This Week in Tech 514 Transcript

Leo Laporte: It's time for TWiT: This Week in Tech! Patrick Norton is here. Merlin Mann is here. Dylan Tweney is here. Harry McCracken is here. We're going to talk about the WWDC announcement, whether Apple Music can make it, whether it needs to make it. We'll also talk about that big break in at the Office of Personnel management and ROBOTS! It's all coming up next on TWiT!

Leo: This is TWiT, This Week in Tech, episode 514. Recorded Sunday, June 14 2015.

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It's time for This Week in Tech! The show where we cover the week's tech news with some of the best people in the biz. I'm blown away. This panel is going to be way too good. Hey Harry McCracken, Technologizer guy! Nice to see you.

Harry McCracken: Great to be here.

Leo: Welcome. fastcompany.com. Hey Patrick Norton. You were here yesterday and you came back!

Patrick Norton: I did!

Leo: I love that. Patrick is at tekthing.com.

Patrick: Yes I am.

Leo: If you didn't see yesterday's new Screensavers, you were great on that. That was fun doing that with you again. It's like old times.

Patrick: Check out my pants on though. That's a joke.

Leo: Where's your kilt?

Patrick: Somewhere.

Leo: Do you still have kilts now that you're a father? I think you should wear a kilt next time.

Patrick: We'll talk about it.

Leo: I'll tell you what. If you wear it, I'll wear it. You're famous for the kilts and the sledgehammer. You have to carry that burden with you until the day you die.

Patrick: Looking forward to the day my oldest son finds that out.

Leo: Dylan Tweney is also here. He is the editor at Venture Beat, formerly of Wired. Good to see you, Dylan.

Dylan Tweney: It's great to be here.

Leo: Back from camping with the cub scouts. I presume you have a cub scout.

Dylan: Yes, there is a cub scout in my family.

Leo: Good. You're not the creepy neighbor that volunteers. You actually have a cub scout. That's nice. I was in cub scouts. I'll have to find a picture of me doing the Cub Scout salute. Low and behold, look at this. Hot dogs ladies? You bet. Merlin Mann is back.

Merlin Mann: How are you?

Leo: Apparently he does nothing but Tweet.

Merlin: Me?

Leo: Yeah.

Merlin: I was in cub scouts too. I was a permanent Bobcat.

Leo: Love to see you. It's great that you guys did a revival of You Look Nice today.

Merlin: It was super fun. I miss those guys. They're getting pretty old though.

Leo: Lonely sandwich. Scott who used to work at the fruit company.

Merlin: Yeah, the paper company. It's been a crazy week here. There's been so much going on this last week around WWDC and so many other events related. Different conferences... it's been a great week.

Leo: We have a lot to talk about, that's for sure. Let's start with Monday and WWDC. The Worldwide developer's conference. In my opinion, kind of a fragmented talk. Lots of different stuff. Of course, you're talking to the developers. Although, it's a little weird, because this is one of only three big public events that Apple has. It can't just be for developers. They did announce IOS 9, which will come out this Fall. They announced Mac OS X. 10.11. El Capitan. For the first time, they named the operating system for the Apple Watch. It's called Watch OS. Harry, thoughts?

Harry: Well, if you were expecting surprises or great leaps forward, it was a disappointment. Almost everything was leaked. Just in terms of useful stuff that might make your life better, it was not a bad event. It was pretty dense with new features on the various platforms. The Watch OS stuff means that for the first time, Apple Watches will be able to run apps, which is a big deal.

Leo: At this point, the Apple Watch is a gadget that doesn't have a whole lot of utility, although I talked to blind guy on the radio show who said for the blind community, it was great. It's a talking watch. Somebody said I was sitting next to a guy on the bus, he asked his watch, "Where are we now? What stop is this?" The watch told him. There's a lot of value for that. For the vast majority of us, it's just a gadget.

Harry: I think it will get way better quite quickly once developers have access to stuff like the digital crown and all the sensors. That was great. The other thing I thought was interesting was that the iPad is looking more and more like a PC operating system. People have been asking for multiple apps on screen, and once your finally getting that, it's not unreasonable to assume that we'll see future devices running IOS that start to look a little more like a PC with a larger screen.

Leo: Merlin, do you like that idea? The ability to do two windows on an iPad?

Merlin: Yeah, I do. I have an iPad air too. As I sit here today, I think maybe next to my SE30 I had in the early 90s, it might be my favorite Apple device ever. I love my iPhone. You really get the power of what that thing can do, and I'm really looking forward. I'm not one of those guys who runs around doing betas anymore, but even watching the keynote and seeing the picture, I immediately feel like an animal having to watch something on YouTube. It feels like the 1930's. Come on. I can't get this fast enough. I think the OSX stability and the ISX announcements were for me the two most interesting things.

Leo: Isn't there a risk of making the iPad too complicated, Dylan?

Dylan: I was just thinking that. On the one hand, you've got features like the split screen view, which Windows has had for years, right? Apple is like, hey look! You can look at two apps at one time! The rest of the world is like, uh huh.

Leo: Like my Note 4? Oh!

Dylan: The thing is, one of the things that is appealing about the iPad and the tablet interface is that it's very focused. It's like one thing at a time. Up till now, they have struck a very good balance between that extreme simplicity and the usability that that engenders. I just wonder, as it gets more PC like, is it going to become more PC like in usability too?

Leo: Is it, as Neil Degrasse Tyson said, a watershed moment in civilization? What happened there?

Dylan: Neil Degrasse Tyson, world famous astrophysicist, host of Cosmos, director of the Hayden planetarium in New York, he's an awesome guy. He's a hero to many of us. He had a little cameo in a video about the app store where he said apps plus hardware is a watershed moment in civilization.

Leo: When Neil says it though, you go, "I think he's right."

Dylan: Right. I was like, "Wait a minute. Did he really just say that about the app store?" I called him up and asked him about that. He yelled at me for 20 minutes. He was like, listen to my words. I did not say the app store. I said hand held devices+apps. He never mentioned Apple and he never mentioned the app store. It turns out that Apple interviewed him for 45 minutes. He spent the entire time raving about hardware in general and the kind of sensors that are in Smartphones and how that enables people to be scientists and connected to the Internet gives you all this information, and the one second that he mentions the App store, that's the clip that they pull out and put into their video about the app store so it sounds like he's saying the App store is a water shed moment. He really meant this whole tiny computer and all of the Internet in the palm of your hand is a watershed moment.

Leo: Do you think he yelled at Apple like he yelled at you?

Dylan: I hope so. They paid him, he told me. He probably cashed the check and shook his head. He was real concerned that we get that right.

Leo: This is why, my friends, even if Apple asked, I wouldn't accept a check for talking to them on camera. Not that they've ever asked.

Harry: It reminds me of an event I went to long ago that Intel put on, which they hired Malcolm Gladwell for. Malcolm Gladwell said maybe Centrino will be a tipping point for the world because it puts Wifi on the same platform as CPU.

Leo: At least he got a plug in for the book. That's what Neil missed. In the Cosmos, this is a watershed moment. Then maybe it would be worth...

Merlin: There's also the side problem. Every time Apple writes a check, they only give you 70%.

Leo: It was actually a decent presentation. I don't know why they spent so much time. I don't know why they do this. I remember they did that with the Cardstore. Remember they had a card app? They spent ten minutes talking about it and killed it a year later? They're want to do that. They get excited. Then the thing really went off the rails. Jimmy Iovene walks out. I feel like it's a New Jersey moment between Eddie Q and Jim Iovene.

Dylan: Eddie was dancing in his pink shirt! He was having a good time.

Leo: I rolled my sleeves up like him. Only one. You don't want to go too far. I opened an extra button in honor of him. You were there, right, Harry? What was the feeling in the room? Were people worried he was losing it?

Harry: I think Apple events these days are more fun than the old days just because more weird stuff goes on. You can see people having fun on stage. They had who knows how many people try to explain Apple music. None of them actually succeeded. I know Apple music is an upgrade to Beats music, which is not a bad app. I know that Apple is doing a radio station. I know they're saying human curation is better than an algorithm. It's still not clear how Apple music has come into this category. The pricing is good.

Leo: The family plan. But you know that Spotify and everybody else is going to come up with a similar 15.99 for 6 people plan. Why wouldn't they? Music industry says yes to Apple, they're going to do the same thing. There it is, on The Verge. This is not the scoop exactly, because they didn't get confirmation. They say Spotify does plan to match that.

Harry: They have to.

Patrick: They've raised a half billion dollars, it's interesting as this is going on, all the lawsuits are coming out about whether or not Apple was coercing music labels to remove free streaming labels on other platforms. Apple is so desperate to get into this market. I don't think it was as tone deaf as the title announcement. There was something sad about...

Leo: Which Daisy brought all these people out.

Patrick: We're not making enough money off of streaming music. Then your lawyers should have done a better job with the record companies.

Leo: Then they signed a weird document, which nobody told them what it was. They all signed it for some reason. Lady Madonna put her foot up on the table while she signed it. Or was that Lady Gaga? One of them did that. That was weird. This reminded me a little bit of a Samsung event. There she is. Thank you, Madonna. Interesting point of view from Panda Daily. Is Spotify doomed because of Apple music? No--Spotify's been doomed from the start. We focus on can Apple music beat Spotify, but what the real question is, is there a future at all for these streaming apps because the music industry hates them. Do you think artists should hate the music industry?

Dylan: I think they're getting a better deal from Apple... the economics don't add up. If you're paying ten dollars a month, Apple isn't going to have more to give the artists.

Patrick: Apple can spend more money. This would be the classic proctor and gamble move. We're going to go in and make the cheapest service on the planet, put everybody else out of business, and then we're going to put our premium brand in. That was their thing for decades. Apple could be doing that, or maybe Apple is desperate to stay relevant.

Leo: There is this funny scenario that the music industry finally met somebody that was more of a shark than they were. There's a quote in this Panda daily industry from the Verge. "All the way up to Tim Cook, these guys is cut throat. When Jimmy Iovene takes the stage, he seems a little more street-smart. A little more tough. Maybe that's just his persona. He from the very beginning of Beats before Apple came along said the thing that's going to save the music industry is human curation.

Harry: It will be interesting to see how that scales. It makes a lot of sense if you're talking about a few songs and a fairly small number of people, but if they're doing this on Apple Scale and trying to appeal to people with all sorts of different taste in music, how many human curators do they need to do that? How do they keep it interesting a year from now because the play lists I like now I won't care about a year from now.

Dylan: It's not like human curation is untried. We still have FM radio and that's human curetted.

Leo: That's what cracked me up. Apple announced Beats 24/7 global radio station as if this was an innovation. Don't we have radio?

Patrick: Denial is a powerful force in the Universe.

Leo: I invented radio on the Internet!

Dylan: My theory is there is still a reality distortion field at Apple, but it only applies within the executive suite.

Leo: Merlin, you seem like a music guy.

Merlin: I am. I like iTunes Match. That's been good to me. I subscribed to Beats for some time.

Leo: Do you prefer it to any of the other choices?

Merlin: I don't know. I tried the other ones. I tried Spotify for a while. Beats made sense to me. I like the way it works. I wish it would keep me logged in longer. I don't know that much about the streaming music business. I have a theory that I share with a few other people that it feels like the first 2/3 was a pretty good show. The music part felt like it was a mess. It was unrehearsed, it felt not ready. It felt... I enjoy unrehearsed moments. I share the theory with a few other people to invoke the semi-sacred one more thing to announce a consumer facing service that has zero to do with developers. There's part of me that wonders if they were this close on something like an Apple TV announcement and it just wasn't there yet. I wonder if this event, which was not a particularly water shed event, there's a part of me that wonders if that's what they had to put in at the last moment.

Leo: I'm convinced that's what happened. The fact that the Home Kit announcement was so short, and they had so much more to say told me that that's what they would have said. By the way, the hub for your Home Kit will be the brand new Apple TV. That's still to come. Apparently that was, if it was delayed, it's delayed because of deals. This is the overall point of this. The point of the Panda daily article is Apple is now going into areas like the music business where they're bringing a knife to a gunfight. The music industry is going to eventually kill Pandora. They've been trying hard. It's suicide. There's no alternative the music industry has proposed. What they want is for you to go back and buy CDs some more.

Patrick: Are they going to kill Spotify by raising the rates and raising the rates?

Leo: Yeah. Spotify isn't making money. Spotify is raising money, but Spotify is not and never will be profitable, because the music industry determines how much money they make. They could have every person on the planet sign up; they still take home less than they spend. How is that a business? Where does that flip? I presume Tim Westogrin at Pandora is counting on the music industry giving in. The music industry doesn't seem to have any will to do this.

Harry: Spotify is expanding to video and other stuff so they don't have all their eggs in one basket.

Leo: I should disclaim that we are one of the podcasts on Spotify. Our audio video is on the new Spotify. I'm thrilled about that. That's a smart move, because I don't charge them for putting TWIT on Spotify. That's free. One advantage Apple has is their massive clout, the fact that they're going to put Beats on every single IOS device come the end of the month with 8.4, they have multi billion dollar slush fund, they've already started buying ads like crazy. Have you seen the Apple music ads? I don't think that this... maybe there's going to be more to this campaign. They're great ads, this is the video they showed at the event as well. Love the ads, it's the history of music. At no point, does it talk about a product.

Patrick: It looks like Oh Brother Where Art Thou light.

Leo: All they say at the end is "Apple Music." Most people seeing that will say iTunes. I'm a big fan. Merlin, is this the beginning of a campaign that will do more?

Merlin: You can really tell when a company is putting wood behind the arrow. It's funny, because there are several things that came up. What was the one you had mentioned? The cards app a few years ago. It seems like Apple will have these things they toss out that seem a little north of a trial balloon.

Leo: This is no trial balloon. This has to work, right?

Merlin: I guess so, but it seems incredibly fragmented. It really feels like they got a box, put three things in it, and called it a service.

Leo: It's a me too!

Merlin: If you show the set up with the Bubbles, that's Beats. That's setting up a Beats account. I don't know. I would have liked, as a consumer who is super interested in this kind of stuff, and does like music and doesn't mind paying for it, I wish there had been more clarity about what this was replacing, in the same way that... they come up with these things that are partly baked and do enough to put things out of business, but they don't change fundamentally how things work. The Notes app stuff, those are great additions, but in the case of stuff like that News app, is that going to be here a year from now? I realize they have to do that to compete with Facebook, but there are certain kinds of things that I would like to have more clarity to replace. I have friends that put out magazines for money that have not officially been told that yet.

Leo: That was the assumption, which was that they were going to get rid of the Newstand, which was kind of lame, which was a folder that isn't a folder that holds publications. That's going to go away. This news doesn't replace that. This is something else.

Harry: What you want is the magazine that used to be in that newsstand folder just to be in the desktop.

Leo: Are you saying that Apple, Merlin, hasn't told anybody?

Merlin: I can't say for sure. Actually, this podcast I do with Jim Dowripple, which will come out this week's episode. He does something for Loop insight on Yes Magazine, and according to him he hasn't received any kind of notification from Apple about that. It's just I don't know. There's times when Apple comes up with stuff and you kind of hope, sometimes it feels like a gamble for any company. This is true for Google, but especially with Apple you really hope that they're going to see it through to completion. As they say put that whip behind that arrow. In the case of that music app, that smelled more like ping to me. Drake is going to send me lyrics in the app where I listen to REM? The problem with stuff like iTunes is too much junk in one place. This feels like a different way of organizing that junk around beats plus something. They did not clarify the iTunes match thing. I think you still have to have a separate iTunes match account. It was muddled.

Leo: Dylan, you were going to say something?

Dylan: Yeah. iTunes is not going away either. They weren't clear about that.

Leo: Is Match going away? Match continues.

Dylan: Yeah, I don't know. It feels to me like they had a checklist of things. We need lyrics, we need curation, and we need this and that. They shook it up.

Leo: The problem is, I don't see any friction. I don't know if there's friction to switch from Spotify. I'm a Spotify and Google Music subscriber.

Harry: I jump around all the time.

Leo: That's not a hard thing to do, right? Because they're going to give people a free three months, it's the same price. Ten bucks a month. I presume, the same 30 million songs that everybody else has. The selling point is it's Apple.

Harry: The big question is, maybe they have plans for something that is newer and more interesting and more of a great leap forward, which is Apple music 2.0. Maybe the first step is to get it onto the devices and then do something cool and interesting. Of course Apple and other companies all the time deliver something half-baked and then deliver something more impressive.

Leo: Yeah.

Merlin: That's another part of this that feels like a sleeping giant. I know this is true in extent with Google, it's certainly true with Amazon, there was that number that came out in the last year or so about how many active credit cards Apple has on file. How many people are comfortable buying stuff with Apple. It's a super interesting metric to me that there are so many people OK with buying stuff with Apple and ideally they want to find a way to run that card more often. I'm kind of surprised. To me, the big hit would be eventually getting something where developers can put stuff on an Apple TV, because then you can buy $1000 worth of apps in a month. You only spend $10 a month on streaming. That sounds a little capped out to me.

Leo: I have a product that looks a little bit like this kind of Apple TV. It's called the Android TV, the Envidious Shield TV. It has an App store, it has games, it works great with Google Music (which I am a subscriber of) the nice thing about Google Music, like Apple Music, whatever I bought including Beatles Music is on it. Plus the 30 million songs I don't own. It plays through my TV. I could see an Apple TV being great. I think Apple has got trouble if the only thing Apple can say is "But it's Apple." They have to offer something of value beyond what's out there. It feels like Apple is merely saying, "But it's Apple." The other thing, you bring this up with the new news program, is they've definitely said this on stage, "We're Apple, and unlike those other guys, protect your privacy." That's a question mark. How can you, for instance, on Google Plus if in fact as Craig Federigi said, Apple News is anonymous, not associated with your Apple ID, not linked to other Apple services, not shared with third parties, you're in control there's some negatives to that. My iPad won't know what I read on my iPhone because it's not shared. It says it gets smarter as you use it, but only that one App will get smarter. If I re-install or use a different device it won't know because it's not tied to my Apple ID. There's an advantage that Google has, there's an advantage other companies have to not saying, "don't worry, none of this is connected." Connected is sometime what consumers want. Dylan, do you agree?

Dylan: I think connected is usually what most consumers always want. There's a tiny number who are concerned about privacy. When you come down to it, if it costs anything, most people would rather give up their privacy rather than anything...

Leo: Let's make it free. You can have anything you want. I love Google Now. I don't mind giving whatever it is I'm giving up to Google, because it's valuable information. The aggregation is valuable.

Dylan: That's not to say we shouldn't be concerned. There are absolutely legitimate reasons to be concerned about privacy. Most consumers don't agree yet. Most consumers haven't experienced anything that would lead them to feel like losing their privacy was anything bad. It's like the Vaccine argument, right? Nobody around me is getting measles, so I don't need the vaccine.

Patrick: A couple weeks ago, the news bubbled up about a story. Annenberg School for communications, which is a University of PA school. They did a study. Americans have given up on the concept of privacy.

Leo: Americans want privacy, but they've given up.

Harry: They say they want it, which is not the same as taking actions to preserve it.

Dylan: As long as it's convenient and free, they're happy to preserve it.

Leo: I have to say, our audience is outspoken in that. Privacy advocates tend to be very loud, so people get the impression that the American public doesn't care. I think the American public does care, but look, I go into a Target Store they know exactly what I'm going to buy and they know exactly what coupons to feed me. There is no advertising privacy. This is again from this incredible post from Thomas Bechtel. He quotes Tim Cook, talking about other companies. "Everything they can learn about you and monetize it, we think that's wrong, say's Apple. It's not the kind of company Apple wants to be. We don't want your data." At that very same event, they launched three new services. Apple Wallet, Apple Music, and Apple news, all featuring individual targeting, tracking, and tailoring, integrated directly into iAds. He says, I call shenanigans. They're doing what Google does and what everybody does.

Harry: Google should not be available on the iPhone if it's really as disastrous as they say.

Leo: I think Apple is working hard towards that. The problem is that customers want it!

Harry: I don't think you can look at what Tim Cook is saying outside of the context of Apple having this archrival called Google whose business is making tools better by storing your data and using it and monetizing on that by selling advertisements.

Leo: Nobody is denying that the iPhone sells very well, and I would bet that a lot of people who buy the iPhone are aware of the promise, whether it's the reality or not, that Apple is going to protect their privacy, and that's certainly the reason they choose it, right?

Patrick: But what's also interesting about that study, there's a good study of it up on C Net, Americans are resigned to giving up their privacy. In the survey, they found out 65% of Americans believe the mere mention of a privacy policy meant that your privacy was protected, or that Expedia and Orbit are legally required to give you the lowest possible price when you're searching for a flight. It's a really good write up.

Leo: When I was a kid, I remember we'd say they can't say it on an ad if it's not true! Remember that? Did you ever think that as a kid? The government wouldn't let them say it if it's not true. It's kind of like that.

Patrick: I remember being ten and ordering something, mail order, it was an out and out lie. It was the beginning of that, and having a publisher change a review I wrote for a very first printed review in a guitar magazine, they made it a glowing endorsement of one of the biggest pieces of crap I've ever seen in my entire life.

Leo: You panned it, and he changed it?

Patrick: He changed it, completely. I never wrote for the magazine again, and I've never not had full editorial control.

Leo: You're eyes were opened.

Patrick: I realized that everything I ever read in that magazine had been a complete fabrication for the last 8 years of my life, which was also heart breaking.

Leo: It's tough when you grow up and you realize the world is crap. It's not. It's a wonderful place. Yeah. Everything is so great.

Dylan: It's a wonderful life, Leo.

Leo: It is. We love it. I feel like, I know I'm going to get e-mail, why are you so hard on Apple? Are we being hard on Apple? Are we asking Apple to be straightforward? I do see problems ahead. This is very dangerous territory. Merlin, you're an Apple fanatic.

Merlin: Am I?

Leo: You seem like you're a little negative. Is Apple stumbling?

Merlin: No. I'm just very critical of stuff I love. You'll notice how many things I don't have a comment about.

Leo: I expect more of Apple.

Merlin: I only get mad at stuff I expect to get better. I really believe that... I guess I'm a little less skeptical or cynical of Tim Cook's Apple. I really think he does want to do the right thing. I think the problem is that we as consumers, you hear those numbers about how jobs are created. How many people are applying trying to get new jobs? There's a certain point of fatigue that people reach in the down economy where they're not even trying to get a job anymore. I think that's kind of where we are at the moment with privacy. It feels completely out of people's control. I don't know whom you blame for that, but if you start reading about Security every day, you start to realize what all is out there. Maybe you can't control it all. Absolutely. I'm glad somebody is out there showing there is a value proposition to be made for taking a stand on this. I use lots of Google stuff, and I like lots of Google stuff. I'm not a Google tin foil hat guy, because they deliver a lot of value for what I perceive them taking away. I think what drives people nuts is when there's opacity to these processes and even people who try to bone up and do the right thing, it's difficult. It's difficult to have two-factor authentication of everything. It's difficult to enter a military grade password using an Apple 4 way dingus on an Apple TV. I would love to have seen Steve Jobs live long enough to enter a three trillion year password using one of those things. I think the trouble is.. not to blame the media, part of this is in the way it's presented. Cyber security and cyber threats and cyber problems. No. This is just our life now. There has to be more sanity brought to what we can all do on this together. How much of the stuff that happens is social engineering? What company are you going to blame for that? I guess there's still so much we could all do better. I'd like to see a company... I feel like Apple does care about that, and they wouldn't be saying it unless they thought they were doing it better. They have to find a way to differentiate themselves. I'm not an Apple fanatic. Apple is the stuff I use so I have to be cynical about it sometimes. I don't know. I hope we all get to a place where we can evolve and adapt beyond the way we've done stuff for 50 years. It's time for some new thinking about stuff like name password pairs as the way we deal with life. Anyway, I hope that's a conversation... I would hate to get to the point where we all just throw our hands up in the air and say nobody cares anymore, because I care. Even if I can't be perfect, I still care. I hope that the generation younger than us will care too. They're the ones that matter. We're all old. Nobody cares what we think. I hope they care, and I hope they hold people to a higher standard of taking care of us.

Leo: Until they get beat down like we are, and they'll give up too.

Merlin: Enjoy that confidence while you're young, guys. Enjoy it. Be able to stand and sit without making a noise, move your bowels in a normal way. Enjoy that while you can. It's good. Drink a lot of water and sleep while you can. You're going to be dead someday.

Leo: Let me wrap this up with two questions related. One is, how important is it to Apple that Apple music succeeds? Is it in fact going to be enough to replace iTunes sales which are clearly declining? And, on the other side, how important to the music industry is it, and what does the music industry do? Merlin, you gave us an article from Pitchfork that shows how little bands make, and we know this from Pandora and Spotify.

Merlin: How comically low it is. It's actually funny how little it is.

Patrick: Part of that is not necessarily, in many cases, the fault of Spotify or Pandora. The labels take a big chunk of everything.

Leo: Music is not in good shape. You think? I hate to say the music industry. If you're an artist...

Dylan: Who cares about the Industry?

Leo: It's about artists.

Dylan: If you're an artist, you may have a hard time making money the traditional music industry ways, but isn't it true that you can reach a bigger audience than ever before if you want to go on YouTube? Aren't there more ways to build a fan base and to build a following than ever before? You can't make money by selling CDs, but maybe you can make money by...

Patrick: Nobody ever made money in CDs. There was a small group of people that made a lot of money off CDs, it's always been a small group. Most artists, even the huge artists, make their money off the tours and the merchandise from the tours. That hasn't changed that much.

Leo: We want artists to succeed. We want young people coming up as musicians, as performers, to be able to make a living.

Patrick: Yes, it would be nice.

Leo: It sounds like Dylan, you're saying the good news is that is doable. You just can't do it the old way.

Dylan: Easy for me to say. I'm not trying to make a living as an artist of any kind. It does seem like there are some possibilities for making a living as a musician, if you're willing to look outside the "I need to get a big contract."

Leo: Platinum artists, probably not.

Patrick: But this situation hasn't changed much in the last 30 years. I remember interviewing people where all they wanted to be, I'm looking for a big record deal. You need to talk to people with "big record deals." They're not making money off the records.

Dylan: In one way, Patrick, I think it has changed, which is you can build a following in Twitter, YouTube, or what have you. Look at Amanda Palmer, look at Zoey Keating. There are a lot of artists out there who... they're not huge, they're not getting rich off their music, but they're supporting themselves.

Leo: Thanks to Patrion, thanks to YouTube, there are ways to do this.

Patrick: That's what I was going to say. Nobody is getting rich off YouTube. Patrion has been amazing. Patrion is supporting TekThing and all these other people doing it. I'm not saying there's not a thousand other ways. What I find ironic is that there's still people who want a record deal, even when they know because everything is so public on the Internet now, that they're probably not going to make any money and get screwed by the record label. I can remember... I have issues with record companies because there's nothing more unpleasant in the world than being in a meeting with a pissed off PR person for a record company, at least when the Record companies were making money hand over fist. They were nasty, they were vicious, they were manipulative in the way they handled things. You won't have access to this artist if you don't put this artist on the cover of your magazine this month.

Leo: Companies in power tend to do stuff like that.

Patrick: They were making money that the artists weren't seeing! It's always been like that. I think it's disingenuous for people to blame Spotify for them not making money when the record companies cash in larger checks and are just not giving them a cut. That's a contract problem. That's an Industry problem, but yes. There are so many better ways to make music.

Leo: Question two was music Industry. All are in the affirmative that there's a future going forward, it's just not going to be the way the Record labels wanted it to be, or maybe even Spotify, Apple Music, and Pandora want it to be. Artists do have an opportunity if they know how to work the system properly, right?

Harry: When all is said and done, I don't think it's all that essential to Apple that Apple Music do well. For Spotify, Spotify definitely has to figure that out, because if it doesn't have that it has very little. Apple, music was great to get people to buy iPods in the first place, the great thing about the iPhone now is that it's a great platform for all these third party music services. I'm still buying Apple's hardware. Apple is never going to be all that dependent from revenue for selling music.

Leo: You could make the case that it's more important for the Apple Watch to do well than the Apple Music to do well.

Harry: Totally. They have to be an important device on your wrist. That is really important to them.

Leo: They need a successor to the iPhone at some point.

Harry: If Apple Music does well, great. If Apple music is something of a disappointment, I don't think Tim Cook loses that much sleep.

Leo: If revenue from iTunes went away, it's not so much money that it's going to hurt them.

Patrick: iTunes is 10 billion out of 182 billion earnings for Apple in 2014.

Leo: It's nice to be in that position. It's really the iPhone. It's all about the iPhone. But they need a successor to that. I think the professional iPad might be something to look at. I think the Apple Watch has some potential. Merlin, final word on the Apple event? Anything else to say? Are you a fan of Drake?

Merlin: Huge fan. I'm just happy that he knows so many famous people. I agree with you guys. I don't know anything about business. I don't see how this needs to happen for Apple. It sounds like another one of those things where somebody in the peanut gallery is screaming what Apple has to do to be successful. Look at what they've done well with. What they've done well with is finding a way to take something, start with something that everybody thought was a lost cause, find a way to make it beautiful, sexy, and costly, find the people who want that, and then give them a way to buy huge amounts of more stuff with that. The thing is, having a commodity music service where you're competing on price does not feel like Apple to me. I think that's why this feels like an out of left field thing. They were part of the undoing of the way that the music industry worked. That's probably harming them a little bit too. Truth is, they don't have to sell iPods. They're selling iPhones and they want you buying apps. I would love to be back some time to talk about the Apple TV, because I think that's a really interesting place the future is headed. Especially when that becomes the hub for all your home stuff.

Patrick: I really wanted to see something from Apple TV. I was so disappointed that there was no Apple TV.

Leo: There's no reason we have to drop it. Let's come back and talk about it. There are so many things to talk about. This is going to be the first 18-hour TWiT, and I'm so glad. The audience is going, "Oh My god." We have the most uncomfortable chairs we've ever sat in. Merlin Mann is here, it's so great to have you back. What do you want to plug?

Merlin: OK. To make people go and do a thing?

Leo: Yeah. Make them go and do a thing.

Merlin: I don't like plugging. I've got two things I'd like people to go and check out. There's a show I mentioned with Jim Deripple called the Deripple report. You can get that at Insight.com/the delripple report.

Leo: So it's you and Jim? That's got to be great. You talk for half an hour, and he goes, "Yep." Is that basically how it goes?

Merlin: You don't need to listen. That's it. That's the whole thing. The other show I'm really excited about on Relay.FM is a show called reconcilable differences that's me and John Syracusa. I'm very excited about that. You can see that on relay.fm/rd. I'm really proud of both of those. I still do Back To Work with Dan. I do lots of stuff. I'm very happy to be here. It's nice that you've...

Leo: We love Merlin Mann. We're so thrilled to have you.

Merlin: I'm going to get a better camera next time.

Leo: You look like you might be one of the two guys who escaped from prison last week, but other than that...

Merlin: I could put the blue light on.

Leo: Much better. OK. Harry McCracken, the Teknologizer is here. You can read is works at fastcompany.com. Follow Harry and Marie on Instagram. I love your pictures. Wild stuff. Were you at the computer history museum? I saw a lot of old stuff.

Harry: My feed is probably half stuff about old technology, and when radio shack is out of business, I'm going to be in trouble because I keep going into radio shack and instagramming the going out of business sales.

Leo: I love it. What is it on Instagram? Is it Technologizer?

Harry: It's Technologizer.

Leo: I keep up with my friends basically on Instagram. That's the only way I know anything is going on.

Harry: I put photos of you on Instagram. We'll put you on your Segway as soon as the show is over.

Leo: That should be fun. I rode in on the Segway. My buddy, Patrick Norton, is here. You've got to watch the last episode of the new Screensavers. So much fun. And of course, tekthing.com.

Patrick: 2100 dollars less expensive than techthing.com.

Leo: That makes a big difference, but with that patrion money rolling in, you and Snubs might be able to afford that someday.

Patrick: I just want to make a living. Feed my children, get health insurance.

Leo: I just want to make a living. That's all he asks, folks. Brand new to the show, and I'm thrilled to have him, Dylan Tweney. Great to have you from venturebeat.com. Editor at large is the best title you could have. That means you can do anything you want, right?

Dylan: Yeah. I don't have to go to the office anymore. I can go down to Las Vegas and file 10,000 words stream of consciousness. So watch out.

Leo: I was visiting a friend of Dvorak's, Will Hurst, when he was Editor in Chief of the Examiner, and he was responsible for getting Hunter S. Thompson to file. I'll never forget listening to one half of a phone conversation where Will is going, "Hunter! Listen to me. We put the paper to bed in half an hour. Where did you go?" Anyway. Must have been fun working with that fellow, kind of like working with Keith Oberman. More to come in just a second. Let's talk TV. Apple TV. Merlin, you and Jim did a whole show on TV.

Merlin: Actually we did. We talked about cord cutting. A lot of it was blue skies solutioneering.

Leo: You're the king.

Merlin: Basically, I...

Leo: Save it. Don't start. This is good stuff, but I've got to do an ad. Look at that, he froze. You take orders well, Mr. Mann.

Merlin: Thank you!

Leo: Out show brought to you by Audible.com! We love Audible. There's no reason to even do the ad. We know. You love it. Just get it, OK? We actually have two books for you. audible.com/twit2 is the largest and best audio bookstore in the world. 180,000 titles. Now, summer time is coming. Your summer time reading is so much better. You're lying on the beach not trying to read between the sand grains and the sun. You could just listen and relax. On the plane, I got a big flight coming up in a couple of weeks, I'm loading up on the Audible books. What I do is I... There's Neil Degrasse Tyson. What I do is I alternate between fiction and non-fiction. Back and forth, back and forth, so I get a little bit of escape, a little science fiction, got the new Neil Stevenson. You know. You and I are Neil Stevenson fans. You read the Baroque Cycle.

Patrick: I just re-read it.

Leo: What? Holy cow. I have it on Audible, but I don't know if I'm going to be able to get through it here. Season of the Witch.

Patrick: Season of the Witch. Just looked it up.

Leo: Enchantment, terror, and deliverance in the city of David Talbot. It's San Francisco in the late 60's/ early 70's. Do you know of it? That's my next book.

Patrick: Is this Salon David Talbot?

Leo: Yeah. We interviewed Ashley Vance last week on triangulation about his new book, Elon Musk: Tesla, Space X, and the Quest for a fantastic future. Man, there's some great stories in there, including the day he wrecked his McLaren.

Harry: Elon or Ashley?

Leo: Elon. I don't think Ashley has a McLaren. So non-fiction is doing great, but there's great fiction too. The science fiction selection here is phenomenal. Audible always has great recommendations. One thing that's cool about people who love Audible, when they get together, they always talk. Jurassic Park. Before you see the movie, re-listen to the novel. I'm really excited about the new movie. But all the Michael Crighton novels are here. Scott Brick does a great job. This is a re-record for the 25th anniversary of Jurassic Park. Audible.com. Here's how you get two books. I've given you a few. Audible.com/twit2. You're signing up for the Platinum Plan. That's the two books a month plan. It includes the daily digest of the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal, and you pay nothing for the first 30 days. Cancel anytime in those first 30 days, keep those books forever. You won't want to cancel. I am a fanatic. I just got the Amazon Echo... that little tube that you talk to. You can now say, "Hey Echo. Read me." It will read to you from your Audible collection, which is amazing. audible.com/twit2. We thank them for their support of This Week in Tech. Merlin, we used to talk about this when the Apple TV first came out on MacBreak weekly when you were there, that they will put an App store on the Apple TV?

Merlin: It sounds like one of my predictions.

Leo: From 8 years ago, or whatever?

Merlin: My track record is outstanding.

Leo: We're still waiting for that Beatles iPod. What was that...

Merlin: The Yellow Submarine iPod?

Leo: Yeah. Still waiting for that now.

Merlin: I don't think this is anything... I'm not the first person to say any of this stuff. It's just that it's been so long since the Apple TV has been updated. It's really...

Leo: People have moved on. They've gone to Roku. They've gone to other platforms.

Merlin: The Amazon Fire TV really did fly. The thing is, when I talk to my friends who have just an Apple TV that sounds really crazy. How could there be a performance difference? The fact that it wakes the second you hit it. It's crazy. Anyway. All that aside. I feel like there's a big opportunity out there for some kind of device. I sometimes feel like our biggest constraint of mind is that we call it an Apple TV. We came to know this little puck as a way to buy things in the iTunes store. That's something different is going to happen with that. Maybe it gets mixed in with a router. Who knows what it could be? It's been a while since I've done a really dumb prediction on a TWiT show. My dumb prediction is going to be that they're going to have an amazing pivot in the next two years where they're a company that has typically said we'll take it in the shorts on content in order to make it up in hardware. There's a part of me that wonders if they'll take it in the shorts on hardware in order to make it up on content when it comes to things like movies and apps. I would love to see a future in two years where you could walk into a Walgreens and pick up whatever replaces the Apple TV, take it with you anywhere, have a service that's portable. Marriott, for example, just announced this service where you can get Netflix inside your room. If they really are going to move this stuff into the cloud, the Apple TV becomes the way it gets from the tube onto your TV. That App store becomes so important in that scenario. That said, having a device where you can do Home Kit stuff would be giant. It seems like the most obvious thing in the world. If one or two of those things are what was planned or what is being planned for the Apple TV, I'm not surprised that it's taking a while. That's a whole lot of stuff in a company that has not done great with services in the past.

Leo: They dropped a 69, which was I think because they were going to clear it out.

Merlin: So we all thought, yeah.

Harry: They might have thought they were about to announce a tune but they had to delay it a little bit.

Leo: That's all right. They could do it next month.

Dylan: A couple weeks ago, Les Moonba, the head of VS was talking about how yes we are talking to Apple. He was at the code conference.

Leo: He said he was excited.

Dylan: He said basically, it's about money right now. They're just negotiating about how much they get paid is what it sounded like.

Leo: It is the bottom line, isn't it? That's Les's only job is to make sure the money is there.

Dylan: How many billions are you going to give us?

Leo: Speaking of which, I'm stunned by what you just told us, Merlin, which is Marriott, which makes a ton of money on in room entertainment, mostly porno is going to let you watch your Netflix. They must have been forced to do that. There's no way. Why would I ever rent a twenty-dollar movie on the Marriott?

Patrick: Maybe the revenues from the movies are disappearing because of the Internet and the Hotel rooms, so they're trying to figure out a way to make people more loyal to the brand.

Merlin: Have you read any of the articles about how many hotels are not doing mini bars in their rooms anymore?

Leo: Why is that?

Merlin: I've read a couple things about it. I don't remember where I read a big piece on this. I've been surprised that more and more stuff...

Leo: You just get an empty refrigerator. It's not even turned on.

Harry: You don't use the landline in the hotel room any more. I hardly turn on the TV at all.

Merlin: Somebody wrote this comprehensive history of the mini bar and what has happened to it over the years.

Leo: That I want to read. It must have been on Medium.

Merlin: Yeah, you've certainly done the thing where you go do I want this and you move it around and you get charged. Basically, the idea is that it's not nearly as profitable as you would guess. It takes a lot of resources. Hotels are pretty under-resourced in a lot of ways. It's very costly to keep up. They lose a lot of money on it, they end up having to give a lot of money back on refunds and stuff like that. I guess what I'm wondering is, it seems like selling movies in a room would be pure profit, but maybe the margins on that aren't great.

Patrick: The systems were always really clunky I did a quick search. 2010 LA Times article talking about how Hotel Revenue from phone calls and in room movies was drying up.

Leo: Here's the Economist. Mini Bar Blues writes the Economist. Unfortunately I can't read it because I have to see an ad from Rolex first. If you're reading The Economist you can obviously afford a fine watch. Hotel Mini-Bar, the last refuge of many a tired Hotel business traveler is in its twilight years.

Harry: Hotels aren't even charging for wifi nearly as much as they used to. A lot of the time, that's just been rolled into the cost of the room.

Merlin: Increasingly, that's going to be table stakes, which seems improbable. It doesn't seem that long ago, it was 30 dollars a day for one device to connect. It seems like two years ago to me.

Leo: As Beef in our chat room says, it's pretty sad when a company can't make a profit off a ten-dollar bag of peanuts. Or a $25 day of wifi. Obviously there's overhead I didn't understand.

Patrick: It's funny. This LA times article revenue collected by US hotels from phone calls dropped to an average of $178 per room in 2009 from $1252 in 1999. An 86% drop.

Leo: Part of the problem is theft. Customers drink the booze in little bottles and replace it with water. Who knew?

Merlin: So then what they did was, I remember when they started doing this as a drinker. They started making it so that if you even moved the thing it would charge you. If you don't check your bill, people don't check the bill. There would be all this stuff on there and they would have to do all these charges. Once again, there is a reason I'm not in the corner office. It feels like the Industry, there's always ways of trying to make a buck, but more and more, as an occasional traveler, it feels like they're trying to save money. If there's not a clear winner and a way to make a profit, it's more about minimizing costs. Have you noticed, not to sound like Jerry Seinfeld, what's the deal with garbage cans? Is it just me, or is there like one tiny garbage can for the entire room?

Leo: There is. That's all.

Merlin: There must be a reason. There's an economic reason for that. They want to clean that room and flip it around as soon as possible, because that means fewer staff. I don't think hotels do as well as it seems. I don't know how this became about hotels.

Harry: They're looking at replacing the housekeeping staff with robots. Literally.

Leo: There's a hotel in Silicon Valley where the robot comes and brings you your toothbrush.

Patrick: The smaller hotels in Vegas...

Leo: That doesn't seem like a cost saving, by the way.

Patrick: It's funny though. For the larger hotels it's a big deal. For the smaller hotels in Vegas, it turns out the people they brought in are independent contractors, and if they step into your room and give you towels, they make three dollars. If they're not allowed in the room, they make nothing. There's a person watching and cuing them to see which room they go into. In the case of the larger hotels in Vegas, it'll go from 80% occupancy during CES and maybe spend 80% of its time at 20% occupancy keeping Staff all night for that is a nightmare. In that case, robots would be less expensive. Robots don't expect retirement; they don't have health insurance policies. The tiny garbage cans is about minimizing the amount they pay. I've walked into a hotel room where somebody emptied the entire back of their truck into the garbage can.

Leo: That's why you would want garbage cans, to encourage people to take the trash and put it in a garbage can. If you don't give me enough garbage cans, I'm going to leave it on the floor.

Merlin: I had the same thought. We have a park near our house. One day I ran into the inscrutable woman who takes care of the park. I said, "Inscrutable woman, why do we not have more garbage cans in the park? It seems to me that all the high school kids who are monsters throw all their trash and sweet things on the ground, wouldn't it be a nice thing for the park if we had more garbage cans? People can put their garbage in them. She goes, No. We just empty those. There's a reason I'm not on city council.

Leo: I'm just thinking. Crazy.

Dylan: I think I missed a step here. What is Apple doing to disrupt the hotel industry?

Leo: Dylan, you're new here. Let me explain.

Merlin: Johnny Ive in a white room. We have taken everything you love about your home trashcan.

Leo: The simplest hotel room we've ever made. The problem with this show in general is that we all are massively suffering from ADD, and we haven't taken our meds, so you never know where we're going to go. Merlin, you invented the Rat Hole.

Merlin: That was me.

Leo: Here he goes. The Rat Hole theme, ladies and gentlemen. Everybody.

Merlin: Rat Hole!

Leo: I have a recording of that somewhere. Thank you, Merlin. It wouldn't be the same without you.

All right, this is another rat-hole, but I think an interesting one. The market – I think, it's the market has slowly been eating away at Twitter, first a foot, then a thigh, then another hand. They've scapegoated every executive, finally got to the head office. The CEO, Dick Costolo, who's well beloved – I think you probably know him, Merlin. A funny guy, talented.

Merlin: Everybody seems to like him except for Wall Street.

Leo: Wall Street didn't like him and bye, bye Dick Costolo. He's no longer going to be the CEO. Jack Dorsey's coming back. Jack's like a bad penny, you cannot get rid of him, until they find another CEO, right or wrong?

Harry: Steve Jobs was the interim CEO at Apple for like several years, if I remember correctly.

Leo: Jack was interim CEO before, remember he was going back and forth between his start-up Square and – like in one day, he'd do half a day at Square, half a day at Twitter and -

Harry: They're in buildings right next to each other on Market Street.

Dylan: I think he's still doing that. He's really taking this being like Steve Jobs thing really way [1:00:55.7?].

Leo: So what -

Dylan: Except for the beard. Steve would have never have let his beard grow that long.

Leo: Yes, Jack. The beard, I hadn't seen the beard until this news came out.

Harry: Did you see his mom complaining about the beard on Twitter? She went on Twitter and said she didn't like it because he has such a nice face.

Leo: Aw, he has such a nice punim. I have a feeling there probably, and I'm just going to check, is a Jack Dorsey's beard account on Twitter right now. You probably know all the players, Merlin. I think you were a very early adopter and very tight with the Twitter group.

Merlin: I'm so deeply out of the loop. I did a talk at Twitter about meetings you can find somewhere on the internet, probably about two or three years ago, and I remember going in there and I was going, "Oh, yes, this is supposed to be really crazy, really difficult. You're growing." Yes, in January we had 150 people and then in that fall, they had 300 people. Now today, how many – you guys follow this, how much do they have? How many people do they have today?

Leo: I don't know. At Twitter? You think it's smaller than it was?

Merlin: Oh no.

Harry: I work in the same building as Twitter and the building is just vast numbers of Twitter people. There were 30 people for an amazingly long time.

Leo: So I don't feel like Dick did anything wrong. In fact, to me, he was of all the CEOs the one who was most interactive with its users, its most forthright. He was the guy who wrote the memo that said, "We screwed up. We're going to do better," when harassment became a problem thanks to Robin Williams' daughter who was basically chased from Twitter. He said, "That's our fault and we're going to fix it." I admired him for that. Wall Street's problem is that Twitter's not growing as fast as it used to.

Harry: They want it to be Facebook.

Dylan: And it's not making money. It's losing money. I mean, that's the real issue. Twitter's actually growing pretty quickly and it's doing – you know, in terms of shared metrics, it's not bad for being a distant number two to Facebook. But in terms of revenue, I mean, the question is, like, they could be doing – they could be making so much more money. They could be doing such a better job of engaging people and keeping them sticking around. I think Wall Street is just like, you know, "We've had too many lackluster quarters and we've had enough."

Leo: By the way, here's the Jack Dorsey's beard account, it really does exist. But it's funny, because it feels like Twitter has kind of cracked the monetization nut. They've got these promoted accounts. They've got – I see an ad now every time I look at Twitter on the web. I see – this is a New York Times promoted tweet, so that's an ad. Why can't they monetize? They seem like they have a very – kind of a great monetization strategy.

Harry: They can't monetize as well as they would if you measured their users in billions rather than hundreds of millions.

Leo: I see, they're just not big enough. Well, even Instagram is bigger, right? Go ahead, Dylan.

Dylan: Yes, I think that's it. I mean, they're almost overdoing it in promoted tweets. I see way too many in my stream. I think the issue they have is one with engagement and just getting people to stick around, and come back. You know, Chris Sacca, who's one of their big shareholders/investors from early on had this gigantic, 10 thousand-word essay this week about all the things Twitter could do better. It's way too long but his point is that they could do much better at engagement and at sort of building around events, right? So if you're watching the Warriors play the Calves in the NBA finals – like, if you want to actually do that right now, you'd have to figure out which hashtags to follow. You have to like – there's a handful of them, there's some key accounts you have to follow. You have to set it all up and kind of be a power user to actually make use of what's going on on Twitter around a sporting event, right?

So they could way easily put together these channels where people could just be like, "Hey, the playoffs are on tonight. Let me follow this channel on Twitter while I'm watching the game and it'll enrich the experience." They just haven't done a lot of that kind of thing to bring people in and get them engaged who are not power users like all of us talking right here, right?

Leo: You know, it's funny. I was talking today on the radio show about when you have a kid, you should do a Google search on the proposed name to make sure you get a unique enough name. You should probably create a Gmail account in that new name, a website in that new name and then I wondered, "Well, should you get that kid's Twitter handle just proactively?" Because will Twitter be around in 10, 20 years? I don't think so. I don't feel like it will, will it? Facebook will. Google will.

Jason: I don't know about that. Google will.

Leo: Will Twitter?

[crosstalk]

Leo: By Google.

Harry: By Google, which doesn't mean they'll shut it down, but -

Leo: It seems like that would be a bad thing. If you're a fan of Twitter -

Harry: But it's a sign that people don't see Twitter as something that's going to just grow and grow, and thrive and thrive indefinitely.

Patrick: Well, there's a lot of things I love about Twitter. It's a great way to interact with the audience. It's an interesting way to interact with friends. It has never generated click-throughs in any significant way.

Leo: That's true, when you put a link or show up on Twitter, no value. Interesting.

Patrick: No.

Leo: Is that because of a lack of engagement?

Patrick: It's partially once you start following a bunch of people, things start flying by so fast and also, a lot of Twitter is when you build a 140 cap into everything, you know, you tend to have the world's shortest attention span. Why would you click the link to get the article if somebody's done an incredibly clever, 140-character spiel that encapsulates the rest of a 3000-word screed? It's a peculiar environment to try to make – you know, to use as a promotional tool or a tool to drive use.

Leo: That's a structural problem, though. What are you going to do that can fix that? I mean, you're kind of tied to 140 characters.

Patrick: Which brings us back to, you know, the idea of them being bought and integrated into something else but hopefully not becoming the next Orkut.

Leo: Or the next Google+.

Dylan: They kind of feel like plumbing, to me. To me, Twitter is like sort of not sexy but very essential. It's sort of like, almost the plumbing of the social era of the internet and in that way, I think it may be around for a long time if – you know, if Twitter plays it right, either by itself or by part of another company.

Leo: That's what we used to say. When they first started, it was the internet's dial tone almost. It was the carrier that carried the conversations on the internet and I have to say, I still to this day – if somebody dies, if there's a story breaking, I go to Twitter, weirdly enough. Maybe that's just because it's a habit, but I go right to Twitter. That's where the conversation -

Dylan: That's good for breaking news, outstanding for that.

Leo: Now, you don't stay there, you don't – you know. But if you want to know what's going on, when Ferguson was hot, Twitter was where you would find out about it, probably better than CNN. In fact, for a long time, CNN would just report Twitter until they got anything better, till AP had it.

Well, that would be sad. I don't know why I so closely associate you with Twitter, Merlin, but I do.

Merlin: Well, I was a – well, I originally was a very early adopter. I was one of the very, very first users and then I demanded they take me – back then, it was just texts and SMS. I was getting SMSs at five in the morning about somebody's great run and I was like, "Ah! Get me out of this!" Back then, it was just torture. But no, I've enjoyed it a lot. I've met a lot of really good friends through it. I don't have anything really to offer here except the most obvious kinds of observations, which is, you know, what makes Twitter great is all the stuff that you can easily corrupt by trying to – I don't want to say by trying to make money with it, but there's so many things where even just the teeniest bit of corruption about the simplicity of Twitter totally screws up huge aspects of why people like it.

I mean, I think the thing that has made Twitter, Twitter, are just – the fact, the rules are simple. Right? You get 140 characters and of course, that's changed now. There's cards and different stuff in and out of band that add more flexibility but the rules are still pretty simple. You follow who you want, they follow you if they want, there's 140 characters and you get to decide how much you want to be involved in any aspect of it. Like, why is Twitter different from email? Because you don't really have to read Twitter in the same way you have to read email and like you say, for us, it's like – you know, if we have the slightest inkling of whether there might be an earthquake, that'll be on SFGate in two hours after some celebrity bikini story. But if I want to find out if there's an earthquake, I'll go straight to Twitter.

I guess all I'm saying is, you know, over time, I think they've actually done a pretty good job of not screwing that up in the thousand ways they could have screwed it up. That makes it sound like I'm damning them with faint praise. I'm really happy. The reason I'm still there – the reason my friends are still there is it has not been corrupted in a super weird way. But you know, like you say, when you get these kind of weird mystery meet things like, you know, "Did I really follow that person? Why is this here? What does this mean?" I don't know what the answer is. I have to say, as I sit here, I don't understand why Google hasn't bought them three times over. It just seems like the most obvious fit in the world. So many of the folks at Twitter are Google alumni and I guess I'm just blown away that hasn't happened yet. I'm surprised they made it this long, you know?

Leo: Why would Google want them?

Patrick: It's the – remember the thing about the glue and the conversation, holding it together?

Leo: Yes, but what is Google's business? Google's business is organizing all the world's data, that's one of the things they say. They did try to do a social network to get more social signals with Google+. That was a flop.

Harry: And Google Buzz.

Patrick: Orkut.

Harry: Google Wave and many other things.

Leo: So maybe Twitter would add – I mean, they're starting to include Twitter results in the Google search, right?

Harry: I mean, Twitter is, by definition, real time, and I think Google is interested in real time and thinks of itself as not having aced real time yet. That might be appealing to them.

Leo: Okay, well, we've decided. Google, but them.

Patrick: Done.

Leo: Done, that was easy.

Merlin: Next issue!

Leo: Do you still post funny stuff on Twitter, Merlin? @hotdogsladies was the -

Merlin: I guess that's up to other people to decide.

Leo: No, wait. @hotdogsladies is a great account to follow, that's Merlin, because it's just so fun and funny. I ask because Steve Martin, who was posting for a while really funny stuff on Twitter, decided it wasn't worth it.

Merlin: Yes, ditto for Louis CK. Ditto for a lot of people. And you know, it can be – boy, if something happens on the wrong day and you get on some of these sights, it can be really weird. The internet creates a lot of distance between us in a way that on the one hand, it can seem so intimate and in the next minute, it seems so distant and hostile. But that's exactly, again, the reason why I like it. Nobody has to use Twitter the same way. No two people have to use it that way and for folks like me, it really – the constraints of Twitter are what made it interesting, like app.net should have been a giant hit but I don't want to see something with that many characters. I like this, you know?

And if you want to follow people who are doing like, "My commentary, part 7 of 85," it's like, I don't follow that. But if you want to, that works great for some people.

Leo: Mark Andreessen is like that. I mean, he'll number his tweets so you can read them in sequential order.

Merlin: That's – I can't believe that guy was a programmer, that just doesn't even make any sense. God, what an odd person.

Leo: It's so strange.

Merlin: Anyway, you know, that's the beauty part. So I don't know. I hope it sticks around. I hope it stays good. You know, I hope that people can continue making apps for it because I know nobody cares about this tiny percentage of nerds who have been using it for a long time but me and all my friends are really – we talk a lot about things like being able to keep using a third-party app like Twitterific, Tweet Fodder or whatever. Twitter app has gotten a lot better and I do use it a lot.

Leo: I find myself using the website more than I would have expected, not on mobile obviously but -

Merlin: It works well, the quoting thing works. So I don't know. It's been so fun for so long, it's one of those things where it's almost like a DBS where I feel like I've met our user group, something like I met so many people through these kind of things and in a way, it felt very pure in a lot of ways. Yes, sure, you're seeing this certain performance version of a person but that's how I got to know the guys in You Look Nice Today. That's how I've met so many people who have become my really good friends.

Leo: By the way, to answer my own question, you still post very funny stuff on Twitter. I'm just reading through your feed and you're just great.

Merlin: I can nominate many much funnier people to follow, but it is – I stand by the fact that we're all just holding our breath for the day that something comes along that makes it just not fun to use any more and I haven't gotten that yet.

Leo: No, I haven't either actually.

Merlin: Also, I've been fortunate, you know? I'm glad to see them beefing up stuff. You mentioned in the show maybe – you talked about the block list stuff. It's a shame that we have to do that with such a blunt instrument but for some folks out there, it's real important.

Leo: Yes, we've had our share of trolling. You know, it's still – I haven't left. It's still worth it. But what I would like to do is just follow the people you follow.

Merlin: So it's like the opposite, that's good.

Leo: So I get your experience. I want your experience of Twitter because that's really it -

Merlin: I'll come up with a list, five good names to follow by the end of the show.

Leo: Are you at Outside Lands right now?

Merlin: Yes, right there.

Leo: We're going to take a break. When we come back, I do – actually, speaking of that, I wouldn't mind talking about the horror that Reddit has gone through in the last few days and wondering if maybe it's the end for Reddit thanks to the lovely folks of the internet. There's lots more to talk about. We've got a jampacked show and a great team to do it. Here from – Dylan Tweeney is here from Venturebeat, good to have him, editor-at-large from Tech Thing, my buddy, my ol' pal. Mr. Patrick Norton and of course, the technologizer Herry McCracken and Merlin Mann. See, if you were a basketball player, I could do that when you come out. "And Merrrrrrlin Mann!"

Merlin: I'll do that, I'll start playing basketball.

Leo: Yes, why don't you pick that up?

Merlin: Here's a question, when do you guys do your bathroom break?

Leo: Now, everybody.

Merlin: Am I the only one who takes a bathroom break on podcasts? I feel like Clinton Howard here, I'm surrounded by bottles.

Leo: Do you actually formalize that? Do you have to formalize on the shows that you do that are like, "Okay, after an hour, we have to do a bathroom break?"

Merlin: You know, every relationship is different, in a different comfort level. You get a man diaper?

Leo: Now would be a good time, get your astronaut diapers out. It's time for a break and you too, in the studio audience, I won't take offense.

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So as everybody trickles back – that's probably not the right word to use.

Merlin: Language! Wording! Phrasing!

Leo: Phrasing! I feel really bad for Ellen Pao in so many ways. She is just – so now, she's run into a buzz saw. Reddit, which has been on the one hand kind of famous for free speech and yet there are Reddits, subReddits there that are just horrific. They decided to kill three of the worst, some fat-shaming sites and then the trolls basically clobbered Reddit for doing it, putting trolling content all over it. I suppose they'll get tired and move on. I don't know why they're so upset. If you have a subReddit about making fun of people who are fat – speaking as a fat person, that's hurtful. That's shameful. Should it be censored? Did Reddit go too far?

I'm sorry, Patrick. I shouldn't – come on, Patrick, how do you feel about Gamergate while we're at it?

Patrick: No, no. It's – my problem is my belief in the Bill of Rights and the First Amendment often runs face to face into my issue with people being delete expletives. This is a family podcast still, you can't use -

Leo: This is Reddit still. It's not the government censorship. The Bill of Rights, in our chat room, if I want to kick somebody out for what they say, I can do it. It's not against the Bill of Rights.

Patrick: No, no. Free speech says you can be a scumbag as loud as you want, you're just -

Leo: The government can't do anything about it.

Patrick: But I don't have to listen to you and you don't have to be on my forums. You know, it's funny because I've always thought of Reddit as having one of the nicer online audiences, right? It's as if -

Leo: I love Reddit. Is it becoming 4Chan?

Patrick: I don't think it's becoming 4Chan but I think a small group of people can do a lot of damage if they have a lot of time and anger.

Dylan: So you know, these guys who ran this fat-shaming site, they all ran over to some other site that they think is better than Reddit because they promised not to censor anybody for anything at any time and they immediately crashed its servers because it wasn't ready for the demand.

Leo: They were too fat.

Dylan: Then they started like – right? "We've got to raise some money for this site," whatever it's called and they're starting to like, "Come on, send us some Bitcoin." They're all running around going, "Wait, how does Bitcoin work again? How do I get a wallet?"

Leo: That would be the ideal solution, though. If Reddit doesn't want them around, go somewhere else. The internet is a big, fat place and you can go anywhere -

Merlin: "Phrasing!"

Dylan: Well, it turns out it's actually maybe not so easy to run a site like Reddit and not have the servers crash with all the volume. You know, the upvoting works smoothly and having it be there when you want it, so it turns out there is sort of a trade there. There's an exchange, like, "You come to our site and we're going to set up some very minimal but pretty permissive rules and in exchange, you get to use the site. It won't crash and there's not too much advertising. It'll be awesome." Then these people are like, "No! I want to say whatever I want."

Leo: They're babies.

Dylan: "If you don't like that, we're going to say screw you and leave." Fine, you can leave.

Merlin: One thing that makes this challenging in any growing community is, you know, if you ask anybody about what they believe in, everybody's going to say something that sounds really good. You're going to say, "Yes, I believe in free speech," because we do. I think the part of the question becomes – I mean, I'll speak for myself. There was a time, for example, where I decided on a pretty popular site of mine back in the day that I just wasn't going to – I couldn't do the comment thing anymore. People were actually, by and large, fantastic, really great and some of the best commenters in the world came to 43 Folders. It was a great community, we had a forum, but I kind of got to a point where I think a lot of people get to, which is you get kind of damned by your own success in some ways where once a place gets big enough, there's going to be a whole bunch of different people there. You've got whole different scale issues.

Go talk to Matt Howie, talk to anybody who's tried to run a big site and you have fundamentally different problems when you add a couple zeroes to the number of people that are out there. Here's, I think, one problem that's the heart of this. This does not solve the problem but I think it helps to identify the problem. If you've got a site that you and three of your friends write for – let's say you share a Tumblr. There's this sense of what I'm going to call the living room effect where you go, "This is our place. This is our living room and we don't drop a dooce on the couch, we treat this as a place we're going to have respect for." You're welcome.

Leo: Best take on the tragedy of commons ever.

Merlin: You don't even have to put up signs saying, "Please don't pinch a loaf on the couch." We don't even need a sign for that, we just know. The problem is, when you get to a place that has 10 to 20 thousand or however many thousand people, everybody still feels like it's their living room. So on the one hand, there's one group of people who say, "Hey, can we try to use a coaster here and take care of this?" Other people are saying, "You can't tell me what to do in my own house." If you listen to what's behind what a lot of those folks are saying – whether I personally agree with them or not, it's the same sentiment we've heard from a lot of people. We heard of this with Digg however many years ago. "Hey, we're the ones who made this site and so being provocative about telling us what we can do here is beyond the pale," from their point of view, "Because now it's our living room. It's your living room – you can't just call this your place by fiat, we're the ones who built it. You would not have anybody to throw off of here if it weren't for us." So like I say, I don't think that solves the problem but I think it helps frame the question.

Whenever we try to understand how somebody feels about these things, it helps to remember that everybody thinks someplace is their living room.

Harry: And Reddit, more than most places, was defined by having virtually no censorship although little by little, over the years, they've ratcheted it up a little bit. You know, a few years ago, they allowed stuff on Reddit that was way worse than fat shaming. They got rid of that and now they're doing this.

Dylan: Well you know, Harry actually, I think there's censorship rampant on Twitter. I just think it's the moderators of the subReddits that are -

Leo: On Reddit, yes.

Dylan: Yes.

Harry: And the fact that – I mean, Reddit is almost like a confederation more than one place that the subReddits are run by different people with different rules and they – the stuff they run, they feel is theirs rather than part of this large company controlled by Konde Nast.

Leo: It's kind of a challenge, though, for them, because it is Konde Nast. I mean, they've spun – they've distanced it enough so they can say, "Well, it's not exactly us." What do you do if you're Reddit? I mean, you don't – maybe it was a mistake to censor. Maybe you just block illegal stuff because then it's not you making the rules, you just say, "Hey, it's illegal. We can't do that."

Harry: Well, if you're harassing individuals, that's going to show. Harassing groups of people is a little bit different. Stuff that's illegal or borderline illegal is different from stuff which is merely offensive. So I am curious, like three or four years from now, where will the bar be? Will the bar go higher and higher to a point where anything that is created by jackasses or which reasonable people might think is unpleasant is no longer allowed?

I do feel like, when all the sudden, done is the internet, so if you're on Reddit and you're unhappy with reddit, fine. You can go and create your own site, find somewhere else. It's not censorship. There should never be a time when people who want to be jackasses can't create their own place to be jackasses, but build your own damn site.

Leo: We need to cheer up a little bit here. Let me show some videos of robots failing. You – it just makes me happy to see the robots not doing so well.

Merlin: This is how they lull us into a false sense of security.

Leo: Somebody said, "If you keep laughing at robots, you're going to regret it in a few years."

Merlin: They're like crows, they remember all.

Dylan: That's right. Everybody who watched those videos on YouTube, the record of you watching that video is going to be stored on Google somewhere and they will know when Skynet comes. They're coming for us.

Leo: I did admire – first, let's show the – this is from the DARPA challenge. They were trying to get humanoid-like robots to do things like diffuse nuclear power plants, so it was based on the tsunami and earthquake that destroyed Fukishima. But some of these robots just – it's hard if you're a robot to -

[video plays]

To really – aw. That's my favorite. What's great is, the audience is cheering the robot on, so you've got to kind of admire them. The winning – the challenge was a course of eight challenges – these are autonomous robots. They're not remote-controlled robots, they're autonomous. I think six of the eight, they knew about it ahead of time. Two were just random, you didn't know. They had to drive a car, open a door, turn a valve, the kinds of things a robot would need to do to diffuse the nuclear power plant at Fukishima. But the South Korean robot won a $2 million prize. Are you sad? Is it sad for you?

Patrick: No, I think it's depressing, very sad. But it was so funny.

Dylan: What's weird is the falling over backwards in front of a doorway seems to be a really common problem with those robots. What is it about doorways?

Patrick: I was at the first DARPA challenge, the vehicular one and it was hysterical because I joked, "I'm going to get run over," and literally 30 seconds after I said that, a car comes out of the gate, makes a hard right turn and bangs into the jersey barrier literally four feet from where I was standing as I'm backing up, taking a shot because television. But it was – the next year, they finished.

Leo: Now we're talking about never having to drive again, only 11 years later. It's amazing.

Patrick: It's like, yes, they look ridiculous, but it's – you know. You get a bunch of robot developers pissed off, they do really good work to catch up and develop as quickly as possible.

Leo: So the robot from MIT did not win because of a minor, kind of user error. So one of the things – here, let's show this. One of the things the robot had to do was drive a car and when they programmed it – they knew this ahead of time. They forgot to tell the robot to turn off the car before it got out. The robot stumbled a little bit – well, you'll see. But this is the robot made by Boston Dynamics, the Google company that makes the crazy dogs that run around. 6'4'', 400 pounds. Go ahead, you can play the audio track on this.

[video plays]

This is autonomous! You can hear the crowd, though, go, "Oh!" But watch!

[video continues]

It continued on and watch its wrist, it's broken. It's like a great athlete getting injured and then completing the field.

Dylan: There's something really touching about the way that robot's legs shake as it's getting out of the car, like, "Oh!" I don't know, I feel for it.

Leo: Maybe because they look like humans, even though it's a 6'4'', 400-pound human, you do. You feel some sympathy for it and the crowd is cheering.

Merlin: Was that a rule, that it has to be bipedal?

Leo: It doesn't have to be but most of them were because it has to go places a human could go. So there were a couple that were more platform like but ultimately, it has to really be human-shaped to get -

Merlin: It's such a high center of gravity, though.

Leo: It's a terribly design for a robot, absolutely.

Dylan: The winning one kind of rolls around on its knees, so it's a nice low rolling platform most of the time but then when it needs to, it can kind of stand up on two legs and walk, which I thought was pretty clever.

Leo: That's a good solution, because you've got to go through doors, open doorknobs and do things that a human in a human situation could do.

Patrick: I have a nightmare of stairs.

Leo: The point you make, though, is excellent because 11 years ago, the car went straight for you but now, 11 years later, we're expected – we're saying, "It's safer for a robot to drive than a human to drive." 11 years from now, I don't know what these robots will be doing but I'm sure I'm going to get punished for laughing.

Patrick: I was going to say, "Burying us."

Leo: Speaking of happy stories, the comet lander has woken up. Is it Philae? It seems like that's not a really good – you remember that it had a little bit of a problem. It bounced when it landed on the comet, we had sent it to explore the comet. It bounced when it landed on the comet and instead of landing in sunlight where it could charge up its solar batteries, it landed in the shade. But the good news is, Philae is back in contact because the comet has moved, the sun has moved and all of the sudden, it woke up and sent a bunch of data back. It's alive!

In fact, now they're thinking this might have been serendipitous because we'll be able to get closer to the sun than we would have if it had been in the bright sunlight. We might get some very interesting observations so again, technology, mind boggling. Seven months after silence from Philae -

Patrick: The Twitter feed is pretty awesome.

Leo: He talks, yes, or she. "Hello, Earth. Can you hear me?" That's her first tweet.

Merlin: Robots are the new dogs, they've made us care again.

Leo: We love them.

Patrick: So the AIBO was just ahead of its time?

Leo: Yes, I feel very positive about our future now.

Dylan: I have to say, the photos of that thing landing on the comet when it landed what, six or seven months ago? My mind was blown. It's like, we're landing on a fricking comet, people! It was amazing.

Leo: I got chills. I was – when did they – John is our resident space expert. How long before it landed after they launched? It was a very complicated thing and there it is on a comet. Just amazing. It's alive! "Hello, Earth. Can you hear me?"

Dylan: Over a decade, I think.

Leo: Over ten years, they launched it and then ten years later, they got the – it's incredible.

Dylan: It's amazing. There wasn't even Twitter when it was launched.

Leo: How did they live? But fortunately, before Philae left, she left instructions to create a Twitter account.

Merlin: (in robotic voice) "How are things with my MySpace account?"

Leo: Oh, Philae, we have so much to talk about.

Merlin: Are you sitting down, Philae?

Leo: I've got some bad news for you.

Let's take a break and have more great conversation with a great panel. Merlin Mann, Harry McCracken, Patrick Norton, Dylan Tweney and you, my friends. You fabulous audience. Our show today brought to you by Braintree Payments. We love Braintree and you know what? Most users do and you may not know it, but you've used it. Braintree is the payments API used by Uber, AirBNB, Hotel Today, LivingSocial and Github. In just ten lines of code, you can add Braintree to your mobile app and take payments from everywhere, credit cards, Paypal, Venmo, even Bitcoin, even Apple Pay – everybody wants Apple Pay, right?

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YouTube is building a Twitch. Remember, when Twitch was on the market, everybody thought YouTube was going to get it.

Harry: I wrote a post explaining why that would be such a smart idea.

Leo: Brilliant. And who got it? Amazon. I don't know why Amazon wanted it but they obviously bid the right price and the guys at justin.tv are very happy. But remember, that doesn't mean YouTube can't build their own and in fact, they say this summer, they're going to launch a YouTube built for gamers, YouTube Gaming. An app and dedicated website for all of those Let's Play videos. Do your kids watch Let's Play videos yet?

Patrick: No, my kid's – well, they have some access to games on the iPhone or iPad, but we don't really do consoles in my family, at least not yet.

Leo: I get calls every week on the radio show from 12-year-olds invariably, what they want to know is, "Well, I play Minecraft and I would like to know how to make a video that I can put a video on YouTube about Minecraft." It's like being – my generation, we all wanted to be Air Jordan. They all want to be PewdiePie, of all people.

Merlin: It just takes over. It's taken over everything. There was life before Minecraft and now there's Minecraft. All my daughter does is make glass houses and bacon all day.

Leo: No, does she do Minecraft?

Merlin: Oh, she's just playing in creative mode but man, is it ever cool to find.

Leo: How old is she now?

Merlin: Seven and a half.

Leo: Oh my God, I can't believe it.

Merlin: But it's fun, like I get it. When she has a friend come over and they play both on iPads, it's really fun. But it's – you know, this is one of those things where I feel like I missed like two decades because the last video game thing I was into was the Atari 2600 in the 1920s, like Moon Patrol. That was my last one and then I've been like, "Oh, you kids and your crazy – your video games, it's never going to amount to anything." Now, it's life. Everything is video games now and I realize, it's the first thing apart from my physical condition where I actually do feel like an old man.

(video of Moon Patrol plays)

Leo: When we were kids, hyperspace sounded like this – (blows into microphone) – and we were happy.

Merlin: That tune, man. That tune has been in my head since 1983.

Leo: Now you can play that on your – I don't know, what's the dumbest computer you got?

Harry: What a great game.

Leo: Raspberry Pi, you could probably – really, you remember this too, huh?

Harry: I haven't played it like 25 years but I want to right now.

Leo: We've got one in the basement.

Harry: The arcade version is the one that resonates with me, not the 2600 because we never had a 2600.

Leo: That's very primitive, too.

Merlin: You can still play Yars' Revenge. Yars' Revenge is still a lot of fun.

Leo: Minecraft, in a way, if you think about it, is a tip of the hat to that era because of the 8-bit effect. When I first saw Minecraft, I said, "Who would want to play this?" It's not about the visuals.

Patrick: It's the ultimate take – it's like, I love it because my son just discovered it but part of me is like, this is Legos from hell and I'm going to lose him.

Leo: It's Legos, it is. Yes.

Merlin: Creative mode for like a little kid is incredible – it is super creative. I'll look over and like a few minutes later, she's built this palace, she's got pigs in pens. She's shooting things with fire and making bacon. I don't know how she picked this up, but it's insanely creative.

Leo: We have – you know, Lisa's son is 12 and of course, he's into Minecraft too. He knows about rubies, diamonds and I said, "What do you know about rubies?" He says, "Well, if you combine -" This is what kids know of the world now. Did you read, though, the very sad article – where did I read that? About when the Mojang employees found out about the sale to Microsoft? Maybe you wrote it.

Harry: I didn't write it but I read it and it resonated with me because a couple years ago, I did a big story on Minecraft where I went to Stockholm and hung out at Mojang, saw all those people working at their little desks.

Leo: What are they, IKEA desks?

Harry: It's a really nice office.

Leo: But they were told – they were always were told that, "We don't want to be big. You're not paid well, but you're part of a team." Meanwhile, you know, Marcus Pearson, Notch, and a couple of other people are raking in the dough. Notch kept most – there it is, it's Wired of course. "The unlikely story of Microsoft's surprise Minecraft buyout," and they're quoting in particular one of the Mojang employees who was told but told not to tell anybody and what a difficult thing that was for him, and how sad everybody really was. Of course, management just took off with $2-3 billion, just went off and that was that.

Harry: I wish I had figured out that Minecraft was a likely acquisition target because when I went there, I talked to Notch and he really talked about how sick he was of the whole thing, how he had no interest in it whatsoever and if you're sick of it, then sure. You have no problem selling it.

Leo: And he, of course, bought – outbid Jay Z and Beyonce for that $70 million house in Los Angeles that has its own candy room. So that's really – that's success.

Merlin: Leo, is it for making candy, for storing candy?

Leo: No, no, just eating candy.

Merlin: I thought having like a present-wrapping room was big, but a candy eating room.

Leo: I don't think Notch should eat much more candy but he does apparently. Let me see if I can find pictures, it was a $70 million mansion. The candy room itself, $200 thousand and there's the kind of decent image of the candy room. It's not really a room, it's more like a candy foyer, really, or candy vestibule.

Merlin: Oh sure, that's more reasonable.

Harry: Who put that in there?

Leo: The house was a spec house, so it was built by a developer and furnished in some of the oddest ways you've ever seen.

Patrick: Well, it was also like the developer got all these different designers in places in LA to build rooms, so it is – there's like disjointed from hell. You turn a corner and it's just -

Leo: It's just weird. But Notch likes it. I wonder if Notch has remodeled or if he – I bet you he kept the candy room or candy vestibule. Do you think, though, that he kept this bedspread?

Patrick: Oh, yes.

Leo: Just weird. There's a giant hand grenade in the living room, did you see that? Some very odd stuff.

Harry: The conference room in Mojang in Stockholm where I interviewed Notch basically had a Goldfinger theme. Everything in the entire room is done in gold and they wanted to be as garish as possible so it would look like the conference room of a James Bond villain.

Dylan: Didn't they have oil paintings commissioned of all their employees?

Harry: That was fantastic, yes. They went to this Chinese oil painting mill and there are all these unbelievably garish paintings of everybody, some of them like in hunting garb and Elizabethan attire.

Leo: I want to do that.

Dylan: So Notch got the billion dollars, but the employees at least get a nice oil painting.

Leo: Each of them got to take home their oil painting, yes.

Patrick: That was the big thing in the Wired article is they talked about how, "Well, we don't pay much but you get to go to game developers conferences. We don't pay you much but Notch decided to take everybody to wherever he took them for a weeks vacation." I mean, it was – nobody had any equity. Nobody had any much of a salary, I guess.

Leo: Oh well. I noticed, though, that Notch now can sit in a chair much like my own, so there's something to be said for that. Those are restoration hardware lamps, I recognize those and the chairs. Maybe our set designer did one of the rooms in that mansion.

Patrick: I had no idea there were so many places to go to buy Chinese-manufactured custom artwork.

Leo: I want to get that.

Patrick: $79, portrait-painting.com.

Leo: Wow. I would like to get that for our employees. Here's the giant blue hand grenade at the end of the bar, there.

Patrick: I like it.

Leo: Yes.

Merlin: Might be less costly to just bring in somebody from the boardwalk who like, draws them in silhouette kicking a soccer ball or something.

Leo: That's a good idea.

Merlin: They'd enjoy that, Leo. Do you like soccer? "No." Well, I'm going to have you kicking a soccer ball.

Leo: They're only like $5 each, right?

Merlin: I bet it's like domain name registration, about 50 of those and the price goes down to like $3 each. Like rollerskating? "No, not really." I'm going to have you rollerskating.

Leo: This is nice. You'd want this, I think, in your living room.

Patrick: That's classy.

Leo: What the hell? Oh, and a book about 007 makes it all okay. Wow. I think we're going to take a quick break because we're running out of time and I'm sure Merlin has to pee again, so let's do that and we'll come back and cover kind of the bread crumbs, the shake, the stuff that falls to the bottom of the – Merlin got it! Thank you, Merlin.

Merlin: I got it. I'm hip with the kids.

Leo: The popcorn, the little unpopped kernels at the bottom.

Merlin: I'm aware of cultural trends, yes.

Merlin: Look, Bundt cake!

Leo: Our show today -

Merlin: You guys like Herbert Hoover, huh?

Leo: I don't even get that.

Merlin: I'm just making cultural references. Show of hands, anybody like bicycles? Back to you, Leo.

Leo: Our show today brought to you by stamps.com. I bet you Notch, somewhere in there with the candy room, the carbine rifle, the giant blue glass hand grenade, has a stamps.com USB scale and a computer hooked up to the stamps.com account because any time he needs to mail candy to anywhere in the world, that's -

Patrick: In the mailing room?

Leo: What good is a house without a mailing room?

Patrick: I don't know. What is a mailing room without stamps.com?

Leo: If you have a mailing room in your business – if you send – are you an Etsy, Amazon or eBay seller? If you sell stuff, please, I keep getting stuff with hand-licked stamps all over the front and then they wrap it in brown paper and twine. I look at it each time and think, "There's probably a bomb in there," but I open it anyway. Don't be that guy. Start sending stuff via stamps.com. You get nice, professional-looking labels with barcodes, your company's logo. It automatically gets the return address, the mailing address from the website. It'll even automatically fill out international customs forms. It'll handle certified mail, return receipt. In fact, if you've got certified mail, it'll send an email to the recipient saying, "Here's the code."

It makes you look like a professional mailing enterprise and that's what you want. If you're in business, you want to look good, plus it's better than a postage. It'll save you like 50% from a postage meter because you don't have to buy special inks and when the stamp prices go up, you don't have to go in to get it recalibrated, it just all happens automatically. All the stuff you want to do to look more professional, to save money – you get discounts you can't even get at the post office and here's the best part, you don't have to go the post office.

A uniformed employee of the federal government will come to your place and pick up that package. In fact, there's even a button – it's called a mailman. There's even a button on the site that says, "Get the mail carrier here to pick up, I've got a package." It's so cool, stamps.com. I've got a great, no-risk trial for you when you click the microphone in the upper right-hand corner there and enter the offer code TWIT – look at that microphone, "ON THE AIR!" There's a nice guy, Leo Laporte. You'll see my shining face and get this $110 bonus offer including the digital scale, $55 in free postage you can use over the first few months of your account. Of course, a free trial, activity kit and more, stamps.com. Just do me a favor, click the microphone in the upper right-hand corner and use the offer code TWIT.

We had a great week. If you missed any of it, take a look at the week gone by.

Voiceover: Previously on TwiT.

(From the TwiT live special – Apple WWDC Keynote)

Leo: Excuse me, my watch is telling me I need to stand, I'll be right back.

Female: Just wave your arm around, Leo, that's what I do.

Leo: Don't shake your watch!

Voiceover: The new Screen Savers.

Leo: My Wi-Fi sucks.

Patrick: One of the things I've been playing around with – the heat map. This is free software.

Leo: If you can find that FBI surveillance van, I'd be very grateful, okay?

Patrick: I'm pretty sure I know which corner of the building it is, down in the basement.

Leo: They're in the building?

Voiceover: All About Android.

Jason: Apple still gets its jab in on Android users because though there will be a three-month free trial for iOS and web users of Apple Music, that will not be the case for Android users.

Voiceover: Security Now

Steve Gibson: We have to talk about the breach the U.S. Government suffered, the 4.1 million records not encrypted. Quote, "Encryption and data obfuscating techniques are new capabilities that we're building into our database."

Leo: We only just discovered! Who knew?

Voiceover: TWiT for justice!

Leo: You know, we didn't cover the big break-in on the office of personnel management. We talked about it yesterday on the new Screen Savers.

Patrick: It's just so depressing, so crazy.

Leo: We're now thinking 14 million records of every federal employee, Social Security numbers – I was talking to somebody on the radio show who said, "Our union rep -" The problem is the federal government is kind of downplaying it, "There's only a million records." They're denying that security clearance forms were leaked or stolen by these hackers but this guy said, "Our union rep came to us and said, you get two years of fraud protection and everybody, you just assume your Social, your driver's license, everything." The worst thing is, what if you applied for a federal job, were investigated by the FBI, they found out something really horrible – didn't hire you but that information is in that database and now the hackers have it? You didn't even get the job. Just horrific. The President, though, good news, is considering financial sanctions against the attackers, so that's good news. How he even knows who they are, I don't know. They say it's China.

They also mention that the office of personnel management did have strong security, something called Einstein. But it didn't work! The break-in occurred at the end of last year. The number, like I said, has now gone up to 14 million people. The Einstein system failed. According to the Wall Street Journal – this is my favorite part. Einstein didn't discover the breach, it was discovered during a sales demonstration by a security company named Psytech Services. "We'd like to show you our new product."

Patrick: Psytech Services has actually since said it was not during a product demonstration. They discovered it in April 2015.

Leo: But Psytech disovered it?

Patrick: Yes, and notified cert and the FBI.

Leo: They were told not to say, "Hey, by the way, could you not mention this was during a sales presentation?"

Harry: I don't think you ever want to name any technology Einstein now. That's just asking for trouble.

Leo: Lots of – of course, lots of cover up right now. Everybody's saying, "No, no, no. This isn't true." But it's just a scary thought.

Merlin: With every new Snowden-esque revelation, the thing that always goes through my head is first of all, wow, that's so sad this is happening, that this information is being recorded. I know this is different but I mean, with the Snowden announcements, every time some piece of new information comes out, I think, "Oh, my gosh. I hope the people who are so good at gathering that information are really good at securing it," because you know -

Leo: Apparently they're not.

Merlin: You know, you think about the first scene from Deadwood when they go and want to hang the guy at the jail, the jail's not that secure! You can still get stuff out of there. It's like, if you don't really, really need to be collecting that stuff, my gosh. Please do something responsible with it and it's just to have that sitting around – I guess what I'm trying to say it, all the stuff it seems like they've kind of skimmed from all our information over the last few years, that's all just sitting somewhere.

Leo: That's nothing.

Merlin: It's so depressing.

Patrick: If the federal government can't protect it?

Leo: Here's something that's not going to be hacked. Grand Rapids, Michigan, 19 public schools. The heating and cooling system is controlled by an Amiga from the '80s. The program was written by a high school student at the time and it's still running. They say, when things break, he still lives in the area. So we go and we ask him to fix it. It turns on and off the boilers, on and off the heat, it has been doing this without complaint for 35 years.

Harry: There's such a lesson there, too, which I guess to run everything on Amigas from now on.

Leo: I bet it's secure.

Patrick: Or they have a stash of Amigas.

Leo: You know why it's secure? It's on a 1200-bod modem. Does anybody even have a 1200-bod?

Patrick: I think you can buy them on eBay. A friend of mine worked for a major financial company in New York City and at one point, he was doing data verification stuff and had to work a lot with the engineering team. They had this board – he kept seeing this board and finally, he goes, "What is this?" He's like, "These are servers that we don't know the physical location of." He's like, "What do you mean?" "We've got all these offices, all these offices on X number of continents, like 72 offices in New York City. There's stuff that runs and we access it, we just don't know where it is." So all these servers, they're in the process of migrating them to places where they know where the box is, you know what I mean? You laugh but you know, things accrued over time, you bring systems online, people move, things happen.

Merlin: I'm groaning with familiarity. Like, if I ever lose this SFT bookmark? I don't know where it is. What, I've got the IP address memorized?

Leo: That's a good point. Certainly, not the password.

Merlin: What the password is to get into the password? I locked my keys in a succession of cars in various countries. I don't know what the hell I would do.

Leo: Look at this, this is actually phenomenal. It's an Amiga 2000. There's an ad for the Amiga. I think that's the kid who programmed it. It's phenomenal. I think this is a great success story.

Patrick: Home automation, 1980.

Leo: Yes, but 19 schools! That's nothing trivial, this is a lot of stuff.

Dylan: That's fantastic. That's great.

Patrick: You could always make an Amiga music video from the – [crosstalk]

Dylan: [crosstalk] – good for the Amiga company.

Leo: It does.

Harry: I feel like the very last computer on earth may be an Amiga.

Leo: It's the cockroach of computers, it's never going to die. We actually have an Amiga in the basement.

Dylan: I think that company has a great future ahead of it.

Leo: You might have covered this on This Week in Computer Hardware – I never remember to plug the show you do with Ryan on our network but it's a great show. I watch it and I love it. Did you talk about Asus maybe buying HTC?

Patrick: We did not.

Leo: That's an interesting story.

Patrick: Ryan may have. I was actually – I had family in town and couldn't record the show this week. It's such an odd concept, though, Asus buying HP.

Leo: HTC, not HP.

Patrick: Oh, well that would make a big difference.

Leo: Well, they're both Taiwanese companies but HTC has really struggled as of late. Although last week, we talked a lot about VR and the consensus -

Harry: Vive was great.

Leo: Vive was actually better than Oculus Rift.

Harry: It's really good, although Oculus just announced their hand controller. Up until Oculus announced that, one of the coolest things about Vive was it had the hand controllers.

Leo: I'm actually – I've turned around on VR. I'm kind of excited to buy it and I have the feeling we're going to see a lot of interesting stuff and not so far off, like maybe late this year.

Harry: Vive is allegedly going to ship by the end of the year, which might give it a little bit of a head start against Oculus.

Leo: Oculus is next year.

Harry: And Morpheus, Sony's system.

Leo: I don't feel like Sony's really got a dog in the hunt, do they?

Harry: That looks pretty good, too. That's the one I have not tried myself but Oculus is amazing and Vive is also really impressive.

Leo: I really would love to see a standard – it kind of exists now. You know, I have the Gear VR which is basically powered by Oculus but I can do to a lot of different, including Google 3D stuff – I'd love to see Google's Jump, Oculus, Vive, all just use kind of – I guess it kind of is basically two screens, right? But I'd love to see a standard for this.

Harry: It's kind of shaping up like the console industry, where they're all competing and they all have some experiences which are exclusive to one platform and some companies that decide to be on every platform.

Leo: I just – it's mostly going to be gaming but there are a lot of other applications, touring around, seeing the world.

Patrick: Makeouts on Facebook.

Leo: Right on. We're pretty much done here, I'm cooked. You cooked, Merlin?

Merlin: You kidding me? I'm just getting started, I've still got two or three more bathroom trips in me.

Leo: I feel like Merlin – we could just turn the camera on Merlin. We've done that. I think I did that once, I walked away and you guys just kept going. Am I wrong?

Merlin: No! Come on, Dad, we need you here.

Leo: This has happened a couple of times where Nick Bilton and Baratunde just stayed after I left and the show just – they did another hour. Anyways, great to see you, Merlin. I miss you, I adore you. @hotdogsladies, but he's doing a ton of podcasts.

Merlin: It's great to be back. It's always a thrill to be here and to hang out with everybody. Thanks for having me here.

Leo: Anything to say about tonight, the Game of Thrones ends its season, Silicon Valley ends its season.

Merlin: I love Silicon Valley, I really do.

Leo: I do too. I feel like I'm the only one but I think it's the best.

Merlin: Game of Thrones, like Walking Dead, I conceptually like it but I'm going to be straight up, it's too grisly for me. My wife watches Walking Dead, I have to leave the room.

Leo: I'm done with zombies and frankly, Game of Thrones is turning into a zombie game, which is weird. But Silicon Valley – our friend Dan Lyons, fake Steve Jobs, former Newsweek writer, worked for a week, I think, at Valley Wag. He's one of the writers and actually there's a great interview with him about how he became a writer. I guess she had piloted a show that was never picked up for Larry Chase and -

Harry: Larry Charles.

Leo: Charles, I mean. Then Charles knew somebody who was working, the showrunners at Silicon Valley brought him in. He's added some verisimilitude, I feel like.

Merlin: There's so many characters on that show where you're like, "Oh, man. I've worked with that person for years, I know that person."

Leo: Yes.

Dylan: I haven't seen any of Dan's shows yet, any of the episodes he's contributed to but last season, I found really hard to watch. It was just cringe-worthy on how painfully real it was.

Leo: It is a little cringey, I agree.

Dylan: "Oh, I see that every day."

Leo: A little too close to home, yes. Well, we'll find out. Last episode, how do they wrap this season up? I'm going to go watch that.

Merlin: I'm sure it won't be awkward at all.

Leo: Nothing awkward about that show.

Merlin: Every frame more painful than the last and like, "Oh, my God, this is happening every day like all over."

Leo: That's why I like [?]. He's like the Greek chorus. "Oh, that's not a problem." Patrick Norton, keep going with the Tek Thing, that's good. Tekthing.com. I hear you're the host of This Week in Computer Hardware on stations around or about.

Patrick: You can find me at TwiT.tv/twich.

Leo: Love having you here. Thank you, Dylan. Great to meet you and have you on for the first time. I hope you'll come back.

Dylan: I'd love to, I've had a blast.

Leo: Venturebeat.com. He's @dylan20 on the Twitter. What's the 20?

Dylan: Well, if you mispronounce my name or change one letter, instead of Tweney. Yes, Dylan 20, it's like my one-line identity.

Leo: I'm an idiot, of course.

Dylan: I thought about changing my name to 20, I thought that would be really futuristic and techy of me but I never did it.

Leo: Do it, you'd be like Prince or something! No, that's so cool. @dylan20 on Twitter. Harry McCracken, he's a technologizer and technologizer is the guy to follow everywhere. It was great to see you again.

Harry: Great to be here.

Leo: Thanks to all the people in the studio audience, nice to have you. tickets@twit.tv if you'd like to join them for the next show, in fact, we'd love it if you come and visit us in the studio. It's always fun for us. But you can also watch on the internet, live.twit.tv. Actually, I'm going to stop saying that because it's now just TwiT.tv and click the live button when the new site goes up on Tuesday. I'll do a little tour of the new site at some point, probably before the show next week, something like that. It's good, I like what we've done. I feel good about it, kind of like building a super tanker. But it's done.

You've done a little web design in your time, Merlin.

Merlin: It's never finished, you just stop.

Leo: Exactly, yes.

Merlin: It's like being a parent, every day you find a new way you were wrong and didn't realize it. Congratulations.

Leo: That's exactly what happened. At one point, we had to stop.

Merlin: "Your website's done?" "No, I just gave up hope. Enjoy!"

Leo: Did you ever work in an agile environment?

Merlin: No, I went whatever the opposite of agile is. I'm inert, I don't know how to scrum, how to retro, how to do any of that. We worked in places we didn't even have a staging server, we would just edit the files live.

Leo: That's the way to do it.

Patrick: I had somebody who thought that was an agile environment, which was great until it broke.

Leo: He got the break it a lot part, he didn't get the other part. I've been scrumming every day since January, like every day. I'm like -

Merlin: Are you the -

Leo: I'm the PO.

Merlin: Wow, wow. Do you have the index cards and everything? The stories and whatnot?

Leo: All of it, did user stories, did epics, it's got points.

Merlin: These could all be made up terms and I would not know.

[crosstalk]

Leo: I've interviewed Kent Beck, the guy who created it. In fact, they do agile in Silicon Valley when they put the little cards on the board. That's agile.

Merlin: Well congratulations, that's a big thing.

Leo: It is a big thing.

Merlin: It's so much work, like [?]'s law. Everything takes more than you think even when you account for a [?]'s law. It's – congratulations.

Leo: It's a recursive law.

Merlin: Yes, which is also recursive.

Leo: Congratulations, probably the right thing to say.

Merlin: Masel tov.

Leo: Masel tov and condolences, but the new site should be up soon and we'll talk a little bit about it when it goes up. But meanwhile, TwiT.tv is the place to go to get the on-demand versions or to get links to your favorite podcasts' thing, iTunes or whatever. It'd be nice if you subscribed, that way you'd get it each and every week.

Patrick: It looks really good.

Leo: Do you like this? It's all about big pictures. Thanks for joining us. We'll see you next time, another TWiT is in the can. Thank you!