The Great British Marmalade Scandal - Building Your Own Router

April 6, 2026·2 hr 36 min·5 clips

Outlook crashes on NASA's Artemis II mission, forcing a remote reinstall while the capsule is a quarter million miles from Earth.

April 5, 2026, starts sideways. The cold open tees up Outlook crashing in space, OpenAI buying a podcast for hundreds of millions, and Zombo.com maybe ending or somehow coming back. The panel mood is loose and amused as Abrar Alhidi from CNET, Ian Thompson, and Patrick Beja settle in. Then the money starts looking odd. OpenAI's purchase of TBPN turns into the segment's live math problem, because the panel keeps circling the gap between price, audience, and revenue. Five million dollars comes up. Put that next to a possible two-hundred-million-dollar price, and the calculation lands with a dull little clank. The hosts do not sound sold. They wonder whether advertisers will still buy spots once OpenAI owns the show, even with editorial independence promised. TBPN gets summed up bluntly as CNBC for AI and tech bros, with daily four-to-five-hour programming and about seventy thousand viewers. That comparison sits badly with the host. He points out that TWiT reaches more listeners and brings in more revenue, which makes the deal feel less like plain media math and more like Sam Altman's taste getting a very large budget. The panel tries on a few motives, including training data and a direct media channel, then pushes back on them. No neat answer appears. The worry underneath is simpler: podcasting has felt like one of the few places independent tech media could still breathe outside corporate ownership. Abrar shifts the room. Smart glasses become the lighter topic, with Ray-Bans as the prompt and her take staying skeptical, practical, and cheerfully boring about contacts. The ending goes commercial. The closing ad pitch sells TWiT's audience as influential, technical, and measurable for advertisers, which lands a little too perfectly after all that talk about who gets to own tech media channels.

As heard by us

A skeptical, conversational tech roundtable on AI media money, smart glasses, spacebound Outlook problems, and the week's odd internet stories.

This Week in Tech frames a busy week around tech's stranger pressure points: Outlook breaking in space, OpenAI paying the low hundreds of millions for TBPN, Zombo.com's possible end and rebirth, and the episode's own router-building hook.

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Why you'd press play

OpenAI just spent what looks like $200 million on a podcast. Four tech journalists have opinions.

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