This Week in Tech episode 852 Transcript

Leo Laporte (00:00:00):
It's time for TWiT, This Week in Tech, Alex Wilhelm here from tech brunch, Brian McCullough from the tech meme ride home podcast. And my favorite gastro nomad. Mike Elgan, Jack Dorsey's quitting at Twitter. What does it mean? What does Web3 mean? Alex explains and Microsoft finally backing down on some changes to Edge plus what's that mystery hut on the moon. It's all coming up next on TWiT.

Speaker  (00:00:29):
Podcasts you love, from people you trust... This is TWiT.

Leo Laporte (00:00:44):
This is TWIT, This Week in Tech. Episode 852 recorded Sunday, December 5th, 2021. Mystery hut on the moon. This Week in Tech is brought to you by ignite. Learn more about how ignite can protect your business from ransomware. See why it's rated number one for data security by real customers in G2 crowd. Start your free trial today@ignite.com by Stripe, whether you're an online or in person retailer, software platform, marketplace, or subscriptions, business like ours, visit stripe.com to learn more about how Stripe can support your business today. And by worldwide technology and Dell technologies with an innovative culture, thousands of it, engineers, application developers, unmatched labs and integration centers for testing and deploying technology. At scale WWT helps customers bridge the gap between strategy and execution to learn more about w WT visit wwt.com/twit and by express VPN going online without express VPN is like leaving your laptop exposed at the coffee shop table. While you run to the bathroom, secure your online data today by visiting express vpn.com/twit and get an extra three months free, not a one year package. It's time for TWiT, This Week in Tech, the show we cover the weeks tech news. I'm excited. I love this panel. Some of my favorite people, Alex Wilhelm is here owner of my childhood home reporter at tech crunch at Alex. I wish I only wish I'd sold it to you, Alex. And I would have some money for it.

Alex Wilhelm (00:02:29):
Yes, sadly. Uh, you got none of the profits, but you have Jaco me into being on Twitter for like 10 years now. So I, as a have

Leo Laporte (00:02:35):
As a result. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Alex Wilhelm (00:02:38):
<laugh> a pleasure to be here, Leo. Thank you as awesome.

Leo Laporte (00:02:40):
Always a pleasure to see you also with us from tech meme, ride home, uh, the internet historian himself, Brian McCullough. Great to see you. Hello, Leo in the pitch black environment. That's right. Where are you? Uh, these days? Where do you live? Uh, in

Alex Wilhelm (00:02:55):
Brooklyn? Uh, usually I, when I do these, I do 'em from my

Brian McCollough (00:02:59):
Office. And so this is the first time I'm doing it from my house and it didn't work out. And so I'm trying to hide

Leo Laporte (00:03:06):
Everything. Oh, that's uh, just to be clear though, this is not my childhood home, right? I mean, I don't think it is anyway. Could be, I don't know. It's confusing. I was born in New York, raised in Rhode Island and now we also go down the peninsula a bit to say hello to Mike. ELGAN our good friend. Last time I saw you, Mike, you were in Oaxaca. We were in Oaxaca. Yep. Yep. Uh, you're going back tomorrow.

Mike Elgan (00:03:29):
Back tomorrow. We're gonna be in Mexico city for three days and then Oaxaca for a week and then back here for the holidays.

Leo Laporte (00:03:35):
So this, this was an amazing GA we're gonna actually get Mike a naira on, uh, our, uh, discord server to a special about the gastro Noma experiences. Cuz super excited about that. I can't wait. Can't wait. And I just a huge, uh, pleasure to do this. They go all over the world. We were in Oaxaca for the day of the dead. It was incredible. The food, uh, the people were with us. It was just so much fun. And then you, you uh, left to, uh, go to Indiana with Kevin, your son, how did that go?

Mike Elgan (00:04:06):
That's right. It was huge Leo. It was so amazing. So it was the Indiana tech conference. The people in Indiana who run this thing to do an amazing job and they bring literally educators from all the schools in the state to this place and, and chatter box was the featured tech product and he was doing four sessions a day and it was just amazing. All these educators who were dying to get back in their classrooms were, uh, learning about chatter box learning, how to build it, all that kind of stuff. So it was really, really, and I was basically a booth bunny <laugh> um, uh, we don't say that anymore. Do we? I was a, a representative in the booth and uh, no, it was, it was absolutely amazing it's it was it's first time I'd ever been to Indiana and it was just a really great experience, uh, for all of us.

Leo Laporte (00:04:54):
Chatterbox is Kevin's. If you go to hello, chatterbox.com, you can read about it. Kevin's smart speaker that's designed for are kids to learn literacy, to learn that the speaker is not a human. And you don't have to say please, and thank you, but it's also, uh, private, which is great. Um, really cool. Cool, cool product. It it's a wonderful one. And if you wanna know more, hello, chatterbox.com. So the last time, uh, <affirmative> Adam Curry was on the show, uh, he, uh, ex expressed his feelings that the us military had built a, uh, army base on the dark side of the moon. Uh, that was the last time Adam Curry was on the moon, but I imagine yeah. Ever, uh, on the moon or on the show, but I imagine he, uh, is perhaps taking a victory lap right now because China's U2 Rover has spotted what the Chinese are calling a mystery hut on the dark side of the moon. It is a as close as you can and they're, they're still, they're gonna drive over and see the three months away from that. But, uh, it takes a while I guess, but it's uh, it's uh, apparently, uh, about 20 meters in height and it looks like a pretty human made cube. Yeah.

Alex Wilhelm (00:06:19):
It's a 2001 of space, honestly, but it's our moon and

Leo Laporte (00:06:22):
It's, I'm sorry. Should I call it the monolith? It should be a monolith. Yeah,

Alex Wilhelm (00:06:26):
It's better than it probably got there. <laugh> no, no hut is 20 meters tall, I think is what I would start with. That's a nasal hut, probably not a goods for the moon. More like for the south Pacific maybe, or it's only someplace

Leo Laporte (00:06:42):
Warmer. It's it's puzzling cuz it's only, uh, 260 feet away from the Rover, but it take three months to get there. <laugh> again, this and doesn't move very fast.

Alex Wilhelm (00:06:53):
Get a helicopter China like everybody

Leo Laporte (00:06:55):
Else. No, I, you know, it feels to me like it would be you a great movie, like, uh, Bruce Willis and Matt Damon decide they want to get there before the Chinese Rover, they got three months to create a mission, launch it and get there to find out what that cube is. Um, and then of course where's Elon. Yeah. Where's Elon where the, we

Alex Wilhelm (00:07:12):
Got time, the Americans in the Russians, uh, want to be first to film a movie there. So Tom cruise is trying to get to the hot and,

Leo Laporte (00:07:18):
But it's crazy. Anyway, I, it probably it's a Boulder. Uh, this side of the moon has a lot, had a lot of impacts. I mean your impacts. It's probably just a Boulder. That is coincidentally square. Uh, but it could be, uh, the, the long lost military base on the dark side of the moon. And I'm sure Adam will say it is for the next three months. No, I just want to give him a little heads up. Uh <laugh> it's it's uh, it's it there, it's out there. The, the truth is out there. Uh, that's not the big story of the week. Probably the big story of the week is Jack Dorsey's tweet. Um, which went, not sure anyone has heard, but I resign from Twitter. I'm outta here, uh, left that day. Now Alex Wilhelm, you cover financial markets. So there's been a number of specul a bit of speculation. One is that the, uh, the, uh, activist investors, Elliot management who wanted Jack out last spring, maybe finally got their way. What do you think?

Alex Wilhelm (00:08:21):
I I'm sure that's part of it. Uh, the other thing to keep in mind is that Jack is at an increasing interest in all things kind of cryptocurrency. And I wouldn't be surprised if he wanted some more time to focus on that. And with the changes we've seen at his other companies square, it's not an enormous surprise to me that he was willing to kind of set down the Twitter mantle, especially because he had his kind of number two in place, right. To take over. And, uh, you know, Twitter's in a good spot right now. I feel like its product work has been really good. They did fend off Elliot for some time, but you know, I mean, how long can you really run two public companies when your heart's only really in one of them? That's my general read. So it's less pernicious and more just kind of like, maybe

Leo Laporte (00:08:55):
It's about time. The market's generally kind of disappointed that Twitter given its importance, uh, its cultural currency, uh, doesn't make more money. Um, and so they've been, you know, angry at Jack as if that's his fault. I'm not sure it is his fault. Uh, it's also, you know, he's not the only tech CEO to say, yeah, I'm gonna get outta here now, before it gets really hot in the kitchen. Uh, yeah. Could have something to do with that. You agree, Mike?

Mike Elgan (00:09:23):
Well, I think that, I think that, um, the problem, I mean, I personally am disappointed because I feel like Jack Dorsey for whatever perceived flaws he may have was at least a very, very thoughtful person. Well probably presumably still is. He's a very thoughtful person and he's he's, uh, I thought he was, he did his best for the policy parts of it for dealing with the impossible task of having free speech, but also not allowing lunatic to create too much trouble, et cetera, et cetera. And he handed the reins over to somebody who's essentially a technologist. I don't really think that the technology part of it is, well, certainly not as a user. The part that, uh, interests me the most, uh, I would love for Twitter to continue to be, you know, the public square. Obviously it's a terrible business, um, compared to Facebook or Instagram or any of the, as other companies that have so many more opportunities to make so much more money simply because it's text based and it's it's for people who want like a news fire hose and that's always gonna be a minority. Right? So, um, I, I think Twitter, you know, I would've loved for Twitter to have been the pet project of some billionaire. So you didn't have the, the, um, the pressure from activist investors to, to push them, to try to make it, uh, a cash cow like Instagram is,

Leo Laporte (00:10:47):
But well, and I, of course, sort of interestingly, the markets initial reaction to Jack's resignation was to boost Twitter's price by as much as 10% and then announced that, uh, the Twitter CTO, uh, also the guy in charge of Twitter's, uh, crypto, uh, arm, um, uh, per aro wall was gonna take over in the stock plummeted <laugh> right. Sell, sell, sell. Um, this is, uh, this is, uh, your article Alex, along with NA and, uh, Amanda Jack is leaving Twitter and we have thoughts. What <laugh> this is in the equity process. Sorry about that headline. We have thoughts.

Alex Wilhelm (00:11:28):
Well, I we've been working a lot this year and so my, my title and headline discipline has declined in the last couple of weeks. What does the

Leo Laporte (00:11:36):
Mean around thoughts? What does that mean? Till thoughts? Tilda? Is that like, okay,

Alex Wilhelm (00:11:39):
So it, it it's like this, so you don't read it jacks leaving Twitter and we have thoughts it's Jack's leaving Twitter and we have thoughts, thoughts. I believe <laugh>, I believe that's the correct.

Leo Laporte (00:11:48):
The new scare quotes it's scare Tilda. Is that what you're saying? Yeah.

Alex Wilhelm (00:11:52):
Or skill does if you're into it. <laugh> um, to, to, to Mike, to Mike's point though, the issue with Twitter and the billionaire idea is that it's a little bit too expensive. I mean, Twitter, I just pulled up it's um, stock chart here. Yes. Even after

Leo Laporte (00:12:04):
A lot of declines in the last couple of months, it's still worth 34 billion. And so it's not really an asset. You had a tuck under your arm, like Washington post on Musk. Yeah. Even Elon's not gonna spend that much money on a money losing social network. Come on right

Alex Wilhelm (00:12:20):
Now. You're right. He has too much fun for free. So <laugh>, I just wish it would've happened like 15 years, you know, 10 years ago. Yes. 12 years, you

Leo Laporte (00:12:27):
Know, that's the irony of this is people like Elon love Twitter and use it and they use it for free. And so they don't need to buy it because they've got the benefit of it with, they don't need to own this. What is it? Is it a dog? Is it, is that

Alex Wilhelm (00:12:41):
No, no. It's not a dog. It's, it's not growing as quickly as it should, but I mean like they just rolled out Twitter blue. They've done very well with their audio product. They bought a newsletter product. Twitter is managing to kind of build on top of its core ethos, which is what Mike said, that the stream of news, the fire hose of headlines, um, and I'm kind of bullish. I mean, I'm now a Twitter blue subscriber. I haven't paid Twitter before pay anybody

Leo Laporte (00:13:02):
Here, not paying three bucks a month for Twitter blue. I'm not, you're not, I just haven't had time. I thought you'd be the first person. How about you, Brian?

Brian McCollough (00:13:12):
I am paying. And um, yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:13:14):
That's who Twitter blue appeals to tech journalists. Right? One of the problems

Alex Wilhelm (00:13:18):
That <laugh>, that's, that's who Twitter appeals to that's on Twitter.

Brian McCollough (00:13:21):
Yeah. But, but see, that's always been sort of the problem, like philosophically Twitter, there were times when they thought, or at least the markets thought that they should be like Facebook and have billions of users or whatever. Like, I feel like the problem has always been for of a business perspective is that they have the S and you can make a business out of S you can make a business out of only the, you know, that 10% law or the, whatever the percentages of your users that produce most of the content. It's just that they've never tried to. And so, like, Alex is saying a lot of these products are like, all right, it fine. There is a certain percentage of you that live on Twitter all day, and I'll raise my head for that one. And so by the way, throw a couple shackles at us a month and, and, you know, that's theoretically a good way to start building a business. Um, can I, can I make one other point though? Yes. This might, this might lead us into what will logically be the next discussion into square slash block, but, um, you know, so the only person left of these, of this generation of founders, of, of social media platforms that is still at his founded company is, is Z. And we talked about earlier, how it's maybe no fun to run one of these anymore and have everybody to hate you.

Leo Laporte (00:14:37):
If somebody's not having fun Congress, it's gotta be mark Zuckerberg right now. Right.

Brian McCollough (00:14:41):
So, you know, when Jack has a choice, it's not exactly a Sophie's choice. He he's gonna pick one company, one of the reasons, and this'll get into the idea of web three, if you wanna cover that. Well, Lord,

Leo Laporte (00:14:55):
We are, we're gonna talk about it cause we can't not, but

Brian McCollough (00:14:58):
So why is Z at, uh, doing, uh, meta and the rebrand? Right? Because all of the energy seems to be in crypto and NFTs and web three. That's where the talent is going. People are, you know, fleeing, not fleeing, but jumping ship to these web three companies. And, and all the kids have board ape, uh, icons on their, their Twitter accounts and things like that. So one of the way to look at it is, is Jack sees more fun. And maybe what Jack was always into, which is of like utopian style, changing the world stuff, which he can do with square that he can't do with Twitter, where it's essentially a maintenance job. It's putting out fires.

Leo Laporte (00:15:42):
I should point out that Bitcoin has gone down like $10,000 since, uh, he, he, he quit related. No, <laugh> no, no, no,

Alex Wilhelm (00:15:50):
But, but let's talk about

Leo Laporte (00:15:52):
Twitter. I'd like to stir the pot a little bit. Okay. Go. We're actually gonna get to block. I really do want to talk about that and web three, but let's stay with Twitter for a little bit longer. Go ahead, Alex. Yeah.

Alex Wilhelm (00:16:01):
The crypto flash crash is a lot of fun. I, we will talk about that because nothing makes me giggle more than watching everyone who brags about crypto prices. All of a sudden goes silent. Yeah. As a unit.

Leo Laporte (00:16:09):
No, they'll be back. Don't worry. Yeah,

Alex Wilhelm (00:16:11):
No, they always are data point though, about Twitter. We're talking about Twitter as if it is this kind of failed density. And I do agree in comparison to Facebook or meta, depending on how you wanna call it. It is small, but in the last quarter, Twitter had, uh, 1.2, 8 billion in revenue, up 37% year over year, how much profit business? Um, they had adjusted operating profit of like 23 million, I think. Okay.

Leo Laporte (00:16:31):
I mean, it's not, you know,

Brian McCollough (00:16:34):
And they have that weird metric that's, uh, monetizable users or something, but they're growing that metric, which is the one that they want people to care about. Right?

Alex Wilhelm (00:16:42):
Yes. M D Aus, which is the most non gap way to say people use our site and we Sullivan stuff. Um, I don't know why they had to invent that, but well,

Leo Laporte (00:16:48):
They did because the growth is, uh, stagnant. So they had to make up some other number that didn't reflect growth, real growth. <laugh>

Alex Wilhelm (00:16:58):
Right. Okay. Look, Leo, let's tweet more. Let's let's help them out. <laugh> you know,

Leo Laporte (00:17:02):
Let's, let's get a couple, so it's not that we're not tweeting enough. It's that? It's the same 300 million people tweeting. Yeah. It's, there's gross in their, uh, in their user base. I, I

Mike Elgan (00:17:12):
Think the problem with a business is that we are all, we are all somehow for some reason, gotten all wrapped up in, in the all importance of massive profits. Um, why do we care? As long as they have enough money to survive? I think the thing

Leo Laporte (00:17:27):
That's interesting. You're right. If you don't own Twitter stock, why do you care? Exactly, exactly. The

Mike Elgan (00:17:31):
Cultural significant yeah. Gigantic it that's right. Arguably bigger than Facebook,

Leo Laporte (00:17:36):
But that's the problem is you have this huge cultural significance and 24 million in revenue.

Mike Elgan (00:17:42):
Yeah. I'm happy with that profit. I'm happy with that. What's what's wrong with that.

Leo Laporte (00:17:48):
Um, it feels like that should be bigger if you're that important. It should be bigger. Leo keep the that's only 4 million, what? A 8 million a month. It's nothing. <laugh> what

Brian McCollough (00:17:59):
Is the, uh, I mean like, I mean, it's more profitable than TWI. It's more profitable than yeah. Okay. They

Leo Laporte (00:18:04):
Make more in a month than we make in a year, but it's still for something that's Twitter. We're talking here. What's Facebook's profit

Brian McCollough (00:18:12):
Of a it's infinite, infinite soap bad. But Mike Mike said at the outset that Jack is very thoughtful. Right? And the problem is, is that from wall Street's perspective, he was thoughtful to the point of being unable to make unable, to make an need decisions. It's only in the last year that, you know, this sudden, I remember when it happened on, on my show, we kept saying, oh, hell froze over again. Twitter actually iterated on product. But now that joke is, is, is, is, is way dead because they've done nothing but product over the last six

Leo Laporte (00:18:47):
Months. This, this six months has been an amazing, you know, on resident for Twitter. But there are those who say, Twitter doesn't need to iterate on product. Right? In fact, the best thing Twitter could do is just stay Twitter, right? There's a big risk. There's a big risk for Twitter when they change things because it's working as it is. I know it's not profitable. Actually. Ben Thompson has a great piece on this in which he said, Twitter, can't be profitable with an ad model because of the nature of Twitter. He says Instagram for it compares to Instagram. Instagram does very well with ad model cuz it's a, it's a sit back, uh, engagement. You're sitting there. You're leisurely. You looking at photos, you get a photo for, you know, a new kind of underwear. It's not such a big deal to buy it. Pete Twitter, he says quoting, uh, Ben Thompson in Strat is intense and combative and far more likely to be tied to something happening in the physical world, whether that be watching sports or politics or doing work.

Leo Laporte (00:19:42):
And that does not lend itself well to, oh, in the middle of all this, let me click and buy some underwear. So Twitter, they said, he says, and I think he, I don't think he's wrong. Twitter's not gonna make money. Especially with the kind of direct response advertising that they're doing. It may be brand advertising, but at least not click to buy advertising. Uh, and then he says, that's one problem. The other, another problem is the number of people actually want to experience the internet this way. And this intense lean for forward thing is relatively small. Uh, people know about Twitter, but PE people don't, you know, go, oh, I gotta get on there except us, you know, there's a, a group of people that do. So his suggestion is there are, there is a group of people, few hundred million people that certainly value Twitter, often professionally politics, uh, sports stars, tech journalists, those people will pay. He says, Twitter should just make it a, be a pay service period. Is that crazy? Um,

Brian McCollough (00:20:44):
Uh, well, it's, it's uh, it goes back to what I was saying before,

Mike Elgan (00:20:47):
Which is that it would essentially to me involve ruining Twitter for the benefit of the minority who make money from Twitter. It, it's basically saying that the monetary significance for the shareholders is more important than the cultural significance for everybody. So even the people who don't use Twitter benefit enormously from juror journalists, talking to politicians, hearing from these other people, interacting with each other with professors, all it's a, it's a, the town square. Isn't just for the people at the town square meeting. It's you

Leo Laporte (00:21:19):
Had to pay to post, but not pay to read.

Mike Elgan (00:21:22):
Uh, yeah, that would be better,

Leo Laporte (00:21:26):
I guess, in a way that's really what Twitter blue is. It's gonna capture those people probably right. Three bucks a month. It's it'ss gonna capture those people.

Alex Wilhelm (00:21:34):
Leo multiply it by five, charge me 15 and take away the

Leo Laporte (00:21:37):
Advertisements. Yeah. That's there you go. That I

Alex Wilhelm (00:21:39):
Would prefer. So like just admit the fact it's not to be a billion people realize that those of us who use it, use it a lot, realize that those of us who use it a lot, don't want ads in our iOS feed. And let me pay you to get rid of them. Can the

Leo Laporte (00:21:51):
People do it? Please? Can the there's nowhere else, the people who use it can go, right? There's a certain use for Twitter. For instance, if, if, if somebody tells me, uh, oh, Bob DOL just passed away, first thing I'm gonna do is go to Twitter. Right? Right. Because maybe not Bob doll, but if it were a famous person, uh, would go, geez. Oh, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Bob doll was too soon. If I were a comedian that did in Bob doll impressions, I probably would've stopped doing them long ago. Let's put it that way. Nobody under

Mike Elgan (00:22:21):
The age of 30 knows who Bob doll. Exactly.

Leo Laporte (00:22:23):
Exactly. So 40 Mike, I think is, and I only used that cuz he did pass away, but today, but uh, I don't know. Uh, what if Paul McCartney passed away? If somebody told me Paul McCartney's dead, I would immediate go to Twitter to verify it. So there, so there's certain things you do, you know, uh, earthquakes, earthquakes <laugh> yeah. In the California. It's all about earthquakes. If you're a big F one fan, we won't say no spoilers cuz Alex hasn't watch the race yet, but you would. And that's, by the way to Ben Thomas's point, you would actually have it open while you're watching and you'd have a community around you. Same thing with the Oscars or any, any other live event talking about it. Yeah. Those are the people who, and I think those people would be willing to pay. I don't know, 15 bucks that's a lot, but say seven bucks, eight bucks a month. Nine bucks. Sure. Mike, what <affirmative>

Brian McCollough (00:23:10):
Mike, one more thing that you said, um, was that, you know, Twitter would benefit from a billionaire sort of uh,

Leo Laporte (00:23:18):
A Jeff Basos. Yeah.

Brian McCollough (00:23:20):
Well, but guess what? Uh, we had a billionaire sort of benevolently overseeing it for us. There's a piece that, um, Mike Solana, another Mike wrote this week about Jack and he ended like this, um, saying, I think we're all about to realize just how much he was doing quietly in stewardship over a power. He was wise enough to fear and good enough not to use. So that's the flip side of Jack being overly thoughtful. Perhaps we're gonna find out pretty quickly that for the last six years we had a really useful guy overseeing Twitter and not it up too badly. That's how I feel. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (00:24:01):
Exactly why we announced it. That way of isn't it tip more typical that you would say as Bezos did, I'm gonna step down. I have a

Brian McCollough (00:24:09):
Theory. Okay. I have a theory, uh, and it involves, uh, block and square, which is the block square announcement happened. I think it was the 12 year anniversary of Square's first. Um, I don't know, public trial or public being launched or something. So he needed to get the Twitter news out of the way so that he could launch the square block news. That was probably really where his heart was at

Leo Laporte (00:24:35):
Anyway. So almost immediately after resigning, he announced that he, uh, square announced it was gonna change its name to block by the way. Why is that a big enough? It's just a name it's moving to be a, it's like changing the name to meta.

Alex Wilhelm (00:24:51):
Yeah, but it's different though. Leo, because remember when square bought title and we were all sitting around going like, whoa, what, why is a consumer payment service and a business transaction application buying music.

Leo Laporte (00:25:00):
When this news broke, I, I was on twig and I mentioned square bought title and everybody went really <laugh> nobody remembers that.

Alex Wilhelm (00:25:08):
Exactly. But my point is, uh, as a holding company that may make digital products via the blockchain for artists and musicians, it makes a lot more sense to block the holding company to own type. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:25:20):
Cuz you know, who makes money on NFTs? The people who mint them. Yep. Not the creators, not the buyers, the people who min them for 12 bucks, a pop they're the ones making money. You think that's what square wants to do. That kind of thing.

Alex Wilhelm (00:25:34):
I mean, it makes more sense than it did before. Yeah. I mean, I, I, I don't think that we fully understand where Jack wants to go with block. Um, but on the point about him leaving though one last little, little note, if you go read the letter he posted on Twitter, he talks a lot about how, uh, a company shouldn't always be run by its founder. And he talks a little bit about, he does mention that. Yeah. Yeah. And inside of Silicon valley, that was heresy because the mark Zuckerberg Facebook's story was an early data point that led people to think that maybe startup founders should not only Stacy or their company through their public, private life, but also into their public life. And here was jobs also. Yeah. Well I, Jack

Leo Laporte (00:26:15):
I'll take that. Jack w writes, there's a lot of talk. This is in his tweet. There's a lot of talk by the way. I think it's ironic that Jack Dorsey can't find a way to resign in 280 characters. So he does what everybody else does and posts a picture of his resignation. <laugh> Jack hint, hint. There's a lot of talk about the importance of a company being founder led. Ultimately I believe that's severely limiting and a single point of failure. I've worked hard to ensure this company could break away from its founding and, uh, founders. Uh, there aren't many companies that get to this level and there aren't many founders that choose their company over their own ego. That's an interesting shot. Who's he thinking? Spicy, spicy mark.

Brian McCollough (00:26:56):
All of them mark. Well, it's, it's mark and it's also Leo LePort <laugh>

Leo Laporte (00:27:01):
I I one my resignation today, but I'm gonna keep doing the show if you don't mind. Okay. Uh <laugh> uh, I long ago gave up the reins running the company. So maybe that, you know, by the way, a couple of interesting, uh, let's talk a little bit about his successor. He also, uh, chose as chairman of the board. He's gonna resign him from the board as well. In a few months, chairman of the board is Brett Taylor, who is really one of the great people in Silicon valley. I think former Google engineer, he was at maps. He was a Gmail started friend feed. Oh yeah. Uh, a a, not just a create, I mean a real creator and founder, and I think an interesting person to put on the, uh, the chairman of the board. And let's talk about him and let's talk about, uh, agro wall. Good choice. Good choice is thoughts. I

Brian McCollough (00:27:52):
Was, I was surprised. I was surprised that it was not kaon who has been, uh, you know, sort of the product head leading things. Like I think

Leo Laporte (00:28:02):
Kaon was surprised, actually. I, uh,

Brian McCollough (00:28:04):
<laugh> I've heard some heard some things. Um, but when you

Leo Laporte (00:28:09):
He's, he did not quit by the way,

Brian McCollough (00:28:11):
Did not. No, no. Um, when you do, you know, find out because that that's one of the things is that, um, agar well was not very well known even to those of us that follow this stuff all the time. Cuz he didn't have a big profile, but when you read the details, he has been involved in basically every major important sort of iteration at Twitter for the last few years when Jack decides, Hey, we're going in on the blockchain of Bitcoin. Um, AWA was the one that was that headed up that team the last few years as CTO, when they're, we're doing things like launching spaces and, and Twitter blue and all that stuff, you know, he's, he's the CTO that's in charge of all that stuff. So it does make sense. But then also I think there was a lot of speculation and maybe this was more from wall street types that, that were like, well, what Twitter does need to do is maybe are somebody from outside that would never use Twitter. You know what, like, like, you know, this didn't work out necessarily for Yahoo. But remember when Yahoo brought in that Hollywood guy to like save it after the dot converse or something like that, I feel like a lot of people thought that was gonna happen too. Um, but if what you want is Twitter to continue firing on all the cylinders that's been fir I think, uh, AWA is a decent pick. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:29:29):
I'm not sure. I agree with you, Mike, that AWA is technical, but that's not worth where the problems lie with Twitter. You need, I think a guy with vision and strategy, don't you? It seems to me that he's

Mike Elgan (00:29:41):
A product guy and not a policy guy. Yeah. And I would prefer personally to have Twitter be run by a policy person, somebody who really understands the, all of the nuances and maybe he does. I, I don't know. Well, you know, time will tell, but somebody who really has a passion for figuring out the, is the, the, the, the biggest problem, which is, uh, fake accounts, bots, trolls, harassment, um, how to allow free speech, but not hate speech. So many finals. Yeah. Yeah. And, and that's, that's where Twitter, I think that's where Twitter's gonna succeed or fail for its most passionate users. It's not like, how does the data center work? How many more, how many more products can they throw into the mix? I, I personally, I mean, other than, um, you know, other than, uh, well actually I can't think of any recent addition that they've made. That's really changed the way I use Twitter. I use it exactly the same as I did to three years ago. And I'm a really active user. I just don't think all these new products which may help in monetization and so on are really what Twitter really are. The things that make Twitter better. I think what would make Twitter better is if they would get rid of all of those hundreds of thousands of fake bot driven, you know, figure out, figure out that problem. I feel

Leo Laporte (00:30:59):
Like Twitter has solved most of those problems. I really do. I mean, I, yeah, I guess there's still a lot of bots on Twitter. That might be one reason. They don't count active users, but monetizable users instead, you can't monetize a bot. Uh, but I don't think that that's really a problem because at the way, most people use Twitter, they follow certain people and mean two

Mike Elgan (00:31:19):
Days ago they just, or three days ago they just removed, uh, 3,500. Yeah. They're gonna

Leo Laporte (00:31:24):
Keep doing that. That, that counts. Yeah. They're gonna keep doing that. I don't think that's a huge problem. I think that they've saw that they've made themselves culturally important. They've done think they didn't just announce another policy actually, probably something Jack had been working on, but it was announced on their ag wall that going to, and I think this is a big step. They're going to, uh, prohibit the posting of media, of private individuals. Not, not celebrities without the permission of the people depicted. That's a step towards getting rid of harassment. And I felt that

Mike Elgan (00:31:58):
The way that they rolled it out was a huge BL um, one, one point and then, and then I'll get to that one. Okay, go ahead. The point is that in the us, everything is better on Facebook and Twitter. The, the attention given to these issues is way better in the us, but oh, in the other 200 and something countries, uh, depending how small the country is, um, uh, sites like Twitter, Facebook also WhatsApp, and these other, uh, communications media are just having huge problems with fake news causing riots. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:32:29):
See, I'm not aware of that.

Mike Elgan (00:32:31):
Yeah. So, so I, I think that, you know, that that's another issue, but back to the, the rollout of this policy, the way they, um, stated it, and this happened immediately after the new CEO took, took charge, it was like, oh, you, you know, it's like you can't, you know, we're banning the, you know, the, the posting of private individuals. Well, that's ridiculous that it's just ridiculous. Most pictures have people in the background. They're not actually banning it. What they're do, what they're actually doing is they're saying, okay, if someone complains that's me in that picture and I don't want myself, that's my PRI that that's me in a private situation, they'll consider it. That's really what they're talking about about,

Leo Laporte (00:33:09):
And that's fair. I mean, yeah, you don't wanna just, you can't automatically do it. You have to wait there as a complaint. They do say that they're not gonna remove stuff, uh, where the accompanied tweet text shared in the public interest or adds value to public discourse even. And if it is a private individual that would allow things like the George Floyd video to get through. Yes. Even though he's not a celebrity, uh, the police officers could perhaps say, uh, that I'm a private individual. I don't want that image posted. Um, except it's already

Brian McCollough (00:33:37):
Been sort of weaponized by trolls where if Leo, you posted a picture of me, it's sort of like a, a take down request for, oh, you could

Leo Laporte (00:33:44):
Request, they could request on your behalf.

Brian McCollough (00:33:47):
Exactly. So if, if I wanted to screw your account and you posted a picture of me on your Twitter account, all I have to do is file the complaint. They, and then like on YouTube with the DCMA or whatever, take down request. Yeah. Then it's on you to spend the next few weeks fighting to get your account back. It's not on me because all I had to do was rat you out.

Mike Elgan (00:34:09):
Well, the white supremacists are already all over this and they're actually organizing around this idea that, you know, one of the, there are a whole bunch of anti, um, white supremacy, anti-racist organizations who, uh, who show, you know, people waving swastika and all that kind of stuff and shame them. And that's part of what they do in, in their work. They, but Twitter

Leo Laporte (00:34:32):
Has preserved their capability of moderating that and saying, no, no, that's public discourse. So they're giving, they've given themselves an out

Mike Elgan (00:34:40):
After, after removing those accounts and then putting 'em back. Well, that

Leo Laporte (00:34:43):
Depends. Have we seen that they're immediately taking 'em down. I mean, is

Mike Elgan (00:34:46):
There an incident I believe, I believe some were actually, uh, taken down. Okay.

Leo Laporte (00:34:49):
So there is an instant take down that's perhaps something they wanna change. This is the reporting form on Twitter. And you can, you can say the information belongs to me. Someone I'm authorized to represent someone else. Uh, I guess if, uh, if I said me, I would have to provide my own Twitter information and I would have to sign it. And by the way, they, they say electronically, sign this notice by typing your full name. So that perhaps has some legal power. I think they're trying look, it, they are, they're obviously try to do this. Right. I'm just, my complaint is it's easily gamed. That's not good. Obviously

Mike Elgan (00:35:27):
As a writer and an editor, why can't Twitter write a clear tweet

Leo Laporte (00:35:31):
Or a clear policy tweet?

Mike Elgan (00:35:32):
I have a, it was the tweet. I have a policy, a problem with it. Yeah. Yeah. It caused an entire caused, you know, millions of people an entire day, arguing about what it means and freaking out and all this kind of stuff. When they could have just written a, a, they could have written an unambiguous tweet. And I, right.

Alex Wilhelm (00:35:49):
I I'm willing to give the new CEO a little bit more time to get their feet underneath them. I don't expect them to be perfect from day one. I, I think everything that Mike is talking about is totally fair and valid, but I, I, I just want to let him breathe for a couple weeks and see how this goes out. Uh, if this happens again, gosh. Um, but I don't think Jack made a mistake in picking, or I don't think he made a, um, a quick choice in this decision and also like, keep in mind, we have all said how we like Twitter's product choices in the last, you know, six, 12 months. Well, Brett Taylor was on the board that entire time, and now he's chairman of the board, so, or will be. So there's gonna be some continuity of leadership there from the reason there. So maybe that'll help see them through some of the more sticky questions and product choices. I hope so. At least as a Twitter fan boy,

Leo Laporte (00:36:29):
The, uh, best headline came from the onion self important. A-hole making big show about leaving Twitter who had, who hasn't. I didn't see that. <laugh>,

Alex Wilhelm (00:36:40):
That's amazing. Oh, oh my gosh. Can we talk about Jack's beard and how it needs to go? Because Jack is a handsome boy and he's wearing this like Eazy, top beard, and it's, it's just, it's only good when he is in front of Congress. Otherwise

Leo Laporte (00:36:53):
Not, it was fantastic when he was testifying for Congress, it was like, so good. It just didn't, I've one of these things is not like the other, uh, let's take a little break cuz I do. I mean the next thing let's talk about block. Let's talk about, uh, web three, whatever the hell that is. I think I have a pretty good crew here to explain that to me. Um, we will get back to a very good panel, Alex, Wilhelm of tech crunch fame. Uh, great to have you from the tech meme ride home podcast, Mr. Brian McCullough. And uh, my good buddy, uh, Mike ELGAN from gastro net and ELGAN uh, dot com going back to wa on his way back to Oaxaca. And then what's the next gastro Noma Prosecco.

Mike Elgan (00:37:40):
Uh, yes. Prosecco and we are gonna have a big one. It's gonna be a celebration of a complete return to normality. Yeah. Good luck. Good. Uh,

Leo Laporte (00:37:49):
Yeah. Yeah.

Mike Elgan (00:37:50):
But, but yeah, it's gonna be, it's gonna be awesome. Prosecco. And then PR that was we're

Leo Laporte (00:37:54):
Back to, I was very nervous cuz I hadn't traveled internationally since the COVID started, but it, you know, was we're it down really? Well. We all got tested before we left. Everybody was, was uh, negative, which is positive. And

Mike Elgan (00:38:05):
Uh, it was very positive that we were negative and we took another test before we left. And that was a very positive, negative experience. <laugh> and you know, as you saw, as you saw Leo, um, you can tell that Oaxaca's a great place during a pandemic. Yeah. There's a lot of open spare. Yeah. Restaurants are outside. Everybody wears a

Leo Laporte (00:38:22):
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Alex Wilhelm (00:42:32):
Ah, yes. So Leo, thank you for putting me in the hot seat on this one. Cause that we all look at all the tweets and uh, and not you better you than, than me buddy. Yeah, no, I appreciate that. Um, web three is a rebrand of blockchain, which was a rebrand of crypto. I think it's the simplest way to put it. Oh, it's broadening each time. Cuz cryptocurrencies were originally just, you know, bit co and light going back in the early days. And then we talked more about blockchain thinking about, uh, the broader crypto economy and you know, in, in a larger sense, what else can we build with blockchain technology, web three encompasses, NFTs, and um, kind of like the games you can play on the Ethereum chain and so forth. And so I, I think it's, it's a broader term, but it is mostly the same stuff. Uh, but I will say was a shift overnight sometime a few months ago, web three became the thing to say and I don't know quite what change, but all of a sudden it became, how would people use to describe the larger world of, of, you know, Bitcoin at all? So if you wanna sound cool, say web three and by cool. I mean not cool. <laugh>

Mike Elgan (00:43:32):
To me it sounds like a rebranding of the, the original vision of the internet, which is no borders, no controls. Everybody just does everything, uh, that they want and there's no governments can so well, yeah. And then that didn't happen. It was, you know, argue, you know, the, the, the internet was largely taken over by giant corporations. And so this is an attempt to get back to that original vision. Nobody's nobody characterizes it like that, but it's clearly, that's what it is taking the a, the basket of hot new technologies, like blockchain NFTs and lumping in meta, if you, uh, lumping in the, the metaverse, et cetera, don't forget the metaverse you get, you get this new world, which is the original vision of the internet.

Alex Wilhelm (00:44:14):
Yeah. But, but Mike it's, it it's claims to be so punk rock, right. What you just said is so dead on it claims to be this, this open freewheeling place. And yet it seems that the same people who made a bunch of money on internets one and two are making all the money in web three. So to me, like, are they just failing to live up to that kind of punk ethos you're describing or is, or am I misreading where things are today? Technologically? I just, I just think that's, there's a, a techno technology type people are into that sort of thing. Is that,

Leo Laporte (00:44:43):
Is that somebody at your door? <laugh> that's that's

Alex Wilhelm (00:44:46):
That's my Alex. Uh, that's

Leo Laporte (00:44:50):
Sorry about that. She really wants in <laugh> are you in her playroom? Are you, uh, I'm sort of, yes. You've taken over your, your, your granddaughter's playroom and now she wants in she's pounding on the door much. As many people wanna get into web three point. It's not three point. Oh, by the way, w E B three. Let's get that right. Okay. Yeah. I've heard people in the media call it web 3.0, cuz it was web 2.0, but no, no, no. That would just be a successor to web 2.0, this is nothing like web 2.0, this is web three.

Alex Wilhelm (00:45:25):
Except for the fact that it's literally all the same stuff from web 2.0, <laugh> on the blockchain it's games. It's social it's it's you know, like different interest groups around different cultural means.

Leo Laporte (00:45:36):
Am I, uh, old out of touch or dumb to every time I hear the word blockchain, think, watch out, watch your wallet. This sounds a little bit like a pyramid scheme to me.

Alex Wilhelm (00:45:51):
Uh, Leo, have you heard of ay infinity

Leo Laporte (00:45:54):
By chance? No, what's that? Okay. Well,

Alex Wilhelm (00:45:56):
There's a lot of these, these pay to earn games or sorry, play to earn. So like you kind of play them and then you earn tokens that are then have some sort of monetary value. And that always strikes me as slightly ski V and then also there's a lot of ways to like essentially loan your, is this like

Leo Laporte (00:46:10):
Crypto, crypto cats?

Alex Wilhelm (00:46:12):
It's uh, kind kind of it's closer,

Brian McCollough (00:46:16):
Alex, isn't it closer to like essentially, um, uh, Pokemon kind of like don't you, but you make money characters and you fight them or something, but then you earn money. Yeah. By doing that.

Alex Wilhelm (00:46:27):
Yeah. But where does all the money come from? Cuz usually in my experience as a long time gamer, I pay money. Right. And then I play versus I play and then I get paid. That sounds like work. And yet it's a game. And so to Leo's point about just having a general sense of unease, that's how I feel. Because as far as I'm concerned, there is no never ending font of capital. There is no way to make money for free forever. So from wins, does it come is

Leo Laporte (00:46:51):
But no, but there is because, uh, uh, you know, I mean people always get mad at the federal reserve for creating more money, but there's nothing to stop us from creating more cryptocurrency Leo,

Brian McCollough (00:47:05):
You might feel more Skee about, uh, ay infinity specifically when you find out that the majority of the players are in the Philippines and that what happens is rich Westerners higher. Oh.

Leo Laporte (00:47:18):
Uh, to grind, to grind to them. Right?

Brian McCollough (00:47:20):
Yeah. Now there's, they're making more than they would at a, in meat space job. Uh, but uh, apparently like 90% of the active players are in the Philippines right now, even though a lot of that money is flowing to, uh, bigger wallets

Leo Laporte (00:47:38):
Elsewhere. So I'm just setting up my <laugh> ay account and I have to get a Ronan wallet and I have to deposit Ethereum <affirmative> or ether into my Ronan wallet. So I am paying to play. Yes. And

Brian McCollough (00:47:53):
Don't forget, that's gonna cost you several hundred dollars in gas fees, fees, transfer to

Leo Laporte (00:47:58):
Your wallet. I never heard the phrase gas fees until constitution Dao. Uh, this

Alex Wilhelm (00:48:06):
It's pronounced Dow Leo I've been

Leo Laporte (00:48:08):
Saying do, and then I thought, oh, I should probably say Dao since it is an acronym.

Alex Wilhelm (00:48:12):
Also no one says ether. Everyone says E I know, yes. It's E web three, no space and Dow BA. So

Leo Laporte (00:48:18):
You're saying I'm basically marking myself, uh, as a future sucker and

Alex Wilhelm (00:48:24):
That yes, you are marking yourself as a mark.

Leo Laporte (00:48:26):
I'm I'm a mark. I'm wearing the sucker hat when we were in, uh, Mexico many years ago on the beach in Porto, Escondido and beautiful Oaxaca, uh, vendors came down, uh, selling hats. One of which was made from Palm leaves. It was a very cute hat. And um, my ex at the time my wife bought it. Jennifer bought it and I said, Jennifer, you just bought the sucker hat. Now everybody coming down the beach is gonna make a B line to you cuz you just gave somebody $10 for some Palm fronts. So you're saying to me that I'm wearing the sucker hat when I say constitution Dao or ether I'm

Alex Wilhelm (00:49:05):
Yes, but the good news is Leo. You don't have a lot of your personal net worth crypto assets. I have not. I

Leo Laporte (00:49:09):
Think you're probably wait a minute. I do have that wallet with 7.85 Bitcoin. But thank God I can't get into it.

Brian McCollough (00:49:15):
Alex. Alex, wait till he finds out that good morning is a very, very loaded acronym.

Alex Wilhelm (00:49:21):
Good morning. GM baby GM. I say GM. You say GM back because apparently the crypto meme world and culture is rooted in middle school. Terror. What's the one.

Leo Laporte (00:49:33):
Wait a minute. What does it mean morning? Good morning.

Alex Wilhelm (00:49:36):
Good morning. But if you're in the crypto also, no you say GM back. It's it's this like weird SHS.

Leo Laporte (00:49:42):
Oh's a handshake. It's a secret handshake. Yeah. Oh, okay. We're

Brian McCollough (00:49:45):
We're all gonna make it or we're not gonna make it there's there's a wame now by. Yes. Right, right, right. Let me to give them their credit. One of the things that you have to say about the web three crowd is that now they're all very eager and excited, but generally they're very optimistic and friendly. So you know, their secret handshake is literally good morning. Good morning. They're all gonna make it. Good morning.

Leo Laporte (00:50:11):
It's what Tim cook says at the beginning of an apple event. Good morning. Uh, G but if you wanna say you're in the know you say GM GFM, which I presume comes from texting, right? R O TFL w U T right? It's

Alex Wilhelm (00:50:26):
Uh, maybe I, I, I, I don't. No, actually I don't. I don't think that's right. Um, but I, I do think Brian's point is great though, because no one is having more fun than the crypto kit. They're having fun. Yeah. I mean, they're having an absolute blast. Like, do I want this? Yeah. Not this week. Not this weekend. Cause the sell off, but like I'm never gonna spend $10,000 on in Ft. I don't want to purchase the digital signature to a particular image on one blockchain doesn't really drive my buttons, but they're having an absolute blast. There are somebody on chat room, making

Leo Laporte (00:50:56):
Rooms, stoic squirrel says you have to be optimistic. They think you're gonna make money on this stuff. Right. You have to be bull. There's no bears in the, in the crypto world.

Alex Wilhelm (00:51:07):
Well, I I've. Well, can you short sell?

Leo Laporte (00:51:10):
Can you short sell crypto

Alex Wilhelm (00:51:12):
Probably. But I've written mean things about Bitcoin off and on for since 2013, has that worked?

Leo Laporte (00:51:16):
I for you've

Alex Wilhelm (00:51:17):
Poorly, people have been crossed for a very long time with me. Um, but all my money's an index fund. So it's, this

Leo Laporte (00:51:23):
Is the problem, by the way, with any pyramid scheme or any, any other scam is the most threatening people or the people who don't believe it. You wanna, you know, you gotta beat them down because it's all based on this optimism. We're gonna get rich, uh, philosophy. And anybody who doesn't is, you know, is peeing in your chowder,

Brian McCollough (00:51:40):
Alex, uh, you would know this better than me cuz you cover, uh, the VC space closer than I do. But Mike theory is that, and this is gonna be something that's Leo won't know about also. But um, I think you

Leo Laporte (00:51:54):
Said the show is full of that by the way. Go ahead. How,

Brian McCollough (00:51:58):
Why like two months ago did web three suddenly become the thing? And my theory is is that, that it's literally Chris Dixon, it's literally Andon Herwitz it's literally VCs. Yeah. Um, decided on mass to brand it this way. And my motivating theory for that is they made so much money from Solana that all of a sudden, especially Andre, but a lot of the VCs are like, we need more. So salons <laugh>

Alex Wilhelm (00:52:24):
So let me explain a couple things about what Brian just said. So I think it's pretty good. So first of all, so Chris Dixon and mark Hendrickson have both blocked me on Twitter. I just, I don't know why that matters, but I wanted to bring it up. I just wanna particular

Leo Laporte (00:52:35):
Context. I am so way ahead of you in 1993 on MSNBC, I told the world when, uh, Microsoft did not internet Explorer, 3.0, it's all over for Mozilla. It's all over for Netscape. They're charging for a browser. Microsoft's giving away and mark Andreson apparently at that point began a long standing hatred of me because I told the truth, by the way, I was absolutely right. Um, I was told later he came screaming down the halls at Netscape saying, who is this? Leo LA port <laugh> who is this? That's all <laugh>.

Alex Wilhelm (00:53:12):
Well, Leo I've always joined

Leo Laporte (00:53:13):
The club, join the club, Alex <laugh>.

Alex Wilhelm (00:53:16):
Yeah. I I've always liked you Leo and, and Mark's never liked us and that's fine. Um, but what, what I'll say is the Solana example that Brian brings up is actually a great point because Solana is a, is a blockchain. It has some similarities to the Ethereum blockchain. It is better in some technological ways. It is cheaper to execute transactions. So other often faster. And so as a piece of technology, frankly, it's kind of cool. It shows the evolution of blockchains from Bitcoin to ether, Ethereum, to, I would say Solana and some other ones to like, maybe, I don't know, there there's a couple of options out there, but I think if you look at the initial token distribution of salon and I'm pulling back to my memory here, so if I get this a little bit wrong, don't jump on me. Um, I think a lot of their early backers got a bunch of early tokens and that I've appreciated very, very well. And so the people that invested in it, I think was injuries in Horowits, uh, or maybe their crypto fund made out like bandits. And so that was my point earlier about the same people that already have money making the bulk of the money in, in the crypto space. And that's why I'm not that interested in it. It's not bringing economic prosperity to poor people, right. So

Leo Laporte (00:54:15):
You could actually argue, it might even be doing the opposite. It's uh, I mean, it's not good for the environment.

Mike Elgan (00:54:22):
Uh it's it's not good for cybersecurity it's uh, you, uh, Bitcoin is, is the main is one of the things that makes ransomware, ransomware, uh, work the way it does. Um, my, well, first I have a comment about Alex's watch. I've never seen anybody wear the watch on their hand. Let me see

Leo Laporte (00:54:38):
Alex on their wrist. What are you doing? Oh, that's interesting. Never seen

Alex Wilhelm (00:54:43):
So BA basically everyone, if you're not watching the video I'm wearing my, my apple watch around my, do you, you have

Leo Laporte (00:54:47):
A boo boo on your hand that you're covering up. <laugh>

Alex Wilhelm (00:54:50):
I do not have a, I do not have a boo boo, nor do I have a cut. Um, I'm just kind of a twitchy boy. And so I play with my watch when I'm sitting around and if I, yeah, I, it's not, he's a risk

Brian McCollough (00:55:02):
Model and he has to protect his

Leo Laporte (00:55:04):
Wrist, the wrist all.

Mike Elgan (00:55:07):
Yes. I just like to call out any sort of innovation. I see. No matter what it is, but, but in terms of, uh, cryptocurrency, the thing that bothers me is when I, whenever I say something that's vaguely, uh, negative about, about any of this stuff I get, uh, the, the argument is that, oh, no, this is a great currency. It's for purchasing things. And it's really not used way. Is it? I mean, it's, it's hoping that value will go up.

Leo Laporte (00:55:30):
The people will buy things with it, regret it deeply like the guy I bought the what is the hundred thousand dollars pizza

Mike Elgan (00:55:36):
Worth, that the thing that, and I'm probably wrong about this. And I'm prob I probably will be proved wrong over time. Cause I, I don't, I don't look at it that carefully, but it seems to me that this is a place where you can invest money, make money without really contributing to society. Yeah. It's speculation. Employing anyone. Yeah. Without making anything it's specul speculation. I think the whole thing kind of bothers me, but I'm probably just

Leo Laporte (00:55:58):
About it. I don't think so. I think that's exactly what it is. And I think a lot of the enthusiasm is for coming from people who speculated successfully and was with any pyramid scheme, you gotta pull in new people because, you know, that's what keeps it going. That's where the comes

Mike Elgan (00:56:12):
From. That's what keeps it flow

Brian McCollough (00:56:13):
To, to bring it back real quick to the original question of what web three is. And Alex helped me out here because I feel like maybe we're the closest it, the difference. So, so Mike is talking about, oh, currencies and things like that. The way I understand it is web three is moving, is moving crypto beyond just the idea. Satoshi's original idea of something that can replace money to essentially being the promise. That's always been there for, for utopian folks of a global computer where it's not, not just money that is digitized, it's contracts, it's gaming, it's all of these things. It's moving towards the metaverse where yeah. Your NFT is gonna be your, your, your, your image that you present to the world when you're in the metaverse and things like that. And so it, it, I, I think web three, the, the, of people that are proponents of web three, think that this is the next evolution beyond just, oh, what's this new coin. It's, what's this new thing that allows computing to happen natively on the internet.

Alex Wilhelm (00:57:15):
Yeah. And, and, and the question, this cuts that, and this is why it's interesting, even if you're not a, a act of speculator in current crypto coins is, is the internet and the future of technology better distributed and therefore slower, more expensive, but more censorship resistant or centralized ALA, AWS, Azure, and the other major cloud platforms or DocuSign for contracts, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. My, my question is the, the decentralized world can only really kick the butt of the decentralized world if it can provide what large companies need. And if you've ever talked to a company like ignite, who was in the ad, I, I know that company for a thousand years, I know the CEO for a while too. They have to build stuff like single sign on and, you know, provide uptime guarantees to their customers, to get them to use their service blockchain and DAS. Haven't gotten close to kind of that level of the

Leo Laporte (00:58:04):
Believe they're called Dows. I've learned that now. Oh my gosh,

Alex Wilhelm (00:58:08):
<laugh>, this is why this is why I shouldn't come on to it. Cause I always clown on myself, my accident <laugh>. Um,

Leo Laporte (00:58:15):
So I look, I think the central technology of, uh, blockchain is actually really interesting. The idea that it's decentralized, that it's secure. No one, you know, the financial system has, has currently constituted is centralized in banks, uh, you know, national banks, central banks

Brian McCollough (00:58:34):
Imutable ledger. So that in theory, it can't be

Leo Laporte (00:58:37):
Messed with, can't be messed with, uh, there is a privacy component, although, you know, that can vary depending on how it's implemented. I, I, I think that's all very positive. I'm not sure why the web needs to be running on, on, on blockchain. I don't understand the benefit of that exactly. But, you know, I, you know, it's interesting, how's it going in El Salvador? That sounds like a real non sequiter, but of course, El Salvador is now, now using block big chain, there must be really happy this weekend using, uh, uh, Bitcoin as their currency, their national currency, they must be so thrilled. Right. I've seen all the stories, but I've never seen stories about actual ordinary Salvador's it sounds like benefiting. This is hyperinflation. This is what happened in the Wimar Republic. I have, uh, oh, I'm so excited. I've taken all my dollars cuz they used to be on the dollar system, us dollars. So I had a hundred thousand dollars. I, uh, put it in the bank, converted it to Bitcoin. Uh, I got one and a half Bitcoins for it. And now there worth 20,000. There is nothing to celebrate, but it's secure and decentralized.

Alex Wilhelm (00:59:46):
Yeah. I, I mean,

Leo Laporte (00:59:47):
So money it's bad for money. Let's just say that's a different, you know, and that's another argument. If you wanna replace government run Fiat currencies with uh, some sort of mathematical equation run Fiat currencies, that's uh, that's a different, but the underlying technology, blockchain that's I think that's kind of interesting. Yeah. I mean I could see some uses for it

Alex Wilhelm (01:00:09):
Fundamentally. I agree with you and this is why I'm, I'm never gonna be fully dismissive of it though. I will be critical of certain actions, certain coin, certain projects, whatever, but like fundamentally technology has been driven by optimist them and people being willing to tear up the prior rule sheet and start again. And maybe it'll eventually become true that the promise of web three or call it what you will, will bear out. But today transfer wise is doing fine in the, in the money movement space. So it hasn't kill off traditional ways of handling remittances, which was one of the original promises. It might

Leo Laporte (01:00:38):
Be a better way to it off, down the road, right? Maybe

Alex Wilhelm (01:00:41):
Yeah. Early hasn't killed off art. It hasn't killed off gaming. I mean, what it has done is captivated people that are interested in making quite a lot of money and that's fine, but that isn't the, the world changing thing that we often hear people discuss when they talk about web three and I would love to see more incoming quality, more economic distribution, uh, the things that are the higher level promises of, of what blockchain is supposed to become. That's what I'm interested in much less today's NFT meant, for example,

Leo Laporte (01:01:08):
Uh, by the way, uh, obviously, uh, the president of El Salvador is all into buying the dip because when Bitcoin dropped president, Quele bought 150 more great, uh, investment opportunity for a Salvador.

Alex Wilhelm (01:01:24):
Yeah. That's that's gonna solve the GDP issues there. And the corruption and the gang violence is buy more Bitcoin

Leo Laporte (01:01:29):
Buy more Bitcoin. Well at least he bought it a low <laugh>. Uh, will it be a record low? I don't know. Um, I think it's also very, we're gonna take a break, but I think it's also very interesting, uh, that venture capitalists have invested 27 billion this year in Bitcoin, more than all previous 10 years combined. That'll give you some idea of the acceleration of, of not Bitcoin alone, but crypto in general, that'll give you some idea and, and it's a gold rush. It's a gold rush. And when you see staples arena, rename crypto.com arena, when you see, uh, the F1 race with crypto.com all over all the cars, I was just watching the world chess championship. Even there, you see FTX, you see crypto everywhere because where all the money is. Um, but that doesn't mean to me, that it's necessarily important in the sense it's gonna those change the world, right?

Alex Wilhelm (01:02:26):
But those advertisements Lee are for crypto exchanges, essentially the, the, the gateway between the Fiat world and, and the blockchain world. And they're not decentralized, they're not, Dows, they're just traditionally run corporations that have incorporation documents where you expect them to exist. So are those really like blockchain companies or are those just normal companies? Aing their way, right? Like a, a more serious crypto company, like Coinbase makes money from fees, right? Banks have been doing just like a bank the Dawn of time.

Leo Laporte (01:02:52):
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Just like currency exchange, uh, you know, travel X they're, the travel X of crypto. Um, and in fact, if, when you talk about native crypto, like constitution Dow <laugh>, there you go. It didn't go all that. Well then not only did they not get the printed constitution, the cons printed copy of the constitution, they lost their bid too. <laugh> hedge fund billionaire, uh, who was the guy who bailed out coin, uh, coin, uh, uh, Robin hood Robin,

Brian McCollough (01:03:20):
By the way, Leo, as an example of how hopeful all of these folks are, we had about six members of the constitution Dow on our show last weekend. And they were nothing. But like, man, this is awesome. You know, like, so we, we, we talking to them, I guess, 48 hours after they lost. And um, why were they

Leo Laporte (01:03:38):
Bull? Because you have to be Polish <laugh> right.

Brian McCollough (01:03:43):
You running a gun, they were taking the position of, can you believe we did all this in a week? It didn't work out. Can you

Leo Laporte (01:03:48):
Believe the gas ate away? Almost every single donation who made the money on constitution? Doubt the gas fee. Uh, the gas minor, sorry,

Alex Wilhelm (01:03:58):
Ethereum minors.

Leo Laporte (01:04:00):
We call it east, but I'm I might be wrong. The E <laugh> the, what do we call it? The et, what do we call it again? E

Alex Wilhelm (01:04:08):
E I'm. I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna go cry now. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:04:11):
What I gonna go do constitution Dao. All the money was made by the Ethereum, uh, uh, gas fee monitors that, I mean, they made

Brian McCollough (01:04:21):
That's legitimately. The reason why I didn't contribute because I wanted to put in a hundred dollars and at the time, because gas fees vary by the hour, which is another great thing about it. Oh yeah. Um, it would cost me $145 to contribute my $100. Yeah. Not

Leo Laporte (01:04:36):
Only do you not know what your crypto is worth at any given point in time, you don't know what it's gonna cost to even buy or sell it.

Alex Wilhelm (01:04:43):
Yeah. I tried to buy an NFT and by the time I put my $50 on Coinbase, moved it to a meta mask and then brought it to open sea, which is an NFT exchange. I couldn't afford the gas fees to buy a free NFT. Yeah. So I was like, this is not an improvement.

Brian McCollough (01:04:59):
I believe this is still the first podcast that was minted as an NFT. But back in March, I minted a podcast episode as an NFT. Yeah. Now I have 10 copies available. I've sold two. So there's eight remaining, but I haven't sold anymore because after the fees, even if someone offers me the equivalent of

Alex Wilhelm (01:05:17):
A hundred dollars, I lose money. If I sell it, <laugh>

Leo Laporte (01:05:20):
You lose money. Yes.

Alex Wilhelm (01:05:23):
<laugh> so, well, welcome to web three. It's like visa, but way worse. And

Leo Laporte (01:05:30):
You have to pay, I, I appreciate you doing the experiment, Brian. That's that was a good experiment. You we've all learned something vice the same thing. They, I think they tried to donate $200 to constitution do by the time it got there and got back with the refund, they'd lost money on the whole thing. So yeah. I mean, yeah. I, I, you know, buyer beware, although this, I have to say, uh, this ay infinity looks like a lot of fun.

Alex Wilhelm (01:05:57):
It's popular. I mean, people like to play Pokemon. Pokemon's a big game for a reason. It's still popular. I played Pokemon cards when I was in elementary school. Yeah. Like, and it's still a big deal. Yeah. So, you know, it's staying power. Good job. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:06:08):
Yeah. I, uh, I saved all my beanie babies from the, uh, nineties. I hope someday I will be rich our show today. Let's take a little break. We'll come back lots more to talk about. Um, our show today brought to you by Stripe. <laugh> I love this. <laugh> the complete payment solution and yes, you can. I believe you can pay in crypto with Stripe Stripe actually supports and we use Stripe. One of the reasons we use it is Stripe supports 135 D currencies and payment methods. It is the payment platform. No question about it. That's why leaders of adaptive businesses, businesses on the move choose Stripe as their payment platform with Stripe, your business can easily optimize your payments. Infrastructure, simplify expansion plans, create new revenue streams, all to help you and initiate change rather than having to react to it. That's why Shopify uses Stripe and Postmates and Twilio.

Leo Laporte (01:07:05):
They all look to Stripe to power their global payments. And one of the things, and I didn't really know much about this until we started taking Stripe for Club TWiT. But one of the problems in general with taking, uh, credit cards or, or payment systems is authorization rates. You can really, uh, lose a lot of purchases with a low authorization rate. Twilio increased its authorization rates by 10% with Stripe, they actually did an AB test with multiple global payment processors Stripe one easily. And to give you an idea of how much difference they can make Stripe helped Postmates generate over 70 million in revenue by increasing their authorization rates. That is important stripes, easy to use once you integrate it. Their single platform, world class stocks allow businesses to easily experiment like, you know, an AB test to scale, to grow revenue, Stripe processes, billions of dollars each year for every kind and every size of business from preceded startups to fortune 500 companies.

Leo Laporte (01:08:07):
And they're always improving the platform. I'm always impressed hundreds of new features and improvements every year. So you will keep up with the industry. You'll stay ahead. And man is I reliable five nines of API uptime. They handle more than 250 million, a quarter of a billion API requests. Every single day. We, uh, launch Club TWiT this year on Stripe. That's our payment platform. We are very happy. It's easy. Uh, for our customers, our listeners, uh, it's seamless and accepting payments. We don't like to issue refunds. We don't have to, but when we do, it's very easy, uh, we couldn't be happier. And with all those currencies, it means we're truly global, which you know, is important to us. Uh, we're able to focus on the business of making these shows while Stripe handles the business payments and money movement. That's just how I like it.

Leo Laporte (01:08:57):
I also like this and you should, if you're a Stripe customer flip this switch Stripe climate, you can direct a fraction of your revenue to help scale emerging carbon removal technologies. You might wanna turn that on. So whether you're an online or in person retailer, software platform, marketplace, or subscriptions, business like ours, visit stripe.com to learn more about how Stripe can support your business today. stripe.com S T R I P E. Learn more get started today. stripe.com. Ah, okay. I'm sure the, uh, Bitcoin browser I can say, well, I see why out against Bitcoin. He takes credit cards. Um, let's see what else there was some money spent, but not a lot on cyber Monday and black Friday, we had the black Friday, uh, report last weekend. Cyber Monday, sales dropped 1.4% from an already slow year. Last year, 10.7 billion. That's the first time ever, uh, Alex, you say this is evidence that eCommerce growth is slowing.

Alex Wilhelm (01:10:06):
Yeah. So critical phrasing there. eCommerce growth is slowing. Not that eCommerce is in decline, but we did see, I think it was year over year declines in digital sales for black Friday, and then also slight decline in cyber Monday sales. Did it go up

Leo Laporte (01:10:19):
A lot last year? Cuz of COVID. And is it now just kind of normalizing,

Alex Wilhelm (01:10:23):
Is that that's my broader thesis about all of this, because like a lot of folks I've spent much of the last two years at home, which means I've already bought all the stuff for my house I could possibly want, we got a new dishwasher, you know, we bought Sonos. And so like now my house is pretty kid out. I have a home gym now. And so when cyber Monday comes along or black Friday, I I'm like, oh, I'm actually kind of done. I I've completed all that stuff. And so I, I wonder if

Leo Laporte (01:10:47):
There's just a, is it also possible? I think this might be maybe a part of it. I notice we're doing this, we're buying more locally. It's a little more expensive sometimes, but it is certainly less convenient, but we wanna support our local merchants cuz we're terrified they're gonna all disappear.

Alex Wilhelm (01:11:03):
Yes, very much so. Right.

Leo Laporte (01:11:05):
Point the restaurants are closing for sure. I'm worried a lot of stores downtown are closing. So I wonder if people are also saying maybe we should buy, spend our money locally.

Alex Wilhelm (01:11:15):
We, we try to do that with books. There's a, a bookstore in confidence called books on the square. Yeah. And we're trying to do most of our book buying there because we don't want them to go away. They have great children's book section. We want to have kids. I want that to be there when I have children, every dollar

Leo Laporte (01:11:28):
Amazon doesn't get foots on the block. Yeah. You can use your E there. You know,

Mike Elgan (01:11:34):
I don't e-commerce they take it is actually worse than I think it's worse than it. It sounds because one of the strange phenomenon phenomena that happened during COVID and continues to happen is that people are shift. People have shifted their purchasing from services to some degree to products, right? So, uh, travel services, people are traveling a lot less, uh, all the things that people do and for business travel business travel is way down. So, um, you know, services in general, um, the kinds of services you can't take advantage of during a pandemic are down and people are buying products. And so if you're looking at a declines in what essentially on e-commerce, it's gonna be even worse once the pandemic is over, because I think there's gonna be a rush, a pendulum swing back to services and the money available to be spent to spend on products is going to, I think, crash to a certain extent as a correction.

Leo Laporte (01:12:35):
Um, so I guess we'll watch next year. Uh, I feel like eCommerce is here to stay though, right?

Alex Wilhelm (01:12:45):
Oh, absolutely. That's the thing like it, it's not that eCommerce is going to go away. It's that the rapid ascent eCommerce as a percentage of the larger economy yeah. Is slower. Right. And so we saw this in Amazon's earning AWS crushed it, the broader eCommerce business at Amazon was kind of soft. Yeah. Shopify had its first kind of quarterly miss if you will, in, so in its history as a public company, um, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And so we're seeing signals that this great, uh, acceleration of eCommerce or the movement to eCommerce is slowing, but um, Amazon's not going away. You know, there's still gonna be struggles in the, in the town square. But I, I, I think that we are seeing a bit of a reversion towards a more normal period of growth, which matters a lot,

Mike Elgan (01:13:23):
Frankly. And, and speaking of, uh, the new normal, I mean, I think, you know, for, for a while, for, for several years, black Friday was a thing cyber Monday was a thing because it, it, there was a certain novelty to it. There was a lot of competition to drive down prices. There was a lot of loss leading, uh, and so on. And now I think we've gotten to a new normal where essentially there are discounts all year long. That's true. Um, yeah. And, and it's really not that big of

Leo Laporte (01:13:48):
A deal. So be spread out, not just that down, just spread out more. Exactly.

Mike Elgan (01:13:52):
It, it doesn't make sense for a lot of companies to compete for, you know, on low price for that one day when they can offer a super low price in the middle of February and like get all the sales for that, you know, for that particular moment. So I, I just think, I, I just think it's kind of over now. Yeah.

Alex Wilhelm (01:14:09):
Also fake shopping holidays are stupid. Like why, why do we have cyber Monday, one terrible name two, just awful branding in general three it's a Monday I'm busy. I'm working from half off.

Leo Laporte (01:14:22):
Let me Brian McCullough. He's the internet historian. I'm sure can explain this. It comes from the idea and the word cyber is the dead giveaway at back in the day, you would wait to do your online shopping until you got to the fast internet at work the day after. Thank you know, Monday after Thanksgiving. Oh, so it was cyber Monday, but now most people at home have faster internet than they do at work. So nobody's waiting till cyber Monday to buy stuff. But I think you larger point, they're buying not only all November, they're buying all year long. I mean, you

Mike Elgan (01:14:55):
Could surf the internet super highway in cyberspace. Yes. At work much more

Leo Laporte (01:15:00):
Precisely. Yeah. The internet super highways faster it's Bob mode.

Mike Elgan (01:15:05):
Exactly. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:15:06):
Another

Alex Wilhelm (01:15:06):
Thing buzz buzzword now like E and uh, blockchain. GM. Yeah.

Mike Elgan (01:15:12):
G a web three Monday.

Alex Wilhelm (01:15:14):
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But I mean, another thing to keep in mind is that there are some supply chain issues in these numbers. Yeah. So for example, I, I tried to buy an iPad and I wanted to get an iPad air. I wanted to get the rose gold one cause I bought a pink iMac recently and I wanted to kind of match. And so I went to the apple store and they didn't have any iPad airs in Providence and they didn't have any regular iPads either. So I was on the website trying to find one to buy for a long time, ended up buying a refurbished iPad pro just because it was the only one that would ship to me. Um, but I think there's just some stuff that people want that may have a high, uh, dollar amount or high ticket price that is just not available. And that may have also led to some softness in the numbers.

Mike Elgan (01:15:49):
Yep.

Leo Laporte (01:15:50):
For sure. Uh, yeah. I mean, you, you couldn't buy a car, you couldn't buy a lot of things. I don't know if people buy cars on each e-commerce, but uh, certainly those shortages must have very much had an impact.

Alex Wilhelm (01:16:03):
Yeah. Yeah. There's a, there's a lot of stuff going on right now that adds to these numbers. But I think even given all of these caveats, the fact that we saw some declines in volume of sales on these two kind of folks, shopping holidays is still a data point worth considering it's worth chewing on, but not changing your view of the broader market for

Mike Elgan (01:16:20):
As, as the supply chain crisis itself, there are a whole lot of very complex reasons for it. And, um, you know, it's not just one big thing. And speaking of which, Alex, do you have any predictions on when the supply chain crisis will, uh, will ease up, especially around electronics

Alex Wilhelm (01:16:38):
713 days in two hours.

Leo Laporte (01:16:39):
<laugh> okay, good. I learned

Alex Wilhelm (01:16:41):
Something very my, to be

Leo Laporte (01:16:42):
Honest, I have no idea. I learned something very interesting about the supply chain. I thought it was, uh, you know, we couldn't make enough chips, maybe it's the leg, what they call legacy, the older chips. But I learned that one of the biggest problems has nothing to do with chips. It has to do with substrates. And there was a substrate fire factory, uh, a while ago, the companies that make these, uh, substrates are having a really hard time making enough. There's actually a good article on the wall street journal. The chip shortage has made a star of this little known component sourcing a low margin part called the substrate has become a priority for Intel Invidia and ABD. You can at make the chips without the substrate and because of, you know, various shortages we're running outta substrates. So there you go. I'll give you that for there's also tech crunch, uh, plus article, you can tell the world about substrates, thank you

Alex Wilhelm (01:17:46):
For working in a, a plug there with the elbow. I appreciate that. Um, I wanna throw through there's other small bottlenecks, for example, there's, there's a Dutch company that has this specific chip making tool that is very hard to get, and they have essentially a lock on, on that part of the market. And the us wants to prevent that tech from reaching China. And so there's like, you know, the, the chip shores can also be kind of focused down to like one Dutch company, which is not the way you think about the global interconnected economy that we live in. Um, but there's more weakness than you think, because we've stripped all the fat out of the supply chain in, in kind of this, this pursuit of marginal profitability at the major corporate level. And so when something goes wrong, it goes really, really wrong. Cause there's no built in Kushner in the system. We've just taken all that out that

Leo Laporte (01:18:29):
Just in time stuff. Yeah.

Brian McCollough (01:18:32):
So I don't know. Have Leo, do you ever have Chris Mims from the, uh, wall street journal? I,

Leo Laporte (01:18:38):
I know him by his byline, but no we've never had him on. Yeah. So

Brian McCollough (01:18:41):
He had a, he has a book. This is a great Christmas present. Chris is a friend, but I I'm, I he's not paying me to pimp this book, but, um, it's called arriving today from factory to the front door. It just came out like two months ago or something and it's all about supply chain stuff. And he started writing it. Good timing when COVID hit. Right? Yeah. You

Alex Wilhelm (01:18:59):
Can't, you can't get the book though, because of supply chain.

Brian McCollough (01:19:01):
<laugh> actually books, books have been, there's been shortages of books recently. Uh, uh, anyway, but, um, so I highly recommend this book because he literally follows a us charger from a factory in Vietnam, you know, shipped across the oceans then on a truck. And so he, you know, he, he goes into each and every segment of how something gets to your door across this global supply chain. And one of the takeaways and from his subsequent reporting on this stuff too, because as he says, he, this is accidentally his beat. Now that

Leo Laporte (01:19:31):
Now he is the king of supply chain.

Brian McCollough (01:19:34):
Yeah. Is the biggest story in the world is this idea that it's almost an accident of history that since the Berlin wall fell and globalization happened, relatively speaking, the world was a relatively stable place. And so the supply chain chain took out all of the slack, as Alex is talking about where to get, you know, something sitting in a warehouse is, is costing a corporation money. So they only, they seven days after it's made, they want it in your hands. Right. And so there's this thinking now that, that, that was again, an accident of history that needs to be corrected because maybe going forward for the next few decades in theory, and hopefully, or I dunno, maybe even longer, but, um, that you can't rely on the globe being stable enough, not to have this level of disruption where a hurricane can knock out chip supply, or, you know, a global pandemic can do things, you know. And so a lot of the thinking now is that we need to build capacity back in and take the slackness and put it back in the system. This

Leo Laporte (01:20:42):
Is probably a larger conversation for another day. And maybe, uh, we can get some people with some expertise in this, but I also think it might have been a mistake to rely so heavily on China and Taiwan for so much of this, uh, because it's given Chi, China a huge leverage against the world. And frankly, you know, they have, they, they, they have eyes on Taiwan. They're arming up on Taiwan. And, uh, I wonder, you know, I was talking about this with Lisa the other night. What would we do if, uh, China decided, yeah, we decided we're gonna take Taiwan back. Uh, would the United States have the willingness to go into a global, what would certainly be a world war against, uh, superpower over Taiwan and yet without Taiwan and China's may manufacturing capacity. <laugh> we, we lost the war without a, without a shot fired. Well, this is why don't forget how go ahead, Mike first. Yeah.

Mike Elgan (01:21:38):
This is why we need diversification of the supply chain. I mean, one of the things, you know, the essential way that complex electronics are built is that many of the components are from multiple Asian countries. They go by ship into China and then they're assembled in final products with additional components that are made in China and then shipped out from China. And the ports in China have been just overwhelmed constantly for most of the pandemic in. So a lot of the dock workers were sent home because you know, of quarantines and stuff like that. And then by the time they come back, all the ships are like out there waiting. And so it's, it's, it's not just the manufacturing part. It's not just the substrates, it's dumb stuff like shipping. And there's a trend in cybersecurity where, where, where, uh, hackers are target ports, uh, for, oh really, uh, ransomware attacks.

Mike Elgan (01:22:33):
Oh, nice. And so the port of Los Angeles is completely backed up lots of the ports where things come and go. So yeah, what we need is to get everybody thought it was the greatest thing in the world to have this just in time stuff, no inventory, everything was shipping in the last minute. Everybody's patting themselves in the back at how it efficient. That was. But what we really need is we need to get back to inventory. We need to have lots of diversification. A lot of that stuff that's happening in Asia needs to move to Latin America and elsewhere. Um, also,

Leo Laporte (01:23:02):
And I think that process has begun. Uh, certainly Biden is, is funding. A lot of that we TSMC is building a 17 billion fab in tailored, Texas. So that, but it takes a long time, takes several years to build those plants. Yeah. Um,

Brian McCollough (01:23:19):
This is because think about it. One of, and I only know this because reading great Bloomberg article about this, but it, it it's affecting everybody. China invading Taiwan can't happen yet, even if they wanted to, because if they invaded Taiwan and blew up all the factories, they don't have the chip capacity. They're just,

Leo Laporte (01:23:37):
As they discovered,

Brian McCollough (01:23:39):
They discovered that when the Trump administration started to have the trade war with them and they lost access to certain, um, uh, chip designs and chip technology. Yeah. Look what

Leo Laporte (01:23:49):
Happened to way, yeah.

Brian McCollough (01:23:51):
They're on this crash course, even in China to build local chip fabs, because if they lost access to Taiwan, they'd be up a Creek, just like everybody else.

Leo Laporte (01:24:04):
We're all S the real message of this is that we are all in interdependent and, uh, we cannot afford to fight each other. We've got to work together. There's a lot of problems that are global, that we've gotta solve. And, uh, and, and battling over territory or political mind share is, is a foolish thing to do at this point. We need to, we need to solve our problems.

Brian McCollough (01:24:32):
Uh, somebody who's been watching that Beatles documentary,

Leo Laporte (01:24:34):
That is a good, by the way, that's a good way to waste 18 hours of your life. <laugh>

Alex Wilhelm (01:24:41):
No guys, we can't talk about the Beatles. I, I, I've already picked a fight with the crypto guys. I can't also get in trouble with the boomers. Oh,

Leo Laporte (01:24:47):
No, no. It's, I've been watching it. You have to, I mean, you gotta bring a lunch cuz each one of them's three, three hours and there's three of 'em and it's mostly just the Beatles sitting around going, I'm bored. What do we do now? Should we make an album? Okay, I'm leaving. Good boy. It's just, it's really at one point, Peter Sellers wanders in cuz he is about to make a movie next door tweaking 'em studios and the guys are sitting around, I don't know what to do. What should we do? And sellers sits there for about five minutes. He goes, and then somebody says, you want a cup of tea says yeah, no, I can't. I'll be, I'll buy <laugh>. He said with the Beatles who even, you know, time in 1968, they were pretty big. Uh, and he's even he's bored. They were too boring for me. They were too boring for Peter. So, so, but I, it is fascinating to watch. And especially when Paul starts noodling at the piano and in effect writes, let it be in front of you, is, is amazing. So I'm glad that exists. Not a Beatles fan. Alex

Alex Wilhelm (01:25:49):
Beetles were fine, but I, I, I viewed them as, uh, a little bit over indexed upon and I find this sort of document should be slightly.

Leo Laporte (01:25:55):
That's why it's great masturbatory. That's why it's great. No, no, no. That's why it's great. Cuz we've never, it's never before been seen, uh, it gives you insight if you are like me Beatles, obsessed, and you've read every book and all that because things happen there and you're what, and you're going, that's how that happened. It's fascinating. Um, yeah, but

Alex Wilhelm (01:26:15):
The, the idea of the documentary about a, the music creation process is certainly not new. I mean, like Metall had gone to a lot of trouble with, um, some kind of monster, which was a, an even deeper dive into the psychology of a, of a band at kind of the, the peak issue of their popular.

Leo Laporte (01:26:28):
Oh, I love it. When James Hatfield storms out and slams the tour it's over and

Alex Wilhelm (01:26:33):
Goes and goes right to

Leo Laporte (01:26:35):
Rehab, he goes, which is fine.

Alex Wilhelm (01:26:38):
Um, no, I mean, all this is fine. It it's just, it it's just SOP for boomers. That's fine. I, I have

Leo Laporte (01:26:43):
No beef that I just, I guess I qualify. Yeah, it's

Alex Wilhelm (01:26:46):
Fine. You're I like you. You're fine by

Leo Laporte (01:26:48):
Me. Yeah. I, I could, it was it's I haven't finished it cuz it's really long and not a lot happens, but it's fascinating when it happens. It's really like you you're watching this and you're going, he's writing. Let it be. Do you realize that he's he's and he he's he's uh, like one of the engineers is sitting next to me. He says, well, should it be, find myself at times of trouble or maybe find myself in times to double. What do you think? And Glen Johns go a tight trouble and they're writing the song in front of you and it's I don't know. Okay. Nevermind. Let's take a break. I'm sorry. I'm a boomer. What can I say? Have we talked about howdy duty lunch boxes cuz I can go on and on about that too. Alex

Alex Wilhelm (01:27:30):
Leo flyer flag, man. <laugh> enjoy yourself. Don't

Leo Laporte (01:27:32):
Listen to me. Don't there might be one buried out in the backyard out there. I don't know. I'll go. I'll get a trouble. I like to bury stuff out there. Uh, Alex Wilhelm on the scene of my childhood home reporter at tech crunch at Alex. Great to have you tech. Good to be here. Crunch. What is it? Pro plus plus tech crunch, plus get it for all his incisive writing and the equity podcast. The equity podcast. Oh, equity's great. Yeah, yeah,

Alex Wilhelm (01:27:59):
Yeah. I'm gonna take the extra plug there, Brian. Thank you. But it's, I'll go back to you tech meme, right home. Fantastic

Leo Laporte (01:28:04):
Is nice. You guys both listen to each other's podcasts. Yeah, we do really do. Yeah. And they, and it's sincere, uh, the tech meme ride home. You can find it@techmeme.com right there on the front page. Brian McCullough, the host internet history podcast and others. And of course my Mike elgan@elgan.com and uh, the, the, uh, official photographer of get chatterbox, right? Yes, that's right. chatterbox.com. Uh, our show today brought to you by worldwide technology and Dell technologies WWT. If you are, uh, a business and you know, you know, technology is the backbone of every business these days, but you need a partner when it comes to enterprise technology, I can, I make a suggestion, worldwide technology. They are amazing. They're at the forefront of innovation. They work with clients all over the world, transforming their business. And it all starts with the advanced technology centered, fascinating started with one, you know, one rack and one building.

Leo Laporte (01:29:06):
And it's spread now many, many hundreds and hundreds of feet of racks in I think four or five buildings, a research and testing lab that brings together technologies from all the leading OEMs, more than half a billion dollars in equipment. This lab, this is where WW T's own engineers go to spin up proofs of concept and pilots. So customers can confidently select the best solutions they can play with stuff, learn about it. But here's the cool thing it's open to you. You can use it too. Members of the ATC platform can run their own lab labs there. I mean, it's, this is kind of an amazing gift to the world from worldwide technology. The ATC offers hundreds of on demand and schedulable labs, things like Dell's VX rail or cyber recovery solutions. You could try the power store, the power flex, the power scale, the PowerMax, all the power, unity data protection and central IDPA.

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These labs represent the latest advances in primary storage. And you can try it all, but it's not just storage. Other labs in the ATC represent the newest advances in multi-cloud architecture and security in networking and primary and secondary storage and data analytics and AI DevOps. And so much more with ATC. You can test out products and solutions. Before you go to market, you can access technical articles, expert insights, demonstration videos, white papers, hands on labs, all the tools you need to stay up to date with the latest technology. And here's the best part. It's free. As a member of the WWT platform, you can use this, they virtualized it. You can access these resources anywhere in the world. You don't have to go to St. Louis to do it 365 days a year, not just the platform. There's also events. There's communities, all sorts of places.

Leo Laporte (01:30:56):
You can learn about technology trends here, the latest research and insights for my experts. I love this WWT share their knowledge, shares their resources, and it's all available to you. If you go to wwt.com/twi, whatever your business need, worldwide technology can deliver scalable, tried and tested tailored solutions because they know that it's not just about the tech. It's about execution. It's about strategy. Tech only works. If it supports your business and your business goals, they know that better than anybody. And they're the partner you want to help make this new world happen. Learn more about WWT, the ATC to get access to all these free resources. Again, wwt.com/twit is create a free account on the platform. Amazing worldwide technology, wwt.com/twit FTC. Boy, they have been active V under Lena con going after big tech. Now they've sued Invidia to block acquisition of arm. This was gonna be the biggest semiconductor chip merger in history. In fact, because arm stock prices gone up, it was first 32 billion that it was 40. Uh, as of this week, <laugh> the CA cash in stock. Transaction is now worth $75 billion. And the FTC is about to scuttle the deal entirely. Alex Willhelm. Is it over for Invidia and arm?

Alex Wilhelm (01:32:37):
It, it certainly seems though. I mean, we've seen a much more active American government on the antitrust beat. Um, just think back to what happened with, uh, visa and PLA. That was a smaller deal to be clear and a different kind of industry. But I think this is, uh, this is kind of the new normal. Now what's their

Leo Laporte (01:32:51):
Objection to this, because that seems to me that would be a good thing. Why does it make Invidia too powerful? I'll tell you why. We've really Intel. We've got AMD. That's the X 86 guys under arm. We've got Qualcom uh, we've got Samsung media tech, a few small companies. We've got apple, of course, making arm. What would be wrong with making Invidia a big player in that space as well? The more the merrier, the better the competition. We clearly that's one answer to the supply shortage. Right?

Alex Wilhelm (01:33:23):
Well, why doesn't envi just get into the arm business itself as opposed to, well,

Leo Laporte (01:33:27):
They are buying, they make Teras, they make arm processors, they buy, they have an arm. I'm sure that it's an architecture license. They have an arm license arm doesn't make anything. Yeah. Right. They're a, they're a fabulous, uh, design firm. Uh, well,

Alex Wilhelm (01:33:41):
Do you wanna have the fabulous design firm then in that case, under the auspices of one particular company, or do you think they should stay independent? I mean, to me, to me, the anticompetitive angle here, isn't too hard to see versus I'm struggling to really figure out who's gonna benefit from the, the takeover aside from Invidia.

Leo Laporte (01:33:57):
Well, and maybe not at that price, cuz I have to say 75 billion. It's starting to look like maybe Invidia might breathe a sigh of relief, uh, here.

Brian McCollough (01:34:05):
Well, but that's also, that's the problem for arm and, and SoftBank that owns them is that so if this deal goes down and, and SoftBank is like, all right, fine, we'll just do an IPO. There's no way that IPO is gonna be $75 million. No. So, but so, so also, and

Leo Laporte (01:34:23):
I don't think SoftBank is a better, uh, owner to answer your question Alex than Invidia would be. I think they're probably a worse owner. Go ahead, Brian, are they? But,

Brian McCollough (01:34:33):
But my question maybe to Alex's are they essentially ONAC acquirable because is there a buyer for whom wrong argument <laugh> anyone that could buy them? You could make the argument that, well, we can't let them buy them because then it's too strategic for everybody. They just cut everybody else off. That's a good

Leo Laporte (01:34:53):
Point, too dangerous. It's not that only applies Invidia that lost. I'm sorry. Everybody's lost now. Nobody's yeah, that, that only applies to us companies. So, uh, the, the FCC has no, you know, arms. No, but the EU also investigated UK, which is where arm's headquartered said we don't like this idea either. Um, I mean, I think there's a global yes. Kind of no, this isn't gonna happen. China was also looking into the deal apparently <laugh>

Alex Wilhelm (01:35:20):
I'm sure. I'm sure the Chinese communit probably love to by arm. Yeah. And then, uh, cut us all off of it. Um, uh, to me, the, the more important thing is not this particular deal, but just the change in how technology transactions are being viewed by major governments around the world or governing blocks. And I, I, we just saw this recently with face book, sorry, meta and Giffy. I think that was in the UK. Also

Leo Laporte (01:35:41):
The UK, I'm curious, can they force me to sell Giffy? That's what they say. I,

Alex Wilhelm (01:35:48):
I don't know how much market leverage the UK has outside of the European union body, but we do know that the EU can throw its weight around so

Leo Laporte (01:35:56):
Well, the EU would probably be so successful, but what would, would meta have to withdraw from the United Kingdom and say, okay, I guess we will ignore them and not do business there. Alex.

Brian McCollough (01:36:04):
I don't know if you've heard this, but I've heard they're considering that, that they're considering just, you know, being like, all right, we'll either take the fine that you would levy against us or rewrite it just for the UK market because it might be, it might be worth it to take any slap on the wrist to, to do this everywhere else in the world.

Alex Wilhelm (01:36:23):
Well, this is why I've been a, a big advocate for larger technology fines. What I find really funny is when like the FCC or the SCC is like, we find Facebook

Leo Laporte (01:36:30):
A million dollars. Yeah. Big deal. And

Alex Wilhelm (01:36:31):
I'm like, stupidest, you just literally told them the price for doing this thing is a million dollars. They're gonna do it a hundred thousand times. Cause I don't care. Um,

Leo Laporte (01:36:39):
That was one of the strengths of GDPR is the fines were a, a, uh, percentage of your income of your revenue and, and I mean, significant fines, billions,

Alex Wilhelm (01:36:50):
On the point though, about the actual Invidia deal, keep in mind, I just pulled this up to refresh my memory, but there were a, a huge chunk of shares involved. I think it was um, yeah, that's why it's said 44.3 million. Yeah. Right. So what procedure is the appreciation of Invidia, right? Uh, in the Bitcoin blockchain GPU era, if you will. And so they've essentially priced a deal in their own, their own currency, which went up in value. So you kinda screwed yourself to a degree. I think,

Leo Laporte (01:37:16):
Um, I, I don't know what you know know on the one hand, I'm glad that governments are, are sitting up and, you know, developing a spine and saying, you know, this isn't a good thing, this, this kind of aggregation of tech, but on the other hand, I'm kind of terrified of the notion that governments are gonna have such a huge influence on how tech companies get run. I don't know, which is worse. I really don't.

Alex Wilhelm (01:37:38):
No, I don't think, I don't think that's entirely fair. And, and, and to, to, to bring up a point, why, think about what Christopher mins wrote again for the journal about, um, Neo, uh, conglomerates, uh, recently and how we used to kind of look up to GE that did you know everything from like airplane engines to like appliances and now we're seeing major tech companies in that way. I, I don't see the government telling tech companies what they can and can't do. You're not gonna break up Amazon. I mean, good luck, but not letting Amazon buy more smaller companies to increase its own in market half seems very reasonable to me. We're not saying that Facebook can't make its own gift product, that it can't buy Giffy, which is different.

Leo Laporte (01:38:13):
I loved this piece, but by the way, from, uh, your, your, your pal, Chris move over GE the tech conglomerate of the new leaders of industry and his, uh, proposition is that Amazon apple alphabet, Microsoft meta are the, the big conglomerate as GE and others fade away the dismantling of general electric, Toshiba Johnson and, and Siemens Dow DuPont, United technologies. Uh, that makes sense. The industrial era is over. It's the information era. Yeah.

Alex Wilhelm (01:38:45):
I, I actually, I, I have a small, I'm gonna say something nice about myself. Um, I wrote a piece about this in like 2014. I'm like these platform companies are just getting to be super huge and they're doing everything now. And in one of the very few things I've noticed slightly early, that ended up being correct. Usually I'm wrong. <laugh> so I just wanna get myself one point for actually getting to me. Right. Just, you

Leo Laporte (01:39:03):
Know what you you're so self deprecating, Alex, little, just a little advice. Say, you know, I knew that back at 2014, see my article, Christopher Mims <laugh> you're late to the game. Yeah. But later chest thumping here. It's okay.

Alex Wilhelm (01:39:18):
Yeah. 2014. He would've said that, but post rehab made as a much smaller ego.

Leo Laporte (01:39:22):
It's a different, it's a different Alex. It's an improve one. I hope. Yeah. Uh, yes, you were always great. You were always great. I'm always, always enjoyed you, Alex. Always. I

Mike Elgan (01:39:32):
Mean, Mims, Mims, lumped together, um, companies like I, Amazon and apple, which aren't really lable. They're

Leo Laporte (01:39:39):
Different businesses. Yeah. Conglomerates.

Mike Elgan (01:39:41):
Yeah. Because, because Amazon does a vastly larger number of things that are

Leo Laporte (01:39:45):
Completely relate. His point is apple wants to, right. They want to get into cars. They wanna do other things too. So, but

Mike Elgan (01:39:51):
I, my argument, which again, I'll Thum my chest. I wrote this long before Christopher Mills ever wrote it,

Leo Laporte (01:39:56):
Even before, before Alex Wilhem yes.

Mike Elgan (01:39:59):
VO before Alex Wilhem ever wrote anything like this. Um, the a a

Leo Laporte (01:40:05):
Before he was a twinkle in the eye.

Mike Elgan (01:40:08):
Go ahead. I knew that car is not a car. Um, a self-driving car is a super computer and a robot. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:40:15):
And, uh, actually that's what Tim cook, I think said is it's a robot we're building robots. Apple

Mike Elgan (01:40:20):
Is in the artificial intelligence business. And in the consumer electronics business, it's gonna be a content consumption device as much as it is at a conveyance. And so if apple did ordinary gas, gas, and cars with, you know, no sophisticated computer, yes. That would be a different business. But the future of self-driving cars, the car that Apple's actually working on is a lot more like a, you know, a lot more like an iPhone, uh, than, than, than a regular car is true. True.

Leo Laporte (01:40:52):
Uh, cook, uh, we were talking about this on Mac break weekly on Tuesday, uh, cook, doesn't see himself as getting into the car business. He says himself as getting into the autonomous robot business, that autonomy is what they're interested in. Yes. And cars is just one manifestation of that. That's kind of, that's kind of, that's a much bigger ambition. So in a, you know, I think, well, currently apple is not an Amazon territory, but they'd like to be, they'd like to diversify. I mean, the biggest,

Mike Elgan (01:41:21):
The biggest, uh, area that they're getting into that is unrelated to the business is finance. So the whole platinum card and all that stuff, I think that there's a huge future for apple in, in doing, uh, banking essentially. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:41:35):
Alex, Lindsay keeps wondering why they haven't turned apple card and apple pay into a bank. Alex is all I know from banks is I learned in, in the TV show. Billions, uh, well,

Alex Wilhelm (01:41:47):
I'm sure that's representative, but, but I think Mr. GaN is, is dead on that. There is a, a large future for them because people have shown a willingness to give apple control over parts of their finance. We trust apple in the TV,

Leo Laporte (01:41:59):
Their lives. Billions, uh, <laugh> owning a bank was a completely different kind of business because of regulators like Paul GI like Paul Jamma. Yeah. He's tough. And then there's that, uh, then there's the, oh, I don't know. It's a complicated story. Leo. Yeah. Wags wags. His kids go to my kid's school. No kidding. So FYI, I see him. I love him times a week. He's a great actor. Ask him Dave, David Constable. If, if ask David, if, if, uh, he read the article that said he is the tinker bell to, to axle rods pan, I'm curious. I'm just curious. I'm sure he has a Google alert on his name. Yeah, actually. Yeah, it probably does. It probably does. Is

Alex Wilhelm (01:42:41):
This how most people feel when people bring up, bring up like NFTs because I have no idea. Yeah. That we're doing this to

Leo Laporte (01:42:46):
You on purposes. Yes. We're doing this to you on purpose. Okay. Uh, while you, I don't have a Showtime subscription, come on. Uh,

Alex Wilhelm (01:42:53):
I refuse to watch, uh, capitalism. Um,

Leo Laporte (01:42:56):
Oh, you have enough of it. <laugh> during the day. Yeah. Like

Alex Wilhelm (01:42:59):
I got plenty. I don't need to watch succession to realize that companies are

Leo Laporte (01:43:03):
Run by. I love success. You know why? Cuz these guys are so they're wealthy. They're the Murdock clam. Basically. They're multi, multi multibillionaires and their lives are so dreary and horrible and miserable. And I just love that about it. <laugh> like sure you can buy your own island, but you're miserable on it. That's what I, that's what I like to hear. <laugh>

Alex Wilhelm (01:43:23):
I watched the first episode and it gave up, so, oh, shout

Leo Laporte (01:43:26):
Out to you for me. It than gets better. It gets even better. So Giffy, uh, so what is Facebook gonna do? Are they gonna dives?

Alex Wilhelm (01:43:35):
Oh God. I mean, I, I don't know. I don't think anyone knows quite yet, but I think it will be a illustrative. What you're really asking there, Leo is when you get hit with something like this, what is the big tech response? And I don't, I don't think we really have a playbook. It's just the

Leo Laporte (01:43:47):
Beginning. Isn't it? Yeah. Can they? Yeah,

Mike Elgan (01:43:49):
Just disable. I mean, this is, you know,

Alex Wilhelm (01:43:51):
Just for this particular instance, can they just disable it in

Leo Laporte (01:43:54):
The UK and would that be enough? That's what I've heard. That's what I've heard is you can disable Giffy big deal, but would the UK then take arms against meta? Well, right,

Alex Wilhelm (01:44:04):
Because like the, the, the nuclear option would be, oh, what are they gonna block? Uh, Facebook on ISPs across us, the land. Like they would never go

Leo Laporte (01:44:11):
That far. I'm sure mark Zuckerberg would love it. That would be the best thing. It's just like when Google said to Spain, well, you don't want Google news. You don't get Google news and Spain capitulated, I think, uh, go ahead, UK government challenge. I'm trying to think about, see how your, see, how your voters feel about that

Alex Wilhelm (01:44:31):
Between Zuckerberg and Boris Johnson. Who would you rather have win a cage match? I'm really struggling to

Leo Laporte (01:44:35):
Pay. I would like to see the both in the

Alex Wilhelm (01:44:37):
Cage match. Yeah. To be clear though. But who would you root for? It's kinda like,

Leo Laporte (01:44:42):
I don't know. Mutual assured destruction, I guess. Speaking of which the Russians, this is crazy. When is when of ever people put the word crazy and Russians together never first time. Yeah. First time ever. Yeah. The Russians are threatening criminal charges against a NASA astronaut. They say drilled a whole intentionally in the international space station cuz they were homesick Ross cosmos. The Russian space corporation has completed an investigation into the whole found. So spacecraft while docked to the ISS in 2018, they've all along said, we think it was astronaut Serena, uh, chancellor who wanted to go home. So, uh, drilled a hole in their spacecraft. The NASA says we have cameras on all of the astronauts during the time this must have happened when the leak was detected, they were nowhere near this NASA thinks it's it was the Russians building. The saw use that made a mistake. They screwed up and they're covering it. They screwed up and they're covering it up. Uh, crazy man.

Alex Wilhelm (01:45:57):
The, the best part of the story though, in the actual artist technical piece, there's a section called Russian provocations. And the first sentence reads, the reality is that these Russian attacks are indeed false. Just I love the declar false declarative. That is, this is all the way. Big crap. Yeah, yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:46:13):
Yeah. Well, and then the, and then, uh, the Chinese, uh, or I'm sorry, the Russian military that shot its own satellite testing. Their anti-satellite ballistic missiles, creating debris, which forced the astronauts to shelter for two hours because they were afraid the debris would hit the ISS. Oh, this is like having, uh, a crazy neighbor. Yeah. You know who blames you because their bears have gotten loose.

Alex Wilhelm (01:46:40):
Yeah. Or more like a crazy flatmate who like takes your mixer and crashes it on the floor. Ands. Like you broke it. You broke it. Wow. You're a psychopath. What's wrong with you?

Leo Laporte (01:46:48):
Yeah. Do you wanna hear, uh, sounds, uh, the sounds of Mars, would you like to? Yes. The sounds ladies

Speaker 6 (01:46:56):
And gentlemen, the Mar Mars Rover sounds from Mars.

Leo Laporte (01:47:05):
<laugh> that's it? That's. It is. That's no different it's it's gonna sound like that. There's no many hello. Hello. But they put, they did to their credit. They put good quality, uh, microphones on the, the perseverance. And uh, now we hear actually you're I think you're hearing the, the John, correct me. Is the wheels moving? There's something you're hearing. Yeah. Sounds of space. Okay. Is that a typewriter? I dunno what that is. Just what? I just know. You should never write on the CMS. I just know that that's all I know. Oh my gosh. I

Alex Wilhelm (01:47:45):
Can't believe we're. We talked about that. We talked about that

Leo Laporte (01:47:48):
Off air hours. Okay. Um,

Alex Wilhelm (01:47:55):
Do you remember that time? The internet, when everyone would take little clips and like auto tune them and turn them into songs? Yeah, it was that. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. We need to take the sounds of Mars and do like the dubstep remix of what Mars sounds like. Cause that would actually be

Leo Laporte (01:48:06):
Fun. I think that, uh, they stopped the auto tune songs after, uh, song. This did the definitive auto tune with mark Zuckerberg, ladies and gentlemen. Hey

Speaker 6 (01:48:20):
Everyone. We are live from my backyard where I am smoking meat, meat, like a brisket. I'm making meat now. So do I hope meets? That's gonna be delicious. Yeah. Hope meat. That's the I'm talking now. Yeah. Give the sock, give the sock, see you CC my name. Maybe gimme the, gimme the

Leo Laporte (01:48:44):
I'm sorry, I can't stop playing this. Hello

Speaker 6 (01:48:48):
To you. Thanks for hanging out with me in my backyard while I'm smoking these meats too. The thing about smoking meat is it takes a long time sitting around with my wifi. I like racing, grilling meats. Um, racing cars are two of the most fun things that you can do manual transmission. Um, I enjoy that. Do I hunt? Um, yeah. Smoking these meats. Oh no, it seems I was daydreaming again.

Speaker 7 (01:49:17):
I just wanna make clear that you have had subpoenas. Is that correct?

Speaker 8 (01:49:23):
Mr. Zuckerberg? What is Facebook doing to prevent foreign actors from interfering in us elections?

Speaker 6 (01:49:30):
Uh, we are smoking need like a brisket. Okay.

Leo Laporte (01:49:36):
We're gonna take a break. I'm sorry. I'm just gonna watch this for the next hour. And uh, we'll be back with more this week in tech in just a little bit. We had a great week on TWI. Let's watch this movie and uh, enjoy Jeremy

Jason Howell (01:49:51):
Says, have you experienced a rattle from the cameras on the pixel six pro? I definitely have a rattle. I don't have a rattle that way. Okay. I have a rattle if I do it this way. All right. This very scientific experiment say rattle and phone

Announcer (01:50:04):
Previously on TWiT: Tech News Weekly

Jason Howell (01:50:07):
Jack Dorsey, leaving Twitter for square and square becoming block. It's a tangled mess.

Speaker 10 (01:50:13):
Especially over the last few months, he's really become more focused on Bitcoin and crypto in general, they've announced that they are going to come up with their own consumer hardware wallet,

Announcer (01:50:24):
Hands on photography.

Speaker 11 (01:50:25):
We're gonna talk about moon fee and how you can capture moon photography with whatever camera you're using. Yes. I said, whatever camera you're

Leo Laporte (01:50:34):
Using windows weekly, Microsoft keeps messing with edge. There's

Speaker 12 (01:50:39):
Some indication that this by now pay later, may in fact, literally be malicious and have serious problems, um, that it's not a Microsoft service. It's a third

Leo Laporte (01:50:48):
Party service. Wait a minute. It's not even a Microsoft service. They, they just said to some third party, go ahead, put your crap in our brows or what? So here, TWiT tell your boss it's job related.

Speaker 13 (01:50:59):
Now I have to shut it off because there's so many intrusive things like rewards

Speaker 12 (01:51:03):
Are coming up. I got one that said you can print out coupons on paper from

Leo Laporte (01:51:07):
This site. You ready? Now, now we're talking by the way, I got a rattle too. Jason, on my pixel six, that's just the optical image stabilization. Don't worry about it. He's gonna blame me because Mike, you know this, I, I borrowed his pixel six that took it to Mexico. So I have pictures from Oaxaca, which came out great by the way. Uh, and this is mine. It has the same thing. So don't blame me, Jason, for your, your jiggles, our show today brought to you by express VPN. I love these guys using the internet without express VPN is like leaving your laptop, exposed at the coffee shop. While you run to the a good VPN protects, you protects your privacy and also gives you the chance to, you know, watch Netflix in another country. There's three very valuable things a VPNN could do, but there's something you should be aware of.

Leo Laporte (01:52:02):
If you're trying to protect your privacy and security, you rely on the VPN provider to be secure and private. That's why I recommend and only use express VPN express. VPN is regularly audited to make sure that they protect your privacy and they protect your security. How do they do that? Well, in a couple of ways, first of all, they destroy all logs. They keep no track of your visit. That's really important because they cannot be subpoena that for what you were doing online, they can't sell your information on to marketers. They care so much about this. They actually wrote the trusted server technology they use, which when you join an express VPN server, easy to do, press that big button on the app. Uh, all they spin up into Ram only the trusted server. It runs in Ram sandbox. It cannot cannot right to the hard drive.

Leo Laporte (01:52:53):
So it can't log what you're doing. And then immediately after you close out the session, it disappears out of Ram. There is literally zero trace of you being there. That's what you, you want. It also protects you. If you're in a coffee shop from being hacked, you can go out now and buy a wifi. Pineapple makes it easy to attack people's computers. If they're sitting there on an open wifi access bar point, but if they, if you're using express VPN, they can't see you're there. All they see is gobbly, go encryption. That's it. So it's an encrypted tunnel between your device and the internet. They can't steal your data. They can't get into your system. And then of course there's the great geographic benefits. I love express VPN. You can trust them. They spend money to make sure that their infrastructure's fast enough to watch HD video.

Leo Laporte (01:53:39):
In fact, one of the problems with some older VPNs was it was so slow. I didn't want to use it with express VPN. I leave it on all the time. You can run it on your phone. You can run it on your computer, but you can even put it on a router so that your entire home is protected. And I guarantee you, nobody's gonna say, oh, what happened to the internet? It's gonna be just as fast. You won't even know, but you'll be twice as safe. It would take a hacker hacker with a super computer, a billion years to get past express VPNs. And it works everywhere you go. It is the best VPN in the world. And right now we got a deal for you three extra months free. When you sign up for a year, that brings it down below seven bucks a month.

Leo Laporte (01:54:18):
I know you can get free VPNs. How do they pay for themselves? You might ask that question. It's worth it. Secure your online data today by visiting express vp.com/less than seven bucks a month for absolute protection express, vpn.com/twit P R E SS, vpn.com/twit three months, extra free with, uh, one year subscription, protect your online privacy with express VP N I don't know, even know what this means. The headline is meta has chosen AWS as its long term strategic cloud provider. I was baffled by this doesn't didn't Facebook, AKA meta, the company, formerly known as Facebook spent all this money on open compute and network centers. And what do they need Amazon for Alex? Do you know?

Alex Wilhelm (01:55:14):
I mean, I, I have a hunch, which is that Facebook is a service used around the world by lots of people all the time. And Facebook is not going to put quite as much capital as Amazon is into AWS or Microsoft and Azure. Ah, so they probably want to have someone to cover in some blanks.

Leo Laporte (01:55:30):
So if it's for global use, then

Alex Wilhelm (01:55:32):
That, that's my, that's my read. I I'd love to get Brian and Mike to back me up and tell me if I'm wrong or right. But that was my hunch when I, when I saw this. Yeah. I thought it was

Leo Laporte (01:55:38):
Weird. You agree guys?

Mike Elgan (01:55:44):
Well, uh, yeah, I think, I think that, um, I think they're, they're re-engineering or claiming to re-engineer the entire company around, uh, around the metaverse, uh, making, uh, social, you know, creating an alternative digital reality that we all live in. And I think that they would like to focus on that and not focus on running gigantic data centers in the Arctic circle and all that kind of stuff. So, uh, you know, I think it's just a focus thing. I think they've, if you can imagine what they're already up against with, uh, the videos and photos that are uploaded and downloaded from Facebook every day with the number of users they have, it's just a catastrophically, huge it's

Leo Laporte (01:56:22):
Mind,

Mike Elgan (01:56:23):
Absolutely mind boggling. And now they're talking about, oh, let's increase that by a hundred fold. You know, it's probably, you know, AWS is probably one of the few companies that can handle that sort of ramp up that they're talking about and they still have to deal with the photos and the videos. Right. So it's all additional,

Brian McCollough (01:56:41):
Sorry I was on mute, but, um, that, uh, my only take would be, I mean, for, for things like this, uh, does it hurt to have your eggs in several different baskets? <laugh>, you know, right. Like, uh, I know, I know if you're, if you're Microsoft, you wanna do all of your stuff in house, but if that's not your main core business, then I'd have a little Azure. I'd have a little AWS. I'd have a little here, a little there. Right. It seems

Leo Laporte (01:57:04):
Smart. All right. I won't worry about that too much.

Mike Elgan (01:57:08):
I wonder one, one last thing on this point, I wonder if their, their recent, um, uh, blackout, uh, which was really embarrassing for Facebook, uh, where multiple, uh, of their products went down as a P Facebook is incredibly P are driven and that just made them look like a bunch of clowns that, you know, these stories about how they couldn't even get into their own, you know, server cage to, to fix it and all that kind of stuff. Most of those stories were not true, but basically they had a big crash and everybody was kind of pointing and laughing at Facebook on Twitter. And so part of this might be, um, just somebody else to blame if things go south. Yeah. Because

Leo Laporte (01:57:49):
It's not like that hasn't happened to AWS by the way, and Microsoft,

Mike Elgan (01:57:53):
But again, if it's gonna happen, it's better for Facebook to say those guys, oh,

Leo Laporte (01:57:57):
It's over there. No attention we were talking, or you saw in the promo, uh, about what Microsoft is doing with edge, which is just reprehensible. They edit a buy. Now pay later feature. It's not an extension. You can't turn it off. They have a coupon search built into edge, but there is some good news. This broke a couple of days ago, Tom Warren writing in the verge. Uh, but I think actually was Rafael Rivera, uh, who found it, um, for a while, the reason people were upset at about edges being bloated was that Microsoft was making it really hard on windows 11 to change the default browser. You couldn't just push one button and use Firefox or Chrome. You'd have to go through every single app extension, every single document extension that a browser could open and say, yeah, I want that to be opened by Chrome.

Leo Laporte (01:58:45):
Yeah, that too. Yeah, that too. And it was a very long multi click process. That was just from a normal person, probably undoable, Firefox, figured out a way around it. Microsoft reversed that they blocked Firefox from doing that. So we really thought they were gonna make people edges, the default browser. Well, at least for now they've backtracked on those browser changes. They're gonna let you with one button as it used to be change all of the, uh, all of the things. So this is the di the dialogue you'd get, where you'd have to go through average tension, HTM, HTML, PDF S HTML, SVG. Now you can just click this one button. I hope that stays. Uh, they probably got a little bit of heat from, uh,

Brian McCollough (01:59:30):
Well, ISN. Isn't it funny that everybody's remembering, uh, the hits with Microsoft, all of a sudden, cuz Europe is, is thinking of suing them for bundling teams. Um, you've got bundling, you've got Microsoft playing fast and loose with browser bundling and <laugh> things like that. It's like, everyone's like waking up and being like, oh yeah, if we're gonna do antitrust stuff, uh, Microsoft has gotten a free pass these last few years, but they're the

Alex Wilhelm (01:59:55):
OGs. Yeah. Yeah. Also you can just hear echoes of the pre SA Adela, Microsoft and in the, in these issues, like who thought this was a good idea who signed off on this system? Who thought, ah, yes, we're not gonna get hit for this. We're not gonna have to backtrack on this. This is not gonna create problems for us. Let's make everyone use edge. And then let's bake in some crap to try to what really drive some tiny, incremental revenue compared to their aggregate. Like let

Leo Laporte (02:00:22):
A top line, why would, who cares? Why would you even do that? Microsoft? Are you that desperate for real? No,

Alex Wilhelm (02:00:28):
They're not. Yeah. But I guarantee you, there was an, there was some corporate planning, OKR about how edge needed to drive X revenue by date. Y and people wanted to get their bonuses. So they followed it. It's just, it it's amazing that it got out. Yeah. And made it into the public and that they made doubled down mistake on Firefox and had to end up here. It was always going to end up here. And by the way, if you wanna poison user trust, do stuff like this. For example, on iOS, it happened to be today. If someone texts you an address and you click on it, it wants to load apple maps. Well, I deleted that and I run Google maps like everyone else. But iOS, when you click on an address says, oh, you don't have apple maps. Right. Do you wanna download it? And I'm like, no, I wanna be send to my mapping. Application's a reason <laugh> I know you can do that apple because you're not made up of morons. You're just trying to get me to use your crabby product. And it makes me really hate iOS. So like, don't do this Microsoft, what the hell? Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:01:25):
Yeah. Right. I agree.

Alex Wilhelm (02:01:27):
Yeah. Frank, Frank asking me a tweet, but I'm still right about this.

Leo Laporte (02:01:31):
Well, next week we're gonna have the chief marketing officer, Chris Capella on windows weekly. That should be fun. I'm surprised he, someone wants to be on, but

Alex Wilhelm (02:01:40):
Okay. Chris, Chris is nice. I know I'm

Leo Laporte (02:01:42):
On Twitter. A little Chris. Great loved Chris. Uh, he's he's always straightforward and honest. Um, you know, and this is the thing you learn is that these companies are filled with great people. Uh, but they don't necessarily control every aspect of the company's operation. I'm you know, and somebody in marketing, Microsoft said, you know, we really need to buy now pay later plugin for edge and forced it through probably.

Alex Wilhelm (02:02:04):
Yeah, but here's the thing Brian's right. There is a different climate of antitrust and making mistakes of this. Now it's not a good time. Now, now it's, it's the worst possible time to appear to be a platform player over leveraging your, your builtin advantages. Just stupid. Don't

Leo Laporte (02:02:19):
Don't it don't do it. Uh, especially if you've

Alex Wilhelm (02:02:22):
Been skating so much lately, everybody forgot to invite them to all the congressional hearings

Leo Laporte (02:02:26):
And whatnot though. Yeah, that's right. But this was a good time for Microsoft just to keep its head down and, and pay no attention

Alex Wilhelm (02:02:33):
And keep mentor. That's why they did it

Leo Laporte (02:02:35):
Left out. Yeah. Yeah. Just, yeah, we really wanna go to go to sat. Satcha is lonely. Yeah. Lonely. A new rule will allow deck cur collectors to track you down on social media. They can't DM you, but they can, or cause they can't tweet you in public, but they can DM you. Yes. Uh, em, email, text messages, social media, all open. These are changes to fair debt collection practices act. They were introduced, uh, under the Trump regime and now, uh, our law. So, uh, get ready for, uh, your creditors to slide into your DMS. Maybe we'll is this

Mike Elgan (02:03:18):
Think we should be upset about, I mean, I, I don't, you know, they can do it, but you can block them.

Leo Laporte (02:03:23):
Right. I, I feel like it's fine. I mean, yeah, exactly. What are you, they can call you. They can send you

Mike Elgan (02:03:29):
A letter in the mail. So why not? Why not? Your publicly known Twitter

Leo Laporte (02:03:33):
Account? Yeah. Yeah. Uh, just making sure we've covered all of our bases. Wanna mention, uh, the passing of Jim Warren? I don't know if any of you knew Mike, do you remember Jim?

Leo Laporte (02:03:49):
Uh, no. He was, uh, the guy who created the west coast computer fair. Ah-huh. In fact, you might remember the famous, uh, images of him roller skating around this was back in the seventies. This was where the apple two was introduced. In fact, here's a picture of, uh, Steve jobs at the apple booth at the first west coast computer fair. Um, it was really a big part of early days, uh, in Silicon valley. Uh, Jim Warren was a great guy, passed away, uh, at the age of 85, uh, this week. So he just wanted to, uh, mention that a very important person in the early days of, uh, personal computing. And now I think we can let you all enjoy your Sunday evening. Mike ELGAN let's give a plug to chatter box. What do you say?

Mike Elgan (02:04:39):
I would love to, and thank you for that opportunity. Yeah. Chatter box is my son. Kevin's, uh, brilliant educational product and it's a smart speaker, like an Amazon echo, but kids build it themselves. Then they program it themselves. And then after that they have this smart speaker that's totally private. There's no way for chatter box or any company to know who the user is. So it's UN monetizable in any other way, other than after you buy the product. And it teaches AI literacy, which is super important, cuz kids these days are the first generation to grow up in a world where there's a talking AI thing in their house. Right. So psychologically we're not really prepared for that and the way to teach kids what that thing is, is to build one. So that's it. And it's a big push for schools now, um, this year, uh, next year rather, uh, there's gonna be, uh, Kevin's, company's gonna create all kinds of brilliant curriculum, uh, to help, uh, teachs teach all these programming concepts and kids love. It's like super fun. So yeah. Hello, chatterbox.com is, is where to go to find out more. And it's just a, it's just a brilliant product and I love it, but, uh, I'm biased

Leo Laporte (02:05:47):
<laugh> uh, and how's he been able to get, uh, parts because I know, uh, he uses a raspberry pie, right?

Mike Elgan (02:05:56):
Yes. Well, one of the, the, the, uh, the voice hat part, I is proprietary and everything else is open. The hardest part has been raspberry pies. And so he's been kind of hoarding them for a long time. So he is able to fulfill <laugh> Christmas orders and stuff like that, but he's, he's nervous about it. Yeah. And you know, hoping that that starts flowing, uh, sooner rather than later, but that's the hardest part is the raspberry pies. Yeah. Yeah. You, you can buy one off raspberry pies. If you're a consumer on Amazon, if you get the kit with a, with a keyboard and all that stuff, you can buy that and it'll cost you 150 bucks. There you go. But to get, but he needs hundreds of just the raspberry pie fours and that you cannot get right now. So, okay. He's on it. You can probably get

Leo Laporte (02:06:41):
Threes a little bit easier. So the, the other

Mike Elgan (02:06:43):
Chatter box can use three chat box works with all of them. Oh, all of them, which is, which is nice. But, um, but fortunately for schools and also people who are inclined toward this type of product, many of them already have a raspberry pie that, you know, a lot of schools bought raspberry pies thinking, wow, we're gonna teach kids about computers and they're just kind of sitting there. They don't know what to do with them. Here you go. So for those kinds of schools, this is a fantastic product. He also sells the Chatta box with no raspberry pie in it. And of, of course, for reduced price, greatly reduced price. And so schools and individuals come by those and use the raspberry pie they already have. So it's pretty great.

Leo Laporte (02:07:18):
That's a brilliant idea. And, uh, gastro Noma, I imagine you're sold out for Prosecco.

Mike Elgan (02:07:25):
We are not, we're doing a pretty big Prosecco. Oh no. We, we, we normally only have three couples for that one, but this time, uh, we're gonna have, I believe, uh, six couples. And so we already have three couples signed up, but we have room for two more couples, so that's gonna be amazing. Um, and so, you know, I'd recommend if people want to really, if you wanna really score big with your spouse for Christmas, <laugh> a

Leo Laporte (02:07:52):
Gift. Uh, somebody who just came off your most recent gastro nomad adventure, highly recommended highly. Thank you, Leo. Yeah, I appreciate that so much. We appreciate that. And I gain, I had so much fun <laugh> yeah. So good. It happens. I I'll never forget it. It was really an amazing, uh, experience you and Amira dude. Amazing thing. Well,

Mike Elgan (02:08:12):
Thank you. And your, your pixel photos. We, we are in many lowlight situations cause it was day of the dead. We're in a cemetery after midnight, we were in all these lowlight situations. And you're your pictures are some of the best

Leo Laporte (02:08:23):
Ones. Well, Mike is the, uh, official photographer. So, uh, uh, I probably shouldn't show all of these cuz I don't know. Oh you can, you

Mike Elgan (02:08:32):
Can. It's totally fine.

Leo Laporte (02:08:33):
Okay. No, absolutely. Yeah. All many of them, it was, I mean the, there was so many great things and you really do a great job taking pictures. Um, thank you. A lot of food, pick a lot of food, a lot of food, but there's people happy people here. We are enjoying our final meal. That was so much fun. That's

Mike Elgan (02:08:52):
That's that beautiful church in the background, across the, across the cobbles to lane there that's

Leo Laporte (02:08:57):
Beautiful spot. It was a really, uh, uh, God, the food and the, and the people. And I loved Oaxaca. I just really loved the, uh, people there. It was just so much fun. They're just such wonderful people. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh, Mr. Uh, Brian McCullough tech. Yes. Meme ride home podcast. I thought you were doing seven days. You've cut back to six, huh?

Brian McCollough (02:09:22):
No, what it is is we've always done five days a week because that is the, um, Monday 15, 20 minute news Roundup. Yeah. Um, where it's just the news of the day. And then, um, on the weekends now, uh, Christmas, CNA and inventor of hashtag is my

Leo Laporte (02:09:38):
Co-host. Oh, I didn't know that. I love Chris. We,

Brian McCollough (02:09:41):
Uh, we do these bonus episodes where, for example, uh, we had the constitution Dow folks on, uh, as I told you, uh, when Twitter lodged, um, uh, Twitter blue, we had Cavan on, um, Chris is really good at getting guests cuz he know is

Leo Laporte (02:09:57):
Everybody, he knows everybody he's worked everywhere.

Brian McCollough (02:09:59):
Yeah. When, when NFTs were, were popping again, we had some big NFT folks on there and stuff. So essentially, um, the weekend bonus episodes are sort of deeper dives into stuff. And so that's the, that's the sixth day of the week.

Leo Laporte (02:10:14):
Nice. Oh, well give Chris my regards. I had no idea he was helping you out. That's he's a legend that created the hashtag baby. Exactly, exactly. That's uh, that's pretty good stuff.

Brian McCollough (02:10:25):
And we have a good rapport which happened accidentally because he just started coming on regularly. And then I'm like, well, why don't we do this officially? Nice.

Leo Laporte (02:10:33):
So he's, he's officially the co-host ride home.info for the tech meme ride home podcast. It's great to have you Brian. And of course, thank you, sir. Alex, who is the caretaker of my childhood home? Alex Wilhelm reporter at tech crunch, who said you're trying to have children.

Alex Wilhelm (02:10:53):
Yeah. That's the stage of life that I'm um,

Leo Laporte (02:10:55):
I feel like I'm currently in, this is kinda like the Alex Teck moment on jeopardy <laugh> and our contestant from Rhode Island. You're trying to have children <laugh> yes.

Alex Wilhelm (02:11:06):
I, I didn't know. This was a game show. What, what did

Leo Laporte (02:11:10):
I win later? It's always the part of jeopardy I skipped through. It's the contestant interviews. It's like, who cares? I don't care. Just go back to the questions. So, uh, good congratulations to you. And Lizza your wonderful wife. I hope everything's going well in Rhode Island and uh, tech crunch.com tech crunch. Yes, sir. Get the tech crunch plus feed because that's where you get the best stuff from Mr. Willhelm the equity podcast equity podcast. And don't forget the equity podcast, which is a must. Listen. If,

Alex Wilhelm (02:11:43):
If you are into startups in venture capital and want to hear people talk about startups in venture capital equity is for you. If you are not into those things, you will hate it. So, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's kinda it's either for you or it's not, we didn't,

Leo Laporte (02:11:56):
You know what? We didn't even get to talk about block. So if you wanna know more about Square's new name, go listen in the equity podcast, they do

Alex Wilhelm (02:12:06):
Three days

Leo Laporte (02:12:06):
A week, three days a week. How do you survive? Join, uh, Alex Wilhelm. Let me try this now. Natasha muco and Maryanne Avedo yes,

Alex Wilhelm (02:12:17):
That is our Friday crew. I do the Monday show solo Wednesdays. We niche to a single topic and Friday is our news Roundup.

Leo Laporte (02:12:23):
It's a good time. Amanda. Silver link joins you for that.

Alex Wilhelm (02:12:26):
Actually. Can I just, can I just say Leo, we hit our five year anniversary of equity. Uh, I think in March. Congratulations. And, and I am in awe of how fast time move. Yeah, that, that took me by surprise. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:12:37):
Five years is nothing people used to ask me when you know, we'd have our hundredth episode and they say, well, don't you wanna celebrate that? Talk to me when we at a thousand. Okay. You know, a hundred is nothing. It's nothing. So

Alex Wilhelm (02:12:50):
This is TWiT number 852, according to my notes doc. So we're that's right. Three years away from episode a thousand. That's

Leo Laporte (02:12:58):
Right. And I think we're gonna make it at this point. <laugh> unless the lights drop from the ceiling and hit me in the head, we shall be doing an episode 1000.

Alex Wilhelm (02:13:08):
Can I be on that one? Cause that'll be fun.

Leo Laporte (02:13:11):
I deal. Deal. Done. Done. Be on a two. Yeah. Yeah. You too. I know Brian. You too. Everybody. You all gonna be all, but like this, I don't know if you remember you

Alex Wilhelm (02:13:20):
Quit earlier in this show. You retired, right? Oh yeah. That's

Leo Laporte (02:13:23):
Right. You're going to your other company. What am I doing now? Blockchain. Yes, that's right. Unlocking my wallet.

Alex Wilhelm (02:13:30):
You're flipping in

Mike Elgan (02:13:31):
FTS with your resident

Leo Laporte (02:13:32):
Dow. Actually, if I, if it took me a whole year to guess the password of my wallet, it would still be worth it.

Mike Elgan (02:13:39):
<laugh> how many

Leo Laporte (02:13:40):
Bitcoin you lose? 7.85. I didn't lose 'em I got 'em just, can't get to Em's a quarter

Mike Elgan (02:13:46):
Million dollars in there, man. That's I get the press release. YeahOr the famous podcaster Le Laport retired saying he the won. Spend your time with this Bitcoin password. I do wanna spend

Leo Laporte (02:13:56):
More time with my wallet. That's true, actually. That's true. Thank you all three of you. What a pleasure, always fun. Uh, you you're the greatest, uh, thank you to all of you, our listeners, and thanks, especially to members of our Club TWiT because they made this possible along with our sponsors, uh, Club TWiT is the way to hear, add free versions of the show. If you don't like the ads, seven bucks a month, no more ads. Plus the, uh, access to the fabulous discord, which is always a lot of fun. We had a, uh, an event with Mary Jo Foley on, uh, Friday, that'll be on the TWiT+ feed, which is also part of your Club TWiT membership, lots of stuff behind the scenes, Mike and Amira Elgan. You're gonna join us, uh, next month. No, this month when,

Mike Elgan (02:14:43):
Uh, uh, I think it's next month. Yeah. Next month. Looking forward to that. That's gonna be awesome. And we're gonna, we're gonna talk about a lot of stuff that we don't normally talk about in public because it's a, it's a it's for the club, right. So yeah. You're not, you be much

Leo Laporte (02:14:54):
More open about you're in with the friends. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, uh, it really is a, the discord has been, as it turns out the most interesting part of the club. It's great. Not only, uh, do we chat about the shows as the shows are going on? Uh, but every other possible aspect of geek life, including Stacy IBAs, science fiction, book club, ham radio, there's a philosophy channel, a sport ball channel <laugh> and we'll be talking about the TWiT crew. In fact, we want everybody who's going on the TWIT cruise to join the club. That way we can have our own private back channel. Uh, when we go on that TWiT cruise in, uh, July.

Mike Elgan (02:15:29):
And I would like to shout out to those of you who think you're gonna miss out on, on the ads. If you join a club, you can still get the ads. Yes, there's a channel, which it was what I do. <laugh> cause I don't wanna miss anything. Right.

Leo Laporte (02:15:40):
One of the, uh, Discord server, uh, things is all the ads <laugh> so you can get all the ads if you want. I don't know why you'd want to, but you can. Uh <laugh> thank you, Mike, for, for that. Appreciate you listening to, uh, all of the ads. Um, if you wanna join the club, we'd love to have you, uh, all you have to do is go to twit.tv/clubtwit for all the information. Uh, and we appreciate that. Uh, the show, uh, is recorded live before a live out studio audience. Every Sunday evening, 2:30 Pacific 5:30 Eastern, 2230 UTC. You can watch the show live stream or listen to it at live.twit.tv. And then if you're doing that, you should chat. You could chat live as I mentioned in the discord server, but everybody's always welcome also in our IRC server, irc.twit.tv. After the fact on demand versions of the show are available at our website, twit.tv.

Leo Laporte (02:16:38):
There's also a This Week in Tech YouTube channel. I think Mike you're in that picture is Mike in that, that is, that is my, the back of my head. It's back of your head there. Look at that. Uh, uh, that's a twit.tv. If you are a listener after the fact, you know, an on-demand listener, please continue the conversation at, uh, twi.community. Those are our forums. Our discourse forums are really fun, a lot of fun in there. And uh, we also have our own MAED on instance, you can see it right at the bottom of the screen, twi.social, and I'm on there as well. Um, and of course the best way to get the show. It certainly helps us if you do this, whether you're watching live or not subscribe in your favorite podcast player, that way you'll get it automatically every week when it's available and you won't have to ever wonder what you're gonna listen to on a Monday morning. Plus if your podcast client allows reviews, please, we wanna catch up with Brian McCollough's 4.7 star review here. We want five stars to leave us a five star review. And, uh, that would help spread the word about what is, I think now the world's longest running tech podcast since 2005, This Week in Tech I'm Leo Laporte. Thanks for being here. We'll see you. Now. Another TWiT is in the can.

Speaker 14 (02:17:53):
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