Transcripts

This Week in Tech 573

Leo Laporte: It's time for TWiT, This Week in Tech.  Mike Elgan is here, Jason Calacanis. Lots of financial news, we'll talk about all the quarterly reports from Google, Facebook, Apple, Twitter. We'll also talk about virtual reality, we'll talk about the new Tesla, the new Giga factory, it's all coming up next on TWiT.

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Leo: This is TWiT, This Week in Tech, episode 573, recorded Sunday, July 31, 2016.

A Very Vindictive Bulldog

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It's time for TWiT, This Week in Tech, the show where we cover the week's tech news in front of a live studio audience. You are here, Jason Calacanis in person. I'm so thrilled to have you.

Jason Calacanis: Thanks for having me. Good to be here.

Leo: He is at calacanis.com, and of course you can find a bunch of great news letters now...

Jason: inside.com.

Leo: ...on every subject, including electric cars and everything.

Jason: My theory is that journalism is really having a challenging time because everybody is link baiting, and if you email people, it's the purest form of communication, so I'm trying to hire the best journalists, start an Email relationship with a small cohort of people, ten or twenty thousand per email newsletter, put a little advertising in it...

Leo: Is that the break-even number?

Jason: Something like ten or twenty thousand. It takes ten hours to twenty hours to do a really good newsletter, I think. For a good writer, it takes a full day.

Leo: Originally inside.com was going to be targeted web page...

Jason: It was going to be news apps, and it turned a quarter million people downloaded the app and five hundred people use it a day, then we took the top ten percent of the people who had installed the app, we sent them a newsletter with the same exact content of the app, and 40, 50, 60% of people opened it. Forget about apps, the idea of the news app is hard because the social networks have run the table on news.

Leo: Jason is just back from the Giga Factory grand opening, we'll talk about that. But I want to introduce our other panelists. Mike Elgan is visiting us from France where it's after midnight. Bon soir? Bon jour now, I guess.

Mike Elgan: Yes it is. From here on out, it's Bon jour.

Leo: Always great to see you. I just love that you have the window open. I imagine outside is a French street, cobblestone.

Mike: Yes. Young lovers stumbling down the cobblestone streets. All night, believe me.

Leo: France all night. I like that. I don't know where to start. We have a lot of financial reports, although I'm not that interested in how the stock market reacts to a quarterly report. What we talk about is more how technology is changing our lives and what it means and things like that. But, as I pointed out before, the stock price does make a difference in who a company can hire, right?

Jason: Of course, and it's a pretty good bell as to how the company is doing.

Leo: Is it?

Jason: I think so. There can be all kinds of shenanigans with stocks and people shorting them, but generally speaking, the markets get it right eventually.

Leo: Really. Because it seems like the market always... what is the slogan? You buy on the rumor and you sell on the news.

Jason: Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn't.

Leo: It was reversed for Apple. The price was depressed until the news came out, and then it came back up.

Jason: Apple is a really interesting case, because they've been going through this money printing machine with the iPhone. It's unbelievable how much that device makes and how they've maintained a pretty good margin on it. They make a huge profit compared to Android phones which make no profit. But people are starting to think...

Leo: I want to show you this. This is a Chinese made phone, the Axon. It is from ZTE. $400, and in every respect, I would say it is the equal of the iPhone. Camera, screen may even be better. It's certainly higher res. It's fast, it's Android, it's the only negative. Apple's only lock-in is iOS. But paying twice as much for iOS, is it worth it?

Mike: First of all, they're not going to sell a billion. Another thing Apple has a great advantage on is accessories, cases, and all that. It's so well supported by software by ad ons, and stuff like that.

Leo: Apple is going to double down on accessories, because if they are true to the rumors, they're going to remove the headphone port, and you'll have to buy special headphones.

Mike: This is just like the original iPhone when they came out with a phone that had no keyboard and everybody said that's impossible, nobody is going to use a phone with no keyboard, and now you can't have a keyboard. Even blackberries are going to make phones with keyboards, so I think this will be a non-issue in a few years, once we get over the pain and suffering of not being able to use our devices without a dongle.

Leo: A dongle, but Apple makes a lot of money licensing, I might point out. There's no money in licensing a mini jack, but there's a lot of money in licensing a lightning port.

Jason: The interesting thing about the report is they actually sold a lot of phones, people thought the...

Leo: But not the fancy ones.

Jason: Not the fancy ones. This iPhone ..

Leo: iPhone unit sales for the quarter fell 15% year-to-year. Only 40 million. it's still a good number. Everybody thought it would drop. Go ahead, it's your turn.

Mike: You have to think about Apple in terms of everybody wants to see that curve going up, but in the past year or so, everything about Apple's success has been related to China. There was an artificial series of events in China, growing out Apple stores, getting on China mobile, and busting in with a large device into the Chinese market.

Leo: See, Apple's just like Yahoo. It's all about China, right?

Mike: Not exactly. But now rocky in China. You can't come barging into a new China every year, so we're comparing the post China entrance to the China entrance.

 Leo: You could if India weren't so recalcitrant. India is another big market, but Apple is having a hard time penetrating it because they're a US company.

Jason: They keep trying to get this lower-end phone working and it seems like people are buying up.

Leo: That was the story of their quarterly results this week was that the SE sold very well. Right?

Jason: It's basically like the iPhone five, they just sort of re-put it out.

Leo: It's only a hundred bucks cheaper, right?

Jason: But i think for some people who are at the top end of the Android, they might pull a trigger based on that. The big question that nobody can really answer is are people going to keep their phones longer now that the upgrade cycle doesn't feel as necessary. Right? So the difference between the iPhone five and six, the difference between the six and the seven, are they going to be step functions or are they going to be incremental and it feels incremental now. We'll see. Apple could have surprises, they might do something really interesting with VR, with the new iPhone seven. The headset is not a reason to upgrade, the cameras have been a reason to upgrade in the past, but the camera at 4K, how much battery can you get?

Leo: Everybody has got decent cameras. Maybe they're not quite as good, but even this Axon at half the price is a decent camera.

Mike: Augmented reality could have an impact on the mass market. I think...

Leo: I don't think it has any impact. I think it's a gimmick at this point. Apple's phones are not high res enough to do VR well, so they're going to have to upgrade their screens to 4K right now, the 6S plus is only 1080 p.

Jason: They're just extracting as much as they can out of this iPhone franchise.

Leo: Two thirds of their sales of revenue.

Jason: If you took it out, the company would be in very rough shape, so the question is "What becomes their next big thing," and services is one big piece. The iTunes store, selling movies, and then there's other... obviously cloud storage, but these things are not huge compared to the massive money printing machine that the iPhone has been. The good news is they have saved up over 200 billion dollars, which makes them the largest hedge fund in the world. They've got this mountain of cash, which to me means if they don't get a new product out there and it looks like project Titan, their car...

Leo: Isn't that interesting? The latest rumor is that they're going to sell software, not hardware.

Jason: Good luck with that.

Leo: I'm thinking about Tesla. Of course, you know a lot about tesla, but Elon has been very clear that you can't do the software and hardware separately. They're tightly integrated. You need the data you get from the car to improve the software.

Jason: Which is what Apple has done typically. Their whole ecosystem. Maybe this is misinterpreted information, but...

Leo: Somebody is pointing out in the chat room, Apple services suck. This is not their strong suit.

Jason: No. Hardware is. So if you take hardware out, what good are you?

Leo: do you want Apple maps to drive your car?

Mike: Not exactly.

Jason: I think there's a high chance that Apple could go on Tilt in the Poker sense and start buying stuff up. They have all that cash, if the revenue picture doesn't get great and they can't release a new ground breaking product, which obviously the watch has been a sideways product, that's not groundbreaking, we thought it would be. It's not a must-have. How many people in the audience here bought the watch? How many people are wearing it?

Leo: People who come to TWiT are definitely outliers. I see more Apple watches than I have in the past...

Jason: But there's ten people here, only three have bought it, which tells you something. Only 30% of the TWiT audience? I bought one, I don't wear it. you bought one, you don't wear it.

Leo: Mr. Elgan is wearing his. Why do you wear it, Mike?

Mike: I wear it primarily to take remote control pictures easily. I set the phone over there. I hit the button, it takes a picture. One of my favorite things to do is to do gifs instead of pictures. I do a lot of gifs, probably half the things I post are gifs. On the automatic setting with the watch, it will take ten in a row, which makes a perfect gif of the kind that... I use it for that reason. It takes an even more perfect gif because you're not using the phone, you're not holding the phone, you're not touching the phone. The phone is propped up elsewhere and you are touching the watch. It's a really expensive gif machine, basically.

Leo: Wasn't that the preamble to the constitution? In order to make a more perfect gif? Maybe I haven't read that constitution lately.

Jason: If they're going to buy stuff...

Leo: But wait a minute. Most of that 200 billion is held off shore, so they can't buy US companies. Is that a disadvantage?

Mike: They could always bring the money home.

Leo: At a high tax premium.

Mike: They'll have to pay a third of it back to taxes or something in that regard.

Leo: is it amnesty? Obama talked about amnesty.

Jason: I think if Trump wins, that'll be a huge amnesty program.

Leo: Trump says we want Apple to bring all of its manufacturing back to the US. The only way you do that is by saying Here's some huge tax incentives.

Jason: We're going to have to make some incentives. This idea that manufacturing can't be done here is a little crazy. I just went to the Giga factory opening, and Elon is going to be making more batteries here. The current factory, which is only 17% of what the effect will be. That one building, or the first piece of the building can make more batteries than were made in all of 2014.

Leo: Is he doing that? Because it's so expensive to ship lithium ion batteries because they're heavy.

Jason: His big idea is first principles. He wants materials to come in one side of the factory and a great product to come out of the other.

Leo: You know who else wanted to do that? Henry Ford. The Rouge plant that he built in Dearborn, railroad cars of iron, coke, lumber, trees would come in one end, and a model T would come out the other end.

Jason: What Elon told me was he is laser focused on the factory. Forget about the cars. He's got teams, the cars are great, they're awesome, they're award winning, but he's trying to make a factory that is so efficient that it can make cars and make batteries five or ten times cheaper. He thinks he can make his plant ten times more efficient.

Leo: And the car price falls.

Jason: Right, because if you look at the car that we bought, whether it's the X or the Model S, you're talking about the original battery pack and the roadster, which I believe was about 40,000. I don't have insider information, so I'm just going off of what I read, to be clear. The original one was 40...

Leo: You can't make a 30,000 car with a 40,000 battery.

Jason: Then if you think about the Model S, my understanding from what I've read in the press, again not what I read from Elon, is 20 K or something like that. Who knows how cheap the model 3 battery can get, but if it's a 35,000 dollar car, I'm going to guess 1/3 of it will be the battery pack. if he makes that, or he gets the battery packs down to 7, 8, 9, ten thousand dollars, then everybody can drive these cars.

Leo:  Now that I have one, I feel like it really is an electric go cart. They put some nice stuff on top of it. You feel like you're on a sled with a giant battery. Then they put a shell around it. They put some software in there to make you feel better.

Jason: Doing it end-to-end is going to be the big thing, and I just feel like Apple has no way of catching it at this point.

Mike: So I think the problem with all of this, and one of the reasons why I kind of buy the rumors that it makes sense for Apple to focus on software is that in the self-driving universe of the future, there will be Teslas, there will be guys like you who have a Tesla, but I think it will be like sail boats. Right now, most water born transportation isn't with sail boats, but people were enthusiastic about it, and have the means to have one can have a sail boat, and in the future, a nice car is something that only a tiny minority of people will have. I think that...

Leo: Personal car ownership is going to disappear, I think. That's the goal.

Mike: They'll become a commodity. They have these little cars in ex en provence and probably all over Europe for all I know, they have these tiny narrow streets, so they have these special purpose cars that are for those little streets, and the way they're built, they have a swiper in the back, like a credit card swiper. So you hop in, you swipe the credit card, you punch the thing, there's a driver.

Leo: There is a driver.

Mike: There's a driver, but in the future, there won't be. It's very utilitarian, very spacious. The back of it isn't like sitting in back of a car, it's like sitting in an open living room thing, and that's exactly how self-driving cars will be. What Apple wants is the content consumption experience. When you drive in a car, you're going to pay a lot less attention to driving the roads and all that stuff. You're going to be focused on consuming content: watching movies, doing VR, listening to music, communicating with people on video calls and stuff like that. That's the experience that Apple doesn't want to miss out on. So if they can come out with the ultimate experience for the content consumption experience within a self-driving car that is of course a big commodity and you don't even have to own, then I think they'll win the future. If they get locked out of that market, there's a big chunk of the content consumption world that they will have nothing to do with.

Jason: One person's margin is another person's business opportunity. The margin on cars, whatever people make, that can be evaporated and people can rent these things. So Elon, in his master plan part deus...

Leo: Is he a fan of Hotshots the movie? Is that where that came from?

Jason: I can tell you where it came from. I was talking to him about the Master plan, and I said to him, "You should call it part deus."

Leo: You thought of it!?!

Jason: He goes that's a circle peg.

Leo: just throw a French word in. Why not?

Jason: We were laughing about Hotshots part Deus. He said I'm writing this thing, and I said call it "Part deus," and he said he was going to use it. It was pretty funny.

Leo: Next one will be Master Plan the Quickening.

Jason: In the Master Plan he talks about renting your car, and now that you have your Tesla, the Tesla has a really great app that lets you unlock it, locate it, set the temperature of the air, and you can watch it in real time. All these things that are obvious, kind of like Uber's app.  I think what he put in the Master Plan, he should be able to take your car and put it into the pool of cars that are available. In the next two or three years...

Leo: There will be a switch on the app to say if anybody wants to take it...

Jason: You might not want to do that for your X, but if you had the Model 3 and think about Zip car, I had somebody working for me, one of my techs who would put his car on. He didn't use it except for the weekends and he put it on Zip Car. He told me that he was making more than his car payment. His car went from being a cost center to being a profit center for him.

Leo: That's part of the master plan.

Jason: That's part of the Master Plan is you can take your Model 3, put it in the pool, and if anybody uses GetAround or ZipCar or any of these services, they're perfect for cities, and perfect for half the audience, which only uses a car a small amount of time.

Leo: I'd do it for a hundred an hour for my X.

Jason: The X is not exactly the one he'll let out there. Then he'll probably do the zip car thing in the coming years. Full autonomy in the car, coming to you, dropping you off, that's at least ten years out in my mind. Level 4, level 5 is ten years out. Everybody is very excited about it.

Mike: And so is whatever Apple is working on in the car space. We're not going to see that any time soon.

Jason: People are drunk on this self-driving thing, how quickly it's going to be here.

Leo: Elon is a little at fault for that. Calling it auto pilot implies more than it is. it's very fancy cruise control... Maybe my sense of this is, and I am a huge admirer, one of the things he's doing is with things like bioweapon defense mode and ludicrous mode, the word auto pilot is marketing. He's selling a dream. I don't anticipate encountering any bio weapons in the near future.

Jason: I talked to him about the auto-pilot back in the day when he said he thought the Bridge step would be before full autonomy, it'll be like an auto pilot mode where you'll have to pay attention like a pilot in a plane, but the plane will take care of some of the functions. Just like, it's very similar from going from a stick shift to an automatic.

Leo: Doesn't auto pilot imply autonomy? Isn't that...

Jason: Partial autonomy. Now...

Leo: You really wouldn't want to do that.

Jason: If you think about how educated you're getting about how computers work, you are describing on a previous podcast that you see the cars, you can see the motor cycle, you can see the truck...

Leo: It's amazing.

Jason: He's explaining to the audience in the dashboard what the computer is seeing. So you're actually learning what the computer is capable of, and what it doesn't know.

Leo: It didn't see the bag of cement that I was coming up on, so I took the wheel and steered around it because I couldn't see it.

Mike: One of the things that's happened is you have a bunch of people who are jumping the fence with this technology, where they're like it's working on the 101 perfectly. I drove up here from the peninsula. It was perfect the entire way.

Leo: I've driven almost 200 miles in a week, more than half of that is auto pilot. Full auto pilot.

Jason: Here's the question: if you were on the highway...

Leo: I keep my hands on the wheel and I'm paying attention!

Jason: This is all you need to know. This is the first generation product. If I told you your family and you could be on a road where 100% of the cars had auto pilot...

Leo: Then I'd feel safe.

Jason: Or none of them had it.   Which would you pick?

Mike: Here's the thing though, Jason. I don't think people are ever going to want to really fully disengage with what's happening with their fully self-driving cars. Statistically, self driving cars are going to be massively safer than human drivers, but individually you don't make choices like that based on statistics.

Leo: You think you're an excellent driver. Everybody thinks they're a great driver.

Mike: Let me give you an example. If you were to take a baby and roll the baby in a baby carriage down to one of the public parks in Petaluma, and leave it there and go shopping in downtown Petaluma, overwhelming likelihood is that nobody would harm the baby, nothing would happen to the baby, but nobody would do that, based on the infinitesimally small chance that something could happen. Likewise, people are not, with their kids in the car going to go down the highway and take a nap while...

Jason: No. You shouldn't take...

Leo: Unfortunately there are some dufusses that do, and they get the attention. I have to tell you, we called my insurance agent, and as soon as we said it was a model X, they said you're deductible is now 6,000 dollars. She said, "Are you using auto pilot," She said mm. That did not reassure her or make her feel like it was safer. Although I believe I am safer, it scared her, and I'm wondering how Insurance companies, given the latest, most recent news...

Jason: People may have to explicitly sign onto this and sign a waiver or something. I'm just thinking, because some group of people are using this technology incorrectly. It gives you Ample Warning to not take your hands off the wheel. Now with the latest update, I may be wrong, but I feel like it's telling you more often to put your hands on the wheel than the last update, but it's going to save so many lives and it's worth pursuing.

Leo: it reminds me of Pokemon Go.

Jason: Did you see the guy playing Pokemon Go while he was driving it?

Leo: Yes.

Jason: Why are we not arresting these people?

Leo: He realized that what he did was highly illegal and pulled the video down. Pokemon Go had some features that encouraged people to trespass, to wander off cliffs, to not pay attention, in the latest update which came out yesterday, first of all, many more warnings when you launch it. "Pay attention." One of them says, "Don't trespass." They took out the radar feature, which people were using to track down rare Pokemon. This is clearly an issue. You cannot... if you’re selling a hundred million copies of Pokemon Go, you have to be aware that some percentage of people are going to do stupid things.

Jason: We should build all products in the world based on how the stupidest people...

Leo: That's why it says "Don't eat the Silicon Gel" in the...

Jason: Gee vitamins are this size, and there's a white bag that says "Don't eat me."

Leo: Not for internal consumption.

Jason: The world is trending towards the least common denominator. It feels like we're turning into an idiocracy. It's very sad. The person who died in the car, but all indications are that he was literally watching a movie and this guy was playing Pokemon Go. There's a group of people who do stupid things, we can't give up the mission of making this technology for them.

Leo: Mike, you wrote an article in Computer World. Is it dumb to trust Smart Technology?

Mike: Exactly. That's what I was going to bring up, is one of the mistakes we're going to make is as soon as we have anything that's automatable, we're going to be like, "OK. Done with that, hand it over to the machines." That's going to be fine for trivial things that don't matter, but not so much for things that do matter. The most recent scandal was that there was a pet feeder that uses a cloud surface called "Pet Nat." Pet Nat went down, so all these dogs went hungry for about ten hours. It was a relatively minor problem, but what happened was people were complaining, because they said I can't feed my dog manually, we're on vacation, we drove to Jelly Stone and so this is the problem. You can't leave a pet in the car of a cloud service.

Leo: You really shouldn't. Part of the problem is the statistics lie a little bit. You can say, "Auto pilot has driven a hundred thirty million miles, the average fatality is every 80 million miles, so we're doing better," doesn't really tell the whole story. Even if only one tenth of one percent of people die due to auto pilot, that's going to be perceived as a massive failure.

Jason: I call this the Craigslist phenomenon. Any time a new technology comes out, people blame the technology for something that already exists in the world. When Craigslist came out, you probably remember these big headlines. "Craigslist killer," as if Craigslist manufactured a serial killer, sent them out into the world, and then murdered people. No. A murderer put a honey pot on Craigslist and then murdered some people. If the person killed them with a certain brand of knife, it wouldn't be the Acne knife murders, or they ran people over with a Volvo, we're not calling it the Volvo murders.

Leo: If you're the one person whose spouse or father was killed in an auto pilot wreck, that's not going to reassure you that this is 99% safer than driving. He might have been killed anyway. it's not going to make you feel any better.

Jason: These are emotional situations, and people will project into them...

Leo: We're not statistical beings.

Jason: We will make decisions based on emotion, and we will blame things emotionally that should not be blamed...

Mike: There's an inherent tech bias in the public in general and the media in particular that says... I wrote a series of articles about people texting in cars and how I believe that yes, people are causing accidents because they're paying attention to their phones in cars, but those are the same people who would be eating or reading the newspaper or doing something else if they didn't have the phone. It's distracted, dangerous people. One of the best stats for this is we went from a world over the last twenty years, a world in which nobody had a phone to a world in which everybody has a phone, and you would think if texting and driving was causing all these accidents, the accident rate would have risen, but in fact its declined due to safety features in cars and things like that. Where are all those extra car accidents that are being caused by this brand new behavior that didn't exist before? it's the same idiot that is causing distracted drivers. I've seen people putting on makeup in their cars, reading the newspaper. Eating.

Leo: But you can blame them for that. If auto pilot kills them, it's a different matter. Then the machine killed them, and you understand psychologically that's significantly different.

Jason: Listen. When I run for mayor, I have a very simple program that I'm going to deploy. If you're caught in your car on your phone, we are going to take your phone from you. Not the car, the phone. I'm literally sending the cops out there, and they're going to look for people on their phones, pull them over, they're not going to give them a ticket. They're going to take their phone from them. Literally you are in time out. I'm taking your phone from you right now. We're going to put it at the police station, and you can pick it up in 72 hours. Your phone is going in the tank. Can you imagine? People would stop immediately. The audience is laughing, but it would stop the behavior immediately.

Leo: it's worse than $125 ticket.

Jason: It's worse than any fine. "I don't have my phone?" People go into a full scale panic. You do that, and you put the film on the Internet of the cops taking the phones and the cop with a car full of iPhones and little bags.

Leo: A guy in the chat room named Mashed Potato says he'll vote for you.

Jason: I am going to win. mayorjason.com . Trump has inspired me.

Leo: It starts with Mayor. It goes on from there. 2024, 2028.

Jason: Listen, we're in the burn it down. This election is the burn it down party.

Leo: We'll be looking for a savior.

Jason: Absolutely. Triple the number of cops. That's what I'm doing in san Francisco.

Leo: Your conclusion, and I think it's an apt conclusion, Mike in your article is we need a set of cultural norms that makes it clear to people automating important things does not and cannot replace a human paying attention. That's always been the case. I remember when our kids were little, our mantra was there is no substitute for parental supervision. Period. This was in the era when people were wanting to put Internet filters on the router. You know. You've got to be involved. You can't replace your parental responsibilities with a filter or with an auto driving car.

Mike: People are dumb, and one of the things that has happened with additional safety features, better seat belts, airbags, all that stuff, is people now drive more recklessly. So people push the envelope on recklessness.

Leo: Auto pilot is going to do it. We already see it. YouTube is the evidence. I on the other hand was so terrified. I had my foot hovered over the brake pedal, my hands on the wheel, and I was scanning the traffic more than I would normally. It should make you more alert. At the same time, as I'm driving home and getting a little drowsy, I'm thinking at least I don't have to worry about the car ahead of me or going off the road.

Jason: Fender benders are going to end. The idea that you're going to be in a shopping mall and you're going to back into somebody... it tells you how many inches you are from the other car. Six inches, five inches, if you hit the other car...

Leo: It says stop. Even if you're not using auto pilot, correct me if I'm wrong, if it thinks you're going to run into something, it will jam up.

Mike: It's a separate feature. It's called auto breaking. It's one of the most fantastic technologies ever invented, in terms of saving lives. It failed because of the reflective nature of the truck and so on. That's separate from auto pilot, but you know what? that's a feature that is extra in addition to what the driver is doing. When you're driving a car and there's a truck in front of you, it's your job as a driver to apply the breaks.

Leo: That's why I think the semi-automatics are important. They shouldn't call it auto pilot, call it driver assist. Call it something that communicates the idea that it's not going to drive itself.

Jason: Keep your hand on the wheel. It tells you a hundred times.

Leo: i think Elon knows that auto pilot is sexier than driver assist.

Jason: I don't think it was a sexy thing. I think it was literally, in his mind it's just like an airplane. Nobody who is piloting a plane puts it on auto pilot and goes to the back and takes a nap.

Leo: But that's pilots. They know better.

Mike:  That's actually not true. Some pilots do take naps. But theirs is an entirely different situation. There's not a lot of traffic. Right. Exactly. You can feel everything that's happening while you're taking a nap.

Leo: Humans who aren't pilots think auto pilot means it flies itself. That's the problem. A pilot is well trained, one hopes. We're going to take a break, come back with more. I want to hear about the giga factory. We have Google and Facebook. We have a lot of quarterly results, we barely got through Apple. We haven't even finished Apple. I want to bring up the nobel prize laureate economist, who said Apple is engaged in fraud with its tax strategy. We got to fix it. Our show to you today brought to you by texture. I know you love magazines. I love magazines. If anybody watches this show, listens to this show, it means you probably have a good brain, a good head on your shoulders and you like information. You like to absorb stuff, and as tough as it’s become for newspapers in this country, there is still great stuff being written in Magazines. The New Yorker, National Geographic, every month there is something in the Rolling Stones. There's an article I want to read, and then there's magazines you probably don't subscribe to, but it would be kind of fun if you had the Billboard charts and you could see them whenever you felt like it, or maybe you look at ad age and see what the going price is for Super bowl ad... wouldn't it be great if you could read magazines like you watch movies on Netflix? Now you can. Texture.com. We're all binge watching these days thanks to Netflix, now you can start binge reading. When it comes to magazines, they're all there. You don't want to subscribe, you don't want to buy because it costs a lot of money, not to mention the burden on your coffee table. Wouldn't it be great to have, like national geographic. Great images in there. Now they're on your iPad, they look gorgeous, you're getting every page that's in the newsstand edition. Plus stuff that they can't put in the magazine, like video. You also get back issues. You're re-claiming the magazine reading experience in a way that really works for you. The next time you get on a plane, you'll have all those magazines. You can read them off-line, just favorite the magazines you like, they'll download automatically. You'll also get insider access to content from the world's most in-demand publications, and I love this. They encourage this. You can share your subscription with your family, so once you sign up for Texture, you're going to have five devices. Lisa has our family account, but I still get the magazines, we have it on my iPad, her iPad, and my Android phone and her Android phone. She has an iPhone. It's awesome. You're going to get it free to try it, see what it's like. You'll get all the top magazines, back issues, bonus video content, free at texture.com/twit. Texture.com/twit. Try the free trial.

Jason: I actually wasn't aware, but I love that you share across five people.

Leo: They say it in the ad, so it must be true. In other words, they're not prohibiting you from doing that.

Jason: It was like the early days of Netflix where people were sharing accounts, and they were like, "Oh. We're turning a blind eye to it." Oh this is a feature, let's charge 12 bucks and give people the ability to stream through five devices.

Leo: Actually according to the ninth circuit court of appeals, that might be technically a felony. This was an interesting judgment. The update is they've maybe taken a step back for that. They made a decision in a business case, the US versus Nassau that it was a violation of the computer fraud and abuse act when somebody logged... let's see. I'm trying to remember the facts of the case. Here it is.

Jason: Somebody sharing a password was illegal?

Leo: There was a second circuit and there was a ninth circuit. I think in the ninth circuit, the issue was somebody had shared the password to corporate Internet, and that was considered a violation, a serious felony. A CFAA is a very serious law. Many people who reviewed it said the court's decision was so broad that it seemed to make it a federal crime to use somebody else's password, even with their knowledge and permission.

Jason: This is what Matthew Keys the journalist is going to jail for. He allegedly, and now I guess he's been convicted, so I don't know if it's alleged any more, he gave the passwords to the Tribune sites to an anonymous chat room, and then they defaced the sites, so now he's going to jail for two years or something. They're really putative about this.

Leo: It's intended to fight hacking.

Jason: We're pretty hardcore about hacking in this country with this computer regulation, if you've literally broke into the LA Times and defaced the lobby and stole a bunch of stuff, you go to jail for less time than if you deface the website. It might be a little bit over putative to put these hackers away, but it's the world we live in.

Leo: Then there's Facebook versus power ventures. Power adventures was offering some sort of contact, list management thing, and they asked Facebook users to allow them access to their account so you can get their contacts. Facebook sent them a cease and desist, and power ventures continues, saying now we have the permission of the customer. The user to access their contacts. What's wrong with that? The ninth circuit found that Power Ventures violated the CFAA by doing that. The court acknowledged Facebook could use Power Ventures valid authorization to access accounts, they changed it. They backed off a little bit. I'm a little confused, this recently happened. The EFF has a very long article that I'm not going to try to parse right now, but the Ninth circuit has backed away from its dangerous password sharing decision. It creates even more confusion about the computer fraud and abuse act. Yeah. The problem is it's hard to know. The problem is also it's hard for the perpetrator to know. Am I committing a federal crime here or just logging into my friend's Netflix account. I don't know.  

Jason: I think you're OK with the Netflix account. I think sharing your work password if you...

Leo: That was... So this was on Bloomberg interview. Nobel Prize winning economist, Joseph Stiglitz, let me go to the Bloomberg page... calls Apple's profit reporting in ireland a fraud. He doesn't say it's illegal. He says "Our current tax system encourages companies to keep their money abroad, opens up a vast loophole through what is called 'The transfer pricing system.' It allows them not only to keep their money abroad but to evade taxation.

Mike: From the headline, it sounds like he's accusing Apple of fraud, but they're not because it's lawmakers perpetuating this fraud. But that's not what it is. They need to pass laws and treaties and do it faster than they're now doing it, figure out what's going on now in Ireland. But Apple is not doing anything wrong. They're finding the most advantageous tax system, and they're taking advantage of it.

Leo: He says, "here we have the largest corporation, not only in America but in the world. Bigger than GM was at its peak, claiming that most of its profits originate from a few hundred people working in Ireland. Yeah. It's legal.

Jason: The reason this is an issue is right now we have a great wealth disparity. This is why Bernie Sanders was such a popular candidate. This is why Trump is also a popular candidate. It all comes back to the disparity in wealth, income inequality, and when people feel no hope and they don't have the ability to advance, whether it's the poor to the middle class or the middle class to the upper middle class, and that's how a large part of the country feels right now, they're going to start looking at things like conspicuous consumption on individuals part, or tax loopholes and say "If I'm getting screwed in my life and I have no hope," these other things become highlighted. So if the world felt more fair, which it should, then Apple's tax... wouldn't be as upset. You just have this horrible situation in the world where people are not advancing, don't have hope, and you have a whole generation of people who are moving back in with their parents and it just feels hopeless to them. That's why these things are being highlighted. If you think about it on a realistic basis, if the corporate tax rate in the United States is 35% and it's 12 in Ireland, what we have to do is have common sense here and leadership say, you know what? We're going to allow American companies to re-patriate their cash at 22%. 18%. Just split the difference.

Leo: Apple has, of its 232 billion in cash, 215 billion is held outside the US. The way they do it is they transfer intellectual property rights to this small Irish holding company and say all the profit that we make worldwide is from this small company in Ireland. It's not illegal. It feels a little unethical, but in fact Tim Cook testified in front of the senate a few years ago saying that they should change the corporate tax code. He said he recommended eliminating all corporate tax expenditures, lower corporate income tax rates and implementing a reasonable income tax on foreign earnings that allows a free flow of capital back.

Jason; The easy way to balance this out is saying we're going to raise minimum wage in the country, and we're going to expand the K through 12 system to pre K to maybe two years of vocational school after graduation, and we'll lower the tax rate, bring the cash back. There's a ittle give and take in the world, but it doesn't feel like with the polarization of the sides in this country that we have that.

Mike: One of the things that people know, and this is not being discussed enough, is there is actually a version of this for very small businesses.

Leo: Tell me about that, because I might take advantage of that.  

Mike: The nation Estonia, which has a population of the size of...

Leo: I'm going to be there in approximately six weeks. What can I do there?

Mike: They're offering something called e-residencies. So basically if you do want to start a small business and headquarter it in Estonia instead of Delaware, their taxes are incredibly low. They don't give you a passport.

Leo: This indignation about Apple's fraud has suddenly changed to interest. If I can do that... They also have a digital card that has a public key on it that you can use. There's some interesting... what is their corporate tax rate? Do you happen to know that?

Mike: I don't offhand, but it's very low, especially for Europe.

Leo: By the way, when Putin marches in and takes it over, NATO says it's yours, we don't really want it, that's going to all change.

Mike: Hopefully your business is selling vodka.

Jason: Gawker...

Leo: Are they still around?

Jason: They're in the process of imploding. They're being sold because on Friday or Saturday the judge said that Denton lied about the value of his shares. Hard to believe. That he, Hulk Hogan could start collecting assets, so now he's got to go into bankruptcy, because he said his shares were worth a hundred million or something. They're actually worth 30 million, so the judge seemed to have enough of the shenanigans and said he lied. Which may or may not be the case. The value of his company can vary based on buyer and time. The point is, he had taken all of their trade marks and put them in Estonia, I believe. No, Budapest. He was trying to do this whole offshore thing, and sort of protect himself. There's a lot of that going on, and it feels unfair to people.

Leo: I understand.

Jason: People move out of California to try to avoid taxes. They're going to have a sale of something, they move to Seattle, Washington State, they go to Seattle on a boat or whatever and they don't have to pay these taxes and you can only be in the states.

Leo: Apple is benefitting from our education system, from our roads. Every bit of infrastructure that was paid for by taxation but not giving back its fair share.

Jason: I mean, if you took all the Marvel characters and you put all your Marvel trade marks in, for the X men in Dublin. All the money goes back there, it kind of feels cheap. It feels unfair.

Mike: It's impossible to imagine a company making that decision, to say, "What's the most we can pay in taxes?" How can we arrange our whole business so we pay billions and billions...

Leo: Never pay a penny more than you have to, never pay a penny less than you need to.

Mike: It's a law issue. They have to get it straightened out.

Leo: You can imagine the lobbying that's going on. Frankly, sad to say that bags of money that are being transferred to keep that law the way it is. It's a lot cheaper to buy a Congress person than to pay taxes.

Jason: Or, in the Russian's case, to back Trump.

Leo: Do you want to talk about that?

Jason: It seems pretty... the hacking angle is pretty valid.

Leo: It's widely agreed now by US law enforcement that the Russians did in fact hack the DCC.

Jason: Why? What's the why here?

Leo: They got emails. They released those emails. I don't think I'm saying anything that is still conspiracy theory. They released those emails to Wikileaks. Julian Assange in an interview, several months ago said I have explosive material, but I'm going to hold onto it. He doesn't like Clinton. I'm going to hold onto it, I'm going to time it for release, right before the Democratic convention.

Jason: Horrible person. I hate Assange.

Leo: Why do you hate Assange? Wikileaks has done some great stuff.

Jason: Here's the thing. When you are encouraging people to do data dumps, I think if you're going to encourage the world to be open and transparent this way and dump all this data, you are going to need to think about the fallout from it, and the collateral damage.

Leo: Why should he worry about that? His job is to get the information out there.

Jason: Job defined by who? On an ethical basis, you have to think...

Leo: Snowden's problem with WikiLeaks is it's uncurated. When I had my information, what I decided to do was to hand it to several, not one but several journalistic entities and let them curate it.

Jason: You have to think it through, and I think Assange is a bit of an anarchist... I think there's probably some...

Leo: he's stuck in the Ecuadorian embassy in...

Jason: Because of rape allegations. This idea that you're going to just dump all this information and the people who might be informants on the other side of it, or the people who gave it to you, like Chelsea Manning are going to pay the price for it... it's a very sad story. Who was probably by all accounts, a very emotional... suicidal, perhaps even mentally ill before this happened.

Leo: Looks like she'l have solitary confinement the rest of her life because of it.

Jason: And she could have been mentally ill when she gave him all this information, then he took advantage of her...

Leo: But the information was valuable. It showed us...

Jason: it was valuable to Assange as a grandstander. To release it all, and who knows what informants were murdered based upon it. I just think that the world is better if we dump all information publicly is a bad argument.

Leo: But it's not an... it's a philosophy that you could...

Jason: it's a dangerous philosophy. If I tell you here's all the informants of every FBI and CIA informant, here's the file, what would you do with it? Would you just dump it on the Internet? No reasonable person would do that. Who would do that? A douche who is a grand standing who wants to be famous, which is what I think Julien Assange is.

Mike: There isn't a whole lot of evidence they are dumping all the information. The fact that they withheld information and timed it to go after a political enemy of Julien Assange personally, makes me think if they did uncover information that was counter to their political aspirations, they would sit on it

Leo: That's the beauty of being an anarchist.

Jason: It's a really good point. Mike's right. If you were to work against him and keep him in the Ecuadorian embassy longer, people would be like just delete that file.

Mike: He's demonstrated the willingness to use control of this leaked information for political gain for personal vendettas, whatever you want to call it. That opens up a can of worms, it's not based on a philosophy of find everything we can and get everything out there. That's not a philosophy we just learned.

Leo: A lot of people point out, and in fact there's a conspiracy theory that Twitter killed the trending topic DNC leaks, that attention is being paid to the hack and not to the content. It deflects from the story. This isn't really a tech topic, exactly, but should we put aside the source of the content and pay attention to the content?

Jason: I think it is a tech topic to say what do these platforms that mitigate a lot of our communication... do they have their thumbs on the scale and are they filtering what we see? Facebook Filters everything you see. They decide what's in your feed. Twitter was not supposed to do that. They're trending now, Twitter feels like a left leaning organization, Facebook feels like they're manipulating all the results.

Leo: This result of this is a general mistrust of all information. At this point, what a lot of people do is they just believe whatever they want to believe and assume that... by the way that was a great ad on the right of that one. They assume... that completely distracted me. Don't show it again. That's why I use an ad blocker, by the way for this show. We got to put an ad blocker on that. That was a story? It's stories, so you can't block it. I completely lost my train of thought. It was a good point too.

Jason: My friend goes to, searches for bikinis on Amazon so when he surfs the rest of the web, all the ads that are targeted to him has bikinis. That's what my friend told me last week. That's bizarre. Back to the fairness point of the world, if the world feels unfair, and people don't have hope, they're like, OK. I'm going to believe the narrative that the whole system is rigged. The Clintons have played the political game so hard for so long that it's not unreasonable to think that there is an entire machine to get them elected to keep the status quo that works against the poor and the middle class. If you're taking hundreds of thousands of dollars from Goldman Sachs for your speaking gigs, that feels true. If you look at all the leaks, people said "Hey. Maybe Saudi Arabia was somehow involved in 9/11." That seemed crazy.

Leo: You get this deep cynicism though, that ends up being destructive. You become a nihilist because everything sucks.

Jason: It turns out that maybe the Saudis... maybe low level Saudis were involved. Now it's like, is the world not prepared to deal with the fact that low level Saudis could have been involved in 9/11. But that doesn't mean the Saudi government backed 9/11. These are hard times to understand what's going on in the world because we have partial information.

Leo: Most people, and much of the electorate just gives up, which is the most nihilistic thing you can do.

Jason: We're in the 'burn it down' moment. I believe Trump is going to win, and he's going to win because people want to see the system collapse. They believe he's the quickest way to collapse the system. The two party system I'm referring to, not America.

Leo: I don't know. I think he could actually burn the country down.

Jason: He could. But I don't think that's people's intent in voting for him.

Leo: I hope not.

Jason: Just like Brexit, the intent was not to destroy the UK. Brexit was to...

Leo: We'll deviate. This is where it's difficult for us, because a lot of the stories nowadays... our tech stories are political stories. There is a very... tech is changing everything.

Jason: Wikileaks is a tech enabled project, the trending topics on Twitter, Facebook having its thumb on the scale. All the stuff is being mitigated by the big technology companies that we use every day.

Leo: OK. Kanye West wants a meeting between Tim Cook and Jay Z. Should we do that story?

Mike: Don't show his tweets.

Leo: Here's a great site. Somebody did everysecond.io, and it shows how much Apple makes/sells every second. if you go the page, in the ten seconds I've been talking about it, 72 iPhones, 16 iPads, seven macs were sold, five Apple watches, five iPad pros. 110 thousand dollars in revenue. It's been 18 seconds. It's now been twenty seconds. 29 thousand dollars in profit, 18 thousand apps downloaded. 16 thousand dollars spent on the app store, 13 million iMessages sent in the last thirty seconds, seven thousand Facetime calls, this gives you some idea of the scale of Apple's operation.

Jason: Who will be the trillion dollar company first is the big discussion.

Leo: Elon wants to be the trillion dollar company...

Jason: It's going to be Amazon first. If you're not competing with Amazon right now...

Leo: everysecond.io. Amazon announced something kind of interesting this quarter. It hired, in the past year, 85 thousand in the year.

Jason: It grew 47% in one year. It's crazy. You got to keep in mind these are not developers. There's a lot of fulfillment, and there's some part time. How many people in the audience here are Amazon prime members, raise your hand if you have Amazon prime.

Leo: Everybody.

Jason: Raise your hand if you don't have Amazon Prime.

Leo: One person. Two people in the whole...

Jason: But you're a couple. This dude is a nihilist who doesn't shop.

Leo: Why don't you have Amazon Prime? You have an Apple Watch. He's not from America. Where are you from. Australia.

Jason: Do they have Amazon prime there? Do they have Amazon?

Leo: We got to rule you out. You couldn't get it if you wanted it.

Jason: They said they want to make it financially irresponsible for you not to have Amazon Prime.

Leo: At this point, it is. Can you get Amazon Prime in France, Mike? What do you do?

Mike: No you can't. But this is a mega trend for us all to be looking at, because there are so many different technologies that are going to make things so cheap that you can't not afford to do it. Amazon is one of them, they talked about self-driving cars, you can go on vacation the car goes off and makes you a bundle and pays for itself, then you get profits from it. There's going to be so many technologies. I interviewed the guy behind the farm bot. I don't know if we talked about the farm bot on TWiT. It's a farming robot. He believes that within three years, he's going to get this farming robot to be a thousand dollars and it'll produce about 12 or 1300 dollars’ worth of produce each year. In less than a year it pays for itself. I think there are so many areas where this is going to be the case. You look at solar power that Elon is working on.

Leo: It's a CNC farming machine. Is that wild?

Mike: This is an awesome project. it's completely open source, there's a cloud. Open source software platform, open source hardware platform. He got triple their funding goal on Kickstarter, what this robot does is it plants the seeds, it waters them, it monitors the soil. It does everything in a very exact way. The ultimate goal is for you not to ever touch your garden.

Leo: Isn't Elon's brother all in? He said the future of VC is food.

Jason: People consume a lot of it. Kimball Musk has a great restaurant called The Kitchen if you're ever in Boulder. He really pioneered farm to table and locally sourced stuff. He's doing what he calls "Community gardening." So he's got a program called the Kitchen Community Gardens and they basically are donating his gardens to schools and communities and this farm bot open source stuff. This is where jobs are going to be replaced.

Leo: Are you looking at investing in these kinds of things?

Jason: I mean while we were talking, I just wrote down farmbot. And I’m like literally, I was like, thanks, Mike. I am going to give that person a hundred grand and Mike a carrot.

Leo: (Laughing) Why should he?

Jason: If I invest in it, I’m going to give you 10% of whatever I make.

Mike: Thank you.

Leo: I’m the middle man. I connected you guys.

Jason: All right, you know what?

Leo: No, I don’t want anything. I don’t want your money. I don’t want your money.

Jason: I’m going to invest in it right now and give you each 10% of the carry. 10% of my carry.

Leo: I don’t even know what that means, your carry. What does that mean?

Jason: Carry is defined as if you invest $100,000 dollars and you turn it into a million, there’s $900,000 in profit. If I were to invest your money—

Leo: Oh, you mean profit.

Jason: 900 profit, the carry would be 20% of the 900,000. So $180,000.

Mike: It’s getting smaller by the minute.

Jason: So the carry is, if you invest other people’s money, you get a percentage of the gain, you get nothing if it’s lost.

Leo: That’s a good deal.

Jason: But what’s really interesting about this crowdfunding is they beat the crown funding goals.

Leo: By seven times.

Jason: Now the next piece is equity crowdfunding is occurring now so title free was just passed in May.

Leo: The Jobs Bill.

Jason: The Jobs Bill. And now what this person can do is they can take each of those equity people who backed it, and when the product comes out they can say, “Would you like to buy one share?” And for up to a million dollars a year they can then let civilians who buy that unit for let’s say it’s $500 bucks, they can say, “Hey would you like to give $501 dollars and get a share?”

Leo: This is to be prevented, the theory being, if you don’t have a lot of disposable income, you don’t have A. the knowledge and B. the disposable income to be investing.

Jason: Yea, there’s two types of investors, accredited and non-accredited. Accredited have over a million dollars or so and over $200,000 of cash.

Leo: That you can afford to lose.

Jason: That you can afford to lose it. Now they’re saying , non-accredited people can go put small amounts of money into these things. So the world is going to accelerate because individuals are smart. The crowd is smart. Crowdfunding proved that with the Pebble Watch and other things. They can also make mistakes but the crowd will take these chances and a lot of people, many hands make for light work. If many people put in a hundred dollars into this farmbot, you get a million people in the world to do that, and there’s billions of people on the planet, holy cow, you could have some entrepreneur who proves some things, get a hundred million dollars. And in Australia, crowd funding is becoming a very big thing, equity crowd funding, correct? It’s a big, there’s a lot of talk.

Leo: It’s been legal there for a while.

Jason: It’s been legal there forever so there is an airline, crowdfunded another plane to set up a route and so people got to own shares in the company.

Leo: That’s brilliant.

Jason: They’re like, “Hey, we can’t afford this plane.” And people were like, “But we want this route.” They’re like, “Ok, if you want the route, just give us the money.”

Leo: Or just give us the money to Christ Christie and it’s good. Whoa. We’re going to take a break while Jason mops up the oil spill here.

Jason: All good. All good.

Leo: (Laughing) Let’s do a commercial. Our show today brought to you by, hey, you’re talking money, If you’re a developer, if you’ve got an app, if you’ve got a website, you know, show me the money. That’s the magic here. You’ve got to have e-commerce.

Jason: I know where this is going.

Leo: You’ve got to have e-commerce. You’re going to go where—well, a couple ways to do this. You can write it yourself. Don’t please, don’t. This is not a trivial operation doing this. A lot of work for you. And the security hazard, you know, it’s fraught with risk. Not to mention the fact that if you write your own monkey shopping cart—shopping cart abandonment rate is already 70%. It’s only going to get worse. Do what the big guys do. Do what Uber did, Lyft, Airbnb, Hotels Tonight, GitHub. They all use Braintree. See those buyable pins, the Pinterest buyable pins? That’s Braintree. Braintreepayments.com. One simple integration gives you every kind of payment period. Everything from pounds to PayPal, from credit cards to Apple Pay to Android Pay and when the next big one comes along, maybe it’s Epherium, you’ll be ready because they’ll add the code, you can go to your control panel, you check the box. Boom. It’s in. All you have to do is update a few lines of code. No latents, no complicated recoding, no stress about staying ahead of the curve. And great fraud protection, fast payouts, a very reasonable fee. In fact the first, what was it, $50,000 worth of payments fee free. Kind of like a little nest egg.

Jason: And there’s no minimums or monthly fees. So they’re not like trying to grind you down. It’s a fantastic product.

Leo: Well, thank you, Jason. That’s about the best endorsement I’ve ever heard.

Jason: No, when you’re an investor you want every dollar to go on the product. If everybody has to rebuild the payment stuff, then all of a sudden it’s like, it’s like the old days when you had to set up web servers. It’s like oh my God, the startup doesn’t write one line of code until month three when the sys admins put the racks up. This is the same thing. It saves literally 3 to 6 months for every startup.

Leo: It’s another one of our sponsors, Digital Ocean. It’s like the Digital Ocean of payments.

Jason: For sure. For sure. This is why startups can get done. Things like the farmbot can get done because a lot of the infrastructure has been done by great companies like these.

Leo: We live in amazing times. Take advantage of it. Tell your boss, your product manager, you do it. But whoever needs to make the decision, go to Braintreepayments.com/twit. And don’t forget to let them know you heard about it on TWiT. And that Jason sent you. You don’t have to—you are Jason. This is nice. You’re @ jason on Twitter.

Jason: And Instagram.

Leo: Yea but nobody thinks Jason Schwarzman when they say—it’s always you.

Jason: Statham, yea.

Leo: There’s Statham.

Jason: I get that a lot but that’s more body type. Statham and I, it’s like a body type thing.

Leo: Notice he preferred to be compared to Statham than Schwarzman. Ok.

Jason: I got Tumblr, right, as Tumblr became relevant. Jason.tumblr.com.

Leo: Jason.tumblr.com. I have leo.tumblr.com and I get messaged every day. Usually teenagers. What, you’re not doing anything with that, Leo, could you give it to me?

Jason: You wouldn’t believe how many people try to get @Jason on Instagram. Constant. All day.

Leo: I bet. You are THE Jason.

Jason: I want to get Jason.com.

Leo: And he is THE Mike Elgan.

Mike: That’s right.

Leo: It’s not mikeelgan.com anymore. Where do people go?

Mike: It’s elgan.com. Elgan.com is a good place to go. And you know, a funny story about first names. Back in the 90s, I lived is Los Gatos and wanted to get kevin.com for my son Kevin. And found out some guy owned it and contacted him. And he was a neighbor. He lived right down the street.

Leo: Oh, you’re kidding.

Mike: Said he would never give up kevin.com. But he lived right there. It was such an amazing coincidence.

Leo: That’s a weird coincidence. And he never did get—so I registered, I was actually telling this story on the radio show earlier. I registered abbylaporte.com and henrylaporte.com when they were born. And I did a 20 year registration.

Jason: Perfect.

Leo: And I had to renew it because they still weren’t interested at the age of 20. But Abby now is 24 and she’s been calling me to read me her papers. And I say, “Abby, you need to start posting stuff on the internet. It’s very important you be proactive. I’ve got abbylaporte.com. We’ll set you up a Squarespace and that way when people Google your name, it won’t be the stuff other people posted. It will be your stuff. It will be your best stuff. It will show your best side.” And I think this is an important message to get out to everybody. If you’re a kid, start posting your medals, your drawings, your best writing. Because if you don’t do it, somebody else will do it for you. And it will be the picture of you drunk on New Year’s Eve or throwing up or whatever. You don’t want that.

Mike: Words of wisdom.

Leo: I’m just saying. I love this picture by the way that’s on my Instagram. This is actually, I posted this on Google +. It’s Google+ losing its steam. Please leave the nozzle unattended (laughing) at a gas station. And I think that somebody erased the do not and they added no to por favor deje la manguera descuidada.

Jason: People have no idea how far ahead Google is with this AI stuff.

Leo: (Laughing) you think Google + is the future of AI?

Jason: No, Google + is another one of their failed little experiments. But their AI stuff since they bought DeepMind, and—

Leo: Really? You have some inside knowledge. It sounds like you want to share some of it with us here.

Jason: No, it’s just that they’re very far ahead, maybe 5 years ahead of everybody or 10 years ahead of everybody. And the amount of data they have is crazy.

Leo: You’re talking about the first trillion dollar company, Amazon. First breakthrough in artificial intelligence and deep learning, you think Google.

Jason: Oh, of course.

Leo: Not Facebook.

Jason: No. No, Facebook is, they’re so laser focused on monetization and advertising and they’re crushing on that front. That’s why they’re printing money. And you know they may actually catch up to Google’s money printing machine.

Leo: Google had a very strong quarter, a surprisingly strong quarter.

Jason: They’re just, Google and Facebook are just everything in advertising. And there’s a couple of wonky things that are occurring. One of them is retargeting which I think that everybody knows. If you go to one site, you search for something on Amazon, you see that ad forever.

Leo: Like your friend that searched for bikinis.

Jason: He searched bikini, he’s bikini all over the world, all over the internet. The next piece is, there’s a level of targeting that people don’t understand.

Leo: Why do I keep getting belly fat ads then?

Jason: Stop searching for donuts, Leo.

Leo: (laughing) what have I done?

Jason: Maple bacon donuts. Stop Googling maple bacon donuts. No, but what’s really interesting though—

Leo: (Laughing) you’re probably right.

Jason: I see this in some of my startups. They’re doing multi-layered, multi-staged retargeting. So let me just explain what this is to a civilian. Ok, you know when you do a Google search, or a Facebook—you see those Facebook ads all over the web. It’s retargeting. Now, let’s say you click through on the maple bacon donut and you go to the Dunkin Donuts website. Now they know you visited the Dunkin Donuts website. They’ve targeted you a second time. Then you’re—

Leo: I’m building them a whole profile.

Jason: It’s unbelievable. So what happens is—

Leo: I’m never going to stop getting belly fat ads.

Jason: People like, you have Casper as one of the sponsors of the show.

Leo: Mattresses, yea.

Jason: Mattresses. Let’s say the better example of Casper with retargeting. You go to Casper one time. And you picked one and you said, “Oh, let me click on the king sized bed.” Now the next time you’re on Facebook or on another website, it puts you in the 2nd bucket in the funnel which is you clicked on king size. It says, “Hey would you like to close your purchase for the king size or would you like to send us something about your king size.” Then if you’re out shopping—

Leo: You know how creepy people feel? This is why people hate tracking. They think it’s creepy.

Jason: It’s unbelievable. And what’s happening is the advertising on the internet went from being oh, I put an ad up on the internet and 100% of people saw it on this website. Now it’s like oh, no, no, no, just this group of people. People who went to Casper and put this in the—and I don’t know if Casper’s doing this, but all the major companies are.

Leo: Everybody’s doing it.

Jason: You put it in your shopping cart. Now you’re part of that group. Now the interesting thing that happens is something called similar audiences. So now they say, “Ok, Jason and Leo both have a Model X. They both visit the Tesla site. They both visited this. They both did this Google search. Now can we find other people like Jason and Leo who also own Teslas, who also live in Northern California?” And that’s where advertising is going super nova. And that’s why they’re printing money over at Facebook because it’s similar audiences. So I can take a list—

Leo: Does Google not have this? Because Google must have this too.

Jason: Google has it too. So what happens is you upload a—if I upload a thousand emails of people who own Teslas to Facebook or Google, it will find other people who are similar and are likely to own one. So all these marketers are uploading their mailing lists, your email—

Leo: And matching it.

Jason: They hash it. They match it. They find other similar people. So this idea of wasted advertising dollars is going away.

Leo: That’s both good and bad. If you’re a television network, you know the old saw was, “I know half of my ad dollars is wasted, I just don’t know which half.” You’re really living in ignorance. When Ford buys a million-dollar campaign or a ten-million- dollar campaign on NBC, they don’t know. They do research but that’s after the fact and I’ll be honest with you, most podcast advertising is direct response because at least that’ some idea that it’s working. That’s why we always, you know, it’s twit.tv/casper or whatever it is. But it’s still not a perfect science compared to what you just described.

Jason: Yea, I mean—

Leo: Should I be worried? I’m never going to give that kind of information out.

Jason: No, they’re totally going to work it. They’re still be influencer marketing and they’re still be branding but this—

Leo: But it’s going to be a fraction though of the big bucks.

Jason: It will be blended but the point is Google and Facebook are going to have so much money based on this that they’re going to be able to do all these crazy moon shots.

Leo: They had a very big quarter in mobile and that’s of course critical to transition from desktop to mobile since everybody’s using mobile these days. Alphabet stock took a big jump thanks to it. The market was very happy. Facebook also said its 2nd quarter profit tripled year over year, $2.1 billion dollars in profit beating Wall Street. Again, mobile. 84% of Facebook’s profit of its advertising sales, 84% was on mobile. So when Facebook went public, that was the big question mark. Can they transition to mobile? And a lot of people didn’t buy Facebook stock thinking, “You know, they can never make this transition. They’ve never shown any ability to do it.” Well they have clearly shown it.

Jason: That was the big mistake I made with Facebook was, and a lot of companies, was you know you look at the product they currently have and you say that won’t work. And you might be right but then you have a team that figures it out.

Leo: Don’t underestimate Mark Zuckerberg.

Jason: I did.

Leo: When you buy stock in Facebook, you are buying stock in Mark.

Jason: 100%. And the same thing, this is why people underestimated Tesla too. It’s like Elon Musk is just such a machine at—he sets the goal so high that even if he misses the goal by 10%, he’s still outpaced Volvo by 1000x.

Leo: You’d think you’d know that because every VC says you’re investing in the team, not the idea, right?

Jason: It just takes time to like actually have these lessons change your behavior. It’s very hard to fold aces. Even if the board comes out with three hearts.

Mike: Back to Facebook, though, and Google, the other thing that is interesting and it’s hard to even remember now, not only was it a question as to whether Facebook could really make an impact on mobile, it was a question whether mobile could actually become a viable form of lucrative advertising. And of course that is clear now. And the other factor that both Facebook and Google are emphasizing strongly, both about current performance and the future is the power of video and video advertising. And so video’s so huge I can’t wait until Google comes out with its mobile live streaming feature which now I think only 5 people can use it. But essentially Facebook Live for YouTube on a mobile device. That’s going to be huge. I can’t, I’m just curious to see how live streaming video is going to, first of all, how are they going to handle it and also how are they going to monetize it because that’s going to be the question.

Leo: Clearly all these companies, YouTube and Facebook and Twitter, think this is the next big thing. They’re all investing heavily in it. This is an interesting graph, the revenue—so 64% of Google’s revenue is mobile. Ad revenue made up $19 billion dollars of its revenue, $2.2 billion dollars from other Google revenue. I don’t know why there would be other, maybe, I don’t know.

Jason: It would be the App Store and it would be Google Docs and people paying for those.

Leo: Apps. And then the Bets, the moonshots, $0.2 billion.

Jason: Yea, they’re not going to make anything off that. That’s like Nest I think and other stuff in there.

Leo: Yea. Although they were happy in their annual report, they were happy with Nest’s performance, right?

Jason: I think they’re probably happy because they got Tony Fidel out. He was a bit of a disaster there and his inability to manage people was just legendary. And back to Mike’s piece about the dog food being unavailable and the dogs being hungry, remember the Nest was turning off and then people were waking up and it was like freezing cold.

Leo: They broke it.

Jason: And so as the stakes go up, people need to change their behavior. If you’re running a lab for blood and this is a good pickup from a conversation we had months ago, remember we were saying, “Hey this feels like a complete fraud. This feels like this is going to be a disaster.” And here we are 6 months later after we had that original conversation and she’s been banned for 2 years.

Leo: Yea, what was it, the CDC, the FDA? One of the health, government health organizations. They can’t do tests anymore.

Jason: It’s a humorless group. They’re there to protect people. It is not a joke with them.

Leo: We don’t appreciate—

Mike: But HBO isn’t humorless and they became a punchline very quickly on Silicon Valley.

Leo: (Laughing).

Jason: You caught that.

Leo: No, tell me.

Mike: They committed—they accidentally, not accidentally but one of the people on the startup team on Silicon Valley got a user farm to fake users.

Leo: Oh, that’s right, that’s right.

Mike: And the founder, the CEO, Richards was like, “Well it’s not like we’re Theranos. We’re not that bad.”

Leo: Did they actually say that out loud (laughing)?

Jason: Pulling a Theranos is like you know, if you Theranos it, it basically means like you’ve really F-ed up.

Leo: Has she gone to jail?

Jason: You know, honestly—

Leo: They’re investigating, right?

Jason: Yea. I mean.

Leo: She’s been punished enough.

Jason: No.

Leo: No?

Jason: I disagree 100%. The level of denial and attacking the press over this was deranged.

Leo: Do you blame her? Do you blame Elizabeth Holmes?

Jason: 100%, 100%. I mean all this leadership stuff starts at the top. Every organization has a leader. She’s the leader and she created this culture of secrecy and this culture of lying and deception.

Leo: But she wore black turtlenecks.

Jason: It’s deranged. You know it’s so deranged that they’re making a movie about it and the story’s not even finished. You know just think about it. Just let that sit in. Hollywood’s like, “My God.”

Leo: Same guy that did Spotlight, right?

Jason: I think that might be right, yea. It was a great film.

Leo: Yea.

Jason: Yea, anyway. Deranged.

Leo: Deranged.

Jason: Is the word I would use.

Leo: Well I often do wonder when you see these kind of—like the Bernie Madoff’s of the world, and I think she’ probably in that category at this point, is what’s motivating them? Don’t they know they will get caught eventually? Is it self-destructive? Is it, you know what’s going on in their heads? I always wonder. How does somebody become evil? Nobody thinks they’re evil, right? Everyone thinks they’re justified, that they’re doing the right thing. I think.

Mike: Says the guy sitting in the Dr. Evil chair.

Leo: (Laughing) We’re all good people, aren’t we (evil laugh)?

Mike: Yea, there are clues, Leo.

Jason: My gut tells me like you start cutting corners and then you get caught in a trap. And then the lie gets bigger and bigger.

Leo: It’s the Breaking Bad story where you’re an innocent high school science teacher and then it all goes to hell.

Jason: Or as somebody said in the chatroom, sociopaths do not think like we do. They look at the world transactionally. They look at people transactionally. They don’t think of the fallout of their behaviors.

Leo: I would submit though if they’re really, truly looking transactionally, they would make the calculus that this is going to be hard to get away with at some point. I can’t do this forever.

Jason: How long did Bernie Madoff, how many decades?

Leo: A long time.

Mike: Sometimes I think it’s kind of like a gambling addiction or something like that.

Leo: It’s addictive.

Mike: I think that a lot of the people with addictions that never end well are able to delude themselves and just go for the next—

Leo: How’s the poker career going, by the way?

Jason: It’s, uh—

Leo: (Laughing).

Jason: I am doing so well this year I literally—

Leo: You can’t lose, can you?

Jason: I had two years where I just got demolished and then this year I’m literally crushing it.

Leo: Well that’s what happens. You were learning how to play, right? That was your investment.

Jason: Yea, yea. You learn and it’s one of those costly things. But what I’ve learned about gambling is like there are people who gamble because of the chemical experience, like the ups and the downs. And I think they get as much release from being down and then catching back up and getting to even as they do going up. There’s a group of people who should not gamble. Let’s just leave it that way. And then you know what? I think some people don’t gamble enough. Like think about people who are so conservative with their wealth and they don’t actually make any bets, that’s where I think back to the crowdfunding, you know, the average consumer, how many people here used Facebook, LinkedIn or Uber in the first year? How many people used any of those services? 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, like half the audience used one of those 3 services. How many people knew that that service was going to be a hit? Like 1 of them did. So if one of those 5 people had made that bet, they would be worth $100 million dollars right now, or $10 million dollars right now.

Leo: If they had the money to make that bet, too.

Jason: Well if they made $1,000-dollar bet, they had the money, right? And that’s the Title 3 will allow them to do. So I think there’s a lot of people out there that can look at a product and—

Leo: But 99 times out of 100, you’re wrong.

Jason: Right but then the slight odds if you get paid back $5,000 makes that worth doing.

Leo: Incidentally, tomorrow, Elizabeth Holmes will be in the news because she’s going against the advice of her lawyer and actually presenting at a major medical conference. She is going to—by the way, Jennifer Lawrence will be playing her in that movie which I think is perfect casting. And this will be definitely, the writers will be watching with great interest. She’ll be presenting Theranos’ technology at this even tomorrow.

Jason: Yea, she said she was going to do this in August. So she’s living up to it.

Leo: Under fire from all sides, Holmes finally accepted the invitation from the American Association for Clinical Chemistry to present at this years’ conference tomorrow in Philadelphia.

Jason: Maybe she’s got the goods. Maybe the world doesn’t understand her.

Leo: Or, and see this is my question, she believes right? Maybe she believes. Maybe she thinks she can get away with it? Former assistant US attorney in the Bay area, Eric Havian says, “Two things come to mind. She is absolutely convinced that she has nothing to worry about. And she’s ignoring the advice of her lawyer.”

Mike: Good thinking.

Leo: Well, we’ll see. It’s going to be interesting. It’s going to be a good movie, let’s put it that way. So it’s not, if Jennifer Lawrence is playing in it, it’s not the Spotlight people. Let me see. I’m going to find this because I don’t want to misrepresent this. It’s Adam McKay. He didn’t do Spotlight. He did The Big Short.

Jason: The Big Short, yea.

Leo: It’s The Big Short people.

Jason: It would be really interesting if she comes out and she has this brilliant piece of technology that’s just failed for three years and gave bad results. But suddenly, in the last 30 days, she fixed it and it’s working perfectly and so sorry about the wrong lab results for the past years. Sorry about that but I figure it out and it’s going to change the world. I mean—

Leo: By the way, she was on the Forbes list with a net worth of $4.5 billion. Forbes now estimates her worth zero. Elizabeth Holmes, not Jennifer Lawrence.

Jason: I’m going to have to agree that Jennifer Lawrence is worth more than Elizabeth Holmes.

Leo: (Laughing) I think at this point. Google says that they reason they did so well this quarter, better than anybody expected, is their reaping the rewards from the shift to mobile because companies are increasingly willing to advertise on smartphones. So they found the gold. They found the gold.

Jason: Slowly but surely, they’re figuring out mobile.

Leo: 19% growth in advertising revenues.

Jason: Snapchat’s going to be a big part of the story over the next couple of years and I think it’s a company that’s not going to sell. They’re going to go public next year I think.

Leo: But you know who’s not? Twitter. Twitter is having trouble monetizing.

Jason: That’s a disaster. They’ve done ok in monetization wise. They’re not growing. So if you’re not growing, and you’ve maxed out, you’ve made a decent amount of money, they basically have squeezed—they put the throttle has hard, they turned the lever as hard as they can to get revenue. They haven’t figured out how to grow the user base and the trolling and the banning of the right-wing crazy people and the trolling going on and so celebrities being upset about people trolling them. The whole thing is sort of devolving and I think Jack’s the wrong leader right now because he’s a very left, like not even keeled leader in terms of that regard. So I think they need to get rid of Jack at this point and get somebody in there who can run it as a platform. Because picking who gets to have what speech is a huge mistake. A huge mistake because once you pick a side—

Leo: Yea, banning Nero in other words. You’re talking about banning Nero.

Jason: Well, they banned a bunch of people and they’re just arbitrating. I’m not saying I support Milo at all, I mean I don’t. And I don’t support any people attacking people or being violent towards people or that stuff.

Leo: But banning him is a mistake because—

Jason: Well here’s the thing.

Leo: It puts, it makes them an arbiter.

Jason: They’re making them the arbiter. So if he makes fun of somebody’s grammar or tells them they have a terrible movie and he attacks a celebrity, you know what? That’s freedom of speech. Go for it. It’s fine. The problem is they’re claiming that—

Leo: Even if it’s racist?

Jason: The terms of service should not allow for racism and hate speech. But then again you have on the other side, and this is where once you start getting into speech, you have a big problem. Because now it’s open to interpretation. So then if—

Leo: Interpretation is difficult.

Jason: Chris Rock makes a joke about you know—

Leo: About white people.

Jason: About white people--

Leo: Now that’s racist?

Jason: Right. So now we’ve got to go through all of this racist—

Leo: So should they not edit anything?

Jason: If they were a platform and they said—

Leo: Everything goes. We’re not going to block anything.

Jason: You have to go one way or the other. Either you have to say, “We’re not going to block stuff. We’re not going to interpret speech. If you have a problem with the terms of service, we’re going to go to law enforcement if you’re being harassed.”

Leo: Yea, yea, if you’re committing a crime, that’s different.

Jason: But hate speech is hate speech. The problem is he is trolling somebody and they banned him from trolling. And then it’s an anonymous platform. So the second you start doing this arbitration, then everybody watches a thousand new accounts, the thousand new accounts then start trolling the person 10 times harder.

Leo: Right, it’s worse.

Jason: It’s worse. What they have to do is move to real names. And—

Leo: That solves it, by the way.

Jason: That solves it because if you look—

Leo: That’s how Google + solved it and Facebook.

Jason: Right. When you’re—

Mike: But then Google + backed off on it, so.

Leo: Yea but it was too late. It was too late. And by the way, aren’t you noticing a resurgence of spam and other problems on Google + as that policy went away?

Mike: Absolutely.

Leo: But, ok, I’m of the same opinion that anonymity is what breeds this. And yet, everybody says, and I guess I agree, you do need a place for whistle blowing, anonymous conversation. Where do you put that?

Jason: Yea, I mean that’s why the world wide web exists and anybody can put up a website at anytime.

Leo: Right, that’s always going to be anonymous.

Jason: And that’s always going to be there. So on these other services that involve human beings, if you opt into Reddit, Reddit allows for anonymity. There are going to be some ugly moments. Reddit has done an exceptional job of shutting down all of these really abhorrent sub Reddits. I don’t know if you notice, but we don’t hear about the horrible sub Reddits as much, right? Because they’ve actually starting policing it. But it’s a whack-a-mole situation. If Twitter just said, “We’re going real names. Here is the path to—“ and remember I said they’re going to open up verification? They opened up verification. So now verification is going to be a process that anybody can go through. I think they’re doing exactly what I said they should do a few years ago, which is verify everyone.

Mike: But we don’t know if they grant verification.

Jason: What’s that?

Mike: We don’t know if they grant verification. I agree, essentially verification should be not a badge for celebrities, but it should be a voluntary real names policy.

Leo: And that’s what they’re doing now.

Jason: Yea, they’re doing a real names policy.

Mike: Are they?

Leo: Yea, if you send them—

Mike: Are they giving it to everyone that applies?

Leo: That’s what they’re saying. They’re saying, and there are, you know you have to prove you are. But they’re going to give everybody the blue check mark as long as you request it and provide identification. And then what you can do I guess is you can only look at verified Twitter, right?

Jason: That’s what I said 2 years ago was listen, you have to pick. Either be a verified service like Facebook or not. If you want to go verified, let everybody get verified and you can either put a way to get to the front of the line, so you can pay $10 bucks to get to the front of the line, get verified and then everybody else will be slowly verified and then you can rat out people who are fake accounts. And if the account is fake and we can’t find the real name of the person, they get put in the non-verified bucket. When you join the service the default is either verified Twitter or Wild West Twitter.

Leo: Twitter announced this a couple of weeks ago, an online application process for Twitter accounts to receive verification status. Verified accounts, blah, blah, blah. Our goal is—

Mike: I know about that but I don’t think they changed the, they still are looking for, you have to have a good reason for—

Leo: You have to be a creator, an influencer. You can’t just be a man on the street.

Jason: For now.

Mike: Exactly.

Jason: But the fact that they opened this up is phase one. Phase two will be everybody.

Mike: But you say that, Jason. Have they said that it’s just for now? Have they said, “We’re going to upen this up to everybody who can verify themselves?”

Jason: I’m telling you that they’re going to do it.

Mike: Ok.

Leo: And then what? Does that make, Mike, does that make you feel better about Twitter?

Mike: It would make me feel better about Twitter, absolutely and I think—so a bunch of things about Twitter. So first of all I think that would help a lot. I also think as I’ve said on other TWiT shows like TWiG, I really think they need a way for you to delete other people’s tweets and for the blocking to me more meaningful. And again, you can do that a lot better if you have real names.

Leo: Instagram just added that capability, to comments on Instagram. You can now—

Jason: Yea, the spam on Instagram is out of control.

Leo: You can mediate it a little bit better. You can always delete a comment.

Jason: You can turn off comments just like you can on YouTube.

Leo: You can turn off comments.

Jason: Which is what celebrities will do because people are going into celebrities—

Leo: Oh, it’s terrible. I see, you know when Beyoncé posts it ends up being all spam, right? It’s just, yea.

Jason: It’s a disaster.

Leo: So you, it says, this is what Twitter’s saying for today. We approve account types maintained by accounts of public interest. That is music, acting, fashion, government, politics, religion, journalism, media, sports, business and other key interest areas. So you need to have an account of public interest. And then you—

Jason: It will be everybody.

Leo: I guess they’re—

Mike: Why do you say it will be everybody, Jason? What’s the evidence for that?

Jason: Inside information.

Mike: Ok, great.

Leo: This is the plan.

Jason: I mean, listen. I have a lot of inside information.

Leo: Are you an investor in Twitter?

Jason: No, I’m not. I predicted this or I talked about it a year ago that they’re going to open it up to everybody. Of course I had inside information. And I have inside information that they’re going to open it up—that they would create a process and I have information that they do.

Mike: Well that’s fantastic. It’s like Christmas.

Leo: Merry Christmas, Mike! It’s Christmas in July.

Jason: You’re a journalist. You’ll get it immediately. But—

Leo: Are you verified on Twitter, Mike?

Mike: Yea, I just recently under the new plan. I’ve been trying to get verified for a long time. And then it’s like talking to the wall. And as soon as they opened this up I applied. They granted it immediately. And speaking of Twitter, I guess very quickly want to give a shout out to Noble Ackerson. He’s in the studio there and he’s a friend of mine.

Leo: Hey, Noble?

Mike: Awesome. He’s like the biggest and best Glasshole there is. He’s still a big Glass user.

Leo: He’s not wearing Glass right now, are you? No, Noble’s not wearing Glass. Why not? What kind of Glasshole are you?

Noble Ackerson: It’s in the car.

Leo: It’s in the car.

Jason: He’ll be a Magic Leaper soon. A Magic Leaper soon.

Leo: I’m hearing some good things about Magic Leap. You know we’ve actually mentioned this before that Kevin Kelly’s kind of glowing article that really talked about the technology. But now people are starting to see it. And starting to say, “Oh, there is something going on here.”

Jason: I used the HoloLens. I was pretty impressed by that. I was more impressed than I thought it would be. It’s a narrow field of view but walking around and seeing objects in the real world—

Leo: I think augmented reality is exciting.

Jason: It’s super exciting.

Leo: Pokémon Go gives people a taste. We just had on The New Screen Savers yesterday, a new game called something, what was it? Father.io that is basically laser tag with augmented reality. You add a little laser tag receiver to your phone and you can run around shooting at people and—

Jason: Well imagine just looking out at this audience here, if I could look out and see all the—

Leo: If I could see their names. I could see that was Noble. Look who’s in the studio?

Jason: But imagine if I saw which Facebook friends we had in common or the last time we interacted.

Leo: Wouldn’t that be cool? What about stalking? Are you worried about that?

Jason: If you’re worried about stalking at this point, you have not been paying attention.

Leo: You’re not on Twitter (laughing).

Jason: I mean look, again, back to the real world and legal stuff like it turns out there’s a small number of bad actors in the world. It might be a finite number of people and because technology changes and the world changes it doesn’t mean that a bunch of people are going to go commit crimes. They created these checkout, self-checkout at the Home Depot.

Leo: Yea, so you can just walk out the door.

Jason: You could just walk out the door, yet people don’t, right? Because most people are honest.

Leo: People are honest.

Jason: Most people are honest. So the fact is , people can rob stuff. They don’t because you know, they’re generally good people.

Leo: You know who won’t be robbing a 7-11 anytime soon? Mark Zuckerberg. I told you I wouldn’t care about stock prices but this you’ve got to care about. His stock price went up so much, he gained $3.4 billion dollars in one hour.

Jason: He committed to giving all his money away, so.

Leo: He’s going to give it all away.

Jason: I give him a lot of credit.

Leo: He’s now worth $56.7 billion dollars according to Forbes. He’s the 5th richest person in the world right behind Jeff Bezos who’s worth $64 billion and a guy named Jason Calacanis.

Jason: Who’s worth nowhere near that. Trust me, if I was worth that, I would own the New York Knicks right now.

Leo: And I’d be sitting here for a little hand out, just a little bit.

Jason: Absolutely.

Leo: $10 million, just a little bit. What do you call that?

Jason: Get your beak wet.

Leo: Get my beak wet. Get your beak wet.

Jason: What, I can’t get my beak wet?

Leo: (Laughing) Is that what they say? When you get together? Oh, yea.

Jason: If you can’t get in on a deal, I’m like, “Can I get my beak wet here? What’s going on?”

Leo: Come on. What’s going on? Wha?

Jason: Let’s sell something.

Leo: Let’s sell some TrackRs. Look at these. Aren’t these cool?

Jason: What is that?

Leo: These are TrackRs. You know about the TrackR?

Jason: I don’t know anything about it.

Leo: These are the new TrackRs. TrackR is of course a great little coin sized device you put on your keys, your wallet, your computer. They have a waterproof cover. You can put it on your pet. And it will pair to your iOS or Android device using Bluetooth LE so it doesn’t kill the battery. This goes a year.

Jason: Oh, I know this.

Leo: Yea. And two way separation. So if you leave your keys behind, your phone notifies you. If you leave your phone behind, then you press the button on your tracker, your phone starts screaming, even if it’s silenced. A million and a half devices out there right now. That’s the Leo Laporte TrackR.

Jason: I like that, with your photo.

Leo: Yea, I guess—I don’t know, they just sent these to us. I don’t know. It’s a little strange. Here’s a TWiT TrackR. Your phone can track up to 10 devices at once. So get a bunch of them. But the crowdsource, this is really brilliant because obviously, Bluetooth only goes about 100 feet, right, so once you get 100 feet away, you don’t get updates. But everybody who has TrackRs and the TrackR software is always looking for TrackRs out in the world so if somebody walks by your keys their phone—there’s how many TrackRs there are. Their phone will notify you.

Jason: You know what I want to do with this?

Leo: Oh, I saw your keys. It’s on the beach.

Jason: Forget about my keys. I have the greatest idea.

Leo: What should you put it on.

Jason: I’m going to buy 10 of these. I’m going to put them in my luggage.

Leo: Oh, yea, brilliant.

Jason: So I put it in my backpack luggage. If it ever goes missing—

Leo: The people will let you know.

Jason: I can go find it.

Leo: And you’ll get an alert on your phone.

Mike: (Garbled talk – technical difficulties).

Leo: I gave you one.

Mike: I put it in my backpack and it’s been fantastic. Unfortunately my backpack hasn’t been stolen yet.

Leo: (Laughing). The proof of concept. We’re waiting for the proof of concept. Just remember when you’re in Marseilles, you don’t want to do the Apache dance.

Mike: I do not.

Leo: Let the Marseilles police, the Gendarmerie will track down your TrackR. They also just introduced something new. I like this, called TrackR Atlas. So you might say, “Oh, I know my keys are in the house, but where?” The TrackR Atlas lets you pinpoint your items on a customizable floor plan of your house. And it doesn’t just work with TrackR it works with all of these Bluetooth tracker devices, so.

Jason: It’s genius.

Leo: Genius.

Jason: I was just, I left my iPad in a hotel and I literally had find my iPhone and I actually saw—I turned it on and I saw it move. And I called security. And they said, “Yea, we have it. We’re going to send it to you.” And so this lets you do it for everything, right, not just your iPad or iPhone you can do it for every device.

Leo: Think of it that way. It’s like Find Your iPhone on everything, right?

Jason: Right. It’s amazing.

Leo: Go to Trackr.com you’ll never lose your possessions again.

Jason: There’s no monthly fee, right?

Leo: No fee.

Jason: You just buy.

Leo: You just buy it. And you can get 30% off your order, your entire order. Order 10 when you use the offer code TWIT. Thetrackr.com the hardest thing to find is actually the website because they spell it funny. T-H-E-T-R-A-C-K-R.com.

Jason: The TrackR without the E.

Leo: Without the E at the end.

Jason: Like Flickr. No E.

Leo: Yea, like Flickr.

Jason: The TrackR.

Leo: .com promo code TWIT for 30% off and I don’t know. I think you can get customized TrackRs like this.

Mike: Yea, you can. You can.

Jason: It’s genius. It’s good for kids and kids’ stuff.

Mike: If you have a teenager who’s trying to find themselves, it’s a great way for them to do that as well.

Leo: I lost it. I have to get it. Excuse me. I’m not hitting on you, I just dropped it.

Jason: Wow. Don’t stop.

Leo: (Laughing) There we go. Hey let’s take a little break for a commercial here. It’s not really a commercial, it’s a promo. It’s a house ad. It is a little summary of some of the things you might have missed if you missed a minute this week on TWiT.

Narrator: Previously on TWiT.

Leo: We already got the newest augmented reality game. It’s laser tag only you’re looking at real people, shooting at real people with your camera phone. Who’s shooting at me? Ah!

Narrator: Home Theater Geeks.

Scott Wilkinson: This weeks’ guest geeks are Scott Wilker, founder and CEO of a company called Sonic Blocks.

Scott Wilker: Well we started with was this modular concept where we would separate all the essential parts and pieces. And we designed this exoskeleton that you could also pop onto it. And every face of that cube has a place where you can decide what type of drivers you want in the system. Users and consumer can have a very long life of technology available to them that doesn’t go obsolete.

Narrator: Tech News Today.

Jason Howell: If you hate picking up dog poop, there’s an app for that. An app called Pooper for iOS is for those dog owners too lazy to pick up Trixie’s mess in the park. Think of it as the Uber for doggie poopers.

Narrator: TWiT. Tech just like you like it.

Megan Morrone: You know, it’s not actually that big of a deal. You take a plastic bag, you mmm and yea. You’re done. Just throw it over your shoulder.

Leo: (Laughing).

Jason: I knew that was fake.

Mike: It turned out to be a hoax actually.

Leo: Is it a hoax?

Jason: It had to be a hoax.

Mike: Yea, it was a hoax.

Jason: Because it is illegal to leave poop.

Mike: Actually through the last minute of the run down, there is a company that’s trying to make a statement about the ridiculousness of the app and the economy or something like that, the human condition. Something like that. It was hilarious.

Leo: Pooper.io

Jason: I have to say, one of the really interesting things, speaking of poop—

Leo: (Laughing) Yes?

Jason: Is we had a poop controversy in Pac Heights. So my neighbor was like, “Jason your bulldogs are leaving poop outside of my house.”

Leo: Uh oh. I’d be mad.

Jason: I was like, “No, I walk my dogs myself and my wife walks the dogs and we have a cleaning lady. Sometimes she walks the dogs.” I’m like that’s not possible but I said to this person, I’m like, “Ok, I’m going to set up a camera and you know, I was just going to turn the Dropcam on the street, right? It would be like ok, because listen there are a thousand dogs walking around.

Leo: Yea, yea. It was some homeless guy, wasn’t it?

Jason: Exactly this is San Francisco. And so she’s like, “Buy me a Dropcam.” And I’m like, “I’m not buying you a Dropcam. Nice try.”

Leo: What? What? She asked you to buy her a—

Jason: She’s like, “No, I need to have the Dropcam because I need to have the video footage.” And I’m like, “Listen. Calm down.”

Leo: If it’s my dog, I will buy you a Dropcam.

Jason: She’s like, “Oh, there’s residue.” She goes, “Oh, there’s poop outside.” I said, “Ok, what happened?” So then I look at it, and it turns out, because no dog had pooped, but a dog had pooped outside of her house. The person cleaned it up. But there was residue of the poop. In other words, 95% was cleaned up. And we had this issue.

Leo: It was residue. The residual problem.

Jason: I will tell you something very interesting happening with Ring.com which I’m not an investor in unfortunately. I passed on investing on them.

Leo: And they are a sponsor we should mention.

Jason: Ring.com realized that like 95—I passed on investing in this company like an idiot.

Leo: You did? You actually did?

Jason: And you know, Jamie Siminoff’s a friend of mine and I made the classic error of, I didn’t think it through. And I should have just bet on Jaime. That’s like a million-dollar mistake probably. But anyway, what the Ring community is doing is, because people are stealing packages now, because of all the on demand deliveries.

Leo: UPS will not leave a package on my stoop because our neighborhood, they’re getting a lot of robberies.

Jason: Now if you get Ring, what’s happening is Ring plus Nextdoor equals no crime.

Leo: Yep.

Jason: So what’s happening is people are putting Rings which are like $200 bucks, I just ordered one, and it has a full view of your door. People ring it, you pick up the phone and you go, “Oh, hey, yea, just leave the package there.” But if somebody steals it, then you can easily upload it and I don’t know if you use Nextdoor but it’s like a local Facebook for communities.

Leo: Oh, that’s a good idea.

Jason: They’re all sharing the videos of stolen stuff. So in Pac Heights, somebody was stealing stuff, two different people caught the same person doing it in like the same week.

Leo: Busted.

Jason: Busted. Everybody gives and then the police deparment—

Leo: And the amazing thing is, it was one of his bulldogs.

Jason: It was my bulldog.

Leo: So full circle.

Jason: And he dropped a deuce after stealing the package.

Leo: Gave me a link, Nextdoor, discover your neighborhood. This is Facebook for your neighborhood.

Jason: He’s a very vindictive bulldog.

Leo: Someone gave me a link of you calling out Mark Zuckerberg for supporting Trump. Is that a YouTube video? Do you know about that?

Jason: Me?

Leo: Yea.

Jason: Well what I said was, I didn’t say that I was supporting him, I wasn’t coming out against him.

Leo: He wasn’t not supporting him.

Jason: Here’s the thing.

Leo: But he can’t. He needs to maintain objectivity because now he’s a media guy, not a social network guy.

Jason: But here’s the point. I think that you have to address—forget about picking a side. If you’re Zuckerberg and you have a position on immigration and another person picks the polar opposite position.

Leo: Then you’d be reasonable to say, “Well, he doesn’t share my opinion.”

Jason: Just as Americans I believe we should talk about issues and we should debate issues. That’s what makes—

Leo: They say we should build bridges, not fences. He said that was clearly targeted at Trump.

Jason: I think it was, yes. But then you have the—he really fought for immigration and the H-1B Visas and all this kind of stuff. You have to consistently discuss what people’s ideas are. And that’s what makes our democracy great is the debate of ideas and you know what? We’ve lost that. And we’ve become polarized about Hilary’s a crook, you know Trump is a racist. Those are—

Leo: I blame, by the way, Twitter for this. Because everything has to be 140 characters. And I feel like Twitter is driving this election in a way that is very scary to me because I don’t think, I think 140 characters is—

Jason: Oh, I think Trump has mastered Twitter.

Leo: He has mastered Twitter.

Jason: He knows exactly how to troll people.

Mike: One problem with that idea though Jason is that Mark Zuckerberg is like 100 William Randolph Hearsts. He’s got so much power to influence public opinion, nobody in the history of mankind has ever had, what is it, 1.67 billion sets of eyeballs at his disposal. So I kind of don’t like the idea of him weighing in with his personal opinions on Facebook in any sort of major way.

Jason: Well here’s the thing. I’m not saying he should remove Trump from everybody’s feed and use his power as the arbiter of the 1.7 billion people.

Leo: He would be wrong to do that.

Jason: He should not tilt it. What he should do is he can come out as an individual and say—

Leo: Mark Cuban just did that, surprisingly. I think a lot of people were surprised Mark—

Jason: We all just have to say, listen, if your position is all Muslims should be banned from the country, let’s talk about that idea. Ok, that is obviously a crazy bad idea. Now if you want to talk about, hey, people coming from this region that has the largest number of terrorists, we’re going to give them extra screening because they’re in a terrorist hotbed-

Leo: By the way, that’s what Trump has said now is his policy.

Jason: Right. But so this shows you what a master troll he is. He basically said the most vitriolic, outrageous things--

Leo: (Laughing) outrageous things.

Jason: First, got all the attention in the cycle. Beat out Cruise and all these other idiots. And then he know is coming back down towards the middle and trying to say intelligent things. I mean it may wind up being—

Leo: You think he’s going to win.

Jason: I’m pretty—I tell you why I think he’s going to win. I think he’s going to win because there’s so many people who’ve been ground down and feeling no hope that voting for Hillary Clinton feels like you preserving—

Leo: More of the same. More of the same.

Jason: We’re preserving state.

Leo: It’s a 3rd term for Obama.

Jason: We’re preserving the state where I have been screwed. Whereas with Trump, maybe, maybe—he’s crazy, but maybe he’s crazy enough to make it better for me.

Leo: And it can’t get worse.

Jason: It can’t get worse. If all these people are getting private jets and becoming billionaires and adding $3 billion dollars in an afternoon to their net worth, and we’re unwilling to raise-- and we’re fighting against the raising of the minimum wage. We’re fighting against 2 more years of college. We’re fighting against universal healthcare. You know what? F you all. I’m going to burn it down. And I don’t think people are unreasonable in that. We have ground the middle class down too much. We have ground poor people down too much. And we could very easily make life a lot easier and reduce suffering for a large number of people based on the prosperity this country has and we, the tax laws and how we distribute wealth, I’m not into wholesale redistribution. I’m not into universal income necessarily, but I do think things like raising the minimum wage and giving people an extra two years of college, you know it’s not that big of a deal on an economic basis. We have to give people hope that they can move up in the world. And people don’t have the American Dream that they used to.

Mike: The problem is, well, we’re getting political again. But—

Leo: It’s hard not to. This is the conversation of the country.

Jason: We’re a hundred days out.

Leo: A hundred days is going to be a long hundred days by the way.

Jason: Oof. It’s been a long past hundred. What were you going to say, Mike?

Mike: I do agree with you that I think Zuckerberg should do a post on his Facebook profile like everybody else and that would be great. That’d be absolutely great.

Leo: It’s an interesting question because you know, there’s two kinds of schools of thought. In the traditional school of thought is that journalists should raise above—and I’m going to put Zuckerberg in this category because Facebook has moved from being the social network to the social media. But that journalists should keep themselves above the fray and not declare for a candidate and feign objectivity. The other school of thought is but they aren’t objective and they have an opinion. So not to disclose is to in effect dissemble, to pretend that you’re being objective when in fact you can’t be who you are. So you’re clearly of the 2nd school of thought.

Jason: I just think we need to have a debate about ideas. You know and if you’re a journalist—

Leo: I don’t think it’s Mark’s job to foster that debate, is it?

Jason: I think as leaders—

Leo: Is he a leader?

Jason: For sure he’s a leader. You know what, at this point, what’s at stake is so high I think everybody has to come out, every American and discuss the ideas. And we have to start thinking what ideas do we want to pursue. What strategies do we want to pursue as a country because the world is changing very quickly?

Leo: Isn’t he going to do what his fiduciary responsibility is which is to maximize the benefits?

Jason: Which that is what he’s doing.

Leo: He’s doing what maximizes the benefit of the stakeholders.

Jason: That’s what he’s doing.

Leo: And that’s why we should shut the hell up.

Jason: He had Glenn Beck over and he’s like “I’m going to have Glenn Beck over and Glenn Beck’s going to come over for the rightwing summit.”

Leo: His job is to be, his job is to be above the fray. You’re asking him to do something that maybe is not within his interest.

Jason: Well I think he should—

Leo: For a moral reason I guess.

Jason: Well no, I think that the immigration issue specifically does relate to his business because of importing talent to the country.

Leo: I think actually Clinton has come out against H-1B as well. She’s a little concerned about that. I mean I think what people look at is what Disney did for instance which is replace all of its in-house IT people with H-1B importees and have them train their replacement on the way out the door. And that’s happening an awful lot. They are getting misused.

Jason: There are abuses of all systems and then you have to decide if—

Leo: Companies like We Pro using this, manipulating this system.

Mike: It’s funny in the political debate is that Donald Trump has said a whole bunch of incendiary things about immigration, about Muslim immigrants and so on. And a lot of people out of frustration have said that if he gets elected, I’m going to move to Canada. And he’s also said a lot of things about Mexicans coming in, we need to build a wall, all that kind of stuff. What’s funny about that is that the American public seems super uneducated about the immigration policies of other countries. So for example, Canada deports illegal immigrants. And they have a fabulous H-1B Visa-centric immigration system where if you’re a skilled person, you’re welcome in Canada. It’s not like the US where we, if you have no skills, you come on in. But if you’re like super highly skilled and an entrepreneur and have a lot of money to spend, we don’t want you. We only want 64,000 of you, whatever the ludicrous—

Leo: Canada has an interesting history because in the 70s they had a much more open immigration policy and as a result, Canada’s an incredibly diverse country. I think Toronto has three Chinatowns as a result. I mean it’s really diverse and I think there was a backlash, which I wouldn’t be surprised to see Justin Trudeau reverse.

Mike: The only way to have diversity is to actually have a Canada style immigration policy where you decide who comes in and who doesn’t and then you don’t let the people who are illegal come in. That’s what Canada does. That’s what Mexico does. And that’s how you have diversity. In the United States, you know, you have like a huge percentage of the population coming in from a single country or a single region and that’s not diversity, that’s counter diversity. But anyway, I think the point that’s really frustrating to think about the election is the candidates are always against the H-1B Visa thing because it’s a popular issue and they’re completely wrong about it. They’re completely wrong about it.

Jason: They took our jobs.

Mike: Silicon Valley, it’s up to Silicon Valley to really push on the H-1B Visa issue because nobody else is going to—

Leo: Well it needs to be reformed because it is being abused.

Jason: There can be abuse just like there’s credit card abuse but we don’t want to get rid of credit cards, right? And so you have to be able to keep these two conflicting ideas in your head. This is why I think the dialogue in this country has become so dangerous. If you want to call it the Twitterfication of dialogue and we’re just going to snip at each other and do ad hominem attacks is really destructive because these are very, very—

Leo: Ideas don’t get debated and solved.

Jason: A very complex issue.

Leo: Becomes polarized, yea.

Jason: And the H-1B Visa, we want the smartest people to come here and be on our team. And the idea that we’re going to deport people is crazy. But it’s also crazy to think that you’re going to have open borders and allow people from regions who have massive terrorist problems to freely flow into a country. It’s also a bad idea as we’ve seen in European countries. And you know if you say we have to have reasonable immigration, we have to think about who we’re bringing, this regressive left says you’re a racist because oh my God, you don’t want to let this country freely flow in. Well it’s like, well that country is living in another century with how they treat gays, women and their views about terrorism and that it’s ok to blow people up. Well maybe you don’t want those people, you know? And maybe you really want to think about if a group of people thinks women should be subservient to men and not drive, maybe we don’t actually want to steer your society to that world. And that doesn’t mean you’re a racist. It means you don’t want to have women be subservient to men and you don’t want gays to be thrown out of buildings. This logical discussion needs to be reset. And we have to be able to have very logical non-attacking discussions with each other. And you know , Trump is a master at the ad hominem attack. And it’s a very scary time for the world. It’s a very scary time for the world, I believe.

Leo: Meanwhile, it’s an interesting week ahead. Jason Howell has a look (laughing).

Jason: Yes.

Jason Howell: Thanks, Leo. Let’s take a trip into the future and see what we expect to be keeping an eye on in the week ahead. It’s time to find out what’s insecure and hackable and get a little scared with the BlackHat security event already underway and lasting through Wednesday, August 4th. We have Fr. Robert Ballecer and Bryan Burnett on the floor covering the event and hoping like heck their phones don’t get compromised in the process. Also starting on August 4th is another infamous hacking conference, DefCon 24 lasting through the 7th. In non-hacking news to expect Samsung unveils its next big flagship device, the Galaxy Note 7 on Tuesday, August 2nd at 8:00 AM Pacific. Leo, myself and Ron Richards will be covering that event live here at TWiT so tune into that. And also on the 2nd, Microsoft officially releases the Windows 10 Anniversary Update. I hope you got it free while you could. Megan Morrone and I will be chatting about all this and a whole lot more every day next week on Tech News Today so we hope to see you there. Now, back to you, Leo.

Leo: Isn’t that a good show?

Jason: Great show. You know what I like about it is? They get to the point. They’re very efficient on the show. I think it’s 30-40 minutes you get. So while I’m driving I listen to it every other day.

Leo: Well tune in as Jason mentioned, 8:00 in the morning on Tuesday.

Jason: I don’t listen to it live.

Leo: We’re going to be—well, it’s not on at that time normally but I have to come in early because the Note 7 is coming. We think it will be called the Note 7, the next Samsung Galaxy Note will be announced in New York.

Jason: That’s the big one.

Leo: That’s the big one with the stylus. Let’s take a break. When we come back we will have some final thoughts and words. We’ve gone almost 2 hours. I could go another 4 hours with you guys. I love talking about difficult stuff with smart people.

Jason: Dialogue.

Leo: Dialogue, man.

Jason: There’s an argument that this is why podcasting has actually done so well.

Leo: People want to hear conversation.

Jason: People want to have a deep conversation.

Leo: And they don’t want to 5 minute—your show this week is startups. It’s really meaty.

Jason: Well I modeled it after our time together. It’s like we talk about startups the way you talk about tech.

Leo: It’s meaty. I hope you’re right. I hope there is a market for that.

Jason: Clearly.

Leo: Going forward, because if there’s not, I’m not going to have—my whole plan of moving to New Zealand’s going to fall through.

Jason: I’m starving right now.

Leo: Are you hungry?

Jason: Dying.

Leo: You know what you should do? You should get a Blue Apron Box. Did you ever try that? We could get you set up.

Jason: I’m going to set this up. You know what, I’ve been dancing around the idea of Blue Apron. I know about it. They send you a box. This is what I know. They send you a box. Everything’s all setup. And then I can cook dinner in like 10 minutes.

Leo: Yea. And you get all the ingredients. No more, no less than you need. But they’re kind of—it kind of reminds me of Tesla in that there’s this product that makes sense, it serves a purpose. But there’s a larger goal much like Elon’s larger goal of a sustainable world. Blue Apron’s mission is to make incredible home cooking accessible to everybody. Because everybody should cook because this is human. This is what humanity’s about, making a meal for your family, your loved ones. It’s magic and supporting a more sustainable food system, setting the highest standard for ingredients, building a community of home chefs. They really, their heart is on the right place. The apron comes from Le Cordon Bleu, the famous French cooking school where the apprentices would wear blue aprons.

Jason: Magnifique.

Leo: You are an apprentice. But don’t be—I don’t want to, I kind of worry that people are going to say, “Oh, this is too hard for me.”

Jason: No, the point of this is that—

Leo: It’s easy.

Jason: They also portion everything right?

Leo: They portion.

Jason: You can’t get it wrong.

Leo: You’ve got the shopping done, that’s the hard part. The meal planning and the shopping is the thing I always think, oh I got to—and I never do. And then you get to the end of the day, 5:00 and go—the last thing you want to do is go to the store, think about what you’re going to make. If you want, burgers, make barbeque pork burgers and corn on the cob with crispy onion rings and garlic—what does it say? Garlic butter? Oh my God, that looks so good. Doesn’t that look good? And you can do it. Everything you need is there. They give you a recipe card with pictures. Has even videos.

Jason: You can learn.

Leo: You learn. There’s videos online. And nothing is hard. You will be using ingredients using things you’ve never heard of. I have learned a lot. I found Bok choy, I can’t remember the name of it, that’s unique. It’s wonderful and I will be using it a lot more. You get—they have plans for couples. But they also have family plans and by the way, cooking together with a family, with your kids-

Jason: That’s what it’s all about.

Leo: Research shows Blue Apron families cook three times together, three times more often. Summer vegetable and quinoa bowl, with fairy tale eggplants, shashito peppers and corn. And your mouth—the other thing is, the sensory experience is much better because you’re cooking in the home. The home starts to fill with these amazing aromas. People start going, “What are you doing?” And you just feel good about it and it’s love in a box. It’s awesome. Chicken Tinga Tacos with summer squash and tomato salsa. Now you get to pick when the box arrives so no surprises. You get to pick your menu plan, you just go there. And we’re going to set it up so you get your first free meals free when you go to blueapron.com/twit. Blueapron.com/twit.

Jason: Three free meals.

Leo: This is such a great idea. This is about $10 dollars each. Take about 40 minutes to prepare. In fact, shopping at the grocery store, I didn’t realize this, is more expensive than Blue Apron. They actually are saving you money. Let’s see, someone in our chatroom says, “Cooking with your spouse is a good way to be single.” (Laughing). No.

Jason: No, the opposite.

Leo: No. It’s so—Lisa and I made pasta the other night together with the crank and the whole thing and it was this wonderful experience.

Jason: It’s great.

Leo: Sure, you fight a little bit because she says, “No, I want to use the thin cutters.” And I wanted the thick. But you know what? You grow, you grow.

Jason: Leo wanted capellini, she wanted pappardelle.

Mike: And what’s good about Blue Apron too is like usually one of the couple does most of the cooking.

Leo: Right.

Mike: And it’s a perfect opportunity for the other one to give the main cooker a break.

Leo: We have a deal. One cooks, one washes dishes. And you rotate. That’s the way to do it, right? Anyway, thank you, Blue Apron, for your support. Thank you guys for being here. I just love—we always have the smartest, best conversations with Jason and Mike and I’m really thrilled you’re here. I was curious if you saw this article about Dark Patterns. This isn’t something you don’t know. They’re all over the web. They’re interfaces that intentionally confuse you, the idea being—

Mike: Like Snapchat?

Leo: No, not intentionally obscure, but that you accidentally sign up for a service or a feature when you download a file from let’s say, I don’t know, downloads.com, you accidentally agree to have the Ask Toolbar replace your Google Search.

Jason: I hate that, yea.

Leo: There is a fabulous site, darkpatterns.org, designer Harry Brignull does this. And he has put together examples on the site, a library of bait and switch, disguised ads, Faraway bill, forced continuity, forced disclosure, friend spam, hidden costs. We’ve all experienced this stuff. Number one, bait and switch. Microsoft Windows 10 Upgrade. Anyway, it’s really worth reading at darkpatterns.org and since we all experience it, it’s good to bring it to the surface. Don’t unconsciously do all this clicking. Speaking of which, I expect to get a flurry of phone calls from people who say, “Hey, I thought the Windows 10 Upgrade was free. Why do they want $120 bucks now?” It’s over. July 29th, Friday was the last day. Nobody believed Microsoft was going to start charging. They did. And if you didn’t do the upgrade, I had someone call the radio show, he said, “Oh, yea. I did the upgrade. I set it to do it on Tuesday.” And I didn’t really have the heart to tell him—

Jason: Why are they charging a onetime fee? Why don’t they make it a monthly subscription like a dollar a month?

Leo: You know I’m surprised that they don’t because that’s their goal, obviously they do it with Office now. That’s software as a service subscription. I think they really wanted everybody to be on the same platform. What Microsoft has said is “This is the last version of Windows. We’re not going to do Windows 11. We’re not going to do Windows 12.” Mike, you were an editor at Windows Magazine for years, so you weigh in on this. What we want to do is, and they say every two to three times a year, in fact the first one’s coming on Tuesday, we’re going to make an update. It’s free. Once you have Windows 10, you’re done. You don’t need to by Windows ever again. And that I think is really to focus people on—just like Apple, on the services, on the subscriptions, on Azure, on Cloud, on OneDrive. You think so, Mike?

Mike: Yea, I think Apple does it right and I think it’s obvious that that’s the way to do it.

Leo: Apple hasn’t charged for upgrades in years.

Mike: But partly because you can’t run their software on somebody else’s hardware so you’re really buying Apple hardware which is you know, always very profitable for them. But I think that it’s clear that—I’ll believe it when I see it if Microsoft can come out with a model for you to acquire the latest features and everything on Windows without confusing everybody. They’ve always had all these different options. Nobody knows what’s going on, what the price is really. So I’ll believe it when I see it. But I do hope that they move to—and obviously there’s going to be new versions of Windows. Whether they call it a new version or not, they’re going to be updating it all the time. There’s an article—

Leo: But whether they charge for it or not is the question.

Mike: Exactly. There’s an article on winbeta.org you might want to check out that says that you can get it free if you change your clock.

Jason: That would be a classic Microsoft move.

Leo: (Laughing) oh my God. They also, I should mention this, if you use assistive technologies, they are also extending the deadline which was reasonable because people use Jaws and other screen readers and other assistive technologies may not be able to upgrade but they want to make sure you get to. So there is a form you can fill out and say, “Yep, I’m using this assistive technology,” and you will be able to upgrade later. But for everybody else—

Jason: I just bought my first Windows computer in a decade.

Leo: What? Why?

Jason: Oculus.

Mike: Why?

Leo: Oh, yea. You had to.

Jason: They got me.

Leo: You had to.

Jason: I’m back in.

Leo: Ok, we’ll wrap up with VR because I think that’s an interesting topic. I’ve just heard that the PlayStaion VR which will be coming out, they’ll have some bundles in a month or two, is going to require 60 square feet, 10’ by 6’ of clear space.

Jason: That’s realistic.

Leo: But PlayStation VR, you can’t get up so I don’t even know why. But yea, is that going to help the sale? Oh, Mom, can we move everything out of the living room? I want to get a PlayStation VR.

Jason: 6 by 10.

Leo: 6 by 10. That’s a lot. And the Vive, similar because it has two cameras. But the Vive you get up and move around. I don’t understand why this is—

Mike: Is that similar to the old Connect using Xbox?

Leo: Yea, the old Connect you had to get far enough back. The new one is a little easier but the old one you had to get far enough back. Maybe that’s it. Maybe they don’t have a—maybe that’s it. Because they’re using the camera, they didn’t make a new camera. They’re using the old PlayStation camera.

Jason: How long are people going to play these games for?

Leo: This is my question. I’m starting to think this might be a gimmick.

Jason: Yea, that’s the thing. Because like Connect and like the Wii, people got really into it.

Leo: The Wii’s a great example.

Jason: And then what happened? It didn’t sustain. So is this going to be sustainable or not?

Leo: Is it the 3D TV? Is it just a gimmick? I have to say we have a Vive and Rift. Did you get your Rift yet? Did you get it set up?

Jason: Oculus Rift, yea. I mean it’s nice but it’s not like I’m running—

Leo: You don’t run to play it, do you? I’ve got it back there. I don’t want to play it.

Jason: In fairness, I’m not a video game player, you know, but I’m very interested in what these hard core gaming people who play 10 hours of games, are they going to play this 10% of the time, 20% of the time and if so, when?

Leo: I think not. I think the hardcore gamers are going to prefer their existing experience, their Call of Duty experience. They’ve got a big screen. They’ve got it set up the way they like it. They’ve got the keyboard. They’ve got the mouse.

Jason: Will there be a new sort of pocket of gaming that—like casual gaming that emerges? Like so we didn’t anticipate that a bunch of casual games on mobile phones would exist and now you have this group of people—

Leo: That’s the unknown, isn’t it? You need the killer app. You always need the killer app.

Jason: The Angry Birds of this. The Farmville, the Bejeweled. I don’t know.

Mike: I went to E3 and all the major coming VR gaming platforms had these booths. Of course they had to deal with the fact that in one way or another that people could bump into others. It was a very crowded show. And in some cases they assigned a person to stand there next to somebody that’s using the goggles. In other cases, they had sort of an isolation.

Leo: A minder.

Mike: Yea. And so there seemed to be a lot of excitement and I do think hardcore gamers are going to love it. I don’t think casual gaming is going to be big on VR because it’s not a casual thing. You know, it’s like to immerse yourself in a virtual thing is inherently not casual. You know what I’m saying? And I think that there’s also a question about how many hours you can play this without feeling nauseated and that sort of thing. It’s really fascinating to see that for years we’ve been talking about virtual reality and now it’s becoming clear that augmented and mixed reality is going to be enormous. And great for casual gaming. Very clear already.

Leo: I think augmented is. I think augmented is about a new UI, a new way of thinking about. And you described a scenario, we’re sitting here, and we’re just wearing regular glasses maybe, kind of like Noble’s strange Google Glass. But instead of—but we’re seeing the world, plus.

Jason: Valuable information.

Leo: I think that is a killer app. I’m not sure that I want to spend more than 20 minutes or half an hour at a time wearing a helmet.

Mike: Exactly.

Jason: I would wear the augmented reality stuff all the time if when I’m walking through a neighborhood—

Leo: Yea, if it’s glasses. Look at Pokémon Go. It’s amazing. You sit here and you’re playing the game as you walk around. You’re walking around in a map of your world. The augmented reality part isn’t really augmented reality, but that’s not what I’m talking about. You’re seeing the world you’re in, and you’re seeing Pidgeys and Ratatas around you. That’s pretty cool.

Mike: I’m super fascinated by a patent that Carl Zeiss has for an augmented reality, Google Glass style lens technology. Essentially what they’re doing is it’s roughly as obtrusive as bifocals. They actually just do stuff with the lens itself on glasses and this could be sunglasses, regular glasses, prescription glasses whatever. And it just takes that whatever it’s beaming from the side and makes it do a left turn right into your eye just like Google Glass does and you cannot even see it at all. And I think once we can have a smart upgrade for our regular glasses that we’re already wearing, forget about it. It’s going to be like so amazing to have, augmented reality data. And we’re going to see it everywhere.

Jason: Yea, I just want to be able to walk down the street and if somebody has a felony or like is a predator of some kind it puts like a big, red, you know—

Mike: Yea.

Jason: When you start thinking about it, if people are—I mean we’re moving to this Minority World Report. If somebody’s in the Sex Registry, they’re just going to have like this big sign above their head.

Leo: Let’s get Noble up here. Noble has a community on Google +. Can we get a chair and a microphone? Or at least a chair. We’ll share. Would you mind, Noble, coming up here? Because you’re all in on wearables but I think you also have something to share about—you’ve got a Jibo shirt I notice. I think you’ve got something to share about Magic Leap as well. We’ll get you a chair over here. I’m just curious. I’m looking at your Wearables Weekly community on Google +. Still in on the Google +. That’s awesome.

Jason: Even after Robert Scoble game up, you’re still in.

Leo: (Laughing).

Mike: Especially after he gave up.

Leo: That’s a good reason to go back. Oh look, we’re even going to get him a microphone. Talk about a—sorry, Mike, hey it’s nice knowing you. Bye-bye. No, they’ll widen the shot. We had to slide Mike over a little bit to make some room. Thank you. I don’t normally do this but let’s go crazy since Noble’s in the audience.

Mike: Yea, Noble’s a really serious user and does a lot of really innovative stuff so yea. Glad you brought him up.

Leo: Yea, why not? If you’ve got—anybody else (laughing)? If you’ve got brains in the audience.

Jason: Anybody out there have a Blue Apron recipe they prefer?

Leo: Have a seat. Noble, are you from around here, or where are you from?

Noble: Absolutely not. I’m from DC.

Leo: OK, get right up to the mic.

Noble: Yea, Washington DC.

Leo: And are you going to get a Jibo?

Noble: I am. I am.

Leo: Do you have your Jibo yet?

Noble: I do not. I’m actually one of the developers on their—

Leo: Oh, are you? So this is your business then, the Jibo part. I have one on order, by the way. Can you tell Cynthia to hurry up? I’m ready for my Jibo. The Jibo is like an Amazon Echo but it looks at you.

Jason: Yea.

Noble: Like a pet.

Leo: It’s like a pet. Is that what it feels like to you?

Noble: Yea, it has a little personality. It has a screen on it, makes faces at you.

Leo: What part of it are you working on?

Noble: Just the—had an open developer kit.

Leo: Oh so you have one and you’re—

Noble: I do not have one.

Leo: Independently developing.

Noble: You can actually use a virtual--

Leo: Right. I saw that. That’s kind of cool. That’s kind of cool. So tell us about Magic Leap. What do you know? What do you hear? What do you think?

Noble: It’s right now, not a lot of people know anything about it and if you did know anything about it you couldn’t talk about it.

Jason: I actually have not seen it. There is a big thing in the investor community though about all the money that’s been poured into it and nobody’s seen it.

Leo: Yea, but Theranos has a little bit of money poured into it too.

Jason: The difference here is the people who invested in Theranos maybe—

Leo: Didn’t know what they were doing.

Jason: And the people who invested in this—

Leo: Know what they’re doing.

Jason: Magic Leap people are like, “Oh, these are the world’s best investors.”

Leo: Ok, I know what you’re looking at Carson. This is the gym. This is from the Magic Leap webpage. There’s kids in the gym and the giant whale comes out. Or a child’s holding a small elephant in her hand. But these are fake videos much like the HoloLens videos overstated the HoloLens capabilities. This is not Magic Leap.

Jason: Shouldn’t they have to put on this simulation somewhere, like this is not the actual product?

Noble: Yea, but I mean, they actually also have videos that—well, they claim to have videos that—

Leo: We saw on the Wired article that Kevin, sorry, Kelly did that we saw the video. We don’t really understand how they—

Noble: It’s invented. It’s a real thing. They’re just playing with light field technology. If you remember Light Room. So the same concept they’re just approaching it—their biggest challenge would be to, as with all of these things, to miniaturize it to the point where it actually makes sense to wear. Not a tethered thing like it is right now. And yea, so that’s what they’re—

Jason: How many years until untethered, just full-on augmented reality with normal wear?

Leo: With Jason and I walking around town.

Jason: Like your glasses plus like 20% maybe or plus 30%?

Noble: Personal opinion, crystal ball? 4 years, 2020.

Leo: Ok, I’ll take it.

Jason: That’s quicker than I thought.

Noble: If not sooner I think. Law of accelerating return.

Jason: How long until it’s under $200 bucks?

Nobel: Ah, now that I—probably a little later.

Jason: $300 bucks? $400 bucks?

Noble: That is quite cheap.

Leo: It took 10 years for this Axon to be half the price of an iPhone, so.

Noble: 6 to 10 years maybe.

Leo: And that’s because all the technologies that Samsung and Apple did masked—

Jason: Yea, can draft off it.

Leo: Yea, they drafted of it and mass produced. Magic Leap according to an article linked to your Google + page will soon have a developer testing lab at Lucasfilm. That’s encouraging. Walt Disney investment there. That seems like somebody’s interested in that.

Jason: What’s the killer app going to be for these augmented glasses do you think? What’s the thing that people will use most of the time, the most hours consumed?

Noble: So it’s different. For Magic Leap, it’s going to be more entertainment because if you noticed they’re aligning themselves with the Lucas arts of the world. Just like with VR, since you’re completely immersed, it would be gaming. I have always, I wrote a thing about VR being the gateway drug to what people really want which is like true next reality, true AR which actually recognizes and has context around with spatial awareness and tries to do what HoloLens and Metavision and all those other guys are trying to do.

Jason: So Mike could be here and we wouldn’t even know that he was not here.

Noble: Mike could really be sitting where I’m sitting right now.

Leo: I can do that now, actually. The people who—

Mike: Yea, didn’t CNN do that?

Leo: Yea, but that was terrible, during the election last time. But Craig Panos who was involved with the people who created that 3D character I did on the site 20 years ago using a Silicon Graphic Onyx, a million-dollar workstation, he said, “Oh, you can do that on a PC now.” And you could have somebody sitting—Noble isn’t actually here. He’s back in Washington DC. You have him sitting here. And watch , I can put my hand right through him. See? So it doesn’t—(laughing).

Jason: But that would fool you. Like if I sat down and I couldn’t tell who was here and who wasn’t, how long before that?

Leo: They intentionally on CNN made her vibrate. And we know the guy who did it. I meant they didn’t want it to look real. They wanted it to look magical.

Mike: But what’d going to happen is it’s actually going to be really a fascinating world if Noble’s right, 6 years or so.

Leo: I don’t need avatars. I want you all sitting here.

Mike: But it raises some philosophical questions. So one of the expected applications of which there will be many that we haven’t thought of, but one that I have thought of is that you know that roadside memorials? If somebody dies in a car accident they put flowers and things like that. They’re going to build memorials that are in augmented reality and they’ll have sort of a holographic video of the person. Now what’s the difference between that sort of semi see through person waving from the roadside and a ghost? Like philosophically, what is really the difference?

Leo: That is kind of ghostly. Yea.

Mike: When people—

Jason: I see dead people.

Mike: People would leave messages for their family members in a full person holograph, a holographic image, and what’s the difference between that and that person sort of like projecting their soul through the universe? It’s really psychologically, it’s going to be very different than we think it is. It’s going to be a lot like the world used to be before we had science where you thought every object had a spirit inhabiting it. The volcano gods and all this stuff. Well I think we’re going to sort of go back to a version of that psychologically where we’re going to see these multiple dimensions. All we need is the right app and we’re going to see dead people just like in 6th Sense.

Leo: I actually have a picture from the future. This is TWiT in the year 2828.

Jason: Here we are in the Jedi Council.

Leo: In the Jedi Council.

Jason: The TWiT Jedi Council.

Leo: None of this is real. We’re all teleporting in from our—

Jason: (Yoda voice) iPhone will no phone jack. What do you think of the lighting connector?

Leo: (Laughing) Noble, give us a place to plug. Where do you hang your hat mostly nowadays?

Noble: Lately I’ve been posting a lot on Medium, so medium.com @nobleackerson my first name and last name.

Leo: You have to use the last name there unlike Google +, huh?

Noble: Unlike Google—actually Google + I heard I was going to be verified so I just removed my last name just so I could be like Prince.

Leo: Noble. You need a glyph. Next, it’s a glyph. So we’ll look for Noble Ackerson?

Noble: Yes, sir.

Leo: On medium.com. Thank you for coming up. I really appreciate it.

Noble: Thank you so much.

Leo: Nice to meet you.

Noble: This is an honor.

Leo: Mike Elgan, great to have you, too. Everybody should go to Elgan.com follow Mike and his travels. Of course he’s becoming a nomad and that’s the name of his other site, becomingnomad.com. Next it’s—

Mike: And avoiding sailors in Marseilles.

Jason: Is he becoming nomad? Like are you literally going to travel the world?

Leo: He’s doing it. I’m so jealous.

Mike: I’m doing it. So, Jason, that’s the title of the upcoming book and so I’ve got a website out there. Yea, the idea is you put all of your stuff into storage or in your case you just throw it all in the Tesla. And then you just live in Airbnbs and other sort of—

Jason: How long are you going to do this for?

Mike: As long as I can get away with it.

Jason: Wow.

Leo: Isn’t this awesome? They started in Cuba. You’ve been to Mexico. Then on to Aix-en Provence.

Mike: I’ve been a fan of this lifestyle for about a decade now.

Jason: Is there a downside like not having a home?

Mike: Yes.

Jason: Did you feel like a psychological—

Mike: Yes.

Jason: Explain.

Leo: And Mira misses her kitchen probably, right?

Mike: It’s difficult. Yes. That’s a big, big thing. There’s all kind of—you know, one of the things is that we come and go into the United States. We make friends abroad. And it’s like one of the things we noticed is we’re always saying goodbye to people. And it’s kind of a bummer. But there are lots of downsides which I enumerate on the website and elsewhere but I think the benefits for some people are just—it’s the first time in human history where you can just live anywhere you want to just about. So taking advantage of it is awesome.

Leo: I’m waiting for the Jedi Council technology, widespread, high speed internet. And there’s no reason why we couldn’t run TWiT, we couldn’t do TWiT anywhere in the world. I’d like to do it from a boat. That might be a little more challenging.

Jason: I’m going to be scuba diving so I’ll just come in from like 100 feet under water. Blub, blub, blub, blub, Theranos, blub, blub, blub.

Leo: You won’t be scuba diving. You’ll have your rebreather. You actually won’t emerge from the water but every few years to get a new carbon filter.

Jason: Absolutely. I’m going Aquamed.

Mike: Becoming Nemo.

Leo: Follow Jason at Calacanis.com. He’s @Jason on Twitter. And don’t forget those great newsletters at inside.com.

Jason: Yea, go to VR.inside.com. We started a VR newsletter. Fastest growing. It’s got 13 or 14 thousand people.

Leo: See, that’s proof that maybe there’s something going on there, right?

Jason: Something, it’s our fastest growing. Vr.inside.com.

Leo: You can’t downplay the interest at least.

Jason: Are you doing This Week in AR or VR yet?

Leo: No, no, you should do it.

Jason: Think about it and you do it. I’m too busy.

Leo: You’re done. You’re done. You’ve got This Week in Startups. That is by the way, the must watch. The latest episode was great because it was just kind of—what did you call it?

Jason: A jam session.

Leo: Jam session.

Jason: Well I do these jam sessions already with founders where we just get together and say, “Hey, what are you struggling with?” And then they just help each other because it’s fairly lonely to run these companies. So I just bring 3 or 4 people together and say, “Hey, let’s jam out on making each other’s businesses better.” So, anyway. I modeled my podcast after this one and—

Leo: Smart man. Good idea. Good thinking.

Jason: It really helps a lot of founders. It really does help because—

Leo: And it’s also fascinating for those of us who aren’t founders to hear how this process works.

Jason: Yep. It’s hard.

Leo: It is hard.

Jason: 80% chance of failure. Who wants to join? Who would like to try?

Leo: Anyway, great to have you both. Thanks to our producer, Karsten Bondy for putting this all together each week. You do a great job, Karsten. Thanks to all of you for joining us. We do TWiT every Sunday afternoon, 3:00 PM Pacific, 6:00 PM Eastern time.

Jason: Thanks to the chatroom. They always have great contributions.

Leo: Love the chatroom.

Jason: They’re well behaved.

Leo: I consider them my writers, you know? Like some of the best lines—

Jason: They punch it up.

Leo: I steal from the chatroom.

Jason: I was going to steal the They Live line. Somebody had a great one, I was like, “Oh, when are we going to have They Live on our augmented reality?”

Leo: They Live.

Jason: What a great sci-fi film. If you have not watched that one, it’s got a 10-minute wrestling match in the middle. It’s great.

Leo: I think I don’t know that movie.

Jason: They Live, with Rowdy Roddy Piper? Are you kidding me?

Leo: I’m not a big WWE fan.

Jason: Oh, it’s strange, Stranger Things. Netflix.

Leo: That has been a—we binged that last week in about 2 days and that was awesome.

Jason: That was one of those binges where like, did you have the like, “Are you awake? Are you awake?” My wife is like, “Are you awake?”

Leo: That was a very interesting—

Jason: Creepy.

Leo: A Netflix original. They’re really doing a great job with those originals. They’re making so many now though, it’s hard to know which to watch.

Jason: Library—oh, Metacritic. Go to Metacritic. Sort by the user score for television.

Raymond St. Jacques (Video): And recruited the Rich and the powerful.

Male 1 (Video): They’re running the whole show.

Raymond (Video): Wake up. They’re all about you. All around you.

Jason: That’s quality entertainment. They’re AR glasses.

George Flower (Video): They are safe as long as they’re not—

Roddy Piper (Video): I don’t know what they are, or where they came from.

Leo: Am I asleep? Am I dreaming this? Is this real? Is this real life? Or is this just fantasy?

Raymond (Video): We have no other choice.

Jason: It is fantastic.

Leo: I don’t think I could make it through this.

Jason: You will love it. I guarantee you will love it.

Leo: All right (laughing). Should I have a burrito? Should I have some popcorn.

Jason: It’s in 4:3.

Leo: Looks like it’s in 4:3, yea.

Jason: It’s a disaster.

Leo: (laughing).

Jason: It is so well done.

Leo: Ladies and gentlemen, what did I say? 3:00 PM Pacific, 6:00 PM Eastern time, 2200 UTC every Sunday. You can join us in the chatroom at irc.twit.tv. You can join us in person in the studio. Now there’s some notes about this. This is one of our last weeks in this studio. You guys, they emailed tickts@twit.tv. They’ve got a nice seat. But we will be moving. The next couple of TWiTs will be here. Come see your brick. We are taking the bricks with us I’m happy to say.

Jason: Nice.

Leo: We can take them down and remount them in the new studio.

Jason: Genius.

Leo: But the first TWiT episode from the new studio will be August 21st. Three weeks.

Jason: I’ll bring the donuts.

Leo: Three weeks. So there’s—that means there’s two or three more TWiTs here. My math’s not so hot. And then we’ll be moving. And if you do—I guess we’re going to let people come to the studio audience on that first show. We don’t know exactly how much room there’ll be. I think, you know, we’ll figure it out. So do email us if you want to be in that first episode.

Jason: You can ride the cable car.

Leo: That I don’t want to invite people to do because I think there’s going to be—I don’t know how much room there is on the cable car and I don’t want anybody falling out. So we’re getting a cable car to take us—so I’ll wrap up the radio show at 2:00 PM on the 21st. Grab as many boxes as I can. Everybody here will be invited to grab a box or two and then we’re going to get on a cable car.

Jason: Hilarious.

Leo: And drive to the new studio. We have a camera we’ll bring with us.

Jason: Hilarious.

Leo: You’ll be able to watch us live. And then we’ll arrive at the studio and do TWiT from there. And I think this TWiT is going to be all in-house staff because we’ve never done that before and it would be kind of fun to have Jason and Megan and Robert and do that from our studios, our brand new studios. So you’re more than welcome but do email us because we will be monitoring the number of people we can get in there.

Jason: Yum, yum.

Leo: Email tickets@twit.tv. Of course you don’t have to watch live. There’s on demand audio and video of everything we do at our website twit.tv. You can also subscribe in every podcaster knows to man, iTunes, Stitcher, Google Music, you know, every podcast apps. There’s even TWiT apps thanks to our generous fans who are also developers that put apps on every platform, Roku, Apple TV. There’s like 5 apps on Roku, on Apple TV I should say. So get it. Subscribe. Don’t miss an episode! We’ll see you next time. Another TWiT--

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