogwith Hat. And in this case, you know, people saw Nvidia skyrocketing, AI driving the standard stock market, a lot of, and, and again, you look at the regular stock market, there's not much left in the meme stock way, but, you know, more of the blue chip stocks positioned well to capture generative AI have absolutely blown up well. Um, do you think it's more the people who didn't get in on Nvidia want to buy Dogwith Hat because it's the next thing?

• 27:29Speaker 02

  I guess there could be some of that where, yeah, just things were moving around a lot. So let's, we've seen in the past that when risk assets go up, dog coins also go up. So let's, let's buy some dog coins. Um, I mean, I do think there's a risk if you buy the dog coins, that you could be the guy who is holding the dog coins when everyone else remembers that the dog coins don't do anything and we don't, there's no need, they're worthless. Um, but I don't know, it's, it's like GameStop, AMC, those did go down over time. These like memes are not, are not forever.

• 28:09Speaker 01

  But I guess, yeah, like, what do you think is holding it? Because even Tether, like, as Alex said, and reading through your whole book, and for a long time, I've followed the Tether story closely as well. And obviously, the absurdity isn't quite crypto dickbutt level, but Inspector Gadget creator being part of it, or all these other nuances is quite incredible. But, but again, the idea that every sign points to it should collapse, and yet it holds. Like, what, what, what's, what are the forces that? Because in the book, I think you push towards a lot of ideas, but, I mean, I think, in fairness, don't definitively say what you're thinking of what is actually keeping Tether up.

• 28:54Speaker 01

  And we, but like, what is it now?

• 28:56Speaker 02

  Since the book has come out, Howard Lutnick, the CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald, which is a, you know, respectable New York investment bank, has come out and said, "I'm holding most of Tether's money, and I've seen the rest. They have the money." And I think, barring evidence of some sort of crazy conspiracy, that, that, his comments carry a lot of weight with me. And I think that Tether has been helped by rising interest rates. And now, so they're sitting on like $100 billion. That's how many Tether tokens are out there. They don't pay interest, and they have it invested in treasuries at like 5%.

• 29:41Speaker 02

  So they're clipping $5 billion in profit a year now. And so if, in, let's just say, for the sake of argument, Tether had a Sam Bankman-Fried sized hole of $8 billion, they could earn that back in a year and a half. Where I come down on it is that there's like clear evidence of a lot of shadiness in Tether's early years, but now, what's, it seems to me is that Tether's found widespread acceptance among people doing shady things around the world, who are willing to overlook red flags

• 30:25Speaker 02

  and are willing to hold a dollar coin that doesn't pay interest. You know, whereas in the US, you'd be like, "Why don't I just put this in my, you know, Apple wallet and get 5%?"

• 30:36Alex Kantrowitz?

  Zeke, as we round out this segment, I want to talk to you about like one of the like clear negative externalities or uses of tether which is pig butchering, which you go into depth and take an amazing trip in your book to a place that was tied directly to these scandals. So love to hear you talk a little bit about that. And then just as a corollary, corollary to that, does that relate to all these nudes in bio tweets that we're seeing on Twitter today?

• 31:04Speaker 02

  Sure. So if you're not familiar, pig butchering is a scam where someone approaches you either on a dating app, LinkedIn, whatever, of wrong number text is common. And they try to be your friend and they start to drop hints that they're really good at trading crypto. And eventually they get you to download some sort of bootleg crypto app and to send them usually tether to deposit into that app. And they'll even, you can open the app, it looks like you're making money, it seems great. And people start to send in more and more money. Like, I was just at a press conference held by the Brooklyn DA yesterday, where they

• 31:49Speaker 02

  talked about victims who'd sent hundreds of thousands of dollars. And eventually, the scammer will just ghost you and take all the money. And the really dark part of it that I write about in the book is that the people, the scammers themselves are often victims of human trafficking. And there are these scam compounds in Cambodia, Myanmar, and Laos, where, which are like evil office parks filled with thousands of people who've been lured there with the offer of like a high paying job in customer service. They get there, they're trapped, they are tortured, they're beaten, they're forced to send, to

• 32:29Speaker 02

  run these scams. And it's hugely lucrative. It's mostly run by Chinese gangsters. And new research by professor at UT Austin says that these gangs have collected in the last few years, something like $75 billion, mostly using tether, which is pretty wild. And if you go to

• 32:55Speaker 02

  So this doesn't, you know, this obviously doesn't prove anything. But in my, I'd spent like years looking into tether by this point. The first time I saw tether in use in the real world was when I, well, I was in a border town on the border of Cambodia, Vietnam, one that's known to hold a lot of scam compounds. I get off the bus and right in the parking lot of one of these casinos that is known to be a, a site for forced labor, there's a little booth that's like, we'll trade your tethers for local currency. And I'm like, I literally don't think I'd seen the tether logo outside of a crypto conference until I got there.

• 33:37Speaker 02

  And I'm just like, hmm, doesn't prove anything, but kind of a bad sign that this is the, the place where I actually see crypto in the real world.

• 33:47Alex Kantrowitz?

  That's crazy. And so is that what's going on with these nudes and bio scams on, on Twitter?

• 33:53Speaker 02

  So based on a research by John Herman for New York Magazine, he followed some of these scams and

• 34:05Speaker 01

  Wait, sorry, could you guys explain the nudes and bio scam?

• 34:09Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. So there's often on any sort of popular tweet, someone will reply with this tweet in a kind of funny format with a lot of weird like black spaces in it, they'll write like nudes and bio. And they're trying to obviously lure you into clicking. And if you do click through, it takes you to like a very particular fake dating site called provocative neighbors where you can pay to chat with, I guess, like supposedly horny singles

• 34:50Speaker 02

  who are actually gig workers who get paid on commission on. So it's, it's kind of similar to the pig butchering model, but I've, I've do not, I've yet to meet anyone who's escaped from a scam compound who had to work on these.

• 35:11Speaker 02

  Nudes in bio replies, so that they may be fully voluntary.

• 35:17Speaker 01

  This is more traditional catfishing than

• 35:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:20Speaker 01

  Something more sinister.

• 35:22Speaker 02

  And I think it just shows, um, so I, I once spent a while researching affiliate, the shady side of affiliate marketing. And there's always been these guys who there will buy up ads on like porn sites and direct people into these kind of low end scams. Uh, they call them like dating sites, but it's not real dating. And I think what happened is that Twitter has such bad content moderation and is getting really low prices for its ads now. So it's, it's getting like these porn site quality ads that used to be screened out by

• 36:07Speaker 02

  better moderation or just higher prices for their ad inventory.

• 36:10Alex Kantrowitz?

  Just ads though, like they just show up like in the replies as like bots and I mean, it could all be true.

• 36:17Speaker 01

  Was going to save us from the bots on Twitter.

• 36:20Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, but okay, one last thing about this and then, then we'll go to break. It's what's interesting. I also read in the Herman story is that like this is just sort of like the tip of the iceberg when it comes to only fans agencies. So there are companies that run, this is what he says, there are companies that run only fan, only fans accounts that are staffed and they talk simultaneously with dozens of users who are led to believe they are talking with real models, not male operators in say Poland. And there's a quote, every guy has three monitors, three chats at a time.

• 36:52Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 36:53Alex Kantrowitz?

  Just sad. So.

• 36:55Speaker 01

  Wait, before we go, I just wanted to ask one thing, cause again, from reading the book, there's one thing that I kept thinking about going back to pig butchering. It's almost rare you have a scam where both sides of the scam are victims. And then, you know, there's a middle man who's kind of controlling it versus usually you have the very clear scammer and the scammy. But here's something that's so awful where you have people losing their money on the being scam side and then literal human trafficking to help drive these scams. And obviously, like, why is this not more of a story? And I've seen, I think John Oliver did a segment. I've started to see it some more coming out.

• 37:40Speaker 01

  But, you know, there are some stories when I read them. After reading your book, all I can think about is why are more people not talking about this or why hasn't this got more attention? And I'm assuming you want more people to read your book and that would be step one. But, but in general, like, is there something to this story that prevents people from just, you know, jumping towards it as this massive thing we need to work together to solve?

• 38:06Speaker 02

  From a government perspective, I think it's tricky to solve because the criminals are in other countries where in some of these places, they operate pretty much with impunity. And the, the US doesn't have any authority there. So what people activists are doing is trying to work with law enforcement in those countries to push for more raids of scam compounds for them to stop, you know, looking the other way and to make it into sort of an embarrassment.

• 38:44Speaker 02

  So they can't, like in Cambodia, it became kind of like a national embarrassment, which led to at least some raids, although they continue to operate in Cambodia. But from a law enforcement side here, somebody comes to them and they say, hey, I lost a million dollars to a pig butcher. And if you're lucky enough to find, first of all, a lot of police officers don't know about this because they might not understand what happened or how they might be able to help. Even if they are savvy, they, the money is long gone. And that's why crypto.

• 39:23Speaker 02

  That's why crypto is so great for these scams. And because like if you're a crypto person, you're like, come on, it's not crypto's fault. But the thing is, is if you, uh, like if, if you send some tether to a, someone who you think is a pretty girl, but is actually a victim of human trafficking in Cambodia, you zap them a million tethers. That money is gone and you don't have any clues. You don't have any address or any name. It used to be like for a Nigerian email scam, they would often work with money mules in the U.S. Who would let the con men use their bank accounts. Um, so that would at least give law enforcement something to go off of.

• 40:05Speaker 02

  And also like, I mean, some of these pig butchering scams do use bank wires too. But you're going to set off a lot of alarms at the bank. You're going to get a lot of warnings on.

• 40:17Speaker 02

  But yeah, honestly, I'm surprised that people haven't tried to do more to stop this too. It's really like, it's really massive in dollar amount in terms of the amount that Americans and people in other countries are losing. And the United Nations has called it, uh, possibly the biggest human trafficking. Operation in history. They estimate 200,000 people are trapped in scam compounds. That's crazy. Yeah. So I would say people should work on figuring out how to, how to solve this. Um, and I would, it's another place where I would argue that the crypto.

• 40:59Speaker 02

  Provoters who are run the coins that they're, like if you run tether and all these criminals are using tether to do horrible things. You may say like, well, I don't, I don't know these people. I didn't mean for this to happen. But it's like, well, they're using your product to do it. So maybe you should try and figure out how to stop them, you know?

• 41:18Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yep. Okay, so we've talked about gambling with crypto. Let's talk about gambling for real on sports betting. And then, of course, Jon Stewart's stance against AI. When we come back from the break right after this. This episode is brought to you by App Point. Everyone's racing to roll out AI right now. Co-pilots, chatbots, agents doing real work. But here's the part nobody loves talking about. All that AI runs on your data. And most teams have no single way to see it, secure it, and prove it's under control. That's exactly what App Point does. For 25 years, they've been the trusted layer beneath the world's most demanding data, now extended across your entire AI estate,

• 41:59Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 42:44Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 43:31Alex Kantrowitz?

  And we're back here on Big Technology Podcast with Zeke Fox. He's the author of Number Go Up. It's going up, but he wasn't predicting that. So he tells us, or maybe he was. It's a mystery. We'll leave it in, leave it for you to decide.

• 43:45Alex Kantrowitz?

  And Ranjan Roy is also here. Ranjan of Margins. So Ranjan, first of all, welcome back. Ranjan, you and I have been texting about sports betting and I've sort of been like, this is a growing disaster. We have this NBA player, Jontay Porter, who made some like really suspicious prop bets about his output on the court and hit and well, sorry. We don't know if he made them, but we do know somebody who made some of these bets, hit on every one of them and was like big winner on DraftKings or whatever it is, whatever sports betting platform it is. It seems like it's corrupting sports and it seems like it's also turning people into serious gamblers that might not have been otherwise. What's your perspective on it?

• 44:28Speaker 01

  All right. When I think about sports betting, the United States, I have to compartmentalize myself because on one hand, I agree. I think it's going to really have a negative impact on especially college sports or lesser compensated sports. And it's going to cause a lot of problem for, you know, addictive behavior. On the other side, I love it. I absolutely love betting on sports and in a way I am very controlled on it. You know, I, I literally can get a tremendous amount of joy on putting $5 on a random NBA game that happens to be televised and keeping it on my TV on like a random Tuesday night and just having the time of my life.

• 45:11Speaker 01

  What, so it doesn't even need to be big money, five, 10 bucks here and there. And it's great. So I gamble on sports very regularly and it provides me a great deal of entertainment. But I do think like, For college sports, and I was also another thing that I was reading in The Athletic, that there was a, there was an athlete, and this stuff, I mean, I will myself yell at the screen where he took a last minute three, and they were already down by, they're up by 25 points, it put them up by 28, the line was 27 and a half, and he started getting death threats. And, you know, this is like some like, division one game, middle of the season, up by 27, takes a random three, just kind of heaves it up at the end, it happens

• 45:53Speaker 01

  to hit, and they get death threats. So the amount of weird behaviors and problematic behaviors this is, you know, generating on every side is a reminder that, to me, the problem is, when these things come at full force with absolutely, it went from completely illegal in the majority of the country to very legal in a lot of the country, and tons of TV advertisements, tons of apps available, whether, like, whether you want DraftKings or Caesars, or what, FanDuel, or whatever else, it, I mean, I don't know, I think the speed at which it came, and the ferocity with which the marketing comes with it, that's the problem here.

• 46:35Alex Kantrowitz?

  Do you know how it happened, by the way?

• 46:38Speaker 01

  No, I've actually never-

• 46:40Alex Kantrowitz?

  Why it happened so fast? I did some research. It's an amazing story. And it all comes down to Chris Christie. So this is from some AP reports, and a combination of AP and The New York Times. Yes, it really is a Chris Christie thing. "In 2012, New Jersey Governor, then New Jersey Governor, Chris Christie, signed legislation authorizing sports betting in the state. It was seen as a way to attract more visitors and gamblers to help revitalize Atlantic City and generate tax revenue for New Jersey's budget." Then the leagues sued him. He, it went all the way to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court made it constitutional everywhere, allowing states to make their own rules, right? So the Supreme Court makes

• 47:19Alex Kantrowitz?

  that ruling in 2018, and then now there's 40 states that allow sports betting, and that's why it's exploded. So it all comes down to this initial, you know, move by Chris Christie to revitalize Atlantic City, which I just visited for the first time, and had a lovely time out there. And I see Zeke reacting with indignation, so I'll turn the floor to him.

• 47:44Speaker 02

  Well, I think like sports betting is one of those things where it's really gambling in general, it's really well established that most people can like enjoy gambling and can do it without ruining their lives, but there's some percentage of people who will gamble compulsively and where this is really, really harmful to them. And so by expanding the universe of gamblers, we're creating more people who are going to be these big losers who are going to hurt themselves.

• 48:21Speaker 02

  And is, look, you can say everyone should be allowed to do what they want, but is it really desirable to let everyone have access to this like in their pocket, you know, like are, is the good that we're creating for society by helping other, you know, somebody like you have more fun outweighed by the small percentage of people who are going to have like serious negative consequences? And I would say like, maybe yes, you know, don't, um, and it's also kind of gross to just, let's like, just watch sports and not talk about betting lines the whole time.

• 49:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  Such a good point.

• 49:01Speaker 02

  Kind of ruins it for me.

• 49:02Alex Kantrowitz?

  Because that's, that's, I think, the big problem here. It's not just that fact that it's become legal, it's the fact that leagues have so integrated it and, and media, by the way, not getting off the hook here, have so integrated it into the experience. You're like, watch a game and you see the line. You have gambling shows on, you know, networks, for instance, like ESPN, et cetera, et cetera. They, it used to be announcers would never talk about the line, would never talk about a team covering, and now it's everywhere. And that popularizes it to the point where you feel like you're not, you're not really part of the sport if you're not betting on it. And that's really the issue. And you're right, it's led to some crazy stuff. We even have this, uh, there was this Cavaliers coach,

• 49:44Alex Kantrowitz?

  Cleveland Cavaliers coach, JB Bickerstaff, talking about what the gamblers are doing, you know, again, because of like, You know, the line and trying to make sure that they hit on their bets. He says, they got my telephone number and were sending me crazy messages about where I live and my kids and all that stuff. It's a dangerous game. And he says it right here in a fine line that we're walking for sure. And you look at what's happened in the major league baseball with Shohei Ohtani, the game's biggest star and a star in a game that really needs stars. Being involved in this with his interpreter, we still don't know the extent of that. And it is going to spiral where you have, you know, of course, players are going to be involved. We know that. And the leagues are going to really harm some people's lives by pushing this stuff so hard.

• 50:29Speaker 02

  Well, I want to say that I, I mean, I say this kind of hypocritically because I, I don't really gamble anymore, but I have enjoyed. I wanted to bet on the Mayweather De La Hoya fight so bad that I took, you know, a thousand bucks to Western Union and sent it to some online casino in Jamaica.

• 50:50Alex Kantrowitz?

  As long as you don't send tether to some lover out there, it's much better.

• 50:54Speaker 01

  Was the original tether, I feel.

• 50:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, I kind of, yeah, it's like, it's another example where it's like, do you really want to make this easier? Like maybe a little friction was good for society.

• 51:07Alex Kantrowitz?

  Exactly.

• 51:08Speaker 01

  I think that's, that's the right point, that friction is the most important thing. I mean, and again, in terms of the amount of energy with which the leagues are integrating themselves into this. Cause even from a media standpoint, I forget who it was, but I think one of the prominent ESPN journalists started his own sports gambling media site account or whatever. And I don't know, do you guys remember in the early days by, I think, what's that a year and a half, two years ago? Of it being legalized in New York, New Jersey, there were just viral tweets of people who like hit a parlay that they bet like 25 bucks and won $2 million. And it would all be pushed by this one person who had just went over to start a sports media gambling media.

• 51:53Alex Kantrowitz?

  Oh, wow.

• 51:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, and it was so obvious like, and to me, the corollary with crypto is so clear where it's like, you have to tell that story of winning, you have to make it go viral and everyone else will rush in. And again, like, that's where. If you even the UX of one of these apps, like it's not encouraging you to put 10 bucks on a, you know, like a 5149 bet. Everything is about the parlay because they know the promise is high, but you will likely lose and that's where they make their money.

• 52:26Speaker 02

  Before I knew Sam Bankman Fried was running any sort of fraud, when I was down with him in the Bahamas, when things were going great, this is what I was like, Sam, you're essentially these ads you take out promoting FTX with like Tom Brady and Larry David, you are promoting gambling. And like you yourself say that it's even worse because a lot of the crypto coins on your exchange, you yourself say are probably fraudulent and going to zero. So this is you're promoting something that's just going to lose money for most people. Isn't this inconsistent with your, you know, effective altruism mission? Yeah. And he never really had a good answer for that. Maybe because he was too busy covering up his massive fraud.

• 53:11Alex Kantrowitz?

  Exactly.

• 53:11Speaker 01

  It takes a lot of time.

• 53:12Alex Kantrowitz?

  Now we know.

• 53:12Speaker 01

  It takes a lot of effort.

• 53:14Alex Kantrowitz?

  So we have a few minutes left here. I think we should talk, I'll just, just to wrap up this, this segment, this is a huge story, the sports betting story. And I think we're just at the very beginning and it is in its early years and it will, it will get worse. And there's going to be some massive scandals and the leagues and state governments are going to have to reckon with it. And we do have some late breaking news that Louisiana is going to ban prop bets for college players starting this summer. So I expect more of this to, to hit and that might have reverberations for these betting apps like DraftKings. And actually, maybe it will send more money into crypto because if people hit restrictions with sports betting, they're going to just want to get more dog with hat. So now speaking with this, about this Jon Stewart thing,

• 53:58Alex Kantrowitz?

  I thought it was really interesting that Jon Stewart went after AI in his segment on Monday. He made a really good point, right? And that was that. There are all these people out there, all these tech executives out there promoting crypto, I mean, AI's benefits and saying that AI is going to help save the world. Meanwhile, on the other side of their mouth, they're talking about how it's going to reduce the need for labor. And, and he basically hammered home this inconsistency, saying, you're talking about how AI is going to help cure disease. Meanwhile, what you're actually doing is inventing labor replacing technology. Now, I've been on record about how I think that the labor fears are a little bit overblown. But recently, I've started to think, actually, you know, this is going to be something that

• 54:43Alex Kantrowitz?

  displaces a bunch of jobs. Stuart was not nuanced about this, right? He didn't talk about the fact that there was actually going to be a lot of good that comes from AI. He basically discounted that, but I thought it was a good point. And I'm curious what, what you guys think about it.

• 54:56Speaker 01

  Jon Stewart, I was, am very excited for his return away from Apple, which I didn't really watch him. I was a huge fan through the 2000s and of the Daily Show. I love listening to him still on politics and more societal commentary, but when he talks about tech, the episode with Lena Kahn, I did not love. Like, he was trying to make jokes about the wrong things or trying to, you know, bring too much light to what I think anti-trust and monopoly is a serious issue. And even on AI, when I'm listening, like, yes, every CEO who's in an earnings call trying to say how AI is going to increase productivity and cut jobs is, that's what

• 55:40Speaker 01

  they are supposed to say, essentially. And that's just the way, you know, the stock market will value things and investors will look at things. So I think trying to use that to just, or to try to make an argument about the actual implications around job loss does not make sense. And as you said, the question of impact on labor is an important one and is an interesting one. But I think this was one of those examples where when it comes to tech, I a lot of the time do feel just Stuart oversimplifies things.

• 56:10Speaker 02

  Like on on the face of it, to me, it's sort of impossible to imagine that AI would not lead to big job loss, but in the past, when there have been innovations that have replaced certain classes of workers, it had we've found newer and more productive things to do. So could this be like the the one time that it's different like it sort of seems like maybe yes, but I also it always seemed that way in the past, too, when there have been like scary new innovations.

• 56:47Alex Kantrowitz?

  Stuart's argument here is that this is going to happen faster that in like, for instance, take the Industrial Revolution that happened over dozens or more than 100 years, whereas AI, he says, is something like coming Thursday. What do you guys think about the speed of this?

• 57:01Speaker 01

  That that's again, like for anyone, and we've on this show talked about this a lot, like the for all the talk and the hype and the toy you like use cases for anyone really trying to operationalize this for work purposes, we're still a long ways away.

• 57:19Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah.

• 57:20Speaker 01

  I mean, again, for all the talk for like and using it in your job in different ways, people are starting to understand and acclimate things and come up with different, you know, like halfway use cases, but the complete replacement in automation, we're there. I don't know. I think there's still it's not coming Thursday, maybe not 100 years, but it's a it's going to be in the years, at least, especially if there's not some huge pushback because those benefits and gains aren't seen in the next six months like everyone's promising us.

• 57:53Speaker 02

  I mean, I I've been playing around with this one app that I think shows kind of a paradox about AI. It's kind of a silly one called Suno. It can you give it a little one sentence prompt and it'll make a song for you. And it's like, it's kind of amazing. Like, I told it to write a song, like a country song, about my daughter and her friend going to the movies. And it did. And it sounds kind of like a real song. And my daughter was kind of amazed by it. But then, uh, the song is kind of also like the most terrible song ever. And no one has asked to listen to it again. And even my six-year-old daughter has not expressed any interest in playing with this

• 58:37Speaker 02

  app anymore. And I think there's like one version where in like a couple of years, this app becomes amazing. And we do want to use it. And it is like displacing real artists. And there's another version where somehow we sort of plateau in this uncanny valley, where it's like this really cool trick, but it is sort of useless for those types of things that that we want.

• 58:59Speaker 01

  I'm so glad you brought up this. My favorite discovery of the week was Sonato, S O N A U T O dot A I, also a music creation app and had the same exact experience. Really cool, fun, making novel songs about really stupid, funny things. And then you listen to them once and it's fun and then you move on. But it's not, some of them, but again, there's glimmers of genius almost where you're like, wait, if it could do that and make the entire song that good, this is amazing. But which way this is going to go? Yeah, I don't think it's a guaranteed that it gets better and better and better and better every single day at a scale that we've never seen.

• 59:43Speaker 02

  It, I'm a little surprised that there hasn't been some like groundbreaking AI-created art that's gonna get all of our attention. I mean, it seems like there'd be a lot of interest in like the first AI this or the first AI that. And so there'd be like some incentive to be the one to create it. And yet, I don't know, maybe I missed something, but I haven't seen this like thing that has people saying, oh, my God, I can't believe like AI did that, other than like these little demos.

• 1:00:10Alex Kantrowitz?

  So Jon Stewart, for all his faults, he's been good at tapping into the nerve of, in the vibe in the country. And it's, I find it just interesting that he's come out against AI. And I haven't really seen an overt AI backlash, yet, at least. So do you think there's something under the surface there that he's seeing and that potentially we're missing? Or do you think this is just a misfire on his part?

• 1:00:35Speaker 02

  I would say like among like regular people that I talk to, they are pretty down on AI and think more about kind of the annoying spammy aspects of it than, you know, the potential for helping make new advances in medicine or things like that. So I, I think he's

• 1:00:55Speaker 02

  not, um, he's tapping into like the mainstream sentiment there.

• 1:01:01Alex Kantrowitz?

  Zeke, how many of your friends have fallen for the nudes and bios scam? And are these the ones that hate AI?

• 1:01:09Speaker 01

  And that have come forward and are ready to be named to the world.

• 1:01:14Speaker 01

  I think first of all, Jon Stewart, I wouldn't even say all his faults. I still think overall, like, you know, he's still a force in the media. But, but I, I agree. I do think he's tapping into something. I just don't think this specific topic, he did well, in my opinion. But, but he totally is tapping into something because if you think about it, you know, the Taylor Swift deep fakes on Twitter, these are the things that are going to be much more present in the conversation. Again, as Zeke said, as you know, like the, like breaking down of protein structures via AlphaFold and the rewriting of medicine or whatever it is, like, no one's going to talk about that. So especially in the election year,

• 1:01:55Speaker 01

  you're right, it hasn't been a debate or a topic yet, but maybe it could be. And if so, who comes out on which side?

• 1:02:04Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, it's gonna be interesting. I mean, him jumping into the fray, I think is a signal.

• 1:02:09Speaker 01

  Oh, Jon Stewart? Yeah. No, but Trump, Biden, who's pro and who's anti-AI?

• 1:02:15Speaker 02

  I think you gotta, you gotta be pro American innovation, right? I think they're, they both go pro-AI.

• 1:02:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, that, that's what makes this one complicated. The American innovation side.

• 1:02:25Alex Kantrowitz?

  Maybe there's a third party candidate that comes out anti-AI and ends up winning because of that, like RFK Junior.

• 1:02:32Speaker 02

  Could RFK, yeah. That would, that would threaten his support from the All In Podcast.

• 1:02:39Alex Kantrowitz?

  That would be really rough for him.

• 1:02:40Speaker 02

  His crucial backing.

• 1:02:42Speaker 01

  He's going to turn on them. That's the heel turn. He goes anti-AI come, come October.

• 1:02:47Alex Kantrowitz?

  I mean, AlphaFold is laying the groundwork for lots of vaccine development. So you would think that RFK Junior would be reflexively anti-AI.

• 1:02:56Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:02:58Alex Kantrowitz?

  Just say.

• 1:02:59Speaker 02

  Nobody tell them that.

• 1:03:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay. The book is called Number Go Up. It's by Zeke Fox. You can get it in any bookstore of choice. A favorite of Ranjan and I's. We'll be talking about it on the show for quite some time. And so great to have you join us, Zeke. Thank you for being here.

• 1:03:16Speaker 02

  Thank you so much for having me. It was really fun.

• 1:03:19Alex Kantrowitz?

  Super fun. And Ranjan, welcome back. Thanks for being here with us.

• 1:03:23Speaker 01

  This was fun. I'll see you next week.

• 1:03:25Alex Kantrowitz?

  Great stuff. Ranjan and I, one on one for the first time in a month coming up next Friday. In the meantime, I'll have Jack Clark, a co-founder of Anthropic, joining me for an in-depth episode on what Anthropic is up to on Wednesday. So until then, we'll see you next time on Big Technology Podcast.

• 1:03:44Speaker 03

  Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid, and risked 350,000 Virginians' healthcare to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes, and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the House Majority PAC dot com. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.

• 1:04:13Speaker 04

  In this life, you can't win.

• 1:04:15Speaker 05

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• 1:04:16Speaker 04

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• 1:04:17Speaker 05

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• 1:04:26Speaker 02

  You stay classy, San Diego.

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  Watch School of Rock, Crazy Ex Girlfriend, Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, The X-Files, Wayne's World, and so much more.

• 1:04:34Alex Kantrowitz?

  We're not worthy!

• 1:04:36Speaker 05

  The best things on TV really are free. You just have to know where to look. Escape to Pluto TV. Streaming now, pay never.