Stop Trying to Unmask Satoshi Nakamoto
On this week’s Big Interview podcast, actor-director Ben McKenzie talks about the rise of crypto, why he finds it dangerous, and why it benefits from having a mysterious creator. Source link
All posts tagged: big interview
The Internet’s Favorite Lawyer Says We’re Living Through ‘Multiple Watergates per Week’
Devin Stone never intended to become one of the internet’s most recognizable legal analysts. Instead, he was supposed to follow a predictable path: graduate, grind it out in Big Law, make partner, and spend the next several decades enjoying a conventionally successful career as a lawyer. But a bout of burnout early in Stone’s career led him to YouTube, where he started publishing explainer videos under the name Legal Eagle. Stone’s channel, which now boasts nearly 4 million followers, started out pretty fluffy, with videos dissecting legal representations on popular TV shows and movies becoming an early audience favorite. While those turned him into a prominent online influencer—yes, there’s at least one for pretty much everything these days—Stone has more recently become a figure both beloved and detested for his prolific video explainers of the Trump presidency’s various legal quagmires and the constitutional crises they’re creating. What Stone now does, I would argue, is something closer to public service journalism in a YouTube-optimized wrapper: He and his team publish upward of three videos a week …
Silicon Valley Is Spending Millions to Stop One of Its Own
Alex Bores, a former Palantir employee, helped pass one of the country’s toughest AI laws. Now Silicon Valley’s biggest names are trying to stop his rise to Congress. Source link
He Started a Social Network Alone. Then 5 Million People Signed Up
If you haven’t heard of UpScrolled before, a brief primer: It’s a social media platform not too different from, say, Instagram or TikTok. You can share photos or short videos, follow accounts, comment on posts, and amass a following of your own. Nothing too earth-shattering, right? UpScrolled founder Issam Hijazi would beg to differ. Indeed, his nascent company diverges from most Big Tech platforms in a few notable ways: UpScrolled offers an old-fashioned chronological feed, rather than one dictated by an algorithm ostensibly serving up content you’ll latch onto; the platform also promises not to share user data with marketing firms or other commercial enterprises. And Hijazi, who is of Palestinian descent, founded UpScrolled in response to widespread user allegations that some social media companies were censoring or shadow-banning their posts—particularly pro-Palestinian content. The platform explicitly vows “never” to covertly suppress content, provided it doesn’t violate UpScrolled’s community guidelines. Aside from breaking with plenty of Big Tech norms, Hijazi’s stance is rare among Silicon Valley types for being uniquely, overtly ideological. (In our conversation, Hijazi …
Duolingo’s Luis von Ahn Wants to Delete the Blockchain
Luis von Ahn could have retired to a beach somewhere years ago. Best known as the CEO of the learning app Duolingo, von Ahn in the early 2000s invented the captcha, those infuriating little online tests that force people to prove they’re not robots. But after selling his creation to Google in 2009, von Ahn didn’t waste any time launching his next venture: a company borne of his experience growing up in Guatemala, one that’s now among the most prominent education platforms in the world. Von Ahn’s mom, a doctor, spent all of her extra income to send him to private school, giving von Ahn opportunities that most of his peers never saw. It is, as he tells me in this week’s Big Interview, the reason he founded Duolingo more than a decade ago, with the goal of making high-quality education free and widely available. Today, the company reaches more than 130 million users worldwide, from immigrants learning new languages to celebrities like George Clooney. Inequality may have inspired von Ahn, but his company now …
Arm’s CEO Insists the Market Needs His New CPU. It Could Piss Everyone Off
Rene Haas is half-prone on a couch in his office in San Jose, California. A basketball rests in his hand, partly obscuring his face. Haas had grimaced when WIRED’s photographer first asked him to assume this position. The headlines came to him immediately: “People are going to say ‘Arm’s CEO sleeps on the job,’” he says. Still, Haas obliges. He gives us 46 minutes of his time, then shoos us out so he can hop on a call with Masayoshi Son, the Softbank CEO and chairman of Arm’s board. I’m meeting with Haas just days before the chip firm’s momentous announcement that it’s launching its own silicon. For a company that’s made its fortunes licensing its architectures to other chip companies and never fabricating its own, the move is a huge bet. Apple, Tesla, Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon, Samsung, and Qualcomm all make or sell chips based on Arm, either licensing the chip designs or paying royalties to the firm. It’s been estimated that there are three Arm chips for every human on Earth. Seen another …
Chris Hayes Has Some Advice for Keeping Up With the News
Chris Hayes makes a living from attention: What deserves some, what doesn’t, and how to make sure the public gives their own limited span of it to the right things. That sounds simple enough. But as I found during my conversation with Hayes, which kicks off season two of The Big Interview podcast, it’s increasingly not. In 2025, the host of MS Now’s All In With Chris Hayes released The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource—a book whose central thesis argues that attention has become the defining commodity of modern life. In keeping with that theme, Hayes himself is everywhere audiences spend time: opining on TV, hosting a podcast called Why Is This Happening?, interacting with his thousands of followers on social networks, and posting vertical videos there as well. In other words, Hayes is both adept at considering the attention economy from an intellectual perch and is participating in it as an attention merchant himself. That’s specifically why I wanted to talk to Hayes, and talk to him right now. …
How Is Kalshi Not Gambling?
No matter what mechanism, there’s still a bet made. Maybe you are offering a better deal. As far as the customer is concerned, it’s as if your particular casino is offering better odds. Better prices is a good thing for society. But there is a fundamental difference. When you go to a traditional sportsbook, the odds are stacked against you. Our customers are more sharp. They’re a bit like Moneyball. They’re more quantitative. They love doing analysis on the economy, and they like the idea that on Kalshi you have to be smarter than your neighbor—not smarter than some sort of system that’s stacked against you. People do feel that, even in the stock market, the system is rigged against them. How are you going to beat the large hedge funds today on trading stocks? And the answer is, you probably won’t. It’s impossible for an individual to do that. On Kalshi, there’s a level playing field. If you have studied a lot about things like inflation, or Covid, or culture, or Taylor Swift, or …
‘Fallout’ Producer Jonathan Nolan on AI: ‘We’re in Such a Frothy Moment’
Jonathan Nolan saw this coming. As a screenwriter, he’s worked on several of his brother Christopher Nolan’s films, from Interstellar to the Dark Knight movies. Partnered with his wife Lisa Joy, he created HBO’s Westworld and executive produced Amazon Prime’s Fallout. But before that, he cut his TV teeth creating Person of Interest, a CBS procedural about a solitary tech billionaire who creates a piece of surveillance software aimed at stopping crime before it happens. It was fiction, but it’s hard not to feel its prescience. With Fallout, now in its second season, Nolan also has his sights on the future. Based on the video game series of the same name, it’s about a postapocalyptic America where everyone must survive in any way they can. It’s also wickedly funny and full of 1950s-era retrofuturism. So, what does Nolan see happening in the coming decades? A lot. For one, he doesn’t think AI is going to replace human filmmakers. In fact, he thinks it could help aspiring directors get a foot in the door. (Though, he …
Silicon Valley Tech Workers Are Campaigning to Get ICE Out of US Cities
The first Trump administration, and the tech industry that stood up to it, are both looking quainter by the day. Here’s one example: In 2017, when President Trump issued a series of executive orders instituting a travel ban on foreigners from certain countries (predominantly Muslim-majority ones), people from across the United States vigorously protested the policy. They included some of tech’s most elite: Google cofounder Sergey Brin, who joined a demonstration at the San Francisco airport; Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who wrote a company-wide email outlining “legal options” that Amazon was considering to fight the ban; and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who took to Instagram to describe his own family’s immigrant roots. How times have changed. On Saturday, hours after federal agents shot and killed ICU nurse Alex Pretti in the streets of Minneapolis, several prominent tech executives attended a private White House screening of Melania, a documentary being released by (of course) Amazon MGM Studios. The timing was not lost on the group of Silicon Valley workers who recently launched ICEout.tech, essentially an open …