This Week in Tech 525

Leo Laporte: It's time for TWiT: This Week in Tech! Oh what a great panel for you. Steve Kovach is here from Tech Insider. His new blog, techinsider.io, Jason Hiner from CBS interactive and from imore.com, the wonderful Georgia Dow. We're going to talk about the latest tech news, what to expect next week, I guess September 9 would be the Apple announcement, we'll talk a lot about the Apple TV, and blockapalooza. It could be the end of the line for Internet advertising. We'll talk about that, lots more. The sad story of Notch, the creator of Minecraft. You can be a billionaire, but not be happy. It's all coming up next on TWiT. 

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Leo: This is TWiT, This Week in Tech, episode 525, recorded Sunday, August 30, 2015.

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It's time for TWiT, This Week in Tech, the show where we cover the week's tech news. I love getting together with the TWiT panels every week. It's my closest friends, really. I have no social life, so this is pretty much it. I'm so pleased to welcome Steve Kovach back to our studio. Steve is at businessinsider.com. You are sitting in a beautiful brick study. It's gorgeous.

Steve Kovach: Thanks. Actually, it's my living room. I love the exposed brick. It's like I'm in a comedy club. 

Leo: We'll call it Kovachs. Kovach's chuckle hut. There's also Jason Hiner from Tech Republic. Nice to see you, Jason.

Jason Hiner: Great to be here as ever.

Leo: You got a new chapter out in the book. We'll talk about that. 

Jason: Absolutely. I'd love to.

Leo: Did we go through a few months of nothing, or was I just not paying attention? 

Jason: Last month was Chase Jarvis. That chapter is still up for another 48 hours. 

Leo: He's one of my favorite photographers.

Jason: He's amazing. Awesome human being and great digital leader, innovator! 

Leo: Where do we find that great book? 

Jason: followthegeeksbook.com. 

Leo: followthegeeksbook.com, and chapter seven for just a couple more days. Chase Jarvis, we interviewed him a couple of times on Chase photo. I just love him. Also here, Anthony's wife. I'm trying to give back, Georgia. Georgia Dow is here.

Georgia Dow: Anthony is going to love that. 

Leo: She's from iMore.com, her husband Anthony, I just learned for the first time was a caller to the old call for help TV show. He took half a day off work and waited by the phone and we never called him.

Georgia: You never called. He's still waiting! I'll let him call in later and you can actually ask the question he was going to ask. 

Leo: What was his question? I've got Windows 98 and I'm trying to decide if I should upgrade to Service Pack too.

Georgia: He ran IT too, so it was probably a little bit more technical. 

Leo: Besides writing for iMore, which is my go to place, Renee Ritchie is there, Serenity is there, Georgia is there, but it's become my go to place for useful how to information on Mac and IOS. Georgia is also a psychotherapist. Is this a new enterprise for you? Anxiety-videos.com.

Georgia: Yeah, we just launched this video. It's myself and Sandra Riche she runs Montreal's center for anxiety and depression. She's one of my closest friends, my mentors. She's a phenomenal therapist. This is for people who are dealing with anxiety but are too shy to go in to see a therapist. You can download the video and deal with your anxiety at home and all sorts of good adjunct. If you're dealing with therapy and you want to remember something or you want to deal with sleep or a certain set, you can get one of the videos that way as well. This is all we do every day is deal with anxiety and depression. It's something we're good at and we're hoping to help more people. 

Leo: I think people know about depression, but anxiety is so debilitating. So many people suffer from anxiety disorders. Not just panic attacks but all sorts of phobias and PTSD. It's just terrible. 

Georgia: Yeah. OCD. There's many different aspects to it. It stops people from living lives. Anxiety is like a game of Risk and it takes large and larger territories from you. Some people never leave their home or won't even leave their bedroom.

Leo: Most of our viewers, actually. We're talking to you. Go to anxiety-videos.com. Let's talk about tech news, because that's what we're here to talk about. Next week, many of you will be flying to San Francisco. Apple sent out the invitation. You know what I need? Could you get me my iPad? The invitation reads--I won't say the S word. I'll say shlo mo, but you'll know what I'm talking about. Siri. "Hey Shlomo, give me a hint." They announced that it's going to be September 9. That's when they always do it. In this case, not a Tuesday because Monday is Labor Day, so they're going to do it on a Wednesday. The big surprise is Bill Graham's civics center, which is a 3000-seat venue, but as soon as I saw the invitation I had to try this. Let me ask Siri. Give me a hint.

SIRI: You're cute when you're desperate for information.

Leo: She's snarky. You're cute when you're desperate for information. Give me a hint. 

SIRI: Why don't you check a rumors blog? That's what I do. 

Leo: Give me a hint.

SIRI: I can neither confirm nor deny that I am not authorized neither to confirm nor deny that I cannot disclose anything that you would then have to confirm. In any case, I would deny it. Got it. 

Leo: I like it that Apple's got a sense of humor. This is the one. Give me a hint.

Siri: What? You can't tell from my colorful wavy words? 

Leo: That's not the one. Give me a hint.

Siri: The only hint I can give you right now is the hint that there's a big announcement on September 9. 

Leo: They actually built into Siri that there's a big announcement September 9. Did that go live that day? It must have.

Steve: No one got to try it before I guess. I'm assuming it went live that day. 

Jason: Siri is calling the web, right? I guess that in real time they could update Siri at any moment with an update. It's not like they have to wait for a software update. Yeah. 

Leo: It's probable that after September 9 if you ask her for a hint she'll say something else, right? 

Georgia: Probably. I think it's brilliant though. 

Leo: It's good marketing, I’ve got to say.

Georgia: Yeah, because people love to be involved in something and so this pulls people in. It's not something that you're getting to watch, you're getting to interact with it being a little bit part of the event. 

Leo: So let's speculate. We got three good speculators here and then me. I never get anything about Apple right. Let's speculate. A couple of question marks. Why such a big venue, and why is Schlomo so prominent in the invite? 

Jason: Apple TV. It's all about Apple TV. I think that's going to be one of the headliner bits for the event. Siri and Apple TV. 

Leo: Steve, do you agree?

Steve: Yeah. I think that's going to be the focal point. The iPhone success, pretty much everything is like that already. It's going to be iterative of last year's model, which was a big change. I think a lot of the focus is going to be on the TV, and specifically, maybe there's Siri controls. Maybe they taught it something really cool. It's weird thinking about talking to your TV. It's been done before. Roku has it, but it's still a little awkward.

Leo: Fire TV has it, Roku has it, and X Box one has it. 

Steve: Yeah. X Box too, but it's terrible on X Box. 

Leo: I use it all the time! I use it for commands. I don't tell it; let's watch Dukes of Hazard. I say things like pause, play, rewind, that stuff. 

Jason: That's true. But Fire TV, the search on Fire TV... 

Leo: Amazing, isn't it?

Jason: It works pretty remarkably. You just speak into the remote and hold down the mic and it's remarkably accurate. They've done some good work. I don't know if they're licensing this. This is one of the questions I sort of have that I've been trying to figure out. Are they licensing their voice recognition software or do they have their own voice recognition division doing a bunch of research? I assume they're licensing it...

Leo: Was it Nuance? It was Nuance. That's a good question. Remember, Siri was in acquisition. Siri was a very cool application. It did even more than today's Siri. You could make dinner reservations with the app, and I believe that that was nuance based. But I do feel like Apple has slowly moved to its in house stuff. 

Jason: Not only is Amazon Fire TV good, but with the Echo, that's remarkably good as well. Some of that may have to do with all the mics. So it could be that it's getting the audio data in better and more clearly. Interpreting it better. Amazon is doing good work is the bottom line. There's pressure on Apple to respond because the Fire TV is a good device and Apple TV is... I've always liked Apple TV. There were people who poo pooed it, but I found it super useful and the interface a little easier in general than Roku, but with Amazon Fire TV and the newer layers of Netflix, for example which is what a lot of people are accessing on these devices, Netflix itself, their native UI is a lot better. The Fire TV UI seems to use a lot of those same models from the Netflix, what Netflix has done. Certainly the pressure is on for them in the TV game to get it right, but most of the eggs in the basket right now is making better deals with content providers and they've done a good job with that. They've added a lot of channels. There are a lot of channels on Roku, there are a lot of channels on Fire TV as well, but Apple has a lot of the big hitters. 

Georgia: I'm really hoping that the Siri hint is that Siri is going to be a better digital assistant. Using it for my TV, that sounds nice, but I don't mind looking for the remote in the couch somewhere. I want Siri to be able to help me manage my life, not miss my appointments, know when traffic is going to be too late, remind me to call this person because this meeting has been moved up. That's what I'm hoping Siri is going to give me. 

Leo: I feel like we're really on the cusp of breakthroughs in voice recognition. It's interesting actually. Cord cutting, voice recognition, home automation. They're all converging on a point, aren't they? Certainly the Apple TV would be well positioned. In my opinion, one of the reasons I don't like the Apple TV is it is so tied to the Apple ecosystem. It is the only way you can watch iTunes TV and movies connected to your TV. It doesn't support Amazon streaming, which is critical. They do have HBO and Showtime. I feel like its been left a little bit behind, a little neglected. 

Steve: I totally agree. When I test the Roku versus the Apple TV, Roku just blows it out of the water. It's between the search, it's so much better. You can search something like a director or an actor and you get all the sources from where you can find that director or actor or movie or whatever it is you're looking for whether it's Netflix or Voodoo or Amazon and again, like you said, Apple is just tied into iTunes. Whenever someone asks me which one of these little boxes should I buy? I say unless you have all your stuff already in iTunes and you want to watch your own TV, go with Roku because you have more options. 

Leo: One little thing that Apple TV does better than anybody else is Netflix. First of all, everybody does Netflix, but Apple TV, and I was told this by a streaming video guy, Apple is the only company that has in-house caches of Netflix content so that when you're watching Netflix on an Apple TV, you're getting it from the Apple CDNs. 

Steve: I had no idea about that.

Leo: I didn't either, until he told me this. That may be changing because Netflix has its own competing technology where they put servers in the ISPs and so forth, but Apple did this first. This guy told me, if you want the best Netflix streaming, Apple TV. I have to say I agree, Apple TV seems to be the most consistent.

Jason: I still feel like it has better content. It doesn't have a search. I think the search is better on ROKU and now the voice search on Amazon is much better, but I do still find that there's more and better and higher quality content on Apple TV, because iTunes has more. It's one to one. iTunes versus Amazon. They both do have things that the other doesn't. It could be me and I'm sort of older in the stuff that I like, which is a lot of documentaries and history and things like that. More on Apple TV than on Amazon, but I find that a lot of that stuff is better content mostly channels that I have to connect with places like NBC you still have to have a cable subscription to do it, to connect with NBC and PBS or other places like that. The interfaces and the experiences, in some cases, the content isn't on ROKU or Amazon. Like I said, I use all three. I typically do the same thing, Steve. I recommend ROKU to most people because I think it's super simple and it tends to be cheaper. But, I do think Apple has an opportunity here, and they see it. They have to catch up to Amazon with the voice recognition and with some of those other things. They have an opportunity to go over the top and skip cable providers. Apparently we're not going to get that yet. All those deals aren't done. They were supposed to be done by WWDC and some of them are still on the bubble and we're probably not going to see that until 2016, so with that, that leaves us with Siri becoming the main event. Not only Siri, but it also has to do with what you said, Leo, which is home automation. We've heard some indications that a lot of the Apple home stuff is tied with the new version of Apple TV. It is reportedly more expensive. It's a larger box, it's more expensive. That's probably to do with the other piece, which is that you're actually going to be able to build and run apps on this thing, which mostly means games. It's probably a faster, more expensive box so that it can run games and apps as well as some of the Siri processing, even though a lot of that is done in the cloud. It makes it all pretty interesting to see which direction they're going to go.

Leo: I feel like Apple is at this point giving up on the rest of us and focusing on the Apple ecosystem. For instance, home kit will not, obviously, inter-operate with any non-home kit stuff. It's going to be a non-product designed for Apple people. Apple is, from everything I see, and Mark German has recently pushed an article in 9 to 5 Mac about the new features, this is playing catch up with everything that already does all this. Apple, people who live in the Apple ecosystem will say, "Yay." We can talk to a TV. We can do voice search, because they live in the Apple ecosystem. It's as if they're on an island and they don't know what else is out there and they're very happy to get these new features, even though most of us will say there's nothing new there. The cant was, maybe Steve can answer this. The common response to that was, "Yes, but Apple waits and then does it better." Is that still true?

Steve: I don't know if that applies to the Apple TV, because it's been slagging behind. I don't know what they can do that's much better. Maybe Siri controls could be a lot better.

Leo: German says they're going to charge 200 bucks for this. That's twice as much as a Roku. More than twice as much as a Roku.

Steve: At the same time, the app store could be a big deal, so you'll finally get your Amazon on there and maybe some other third party content stores. 

Leo: Will Apple allow that? Will Amazon allow that?

Jason: I think they'll have to. I think they'll do it.

Leo: Let me give you an example. Amazon is a very crappy experience on X Box One because Microsoft says if you buy an Amazon title on the Amazon app you give us 30%. That's exactly what Apple will say, whereas if you use the Amazon app on Roku, which doesn’t take a cut, it's a much better experience because you have the full store. There's no store, and there won't be a store on the Apple version, I guarantee you, because Amazon isn't going to give Apple 30% of everything it sells. 

Steve: It'll be like the IOS version with this. It's only the stuff I've either bought through Amazon or it's available on prime.

Leo: It's not a good experience.

Steve: If I want something new to pop up on here, I have to go to amazon.com, buy it or rent it or whatever and then it pops up. That's a terrible experience. 

Leo: It's confusing to people because like you guys, I have everything. It's very confusing, not for me, I know why this is happening, but Lisa will try to buy something, she'll be watching Amazon on the X Box one, and she goes I only see Prime. I have to explain that on this platform and on that platform. That's a bad way of doing things. 

Jason: It is bad. And home automation is the same game too. This is very bifurcated. That's why I think everybody uses Netflix, because it's pretty simple and it's straightforward even though it doesn't have as much content. It's very bifurcated. Smart Home is even worse. It's like 34 different ecosystems and the Apple home kit and also Google...

Leo: Google is on presumably, they've got Zigby, they've got one of the two built in. So Google will presumably be a little bit more open. Smart Things, that's the Samsung solution is designed to talk to Z Wave, Zigby, and many other things. 

Jason: So is Wake. 

Leo: I know, iMore, Georgia, Serenity has tried some of the Home Kit stuff. Home Kit is more open than what one would expect from Apple, I think.

Georgia: It's more open and you have to trade off security for a pain in the butt. 

Leo: That may appeal to people. 

Georgia: It depends. We just installed Sky belt, which is an amazing service, but I was reading through their privacy policy. If Skybell is a home-automated doorbell and you ring the doorbell and you get to talk to the person and see the video on your watch. The watch only sends you a message on your phone and you can see the video of who is there and you can talk to them so if you're lying down in bed and telemarketers come by your door, you can say no thank you and leave and you don't have to get out of bed. Which is fabulous, but they store everything on their own service and what happens to all of these videos when people come into my home? I'm more security conscious. It's something that we need to discuss. If Apple is going to make sure everything is secure, I don't mind waiting for that. I think we often give up our own privacy for the short-term gain, and I don't know if that's the most intelligent way to go through it. 

Leo: I am going to take a stand against privacy. Somebody has got to. Mark Zuckerberg and me. I feel like everybody is so paranoid that nothing good can happen, because everybody says you can't do that. Dudes. Look. Don't you want Hell 9000? Don't you want to have a conversation with your house? Guess what? If you do that, it can't do it by itself. It's going to have to go out to the Internet where people might hear you. Oh my god! So what are we going to do? Not have Hell 9000 because you guys are so paranoid? 

Georgia: Yes. Maybe not the best example if you're trying to tell people about their rights and freedoms. 

Leo: I'm sorry. By the way, that was Dan Rayburn of the streaming media blog who was the one who filled me in on that. He knows his stuff. It may not still be the case. So when you've got Netflix on an Apple TV, you're getting it not from an ISP, you're getting it from a CDN. Hey, let's take a break. I'm having fun. I hope you are too. Georgia Dow is here from iMore.com and anxiety-videos.com. Also Jason Hiner from Tech Republic.com and CBS interactive. We've got to find out about the new book, oh we did find out about the new book. Chase Jarvis. That's exciting, new chapter.

Jason: That was seven.

Leo: You're going to tell the world?

Jason: We did. We just announced 8 this morning. 

Leo: Stay tuned. And Steve Kovach, who is also here from Tech, wait a minute. You just changed where you're from. 

Steve: Yeah. There's a new site. 

Leo: What's techinsider.io?

Steve: It's the new site from business insider. I'm one of the deputy editors there now. 

Leo: Should we pronounce it techinsider.io or techinsider.eo?

Steve: Just Tech Insider is good. That's our new site.

Leo: It's purdy. 

Steve: It's the first spin off site, and it's coming soon. 

Leo: And the focus of this...?

Steve: The broad theme is innovation. Let's just say that. Science, culture, consumer tech.

Leo: Absolutely appropriate to start with memories of Oliver Sachs, the great neuroscientist. He actually wrote his own obituary admittedly in February in the New York Times because he discovered that his cancer had metastasized. He knew there was no cure and he would die sometime this year. What a brilliant guy. I interviewed him once. He came in bright red suspenders on his big motorcycle. He was quite the character. If you've not read any of his stuff, including The Man who Mistook his wife for a hate, all his PBS stuff, just a really great guy who lived fully right up to his last days. Really remarkable fellow. He did exactly what you'd expect him to do. What a sweet guy. Quite a character. Let's take a break. When we come back, more from those fabulous panelists, but first a word from FreshBooks. If you're a small business or a freelancer, this is really for freelancers. This is when I discovered FreshBooks. When I had to send out at the end of the month invoices... I loved having many jobs, and I hated having to open up Microsoft word and Excel and create a spreadsheet and hope you get paid. When I discovered FreshBooks. It's been a while now. It was just a revelation. FreshBooks lets you do invoicing easy and simple. You create these professional looking invoices, you send by email, every email has a pay me now button that makes it very easy for your clients to pay. Turns out clients want to pay you. Paying the bills is as awful as making the bills. If you make it easy for them, you're going to get paid faster. In fact, FreshBooks users get paid on average 5 days faster. If you're keeping hours, the FreshBook app will do that for you and automatically insert it into the invoice. Great for expenses too. You can take pictures of the receipts. It is a super simple cloud accounting program that's giving... program isn't the right term. I don't know what you call it. Software service? It's giving thousands of freelancers like you the tools to save time billing and get paid faster. Create and send invoices in minutes, organize your expenses easily, track your time instantly. I'm telling you, you're going to wonder why you didn't start sooner. The FreshBooks award winning support rock stars are there waiting for your call. They're fabulous. They're in Toronto. There they are. Love them. Get started right now. Free for 30 days. freshbooks.com/twit, and do me a favor. When they ask you how you heard about it, just say I heard it on TWiT. Start your 30-day free trial today. We thank them for supporting This Week in Tech and the TWiT podcasts. Anything more to say about the big actually you know, maybe of more interest, frankly, I'll probably get the new iPhone, mostly because I sent my son my old iPhone because he broke his again. He said, "Dad. Are you going to get the new iPhone?" I said of course. "What are you doing with the old iPhone?" I've heard that sound before so I said I'll send it to you now. I sent it to him. I think I'm going to get the bigger one.

Jason: I was going to say six or six plus? 

Leo: I got the six and I really liked the six. For a while I was saying don't get the six plus because it's just bigger. Apps don't take much advantage of the bigger screen, but I think that's changed over time. More and more apps take advantage of the extra pixels. I like a big phone. I'm using a Note 5. I like big phones. I cannot lie. Those other brothers can't deny. 

Steve: Is your Note broken?

Leo: Yes. How did you know?

Steve: I don't know. Everyone was jamming their pen in their--

Leo: There's no jamming involved. That was the thing... I thought oh. I read the articles. If you put the pen in backwards you can break it, right, and I just thought I'll show how easy it is to get it in backwards. At some point I thought it's going to fight me. It falls right in. Don't laugh.

Georgia: It's so funny, Leo. When I was researching it, I wanted to see people dropping their phone when they were doing their box opening, and so then I see MacBreak Weekly and I look through and I'm watching to see you, and I'm like no he didn't.

Leo: Oh yes he did. 

Georgia: He did it! I got to watch you do the unthinkable.

Leo: I think you can tell, I wasn't making this up. I didn't expect it to happen. I wasn't intentionally breaking my phone. What you don't realize is there is no resistance. Resistance is futile. You let it fall in, and as you're pulling it out, suddenly you can't get it out. I did not yank it. I did not pull it. I went to the AT&T store where I bought it and said please sir. I seem to have something stuck in my phone. They said what do you want us to do about it? I said fix it. We don't do repairs here, you could send it to Samsung and see it three months later. 

Steve: Just go to the Samsung store. 

Leo: Then I said OK, but don't you have if you don't like a phone you'll take it back? They said we won't take it back like that. If you were to remove the pen and put it back in we'd take it back. But then I couldn't have the phone and I like the Note 5. So I walked away hanging my head. It didn't fight me. It just came out. But in fact, there's a teeny tiny plastic hook that gets caught and I broke it. It doesn't make that much of a difference.

Georgia: I saw someone take it out really nicely by cutting a sliver of a piece of paper and they just slid it on and pulled it out.

Leo: You can push that lever out before you remove the pen. I didn't do that. It's not the end of the world. The only thing you lose is the sensing that the pen has been removed, which has some slight benefits. The pen still works. You can still press the pen button and all the pen applications pop up, so it's not the end of the world. By the way, I gained a little battery life. I turned off pen detection in settings and my battery life went up by an hour. 

Georgia: So now you'll be saying it's a feature. Yeah. 

Leo: What do you think? There's a lot of debate over this. A lot of people said you're an idiot. You put it in wrong. I feel like this could easily.... you're not looking. That was easy to do. So is it bad engineering? Or is it user error?

Jason: That's bad design. If it's that easy to make it malfunction, it's bad design no question.

Leo: Should they recall these? I'm sure they'll fix it in future editions.

Georgia: They should recall them. It makes no sense. If some of the best people in tech are putting their pens in backwards and having this happen, then what do the regular people expect to have happen? It would happen immediately.

Leo: Samsung’s response was a manual. Except it doesn't come with a manual, you have to read it in a PDF online, which nobody is going to do.

Jason: Nobody reads manuals anymore. We've been trained not to.

Leo: You shouldn't be able to do this, I think.

Georgia: New technology is supposed to protect me from myself. That's good technology. They should know that people are going to put the pen in backwards, try to put it in sideways. They should not allow that. All they had to do was make it a little bit wider in the base. That's it. It wouldn't take that much. Or change the manner in which they had the little sensor latch on the inside.

Leo: Compare this to antennae gate. The iPhone 4 problem. Worse? Better?

Jason: Same.

Leo: Really? I think this is worse. The iPhone 4, any phone if you hold it to block the antennae it's going to get worse. I also feel like an idiot for having done it. I believe the people who say Leo, you're just an idiot, you shouldn't have done that. I like this phone, I really like this phone. It still works exactly as before and I still use it. If you don't want to have the pen, you can get the Samsung galaxy S6 Edge Plus, which is the same phone with no pen. 

Jason: You accidentally hit the edge of the screen sometimes and do weird things, but it looks fabulous. That thing looks like a beauty. I would say... let's talk fabulous a little bit. We were talking about if you were going to get the 6 or the 6 Plus and you were saying you were going for the 6 Plus which you have to pay 850 for. The tablet thing is so real. I use to laugh at fablets. I find myself more and more wanting one.

Leo: People mocked me. I've had every Note since the Note One. This phone is not as big as the Note one. Nobody laughs at me anymore if I talk like this. It looked weird at the time. Now it's like... do you know what we discovered? We discovered we're more productive with a bigger screen, it's easier to read, it's easier to use, and frankly this is the computer we spend more time on than any other computer in our life. We might as well have one that's easy to use. 

Jason: I agree. I was one of the ones that laughed at you for the Fablet, sorry Leo, but the more I... I've carried an iPhone and an Android phone since 2010, and obviously all of us we get testers in, and the more time I've spent testing these fablets, the more I'm like it's nice having that big screen. I find myself reading more on it, I answer emails on it, because with a bigger screen you can manage to keyboard better. For the first time I'm thinking for my everyday phone--

Leo: You're going to get the 6 Plus? 

Jason: I may actually get a fablet. I think it's an interesting time if we're talking about phones and then I'll shut up and let the guests say what their perspective is too. With Verizon going no contract, T Mobile is essentially the same direction, others are going to follow clearly, all of a sudden, the price of these phones is going to be a lot more... people are going to be more sensitive to price than they are currently. I think that actually hurts Apple and Samsung.

Leo: Oh My god. This phone is 850 bucks. 

Jason: Right? Exactly. Whereas you look at something like the Moto X pure edition, another beautiful phone, 400 bucks and that is a super powerful phone. Very well received. I expect that it's going to be well received and if you're a consumer and wanting to upgrade your device and you're looking at 400 versus 850, even if it's 90% as good, I think the perception of it is going to be that it's really close. There's no doubt people will choose something like the Moto X pure edition over an 850 iPhone 6 or Samsung 5. 

Leo: Part of the reason is that they're seeing the actual price now that subsidies are starting to go away, you will actually be seeing the actual price you're paying. Once you know what you're paying, it's like you're kidding. That costs more than my desktop computer. Are you kidding me?

Georgia: Leo, that's not the question I want to know though. If rumor has it that they're going to go with the rose gold, are you going to go rose gold?

Leo: First of all, I'll go with whatever I can get, because rose gold will definitely be out of stock within 5 minutes on Friday the 11. 

Jason: Just for the novelty factor and looking unique, right?

Leo: No, because, think about it. If you want to buy a new iPhone, a high priority is that people know you have the new iPhone. The only way they would know that is if you have the rose gold one. Everything else looks like the old ones.

Jason: Remember when the white came out? Everybody got the white.

Leo: Apple's finally learned this. In the old days, they thought nobody will buy whatever the weird color was. Now they know that's the one you make the most of. 

Georgia: You get the prestige factor. It's nice to have people say, "Oh my god. Do you have the new.... whatever." 

Leo: It's also painted pink.

Georgia: It's a beautiful color. The rose gold is a bronze color. It's not overly girly. 

Leo: You haven't even seen it! You're projecting. 

Georgia: If it's the same as they say, like the watch, it's a beautiful color. 

Leo: It's not the watch because the watch is actually rose gold. This will be aluminum. 

Georgia: It will be rose gold-ish. 

Jason: Can it make rose gold fashionable again? There's an editor on my staff, who used to be a fashion editor. Rose gold is so out. Rose gold has been out for ten years. I was like, really? 

Leo: Did you ask her what's in? I'd like to know. 

Jason: What's in? This is a good question. She said rose gold was a thing 10/20 years ago.

Leo: Is that true, Georgia? You're fashion forward?

Georgia: I'm not that fashion forward. I'm not that into rose gold, I never was, although I would get the phone in rose gold.

Leo: You know that Christina Warren finally got her pink leather. You guys are nuts. You Apple phone people are nuts. 

Georgia: Any worse than any other techie? We're the bad ones.

Leo: How many bands does Renee Ritchie have now? 

Georgia: That's true. I think that he has 8 bands perhaps? 

Leo: What's the DSM 7 diagnostic for somebody who has too many watchbands?

Georgia: I would call him passionate. 

Leo: That's it.

Georgia: It's nice to have fun. Technology can be fun and enjoyable, and when you find something that matches, when I found my little watchband from Etsy, I was so excited, and it was fun and affordable, so why not?

Jason: I would rather get 20% off. 

Leo: Actually you should do it. I know people will want it.

Jason: It's a pretty nice band. I just have the white. 

Leo: I have the transparent one. It's so beautiful you don't even... I stopped wearing my Apple Watch. It's dopey. 

Jason: Here's the problem. I tweeted this last week because I've had a lot of conversations about the Apple Watch, obviously. I was a skeptic going into it, although I've worn fitness bands... I've owned a FitBit since they came out. The problem with the Apple Watch are the expectations, and some of this Apple is to blame for. People expect it to be an iPhone on your wrist, when it's actually just a smarter version of a FitBit. If you're expecting an iPhone on your wrist, you're going to be disappointed. Even Apple with some of the things they tried to do in Apps over-reached a little and was a little too ambitious. The UI is not thought well through enough to work with some of the ways that they'd like to do apps. That could get better in the version of the software that's about to be released, but...

Leo: Does the 2.0 come out next week? Is that going to be part of the 9th?

Georgia: Yes.

Leo: I'm not throwing my watch away. In fact, I've ordered hearing aids, because if you hadn't noticed, I'm an older person. The hearing aids that I bought work with an iPhone, so... it's the starky halos. 

Georgia: How do they work with the iPhone?

Leo: A couple of things. You can play anything that's on your iPhone through the hearing aid. They're like a Bluetooth headset. I don't know how good the sound fidelity is. 

Jason: I tried some of those at CVS.

Leo: How were they?

Jason: I thought they were pretty good. I thought they were amazing. They also worked to integrate this through TVs too, so if you're an elderly person with a hearing aid, they would have to turn it up. Now, they can actually hear it in many ways better and more clearly and on a higher fidelity than even the people in the room because their hearing aid can connect with...

Leo: I can hear better than you all, damn you. The other thing it does, is it geo-locates. It has 25 different presets for different locations. You can change these EQ for background noise. Whatever. It does a weird thing, which is... the ad copy is not politically correct. It says, "For children and women with high voices, we'll automatically lower the pitch into your hearing range so you can understand children and women." 

Georgia: That's horrible. 

Leo: From now on, all women are going to sound like this. 

Georgia: I thought you were going to say for women and children it just turns them off so you don't have to listen. 

Leo: It has an Apple interface, so you can say put in preset number 4, I'm watching Matlock, and so I think that's going to be kind of cool. iPhone and Apple Watch. I may end up wearing the thing again. To me, that's the Apple Watch. It appeals to people that have a specific use that it works for. If you have a specific need. 

Jason: It's good at two things. I've written about this and done a video about this. It's good at two things, which are alerts. The alerts are good because of the app ecosystem; it gives you a diversity of alerts. It keeps you from missing calls to missing text messages

Leo: I don't like that. It's too annoying. It's constantly beeping and booping on my wrist, I don’t' want it. 

Jason: You have to tune it a little, but for me, I take out my phone a lot less. I like that.

Leo: You sound so freaking lazy. All these people who say I don't have to take my phone out of my pocket. How much trouble is it if you wish to look at your phone? 

Georgia: Have you seen my purse? It's a lot of trouble, Leo. It's a lot of trouble to find my purse, find my phone in my purse, take it out; by then the call is already left. I have to go to voice mail, that means I have to go through all my voicemails to see what happens, I get to check it out on my wrist, I can curate. Do I want to answer the phone right now? Is this important? Is it not? And then I can decide if I want to search through my purse because it's important enough and I need to deal with this call or not. It saves me time. 

Jason: I like that more than I thought I would. I kind of liked it on FitBit when FitBit had started to do some of this too. This is just a little bit more sophisticated version. Same thing with the fitness tracker. It's just a little bit more sophisticated version of the fitness tracker. The back end, Apple's health kit pulls all that health data from your tracker into health kit and health kit can feed it back to apps. You can then get a larger picture of your health.

Leo: Boy have you drunk the Kool-Aid. By the way, my hearing aids will do that too, you know. Apple...

Jason: Only two things that it's really good for. That's what I say in my piece. If you want to use it for those two things, you're in business, if you want it to do other stuff; it's just not there yet. 

Leo: That's my attitude. There are a few specific use cases that make a lot of sense. Fitness is one of them. Although, I don't think it does anything more... in fact, it's not even the best selling fitness band. This is what gets me. Apple is going to say we're number two. FitBit outsells them according to IDC. Nobody knows what the actual numbers are. I don't know how accurate these are, but according to IDC, in the second quarter of 2015, 4.4 million FitBits, 3.6 million Apple Watches, a Xiaomi fitness band, and others. Apple only has 3.6 out of the 18.1 million wearables sold. It's a small fraction. 

Jason; Oh yeah. It's a small market.

Leo: It's not just a small market. They have a small fraction of the small market. This is not some break away hit. By the way, it's not my job to decide whether a watch or a product is a success of any kind based on sales. I don't do that. This is not a business show. We're not judging Apple's business acumen; I judge it on whether it's a success in terms of being a product I or others might want to use. I think it's of limited utility. It's a little bit of a disappointment. 

Jason: That's fair. 

Steve: I wear mine every day. Someone at the Subway or at a bar or restaurant ask me what I think of it and should I get one? My answer is almost always no. Don't get one; you have to know what it is. I think that like we were saying earlier, it's best used as a watch. I use it to check the time and notifications.

Leo: That's sad!

Georgia: That's what I think the watch does worst is the time. 

Leo: It turns itself off! It's a watch that doesn't work most of the time.

Georgia: It doesn't actually tell me the time. I have to tap it or flick in order to see the time, which is relatively obvious. 

Leo: At least Android Wear stays on. 

Georgia: That's what I would love is to have it in a low battery mode. 

Leo: I'm not as negative on the watch as I sound. I know I sound like I'm very negative on it. I mostly want to give an opposing point of view that it isn't all that. A lot of people are saying this is a Jesus watch. Wearables are difficult. Something that small, it's difficult to come up with a user interface that's actually useful. I think wearables in general, the FitBit does well for a lot less money at the kinds of things that people want fitness watches. A Timex will do very well at telling time. Notifications is the one thing. I don't want those notifications coming in all the time. I find it a little bit annoying. There are some use cases. Walking around London it was great to have a smart watch say turn left now turn right now without having to stare at the map the whole time. I feel like these are limited use cases. Mostly I'm saying they haven't yet figured out how to make wearables really useful. 

Jason: I don't think they will either. I don't think there's a whole lot more that thing is going to do. I think expectations are a little too high. Apple didn't necessarily help with that. It is good at those two things, and I think it will only get better, which are the notifications. I don't like taking my phone out of my pocket all the time. To me, that's super useful to me. I like notifications on FitBit before this came out and did it a little better. I used a FitBit a long time for fitness, and FitBit does it well and most of the other people in my family and friends still use FitBit and I've passed on my FitBit to other people. It does those things a little bit better. It's not a breakthrough product, but it does do some things better. People were talking about how it's going to sell 20 to 30 million units this year. That's insane. It will not sell more than 5 to 10. That's about the trajectory that they're on. It does those two things well. It does need to do, like Georgia was saying, it needs to stay on all the time so you can look at your watch. I think the next version will have an OLED display, which is low power enough. 

Leo: Apple is using an OLED display. 

Jason: I guess it's not OLED enough. 

Leo: I think Apple did a lot of great things with the watch. They're good at design, but I still don't think it's pretty. It's only mildly useful. What I'm saying is the same thing you say, Steve, when you see people on the subway. Unless you know you have a use for this and you know you want it, you probably shouldn't. 

Jason: I haven't recommended any real person to go out and buy one, like a person not in tech.

Leo: My hearing will tell me what time it is. Actually, a blind guy told me he loves his Apple Watch because it talks to him. It's a talking watch. I didn't know that. He said, for that alone this is great. That's a great use as an accessibility device.

Steve: It has all the accessibility settings built into it just like the Mac, the iPhone, and the iPad. Anybody can use it. It's interesting they were able to cram that in there.

Leo: I'm going to coin a new word. Blockapalooza. It's about to happen next week. Blockapalooza will happen September 9. I'll explain why it is absolutely a massive sea change in what's happening on the Internet. Is that a good tease? Blockapalooza. 

Georgia: After the break.

Leo: Thank you, Georgia Dow. It reminds me, are you part of that incomparable team?

Georgia: I do a couple of shows with Jason. I don't know what that means. 

Leo: He's asked me to record, I want to be a part of that special handshake. He's asked me to record a bit for the next incomparable theatre. I'm going to be the announcer. 

Georgia: You're not type cast at all.

Leo: I could be the creepy uncle. Give me a chance! Our show today, see? I just get myself in these things, don't I, Georgia?

Steve: You do. You step in it. 

Leo: Our Show to you today brought to you by Citrix GoToMeeting: a great way to meet with clients, colleagues, coworkers from the convenience of your Smartphone, tablet... they don't have it for your watch yet. Don't put it past them. These guys could easily do that. When we have a meeting, we don't have a conference call, we have a GoToMeeting. You get all the Conference call features and you can use that. If you have an iPad and speakers, you can use the microphone on the iPad, or you can use your regular phone. The nice thing about doing it with GoToMeeting is if you need to share a screen, if you want to show your client a PowerPoint presentation or your keynote presentation, you can do it. Even better, you've got a camera on that device. Just turn it on, now you're seeing them in HD quality. It's practically like a face-to-face meeting. You can share screens to present. You can get Feedback in real time, and you can see each other. I love GoToMeeting. This is truly empowering technology. It deserves the attention. It's taking the backseat. We're all used to this now. If you're not, do it right now. You can sign up and it literally takes a minute. You get 30 days free. You go to GoToMeeting.com; it's so fast you'll be ready to have your first meeting before I'm through with this commercial. GoToMeeting.com, try it free. 30 days awaits you. GoToMeeting from Citrix. You're watching TWiT: This Week in Tech. Georgia Dow is here from iMore.com, Jason Hiner from CBS Interactive, from I want to say Business Insider, but it's the new one...

Steve: Tech Insider.

Leo: Techinsider.io. Steve Kovach. That's exciting. What is your job there?

Steve: I am now a deputy editor. It's going to be crazy. I oversee the tech section of tech insider. There are four sections. 

Georgia: Congratulations. 

Leo: Well done. 

Jason: Can we say one more thing about Smartwatches?

Leo: OK. Go ahead.

Jason: The next wave of Google Wear is about to happen, or Android wear devices is about to happen. Waway is about to release their watch which looks really sharp, by the way. They were showing it off to tech journalists not last week but the week before in San Francisco. That one looks sharp. Also the next Samsung gear is about to be released as well. That one is Tyzon and not Android Wear. They're going in the same direction. It's similar. 

Leo: This Waway has an Apple Watch Feel to it, doesn't it? 

Jason: It looks really sharp. 

Steve: The Gear S2 looks incredible. They've been posting pictures of it and Instagram already. Jason, you were going to say it works on IOS?

Jason: That's what has been reported. It will work in IOS. I should say rumored. 

Jason Howell: They have it on their product page on Amazon. It says supports IOS and Android wear. Nobody knows if that's true or not.

Leo: It's always going to be limited because Apple doesn't let you be a peer to the Apple Watch. Is this the gear that you're talking about?

Jason: This is the old one. 

Leo: I had this one. This was a nightmare. 

Jason Howell: It's the Gear S2. 

Leo: Here it is. Coming soon. Berlin Thursday. This week? Is IFA—you know with Samsung making announcements outside of IFA, Motorola, Microsoft, it feels like IFA’s less, has suddenly gotten less important, not more important.

Jason: I don’t know, it’s kind of like the CES of—it’s sort of like “CES Light” of Europe, you know?

Leo: So this is the Gear 2.

Jason: But everyone’s moving away from these big watches anyway. The Gear 2 looks great. I mean both of these look better than the Apple Watch.

Leo: Wait a minute, is that an Apple Watch or a …

Georgia: That is the Apple Watch.

Steve: We’re comparing it to that.

Leo: Ok, that was confusing for a moment because I thought, “Wow Samsung’s really ripping off Apple.”

Georgia: They’re really copying them now.

Leo: So, it’s round.

Steve: That top right image, if you go to the very top of the page, even more—there. That’s someone actually wearing it.

Leo: See I like round.

Steve: Yea.

Leo: I was surprised a little bit that Apple did not go round.

Jason: Yea, I think the ecosystem is moving to round. It’s harder to do it, you know, from a developer’s perspective, right? Round is harder to a degree than square because so many of these apps and the existing ecosystem of all the things that are there are built for square, right? So round is a little harder. But round does look nicer. I mean when I was testing the Apple Watch, I was testing the Moto 360 at the same time, and I liked the look of the 360. I just wish it was about a third smaller, but it was just kind of huge.

Leo: Yea.

Jason: And you know, but I also go the smaller Apple Watch to test as well, the 38mm. And I find that it’s fine. But these round ones look really, really sharp. I think the Huawei one same thing, looks fantastic.

Leo: So maybe I’m wrong. Maybe this category has some life in it and it’s just we haven’t seen the best yet.

Georgia: I think that it’s going to be the wave of the future. I think that people are going to want to have technology with them that they don’t have to actually take out of a pocket or a purse, that’s going to be something that’s seamless and becomes part. Similar to what you were saying, you know, with the hearing aids. It’s something that makes it really easy because it’s already a part of you so you don’t have to find it. It’s there to give you information as you need. And to help you be like that digital assistant throughout your day.

Jason: I think the trend is toward—I get what Georgia’s saying—the trend is towards, you know, technology becoming more invisible, right? Becoming, you know, integrating more seamlessly until everything-- 

Leo: If you do that, each piece has to work with the other piece and UI is the problem. And this is the problem I see with watches. They’re so small. Look at what Apple’s done with the stem and the button and the Force Touch. There’s too much UI there. It’s really hard to navigate, those icons are tiny. I feel like if you’re going to do that, then what you do is you take the computer and you break it out. But it all has to come back into a central hub. Which was what the computer was for a long time in the home. And I feel like a smartphone is actually perfect. It’s the perfect form factor. We’ve solved the problems on this. And it’s not so far away. It’s on your body, it’s on your person. And this can have an acceptable UI where as a watch or a hearing aid or something stitched into your fabric can’t.

Jason: Yea, but if I’m taking a walk or I’m hiking or I’m at the gym or I’m doing anything active—

Leo: You guys are too active. That’s part of the problem.

Jason: I don’t want to pull my phone out all the time.

Leo: No, no. You guys relax. You’re doing too much crap outside of your house. Just sit.

Georgia: The problem with the phone—the problem with the phone is that it uses up either 100% or 50% of your usable limbs. And so you’re having to hold it. So I have one phone that is being, my one hand that I cannot use for something else, and then if I’m going to interact with it, now I’m using both. And so I can’t do something else at the same time. And that becomes exceptionally cumbersome.

Leo: Don’t do something else at the same time. Stop it. You’re doing too much.

Georgia: But we—that is our, that is what we want to do. We want to do more for less.

Leo: What do you mean it uses 50% of my usable limbs? So what? What are you doing with the other ones? Are you an acrobat?

Georgia: You could be, you know, trying to catch one of your children that are running around. You might be driving at the same time. You don’t use any technology while you’re driving. But you know, you might be wanting to read the newspaper, being able to travel somewhere or something might have fallen down and you have to choose between do I drop my phone or do I drop my donuts? Don’t pick the donuts. I did that once and I broke my phone.

Leo: Really?

Georgia: It’s a true story. Absolutely true. I was so angry after that—

Leo: Take the donuts, leave the phone. That’s my advice to you. What about voice? Will that solve this? Because that is a UI that’s getting better. We just talked about it. 

Jason: It’s going to have to.

Leo: If I could talk to my stuff. The problem is that you then look like a crazy person.

Jason: Yea you can only do that in certain contexts, right? You can’t do that in every context and that is part of the challenge.

Leo: I bought a 2nd Alexa. I’m sorry, Echo. I shouldn’t say the A word. I bought a 2nd Echo because I like being able to talk to my house. And it’s interesting. It’s not my house. It’s a tube but it feels like you’re talking to your house. And I think that’s what cool about that is it’s you know, probably Siri and Google Now can do more than Amazon. But it feels like it’s kind of always there and you don’t have to take anything out. I’m lying in bed and I can say, “What time is it?” I can say, “Read me my book. Put me to bed. Get me a hot cocoa.” No, I can’t do that last stuff. But that’s not too far off. Maybe voice is the way—I don’t know.

Jason: Yea, no. It’s a big part of the future but it has limited context because you can’t, you know, be walking through, you know, downtown San Francisco--

Leo: But remember how crazy we thought people were when they talked into their Bluetooth headsets walking down the street animatedly talking away? We thought they were nuts. Now we’re used to it.

Steve: I still think they’re nuts.

Leo: (Laughing) do you?

Jason: I don’t know. Yea I was going to say, I still think they’re nuts. I still think it’s not socially, completely, totally acceptable.

Leo: I just go, “Douchebag.” And move on.

Jason: Yea, yea. Yea.

Leo: By the way I’m just noticing tech- what is this? A techinsider.io. They’re talking about the Tesla. First car ever to get a 103 points from Consumer Reports. More than a perfect store.

Steve: It broke their system.

Leo: It broke their system.

Jason: It broke the system. That’s great.

Georgia: I watched that. That was amazing.

Leo: Yea. Wow.

Georgia: That is a safe car.

Leo: Safe car. Still not getting one. I don’t want to go out anymore. I want to stay at home with my Amazon, with my Echo and just talk and relax and—

Jason: You’re not even onboard with Apple Watch. There’s no way you’re getting a Tesla.

Leo: (Laughing) you kids and your electronics. If you missed any of the fine programming that we had this week on TWiT, you might have missed something really entertaining. Take a look. 

Narrator: Previously on TWiT.

Leo: You can jam this stylus back in. And you can. It goes in very—this is backwards.

Rene Ritchie: Samsung issued a statement now which is amazing, telling people to--

Leo: What did they say?

Rene: You should read the manual.

Leo: Ooo, I just did it. Crap.

Rene: Leo.

Kelly Guimont: And that’s their official stance, is RTFM?

Narrator: iOS Today.

Leo: I just came back from a long trip. I did use translation apps and they were great. I’m wondering where I can find the art museum.

Phone: (Chinese).

Male Voice: (Chinese).

Phone: I do not know.

Narrator: This Week in Google.

Ron Amadeo: I wonder if we just drop it—

Leo: Don’t, no, Ron, don’t, no, no, no!

Ron: If we just drop it—

Jeff Jarvis: Do it, Ron.

Ron: Like straight up gravity I wonder if it will get stuck.

Leo: See? You see how easy that went in?

Narrator: Tech News Tonight.

Megan Morrone: I feel like all these notifications are making me much more productive. What do you think?

Jonathan Strickland: So notifications are very much the same as multi-tasking. If you multi-task you commit about twice as many errors as you would if you were focusing on a single task. And it takes you 25% longer to complete all of those tasks.

Narrator: This is your brain. This is your brain on TWiT. Any questions.

Phone: But I can search the web if you’d like.

Megan: Thank you. And It’s so polite.

Leo: It is helpful. And I like the male Siri.

Megan: I do.

Leo: Do you call him Sir?

Megan: No. He calls me ma’am. That’s why I have him.

Leo: If you –we’re just beginning. What’s coming up this week? Mike Elgan has the latest.

Mike Elgan: Coming up this week. Tuesday, September 1 is the beginning of the end for Flash on the internet. On that date Google will disable Flash ads by default and Amazon will stop accepting all Flash ads on its main site Amazon.com. Then on Thursday, September 3rd, Motorola will ship its Moto X Pure Edition known as the Moto X Style outside the US. The Samsung Galaxy S2 Tablet ships Thursday as well. And IFA, the giant consumer electronics and appliance show officially starts in Berlin on Friday, September 4th. But a few companies are jumping the gun. For example both Sony and Asus will hold IFA related events on Wednesday and we’ll cover the Sony event live at 7:00 AM Pacific. For all this and the rest of the news this week tune into Tech News Today at 10:00 AM Pacific 1700 UTC at TWiT.tv/live. Back to you, Leo.

Leo: Thank you, Mike Elgan, our news director. And I imagine Mike will be here next Wednesday. I’m going to be out of town. We’re having a meet-up in New York City on Wednesday, September 9th. So I’m going to miss the Apple event. 1st time ever I think since 2001 I’ve missed an Apple event. But if you are in the big apple or near the big apple, come by Rattle n Hum, Mary Jo Foley’s favorite bar from 3:00-5:00—

Jason: Yea!

Leo: Yea, you know it? Have you been there?

Jason: Oh yea, Rattle n Hum. That’s our spot.

Leo: Come by. Come by. Anybody that’s in New York 3:00-5:00 PM Pacific, not Pacific, Eastern. We’ll be there and so will be Dick DeBartolo, Mary Jo Foley will be there and Paul Thurrott from our Windows Weekly show. I think others as well. I’ll be there, Lisa my wife and our CEO will be there and we’ll be glad to talk. And it’s going to be a lot of fun. Have beer. And then I think Apple’s going to make us order at Midnight Pacific, right? If we want the new iPhone.

Steve: Most likely if they follow their pattern, yea.

Jason: Yea, yea.

Leo: So that means 3:00 AM New York Time? Do you—what do you east coasters do? Do you just get up at 3 in the morning?

Georgia: You set your alarm.

Leo: Oh, God.

Georgia: And then the alarm goes off. And then you order all your Apple products. And then you go back to bed.

Leo: I last time, I did that last year. And I – the alarm went off and I went back to sleep for 10 minutes. That’s all. And then I got online and there was nothing.

Steve: Was that for the watch?

Leo: No, was it the watch? Yea it was the watch.

Steve: I think we talked about that one of the times that I was on this show.

Leo: Yea. I fell asleep. I fell back asleep.

Jason: Yea I didn’t get up at 3:00 because I thought, “It’s the watch. It’s not going to sell out, you know.”

Leo: Oh boy.

Jason: And then I got up in the morning and I was like, “Oh, crap.”

Leo: Dude. It sold out. So and I need a phone because as you know I gave mine up.

Jason: Yea. I think my tech journalist—I think I might have got my tech journalist card nearly taken away after that, so you know. There you go.

Leo: Pressure. People don’t understand what pressure we’re under. You know?

Georgia: Rough job.

Jason: That’s true. Exactly right.

Leo: Rough job.

Jason: Exactly right.

Georgia: It’s a rough job getting all of these cool tech things and getting to talk about it online. It’s rough. It’s hard.

Leo: Tough job. All right, I’m calling it Blockapalooza. I don’t think this will catch on but I’ve been calling it that. And you guys no better than anybody because you work for web based publications. We’ve talked about this before. Content blocking, ad blocking is going through the roof.

Jason: Yea.

Leo: Ad Age said billions of dollars lost. I don’t know if that’s a hyperbole or if it’s accurate but I think it’s really going to start snowballing. And September 9th might be D-day for online—not just online advertising but online analytics of all kinds because iOS 9 will ship we presume. And Apple is going to allow, they’ve announced, content blockers in Safari.

Jason: Yea.

Leo: That means that many of the people who visit your site will not only no see your ads, you won’t even see them. You won’t be able to count them. Is that something that worries CBS Interactive or Business Insider? It worries me and I don’t even have, I don’t even make money that way. I feel like—

Steve: I mean of course it worries me and I mean obviously my livelihood is tied to people visiting the site and viewing ads. And you know, I see it from a product standpoint. Yes, it can slow down some sites. By the way, Business Insider is very fast. There’s a study done comparing us to other sites and we are much faster than a lot of the competition. But anyway you know, it’s almost like stealing. You know, I need to eat too. I’m providing you a service. I’m giving you great content. And if a little ad next to the content you’re viewing bothers you, then pay us. You know what I mean?

Leo: It’s an ethical—I agree that there is an ethical concern. But let me as you this, Steve? Do you TiVo TV shows?

Steve: No, I’m a cord cutter so, cord cutter.

Leo: Ok.

Steve: But I pay for everything that I—

Leo: You do.

Steve: I have Netflix and I have—

Leo: So you’re ethical.

Steve: I’m totally ethical. I don’t forage or anything.

Leo: Ok. There are shows, network television shows, that I watch that I skip the commercials. That’s why I DVR them. Is that—I’m doing the same thing aren’t I?

Georgia: No because they don’t know that you’re skipping the commercials.

Leo: Oh good. Whew. I’m off the hook.

Georgia: So you’re fine.

Leo: But ethically (laughing), morally it is the same thing which is, you know, you’re consuming free content, ad supported content. But you’re not supporting it. You’re trying to get—is stealing too harsh a word? That’s what Steve?

Steve: No, no.

Leo: It’s not.

Steve: What else is it?

Jason: Part of the social contract. It’s part of the social contract.

Leo: If you walked in a store and took a candy bar and left without paying for it that would be stealing. If you go to a website, read the content without seeing the ads, is that the same?

Georgia: I think that there is a little bit of a difference in between this, is that so you know, our mind works that things that are stagnant and stay in one place eventually we start to block out. We don’t actually see them. We don’t even – like it doesn’t even register in our mind because it’s static and most static things are not anything dangerous. So it’s nothing that we actually need to pay attention to. Most static things didn’t kill us.

Leo: That’s right.

Georgia: And so then after a while that they figure out that people aren’t actually reading the advertising on the side, we actually block them out from our mind as if they don’t exist. And so then they started changing them by making them really vivid colors so you could think about animals that are vivid colors, they’re a little more dangerous, so you should pay attention to them. But after a while in time people noticed, “You know what? We’re not looking—they’re not looking at those ads either or increasing their clicking.” So then they started making the movement. Our eyes are naturally made to take a look at movement. Because movement was dangerous to us. And then the ads became more and more obnoxious. And so I think it was that they took advantage of the goodwill of wanting to go to sites and now they’ve made these ads that are intensely. They chase you around the screen sometimes, they blink, they turn on audio without your choice. And I think that they kind of broke the social contract and that’s why this is happening. And I also, my site also needs people to come in and you know, there’s advertising on that. And so I understand the other side of it as people are saying, “You know what? It’s gotten to be too much.” And that increases our level of stress, right? These ads are actually emotionally damaging to us. They cause us stress because things that chase us, things that we don’t want –

Steve: Emotionally damaging? An ad emotionally damages you?

Georgia: It actually, physiologically, yes.

Leo: That belly fat ad, that breaks my heart every time I see that ad.

Georgia: No but in increases our stress level. It’s not something that we have to—

Leo: It tears a little bit out of us each time. It’s death by 1,000 cuts.

Georgia: Well it makes us more stressed, it’s contributory to us so sites that run those types of ads I won’t go back to a site. And I will even e-mail and let them know because often, you know, some other ad company has placed these ads there. So a lot of websites you don’t know which advertising is happening on your site.

Leo: Isn’t that though, isn’t that the right way to deal with it? The ethical way to deal with it is to just not go there again.

Georgia: Yes.

Leo: Like, “My God, you’ve invaded, you’ve torn a little of my soul out and I’m never coming back.” But you know, on the other hand, if you’re on a quest for news or information, it’s hard to remember which sites you’re not allowed to visit anymore.

Georgia: But I think that that’s why that this has happened. Is that people are so annoyed with so many ads that are you know, everywhere causing load times to be so slow that now people have taken to the other side and said, “Well then, no more. I’m done now.” And the problem is that that’s going to make it, we’re going to be changing the entire way that we monetize web based performances because people are going to be making money that way anymore. And so I think--

Leo: Well that’s why I call this Block-a-populus.

Georgia: Because no one’s going to turn them back on after you’ve turned off ads.

Leo: As soon as you use an ad blocker once, you never go back, I hate to tell you.

Steve: If you’re enjoying the content you’re reading, if you want that to go away one day, then block all the ads because that will immediately vaporize so much great content out there. The iMores, the Business Insiders, the C-Nets, all those sites.

Georgia: Yep.

Steve: The Verges, the Gizmodos. They will be gone.

Leo: I hear both sides. I hear both sides, though. I also understand why people—load times are tripled in some cases, not on Business Insider but on some sites, malware is injected via Flash and other means on some sites. We’ve seen this happen over and over again. The ads tear a little bit of your soul away each time. So I understand why people block. I really do. And I also think it’s important for people to understand that that’s how sites like Business Insider and iMore and Tech Republic, that’s how – these are free to you. They pay for the staff. They pay for the service. They pay for the bandwidth with these ads. 

Jason: Yea, but it’s so—this is a game that is changing and is changing drastically. You know for us, you know, we see the writing on the wall that you know, advertising is a race to the bottom, right? Like there’s infinite, there’s infinite demand—or, sorry, not infinite demand but infinite supply now, right? There’s so many sites writing about tech. There’s so many sites you know, writing about business that you know that they will do it and give people ads cheaper than what we get because we are, our game is to play a quality game. And so you know, more and more we’re looking to other ways to monetize and we say that absolutely that’s the future. And when you know, there’s lots of conversations that we have all the time about you know, how to make our pages load faster. How to not annoy people with ads. You know there’s lots of talk when sort of new kinds of ad units get put on, and on the pages. And then it’s like, “OK, then take some off,” right? Because then that will enable the page to load faster. That will not infringe on the users time and their attention as much. And those are the conversations you should be having when you’re, you know, in the business that we’re all in. But and that’s where, because if you don’t and you overstep, that’s when more people will use ad blockers. Because they’ll feel like, you know, you sort of broke that, that unwritten rule of, “Well I come here and I agree that I’m getting free content. And so I have to, you know I have to see some ads.” Or I have to do whatever. But if you, if you abuse that, that’s kind of what Georgia’s getting at, if you abuse that then the users take it up on themselves and say, “You know what? I still want to come here but I’m not going to keep doing this. This is out of hand.” And so that’s where as brands we have to find ways to balance that. It’s like you limit the number of ads you run on your show to a certain number and you won’t take more than that even if there is greater demand. Even if you could make more money by running 6 ads or 7 ads on your show, you know, you limit it to like 3 or 4. And so that’s sort of the tenuous balance of this thing. But I do think that all of us are faced with a future where we are going to have to think of other ways to monetize our sites because in a world of infinite supply, where more and more people are doing tech, now mainstream media is trying to do tech, often very badly but they will catch up and they will hire, you know, more people, then you know, that takes the value of all these ads down. And so we put more on the pages and that’s when ad blocking helps. That’s where the vicious cycle comes and that’s where we’re at.

Leo: What is Apple’s responsibility? I mean they’re turning this on and there are already 3 or 4 companies that have announced they’re going to do ad blockers for iOS. Why is Apple doing this? Is this just because, “Hey, we care about users?”

Jason: No, they’re just trying—

Leo: I bet you anything it’s not going to block iAds.

Jason: They’re trying to push everybody to apps, right? They want all of us to not, you know, encourage people to not use our mobile websites because in our apps then we can serve ads, right? So they want us to create apps and get them more engaged in the app ecosystem and make really good apps on iOS and use those and not just use the mobile web. Because when it comes to the mobile web who wins? Google wins. When it comes to apps who wins? Apple wins. Because they take a cut of any revenue you may have. Because they, you know, you’re making, you’re trying to make really good apps for one platform or the other. Sometimes both, but if, most people are developing for Apple first. They win when it’s apps. They lose when it’s the web. And so they’re pushing—that’s what this whole thing is about. And I don’t think they should be doing it and it pisses me off that they are doing it. But that’s what their game is.

Leo: I worry—the other side effect of this is that the less people look at ads the more outrageous, obnoxious ads have to be. And then ads go underground with native content, ads that opposes editorial but are in fact paid advertisement. You are seeing a lot of sites do that. Product placement. Watch American Idol. They have big Coke cups in front of them. That’s because people are skipping the ads in between. And some of these—

Jason: Is that bad?

Leo: Well I don’t think that’s so bad. In fact we keep trying to do product placement deals but nobody will give me free pizza (laughing). So I don’t know why.

Jason: Pizza Break?

Leo: Actually we’re talking about selling naming rights for the studio which I think would be a nice unobtrusive way to do an ad. But we have to be very careful because we have a sophisticated audience that’s very privacy concerned. It’s very savvy. I would assume that most of our users use ad blockers. So and it doesn’t cost us much because we only have two banner ads, only one of which we charge for on our website. It does hurt us because we don’t get analytics on the website, but yea, it’s not the end of the world.

Steve: That’s how your distribution is.

Leo: Most of our money, 99.9% comes from ads in the podcasts. And those have always been skip-able. I mean a podcast you just fast forward it. We TiVo it for you. So those are—

Georgia: The nice thing is they have you, you know, saying something and people are already attached to you and so it’s something that’s not obtrusive. It’s something that’s not exceptionally long. And there’s not like lights blinking out. And so it’s something that’s comforting from someone that they’ve chosen to watch. And so I think that that’s—people feel comfortable to deal with that as their contract of, “Oh, ok, this is the advertising.” And I think that it increases the salability of a product. It’s not just some square on, you know, a page. 

Leo: No, in fact if I were purely selfish I would promote ad blocking because the worse ads work on Tech Republic and Business Insider and iMore, the more my ads are valuable. But I—

Jason: You’re filtering it. Your audience also trusts you that you’re filtering it.

Leo: We do. I turn down advertisers almost every day. I say no to somebody. And by the way that hurt’s people—nobody ever, it’s so funny. Because it’s culture shock. “Wait a minute. You don’t want my money?” No. Nobody’s ever heard of turning down an ad. That never happens. And people are hurt. “Are you saying my product sucks?” I’m saying, “No, I just don’t think our audience is interested or we can’t--” A lot of times it because, “We can’t help you. I don’t think we’re going to sell, that product will sell very well to our audience so I don’t want to take your money.” I try to be ethical. Maybe that’s my-- But I—

Jason: This is—it’s also innovative though, right? You know because that’s what creates the trust with your audience. You are filtering essentially people who want to make a pitch to them and they trust you to do that because the stuff that has pitched, many of them have turned out well, right? I can think of at least 3 products that I learned about first on TWiT that I’ve ended up using. Like Squarespace—

Leo: You know it’s so funny because Squarespace—I just was reading Lance Ulanoff’s piece on Mashable about the quote “renaissance of podcasting.” And he said Squarespace buys I think he said 100 or 200 different podcasts. But we were the first one they bought. We’re how they got into podcasting. 

Steve: You can’t listen to a podcast without a Squarespace ad.

Leo: There’s always a Squarespace ad. I think that hurts us a little bit. But anyway, whether ad blockers are good or bad, and by the way we’re going to spend a whole show on Security Now talking about a particular ad blocker called uBlock Origin that seems to be the ad blocker of choice these days from a security perspective as well as a privacy perspective as well as pure convenience. I don’t want to promote ad blockers because I want your sites to persist, I want—I don’t want, I don’t want content, good free content to disappear. I don’t want paywalls everywhere I go. I really hate it when I’m trying to read a Financial Times article and it says, “Sorry, you can’t because you don’t pay for Financial Times.”

Steve: Now I wonder if the people like in the chat and so forth are complaining about ads. I mean would they just start paying if they loved iMore, if they loved C-Net, if they loved Business Insider?

Leo: What about this Google Contributor. Is that viable? Google has this contributor thing you pay Google then they replace Google Ads in the sites you visit. And some of that money goes to the website. Have you guys been approached by Contributor?

Steve: Oh, I have no idea.

Leo: I mean that’s way to kind of—because what you don’t want to do, I don’t think anybody wants 500 little bills (laughing). Micropayments? Is that the solution?

Jason: Micropayments will be part of it. You know, freemium essentially is part of it right? There’s going to be where there are layers of things you get for free and then to get greater value you know, that’s where micropayments come in right? So in our—

Leo: Here’s an interesting thing from Becky who’s a regular in our chatroom and a devoted fan. And she says something that I think is very interesting. She’s talking to you, Steve.

Steve: I saw it, yea.

Leo: She says, “It’s not free content. I pay for my internet access.”

Steve: That is—I hate that argument because that is, the internet is the pipe for the content. Yea that is—

Leo: That’s like saying, “I pay for a cable subscription so I shouldn’t have to pay for HBO.”

Steve: Exactly. Or like Netflix should be free because that’s delivered over the internet. Or Hulu. Or anything you buy on iTunes. All that should be free because you’re paying $50 a month or whatever?

Leo: I think that that’s if not explicit, that’s kind of how people are thinking. “Well, I spend a lot of money on the internet.”

Jason: Yes, that’s a perception that’s been there for 20 years, right? I’ve heard that argument. And so I understand where it’s coming from. But that again gets back to this idea of people not really understanding you know, this sort of social contract with advertised, advertising based content. And I don’t think that that’s going to change. You know there are audiences that are more sophisticated or whatever that can understand some of that stuff but that’s not really the point. You know the point is that yea, we have to make a better case to our audiences to, you know, what we do and how we can provide them with value and that how you know, we need to get a certain amount of value back from them. And that’s about telling our story, right? And that’s something that you do and you know you have kind of innovated and you know, have a way to do that. Everybody else has to think that same way, right? We’re giving you this value and we expect this amount of value back. Or we get this much value out of you and so here’s the value we give back.

Leo: Ad Block-a-nado? Ad Block-a-palooza? 

Steve: Wait what was the first one you said before we--?

Leo: Block-a-palooza. 

Steve: Block-a-palooza, yea. But that makes it sound like a party and a good thing and it’s totally not.

Jason: This is true. Block-apocalypse.

Leo: I think we’ll look back at September 9th as kind of a turning point in this.

Jason: Block-apocalypse.

Leo: Blockpocalypse. Blockapopulous?

Jason: Block-apocalypse.

Leo: Ad Block-apocalypse?

Georgia: I don’t even know if it’s going to be that bad of a thing. I think that it’s going to, I think that it’s going to cause people to change the manner in which we do advertising. And I think it’s also going to deal with, you know, how—people don’t really understand the manner in which websites really run. But I think that, you know, I think that it’s going to change that. I don’t know if it has to be though ad. I think that we can find better ways or have better contracts with people so that, you know, people feel comfortable in the sites that they go to and we can still fund them as well.

Leo: Yea. Well it’s going to be interesting to see what the side effects of these are. And I find it almost a little cynical that Apple’s—they’re not doing it. They’re opening up the door to it. But it almost feels like it’s to their advantage that they’re doing this. 

Jason: Oh yea.

Like “Well, you should just look at the ads in the apps and not on Safari.”

Jason: You should just go to the app. 

Leo: Just go to the app.

Jason: And then we’ll help serve the ads. You can sell ads there or you know, if you can’t sell ads there, you know, then we’ll sell you know, ads for you there. I mean that’s the whole pitch you know. And so, yea, it’s not, it’s very, it’s very hostile to contact companies which is not cool.

Leo: We’ll see what happens. Georgia Dow is here from iMore.com. Don’t forget anxiety-dashvideos.com if you are someone you know is suffering from anxiety. Maybe it’s the first step towards therapy. Maybe it’s an adjunct to the therapy you’re already getting. How do you feel about medication?

Georgia: I think usually unless someone is you know, suicidal or rally not able to live their life I usually say, “Let’s try to do it without medication.”

Leo: Right.

Georgia: There’s a lot of other things that you can do. But I’m completely neutral towards it. In the end you know, just live your life and there’s some great medications out there that can make a huge difference to people. And if you can’t get out of bed and if you can’t do any of the exercise or you’re having, you know, three or four panic attacks a day, great, there’s some fabulous medications. It’s not like you know, your grandfather’s medications that were out like 20-30 years ago.

Leo: No, it’s much better. Yea.

Georgia: And so I think that it could be a great help. But usually I say, “Let’s try to do it without. And then we’ll see. If things are not moving along fast enough then let’s talk about some medications and then we’ll monitor and see where they’re at.” SSRI’s are not addictive so you can go off of them. It doesn’t have to be stay on them for life.

Leo: That’s interesting. Yea. That’s interesting. Selective—wait, don’t tell me. Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors. 

Georgia: Whoa! Leo! That’s amazing!

Steve: That’s right.

Georgia: Very, very impressive.

Leo: I have, I don’t know why, I have a strange memory for acronyms.

Georgia: That’s brilliant.

Leo: That has helped not a whit in my career.

Georgia: You might have went into the wrong career.

Leo: What career is it that acronyms—

Georgia: You could work as a cryptologist.

Leo: I always thought I had a, I always wanted to do a game show on this network called Acronym Olympics. But it’s so boring we’ll never do it. Jason Hiner is—

Georgia: You’re the only one who would want to play.

Leo: I would win it every time.

Georgia: Right.

Leo: Every time (laughing).

Georgia: You’d be alone. You’re one listener.

Leo: It’s boring. Jason Hiner’s also here—if I could have only converted that to something useful—from Tech Republic and CBS Interactive. You were just in the bay area and you didn’t tell me.

Jason: Ah, so sorry. I was at an event, Intel IDF was happening.

Leo: Oh, how was that?

Jason: It was good.

Leo: That looked cool. The spider? Who made that spider robot?

Jason: The spider, yea. They’re really, they’ve lost mobile and they know it and so their putting all their—

Leo: Intel has lost mobile.

Jason: Yea, yea.

Leo: Wow.

Jason: Yea, they’re not even close right? So they’re looking at what’s next which is internet things and robots. And they are really putting a lot of emphasis on both of those things and doing some interesting things you know, in that regard. And they’re thing that I think that are a risk because, or not a risk but there’s a risk that they won’t succeed in that either because what, the reasons they’ve lost in mobile because their chips are too expensive and they use too much power, are not power efficient enough are even more of an issue in IOT in many cases than they are in mobile. Except for when you’re dealing with sort of bigger things. But in robotics which require massive amounts of processing, right, they are doing some really interesting things beyond just processing but in terms of you know building and sensing to devices. They have this real sense camera which is actually like Microsoft Connect but you imagine that in like every laptop and eventually in your phone and those kinds of things. Basically a 3D scanner, a 3D camera, be able to do 3D gestures. That they’re building into lots of different things and they’re eventually, their idea is they want, you know, that to be in robots as well. It’s already in a few now but anyway, they’re doing super cool things. I really applaud them. They’re also spending a lot of effort on security both for the internet of things and in other ways you know, too for PCs and other devices. And so they say that that’s the thing that they’re hearing the most from technologists and from businesses and organizations is they’re really worried about security right now. So they’re trying to build it in and they’re, in this way they’re becoming a bit of a software company right there because they’re having to do software for that. So yea, they’re doing some smart stuff which is beyond just the sort of the chip that’s going to power your next Window’s PC which is still the way most people think of them. But they’re doing a lot more which is very cool.

Leo: They lost mobile then ARM won mobile, right? 

Jason: ARM. It’s over.

Leo: And the problem is ARM is a lot of different companies. It’s Qualcomm, it’s Samsung, it’s hundreds of different companies making ARM devices.

Jason: Yes, yes.

Leo: And then what happened to AMD? Are they around? I feel bad because I was rooting for AMD because if it weren’t for AMD, I think they kept Intel honest, they kept prices down. If it weren’t for AMD we probably wouldn’t have the Core Processors. Intel—

Jason: It’s also a great—yes it’s a great company too.

Leo: I know.

Jason: And so it’s an easy company to root for. You know, it’s one of the greenest companies in the world. Like their headquarters is one of the greenest you know, buildings in the world. And they also, you know, some of the nicest people I’ve ever met in the tech industry were from AMD. That’s probably why they lost. Because Intel is so kind of cutthroat and so you know, ruthless in many ways that they just ran over them. You know, they just completely bulldozed them. But yea, they’re still out there. They’re still doing some things. But yea, things are not super bright you know, over there for them. They’re trying to find their way in the kind of post PC world, so.

Leo: Also here from-- I want to get the right website. Techinsider.io. Part of Business Insider so it wouldn’t be wrong to say Business Insider. Steve Kovach @stevekovach on the Twitter. Do you still use the Twitter?

Steve: Oh, constantly.

Leo: Yea? A read? Are you read, are you write or are you both?

Steve: I am a prolific tweeter. Anyone who follows me will probably get annoyed. But—

Leo: I did something very wrong and bad on Twitter.

Steve: What’s that?

Leo: I don’t know if I should even—(laughing). I don’t know if I should admit this.

Georgia: What did you do?

Jason: Now you have to tell us.

Georgia: Now you have to tell us.

Jason: Yea, yea.

Leo: Oh. I got a-

Georgia: I like the giddy little smile you have. It is bad.

Leo: I got this dongle that goes—you never want to begin a sentence that way, by the way.

Jason: I like sentences that start with dongle.

Leo: This is terribly wrong. I got this dongle. I got this dongle that goes in my car. It’s called OBD, you know the Onboard Diagnostic Port. And it ties into software called Dash. And Dash records everything. In fact Dash yells at me if I accelerate too much or I jam on the breaks. It actually says, “Stop it!” And then, and all of this with an eye towards better gas mileage. But it also keeps track of all this stuff. And then it turned out, I found out If This Then That has a Dash connector. So now I Tweet when I arrive at the studio. My car says, “Leo, turn off the ignition.” If This Then That looks to see if I’m in the geographic area of the studio and then it sends a tweet to Twitter saying, “Leo just arrived at the studio.”

Steve: Oh, I saw that. I saw you tweet that the other day.

Leo: Is that so bad?

Steve: Is that bad?

Jason: No.

Steve: Why is that bad?

Leo: I feel like that might be useful because then people will know well, Leo’s here.

Steve: I wondered what that was because I saw you Tweet that. I was like, “What is he--?” It was like a sworn check in but kind of not. I was like, I don’t know what was going on.

Leo: I’ve always hated automated things but I just thought, well, that’s kind of useful.

Georgia: Did anyone Tweet you back?

Leo: Yea people hate it.

Jason: That’s funny.

Leo: I think I’m going to have to turn it off. The reason I started playing with this is I’ve been starting to play with the messenger app called Telegram. Have any of you tried Telegram?

Georgia: No.

Leo: You know there’s so many. There’s WhatsApp, LINE, you know WeChat, Insta—

Jason: Slack.

Leo: There’s millions of them. But Telegram I just, I kind of got into it. I like it. And it allows you to create bots. So I’ve created a bot called The Mechanical Leo. If you want—

Jason: Twitter Bot?

Leo: No, it’s a Telegram—I’m trying to do this on Twitter but I can’t. I do it on Telegram so you have to follow me. You have to explicitly follow @chieftwitbot. But then it will tell you when a new show comes out, when I’m about to begin a show. If I post a picture or a blog post it—and so if you follow this bot it just tells you. Like the last one. “Looks like Leo is about to go live with This Week in Tech.”

Georgia: Now where does it get this information from? It’s from Twitter that it then sends it out?

Leo: No. No, it’s all these sensors I’ve—eventually you’ll know what I’m hearing. And if I’m—“Leo is deaf right now.”

Georgia: It’s not hooked up to your hearing aids.

Jason: In 50 years when you’re gone Leo, this will be doing all of the shows.

Leo: Exactly. I want it to continue after my death. Anyway, I—yea, it gets the information from a variety of sources. So there’s a commercial version of IF This Then That called Zapier. You have to pay for it.

Jason: Yes, yes.

Leo: So you have to pay for Zapier. But Zapier has all of these like—it’s different from, it’s similar to If This Then That. You make recipes. I don’t—it works with Slack and stuff. So I have Zapier going out and look at things like if I post on Pinboard, if I update. You know it’s scanning through things. I want to do more with that. 

Jason: It’s artificial intelligence. This is basically like the beginnings of artificial intelligence, right? Super interesting.

Leo: Yea. I feel like—yea, yea.

Jason: You know one of the cool things—so if you have—do you have Automatic? Is that the thing that you have in your car?

Leo: I do have Automatic. Actually this thing is Dash is the software. It’s free software. And I use just to kind of, you know there’s a million of these commoditized OBD ports. I’m using one called OBDMX. They’re $50 bucks. They’re cheaper than Automatics. Automatic would do something similar. But the I also—this is really, this is OCD. I in Evernote, I will post—“Leo’s vehicle trip completed.” I will post complete—this is really—Automatic tells me how far I drove, 2.37062 miles. How many engines alerts, hard break alerts, hard acceleration alerts, speed alerts, estimates. If you had a teenager this would be useful. How much fuel it consumed. How much it cost. It was a quarter. What the weather was like.

Jason: It’s cool. It’s remarkable. Yea.

Leo: And that’s in my Evernote.

Jason: But here’s like the future.

Georgia: I find it creepy.

Leo: (Laughing).

Georgia: It’s almost too much.

Leo: That’s why I like it.

Georgia: I want things to know less about me. I’m trying to—I shouldn’t be in technology, but.

Leo: You shouldn’t be in technology. And this is—

Georgia: It’s too much. It’s tracking too much information to me and I don’t want to be Tweeted out if I go home or if I’m at work.

Leo: It’s ok. Georgia, I’m going to work with you.

Georgia: Ok.

Leo: This is called radical transparency.

Georgia: Right.

Leo: It’s the new thing. All the kids are doing it. And it’s immensely freeing. No, it is. In fact, if everybody was radically transparent there would be no television sitcoms. Follow my thinking here, because all sitcoms rely upon a misunderstanding that comes from miscommunication. All of them. Every situation is, “Well, he didn’t tell you that he was actually outside and—“And if everybody is radically transparent then it eliminates all this drama.

Georgia: See, I think it changes a little when you’re a woman. You probably don’t want to be as radically transparent as to what you’re doing, where you’re going, how you feel. And so I think that I have a little bit of a different mind-set to that because of that.

Leo: That’s sad. That’s a shame.

Georgia: Information is power. And I think that people you know, they have something that could be very dangerous in another part of the world. And so I think that you need to be careful that—you know we’re very lucky that we live in a, you know, in a free part of the world, free-ish part of the world.

Leo: No, you’re right. This is white male privilege.

Georgia: And not everyone is.

Leo: Yea, this is white male privilege speaking. 1st world white male privilege. I can be radically transparent because what’s going to happen to me? Nothing.

Jason: Yea. 

Leo: Yea but something bad I guess – it’s a shame. And that’s too bad. Because it is very freeing.

Georgia: Yea.

Jason: There are interesting—so there’s people already that are doing stuff with Automatic. And the combination of Automatic and the Internet of Things and sort of home automation where you can have automatic geo-fence just exactly what you’re doing, Leo. It senses when you’re close to your house. And if you have the Chamberlain Garage Door Opener that’s connected to Wi-Fi, you pull up and it automatically opens your garage door for example.

Leo: Yea.

Jason: Without you having to hit the button.

Leo: What could possible go wrong?

Jason: And then, not only that, if you have August Smart Lock, it can unlock the door right into the inside of your garage automatically because you geo-fenced that to you know, to do it. And then it can also turn your lights on even when you get in automatically if you have you know, smart lights. So there are people doing that right now. But again, to Georgia’s point, right, like so what if somebody gets your car, can they go and do exactly that? Well, yea. So you know, somebody could steal your car and break in.

Georgia: But it’s easier, right?

Leo: E-Liz in the chatroom says, “I can do this because I’m a high functioning sociopath.” Let’s just through around diagnoses, what do you say? Let’s take a break. We’re going to come back with more. I’m something. I know I’m screwed up. I am. But I love it. You know what happens? This is great. You guys are all young. As you get older you start to care less and less, frankly.

Georgia: I think that that’s healthy.

Leo: And that’s great.

Georgia: And I think that we all shouldn’t care too much about what other people think and want and do and we’re not ourselves.

Leo: What is that—there’s that old saying. When you’re young you think everybody’s looking at you. But when you get to a certain age you start to realize nobody’s thinking about you, they’re thinking about themselves.

Georgia: They’re all thinking about themselves. Who looks at—when you look at a group photo, who’s the first person that you look at?

Leo: Right.

Georgia: That’s what everyone’s doing.

Leo: Yep. Our show today brought to you by backup. This is—I mean I would do an ad for backup no matter what. Because you people need to back up. I don’t mean backup, backup your car. I mean backup, back up your data. Especially if you’re a business. I can’t believe how many businesses do not have a disaster plan. And the thing is, if you lose—let’s say there’s a fire in your business. The computers go but so do the backup drives in the closet? They’re gone too. Now how long before you get back in business? You just lost your customer list, your accounts receivable, your suppliers, everything is gone. It’s almost impossible to reconstruct that. Unless you have off-site backup and that’s why I love Carbonite. Carbonite for Business, it’s a no brainer. First of all it’s very affordable. Flat rate, you pay once a year. Or in fact you could do two years or three years. You’ll save a ton of money because it’s flat rate. You don’t pay for how much you’re storing, it’s just, you know, you store it. It’s stored in the cloud where it’s safe. The backups have backups. More than a million and a half homes and small businesses use Carbonite. And the thing about Carbonite is it’s simple. I know a lot of you geeks go, “Well, I’m going to roll my own within and write a Python script that writes to Amazon’s Glacier and…” Yea, you could do that. Or you could just install Carbonite and forget it. This is a great solution. Carbonite.com. You’ll get two free bonus months when you use our offer code TWIT. You’ve got to back it up to get it back. This is not the time to geek out. This is the time to protect your data. Carbonite.com. Use the offer code TWIT and you’ll get 2 months free. Actually that’s one thing my—I don’t know how accurate it is. But that’s one thing my Samsung will do. It has S Health. So there’s some sort of weird thing on the back that will read your heartrate. But then it also says it will read your blood oxygen level and your stress level. So and I’m always stressed. I’m never—

Jason: Every time you try it, it says you’re stressed?

Leo: I’m never not stressed.

Jason: Wow.

Georgia: Now you have to place that onto your skin?

Leo: Yea, you want—I’ll show you.

Jason: Yea, yea.

Georgia: Similar to the watch, I’d assume?

Leo: It’s kind of cool. Let me take the back off. It has nothing to do with the watch. So—

Steve: It used to be just a heartrate monitor. I guess they added more stuff to it.

Leo: They added more stuff so it keeps track of your steps. There’s my heartrate. My SPO2. I don’t know what that is, oxygen. And here’s stress. So let’s measure my stress. Now you put your finger on the sensor here, right? And it starts to shine a bright red light in there. Whoa. It won’t accept it if you accidentally close it. Ok, measuring. Try to keep still and quite. Shh. 

Steve: We’ll scream at you to raise your stress level.

Georgia: We’ll see how much we talk how much he gets stressed when we speak to him.

Leo: Ohm. Ohm. Stress is going down. It takes a long time to measure stress.

Steve: But what is the definition of stress on this?

Leo: I don’t know. It doesn’t tell you.

Georgia: How fast your, you know, increase of your blood pressure. So when we’re more stressed we end up getting more adrenaline and more cortisol in our system which, you know, pumps out more blood to our main muscle groups so we could get out of danger faster. So they’re, it’s reading that. So our heart starts to beat a little faster. Our breathing begins to go a little quicker but that’s just to get out of danger.

Leo: See? And then it says, “Tell me how you’re feeling.”

Jason: It’s like a little emoji thing.

Leo: There’s a little emoji.

Georgia: I like that.

Leo: I’m fearful. The green is low and see high is red. And I’m really right on the edge of high. But I’ve never been any lower than that. So.

Jason: That’s like Mike Harrington mode.

Leo: I’m always like a little, yea. I’m fearful (laughing).

Jason: You’re fearful? Is that what it says?

Leo: Yea. It’s bullshit.

Jason: Really?

Georgia: It’s just because I’m on the show.

Leo: I am scared of women. You know that about me, Georgia. Aren’t we all though really? Let’s face it. Did I say too much? Let’s move on. That was painful. Amazon is getting rid of the Fire Phone folks. You know what? That was a flop.

Jason: One of the biggest flops ever.

Leo: And they say they’re curtailing development of consumer products like the Fire Phone. Consumer devices. At the same time I feel like the Echo is a home run.

Steve: The Echo’s awesome.

Jason: Yea.

Leo: Layoffs—this is the secretive lab 126. It’s hardware development center. 1st layoffs in 11 years.

Jason: I think this is—I think this is mostly, you know, I would think phone and tablet kind of group. They haven’t said that and this is just pure conjecture you know on my part. But that’s my sense of it. I think things like the Echo, things like the Fire TV which are right on target, I think they’ll continue to do more of those.

Leo: Apparently the Fire TV is way outselling the Apple TV. It’s doing, it’s doing really well.

Jason: Would not surprise me at all. I could see them doing more of that. You know tablet is a race to the bottom. You know phone is a race to the bottom. E-reader, they kind of still have a corner on that market, you know it’s not great.

Leo: Kindle’s the best.

Jason: It’s the best.

Leo: It’s the best, yea. Whatever happened to the Kobo? I mean they’re all gone, aren’t they?

Steve: They’re toast. Sony’s too. Sony ducked out of it.

Leo: Sony got out of it. Kobo’s still around I think.

Jason: The B&N Reader, you know which wasn’t bad but you know that squarish one that they had. Which was not a bad device. It was a really pretty good device.

Leo: Here’s an interesting one. I have a Dash button. Anybody buy a Dash button?

Steve: No.

Jason: Oh my gosh. No.

Georgia: No, no.

Leo: This is where Amazon is so brilliant. I can see Jeff Bezos having a fever dream, waking up and saying, “Make button. You push it. It orders a product. Done. Profit.” So you buy, when you buy it you buy it with a brand on it. So I bought Cottenelle Toilet Paper because I figured, “Well, if there’s one thing you’d want a button for it’d be toilet paper.” And when you run out, you press the button and it orders more toilet paper. Now unfortunately it’s only 2nd day delivery so you’re going to be stuck on the john for a while. But it’s kind of cool. It’s kind of cool. But I realized now is I don’t need this button anymore because they added it, I can tell Echo—if I’ve bought something before and I can just say, “But that again.” And it will just do it. It won’t – ok fine. This is where Amazon’s brilliant. This stuff is going to sell more product for Amazon than anything, right? 

Georgia: For people with kids would they, if they press the button multiple times is it going to send—

Leo: Nope, they thought of that. Nope, they thought of that. It’s de-bounced. So the first time, you press the button and it orders it. And until the stuff comes, you can’t order it again.

Georgia: That’s fair.

Jason: Didn’t they announce this on April 1st and everybody thought it was an April fool’s joke?

Leo: The thought it was a joke.

Steve: I totally thought it was a joke.

Jason: I mean, so did I. I think it’s still a joke but—

Leo: No, it works. It tried it. I installed it. You pair it to your Wi-Fi. It’s 5 bucks and it’s completely—it’s an ecological disaster.

Jason: It is an ecological disaster. They should have been giving it away for free.

Leo: 1st of all they should have been giving it away, but 2nd it’s a – because you can’t replace the battery it’s just a disposable piece of colorful crap.

Steve: I didn’t know you couldn’t replace the battery. That’s hilarious.

Leo: You can’t do anything. It stops working, you throw it out and you get a new one.

Jason: This may be the end of society as we know it. This thing is like, you’ve got to be kidding me, you know.

Leo: Fortunately I don’t think this is going to sell like hotcakes but imagine an archeologist 1000 years from now and our entire civilization is buried under Dash buttons. My God, what where they doing?

Jason: It was like a Wall-E moment. Like with all that crap piled up.

Leo: It’s Wall-E. So I got it, I did the pairing, you do that within your Amazon, it’s built in. Believe it or not it’s built into your Amazon app that you already have on your phone and you just go and look at devices. Oh, there’s one of my devices. And you pair it. And then it has that little sticky back. You put it on the shelf. You don’t have to lick it, that’s just—

Jason: You don’t have to lick it.

Georgia: (Laughing) he was just doing that for fun.

Leo: Because it looks good.

Jason: Darn.

Leo: So and I thought long and hard. “Where am I going to put this?” And I thought, “No, I’ll put it in the pantry. I don’t really want it in the bathroom because it will raise false hopes.” So I put it in (laughing)— Well, it would!

Georgia: You’d want your drone to bring you the toilet paper.

Leo: You would, yea! You’d think, “Oh my God, thank God there’s a button here.” And then you’d sit. And sit. So I put it on – I’m thinking. See I am, I am an empathetic person. I put myself in the position.

Jason: Leo, you might be on to something. Like that might be their next thing. Like you’re in the bathroom, you hit the button, it’s going to drone—

Leo: A drone comes. Bzzzzzzzz.

Jason: A drone will bring you toilet paper. You’re headed to the door, there’s a knock—

Leo: You joke but if Amazon could do it, it would be huge. They just need to do it. They have to figure out how.

Georgia: I would buy that.

Leo: Yea. Who wouldn’t? Who hasn’t been stuck sitting there? And it’s really, I mean—well anyway, I don’t want to go into this. So (laughing)… No, I’m thinking. Now you can see my brain’s working. Should I go there? No, I’m not going to go there. So I push the button, you lick it, you put it on the wall. And I push the button. 2 days later toilet paper came. It worked.

Georgia: So you do have to at least have enough forethought to know that you need toilet paper in two days.

Leo: Two days. But you’re in the pantry, right and you’re looking. You go, “Oh, there’s only one roll left.” And you push the button. It’s easy. But the problem is it’s only for one product. So now you have dozens of these (laughing) all over the pantry. So I think the Echo is the right thing because you can actually say to the Echo, “Order more toilet paper.” And it will. In fact watch this.

Jason: That makes a little more sense.

Leo: This is fun.

Jason: Hold on, it’s there?

Leo: Alexa, order more toilet paper. At least 50 people on our audience are going to get toilet paper in 2 days.

Jason: Oh no!

Steve: I have my Echo right here but luckily you’re wired into my headset, so it didn’t wake it up. It’s like literally right over there.

Jason: Man, you just punked like the whole audience.

Leo: (Laughing) Ok, moving on. Speaking of exodi—is that the plural of exodus? Exodus?

Steve: You got someone in the chatroom by the way.

Leo: I know. 

Steve: Yea, there you go.

Jason: Oh.

Leo: Oh, I know. You think I’m joking. Little worrisome. Google Now folks are leaving. Now I think Google Now is awesome. But apparently that was more of a Larry Page thing, Sundar Pichai less of a Google Now guy. Turns out that even after, even during Google IO when they were announcing Now on Tap, people had already left. I think that only 1 of the original team is still there. Should I worry, Steve? Is it going to be over, or is this…?

Jason: No, no, I wouldn’t put too much into it.

Leo: Ok. Steve?

Steve: The timing is bad because of like Facebook just announced their M-assistance which is powered by real people and so forth. But like Google Now is like baked into Android. It’s an awesome product. It’s more of like a, it’s more search than anything anyway, right? So I don’t think it’s going to go away. And Now on Tap is awesome. This is, I mean, maybe Sundar is shuffling things around or something, but I mean that thing is such a homerun. It was light years ahead of Siri when they first announced it. I still think it’s better than Siri. The timing is bad because Facebook is getting into the space and we have—and we were just talking Amazon and Alexa and so forth. But I think we don’t have to worry about it. If you love Google Now it’s going to stick around.

Leo: Let’s talk about this Facebook thing. It was rumored it was going to be called Moneypenny. They decided to call it M. It’s tied into messenger, right?

Steve: Yea. 

Leo: So…

Steve: Yea it’s neat. They have all these contractors who will do anything for you.

Leo: It’s people.

Steve: I mean there like—yea. So they won’t say how many they have but it’s in the Bay area only for now. So I guess you can try it if you want.

Leo: No, no I tried it. It’s San Francisco. I’m too far north.

Steve: Actually just in San Francisco.

Leo: Yea.

Steve: And there are other services like this. I think Path had something similar to it maybe. And there are a few others. Like these services where you text and like this human being will like do everything you want for you for free. Which I don’t know how you make money on that but it doesn’t matter.

Leo: Who was it? Was it Chris? I think it was Chris Messina, the father of the hashtag—which by the way just celebrated I think the 10th, was it the 10th? No, it couldn’t be the 10th. The 5th anniversary of the hashtag. He tweeted, “Why don’t we use I don’t know, a number sign plus a word to have a Twitter search.” And that became. So anyway Chris is a great guy. He had signed up for some maid service that does the same thing. You text them and they come. And he couldn’t cancel them. So then he went to, he signed up for another personal assistant service and texted them to cancel the maid service. And it worked.

Steve: Wow. Buttons for toilet paper and assistants taking care of other assistants.

Leo: It’s… yea. 

Jason: What a world.

Leo: I think this is, this is a—would you use something like this, Georgia, if you could message a personal assistant? Sure you would, wouldn’t you?

Georgia: This actually interests me. And I’m not a Facebook user but I love the idea of like trying to find a gift for a friend. And an actual person is going to personalize it and be able to tell me what would be the best thing to do. Because that would save me time. And I don’t have a lot of it so, I’m intrigued.

Leo: Right.

Georgia: Or a restaurant reservation where you’re going to be on the phone forever. That sounds fabulous.

Leo: Yea just could you hold on for me while I go do something else?

Georgia: Exactly. I would love it if they would wait in line at the bank as well but I’ll wait for that.

Jason: Yea it is sort of interesting, right? It’s kind of like the idea like can technology be more helpful? Can it create like more meaningful connections between people? Because this is ultimately what this is trying to do, right? Is connect you with someone that can help you in a meaningful way.

Leo: There’s AI in it but the AI is only used to the extent that it contacts a human.

Jason: Yea, yea. So that’s good. Like that makes sense. I like that Facebook’s trying to do something different, right? That they’re trying to take advantage of what they have which is a huge network of people. And it is a more sort of people oriented you know, service. So I think it is. It’s intriguing. And it’s interesting to see them doing something different, not trying to do the same kinds of things with the stuff that you know, Apple and Amazon and Google are already doing and are already pretty good at and are you know, slugging it out right now.

Leo: Let’s take a break. We’re going to come back. Some final words and I’m going to ask you if you know what Netflix and chill means. Oh, somebody does.

Steve: Oh, I know.

Leo: Oh, I know. Do you know, Georgia?

Georgia: I might know.

Leo: (Laughing) I just found out. Our show today brought to you by Prosper. A really brilliant way to solve a kind of a conundrum. If you need some cash to fix up your house or to maybe pay off some high interest rate credit cards, you don’t have a whole lot of choices. If you want I guess you could go to a family member. That’s you know, that’s sticky. That’s messy. You could go to a loan shark. No. You could put pants on, put on a necktie, nice hat and go to the bank and say, “Please, sir, may I have some money?” None of these are the best way to do it. Thanks to the internet there’s a better way. Prosper. Prosper’s something that couldn’t exist without the internet. It’s what they call a peer to peer lending marketplace. So it’s a marketplace for people who have money to lend, brings them together with people looking to borrow money. And it works great. It’s amazing. You can borrow up to $35,000. Take you as little as 5 days. These are low fixed rate interest rates. In fact you can go right now to Prosper.com/twit and find out what your rate would be without affecting your good credit. Prosper. P-R-O-S-P-E-R.com/twit. Don’t wrack up more debt on those high rate credit cards. If there’s one thing you would do right away, do it. Pay it off with Prosper. Get a low fixed rate, payment, you’ll know exactly what you’ll pay every month. You can get out from under. There’s so many reasons you might want to borrow as much as $35,000 in just a few days. And this is the way to do it. Prosper.com. And for a limited time Prosper is offering TWiT viewers a $50 Visa gift card with your low interest loan. You can get up to $35,000 in your account in as few as 5 days plus a $50 Visa gift card. Propser.com/twit. Speaking of layoffs, Angry Birds folks, Rovio cutting another 260 people. But what did they have 800 employees for (laughing)? They had 800 employees. I mean I don’t mean to laugh but it’s—this is you know, you have one hit, Angry Birds. Rovio which was huge. They laid off 110 employees last October, another 260 jobs down from 800. Kind of sad.

Jason: Yea.

Leo: Just shows how hard it is to come up with a 2nd one, isn’t it?

Jason: Oh yea. I mean anything in life is kind of like that, you know? You have a huge hit and it’s tough to replicate, right, anything. I remember, I remember somebody we all know. Ryan Block. I remember when he left.

Leo: I remember him. Whatever happened to Ryan Block?

Jason: I remember when he left Giz– not Gizmodo, Engadget. And he said something really wise. Especially when I think he must have been late 20s at the time. And he’s like, “Look, this has been amazing. You know, I had a great time doing this. And I fully realize that I may never do anything that’s this successful again. But there’s a lot of other things I’d like to try. And there’s a lot of other things I’d like to spend my time doing. And I’m going to go and do those.” And I thought that was you know, really wise. And you know, most people don’t think that way. Most people think like, “I’m on top of the world. I’m doing something that’s just on fire. And the next thing I do is absolutely going to be just as amazing.”

Leo: Isn’t that the worst thing you could do is be a great success in your 20s?

Jason: Right? It’s tough, right? Because you know what success is like and you have to replicate it.

Leo: You all know what that’s like. Yea. Georgia, do you deal with people who suffer from early success? I was reading--

Georgia: You know I think that—

Leo: Did you read? I felt so bad—I’m sorry I didn’t meant to interrupt—but Marcus Persson. The guy who invented Minecraft. 

Jason: Yes, yes.

Leo: I mean this guy sold Minecraft for how much to Microsoft? Billions. He made billions. So much—

Jason: A couple billion.

Leo: Yea. And he kept a lot of it. He had close to half the company. Tweeting this week like how depressed he is, how lonely he is, how sad he is.

Georgia: Yea. It’s a normal thing. It doesn’t even have to be that you’re doing this when you’re young at life. I think that anytime that you feel like you’re on top of the world you get a lot of accolades, you get a lot of outside feelings of self-esteem and self-worth and that releases in your brain the natural reward hormone. That neurotransmitter which is dopamine. And then when you go back to being you know, normal and people aren’t following you and want to hear everything you do, you cause a decrease in the amount of dopamine which can bring on a depression. And a lot of people who are actors, actresses like you know, dealing with great wonderful things, and everyone knows who you are, it’s a huge drop. And so you need to also remember to kind of build that internal modes of self-esteem because it’s devastating to people. And it’s a situational depression which is much easier to deal with in that you know that it’s caused because of something. But it’s still just as emotionally devastating.

Leo: Listen to this. This is Notch.

Jason: It’s like taking a drug.

Leo: This is @notch yesterday. 2:52 in the morning. “Hanging out in Ibiza with a bunch of friends and partying with famous people, able to do whatever I want, and I've never felt more isolated.”

Georgia: Hmm mmm.

Leo: “The problem with getting everything is you run out of reasons to keep trying and human interaction becomes impossible due to imbalance.” People really reached—this is interesting that he tweeted this. I mean that’s a very public—It’s not, it’s kind of a cry for help, I don’t know.

Georgia: Yes, it is. It definitely is.

Leo: He says, “In Sweden I’ll sit around…” This is all within a few minutes. “I will sit around and wait for my friends with jobs and families to have time to do stuff. Watching my reflection in the monitor.”

Georgia: Hmm mmm.

Leo: “Found a great girl but she’s afraid of me and my lifestyle. And went with a normal person instead.” And then the next day he tweeted something like, “I’m having a great time.” But a lot of people I think were touched by that. Wanted to reach out. So many people were influenced by Minecraft and honor Notch for his successes. It just shows you. You can, you can be this vast success and…

Georgia: Yes, and people, I don’t think that people really know the cost of being successful or how it excludes you. You become not the same as everyone else. And how people treat you is different and then you don’t know who’s really your friend versus people that want to be your friend just because you were this success. And so it also causes that disjoint in social interactions which can be really difficult.

Jason: And attention is a drug, right? Like it’s this natural drug like Georgia’s saying. And you get used to that. And you like it. And you know, you depend on that. And when you don’t have it then you know, it becomes, it becomes painful and isolating and lonely. And so—

Georgia: It actually becomes normal. Like right, if you’ve received tons of accolades all the time, that becomes your normal base level of normality. So it’s not even a high. That’s just normally how you feel good and then that’s why you end up with that decrease because your body is, has adapted to having that much dopamine in its system being released because of things. And so it can happen in many different—I remember when I first started therapy I would get all these hugs for helping people and on the weekends I felt a little bit down and low because I was not helping people like I was before. And so I had to think, “Oh, what’s happening?” And then, “Oh, ok, I understand what the process is.” Which made it a little bit better to deal, easier to deal with.

Leo: One of the reasons we can identify with this too is I think we can identify with Notch. Like he was just, he was a nerd like us, or like me anyway, and he you know, wrote this great program. And it’s kind of lightning in a bottle. Made a billion dollars. And he doesn’t have any more skills to deal with it than anybody would. He’s a nerd. He probably has fewer because he’s an introvert. I’m sure he’s an introvert. And anyway, Notch I hope you’re getting some love and some help. And stay safe.

Jason: Yes.

Leo: I think we should wrap it up. It’s kind of a sad note but I think we’ve done a great—we’ve done our job here. We can move on happy in the knowledge that we’ve helped so many people in their daily lives. And Steve Kovach is tweeting like a madman.

Steve: Yea. Always.

Leo: (Laughing) you do tweet a lot. Holy cow.

Georgia: How many tweets did you send, Steve, during the show?

Leo: How many tweets did you send during the show, yea?

Steve: During the show? Not that money.

Leo: No, only 2. Just a couple.

Steve: Yea. I thought we were going to talk about Netflix and chill so I teased that a little bit.

Leo: Oh well we can. What is—so, I had never heard that phrase before. Although—

Georgia: I hadn’t either.

Leo: As soon as I heard it I got it.

Steve: Yea, yea.

Leo: Because it’s what the kids—

Steve: It’s the modern day equivalent, yea. It’s the modern day equivalent of “Do you want to watch a movie?” That’s what we did in college. It’s like “Come to my dorm room and watch a movie.”

Leo: It was Blockbuster and chill, right?

Steve: No, it was just we’d put a DVD in and we’d watch Kill Bill or something for 5 minutes and then start making out.

Leo: Yea, yea. In fact there’s a great BuzzFeed, series of pictures from BuzzFeed kind of putting this in perspective. “You said Netflix and chill,” they had all over the hamster.

Jason: Can you imagine all these like poor, clueless teenagers that are saying this by accident and not realizing it and—

Leo: Yea, here’s a good one. “20 minutes into LOTR and chill and he gives me this look.”

Steve: I love it.

Jason: It’s like the Tinder of internet euphemisms now.

Leo: Here it is. Blockbuster and kick it (laughing). Anyway now you know. When you’re on a budget but still trying to get down, “YouTube and chill?” You know I think that actually works. When you start kissing the neck before Netflix even load. Ok, we’ll move on. Thank you (laughing). See in my day it was Nesquik and chill. Georgia, you had no idea what that meant.

Georgia: I didn’t until I read the notes actually.

Leo: Yea, yea. I think Anthony knew though.

Georgia: I just don’t think women, I think that for women it’s just kind of like if a guy’s asking you over to his place—

Leo: You know.

Georgia: You’re kind of like, oh yea. I don’t think it really matters.

Leo: It doesn’t matter what he says after that. Yea.

Georgia: You’re kind of like, “Eh.”

Leo: Uh huh. It’s so different for women. 

Georgia: It is completely different than men. We still expect guys to do most of the work to try to get a female. And females don’t have the same amount of work. Look at the Ashley Madison stats, right? It was like 20 million men and 1,400 girls that were real girls. 

Leo: That’s so pathetic (laughing).

Georgia: That’s a really difficult statistic.

Leo: That’s so pathetic.

Georgia: It is much easier for women to find a relationship which is really, you know, difficult. It’s really difficult to get out there. And now we’re becoming more introverted with technology, not better at it unfortunately.

Leo: Yea. It’s like Saturday night at the bars. 12 million men and 4,000 girls. Sad. Georgia Dow, you are at iMore.com doing great work. Stay away from her guys. She can kick your ass. 2 time champion in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. Canadian champion, ok? Is that why you learned that?

Georgia: I just wanted to become powerful. So I could do that, so.

Leo: She’s Wonder Woman. She doesn’t even need bracelets. She just does.

Georgia: I don’t need bracelets.

Leo: Awesome. You are awesome. And again, the website which—in all seriousness I think this is great to promote it. 

Georgia: Thank you.

Leo: Anxiety-videos.com.

Georgia: Yes, yes. And if you know someone that suffering, like you don’t, you truly do not have to suffer with them. So you can get help. It doesn’t have to be these videos. Whichever way it might be.

Leo: Good on you. Appreciate you doing that. Jason Hiner. He’s at CBS Interactive. His book is now up to chapter, what 7? 8?

Jason: Chapter 8. So Chapter 7 is Chase Jarvis and it’s available for 48, about 48 more hours.

Leo: Yes.

Jason: You can still read for free online. We release every chapter online for free, serial publishing. And then the next chapter, we just announced today that will be released this week on Wednesday is actually Juliana Rotich, who is the co-founder and executive director of Ushahidi. Which is the amazing company that has created, the created in 2008 this mapping software. Which sounds simple enough, right? But it was, following the presidential elections in Kenya, disputed presidential elections. They cut off, you know, communication and people couldn’t figure out what was going on. This software let people you know, from their phones be able to essentially do citizen journalism. To report incidents, to report things that were happening on the ground and so it gave you know, the citizens of the country an idea of where you know, places to avoid, where they could go to get resources and help. If they needed—and from there, it’s taken off like wildfire. And now Ushahidi is used you know, all over the world. And it’s not just with SMS it’s also now with Web SMS, it’s used with apps, it’s used with Twitter. Twitter has a special relationship with them, like in places of crisis it can use this software. People can tweet stuff and then that gets triangulated on this tweet map. So anyway Juliana’s this really amazing person. She also did a, she does all kinds of other technology products. She started as a computer scientist and now she runs Ushahidi and is also a globally in-demand speaker. One of the most in-demand speakers in the tech world. She did the TED talk last year about this other thing they do, BRCK, which is a little modem and power generator for remote areas so you don’t lose your internet connection. She did a TED talk about that that got you know, over half a million views and was translated into 30 languages. So she’s really amazing. She’s one of the people that a lot of people maybe don’t know a lot about. She doesn’t necessarily toot her own horn. But she’s one of the people that we feel like is one of the most important digital innovators in the world. And so we can’t wait to share her story this week.

Leo: Nice. Followthegeeksbook.com. 2 more days you can read about Chase Jarvis which you should do. And there have been so many great people in all of these chapters. Many people you know if you’re a TWiT follower. Baratunde Thurston. By the way, Baratunde just got a job with The Daily Show.

Jason: The Daily Show! Yes!

Leo: As a digital strategist. Nice going, Baratunde.

Jason: Yes. A national treasure, that guy.

Leo: That’s really great. Yea. Chapter 2, Lisa Bettany. Chapter 3, Gina Trapani. Chapter 4 with Tom Merritt. Chapter 5, Veronica Belmont. Om Malik, Chapter 6. Chase Jarvis. There are some really—this is—can’t wait until—when will you be done? How many chapters total?

Jason: Yea, yea. 10 chapters.

Leo: Ok.

Jason: So we’re almost done. I mean really most of the book is finished. We’re still over the next couple of months releasing the next, the last two chapters. 

Leo: And if you missed like say the Baratunde chapter, is there a way that you can read that now?

Jason: Yes. So one of our, one of the great, one of the reasons we’ve done this the way we are doing it, releasing one chapter at a time to give people a chance to read it while we’re working on it is so that we can get feedback from users. And one of the, one of our readers suggested, they’re like, “Hey, I missed one of these chapters and I pre-ordered the book.” And they’re like, “Can I just get access to the other ones online?” We thought “That’s a great idea.” So now if you pre-order the book, any of the versions, it’s available in e-book, audio book, paper back and hard back, if you pre-order any of the versions of the book we will give you, we will send you a confirmation e-mail and with that you’ll get the way that you can access the full archive of the chapters that have already published.

Leo: Nice. Follow the Geek. Follow the Geeks, plural, book.com. Thank you, Jason.

Jason: Yes, absolutely. And Tech Republic.

Leo: And thanks to your co-author, Lyndsey Gilpin. We’ve got to give her credit as well.

Jason: Lyndsey’s amazing and you know, we spilt the work, you know 50/50. And really wouldn’t have happened but for her because I’ve been saying I should write this book for years. And Lyndsey was like, “You should do it now.” And “What are you waiting for?” And so if it weren’t for her this wouldn’t have happened. And she’s also an amazing writer and just a great, great, great person. Also Tech Republic. One other piece of news. Tech Republic. We just hired somebody that TWiT listeners will know really well. Dan Patterson is going to—

Leo: Oh!

Jason: Yes. Awesome guy.

Leo: Nice.

Jason: One of the best tech reporters in the business. And Dan comes to work for us in October. So we just announced it this week. And Dan will be a writer, senior writer for Tech Republic. He’ll also be doing some podcasting and some other things as well. And so yes, very well known to TWiT listeners.

Leo: That’s grand. Finally Dan has found a home. He’s been traveling all over the internet and he’s great. Love Dan.

Jason: Yes.

Leo: All right, good. Nice. Thank you also for being here, Steve Kovach. Congratulations on the new, kind of new gig.

Steve: Yea, thank you. We’ve been live for about a month, actually almost exactly a month now. So it’s steaming right along. So check it out.

Jason: It’s really beautiful.

Leo: You know what I like? It’s very clean, very simple. Oh wait a minute I’m running an ad blocker. Never mind. No it’s gorgeous. Really nice design. And I like the mix. Because it isn’t just kind of geeky stuff. It’s you now, an article about Oliver Sacks. And then an article about the Apple TV.

Steve: That’s kind of what we were going for. We’re not, we’re not just another gizmo gadget blog. You know, we’re really exploring these themes of innovation and digital culture. You know, tech is just one nugget of everything we are, our ambition. So you’ll see iPhone news but you’ll see a lot of other really cool stuff too.

Leo: It looks really nice.

Steve: So check it out.

Leo: Yea, really looks good.

Steve: I’m really proud of the team and what we’re doing. And more to come. We’re just going to grow and grow and grow. I can’t wait.

Leo: Everybody should run to techinsider.io and follow along with Steve’s twitter feed because it’s bizarre.

Steve: Yea.

Leo: @stevekovach.

Steve: To say the least.

Leo: Hey, thank you for being here everybody. We appreciate you watching TWiT each and every week. If you want to watch live, it’s fun to do that. You can do that 3:00 PM Pacific, 6:00 PM Eastern time. That’s 2200 UTC on twit.tv. twit.tv/live if you want the specific page. You can also be here in the studio. We had a great studio audience. Thank you all for being here today. I know it was, it is always a really long boring show but you stayed. Most of you. If you want to be here in the audience, we’ll try to get you a comfortable chair. Can’t promise. E-mail—I’m really selling it, aren’t I? E-mail tickets—I just feel guilty, I’m sorry. Tickets@twit.tv and we’ll try to be nice to you and I think soon a can of Dinty Moore under every chair I think is the new. I think that’s the new way we’re going to get people. I may be wrong. If you can’t watch live or be in the studio live then there is a 3rd way. All of the shows on TWiT are available after the fact on demand either from our website twit.tv or where you get your shows. And there’s lots of places, of course, iTunes and the Xbox Store and your podcast app on your mobile device. And there’s even TWiT apps—we don’t right them—some great TWiT apps from our 3rd party developers on all the platforms, iOS, Android, Windows Phone, even Roku. And that will make it easy for you to watch wherever you want, whenever you want. We just want you to watch. Make sure you subscribe that way you won’t miss an episode. I’m Leo Laporte. Thanks for being here. But wait a minute. Before I go, do we know who’s on Triangulation tomorrow? Because I always forget to promote that. We always have great people. Let me just—I could probably quickly check. I’ll do that. Should have done that before the show. I’m not very well prepared. Triangulation is our Monday morning review show. Ooo, Drew Curtis is coming up. That will be fun.

Steve: Is it Alan Stern?

Leo: Alan Stern was the principle investigator for New Horizons. That’s the satellite that just went around Pluto and is now going on to the Kuiper Belt. That will be really great. We talk space tomorrow 11:00 AM. That’s the next show I do. Thanks for being here. We’ll see you next time! Another TWiT is in the can. Bye-bye.