This Week in Tech 506 (Transcript)
Leo Laporte: It's time for TWiT: This Week in Tech, and it's a very special episode celebrating ten years since our founding. We've
brought back the original cast of the very first episode of This Week in Tech. Stay
tuned: an amazing evening is ahead.
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Leo: This is TWiT, This Week in
Tech, episode 506, recorded Sunday April 19, 2015.
This
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This is TWiT! Ladies and gentlemen, a very special episode of TWiT,
our tenth anniversary episode. It was April 17, 2005 that we recorded
what we consider episode 1. There was an episode before that. Episode 0
recorded in January of that year at the 21-amendment group hub. I think you
were all there except John C. Dvorak. Let me introduce the panel. Starting on my left, Robert Heron. Great
to see you, Robert.
Robert Heron: Good to see you, Leo.
Leo: I'm so thrilled you could be here. Patrick Norton—
Patrick Norton: Hey!
Leo: You've been on TWiT many
times, but I knew you from the screensavers, because I knew Robert.
Patrick: I used to check Leo's badge when he came into the
building on the screensavers. He's a lovely man.
Leo: Because TWiT was really just
a chance to get together with my old buddies from tech TV. You were here for
that. John C. Dvorak was on the first episode—
John C. Dvorak: I think so.
Leo: There's a famous episode where your Skype died, and
you were texting me and I was reading messages from Dvorak beyond the grave.
Leo: I remember we were in the little room. David Prager also here.
David Prager: Happy to be back. I still feel like I didn't deserve
it. To be on episode zero, I just happened to be there. Still
honored.
Leo: Everybody in episode zero just happened to be there.
David: We went there and we specifically sat down and
recorded something. I don't think anybody had any idea—
Leo: Screensavers was nothing without Prager. The ability to say when something went wrong. PRAGER! It was
great. We have a new guy by the way too. His name is Needles. You always have
to have somebody that you can shout his name—
David: A scapegoat.
Leo: That's one way to put it. Roger Chang is also here.
Roger Chang: Thank you for having me.
Leo: You worked with me on Call For Help as well.
Roger: Yeah. I started my internship two weeks before the
network launched, and I was on Screensavers and Call for Help till we got
Prager to take over.
Leo: Somebody lower than you.
David: That was me.
Leo: I definitely want to talk about what you guys are up
to. I guess we should do our news...
John: You should also introduce this audience. Look at the
size of this group.
Leo: We had to cut it off. I feel so bad, because we got so
many requests to be part of this tenth anniversary show.
John: Standing room only.
Leo: I'm really thrilled to have everybody, so thank you
everybody for being here. We really appreciate it. For those
of you on the waiting list. I'm sorry we couldn't get you in, but
there's only one toilet and we didn't feel it would be fair to all of you. That's
nervous laughter. But the first Screensavers wasn't—first what we called it the
Revenge of the Screensavers, but the first one was just sitting around after a MacWorld at Group hub chatting. You saw that picture,
Jason? Somebody tweeted the picture to David Prager of
the group. You may notice there's one person missing from that group. That's
Kevin Rose who was going to be here, had to get on a plane and couldn't make
it. He has sent a video greeting which we'll play a little bit later. Look how fresh-faced
Kevin looks. He looks so young there. Roger Chang, Patrick Norton's hair
sticking out. That's where you left it. You might want to check. The still lovely Sarah Norton to your left. David Prager and me. I had a recorder, I was very
spontaneous. I didn't plan this. I just said, "Hey, let's talk." We
talked for 20 minutes, 30,000 people downloaded that episode. I thought, Boy it
would be great—
Patrick: It was 30,000 people the first day, and then it got up
to 130,000 in three weeks. You were like, "Um. I think we have a thing
here... We have a situation!"
Leo: But you were all in different places. Kevin was in LA,
so it wasn't practical to do a show. It was on the radio show a couple months
later. Somebody called in via Skype, and wow. That sounds good. What if we
could do a show and everybody would be on Skype? It was April of 2005. I said
let's just try this. We'll call this.... we didn't have a name. The Revenge of the Screensavers. I have a list of things... you
weren't here, John. But you came soon after.
John: I was snubbed.
Leo: You Patrick decided you were leaving Sprint for
Verizon. Who is your carrier now?
Patrick: AT&T. I was on Verizon for a whopping three months
because I moved into a hole in the outer sunset of San Francisco where Verizon
didn't work. I had to walk two blocks to use my phone.
Leo: Verizon seems to be getting worse around here. I don't
know if it's worse than San Francisco. Kevin says he hated his Trio 650. That
was his phone.
Kevin: That was kind of the first Smartphone, I think. It
was the first one that had a keyboard, and it had a device where you could
multi-task.
Leo: He said he wants better screen resolution and a better
camera. There it is. That looks like a blackberry! That's on Sprint. Everyone
was excited for Verizon V-Cast.
John: I don't remember that.
Leo: What was that? I think they were going to do streaming
TV on it.
Patrick: It was their horrible—the antennae or the screen would
flip out of the phone and you'd be able to watch television over Verizon's
network.
Leo: Robert Heron said, "I'm using Nextel, but I don't
like the chirp sound when you push to talk."
Robert: It worked really well. You know what? I ended up
donating that phone to a good cause.
Leo: You remember it?
Robert: It was the first color display I had on a phone.
John: What was the tax write off you took?
Robert: Nowadays I tend to save every Smartphone I have for a
few generations at least.
Leo: The sad thing is it's accelerated in the flagship
folks. If your desire is to see all the flagship phones and how they work now,
it's almost impossible to keep up now. Isn't it funny? Ten years from now we'll
say, "And Leo was talking about his Galaxy S 6 Edge. What a terrible...” Isn't
that...
John: This is your favorite thing in the world.
Leo: It's my new lover until Friday when my new lover will
arrive with Apple Watch. David, you're a watch guy. For a long time you were a
stolen Tag Heuer.
David: I did. No, it wasn't a stolen one. It was a
fabrication.
Leo: You said some guy walked up to you on the street and
said, "do you want to buy this for 50
bucks?"
David: I bought it for ten dollars. It totally applies to
Apple watches, but I used to think the fact that you could put an equivalent of
a car on your arm is pretty dumb. I don't understand why you need something the
price of a car on your arm, but then you start thinking of the mechanics of it
and the machining of it, and it's a piece of art.
Leo: Are you a watch guy?
David: I'm not becoming a huge watch guy, but I appreciate
and understand how a watch can be a piece of fine art from a mechanical
perspective. It is far removed from the discussions around Smatwatches.
People are trying to compare them. Three weeks ago, Kevin was writing about the
Gold edition and why are you paying extra money for an 18 Karat gold that's
worth X?
Leo: He said it's a douchebag detector.
David: There's one thing that's putting a Smartwatch that has
capabilities on your arm, and then there's putting a gold leaf on it.
Patrick: We just bought my son his first watch. It's a Timex,
and if it was the Apple—
Leo: My first Watch. You think your son needs a watch?!?
Patrick: Yeah. To tell time.
Leo: Do they do pie face time? Do they do analogue time?
Patrick: Let's not go into the educational aspect of it.
Leo: My kids do not know how to tell time with hands. They
don't know that.
Patrick: If my children wake up in 1941 and have to figure out
whether or not to get out of the boat, they're going to know what time it is. But
I laugh, right? If you take the $27 Timex watch my son has and electrolate it, it suddenly becomes a $10,000 watch with
the same delete expletive $27 innards inside of it.
Leo: It's about 2,000 worth of actual gold. One thing I
want off that watch is the Ruby crystal.
Patrick: In theory, I break screens like you open bottles of
wine. It happens constantly.
Leo: We were thinking of a new show. We're going to
announce a new show here. We were brainstorming, and I got one. Chair aerobics
with Patrick Norton. You sit in a chair, but you have a sledgehammer and you
lift it, you move it. I think that would be a great show.
Patrick: Don't we have a video of you with a ball popping beneath
you?
Leo: I think we do. Do you want to see it? I have the clip
here. Clip number 7, please.
Jason: That's the audio only one. This is the original
one. It wasn't on video.
Leo: Will Harrison is talking. My exercise ball popped. People
know this by now, but I like to sit on a ball during the shows, because it
keeps you moving around. We used to do this whole show standing up, but I don't
want to do two hours. These shows are too long to stand up, and I'm too old, so
I sit on a ball. Colleen who was our chief engineer, she was our chief engineer
at the time. She said, Leo, you're buying expensive balls from Gopher Sport. You
can get it cheaper. There's a Chinese company that makes the same ball. So we
got Chinese balls.
David: Are those the same people who made my fake tag watch?
John: A lot of people said that, Leo.
Leo: Show the video. Even after the first one bursts, you'd
think I have learned. But we got a second one. This one had sprung a slow leek.
I thought this will be funny. I'll ride it down. It doesn't quite work like
that. By the way, notice the great book. PowerShell in
Action.
CLIP LEO: I
punched a hole in my ball. This is terrible.
Leo: I thought this was so funny, I'll slide down.
CLIP LEO: I'm
sinking. {ball pops.}
Leo: The funny thing is if you don't hurt yourself—
Roger: Is that one of the Chinese ones? So your Chinese ball—
John: Give it to him, Roger. Don't put up with that.
Leo: The chatroom is very useful. Let them write the jokes.
John: This show is going to go lewd. That's what I'll do.
Leo: Gopher Sport anti-burst ultra fit stability balls. They never pop. We have a rack of them. We thought when we
first built this studio that we would make our audience sit on balls.
Patrick: I remember walking in here and being like why do we have extra balls? There was a rack for them.
Leo: Maybe we've taken I down by
now, but there was a rack and 30 balls. Frankly, those of you sitting in the
metal chairs are probably wishing right now you had some balls.
John: Especially those guys from Canada. Wow. That fell
flat. That was great.
Leo: We've gotten more comfortable chairs. We went out and
got some chairs. So I guess, today we'll do some news. There's stuff to talk
about. Since we're on the watch. Somebody said, thank god they're not going to talk about the Apple watch
today. Of course we are.
John: That's all you talk about.
Leo: That's all there is to talk about.
John: I have to tell you. This is an outrageously great
phone.
Leo: Five minutes with it, and he's already decided about
it.
John: It's gorgeous.
Leo: 570 dots per inch. Which is a
little... We're talking about the Galaxy S6 and this is the Edge.
John: He's been raving about it for weeks.
Patrick: Do you find the Edge to be useful?
Leo: The Edge is aesthetic.
John: What is the Edge part?
Patrick: There's a tool bar that wraps around the Edge. You can
see the side of your phone when you're lying down on your bed.
Leo: There's a special gesture. You rub it like a genie's
lamp. You can see it! Where is the camera? You can see the time, the date. I
can scroll that. I can get news.
Patrick: I thought it was supposed to show up there.
Leo: That was the problem that I had with the Note 4 Edge,
which was actually upside down. This one finally flicks around. And you can
assign colors to people. Who leaves their phone face down? That's a bad idea. If
you leave your phone facedown, it will glow with the color of the person who
called/texted you. Totally useless.
Robert: That's my favorite phone right now.
Leo: You like it?
Robert: Beautiful. Do you mind the glow in the parts of the
glass?
Leo: Yeah. Somebody has complained about that. A lot of
people are saying don't spend the extra hundred bucks to get the curve.
Robert: That's a gimmick if I've ever seen one.
Leo: It's absolutely a gimmick. But remember I'm the guy
who paid 100 bucks for a black painted MacBook. It was a hundred bucks extra
for black paint.
David: Put 18 Karat gold on your iWatch. On your watch, sorry.
Leo: I would spray it with gold paint. Are you getting an
Apple Watch?
David: I'm not. Not because I don't believe in it, but the
only reason I could see to get one is that some of the beta testers say if they
pull their phone out 100 times a day, they'll now only pull it out 20 times a
day, so now they spend less time staring at their phone. If that really holds
true, maybe it would be worth it. I get to get the input and then carry on, but
I'll probably have 500 interactions instead of a hundred.
Leo: You'll use it more.
David: I want to wait and see what the jury of hundreds of
millions people have to say, and then maybe I'll consider it.
Leo: That's surprisingly intelligent.
Robert: What about having to charge it every 18 hours.
Leo: So what? Don't you charge your phone every day?
Robert: Not necessarily.
Leo: I get home, I get in bed. I put my phone on the charger, I put my watch on the charger. I do that already. Analysts
say, of course analysts are guessing, about a million pre-orders. That's got to
be all the people who are going to get one, at least initially.
David: There's a study that said—I think it was done the same
way they do exit polls, they said how much did you spend on your order? $700. I feel like those are clearly the early end of the
sample.
Leo: It's a billion dollar business already.
David: Do you really want to spend $500 on a watch that has a
market place that's not defined yet?
Leo: It's a testament to Apple and their ability to market.
It's completely unknown whether this watch is going to work, if it's going to
do what you want it to do. Is it going to be of any value?
David: All they do is talk about the aluminum among other
things, but they put so much work and research, of course they're tailoring the
way they present, but the thing is incredible.
Leo: It seems like you should be buying one.
John: Get one.
David: I don't know if it's going to enhance my life. I have
too much ADD.
Leo: You're selling your TESLA right?
David: Yep.
John: Why?
David: I don't drive, and I live in the city. I have no
commute almost. It's starting to depreciate like a tech product. I had the
360th one, which in a way is neat, but now mine doesn't have as many sensors. There's
a reason for that car to depreciate in value. I think the TESLA is an amazing
feet of engineering, but I have no reason to keep it. I might as well wait 6 or
8 months and save that hundred thousand in depreciation.
John: Not a bad idea. I think we should get back to talking
about the watch.
Leo: Next week will be about the watch.
Patrick: I'm going to be down at iFixit watching them tear it down. That should be amusing.
Leo: Where are they getting this from? They think they'll
have one on the 24?
Patrick: They'll have three.
Leo: That was one of the stories this week. Don't even try
to buy one in an Apple store.
Patrick: I thought that was interesting. Errands were shutting
it down indefinitely, I hope everybody ordered one. We'll start selling in
stores in June. Ish.
Leo: There is a genuine risk that the watch will come out,
and after the first blush, people will say no.
Patrick: You say that about every new Apple product.
John: You're an anti-Apple bigot. It's a fact, I'm not
joking. You know it, I know it. Patrick knows it.
Patrick: Ladies and gentlemen, can we get a round of applause
for the best troll I have ever known? John C. Dvorak?
Leo: A bigot is somebody who decides without the basis of
fact, "I hate those guys." I'm not a bigot. I love Apple, are you
kidding? I was one of the rainbow guys.
Roger: Remember when you bought the G4 Cube?
Leo: It was cancelled.
John: Get out of the Apple events.
Leo: People think that, and why would I care? By the way,
do you want to see what was going on? This goes back to 2010. Apple wasn't
streaming this events, so there's no way that you as a
normal person could see what was going on. I was lucky enough to get an
invitation to go see the event. You know what? One of the things I'm very
grateful for, is I got to see Steve Jobs introduce the iPhone and the iPad. You
were watching a master at work. People were excited. We had several hundred
thousand people watching the live stream because Apple wasn't streaming it. I'm
talking in my ear because I'm in communication in my studio. I opened up my lap
top and this is what happened. Apple's own video has a picture of me in the
audience. I don't know if you can tell, but I'm holding, see? It's gone full
stream. What I'm doing is holding up my laptop and taking a picture of the
speech. Steve Jobs looked over at me and gave me the stink eye. I realize now
that's because he saw himself on the screen, I'm holding up a screen with his
picture on it. That was the only way you could watch it. If I
had Meerkat your Periscope... in fact, at the last
Apple event, everybody Meerkatted. What was
it? Was it an Apple event? It was in January or February.
John: What happened after this? After you violated the
rules? You never got invited to anything again.
Leo: Nothing. I don't know if they're tied together. Nobody
came and said anything. I never got a call, I never heard from Apple. That's
not a big deal, because Apple streams them. I wouldn't go even if I got invited
at this point. I can't cover it from there. I was glad to visit with Steve Jobs
to watch this amazing fellow at work. At this point, watching Tim Cook at work,
it's like watching paint dry. I'm not trying to get in anybody's good graces. What
do I care?
Patrick: Tim has the worst job ever, which is to follow up
Steve Jobs's presentations. The most amazing
presentation ever was when they announced the Intel processor, because they did
such an amazing job of lying to the Apple community for years about the
performance of the processor, which was incredibly far behind until that point.
We're proud to announce that we're putting the INTEL, not that Steve Jobs
sounds like that, but the entire room sounded like people got punched.
Leo: There's a similar moment. Remember when Steve came
back to Apple and his first MacWorld expo Keynote, a
big giant Bill Gates shows up on the screen.
John: I think that was the second one.
Leo: It was. Apple was in dire straits. They were running
out of money, they were 3 months from going bankrupt. Bill said, I'll give you
a hundred fifty dollars and continue to do Office for the Macintosh. You know
why? Because Bill saw a DOJ investigation down the
road. He said, we're not a monopoly.
John: I know this happened, but I think this was after the
DOJ thing happened.
Leo: Do you have video of that? Can you imagine? The Apple
faithful who for years said, "Microsoft is the evil empire."
John: They booed him.
Leo: It sounds like they're cheering. They're booing. Look
at that. Not happy. Does he look happy? But you know what? It was a lifesaver. I
don't think they would have continued without that money.
David: It was on the cover of Time magazine. Thank you Bill Gates.
Leo: I was a weird moment. I think that was one of those
moments where Steve Jobs learned a big lesson. You don't have some giant head
on the screen.
Patrick: Just like the 1984 commercial, except Steve wasn't
carrying a hammer.
Robert: Were you the first person to live stream an Apple
event?
Leo: I was the last person.
Robert: That kickstarted probably
Apple doing that themselves.
David: The whole thing was a PR attempt. They could have
live-streamed it any time they wanted, but they thought the hype built around
people talking about it, and even the live blogging that was going on—that had
to be the strategy. I don't know if the strategy worked. That's clearly why. Everyone
who watched it, maybe the hype was more since they couldn't. I can't think of
any other explanation.
Roger: There's an air of exclusivity when certain people get
to see things. You add a certain prestige to the product. Now people can live
tweet or blog or whatever.
John: They weren't objecting to live blogging.
Roger: Now they realize having a bunch of people singing
praises instead of a selected few doing it is a lot more advantageous to get
the word out.
Leo: It's very hard for me to control my enthusiasm. I
don't care what they show me. Gold plated crap, it's very hard because they
sell it so well. They're very good at that.
Roger: Aren't they ripping that off from—
Leo: Go ahead and sue them here.
Roger: I've always been pretty immune to the Apple...
Patrick: You also found out you were pregnant. Oh cool.
Roger: I'm not pregnant.
Leo: Congratulations! How old is your baby?
Roger: 2 and a half months.
Leo: Boy or girl?
Roger: Girl.
Leo: What's her name?
Roger: Eloise. Ellie for short.
Leo: Do you have a wife?
Roger: Yes.
Leo: What's your wife's name?
Roger: Jennifer.
Leo: Jennifer. That's so great. Is she from Australia?
Roger: No. She's from New Jersey.
John: How does Australia come in the picture?
Leo: That's an in-joke. Roger, back in the tech TV days,
his girlfriend lived 8,000 miles away. Kind of hard to have a
relationship. She was a nice woman. Loved her.
Roger: She was great.
John: Had to literally mail it in.
Leo: Anyway. Congratulations. David, did you get married? Any life events?
David: Not married. I have an amazing girlfriend. Everything
is amazing and fantastic.
Leo: You were a big part of Revision 3. Frankly, I don't
know if people know this, Kevin and you started it. You really made...
David: You can't discount J. He was the first guy to throw
money at it. Actually, he was the catalyst. If you guys do this full time, I
will give you 50,000. I didn't like working for Comcast. All
right.
Leo: You were still in LA doing the G4 tech TV. Was it
still a screensavers?
David: It was in process of changing. They were coming up
with a re-launch and re-branding strategy for the show. Kevin had the idea for
Digg, which he started when you were still host. Hey look at this cool idea. It's
this website I have for Digg. I think Digg was sort of before Revision 3, but
Revision 3 took off faster. Revision 3 waned before we got our funding and Digg
was going this way. All the focus shifted to Digg. The only reason I can take
credit for Revision 3 is being technically employed. I wasn't there on day
zero. It was day 10. Everybody shifted over to Digg. Here's this hot Internet start up. I don't want to do that, so I ran revision 3 for
a year and a half.
Leo: You deserve a lot of credit. You made that thing happen.
David: Thanks. A lot of pieces fell into place. I worked hard,
and I feel proud of what I did. That was one of the opportunities I was given. I
was able to manage it and take advantage of it and have the right ideas.
Leo: Ten years ago, TWiT, Kevin
talked about Digg. He spent all his nights adding new features. He was very
much involved in Digg. I remember that it was only a few episodes into Digg
that he announced: I think I'm going to leave G4 and pursue this. So you left
with him?
David: No. I left within a month. They were looking for
people to help monetize Revision 3. I'm a TV producer by trade. I thought, luckily since I didn't come from a traditional sales
background, I didn't have rules. I was able to make them up. Who is our audience, and what kind of companies can we do things
for and move the needle for? That was all CPA, even though everybody wanted
branding campaigns. Making up ideas and trying it, if you have some semblance
of an audience, you can try things and see what works.
Leo: What was the first Revision 3 show? Was it system?
David: It was a hybrid version of the broken and I guess a
newer version of System.
Patrick: One episode of Broken, there were two or three of the System. Then Digg nation started. Then you brought me on to
work with David to do system regularly, and then the funding came that summer.
Leo: The worst thing that ever happened to you guys was
getting funded by—
David: In 2006? We wouldn't have worked out if we didn't get
it.
Leo: Here's some video from System. This is cut to track
six. Kevin and you too, David, came to visit. This was when I was working at
the smallest room of the cottage. How to podcast.
CLIP: I'm here behind the scenes with host Leo Laporte. Leo, this has to be the most complicated set up
I've seen in my entire life.
CLIP LEO: This
has grown in a bad way. We've just completed out last time that we're going to
do it here in the mini TWiT. I do the KFI radio show
from here. That's how we started with TWiT. We didn't
have a lot of equipment when we first started doing it. To do
the radio show. all I need is this headset mic.
This is a good one. This is an ISDN Kodek.
Leo: You get the idea. This is still available on YouTube
if you want to watch the whole thing. Do you guys remember doing a show where
we were all sitting on the floor in that room? It was so hot up there. It was
all analogue.
Patrick: I remember the bathroom having a slanted roof in
there, so you would always hit your head.
Leo: Remember that? Did you guys ever take a bath? We're
going to take a break. You can see immediately, as we've been sitting here,
it's like it never ended. We have this bond.
John: It never ended. What never ended?
Leo: TWiT.
John: Of course not. You do the show every Sunday.
Leo: Do we? Our Tenth anniversary show continues in just a
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Dropbox.com/business. Dropbox.com/business. Thank
you so much Dropbox. We're really thrilled to have them as part of our TWiT family. It's funny about the advertisers. We try to
use advertisers we use. I've been trying to get Dropbox to advertise on TWiT for five years. Thrilled to have
you. You want an extra space; pick up your microphone first. John C.
Dvorak.
John: Extra space. I need extra space.
Patrick: They give you a terabyte.
Leo: Isn't that amazing? Cloud has changed so much. Let me
ask you, John. You've always been really negative on Cloud storage.
John: I said that.
Leo: Have you changed your tune on that?
John: No. No good.
Leo: I love Cloud. The Chrome book is amazing because I
sign into the new Chrome book.
John: What if Google decides to take control of your account
and kick you out? Enough said.
David: If he was secretary of defense, he would have a
private e-mail server for sure.
John: Absolutely.
Leo: Would you? In the basement.
John: Yeah. Off a laptop. That way
we always have it with me.
Leo: The cloud is such a revolution.
Roger: It's a double edged sword.
Leo: There's a theoretical problem. It hasn't happened.
John: There's plenty of people that
are on the various Yahoo groups that bitch and moan about their accounts being
pulled out from under them. That's Cloud.
Leo: Don't just be tied to one source.
John: Yahoo groups and you're doing something for—
Leo: Really? Yahoo groups?
John: These stories come and go. Yes. Yahoo
Groups.
Leo: Is that what you're worried about?
John: I'm not worried about it, because I don't use these
services.
Leo: I like the Cloud. What do you think?
Patrick: I was having this conversation a couple of weeks ago. I
can remember when I first started working at Windows sources and later on PC
magazine, how there was this big we're taking control back to the servers. Remember
Java Machines? Those were big for 20 or 30 minutes. You could really ruin your
career by moving everybody onto these boxes. But this time, it's actually
useful and works. There's a lot of stuff I don't want in the Cloud. I don’t
want to deal with stuff not streaming or stuff not playing. Like Crash Plan? I
love Crash plan. Me and half my family live in places
that might get wiped off the face of a map due to some sort of natural
disaster.
Leo: It's not like you put all your eggs in that basket,
but that's a second basket that you can have, so if you're original basket has
a hole in it and the eggs fall out, you have eggs somewhere else.
Patrick: How many people have their entire life, or their professional life on Google? Everybody who works for TWiT raise your hands.
Leo: We use Google for work, yeah.
Patrick: But it's amazing. You probably don't. You might.
David: The two reasons for Cloud in my mind are work collaboration
and automated seamless backup. Then the biggest problems are hacking and the
fact that you're connected and more places can connect to your data independent
of you. Then not trusting a large company with your privacy or them deciding
that you're violating some term and taking it away. That's why for some reason
ever since I used eBay for the first time a million years ago, I would never
ever leave money on PayPal because my PayPal account got frozen. Never leave
money on PayPal ever! Your data on the Cloud is slightly less important.
Leo: How much do we have on our PayPal account right now? We've
been using PayPal for donations for ten years. They don't close accounts after
a while, they get to know you. If you look like a fly by night, you drain your
account at midnight every night, they could bite you.
Patrick: The first time I ever got money deposited into my
account, it was a share. A couple thousand dollars, and they locked my account down. There's no—
Leo: That was a long time ago.
Patrick: Sometimes it doesn't really change, because some of
the companies are great if you dial 1-800. Or try to work with them. Sometimes,
there's still a void when you try to deal with customer service or you have a
problem.
David: I think part of the problem, this is somewhat
unqualified, so I don't want to get in too much trouble, but when you're doing
sales of personal things online with people you don't know, fraud is really
high up.
Leo: We got ripped off.
David: So when there's fraud, companies like PayPal have
obviously not been owned by PayPal forever, they have to have all these checks
and balances on it.
Roger: Part of the problem is that you have to put a lot of
trust in that corporate entity that holds your stuff in the cloud.
Leo: You trust your bank.
John: Do you now?
Roger: But at the same time I don't.
Leo: John, I forgot, has gold buried in the backyard. I'm
sorry.
Robert: I encrypt anything I find important before I upload
it.
Roger: I use crash plan too. I encrypt everything I don't
want people to see.
Leo: We might have some pictures. In the early days, we
used Cannon 1 XL cameras. Those were good in their day. We've gotten better
now. I wanted a third. I had two and I wanted a third. I bought one on eBay for
a lot of money.
Roger: I thought you got a bunch of them donated. I remember
being jealous that you had all of these Cannon cameras that no one would want
now.
Leo: I don't know what we're looking at now. I bought one I
thought on eBay. There's Roger Chang and Tom. That's probably East meets West. Do you still do that?
John: Whatever happened to that show?
Roger: Once a month.
Leo: Love that show. Except I can't say
it. I always say, "eats meets wets." That
would be a great food show.
John: eats meets wets?
Leo: Did I mention we're going to announce a new show
later?
John: The name also reminds me of something else I won't go
into.
Leo: I bought online an Excel one camera and it never came.
I finally got a refund. PayPal will refund your money if you go through the
process. I never ever bought an expensive item on eBay again.
Roger: Any company that allows you to automate your bill
paying, my bank allows me to—
Leo: Wait a minute. You guys are technologists and you're
all afraid of technology.
John: We know too much.
Leo: You don't use bill pay?
Patrick: I got called by lawyers and detectives in two states. They
later found out they were chasing down a Russian organized crime group that was
rotating people through hotels in the United States scamming people buying
goods and services on eBay. What happened is I had won an auction for a tig welder. It's basically earth gas. It's for welding
steal. In any case, I needed a welder for a project I was working on. I won the
bid, it was suspiciously low. There was a picture of a used welder, the guy said it was actually new. Western Union the money. The sale was in New York, he wanted me to send the money order to Ohio and they
would be shipping me the welder from Florida. I'll give the money to
escrow.com, and you can send the Welder and you'll get the money when the
welder gets shipped to me. Silence. Four days later, I
get a message and this guy is like he said you refused to pay for the welder
and he was contacting everybody in the next four highest bids. I sent him 1700
and I'm like you're never going to see that money again. Apparently 4 out of 5
people on the bidding list all did Western Union to somebody in Indiana or
Ohio.
Leo: By the way, the good news: Western Union gone.
Patrick: Whatever it was.
John: They're not gone.
Leo: You can't send money by telegram any more.
John: Sure you can.
Leo: Stop. I'm sending you this money via telegram. Stop. Please
respond ASAP. Stop. Do you remember those days? Did you ever have a guy running
around with a call for John C. Dvorak?
John: I remember that. That was recently.
Leo: Stop.
Patrick: That's all Western Union does any more. Send money
orders.
Leo: They did the last telegram.
Roger: I pay my car insurance with Western Union.
Leo: But you won't use bill pay?
Roger: My process is this.
Leo: I can't believe I work with such Leadites.
Patrick: Hold on.
Roger: Let me add this. I distinctly remember a period of
time where you were complaining because you set up automated bill pay with a
service that you no longer use, but it was still charging you.
Leo: Still using it. It's called Pay trust. It's in Sioux
City, South Dakota. I think they were using prisoners because there's a big penitentiary
there. All my bills would get sent to South Dakota and then magically appear on
the screen, and then they would automatically pay them. I still can't cancel
that, by the way. Ten years later.
John: That's a good argument for your side of the debate.
Patrick: Boy. Aren't you technologically advanced, Leo.
Leo: Kevin Rose couldn't be here. Now you know why. He sent
us a video though. Do you have that Kevin Rose greeting cued up? I think
somebody else too from our past.
Kevin: Hey, Leo. Kevin Rose here. Just wanted to wish you a huge congrats on ten years of
outstanding content. I obviously was a huge fan of yours. You probably
don't know this. I used to watch ZDTV before I joined tech TV. To get to work
with you on that show back in 2003 was an absolute honor and I had so much fun.
I learned a ton from you, and then to watch you go and break off and create TWiT and build this into an empire, you have always been an
inspiration to me. I thank you for the great content. I know you've inspired
millions of people out there to understand and learn technology in an easier
way which only you can do. Thank you and I wish you health, happiness, and another 30, 40+ years of great content.
Justine Ezarik: Hey Leo. Congratulations
to you and the entire TWiT TV team. You guys are
amazing. It feels like just yesterday when I made you sign up for Twitter. #neverforget. You guys are
amazing. I love you all. Happy tenth anniversary TWiT.
Leo: Thank you, Justine. We have some pictures of Justine
on early MacBreak Weekly always talented, beautiful. She's
going to be a big star. She was in a movie recently. Small part, but I think
she's going to be a big star. Thank you, Kevin. Sorry you couldn't be here. Did
you see the designs for his new app behind him on the blackboard there? It was
hastily erased. Anyway, I can't imagine anything I'd rather do on our tenth
anniversary than bring back the original crew from the very first Screensavers.
It was called the Revenge of the Screensavers, because at the time I was
bitter. Were you bitter?
Patrick: no, but I take everything a lot less personally.
John: We think you're still bitter.
Leo: After we called Revenge of the Screensavers, G4 sent
me a letter. Not a cease and desist, a nice letter saying don't use that name.
John: Don't use it period.
Leo: It was from a lawyer. It wasn't a cease and desist. It was, "We'd prefer if you didn't use that
name." Screensavers was still being used. It was Kevin Rose and Sarah
Lane.
David: And Kevin Perera.
Leo: Kevin came later, didn't he?
David: They launched Attack of the Show with Chilon Leu and Kevin Perera as the hosts. The very first
episode of that show.
Leo: Do you remember when G4 ended Attack of the show, it
wasn't so long ago. Joshua who worked with all of us at Tech TV called us and
said it would be a hoot. They don't care anymore, if you guys came back for the
last show, and at the very end of the last show, we'll go through the goodbye
and what fun it's been—take a look. This is the very end of Attack of the Show.
The last time it aired. This is what you saw. Do you have it? Go back a little
bit. Get the audio on this; I think I'm actually speaking. Actually, play a
little of this. This is their montage of Olivia Munn eating hotdogs.
CLIP PATRICK: You were having a dream.
CLIP LEO: I
had the weirdest dream. My mouth tastes like hot dogs. I dreamt that tech TV
was sold to a Cable company that had a name that was an obsolete Apple
processor, and they moved us all down to LA.
CLIP PATRICK: LA? That's worse than hot dog mouth.
CLIP LEO: And
then we had to stop doing Tech news, and we started doing this pop culture
night gallery. My uncle Ted was there. We were all eating pie.
CLIP PATRICK: Pie...
CLIP LEO: Never mind. It was too weird. I can't explain it. What do you think a dream
like that means?
CLIP PATRICK: Who cares? Time to go to work.
CLIP LEO: What's
a hype machine? Did we ever review that?
CLIP PATRICK: I don't know. We can think about it on the way in. It's about time to start the
show. {Leo and Patrick jet pack away.}
Leo: Now that's an alternate history I dig.
Roger: Does Brentenna have credit
for making that happen?
Leo: It's in some ways a dig. Can we say this? They're no
longer paying attention. Go ahead. We should announce our new show now. This is
a fitting segway into this. Ever since we started
this, people would always come to us and say when are you doing Screensavers again. We're not. Patrick and I agreed. There's no point in
going backwards. I don't want to be a county fair act. It's half of Rush. It's
not going to—on the other hand, one of the things that we did with the show was
validate people that it was OK to be a geek. Technology was cool and it was OK
to be interested in it. How many of you watched the old screen savers show? How
many of you became geeks because of the old screen savers show? Don't you meet
people all the time and say when I first started watching it and then I got
into it, and now I'm doing it for a living. It was an important thing to do,
especially in the late 90's, early 2000's. So I thought I would only do it
again if we could do the future. I think we are going to bring back
Screensavers. Patrick, we asked you to be part of it on a regular basis. You
have something you're doing, but you're going to be the first co-host with me. John,
if you want to, you have to think about this. We invite all of you to be part
of this for us. We're always going to have a co-host. One of the reasons we
want to do it is we have a lot of things we'd like to do that don't merit a
weekly show but a variety show would help us produce make your space stuff. Mike
wants us to do cooking. John, I want you to do a segment on how you make
vinegar.
John: Surprised this has taken you this long. You build a
studio with a bunch of sub studios, including over there in the corner.
Leo: How many times did we— the first one, we drove very
nice.
Roger: The first one was Jerry's mustang.
Leo: That was Kate and me. The guy told us, don't turn the
wheels too hard, because the tires are too big. They'll hit—
Patrick: Somebody is like, oh if we could only do a burnout. No
problem. You've got to get up to 4000 RPM and then drop the clutch. I got up to
4000 RPM and I dropped the clutch. You squealed. You made the most amazing
noise.
Leo: Terrifying.
John: You've never seen anyone do that, apparently.
Patrick: I got to fly with the Blue Angels.
Leo: The second one we rented those weird things that you
drive around San Francisco. I was like; we're going to die. Such
a stupid show to die for.
John: Those yellow things?
Patrick: These were before the yellow things. They were the
worst of a scooter, a go-cart, a silver loop between the two passenger seats. They
were like, "it's impossible to flip."
Leo: No.
John: They were like, we need it to rock. The blood went
like this.
Leo: It was scary. We don't want to re-create Screensavers,
but we've made a new show. Actually, can we roll that? This is the return of
the Screensavers.
{clip plays.}
Leo: We wanted to have us arrive on rockets. We couldn't
manage that. We have some Segways in the back and a
green screen, so we can ad you guys to it. All of the TWiT team is working hard at this. All of the TWiT team is going to be apart of
this. I feel like we have the facilities to do it, we have the staff. It's
something important, but also look ahead for the
future generation. May 2 that launches. We're going to shoot that Saturday
afternoons. I believe you're down for May 2, so Patrick will be part of the
first show. We hoped you would come on May tenth. 30? Now
that you've seen it.
John: I lost five bucks on a bet by the way, thanks to this.
Leo: You didn't think so.
John: I thought you were going to do a travels how.
Leo: That's one of the things. We were trying to do a
travel show. We've got a board in the back and there's some really fun stuff
playing. We're excited. I guess it was on Reddit earlier today, somebody found it. It leaked out.
John: How could that be possible?
Leo: Our audience is— our mistake was we put it on the
Cloud.
John: Are you going to have live call in?
Leo: We're going to have a mailbag segment at the end of
the show. We used to have a mailbag segment at the end of the show because it
was a G spot, what they call—
John: The G spot? A mailbag in the mailpot?
Patrick: Later on, we called it the N spot.
Leo: That's crazy. ABDEFG, six segments. We had to have the show be exactly 45 minutes.
David: A block, commercial break B, and then we had 90
minutes and went all the way through K. For all of us working in our run down,
we have to go through that many segments?
Leo: Five days a week.
David: The best part of it is that a lot of those shows were
taped and edited. The thing about doing a live show is you tape it and you are
done. Take out some random expletive that Pat left.
John: There's an obvious question that needs to be asked. Since
this is the intellectual property of Comcast, did you get permission to change
it?
Leo: No. They let the trademark lapse, because they were
still doing a show called Screensavers. They haven't done one in 8 years. This
letter we'll ignore. We've consulted with legal, and they said it's OK.
John: Legal in upstairs. OK.
Leo: Actually, we debated whether to use it. Why not? I
know what they're going to be doing. I used to watch that show.
David: Who owns .com?
Leo: We nailed everything we could. We have the new
Screensavers.com. Remember that was a whole thing? They named the show before
finding out if there was a domain name available, and it wasn't. Eventually.
Roger: We couldn't get call for help, because wasn't that
taken by someone?
Leo: When we started, remember our T-shirts said ZD TV/
screensavers. That was a constant battle.
David: It was profitable when Comcast bought it.
Leo: Oh, the website?
David: The website was profitable.
Patrick: The website was making over $2 million a year,
and Comcast was like, we don't do websites. They shut it down.
Leo: The said we will take it and they sent the box
server to LA, and it's in kind of like the Holy Grail in Indiana Jones. It's in
a very big warehouse at the back.
Patrick: Well they migrated the
content off eventually, in part because a lot of people went nuts.
Leo: Part of the reason that we delayed this and we
are finally doing it is that we have been talking to NBC Universal for several
years trying to get rights. How many? Three? Almost
three years. Not to do the show, just to get the tapes. They say they have all,
I know you don't believe this.
Roger: Wait, you mean the tapes of the show?
Leo: Yeah, we wanted the old Screen Savers. We are
going to do a kind of Mystery Science Theater 3000 with the old Screensavers
and we would sit here just like this, watch the show, and laugh at ourselves.
Roger: I have like 8.
Leo: Well they are all on YouTube, too, but we wanted
the original.
Roger: That's what I'm saying. I have like 8-10 of
them.
David: They actually had had it cataloged. It was all
tapes where they had barcoded all of it, put keywords on all of it, and the tape
library, quite frankly for back then, was pretty well organized. I remember
trying to find a clip of something back when Josh Norgentano was still there. They were going to find it in their deep archive, and they
couldn't find it because they had tossed all of it everywhere. It was there,
but it was in boxes, and whatever that original database with all of those
barcodes, it might be somewhere.
John: I went into the office one day and there was a
big box of silicon spin tapes. It was huge; it was like all of the shows for 2
years. I said what are y0u guys doing with these tapes? They said well, we
can't use them so we are throwing them out. I took them home.
Patrick: Those were the tapes that they did the extra
capture on.
John: Eventually, yeah. Dennis Soben never made the tape anymore.
Leo: It was so that they could air it. It was shot
with the DVC Pro, and it wasn't right way, but within a few years the NOC was
using hard drive.
David: I remember Kevin Meln I think that it was, and they brought in this machine, they rented it for
oodles of money, and they wanted to digitize things so that they could do
longer commercial breaks. They secretly would speed up stuff so that you would
be speaking but it would voice modulate, but then they digitized everything in
order to make longer commercial breaks.
Leo: So there are masters. The masters you have Roger
is probably one kind of masters. We have been told by them at NBC...
Roger: I had a stack of them that I needed to return
because I was doing it for the show.
Leo: But they are DVC Pro?
Roger: They said, okay, you are done. I was like, okay,
see ya. So they took my stuff. I have 8-10. They are
probably standard copies.
Leo: They have assured us that everything that TechTV did, not just The Screen Savers, but Silicon Spin,
your show, everything that they did, is somewhere in a storage locker, and we cannot persuade them. We said that we would
rev share with you.
John: It's because they don't have them. They are
lying to you.
Leo: Well, if they don't have them they could just
say, well, we don't have them
John: They figure you might sue them or something. The
very conservative thing to do is just to stall.
Leo: We tried to throw money at them.
Unknown Speaker: They said it probably wasn't enough money.
Leo: I think that it was $50 I threw at them.
John: Here's some money.
David: Well now you just make new content.
Leo: Right. We don't really need the old content that
much. It was very dated. It would have been fun. Anyway, that's how this
started. Eventually we just said, ah, just screw it. We will just make new
stuff. We will start over. So I hope that you watch. We are going to continue
with a very special 10th Anniversary Edition with some of my closest friends
still, because I don't have any new friends. Roger Chang, congratulations on
the baby. Where are you working these days?
Roger: I am freelancing and I am helping out on top
with DTNF.
Leo: That's great. But he is in LA. Are you up here?
Roger: Yeah.
Leo: David Prager, I wondered what you are doing
because you got a pretty big payout I'm sure after Revision3 got sold to
Discovery.
David: It was a modest amount.
Leo: Enough to not have to work right away?
David: Enough after 7 years of running something to be
able to take a break and think about what you want to do. That was nice.
Leo: And you are still thinking?
David: No, I started an ad agency. I think that I have
talked about this before to some extent. Maybe not on TWiT. It's called The Asmbly,
t-h-e and a-s-m-b-l-y. The catalyst for that was basically making product
videos, kind of like Kickstarter campaigns. Of course, wanting to have a
Kickstarter campaign outside of the product or service itself is the video that
tells the story about that. So did that kind of for fun when somebody was like,
hey, I've got this product with a Kickstarter campaign. So we would do that,
and then it turned into well, why don't we graduate from doing the Kickstarter
campaign videos to doing Fortune 500 ads, and then once we started doing a
couple of deals for companies like Gap and Whole Foods it was like the startups
were the more interesting ones. They just don't have as deep of pockets, but we
would rather do them, so right now we are kind of doing this hybrid model of
some of the larger companies that are public and then some of the startups that
we are passionate about or are interested in affording some real marketing. The
ones that can't, we are starting to dabble in taking some of the payment for
what we do as equity in some of the startups.
Leo: There is the website right there.
David: So that's what I'm doing right now.
Leo: Nice, and it is going well it sounds like.
David: Yeah, it's doing great, yeah.
Leo: John, what have you been doing in the last 10
years?
John: Pretty much nothing. I'm retired. Oh, that's
right, I do some podcasting. I do a thing called the No Agenda Show at
noagendashow.com. We are on Episode 714.
Leo: Is it that many? But at 2 a week that probably
only took you 315 weeks.
John: Something like that. Then I do DHM Unplugged
with Andrew Horowitz and we discuss the Stock Market, and we are pretty good at
picking stocks even though we don't do it for a living . We don't recommend them.
Leo: Did you set up like a dummy account so that you
could just track your investments?
John: No.
Leo: You should have.
John: Ah, what's the point? We have a, it's pointless,
we have a spreadsheet.
Leo: You would be rich!
John: Actually on a couple of these you probably would
be. Then I come on here once in a while. I still write for PC Magazine, which
is available at pcmags.com, I have a column that comes out every week. But
again, I think that No Agenda at noagendashow.com is probably where you want to
go to see what we are really up to. Twice a week now.
Leo: Now twice weekly. There it is. Mr. Patrick
Norton, we know that you are doing well with TekThing.
I'm glad that you are doing that, too. It's great. Then what was it, Don't Do
This at Home Because it’s Going To Hurt Your Tongue?
Patrick: Possibly Unsafe with Michael Mankowitz of the
DIY show at possiblyunsafe.com. TekThing is
t-e-k-t-h-i-n-g.com, or youtube.com/tekthing. Mr.
Robert Haron and I have a new thing.
Leo: What? Tell us about it. You are launching it
here today? This is a surprise to Robert.
Robert: Yeah, it really is. Sorry.
Leo: Robert does home, you
do installations of home theaters and that kind of thing?
Robert: Right, mostly video calibration too. That's my
specialty.
Leo: Are you THX certified, Dolby certified?
Robert: THX, ISF, and all of the other acronyms.
Leo: Those are both of the big ones.
Robert: They are. If you are going to do that for any
length of time you should get those certifications.
Leo: I had Scott Wilkinson come in and do my TV.
Robert: He and I worked on your home last year.
Leo: Oh, you were there for the OLED, which didn't
need much, I'm surprised.
Robert: No, it was a pretty good set, although Samsung
has been out of the game for the last couple of years as far as OLED is concerned. They made that one, and it was beautiful. But
they are waiting.
Leo: They made that one, Leo bought it, and they
said, okay, that's good, thanks.
Robert: Actually I'm calibrating another OLED, one of
LG's new ones.
Leo: Are they still, you think that OLED's are the
top of what you can get, right? Plasma is gone sad to say.
Robert: Yeah, it is. It was the best for eye candy. It
does that dark black. If you are sitting in a dark room it has the best
contrast of any TV that you can buy right now. There are some other
technologies coming out in the next 5 years that will probably give it a good
run.
Patrick: If you would have went to CES you would already own a new TV.
Leo: Why? What did you see?
Patrick: There was a just a gorgeous...
Leo: Was it a 4K LCD?
Patrick: OLED.
Robert: LCD's are still good. Samsung is doing what they
call high dynamic range, and so is Panasonic to a degree.
Leo: I think that maybe as much as 4K that is going
to be the next thing.
Robert: It's going to be awesome.
John: How about 8K?
Leo: 8K schmaitK.
Robert: NHK is already shooting out.
John: So then go to 8K.
Leo: There already isn't any 4K content. Why would
you want to go to 8K?
Robert: You are starting to see some high dynamic range
content. So either the movies are shot in it...
Leo: There is some in 4K. So Netflix is doing some in
HDR?
Robert: Totally, and that is probably going to be one of
the first ways that you will see it.
Leo: Is there a Devil HDR or what? What is Daredevil?
It's weird.
Robert: Anything, I think, that has been shot in the
last couple of years, any of the new digital cinema cameras, has enough stops
of exposure in order to create, or remaster, as HDR.
Leo: Right.
Robert: The complexity really is that if you think of
the studio monitors that the producers are looking at when they make this
content for distribution; they are not looking at HDR displays.
Leo: Well good, because neither are we.
Robert: But, how are you going to make the content? If
you don't know the characteristics of the display then it's going to be really
hard that supposedly is high dynamic range.
Leo: We are just now solving that for 4K. At every
step of the way you know what you are going to get. There is a standard, and it
will reflect what is shot. We still don't have those TV's. That isn't until the
end of this year, right?
Robert: The beauty about Netflix in particular is that
there is a new HDMI standard, the plugs, that is now supporting the metadata
for high dynamic range that will be embedded in the context. But you are going
to get your streaming content over the internet. Things like Netflix, it's just
going to be a software update for the TV, you won't have to worry about a port,
and you won't have to worry about an upgrade there. It will just broad range.
Leo: Is it the same color gamut? Is it a different
color gamut?
Robert: That's the potential. They want to use the same
color space that is in commercial cinema right now, which is another 50% larger
than HD. So a bigger pallet of color, more saturated colors;
that's probably just as important as High Dynamic Range. Although High
Dynamic Range really has a good look to it. The TVs that will really be able to
support that, though...
Leo: Are mine.
Robert: ...are really going to be expensive.
John: You got screwed.
Robert: That's a debate though. It won't be able to do
the peak range.
John: I'm sorry, but how about better content?
David: Don't you think the 4K TV's are going to deploy
faster than HD did over standard def? I think that
it's going to be a lot faster.
Leo: You know, what drove
that was 3D because these 3D displays had to have more resolution so that they
could be...
David: Don't you remember when you used to watch all of
this underwater nature stuff because it was the only content available on HD at
first?
Patrick: The eagle soaring stuff.
David: The World Cup last year had an entire 4 games,
it was the largest sporting event on the planet; 4 games only were done in 4K. The
next World Cup it's going to be 100% of them all streaming.
Leo: It's kind of amazing, I was at a ballgame on
Friday and there is HD cameras everywhere. It's kind of like remember when this
was a special thing? It's not special at all; it's standard.
David: Go look at the World Series, or even all of the
MLB playoffs. They have got probably 750 frames per second on everything
happening at the plate. That's only in the last 3 years.
Robert: Super slow mo.
David: Yeah, it's incredible.
Robert: They did that at the Olympics a couple of years
back. You saw them introduce those cameras that would do minimum of 500 frames
per second. That really took off. For archive purposes 4K / 8K is the way it is
currently, but don't focus so much on resolution. I think that it's more about
being able to produce a bright image in a well lit room or the really inky dark
black levels that OLED can do in a darker room.
Leo: As John says, let's get the content. Bring back
The Shadow, right? The Lone Ranger.
John: Now that was a show.
Roger: They did try to bring that back.
Leo: Allen's Alley and Fibber McGee. Remember them?
John: No.
Leo: Let's bring back great content like they used to
do. I'm sorry.
Roger: I think that Daredevil was already shot in 4K.
Leo: They are processing it. Have you seen it? It's
heavily processed, like overly saturated.
Roger: Part of that is just the look.
Robert: Buy bigger TV's.
Leo: Bigger TV's. Projection
systems.
Robert: Projection systems.
Leo: Projectors, projectors, projectors. The new show? Come on, tell us.
Robert: What?
John: Come on, tell, talk, talk.
So everyone can hear.
Patrick: A-v-e-x-c-e-l.com. It's like HD Nation but a
podcast.
John: But it's not.
Leo: And it has a nice big connector board right
there. Is that it?
John: Are you shooting it in 4K?
Patrick: No, we are shooting it in stereo.
John: Oh, it's in audio. It's a podcast podcast.
Leo: I remember those. Twice
weekly.
John: That's the way to go. Yeah, we do that on the No
Agenda Show. It's just audio, audio, audio.
Robert: Crowdfunded, just take it from there.
Leo: That's what has totally transformed the space is
crowdfunding. Really, you are the pioneer of that. Anybody can do a show now
and just make a living at it, which is fabulous. Alright, we tried to hire
Patrick, but he said, no, I don't need you. I've got Patreon.
John: But did he give you the finger?
Leo: No, he was very nice about it. I just don't want
people to think that we didn't try to hire you.
Patrick: No, I also came up with alternate ideas, we
looked at some different stuff that it out there, I'm also still doing TWiCH, twit.tv/twich.
Leo: You are a regular host on our network and that
is a great show.
Patrick: No, it's fun.
Leo: And you are going to be, I hope, a frequent
visitor.
Patrick: It was time for me to finally experiment with entrepanuership and ownership of content.
Leo: You totally should. It's been a great
experience. It's really the way to go. Now it's a lot easier than it was 10
years ago. Our show today is brought to you by, you
know who has done well? Lynda Weinman, lynda.com.
David: Oh wow.
John: She's been doing this forever though.
Leo: She started doing those great web design books. We
had her on The Screen Savers several times with those cat eye glasses. We love
Lynda. She started lynda.com right about that time, I
think that it was '98 or '99. It has grown now; more than 3,000 on demand
classes in the latest stuff.
Patrick: Incredibly good stuff.
Leo: Beautifully produced. It is all video with
written transcripts so that you can search through the transcript and jump to
that part of the video. The video is chunked up nicely so that you can easily
jump to the part you want or watch it all. There is Burt, my good friend. He is
one of my favorite photographers. If you want to learn about
photography, Photoshop, if you want to learn about programming. Burt
Monroy does Photoshop classed on lynda.com. You are learning from the best. Beautifully produced classes. If you are interesting in
learning how to develop an app, even if you are a complete rank, new starter;
there are courses on Android Studio Essential Training, Swift for IOS Essential
Training, there is one called Building a Note Taking App for Android, IOS, and
Windows Phone. This one course will have you create a working app from start to
finish for all 3 platforms, which I think is great.
Patrick: It's amazing.
Leo: They also have beginner courses on Programming
for Non-Programmers. Lynda, l-y-n-d-a.com. John and I
are both big fans of the photography courses there, and the Photoshop courses. The Lightroom Courses couldn't be better. Your lynda.com
membership gives you everything, you have the run of
the place. You pay a flat monthly rate so that you can take as many classes as
you want. A lot of companies use Lynda, we do, for
training of their staff. Because Lynda works with companies, when a new
operating system or program is about to come out Lynda is right there on the
spot with brand new courses. So when Yosimite came
out they had Yosimite courses. When IOS 8 came out
they had IOS 8 courses. Whether you are looking to become an expert, whether
you are passionate about a hobby, or whether you just want to learn something
new, I have a site for you; lynda, l-y-n-d-a.com/twit
and the number 2. We are going to get you free 10 days. 10 days is enough to
see everything, take a whole course if you want, if you are devoted. L-y-n-d-a.com/twit and the number 2. We love Lynda, we have known her since way back when. How much did
she sell for?
Patrick: Lots.
Leo: They sold it to LinkedIn for over a billion.
Roger: I think that it was $1.2.
David: Yay Lynda.
Leo: Nice job. What is also great is that that is a
15 year old ed tech company,
right, and it could be selling at startup prices, which is encouraging to a 10
year old tech ed company.
David: I didn't realize how much B2B they did for some
reason. I just thought it was consumer, but it is mostly business.
Leo: A lot of it is. It's huge.
David: It's like you said, for training.
John: So are you up for sale Leo? Is that what you are
hinting at?
Patrick: Do you have a big announcement today?
Leo: How much do you got?
John: I've got nothing.
Leo: You know, if somebody
offered me $1.5 billion it would be pretty hard to say no.
John: Yeah, but that's never going to happen.
Leo: I'd give you $5. You've been instrumental in
this.
John: You wouldn't give me anything. Why would you?
Leo: No, I've already figured out how much I'm going
to give you.
John: Yeah, it will be less than this lens I'm sure.
Leo: Are you having fun with that? John said, I will
come in, but one stipulation is that you have got to let me use your camera.
John: Well, to reiterate, he's got every one of the
new Sony cameras, including this one which is the S.
Leo: The Alpha one.
John: The Alpha, oh I'm sorry. Then he went out and
spent $8,000, I made a mistake last time when I assumed, this is the classic
2.0 Summicron, which everybody knows about.
Leo: 50 mm.
John: Yeah, and you said that you paid $8,000 for it,
and I said that's bullshit, you can get these things for $2,000.
Leo: Not that one.
John: Then I looked it up. This is not the regular
one. This is like some aspherical, crazy, crazy, expensive lens.
Patrick: Are you telling me that that is an $8,000 prime
that you are holding there?
John: Yes.
Patrick: Yes, and I looked it up. I did all of the
research, and I said holy crap.
Leo: I bought it by accident.
John: Mr. Breakable here has got the camera now.
Leo: No, he can break it. I bought it by accident.
John: You didn't buy it by accident.
Patrick: Just like I bought my truck by accident on eBay.
Leo: No, it was like a Tesla, where you order it, and
it's going to be a while before you get it, right? They said that it's 9-12
months backordered. So I thought I will order it now, because that way I could
decide in 9 months if I am really ready to spend that kind of money. They said
no problem, its backordered. A week later they said your lens is on its way. I
was like what?
John: You didn't back out? It was just kind of a test?
Leo: No, it's like a Tesla. You say I'm going to buy
a Tesla, you say let me give you $500 and I'm going to reserve a place in line.
David: $5,000, but they give you $4,950 back at any
time. Now I think that if you order you will probably get it in 3 months. When
I ordered mine it was 3 years before they delivered.
Leo: 3 years?
Patrick: I remember the day that you did that.
David: I'm not a car person.
Leo: But you also knew that there was not risk.
David: But I also wish that I would have bought Tesla
stock instead because I could have bought 4 of those cars.
John: There you go.
Leo: So I'm going to by Livest Stock.
John: Well that may not be the best thing.
Leo: That's not going anywhere?
John: No. But yeah, that's an $8,000 lens.
Roger: What's the aperture on it?
John: 2.
Roger: 2.
Leo: It's just 2. It's not like this big, wide
aperture lens.
John: That's beside the point. It has no aberration
whatsoever.
David: Did you see that they almost landed that Falcon
rocket after the Livest launch, the dragon?
Leo: That is an interesting plan.
David: It's Space X.
Leo: I've never heard this, but the booster that
launched was for DISS supply?
David: Well, the Dragon capsule. It was for DISS
resupply. It had plenty of stuff in there, but most notably, at least in the
press, was an expresso machine.
Leo: Yeah, you've got to have your expresso.
David: There is an Italian astronaut up there.
Leo: An Italian astronaut.
David: She tweeted out a picture of her wearing a Star
Trek uniform looking out of the Bird's Nest, I think that you call it, looking at the Dragon Capsule talking about how there is
an expresso machine coming. It was a very Star Trek uniform. Very
awesome.
Leo: You've got to go up there now for a year, right?
This is a long trip.
Roger: I think that it is 3-6 months.
David: And one of the Russian cosmonauts. They are up
there for a year. The American one is a big story because he's got an identical
twin brother on Earth, and they are going to try to study them.
John: They are going to try to communicate without
radio.
Roger: You've aged 5 years by spending one year in
space.
John: The older brother suddenly comes home.
Leo: Is it too early to talk about that amazing
interstellar moment?
Robert: You mean the movie Insterstellar?
John: I never saw the movie.
Robert: I saw it.
Patrick: La, la, la, la, la.
Leo: For crying out loud, get the god damned movie!
Patrick: I will go get some coffee.
John: Oh please, I always liked the spoilers.
Leo: It's a great moment, because the whole idea is
that there is a black hole, and they are very close to the black hole. There is
a planet that is in a rotational orbit around the black hole, and they know
that if you go down to this planet that you are going to have a massive time
dilation. So they are going to go down for a few minutes. What is it, every
minute is 20 years?
Roger: It was like a few minutes was a year. So they have been down for a couple of hours.
Leo: They have been stuck down there for 2 hours by
accident.
Roger: And it's like 8 years, or 7.
Leo: They come back, and the astronaut in the capsule
is like, you've been gone 20 years. Thank god you came back. I was so bored. That
is cool. Time dilation is cool. Very cool. That's
physics 101. That's true.
Roger: That's actually happening on the DISS right now,
by microseconds. Not much time, but to Einstein maybe.
Leo: Did that spoil anything? I don't think that
spoiled anything.
John: All it did was prove that the movie was bad.
Leo: It was a great movie.
John: Most people thought it was crap.
Leo: It is the movie that 10
years from now you will say 2001 Space Odyssey.
Robert: It was a weird ending.
Leo: Which also had a weird
ending.
John: Yeah, but 2001 Space Odyssey was never
considered crap by a lot of critics when it came out. It was considered great.
Leo: I think that it is a great movie anyway.
Patrick: Are you guys all done?
John: Yeah, they all died.
Leo: Rent it for crying out loud.
Roger: You will be scratching your head at some of it.
Leo: No one dies. That is the amazing thing about
that movie. Do you remember that time on TWiT? Do you
remember when we did the show from the Apple store?
John: Oh yeah, we were all sitting on the thing and
there was a bunch of people there?
Leo: That was wild.
John: You refused to invite a certain female famous
podcaster?
Leo: Why?
John: I'm just saying.
Leo: John, you are just such a troll.
John: I'm not a troll.
Leo: I don't even remember what you are talking
about.
Roger: When you did the show from the Apple store over
on...
Leo: Roger McGuinn was
there, he brought his 7 string.
Roger: Are you talking about Amber?
Leo: Amber might have been there.
John: No, it wasn't Amber that I'm talking about.
Patrick: I just remember the guy running the Goatse intercept on the Wi-Fi. Me walking
up behind him and tapping him on the shoulder.
Leo: Was it you that caught him?
Patrick: Yeah.
Leo: So somebody was sitting in the Apple store, had
commandeered the Wi-Fi, and made sure that no matter where you went it was Goatse.
John: Ha ha, very good.
Patrick: If you have never searched for Goatse on the internet don't do it now.
Leo: Don't do it.
Patrick: And do not do it if you are easily offensable or have children around.
Roger: It doesn't matter. Just don't.
Leo: For anybody, the single most offensive picture
you will ever see.
Patrick: Not even close to the most offensive picture.
John: He has his own top 10.
Roger: He's very experienced.
John: Is it in the top 10?
Patrick: I will put it somewhere in the top 20.
John: Okay, so he's got at least 10 worse pictures.
David: Was that the Apple store on Stockton and L street?
John: Yeah.
Leo: That was fun.
Patrick: That was a cool event.
Leo: That was a cool event. We had a big panel,
Veronica showed up. I saw Veronica. I was like, wow, that's Veronica.
John: I don't remember you saying wow.
Leo: I said wow! Whoa! We have more greetings. I
think that this is from Paul and Storm.
(Paul and Storm Video): Hello there Leo. Paul, half
of Paul and Storm. Just wanted to send you a very quick happy
anniversary, birthday, birthversary I guess. Happy birthversary, 10 years. Wow,
520 weeks in tech. Who thought that was possible? Not me certainly, but you
have proven us wrong. The take home lessons to be learned from all of this, I
think, is number 1, you are very old. Older than me anyway. That's all that matters. I'm sending you my own video from the Paul half of
Paul and Storm because I'm the only true fan of This Week in Tech. Strom may
tell you differently in his video, but don't believe his lies. But
congratulations from Paul and Storm. Here is to many
more years, and weeks, in tech.
Hey Leo, it's Storm. Yeah, I know, that
I'm a cat. I'm kind of tired. Anyway, congratulations on the
10 years. Stretching out. Here is another 100
more.
Leo: That's great. Thank you to Paul and Storm, the
great comedy music duo. They and Jonathan Colton did an event, remember this event, at the Great American Music Hall, where they debuted the
Rock Band version of the song that Colton wrote for Portal? Is it Still Alive? They
invited Merlon Mann, me, Veronica Belmont...
John: Oh, you have a clip!
Leo: I think that we have a clip.
John: This should be good. This is quite interesting. I
remember this.
Leo: ...to play. By the way I had never played Rock
Band ever.
Patrick: You can't tell at all though.
John: It's pretty obvious.
Leo: You know why you can't tell? If
you can't. It's because we reversed the stage order, so it looked like I
was playing really well. In fact, it was Veronica who was saving us all and
playing like crazy, but I was standing under her avatar, so it looked like I
was doing much better than I was. Merlon was playing
drums. I don't remember who else was up on stage. It's on YouTube, we are going to find it.
Jason Howell: I'm going to do my best to try my search skills
here.
Leo: It's Still Alive, Great American Music Hall. It
was pretty bad.
John: Yeah, I agree with that. We will find something
that is good here on your list.
Leo: We will find something that is good. That's
okay.
John: Let's talk about watches.
Patrick: Let's talk about the Apple Watch.
Leo: I'm looking forward to it, and I think that it
might be a big bust.
Patrick: Does that mean that you are moving back to the
iPhone 6?
Leo: Did you see the LA School, how much did the LA
school? Yeah, I have to.
John: Oh, that's right. So you've got that gorgeous 6.
Leo: You want the Edge?
John: Oh yeah.
Leo: It's beautiful isn't it? That's going to make me
so sad.
Patrick: If you get the Edge can I have the camera?
Leo: I didn't die. I'm still here.
Patrick: I didn't realize there was a lending library. You
never told me about the lending library.
Leo: This isn't Leo's wake. Although I think that it
is going to be somewhat like this actually.
John: Yeah, definitely.
Leo: Here we go. I wore a special shirt. There's
Jonathan Colton. Veronica Belmont is all the way on the left.
(Video Plays): I can officially announce it now. The song Still
Alive is coming to Rock Band.
Leo: Merlon Mann is behind us. It's kind of really not fair
having the guy who wrote the song sing it on Rock Band. Ironically, he didn't
do as well as Veronica. Do look like I know what I'm doing? Because
I'm on the wrong side. In face there is no notes for me at all.
John: You made Veronica look like a shlub.
Leo: Look at that. Doesn't it look like I know what I
am doing? Meanwhile, there is literally no baseline at all in this song. There
we go. Now I am going to ruin the thing. She saved me, though, a couple of
times.
Roger: You are getting about 50%.
Leo: I had never played it. I had no idea what I was
supposed to do even. Merlon was pretty good on the
drums. Did you see that Veronica had a piece in Cosmo about her? There was a
piece in Cosmo, or a woman's magazine?
John: I think that it may have been.
Leo: She's like a superstar. Pretty cool stuff. I
think that it's neat how Justine, and Veronica, and you, John C. Devorak, and how your careers have just taken off.
John: Mine has dropped dead. I'm a podcaster.
Leo: Hey, say that nicely.
John: It's like what do you do for a living? I'm a
podcaster. Really?
Leo: There you go. What is that?
Roger: It's Cosmopolitan.
Leo: Cosmo. What does it say? Get That Life. It's
inspiring people to act like Veronica. How I Became a Successful Podcaster, TV
Host, and Tech Expert.
John: Well at least she got the podcasting thing in
there. That's good.
Leo: Podcasting is back. Isn't it?
John: Yeah, you can use the word now. You were trying
to give up on it.
Leo: I hated the word. I still hate it.
John: Aw netcast; we've got a netcast going on.
Leo: I mean, are we doing a
podcast here? I guess we are.
David: For some reason they are saying that there is
this renaissance in audio podcasting. I kind of agree . If you look at the way that the mainstream media leans, not to give it all of
the credit, but as soon as that gameshow Cereal, which is a gameshow, but it
turned it into like a narrative. If you look at 15 years ago on television,
they had drama shows, and they wouldn't carry from episode to episode, you had
to watch it in order. That was maybe the first fiction based, or it was
nonfiction, where you had to carry from episode to episode. I think that there
is a lot more doing that. But there is a lot more of those little upstart
podcast networks, quite frankly.
John: Upstarts.
David: It was when TWiT started, and when Revision 3 started, and some of the earlier podcsats. All of the sudden the rest of the world decided
to catch up about 2 years ago. I don't know why.
Patrick: Part of it, and I think thanks to groups like Podtrack, and a bunch of the people who started early on in
podcasts, where they held out for CMA deals rather than Cost For Action deals, and they have been doing their thing. Just all of the sudden
people are noticing that all of these podcasts have been making money and doing
their thing in the background. All of the sudden it's a thing.
David: I think that the main reason is that cord
cutting is mainstream now. Now that everyone doesn't
have cable...
Patrick: I wouldn't say that it's mainstream. Cord
cutting isn't even close to mainstream. A lot of people know about it, but
there is still...
David: I feel like, I still feel like here we are
polarized by the coasts...
John: Polarized.
David: ...I'm saying that you can get to a place where
you can get what you want to watch without having cable. There is a higher percentage of people who are realizing that I
don't need traditional means. What is out there? In addition to finding normal
shows what else is out there? What else is out there? You've got extremely
professional content. In a way House of Cards might have even started the darn
thing. Now everybody else who has the opportunity to spend big budgets or well
produced smaller budgets, and now all of that content is there. People are not
looking for it.
Leo: This was the month because Game of Thrones, for
the first time HBO NOW allowed you to watch in the United States anyway, it's
been going on in Scandinavia; but to watch Game of Thrones without a cable
subscription.
John: Has anybody been watching the Tina Fey series?
Leo: The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.
John: Yeah.
Leo: You know what is sad about that?
John: It's a fantastic show.
David: Where is it?
Leo: Oh, it's on Netflix. It's a Netflix Original. Tina
Fey wrote it and proposed it to NBC. They declined.
John: I heard another version of that story.
Leo: What's that?
John: She proposed it to NBC. They bought it, and
Netflix bought it out from under them for more money.
Leo: Eddie told me that they had a deal with another
big producer when Netflix called.
David: Who works closely with Kevin Spacy.
Leo: Yeah, this was for House of Cards. It was on a
Triangulation episode. Netflix called, and Granetti called Spacy and said, look, they are offering us, he didn't say at the time
but now we know, $100 million. We can release an
entire season at a time. 100% under our control. The
budget is ours, all we have to do is make what we
want. Do you want to pull out? I think the other company must have been HBO. Do
you want to pull out of what this deal is and go with Netflix? They said yeah.
David: It couldn't have been up front money I wouldn't
think because even with Kevin Spacy and other stars in a way...
Leo: But that's what Netflix did. They wrote a check.
David: When you create a pilot for a big drama the
success or failure is almost the same. So you might have an ABC, CBS, or HBO,
not even so much HBO; they will spend $10 million on a pilot and it might fail.
They might make 10 of them, but if 2 of them hit that covers them for the rest
of them.
Leo: Netflix understands that.
David: That's why I don't understand why they offered
to front that much money.
Roger: That's why they are going with stuff they
generally have a good feeling will be a good enough return on what they put
into it.
Leo: They didn't make a pilot. I don't think that
they made a pilot. So all they had was ideas and scripts maybe.
Roger: Of all the pilots that they shoot for a new year
around 40% actually get into something that will be broadcast. Even then they
are not guaranteed a full season run, depending on people's reaction.
Leo: You know the sad story about The Unbreakable
Kimmy Schmidt? You know the plastic surgeon in that? Martin Short. He plays an
amazing character.
John: Did you see that episode?
Leo: He can't say his name because he has so much
filler. He talks like this.
John: He has to pull his face back to talk.
Leo: I didn't know, as I'm watching it, it's very
funny, Martin Short is a brilliant comic, that that is based on a real person.
John: Yeah, a guy in Florida who committed suicide.
Leo: Next week. He was a very sensitive fellow.
John: Well, I don't think that it was the next week.
Leo: Well, it was right after he saw that it
happened.
John: Well, whatever the case, he was depressed and he
had all of these other issues.
Leo: But he looked exactly like that.
John: Martin Short is a standup. He can now
legitimately say that he killed. Hey, I don't need to get booed here.
Leo: Please folks, don't hold back.
Roger: Have you ever watched the great documentary
called Show Runners?
John: It's so good.
Leo: Isn't that good? I love that. Lisa and I watch
that.
Roger: It's a really good look. My friend does visual
effects, and every February is the start of pilot season, like full tilt, and a
lot of that stuff is incredibly complicated, so many hands involved, and it's
just this huge beast that people need to get around. It's one reason why shows
traditionally don't do very well, because there is
only so many that you can pay for during the pilot season. They are like, okay we can pick up 5 of these.
Leo: Do you do a cord cutter show anymore? You
should.
Roger: Tom is.
Leo: I know that Tom is still doing it. Are you on that
regularly?
Roger: No.
Leo: You should do a cord cutter show.
Roger: Alright.
John: He's being offered a job.
Leo: I'm saying come do a cord cutter show.
John: Right here.
Leo: Hey, Jason Heiner is
here from TechRepublic. Jason, thank you, I saw that
the story went up. He got a little scoop there and was able to do a story on
ZDNet for the new Screen Savers. Thank you Jason, I appreciate it. Jason is a
great guy. He got me elected president of the internet.
John: It's about time.
Leo: The best thing that he did was that he never
held another election. For life.
Roger: Isn't that how dictators work?
Leo: For life I am a dictator now. I get a lot of
heat from the Apple folks because I compared Apple iPhone users to people who
loved Benito Mousalli, because Mussolini got the
trains to run on time.
John: And so?
Leo: Apparently they didn't like that.
John: You made an analogy, and you cited Benito
Mussolini?
Leo: Does that break Godwin's law?
Patrick: It's not that you called them Fascists, it's that you called them inept Fascists.
John: Yeah, there you go. That's exactly what
happened.
Patrick: And Segway into a sponsor.
Leo: Actually, before we do that let's take the
bitter taste out of your mouth. We have some more video greetings.
(Video Plays): Hello Leo Laporte,
this is David Hewlett from Stargate Atlantis, and I
had to say congratulations on 10 amazing years of TWiT TV. You are an inspiration to nerds on this planet and to galaxies far, far
away my friend. Thank you so much for 10 wonderful years of nerdy, geeky,
wonderful greatness on TWiT TV.
Hey Leo, we wanted to congratulate you for 10 years of This Week
in Technology. I have to say that we have done nothing but talk about this
major accomplishment in internet history.
Yep, that's pretty much the case. Leo, you rock. Thank you so
much. I run all the time and I listen to you, so I feel like you run along with
me. 10 years of that is fantastic, and amazing, and people love you, and we
appreciate it.
Yeah, I don't run anywhere.
Leo, it's Chris. I just wanted to wish
you a happy 10th anniversary to This Week in Tech. It's a great show. They are
going to kick us out of the theater here, but Morgan and I, we are overwhelmed
with emotion on account of how happy we are for you. So congratulations.
Leo: Chris Dibona, who of
course was our first host on FLOSS Weekly, and is
still in charge of the Open Source over at Google. Matt Cutts,
who fights spam on Google web pages for Google, and was one of the first 100 employees.
John: I thought that he went someplace else?
Leo: You know what? That was an April Fool’s joke, and a nasty one at that. One of the things that
Matt does is he does the webmaster tools for Google, he does great videos for
webmasters, and he is always saying that the best SEO is to make great content.
So an SEO firm, I'm not saying a rogue SEO firm, but an SEO firm thought it
would be funny if they announced that they hired him. He is not working for
them. I asked because I thought what?
John: Well, a good April Fool’s joke works that way.
Leo: And then Morgan Webb, who we love, and who has
agreed, I think, to be one of the co-hosts on an upcoming new Screen Savers,
former TechTV host...
John: I thought that she lived in LA.
Leo: She does. She was working here before.
Patrick: They have airplanes now and cars.
Leo: Airplanes.
Patrick: And the bullet train from nowhere to nowhere.
Leo: When are we getting the hyper loop? And do you
want to get in that?
Roger: There are multiple companies working on that
right now.
Leo: That is Elon Musk's idea for a pneumatic tube
from LA to San Francisco.
Patrick: I'm waiting on the portal.
Leo: A stargate would be
nice.
John: A stargate would be
better.
Leo: David, work on the stargate.
That would be really nice. Our show today is brought to you by one of, if not the longest sponsor we have had on the show. I
bet you can guess; audible.com. We love audio books. When they first said we
want to advertise everybody said don't let Audible advertise; people will
listen to audio books instead of you. We love Audible so much. I started
listening in 2000 on the way to Screen Savers. What a horrible commute from
here to San Francisco, you know. I have 500 books under my belt thanks to
Audible that I probably never would have heard. There is new stuff all the
time. I'm currently listening to Becoming Steve Jobs, which is amazing, I think
better than the Isaacson book, although you should read both. Both are on
Audible. In fact, I'm going to get you 2 books. If you go to audible.com/twit2
you will be signing up for the Platinum Plan. That's 2 books a month. Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a
Visionary Leader. It's by Brent Schlendler,
who is a Fortune writer. He had interviewed Jobs many, many times right from
the beginning to the end. It really is an interesting profile with a lot of
stuff that I hadn't heard before. But then I'm going to listen to some Science
Fiction because I love Science Fiction. I got the new Peter F. Hamilton. I'm a
big fan of his. Look at that, Elon Musk, the story of Ashley Vance's, is that
Ashley Vance that wrote that? Wow, I didn't know that. Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future. Look,
go to audible.com/twit2. You are going to sign up for the Platinum Plan; that's
2 books, you also get the Daily Digest of the New York
Times or the Wall Street Journal. They know that you want to try before you
buy, so listen, you get a month free, you don't have
to pay anything the first 30 days. Cancel anytime during that period and you
pay nothing. The books will be yours to keep anyway. Best sellers, they come
out like crazy. Does anybody do Audible? You guys don't have commutes anymore.
Roger: I do.
Leo: You do?
Roger: I'm looking after...
Leo: You need Audible now. You can listen to Audible
and look after a two and a half month old. In fact, Audible is a lifesaver with
little kids. If you have a commute, if you go to the gym and the treadmill is
so boring, if you walk the dog, or wash the dishes it is great because you can
read when your hands are too busy to hold a book. It's a great thing. Put it in
one ear. Put it throughout the house. I listen to it through the Sonos. I love it. Audible.com. I love this one; The Art of
War, it's read by Lord Balish, Little Finger from
Game of Thrones. Who better to read the Art of War than the man who
masterminded the entire nut house that is Game of Thrones? Lord
Peter Balish. Really he sounds good, too.
(Audio Plays): The control of a large force is the same
principle as the control of a few men. It is merely a question of dividing up
their numbers. Fighting with a large army under your command is no different
than fighting with a small one.
Leo: I think that you should have a Scottish accent
if you are going to read The Art of War, don't you? Audible.com/twit2, that is the place that you go to get your 2 free
books today. We are celebrating 10 years today with cupcakes.
David: Have you ever read an audio book?
Leo: Have I ever read one? I did a little one that we
just did for fun called Little Golden Riding Hood. It's on Audible, you can get it for free. I did a terrible job with it because I was very
nervous. John has run out of battery, I brought a second one. I put it on the
desk.
John: I will go.
Leo: Yeah, go get a battery.
David: There's some good.
Leo: I got asked to do more, but I don't have time.
David: Lavare Burton is a really good audio book narrator. Samuel
L. Jackson has a very expletive laden one.
Leo: Go the F to Sleep.
David: It is the best.
Leo: Isn't it funny? We read that.
David: Every new parent loves that book.
Leo: Have you read that to your child yet?
David: The Samuel L. Jackson version of Go the F to Sleep.
Roger: Veronica gave me that book before.
Patrick: Even not so new parents like it.
Leo: We did a 24 hours New Year’s thing and the last
thing that we did was we ended the show at 3 in the morning, I gathered the
kids around in our jammies, and we read Go the F to Sleep. But I didn't delete
the expletives. It was fun.
Roger: I will probably save it for when she's slightly
older.
Leo: Yeah, a lot older. The 12 year olds love it.
David: Slightly older and understands the words.
Roger: Right now I have her on my lap and I play Halo.
Leo: No.
Roger: Yeah.
Leo: You are going to poison that kid. Did you get
the new one? Yeah, just put it in and I will show you.
Roger: Hopefully she doesn't remember too much.
Leo: Thank you. My battery. How
about the Google Europe thing? I'm really surprised, because my first reaction
was oh, that's full of it. But a number of people are saying they are full of
it.
Roger: Wait, Google or the EU?
Leo: No, the EU, who says 2 counts; 1, that Google
modified their search results to benefit their Google properties, particularly
in shopping...
John: There is no doubt about it.
Leo: Yeah, but what is wrong with that?
Roger: Because they are a monopoly.
John: By European rules it is bad.
Leo: By US rules it is if you use your monopoly to
get new business, but what they did was make the search results better. Nobody
disagrees that they made the search results better, and that is their job.
John: The way I see it is that this is just another
example of the EU trying to gouge the American corporations because they are
uncompetitive over there.
Roger: USA, USA, USA.
John: Seriously.
Patrick: Well, we hide all of our profits over there. In
Ireland alone how many billions or trillions are hiding there?
John: They should be happy with that.
Leo: We give them our money. What more do they want?
Roger: Well the Euros have traditionally been a great
location for companies that want to beat other companies upside the head. When
Microsoft was going through it it was because of
Google and a few other companies.
Leo: There is a good example. Both the Department of
Justice, which went on for years and years, and Europe went after Microsoft for
bundling Internet Explorer. By the time all of this was done it made no
difference at all. The upshot in the EU was when you installed Windows in the
EU the user would get an impenetrable menu of 10 different browsers.
John: It made a big difference. Have you ever looked
at the big buildings for the EU Parliament?
Leo: They are beautiful.
John: Yeah, where do you think that they get the money
to pay for that stuff?
Leo: Vegas. Like the rest of us. They also are going
after them for Android. They say that the rules that Google insists on for
companies that want to bundle services with Android are...
Roger: Just to bundle the Google Maps.
Leo: Right, and they say that that is anti-competitive. Here
is a company that is giving away a free version.
Patrick: So what, it's anti-competitive versus Windows or
IOS?
Leo: IOS? You don't even get to put IOS on a phone. It's
not even an option.
Roger: In some ways we are looking at it in a very kind
of American centric way. It's the same thing with Zuckerberg and the whole
internet.org in India where a bunch of local companies are saying no, that's
actually anti-competitive by picking and choosing which ads get...
Leo: Let's talk about this. This is the initiative
that Mark Zuckerberg and others have funded, internet.org, to bring internet to
third world nations.
Roger: Developing nations.
John: And this is the thing...
Leo: Is third world bad?
Roger: Yes. It's developing.
Leo: Developing?
Roger: Developing. It has a merging economy.
Leo: Emerging. Like a teenage girl is what you are
saying. Developing, emerging, blossoming countries. They
want to bring internet to them. Is this the one with drones, internet.org?
John: No, that's other third world countries.
Leo: No, they do want to fly unmanned vehicles with
internet over there.
Roger: The whole idea about internet.org is that they
would have no charges for data that is used by certain applications. People
automatically migrate towards those because they won't charge them.
Leo: That happens in the United States, right?
Roger: What do they call that, zero...
Leo: I have certain music services that don't go
against my bandwidth if I'm using on T-Mobile.
David: If you step all the way back to the beginning
the original purpose of internet.org was to bring internet to those world
populations that don't have internet access. I forget the exact percentage, but
it's extremely high. The thesis, which I believe in, is that the world will be
a more connected, better place, with more equal opportunity, not completely
obviously, but closer to equal opportunity if you have connectivity. The big
problem is, of course, that those who are putting opportunity together, which is more than just Facebook even though Marc Zuckerberg is
spearheading it. If they have the opportunity to put certain services at better
ease than sometimes that happens.
Leo: This is an anti-Zuckerberg move, don't you
think? This is saying we will take the internet, but not the Zuckerberg
internet.
Roger: They don't want it because the actual complaint
is from service providers within India because you are basically choosing the
certain companies that give out their services free of any data charges while
we provide a competing service and people will get charged if they use ours. People
automatically migrate to the one with the least cost impact.
David: It's almost like they have got net neutrality
going on.
Roger: In a way, kind of.
Leo: This is what they say, though. They are talking
about Net Neutrality. How is that going by the way John? Is anything bad going
on with Net Neutrality?
John: Yeah, let me ask you a question because this
could be unlawful and that could be unlawful. Do you think that with Net
Neutrality actually installed and working...
Leo: Is it yet installed?
John: No, they are just talking. But once it gets in
play and the FCC is controlling everything, do you really think that WikiLeaks
will stay in business? I don't think so.
Leo: How would they shut it down? It's not even in
the US.
John: They can shut it down with filtering.
Leo: The great firewall of America.
John: Well that's definitely happening. They want to
have the Sony memos, and the searchable database; that's unlawful.
Patrick: So you are saying that the FCC is going to be
able to put total constraint over all content moving over the internet?
John: As much as they can. You can't get around that.
Patrick: How is that different than what the NSA is doing
now?
Leo: They are watching it. They aren't blocking it,
they are encouraging it.
Roger: Once people start shifting to fully encrypted
web transfer will that matter anymore?
Leo: I deeply hope. I said this 10 years ago; remember they were doing a movie, it was actually David Bernettie doing a movie about hackers. There was a rights
dispute and it died. They interviewed me and at the time I said that Hackers
will be the freedom fighters of the 21st century. It's the people who know how
to get around things. It's not going to be hide your
guns and women; it's going to be hide your computers.
Roger: And women.
Leo: And women.
Patrick: Actually I'm arming the women.
Leo: I'm going to call it the blossoming nations from
now on. Do you mind? John, what are you watching on TV these days?
John: Well, I saw the Kimmy thing.
Leo: Did you like that?
John: I thought that was funny, and it's going to get
weirder because Tiny Fey is already kind of looking around.
Robert: She's awesome.
John: Yeah, I think so too. I think it's astonishing
and it's really going to be good.
Leo: It's a hit and miss though. There is some bad stuff.
John: No, no, I thought it was 100%.
Leo: Really? A home run?
John: Yeah, as far as I was concerned.
Leo: Have you watched the whole thing?
John: Yeah.
Leo: See, I haven't seen the whole thing yet.
Roger: I saw the first episode.
Leo: It grows on you.
John: I watch Grimm. I think it is a very funny show.
Patrick: You've seen Grimm?
Roger: Remember when it first started.
Patrick: You were just like John watches Grimm? Was that
what that was?
Roger: Yeah, it was like you watch Grimm?
John: I do. I watch Grimm. It's a great show. It's one
of the few shows for the whole family. We make sure to record it because if you
watch it from the beginning you get most of the jokes. It's very funny. It's a
comedy.
Roger: Why are we still recording shows? Why can't we
just make it on demand?
John: Try to find it, it was on Amazon for a while,
it's this 13 part AMC series called Rubicon, which discusses the intelligence
state. It disappeared. You can't get this anywhere.
Leo: That happens even for innocuous content.
John: It disappeared, which is why your complaint
would be valid forever.
Leo: Yeah.
John: I watch a few things that I still like. Now,
what am I watching? I'm watching the Golden State Warriors.
Leo: Aren't we excited? It's the first time since
19...
John: 72?
Leo: 72. Wow. How did you like the...
John: Why are you grilling me?
Leo: I'm trying to find something that we can talk
about. How did you like the March Madness? Did you enjoy that?
John: I always enjoy the March Madness.
Leo: You were always telling me to watch Kentucky,
watch Kentucky.
John: Oh, this is what this is leading to.
Leo: That was exciting. They lost?
John: They lost. The Badgers beat them, right.
Leo: Was that right? Was it the honey badgers?
John: You got it, you got it. I was wrong about the
Kentucky team.
Patrick: We should change the subject in case Ryan Shroud
is watching.
Leo: Oh.
Patrick: Because he was at that game. It was a quiet ride
home from the game, then a quiet ride back from Indianapolis to Kentucky.
Leo: Tears were shed.
Patrick: I don't know if tears were shed. I think that he
was just silent for a couple of days.
Leo: Poor Ryan.
Patrick: Then we had to all sit down and realize that
they had an undefeated season until that game.
Leo: Robert, do you watch anything besides test
patterns on TV?
Robert: Yes, yes I do.
Leo: Not that there is anything wrong with test
patterns.
John: He does watch a lot of test patterns.
Robert: I get the test patterns out of the way so that I
can watch good content. I just binge watched all 3 seasons of House of Cards.
Leo: Now 3...
Robert: 3 was off, but it’s a
cliffhanger, so...
John: I never watched 3. They told me it was crap.
Leo: It's disappointing.
Robert: It wasn't as cool as the end of season 1 and the
beginning of season 2. That was just jaw dropping for a few episodes right
there.
Patrick: Have you seen Justified yet?
Robert: No, that just ended so I will Binge watch it.
John: Have you seen The Comedians on FX?
Leo: Is that the one where they all tell the same
joke?
John: No, this is the new Billy Crystal show. It's
actually produced by one of the original co-producers of the Seinfeld show,
Larry Charles.
Leo: It's interviews though?
John: No, you are thinking of Larry Seinfeld driving
around with comics. This is called The Comedians. It's a very funny show based
on a Swedish premise of a show called Baxtrum, which
is another Swedish show. I don't know why we are going Swedish.
David: We are totally doing This Week in Television.
Leo: More greetings.
John: I didn't start it. He did. I wasn't talking
about the watches.
Leo: You lie.
Patrick: John, did you order an iWatch?
John: No, it's too expensive.
Leo: $350?
John: It's too rich for my blood.
Leo: How about you?
Patrick: This coming from the guy with an $8,000 lens. I
was going to buy one in the store.
John: That's not my lens. It's Leo's.
Leo: That's not my lens. That's not my lens.
Patrick: All of the luxury none of the cost. This, ladies
and gentlemen, is a man who should have his own show.
John: There you go.
Patrick: Living the Life.
Leo: What do they call them? The
Aristocrats. I don't know where we are going.
Patrick: I was going to buy one on the 24th, but now I
can't, so...
Leo: 24th of June maybe.
Patrick: I want to get one for testing.
Leo: You have to.
John: Is it going to be the blender test? That would
be cool.
Patrick: No, no.
Roger: It's going to be the Patrick Norton test.
Leo: That's what you want.
Roger: Where he wears it throughout his normal life.
Patrick: I haven't worn watches since I started working
in magazines with Seth Davis because I was typing 60 hours a week and my wrist
started to throb. So I took the watch off of my left wrist, put it on my right
wrist, and 6 weeks later that wrist started to throb. So I started carrying
pocket watches again. I didn't have any problems with my wrists, no matter how
many hours a week I was typing.
John: Interesting.
Robert: Give it a couple of months. There will be a
bunch of them on eBay.
Leo: I think you are right. I think you are right. There
might be some real disappointment.
John: The problem is that you have to have an iPhone.
David: Then there will be new glasses with new heads up
displays. Never heard of those before.
Leo: In this book Becoming Steve Jobs one of the
things that they talk about is how Steve and Lorraine his wife would go to
Paris, and this surprised me, Steve was wearing his cut offs, Bernkenstock sandals, a black t-shirt; but they would go
into the Courtier stores, the Bjors. They would go in
there; Lorraine kind of browses around and Steve immediately buttonholes the
clerks and says why do you have so little merchandise? Why is it dark over
here? Why is it lit this way? He was, this was in 2003 before they opened a
store, he was really interested in how you could take a product that clearly
had $100 worth of materials in it and sell it for $10,000. What is the process?
What is the alchemy that a designer does? It's interesting because here we are
15 years later and that is exactly what Apple is doing. They are adding value,
perceived value. There is no technical value. Their $8,000 watch has the same
insides as the $350 watch. So it's all perceived value.
John: And that's too expensive.
Leo: So I think that is very interesting. Of course
there is no better way to become a profitable company than to be able to mark
up 1000%. What is the markup on an Apple Watch? Not the $350.
Patrick: About 5x.
Leo: Typically Apple was 5x. That's the Apple rule.
John: Was it 5x?
Leo: 5x on everything.
Patrick: 5x, 7x? You said that
there was $2,000 worth of gold in the watches?
John: It's 5 or 10, yeah.
David: I don't know. There is the world of putting a
console out and losing money on it becasue you can
sell titles, and then there is the world...
Patrick: That fits in their world.
David: But they are different. I didn't know that they
had rules that were 5x or more.
Patrick: I'm guessing based on what the company gave
about the gold.
Leo: Kevin Rose said that there was no more than
$2,000 worth of gold in that watch. Let's say the insides are $200. That means
that there is an almost $8,000 profit, 4x profit, on that watch. But that's
without a band. Did you notice that the red leather band with the gold buckle
is a $7,000 band? What's the markup on that?
John: It's pretty high.
Patrick: Crafted under soft moonlight on Thursdays.
Leo: But I think that this is what Haute Couture is
all about. This is what Dior does. This is what Chanel does. Those dresses,
those Shamata, aren't more than a couple of dollars’
worth of material.
John: I think that Kevin Rose nailed it. This is a
douchebag watch.
Leo: That's what Rose said. I wish Kevin were here,
because I have a feeling that he will be wearing probably an Edition next week.
No?
David: I would almost buy one of the Gold Editions,
then just save it and never take it out of the box.
Leo: Is it going to appreciate?
John: No.
David: I think that on the other side when people were
complaining...
Leo: I have the original iPod. How much would you pay
for that?
David: People would pay. If it is still in the box it's
probably worth something.
Patrick: Dip it in gold.
David: The funny thing about a watch is...
Leo: Now how much would you pay?
David: You can hand your grandfather's watch down that
he wore in WWII and it might be worth something. No one is going to be handing
down a Gen 2 Apple Watch with 20 years of old software.
Roger: Heirlooms, like antiques, like any collectable;
the value is based on what people are willing to pay for it. That was a thing
that baseball cards went through, then there was a great crash, and people were
like I'm not shelling out $800 for a rookie card. People are willing, or just
so ungodly rich that they can afford to so it's not a big deal. You will see
that level, that market share buying into it. More pragmatic people were like,
well, you know, I don't need a watch that badly, or I can buy a cheap Timex for
like $25.
Leo: Jeff Needles, who is today's David Prager here
at the TWiT Brickhouse,
he's the shout at, said he went in to do a try on and the clerk said yesterday
I sold $200,000 in Edition Watches to one family. $200,000.
John: Do you know who the family was?
Leo: Everyone in the family got one.
John: Yeah, but how big is this family?
Leo: A very wealthy one.
John: Well that was useless information.
Leo: I don't know the name. Jeff, did they say the
name?
Roger: Did they upsell them on all of the accessories?
Leo: They do. Well you saw the manual.
Roger: So I'm just wondering, did they get everything?
Leo: You both have to admire the hoodspa,
and the amazing marketing. You have to admire that.
David: It's the American way.
John: It's disgusting.
Leo: One of the guys that we worked with, in fact
I've got 3 people who worked with us through the years who decided to record
videos, one of them is going to be back doing a new Screen Savers with us,
actually all 3 of them. Let's roll that tape.
(Video Plays): Hi, I'm Martin Sargent. When I'm defragging my
hard drive, updating my Linux Kernel, or Overclocking my Patrick Norton Doll, I
prefer to watch This Week in Tech, and have for 10 wonderful years. Way to go
Leo and the gang!
Leo: He even had a portrait.
(Video Plays): Leo, congratulations on 10 years of TWiT TV. May your show continue to live long and prosper.
Congratulations Leo, for 10 years of This Week in Tech. Could you
have imagined a decade ago me recording this video on a phone? It was possible.
So was my career thanks to you.
Leo: The great Chris Parillo.
(Video Plays): Hi, this is John Hodgman sending congratulations to Leo Laporte and This Week
in Text. Wow, 10 years of This Week in Text. I didn't even think people were
even texting 10 years ago. You saw it coming. Congratulations and keep texting.
Leo: I don't know how we got on this tradition, but
we had a tradition every Christmas of doing a holiday TWiT with Hodgman, Paul and Storm, and Jonathon Colton. It
was so much fun. A lot of Jagermeister was consumed. Those
were a lot of fun. They are still online. That is one of the things that I'm
proud of. Everything that we have done for 10 years is online. That's a lot of
shows. We are designing a new website that will launch next month. We have
migrated 11,000 episodes. 11,000 episodes migrating over from
the last 10 years. It's kind of mindboggling, isn't it?
Patrick: That's kind of terrifying.
John: That's quite a few.
Leo: It's something. You know.
John: By the way Chris, I apologize for making that
cheap gag.
Leo: We love Chris Parillo.
John: We do.
Leo: Yes. He is small but powerful. You know why they
call him locker? He used to get stuck in the locker.
John: He claims that he used to be thrown in a locker.
I don't believe him.
David: The gnome.
Leo: Didn't we do a Christmas thing for him on The
Screen Savers? Were you around for that? He did a song, I think, for call for
help. I think that you can find this. Can you see if you can find it? Chris Parillo's Leo Christmas Song. He performed, we played the video, and he was in the fridge. Remember we used
to have a fridge?
Patrick: I remember that, yes.
Robert: You mean the geek library?
Leo: The geek library. It was an old fridge, it was
decommissioned obviously, and it had books in there. I don't know why, but we
would open it from time to time.
David: We would do like a segment.
Leo: The refrigerator magnets were on the geek
library. So he did the song, and we opened the thing, and he was in the fridge.
He hobbled out.
David: Didn't he do one of the first marathons? Or were
you the first one?
Leo: He did the first marathon.
David: He had so many, he was losing it.
Roger: It was the Call For Helpathon. I remember it. I was there for both of them.
Leo: You had to walk him around the block, right?
Roger: Actually Morgan.
David: He had the guy with the old record that was a
spindle.
Leo: Yeah, but that was fake.
David: I know, but I mean then tricked me. I was like
this poor guy.
Leo: Chris didn't know it was fake?
Oh, I didn't know that.
Roger: The whole thing was that it was a prank to play
on Chris. Everybody else was in on it.
Leo: Ah. So these were old Edison cylinders, these
really valuable, no one is making them anymore, the guy was a collector and he
was showing Chris, and he dropped it.
David: He cracked it, but I don't know how much of it
was acting, but he was like nervous to be on TV.
Roger: It was both. He was nervous about executing the
joke correctly. The thing is, they were all blank cylinders, so they weren't
really worth anything. The ones that are valuable are the ones that had already
been recorded on. So when we did that Chris was like, whoa. He kind of freaked
out. What was interesting was that the following week it went viral and a bunch
of television stations were asking for copies of it to run in their bloopers
and practical jokes or whatever. It was a thing were it just showed up as the
funniest or dumbest thing to do on TV.
Leo: Well, the guy was a good actor. People bought
it. I saw that video. Is that the Chris Parillo? Is
that it?
John: No, that doesn't look right.
Leo: No, that's before then. I don't know what that
is.
Jason: That was passed through the chatroom. Although we do have the wax cylinder.
Leo: A bad word was said there, wasn't it? Chris
didn't know. He's shaking.
(Video Plays): Oh my god. Well those things happen every once
in a while. That can't be good.
Leo: I like Chris. He's going to keep it going no
matter what.
John: The show must go on.
Leo: The show must go on.
Roger: That was a great show, the whole Call For Helpathon.
Leo: It was really good.
Roger: We had the guy that sang Grandma Got Run Over By
a Reindeer, and we brought him on set, and he played the song, but we had Chris
Breen and the Brat...
Leo: Patsy and Elmo.
Roger: Right.
Leo: It's kind of sad, Patsy and Elmo broke up, they
fought over the rights because there was some money in it, and Elmo got the
rights to Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer. He would go around playing it.
David: Is this the song?
Leo: This is it. Kevin, Kat, Morgan, Megan, Martin,
Yoshi, Darcy, there's Paul Block. He actually is really talented. Do you
remember that? He's blocked out, John has blocked out almost everything that he
did on Tech TV. I don't know if we pulled him out, so it was another time that
we pulled him out of the fridge. We had such a good team then,
that was so much fun. A lot of fun. Let us take
a break. We will come back with final words, final thoughts, we have gone a
long time.
John: Too bad the owners of that place had a clue.
Leo: If we could get those tapes
that's the kind of stuff that we could show in good quality. Although,
the irony is that it really wouldn't be that good of a quality. You would see
it now, and it's not HD, it's SD, right? It wouldn't
look like this. Isn't that sad? Here we are with $1,500 consumer cameras. I'm a luddite.
John: You are a luddite.
Leo: We are going to wrap up our 10th anniversary
celebration and give you one more time to look at the new Screen Savers and
tell you where you can find it. It's coming May 2nd. Our show today is brought
to you by my mattress. One of the things when we started TWiT,
I thought wouldn't it be great, first of all I said that we will never have
ads, that didn't last very long. Patreon didn't exist
then; it was very hard. We took donations to PayPal, but you wouldn't make
money for more than 1 person. I wasn't really ready to do everything. I was
kind of doing all of the editing. Sunday nights I would go home at midnight
because I had to do all of the matching of sound and stuff. So then we said,
okay, we are going to take ads, but wouldn't it be nice if they weren't tech
ads so that there would be no conflict of interest, right? Never were able to
get non tech ads. Now we are getting non tech ads, and people are saying what
is with the mattress ads?
Roger: Isn't it a 3D printed mattress? No, I'm kidding.
Leo: I can't win. The truth is that this is a tech ad
because you couldn't do this until the internet came along. Casper eliminates
the idea, which was on the face of the idea that you could choose a mattress by
going in an lying on one in broad daylight for 5
minutes while the sales girl gives you the stink eye. It is not a good
experience. Let me tell you, I just bought my mattress that way a couple of
years ago, and it was too hard. So Casper says look, here is what we are going
to do, we are going to make these great American made
mattresses. They are memory foam and latex. They provide firmness and give in a
way that is incredible. We are going to ship it to you, and by the way that is
a queen sized mattress in the box if you are watching the video. That is what
is amazing. I got one for my son because he wanted a queen. He is up 3 flights
of stairs. It's the only way that we could get a mattress up there. He loves it
at college. You have 100 days to sleep on it. Anytime in the first 100 days you
can return it; they pay the shipping to you and they pay the shipping back, no
cost to you. You don't have to worry. That is a trial. That's the way. Doesn't
that look comfy?
Roger: Springs or memory foam?
Leo: It's memory foam and then on top of it latex. You
should try it. We can get you one if you want, they are really incredible. Go
to casper.com/twit. You can get yours. It's $500 for a
twin all the way up to $950 for a king size. A lot less than the mattress at
the mattress store. And we are going to cut $50 off as an audience member if
you go to casper,
c-a-s-p-e-r.com/twit and use the promo code TWIT. Casper, c-a-s-p-e-r.com/twit,
use the promo code TWIT. 100 days to try it. It is incredible. Really thrilled
with our Casper mattresses, and you know what, they have been a sponsor for a
long time. It's a great product at a great price.
There is a long list of thank you’d and names that I wish to
mention. First of all let me thank Jason Howell, who really worked very hard.
Jason: Thank you.
David: Each and every week actually.
Leo: Every week. And before Jason it was Chad
Johnson, and before Chad Johnson it was Eileen Rivera. I have been blessed with
great producers. Before that Dane Golden. Great producers producing our great shows. So many staffers
have been here for so long. John Slanina, our studio
manager. Fredrick Louis Hale, who mans the front desk. You know, if I go through all of the names I'm going to miss somebody. We have
such a great team of people. We couldn't do it without them. Through the years
people like Dick D. Bartolo, Paul Thurrott,
Steve Gibson, all of our hosts, and all of you. TWiT doesn't exist because of me, it exists because of you,
our great audience, and our great people who get together every day to make
great programming. Thank you, excuse me, from the
bottom of my heart. I'm going to die of cancer now.
John: No. Hey, don't cough on me if that is the case.
Leo: John, you said we would go together.
John: I meant in a car over a cliff.
Leo: We should make a pact that whoever goes first I
will go to your funeral.
John: Okay. You would anyway.
Leo: I would. Do you want me to do the Eulogy?
John: No, god no.
Patrick: I'm not here to praise John C. Devorak, but to bury him.
Leo: Colleen, our first director of engineering. So many people.
John: I just saw her the other day.
Leo: She's doing great. She's at Facebook now. When I
hired her she was a Sociology major at San Jose State
in her last year.
John: You are losing it. You are losing your voice. Get
him some water.
Leo: Oh, I have some here I'm sure. She wanted an
internship. It's giant, isn't it? Look at the size of
that. She wanted an internship, and when I talked to her I said I'm not going
to give you an internship, I'm going to hire you. She finished up her last year
of school, but she always told me, "If I get a job at Google I'm
gone." She got a job at Google.
John: And she was gone.
Leo: And she was gone. But she built the first Skypasaurus, the 4 headed Skype beast. Remember that?
Patrick: Yes.
Leo: What an improvement that was. The first maybe
hundred shows we were all on the same Skype channel. That was horrible. I spent
so many hours tweaking and editing each individual voice.
Patrick: I started to laugh, because you were doing this
experiment where we were all reporting locally and sending the audio tracks to
you, and trying to reconcile everything.
Leo: We did that once.
Patrick: Twice, because I ended up helping and I spent 24
hours on it.
Leo: I remember, because I was gone on vacation or
something. Horrible, horrible, wasn't it? Thank you for doing that.
Patrick: My pleasure.
John: Finally he got his thanks.
Leo: I will never forget that you did do one show
under your car.
Patrick: Yeah, I was changing the brakes. Wazniack was on; Shamus was very, very young, he was losing
his mind in the house, and I ended up out front changing the breaks on the car
talking through the laptop and talking to you guys.
Leo: Wasn't it the handset that you were using, too,
one that looked like a telephone handset?
Patrick: It was a weird thing.
Leo: Or was it another time? I don't remember.
Patrick: Gearheading with Waz on TWiT while I was working on my car. That was a good day.
Leo: When we first started the show it was called The
Revenge of the Screen Savers. You have clip 4 there? This is audio only. This
was we were trying to come up with a better name for the show. We asked our
audience. The logo was from the audience. Dorthy D. Yamomoto, among many others, submitted that. She was a designer
who had taken some time off to raise a family but wanted to get back into
design. She did the TWIT logo, but at first it was on the side. It was an anthgate, or adgate.
Jason: Was it one of these?
Leo: Look at it, some of those are the genial. Some of those are more recent.
Jason: When I went digging I found this random page
that just happened to have these thumbnails at the top.
Leo: Up in the left, that was the original logo for Screen Savers. I can't remember who gave us that.
Jason: This is just random.
Leo: User submissions, yeah. The bottom 3 I think
that we did.
Jason: Yeah, that's the evolution basically from early
on.
Leo: Then you have somewhere where we were trying to
decide what to call the show?
Jason: Yeah, it's a bit of a longer clip. It's almost 2
minutes. It's basically a bunch of name suggestions and where you ended up.
(Audio Plays): Hello angels, this is Leo Laporte welcoming you to the next, and last edition of the Return of the Screen Savers.
Leo: I had to bleep it.
(Audio Plays): I say the last because we need a new name. We
aren't going to call it anymore, and I'm getting tired of bleeping it out.
Leo: Talk about vocal thrives.
(Audio Plays): Thank goodness. We have got so many creative,
clever submissions. You want to hear some of the names that people sent in? Absolutely. Saved by the Geeks, WWSD, What Would the Screen
Savers Do, Are You Now or Have You Ever Been a G4 Employee, Return of the Meat
Popsicle, Goodfellas, but I think that maybe GeekFellas might be good, This Week in Geek, which might be
the closest to the one that we are actually going to use. What do you think of
This Week in Geek? That's not bad though. We could call it Geek Week. TWiG, yeah, t-w-i-g. Attack of
the Podcasts, Reunion of Tech Support Scholars, she wanted to keep the RTOSS
acronym, Revenge of the Dark Tipping, Sledgehammer Swinging, PC Moding, Lab Rat Tech Guys. Excellent. It's a little long but I like it. I'm kind of embarrassed to admit that I think
we are going to go, Robert, you weren't in on this conversation because you
were busy finding headsets, but I think that we are going to go with the boring
This Week in Tech, TWiT. The only reason is that I
think the podcast has to say in its name what it is because otherwise when
people look at it in the directory they will have no clue. Is that so boring
that we should just say no?
Leo: Thanks for backing me up guys! You guys were all
in shock.
Robert: I think that the...
John: Skype just faded out.
Leo: No, it's not a Skype problem.
Jason: Same here Leo, same here.
Leo: Yeah, you couldn't hear what I was saying.
Patrick: That was it.
Leo: Yeah, so that was it. TWiT was kind of a yeah, let's just try it.
Patrick: I remember a few weeks later you were having, I
think we will call it a panic attack. You were sitting off and you were like
are you sure? I was like, yeah, good name. What else are you going to call it?
John: Actually I talked to him on the phone and it was
the same thing. He was totally panicked about it. You called me and you we said
do you think that we should keep this name? I said yeah, it's a great name. You
got the logo.
Leo: But it's TWiT.
John: That's what you said to me too.
Leo: Well good. You guys advised me to stick with it,
and that was good advice.
John: With that and $5 we can get a cup of coffee.
Patrick: But not really good coffee.
Leo: Have some fresh coffee. We've got cupcakes. Thanks
to also, we really couldn't have done any of this without an amazing community
of people who participate in so many ways. They create the chatroom, they run
the chatroom, Dan our moderator has been there for
more than 10 years. The people who come to visit us in the studio, we love you
all, we really appreciate that. The people who watch at home
every day. There are emails that I get from all around the world. We had
a called today from Islamabad, Pakistan, who is a big fan and congratulated us
on our 10th anniversary. People all over the world. We
could not exist without that great community. We did it because people said you
need to do this, and we continue to do it because you support us. Without you
there is no TWiT. Thank you, and I mean you, very much. Can we run one more time the New Screen Savers open?
Don't forget it's coming. May 2nd is our first show. Saturday,
May 2nd. Patrick Norton is going to be my co-host. We bought 2 Segway’s. We can
ride Segway’s into the studio. We already measured. They fit.
Patrick: I want to drive your Audi into the studio.
John: There you go.
David: You guys are the first live, televised Segway
crash on the Screen Savers.
Leo: That would be good.
David: No, you already had it.
Leo: Wazniack. Steve Wazniack brought in 8 Segway’s.
David: We crashed them into each other on live TV.
Leo: That never happened before.
John: That was a huge breakthrough. You won an Emmy, I
think, for that.
Leo: So we are going to run that again, but a very,
very deep thanks to Robert Herron, to Patrick Norton, to John C. Devorak, to David Prager, and to Roger Chang, as well as
those who couldn't be here, the original Screen Savers, the original Revenge of
the Screen Savers, the original TWiT. Thanks to
everybody who is here. I will say it 10 years in a row. I don't know when I started
saying it, but I think that it was very early on, another TWiT is in the can! Thank you very much.