TWiT 989 transcript
Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show
0:00:00 - Leo Laporte
It's time for Twit this Week in Tech Great panel, anthony Ha is here. From TechCrunch, ashley Esquitha, our favorite commentator. She's got a new company we'll tell you about in just a bit Rowdy's Skeleton. And from NoJittercom, lisa Schmeiser. Of course, number one topic of the day the CrowdStrike hack. What happened? Also this morning there was a pretty big announcement on Xcom. We'll talk about that and that poor old laundry folding machine that is now out of business. That and a whole lot more coming up next on TWIT Podcasts you love.
0:00:39 - Lisa Schmeiser
From people you trust.
0:00:42 - Benito Gonzalez
This is TWIT.
0:01:11 - Leo Laporte
This is TWIT. It's time for twit this week in tech the show. We cover the week's tech news. Oh boy, there was a little news this week, so we'll be covering that. Let's say hi to ashley esketha. It's been a long time. Good to see you, ashley moisturized and unbothered from the depths of southern california.
0:01:22 - Ashley Esqueda
What's up, leo?
0:01:24 - Leo Laporte
is it 110 degrees out there right now?
0:01:27 - Ashley Esqueda
You know, I wouldn't know because I'm inside of the air conditioning. I refuse to find out. I refuse to find out, never.
0:01:33 - Leo Laporte
Ashley has a new enterprise, rowdieskeletoncom, where she trains media, does media training for game companies and the like, so that their CEOs don't look like rowdy skeletons on stage.
0:01:48 - Ashley Esqueda
Yeah, well, I mean, if you're a rowdy skeleton, that means you're lively.
0:01:50 - Leo Laporte
It's better than being a dead skeleton.
0:01:52 - Ashley Esqueda
It's better than being a boring skeleton. But yeah, I do on-camera talent training, spokesperson training, media training, nice, mostly tech and games. But we're open to. Clearly, we're open to anybody. Anybody can come get media training for a row and games. But we're open to clearly, we're open to anybody. Anybody can come get media training for Rowdy Skeleton.
0:02:07 - Leo Laporte
Well, I can think of a few people who could use your services.
0:02:11 - Ashley Esqueda
Sincerely call us.
0:02:12 - Leo Laporte
Let's just say all right, I'm right here, leo. Lisa Schmeiser look at that from no Jitter. I wasn't thinking of you. Editor-in-chief of NoJittercom. Hi Lisa, good to see you. I bet you had a busy week with the CrowdStrike thing.
0:02:26 - Lisa Schmeiser
Yes, yes, we did.
0:02:27 - Leo Laporte
Yes, we did. We'll get to that A lot of valuable lessons. Yes, we shall get our learnings in order. Also, hello to Anthony Ha of the original content podcast Weekend Editor at TechCrunch, who was in fact pulled in moments ago to do a little weekend editing. Hello, anthony, great to have you back.
0:02:47 - Anthony Ha
Hello, yes, if for the people watching I look slightly disheveled and surprised and just kind of generally overwhelmed, it's been kind of a crazy news day.
0:02:57 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, no kidding, and we're not talking CrowdStrike, amazingly.
0:03:03 - Ashley Esqueda
I thought that would be the big story this week.
0:03:05 - Anthony Ha
I was so wrong, wrong. There was a post on threads that was like a gif of like this is the crowd strike ceo right now, and it's, uh, the superhero, one of the bad superheroes, from the boys being like oh great.
0:03:17 - Leo Laporte
Well, he, he has a checkered past. Actually, we'll talk about that in just a little bit, but I guess we should start with a tweet that came over the wire this morning at 1045 Pacific Time from a guy named Joe Biden. Now it's really interesting to me that, despite everything Twitter slash X has been through, this is the first place the president of the United States went to announce he wasn't going to run. I'm old enough to remember, in 1968, lbj taken to the TV saying I shall not run, nor will I accept a nomination because of Vietnam, which really made him unelectable, at least in his eye. But Twitter, really, is that the place you want to make this announcement?
0:04:13 - Ashley Esqueda
This is the literal embodiment of the phrase and he just tweeted it out. I thought I'd take the next four years off.
0:04:23 - Leo Laporte
You don't mind, do you?
0:04:25 - Lisa Schmeiser
Fairly or unfairly. This is still where reporters hang out and talk to each other and this is still where they put their attention first. They're not sitting on different Mastodon instances, and Blue Sky is an echo chamber. It can be an amusing one, but it's an echo chamber and Threads is pretty heavily moderated. So X makes the most sense from a I want to get this out and spin the narrative as fast as possible perspective.
0:04:51 - Leo Laporte
And that's the point, is that that's where the journalists are. If you wanted to put it out a press release, that would reach the most journalists the fastest, it's still where you would put it is on X dot com, which must be fairly gratifying to Elon Musk, who's announced that he supports Trump.
0:05:07 - Lisa Schmeiser
That said, he did put out his endorsement of Kamala Harris on Instagram first.
0:05:13 - Anthony Ha
Oh did he? I didn't realize.
0:05:14 - Lisa Schmeiser
Yes, wait a minute.
0:05:15 - Benito Gonzalez
Elon just. No no, no, no no. That would have been way more interesting.
0:05:22 - Lisa Schmeiser
We'd have a whole different news cycle.
0:05:24 - Leo Laporte
So he tweeted the fact that he wasn't going to run, and then insted his support for Kamala Harris.
0:05:32 - Lisa Schmeiser
Isn't that interesting.
0:05:33 - Leo Laporte
Well, this is very media savvy, I guess.
0:05:36 - Lisa Schmeiser
And I don't know if we're going to get this from his team or if we'll get any book updated. I would love to know if his team took a look at which constituencies are on which platform before they rolled this stuff out, or if it was a matter of okay, oh crap, I should have said something about kamala quick open instagram I want to know.
0:05:56 - Leo Laporte
Wait a minute, I'm going to tiktok right now because the biden campaign, despite the fact that biden has banned tiktok, yeah they've been on it every day. They use it.
0:06:05 - Ashley Esqueda
Well, they know they got to reach those voters.
0:06:09 - Anthony Ha
They got to reach those voters and actually the piece I was working on before and when I showed up late was trying to pull together some quotes about what Harris has said about different tech issues in the past, and one of the things she did say when the TikTok ban was on the table was that she was very insistent not to characterize it as a ban and just saying we have to deal with the owner. But this is not. We don't want to ban TikTok.
0:06:31 - Leo Laporte
Oh, interesting. Ok, what is the? Anthony, you've done the work, the legwork. Let's get the the early reporting. How does Harris stand on the tech sector?
0:06:47 - Anthony Ha
early reporting. How does Harris stand on the tech sector? Well, I mean, you know, she certainly has a long history with the tech sector.
She's from California, she was our attorney general, then our senator, and yes, that's right, and a lot of her early support was from you know, folks like Ron Conway, other. You know VCs and tech executives and you know, I think, in general, you know, I think she's a politician and as sort of the tech industry has come under more criticism from you know, from the political world, I think she's definitely been willing to criticize tech but in general, you know, in terms of like big legislation or really cracking down, I think that there's a sense that she's pretty friendly with the tech industry and that seems to have continued even as vice president.
0:07:33 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah, I mean we let's not forget the Biden administration appointed Lena Khan as chairman or commissioner on the FTC chairman of the FTC and has been very much more aggressive in promoting antitrust action on the FTC, most recently right to repair stuff. The FTC has been very active and I think in the most I mean there are disagreements. I got in a big fight with Paul Theriot over the Activision Blizzard acquisition from Microsoft, which I was somewhat against, but I think they've been very aggressive and very and so far, pretty right on in their in their prosecutions. I presume it's impossible to say how it would be different, I guess, under a Harris presidency.
0:08:23 - Lisa Schmeiser
One of the big through lines in the Biden-Harris administration as a whole has been using especially the executive branch to begin to build a body of policy for identifying areas where regulating tech is in the interest of national security or where funding tech is in the interest of the national good.
For example, in the first year of Biden's administration there were something like five different meetings at the White House with different CEOs talking about look, when you guys have data breaches, we have to know this is not just a private business interest, this is something that affects national security because we don't know what data is being stolen, we don't know who has it, we don't know who's affected. It would be good not to be caught flat-footed. And they've built on that with all sorts of different policy areas. The FTC and Lina Khan was a concerted effort to put the building blocks back into place, to reintroduce some form of net neutrality. And then this past week, which honestly feels like a decade ago, they announced a tremendous amount of funding for all sorts of public technology infrastructure initiatives. So it hasn't been a big headline grabbing story, but it's been a really consistent through line for Biden, harris and I have a feeling, given Harris's deep understanding of how technologies and economies work. She would probably continue that if she's.
0:09:54 - Leo Laporte
You know, I have just checked the Biden Harris tick tock and there is no mention on the Biden Harris tick tock of this. However, if you search for Joe Biden on TikTok, every news. It's really interesting, despite you know, the non-ban. Every news agency CNN, nbc, philip DeFranco, the Daily Mail, the CBS News. I guess for Phil DeFranco, the fact that he's right next to CNN and the Daily Mail is probably a good thing and, as Sian Divni or Divine, however you pronounce it, it's really you know, because young people are so important, they're going to where the young people are.
0:10:42 - Ashley Esqueda
There's a. There's an interesting divide, though, like with younger people, particularly gen z and younger. There's this kind of permeating, uh feeling of and I've seen this multiple times and uh, multiple different kind of like research and data that's been published where it's, they really feel that the the most important news will make it to me like they're not out there they're pull not push, or push not they.
They feel yeah they feel that I don't need to go looking for it because the most important news is going to find me right. I like the thing that is relevant to me. They really like, they really trust the algorithm, which is slightly terrifying, but but also it's just. It is an interesting change, it's an interesting shift. There's like the first group of people who have grown up entirely like in algorithms. It's like our people who really genuinely trust them to bring them the relevant news that they need to know, as opposed to even a younger millennial who might not recall those times. You know, like who wasn't, who remembers a time where there wasn't an algorithm right to contend with.
0:11:54 - Leo Laporte
You brought up an interesting point, lisa, that the campaign has to now shift on a dime. Yes, and I didn't even think about this, but the websites, all the things that have to be changed now, yes, and and I didn't even think about this, but the websites, all the things that have to be changed now, yes, yeah, the.
0:12:09 - Lisa Schmeiser
I was thinking about the mailings that go out, the text blasts that go out to people, the branding alone. Um, if you take a look at the uh, the Biden Harris 2024 website, they have all this branding that's built around dark brandon.
Another meme, another example of going after the tiktok has the dark brandon logo but you have all this merchandise that's built around biden as a person and what I am wondering about is when did everybody who's working on all these different electric arms when did they get the go sign that they're like all right, we got to come up?
0:12:43 - Leo Laporte
with a new logo. We've got to come up with new names. I think it was a go until 145 Eastern, I mean, I think it sounds very much like Biden made this decision entirely on his own and just tweeted it.
0:12:54 - Benito Gonzalez
Yeah.
0:12:55 - Leo Laporte
I mean I wonder, I thought he would do it on Sunday.
0:12:58 - Lisa Schmeiser
I thought he would do it on Sunday after the morning talk show news cycle, that's exactly what he did you nailed it. Yeah, because this way it's not the topic of it and he can control the media narrative for the next 24, 36, 48 hours until something else comes up, some new horror pops up on a Tuesday morning right.
I was like that's what we're waiting for. Oh man, yeah, Every week is a decade. But we all know how fragile supply chains are and have been, and we also know that the American consumer is super habituated to. I clicked a button why hasn't it been delivered yet? Designing the merch to trying to line up suppliers to what the budget is going to look like, to turn this stuff around to basically pivot on branding and pivot on messaging in the middle of July.
0:13:53 - Anthony Ha
Well, and also with the caveat that we don't actually know who the nominee is going to be.
0:13:57 - Lisa Schmeiser
Right, yeah, yeah.
0:13:58 - Leo Laporte
Oh, that's a good point. There's a it's kind of a mess now. It's kind of a mess. Uh, biden has thousands of delegates. He's apparently said he endorses harris, but there is a convention still to come. I don't know if those delegates are free to vote for harris or their conscience, so I believe.
0:14:19 - Ashley Esqueda
I believe. Uh, from what I have seen um there, I know they have over 3000 delegates, so it's like having her. There's a certain number of signatures that anyone who wishes to submit themselves for the candidacy must have, and there's a very short amount of time in which to get those signatures. I believe it's 600. And then anybody who gets that amount of signatures can be considered and then anybody who gets that amount of signatures can be considered.
0:14:46 - Leo Laporte
So presumably everybody who wants to be president and I imagine there are more than a few is doing that right now, right? Well, they would have to get those 600 signatures from the delegates.
0:14:58 - Ashley Esqueda
So which I mean that could be an uphill battle and also I would imagine there's probably going to be a full court press to unite at this point. But I mean, obviously I'm not like a political strategist, but I would imagine, I think at this point there's been so much divisiveness over, you know, should he or shouldn't he step aside, and all this other stuff that I would imagine there they would. You know, the coalition of the Democratic base will want to kind of rally behind one single candidate.
0:15:22 - Lisa Schmeiser
But who knows, at this point, like like really a movement to have everybody sign a letter saying yay, go harris.
0:15:29 - Benito Gonzalez
So uh, if you're the web designer are you gonna make like a bunch of just yeah, tk, just a bunch of I don't know, I don't know.
0:15:37 - Leo Laporte
Tk 2024 wow wow, all this piled on a uh couple of sleepless nights, getting the CrowdStrike thing fixed, and we've got a tech community that has completely torn its hair out by now.
0:15:52 - Ashley Esqueda
Hug your local, hug your nearest IT person, absolutely. Find them, hug them, appreciate them. Give them caffeine.
0:16:02 - Leo Laporte
You know this just broke and there is a tech angle to it and I will all read your post, anthony, about what a Harris administration would look like for the tech community. It's interesting because right after the Republican convention, a lot of the tech community broke for Trump and I wonder what this does, if this changes that or not, and so forth A lot of the VCs anyway. Do you know anything about how Harris feels about Bitcoin?
0:16:34 - Anthony Ha
I was actually looking that up. She has not said anything about crypto. That's an issue she seems to have stayed away from. Obviously, the Biden administration has had some crypto regulation around taxes and things like that, and it seemed like people like David Sachs and Peter Thiel and so forth.
0:16:49 - Leo Laporte
crypto was one of their big concerns, oddly, they're big.
0:16:52 - Ashley Esqueda
Yeah, they really want Crypto and AI yeah. Ai. Those are the two big, two big points.
0:16:57 - Leo Laporte
What did Harris say about AI regulation? Because the Biden administration has proposed AI regulation.
0:17:03 - Anthony Ha
Right. So they've done an executive order that, from what I understand, doesn't necessarily have a lot of teeth, but sort of says that there should be new standards. I think yeah.
0:17:11 - Leo Laporte
It was mostly there ought to be, there should be.
0:17:13 - Anthony Ha
We recommend, without any actual yeah, exactly, and I think and so Harris has said this we see this as like a first step and there definitely needs to be more regulation. Whether or not that would actually be a priority, I don't think no, if that's clear, does it is. But she's definitely come out and said that she wants there to be more, that it's not just the executive action and then we stop.
0:17:34 - Leo Laporte
are people like mark andreessen van horowitz and peter teal are they? Uh, they want no regulation at all. Because then there's people like mark Mark Zuckerberg who said we should have some regulation. It's very unclear what the AI community wants.
0:17:50 - Anthony Ha
Well, I don't think there's one AI community as part of it.
0:17:53 - Leo Laporte
There was that long petition including and Elon Musk signed it saying let's pause for six months. That's kind of gone by the wayside, hasn't it? That sounds like a hundred years ago. So yeah, I don't.
0:18:12 - Anthony Ha
I don't really know what they want, to be honest, I mean, I think they're probably sectors who just they're folks who are just like there should be no regulation, government whenever they get involved in tech. I mean that's sort of the libertarian camp. And then I think, particularly from like larger tech companies, I I think there is a sense of like let's, uh, let's, have some regulation, because then we have some sense of like what the playing field is.
0:18:36 - Leo Laporte
And also, you know, frank, that was the attitude towards crypto regulation too. For a long time was people said well, just give us the rules so we can follow them, but that now they they want no regulation at all, or I don't understand.
0:18:49 - Ashley Esqueda
I don't I think that's just also. It's like a sad byproduct of the fact that, like a large majority of representatives in congress like have no idea barely how to turn their computer on. Like they don't know. That's right. They don't even they're like what is a twitter? Like they still don't know. They don't even they're like what is a Twitter? Like they still don't know. It's just like guys, it's been around for like almost two decades. Like we can figure this out, but it's just. They don't, they're not. These are the people who just are completely removed from using technology because they have a whole staff of people to do it for them.
0:19:20 - Anthony Ha
Every time this comes up. Very frustrating to feel like we're caught between, like you know, a government where so many people don't understand how the tech works, and then these big companies that are not necessarily malicious but certainly are not, I think, going to be looking out for everyday consumers.
0:19:33 - Ashley Esqueda
Taking advantage of the fact that those people don't know how the technology works. It's like they're just like well, they don't really know. So we can just sort of selectively tell them these things about the technology and then we'll kind of make massage it in our favor.
0:19:46 - Lisa Schmeiser
It's not a crime if there are no victims, and I haven't you haven't told me who's a victim yet, so it's not a crime.
0:19:52 - Ashley Esqueda
Yeah, yeah, and then, of course, you have the, the ultimate, which is my favorite, the ultimate optimism of like oh, it's this, our product brings people together, it does these amazing things without ever acknowledging the actual, like worst use case scenario, which is almost always what ends up happening. Brings them together to do what is that? Yeah, it's bringing who together to do exactly what. Now, like we need to have that information.
0:20:15 - Lisa Schmeiser
Zeke Foe wrote that this, that really great book called number. Go up where he um, he's oh, I need to read that it's phenomenal. I read that in tandem with the one that benjamin mckinsey wrote um, because again, the guy who started in the oc has a degree in economics and was like how, how is cryptocurrency? Who is buying? So I read the two books together and one of the things that zeke foe points out is everybody loved cryptocurrency until they were the ones who lost their money.
0:20:42 - Benito Gonzalez
Yeah, as long as the number go up.
0:20:48 - Lisa Schmeiser
Their actual, like government backed cash goes to this company, that's like oh, it's ours now. Thank you, goodbye. And that's ultimately what happens with every single one of these things is everyone's like oh, I love an unregulated technology thing. Innovation innovation Until they have Until they lose either money or property or jobs. And then, all of a sudden, someone should regulate this and someone has to pay for this. Exactly when is my restitution when? Where are my guardrails? Where are the guardrails that keep people from hurting me?
0:21:15 - Ashley Esqueda
And I need to bail out.
0:21:17 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, every time our ignorant Congress comes up, I remind people that we once had something called the office of technology assessment to inform Congress about technology. Up, I remind people that we once had something called the office of technology assessment to inform congress about technology. Was founded in the 70s, authorized in 1972. Newt gingrich uh killed it in 1995 because they thought I don't know to expend is wasteful and hostile to gop interests. Is what they is what they decided. But this was something that was a nonpartisan office, kind of like the GAO that that analyzed complex scientific and technology issues so that Congress had information and it's. I think that you know, when you complain about Congress's ignorance, every member of Congress relies on their staff. Some people, like Ron Wyden, have better staff than others, but I think that's a huge loss. And if we you know, if I had one thing as a technology reporter that I would want Congress to do is to bring the OTA back. Because, look, you may not agree with every decision, but as long as they're informed decisions, that's. That's good. We need that.
0:22:32 - Ashley Esqueda
You can at least point to him for right. It's like you can at least point to some data, some research and say, hey, like this. This is why we came to this conclusion.
0:22:40 - Leo Laporte
There's a lot of made up facts right now. Just not like I feel like it's doing that thing. I feel like TikTok is bad. I feel like DJI drones are used to spy. I feel like that it's giving me heartburn.
0:22:53 - Lisa Schmeiser
You pointed out that so much of this comes from congressional staffers and their expertise, and it's just a handy reminder that you just have an army of people who have their own agendas and their own qualifications or lack thereof, and their own connections or lack thereof, and their own connections or lack thereof, and they're the ones who are ultimately informing senators who yay or nay this policy. Um, to give you a moderately terrifying example, back in 1995 my creative writing professor called me up and she's like hey, can you talk to senator tim lahey's office about intellectual property?
uh, because he's about to talk about before and he needs like a quick five minute, right, I mean, I was doing research for her on it and was explaining it to her and then, all of a sudden, I'm talking to a senator's office as a 22 year old and I should not be at age 22 telling senators how to oh, this is what. These are what the issues are and this is what you should be concerned about that's why you Yenny the OTA wizardling points out that many politicians don't want to be informed that they want to vote their feelings or what is politically expedient.
To the credit of Lakey's staff. They did reach out to people and say, can you connect us with people who are doing work in this area? And it's to the credit of that staff, but that's not consistent across staffs.
0:24:09 - Leo Laporte
That's not consistent across staffs. Right, that's not great. And there are some very good staff. There are some very good congressional staffs. Chris zagoyan works for ron wyden. You couldn't have a better guy, uh, working for ron wyden, but that's just one senator.
Um, uh, let's take a break. Okay, enough politics. You heard it all we had. I mean, look, we had to cover the story. It's a, it's an important story and there is a definitely a tech angle. There always will be.
Uh, when, this, when, when politics comes up, because, uh, they're the regulators. Uh, look at what europe has done. Uh, to the american tech scene, a couple of uh, just program notes. Uh, in two, we are going to do I don't know how it's going to be, but two weeks will be our last Twit from this studio.
We're shutting the studio down to save money and Alex Lindsay and the Stream Voodoo folks are going to come in with a special camera and we're going to do a Vision Pro version of twit on august 4th. So in two weeks, uh, if you've got, if the the 10 of you who have vision pros now there's probably more than that and 11 of you that have vision pros make sure you you dust them off and get them ready for uh, two weeks from now, when we're going to do a uh, it'll be a 3d, I don't know what it's going to feel like. It'll be powerful, powerful and we'll don't know what it's going to feel like. It'll be powerful, powerful and we'll have everybody will be in studio for that show, because it doesn't really make sense to do it otherwise. So I guess it's a fixed camera, though right, it doesn't. It doesn't wander around or anything.
I don't know. I feel like. I feel like as like a 90 year old senator, I'm like I'm Strom Thurmond when it comes to this stuff. I'm sorry, I'm doing my best. The other program note is, of course, if you're not a member of Club Twit, that's how we're doing it. We are shutting the studio down to save money, but we need your support as well. Twit TV slash. Club Twit would love to have you, uh, in the club. We'll have more with our great panel ashley esketha, the rowdy skeleton, ashley esketha, uh. Lisa schmeiser from no jitter and anthony ha original. What is the original content podcast all about?
0:26:21 - Anthony Ha
uh, we talk about. You know, just if we started it kind of at that point when streaming was going crazy that no one knew, you know there was way too much to watch and we do our best to guide people through it, although it's over time it's gotten kind of more particular and we just kind of follow our own weird tastes.
0:26:36 - Leo Laporte
I will talk later in the show about this. Because, uh, all these streaming companies are suffering mightily, uh, whereas companies like Amazon and Apple can. Just you know they don't have to make money on it, they make plenty of money otherwise. But boy, netflix was a big winner this week in their audience growth, maybe the winner when it comes to streaming. We'll talk more about that with Anthony Hahn in just a bit.
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In tech, everybody's concerned about security. That's why so many people Microsoft says 8.5 million Windows users installed CrowdStrike and the CrowdStrike sensors. Now, crowdstrike used to be a sponsor, so I know a little bit how they operate. In fact, I remember interviewing their CTO. One of the things that makes CrowdStrike work so well is these sensors are out there in the world monitoring malicious traffic, so they have kind of an early warning system about all kinds of attacks going on. Unfortunately, on the 19th, a couple of days ago, crowdstrike pushed a sensor that had a bug, pretty bad bug. It forced a blue screen of death on windows machines that were running CrowdStrike. Microsoft says it was 8.5 million windows machines, but that doesn't. That underestimates the impact of it, because it was. It was everywhere. Blue screens everywhere Delta and America airlines down the Las Vegas sphere a blue screen of death. It's just it was mind bogglingling.
0:31:50 - Lisa Schmeiser
When did you learn about this, lisa? Blue screens, when did I? I woke up to it? Um, my phone.
0:31:54 - Leo Laporte
My phone blew up, as did everybody you know they pushed it out, uh, in the early morning hours, and it was australia, of course, that first saw this happen and this you could hear the yells all the way up here in the northern hemisphere. So we've heard from listeners who are IT professionals, who have been up two or three nights in a row. There is a fix. You remove a file from the CrowdStrike director. You've got to boot into safe mode to do it. Apparently, microsoft has created a USB key that will perform the fix automatically. That's what they're saying.
0:32:33 - Ashley Esqueda
I haven't heard about anything about that, but it's all physical right you have to physically access this is the problem?
0:32:40 - Leo Laporte
You've got to go to the machine. One of our listeners in Tw twit social said my feet are killing me. You got to go to every machine, reboot it in safe mode, uh, remove the file, which you can do pretty quickly, and then you're. You're good to go, but you got to do to each one, uh, one by one. Holy cow, what a friday it was a great disturbance in the force.
0:33:04 - Ashley Esqueda
A million, millions of computers suddenly cried out in terror.
0:33:11 - Leo Laporte
Suddenly silenced. So what have we learned?
0:33:17 - Lisa Schmeiser
We have learned that CrowdStrike's team that checks these things either missed a step or they're just not big enough or well-staffed enough to do the kind of testing you need to do.
0:33:28 - Leo Laporte
They're a big company. They're one of the premier companies in security.
0:33:34 - Lisa Schmeiser
There's something wrong with their rollout process, because you literally have one job and you didn't do it.
0:33:41 - Ashley Esqueda
I call this some gaming. This is called a skill issue. It's a skill issue.
0:33:46 - Anthony Ha
I mean, I'm a dummy as far as IT, but it just it seems like this isn't like a really deep into QA thing. It seems like a like you just install it and turn the computer on and it doesn't work and you realize like that's bad.
0:33:56 - Ashley Esqueda
That seems bad yeah.
0:33:59 - Lisa Schmeiser
That's the thing is. I'm wondering if, um, they had a staff reduction last year that was linked to the company wanting to reduce headcount by rolling out a return to office order. So people left, of course, and they've been reconfigured, and what I'm wondering is how many people in the QA and product launch teams are no longer there and are no longer insisting that we test the six ways to Sunday before it gets pushed out, because this seems like a serious failure on the part of the people who made the decision to say yeah, yeah, it's fine, send it. They should not have made that decision because and they didn't have the right data to make that decision, and that means there was a breakdown somewhere in the chain.
0:34:40 - Leo Laporte
Here's the toots, if you were from our listener and twit social A DaCosta. So I just ended my second overtime shift thanks to CrowdStrike today. What I've learned these past two days is primitive modern operating systems like Windows remain. No so-called AI could fix this. It was a boots-on-the-ground effort. My legs and feet hurt so bad. But, going back to my point, the recovery tools in Windows are trash and can't do anything useful. A lot of this required command line operations to speed up deleting the corrupt file that was triggering the blue screen. After today, I don't even want to look at my Windows PCs at home. It's got to be frustrating. Is Microsoft to blame, though? Though I don't think so. He says they should have better recovery options, and I think I probably agree with sure, but also like don't break it.
0:35:35 - Ashley Esqueda
That seems like the first, that feels like the first thing that should not happen.
0:35:40 - Lisa Schmeiser
But yes, I yeah well, I mean microsoft, for this would be like blaming a human being for their cat, perpetually knocking things off of a dresser. Like that's a good analogy Cats be doing what cats be doing.
0:35:53 - Leo Laporte
And, but you should move things off the dresser Right.
0:35:55 - Lisa Schmeiser
Or have a squirt bottle One or the other, but like as someone who kept me up all night last night.
0:36:01 - Leo Laporte
I I'm not interested. No, I love my cat.
0:36:06 - Ashley Esqueda
Straight to jail. Cats straight to jail.
0:36:10 - Leo Laporte
Now Business Insider pointed out, this is not the first time George Kurtz, the CEO of CrowdStrike, has been the center of a global tech failure. His job before this was CTO at McAfee In 2010,. You may remember, if you're in IT McAfee in 2010 you may remember if you're an IT McAfee released this sounds familiar an update to its software used by corporate customers. The update deleted a key windows file, causing millions of computers around the world to crash and repeatedly reboot. I remember we covered this.
I remember that yeah, he was CTO at the time. He left. After Intel acquired McAfee, founded CrowdStrike in 2012, and has been its CEO ever since. Probably just a coincidence, although somebody emailed me and I didn't verify this, so this is a conspiracy theory but he said you know, there was an unusual amount of shorting activity several days before on CrowdStrike stock, several days before this happened. If you knew you were going to push out.
0:37:16 - Ashley Esqueda
I mean, if that's true, not great.
0:37:18 - Leo Laporte
I imagine the SEC will have some interest in what happened there.
0:37:23 - Benito Gonzalez
I look forward to seeing how this shakes out.
0:37:25 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's the thing. It's pretty hard to succeed with that kind of stuff because it's all done in public, right Banks, airlines, TV broadcasters, that you know, just a mess. Blue screen of death.
0:37:43 - Ashley Esqueda
Yeah, even just in games, like I mean. I mean, this last week people were flying to evo, which is a fighting game uh tournament, like the biggest fighting game tournament in the world, and then also bit summit, which is an indie developer conference in japan. So there was just like I, just all over my feed just people being like, well, I just live at the airport now until they figure this out, I guess, guess, unless you fly Southwest, unless you fly Southwest, well, now, that's hysterical.
0:38:08 - Leo Laporte
Tell us why this is so interesting. Tell us why, lisa, why Southwest? Why weren't they down?
0:38:14 - Lisa Schmeiser
They still use Windows 3.
0:38:15 - Benito Gonzalez
Good for them. Good for them, I'd say.
0:38:20 - Lisa Schmeiser
No, it delights me, it's absolutely delightful, and one of the reasons I find it delightful is One Southwest is known for keeping a really, really vigilant eye on expenses, and I can just imagine what it's like to be a tech professional working for Southwest. It's like we have to upgrade. They're like no, we have to upgrade, no, and then this year when we have to upgrade, we managed to keep our planes running and made this much money over the weekend.
0:38:49 - Benito Gonzalez
So they're running.
0:38:50 - Lisa Schmeiser
There's also that whole tech cliche about how, like the more you know about technology, like the lower and more primitive your tech is, because this way you can fix it. I feel like this is a perfect illustration of that.
0:39:01 - Leo Laporte
Southwest this is, according to Times Hardware is the fourth largest airline in the US. It used Windows 3.1 because it's not getting any updates. It doesn't run CrowdStrike either. They also use Windows 95 for staff scheduling. That didn't get any blue screen of death either, for staff scheduling. That didn't get any blue screen of death either. Now I'm sure I would hope that they have some extra security on these machines, that they're not connected to the open Internet. Southwest Tom's right was often criticized for its outdated systems, but an old but proven operating system saved it from the stress that most other airlines were experiencing. Now that didn't mean you didn't have problems, because many airlines were also running windows 10 and got the crowd strike bug. So, uh, it still was problematic. Um, the, I guess if it ain't broke, don't fix it I guess not, man.
0:40:05 - Ashley Esqueda
Just what a isn't that wild. Just imagine you're just like oh, southwest definitely gonna have these problems. Like no, actually we're fine, we're running on windows 3, we just never upgrade our computers for like 30 years would you like to see on this flight?
0:40:17 - Lisa Schmeiser
it will cost you several thousand dollars exactly.
0:40:20 - Ashley Esqueda
This is the first time ever that Southwest is going to enact surge pricing for flights.
0:40:27 - Leo Laporte
Although as somebody pointed out on the Hacker News Windows 3.1 didn't save Southwest. Not using CrowdStrike saved. Southwest so true, let's point that out, they're not immune.
0:40:40 - Anthony Ha
Yeah, well, and that was part of what was like this strange, you know, kind of it was this massive tech outage, but you know most, you know most of us probably don't have crowd strike on our home devices, so it was this thing where everything's breaking but you're like, my phone's fine, my computer's fine. What the heck is happening to? Like all these business computers?
0:40:58 - Lisa Schmeiser
If anything. To get back to the point, I think this does give us an opportunity to ask if upgrade, upgrade, upgrade is really the command that you need to be sort of mindlessly following every time. In other words, just because an upgrade comes out doesn't mean you necessarily need to install it, and I would argue we have 30 years of users habituated to the idea that, oh, there's a new version of this thing. I'm using click, and maybe that's a behavior we should all start examining, on either a consumer level or an enterprise level, where just because the upgrade is out doesn't mean that you just uncritically roll it across your system. Either you do a test bed or you're like I will wait and see what other people do first.
0:41:43 - Ashley Esqueda
And let other people be the test subject like we used to do that with premiere. All the time it was like that was a big. It's like if you, if you were working on a project and there was an update for premiere, like let's just wait, let's just wait, we're gonna wait don't update right away. Like never, ever, ever automatically update. And then obs also the same for streaming. It's like you just never update OBS. If you have a stream planned, just don't.
0:42:08 - Leo Laporte
There is, by the way, some debate over whether Southwest does in fact use Windows 3.1. I'm still looking for a confirmation from. Southwest. It may just be a meme which Tom's hardware then adopted. You know it's funny, you can't trust anybody anymore when it comes to her.
0:42:25 - Lisa Schmeiser
I dropped a link in the spreadsheet from a publication called Digital Trends that had been reporting on it.
0:42:31 - Leo Laporte
So Digital Trends used. So this is Dave Anderson posting on Hacky Derm. He says it's quite funny that in the midst of the CrowdStrike thing yesterday somebody tweeted, as far as I can tell, as a shite post, that Southwest Airlines were unaffected due to running Windows 3.1. Then Digital Trends published that claim, using the tweet as a source, and they are now quoting themselves as being quoted themselves as a source. Oh wow, and it all comes from a misquote from two years ago. That, I mean, it goes way, way back, and this is part of the problem with modern journalism. Urban legends yeah Well, there's also this kind of Simon Says thing where if one person says it, everybody else parrots it and no one really knows what's?
0:43:21 - Ashley Esqueda
We're perpetuating it, right now.
0:43:22 - Leo Laporte
This is terrible yeah.
0:43:24 - Lisa Schmeiser
Oh my God, I'm super embarrassed now.
0:43:26 - Leo Laporte
Well, I don't know. You know, this is the thing. I read the same article, and it was in Tom's Hardware. That's supposed to be reliable, but apparently.
0:43:36 - Lisa Schmeiser
I've heard their editorial meetings. They're generally really rigorous.
0:43:39 - Leo Laporte
I would think so, but remember, this is one of those weekend stories, anthony, with all due respect.
0:43:45 - Ashley Esqueda
Listen, I was going to say Anthony is right there, Leo, there's a lot less oversight on the weekends, that is true.
0:43:52 - Anthony Ha
I mean, I don't know about Tom's hardware, but I can say that's true at TechCrunch.
0:44:01 - Leo Laporte
Everywhere Dave Anderson says it really comes back to a quote from way back in 2022. The president of the Airline Workers Union, representing flight attendants at Southwest, are recorded as saying some systems even look historic, like they were designed in Windows 95. And then, as you know, it's a game of telephone.
0:44:16 - Ashley Esqueda
It propagated back, so well, there's only one thing left to do. Leo, you got to get a job at Southwest and tell us what's going on. I need some first. Well, there's only one thing, left to do.
0:44:24 - Lisa Schmeiser
Leo, you got to get a job at Southwest and tell us what's going on.
0:44:27 - Ashley Esqueda
It's on the ground reporting. I need some firsthand eyewitness evidence.
0:44:32 - Lisa Schmeiser
If I were Southwest. I do have a rep for their price controls, though that's come up in multiple business stories where they are not free with the spending.
0:44:41 - Leo Laporte
Let me see if they say anything on their Twitter account, which is apparently where everybody goes these days to spread, to spread stories. No, they haven't posted, in fact, on x? Uh since january. So I don't, I honestly uh don't think the replies, uh oh, and the replies to what? The last post?
from january replies oh, I see the replies. I don't know how to use twitter. How did the replies tab let's see? Uh, yeah, they're talking about flight delays and apologizing. They're apologizing to a lot of people, but I don't see anything about windows 3.1 here anyway. So you've you heard it here first? It's probably not true we unheard it, you unheard until southwest confirms, I'm just going to assume that that's a there's a?
0:45:34 - Lisa Schmeiser
uh, there's a report out of tv station wfaa and the way they're reporting the story now is Southwest airline gets made fun of by people online.
0:45:45 - Leo Laporte
Um that's more like it. Yeah, people online. You know who that is, us, yeah, so, uh, maybe the real issue is the the issue of monoculture, right, the more you get, uh, everybody, well, everybody uses CrowdStrike, so everybody should use CrowdStrike. That's when you have problems in any. Any security software is going to operate at a low enough level Well, not always, but, I would imagine, operate a low enough level that it can cause these problems. It uses I guess uses ring zero, otherwise it wouldn't have been able to crash the whole system, should we not? Maybe that's the other thing. I'm sure we'll talk about this on Tuesday with Steve Gibson on Security Now, but maybe we ought to be a little more careful about what permissions we give security programs. Do they have to operate at such a low level? That could be an issue. That could be an issue. Right, certainly made us vulnerable, not the first time. In fact, most of the stories on here are about problems. Did you buy anything on Prime Day? How was Prime Day for y'all?
0:46:57 - Lisa Schmeiser
Oh my gosh, that was this past week, wasn't it?
0:46:59 - Ashley Esqueda
I was going to say that was like three years ago.
0:47:01 - Lisa Schmeiser
Leo.
0:47:03 - Ashley Esqueda
Leo, a lot has happened. Literally, you said that sentence and my brain short-circuited. I was like wait, prime Day, prime Day. What about CrowdStrike? It's October, what are you talking?
0:47:16 - Lisa Schmeiser
about no it was in July right.
0:47:17 - Leo Laporte
The election is next week.
0:47:18 - Ashley Esqueda
Yeah.
0:47:18 - Leo Laporte
I know it feels like it. No, I'm freaking out.
0:47:20 - Ashley Esqueda
My brain's freaking out, I'm freaking out my brain's freaking out.
0:47:22 - Leo Laporte
Yes, tuesday and Wednesday were prime days.
0:47:25 - Ashley Esqueda
Prime days. Prime days there were some good deals on the prime days. Do you buy stuff? I bought a couple things. Do you do stuff? I bought a couple small things, small things.
0:47:33 - Leo Laporte
I bought some shorts with a 32-inch waist.
0:47:39 - Ashley Esqueda
Those aren't much good. That's for, that's your next year, that's hot girl summer next year.
0:47:42 - Leo Laporte
It's going to happen. I'm going for hot girl summer. Yeah, just have to wait.
0:47:45 - Anthony Ha
Okay, what I was asking is why did you buy the shorts with the 32-inch waistline?
0:47:48 - Leo Laporte
I was in a hurry because it was such a good deal.
0:47:51 - Ashley Esqueda
It was a limited to lightning deal. You got to strike quickly. No, I have things like in my cart that are saved for later and then on prime day I just check my save for later cart to see if there's anything that I have been have my eye on that ends up on sale.
That way I never buy anything. I don't. No, I don't. I, I used to, um, but I like I just usually I just have like a small amount of things where I'm like, well, it'd be nice to have one of those, like, I really wanted a beach tent, like a new beach tent, and so, um, there was one on prime day that was usually, I think it was like 70 and I think it was half off so I got it inexpensively.
0:48:29 - Leo Laporte
Is your baby now, by the way?
0:48:31 - Ashley Esqueda
he's not a baby anymore, he's five.
0:48:33 - Leo Laporte
He just turned five, god.
0:48:34 - Ashley Esqueda
No wonder you need a beach tent this child is 46 inches tall and he just turned five years old, like two weeks ago I'm congratulations I'm concerned. I can't believe he's a giant actually your son is five years old now he's.
0:48:49 - Leo Laporte
How is that possible? You just had him I don't know.
0:48:53 - Ashley Esqueda
He's an insight. He's a pokemon encyclopedia. Now too, this is like his. This is his first true kid obsession it's pokemon like mine was ghosts when I was a kid. I loved ghosts like everything. Ghosts he loves Pokemon.
0:49:05 - Leo Laporte
Oh, he loves Pokemon so if you said what does Charizard evolve into, he would know immediately he would tell you not only would he tell you what it evolves, he'd be like.
0:49:15 - Ashley Esqueda
Here are all of its evolutions, here's the region it's from, here's its height and weight. He has the little encyclopedia. He got it at his. By the way, anybody listening? The scholastic book fair is still a thing at schools. Yes, how nice. And they saw him, yay.
0:49:29 - Leo Laporte
Still real.
0:49:29 - Ashley Esqueda
Still happens and still wildly overpriced. But we buy books at the book fair and he really wanted that Pokemon encyclopedia and I'll tell you it's actually like it. It has accelerated his reading ability tremendously. I can't believe that he's memorizing that he's got, I mean, his favorite app he has an iPad that has some educational stuff on it and Apple Music. He listens to music on his iPad.
0:49:57 - Leo Laporte
Good for him.
0:49:59 - Ashley Esqueda
Good for him. Oh, my God.
0:50:00 - Leo Laporte
He's a good kid. It sounds like he had a good one.
0:50:02 - Ashley Esqueda
He's a really good kid, he's a keeper, he's in the kid. He's a really good kid. He's into System of a Down right now.
0:50:10 - Leo Laporte
That's a whole other thing. A five-year-old who is into System of a Down, does he sing?
0:50:15 - Ashley Esqueda
In the tub, which is hilarious. He also sings Foo Fighters. My husband plays guitar.
0:50:24 - Leo Laporte
We, like all music we like so many different genres. Is he sitting in in the tub soaping up, singing toxic screaming?
0:50:29 - Ashley Esqueda
to the pretender like yeah and chop suey. Yes, like he's like, you can hear him. He's like what? And then he, but he, he's also got like a little kid voice so he tries to put like a little growl in it.
0:50:39 - Lisa Schmeiser
So he's like if you launched a patreon and gave us access to these videos for five dollars a month, it is when the show is over.
0:50:50 - Ashley Esqueda
I will find the clip. I have a clip of him singing the pretender in the tub. I like the audio of it from like the hallway and I was just dying laughing because he's just so into it and he, the foo fighters are playing at bmo stadium in like three weeks and I mentioned that I was going and he's like, oh, I want to go. And I'm like, oh, buddy, I'm sorry, like I don't have a ticket for you, like I don't, dave, girl, if you're listening, like my child wants to come see you play at BMO Stadium. But yeah, like I was, like you can go. What's the? What'd he say? What's the? What's the? Um hardest rock song you know? Or like, what's the?
I don't know what it is like he like he's like what's the, what's the, whatever song you know, and he was like um, he was like oh, uh, like okay, so he played mastodon for him. He's like mastodon, I guess like curl of like Mastodon, I guess like Curl of the Burl, like here you go. And so, yeah, he loves oh Lord. And then I let him listen to System of a Down. This is like my. I'm like, oh, you want like metal. What's the most metal thing I can play? Be like System of a Down.
0:51:59 - Leo Laporte
I'll play.
0:52:00 - Ashley Esqueda
System. Little rage against the machine. There's like one song that doesn't have explicit lyrics in it.
0:52:06 - Leo Laporte
So yeah he, he loves you gotta be careful, Don't do what Lisa said California. I think it's the first state in the union to pass a law protecting children's earnings and social media from their parents.
0:52:18 - Ashley Esqueda
No.
0:52:19 - Benito Gonzalez
I would never make him an influencer. I would never make him an influencer.
0:52:23 - Ashley Esqueda
There's enough. There's enough white dudes on the internet being like what's up, guys like and me, I'm a white lady on the internet doing the same thing, so it's.
0:52:30 - Leo Laporte
We don't need another one of those so the reason I asked about uh prime day is it is a major cause of worker injuries. According to the senate's health, education, labor and pensions committee preliminary results of a year-long investigation into Amazon Warehouse, this is really going to put a damper on your prime purchases. Amazon's Warehouse working conditions. Amazon says you're ignoring the progress we have made, but it is apparently a.
0:53:02 - Lisa Schmeiser
Such a terrible statement. It used to be bad it.
0:53:06 - Ashley Esqueda
Like literally disabled going, like actually I think the progress still isn't good enough yeah.
0:53:12 - Lisa Schmeiser
Stop punching me. Why are you complaining about the bruises Amazon?
0:53:15 - Leo Laporte
provided the committee with internal data from prime day 2019. Just.
0:53:20 - Ashley Esqueda
Amazon. If you need someone to help you craft your statements about things like this, please call me.
0:53:26 - Leo Laporte
Including injuries, the company's not required to disclose to OSHA. The injury rate was 45%.
0:53:34 - Ashley Esqueda
What.
0:53:35 - Leo Laporte
That's awful.
0:53:36 - Ashley Esqueda
That is very that's a very high number. Yeah, that's a very, that's a very ugly number, but they have to rush right.
0:53:41 - Leo Laporte
I mean that's because they're like there's a lot of stuff going on, do we though?
0:53:46 - Lisa Schmeiser
I just, yeah, this. This goes back to the whole. We press buttons like rats and expect things to show up at the doorstep and one of the. I don't know the origin story behind this, but I do know that one of the things Amazon does is they're like oh, we can deliver it, it tomorrow, or if you're willing to wait a week, we'll give you some digital credit towards a github purchase. And it would be interesting they won't do this. It will be interesting if they could do like ab testing with prime next year with. Can you boost the incentive and get people to delay their purchases and maybe cut the injury rate a little bit? And how does that land compared to? Like the control group?
0:54:25 - Leo Laporte
They have started doing that.
0:54:26 - Lisa Schmeiser
Give it to me now. I need five cases of Jolkola delivered.
0:54:29 - Leo Laporte
at the parking I noticed now that they say it's not. It's kind of an empty promise that, oh, you could have everything all delivered on the same day. You have your Amazon Prime Day, your Prime Day, but it doesn't cost less or anything.
0:54:46 - Ashley Esqueda
It's just like yeah it's just have it all wait till wednesday no, yeah, for all your stuff to come at the same time. That's like asking, like do you want your dinner and your appetizers and your dessert all to come to your table at the same time?
it's like no, I want it when it's ready like, please bring it out when it's time I think it would be interesting as an incentive for amazon to say, instead of it going to your digital purchases, like it would be a really interesting thing if amazon was like, for every purchase, if you allow it to come a little bit later or if it's not rushed, then we give you a small credit toward your amazon prime membership. Yeah, yeah, that feels like a thing that, because I certainly make like at least probably 100 purchases a year and from amazon. So it's like, yeah, like that would be. I would delay it if that was the case because that feels like it would be worth it to me, right, like a dollar every time.
0:55:32 - Lisa Schmeiser
Yeah, if you could just find the incentive, I think they should do A-B testing to see if this incentive actually works or if it just works on people who read on Kindle all the time, like I do because I do. When on people who read on Kindle all the time, like I do because I do when I make an Amazon Prime purchase, I do delay. If I can get like the $3 credit or whatever I'm like yes, I'm like, oh yeah, digital, let's go.
Because then I'm like, ooh, then I can hit the sales bin in the Kindle store and get my book for 99 cents.
0:55:56 - Leo Laporte
Yes, that's what I look for in good reading Low cost.
0:56:01 - Lisa Schmeiser
No, I, you know. Just I want to point out just like Ashley and I do this too where you, where you hoard things in the safer later part of your Amazon basket. I keep a lot of the Kindle books I want to read on the wish list and then I'll go through and say, OK, is it on sale this month? And pick it up.
0:56:18 - Ashley Esqueda
That way, that's a good, it's a good and that's like that's how I shop, like that's a lot of people shops, right. It's like that's how I shop, like that's how a lot of people shops, right. It's like you always have things in mind where you're like I want that, but I not, but I'm not ready to get it, or I want to see if it goes on sale. And then it does go on sale and you're like yes, this is the time, and so that's like all of those non essential, like immediate need purchases. I tend to just save in my cart for later and then inevitably like there will be some, so I'll have. Like like I got a TV in my safe for later. I'm just like looking at, I'm like I really want a new TV, but also I just like I don't want to justify.
I can't justify a full price, but then prime days in October they're going to have Black Friday sales. Like there's no hurry, there will be a time and it's like it's OK.
0:57:00 - Leo Laporte
You're going to get a new tv soon, askella, you're gonna, you're gonna, be all right yeah, I should be to be fair to amazon, say that amazon says since 2019, when that data came out, it's reduced its incident rate for anything requiring more than basic first aid by 28 in the us and it's lost time incident raised by 75.
0:57:21 - Lisa Schmeiser
So do we know how many incidents there are that have required beyond basic first aid, though?
0:57:27 - Leo Laporte
yeah, my god, what is?
0:57:29 - Lisa Schmeiser
uh, because in march it's great that there's a one in four reduction, but like are we talking right? What's what's from a thousand to?
0:57:37 - Benito Gonzalez
250 I mean, what is it?
0:57:38 - Leo Laporte
yeah, yeah, the company said its injury rates have improved. They also announced in March they're going to invest $750 million in safety initiatives. They've also appealed a string of citations issued by OSHA around safety hazards and violations. So go ahead and order more stuff, because it's okay now.
0:58:01 - Ashley Esqueda
It's reminding me of the acolyte. I don't know if anybody else saw that meme where it was like me at my warehouse job and then it just said it has that screenshot of the Jedi who's like. Are you familiar with the name OSHA?
0:58:12 - Leo Laporte
Oh boy.
0:58:13 - Ashley Esqueda
Anyway, sorry stupid joke, but it's a great meme. It made me laugh.
0:58:27 - Lisa Schmeiser
Prime Day this week was. It was impossible to open very nearly any publication on the web without getting smacked in the face with our top 25 picks for Amazon Prime. Or here are the 10 things our editors think are great for Prime, and everybody had an angle.
0:58:37 - Leo Laporte
Anthony, have you ever had Amazon Prime Day duty?
0:58:42 - Anthony Ha
I have not and I I'm going to say because, again, I mostly work on the weekends, so I'm not 100% sure, but I'm going to say I'm 90% sure we did not do anything. Prime Day related.
0:58:52 - Leo Laporte
I have talked to people. I'm just trying to think, brian, what's his name at Wirecutter, the founder of Wirecutter, who? Brian Lamb Lamb? Thank, I met Dwyer Cutter, the founder of Wirecutter, brian Lamb Lamb, thank you. I'm sorry, brian, those guys hate Prime Day because they have to spend, you know, talk about working late, all night. Yeah, you've got to keep pushing up.
Here's another great Prime deal, don't get this one. This is a good one. Around the clock Must be just so difficult, so difficult. Let's take a good one. Around the clock Must be just so difficult, so difficult. Let's take a little break. Anthony Haas here from well a number of places, as you heard Tech Crunch, where he's a week editor. He's also the co-host of the original content podcast and, let's not forget, was it the Fresno Freelance? What was the the Hollister Freelance.
0:59:44 - Anthony Ha
The Hollister Freelance, hollister Freelance. It's an even smaller town than Fresno.
0:59:48 - Lisa Schmeiser
Oh, it's near Pinnacles National Park right.
0:59:50 - Anthony Ha
Yes, it is near Pinnacles National Park, that's right.
0:59:53 - Leo Laporte
And Gilroy, the garlic capital of the world, is just next door.
0:59:57 - Anthony Ha
Oh, gilroy, yes, our sister paper, the Gilroy Dispatch, was Dispatch.
1:00:01 - Leo Laporte
Was that your first job in journalism? That's cute, I love that?
1:00:04 - Anthony Ha
Yes, I mean I had internships, but it was my first full-time job. That's awesome.
1:00:09 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, also Ashley Esketha, who is now training people to look as good as she does on camera. Wow, rowdyskeletoncom.
1:00:19 - Ashley Esqueda
I do as I say, not as I do. I'm a menace.
1:00:23 - Leo Laporte
Well, I was wondering, as a media trainer do you ever watch your own tapes and think oh, I can't watch my own, so I get mad.
1:00:31 - Ashley Esqueda
I get so mad, I get furious. I'm like what's wrong with you? Terrible at this. Um, no, I, I, uh. I like to watch myself give interviews, cause I think that's a place where I am, I shine, but also there's a lot of room for improvement. So it's like I feel like I'm a good active listener, but then I also feel like there are things that I do during interviews that I can be better at not doing yeah, I don't ever watch tape of myself.
1:00:59 - Leo Laporte
It's the thing.
1:01:00 - Ashley Esqueda
I hate the most.
1:01:01 - Leo Laporte
I just I can't do it.
1:01:03 - Ashley Esqueda
I went back and looked at the very first like tech thing I hosted, which was in 20, it's like February of 2010,. I think on camera and it was for this week in Android. Ah Right after the Nexus 1 had come out, I think, like four months after. Wow, and man, I was just so, I was baby. I was such a baby, all about.
1:01:29 - Leo Laporte
Android with Jason Howell and Elaine and I can't remember who the third was on that. We have the tapes if you'd like to watch them.
1:01:40 - Ashley Esqueda
I could, like I watched like this week in Android from like I just can't you know. Yeah, I'm awful, like just terrible.
1:01:49 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I can't do it. They brought in a tech TV, they brought in a media trainer and I begged off.
1:01:54 - Ashley Esqueda
I said please don't make me do that.
1:01:56 - Leo Laporte
Please. I don't want to, I won't. Also Lisa Schmeiser here, who needs no media training. She lives a bug's life in the grass, the beautiful dew-laden grass of her backyard. If you're not watching the video, you think I'm nuts right now. Editor-in-chief. At no Jitter, and this from our Discord KTLA, Louisiana police officer crashes after owl flies in a patrol car starts pecking at him, followed by a tweet from owl from Louisiana. And I'll do it again.
1:02:29 - Ashley Esqueda
How did they find my account?
1:02:32 - Leo Laporte
And I'll do it again.
1:02:35 - Ashley Esqueda
Sometimes the internet is good.
1:02:36 - Leo Laporte
Thank you Chocolate Milk Mini Sip for that moment of levity Our show today brought to you by Lookout. Every day, every company in this modern world is a data company. Right, this is what we're learning. But that means every company is at risk from cyber threats, from breaches, from leaks. These are the new norm, and cyber criminals grow more sophisticated by the minute. At a time when boundaries no longer exist to your data, what it means for your data to be secure is fundamentally changed. Enter Lookout From the first phishing text to the final data grab. Lookout stops modern breaches as swiftly as they unfold, Whether on a device in the cloud, across networks or even working remotely at the local coffee shop. Lookout gives you clear visibility into all your data, at rest and in motion. You'll monitor, assess and protect without and this is important sacrificing productivity for security. You can have both and with a single unified cloud platform. Lookout simplifies and strengthens, reimagining security for the world that we'll be today. Visit Lookoutcom today to learn how to safeguard data, secure hybrid work and reduce IT complexity. That's Lookoutcom. We thank them so much for supporting this week in tech.
A wizardling in our Discord says CrowdStrike has a $70 billion valuation A little bit lower on Friday, but you know, and over $3.28 billion in revenue. So the real question is why weren't you testing software before you pushed it? How does something like that happen Again? I think I will look for more detail from Steve Gibson on Tuesday. One security product you will not be using Kaspersky's antivirus. The United States government put them on a do not use list, first for the government and then for everybody. The US Commerce Department said it's banning the sale of Kaspersky software in the United States beginning yesterday. Kaspersky, instead of fighting it, is winding down its US operations and laying off all its US workers.
The Commerce Department doesn't like Kaspersky because it's headquartered in moscow its founder, eugene kaspersky uh, went to college in a military university, worked in the russian military, uh as his first job, so there's some concerns about his association with the russian military. He has said again and and again that he does not have any association with the Russian government, but there have been cases, like the NSA contractor's machine that was running Kaspersky antivirus software. It found NSA exploits on the machine, exploits he was working on and, as it does, quarantined him and sent him off to Moscow for analysis. Kaspersky says once they discovered the code, its antivirus software detected on the NSA workers' machine was not malicious, but source code in development for the government for its hacking operations. He ordered because Eugene says he ordered workers to delete the code but somehow, weirdly, that code was revealed to the world shortly thereafter and used against us, by the way, by malicious hackers. So I think it's probably not unreasonable for the Commerce Department to say to put a halt on Kaspersky.
The government itself banned Kaspersky on federal government agencies and department computers in 2017. The 2018 Defense Authorization Act this is six years ago banned Kaspersky software and military systems. The Commerce Department ban is the first to ban it nationwide. It's not exactly TikTok.
1:06:54 - Lisa Schmeiser
Not exactly.
1:06:56 - Benito Gonzalez
Has.
1:06:56 - Lisa Schmeiser
TikTok been proven to be spying on citizens for foreign governments.
1:07:00 - Benito Gonzalez
No.
1:07:01 - Leo Laporte
I mean honestly, neither has Kaspersky, but there there is. You know there's where there's smoke, maybe there's fire. But the other thing is that, unlike TikTok or a DJI drone, antivirus software is, as we now know from CrowdStrike, buried into the system. It's in there, has unique access, much more so than TikTok does, really specific access.
1:07:23 - Ashley Esqueda
Yeah, that, that's the big thing.
1:07:26 - Anthony Ha
Yeah, I was sort of imagining some of the people who wanted this ban after the CrowdStrike situation being like see See.
1:07:33 - Benito Gonzalez
Told you.
1:07:37 - Leo Laporte
Speaking of problems, remember Google Domains, the Google registrar, which Google sold to Squarespace a year ago. Little problem If you were on Google Domains and you did not set up a new account with Squarespace. Squarespace's weak security defaults allowed malicious hackers to commandeer those accounts.
1:08:02 - Benito Gonzalez
Oof.
1:08:04 - Leo Laporte
So let's say you have, you know, admin at twittv. It was a Google domain and it was moved without your knowledge or permission, but just by sale to Squarespace, and you never claimed it. Well, anybody who figured out that admin at twittv was a legit email address could claim it. Well, anybody who figured out that admin at Twittertv was a legit email address could claim it. The Squarespace domain hijacks which took place between July 9th and 12th mostly targeted cryptocurrency businesses. You know, you got to go where the money is Quite a few.
And in some cases, attackers were able to redirect the domains to phishing sites so that when a visitor with an account at that site logged in, they handed over their credentials to the real site. Squarespace bought 10 million domain names from google domains in june of last year and has been gradually migrating those domains over ever since. Squarespace, according to Brian Krebs this is from krebsonsecuritycom has not responded to a request for comment, nor has it issued a statement about the attacks. The analysis released by security experts at Metamask and Paradigm says basically, squarespace assumed all users migrating for Google domains would select the social login options continue with Google or continue with email. How could you assume that Never accounted? You're in the security business.
1:09:34 - Lisa Schmeiser
You're not supposed to assume anything. You're supposed to think through all. You're literally this is what you're paid to do as a security company is. You're paid to game out all possible loopholes and scenarios.
1:09:46 - Leo Laporte
How would you just be like oh, everyone will do what I think they're just going to use google or apple, so we don't have to pay too much attention to that. Continue with email choice. So threat actors could sign up for an account using the email associated with a recently migrated domain before the legitimate domain owner created the account themselves.
1:10:06 - Ashley Esqueda
That makes me sad.
1:10:09 - Leo Laporte
Since there's no password on the account. It just shoots them to the. Create new password for your account.
1:10:13 - Ashley Esqueda
Flow and boom the person who made that decision next. Ceo of CrowdStrike.
1:10:21 - Leo Laporte
We got a job for you, buddy.
1:10:23 - Ashley Esqueda
Have I got a job for you, buddy? Have I got a job for?
1:10:28 - Leo Laporte
you? Yeah, All right, what else? Hey, let's talk streaming. Anthony huh Sure Olympics. What's the best way to watch the Olympics? They're coming up.
1:10:38 - Anthony Ha
Oh, you're asking the wrong guy because I don't really care that much about sports, you don't care about people in shorts running around I love the Olympics but Peacock is my understanding. I don't really care about sports and shorts running around. Peacock is my understanding. Peacock is on.
1:10:48 - Ashley Esqueda
Peacock, they actually. I was just looking through the interface for that because my son has never seen an Olympics and so I was like, oh yeah, you got to like watch Olympics. First of all, I have to give credit to Peacock here because NBC Universal traditionally I have hated that user interface.
1:11:07 - Leo Laporte
They have mangled the Olympics for decades.
1:11:10 - Ashley Esqueda
God awful user interface. It has taken them way too long to figure out how to present the Olympics, I think in a streaming format.
1:11:19 - Benito Gonzalez
But they've done it. It's great. I feel like they've done it.
1:11:22 - Ashley Esqueda
It's a very good user interface this year, extremely user friendly. I also really love that. So, for example, I wanted to show him simone biles, and so, um, I opened up gymnastics as a category and the very first thing there is like follow simone biles.
1:11:38 - Leo Laporte
You can specifically choose the following that's cool, oh, that's cool.
1:11:41 - Ashley Esqueda
And and you can watch all their performances leading up to the Olympics. Like it's really impressive the way that it's very thoughtful.
1:11:50 - Leo Laporte
That's actually the word I'm looking for.
1:11:52 - Ashley Esqueda
It's very intentional too it's very intentional, Really well laid out. And yeah, I'm looking in the live chat right now and it says if it doesn't have Snoop, it's second best of best. I agree with you. I love snoop's commentary on the olympics. Um, that dressage clip still makes me laugh snoop does a commentary on the olympics.
1:12:10 - Leo Laporte
Where can I sign up for that?
1:12:13 - Ashley Esqueda
um, this is like one of the it's probably my favorite olympic content. So snoop is uh. Snoop did commentary four years ago for?
1:12:23 - Leo Laporte
For what event With Kevin Hart? Oh, he's coming back, he's coming back. He's a special correspondent for the 2024 Olympics.
1:12:36 - Ashley Esqueda
It was the funniest, literally the most entertaining content I think I've ever seen around the Olympics. It's the best thing ever entertaining content I think I've ever seen around the Olympics. It is, uh, it's the best thing ever. So, um, if you can catch Snoop doing commentary about the Olympics, you will not be disappointed, because he is very funny. Um and uh, him and Kevin Hart did it last time and I don't think they're they're doing it together, but I think Snoop is doing something on his own.
1:12:59 - Lisa Schmeiser
I think Kevin Hart is year, but the I also really adore how Flav has become like the official hype man for the women's water polo team.
1:13:08 - Ashley Esqueda
Yeah, somehow.
1:13:09 - Anthony Ha
I'm just so confused right now.
1:13:13 - Ashley Esqueda
Sentences. We never thought we'd say have been happening a lot today guys. But yeah, like the user interface on Peacock for the Olympics in particular is actually a very good example of, I think, how to do kind of a global sporting event the right way, as opposed to it just being like well, now you have to pick through the schedule and set your DVR for each. You can just say I want to follow US women's volleyball, I want to follow I want to follow women's track.
1:13:47 - Leo Laporte
YouTube TV does that too, which is really nice.
1:13:49 - Benito Gonzalez
There's a whole category and it will just automatically DVR everything. It's very good. Did you know that?
1:13:54 - Leo Laporte
Snoop has his own breakfast cereal, broadus Foods. I'm not making this up.
1:14:02 - Ashley Esqueda
Yeah, Broadus, that's his name. That's his real name. That's his real name. That's his real name.
1:14:06 - Leo Laporte
Snoop Cereal, fruity Hoops with Marshmallows, frosted Drizzlers and Cinnamon Toasties. Feed that to your five-year-old. See what happens yeah.
1:14:15 - Ashley Esqueda
So I want to speak up for YouTube as another.
1:14:16 - Leo Laporte
Do I buy it at a?
1:14:17 - Ashley Esqueda
dispensary or do I buy it at a grocery store? Because this is my number one question, because this is my number one question.
1:14:24 - Lisa Schmeiser
Like I actually really need to know the answer to this. It's an important question. The journalism questions here.
1:14:27 - Leo Laporte
Oh wait, a minute. Youtube is also good for. Olympics Leo, by the way, Calvin brought us maple syrup, calvin brought us Mama Snoop's pancake mix.
1:14:36 - Ashley Esqueda
Oh my gosh Mama.
1:14:36 - Leo Laporte
Snoop's grits and Mama Snoop's oatmeal.
1:14:40 - Ashley Esqueda
I mean I'm into all that. Wait, I want into all that.
1:14:42 - Lisa Schmeiser
Let's team up with Patti LaBelle and her pie. We might have lost Aunt Jemima, but we've still got Mama Snoop.
1:14:48 - Leo Laporte
That's all that matters. I'll take Mama Snoop.
1:14:51 - Lisa Schmeiser
Yeah, Patti LaBelle sells pre-made pies, especially sweet potato pies. And she's built a minor empire through Walmart, over her pies, that's some Debra Vance energy I can get by.
1:15:03 - Ashley Esqueda
No, this is great.
1:15:06 - Lisa Schmeiser
Now what I found.
1:15:07 - Ashley Esqueda
Lisa, tell me about YouTube.
1:15:08 - Leo Laporte
I cannot even begin to explain how I want some Polly LaBelle sweet potato pie. It's only $5.87.
1:15:16 - Ashley Esqueda
Wait, we've got to go back.
1:15:18 - Leo Laporte
We've got to talk about YouTube.
1:15:19 - Lisa Schmeiser
Oh yeah, youtube, we've got to talk about the Olympics.
1:15:22 - Ashley Esqueda
I'm dying to hear about this because I did not. I did not watch the Olympics on YouTube at all four years ago and I'm super curious about the experience there because I've heard now Lisa, you're like, you're like the fifth person I've heard in the last two weeks mentioned the YouTube experience versus.
1:15:37 - Lisa Schmeiser
So if you go to the official Olympics channel on YouTube, Are you talking YouTube or YouTube TV?
1:15:42 - Leo Laporte
Just regular YouTube, youtube itself, just regular YouTube. Are you talking YouTube or YouTube TV?
1:15:44 - Lisa Schmeiser
Just regular YouTube itself, just regular YouTube you go to regular YouTube itself. Go to the Olympics channel and you can get clips of almost every medal winner doing the thing that they're doing. But they also do in-depth athlete profiles and deep dives and it's not American athletes, so you can look up see, that's I like.
1:16:01 - Leo Laporte
that you can look up athletes all over the world.
1:16:03 - Lisa Schmeiser
Uh, I do not even remember how we fell into this wormhole, but my family has spent literally hours watching the trampolining competition because it's it's just. You basically watch these people bounce up and down and do perilous flip combinations and it's beautiful when they can get it done. And the one time we watched a competitor to like miss the trampoline and fly off like everyone on the couch was just like and that made it. That made it like. This is a competition that was like eight years old by this point, but it was like it was happening right now and we were all and it was tremendously entertaining. The greatest trampoliner in the world is a chinese gentleman named dong dong and they just do this.
Now you understand how the wormholes happen and we just went through and it was beautiful because you could go through the olympics channel and dong dong okay, and you could watch like the evolution of his career over 16 years thanks to the olympics channel, because they started when he was like this young, wiry adolescent and goes all the way through to when he's the grand old man defending his champion, and he's the coach this year for the Chinese trampolining team, and so, between Peacock and YouTube, I'm going to be looking to see how the trampoline does.
1:17:18 - Ashley Esqueda
That's like the Google Photos version of the Olympics, where, like, they track you from like birth until like now and you're like, how did they even know? This was a picture of me as a child, right?
1:17:28 - Lisa Schmeiser
Or there's um, there was a Russian gymnast, svetlana Korkina, who competed from, I want to say, like 96 all the way through to like 2008,. Uh, just which, in gymnastics years, was a long time Astonishing, especially since that was the era where they threw 14 year olds at the equipment and are like you're not eating. Go and um, she was. She was great, and the olympics has like multiple corkina clips where you can look her up by year, or they did like a 13 minute retrospective saying you can trace her her career with us, and that is what youtube does is. I'm not going to go there for live coverage, but if I want to do a deep dive on somebody like Alison Felix, that's where I'm going to go.
1:18:08 - Ashley Esqueda
That's like an interactive museum exhibit. That's really nice. I actually really appreciate that, because sometimes I'll be watching an athlete and I'm like man, like what's the deal with this person? Because I've now like either never heard of them or I'm just watching them for the first time, or and I'm always super curious and a lot of times you might hear a commentator say something really interesting about them, but then you have no time for added context, right, and it's like they have to move on to all the other competitors. So that's really interesting.
1:18:32 - Leo Laporte
I'm going to check that out, thank you this is, uh, this is going to be, uh, the year for olympics. On streaming, tiktok has an olympics hub. Uh, the instagram account at olympics has been posting training videos to its 8.2 million followers. Nbc is partnering with creators across social media to cover events. You're going to see a lot of vloggers, uh, tiktok stars and so forth spinning up content from paris. Google will showcase live scores, medal ceremonies and highlights within the search results. Uh, it is, it is, uh, I is. Is it that this is just a normally a slow time?
I don't think it will be this august, but normally it's normally it's a slow time for news and here's a chance um, there is going to be a lot more coverage than in the past 3,800 hours, and then they're going to turn that into 11. Wait a minute. So there's 3,800 hours of competition, which you will then turn into 11,000 hours of content. That means that sounds right.
1:19:44 - Lisa Schmeiser
Yeah, yeah, you you gotta have all those profiles of the moms crying in the stands.
1:19:49 - Leo Laporte
It's like hamburger helper you got 3,800 pounds of hamburger, but you put the hamburger helper in and now you got 11,000 hours of content.
1:19:59 - Ashley Esqueda
That's a great analogy actually. I really like that we're the hamburger helper of content.
1:20:03 - Leo Laporte
Yes, the olympics there are new viewing options, as you mentioned on peacock, that will let you curate your own coverage. Uh, nearly every event, and this was a big problem in the last olympics. Of course, it was in shanghai, right, so the time zone was very different from the us. Not quite so bad.
1:20:22 - Benito Gonzalez
It was in Tokyo last time.
1:20:23 - Leo Laporte
Or Tokyo, I mean it was in Asia though this will be almost live for nearly every event from both the Olympics and the Paralympics, which start August 28th. The Olympics broadcast studio, which confusingly is called OBS, will be creating a lot of this content and parsing it out to the various national.
1:20:50 - Ashley Esqueda
Is that like the Olympic Broadcast Service? Yeah, is that their official name? That's so weird.
1:20:56 - Leo Laporte
Literally what they call themselves. Wow, yeah, it's going to be. Even if you aren't interested, you're not going to be able to get away from it. Anthony, sorry, I accept that OBS has more than doubled the multi-camera system it uses to capture multiple angles of the action, for bullet time, super slow-mo replays. It'll also use cinematic camera lenses which are capable oh, you know what that means. Depth of field, right, artsy, or shots, enhanced depth of field, like you've seen in movies. Uh, obs is relying on ai and cloud technologies this is from an article in wired to speed up the processing time so they can use those shots within the live coverage. In the past you've had to. It's taken a lot of post-production for these things, but now they want to be able to do them in real time. 360, 360 degree replays that spin the viewer around the athlete while they're sailing through the air. Sound will be recorded in 5.1.4 audio, so it'll be immersive. Hope you have a 5.1 system. Uh, maybe a little atmos for some haven't.
1:22:08 - Ashley Esqueda
I haven't gotten that discount yet in my cart, on my amazon cart yet sorry, get that in your amazon cart friends, this note could have, could have, but I didn't get to broadcast samsung send me a frame tv like the olympic Service and NBC, will use AI to pull together highlights.
1:22:27 - Leo Laporte
We're doing that already for some of our shows. It actually works pretty well to get clips. The AI is usually pretty good at picking clips. We have a human go through the bin and then say, yeah, that wasn't so good, but that's a good one. That's a good one. They'll be doing that for delivery straight to the viewer on TikTok and Instagram. How?
1:22:46 - Lisa Schmeiser
are they training the AIs to determine exactly what people should be seeing at home is what I want to know.
1:22:51 - Benito Gonzalez
Like I, don't know I should talk to Anthony Nielsen, our.
1:22:56 - Leo Laporte
AI guru, but he I don't know what parameters you give him, but there are tools that we use that will go through the whole show and say this was a good clip.
1:23:08 - Anthony Ha
You know, you say 30 seconds or whatever For something like this. I would imagine it's a lot of like it's when a lot of us are talking and we're excited.
1:23:16 - Leo Laporte
And, like you know, a lot of people talking at once or something like that, you get signals from like the media and social media and stuff.
1:23:21 - Benito Gonzalez
Well, there's actually a lot of human interaction involved with that. So like the AI will come in well, because that's what we do right true of all ai yeah, I will come in and then chop it up. And then you have to go in and select like, oh, that one's all right, that one's right, that one's right. But it'll it'll. It will take into like consideration context and things like that. It will try to cut in together things that that are supposed to be together, but sometimes it's not the best.
1:23:42 - Leo Laporte
But you know it works. Don't be too thrown if you hear Al Michaels. They're going to use an AI-generated version of Al Michaels to narrate.
1:23:52 - Lisa Schmeiser
Not like this Nope.
1:23:55 - Benito Gonzalez
Nope, nope, nope. That just gives me the ick Al was too busy.
1:23:58 - Leo Laporte
He is 79. Maybe he just doesn't have the energy.
1:24:01 - Ashley Esqueda
He doesn't want to fly.
1:24:03 - Leo Laporte
Maybe that's it the team trained its gen ai voice using al michael's past appearances on tv broadcasts and, according to wired, the results sound smooth, yet still unmistakably uncanny boone ashworth yeah, perfect.
1:24:19 - Lisa Schmeiser
Just we're looking everyone. You could have like an ai version of John Tesh commenting on the artistic gymnastics. At that point, nobody would tell the difference.
1:24:28 - Ashley Esqueda
Yeah, find an announcer with less personality in their voice. Maybe it works. You know what I mean.
1:24:33 - Anthony Ha
But also just bring a good human announcer.
1:24:37 - Ashley Esqueda
Yeah, or just don't Hire a good announcer.
1:24:39 - Leo Laporte
Hire a great host. That's always it. Get Snoop Dogg, I hear he's available.
1:24:44 - Ashley Esqueda
Hire Snoop, he's already in Paris. Come on guys, he's already there, man.
1:24:48 - Leo Laporte
He'll bring the cereal.
1:24:50 - Anthony Ha
Leo's not going to be tied to the studio anymore. I know I'm available, so this will be the AI Olympics, so watch.
1:24:56 - Leo Laporte
I mean for people who are interested in tech. There is a lot of AI in what OBS is up to. Ai will conjure up key info in real time and displayed on the screen stats about athletes, probability percentages. You know they do that. I now see that on the formula one broadcast. Aws says you know they're gonna have to change tires between. You know eight laps and 12 laps. That kind of thing. You see it on uh football games. The chance of that catch was 9.73%. That's just like BS. It's like BS stats Like. What does that add to anything? Nbc is incorporating AI into Get Ready For this. It's ad platform with the goal of better personalizing the ads that play during the breaks.
1:25:42 - Ashley Esqueda
There, it is, there it is. That's the one. Wow, it is there it is. That's the one. Guys, we did it. We found the purpose of everything they're doing.
1:25:49 - Leo Laporte
We now know what it's all about here from Deadline NBCUniversal leads into AI and upfront ad sales push. This is what NBC told advertisers. The upfront is where they go to advertisers and sell those ads before the event. The AI technology will specifically be used to drive audience targeting and advertiser performance as marketers continue to seek ways to make their messages more precise. The AI offering analyzes large swaths of programming and digital content across the nbc universal portfolio and pairs it with the company's first party data to produce get ready quote. Emotion-based ai powered audience segments.
1:26:39 - Ashley Esqueda
End quote sounds like a lot of buzzwords. I say that just sounds like a buzzword salad. To me that sounds like a Caesar salad buzzword. That's what we do every week here.
1:26:48 - Leo Laporte
We create emotion-paced, ai-powered audience segments. Nbc says it's developed 300 segments that help advertisers match content to viewers. So it's programmatic buying Wow. So it's programmatic buying, um wow. But you know, they look at google and they see how much money google's making with a similar system and they say, well, we got to be able to get this and tv, among the other ad enhancements coming to nbcu virtual concessions, which lets viewers getting set to watch live sports or movies, order food, beverages and other items for delivery.
1:27:27 - Lisa Schmeiser
Oh man, this is how injuries happen.
1:27:30 - Leo Laporte
Another new offering. Now this isn't just the Olympics, now this is going to be everywhere. Another new offering is called Must Shop TV.
1:27:39 - Anthony Ha
Okay, I feel like I've gotten pitches for like yeah, nbc and people doing like this like for years. I have thought that the peak of this gotten pitches for like yeah, nbc and people doing like this for years.
1:27:46 - Lisa Schmeiser
I have thought that the peak of this technology was like when Hulu was running Taco Bell ads after 9 pm.
1:27:52 - Leo Laporte
I thought that was literally the best time for breakfast.
1:27:56 - Ashley Esqueda
The application, the very specific application of this that I still haven't seen. That is infuriating to me, is like on x-ray like I would be more prone to using something like x-ray if I could use it across every streaming platform and if it, could identify a piece of clothing for me well, that's what they're talking about gucci handbag like here's where you buy glasses especially glasses. You know how hard it is to identify frames yeah, usually you have great frames.
1:28:25 - Leo Laporte
Where's your glasses? You're wearing contacts today.
1:28:27 - Ashley Esqueda
Oh, I mean well, yeah, I don't need them for I need them for distance, not for, like I've been, I've got a bunch of new stuff.
1:28:35 - Leo Laporte
There's a sharp, like aviator rose, tinted aviator glasses I got.
1:28:39 - Ashley Esqueda
I got a bunch of new stuff hanging around. I got some purple ones that I just got like a few, so look for shopping prescription change just like you talked about kind of like x-ray.
1:28:48 - Leo Laporte
X-ray is a amazon prime streaming feature where you're watching.
1:28:52 - Ashley Esqueda
I know lens can do it, google lens can do it, but it's like it's not. It needs to be baked in across it's baked in listen not come from. It cannot come from like one streamer or one company, because it only applies to their stuff.
1:29:06 - Leo Laporte
It has to be like an independent company that can be incorporated into all of it, Anything on the screen, and say I want to buy that, that and that.
1:29:13 - Ashley Esqueda
Yeah, yeah, give me all that stuff, gosh the business infrastructure behind, that would just be. Tremendous Impossible. You know what we could do it.
1:29:22 - Lisa Schmeiser
Imagine the revolts with costumers.
1:29:25 - Leo Laporte
Amazon sells all the crap that's on the screen. They could do it anyway. Must shop. Tv, which is only nbc, will be on below deck. Love island, usa, southern charms, summer house, top chef and winter hours all the reality tv reality tv and it'll it all have e-commerce so you can say I that outfit and you'll be able to click a button.
1:29:49 - Anthony Ha
All the shows where you don't worry who's selling out, because you know the whole thing is a sellout. They're already selling out.
1:29:55 - Leo Laporte
What is the Amazon fashion show? I'm somehow compelled to watch it. It's not Project.
1:30:00 - Ashley Esqueda
Runway the one with.
1:30:01 - Lisa Schmeiser
Heidi Klum.
1:30:02 - Ashley Esqueda
Is it called Make it Work or something Making the Cut? Making the Cut?
1:30:07 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, there you go, and the prize is you get to sell your frock on Amazon.
1:30:12 - Ashley Esqueda
You get your own like featured Amazon fashion. It works.
1:30:15 - Leo Laporte
Lisa has bought. She says, oh, I like that, and has bought stuff that she sees on Making the Cut. Yeah, I have too.
1:30:20 - Ashley Esqueda
I have to, I have to. I like some of the yeah, some of the week winners. I'm like, oh, that is a really cool dress, Like that's really awesome. But then sometimes the mass manufacturing version of it is like no it's not quite as good because it's like you can't have as many pockets or like they have to make some sacrifice for mass manufacturing. That makes it like not worth my, not worth my money.
1:30:38 - Leo Laporte
Mark Marshall, who's chairman of global advertising at NBC, says get ready for this quote this. You should use this, anthony, on your next piece. Television today is a full funnel performance vehicle. A full funnel performance vehicle where marketers can launch, build and grow their brands across any screen at scale. They're working to get one platform total measurement so that they can tell everything Ashley Esquitha has watched in the last 24 hours on any platform anywhere.
1:31:14 - Ashley Esqueda
It's all Elden Ring videos. It's all theory crafting videos. Whatever it takes, but that's the problem.
1:31:21 - Leo Laporte
It's all fragmented now, right? Nobody just sits and watches Channel 4. So they have to measure that, and then it's welcome to your full funnel performance vehicle.
1:31:32 - Anthony Ha
It doesn't sound like much fun to drive. I feel like they always promise that, and then the data itself is always really janky and you're sort of trying to put it together.
1:31:40 - Lisa Schmeiser
That is the eternal data problem.
1:31:42 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's the history of advertising.
1:31:44 - Anthony Ha
Right that's advertising of advertising. Right that's advertising that's digital media.
1:31:47 - Lisa Schmeiser
That's yeah, that's how it works, that's company intelligence, that's customer service. If there's data, it is, by its nature, outside the silos. We try to keep it in.
1:32:01 - Leo Laporte
You know, I'm just thinking. I'm looking at your backdrop and I think that is a perfect backdrop for a mint mobile commercial. Lisa schmeiser, ah, you're very minty, minty fresh, this portion. Yeah, can you get ryan reynolds in here this week in tech brought to you today by mint mobile? Oh, I love a great deal as much as the next guy. I'm not gonna crawl through a bed of high performance funnels to just to save a few bucks, but it you know it's got to be easy no hoops, no bs. So when mint mobile said it was going to make it easy to get wireless for get this $15 a month, all in with the purchase of a three-month plan, I called, called them on. It Turns out it really is easy to get wireless for $15 a month. In fact, I ended up signing up for life.
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I'm sorry that ryan reynolds was not here to do that ad for you, lisa. I wish you were. I wish you were. Um more security news. The judge has dismissed and this kind of disappoints me a little bit the secs suit against solar winds. Remember the solar winds hacks? You must have covered those, lisa. Yeah, the sunburst attack russian hackers conducted one of the, according to cyberscoop, most audacious cyber attack campaigns ever. The uh security and exchange commission sued solar winds, saying they didn't adequately disclose.
1:35:35 - Lisa Schmeiser
The attack that began in 2019 was discovered in 2020 why do you think there are now all of these um policies in place requiring companies to disclose breaches to the federal government? Right, solar winds is what's kicked it all off right because it was appalling that they were not going to say anything about it us district court judge paul engelmeyer wrote.
1:35:58 - Leo Laporte
These do not plausibly plead actionable deficiencies in the company's reporting of the cyber security hack. They impermissibly rely on hindsight and X and speculation.
However, the claims of security fraud were sustained. He dismissed other SEC claims about separate companies' cybersecurity assertions. The SolarWinds breach ultimately led to hackers tied to the Russian government infiltrating at least nine federal agencies and hundreds of companies. One of the things the SEC wanted was a refund for the government agencies that bought SolarWinds. They want their money back. Engelmeyer's ruling is largely a victory for industry officials, who said the charges would create a chilling effect in the field that would make individuals less likely to probe for vulnerabilities if they could face legal ramifications later. That makes sense. Tim stark's writing in cyber scoop I mean, that's legit, right, you don't want to. You want people to report. You want to make them report and if they're then liable, well, maybe they should be liable. I mean they're liable because they screwed up. What do you think Crown Strike's going to face? Will there be lawsuits? I would imagine. Who has?
standing to sue, I guess is the question Well, if you're Delta Airlines and you lost, $100 million on flights you couldn't fly because you were getting blue screen of death on uh on all your terminals.
1:37:36 - Lisa Schmeiser
I but were they forced upgrade or did they voluntarily?
1:37:39 - Leo Laporte
that's a good question. Yeah, well, I think this this case will probably be uh cited, uh the uh.
1:37:46 - Lisa Schmeiser
The case was basically thrown out on thursday the case that was thrown out gets cited, though I mean if well, I know.
1:37:53 - Leo Laporte
The judge's decision, though, will be cited because he said look, it's hindsight right yeah, all right.
1:38:03 - Lisa Schmeiser
I mean you'd also have to take a look at the terms of service for crowd for for the contract too. Because, um, if the terms of the terms of service would have to say we will make you whole. If, if there is a flaw in the product and service would have to say we will make you whole. If, if there is a flaw in the product and we forced you to upgrade and you had no other choice, what do they almost always?
1:38:21 - Leo Laporte
say is no warranty of its serviceability. Is is offered, you're responsible for anything that happens. It's bad, we didn't do it, we're off the hook. They always say that.
1:38:32 - Ashley Esqueda
It's something like CrowdStrike, though, specifically because it has those unique permissions, because there's I would imagine there's probably a likelihood of them, those updates, being forced because they have to be collectively all the same, they all have those systems, all have to be running on the same version, like there's probably. I mean there's not a non-zero chance that those are not voluntary updates, like the fact that they all happen so quickly and right.
That's I'm like that's like I would imagine. You know, if it wasn't like a forced update or a collective like I mean, I guess it would be.
1:39:10 - Leo Laporte
I'm sure it was an automatic update.
1:39:11 - Ashley Esqueda
Let's put it, yeah, like it's automatic update, so I don't know if I.
1:39:15 - Lisa Schmeiser
If I'm the company. What I'm arguing is you have the option to do automatic updates or manual updates. You are presumably tech professionals who can make assessments as to which works best for you.
1:39:30 - Leo Laporte
Dr Du in our Discord does point out that for the government customers they have FedRAMP and the terms of service and FedRAMP do have a service level agreement, so they do have an obligation to perform. So we'll see. Maybe the government SEC will go right back to court and say, hey, we got another one for you, your Honor. It feels like. I mean, it wasn't malicious. The question is, was it negligent? And I think we no one really knows yet if it was negligent. It seems to me to release something like that that crashes computers, every single one of them. It's negligent to release that. You surely you should have tested that and would have seen that before we released it. Right, I know we need more, we need more information, and now that's the. That's the bottom line. Um, what else? What else we got going on here?
The FBI, you may remember, after the attempted assassination of President Trump, the FBI took the shooter's phone, a newer Samsung model, and said they did it really quickly. Yeah Well, they said initially we can't get into it. The Celebrite software that they had the FBI office there in Pennsylvania had didn't work. So they went to Celebrite, which is an Israeli company that supplies phone breaking technology to various security agencies in the US. They went to Celebrite and Celebrite, by the way. Celebrite refuses to comment. So does the FBI. This is from Bloomberg. The local FBI bureau in Pittsburgh held a license for Celebrite software, which lets law enforcement identify or bypass a phone's passcode. It didn't work with the shooter's device. According to the people who said, the deceased shooter owned a newer Samsung model that runs Android.
The agents called Celebr agents, called celebrates federal team, which liaises with law enforcement and government agencies. Within hours, celebrate transferred to the fbi and quantico additional technical support and new software that was still being developed. That worked once the fbi had the update. Unlocking the phone took 40 minutes. So it's just it's you know what good to know. Uh, celebrate says about a fifth of its public sector work is for federal customers. The rest is probably local law enforcement. The company this is again from bloomberg has repeatedly defended itself against criticism from privacy advocates who've argued that using such technology amounts to unethical hacking and has been used by foreign governments against activists. The company told federal regulators in 2021 it had stopped operating in certain locales, including China and Hong Kong, over human rights concerns. Celebrite says the software is used to unlock seized phones only in legally sanctioned cases and never for surveillance.
1:42:44 - Lisa Schmeiser
So the company gets to decide what the human rights grounds are. Yeah, it worked.
1:42:51 - Leo Laporte
As I remember, I don't think they got anything of huge value, but they're still investigating, so maybe they will down the road. Let's see. Hey, this is good news and Apple deserves some credit for this. Apple has invested, or it's committed to investing, two and a half billion dollars in creating affordable housing in California. They've been doing this since 2019. They've committed $2.5 billion and have, at this point by 2021, I should say had invested almost half of that. This is to create affordable housing across the state, although the most recent one is Apple teaming up with the San Francisco Housing Accelerator fund, uh, launching a bay area housing innovation fund to make loans to help new affordable housing developments. Good for them. I think there's probably a little bit of uh self-interest. Uh, you gotta you know nobody can afford to live in the bay area anymore and you want to hire people.
1:43:53 - Ashley Esqueda
You might need to build more housing for projects creating over 400 new homes in the greater san francisco region in the next two years that's not a lot of houses though, yeah, I'm gonna say well, that's the big problem is they have to also defeat the nimbys, which is like that's that's the hard thing, is like actually getting the approvals for these types of affordable housing developments to go forward. That's like the challenge.
1:44:17 - Lisa Schmeiser
The NIMBYs on the peninsula are like solvent level. It's unbelievable how effective they are at blocking new housing.
1:44:24 - Leo Laporte
Well, so this is I guess you got to pick your locale Apple's investment. This is from Apple Insider, and this new initiative brings the company's total to 1.6 billion of its two and a half billion plan allocation. So far, it has contributed to projects that have benefited over 60,000 Californians, with more than 90 developments and 10,000 housing units. Separately, Apple says that it's also helped over 35,000 Bay Area residents who are at risk of losing their homes. They've also assisted 2,500 first-time buyers.
1:44:58 - Lisa Schmeiser
Let's see, leo. The question I have was with the story and I'm sorry if I missed it. Are the houses they're targeting, are they supposed to be for Apple employees, or are they just going to?
1:45:05 - Leo Laporte
be for okay, good.
1:45:06 - Lisa Schmeiser
Because I was going to say that if you're somebody who is being wooed by Apple, it's not just you. Your question is going to be how are the schools or?
1:45:19 - Benito Gonzalez
what are the?
1:45:20 - Lisa Schmeiser
options for parks and things like that. If teachers can't afford to live in the schools from New York, right, this is to ease housing pressure.
1:45:25 - Leo Laporte
They do get some benefit, indirectly, of course, because those people won't be occupying other. You know it helps in general, but I think this is really part of they want to make more affordable housing options. Presumably, if you're working for Apple, you don't need affordable housing, I would imagine. Anyway, good for Apple. They deserve some credit for that Giving back to their local community. Let's take a little break. You're watching this Week in Tech. Lisa Schmeiser is here. What is no jitter? What is no jitter? What is no jitter?
1:45:57 - Lisa Schmeiser
What do you do, what do you?
1:45:58 - Leo Laporte
do so no jitter.
1:46:00 - Lisa Schmeiser
No jitter is a term that goes way back to the early days of telephony and networks and, as you know, all data is basically just ones and zeros that move from one point to another just ones and zeros that move from one point to another. And the biggest technical challenge for things like video and audio was how do you move this incredible volume of information in such a way where it gets downloaded and processed by people smoothly, so there's no jitter in the voices. And when no Jitter was founded, it focused a lot on telecom and the technical challenges around audio video. We've since expanded our brief, so we're just taking a look at the challenge of how do you move information from point A to point B to help people successfully communicate and collaborate.
1:46:47 - Leo Laporte
Bravo, is it nojittercom?
1:46:51 - Lisa Schmeiser
Yes, we are. We are at nojittercom.
1:46:54 - Leo Laporte
Congratulations. It's great to have you, lisa. Sorry you're not in studio with your Girl Scout cookies, but that's probably for the best.
1:47:01 - Lisa Schmeiser
Well, Leo, we're going to figure out a way to get them to you all next year too.
1:47:04 - Leo Laporte
Without a studio, you can't do that.
1:47:07 - Lisa Schmeiser
I don't know, man I figure.
1:47:09 - Leo Laporte
We can mail them out to you. You have websites where you can order them and there's free shipping promotions that go on once a season. We should mention. Lisa is a you call it a scout leader. Now, what do you call it now?
1:47:21 - Lisa Schmeiser
I, I do lead a girl scout troop.
1:47:24 - Leo Laporte
So the boy scouts are scouts, but the girl scouts are still girl scouts.
1:47:28 - Lisa Schmeiser
We are Cause for the girl scouts of Northern California. The umbrella is over anybody who has ever identified as or experienced life as a girl and wants to be part of the community well that's good, that's pretty open that's wonderful.
1:47:43 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, very nice, very nice. Also here ashley esketha gamer and rowdy skeleton at rowdy skeletoncom. What are you playing these days?
1:47:57 - Ashley Esqueda
Elden Ring.
1:47:57 - Leo Laporte
Elden Ring. Still the new DLC stuff. Well, the Shadow of the Earth Tree DLC. It just came out a few weeks ago and you like it.
1:48:05 - Ashley Esqueda
Man might be the best DLC I've ever played. What it's really good. It's really good.
1:48:11 - Leo Laporte
Is it still really really really hard it?
1:48:14 - Ashley Esqueda
is Just checking. Is it still really, really really?
1:48:16 - Leo Laporte
hard. It is so okay, I'm not Checking for a friend, I'm asking for a friend.
1:48:19 - Ashley Esqueda
I'll say this. I'll say this I am not a hardcore Soulsborne player at all, like I would not categorize myself thusly. I use the mechanics that have been provided by From Software in the game to play the game.
1:48:37 - Benito Gonzalez
So I use things like Ash summons and you know there's.
1:48:39 - Ashley Esqueda
There's other stuff you can use. There are some purists from software, like souls born purists, who will say using that stuff is like cheating or like whatever. But I say, if Miyazaki says he's terrible literally the creator.
He's like I'm terrible at these games and I use these game mechanics if in the game it's meant for you to use. So um and I, I'm doing fine, like I'm dying a lot. I mean that's the whole point of those games, but like it's, it's fine, you just have to go forward. I agree with uh wapo, uh gene park over at washington post. He's like you have to play this game. You have to play any souls board game like very fearlessly, meaning you cannot be afraid to like lose your runes which is the currency leap into the game that allows you to like level up.
Yeah but it's like if you die you can go get your runes and pick them back up, but if you die again before you pick them up you lose all the runes. So if you that's the only real penalty for dying over and over again, there's no like equipment penalties or repair, like you don't have to do any of that stuff just don't die twice just don't die twice before you grab your runes again.
But the thing is is like you got to just be afraid to lose. You got to not be afraid to lose the runes, you got to just go forward and and and enjoy it like I'm really enjoying it. I'm dying a bunch, failing a lot, but really enjoying it. Don't Getting absolutely washed over and over again.
1:50:01 - Leo Laporte
But really loving it. Somehow I find that frustrating. But you know, I watch my son, who's very good at this stuff. He loves Elden Ring, michael, he's 21. And I watch him and just he's very good and he beats. But you've got to be patient because you're going to get beat a few times, yeah.
1:50:19 - Ashley Esqueda
It's a whole thing about like, oddly enough, I don't know why I love getting murdered in that game, because it's usually no choice. It's dumb and terrible. It's just you got no choice. It's like you know it's going to happen and sometimes, like when you die, it's like very unexpected and really funny. So, um, you might, like you know, fat, roll yourself right off of a staircase like on accident and stuff. So it's just like that game is hilarious in a lot of inadvertent ways, but I'm really. I'm really loving it, and kudos to the from software team who just made this absolutely incredible, expansive, rich DLC that we absolutely do not deserve and somehow they gave it to us, so I'm very grateful for that.
1:51:01 - Leo Laporte
You have to love the bosses and how they. I mean, it's just when they kill you. It's like, wow, that was I'm honored to be slaughtered by them.
1:51:09 - Ashley Esqueda
I'm like thank you. Yes, okay, Grudging respect Well done. Mike, thank you Please, Once more, please.
1:51:18 - Leo Laporte
Anthony ha, what are you watching? You said you, you, you original contents about. You know your favorite streams. What, what do you? What's your favorite right now?
1:51:27 - Anthony Ha
Well, uh, I was, uh, keeping up with the new doctor who on Disney Plus. I mean that wrapped a month or two ago, but I was a huge Doctor who fan, you know, I don't know 10 years ago.
1:51:38 - Leo Laporte
Did you see it as a kid? Is that I'm trying to figure out what the appeal is? You didn't.
1:51:42 - Anthony Ha
No, it's like Star Trek but goofier. So if you like you know just sort of classic TV science, like you have to get comfortable with that. If you are comfortable with that, I think that actually is what really makes it like sing, because it's just, it's a show that can do anything in a way that I don't know is true of any other show.
1:52:10 - Leo Laporte
I you know you also write sci fi and I loved this piece you wrote for PBS, how Science Fiction Confronts the Real Isolation of Space. We learn I think we learn a lot about life and what technologies we want to pursue and what we want to do from sci-fi. It is kind of, in some ways, the inspiration for so much of what we do these days.
1:52:35 - Anthony Ha
I agree, I think, although I think also we want to try to like watch and read science fiction with like a somewhat critical lens, because I think sometimes people, like you know, watch these dystopian things and they'll just be like, oh, this is great, this is what I actually want to make in real life. And then the writers are like, wait, that's, this is supposed to be a warning, not an encouragement. And then the writers are like, wait, this is supposed to be a warning, not an encouragement yes, if we only had known at the time, then everything would have been
1:53:06 - Leo Laporte
better. Unfortunately, we thought it seemed like a good idea. You know flying cars and all that. Thank you, anthony, thank you Lisa, thank you, ashley for being here. We appreciate it. It's great to have you on the show this week, our show brought to you by net suite.
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By popular demand, netsuite has extended its one-of-a-kind flexible financing program for a few more weeks. So don't delay, go to. Netsuite has extended its one-of-a-kind flexible financing program for a few more weeks. So don't delay, go to netsuitecom. Slash twit, that's netsuitecom. Slash twit N-E-T-S-U-I-T-E, dot com. Slash T-W-I-T. To learn more NetSuite. We thank them so much for supporting our little program here, our little show we call this Week in Tech. We haven't talked about AI hardly at all, except for, maybe, in the context of bringing you more advertising. This is from VentureBeat. To me, this is where AI really shines. Microsoft has created a new AI system called Spreadsheet LLM. This is in Microsoft Research, but I think this is exactly the right idea. It's an AI model designed to work with spreadsheets. Just spreadsheets. Brilliant, right? Just spreadsheets, uh. Brilliant, right, uh. It's possible, I think, for an ai to do much better in a narrow domain than trying to get it to do everything all at once. What do you think?
1:55:47 - Lisa Schmeiser
lisa you agree amazing if it works. I think it's amazing if it works um if it works.
1:55:52 - Anthony Ha
So true of so many AI things so true yeah.
1:55:55 - Ashley Esqueda
It's like well in theory. Well, it's like you get to write half the time.
1:55:59 - Lisa Schmeiser
So I get pitched on a lot of companies that talk about oh, it will improve worker productivity and it will make workers so much more productive. And I want to put the productivity conversation aside for just a few minutes because that's like a whole other thing. But you rarely get anything concrete such as, oh, it will look through a spreadsheet and pull out the biggest insights you need, like which numbers are going down by double digit percentages or how is the data trending in this specific column? And, honestly, that's why people have spreadsheets is because they have to look at all this information and organize it and then be like what is it trying to tell me?
So if AI can do that for you, the same way that you get like a dashboard that tells you how your website traffic is trending or a dashboard that tells you how your email newsletter traffic is doing, if I can have AI that just like pings a message to me in Teams or Zoom or Slack and says, hey, I just took a look at your monthly traffic numbers organic searches up by X percent that's a turnaround from last month. That's great because it means I don't have to think about it, I just have to be aware of it. I would love that. That said, anytime and this is where I bring productivity back into the conversation Anytime you start talking about productivity, my next question is and then what, what and then what do you want the workers to do with their time, or are you expecting increased productivity? Can we finally start talking about how AI should be used to reduce the work week?
1:57:33 - Benito Gonzalez
Oh, the work week.
1:57:34 - Lisa Schmeiser
Oh, absolutely yeah. Give us a 32 hour work week, man, like stop overclocking people. Stop overclocking people and expecting productivity on top of productivity on top of productivity, with no visible gain to their quality of life or their compensation. Like this is the conversation I think we should start having around. Ai is anytime you bring up productivity. Why, why, why do you want to be more productive? Who benefits? What's the gain here?
1:58:00 - Ashley Esqueda
So I think that there's that. I'm going to paraphrase this and I am sorry to the person who originally wrote it, but there's that. I believe it was a it might've been a threads post, but it was just. Like you know, I want AI to help me with the tasks that I don't want to do, so that I can be creative, not the other way around. I don't want it to do the creativity thing for me so that I have all these mundane tasks that I can't do. Like that's not how, so I can do more mundane tasks.
Right so it's like that's. I think that to me, is always like the North Star, like when I'm interested in things that are AI based, I'm like okay, like is this a thing that's going to enable people to sort of like do the thing that fulfills them, whether that is, you know, either creative or non creative? It's just like if you really love crunching numbers but you hate the administrative aspect of your accounting business like, then then that's a thing. Ai, you know. If you can use that to do the thing that you actually want to be doing with your time, that you are an expert at, then that's great.
1:59:00 - Lisa Schmeiser
There's two things where I wouldn't say a word, but there's two things I'm keeping an eye on. One of them is, for example, in the contact center area. There's a real push to use AI first to have customers go through like a chatbot thing and funnel out most of your use cases that way. So, in theory, the only people the agents have to talk to are really complicated cases who can't solve things with chatbots or online menus and things like that. And I said but doesn't that mean that you're getting the most difficult customers or the ones who are probably the angriest at this point and they're like, yeah, and I'm like isn't that making contact center agents jobs harder than because you're not giving them like a really quick oh, here's how you reset your password and they go, yay, and you and you have like a nice interaction before you get to somebody who's going to make your life miserable for 15 minutes as a go. Um, and the counter argument is always well, their call volume will increase because this way they're spending less. They're not doing, or rather that they're doing, more complex work, which is innately more rewarding and I'm all defined rewarding. If you, if you take away a little bit of of of work, what you're doing is you're making someone's job harder all of the time, as opposed to giving them some work that is like, okay, I can do this in my sleep. Decompression work that's a beautiful way of putting it. Yes, decompression work.
And the other thing I'd argue is, in a lot of professions you do kind of have to do rote work to nail down the fundamentals before you can get to the interesting and complicated stuff.
For example, in law, you're writing contracts for a year, but the truth is you can then write a contract back and forth in your sleep and you know what to look for to see if someone screwed up a contract in a way that benefits your client or not.
It goes back to that 10,000 hours thing, which I'm not sure is 100% proven by science, but you do master the fundamentals of your job by doing it until it's muscle memory and you're confident in your mastery of it. And if AI takes away some of that, how are we successfully training up successive generations of people in different jobs? I mean, this isn't to say I'm not advocating for us to go back to oh, everyone has to hand code HTML and oh, in order to put together a plot line on a reality TV show, you have to have an army of loggers who view every second and log it. I'm not saying that, but I'm saying when we look at AI, we do need to see how is it going to help the experience of how people do their jobs and how is it going to help skill building and acquisition for entry level workers is this, and when it introduces efficiencies like what's lost and what's gained.
2:01:39 - Leo Laporte
Thank you, yes, yes, yes I think this is, according to our discord chat, the quote you were looking for, ashley, from joanna machajuska I want ai to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing. Not for ai to do my art and writing so that I could do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing. Not for AI to do my art and writing so that I could do my laundry and dishes.
2:01:58 - Ashley Esqueda
That's the one, oh that's great. That's the quote I love that Great North star for AI, like that's the. That's the way. That's the way I want AI to work in my life.
2:02:09 - Leo Laporte
Yes, Unfortunately, that's not the way it's working is it?
2:02:12 - Ashley Esqueda
That's never a no, it's not. It's like just you know yeah.
2:02:17 - Leo Laporte
The art and the writing. That's what we do for our soul and spirit. Robots do the dishes for crying out loud yeah, that doesn't Doing my laundry.
2:02:27 - Ashley Esqueda
Doesn't God that foldy mate guys. I'm still mad about it. Just how many years was it at CES, leo?
2:02:35 - Leo Laporte
Like 15? Wasn't there somebody? So the last thing I saw was there was somebody back at the home office controlling it. Like yeah, there was a human folding your laundry, but that's a good metaphor for AI.
2:02:47 - Ashley Esqueda
That's a really good metaphor it's just like it's not there. And it's like that's the stuff nobody wants to do. Nobody wants to fold their T-shirts unless they want to, in which case, like, if it gives you some sort of sense of like, zen or decompression work, like we're talking about.
If, that's a thing you like to do to decompress great. But the thing is is like all laundry does is stress me out, like I hate it. I have ADHD. I have really bad executive dysfunction. When it comes to laundry, I'm terrible at it and like if I had something to help me do that, like I've had to create my own little weird micro system here in the house like laundry ecosystem that works for me. But it's like if ai could help me figure that out, that'd be great. Like I use um, I really love goblin dot tools.
I don't know if you've heard of this. It's a little like website. Like if you have ADHD, let me tell you goblintools. You write down the thing you want to do and it literally uses AI to break it down into like little tasks, tiny little tasks, micro tasks, so that you. So if you say like do laundry, do my laundry, or whatever, it will literally give you a list of things that you. So if you say like do laundry, do my laundry, or whatever, it will literally give you a list of things that you have to do in order to like, do that thing.
2:03:59 - Leo Laporte
And do them in that order, by the way.
2:04:02 - Ashley Esqueda
It's like here's Do not fold and put away the clothes until you've started the washing machine. It's like, hey, bozo, like you're clearly incompetent because you've come here and so this is great though.
But it's like it's like it's really helpful for me when I'm in a period of, like executive function collapse, where I'm like I just don't have it in me to like to think about this and I just need these. Like it's like eating an elephant Right, it's like one bite at a time, so it's like I need these tiny little steps to help me get through it, and that's the type of stuff that I feel has been the most like the oddly enough, this little tiny website has been like the use, the practical application of AI that has been the most useful in my day to day life, because it's rooted in how people think and work Like this is, this is the, this is great.
2:04:46 - Lisa Schmeiser
Well, this is one of my core this is one of my core critiques of AI in general is, I think, a lot of it. They're trying so hard to make sure they get money by appealing to the money in companies, but if this doesn't reflect the reality of how people build skills or acquire skills or work productively, it's going to be a net loss over time because people either won't use it or they'll work around it.
2:05:11 - Ashley Esqueda
Yeah, the atrophy is real.
2:05:13 - Lisa Schmeiser
Yeah, and I was thinking about the way AI shows up in my inbox, which is it will try to auto-complete sentences in my emails that have no bearing on the sentences that I'm actually intending on typing. So you have to take the time to. No, I did not mean to say that. What I would really love again is for an AI system to pop up and say hey, you've got 200 new messages since last night, which is the thing that happens all the time, and I've triaged them out for you. So here are the ones from inside your organization. Here are the ones from the three people, you email with the most.
Here are 45 PR pitches that you don't have to look at right now, Like that's what I want from AI. I don't want auto-completion and I get right now, Like that's what I want from AI. I don't want auto-completion and I don't want we've filtered some of the messages into into junk mail, Like that's fine, but I would really prefer not to have to pay that much attention to the mental triaging I do in my email.
2:06:06 - Leo Laporte
Break it down.
2:06:07 - Lisa Schmeiser
Yeah, yeah, prioritize it for me. Tell me if you know I email these three to five people the most often. Then bump them to the top of the inbox because clearly that relationship's important like.
2:06:18 - Ashley Esqueda
Lisa, how do we make you the CEO of AI? Install how word where's that. I gotta write a letter to miss to the president of AI and just say you gotta, you gotta get Lisa in there.
2:06:29 - Leo Laporte
Guys, it just ping, here we go but, by the way, I'm sure you know this but because it happened a couple of years ago. But the company behind the 16 000 ai powered laundry folding robot yep rip laundroid went belly up. There's the laundry gosh.
2:06:46 - Ashley Esqueda
It's so many years at ces man so many years at ces.
2:06:49 - Lisa Schmeiser
That was like a landmark at ces right it was. It was it was.
2:06:54 - Ashley Esqueda
It was like every year. I'm like I got to go visit that folding clothes robot, the laundry robot, see how it's doing. Oh my gosh, Got to check the progress.
2:07:00 - Leo Laporte
Well, people with executive laundry folding disorder, you know, might want to get something like that. I can see.
2:07:06 - Ashley Esqueda
That would be so nice, but for now I have Goblin Tools. That's a little so. If you're neuro spicy, there's literally little peppers next to the thing like a little plus sign that generates it. It tells you like how much do you need? Something broken down from on a scale of one neuro spicy to five neuro spicy.
2:07:32 - Leo Laporte
Oh, so I had three, but let me turn it all the way up to five. Neuro spicy oh so I am very nice. So I had three, but let me turn it all the way up to five neuro spices, and then how do?
2:07:41 - Ashley Esqueda
I just do the plus oh, okay plus so cool, all right, let's do it again.
2:07:46 - Leo Laporte
And oh, I think it regenerates itself, maybe oh yeah, you're gonna type it in laundry now five neuro spices so it'll add some extra stuff. Extra NeuroSpicy Sort by colors. Check for stains. Load washing machine. Add detergent Everything. Select water temperature. Start washing machine. Transfer clothes to dryer. Fold and put away. Clean clothes. Clean lint trap. Put away laundry supplies.
2:08:09 - Ashley Esqueda
Thank you. Personally, I think the NeuroSpicy scale should be used in every search engine and like I'm like I swear, like I can see the application for it on like YouTube and like other, like I just feel like that would be really nice, but yeah, this has been a real, oh my.
2:08:24 - Lisa Schmeiser
God for meal planning and recipes and grocery shopping. It's super nice.
2:08:28 - Ashley Esqueda
Like how much help do you need doing this? And like just one to five. Like just break it down for me literally into micro steps, or maybe I just need less. Like I need less help this week or more help. Like it's just really nice tool. Like I'm a big fan of GoblinTools. Like I can't. I recommend it to like all of my neurodivergent friends, but also like a lot of my like non-neurodivergent, my neurotypical friends.
2:08:48 - Leo Laporte
Everybody needs this. This is fantastic. It's helpful.
2:08:50 - Lisa Schmeiser
The genius behind this is it's technology that encourages people to take ownership of domestic labor, as opposed to the wave of startups.
2:08:59 - Ashley Esqueda
Mental load.
2:09:01 - Lisa Schmeiser
Well, there were, for a while, a wave of startups where it was an app. I wish I could remember the name of this company. I think I blacked out from rage and forgot it, but it was an app in San Francisco based, of course, where you press the button and somebody came, picked up your laundry, did your laundry and brought it back to you with a fresh baked chocolate chip cookie on top, like mom used to do and I used one of those.
2:09:28 - Leo Laporte
It's called wash and fold.
2:09:28 - Ashley Esqueda
I was going to say I got to tell you I would 100% use that service.
2:09:32 - Lisa Schmeiser
I think the thing that bugged me was they were oh, it's hot, it's a high-tech way to do your laundry. I was like it is not a high-tech way to do your laundry it is a high-tech way to get someone else to do your laundry. Yeah, exactly, let's draw a distinction between using technology to do work versus using technology to make someone else do the work.
2:09:50 - Anthony Ha
Man I mean that's the whole on-demand economy. It's just let build an app but then not actually like really improve anything on the back end.
2:09:57 - Ashley Esqueda
Yeah. Let's just build an app that makes it a gig job. You can also estimate how long everything takes.
2:10:04 - Leo Laporte
So it thinks doing the laundry will take three hours and 45 minutes. And it would if it took me 30 minutes to sort clothes by color and fabric. But okay, that's a little long. But you know it's not just domestic chores. I asked it. I want to tune up my car. How long is that going to take? One day and 14 hours?
2:10:22 - Ashley Esqueda
some of these estimates are a little bit, I think they go by, like they just add up the time breakdown of each micro thing and then it's like a cred, that's like a crazy amount of time.
2:10:33 - Leo Laporte
Some of them take two hours to replace burnout lights. I don't think so. I don't think so.
2:10:38 - Ashley Esqueda
How many? How big is your house? Two hours.
2:10:41 - Leo Laporte
No, in your car, to top off, top off fluids is needed two hours. I don't, I don't, I don't think so Wash and wax the car that. I'm just tuning it up, dude, I don't know, this is wonderful.
2:10:54 - Benito Gonzalez
But you're also a five spicy, Leo.
2:10:56 - Leo Laporte
I said it's a five spices. I did, oh see yeah, five spicy.
2:10:59 - Ashley Esqueda
I mean that's like very detailed, like thorough. I mean, yeah, yeah, if you do the three one, it's probably like pretty straightforward. Yeah, not too bad, but it is a very handy tool.
2:11:13 - Leo Laporte
Let me try this Shout out to Reddit. Let me just make a four spicy. I'm going to read the next ad. Let's see what it's going to take. Pick up magazine. Open to the page with the ad. Scan the page for the next advertisement. Focus on the content of the ad. Read the text in the ad. Look at the images or graphics in the ad. Note any contact information or details provided in the ad. Consider the product or service being advertised. Determine if the ad is relevant to you. We might want to do that a little sooner. Let me move that one up just at the top of the list there and then and then assess the effectiveness of the ad in grabbing your attention. Thank you, I wonder how long it took to read that ad. Let me just just estimate the time, because that sounds like a lot of time just to it. Yeah, an hour and 22 minutes on one ad. How about, if I do? Let me try it this way 60 seconds to tell you about Cisco Motific, our sponsor for this segment on this Week in Tech.
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2:14:39 - Ashley Esqueda
did that do okay for you? Well, full disclosure I have worked with microsoft xbox, so I don't know, the best person to comment, but I but I also, um, it's like I understand why. Like they wanted to purchase activision Blizzard King and I think a lot of people forget about the King part of it.
2:14:58 - Leo Laporte
King it was mobile right, which is a very important part of the purchase.
2:15:04 - Ashley Esqueda
But yeah, I mean acquisitions are always hard right Because there's always people who get made redundant. I mean, my husband was part of the Activision Blizzard layoffs earlier this year.
2:15:14 - Leo Laporte
Oh, I'm so sorry, it's fine, he's got a great job.
2:15:17 - Ashley Esqueda
Now it's like he's doing fine, but yeah, it's like it's one of those things where my brother like still works at Blizzard. So I'm like very kind of close to that situation. But I just think it's like it's always hard and like I think, just in general in the industry, just as I think we can all agree that we've seen this like massive sort of effort by the bigger companies in the industry so the Sony's, the Microsoft's to to snap up a lot of independent studios and you know it, it does make the industry smaller, right, which is like it's that, which is never a good thing.
2:15:57 - Leo Laporte
You always want a big robust that was my industry, full of yes. Yeah, it's like diversity is a good thing, right it's?
2:16:03 - Ashley Esqueda
always a good thing and so, and and also like, independent studios are important because we see games from them, um, that we might not see from a bigger publisher that owns a studio, and so I mean there have been so many hit games and also really artistic games that push the boundaries of creativity that have been from indies or single developers even. I mean Animal Well is a really good example. This came out earlier this year. It's a really incredible game and Billy, the guy who made it, just worked on it for a really long time and it's just an amazing time and um, and it's, it's just an amazing game is made by one guy, so it's just.
You know this is. You know it's. It's hard and I understand why it happened, because money was very cheap for a long time and like, and it was very easy to like make these acquisitions and there's just a lot of factors that go into it. But it also, you know again, it, I see the effects of it in both gaming and and the. The streaming industry is also suffering from this, where there was a lot of acquisitions and we're seeing like people are having a harder time finding jobs because it's more competitive, there are less roles available and it's like it's just, it's hard for for a lot of people in these creative mediums.
2:17:16 - Leo Laporte
I'm sorry to hear that your husband lost his job. That was one of the concerns, of course, is layoffs. Microsoft, a few years earlier, acquired Bethesda, creators of Fallout and many, many great titles. Bethesda's game studio workers have just unionized, which I thought was very interesting. They're under the Communication Workers of America, which is this is a big story.
2:17:43 - Ashley Esqueda
Yeah, I mean, I think it would have been a bigger story this week had there not been so many news stories. This week.
2:17:50 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, this is the last one in the bucket. I think it broke on Friday too.
2:17:54 - Anthony Ha
Yeah, this is the last one in the bucket. I think it broke on Friday too.
2:17:56 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah so 241 developers, artists, engineers, programmers and designers signed a union authorization card. Microsoft recognized the union to their credit. It's also Elder Scrolls, it's also Starfield, which maybe was a little bit of a disappointment, but Bethesda does good stuff and and actually I'm thrilled to see them I'm thrilled to see them organized. Maybe this is very.
2:18:23 - Ashley Esqueda
This is a long time very needed thing in the gaming industry. Like I think this has just been like a long time coming like I think the unionization of game development is something that I think got staved or like delayed for a long time because of how much money was in the industry and how, but now that we're seeing sort of a consolidation of a lot of different like you know, a lot of different things and a lot of different elements in the industry.
2:18:49 - Leo Laporte
He was not in a union when he was laid off. No, no, he was. He was not in a union when he was laid off.
2:18:53 - Ashley Esqueda
No, no, he's, he was. He worked at um, he worked for Activision, Blizzard, for e-sports, and so when, like when that merger or like when the acquisition closed, like it was really funny because they split, activision and Blizzard now are like their own separate entities under Microsoft, but before, when they were just ABK as a company, it was like there was a business unit that was like activision blizzard and so it just couldn't exist anymore. Like it was like a weird thing where, like it because parts of activision are unionized.
2:19:24 - Leo Laporte
The qa? Uh division is unionized uh blizzard uh in albany and zenimax and zenimax has some.
2:19:33 - Benito Gonzalez
Yeah, that's there's there's.
2:19:34 - Ashley Esqueda
I think again, like this is kind of a it's a long time coming and it's still going to take time, but it's definitely. I think there's just going to be more people who feel like they have less to lose by unionizing and like that is true in, I'm going to say, like the media, like even in, like tech media. We've seen a lot of tech websites unionized. Like tech media, we've seen a lot of tech websites unionized.
We've seen we've seen a lot, a lot of that. I mean it's just, and Hollywood, like the traditional studio system, is already unionized and, like you know, to their benefit, like they are able to, you know, go on strike and ask for, you know, better working conditions and so and protections, and so you know, I think this is kind of a long time coming just in the industry, and it's not just exclusive to Microsoft, I think it's just an industry wide thing. That is like maybe we start seeing a tipping point here. We'll see.
2:20:27 - Lisa Schmeiser
Yeah, I could even argue that unionization leads to innovation because people feel safer at work.
2:20:32 - Leo Laporte
Right yeah.
2:20:33 - Anthony Ha
People running the tech companies will not make that argument.
2:20:36 - Lisa Schmeiser
No no.
2:20:37 - Anthony Ha
I agree no, no, no Well there's such an interesting.
2:20:41 - Ashley Esqueda
there was an interesting article that came out about a lot of Japanese game developers and how Japanese game studios like their turnover rate is like very low. So, and one of the reasons why is because Japan has a lot of regulations in place that are worker protections against layoffs, like there's, there are a lot of feel, a need for a union, maybe. Well, it's well. I mean, yeah, it's like I think that there's not really, it's not even a need. It's just like they feel protected enough yeah.
Yeah, they are protected very well, yeah. And so there's you know, and also, like I mean, you look at companies like nintendo, mario wonder came out last year, super mario wonder and you know the same five guys like one of them might be uncredited on the game, um, but could have potentially worked on it anyway um, but the, the five men who worked on the original mario game, like worked on mario wonder. So it's like these are these people were who worked on the original Mario game, worked on Mario Wonder. So it's like these people worked decades working on the same franchise, not even just within the same company.
2:21:42 - Leo Laporte
And this is Legend of Zelda same thing and you get a benefit from that.
2:21:44 - Ashley Esqueda
It's very clear you get a benefit from that. You very clearly get a benefit from that. That's very much a cultural thing though, because in Japan like those companies Benito our producer, those, industries in Japan.
2:21:53 - Benito Gonzalez
A lot of the corporations. They aren't trying infinite growth Like that's not their thing. Sustainability is a big thing in Japan.
2:21:58 - Ashley Esqueda
Sustainability is the factor there, and also Nintendo has come to the brink, like in the 80s. The early 80s, they were on the verge of bankruptcy, they were on the verge of folding up shop.
2:22:10 - Benito Gonzalez
So like so this is like a very um, and look up what the CEO makes at Nintendo.
2:22:14 - Ashley Esqueda
You'll be shocked.
2:22:15 - Benito Gonzalez
It's like it's not billions huh no, it's like $3 million or something.
2:22:23 - Ashley Esqueda
Wow, and very famously well, very famously, when the Wii U was not a success, then president of the company, satoru Iwata, was like I am taking a pay cut, like I will not get paid because we want to retain our workforce, like these people matter to us, like we need to keep them here, and so that was like a very that's a very like famous example of you know how those studios kind of protect their workers.
2:22:45 - Leo Laporte
They only pay Miyamoto $2 million a year. See Such a bargain.
2:22:49 - Lisa Schmeiser
Oh my God, so envious, oh my gosh, the president makes two and a half million a year.
2:22:56 - Leo Laporte
What does the president of EA make, oh God, can you imagine? Well, like, Zaslav is a good example and he's not a games, but it's just like you know, it's like Take a look at the way the value of the company dropped over the first year he was in charge, though I would love to know what that's going to do to his pay package, if anything.
2:23:23 - Benito Gonzalez
The president of actually the ceo of ea makes 25 million dollars a year, 25.6 million last year time nine to ten times more.
2:23:26 - Leo Laporte
The president makes 12 million. Yeah, you know.
2:23:29 - Ashley Esqueda
And miyamoto is arguably like minimum wage and it's like yeah it's.
2:23:33 - Lisa Schmeiser
It's astonishing what um what the gap is in this country between the lowest paid worker.
2:23:38 - Ashley Esqueda
It's very large.
2:23:39 - Lisa Schmeiser
Right, very large.
2:23:40 - Anthony Ha
So I don't know as much about how this plays out in gaming, although I understand that. Obviously, yeah, there's a lot of really rough working conditions with crunch time and things like that. But I think my understanding is that, certainly in Silicon Valley, there was a very aggressive effort, like the 70s and 80s, to be like don't unionize. We will, like you know, basically do a lot of like propaganda and concessions.
2:24:01 - Lisa Schmeiser
We'll take care of you. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
2:24:02 - Leo Laporte
That was the Reagan era.
2:24:05 - Lisa Schmeiser
No, that's in the 90s Leo.
2:24:06 - Ashley Esqueda
I was going to say the 90s and the early thoughts as well.
2:24:09 - Lisa Schmeiser
Oh okay, I did a reported piece in the 90s on whether or not web programmers and web developers would ever unionize and several of the people I talked to who were developers working crazy long hours were saying no, we'll never unionize because it's a meritocracy and the talent always rises to the top and gets compensated fairly, like that was the myth that they were being sold from management on down even as far as the 90eties.
2:24:35 - Anthony Ha
Yeah, yeah, and I, and my hope is I mean not like I don't think it's a good time, but I think that one of the opportunities of a moment when things are not great in tech or in media is that people sort of realize that, oh, actually, I'm not going to be taken care of forever. Maybe I should actually, you know get more power in the workplace.
2:24:54 - Ashley Esqueda
Yeah, my work, my job isn't actually a family. Yeah, oh wait, it's just, it's a job.
2:25:00 - Leo Laporte
But I just want to tell everybody who works at Twitter your job is a family.
2:25:03 - Benito Gonzalez
You are oh no so you know, yeah let's radicalize Twitter.
2:25:09 - Leo Laporte
No, benito, you're in the family, don't forget it. It feels like a family, but it isn't. You're right, it's a job and everybody has to get fairly compensated. That's just the way it works. Uh, are you excited about the new nintendo switch?
2:25:25 - Ashley Esqueda
anybody that's uh rumor like I've only seen rumors about, I mean I'll buy I really liked the nintendo direct in j. That was cool.
2:25:35 - Benito Gonzalez
New Metroid.
2:25:36 - Ashley Esqueda
I'm ready for new Metroid.
2:25:37 - Benito Gonzalez
I'll say that much.
2:25:38 - Ashley Esqueda
That looks awesome. It's been so long. It's been in development for a long time.
2:25:42 - Leo Laporte
There you go, I'm ready. Ashley, so nice to see you. Congratulations on getting five years out of your kid, really well done.
2:25:51 - Ashley Esqueda
I've kept him alive this long, Leo. I've kept him alive longer than anyone ever predicted? No, no, you're doing a great job if your child is in vegas are paying out right now.
2:26:01 - Anthony Ha
That's terrible everything else is just a bonus that's right.
2:26:05 - Ashley Esqueda
Yeah, everything else now from this point is a bonus.
2:26:07 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, thank you no, it's great to see you. Ratty. Skeletoncom is the company if you are, uh, an executive and you've got to present, if anybody has to get on camera. That's a challenge, it's hard. It's not part of your job and yes, it is, yet it is.
2:26:24 - Ashley Esqueda
If you're a PR team and you don't have the time to, or if you want to focus on crafting your message, you can always call us and we'll help mold and shape your spokespeople to deliver your message as best as possible.
2:26:35 - Leo Laporte
Call the chief executive skeleton at ratty skeleton dot com. Thank you, ashley, it's great to see you.
2:26:41 - Ashley Esqueda
Thanks for having me.
2:26:42 - Leo Laporte
Thanks, anthony Ha. Original content podcast dot com. If you are into original content and who isn't? These days we're in a kind of wonderful time for original content All the TV shows, movies and documentaries you can stream and, of course, weekend editor. At TechCrunch Usually there's no news on the weekend Ha.
2:27:04 - Benito Gonzalez
Ha.
2:27:07 - Leo Laporte
Just a little busy this weekend.
2:27:08 - Anthony Ha
It's nice to have you. It was an exciting weekend. Thank you, anthony, it's always great to see you, but. I'm glad I was there. Thank you for inviting me.
2:27:15 - Leo Laporte
I'm really glad I was able to make it. And of course the wonderful Lisa Schmeiser nojittercom, where she's editor-in-chief. She's in her little dew-covered grass-thatched cottage in the beautiful. Usually you come in here and I'm sorry that going forward there'll be no here to come into but no, me too.
2:27:36 - Lisa Schmeiser
Yeah, I'm looking forward to the creative workarounds you guys will have to to stoke.
2:27:40 - Leo Laporte
It'll be fun yeah, and really what it's going to end up being. I think it's more than just shutting a studio down. I think it has something to do with changing how we think about what we do, from shows to kind of community and uh, and I think this is a very exciting time. Actually, you know, we were early on in the podcast revolution first podcast in October 2004,. Been doing this for almost 20 years now, but I think that there's an opportunity to go beyond the idea of a show. You know beginning and an end, but I've always wanted to use our community in some way, because our community is so great.
By the way, if you're not yet a member of the community, please join us. Club Twitter is only seven bucks a month. Great benefits add free versions of all the shows, video and shows we put out in public as audio only. You get video for all the shows. You also get access to our special events and there are going to be a lot more of those inside the Club. Twit, discord Discord is fantastic. What a great social network. It's become my regular hangout. Now it will be yours too, because there's such a great group of people in there. Twittv slash Club Twit if you want to learn more, and thank you to all our members that made this show possible. Thank you, ashley and lisa and anthony, and thanks to all of you out there. Of course, our producer and technical director, benito benito gonzalez, will continue to work when the studio is closed. In fact, I think your job will be easier, benito. I hope it will no something there's lots of buttons to push.
2:29:12 - Benito Gonzalez
I won't have to drive anymore, but you won't have to come.
2:29:14 - Leo Laporte
Come in here, you can do it in your house. Thanks, of course, to our studio manager, john Slonina, who will be retiring at the end of the month Well, maybe at the end of next month. We've got a lot of work to do to close this place down. He's been a great part of this network for 15 years. Yeah, it's pretty amazing for 15 years. Yeah, it's pretty amazing. Burke McQuinn Wow, yeah, I know it's been a lot. It's so nice for me to come in here, but I think it may be a little harder for them. So we're going to make it a little easier Going to have a little attic studio. I'll just get up and go toddle up the stairs to the attic.
2:30:00 - Ashley Esqueda
Let's say you could, I'll come in and design it. I designed this right here, so yeah you did a beautiful job, your place yeah, all right deal, I'll get some a consult. Call lisa, I'm coming up, hey, thanks everybody.
2:30:05 - Leo Laporte
We're gonna go shopping. We do twit sunday afternoons two to five. If you want to watch live, we are now live on every platform we could find. So it's youtubecom slash twit, slash live, but it's also twitchtv slash twit. It's also xcom, where we're usually at the top of the live streams because, uh well, there aren't that many live streams, but we're happy to be there. Uh, linkedin, facebook yeah, we're, we're number two, right after NBC News, so we're doing all right. 641 people watching on X right now. Linkedin, facebook, kik wherever you can find streaming Sunday afternoons.
I hope you will watch and join us, but I hope you'll also subscribe to the show. We make audio and video available after the fact, both from our website at twittv. There is a YouTube channel dedicated to the video of this Week in Tech and, of course, you can subscribe in your favorite podcast client. That way, you'll get it automatically the minute it's available. Thanks everybody for joining us. We will see you next time. In the meanwhile, another twit is in the can. This is amazing Doing the twit. Doing the twit. Doing the twit All right, doing the twit, baby. Doing the twit All right, doing the twit.
