It's time for Twitter. This week in tech and we have a doozy for you. Jason Calacanis is here. Gina Smith. We are going to talk about Apple's new announcements, the flying car from Tesla, the guy who got pinched at OpenAI for bugging the conference rooms, and a whole lot more. Twit is next.
Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is Twit.
This is Twit. This week in tech, episode 1,116, recorded Sunday, October 18th, 2026. The 10-day reply guy.
It's time for TWiT, This Week in Tech. Oh god, you are in for a ride, ladies and gentlemen. Hello everybody. This is the show where we cover the week's tech news and we're just going to have a lot of fun. This is my last show before I go on vacation for three weeks and I thought I'm going to just blow it all out.
Gina Smith, Dr. Gina Smith is with us. Great to see you, Gina. Senior research director, IDC.
As I was saying earlier, she took my Comdex virginity from me in 1992. Introduced me to Vegas.
Yeah. And you and I hosted a radio show together for many years and 10 years. A TV show, too. Don't forget.
The Personal Computer Show. There's a good name.
It was, I don't know. No one knows.
That's Jason Calacanis. Hello, Jason from This Week in Startups. And of course, very famous now because the All-In podcast is like it. And do you still not take ads? That podcast does not take ads, much to my chagrin. Literally $50 million a year left on the table because, yeah, I'm the poor, you know, like the poorest guy on that podcast is a cent-millionaire. The other guys were like, you know, pre-billionaire, post-billionaire, and like they're like, why would we take ads? I'm like... David Sachs, David. You got who else?
I knew I knew him, but I didn't want to say his name. And you say it so nicely. Palihapitiya.
You got it. Now there you go. Right through my dyslexia.
Which we were number one literally on the trending charts on Apple the last two weeks.
Because everybody wants to know what's going to happen in AI and in the White House and in government and you guys are all so connected. It's a really good place. I think the connections...
We lost half the audience who were like, you're state-sponsored Pravda, like you guys are all in the tank for Trump. So we lose half the audience, but then we gained a bunch of the audience. And then when we stopped talking about Trump because like just, you know, it's not going well. Let's just leave it at that.
It hasn't been going so well the last six months. So all of a sudden we're not talking about Trump as much and the ratings just went through the roof again because the libs came back and they're like, 'Oh, they're not talking about Trump.'
I wasn't going to listen. Listen, I'm not MAGA. But...
Yeah. No, and neither are you. You're kind of more in the center of the...
I'm a centrist. Yes. Independent.
Yeah.
You know you're doing a terrible job when the left hates you and says you're a MAGA racist and then the right hates you and says you're a libtard. Like literally I couldn't be doing it worse. I could not explain my position worse.
So, I got to start with Elon because of the new Roadster, Cybercab.
Are you... Do you have an order in? I'm sure you do.
I didn't put the order in yet. My new philosophy with these new products is buy it in year two. Because I have the 16th Roadster.
Did you have the original? You had the original Roadster. You did.
I still have it. The number 16 in the garage right here. And then I have the original, I have serial number 0001 of the Signature of the Model S, which is now like a massive collector's edition. But when you buy the first generation of anything, you know, Apple Watch, whatever, you know, they're getting the kinks out. And so I will buy some... there's got to be some kinks in this. Watch this car.
By the way, there's an Optimus robot driving it. Don't worry. No human is involved.
This is not fake. There are people in the audience. This is live. It's going upside down on a loop-de-loop, flipping over. Then the rocket engines come on and it lands.
What? Now, now my son said, 'Can I buy that?' I said, 'Well, no. I doubt it.'
They announced this in 2017 the first time, didn't they? I mean, an announcement doesn't... This just is vapor.
Well, at least it's kind of real now, right? Well, it's...
It also drove towards a car and did a backflip over it. Now, my understanding is there are tanks in the back seat, many heavy tanks that have some sort of propellant in it.
They can only fire for about... Huh? It's air.
But they can only fire for about seven seconds. So, you ain't going to be driving down the road and flying over cars.
Not at all. And also I imagine it takes up quite a bit of room and weight in the back seat. And, well, I can't imagine how loud it is.
Yeah, but it's kind of cool.
It's a demo, but I wouldn't put any money down on this. Haven't they been collecting money for this since 2017, 2018, taking orders? It was originally going to ship in 2020, then 2022.
And they changed the design and they added flying. So, I think it's going to be another two years now. I remember the Cybertruck had a hatch in the back and a little mini Cybertruck would drive out of the back of that. I mean, he likes...
Look, he's a showman and he likes this kind of thing and this event was clearly showbiz.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
You know, he showed it to me like three or four months ago, that same demo, and he was like, 'Hey, check this out.' And you know, we're personal friends, whatever. So he showed it to me and I was like, 'Is that AI slop?' And he was like, 'No, no, it's real.' I'm like, 'Let me see it one more time. Let me see it one more time.' And so he showed it to me again in the photo. I was like, 'That doesn't look real. I'm sorry, brother. You can land two rockets, but that still doesn't look real.'
Price and availability 2028.
If you want the thrust trim, the cold gas thrusters.
Yeah. Now that's real. So this will go... like it's just blowing air out the back which makes it go faster. But we've got to get it. So that's not the flying car one. That's just...
The flying car is obviously not street legal. That's...
Oh yeah, there's a minute, invite only.
It has thrusters in the back.
Yeah. So there's three trim levels. One is just electric. Okay. That's going to go like just electric...
Zero to 60 in like one point low. Yeah. One second. By the way, I had the Model X with insane, actually ludicrous, and I didn't use it very much because I almost... I would almost pass out every time I did it. Yes. And I realized this is insanely dangerous. But that was three seconds. And if you have kids, which I think your kids are older now, but if you have younger kids, they get motion sickness. So you pay an extra $30,000 to make this thing go absurdly fast, which is fun. And then you put it on chill mode so things don't go flying in the car and kids don't vomit.
The good news is if they vomit, it does go backwards. It doesn't go...
That's fair. Fair enough. It's on the back windshield.
Anyway, this thing looks gorgeous.
I don't think one point whatever second acceleration is really a good idea to be honest.
Yeah, I think you get to the point at which your retina can disconnect at a certain number of G's, you have this like problem. So they're pushing electric cars and then these air thrusters added to it are pushing the envelope toward damaging the human body. So you're going to have to... like we're hitting physical limits of what human bodies can hit just like when you're an astronaut. This really, if you want to understand what this symbolizes more than anything, is the merger of SpaceX and Tesla, which I don't have any inside information, but he mentioned on stage at the All-In Summit in September, like in a funny way, like, 'Wow, these companies are really collaborating on a lot of projects. It's almost like they're one company.' I think they'll become one company in a short period of time, two to six months from now.
I thought they already merged, so...
They have not merged. X.com, XAI, and SpaceX. Those three are together, but...
They're together. Tesla's on the side.
The little pinky outside there.
Tesla's still on the side.
Tesla has his purchase of Echostar, right? The...
Well, that's the other story. He wants to be a cell company startup.
So, the 800 megahertz spectrums, right? The direct phone to satellite.
There's a problem with that. You still need towers because if you're inside, you can't see the satellite from the inside.
You still have to... Yeah. Being able to connect someone's phone to a satellite is one thing. Being able to do that with millions of phones to a satellite is...
It's not obvious what he's doing. It's not obvious.
What is he doing? Tell us.
It's not obvious. Jason, let me be Captain Obvious. Captain Obvious. I'm going to go fly. Okay. The two companies are obviously coming together at some point, right?
The reason he hasn't done that is because he's borrowing against Tesla.
And yeah, I mean, well, he can't merge those. He's got to keep Tesla standing.
I think these two things merging at some point is an inevitability because they're working on the fab together to make chips. They're working on like this in a little microcosm. Then there's the Optimus robot which has Grok in it. Tesla has Grok in it. That's a SpaceX product. So it's all going to become at some point so much together. They share engineers, they share executives, they're all together. It's just a single...
The shareholders want it because they just want Elon to not be switching between companies. It's like easier for him to just do back-to-back meetings.
Which is what he does. I've sat with him on these back-to-back meetings. It's incredible. But what's happening with...
And then after the meeting the executives pull everybody aside and say, 'Okay, that's what Elon said. Now this is what we're going to do.' Right? Come on.
Actually, it's... you could write a book about his management style. No middle managers, all engineers. The engineers just come in and say, 'Here's the engineering process. Here's the progress.' And then discuss like, 'What's the next test?' It is unbelievably efficient. There's no small talk.
I know you're his buddy, so I don't expect you to say anything negative about him, but his reputation is much tarnished. You understand that, right? And some of it is he seems a little nutty, like too much Special K.
If you, as they said on Saturday Night Live, if you think I'd be a normal chill dude in the monologue, like, have you not been paying attention? Is he normal? Was he always the same? Has he changed at all?
Not much. I think the political thing is new.
Yeah. Yeah, that's a whole... You know what? I kind of understand why he's giving almost $200 million to Ken Paxton in Texas, which is obscene, but crazy.
It's good for his business. He's in Texas and owning a senator is always a good thing, right?
I mean, as Will Rogers said, we'd have the best Congress money can buy.
My feeling on it has always been, I wish he would start with a third party. I just feel like...
I wish he would get out of politics entirely. I don't think that either of those... I think for his reputation, he can keep it to himself. He can still believe whatever he believes, but he doesn't have to say it out loud. He doesn't have to tweet it.
The problem was the Dems were going after him so hard they forced him to pick a side. That's the...
Oh, is that what happened?
Yeah. They were investigating everything and they were like, 'Oh, this guy's got to...' They were publicly saying like, 'There's got to be something on this guy we can get him on.' So, they kind of backed him into a corner. The SEC was going to put him in jail over the Model 3 because they were like, 'You claimed you'd have the Model 3 by this date.' And they were doing an investigation to put him in jail. It's all very publicly known.
And so then he was like, 'Okay, well, if this side wants to put me in jail and this side wants to support entrepreneurship, I'd be the... well, and if I bribe this side, I can get the FTC to drop the investigation over the Twitter stock pumping and all that other stuff.'
Well, I mean, his relationship with Brendan Carr is tight, the FCC chairman. I mean, for sure.
Here's what I've learned about politics getting dragged into it the last 10 years is like all these sides are super conflicted. I mean, independent moderate for a reason. And like on one side, the Dems are stacking this power all together and that's Anthropic and Reid Hoffman and like that side. Then you got Peter Thiel and Elon and everybody on and Sachs on the other side. And our system is broken because money plays too big a role.
I agree. You got to get rid of Citizens United. That would be huge.
That was the Supreme Court decision that said a corporation is an individual with First Amendment rights and so we can't stop them from contributing unlimited funds to campaigns, which is how Elon can give $250 million.
I suggest you judge... Yeah. If you want to judge Elon, just judge him by the products he makes. He's... but also he's... do I... I mean, I'll... I hate to say it, but I'll give him and I'll give Apple a pass because we now know they gave $25 million to the ballroom.
This is business. It's... and I mean, I don't like it.
I think if you're a customer of these companies, you could vote with your feet. Although I note I still buy Apple crap. I still buy... I'm all in on Apple.
Apple's producing great stuff and awesome. You got to just judge these people on the products they build and understand like they're playing the game on the field. When Obama was in, Netflix backed up the truck and gave him $30 million afterwards to produce a podcast. Like no podcast experience and we're just going to... and like here's your Netflix deal. Here's your Spotify deal. And Amazon are the same for the Melania documentary. They're just... this is what they do.
It's the game on the field.
And by the way, I don't mean to make you a proxy for Elon. You're not. But it is certainly one of the stories we would have covered whether you were here or not.
Yeah. There's a lot... he has a lot of power and one of the issues that's coming up is Star Shield, which is the military application of Starlink that Ukraine has been using for its war against Russia. And the White House has ordered a limit to Star Shield for Ukraine. In fact, this turns off their ability to use drones and so forth.
Although they deny that Trump turned it off, but somebody in the White House did.
Officials said leaders at the Defense Department got a message that the SpaceX Star Shield service for the Ukrainian military needed to be slowed. They didn't say who. This is from Reuters who had the exclusive on this. They talked to two US officials and a Western official. They didn't say who in the White House made the decision, but there is also, and I don't know if it's true or not, that there was a call from Elon about this. Elon certainly has opinions about it. Star Shield is his product developed by SpaceX. Remember, in 2022, Elon did... or at least he publicly said that he turned off the satellite during the whole Crimea affair. He said that was... he didn't want to get involved, right? I don't want to take sides in that. This is taking sides.
I think there is zero percent chance SpaceX, Starlink would ever tell or actually make the change for the military government because that would be seditious. Like it's the government's product. It's the government's implementation of that product. It would be like Boeing or some military provider being like, 'Hey, we're not going to let you drop these bombs on Iran.' And it would be like, 'Well, no, no, you're the provider. We get to decide where the bombs get dropped.'
This was the same debate that happened with Anthropic and the Department of War, which...
Yes. If you want to be a military provider, you give it to them. They make the decisions on how to implement it and you just have to be comfortable with that. Zero chance any of these companies would ever make the decision on behalf of the government. They cannot make that decision. It would be the craziest turn of events ever. So there is...
It would be insane. Although Elon did say that he did it and made the decision in 2022 to turn off Starlink during the Crimea invasion, or was it the Crimea? He said he didn't want to take sides in that. I think they also need permission from each government in order to turn on Starlink in an area. So that's why you see announcements, Starlink now available in India or Singapore or wherever it is.
They can't just unilaterally turn it on in a country. Now people hack it and they take a Starlink from the neighboring country, bring it into Iran, which...
They're using it illegally.
Yes. And so then you have countermeasures. But the problem with the situation now is I think you have a bunch of people who've been vocal about supporting Russia or supporting Ukraine and then all of that gets layered on top of this black box where we don't know what the government's doing. And this particular government sometimes doesn't disclose what they're doing or they do things that are unilateral and unclear.
And they have a loose relationship with the truth.
I have a theory because you know the midterm elections are coming up. I actually voted because I'm leaving the country, so I've already sent my ballot in. But one of the big issues, maybe the biggest issue in many red states, is the cost of diesel fuel. As a result, the president has dropped sanctions against Russia for diesel fuel. He's buying... we're buying diesel fuel from Russia, clearly to lower the price of diesel to help him get some votes in November.
And I think this might be related to that as well.
Trying to get the war to deprecate a bit in order to get diesel seems to be the interpretation on the Sunday shows today. Ukraine has been using these drones to bomb refineries, Russian refineries.
So they're affecting the cost of oil that we buy from Russia, which we shouldn't be buying from Russia, by the way.
The diesel, the oil in Russia is only going to India and China right now. I meant diesel. Yes. The diesel fuel. But this is also all performative.
The inflation is 3.7%. It's a complete disaster.
It's not going to change anything.
It's not going to change anything. And they said this is like one day in two weeks and it's kind of changeling.
So it's all performative. You know, that's the other thing I learned in being dragged into politics, which is like my least favorite subject and politicians my least favorite...
No, it's totally... I'm happy to discuss it because it's actually an opportunity for me to reinforce with people like this is not my preferred subject. But you know, all of this stuff is performative. It's literally both sides are just trying to get people to turn out for the midterms and it turns out the American public has a small set of issues that they vote based on. Don't start a foreign war, especially not in the Middle East, and it's the economy. And it's the economy, as James Carville famously said.
Yeah. But what we're not talking about is the very real impacts of turning off Star Shield. I mean, they've got the drones going at 100 miles an hour or something so Ukraine can't defend itself. I mean, this is going to be a rough winter for Ukraine. It really puts a thumb on the scale in terms of the war. I mean, you know, we could say, you know, yeah, who did it? It was the government. It was the White House. They take credit, but what's the impact? I mean, I think it's very disturbing. I mean, of course, Star Shield is needed or something like it is needed, but it's this use of it for political ends. Well, and this is so disturbing.
To turn it full circle to Elon.
One of the things that scares me about Elon is his immense power at this point.
In so many areas and this is just one more area that he has power.
So you were about to say, Jason, what the secret plan is with the cell phones and all of that. What's the end game?
Here's the thing about the power thing. Like if Starlink is not the best product and Amazon's new low Earth orbit satellites are better and a cheaper price, people will go to that, right? And if Tesla is not the best car and BYD produces one cheaper, which they do, it's like 15 grand for a BYD Dolphin in Mexico City or Europe and you see them everywhere. People will buy that, right? So this idea that he has like this amazing amount of power, he's third place when it comes to the large language models. Anthropic and OpenAI are better. All the money is going to them. So he can... he's only as good as his products are in terms of power. And if there's plenty of Democrats who could give just as much money as he's giving, you know, including the Anthropic guys who are going to have much more money combined to give to political causes with their OpenAI and the Anthropic, or they have their own nonprofits basically, their PAC, and so they're going to be able to outspend Elon in 2028 and you can just bookmark that for now. So he's only as good as his products. He has to earn it every day. If there's a better Starlink, people will move to it.
Now, speaking of Starlink, and I have a de minimis amount of SpaceX shares, so I'm not talking my book here in any way. The thing that's happening with Starlink that should be obvious to everybody is that they will be direct to your phone. And if every Tesla has Starlink in it, oh, and every one of them has a Wi-Fi network and they communicate with each other and they communicate in a mesh network. This is the holy grail of autonomous vehicles, by the way, of course, and he's got a thousand of these Cybercabs already with Starlink in them in the Texas area and maybe 50 of them are actually taking rides, whatever it is, and he can probably produce a half million of them a year. There will be a world where he gets to five million Cybercabs. Every one of them has Wi-Fi. Every major city you're in, you're going to connect to Starlink on a Cybercab or from the sky. And the direct-to-satellite connection is getting better and better. Plus, he's got other spectrum and people can buy spectrum. So, there'll be a bundled service for a hundred bucks a month where five people in your family... I don't have any inside information here. I'm just riffing. There'll be a service where for a hundred bucks a month, five people in your family plus your house will have high-speed internet and that'll save you... you probably would be spending 300 bucks on your cable modem and then five $40 plans. So technology is deflationary. He's going to be able to provide for a hundred bucks a month what other people are charging $300 or $400 a month for.
So watch family plans.
No question, Jason, you're right. I mean that Elon will compete based on his products and that's the end word of it. But his thumb is on the scale in the government. His relationship with Brendan Carr at the FCC, for sure this satellite bandwidth thing will be approved. I mean, Brendan Carr is just a rubber stamp for Elon. His competitors don't necessarily have that.
Do you have evidence of that or is that just speculation?
It's not speculation. You can look it up. It's been...
Okay, go ahead. Tell me. Look it up.
Well, Brendan, I think people will take a tweet or something or just assume Brendan's in it. If he is in the can doing something illegal for Elon or giving preferential treatment, that will come out. I'm not saying he was doing anything illegal, only that Brendan Carr is on the record as being a big supporter and friend of Elon's.
I don't think he's a friend of his, but he might be a supporter of his, just like when Obama was in, Reid Hoffman and Marc Pincus were friends of his. So like all of this, like people make a major jump that something untoward is happening. By the way, all that stuff can be investigated. It will be after these midterms. And you can...
Good point. And it will be in three weeks.
The worm is about to turn. Yeah.
And you know, you don't think that all of these folks know that that's coming. Of course they do, because that's what happened the last time. Everybody investigates the other team and there's no way anybody's doing anything that would be anywhere close to illegal in my mind.
It is the case. And it's only a smoking gun that Brendan Carr has greenlit every request that Starlink has made, has lavished praise on Elon Musk. I don't know if he's turned Jeff Bezos down. Jeff has enough money to make sure that everybody is well taken care of.
I actually think they're going to give everybody who's providing cheaper a... which is what we want. They were spending for rural internet $5,000 to run internet to people's farms way out there at the time when Starlink was available for less than 100 bucks a month.
This is my problem though. So these are the broadband grants from the infrastructure bill that was to, I mean in my opinion, wire up these homes with something that would be lasting like fiber. I understand it's a lot to fiber a one farmhouse 300 miles away, but the problem with Starlink is it's expensive to start and it's expensive every single month thereafter, you know, and I know because we're paying for it. And the fiber once you got the build out is...
I don't think so. No, I think they were going to spend $5,000 per home. It was $5,786 to connect each home, according to just a quick LLM search here. And if you were to look at Starlink, all the people who were in line to get that, they all bought Starlink because they didn't want to wait for fiber. So we don't even need to buy it for those farms. They're not being given broadband because they can't afford.
It's not just those farms though. Also there's plenty of rural communities. It's plenty of places...
And they are paying for it. They're not going to get wired service. They're going to get Starlink because...
Or they'll get Jeff's version of it and everybody will save money.
But Leo, they're paying for it themselves. They don't need the subsidy. They only needed the subsidy...
You can use these farmers as, you know, the poster child. But it's not just farmhouses in rural areas.
It's rural areas in general.
Sure. If it's Appalachia...
Those people though can afford to buy Starlink and they are buying it. If you look at all those homes, this is a point Brendan Carr started making. By the time we get to them with the fiber line in three, four, five years, they already have bought Starlink because people want the internet. And two bucks a day for the internet, everybody can afford. The minimum wage in this country, even if you have the lowest, is $8 an hour. Which is to say, you know, if you work for 15 minutes a day for your internet at the lowest possible price, which is... only 5 million people make that $8 an hour minimum wage in the country. Only 15 million people make under $15 an hour. It's so de minimis that those people can afford a Starlink or whatever. What is Bezos's called? That's coming.
Leo. So they can afford that name. There you go. Trademark abuse again. Twitter now. Leo. They keep taking your trademarks. Leo.
But the point is poor people, the poorest people in this country, the entry level, can afford a dollar or $2 a day for the internet. So we're...
It's more than that. I'm paying 90 bucks a month and I think it's going up.
I think it's going the opposite. It's going down. I hope it goes down. If you're right, then that makes...
I guarantee you it'll be $50 a month within two years.
Okay. Because it has only gone up since I bought it.
I think it's 60, 70 bucks a month for the basic tier right now.
I'm pretty sure I'm paying 90, but who knows?
Because you want broadband. You want a higher amount of...
I want broadband. And that was the whole point was to give the entire country broadband because nowadays if you aren't on the internet, if you don't have broadband, you are left out.
Now, aren't there other companies also trying to do this? I'm thinking of Apple and Globalstar. And...
100 megabits a month is 55 bucks by the way. So, it is 55 right now.
If you limit to 100 megabits, which is... that's broadband. That's fine. And I should say in fairness the FCC did approve Leo 4,600 satellites.
I mean, I hate to break the narrative here, but things are getting cheaper and better. Sorry.
If they get cheaper and better then I'm fine. It's just a massive federal subsidy that was originally going to fiber that is now going to Elon. And you know, maybe it'll go to Leo.
It's not going to go to anybody, Leo. There's going to be no subsidy. These people don't need a subsidy. If it's $2 a day, they can buy it themselves. There doesn't need to be a government subsidy. The government subsidy is because you couldn't get it. So, you needed to spend $5,000 to get the fiber line there. Now, you don't need to spend the $5,000. It's $55 a month for the cheapest version and going down. So, for $2 a month, anybody can have this. There are only like the number of people making minimum wage in this country, federal minimum wage, which is a disgrace at $7.25 or $7.80 or whatever it is. Totally disgraceful. Should be 15. Put that aside. They can work for 15 minutes in the lowest possible hourly rate and have their broadband paid for. So for 15 minutes of work a day, you can get that. That is a completely reasonable deal. And I think we would all agree that the best solution to this in the long run is to let the market decide and to get money out of politics because that's clearly the issue right now is that we have basically people can buy politicians.
I love that we did this story because what this story shows is that when you actually go to first principles and look at the actual cost and look at the actual competitive set, the problem's been solved by the free market. What's the next story that everybody hates Elon for or everybody hates Bezos for that the free market's not solving? The free market solves these problems.
Monopoly is the problem. And...
Who's got a monopoly right now?
You need to also enforce antitrust regulations. That's...
Right. Monopolies aren't illegal, right? It's the use of a monopoly to do things...
Technically. That's correct.
And then who's got a monopoly today? Like when you look at the monopolies today, it's very hard to actually find one. There are very few actual monopolies. You do have a couple of duopolies, right? But there's very few monopolies. It's really hard to establish monopoly.
Cable companies are the most notorious.
They were. And who cracked them?
And we broke it. And we broke it. That's true.
I mean, you talk... So now we're blaming the guy who broke the actual monopoly and saying he's the monopolist. He's not the monopolist. He's the guy who broke the monopolist.
Sorry. Defense. I have no argument. We're going to take a break and come back with more. Gina, do you want to rebut? I feel like I'm in the middle of a debate. Who's running for Congress here?
When we come back, it'd be cool to talk about Nvidia regarding monopolies.
We have a lot of that, too.
They're doing this acquire thing.
As opposed to acquiring thing as a way to get away from monopolistic accusations. It's super interesting and we could talk about that when we come back. Let's... Oh, it's six bells. So, it's time to take a break. We'll have more in just a bit.
I'm sorry. I have an AI that rings the bells in the ship's fashion at the top of every hour and then announces.
It's very Star Trek in a way, in the Enterprise.
It's actually... I think it's Grok. It's actually the voice of Patrick Warburton in the movie The Emperor's New Groove, Kronk. And he is my night watchman. But I told him, 'You're daytime, too.' So he patrols and every hour rings the bells and says whether everything's okay on the...
Who's the sponsor? Who's the sponsor?
The sponsor? Well, let's find out. We're going to take a break. We'll have more. You're watching This Week in Tech with Gina 'Dr.' Smith. We love Dr. Smith. Some love. And Jason Calacanis. More in a moment.
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We thank Palo Alto Networks for supporting This Week in Tech. Now back to the show. Thank you, Leo.
Thanks Leo for that incredible ad.
What a bit of an amazing advertisement.
Actually I should explain. Normally I don't record those ahead of time. Last night I was recording ads for my vacation. I had to do more than 60, which is a good thing. I'm not complaining. We had them, but I was in kind of a... I was on a roll and I just recorded all the ads, including the ones for today.
And then I had a decision, a moral quandary. Should I redo them live on the show? And I thought, nah, I already got them. So we just...
Yeah, I already got them. It's still live today. The only drawback, if I thought about it, is you are so good, Jason, with making my ads better.
You should... I have recordings of him somewhere.
Oh god, we had so much fun. We would laugh our asses off doing those ads over Audible. You were just on Platinum Plan to this day. 20...
They took mine away. Did you know that?
Well, I had the original. It was called Light Listener, but it was $14.95 for two books a month.
They kept... I get emails from Don Katz back before Amazon saying, 'Can you... we can't really afford this anymore. Could you please?' And I said, 'No, I like it.' And they didn't have the nerve to kick me off, but Jeff had actually... Andy Jassy had no trouble kicking me off. So I got an email which I missed from Amazon, from Audible saying we're going to cancel this if you don't do anything. Yeah, if you don't do anything. And I didn't. And so they had my account. So I went to Libro.fm. So there...
I'm doing Platinum. It was just 20 bucks a year because I don't like to think about it. 20, not 20 bucks a month.
I'm sorry. It's 20 bucks a year for like 200 books or whatever. It's, you know, 10 bucks a book. So sometime or eight bucks a book.
And then you get a bunch of credits.
You get credits. And so now I got three daughters. They're on it as well. So now we're trying to figure out...
No, they love audiobooks. So good for kids. And they like to read, too. So that's good. But...
I got a 16-year-old daughter and then two 10-year-old twins.
They were little girls the last time I...
Yeah, you're still... the days go slow, the years go fast, Leo.
You know it. Well, you don't have to tell me. Gina and I both know we've got adults.
We do have adults. Apparently, you've got an incredible entrepreneur in your family with this.
I am very proud. Did not use my name in no way. In fact, I don't think he even wanted to use my name.
He did not leverage his dad's name.
Pretty honorable and he's done much... he's much more famous than I am.
I would have been like, 'Dad, can I get a couple of promos on the pod?'
Well, I plugged him like crazy. I did, but he didn't ever ask me. All right. I have...
He sold Salt Hank. He sold it to Marc Lore at Wonder.
Wonder. I saw it. I was like...
Stock deal. I hope that works out.
You're going to be like, 'Hey son, can dad get a little short-term loan just... I have a vacation Lisa and I want to go on. Can I get a little loan?'
A couple of months ago, he texted me. He said, 'I'm richer than you now.'
'I make more than you, Dad.'
All right, Gina, you've not heard this. This is Jason Calacanis back in the day.
Audible. Oh, how I love Audible.
You don't have to say that, Jason.
No, I do. I have an Audible account. Hey, this is Jason Calacanis, the CEO of Mahalo.com and formerly of Weblogs and Silicon Alley Reporter. I'd like to let you know about a service that I use and I love. Audible. Audible.com. The largest collection of audiobooks on the internet. All with simple, easy-to-use non-DRM MP3 files. MP3 stick, you know.
I'm not paying you any more, Jason. Just because you're doing this...
Somewhere. What's his name? Enshittification's going to come on and be...
Yeah. Cory Doctorow is going after you, man.
Such a great era of TWiT where I would go crazy for Audible.
And then Cory would be like, 'I'm leaving the show if you have Audible because they use DRM.'
He hated Audible. He still does. He won't let his books... because he doesn't like DRM. Yeah. Now, here's a little piece of trivia for you. Remember how I did that biography of Steve Wozniak way back when, 2006? I think it was the very first book ever to be published on Audible at the same time as an audiobook at the same time it was printed.
Yeah. Because publishers didn't want to do that. They thought they would undermine the book sales.
Yeah. It was the very first time. I mean, I remember we did a big press tour around that. So the opposite is that I can't tell you how many books I've bought in paper because I listen to them and I wanted the book.
I do that all the time. People are buying... books are just so cheap for the value you get from a book.
Well, and I also often will buy the ebook and Audible has... Amazon has this thing where they sync. Yeah. The Whispersync. And so it just follows. You can look at the words as it's reading them.
Which is probably good for your girls, actually. Apparently that's very good to teach people...
For retention. The highest retention is to be reading it with the audio playing and the word highlighted as it goes by.
I can confirm that. That's been shown in multiple studies.
You have a PhD in cognitive science.
Yeah. Right. Gina's a doctor in this. She knows all.
That's what I wanted to go for. I was going to go for criminal psychology at John Jay, forensic, or I was going to go for cognitive industrial psychology at Stevens Institute from the internet.
What did you end up doing, Jason?
I wound up starting a zine about the internet in 1993, '94. My timing couldn't have been more perfect.
That was the first one, which was about the scene in New York, right?
Silicon Valley... what was it called? Silicon...
Silicon Alley Reporter was the second scene. I had done five issues of Cyber Surfer, which was pre-internet, pre-web browser, and that was just about CD-ROMs and dial-up services. And I did it with the publisher of Starlog and Fangoria, and I had like a partnership with them to do Cyber Surfer.
It was like a zine magazine. Yeah.
Did a TV show about the internet. All I remember is you riding around in a convertible.
Talking about surfing the internet. I think it was called Super Pre-Web. It was 1993 and it was a PBS documentary called The Internet's Superhighway. Driving on the internet. It's available, everybody can download.
But it was pre-web, so we were explaining Archie and Veronica and all the early servers. And you can get this now, but somebody on TikTok found all these little clips from that. So where I'm explaining email, email, electronic mail, you... I mean literally, and they found all these little clips from...
It and they're all over TikTok, viral among people.
Look at uh, I just sent you the link in the Zoom, Leo. This is the first issue of Cyber Surfer I did with Brian Alvie.
Oh, is it online? Oh, there it is.
Uh, somebody bought it off of uh Chris Frohlich uh from um First Round Capital. Published it. This came out in 1995. So, he bought the paper version.
He bought the paper version because he's like, he collects these things. And as you can see on the cover, um, missed the highest-rated video game ever.
TIE Fighter joined Darth Vader's inner circle of evil. Jurassic Park screen-saving excitement. I was literally reviewing a screensaver.
This looks like Fangoria.
It was like throw every single thing on the cover was what they taught me. Actually, they... Oh, look at the, look at the header here. Cyber surfing on the internet with Mosaic.
Literally, how crazy is that? I started in '94 on these things. It was crazy.
So, this is, this leads...
This is right when we were working for CNET, wasn't it, Leo? Like '93. We were 23 years old.
Yeah. You're, well, you're a little younger.
Did I work for... I briefly worked for CNET? Then they...
Everybody briefly worked.
Then they walked me out the door slowly. Unmanageable.
We were one of the first five or 10 people involved with CNET when it was still a TV show, not a website.
No, it was before the, for me it was before the TV show. They got rid of me. But you were on the pilot I shot, right? With...
I was on the pilot. Adam Curry...
Adam Curry wasn't there. It was, it was uh, no, I was, I would...
Adam Curry was, because my part of it was doing video game reviews. We reviewed Myst...
That was later after me. I, the, the pilot we did was a roundtable kind of like this actually. We were in the same room. Fred Davis, Steuart Alpert, you and Dvorak.
Dvorak. I remember... see Dvorak, the late, the late great John C.
He hated me. But I loved him.
No, he, he didn't like my impersonation that I did here. Yeah, because it sounds like Edward G. Robinson. That's why.
No, every time I saw, every time I saw him with you, I was like, he's so cranky that you named the show Cranky Geeks. Like, he was upset at everybody.
But John was my idol, as were you, Leo, in the early days, because I was 10 years behind you guys. I would run home when I knew PC Magazine was like, it was like the two or three day window, and I would go right to John C. Dvorak's track. It was in the back.
He would take everybody on. He would be like, Apple, they don't have... it was the gossip column for uh industry.
He's the reason I got into tech reporting in 1989 was that, that damn column of Dvorak in PC Magazine. It was the only thing I could understand in the magazine when I first started covering.
I always tell folks like if you look at this entire podcast movement, live shows on the internet, it all goes back to Leo, John, Adam Curry, Dave Winer. And I'm always tweeting like, 'Guys, these are the guys who were standing on their shoulders.' That's why I always make time to come on.
And here, ladies and gentlemen, is, is a fake fight poster of you versus Ed Zitron. Did you get in a fight with Ed Zitron?
What?
I, I think people want to see that. I mean, this is the problem. This is like the AI slop is so good. But that is actually me with my shirt off. So...
I do. Yeah. I, I have become more ripped. It's the...
I don't think Ed looks like that. I'll be honest with you.
No, no, that is Ed's gut, though. You can see he's gained a couple of pounds. It's gotten a little chubby.
So, I guess we have to talk about AI. Uh, here we go. Superintelligence.
Ed, you should uh... Yeah, I'm sorry. Now, do you... Are you, are you in the SI camp? No.
Oh, I don't care. I don't care what it's called. It's software. It's really the best software we ever made.
That's important. I always underscore this. It's software.
Great software. And it is a continuum from the earliest days of computing. We were just talking about this when I got my first Atari. The first thing I did is I looked, I said, I want to do something with this. And you only had two choices. You either went somewhere and got a floppy disk in a Ziploc bag and ran that, or you wrote software. You had Atari BASIC or all these machines had BASIC.
And that's what I chose. I said, I'm, because, and the first time you type 10 GO TO, you know, PRINT HELLO and 20 GO TO 10, there's a real sense of wow, I can make this box do something. And it's a complete continuum to today where instead of typing anything, you talk to it, but it's roughly the same thing. And it's the same desire to get this silicon thing, this, you know, melted sand, to do something. The only difference is it looks like it's thinking now and people really want to personify it. It's just software. It's just software. It's just another...
So much of this was imagined by science fiction. I once interviewed Alvin Toffler and his wife and said, 'How'd you do all these futuristic things? Like, how did you make these predictions?' And he said, 'Oh, very simple. All the nerds are big sci-fi freaks. You just watch sci-fi and say this is what they're going to build as soon as they even the car.'
Totally right. He was right.
Even flying cars.
So today or this week, Microsoft uh shipped its first uh Nvidia-based RTX Spark, a Windows laptop, although they have uh desktops as well. We're running uh ARM processors, but most importantly with uh GB10 Blackwell kind of low-end Blackwell uh GPUs in them that can run models. And the first thing that happens when you turn on your RTX Spark Surface laptop or Dell laptop or the, everybody's making them, is it says which model do you want to install?
Because you're running a local model on this thing.
It's kind of heavy though, isn't it?
It made me think of the old Dolch computer. You know, the 30 lb. Oh my god.
I forgot about the Dolch.
That's like the Dolch. Remember him? But what's interesting about that, the Microsoft Surface story, I think, is how it was leaked. Did you follow this?
I didn't know what happened. No, I mean, they announced it some months ago. So kind of...
The story was that somebody left a copy of, left a prototype of the Surface on a road near Redmond somewhere. And so some guy on Reddit, you know, shared all the data. I find it very unlikely that anybody left his Surface.
Here is a Dolch, by the way. If you... might have been some kind of a leak... what a Dolch looked like.
We had one in my office at PC Magazine and uh...
This is, these are portable... 30 lb.
Yeah, they're luggables we call them.
And full expansion cards could fit in it. Everything that you could fit into a PC, into a regular-sized ISA expansion slot, fit into that Dolch. We put it on the cover of PC Computing.
But you couldn't do much with it because it was probably running DOS, right? It was a DOS-based luggable. They didn't even call laptops. It was a luggable.
And uh I saw this and thought this is awfully heavy and expensive, but not quite like the Dolch.
Founded by Volker Dolch in 1970.
Yeah. So, but it's supposed to be beautiful, right?
2026, shall we?
Yeah. We talk about the past. It's supposed to be a beautiful, beautiful display. So this is really an Nvidia product. Nvidia announced it first. I think, you know, I have the Sparks which were the original versions of these. They were running Ubuntu Linux. Um, I think Microsoft, my theory is, and I don't think I'm wrong, Microsoft went to Nvidia and said, you know, it'd be really nice if we could get a Windows version of this, please.
And Nvidia said, sure. How much money you got?
Sure. Because Jensen Huang is a good businessman and so they're making them.
Nvidia stopped selling the 128-gigabyte Sparks. Uh, I have a feeling they did that because they wanted to put all the parts into the RTX Sparks.
I don't know. You know, I have a theory. All right, I'm going to run, I'm going to run this conspiracy theory by you guys.
You may have information that will debunk this.
Uh, we are supposedly in RAMageddon, right? RAM prices through the roof.
That's a great word. RAMageddon.
And uh, the Sparks that I bought for 4600 bucks, they're originally 4,000, I think, uh, are now 8 or $9,000 if you can find them.
Uh, all of this stuff, you know, any, any Nvidia video card, even the gaming cards have doubled in prices in many cases. Uh, because everybody says, 'Well, you, you can't get the chips.' Why can't you get the chips? Well, because the people who make the chips like Micron, uh, there are only four companies or three companies, SK Hynix, Micron, and Samsung, uh, say, 'Oh, you know, the demand is so great.' What's the demand? Well, everybody wants it for HBM, high-bandwidth memory for their data centers. Oh, and, and how many of these data centers are built?
How many are going to be built? Well, many. Well, really, how many are going to be built? Many, many. So, they've taken orders. They've committed all their production, but all that production is sitting somewhere in a warehouse.
And increasing. So, A, I think this is price gouging by these manufacturers. They're saying, 'Okay, fine. We can charge that much. We're going to charge that much.' B, they're going to have a problem when these data centers do not get built.
Jason, what do you think of all the data centers have been promised, what percentage of them will be built?
Um, I think 95% will be built, but they'll all be 6 months to 6 years behind schedule because we now have such an anti-AI sentiment in the country caused by, you know, all the chaotic stuff.
Watch what happens in November. In a couple of weeks, you're going to have an election. And the signature issue besides the economy in many areas, Texas for instance, is data centers.
And it's the noise, right? And the pollution, isn't that what everyone's upset about?
There's a lot of, there's a lot of mistaken, like people say, 'Oh, water.' That's BS. It isn't the water.
Water. It's all, there's a, there's a giant hoax stack here.
Um, water, it's all closed-loop systems. So it doesn't use more water than a golf course or like...
And there are far more golf courses in America than there are.
Okay. So put that aside. Now in terms of noise. Yeah. Perfect. So there's no sound if they're in the Permian Basin or like somewhere next to somebody's house.
Exactly. That has happened in Virginia, um, where data centers were too close to people and they were fine when they were using electricity off the grid. The problem was the demand for power got so high that it started kicking in diesel generators, gas, gas generators. Those are loud as f.
Yes. So that is a very small number of isolated cases that again, it's a hoax because most of these data centers are nowhere near humanity. They're put in the cheapest acreage anywhere and they're not running off of nat gas. If they are running off nat gas, they're going to where the nat gas is coming out of the ground. Therefore, that's not an issue. Aesthetically, they're ugly in the same way a Walmart or a big-box retailer is, but again...
Or an Amazon fulfillment center, which...
Putting them away. So, there's really no objection to these because they also are willing, there is an objection, but maybe there shouldn't be. It's...
Yeah, there, there's objections that are hoaxes because the people building them are willing to pay for all their electricity and lower the price of electricity in the place they're going because they're so valuable.
Can they use sustainable energy sources?
Of course. Of course. And they, and they are. You just have to get a lot.
It's in their interest, I should point out, not to waste water, not to waste electricity because efficiency is really important.
They will go, they'll go to wherever the cheapest energy is. That's why you see them going near hydro.
Part of the problem... gas.
Sometimes they go where the tax breaks are, which is often Arizona, which is gone now. Texas.
They're gone. Now it's the opposite. We went from 5 years ago, whoever would give the biggest tax benefit would get these, to now, however much they're willing to pay the local community will get them. So that's flipped there. They're no longer asking for handouts. They're actually offering money for your school system, for this, for that, because these things, to get these built.
Correct. There is so much money to be made here to build them out.
So, um, what you're going to see is countries or regions that have excess energy, which would be hydro, some places is going to be solar and batteries. Uh, which is the biggest installs that are occurring right now are solar and batteries. And Texas is the largest geography for solar and batteries. Why? Because they know the energy business here. And they're not precious about it. They're like, 'Whatever's the best deal?' And the best deal right now is solar plus batteries if you can get them because they're backordered. Um, and that price is cheaper than standing up coal or even clean coal. Okay, you may have heard of clean coal.
There's no reason to create a coal plant. It's cheaper to put solar and batteries. It will make more money. So again, the free market has figured this out.
Nuclear is going to be the big one. Like right now, uh, China's got three or 400 nuclear plants imminent, like in planning, breaking ground. We have like none. That's where we really need to like...
Get less precious.
And, and we now have ways of making them safely, relatively safe.
Unbelievably safe. Like safer than gas, safer than coal.
We got to point out most electricity generating plants kill more people than nukes ever have. Nuclear power.
Of course, the number of people is well under a hundred that have been killed by nuclear power plants. So keep that. Gas, coal, uh, any, any fossil fuel, those have taken 8 and 10 years off people's life in places where they have too many of them, which is like Singapore, I'm sorry, not Singapore, um, Shanghai and cities in China, which is why China is using less fossil fuels going.
You couldn't, you couldn't Beijing. When I was in Beijing, it was like soup. It was...
Not anymore though. Beijing now has a blue sky. I worked there probably eight months solid a couple of years ago. They have fixed their pollution.
Because of electric vehicles.
It's all electric vehicles.
Financials. Financial Times. America's $10 trillion AI infrastructure boom is starting to fray. Cracks are appearing in their debt-laden AI infrastructure boom. That's data centers, by the way, because of public backlash. We talked about that. Shaky investor confidence. In fact, or I think it's Oracle's bonds are now selling for 80 cents on the dollar.
Really? Because people go, I don't know about all of this.
They just did a, um, an act of God clause in one of their data centers because they, they invoked it because it was taking so long to get the energy and everything set up that they said we want to do this act of God clause to push out our lease 6 months or a year.
Who, what, um, what was, is God running for office? What, what act of God?
You have this act of God things that are under, out of your control.
Out of your control. So getting energy to the location or getting your memory chips, whatever it happens to be, you can do that act of God clause in many contracts that it's not your fault that you didn't break ground and build your data center.
The Financial Times says 47, at least 47 large projects have been delayed, withdrawn or blocked in 2026 at least.
Now this goes back to my original conspiracy theory.
These companies pre-sold this. They have orders for it for data centers that probably will not get built.
They'll be delayed. They'll be built.
Or they'll be delayed. And by the time they're built, maybe the current DDR7 RAM won't be the latest and greatest. Maybe Nvidia's Vera Rubin processors will not be the latest and greatest. So, all of this stuff is booked but not sold, which means it's somewhere. It's made. It's sitting in a, in a, in a warehouse. A, I think there's going to, I think they're price gouging. B, because they know they're not going to sell this. B, when they do sell it, if they ever do sell it, the price is going to fall out through, bottom out, right? So, am I wrong on this?
No. No. Here's what's happening. Um, the data centers are getting delayed. Why are the data centers being delayed? Because Anthropic keeps saying, 'You're all going to lose your jobs, and there's a 10% chance that the software is going to kill everybody.'
Stop it. Now everybody thinks that smart people believe that there's a 10% chance that 7 billion people are going to die and 100% chance that everybody's losing their jobs. So the public then is anti-AI. Like my daughters hate AI.
They're scared of it and they think it's inauthentic. And when I tried to train my 16-year-old how to use Claude design because she's doing this incredible internship, um, at this beauty company I'm on the board of, um, and I wanted her to learn how to be a creative director. So I'm trying to teach her logo design using AI and she's like, I don't want to use it. I don't want to use it. I'm like, you kind of have to. So I explained to her like...
This is your future, kid.
You may not like it, but...
She's now embraced it. Right. So now, um...
I understand, look, I understand.
What is the one way to protest? But what can you protest, Leo? If you want to take back your power and you're hearing all this, the one thing you can do is go to your local community board and say, I don't want this, and the, and if you don't stop it, we're going to vote you out of the community board.
New York state has banned them.
There you go. So what will happen is you'll get a handful of states that are going to ban data centers or block them. Then you're going to get a handful of states that are going to block self-driving cars. That's already starting to happen. Throttle and ban. So, this is where the front line of anti-AI sentiment will live. Local communities, just like they banned Airbnb in New York, they're going to ban self-driving cars in New York, Boston, DC, all those northeast regions. Portland will put, has a cap on it now. So, that's where people will be able to take their power back. Then the other states that embrace it are going to get all these jobs, all this money, all these amazing taxes. And they're mostly red states, I think.
And that's what's, that's literally what's happening right now. So people are working against their own best interest, which is to get the data centers. Just extort and just get as much money as you can for them. Tell them if they want the data center here, they have to pay the electrical bills of everybody within 10 miles of it. Period. Full stop. And they'll do it. They'll do anything.
Now, Jason, it's true what you say that this whole thing is overblown about AI taking people's jobs. No question. But I don't know if you saw this research last week from Stanford. For people the ages between 21 and 26, um, it's harder than it's ever been to get entry-level employment. And I'm certainly seeing that with my son. And that's scary because you've got, when people are using AI, the number one skill isn't a technical skill, right? It's analytical judgment. It's to be able, it's the ability to look at an AI output and go, I'm calling BS on this. This is hallucination. Oh, there's some bias here. And you need experience to have that analytical judgment. If you're not hiring these young people, where are your smart 30-year-olds going to come from? Where do you, what do you tell your daughter? She's 16.
Yeah. So, it's very simple. Uh, Jensen, uh, got this right. He said, 'Your job's not being taken by AI.' Yeah. You're not having your job taken by AI. It's going to be taken by somebody who uses AI. I have a training program for venture capital associates in training at my firm and we hire five people at a time. The people who rise are the ones who know how to apply AI and know what the output that we're going for is. And then to your point, Gina, very good, important point. Having the judgment to say this is what our goal is. Our goal is X. And did it actually achieve X? And if it didn't, how can I tweak the AI to get us to that outcome? You have to understand the outcome you're going for, which means you have to have a systems, uh, brain. You have to understand systems thinking.
And that is, which is going to be your specialty in cognitive science. So what I am training my daughters to do is, hey, what is the output here? The output is we want a new logo for this beauty company and we want the logo to get people's attention so they buy the product or they engage with the product. Okay, let's work backwards from that goal and okay, how do you get attention? Okay, you get attention in shorts. Okay, how do we make shorts? Great. Let's use the AI to analyze what shorts in the beauty industry have been the most effective, have the most comments. So, that's what I'm training my daughter to do is use the tools and then understand the business goal. How do you understand the business goal? You have to go to the CEO and the founder of the company and say, 'Hey, what's our goals? Can you tell me exactly what are the two or three things at our company that are not working, that are blockages?' And then you say to the AI, what would a smarter person than me with a lot more experience do in order to solve this blockage? And it will just tell you. But people are so scared of using these tools and they're conscientious objectors now in some ways that, uh, they're just blocking their own employment. And that's the big mistake. That's a mistake.
Just use the tools and check the work and understand what the goal is.
From the historical point of view, there's always, every time there's a new technology, it's a disruption for the old technology. So, uh, if you were a buggy maker, uh, Henry Ford was, was bad news. If you sold horses, he was bad news. But that didn't, and jobs in those areas went away, but new jobs are created. And I, I don't, I do think that AI more than people realize requires management, quite a bit of management.
And if you orchestration, like nobody was trained to orchestrate AI, but everyone's going to have to become an orchestrator. If you're a coder, if you've ever worked on a big project, you kind of have those higher-level skills. You just, you've been, you've been sewing everything by hand, but you know how clothing is made. So, you can operate at that higher level. My experience, uh, with, uh, a lot of the coders I know, some of them are saying, 'No, I like to code. I don't want to, this AI, it's taking my job.' But the smart ones are going, 'Yeah, but the higher-level skills I have learned about managing a team, managing a project are much needed, more needed than ever with AI. AI is like a bunch of junior intern-level developers that need a senior manager to corral them.'
And I think it's going to stay that way. I don't think that's going to go away.
That's why AI-assisted cybersecurity is going to be so huge. Right.
Humans add taste. Humans add judgment. Humans add a human point of view that the AI just doesn't have. And the taste and the judgment can only be added, Leo, if, if you hired young people at your company to develop the taste judgment. That's the, the one I'm worried about.
There'll be, um, that's why your son's working at a noodle palace.
Yes. Yes. A noodle factory.
Here's, here to answer your questions, Leo. Um, I do think taste is coming for these systems, you know, 5, 10 years from now. It'll...
GPT-5 has a lot of taste.
It's getting there. It's getting there. So, like you and I see it because we use, um, software to tell us what we should put on our dockets for our podcast. And if you do that...
Picked by AI, by the way.
It does a pretty good job of it because it's looking at the signals on social media to make these.
So I have to say though, the, the undifferentiated pile of stories that the AI generates are not the show. I've let that do that and it's not as good as if I go through it then parse it, organize it. So there is some human input.
But it is better than last year, right? You and I were doing this last year, 10 times better. So, it's obviously going to get there. But there is a super interesting point here, which is, um, who embraces it and who doesn't. And you will see large swath of jobs go away. It's just the timing that people have wrong and can we create new jobs in the time, uh, that people lose the old jobs. I will put out a premise here. I think self-driving is going to be the first time people experience this. Why? That technology is ready and you start to see, uh, in cities that have Waymos, robo-taxis, etc. Um, and DoorDash and Zipline. I'm an investor in Zipline, obviously was an investor in Uber. Those things are coming and that's going to be 5, 10 million jobs in the US.
Yeah, there are 14 million truck drivers and drivers in the US who are going to be out of work in 5 years.
Yes. I would say, I would put the over/under on half those jobs at 5 years.
Sure. Well, like the 50% of them, it's going to, there's regulation that's going to happen all at once. I understand.
Yeah. So, and then it's regulations that's going to slow it down, but we will see it there first.
Where it will happen first is in trucks, by the way, because they, they're much simpler. They drive on highways. Elon, in fact, along with, along with all the press for the flying car, also announced the truck. They didn't get a lot of press for that, right? But that's going to be the product.
And there are 20 people working on self-driving trucks and there are people already doing them. I think what you'll see in regulations is there needs to be a supervisor in the truck for 5 years, but the truck will be allowed to drive for 18 hours a day or however many hours. It might run 24 hours. Just, you'll have 2 hours of charging. So, there'll be a supervisor in the truck, which means instead of somebody driving for a 10-hour shift and having to drink a lot of coffee and do other things to stay awake and alert, let's leave it at that.
Yes. Like there, if you've ever been to a truck stop, you know what they're doing.
There's a little bit of methamphetamine involved in the trucking industry. Sorry to break it to folks, but you know, staying awake for 12 hours and being alert.
They're girlish figures when you... They do. No, literally. Is that true? Are truck drivers?
Yes. What they do is slim and they put meth, and this is what I have researched and read about, is a little bit of meth, not smoking meth and being high, just putting a little, essentially Adderall in your coffee.
Yeah, they're micro-dosing, literally micro-dosing methamphetamine.
Put it all aside. I'm not making any judgments right now. The fighter pilots did it too. That's where it all started.
Don't do it. It's not, don't. It's one of the worst drugs you could ever do is speed.
Well, I mean, Adderall is terrible, too. Like, I don't have my own. I used to take Adderall for ADHD, and then I decided that was a good thing.
ADHD is what, why you're Leo Laporte, by the way, why you're interesting is because you go from the show... Yeah. You go from the show to wanting to do hardware.
We, we need to take another break. I want to talk more about AI and local AI. I do want to show this graph. This is the growth of data center buildouts starting from the launch of ChatGPT. That's that linear 2023... not stopping... billions, trillions really being spent on data centers. But it is again my contention that RAMageddon is an illusion and I wonder if in the next year or so...
I'll explain the cycle when we get back.
Okay, there is... from this important break... this is from our sponsors... back to the Metcalfe's law, right? The network effect.
That's right. It's the boom-bust cycle, just like homes.
And, and boy, it's really been... Anybody who's purchased memory over the last 20 years knows about this. Yes. Times are, it's cheap, cheap, cheap, and then all of a sudden it's expensive, then it's cheap again. And it's one of the reasons memory companies hate the business they're in.
Oh yes. It's the worst business. It's like real estate, memory business.
The CEO of Micron said it's all Apple's fault. They... they... But we will take a break and come back with more. Jason Calacanis, Gina Smith. You see why I didn't have a fourth person on? They wouldn't have got a word in edgewise.
Yeah, no kidding. This is, this is an enthusiastic group. We made in our coffee.
I love it. No meth in our coffee today. No.
No. Just, you just named the show. You just named the show.
No meth in our coffee today.
I am not mentioning meth in the show title. I am sorry.
No in our coffee. No in our coffee. No Adderall for you, Leo.
We're, we're only a little ADHD. We will have more right after this. This episode of This Week in Tech is brought to you by Coveron. You've got a password manager, right? Maybe you got an antivirus, maybe credit alerts. Oh, it's all good stuff. Highly recommend it. But here's the thing. Nobody tells you when a scam actually works. And I know this from experience. Those tools tell you it happened, maybe, but they don't get your money back. Definitely. And scams, believe me, they are working. The FTC says Americans lost more than $15.9 billion to fraud in 2025. And these days, the scams don't look fake. They're written by AI. There's no typos. There's no obvious red flags. Just one message looks just like your bank, or in my case, my cell phone company. One click and it's over in minutes. Yes, I got bit. I believed it. I fell for it. That's why I'm here to tell you about Coveron. Coveron watches the dark web for your personal information and alerts you when your data, login, or payment details are exposed so you can act before somebody uses your identity. It tracks changes to your credit and it helps stop fraudsters from opening new loans in your name. But here's the part that stands out. Coveron steps in when money is on the line. You get up to $100,000 in coverage if you're hit with cyber extortion or online fraud. And you get real people who walk you through recovery step by step, so you're not spending weeks on the phone with banks trying to fix it yourself. Coveron even offers up to $2 million in identity theft coverage, including cases where someone uses your identity to take out a loan. To check it out, go to coveron.com/thisweekintech and use the coupon code This Week in Tech. Coveron also has family and couples plans. One plan, one dashboard covering the, you know, kid whose social security number could show up in a breach and the parent who's one convincing text away from getting phished. Tools reduce risk. Insurance reduces loss. Coveron gives you both. One scam can cost you everything. Protect yourself now. The first 100 users get 20% off with the code This Week in Tech at coveron.com/thisweek. Again, coveron.com/thisweekintech. The code is This Week in Tech. Use it. Thank you. And thank you, Coveron, for supporting TWiT. Now, back to the show.
Uh, yes, this is, yes, this is...
I mean, Club TWiT is the best value for eight bucks.
I have to say it's 10 bucks, but I have to say, uh, the AI-generated art. This is from one of our best artists, Pretty Fly for a Sci Guy.
Hey, no meth in coffee. No, just Adderall.
I like it. The, it's the blue. It's the blue... our noses... from Breaking Bad. It's the good stuff.
The good stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Um...
All right. You, you wanted to know about the, um... take a screen.
So, am I going to get, am I going to get RAM next? Am I going to get a DGX Spark for half off in about a year because RAM is so cheap?
100%. This is, um, I learned this when he... 100%. Here's what happens. Um, not waiting for them to build these factories, right? They've got it already.
They have a ton of orders. They've sold them. People might have them in warehouses. They may be stockpiling them, yada yada.
Here's what eventually happens. Um, everybody builds more fabs. They build more capacity when the boom happens. They all do it at once because they have so much money coming in. The orders come in, people grab the money, the people who pay in advance get to the front of the list. So now you're sitting on a bunch of capital. What do you do? You build more factories. You build more factories. Now you've got massive capacity. The people who bought all that then already have enough memory. So they don't put in this giant order again the next, you know, 18 months later or whatever it is. And now you've got too much capacity. You got to lower your prices and clear out the inventory. I know this because I live in Texas now. In Texas, the prices of homes, Leo, have gone down and rent four years in a row. If you see the chart of Austin real estate, it's literally an apartment gets 10% cheaper year and you're like, 'Wait a second. I just lived in California for 20 years and I watch the 10% a year...'
And it goes up 10% a year and everybody is like number one reason for hating life is their rent and their taxes on their homes.
It's the opposite in Texas because you can build whatever you want.
You have demand because of COVID, that's when they had their big boom, '21, '22. Everybody built every type of home. Apartments, rich people homes, uh, tract homes, everything in between. They built so much supply that demand has plummeted because there's so much supply. Homes sit on the market here for 6 to 12 months. In San Francisco, they stay on the market for 6 days or they're sold before they even go online.
Buy a closet for 1.3 million.
Talkers. I kept all my real estate during the down thing and now I rented it and now I'm like, I got to get this stuff out of here. I got to sell it now before the collapse.
Well, it's a boom-bust cycle. It's like 50 years are going to be crazy.
But those, uh, you and they, you know, the Micron and others say, well, we don't want to build factories because they're kind of aware of this, but they can't stop themselves. Micron's already broken ground on a hundred million fab for more memory in New York.
Great for consumers. I mean, it's like, it's a weird thing that happens in our economy is capitalism and all this money sitting around just drives people to do unnatural things. And sometimes those are natural things like the fiber, dark fiber during the dot-com bust and boom-bust cycle that created Netflix and YouTube and storage companies did the same thing.
So I'm, I'm a, you know, let's talk about something that has actually been in a warehouse for two years. Uh, Apple made this device, designed this device literally two years ago to go with Siri AI. But Siri AI, which they thought it was sucked, it's now, it's now getting there, right? So, they finally announced this week the Home View, which is a little square 7-inch diagonal screen on a base. You can also hang it on the wall. They have a wall-based version of it that's really just an Apple Watch or a CarPlay screen. Uh, it's not...
This is a big feature. It turns around to look at you. It doesn't call a robot.
No. And that's next year. This doesn't even do that. Doesn't even do that. In fact, in the, in the weird kind of family video that Apple made, the, the mom actually manually is aiming it around. Uh, eventually, according to Mark Gurman at Bloomberg, this is going to rotate. Next year, it's going to rotate. But right now, this is the way it is because literally this was made two years ago and stored in a warehouse because they couldn't release it. It wasn't ready. The, the software wasn't ready.
Is this a product everybody's going to buy at 300 bucks? By the way, the reason it's only three, only 300 bucks is because they made them two years ago when the RAM wasn't so expensive.
Are you rushing out to... I had to buy one. Freaks who buy all Apple things no matter what. That's where I'm...
Also bought the $300 Apple TV that's identical to the $129 Apple TV I bought four years ago. Jason, when Leo and I used to host this radio show back in the '90s, whenever the word Apple was mentioned on the show, we used to play Taps. Do you remember this, Leo?
But that was right because it was Gil Amelio was the CEO and Apple was dying.
Apple stock was almost a dollar a share, right?
Apple, by the way, this week is now a $5 trillion company.
Just catching up with Nvidia.
I'm buying it right now. No, I buy, I already bought it. I bought it. I'm an idiot. I'm an idiot. I bought the new Apple Watch, the old Apple Watch, just because in theory at some point this thing is going to listen to my conversations and give me notes.
I use the, I use the Plaud, which is incredible to press a button. I want something that listens all the time.
Yeah, I, I like that I have to press the button, but uh, I'm kind of old now and I, I care about privacy. I'm kind of like a McAfee doctor. Turn, I turn all the, all the microphones off in the house. I don't, I just now corrected my behavior. I don't ever say anything that I wouldn't say on Twitter or publicly.
I know I'm being recorded. I know the CCP. I know Putin and China and Xi have everything I've ever said. I'm the glasses. Oh no.
I've had this product by the way, uh, in my kitchen for over 10 years. Whatever the oldest Apple, um...
The HomePods. Yeah, I've had a HomePod.
You know what it is? It's the old iPad on a stand in the kitchen. They did add one feature to this that everybody's been asking for on the iPad since day one, which they won't add because they want everybody in the family to have an iPad instead of one that the family can share, which is when you look at this, it recognizes your faces and switches to your account. Apple TV, you can have multiple accounts. Uh, on this, you can have multiple accounts. On the iPad, they refuse to have multiple accounts. It's disgraceful. Disgraciad. That's the key feature here is that when I go on it, it has my settings. You go on it, it has yours. Perfect for a family. Do that with the iPad and we'll just buy the iPad and keep one of those in the kitchen.
It's so annoying. But you know, you nailed it. I, you know, this is the first iPad-like product that has multiple user accounts and it recognizes you and made a big deal about that.
Yes. Um, this has been the wet dream of every hardware company since 1981. They want a computer in the kitchen. And remember, we've always thought that was obscene. Why would you want this messy computer in the kitchen? But this is what they always wanted.
Would you like a tissue? Uh, Gina is so inappropriate.
You're right. Gina and I were the mics in my house.
What was the name of the, what was the name of, was it Cisco? Somebody made a kitchen computer. It had a cutesy name. Complete flop. Um, Radio Shack T.
The kitchen computer's always been the great device. I have this wall unit that's Android that's big. It's like a poster and it tells you what all the family's doing. It's got all the family stuff and all the time my girls go up to it and add things to the shopping cart, um, for Instacart or whatever we're ordering from and Amazon and then we check it out and then they are constantly pulling up recipes on it and because the thing's the size of a poster, it costs like a thousand bucks for this thing. Uh, I don't know which brand it is. They can read the chocolate chip cookies recipe from across from the island and make it. It's, it's a perfect device, but this will be a great device. I, I like the fact that they use the Apple Watch. I think that's kind of interesting format, but make it...
Project. It projects from your phone. It doesn't have apps on it. It projects apps from your phone like CarPlay does.
Right. It's like, oh, that kind of sucks. I want it to have its own installed apps. Yeah. Oh, that... Okay, now...
Well, you sort of can. And I mean it doesn't come with Spotify. You could put Spotify on your phone and project it to...
I, I just wish, my wish for John Turnis is that he runs this company based upon engineering and what's in the best interest of the consumer, not extracting profits.
I think under Tim Cook there was an obsession with extracting profits and they made profit-based decisions, not engineering decisions company, right? I know, but it's one of the reasons why like I think they're falling behind, uh, in terms of innovation. I hope he takes an engineering-first approach. The engineering-first approach would be to let every device, um, have maximum memory, maximum, uh, power, you know, and chip and maximum flexibility to switch, you know, based on...
They kind of stumbled into the AI, uh, business because they made their phones have AI processors and then their Apple silicon processors got better and better at that.
Yes. And now, and all of a sudden at the beginning of the year because of OpenClaw, everybody went out and bought Mac minis and Apple went, oh...
I literally just bought the M5 Mac Studio for $12,000.
You bought the top of the line 128.
Fancy. What do I care? I'm, I'm trying to decide. I'm going to be in, uh, uh, Indonesia when it happens. They're going to announce the 512-gigabyte version.
Well, I'll, mine's coming December. If they do announce, I told my team, give that to somebody else and order me the 512 because I want to run local models and local models are going to be able to somewhere around 28, 29. I did a chart in Claude. I was like, when does this cross over to being as powerful as like an H100? And at somewhere around 28, 29, 30, they're going to be as powerful as like an H100.
What does that mean? Wait until then to get them out.
No. No. If you're a technologist and you're in the 1% like you and I are, Leo, and Gina is, if you're in the top 1% or 5% of society globally, just buy the best thing and don't worry about it. You can always resell it. Um, and you're...
The audience knows I have eight local models running right now. Dual Sparks, a 3090, a Mac.
So, you have $25,000 worth of computer on your desk easily.
I think we're going back to that, by the way.
It's no smarter than my $100 a month Grokbot subscription. It's killing me.
Don't worry about it. It's going to, you're going to be part of the tip of the spear like you did when you bought your PC XT.
No, I remember buying a, I'm sure Gina, you did it too. I remember buying a Digital Equipment PC, a 40, 80, bucks, $10,000 in 1984.
Yes. Now that's 3x. So that $4,000 PC would be 12 now. Thus, when you buy a $12,000 desktop workstation now, don't sweat it. You'll have it for 3 years. Divide it by a thousand days. It's $12 a day. That's what I do.
So, I am mad at Elon because Grokbot is so good and it's so much better than I'm running Hermes on the local models. And what I really want to do is duplicate, drop Grokbot's capabilities at home.
Yeah. I don't think I can.
It's so unhinged. I literally all the... fast.
Yes. And unhinged. Like if I want to do something on LinkedIn or I want to download a TikTok or download an Instagram video or transcribe something, it's like, let's go. Sure, why not? Then I asked Claude to do it. Claude's like, you know what? Um, we're in a lawsuit with the New York Times and I cannot, um...
Read the New York Times. I'm like, it's on my browser. This is a browser extension. They're like, I guess you have to cut and paste it and you have to commit the crime. I'm like, I pay for the New York Times.
So tell me about Muse. Have you tried Muse? I play with it a little bit but I don't trust... um, Gina, have you played with any of these agentic tools?
Played yet with Muse, but its persistence... uh, pause.
They are, by the way, every ad surface in the house has an ad for Muse on it now.
Yeah. The only reason I could think of it is Mark suddenly said I could make some money on this.
Uh, he's practically giving it away, right? It doesn't cost you. You can use it pretty heavily without paying a penny. But that's only because he must be hoovering up every bit of data I give it. And at some point the worm will turn and the ads will start flowing. Oh no.
Speaking of flowing... Did anybody see... um, you can see everything. Did anybody see...
I'm dying to see it. I hear it's great. I saw it yesterday. The best documentary of all time.
I've heard that. All right. So this is for those who don't know, Nathan Fielder is the guy who did that crazy TV show, uh, The Rehearsal.
Right? He's a comedian, right?
He's a comedian, but the show was like weird because it was like performance art where he would let people rehearse ahead. It was just weird that he built their house and it was just weird and I tried to watch it and I couldn't. Anyway, apparently he's a cult phenomenon. He and, uh, is it Oppenheimer? The other guy, the director...
Who directed, by the way, one of the greatest... R.J. Oppenheimer, one of the greatest, uh, a couple of the greatest documentaries of all time. One about The Villages.
And one about Ren Faire. He's a really interesting documentarian. Anyway, they convinced Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of Theranos, in the weeks before her incarceration — she'd already been convicted and was about to go to prison, she's still in prison — to let them move in and film everything. Now, no spoilers, Jason, because I understand that things happen in the movie that are maybe a little surprising and unhinged right here. It is... Harris and Jeff have seen it from our Intelligent Machine show and both of them can't stop talking about it. In fact, they have insisted that they do a club special if you guys want. You want to be on it too, Jason, where they talk about it. They're going to have a big sign that says spoilers because they're dying to talk.
I will give the non-spoiler review. At least, number one, it's the greatest documentary ever made. Hands down. Put that.
This is what everybody's saying. They're saying it's the best picture of the year.
It is the best picture of this year. I will say it's in the top five films of the 21st century.
How could it be that good? It's not fiction, right? It's non-fiction. It's a documentary.
And there she is, not blinking and staring at the screen.
So, we all saw that weird clip. Yeah, that clip was so weird.
So it works on multiple layers that are so prescient in our culture. One of the layers it works on is the search for truth, right? One of the layers is fake it till you make it in the technology industry, right? Another one is, are people on the spectrum with Asperger's? Are they sociopaths? Are they lying incessantly? Are they compulsive liars? Or are they just too early and misunderstood and delusional? Right? And so we get into this all the time where Dario, or, you know, Elon has a flying car, or Dario thinks there's a 10% chance that we're all going to die. Tech people are out there, right? And then sometimes they're out there and they're on the spectrum. And then sometimes they're out there on the spectrum and are they committing fraud like the FTX guy or as Elizabeth Holmes was found guilty of. And so it really does challenge all of your thinking on those things. And as somebody who knows Elizabeth Holmes and knows everybody in the industry and has been commenting on it...
You know Elizabeth Holmes?
I do know her. I do know her. Yes. I met her the whole time.
So you knew her from before?
I knew her while she was building Theranos on a cursory basis.
Did you have any suspicions at all about the whole thing?
When the first thing started, I went on CNBC and said, 'I think this is going to be one of the biggest frauds in the history of our industry.' Really? Because I had John Carreyrou on my podcast after his first story, the Wall Street Journal reporter who broke the story, who was upset that he wasn't allowed to do this interview for the documentary. Why would she let John Carreyrou... They had a... The funny thing is Carreyrou was very kind of bitter about the documentary, but he also said it's the best film of all time. So, I mean, I think he's rightfully upset that he never got to interview her because he was the first on the story. He should have won a Pulitzer for it. Let's put it aside. The fact that he didn't win a Pulitzer is a crime. They should give him one, you know, posthumously. Absolutely. Broke it. At the core of all of this, you know, the reason I knew there was a fraud going on here or there was something fishy, however you want to frame it, was because if you had the technology and you were under that much scrutiny, the right thing to do would be to show the machine. She never showed it. Immediately show it. Not even her biggest customer, Walmart, never...
But here's the thing. In the age of AI, we will be sitting here in the next 10 years — I'm making a prediction. Within 10 years from today's date, October 18th, 2026, by October 18th, 2036, someone will have succeeded to some extent, some reasonable extent, in what the mission of Theranos was, which was to take a small amount of blood and give a large number of test results.
They'll do it with super intelligence and arrays. Arrays, super intelligent arrays. Yes. And so that's the hard part, by the way, is not the intelligence, it's the reading a tiny amount of blood. But if anything can figure it out, it will be AI. And so instead of getting that huge draw where you get like, what do they do when you do a full blood panel, like seven or eight of these test tubes after? Yeah. You're in the six, seven test tube range when I did it. And so I think somebody's going to be able to do it with, let's say, one test tube or a half a test tube, and we will be sitting here in 2036 saying, or some group of people were saying, Elizabeth Holmes was 100% correct. It can be done because everything can be done with technology. It's just a matter of when.
Yeah, we used to make fun of the Newton, like a lot of fun. The Newton, the Palm Pilot, and I loved the Newton. I had quite a few of them and I knew that this was the form factor of the future, but it was missing something, as it turns out: internet access.
Yes, absolutely, it was missing.
So I have a question and it's, I guess, probably for Jason. In an age where all these really corrupt people in prison are basically paying the administration and getting pardons and getting out of prison, why isn't she out of prison? Is she...
This is a great question. She's coming out in February or March. People don't know this. That's what I think's going to happen. She's coming out in the first quarter of next year to a halfway house. And so that I think is public, but I got the inside line on this. I was told... Billy, just so you're wondering, Gina, why she hasn't been pardoned? Well, why she... if you want to be pardoned, you need to give a million dollars to the administration. I don't know if she has the million dollars or not, but Billy does, her husband. Maybe. I don't know.
Uh, in this film, there seemed to be some debate around how much money he had access to. Um, putting all that aside...
No spoilers. No spoilers.
The review is the first half is what you've been told about, which is these are the 30 days before she goes to jail. The second half is the actual film and there's a character introduced in the second half, which I won't say, that then blows the whole thing open and you get into the Nathan for You, Nathan's meta commentary in a way that is so unexpected. And there are three turns in the second half of the film. There are literally three turns that your mind gets blown every 15, 20 minutes and that's why it's so powerful. The first half would have been the documentary of the year. The second half makes it the film of the year and the film of the 21st century today, 26 years into it.
But it's like 3 hours long, right?
And the 3 hours — if they told me I could stay in my seat and watch it again, I would have stayed in my seat and watched it again.
Paris has already seen it again. Paris has seen it twice.
I cannot wait to see it again. I cannot wait for you guys to see it and talk to you about it. It is so mind-blowing what happens in the second half of this film. And I don't want to oversell it now, but I am a fan of film. I've always been, and for me this was like right in my wheelhouse of like, what is truth, right? And we live in an era where like, who's an expert? What is truth?
We're in a post-truth age.
Post-truth age. And then who's evil, who's manipulating, who's being manipulated. It came up multiple times here on this very podcast. We have no anchoring to reality. Like, we don't know. We can't figure it out because everybody's got an agenda.
There's too many conflicting agendas. I've been saying this.
Yes. And you have... you don't know what all the subtexts are because there's multiple agendas with every single person. We just did it for Russia, Ukraine, Starlink, Dario, you know, John Turnis versus Tim Cook versus this device. And what are they optimizing for? The person on the street to know what's real, what's precise. And so this film encapsulates that better than any discussion or media property that has ever been done to date. And so he just hit the zeitgeist so perfectly that I cannot think of another moment in time — maybe Bowling for Columbine, that, you know, you just hit and you couldn't stop talking about that movie. Pulp Fiction, perhaps. I'm trying to think of a film that came out of...
The Matrix would be a perfect example. It has like...
Leo would know about that. What was that like back in the day?
Yeah, when you saw it on your 50th birthday, Leo, you talk...
I think The Matrix is the best example. I remember I didn't know anything about The Matrix. I went in and I came out with my eyes like this. I cannot discuss it right now because I don't want to give any of the spoilers.
Don't spoil it. We want everybody to...
But I think I gave you enough.
And so I would say to everybody, don't read any reviews, any...
No. Stay off social media. Ban it from your social media.
I've been trying to because everybody's talking about it. That's why I went at 11:30 in the morning. Go. You have to see it tomorrow morning at 10:00 a.m. It's only... go at 2 a.m. If there's a 2 a.m. screening, stop what you're doing. Jump off this podcast immediately. Change your plans. Go see it. 11:30 a.m. I won't be able to watch it... go see it. You and Lisa are going to have your minds blown. Go. Now, I don't know what...
Put a breakfast burrito in your bag and go.
Now, I don't know about Petaluma or Texas, but in Seattle, it's only playing three days in theaters and only at one theater. Friday night...
Friday. That's because they thought nobody would want to see it.
Queen Anne. Yeah. I mean, it is so next level. It's unbelievable.
Dying to see. He's going on his Fandango. Here you go. You want to see the Fandango, baby? See if it's showing in the Petaluma area.
Fandango. Oh, let's see if it's showing in the Petaluma area.
Just... you just scrolled past it. Go back up. Did I...
I really can't understand how she was able...
Oh, there it is. Big blue eyes.
Look at Blue Eyes. Okay. Check seats. Check seats.
Uh, maybe I'll... maybe tomorrow. Not today, right?
