This Week in Tech 540

Leo Laporte: It's time for TWiT, This Week in Tech! Becky Worley joins Doctor Kiki and Tom Merritt. It's an old timers’ get together. We're going to have a lot of fun talking about the tech news, what's happening at Yahoo, Dow, Dupont, and you'll find out why I'm wearing a onesie! Yes, it's an adult onesie. You got a problem with that? TWiT: is next.

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Leo: This is TWiT, This Week in Tech, episode 540, recorded Sunday, December 13, 2015.

Filling the Room with Noble Gases

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It's time for TWiT, This Week in Tech, the show where we cover the week's tech news. This is going to be... I don't even know what this is going to be. It's going to be crazy because it's 4 good old friends, brought back together for a family reunion, and if you didn't have enough on Thanksgiving, you're ready now. Becky Worley in studio. Great to see you.

Becky Worley: So glad to be here!

Leo: I've seen you recently because we did that Good Morning America thing thanks to you. That was a lot of fun.

Becky: Thanks to you! 40 hours of Good Morning America, they said. And they said why don't you just take two of them back.

Leo: It was their 40th anniversary. Was any of it on TV, or was it all streamed.

Becky: It was almost all streamed, and they picked snippets, and we did the 1AM Tuesday night hour here.

Leo: That's really confidence in all of us. It was 1 AM East Coast time.

Becky: It was only 10 AM here. I tell you, I was back there and I saw the engineers and they all hugged me and said thank so much to you and Leo. Because of you we got to pee. We were the only hour they could get up and walk away and not have to... Because of you we got to pee. We were so low maintenance for them because it was all self-contained at TWiT.

Leo: We're standing here in the studio watching it as they're coming up to our time and they were doing some sort of barbecue thing. Then there was a chicken.

Becky: They were doing a segment on Ecoli and healthy food handling.

Leo: Some woman was cutting up a chicken like she was really into it.

Becky: That's the thing. I went to the production services people to talk to them and thank them, and they had a picture up on their board of the chicken. The worst moment of the whole 40 hours.

Leo: It was shaky cam. Someone was doing it vertical video. I thought this is network television. This is what we've come to. Hey, speaking of network television, also with us... I don't know what that segway means, Tom Merritt from DTNS. dailytechnewsshow.com.

Becky: Did you say DTNS stands for Daily Tech News Show? I've seen you posting all this stuff about DWTS. I thought you were on Dancing With the Stars.

Leo: Does he dance during the...

Tom Merritt: No. I leave that to Brian Brushwood.

Leo: He's a dancer. Still in Alle a yacta est, I see.

Tom: Now it's not just a Warcraft guild. It's a gaming guild. Just for kicks, for fun.

Leo: I'm looking at your mantle. I see your podcast award up there. What is that? Your family from 1880?

Tom: That's my great grandpa, John.

Leo: That is cool. Nice to see you. I haven't seen you in ages. Always welcome. Speaking of returns, many happy returns. Dr. Kiki is here. Kiki Sanford from TWiS, This Week in Science, twis.org and broaderimpact.tv, and she's got her lab coat in the back.

Kiki Sanford: That's right. Two lab coats.

Leo: Is that set dressing, or do you wear that?

Dr. Kiki: If I'm doing experiments, I have to protect my clothes. But very often it's just set dressing.

Leo: Nice to have lab coats around, just in case.

Dr. Kiki: I've got goggles, I've got some scales back here. I've got all sorts of stuff.

Leo: Since we saw each other last year, you moved to Portland, Oregon.

Dr. Kiki: Yes. I have. The home of the happy hipster.

Leo: Are you the happy hipster?

Dr. Kiki: I hope to keep it weird.

Leo: OK. Nice to see you. It's great to have this panel. I've been looking forward to this all months. Of course Becky, being the trouble maker that she is, brought wine.

Becky: Yeah. That makes for an interesting show. Especially when I've been working on other stuff this week, so I don't really know what's going on in the tech world. That's a good sign I should bring wine.

Leo: I don't know what we're going to talk about, but it's going to be interesting.

Becky: What happened This Week in Tech?

Becky and Leo: I have no idea.

Leo: I tell you one of the things we were talking about all week was Satoshi Nakamoto. The name you should remember from Bitcoin. We don't know anything about him. Newsweek very famously a couple years ago announced on its cover. They discovered it was some poor Japanese guy in Southern California who didn't know anything about anything.

Tom: He loved model trains, that guy.

Leo: Not even close. So This Week in Tuesday, Wired Magazine and Gizmoto, both revealed that they had been in contact with a hacker that had provided them with significant number of documents, convincingly and if you read the article very convincingly pointing to an Australian as Satoshi Nakamoto. The documents were provided apparently, Wired Magazine said an unnamed source. Gizmoto said by a hacker and they both pointed to Craig S. Wright, an Australian who at least has Newsweek’s pick. At least has the credentials to be the creator of Bitcoin. Bitcoin of course requires great mathematical and crypto abilities.

Becky: And allegedly, four million dollars’ worth of Bitcoin.

Leo: There's many reasons why people would like to know who Satoshi is, but one of the reasons is 1.1 million Bitcoins are held in an account believed to be Nakamoto's. No one has touched, moved, or in any way accessed that account in years. When you create a new Crypto currency, it turns out, as the creator, you have the opportunity to amass quite a significant number of those. Should the currency take off, as Bitcoin has, that cache of coins could be quite a bit. A million coins at 400 dollars a coin is not an insignificant amount of money. However, and this is a Motherboard article, but a number of other articles are saying this. Mmmm. I don't like the odds.

Becky: Haven't there been 16 alleged Bitcoin creators named so far?

Tom: I think this is the 16th, right?

Leo: And an account thought to belong to Nakamoto, but could have very well been hacked since said that's not Satoshi. I'm Satoshi. This guy has apparently been going around saying he was Satoshi Nakamoto for some time. It appears, although I don't know what the answer is, but it appears that he may be was the hacker who provided the leaked documents itself. The PGP Key, which would be a very convincing piece of evidence, if it were true that was supposedly matched Nakamoto's is apparently forged and back-dated.

Becky: But this guy is supposedly, he paid out 80 some million in Bitcoin to someone else, right? That's one of the reasons...

Tom: He created a trust. He created a 1.1 million Bitcoin trust with his partner, which is why everyone is like that's 1.1 million Bitcoins. We don't know whose it is, it might be Satoshi's. It's coincidental evidence.

Becky: Can I ask a dumb question? Is this just fun to figure out who this guy is or is there something deeper, more meaningful, more important that I am missing?

Tom: I think it's just fun. I think we are all curious, whether Satoshi Nakamoto is a guy, a woman, a group of people. We all want to know because it's such a brilliant invention. I think that's just human nature. But I don't know that it matters, other than who owns that 1.1 million block of Bitcoins, which could turn out not to be Satoshi Nakamoto. I don't know who owns that block.

Leo: I think we should do a Serial in search of Satoshi Season 3.

Becky: Why wouldn't you come forward?

Leo: This guy was immediately arrested.

Becky: He was arrested beforehand!

Leo: Coincidental. The Australian tax authority said he had nothing to do with it, but they did raid his house that day. I don't know if it has nothing to do with it. If he really is the owner of the 1.1 million Bitcoin trove, I think that's more than academic interest, right?

Becky: Is the concern that he is someone.. .we want to know who this person is because they may have some undue influence over the value of Bitcoin, therefore it's important to..

Leo: I don't think so. Just that that guy is worth 40 million dollars.

Tom: To me, it's two different questions. Who invented Bitcoin as an academic question, who owns 1.1 million Bitcoins is an influence question because that's a lot of Bitcoins.

Leo: I think it would be very dangerous if you were the real Satoshi. I completely understand why he would prefer to remain anonymous. If you are real Satoshi, you don't want the world to know who you are, merely because you have a lot of money, you're fairly notorious. You may be subject to...

Becky: It sounds like you were just describing the Kardashians. I don't quite understand that logic. Because they really want to be known.

Leo: Part of the fear is that you would be hit, that you would be taken out because people think that governments don't like the idea of this non-governmental currency and might do something to you.

Dr. Kiki: There is a question as to whether this forging of the number... whether or not it was to get people going after Craig S. Wright. Maybe somebody has something against him.

Leo: I feel like it's far more likely that Wright is one of those guys who wants notoriety and set this whole thing up. He's been going around saying hey. He's been hinting. Hey ladies. You know that Bitcoin? Would that work?

Becky: No. Curtis B. in the chatroom says maybe the reason why we want to know is because people want to keep an eye on him in case he has some sort of backdoor into the currency that nobody knows about.

Leo: That's unlikely because it's open source. It's well known how it works. There's no backdoor.

Tom: I think Satoshi Nakamoto preserved on anonymity so people would concentrate on the technology, and not talk about the person. When you talk about this sort of thing, it could become a cult of personality. That's why I don't think Wright is Satoshi Nakamoto. Either he wants the attention or someone wants to get him because he's a jerk. Either case, he doesn't fit the profile I don’t' think.

Dr. Kiki: Why did you come out all of a sudden going hey I've been quiet for years, here I am now? I want all this attention.

Leo: That's why it's suspicious, I think. There's also another reason, Tom, which is if you want Bitcoin to.. it's not merely the cult of personality, it's a question of trust. If you want Bitcoin to succeed, it needs to succeed purely on its own merits, mathematically. I am always wary of this. I think there is some case to be made that Bitcoin is like any classic pyramid scheme. The person who creates a new crypto currency has the opportunity to profit significantly because he's at the apex of the pyramid and everybody else is contributing to this. If it is a pyramid scheme, it's really important that you not rub it in that I got a hundred or whatever. You don't want to emphasize that fact. It should be a secret, right?

Becky: Maybe it's a marketing ploy. The more secret it is, the more intriguing and the more interesting and people want to be a part of it.

Leo: It came from Chicago. The chatroom is saying look what happened to Snowden. It might be best not to be well known. IN this day and age, anonymity is the right... It's got to irk Satoshi when somebody else comes forward and says it’s me.

Dr. Kiki: Having this big a trust too. That many Bitcoins. What kind of influence would it have on the Bitcoin market and value if suddenly it were dumped into the market?

Leo: It's been very volatile up to now. It's been well over a thousand dollars per Bitcoin. It's down to... I don't know what it is currently. There have been a lot of prosecutions. Matt Goss, which we used to go to to find out what Bitcoin is worth turned out to be fraudulent. Its founder is headed to jail I believe.

Tom: 433 dollars per coin according to the Winkdex.

Leo: We interviewed the chief scientist at Bitcoin foundation on triangulation a couple of years ago. Gavin Andreeson, who many have said is Satoshi. He denies it. But Satoshi very publicly handed over Bitcoin to Gavin saying I'm done, you can run this from now on So he denied. I asked him. He said I'm not Satoshi.

Becky: This is such a good movie!

Leo: That's what I said. That means you are. Just tug your ear. Let me know. It is fascinating. I don't know what the future of Bitcoin is. I do think that there's a lot of attention on block chain, the technology behind Bitcoin and there's all sorts of interesting uses of blockchain, including as a music distribution system. So who was it.. I'm trying to remember the name of the artist who wanted to distribute her music via a blockchain technology. Imogene Heap. The idea is that one of the things Blockchain could do is verify identity. Watching isn't perfect for this though. I think the negatives of Blockchain is that everybody who has a Bitcoin wallet has the entire Blockchain in the wallet. You have a record of everybody so you have to do that with a music system as well, but there are three companies at this point. Peer tracks, what are the other ones? That are trying to use Blockchain as a way of re-inventing the music industry. Bittoons and Ujo music.

Tom: The idea that Bitcoin could make a currency that is non-replicable using math is ... the music industry is like, that's what we want. We want people to not be able to replicate our bits.

Leo: Right. I've been begging Steve Gibson to do a Blockchain segment. We did a Bitcoin segment in Security now. I really want Steve to explain it to me. I think only he understands the math. It's fascinating. Bitcoin has been around for seven years.

Becky: Own any?

Leo: I have seven.

Becky: Seven.

Leo: You can't have them.

Becky: I remember Dvorak once, slagging off the host of the money machine on Tech TV because they said portfolios are down 10% with this crash. He said you can never be a finance expert and say your portfolio is down. I wonder if I'm missing the boat. Is there someone who is supposedly aware of the tech community but by thinking its too volatile. It makes me nervous. I don't want to ...

Leo: Does this make you feel better? The Winkle Vos twins are bit in the Bitcoin.

Becky: No.

Leo: They're all in on the Bitcoin.

Dr. Kiki: I think a lot of people are really behind it in practice and also because of the technology that supports it, but a lot of people don't have faith that it's going to pan out. It's going to end up failing, but maybe it's a successful experiment, because it shows us how the technology could work to create the next better currency.

Leo: That's what I love. It's what they call a crypto currency. That's what I love about it. It's based on math, it's very rigorous, it's very clever in a lot of ways. For instance, they're creating a money supply and all the Bitcoins will be created at some point in the next 20 years. I can't remember the date. I think 2040. Something like that. And then no more will be created. That will be a complete money supply. That is created by work. That's how you can mine Bitcoin by performing complex mathematical calculations. It's designed in such a way that it gets harder and harder to make a Bitcoin. The idea being that as the supply increases, computing power is expected to increase, and as the value increases, people will be more interested in doing it. So, at this point, it seems to always be this as the case. It's a push between the amount of power and hardware you could buy and the amount of Bitcoin you would make. It's brilliant. Bitcoin is infinitely divisible. So sometimes they say there's a fixed money supply, it doesn't mean you're going to have incredible potential for inflation and deflation, but no. Because you can slice it infinitely it's digital, you can handle that. A tenth of a Bitcoin would be worth a thousand bucks and then you make it 1/100th of a Bitcoin.

Dr. Kiki: Here. I'm going to give you my infinity slice of Bitcoin.

Leo: People do. When they tip me... one of the reasons I have so many Bitcoins is because I have a wallet. People don't tip you a Bitcoin. They tip you 1/00th or a 1/1000 th of a Bitcoin. Do you take Bitcoin, Tom? I think you do.

Tom: I think I do. Somebody was nice enough to give me a bunch in the early days of Bitcoin when it first launched. I've got a few too. But somebody gives 20 dollars, and whatever system they're using to send the Bitcoin says that's .43 Bitcoins.

Leo: There is some risk involved. Remember the guy who bought pizza in 2010. You can. There's a cupcake company in San Francisco who will sell you cupcakes in Bitcoin. There was a guy who used Bitcoin to pay for pizza. A Florida programmer, Lazlo Hannitch. He paid for two pizzas. Ten thousand Bitcoins. At the time, not worth a whole lot of money, but at one point worth seven million dollars.

Tom: That pizza is not worth that much now.

Leo: I don t know.

Becky: I like cold pizza.

Leo: Pretty cold by now. Can you believe that? The guy must be kicking himself. I had ten thousand Bitcoins.

Tom: You used to be able to sign up for Bitcoins. You'd get like half a Bitcoin or a full Bitcoin free once you downloaded the software.

Leo: That Was Gaving doing that. In fact, that's how Gavin became involved with the Bitcoin foundation was he wanted to promote Bitcoin. Something somebody liked. Satoshi Nakamoto, might want to do, so he was giving away a Bitcoin. That's how he became known at the Bitcoin foundation, supposedly, and Satoshi supposedly and became their technical director, supposedly. I think there's compelling evidence.

Tom: It's a fascinating mystery. I think it's more than one person. I think it's a group.

Becky: Aaron Sorkin movie waiting to happen.

Tom: Definitely. And we'll see Satoshi when he was young and then when he was middle aged, and then near the end of his life.

Leo: Did you see the Steve Jobs movie?

Tom: I saw it.

Leo: What did you think?

Tom: I thought it was a good character examination that gave me an impression of what it might have been like to be around Steve Jobs, but it certainly wasn't accurate. Right?

Leo: It was horrible, I thought.

Tom: Maybe, you've been around Steve Jobs, so you can say this much better. I thought that maybe he could have been like that. But the facts were all wrong.

Leo: It was a good movie I guess, if it had been about somebody not Steve Jobs.

Tom: It had snappy dialogue.

Leo: I love Aaron Sorkin. He's a great writer. But he does hate technology.

Becky: Did you guys get to see the Alex Gidney documentary on Steve Jobs?

Leo: No I haven't. Have you seen it? Is it worth seeing?

Becky: It's worth seeing It does not pull any punches. He really portrayed Steve Jobs the A-Hole.

Leo: If somebody is just a jerk, you cannot inspire people to create this great things that he inspired people to create. You cannot get people to work for you over a period of 10, 20 years. That is not the whole picture in any means, and that's one of the reasons I didn't like the movie. I felt like it does him a disservice to portray him as any one thing. I mean I'm an A**hole, but there's more to me than that, I hope.

Becky: By the way, thank you for clarifying whether or not we can say that. I did the parental version.

Leo: They'll bleep me out.

Tom: I'm waiting for the Aaron Sorkin biopic of Leo at Tech TV.

Leo: You people are ruining this company! Steve did say that for the Mobile Me developers. Mobile Me was such a nightmare. This is in his biography, this is reported by many people who were there. he brought them all into the auditorium at the Apple campus and chewed them out. He said you have ruined my company, you have ruined our reputation and fired them all. All at once. In an auditorium. You've got to admire his efficiency. Coming up, Elon Musk and others are funding Damn You Artificial Intelligence. What's wrong with these people? A billion dollar AI fund. But first a word from my sheets. I'm talking about my Boll and Branch Sheets. You said you wanted to hear about this? Let me tell you about my Boll and Branch sheets.

Becky: When you mean Sheets, you're not talking about spreadsheets or you mean Bed sheets.

Leo: I'm talking cotton baby. Let's lay this flat What’s the thread count.

Becky: What is the thread count?

Leo: That's a marketing term. I have high thread count. You can buy at Wall Mart very high thread count. Doesn't mean it's a great sheet. What makes it a great sheet is great cotton. Boll & Branch is the first bedding brand to get fair trade certification in its organic cotton. It is, I will tell you this, the softest cotton I have ever slept on. It is amazing. They don't sell them in Department stores, so they eliminate the 800% markup. They sell it direct to you from their website: bollandbranch.com. You're going to mock this, but it says it be here. Slept on by three US Presidents.

Becky: Is that the new metric?

Leo: That's the new metric. Three US Presidents. Countless celebrities. I sleep on it, and I love it. By the way, what a great gift for the Holidays. Scroll down to the pictures, Jason. Look at the box. They come in this beautiful box with ribbons on it. When they came, I thought they sent us a wedding present? No. That's what they come in. This beautiful Beribboned box. They are the nicest sheets. Not just sheets. You can get pillowcases, towels, duvets. They even have beautiful cotton shawls. It is a luscious, quality sheet, without paying department store overhead. Just a couple hundred bucks. Treat yourself to these luxurious, incredibly comfortable sheets. Right now, when you use the offer code TWiT at checkout, you'll get 20% off your entire wardrobe. This would be a great wedding gift, a baby shower gift, a holiday gift. Soft, pure, incredible linens, and they donate a portion of your sale to charity. Because it's fair trade, you can feel good about these sheets. I love them. Boll & Branch. bollandbranch.com. Don't forget the offer code: TWiT for 20% your entire order. Sheets, towels, blankets, Duvet covers and more. And free shipping right now All their products come beautifully packaged and even if you don't love them because you get thirty days risk free. If you're not completely sleepy. bollandbranch.com. Between Boll and Branch and my Casper mattress, sleep is interesting. Geeks are realizing.. You must for Good Morning America cover this, right?

Becky: I've done tons of seep stories and I can tell you all the products that are out there and I've done a sleep study at Stanford while wearing and using five of the most popular products. They're mostly within 10% variance in terms of figuring out how things like your duration of sleep and how long it took you to get to sleep and how many wake events. That's interesting because everyone defines that differently. I don't think it's about accuracy. We were talking about the Zio one time.

Leo: I'm using the Zio.

Becky What do you think?

Leo: So the Zio is a startup that raised a lot of money. They failed. They went out of business, and I think it's because of the FitBit. I think it's because of the motion trackers. They even say... because this was a headband that measured your EEG. So this wasn't... I always thought it's telling me I'm sleepy, it's telling me how my wrist is doing. Or you can get the Beddit, which goes under your sheets.

Dr. Kiki: We had the Beddit and that didn't go over well. It wasn't that accurate.

Leo: I don't know how accurate this is. I found them on Ebay. Steve Gibson said quick. They've been liquidated and you can buy them on Ebay. Apparently the software is still on Android.

Becky: The Zio is great. I used it for a long time. The biggest problem is I would wake up every morning with an indentation on my forehead. Look at the size of our collective heads! These things are massive domes.

Leo: some people were saying why are there three dots on your head?

Dr. Kiki: It's pillow wrinkles!

Leo: You're a red head so you would show up.

Becky: You wouldn't want to use the Zio. Try the S Plus from Resme. I like that one a lot. It uses motion, but I think their algorithm is better than some of the other ones. The bottom line is it doesn't necessarily matter how perfectly accurate they are, it's about cause and effect. You use these sleep devices, basically to determine if I have three glasses of wine, I notice that I wake up 15 times in the night. There's a bunch of different ways to use them, but basically it's identifying what causes sleep problems for you.

Leo: You know what this is? This is an outcropping... outburst of the quantified self. We want to measure everything. I think that's a little self centered. This is typical geek activity. I want to know exactly how I sleep.

Tom: Trouble shooting, right? The people that use these are like I don't think I'm sleeping well enough. I want to gather the data and figure it out.

Becky: I talked to one sleep expert at the University of Chicago, Dr. Grawlnick and she said she has a ton of people who come to her and say they have insomnia and when she actually tests them they don't have it at all.

Leo: Really?

Becky: Yeah.

Leo: I think we're all just tired.

Becky: If you think you have insomnia, go look up the clinical definition of it. It's not what you think. It's a prolonged, three nights a week of sleeping less than five hours for three to five months. It's about the duration of sleep deprivation you have. I think quantifying that and saying I'm not actually an insomniac, I just occasionally have trouble sleeping, because one of the reasons you get insomnia or perceived insomnia is anxiety about insomnia. So that's part of what happens.

Leo: But you've heard about FFI, right?

Becky: FFI?

Leo: Fatal Familial insomnia. This is a real disease. It's a genetic disease. You can't sleep. You go psychotic and die.

Becky: It's real?

Leo: Yes.

Becky: I've never heard of that.

Leo: You are going to get it.

Becky: I don't have it.

Leo: This is something a big brother tells his little sister. You've got it. You're going to die.

Becky: And you're adopted.

Tom: FFA.

Leo: It's not very common. 40 families worldwide. But it is a genetic disease that causes death. Anyway, that would be the extreme. You need sleep. It is good to know if coffee is keeping you up. But I think we're all so stressed.

Dr. Kiki: Coffee, anxiety over work or whatever it happens to be, or whether it's the bluelight from your device that you're using to read before you go to bed.

Leo: Is that real? Because everybody is talking about that now. Your device is putting blue light in your eyes. Is that real?

Dr. Kiki: I think there's something to it. I don't know that anybody has... that it's been completely scientifically proven that people falling asleep with these devices are having more trouble sleeping. I do know though that blue light does stimulate the brain, so that stimulation will have an effect.

Leo: The blue light from the sun? So that's to tell you you're up? Is that why?

Dr. Kiki: Exactly. So it affects your melatonin release.

Tom: Further research is needed.

Dr. Kiki: Yes.

Becky: There are quite a few studies. This is one of those issues where there are lot of studies, but there's also some corollary factors that haven't totally been considered, which is if you're reading or checking Facebook or reading Email, there's something that stimulates you emotionally or intellectually, and that I think is as much a factor as the blue light itself.

Dr. Kiki: I totally agree.

Leo: How about bimodal sleep? This is another hipster thing.

Dr. Kiki: What is that?

Leo: You know about this?

Dr. Kiki: Yeah.

Leo: This is where people don't sleep eight hours. They're up four hours, they sleep four hours, they're up another four hours. It's split sleep.

Dr. Kiki: I do this a lot for work. So I'll go to bed at ten, I'll get up at two and do a live shot at four, and I'll go back to bed at five, and I'll sleep until 9. I do this probably twice a week. It sucks.

Leo: This is the paleo of sleeping, OK? Anthropologists say that bimodal sleeping was the pre-industrial norm where the sun goes down, there's no light, so you go to bed. You wake up a few hours later, you have a bowl. I don't know what you do. You talk. You fornicate. You're doing something.

Tom: Paint on the cave wall.

Leo: Paint on the cave wall. Actually it literally says, without electricity people went to bed at sunset, they woke a few hours later to relax, muse on their dreams or have sex, then they drift off again until sunrise.

Dr. Kiki: Who is showing this though? How do we know? We don't know what people did in the caves ten thousand, fifteen twenty thousand years ago. We have no idea.

Becky: Leo has been watching a movie about what people did in the cave.

Leo: In the 90's, there's a famous sleep study where they gave people 14 hours of darkness. Over a long period of time, months, and let them get to a natural sleep cycle. In many cases, the bimodal cycle was the natural sleep cycle. That's my case for why I wake up at 4 in the morning, I diddle around with my iPhone for a while.

Becky: You diddle?

Leo: No. Wrong. Dirty mind. I read news. Some of my best reading is at that hour. And then about 6 or 7, I drift off and I don't get up till 9. I sleep a few more hours. I find that very resting, restful, I get work done in the middle of the night. I think it's not unusual.

Becky: That is so unique. I'm going to counter this with one thing. There was a study published in Current Biology back in October that studied, basically what it asserted was that our ancestors didn't get as much sleep as we think they did. They didn't go to sleep when it went dark, and they studied a tribe, the Hadza people in Tanzania--

Leo: Oh. I know them well.

Becky: You read about them at 4 in the morning.

Leo: I have a couple of buddies. I communicate with the Hadzas in the middle of the night.

Becky: Mean sleep time: 6.4 hours. Which is only slightly less than the average American.

Leo: You should think about it. What would you do if it's dark, the sun goes down, you're not going to sleep sunset to sunrise. That's too much sleep.

Dr. Kiki: There are other studies that include people who did go into caves and lived in caves in the dark for extended periods... weeks. And their sleep cycles completely changed to the point where they would sleep for sometimes up to a day or two at a time.

Leo: But, the other side of that, they stay up for 30 or 40 hours.

Dr. Kiki: They had completely lost track.

Leo: The diurnal cycle is normally based on sunrise/sunset, their Diurnal cycle, without the input of sunrise or sunset completely changed.

Dr. Kiki: There have been numerous studies. We've been studying the zercadian rhythm in humans, in mice, in monkeys, in many animals for decades. The research goes back 1950's, 1940's. We've been putting people in dark rooms and looking to see what happens to their cycles. It's interesting that just now people went into a cave and they have this interesting result, which is not corroborated by any other research that I'm aware of.

Leo: Isn't that interesting? I remember that study, and I thought that without any input, that's what happens in Vegas.

Dr. Kiki: Right.

Becky: That's what they want to happen.

Leo: Do they pump oxygen into your room in Vegas?

Becky: That's what I heard.

Leo: Do you remember, Tom, we'd go down and duke...

Tom: Probably mostly argon and nitrogen.

Leo: Right. Let's just fill the room with noble gases. Or are those inert? I think we would go to Vegas to do Comdex and we would be wired at night.

Tom: It's hard to tell. Is it because there is so much going on and you're stimulated walking through the lobby and you're at CES and they got so much to work on, and maybe they're trying to artificially increase the oxygen in the room. Who knows?

Leo: I think so. I think they want you out of the room.

Tom: They don't give you a lot of options for cheap entertainment in your room.

Leo: They do now. It depends at the hotel. We were at a cheap hotel, and there's nothing. Remember the circus? They were remote control. You would go home with the hotels remote control, and it was bolted to the table. It had a little swivel so you could aim it. The lamp was bolted to the table. You would take the lamp and the remote control home with you if they didn't bolt it down. Everything was bolted down, and then there was nothing you could do in the room. You couldn't open the window, you could barely turn on the TV, and there's certainly no mini bar.

Becky: You're going to leave. They want you to leave.

Dr. Kiki: They watched The Jerk too many times. Steve Martin going I'll take this lamp and this chair...

Leo: Anyway. I'm sorry, I got very distracted by sleep. But it's fascinating to me. Well, let's talk about Elon Musk. There's a new organization called Open AI, and the idea is... Elon Musk funded this along with Reid Hoffman of Linked In, Peter Tield of Financier, the guy who put the initial investment into Facebook. I don't know who Jessica Livingston is. Amazon Web services. Collectively they have pledged more than a billion dollars over a period of time, the co chairs are Musk and the CEO of commodator, and the idea is to open source AI artificial intelligence research so that Google, Microsoft, Apple, Uber, don't own this as a proprietary thing.

Becky: She's a founding partner of Why Commenator

Leo: OK. There you go. Why Commenator is a very famous startup school and angel investment company. So what do you think? Is this a good idea? I like the idea that no one company can own this. They say any patents we come up with will be royalty free, all our results will be public, so on that side, I think it's good. The other side, I'm a little worried about too much money being pumped into AI research.

Becky: But if it's going to happen don't...

Dr. Kiki: It's not going to be Skynet.

Leo: Why not?

Dr. Kiki: It's not going to be a single incident of AI. What they're doing, by making it open and everything open source, it's going to allow anybody to be able to hack on it. Anybody to implement new ideas, to be creative, to actually make a new product off of the backbone of what they're created, so instead of having one Skynet that controls everything, we're going to have little tiny AIs popping up all over the place.

Leo: Stephen Levy who wrote this article that we're referring to on Medium, that's his publication, Stephen Levy asks Elon, "If I'm doctor evil and I use it, won't you be overpowering me?" Musk says that's an excellent question. It's something we've debated quite a bit. So they too are worried bout this. Oltman says there are few different thoughts about this. Just as humans protect against doctor Evil just by nature that most humans are good... uh oh. If they're relying on the 'most humans are good' thesis i don't know. The collective force of humanity can contain the bad elements. We can't even contain Donald Trump! We think it's far more likely that many more AIs will work to stop the occasional... This is what you're saying, Kiki.

Dr. Kiki: It's going to be competition.

Leo: We're going to stop the occasional bad actors in the assumption that there is a single AI more powerful than anything else is not going to happen.

Tom: The other part of this I think is really interesting is that as AI starts to take off, we're seeing people go right to open source. Unlike Operating systems, where it came along later, you have Google open sourcing their tensor flow, deep learning software, you have Facebook open sourcing the design of their deep learning machines, which can run the flow stuff on, so everybody is pitching in and saying let's do this as openly as possible, because we all benefit.

Leo: Neither of these Google or Facebook projects will be used to buy open AI. they're going to go their own route and start from the ground up.

Becky: Do you think altruism or intelligence around deployment from the start design an ethos in the beginning, or is that because the business model is not clear, therefore the competitive spirit is not as high to protect IP?

Tom: It's probably both. I mean both Google and Facebook made a calculated decision to say we'll make more money if we open source this because it will progress faster. That's part of what drives open source development.

Leo: I don't think tensor flow is Google's state of the art development. Is what I think. I think they gave away their old stuff and open sourced that. Remember one of the things you get when you open source something is contributors from outside Google putting contributions back into it. I fully believe that Google has their own proprietary stuff. That's pretty much how Google does it. Elon Musk was one of the people who said we've got to pay attention to AI. This is potentially very risky. We've all seen too many movies like The Matrix and Terminator and going back to RUR, the first movie about robots in the 20s, which was about robots taking over the world... This is not new. We've always been worried about that. Yet I do feel like this is potentially a risk. I once asked Ray Curswile who is now at Google, a great AI researcher, why should be trust these AIs? he said because they'll think of us as their parents. Their progenitors, so they will respect and protect us. But again, I don't find that compelling.

Becky: Paul Saffo had a different philosophy about this. We were talking about it this week. He said AI devices will think of us as their pets. I think that's a little better.

Leo: But you kill your pet if you get hungry, right? I know our cats are thinking any day now. It's just a matter of time.

Becky: You get the eyes, I'll get the tongue.

Tom: The pattern is always we don't know what this technology will be used for, we don't know how powerful it might end up being, it's got the potential to do damage. We should be careful with it. I think that's good and sensible. We've developed things that can destroy our entire planet. I'm not saying that makes it OK to do anything, but maybe this is how we learn as a species not to destroy ourselves, to keep trying on these sorts of things.

Dr. Kiki: yeah. Over and over again we've seen that we've done OK with technologies that we have actually... that the Internet has allowed people to connect all over the world, do business, to share ideas. It has improved society greatly. I don't know if you can put a number on it. We're doing good things.

Leo: How about nuclear bombs?

Becky: I was just about to say, Leo, where is this groany skepticism coming from? Climate change?

Leo: Here is my genuine question. Is it just a science fiction version of AI that scares us, or is it legitimate to think that A) it's possible to create a computer program that thinks like a human or has its own... let's say sentience and its own will. Because that's what would be scary. I don't want to buy into some science fiction that isn't even possible.

Tom: The fact that people like Stephen Hawking and Elon musk are saying it might be possible, and even Ray Curswell are saying it might be possible. The fact that it might be possible makes me say yes, we should be careful, but not that we shouldn't investigate it.

Becky: Here's my question. We were talking about service robots earlier this week. The success of service robots is going to come from...

Leo: Have you watched Humans?

Becky: No.

Leo: What a great show!

Becky: I'm a mother. I haven't seen a new show in ten years.

Leo: It's a show you can watch. It's a TV how. You've seen this, Tom. Wonderful TV show about service robots and their humanoid and they have...

Becky: It's a TV show? I didn't even realize it was a TV show. Now I’m with you. I'll pretend like I'm going to watch it now.

Leo: It's interesting because there's lots of implications that are raised by these.

Becky: The point was that they're only going to succeed when we stop anthropomorphizing them.

Leo: That's a mistake humans made.

Becky: Right. Therefore our expectation is so high that they'll meet human standards and maybe that's what is so wrong about this discussion about AI, it's not that they become human-like, but that they employ pieces of intelligence that meet our needs, and if we see them starting to exceed that in some way that is scary, it ill still be so nascent that we can stop it and change it. You don't think so? You think it’ll just snowball?

Leo: One of the things Cursewell talks about is the singularity moment when human intelligence/machine intelligence is indistinguishable from human intelligence. He' makes it clear that it's not going to be the same ads, but it will be indistinguishable. If that happens, what's the next logical step for AI to start taking over esign and construction of artificial intelligence. And then rapidly a much better job. geometrically an infinitely better job than what we do. At that point, it doesn't matter what we say.

Dr. Kiki: Here once again, we're jumping to that answer, that AI end. When actually AI, there are many different kinds and like you said, Becky, different kinds of intelligence. We program in what we want a particular AI to have for our needs. Does a service robot need to have AI that contains emotions? Do we program in some kind of emotional social connectivity to that robot? Or is it just for working. Is it just AI to be able to notice when drugs need to be given, when care needs to be given. That's the question. What are we designing for? What are we creating? Do we need to create this human like intelligence? This is just people playing God.

Leo: That's never stopped us before, right?

Dr. Kiki: No. It's not going to stop us.

Leo: It's pretty cool. But wouldn't it be cool...

Tom: I think Kiki is making a good point, which is there's loads of different questions. Should we investigate this at all is biomedical research. We play around with viruses and dangerous infectious agents because we think we can make something good for humanity out of it, even though it's dangerous to research on those. I think that question is yes, we should investigate AI deeper for those reasons, then there's also the jumping to the end and being like what if we end up making something that is a different kind of intelligence and can get off on its own? Will it be more intelligent than us? Will we let it take over? That's a different set of questions too. I've been interviewed b y a number of people on this subject, including people who were advanced researchers in this field, in fact I interviewed one guy on Triangulation who is an ethicist, an IA ethicist. His background is fascinating. Philosophy, science, he says we don't have an ethical framework for this at this point. We need to do the ground work now. He says many people quote Asimov’s rules for robots, rules for robots as a way to protect ourselves. He says it's logically flawed, the whole thing is ridiculous. It's a fictional creation and it's not going to protect us in any way. We need to do much better and we need to start doing it at home before we do the research.

Dr. Kiki: This is something that's happened not just in this field of technology for AI, but also gene editing. Whether or not we're going to be using a new crisper technology to be allowing us to edit human DNA in the future. Recently, there was a summit in Washington DC where experts from all over the world, from China from India, from Europe, from the United States all came together to talk about what they thought was OK and not OK. Basically everyone came out of it going all right. For now we all promise not to mess with human DNA. For now. No designer babies. It's the conversations that need to be happening. Getting ethicists with the technologists and engineers, and getting everyone together to decide what they want to do.

Leo: The reason I'm fascinated by this is we're really on the cusp of all this. We had yesterday a dentist on, well he's a researcher and dentist. He's talking about using adult stem cells for regenerating your teeth in your mouth. We're actually getting closer. Turns out that's the first step to growing organs. Teeth are a little easier than a liver. So we're surprisingly close to doing that. It was actually a fascinating interview yesterday on the new screensavers. We've done so many interviews on Triangulation on AI. James Barod, who was a journalist, wrote a book called AI in the end of the human era. He was very concerned and negative about this. But then we... I'm trying to find the name of the fellow we talked to about this. He was an academic who was one of the few AI ethicists. He wants to grow that field, because he says this is where we should be starting.

Tom: You don't want to research infectious agents without clear rules about what you're doing and how you handle them.

Becky: There's a presumption, just as we're anthropomorphizing robots there's a presumption that they'll have our same desire for supremacy. I'm not sure that's clear.

Tom: There's an assumption that there will be only one kind of AI. There will be all kinds.

Leo: Here's what Jeff Hawkins said, who is also doing this kind of research. The founder of Graffiti. He is currently working on this. To create a microprocessor that can duplicate the process of a human brain. That's a better path . Nothing to worry about. Just don't let them replicate. That is an important point.

Dr. Kiki: The AI that designs the AI.

Leo: As soon as they can replicate, it's my opinion that was the signal moment in human evolution was not the creation of life. It predates that. It was when the first replicator was created. As soon as something, it doesn't have to be alive, it will start competing with other processes for resources. The one that is the most efficient will succeed and regenerate, and in fact if you follow that logic, you get life, diversification, the organizing principle of evolution. It starts with replication. So you don't have to say they're malicious. You merely have to say if they started to replicate themselves, we'd be in deep trouble.

Tom: Stick them on the block chain.

Leo: No replication!

Dr. Kiki: I got this book in the mail from the editor of Edge.org, and it's what to think about machines that think. It's a whole bunch of short essays by thinkers. Thinkers thinking.

Leo: That looks really interesting.

Dr. Kiki: It's really good. Some neat reading in here.

Leo: This is when TWiT is at its best is when we get interesting, smart people talking about today's news and what it means.

Becky: I was just having a thought about wasn't your Dad a paleontologist?

Leo: He still is.

Becky: Your Dad was studying dinosaurs, and you're thinking about the future of robots. What a spectrum. That is so cool to me.

Leo: What a world. Let's take a break. We've got a lot of stuff to talk about with some of the best people in the world. My great great oldest friends, Becky Worley who produced the old Screensavers, and Call for Help and has been a friend for almost 20 years.

Becky: Crazy.

Leo: Nice to see you. She is currently at Good Morning America, GMA, and are you still doing Yahoo stuff?

Becky: We're going to talk about that. Not as much, so now I can dish.

Leo: That's next. @bworley on Twitter. Dr. Kiki Sanford. From This Week in Science. How long has TWiS been around?

Dr. Kiki: 15 years.

Leo: Before there was TWiT, there was TWiS. Absolutely the greatest. twis.org. What is broaderimpacts?

Dr. Kiki: I've started a production company to help scientists and organizations tell their science stories in video.

Leo: Very nice. broaderimpacts.tv, @drkiki on Twitter. And of course Tom Merritt who is a long time tech TV-er. He was the original editor in chief of the tech TV website. What was your title?

Tom: Executive producer.

Leo: You were TV people. What did we know? He's running the daily tech news show. You'll find it at dailytechnewsshow.com and don't forget to support it on Patreon. It sounds like you're doing really great with that.

Tom: I just get to sit in my basement and talk about tech news.

Leo: It's the dream. You're living the dream. This is kind of like my basement. We actually have a basement, but this is the basement above the basement. This is just a really big man cave. You actually nailed it.

Becky: That is why I like to come here and drink. You nailed it!

Leo: Why don't we just call it the TWiT man cave and be done with it?

Becky: That's what I'm talking about! That is not a misogynistic title by the way, because this lady likes being in this man cave.

Leo: Hey! What would a man cave be without the ladies?

Becky: We are going South so fast.

Leo: You're the one who gave me wine. Our show to you today brought to you by SquareSpace. If you watch TWiT shows, you know about SquareSpace. It's the place to make your next website a beautiful professional website without any CSS. You don't have to know HTML, you just build it beautiful at Squarespace.com. Of course, if you want to get geeky, the sky is the limit. They've got a developer platform customizable settings, fonts, colors, page configurations. The nice thing is you're going to start with a modern template, designed by artists and not just artists, really good web engineers, so that template has state of the art in it. Remember Calacanis telling me you'd be nuts... this is after I spent a quarter of a million dollars on a new website. You'd be nuts to do your own website he said, because what you want to do is take this great engineering and build your site on top of it, make it express you. SquareSpace does that. Mobile responsive, the site looks great on any size screen from 55 inches to 4 inches. That's built in. Ecommerce is built in. It's gorgeous. If you go to Leoville.com, my new Squarespace site, I just love it. I used a simple template, but over time it's easy to customize it. Pricing is very straightforward when you register for a year. There's leoville.com. By the way, if everybody watching today went there at this time, any other site would break. You cannot break a Squarespace site. Look at that great full bleed, brilliant images. I just love it. And SquareSpace commerce built into every site. It's the only platform that lets you create, manage, and brand your store in a beautiful way that reflects your ethos. There's a basic plan, there's an advanced plan, incredible 24/7 customer support. Plus Pages with webinars, and all sorts of information. If you’re a musician, they have a template for you that includes selling music, set lists, performance concert calendar. All of that! If you have a business, man, this is made for you. Even like things like a new baby or getting married, life events. Squarespace is fantastic. You can try it right now by going to Squarespace.com and click the get started button and you’re in. You can play with the template. The beauty part is, you put the content in there, the template is completely separated. Of course it should be. This is modern engineering. You can change the template anytime. Completely change your look with the click of the mouse. Change it back. Move around. It will always look the way you want it to. Start your free trial. No credit card needed. Squarespace.com. all I ask is when you decide to buy, and I forgot to do this when I bought it, is use the promo code TWIT and you’ll get 10% off. I was conflicted. I thought, I shouldn’t really use my own promo code.

Becky: I used it.

Leo: Did you?

Becky: I used the TWIT promo code when I did my Squarespace.

Leo: Thank you. 10% off is a good deal. Especially if you buy a year or two. That could be significant. Squarespace.com. We love them. They really do a great job. I wonder if they’ll have a Super Bowl ad again this year. They had one last year. Remember the Jeff Bridges ad?

Becky: Oh, the dude.

Leo: The dude.

Becky: Isn’t that what they call him, the dude?

Leo: The dude. It was wild. It’s so wild to see—

Dr. Kiki: The dude abides.

Leo: I remember, what was the first Super Bowl ad?

Tom: I shop at Ralph’s.

Leo: (Laughing) do you buy vodka and cream?

Dr. Kiki: That’s right. The white Russian.

Tom: I have bought both of those things at Ralph’s, yea.

Leo: That was, by the way, and I’m glad he did—

Becky: Black Russian? Vodka and cream?

Dr. Kiki: White Russian.

Becky: White Russian.

Leo: White Russian. That’s what the dude drinks. You saw, you saw Leonard Nimoy’s incredible Lazy Day video that he did to the Bruno Mars’ song? Where he basically is the dude. Have you seen this? Can I play the audio or will I get in trouble with Bruno? This is before he, shortly before he passed away. But he goes into this, he does the whole dude thing.

Becky: Nice.

Leo: Where’s the audio? Are you not getting that, Jason? It’s probably just as well right now.

Becky: We don’t need that. Oh, yea, yea. Ok,.

Leo: He’s totally the dude. There’s probably something going on. No, it’s not muted. I think he even goes to the grocery store in his bathrobe. He yells at—yea. You know that Leonard Nimoy did the dishes I would think.

Becky: You would think. I once when I was working at Tech TV, I’d left the dishes so long and then I was going on a trip that I put the dishes in the refrigerator.

Leo: (Laughing) just because you want to keep that e-coli fresh.

Becky: I figured it would smell less bad.

Leo: That’s what Chipotle did. That’s a great technique. Great technique.

Becky: Desperate measures for desperate times.

Leo: I feel bad for Chipotle. You give a few people e-coli and it just ruins it.

Becky: No, it was norovirus.

Leo: It was norovirus.

Becky: Norovirus is better, I think.

Dr. Kiki: Yea, I think e-coli was here in Oregon, actually. Their lettuce was tainted.

Leo: There he is. He’s doing his dude. Look at that. That’s straight out of the dude.

Dr. Kiki: That is. That’s the shot from the dude.

Leo: And he yells at a kid. Watch this. You never saw Leonard—he’s doing a Jell-O shot. Ah! All right, I don’t know. I don’t know why I got it this. This is—so was it, it was e-coli and noroviruses?

Dr. Kiki: 2 separate, it’s two separate incidences.

Becky: We think that the sneeze guard is probably going to protect us. We like to see our food prepared.

Leo: Now wait a minute. Let me think. Have you done a GMA piece on the sneeze guard?

Becky: Great idea.

Leo: (Laughing).

Becky: Leo, your genius continues to astound me.

Leo: The sneeze guard. No basically it’s 6th grade science projects. Yea, now we’re getting the audio. I don’t know what happened. I think we have to cut it here because at this point, there is a dirty hand gesture. Just in time. You don’t want to see Leonard Nimoy play with nunchucks, do you?

Jason: Right when we got the sound working.

Leo: Ok, Yahoo. What the hell is going on? We’ve been talking about this a couple of weeks. It started with the Wall Street Journal article which now I’m convinced—

Becky: That it was a plant?

Leo: It was a plant by the activist investors who wanted Yahoo to make them some money. So the initial plan for Yahoo was to spin off their $35 billion dollar stake, $35 billion stake in Ali Baba, to spin off their multi-billion dollar stake in Yahoo Japan.

Becky: They paid a billion dollars for that in 2005.

Leo: Yea, it was a good investment. In 2005, so Marissa Mayer cannot take credit for that.

Becky: No, was that Terry Semel?

Leo: I think, it might have been.

Tom: Yea.

Leo: They’ve had—it’s hard to keep track. They’ve had 5 CEO’s in 5 years.

Becky: Is it Tuesday? Because then it’s Marissa. If it was Monday, it was—

Leo: But then the IRS told them, “We can’t guarantee that is a tax-free transaction.” There might be a bill as big as $10 billion dollars. So.

Becky: Right. So is that like a cap gains basically for corporations? Is that what we’re talking about? Ok, got it.

Leo: Yea. And the IRS said, “No, no. We’re just not going to tell, we’re not going to say.” The activist investors who are trying to get this done asked for a judgement by the IRS because they didn’t want to pay one third of it in taxes.

Dr. Kiki: Come on, I don’t want to pay any taxes. Let me have the free money.

Leo: No, they thought it would be tax free. They thought it would be tax free.

Becky: Two bites of the apple because then the investors have to pay cap gains on all the—

Leo: Yea, that’s probably why.

Becky: It is.

Leo: Double taxing.

Becky: Double taxation.

Tom: There’s going to be a tax implication to what they’re doing too. It’s just less of a tax implication and they didn’t want to wait around for clarification on the Ali Baba one. They wanted to go with the one they were sure was going to be lower.

Leo: So instead of spinning off the peripherals, they’re spinning off the core business. Well, we don’t even know what they’re doing. Because I feel like a lot of this is just leaked out. What is the board saying? I know Max Levchin is off the board. He was one of Mayer’s supporters, former PayPal founder.

Becky: Is Yahoo high school or not?

Leo: It’s very much.

Becky: I just can’t even, I mean I don’t work there anymore basically.

Leo: You basically don’t. Did you enjoy working there?

Becky: Yes and no. I mean it’s great, I always say mine the miners. So go where, when you work in media, you go where the money is. And it’s like a kind of—

Leo: Well you weren’t alone. You followed Katie Couric, David Pogue.

Becky: Well no, that’s an interesting story but that’s not about what we’re talking about. Basically, this is a little dirt that I can tell which is Marissa Mayer went to Davos. She met up with the head of one of the big banks. And he said, “Oh, I love Yahoo Finance. It’s so great.”

Leo: Me too. It is great.

Becky: And she said, “Oh, which anchor do you listen to? Who’s advice do you listen to?”

Leo: Anchor? I just look at the graphs.

Becky: Well, because he said, “I watch it all the time.” Like on Bloomberg or CNBC. She said, “Which, who do you like?”

Leo: Who do you like?

Becky: He said, “I don’t know, they’re all great.” Now if you heard that, would you turn around and what she did, is she said—

Leo: We need an anchor.

Becky: One person for every vertical and that’s the only talent that we have for that vertical. Which is such an interesting—I mean actually I find it not the worst idea because—

Leo: Now you’re a TV person. First and foremost.

Becky: Right. You have to have someone iconic that represents the brand in each vertical. So that was one of the things that she did. She came back and she—

Leo: So you agree with that?

Becky: I think it’s smart because—

Leo: Was Couric for news? Pogue for tech?

Becky: It was Couric for news, Pogue for tech, I don’t even know for finance. I think they went maybe with the guys they had. They had two people that were really good.

Leo: Yea.

Becky: But it just was an interesting move on her part. So anyways, I digress.

Leo: That’s smart.

Becky: That’s one thing that she did. But that’s not the news of today.

Leo: In fact I was listening to Kara Swisher. She was interviewed locally by KQAD about this along with Miguel Helft from, he was at the New York Times. I think he’s at, is he at Fusion? Anyway, she implied that she had heard from both Pogue and Couric, or heard from people who heard from them that they were less than happy about what’s going on at Yahoo right now.

Becky: Oh, they’re all I’m sure freaking out.

Leo: Their career decision may not have panned out.

Becky: Well, Yahoo said, “We’re going big on media.” And it’s just not as easy as they made it seem. Aaron Task is the finance guy that they have. And Jeff Macke. But I think that’s the point is that they underestimated how difficult the media landscape is now and putting all their eggs in one basket and the money they spent on Pogue and Couric and the like.

Leo: We concluded last week because we talked about this last week. In fact we had a good panel to do it because we had from the New York Times, who was it, Jason, that was from the New York Times that was here? She was great and I can’t remember, I apologize, I’m sorry.

Jason: Katie Benner.

Leo: Katie Benner. Of course. It was her opinion A. that the Journal story had been planted and that B. that Marissa would never be fired because the board is Marissa’s board.

Becky: Right. And her severance is $150 million.

Leo: Yea, big deal. That’s—we’re talking billions here. This is not—

Becky: I know but it’s not going to get fixed with a CEO. She’s not doing anything wrong.

Leo: That’s the question. You know, Swisher kind of said that she was.

Becky: Oh. Well, tell me. I mean that’s what, that’s what—

Leo: Swisher said, and Kara as you know, there’s no one that spends more time. She’s of course out of Re/Code and probably the single, the number one recipient of leaked Yahoo memorandum, company memorandum. But she was of the opinion that Yahoo, that the board made this celebrity hire. That Marissa Mayer was the celebrity hire. The wrong person. She said, “They should have hired a turn-around specialist to come in, correctly assess the value of each piece, turn the most important pieces around, dump the rest. That was the only way to save Yahoo.” Instead they brought in a well-known Google executive who perhaps, you know arguably wasn’t, didn’t have a future at Google. Paid her an awful lot of money including a huge golden parachute and she, but she wasn’t the right person. That she was merely a celebrity hire.

Becky: Ok, so then my question is turn around to what?

Leo: Well like I said, ok, Yahoo Mail.

Becky: Great. Love it.

Leo: Flickr. Let’s think of some properties. Some valuable properties. Focus on those, make the valuable again and sell off the stuff that’s not ever going to turn around.

Becky: But none of those are going to satisfy—

Leo: They’re not going to make it big enough.

Becky: I thought it so interesting on the day that all this Yahoo news came down was also the day that the Dow and the DuPont merger were announced.

Leo: Isn’t that wild?

Becky: And what that tells me is that everything in our economy, in our stock market is around growth companies. And that stable companies that do certain things well but aren’t super sexy are struggling.

Leo: That was my take-away. The lesson is don’t go public whatever you do (laughing).

Becky: The expectations of growth are so high. The percentage of profit margin that people expect are ridiculous. And therefore, I don’t know, I’m not defending Yahoo. I’m more interested in what do we want from Yahoo and what’s the reality.

Tom: Well I think Becky’s right that Marissa hasn’t done anything particularly wrong. She just hasn’t done anything crazy right. And what Kara was saying is that they should have hired like a John Chen who’s gone in to turn around Blackberry. Or maybe sold to a venture capitalist.

Leo: How’s that working out by the way for John Chen?

Tom: It’s actually not working out bad. Blackberry just had a profitable quarter last time.

Leo: And Leo bought a Priv.

Tom: It’s not—and Leo bought a Priv. So, it’s working out really well for John Chen.

Leo: (Laughing) congratulations.

Tom: You know, I mean, that’s a tough, tough boat to turn around. But it is turning. And I think a better example would be Ziff Davis where the Ziff Davis properties, the magazines where considered just junk and venture capitalist companies came in and like slimmed them down and tidied them up and turned them into something that was actually worth owning. Which is not exactly an exciting or sexy thing to do but I think that’s what Kara might have been suggesting should have happened to Yahoo. You just get a specialist to come in and strip it for parts, turn it into something that actually makes profit.

Becky: You make such a good point because what they brought Marissa in to do is to keep it the Titanic. They didn’t want to slim it down and turn it into parts. They wanted to add more, acquire more, get more and be as big. And I’m not sure that’s a realistic strategy so maybe the point is, go big and then when you realize there’s no big to go, go home. And that’s kind of where I feel like we might be.

Tom: It’s not that Marissa did anything wrong, it’s that they hired the wrong person. Maybe.

Becky: Eh, I don’t know. There’s a lot of smart people there. I have no idea what the solution is for Yahoo. And I thought media, jus the power of the front page continues to be so strong and it’s such a global play. When I had a show there, 25% of our traffic came from the Philippines alone.

Leo: What?

Becky: Yea. Unbelievable amounts of global traffic and it’s because that front page is still really powerful there.

Leo: It’s so powerful, yea.

Becky: It’s the firehose effect. You know, you get on that front page, you’re good to go. And they’ve actually done a decent job of creating some verticals that were self-sustaining. Finance, sports, tech was, is interesting but I wouldn’t say it’s self-sustaining. Parenting has got a lot of legs. And they’re really trying that media company plays what they’re going for.

Leo: Yea, mail is still huge, right?

Becky: Oh massive.

Leo: So Yahoo, one of the things Yahoo Mail did last week is they allowed you to connect your Gmail and Outlook Mail accounts in. So that you could use, if you like the Yahoo interface better, you could use it for Gmail.

Becky: So bring the POP settings in or the—

Leo: Yea, the all the mail, the whole thing via IMAP. Which I did and then I realized why I use Gmail because, you know one of the reasons I didn’t, one of the things I didn’t like about Yahoo Mail is just the, I mean look at all the spam on here. It’s a spam nightmare. So what did they do to my Gmail? They just loaded it up with spam. I am not apparently, there’s a ton of spam in my Gmail that I don’t see because Google handles it. But Yahoo said, “Hey, guess what? Bringing back the spam, baby.”

Dr. Kiki: Oh, no.

Tom: Because Yahoo’s so good at showing you spam.

Leo: Yea, Yahoo Mail’s better.

Tom: It has to learn your new spam, that’s all.

Leo: It’s showing me spam.

Becky: Can I make the point that we’ve buried the lead here?

Leo: What’s the lead?

Becky: The lead is that the day after Marissa announced this huge spin-off and the tax implications and fielded questions, oh she gave birth to twins.

Leo: Oh, I know. That was so sad. I was watching, I was listening to this KQAD interview with Swisher and Helft and in the middle of it, Kara says, “Oh, yea. I just got a text from Marissa. She just had twins.”

Dr. Kiki: Oh, my God.

Leo: Like as they’re bashing her.

Dr. Kiki: Oh, my God. I couldn’t even imagine.

Leo: Oh and by the way, she’s been pregnant this whole time and she just had twins. And she’s going back to work in 2 weeks.

Becky: I just shudder. I mean there was like a cold sweat that hit me as the realization of this came out.

Leo: Don’t you think that Ms. Mayer is actually, has been for months hoping, “Fire me. Please fire me. Please. Please.”

Tom: Spin it off whatever direction you want. I don’t care.

Leo: “Just fire me, please. I want $110 million dollars. Please fire me. I’ve got twins. I’ve got expenses.”

Becky: I just want to show you—

Tom: We have lived through God knows how many meetings and discussions. I mean she is exasperated.

Becky: Yea. Do you know how uncomfortable she must have been in every aspect of the word?

Leo: Of course you and Kiki know very well, this must have been very difficult for her, right?

Dr. Kiki: Oh, my God.

Leo: And look how huge she is.

Becky: That’s me.

Leo: Oh, that’s you (laughing).

Becky: (Laughing).

Leo: You’re ginormous!

Becky: Is that not terrifying?

Leo: Where’s that from?

Becky: That was the day before I gave birth.

Dr. Kiki: To twins.

Leo: That’s not a real picture is it?

Becky: That is a real video. I did it—

Leo: Where can I find that?

Becky: Here, plug your HDMI in here and we’ll look at it.

Leo: Just plug it in. You’ve got to see this.

Becky: Is that not the most terrifying thing you’ve ever seen?

Leo: And you had twins, right? How big were the twins?

Becky: Oh, my god, it’s so—that’s when I just freaked out. Ok, you can see it.

Leo: Where am I getting this audio from? Oh, this is my computer.

Becky: I don’t know if you can see this but—

Leo: Make it go full screen so we can see the value, the giant value of this.

Becky: Oh, God, it’s terrifying. But that’s where I was like, Oh, my Lord.

Dr. Kiki: Wow, wow.

Leo: Wait I want to see this all. Go full screen here.

Becky: Oh, this promo, I don’t even know if it can here. This is like old school. This—

Leo: Yea this was before they had full screen. They have full belly. Holy—that’s not possible.

Becky: Isn’t that insane? I was 200 pounds.

Leo: What?

Becky: I mean this woman, I mean that’s the part that I can’t convey to you is that she’s feeling, she’s feeling—

Leo: She didn’t look like that.

Becky: I don’t know why she wouldn’t.

Dr. Kiki: She’s having twins.

Leo: Twins. There’s 2 children in there.

Becky: Yes. That’s the realization I’m trying to share with all of you.

Leo: Holy cow.

Becky: Ali Bab, who gives a rip?

Leo: And when I say cow, I don’t mean that disparagingly. Wait a minute that’s like there’s an optical illusion. You’re not sticking out that far.

Becky: No, no. That is, those are—

Leo: You couldn’t reach the end, could you?

Becky: I could barely drive. I was doing a live shot, like Black Friday was like two weeks prior to this. And I was talking about 50” TVs and the director said in my ear, “Get back. We can’t see the TVs.” (Laughing) Was that not amazing?

Leo: (Laughing) Oh my God.

Becky: That’s Marissa Mayer doing this.

Leo: Yea, it is kind of amazing. And I have huge respect for Ms. Mayer. I think she is very smart. You know though she’s a product person. That’s what she did at Google, right? She was famous for managing the Google front page and making sure that it didn’t get cluttered. I don’t understand why she couldn’t bring that—maybe Yahoo is just a ship that just couldn’t be turned at this point.

Tom: Maybe.

Leo: It’s just a giant oil tanker.

Becky: It’s a—that’s what I’m saying is it’s like a boat—

Leo: Or, Becky Worley with twins.

Becky: It is. There was no turning that. That was not very agile.

Leo: Press play. I want to see—I think this is a fake picture.

Becky: Do you really want to see this?

Leo: Yes.

Becky: Ok. All right.

Leo: Can we go to the beginning?

Becky: Yea. So this was, ok so it’s kind of hidden through the—

Leo: Is this a montage?

Becky: No, it was this promo. I was going to do this show with Dvorak and so we made this promo and they’re like, “We’ve got to explain why you’re not available right now.” So there like, “You have years of experience as a reporter, tech reporter. You want your tech news now.”

Leo: Yea, yea, there she is pretending to type.

Becky: And I’m like, “Right now?”

Leo: Like, “Oh my God!”

Becky: (Laughing) and then, you know, then my water breaks and then we do the whole fake birth thing.

Leo: (Laughing) no, this is good. This is good. And how—your technology news upload. And how, how shortly after that did you give birth?

Becky: The next day.

Leo: Oh my God.

Becky: The next day.

Leo: There’s Finn and Emalia. By the way, great kids.

Dr. Kiki: You went Marissa all over that.

Becky: See? Yea. They had so much fun when we came to the new house and they got to—

Tom: Did you spin them out for tax reasons, or?

Becky: I did. I did.

Leo: She started an LLC.

Becky: I did.

Leo: Yea, the Finn and Worley, the Finn Worley and Emalia Worley LLC. Charitable trust.

Becky: That’s right. One is, one is an S-Corp and the other is a C-Corp so I kept it separate for tax reasons. Yea, but I just couldn’t, I just get cold sweats when I thought about the whole Marissa thing. Like, wow.

Leo: You guys aren’t financial analysts so there’s really nothing to say about this spin-off. I mean I don’t even know what they’re—they’re spinning the spin. What does it mean? If you hold Yahoo stock you’ll get parts of all of the new companies, right?

Tom: As far as I understand it, there’s a little more transparency into Yahoo because they’re spinning it out.

Leo: Yea, it’s like Alphabet.

Tom: Yea, so.

Leo: Like Google did with Alphabet.

Tom: Yea. For different reasons, but yea.

Leo: And well, there’s no overarching company anymore. There will be Yahoo core, whatever they name these things.

Tom: Yea or like HP with HP Enterprise and Hewlett-Packard.

Becky: But one question I have is, does the board still oversee Yahoo or does Yahoo have a new board?

Leo: No, no, no, no. I think the board goes with one of the 3, probably with core businesses. Right? And Marissa probably goes with core businesses.

Tom: It’s going to be a year before that even gets just settled, so.

Leo: We don’t even know.

Tom: But yea my guess is that’s what will happen.

Leo: All right, let’s take a break. I’m still reeling from these issues.

Becky: I’ve traumatized you with visions of my body morphing.

Leo: And look how great you look.

Becky: To Jabba the Hut size.

Leo: Look how great you look. I mean, seriously. It took 6 years, but you look fabulous.

Becky: Yea, I got there eventually. 7 or 8 surgeries but it’s all good.

Leo: No you actually didn’t, I never saw you that pregnant and you looked, you look fabulous. Like instantly. Like—

Becky: No.

Leo: No?

Becky: But thanks.

Leo: It was that cryogenic thing. You know people have died now doing that.

Becky: I know.

Leo: Are you regretting having risked your life in a cryogenic tank?

Becky: No, no, no.

Leo: No? It wasn’t that cold, was it?

Becky: I had supervisory people around and opposed to that woman who decided to freelance it and just go.

Leo: She just hopped in?

Becky: I don’t know what. I think she was by herself and it was like negative 270 degrees. It’s so sad.

Dr. Kiki: Yea, I heard that story.

Leo: Sad? Dumb? I’m not sure which.

Becky: I know. So creepy.

Leo: Here, John, hand me my gift. I got a gift. You guys can fight over this. Harry’s. Love Harrys’ razors as you know and it is the holiday season.

Becky: Getting gifts for guys is so hard.

Leo: It’s so hard and you know, there’s different guys in your life. Like there’s the secret Santa guy that you really don’t want to spend more than a few bucks for, right? Maybe you even have a limit. And then there’s Dad, you know? Or the special guy in your life. So Harry’s can be really a good place for you to stop off. First of all, just you know, to recap, great blades, Harry’s owns the factory. They sell direct to you. Not only do you get an amazing shave but you get it at a great price. Much less than the drugstore blades. They even give 1% of their sales and 1% of their time back to the communities they serve. They’re really passionate about creating a great shave at a fair price. But they also have some great kits. And the kits are great. If you’re just getting started with Harry’s, like the Truman set here’s $15 dollars, you get in every kit the handle, you get three blades, you get the foaming shave gel or the cream and that’s not a sampler bottle. It’s a full-size bottle of that. You get—nobody ever mentions this but I love it, the Harry’s cover. But Harry’s has many other lovely gifts including this. Look at this. So, get the Truman for the guy in your Secret Santa list because I’ll show you how you can get it for ten bucks. That’s fine, right? Then for Dad or somebody special you get this. This is the Winter Winston kit. Now this is extra special. And very affordable. You don’t have to tell Dad that. Here’s the copper handled Harry’s razor. By the way, monogrammed. If you monogram it you get this full gift set as well. There’s the shave cream. You see, it’s a full size, this tube is exactly what I get with my subscription. Every month I get more blades, more shave cream. It’s fabulous. You can also, and get that monogrammed with Dad’s initials. You can also get, here’s another thing that you can also get monogrammed. This is the Harry’s razor stand. I love this. It’s a cast aluminum, it’s heavy, it’s solid. The razor goes right in there. See, you can tell it’s my razor. They now sell a daily face wash which you can, and you can make this like a whole package. You can get the razor, the shaving kit which is really nice, the aftershave balm. I love Harry’s. H-A-R-R-Y-S, harrys.com. All their products are sleek. And the nice thing is then you get the blades and they’re half as much as the drugstore blades. They give you a great shave. And of course Harry’s guarantees you’ll be satisfied. H-A-R-R-Y-S. Since they started with us, over a million guys have made the switch to Harry’s. I love it. And what a nice site, too. It’s a pleasure shopping there. 30 seconds and out. Get those gifts for the difficult to shop for man in your life. Harrys.com and as a special offer, Harry’s will give you $5 dollars off your first order but you have to use the offer code TWIT and the number 5. And through December 18, we’ve got a little bit more time, economy shipping for the holidays. Harrys.com and you’re guaranteed to get it in time for Christmas.

Becky: Can I do a quick PSA when you’re done?

Leo: Yea.

Becky: Are you ready? Are we good?

Leo: Let me say one more thing. Every morning you shave, it’ll feel like a holiday.

Becky: A little luxury every day is a good thing.

Leo: With Harry’s.

Becky: Quick PSA. Deadlines for Christmas shopping this week, December 15th. So if you’re going to be doing your online shopping-

Leo: Shipping not shopping.

Becky: Shipping. Shipping. I meant to say shipping.

Leo: You can shop as I do right on Christmas Eve. Right up to midnight.

Becky: You have one more day.

Leo: It’s great. I go to the Target, the shelves are nuded, denuded. There’s nothing left.

Becky: Yes, I see.

Leo: But it simplifies the process.

Becky: Yes. You just get whatever’s left.

Leo: See those cocktail napkins? I’ll take three of those.

Becky: Yes, they are leftover.

Leo: They are leftover but I like them.

Becky: Hey I tried that Curbside. Have you seen that Curbside? So it’s an app and it has a bunch of different vendors and you do your online shopping through Curbside.

Leo: Do you pull up? Do you pull up?

Becky: And then you schedule a pickup. You pull up. The app knows you pull in. You fire it up. You say come bring it out to me. Boom. Done.

Leo: Here she is. She’s about to shop Curbside.

Becky: You never have to get out of your car. Now this sounds incredibly lazy but when, but when your child is napping in a car seat in the back seat it is genius.

Leo: Oh, it’s for moms, for busy moms.

Dr. Kiki: Can’t get out of the car.

Becky: Curbside. Try it at Target. So yea, shipping deadlines. December 15th is USPS.

Leo: I don’t know what this video has to do with anything. But I’m enjoying it.

Becky: I have no idea. Sorry, it’s really—

Leo: I’m so busy with my photo shoot, I guess.

Becky: It’s a little movie there.

Leo: Yea. Curbside. So what are the stores?

Becky: Target, H&M, CVS is in there. Nice.

Leo: But it has to be in Bay area, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, New York.

Becky: 25 million Americans have access to it in terms of the areas.

Leo: No Portland.

Becky: Sorry, no Portland yet.

Leo: No but we’ve got a Target nearby. Wait a minute. I can go to the Nevato Target.

Jason: The Target here in Petaluma has it. There’s signs for it. I saw it and I wondered what it was.

Leo: Drive up, oh wait a minute.

Becky: The app knows you’re there and they come right out and they.

Tom: They’ll bring your cocktail napkins out to you.

Leo: This is awesome. Does this work on Christmas Eve?

Tom: Of course.

Becky: Of course. Yes it does. I’m telling you.

Leo: Bingo.

Becky: I know. Yet again, we’re those people in Wall-E, we’re not leaving our little pod.

Dr. Kiki: Got my little bubble. I like it in here.

Leo: Can I drive up on my Segway?

Becky: Yes. I think they would serve you. They would think you were weird.

Leo: So shipping.

Becky: Yes.

Leo: This week is it.

Becky: This week is it. And December 21st I think is Amazon’s 2-day shipping deadline. So just FYI, it’s coming down the pipe, gang. And this is actually a really good week for, it’s the last week of deal that you can still ship. Because then it starts getting crazy with shipping costs and all that kind of stuff. So anyways, we don’t need to go into that, but this is my life right now.

Leo: You’re the consumer reporter for Good Morning, America so these are the things that really occupy your time.

Becky: Yea, they hit me, although—hey, I want to talk, can we talk about the Apple battery case? Because I want to get—

Leo: I have one. Where is that?

Becky: Is it too old or is it still something that we can talk about?

Leo: No, no, it’s this week. Can you, somebody go into my, it’s the big drawer on the left. That’s where put all my Christmas presents. I have, don’t tell anybody, I have a BB8 in there. I have a, for my son who’s 21, a drinking horn, a 28 ounce drinking horn.

Becky: Is that the kind you get at a certain point you can’t stop? About a yard?

Tom: Yea, it’s magical. It keeps refilling itself.

Leo: I have, then I have this. Because he has an iPhone S6. That’s the only problem is that this is only for a 6 or a 6S.

Becky: Right. The 6S doesn’t need one.

Leo: Well, now you tell me. Now you’re going to see this in person. Here it is. This is the black one. Silicon rubber, nice soft rubber.

Becky: Ok.

Leo: (Laughing) I think there’s a battery in there.

Becky: Doubles your battery life? That’s the claim-ish?

Leo: Well Apple—this is Apple. They’re so cagey. Because they don’t tell you how many milliamp hours.

Becky: Ok, that’s what I want to talk about. But give us the top line on this so that I don’t bury the lead.

Leo: The top line is that it doubles your battery life. Because it’s silicon rubber, it’s easy to peel the top back. It has lightning built in and the phone, because it’s an Apple product, will show the charged state of the case, you know, in the software.

Becky: Ok.

Leo: There are some negatives. You see that really big hole? That’s where you put the headphones.

Becky: But you need an extender, right?

Leo: Well, Apple’s had phones that fit through the hole but nobody else is. So you will need an extender. Does not come with the extender. And it’s $100 bucks which, you know, a Mophie case is a little bit less and a little bit more capacity I believe.

Becky: And the Anchor battery case was being advertised on Amazon the day this was announced for $39 bucks.

Leo: And Anchor makes good stuff.

Becky: Well this is what I want to talk about. Batteries. I’m so excited.

Leo: Well anyway, there it is. Just before you get to batteries—

Becky: Yes.

Leo: Any thoughts, anybody have an opinion? Is this a good design? There was some controversy over this. It’s too late. I already bought it for Henry, so.

Becky: Well, the line I heard was this is an Apple product Jony Ive has never even seen.

Leo: (Laughing) I don’t know. In a way this is truth in advertising. Because the way that Mophie and Anchor do it is they just make the rest it thicker so it’s just a big, thick case. Here’s Apple saying, “You know what? Form follows function.” This is a battery. It’s like a snake that ate a rat. It’s got a lump in the middle. But why should we hide that? We ate the rat. Let’s just admit it.

Becky: Can I ask just one question? See the base is a little thinner, so you know, anything that’s got a, that you plant your phone into might be more able to handle this then per se than a Mophie case per se which is that thick block all the way through? But is it enough on there?

Leo: There’s one thing Jony Ive might have been, Sir Jony might have had something to say about. See that? That’s the light that tells you whether the batteries charged. But you can’t see it when the phone’s in there.

Becky: Oh. Oh, geez.

Leo: I think Sir Jony might have said, “I’ve got an idea. Let’s make that light visible.”

Dr. Kiki: When the phone’s in it.

Leo: “When the phone’s in it. It might be really cool if you could see it.”

Dr. Kiki: Yea I guess with the light in there you assume that people are charging it separately from the phone and that it’s a separate device somehow.

Leo: Maybe that’s it I guess. I mean the idea is really that you, you keep the phone in it and you charge it and it charges both your phone and the battery.

Tom: And then you can see on the lock screen weather it’s charged up or not.

Leo: And the nice thing that they do is, it keeps your, so you charge this up, you start using your phone. It keeps your phone charged. It depletes this battery first. So once this battery is depleted you can take the case off and continue to use the phone.

Dr. Kiki: Throw away a hundred dollars.

Tom: Yea, I’d toss it.

Leo: The hell with that. Anyway that’s—I opened that even though it’s going to be a gift.

Tom: Now is the idea that it feels like the original iPhone with—the Mophie makes your iPhone feel big.

Leo: Yea, this isn’t that.

Tom: Because this kind of hides that because it’s in the cup of your hand where the bulk is.

Leo: You know what? This is, Apple didn’t patent silicone rubber but feel this. Come here, come here Becky. Touch my rubber.

Becky: I’ve felt it now.

Leo: It’s nice. It’s good. Yea, touch my sweater and my rubber.

Becky: It’s nice. It is soft.

Leo: Is there something about Apple silicon? I don’t know. They make it in a special factory with only virgin children, but it’s important. It’s something, they’re doing something to make it extra special.

Becky: (laughing) you are so wrong. Ok. So listen up. I went up to Vancouver to this company called Kydex. They make devices that test batteries. Industrial, military grade batteries. And we took, we went in with the wire cutter and we took a bunch of backup batteries and had them tested for capacity.

Leo: Yea.

Becky: Straight out of the box. Charge them once. Test the capacity.

Leo: Yea.

Becky: What is your perception of percentage of capacity that would be in these backup batteries on 1st use after a full charge?

Leo: If it’s the first time you’ve ever used it, it should be 100%.

Becky: Ok, so 2100 milliamp hours should have—

Leo: Ok, so 2099. Close to 100%.

Becky: The best ones were less than 80.

Leo: Less than rated by a significant amount.

Becky: The worst ones were 23%.

Leo: Wow. That’s terrible.

Becky: Straight out of the box. And did you know this?

Leo: And can you get them higher than that?

Becky: No.

Tom: Straight out of the box and then charged up though, right?

Becky: Charged straight out of the box. Depleted. Charged.

Tom: Yea, got it.

Becky: Does that surprise you, Tom, Kiki?

Leo: Yea, that’s crap.

Dr. Kiki: Yea, that’s really surprising.

Tom: I mean the 80% doesn’t.

Leo: 80 maybe.

Tom: Because it’s, you know, all these things are not 100% efficient but wow, 23% is pretty surprising.

Leo: How many of them did you test?

Becky: I think we did 20 different devices and—

Leo: This is a well-known issue with things like power supplies. You know power supply ratings in a PC. It’s a 200 watt power supply. And the way they test it, they take one. And then we’re going to keep making them that way. And they don’t really, it’s all over the place. And this is well knows about hobbyists who build their own computers is their power supply, you want a company that’s pretty reliable because if you buy it from, you know, just some Joe, they’re very often not even close to the actual rated power.

Becky: Well, what was interesting too is when I went and looked at all the brands—

Leo: This is terrible. Is this a known company, this?

Becky: I don’t want to, it’s the Wire Cutter’s story so I don’t want to let it all out.

Leo: Ok.

Becky: But and they’re not publishing until I think later.

Leo: Oh, I would like to see this.

Becky: I think what was so surprising to me is A. how few brands I actually knew. That is really was the wild west of sort of companies that were manufacturing in China and I had never heard of them

Leo: Chemistry is hard. I’ll be honest. Chemistry is hard.

Becky: Well, here’s what I understand about this. Is if you think about a battery as a gallon of water that has a bunch of stones in it. That even though it can hold a gallon worth of materials, that it can’t, there’s certain technical limitations, the stones, that prevent it from actually having a full capacity of the water.

Dr. Kiki: Being a gallon.

Becky: And that the better the battery, the fewer the stones. And you really have to do your homework. And I had no idea. I thought they were all the same. They’re commoditized.

Tom: And that’s why they’re banning all those hover boards from airlines because they can’t tell which batteries are actually properly labeled and which actually won’t have a risk of catching fire so they’re all just like forget it. We’re not going to even bother.

Leo: That and because you don’t want passengers Segway-ing down the aisles.

Becky: I was in LAX—

Tom: I don’t think you can Segway on those things anyway. Not in the planes I’ve been on.

Becky: I was in LAX two weeks ago and I saw a woman on the hover board, going around the airport with no shoes on. Which indicated to me that she was not planning on walking at all from her leaving the car at the curb.

Leo: Or she left them on the conveyor belt. But thank God she had the hover board.

Becky: I think she was going to board the plane that way. She is so bumming right now. I know, I know.

Leo: I gave my son, accidentally, I ordered a hover board from Sheikh. So you don’t know where to buy from, right, because—and I do see the Wire Cutter’s finally picked one, one hover board to get, but at the time it was kind of the—and also the Wild West. The company that invented the hover board is a Chinese company, a Chinese manufacturer called Sheikh. So I thought, well, they should get, I should buy it for them. They should get the credit because they’ve been ripped off by everybody else. And by the way, the range in prices is somewhere from $300 to $2,000 dollars and as far as I can tell, it’s the same machinery. I don’t know if there’s a big difference. Anyways so I got him a Sheikh. But somehow, you know, this happens to me sometime on Amazon. I got 2 by accident. You ever do that? Sometimes? I once ordered a helicopter. I got 10. So all my friends now have their own helicopters.

Dr. Kiki: And everyone gets a helicopter.

Leo: Well they were, to be fair, they weren’t—you couldn’t ride in them (laughing).

Tom: Look up your seats, folks.

Becky: Was that your Oprah moment?

Dr. Kiki: And you get a helicopter. And you get a helicopter.

Leo: Well I’m kind of glad. So I didn’t—he said, “Dad, did you mean to get me two?” And I said, “You got two?” And he said, “Yea.” I said, he said, “Well, I can send it back.” I said, “No, you might as well keep it.” And you know what? As a father I’m paying a lot of money for my son to go to college. And I know he’s studying hard but really my proudest moment as a father is when he got on Tosh.o in the hover board that I gave him. Let’s see. You know this show on Comedy Central? Here he is on his hover board.

Becky: Oh, sweet.

Leo: I’m so glad I got him two. I am so glad.

Becky: How does—that’s hover board jousting.

Leo: It’s called hover board jousting. He invented a new sport.

Becky: Ok, so my question is, that kid, who fell? Henry?

Leo: His friend. No, his friend.

Becky: Ok, so what Henry did that was genius, is the other kid dropped his shoulder—

Leo: Neither one is Henry. Henry’s the camera man.

Becky: Oh, so ok then Henry’s really genius.

Leo: He’s really genius.

Dr. Kiki: He talked 2 other people into doing it.

Leo: His friends are basically drunks—

Becky: Well, that’s when you don’t get hurt doing things like that.

Tom: You just said he was in college, I mean—

Leo: I mean he’s a frat brother. He’s a frat brat. These are frat brothers and—

Becky: If he was sober and you did that, you’d go down. You’d be in the ER. Speaking of which—

Leo: Boom. Nice shot.

Becky: ER doc, do not sign up for the day after Christmas because hover board.

Leo: Oh, it’s going to be bad, isn’t it?

Becky: Broken wrist, broken shoulder, it’s going to be bad.

Leo: Don’t tell anybody.

Tom: We should, we should of course point out as Creamy Corn Cob in the chat says, “These are not, these boards do not actually hover.”

Becky: Well what was your name for them? You had like some other name that—

Leo: Cyber boards or what do you call them, Tom?

Tom: I call them hover boards because that’s so people know what I’m talking about.

Leo: People know them as.

Tom: He suggested Rover board.

Becky: Self-propelled—rover board.

Dr. Kiki: Rover board.

Leo: Or rubber board.

Becky: Self-propelled handle-less Segway’s.

Leo: They’re like Segway’s without the handle, yea.

Tom: Yea.

Dr. Kiki: Balance boards.

Tom: Handle-less Segway’s. Trips off the tongue. I like it.

Becky: That’s a really important distinction, Tom. I appreciate that.

Leo: Anyone here giving hover boards for Christmas?

Becky: No.

Dr. Kiki: No.

Leo: Finn and Emalia aren’t getting a hover board?

Becky: No. Actually I was having dinner with some Marin moms. And for those of you who aren’t from the Bay area, Marin is like frou-frou, like. And the Marin mom’s like, “Guys are we getting the 8 year olds all that $900 hover boards? Are we all doing it?” And I just, I lost my appetite.

Leo: How old’s your son now, Kiki?

Dr. Kiki: 4 and a half.

Leo: Oh, he’s too young for a hover board.

Becky: What’s he getting for Christmas?

Dr. Kiki: Minecraft and Lego stuff. Yea.

Leo: Yay. Yay. Nice.

Dr. Kiki: He’s super into Minecraft, so.

Leo: Minecraft stuff. What are Finn and Emalia?

Becky: They are getting, Finn really wants a drone and I’ve been doing all these drone stories and I lost a drone this week.

Leo: I lost a drone every time I flew one.

Becky: I’m telling you.

Leo: They’re not easy.

Becky: Have you been to Fry’s this week? There are, there are 50 yards of generic drones for sale right now. There’s going to be a million drones sold this holiday.

Leo: Syma. S-Y-M-A. It’s 40 bucks. It’s the one I lost.

Becky: Oh. Well, I mean that’s the thing. What’s a good, what’s a good drone to get into? And entry level drone that is actually controleable.

Leo: Syma. This is what our drone father tells us, Fr. Robert Ballecer. The Syma. Don’t get the one with the camera.

Becky: Oh, ok. Syma.

Leo: Because it’s cheap, it’s good for an eight year old, you know, it’s not, it’s ok if they lose it.

Becky: Nice. Ok.

Leo: And it’s small enough that if it hits somebody in the head it’s really not going to hurt anybody.

Becky: Well I lost mine to be completely clear, I lost mine, we flew it over trees and I lost it in the trees. I didn’t want to be an irresponsible drone person. And what is incredible to me is how difficult they are to control right out of the gates. And I didn’t realize when you get a drone, you should fly it inside for the first 5 times.

Leo: Right.

Becky: I had no idea. And apparently the FAA now has a website called Before You Fly that’s for drone owners because idiots like me are losing drones.

Leo: So I go out on the back deck, I press one button. The drone starts going up. And it keeps going up. Like a little balloon until I lose sight of it. And that’s the last time I saw it.

Becky: That happened to me with—

Leo: Anybody want to buy a drone remote control because I’ve got extras.

Becky: I’ve got one of those for those inflatable sharks. Remember the inflatable shark? I lost mine.

Leo: Yea. It was shark week at TWiT. It was great. Tom, are you into the drone?

Tom: You know, I don’t play around with drones much. I’ve worked with them a couple of times on shoots because they’re great for essentially what would have been a helicopter shot back in the day.

Leo: Yea, they’re beautiful. Right.

Becky: DJI has an entry-level drone that’s in the $500-$600 dollar range.

Leo: Don’t get your son that.

Becky: I’m not, trust me.

Leo: I have the Bebop. Is that what you’re talking about? The Parrot?

Becky: The Parrot was amazing. It was $394 on Black Friday, the Bebop. But it’s more like $500 now.

Leo: I have that one and I actually like it except I accidentally, again, this time it didn’t go straight up, I flew it into the side of a hill the first time. And then somehow it broke its wing and now if I fly it, it just goes like that every time. It doesn’t—I have to bring it in for repairs to the Drone Father because it won’t go anymore. Beautiful images though.

Becky: The biggest difference between the Bebop and the DJI is the Bebop is all iPhone control or device control whereas the DGI’s are sticks.

Leo: Right.

Becky: And it has an iPhone interface where you can see, so you can clip the iPhone in and you can see the camera and still control with the sticks.

Leo: I like having the iPhone interface.

Becky: That’s the difference.

Leo: Yea, it’s a little smarter. This is cool. This is the Parrot, they call it a drone, I think this is good for an eight year old. It’s not. It’s a rolling vehicle.

Becky: It’s awesome.

Leo: And it jumps. Have you seen it jump?

Dr. Kiki: That is so cool.

Leo: Do we still have that or did we sent it back? Because we showed it on iOS Today earlier this week. It jumps. You press a button and it goes like 4’ high. It’s awesome.

Becky: No, that’s thing’s cool. The BB8’s cool. There’s a lot of neat RC.

Leo: This does not fly. I should be clear. It shouldn’t be called a drone.

Tom: I do have a BB8.

Becky: What do you think, Tom?

Tom: It scares the crap out of my dog.

Becky: Jengo doesn’t like it?

Tom: No, Jengo’s fine with it, it’s Sawyer is the one that gets scared. But yea, they’re great. They’re fantastic.

Leo: This is going to be a drone hover board Christmas.

Becky: Yea. Here’s the brands that Eric Chang, my drone guy recommends: Cheerson and the Blade Nano. They’re both—Cheerson’s like $29 bucks. It’s like a mini quad copter. That’s a lot of fun. And it flies with sticks so basically you get used to the interface and you have very little to lose. And then the Blade Nano is also the same.

Leo: It’s $90 dollars. It’s a little more pricey.

Becky: It is. It is. That one might have the camera. One of them doesn’t and it’s a little bit cheaper.

Leo: Yea, save your money. You don’t need a camera.

Becky: You’re going to wreck it is the bottom line so get one that you can—and fly it indoors. I had no idea.

Leo: Cheerson. C-H-E-E-R?

Becky: Yea, and it’s teeny tiny. I have a little one—

Leo: Oh, it’s cute. And that’s cheap. That’s $15 bucks.

Becky: Yea. I have one of those in my purse. I’ll go grab it.

Leo: Do you really?

Becky: Yea.

Dr. Kiki: You just have it in your purse. You can take it out and play with it whenever.

Leo: When somebody attacks you, you just go, “Watch out. I’ve got a drone.” The sound is scary. It’s scary.

Dr. Kiki: So how is the FAA, the FAA and the government going to regulate all the, the licensing of individuals who are buying drones? Isn’t that the state of policy at this point in time?

Leo: Currently the FAA says you have to have a license for commercial flight but you do not as a hobbyist.

Dr. Kiki: Oh ok, because there’s—

Leo: You don’t have to have a license. You have to register in some way.

Dr. Kiki: You have to register somewhere, right?

Leo: Not yet.

Dr. Kiki: So is it like you buy it, with this field just exploding with so many available on the market, I mean are they just going to make it easy where you buy it and it just registers you immediately as you buy it or do you have to go register it?

Leo: Here’s the problem. The FAA doesn’t have a police force.

Dr. Kiki: I know.

Leo: It has no enforcement. What the what? That’s cute.

Becky: It is, right? Show, show, put it on the close-up cam before I wreck it.

Leo: That is so cute.

Becky: I know.

Dr. Kiki: I love it. It’s tiny.

Becky: It’s teeny.

Leo: Now take off.

Becky: I’ll try.

Dr. Kiki: Oh, you probably keep it in your purse right next to your toothpicks.

Becky: I’m terrible.

Leo: It is so cute.

Becky: But that’s the thing. You look at the controls too.

Leo: I think that’s pronounced Tampax by the way, not toothpicks. Ok, let me—

Becky: The controls are teeny tiny. And then—

Leo: Oh, it’s so cute!

Becky: I know, that’s $29 bucks.

Leo: And how do I lose it? I press this button?

Becky: No, this.

Dr. Kiki: The controller’s bigger than it.

Becky: Oh, it’s going to go in your line. There it goes.

Leo: (Laughing). It’s a little sensitive. Ok, for those of you listening at home, it is about the size of a, I don’t know, a silver dollar. It’s not very big.

Becky: No, it’s teeny tiny.

Leo: And but it is a quad copter. It has built in bumpers and little lights up, LED lights all around.

Becky: 20 minute fly time battery.

Leo: Really? That’s better than a lot of the bigger drones.

Becky: No, and the important thing is the controls. So the left is up down, left right, and the right is the turning—

Leo: Steering.

Becky: Yea, it’s like 360 in space.

Leo: Let’s try it a little slower.

Becky: Yea, it’s very—but this is the important thing. Is that you have to start cheap and slow.

Leo: This is so cute.

Becky: The woman at Fry’s said, “Are you sure you want to buy that?”

Leo: She said are you sure you want to buy that?

Becky: She said they have, they come in—

Leo: That’s good salesmanship (laughing).

Becky: She also works in the customer returns department. And so she sees them coming back all the time. Now what’s interesting is I called Wal-Mart and Fry’s. Neither one of them, who are pushing constantly that extended warranty to you. Guess what? These aren’t eligible for the extended warranty.

Leo: Of course not.

Tom: Well, for $29 bucks.

Becky: Oh, good, Leo. You’re doing great. You’re really good at this.

Tom: And that size of drone will not be required to be registered. There’s a weight limit under which you can just fly them.

Leo: It seems to be losing altitude no matter what I do. I think the battery died. But that was fun.

Becky: But you did great with that. I know.

Leo: Thank you, Becky Worley.

Becky: For $29 bucks. I’m always bringing props. I’m like the Gallagher of TWiT.

Dr. Kiki: What’s that called again?

Leo: Prop comedy. It’s—oh, I’m sorry, you mean the drone?

Dr. Kiki: Yea.

Leo: It’s the Quatro Radical it’s called.

Dr. Kiki: Quatro Radical.

Becky: You don’t have to register them. You have to keep them under 400’ elevation. You have to have them in line of sight at all times.

Leo: And why do you put this in your purse? The current recommendation—

Becky: I also have an adult onesie but that’s for later.

Leo: (Laughing).

Tom: The reason people are talking about registration is the FAA is currently considering it.

Leo: Considering it.

Tom: A proposal that would say—

Leo: That’s not a law yet.

Tom: Everything about a certain weight limit you would have to register yourself as a drone pilot and then that would apply to all your drones and you’d stick a sticker, you’d stick a bar code on there to say yes. Because what they’re after is not keeping track of everybody who flies drones. They’re after educating people into where they can fly them and what they should be able to do with them.

Leo: We were in the airport the other day, and when you’re doing the security line along with the you know, take your purse out, take your laptop out and stuff, it had four screens on drones from the FAA including you know, if you see a drone flying into airspace at this airport, please notify the FAA immediately. And here’s the FAA website, FAA.com

Becky: Know before you fly.

Leo: Fly save—yea, know before you fly. That’s what they say. Fly safe with your drone. You’re headed to the stores on Black Friday to buy that shiny new camera-equipped drone. Do you know you’re also going to become a pilot when you fly your drone anywhere in the nation’s airspace? You automatically become part of the U.S. aviation system. So my flying it inside is not.

Becky: Right.

Leo: Under the law your drone is an aircraft. So while the rules for drones may be different, you have the responsibility to operate safely just as a Cessna or a 747 pilot. And they have a checklist. So that’s a good, I mean, that’s a good response.

Becky: Well what’s interesting is that’s putting the onus on the pilot. So about 3 weeks ago, the DJI folks announced that they are working with the FAA to create electronic fences. That’s the solution. So what you do is basically you build around airports or any of the known fly zones. And you work with the drone manufacturers to make sure that they have basically geo-locating you know, GPS locations and know where those no-fly zones are.

Tom: Unless you’re the Tokyo Metropolitan Police in which case you create a squad that has a drone with a net.

Leo: The net drones.

Becky: That is so cool.

Leo: I think we need more of these. I either want a drone with a net or I want a shotgun (laughing). I bean bag shotgun.

Becky: I’m going to have trained birds. I’m going to, you know, I’m going to get into hawking and I’ll use hawks to take down drones.

Leo: Dude.

Becky: Oh, it’s amazing, that net.

Leo: So it’s actually another drone but it has a long net on it and it can, watch it’s going to scoop up.

Tom: It’s like hawking for drones.

Becky: That is so cool.

Tom: This is highly impractical by the way.

Leo: (Laughing) high speed drone chases in the sky. Oh my God, I think O.J.’s in that white drone.

Becky: Way to buzz-kill, Tom. That’s safe.

Leo: Oh, that’s a terrible idea.

Becky: Ok, hypothesis.

Dr. Kiki: I can’t see this going wrong in any way.

Becky: No. So I’m going to throw this hypothesis out and see what you guys think. So I have this over-all philosophy about technology that started with the Xerox machine which is whenever new technology comes out, we tend to use and abuse it in the most base possible ways. Ergo, photocopying your ass cheeks on the Xerox machine.

Leo: Right.

Becky: We don’t do that anymore.

Leo: No, you learn. Some, well.

Becky: It gets old. It gets old.

Leo: I might. Once in a while still.

Dr. Kiki: You don’t?

Leo: (Laughing).

Becky: But like sticking the cell phone cameras under the sinks and the toilets.

Leo: Yea, we do.

Becky: It happens.

Leo: Initial use, when laser writers came out, everybody did 100 font documents.

Becky: Right.

Leo: Yea. Or the Apple iPad now everybody seems compelled to post their crappy sketches on Instagram. That kind of thing.

Becky: Or a really close parallel is the lasers that people were pointing at the airport—

Leo: Yea. That still happens though.

Dr. Kiki: That still happens.

Becky: But hasn’t it kind of?

Leo: I don’t know. I think teenagers have an infinite capacity for stupidity.

Becky: But they want the newest stupidity. So this will be that.

Tom: That’s why we made the hover board.

Becky: Right.

Leo: Yea, we’re always making new teenagers. That’s why we have to. Because we’ll run out if we. So we’re giving.

Dr. Kiki: Stupidity. There’s a never ending supply.

Leo: We’re giving our 13 year old a hover board. Is that so very wrong?

Becky: No. Michael will love it.

Leo: Henry loved his.

Becky: Yea. Jousting that’s so creative. That will be the best thing he did in all of his college.

Leo: They also rode it, they also rode it down the stairs (laughing). No video exists but he swears of that one. Hey we had a good week this week on TWiT. If you missed—stupidity. It’s everywhere.

Dr. Kiki: It reproduces.

Leo: In fact if you watch carefully you might find some in this rendition of This Week on TWiT.

Narrator: Previously on TWiT.

Terrence O’Brien: The Jolly Tracker is a Santa beard that has electrodes that if you don’t smile there are other electrodes that shock you and give you a gentle reminder that you should be happy.

Narrator: Know How.

Fr. Robert Ballecer: We’re actually going to be doing a gift giving guide. We want to show you some of the tools, some of the gadgets, some of the gizmos that you should either buy for yourself or perhaps buy for that loved one who you’re hoping to get into the maker’s spirit.

Narrator: The New Screen Savers.

Leo: So I go this from Google. They said, “We’re going to send you a charging stand and—“ (Laughing) there’s no charging stand. And with any luck at the end of the show I will have a charging stand for my Nexus 6.

Fr. Robert: Or I’ll make a spaceship.

Narrator: Tech News Today.

Megan Marrone: Recently we’ve seen a slew of tech tools to help you manage the end of a relationship. I guess it was just a matter of time before someone made a business of helping someone rid someone else from their digital lives completely.

Selena Larson: It might sound like kind of a silly convenience that, oh, I don’t want to look at pictures of my ex-boyfriend. Can you do it for me? But it can also come down to, I don’t want to have to look at the messages that I’m getting from my harasser, and this can help you deal with that.

Narrator: TWiT. We’re no strangers to love. You know the rules. And so do I.

Megan: Were you smiling more afterwards?

Terrence: No, no, I was smiling in fear.

Leo: So here it is by the way. This is the Lego. So if you’re a Google Fi, that’s their cell phone service, customer, they sent you, it’s cute. It’s not real Lego, it’s faux Lego. But you know, talk about taking—I don’t know, taking lemonade and making a lemon out of it. I’m not sure exactly what the opposite is, but I was, this was cool but they didn’t send me enough pieces. And they sent me the wrong pieces.

Dr. Kiki: Oh no.

Leo: So it’s like I was all excited and then I was incredibly frustrated.

Becky: Oh, that’s not good.

Leo: So what’s going on? Why would you do that? That’s terrible.

Becky: That doesn’t surprise and delight you as a user.

Leo: But at the same time, it’s a free gift. But it’s a free gift that kinds of frustrates. And so I thought that was a little strange.

Becky: Isn’t that kind of Google?

Leo: (Laughing) yea, maybe it is. In a nutshell.

Tom: It’s kind of their mission statement, isn’t it?

Leo: Yea. Maybe.

Becky: It is free.

Leo: It’s free.

Becky: So your expectation should be low.

Tom: I mean I use Feed Burner for free.

Becky: Yea, Google Docs. I never bought it. I don’t have a license.

Leo: I did not build it wrong. They literally did not include all the pieces you need.

Becky: Has that been verified?

Leo: By what, a professional Lego builder?

Becky: There’s like a store here like down in Summerfell that has the Lego store.

Leo: Do we still have the instructions?

Becky: I mean I’m not doubting you. I’m just saying.

Leo: I think they’re over there on the radio set. No they might be on the radio set. I will, ok Worley, challenge accepted.

Dr. Kiki: She’s doubting your Lego skills.

Becky: I’m going to have to stay after the show and build with you.

Leo: I’m going to give you, so they sent it in a bag. Supposedly all the pieces and you know, the traditional Lego non-verbal instructions.

Becky: Ok.

Leo: I was able to make the stand. There’s some differences in the color. Here’s the instructions.

Becky: Ok, I’m on it.

Leo: I crumpled them up in frustration so I apologize. So I built that, the stand, and even thought the colors don’t match, like that’s supposed to be all green, here on the other side is what they call the cable route thing. The cable tidy. So see if you can build that from the remaining pieces. And I promise you, this is the complete set. Good luck. While you’re doing that—

Becky: Questioning you is the worst thing I’ve done all week.

Leo: (Laughing).

Becky: I’m just going to say, I’ll be here for an hour.

Leo: This is the Google Reader of Lego kits. That’s what I’m saying. I also got the Google Pixel C which is actually very nice. Look at this, it’s kind of a magnet thing.

Tom: That has all the pieces?

Leo: Yea, I believe so. Although Jason Howell ordered his at the same time, in fact a little earlier than mine, and he’s only got the keyboard so far. So in fact you got the same—

Jason: It’s a thing. It’s a thing with Google.

Leo: It’s a thing. So this is it. It’s a 10” tablet, a little pricey but it’s from Google. And then you order for another $179 bucks, $500 bucks for the tablet, $179 bucks for the keyboard, and this is what they tell you to do. Slide the keyboard off to break the magnetic attraction. And then you slap the, slap the tablet on this thing and then it tilts up. And it’s actually a really strong magnet so it’s not going to fall off. And now you have a keyboard. It’s Android, it’s an Android tablet with a keyboard. It’s kind of like a little, it makes a little laptop.

Becky: How’s the application switching compared to iOS?

Leo: It’s similar. You know it’s Android. If you’ve ever used Android it’s a very similar thing. With iOS you double tap the home key. Or if you have a modern iPhone you can force touch it over. With Android it’s alt-tab and or you hit the, or you hit the recents. Actually let me do that. Let me hit the recents and you get, you get with the recents you get that.

Becky: Yea, that’s like iOS, ok.

Leo: Sort of, yea. And there’s a keyboard just as there is for the iPad Pro, there’s a keyboard stroke which is alt-tab that does this unless you scroll through these.

Becky: That’s always my beef with these, with mobile devices is productivity tools.

Leo: Well it’s not, you know, it is, it is Android. So it’s not really designed for a big screen. But I like the widgets which makes to me, this makes it a little bit better than an iPad. Instead of just a faceless grid of icons which is what you get in iOS, admittedly this is ugly as sin. I mean it looks like Times Square. But every one of these widgets is telling me something. Here’s the chatroom. That’s a notification just came through. Those big texts, that is just Google + so I let it have a big screen. So more often it’s picture like that. I like this. I actually, I’m pretty happy with it. I know it got very mixed reviews. Partly because some apps like Instagram it’s kind of pathetic. Instagram still thinks I’m on a phone, so it makes it all sideways but that’s Instagram’s fault, right? You can’t really fault Google for that. Most apps do a better job. This is our chatroom. And it uses the space intelligently. It uses panes. This is actually kind of more like a desktop experience would be. Here’s, this is AquaMail which is very much like a desktop mail app. And when I use this I feel like I have full productivity. You know I can slide stuff. I mean I feel pretty good about this. This isn’t a Google product. This is a 3rd party mail app. I like it. I personally think this is a great product. How’s the Lego going?

Tom: This and the iPad and those kinds of things, there’s no drag and drop. When I start actually wanting to be productive, I want to be able to have multiple windows, move things around.

Leo: It’s not a computer.

Tom: It’s getting better. But and I can use the iPad Pro with a keyboard now and actually get some stuff done which I couldn’t before.

Becky: For those of you listening, I want you to hear this snap. Yep, you hear that? I just put the last piece in and I’ve done it correctly.

Leo: (Laughing) get out of here. Liar!

Becky: (Laughing). For those of you watching, please turn away.

Leo: Liar! You haven’t even started.

Becky: I know. I—

Leo: Are you not a Lego user, doer? Can we get Finn in here?

Becky: I’m just really regretting that I was questioning you in any way, shape or form because it’s going to end up in my own personal shame.

Leo: No, I would, what’s cool is I was able to build a Star Wars Speeder. But I can’t for some reason, I can’t, Cable Tidy just doesn’t have enough. Hey I want to thank iTunes which names us one of the best of 2015 podcasts.

Becky: Duh.

Leo: We’re, well.

Becky: You guys are the best.

Leo: It’s kind of a mixed compliment because they put us in the classics section (laughing).

Becky: Does Yo-Yo Ma also have a podcast that you’re next to?

Leo: In Classics. This is a good time of year, though. This is when the Google and Twitter and YouTube do their end of year thing. I’m into, I meant to do this last week and I forgot to play the YouTube Rewind video.

Tom: My wife works there. Disclosure.

Leo: Disclosure. She actually probably produced some of this, didn’t she?

Tom: No, she didn’t. That’s a totally different place.

Leo: It wasn’t done in LA?

Tom: No, it was done by the team up in San Bruno.

Leo: No kidding?

Tom: Yea.

Leo: Because I feel like this, the YouTube Rewind video is, really has upped the ante in terms of production value. This thing is—

Tom: I mean they shot some of it at the space, it just wasn’t—

Leo: Right. I mean it’s amazing. I’m sure they used green screen a lot and stuff but apparently they rented a barge with a pit, a ball pit.

Becky: Well, didn’t they have a barge? Isn’t that what they had parked?

Leo: Maybe what this is what the old barge is for.

Becky: Yea.

Leo: I mean this, the production values on this are actually through the roof. And of course they have a lot of YouTube stars in it including watch, Shira Lazar was in it. She’ll show up in just a second. She’s going to be a little bit blurry because—there she is.

Dr. Kiki: Wow. You’d have to hit pause really fast.

Leo: She did and there’s a blurry image of her. These are all YouTube stars that I don’t know. But Tom, you might know them. I’m sure Eileen would know them.

Tom: I know them a little more just because Eileen works there, yea. But this is, if you’re over 25 or 30—

Leo: You won’t know who these people are.

Tom: Yea, this is like watching MTV in the 80s, right?

Becky: Is that Marcus Bromley? Who is that?

Leo: I don’t know.

Dr. Kiki: Seriously though, is there anybody over 40 in this video.

Leo: Yes, John Oliver’s in it.

Dr. Kiki: Oh, one person.

Leo: They and actually—

Tom: It’s not meant for that.

Leo: They had more real, legitimate, I shouldn’t say that. That’s wrong. They had more mainstream stars last year. These are legitimate stars. When you talk PewDiePie that’s a legitimate star. He gets—

Tom: And that’s the thing, right? And this kind of hit me when I was at the YouTube space for light night with James Corden taping, I was sitting next to these 2 folks talking about how they watch TV and the one was saying, “Yea, I actually do watch Netflix sometimes, but mostly YouTube.” And his girlfriend was like, “Yea, I only watch YouTube.” And granted, we were in YouTube space, but that is the reality for a lot of folks under 30. Not just about YouTube but just like they don’t watch TV. So our stars are not familiar to them unless they’re on those other shows.

Becky: It’s so interesting to think that The Verge and Gizmodo and all these big blogs, sort of the Ziff-Davis reviews and the—

Leo: This has totally usurped everything, all main-stream media.

Becky: But now, YouTube is usurping the review space from the blogs.

Leo: From everybody.

Becky: That’s where everybody’s going to get advice on products.

Leo: Again, if you’re, as Kiki said, if you’re under 25. This, what’s really interesting, this is a foreign language to me because I know, there’s John Oliver, I know a lot of this is referring to YouTube. You know, like if you’re a YouTube fanatic, you’ll recognize, oh, there’s a lot of in jokes. It’s lost on me. Completely.

Tom: Yea, it’s like hearing people talking about Warcraft and you don’t play World of Warcraft.

Dr. Kiki: Oh, come on. You didn’t learn how to whip it and Nene?

Leo: I know how to Nene, but can you show me how to Dougie?

Becky: No.

Leo: There’s Freddy Fazbear from Five Nights of Freddy. Shows up in—I don’t know, oh, I guess that’s Subway Rat. So a few of these memes I’m recognizing but very few. And I, you know.

Tom: I like the major laser though.

Leo: I’ve got to sit down with my son and have him.

Becky: He’ll know.

Leo: Yea, I’ll tell him about James Joyce Ulysses and what that means and he can tell me what YouTube Rewind means.

Becky: Do you know?

Leo: Oh sure.

Becky: Wow.

Leo: It’s on the Bloomsday book, my friend.

Becky: Wow. I’m Irish and I drink and I still don’t know.

Leo: (Laughing) There’s Justine for 3 seconds. Some of this is in this, Tom, isn’t this really about the YouTube stars in it and kind of giving them props and having them feel good? Because really this is how YouTube makes money is these people.

Tom: I suppose, yea.

Leo: Like making them feel good about what they do and like, “You’re in the Rewind Video.”

Tom: So for the people who give these people in this video millions of subscribers, it’s about making them feel like, “Wow, yea, I was a part of that.”

Leo: Right.

Tom: It’s just like any network promotion at the end of the year.

Leo: I guess you’re right, yea.

Becky: We used to call them POPS. Proof of performance.

Leo: Yea. But the real key—there’s PewDiePie and his, what’s her name? CutiePie, I can’t remember. The real key though for YouTube is not the audience but the stars. They need to keep these guys in the stable. There’s a lot of people going after them.

Becky: Cash cows.

Leo: Yea. These are their cash cows. And in many cases, there’s Casey Neistat in the middle, in many cases they don’t make that much money. They work really hard. It’s kind of like—you ever seen Calacanis’ newsletter? He says, “I ain’t gonna work on YouTube’s farm no more.” It’s kind of like, this is your spiff because you worked really hard this year and you made $3,000 dollars.

Becky: Well and they need to sell this to the next generation.

Tom: These people are not those folks.

Leo: These are the people making hundreds of thousands.

Tom: These are the people making real money. And a lot of these people are out on Vessel and doing their own studio stuff. There’s all—the problem is it used to be just YouTube, right? And now there’s all different levels of people at YouTube. There’s people making money, people getting paid by YouTube for YouTube originals. There’s people leaving YouTube to go make money elsewhere. It’s just exploding.

Leo: Well and most of the people who make money though, don’t make it from YouTube Plus. Like Michlle Phan who sells cosmetics.

Tom: Correct.

Leo: I mean it’s not just YouTube.

Dr. Kiki: They have merchandising. They have sponsorships.

Tom: They don’t make it off ads.

Becky: It’s a branding tool.

Leo: So that’s kind of my point is that YouTube’s kinda got to make nice with these people.

Tom: Which is why they started YouTube Originals, right, is to go like, “Ok, we’ll actually give you direct money to make stuff.”

Leo: That flopped though, didn’t it? Doesn’t—

Tom: No, no, no. This is new. There was the old thing where they tried just giving people money and seeing what happened. This coming year, there’s like a dozen shows that are high quality productions.

Leo: Like Netflix. Like Netflix is doing.

Tom: Not quite there, but yea, closer to that.

Becky: Incubated.

Leo: Interesting.

Tom: They’re direct productions.

Leo: Will they be long form?

Tom: Yea. PewDiePie’s got one about pranks. The Fine Brothers have one that’s a parody of a singing competition.

Leo: That’s smart.

Tom: Yea.

Leo: Because that’s, that’s what you, I think that’s what YouTube needs to do and that’s certainly what advertisers want them to do which is prove they’re more than just, you know, quick viral videos.

Becky: You know when I was driving up here, I was thinking to myself that this was going to be like going to a Christmas party. This was going to be so fun to sit with friends and talk about stuff.

Leo: it kind of is. Isn’t it? Have some more wine, I’m sorry.

Becky: No, no. I was just thinking it—

Tom: And then we started talking about YouTube monetization.

Becky: I just looked at the clock, I’m like oh my gosh.

Tom: We’re sorry, Becky.

Leo: We’re 2 hours in.

Becky: No, I was just about to ask you like, “How’s it going for Eileen,” and I wanted—and then I’m like this is not a personal chat.

Leo: (Laughing) we’re doing a show here.

Becky: This is actually—

Leo: You know what? It can be because people are interested in how Eileen’s doing. You know. It’s ok. Hey, let me do a quick Casper ad and then we will, we will wrap this up. Casper of course is an on-line retailer of great mattresses for a fraction of the price. You can kind of see a thread line through all of our advertisers. The whole idea is to take businesses, traditional brick and mortar businesses, disintermediate them, go from the factory direct to you saving you money, giving you a better experience. Casper’s a perfect example. The mattress business is a terrible business. If you go to a showroom the markup is insane. They give you this fiction that you can try before you buy. You’ve got to go to a showroom. You’re lying on this thing in broad daylight under fluorescent lights for 5 minutes with the shop girl looking at you. So it’s not a good way to test a mattress.

Becky: No.

Leo: They make the mattresses, very high quality, in the US with really state of the art technology. Here’s a—if you’re watching the video, our Casper mattress. It came in a very small box. That’s a queen sized mattress. Pay no attention to the fact that I’m wearing my jammies already. I just was, I was excited.

Becky: I like that.

Leo: I was excited.

Becky: I mean, those are nice jammies.

Leo: You buy it online. And by the way, no risk because you get 100 nights to lie on it, do anything you want on it, really test it out and if you don’t like it, they will come, they will get it, they will refund you every single penny. So basically it’s 100 days or better yet, 100 nights to try it out.

Becky: So instead of spending—oh, I got to see this. He’s leaping on it.

Leo: No, it’s really comfy. In fact Ozzie loved it too. Everybody loved it. We all tried it.

Becky: So instead of that markup and instead of spending money on the retail location, they’re spending money on the customer service to say, “We will take it back if you don’t like it.”

Leo: Yea, yea. And the mattress itself, yea. No springs. It breathes. It’s very, you know sometimes people say, “Oh, well it’s latex and memory foam. That’s not going to breathe.” No, no it’s a very cool mattress. I really like it.

Becky: Oh, Ozzie does like it.

Leo: I know I’m not kidding. $500 for a twin, $950 for a king size. That’s the biggest size. And it comes in a small box. It’s very easy. I ordered one for my son in college because it was easy for him to get upstairs. Casper.com/twit to find out more. And by the way, use the promo code TWIT and you’ll get $50 bucks off. Some terms and conditions apply. Casper.com/twit, promo code TWIT to get $50 bucks off for a very good mattress and absolutely no risk. Yea, I think it’s really fun to watch the internet change all of these businesses.

Becky: Disrupting. Disrupting them.

Leo: Completely just disrupt them. Oh, man, we haven’t gotten to hardly any of these stories (laughing).

Tom: I’m going to go have a shave, lay down and do a website.

Leo: Makes you—

Becky: Well you’ve got to get those sheets on there.

Leo: Get those sheets.

Dr. Kiki: Get the sheets, nice comfy mattress.

Leo: Get the sheets.

Dr. Kiki: I am wondering though, the no-risk to the consumer for the mattress. It’s because it’s hard to put the mattress back in the packaging. See the way that thing expanded?

Leo: No, that’s right. You’re not required to put it back in the box. They actually send a courier. I actually inquired. I thought, “Well, how do they get it back?” They got—a guy comes with a truck and they give it to charity. They don’t ship it all the way back to Casper. They give it to charity and then they give you your money back. So it’s actually a pretty good deal.

Becky: I know you’re nervous that we didn’t do any news today, so if I gave you six—

Leo: You looked at this and said, “Great stories.” So—

Becky: No, I was just making that up because I didn’t know any of it and I wanted you to tell me about it.

Leo: 6 stories.

Becky: So give me, give me six stories in 60 seconds.

Leo: Ok.

Becky: That are important to people to know about even if they don’t hear about them on this show, that they should go research.

Leo: Racial discrimination by Airbnb. Study offered Airbnb hosts rentals. People with apparently African American names were turned down at a significantly higher rate than people with white sounding names. They didn’t have pictures or anything. It was just by name. Tech giants say Verizon’s new cellular tech could wreck Wi-Fi. Verizon among others wants to use Wi-Fi networks, Wi-Fi mesh networks to, for their cell network, but Google, Microsoft and Comcast say, “Whoa. That’s going to really screw up the spectrum.” LTE and the unlicensed spectrum it’s called. LTEU and it is right there in the Wi-Fi spectrum. So beware.

Becky: Right? That’s two, you’re doing great.

Leo: Yep. One fifth of Americans report going online quote almost constantly (laughing). This is the great Pew study. T here’s an ongoing study of the internet. 21% of Americans report that they go online almost constantly. 73% go online on a daily basis. 42% go online several times a day. % go online one a day. But I love the 21% who say “I’m always on.”

Becky: I’m always on. Well, you got to watch it. You’re always on. Yea, yea, Leo’s always on.

Leo: I’m always on.

Becky: I know.

Leo: Right, Lisa? Always.

Becky: Always on. Especially 4 am.

Leo: Watching a TV show on the internet.

Tom: It’s like Beats One radio.

Becky: Hey, that’s 3 stories.

Leo: I’m the Beats One radio of internet.

Tom: Totally.

Becky: What else do I need to know?

Leo: Ted Cruz used a firm that harvested data on millions of unwitting Facebook users. He won’t be the only one. It’s a donor funded US startup. The Republican’s campaign paid UK, university academics to collect psychological profiles on potential voters from their Facebook profiles.

Dr. Kiki: This is bad.

Leo: Largely without their permission.

Dr. Kiki: Yea.

Leo: But I don’t think, I can almost guarantee you Ted Cruz is not the only guy doing this. This is valuable stuff, right? This is what Facebook was made to do.

Becky: You’ve got to find those conversion candidates. Who are the people that are on the fence?

Leo: It’s the swing voter, right, that’s going to determine who wins the election. Cruz’ campaign according to FCC filings paid Cambridge Analytic a $750,000 dollars this year. But they’ve received another $2.5 million over the last 2 years from other super PACs.

Dr. Kiki: I think they say in there also that Ben Carson paid for some data as well.

Leo: Yea. I guarantee you once you know, you’d be dumb not to do this. If the data’s there, wouldn’t you want to know?

Becky: Well if you assume your opponents are doing it too, it’s that kind of thing.

Leo: And whose failure is it? Is it their failure or is it Facebook’s failure? Right, if the data’s there.

Becky: I think that’s four. Is that four stories?

Leo: Four?

Becky: Yea.

Leo: I need 2 more?

Becky: Well I mean, have we—you’re the curator.

Leo: Wal-Mart launches Walmart Pay.

Becky: Tom, you had some interesting thoughts on this.

Leo: You’ve got Apple Pay. You’ve got your Android Pay. Now you’ve got your Wal-Mart Pay.

Becky: Is anybody going to use this?

Tom: No.

Leo: Do you have to wear stretch pants?

Becky: (Laughing).

Dr. Kiki: (Laughing) jeggings. You have to wear jeggings.

Tom: (Laughing) you have to wear jeggings. Well it requires you to scan a QR code essentially to pay.

Leo: It’s worse. Don’t you have to generate a QR code? They scan your QR code then they send the QR code which you scan?

Tom: Exactly. Yea.

Leo: It’s worse. And all of this—

Tom: It’s not ridiculously convenient.

Leo: And all of this is currency. By the way, you can’t use a credit card. You have to use your Wal-Mart Pay card. All of this because of the problem with Android Pay and Apple Pay is they don’t learn enough about you so this way they can really get some information. Don’t think it’s a non-starter, don’t you?

Becky: Well, I always think it’s interesting because Wal-Mart makes plays for their clientele that are, may not, they may not be cash based only. You know they’ve done some really interesting things with you know, what’s it called when you pay on installment?

Leo: That’s right. That’s right. Layaway.

Becky: Layaway, sorry, I had a brain fart.

Leo: You haven’t been in a Wal-Mart in a while, have you?

Becky: (Laughing) No. Actually I was just there on Friday.

Leo: I was in my first Wal-Mart the other day.

Becky: First?

Leo: Oh yea. You know they have greeters at the door that say hello?

Becky: Yea.

Leo: And it’s huge.

Becky: I went to their e-commerce center down in Silicon Valley. Amazing. They have a command central of every SKU and what’s going and it’s a completely customizable display to see what—that’s where dynamic pricing is happening. Amazing.

Leo: Amazon is offering subscriptions, not just to Amazon itself but to Showtime, Starz and even more. Amazon Prime is doing what Apple apparently could not do which is build a television, a cord cutters paradise. Apple has abandoned apparently, or at least temporarily, it’s attempt to create live television on Apple TV. But Amazon seems to be—this is, we are, you cover cord cutting, Tom. I know this is a big interest of yours.

Tom: Yea, Brian Brushwood and I do a show called Cord Killers. This was something where we could, before they announced it we said, “Why doesn’t somebody just take all these services and bundle them together to make it simple to subscribe to?” And it looks like Amazon’s trying. They only have Showtime and then a bunch of networks that are kind of made up for cord cutters from the properties of major networks.

Leo: Like Crackle?

Tom: Well, no, even weirder than that. Like an AMC Network about indie films and stuff like that. But if, if this gets some traction, then they might start putting more permanent services up there possibly. And Amazon providing the billing and the hosting, so they’re giving landing pages to companies. Somebody who might not want to roll their own, like HBO Now may be willing to go to Amazon and say, “Hey, can we put a platform up for our product?”

Leo: Well Showtime already has that kind of service, that over the top service that HBO Now is.

Tom: Yea. Showtime’s playing both ways. And that’s what Les Moonves is saying ever since he bought CNET. He’s like, “We want to authenticate. We don’t care where. We’ll do it on your platform, we’ll do it on our platform as long as somebody’s paying us for this stuff.” That’s why they didn’t want to give it to Hulu though because they weren’t authenticating people paying them for it.

Leo: See that’s smart because I can think of, I wouldn’t mind cord cutting but I don’t want 20 different bills from 20 different services. It would be nice if I could, somebody could bundle it for me. By the way in related news, I went to a Comcast store this week and had a great experience.

Becky: Really?

Leo: Flash. Yea.

Becky: Flash? It’s a news flash that it was a good thing?

Leo: No, it’s a news flash.

Becky: Ok, now I’m with you. I’m with you.

Leo: I was dreading it. I was putting it off for months.

Tom: I thought you were saying you had a great experience with Adobe Flash.

Becky: Me too.

Leo: I—well, here’s the thing. So 3 years ago I moved out of an apartment. 3 years, literally 3 years ago. And carefully returned my Comcast gear to Comcast, thinking that was the end of it. I probably got a receipt. Maybe I even saved it. 3 years later I got a bill for the unreturned equipment. 3 years later.

Becky: Really?

Leo: I said, I went in there, I said, “You know, I don’t, I can’t prove it, because it was 3 years ago. What happened?” I said, “Did you guys do an audit and suddenly realize, ‘hey, we don’t have Leo’s modem.’” They said, “Yea, maybe.” So she looked in the computer. It wasn’t there, so she said, “All right. Forget it.”

Becky: Wow.

Leo: We’ll see. Lisa, let me know if we get another bill.

Tom: Wait until they send it to the collection agencies.

Leo: iPhone. Actually, ok, I just gave away the—I was going to do a quiz. What do you think the—

Becky: iPhone.

Leo: (Laughing).

Becky: iPhone. I am so smart.

Dr. Kiki: I’m with you, Becky.

Leo: You agree? You all agree?

Becky: Great. Now skip to an awesome story. That was the 6th one.

Leo: Actually the answer is, iPhone. Question is, what’s the most popular camera on Flickr?

Becky: That is?

Leo: The head of Canon, Nikon, Samsung even? 42% of all photos shared on Flickr, because you know, you can tell from the information uploaded information, 42% of all photos on Flickr are iPhone.

Becky: I wonder if the grouped all the Android operating system phones together—

Leo: Oh, if they were all—because Samsung is just one.

Becky: I mean I don’t doubt it.

Apple: It looks like they’re breaking it up by manufacturer.

Leo: Yea. And there’s a little graph and you can see the iPhone 6 is kind of gaining.

Becky: Have not pulled the DLSR out in two years.

Leo: Why should ya?

Becky: And I have kids. I mean but it’s about timing you know. When you think that you’d want to get… no.

Leo: But the iPhone’s really good actually. Actually all of the top line camera phones are now very good. As good as any point and shoot probably.

Dr. Kiki: And additionally with the DSLR you have to have, you know, external photo processing where you know, with your phone, you’ve got it right there and the apps are right in the phone and you can process, you can do it, you can put it on Flickr, you can put it on Instagram. It’s out. And you’re done.

Leo: Shocking, we’ll end this with a shocking rumor of the week. According to Mark Gurman who apparently knows everything at 9 to 5 Mac, Apple’s going to have an event in March in which they’re going to announce a new Apple Watch and a new iPhone. What?

Becky: So for all of you who are getting or giving the Apple Watch for Christmas—

Leo: It’s obsolete. 3 months later.

Becky: That would be a slap in the face.

Leo: Would be. It would be a slap in the face for me and I bought mine months ago.

Becky: Yea, it’s too soon.

Leo: Too soon.

Tom: Well in March if they announce it for like a summer release that wouldn’t be so bad.

Leo: It would be one year, right?

Tom: Yea.

Leo: And that’s when they, last year’s March event they debuted the 12” MacBook and finalized the first version of the Apple Watch for, I think was a June release just as you said.

Tom: 4” iPhone.

Leo: That’s what they’re saying. A 4 incher.

Dr. Kiki: It’s like an iPod.

Leo: It’s about the size.

Tom: It’s like they already did all the design work years ago.

Dr. Kiki: We already did it. Let’s do it again.

Leo: Let’s do it again. Doesn’t have to have a lump in it, does it?

Dr. Kiki: No.

Becky: Their release cycle is now new, a little newer, cheap.

Leo: Dr. Kiki, can I just say, I miss you, I love you. You’re doing great. I’m happy about that but why the hell did you move to Portland after all?

Dr. Kiki: (Laughing).

Becky: That’s were all the cool kids go.

Leo: It’s so nice to have you on.

Dr. Kiki: It’s pretty awesome in Portland. But don’t tell anyone I said that.

Leo: I bet it is. Great beer.

Dr. Kiki: Thank you.

Leo: This Week in Science, twis.org, Broader Impacts TV. If you’re a scientist and you want to get your help putting your name and your brand and your ideas out there, Broaderimpacts.tv. Follow her on the Twitter @dr, D-R-K-I-K-I.

Dr. Kiki: Thank you so much, Leo.

Leo: It’s so nice to see you. You look great. I follow you on Facebook so I don’t feel like I’m not, you know, keeping up, but it’s just nice to see you.

Dr. Kiki: Yea.

Leo: Moving. Dr. Tom Merritt, professor of tech newsology. He is at the dailytechnewsshow.com, @acedtect. He’s never changed the worst Twitter handle in history.

Becky: Ace dtect.

Tom: Every follower has to earn it.

Leo: (Laughing) A-C-E-D-T-E-C-T.

Tom: Yep. Yea, tomorrow on Daily Tech News Show we’re going to have Peter Newell on with Veronica Belmont talking about making the transition from the military to Silicon Valley and the connection between the two. It should be fun.

Leo: Gosh it was just like I was flashing back to the week ahead.

Tom: Blackberry earnings are coming up and Oracle.

Leo: Ah, how exciting.

Tom: Yea.

Leo: And, of course, Becky Worley. You’ll find her on Good Morning America. She’s their consumer reporter. You’ll find her on Twitter B-W-O-R-L-E-Y.

Becky: All next week.

Leo: And how’s it going on that Lego?

Becky: Oh, it’s great.

Leo: (Laughing) all next week? What are you covering?

Becky: Let’s see. I’m just going to go through it really, really quick.

Leo: Yea.

Becky: I got the buyer’s guide to headphones. I’ve got the buyer’s guide to adult onesies. I’ve got the buyer’s guide to—

Leo: Wait a minute. What’s an adult onesie?

Becky: I love adult onesies.

Leo: Would you get me my adult onesie off the, it’s on my coatrack.

Becky: This is the number 4—

Leo: Oh, that’s sexy. That’s leopard skin.

Becky: This is the number 4 searched item in fashion on Google. And so not only does it have—

Leo: Does it have feet?

Becky: It has feet.

Leo: No, this one doesn’t have feet.

Becky: It has—I don’t know if it—

Leo: No, it has holes for your feel. Mine has feet. Mine has—wait a minute, let me put mine on.

Becky: It also has hands. Look at this. It has paws.

Leo: Oh, it has paws but no feet.

Becky: Yea. So I’ve got adult onesies. I want to see you in yours.

Leo: I’ve got SpongeBob SquarePants.

Becky: Oh, nice. I’ve got an in depth—

Leo: Mine has feet.

Becky: Yours has feet. I have an in depth look at battery technology. Then cashmere sweaters follows naturally, right after that.

Leo: Nice. Batteries and cashmere.

Becky: Yep and then—

Leo: Do you know how they make cashmere?

Becky: Yes. It’s from the underbelly of the goat.

Leo: And you know how they gather it?

Becky: I don’t. Do I want to know?

Tom: Tell us.

Leo: As the goats wander through the little fields, there’s these bushes that their fur gets stuck on and then they go out and they harvest the cashmere from the bush.

Becky: Really?

Leo: Yes.

Becky: Well I learned that the best Italian firms have their own herds in Mongolia.

Leo: Yea, yea.

Becky: And they can’t have them, you know, in Italy because they won’t produce the same, even the same types of goats.

Leo: I love cashmere.

Dr. Kiki: Me too. Me too. I’m wearing it right now.

Leo: You’re wearing it right now?

Dr. Kiki: I am. This is a cashmere hoodie and it makes me so happy every day.

Leo: Oh, it’s the official textile of Oregon.

Becky: Lisa. You need to get Leo a cashmere adult onesie.

Leo: Lisa hates cashmere. She’s allergic to cashmere.

Becky: Oh my God. Look at this.

Dr. Kiki: Go with the SpongeBob.

Becky: Oh, my Lord. I’m taking your FB out because—

Leo: Who lives in a pineapple under the sea?

Becky: SpongeBob Leo.

Leo: Wait a minute. Come one, audience. Help me out.

Becky: Wait, I was with you.

Leo: Who lives in a pineapple under the sea?

All: SpongeBob SquarePants.

Leo: I didn’t have my headphones plugged in. I don’t know. Was that good?

Becky: It was so good.

Tom: It was beautiful.

Leo: Was it good for you?

Becky: I’m going, I’m going to finish up this show in my adult onesie just like you. And we’re going to, we’re going to be in really good shape here. Sorry, didn’t mean to unplug you I was just worried you were getting—

Leo: No, it was impeding the, the—

Becky: Yea, I know.

Leo: There we go. It’s all better.

Becky: All right.

Leo: You’ve got a hood though. I don’t, I wish I had a hood. We do TWiT, I don’t know why, but we do every Sunday afternoon, 3:00 PM Pacific, 6:00 PM Eastern time. That would be 2300 UTC for those of you watching around the world. I do hope you watch live and join us in the chatroom at irc.twit.tv. It doesn’t fit as well as it did last year.

Becky: It looks great.

Leo: I think onesies shrink over time.

Becky: That’s what it is. Oh, boy.

Tom: It’s all I had.

Leo: (Laughing) now that’s a Portland hat.

Becky: It is, it’s a—

Dr. Kiki: It is.

Becky: Knit beard. A knitted beard.

Leo: Very attractive.

Dr. Kiki: Tom, come to Portland.

Leo: It’s very attractive.

Dr. Kiki: You would fit in here very well.

Leo: If you can’t watch live, you can always watch after the fact. On demand at twit.tv or wherever you get your podcasts including, yes the iTunes Best of 2015 list. We’re in the classics section.

Becky: Oh, boy.

Leo: But you know what, so is WTF with Mark Marin, so.

Becky: Hey, that’s a great place to be.

Leo: It’s a good place to be.

Becky: That is great company.

Leo: Thanks for being here; we appreciate it! We’ll see you next time. Another TWiT is in the onesie. Whoo!