This Week in Tech 508 (Transcript)

Leo Laporte: It's time for TWiT: This Week in Tech, and folks, this may be the best TWiT we've ever done. I am so excited. Georgia Dow is here from iMore. Owen JJ Stone Ohdoctah, Harry McCracken the Technologizer, and Jason Calacanis stops by in his Tesla and we patch things up. It's all next, on TWiT.

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Leo: This is TWiT, This Week in Tech, episode 508, recorded Sunday, May 3, 2015

Calacanis Returns

This Week in Tech is brought to you by Carbonite: For the hands on business owner, Carbonite makes data backup hands-free. Carbonite's automatic cloud backup provides you with round the clock protection at work and at home. Visit carbonite.com and use the offer code TWiT for two free bonus months. And by stamps.com: start using your time more effectively with stamps.com. Use stamps.com to buy and print real US postage the instant you need it, right from your desk. To get our special offer, go to stamps.com now. Click on the microphone and enter TWIT. That's stamps.com, use the offer code TWIT. And by Citrix GoToMeeting: The powerfully simple way to meet with coworkers and clients from the convenience of your computer, Smartphone, or tablet. Share the same screen and see each other face to face with HD video conferencing. For a 30-day free trial, go visit gotomeeting.com today. And by SquareSpace: SquareSpace is the easiest way to create a beautiful website, blog, or online store for you and your ideas. Go to squarespace.com; enter the offer code TWIT at checkout to get 10% off. It's time for TWiT: This Week in Tech, the show where we cover the latest tech news. We have such a good panel; I don't even know where to start. I'm going to go right to left or something like that. I don't know. Starting with Owen JJ Stone, Ohdoctah, on the horn from his mystery layer in New Jersey.

Owen JJ Stone: My mystery lair has been downgraded to subpar cave, because we have another guest with a super duper mystery layer, so I'm just like, "I'm old," in the back room somewhere—

Leo: Oh no! Move that Microphone closer to you so we can hear you better. Are you using that Snowball there? Is that what that is?

Owen: I am. I have a better mic somewhere, but I don't know where it is.

Leo: You sound good. As long as it's close to you, you sound good. Ohdoctah. Also with us, Harry McCracken: The Technologizer. Everybody on the show's got to have a nickname.

Harry McCracken: I brought my own.

Leo: The Technologizer is here. Good to see you once again, Harry. fastcompany.com, one of the great tech journalists for many years. Here's a guy you wouldn't expect to see on this show, but I brought him back. Jason Calacanis.

Jason Calacanis: Good to be home.

Leo: Buddy, I missed you! We had a falling out; I was a small, petty individual. I apologize. I'm thrilled to have you back.

Jason: It's good to be home.

Leo: And, we've got a newbie. This is great. We're really throwing her to the lions. Georgia Dow from iMore.com. It's great to see you Georgia. You've been on other shows with us, but this is your first time on TWiT, right?

Georgia Dow: I know! I'm so excited!

Leo: We're glad to have you. Georgia is in Montreal.

Georgia: I'm in Montreal.

Leo: You're seen regularly on iMore and other podcasts. There is so much to talk about, I don't even know where to begin. Microsoft had billed this week, and there was a lot of news from Microsoft. Elon Musk announced Tesla's new product and it's not a car, we are all wearing Apple watches except for... Owen, are you wearing your Apple watch?

Owen: No. I sold the first one. I've got the new one coming in next week.

Leo: You got one and you sold it already?

Owen: I messed up, because I bought two. I didn't know if I wanted the sport or the stainless steel, and I don't want the stainless steel so I sold it.

Leo: So you're getting the sport.

Owen: Yeah, so I can get my maximum dollar out of it, which was people who wanted to over-pay for it.

Harry: You made a profit?

Owen: Yeah. I doubled my money, so I got my sport for free.

Leo: That's smart! All you had to do was get up at midnight.

Owen: I was up and ordering away. I ordered two because I didn't know what I wanted, so I was like: "I'll get it." I got it, and I opened it up and said nope, bye. Somebody paid double the price, and I was like, "Yeah! Free watch."

Leo: They're kicking themselves now, because Apple has advanced the—I wasn't supposed to get this until later this month and I got it last week. This is the 42 mm. Apple has loosened the dials a little bit. Georgia, you have a sport?

Georgia: I have a sport. I have it on the white band, but I'm getting the Milanese band for it as well.

Leo: All of these are interchangeable, right? You can use any band with any watch?

Georgia: Yep. You can use any band. I was hoping to steal from all of Renee's. He got the 42, and I got the 38. Yes, you can interchange as you need and really easily.

Leo: I was using the 38, because I got Lisa's first. You have a 42 sport?

Jason: 42 sports. They let us get one on the inside because of the developer kit, so they sent us one early.

Leo: So your inside app is on the watch already?

Jason: No, just SMS. They featured us, so we have a good relationship with them. When you're a top developer they'll give it to you. I also have another one coming, lego doctor. I have to say; I think this is going to be a great success for them. I could see this easily being 25 to 50 million a year, if they can produce that many, because the act of getting your SMS messages here and your alerts here is so delightful, I think. Once people see the early adopters with it, they're going to want it. At Christmas, people went back and downgraded their iPhone 6 to 5. Ed Williams was like I don't like the 6; I'm going back to the 5.

Leo: Really?

Jason: Yeah. I think a lot of people don't feel the necessity to keep updating their phone, so they have a bit of extra budget.

Leo: So they buy the watch.

Jason: They buy the watch, because it does enhance the experience when you're waiting for an Uber or your getting news and you can just look at your wrist. In meetings, and I was at the movies yesterday, and I had alerts coming in from the babysitter.

Leo: I bet everybody behind you loved that as your watch lit up.

Jason: It's on low. It's better than lighting up the LG—

Leo: Did you jump up every hour and do some exercise?

Jason: No. But that is the most annoying part of it. "You could get up now."

Georgia: The first thing I turned off was the annoying reminder to stand up and the trash talking from my watch saying that I have not made my activity goals this week. You know what? I don't need that. That's what your parents are for. Sorry.

Harry: I was at a conference, and I got the nag-note to stand up and I was sitting down and had to.

Jason: So you literally just stood up in the middle of a conference? Wow. Harry is losing it.

Leo: I've been doing that.

Jason: In shows you've been standing up?

Leo: I got the little stars. Did you get the gold star? I got a gold star on here.

Harry: That's a pitiful achievement.

Owen: That's because Uncle Leo will stand up where he's at. He's a boss, he doesn't care. He stands up at the movies, he stands up at the baseball game, it doesn't matter. He just stands up.

Leo: I'm already all the way around. Look at that.

Georgia: I'm so sad that when I got my stand up reminder when I was having dinner, I actually did this with my arm and waved it around for a while.

Leo: Did it fool it?

Georgia: Yeah. And I got my status saying "You've done your stand up," and I was like, "This is trash."

Leo: I hate this thing. I don't think this is a product at all, Jason, I think you're completely wrong.

Jason: Wow. Welcome back to the show.

Leo: I feel like I suddenly got it. I've worn this all now. Android wear and Pebble. You're wearing two watches. You're crazy. I finally realized, as much as I want this category to take off, they're too damn small to be useful. The UI is too difficult on something this small. It's the same problem I had with Google Glass. It's too fussy, it's too finicky. It's hard to get it to work. Especially when everything I do on this, I could do on my phone which is right here. I feel like I was hopeful that Apple—just as they have in the past with the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad, would take an existing category and figure out the secret sauce that would make it sing, now that I've had this for ten days, nah. I disagree entirely. I think this is not going to sell. I think it's going to sell worse and worse.

Owen: I'm in the middle. First of all, as average consumers, people wanted a big phone. The iPhone 6 Plus sales show that. People were holding onto their iPhone 4s waiting for an i6.

Leo: So what do they want this little stamp size—

Owen: That's my point. That's something that will be a novelty, but I don't think it's a necessity. This watch is not a necessity. It doesn't change my world or my lifestyle so I need to have it. Secondly, most people that have regular funds say Apple is going to come out with a better one next year. If I'm going to get one, why would I get the cheapest one? There's no way in the world I'm going to spend more money than I have to knowing next year is going to be thinner, lighter, and faster. They're going to want to get rid of it.

Leo: Thinner and lighter isn't going to solve it. It's too small. It's a postage stamp on your wrist. No matter who is making it, that makes it difficult to be useful.

Georgia: It depends on how you use it. I'm with Jason on this. I don't use it for many things. I use it for use case scenarios where I want to do something quick, fast, and seamless without bugging anyone. I use it for turning on my lights, changing my hues, turning off my lights, opening my door, shazaming music, and answering calls, and checking notifications so I know if I have to get out my phone or not. That makes things easier. I think it makes things faster, and I enjoy using it for those cases. I don't interface with it much besides that.

Jason: The apps are going to need to catch up with it first. That's the issue. Having to hunt and peck to get what you want is a bummer, I concede about that, but when you get a nice alert here's the SMS, your food is arriving, when those gentle notifications come and you don't have to take it out, I think people are going to be come addicted to it.

Leo: How lazy have we become? I don't understand why it's so hard to look at your phone.

Georgia: Have you not seen Wall E where everybody is sitting—I was getting map messages of how to drive, which was fabulous because it was on my wrist and it was easy to see and it was telling me which way to turn.

Leo: I'm with you on that. I discovered that last fall when we were in London with Android Wear. I said, "Take us to the tower of London, and just like the Apple Watch, you turn left, you turn right. But you have to be walking; you have to be trying to find something.

Harry: I like Smartwatches when I'm up and about and moving around, because I don't want to be using my phone. I also want to think that almost all the Apple watch apps that exist were written by people who have never seen an Apple Watch. It's going to take 60-90 days before it's clear what's going on. The killer apps for the most part will not be written by Apple. It will be the third parties that make this thing compelling or fail to make this thing compelling.

Leo: I agree with you. We've talked about this on MacBreak weekly. The ecosystem can change because Apple pays interest— although with Apple Pay, I don't find so much of a convenience, because I still have to debit or credit, do you want cash back, I actually had to sign. I think it's card specific. It should be you do that, but even that, and that's such a huge savings in time. I feel like it is possible, and I'm going to be open minded, I'm going to continue to use it that the ecosystem and the apps could change it, but I also think that there may be a structural issue, which is it's very hard to create a user-interface on something this tiny that's functional that's good, that's not fussy. This thing has two buttons, a crown, force touch, and you still have to fumble around quite a bit to do something.

Jason: I was hoping they would have a bigger screen. I was hoping for a bango—

Leo: Who is that guy who has the big clock around—

Jason: Flavor Flav.

Owen: The other point is, you named a whole ton of other watches and other things. Jason's big thing is the notifications that easily come and tell you, a lot of watches—

Leo: They all do that!

Owen: They aren't mass market adapted yet. People aren't saying, "Oh wow. You're getting SMS on your watch? I need one of those. Regular people aren't doing that. In the bubble we live in, people are like this is the best watch in the world. Regular people don't do that. They look at wear or an app phone, and they say, "Oh. I cold get an Uber alert?" What's Uber? I live in a regular town, I don't know what Uber is.

Leo: That’s why I don't think we're going to have the sales figures that you're quoting, Jason. Our group will, but normal people will not.

Jason: You're going to see a social product arrive for this, like an Instagram or a Snapchat that will be made for this. We haven't seen it yet. You're going to see a game like Clash of Clans, or Solitaire for Windows. We just haven't seen it yet.

Leo: Apple doesn't allow animation on this. The only way you can have anything at all with animation is with a slideshow. There are some severe limitations to doing anything compelling on this, right now.

Harry: But it's pretty clear that the apps right now, at some point—

Leo: Somebody might solve it.

Harry: You'll also have an Apple watch that doesn't require your phone to be there.

Owen: Those things in the future might mean something. Apps that magically make people excited? Sure. Wifi on my phone? OK. Those things sound better, but the world we're living in right now...

Leo: It's true on any platform, a killer app is what makes the difference. My position is I'm wondering what that killer app could possibly be.

Jason: People have the same position with the iPhone. People were like, "What's this big screen for?"

Leo: But multi touch... when you first used multi touch a light bulb did go off, didn't it? Even on the first multi-touch, which was very limited. It had no app store. Multi touch was a revelation. It was like, "Ah. I don't need a keyboard anymore. I can do this and I don't need multiple... I don't know what the multi touch is for this. It's very obvious how much thought was put into this. You can see the activity thing that J Blonic the Nike guy was spending a lot of time. We'll do circles, we'll do this, a little star. There is clearly years of thought that went into this. I may be a little discouraged with this, that even with all the brains that Apple threw at this for years, they weren't able to come up with that compelling app. I'm wondering if that compelling app exists.

Owen: Somebody in the chat room said: iPhone solved the problem. This doesn't solve the problem.

Leo: Exactly. It's a luxury. It will sell well among certain people like us, we all five have one. That's amazing.

Jason: The activity tracking alone is a major win. I've been using this basic one. It has changed my behavior. I try to hit my steps every day.

Leo: The FitBit did that.

Jason: Right. I think those changed behavior. Now, if a company like Apple can make it elegant and compatible with the iPhone in an easy way without set up, that alone, if they get people hooked on it, that could be an entire category just to get people to buy it.

Owen: I agree with that. I had the Jawbone and the FitBit. I made myself stop using both of them, because I was waiting for my watch to come. Apparently Apple Watch is more accurate than all those devices so...

Jason: But the software sucks. I have to say, I'm super disappointed in their health kit so far, and I really hope that Basis or FitBit will use this as an input. That would be killer, if you could use any of the other apps with the Apple Watch as the input to get that data.

Harry: The interface is terrible, but it's a great station for stuff to come in and go out.

Georgia: It's a first gen for its interface. I think they're going to get better when they realize how people interact with it. Apple fans are huge fans of their products. We're talking over 250, million-user base of people who have iPhone 5 and 6. We're talking about 2% and we've already hit our 5 billion. We're going to be, I think 2 percent of Apple users, way over that percent, are going to end up getting an Apple Watch. It's easy to hit huge numbers for Apple, and we'll have to see where it goes from there.

Leo: The other thing I came away with is how brilliant Apple is at design and marketing. It is beautiful. You have two of the best designers in the world. Johnny Ive and Mark Nussem, and given that they had to make it thick enough to put a battery in, they've done a good job of design. It feels good, it looks good. The OLED screen is spectacular.

Harry: Each band is clever in a different way—

Leo: On the other way, when the Apple iPhone came out, they lapped everybody in the business. There was nobody even close, right? I don't feel like that's the case. I think in fact, Android wear is darn close, and could easily keep up and best what Apple has done. So that's good for consumers. That means there's going to be a lot of choice and it's not going to just be on iOS.

Harry: Although Apple has a huge advantage on IOS in that they can establish a much more robust and sophisticated connection between the phone and the watch than Pebble.

Leo: I agree, on IOS. But the Android wear watch could do much more than any other watch on Android. Of course, the Android is much more open.

Harry: It can talk to all of Google's services, which it does.

Leo: I agree. Android wear, even though it is coming to IOS, it will never be a full peer as Apple Watch is to IOS. On the other hand, if you're an Android user, don't feel left out. You're going to be just fine, because the Android wear watch is already a second generation. I'm going to get the Bane on Wednesday.

Owen: But does it come in solid gold, Uncle Leo?

Leo: It is goldish.

Owen: Not goldish. Solid Gold.

Leo: It's funny because Jason bought the solid gold watch and had it plated to look aluminum because he didn't want to be—

Jason: I didn't want to be ostentatious here.

Leo: If you put his watch on, it weighs like four pounds. It's amazing.

Jason: I cover the diamonds in rubber.

Owen: Jason hangs out in rough neighborhoods. He doesn't want to get robbed on the street.

Jason: I don't want to get jacked for my bling.

Leo: I've been wearing the Moto 360, which is an LCD screen which doesn't look half as good as the OLED screen.

Jason: At what price would this become a huge seller, do you think?

Leo: 250. No. 199.

Jason: He said it cost 80 bucks to make.

Leo: By the way, Tim Cook in his analyst call said, "I hate it when people say how much it costs to make." He hates it for two reasons. 1, because you see the profit margins, 2 because he said they don't use off the shelf components. You can't tell me you know how much my VLSI CPU costs because I make it and you don't. By the way, Taptic, it's just a vibrator. This is Apple's marketing skill. The engine is a taptic engine that will make your wrist feel as though somebody is touching it. No. It's just a vibrator. It's a normal—I thought it was going to feel like left right or ghostly touches. No. It's a buzz. Am I wrong?

Georgia: It's a softer buzz.

Leo: You guys are in the reality distortion field if you think this is anything but a buzz. By the way, other people can hear it. It is not an invisible tap on your wrist. It sounds like a buzz; I can hear it when you're buzzing. Stop it.

Jason: They did oversell that a bit.

Leo: They oversold it. That's what they do. They find new words for everything. The intersection between humanity and technology, the taptic engine—

Jason: There's one new thing though for the interface. The force touch, which I don't think people know about.

Leo: I have the MacBook pro with the Force Touch. It's weird, because when it's off, you can tell. That's one piece, there's no clicking at all. Then you turn it on and suddenly you feel clicking. What happened? That does fool you. On the watch, does it? I don't know. The watch does do one thing I wish the iPhone did. You can force touch notifications and clear them all at once. You can't do that on the iPhone. It's the worst thing ever. That's genius. They had it on every other phone for five years.

Jason: But Apple ditched. It's genius now.

Leo: You get all your notifications, you force touch. I'm not in the—

Jason: For people who don't know what force touch is, you push it down and you don't let go.

Leo: It's pressure sensitive, right?

Harry: The problem is you don't know when you can and can't do that until you try.

Leo: It's like Windows 8 in that regard. It has magical incantations.

Harry: It's like a right click. You don't know what you get until you try it.

Leo: It's analogous to the right click. This is the simple watch..., which one are you using? We have to try this. Everybody put your watch face on Mickey, those of you in the room.

Georgia: Do I have to?

Leo: No, you don't have to. You're not in the room, it won't work. I just want to see if all three of the people in the room put it on Mickey, and I want to see if Mickey's toe tapping would be in sync. Take it off, put them all in one spot. Oh crap.

Jason: Cover your pin code! People can see your pin code.

Leo: So what? I'm going to take money out of your bank account. It looks like it's in sync. We just need one more to prove this! I think he's in sync. I don't know why that excites me.

Owen: The bow tie is getting tighter and tighter every time you get to shrieking. I feel for you.

Leo: Am I turning red? What happened to Ohdoctah? Are you in the dark there?

Owen: I got skylights, the sun setting on me.

Georgia: I love that you have your glasses on.

Jason: This is like an episode of Homeland all of a sudden.

Georgia: He's wearing—

Owen: Normally when I call it's wintertime and night time, so I have my lights set up and it's so bright I don't need lights. No the sun is right in my face.

Owen: We buried the— Georgia Dow, you don't like Mickey Mouse?

Georgia: I really don't like Mickey Mouse.

Leo: Is he like creepy clown creepy?

Georgia: I don't know. It's too much hype with Mickey. I'm done with that.

Leo: It's interesting. Remember, Disney isn't owned by Apple.

Harry: They're good friends though.

Leo: They're very close. Lorraine Jobs is the largest stockholder in Disney, but this is still a licensing deal.

Jason: Why don't they have a store with a hundred different options yet?

Harry: From Apple or from third parties? You can't do that. I was always impressed by the ones they had that were customizable.

Leo: I like the way you can customize it. That solves my need.

Harry: I assume there will be additional Apple ones, the only question is whether there will be ones from third parties.

Leo: All right. We've done it again, I don't know why. The Apple watch has consumed many hours of programming. When the iPad came out, we spent a lot of time talking about the iPad. When the iPhone came out, we spent a lot of time talking about the iPhone. It's the way it is.

Owen: I tell you what. This watch didn't change the world like somebody else this week.

Leo: Who else changed the world, Owen JJ Stone?

Owen: Mr. Musk.

Leo: Mr. Elon Musk. Let's talk about Tesla and the power wall. Coming up next.

Georgia: Elon Musk is our own Tony Stark.

Leo: Love him. I'm sitting here. The announcement was 8:30 pacific time, which is 11:30 East Coast time. I'm sitting and watching, they're playing the same two crappy songs over and over again. I even tried on Shazam on my watch to figure out what they are. They're production music. I Tweeted, "apparently Elon is having trouble getting the iron man suit on." That was the big joke of the week. Let's take a break, when we come back, Power Wall. We will talk about a giant battery that is changing the world, says Owen JJ Stone. Great cast today. The return of Jason Calacanis to TWiT. Siri was listening. It's got my entire last... that's pretty good. It's the entire show. It says, sorry Leo. Can you try that again in fewer words? Everybody is a critic. Owen JJ Stone is here from New Jersey.

Owen: Somebody in the chatroom said I'm off in Baltimore. I think I might—

Leo: The Technologizer Harry McCracken, the return of Jason Calacanis. How long has it been?

Jason: A couple years.

Leo: I'm sorry.

Jason: Don't worry about it. It's built up all this energy now. TWiT is blowing up.

Leo: And Georgia Dow. People have been saying we've got to get Georgia on TWiT for years. Happy to have you, from iMore.com. Our show to you today brought to you by those good people at Carbonite. It's national small business week this week. There are no such thing as small businesses, only small minds. Small people, even a small business like this needs good backup. Carbonite for home or Office is the best way to protect your data in the cloud. If there is a fire or flood, or an earthquake tsunami, whatever happens, you don't lose your business. If all your backups are sitting next to your computer and the place burns down, you've lost your receivables, your client list, your supplier’s list. How do you get back in business? You need Carbonite and cloud backup. Carbonite is easy, especially for a small business where you don't have an IT department. It's easy to set up. 75,000 small businesses use Carbonite for their data. More than a million and a half folks all over the world use Carbonite. For the hands-on business owner, it makes it hands free and hastle free. Right now, during small business week, a special deal when you go to Carbonite.com. Here's the deal: try it. That's the best thing. I love our sponsors who say try it for free, because you can see if it works for you. Carbonite.com, use the offer code TWiT, get that round-the-clock protection, and two free bonus months. As long as you say I heard it on TWiT. Carbonite.

Georgia: Their tag line should be it was good enough for Han.

Leo: Good enough for Han. How long was Han in Carbonite? Do we know that? Was it between—?

Jason: Siri?

Leo: Hey Siri! See, Siri isn't listening to me. She listens when she wants.

Jason: Hey Siri.

Owen: Why are you talking to your hand like that? You all look like weirdos. Remember when people used to talk with an earpiece in, and you thought they looked insane?

Leo: By the way, Georgia, how do you stand on Star Wars? Are you an original episode 4, or do you like the BluRay version? Have you downloaded all six digital episodes? Where do you stand on that?

Georgia: My husband is a huge fan, so I've had to watch them a million times. I like the original. In my Star Wars, Han shoots first.

Leo: That's the key.

Jason: No brainer.

Leo: George Lucas for some reason wants to change it all. I don't know why. It's going to be good, isn't it?

Jason: JJ Evans is going to crush it. It's going to be amazing. You can just tell. He's doing the real models, so if you look at a film like Blade Runner or the original Star Wars, it's so believable because the models were real. Once you have everything is CGI, I think the actors can't act well, and I don't think it looks real. So when you go back to the models, it's easier for them to act.

Owen: He has nailed Star Trek. He hit Star Trek out of the park.

Jason: Best Star Treks ever.

Owen: I went and watched Star Trek, I was so proud, like he was my son. I don't know JJ Abrams, but I believe—

Leo: Have you seen BB8? Look at this guy. It's made by Sphero, right?

Georgia: Am I the only one that's going to be getting one when they come out?

Leo: Sphero is going to sell them. I signed up immediately.

Jason: Will it have the top piece too?

Georgia: Yes.

Leo: So Sphero, if you didn't see it, it's a dorky game where the ball rolls and you control it with an iPhone. We've all played it, they have Sphero soccer and stuff, and I even have some in the basement, we have some Spheros. It didn't really take off until this. This is going to be the toy of Christmas. You passed on investing?

Jason: I passed on investing. I saw it two years ago, and I decided that I wasn't an investor in toys. I don't understand how this is becoming a huge business. This is going to become huge.

Georgia: This is going to kill it.

Leo: It's a robot. It looks like a snowman. The bottom ball is independent of the head. The head is held on by magnets. There's a rod in the lower ball that actually moves the head around. The head can spin independently, but the reason the ball can roll independently is because it's not attached, it's just held on magnetically.

Jason: It's genius.

Owen: What am I going to do with it?

Georgia: You know, you're just going to bring it around. It's one of those great things to show everyone, because it's so neat, and then it will sit forever.

Leo: There's a certain irony to saying this Apple Watch is stupid, but I've got to have a robot on a ball.

Georgia: I have Rob.

Leo: Is that yours or your husband's? Tell the truth.

Georgia: This is mine. I asked him...

Jason: You could do some serious science experiments with that, if I remember marketing correctly.

Georgia: I need BB.

Leo: I really want a BB8. I don't know how we got into that.

Harry: I wrote an enthusiastic review, but I have to admit after finishing my review, I didn't come back to it.

Leo: It was cool, but...

Owen: Here's the thing, I'm playing with it with my seven-year-old daughter. We have two of them, we have friends over, we make tracks, we have races, we take them into the pool. Jason said he didn't want to invest in a toy. You all don't know anything about toys. Give it to some kids, share with the world.

Leo: I bought for Christmas last year, not even this 2014. I bought the Anky Drive. Those were the cars... there were no tracks, but they would shoot at each other.

Owen: I'm raiding your garage, Uncle Leo. I'm coming.

Leo: This was expensive. I only bought the basic kit, but I got two extra cars. I spent a lot of money on this. Harry went that's nice and went home and back to school, and that was it.

Owen: I'm bringing my daughter over and we're going shopping.

Leo: Come over! I would love to meet your daughter. She's got to be totally awesome.

Owen: She does karate, right? This week, she made me take her to MMA. She saw UFC on TV. She's like, can I do that. I'm like you want to do that? She's like yeah. So we went for a free class and everybody was like, wow. Your daughter is a beast. I'm like, yes she is.

Leo: How old is she?

Owen: She's seven.

Georgia: Owen, you have to get your girl involved in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. Every girl should learn it.

Owen: She has a purple belt in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. Now she's doing regular karate and she wants to start MMA. Like I said, she asked for a punching bag for Christmas. That's the kind of daughter I got.

Leo: Get her a BB8 instead. She could punch the BB8.

Owen: I don't have to worry about boys, that's all I'm happy about.

Leo: You do not have to worry about boys. She's going to kick their ass. Georgia, you're also going to Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. I know Renee is. He almost killed me on New Year’s Eve.

Georgia: That was a great video! I love Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. I've done martial arts all my life, but Brazilian Jiu Jitsu evens out the odds.

Leo: You use the energy and momentum of your opponent against them.

Georgia: I'm tiny, but all my body against someone's neck, it's not happening.

Leo: Right. I'm scared. Elon Tesla... That should be his name. Just call him Tesla. Tesla II. Elon Musk... I actually gave up. It was half hour before it started. It was late. I gave up, and now I'm sad because everyone was saying it was a great keynote. What I saw of it wasn't super polished, he was just talking.

Owen: You didn't watch it later?

Leo: I did watch it later, but did you think it was the greatest Tech Keynote you'd ever seen?

Owen: Let me tell you something. First of all, everybody has been watching this. To see a regular man get up and give a speech, I don't care what he said. I don't care if he flubbed, what he joked. He was passionate about we can change the world now if we do X Y Z. It's possible. If you guys can help me, I can help you. It was 18 minutes of pure joy. I sent it to two of my friends who travel the world helping sick kids in Africa; the other friend is in China helping animals. My one friend was like I'm crying right now. You don't understand the places I go to that have solar power. There aren't options. The batteries he was saying were junk... one day in those countries, they will be able to have sustained power. He changed the world. I want to work for that man. I would work for him for free; I love that man so much. It is a powerful thing. It's amazing.

Leo: You know what? I'm playing it right here. He's Canadian.

Owen: That's why it's so nice.

Georgia: I thought he was from South Africa.

Leo: It says he's Canadian on Wikipedia.

Georgia: I wish.

Leo: South African. That makes sense.

Georgia: What I loved about it, I don't think it was the greatest keynote. I loved what Owen said. It was fresh, it was honest. It wasn't filled with 'America speak.' It was just him, something he believes in, it was quirky, it was awkward, but it was honest.

Leo: This is one of my favorite pieces. Let me back it up just a little bit. We'll play this. Can you hear him? Why is it so low? Can you turn it up all the way?

Owen: Right before that is the best part. He said we have this fusion reactor and it's free. I thought of every movie I've seen in my lifetime. They're building a Fusion reactor! None of that crap is real. We've got a free one. It's up there.

Leo: Jason, is it turned up all the way? Is it just me? It's very quiet.

Elon Musk: It's not much.

Leo: Let me back up one more time.

Elon: To get rid of all fossil fuel generation in the United States. That Blue Square there is the land area that is needed to transition the United States into a zero carbon electricity situation.

Leo: That blue square, if that were solar panels—by the way, that blue square is probably 800 miles by 800 miles. It looks small, but it's a city. That would replace all our dependence on foreign fuels, on anything. It would be solar. If, by the way, that area is about the area of all the roofs in the United States.

Elon: It's not much. Most of that area is going to be in rooftops. You won't need to disturb land, you won't need to find new areas. It's mostly going to be on the roofs of existing homes.

Leo: Although the panhandle in Texas would be a good place to put it, because it's sunny.

Owen: There's a lot of places out there that are open that you can get a lot of good space out of.

Leo: Nevada has some big solar farms, doesn't it?

Jason: You want to have local storage, which is the whole point of this, because you have the peak usage and the dip. When we have peak usage in California and other states, we fire a lot of coal to build enough energy for people. That's what he's talking about here.

Elon: You can use it at night and also during the day. The energy generation varies. There's a lot more energy generated in the middle of the day than at dawn or dusk. It's very important to smooth out that energy generator.

Leo: There's these peaks and valleys.

Jason: Even if you had the battery pack without solar in your house, you could download, and the grid will tell you electronically energy is cheap now. Charge your battery. When you have a Tesla, you can set it to charge at 2 AM, or 3 AM when the load is low, and you have cheap electricity.

Leo: You have a Tesla, right?

Jason: Yeah, it's outside. Elon gave it to me.

Leo: That's nice.

Jason: There's a good story behind it.

Leo: You were the first person I knew to get a Tesla.

Jason: What happened was the company was going out of business, and I was at dinner with him? He was...

Leo: Is this the period where we learned Google...?

Jason: Even before that. The trade pubs were saying he's got two or three weeks worth of pay roll. So we're out at dinner, just the two of us in LA, and I said certainly there's some good news. He said I blew up the second rocket. What happens if you blow up a third rocket? Space X is done. How are you doing personally? He was getting divorced from his first wife at the time. I said, "Certainly there must be some good news. Tell me something good that's going on." He took out his Blackberry, that's how old it was. He said, "Don't tell anybody, but here's the clay model of the Model S. He showed me the clay model of the Sudan. I said, "Wow, that's gorgeous." He said, "Don't tell anybody, but I think I could make this for 50 grand." I went home, I wrote two checks for 50,000, put them in a FedEx envelope, and I said, looks like a great car. I'll take two. I told my wife, we're never going to see this, but Tesla is going out of business. I have to support my friend. Two years later, the checks were cashed and it said, "Congratulations, your serial number is 0000001, 000000073. I forwarded it to Elon, and I said you don't have to give me the first one. He said, you ordered it before anybody. You deserve it. I was outside and I was offered one that was a quarter of a million dollars, because it's one. I'm going to donate it to the Smithsonian or something.

Leo: That's amazing.

Jason: He's a transcendent entrepreneur. He went up there and talked about, not his business, but the problem that the world faces. 99% of the keynote was everybody is denying climate change. Here is the chart of carbon. Here is a solution that will work, and he's trying to explain to people that are in climate denial, and who believe that the world cannot solve its own problems. He's saying you can solve your problems. If we put out a couple millions of these in the world, we could get everybody out of fossil fuel. It is possible. To give you an idea, we put out a billion cars in the world every 20 years; we can do this in our lifetime and make carbon go sideways. This was a pitch to stop climate change, and that's what blew everybody away. It would be like if Steve Jobs got on stage and said "The reason we're going to get these watches is if we had everybody's health data, we can help everybody cure cancer eventually." This was transcendent. It wasn't about him, it was about climate change.

Owen: When I say change the world, I mean change the world. You get to those points that Jason just pointed out, and he also said I can't do it alone. How many of these companies are going to sit around like Blockbuster looking at Netflix saying oh, nobody is going to want that. That doesn't matter. Nobody is coming into the store. Why doesn’t the grid produce as much power as it used to? Oh. People were getting these batteries. The next thing you know, they're left out in the dust because somebody else is doing it. I hope to God that people get behind it and the older dinosaur parts of the world think about the future and change things. He literally said, "Hey. It's open source technology. Help me change the world. Here's how we do it. He gave you a plan, and he's giving it to you on a platter."

Leo: I want to talk specifics. What he's selling is a battery suitable for a house. It's called Power Wall. It's not that big. Small Refrigerator, maybe. It's thinner than that.

Jason: It's only 9 inches deep.

Leo: It's lithium ion batteries.

Jason: The whole floorboard of the Tesla is a battery pack.

Leo: I've heard stories of people taking their Teslas apart for the batteries.

Jason: I took the Tesla technology and put it there. What’s really interesting is the story ark for Elon was when he was doing Space X, he started bringing metal into this side of the factory, and I remember Jordan saying this is the metal we're going to use to make that rocket, and they've got a machine in between them. Then when he did Tesla, he took those same lessons he learned and put it to Tesla to build a car. When you go to the Tesla factory, materials come in here, car comes out there. He's not making any of the parts for somebody else.

Leo: By the way, that's what Henry Ford did with the Rouge factory. Boxcars pulled up with Timber and iron or coke. A car would come out the other end.

Jason: Two things he was supplying for the place: The steering column was for Mercedes, and then the battery he got from China. I remember him telling me, "They're not going to be able to make enough batteries for me. I'm going to have to make my own battery." That's where the Giga factor came in. One of the things that happened is that the stock price of Tesla has appreciated so much that he's able to use that to take on bigger projects like the Giga factory. The Giga factory is going to produce batteries for everything. This wall battery idea could change everything. If you store that electricity local and you got 10% of people to do that, we might not have to fire up the coal plants. We might be able to stick with nuclear, hydro, and solar. And the cleaner choices. If you think it's impossible, in Germany they're phasing out nuclear. They've had days when they've been 60 or 70% renewable. Those are weekend days. You have France, which is 90% nuclear, and then Germany, which is 70% renewable. This could happen in the United States, and we're going to get to the point where we have free or close to free electricity. There's new nano technology, basically mesh filters where water could get pushed through. It's going to go down to a tenth of a penny per gallon. When that happens, if we can have the solar, the batteries, and a de-centralized grid, we could be sucking the water out of the pacific ocean and making deserts into oasises. The whole world is going to change in our lifetime.

Leo: So this is a first step?

Jason: This is going to be part of the legacy that Elon has to solve the world's problems. I'm a techno-optimist, maybe because of my friendship with Elon, but seeing him do it—

Leo: He's quite impressive.

Jason: He doesn't have the fear gene. Zero fear in the man. I saw him on the brink of a nervous breakdown. He's told this story publically about how he almost had a nervous breakdown from all this. He was living off a loan from one of our famous billionaire friends, and he brought it all back. To have 200,000,000 in personal wealth, shove it into two companies, be living off a loan from your friend, and then come back from that? He has no fear gene. One time he was like, "You're playing poker? I wonder if I should learn how to play." I was like, "No. I am not going to be the man responsible for you learning how to play high stakes poker. No f-ing way. He's a very funny guy. What I like about his talk here is you're starting to see his humor. He's coming out of his shell a little bit.

Leo: So you feel like this is the Elon you know a little better.

Jason: It's definitely the Elon I know. He was putting his little pinkie up when he said billion and stuff like that.

Leo: I liked what I saw.

Harry: Unplugged. I went to the Billed keynotes, they have 27 people on stage, nobody tries to pull off a keynote by themselves. Even Steve Jobs for many years would bring other people on stage.

Leo: Heavily rehearsed for weeks, and never strays off the prompter, but this is loosy goosy. Let's talk about—this thing is 3500 bucks. This power wall battery, the installer. How does this work for the end-user? Do I need to install a solar array in my backyard or does it matter?

Jason: It doesn't matter. You put solar in.

Leo: I would like to do that, because then it would be off the grid.

Jason: When you have these things, I was texting with Elon the other night. If we have another New York situation where New York lost power for a few days, everybody in that city is going to put one of these in. That's going to be the tipping point. Nobody really got this on Thursday night.

Leo: But is it too expensive to do something like that? That's a lot of money.

Jason: 3500 if you own a house, the average home in these major cities is 3 million dollars.

Leo: The people looking at the cost, my power bill is so much and this is going to cost so much, and this is going to take 30 years to pay off.

Jason: But think about this. How many people do you know who are putting back up generators in or buying a back up generator from Home Depot for 600 bucks?

Owen: That's exactly what I was going to say. There are people who are in struck areas of the country, that means there's storms, there's outages, that would want something like this. One, it's fixated and you know what it is. A generator can go bad in a different way, you have to have them outside your house, they cause fires, there's all kinds of problems with those kinds of generators or back up systems that you have currently. If you did have solar, great. You're going to get free power. If you don't and you're in Alaska or off grid anyway, this is where that's going to start and then it will expand out.

Georgia: People love that feeling of being in control of themselves. I think that makes them feel much more empowered, so that you're controlling the electricity that you deal with, and you're helping out the environment at the same time. It's not about monetary gain. I think that people will enjoy being able to do it themselves and producing their own electricity, and if they can, being able to give back to the system.

Leo: How long would this keep me with power? Is it a day? A half a day?

Jason: A couple of hours. It depends on if you have your dryer, your washing machine, and your dishwasher.

Leo: The well is electric. If I lose my power, I don't have water. There's an advantage to having a—

Jason: Don't be surprised if in a couple of years you see an incentive from California or other states. Because just like they did for solar, they're having a problem as the cost of maintaining the grid goes up, something like this takes the train off the grid. They're actually—

Leo: Huge benefit to them.

Jason: Huge benefit to them. So they'll subsidies it, you're talking about a dollar a day for ten years and you'll have something like this in your house. People who own homes, it's going to be a no-brainer.

Leo: Did you write a check already for the first power wall?

Jason: I didn't buy this one yet, because I'm renting right now. I moved up to San Francisco.

Leo: You moved up here? You're not living in beautiful Brentwood with the movie stars?

Jason: I'm selling my house in Brentwood. I was coming up here every week, and I have a daughter now. Too much commuting.

Leo: So we'll see more of you.

Jason: Absolutely. I'm down the block. It took me half an hour to get here. I was racing.

Leo: Did you have the original roadster?

Jason: I have the number 60 of the roadster. I still have that one.

Owen: I have a picture of me sucking that. Uncle Jason let me sit in it up front.

Leo: I remember that.

Owen: I couldn't get out. I couldn't drive a Tesla, because my feet couldn't reach the pedal, I couldn't get out so they had to Jaws of Life me.

Leo: Now you got me excited. I was excited before, but now you got me really excited.

Harry: I'm way more excited than I was when I came here.

Leo: Yeah.

Owen: You change the world. You hear all the stories; you see all the movies like, what will make me change the world? One man can make a difference. Elon Musk is doing it.

Jason: Just a tease before we go to commercial; I just dropped 1 hundred dimes into the hyper loop company.

Leo: That's crazy. Your brains will be on the back wall.

Jason: I just put a hundred dimes into it. It's the same reason that when people told me investing in Uber was crazy. That's my job; to make crazy bets.

Leo: Elon is not going to build a hyper loop. He just suggested it.

Jason: He suggested it. One of his senior engineers form Space X—

Leo: Somebody is going to build it.

Jason: After we get back from commercial break we'll talk about it. Professional broadcasting.

Leo: You are a trained professional. I wish I had an Audible ad for you.

Jason: I wish you had a Stamps ad, because that's saved my life a bunch of times.

Leo: OK. You're not an investor in Stamps, are you?

Jason: No, but I use it.

Leo: Even better! Stamps is what turns your fulfillment operation pro. If you sell on Ebay or Amazon or Etsy....It's so funny. Lisa buys a lot of stuff on Etsy and we always get these boxes and it always looks like a monkey wrapped it and it's got 800 stamps on it. It doesn't project the most professional look. It's so easy with stamps.com. First of all, you don't have to go to the post office anymore, so a lot of stress is off your head. You could do it on your desk with your computer; you get that USB scale so you know exactly how much postage. When you print the postage—by the way you can print on envelopes too, it's not just for packages. You can print it right on the envelope with your company logo. The return address is automatic you can pull the addresses out of Quickbooks or other address databases or right from the website. If you're sending a package, see how professional it looks. You look like you're a real business. I can't tell you how important that is. It just makes a huge difference. First impression, absolutely. You're going to love it because you don't have to go to the post office. You get a discount you can't get at the post office. You get convenience factors. It will automatically send an e-mail if it's one of those priority mail that you have to sign for or express mail. The e-mail goes out with a tracking number. I want you to try it. It's a great deal for you. It's our no-risk trial if you go to stamps.com, click the microphone in the upper right hand corner there. The offer code for this is TWIT. Just put TWIT in the offer code, then they now that you heard about it here, and you'll get $110 bonus offer that includes that digital scale. Yours to keep. $55 in free postage, a month of stamps.com. It's really a nice deal. Stamps.com, click the microphone, use the offer code TWIT, and transform your business.

Jason: You know what we used it for?

Leo: What do you use it for?

Jason: You know what Media Mal is?

Leo: You send books.

Jason: The idea of selling a book for two or three bucks, but then you have to ship it for 7 or 8 dollars because it weighs a lot, it's crazy. The US postal service came out with this thing called media Mal. It's like 2 bucks. It gets there in under ten days. You can do it through stamps.com, and we sell all of our books every year. All of our media and you can just get rid of it.

Leo: I didn't know you did books.

Jason: I like to read. I'm a big reader. I like to learn. I love books and I love audio books. Media Mail, it's a super tip.

Leo: So you are going to tell us about... it sounds science fiction crazy here. How fast do you travel in?

Jason: It'll be a thousand miles an hour.

Leo: So from San Francisco to LA, like a half hour?

Jason: Yeah. About 20 or 30 minutes. Elon isn't doing it, just to be clear.

Leo: He proposed it.

Jason: One of the Space X engineers is now doing it. I invested in it and a couple of other people have invested in it. We're going to make a two mile test track. Then, from there once we get the two mile test track (we're making a life size one), when people can see that....

Leo: What do you mean life size? I'm glad to hear that. Little HO size trains.

Jason: People were suggesting that we make a small one. We're making a full two mile track.

Leo: Are you going to ride in it?

Jason: I don't know if humans will be in it, but I wouldn't opposed to it if it's tested enough. Here's the thing. What Elon learned with doing the space engines; oh make a small size model. The cost savings of making a small size model is the difference in materials. It's not much different. The engineering and the time costs all these engineers. We've hired a bunch of engineers, and we're off to the races.

Leo: How important is that proof of concept? That's how you get lawmakers to—

Jason: Basically we just took the Elon Musk playbook from Space X and Tesla, which was you have to prove it to people. We proved it with this ridiculous Roadster. People paid $140,000 for a basically unusable car. Then the next one came out which was somewhat usable. The third gen will be the super usable.

Leo: Should I get the new one?

Jason: It's going to be amazing.

Leo: It'll have 18 batteries in there...

Jason: Actually, when the doors open, it's narrower than opening a regular door. It just goes like this. Anyway, the Hypo Loop could change everything. It could go underground and underwater to China.

Leo: It's not going to LA?

Jason: LA, Vegas, everywhere is a possibility. Here's the thing. The magic of it could be shipping. If we could get it to work from here to China in our life time....

Leo: The two months it would take to put this {indicating iPhone} you're not going to do it.

Jason: It turns out a lot of the fossil fuel being used on the planet is being used by a small number of container ships. Literally a hundred container ships are causing a lot of the problems in the world.

Leo: What powers it?

Jason: So it can be any power.

Leo: Is it electrical?

Jason: It could be anything because there's no vacuum.

Owen: That just made me understand it and care about it. 34 seconds ago I could care less about hyper looping. Putting freight in it and moving it is fine. Otherwise, scrambled eggs. I keep thinking people with their brains scrambled. Shipping? Oh.

Leo: It's basically a giant nomadic tube between here and China.

Jason: Precisely. The interesting thing is also...

Leo: Wait a minute. Do you have to dig a tunnel to China?

Jason: No. It would actually be floating in the water. So you basically would have it snaking to China underwater at a certain depth that you would have to make sure that people don't like drop anchor around that area. So I said what's the biggest danger? Like an anchor. I was like oh that would be bad that wouldn't it? But here's a very interesting thing. So that would be that wouldn't be use for humans and all, but I was like well what happens if this tube gets compromised? They were like well that's the greatest thing in the world in terms of safety because then it slows down because there's air in the tube. So the second you compromise the tube, if a terrorist were to break it open everything just slows down you stop no problem. It's like a ride at Disneyland stopping. It's not a big deal. So you know.

Leo: And there are not people in any way just eighty thousand iPhones.

Jason: If it works we could be putting cities in places, you know like we could go an hour east of here, two hours east of here, and have people commuting into San Francisco. You would solve this problem of the poor, and the rich, and the real estate crisis. I think if this works you could short real estate in New York,L.A., and San Francisco because people will be able to live on an acre out two hours east of San Francisco and be able to come in and commute every day. It could be change the world kind of stuff, which is you know, sort of as an angel investor what you're looking.

Harry: Where is the test track going to be?

Jason: I can't say.

Harry: You know?

Jason: Yep, I do know.

Leo: It's in my back yard.

Jason: Anyway, it doesn't really matter even where the test track is. I think we've got enough money to get the test track done, and in two years if we can prove the test track works then it's a true game changer.

Leo: It feels very science fiction.

Jason: It is and it isn't. You know, it's like a lot of the things that we think are science fiction the technology has caught up to. So when you just think about this device; what this device has done in terms of batteries and sensors is now allowing this next generation. So the way DARPA and the Internet allowed this whole level of commercialization to occur with the Internet the smartphone revolution and the sensors and here are allowing the drone revolution you couldn't have the drone Evolution without the batteries and you couldn't have the Tesla revolution with the batteries in here. So everything builds on itself.

Leo: See, Father Robert has become the quad father; he's our drone guy.

Jason: Yeah.

Leo: He says it was actually the Segway. That the technology for the Segway was what led to the capability of doing these drones, the self-balancing all that stuff.

Jason: That makes total sense.

Leo: So let's talk about another futuristic idea that may not be as good as we thought; the HoloLens. Harry, you wrote about this at Fast Company. So you got the demo at Build?

Harry: I did the original demo back in January in Redmond and then the new demo of something close to the shipping units last week.

Leo: Yeah, Paul and Mary Jo got both of those demos, and they were both crazy. They were so excited after the first demo, you know the Mars Rover thing, the ability to put augmented reality on top of reality itself so that you can manipulate. But they were very disappointed with Build.

Harry: Me too. I mean it was partially because on the first day of Build they had the keynote, you know, where on stage they would have somebody walk out wearing HoloLens and then to give us an idea of what the experience was like on these giant video screens they would overlay the holograms, the 3D objects on top of video of the person wearing the headset and there would be a giant screens on the wall that were holograms, or be a dog down here, there would be a spinning globe over here; it really felt like you'd see that stuff all around you. Well the units that we got to try a day later, which they were much closer in terms of industrial design to the final product than what we saw back in January.

Leo: You don't have a fanny pack. There are no wires.

Harry: It's a headset that works well. It worked fine with my glasses.

Leo: Windows 10 is built into it.

Harry: Windows 10 is built into it. But there's a small window in the middle of your field of view where you see the hologram. At first I thought there is something wrong with that because...

Leo: That's what Thurrott thought. He actually gave it that he said no, no, it's wrong.

Harry: There was like this little program project. There was like these little balls and ramps on a platform, and I couldn't see the whole thing. I was like moving my head back and forth, and I realized if I went back a few steps and bent my knees I could see the whole thing, and it turned out that that's the way it is, and you can there is just a little sort of subset of your field of view where there's a hologram. I was way more bothered by it because a day before Microsoft made it look unbelievable.

Leo: Well, we are watching the demo on stage.

Harry: Andif they had said well of course on it they were stolen and if they had said of course on this first unit you are going to see it right in front of you and that's fine. I talked to somebody from Microsoft who said that after you view it for a while you start to forget about it. Which I can believe because even after an hour it was less bothersome to me. But I think they are setting expectations way too high by having this truly science fictiony on stage demo experience, and I hope before they actually ship this thing that they push people's expectations down so low that it becomes mind blowing again because even with the limitations it's pretty incredible.

Leo: What do you think what wrong? Is it just that you don't have enough compute power to make it?

Harry: Microsoft to say very little about how this works but it's pretty clear there are some, you know, you have a little screen which has been projected in front of your eyes and that little screen is not a wraparound.

Leo: Is this closer to the actual experience? What we're seeing right there?

Harry: As far as I know, no. Not that even that is not all that close. As far as I know they've never actually shown how this works. On their website for HoloLens it looks even more amazing than a does in that demo. Clearly it has something to do with the screen, or the processing power, or something.

Leo: Or people were walking into walls.

Harry: And it's not like Oculus, where Oculus, you know...

Leo: That's your whole field of view.

Harry: ...where it's all around you.

Leo: But that's kind of what I liked about augmented reality, like HoloLens, versus virtual reality is that I'm not sealed away inside something else. I'm actually seeing the world around me, but I'm getting additional information about it. It seemed like a great user interface.

Harry: This could still be pretty spectacular even with the limitations. Who knows, maybe this is a first generation kind of thing, and generation 2 a year later will solve this.

Georgia: You know I was so excited because I'm waiting for like my Star Trek HoloDeck, and so I'm so excited about it, but I think they also like the way that they marketed it as like a user interface inside of your house, I don't think it's the best application. I think that using it for research, being able to take a look in 3 dimensions of a brain, or do surgeries and see actually how everything's interacting with itself would be better because all I'm thinking about is like Leo, think about being at home and everyone in the house is wearing their HoloLens. What's happening to our social dynamic and how are we talking to each other?

Leo: We are all looking at homes and watches anyway. We might as well look in the glasses.

Georgia: That's why the watch is better than the phone, because you're not looking at it most of the time whereas now we're not only looking at it but we released most of like body language is dealt with how we talk to each other. Language is mostly, like eighty percent is looking at facial features and so we have lost most of them. So I worry about using a whole bunch of people in their house with HoloLenses. I think that it's going to put a little bit of damage to our social constraints as each of us is dealing with our virtual world.

Leo: I can't wait.

Owen: Unless you are Tony Stark and you've got something going on where you need to rebuild a space machine or something I have no reason to care about this stuff at all.

Leo: Oh I want it.

Owen: It is the most annoying. Is your life that bad? Do you not have an LED TV? Do you now have a nice home? Uncle Leo, just listen to me. Do you not have nice things? Are you not married to a beautiful woman? Don't you want to look at her, and the television, and watch 4K movies? I don't care about a blue bubble of water sitting right in front of my face. It's just silly. I don't need to stand up and Skype somebody. I've got the computer sitting right here. I've got it on my phone. I've got it on my tablet. Just FYI, people do stare at their phones more than they stare at their watches because nobody is going to Facebook on their watch. That's why people are looking at their phones all day; Instagram on Facebook. I don't need no HoloDeck. I don't need no bubble thing on my eyes. I love the real world, and real world is beautiful.

Leo: Wow. I still want it. Can I have it anyway?

Owen: You can have it if you want to.

Jason: You know, he makes a very good point about virtual reality. We've seen this movie before, right? We've been promised four or five times because we are old dudes. We remember VRML, we remember Jaron Lanier telling us we are all going to fly through like Yahoo directory, and click on arts and entertainment, and pull out our folder, and that is going to be faster and better than our normal searches on Google. You know it's never happened and with Oculus certainly there are many great advances, but what is the killer app going to be outside of video games and adult entertainment?

Leo: Oh, I could see a ton of killer apps. Well, for VR adult entertainment, adult entertainment on VR is amazing.

Jason: Well sure. It is? You have something you want to share with us? Is there a device or service we don't know about that I can angel invest in?

Leo: Yes. Oh absolutely.

Jason: Is this something that exists already?

Leo: Absolutely. Get your Samsung Gear VR and then the you actually can serve to websites. It's a little scary actually.

Jason: Yes, I'm a doctor I don't know that it would be super compelling even with video games like people like to hang out and play video games.

Leo: But AR; Minecraft.

Owen: This is how I'm going to start doing a show. Leo, you look so good. It's like you are in the studio with me. Oh wow.

Leo: He looks like Jordy. Jordy Laporche.

Jason: It's like Jordy Laporche is here.

Owen: The set is awesome here. I can't believe it. I feel like I'm right there with you.

Leo: I want to do that. I want to put a VR camera right here.

Jason: Augmented reality is different. Augmented reality is going to be awesome when it's so lightweight when you're wearing your sunglasses and when you're walking by you can see that this restaurant is four and a half stars yelp, and that the special is this, when you go by the movie theater it's like hey here are the movies rated by Rotten Tomatoes score in this movie theater and there's one starting at this time.

Leo: I want life to be like that I could look over your head so your net worth I could look over Harry's head and get his reputation score.

Owen: But my watch does that. It gently sense, and nudges me, and lets me know all of those things. It just gestures like Uncle Jason says.

Jason: You know what is interesting is they did that thing with how old do you look? Putting that in the same time as the augmented reality, I don't think anybody put together that when you wear glasses are going to be able to walk around the world and see how old people are and that kind of information we want to have when we have never met them before.

Harry: But that's not really what Microsoft is trying to do with HoloLens; that's the Google Glass version. With HoloLens the most compelling demos they did during the keynote where things like architecture, where you are standing around a table in a large model of anatomy you know you can see these full size bodies.

Owen: Again, all of those things are useful. Like I said if you are Tony Stark or if you are a doctor and you want to look inside of a heart because you are about to do surgery that's cool. But siting inside of someone's living room looking at a little watery bubble thing with the weather is stupid to me and I don't care. Show me somebody who is doing something technical, and they doing something important and maybe I will care.

Jason: I'll tell you about a company that I almost invested in. They were doing something very interesting which was you could take the number of shelves that you wanted to put in a room, you take out your iPad, and you would say I want to put shelves over there. It says, okay, that's four feet wide and twelve feet tall, and it would just put how many shelves would fit there. And you are like well, I want to have deeper shelves or wider shelves. It would say buy? Then it would then ship you all the pieces you put together, and you it together. That's like whoa. That's kind of trippy.

Owen: That sounds useful.

Jason: So I think in architecture, in furniture, and like what's going to space, in education especially the HoloLens stuff is going to work really well.

Leo: Harry, do you feel like it's a new UI though?

Harry: I think the UI needs more work because there's this thing called an air tap where you kind of go like this and you do that here.

Leo: That's not good.

Harry: A, it doesn't work all that well, and B it's all fairly limiting. I think as...

Jason: And you kind of look like a douche.

Georgia: You look a little funny doing it.

Harry: As a next reality, an augmented reality, and virtual reality get more real I think you know want to just use your hands and that step is how you do.

Leo: You know, the Kinect on the Xbox, you can do that and I don't think it works very well. There's gestures like this where you kind of wax on wax off.

Owen: Wax on wax off.

 Leo: And they don't work very well.

Harry: The folks from Wave Motion, who do the game controller.

Leo: Yeah, I bought a Leap and that's silly too.

Harry: They are also they're working on virtual reality though, and it does work better than the Air Tap.

Leo: Georgia, this is going to be good for your practice right? Do you already see people who are kind of disassociated from the real world? Kids who grow up associating with screens better than humans? And is this going to increase?

Georgia: Yeah, well the unfortunate thing is that whatever we do we end up getting better at, right? So whatever you're practicing you are getting better at it, so people are not really doing really well with reading each other's social cues, and so social skills are going down because people are interfacing more with an unreal world So it unfortunately increases social anxiety and people feeling you know depressed because they're, you know if you can be a god in a video game, and you know, you're in school suffering in real life, who's going to choose real like, they are going to choose a god, that's going to run out every time. Plus the games are marketed to make people, you know to increase the reaction of dopamine so that off / on switch is making us feel good, and it's becoming closer and closer to feeling more and more real. So I think that it's a huge time sink and unfortunately not great for our brains. But I think that in the other hand I think that we can also use virtual reality to get over different types of fears and to help people who are dealing with, you know, you know the manner in which they interact with the world as well. So I think that how we use it more than you know if the technology is good or bad.

Owen: It almost sounded like high school just then when you were talking about being a god. In high school I was the quarterback, then I got out and I couldn't get a job because I'm a loser. Life is kind of the same things and virtual helping someone be more social, you are still taking them away from being social. Some people are with good people ala myself some people are horrible like Uncle Jason because he's from New York and he's got the attitude.

Jason: What are you talking about? I'm great with people.

Leo: No, I'm an introvert, and we have a twelve year old at home who is an introvert, and we spend a lot of time in the screen.

Jason: That's fascinating you are an introvert. You really a Meyers Brig introvert?

Leo: I hate people.

Jason: IMTJ? I think it's a misanthrope.

Leo: I'm a misanthrope and an interpreter.

Jason: That's a tough combination for a talk show host.

Leo: I hate people and I don't want to be around them. No after, after when I get home after doing all this interacting with people I just want to...

Jason: Recharge.

Owen: I want to put on a virtual head and go talk to...

Leo: I want to get my Hyperloop and curl up in a ball.

Georgia: It's almost like your Tesla battery pack. You are recharging during that period of time to expend so much energy outside of your comfort zone. Yeah but it works too well. If you want to get better at something you have to practice it.

Leo: I practice it all day and I still hate people so...

Harry: How did you choose your profession in that case?

Leo: If you think about it my profession is radio announcer. What do you do if you're a radio announcer? You sit in an empty room padded room and speak into a machine all by yourself. That's right. I chose the right profession. I don't know how I got here. This is a mess.

Georgia. And you are so good at it.

Leo: It almost feels like Georgia, we are teaching ourselves to be Asperger's like a little bit or autistic a little bit.

Jason: It's Asperger's inducing.

Leo: On the spectrum, right?

Georgia: It does it does increase our inability to deal with other people, and unfortunately because their lives are so, we're playing to our own weaknesses of not having to move, not having to deal with other things, and we are getting worse at it. You know, you want to always feel like you know make sure that you're thinking about being slightly outside of your comfort zone at the same time so that you don't get worse that the skills that you need to get better at.

Owen: I just don't like what you said about Virtual Reality trying to get help that because I feel like there's still some kind of screen. You are not making a friend can help you. You know people don't I guess. I just live in a world where I see kids and people say okay I'm playing. My daughter plays every sport, her friends play stuff, they come over here I've got everything. She's got her own TV in her room, her play room, Xbox, Wii. They go outside and play catch, they go play basketball, and like they have everything they still go do stuff. Some people do, some people don't. That's the way the world works.

Georgia: I think you're absolutely right. I think that it's important to do, and with my kids I actually don't have them play video games or deal with tech. Even though I have like a full grown like arcade cabinet meme and every single video game and technology piece in my house they don't play it.

Leo: Can I come over?

Georgia: Yeah sure, you can bring Sbarros. We would have fun.

Owen: You are hoarding from the kids.

Georgia: In some ways it can be helpful. So say that you have a really strong phobia of spiders, and such a phobia we start really, really small so we would get a picture of a spider, and then a picture of a spider that's moving, and then you can think of the virtual reality would make it one step closer before I actually bring in, which I do, I wrangle real spiders and bring them in to therapy. But it would be great to have a virtual experience where they're interacting with the little tiny spider on their hand virtually, which would increase their anxiety response. They could then plateau with it and then it would me much easier to take that next step when I bring a live spider into session.

Owen: My love for you has been renewed 10 fold and I apologize. That was a great example and I am not the one to deny when I am incorrect. You have proven me semi incorrect, so I stand corrected.

Leo: Semi incorrect, Oh Docta!

Owen: Semi incorrect. Perfect example. Touché.

Leo: By the way I just want to say, I love humanity; it's people I don't like. I just want to be clear.

Georgia: Okay, right.

Leo: Just people I don't like.

Jason: You know what I like?

Georgia: Well, without people humanity would be so much better off.

Leo: I agree. Exactly my point. Georgia Dow is the greatest. We're so glad to have you; IMore.com. Jason Calacanis from inside.com. That's your current enterprise. Although it sounds like you have a lot of irons in the fire. You still do Launch?

Jason: I still do the Launch festival, yeah. 12,000 people this year, yeah.

Leo: What?

Jason: 12,000 people were at Launch this year.

Leo: What? That's crazy.

Jason: I don't have to make money from the conferences anymore so I just give all the tickets for free to founders.

Leo: Oh, that's nice.

Jason: So I gave away 11,000 tickets out of the 12,000. And, you know, it cost like a $1.5 million to do a break over.

Leo: Does it piss you off that TechCrunch got all the attention on Silicon Valley?

Jason: No, not really. Mike and I were partners in the conference obviously. He screwed me out of it, and then I went and started my own, and I got like a very toxic person in my life.

Leo: By the way, Mike's going to show next week just in case you want to come out. No, I'm joking. I'm joking.

Georgia: That would be an interesting show, though.

Leo: I'm joking.

Georgia: Everyone will be tuning in now.

Leo: And then, on last week's, do you watch Silicon Valley, or is it too annoying for you?

Jason: No, I love it.

Leo: Kara and Walt are on it!

Jason: Listen, I think the show is great except for the cameos, and by the reason I hate the cameos is because I haven't had one yet. When I finally get my cameo I will absolutely endorse the show.

Leo: Exactly.

Georgia: Silicon Valley, get Jason on next week.

Leo: They are at the Hode conference, and they are sitting in their red chairs.

Jason: No, they contacted me.

Leo: Did they?

Jason: Yeah.

Leo: You know who is writing for them is Dan Lyons?

Jason: Dan Lyons, exactly. I've had 2 people contact me from there. They were like, hey, doing you want to sit down or whatever? So I'm sure that I will be on some season.

Leo: Fake Steve Jobs, then for 4 minutes the editor in chief of Valleywag.

Jason: Yeah exactly. Talk about toxic.

Leo: I love Dan, though. In fact we've been trying to get him on.

Jason: He's a good writer. Dan is a good writer.

Leo: I'm very curious, because it's clear that he's giving them a lot of inside stuff.

Jason: They nail it. The only thing that I wonder is if they are nailing it too much and it is too insider based?

Leo: That's what it is.

Jason: Do they even understand what they are talking about?

Leo: Or care?

Jason: Like the whole valuation thing was so accurate and weird when they were negging, and they were getting all of the term sheets coming in higher and higher, and then everything went away. It reminds you of Secret, which you saw last week imploded.

Leo: They took too much money.

Jason: Pied Piper went crazy, and then it come crashing down, then it goes back up, then it crashes back down, and nobody knows.

Leo: Alright, we are going to take a break. I actually want to talk about Secret. When we get Jason here we got it we got to kind of find out about the inside story of all this stuff because he knows all the dirt. Also Harry McCracken from the Technologizer, who knows all tells all in fastcompany.com.

Owen: Great writer.

Leo: Great writer. And OhDocta.

Jason: Great speaker.

Owen: Living in my virtual world. I feel the spiders on me. I have less fear than I had 22 minutes ago. I am so happy to be here Uncle Leo. Uncle Jason is here. You let Uncle Jason come back. He hasn't been to a Christmas party since he got drunk at the last one and you kicked him out.

Leo: Ohdoctah 2000. That's it.

Jason: I think that it's the sequel to Blade Runner.

Leo: Faster and Furiouser.

Harry: Now we know why Apple bought Beats.

Jason: Can we talk about Citrix GoToMeeting? It's an incredible product that I use.

Leo: An incredible product. We only advertise incredible products that Jason Calacanis uses.

Jason: I have 2 accounts. I love it.

Leo: What do you have 2 account for?

Jason: One for each company, one at Launch and one for Inside. I do about 10 GoToMeetings a week.

Leo: I don't do that many, but we do them almost every day. It's so easy because once you have the GoToMeeting account you just click a button and the meeting is set up. So often you just want a conference call, so it sets up a conference call, but then if you need to it shares your screen so that if you have a presentation, or images, or you just want to show them images of the first Telsa, you can show them that. And then, if you want to turn on your cameras suddenly it's like you are meeting in person. You are meeting in Hi-Def video. You can meet on anything, a computer, a tablet, a smartphone, you can literally present from an iPad in your backyard. I've done it, it's awesome. So here's the deal; thirty days absolutely free. You don't have to give him a credit card. They've made this is easy as possible because they know once you set it up you'll have your first meeting going in minutes.

Jason: It's a no brainer.

Leo: In fact even if you didn't try it today, if on Monday or Tuesday you got a conference call or meeting with somebody, just try it. Gotomeeting.com, it won't take any time to set it up and the nice thing is it won't take your conferee any time either, and that's nice because if you're doing a sales presentation you don't want your client to have to jump through hoops to hear your pitch. Make it easy, make it fun, and make it engaging. Gotomeeting.com, click the try it free button, thirty days free. You do not need to give him a credit card. There's no obligation. No salesman will call. Gotomeeting.com, try it free.

Jason: You know what the best thing on GoToMeeting is now?

Leo: What?

Jason: Aside from the meeting starts on time. The reason that I use it is that it just works. One click and you are in. But, the really cool feature that they have now is this Chrome extension that I use that puts it into your Google calendar, so that when I'm looking at my Google Calendar, I press one button and it sends everybody the meeting stuff. So literally the friction between putting something in my calendar and having the GoToMeeting set up is zero. I used to have my assistant set it up and send everybody the instructions.

Leo: It's so much easier.

Jason: You can Google GoToMeeting Chrome extension. It just works in your calendar. It's genius.

Leo: Harry, was there anything else at Build that you thought was important? Microsoft did, it was a developer's conference, so they did in fact, the first hour and a half of the keynote they don't even say Windows at all almost. It's all about Visual Studio.

Harry: It was about Azure and stuff.

Leo: Yeah, the Cloud.

Harry: The other big news was that developers and take Android code, and IOS code, and give themselves a big head start on writing Windows applications.

Leo: My question is who cares?

Harry: That's not going to say Windows.

Leo: Well, for Windows Phone it's not going to say it.

Harry: Developers are going to want to write for Windows and Windows Phone because there is a critical mass of people.

Leo: It's a billion people. They want to get a billion and a half people using it right away.

Harry: I think that sometimes they are reaching out to this community, this new generation of developers who don't have this background of the era when everybody did Windows. I think that it's helpful.

Leo: If I'm an IOS guy am I going to say, oh great, now I can write for Windows?

Harry: It will give them a head start, I think, and that might have some value to it.

Leo: Do we know how hard it would be to do the port?

Harry: According to Microsoft it's super easy.

Leo: Of course it is.

Harry: It's not just recompiling works, but it's somewhere close to that. Of course, you wouldn't want to do that, you would want to add Windows specific functionality, and I think that when it's all said and done you would want to write Windows apps using the kinds of tools designed to write with Windows apps.

Leo: The applications that they use as an example, Candy Crush and Cut The Rope 2, there isn't a Window UI. There is no menus. It's swiping, so of course that works fine. I hate to see somebody...

Harry: If you are writing a productivity app and you want to make it look like a Windows app even then some of the existing code might be repurposed in a way that might be valuable.

Leo: It does feel like, though, that Microsoft is making a pivot in that instead of saying Windows everywhere, Microsoft Office everywhere, they are saying we will let people use our apps on any platform, the Cloud is really the platform not the desktop operating system.

Jason: Nadella, Satya Nadella is doing everything right as far as I'm concerned. Azure, I'm seeing come up more and more often as startups are using it.

Leo: See, that's interesting, because startups are so tied to the Lampstack and Open Source.

Jason: Exactly, and it just works with that stuff. They went into Wicombinator and gave everyone a half million dollars in free credits that they could use at any time in 3 years. So that's like if a startup decides in month 30 that they want to be on Azure they could spend it all from months 30-36. The other thing that is very interesting is that the Outlook app on iPad is tremendous. It's the best email app on IOS.

Leo: It's because they bought Accompli.

Jason: They also bought Sunrise, which is a Word calendar app. So what you are seeing is Ballmer and Gates were like, hey, not built here, no good. Now they are saying, hey, let's buy Calendar, let's buy other things. Let's put it on iPad, let's put it on everything, and I can tell you the real secret that is going to come out in the next year or 2 I think is the embracing the of the Android Fort. This company Cyanogen, I think is what it is?

Leo: Yes, Cyanogen.

Jason: Cyanogen, which a couple of friends of mine have invested in, I'm not an investor in it, they are going to bundle all of the Microsoft apps. What I think is going to happen is at some point Microsoft is going to put up a flag on Windows Mobile, and I think that what they are going to do is buy Cyanogen, or they are going to say we will just incorporate Cyanogen somehow into the Microsoft Suite of phones. If they bought it then Android would work everywhere.

Leo: They have a great product with a Lumia phone.

Jason: Incredible product. Inductive charging. They had that before everybody 3 years ago.

Leo: You could put it on a pillow and it would charge up overnight.

Jason: Unbelievable.

Leo: They also have, unfortunately, a very nice operating system in Windows Phone, which isn't going anywhere. This is the hail mary right now. This is the last ditch effort. You make IOS developers and Android developers comfortable moving. They are giving away Windows 10 so that they can get a billion people using it. This is a hail mary to save Windows Phone. It's not going to work.

Harry: And that's a universal app. If you have written an app for a Windows PC it will also work on Windows tablet and Windows Phone.

Jason: Surface is an incredible product too. If you think about that, if Microsoft sticks with it they get it right in version 4 or 5 typically. We all saw the story where Word Perfect was so much better than Microsoft, but with Microsoft Word 4 or 5 you couldn't tell the difference. Surface 3, great product, people who have it love it, and they sold a billion of them last quarter or something crazy.

Leo: Did they?

Jason: Yeah, wow. If they stick with something they eventually get there. If you look at app, the IOS app now, Outlook is fantastic. Word, I opened up Word for the first time in 5 years just because it was available, and it was like, wow, Word is pretty tight on iPad.

Leo: It is a very different app on the iPad.

Harry: So is there going to be Inside for Windows or Windows Phone?

Jason: Yeah, it's interesting that you say that. If they gave us some kind of a deal with bundling we would definitely consider doing it, but not just yet. So the desktop is really interesting. If you look at Slack and HipChat they both made desktop clients because it's a great marketing tool. You can get all of those Windows people and there is not a lot of competition there. So I think that you will see it on the Enterprise first and then consumer second.

Leo: I want to step right up and say that there will be a TWiT app on Windows 10 because the guy who developed it works for Microsoft, he works in the tools division, Dimitri Leolin, was here on Friday after Build and he said I am rewriting the TWiT app in Zamel, it's going to be a universal app so it will work on Windows 10, Windows Phone, and Xbox, and he is going to Open Source it.

Jason: That makes sense.

Leo: So we are thrilled. One of the things that we have been doing, we are in the midst of a website redesign, I have talked about this before, where Drupal, which has been running our Website, will be headless. You won't be interacting with Drupal directly, it will be an API engine that will offer a fairly rich, much richer than RSS, API to our content. Dimitri and Craig Molaney, who is in the chatroom, he wrote the IOS app, are already looking at our API and they are going to write our apps to this API. Even our website will be a consumer API, it's going to be in no JS, but consuming the API. This is what's happening, isn't it? You are starting to see this move. What's great about the Cloud is that it doesn't care what OS you are using. It really doesn't matter.

Jason: Inside is done on API as well, so whenever we are going to fire up a new app we are going to make it public right away.

Leo: It makes it easy, doesn't it?

Jason: Yeah, so somebody could just say give me the top 10 stories from drones in the last month or tell me what the top 10 drones are.

Leo: That's what you want. You want users coding.

Jason: Anybody can do it on any platform. They made .net Open Source, which I think was an awesome move because there were so many people using it on the Enterprise, but is Windows going to ever be Open Source? Have they ever given any thought to that?

Leo: They have implied that it might happen. The Azure guy said I wouldn't be surprised. I don't think that is ever going to happen.

Harry: More likely to happen now than under Ballmer.

Leo: There have got to be proprietary pieces in that code that Microsoft just can't open up. They license.

Harry: Yeah, stuff that they license.

Leo: I have a feeling that that is just not legally...

Harry: Possible.

Leo: ...possible. It's just not doable. But I do think that they are making .net more widely available. Do you, as an investor, when you come along and you look at a startup, if they are on Azure and .net is that a mark against them? You don't care?

Jason: No, really, the state of the art in terms of startups is that you just take one platform and do it perfectly. So I have seen people start on Android, get it perfect, take a year, piss off all of the IOS people, and then go to IOS. I have seen many more people do IOS only, piss off all of the Android people, and then they get it right and they more over there. What happens is if you try to build an app on 3 or 4 platforms at once you can't do it because every mistake you do you have now magnified 4 times. You will run out of money. Where people start is very interesting. It used to be that you have to start on IOS, then it because where Android got more people, now it's kind of back to IOS first because they are the best early adopters.

Harry: I have to say one of Microsoft's challenges is to this day, usually when I meet with someone who has a cool new mobile app, if it can be done on IOS then IOS is almost first. You ask about Android. Sometimes Android ships at the same time, but very often Android is a few months later, and sometimes Android is even, well, we are intrigued by the Android opportunity, blah, blah, blah. If it's tough to do Android, which has more users than anybody, then it's really tough for Windows Phone, which is a very distant number 3.

Jason: Here is the inside thing that has been going on. Satya has been spending a lot of time here, so without going into too much detail.

Leo: He seems like San Francisco.

Jason: He's coming down here a lot.

Leo: He's made numerous appearances down here. Who is he talking to?

Jason: He's been coming down here and having a lot of meetings with startups. So he will come down, he will meet with 10 startups in a day, and he will go back. I think that you will see the center of gravity start to shift a little bit...

Leo: To Seattle?

Jason: No, no, I think you will see...

Leo: From Seattle to here?

Jason: Yeah, so I think that you are going to see a lot more activity in San Francisco.

Leo: I even hear that Jason Calacanis moved to San Francisco.

Jason: Exactly.

Leo: Hard to believe.

Jason: You could see a lot of executives being based here, and a lot of different products being based here that maybe weren't based here.

Leo: I love the story, and I don't know that it's true, that they would acquire Cyanogen, and they would literally by doing so be able to flip a switch and say, you know all of those Lumia phones? They are Android phones now. They are the best cameras and the best hardware.

Jason: Or Cyanogen phones.

Leo: Well Cyanogen is Android, right?

Jason: Right, yeah.

Leo: It's Android ISP. It's very interesting.

Jason: See, the thing is, now Google is so hypocritical where they are like oh, everything has got to be open, except for Search, which we will make a black box to our own advantage and the FTC and EU are going to get us on that. Then they are like, oh no, Android is of course totally open, until we get market share, and now we are going to make everything that you have to use Search, you have to use Google Maps, you have to use everything. Google is completely hypocritical, and now you have Microsoft who is losing opening up.

Leo: Wouldn't it be amazing? We are the open company.

Jason: Exactly.

Leo: Wouldn't that be amazing?

Jason: You are closed when you are winning, and when you are losing you are open.

Owen: Ding, ding, ding. That's the bottom line.

Leo: I love that. I love that.

Georgia: Offense versus defense.

Leo: I'm learning so much on this show. This is fantastic.

Owen: We don't have to talk about this story, but can I just drop it into the show so that somebody can catch it later? They made a Stingray box that lets people know when they are being Stingrayed. I don't know if people know what Stingrays are, but the government is flying little bots over your house, and they picking up all of your cellular data. Now we've got something that you can detect it with. That is all.

Leo: Which is a good thing because apparently now the source code for creating a Stingray is so widely available that any idiot with a PC can make his own Stingray. So the Stingray poses as a cell tower and grabs your phone briefly just to see what you are doing, what you are up to. Then the problem is that you can't make any phone calls while the Stingray has got you. So then they pass you back to the cell tower. Good, I'm glad to hear that.

Jason: If only we had Devorak. Yeah, see, they are taking everything, and they are going to put it there, and they are going to get you yeah, see. It's the NSA, see, they've been doing it since '64. In fact I was talking to Nixon.

Owen: I just dropped a bomb and ran out. That's it. I dropped the bomb and ran out.

Georgia: I don't know if I want to know. I'm busy trying to make my tin foil hat, right?

Jason: Assume everything is compromised.

Leo: That's basically it, right?

Jason: Assume everything is compromised. I don't put anything in email that I do not want plastered on the cover of the New York Times. Everything is already compromised. You have already been compromised. Do not take naked pictures ever on your phone. It's compromised.

Owen: I've got a whole naked picture system actually.

Georgia: Owen.

Leo: Wait a minute. Tell us about that.

Owen: So basically...

Leo: No, wait, stop!

Owen: I can make sure that nobody ever gets hacked again. I've got a system. It's foolproof.

Leo: What is it?

Owen: I'm just saying, I want to help people. Look, so instead of keeping it directly on your phone, say, you make a random email with Jo Bob Jibbity on it. So if somebody happens to find it they are not going to think that it's you or care. You take the pictures, you send them to yourself, if you need the pictures you recall them to yourself. As far as you having a significant other or somebody important, you just make them do something so weird that if they ever go against you then you can blackmail them or they can lose their job. I don't know, I will write a media post about it, and then you can just look it up or whatever.

Leo: This is the new prenup. If we are going to be in a relationship then I need a highly compromising picture of you, and I will give you a highly compromising picture of me.

Jason: Actually, you know, these scumbags who were doing this revenge porn site, the guy got 15 years. It's so great. People forget, you know, just because I am doing this criminal activity on a digital platform that it's not criminal and it doesn't matter. I can just make stuff up, it's digital.

Leo: What's worse is that he would post the picture then he would blackmail you.

Jason: $5,000 to take it off.

Leo: He would say if you pay me I won't put it up.

Jason: He's going to jail for 15-20 years. Thank god the justice system is working.

Owen: That's what he gets.

Jason: Thank god. Then they are making all of these laws now, so if you actually do this to your ex, husband, wife, girlfriend, boyfriend, whatever, you are going to go to jail, and you are going to get in a lot of trouble, and rightfully so because these poor, young kids are so naive that you are hearing these incredibly terrible stories where some girl sends one photo that is compromised and then they blackmail them into doing even more horrible stuff. Then they say, oh, we are going to send this to your family over Facebook because we know who your family is, and dah, dah, dah. These people are all going to go to jail, and that is fantastic that prosecutors are going after these people in my mind.

Georgia: It's a horrible thing. We are giving children these technologies, and even adults, and you know, up until 24 your frontal lobe, the part of your brain that deals with consequences to actions, has not yet been formed. Everyone thinks that it's funny and enjoyable, and once it's out there it's out there forever. The damage that it does in people's lives is absolutely devastating.

Jason: These young kids are killing themselves over it. This poor gay kid in New York, or New Jersey, wound up committing suicide over this. It's like people think that it's this huge joke and it's not. Your prefrontal lobe, you don't have any idea of long term consequences, we also have those people take out loans that they can never pay back at the same time...

Leo: College loans forever, yeah.

Jason: At the same time as their frontal lobes are not developed there is a pretty good...

Leo: As an adult too, before you are 24 we will lend you as much money as you want at a large percentage.

Jason: By the way, if you go bankrupt those are the one set of loans that don't count towards your personal bankruptcy.

Leo: Nice, very nice. Let's take a break. There is lots more to talk about, and I don't ever want this show to end. But I'm afraid that we do have to end it at some point. Why are you looking at your watch? Are you anxious.

Owen: It's probably sending him notifications. It's sending notifications. Oh, Uber is here.

Leo: You strike me as the kind of guy who pays $90 to watch a boxing match.

Jason: I didn't watch it. I just won't watch that. Here is the thing. I know that Floyd Mayweather is going to do the same thing every fight, he's going to go like this, he's going to throw 3 punches, he's going to win the round, then he's going to go like this. It's not worth it. Mike Tyson? I will pay $90 every time to watch him kill somebody in 30 seconds.

Leo: Now you can watch on Periscope or Meerkat for free.

Jason: For free. Exactly. You can steal it.

Leo: It's weird, though, because it's kind of like horizontal.

Georgia: It did the crime.

Owen: You just have to go on there and say landscape. You just have to say landscape, that's all. Type landscape and you are good.

Leo: The fact that you could get paid $180 million to take punches for 12 rounds blows my mind.

Jason: If somebody pays us $10 I think that you and I should do it.

Leo: I'm in. I will do it.

Jason: If somebody puts up $10 million we are going 12 rounds for sure.

Leo: I will do it. I won't even wear a cup. We will just go right out there.

Jason: No cup, really?

Leo: No cup.

Jason: Really? Whoa. I know right where my first shot is going.

Leo: That's $15 million. That's $15. Alright, I've had my children.

Jason: Let's talk about Squarespace. Talk about Squarespace, Squarespace, I use Squarespace for all of the Launch Festival sites.

Leo: You are on everything.

Jason: It's because it's the best product, a great design, and I don't have to hire technical people to update the website. So Launch Festival, the Launch Conference...

Leo: You use Squarespace for all of that?

Jason: 100%.

Leo: That's the best endorsement ever.

Jason: Here is why. When I put up a page I don't have to find a developer and pay them $400 to do it, and Squarespace keeps releasing new features. Like they added ecommerce, I don't know if you know that, and they also added Calendar. So we can do Calendar and we can do ecommerce right on the site. So you don't have to put Magento, or Shopify, or any other software on it. It just automatically comes with that.

Leo: What are they using? They are using something really good.

Jason: No, they built their own. It just works. It's amazing. It is a fantastic product, Squarespace, and it starts at only a couple of dollars a month, and if you use the promo code...oh my god, really?

Leo: The promo code is TWIT.

Jason: $8 a month.

Leo: $8 a month, and you get 10% off when you use the promo code TWIT.

Jason: But it's responsive design, too, by the way.

Leo: Yes.

Jason: So if you are using mobile or anything it just works.

Leo: It's just gorgeous.

Jason: On iPad, phone, right out of the gate. It's gorgeous.

Leo: The best help ever right from the offices in New York.

Jason: 24?

Leo: Yep, 24 / 7. Email and chat. I'm glad that you brought up the ecommerce because I think that what they are doing is so great. Every Squarespace site, even the $8 a month site, has ecommerce. So if you want to do donations or whatever, it's pretty incredible.

Jason: What's one of the great things about a sass space business like this is that they keep making and adding features to it. When they add a feature everybody who has the product gets it, right?

Leo: Isn't that sweet?

Jason: Yeah, it's fantastic.

Leo: They make that clear, it's hosting, it's a web host, but you are also using their software, so the software is always up to date. Every day I get up in the morning and see is there a patch for my WordPress site? It's an endless process.

Jason: That's the previous Pyridine, right? And it's just broken.

Leo: Squarespace.com, use the offer code TWIT, you get 10% off of your first purchase. Jason Calacanis, great to have you back. You are the best for our sponsors ever.

Jason: God, if you had Audible I would tell you.

Leo: What are you listening to?

Jason: I have this amazing book that I am listening to, Season of the Witch by Dave Talbot. It's about the history of San Francisco. So Dave Talbot did Salon, or Slate, one of the two.

Leo: I love Dave Talbot, was he at The Examiner or The Chronicle?

Jason: He is just a great, great person. But you can save this for your next one. Season of the Witch is absolutely outstanding.

Leo: I'm downloading it now.

Jason: Then Sam Harris has a great one called Waking Up. It's amazing. Sam Harris is the guy that wrote Christian Nation. He is just amazing. But this book, Season of the Witch...

Leo: Now when do you listen?

Jason: I was listening on the drive up here.

Leo: I want to have a commute again.

Jason: Whenever I'm driving, whenever I'm on an airplane, and whenever I'm working out I listen to it. So I try to go on the treadmill for an hour every other day, an hour and a half, and that's what I listen to. Season of the Witch is amazing.

Leo: I just bought it. Well I had 2 credits. See, I try to keep those credits. They are precious.

Jason: You are platinum?

Leo: Platinum.

Jason: Platinum.

Leo: Platinum. That's 2 books a month. I listen to half a book a month. I just finished the Steve Jobs book Becoming Steve Jobs. Isn't that good?

Jason: I haven't got that one yet. I've got the original one.

Leo: I cried. Did you read it Georgia?

Georgia: I did read it. I really liked it. I really enjoyed it's perspective. I wish that instead of telling us the characteristics that he has they just would have explained to us and let us decide on our own. That would be my one quip in the book.

Leo: That's because you are a psychotherapist, and I know that is the worst thing is this kind of amateur diagnosis stuff.

Jason: What's the best thing that we can do, Georgia, to be more present in our lives? Do you have some tip for us addicted to phones or stuff like that?

Georgia: Yeah, I think that the one thing that everyone should do is try to be where you are right now instead of thinking about what is going forward into the past or into the present. You want to be just where you are right now and make the most of those right now, because if you live in the past you are dealing with regret, and if you are living in the future you are dealing with anxiety. You are missing all of the good stuff. Time slows down when you are in the here, just doing now and trying to be the best and get the most out of it.

Leo: Ram Dass baby. Be here now, right?

Jason: That's why I meditate.

Owen: That is 100% correct.

Georgia: That's great.

Leo: All of the euntrapenuars are doing that.

Jason: I will tell you that it's a fad. I have been doing it for 3 or 4 years. It's mindful and it really works in terms of focus.

Georgia: Yeah, it's amazing for your brain. For your brain, if you meditate every day, they did studies. These aren't studies at some hokey universities. These are universities that are big. They did studies having people meditate for 20 minutes a day versus people that didn't. They were 50 years old, and they tested them in a year, and their brains were tested. The people that were meditated were tested as if they were 40 years old.

Leo: Can I watch TV while I meditate?

Jason: That's the opposite of being present.

Leo: But I'm behind on Game of Thrones.

Georgia: Well you have to do Game of Thrones, and then you meditate after.

Jason: This is the best advice I got on meditation, which was oh my god, it's so complicated or whatever, and somebody who does it said it's like going in the ocean. If you dip your feet in the ocean you actually experience the ocean just like a swimmer might. Just like a scuba diver might. So if you are just going up to your knees in the ocean, that's actually experiencing the ocean. So a 5 minute meditation, and there is a woman named Dianna Winston from UCLA, who runs the Mindfulness and trains the meditators down there, has these 2 albums for free on iTunes and her website, diannawinston@ucla. They are amazing and free.

Georgia: You can do other types too. You can do passive relaxation, which is more active, and you can do things like guided imagery. But I don't do long meditations either, I do something short.

Jason: Yeah, 12 minutes, 5 minutes, whatever. I'm an investor in a company called calm.com.

Leo: I'm going to do Call Of Duty. Calm.com? You put money into it? I think calm.com is cool.

Jason: I put 400,000 into calm.com. Nobody would invest in it, and now I can't say exactly what the company is doing, but it's now gone to millions a year.

Leo: I paid for it.

Jason: The company is worth 5 times what I invested in it. It is taking over because if you think about yoga...

Leo: It's so calm. I'm looking at the website.

Jason: Yoga, if you look at yoga, yoga is something that seemed like crazy that everybody would do yoga, but now if you go to any hotel they have yoga classes every day. Yoga has to be delivered in person, but meditation can be delivered in your earbuds.

Leo: Do you have like a mantra? What do you do?

Jason: No, I do the mindful stuff. That mantra stuff is a whole other category. You just have to be in a quiet place, you are present, and what you are trying to do is calm your mind.

Leo: Do you close your eyes?

Jason: I do close my eyes and I put my hands on my knees.

Leo: Do you have the little pillow?

Jason: You can do it laying down or sitting, but you have to feel your body.

Leo: If I lay down I will fall asleep.

Owen: Can I just say something? I do meditation every day. It's called falling asleep. I usually do it for like 20 to 40 minutes a night. I'm dead serious. Listen, listen, let me finish what I am saying.

Leo: If I studied naps it would be the same thing.

Owen: When you get to bed at night, turn your phone off, turn the iPad off, turn the TV off, look at the ceiling or the back of your eyelids, and do what I do. Think about how beautiful you are as a person, and then think about the long run that you were supposed to take today. I didn't take it, but I think about it every night when I go to sleep. I think about the exercise I was going to do, and then the next thing I fall asleep peaceful as a mouse. When I wake up I'm happy.

Leo: When you wake up do you have your hand in a bag of Cheetos?

Jason: When I do to dinner with my friends now...

Owen: I don't have food in the bed at night.

Leo: That's good advice too, I like it.

Jason: When I go to dinner with my friends now we have a rule, everybody puts their phone in the middle of the table, first person to touch their phone at dinner pays for dinner.

Leo: I love it.

Jason: We will put a stack of 6 of them there, and oh my god, for the first half hour it's hard, and then you get 90 minutes into talking to your friends, and you are in the moment, and you are like oh my god, this is what life used to be like. We used to listen to each other.

Georgia: And we actually talked to each other.

Owen: Jason is checking his watch. He's sneaking.

Leo: I'm going to announce my retirement from the internet today. I'm going home.

Jason: That's big news.

Georgia: For how long, though. For how long Leo?

Leo: A minute. Two. I don't think that this is going to work for me.

Georgia: That's my biggest pet peeve, though, is when we go out to eat, or people are around, and they are on their phones. I love technology, but that I can't stand. I bug Renee about it every single time we go out. I watch him, and I'm like really, you have to do that now?

Leo: It's neurotic. It's an aversion.

Jason: When I take my daughter for a brunch, or a breakfast, or something, I leave my phone at home. I tell my wife that I'm going here for breakfast, and that I will come back, and I leave the devices at home. I know that's a very hard thing, but Leo, trust me. Take your wife to dinner and leave your phone at home. She will love it and you will get lucky. Trust me. If you leave your phone at home. I told my wife I'm leaving my phone at home, I just want to totally listen to you. She was like I love you. I was like, you love me again? Really? I should have left my phone at home a long time ago.

Owen: Leo, your phones are people. You hate people. So disconnect to those people and leave your phone at home sometimes.

Jason: He got you.

Owen: Cut off those people that you don't like and leave your phone at home. I take a purge from the internet once a month because it doesn't do anything for me. Just leave it at home.

Leo: I am actually breaking into a sweat. I am actually sweating.

Jason: If you are that anxious about leaving your phone at home you have a problem. Hi, I'm Leo Laporte, and I'm addicted to the internet.

Leo: Oh, I have such a problem.

Owen: When I come out there I'm kidnapping all of your devices.

Leo: Hey, we've got some good news. This just got handed to you. Neil Young will be joining us on Triangulation tomorrow. As you know, I'm a Pono Player owner, I Kickstarted it, I'm a fan, I think that Hi-Res music is very interesting. Neil Young is one of the greats of all time.

Jason: He's a god.

Leo: I'm flipping my lid. It will be via Skype, so don't run to the studio, but we will be talking to Neil Young tomorrow morning at 11 am. Is that okay. Yes.

Jason: I've been a miner for a heart of gold.

Owen: Don't we have to pay royalties if you all keep singing?

Leo: A man needs a maid. That's all I can say. Hey, ladies and gentlemen, if you missed, this was a very important week at TWiT because we launched a new show, a show we've never done before, I think that it's the first TV show we have ever done on TWiT. You know what I'm saying?

Jason: Yeah, a TV show.

Leo: We do radio shows with pictures. Ladies and Gentlemen, here is what you missed if you missed anything this week on TWiT.

(Video Plays): This week on TWiT. Live, from the TWiT Brickhouse in beautiful downtown Penta Luma, it's The New Screen Savers. The New Screen Savers, I'm Leo Laporte. And I'm Patrick Norton. My old pal. You know, it's TWiT's first TV show. It's hard to hug over the netcam network, but you know, it's a little off. Before You Buy. Samsung Galaxy S6 is a phenomenal phone, and it's one of my favorites of the year right now, and without a doubt this is the best camera that I have used on an Android device. Windows Weekly. I am very excited about HoloLens. You know, I put it on my head, I took it off, and I said that is not what it looked like in January. All you can see is the little thing in front of you. The video is following you over here, but you can't see it. GizWiz. What do you think was the most dangerous thing that you ever did on the show? The skates, the orbit skates. Avoid steep inclines, and don't ride too fast. I would also avoid flat surfaces. This is like skating where the wheels are going sideways. TWiT, like Tech TV, only better. Sorry, I was about to say something foul and unprincipled on camera. That's okay, it's not a TV show, it's just a podcast. Nonetheless, there is a certain family friendly expectation here. That's our story and we are sticking to it. Go ahead. Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Leo Laporte.

Leo: What a fun week we had. And of course The New Screen Savers is back every Saturday, 2 pm Pacific, I'm sorry, 3 pm Pacific, 6 pm Eastern Time, 2100 UTC. You can watch live, but we will get it on the feeds pretty quickly after that. It was a little slow this first time because we wanted to make it just right. If you want to subscribe it's twit.tv/tnss. Grooveshark shut down.

Jason: And they had to apologize.

Harry: I thought that so was embarrassing.

Jason: They were like, you are going to shut down, then you are going to apologize, then we are going to cut your head off.

Leo: That was the music industry's response?

Jason: This is why I don't invest in music companies. Ever.

Harry: Then they told you to go out and pay for your music from some other service.

Leo: How did they survive for 8 years is kind of the thing that I wondered?

Jason: Investment money I guess. They probably had some PC money.

Leo: Grooveshark allowed you to listen to streaming music that you didn't own, but they did not pay any royalties to the music industry.

Jason: It was YouTube. You upload songs and share them. Just like Soundcloud can. But they didn't have content ID like YouTube did to automatically take stuff down and claim stuff.

Leo: So they were served in 2011 with a $17 billion lawsuit.

Jason: That's how the music industry does. $250,000 per infringement.

Leo: Wow. So the apology that they were required to publish said that that was wrong, we apologize without reservation.

Harry: They said that their hearts were in the right place but we did many bad things.

Leo: Grooveshark has agreed to wipe clean all of the record companies' copyright works, hand over ownership of their website, their mobile apps, their intellectual property, including their patents and copyrights.

Jason: So everything that they worked for. Not only do they have to apologize and shut down, we have to give you everything that we made. The music industry, they are some vindictive...

Owen: Who are they giving it to? Who gets it?

Leo: Lady Gaga. No?

Jason: They are just so vindictive.

Leo: They knew this was coming though.

Jason: Of course.

Leo: I was surprised the day that Grooveshark launched.

Jason: Pandora is like hanging on by a thread.

Leo: Really? Because they pay royalties.

Jason: They pay royalties, but then they only give them 4 years, and they have been paying like a half deal, and now that's going to end. When it doubles they will be underwater again.

Leo: Tim Westerkrin's point is look, radio stations aren't paying as much as you are asking us to pay. How are we different? Isn't this the radio station of the 21st Century? Isn't this how people discover music? This is good for the industry.

Jason: It's the fact that you can switch and hit the next one I guess.

Leo: But you can only do it a couple of times. Anyway...

Jason: So the music industry has moved so slow.

Leo: Can they push too hard? Can the music industry push so hard that they really chase away their audience and that people just say screw you, I'm not buying any...

Owen: Where else are you going to get music from? People that don't make music?

Leo: Well no, musicians instead of labels.

Jason: YouTube has been the ultimate hack. Kids are listening to music on YouTube.

Leo: My kids, that's all they listen to.

Harry: I listen to music on YouTube.

Jason: So if you go to YouTube and you type in Bob Dylan or Neil Young you can listen to a lot of great songs, and you have some commercials.

Leo: I will ask Neil about that. He may not be too happy about that. Secret is going away, the anonymous social app. This isn't much of a surprise either.

Georgia: Yeah, Secret.

Leo: All of these, you must have seen Georgia...

Jason: Yeah, Georgia, what do you think about that in terms of people...

Leo: Anonymous posting.

Jason: Is there value to that existing in the world in any way?

Georgia: I'm not really into it. Like I get paid to do that. That's not fun for me.

Leo: You hear people's secrets all the time at work.

Jason: But you try to help them as opposed to destroy their lives.

Georgia: Right, it's not as much fun to listen to people's secrets in those moments, and I wonder if they are in my circle group of not. I don't need that much stress. I don't find any value to it. There are some people, I'm sure that feel great saying whatever hurts and wounds they have to others, and the salacious value of like being on a Morrie Show without actually being on a Morrie Show. It does not bother me that it's going away. I don't know.

Leo: I installed it an read it for a while, and felt bad about it, and deleted it. But I think that really the real reason it went out of business wasn't because it was bad for the world, but it was just Silicon Valley posting about other Silicon Valley. It was not something, what about YikYak, or these college focused apps? These aren't going under. These aren't going away.

Harry: Secret did this weird redesign where basically they dumped everything that was interesting about Secret and became YikYak.

Jason: Yeah, they pivoted to YikYak.

Harry: After that, it was at least, and I checked in every few weeks and it down.

Owen: Secret was interesting when it was a website and coffee table books, but when you put it in an app with a real situation and circle of people then you start feeling weird about it, you start feeling a certain way, and it's too close to home. You've got people thinking about, who is this person? I can help this person? You feel guilt in your heart, and you are like, okay, well this person is somewhere in my vicinity, and they are talking about doing this to themselves. I need to help them.

Jason: The intent really matters when you build these startups, and I think that their intent was to make a bunch of money and to grow.

Leo: In fact, they took a lot of money off of the table.

Jason: That was the really weird thing.

Leo: They took $6 million off of the table.

Jason: Yeah, I passed on investing, obviously I didn't want to be associated with it, but some of my friends invested. These guys took $3 million each off of the table, and from my understanding it was a requirement of them investing to take this $3 million.

Leo: This is not something unusual. Founders will say, look, I want to get something for my efforts, so I'm going to take some of the investment.

Jason: In year 4 or 5 Leo. If a founder in year 4 or 5 gets an offer for $100 million from Facebook, the venture capital agents might say hey, we will buy some shares from you so that you can buy your house, and then you have idiot insurance against it going to zero. That's reasonable if you have built a $100 million business. Sure, we will buy $2 or $3 million in shares from you and then you get the upside from here. The problem is these guys did it in their A round when the product wasn't proven at all. That was the price of admission. That set off all kinds of red flags.

Leo: Yeah, but they are smart, right? I mean they got $6 million.

Jason: There also might be hucksters and fraudsters, so it kind of felt like, none of the employees got to do it, only the 2 founders got to do it.

Leo: In fact they didn't even tell the employees.

Harry: Yeah, the employees read about it.

Leo: On Secret!

Jason: It was really, really done, and it set a horrible precedent. I'm an investor in a company called Whisper, which is sort of the good version of this, which is Whisper didn't take your address book and say hey, let's spread rumors among your address book, tell me something about yourself that you want the world to know and we will share it by location if you choose to do that. It's all opt in, so people who were maybe in the closet, or maybe had anxiety about something going on would use it as a way to share it, then people would write comments of support, and you could start discussions with it. Whisper has, much like post Secret, which I think is a lot of the inspiration, for these services. It was a way for people to, I guess, and I'm interested in Georgia's position on this, but a way to sort of release that energy, and share it with people, and maybe be heard. Kind of like therapy can in a safe way. But Secret was designed to take your address book, we are all going to talk sh%^ about our friends, and boy was it nasty in there.

Leo: It was really nasty.

Harry: They claimed they were doing that to help.

Georgia: Then you have to worry all the time when someone is asking strange to you. You're like, are you sure, do you want to take that other glass of wine? And you are like, why are they doing that. It's probably just somebody else's Secret that caused them some stress.

Leo: They thought it was you. Yeah.

Jason: People say stuff about me on it, and I.

Owen: You know what it is, you start putting it on other people, and that's a whole problem inside of itself.

Jason: Yeah, I've hear people say some stuff about, I'm a public figure, and I immediately wrote comments and said this is Jason Calacanis, if you have a problem with me, I'm sure that I pissed you off with something that I wrote, I'm not a perfect person, very far from it. Why don't you email me? I don't really want to have all of these things just out there. I'd rather just resolve them and move on. Life is short. I lost good friend of mine Dave Goldberg this past week.

Leo: Hey, let's talk about that. In fact, we will wrap up with that. That is a shocker, 47 years old, the husband of Cheryl Sandberg, they have 2 small children, I think 11 and 9. He was CEO of Survey Monkey.

Jason: He was doing tremendous. He done launch.com, and sold it, and was an angel investor, and was one of my good friends. I just spent the day yesterday in shock.

Leo: Very young. Very sad.

Jason: He was the guy who was the nicest guy at our poker game. He was the guy who...

Leo: You really knew him?

Jason: I literally played poker with him on Wednesday night, and we have a tradition in the poker game where you draw for seats, and as fate would have it he drew the seat next to me, and we sat there all night and laughed. Like we had a 100, 200 other times that we played cards together. It's just like, if you made a list of all of the guys in the poker game, you get older in your life, and one of the things for the people who are young in the audience, you deal with a lot of people in your life that you don't want to deal with. As you get older you get the choice to pick who you want to hang out with, and the good people gravitate towards each other and you hang out. Amongst that good group of people who play cards every week for the last decade or so he was like the best guy. He was the guy who was the best dad, the best husband, the best leader, and in fact he designed Survey Monkey, I remember talking to him about this, he said Jason, I'm designing Survey Monkey as the place that you can go and still have a life and have kids. That's my pitch to people who come work for me, is come have a life. He would just, he was the kind of guy who would just talk to you for hours about you. Finally, I had to say to him what is going on at Survey Monkey, and what can I do to help you? We went on a trip 2 weeks ago, a bunch of us went to Mancanto, because one of our friend's companies got bought by it. We played cards the whole way there, and we learned about GMO Foods, and just the most generous, amazing person. I wrote about him this past week, and Rob Goldberg, his brother, is a good friend of mine.

Leo: You know, it's interesting how Facebook became the place that people gathered to talk about this and write about this. For all of the horrible things about Facebook and all of the bad things that I have said about it, it has turned out that a couple of events, the Nepal earthquake, where their safety check page has been so valuable, and now with this. This is the value of a social network.

Jason: Yeah, no, a lot of people are coming out with remembrances.

Leo: Very powerful.

Jason: To his family my heart goes out to them. It really makes you evaluate life and think about being a better person. He was, when you talk about the word mensch in Yiddish, a good person who helps other people; this was the uber mensch. The mensch of mensch’s. He literally was the guy that we all wanted to be a little more like. So to Cheryl and family our hearts go out to you, and I'm going to miss you Goldie. His nickname was Goldie, so it's really just tragic to die at that age, so young. He really was a beautiful person. I'm going to miss him terribly.

Leo: I'm really glad that you can be here to share your tribute to him. Thank you. I thank you all for being here. I think that is a note that we probably want to wrap up on. Georgia, wow, it's great to have you. Would you come back please?

Georgia: I would love to. I would love to.

Leo: IMore.com, @Georgia_Dow if you want to follow her on Twitter. Anything else that you want to tell people about or plug?

Georgia: No, I don't have anything to plug. I'm just so happy to be here, so thanks.

Leo: Come back, you were a great addition to this show.

Jason: It was nice to have a psychologist here.

Leo: Yeah, she can explain all of this stuff.

Jason: Give us some advice. What do we do?

Leo: I am a wreck. I'm going to go home and meditate on the Game of Thrones.

Owen: You guys need private sessions. You 2 in the middle need private session. I'm crazy, but I know that I'm crazy. I know what is wrong with me. You need to come back, and like loop it around, Uncle Jason, and Uncle Leo, and the family feud is finally over, and lord help us.

Jason: A lot of people are relieved. A lot of people are relieved. People are so broken up about it, they are like god, you did the best radio together.

Leo: It's more than that. I really like you, and I've always liked you. I thought you were the greatest guy, and I apologize for being so small and petty.

Jason: I could have done better myself.

Leo: I don't think that it is your fault. You son of a bitch.

Harry: I love that.

Leo: Owen JJ Stone, thank you so much. What do you want to plug? Your New Jersey mailbox, anything?

Owen: I want to plug my daughter's college fund, which has turned into my Tesla fund. I'm halfway there, so if anybody would like to contribute to the Tesla, I promise that once I get said Tesla I will work back on the college fund. There are certain things that I need to do in my lifestyle, and getting that S is in my future. I love you Uncle Leo, I love you Uncle Jason.

Leo: I love you JJ.

Owen: I love the chatroom. The chatroom is the best people in the world. They know what is going on there. I be talking to them, they be talking to me. If he wants to charge a dollar a year, Uncle Jason is going to front at least like $1,000.

Jason: No, no, no. That is free on me.

Owen: That's what I'm saying. Take that business.

Leo: Harry McCracken is wondering what the hell am I doing here? The Technologizer, fastcompany.com, always a pleasure. Great to have you.

Harry: It's great to be here.

Leo: Thank you for spending a little time with us, all of you. We do this show every Sunday afternoon, 3 pm Pacific, 6 pm Eastern time, 2200 UTC. We would love it if you could join us live, because despite appearances I love the chatroom too. It's full of people, though.

Jason: There is it, those people.

Georgia: Oh no, he's having an anxiety attack.

Jason: It's people! It's people!

Georgia: Leo, keep breathing. It's okay.

Leo: We also make on demand audio and video available after the fact. Twit.tv is the website, all of our shows are there, including The New Screen Savers, TWiT, everything else, and where you get your podcasts. That includes iTunes of course, but I think that most people nowadays use the podcast app on their mobile device. That's fine with me. Don't forget, we do have TWiT apps, written by members of the community, not by us, on IOS, on Android, on Windows Phone, and on Roku. So please...

Jason: Is TWiTpad an official app, or no?

Leo: Nothing is official.

Jason: I like TWiTpad.

Leo: TWiTpad is great. You know, on each platform there is several choices.

Jason: I mean, look at this. Somebody did that for free?

Leo: Well, yeah.

Jason: They just did it because they are super fans?

Leo: Some people are charging, there are some ads on some of them, but I don't think that they make a lot of money.

Jason: Feel the love. The love.

Leo: TWiTpad is amazing. I'm going to sing You Will Never Walk Alone. I'm Leo Laporte, thank you for joining us. We will see you next time! Another TWiT is in the can. Thanks everybody.

Leo: I'm really glad that you could play tribute to Goldie. That's fantastic, because I didn't know him, but...

Harry: I didn't either, but I have been moved just reading about him.

Leo: No kidding.

Jason: Yeah, it's very interesting, like we live in a world in this industry of narcasstic champions of the world, and it's all about the singular person, whether it is Elon, or you know, Satya, or Bill Gates, or whoever it is. Some people would just go about it in a quiet way, and he was that guy who just went about it in a quiet way and was a mensch. We can all take a lesson, like everyone take a note.

Leo: They were overseas when it happened?

Jason: Yeah, he was in Mexico, yeah. It was terrible.

Owen: The best part of hearing you talk about a friend like that is that it makes you think about yourself. It's like man, should I be doing better? I could be doing better. I was telling you about how that Elon Musk changed my world earlier this week. You talking about somebody that you care about makes me think about the things that I do well, and the things that I should do better, and I should go hug my kid this week like extra because it's like that's the biggest thing.

Jason: Yeah, yesterday was like hug my kid.

Owen: That's the biggest thing. People say why don't you live in New York or San Francisco Owen? I'm like, I can't leave my kid, like that's what matters to me. I hope that one day somebody thinks that I did a good job. The way that you talked about him, that's great. It makes somebody who doesn't even know the guy feel for you and feel for the guy's family.

Leo: It's rough.

Jason: Life is very perplexing, you know. We have got to have the padre on, but it's very perplexing when the best person you know goes first. That's the thing that I have been personally struggling with the last 48 hours.

Leo: It's like why.

Jason: You know, I was talking to another friend that we play cards with, David Sax, and we were just lamenting about how god, if you took this list of like the great guys we would all put him number 1.

Leo: Wow.

Jason: And I told David, you and I would be like 7, 8, and 9 on the list. We should go first. Why does the guy who is the best go first? It doesn't make any sense. Then you think, gosh, the poor kids are going to have to grow up hearing the stories of how great their dad is. It's something horrible and tragic, but also something great that his legacy is great. As you said, even the Facebook page was very powerful. I have spent at least an hour a day reading stuff on the Facebook page, 2 hours a day maybe.

Leo: That's a phenomenal thing that that exists. That's a really great thing to have. His kids can read this 20 years from now, or 10 years from now.

Jason: I think that it's going to be a mitzvah for them to see like, gosh, my dad was this special.

Leo: He was something.

Jason: He was something. Tremendous, tremendous guy. It's just hard to comprehend. I think that you think about the unfairness of death, and I don't know if any of us will be able to comprehend. After 911 I had this very existential crisis being a New Yorker and being there, like why did these people die, and how is it fair that these people died, and what does it mean? You don't get over it, but it changes the way that you live. You can change the way that you treat the people around you. A lot of you people know me because I am a public person. I haven't always been the best person, I haven't always been nice to people in my writing, I have kind of been a little bit of a brawler in my life, and it's like I have been reassessing that over the last couple of years and trying to be a better person, and better to other people.

Georgia: What will be your legacy? That is the one lesson that you can take from that, is like our time is really precious here, and relatively fleeting. You don't know what cards are going to be dealt, you can only say what can I do with the cards I get? It's a really hard thing to deal with. Our culture does not deal exceptionally well with death. We don't have really great means of helping people through it. It's nice, the Facebook and memorializing is helpful for everyone.

Leo: Anne Lemotte wrote a book All New People, she said that every hundred years it's all new people. What that really reminded me of was that of course some of us go sooner than others, we are all gone sooner than later really. But what we have that is remarkable is that we are all alive in this space. This was our cohort of the people that we got to share the planet with. It includes people like him, like Goldie, like Steve Jobs, the people that we know around us. Some of us are going to go sooner than others, but really we are all in this cohort. This is our group, and in 100 years we are all going to be gone.

Jason: Yep, we are all going to be gone.

Leo: We are all going to be gone.

Georgia: So what do you leave on this earth?

Leo: So celebrate this cohort.

Harry: We overlap with some great people. We overlapped with older folks and we overlap with people who aren't born yet.

Leo: We have lived with some amazing people in our group, in our cohort.

Jason: And we have lived in an amazing time.

Leo: This is an amazing, amazing, time.

Jason: It's like, I think it was the Lord of the Rings, where Gandolf says all you have to decide is what to do with the time that you are given. I'm butchering the quote, but it always stuck with me. It's like we have this time, we have to decide what to do with it. It's kind of freeing in a way that you have a limited amount of time and you chose to do with it what you will. Just know that it is limited. I had this really deep conversation with my wife, and I was like, you know, all of the success and I have lucked into so many great things in my life, what am I going to do with this last 10-20 years, or months, or weeks, or days. It's like holy shit, I need to start really thinking about this.

Leo: It's not long no matter what. Even if it is 40-50 years, it is long, but it goes by really quickly.

Georgia: The coolest thing that I ever learned was when I did therapy on a very expensive old folks home, so I was dealing with the movers and the shakers of the world, people who were multi billionaires that ran huge companies. The one thing that I took from it was that they were on the last part of their life, and they didn't talk about their companies, or how much stuff they had, or how successful they were. All they said was I wish I could spend it with those that I love for a little longer.

Jason: That's interesting when people are like, oh god, you spend all of this time playing cards, you know? I'm like, yeah, I play cards once a week.

Leo: Yeah, it's a social thing.

Georgia: It's not the cards.

Jason: I see my friends every week. I check in with my friends every week.

Leo: It's a social thing.

Jason: We spend 8-9 hours playing a game and laughing our asses off.

Leo: That's great. It's not about the money or the cards. That's not it at all. It's about the cigars.

Owen: Last note, then I'm getting out of here.

Leo: Are you waving a carrot at me?

Jason: What is he waving?

Owen: I wish it was a carrot. It should be a carrot. I need more carrots. I need more carrots than not.

Leo: Meh, what's up doc?

Owen: Listen, listen, listen. Uncle Jason is talking about not being such a great guy and that kind of stuff sometimes and trying to be better. I met Jason a long time ago, and I met him at a couple of events and never really talked to him other than in passing, like hello, or whatever. I'm down here, he's up here. One day I go to get on a flight, and they are like, oh, do you want to upgrade to first class? It's $25. I said sure. I sat down, Jason sits down next to me, and he's like OhDocta. I'm like, oh, gee, Jason remembered my name. That's what's up. I talked to him for 20 minutes, he tweets out my website, he shuts my website down, he said, oh, I see you do interviews with people. Come by the studio sometime. Sure enough, he answered my email, I came by the studio, I had my little crappy equipment, he's like don't worry about it, I will videotape everything. I will format it, I will send it over to you. The guy was nice enough to let me get stuck in his Tesla. I'm seen him once or twice after that, but in my mind I defend Jason all the time because when people say, oh Jason is this and that I'm like you don't know him. You see someone on the internet, and you think that you know somebody, and maybe you had a problem with this person or this person didn't like him, but you don't know him. Again, for somebody like me, I'm not "important", I'm not special. You took the time out to talk to me, and I'm a regular dude, so you don't know somebody until you get to know them. Just being online and reading a tweet does not make you an aficionado on anybody. I've always loved you Uncle Jason, and I love Uncle Leo. You are a hard headed person. Uncle Leo is hard headed. But I'm just saying when family comes together.

Jason: The Docta is breaking it down.

Leo: This is the deepest panel we have ever had. You guys are full of heart. That's great.