TWiT 1106: The 10-Day Reply Guy - RAMageddon, HomeView, Ikigai, & the Flying Tesla Roadster

Tesla Roadster and Politics

0:00It's time for Twit This Week in Tech, and we have a doozy for you. Jason Calacanis is here. Gina Smith. We are going to talk about Apple's new announcements, the flying car from Tesla, the guy who got pinched at OpenAI for bugging the conference rooms, and a whole lot more. Twit is next.

0:23Podcasts you love. From people you trust. This is Twit. This is Twit This Week in Tech. Episode 1106. Recorded Sunday, October 18th, 2026. The 10-Day Reply Guy.

0:48It's time for Twit This Week in Tech. Oh, God. You are in for a ride, ladies and gentlemen. Hello, everybody. This is the show where we cover the week's tech news. And we're just going to have a lot of fun. This is my last show before I go on vacation for three weeks, and I thought, I'm going to just blow it all out. Gina Smith, Dr. Gina Smith is with us. Great to see you, Gina, Senior Research Director, IDC. As I was saying earlier, she took my Comdex virginity from me in 1992, introduced me to Vegas.

1:20Yeah, and you and I hosted a radio show together for eight years, ten years, and a TV show, too. Yes, and a TV show. That's right. The Personal Computer Show. There's a good name. That was my very first name. What was it about? I don't know. No one knows. That's Jason Calacanis. Hello, Jason, from This Week in Startups. And, of course, very famous now because the all-in podcast is like it. And you still don't take ads. That podcast does not take ads, much to my chagrin.

1:54Literally $50 million a year left on the table because I'm the poor, you know, like the poorest guy on that podcast is a centimillionaire. The other guys are like, you know, pre-billionaire, post-billionaire. And, like, they're like, why would we take ads? I'm like, because I would make- You got David Sachs. David Sachs. You got, who else? Chamath Palihapitiya. I knew him, but I didn't want to say his name. And you say it so nicely.

2:18Palihapitiya. Palihapitiya. You got it. Palihapitiya. Right through my dyslexia. Which we were number one, literally, on the trending charts on Apple the last two weeks. Oh, yeah. Number one. Because everybody wants to know what's going to happen in AI and in the White House and in government. And you guys are all so connected. It's a really good place to- I think the connections, we lost half the audience who were, like, your state-sponsored, Pravda, like, you guys are all in the tank for Trump. So we lose half the audience, but then we gained a bunch of the audience.

2:50And then when we stopped talking about Trump, because, like, you know, it's not going well, let's just leave it at that. To put it mildly. It hasn't been going so well the last six months. So all of a sudden, we're not talking about Trump as much. And the ratings just went through the roof again because the libs came back. And they're like, oh, they're not talking about Trump. I wasn't going to listen. I'm not MAGA. But honestly- Neither am I. Yeah, no, and neither are you. You're kind of more in the center of the- I'm a centrist, yes. Independent. Yeah. You know you're doing a terrible job when the left hates you and says you're a MAGA racist, and then the right hates you and says you're a libtard.

3:27Like, literally, I couldn't be doing it worse. I could not explain my position worse, Gina. Everybody hates you. Everybody hates you. Everybody hates me. Everybody hates you.

Elon Musk's Ventures

3:35Literally. So I got to start with Elon because of the new Roadster singamajigger, the flying car. Nuts. Are you- do you have an order in? I'm sure you do. I didn't put the order in yet. I- my new philosophy with these new products is buy it in year two because I have the 16th Roadster in the first Model S. You had the original Roadster. You did. I still have it. Number 16 in the garage right here. And then I have the original- I have serial number 0001 of the signature of the Model S, which is now, like, Massive Collector's Edition.

4:11But when you buy the first generation of anything, you know, Apple Watch or whatever, you know, they're getting the kinks out. And so I will buy this in year two. Well, there's got to be some kinks in this. Watch this car. Yeah. By the way, there's an Optimus robot driving it. Don't worry. No human is involved. This is not fake. There are people in the audience. This is live. If it's going upside down on a loop-de-loop, flipping over, then the rocket engines come on and it lands. Thrusters. Wow. What? Now- All right. Now- My son said, can I buy that? I said, well-

4:42No. I doubt it. They announced this in 2017 the first time, didn't they? I mean, an announcement, doesn't it? It's just as vapor. Well, at least it's kind of real now, right? Well, it's demo-able. It also drove towards a car and did a backflip over it. Now, my understanding is there are tanks in the backseat, many heavy tanks that have some sort of propellant in it. They can only fire for- Huh? It's air?

5:13It's just air. It's just air. Yeah. But they can only fire for about seven seconds. So you ain't going to be driving down the road and flying over cars. I know. And also, I imagine it takes up quite a bit of room and weight in the backseat. And, well, I can't imagine how loud it is. Yeah. But it's kind of cool. It's a flying car. It's a cool demo, but I wouldn't put any money down on this. Haven't they been collecting money for this since 2017, 2018, taking orders? It was originally going to ship in 2020. Then 2022, now they finally showed.

5:43And they've changed the design and they added flying. So I think it's going to be another two years now. I remember the Cybertruck had a hatch in the back and a little mini Cybertruck would drive out of the back of that. I mean, he likes, look, he's a showman and, and he likes this kind of thing. And this event was clearly showbiz. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, he showed it to me like three or four months ago, that same demo. And he was like, Hey, check this out. And, you know, we're personal friends, whatever.

6:14So he showed it to me and I was like, is that AI?

6:19Slop? And he was like, no, no, it's real. I'm like, one more time. Let me see it one more time. And so he showed it to me again in the photo. I was like, that doesn't look real. I'm sorry, brother. I know you can land two rockets, but that, and it still doesn't look real. Price and availability, 2028, quarter of a mil. If you want the thrust trim, the cold gas thrusters. Yeah. Now that's real. So this will go that, like, it's just blowing air out the back, which makes it go faster. But we've got, oh, I get it.

6:50So that's not the, that's not the flying car one. That's just. The flying car is obviously not street legal. That's. Oh yeah. There's that. So wait a minute. It has thrusters in the back. Yeah. So there's three trim levels. One is just electric. Okay. That's going to go like. Just electric. Zero to 60 in like one point low X. Yeah. One second. By the way, I had the Model X with insane, actually ludicrous. And I didn't use it very much because I almost would almost, I would read out every time I did it. I would almost pass out.

7:21Yeah. And I realized this is insanely dangerous, but that was three seconds. And you, if you have kids, which I think your kids are older now, but if you have younger kids, they get motion sickness. So you have to, you pay an extra $30,000 to make this thing go absurdly fast, which is fun. And then you put it on chill mode. Yeah. So things don't go flying in the car and kids don't vomit. The good news is if they vomit, it does go backwards. It doesn't go. That's fair. Fair enough. It's on the back windshield. Anyway, this thing looks gorgeous.

7:51I don't think one point whatever second acceleration is really a good idea, to be honest. I think you get to the point at which your retina can disconnect at a certain number of Gs. You have this like problem. So they're pushing electric cars and then these air thrusters added to it are pushing the envelope toward damaging the human body. So you're going to have to, like, we're hitting physical limits of human bodies can hit, just like when you're an astronaut. This really, if you want to understand what this symbolizes more than anything, is the merger of SpaceX and Tesla, which I don't have any inside information.

8:28But he mentioned on stage at the All-in Summit in September, like, in a funny way, like, wow, these companies are really collaborating on a lot of projects. It's almost like they're one company. I think they'll become one company in a short period of time, two to six months from now. I thought they already merged. So who's merged? They have not merged. They have not merged. X.com, XAI, and SpaceX. Those three are together. They're together. Tesla's on the side. A little pinky outside there. Tesla's still on the side. And then he has his purchase of Echo Star, right?

9:01Well, that's the other story. He wants to be a cell company. Yeah, so the 800 megahertz spectrums, right? The direct phone to see satellite. Yeah. There's a problem with that. You still need towers because if you're inside, you can't see the satellite from the inside. You still have to. Yeah, being able to connect someone's phone to a satellite is one thing. Being able to do that with millions of phones to a satellite is entirely enough. Is it not obvious what he's doing? It's not obvious? What is he doing? Tell us.

9:32Not obvious? Okay. It's not obvious, Jason. Let me be Captain Obvious. Okay, Captain Obvious. Captain Obvious. I'm going to go fly. Okay. The two companies are obviously coming together at some point, right? The reason he hasn't done that is because he's borrowing against Tesla. Yeah. I mean, well. He can't merge those. He's got to keep Tesla standing on. I think these two things merging at some point is an inevitability because they're working on the fab together to make chips. Right. They're working on like this in a little microcosm.

10:04Then there's the Optimus robot, which has Grok in it. Tesla has Grok in it. That's a SpaceX product. So it's all going to become at some point. It's all mushed together. They share engineers. They share executives. Exactly. It's all mushed together. Exactly. It's just whether it's a single. Yeah, right, right. The shareholders want it because they just want Elon to not be task switching between companies. It's like easier for him to just do back-to-back meetings, which is what he does. I've sat with him on these back-to-back meetings. It's incredible. But what's happening with the phones. And then after the meeting, the executives pull everybody aside and say, okay, that's what Elon said.

10:35Now this is what we're going to do, right? Actually, you could write a book about his management style. No middle managers, all engineers. The engineers just come in and say, here's the engineering process. Here's the progress. And then discuss like what's the next test. It is unbelievably efficient. There's no small talk. I know you're his buddy, so I don't expect you to say anything negative about him. But his reputation is much tarnished. You understand? You think? And some of it is he seems a little nutty, like too much special K.

11:08Yeah. If you, as they said in the Saturday Night Live, if you think I'd be a normal chill dude in the monologue, like have you not been paying attention? He's not a normal guy. Was he always the same? Has he changed at all? Not much. I think the political thing is new. Yeah, yeah. That's a whole thing. You know what? I kind of understand why he's giving almost $200 million to Ken Paxton in Texas, which is obscene. Crazy. But it's good for his business. He's in Texas. And owning a senator is always a good thing, right?

11:39I mean, that's what I'm saying. As Will Rogers said, we'd have the best Congress money can buy. My feeling on it has always been, I wish he would start a third party. I just feel like- I wish he would get out of politics entirely. I don't think he would do that. Me too. Either of those. I think it's bad for his reputation. He can keep it to himself. He can still believe whatever he believes, but he doesn't have to say it out loud. He doesn't have to tweet it. The problem was the Dems were going after him so hard, they forced him to pick a side. That's the- Oh, is that what happened? Yeah, they were investigating everything. And they were like, oh, this guy's got it.

12:10They were publicly saying, like, there's got to be something on this guy we can get him on. So they kind of backed him into a corner. The SEC was going to put him in jail over the Model 3 because they were like, you claimed you'd have the Model 3 by this date. And they were doing an investigation to put him in jail. It's all very publicly known. Yeah. And so then he was like, okay, well, this side wants to put me in jail. And this side wants to support entrepreneurship. Well, and if I bribe this side, I can get the FTC to drop the investigation over the Twitter stock pumping and all that other stuff.

12:41Well, I mean, his relationship with Brendan Carr is tight. So the FCC chairman, I mean, for sure- Here's what I've learned about politics getting dragged into the last 10 years is like all these sides are super conflicted. I mean, independent, moderate for a reason. I think that's probably true. And like on one side, the Dems are stacking this power all together, and that's anthropic. And Reid Hoffman and like that side. Then you got Peter Thiel-verse and Elon and everybody on, and Sachs on the other side. And our system is broken because money plays too big a role.

13:12I agree. We got to get rid of Citizens United. That would be the best news ever. 100%. Huge mistake. That was the Supreme Court decision that said a corporation is an individual with First Amendment rights. And so we can't stop them from contributing unlimited funds to campaigns, which is how Elon can give $250 million to Trump. I suggest you judge. Yeah. If you want to judge Elon, just judge him by the products he makes. He's- But also he's- I mean, I'll- I hate to say it, but I'll give him and I'll give Apple a pass because we now know they gave $25 million to the ballroom.

13:43Ballroom. Of course. That this is- The game on the field. The game on the field. It's- And I mean, I don't like it. I think if you're a customer of these companies, you could vote with your feet. Although I know it. I still buy Apple crap. I still buy- I'm all in on Starlink. Apple's producing great stuff. And Starlink's awesome. You got to just judge these people on the books, on the products they build, and understand like they're playing the game on the field. When Obama was in, Netflix backed up the truck and gave him $30 million afterwards to produce

14:18podcasts, like no podcast experience. And we're just going to- And like, here's your Netflix deal. Here's your Spotify deal. All of that was like- And Amazon is the same for the Melania documentary. Exactly. This is what they do. It's the game on the field. And by the way, I don't mean to make you a proxy for Elon. You're not. But it is certainly one of the stories we would have covered whether you were here or not. But he has a lot of power. And one of the issues that's coming up is StarShield, which is the military application

14:49of Starlink that Ukraine has been using for its war against Russia. And the White House has ordered a limit to StarShield for the Ukraine. In fact, this turns off their ability to use drones and so forth. Although they deny that Trump turned it off. But somebody in the White House did.

15:11Officials said leaders at the Defense Department got a message that the SpaceX StarShield service for the Ukrainian military needed to be slowed. They didn't say who- This is from Reuters, who had the kind of the exclusive on this. They talked to two U.S. officials and a Western official. They didn't say who in the White House made the decision. But there is also, and I don't know if it's true or not, that there was a call from Elon about this. Elon certainly has opinions about it.

15:43StarShield is his product. It's developed by SpaceX. And Leo, remember in 2022, Elon did, or at least he publicly said, that he turned off the satellite during the whole Crimea affair. He said that was- It's not like he hasn't done it before. He didn't want to get involved, right? I don't want to take sides in that. This is taking sides. I think there is 0% chance SpaceX, I, Starlink, would ever tell or actually make the change for the military government, because that would be seditious.

16:19Like, it's the government's product. It's the government's, you know, implementation of that product. It would be like Boeing or some military provider being like, hey, we're not going to let you drop these bombs on Iran. And it'd be like, well, no, no, you're the provider. We get to decide where the bombs get dropped. This was the same debate that happened with Anthropic and the Department of War. Yes. If you want to be a military provider, you give it to them. They make the decisions on how to implement it. And you just have to be comfortable with that. Zero chance any of these companies would ever make the decision on behalf of the government.

16:50They cannot make that decision. It would be the craziest turn of events ever. So there is- It would be insane. Although Elon did say that he did it and made the decision in 2022 to turn off Starlink during the Crimea invasion. Or was it the Crimea? He did. He said he didn't want to get involved. He said he didn't want to take sides in that. I think they also need permission from each government in order to turn on Starlink in an area.

17:21So that's why you see announcements, Starlink now available in India or Singapore or wherever it is. They can't just unilaterally turn it on in a country. Now, people hack it and they take a Starlink from the neighboring country, bring it into Iran, which I heard. Yeah, Russia's been using it, illegally using it. Yes. And so then you have, you know, countermeasures. But, you know, the problem with the situation now is I think you have a bunch of people who've been vocal about, like, supporting Russia or supporting Ukraine.

17:51And then all of that gets layered on top of this black box where we don't know what the government's doing. And this particular government sometimes doesn't disclose what they're doing or they do things that are unilateral and unclear. And they have a loose relationship with the truth. I have a theory because, you know, the midterm elections are coming up. I actually voted because I'm leaving the country. So I've already sent my ballot in. But one of the big issues, maybe the biggest issue in many red states is the cost of diesel fuel.

18:24As a result, the president has dropped sanctions against Russia for diesel fuel. He's buying, we're buying diesel fuel from Russia, clearly to lower the price of diesel, to help him get some votes in November. Yeah. And I think this might be related to that as well. I trying to get the war to deprecate a bit in order to get diesel. But also to be the interpretation on the Sunday shows today. Ukraine has been using these drums to bomb, no, refineries, Russian refineries.

18:57So they're affecting the cost of oil that we buy from Russia, which we shouldn't be buying from Russia, by the way. The diesel, the oil in Russia is only going to India and China right now. I meant diesel. Yes, yes. The diesel fuel. But this is also all performative. The inflation is 3.7%. It's a complete disaster. I agree. It's not going to change anything. It's not going to change anything. It's still going to be $7 a gallon in two weeks. And it's not going to change. It's two days worth of diesel. It's literally like two days worth of diesel. So it's all performative.

19:28You know, that's the other thing I learned in being dragged into politics, which is like my least favorite subject and politicians, my least favorite label. I'm sorry I dragged you into this. No, it's totally, I'm happy to discuss it. Because it's actually an opportunity for me to reinforce to people, like, this is not my preferred subject. But, you know, all of this stuff is performative. It's literally both sides are just trying to get people to turn out for the midterms. And it turns out the American public has a small set of issues that they vote based on. Don't start a foreign war, especially not in the Middle East.

20:00And it's the economy, stupid. And it's the economy, stupid. As James Carville famously said. Yeah, but what we're not talking about is the very real impacts of turning off Star Shield. I mean, they've got the drones going at 100 miles an hour or something. So Ukraine can't defend itself. I mean, this is going to be a rough winter for Ukraine. It really puts a thumb on the scale in terms of the war. I mean, you know, we could say, you know, yeah, who did it? It was the government. It was the White House. They take credit. But what's the impact? I mean, I think it's very disturbing.

20:31I mean, of course, Star Shield is needed or something like it is needed. But it's this use of it for political ends. Well, and this is, to turn it full circle to Elon, one of the things that scares me about Elon is his immense power at this point in so many areas. And this is just one more area that he has power. So you were about to say, Jason, what the secret plan is with the cell phones and all

21:02of that. What's the end game? Here's the thing about the power thing. Like, if Starlink is not the best product and Amazon's new low Earth orbit satellite is better and at cheaper price, people will go to that. Right. And if Tesla is not the best car and BYD produces one cheaper, which they do, it's like 15 grand for a BYD Dolphin in Mexico City or Europe. And you see them everywhere. People will buy that. Right. So this idea that he has like this amazing amount of power, he's third place when it comes to the large language models.

21:32Anthropic and OpenAI are better while the money is going to them. So he can he's only as good as his products are in terms of power. And if there's plenty of Democrats who could give just as much money as he's giving, you know, including the Anthropic guys who are going to have much more money combined to give to political causes with their OpenAI and the Anthropic or they have their own non-profits they have a pack and so they're going to be able to outspend Elon in the 2028 and you

22:05can just bookmark that for now. So he's only as good as his products. He has to earn it every day. If there's a better Starlink, people will move to it. Now, speaking of Starlink and I have a de minimis amount of SpaceX shares, so I'm not talking my book here in any way.

22:19The thing that's happening with Starlink that should be obvious to everybody is that they will be direct to your phone. And if every Tesla has Starlink in it and every one of them has a Wi-Fi network and they communicate with each other and they communicate in a mesh network, which is the holy grail of autonomous vehicles, by the way, of course, and he's got a thousand of these cyber cabs already with Starlink in them in the Texas area and maybe 50 of them are actually taking

22:51rides, whatever it is. And he can probably produce a half million of them a year. There will be a world where he gets to five million cyber cabs. Every one of them has Wi-Fi. Every major city you're in, you're going to connect to Starlink on a cyber cab or from the sky. And the direct to satellite connection is getting better and better. Plus, he's got other spectrum and people can buy spectrum. So there'll be a bundled service for 100 bucks a month where five people in your family. I don't have any inside information here. I'm just riffing. There'll be a service where for 100 bucks a month, five people in your family plus your

23:26house will have high speed internet and that'll save you. You probably would be spending 300 bucks on your cable modem and then five $40 plans. So technology is deflationary. He's going to be able to provide for 100 bucks a month what other people are charging three or $400 a month for him. So watch family plans. No question, Jason. You're right. I mean, Elon will compete based on his products and that's the end word of it. But his thumb is on the scale in the government.

23:57His relationship with Brendan Carr at the FCC, for sure this satellite bandwidth thing will be approved. I mean, Brendan Carr just is a rubber stamp for Elon. Not his competitors don't necessarily have that. Do you have evidence of that? Or that's a speculation. It's not speculation. You can look it up. It's been. OK, go ahead. Tell me. Look it up. Brendan Carr is known. So this is what I think is people will take a tweet or something or just assume Brendan's in it. If if he is in the can doing something illegal for Elon or giving a preferential treatment

24:28that will come out immediately. Oh, I didn't say he was doing anything illegal, only that Brendan Carr is on the record as being a big supporter and friend of Elon's. I don't think he's a friend of his, but he might be a supporter of his, just like when Obama was in, Reid Hoffman and Mark Pincus were friends of his. So like all of this, like people make a major jump that something untoward is happening. By the way, all that stuff can be investigated. It will be after these midterms. And you can be. And it will be in three weeks is about to turn. Yeah. And, you know, you don't think that all of these folks know that that's coming.

25:02Of course they do, because that's what happened the last time everybody investigates the other team. And there's no way anybody's doing anything that would be anywhere close to illegal. It is the case. And it's only a smoking gun that Brendan Carr has greenlighted. Every request that Starlink has made has lavished praise on Elon Musk. I don't know if he's turned Jeff Bezos down. Jeff has enough money to make sure that everybody's well taken care of. I actually think they're going to give everybody who's providing cheaper with a greenlight, which

25:34is what we want. They were spending for rural internet $5,000 to run internet to people's farms way out there. At the time when Starlink was available for less than a hundred bucks a month. This is my problem, though. So this was these are the broadband grants from the infrastructure bill that was to. I mean, in my opinion, wire up these homes with something that would be lasting like fiber. I understand it's a lot to fiber one farmhouse 300 miles away.

26:05But the problem with Starlink is it's expensive to start and it's expensive every single month thereafter, you know, and I know because we're paying for it. And the fiber, once you got the build out. I don't think so. No, I think they were going to spend $5,000 per home. It was $5,786 to connect each home, according to just a quick LLM search here. And if you were to look at Starlink, all the people who were in line to get that, they

26:37all bought Starlink because they didn't want to wait for fiber. So we don't even need to buy it for those farms. They're not being given broadband because they can't afford it. It's not just those farms, though. Also, there's plenty of rural communities. It's plenty of places. And they will pay for their not going to get wired service. They're going to get Starlink. Or they'll get Jeff Bezos' version of it and everybody will save money. But, Leo, they're paying for it themselves. They don't need the subsidy. They only needed the subsidy. You can use these farmers as, you know, the poster child.

27:09But it's not just farmhouses in rural areas. It's rural areas in general. Sure. If it's Appalachia, those people, though, can afford to buy Starlink. And they are buying it. If you look at all those homes, this is a point Brendan Carr started making. By the time we get to them with the fiber line in three, four, five years, they already have bought Starlink because people want the internet. And two bucks a day for the internet, everybody can afford. The minimum wage in this country, even if you have the lowest, is $8 an hour, which is to say, you know, if you work for 15 minutes a day for your internet at the lowest possible

27:41price, which is only 5 million people make that $8 an hour minimum wage in the country. Only 15 million people make under $15 an hour. It's so de minimis that those people can afford a Starlink or whatever. What is Bezos is called? That's coming. Leo. Leo. Leo. So they can afford Leo. I don't know that name. There you go. Trademark abuse again. Twitter. Now Leo. You can take your trademarks, Leo. But the point is, poor people, the poorest people in this country, the entry level can

28:11afford $1 or $2 a day for the internet. So we're- It's more than that. I'm paying 90 bucks a month and I think it's going up. I think it's going the opposite. It's going down. I think it'll be 50, 60. I hope it goes down. If you're right, then that makes the point. I guarantee you it'll be $50 a month within two years. Okay, because it has only gone up since I bought it. I think it's 60, 70 bucks a month for the basic tier right now. Okay. Yeah. I'm pretty sure I'm paying 90, but who knows? Because you want broadband. You want a higher amount of broadband. I want broadband. And that was the whole point was to give the entire country broadband because nowadays,

28:46if you aren't on the internet, if you don't have broadband, you are left out. Digital divide. Yeah. Now, aren't there other companies also trying to do this? I'm thinking of Apple and Globestar. Globestar. 100 megabits a month is 55 bucks, by the way. So it is 55 right now. 55 for 100. If you limit to 100 megabits, which is, that's broadband. That's fine. And I should say, in fairness, the FCC did approve LEO, 4,600 satellites. I mean, I hate to break the narrative here, but things are getting cheaper and better.

29:18Sorry. If they get cheaper and better, then I'm fine. It's just a massive federal subsidy that was originally going to a fiber that is now going to Elon. And, you know, maybe it'll go to LEO. Because LEO could use a little subsidy. It's not going to go to anybody, LEO. There's going to be no subsidy. These people don't need a subsidy. If it's $2 a day, they can buy it themselves. There doesn't need to be a government subsidy. The government subsidy is because you couldn't get it. So you needed to spend $5,000 to get the fiber line there.

29:48Now you don't need to spend the $5,000. It's $55 a month for the cheapest version and going down. So for but $2 a month, anybody can have this. There are only, like, the number of people making minimum wage in this country, federal minimum wage, which is a disgrace, that's $7.80 or whatever it is, totally disgraceful, should be $15. Put that aside. They can work for 15 minutes in the lowest possible hourly rate and have their broadband paid for. So for but 15 minutes of work a day, you can get that.

30:19That is a completely reasonable deal. And I think we would all agree that the best solution to this in the long run is to let the market decide and to get money out of politics. Yes, 100%. Because that's clearly the issue right now is that we have, basically, people can buy politicians. I love that we did this story, because what this story shows is that when you actually go to first principles and look at the actual costs and look at the actual competitive set, the problem's been solved by the free market. What's the next story that everybody hates Elon for, everybody hates Bezos for, that the

30:52free market's not solving? The free market solves these problems. Monopoly is the problem. And who's got a monopoly right now? You need to also enforce antitrust regulations. That's right. Monopolies aren't illegal, right? It's the use of a monopoly to do the legal things. Technically, that's correct. And then who's got a monopoly today? Like when you look at the monopolies today, it's very hard to actually find one. There are very few actual monopolies. You do have a couple of duopolies. Right. But there's very few monopolies.

31:22It's really hard to establish a monopoly. Cable companies are the most notorious duopolies. They were. And who cracked them? And we broke it. And we broke it. That's true. Who broke them? Yeah. Sterling. Well, I mean, you've talked about the free market. So now we're blaming the guy who broke the actual monopoly and saying he's the monopolist. He's not the monopolist. He's the guy who broke the monopolist. Sorry. Narrative violation. That's a good defense. I have no argument. We're going to take a break and come back with more. Gina, do you want to rebut? I feel like I'm in the middle of a debate. Who's running for Congress here?

31:53Mayorjason.com. When we come back, it'd be cool to talk about NVIDIA regarding monopolies. Oh, we have a lot of that, too. They're doing this acqui-hire thing as opposed to acquiring things as a way to get away from monopolistic accusations. It's super interesting. And we can talk about that when we come back. Oh, it's six bells. So it's time to take a break. We'll have more in just a bit. I'm sorry. I have an AI that rings the bells in the sea fashion at the top of every hour and then announces.

32:31It's very Star Trek in a way. In the Enterprise. It's actually, I think it's Grok. It's actually the voice of Patrick Ward-Burton in the movie The Emperor's New Groove, Kronk. And he is my night watchman. But I told him, you're daytime, too. So he patrols and every hour rings the bells and says whether everything's okay on the agency. Who's the sponsor? Who's the sponsor? The sponsor? Well, let's find out. We're going to take a break. We'll have more.

33:01You're watching This Week in Tech with Gina. Who's the sponsor? Dr. Gina Smith. We love Dr. Gina Smith. Give him some love. And Jason Calacanis. More in a moment.

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35:22Learn more at paloaltonetworks.com slash I-D-I-R-A. Again, that's paloaltonetworks.com slash I-D-I-R-A. We thank Palo Alto Networks for supporting This Week in Tech. Now back to the show. Thank you, Leo. Well, thanks, Leo, for that incredible ad. What a bit of an amazing ad for time. Hey, everybody. Actually, I should explain. Normally, I don't record those ahead of time. Last night, I was recording ads for my vacation. I had to do more than 60, which is a good thing.

35:54I'm not complaining. We had them. But I was on a roll, and I just recorded all the ads, including the ones for today. And then I had a decision, a moral quandary. Should I redo them live on the show? And I thought, nah, I already got them. So we just- Yeah, I already got them. It's still live to two. The only drawback, if I thought about it, is you are so good, Jason, with making my ads better. Punching them up. Yeah. They punch up. You should- I have recordings of him somewhere.

36:25Oh, God. We had so much fun. We would laugh our asses on doing those ads. Going crazy over Audible. You were- Was it just- It's true. I'm on Platinum Pan to this day. 20- They took mine away. Did you know that? What? What? Well, I had the original, it was called Light Listener, but it was $14.95 for two books a month. And they kept- I come and get emails from Don Katz back before Amazon saying, you know, we can't really afford this anymore. Could you please- And I said, no, I like it. And they didn't have the nerve to kick me off.

37:00But Jeff had- They deprecated it. Actually, it was Andy Jassy had no trouble kicking me off. So I got an email, which I missed from Amazon, from Audible saying, we're going to- Cancel this if you don't do anything? Yeah. If you don't do anything. And I didn't. And so they ended my account. So I went to Libro.fm. So there. I'm doing Platinum. It was just 20 books a year. Because I don't like to think about it. I just want to- Not 20 books, a month. I'm sorry. It's 20 books a year for like 200 bucks or whatever.

37:30It's, you know, 10 bucks a book. So sometimes- Or eight bucks a book. Something like that. And then you get a bunch of credit. Yeah, Lisa does that. You get credits. And so now I got three daughters. They're on it as well. So now we're trying to figure out- How old are your girls now? Yeah, they're reading. No, they love, they love audio books. It's so good for kids. Yes. So good for kids. And they like to read too. So that's good. But- How old are your kids? I got a 16-year-old daughter and then two 10-year-old twins. They were little girls the last time I- Yeah. You're still little. Days go slow. The years go fast, Leo. So true. You know it. Well, you don't have to tell me.

38:02Gina and I both know we've got adults. We do. Eric's 23. Apparently, you've got an incredible entrepreneur in your family with this. Yeah, Mr. Salt Hank, who I am very proud did not use my name in no way. In fact, I don't think he even wanted to use my name. He did not leverage his dad's name. He didn't leverage me. He's pretty honorable. And he's done much, he's much more famous than I am. I would have been like, dad, can I get a couple of promos on the pod? Well, I plugged him like crazy. I did, but he didn't ever ask me. All right, I have- He sold Soul Tanks. He sold it to Mark Lohr at Wonder.

38:34At Wonder. I saw it. I was like, oh, wow. In an all-stock deal. I hope that works out. Their IPO is next year. You're going to be like, hey, son, can Dad get a little short-term loan? I got a vacation. Lisa and I want to go on. Can I get a little loan? A couple of months ago, he said, he texted me, he said, I'm richer than you now. Absolutely. It's Soul Tanks. I make more than you, Dad. All right, Gina, you've not heard this. This is Jason Calacanis back in the day. So who's the sponsor? Audible.com. Audible.

39:04Oh, how I love Audible. You don't have to say that, Jason. No, I do. I have an Audible account. Hey, this is Jason Calacanis, the CEO of Mahalo.com and from formerly of Weblogs Inc. and Silicon Island Reporter. I'd like to let you know about a service that I use and I love. Audible. Audible.com. The largest collection of audio books on the internet. All with simple, easy-to-use, non-DRM MP3 files. It is DRM. It is DRM.

39:30I'm not paying you any more, Jason, just because you're doing this. Somewhere, what's-his-name in shit-ification is going to come on and be- Yeah, Cory Doctorow is going after you, man. That's right. That was the best. Such a great era of twit where I would go crazy for Audible. Yep. And then Cory Doctorow would come on and be like, I'm leaving the show if you have Audible because they use DRM. He hated Audible. He still does. He won't buy his books because he doesn't like DRM. Now, here's a little piece of trivia for you. Remember how I did that biography of Steve Wozniak way back when?

40:02Oh, I was. I was. I think I was, was the very first book ever to be published on Audible, an audio book, at the same time it was printed. Yeah, because publishers didn't want to do that. They thought they would undermine the book sales. Yeah, it was the very first time. I mean, I remember we did a big press tour around that. So I'd say 2006. Is that about the time? I can't tell you how many books I've bought in paper because I listened to them and I wanted the book. Yes. The book. I do that. I do that all the time.

40:32People are buying, books are just so cheap for the value you get from a book. Well, and I also often will buy the e-book and Audible has, Audible Amazon has this thing where they sync, yeah, the whispers sync. And so it just follows, you can look at the words as it's reading them, which is probably good, but good for your girls, actually. Apparently that's very good to teach people. For retention, the highest retention is to be reading it with the audio playing and the word highlighted as it goes by. There you go. I can confirm that.

41:03That's, that's been shown in multiple studies. You have a PhD in cognitive science. Oh yeah, right. Gina's a doctor in this. She knows all that. That's what I wanted to go for. I was, I was going to go for criminal psychology at John Jay Forensic, or I was going to go for cognitive industrial psychology at Stevens Institute. What did you end up doing, Jason? I wound up starting a zine about the internet in 1993, 94. And my timing couldn't have been more perfect. That was, that was the first one, which was about the scene in New York, right?

41:36Yeah. Well, I did. Silicon Alley, what was it called? Silicon Alley Reporter was the second zine. I had done five issues of, of Cyber Surfer, which was pre-internet, pre-web browser. And that was just about CD-ROMs and dial-up services. And I did it with the publisher of Starlog and Fangoria. And I had like a partnership with them to do Cyber Surfer. It was a zine. It was like a zine magazine. Gina did a TV show about the internet. I, all I remember of, Gina, is you riding around in a convertible talking about surfing

42:09the internet? I think it was, was it called? It was pre-web. It was 1993. And it was a PBS documentary called The Internet's Super Highway, driving on the internet. It's available. Everybody can download it. Oh, the metaphors. But it was pre-web. So we were explaining Archie and Veronica and all these early servers. And you can, you can get this now, but somebody on TikTok found all these little clips from that. So where I'm explaining email, email, electronic mail. I mean, literally.

42:40And they found all these little clips from it and they're all over TikTok viral among the Oh, I got to find that. Look at, I just sent you the link in the Zoom, Leo. This is the first issue of Cyber Surfer I did with Brian Alvey. Oh, is it online? Oh, there it is. Somebody bought it off of Chris Frolic from First Round Capital. Published it. This came out in 1995. So he bought the paper version of it? He bought the paper version because he's like, he collects these things. And as you can see on the cover, True Lies, the video game, missed the highest rated video

43:14game ever, TIE Fighter, joined Darth Raider's inner circle of evil, Jurassic Park, screen saving excitement. I was literally reviewing a screen saver. This looks like Fangoria. It was like throw every single thing on the cover was what they taught me. Actually, they taught me. Oh, look at the, look at the header here. Cyber surfing on the internet with mosaic. Literally. How crazy is that? I started in 94 on these things. It was crazy. So this is, this leads into.

43:45This is right when we were working for CNET, wasn't it, Leo? Like 93, we were helping CNET do their launch. Yeah, you're, well, you're a little younger than I was in my late 20s. Did I work for CNET? I briefly worked for CNET. Then they. Everybody briefly worked for CNET. Then they walked me out the door slowly. Unmanageable. We were one of the first five or 10 people involved with CNET. When they were still a TV show, not a website. No, it was before the, for me, it was before the TV show. They got rid of me. But you were on the pilot I shot, right? With Dvorak. I was on the pilot. Adam Curry. And Stuart Alsop.

44:15Dvorak. No, Curry wasn't there. It was, it was, no, I was, I wouldn't. Adam Curry was, because my part of it was doing video game reviews. We reviewed myths. That was later. That was after me. The pilot we did was a round table. Kind of like this, actually. Yeah, a lot like this. In the room, Fred Davis, Stuart Alsop, you, and Dvorak. Dvorak, I remember that. Nah, she, Sean, she, Dvorak. Exactly. The late, the late, great John Cena. I love John. He hated me, but I loved him.

44:46Yeah. He was my mentor. He's like, nah, Calacanis, what this was? Why did he hate you?

Microsoft's AI Laptops

44:49No, he, he didn't like my impersonation that I did here. Yeah, because it sounds like Edward G. Robinson. That's why. No, every time I saw, every time I saw him with you, I was like, he's so cranky that you need him to show Cranky Geeks. Like, he was upset at everybody, but John was my idol, as were you, Leo, in the early days, because I was 10 years behind you guys. I would run home when I knew PC Magazine was like, it was like the two or three day window, and I would go right to John C. Dvorak's column. Inside track.

45:20It was in the back. He would take everybody on. He would be like, nah, she, Apple, they don't have the porch. It was the gossip column for Good Industry. He's the reason I got into tech reporting in 1989, was that, that damn column of Dvorak in PC Magazine. It was the only thing I could understand in the magazine when I first started covering it. I always tell folks, like, if you look at this entire podcast movement, live shows on the internet, it all goes back to Leo, John, Adam Curry, Dave Weiner, and I'm always

45:51tweeting, like, guys, these are the guys who were standing on their shoulders. That's why I always make time to come on. And here, ladies and gentlemen, is a fake fight poster of you versus Ed Zittrain. Did you get in a fight with Ed Zittrain? What? I think people want to see that. I mean, this is the problem. This is like, the AI slop is so good, but that is actually me with my shirt off. You look very ripped. I do. Yeah. I have become more ripped. It's the peptide. I don't think Ed looks like that, I'll be honest with you. No. That is Ed's gut, though.

46:22You can see he's gained a couple of things. It's gotten a little chubby. So I guess we have to talk about AI. Super intelligence. Ed, you should... Yeah, I'm sorry. Now, do you... Trump-telligence. Are you in the SI camp? No. Oh, say no. I don't care. I don't care what it's called. It's software. It's really the best software we ever made. That's important. I always underscore this. It's software. Great software. And it is a continuum from the earliest days of computing. We were just talking about this. When I got my first Atari, the first thing I did is I looked at it and said, I want to

46:56do something with this. And you only had two choices. You either went somewhere and got a floppy disk in a Ziploc bag and ran that, or you wrote software. You had Atari Basic or all these machines had Basic. And that's what I chose. I said, I'm going to... And the first time you type 10, go to, you know, print hello, and 20, go to 10, is a real sense of, wow, I can make this box do something. And it's a complete continuum to today, where instead of typing anything, you talk to it.

47:27But it's roughly the same thing. And it's the same desire to get this silicon thing, this, you know, melted sand, to do something. The only difference is it looks like it's thinking now, and people really want to personify it. It's just software. It's just software. It's just another... And so much of this was imagined by science fiction. I once interviewed Alvin Toffler and his wife and said, oh, how'd you do all this futuristic things? Like, how did you make these predictions? And he said, oh, very simple.

47:58All the nerds are big sci-fi freaks. So you just watch sci-fi and say, this is what they're going to build as soon as they're able to do it. Even the flying car. Totally right. He was right. Even flying cars. So today, or this week, Microsoft shipped its first NVIDIA-based RTX Spark, a Windows laptop, although they have desktops as well, running ARM processors. But most importantly, with GB10 Blackwell, kind of low-end Blackwell GPUs in them that

48:30can run models. And the first thing that happens when you turn on your RTX Spark Surface laptop or Dell laptop, or everybody's making them, is it says, which model do you want to install? Love it. Because you're running a local model on this thing. Love it. It's kind of heavy, though, isn't it? It's heavy. It's hot. It made me think of the old Dolch computer, you know, the 30-pound laptop. Oh, my God. Yeah. I forgot about the Dolch. It's like the Dolch. Remember him? But what's interesting about that, the Microsoft Surface story, I think, is how it was leaked.

49:05Did you follow this? I didn't know what happened. No. I mean, NVIDIA announced it some months ago. The story was that somebody left a prototype of the Surface on a road near Redmond somewhere, and so some guy on Reddit shared all the data. I find it very unlikely that anybody left a Surface. Here is a Dolch, by the way, if you want to see what a Dolch looked like. We had one in my office at PC Magazine, and it was 30 pounds.

49:37Yeah, they're luggables, we call them. And full expansion cards could fit in it. Everything that you could fit into a PC, into a regular-sized ESA expansion slot, fit into that Dolch. We put it on the cover of PC Computing. But you couldn't do much with it because it was probably running DOS, right? It was a DOS-based luggable. They didn't even call laptops. Luggables. It was a luggable. And I saw this and thought, this is awfully heavy and expensive, but not quite like the Dolch. Founded by Volker Dolch in 1987.

50:09Volker Dolch. I remember him. Yeah. Yeah. So let's fast forward to 2026, shall we? Yeah. We can talk about that. It's supposed to be a beautiful, beautiful display. So this is really an NVIDIA product. NVIDIA announced it first. I think, you know, I have the Sparks, which were the original versions of these. They were running an Ubuntu Linux.

50:34I think Microsoft, my theory is, and I don't think I'm wrong, Microsoft went to NVIDIA and said, you know, it'd be really nice if we could get a Windows version of this, please. Yes. And NVIDIA said, sure. How much money you got? Sure. Because Jensen Wong is a good businessman. And so they're making them. NVIDIA stopped selling the 128 gigabyte Sparks. I have a feeling they did that because they wanted to put all the parts into the RTX Sparks.

51:04Yeah. I don't know. You know, I have a theory. All right. I'm going to run this conspiracy theory by you guys. Oh, conspiracy corner. You may have information that will debunk this. Okay.

51:18We are supposedly in Ramageddon, right? Ram prices through the roof. That's a great word. Ramageddon. Haven't heard that. And the Sparks that I bought for 4,600 bucks, originally 4,000, I think, are now eight or $9,000 if you can find them. All of this stuff, you know, any NVIDIA video card, even the gaming cards. Have doubled in prices in many cases. Because everybody says, well, you can't get the chips. Why can't you get the chips?

51:49Well, because the people who make the chips, like Micron, there are only four companies or three companies, SK Hynix, Micron, and Samsung, say, oh, you know, the demand is so great. What's the demand? Well, everybody wants it for HBM, high bandwidth memory, for their data centers. Oh, and how many of these data centers are built? Well, none. How many are going to be built? Oh, many. Yeah. Well, really? How many are going to be built? Many, many. So they've taken orders. They've committed all their production.

52:21But all that production is sitting somewhere in a warehouse. Yeah. And increasing, so A, I think this is price gouging by these manufacturers. They're saying, okay, fine. We can charge that much. We're going to charge that much. B, they're going to have a problem when these data centers do not get built.

Data Centers and Power

52:38Jason, what do you think of all the data centers have been promised, what percentage of them will be built? I think 95% will be built. But they'll all be six months to six years behind schedule because we now have such an anti-AI sentiment in the country caused by, you know, all the chaotic stuff. Yeah, and watch what happens in November. In a couple of weeks, you're going to have an election. And the signature issue besides the economy in many areas, Texas, for instance, is data centers.

53:14Correct. And it's the perfect. Right? The noise and the pollution. Isn't that what everyone's upset about? There's a lot of mistaken. Definitely. Like people say, oh, the water. That's BS. It isn't the water. There's a giant hoax stack here. Water, it's all closed loop systems. So it doesn't use more water than a golf course. It uses, right, and there are far more golf courses in America than there are data centers. Okay, so put that aside. Now in terms of noise. Yeah, perfect. So there's no sound if they're in the Permian Basin or like somewhere away from people.

53:46They don't build it next to somebody's house. Exactly. That has happened in Virginia where data centers were too close to people. And they were fine when they were using electricity off the grid. The problem was the demand for power got so high that it started kicking in diesel generators, gas, NAC gas generators. Those are loud as F. Loud and polluting. Yes. So that is a very small number of isolated cases that, again, it's a hoax because most of these data centers are nowhere near humanity.

54:16They're put in the cheapest acreage anywhere. And they're not running off of NAC gas. If they are running off NAC gas, they're going to where the NAC gas is coming out of the ground. Therefore, that's not an issue. Aesthetically, they're ugly in the same way a Walmart or a big box retailers. But again- Or an Amazon fulfillment center, which are all over the place. And they're sure they're putting them far away. So there's really no objection to these because they also are willing to pay for the power. Well, there is an objection, but maybe there shouldn't be. There's objections that are hoaxes because the people building them are willing to pay for all their electricity and lower the price of electricity in the place they're going because they're so valuable.

54:57Can they use sustainable energy sources? Of course. Of course. And they are. You just have to get a lot of batteries. I should point out, not to waste water, not to waste electricity, because efficiency is really important to make money. They'll go to wherever the cheapest energy is. That's why you see them going near hydro. They're going to NAC gas. Sometimes they go where the tax breaks are, which is off in Arizona. Which is gone now. Texas. Texas. Are those gone? They're gone. Now it's the opposite. We went from five years ago, whoever would give the biggest tax benefit would get these,

55:30to now, however much they're willing to pay the local community, we'll get them. So that's flipped. They're no longer asking for handouts. They're actually offering money for your school system, for this, for that, because these things are so valuable. Because they're desperate to get these built. Correct. There's so much money to be made here to build them out. So what you're going to see is countries or regions that have excess energy, which would be hydro. Some places it's going to be solar and batteries, which is the biggest installs that are occurring right now are solar and batteries.

56:02And Texas is the largest geography for solar and batteries. Why? Because they know the energy business here, and they're not precious about it. They're like, whatever's the best deal. And the best deal right now is solar plus batteries, if you can get them, because they're back-ordered. And that price is cheaper than standing up coal or even clean coal. Okay, you may have heard of clean coal. There is no clean coal. Bad news. There's no reason to create a coal plant. It's cheaper to put solar and batteries. Or nukes. It will make more money. Or nukes. So again, the free market has figured this out. Yeah. Nuclear is going to be the big one.

56:33Like right now, China's got 300 or 400 nuclear plants imminent, like in planning, breaking ground. We have like none. That's where we really need to like get less precious. And we now have ways of making them safely, relatively safe. Unbelievably safe. Like safer than gas, safer than coal. We've got to point out, most electricity generating plants kill more people than nukes ever have. Nuclear plants ever have. Of course. The number of people is well under 100 that have been killed by nuclear power plants.

57:03Whereas gas, coal, any fossil fuel. Those have taken 8, 9, 10 years of people's life in places where they have too many of them, which is like Singapore. I'm sorry, not Singapore, Shanghai, and cities in China, which is why China is using less fossil fuels, going nuclear, and going electric cars. When I was in Beijing, it was like soup. It was terrible. It looks not anymore, though. Not anymore. Beijing now has a blue sky. I worked there probably eight months solid a couple of years ago.

57:33They have fixed their pollution problem. I was there in 2009. Because of electric vehicles. That's right. It's all electric vehicles. Financial times. Financial times. America's $10 trillion AI infrastructure boom is starting to fray. Cracks are appearing in their debt-laden AI infrastructure boom. That's data centers, by the way. Because of public backlash. We talked about that. Shaky investor confidence. In fact, I think it's Oracle's bonds are now selling for 80 cents on the dollar. Really? Because people go, I don't know about all of this.

58:05They just did an act of God clause in one of their data centers because they invoked it because it was taking so long to get the energy and everything set up that they said, we want to do this act of God clause to push out our lease six months or a year. Is God running for office? What act of God? No, you have this act of God. Things that are out of your control. Out of your control. So getting energy to the location or getting your memory chips, whatever it happens to be, you can do that act of God clause in many contracts.

58:39So it's not your fault that you didn't break around and build your data center. The Financial Times says 47, at least 47 large projects have been delayed, withdrawn, or blocked in 2026, at least.

58:52Yeah. Now, this goes back to my original conspiracy theory. These companies pre-sold this. They have orders for it for data centers that probably will not get built. They'll be delayed. They'll be built. Or they'll be delayed. And by the time they're built, maybe the current DDR7 RAM won't be the latest and greatest. Maybe NVIDIA's Vera Rubin processors will not be the latest and greatest. So all of this stuff is booked but not sold, which means it's somewhere.

59:23It's made. It's sitting in a warehouse. A, I think they're price gouging. B, because they know they're not going to sell this. B, when they do sell it, if they ever do sell it, the price is going to fall out through the bottom out. Right? So am I wrong on this? No, no. Here's what's happening. The data centers are getting delayed. Why are the data centers being delayed? Because Anthropik keeps saying, you're all going to lose your jobs and there's a 10% chance that the software is going to kill everybody. Stop that, Dario. Stop it.

59:55Now everybody thinks that smart people believe that there's a 10% chance that 7 billion people are going to die and 100% chance that everybody's losing their jobs. So the public then is anti-AI. Like my daughters hate AI. Young people hate AI. Young people hate AI. Because they're scared. They're scared of it and they think it's inauthentic. And when I tried to train my 16-year-old how to use Claude Design, because she's doing this incredible internship at this beauty company I'm on the board of, and I wanted her to learn how to be a creative director.

1:00:29So I'm trying to teach her logo design using AI. And she's like, I don't want to use it. I don't want to use it. I'm like, you kind of have to. So I explained to her like. This is your future, kid. Exactly. You may not like it, but when you grow up. I understand, right. Oh, good. So now. I understand. Look, I understand the visceral. What is the one way to protest? But what can you protest, Leo? If you want to take back your power and you're hearing all this, the one thing you can do is go to your local community board and say, I don't want this. And if you don't stop it, we're going to vote you out of the community board. New York State has banned them.

1:01:00There you go. Moratorium. So what will happen is you'll get a handful of states that are going to ban data centers or block them. Then you're going to get a handful of states that are going to block self-driving cars. That's already starting to happen. Throttle and ban them. So this is where the front line of anti-AI sentiment will live. Local communities, just like they banned Airbnb in New York, they're going to ban self-driving cars in New York, Boston, D.C., all those northeast regions. Portland will put has a cap on it now. So that's where people will be able to take their power back.

1:01:32Then the other states that embrace it are going to get all these jobs, all this money, all these amazing taxes. They're mostly red states, I think. And that's what's that's literally what's happening right now. Although people are working against their own best interest, which is to get the data centers, just extort and just get as much money as you can for them. Tell them if they want the data center here. They have to pay the electrical bills of everybody within 10 miles of it. Period. Full stop. And they'll do it. They'll do anything.

AI Impact on Jobs

1:02:01Now, Jason, it's true what you say, that this whole thing is overblown about AI taking people's jobs. No question. But I don't know if you saw this research last week from Stanford. For people the ages between 21 and 26, it's harder than it's ever been to get entry-level employment. And I'm certainly seeing that with my son. And that's scary because you've got when people are using AI, the number one skill isn't a technical skill, right? It's analytical judgment. It's the ability to look at an AI output and go, I'm calling BS on this.

1:02:37This is a hallucination. Oh, there's some bias here. And you need experience to have that analytical judgment. If you're not hiring these young people, where are your smart 30-year-olds going to come from? What do you tell your daughter? She's 16. Yeah. So it's very simple. Jensen got this right. He said, your job's not being taken by AI. Yeah. You're not having your job taken by AI. It's going to be taken by somebody who uses AI. I have a training program for venture capital associates in training at my firm.

1:03:08And we hire five people at a time. The people who rise are the ones who know how to apply AI and know what the output that we're going for is. And then, to your point, Gina, very good, important point, having the judgment to say, this is what our goal is. Our goal is X. And did it actually achieve X? And if it didn't, how can I tweak the AI to get us to that outcome? You have to understand the outcome you're going for, which means you have to have a systems brain. You have to understand systems thinking. Yep. And that is, which is going to be your speciality in cognitive science.

1:03:41So, what I am training my daughters to do is, hey, what is the output here? The output is we want a new logo for this beauty company. And we want the logo to get people's attention so they buy the product or they engage with the product. Okay, let's work backwards from that goal. And, okay, how do you get attention? Okay, you get attention in shorts. Okay, how do we make shorts? Great. Let's use the AI to analyze what shorts in the beauty industry have been the most effective, have the most comments. So, that's what I'm training my daughter to you is use the tools and then understand the business goal. How do you understand the business goal? You have to go to the CEO and the founder of the company and say, hey, what's our goals?

1:04:14Can you tell me exactly what are the two or three things at our company that are not working, that are blockages? And then you say to the AI, what would a smarter person than me with a lot more experience do in order to solve this blockage? And it will just tell you. But people are so scared of using these tools and they're conscientious objectors now in some ways that they're just blocking their own employment. And that's the big mistake. That's a mistake. Just use the tools and check the work and understand what the goal is. From the historical point of view, every time there's a new technology, it's a disruption for the old technology.

1:04:48So, if you were a buggy maker, Henry Ford was bad news. If you sold horses, he was bad news. But that didn't – and jobs in those areas went away, but new jobs are created. Correct. And I do think that AI, more than people realize, requires management, quite a bit of management. Yeah. It requires a lot. Orquestration. Like, nobody was trained to orchestrate AI, but everyone's going to have to become an orchestrator. If you're a coder, if you've ever worked on a big project, you kind of have those higher level skills.

1:05:22You just – you've been sewing everything by hand, but you know how clothing is made. So, you can operate at that higher level. My experience with a lot of the coders I know, some of them are saying, no, I like to code. I don't want to – this AI is taking my job. But the smart ones are going, yeah, but the higher level skills I have learned about managing a team, managing a project, are much needed, more needed than ever with AI. AI is like a bunch of junior intern level developers that need a senior manager to corral them.

1:05:58Correct. And I think it's going to stay that way. I don't think that's going to go away. That's why AI-assisted cybersecurity is going to be so huge. Humans add taste, humans add judgment, humans add a human point of view that the AI just doesn't have. It doesn't have it today. The taste and the judgment can only be added, Leo, if you hired young people at your company to develop the taste and judgment. Well, that's the problem. That's the problem. That's the one thing I'm worried about. There'll be – That's why your son's working at a noodle palace.

1:06:31Yes. Yes, a noodle factory. Here's – to answer your questions, Leo, I do think taste is coming for these systems, you know, five, ten years from now. Opus 5.5 has a lot of taste. It's getting there. It's getting there. So, like, you and I see it because we use software to tell us what we should put on our dockets for our podcast. And if you do that and it summarizes it – All these stories were picked by AI, by the way. It does a pretty good job of it because it's looking at the signals on social media to make these. I have to say, though, the undifferentiated pile of stories that the AI generates are not the show.

1:07:07I've let that do that, and it's not as good as if I go through it then, parse it, organize it. So there is some human input. But it is better than last year, right? You and I were doing this last year. Oh, infinitely. Better every six months. So it's obviously going to get there. But there is a super interesting point here, which is who embraces it and who doesn't. And you will see large swaths of jobs go away. It's just the timing that people have wrong. And can we create new jobs in the time that people lose the old jobs? I will put out a premise here.

1:07:38I think self-driving is going to be the first time people experience this. Why? That technology is ready. And you start to see in cities that have Waymos, robo taxis, et cetera, and DoorDash and Zipline. I'm an investor in Zipline. Obviously, I was an investor in Uber. Those things are coming. And that's going to be five, 10 million jobs in the U.S. Yeah. There are 14 million truck drivers and drivers in the U.S. who are going to be out of work in five years. Yes. I would say I would put the over under on half those jobs at five years.

1:08:09Sure. Well, like the 50% of them, it's going to, there's regulation that's going to slow this down. It doesn't happen all at once. I understand. Yeah. So, and then it's regulations that's going to slow it down. But we will see it there first. Where will happen first is in trucks, by the way, because they're much simpler. They drive on highways. Elon is, in fact, along with all the press for the flying car also announced the truck. They didn't get a lot of press for that, right? But that's going to be the product. And there are 20 people working on self-driving trucks. And there are people already doing them. I think what you'll see in regulations is there needs to be a supervisor in the truck

1:08:44for five years, but the truck will be allowed to drive for 18 hours a day or however many hours it might run 24 hours. Just you'll have two hours of charging. So there'll be a supervisor in the truck, which means instead of somebody driving for a 10 hour shift and having to drink a lot of coffee and do other things to stay awake and alert, let's leave it at that. Yes. Like there was a big- If you've ever been to a truck stop, you know what they're doing. There's a little bit of methamphetamine involved in the trucking industry. Sorry to break it to folks, but, you know, staying awake for 12 hours and being alert.

1:09:18That explains their girlish figures. They do. No, no. Literally. Is that true? Are truck drivers- Yes. Yes. Yes. What they do is- They're slim and- They put meth, and this is what I have researched and read about, is a little bit of meth, not smoking meth and being high, just putting a little, essentially Adderall in your coffee. Yeah, they're microdosing. They're microdosing. They're literally microdosing methamphetamine. Put it all aside. I'm not making any judgments right now. The fighter pilots did it too. That's where it all started. It's not good for you.

1:09:48Don't do it. It's not good for you. It's one of the worst drugs you could ever do is speed. It's terrible for you. Well, I mean, Adderall is terrible too. I know. I have my own feelings on this. I used to take Adderall for ADHD, and then I decided that was a good thing. ADHD's why you're Leo Laporte, by the way. This is why you're interesting. Where I am today. It's because you go from the show. Yeah, you go from the show to wanting to do hardware. We need to take another break. I want to talk more about AI and local AI. I do want to show this graph. This is the growth of data center buildouts starting from the launch of ChatGPT.

1:10:21That's that line. Holy cow. In 2023. Not stopping. Billions, trillions really being spent on data centers. Not stopping. But it is, again, my contention that Ramageddon is an illusion. And I wonder if in the next year or so. I'll explain the cycle when we get back. Okay. There is a cycle. From this important break. This is. From our sponsors. Like back to the Metcalfe's law, right? The network effect. That's right. It's the boomer bus cycle, just like the arms. And boy, it's really been, anybody who's purchased memory over the last 20 years knows about this.

1:10:55Yes. Times are. It's cheap, cheap, cheap. And then all of a sudden it's expensive and it's cheap again. And it's one of the reasons memory companies hate the business they're in. It's the worst business to make. It's like real estate. Memory business. The CEO of Micron said it's all Apple's fault. But we will take a break and come back with more. Jason Calacanis, Gina Smith. You see why I didn't have a fourth person on? They wouldn't have got a word in edgewise. Yeah, no kidding. This is an enthusiastic group.

1:11:26We may have put something in our coffee. I love it. No meth in our coffee today. No. No. You just named the show. No meth in our coffee today. I am not mentioning meth in the show title. I am sorry. No Adderall in our coffee. No Adderall in our coffee. No Adderall for you, Leo. We're only a little ADHD. We will have more right after this. This episode of This Week in Tech is brought to you by CoverOn. You've got a password manager, right? Maybe you've got an antivirus. Maybe credit alerts. It's all good stuff.

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1:14:11Yes, this is. I mean, Club Twit is the best value for $8. I have to say it's $10, but I have to say the AI generated art. This is from one of our best artists. Pretty fly for a cis guy. Hey. No meth in our coffee. No, just Adderall. We all have blue. It's the blue. It's the blue. The blue on our noses. I'm breaking bad. It's the good stuff. The good stuff. Yeah. Yeah. All right. You wanted to know about the.

1:14:43Take a screen. So am I going to get. Am I going to get Ram next? Yes. Am I going to get a DGX Spark for half off in about a year because Ram is so cheap? 100%. This is I learned this when he agrees 100%. Here's what happens. Not waiting for them to build these factories. Right. They've got it already. They have a ton of orders. They've sold them. People might have them in warehouses. They may be stockpiling them. Yada, yada. Here's what eventually happens. Everybody builds more fabs.

1:15:14They build more capacity. When the boom happens, they all do it at once because they have so much money coming in. The orders come in, people grab the money, the people who pay in advance get to the front of the list. So now you're sitting on a bunch of capital. What do you do? You build more factories. You build more factories. Now you've got massive capacity. The people who bought all that then already have enough memory. So they don't put in this giant order again the next, you know, 18 months later, whenever it is. And now you've got too much capacity. You've got to lower your prices and clear out the inventory. I know this because I live in Texas now. In Texas, the prices of homes, Leo, have gone down and rent four years in a row.

1:15:50If you see the chart of Austin real estate, it's literally an apartment gets 10% cheaper a year. And you're like, wait a second. I just lived in California for 20 years and I watched the opposite. It's going up 10% a year, yeah. And it goes up 10% a year. And everybody's like number one reason for hating life is their rent and their taxes on their homes. It's the opposite in Texas because you can build whatever you want. You have demand because of COVID. That's when they had their big boom, 21, 22. Everybody built every type of home, apartments, rich people, homes, track homes, everything

1:16:21in between. They built so much supply that demand has plummeted because there's so much supply. Homes sit on the market here for six to 12 months. In San Francisco, they stay on the market for six days or they're sold before they even go on market. People buy a closet for 1.3 million. Talkers. I kept all my real estate during the down thing and now I rented it. Now I'm like, I got to get this stuff out of here. I got to sell it now. Before the collapse. Before the collapse. Well, it's a boom-bust cycle. It's like the next two years are going to be crazy. But those, you know, the Micron and others say, well, we don't want to build factories

1:16:54because they're kind of aware of this, but they can't stop themselves. Micron's already broken ground on a $100 million fab for more memories in New York. Great for consumers. I mean, it's like, it's a weird thing that happens in our economy is capitalism and all this money sitting around just drives people to do unnatural things. And sometimes those are natural things like the fiber, dark fiber during the dot-com bust and boom-bust cycle that created Netflix and YouTube and storage companies did the same thing. So I'm, you know, let's talk about something that has actually been in a warehouse for two

Apple Home View Display

1:17:32years. Apple made this device, designed this device literally two years ago to go with Siri AI. But Siri AI, which they thought, it sucked. It's now getting there, right? So they finally announced this week, the Home View, which is a little square seven inch diagonal screen on a base. You can also hang it on the wall. They have a wall-based version of it. That's really just an Apple Watch or a CarPlay screen. Is this a big feature?

1:18:03It turns around to look at you? It doesn't yet. And that's what we now call a robot? No, and that's next year. This doesn't even do that. It doesn't even do that. In fact, in the weird kind of family video that Apple made, the mom actually manually is aiming it around.

1:18:19Eventually, according to Mark Gurman at Bloomberg, this is going to rotate. Next year, it's going to rotate. But right now, this is the way it is. Because literally, this was made two years ago and stored in a warehouse because they couldn't release it. It wasn't ready. The software wasn't ready. Is this a product everybody's going to buy at $300? By the way, the reason it's only $300 is because they made them two years ago when the RAM wasn't so expensive. Oh, there's your angle.

1:18:48Are you rushing out to buy? Apple freaks who buy all Apple things no matter what. I'm a sheeple. I'm a sheeple. I also bought the $300 Apple TV that's identical to the $129 Apple TV I bought four years ago. Jason, when Leo and I used to host this radio show back in the 90s, whenever the word Apple was mentioned on the show, we used to play taps. Do you remember this, Leo? Yeah. But that was right because it was Gil Emilio was the CEO. And Apple was dying.

1:19:19Apple stock was almost a dollar a share. Right. Apple, by the way, this week is now a $5 trillion company. Amazing. There you go. Just catching up with NVIDIA. I'm buying it right now. I already bought it. I bought the NVIDIA. I buy everything. I'm an idiot. I'm an idiot. I bought the new Apple Watch. It was identical to the old Apple Watch. Just because in theory, at some point, this thing is going to listen to my conversations and give me notes. I use the Plod, which is incredible.

1:19:51You have to press a button. I want something that listens all the time. Yeah. I like that. I have to press the button. But I'm kind of old now. And I care about privacy. I'm kind of like a McQuarrie doctor. I turn all the microphones off in the house. I just now corrected my behavior. I don't ever say anything that I wouldn't say on Twitter or publicly. I know I'm being recorded. I know the CCP. I know Putin in China. And she had everything I've ever said. I think I'm the glasses owner. I've got my glasses. I've had this product, by the way, in my kitchen for over 10 years.

1:20:26Whatever the oldest Apple. The HomePods. I've had a HomePod. You know what it is? It's the old iPad on a stand in the kitchen. They did add one feature to this that everybody's been asking for on the iPad since day one, which they won't add because they want everybody in the family to have an iPad instead of one that the family can share, which is when you look at this, it recognizes your faces and switches to your account. Apple TV, you can have multiple accounts. On this, you can have multiple accounts.

1:20:56On the iPad, they refuse to have multiple accounts. Disgraceful. Disgraciad. That's the key feature here is that when I go on it, it has my settings. You go on it. It has yours. Perfect for a family. Do that with the iPad. And we'll just buy the iPad and keep one of those in the kitchen. It's so annoying. It's so annoying. You nailed it. You know, this is the first iPad-like product that has multiple user accounts, and it recognizes you and made a big deal about that. Yes. This has been the wet dream of every hardware company since 1981.

1:21:28They want a computer in the kitchen. And remember, we always thought that was obscene. Why would you want this messy computer in the kitchen? But this is what they always wanted. Would you like a tissue?

1:21:39Gina's so inappropriate. You're right. Gina and I remember. This is why I turn off the mics in my house. What was the name of that? What was the name? Was it Cisco? Somebody made a kitchen computer. It had a cutesy name. Complete flop. Radio Shack. Tandy. The kitchen computer's always been the great device. I have this wall unit that's Android that's big. It's like a poster. It tells you what all the family's doing. It's got all the family stuff. And all the time, my girls go up to it and add things to the shopping cart for Instacart or whatever ordering from.

1:22:13Yeah. And Amazon. And then we check it out. And then they are constantly pulling up recipes on it. And because the thing's the size of a poster, it costs like a thousand bucks for this thing. I don't know which brand it is. They can read the chocolate chip cookies recipe from across from the island and make it. It's a perfect device. But this will be on a great device. I like the fact that they use the Apple Watch. I think that's kind of interesting format. But make it bigger. It projects from your phone. It doesn't have apps on it. It projects apps from your phone like CarPlay does.

1:22:43Right. It's like that kind of sucks. I want it to have its own. No, it can't install apps. Yeah. Oh, that. Okay. Now you sort of can. I mean, it doesn't come with Spotify. You can put Spotify on your phone and project it to. I just wish my wish for John Ternus is that he runs this company based upon. On engineering and what's in the best interest of the consumer, not extracting profits. I think under Tim Cook, there was an obsession with extracting profits and they made profit based decisions. That's how you get to make a 5 trillion decisions. That's a company.

1:23:15I know, but it's one of the reasons why, like, I think they're falling behind in terms of innovation. I hope he takes an engineering first approach. The engineering first approach would be to let every device have maximum memory, maximum power, you know, and chip and maximum flexibility to switch, you know, based on. They kind of stumbled into the AI business because they made their phones have AI processors and then their Apple Silicon processors got better and better at that.

1:23:47And now, and all of a sudden, at the beginning of the year, because of OpenClaw, everybody went out and bought Mac minis and Apple went, oh, I literally just bought the M5 Mac Studio for $12,000. You bought the top of the line, 128. Of course. Fancy. What do I care? I'm trying to decide. I'm going to be in Indonesia when it happens. They're going to announce the 512 gigabyte version. Well, mine's coming December. If they do announce, I told my team, give that to somebody else and order me the 512 because I want to run local models.

1:24:21And local models are going to be able to somewhere around 28, 29. I did a chart in Claude. I was like, when does this cross over to being as powerful as like an H100? And at somewhere around 28, 29, 30, they're going to be as powerful as like an H100. But should we wait until then to get the Mac? No, no. If you're a technologist and you're in the 1% like you and I are, you know, and Gina is, if you're in the top 1% or 5% of society globally, just buy the best thing and don't worry about it. You can always resell it.

1:24:51And you're going to agree. Jason, the audience knows I have eight local models running right now. Yes. Dual Sparks, a 30, 90, a Mac. So you have $25,000 worth of compute on your desk. Easily. I think we're going back to that. By the way, the first PC. And it's no smarter than my $100 a month GrokBot subscription. It's killing me. Don't worry about it. It's going to, you're going to be part of the tip of the spear like you did when you bought your PC, XT, AT, Gina, or whatever. No, I remember buying it. I'm sure, Gina, you did it too. I remember buying a digital equipment PC, a 48 or 46, $10,000.

1:25:26Oh, you got this. In 1984 dollars. Yes. When it was real money. Which is 3X now. That's 3X. So that $4,000 PC would be 12 now. Right. Thus, when you buy a $12,000 desktop workstation now, don't sweat it. You'll have it for three years. Divide it by 1,000 days. It's $12 a day. That's what I do. So I am mad at Elon because GrokBot is so good and it's so much better than I'm running Hermes on the local models. And what I really want to do is duplicate GrokBot's capabilities at home.

1:25:56I don't think I can get it. It's so unhinged. Literally, all the things. It's so fast. Yes. And unhinged. Like if I want to do something on LinkedIn or I want to download a TikTok or download an Instagram video or transcribe something, it's like, let's go. Sure. Why not? Then I asked Claude to do it. Claude's like, you know what? We're in a lawsuit with the New York Times and I cannot read the New York Times. I'm like, it's on my browser. This is a browser extension. They're like, I guess you have to cut and paste it and you have to commit the crime. I'm like, I pay for the New York Times.

1:26:27So tell me about Muse. Have you tried Muse? I play with it a little bit, but I don't trust. Gina, have you played with any of these agentic tools? I haven't played yet with Muse, but it's persistence. It gives me pause. They are. By the way, every ad surface in the house has an ad for Muse on it now. Yeah. They are going on. The only reason I could think of it is Mark suddenly said, I could make some money on this.

1:26:55He's practically giving it away, right? It doesn't cost. You can use pretty heavily without paying a penny, but that's only because he must be hoovering up every bit of data. I give it. And at some point, the worm will turn and the ads will start flowing. Oh, no. Speaking of flowing. Did anybody see? You can see everything? Did anybody see it? I'm dying to see it, Nathan. Have you seen it? I hear it's great. I saw it yesterday at 1130. It's the best documentary of all time.

1:27:27I've heard that. All right. So this is, for those who don't, Nathan Fielder is the guy who did that crazy TV show, The Rehearsal. Right. He's a comedian, right? He's a comedian, but the show was like weird because it was like performance art where he would let people rehearse ahead. It was just weird. He'd build their house and it was just weird. And I tried to watch it and I couldn't. Anyway, apparently he's a cult phenomenon. He and, is it Oppenheimer, the other guy, the director?

1:27:57Oppenheimer. That's Oppenheimer. Who directed, by the way, one of the greatest. Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer. One of the greatest, a couple of the greatest documentaries of all time. And one about the villages and one about Ren Faire. He's a really interesting documentarian. Anyway, they convinced Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of Theranos, in the weeks before her incarceration. She'd already been convicted and was about to go to prison. She's still in prison. To let them move in and film everything. Now, no spoilers, Jason, because I understand that things happen in the movie that are maybe a little surprising.

1:28:33An unhinged, I hear. It is. Paris and Jeff have seen it from our Intelligent Machines show. And both of them can't stop talking about it. In fact, they have insisted that they do a club special. If you guys want to, you want to be on it too, Jason. Yes. Where they talk about it. They're going to have a big sign that says spoilers. Oh. And they're, because they're dying to talk about it.

Elizabeth Holmes Documentary

1:28:53I will give the non-spoiler review. Please do. Number one, it's the greatest documentary ever made, hands down. Put that aside. This is what everybody's saying. They're saying it's the best picture of the year. It is the best picture of this year. I will say it's in the top five films of the 21st century. How could it be that good? It's not fiction, right? It's non-fiction. It's a documentary. And there she is, not blinking and staring at the screen. Well, we all saw that weird clip. Yeah, that clip was so weird. Okay, so it is working on multiple layers that are so prescient in our culture.

1:29:28One of the layers it works on is the search for truth, right? One of the layers is fake it till you make it in the technology industry, right? Another one is, are people on the spectrum with Asperger's? Are they sociopaths? Are they lying incessantly? Are they compulsive liars? Or are they just too early and misunderstood and delusional, right? And so we get into this all the time where Dario or Elon has a flying car or Dario thinks

1:29:59there's a 10% chance that we're all going to die. Tech people are out there, right? And then sometimes they're out there and they're on the spectrum. And then sometimes they're out there on the spectrum. And are they committing fraud like the FTX guy or as Elizabeth Holmes was found guilty of? And so it really does challenge all of your thinking on those things. And as somebody who knows Elizabeth Holmes and knows everybody in the industry and has been commenting on it. You know, Elizabeth Holmes? I do know her. I do know her.

1:30:30Yes, I met her a couple times. So you knew her from before? I knew her while she was building Theranos on a very cursory basis. Did you have any suspicions at all about the whole thing? When the first thing started, I went on CNBC and said, I think this is going to be one of the biggest frauds in the history of our industry. Really? Because if I called it because I had John Kerry Rue on my podcast after the first after his first story. The Wall Street Journal reporter who broke the story. Who broke the story, who is upset that he wasn't allowed to do this interview for the documentary.

1:31:01But why would she let John Kerry? She hates John Kerry Rue. The funny thing is, Kerry Rue was very kind of bitter about the documentary, but he also said it's the best film of all time. I mean, I think he's rightfully upset that he never got to interview her because he was the first on the story. He should have won a Pulitzer for it. Let's put it aside. The fact that he didn't win a Pulitzer is a crime. They should give him one, you know, post it happening. But at the core of all of this, you know, the reason I knew there was a fraud going on

1:31:32here or there was something fishy, however you want to frame it, was because if you had the technology and you were under that much scrutiny, the right thing to do would be to show it. She never let anybody see the machine. She never let anybody see it. You would just show it immediately. Not even her biggest customer, Walmart. Exactly. And so, but here's the thing. In the age of AI, we will be sitting here in the next 10 years. I'm making a prediction in the next 10 years, within 10 years from today's date, October 18th, 2026, with by October 18th, 2036, someone will have succeeded to some extent, some reasonable

1:32:08extent, what the mission of Theranos was, which was to take a small amount of blood and give a large number of test results. How will they do that? They'll do it with super intelligence. And arrays, arrays, super intelligent arrays. Yes. And so that's the hard part, by the way. It's not the intelligence, it's the take, it's the reading a tiny amount of blood. But if anything can figure it out, it will be AI. Yeah. And so instead of getting that huge draw where you get like, what do they do when you do a full blood panel, like seven or eight of these things?

1:32:38Four test tubes after. Yeah. You're in the six, seven test tube when I did it. And so I think somebody is going to be able to do it with, let's say one test tube or half a test tube. And we will be sitting here in 2036 saying Elizabeth, or some group of people are saying Elizabeth Holmes was a hundred percent correct. It can be done because everything can be done with technology. It's just a matter of when. And we used to make fun of the Newton, like a lot of fun. Of course. The Newton, the Palm Pilot. But I love the Newton, I learned quite a few of them, and I knew that this was the form

1:33:08factor of the future, but it was missing something, as it turns out, internet access. Yes, that's what it was missing. So I have a question, and I guess it's probably for Jason. In an age where all these really corrupt people in prison are basically paying the administration and getting pardons and getting out of prison, why isn't she out of prison? Is she really going to serve 11 years? This is a great question. She's coming out in February or March. People don't know this. That's what I think is going to happen. She's coming out in the first quarter of next year to a halfway house.

1:33:40And so that, I think, is public. But I got the inside line on this. I was told- I'm sure Billy just wanted the fat check, right? You're wondering, Gina, why she hasn't been pardoned. Well, why she hasn't been paid away. If you want to be pardoned, you need to give a million dollars for the administration. I don't know if she has the million dollars or not. But Billy does, her husband, right? Maybe. I don't know. In this film, there seemed to be some debate around how much money he had access to. Putting all that aside, because I don't want to do any spoilers. No spoilers. Give us your review.

1:34:11The review is, the first half is what you've been told about, which is, these are the 30 days before she goes to jail. The second half is the actual film. And there's a character introduced in the second half, which I won't say, that then blows the whole thing open. And you get into the Nathan for you, Nathan's meta commentary in a way that is so unexpected. And there are three turns in the second half of the film. There are literally three turns that your mind gets blown every 15, 20 minutes.

1:34:46And that's why it's so powerful. The first half would have been the documentary of the year. The second half makes it the film of the year and the film of the 21st century to date, 26 years into the side. And it's like three hours long, right? And the three hours, if they told me I could stay in my seat and watch it again, I would have stayed in my seat and watched it again. Paris has already seen it again. Paris has seen it twice. I cannot wait to see it again. I cannot wait for you guys to see it and talk to you about it. It is so mind-blowing what happens in the second half of this film that, and I don't want to oversell it now, but I am a fan of film.

1:35:25I've always been, and for me, this was like right in my wheelhouse of like, what is truth, right? And we live in an era where like, who's an expert? What is truth? We're in a post-truth age. Post-truth age. And then who's evil? Who's manipulating? Who's being manipulated? It came up multiple times here on this very podcast. We have no anchoring to reality like we used to. We don't know. We can't figure it out. Because everybody's got an agenda. There's too many conflicting agendas.

1:35:56I've been saying this. Yes. And you have to triangulate. And you don't know what all the subtexts are because there's multiple agendas with every single person. We just did it for Russia, Ukraine, Starling, Musk. Dario, you know, John Ternus versus Tim Cook versus this device. And what are they optimizing? It's impossible for the person on the street to know what's real. Precisely. And so this film encapsulates that better than any discussion or media property that has ever been done to date.

1:36:27And so he just hit the zeitgeist so perfectly that I cannot think of another moment in time, maybe Bowling for Columbine, that, you know, you just hit and you couldn't stop talking about that movie. Pulp fiction, perhaps. I'm trying to think of a film that came out of The Matrix would be a perfect example. It has like.

1:36:50No, no. Leo would know about that. What was that like? Well, when I was a kid. Yeah. When you saw it on your 50th birthday, Leo. No, I think The Matrix is the best example. I remember I didn't know anything about The Matrix. I went in and I came out. Yes. With my eyes like this. I cannot discuss it right now because I don't want to give any of the spoilers. Don't spoil it. We want everybody to experience it. But I think I gave you enough. Yeah. Without spoiling it. And so I would say to everybody, don't read any reviews. No, stay off social media. Ban it from your social media. I've been trying to because everybody's talking about it.

1:37:21Now, is it going to streaming? That's why I went at 1130 in the morning. You have to see it in the theater with other people. I could go tomorrow morning at 10 a.m. It's only in theaters. Leo, go at 2 a.m. If there's a 2 a.m. screening. Stop what you're doing. Jump off this podcast immediately. Maybe I shouldn't. Change your plans. Because I'm getting on an airplane tomorrow night. I won't be able to watch it in Bangkok. Go see it. You and Lisa are going to have your minds blown. Now, I don't know what the case is. Put a breakfast burrito in your bag and go. Now, I don't know about Petaluma or Texas, but in Seattle, it's only playing three days in theaters and only at one theater.

1:37:53Friday night or four days. Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday. They'll change that. They'll change it immediately. That's because they thought nobody would want to see it. Queen Anne. Yeah. I mean, it's so next level. It's unbelievable. It's incredible. I'm just looking. He's going on his Fandango. Here you go. If you want to see the film. I'm on my Fandango, baby. Do the Fandango. I'm going to see if it's showing in the Petaluma. Boom, the Fandango. Fandango. Let's see if it's showing in the Petaluma area. There it is. You just scroll past it. Go back up. Did I? I really can't understand how she was able to scam Larry Ellison.

1:38:28Look at Blue Eyes. Okay. Check seats. Check seats. Maybe tomorrow. Not today. Tomorrow, yeah. I got to change the day. Does she really not blink in the movie? She doesn't blink much, really. The cinematographer of this and how they filmed it, they also need an award because they are so tight on her without the camera being tight. So they're filming it like a documentary team far away, but they use the focal lens that gets so close. Just go. Just go, Leo. 11.30 a.m. You're in.

1:38:59Go. I got two seats for 11.30 a.m. at the Cinema West. Anybody wants to join me? Get in there with Leo. Leo Stalkers. Here's your chance. Here's your chance to get a selfie with Leo. Oh, hey, I'm a senior. I get a dollar off. Yeah, she? Yeah. Yeah. Me and JCD are going to go and take a dollar off. Dvorak's going to come home. You know what? Come back from the grave. Tickets are free if you're dead.

1:39:26No, I'm not saying that. Well, that's the title of the show, Leo. Tickets are free if you're dead. John C. Dvorak would have loved this. I can tell you, like, his conspiracy corner, like, this feeds right into his. Totally. He totally loved it. In his wheelhouse. Yeah. He would have loved this movie. I bet you're right. Actually, everybody's a scam artist.

iPhone Duo Release

1:39:45All right. You mentioned the Newton. I got to mention the iPhone Duo, which went on sale on Friday. I set my alarm. I got up at 10 minutes to 5 a.m. Is that the foldable one? That's the foldable one. Okay. I got, you know, you go to the Apple store. It said, oh, we really love that early morning energy. Just hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on. Refreshed it a few times. Hang on, hang on. Finally, like 5.05, it opens up. I'd already pre-saved everything. So all I did was press one button.

1:40:16It said, congratulations, you own an iPhone Duo. It'll be arriving December 7th.

1:40:23Pearl Harbor Day. By then, they had slipped a month, more than a month. Is that right? Yeah, I think so. It's October 23rd was the ostensible ship date, December 7th. If you ordered it an hour later, it's January of next year. Now, a number of people have complained, and I think this is the case, that Apple was scalped. That people used their GrokBot.

1:40:54I blame you, GrokBot. People, oh, I got tickets. Well, that was easy. Congratulations. Did your GrokBot get them or you got them? No, I got them. I should have asked the GrokBot. That's a good idea. It was a little too easy to buy those tickets. Now, I don't know what happens now. It's 11 a.m., Leo. Yeah. This is like serious old man behavior. The theater was buying an 8 a.m. ticket. Yeah. I did 11.30. I am now in my old man era. I am in my John C. Dvorak era. I would go see this at 9 a.m., 8 a.m.

1:41:26And, oh, so great. All right. So, I'm going tomorrow morning, right after my Tai Chi class. And you're going, too. Tomorrow night. All right. We all have to go see it before the spoilers ruin it. It's so good. It's so good. I don't want to oversell it, but it is so good. So, there was a number of people. In fact, there was one guy on X, a deleted tweet now, who said, yeah, we spent $400,000 in the first few seconds of the Apple Duo because we were going to scalp them on eBay. And they are selling on eBay now for thousands more than the list price.

1:41:57That's brilliant. Genius, maybe. But is there anything Apple can do about this? That is. Who cares? They'll have so many out. It'll be fine. Who cares? Who cares? I don't want the guy to make some money. I care. No, actually, I don't care. I want the circus. I want people doing crazy stuff. I know. I was fine with the circus. I mean, it's. Everything is. Anything that can be hacked will be hacked. And everything is with these agents are going to be super mega hacked. People are doing this for restaurant reservations now. Oh, yeah. There are like there's an aftermarket for like the hard reservations. So people are buying their getting the reservation six months out.

1:42:30And then they sell them to other people like on these back channels. And that is disgraciate as well. But it is. Well, what are you going to do? I guess you can't. I mean, everybody's got to hustle, man. Everybody's got to hustle. This is why cyber security is going to explode as a career choice. For all the young people out here. Gina, bad news. Right? I mean. Your son needs to get out of the noodle factory in his cyber security. Well, he has his cyber security certification from. What's he working at a noodle factory for?

1:43:02Because he's sending out resumes everywhere. It's hard to get a job. He'll get one. It's the lowest unemployment of our lifetime. He's got his CompTIA plus certification, which is a base level. Oh, yeah. That's what you need. Yeah, he's got the Microsoft one, the first Microsoft one he's collecting. Now, he's a cyber security fellow at University of Washington. Is he making noodles? No, he's not making noodles. He's smashing noodles. He's eating them. He's somehow in business development. He speaks Chinese. Oh, okay. Right? Eric speaks Chinese, so they rule him out, you know.

1:43:36He's not earning minimum wage making noodles at the noodle factory. He is an executive at a noodle factory. My executive is strong. He's 23, but he's doing this dev and speaking Mandarin to their, you know, customers and stuff. They're rolling out, you know, Eric and his. Well, congratulations. We're going to take a break. When we come back, speaking of secret agents, they caught one at OpenAI. What a story this is. You hang on.

1:44:06Jason Calacana says, it's insane. Bug in the conference room. Yeah. Oh, you already know all about it, Gina Smith. Yeah. Dr. Gina Smith. Geez. I didn't mention this. Senior Research Director at IDC. What do you do at IDC? What do you research? I research AI training. Oh. AI skills. How are we going to skill everybody up to work with AI and jobs, AI jobs, all the stuff we've been talking about. So you're kind of an expert on this topic. Yeah. Oh, okay. Sort of. Sort of. To the degree anyone's an expert this early in the game.

1:44:36Well, but is it your opinion that there will be jobs? That it's not that people. No, it's just what y'all said. It's, you know, there'll be huge amounts of new jobs orchestrating AI. But there'll be different. And these young people are going to lose their entry level opportunities. If you hate AI, you maybe want to rethink it. I think some of this, honestly, I think some of it is the uncanny valley effect where people have actually have a visceral. A lot of it will be handled by regulation in China and in Europe.

1:45:07They're making it. They're starting to make it so you can't just fire someone and replace it with AI without retraining them into an AI-assisted job. And I'd love to see that. China did that. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. It's really happening. Isn't it funny that they're more enlightened than we are about this whole thing? They're more community-oriented. I'll tell you, China was a great place to live for me during the pandemic. Especially when Eric was a kid, right? Yeah. He grew up there. Yeah. That's why he speaks Chinese. Mandarin and Cantonese. It's Cantonese.

1:45:38No, he speaks Mandarin because they study it in school. They have to in Hong Kong. Yeah. But we both get around with Cantonese pretty good. Jeff Jarvis is in our discourse. I used to be Chinese, Leah. I studied Chinese in college. Jeff hates me. Oh, no. Yeah. I had a Chinese doctor the other day. I said, And he said, And that was the extent of my Chinese.

1:46:00Oh, That's your sentence here. It is. It's my sentence. You knew that sentence. You've heard me say that sentence many times. You know, it's funny. I put whisper large on my computer to do a voice. Oh, whisper flows. Great. Whispers. Well, I actually have the, you know, just the whisper model running. And it understands Chinese. So when I say, It translated it.

1:46:31And I thought, Well, my Chinese must be pretty good. Yeah. No, I test my Chinese with it all the time. I did. I did. I did French too. And it translated that. It's hysterical. I'm like you. I memorized a Chinese sentence. I pull out. It's impressive. Let's hear it. It's if I were you, I wouldn't eat that. I wish I, I better memorize that for my trip. Yes, I'll teach it to you. And here we are, baby, working in the Twit Noodle Factory.

1:47:03More to come in just a little bit. At least we got the sanitation done. That's right. This episode of This Week in Tech is brought to you by NetSuite. AI isn't just opening new business opportunities. It's changing the way businesses get work done. The questions they ask, the decisions they make, the routine tasks they can hand off. That's the idea behind NetSuite Next. The next generation of the business management suite trusted by over 44,000 companies.

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1:48:11And right now, it's absolutely free. In this guide, you'll see how AI could reshape work across your entire organization and how you can prosper from it. If your revenues are at least in the seven figures, go to netsuite.com slash twit. Get your free guide at netsuite.com slash twit. netsuite.com slash twit. We thank you so much for supporting This Week in Tech. And you support us when you go to that address, netsuite.com slash twit. Thank you, Netsuite.

1:48:42Now back to the show. Oh, my God. We're back from the noodle factory. And there is much to talk about.

OpenAI Conference Room Bug

1:48:50So, OpenAI. This was a wild story. The first thing that leaked out was we discovered somebody bugging our executive conference room, the one where we talk about the most secret stuff at OpenAI. They found a little bug device plugged into the TV in the conference room. It's got a USB, right? Yeah, I guess for power. Ostensibly to power it, yeah. But it was unaccountably, it was wrapped in toilet paper. I don't know. It's a bit of a tell, but okay.

1:49:21And then they put a camera in. In fact, OpenAI has actually been focused on security a lot more lately. They put a camera in there, and the employee came back to get it. So, it wasn't streaming the conversation. It was storing it. It was recording it. Yeah. That's the mistake. And they found the guy because there was a camera, and they saw him checking. Yeah, they knew he was going to come back to get it. So, they put a camera, and they found him coming to get it. There is a picture. Although his spouse was searching on ChatGPT for what recording devices to find, which means this was not a government operation.

1:50:00This was a stock trading operation. This was a corporate espionage situation, not the Saudi government, because they have their own devices, and they're super sophisticated. They would not leave it to the- It is pretty unsophisticated. Yeah. That's the tell. So, he has now been arrested. Department of Justice- He's not going anywhere. Arrested him as a spy, a Saudi Arabian national, Abdelrahman Al-Fazan. He worked at a VC firm. Yeah. He joined the product team in July last year as an engineer.

1:50:33He was fired on Friday and arrested immediately. That's a bad day. You know, you're fired and arrested. Well, he got arrested. He had a one-way ticket back to Saudi Arabia with his wife. Oh, really? And they arrested him 90 minutes before he got on the plane. So close. He was so close to not going to jail for a decade.

1:50:57Corporate espionage. So, you think it was corporate and it wasn't- It has to be. It's corporate espionage. Somebody's making a trade. So, here's the thing. There's somebody who has hundreds of millions of dollars, billions of dollars at stake in these companies and is trying to make a decision of when to liquidate that position or when to double down on that position. And they just want more information so when it goes and becomes public, they can trade on it. That's all they're doing here. If it was a literal spy, they would have been able to put a device in there that wasn't

1:51:28found and wasn't wrapped in toilet paper and they wouldn't need their spouse to research on OpenAI, logged in, logged into OpenAI saying, what are the spy devices for me? Totally, totally, totally. It's so unsophisticated. It's laughable. I mean, Cleo, you and I- By the way, I should probably say alleged, you know. Alleged. It is alleged. But corporate espionage is as old as Silicon Valley, right? I mean, do you remember, it's a little bit before our time, but in 81, the FBI set up that fake company to sell IBM's PC secrets and allegedly someone at Hitachi bought them.

1:52:07And then recently, wasn't that engineer from Google? There was some kind of Waymo versus Uber. Oh, yes. Corporate espionage thing. What was that in 2021 or something? Anthony Lewandowski brought a hard drive with him, allegedly. Allegedly. And was allegedly pardoned.

1:52:27He was. He was pardoned, wasn't he? Yeah. Corporate espionage. I'd be surprised if people are giving out pardons like they're giving out borders these days. They are.

1:52:39All right. Well, I guess that's all we have to say about that. I mean, it's pretty. I mean, it's really been going on for a while. You have Chinese spies everywhere in Silicon Valley. That's right. And Silicon Valley is the most lax security system I've ever seen. You got people leaving the iPhone 4 in a bar, getting bought by Gawker for five grand. Right. It is a super unsophisticated place that needs to get super sophisticated real quick because,

1:53:10I mean, Apple was great at it despite losing the iPhone 4, which should have left the building. Oh, I remember that. Yeah. That was a weird one. We got offered that in Gadget to buy it. Did you? Really? Yeah. They were like, hey, boss, somebody's trying to sell us the iPhone 4 and Gawker's going to buy it or Gizmodo's going to buy it. I was like, that would be a crime. Please encourage the person to sell it to Nick Denton because then he'll get pinched and then I'll have a less competitor. That's right. So tell them that we're not going to bid, but expressly tell them that the folks at Gizmodo

1:53:42will pay double. I know who am I? And they did. And by the way, Gizmodo was banned from Apple Events for years. Yes. As was I. They're back. I never did any of that. We got banned for 48 hours. I had to like email Steve Jobs three times. I am still banned since 2011. It was over the iPhone 4 because we did a blog post called Antenagate. Oh, you were the ones who made it. Here's what happened. Somebody put the word Antenagate in the replies. Peter Rojas or Ryan Block made that a story and took it from the comments because we had a

1:54:14philosophy. The inmates were on the asylum. We had such a good community that the comments, kind of like Club Twit, which is only 10 bucks a month. It's the best 10 bucks you could spend on anything. Go to ClubTwit.com and search Google. You get in there. I'm a member. And so is Jeff Jarvis. Putting it aside, they promoted it. Then Steve Jobs banned us. I emailed Steve and I was like, Steve, our guys are going to get reports. People are going to be sending reports to them over text messaging. We've been to everything. We've done. We created the Steve note.

1:54:44The live blog was created by Peter Rojas at and Ryan Block at Engadget. They pioneered that. I said, the guys are crestfallen. They're going to be outside their place in Moscone. Like, we didn't mean any harm by it. And then literally at 2 a.m., he replied back to me, you're good. And they gave us our credentials overnight and then they were allowed back in. But Steve was on top of it. Wow. He's been happy. When I came out with I Was, Jobs contacted me and said, I'd like to read the book. And I said, I'd like you to write the foreword of the book.

1:55:17He said, send me a copy. I sent him a copy. I sent him one chapter. Then you got an attorney letter? Yeah. He read the first five chapter and called me screaming. Ooh. You will never sell this book at the Apple store. Never, never. And it didn't occur to me that I could argue him down. Well, you've got to this day. Why would you care if you could sell it at the Apple store, to be honest? Yeah. Well, Steve was. That's all he could do, I guess. Steve was the best level of petty. He was. Yeah. He was exceptionally petty in all the best ways.

1:55:48Like, everything mattered to him. Yeah. And that's why they made the best products in the world. Everything mattered. Everything mattered. That's a good way. You know, it's a double-edged sword. Yes. And at the same time. I love people who are petty. It's my favorite. He hated Android so bad and sued them. Well, that's because they double-crossed him. Yeah. Eric Schmidt was on the board of Apple. Yeah. And they're like. He leaked it. And he's like, hey, guys, I don't want to say, but maybe we should have a piece of glass with an operating system on it as well. Well, the story was they had a phone they were shipping with Android.

1:56:18I think it was the first Android phone. And they saw the iPhone and they pulled it back. They said, we cannot sell this now. Yeah. No keyboard. We need to go for the piece of glass. Black mirror time. Yeah. Yeah. The first Android phone, not such a great phone. I have my favorite level of petty now. I love people who are petty like this, like where they just the unreasonable amount of anger over something that's so de minimis, like your book or the keynote or like antenna gate, whatever it is. And so there's a guy on TikTok who I love.

1:56:48He is he cares about public spaces in New York and he goes and visits public spaces because in order to build like a skyscraper, they were like, you can build that skyscraper an extra 10 stories if you give us a public park at the base of it. Now, I used to love these places. I used to, when I was in school in Manhattan, I'd go hang out in these public spaces. They were great. These scumbags who own the buildings have started closing them off and pretending they're private spaces. No, they're not. Which is infuriating. Yes. So this guy, all this guy does on his Instagram and TikTok is he goes to those spaces and he

1:57:23starts recording and the security guards come out and they're like, you can't be here. And he's like, I can be here. And he brings out the forms. Then he he's got, he's got a person inside Mondami's, you know, department and he sends them who's doing it. And Mondami is like the greatest, like, you know, media thinker in the world for politicians. I mean, he is a, despite what you think of him, he's a world-class politician. Any socialist who can get Donald Trump to embrace him. Exactly. He's doing something right. He's literally got the Trump savant media thing. So now he gives fines for thousands of dollars to these people.

1:57:58Then this guy gets to go and this guy does a meetup at the place with the fines and then torches the person. So now they have 10 times as many people there. And then he records that. And then he calls out the person by name who owns the building. Do you remember the name of this TikTok? I'm going to, you guys carry on. Somebody will, don't worry about it. Somebody will tell us in the chat room. They're looking right now, I'm sure. Somebody in Club Twit will tell us. Is it a, is it a, it's a TikTok. Or an Instagram. The Instagram is where I follow them. Instagram, okay. Hold on, public. Actually, OpenAI and Apple are in an open battle over some employees leaving Apple and

1:58:33going to OpenAI via Johnny Ives' Love Actually, or whatever the name of his company is, which OpenAI bought. They're making something there, we think. Are you talking to your Grok bot?

1:58:52I'm looking for the public spaces guy. Sorry. Are you talking to your Grok bot? 780, Lord of the Bench. 780, Lord of Bench. Lord of Bench. On Instagram? On Insta. The greatest account ever. It is so great. Well, it's the second greatest after Salt Hank, right? I mean, Salt Hank is incredible. These are the two things in New York that matter. As soon as I typed 780, it came right up. Oh, there it is. Violation served. Oh, look at this. That is hysterical. I mean, play one of them. It is so great.

1:59:23Look at this one. Anyone that has a security guard in it confronting him is the best. So, like, if you scroll down. Oh, this is the police who are telling him he can't. At Rockefeller Center, I know this place. I used to hang out in this place. And they're telling him he can't film. And he's like, but it's a public space. He's like, oh, yeah, you're right. So, the New York City cop gives him credit. He's like, you're right. You can record here. The bench over there doesn't have anything about filming. This guy is so petty. He's brave because. Oh. Go a couple down and find, like, a security guard.

1:59:55So, now. I'm sorry, sir. You're not allowed. There's one. See the security guard? So, this is his other specialty. He gets the security guards to engage with him. And so, they come out. And then they get upset. It's so great. It's so petty. It's amazing. Dude, we're getting mugged out by guys today.

AI Chips and Hardware

2:00:15So, you want to talk about something else? Talk about the Microsoft Maya 300 chip. Have you noticed that all these chips that the vendors are coming out with, they're all just TSMC chips, right? The Maya 300, the jalapeno from OpenAI, the, what's the Amazon one called? Tranium something? Inferentia? The problem is no one can make these chips at that scale. Except for Taiwan. Except for TSMC. Yeah. So, they're all competing with each other for limited capacity, right?

2:00:48Right. And it used to be Apple would buy all their chips. Then, NVIDIA came along and said, you know, excuse me, Apple, I got a bigger checkbook. Now, NVIDIA buys up all the capacity. Now, here comes Microsoft. Boy, I'd like to be TSMC in this equation. Yeah. Microsoft, Broadcom, Amazon. The Maya chip is massive, by the way. It's huge. Not coming until next year. Supposed to be much more efficient. But why are these companies making hardware like this? Why do they, is it because they want NVIDIA's, a share of NVIDIA's gold?

2:01:19Yeah. Bucket of gold? Yeah. Everybody wants a piece of that. NVIDIA's has what, is it 90% market share on AI chip? Something like that? Maybe more? Will this make this stuff cheaper? No, because it's all the same factory. Well, they say that they have 40% more tokens per kilowatt or something. I mean. Well, but NVIDIA's doing that too. The Vera Rubin is like 10x more efficient. It's going to create downward pressure on margins. It's one of the great things about capitalism.

2:01:50That's great. Anytime somebody figures something out, competition comes. And then there's this phrase we have, your margin is our opportunity. And so, you know, when you were Google Docs or Gmail, they looked at Microsoft Office Suite and they looked at people who were selling online mail, which would be like AOL or Yahoo used to charge for mail. They looked at both of those and they were like, okay, you're a margin where you're making all your money. We'll make that free, close to free. We get all those users. Then we'll figure out another way to make money from it, which was for Google advertising,

2:02:22right? They were using the data in Gmail to, you know, target advertising better. So this is what happens all the time. Now you have so many people going after NVIDIA in so many different ways that they, nobody, no one person has to sell more chips than them, but it will be death by a thousand competitors. There'll be a verticalized chip for small language models. There'll be people making desktop computers and desktop chips, memory for inference.

2:02:53You have Grok. And what's the other public company that does inference chips? Oh, yes. Cerebrus. Yeah. Actually, I've interviewed the founder twice. They're so fast. They're so unbelievable. You can, you can buy AI from Cerebrus directly. They only have a few models, but they, they're super fast. Well, and then the thing is, these are going to be, yeah, they're going to be very tailored to use cases. So there'll be one for math. There'll be one that's really good for doing, you know, statistics, math.

2:03:30These are all going to be- There's a huge opportunity here because essentially it all started with Intel's MMX matrix math processing in its Intel processors way back when, which, you know, the idea was- The 8287? Yeah. Yeah. It would, it would handle big chunks. We could make the same operation against big chunks of memory. And then NVIDIA, actually it was before NVIDIA was 3DFX, I think, said, hey, that'd be good for video games because we have big chunks of texture that we have to process for the

2:04:02video game. So they made those. NVIDIA comes along, makes video games. And it turns out the same exact stuff, this matrix math that AI does, it fits, but none of these really were purpose-built for AI inference. No. And I imagine there's some opportunity there for companies like Microsoft, Cerebrus, Broadcom. I mean, Apple, I'm sorry, Google is making obviously TPUs. They were the first in the business. AMD has many different operations.

2:04:33Meta, AWS, and OpenAI are also coming. TPUs are Taiwan Semi though. The TPUs are all TSMC. Well, everybody makes them. Googles are made by TSMC? Googles are. Teslas aren't though. I looked at this last night and I looked up everybody's chips and only Tesla. I can't figure out who makes that Dojo chip. It might be Qualcomm. Maybe. Everybody else uses TSMC, but not Tesla. This is all going to be, again, it's kind of like the memory situation.

2:05:05When something works in technology, everybody chases it. And so you've got so many people chasing this. You'll have a bunch of them go out of business because they miss, but you'll have some of them hit. And it will be the person who benefits is the consumer ultimately. So if you want to spend $100 on a smartphone right now, you can get an incredible smartphone for $100 that would have been state-of-the-art, I don't know, five to 10 years ago. And you could buy a used iPhone from, you know, 2015 to 2020 for $100.

2:05:37That is an extraordinary value. And so it's just all going to get cheaper, better, and faster. Cheaper, better, smaller, faster. And this is what Metcalfe predicted back in the 70s with the network effect, which says what, if the number of users increases, the network increases quadratically. Every time you add a node to the network, the value is whatever. Squared. The value is squared. Yeah, quadratically. More than exponentially. We are living in the best of times when it comes to capitalism and competition.

Education and Tutoring

2:06:11We just have three things in the world, especially here in the United States, that are completely dysfunctional and making young people and people who are in the bottom half of society feel like they're boxed out. Education, healthcare, homes. And so that's what I'm spending the last couple of decades of my life on is trying to invest venture capital and angel invest in those areas. To solve those problems, because those are problems that the free market hasn't solved completely, but we're on the verge of solving them.

2:06:44Education is especially critical. I saw that ChatGPT for teens release, and it's basically just doing kids' homework. You know, I mean, with education, right, you've got to, you know, introduce the concept and then they practice and then they apply. And that's what learning is. But the AI kind of just takes the first one and doesn't do anything. It could do that. I actually have a bot. I have a bot in my Grok bot that is a teacher bot. And I said, tell me what books I should bring on the trip.

2:07:16And it told me. And I said, okay, and you're going to work with me on those books? And I said, yeah, I'll give you a study guide and all of that. And I think that it's possible to use AI to teach effectively. Yes, but ChatGPT is not doing it with ChatGPT for teens. Use it to teach kids just to sit back and learn. Yeah, there's a, in my research, I stumbled upon this Bloom's two sigma problem. And it turns out one-on-one tutoring will make any student, like two sigmas over, better.

2:07:49But doesn't it have to be by a human? Yes. Currently, that's where the two sigma came from. And so what they realized was, you know, rich people are just going to always have this advantage. However, there is software being made now, and you can do this with any model right now. You can say, make me a workbook, make me a lesson plan, create quizzes, et cetera. We have a company, brilliant.org, that we invested in many years ago. I had, oh, brilliant. Yeah, I used to use Brilliant.

2:08:20It was an iPhone app for your brain. Yes, and it makes you really smart. And it turned out, the reason this worked was because they didn't sell it to schools. They just sold it to parents. And for 20, 30 bucks a month, you could have the equivalent of a $200 an hour tutor. And so I believe the two sigma problem, which is rich people can afford tutors, and anybody who has a child who they've gotten a tutor for to do the SATs knows you go from whatever, 800 is the average, and you immediately go to 1,000 or 1,100 with three months of tutoring,

2:08:52because it's a rigged test. It's a finite test. Yeah, the tutoring is what makes a kid successful. I mean, I wouldn't call myself a rich person, but for sure, Eric had private basketball coaching, private math coaching, private singing coaching. I did the math. I think there's an ineffable part of that that's the human-to-human interaction that a machine can never do. Are you sure it will never be able to do it? I don't feel that way. Are you sure? Yeah, because the machine isn't a human, and that there is a transaction between two people.

2:09:25I agree that it might not be the peak, but it will be 60, 70, 80%. So between a poor person can't afford it and a rich person can, and, you know, listen, it's obvious. All other things being equal, it would be better to have a person. You are affluent and rich if you can afford that stuff. Totally. If you look globally, you may not feel rich in the United States, which is a problem. People see things on Instagram like private jets or mansions or third homes, and they just think, oh, I'm poor. If you can afford any type of tutoring, you're rich on a global scale.

2:09:58Yeah. Absolutely. And one thing, you know, that they tell you, as soon as you do, like, grad school for cognitive psych, the first thing they tell you is that there's 120 years of research that shows that no one learns anything without practice and getting their hands dirty. If you have a kid who doesn't practice piano between lessons. 10,000 hours, right? Yeah. And so that's going to be the challenge for AI teaching and training. Yeah, you can coach, but how can you get that kid to practice and apply what they've learned?

2:10:28Because otherwise, you forget 80% of all new material, I think, in 45 days. I'd have to look at the research. One of the real issues, and it's for all humans, kids, of course, but all humans, is that there is, in learning anything, a period of time where it's painful, it's uncomfortable. Yes. You have to break through. That's right. People don't want to go through that stage to get to accomplishment. It's true of learning the piano. It's true of learning a language. It's true of learning anything. Yeah. Is at first, it sucks. Yes. I have a solution for this.

2:10:59What's the solution? For people who are parents and listening, you have to show your kids by doing it with them that you will do the uncomfortable process. So learning to ski. I'll suffer along with you. Yes. Pickleball is a great example. So I took my 16-year-old two years ago and the twins to go learn pickleball. Pickleball is hard to learn. I still think it sucks, so I must be at the beginner stage. I've never played pickleball, but why is it hard? If you get to 20 hours, you'll enjoy it. But the first five hours, not enjoyable.

2:11:30The next 10 are okay. It's true of any skill. It's true of tennis. Not all skills. Not all skills. Some you can pick up quickly. But chess, skiing, golf. It's a lot of pain when you're first skiing. Skiing is the canonical example. Billiards. So all you have to do is go- Skiing is not fun for the first 100 hours. I would say somewhere around the afternoon of day three, you will put together an afternoon where you don't fall and you have some flow moments and then you'll be addicted.

2:12:00So time to the flow moment is what I look at with the kids. That's a good one. Time to flow. And I try to break through and I do it with them. And so I'm going to do rock climbing next. And, you know, I'm terrified of heights. So it's going to be hard for me to do it like in a gym. And I'll do it with them. But anyway, the other company I invested in is called Icon. I'm looking at this icon. So these are, I've seen these in videos. These are cement printers, right? Concrete printers. Yes, 3D cement printers. If you scroll down, you'll see the technology working.

2:12:30So I had a company called- So these are 3D printed homes. That is wild. Yeah, this is my second swing at that. I did a company called Blockable. I lost millions of dollars. My investors and I on that one, trying to do homes in factories that were module that were then brought to locations and put together. It didn't work. You know, there were mistakes made. There were lessons learned, like everything. But this is the one. So what they do is they 3D print the frames. So I've seen these machines. They extrude. Oh, so there's a frame. There is a frame. No, no, no frame. They built it. The technology is a giant 3D printer here.

2:13:01I'll give it to you. It's on the technology page. If you go to the top. If you go, it's on the top of the- What would a house like that cost if I wanted to- It's going to be half the price of current houses. Look at this. It'll reduce it by half. Yeah. So- So it is hollow. Yeah. So what it does is- So you could put insulation or something in there. Wires. Wiring, yeah. And as it goes around in a circle, and they're building the system to do this, you can see it where, like, the tip goes and then just makes a 3D printing, like, in a circle.

2:13:35Like your 3D printer on your desk making little tchotchkes. Right. You know, ornaments. Remember we had the 3D printing craze, you know, 15 years ago. It was awesome. You could build, like, little fabricated parts. But the technology here just prints a layer of cement over and over and over again. It makes that ribbed wall. And eventually- Show this, Benito, because it's- So you still have the extruder, that part of a 3D printer, but you're extruding concrete. Yeah, and what you're doing here is you'll be able to-

2:14:06They have government contracts to build barracks and stuff like that, and then you can put whatever you want on the cement. So if you don't like the aesthetic of cement, but you can build this for $20 a square foot. There is a limit to the way the house can look, obviously. It's going to have to be kind of- You can snap anything onto the outside, Leo. Yeah, you could do a brick cover, can you? You could do brick, you could make it look like shingles and Cape Cod, whatever you want. Yeah, this is, yeah. But we could be solving-

2:14:37Is it expensive? No, it's super cheap. $20 a square foot to build a house. So you want to build a 25, 40, 50% less than the average home being built. And this is probably, this is the part I always want to show, and this is the part we keep cutting away from. You missed it again. Okay, it's hard. It's the 3D printer. There it is. There it is. There's the tip. Yeah, squirting it out there, the little nozzle. Yeah, it's the extruder. That's wild. Yeah. And it's probably more solid than wood frame or brick.

2:15:08Fireproof. It will last 100 years. Yeah. You know, pick anything you want. Any vector, it's better. So have you filed a bunch of IP on this? I mean, what would be the barrier to entry for something? You know, it turns out the barrier to entry to technology companies is your relentlessness and solving problems. It's true. Doing the distribution. It winds up almost never being the patents. So a lot of people have tried in this space to build 3D printers for stuff. It's who can get product market fit and deploy it. And they have a lot of contracts with the builders.

2:15:40So they're providing this to the home builders, the KB homes and those kind of people. And they love it. And they've got the military using it. So if you're the military. And you can do more than a single story, right? It's not limited to. I mean, if you want to, yeah, you can go to the second, third story. I think what's going to happen is. It says 27 feet is the limit. Yeah. Today. Today. That's two stories, right? Yeah. Two in an attic, I guess. They're just two really tall stories, but they've got a military contract now that's public. So you want to build a barracks. How does Wi-Fi work? Does it go through the concrete? How does what work? Wi-Fi.

2:16:11You will just put it on the inside, I guess. Yeah. Yeah. Which actually might not be a bad thing. You're kind of RF insulated. Yeah. It is the obvious solution. The problem is regulation. How's it doing with earthquakes? Oh, credible. Yeah. The stuff is super, super stable. So it'll be fine. I think that the only thing you have to worry about in earthquakes is very tall buildings and their foundations. You know, if you're that, that's the big problem is like Tokyo, New York, San Francisco. Rigid is not good because you want it to sway. And height is your enemy.

2:16:42And height. Yeah. Height. And then also like, are you in like that leaning tower in San Francisco, Millennium Tower? Yeah. Yeah. They built it on. It's sinking. They built it on top of sand and then they didn't build the struts deep enough. So how did they let them build that? Like what corrupt person signed off on that? Who let them do that? All right. Let's take a little break. More to come. You're watching This Week in Tech and Concrete Houses with Jason Calacanis of This Week in Startups and All In. Interesting. How do you get the little All In logo on your name on Twitter?

2:17:16How does that? Oh, I think you just pay like 10 bucks a month per person. You pay for it. You apply for a business account and then everybody on your team has it. I want to twit little twit logo after my name. Yeah. I canceled my Twitter account when they took away my blue check mark. You'll be back. I probably will be back. You know what? You took my blue check mark away. They took it away and they gave it back. Well, you have to pay for it. You got yours back? Some people got it back for him. Because I had half a million followers, I think Elon thought maybe he might put something I had like two or three hundred thousand, but they took that blue check mark away and

2:17:49I was gone that day. I get brigaded by like all the dark forces. You're going to get brigaded today because you were on this show, I'm sure. Yeah. And then certain people won't be on the show with me. So do you guys not do Blue Sky? It's like, come on, don't be a coward, Corey. You're on the show and just debate me. But you don't do Blue Sky or Threads or any of those? I mean, I have dabbled in all of them. Blue Sky is a bunch of panicking, like hand-wringing folks. I don't want to be on Blue Sky. I don't want to be on Truth Social.

2:18:20I hate the people at the ends of the margins. I like the people who are thoughtful and intelligent and make a decision on first principles each time. We have our Mastodon, twit.social, and I love it. But it's just, that's the network effect. That's Bob Metcalf's network effect. Back to Metcalf. It just can't quite get started. It's too late. I left X the minute Elon bought it. But I'm back because that's where the information is. Literally, and every new CEO now is engaging.

2:18:51So Jensen came on. He started tweeting. Apple's there. Apple, John Turnus. Turny? Turnus. Yeah. He's now got an account. He's engaging. Satya's engaging. And Zuckerberg's engaging. I'll tell you something I don't like about X. It makes me mad. Is it's aggressively algorithmic. And it's impossible to do chronological. So when I load up. Second tab over is your feed of your followers. So just go to them. No, no, no. But I want to look at the AI feed. I know. This is 15 hours old.

2:19:23Go to following. This is seven hours old. I can go to following and that's more. And that's your appeal, yeah. Or make lists. So you have lists. Look, you have tech news. I have lists. I should make lists. You got to go to lists. Oh, look. And then here we are. Have your GrokBot make lists. There's the fat Leo and Jason hugging. Look at us hugging it out. Chubbies. Oh, Doc, Doc. I love. What happened to Doc? He was on a couple weeks ago. You want to go on with him again? He's a character. No, I want to. Who? Jeff Jarvis. And who hates me? Jeff Jarvis. We didn't say this on the show. This was during the commercial. Jeff was your professor at CUNY when you were 18.

2:19:55I made it up. I made it up. Oh, you lying son of a.

2:19:59I was trying to make an old joke. We'll be back with more with Gina Smith. Dr. Gina Smith. Doctor. From IDC. Dr. Jeff Jarvis. And the lion son of a gun, Jason Callaghan. Trolling. It's a mini troll. You. You're my boy. I totally believed it. I do, too. Jeff is like my grandpa, and he's like your older brother, Leo. He's like 80. You're like 60. He's my age. He's basically my age. No, he's much older than you. He's at least 10 years older than you. He's old.

2:20:30He's been around a long time. He's very old. Jeff Jarvis is extremely old. This trip I'm taking is my 70th birthday present for myself, and he's just a couple of years older than me. I'm joking. I'm joking. But you know what? You're going to be 70? We should have a party for you. Did you turn 70, Leo? I didn't know that. You're not 70. I remember your 40th birthday. Wait. Are you 70, Jeff? Really? Leo, you're 70? I will be. When? Next year? November 29th. Oh, I'm November 29th. We're like one day apart. We're both Sagittarius. Both Sagittarius. Wait. That explains so much? What was my 40th birthday like?

2:21:01I don't remember. I don't know. We were on a trip or something, and we went out to dinner. It was the 80s. It was tons of cocaine. I don't remember anything. And Depeche Mode. It was awesome. Depeche Mode. Yeah, it was the 90s. Early 90s, wasn't it? It was the 90s, baby. All right, we'll have more. The 90s were great. To be 40 years old, the 90s was awesome. Oh, we had some fun, Dan.

Podcast CDN Infrastructure

2:21:22Too much fun.

Podcast CDN Infrastructure

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2:22:57Learn how you can get your first month free at cashfly.com slash twit. That's Cashfly. How many times have you heard me say this? Bandwidth for this week in tech is provided by Cashfly at C-A-C-H-E-F-L-Y dot com slash twit. And from the bottom of my heart, thank you, Cashfly. Now, back to twit. I sound like I'm 70 on that ad, but that's because I had just done 60 ads. That was the last one. I mean, this is the price.

2:23:27People don't know the price you pay for a successful podcast. Number one, you can never quit. Yeah. You can never quit. I should be retired. You can't quit. The audience will be extraordinarily upset. I always said, though, I would, as soon as the audience says, you're done, I'm done. I'm not going to push it. It's a powerful relationship. I want to show you this. This is my plaque. This is in honor of Leo Laporte, who had a verified Twitter account before they were available for purchase. That's hilarious. November 2022. That's the that's when you bought it.

2:23:59Yes. There was a company selling it, actually. Oh, that's great. And I said, oh, I have to have that. But I still have that. But that was then I had lost the blue check and then I had it back. Anyway, it's they didn't give me my blue check back. Twitter left. That's why. Twitter is better than everything. Everybody who is a conscientious objector is back. The guys from it, but it's true. Because it's all the important discussions. The problem is there's a brigade brigading problem. There is a bot problem. Do what I did. Tell everybody one dollar a month to charity to be in your replies.

2:24:32I'll do that. Yeah. Or just take the money for yourself, Leo. And then you can. OK. No, you deserve it. But you know what? I don't make it. I don't want to have an obligation to post. I post once in a while. I don't want to have an obligation. So just what you tell your audience. One post a week. OK, I could do that. And it's the same price as Club Twit. And if you sign up there, if you email this address, you get your Club Twit turned on. So just make it another channel and just say you'll read your replies once in a while and then interact with the people who reply. And it is chef's kiss, a wonderful experience again.

2:25:02I don't know if I'm suppressed. I might be suppressed. You're not. They got rid of that. They got rid of the whole suppressing algorithm. And they don't do that anymore. I have 444.8 thousand followers. But I, you know, so this last tweet of mine, 8.5 thousand views. None of these, none of these get much traction. So I think you might not be. I'm not saying things people want to hear.

2:25:34You're probably not active enough. But if you start being more active, then I think you'll get more people engaging with you. You have to get people engaging and replying. But they publish the algorithm. If people share your tweet, you get 20 points. If people reply, you get three. If people retweet, you get three. So now the algorithm's public. So just ask your GrokBot, like, what should I do? And if you made, if you had your team say, what were the best products talked about last month on the network? And you just made, you know, a tweet storm and you don't have to do it.

2:26:05Your team will do it. What are the, and your bot can do it. What are the 20 most interesting movies and books talked about on the Twitter network? Or people will bookmark it and then it'll become an incredibly big post. Or those 444,000 followers are three quarters bots. Uh, if you go to your, you can find out analytics and you go to the creator studio, it shows you how many are active. So of my 1.8 million, if I go to analytics, 1.8 million followers, well, it all in drove a lot. So, and then sometimes Elon retweets.

2:26:36So that drove a lot. Yeah. All you got to do is get Elon to treat you. Of my 1.7 million. Guess how many are active? 10%. In the last 24 hours. 10%. Nope. High, much higher. Really? Yeah. So in the last 24 hours, 681,000 of mine are active. So I have a pretty active account. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. I can. That's impressive. So where do you find that? In the creator studio? In the creator studio. Yeah. Uh, I see subscriptions, live studio. Oh, analytics. There it is. Yeah.

2:27:06Here. Uh. Share my screen. So here, can you see my screen? Did I just take it off? I don't want to see your screen. Oh, stop. No, it's okay. I'm just jealous. Anyway. Well, okay. Show his screen real quick and then show mine and you'll see why I'm jealous. Anyway, it's just a function of like, I do 20 tweets a day or something. So here, hold on my screen. There you go. Okay. 169 million impressions. See on the bottom, right? Yeah. Up 20%. I got 20,000, but it is up 43%. All you have to do is, the other thing to do is have your bot say, um, have your, here's

2:27:43the issue. 11,000 verified followers out of 440,000, 69,000 active followers. Yes. So it's a fraction. Because you haven't been active. So as people roll off or they create new accounts or whatever, you're just not engaging with the most recent group. If you start engaging, what you have to do is do clips from the show on your personal account. The whole thing will be changed. I'm so bad at promotion. I hate that. I don't want to promote it. Me too. I've always hated it. It's because we came out of journalism and it feels like you're not allowed to do it.

2:28:13Tell the people what they want. There's a whole group of people who just want the clips from the show. Just clip the, well, we do that. We do the clips. I just don't put them on my account. Put them on your personal account. Benito. One a day. Send me the clips. One a day. Just share it. I'll have my bot do it. Have your bot do it. One a day. No, not retweet. It has to be published to his as an organic tweet. Don't retweet it. Organic tweet. Organic tweet. You can hire some kid to do it. Oh, here's the other thing to do. Tell your bot to tell you who are your highest influence people. Following you already.

2:28:44Yeah. And then say, tell me every day their best tweets. Then you click on those tweets and you do become a reply guy. I am not going to ever be a reply guy. If you reply guy, if you do my 10 day reply guy, your stats will go way up. 10 day reply guy. That's never going to be a reply guy. Is that like 90 day fiance? Amazon has over 1 million robot workers.

2:29:15Doesn't that seem like there's a lot of jobs that they're going to be. Maybe it's a job. They're the story. Buy buy Amazon stock. Now they are going to be the most efficient, profitable company in the world. It's certainly efficient. No humans. It makes so, I mean, a related story is Masayoshi Son, of course, Son Son, SoftBank, saying that he's trying to raise a hundred billion dollars. And what he's using the money for is to buy companies to do the same thing that Amazon's doing. Totally roboticized and AI-sized, all kinds of different buildings.

2:29:49Isn't Son Son's record a little checkered these days? Oh, totally. You're right. Wasn't he the WeWork guy? Yeah, but you know what? He hit open AI. He's also the Yahoo guy. He hit Uber. He hit open AI? You only need to hit one. You only need to hit one. He has a lot of successes. He's hit many. Right. Hey, you remember MapQuest? Of course. Anybody ever use MapQuest anymore? Find your flock camera on that thing. They are. They're making a bid to come back. Now I use Apple Maps and Google Maps and maybe Waze, but MapQuest was the original. Remember you would, before you go anywhere, you'd print out a map from MapQuest?

2:30:22Yeah. A hundred percent. Yes. It was like, that was mind blowing. But here's the thing about Amazon. There was internal documents that got leaked where they were talking about not hiring like the next million people. Right. And they were trying, and I sent you the New York Times story about this. Pulling it up right now. Yeah. And Jassy then wrote a memo to the company and made it public saying like, hey, AI is going to have a profound impact. He kind of was signaling it. So when people tell you what they're doing, pay attention. Yeah.

2:30:53And he just listen. And they are going to replace every factory worker and every delivery driver with automated technologies, robots, Zoox, et cetera. It's they're all getting replaced. And you're talking about, and they were talking about how do we deal with this in the future in local communities where those Amazon jobs are going away? How do you deal with that? From a universal basic income is what they could do. Well, they said, give money to Toys for Tots. So close it up.

2:31:24Yeah. Close it up. Or they could retrain the people for Toys for Tots. That's their plan? Give more money to Toys for Tots? The plan that isn't just marketing people. We're like, how do we deal with the press? And somebody in the meeting said Toys for Tots. It's literally in the story I sent you. God, that's pathetic. Here it is. Documents show the company has considered building an image as a, quote, good corporate citizen through greater participation in community events, such as parades and Toys for Tots. Remember CSR? It's corporate social responsibility is back.

2:31:55We talked about that. I mean, it's going to be, this will be the front lines. It's not going to be white collar workers. There's so many opportunities for white collar workers. It's going to be bonkers because everybody can start a company and there's so many problems to solve. And it's going to be amazing. All right, so they should take the factory workers and train them all to be electricians. But then they're going to all be driving Tester Roses all over the place. It's not going to happen. And there's going to be a huge number of people out of work, on the streets, not eating.

2:32:30This is terrible. Without Medicaid. Without insurance. There's no health care. Without Obamacare. Yeah. So Meta did something right. They have a workforce academy. So what they're doing is they're training people for free to learn to be electricians and to build data centers. Because we need more electricians, frankly, plumbers, electricians. I can't get a handyman to save my life. This is where the jobs are going to bifurcate. Either like superhuman activities, which is building stuff and supervising the robots, building

2:33:03stuff. Then there's going to be, on the white-collar side, supervising the developer bots, building stuff. So if you look at what does a developer do today, you mentioned earlier in the show, Leo, there's one group of developers who are like, I want a bespoke build code, and I don't want to give, because I love it. I love working in a team. And then there's another group who are like, you know, I just don't like other developers. I just want to have a bunch of agents produce stuff because these other developers are annoying and persnickety, and they want raises, and they want time off, and they don't want to

2:33:34come to the stand-up, yada, yada. And so you have that group who are like, I just love having 50 agents working for me overnight, and then I check in their code. I love programming. It was a hobby for years, for 40 years. I love it. It's satisfying. I get in the flow. I enjoy it. I haven't written line of code in a year, ever since Opus 4-5 came out, November 24th, 2025, a day I will never forget. And I actually really enjoy coding with agents, because there's still that higher level process

2:34:04of thinking about it, planning it, organizing it, and reining them in. Gina, this is your field, though, is jobs. Training is going to explode as a result of all of this. It's such a great investment to make, because there's going to have to be wholesale training of everybody, the blue-collar workers, the white-collar workers, training for these new positions. You must have studied this Workforce Academy that Meta's doing. Is this real, or is it just- It's real. It's real, and it's not just them. Look at the investments that you're seeing across the board in IT training, technical

2:34:38training. Look at a company called Orcara. It just actually was purchased, I think, but it's all about verifying skills. So a big problem that companies have is they really don't know who has what skills, right? Like, it's kind of a black box. And so what you do is you verify skills, you know, with its AI-assisted software that can actually test someone. It rolls up a simulation, and so you can secure a Kubernetes instance, can you? Do it.

2:35:08You've got four minutes. There are people who just will never be able to do that, right? I mean- Do what? I mean, any of that. Secure a Kubernetes instance? Maybe they can become electricians, I guess. I don't know. But training for everything, not just high technical skills, but training in human judgment is becoming a thing. It's just back to motivation again, Leo. Yeah. The word that no socialists want to talk about or people on either extreme of the horseshoe, the individual sovereignty and their ability to be motivated to improve their lot in life.

2:35:45That is always the hard thing. And, you know, all these people with graduate degrees on one side or lazy people on the other, they have to have the will to spend an hour to a day to improve their skills to be able to operate in this new world. And it's free. It's free to go use these tools. These tools are free slash close to free. It's true. There's no excuse now for not learning. A hundred percent that's true. And when I was living in Hong Kong- And that's the message we need to give people. You meet people all the time. They say, oh, I've lived here for 12 years.

2:36:16I speak no Chinese. How is it you're able to order in the restaurant? It's like, you spend no effort. You can learn how to order and talk to an Uber and say thank you and ask for the check. You really can, but people make no effort. They feel like school's over and I'm not going- Everybody wants a handout. Everybody wants UBI. Not everybody. There's a group of people who are just like, give me, I want a free graduate degree. I want to go study media studies or whatever. It's like, look at the world.

2:36:46And there's this Japanese concept of, it'll come to me in a second. Anyway, you can just make three or four circles, Leo. One of them is what you're good at. One of them is what the world needs. And one of them is what the world is willing to pay for. And ikigai is what it's called. Pull up ikigai, ikigai, the Japanese secret. And if you look at ikigai on Google- It means a reason for being.

2:37:18Yeah. I thought ikigai is a life purpose. What is your life purpose? That's another way to put it. And so you have to look at the formula is for ikigai is what you can be paid for, what the world needs, what you love is the one I missed that and what you're good at. That's what it is. Show this, Benito. So you look at your son- When Jason showed his screen, I lost yours. So I need to pay. Oh. Sorry about that. I blocked you. You stole my screen, man. You stole it. My screen blocked you. But if you look at this, this explains everything. And you look at your son, right?

2:37:49He loved to cook. The world loved to pay for a nice beef sandwich with the dip, right? Like if you said, what does the world want? It may not want some fancy, dancy Michelin star food, but you know what everybody likes? A French dip. A good French dip. There's nothing like it. It's fricking delicious. And what are you good at? He's good at making the French dip. He knows how to make the beef. He's good at making sandwiches. Find your magical skill. So the world needs a French dip. They're willing to pay for a French dip. Do you think everyone can find a place in this?

2:38:22Of course they can. And the problem with the dialogue today is everybody wants to debate politics instead of ikigai. Just sit everybody down. What are you good at? And what do you love? And is the world willing to pay for this? And does the world need it? And then everybody would have it. This is another way of saying purpose, right? But you can't have your purpose be, I want to fight for indigenous people who have an amputee, and I want a virtue signal because nobody's willing to pay for it. Okay. That's a hobby. That's a passion too, but it's not paying your rent.

2:38:55Right. Yeah. I'm with you, Jason. I'll tell you, I just recently did research. I ran a survey of 1400 enterprise leaders and asked them, what is the number one skill your company needs to be ready for AI? And everyone said analytical judgment. We already talked about that. But then when you ask schools, what is, we'll get that from experience and practice. But the, we asked the second question is what skill are you most missing? And overwhelmingly, everyone said learning agility.

2:39:26Employees who have the ability to say, yeah, I can learn that. I can change the way I do things because at the rate of technological acceleration, everybody working at a company needs to be fast moving and fast learning. Kevin Rose always used to say that. I don't hire the smartest guy. I hire the guy who can learn. That's right. A passion for learning is just so important. Yeah. So important. Totally. Well, on that note, I thank you both. What a great show.

2:39:57I'm so much fun. Where are you based, Gina? Where are you based? I'm in Seattle, Jason. I'm right here. I'll connect with you on LinkedIn if we're not already connected. Jason at Calacanis.com is my email. There you go. First name at last name. But if you ever make your way through Texas, let's get some brisket or beef ribs. Where is the best barbecue? Is it Franklin's? Okay. So you always have this. This is what the non-residents say. What's the best barbecue? The right question is, what's the best specific barbecue dish?

2:40:28So what's the best brisket? You got to get brisket. That would be Franklin's and that would be Salt Lick. Salt Lick's good. If you said best beef ribs, then you go in Terry Black's. If you said best bison rib, then you're saying Salt Lick. So you have to, and then if you want to go for smoked pork belly, that's a different thing. Pork ribs is different than beef ribs. It's all different. Yeah. So you're picking a dish and working backwards. I make Franklin's brisket. I smoke, I get up at three in the morning, follow his recipe. You got the Traeger? I got the Traeger.

2:40:59Oh, so great. The Traeger. I smoked that. And man, that is the best. I haven't smoked since I got here because it's so easy to buy it. Gotta get, well, I know if I had a brisket place down the road, I probably wouldn't because it's a real, get up at 3 a.m. to do this. That's hardcore. But you also, my secret is Snake River Farms wagyu brisket. Yes. Snake River Farms, so good. You know, once I went to Costco, got the brisket there. Not as good. No. If you're going to smoke in those meats, you got to get the good meats. Smoking meats.

2:41:29All about the ingredients, right? No, it's a reference to Mark Zuckerberg. Just had the 20th anniversary of Smoking Meats. Remember that? Yeah. Now I do. Smoking meats. That was awesome. I mean, you can interpret that however you want. I went to my Grokbot because I thought maybe, I asked my travel bot, could you find the movies that are going to be on the airplane? It did. I said, are they going to have, you can see everything? They said, no, they are not. But I can't watch the Devil Wears Prada too, so I'll be all right.

2:42:02Oh man, I hit a Starlink flight the other day on United. I mean, I was, and it was only from Austin to LA, not to Japan, but I was taking United to Japan. And I emailed the CEO of United because I'm famous now, Leo. And I just assume he knows who I am. And he got back to me immediately. And I said, listen, Starlink's mind blowing. What's the story with Starlink on the long haul flights? And he said, oh, you know, this specific aircraft manufacturer is like, takes a long time.

2:42:34Didn't Elon get in a little tussle with Delta over all of this? The Delta guy was like, he's a anti-Trump, anti-Elon. Yeah, he said he wouldn't, he didn't want to. He said it was bad for aerodynamics. I don't want to have it on. It's bad for aerodynamics. Which is not true. It's literally like an inch high and it has no impact on drag, but he's an anti-Trump Elon guy. So he was like, I'm not doing it. I'm a conscientious objector to Elon. And then all of his customers were like, hey, dummy, we want broadband.

2:43:04We don't care about anybody's political statement. So what is this system on Delta that they're using? They're waiting like three or four years for the Leo satellites that Leo is working on with Jeff Bezos. I will get those satellites up as fast as I can. Step on it. When you get back from vacation. You have my word. First vacation. I just checked EVA has the Panasonic satellite Wi-Fi. Oh, terrible. And they say it's terrible. Isn't it just nice to bring a book on a plane and not be online? I'm going to read the Ramayana because I need to get up on all of the mythology of the area

2:43:41I'm going to. I am off. Patanjali's Yoga Sutras. It's good airplane reading. Say it again. Patanjali's Yoga Sutras. It's an ancient Indian text. It's the basis of all yoga, but it's really interesting. I didn't know. I'm kind of a Tao Te Ching kind of guy. Well, same idea. Explaining reality. Woo-wee, baby. The Stephen King biography. Is there a biography of Stephen King? Well, on writing is kind of his biography. I've read on writing. That's fantastic.

2:44:12Steve Martin biography, also great. I've read that. I have read that also. Hey, you guys, you can read I Was. Born Standing Up. I Was. There's this great biography all about Steve Wozniak. Pretty great. You know what? Steve looks like he's doing great. I'll give you a sleeper. I'll give you a sleeper. Akira Kurosawa is something like an autobiography. The famous. I love Kurosawa's movies. I do too. His autobiography, nobody knows about it. Something like an autobiography. So good. So good. Mike Ovitz. Who is Mike Ovitz? Incredible.

2:44:43It's called Who is Mike Ovitz? Yeah. It's pretty great. Who is Jason Calacanis? Who is? Well, just ask the president of United Airlines. He'll tell you. You can catch him on the All In podcast. Do you guys do that on a regular? Every Thursday we tape. It comes out every Friday. Perfect. Yeah. And I think you could probably find it pretty quickly. Maybe that's what you should call the show. Just go to the charts and look at number one. I liked how Jason said, I'm famous now, Leo. That is the name of the show. Podcast famous is like right below the least famous reality TV star.

2:45:14Right. Exactly. Literally right below whatever is trending on Bravo. Somebody who was mad at me. 90 day fiance. When I was working at tech TV, got real mad at me. And she said, you're nothing but a second rate celebrity on a class D cable channel. And he said, Leo's like, I'll take it. That's better than that. Exactly. I said, nailed it. Perfect. Book it. And now I'm a podcaster. Thank you, Jason. Always a pleasure to see you.

2:45:45Really appreciate it. Keep up the good work. Gina Smith, do you have a podcast? Anything you want to plug besides your great work at IDC? No, nothing at the moment. I'm thinking about writing a book about those crazy 90s days. I was at Good Morning America all those years. I would love to read that. Yeah. We would require my writing it. I'm not on Twitter. But, you know, if you could talk to Elon and guarantee my blue check mark back. What is it? Ten bucks a month. Don't be such a cheapskate.

2:46:16Shoot the lock off your wallet. Yeah. You and Amazon Web Services. I'm on LinkedIn. And find some ads on Twitter. Come on. Yeah. Well, we'll have you both back soon, I hope. It's really been a great way to send me off on vacation. I will be gone for three weeks. Oh. Oh, it's a pleasure. Tune into the show. We've got great hosts. I'm always grateful when people show up to do this show, because I know it's interminable. No, I do it twice a year. I do it twice a year. Twice a year. I would have you on more, but you've got this other thing you're doing. I don't know. It's all in. Twice a year. Perfect. Lock me up. Twice a year.

2:46:47You're locked. And when you're on vacation and you need a moderator, feel free to ask. Oh, I should have asked you, actually. Well, no, I mean, moderation is my speciality. So that's true. I'm here. That's true. I love doing this show, because, Leah, how many years did we do that radio show together? And we were taking calls, Jason. It wasn't a show where we just talk. We actually answered calls, often from farmers on tractors who had computer questions. Yes. Yes, it was for four hours or five hours every Sunday.

2:47:19No vacation. Crazy. For years we didn't want together. Next week, Micah Sargent will be filling in for me, Devinder Hardwar, the week after that from Engadget. You might know something about them, Jason. And Father Robert Ballinson will be hosting. I love Father. I like him, too. He's desperately trying to buy Engadget back. They won't sell it back to me. He's bringing on his buddy, David Hewlett, the sci-fi author. So that'll be a lot. That'll be a great show. That's interesting. Yeah.

2:47:47Yeah. Hewlett, what did he, he was, no, he's an actor. He was in Stargate. That's right. Stargate actor. But he's a geek. So he'll be a lot of fun. All right. Thank you all for being here. I'll see you in a month. Have a great trip. I'm really excited. I hope I survive.

2:48:07You will. And Thailand, you've got to learn how to say Saudi. Do you need a hotel when you're in Singapore? No, no. I've got a boat. Say what I say. Saladi. Well, a man would say Saudi crap. Saladi crap. A woman would say, yeah, like crap. But it's crap. You'll see. You'll learn how to do it. Saladi crap. You'll greet people like this. It's like salaam. Yes. But you say crap. Anytime you say a word, you indicate that you're a male and you say crap.

2:48:38Crap. Saladi crap. Yeah. You'll see. And you do this? You do the little thing? Yeah. Yes. Sawa si crap is good morning. You'll learn all this in Thailand. I promise you'll learn it. It'll be a blast. They're such nice people. We do twit every Sunday afternoon, 2 to 5 p.m. Pacific, 5 to 8 Eastern, 2100 UTC. You can watch us. We stream it live on X, but also YouTube, Twitch, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Kik. So six different platforms. And of course, if you're a generous Club Twit member, thank you, Club Twit members. You're keeping the show afloat and afoot.

2:49:10A foot. A foot and a half. If you're a Club Twit member, you can watch in the Club Twit Discord. And just like you said, Jason, when people pay a little bit, the social network is that much better. So 10 bucks a month, ad-free versions of all the shows. It's so good. The Discord is so good. And I love the Discord. Well, it's so great about the... I jump into the Discord once in a while because... I see you there. Yeah, it's great. But you know what? It's like by having that $10 a month, you know, like a latte and a half, that opt-in makes it the top 1% of the audience here, which is like really interesting, fun people.

2:49:43And you get rid of the trolls, which are the bottom third of the audience. So it's a nice experience. No bots, no trolls. Nice experience. Just real people smoking their meats. There he is. Smoking meats. There he is. Smoking meats. You guys should just... Here's what you guys should do in the Club Twit, is just troll Leo by doing classic memes with him in it. Because that's what my people do to me. They do it. And it is hilarious. And with AI, there's nothing you can't fake. Nothing's stopping you from having me and Leo smoking meats. I mean, it's not a euphemism.

2:50:15We're literally smoking meats. It's not a euphemism. It is not a euphemism. Not a euphemism. It's not code for anything. No, it's code. It's code. Admit it. Admit it. Admit it. That was the wonderful Gregory Brothers who do those Songify this. It was one of their great Songify's. Oh, I remember Songify. Is that still around? I don't know. Is it? I don't know. We do this show on Sundays, but you can download it anytime you want to.

2:50:48From twit.tv. It's a YouTube channel also. And of course, you can subscribe on your favorite podcast client. You can get it automatically the minute it's done. Thank you for being here. I'll see you later. Another twit. See y'all. Thanks. It's in the can. Bye. Bye. Smoke some meats. He's amazing.

2:51:08Doing the twit. Doing the twit. All right. Doing the twit, baby. Doing the twit. All right. Doing the twit. We all have routines. I'm Jabron, and with diabetes, mine was finger sticks. Sometimes, I skip them because it hurt. The Freestyle Libre 3CGM changed that. It gives me glucose insights without finger sticks. Learn more at freestyllibre.us. Finger sticks are required if your glucose alarms and readings do not match symptoms, or when you see check blood glucose symbol for the first 12 hours. The views expressed should not be used for medical diagnosis or treatment as a substitute

2:51:39for professional medical advice. Individual circumstances may vary. For prescription only. Safety info found at freestyllibre.us.