This Week in Tech 1106 Transcript
Please be advised that this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word-for-word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-free version of the show.
Leo Laporte [00:00:00]:
It'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. Podcasts you love.
TWiT.tv [00:00:25]:
From people you trust.
Leo Laporte [00:00:27]:
This is TWiT. This is TWiT, This Week in Tech, episode 1106, recorded Sunday, October 18th, 2026. The 10-day reply guy. It'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 gonna have a lot of fun. This is my last show before I go on vacation for 3 weeks.
Leo Laporte [00:01:02]:
And I thought, I'm gonna just blow it all out. Gina Smith, Dr. Gina Smith is with us. Great to see you, Gina. Hi, great to be here. Senior Research Director, IDC. As I was saying earlier, she took my COMDEX virginity from me in 1992, introduced me to Vegas.
Gina Smith [00:01:21]:
Yeah, and you and I hosted a radio show together for many years.
Leo Laporte [00:01:24]:
Many moons. 10 years. A TV show too.
Gina Smith [00:01:28]:
Yes, a TV show. That's right.
Leo Laporte [00:01:29]:
The Personal Computer Show. There's a good name.
Gina Smith [00:01:32]:
That was my first.
Leo Laporte [00:01:33]:
What was it about? It was— 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?
Jason Calacanis [00:01:50]:
That podcast does not take ads, much to my chagrin. Uh, literally $50 million a year left on the table because,
Leo Laporte [00:01:57]:
yeah,
Jason Calacanis [00:01:58]:
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, 'cause I would take it.
Leo Laporte [00:02:09]:
You got David Sacks. David Sacks. You got who else?
Jason Calacanis [00:02:11]:
Chamath Palihapitiya.
Leo Laporte [00:02:13]:
I knew it, I knew it, but I didn't wanna say his name. And you say it so nicely.
Jason Calacanis [00:02:17]:
Palihapitiya.
Leo Laporte [00:02:19]:
Palihapitiya.
Jason Calacanis [00:02:20]:
You got it. Palihapitiya. Yeah, right through my dyslexia. Which we were number one Literally on the trending charts on Apple the last 2 weeks.
Leo Laporte [00:02:29]:
Oh, yeah.
Jason Calacanis [00:02:30]:
Number 1.
Leo Laporte [00:02:31]:
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 be.
Jason Calacanis [00:02:39]:
I think the connections— we lost half the audience who were like, you're 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. And then when we stopped talking about Trump, Because like, just, you know, it's not going well. Let's just leave it at that.
Leo Laporte [00:02:57]:
To put it mildly.
Jason Calacanis [00:02:58]:
It hasn't been going so well in the last 6 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.
Leo Laporte [00:03:09]:
I wasn't going to listen. I'm not MAGA. Neither am I. Yeah, no, and neither are you. You're kind of more in the center of the—
Jason Calacanis [00:03:16]:
I'm a centrist. Yes, independent.
Leo Laporte [00:03:18]:
Yeah,
Jason Calacanis [00:03:19]:
you know you're doing a— 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. Like, literally, I couldn't be doing it worse. I could not explain my position worse. Everybody hates you. Everybody hates me.
Leo Laporte [00:03:34]:
Everybody hates you.
Jason Calacanis [00:03:36]:
Literally.
Leo Laporte [00:03:37]:
So I gotta start with, uh, Elon because, uh, of the new Roadster thingamajigger. Amazing. The flying car.
Jason Calacanis [00:03:46]:
That's—
Leo Laporte [00:03:46]:
Are you— do you have an order in? I'm sure you do.
Jason Calacanis [00:03:49]:
I didn't put the order in yet. Um, I— my new philosophy with these new products is buy it in year 2, uh, because I have the 16th Roadster.
Leo Laporte [00:03:58]:
You had the original Roadster. You did.
Jason Calacanis [00:04:00]:
I still have it, number 16, in the garage right here. Uh, 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. But when you buy the first generation of anything, you know, Apple, Watch or whatever. Uh, you know, they're getting the kinks out. And so I will buy this in years.
Leo Laporte [00:04:19]:
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. It's going upside down on a loop-de-loop, flipping over, then the rocket engines come on and it lands.
Gina Smith [00:04:36]:
Thrusters. Wow.
Leo Laporte [00:04:37]:
What? Now, now, all right, now my, my son said, can I buy that? I said, well,
Gina Smith [00:04:42]:
No.
Leo Laporte [00:04:43]:
I doubt it.
Gina Smith [00:04:44]:
They announced this in 2017 the first time, didn't they? I mean, an announcement doesn't— it's just as vapor.
Leo Laporte [00:04:52]:
Well, at least it's kind of real now, right?
Gina Smith [00:04:54]:
Well,
Leo Laporte [00:04:55]:
it also, it also, uh, drove towards a car and, and did a backflip over it. Now, my understanding is there are, uh, tanks in the backseat, many heavy tanks that have some sort of propellant in it. They can only fly for about— huh? It's air?
Jason Calacanis [00:05:13]:
It's just air? It's air.
Leo Laporte [00:05:14]:
But they can only fly for about 7 seconds. So you ain't gonna be driving down the road and flying over cars.
Jason Calacanis [00:05:21]:
Not at all.
Leo Laporte [00:05:22]:
And also, I imagine it takes up quite a bit of room and weight in the back seat. And, well, I can't imagine how loud it is.
Gina Smith [00:05:30]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:05:30]:
But it's kind of cool. It's a flying car.
Gina Smith [00:05:33]:
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 gonna ship in 2020. Then 2022. Yeah.
Jason Calacanis [00:05:43]:
And they changed the design and they added flying. So I think it's gonna be another 2 years now.
Leo Laporte [00:05:48]:
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, uh, and he likes this kind of thing. And this event was clearly showbiz.
Gina Smith [00:06:05]:
Yeah.
Jason Calacanis [00:06:05]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:06:05]:
Yeah.
Jason Calacanis [00:06:06]:
Uh, You know, he showed it to me like 3 or 4 months ago, that same demo. And he was like, hey, check this out. And, you know, we're personal friends, whatever. So he showed it to me and I was like, is that AI slop? 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.
Jason Calacanis [00:06:27]:
You can land 2 rockets, but that— and it still doesn't look real.
Leo Laporte [00:06:30]:
Price and availability, 2028.
Jason Calacanis [00:06:33]:
Okay,
Leo Laporte [00:06:34]:
quarter of a mil, uh, if you want the thrust trim, the cold gas thrusters.
Jason Calacanis [00:06:41]:
Yeah, now that's real. Um, so this will go— that, like, it's just blowing air out the back, which makes it go faster. But what we've got— Oh, I get it.
Leo Laporte [00:06:50]:
So that's not the— that's not the flying car one. That's just—
Jason Calacanis [00:06:53]:
So flying cars, obviously not street legal. That's—
Leo Laporte [00:06:55]:
Oh yeah, there's that. Yeah. So wait a minute, it has thrusters in the back?
Jason Calacanis [00:07:01]:
Yeah, so there's 3 trim levels. One is just electric. Okay, that's gonna go like— Just electric. 0 to 60 in like 1 point— 1 second. Yeah, 1 second.
Leo Laporte [00:07:10]:
By the way, I had the Model X with Insane, or actually Ludicrous, and I didn't use it very much because I almost would almost— I would red out every time I did it. I would almost pass out.
Jason Calacanis [00:07:21]:
Yes.
Leo Laporte [00:07:21]:
And I realized this is insanely dangerous, but that was 3 seconds.
Jason Calacanis [00:07:26]:
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 so things don't go flying in the car and kids don't vomit.
Leo Laporte [00:07:43]:
The good news is if they vomit, it does go backwards. It doesn't go—
Jason Calacanis [00:07:46]:
That's fair. Fair enough. It's on the back windshield. Anyway, uh, this thing looks gorgeous.
Leo Laporte [00:07:52]:
I don't think 1-point-whatever-second acceleration is really a good idea, to be honest.
Jason Calacanis [00:07:57]:
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 gonna 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, but 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, 2 to 6 months from now.
Leo Laporte [00:08:44]:
I thought they already merged. So they have not merged. X.com, xAI, and SpaceX, those 3 are together, but they're together.
Jason Calacanis [00:08:52]:
Tesla's on the side.
Leo Laporte [00:08:54]:
A little pinky outside there.
Jason Calacanis [00:08:56]:
Tesla's still on the side. And then Tesla has options.
Gina Smith [00:08:58]:
And then, yeah, his purchase of EchoStar, right? The—
Leo Laporte [00:09:01]:
Well, that's the other story. He wants to be a cell company. Starlink wants to be—
Gina Smith [00:09:04]:
Yeah, so the 800 MHz spectrum, right? The direct phone to satellite. Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:09:12]:
There's a problem with that. You still need towers because if you're inside, you can't see the satellite from the inside.
Gina Smith [00:09:19]:
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—
Jason Calacanis [00:09:27]:
Is it not obvious what he's doing? It's not obvious?
Leo Laporte [00:09:30]:
What is he doing? Tell us.
Jason Calacanis [00:09:32]:
Not obvious? Okay.
Leo Laporte [00:09:34]:
It's not obvious, Jason.
Jason Calacanis [00:09:36]:
Let me be, let me be Captain Obvious. Okay, Captain Obvious. Captain Obvious, I'm gonna go fly. Okay, the 2 companies are obviously coming together at some point, right? The
Leo Laporte [00:09:46]:
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 its own.
Jason Calacanis [00:09:54]:
I think these 2 things merging at some point is an inevitability because they're working on the fab together to make chips. They're working on like this in a little microcosm. Then 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—
Leo Laporte [00:10:11]:
It's all mushed together. They share engineers, they share executives. Exactly. It's all mushed together. Exactly. It's just— it's just weird. All the shareholders want that. A single— yeah, right, right.
Jason Calacanis [00:10:18]:
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. Yeah. Uh, which is what he does. I've sat with him on these back-to-back meetings. It's incredible. Um, but what's happening with that— And
Leo Laporte [00:10:31]:
then after the meeting, the executives pull everybody aside and say, okay, that's what Elon said, now this is what we're gonna do, right? Come on.
Jason Calacanis [00:10:37]:
Actually, it's, um, 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 are no— there's no small talk.
Leo Laporte [00:10:54]:
I know you're his buddy, so I don't expect you to say anything negative about him, but sure, his reputation is much tarnished. You understand that, right? You think? And, and some of it is he seems a little nutty, like too much Special K.
Gina Smith [00:11:08]:
Yeah.
Jason Calacanis [00:11:09]:
Uh, if you— as they said on the Saturday Night Live, uh, if you think I'd be a normal chill dude in the monologue, like, have you not been paying attention?
Leo Laporte [00:11:18]:
Was he always the same? Has he, has he changed at all?
Jason Calacanis [00:11:21]:
Not much. I think the political thing is new.
Leo Laporte [00:11:24]:
Yeah, yeah, that's a whole— you know what, I kind of understand why he's giving almost $200 million to Ken Paxton in Texas, which is obscene, but crazy. Yeah, it's good for his business. He's in Texas, and owning a senator is always a good thing, right?
Jason Calacanis [00:11:39]:
I mean,
Leo Laporte [00:11:40]:
as Will Rogers said, we'd have the best Congress money can buy.
Jason Calacanis [00:11:43]:
My feeling on it has always been I wish he would start a third party. I just feel like—
Leo Laporte [00:11:47]:
I wish he would get out of politics entirely. I don't think he's—
Jason Calacanis [00:11:50]:
Either of those.
Leo Laporte [00:11:51]:
I think too much money 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.
Jason Calacanis [00:12:00]:
The problem was the Dems were going after him so hard they forced him to pick a side. That's the—
Leo Laporte [00:12:04]:
Oh, is that what happened?
Jason Calacanis [00:12:06]:
Yeah, they were investigating everything and they were like, oh, this guy's got it. They 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 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.
Gina Smith [00:12:26]:
Yeah.
Jason Calacanis [00:12:26]:
And so then he was like, okay, well, this side wants to put me in jail and this side is like, I'd be— wants to support entrepreneurship.
Leo Laporte [00:12:33]:
I'd be this— 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.
Gina Smith [00:12:41]:
Well, I mean, his relationship with Brendan Carr is tight. So the FCC chairman, I mean, all
Jason Calacanis [00:12:46]:
of them Here's what I've learned about politics, getting dragged into it the last 10 years, is like all these sides are super conflicted. I'm an independent moderate for a reason. That's totally true. Yeah. 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 Thielverse and Elon and everybody on— and Sachs on the other side. Uh, and our system is broken because money plays too big a role. I agree.
Leo Laporte [00:13:13]:
They
Gina Smith [00:13:14]:
should get rid of Citizens United. That would be the first huge mistake.
Leo Laporte [00:13:17]:
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.
Jason Calacanis [00:13:29]:
I suggest you judge— yeah, if you want to judge Elon, just judge him by the products he makes.
Leo Laporte [00:13:34]:
He's— but also, he's doing— I, I mean, I'll— I hate to say it, but I'll give him and I'll give Apple a pass because they— we now know they gave $25 million to the ballroom.
Gina Smith [00:13:43]:
Ballroom. Of
Jason Calacanis [00:13:44]:
course.
Leo Laporte [00:13:45]:
This is— The game on the field. It's— and, uh, I mean, I don't like it. Um, I think if you're a customer of these companies, you could vote with your feet. Although I note I still buy Apple crap. I still buy— I'm, I'm all in on, on Starlink.
Jason Calacanis [00:14:02]:
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 podcasts. Like, no podcast experience, and we're just gonna— and like, here's, uh, your Netflix deal, here's your Spotify deal.
Leo Laporte [00:14:26]:
All that was the same for the Melania documentary. Exactly. This is what they do.
Jason Calacanis [00:14:30]:
It's the game on their field.
Leo Laporte [00:14:32]:
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.
Jason Calacanis [00:14:41]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:14:42]:
There's a lot— he has a lot of power. And one of the issues that's coming up is Starshield, which is the military application of Starlink that Ukraine has been using for its war against Russia. And the White House has ordered a limit to Starshield for Ukraine. In fact, this turns off their ability to use drones and so forth.
Gina Smith [00:15:04]:
Although they deny that Trump turned it off, but somebody in the White House did.
Leo Laporte [00:15:09]:
Yeah, officials 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 2 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. Starshield is his product developed by SpaceX for government agencies.
Gina Smith [00:15:47]:
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 just—
Leo Laporte [00:15:58]:
He hasn't done it before. I didn't want to get involved, right? I don't want to take sides in that. This is taking sides.
Jason Calacanis [00:16:04]:
I think there is 0% chance SpaceX, Starlink would ever tell or actually make the change for the military government because that would be seditious. Like, it's the government's product. It's the government's 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.
Leo Laporte [00:16:34]:
This was the same debate that happened with Anthropic and the Department of War, which—
Jason Calacanis [00:16:38]:
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. They cannot make that decision. It would be the craziest turn of events ever. So there is—
Leo Laporte [00:16:55]:
It has to escape from those.
Gina Smith [00:16:56]:
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?
Leo Laporte [00:17:09]:
He did. He said he didn't want to get involved. He said he didn't want to take sides in that.
Jason Calacanis [00:17:13]:
I think they also need permission from each government in order to turn on Starlink in an area. So 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 and try to hurt it.
Leo Laporte [00:17:37]:
Yeah, Russia's been using it, illegally using it.
Jason Calacanis [00:17:39]:
Yes. And so then you have countermeasures. But the problem with the situation now is I think you have a bunch of people who've been vocal about supporting Russia or supporting Ukraine. And 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.
Leo Laporte [00:18:05]:
I have a theory.
Jason Calacanis [00:18:06]:
And they have a loose relationship with the truth.
Leo Laporte [00:18:09]:
I have a theory, 'cause you know the midterm elections are coming up. I actually voted 'cause I'm leaving the country, so I've already sent my ballot in, but, uh, um, One of the big issues, maybe the biggest issue in many red states, is the cost of diesel fuel. As 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.
Jason Calacanis [00:18:38]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:18:39]:
And I think this might be related to that as well.
Jason Calacanis [00:18:45]:
Trying to get the war to deprecate a bit in order to get diesel seems to be the interpretation on the Sunday shows today.
Leo Laporte [00:18:52]:
Ukraine has been using these drones to bomb— But why are you doing this to us? No, refineries. Refineries, yeah. So they're affecting the cost of oil that we buy from Russia, which we shouldn't be buying from Russia, by the way.
Jason Calacanis [00:19:03]:
The diesel. The oil in Russia is only going to India and China right now.
Leo Laporte [00:19:07]:
I meant diesel. Yes, yes.
Jason Calacanis [00:19:09]:
The diesel fuel. But this is also all performative. The inflation is 3.7%. It's a complete disaster.
Leo Laporte [00:19:17]:
I promise it's not going to change anything.
Jason Calacanis [00:19:18]:
It's not going to change anything.
Leo Laporte [00:19:19]:
And they said this is like one day in 2 weeks, and it's not going to change.
Jason Calacanis [00:19:23]:
It's like, it's literally like 2 days worth of diesel. So it's all performative, you 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 people.
Leo Laporte [00:19:35]:
I'm sorry I dragged you into this.
Jason Calacanis [00:19:36]:
No, it's totally— I'm happy to discuss it because it's actually an opportunity opportunity for me to reinforce with 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.
Leo Laporte [00:20:00]:
And it's the economy, stupid.
Jason Calacanis [00:20:02]:
And it's the economy, stupid.
Leo Laporte [00:20:03]:
As James Carville famously said.
Gina Smith [00:20:05]:
What we're talking about are the very real impacts of turning off Starshield. 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.
Gina Smith [00:20:32]:
Of course, Starshield is needed, or something like it is needed, but it's this use of it for political ends that I find so disturbing.
Leo Laporte [00:20:42]:
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. Exactly. 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 of that. What's the endgame?
Jason Calacanis [00:21:04]:
Here's the thing about the power thing. Like, if Starlink is not the best product and Amazon's new low Earth orbit satellite's better and at a cheaper price, people will go to that, right? And if Tesla's not the best car and BYD produces one cheaper, which they do— it's like $15,000 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. Anthropic and OpenAI are better. All the money's going to them. So he can only— he's only as good as his products are in terms of power. That's a good point. 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 gonna have much more money combined to give to political causes with their OpenAI and the Anthropic, or they have their own nonprofits, basically. Their PAC.
Jason Calacanis [00:22:00]:
Yeah, their PAC. And so they're going to be able to outspend Elon in 2028. And you can 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. Um, the thing that's happening with Starlink that should be obvious to everybody is that they will be direct to your phone.
Jason Calacanis [00:22:27]:
And if every Tesla has Starlink in it, oh, and every one of them has a Wi-Fi network, and they communicate
Leo Laporte [00:22:38]:
with each
Jason Calacanis [00:22:38]:
other, and they communicate in a mesh network—
Leo Laporte [00:22:40]:
The holy grail of autonomous vehicles, by the way.
Gina Smith [00:22:43]:
Of course.
Jason Calacanis [00:22:44]:
And he's got 1,000 of these Cyber cabs already with Starlink in them in the Texas area, and maybe 50 of them are actually taking rides, whatever it is. And he can probably produce 500,000 of them a year. There will be a world where he gets to 5 million CyberCabs. Every one of them has Wi-Fi. Every major city you're in, you're going to connect to Starlink on a CyberCab 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 a month where 5 people in your family— I don't have any inside information here, I'm just riffing.
Jason Calacanis [00:23:20]:
There'll be a service where for $100 a month, 5 people in your family plus your house will have high-speed internet. And that'll save you— you probably would be spending $300 on your cable modem and then 5 $40 plans. So technology's deflationary. He's going to be able to provide for $100 a month what other people are charging $300 or $400. $100 a month for. So watch family plans.
Gina Smith [00:23:47]:
No question, Jason, you're right. I mean, that 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. His 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— his competitors don't necessarily have
Jason Calacanis [00:24:10]:
Do you have evidence of that, or that's just speculation?
Gina Smith [00:24:13]:
It's not speculation. You can look it up. It's been—
Jason Calacanis [00:24:16]:
Okay, go ahead, tell me.
Gina Smith [00:24:17]:
Well, Brendan Carr—
Jason Calacanis [00:24:18]:
See, 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 him preferential treatment, that will come out immediately.
Gina Smith [00:24:29]:
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. Only that.
Jason Calacanis [00:24:36]:
I don't think he's a friend of his, but he might be a supporter. 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—
Leo Laporte [00:24:53]:
That's a good point.
Jason Calacanis [00:24:54]:
And it will be in 3 weeks.
Leo Laporte [00:24:56]:
The worm is about to turn. Yeah.
Jason Calacanis [00:24:58]:
And, you know, you don't think that all of these folks know that that's coming? Of course they do, because that's what happened the last time. Everybody investigates the other team. And, uh, there's no way anybody's doing anything that would be anywhere close to illegal.
Leo Laporte [00:25:11]:
It's 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. Um, I don't know if he's turned Jeff Bezos down. Jeff has enough money to make sure that every— everybody is well taken care of.
Jason Calacanis [00:25:28]:
I actually think they're gonna give everybody who's providing cheaper bandwidth a green light, which is 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 $100 a month.
Leo Laporte [00:25:46]:
This is my problem though. This— so this was— these are the broadband grants, uh, 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, uh, one farmhouse 300 miles away. But, uh, 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—
Jason Calacanis [00:26:20]:
I don't, I don't think so. No, I think they were going to spend $5,000 per home. Uh, 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 all 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.
Leo Laporte [00:26:47]:
It's not just those farms, though. Also, there's plenty of rural communities. It's plenty of places that are now not going to get wired service. They're going to get Starlink.
Jason Calacanis [00:26:57]:
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
Leo Laporte [00:27:05]:
can use these farm— farmers as, you know, the poster child, but it's not just farmhouses in rural areas. It's rural areas in general.
Jason Calacanis [00:27:13]:
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 3, 4, 5 years, they already have bought Starlink because people want the internet. And $2 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, if you work for 15 minutes a day for your internet at the lowest possible price, 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's called that's coming?
Leo Laporte [00:27:57]:
Uh, Leo.
Jason Calacanis [00:27:58]:
Leo.
Gina Smith [00:27:58]:
Leo.
Jason Calacanis [00:27:59]:
So they can afford that name. There you go, trademark abuse again. Twitter, now Leo. They keep taking your trademarks, Leo. But the point is, poor people, the poorest people in this country, the entry level, can afford $1 or $2 a day for the internet. So
Leo Laporte [00:28:15]:
we're, uh, more than that. It's— I'm paying $90 a month, and I think it's Going up.
Jason Calacanis [00:28:21]:
I think it's going the opposite. It's going down.
Leo Laporte [00:28:22]:
I think it's going— I hope it goes down. If you're right, then, then that means—
Jason Calacanis [00:28:25]:
I guarantee you it'll be $50 a month within 2 years.
Leo Laporte [00:28:27]:
Okay. Because it has only gone up since I bought it.
Jason Calacanis [00:28:30]:
I think it's $60, $70 a month for the basic tier right now.
Leo Laporte [00:28:34]:
Okay. Yeah, I'm pretty sure I'm paying $90, but who knows?
Jason Calacanis [00:28:37]:
Because you want broadband. You want a higher amount of broadband.
Leo Laporte [00:28:40]:
And that was the whole point, was to give the entire country broadband. Because nowadays, if you aren't on the internet, if you don't have broadband, you are left out.
Jason Calacanis [00:28:50]:
Digital divide. Yeah.
Gina Smith [00:28:51]:
Now, aren't there other companies also trying to do this? I'm thinking, uh, well, and I have Apple and Globestar. And
Jason Calacanis [00:28:57]:
100 megabits a month is $55, by the way. So it is $55 right now.
Leo Laporte [00:29:01]:
$55 for $100
Jason Calacanis [00:29:02]:
if you limit to 100 megabits, which is— that's broadband. That's fine.
Leo Laporte [00:29:07]:
And I should say, in fairness, the FCC did approve LEO, 4,600 satellites. Uh,
Jason Calacanis [00:29:13]:
I mean, I hate to break the narrative here, but it's Things are getting cheaper and better. Sorry. If
Leo Laporte [00:29:18]:
they get cheaper and better, then I'm fine. It's just a massive federal subsidy that was originally going to fiber that is now going to Elon. And, um, you know, maybe it'll go to Leo.
Jason Calacanis [00:29:30]:
It'll go to— no, no, 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. Right. Now you don't need to spend the $5,000.
Jason Calacanis [00:29:50]:
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 at $7.80 or whatever it is, totally disgraceful, should be $15. Put that aside. They can work for, uh, 15 minutes in the lowest possible hourly rate and have their broadband paid for. So for about 15 minutes of work a day, you can get that. That is a completely reasonable deal.
Leo Laporte [00:30:22]:
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, because that's clearly the issue right now, is that we have basically people can buy politicians.
Jason Calacanis [00:30:37]:
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 cost 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 free market's not solving? The free market solves these problems.
Leo Laporte [00:30:55]:
Monopoly is the problem. And, uh, who's got a monopoly right now? You need to also enforce antitrust Regulations. That's right.
Gina Smith [00:31:04]:
Monopolies aren't illegal, right? It's the use of a monopoly to do illegal things. Technically, that's correct.
Leo Laporte [00:31:10]:
Yes.
Jason Calacanis [00:31:10]:
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,
Leo Laporte [00:31:20]:
right?
Jason Calacanis [00:31:20]:
Um, but there's very few monopolies. It's really hard to establish a monopoly.
Leo Laporte [00:31:25]:
Cable companies are the most notorious.
Jason Calacanis [00:31:27]:
They were. And who cracked them?
Leo Laporte [00:31:28]:
And we broke it. And we broke it. That's true.
Jason Calacanis [00:31:31]:
Who broke them?
Leo Laporte [00:31:31]:
Yeah, Starlink.
Gina Smith [00:31:32]:
I mean, you've talked about monopoly.
Jason Calacanis [00:31:34]:
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 violence.
Leo Laporte [00:31:45]:
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?
Gina Smith [00:31:54]:
No, it's—
Jason Calacanis [00:31:55]:
MayorJason.com.
Gina Smith [00:31:57]:
When we come back, it'd be cool to talk about Nvidia regarding monopolies.
Leo Laporte [00:32:02]:
Oh, we have a lot of that too.
Gina Smith [00:32:04]:
They're doing this acquihire thing. Yeah. As opposed to acquiring thing as a way to get away from monopolistic accusations. It's super interesting. And we can talk about that when we come back.
Leo Laporte [00:32:14]:
Let's— oh, it's, it's 6 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—
Gina Smith [00:32:30]:
It's very Star Trek in a way. In the Enterprise too.
Leo Laporte [00:32:33]:
It's actually, it's actually, uh, it's actually, I think it's Grok. It's, uh, it's actually, um, the voice of Patrick Warburton in the movie, uh, The Emperor's New Groove, Kronk. And, uh, he is my night watchman. He 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, uh, on the—
Jason Calacanis [00:32:55]:
Who's the sponsor? Who's the sponsor?
Leo Laporte [00:32:58]:
The sponsor? Well, let's find out. We're gonna take a break. We'll have more. You're watching This Week in Tech with Gina— Who's the sponsor? Gina Smith. We love Dr. Gina Smith.
Jason Calacanis [00:33:05]:
Give him some love.
Leo Laporte [00:33:07]:
And Jason Calacanis. More in a moment. Thank you, Leo.
Jason Calacanis [00:33:11]:
Well, thanks, Leo, for that incredible ad.
Leo Laporte [00:33:13]:
Oh yeah, what an amazing ad. Hey, everybody.
Leo Laporte [00:33:15]:
Uh, 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. I'm not complaining, we had them. But, uh, I was in kind of a— 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.
Leo Laporte [00:33:40]:
So we just—
Jason Calacanis [00:33:40]:
Yeah, I already got them. It's still live to tape.
Leo Laporte [00:33:43]:
The only drawback, if I thought about it, is you are so good, Jason, with making my ads better.
Jason Calacanis [00:33:50]:
Punching them up.
Leo Laporte [00:33:51]:
Yeah,
Jason Calacanis [00:33:51]:
we'll punch up.
Leo Laporte [00:33:53]:
You should— I have recordings of him somewhere.
Jason Calacanis [00:33:55]:
Oh God, we had so much fun. We would laugh our asses off doing those ads.
Leo Laporte [00:33:59]:
Over Audible. You, you were— was it just true?
Jason Calacanis [00:34:02]:
I'm on Platinum Pen to this day. 20—
Leo Laporte [00:34:05]:
They took mine away. Did you know that?
Jason Calacanis [00:34:07]:
What?
Leo Laporte [00:34:08]:
Well, I had the, uh, like the original, it was called Light Listener, but it was $14.95 for 2 books a month. Good deal. And they kept— I would 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, and they didn't have the nerve to kick me off. But, uh, Jeff had— actually, it was Andy Jassy had no trouble kicking me off. So I, uh, I, uh, I got an email which I missed from Amazon, uh, from Audible saying we're gonna, uh, cancel this if you don't do
Jason Calacanis [00:34:44]:
anything. Yeah,
Leo Laporte [00:34:45]:
if you don't do anything. And I didn't, and so they ended my account. So I went to Libro.fm. So there.
Jason Calacanis [00:34:51]:
I'm doing, uh, Platinum. It was just $20 a year because I don't like to think about it.
Leo Laporte [00:34:55]:
$20 a month?
Jason Calacanis [00:34:57]:
I'm sorry, it's 20 books a year for like $200 or whatever. It's, you know, $10 a book. So sometimes— or $8 a book.
Leo Laporte [00:35:03]:
And then you get a bunch of credit. Yeah, Lisa does.
Jason Calacanis [00:35:05]:
You get credits. And so now I got 3 daughters, they're on it as well. So now we're trying to figure out—
Leo Laporte [00:35:11]:
Yeah,
Gina Smith [00:35:12]:
3 daughters.
Jason Calacanis [00:35:13]:
No, they love, they love audiobooks. Um, so good for kids. And they like to read too, so that's good. But
Leo Laporte [00:35:20]:
how old are your kids?
Jason Calacanis [00:35:21]:
I got a 16-year-old daughter and then 2 10-year-old twins.
Leo Laporte [00:35:23]:
They were little girls the last time I—
Jason Calacanis [00:35:25]:
Yeah, they're still
Gina Smith [00:35:26]:
little.
Jason Calacanis [00:35:27]:
The days go slow, the years go fast, Leo.
Gina Smith [00:35:30]:
So you know it.
Leo Laporte [00:35:31]:
Well, you don't have to tell me. Gina and I both know we've got adults.
Gina Smith [00:35:34]:
We do. We have adults.
Jason Calacanis [00:35:36]:
Apparently you've got an incredible entrepreneur in your family with this.
Leo Laporte [00:35:39]:
Yeah, Mr. Salt Hank. Oh God, 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.
Jason Calacanis [00:35:46]:
He did not leverage his dad's name. He didn't leverage it. Pretty honorable.
Leo Laporte [00:35:49]:
And he's done much— he's much more famous than I am.
Jason Calacanis [00:35:51]:
I would have been like, Dad, can I get a couple of promos on the pod?
Leo Laporte [00:35:55]:
Well, I, I plugged him like crazy. I did. But he didn't ever ask me All right, I have—
Jason Calacanis [00:35:59]:
he sold Salt Tanks. It's
Leo Laporte [00:36:01]:
like he sold it to Marc Lore at, uh, Wonder.
Jason Calacanis [00:36:04]:
I, I saw it. I was
Leo Laporte [00:36:05]:
like, all-stock deal. Well, I hope that works out. Their IPO is next year.
Jason Calacanis [00:36:11]:
You're gonna be like, hey son, can Dad get a little, uh, short-term loan? I have my— I got a vacation Lisa and I want to go on. Can I get a little loan?
Leo Laporte [00:36:19]:
A couple of months ago, he said— he texted me, said, I'm richer than you now.
Jason Calacanis [00:36:23]:
Absolutely. I
Leo Laporte [00:36:25]:
make more than you, Dad. All right, Gina, you've not heard this. This is Jason Calacanis back in the day.
Jason Calacanis [00:36:30]:
Who's the sponsor?
Leo Laporte [00:36:32]:
audible.com.
Jason Calacanis [00:36:33]:
Audible. Oh, how I love Audible.
Leo Laporte [00:36:36]:
You don't have to say that, Jason.
Jason Calacanis [00:36:37]:
No, I do. I have an Audible account. Hey, this is Jason Calacanis, the CEO of mahalo.com and from formerly of
Jason Calacanis [00:36:43]:
Weblogs Inc. and Silicon Alley 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.
Leo Laporte [00:36:56]:
It is DRM. I'm not paying you anymore, Jason, just because you're doing this.
Jason Calacanis [00:37:05]:
Somewhere, uh, what's-his-name in Shinification is gonna come on and be—
Leo Laporte [00:37:08]:
yeah, Cory Doctorow is going after you, man. That's right.
Jason Calacanis [00:37:12]:
Such a great era of Twit where I would go crazy for Audible.
Leo Laporte [00:37:16]:
Yep.
Jason Calacanis [00:37:17]:
And then Cory Doctorow would go on and be like, I'm leaving the show if you have Audible because they use DRM. He hated Audible.
Leo Laporte [00:37:23]:
He still does. He won't let his books— because he doesn't like DRM. Yeah. Now
Gina Smith [00:37:27]:
here's a little piece of trivia for you. Remember how I did that biography of Steve Wozniak way back when?
Leo Laporte [00:37:32]:
2006?
Gina Smith [00:37:34]:
I think I, Woz was the very first book ever to be published on Audible at the same— an audiobook at the same time it was printed.
Leo Laporte [00:37:43]:
Yeah, because publishers didn't want to do that. They thought they would undermine the book sales.
Gina Smith [00:37:47]:
Yeah, it was the very first time. I mean, I remember we did a The opposite. Press tour around that. So, I'd say 2006. Is that about the time?
Leo Laporte [00:37:55]:
I can't tell you how many books I've bought in paper because I listened to them and I wanted the book.
Jason Calacanis [00:38:00]:
Yes. I do that all the time. People are buying— books are just so cheap for the value you get from a book.
Leo Laporte [00:38:07]:
Well, and I also often will buy the ebook and Audible has— Audible, Amazon has this thing where they sync. Yeah, the WhisperSync. And so it just follows. You can look at the words as it's reading them, which is probably good for your girls, actually. Apparently, that's very good to teach people.
Jason Calacanis [00:38:25]:
For retention. The highest retention is to be reading it with the audio playing and the word highlighted as it goes by.
Leo Laporte [00:38:31]:
There you go.
Gina Smith [00:38:32]:
I can confirm that. That's been shown in multiple studies.
Jason Calacanis [00:38:36]:
You have a PhD in cognitive science.
Leo Laporte [00:38:39]:
Oh, yeah, right. Gina's a doctor in this. She knows a lot.
Jason Calacanis [00:38:42]:
That's what I wanted to go for. I was going to go for criminal psychology. at John Jay, forensic, or I was gonna go for cognitive industrial psychology at Stevens Institute.
Gina Smith [00:38:51]:
Well, criminal psychology—
Leo Laporte [00:38:52]:
And what did you end up doing, Jason?
Jason Calacanis [00:38:54]:
I wound up starting a zine about the internet in 1993, '94. A little time pilot. My timing couldn't have been more perfect.
Leo Laporte [00:39:02]:
That was, uh, that was the first one, which was about the, the scene in New York, right?
Jason Calacanis [00:39:06]:
Yeah, well, I did— Silicon Alley—
Leo Laporte [00:39:08]:
what was it called?
Jason Calacanis [00:39:09]:
Silicon Alley Reporter was the second zine. I had done 5 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, um, and, uh, Fangoria, and I had like a partnership with them to do CyberSurfing.
Leo Laporte [00:39:29]:
It was a zine?
Jason Calacanis [00:39:31]:
It was like a zine magazine, yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:39:32]:
Gina did a TV show about the internet. I— all I remember of it, Gina, is you riding around in a convertible talking about surfing the internet. I think it was— was it called surfing?
Gina Smith [00:39:41]:
It was Pre-Web. It was 1993 and it was a PBS documentary called The Internet Superhighway, 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 get this now, but somebody on TikTok found all these little clips from that.
Gina Smith [00:40:05]:
So, where I'm explaining email, email, electronic mail. I mean, literally. And they found all these little clips from it and they're all over TikTok, viral among the history people. Oh, I gotta find that.
Jason Calacanis [00:40:17]:
Look at, uh, I just sent you the link in the Zoom, Leo. This is the first issue of Cyber Surfer I did with Brian Alvey.
Leo Laporte [00:40:23]:
Oh, is it online?
Gina Smith [00:40:23]:
Oh, there it is.
Jason Calacanis [00:40:24]:
Uh, somebody bought it off of, uh, Chris Froelich, uh, from, um, First Round Capital, published it. This came out in 1995.
Leo Laporte [00:40:34]:
So he bought the paper version?
Jason Calacanis [00:40:35]:
He bought the paper version because he's like, he collects these things. And as you can see on the COVID Um, there's a Godzilla and Darth Vader. Missed the highest rated video game ever. Oh, TIE Fighter joined Darth Vader's inner circle of evil. Jurassic Park screensaving excitement. I was literally reviewing a screensaver.
Leo Laporte [00:40:53]:
This looks like Fangoria.
Jason Calacanis [00:40:55]:
It was like, throw every single thing on the COVID was what they taught me, actually.
Leo Laporte [00:41:01]:
Oh, look at the— look at the header here. Cyber surfing on the internet. Exactly. With
Jason Calacanis [00:41:07]:
mosaic. Literally, how crazy is that? I started in '94 on these things. It was crazy.
Leo Laporte [00:41:13]:
So, this leads into—
Gina Smith [00:41:14]:
This is right when we were working for CNET, wasn't it, Leo? Like '93, we were hosting CNET 231. I was 23 years old. Yeah, you're a little younger than I am.
Leo Laporte [00:41:23]:
I briefly worked for CNET.
Jason Calacanis [00:41:25]:
Everybody briefly worked for CNET.
Leo Laporte [00:41:26]:
Then they walked me out the door slowly.
Gina Smith [00:41:29]:
Unmanageable. We were one of the first 5 or 10 people involved with CNET when they were still a TV show. Not a website.
Leo Laporte [00:41:37]:
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.
Gina Smith [00:41:43]:
I was on the pilot. Adam Curry.
Leo Laporte [00:41:44]:
And Stuart Alsop. Dvorak. Adam Curry wasn't there. It was, it was, uh, no, I was— I wouldn't—
Gina Smith [00:41:49]:
Adam Curry was, because my part of it was doing video game reviews. We reviewed Myst. That was later.
Leo Laporte [00:41:54]:
That was after me. I— the, the pilot we did was a roundtable, kind of like this, actually.
Gina Smith [00:42:00]:
Yeah, a lot like this.
Leo Laporte [00:42:01]:
We were in the same room. Fred Davis, Stuart Alsop, You and Dvorak.
Gina Smith [00:42:06]:
Dvorak. I remember.
Jason Calacanis [00:42:07]:
Nah, she's John C. Dvorak.
Leo Laporte [00:42:10]:
The late, great John C. Dvorak.
Jason Calacanis [00:42:13]:
I loved John. He hated me, but I loved him.
Gina Smith [00:42:16]:
He was your mentor.
Jason Calacanis [00:42:17]:
He was kind of a canny. Why
Leo Laporte [00:42:18]:
did he hate you?
Jason Calacanis [00:42:19]:
No, he didn't like my impersonation that I did here.
Leo Laporte [00:42:24]:
Yeah, 'cause it sounds like Edward G. Robinson. That's
Jason Calacanis [00:42:26]:
why. No, every time I saw him with you, I was like, so cranky that you named the 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 2 or 3 day window, and I would go right to John C. Dvorak.
Leo Laporte [00:42:48]:
Inside Track. It was in the back.
Jason Calacanis [00:42:51]:
He would take everybody on. He would be like, nah, see, Apple, they don't have the ports.
Leo Laporte [00:42:56]:
It was the gossip column for, uh, the industry.
Gina Smith [00:42:59]:
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.
Jason Calacanis [00:43:10]:
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 tweeting like, guys, these are the guys who were standing on their shoulders. That's why I always make time to
Leo Laporte [00:43:26]:
come And here, ladies and gentlemen, is a fake fight poster of you versus Ed Zitron. Did you get in a fight with Ed Zitron?
Gina Smith [00:43:35]:
What?
Jason Calacanis [00:43:35]:
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. So
Leo Laporte [00:43:43]:
you look very ripped.
Jason Calacanis [00:43:45]:
I do. Yeah, I have become more ripped. It's the peptide effect.
Leo Laporte [00:43:47]:
I don't think Ed looks like that, I'll be honest with you.
Jason Calacanis [00:43:50]:
No, no, that is Ed's gut though. You can see he's gained a couple of pounds. It's gotten a little bigger. A little chub.
Leo Laporte [00:43:55]:
So I guess we have to talk about AI.
Jason Calacanis [00:43:58]:
Here we go. Superintelligence.
Leo Laporte [00:43:59]:
Ed, you should— yeah, I'm sorry. Now, do you— Trump-telligence. Are you, are you in the SI camp? No. Oh,
Gina Smith [00:44:05]:
same old.
Jason Calacanis [00:44:06]:
I don't care. I don't care what it's called. It's software. It's really the best software we ever made.
Leo Laporte [00:44:11]:
That's important. I always underscore this. It's software.
Jason Calacanis [00:44:15]:
Great software.
Leo Laporte [00:44:16]:
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 do something with this. And you only had 2 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 gonna— because— 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.
Leo Laporte [00:44:52]:
And it's a complete continuum to today where instead of typing anything, you talk to it, but it's roughly the same thing. And it's the same desire to get this silicon thing, this 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—
Gina Smith [00:45:16]:
And so much of this was imagined by science fiction. I once interviewed Alvin Toffler. And I remember I went to see him in his office, and I sat down with him and his wife and said, how'd you do all these futuristic things? Like, how did you make these predictions? And he said, oh, very simple. All 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 can do it.
Leo Laporte [00:45:35]:
He was right. Even the flying car.
Gina Smith [00:45:37]:
Totally right.
Leo Laporte [00:45:38]:
He was right.
Gina Smith [00:45:39]:
Even flying cars.
Leo Laporte [00:45:40]:
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 can run models. And the first thing that happens when you turn on your RTX Spark Surface laptop or Dell laptop, 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.
Jason Calacanis [00:46:15]:
Love it.
Gina Smith [00:46:15]:
It's kind of heavy though, isn't it?
Leo Laporte [00:46:17]:
It's heavy. It's hot.
Gina Smith [00:46:19]:
It made me think of the old Dolch computer, you know, the 30-pound portable.
Leo Laporte [00:46:24]:
Oh my God. Yeah, I forgot about the Dolch.
Gina Smith [00:46:27]:
It's like the Dolch. Remember him? But what's interesting about that, the Microsoft Surface story, I think, is how it was leaked. Did you follow this?
Leo Laporte [00:46:36]:
I didn't know what happened. No, I mean, Nvidia announced it some months ago, so The story
Gina Smith [00:46:41]:
was that somebody left a copy of— 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.
Leo Laporte [00:46:56]:
Here is a Dolch, by the way, if you want to see—
Gina Smith [00:46:57]:
But it might have been some kind of a leak.
Leo Laporte [00:46:59]:
What a Dolch looked like.
Gina Smith [00:47:01]:
We had one in my office at PC Magazine. These are 30 pounds.
Leo Laporte [00:47:07]:
Yeah, they're luggables, we call them. And
Gina Smith [00:47:10]:
full expansion cards could fit in it. Everything that you could fit into a PC, into a regular-sized ISA expansion slot, fit into that Dolch. We put it on the COVID of PC Computing.
Leo Laporte [00:47:22]:
But you couldn't do much with it because it was probably running DOS, right?
Gina Smith [00:47:25]:
It was a DOS-based, uh, luggable. They didn't even call laptops luggables. It was a luggable. And, uh, I saw this and thought, this is awfully heavy and expensive, but not quite like the Dolch.
Leo Laporte [00:47:37]:
Founded by Volker Dolch in 1987.
Gina Smith [00:47:41]:
I remember him. Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:47:42]:
Yeah. So let's fast forward to 2026, shall we? Yeah.
Gina Smith [00:47:48]:
We talk about the past. It's supposed to be a beautiful, beautiful display.
Leo Laporte [00:47:53]:
So this isn't really an NVIDIA product. NVIDIA announced it first. I think, you know, I have the Sparks, which are the original versions of these, they were running an Ubuntu Linux. I 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.
Jason Calacanis [00:48:15]:
Yes.
Leo Laporte [00:48:16]:
And NVIDIA said, sure, how much money you got?
Gina Smith [00:48:19]:
Sure.
Leo Laporte [00:48:20]:
Because Jensen Huang is a good businessman, and so they're making them. NVIDIA stopped selling the 128GB Sparks Uh, I have a feeling they did that because they wanted to put all the parts into the RTX Sparks.
Gina Smith [00:48:34]:
Yeah,
Leo Laporte [00:48:35]:
I don't know. You know, I have a theory. All right, I'm gonna run— I'm gonna run this conspiracy theory by you guys.
Jason Calacanis [00:48:41]:
Uh-oh, conspiracy corner.
Leo Laporte [00:48:43]:
You may have information that will debunk this.
Jason Calacanis [00:48:46]:
Okay,
Leo Laporte [00:48:47]:
uh, we are supposedly in RAMageddon, right? RAM prices through the roof.
Gina Smith [00:48:53]:
That's a great word.
Leo Laporte [00:48:54]:
RAMageddon.
Gina Smith [00:48:55]:
Haven't heard that.
Leo Laporte [00:48:56]:
And the Sparks that I bought for $4,600, originally $4,000 I think, are now $8,000 or $9,000 if you can find them. All of this stuff, you know, any, 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? Well, because the people who make the chips, like Micron, Uh, there are only 4 companies or 3 companies, SK Hynix, Micron, and Samsung, uh, 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, and how many of these data centers are built? Well, none. How many are going to be built? Well, many.
Gina Smith [00:49:42]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:49:42]:
Well, really, how many are going to be built? Many, many. So they've taken orders, they've committed all their production But all that production's sitting somewhere in a warehouse.
Gina Smith [00:49:53]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:49:54]:
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 gonna charge that much. B, they're gonna have a problem when these data centers do not get built. Jason, what do you think of all the data centers that have been promised, what percentage of them will be built?
Jason Calacanis [00:50:16]:
I think 95% will be built, but they'll all be 6 months to 6 years behind schedule because we now have such an anti-AI sentiment in the country caused by, you know, all the chaotic stuff that Trump has said.
Leo Laporte [00:50:32]:
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.
Jason Calacanis [00:50:44]:
Correct. And it's the perfect—
Gina Smith [00:50:45]:
The noise, right? The noise and the pollution. Isn't that what everyone's upset about?
Leo Laporte [00:50:51]:
No, there's a lot of mistaken— like people say, oh, the water. That's BS. It isn't the water.
Jason Calacanis [00:50:57]:
It's all— 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 or like— Right.
Leo Laporte [00:51:06]:
And there's far more golf courses in America than there are data centers.
Jason Calacanis [00:51:08]:
Okay, so put that aside. Now, in terms of noise— I want to focus on that. Yeah, perfect. So there's no sound if they're in the Permian Basin or like somewhere way further north.
Leo Laporte [00:51:16]:
Don't build it next to somebody's house.
Jason Calacanis [00:51:17]:
Exactly. That has happened in Virginia, um, 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, nat gas generators. Those are loud as F.
Leo Laporte [00:51:36]:
Loud and polluting.
Jason Calacanis [00:51:37]:
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. They're put in the cheapest acreage anywhere, and they're not running off of nat gas. If they are running off nat gas, they're going to where the nat 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 retailer is. But again—
Leo Laporte [00:52:03]:
Or an Amazon fulfillment center, which are all— And they're sure putting them there.
Jason Calacanis [00:52:07]:
So there's really no objection to these because they also are willing to pay for the power.
Leo Laporte [00:52:12]:
Well, there is an objection, but maybe there shouldn't be.
Jason Calacanis [00:52:16]:
There's objections that are hoaxes because they're— 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.
Leo Laporte [00:52:27]:
Can they use sustainable energy sources for that? Of
Jason Calacanis [00:52:29]:
course, of course. And they, and they are. You just have to get a lot of batteries.
Leo Laporte [00:52:32]:
I should point out, not to waste water, not to waste electricity, because efficiency is really important.
Jason Calacanis [00:52:39]:
They will go. They'll go to wherever the cheapest energy is. That's why you see them going near hydro.
Leo Laporte [00:52:44]:
Well, part of the problem is—
Jason Calacanis [00:52:45]:
They're going to nat gas.
Leo Laporte [00:52:46]:
Sometimes they go where the tax breaks are, which is often Arizona.
Jason Calacanis [00:52:49]:
Which is gone now.
Leo Laporte [00:52:50]:
Texas. Texas. Are those gone? Oklahoma.
Jason Calacanis [00:52:52]:
They're gone. Now it's the opposite. We went from 5 years ago, whoever would give the biggest tax benefit would get these, to now however much they're willing to pay, the local community will 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—
Leo Laporte [00:53:12]:
Because they're desperate to get these built.
Jason Calacanis [00:53:14]:
Correct. There's so much money to be made here to build them out. So, um, 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. And 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 backordered. And that price is cheaper than standing up coal or even clean coal.
Jason Calacanis [00:53:50]:
OK, you may have heard of clean coal.
Leo Laporte [00:53:51]:
There is no clean coal, Ben.
Jason Calacanis [00:53:53]:
There's no reason to create a coal plant. it's cheaper to put solar and batteries. You'll make more money. So again, the free market has figured this out. Yeah, nuclear is going to be the big one. Like right now, uh, 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—
Gina Smith [00:54:13]:
yeah,
Jason Calacanis [00:54:13]:
get less precious.
Leo Laporte [00:54:14]:
And, and we now have ways of making them safely, relatively safely.
Jason Calacanis [00:54:17]:
Unbelievably safe. Like safer than gas, safer than coal.
Leo Laporte [00:54:22]:
Oh yeah, we gotta point out most electricity generating plants kill more people than nukes ever have. Nuclear, of course.
Jason Calacanis [00:54:29]:
The number of people is well under 100 that have been killed by nuclear power plants. So whereas gas,
Leo Laporte [00:54:34]:
coal,
Jason Calacanis [00:54:36]:
uh,
Leo Laporte [00:54:36]:
any, any fossil fuel,
Jason Calacanis [00:54:38]:
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, um, Shanghai and cities in China, which is why China is using Less fossil fuels, going nuclear, and going electric cars.
Leo Laporte [00:54:52]:
You couldn't breathe in Beijing. When I was in Beijing, it was like soup. It was terrible.
Gina Smith [00:54:56]:
It looks not anymore though. Beijing now has a blue sky. I worked there probably 8 months solid a couple of years ago. They have fixed their pollution problem.
Leo Laporte [00:55:04]:
I was there in 2000.
Jason Calacanis [00:55:05]:
Because of electric vehicles.
Gina Smith [00:55:07]:
That's right.
Jason Calacanis [00:55:07]:
It's all electric vehicles.
Leo Laporte [00:55:09]:
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. Yes. Because of public backlash. We talked about that. Yep.
Leo Laporte [00:55:25]:
Shaky investor confidence. In fact, I think it's Oracle's bonds are now selling for 80 cents on the dollar.
Gina Smith [00:55:32]:
Really?
Leo Laporte [00:55:32]:
Because people go, I don't know about all of this.
Jason Calacanis [00:55:35]:
They 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 6 months or a year.
Leo Laporte [00:55:53]:
What, um, what was— is God running for office? What, what act?
Jason Calacanis [00:55:57]:
No, you have this act of God, things that are under— 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 that it's not your fault that you didn't break ground and build your data center.
Leo Laporte [00:56:13]:
The Financial Times says 47, at least 47 large projects have been delayed, withdrawn, or blocked in 2026, at least.
Jason Calacanis [00:56:20]:
Uh, yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:56:22]:
Now this goes back to my original conspiracy theory. Here we go. These companies pre-sold this. They have orders for it, for data centers that probably will not get built.
Jason Calacanis [00:56:34]:
They'll be delayed. They'll be built.
Leo Laporte [00:56:35]:
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, it's made, it's sitting in a warehouse. A, I think there's going to— 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— bottom out, right? So am I wrong on this?
Jason Calacanis [00:57:12]:
No, no. Here's what's happening. Um, the data centers are getting delayed. Why are the data centers being delayed? Because Anthropic keeps saying you're all going to lose your jobs and there's a 10% chance that the software is going to kill everybody.
Leo Laporte [00:57:23]:
Stop that, Dario.
Jason Calacanis [00:57:24]:
Stop it. Now 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.
Leo Laporte [00:57:41]:
I know, young people hate it.
Jason Calacanis [00:57:42]:
Young people hate AI.
Leo Laporte [00:57:43]:
'Cause they're scared.
Jason Calacanis [00:57:44]:
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, 'cause 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. So I'm trying to teach her logo design using AI. And she's like, I don't wanna use it. to use it. I'm like, you kind of have to. So I explained to her, like,
Leo Laporte [00:58:06]:
this is your future, kid.
Jason Calacanis [00:58:08]:
Exactly. You may not like it, but she's now embraced it, right?
Leo Laporte [00:58:11]:
Okay,
Jason Calacanis [00:58:11]:
so now,
Leo Laporte [00:58:12]:
um, I understand. Look, what is the one way to protest?
Jason Calacanis [00:58:15]:
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, right, and say, I don't want this. And the local— and if you don't stop it, we're going to vote you out of the community New
Leo Laporte [00:58:28]:
York State has banned them.
Jason Calacanis [00:58:30]:
There you go. More to it. So what will happen is you'll get a handful of states that are going to ban data centres 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.
Jason Calacanis [00:58:50]:
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, Portland has a cap on it now. So that's where people will be able to take their power back. Then the other states that embrace it are going to get all these jobs, all this money, all these amazing taxes.
Leo Laporte [00:59:08]:
They're mostly red states, I think.
Jason Calacanis [00:59:10]:
And that's what's— that's literally what's happening right now. So 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 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.
Gina Smith [00:59:31]:
Now, 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 hard to find a job. 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 to be able— it's the ability to look at an AI output and go, I'm calling BS on this.
Gina Smith [01:00:07]:
This is a hallucination. Oh, there's some bias here. And you need experience to have that analytical judgment. And if you're not hiring these young people, where are your smart 30-year-olds going to come from?
Leo Laporte [01:00:18]:
What do you tell your daughter? She's 16.
Jason Calacanis [01:00:21]:
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.
Jason Calacanis [01:00:38]:
And we hire 5 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. Systems thinking.
Gina Smith [01:01:06]:
Yep.
Jason Calacanis [01:01:07]:
And that is— which is going to be your specialty in cognitive science. So 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. OK, let's work backwards from that goal. And OK, how do you get attention? OK, you get attention in Shorts. OK, 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 do, 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? Can you tell me exactly what are the 2 or 3 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.
Jason Calacanis [01:02:06]:
And that's the big mistake.
Leo Laporte [01:02:07]:
That's a mistake.
Jason Calacanis [01:02:08]:
Just use the tools and check the work and understand what the goal is.
Leo Laporte [01:02:11]:
From the historical point of view, there's— every time there's a new technology, it's a disruption for the old technology. So 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. I don't— I do think that AI, more than people realize, requires management, quite a bit of management. Yeah.
Jason Calacanis [01:02:38]:
And if you can—
Gina Smith [01:02:39]:
Orchestration. Like, nobody was trained to orchestrate AI, but everyone's going to have to become an orchestrator.
Leo Laporte [01:02:46]:
If you're a coder, if you've ever worked on a big project, you kind of have those higher-level skills. You 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, it's 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.
Jason Calacanis [01:03:28]:
Correct.
Leo Laporte [01:03:29]:
And I think it's going to stay that way. I don't think that's going to go away.
Jason Calacanis [01:03:32]:
There's like—
Gina Smith [01:03:32]:
That's why AI-assisted cybersecurity is going to be so huge, right?
Leo Laporte [01:03:36]:
Humans add taste, humans add judgment, humans add a human point of view that the AI just doesn't have. And I don't think it will.
Gina Smith [01:03:44]:
It doesn't have its taste and the judgment can only be added. Leo, if, if you hired young people at your company to develop the taste judgment.
Leo Laporte [01:03:54]:
Well, that's the problem.
Gina Smith [01:03:55]:
That's the one thing I'm worried about.
Jason Calacanis [01:03:57]:
I agree.
Leo Laporte [01:03:58]:
That's why your son's working at a noodle palace.
Gina Smith [01:04:01]:
Yes, yes, a noodle factory.
Jason Calacanis [01:04:03]:
Here's— to answer your questions, Leo, I do think taste is coming for these systems, you know, 5, 10 years from now.
Leo Laporte [01:04:12]:
Opus 5.5 has a lot of taste.
Jason Calacanis [01:04:14]:
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, it summarizes it.
Leo Laporte [01:04:24]:
All these stories were picked by AI, by the way.
Jason Calacanis [01:04:26]:
It does a pretty good job of it because it's looking at the signals on social media to make these. So—
Leo Laporte [01:04:30]:
I have to say, though, the, the undifferentiated pile of stories that the AI generates are not the show. I'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
Jason Calacanis [01:04:43]:
it is better than last year, right? You and I were doing this last year.
Leo Laporte [01:04:46]:
Oh, infinitely.
Jason Calacanis [01:04:46]:
Better every 6 months. 10 times better. 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. I think self-driving is going to be the first time people experience this.
Jason Calacanis [01:05:12]:
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 5, 10 million jobs in the US.
Leo Laporte [01:05:29]:
Yeah, there are 14 million truck drivers and drivers in the US who, yeah, are going to be out of work in 5 years. Yes,
Jason Calacanis [01:05:36]:
I would say I would put the over-under on half those jobs at 5 years. Sure. What, like the 50% of them? It's gonna— there's regulation that's gonna happen all at once.
Leo Laporte [01:05:44]:
I understand.
Jason Calacanis [01:05:44]:
Yeah. So, and then it's regulations that's gonna slow it down, but we will see it there first.
Leo Laporte [01:05:49]:
Where it will happen first is in trucks, by the way, because they, they're much simpler. They drive on highways. Elon, in fact, along with, 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.
Jason Calacanis [01:06:03]:
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 for 5 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 2 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.
Leo Laporte [01:06:36]:
Yes.
Jason Calacanis [01:06:37]:
Like, there was—
Leo Laporte [01:06:37]:
If you've ever been to a truck stop, you know what they're doing.
Jason Calacanis [01:06:40]:
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—
Gina Smith [01:06:47]:
That explains their girlish figures. They do.
Jason Calacanis [01:06:50]:
No, no, literally. Is that true?
Leo Laporte [01:06:53]:
Are truck drivers, uh—
Jason Calacanis [01:06:54]:
Yes, yes, yes. What they do is they put meth— 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.
Gina Smith [01:07:09]:
Yeah, they're microdosing.
Jason Calacanis [01:07:10]:
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.
Leo Laporte [01:07:18]:
Don't do it. do it. It's not—
Jason Calacanis [01:07:19]:
don't, don't. It's one of the worst drugs you could ever do is speed.
Leo Laporte [01:07:22]:
It's terrible for you.
Jason Calacanis [01:07:23]:
Well, I mean, Adderall is terrible too. Like, I know I have my own feelings on it.
Leo Laporte [01:07:26]:
I used to take Adderall, uh, for ADHD, and then I decided that was a good thing.
Jason Calacanis [01:07:31]:
ADHD is why you're Leo Laporte, by the way. This is why you're interesting. It's because you go from the show— yeah, you go from the show to wanting to do hardware.
Leo Laporte [01:07:40]:
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. That's that line. Holy cow. 2023.
Jason Calacanis [01:07:54]:
Not stopping.
Leo Laporte [01:07:55]:
Billions, trillions really being spent on data centers. But it is again my contention that Ramageddon is an illusion. And I wonder if in the next year or so— I'll
Jason Calacanis [01:08:06]:
explain the cycle when we get back.
Leo Laporte [01:08:08]:
Okay. There is
Jason Calacanis [01:08:09]:
this important break.
Leo Laporte [01:08:10]:
This is From our sponsors
Jason Calacanis [01:08:11]:
at—
Gina Smith [01:08:11]:
Like back to Metcalfe's Law, right? The network effect.
Leo Laporte [01:08:15]:
That's right.
Jason Calacanis [01:08:16]:
It's the boom or bust cycle, just like homes.
Leo Laporte [01:08:18]:
And, and boy, it's really been— anybody who's purchased memory over the last 20 years knows about this. Yes, times are it's cheap, cheap, cheap, and then all of a sudden it's expensive, and then it's cheap again. And it's one of the reasons memory companies hate the business they're in.
Jason Calacanis [01:08:33]:
Oh yes, it's the worst business.
Gina Smith [01:08:36]:
It's like real estate.
Leo Laporte [01:08:38]:
The CEO of Micron said it's all Apple's fault. They, they, uh, but we will take a break and come back with more. Jason Calacanis, Gina Smith. You see why I didn't have a 4th person on? They wouldn't have got a word in edgewise.
Gina Smith [01:08:52]:
Yeah, no kidding.
Jason Calacanis [01:08:54]:
This is an enthusiastic group. We may have something in our coffee.
Leo Laporte [01:08:57]:
I love it. No meth in our coffee today. No,
Jason Calacanis [01:09:00]:
no, just, you just named the show. You just named the show.
Gina Smith [01:09:03]:
No meth in our coffee today.
Leo Laporte [01:09:04]:
I am not mentioning meth. in the show title. I am sorry.
Jason Calacanis [01:09:07]:
No Adderall in our coffee. No Adderall in our coffee. No Adderall for you, Leo.
Leo Laporte [01:09:11]:
We're only a little ADHD. We will have more right after this. Uh, yes, this is— yes, this is—
Jason Calacanis [01:09:19]:
I mean, Club Twit is the best value for $8.
Leo Laporte [01:09:21]:
I have to say, it's $10, but I have to say, uh, the AI-generated art— this is from one of our best artists. Pretty fly for us, this guy.
Gina Smith [01:09:30]:
Hey,
Leo Laporte [01:09:31]:
no meth in our coffee.
Jason Calacanis [01:09:33]:
No, just Adderall.
Leo Laporte [01:09:35]:
I like that. Yeah, it's the blue. It's the blue,
Jason Calacanis [01:09:39]:
uh,
Leo Laporte [01:09:39]:
from Breaking Bad. It's the good stuff.
Jason Calacanis [01:09:43]:
The good stuff.
Leo Laporte [01:09:43]:
Yeah. Yeah.
Jason Calacanis [01:09:45]:
Uh, all right, you wanted to know about the, um,
Gina Smith [01:09:48]:
take a screen.
Leo Laporte [01:09:49]:
So am I gonna get— am I gonna get RAM next? Am I gonna get a DGX Spark for half off in about a year because RAM is so cheap?
Jason Calacanis [01:09:57]:
100%. This is, um, I learned this.
Leo Laporte [01:10:00]:
He agrees.
Jason Calacanis [01:10:01]:
100%. Here's what happens.
Leo Laporte [01:10:04]:
Not waiting for them to build these factories, right? They've got it already.
Jason Calacanis [01:10:09]:
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. They build more capacity when the boom happens. They all do it at once because they have so much money coming in.
Jason Calacanis [01:10:25]:
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 18 months later, whenever it is. And now you've got too much capacity.
Jason Calacanis [01:10:45]:
You've got to lower your prices and clear out the inventory. I know this because I live in Texas now. In Texas— Yeah. The prices of homes, Leo, have gone down. and rent 4 years in a row. Right. If 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.
Leo Laporte [01:11:04]:
It goes up 10% a year. Yeah.
Jason Calacanis [01:11:05]:
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, uh, tract homes, everything in between. They built so much supply that demand has plummeted because there's so much supply. Homes sit on the market here for 6 to 12 months. In San Francisco, they stay on the market for 6 days, or they're sold before they even go up.
Leo Laporte [01:11:39]:
People buy a closet for $1.3 million.
Jason Calacanis [01:11:41]:
Talkers. I kept all my real estate during the down thing, and now I've rented it, and now I'm like, I got to get this stuff out of here. I got to sell it now
Leo Laporte [01:11:48]:
before the collapse.
Jason Calacanis [01:11:50]:
Well, it's a boom-bust cycle. It's like, well, it's the next 3 years are going to be crazy.
Leo Laporte [01:11:54]:
But those, uh, you know, and they are, you know, the Micron and others say, well, we don't want to build factories because 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 memory in New York.
Jason Calacanis [01:12:06]:
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 unnatural things, like the fiber, dark fiber during the dot-com bust and boom-bust cycle, that created Netflix and YouTube, right? And storage companies did the same thing.
Leo Laporte [01:12:29]:
So I'm, I'm, uh, you know, let's talk about something that has actually been in a warehouse for 2 years Apple made this device, designed this device literally 2 years ago to go with Siri AI. But Siri AI, which they thought— Sucked. It sucked. It's now getting there, right? So they finally announced this week the Home View, which is a little square 7-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. Uh,
Gina Smith [01:13:07]:
it's not a big feature. It turns around to look at you. It doesn't. That's what we now call a robot.
Leo Laporte [01:13:12]:
No, and that's next year. This doesn't even do that.
Gina Smith [01:13:14]:
Doesn't even do that.
Leo Laporte [01:13:15]:
In fact, in the, in the weird kind of family video that Apple made, the, the mom actually manually is aiming it around. Uh, eventually, uh, 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 2 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 gonna buy at $300? By the way, the reason it's only $300 is because they made them 2 years ago when the RAM wasn't so expensive.
Gina Smith [01:13:50]:
Oh, there's your angle. You want—
Leo Laporte [01:13:54]:
why are you rushing out to buy it?
Gina Smith [01:13:56]:
Apple freaks who buy all Apple Apple things no matter what. Guilty. That's where I'm a sheeple.
Leo Laporte [01:14:01]:
I'm a sheeple.
Jason Calacanis [01:14:02]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:14:02]:
I also bought the $300 Apple TV that's identical to the $129 Apple TV I bought 4 years ago.
Gina Smith [01:14:09]:
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 Laporte [01:14:19]:
Yeah, but that was right because it was Gil Amelio was the CEO of Apple. Apple was dying.
Gina Smith [01:14:25]:
Apple stock was almost $1 a share, right?
Leo Laporte [01:14:28]:
Apple, by the way, this week is now a $5 trillion company.
Jason Calacanis [01:14:34]:
Amazing. There you go.
Leo Laporte [01:14:35]:
Just catching up with Nvidia.
Jason Calacanis [01:14:37]:
I'm buying it right now. I buy everything.
Leo Laporte [01:14:39]:
I already bought it. I buy everything.
Jason Calacanis [01:14:41]:
I'm an idiot. I'm
Leo Laporte [01:14:42]:
an idiot. I bought the new Apple Watch, which is identical to the old Apple Watch, just because in theory, at some point, this thing is going to listen to my conversations and
Jason Calacanis [01:14:53]:
I use the— I use the Plaud, which is incredible.
Leo Laporte [01:14:56]:
But you have to press a button. I want something that listens all the time.
Jason Calacanis [01:14:59]:
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 Macquarie doctor.
Gina Smith [01:15:07]:
I turn all the microphones off in the house.
Jason Calacanis [01:15:10]:
I just now corrected my behavior. I don't ever say anything that I wouldn't say on Twit or publicly. I know I'm being recorded. I know the CC is on. I know Putin and China and Xi have everything I've ever said. I think I'm the glasses owner.
Leo Laporte [01:15:25]:
I got my purple glasses.
Jason Calacanis [01:15:27]:
I've had this product, by the way, in my kitchen for over 10 years. Whatever the oldest Apple—
Leo Laporte [01:15:34]:
The HomePods.
Jason Calacanis [01:15:35]:
Yeah, I've had a HomePod. You know what it is? Yeah. 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. On the iPad, they refuse to have multiple accounts.
Jason Calacanis [01:16:04]:
Disgraceful, disgraciado. 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.
Leo Laporte [01:16:17]:
It's so annoying, but you're naming it. It's so annoying. You nailed it. I, 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.
Jason Calacanis [01:16:28]:
Yes.
Gina Smith [01:16:29]:
This has been the wet dream of every hardware company since 1981. They want a computer in the kitchen. And remember, we've always thought that was obscene. Why would you want this messy computer in the kitchen? But this is what they always wanted.
Leo Laporte [01:16:42]:
Would you like a tissue?
Jason Calacanis [01:16:45]:
You're right, Gina
Leo Laporte [01:16:47]:
and I—
Gina Smith [01:16:47]:
this is why I turned off the mics in my house.
Leo Laporte [01:16:50]:
What was the name of that? What was the name of— was it Cisco? Somebody made a kitchen computer, had a cutesy name, complete flop.
Gina Smith [01:16:58]:
Um, Radio Shack had Tandy kitchen computers.
Jason Calacanis [01:17:01]:
Always been the great device. I have this wall unit that's Android that's big, it's like a poster, and it tells you what all the
Leo Laporte [01:17:08]:
family's
Jason Calacanis [01:17:09]:
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, um, for Instacart or whatever we're ordering from. Yeah. 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 $1,000 for this thing, uh, 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.
Jason Calacanis [01:17:36]:
But this will be a great device I, I like the fact that they use the Apple Watch. I think that's kind of interesting format, but make it bigger.
Leo Laporte [01:17:44]:
It projects from your phone. It doesn't have apps on it. It projects apps from your phone like CarPlay does,
Gina Smith [01:17:49]:
right? It's like,
Jason Calacanis [01:17:49]:
oh, that kind of sucks. I want it to have its own—
Leo Laporte [01:17:52]:
No, you can't install apps. Yeah.
Jason Calacanis [01:17:53]:
Oh, that— okay, now
Leo Laporte [01:17:55]:
you sort of can. I mean, it doesn't come with Spotify. You could put Spotify on your phone and project it to—
Jason Calacanis [01:18:01]:
I just wish— my wish for John Ternus is that he runs this company based upon 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.
Leo Laporte [01:18:17]:
That's how you get to be a $1 trillion company, right? I
Jason Calacanis [01:18:20]:
know, but it's one of the reasons why, like, I think they're falling behind, uh, 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, in chip, and maximum flexibility to switch, you know, based on— They
Leo Laporte [01:18:41]:
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.
Jason Calacanis [01:18:52]:
Yes.
Leo Laporte [01:18:52]:
And 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, oh, here we
Jason Calacanis [01:19:00]:
are. I literally just bought the M5 Mac Studio for $12,000.
Leo Laporte [01:19:06]:
You bought the top of the line, 128?
Jason Calacanis [01:19:07]:
Of course.
Gina Smith [01:19:08]:
Fancy.
Jason Calacanis [01:19:08]:
What do I care?
Leo Laporte [01:19:09]:
I'm, I'm trying to decide. I'm going to be in, uh, Indonesia when it happens. They're going to announce the 512GB version.
Jason Calacanis [01:19:17]:
Well, I'll— mine's coming December. If they do announce, I told my team, give that to somebody else and order me the 512GB because I want to run local models. And 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?
Leo Laporte [01:19:36]:
It keeps going up.
Jason Calacanis [01:19:37]:
And somewhere around '28, '29, '30, they're going to be as powerful as, like, an H100.
Leo Laporte [01:19:42]:
But should you wait until then to get them out?
Jason Calacanis [01:19:44]:
No, no. If you're a technologist and you're in the 1%, like you and I are, Leo, 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. And you're going to—
Leo Laporte [01:19:57]:
Just so the audience knows, I have 8 local models running right now. Yes. Dual Sparks, a 3090, a Mac Mini.
Jason Calacanis [01:20:02]:
So you have $25,000 worth of compute on your desk easily. Easily. I think we're going back to that. By the way, the first piece of this—
Leo Laporte [01:20:09]:
And it's no smarter than my $100 a month GrokBot subscription. And it's killing me.
Jason Calacanis [01:20:14]:
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.
Leo Laporte [01:20:22]:
No, I remember buying it. I'm sure, Gina, you did it too. I remember buying a Digital Equipment PC, a 486. $4,000. $10,000.
Jason Calacanis [01:20:31]:
In 1984 dollars.
Leo Laporte [01:20:34]:
Yes.
Jason Calacanis [01:20:34]:
Which is 3x now. That's 3x. So that $4,000 PC would be $12,000 now, right? Thus, when you buy a $12,000 desktop workstation now, don't sweat it. You'll have it for 3 years, divide it by 1,000 days, it's $12 a day. That's what I do.
Leo Laporte [01:20:48]:
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. Yeah, I don't think I can.
Jason Calacanis [01:21:02]:
It's so unhinged. I literally— all the things—
Leo Laporte [01:21:05]:
It's so fast.
Jason Calacanis [01:21:06]:
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, um, we're in a lawsuit with the New York Times and I cannot, um, 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.
Leo Laporte [01:21:32]:
So tell me about Muse. Have you tried Muse?
Jason Calacanis [01:21:35]:
I play with it a little bit, but I don't trust
Leo Laporte [01:21:37]:
Gina, have you played with any of these
Jason Calacanis [01:21:39]:
tools?
Gina Smith [01:21:40]:
I haven't played yet with Muse, but its persistence gives me pause.
Leo Laporte [01:21:47]:
They are, by the way, every ad surface in the house has an ad for Muse on it now.
Gina Smith [01:21:52]:
Yep.
Jason Calacanis [01:21:53]:
They are going all in.
Leo Laporte [01:21:54]:
And the only reason I could think of it is Mark suddenly said, I could make some money on this. He's practically giving it away, right? It doesn't cost— you can use pretty 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,
Jason Calacanis [01:22:20]:
did anybody see You Can See Everything? Did anybody see it?
Gina Smith [01:22:24]:
I'm dying to see it. Okay, good. I hear it's great.
Jason Calacanis [01:22:27]:
I saw it yesterday at 11:30. It's the best Best documentary of all time.
Gina Smith [01:22:32]:
I've heard that.
Leo Laporte [01:22:33]:
All right, so this is for those who don't— Nathan Fielder is the guy who did that crazy TV show, uh, The Rehearsal,
Gina Smith [01:22:40]:
right? He's a comedian, right?
Leo Laporte [01:22:42]:
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, uh, is it Oppenheimer, the other guy, the director?
Gina Smith [01:23:02]:
Oppenheimer. That's Oppenheimer.
Leo Laporte [01:23:03]:
Who directed, by the way, one of the greatest— Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer, one of the greatest, uh, a couple of the greatest documentaries of all time, 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, 'cause I understand that things happen in the movie that are maybe a little surprising.
Gina Smith [01:23:39]:
And unhinged, I hear.
Jason Calacanis [01:23:41]:
It is.
Leo Laporte [01:23:41]:
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 gonna have a big sign that says, Spoilers, and they're— because they, they're dying to talk.
Jason Calacanis [01:23:58]:
I will give the non-spoiler review.
Leo Laporte [01:24:01]:
Please do.
Jason Calacanis [01:24:01]:
Number one, it's the greatest documentary ever made, hands down. Put that—
Leo Laporte [01:24:05]:
This is what everybody's saying. What everybody's saying, it is the best picture of the year.
Jason Calacanis [01:24:09]:
It is the best picture of this year. I will say it's in the top 5 films of the 20th, 21st century.
Leo Laporte [01:24:15]:
How could it be that good? It's not fiction, right? It's nonfiction. It's a documentary.
Gina Smith [01:24:20]:
And there she is. blinking and staring at the screen. She's so close up.
Leo Laporte [01:24:24]:
So, we all saw that weird clip. Yeah, that clip was so weird. Okay.
Jason Calacanis [01:24:27]:
So, it is working on multiple layers that are so prescient in our culture. One 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? Yeah. compulsive liars, or are they just—
Gina Smith [01:24:54]:
Delusional.
Jason Calacanis [01:24:55]:
Too early and misunderstood and delusional, right? And so we get into this all the time where Dario or, you know, Elon has a flying car, or Dario thinks there's a 10% chance that we're all gonna 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, um, 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—
Leo Laporte [01:25:33]:
You know Elizabeth Holmes?
Jason Calacanis [01:25:34]:
I do know her. I do know her. Yes, I met her a couple times.
Leo Laporte [01:25:36]:
So you knew her from before?
Jason Calacanis [01:25:38]:
I knew her while she was building Theranos on a very cursory basis.
Leo Laporte [01:25:42]:
Did you have any suspicions at all about the whole thing?
Jason Calacanis [01:25:45]:
When the first thing started, I went on CNBC and said, I think this is gonna be one of the biggest frauds in the history of our industry.
Gina Smith [01:25:50]:
Oh, really?
Jason Calacanis [01:25:52]:
Because— You called this? I called it because I had John Carreyrou on my podcast after the first— after his first story.
Leo Laporte [01:25:59]:
The Wall Street Journal reporter who broke this story.
Gina Smith [01:26:01]:
Who broke the story, who was upset that he wasn't allowed to do this interview for the documentary. But why would she let John Carreyrou into her world?
Jason Calacanis [01:26:08]:
She hates John Carreyrou.
Leo Laporte [01:26:09]:
Well, funny fans. They had a thing for each other. Theroux was very kind of bitter about the documentary, but he also said it's the best film of all time. So he did say—
Jason Calacanis [01:26:17]:
I mean, I think he's rightfully upset that he never got to interview her. Yeah, 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.
Leo Laporte [01:26:31]:
But he broke it. Yeah.
Jason Calacanis [01:26:32]:
At the core of all of this, you know, the reason I knew there was a fraud going on here, 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.
Leo Laporte [01:26:47]:
She never let anybody see the machine. She never let anybody see it.
Jason Calacanis [01:26:48]:
Right, you would just show it immediately.
Leo Laporte [01:26:50]:
Not even her biggest customer, Walmart. Never let Walmart see it.
Jason Calacanis [01:26:52]:
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, by October 18th, 2036, someone will have succeeded to some extent, some reasonable extent, 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 superintelligence.
Gina Smith [01:27:22]:
And arrays. Arrays. Superintelligent arrays.
Jason Calacanis [01:27:25]:
Yes. And so
Leo Laporte [01:27:26]:
that's the hard part, by the way, is not the intelligence, it's the take— it's the reading a tiny amount of blood.
Jason Calacanis [01:27:34]:
But if anything can figure it out, it will be AI. And so Instead of getting that huge draw where you get— like, what do they do when you do a full blood panel? Like 7 or 8 of these things? Oh my God.
Leo Laporte [01:27:43]:
How many test tubes out of you?
Jason Calacanis [01:27:44]:
Yeah, you're in the 6th, 7th test tube when I did it. And so I think somebody is going to be able to do it with, let's say, 1 test tube or half a test tube. And we will be sitting here in 2036 saying— or some group of people will be saying, Elizabeth Holmes was 100% correct. It can be done. Because everything can be done with technology. It's just a matter of when.
Gina Smith [01:28:03]:
Yeah, we used to make fun of the Newton. Like, a lot of fun. Of course.
Jason Calacanis [01:28:07]:
The Newton, the PalmPilot. Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:28:09]:
But I loved the Newton. The BlackBerry. I had quite a few of them, and I knew that this was the form factor of the future, but it was missing something. As it turns out, internet access.
Gina Smith [01:28:18]:
Yes, that's what it was missing. So I have a question, and it's, I guess, probably for Jason. In an age where all these really corrupt people in prison are basically paying the administration and getting people pardons and getting out of prison. Why isn't she out of prison? Is she making—
Jason Calacanis [01:28:35]:
Okay, this is a great question. She's coming out in February or March. People don't know this.
Gina Smith [01:28:40]:
That's what I think is gonna happen.
Jason Calacanis [01:28:41]:
She's coming out in the first quarter of next year to a halfway house. And so that, I think, is public. But I got the inside line on this. I was told—
Gina Smith [01:28:50]:
And so Billy just wrote this fat check.
Leo Laporte [01:28:52]:
You're wondering, Gina, why she hasn't been pardoned.
Gina Smith [01:28:55]:
Well, why she—
Jason Calacanis [01:28:56]:
If you want to be pardoned, you need to give $1 million. That's right. For the administration. I don't know if she has the million dollars or not.
Gina Smith [01:29:02]:
But Billy does. Her husband, right? Maybe.
Jason Calacanis [01:29:06]:
I don't know. Uh, in this film, there seemed to be some debate around how much money he had access to. Um, putting all that aside— No spoilers.
Leo Laporte [01:29:14]:
No spoilers. Give us your review.
Jason Calacanis [01:29:16]:
The review is, the first half is what you've been told about, which is, these are the 30 days before she goes to jail. Right. The second half is the actual film. And there are— 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 3 turns in the second half of the film. There are literally 3 turns that your mind gets blown every 15, 20 minutes. Oh, wow.
Jason Calacanis [01:29:52]:
And that's why it's so powerful. 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 century. It is.
Gina Smith [01:30:04]:
And it's like 3 hours long, right?
Jason Calacanis [01:30:06]:
And the 3 hours— I— 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.
Leo Laporte [01:30:11]:
Paris has already seen it again. Paris has seen it twice.
Jason Calacanis [01:30:14]:
I cannot wait to see it again. I cannot wait for you guys to see it and talk to you about it. If 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. I've always been. And, 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?
Gina Smith [01:30:41]:
We're in a post-truth age.
Jason Calacanis [01:30:43]:
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.
Leo Laporte [01:30:55]:
Like, we don't know.
Jason Calacanis [01:30:55]:
We
Leo Laporte [01:30:56]:
can't figure it out
Jason Calacanis [01:30:57]:
because everybody's got an agenda.
Leo Laporte [01:30:59]:
There's too many conflicting agendas. I've been saying this.
Jason Calacanis [01:31:02]:
Yes.
Leo Laporte [01:31:03]:
And you have to try and know what all the subtexts are because there's multiple agendas. We just did it.
Jason Calacanis [01:31:08]:
We just did it for Russia, Ukraine, Starlink. you know, John Ternus versus Tim Cook versus this device, and what are they optimizing for?
Leo Laporte [01:31:16]:
It's impossible for the objective person on the street to know what's real. Precisely.
Jason Calacanis [01:31:22]:
And so this film encapsulates that better than any discussion or media property that has ever been done to date. And so he just hit the zeitgeist so perfectly that I cannot think of another moment in time— maybe bowl 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— Leo would know about that. What was that like?
Leo Laporte [01:31:57]:
Well, when I was a kid— When
Jason Calacanis [01:32:00]:
you saw it on your 50th birthday, Leo, you talk about it.
Leo Laporte [01:32:03]:
The Matrix is the best example. I'm I remember I didn't know anything about The Matrix. I went in and I came out,
Jason Calacanis [01:32:08]:
yes,
Leo Laporte [01:32:08]:
with my eyes like this.
Jason Calacanis [01:32:10]:
I, I cannot discuss it right now because I don't want to give any of the spoilers.
Leo Laporte [01:32:14]:
Don't spoil it. We want everybody to experience it.
Jason Calacanis [01:32:16]:
But I think I gave you enough.
Leo Laporte [01:32:17]:
Yeah. Without spoiling it. And so I would say to everybody, don't read any reviews, any stuff.
Jason Calacanis [01:32:21]:
No, stay off social media. Ban it from your social media profile.
Leo Laporte [01:32:24]:
I've been trying to because everybody's talking about it.
Jason Calacanis [01:32:26]:
No, that's why I went at 11:30 in the morning. So you have to see it and get rid of the reviews.
Leo Laporte [01:32:31]:
I can go tomorrow morning at 10 AM.
Gina Smith [01:32:33]:
It's only in theaters.
Jason Calacanis [01:32:34]:
Go at 2 AM if there's a 2 AM screening. Do stop what you're doing, jump off this podcast immediately. Maybe I should change your plans. You go see it.
Leo Laporte [01:32:43]:
I won't be able to watch it. And go, go see it.
Jason Calacanis [01:32:46]:
You and Lisa are going to have your minds blown. Now, I don't know what— put a breakfast burrito in your bag and go.
Gina Smith [01:32:51]:
Now, I don't know about Petaluma or Texas, but in Seattle it's only playing 3 days in theaters and only at one theater. Friday night. No way. Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday.
Leo Laporte [01:33:01]:
They'll change that. They'll change it immediately. That's because they thought nobody would want to see it.
Gina Smith [01:33:06]:
Queen Anne.
Jason Calacanis [01:33:07]:
Yeah, I mean, it's— it is so next level. It's— it's— it's unbelievable.
Gina Smith [01:33:12]:
It's incredible. I'm just looking at this.
Jason Calacanis [01:33:15]:
He's going on his fandango. Here you go if you want to see the film.
Leo Laporte [01:33:18]:
Fandango, baby. Let me see if it's showing in the—
Jason Calacanis [01:33:21]:
Fandango.
Leo Laporte [01:33:23]:
Fandango. Boy, let's see if it's showing in the Petaluma area.
Jason Calacanis [01:33:26]:
There it is. You just, you just scrolled past it. Go back up.
Leo Laporte [01:33:28]:
Did I?
Gina Smith [01:33:28]:
I, I really can't understand how she was able to see Larry Ellison.
Jason Calacanis [01:33:33]:
Look at Blue Eyes.
Leo Laporte [01:33:34]:
Okay, check seats,
Jason Calacanis [01:33:35]:
check seats.
Leo Laporte [01:33:36]:
Uh, maybe I'll— maybe tomorrow, not, not today.
Jason Calacanis [01:33:39]:
Tomorrow.
Leo Laporte [01:33:39]:
Yeah, you got to change the day.
Gina Smith [01:33:41]:
Wait, does she really not blink in the, in the movie? That was—
Leo Laporte [01:33:44]:
she doesn't blink.
Jason Calacanis [01:33:45]:
That's the other thing, the cinematographer of this and how they filmed it, they also need an award because They, 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. Just 11:30 AM, you're in. Go.
Leo Laporte [01:34:04]:
I got 2 seats for 11— for 11:30 AM at the Cinema West. Anybody wants to join me,
Jason Calacanis [01:34:10]:
get in there with Leo. Leo stalkers, here's your chance. Careful, get a selfie with Leo.
Leo Laporte [01:34:18]:
Uh, oh hey, I'm a senior, I get a dollar off.
Jason Calacanis [01:34:21]:
Yeah, she— yeah, me and JCD are gonna go and take a dollar off.
Gina Smith [01:34:25]:
Dvorak's gonna come haunt—
Jason Calacanis [01:34:27]:
you know what, come back from the grave.
Leo Laporte [01:34:28]:
Tickets are free if you're dead. Uh, no, I'm not.
Gina Smith [01:34:32]:
Well, that's the title of the show. Tickets are free. John C.
Jason Calacanis [01:34:36]:
Dvorak would have loved this. I tell you, like, his Conspiracy Corner, like, this feeds right into his Totally in his wheelhouse. This would be—
Leo Laporte [01:34:46]:
yeah, he would have loved this movie. I bet you're right.
Jason Calacanis [01:34:48]:
Actually, everybody's a scam artist.
Leo Laporte [01:34:50]:
All right, you mentioned the Newton. I gotta mention the iPhone Duo, which went on sale on Friday. I set my alarm. I got up at 10 minutes to 5 AM.
Gina Smith [01:34:59]:
Is that the foldable one?
Leo Laporte [01:35:01]:
That's the foldable one.
Gina Smith [01:35:02]:
Okay.
Leo Laporte [01:35:03]:
Uh, I, uh, I, uh, 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. Refresh it a few times. Hang on, hang on. Finally, like 5:05, it opens up. I'd already pre-saved everything, so all I had to do is press one button. It said, congratulations, you own an iPhone Duo. It'll be arriving December 7th.
Leo Laporte [01:35:28]:
Pearl Harbor Day. By then they had, they had slipped a month, more than a month. Is that right? Yeah, I think so. It's October 23rd. Is— 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. I blame you, uh, Grokbot.
Leo Laporte [01:36:02]:
People— oh, I got tickets. Oh, that was easy.
Jason Calacanis [01:36:06]:
Congratulations. Did your Grokbot get them or you got them?
Leo Laporte [01:36:07]:
No, I got them. I should have asked the Grokbot. Uh, it was a little too easy to buy those tickets. Now I don't know what happens now.
Jason Calacanis [01:36:14]:
It's 11 AM, Leo.
Leo Laporte [01:36:16]:
Yeah, this is—
Jason Calacanis [01:36:16]:
no, this is like serious old man behavior. The theater was buying 8 AM tickets.
Leo Laporte [01:36:21]:
Yeah, I mean, I did 11:30.
Jason Calacanis [01:36:23]:
I am now in my old man era. I am in my John C. Dvorak era. I would go see this at 9 AM, 8 AM. And, oh, so great.
Leo Laporte [01:36:34]:
All right, so I, I'm going tomorrow morning right after my tai chi class, and you're going too
Gina Smith [01:36:39]:
tomorrow night.
Leo Laporte [01:36:40]:
All right, we all have to go see it before the spoilers ruin it.
Jason Calacanis [01:36:43]:
So good. I don't want to oversell it, but it is so, so good.
Leo Laporte [01:36:46]:
There was a number of people— if 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, uh, Duo because we were going to scalp them on eBay. And they are selling on eBay now Thousands more than the list price. Genius, maybe. But is there anything Apple can do about this? That is— Who
Jason Calacanis [01:37:08]:
cares? They'll have so many out, it'll be fine.
Leo Laporte [01:37:10]:
Who cares?
Jason Calacanis [01:37:11]:
Who cares? I don't care.
Leo Laporte [01:37:14]:
No, actually, I don't care. I was fine with this.
Gina Smith [01:37:16]:
People doing crazy stuff.
Leo Laporte [01:37:17]:
I know, I was fine.
Jason Calacanis [01:37:18]:
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 restaurant reservations now. Oh yeah, there are like— there's an aftermarket for like the hard reservations. So people are buying their— getting the reservations 6 months out, and then they sell them to other people like on these back channels. Uh, and, uh, that is disgraciado as well, but it is right.
Leo Laporte [01:37:45]:
Well, what are you gonna do? I guess you can't— I mean, you can't tell everybody's got to hustle, man.
Jason Calacanis [01:37:49]:
Everybody's got to hustle.
Gina Smith [01:37:50]:
This is why AI cybersecurity is going going to explode as a career choice for all the young people out there. Right.
Leo Laporte [01:37:58]:
I mean, your son needs to get out of the noodle factory and his cybersecurity.
Gina Smith [01:38:01]:
Well, he has his cybersecurity certification from— what's he working at a noodle factory for? Because he's sending out resumes everywhere. It's hard to get a job.
Jason Calacanis [01:38:11]:
He'll get one. It's the lowest unemployment of our lifetime.
Gina Smith [01:38:14]:
He's got his CompTIA+ certification, which is a base level. Oh, yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:38:18]:
That's what you need. Yeah,
Gina Smith [01:38:20]:
yeah, he's got the Microsoft one, the first Microsoft one. He's collecting. He's a cybersecurity fellow at University of Washington.
Leo Laporte [01:38:28]:
Is he making noodles?
Gina Smith [01:38:30]:
No, he's not making noodles. He's
Jason Calacanis [01:38:32]:
smashing noodles. He's eating them.
Gina Smith [01:38:34]:
He's somehow in business development. He speaks Chinese.
Leo Laporte [01:38:36]:
Oh, okay.
Gina Smith [01:38:37]:
Right, Eric speaks Chinese, so they roll him out, you know.
Leo Laporte [01:38:41]:
He's not at— he's not earning minimum wage making noodles at the He is— no, he's working at an executive at a noodle factory.
Gina Smith [01:38:48]:
Executive company. Strong. He's 23, but he'll be fine. He's doing this stuff and speaking Mandarin to their, you know, customers and stuff. They're rolling out, you know, Eric and his—
Leo Laporte [01:39:00]:
Well, congratulations. We're gonna take a break. When we come back, speaking of secret agents, they caught one at OpenAI. What a story this is. You hang on. Jason Calacanis says it's insane.
Gina Smith [01:39:14]:
Bug in the conference room.
Leo Laporte [01:39:16]:
Yeah. Oh, you already know all about it, Gina Smith. Yeah, Dr. Gina Smith. Jesus, I didn't mention this— senior research director at IDC. What do you do at IDC? What do you research?
Gina Smith [01:39:24]:
Uh, I research AI training, AI skills, how we skill everybody up to work with AI and jobs, AI jobs, all the stuff we've been—
Leo Laporte [01:39:34]:
So you're kind of an expert on this topic?
Gina Smith [01:39:36]:
Yeah. Oh,
Leo Laporte [01:39:37]:
okay,
Gina Smith [01:39:37]:
sort of, sort of, to the degree anyone's an expert this early in the game.
Leo Laporte [01:39:41]:
Well, but is it your opinion Uh, that there will be jobs, that it's not that people—
Gina Smith [01:39:48]:
No, it's just what y'all said. It's, you know, there'll be huge amounts of new jobs, but they're different, but they'll be different. And these young people are going to lose their entry level opportunities.
Leo Laporte [01:39:59]:
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
Gina Smith [01:40:09]:
of it will
Leo Laporte [01:40:10]:
be handled by
Gina Smith [01:40:10]:
regulation in China and in Europe. They'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 China
Leo Laporte [01:40:23]:
do that. That's right. Yeah.
Gina Smith [01:40:24]:
Yeah, it's, it's really happening.
Leo Laporte [01:40:26]:
Isn't it funny that they're, they're, they're more enlightened than we are about this whole thing?
Gina Smith [01:40:30]:
They're more community-oriented. I'll tell you, China was a great place to live for me during the Especially
Leo Laporte [01:40:35]:
when Eric was a kid, right? He grew up there.
Gina Smith [01:40:38]:
Yeah, that's why.
Leo Laporte [01:40:38]:
And he speaks Chinese.
Gina Smith [01:40:40]:
Yeah, Mandarin and Cantonese.
Leo Laporte [01:40:41]:
Cantonese? It's Cantonese.
Gina Smith [01:40:43]:
No, he speaks Mandarin because they study it in school. They have to in Hong Kong. But we both get around with Cantonese pretty good.
Leo Laporte [01:40:51]:
Jeff Jarvis is in our Discord. I studied Chinese in college.
Jason Calacanis [01:40:55]:
Jeff hates me. Oh no.
Leo Laporte [01:40:56]:
Yeah, I had a Chinese doctor the other day. I said, xie xie ni, and he said, bu xie. And that was the extent of my Chinese.
Gina Smith [01:41:03]:
Okay. 我们说中文。
Leo Laporte [01:41:05]:
Oh, 我是小孩子，就说我，呃, whatever.
Gina Smith [01:41:09]:
That's your sentence here. It is.
Leo Laporte [01:41:11]:
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 voice-to-text. Oh, Whisper Flow is great. Well, I actually have the, you know, just the Whisper model running. It understands Chinese.
Leo Laporte [01:41:28]:
So when I say, wǒ shì hǎo, xiǎo hǎiji de shì hòu, wǒ zài jīnggāng zhūgō, dà xuèi jiāoshū, it translated it. And I thought, well, my Chinese must be pretty good.
Gina Smith [01:41:38]:
Yeah, no, I test my Chinese with it all the time.
Leo Laporte [01:41:43]:
I did French too, and it translated that. It's hysterical.
Gina Smith [01:41:47]:
I'm like you. I memorized a Chinese sentence I pull out. It's impressive. Let's hear it. 如果我是你，我是不为吃的。If I were you, I wouldn't eat that.
Leo Laporte [01:42:00]:
I wish I—I better memorize that for my trip.
Gina Smith [01:42:03]:
Yeah, I'll teach it to you.
Leo Laporte [01:42:04]:
And here we are, baby, working in the Twit Noodle Factory. More to come in just a little bit. At least we—at least we got the sanitation down.
Gina Smith [01:42:15]:
That's right.
Jason Calacanis [01:42:16]:
Oh my God!
Leo Laporte [01:42:17]:
We're back from the noodle factory, and there is much. To talk about. So OpenAI, this was a wild story. The first thing that leaked out was, uh, we discovered somebody bugging our executive conference room, the one where we talk about the most secret stuff at OpenAI. Uh, they found a little bug device plugged into the TV in the conference room.
Gina Smith [01:42:42]:
Like a USB, right?
Leo Laporte [01:42:44]:
Yeah, I guess for power.
Jason Calacanis [01:42:45]:
Ostensibly to power it. Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:42:46]:
But it was unaccountably— it was wrapped in toilet paper. I don't know.
Jason Calacanis [01:42:51]:
It's a bit of a tell, but okay.
Leo Laporte [01:42:53]:
And 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.
Jason Calacanis [01:43:04]:
So it wasn't streaming the conversation, it was storing it.
Leo Laporte [01:43:07]:
It was recording it.
Jason Calacanis [01:43:08]:
Yeah, that's the mistake.
Gina Smith [01:43:09]:
And they found— they found the guy because there was a camera and they saw I'm checking the—
Leo Laporte [01:43:14]:
Yeah, they put a— they knew he was going to come back to get it, so they put a camera and they found him coming to get it. And they kind of— there is a picture.
Jason Calacanis [01:43:21]:
Also, his spouse was searching on ChatGPT.
Leo Laporte [01:43:26]:
Oh, yes.
Jason Calacanis [01:43:26]:
For how did— what recording devices to find, which means this was not a government operation. This 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 them.
Leo Laporte [01:43:44]:
It is pretty unsophisticated.
Jason Calacanis [01:43:45]:
Yeah, that's the tell.
Leo Laporte [01:43:47]:
Though he has now been arrested. Department of Justice—
Jason Calacanis [01:43:50]:
He's not going anywhere.
Leo Laporte [01:43:52]:
Arrested him as a spy, a Saudi Arabian national, Abdulrahman Al-Fazan.
Jason Calacanis [01:43:57]:
He worked at a VC firm.
Leo Laporte [01:44:00]:
Yeah, he joined the product team in July last year as an engineer. He was fired on Friday and arrested immediately
Gina Smith [01:44:09]:
That's a bad day, you know. You're fired and arrested.
Leo Laporte [01:44:14]:
Well, he got arrested. He was fly— he had a one-way ticket back to Saudi Arabia with his wife.
Gina Smith [01:44:19]:
Oh, really?
Leo Laporte [01:44:20]:
And they arrested him 90 minutes before he got on the plane.
Jason Calacanis [01:44:24]:
So close. He was so close to not going to jail for a decade.
Gina Smith [01:44:29]:
I mean, corporate espionage.
Leo Laporte [01:44:30]:
So you think it was corporate and it wasn't—
Jason Calacanis [01:44:32]:
it wasn't— it's somebody's making a— 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 found it 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?
Gina Smith [01:45:11]:
Totally, totally, totally.
Jason Calacanis [01:45:12]:
It's so unsophisticated, it's laughable.
Leo Laporte [01:45:15]:
By the way, I should probably say alleged, you know. Alleged.
Gina Smith [01:45:20]:
It is alleged. But corporate espionage is as old as Silicon Valley, right? I mean, do you remember? I— 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. Well, who wouldn't? Recently, wasn't that engineer from Google? There was some kind of Waymo versus Uber corporate espionage thing. What was that, in 2021 or something?
Jason Calacanis [01:45:50]:
Anthony Lewandowski. Brought a hard drive with him, allegedly, allegedly, and was allegedly pardoned.
Leo Laporte [01:45:59]:
He was, he was pardoned, wasn't he?
Gina Smith [01:46:01]:
Yeah, corporate espionage. I'd be surprised if
Jason Calacanis [01:46:03]:
people are giving out pardons like they're giving out, uh, executive orders these days.
Gina Smith [01:46:07]:
Um, they are.
Leo Laporte [01:46:11]:
All right, well, I guess that's all we have to say about that.
Jason Calacanis [01:46:13]:
I mean, it's pretty— I mean, it's Really, uh, 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 $5,000. Like, it is a super unsophisticated place that needs to get super sophisticated real quick because, I mean, Apple was great at it despite losing the iPhone 4, which should have never left the building.
Gina Smith [01:46:46]:
Oh, I remember that.
Jason Calacanis [01:46:47]:
Yeah, that was a weird one. We got offered that in Gadget to buy it. Did you? Yeah, they were like, uh, hey boss, somebody's trying to sell us the iPhone 4 and Gawker's gonna buy it, or Gizmodo's gonna buy it. I was like, uh, 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. So tell them that we're not gonna bid, but expressly tell them that the folks at Gizmodo will pay double.
Leo Laporte [01:47:14]:
I know, they might.
Jason Calacanis [01:47:15]:
And they did.
Leo Laporte [01:47:15]:
By the way, Gizmodo was banned from Apple events for years.
Jason Calacanis [01:47:18]:
Yes.
Leo Laporte [01:47:19]:
As was I. They're back. I never did any of that.
Jason Calacanis [01:47:22]:
We got banned for 48 hours. I had to like email Steve Jobs 3 times.
Leo Laporte [01:47:25]:
I am still banned since 2011.
Jason Calacanis [01:47:26]:
And it was over— it was over the iPhone 4 because we did a blog post called Antennagate.
Leo Laporte [01:47:32]:
Oh, you were the ones who—
Jason Calacanis [01:47:34]:
Here's what happened. Somebody put You're quoting him. The word Antenagate in the replies. Peter Rojas or Ryan Block made that a story and took it from the comments, 'cause we had a philosophy, the inmates run the asylum. We had such a good community that the comments, kinda like Club Twit, which is only $10 a month, it's the best $10 you could spend on anything, go to clubtwit.com and if you 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.
Jason Calacanis [01:48:05]:
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 created the Steve Note. The live blog was created by Peter Rojas and Ryan Block at Engadget. They pioneered that. I said, the guys are crestfallen. They're going to be outside their place in Moscone.
Jason Calacanis [01:48:26]:
Like, we didn't mean any harm by it. And then literally at 2 AM, 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.
Gina Smith [01:48:40]:
Wow, he's ban-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. He said, send me a copy. I sent him a copy. He read it. I sent him one chapter.
Jason Calacanis [01:48:52]:
And then you got an attorney letter?
Gina Smith [01:48:55]:
He read the first 5 chapters and called me screaming. Ooh. You will never sell this book at the Apple Store. Never, never. And I— it didn't occur to me that I could argue him down because, well, you've got to—
Leo Laporte [01:49:07]:
Why would you care if you could sell it at the Apple Store, to be honest?
Gina Smith [01:49:11]:
Yeah. Well—
Jason Calacanis [01:49:12]:
Steve was—
Leo Laporte [01:49:12]:
That's all he could do, I guess.
Jason Calacanis [01:49:13]:
Steve was the best level of petty. He was exceptionally petty in all the best ways. Like, everything mattered to him. Yeah, and that's why they made the best products in the world.
Leo Laporte [01:49:24]:
Everything mattered. That's a good way, you know, it's a double-edged sword. It— and it's— I
Jason Calacanis [01:49:29]:
love people who are petty. It's my favorite.
Leo Laporte [01:49:31]:
He hated Android so bad and sued them. Well, that's because they double-crossed him.
Jason Calacanis [01:49:35]:
Yeah, Eric Schmidt was on the board of Apple and they're like—
Leo Laporte [01:49:38]:
he leaked it.
Jason Calacanis [01:49:39]:
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.
Leo Laporte [01:49:46]:
The story was they had a phone they were shipping with Android, I think it was the first Android phone, and they saw the iPhone and they pulled it back. They said, hmm, we cannot sell this now.
Jason Calacanis [01:49:58]:
Yeah, no keyboard. We need to go for the piece of glass, Black Mirror type.
Leo Laporte [01:50:02]:
Yeah.
Jason Calacanis [01:50:02]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:50:03]:
The first Android phone, not such a great phone. I
Jason Calacanis [01:50:05]:
have my favorite level of petty now. I love people who are petty like this, like where they just, they take unreasonable amount of anger over something that's so de minimis, like your book or the keynote or like Antennagate, whatever it is. And so there's a guy on TikTok who I love. He 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. Yeah.
Jason Calacanis [01:50:42]:
scumbags who own the buildings have started closing them off and pretending they're private spaces.
Leo Laporte [01:50:47]:
No, they're not.
Jason Calacanis [01:50:48]:
Which is infuriating. Yes. So this guy—
Gina Smith [01:50:51]:
beaches—
Jason Calacanis [01:50:51]:
all this guy does on his Instagram and TikTok is he goes to those spaces and he starts 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's got— and he's got a person inside Mondavi's, you know, department, and he sends them who's doing it. And Mondavi's the greatest, like, you know, media thinker in the world. And for politicians, I mean, he is a— despite what you think of him, he's a world-class politician.
Leo Laporte [01:51:17]:
Any socialist who can get Donald Trump to embrace him— Exactly.
Jason Calacanis [01:51:21]:
This guy, he's literally got the Trump savant media thing. So now he gives fines for thousands of dollars to these people. Then 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— Do you remember the name of this? Who owns the building?
Leo Laporte [01:51:44]:
Do you remember the name of this TikTok?
Jason Calacanis [01:51:46]:
Uh, I'm gonna— you guys carry on.
Leo Laporte [01:51:48]:
Somebody will— don't worry about it. Somebody will tell us in the chat room. They're looking right now.
Jason Calacanis [01:51:51]:
Uh, Club Twit.
Leo Laporte [01:51:52]:
Is it a— is it a, uh— it's a TikTok or an Instagram?
Jason Calacanis [01:51:55]:
The Instagram is where I follow them.
Leo Laporte [01:51:57]:
Instagram.
Jason Calacanis [01:51:58]:
Okay. Hold on. Public.
Leo Laporte [01:51:59]:
Actually, OpenAI and Apple are in an open battle over, uh, some employees leaving Apple and going to OpenAI, uh, via Jony Ive's, uh, Love Actually or whatever the name of his company is, uh, which OpenAI bought. They're making something, uh, there, we think.
Leo Laporte [01:52:19]:
And
Leo Laporte [01:52:20]:
are you talking to your Grok bot?
Jason Calacanis [01:52:24]:
I'm looking for the public spaces guy. Sorry.
Leo Laporte [01:52:26]:
Are you talking to your Grok?
Jason Calacanis [01:52:27]:
780 Lord of the Bench. 780 Lord of Bench. Lord of Bench. On Instagram? On Insta. The greatest account ever. It is so great.
Leo Laporte [01:52:39]:
Well, it's the second greatest after Salt Hank, right?
Jason Calacanis [01:52:42]:
I mean, Salt Hank is incredible. These are the two things in New York that matter.
Leo Laporte [01:52:45]:
As soon as I typed 780, it came right up. Oh, there it is. Violation served. Oh, look at this. That is hysterical.
Jason Calacanis [01:52:53]:
I mean, play one of them. It is so great. Look at this one. one 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.
Jason Calacanis [01:53:12]:
So the New York City cop gives him credit. He's like, you're right, you can record here.
TikTok [01:53:15]:
The bench over there doesn't have anything about filming.
Jason Calacanis [01:53:19]:
This guy is so petty.
Leo Laporte [01:53:21]:
He's, he's brave because—
Jason Calacanis [01:53:23]:
oh, go a couple down and find like a security guard. So now,
Leo Laporte [01:53:28]:
I'm sorry, sir, you're not allowed.
Jason Calacanis [01:53:30]:
There's one. See the security guard? So this is his other specialty. He goes, 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.
TikTok [01:53:42]:
Dude, we're getting mugged out by guys today.
Gina Smith [01:53:47]:
So you want to talk about something else? Talk about the Microsoft Maya 300. 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 Jalapeño from OpenAI, the— what's the Amazon one called? Trainium something? Inferentia?
Leo Laporte [01:54:07]:
The problem is no one can make these chips at that scale.
Gina Smith [01:54:11]:
Except for Taiwan Semi.
Leo Laporte [01:54:12]:
Except for TSMC.
Gina Smith [01:54:14]:
Yeah, that's so—
Leo Laporte [01:54:16]:
so they're all competing with each other for limited Capacity, right? And right, it used to be Apple would buy all their chips, but 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 Micro— boy, I'd like to be TSMC in this equation. Yeah, Microsoft, Broadcom, Amazon. Um, these— the Maya chip is massive, by the way. It's huge. Not coming till next year.
Gina Smith [01:54:42]:
Supposed to be last year.
Leo Laporte [01:54:44]:
Why are these companies making hardware like this? Why do they— is it because they want Nvidia's— a share of Nvidia's Gold.
Gina Smith [01:54:51]:
Yeah,
Leo Laporte [01:54:51]:
bucket of gold.
Gina Smith [01:54:52]:
Yeah, everybody wants a piece of that. Nvidia has— what is it, 90% market share on AI chips, something like that?
Leo Laporte [01:55:00]:
Maybe more. Does this make this stuff cheaper? No, because it's all the same factory.
Gina Smith [01:55:06]:
Well, they say that they— it will be 40% more tokens per kilowatt or something. I mean,
Leo Laporte [01:55:12]:
well, but Nvidia is doing that too. The Vera Rubin is, is like 10x It's
Jason Calacanis [01:55:17]:
going to create downward pressure on margins. It's one of the great things about capitalism. Good. That'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, your margin where you're making all your money, we'll make that free, close to free.
Jason Calacanis [01:55:49]:
We get all those users, then we'll figure out another way to make money from it, which was for Google advertising, right? 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'll be death by 1,000 competitors. There'll be a verticalized chip for small language models. There'll be people making desktop computers and desktop chips, memory. For inference, you have Groq, and what's the other public company that does inference chips?
Leo Laporte [01:56:31]:
Oh yes, Serpas.
Jason Calacanis [01:56:33]:
Yeah, actually I've interviewed them. Cerebras. I've interviewed them twice. They're unbelievable.
Leo Laporte [01:56:38]:
You can, you can buy AI from Cerebras directly. They only have a few models, but they're super fast.
Jason Calacanis [01:56:45]:
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. These are all going to be—
Leo Laporte [01:57:02]:
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—
Gina Smith [01:57:16]:
The 8287?
Leo Laporte [01:57:18]:
Yeah, it would, it would handle big chunks. It would make the same operation against big chunks of memory. And then NVIDIA— actually, it was before NVIDIA, it 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 video game. So they made those. Yeah, 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.
Jason Calacanis [01:57:49]:
No.
Leo Laporte [01:57:50]:
And I imagine there's some opportunity there for companies like Microsoft, Cerebras, Broadcom.
Jason Calacanis [01:57:56]:
I mean, Apple— I'm sorry, Google is making obviously TPUs. They were the first in the business. AMD has many different operations. Meta, AWS, NVIDIA. TPUs are also coming online.
Gina Smith [01:58:10]:
Taiwan Semi, though. The TPUs are all TSMC.
Jason Calacanis [01:58:14]:
Well, everybody makes them.
Leo Laporte [01:58:14]:
Even Google's are made by TSMC?
Gina Smith [01:58:17]:
Google's are. Tesla's 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.
Jason Calacanis [01:58:28]:
It may be Qualcomm.
Gina Smith [01:58:29]:
Maybe. Everybody else uses TSMC but not Tesla.
Jason Calacanis [01:58:33]:
This is all going to be— again, it's kind of like the memory situation. When something works in technology, everybody chases it. And so you 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, 5 to 10 years ago. And you could buy a used iPhone from, you know, 2015 to 2020 for $100. That is an extraordinary value.
Jason Calacanis [01:59:11]:
And so it's just all going to get cheaper, better, and faster. Cheaper, better, smaller.
Gina Smith [01:59:15]:
And this is what Metcalfe predicted back in the '70s with the network effect. Which says what? If the number of users increases, the benefit— the network increases quadratically.
Jason Calacanis [01:59:27]:
Yeah, every time you add a node to the network, the value is whatever. I don't know. Squared.
Gina Smith [01:59:32]:
The value is squared. Yeah, quadratically more than exponentially.
Jason Calacanis [01:59:38]:
Yeah, everybody, we are living in the best of times when it comes to capitalism and competition. We just have 3 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.
Gina Smith [02:00:16]:
Education is especially critical. I saw the 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 does it.
Leo Laporte [02:00:36]:
It could do that. I actually have— 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. And it told me. And I said, okay, and you're going to work with me on those books? And it 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.
Gina Smith [02:00:59]:
Yes, but ChatGPT is not doing it with ChatGPT for Kids.
Leo Laporte [02:01:04]:
Use it to teach kids just to sit back and—
Jason Calacanis [02:01:06]:
Yeah, there's a, um, in my research I stumbled upon this, uh, Bloom's 2 Sigma problem, and it turns out one-on-one tutoring will make any student like 2, uh, sigmas over better.
Leo Laporte [02:01:21]:
But does it have to be by a human?
Jason Calacanis [02:01:23]:
Yes, it currently— that's where the 2 Sigma came from. And so what they realized was, you know, rich people are just gonna 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.
Leo Laporte [02:01:50]:
I had— oh, Brilliant. Yeah, I used to use Brilliant. It was an iPhone app for your brain.
Jason Calacanis [02:01:55]:
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.
Leo Laporte [02:02:02]:
Yeah.
Jason Calacanis [02:02:02]:
And for $20, $30 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 3 months of tutoring because it's a rigged test. It's a finite test. And
Gina Smith [02:02:27]:
yeah, the tutoring is what makes a kid's 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.
Leo Laporte [02:02:40]:
I still think there's an ineffable part of that that's the human-to-human interaction that a machine can never do.
Jason Calacanis [02:02:46]:
Are you sure it will never be able to do it?
Leo Laporte [02:02:48]:
I feel that way. Are you sure? Yeah, because the machine isn't a human, and that there is, there is a transaction between 2 people I agree that
Jason Calacanis [02:02:58]:
it might not be the peak, but it will
Leo Laporte [02:03:01]:
be 60, 70,
Jason Calacanis [02:03:02]:
80%. So between— I'd agree, a poor person can't afford it and a rich person can. And, right, you know, listen, it gets you half the way. It's obvious, like, all other things being equal, you are halfway between poor 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. Um, 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.
Leo Laporte [02:03:30]:
Yeah, absolutely.
Gina Smith [02:03:31]:
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? Because otherwise you forget 80% of all new material, I think, in 45 days. I'd have to look at the research.
Leo Laporte [02:04:05]:
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.
Jason Calacanis [02:04:15]:
Yes, you have to break through.
Leo Laporte [02:04:16]:
People don't want to go through that stage. To get to accomplishment. This is true of learning the piano. It's true of learning a language. It's true of learning anything.
Gina Smith [02:04:26]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [02:04:26]:
Is at first it sucks. Yes.
Jason Calacanis [02:04:30]:
I have a solution for this. What'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—
Leo Laporte [02:04:41]:
Uncomfortable along with you.
Jason Calacanis [02:04:42]:
Yes. Pickleball is a great example. So I took my 16-year-old 2 years ago, And the twins to go learn pickleball. Pickleball is hard to learn.
Leo Laporte [02:04:51]:
Yeah, I still think it sucks, so I must be at the beginner stage. I've
Gina Smith [02:04:54]:
never played pickleball, but why is it hard?
Jason Calacanis [02:04:56]:
If you get to 20 hours, you'll be— you'll enjoy it. But the first 5 hours, not enjoyable. The next 10 are okay.
Leo Laporte [02:05:03]:
It's true of any skill.
Gina Smith [02:05:04]:
It's true.
Jason Calacanis [02:05:05]:
It's not all skills. Not all skills. Some you can pick up quickly, but chess, skiing, uh, you know, golf—
Leo Laporte [02:05:12]:
It's a lot of pain. Rock climbing.
Jason Calacanis [02:05:14]:
Skiing is the— Billiards. The canonical example. Yeah. Billiards. So, all you have to do is go—
Leo Laporte [02:05:20]:
Skiing is not fun for the first 100 hours.
Jason Calacanis [02:05:22]:
I would say somewhere around the afternoon of day 3, you will put together an afternoon where you don't fall and you have some flow moments, and then you'll be addicted. So, time to the flow moment is what I look at with the kids.
Leo Laporte [02:05:35]:
That's a good one. Time to the flow moment.
Jason Calacanis [02:05:36]:
And, I try to break through and I do it with them. And so, I'm going to do rock climbing next. And, I'm terrified of heights. So, It's gonna 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.
Leo Laporte [02:05:50]:
I love ICON. I'm looking at this ICON. So these are, I've seen these in videos. These are cement printers, right? Concrete printers.
Jason Calacanis [02:05:58]:
Yes, 3D cement printers. If you scroll down, you'll see the technology working. So I had a company called Blockable.
Leo Laporte [02:06:04]:
So you can do 3D printed homes. That is wild.
Jason Calacanis [02:06:06]:
Yeah, this is my second swing at bat. 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 modular 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 frame.
Leo Laporte [02:06:27]:
Oh, so there's a frame? There is a frame?
Jason Calacanis [02:06:29]:
No, no, no frame. They built it. Uh, the technology is a giant 3D printer here. I'll give it to you. It's on the technology page if you go to the top. Yeah, it's on the top.
Gina Smith [02:06:38]:
What would a house like that cost if I wanted to It's going to be half the price of
Jason Calacanis [02:06:43]:
current houses. Look at this. It'll reduce it by half. Yeah. So,
Leo Laporte [02:06:47]:
so it is hollow.
Jason Calacanis [02:06:49]:
Yes.
Leo Laporte [02:06:50]:
So what it does is put insulation or something in there.
Gina Smith [02:06:53]:
Wiring.
Leo Laporte [02:06:54]:
Wiring. Yeah.
Jason Calacanis [02:06:55]:
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, like your 3D printer on your desk making little tchotchkes.
Leo Laporte [02:07:10]:
Right.
Jason Calacanis [02:07:10]:
You know, ornaments. Remember we had the 3D printing craze, uh, you know, 15 years ago? It was awesome. You could build like little fabricated parts. But the technology here just prints, uh, a layer of cement, uh, over and over and over again. It makes that ribbed wall, uh, and eventually—
Leo Laporte [02:07:28]:
Show this, Benito, because it's—
Gina Smith [02:07:29]:
So you still have the extruder, that part of a 3D printer, but you're extruding concrete.
Jason Calacanis [02:07:35]:
Yeah. And what you're doing here is you'll be able to— they 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, um,
Leo Laporte [02:07:50]:
there is a limit to the way your house can look. Obviously it's going to have to be kind of—
Jason Calacanis [02:07:55]:
you can snap anything onto the outside, Leo.
Gina Smith [02:07:57]:
If you want, you could do a brick cover, a brick cover, couldn't you? Or
Jason Calacanis [02:08:00]:
you could do brick, you could look like, uh, shingles in Cape Cod. Okay, whatever you want.
Leo Laporte [02:08:06]:
Yeah, this is— yeah,
Jason Calacanis [02:08:07]:
but we could
Leo Laporte [02:08:08]:
be solving— is it expensive?
Jason Calacanis [02:08:11]:
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.
Leo Laporte [02:08:18]:
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.
Jason Calacanis [02:08:24]:
What's hard is the 3D printer. There it is,
Leo Laporte [02:08:28]:
there it is, there's the tip squirting it out there. the little nozzle.
Gina Smith [02:08:30]:
Not the extruder,
Jason Calacanis [02:08:32]:
just the tip. That's wild. Yeah.
Leo Laporte [02:08:34]:
And is it— it's, it's probably more solid than a frame, wood frame or brick, right?
Jason Calacanis [02:08:39]:
Fireproof. It will last 100 years. Yeah. You know, pick anything you want. Any vector, it's better.
Gina Smith [02:08:46]:
So have you filed a bunch of IP on this? I mean, what would be the barrier to entry for something like this?
Jason Calacanis [02:08:51]:
You know, it turns out the barrier to entry to technology companies is your relentlessness in 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, so 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.
Jason Calacanis [02:09:19]:
So if you're in the military—
Leo Laporte [02:09:20]:
More than a single story, right? It's not limited to—
Jason Calacanis [02:09:22]:
I mean, if you want to, yeah, you can go go to the second, third story. I think what's going to
Leo Laporte [02:09:25]:
happen is 27 feet is the limit.
Jason Calacanis [02:09:28]:
Yeah, today. Today,
Gina Smith [02:09:29]:
that's, you know, stories, right?
Jason Calacanis [02:09:31]:
Yeah, 2 and an attic, I guess, or just 2 really tall stories. But they've got a military contract now that's public, so you want to build wires.
Leo Laporte [02:09:38]:
Does it go through the concrete?
Jason Calacanis [02:09:40]:
How does what work?
Leo Laporte [02:09:41]:
Wi-Fi.
Jason Calacanis [02:09:42]:
Um, you will just put it on the inside, I guess.
Leo Laporte [02:09:46]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Which actually might not be a bad thing. You're kind of RF insulated. Yeah,
Jason Calacanis [02:09:53]:
it is the obvious solution. The problem is—
Leo Laporte [02:09:55]:
How's it do in earthquakes?
Jason Calacanis [02:09:57]:
Oh, incredible. Yeah, this 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, well, rigid Tokyo, New York, San Francisco is not
Leo Laporte [02:10:11]:
good because you
Jason Calacanis [02:10:12]:
want it. And height is your enemy.
Leo Laporte [02:10:14]:
And height, yeah,
Jason Calacanis [02:10:15]:
height. And then also like Are you in that, like that leaning tower in San Francisco? Millennium Tower?
Gina Smith [02:10:20]:
Yeah. Yeah.
Jason Calacanis [02:10:21]:
They built it on—
Leo Laporte [02:10:22]:
it's—
Jason Calacanis [02:10:22]:
yeah, but 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, who, what corrupt person signed off on that?
Leo Laporte [02:10:31]:
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.
Gina Smith [02:10:42]:
Interesting.
Leo Laporte [02:10:44]:
How do you get the little All In logo on your name on Twitter? How does that—
Jason Calacanis [02:10:48]:
Oh, I think you just pay like $10 a month per person. Oh, you pay for it? Yeah, you apply for a business account and then—
Leo Laporte [02:10:54]:
I want a little Twitter logo after my name.
Gina Smith [02:10:58]:
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, took my blue check mark away.
Leo Laporte [02:11:08]:
And they gave it back.
Gina Smith [02:11:10]:
Well, you have to pay for it to go. You got yours back?
Jason Calacanis [02:11:13]:
Some people got it back for free.
Leo Laporte [02:11:14]:
Yeah. Oh, because I had half a million followers. I think Elon thought maybe he might—
Gina Smith [02:11:18]:
I had like 200,000 or 300,000, but they took that blue check mark away. And
Jason Calacanis [02:11:21]:
if you don't like it, I get brigaded by like all the dark forces.
Leo Laporte [02:11:27]:
You're gonna get brigaded today because you were on this show, I'm sure.
Jason Calacanis [02:11:31]:
Yeah. And then certain people won't be on the show with me.
Leo Laporte [02:11:34]:
There are—
Gina Smith [02:11:34]:
so do you guys not do Bluesky?
Jason Calacanis [02:11:36]:
It's like, come on, don't be a coward, Corey. Come on the show and just debate me.
Gina Smith [02:11:40]:
But you don't do Bluesky or Threads or any of those?
Jason Calacanis [02:11:43]:
I mean, I have dabbled in all of them. Bluesky is a bunch of panicking, like, folks. I, I don't want to be on Bluesky. I don't want to be on Truth Social. I 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. We
Leo Laporte [02:12:00]:
have amassed it on twit.social, and I, I love it, but it's just— that's the network effect. Uh, that's Bob Metcalfe's network effect. Back to Metcalfe. It just can't—
Jason Calacanis [02:12:11]:
You can't displace Twitter.
Leo Laporte [02:12:12]:
Sorry. It started, and, and X—
Jason Calacanis [02:12:13]:
It's too late.
Leo Laporte [02:12:14]:
I left X the minute Elon bought it, uh, but I'm back because that's where the information is.
Jason Calacanis [02:12:19]:
Literally every— and every new CEO now is engaging. So Jensen came on, He started tweeting. Apple's there. Apple. John Turnus?
Gina Smith [02:12:29]:
Turnus.
Leo Laporte [02:12:30]:
Turnus.
Jason Calacanis [02:12:31]:
Yeah. He's now got an account. He's engaging. He's on it, man. Satya's engaging.
Leo Laporte [02:12:36]:
Can you talk to me about—
Jason Calacanis [02:12:36]:
And Zuckerberg's engaging.
Leo Laporte [02:12:38]:
I'll tell you something I don't like about X. It makes me mad. Go ahead. Is it's aggressively algorithmic and it's impossible to do chronological. So when I load up—
Jason Calacanis [02:12:47]:
Second tab over is your feed of your followers. So just go to that.
Leo Laporte [02:12:50]:
No, no, no. But I want to look at the AI feed. I know. Look, this is 15 hours old.
Jason Calacanis [02:12:54]:
Go to following.
Leo Laporte [02:12:55]:
This is 7 hours old. I can go to following and that's more— that's your opinion.
Jason Calacanis [02:12:59]:
Or make lists. So you have lists. Look, you have—
Leo Laporte [02:13:01]:
I have lists. I should make lists.
Jason Calacanis [02:13:02]:
You gotta go to lists. And then here we are. Have your Grok bot make—
Leo Laporte [02:13:05]:
there's the fat Leo and Jason hugging.
Jason Calacanis [02:13:07]:
Look at us giving— hugging it out. Chubbies.
Leo Laporte [02:13:09]:
Oh, Doc.
Jason Calacanis [02:13:10]:
I love— what happened to Doc?
Leo Laporte [02:13:12]:
He was on a couple weeks ago. You want to go on with him again? He's a character.
Jason Calacanis [02:13:16]:
No, I want to— who? Jeff Jarvis, uh, and, uh, who hates me? Jeff Jarvis.
Leo Laporte [02:13:21]:
We didn't say this on the show. This was during the commercial. Jeff Was your professor at CUNY when you were 18?
Jason Calacanis [02:13:27]:
I made it up. I made it up.
Leo Laporte [02:13:28]:
Oh, you lying son of a—
Jason Calacanis [02:13:32]:
now your whole credibility is shot.
Leo Laporte [02:13:34]:
We'll be back with more with Gina Smith, Dr. Gina Smith,
Jason Calacanis [02:13:37]:
doctor
Leo Laporte [02:13:38]:
from IDC, and the lying son of a gun Jason Calacanis.
Jason Calacanis [02:13:43]:
Trolling. It's a mini troll.
Leo Laporte [02:13:46]:
You, you— I totally believed it.
Gina Smith [02:13:49]:
I do too.
Jason Calacanis [02:13:49]:
He's like— Jeff is like my grandpa, and he's like your older brother, Leo. He's like 80, you're like 60, I'm like 50.
Leo Laporte [02:13:56]:
He's basically my age.
Jason Calacanis [02:13:57]:
No, he's much older than you. He's at least 10 years older than you. He's old. He's been around a long time. He's very old.
Leo Laporte [02:14:04]:
This is my 70th birthday present for myself, and he's just a couple of years older than
Jason Calacanis [02:14:10]:
me. I'm joking. I'm joking. But you know what? 70? We should have a party for you.
Gina Smith [02:14:13]:
Did you turn 70, Leo? I didn't know that.
Jason Calacanis [02:14:15]:
You're not 70.
Gina Smith [02:14:16]:
I remember your 40th birthday.
Jason Calacanis [02:14:18]:
Wait, are you 70? Really, Leo? You're 70?
Leo Laporte [02:14:20]:
I will be.
Jason Calacanis [02:14:22]:
When? Next year?
Leo Laporte [02:14:23]:
Uh, November 29th.
Jason Calacanis [02:14:25]:
Oh, I'm November 28th. We're like one day apart. We're both Sagittarius.
Leo Laporte [02:14:28]:
Sags.
Jason Calacanis [02:14:29]:
Wait, that explains so much.
Leo Laporte [02:14:31]:
What was my 40th birthday like? I don't remember.
Gina Smith [02:14:34]:
I don't know. I— we were on a trip or something and we went out to dinner.
Jason Calacanis [02:14:38]:
It was the '80s. It was tons of cocaine. I don't remember anything. It was the '90s.
Leo Laporte [02:14:44]:
Yeah,
Gina Smith [02:14:44]:
it was the '90s, early '90s, wasn't it?
Leo Laporte [02:14:47]:
It was the '90s, baby. All right, well, let's go.
Jason Calacanis [02:14:49]:
The '90s were great. To be 40 years old in the '90s was awesome.
Gina Smith [02:14:52]:
Oh, we had some fun then.
Leo Laporte [02:14:54]:
Too much fun. I sound like I'm 70 on that ad, but that's because I had just done 60 ads. That was the last one.
Jason Calacanis [02:15:03]:
I mean, this is the— people don't know the price you pay for a successful podcast. Number one, you can never quit. Yeah, you could never quit.
Leo Laporte [02:15:10]:
I should be retired.
Jason Calacanis [02:15:12]:
You can't quit. The audience, you will be Extraordinarily upset.
Leo Laporte [02:15:16]:
I always said, though, I would— as soon as the audience says you're done, I'm done. I'm— they'll never say it.
Jason Calacanis [02:15:21]:
It's a powerful story.
Leo Laporte [02:15:22]:
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.
Jason Calacanis [02:15:30]:
That's hilarious.
Leo Laporte [02:15:31]:
November 2022. That's the— that's when he gave you that. You made that? Bought it? Yes. There was a company selling it, actually.
Jason Calacanis [02:15:38]:
Oh, that's great.
Leo Laporte [02:15:39]:
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.
Jason Calacanis [02:15:44]:
Anyway, it's— they
Gina Smith [02:15:45]:
didn't give me my blue check back.
Jason Calacanis [02:15:47]:
Twitter left.
Leo Laporte [02:15:47]:
That's why. If you—
Jason Calacanis [02:15:48]:
Twitter's better. Twitter's better than everything. Everybody who was a conscientious objector is back. Uh, the guys from—
Leo Laporte [02:15:55]:
I hate to admit it, but it's true.
Jason Calacanis [02:15:57]:
Because every— it's all the important discussions. The problem is there's a brigading problem. There's a bot problem. Do what I did. Tell everybody $1 a month to charity to be in your replies.
Leo Laporte [02:16:08]:
do that. Yeah.
Jason Calacanis [02:16:09]:
Or just take the money for yourself, Leo, and then you can— Okay. No, you deserve it.
Leo Laporte [02:16:13]:
But I, 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.
Jason Calacanis [02:16:19]:
So just what you tell your audience, one post a week.
Leo Laporte [02:16:22]:
Okay, I could do that.
Jason Calacanis [02:16:22]:
And it's, uh, 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.
Leo Laporte [02:16:39]:
I don't— I, huh, I don't know if I'm suppressed. I might be suppressed.
Jason Calacanis [02:16:45]:
You're not. They got rid of that. They got rid of the whole suppression algorithm.
Leo Laporte [02:16:48]:
No, they don't do that anymore. I have 444,800 followers, but I, you know, so this last tweet of mine, uh, 8,500 views. None of these, none of these get much traction.
Jason Calacanis [02:17:05]:
So I think you might not be—
Leo Laporte [02:17:08]:
I'm not— I'll tell you why people want to hear.
Jason Calacanis [02:17:10]:
You'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 3. If people retweet, you get So now the algorithm's public. So just ask your Grok bot, 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, your team will do it.
Jason Calacanis [02:17:43]:
What are the— and your bot can do it. What are the 20 most interesting movies and books talked about on the Twit Network? People will bookmark it, and it'll become an incredibly big post. Or
Leo Laporte [02:17:51]:
those 444,000 tweets 4,000 followers are 3/4 bots?
Jason Calacanis [02:17:56]:
If you go to your—
Gina Smith [02:17:58]:
you can find out
Jason Calacanis [02:17:59]:
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—
Leo Laporte [02:18:06]:
1.8 million followers?
Gina Smith [02:18:08]:
Jeez.
Jason Calacanis [02:18:09]:
All In drove a lot. So, and then sometimes Elon retweets, so that drove a lot.
Leo Laporte [02:18:14]:
Yeah, all you gotta do is get Elon to tweet you.
Jason Calacanis [02:18:16]:
Of my 1.7 million, guess how many are active?
Gina Smith [02:18:19]:
10%? In the
Jason Calacanis [02:18:19]:
last 24 hours. 10%? Nope, much higher.
Gina Smith [02:18:24]:
Really?
Jason Calacanis [02:18:25]:
Yeah. So in the last 24 hours, 681,000 of mine are active. So I have a pretty active account. So high? Yeah.
Gina Smith [02:18:32]:
Wow.
Jason Calacanis [02:18:33]:
Yeah, I can—
Gina Smith [02:18:34]:
That's impressive.
Leo Laporte [02:18:35]:
Where do you find that? In the Creator Studio?
Jason Calacanis [02:18:37]:
In the Creator Studio, yeah.
Leo Laporte [02:18:38]:
I see subscriptions, live studio, oh, analytics. There it is.
Jason Calacanis [02:18:44]:
Uh, share my screen. So here, can you see my screen? Did I just take—
Leo Laporte [02:18:47]:
I don't want to see your screen.
Jason Calacanis [02:18:48]:
Oh, stop.
Leo Laporte [02:18:49]:
No, it's okay. I'm just jealous.
Jason Calacanis [02:18:52]:
Anyway,
Leo Laporte [02:18:53]:
okay, show his screen real quick and then show mine and you'll see why I'm jealous.
Jason Calacanis [02:18:57]:
Anyway, it's just a function of like, I do 20 tweets a day or something. So here, hold on, my screen.
Leo Laporte [02:19:03]:
There you go.
Leo Laporte [02:19:04]:
Okay, 169 million on the bottom right. Yeah, up 20%. I got 20,000, but it is up 43%.
Jason Calacanis [02:19:13]:
All you have to do is— the other thing to do is have your bot say, um, have your—
Leo Laporte [02:19:19]:
Here's the issue: 11,000 verified followers out of 440,000, 69,000 active followers.
Jason Calacanis [02:19:26]:
Yes. So it's a
Leo Laporte [02:19:27]:
fraction
Jason Calacanis [02:19:28]:
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, 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—
Leo Laporte [02:19:42]:
I'm so bad at promotion. I hate that. I don't want to.
Gina Smith [02:19:45]:
Me too. I've always hated it. It's because you came out of journalism and it feels like you're not allowed to promote it.
Jason Calacanis [02:19:50]:
People like— they want— there's a whole group of people who just want the clips from the show. Just clip the— Well, we do that.
Leo Laporte [02:19:55]:
We do the clips. I just don't put them on my account. Put them on your personal account. Benito,
Jason Calacanis [02:19:59]:
one a
Leo Laporte [02:19:59]:
day. Send me the clips.
Jason Calacanis [02:20:01]:
One a day. Just share. retweet. One a day. No, not retweet. It has to be published to his as an organic tweet. Don't retweet.
Leo Laporte [02:20:12]:
Organic tweet.
Jason Calacanis [02:20:13]:
Organic tweet. You
Gina Smith [02:20:14]:
can hire some kid to do it.
Jason Calacanis [02:20:16]:
But here's the other thing to do. Tell your bot to tell you who are your highest influence people following you already.
Leo Laporte [02:20:21]:
Yeah.
Jason Calacanis [02:20:22]:
And then say, tell me every day their best tweets. Then you click on those tweets and you do become a reply guy.
Leo Laporte [02:20:30]:
I am not I'm never gonna ever be a reply guy.
Jason Calacanis [02:20:34]:
If you reply, guy, if you do my 10-day reply guy, your stats will go way up, Leo.
Leo Laporte [02:20:39]:
10-day reply guy, that's me.
Gina Smith [02:20:40]:
Never gonna be a reply guy, huh? That's—
Jason Calacanis [02:20:44]:
is that like you start replying?
Gina Smith [02:20:46]:
90 Day Fiancé.
Leo Laporte [02:20:48]:
Amazon has over 1 million robot workers. Doesn't that seem like there's a lot of jobs that, uh, they're gonna— maybe it's a job no woman wants.
Jason Calacanis [02:20:58]:
Buy Amazon stock now. They are going to be the most efficient, profitable company in the world.
Leo Laporte [02:21:04]:
It's certainly efficient. No humans. It
Gina Smith [02:21:06]:
makes— so, I mean, a related story is Masayoshi Son, of course, Son-san, SoftBank, saying that he's trying to raise $100 billion. And what he's using the money for is to buy companies to do the same thing that Amazon's doing, totally roboticize and AI-ize All kinds of different buildings.
Leo Laporte [02:21:26]:
Is Son Son's record a little checkered these days?
Gina Smith [02:21:28]:
Oh, totally. You're right. Wasn't he the WeWork guy?
Jason Calacanis [02:21:31]:
Yeah, but you know what? He hit OpenAI. He's also the Yahoo guy. He hit Uber. You only need to hit one. You only need to hit one.
Gina Smith [02:21:38]:
He has a lot of successes, but there are
Jason Calacanis [02:21:40]:
many,
Gina Smith [02:21:40]:
right?
Leo Laporte [02:21:41]:
Hey, you remember MapQuest? Of course. Anybody ever use MapQuest?
Gina Smith [02:21:45]:
Find your flock camera on that thing.
Leo Laporte [02:21:47]:
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?
Gina Smith [02:21:59]:
Yeah,
Jason Calacanis [02:21:59]:
100%. Yes, it was like, that was mind-blowing. But here's the thing about Amazon, uh, 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.
Leo Laporte [02:22:15]:
Pulling it up, Brian. now.
Jason Calacanis [02:22:16]:
Yeah. And Jassy then wrote a deal— 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. And he— just listen. And they are going to replace every factory worker and every delivery driver with automated technologies— robots, Zoox, etc. It's— they're all getting replaced.
Jason Calacanis [02:22:44]:
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?
Gina Smith [02:22:54]:
How do you pay them a universal basic income is what they're thinking.
Jason Calacanis [02:22:57]:
Well, they said give money to Toys for Tots, so close enough.
Gina Smith [02:23:00]:
Okay, yeah, close enough. Or they could retrain the people for other
Jason Calacanis [02:23:05]:
jobs.
Leo Laporte [02:23:06]:
That's their plan? Give more money to Toys for Tots?
Jason Calacanis [02:23:08]:
marketing people were 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.
Leo Laporte [02:23:15]:
God, that's pathetic.
Jason Calacanis [02:23:17]:
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.
Gina Smith [02:23:27]:
Remember CSR? It's corporate social responsibility is back. We talked about that.
Jason Calacanis [02:23:33]:
I mean, it's going to be This, 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.
Gina Smith [02:23:49]:
All right. So they should take the factory workers and train them all to be electricians. But they're going to all be driving Testarossas all over the place.
Leo Laporte [02:23:57]:
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. This is a— this is terrible.
Gina Smith [02:24:07]:
Without Medicaid, with no healthcare, without Obamacare.
Jason Calacanis [02:24:13]:
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.
Leo Laporte [02:24:25]:
Good, because we need more electricians, frankly, more plumbers. electricians. I can't get a handyman to save my life.
Jason Calacanis [02:24:31]:
This is where the jobs are going to bifurcate. Either like superhuman activities, which is building stuff and supervising the robots building stuff. 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, you mentioned earlier in the show, Leo, there's one group of developers who are like, I want to 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 come to the standup, 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.
Leo Laporte [02:25:19]:
I love programming. It's one of 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 a 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 of thinking about it, planning it, organizing it, and reining them in.
Leo Laporte [02:25:46]:
Gina, this is your field though. Is it?
Gina Smith [02:25:48]:
It's gonna— training is gonna explode. It's such a great investment to make because all the— there's going to have to be wholesale training of everybody, the blue-collar workers, the white-collar workers training for these new positions.
Leo Laporte [02:26:02]:
You must have studied this workforce academy that Meta is doing. Is this good? Is this real, or is it— is it—
Gina Smith [02:26:07]:
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 training. Look at a company called called Workera. 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.
Gina Smith [02:26:30]:
And so what you do is you verify skills, you know, with— it's AI-assisted software that can actually test someone. It rolls up a simulation. And so you can— You can secure a Kubernetes instance. Can you? Do it. You've got 4 minutes.
Leo Laporte [02:26:46]:
There are people who just will never be able to do that, right? I mean—
Gina Smith [02:26:51]:
Do what?
Leo Laporte [02:26:52]:
I mean, any—
Gina Smith [02:26:52]:
secure a Kubernetes instance?
Leo Laporte [02:26:54]:
Maybe they can become electricians, I guess. I don't know.
Gina Smith [02:26:57]:
But training for everything, not just high technical skills, but training in human judgment is becoming a thing.
Jason Calacanis [02:27:04]:
It's just back to motivation again, Leo. 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. That is always the hard thing. And 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 or two 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, close to free. It's true.
Gina Smith [02:27:43]:
There's no excuse now for not learning. 100%, that's true. And when I was living in Hong Kong—
Jason Calacanis [02:27:48]:
That's the message we need to give people.
Gina Smith [02:27:49]:
You meet people all the time, they say, oh, I've lived here for 12 years, I 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 gonna learn.
Jason Calacanis [02:28:09]:
Everybody wants a handout. Everybody wants UBI. That's true. Well, not everybody. There's a group of people who are just like, give me, I want a free graduate degree. I wanna go study media studies or whatever. It's like, look at the world. And there's this Japanese concept of, It'll come to me in a second.
Jason Calacanis [02:28:28]:
Anyway, you can just make 3 or 4 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, uh, uh, ikigai, the Japanese secret. Um, and if you look at ikigai on, um, Google,
Leo Laporte [02:28:52]:
it means reason, a reason for being.
Gina Smith [02:28:54]:
Yeah, I thought ikigai is a life purpose. What is your life?
Leo Laporte [02:28:57]:
That's another way to put it.
Jason Calacanis [02:28:59]:
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.
Leo Laporte [02:29:10]:
That's what it is. Show this beneath.
Jason Calacanis [02:29:11]:
So when you look at yourself—
Leo Laporte [02:29:12]:
Jason showed his screen, I lost yours. So I need— I need to—
Jason Calacanis [02:29:15]:
oh, sorry about that. I blocked you.
Leo Laporte [02:29:16]:
You stole my screen, man. You stole—
Jason Calacanis [02:29:19]:
screen blocked you. Um, but if you look at this, this explains everything.
Leo Laporte [02:29:23]:
Yeah.
Jason Calacanis [02:29:23]:
And, you know, you look at your son, right? He loved to cook. The world loved to pay for a nice beef sandwich with a 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.
Leo Laporte [02:29:41]:
A good French dip. There's nothing like it. It's freaking delicious.
Jason Calacanis [02:29:45]:
And what are you good at? He's good at making the French dip. He knows how to make the beef. He's good
Leo Laporte [02:29:49]:
at making
Gina Smith [02:29:50]:
Find your magical skill.
Jason Calacanis [02:29:51]:
So the world needs a French dip. They're willing to pay for a French dip.
Leo Laporte [02:29:56]:
Do you think everyone can find a place in—
Jason Calacanis [02:29:58]:
Of 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, da da da, and I want to virtue signal, because nobody's willing to pay for it. Right. Okay? That's a hobby.
Jason Calacanis [02:30:29]:
That's a passion too, but it's not paying your rent.
Leo Laporte [02:30:32]:
Right.
Gina Smith [02:30:32]:
Yeah, I'm with you, Jason. I'll tell you, I just recently did research. I ran a survey of 1,400 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— Right. But we don't teach that in schools, unfortunately. What is— well, you get that from experience and practice, Leo. But we asked the second question is, what skill are you most missing? And overwhelmingly, everyone said learning agility.
Gina Smith [02:31:03]:
Employees who have the ability to say, yeah, I can learn that. I can change the way I do things. Because at the rate of technology— technological acceleration, everybody working at a company needs to be fast-moving and fast-learning.
Leo Laporte [02:31:18]:
Kevin Reynolds always used to say that, I don't hire the smartest guy, I hire the guy who can learn.
Gina Smith [02:31:23]:
That's right.
Jason Calacanis [02:31:24]:
A passion for learning is just so important.
Leo Laporte [02:31:27]:
Yeah.
Jason Calacanis [02:31:27]:
So important.
Gina Smith [02:31:28]:
Totally.
Leo Laporte [02:31:29]:
Well, on that note, uh, I thank you both. What a great show.
Gina Smith [02:31:34]:
So much fun.
Leo Laporte [02:31:35]:
Where are you based? I'm in Seattle,
Gina Smith [02:31:38]:
Jason. I'm right here. I'll connect with you on LinkedIn if we're not already connected.
Jason Calacanis [02:31:43]:
Jason@calicanis.com is my email. First name, last name. But if you ever make your way through Texas, let's get some brisket or beef ribs.
Leo Laporte [02:31:52]:
Where's the best barbecue? Is it Franklin's?
Jason Calacanis [02:31:54]:
Okay, so what you always have— this, this is what the non-residents say. What's the best barbecue? But the right question is, what's the best specific barbecue dish? So what's the best brisket?
Leo Laporte [02:32:06]:
Brisket, you gotta get brisket.
Jason Calacanis [02:32:07]:
That would be Franklin's, and that would be Salt Lick. If you said best beef ribs, then you're going Terry Black's. If you said best bison rib, then you're saying Salt Lick. So you, you have to— and then if you want to go for, uh, smoked, um, pork belly, that's a different thing. Pork ribs is different than beef ribs. It's all different. Yeah, so you're picking a date you want to come back.
Leo Laporte [02:32:29]:
I made Frank's brisket. I smoke— I get up at 3 in the morning. You got the Traeger? I got the Traeger.
Jason Calacanis [02:32:35]:
Oh, so great.
Leo Laporte [02:32:37]:
I smoked that, and man, that is the best.
Jason Calacanis [02:32:38]:
I haven't smoked since I got here because it's so easy to buy it.
Leo Laporte [02:32:42]:
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 AM to do this.
Gina Smith [02:32:48]:
That's hardcore.
Leo Laporte [02:32:50]:
But you also— my secret is Snake River Wagyu brisket.
Jason Calacanis [02:32:54]:
Yes, Snake River Farm, so good.
Leo Laporte [02:32:57]:
You know, once I went to Costco, got the brisket there, not as good. No. You gotta— if you're gonna smoke in those meats, you gotta get the good meats.
Jason Calacanis [02:33:04]:
Smokin' meats.
Gina Smith [02:33:06]:
All about the ingredients, right?
Jason Calacanis [02:33:08]:
No, it's a reference to, um,
Leo Laporte [02:33:10]:
Mark
Jason Calacanis [02:33:11]:
Zuckerberg just had the 20th anniversary of smoking.
Leo Laporte [02:33:14]:
Remember that?
Jason Calacanis [02:33:15]:
Yeah, now I do.
Jason Calacanis [02:33:16]:
Smokin' meats.
Leo Laporte [02:33:18]:
That was, uh, that was awesome.
Jason Calacanis [02:33:19]:
So I can interpret that however you want.
Leo Laporte [02:33:21]:
I went to my Grok bot 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 2, so I'll be all right.
Jason Calacanis [02:33:39]:
Oh, man. I hit a Starlink flight the other day on United. Oh, 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.
Leo Laporte [02:34:10]:
Elon getting in a little tussle with Delta over all of this.
Jason Calacanis [02:34:13]:
The Delta guy was like, he's an anti- anti-Trump, anti-Elon.
Gina Smith [02:34:18]:
Yeah, he said he wouldn't— he didn't want to. He's
Leo Laporte [02:34:21]:
like, it's bad for aerodynamics, I don't want to have it on, it's bad for aerodynamics.
Jason Calacanis [02:34:25]:
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, like, we want broadband, we don't care about anybody's political statement.
Gina Smith [02:34:43]:
So what is this system on Delta that they're using?
Jason Calacanis [02:34:46]:
They're waiting like 3 or 4 years for the LEO satellites that Leo reports working on with Jeff Bezos.
Leo Laporte [02:34:53]:
I will get those satellites up as fast as I can.
Jason Calacanis [02:34:56]:
When you get back from vacation.
Leo Laporte [02:34:59]:
Vacation. I just checked. EVA has the Panasonic satellite Wi-Fi and they say it's terrible.
Jason Calacanis [02:35:06]:
It's
Gina Smith [02:35:07]:
just nice to bring a book on a
Leo Laporte [02:35:09]:
I'm gonna read the Ramayana because I need to get up on all of the mythology of the area I'm going to. I am off to—
Gina Smith [02:35:20]:
Patanjali's Yoga Sutras. It's good airplane reading.
Leo Laporte [02:35:25]:
Say it again? Patanjali's Yoga Sutras?
Gina Smith [02:35:26]:
Patanjali's Yoga Sutras. It's an ancient Indian text. It's the basis of all yoga, but it's really interesting.
Leo Laporte [02:35:32]:
I didn't know. I'm kind of a Tao Te Ching
Gina Smith [02:35:34]:
kind Well, same idea.
Jason Calacanis [02:35:37]:
Explaining reality. The Stephen King biography.
Leo Laporte [02:35:43]:
Is there a biography of Stephen King?
Jason Calacanis [02:35:44]:
Well, On Writing is kind of—
Gina Smith [02:35:46]:
Yeah, I've read On Writing. Fantastic.
Jason Calacanis [02:35:48]:
Steve Martin biography, also great.
Leo Laporte [02:35:51]:
I've read that. I have read that.
Jason Calacanis [02:35:52]:
Hey, you guys can read I, Woz.
Leo Laporte [02:35:54]:
Born Standing Up. I, Woz. There's this great biography all about Steve Wozniak.
Jason Calacanis [02:35:59]:
Pretty great.
Leo Laporte [02:36:00]:
You know what? Steve looks like he's doing great. I just— I'll give you a sleeper.
Jason Calacanis [02:36:03]:
I'll give you a sleeper. sleeper. Um, Akira Kurosawa's Something Like an Autobiography, the famous—
Leo Laporte [02:36:08]:
I love Kurosawa.
Gina Smith [02:36:09]:
I do too.
Jason Calacanis [02:36:10]:
His autobiography, nobody knows about it. Something Like an Autobiography, so good.
Leo Laporte [02:36:14]:
Something so good.
Jason Calacanis [02:36:16]:
Mike Ovitz, Who Is Mike Ovitz? Incredible.
Leo Laporte [02:36:18]:
It's called Who Is Mike Ovitz?
Jason Calacanis [02:36:21]:
Yeah, it's pretty great.
Leo Laporte [02:36:22]:
Who is Jason Calacanis? 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
Jason Calacanis [02:36:31]:
Every Thursday we tape, it comes out every Friday.
Leo Laporte [02:36:34]:
Perfect. Yeah, and I think you could probably find it pretty quickly.
Gina Smith [02:36:37]:
Maybe that's what you should do, go to the charts and look at number
Jason Calacanis [02:36:39]:
1.
Gina Smith [02:36:40]:
I liked how Jason said, I'm famous now, Leah. That should be the name of the show.
Jason Calacanis [02:36:45]:
Podcast famous is like right below the least famous reality TV star, right? It's literally right below whatever is trending on Bravo.
Leo Laporte [02:36:57]:
Uh, somebody Somebody who was mad at me—
Gina Smith [02:36:59]:
90 Day Fiancé.
Leo Laporte [02:37:00]:
When I was working at TechTV, got real mad at me, and she said, you're nothing but a second-rate celebrity on a, on a Class D cable channel.
Jason Calacanis [02:37:09]:
And Leo's like, I'll take it. That's better than nothing.
Leo Laporte [02:37:12]:
Exactly. I said, nailed it. Perfect. And now I'm a podcaster. Uh, thank you, Jason. Always a pleasure to see you. Really appreciate it. Uh, keep up the good work.
Leo Laporte [02:37:24]:
Gina Smith, Do you have a podcast? Anything you want to plug besides your great work at IDC?
Gina Smith [02:37:30]:
Uh, 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.
Leo Laporte [02:37:38]:
I would love to read that.
Gina Smith [02:37:40]:
Yeah, it 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, I do want to take it back.
Leo Laporte [02:37:50]:
Don't be such a cheapskate.
Jason Calacanis [02:37:52]:
Shoot the lock off your wallet.
Gina Smith [02:37:54]:
Yeah.
Jason Calacanis [02:37:54]:
You and Amazon Web Services.
Gina Smith [02:37:56]:
I'm on LinkedIn and friends.
Jason Calacanis [02:37:58]:
Buy some ads on Twit, come on.
Gina Smith [02:37:59]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [02:38:00]:
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 3 weeks. Thanks for having us. Oh, oh, this is great.
Jason Calacanis [02:38:08]:
Tune into the show, we got great hosts.
Leo Laporte [02:38:09]:
I'm always grateful when people show up to do this show, 'cause I know it's interminable.
Jason Calacanis [02:38:15]:
No, no, I do it twice a year. I do it twice
Leo Laporte [02:38:17]:
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—
Jason Calacanis [02:38:21]:
Twice a year. Perfect. Lock me in.
Leo Laporte [02:38:23]:
Twice a year. You're locked in.
Jason Calacanis [02:38:24]:
Well, actually, and when you're on vacation and you need a moderator, feel free to ask. Oh, I should have asked you, actually. Any— well, no, I mean, moderation is my specialty, so— That's true. I'm here.
Leo Laporte [02:38:34]:
That's true.
Gina Smith [02:38:35]:
I love doing this show because, Leo, we— 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.
Leo Laporte [02:38:50]:
Yes.
Gina Smith [02:38:51]:
Yes, it was for 4 hours or 5 hours every Sunday. No vacations. Crazy. For years we did that together.
Leo Laporte [02:39:00]:
Next week, Micah Sargent will be filling in for me. Devinder Hardiwar the week after that from Engadget. You might know something about them, Jason. And Father Robert Balanson will be hosting.
Jason Calacanis [02:39:09]:
I love Father.
Gina Smith [02:39:11]:
I like him too.
Jason Calacanis [02:39:11]:
He's trying to buy Engadget back.
Leo Laporte [02:39:13]:
They
Jason Calacanis [02:39:13]:
won't
Leo Laporte [02:39:14]:
He's bringing on his buddy David Hewlett, the sci-fi author. So that'll be a lot. That'll be a great show.
Gina Smith [02:39:20]:
That's interesting.
Leo Laporte [02:39:21]:
Yeah. Yeah, 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.
Gina Smith [02:39:34]:
All right.
Leo Laporte [02:39:34]:
Thank you all for being here. I'll see you in a month.
Gina Smith [02:39:37]:
Have a great trip.
Leo Laporte [02:39:39]:
I'm really excited. I hope I survive.
Jason Calacanis [02:39:42]:
I'll be fine.
Gina Smith [02:39:45]:
You will. In Thailand, you gotta learn how to say sawadee krap.
Jason Calacanis [02:39:49]:
Do you need a hotel when you're in Singapore?
Leo Laporte [02:39:51]:
No, no, I've got a boat. Uh, say, say what I say. Sawadee krap.
Gina Smith [02:39:55]:
Well, a man would say sawadee krap.
Leo Laporte [02:39:59]:
Sawadee krap?
Gina Smith [02:40:00]:
A woman would say— yeah, like crap, but it's krap. You'll see, you'll learn how to do it. Greet people Like this.
Leo Laporte [02:40:07]:
It's like salaam.
Gina Smith [02:40:09]:
Yes, but you say krub. Anytime you say a word, you indicate that you're a male and you say krub.
Leo Laporte [02:40:14]:
Krub.
Gina Smith [02:40:15]:
Yeah, you'll see.
Leo Laporte [02:40:17]:
And you do this, you do the little thing.
Gina Smith [02:40:18]:
Yeah, you sawasdee krub 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.
Leo Laporte [02:40:25]:
We do TWiT every Sunday afternoon, 2 to 5 PM Pacific, 5 to 8 Eastern, 2100 UTC. You can watch as we stream it live on X. But also YouTube, Twitch, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Kick. So 6 different platforms. And of course, if you're a generous Club Twit member— thank you, Club Twit members, you're keeping this show afoot, afloat. It's nice, real people smoking their meats.
Gina Smith [02:40:47]:
There he is, smoking meats.
Jason Calacanis [02:40:51]:
You guys should just— here's what you guys should do in the, in the, 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.
Leo Laporte [02:41:04]:
With AI, there's nothing—
Jason Calacanis [02:41:06]:
there's nothing stopping you from having me and Liam smoking meats. I mean, it's not a euphemism. It's— we're literally smoking meats.
Gina Smith [02:41:13]:
It's not a euphemism.
Jason Calacanis [02:41:14]:
It is not a euphemism.
Gina Smith [02:41:16]:
Not a euphemism.
Jason Calacanis [02:41:17]:
It's not code for anything. We're very— No, it's code. It's code.
Leo Laporte [02:41:20]:
Admit it. Admit it.
Jason Calacanis [02:41:22]:
Very out loud.
Leo Laporte [02:41:22]:
That was the Gregory— wonderful Gregory Brothers, uh, who do those, uh, Songify, uh, this. It was one of their great songs.
Gina Smith [02:41:29]:
Oh, I remember Songify. Is that still around?
Leo Laporte [02:41:32]:
Uh, I don't know. Is it? I don't know.
Leo Laporte [02:41:35]:
Uh,
Leo Laporte [02:41:36]:
we do this show, uh,
Leo Laporte [02:41:38]:
on
Leo Laporte [02:41:38]:
Sundays,
Leo Laporte [02:41:38]:
but you can download it anytime you want to from twit.tv.
Leo Laporte [02:41:44]:
It's a YouTube channel also, and of course you can subscribe on your favorite podcast client and you'll get it automatically the minute it's done. Thank you for being here. I'll see you later. Another twit.
Gina Smith [02:41:56]:
See y'all. Thanks.
Jason Calacanis [02:41:58]:
Bye-bye.
Jason Calacanis [02:41:59]:
Smoke some meats.
