This Week in Tech 549

Leo Laporte: It's time for TWiT, This Week in Tech. Wow, we have a great show for you! Jason Hiner is here from Tech Republic, Alex Lindsay is here from PIxel Corps, Owen JJ Stone, we don't know where he's from. Mars, I don't know. We're going to talk about what's going on with self-driving cars, the latest news from Twitter, Apple, why it's getting everything wrong, and I'm going to make a personal revelation that will shock you. It's all next, on TWiT.

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This is TWiT: This Week in Tech, episode 549, recorded Valentine's Day Sunday, February 14, 2016.

Self-Smoking Cigarettes

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It's time for TWiT This Week in Tech, the show where we cover the latest tech news! I have assembled some close personal friends to jawbone about the news, starting with the guy sitting on my right. Mr. Alex Lindsay at PIxel Corps.

Alex Lindsay: Hello.

Leo: Nice to see you actually in studio. Alex joins us most weeks for MacBreak Weekly, you're actually the creator of MacBreak. Way back when. The first 1080 P video podcast.

Alex: Nearly killed us. It was only 10 years ahead of when we should be doing 1080 P.

Leo: I don't do 1080 P today. We do 720 P is the highest quality, because who needs 1080 P?

Alex: I'm past 1080 P now. I'm doing 4K.

Leo: At the Pixel Corps. By the way, you posted a wonderful article on Facebook which I'm forwarding to everybody. How to work on a movie set, which actually applies to every job ever.

Alex: Pretty much, but it is required reading for our guys if you're watching.

Leo: We also should say hello to Owen JJ Stone who is friends, Ohdoctah. Nice to see you again.

Owen JJ Stone: AKA the chatroom champion.

Leo: He is the champion. Do you use Ohdoctah in the chatroom?

Owen: Yeah! I've been here all day, Uncle Leo. I've been stalking you. Heard you answer some great calls, helping people with their virus situation, not needing viruses, whose got viruses.

Leo: I do God's work on that radio show, because I know I don't want to talk about viruses or malware. Or backup.

Owen: All I'm saying is Do your job. You never know when I'm watching you, Uncle Leo.

Leo: Also, Jason Hiner is here from CBS interactive, the Tech Republic.

Jason Hiner: Yes. Hey! Thrilled to be here, as ever.

Leo: You've got a stack of volumes behind you of the new book. It's out. “Follow the Geeks“

Owen: It was a very interesting listen. I did not read it because I don't know how, but I listened to the audio version.

Leo: Dan Patterson recorded the audio version of that.

Owen: Danny boy did, yes.

Leo: How exciting! I noticed you said I have a lot of books to send out. You're doing your own fulfillment, huh?

Jason: For the crowd funding, we originally crowdfunded the thing because we wanted to make ourselves responsible to readers and not publishers, and so, yeah. Out of all the hardbacks came in, so I've got all those going out this weekend to our Austin crowd funders, if you are a crowd funder, thank you, bless you! Love it. I can't wait to get it in the hands of all those folks.

Leo: Congratulations. I understand there's a very good chapter towards the end, there.

Jason: Chapter 9.

Leo: Chapter 9, my favorite chapter.

Jason: Yeah. Love that chapter.

Leo: The closest thing to a biography I'm never going to get. I was really glad to be a part of that.

Jason: We've had so much great feedback on chapter 9, Leo. Not only feedback, but before it was ever released that it was on there, I had the whole TWiT army harassing me for months. When are you going to cover Leo? This book will be terrible if it doesn't cover Leo Laporte! Little did they know we had already done the interview. It was a done deal.

Leo: I already knew, but I wasn't going to say anything. Follow the Geeks is about innovators, digital innovators, entrepreneurs.

Jason: Yeah. The main thesis is the future works a lot more entrepreneurial, right? Companies are downsizing, many of them are hiring more contractors so that creates a problem and an opportunity for many people. There aren't as many stable jobs at the big companies, but there are in many cases more opportunities where you can contract with companies.

Leo: It's ironic, because you're the only guy on this panel who has a job.

Jason: That is ironic.

Leo: Can I tell you that the future of work looks a lot like work? It's not like it's not work. It's still work. When you're the boss, you actually have to come in more.

Alex: Yes. I was picking up some wine and I was at the wine store and they guys said, what are you doing this weekend? And I was like, "Working." He was like, "You own your own business, don't you?"

Leo: I have worked weekends for years.

Jason: For this book I'm preparing for my own future. The project is its own business, it's own startup.

Leo: Absolutely.

Owen: If you've taken the time to read the book or listen to the book, as I have, make sure you go to Amazon or Audible and write a review and say how much you loved chapter 9 or Baratunde's chapter, or whatever chapter floats your boat, but make sure you leave that review out there and share it with the world. That's about as much work as I've done this week promoting the book.

Jason: Thank you.

Leo: Whatever you do, I want a copy of that, OJ. I'm so sorry.

Owen: You’ve been watching The Simpsons, man.

Leo: I've been watching the People Versus OJ.

Owen: I'm going to tell you two things real quick. When all that was going down, my initials were OJS, and I was dating a Caucasian girl named Nicole, her father had a problem with it.

Leo: Did you know a guy named Ron? So you added the second J just because of that?

Owen: I added a second J because I lie about my middle name and I wanted to be something else.

Leo: I like JJ. JJ Stone is a great name. If there's one thing you learn from Follow the Geeks, the best way to live life is to invent it. You don't have to take what you were given. You invent it as you go.

Jason: A lot of people were forced to become entrepreneurs, right? People lost their job or they couldn't get the job they wanted so they had to make the job they wanted, which is why I admire so many of them including yourself.

Leo: We've all had jobs. You worked at Lucas. You did the Star Wars...

Alex: That was the last job I had.

Leo: I worked in Radio. I still technically have a job. I have that radio thing. They pay me I think. That was my clever hack which was to Segway. I didn't have the guts to leap into it.

Alex: I didn't leap into it. I just kind of leaned towards it. You have the job that's paying money, the job you're trying to get rid of, and the job that's taking you where you want to go. Just those three, and it's a little track. You're slowly moving... That's the safe way to do it.

Owen: People think, I'm a secret ninja and most people don't know what I do, but IQMZ has been around since 2005 and in 2002 it was enquireingminds.com, but people couldn't spell so I bought IQMZ. I used to do those surveys you'd see on Maxim.com and online stuff like that, then we morphed into a website company, then we started doing clubs and party promotions, then we went back to making websites, then I started doing digital video photography, then I did social media consultant, then I did websites and stuff again. Now I'm doing content on my own. I've been doing that since 2003. Everybody says you don't know anything about the Internet, and I'm like I've been on the Internet since the Internet was the Internet before you could do anything on the Internet! I used to code in Flat, bro! You know what I mean? It's funny when people think about the Internet. You've got to be fluent you've got to be able to change and do what you do, and I've been doing everything. I used to write code and I don't write code anymore because writing code sucks. I used to do design and I don't do design because it's too tedious and you have to do layers. Now I'm into video photography and stuff like that, and I used to paint Superman back there. You do everything.

Leo: Move your head. I want to see that Superman. You painted that?

Owen: I did paint that.

Leo: I'm thinking of getting a tattoo that looks like that.

Owen: I'll show it to you closer.

Leo: Put it on my scapula. Oh wow. Who is Superman and who is the other guy?

Owen: One is Superman and one is my black alter ego.

Leo: Oh. It's O Man. Do you call yourself O man, the Big O?

Owen: Ohdoctah, dummy! Who are you talking to?

Leo: Oh. It flipped! So the chapters in the book, Follow the Geeks, Baratunde. The thing is anybody who listens to the show will know almost all these people. Lisa Bettany, “mostlylisa” was the first host of This Week in Photography, my great friend Gina Trepani, Tom Merritt, Ditto. Veronica Belmont. Never heard of her. Just kidding. Om Malik. I think they've all been on TWiT. Chase Jarvis, great photographers, really an inspiration too. He is a true inspiration. Then some people I didn't know. I loved reading the story of Juliana Rotich. She founded Ushahidi. There's some fat guy, and you end with the future, which I love. A 15 year old entrepreneur named Maya Penn. There she is at Ted. This is a great, inspiring book. Anybody who listens to TWiT knows most of the people on this I think.

Jason: The TWiT army has been super, I joked earlier, but the TWiT army has been super supportive. Every time I've been on the show or there's a new chapter, we get so much interest on the site in email, on Twitter, social media. TWiT army has been awesome. As a bonus, because the TWiT army has been awesome, I have a coupon code for the TWiT army for 10% off. You just put TWiT in if you buy the book and checkout. There you go. TWiT army, 10% off. That's not a paid promotion.

Leo: You don't have to pay for that. That's great. We love our hosts, they get to plug whatever they want. Jason, you're an old friend and I'm thrilled to be a part of the book and thrilled to help support it.

Jason: Like Ohdoctah was saying, one of the coolest things is adaptability, a theme that runs throughout all these people. Almost everybody in the book had to recreate themselves, sometimes multiple times at different times throughout their careers, I find that to be when people ask me about the themes that run through it, that's actually one of the ones I bring up the most. I'm glad you guys have touched on that too, because it really is key.

Leo: You have to be fluid. Mind like water.

Owen: Let's adapt into one of these stories, Uncle Leo.

Leo: You want to flow.

Owen: People call Valentine's day, but I call it All Star Weekend.

Leo: Explain to me. I don't know. I'm missing it.

Owen: Basketball. Kobe Bryant's last All Star Game is tonight. Last night was a dunk contest, I had to leave my day early. We didn't leave, I went home early so I could watch the dunk contest. I don't know why they keep putting it on Valentine's day. Look. I got basketball to watch. It's important.

Leo: This is a true test of your romantic intentions.

Owen: We went out early and we made it back home for the dunk contest.

Leo: That's a good test of your...

Owen: It's live, people shared on Instagram. I see all the dunks, I already got one. It ruins it for you, Uncle Leo. You can't get away from stuff anymore. If you really care about something, you got to watch it live.

Leo: Yeah.

Owen: That's why I saw DeadPool twice.

Leo: Twice? In one day?

Owen: The internet reaction would have been live, the spoilers would have been live. I saw it opening night, first show and I saw it again last night.

Leo: This is Valentine's day, but it's also international free software day, so share some love with an open source project that you're particularly fond of. There's lots of great open source software out there. This would be a good day to celebrate that. I love this story. They have arrested a 16 year old teen who was the kid they believe may have hacked the FBI and the department of homeland security. He's been releasing the contact information for thousands of FBI and DHS employees. He calls himself cracka. You'll enjoy this. His hacking crew crackas with attitude. Wow is right. Here's the amazing story. Motherboard had this story before he was arrested he's going to dump 20,000 FBI and 9,000 DHS employee details. They claim to have hundreds of gigabytes. They published these lists on Monday. Motherboard Story explains how it happened. It's almost hard to believe. Apparently it all started with a spear fishing attack. The 16 year old sent an email to a department of justice employee. You know how Spearfishing works. they say this is your bank, we have some documents we want you to sign, the PDF is attached or whatever. But we believe how the Sony hack was initially perpetrated was with a targeted email that had a malware payload. In fact, to confirm that on Monday, the 16 year old hacker contacted Kelsey Atherton the reporter at Motherboard Via the DOJ email account, just to prove I do have access to this account. So he got the account, he compromised the system, he tried logging into the Department of Justice's web portal. It's an Internet designed for employees. Many companies have it. Couldn't get through, because it's got security, so he calls the IT department at the department of Justice. He said I called them up and told them I was new and didn't understand how to get past the portal. They asked do you have a token code? He said no. They said use ours. They gave him a token code and he got in. This is the Department of Justice. This is the FBI. This is the Department of Homeland Security.

Owen: First of all, I love America and America loves me, but I will say when you think the people are giving you (?) it's not really hacking, that's like a phone call. That's like a phone call. You call somebody's grandmother and get them to buy you a watch or something over the phone. That's old school infaltry. You don't think or have protocols. Really?

Leo: It's social engineering. People like Kevin Mitnick, reformed hacker Kevin Mitnick who is a good friend, he wrote a whole book on social engineering. He said that's really the weak point. You can have the best passwords. You can do everything, fingerprint scanner, but if some customer service rep is going to give it all up with a phone call, you're screwed.

Alex: It's amazing how just with an air of authority how far you can get in a lot of places. Definitely had to get back into a location where I did belong, but I didn't have whatever i needed, just talk my way through it.

Leo: Act like you belong.

Alex: He had an English accent. The thing is immediately, as an American, there's an inferiority complex. You're like he must know what he's talking about.

Jason: It's the Journalist thing. If you act like you're supposed to be there or act like you should get information, a lot of times people give it to you. Journalists do this all the time. I got kicked out of the white house and the capitol both. I was some place I wasn't supposed to be and I was acting like I was supposed to be there. It's a long story. The bottom line is, people are the weakest link. It's not the security. It's a lot shorter loop to talk to somebody and be nice to them and ask for their help and they'll help you then to try to spend hours and a lot of computer code to steal someone's password when in fact they'll probably just let you in if you're nice to them.

Leo: Well it was three years ago, remember Matt Honen's article, he had fortunately the Twitter handle Mat, and a three letter Twitter handle is catnip. The way the teenagers got in was he had strong passwords, it wasn't that. They wanted his Twitter account so they used customer service reps at Amazon and Apple to get into it. They used it to get into his Gmail and then asked Twitter to send the Gmail. He said "If I used Two Factor on Google, I might have been all right. But I wasn't using it at the time" that is one lesson. But again, if it's a customer service rep, they'll say let me just give you your second factor. Oh, you don't have the token? That's 624137, OK?

Owen: They don't have caller ID you know when somebody is calling outside the system?

Leo: You can spoof any caller.

Owen: I'm being facetious. They want access to Facebook, they want to go through Twitter's servers and databases. You all are stupid. What are you going to find in there? Really?

Alex: I think we're going to see a lot more, as biometrics right now, it's convenience. I saw a report that Apple Now is going to let you say your password to your Apple TV. I do not want to say my password in front of my kids. What I wan to be able to do is hold down my thumb on my phone and have it...

Owen: Unless I spell it out they're not going to understand my password anyway. My passwords are incredulously impeccable and cannot be hacked by anyone because they are ghetto/hood rat typings of words that you wouldn't imagine to be able to spell.

Leo: I would never think of that. They have access to Urban Dictionary too, you know.

Owen: The way I spell Big Papa and the way you spell Big Papa are two totally different things. There's a number and a capitol letter up in there, so go have fun with Big Papa, people. Get in there if you can.

Leo: There's an interesting related story. The error 53 story, which relates to this fingerprint, we'll talk about that in just a second. I want to take a break right now. Alex Lindsay is here from Pixel Corps, Mister Owen JJ Stone from iqmz.com, he's @ohdoctah with an "H" on Twitter.

Owen: Tis I.

Leo: I thought you said "foshizzle." I'm sorry. You would say that, wouldn't you?

Owen: Sure.

Leo: The Argot of the Streets. The Hood B. I love speaking the Argot of the hood with you.

Owen: I like it when you read rap lyrics.

Leo: I feel that Straight Out of Compton got ripped off. I really enjoyed that movie.

Owen: Forget Straight out of Compton! Creed! I cried three times when I saw Creed. You didn't see Creed?

Leo: No, but it's going to be up for Rent on Tuesday. Lisa and I are on a quest to see all the Oscar nominated movies. Stallone did get nominated.

Owen: Ten seconds, I'll tell you the best part. The kids going to rock and he's like help me train, and he's like, "?" Just write down some stuff for me to work out on the gym. Rocky sits down, he writes this whole list for 20 minutes. He's like all right if you do these, you're going to be on your way, so the kid takes the paper, takes a picture of it, hands it back to Rocky starts jogging home to the gym. He's like, "You left the paper here." He's like I took a picture. He's like what happens if you lose your phone? He's like it's in the cloud. Rocky just looks up and he's like the clouds? I was like classic Rocky. This is a feel good movie! Black director, Rocky was good. I cried three times. I got father daughter daddy love issues.

Leo: I have a horiffic confession to make right now. I've never seen any of the Rocky movies.

Owen: You're lying.

Leo: No.

Owen: How much of your life have you wasted not doing what you're supposed to do?

Leo: I've never seen any of the fast and Furious movies either.

Owen: Rocky is an American... the rest of this week, I don't care what you do in your free time, if you don't watch Rocky I and Rocky II, I'm going to get on the plane and come smack you in the face. That's how important they are to American culture and the way the world works.

Leo: Probably I should see them before I see Creed, right?

Owen: At least one and two!

Jason: Maybe even three. That speech that Rocky gives to Adrian on the beach in three. You got to.

Owen: I'm so upset you haven't seen any Rocky movies.

Leo: This week I have an assignment. I have to see all the Academy Award nominated movies, I also have to see Rocky one, two, three. Who needs work? Movie time.

Jason: It's like with the Russians. If you can change and I can change, everybody can change.

Owen: Rocky is the core of America! The blue collar way the world works. Rocky is legit. I know he's a bumbling idiot, but there is such underlying passion of humanity in those stupid movies, and I swear to jiminy Christmas you better see them. I'm really upset. My heart physically hurts right now.

Leo: Now it's almost a point of pride that I will never see the Rocky. If I've gotten this far without it.

Owen: You haven't gotten this far. You'd be a lot higher in life if you had seen Rocky!

Leo: I could be President! Blew it. All right. I'm going to see it and then I'm going to watch Creed. Wow. Also here Alex Lindsay from Pixel Corps, Jason Hiner from Tech Republic and we will talk about Error 53 in a moment, but first a word from Harry's. We got a great deal for you. We've talked about Harry's for a long time. Harry's is the razor company, created by two guys who are passionate about giving you a better shaving experience by delivering an amazing shave at an affordable price and delivering it to your door, so you don't have to go to the drugstore and get them to unlock the razor blades. Do they lock them up? They're so crazy over-priced. Harry's delivers the shave by doing the best thing. They bought the razor factory in Germany so this is the factory. When they started the company, they said, Look. How are we going to do this? Eliminate the middle man, we're going to make the blades. Where are you going to make the blades? Who makes the best blades? It's this factory in Germany. Let's buy it. I love the Internet. I love founders. That's how they think. They bought the factory, they designed the blades for performance, they sell factory direct to you, so it's literally half what the big brands charge. Now I'm really happy to say they've been with us for how many years? The last couple of years over a million guys have made the switch to Harry's. A million guys. But what's blowing my mind is you haven't. What is it going to take? Harry's has found a way. They're going to give you a free shave. Yes. Harry's now has for a limited time a free trial. You pay $3 for shipping. Go to harrys.com/twit and redeem offer. What are you going to get? You're going to get the handle, the beautiful Truman handle, you get your choice of colors, I don't know which one is in here. Yeah, it's a Truman. You're going to get the blades. You're going to get Harry's foaming shaving gel, which is great. This is not a sample kit, this is a regular kit, but you can get this kit for 15 bucks. It's your choice. Show the sample kit, I want to see what they got. You get the razor, you get the blade, you get the foaming shave gel, it's a sample size, you get the thing that I really like that we never talk about, actually we do now because I really like it, the travel blade cover, which protects your hands. I love this. You need that because you know what? These are sharp blades. They're great. They give you such a close shave and man the price is right. Why are you paying 32 bucks for an 8 pack of blades when you can get them half as much at harrys.com. By the way, when you get the free kit, you're going to also sign up for the monthly... you can cancel if you don't like it, get the monthly shipment. I get them every other month. They ask you how often do you shave? Right there. They send you the razor blades and the foaming shave gel or the cream. I like the cream. Try the cream too. Harrys.com/twit. I shave with Harry's every morning and you should too. A million guys have switched, half of them come from us, I'm sure. But what I don't understand is why you haven't. Now, will you do it if you get the free one? Harrys.com/twit. Harry's!

Jason: You know what the cool lesson about that that entrepreneurs can take from that? It's a solved problem. People that go and take something that is a solved problem why do you need another razor and somebody comes along and they find a better way to do it.

Leo: That's what's really cool about the Internet. A lot of our sponsors are re-inventing age old processes. Casper, they're making mattresses and selling them direct. You would think that's a solved problem, but you're right Jason. There's a huge amount of opportunity thanks to the Internet, thanks to a lot of stuff. On Monday, I interviewed the inventor of the Sphero. The new VB8 is a Sphero. He tells the story of how they started it. They were trying to create a friendly robot. It was really interesting. He's got great ambitions too, it's well worth...

Owen: You know another thing? An RC car when people play with it, I try to explain to them it's like having an RC car when you were a kid. You control it, it zooms around. Don't think of it as a robot or whatever.

Leo: Have you played with that new one? The Auto, what's it called? Olly.

Owen: I wanted the Darth Vader version, but they were sold out so I had to get the regular white one.

Leo: He and his cofounder went to his Disney Startup camp. They thought there was some relationship with the Sphero they could do with Disney, because we personify this stuff, right? One of the things they did, the third employee they hired was a videographer. I thought that was interesting. They said we've got to tell the story, there's got to be a backstory. Bob Iger, the CEO of Disney said, "Hey guys." They go in a room, he has his smartphone, they pull it out, this is two years ago when they were making The Force Awakens. He says, I want to show you some pictures, nobody has seen these. They're looking and he's trying to memorize this, and there's the VB8. Iger says, "See that? We want to make a robot like that." We could do that. It's a great story it's really interesting. That's another example of out of the box. I love the era we live in. We live in amazing times.

Jason: For all the pessimism there is out there, I think that some of it is natural because it's like shifting sands, the sands are shifting underneath our feet, but any time of great upheaval is tremendous opportunity. You have so many people doing things so creatively and re-inventing processes, reinventing ways to do things. Trying to figure out ways to make things better. That kind of passion and that kind of commitment to being better and doing something useful and being useful to other people. I think it's the spirit of the age.

Leo: We interviewed on the new screensavers yesterday. Another physicist from CalTech who did the Lygo experiment. Talk about inspiring. If you're interested in science, proving Einstein's hundred year old theory of gravitational waves with this massive experiment, and I said that must have cost a lot of money. Thanks to the national science foundation they did the Prylit experiment which cost 250 million dollars, but wait a minute. The whole thing, all in, two big experimental facilities on the East and West coast which is going to be built around the world a little under a billion. I got to tell you, that's Star Wars money. One movie. I think we are surrounded by miracles, by wonders, we have now seen gravitational waves created by two black holes colliding and proven that there is gravitational waves. That's incredible. What does that mean? He says who knows. But they're there!

Alex: One of the things that's really important is to realize how malleable reality is. A lot of times people say, "let's be realistic about this."

Leo: We could shoot for the moon and beyond.

Alex: I can stream from anywhere if you give me time and budget. How much would it take to stream from the moon. Off the top of my head, rough budget. 15 billion in 15 years. I could work on that detail for you. We really have streamed from every continent at this point, including Antarctica, which has really bad bandwidth.

Leo: How do you get more bandwidth to Antarctica?

Alex: You can't. The channels are 1024 up.

Leo: 1,024...?

Alex: KB. So it's really small.

Jason: Until we lay more cable.

Alex: There's no fiber.

Leo: Now that it's melting, it should be easy. Move in.

Alex: Someone has to get in... it turns out it's really expensive to run Fiber.

Leo: Do watch the new Screensavers from yesterday, including the ultimate building of VR gaming machine. What's amazing is Albert Einstein created this in his mind with pencil and paper and a hundred years later, this is the last piece. Everything about the general theory and special theory of relativity have been proven. The last piece... that's amazing.

Alex: That's what we call vision.

Jason: He just thought of what was possible. Einstein was sitting around thinking this would be possible. Our capabilities to run those experiments...

Leo: I want to take you up on this streaming because eventually I want to be able to take this studio put it on a boat. I noticed they're talking about putting up maritime satellites that have GB to anywhere.

Alex: We've done streams where as long as you're within ten miles of shore then...

Leo: Microwave beaming and things like that. So Error 53 was broken by the Guardian who had a freelance reporter who was covering the refugee crisis in Macedonia. He had an iPhone, he dropped his iPhone, turns out there's no Apple stores in Macedonia so he got a third party to fix it and they replaced the screen and in the process of that replaced the fingerprint reader. All is well and good, his phone is working he gets home and gets an offered upgrade to IOS 9, he does. Boom, the phone breaks with error 53. He cannot fix it. Has to buy a new phone. Little irate. Turns out this is exactly what is supposed to happen. There's a class action lawsuit over this error 53. Apple says when you have the Fingerprint reader fixed, when you do it at an Apple store, there is a secure store where the fingerprint information, the credit card information is stored. This is paired to the fingerprint reader, what we were talking about, it's secure. If you have to replace the fingerprint reader, you have to repair it. We do this, third parties do not. Probably aren't told how. So we don't feel like your phone is secure anymore, so now we break it. Seems like it's going a little far. It's not completely clear if Apple breaks it intentionally.

Owen: Which they probably do.

Leo: At first you could say that's anti-competitive. They don't want you using a third party. This is Apple's statement. I want to give them the statement, then we could talk about it. This is an Apple spokesperson. "We protect fingerprint data using a secure enclave, which is uniquely paired to the touch ID sensor. When iPhone is serviced--" by the way we know this is an Apple employee, because they call it 'iPhone' not 'the iPhone.' "When iPhone is serviced by an authorized Apple service provider or Apple retail store for changes that affect the touch ID sensor, the pairing is re-validated. This check ensures the device and the iOS features related to touch ID remain secure. Without this unique pairing, a malicious touch ID sensor could be substituted, thereby gaining access to the secure enclave. When iOS detects that the pairing fails, touch ID, including Apple Pay, is disabled so the device remains secure." That seems fine. She adds: “When an iPhone is serviced by an unauthorized repair provider, faulty screens or other invalid components that affect the touch ID sensor could cause the check to fail if the pairing cannot be validated. With a subsequent update or restore, additional security checks result in an ‘error 53’ being displayed … If a customer encounters an unrecoverable error 53, we recommend contacting Apple support.” That's Apple's only statement so far. Many people are reporting this. My question is Apple, why don't you turn off the enclave, turn off... this is what Samsung does. They have a similar situation. They turn off Samsung pay. Some movie things won't work because they're concerned about piracy.

Alex: What I'm not clear about with that is whether you can somehow take it back to Apple and pay them to do whatever they need to do to get your phone to work again. I think that it's very important that they keep that secure because I think there's a huge future in that. Anything in between makes sense. They probably could have communicated it a little bit more clearly. That's one of the big problems is letting people know if you take it somewhere else we're going to break your phone, I wonder whether there is so much security in that enclave that you can't run the phone. It's not just the fingerprint, it's not just Apple pay, but it's all kinds of security measures that are within the phone all got put into this one little box that makes it very difficult for the phone to run at all. A lot of things we do that require our passcode, log into the phone, is all that sitting inside the enclave so that it can be secure? If it is, then it would be very hard to run the phone, but it seems like there's got to be some kind of fix that you could at least upgrade or have Apple replace your touch sensor in the whole section to make that work. It may not be free. As a user, it would be useful to go to Apple.

Leo: I should point out, Mac rumors says they've heard from a retail source that some Apple stores have received the go ahead to replace third parties screens, so it may be resolved.

Alex: I think you have to take it back to the Apple store.

Leo: It would be my guess that this is not what Apple intended.

Alex: I can see why they do it.

Leo: The lawyer in the class action lawsuit says no materials we've ever seen from apple show disclosure that your phone would self-destruct if you download new software onto it. If Apple wants to kill your phone under any set of circumstances and for any reason, it has to make it crystal clear to its customers before the damage is done. That's fair too.

Alex: Fair point.

Jason: This is one of those laws of unintended consequences things. They're trying to make a secure device, they were trying to make sure people couldn't get in there and fiddle it and bypass the security mechanisms, but in doing that, they've wrecked a lot of people's phones who are trying to fix a broken screen or having to their home button doesn't work. Sometimes those home buttons give out. Sometimes it's the cable.

Leo: That's the point. It's not just the cable, it could be the screen or the home button, but because they're paired...

Jason: Exactly. So yeah. Apple certainly should be... the response to it should be better as well.

Leo: These companies take a while to... this just happened this week. I wouldn't be surprised.

Owen: Worst case scenario, if something bad were to happen, if somebody went and bought a yacht off of somebody's phone or something like that, then everybody would be boo-hooing about that. Froze my accounts, and I lost my dog and my sister left me.

Alex: confidence is everything when it comes to the fingerprint process and Apple pay. I'm sure that Apple will be willing to do whatever it needs to do to ensure nothing ever gets between them.

Leo: Mistakes may have been made. Maybe they didn't want to brick it. Here's another mistake. Do not do this. If you set your 64 bit IOS device to January 1st, 1970, it breaks your phone. Should I do it?

Owen: You're a grown man.

Leo: I'm a grown man, I can do anything I want!

Alex: Do it, man!

Jason: It takes a while to do, because you have to scroll.

Leo: First of all, I go to general and I go to phone. Don't set time on automatically.

Owen: You're talking to a man with 32 iPhones! What's wrong.

Leo: I don't have any other iPhones. This is my only iPhone. Good lord, it's going to take me forever. I'm going back in time.

Owen: Don't you have assistants to scroll for you?

Leo: Oh Intern! Come here and scroll for me. Can't I just go to the date?

Jason: Here. Let's just watch the video of some other guy doing it. We don't need you to ruin your phone.

Leo: I'm just going to keep scrolling here, I'm scrolling back. Man this is going to take forever. Back to 2002. I just got to get to January 1st, 1970. Holy cow. I'm back to 1988. Oh man. You know what we need is that picture from Citizen Kane are the calendar pages flying off. 1977. I'm almost there, I'm in the right decade. Oh man. January first, it's got to go back 12, 1 PM. Set that date. What's happening?

Jason: He's going to take it back to the home screen, he's going to put it on Standby.

Leo: You turn it off? You standby it.

Jason: He's going to re-boot it.

Leo: This, by the way, is the Unix 0 day. This is when Unix was invented in 1969 they said the world would begin January 1st, 1970 and all time on Unix systems, and by the way, the iPhone is a Unix system will be the number of seconds from January 1st, 1970. Basically you're setting the time to zero. That's it. Now if you stupidly did this, you just saved me. I was going to do it. More than 1000 dollars for this stupid thing. If I had done it, the only reason I would consider it is if you just let it die, course you can't take the battery out, you just have to let it die, apparently it will wake up and it will be OK. It will be a little groggy. It may say I just saw this movie Rock I, it was so good! But other than that... The Beatles Broke up!?!

Jason: Some reports are if you leave the phone on for five hours it may come back. May.

Leo: Come on, you stopped me. This would have gone viral.

Owen: We got people for that, Uncle Leo.

Leo: Don't do that. The reason I bring that up is that's the kind of bug, I bet you this Error 53 is a similar thing. It's a dumb bug.

Owen: Again, it's dumb until somebody's life gets messed up with their finances. Again. It's dumb until something like that happens. When that happens, oh the hubbub and crying and journalists are going to be writing, "How could Apple let this happen?" No. Brick the phone, go back in the store, get it fixed. One person overgrandizing the financial problems they went through... I've traveled internationally, I've had my accounts frozen, it's annoying.

Leo: I'm sure the genius could fix it. Open it up, unplug the battery.

Alex: I was getting my setup at the office, my Skype TX box is not working and I was talking to somebody. Microsoft did something, they ran some code or whatever. It invalidated every Skype X Box in the world.

Leo: We were going to get this TX Box.

Alex: They're great boxes. We have four of them in the studios.

Leo: How long was the commission?

Alex: Mine was sitting. It was in transport. Mine, I hadn't been using it, but we had other ones in other places so I was... that's the kind of stuff that happens. Somebody hits a button and poof.

Leo: Somebody makes a good point that the error 53 might have to do with Apple, if you can't login to your iCloud account, Apple won't wipe a phone and give it back to you, because they don't want thieves to say can you just wipe this and I'll use it. You would have to validate that you were a legitimate owner of that phone before they fix the fingerprint reader.

Jason: This Error 53 thing is free advertising for Apple. There's IT managers out there going this is why we buy Apple.

Leo: Right there. That's what we want. That's the behavior we want. Here's behavior you don't want. This is not Apple's fault. Adobe pushed an update to their creative Cloud updater program. We all use that, right? If you use Photoshop or Lightroom or Premier you have to have this creative cloud thing that runs in the background. They push an update out for reasons that aren't clear, that update deletes the alphabetically first file in the directory. Just deletes it. For no reason. The only reason we found out about this is because backplays, which is an online backup service, used by a lot of Apple users has a file in the root folder called .btfall.

Alex: You wouldn't see the file that's deleted.

Leo: It's a hidden file. It starts with a dot. .bzfall is critical to the operation of backplace, and that's how people found out, they said my backplace stopped working. A smart guy at Backplace figured it out. Here's the other problem. If you don't have Backplace, in most normal macs, the first thing alphabetically was .documents revisions v 100, which stores data required for auto saving version history functions to work properly. Not such a good thing to have deleted. So the fix for this, until Apple puts out a fix, the fix is to create a new file in your route directory called .adobedon'tdeletemybzvault. It's easy to do. I showed this on the new Screensavers. I typed CD/.

Alex: Is dot higher than space?

Leo: I don't know. You can't start a file with Space.

Alex: Yeah you can.

Jason: Dot is higher than space.

Leo: I'm going to do it this way. Create a file and make it .aaaaaaa. That's going to sort higher than anything else. The touch command if a file exists will update its... it has to be pseudo touch. Yeah yeah yeah. Pseudo touch.aaaaaaaa, you've created that file you've got to give it your password because you're not administrator. Boom. Look. I have a file. .aaaaa.

Alex: Look. You've got a backupone.

Jason: This show is getting crazy.

Leo: It's a simple fix, you want another one? I got another one. Here's another one. There's an issue with an open source updater program called Sparkle and Sparkle is used by a lot of Mac software to update it. Apparently Sparkle allows insecure connections for updates which means it wouldn't be too hard for a bad guy to intercept the Sparkle updater or even to send a fake update to programs that use Sparkle and put arbitrary bad stuff on your Macintosh. This has been fixed by the Sparkle guys, but the problem is it's hard to update a program if what is broken is the updater. Right? You can't update the updater, so apps that have this problem are going to have to get you an update without using Sparkle. It's a catch 22. Anyway, there is an update. The most common one, Cantasia uses Sparkle, Micro Torrent, U torrent uses it, sketch uses it. The most common one is VOC. Somebody in the command line showed you how to figure out if you've got Sparkle in your Macintosh. You run this find command to look for the Sparkle bundle and what you're going to get is a list of files that are using Sparkle and you're looking for inversion numbers and you're looking for inversion numbers past 1.13. If you have prior to 113, which everything on my system does, you're vulnerable. That's fun. More command Line Fu. This has become the Command Line show. I think there is a podcast called The Command Line Show.

Jason: It's audio only.

Leo: Right. There actually is an audible book of On Command Line. I got to listen to that. OK. Percent. C;/tilda. Anyway. I don't want to make this the Apple bug report.

Alex: Production people, all the black magic software uses Sparkle.

Leo: That's right. Black Magic uses it. Sorry. You just did it. Look at all that stuff. None of it's up to date either. Mac funds plugins, a tonality pro which I use as a photographer, a lot of photographers use Mac Fun. That was also the problem, which means Trey Recliffs, great new HDR app.

Jason: The Feds declaring Google self-driving car and driver?

Leo: Yeah. I like that. Let's take a break and then we'll do that. Doctor Drey is doing Apple's first scripted television series and he has a nude orgy scene in it. Which means we've come a long way since Steve Jobs ran Apple.

Alex: The sound that you're hearing is Steve Jobs rolling in grave.

Owen: Part of the problem that Apple is having. All the dumb stuff that they're doing.

Leo: I agree. Nothing wrong with sex. I'm just saying. Our show to you today brought to you by SquareSpace, the place to make your next website. I think Jason Hiner might know a little bit about SquareSpace. Just a little bit. Here's why people like Jason... yeah. You use it for your Follow the Geeks book, right?

Jason: followthegeeksbook.com, hosted on SquareSpace from day one. Amazing.

Leo: The reason people use SquareSpace is it's the best hosting out there. You cannot bring a SquareSpace site down. Everybody go to followthegeeksbook.com right now. Doesn't matter. The site will not even slow down because the second part of it is you're using the software for the site design that is based on the hosting. They're tightly integrated so it's kind of miraculous when traffic ramps up at a site the hosting software gives you more resources. It all happens automatically so everybody can go right now to any SquareSpace and you can't bring it down. leoville.com my blog is on SquareSpace. The nice thing, and you discovered this, is you can make a beautiful website. You wanted to put that time square picture that you just got a few days ago on your cover page and you did. That's so cool. SquareSpace makes that easy, in fact the cover page is a great thing for somebody who just needs a presence on the web and every business you've got to have a presence on the web, but it could also be if you're a photographer or an artist. If you're a musician or a band, SquareSpace has templates designed for you where you can sell your music, you can show concert dates, lots of pictures, they're all beautiful and they all represent your aesthetic. You start with a SquareSpace template, the best designers and best engineers make those, but then you make them your own with just a few clicks and that's what's cool. They're all mobile responsive. That means you don't have a separate mobile site. Your site looks good on every size screen automatically. They all have e-commerce. SquareSpace commerce is the only platform that lets you make your shopping cart look like your website, it's not some separate appendage hung off your website it's integrated in. You get a free custom domain name with your purchase, great support, they have a developer platform if you want to get super geeky, but you don't have to. I love SquareSpace. Even for special one off sites. We found that a lot of our listeners have multiple SquareSpace sites like for a wedding or baby or special event. You can quickly make a site. I always use your example, Alex. You go to a restaurant, they don't have a website, you made them one.

Alex: I made them one. You need a website, I can't find your store. Well it's really complicated. I was eating food and doing it. We're re-doing our website because we haven't touched it for a long time. It's on SquareSpace now, I'm playing with it and these new tools! It's awesome.

Leo: You don't have to worry about security updates, it's all automatic. It's great.

Alex: We did a bunch of custom coding on top of it, you can put stuff in, but now most of the stuff we did custom is stuff you can do...

Jason: It also integrates beautifully with sites and services. SquareSpace has been a great platform. I dig it. I first learned about SquareSpace on TWiT, by the way.

Leo: You're not alone. I think every podcast in the world is sponsored by SquareSpace, but I think we were the first. We certainly helped put them on the map. SquareSpace.com. We were very grateful and know many others are. Offer code TWiT, you'll get 10% off. SquareSpace, you should. Doctor Drey, of course a friend of Apple, he sold his company, Beats for some billions of dollars, making him the first billionaire rap star. He continues to work with Apple. He’s going to—now everybody and their brother is doing scripted TV series. Netflix really showed with House of Cards that this is an opportunity. Screw Hollywood. If you’ve got money you can do it yourself. So according to the Hollywood Reporter, and this is an exclusive from the Hollywood Reporter a couple of days ago, Apple’s making its first original television show, Vital Signs, a dark semi-autobiographical drama. Now we’ve seen Dr. Dre’s autobiographical drama, right? Oh wait a minute, he was—Dre’s part of Straight Outta Compton. He was with NWA. Yea, yea, yea. I’m sorry, I confuse these rap stars.

Owen: Ice Cube had more to do with the writing, the production, all that stuff, than Dre did.

Leo: Ice Cube, yea. And Eazy-E, don’t forget Eazy-E. He’s does not come off well in that movie, I might add.

Owen: I’m talking about as far as the movie’s concerned, Ice Cube was the—

Leo: Oh he produced it. Yea, yea, yea.

Owen: Most of that stuff.

Leo: Dre liked it though, right?

Owen: I’m sure he did. He got a check and played music and he enjoyed it very much.

Leo: And he comes off well in it. He comes off very well in it I think. As does Ice Cube.

Owen: He makes a lot of money. You’ve got to come off well when you’re doing good for yourself.

Leo: Yea. So Dre’s starring in and executive producing this 6 episode TV show, Vital Signs, bankrolled by Apple. Will likely be according to the Hollywood Reporter an exclusive on Apple Music. And it’s not clear whether Apple TV, the iTunes Store or other Apple platforms, even a traditional television distributor will be involved according to the Hollywood Reporter. Apple and Dre declined to comment. Those who have seen descriptions of the show say it’s billed as semi-autobiographical, each episode focusing on a different emotion.

Owen: I don’t buy into this at all. Let me just say it.

Leo: How’s Dre character deals with it.

Owen: I think it’s going to be horrible.

Leo: I would much prefer the ten crack commandments or something like that. I think that’d be a good—

Owen: Well, first of all, his autobiography, he was the one guy in that group that was a DJ, a singer, a dancer.

Leo: He did it all.

Owen: He wore sparkly suits. He had a family that was taking care of him for the most part. Like he lived in the hood but he wasn’t living that hood life. He was one of the biggest pretenders in that group. So first of all—

Leo: Are you saying he wasn’t gangsta?

Owen: No, he was not. And he flipped a switch to go be in the band and whatever. He’s not that guy. Like the guy who is NWA, he’s not that guy. There were other guys in that group that were that guy more so than him. He was not quote unquote about that life. So for him to tell me dark tales about his life from when he DJ’d in his sparkly suit to R&B songs.

Leo: And then I got a blister on my thumb from scratching all night.

Owen: Yes. And you know, Apple, I feel like they’re throwing money at the wrong thing to start this ship off because--

Leo: It’s their buddy.

Owen: If it doesn’t do well, then they’re like, “Oh, well it’s not--” I don’t know.

Leo: I don’t know if it’s the other world. Netflix took a while to ramp up. House of Cards was not the first thing that they did. Wasn’t Lillehammer one of the?

Alex: Officially this is the last year for Lillehammer I think.

Leo: I like it, but it’s not, you know, it’s not genius.

Alex: No.

Leo: So you can stumble. Amazon has made some really bad Amazon Originals. Transparent was brilliant, but.

Alex: I mean for content creators, though, this is the golden age. I mean if Apple gets this. YouTube is just, you know, YouTube Originals are just coming out on Red. You have—well, not just Red, but. YouTube Originals are coming out. You have Apple going into it. You have Netflix, Amazon, all these guys are already knee deep in it. If you have an idea of something you want to make, this is the time to do it. I think that the other thing is that’s really interesting is that if they do it only for Apple Music of course what this is setting up is, we can do this for your band, and they can be only on Apple Music. And I think that we would see, again this is where Apple Music could actually, I mean beyond all the problems that it has which is an interface that drives me absolutely crazy, it is, these Taylor Swift. You know Taylor Swift was showing one side of original content. Dre shows another side of original content. And using that, that’s how you start selling into the music industry.

Owen: It’s definitely the time and the day to do it. If you’ve got an idea, you can pitch it because ten people can turn you down, but there’s 30 different options right there.

Alex: And there has never been more narrative content ever than right now.

Jason: I think that’s totally right, Alex. And it is good if you’re a content creator because it puts all the onus, all the focus is on the people making great content. If you make great content you can sell somebody on the idea, you can do it. Whereas we’re coming out of this era where really just distributors controlled this game. And you needed a big distributor. And the big distributors decided what they wanted, what they were going to show us. And a lot of times what they showed us wasn’t that great which is what led to this sort of bottom up grass roots movement of content. And now, I think you have it in so many places and so many ways too. What YouTube, still what YouTube’s doing is amazing. There are people building whole business models off of YouTube in smart ways from stuff that is like, you know the how-to stuff to people doing full length movies to people doing shorts to people doing music videos, all kinds of things. And so from a video standpoint, from a whatever your content is, you have the opportunity to do this in ways that really weren’t even possible or too expensive even 5, 10 years ago.

Leo: Actually tomorrow, Steven Kings 11/23/63 starts on Hulu, another 8 hour mini-series with James Franco and produced by J.J. Abrams. Although, USA Today gives it 2 stars out of 4 and says not worth the time travel. Which is kind of good. But back to Dre. It’s a half hour show. Sam Rockwell and Mo McCrae will be in it. It’s not a comedy, dark drama. No shortage of violence and sex which is interesting for Apple. I mean I didn’t expect them to go the Disney route but it’s interesting they’d go there. According to the Hollywood Reporter, an episode filming this week featured an extended orgy scene. Sources tell the Hollywood Reporter that naked extras simulated sex in a mansion in the Bird Streets neighborhood of Los Angeles’ Hollywood Hills. Dre was not there but his wife, Nicole Young, was according to one insider. Hard to keep that stuff quiet in Hollywood I imagine. It’s also being produced by Robert Mucic. He’s going to write all six episodes, executive produce it. He was co-executive producer and writer for Empire.

Owen: Well maybe it will be ok.

Leo: Empire was good.

Owen: Empire is like super fluffy so that video is darker with that kind of.

Leo: It’s a soap opera. It’s a soap opera.

Owen: Yea they can go dark with that then, you know what I mean, that would be ok.

Leo: Yea. I think very interesting to hear. We’ve been waiting for this. We talk about this all the time. We’ve been waiting for Apple. You said by Hollywood, but you know.

Alex: I just said by Disney.

Leo: By Disney, yea. I don’t want to make this the Apple show. There are a lot more Apple stories including this conversation—

Owen: Can we talk about Twitter?

Leo: Yea but hold on. One more, ok? I’m sorry. Apple was a lot in the news this week. Because there were articles by Walt Mossberg on The Verge and others about Apple software being crap. And I thought it was very interesting because John Gruber had Eddy Cue and Craig Federighi, Apple executives on the show and kudos to Gruber. When you get an executive like that it’s hard to challenge him. But he said, “What about this Apple software’s crap?” And the response he got was so tone deaf it makes me very nervous. Essentially, I think it was Craig said, “Oh, people just don’t like new stuff. We’re trying a lot of stuff, this new Photos, Apple Music and it’s just people who don’t like new stuff.” And not really taking to hear the criticism that they should that iTunes is crap. I’m sorry. Apple Photos is horrible. It lost my data several times. This is not great software and I would at least expect Apple to say, “Yea, ok, well we’re going to make it better.” Instead they say, “No, no, no. There’s nothing wrong with it. Literally we’re doing great software. It’s just so different people have to get used to it. Same thing happened with Final Cut. Same thing happened with iMovie. They just have to get used to it.” That’s not the issue. And there goes my interview with Eddy Cue and Craig Federighi. All right. Now we’ll talk about Twitter.

Owen: Apple does not care about your feelings.

Leo: No they don’t.

Owen: I was going to pull a Kanye West and George Bush but I don’t want people to jump on me and not understand the joke or the reference.

Leo: Do you want me to set it up for you? That kind of takes the sting out of it, doesn’t it?

Owen: No, that’s ok. They get it. But Apple doesn’t. I mean that’s the problem. A lot of the things they’re doing right now, they really don’t care. But they’re going to start caring when that bottom line starts creeping up. And they just made record profits but Samsung is selling units. Like they’re moving units out of the store so at one point somebody’s going to wake up and say, “Oh, you really don’t like us. Ok, well watch this.” And then they’ll fix stuff. But until they get some kind of fear in them, they don’t care what one or two thousand million people have to say about their product because it’s free. “Oh, you don’t like iPhoto? It’s free. Pay for something better.”

Leo: Yea, yea.

Alex: And there’s some Apple software that I like a lot. I use—

Leo: Final Cut you use, right?

Alex: I use Final Cut 10. I think Keynote is the standard. If you’re going to do a presentation—

Leo: Keynote is great.

Alex: If you want to do a presentation in front of a lot of people, there is nothing close.

Leo: But that was written a long time ago. It has not been much updated.

Alex: It gets updated. There’s a lot.

Owen: Why fix something that ain’t broke? If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Alex: Keynote gets updated. And then Numbers I think, again if you’re not doing big numbers, it’s so much better than Excel.

Leo: Pretty. I feel like those are hits from yesteryear, right?

Alex: Yea but they still work well.

Leo: You’ve got to then look at iTunes which has just gotten worse and worse and worse.

Alex: Why do you have to deal with it?

Jason: Do you think the new—Yea, iTunes has always been a POS. But I do think that the new Apple TV interface, I actually like it. The remote is a pain.

Leo: The remote is insane because you either hit it by accident—

Alex: I thought that I’d always want a Bluetooth remote and not have it be RF, or not RF but infrared. But the problem with that one is it gets under the cushions and then—

Leo: And you can’t figure out when you sit down it rewinds it when you stand up it stops and you don’t know why.

Alex: It’s around here somewhere.

Jason: The remote, this is where they’re design sense kind of works against them. The remotes are so small, like my kids lose these things all the time. It drives me crazy.

Alex: I use my phone and my watch.

Jason: That’s what I do. I’m using my phone instead of the remote, one because I barely touch it and it’s like arrg! Stop!

Alex: You know what would be great? Here’s my big suggestion for Apple. And I hope someone from Apple is listening to this. Is what they need for that remote is they need a little buzzer in there that you can activate with your phone. People would go, that would be like the number one feature is that I can—where is my? I pull out my iPhone, basically find my iPhone but find my remote. Awesome. That’s all I’m saying.

Owen: Alex, when’s the last time you played a game on your Apple TV with that remote?

Alex: Last week.

Leo: Really?

Alex: My son and I play this funky game where you fly through these little gears and you get caught up in these little things and you go slow and go fast.

Owen: I was about to yell at you and now I can’t. Enjoy the remote. I was going to say, just use your phone but if you actually do use it to play games you need that remote, so.

Leo: No, you can use it. You can use a Bluetooth controller.

Alex: I just don’t know which controllers and it never lists.

Leo: I bought the Blues Steel or whatever, no that’s—

Alex: Does that one work with?

Owen: Blue Steel.

Alex: It doesn’t list Apple TV on it. It always says iOS and everything else and doesn’t say Apple TV.

Leo: Yes, any iOS controller will work.

Jason: Steel seriously though.

Leo: Steel. It’s not blue, it’s just Steel. But no, I have that at home. Come over. We’ll play. Steel Series Nimbus.

Jason: I do think the software is pretty decent though. It’s the best software they’ve done in a while. I think that Apple TV is clean, it’s easy to navigate. You can figure out.

Leo: Hey at least they have a store. We have now, thanks to not us but the developers out there who love the show, 5 TWiT apps on the App Store. 5. It’s awesome.

Alex: And it’s really allowing, it’s making it much easier for all these, admittedly most of them are screwed up completely like CBS, but most of these apps, you’re now able to start doing apps for everyone. And it’s allowing as industries0—because we don’t have cable TV we just have a really fast internet connection. And I disconnected my TV from the internet so my TV’s not allowed to talk to the internet over wireless or wire because my kids would leave the interface up and I was afraid it was going to burn in. And it’s an expensive TV. Well because the TV when it’s left in its interface, at least on a Visio doesn’t go to screen saver. And it will burn in. And it does burn in. I don’t care what anyone says, it still burns in. And so the nice thing about the Apple TV is you get these nice little flyovers that it immediately cuts to so I don’t want them using anything else. Now I have a Roku and a Chromecast and the Apple TV all hooked into it.

Leo: Roku has a screen saver as well.

Alex: And the Roku does fine. I just didn’t want, the TV is the only one that doesn’t. But my kids live in—

Leo: Do you love though—I have to say, Siri, as much as I’m not a fan of Siri in general, it is nice to be able, I use this all the time to say, “Skip back 3 minutes” or my favorite, “What did he just say?” And it skips back 15 seconds, turns on closed captioning, shows you the clip again with closed captioning and turns it off. That is good.

Jason: That is very nice. I don’t like the search though. The search on the Apple TV.

Alex: I find shows all the time.

Leo: Some things are nice.

Jason: I’m having a hard time. I have a much easier time with Amazon Fire TV.

Leo: No, the Apple search is very literal. It’s very literal. You can’t say, “I want action movies featuring.”

Alex: I mostly, I had this problem where I’d have with Apple TV if you bought an episode off of Apple TV of something that you wanted to try or whatever, and you go back to that episode and it was previously watched or whatever, you can’t get to the rest of the series. Like you can’t, there’s no way to click. So then what you end up having to do is search, you know, find this series and then it takes you to the series. There’s like a dead end there where you’re like.

Leo: No, I had that problem too. We were watching Cargo we had to back up. So what were you going to say, Owen? I’m sorry.

Owen: I was just telling you, you didn’t hear me because you didn’t have your hearing aid in, that’s the next time you watch the show to have your hearing aid in.

Leo: I hear, Owen. I use both hearing aids all the time.

Owen: If you’d set yourself up properly then maybe you’d be able to hear the episodes.

Leo: It’s not my problem. It’s people mumble these days.

Alex: I’ve been thinking about that.

Leo: There’s a lot of mumblers out there. You’re a mumbler too you know. You talk like blah, blah, blah.

Owen: Speaking that hippity hoppity is that problem.

Leo: Hippity hoppity with the boppity.

Owen: Are you done with Apple?

Leo: Yea, I’m done.

Owen: If you bring up Apple one more time, it’s over.

Leo: I’m D-U-N with Apple.

Owen: I’m having your mic cut.

Leo: You know what I’m going to do? I’m going to leave and you just take over right now. And it’s your turn.

Owen: If you have to go to the bathroom, Uncle Leo, then you just go. You probably should.

Leo: I do. Well I’m getting old now and the catheter’s not working like it used to.

Owen: It happens with the elderly. I understand. Let’s fix Twitter while Leo’s gone because he can’t fix it.

Leo: What are you talking about with Twitter? Twitter’s good. I like the Twitter. I like the new Twitter. Don’t you like the new Twitter?

Owen: Twitter’s trying to fix everything and algorithm-ate and automate and—

Leo: Well they kind of back down. They didn’t say they’re doing an algorithm, they’re just doing like more of that while you were away, here’s what happened stuff. I like that. Don’t you?

Alex: What I’d like to know, it does sound like though that the more popular ones are going to jump up on the top. I don’t understand whether you’re actually going to be watching those, if those are actually what you’re following or whether you’re going to get tweets that are just popular. Which is fine. My only question is, are they going to tell us which ones are which. Like is it going to be the first 5 are the most popular, and then it just goes back to the regular feed? I’m really ok with that as long as—because I don’t mind it trying to figure out that oh, maybe these are 5. Because really, once you start following more than about 100 people, it’s kind of mass chaos. You know as far as—

Leo: I follow 2,456 people.

Alex: I do about 500.

Leo: That’s too many.

Owen: That’s too many. I’m following 700 people.

Alex: And so you’re going to miss a lot of stuff. So I kind of get that. I really wish someone would let the user play with that algorithm a little bit. Like say when a certain number of people that I’m following like something, show it to me. Or like it would be great for us to have some tools to kind of play with that. It would probably give them a lot of feedback too.

Jason: I just wish they’d quit messing with my live feed. The live feed I want is the live feed. That’s Twitter’s killer, that’s Twitter’s secret sauce is the live internet. Twitter is the live internet, right?

Alex: I’m just saying if you could have a section that has 5, if they’re not messing with it, if they just said here’s 5 things that you missed that are popular that are right on the top, and the rest of was just the live feed, I don’t, to me that seems to be fine.

Owen: Alex, wait, hold on a second.

Jason: I like it. I just want it on its own tab.

Alex: Yea, I agree.

Jason: I want that like while you were away as its own tab. Get rid of that dumb moments thing and make the while you were away its own tab. I’d look at that thing all day. I’d probably scroll down and look at all kinds of stuff on there. I just don’t want it on my live feed.

Owen: Everybody here just said how much they dislike iTunes, right? Twitter is starting to look like iTunes to me and it needs to get back to looking like Twitter to me. Like so if I want to see the top 5, they don’t have a good track record of doing that. Again. Moments is nothing but advertisements. It’s not moments. Because when I see hashtags blown up about things going on, it’s not what’s in my Moments. And then when it comes into Moments it’s two days late. That’s not a Moment. That was yesterday. But they’re not doing it right. And they still show me stuff from 5 hours ago like underneath my first 5 or 10. So now you want to put it on the top? I want live. I came on there to see what I’m talking about Donald Trump, I want to get in there and start yelling at people, I want to see what everybody’s talking about. I don’t want to scroll down to the bottom, get back to the midsection, click the Moment, then go through the tunnel to get to where I’m supposed to get to. It’s too much.

Jason: Yes, yes.

Leo: But it is true though, isn’t it? And there’s nothing like this. Like watching the NBA dunking derby or the Republican debate last night. Having Twitter by your side makes that so much more fun, don’t you think?

Owen: It makes it real. You can’t yell at people on Facebook.

Leo: And I love OhDoctah, I follow you because I love to see what you’re going to say.

Owen: I get tweets when I don’t tweet about what’s going on that’s important. People are like, “You’re not watching the debate? Why aren’t you yelling at people? Get on here and start yelling about the debate.” And you can have that free-flowing, click into a hashtag, see something that some Russian mom in Ukraine tweeted about it because she’s watching. Like it’s live. Facebook is just a whole bunch of angry people reacting to stuff they saw two days ago. And I know Twitter’s not having a whole user explosion, but I just assumed that all the smart people have stayed there and there’s not that many smart people left to sign up.

Alex: And I think you can also have all these—the great thing about Twitter, with the GOP debates for instance yesterday, we got into a conversation. I wasn’t interested in the debate itself, but I was really interested in the fact that the mics were huge. I don’t know if you saw how big those were. The mics were like the size of you know, small acorns.

Owen: Size matters.

Alex: They’re, in this case they do. I’m pretty sure they’re WL185s and they’re really big. What?

Owen: The democratic debate they kept peaking out. With those little mics they kept popping. The mics were so awful.

Alex: Well you can see, well anyway. There’s a whole bunch of conversations about the mics. But you can’t have that because I don’t want to talk about the politics of it on Twitter especially. I’m just more interested in the technical aspects. So there were comments about background, comments about the cameras. And you know, but that’s the thing. You can do that live. So the live feed is, there’s something immediate and I think transient. Like the fact that it can be—I think there is a power to Twitter that it is the live feed and it will go away quickly. You know and I think that that was, it’s also one of the things I like about when I started doing Meerkat was the idea that it can’t be saved. It’s just like it’s going to be I’m going to turn it on.

Leo: What ever happened to Meerkat?

Alex: There’s people out there still using it. The saving part did not make me excited about it.

Jason: I mean Snapchat is kind of existed because Twitter had stumbled you know and it’s not being the live internet, not embracing who it is. It’s like Twitter is trying to be Facebook. And there are good things to what they do but like I said, put it in its own tab in terms of the while you’re away, this non-linear stuff. But also its business model. It’s trying to be an advertising space. It’s not very good. It doesn’t know enough about users the way Twitter does. Like its value is in live and its value is in its data. It’s got all this live data on sentiment of what’s happening. And this is a treasure trove of data for governments, for businesses.

Leo: I hear this all the time but why hasn’t somebody bought it? I mean they’re really, they’re in play aren’t they because of their low stock price. And two weeks ago we were talking about this. And Calacanis said, in fact we even heard Mark Andreesen and Silver Lake were looking at it. You’ve got to think Google has looked at it and turned it down by now. Apple maybe. But why hasn’t it been? So this is an article from The New Republic. I really liked it. It says you can’t kill Twitter even if it dies, by Naveet Alang. And this is the quote that I think is important. “Twitter is still the best answer to the question, ‘What’s happening in the world right now?’” No matter what else, it’s that and will continue to be that I think, right?

Jason: It is the live internet.

Leo: It’s the live internet.

Owen: Last night, last night during the debate, not about politics, but the fair moment in my life was when Jeb comes on. He’s like, “Donald Trump has insulted my family. My dad was the greatest.” Blah, blah, blah. “My mother, I was born 63 years ago and she is the strongest, most powerful woman I.” And then Donald Trump’s like, “Yea, your mom should be running.” And I went to Twitter and it was like did you hear what he just said? And like thousands of people were just like laughing at the same thing. We had one moment where we’re like he just called out your mom over you. It’s just amazing. And you can’t have that on anywhere else. Not even Snapchat. You can’t go Snapchat, your mom.

Leo: Twitter feels like a conversation.

Owen: Thousands of people in that moment right with you and it feels so good. Like it’s amazing.

Leo: I guess technically, Snapchat’s similar. Twitter feels like a conversation. It feels much more intimate and real and happening right now than any other platform out there. And that’s not going to go away.

Owen: They can’t sell Twitter for the same reason earlier when you guys were talking and I was really quiet because all three of you were on the we are the world, we are the children and technology’s saving the earth. I was real quiet. I didn’t say one word. And that’s the thing that goes on with the bubble. You guys are so happy but we also downplay and downtrodden everything. Who wants to buy something when every dude with a laptop is writing, “Well Twitter’s going to die next week and I don’t understand.” And then the speculation comes from Wall Street and they don’t know nothing about the internet and the devalue a company and all these games get played because in that world, it’s either technology’s going to save us all or technology’s going to destroy us all. And I live on the latter side.

Leo: Both are true. No, both are true. Both are true. You can have both. Both are true.

Owen: That’s why I let you guys have your moment. I did not take you down. I let all three of you—

Leo: Oh come one. Owen bubble burster Stone. That’s your new name. Owen BB Stone (laughing).

Owen: I’m just saying, Google over fishing and then tell me how we’re going to have all this technology when we don’t have any fish in 50 years and the world falls apart.

Leo: Hey if the world falls apart we’ll pay attention to that. But until then, I’ve got Twitter.

Owen: No.

Alex: At least we’ll know what’s happening live.

Leo: I think we’ll see it on Twitter first. Oh my God the world is falling apart. Where? Right here. I’m getting a lot of sunburn.

Jason: I think it was cool what you said though, Leo, because it touched on when those guys first built it, I remember they talked about the fact that it was their status update. They were inspired to make Twitter by the fact that some of them were just leaving clever status updates in their IM chat.

Leo: Oh, that’s interesting. I didn’t know that.

Jason: Yea, that’s what inspired them. And they’re like, “You know what? What if we had a service that is like making clever updates?”

Leo: With just each other, yea.

Jason: Yea, we’ll just put them someplace. And then if we all shared them. And then the world’s kind of a little bit less lonely place when you can see what other people are thinking. And of course it evolved from there. But that is the core of the idea. Like what’s happening right now. What are people interested and care about and thinking about things. And that live internet is still the core of what it is. And I think that if they stick to that, if they get back to the fact that they are the live internet and they have this data set that nobody else in the world has and they can monetize the crap out of that, you know they can sell it, build tools that help people get it that way.

Leo: They never figured out how to do that and frankly I wish, I hope they don’t because what I just want—because it should be anarchic. It should not be—that’s what’s wrong with Facebook, Google +, they’re data mining it. Don’t data mine it. Just let it be. Let Twitter be Twitter. Let Twitter alone.

Jason: They could be huge though.

Owen: You need money first of all so—

Leo: They’ve got enough money for 412 years.

Owen: Listen, nobody has enough money. This is America and it’s capitalism. Let me finish my point. Give me a moment. Everybody needs more money. You need more money. Leo, stop making any more money for the rest of the year, send me the rest of all your paychecks.

Leo: I’m getting really close to doing that. It’s called retirement Owen JJ Stone.

Owen: Listen to me. Keep on track. I’m saying Twitter also needs to embrace itself. Like I don’t like saying it because I feel weird saying it, but there’s the thing that’s called Black Twitter. And they generate so many comments and content and—

Leo: No, it’s amazing. It’s a whole subculture on Twitter.

Owen: And Twitter ignores them. They need to embrace them.

Leo: No, they should ignore them. Because if they pay attention to them it will change it. Black Twitter, we shouldn’t even say the words. Just let it be.

Owen: Ok, well letting it be doesn’t let people know about it because white people feel weird saying the word Black Twitter.

Leo: Black people know about it. I mean actually probably not everybody.

Owen: You say Black Twitter, people type in blacktwitter.com. They don’t know what they’re talking about.

Leo: And by the way, I’m glad you brought it up because I can’t bring it up. I’m glad you brought it up but I’m very aware of it. I use the code word urban. There’s very much of an urban subculture available on Twitter. I bet there’s other subcultures there too that we just don’t know about.

Jason: Oh yea. Oh yea.

Owen: And more people would love to be a part of the scene and enjoy it.

Leo: There’s probably gay Twitter, right? There’s probably furry Twitter.

Owen: Everything Twitter.

Leo: Right. You don’t want to shine too much light on that. You want it to be organically grown.

Owen: Don’t show any light on it. It’s at the bottom of the ocean, Uncle Leo, with the rest of the non-fish.

Alex: And I still think, I think that one of the original mistakes—

Leo: Where can I find Black Twitter? Can I Google that?

Jason: It’s a hashtag, right?

Alex: I was going to say that one of the original mistakes that they made that I think is part of their problem is they really catered to stars right at the very beginning.

Leo: Yea it was stupid.

Alex: So what happened was that people who had organically built, as soon as they had people who had organically built their—I mean you were in the top 5, or number 1.

Leo: I was number 1 for a while.

Alex: I was in the top 100 for like a week. But the thing is that people had—

Leo: Somebody asked me the other day, so Twitter shared some money with you, right? No (laughing). You put Twitter on the map. No, no, no.

Alex: And so the thing is you had a lot of people that had organically built up all that following, had done all of that stuff and then they just started promoting all these stars. And I get the thought process but it definitely stratified it in a way that I don’t think they’ll ever fully recover from. You know, where they really could have had—you know what YouTube did really well I think is that while there’s big stars on it, it really built up a culture around the little guy. You know YouTube has a much more of a culture around, you know YouTube stars in their world are way bigger than traditional stars. When we do online events, and we do a lot of online events, we always tell the people we work with, you’re much better off with a YouTube star than a Hollywood star because they’re going to bring people. They’re going to like—

Leo: There’s a culture I do not get. I do not get PewDiePi, I do not get Annoying Orange, I do not get any of this stuff.

Owen: It’s not for you.

Leo: Who’s it for?

Owen: For people that, ok—

Leo: Does your daughter love YouTube? Is she like a Michelle Phan fan?

Owen: My daughter is a Netflix fiend and Minecraft fiend. She hasn’t gotten on her YouTube dreams yet. But I’m just saying, certain things aren’t for you. They’re for a certain subculture. And the thing about YouTube stars is they still actually talk to people.

Leo: But are they real stars or are they? That’s my question.

Owen: They’re making money, Uncle Leo.

Leo: No, no, no. YouTube wants you to think they’re making money. 5 people are making money. Most of them like Michelle Phan are making money by selling stuff offsite. That’s a myth that people are making money on YouTube. Most people are working in the mines there, grinding out videos and making nothing.

Owen: Ivory tower. I know 2 people right now that live a regular life. They got four kids. They log in every day. The wife and husband have quit their jobs and they play video games and hang out with their kids all day. I know they’re not making millions of dollars, but they’re making $150,000-$200,000 a year.

Leo: I bet they’re working their ass off.

Owen: They’re making videos. How much—they’re sitting at home. They’re not—again, you know, people are making money. People are getting paid. And it’s not just the top 1% of people. Yes, some of those people have more than others. But people are making a regular good living off of YouTube right now.

Leo: And it’s hard, hard work. In fact there was an article in the New York Times about a YouTube star that has to work as a waitress because to keep ends together, and it’s very difficult for her. Because people look at her and say, “You. You shouldn’t be waitressing. What are you doing here?”

Alex: Like anything else it takes a fair amount of organization. We end up working because of what we do, like a lot of YouTube stars. And they’re making money. I’ll tell you one thing, number one there’s a bunch of them, it’s not 2, it’s not 5.

Leo: Actually is was Fusion. I apologize.

Alex: There’s a lot of them. Again, they’re not driving Rolls Royce’s but they’re making enough to live fairly comfortably. And it is real stars. I was standing, we were waiting to get in somewhere with one of the YouTube stars and he’s just standing there. And these Japanese tourists were just like super excited. Took a picture with him.

Leo: Of course, of course.

Alex: I’ll tell you, but he is super organized. He knows exactly what he’s doing. The thing is, in any industry, whether it’s the railroads or iApps, the apps for the iPhone or whatever. It’s not the people who purely have talent that are getting rich. It’s the people who mix some level of talent with an enormous amount of--

Leo: They get the new meaning. They understand what’s going on.

Alex: You look at a Justin Esarik who we—

Leo: Justine’s done great.

Alex: But she started—

Leo: She works her ass off.

Alex: I met her before. I mean we brought her onto MacBreak.

Leo: She has that work ethic. You discovered her.

Alex: The way I discovered here though was a podcast—I didn’t discover her, though. She was—

Leo: I remember you looked at me and said there’s this woman you need to meet because she’s incredible. She’s going to be a star.

Alex: She was going to be a star. I don’t think I did it but she—I remember we were at pod camp in Pittsburgh and she showed me this magazine. I said, “So what did you do on the magazine?” And she goes, “I did the magazine.” (laughing).

Leo: She’s a hard working person.

Alex: Super talented. But the point is that you know, she’s done fairly well.

Leo: But people always bring up these handful of great successes. And they exist. But read this. This is from Fusion. Get rich or die vlogging: the sad economics of internet fame. It was all so painfully awkward. That night, Brittany Ashely, a lesbian stoner in red lipstick was at Eveleigh, a popular farm-to-table spot in West Hollywood. The restaurant was hosting Buzzfeed’s Golden Globes party. For the past two years, Ashley has been one of the most visible actresses on the company’s four YouTube channels, which altogether have about 17 million subscribers. She does videos, bawdy videos with titles like “How To Win The Breakup which rack up millions of views. The awkward part was that Ashley wasn’t there to celebrate with Buzzfeed. She was there to serve them. Not realizing that her handful of weekly waitressing shifts at Eveleigh paid most of her bills, a coworker from the video production site asked Ashley if her serving tray was “a bit.” It was not. And I think this is much more the common—we always point to and I think it’s unfair to a lot of kids who watch. We point to the handful of YouTubers who work really hard and make, some of them make a lot of money. PewDiePie reportedly makes $7 million dollars a year. Most of them maybe make 6 figures but they’re working 90 hour weeks a lot. Are your friends working hard work? I mean they are if they’re sustainable.

Owen: They’re hanging out with their kids and they’re playing video games. It’s not easy. Nothing’s easy. Again it’s entrepreneurial spirit. I just want you to get out of the ivory tower and stop being down on someone making YouTube videos because the same thing—

Leo: I’m not down on it, I just don’t think you’re going to become rich and famous doing it.

Owen: Listen to me. Listen to me. Context, regular context. There are actors and actresses. There are B list actors and actresses. There are porn stars. There’s a different level for every level for every group that you want to be in a tier. Ask OMGChad how well he’s doing with his YouTube and his Minecraft and his 500,000 views per whatever and his Twitch and everything he’s working for. He’s working on his own now and all that kind of stuff. People are making money. No, not everybody’s making top tier money and people that have top tier money also might not know how to manage their finances like other people and that might be part of the story also. Because some people become a big huge actor and or actress and then end up on the street, Uncle Leo. I’m just saying there’s different tiers and levels. Stop being so extreme.

Leo: No, you’re wrong. You’re falling for the—and by the way, this is in Google’s interest that people believe this because they get you to work for free and create a ton of content which they make a lot of money on. You know who’s making money on YouTube? Google’s making money on YouTube. And a small handful of people. And I think you’re falling for Google’s propaganda.

Owen: I’m falling for people that I actually know. I don’t talk to anybody at Google. I can’t even get them to release my old YouTube account with all my old subscribers on it. So I’m not falling for what Google’s selling me, I’m falling for people that I know that make videos and the life that they’re living. I’m just saying.

Leo: If you want to believe the fairy tale, go ahead. It’s a fairy tale. And you talk to me in a couple years about how those people are doing. Seriously I know a lot of YouTube stars, believe me. I know as many as you do. It is not the golden rain pot at the end of the rainbow.

Owen: I’m saying, ok. So what’s the average minimum wage right now?

Leo: Well, I agree.

Owen: What’s minimum wage?

Leo: If you’re working for minimum wage and you have the skills to become a YouTube star, you can do better.

Owen: I’m trying to get you in perspective. So if a person is making $50 to $100 thousand dollars a year, and maybe they were making $30 some thousand dollars a year at their other job, they’re making a lot of money to them. I’m not saying that everybody’s getting rich. You keep using words like rich, golden—

Leo: No, a living’s fine. A living’s fine. But I think you have to work toward—

Owen: But they’re doing what they love. They’re being creative. You’re talking about selling the golden dream. I’m not selling the golden dream. I’m selling the reality. Some people are good at what they do, some people are not.

Leo: It’s like telling a bunch of high school kids you can be an NBA star.

Owen: Everybody could be TWiT.

Leo: No, they can’t.

Alex: Wait. I think when we look at any of these industries, whether it’s someone who goes into baseball or football or wants to become an actor or wants to become, you know, start a band, or wants to write an app for the iPhone, 99.999% of them are going to fail. So with all of this stuff, it’s going to be—and a handful of them are going to end up in the majors. You know and that is the reality of almost all of these talent based industries.

Leo: It’s a mistake to think that the majors are mainstream. I don’t think that that’s necessarily true.

Alex: I don’t think the majors are mainstream. I think there are unique people at the right time—

Leo: Well, I think there is that idea of you’re not a star because you’re on YouTube but if you could cross over like Fred Figglesworth to Nickelodeon, oh now you’re a star. And that’s also not true.

Alex: But I think most of them, most of the YouTubers that we talk to don’t care about crossing over.

Leo: Good. That’s a big change because that used to be the goal. Look at PewDiePie. He’s now on the YouTube Red Channel Scare PewDiePie where they have big sets. They’re spending lots of money to make videos of him getting scared. And you know what? I don’t think his audience is all that into it. I mean it will be very interesting to see what happens. They are now making feature length films with groups like laser team that most people have not heard of but YouTube, they’re big YouTube stars. We will see. We will see. I mean YouTube has a history of failure. I mean remember they spent more than a hundred million dollars on big channels that just—

Owen: I’m going to say it’s all relative. Some people do better than others. Some people do ok. And if you’re playing at a lounge bar every week and you still get to have your band that you started in high school—

Leo: Oh, of course. You could be doing dishes too. There are crap jobs out there.

Jason: I think the coolest thing in YouTube is actually the how-to stuff because there you can, there’s where you can take, that’s what some of the best content is.

Leo: Huge value. Huge value. We have a family member who is a truck repair guy. He goes around in a giant pickup truck, giant Ford F-350 loaded with parts. Drives up to tractor-trailers that are broken down and fixes them on the road because you can’t haul them back. He says he watches YouTube videos all the time to learn—he’s already doing very well. He knows his stuff but he watches YouTube videos. How do I fix that? Amazing.

Alex: We’ve got an argument about, we’ve got an argument in the office about the proper technique for—I know this is a little geeky but—the proper technique for soldering XLR cables. And of course, where do we go? We go to YouTube. And there’s like 6 of them. And all of them have like a million views. We’re like, “There’s a million people, like over 6 million people that watch videos about wiring XLR cables.” I don’t feel so special now.

Jason: It restores your faith in humanity, right, when you realize that many people are doing something like this. But actually cooly enough though if you have a YouTube channel and you’re doing that kind of thing, you can then translate that into other stuff too, right?

Leo: You have to I think if you want to make money. You have to sell stuff, or you know, you have to find an extra revenue source. There’s nothing wrong with that but that’s how it is.

Jason: Yea, and that’s how you have to approach it. You’re right to an extent. The YouTube star thing is like any hits based business. You need hits to keep coming in order to keep it going, but.

Leo: That’s true. You know I don’t make money on TWiT but it supports my true money maker which is shipping in White Castle burgers via truck because there’s a huge market. And I go and then we sell them off the back of the truck. And that’s where the money is. Have I mentioned that business by the way? I should probably plug that more. Anyway, good conversation.

Owen: You don’t have White Castle’s out there?

Leo: No. I wish we did. You do, right?

Owen: Yea, yea we do.

Leo: Man I love those.

Owen: I went to one like two months ago.

Leo: I love them sliders.

Owen: I haven’t been there in forever.

Leo: They slide right through you (laughing).

Jason Howell: You need to ship us some, Owen.

Owen: I’ll send them overnight. I’ll send you a whole trunkful. I’ve got 9 bucks in my pocket (laughing).

Leo: 9 bucks will buy you 300 burgers. It’s such a deal.

Owen: It’s like the burger Taco Bell. For 6 dollars you feed 14 families.

Leo: It’s 8th dinner. 16th breakfast.

Owen: Uncle Leo, I still love you.

Leo: I love you too, Owen.

Owen: We might disagree. I’m just saying that you know—

Leo: No, you have a good point. I’m not disagreeing. I am disagreeing with you but.

Owen: I’m agreeing with you in general. I’m just saying that some people have a different idea of what’s star. Case in point. Look at me, right? My friend, anytime somebody asks what I do—

Leo: I’ll never understand how you make a living.

Owen: He went out with me to California once because I was hosting a conference. And we were walking down the street and people were just like, “OhDoctah!” And he’s like, “People know who you are?” I’m like, “Yea.”

Leo: Why is that, OhDoctah? Why do people know who you are?

Owen: Why do they know? That’s the first thing you asked me. You’re like who are you and how did you get here. I’m saying like to certain people, I’m a star. And like nobody knows me. My friends are like, “How do people know you?” I’m like, “I’m not special and I don’t feel I’m special when people know me.” And you wouldn’t think so looking at my numbers on the internet (laughing). But I’m known well enough in certain circles. You look famous.

Leo: I just worry about almost a whole generation of kids. I mean I talk to so many 12 year olds who say, “I’m doing my Minecraft channel.” I worry about a whole generation of kids who—it’s the same thing in the inner city schools where they think they’re all going to be NBA stars.

Owen: Isn’t that everybody? That’s exactly what you just said. Everybody’s got a dream, Uncle Leo, and sometimes you wake up from that dream and you go flip these burgers at White Castles.

Leo: Have a dream. I agree to have a dream. But don’t let Google—Because see, Google makes money on this dream. That’s my fear here.

Alex: Yea, but the music industry makes money on the dream.

Leo: Oh, yea, there’s another winner you want to compare to.

Alex: The thing is, like all of these—Apple’s making lots of money on the dream that my iApp is going to sell a million copies. The bottom line is they provide an opportunity.

Leo: You know who gets rich? You know who gets rich? The rich get richer.

Owen: And that’s why I’m voting for Bernie Sanders.

Leo: And you know how the rich get richer? They prey upon people who want to be rich.

Owen: Well everybody wants to be rich. That’s why I tell you, stop talking about being rich. I love being averagely comfortable. You know people say to me, I’ve been offered jobs in major cities. And I’m like, I’ve got friends living out in San Francisco that make $250,000 dollars a year. And every once in a while they ask me for $500 bucks or $1,000 dollars because they can’t afford their rent for some reason. You know why? Because the cost of living is so high. I live in the bat cave with my McMansion because it ain’t nothing but a thing for me. I’ve got a 3,000 square foot house. I’m paying $1,400 a month for a mortgage. Like it’s nothing. Like so it’s all about what you want. It’s all about what you want.

Leo: So you did mention, I don’t know how we got into this conversation, that Google got an interpretation from the National Highway Transportation, I’m sorry, Traffic Safety Administration, about the self-driving cars.

Owen: That’s where we started, huh.

Leo: Yea, who’s driving that car? We’re going to talk about that in a second. Hey, before we do that, I know who’s driving this car. You know what, Jason? Let’s show a promo.

Narrator: Previously on TWiT.

Leo: It’s the ultimate virtual reality gaming machine. Will there be a CDROM on this?

Narrator: TWiT Live Specials.

Tonya Hall: We’re here in San Francisco at TechCrunch’s 9th annual Crunchies Awards.

Mick Butcher: It’s the crème-de-la-crème of the industry.

Alice Steinglass: The trick is less about creating a need, but helping schools, helping teachers figure out how to do that, how to offer it in the classrooms.

Narrator: Know How.

Bryan Burnett: We’ve got steam punk goggles.

Father Robert Ballecer: What we’re going to be doing over the next two weeks is I’m going to be showing you how to put together a completely functional set of these. But we want you to take our design and then run with it. Because no one wants to be walking around in the same set of goggles that everyone else has.

Narrator: Tech News Today.

Becky Worley: The money that’s coming in from all of these private investors from VCs, that’s what fuels innovation and then it hits a natural cap and that’s where we are right now.

Jason Howell: I think the difference between now and let’s say the first big tech bubble of the early 2000s is just that we’re here again. That’s the difference.

Narrator: TWiT. Take it to the bank.

Owen: Someone in the chatroom just said Crunch is so white.

Chris Stoikos: I think when people just let themselves be their real selves and let their beards explode out of their face, you’ll find that you just evolve into a very, very universal version of yourself than you already are.

Leo: The Dollar Beard Club. I need The Dollar Beard Club.

Alex: They don’t have connectors. I can’t do it.

Jason: Tonya was keeping her distance on that with that mic in there. She had her mic up like, fully extend the arm.

Leo: Hey, here’s what’s coming up. We’ve got a great week ahead, too.

Megan Morrone: Thanks, Leo. Here’s a look at some of the things that we’ll be talking about next week on Tech News Today. It’s Developer Week, San Francisco’s largest tech event for developers with a hackathon and a lot more. Plus Kara Swisher, Walt Mossberg and Peter Kafka will host Re/Code’s Code Media conference where we are bound to hear some very interesting insights into how tech is transforming what we watch and what we listen to. And 500 Startups will host their demo day. The NextBit Robin, the code integrated smartphone begins shipping to Kickstarter backers next week and will be offered to the public on Thursday, February 17th. We should be getting a Robin for review on this show sometime soon. All that and a lot more coming up on Tech News Today hosted by Jason Howell and myself, Megan Morrone.

Leo: Monday through Friday, 4:00 PM Pacific, 7:00 PM Eastern, midnight UTC, your daily news of tech news at its new time. Make sure you tune in Tech News Today. Our show today brought to you by Carbonite online backup here we come skidding into the tax season. Time to get those files together, your receipts. You have them, right? You didn’t lose them, did you? Wouldn’t it be terrible if your hard drive died tomorrow? That’s why you need a good backup solution. That’s why you need Carbonite. Automatic continuous backup and it’s not backup next to your computer where it can be stolen, burned to the ground, destroyed in an earthquake. But backup to the cloud where it’s safe. Your data goes on vacation in Carbonite’s climate controlled data centers. It’s got its feet up. It’s resting. It’s relaxing. It’s ready for you whenever you need it back to work. You just log onto your Carbonite on any computer, download all your stuff. They have free apps on the smartphones so you can get your stuff. You can even check to make sure it’s all there. There’s versioning if you use Windows. I tell you, it is a great choice for home, for office, more than a million and a half people trust Carbonite to back up their computers, their servers, their personal files, their business files. Don’t take that risk. Disaster happens. You have fire insurance. Get data insurance. Carbonite. Try it free right now. Just use the offer code TWIT. That way when you buy you get two free bonus months. Carbonite.com, offer code TWIT. Very affordable. In fact I was just looking at a price comparison of all the cloud backup services and at $59 and $99 a year for the personal plan, for as much data as you can get. I mean there’s no limit. That is easily the best deal out there on data, less than $5 bucks a month. Carbonite.com. Don’t forget the offer code TWIT for 2 months free. That makes it an even better deal. You’re watching This Week in Tech.

Jason: Apollo Creed’s son, right? Apollo Creed’s son backs up all his stuff to the cloud, backs up all his data to the cloud.

Leo: That’s right. It’s in the cloud, man, you don’t have to worry. Actually I do that all the time. We go to a restaurant and I’ll take a picture of the specials menu. The camera phone has invented whole new reasons for taking pictures. It’s your memory.

Alex: It’s like literally, I take pictures of anything that I’m interested in. And of course—

Jason: If you go to the store, Whole Foods, you have to check out and you have to give them the numbers. You have to tell them when you buy a little thing in bulk like you know, nuts or something. Pecans. And you go and they’re like, “What was the number?” And you’re like, “Oh, crap. I forgot to write it on the back.”

Leo: Take a picture.

Jason: So I started, no I just started hmm take the picture of it. Boom. And that’s that. And then come to the checkout. There it is.

Leo: My son and his friends were over. I found a pair of keys. I started texting him a description. “Oh your friend left his keys here. They look—“ And then I realized, what am I doing? I took a picture. I sent him the picture. He sent it to all his friends. I thought, what am I doing? It’s hard to get into those habits, you know. Now I have to remember to talk to my Amazon Echo.

Alex: My big thing is I, every time somebody gives me a business card I just immediately take a picture of it. Like as soon as I walk away from them I’m like—

Leo: Do you have software you use that scans it?

Alex: I don’t. I should. I just want to make sure that I don’t lose the card.

Owen: You stick it in your pocket and you dump your pocket out and it’s gone. You lost it.

Leo: So Google had a really interesting question. A letter that they wrote to the NHTSA, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. The director of the self-driving car project at Google wrote to them saying, “Hey. Who’s driving a self-driving car?” Well currently the law is whoever’s sitting in the left hand front most seat—

Alex: Is accountable.

Leo: Is accountable. And as there, you know the wheels and the pedals are accountable. But one of the problems is Google’s cars don’t have a wheel and a pedal.

Alex: Which really bothers me.

Leo: So Google said, “We need an interpretation of the law.” We say there are a couple of possible interpretations. One, you can interpret the term driver as meaningless (laughing) for the purpose of self-driving cars. There’s no human driver. And just say it’s inexplicable. Two, you could say the driver and operator are referring to the software. Three, you could say whoever’s sitting in what would be the driver’s seat or some designated seating position, perhaps the left front outboard seating position is the driver regardless whether that person can drive the car.

Alex: The key is by the way is you just sit on the other side of the car.

Leo: Make sure that seat’s empty.

Alex: Yea, exactly.

Leo: Who’s driving the car? Nobody’s driving this bus.

Alex: You put tape over that like you do not sit here.

Leo: So really I was kind of impressed. They published this letter. It was very long and thoughtful and they really went back and forth. And I really found if fascinating. But ultimately they decided that for purposes of the law, for purposes of liability, for future regulation, we’re going to consider the software to be the driver. NHTSA interprets the software driving system, SDS, as the driver or operator of the vehicle. And they go through all the paragraphs of the vehicle statutes saying we agree that the SDS is the driver. So now you know.

Alex: You know this is all the end, this is the end of people driving.

Leo: I hope so. Because it turns out we’re bad drivers.

Alex: It is like, but I was really thinking about it, how much I dislike driving and how much I’d like to have this. But really, our generation is the last, or my kids might drive. My kids that are 6 and 8.

Leo: They might be the last generation of people who will learn how to drive a car.

Alex: I think that by 2040, possibly earlier, it will not only be unlikely for a human driver to be driving, but illegal.

Leo: Wow.

Owen: Illegal?

Alex: This is my big prediction. Come back to TWiT in 2040 and see how I do.

Jason: All right.

Leo: I’ll be here.

Alex: But it will either be illegal for a human to drive on a public road or it will be in discussion about making it illegal because the cars, once the cars are autonomous—

Leo: I’ll be 84 years old, but I will be here to talk to you about that.

Alex: I told you, I told you it was going to be this way.

Leo: Because you know what? We’re going to have genetic modification. I’m going to be younger in 25 years.

Owen: You might not be able to drive if you’re old. I can see them saying, ok, if you’re 65, 70 years old you cannot drive anymore. But the actual joy of driving which I love doing, you can’t take that away. People are not going to let you take that away from them. We have sports cars. We have racing. We have all these things. People aren’t just going to stop driving. Just because you guys don’t want to drive because you live in major cities and it sucks, people love to drive.

Leo: That’s exactly what horse and buggy drivers used to say. You know people love horses.

Jason: But people still ride horses for fun.

Leo: Yea, for fun. Driving will happen for fun.

Alex: The problem is they’re going to get to a point where they realize that 99% of the accidents, it’s going to get by 2040, 99% of accidents are created by human drivers. It’s slowing down the entire progress.

Leo: Wait a minute. At this point, I would say 100% of accidents are caused by human drivers (laughing). At this point I don’t think there are a lot of robots on the road.

Alex: You’re going to get to a point where there’s—what will start the conversation is when half the cars on the road are autonomous and the other half are human. And they’re going to go—

Leo: Humans are causing all the accidents.

Alex: Humans are running into the cars. They’re causing the accidents. They’re doing all this stuff and they’re going to go-

Owen: What if someone hacks into your car and drives off a cliff or something glitches and somebody deletes a code and the first letter of the street sign comes off and it runs into a pole.

Leo: These things happen.

Owen: Look, we need to drive. Just stop talking about it because it’s making me upset. I already got my comfort animal from when you messed up.

Leo: I see you’re hugging your husky there.

Owen: People want to drive. Driving’s important. And I’m not giving up on what Uber’s going to do to all these people that think that they’re making this money in 5 years and they buy all these cars.

Leo: How many people do you think will be killed by hacked automobiles in the year 2020?

Owen: If it’s just one, Leo, it’s one too many.

Leo: How many people do you think were killed last year in auto accidents? 30,000. 30,000. In the US.

Owen: People die smoking cigarettes, but I’m doing that. People are still smoking cigarettes. And we ain’t banned that yet.

Leo: Well that’s another story for another day. We really ought to ban that.

Alex: We have actually banned that from most places, public places because of how it affects everyone else. And I think that that’s the issue is that the reality of what’s killing them, the car is the smartphone. Because no one will—I would much rather have, I don’t rent very often now because I just Uber around when I get to a location that I’m working in and the reason is because I want to go back to work. I want to do whatever—even if it’s not work, I want to go back to Facebook or Google or CNN or whatever. I don’t want to drive in some other country anymore, or some other city. And so, and I find it annoying when I have to do it now. And I think that my kids, my older kids who are 21 and 19, they don’t have any interest. I’m trying to persuade them to get a license. They don’t have any interest. Like they do their thing and they’re not interested in driving at all.

Owen: You’re also living in a city. People who live in rural areas, kids they need a car because they need a car to get around. It’s also where you live and the environment that you’re in. And that has a lot to do with it. But who also wants to do the speed limit? I’ve got places to go, I can’t be sitting there in this car doing 25 miles an hour when I like to do 45.

Alex: I guess my whole thing though—

Leo: You’re the problem, Owen, you are the problem.

Alex: You’re going to be the one that creates this, outlaw humans.

Leo: I can’t drive 55.

Owen: Me and all the people that, all those Uber guys that are ruining the jobs for taxis, in 5 years they’re going to be really upset when they come to find out that Uber was playing them for fools and their going to be driven around in taxis that are automated.

Leo: Who are these old people and why are they on the screen here?

Owen: They’re getting driven around in Google cars.

Leo: Oh, this is driving around in the car.

Jason: There’s a big challenge though on our way to self-driving vehicles. And that’s that the software and a lot of this is being worked out right now, right, the software is having to make decisions based on algorithms is how it’s likely being thought of about when I am a car and I come up to a dog that’s in the road, and I’ve got two people in the back. If I stop then it’s going to give everybody whiplash or I hit the animal. What do I do, right?

Leo: You run.

Jason: Or if it means swerving and hitting a tree, but—

Leo: Eh, there’s this whole ethical, it’s a whole ethical thing. I understand. But we can solve all that. You know what? It will still be better than 30,000 people dying from stupid.

Alex: But I don’t think it’s going to be a big thing. I think it’s going to be literally a generation of kids that grew up on their iPhones.

Leo: They won’t care. They’ll want to Snapchat more. It’s just more chances to Snapchat.

Alex: And this is the reason Google’s working on these cars because all the time you spend in your car is taking away from Google. That is why you have a self-driving car is because then you can keep on searching.

Leo: I think that the next thing is going to be self-smoking cigarettes because many, many more people die from smoking every year. And if they could just get the cigarettes to smoke themselves.

Alex: Just sit it over in the corner and let it smoke.

Leo: Yea. Let it smoke itself. It would save many lives.

Jason: We shouldn’t underestimate the step that’s going to take us between here and there.

Leo: No, I agree.

Jason: And there’s going to be a lot of people that are going to demonize technology when self-driving cars become a thing and it makes that one, the software makes that one choice that costs somebody a life. And you know, it does it. That is going to be a huge deal and the media is going to be all over it and there are going to be protests and people demonizing technology. And it’s going to be a difficult road between here and there. And there’s a lot of benefits to it. But it’s going to be, you know—

Leo: Here’s a cool thing. Here’s a good thing. Cheer up. Amazon has just released they licensed a game engine, it’s the one used to build Crisis, and they have now made it available free to anybody who wants to write a video game on a new platform Lumberyard. It’s a free 3D game engine. And GameLift, which is a service for building back ends for multiplayer games, and of course Amazon owns Twitch, so you automatically get Twitch built in. It is really interesting. I don’t know how many people have the skills to write their own video games, but the fact that you can get CryEngine without licensing it for commercial use, use Amazon as a back end is unbelievable.

Owen: How many new whipper snappers to the game who couldn’t afford to license or pay of engines are finally going to get their foot in and get a stronghold because of this thing called Twitch. And oh yea, Uncle Leo, let me tell you a couple people making a few dollars off of Twitch.

Leo: Twitch is great but they make money playing games. No, Twitch is good. You know how you make money on Twitch, though? You find benefactors in chat who just give you money because they’re lonely, rich people. That’s the way to make money on Twitch.

Owen: I know you’re not a loan, Uncle Leo, but I was just, if I could get a loan. If you sent me a check and it was blank, just know that I wouldn’t take advantage of you.

Leo: I know you wouldn’t. And that’s why that check is in the mail, Owen JJ Stone.

Owen: I appreciate you (laughing).

Leo: Funny thing though about this Lumberyard, they also released new terms of service. And just so you know, and this is always the case in terms of service, you can’t run a nuclear plant with the software, you know, but it says “Your use of the Lumberyard Materials must comply with the Amazon Web Services Acceptable Use Policy. The Lumberyard Materials are not intended for use with life-critical or safety-critical systems, such as use in operation of medical equipment, automated transportation systems, autonomous vehicles, air traffic control, that kind of thing. However, this restriction will not apply in the event of the occurrence (certified by the United States Centers for Disease Control or successor body) of a widespread viral infection transmitted via bites or contact with bodily fluids that causes human corpses to reanimate and seek to consume living human flesh, blood, brain or nerve tissue and is likely to result in the fall of organized civilization.” So there’s the good news.

Owen: Can we do a slow clap for Amazon for a few things. One for realizing the market. Two for helping out young upstarts. Three for the fact that not only is it free but they’re giving great power to it and elevating their brand to people who will pay for their service if they start making an income off of it. Like so many times big companies miss the boat. And Amazon has an aircraft carrier right now and they’re like “Look, everybody come aboard unless you’re a zombie and we’re about to take off into outer space.” It’s amazing.

Leo: I just think that finally there’s a tool against the zombie apocalypse that we can all count on.

Jason: We can all get behind that.

Leo: We can all get behind that.

Owen: Doesn’t your Tesla have an anti-bacterial mode or whatever?

Leo: It does. It has bio-weapon defense mode.

Owen: There you go. There you go.

Leo: I think I had to pay extra for that. And I don’t know why I did but I did. Elan is so brilliant. I am just, and everybody who buys a Tesla essentially, I mean talk about suckers on YouTube. I am just a sucker for anything Elan wants to put in there, I will buy. You want doors that go like this? I’ll buy it. I mean its insane mode, Ludacris mode, whatever. Bio-weapon defense mode. It has a filter that will literally filter out bio-weapon gasses. And there’s a button on the console you can press.

Alex: Don’t press it too often. You don’t want to use it up on unimportant things like general pollution and smog. You want to use it up when you need it.

Leo: I should check and make sure I bought that.

Owen: The only reason I don’t like Elan is because he’s that one guy right now on the Earth that is just like a better guy than most guys.

Leo: He is. He’s Tony Stark.

Owen: Like when you—not like Tony Stark. He’s just a dude that literally says, “I want to do that.” And everybody says, “You can’t do that.” And then he does it, whether he almost fails to do it. He’s like, “I want to do that.” And then he does it. I think to myself, “I want to go to the gym.” And I don’t go to the gym.

Leo: (Laughing) I know. I can’t even get to the gym. This guy’s going to Mars.

Jason: People mock Tesla.

Owen: I feel like such lesser of a man dealing with this dude in existence and it makes me angry.

Jason: People mocked Tesla for years. I remember people saying for years and years, “They’ll bring a car to market. They’ll never get that thing to market.”

Owen: Remember when they were publically traded? When they started publically traded. They’re a joke.

Leo: And by the way—

Jason: And the space, they’ll never get their rocket into the air. And they’ve had their troubles.

Leo: And Tesla lost a lot of money this quarter and the stock still went whew because they said we’re getting close. We’re going to start taking orders on the affordable $35,000 Model 3 in March.

Alex: And the rattling that you hear is everyone in Detroit shaking (laughing). It was cute when it was $85,000 a year, or $110,000 a year, but it’s not cute when it’s $25,000 a year.

Jason: CES, everything that was at CES on the cars and the car companies were talking a big game that everything that they were talking about it at CES was them running from Tesla and Google. They are scared. They are deeply, deeply scared about what Tesla and Google because those cars are increasingly, you know, they are shells for a lot of data and computing and machine learning and all of these kinds of things. And they’re, you know, electric, right? And so all of them were trying to talk that game about electric vehicles and about autonomous vehicles. But in many ways all of them are trying to catch up with what Tesla and Google are doing. They’re very—and rumored to be Apple as well. I mean more than rumored regarding some documents that shows Apple’s working on it. So it is more than—

Leo: In fact a strong rumor that Apple’s going to continue to try, they’ve been trying to buy Tesla. And the problem is Elan has his plans. He doesn’t want to sell it. But at some point I think he might.

Jason: If you were Elan I wouldn’t. That company could be bigger than Apple. I mean if they do, if they play their cards right. They’re ahead in the market—

Alex: And Apple doesn’t secede.

Jason: Yea, right, if Apple doesn’t secede. I mean the markets that they’re addressing transportation and energy, those are just massive markets that are going to define the next 50 years. If I was Tesla no way would I sell. Like they could be the biggest company in the world.

Owen: And it just shows you old school marketing and men that sit in a room and, I don’t know if you saw the Star Wars pool toys that went out into the world this week, but I mean they look like adult toys. And you just think, there’s somebody who sits on the board, who sits in the meetings—

Leo: (Laughing) I got to find a picture.

Owen: --who sits in the room, there’s the diagram. And then somebody made it. And then it still got passed all these checks and balances. And you’re like why?

Jason: Yes.

Owen: Detroit’s sitting there and you know what, Elan’s saying, “You know what? Forget it. I’m not going to sue you guys anymore. You want my thing? Take it.” And they still can’t make anything like it. I don’t know if you ever sat in a Tesla, it’s not the most comfortable seat in the world to be sitting in anyway.

Leo: I don’t care.

Owen: No, no, I’m saying it’s not that hard to replicate it if you really wanted to do it. But they sit on their old world laurels and by the time they realize that they must change, it’s going to be too late and the too late is looking like it’s coming on the way.

Leo: And by the way—

Jason: And they’re trying. They’re trying hard but it’s just models that—they have to become data companies. They have to be computing companies. They have to become electrical vehicle companies. And these are just so massive it’s turning the Titanic, right? And they’ll say, “We’ve been working on these things for 10 years.” But they’re just getting lapped by Google and Tesla on all the important things.

Alex: When you look at some of these companies like Apple, if Apple steps into it Apple’s got way more cash than all of the American car makers combined.

Leo: Really?

Alex: And so the thing is Apple, it’s not that they’re competing with little companies that, these little upstarts. They’re competing with companies that are bigger than they are and have a lot more resources. And don’t have any history that they have to deal with.

Jason: I mean Google has hired up, you know the DARPA Challenge, the robot challenge where they try to get cars that drive. So Google has hired up like so many of those people it’s actually kind of a shame because a lot of them, they would do a lot of papers and everything about self-driving vehicles and autonomous and all of these things. Google has hired so many of them.

Alex: Well Google and Uber have stripped Carnegie Melon to the bone.

Leo: Wow.

Jason: Yes, yes, they have taken all these people out of the market. So they’re behind the firewall now. They’re not contributing to academic research which then in once sense hurts the existing players because they can’t, they don’t have the R&D invested in these things. And they’re not hiring them. They’re hiring a lot of these people. It’s not that they aren’t. They are too. GM and Ford and Toyota and everyone but Google and Tesla have been so singularly focused on these issues that they’re just taking these huge leaps that the car companies aren’t. They still have to protect their existing businesses and they still have to make sure, they have to invest a lot and make sure those businesses keep their profits up for the quarter. And that’s the innovators dilemma. And it’s going to come home to roost over the next few years unless they make some big changes. And they’re trying but we’ll see. We’ll see.

Leo: We’ll take a break, wrap this up in a moment. Jason Hiner from TechRepublic, CBS Interactive, and author of a book that just came out Follow the Geeks. Go to followthegeeksbook.com to get your copy. I hear it has an excellent 9th chapter. Actually all ten of them are fabulous.

Jason: TWiT users, the code for TWiT users too. TWiT, you can get a 10% discount on the book. Because the TWiT army is so awesome.

Leo: Thank you. Offer code TWiT at the website, right? Followthegeeksbook.com.

Jason: Yes, sir.

Leo: A Squarespace site. Alex Lindsay, pixelcorps.com. OhDoctah, no one knows where he comes from. Probably not this planet but he does have a husky.

Owen: This is you, Uncle Leo. This is your spirit animal.

Leo: That’s my spirit animal?

Owen: This is a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

Leo: (Laughing).

Owen: That’s you. As soon as you told me you didn’t—

Leo: I’m a sheep in wolf’s clothing. I’m the opposite.

Owen: You never saw Rocky. I’m not falling for anything you say to me anymore. Until you fix your life I don’t believe anything you say. You’re not fooling me. Fool me twice shame on—what did Bush say? Fool me three? Whatever.

Leo: He couldn’t figure it out either by the way (laughing).

Owen: Someone in Tennessee. You’re fooling people.

Leo: The Tennessee and the thing with the thing and this show is brought to you by my mattress which I love. Actually not just my mattress, my pillow and my mattress. Casper. Casper, another one of these great companies that’s reinventing a business you would have thought, “Well, that’s done. That business? Everyone knows how to do that.” No, because you know what? A mattress stores sucks. It sucks the profit out of the mattress. I mean they have to double the cost just to support the mattress store. It sucks the life out of you because you go in and it’s bright in the store and the sales girl’s looking at you like “What are you going to do to my mattress?”

Alex: You take a nap and they get upset.

Leo: You try to lie on it. You try to snog on it. And they don’t like that. And how do you know if it’s a good mattress? You don’t. Casper has a better way, folks. And everybody I know who has a Casper including myself loves their Casper. Made in the US with state of the art obsessively engineered technology to give you a breathable, comfortable mattress that simultaneously gives and supports you. That’s what you want. That’s what you want in a spouse and a mattress. Somebody who will give and support. It has just the right sink and bounce and actually show the video of me sinking and bouncing at the same time. There’s our Casper. Queen size in a box that size. It’s amazing. You open it up and as somebody pointed out it doesn’t smell like latex or anything. It’s fresh. It’s delicious. You open it up. That’s a Tyvek sleeve. They give you a little cutter in there. They give you a little book. It’s so cute. They really package it up. And look. The thing it turns into a queen size bed. Now, you say, “But wait a minute, Leo, how do I know if it has the perfect?” Well, you could watch this video. That’s sink and bounce. Or you could order a Casper. They’re very affordable because they don’t have to pay that store overhead. And we’re going to give you $50 bucks off when you use our offer code TWIT. And you have 100 nights to enjoy that mattress. And if at any time in that first 100 nights you say, “Ah, it’s not for me,” they’ll come and get it and refund you every penny. You don’t have to worry about returns because they know there’s no way you’re going to buy this mattress unless they make it easy to return if you don’t like it. You will like it. You will love it. And by the way, get a couple of pillows. Dual layer pillows, they are the most comfortable. I thought I was a feather pillow guy. I have cast aside my feather pillows. I know, you have never heard me say that before. These are the bestest pillows. I don’t know what it is. I don’t know. I just love it. And very affordable. $500 for a twin. Get the biggest they got, $950 for the king size. Compare that to any other mattress in the mattress store, you’ll see you’re getting a great deal and a great mattress. Go to Casper, C-A-S-P-E-R.com/twit and as I said, use the promo code TWIT, $50 dollars off. Terms and conditions apply. You can find those at Casper.com/terms logically enough. $50 dollars off with the promo code TWIT at Casper, C-A-S-P-E-R.com. A week from today, Samsung is going to unpack the S7 and we’re going to cover that live. It’s right before the radio show, 10:00 AM Pacific. We will bring you live coverage of Samsung’s event in Barcelona, in Barcelona for the Mobile World Congress. We’ve got a team there covering this. They’re flying out soon.

Alex: Who went?

Leo: Who’s at Mobile World? I don’t—Carson’s producing it. Is Father Robert hosting it? Do you know, Jason?

Jason H: I missed the flight. I think Fr. Robert is going.

Leo: And Owen, you’re going, right?

Owen: I missed the flight.

Leo: Oh, man.

Owen: I had to be here for you today, so you know, next time.

Leo: These things happen.

Owen: Next time.

Leo: These things happen. So we will give you—and the same day, the 21st, LG’s going to announce the G5, the successor to what I think was arguably one of the great phones of 2015 the G4. We also as Megan mentioned we’re going to get that new Robin phone. This is all of a sudden. We just got used to the phones and now we’re getting all new.

Alex: Because Apple’s going to have more.

Leo: All new phones.

Alex: Small.

Jason: The 5Z.

Leo: The 5Z. Actually the 5SE. Are they calling it the 5’s? Apple’s apparently going to ship that right after its announcement on March 15th according to the rumor mongers.

Jason: And possibly an iPad 3 Air.

Leo: Yea, the iPad. Because they didn’t do a new iPad last fall. They did the mini but they didn’t do a full Air so yea, a new iPad Air 3. I’m really looking, and we talked about this on MacBreak Weekly, to see a pen. A pencil.

Alex: I think a pencil.

Leo: For the new iPad Air.

Alex: I’m not interested in any iPad that doesn’t have one now that I have. I think my iPad Pro is too big for most of what I want to do. What I really want is a mini with a pencil.

Owen: It’s funny how that works when you know, the other people have been having styluses for a long time and Apple finally. It’s so amazing when Apple releases something. Oh my God. I’m like, dude, anyway whatever.

Leo: It really is a nice pencil.

Owen: It really is. It is excellent. They do everything better. I get it. Last thing that’s not Apple related before we go. I just want to ask you your opinion. SoundCloud ain’t got no money and it makes me sad.

Leo: Wow, isn’t that sad? $70 million dollars they’ve lost over the last 2 years. Analysts say and I don’t hear anyone arguing against it that they will run out of money if they don’t get somebody to put more money into SoundCloud they’re actually just going to go belly up. And that is tragic.

Owen: It hurts my heart almost as bad as you not watching Rocky. It’s sad.

Leo: Well I’m going to watch Rocky but I don’t know if anything can save SoundCloud.

Owen: Apple, go buy it. Apple buy it.

Jason: Google should buy them. Google’s into like acquisition charity. Like this is a perfect case.

Leo: For those of us who don’t—actually I use SoundCloud, but for those people that don’t use SoundCloud, what is SoundCloud, Owen?

Owen: SoundCloud is the way that I listen to a lot of my podcasts and content and I find a lot of new artist for music that aren’t in the iTunes Store, stuff like that. I find a lot of bands, alternative rock bands, like small groups. I find a lot of comedians on SoundCloud. I’ve enjoyed SoundCloud for a long time and the app works great. It’s just an awesome platform.

Jason: It’s also like the most—You know I talk about how all CMSs suck and some suck a little less. I mean the process, they make the process of publishing a podcast for example so much better from what it used to be. People on this podcast know that are listening who’ve done some of this before the days of having to edit RSS feeds and XML and all of that stuff. SoundCloud makes it so much easier to just start a podcast, publish it and just be able to focus on building great content rather than all of the stuff you have to go through to do it. And there’s others who have done it but I think like we talked about on the podcast, they sort of built a better mouse trap. They built and audio CMS essentially that is easier and better.

Leo: It’s YouTube for audio, basically.

Jason: It is, yes. It’s YouTube for audio. Very good. Perfect.

Leo: And it would be sad but you can also see why it’s hard for them to make money because you can use it for free and do most of you want to do.

Owen: They did limit, they did put limits on it, well I don’t know how recent it is, but they put limits on that now where you can’t just upload unlimited hours. I think they have a 6 hour, 10 hour cap now or something like that before you have to jump up on their service.

Leo: Enough for a mini-podcast however.

Owen: Yea.

Leo: You know what the new thing for podcast is, is putting a video on Facebook. I thought this was really interesting. WNYC which does a lot of podcasts has started doing this on their Facebook page. Of course you can’t post audio only on Facebook. So they post a static video, a static still and the thing is if starts playing, of course audio doesn’t auto-play which is kind of a problem.

Owen: Cool trick that I’m stealing from someone because I just did my first solo podcast last week is I’m just going to go on my PlayStation and like fail very badly at Call of Duty or an NFL game or something, however long it takes for the podcast is, upload it and then rip it back down and submit the video of me playing a game with my audio underneath of it. So you’ll have something to look at and be engaged in if they want to watch it.

Leo: There you go.

Owen: But that is a very good idea.

Leo: Yea. Yea.

Owen: More so than a static image, so.

Leo: Yea, put a little video in it. What’s so hard about putting a little video in it?

Jason: Or some images. I mean we’ve done this a little bit. TechRepublic pays for SoundCloud Pro. The TechRepublic podcast we run off of SoundCloud.

Leo: Oh good.

Jason: Yea and we’ve done the thing where we posted them on YouTube and put an image up of us so people can listen to them that way because lots of people listen to stuff on YouTube all the time. People have YouTube open in a window and have that tap not even active that are listening to stuff so you can play to that demographic too using YouTube Video. And you can use Facebook video too. We haven’t done that.

Leo: It’s not the idea in fact even SoundCloud’s saying, “Hey we’re doing great. We’re growing.” But there’s some concerns when you lose that much money and you’re basically taking it out of the investors pockets and you need more investment. They just raised $77 million dollars so.

Alex: So someone’s invested.

Leo: Someone’s putting money into it. And if you’re a rich person listening, please do.

Jason: They’re in Europe too. They’re in Germany or Sweden.

Leo: Yea, Germany. They’re in Germany.

Jason: So I mean it’s one of those things. The European startups, right, like there’s a lot of good things happening in the European startups.

Leo: But it’s tough to raise money I think.

Jason: It is. It’s harder.

Leo: They don’t have a tradition of venture capital.

Jason: It’s kind of what I was getting to. It’s a little risk and failing is looked at badly. Whereas here it’s like yay you had three companies that went under and your 4th one hits great. It’s a thing where in other cultures it’s still one of those things. Failure is kind of a black mark.

Leo: I wanted to mention this because we probably mentioned the Jesus Christ post, blog post. Jesus Crust, I’m sorry. Did I swear? I apologize. Jesus Crust blog post in which he reported Windows 10 was phoning home like thousands of times. Thank you, Ed Bott who is a Windows reporter for ZDNet and a friend of this network and has been on TWiT many times. He says, “When it comes to Windows 10 privacy, don’t trust amateur analysts.” He points out that if you look at the data from Jesus Crust it’s not a problem of Windows phoning home at all and in fact it’s Windows trying to get online and saying what’s going on, why can’t I get online? It’s net BIOS. It’s most of the connections were to a Teredo server which connects IPV6 addresses to IPV4. And of course because it couldn’t get through because it was blocked it kept trying. There’s no evidence that Windows 10 phones home at all by any means. Thank you, Ed Bott, for setting the record straight. And I want him to do the same.

Jason: Just one note on that, that’s good and Ed did a great job of it like he always does on that. And obviously at ZDNet I worked for TechRepublic and ZDNet so full disclosure there. Ed does great stuff. I’m putting an asterisk on that though because I also just had an IT consultant. I feel like I would be dishonest if I didn’t say it and I’m putting an asterisk on this because I had an IT consultant tell me this week that if you have a Windows 10 machine that he could not, it kept phoning home on something and they disabled it, disabled this certain update that it was trying to do. And they said like it was like it kept doing it. Like they had disabled it and they had done it and I’ve heard multiple reports like this. And so because this is something that we cover and I keep hearing these reports, so they’re telling everybody out there who is an IT administrator and an IT consultant and helping people sort of maintain their privacy and security and all of that, you know, just keep an eye on this and make sure that you know what’s happening on your network because there are cases where some of this stuff is causing problems by some of this phoning home stuff. But do like what Ed did, do your own research, analyze your own packets, do all of that kind of stuff.

Leo: Take it with a grain of salt.

Jason: And treat it with a grain of salt because the reports that you hear and like Ed said, what analysts you’re listening to and do some of your own research.

Leo: And you know one of the things that really makes people a lot of money on Twitch and on YouTube and I’d like to make some of that money is the let’s play videos. So I think as we end this show we should all get together to play the new game from the Federal Bureau of Investigation called The Slippery Slope to Violent Extremism. Don’t be a puppet. You ready everybody? You want to play the game? Have you played this game yet? Use your arrow keys to steer through the lands of violent extremism. Oh, I blew up. Hit the space bar.

Owen: This is exactly how the NSA hacks into your computer. Good job, Uncle Leo.

Leo: But I’m avoiding the slippery slope to—oh, again. Violent Extremism wins. Hmm mmm.

Owen: No one go to this site. No one does this.

Leo: This is the FBI.

Owen: They’re hacking into his system right now.

Leo: No they’re not. How could they be doing that? It’s just Flash. Wait a minute.

Owen: You think it’s just Flash.

Alex: They just downloaded your whole hard drive.

Owen: And you’re playing this game? Exactly.

Leo: You know wait a minute. The enemy sited for this injustice.

Alex: Did you sign a TOS? The TOS is like we can copy everything and follow you around.

Leo: We must defend our traditions. The use of violence is the only way to defend our beliefs. Our violent actions will result in a better future. Don’t be a puppet. I don’t want to be a puppet. Thank you, FBI. Free the puppet.

Jason: Like study at home for national security.

Leo: Do you think this is going to work in hunting Jihad?

Alex: No, no. Here’s the thing is that there’s a lot of conversation right now on MDC about this, about trying to, like how do we reach out. And the reality is the best way to reach out to extremists or people that are on the brink of extremism is to find people in that community that are not extreme and empower them to say stuff. But of course everyone wants to control it so much that we’ll think of something. Someway for us to talk to the people out there. Rather than talking—I had a guy sitting next to me on a plane that was, I think he has a podcast or a live thing on Periscope called Ask a Muslim.

Leo: That’s good. I like that.

Alex: That’s great.

Leo: That’s what you should do.

Alex: You can ask him questions and he’ll just answer. It’s just a live thing on Periscope and he’s just answering all these questions about, and some of them are haters and all the other stuff but there’s a lot of good questions. He just answers those things. And I was like that’s the kind of person, because he’s you know, he speaks on all these things about not falling into extremism, but also talking to people about how to push that way. And the thing it is, what you need to do is take people like that and let them do something. Give them the money because they’re just doing their own little thing and let them talk about it, not talk about it for them.

Leo: And by the way, this thing just crashed my Macintosh so (laughing).

Owen: Exactly. Alex, by the way, that idea you just had is common sense and that is not something that the upper echelon thinkers in America get in line with. What you said is what should happen but some people just are common sensical enough to get it done.

Alex: It requires a certain level of trust that is hard to come by sometimes.

Owen: I mean Leo just went on a game with the NSA checking out his stuff. He’s got trust. I don’t know why.

Leo: All I say is if we can win their hearts and minds and download their hard drives, the rest will follow. That’s all I can say. Owen JJ Stone. You know him as OhDoctah. Ladies and gentleman.

Owen: No, no, no. Do me last. I’ve got a message for the people. Everybody else goes first.

Leo: You want to end with a message to the people?

Owen: Yes. Yes.

Leo: All right. I’ll get ready, I’ll get a theme song ready for you just for your message to the people.

Owen: I appreciate that.

Leo: Let’s start on the right than. Jason Hiner, Techrepublic.com.

Jason: Yes, sir.

Leo: But more importantly by the GD book, followthegeeksbook.com.

Jason: Yes and @followthegeeks on twitter. Thank you. It was a lot of fun. It’s been very educational, inspiring, exhausting and just keeping up with people like you, Leo. And again, TWiT readers, thank you for all the feedback and support on our journey. You know we self-published it, released the chapters as we went and got great feedback and then included some of that feedback in terms of the people. There’s the comments that we got from the audience, the best ones we included at the end of each chapter as well. And there’s a lot of TWiT readers, a lot of TWiT listeners that are quoted in the book I’m sure because of that.

Leo: Followthegeeksbook.com. That’s Jason.

Jason: TWiT, 10% off you can use when you go to purchase it. Just for TWiT readers or listeners, the code TWiT will get you 10% off.

Leo: Nice. Mr. Alex Lindsay, PixelCorps. You did the Final Cut user group, everything.

Alex: That did not go well.

Leo: Did not go well? Did not go well?

Alex: It’s up there. You know we didn’t have the space really set up yet and it was a new team and you use it as an R&D thing so it was a little rough.

Leo: Did you tweet that link on how to work on a movie set? Tweet that, would you?

Alex: I didn’t write it but I’ll tweet it.

Leo: Yea, I know you didn’t write it but you put it on Facebook and I thought it was great and everybody should read it.

Alex: It’s on my public thing too on Facebook. But I’ll tweet it as well.

Leo: Because it’s really, it’s a great article. Follow him on Twitter, @alexlindsay with an A. And now, ladies and gentlemen, a final word from Reverend Doctor Owen. Turn up my sound here. Reverend Doctor Owen JJ Stone. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you, OhDoctah (laughing).

Owen: Your music is messing up my mood.

Leo: Wait a minute. What do you want? You want something a little quieter?

Owen: No music. You stop talking. You’re not even there right now. I’m talking to the people.

Leo: Shh. Quiet.

Owen: First of all, it’s Valentines Day. Happy Valentines Day! If you’re out there and you’re alone, you’re not alone. Roses are red, violets are blue, if you’re alone, I’m here for you. You can tweet me, you can Facebook me, do whatever you need to do to get in touch with me and I’ll be there. I’ll send you messages, I might send you a digital hug because I know how rough it is to be alone. I’m stuck on an internet show with a whole bunch of dudes, I had no lady today. So I understand the pains you’re going through and I’m here for you. Two things I need you to do for me. My Iqmz is directed to my Facebook page, go listen to my podcast. It’s horrible but you can feel free to tell me that. The second thing I need you to do is tweet Leo, Facebook Leo, email Leo, write him a hand written letter and mail it to him and tell him he needs to watch Rocky I, II and III if not all of the Rocky’s. Please let him know that it is un-American to have not done such in his life. He is too old and too Caucasian to have not seen Rocky. He is not allowed to come to the east coast, get on a plane to the Midwest or leave San Francisco until he has seen Rocky I-III. I appreciate you in supporting me in making him do his American duty in election year. We’ve got to see this movie with Uncle Leo. We’ve got to make sure that he becomes an American the way he’s supposed to do! And I think that another TWiT is in the can.