This Week in Tech Episode 863 Transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show. 

Leo Laporte (00:00:00):
It's time for TWiT This Ween in Tech, two of my favorite people here today, they always are my favorite people, but I love Paris Martineau know from The Information Amy Webb is here from our favorite futurist to talk about her new book. The Genesis machine will also talk about Facebook's pivot and its strategy going forward. The war in Ukraine could mean cyber warfare on our shores will talk about the plans for defense, and then it's the new Senate nudge act. Or as I call it the nudge act to keep platforms from spreading misinformation, will it work that in a whole lot more coming up, including a cameo from Paris' cat. Next on TWiT.

... (00:00:46):
Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is TWiT.

Leo Laporte (00:01:00):
This is, is TWiT. This Week in Tech episode, 863 recorded Sunday, February 20th, 2022. An API for truth This Ween in Tech is brought to you by new Relic. That next 9:00 PM call is just waiting to happen. Get new Relic before it does, and you can get access to the whole new new Relic platform and 100 gigabytes of data free forever. No credit card required. Sign up at new relic.com/TWiT and buy Wealthfront to start building your wealth and get your first $5,000 managed for free for life. Go to wealthfront.com/and by zip recruiter, according to research, 90% of employers plan to enhance their employee's experience this year. And if you need to add more employees, there's zip recruiter, ZipRecruiter's technology finds qualified candidates for your job, and you can invite your top choices to apply. Try ZipRecruiter for free today@ziprecruiterdotcomslashTWiTandbystamps.com. Stop over paying for shipping with stamps.com. Sign up with a promo code TWiT for a special offer. That includes a four week trial, lots of free postage and a digital scale, no long term commitments or contracts. Just go to stamps.com. Click the microphone at the top of the page and enter the code TWiT It's time for TWiT this week at tech, the show we cover the week's tech news. I have the great pleasure to welcome one of my favorite panel on board here. Paris Martineau joins us from the information and Brooklyn. Hello, Paris. Good to see you. I'm glad to see you.

Paris Martineau (00:02:53):
Hello. Nice to be here.

Leo Laporte (00:02:53):
You still have your bedazzled mannequin.

Paris Martineau (00:02:57):
I know. I was like, I have to make sure that it's in the frame this time so that people can see, you can also see above my other shoulder, I've got a lamp. It's like a little human torso.

Leo Laporte (00:03:07):
Oh my God.

Paris Martineau (00:03:09):
You know, we got parts, all bone.

Leo Laporte (00:03:11):
It's kind of a well requi there in the beautiful downtown Brooklyn is it also looks like can tomatoes fine you, but I must the good

Amy Webb (00:03:19):
Kind of taste

Paris Martineau (00:03:20):
That is a tomato can, that is empty in where I keep my masks. Oh cause I both, I got, you know, a big tomato can cause I was making doing a dinner part every week and I was like, this is a gorgeous, can gotta keep this, what should I put masks

Leo Laporte (00:03:36):
Only where San Marzano masks. It's the only kind, I

Paris Martineau (00:03:39):
Mean, yeah, it's that or bust basically.

Leo Laporte (00:03:40):
That's right. Also with this Amy Webb who immediately recognized the Sam Marano tomatoes. Amy.

Amy Webb (00:03:47):
Excellent.

Leo Laporte (00:03:48):
Are you sick of me yet? You were here yesterday. No, we did a, I'm

Amy Webb (00:03:52):
Always happy to see you.

Leo Laporte (00:03:53):
We did a great triangulation it's on a TWiT news feeder on a triangulation feed about a Amy's new book, the Genesis machine, which people are already, I'm seeing raves everywhere. Somebody in our discord just said how much they loved the Genesis machine, highly recommended. It's about, well, tell us what's it about

Amy Webb (00:04:16):
The Genesis machine is about a currently obscure it pretty soon. It will be well known area of science called synthetic biology. So this is basically where scientists engineer or re-engineer organisms to give them new and improved abilities for all different types of purposes. So it's, there's a ton of opportunity and a ton of really horrifying risk on the horizon.

Leo Laporte (00:04:40):
And despite what, you know, it may sound like, oh, this is gonna be kind of a heady read or thick. It's very enjoyable, real page Turner. In fact, I love there's the middle part where you kind of have some sci-fi scenarios about what the next decades might look like. It's really good. And because Amy is an optimist, she keeps telling me that it has a, it has a happy ending. Well, not happy, but at least

Amy Webb (00:05:03):
I don't know. It has a hopeful ending. Yeah, no, there's some pretty horrifically terrifying scenarios intent. Like the, the middle section are all written a little bit like science fiction, but they're all rooted in fact. So the speculative scenarios, yeah. One involves Elon Musk. 

Leo Laporte (00:05:19):
So yes, he has a cult like is a, can built underground shelters on Mars the T years. There's also another horrifying point at which we've discovered that we can live forever. And Ted Cruz is now in his 50, 50 year in the Senate. I you know, I was, I was thinking about that the other day, reading the book, by the way, love it. Genesis machine again, public affairs books. It's on audible. It's on Amazon. It's on your bookstore. I was thinking, do, would I wanna live forever? And I think, no, there's a, even if you can, you know, prolong life, it's good to get out of the way and let the yeah, let the Youngs take you guys

Paris Martineau (00:06:03):
Are too. I was thinking about this the other day and I was like, you know, living forever as a concept. Sounds great. But then when you think and realize that you have to work forever as well,

Leo Laporte (00:06:12):
Less free, no retirement for you. That's another thing in the book, retirement aid keeps getting pushed out farther, right. And farther and farther. Yeah, I, I have I'll have enough money to live for 20 years when I retire and that better be it. Otherwise I'm gonna be eating now and and living at the mission. So what should we talk about this week? Google

Paris Martineau (00:06:37):
You talk about This Ween in Tech news, we

Leo Laporte (00:06:39):
Could do that. I'd I said the G word, let's talk about a big tech company. Google ha have said that they are going to follow an Apple's follow Apple's lead and allow Android users to start blocking digital advertising token. In fact, they have a whole initiative called privacy sandbox. That's what flock was part of. That's what the new topics is part of, but on mobile they want to, this is from the keyword blog limit sharing of user data with third parties operate without cross app identifiers, including advertising D. This is what Facebook says is gonna cost them billions of dollars next year, thanks to apple. But they, what, but they didn't say. And the Google blog is when and you know, Google remember makes money in advertising, but it does seem like if both Google and apple on mobile, make it hard for Facebook and others to track you. That's both a good thing for consumers and a bad thing. Should Facebook be worried about this Paris? What do you think?

Paris Martineau (00:07:49):
I mean, I think ultimately having both of the like major cell phone, providing companies, making these shifts, even if Google the final product ends up being just a fraction of what apples is, it's going to end up being bad for companies like Facebook, who predominantly just rely on being able to track users across a variety of platforms. I think it's going to mean that a lot of these advertising dependent companies are going to have to find other ways to target users or other services to kind of line their coffers.

Leo Laporte (00:08:29):
Me. I don't know if it's related, but on the day of the announcement, meta fell 3% snap, 3.4% on the stock exchange Pinterest down by percent TWiTtter by 3.6%. This is funny because these companies are making a lot of money. Although Google did include a statement from snap and its announcement. Snap said it's made privacy a priority and place at the center of how we designed products. So we're excited to collaborate with Google to develop a new privacy preserving standard for Android. It's funny, cuz snap said kind of the same thing about apple we'll we figured out a way to survive this. Whereas Facebook said, it's gonna cost us 10 billion next year, PRI Amy privacy clearly is something people want is in our future. Our company's gonna find a way around, I guess, is the question,

Amy Webb (00:09:17):
Right? So I think what's happening is that the big tech players are trying to find somebody, one of the entities to focus the spotlight of Washington DC on,

Leo Laporte (00:09:27):
Ah,

Amy Webb (00:09:28):
And from my point of view, you know, 10 billion is, is not insignificant given that Facebook's last earnings report was pretty catastrophic and, and the, you know, the prices dropped like a staggering amount in, in one day and they lost a ton of market share. So, you know, I think what's happening is if apple preemptively strikes, which they have and Google follows suit, you know, that leaves lawmakers a giant boogeyman left and, and that is Facebook. So Google will figure out a way to earn revenue off of other services, you know, and they'll, and people may figure out advertisers might still figure out a way around around some of the privacy measures, but Facebook doesn't have a phone in the market. They don't have an operating system in the market. You, you know, and that puts them at a pretty big disadvantage compared to, to apple and Google who can control, you know, in a way, does Facebook kind of get dis intermediated from all of this? You know, maybe, maybe they do. I think this is, I think it's yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:10:28):
Don't I mean, I, I think Facebook just was blaming apple cause they wanted to blame apple. I mean, we now have heard by the way that mark Zuckerberg has spent 500 billion, half a trillion renaming Facebook to meta, I don't know where that number come from, but that's, that seems

Amy Webb (00:10:42):
Like, well, it hiring, they went through this insane hiring has a lot of money, thousands and like thousands of people dedicated and moved around. So geez.

Paris Martineau (00:10:52):
I mean, I think these two things are connected. I think that obviously it seems like Facebook is seeing the right is on the wall for the current social media based platform space and that they think the future or whatever their next step is going to be, is going to be in AR VR is gonna be in the metaverse whether or not that pans out, we'll see whether or not it pans out in the way that, you know, Facebook thinks is going to work for it is debatable. But I think that it, part of the reason why they have spent this amount of money is because they realize they're going to have to have something else besides kind of an advertising based social media platform.

Leo Laporte (00:11:31):
This number by the way comes from intelligence, sir. And I think you're right. I think this is it's more than just the name change. It's a repositioning of a company that's been CR incredibly successful in advance of what they see as headwinds from the privacy advocates. But I would guess that Google and Facebook are really an Amazon, if you throw them in and Microsoft, if they wanted to are really in a good position even if third party tracking has turned off, cuz they have first party data, doesn't that kind of protect them. They, they

Amy Webb (00:12:06):
Stick. I mean, I need in terms of revenue, Amazon. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:12:08):
Facebook knows everything about you as a first party, they don't need to track, you know, it all right. Maybe I'm misunderstanding how this stuff works. Similarly, Google has all these search signals you know, that they that's why search ads work so well. Right, Amy.

Amy Webb (00:12:27):
Yeah. so again, I think this depends on one of the things that there's a little bit of information as asymmetry here. We don't know right. What plans there are to change advertising. I can tell you that I looked at a patent from snap. Oh my gosh. It must have been 20 15, 20 16 or I dunno time is of vortex. I've lost sense of what your would've

Leo Laporte (00:12:48):
Been a while pre COVID let's say that

Amy Webb (00:12:51):
Pre COVID. I remember seeing a patent that snap was building a visual auctioning system. So it was like AR so if you took a photo, it would recognize what was in the photo, like a can of Coca-Cola or something. Right. and then it would collect all of the data from that image and build it was, it was building what looked like a competitor to Google, but for visual yeah. Advertising. So visual information versus, you know, so we don't know, we don't know what's planned. It's possible that Facebook is going all in on metaverse technologies because it opens up a new avenue to revenue through different types of

Leo Laporte (00:13:29):
Not necessarily even advertising. I mean, look how much Fortnite makes on downloadable content and costumes and ANSYS and things. I mean, you, you basically, Facebook's creating a new world with a it's and owns the economy of a whole new world that probably does Trump advertising revenue. I figure the stock market, the fact that the stock market punished Facebook so badly after their results two weeks ago and it hasn't bounced back. I thought, oh, that's fine. What mark Zuckerberg with 50 billion less or whatever. It'll all come back on Monday. And it didn't tells me that at least the market believes this is, this is problematic for Facebook.

Amy Webb (00:14:05):
I think part of what, again, this is my outside perspective and based on what I'm seeing with some of the folks we talked to, I think people have forgotten that mark Zuckerberg is very, very smart. Right? And I think what I, I think what's happening is that this feels like dumb decisions or silly sort of trendy, shiny object, decision making processes. You know, and there's been so much momentum so much momentum now and that it's almost like buzzy and, and ridiculous sounding and know he's a very smart person. My hunch is that there's much more going on behind the scenes and just, you know, and for whatever reason, I, I think some of this has to do with, with sting off some of the regulatory stuff that's coming. There was this push in October, you know, but preoc October 20, 21, nobody was talking about this and suddenly on that one fateful day, a guy makes a press conference and you know, here we are

Leo Laporte (00:14:59):
Six months later and, and you know, obviously the stock market financial markets are volatile. Unpredictable don't necessarily move in a rational way yet. I've kind of a, a believer in the wisdom of crowds, if this, I mean, with something, with a signal, this strong it's, it's pretty clear. The stock market feels investors feel like Facebook has a problem and they're not giving them credit for being able to build a metaverse that they can recoup. In fact, you see a lot of articles saying, ah, the meta, we already have that. Or we had it. It's not a new idea. They're never gonna be able to do it. Paris can, are you, are you champing it the bit to where VR advisor and, and launch into the metaverse?

Paris Martineau (00:15:43):
I have no interest partially because I wear glasses and I have

Leo Laporte (00:15:47):
To put, yeah, me too contacts. It just

Paris Martineau (00:15:49):
Seems like a whole thing

Leo Laporte (00:15:49):
Uncomfortable. I

Paris Martineau (00:15:50):
Don't know. I look at enough screens person, but I also know that I, it seems like quite a lot of people are interested in this. There were Oculus sales, especially over the holidays were 

Leo Laporte (00:16:01):
Number one app.

Paris Martineau (00:16:02):
Definitely. I mean, number one, the number one app high numbers. Yeah. Yeah. I a high

Amy Webb (00:16:07):
Relative to what Oculus has sold a lot, but

Leo Laporte (00:16:11):
It was the relative to I on C Christmas day was the number one app.

Paris Martineau (00:16:15):
No way am I defending Facebook's decisions. But I think that what you said previously, Amy is smart. Like obviously Facebook now, meta didn't make this decision in a vacuum, just on a whim. This was something that a lot of smart people put a lot of time and effort and thought into. And perhaps, you know, in five years, 10 years, we're all gonna be looking back and like, wow, I can't believe we thought that this whole VR AR thing was just absolute nonsense. But I think that whatever that version of the product ends of being is probably going to be rather different than, and what we are thinking of as the metaverse today, because frankly, I mean, it looks a little ridiculous. It looks like second life, but with a weird Goggle. But I don't know, maybe there'll be something to it.

Leo Laporte (00:17:04):
Chris Cox who's the chief product officer meta told an all hands meeting that the horizon platform has now through 300,000 users, which is a 10 X growth in three months.

Paris Martineau (00:17:18):
Yeah. But that's 300,000 users.

Leo Laporte (00:17:21):
Yeah. Yeah. It's still not a,

Amy Webb (00:17:22):
I mean, that's, that's the thing. And, and it's also not brand new technol. This, none of this is brand new, right? Yeah. So if, if they were up 10 X in the past year or the past three years. Great. But that is not the case here. I, I also just wanna put a plug quick plugin for distinguishing between AR and VR. These are totally different technologies and they get lumped together, virtual reality struggles to find use cases in business cases. Because, well, for one thing, if you wear glasses like we do it makes it really challenging to put on the headset, but secondly, you've gotta be in a place where you can absolutely trust that who, you know, you're doing sensory deprivations. So that means you have to be in a place where you feel totally safe. It is totally private. You know, you've not, a lot of people are in circum, have the luxury to be in a space like that all the time. So I, I don't know. I'm not sure why Facebook is going so all in so quickly on VR when extended reality and like just a straight up heads up display on regular glasses where the

Paris Martineau (00:18:22):
Cookie,

Amy Webb (00:18:23):
Right. It seems

Paris Martineau (00:18:24):
Like AR has a lot more applicable use. It seems like there's already kind of growing use cases for that. I think that the total VR headset move is perplexing, but maybe there is some other use case that we're not seeing. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:18:40):
I I'll tell you, I'll tell you what I think, cuz this is this is the tweet from horizon worlds. And with the video associated video, it's time 10,000 worlds have been created drop in and play or just hang out. The possibilities are endless. The, I agree with you, VR has, is all sorts of problematic issues, but the thing that you can't do in AR is create a world where you can sell outfits and build, build. I mean, look at second life, the whole economy, Lindon, the whole Lindon dollar economy really exploded now ly second life is no longer. I mean it's around, but it's no longer a dry yeah. People still do it, but it, but it's, I think I, if I'm mark, I'm looking at that, I'm looking at how well Fortnite and others have done with as a free product, but with downloadable content and thinking this could be the future of meta. And it could be really big if we, you know, if we create a world that everybody wants to be in and we control the, the economy, I can see how they could see say there's a big upside to that

Paris Martineau (00:19:43):
That's

Amy Webb (00:19:43):
A big upside, but with limited use cases. Yeah.

Paris Martineau (00:19:46):
Sorry. Yeah. And it's very different than what Facebook's kind of is,

Leo Laporte (00:19:51):
Or, oh, it's a

Paris Martineau (00:19:52):
Complete pivot Instagram. It's going to be a complete pivot. And I think that it will, I guess, have to see if these thousands of hires that they've made is enough to transition a company. So radically. Yeah. Because I mean, that is closer to building like a triple a game than running a social media network.

Leo Laporte (00:20:09):
I mean, it is social you're in there with of your friends I guess world of Warcrafts social, but it's not social in the way that Facebook's social, where you follow granny and granny gets to see the grandkids and you see what she's up to. That's what Facebook is. Right. And, and that, and it's news and it's, it's, it's a very different thing. It almost feels like mark says, I don't think Facebook as it stands is the F future. I think this is the future. And we're gonna just leave Facebook behind. Well, I

Paris Martineau (00:20:36):
Mean, I think users have been saying that about Facebook for a long time. They

Leo Laporte (00:20:39):
They're aging out

Paris Martineau (00:20:40):
Right. In the most yeah. Recent earnings update you saw that daily active users had dropped for the Facebook platform, which was the shock. No one. Yeah. Yeah.

Amy Webb (00:20:50):
I had a really interesting conversation a couple days ago with with Philip Rosedale. Who's one of the co-founders of second life. Yeah. He, we are, we we're gonna, we were getting ready for a meeting. He had some interesting stuff to say about,

Leo Laporte (00:21:02):
He's gone back to Oculus to run for second life. Hasn't he? Yeah.

Amy Webb (00:21:07):
Yeah. they were trying to do something with Oculus. It sounded like. And you know, again, I just, I think that the use cases are just, they're just not there. I, I get what's plausible, but I think what's much more probable and practical is, is AR. I mean, I don't, I don't know why everybody's not going all in, on, on digital glasses. Like there's, there's so much data showing that we're all becoming much more nearsighted which makes sense because we're staring mostly at screens and screens up close to our faces. So we know that there's gonna be a total addressable market of like enormous proportions pretty you soon. So if everybody's gonna need to wear some type of corrective lens, and if we know that augmented reality and sort of spatial computing at the moment, it's more practical. It's a little bit easier than all the VR. Stuff's more business use cases. There's more daily use cases. Then why wouldn't you just, I don't understand why people, like, why didn't Facebook become, why didn't Facebook lean in more to, to AR they've got this ridiculous

Paris Martineau (00:22:15):
Pair of glasses. People are often. Yeah. I mean the Ray band glasses, I think the, A little bit scared off by the failure of like Google glass and kind of these, but

Leo Laporte (00:22:23):
None of those were AR those were not AR right,

Amy Webb (00:22:26):
Right.

Leo Laporte (00:22:28):
No. Are the Facebook glasses apple, apparently we don't know apple is gonna do a it's rumor to VR headset this year in AR headset in, in years to come.

Paris Martineau (00:22:37):
I would love it if they had functional AR in glasses that I can

Leo Laporte (00:22:40):
Also see, imagine those glasses you're wearing right now, if with a heads display. Now, maybe there's, if

Paris Martineau (00:22:46):
You're looking at tweets while I also make eye contact with the camera,

Leo Laporte (00:22:50):
You wouldn't be the first one of our panelists to do that. I don't wanna name names, but there are those.

Paris Martineau (00:22:56):
I have done it before on the show. So

Leo Laporte (00:22:59):
I know because I see tweets coming in from our panelists, I'm going, we're, we're doing something

Paris Martineau (00:23:06):
And you just gotta, you gotta stay plugged in.

Leo Laporte (00:23:08):
You know what the truth is? He does. Our shows is completely a D D they need multiple stimuli and that's fine. I understand you gotta be tweeting I'm I got 18 things going on in, I was gonna say,

Paris Martineau (00:23:18):
You have two phones sitting on your desk. You're looking at a computer and you're surrounded by two.

Leo Laporte (00:23:22):
I got a chat room. I got two chat rooms going, but that's my job. Yeah.

Paris Martineau (00:23:27):
You're

Leo Laporte (00:23:27):
At work. I'm totally ad. No that, no, I totally. So, and Microsoft, the rumor is current business insider, not going to go forward with HoloLens three. They haven't found a real market for HoloLens, which is, which is AR magical leap has stumbled. Is, is it because AR is hard to, I, I agree with both of you. I can, I love this vision of, of augmented reality, you know? Yeah. The, the same one that was in Damon and freedom, TM, Daniel SU's books, where you're walking around and you have this rich data set along with seeing the world around you. Is it harder to do Amy than than we thought or what what's holding? Why, why is HoloLens dying? Why, you know, what's going on.

Amy Webb (00:24:15):
Right. So it's hard to do in a compact way. So I've, I mean, I've, I've actually got an original magic leap in the room behind me, I've got HoloLens I've, you know, obviously I've tried and played with all of these things. Hololens is an incredible experience and you can actually wear it with glasses on. The problem is it's an enormous clunky headset. Magic leap I thought was, you know, I thought it was spectacular. I think, I think that technology is spectacular. It was a huge, again, another really big clunky headset. And you had to wear a sort of a pack that heated up and it didn't have a long battery life. Here's, here's what I would say though. You know, we are my, my I'm concerned that humanity is failing the marshmallow test, right? We've we, we have no patience.

Amy Webb (00:25:08):
So like, this is basic technology that need, that still needs many years. And because it's gonna take it's much more functional, it's much more practical. There was something called mind, Mel, that a guy at MIT, it was an app. It was like the greatest thing I have ever to this day, it was the most impressive, most amazing thing I've ever seen. It was an app that you ran on your iPad and while two people were talking, it would automatically pull up and define everything. So like AC all the stuff that you would be like, you're sitting in a meeting, I don't know what half of these acronyms are. We kind

Leo Laporte (00:25:44):
Of have that right now for you think of the product we've made. It used to be. You'd have to go to the library to find out how old John Glenn was when he died. Now you just ask Alexa, all we have all that already. Yeah.

Amy Webb (00:25:56):
But this was, but this was no, no, this was, this was different. It, it was amazing. And it, and it, it would just,

Leo Laporte (00:26:04):
No, I agree with you're getting more and more like that. Yeah. This is instant information, your fingertips. Yeah.

Amy Webb (00:26:10):
So imagine that overlaid when I wanted it to be there on my glasses. Right. So the, or imagine like, that would be amazing if I was, when the world opens up again and I go back to conferences, like, I would love to be able to sit in a conference and hear that conversation and not miss anything because I've got it. Like I've got it in my field of view or better yet. I would love to speak at a conference and feed. I used to live tweet my own. Yeah. Speeches. Yeah. I used to program had a little script that ran and it would automatically tweet out the stuff that I knew people were gonna be looking up or I, things

Leo Laporte (00:26:47):
I was like with TWiTtter behind me, as people were commenting, which is a very brave and dumb you can

Amy Webb (00:26:51):
Do. Yeah, no, that I wouldn't do that.

Leo Laporte (00:26:53):
This was me.

Amy Webb (00:26:55):
That's insane. This was me, like I had a little apple script running. It was badass. It was awesome. But, but imagine if I could pre program a, a speech and feed that stuff right into the field of vision, I, this, this just supercharges our productivity and what we can do. And Ronnie Abovitz who I think very, very highly of, he was the founder of magic leap. This is the kind of stuff he was working on, but man investors, they took on a lot of money.

Leo Laporte (00:27:22):
So this is the marsh Melo test, which is, we're not good at delayed gratification.

Amy Webb (00:27:27):
We are not, and this

Leo Laporte (00:27:28):
Is the couple of toddlers with a marshmallow. And you, you get two marshmallows if you don't eat it right away. And humans just, yeah. And

Amy Webb (00:27:37):
It's, it's, it's technology, it's science. It's just like general patience with other people. This, this stuff, this stuff is very useful. Especially when we, we get to a point where we've got functional digital TWiTns, but when we talked, you're gonna wanna use,

Leo Laporte (00:27:52):
We talked about this before. There are companies like apple that have the resources to be patient and to develop something, you know, no startup, this is why magically the investors just didn't have the patient to give magic leap that, that timeframe. But there are companies like Microsoft, apparently they're not as patient. Maybe. I don't know. They dispute the fact that HoloLens three is dead. They said, it's doing great.

Amy Webb (00:28:16):
It is terrific technology. But again, like you have to think through where are the use cases for that. Right. And outside of gaming, I, again and again, I think the has been the problem it's these companies don't quite understand what the, the better markets are beyond the ones that they've already imagined. And so they, you know, they give up

Leo Laporte (00:28:35):
Yeah, 40 of 70 Microsoft employees, according to the wall street journal, left hollow lens, 40 of them join meta. So it's, you know, this is very atypical Silicon valley. There's a lot of movement back and forth and who knows. They might go back to Microsoft later. I think it's interesting. The companies that have the resources and the patients like apple, like Microsoft, Google, no Google has no patience. They may, they may come up with this down the road. I think meta, I think mark is, I, I will stipulate. He's very smart. And I think he saw the writing on the wall and he said, this it's not so much apple pulling. IDFA, it's not so much Google's you know, security and privacy vault. It's really just the, the consumers don't want ad tracking and that's just become common. It's just, it's a common sentiment.

Leo Laporte (00:29:26):
Even among people who are not technologically that sophisticated. So I think he probably looked at that and said, yeah, we need a different model. And, and he has the money and he has the wherewithal and I hope he has the patience to pivot. They bought Oculus. So clearly they thought about this years ago. And maybe it's gonna take how, what's the timeframe Amy, you think 10 years before we have the technology to wear lightweight, you know, battery powered enough processing power, you need all day battery light. I don't right. You can't, you don't wanna have to charge your glasses at lunch.

Amy Webb (00:30:02):
Right. I mean, I guess, listen, we're all already wearing plenty of other wearables. The problem actually has less to do with the, with the battery than it does refracting the light and making it so that oh, interesting. You know, you can see, so

Leo Laporte (00:30:15):
There are other issues as well. Okay.

Amy Webb (00:30:16):
There are other issues, but solving don't understand what the end. It depends on you talk to you know, yeah, yes. Or, or maybe not. Yeah. Or maybe

Leo Laporte (00:30:28):
Paris is wearing right now. One, those, your answers Paris is wearing those earbuds as apple earbuds. I

Paris Martineau (00:30:33):
Am, I've got a watch.

Amy Webb (00:30:35):
The spatial I spatial audio. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:30:36):
We already are kind of in this semi, you know, we're halfway there, I guess. And I could, and I totally can see how somebody like mark or Tim cook might say, I see this coming. We need to solve these very real technology hurdles, but we think this is gonna be the next big thing. If we can do that.

Paris Martineau (00:30:58):
And I think for a company like Facebook, obviously a large part of this is, is they had to rebrand. I mean, I have noticed this just even scrolling through apps like Instagram lately from meta.

Leo Laporte (00:31:10):
I follow

Paris Martineau (00:31:11):
By meta. I know from meta, but I follow an influencer who normally, I think when all of the Facebook stuff is going down shared some like memes or whatever, very anti-Facebook, but have, of course now they're all promoting the Ray ban meta glasses. But I think that part of theand is to make these sort of technologies that Facebook wants to corner very palatable to a younger generation that might have kind of negative associations with the brand named Facebook, because they're all, you know, tagging at Rayen at meta. That seems a bit more innocuous than a Facebook product that is going to be a camera you wear around all the time.

Leo Laporte (00:31:52):
If you could. I, you know, I think all would be forgiven, all would be forgiven if you made a cool enough product. That's all that matter.

Paris Martineau (00:32:01):
Is that, is that your blanket statement? Yes. All is forgiven. If you

Leo Laporte (00:32:05):
Product, you know, I won't, I, I don't have a Facebook account, so I can't use an Oculus quest and it's not quite cool enough for me to bite the bullet and make a Facebook account to do it. But if there really were a metaverse and maybe we even got legs in this metaverse and, and all my, my friends were in there and I were missing all the fun. I don't think people AR memories aren't that long. I think in five years, if there's something cool enough, people will flock to it and they won't care. What the, if it's mark Zuckerberg, I don't think,

Amy Webb (00:32:37):
I think if I'd be curious to know whether or not people want that type of kinetic experience, because I think the other thing we're, I don't know, I I've screwed around a lot with VR and I sometimes I just wanna be a blob on my couch and play Zelda. Like I don't, I don't want a full body digital experience, you know?

Leo Laporte (00:32:55):
No, that's a, and that's, I wanna

Paris Martineau (00:32:56):
Have to climb a giant tower, right. While I'm playing Zelda. I want,

Leo Laporte (00:33:01):
I just wanna do it in, in Zelda. I

Paris Martineau (00:33:03):
Wanna hit, yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:33:04):
I just wanna go up, up, up, up. No, I think that that's an unknown and I, I think that there are unknowns and and it's not a, it's not a sure thing. It's a gamble, but I think I would, I would bet apple and Facebook bought into this Facebook to the tune of half a trillion dollars have bought into this notion that, yeah, it's a gamble. People might not, you know, flock to it, but if we build it, we believe they will come. And

Amy Webb (00:33:32):
I think that, and that's a good, that's a good point, Leo, cuz why, therefore, why are we chastising Zuckerberg for defining the future and working backwards? That is the thing that we praise and we continue to praise Steve jobs for. Right, right. I think he's gutsy. People didn't know they needed

Leo Laporte (00:33:47):
No, I think he's gutsy as hell. I think to take an enterprise like Facebook that's I mean, look, they did not have an unprofitable quarter. You know, there were some, a couple of negative numbers that stock market punished him for, but really that's a juggernaut. And yet he is saying, yeah, I, you know, I see farther and I see problems. So we're going to spend half a trillion dollars and change everything. I mean, that's a very gutsy thing to do.

Amy Webb (00:34:17):
I'm curious to hear, Paris's take on this. We haven't very much from Cheryl Sandberg this entire time. Right.

Paris Martineau (00:34:24):
I'm sure that's purposeful. I mean, why I think that with

Leo Laporte (00:34:27):
All, well, something happened,

Paris Martineau (00:34:28):
I think in the same sense that you know, one, there was all that attention on, oh, is there a rift in their relationship? Right. and I think that part of this is that she is working behind the scenes and they've realized at most press for them ends up being negative press. I think the times had some really interesting reporting probably not recently, probably a couple of months ago at the very least on kind of the very calculated way in which Facebook handles PR I mean, part of the reason why people have been laughing at the goofy mark Zucker Oberg launching meta is because they have crafted this, right. They've carefully crafted this image of him as the goofy guy who wears a lot of sunscreen and goes windsurfing, right. Or the person who posts about smoking meats in his backyard, that's too kind of soften his image. Oh. And obviously Cheryl Sandberg hasn't had that 

Leo Laporte (00:35:22):
They're making him the friendly dufus so that we're not afraid of mean

Paris Martineau (00:35:26):
Completely purposeful. That's the only reason why you're going to have a lot of images of someone surfing on a wind board with a bunch of 

Leo Laporte (00:35:34):
Sunscreen on the and American flag, all these

Paris Martineau (00:35:35):
Weird things that we do, you know,

Leo Laporte (00:35:37):
So something happened this week that actually might be Jermaine, which is they moved. They basically created a triumph for it. So Cheryl Sandberg is in charge of operations. Mark is in charge of, you know, vision. And now Nickle who was the former and deputy prime minister in the UK who was in charge of global affairs and communications. Now he is global president of global affairs. He's a new president. And it's essentially a triumvirate of San Cheryl Sandberg, mark Zuckerberg, and Nickle, and Cheryl runs the business Mark's in charge of product, I guess, is the best thing to describe it as, and Nick's in charge of relationship with the outside world government, but also in marketing. And that

Amy Webb (00:36:29):
Sounds well to see if Nick, oh, sorry,

Leo Laporte (00:36:32):
He's good at this. And I think that sounds to me like a streamlined yeah. Like this is, this is the, their curtain for action. This is, I mean, it's structure, the streamline

Paris Martineau (00:36:41):
It's similar to kind of what Microsoft did as it was facing a lot of regulatory scrutiny when it elevated its general counsel, Brad Smith to president in charge of dealing with kind government, right. And governmental issues cl is there to kind of be in front of the firing squad and handle all this public scrutiny and let people like mark Zuckerberg. And I guess to a lesser extent, she Sandberg kind of fade into the background,

Leo Laporte (00:37:07):
Do their job. So he'll take all the heat. Well, this is what mark wrote in his post. We need a senior leader at the level of myself for our product and Cheryl for our business who can lead and represent us for all our policy issues globally. So he's elevated Nick to it equal Nick will now lead our company on all our policy matters, including what I would say, not limited to how we interact with governments as they consider adopting new policies and regulations, as well as how we make the case publicly for our products and work. Is that

Paris Martineau (00:37:44):
A sense? Let me translate this. Yes, please. This is cl will be the guy who's going to sit in front of Congress and the European commission and get yelled at. He's going to be the person we

Leo Laporte (00:37:54):
Painted a target on his photos.

Paris Martineau (00:37:56):
I mean, you know, he's probably getting paid quite a lot, so it's probably a pretty,

Leo Laporte (00:38:01):
He's happy to do it.

Paris Martineau (00:38:02):
Gold laid target. Yeah. But it means that you're not gonna have any more photos of mark Zuckerberg sitting on his little high chair at Congress that's right. Because he has better things to

Leo Laporte (00:38:12):
Do. That's right.

Amy Webb (00:38:13):
But another way to look at this is so that, that was what I was gonna say. And Brad Smith's position and you know, how, how he wound up president of Microsoft, but Brad Smith is an incredibly smart gifted, you know, technology diplomat, what, whatever that, that official role, you know, job title is for that. Now I, I don't think that that Nick Clegg is anywhere close to that, to that status. And, and for that reason, you know, this might be a huge missed opportunity for Facebook, cuz it's not enough to stave off criticism and to deflect the attention away from mark. It it's an op it could have been an opportunity to start building forward and to become an indispensable part of policy and decision making the way that that Brad has done for Microsoft

Leo Laporte (00:39:04):
When you were sitting with,

Paris Martineau (00:39:05):
So part of the issue, go ahead. I think part of the issue my cat has joined us here. Yay. I don't know why she's doing this always

Leo Laporte (00:39:11):
Welcome.

Paris Martineau (00:39:12):
Well, I think part of the issue is that when you are a company like Facebook at this moment in time, the number of people who are truly gifted at you know, policy political matters and technically gifted that are also going to take a job as being the target for Facebook. That's a very small list. It's probably only going to be internal people like Nick Clegg,

Leo Laporte (00:39:37):
Actually, according to our what's your cat's name?

Paris Martineau (00:39:40):
Ismo she's. I was trying to sit on all of my keyboards.

Leo Laporte (00:39:45):
Ismo two years ago, three years ago, Facebook tried to hire Brad Smith by the way Hmm. 2018. So I think this has been in the works. I, you know, I've come around to the, I was very skeptical when Zuckerberg told everybody, look, this apple thing is gonna kill us. It's gonna cost us 10 billion. I thought that was misdirection. I think, you know, snap has said, and I'm sure Facebook has ways of tracking people without the help of one little bit of information from an iPhone. However now, as I think about it, I think maybe mark has realized this is a much more serious problem than just that Google's kind of confirming that with their decision to do this and that mark has pivoted and I'm, I'm starting now as I think about it. I think maybe this is a very interesting move that could fail spectacular admittedly, but he doesn't wanna be my spaced. And you know what, you're gonna go through a few years of the market, not believing of pundits like us saying, oh, Facebook's had it. But if you're, if, if your, if your mark, if you grant, if we grant that he's smart, this is a very interest, interesting strategy it's

Amy Webb (00:40:57):
While it's worthwhile noting that Facebook is a very different company outside of developed economies. So in maturing economies or, you know, developing economies, Facebook is it serves a different purpose in society to some, you know, in some cases it is the way that that people get online. It is, I mean,

Paris Martineau (00:41:16):
Facebook is also, I think we need to

Leo Laporte (00:41:18):
It's WhatsApp and its Instagram. Absolutely. It, it is

Paris Martineau (00:41:21):
The way that people communicate with everyone.

Leo Laporte (00:41:22):
Yeah. And Brazil is

Amy Webb (00:41:24):
So there are,

Leo Laporte (00:41:24):
Do it without WhatsApp. Yeah.

Amy Webb (00:41:26):
Right, right. So you've got small businesses, parts of the economy in emerging. So in emerging markets like Brazil like India, you know, Facebook is a core part of the economy. So from our vantage point in the United States, like, yeah, we may not need to like post whatever messages to our high school people or whatever it might be. And maybe metaverse seems silly, but there's a pretty, there's, there's a huge market outside. And so I'd be curious to know with the P pivot, how it is, you know, I'd be curious to know what that long term roadmap looks like outside of the us where I don't know Google, Google. I was just about to say like where there may not be enough compute or enough resources, but then I changed what I was gonna say because Google is funding a huge pipe to Africa to get parts of the region online and with like higher speed broadband. So,

Leo Laporte (00:42:15):
And remember Facebook's internet.org plans, which India said, no, thank you. We don't need any more colonialists running our internet, but for a while it was their thinking, oh, we'll, we'll actually provide internet to people who don't have it. It'll be Facebook internet, but we'll provide this kind of internet to people who don't have it. Right.

Amy Webb (00:42:31):
Facebook internet. I wonder

Paris Martineau (00:42:32):
If eventually. Yeah. Yeah. I think, I wonder if eventually we'll see something like that, but with providing, you know, Oculus headsets or whatever medium, they end up choosing to be like the basis of their VR world or metaverse what have you, because I mean, I think that that would be the main barrier to entry as far as kind of a global expansion of these products is that most people probably are not going to be able to purchase an Oculus headset in the, the developing world.

Leo Laporte (00:43:03):
Would you, when you sat with Philip Rosedale, did you ask him about all of this Amy or did you get a chance to kind of pick his brain? I'm

Amy Webb (00:43:09):
Curious. Yeah. So, well, we,

Leo Laporte (00:43:11):
He was first in a way.

Amy Webb (00:43:13):
Yeah. I don't know, know, I don't have his permission to repeat what we talked about. So I feel like I probably shouldn't, I don't, I don't know that it was off the record, but right. I think, I think generally speaking, I think Oculus, I think Oculus is one of the few head mounted displays that are out that are functional, that are great, that have some type of eco system, but the market's not quite there. And I think part of what they were facing, I think part of what every company faces is, you've got a, maybe a great product that probably needs a little bit more time and this you've got a tiny market size. Right. So, you know, are you gonna, are you gonna throw all of your effort into developing for a product that's just probably not gonna reach critical mass? Or are you gonna try and do something else? If it's me, I'm gonna try and do something else

Leo Laporte (00:44:01):
In a way second life was too early, the technology wasn't ready for it. 

Amy Webb (00:44:10):
Yeah. And somewhat ironically, like I remember Reuters doing, I remember hearing about the first, I was probably still at journalist at that point when Reuters did its its big press conference inside of second life. Do you remember that? Yeah, I think they were the first ones. Yeah. 

Leo Laporte (00:44:24):
Consulate and in second life. Right.

Amy Webb (00:44:27):
Right. And now the city of soul, everybody somehow has forgotten this. So like the city of soul is opening up a, a metaverse for city services. Why not just do what Estonia has done, which is just like put, make the digital stuff work. Estonia doesn't need a metaverse Estonia has best in class, hyper futuristic digital services and tools for its 4 million, you know, residents. So it's a teen tiny little country in, you know, north central Europe, but they've done amazing things without needing a metaverse to support all of it. So we'll see. I don't mean to be super down on the metaverse, but I also, I also think I'm concerned because I'm seeing all of this money and time and effort and resources being thrown at this. And I think that with people forgetting is the metaverse like many other huge things as they are being built is still picks and shovels stage. Where, and every, I feel like people are putting the cart before the horse, you know, like there's infrastructure that has to get built. And there's I saw a, oh my God. I saw the most Aine graphic from a professional from Gartner. I'll just say who it was. It was the dumbest, it was the most ridiculous chart that I've ever seen. And it was like, this is the metaverse and it was just like, it just had random words on it. Like 

Leo Laporte (00:45:45):
Maybe they use GT three and maybe

Amy Webb (00:45:48):
That, that makes more sense for sure.

Leo Laporte (00:45:51):
Yeah.

Amy Webb (00:45:52):
But that's my point. Like why does that thing exist? Because decision makers and companies feel like they're, they're being driven by fear right now. They feel like they've missed it and they don't know what it is. And the thing is that it isn't a thing yet, you know, it's in the process of being built. So

Leo Laporte (00:46:08):
If you you advise companies all the time on strategy and so forth, Facebook's in a unique position to kind of, and I, I think really what they've done is they've, they've propped up this Nick Clegg doll on the ramparts and they've said, go ahead, Nick. We'll, we'll be down here working on stuff out, they out for the team out of sight, out of mind, one hopes if you were advising a company on that cash flow, right. That has, that has employ, that has a lot of resources, very smart people. And I mean, they're looking for the next big thing, right? I mean, that's what you do in Silicon valley. And it's historically very hard to do there's the innovator dilemma. And if you are advising a company saying, well, the innovators, dilemma, you know, you can't, you, you have to be willing to burn your bridges behind you burn the Cortez's burn the ships. Isn't that what he's doing?

Amy Webb (00:47:02):
I don't know. I, I honestly, I'm trying to, again, I'm trying to think through what's the,

Leo Laporte (00:47:06):
Would you ever advise a company to do that?

Amy Webb (00:47:10):
What we do is long range forecasting, so 10 from now, what are the factors in play and how do you work backwards from that? So I, you know, we we've,

Leo Laporte (00:47:19):
I bet he's done that. I bet he's done that.

Amy Webb (00:47:22):
Maybe I, I know that Facebook doesn't have a, a central foresight division.

Leo Laporte (00:47:27):
No, it's got mark Zuckerberg, so that's his job. So,

Amy Webb (00:47:31):
So if that's what they're planning, I, again, I just would be very curious to know what are those defined use cases and how do they improve upon what exists? Because if there's not some type of improvement, then it, you, I think you go the way of Foursquare, remember Foursquare, Gola, and, and the scavenger that had no vowels, you know, did we

Paris Martineau (00:47:53):
Imagine a lot of money selling

Amy Webb (00:47:55):
Location, but they're, they are, but what they are not doing is gamma the gamification layer in the badges, right? That was the shiny object and people. This is my point. If you understand what to track and you have to do that using data, not your instinct. And then you would've known that location based services are what mattered. That was the long term longitudinal trend, right? Not the badges. So I'm having a hard time as an outsider, thinking about what's going on at Facebook and what they think the, the longitudinal trend is. That's driving the decision making around the Medis, cuz it's definitely not the cartoon avatars that we see bouncing around to today.

Leo Laporte (00:48:30):
No. So if I'm them, I'm starting to do some of the things they've done, which is kind of get people used to the idea, knowing full well that what we're showing them is not gonna be what the final product is, but let's kind of get them used to it. Start to build demand continue the existing product to the degree that he was smart because he's pick a product that meshes nicely with existing product. It's not, it's not a case of cannibalizing. The blue Facebook to make meta in fact, he could probably pre easily transition people once he's got something. So they've got a lot of technology problems to solve. So that's what they're doing. Let's solve these problems, but start building up on, this is what apple apple has been doing for the last five years. Now that we look back in hindsight, they've been slowly adding technologies so that when the time comes in the year, next year or two to introduce some sort of augmented reality headset, they've got everything in place. They've got developers in place and they've even got their users somewhat accustomed to the idea. I think this is a new kind of 40 D chess. I'm gonna, I'm gonna give 'em credit.

Leo Laporte (00:49:38):
And, and that they're thinking about this and that they've made some, yeah, we don't know what they're in your, in your heart of hearts, what they're thinking, but I I'm gonna give 'em some credit. They might have some idea here what they're doing. Yeah.

Amy Webb (00:49:51):
And aren't they also working on some brain machine interface stuff too. That's

Leo Laporte (00:49:55):
Elon

Amy Webb (00:49:55):
Remembering. So that's

Leo Laporte (00:49:57):
Neurally, right?

Amy Webb (00:49:57):
No. Yes, but it is

Paris Martineau (00:49:59):
Neural also didn't

Amy Webb (00:50:00):
Some it

Paris Martineau (00:50:01):
Is test subjects die. There were animals though. Not people

Leo Laporte (00:50:04):
Monkeys die, neurally

Paris Martineau (00:50:05):
Monkeys, monkeys died,

Leo Laporte (00:50:06):
Monkeys. You know what? You gotta crack a few eggs. You gotta

Paris Martineau (00:50:09):
Kill a few monkeys. Yeah. A brag, a brain.

Leo Laporte (00:50:13):
You kinda have to meta averse with, without some dead monkeys. That's just like,

Amy Webb (00:50:16):
I thought Facebook is invested in or doing some type of brain. I think they are. I think he's division Facebook. Yeah. Anyhow, that, that might make sense if he's gone out 10, 15 years and is thinking through, is there a way to think, you know, to, to sort of

Leo Laporte (00:50:31):
That's what you need is a neural interface interface. Yeah. You need

Amy Webb (00:50:34):
A jacket and then maybe the, maybe the metaverse stuff starts to make a little bit more sense if that's again, like forget the cartoon avatars, but maybe it's more thinking you know, two people, so maybe that's what's on the horizon possibly.

Leo Laporte (00:50:48):
That's what, by the way, I just read that. That's what William Gibson wanted to call neuro answer Jack in, but his publishers wouldn't let him do it for obviously God, no,

Amy Webb (00:50:57):
That would

Leo Laporte (00:51:01):
The reviews write themselves. Let's take a little break. I think this is the best panel in a while. I'm gonna only give them tough brainy issues to, to discuss Paris. Martin knows here. She writes at the information about Amazon. Another big tech, wonderful to have you Paris

Paris Martineau (00:51:18):
Have not killed any

Leo Laporte (00:51:19):
Monkeys and no monkeys have died in the making of this. No

Paris Martineau (00:51:22):
Monkeys have died in the making of this podcast

Leo Laporte (00:51:25):
Or that bedazzled mannequin behind you. You absolutely. Nope. Also Amy Webb author of a brand new book, the Genesis machine, which is a must buy a must read. Just fantastic. And you know, it's funny. I, I, I've known, I've known you for a while now, Amy, and I guess familiarity breeds, not contempt, but just kind of complacency.

Amy Webb (00:51:51):
I would hope it doesn't make

Leo Laporte (00:51:53):
Contempt. I don't have contempt for you, but I just, you know, you're con it's Amy. She's great. She's brilliant. And then I read your bio in the back of the book. She's in a professor at the stern school at NYU. And I mean, your fellow of all the, you're just like some big shot and I just kind lost sight of all that. And I just think, well, it's Amy. So a big shot over here. She's a super big brain and it's great to have her from the future today Institute, they're working on their annual report. I can't wait that comes out next month. And some very interesting things in that. We'll talk about that. We'll have you on when that comes out, that's fun. Our show today brought to you by new Relic. You know that routine, if you're a software engineer, if you run a, a network, if you're a, if you're in DevOps, you you're, you're in bed.

Leo Laporte (00:52:39):
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Leo Laporte (00:56:00):
The new Jack, I like to call it the new Jack. This is new bill introduced by Senator Klobuchar. That might actually be another one of those headwinds blowing against Facebook. The, the social media nudge act, which is sponsored by Senator Klobuchar and Cynthia Loomis of Wyoming is kind of interesting. I might say kooky. It would direct the national science foundation and the national academy of sciences, engineering and medicine to study content neutral ways to slow down the spread of misinformation. The FTC would get the recommendations, codify them, mandate that Facebook and TWiTtter and other social media platforms put 'em into practice. Is it even conceivable that the NSF and the national academy of sciences engineering and medicine NASM could come up with best practices to add friction, to content sharing online that would make any sense at all.

Amy Webb (00:57:09):
This makes me very mad. Let me tell you why. Yes. Good. Because in 2014, so this is eight years ago now, 2013, sorry.

Leo Laporte (00:57:19):
I know where you're going with this. I know exactly where you're going with this

Amy Webb (00:57:23):
In 2013, I had more than one meeting at state at state department with some folks some higher level folks, some lower level folks. And I said, Hey, there's this TWiTtter thing. And there's misinformation bots. And here's what a bot is. And here's what a botnet is. And here's how some of this stuff works. And you know, this is probably gonna be sometimes soon a channel for misinformation and, you know, that's something you ought be paying attention to and nobody cared. I could, I, I think I'm a pretty effective communicator and I, I failed repeatedly to get anybody at all excited about the coming onslaught of misinformation and also ways for us to use, like to, to, you know, to, to think through how on TWiTtter and Facebook botnets might pop up and how they would work. So I don't know. I think it's like 20, 22 and I feel like everybody's super fricking late to the party on one. And I'm, it makes me really upset.

Leo Laporte (00:58:30):
See, I thought you were gonna talk about the other thing that makes you really upset, which is the abandonment of the us office of technology assessment.

Amy Webb (00:58:37):
Oh, well, there's that I listen, there's a, we don't have a, I have a list.

Leo Laporte (00:58:40):
There's a long list of things that Amy off

Amy Webb (00:58:43):
There is. I think Senator Klobuchar is great. I think she's her heart is in the right place, but I also think like, what the hell has everybody been doing? We, we, yeah, so I know I was not the only one talk like shopping this around the hill. We don't have an OSTP office of or we don't have a, an OT oh my God. So many acronyms. We don't have the office of tech assessment. The OSTP finally has a new person in charge, but they're, you know, we just, we've just like kicked the can down the road too many times. So I don't know I

Leo Laporte (00:59:19):
Is, does the office super for hope and technology policy kind of take the place of the old office of SI of the no, no,

Amy Webb (00:59:27):
No, because OS

Leo Laporte (00:59:29):
Yeah, O OST was supposed to advise Congress, right? It was supposed to be a, like the GAO, a nonpartisan technology group of technology experts to would help Congress understand these difficult issues.

Amy Webb (00:59:44):
Right. So I'm actually a fellow at the gal on foresight, but the GA's mandate is about auditing. It's not about, it's not really about foresight,

Leo Laporte (00:59:53):
But it's non it's, it's nonpartisan. Right? It's it's supposed to be a trusting, a trusted authority. That is, it is an to grind. In other words,

Amy Webb (01:00:03):
Correct? Ex yes, no, but everybody else has an extra grind with them because they're auditors like nobody wants. Right. so they are doing work and they're trying to become a central hub for foresight, but like nobody wants GA coming, knocking on the door and saying, Hey, let's talk about your long term plans. Right. Nobody wants to deal with auditing the office. Te G assessment was the, the group that was responsible for doing research AB you know, like without politics involved on thorny areas over long periods of time. And when they were around, they produced a lot of terrific research. We are in this situation in, you know, we are highly polarized. Oh, did see this the times like late last night published maybe Perada this they think they know one of the originators of QAN.

Leo Laporte (01:00:51):
Oh,

Paris Martineau (01:00:52):
They know the two yeah. Originators of QAN, which I believe

Leo Laporte (01:00:56):
Has, is it, the father is

Amy Webb (01:00:57):
One of them is

Leo Laporte (01:00:59):
No. Well

Paris Martineau (01:00:59):
Of

Amy Webb (01:01:00):
Them is one of them is running for, yeah. Okay.

Paris Martineau (01:01:03):
Well, one of them is Ron Watkins,

Leo Laporte (01:01:05):
Ron Watkins. We always thought it was him. Yeah.

Paris Martineau (01:01:07):
Yeah. Who's been in charge of kind of the platform behind it, but the other one is I'm forgetting his name, but he was an original like commenter and poster on the original forum.

Leo Laporte (01:01:18):
So Watkins, according, according to the documentary, kind of took over the QAN account when it moved off four Chan to eight Chan Watkins platform. So this, I guess this other guy is the forerunner who, and this is based on linguistic analysis. Interesting.

Amy Webb (01:01:40):
So, but again, the, my point is, yeah, we, he, one of them is running for Congress in Arizona. Like how, how do we it's inexcusable that we have gotten ourselves to this place. I think like, I don't care what your political beliefs are. Just the fact that politics is come. Like, the problem that I have is just that politics is so

Leo Laporte (01:02:00):
Known. Ron Watkins is running for Congress. Oh my God. God. Yeah.

Amy Webb (01:02:05):
In Arizona. Good. No, but, but this is the point, like we are in a situation that was avoidable.

Leo Laporte (01:02:14):
I keep hoping, yeah. If a reason Ferber's not running for Congress, South Africa I can, and

Paris Martineau (01:02:19):
That would put a,

Leo Laporte (01:02:20):
Yeah, it makes it hard. You know, it's a long distance relationship. He know no, never work. I keep thinking that we're all gonna come to our sense.

Paris Martineau (01:02:31):
Oh, that's the first mistake. Leah, our senses are long gone

Leo Laporte (01:02:35):
And then people will just go, oh what? Oh, no, that was nuts. Pizzagate. What? No, no, no, no. We're not gonna elect Ron Watkins,

Amy Webb (01:02:46):
But Klobuchar, I think, I think part of this legislation is in response. I don't think it's just about the platforms. It's about it. It's a, it's this sort of bigger picture thing. And, and again, how did we get to point? I think we got to this point because we just didn't, there wasn't a plan and we didn't have a process in place and I'm not saying we need to plan everything, but it would be good at least to run and develop some scenarios and then run backwards from those.

Leo Laporte (01:03:13):
I think it's a big mistake to blame the platforms. Honestly, I've come around to this. They're just a place where people express themselves. The problem lies. I mean, in the people, not the platforms,

Paris Martineau (01:03:27):
I mean, this is the gun maker defense, correct? Yeah, but Facebook think part of it is

Leo Laporte (01:03:33):
Twittter do make a

Paris Martineau (01:03:34):
Platforms. Well, I mean, you have platforms that are incentivized to,

Leo Laporte (01:03:39):
I guess you're

Paris Martineau (01:03:40):
Like have people on them as much as possible Facebook for a long time was built specifically to have its algorithm kind of feed you things that got more emoji reactions beyond just the like, and it ended up being that some of the emoji reactions that were weighted even higher ended up being things like the angry react. So of course that ends up meaning in practice that people in their feeds are increasingly seeing content that makes them extremely emotional in a negative way. And then generates comments calling that out.

Leo Laporte (01:04:14):
And frankly, so do

Paris Martineau (01:04:16):
The news sees that as engagement.

Leo Laporte (01:04:17):
So the 24 hour news networks do exactly the same thing, your look news at 11, does exactly. They know what drives engagement. They always say absolutely.

Paris Martineau (01:04:26):
I mean, it's a problem bigger than social networks, but I mean, the thing that I guess to circle back to original point, the thing that makes me angry about this nudge act or possible plan is that I don't think it's likely that a government agency reviewing these social networks to come up with a list of best practices for how to slow the sharing of content is ever going to result in any actionable change for these platforms. I mean, one, it seems unlikely that this bill would pass whatsoever given the amount of money in tech lobbying and the amount that companies like Facebook have to gain from something like this, not being codified, but two, it just, it, we have, I've been stunned over the last couple of years, watching all of these congressional hearings relating to tech at just how little the people in power happen to like, seem to understand about how technology actually works. You know, I mean, this is how we get quotes like mark Zuckerberg, will you commit to ending Finsta, which is what happened in a recent Congressional hearing. I mean, it, it doesn't seem likely that this is going to produce something actionable and helpful.

Leo Laporte (01:05:39):
It almost feels like witchcraft. Like they're saying, well, we're just, we need to conduct a study and they're gonna come up with a magic silver bullet. And then we're going to force these platforms to adhere to it. It's, it's almost a way of saying we don't know what to do. We're

Amy Webb (01:05:54):
No, I, they do know what to do. They can't because we have a first amendment. So this, this is the central problem here. Clearly I don't think anybody among us thinks that we're in a good situation, right? I mean, maybe people are making money in the current situ or they people who love chaos, but like, I think the average person is like, yeah, this, this is not great. But, but if any of our lawmakers come in and attempt to impose any restrictions, if I'm one of the platforms I'm gonna Mount a first amendment freedom of speech defense, and like nobody wants nobody wants to be in court on this. So you know, the problem is that there's no way really to incent the, the platforms to change. That's the problem.

Leo Laporte (01:06:40):
Yeah.

Amy Webb (01:06:42):
In our current situ our current setup,

Leo Laporte (01:06:45):
It's politically in expedient, but you want any as much noise about as you can, just so that people think you're doing the right thing

Paris Martineau (01:06:53):
In some way, it all ties back to our original topic of advertising, because the reason why these platforms are set up to incentivize polarizing content or things that PE keep people engaged or in the comments, regardless of what the tone of that is, is because they need eyeballs on ads. And I think that, you know, if the bottom falls out on advertising because of more stringent privacy protections, that that could be a step in the right direction, but it's obviously not a as simple as passing a law that fixes the problem because the problem is very vast.

Leo Laporte (01:07:30):
There is a, there was a house bill similar house bill called protecting Americans from dangerous algorithms act. And I would, I would agree that algorithms seem to be the, a problem, whether it's YouTube, forcing people to more and more extreme content or the Facebook newsfeed now called the feed. Not showing you the stuff from your family, but showing you the stuff that's gonna make you the most angry or most upset. Twittter is an outrage engine. I don't think it's cult. I don't think it's algorithmically driven to be you that, but it's, it's just kind of naturally become that. So, but I do think algorithms could be part of the problem. What if you had to just a chronological feed for everything would that solve?

Amy Webb (01:08:10):
So I, I, this has been my problem with all of these fits and starts they're they are re they are, we're fighting yesterday's war, right? So we're, we're on the precipice of automated versioning at scale. So there's already like, for some researchers at Virginia tech, they created this algorithm that can break down a, a image into individual parts. And they, then they use a generat of adversarial network again, to sort of move things around. Basically what this allows somebody to do is to take one picture of somebody modeling clothing, and then reposition them and put different clothing on them immediately without any real rendering time or anything else. We've got deep, fake dubs where you can already translate at scale just about anything in near real time and their startups that are doing this. What, so my point is like, restrict, like if you try to legislate this at the level of code, right, then it immediate, or, or conceptually in that way, then it immediately becomes outdated. The moment that it eventually get passed, you know, which is very, is gonna take forever. Anyways, we just need a different approach and punitive regulation, I don't think is the right way to do it because the market's gonna win out. So there's gotta be a different way. And the, the, the other way I think to do it is to incentivize the companies to change by giving them economic incentives versus threatening them with punishments. But I know that's a, it like not a super popular viewpoint.

Leo Laporte (01:09:39):
Well, the good news is tomorrow Trump's truth, social will launch, and all of this will become moot.

Amy Webb (01:09:48):
How do you join it? Do you have to be a

Leo Laporte (01:09:51):
$5 a week? You can join. Anybody can join as long as you're willing to spend five bucks a week. Yeah. A week

Amy Webb (01:09:55):
That's that's, that's,

Paris Martineau (01:09:57):
That's more expensive than TWiTtter blue, even,

Leo Laporte (01:09:59):
Right? Oh yeah. Lots more TWiTtter blues, three bucks a month, right. Or five bucks a month, whatever it is,

Paris Martineau (01:10:04):
$5 a week. Oh my God. I thought you said five a month, a week. That is quite a lot.

Leo Laporte (01:10:09):
Well the truth is not, does not come cheaply.

Amy Webb (01:10:13):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:10:13):
The truth is expensive. The, you may

Paris Martineau (01:10:17):
Remember, yeah. Forget about freedom of speech. It's, you

Leo Laporte (01:10:19):
Know, you may remember when they first launched this. There were some complaints from the open source community, cuz it looked like they had just forked masked on without giving credit. They immediately responded by posting a page that says we love opensource. Opensource is not big tech and guess that's true. And here's the source code, so they're compliant. So I guess it's still running on Macon. We run our own Mastodon instance TWiT.social. What would be, although I might rename it TWiT dot truth, cuz I think that's a better name. But what I think is interesting about Macon and I'm curious if they're gonna allow this is that you can federate Mata on instances, unlike TWiTtter, which is a silo, imagine a TWiTtter, but there's thousands of people running TWiTtter servers, all of which can talk to each other. Huh? I'm hoping truth. Social is on the Mata on fed averse, cuz then we could just you know, we could, we could join it without having to pay anything we could just, you know, but I bet they don't do that.

Amy Webb (01:11:19):
Is there a truth? Is there an API for truth?

Leo Laporte (01:11:22):
Oh yes. A well known API for truth. There is from Aon. I don't know. They might modify enough. There is set for were app store release in the apple app store on February 21st, which is of course president's day in the United States. We shall, we shall see, we shall see,

Paris Martineau (01:11:44):
I find it really funny that the retweets on this platform are called RET truths. If I recall correctly, the tweets or post version of this are just truths. It seems incredibly confusing.

Leo Laporte (01:12:01):
I would, I would, I, I'm not gonna pay a five bucks a week, but I would love to just, you know, if you, I guess gab and parlor were not enough and we now need truth social by, by the way, Devon Nunes, Congressman Devi, Nuni who retired to run, this is in charge. So

Amy Webb (01:12:20):
Are, do they take, I'm assuming they take check, right? I can, I can write a check every week. Give for $5. I'm totally gonna do that.

Leo Laporte (01:12:28):
Yeah. Write 'em send 'em pennies. I

Amy Webb (01:12:30):
Five can no,

Paris Martineau (01:12:31):
I just like Trump branded state

Leo Laporte (01:12:33):
5,000. Yeah. There you go.

Amy Webb (01:12:35):
No, a pay Melania's NFT. I'll just

Paris Martineau (01:12:38):
Oh, very important. Yeah, yeah, yeah,

Amy Webb (01:12:41):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:12:41):
Is I read that she bought her own NFT. Is that that's what I read. Is that true?

Amy Webb (01:12:46):
Well, but okay. That's we let's, we can make fun of this. However, let's also just note that that is part of the pyramid scheme that's happening right now. Yeah. People

Leo Laporte (01:12:54):
Are own.

Amy Webb (01:12:56):
Right, right, right. So I believe that was,

Paris Martineau (01:12:59):
You know, I mean, to on the pyramid scheme level, there was recently a Madoff coin was the name of it in the you know, much like Bernie Madoff was the name of this coin. And of course turns out to be a scam couple weeks, months after people had invested Madoff coin, they made off with us.

Leo Laporte (01:13:20):
That was a surprise. Yeah. Bloomberg apparently realized that the entity that purchased Melania's Trump's NFT was the same wallet number that created it. So I

Amy Webb (01:13:36):
Think that's gonna be a problem going forward. I don't think people understand that their wallets are, can be traced in are public. Yeah. So yeah.

Paris Martineau (01:13:44):
I mean that crypto the, that couple that stole all the money from the cryptocurrency exchange currently seriously, didn't realize that their transactions were clearly going to be

Leo Laporte (01:13:56):
Allegedly

Paris Martineau (01:13:58):
Racon I allegedly

Leo Laporte (01:13:59):
Racon the famous rap star. Racon this is, this

Amy Webb (01:14:06):
Is this a real rap star? I, I stopped listening to

Leo Laporte (01:14:11):
Racon. Oh my gosh.

Amy Webb (01:14:12):
I don't know a,

Paris Martineau (01:14:12):
RA's gonna have to play a Racon video for Amy.

Leo Laporte (01:14:15):
There's

Amy Webb (01:14:15):
Only a real thing.

Leo Laporte (01:14:17):
So it's a couple, oh,

Paris Martineau (01:14:18):
I'm so happy for you.

Amy Webb (01:14:19):
Can we do, can we do a rush chaser after that?

Leo Laporte (01:14:22):
Yeah. whatever it is, the crocodile of wall street, rapper accused of laundering, billions of dollars in crypto Heather and her husband Ilia Dutch Lichtenstein were arrested this real. Yes,

Amy Webb (01:14:36):
No.

Leo Laporte (01:14:37):
The shoes of conspiring the lot of millions of

Paris Martineau (01:14:40):
Amy.

Leo Laporte (01:14:40):
This is, this is the cryptocurrency that was stolen. This is amazing years ago. I think this was from 2016. I missed all of this. It was at the time it was only worth millions, but of course, by the time they ended up starting to sell it, it was worth it's worth, I think $4.2 billion. Let me see if I can find Rael con has pulled down a lot of her wraps, but I think there was one on TWiTtter. If I can, if I can find it. Oh my God.

Paris Martineau (01:15:10):
So there was so many incredible detail or

Amy Webb (01:15:12):
Something.

Leo Laporte (01:15:13):
It's kind of hard to describe here. Here's a little bit of Racon right now

Speaker 5 (01:15:20):
I'm mother, boys on payroll. Cause I'm so we to stay home the we heard about rip win. Sprinkle shall wherever I pink. I'm

Leo Laporte (01:15:35):
About actually, is that not her? I don't know who that is. Yeah. It says it's Racon

Paris Martineau (01:15:41):
I believe that is Racon. She was also a contributor to what was it? Was it Forbes?

Leo Laporte (01:15:48):
Oh yeah. She contributed

Paris Martineau (01:15:48):
Forbes. Contributor. Yeah. A Forbes contributor and had written that's article. It's totally unbrand about how to protect yourself from fraud related to cryptocurrency. Yeah. Which I think is quite ironic. Yeah. Even that

Leo Laporte (01:16:02):
She, well, she knew she, is she

Paris Martineau (01:16:03):
Like a legend.

Leo Laporte (01:16:04):
She was an expert. Is

Amy Webb (01:16:05):
She, is she like seriously trying to rap? Or is this like a parody?

Leo Laporte (01:16:10):
Here's the best known? Here's your one, one and a half million views. Her best known rap Racon

Speaker 6 (01:16:17):
Turk is Martha Stark keep gone up in her, been Trapp with dessert, gone poppy from that dirt rebellious young Turk on with a Burke.

Leo Laporte (01:16:28):
I don't know what the, her inverse side effect is

Speaker 6 (01:16:30):
A dark. She come lurk

Leo Laporte (01:16:32):
It. It's not a mistake.

Speaker 7 (01:16:35):
Beard icky. Oo, Turkish, Martha Stewart.

Leo Laporte (01:16:38):
She is apparently the Turkish Marcus. Martha Stewart, I think is

Amy Webb (01:16:43):
The, is she, what, where does she from? Where does she hail from?

Leo Laporte (01:16:47):
I think Rikers island now, but before I'm not sure.

Amy Webb (01:16:51):
Oh my God, this is, she

Paris Martineau (01:16:52):
Recommended RA is a of self care. There were also some fantastic details in a recent New York times article about the couple specifically that when the government went to kind of raid their apartment after the arrest. When, I guess when they were executing a search warrant agents found more than 50 electronic devices throughout their apartment, including a bag labeled burner phone that had more than thousand dollars in cash.

Leo Laporte (01:17:23):
If you're gonna have burner phones, you gotta keep 'em separate, you know,

Paris Martineau (01:17:28):
They had more than at least two hollowed out books whose pages had secret compartments in them. And then as the agents were searching, miss Racon had asked if they could go get, if she could go get their cat, which was hiding under the bed, oh, the agents were like, of course you can get the cat. As she kneels down to get the cat, she grabs a phone, allegedly the off the nightstand and starts hitting it rapidly to try and like wipe it or engage encryption. And apparently the agents had to grab it from her. Yeah. Which I think is a hell of a move. This

Amy Webb (01:18:03):
Is amazing.

Leo Laporte (01:18:03):
Yeah. It's a, it's one of those stories. And now of course, there's a story about open sea users complaining about missing NFTs. 

Amy Webb (01:18:16):
Is, is this the super mega Mayflower yacht, whatever, like a $650,000. Yes. Cartoon boat that somebody purchased,

Leo Laporte (01:18:24):
We are actively investigating rumors of an exploit Associa with open sea related smart contracts open. He posted to TWiTtter last night, there appear to be a Phish attack originating outside of open C's website, do not click links other than open c.io, 32 users. So far according to open C CEO, Devon Finser last night signed a malicious payload from an attacker as a result, some of their NFTs were stolen. So be careful out there. Huh? It's in the word.

Amy Webb (01:18:57):
So this is interesting. I wonder if like who, who in the federal government, who in the FBI is in, right. That would be an FBI case. Who's in charge of cuz that would be, that would be grand larceny if it's above a certain amount, but it's digital. So who's in charge. So the

Leo Laporte (01:19:12):
FDA and what's it really worth. Right. And it's

Amy Webb (01:19:16):
Yeah. I'm more like, do we suddenly like send, this is in your book. Is there a new, this

Leo Laporte (01:19:20):
Is in your book is a chapter from your book where they're trying to figure out who's responsible for what was that for? That was for cyber attack. Oh,

Amy Webb (01:19:27):
That's that's if there's a cyber biological attack, but actually now that I'm hearing you guys, like, I wonder which division is in charge of investigating the theft of an NFT, if it's above $250,000, which I think is what qualifies it for, I feel like

Paris Martineau (01:19:40):
It's probably the same division that was investigating the theft, the alleged thefts of Rael con and her bow. Cuz there was a, I'm trying to remember the specific name. I mean, it sounds funny, but there was a specific division that had to trace back the crypto transactions from like wallet to wallet, to wallet to try and pin it on these two people.

Leo Laporte (01:20:03):
I bet the FBI's pretty good at that by now.

Paris Martineau (01:20:06):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:20:06):
That'd be my guess. Yeah. Yeah. I don't, I don't know, in a series of tweets Finser dispelled rumors, the hack was worth 200 million. He said the hacker has 1.7 million of Ethan in his wallet from selling some of the stolen and Ft. So yes it is grand larceny. Yeah. Let's take a little break. We are having a good time talking about the world. The weird modern world with two who know Amy Webb futurist. She's been living in this present for many years now and she's our tour guide future today Institute at Amy Webb on the TWiTtter and author of the brand new book, the Genesis machine Paris Martineau writes about Amazon and big check at the in four scare quotes of course scare quotes, scare quotes. Our show today brought to you by wealth front they're sensible. They're it's not, we're not talking diamond, hay and stomps taking into the moon.

Leo Laporte (01:21:09):
We're not talking about mem stocks we're talking and you know what? No, not casting aspersions on that. If that's what you wanna do, that's fine. That's fun. A lot of investment apps make it easy to start trading. You saw all those ads on the super bowl, but just cuz it's easy to do. Doesn't mean, you know what? You're doing wealth front, but makes it easy to invest and easy to grow your savings with a diversified portfolio that balances your other riskier bets. You can start investing in no time use wealth front's classic portfolio, or if you feel like it and it's easy to do, make your own portfolio with things you care about. They have socially responsible funds. I'm a big fan of those techno funds. Yes you can do crypto. They've got crypto trusts, hundreds of other investments in every area. But the thing is Wealthfront was designed by financial experts to help you turn your good ideas into great investments without the hassle of doing everything yourself.

Leo Laporte (01:22:03):
If you don't want to, for instance, spend lots of time trying to figure out how to lower your tax bill. Don't worry. Wealthfront does tax loss, harvesting automatically. All the experts say you gotta pay attention and rebalance your portfolio regularly. Right? You know what rebalancing is? Would you know how to do it? Don't worry. Wealthfront does it for you. Automatically. Wealthfront is trusted with over 28 billion in assets. They're helping nearly half a million people build their wealth. It's easy. Get started. $500 opens the account, grow your wealth the easy way. Let wealth front do the work for you. 4.9 outta five stars on the apple app store. By the way, that's how you'll know you got the right one wealth front, start building your wealth right now. Get your first $5,000. Manage free forever at wealth, front.com/i want you to read all about it. W E a L T H wealth front F R ot.com/start building your wealth, go to wealthfront.com/TWiT today.

Leo Laporte (01:23:05):
And we thank him so much for supporting TWiT and you support us when you use that address. So yeah, I know you can just go to Wealthfront, but try to go to the, the one we mentioned wealthfront.com/TWiT. That way they'll know you saw it here. Actually that's becoming a big problem in podcasting in general is is, is, and advertisers really wanna know this, but podcasting is not designed around tracking, you know, it's RSS, you're anonymous to podcasters. That's why we do what we do an annual survey. It's in fact you have a like eight more days to do it runs out the end of the month TWiTt TV slash survey 22, where we just ask and you can, it's completely volunt. We also have been using for some advertisers who request it a firm called charitable, which does what they do is, and they do it in a privacy forward way, which I, which is the only reason we use them.

Leo Laporte (01:24:00):
They get our IP addresses of people who download the show. They get IP addresses from the sponsors website. The, the page you go to like wealthfront.com/TWiT, and then without divulging that information to anybody else, they say, this is you got 36% match or whatever. This is how many people TWiT sent to your website. And yet it's privacy respecting, which is great. Unfortunately charitable. And the other company that we've used, pod sites, both were just purchased by Spotify. So more and more podcasting is moving into this realm where it's not RSS, where you get it in the app called Spotify, where they know everything about you and they have all the analytics they could possibly want. And it makes me worry a little bit about the future of open podcasting of RSS

Paris Martineau (01:24:51):
Podcast. I know this day is coming at some point, but I know the day is coming where I will no longer be able to skip through podcast ads to my heart's content. And it's going to be a dark day. I'm going to have to keep downloading my podcast because you know, can you though, I never skip

Leo Laporte (01:25:10):
In Spotify. Can you, I skip your ads lead? No, no you can. I don't. No, that's not.

Paris Martineau (01:25:13):
I listen to

Leo Laporte (01:25:14):
Everyone. No, no, but, but can you skip in Spotify? Do they have a skip button? Probably not. Right.

Amy Webb (01:25:19):
I used I, so I, I think its called yeah, mine is called castor. Does that sound right? What's this thing called pocket casts and I,

Leo Laporte (01:25:26):
I love pocket cast and yes you that's what I use, but that's the point pocket cast uses RSS feeds. You cannot, for instance, listen to the Joe Rogan experience on pocket casts because Spotify and turns out, by the way, they spent 200 million, not what we had been earlier reported 100 million for the Joe Rogan experience. And by the way, it's been a great investment for them. Joe Rogan million dollars to buy one ad on Joe Rogan and you have to agree to buy ads on other Spotify shows as well. So it's a, it's a money maker, right? That's 200 ads. It's nothing you know, that's a, that's in a year's worth of advertising. So, but the whole idea is it's exclusive. So you have to have Spotify. You don't have to be a paid member but you have to have that app. And that's the thing I think that's gonna, it it's it's bad for RSS podcasting traditional. You won't be able to use podcasts to listen to some podcasts anymore.

Amy Webb (01:26:21):
I, I, I was just reading. I forget where it was the Spotify's plans for how it's attempting to expand because at some point the, the like the market mechanics for the music alone, aren't enough to sustain it cuz the, the margins are too low and just the, the, the money doesn't really make sense over a long period of time.

Leo Laporte (01:26:40):
Oh gosh. Yes. This is why Spotify's doing it. The worst possible business you could be in is streaming music. Cuz you have to pay so much to the labels.

Paris Martineau (01:26:50):
I mean they're not even paying much to the labels.

Leo Laporte (01:26:52):
Well, no, see, now that's a common misconception. They're paying a lot to the labels. Two thirds of the money they make goes to the labels. You're talking about the artists.

Paris Martineau (01:26:59):
Oh yes. Very different. Sorry. Here's a big, the people who may to the music. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:27:04):
Yeah. You very different people make the music. Oh who cares about them? No, you're right. Spotify pays one of the lowest fees per stream. But most of that money doesn't go to the artist. It goes to the label. They are also, I think this is kind of a double under, because not only they're buying podcasts like Rogan, they're buying things like charitable and pod sites and mega, which is a direct ad insertion platform and anchor FM. They're buying the backend as well. Which means advertisers makes sense. Yeah. Advertisers won't yeah, they literally, this is a direct shot at companies like mine because if I, if I don't have access to those metrics, advertisers just say, no, no, we're not gonna buy your show cuz we, we have to buy Spotify.

Amy Webb (01:27:46):
And does Nielsen have doesn't Nielsen do that type of rating?

Leo Laporte (01:27:49):
Nobody. Nobody does anything like this, unfortunately. Huh? Spotify look, it's good business. I don't, I understand completely why they're doing this. They need audio programming that doesn't cost as much as streaming music does and podcasts are a good deal from their point of view. And by the way, they won't even have to buy many podcasts because just because they own the backend, everybody's gonna have to go to them to sell ads. So currently almost looks like three and a half million podcasts are on Spotify, not exclusive, but on that's a,

Paris Martineau (01:28:26):
I'd be curious as to what that number is for like podcasts with a regular audience of like a thousand listeners or more. Oh

Leo Laporte (01:28:33):
Yeah. That's a good question. Yeah,

Paris Martineau (01:28:35):
Yeah. Yeah. I mean how much I just, I don't see how someone uploading something. This

Amy Webb (01:28:40):
Is just distribution. Right? So at some point I'm trying to think of a company that is in, that is in the distribution business that has not at some point faced a problem because at some point there's another disruption that comes around and it just, they, they find it hard to compete. Right. So, or you wind up with market, you wind up with like over sat saturations. So I don't know, I'm trying to play this forward five years, 10, you know, please

Leo Laporte (01:29:07):
Do. And let me know what you figure out cuz I'm, I mean, at, at this

Amy Webb (01:29:12):
Point, I mean I think, I think what happens is that I would be curious to know how, how they pay pivot. And they're gonna have to, at some point, I would think because just the traditional distribution models over and over and over again, tend not to work out digital,

Paris Martineau (01:29:31):
Especially advertising based like a distribution model. I mean, I think the fact that this is all again, based on bringing an ad dollars, it's on almost certainty at some point much like advertising has kind of collapsed for digital media and of course, print media that at some point that is going to come to audio content and it'll move to whatever the next thing is. Maybe that's VR glasses or something. But I I'm curious as to what yeah, like you said, Amy, what is the 10 year plan for this?

Amy Webb (01:30:02):
Well, and if meta act like, again, we don't going back to what we were talking about earlier with meta. I don't know what happens with that. But one would think that if there's a ton of money, advertisers are fickle and they go where they think they're gonna have the greatest impact, you know, and what in a Spotify is pretty much a driven, the, a driven model for distribu over and over again. You don't have enough control over, over that ecosystem and it's a, you, you at some point become vulnerable. So I'd be curious to see what happens,

Leo Laporte (01:30:32):
Amazon iHeart, which does a lot of podcasts. They're, they're the biggest audio company cuz they own a lot of radio stations. Apple too is get into podcasting. So I hope there's some competition, but I also kind of bemoan. I mean the same thing happened to blogging to some degree where it, the small independent blogs kind of just disappeared because they couldn't compete against the big companies that were moving into the blogging space. I like the idea, of course I'm in the business of demo democratized kind of free media, a supportive free media that anybody can listen to. Anybody can make. I like that idea. I don't like to see it kind of moved into silos, but I, I fear that's where it's going. Speaking of silos, I just can't wait to hear the, the roar of horror when people realize that they can no longer you Microsoft windows without signing in to Microsoft. This is, was released in a dev version of windows 11 pro for a long time. It was only windows 11 home. They required a Microsoft account. We would tell people, oh, you can get windows 11 pro or you can disconnect from the internet, still get a local account. It looks like if Microsoft goes ahead with this, it's in the dev channel right now, it will be the first desktop operating system to require internet connectivity and an account with a company for even basic functionality. Max don't do it. That does wilds.

Paris Martineau (01:32:00):
I mean, what do you do if you're on a plane?

Leo Laporte (01:32:02):
Yeah. Well you don't install windows. You wait until you, yeah, you can still use, you want, you can use it on a plane, but you can't install it on a plane. But I think there are still people in the world who don't have internet who might want to use a computer. I don't know. Or

Amy Webb (01:32:19):
There are times when you don't wanna have the internet on. I mean we do some sensitive.

Leo Laporte (01:32:24):
Absolutely.

Amy Webb (01:32:24):
Sometimes we do some sensitive work and we don't even wanna be on like a VPN. We, we need to be completely off. Yeah. And you know, on a machine that doesn't ever connect anywhere,

Leo Laporte (01:32:33):
It's a really interesting move on Microsoft's part. They'll probably get away with it, but there's gonna be, just get ready. We talked about it on windows weekly and, and Paul and Mary Jo were kind of, well, are people gonna care? And I said, Paul, they're gonna care. You don't, you ain't heard nothing yet. People will care. 

Paris Martineau (01:32:52):
I was a die hard windows user. I remember until I think windows eight came out. And that was when I jumped into the world of MacBooks where I've sense, never

Leo Laporte (01:33:00):
Looked back. Did you

Paris Martineau (01:33:01):
Never looked back? I just couldn't get over all the big boxes, but this is the sort of thing that, I mean, and I think if I was still using the operating system would definitely turn me away. Right.

Leo Laporte (01:33:14):
So the super bowl was last week. I know Amy watched iactually I don't know that you watched, I

Amy Webb (01:33:19):
Don't know that. I would say I watched it. We did the opposite of what Paris was talking about. About like fast forwarding through ads. We fast forwarded the game and then just land on the ads.

Leo Laporte (01:33:31):
I think that's what more sensible

Paris Martineau (01:33:32):
People do

Leo Laporte (01:33:33):
They watched

Amy Webb (01:33:33):
For the ads. And then we watched like the, we watched the last two minutes of the game and didn't care. 

Leo Laporte (01:33:39):
So what'd you think about, we were doing the show and I'm looking and I'm saying, oh, I think we've lost the feed, John. There's a bouncing QR code, QR code. What is that all about? It turned out. It was, it was about Coinbase spending. I think it was 12 million for 60 seconds of ad time on the super bowl with a bouncing QR code. But here's the funny part. It worked. Yeah. Crypto apps shot up in the app store after super bowl. Studed with crypto ads. 

Paris Martineau (01:34:15):
You mean there were quite a few, I didn't watch the super bowl, but I heard that there was, I think like six or seven crypto ads.

Leo Laporte (01:34:22):
Yes. And Coinbase for a while that servers were down, they couldn't keep up. They went from 186 to place on the app store to number two on the app store. After that ad, cuz that's what the QR code was. You scan it and you get a link. And as you pointed out, Amy, this is probably not the most secure thing in the world to do.

Amy Webb (01:34:44):
No, I thought it was listen it's they're not targeting my dad. You know, they're, they're targeting the people who were the people who know how to open up a phone and, and scan on that thing. I think it was super smart and annoying. I mean, I think it was exactly what they wanted it to be, but yeah, there were I thought that the whole night was kind of a bizarre near future dystopian hellscape it's just, you know, you're

Leo Laporte (01:35:10):
The future you should have been comfortable in that did it, did it? No,

Amy Webb (01:35:13):
I, what I was, what I was comfortable with. I just remember the first ad that I saw was that Uber eats ad where like, like you're

Leo Laporte (01:35:21):
Diapers and Greg's drinking dish, soap cousin,

Amy Webb (01:35:23):
Greg is right. And, and like what is the message that Uber is trying to tell me? I think what they're trying to tell me, I think what the message there is like technology has, has created this learned helplessness where humans have forgotten to eat. And we're just says,

Leo Laporte (01:35:38):
We're like, it's on the bag. I'm gonna eat it. It was a very strange campaign, especially since you can't do a car commercial without saying professional driver on a closed track, do not attempt. Nevertheless, they've got somebody eating light bulbs in their commercial and see now they did have a, they actually had a series of very funny disclaimers, including do not eat light bulbs. These are not real light bulbs, but they were a very fine print. I could just see the next TikTok fad trying to eat the stuff Uber eats delivers. That's not out edible. Oh yeah. Maybe that was their plan. You

Paris Martineau (01:36:12):
Know, someone's out there crunching on, on

Leo Laporte (01:36:13):
Light bulbs, light

Amy Webb (01:36:14):
Bulbs

Leo Laporte (01:36:15):
Not eat light bulbs please. Yeah. Yeah. And then did you, you see Larry David's ad for FTX, which is another crypto exchange and I

Amy Webb (01:36:24):
Security all

Paris Martineau (01:36:25):
Were earlier in this thing bemoaning saying advertising is dead. And now we just start having a segment where we're talking

Leo Laporte (01:36:31):
About super bowl. Advertising is not dead six and a half million dollars for 30 seconds. And it, but that's the point is that it, in fact, these ads apparently work, which kind of blows me away. The most expensive ads you can buy in media. I think. 

Amy Webb (01:36:48):
Yeah. I, I, I don't know. I did not. I thought the ads were really ho I mean they were clever, but they were horrific the, the was Scarlet Johansen and Colin Joe and the,

Leo Laporte (01:37:01):
And the apple, Amazon echo reading your reading. Yeah.

Amy Webb (01:37:05):
Right. And that was, I don't know. Or the animatronic do, I don't even remember what commercial this was, but there was the animat maybe it was a Facebook that was Facebook. That's the animatronic dot

Leo Laporte (01:37:15):
Animat was not a Facebook. It was ionic. It was the, it was the electric vehicle.

Amy Webb (01:37:19):
Right. But there was, there was another animatronic, like Chucky cheese style dog at the oh. And, and like, like nobody cared anymore. And he was like thrown in the garbage and you know, so like, but he was able to live on and see his friend. He had to find compassion in the metaverse. I, I, I feel like if, if we're okay with this, this hellscape that these companies are showing us like that is, that is very concerning to me. Very, very concerning.

Leo Laporte (01:37:48):
I CA I can't believe I missed the Facebook ad. Here. Let's just, yeah. Let's just watch a little bit of this Facebook ad. This is a Chucky cheese kind of animatronic. The restaurant gets shut down the animatronics get carried out to the front closing forever, which you know, must have happened to a few Chucky cheeses. He's in a pawn shop. Now he's become a part of a mini at your golf course or a karaoke bar. And he's just so sad. He's somehow he got on the back of a car.

Paris Martineau (01:38:24):
He's staring at a man pumping gas.

Leo Laporte (01:38:25):
Yeah. Oh, and it just fell off a truck. And now he's in the desert. God, this is distressing. This is, I didn't see this. This is so depressing.

Amy Webb (01:38:33):
There are tears

Paris Martineau (01:38:35):
Down his eyes. He's being crushed in. Wait

Leo Laporte (01:38:37):
A minute. Paris Martin saving him crushed. That's true. You, you would look so good if you were bedazzled. Now he's now pointing the way to the Bosworth space center space cafe waiting, right?

Amy Webb (01:38:49):
There's a, there's an

Leo Laporte (01:38:49):
Oculus. There's an Oculus is

Amy Webb (01:38:52):
Wearing the O

Paris Martineau (01:38:52):
Oculus space walk with meta quest.

Leo Laporte (01:38:55):
Suddenly he has no legs in the metaverse and all his

Amy Webb (01:39:00):
Love,

Paris Martineau (01:39:00):
The bodies, a disclaimer that says screens are simulated, not indicative

Leo Laporte (01:39:05):
What I should really say that Jeanine. Yeah.

Amy Webb (01:39:08):
So isn't that just, but you guys, what message is this sending that like in the real world, your friends will forget and discard you, but if you plug into the metaverse, that's a constant party. I don't know. I it's a constant

Paris Martineau (01:39:22):
Actually alone. It's very grim. I mean,

Amy Webb (01:39:25):
Think it, I think it's, it's very, very disturbing to me.

Leo Laporte (01:39:29):
I don't know. Wow. I hadn't seen that. I, yeah. Don't know what the message is. Yeah. you're useless. You guarded. No one loves you, but thank God. You've got friends in the metaverse.

Amy Webb (01:39:41):
Yeah. The, the message to me is that the multiverse is real and I'm in the wrong dimension. Right. I wanna go to the right, wherever it forked. I wanna go back in the other direction.

Leo Laporte (01:39:51):
Holy cow. That's depressing. I missed that one

Amy Webb (01:39:57):
Mean

Paris Martineau (01:39:57):
It's very much writing player. One energy. Yeah. It's like, you are going to be in a desolate environment in awful circumstances, perhaps alone, but yet you'll have your Oculus,

Leo Laporte (01:40:09):
Do you think and you'll have to forgive me cuz I'm an old guy. I'm a, I'm a boomer. But do you think Paris, this actually speaks to millennials and gen Z folks. I think of the anti work crowd, the great resignation people who say, you know, I can't make a living, buy a house and have three square meals. I can't even pay rent on, on what I jobs I'm getting. This is a dystopian world already for them is who this is aimed at.

Paris Martineau (01:40:40):
I mean, I don't think necessarily, because I think that also part of the anti work crowd or kind of gen Z disillusionment is also rooted in perhaps just skepticism of like performative sincerity and advertising and corporate culture.

Leo Laporte (01:40:59):
Oh,

Paris Martineau (01:40:59):
Very much so. I mean, I think you look at this and the first thing I think is, oh my God, I mean, this looks like a dystopian nightmare. Yeah. 

Leo Laporte (01:41:07):
But in a way we're already, I think some people were already living in that. This is it.

Paris Martineau (01:41:12):
I mean, but I think that this ad also is probably not targeted to gen Z the demographics for the sum. No. Are like, it's a nostalgic obviously. I mean, it's, it's a nostalgic ad. It is to have people think that this is what the cool kids are doing and that then you should get into it as well. I mean, I was just looking it up, I guess, with Nielsen at found that Sunday super bowl ad a 26.5 rating in adult 18 to 49, which is down 11% from last year. Oh. And that the younger,

Leo Laporte (01:41:44):
Younger adults, I think they had 117 million. Oh

Paris Martineau (01:41:48):
Wait, this is last year. I'm

Leo Laporte (01:41:50):
Sorry guys. This was the biggest super bowl in years. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Paris Martineau (01:41:53):
What is the demo? But let me find the ratings for the 18 to 30 demographic for this year.

Leo Laporte (01:42:01):
Now we're getting some reportage. Now we're seeing a reporter at work, looking for those numbers.

Paris Martineau (01:42:08):
A lot of Googling folks,

Leo Laporte (01:42:09):
The super bowl viewing figures were up 16%, 112.3 million people. The most watched single us telecast in two years.

Paris Martineau (01:42:20):
I mean, two years is not no that long, no. Especially cuz last year of 11% from the year

Leo Laporte (01:42:26):
Prior. Right.

Paris Martineau (01:42:28):
Is this because the teams

Leo Laporte (01:42:29):
Or probably because I don't follow, I don't think Cincinnati is a big media market, but LA sure is. Okay. I think the team, some, some super bowl, according to a study delivered 170 million worth of brand exposure for sponsors, get ready for this 75 minutes of advertising in that game. There's only 11 minutes on average of action in, in an NFL game, Nike got 46 minutes of in game exposure. All those swooshes, Pepsi and Bowes also scored well sofa's minute of exposure was valued by high at three and a half million. See that's half what they paid. But the demographics are interesting. I think that's what I, I agree with you Paris, that's what I'd like to know is do younger people, are they watching?

Paris Martineau (01:43:22):
I mean, yeah, because I was able to find the specific breakdowns, I guess it's from last year, but even then that was found the demographic of 18 to 34 only. It was a 20.95, which is down 13% from the year prior. And I mean, I would assume that it's probably a similar trend this year. Yeah. It seems like. I mean the notion of gathering around to watch ads seems a little off with me. I didn't watch the super bowl. So I'm probably not the right person to make this proclamation, but it seems very, I don't know, not in line with kind of the current culture

Leo Laporte (01:44:06):
Here from ad age, the average age of a super bowl, viewer 50,

Paris Martineau (01:44:12):
That tracks.

Leo Laporte (01:44:13):
Yeah. Yeah. By contrast the most coveted demographic for advertisers, the one you were speaking of 18 to 34, but I have to say there probably not a lot of big events that can draw a young audience better than the super bowl. I mean, it not be the best. Well,

Amy Webb (01:44:32):
I think the question is, are there big events five years from now that draw that type of critical mass eSports or like a third of the country? I don't know is I, I don't think so. I think we're pretty diffuse now in what we pay attention to. And I just, I wonder if going forward, we, we have these like moments we're a third of the country is all doing the same thing at the same time. Those are

Leo Laporte (01:44:53):
Getting

Amy Webb (01:44:54):
There's power

Leo Laporte (01:44:54):
In that. Yeah.

Amy Webb (01:44:56):
I think there's, there's a power in, it's be

Paris Martineau (01:44:57):
Similar. Yeah.

Amy Webb (01:44:59):
Collective experience.

Leo Laporte (01:45:00):
We're all fragmented. We're all fragmented now. Right.

Paris Martineau (01:45:03):
Right. I mean, I think it's kind of the micro influencer trend and I think we're gonna start seeing that in advertising more often, which is specifically targeting like key demographic. Even if it isn't, you know, 30% of the us, it is a specific demographic that is interested in a product like that and it might be a much smaller sample size, but then you can kind of spread those ad dollars around.

Leo Laporte (01:45:26):
So Spotify's doing the right thing. Right.

Paris Martineau (01:45:30):
I

Amy Webb (01:45:30):
Guess even so, but, but I don't know Spotify five is, so if Rogan Rogan has 11 million listeners, he claims,

Leo Laporte (01:45:36):
Which is that's right. He

Amy Webb (01:45:37):
Claims that's a large number, but that is a far cry from 130 million people all tuning into the same thing at the same time. And I just, I do think it's worth foregrounding that for just a moment, because while we, you know, not everybody may want to watch the super bowl. It is, we, we don't have a lot of moments in time when we are all doing the same thing. You know, we're all thinking about the same thing at the same time. And I, I think that that is actually important in society that there are these moments where we come together, even if it's fleeting so that we have these sort of common miles in society. And I don't know, I'm not sure if that's gonna be possible going forward. Maybe I

Leo Laporte (01:46:19):
Think, think one thing that's changed

Paris Martineau (01:46:21):
Out of the reason.

Leo Laporte (01:46:21):
Go ahead.

Paris Martineau (01:46:22):
I think that's part of the reason we have the polarization we see today. And it seems like a lot of different people are living in separate realities because right. We all live in separate information ecosystem systems. I mean, for some people it might be bachelor Monday. Some people it is, they're looking forward to super bowl Sunday. Some people are watching some TWiTtch streamer it's radically different. And I mean, I think that fracturing is going to have cascading effects with our society.

Amy Webb (01:46:53):
Yeah. And it's, I think that that's a good point. I'm just looking at the IRC where I like to hang out during these shows and Phoenix is, is mentioning the winter Olympics on ratings. And I think, I think the winter Olympics also tend to get lower ratings, but I, I think this has been like really

Leo Laporte (01:47:07):
Low.

Amy Webb (01:47:09):
Yeah. Yeah. So I don't know. I don't sports don't I don't

Leo Laporte (01:47:13):
Yeah. Sports are the one event where you can get a whole bunch of people together. I think we are moving, I don't to a niche world. I don't know if that's a bad thing. I mean, I'm a look, I'm a niche broadcaster. I like, I, I, I like it that we can reach a niche shotty in.

Amy Webb (01:47:32):
Yeah. I guess what I'm saying is I think it's good for people to have shared experiences. And I guess the point that I'm making is we have shared places.

Leo Laporte (01:47:40):
That's an old fashioned point of view though.

Amy Webb (01:47:43):
It may be, but humans haven't evolved beyond packs and tribalism. Right. And if the that's where we still are, which I think is fine then we should acknowledge that those shared experiences are still kind of relevant and we're so I, I, I worry that like the absence of those shared experiences is maybe not great going forward, but I don't know the thing that would galvanize everybody.

Leo Laporte (01:48:05):
I mean mass media is new let's let's remind ourselves it's only a few hundred, maybe a hundred years old. It's not a, it's a relatively new phenomenon. We didn't have those mass moments before mass media. Did we, do we have a moment?

Paris Martineau (01:48:21):
But I mean, I think in that case, our world was a lot smaller. I mean, the population of demographic you'd be thinking of to have a shared experience would be your town or your street or your, you know, school or church or community because of mass media and communication. Both the population that we're thinking of as in the word us is much faster, but yet also the sort of things that everyone is focusing on are we have almost endless possibilities.

Leo Laporte (01:48:52):
Yeah. Let's take a break when we come back. I'm I got a question on the radio show. When I ask you, it was a very nice woman called she said I'm not very techn literate, literate, but I'm just curious what you think cyber warfare is gonna look like. And I thought, you know, I, this might be more timely because we're, I don't know if we're on the brink of a war in Ukraine, but already the it's pretty clear. The Russians are using DDoS attacks against the financial system in Ukraine. And and may there may be in fact, a cyber front if, if there is a war in Ukraine, what would a, what would a cyber war look like in the United States? We're gonna take a break. I can ask the two of you, very smart people, Paris Martin know, and Amy Webb are here today.

Leo Laporte (01:49:43):
It's great to have you. I, I try to reassure the nice person and say, don't worry. It's gonna be all right. Maybe you don't feel the same. Our show today brought to you by zip recruiter. I'll tell you one good thing. People are hiring. There are lots of jobs out there. In fact, according to the latest research, 90% of employers are not only hiring, but wanna make it a better experience. They know it's, that's a top priority for 2022. You know, it's not given them snacks, although we do that, but it's also making them feel more valued, making them feel more important, focusing on company culture, offering more learning opportunities, allowing for flexibility and work schedules, being more empathetic, allowing them to connect, understanding their situation. I think this, that, that's what we are gonna need to do going forward. And if you need to add more employees to your team, can I recommend ZipRecruiter right now?

Leo Laporte (01:50:40):
You could try ZipRecruiter for free at ziprecruiter.com/TWiT ZipRecruiter technology finds the right candidates for your job and proactively presents them to you. You can easily review those candidates. You can actually invite your top choices to apply, which works really well. When you get invited by a company to apply, you're gonna apply faster. You're gonna be there for the interviews. You really it's flattering, right? No wonder ZipRecruiter is rated the number one hiring light in the us. According to G2 ratings, find the right employees right now with zip recruiter. We've had great experiences with zip recruiter. It's, it's one of the best ways. In fact, it is the best way we've found to hire. Try it for free. We've got a exclusive address just for you listeners, ziprecruiter.com/TWiT, get a free trial, ziprecruiter.com/t I T. It is absolutely the best way to hire ill vouch for that ZipRecruiter. I told the very nice caller not to be afraid, but the first thing if I were a tech, the us I'd go after as a financial system, then I'd go after the electric power grid and then I'd go after our food supply system. And Bob's your uncle, the war's over Amy. Am I crazy?

Amy Webb (01:52:02):
You're not crazy. I was talking to one of the FDA commissioners gosh, maybe six weeks ago. And we were just talking about the global supply of food and, you know, the us has not made shoring up our there's an intersection between cybersecurity and our food supply and that just hasn't been a top priority. And I, I recognize that we can't inflate the number of government employees by four, you know, four X or five X. But the truth is that, you know, we've, we are, we are probably less secure than we should be. And partially I think that's because our federal government tends to make the states like leave it up to the states to do things. And then the states leave it up to the local cities to do things. We just don't have this big coordinated plan. So you saw a lot of, I mean, because of COVID like ransomware is way up in government, local governments and hospitals, and, you know, things like that.

Amy Webb (01:53:01):
We know that there have been critical infrastructure breaks and it's, I don't know, Andy Greenberg who's at wired who I think does really's tremendous reporting. Really. Yeah, he's great. You know, he, I guess in January had a story about maybe Russia has already started something, you know, they, they Russia definitely sent malware to Ukrainian government computers and it was a master. It was a malware that overwrites the master boot record. And then it runs this big long file corruption program and, and overrides file types and directories. And it was pretty, pretty brutal. And you know, if they're wiping out sensitive data at a government level, that's that, I don't know. I mean, this is part of the problem. Like I actually, for a couple of years, I don't remember where I wrote this. It might have been wired. We don't really have, like, we don't have a, a, an agreement upon what constitutes a, a digital act of war or a cyber act of war. And so I just, I, I think we're in kind of a tricky situation right now.

Leo Laporte (01:54:04):
That's actually what, one of the things I hold the color was we need a Geneva convention, a Geneva accord, you know, there's certain things the international community degrees are beyond the pale, even in warfare, things like chemical warfare. And we need that for cyber warfare because we're all vulnerable. You know, I think one of the things maybe protecting the us the, the fact that we have our own hackers, and if you do this to us, we can do it to you. I don't know what there is to protect Ukraine. This is from the Harvard business review this week, the cyber security risks of an escalating Russia, Ukraine conflict the implications for business of conflict in Ukraine, whether conventional cyber or hybrid will be felt far beyond the region's borders. Russia's formidable cyber forces preparing to unleash a new wave of cyber attacks on Ukrainian and Western energy finance and communications infrastructure. This is a way that a war in Ukraine could spiral out of control and, and, and have global implications. The Harvard business abuse said conflict in Ukraine presents the most acute cyber risk us and Western corporations have ever faced CSA. This cybersecurity infrastructure security agency recently issued a war on the risk of Russian cyber tax spilling over onto us networks.

Leo Laporte (01:55:35):
And I, yeah, I don't, I, I, I wish I knew more about what, what we're up to. I imagine we have our own hackers. 

Amy Webb (01:55:47):
I, I find it interesting that when we hear government officials talking, I, the story that we're seeing is very much boots on the ground. You know, troops moving around you, we don't need government. We get commercial satellites that, that show us exactly where troops and things are. I mean, anybody can take a look. CNN

Leo Laporte (01:56:04):
Had a great picture of a bridge built in from bellow Russ. Yeah. You know, I mean, there's no, there's no mystery in that regard.

Amy Webb (01:56:11):
There's not, but, but algorithmic warfare is far less costly. It's less visible. It's easier to cloak. It can be far more damaging. So I, I, I don't know. I, I I wonder if the visual elements that we're seeing are cover for the digital conflict that's maybe already underway. And that has me concerned.

Paris Martineau (01:56:36):
And I mean, as far as risk goes to the us,

Paris Martineau (01:56:40):
Obviously, I mean the aggressive aspect of this or something risky, but the, I think the pandemic has shown us how deficient the us, many of the us government's systems are. I mean what was it, millions of lines of Cobal code or still running on mainframes used in banks here, or government agencies like the VA the department of justice, the social security administration. I mean, this is part of the reason why a lot of unemployment systems crashed and were really difficult to fix. During the early days of the pandemic, we have this very shaky infrastructure already. It feels like it would just take not even the largest attack to cause a lot of widespread destruction. That would be very difficult.

Amy Webb (01:57:28):
I'm not actually

Paris Martineau (01:57:29):
Fix,

Amy Webb (01:57:31):
I'm actually worried about Cobal. There's like nobody who really knows how to program it. Like, yes, it's a legacy system, but it's, I, I don't even know if there are half,

Leo Laporte (01:57:39):
Sometimes those legacy systems are more robust and reliable. Yeah. Yeah. They've been running for a long, the president on Tuesday said if Russia attacks United States or its allies through asymmetric means like disruptive cyber attacks against our companies or critical infrastructure, we are prepared to respond. He didn't go into great detail, but he did say the us and its NATO allies are boosting their collective defenses and cyber space. Yeah. This might be, I mean, this might be the first real cyber war we've ever seen. And I don't know if we're prepared for something like that. I hope we are.

Amy Webb (01:58:18):
Well, we were in process to being prepared. The, our military doesn't has just a couple of months ago. There are these new centers that have popped up. I have to take a look and see what they're called exactly. But to, to try to get more coordination between the different departments and to, to get the cyber people and the data people all talking

Leo Laporte (01:58:38):
Together, I hope they're doing that. We were, I

Amy Webb (01:58:40):
Hope we were just in the process of of organizing all of that. This is probably not the, the best possible time are yeah. Or something like this to happen.

Leo Laporte (01:58:51):
Yeah. You're, you're saying the last four years have not been the optimum for preparing for cyber warfare.

Amy Webb (01:58:58):
Right. So there's a new artificial intelligence and data accelerator. It's part of the joint artificial intelligence center's project. They're just, they're trying to boost they're what's happening is there's trying to, they're trying to coordinate AI efforts across all of DOD now. But that had just started to be in progress. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:59:18):
It's estimated 75% of all ransomware is originated in Russia. Russia would like to say, well, this is just bad actors. We have nothing to do with it, but I don't know if that's the case. I don't know if that's the case. And we don't even know if, as you said, if, is, is that an act of war?

Amy Webb (01:59:41):
We don't, we, you, the part, right. So this is part of the issue you need to have some of these terms defined. Yeah. And because also like, so if, if, let me ask this question a different way. So if it's true that let's say Russia ha is screwing around with Ukraine and in the process somehow attacks the United States in some more meaningful way than it has. Like at that point, do our NATO allies, who do we have to convince, like how does NATO decide that, that there has been a significant enough of an attack that they are willing to retaliate? And if they, but if it was a digital attack, what are they retaliating with? Do you know what I mean? Where I feel like the, the we've got asymmetry in how, I don't know how we're thinking through this, that being said, I know folks at do D who are very sharp. And my assumption is that somebody somewhere is thinking about it. Yeah. I think, I think the operative here is thinking versus we have thought through yeah. 

Leo Laporte (02:00:41):
Yeah. Wednesday, you us should officials warned that Russian state sponsored cyber actors have regularly targeted us clear defense contractors since at least January, 2020. And this is the director of CSA, Jen easterly using the early warning system called TWiTtter. Every organiza in the us is at risk from cyber threats that can disrupt essential services. As we know, the Russians have used cyber as a key component. I don't like the use of cyber in this. A noun have used cyber as a key component of their forced projection to include disabling or destroying critical infrastructure while there are no specific critical threats to the us homeless. And at this time we are mindful of the potential for Russia, Russia to consider escalating its destabilizing action in ways that may affect our critical infrastructure to include cascading impacts. As we saw with NotPetya, which was a Russian originating ransomware, all organizations must adopt a heightened posture of vigilance. The time to act is now this is on TWiTtter. And by the way, she's dressed in a superhero outfit. I'm a little nervous, to be honest with you, we're urging all orgs to put shields up, to reduce the likelihood of cyber intrusion, quickly detect potential intrusion, ensure you're prepared to respond maximum resilience. I'm glad we've got a motto

Amy Webb (02:02:06):
System. I mean, I don't think that was intended for us. I think that's public posturing. All of this is public posturing at this point. That's what, you know,

Leo Laporte (02:02:13):
If you are a country like Russia, you can feel the pretty big army they have. They're on the they're in the ground right outside Ukraine. But you don't need a giant force of hackers to really reek havoc in a world that is ill prepared for this. I just, I hope this doesn't become the first cyber war. I fear that it might,

Amy Webb (02:02:37):
I fear that it already is. You already be perfectly honest. That's

Leo Laporte (02:02:41):
Right. Yeah.

Amy Webb (02:02:41):
That's right.

Paris Martineau (02:02:42):
Yeah. I feel like it would be naive to say that the first cyber war is coming, you

Leo Laporte (02:02:46):
Know, it's here,

Paris Martineau (02:02:49):
It's here and probably has been,

Amy Webb (02:02:53):
Is now the time when we start talking about prepping, oh, sorry.

Leo Laporte (02:02:57):
I'm digging a big hole in the backyard. How do you, Leah,

Amy Webb (02:03:01):
What's in your basement? How do you

Leo Laporte (02:03:02):
Prep?

Amy Webb (02:03:02):
What's in my basement.

Leo Laporte (02:03:03):
How do you prep for this? So this is the conversation I was having with this woman is should you go and plant your victory garden now so that you have food? Cuz we only have five days of food supply. What would you do if the grocery store shelves were empty in a week, where would, what would you do? Where would you go? What

Amy Webb (02:03:21):
I do? Yeah. I would, I would be fine. My husband's gonna kill me for saying this. I would be fine because I, I am, I am somebody who has supplies shoved away in our basement. You

Leo Laporte (02:03:34):
Understand tuna fish in the basement. I understand. No, I actually,

Amy Webb (02:03:38):
That

Leo Laporte (02:03:38):
Too, we got a big pantry, got lots of staples.

Paris Martineau (02:03:42):
I still have a lot of beans left over for the early days of quarantine.

Leo Laporte (02:03:45):
Beans are good. Beans could live on beans for a while

Amy Webb (02:03:49):
And tomatoes,

Paris Martineau (02:03:50):
Leo. It was a side note. We had that. You had that screenshot of TWiTtter going up. Do you have an NFT profile photo? Is that yeah,

Leo Laporte (02:03:57):
But as a joke Ft guy. No.

Paris Martineau (02:03:59):
Okay. That's how it starts, Leo. It starts to joke. Oh

Leo Laporte (02:04:01):
It started. And then you, so you noticed my hexagonal avatar there. It's

Paris Martineau (02:04:08):
Terrifying.

Leo Laporte (02:04:10):
I, you know, this was the thing. If I am TWiTtter blue, I admit, but one of the features of TWiTtter blue is you could, you could get a hexagonal NF. What was it? You had to have an NFT to have a hexagonal TWiTtter.

Paris Martineau (02:04:22):
Yeah. If you have some, I guess yeah, an NFT or can connect it to your wallet, then you can get your profile photo to be a hexagonal profile. That is your NFT. 

Leo Laporte (02:04:37):
So all I did is I went to a site and I just edited it. So it's ex agonal.

Amy Webb (02:04:43):
You should

Paris Martineau (02:04:44):
Photoshop your face onto a board. Ape is my pitch. Yeah. I think that would be

Leo Laporte (02:04:48):
Fun then. That's why I picked this particular avatar because it is the closest I'm gonna get to a board ape. This is actually from Matt. I don't know,

Amy Webb (02:04:56):
Worry

Paris Martineau (02:04:57):
Click. It's a right click lifestyle. Now

Leo Laporte (02:04:59):
It's a right click life face for us. This is from mad magazine. I was Lisa and I were in a mad magazine at one point cuz

Paris Martineau (02:05:09):
Wow. Before the fall.

Leo Laporte (02:05:11):
Yeah. So that should be an NFT. Shouldn't it?

Paris Martineau (02:05:13):
That should be magazines. If you think about it. They're kind of like at the original NFTs.

Leo Laporte (02:05:18):
Yeah. And I bet you, Amy, you can figure out where this picture of me with a dog.

Amy Webb (02:05:22):
I was gonna say, is that

Leo Laporte (02:05:23):
Petra? Yeah. It's Petra.

Amy Webb (02:05:24):
Jordan. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (02:05:25):
Yeah, yeah. Lisa Lisa and I were in Petra. I guess that was the last big trip we took before the, the pandemic in October of 2019. Beautiful. And I know that this I've read you, your, I saw your Ted talk about how this was your, your goal in life was to get to Petra. It's an amazing, amazing place. Yeah.

Paris Martineau (02:05:46):
It's spring. Tell how much the internet has warped my brain because when you said Petra, the first thing that came to my head was Petra. The world, wonder in civilizations, revolutions six a video game and not Petra. The actual thing that that world wonder is based off of in the video video

Leo Laporte (02:06:03):
Game, I shed Meyer was thinking of Petra Jordan. When,

Paris Martineau (02:06:06):
I mean, it's quite literally Petra in there. I was like,

Amy Webb (02:06:09):
Oh

Paris Martineau (02:06:09):
Wow, this

Leo Laporte (02:06:11):
You I've been there. I've been there since six.

Amy Webb (02:06:14):
So my, my daughter's name is Petra because of that place. And I tried to play I six with her and we couldn't get, I, we, it was, it was too hard to explain. I couldn't get her like going on it on her own.

Leo Laporte (02:06:27):
I think it's kind of

Paris Martineau (02:06:27):
Boring. The tutorial is like the tutorial is a, it was too much.

Amy Webb (02:06:31):
It was

Paris Martineau (02:06:31):
Pretty thats. The thing though, I thought it was gonna be too much for me at first. And then I was like, okay, let me try this tutorial. And then months of my life went by, should

Leo Laporte (02:06:39):
I get into it? Should I? Because I love like age of empires and all that stuff, but Civ is turn based, which kind of turned me off. I

Paris Martineau (02:06:48):
Love turn

Leo Laporte (02:06:49):
Base. You don't mind that

Paris Martineau (02:06:50):
Civ six. Fantastic. I like it because I'm a very anxious person and I wanna be able to sit there and think about move for as long as I need. There's no, this also why I love the fight or emblem games. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:07:01):
Fantastic. Okay.

Amy Webb (02:07:02):
I have like 10 minutes a day of free time at this point.

Leo Laporte (02:07:06):
So

Amy Webb (02:07:07):
I that's like, that's not even a, that, that amount of time. Isn't even enough to read the instructions per turn in Civ six. So yeah, that's fair. I'm playing like I playing nothing. I've got no game. I mean, I like to play Zelda, but my family keeps playing without me with my character. And then I, wow. That's so phenomen to play and it's like, great. I don't know where the hell I am or what this tool is or what that Bobette thing is. I don't know what's going on. So,

Leo Laporte (02:07:32):
But thank goodness they did. Cuz it gave you a great opening when you were on coast to coast and yeah, that, and if you dunno what we're talking about, listen to the triangulation we did yesterday with Amy Webb, cuz she tells that story and actually it turned out to your benefit. You actually did a great job. That's true. Changing somebody's mind about COVID vaccinations because of it so

Amy Webb (02:07:54):
Good for, yeah, my husband's actually now using, he's using, when people come in and, and talk about vaccines he's a eye doctor he's this is the story he's now using them to help them understand. So yeah. Do

Leo Laporte (02:08:04):
You start out? Well, it's kinda like Zelda. That would be, that would be good. Yeah. What, huh? Yeah, that would get my attention

Amy Webb (02:08:12):
Actually. He just says it's like a video game first Zelda. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:08:15):
I think it's kinda like Zelda. One more break. We're gonna wrap things up. You I so much, I more, I wanna talk with you about, but I I've taken a lot of your time, so nice to have you both here. Paris Martineau, the information. What are you working on? More Amazon stuff. And we should talk about the unionization move. Yeah.

Paris Martineau (02:08:34):
I mean there's a lot of going on with Amazon just keeps and

Leo Laporte (02:08:37):
We back can do that. Yeah. And Starbucks is now starting to unionize too, which I thought was very interesting. There's there's a big movement afoot. Also Amy Webb futurist and I should just oh and there's the cat.

Paris Martineau (02:08:53):
She keeps trying to hop on my keyboard. She's really, really, she really wants to get online. I'm telling her the Internet's a bad fish.

Leo Laporte (02:08:59):
Where's your cat. Doesn't get, do you need, wait a, you don't have a cat. You have like a Helo monster or something. What do you have?

Amy Webb (02:09:04):
I have now have I have VAD?

Leo Laporte (02:09:07):
Yeah.

Amy Webb (02:09:08):
I have a fish, a fish it's name is fish. Okay. And you could

Paris Martineau (02:09:11):
Get the fish in the shot.

Amy Webb (02:09:13):
It's been that fish. So

Leo Laporte (02:09:15):
Cat would like the fish

Amy Webb (02:09:17):
Fun, fun fact. So goldfish apparently live for like 30 years and they just keep growing. So currently we have a fish named fish that we got at a carnival or something stupid. And it's like that big and it ha oh yeah. You can't put anything else in the tank.

Leo Laporte (02:09:30):
You koi ponds. Now it's

Amy Webb (02:09:31):
A

Leo Laporte (02:09:31):
Monster. You got a coy.

Paris Martineau (02:09:33):
Yeah. If you put it in a Ko ponds, it'll get like this big. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:09:36):
Yeah. Now

Amy Webb (02:09:36):
I, he knows us, you know, and then forgets us, but then knows us again. And we got a whole thing and yeah, fish. Just

Leo Laporte (02:09:43):
Ask the cat. Them's good eating.

Leo Laporte (02:09:47):
Our show today. Stamps.Com. Oh, I love stamps.com. I have stamps actual stamps with my head on them. But the, I made a mistake when I made 'em. I didn't make every stamps. So every couple of months I have to go to Debbie and I say, could you print me some more stamps, penny stamps, 2 cent stamps. So I can still use the picture with my head on it. And then if you ever get an email or, or not email SNA mail from me, you'll see a bunch of one sent and 2 cent stamps to bring the value up. That's the problem, right? The postage changes. There's always this mystery stamps.com solves this problem. Not a trip to the post office. You don't need to do that with stamps.com, skip the trip, focus on your small business. And when you need postage, you use your own computer, your own printer.

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Stamps.Com makes your life easier. No special supplies, no special anchor equipment. Just your computer, your printer, your up and running in minutes. Printing official postage for any letter, any package anywhere you want send. And we always have postage. If we just get the little you know, stick 'em labels, print the postage right on that. It's amazing. Stop overpaying for shipping. Get the discounts, get the convenience of stamps.com. When you sign up today, here's what you do. You go to stamps.com. We're in the right corner. You say hurt us on radio podcast. Click that sometimes a is a microphone. Sometimes not. The promo code to enter is T w I T couldn't be easier. T w I T you get a special offer, includes a four week trial of stamps.com. You'll get a bunch of free postage. You can use over the life of your account a digital scale so that you never have to guess what the postage is. And there are no long term commitments, snow contracts, just convenience and savings. Stamps.Com. Click the top of the homepage. Offer code TWiT. Please use that offer code. We love 'em couldn't could not be happier. We've been using them, as I said, more than a decade stamps.com had a fun week. This week gone TWiT TV. We've made a little, I don't know, movie for you. Watch this.

Speaker 8 (02:13:02):
Sh I meant to send you a bottle list. I will do this

Leo Laporte (02:13:05):
A bottle of what

Speaker 8 (02:13:07):
A bottle of bourbon,

Leo Laporte (02:13:09):
A genetically synthesized bourbon.

Speaker 8 (02:13:12):
Yes.

Speaker 9 (02:13:12):
Previously on TWiT TWiTtter event.

Speaker 8 (02:13:16):
I am very concerned that 10 years from now, the arguments we're having today about big tech are going to become arguments about big bio. And AI is one thing, but we're talking about biology, which tends to, you know, it, it tends to do what it wants. And this is on a planetary scale.

Leo Laporte (02:13:37):
All about Android.

Speaker 10 (02:13:39):
Lodi allows motion designers to create vector animations, export them as a file to just adjacent file. And then there are players on Android and web and iOS and basically every other form. So you can just drop in the file and play it. If you set up a Google home device or a Chromecast device, you might remember these bouncing circles and boxes, and it's almost always Lodi

Leo Laporte (02:14:02):
Tech news weekly, oh,

Speaker 11 (02:14:03):
That's label printers. You can't DRM and ink cartridge because one doesn't exist. Right? It's it's just like a heating element. Tell now thet, IMO brand, they are relying on R F I D chips to identify their own reams of thermal paper. You just wish that you could sort of sort of push that idea out there that he has of like, look, get rid of it, get a different one. You're gonna save money in the long run. Like I want to tell everyone out there who has a DMO printer. Yeah. Not to be a revolutionary or anything, but TWiT Viva law label maker. There it is. Viva LA label maker.

Leo Laporte (02:14:39):
So

Paris Martineau (02:14:39):
Nice. Now that we're back, I think we have to issue a correction. Oh, no. Given to me, by someone on one of our fateful listeners here on TWiT on TWiTtter, they sent me fellow's name is Michael solder, a snoops article entitled will truth, social cost users 4 99 a week.

Leo Laporte (02:14:57):
Not so

Paris Martineau (02:14:58):
No. Oh, we were spreading the false about truth.

Leo Laporte (02:15:01):
How much is truth

Paris Martineau (02:15:03):
Free? I think,

Leo Laporte (02:15:05):
Well, boy, I, I really have to look that up. Cuz I saw that in a lot of media,

Paris Martineau (02:15:11):
I know apparent news circulated on social media about it being, it was just fully wrong. Yeah. Oh good. Daily dot wrote a big thing about it.

Leo Laporte (02:15:21):
Okay. Yeah. Okay. So Hey, good news. I will say

Paris Martineau (02:15:25):
It's free. It's not entirely your fault. Leo, the New York post had spread through Omar.

Leo Laporte (02:15:29):
Well, there is my that is my source for all. 

Paris Martineau (02:15:33):
I mean, yeah, clearly that's where you're getting all of your information. So

Leo Laporte (02:15:38):
Yeah. Okay. Good. Well, I, I stand corrected. I apologize. I guess I am gonna sign up if it's free,

Paris Martineau (02:15:44):
I guess now we're gonna have to start sending some yeah. Some proof

Amy Webb (02:15:47):
It's y'all it's not free. Right? I mean, if it's free then

Leo Laporte (02:15:53):
Well find out to

Amy Webb (02:15:54):
Right then, then you are, you are still paying

Leo Laporte (02:15:56):
You're the customer or are you the product? That's the question. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I suppose we'll find out Amazon has been tr I mean, workers, I feel they've been trying to UN unionize forever. Now new York's Amazon workers, an article by Paris Martin know in the information will be voting what it, but Amazon is playing tough on this. Right? They do not want a union.

Paris Martineau (02:16:25):
I mean, they've been playing tough enough that their first kind of big union election, which happened in Bessimer last year has they're having to have a Doover because

Leo Laporte (02:16:36):
NLRB threw the vote out.

Paris Martineau (02:16:38):
Yeah. They said Amazon interfered too much with that election. Wow. So actually, I mean, it's really interesting right now. The second election is underway. It's in election for workers at BEMER votes will start being like they will start being counted towards the end of March, right around the same time that this other warehouse here in New York is voting in person. So, I mean, March, April gonna be a big time for Amazon could be first two unions

Leo Laporte (02:17:08):
Could all in the Pinkertons Jeff. That's what I did.

Paris Martineau (02:17:12):
I mean, I think they did at one point literally enlist the Pinkertons. No,

Leo Laporte (02:17:15):
Really? No,

Paris Martineau (02:17:18):
I'm pretty sure.

Leo Laporte (02:17:19):
No,

Paris Martineau (02:17:20):
We

Leo Laporte (02:17:20):
Double check that's call snoops on that one. The Pinkerton's very famously famous union busting agency in the, in the right. They busted. Was it GM? 

Paris Martineau (02:17:33):
I mean, yeah, they specifically, yeah. Are Pinkerton spies that would bust unions infiltrate. The motherboard had reported this

Leo Laporte (02:17:40):
Amazon

Paris Martineau (02:17:41):
Hires 20

Leo Laporte (02:17:42):
Pinkerton spies to track warehouse workers. Well, yeah. Well what's so new as old as new again. Huh? That's kind of the Pinkertons are

Paris Martineau (02:17:51):
Back.

Leo Laporte (02:17:52):
That's amazing.

Amy Webb (02:17:55):
What's the origin of the word Pinkerton. Was there like a person with a last name? Pinkerton Mr.

Paris Martineau (02:18:00):
Pink. I think yeah. Last name was Pinkerton.

Leo Laporte (02:18:03):
What's amazing is it's still the Pinkertons are still around.

Paris Martineau (02:18:08):
I mean, clearly Amazon's listing 'em

Leo Laporte (02:18:10):
They were established in the United States by Scottsman Allen Pinkerton in the 1850s.

Paris Martineau (02:18:17):
I think you should just do the rest of the podcast in that

Leo Laporte (02:18:20):
Aha.

Amy Webb (02:18:21):
Pinkerton. I like that. I like that

Leo Laporte (02:18:22):
Accent. He became famous when he claimed to have foiled a plot to assassinate president elect the Lincoln who later hired Pinkerton agents for purity.

Amy Webb (02:18:34):
Ah, now do Irish

Leo Laporte (02:18:36):
Turn in the labor strikes of the late 19th, 20th and 21st centuries businessmen hired Pinkerton to in infiltrate unions. The homestead strike of 19 18 92.

Amy Webb (02:18:48):
That's amazing. That's my favorite accent. Andrew

Leo Laporte (02:18:50):
Carnegie, you know where got it. It's a combination of the lucky charms

Paris Martineau (02:18:56):
Say I'm lucky charms in there

Leo Laporte (02:18:58):
And the Irish spring and I like it too. So I just brought those two together and I've never met an Irishman, but actually when listen, IM

Paris Martineau (02:19:07):
Say some Irish listeners are throwing

Leo Laporte (02:19:09):
Their phones in the wall. When I do thoses, the when Lisa and I got married, we had a wonderful grass priest Irishman. He'd been a priest Catholic priest until he fell in love and got married. But he was, he was still, you know, acting as a minister and his name was Pater and he married us and it was a beautiful thing. He said, when you marry, when you wear your red and ring, you're hold in your, your, your wife's heart in your hand. So you treat that with love there. It was beautiful. I felt like the lucky charms Lecan was marrying us. It was a beautiful thing.

Amy Webb (02:19:44):
That's cool. Yeah. The

Paris Martineau (02:19:45):
Grass pre is that a priest made of grass?

Leo Laporte (02:19:48):
Yeah. It's it's a term for a priest who is no longer. So you you're never not a priest apparently. Huh? That's fun. Yeah. You, you can't, you may be defrocked but you're never you, once you, once a priest, always father Robert explained this to me and I'll have to ask him, by the way, I'm on the information. I'm looking most popular story. The digital reinvention of Playboy.

Paris Martineau (02:20:16):
This is from our weekend section, which has been fantastic so

Leo Laporte (02:20:19):
Far. I love the weekend section cuz it's lighter. It's wonderful. I love Jessica's calling. It's a

Paris Martineau (02:20:23):
Little magaziney story. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:20:26):
Apparently play lay boy is pivoting and I love the headline where NFTs are the magazine and the metaverse is the mansion.

Amy Webb (02:20:36):
Oh my God.

Paris Martineau (02:20:38):
Oh boy.

Amy Webb (02:20:41):
I, I say no to that.

Leo Laporte (02:20:43):
You say no. Okay. I say no. There is apparently they, they realize that they're losing all their business to only fans. So they've created kind of a Playboy only fans featuring celebrities as much as as young women. And then, but I, I can't wait to hear about the meta mansion. No, I,

Amy Webb (02:21:08):
I just drove past. Yeah. That's the old mansion

Leo Laporte (02:21:11):
In you. You're a Chicago in, right?

Amy Webb (02:21:14):
Me. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. But I was in LA a couple weeks ago and we drove past the Hugh

Leo Laporte (02:21:19):
Of the LA myth Playboy cause the original mansion was in Chicago.

Amy Webb (02:21:22):
My dad, my parents once they were there was, I don't know why, but they went to the Playboy club, which was in some, I dunno, my dad's got a story, like some building somewhere and 

Leo Laporte (02:21:33):
I just, I, for one don't really want to go anywhere where the bunnies don't have legs, but that's just that's no,

Paris Martineau (02:21:39):
I

Leo Laporte (02:21:40):
Mean, that just might be me. I don't know. I 

Amy Webb (02:21:44):
Yeah,

Leo Laporte (02:21:45):
They're gonna have to solve that. Aren't they in the, in the bet of, I

Paris Martineau (02:21:48):
Mean, no you could. I get, I, I was like half of your metaverse is, you know, bunnies just top up the other half is just legs down, down just legs. It'll be very terrifying. But

Amy Webb (02:21:59):
Actually

Paris Martineau (02:21:59):
You could have somebody it's nothing BELE, just basically

Amy Webb (02:22:02):
This actually begs the que. So there's already been pretty bad. I don't, I wanna like keep this safe cuz I'm not sure who's listening, but like there some pretty horrific things that have already taken place. I mean they have

Paris Martineau (02:22:14):
To environments now in the metaverse

Leo Laporte (02:22:17):
Ask Philip about what happened to second life because second life. Yeah, I was shocked. I have I have a character in SP second life. My my second life avatar. You, you know, when you joined second life, this is God, this is 10, 15 years ago. Yeah. It's they would ago kind of spin up an automatic name and I, and I liked mine so much. I kept it prune face spatula and oh, that's very good. Isn't that good? I mean, you that's

Paris Martineau (02:22:44):
A password basically.

Leo Laporte (02:22:45):
It's awesome. So my character, so I hadn't used it a while and I still, I still have a login. So I went in and it's it's it's it just, I don't know. You're right. It's not family friendly. People are wearing outfits se kind of because you could always buy a, a body in second life, but they're not like they

Paris Martineau (02:23:10):
Used, they're all kink islands. Now there are whole not now.

Leo Laporte (02:23:13):
Thank you for saying it cuz I couldn't. Yeah. it's gotten there's a lot of listen. We

Paris Martineau (02:23:18):
Gotta talk about the kink island.

Leo Laporte (02:23:19):
Well, if you go to the marketplace, this is, this is not too. I was gonna

Paris Martineau (02:23:23):
Say we early or had opened up second life briefly and it was,

Leo Laporte (02:23:27):
I closed it immediately.

Paris Martineau (02:23:28):
Little bit risky clothes. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:23:30):
Here's the for only 1,299 Lindon dollars. You can get the so this, these are the kind of costumes people are wearing, but this, you know, obviously it's still going on.

Amy Webb (02:23:43):
Why is, why is the met verse and virtual reality and the future always dark and raining and with women have to wear like pleather, like how did, how did, how did that become kill? Oh,

Paris Martineau (02:23:54):
Cause you can't wear a pleather in the rain in real life. It just would be inconvenience. You know, that's fantasy, that's high fantasy right there. 

Amy Webb (02:24:01):
You know, why not at leisure?

Leo Laporte (02:24:03):
Yeah. At leisure, right? Yeah. Let's them be comfortable.

Amy Webb (02:24:08):
Yes. Let our, let's be kind to our avatars. Right? Let avatar rights.

Leo Laporte (02:24:12):
I blame two things. Neuro answer. Let's

Amy Webb (02:24:15):
Not constrict them.

Leo Laporte (02:24:16):
William Gibson's neuro answer. Remember her mirror shades that she couldn't even take off cuz they had, you know, cyber powers and and then I blame the matrix because every of matrix was apparently dressed in latex.

Amy Webb (02:24:28):
Well, I deep faked myself into my, my cyber parents, Neo and Trinity. I, I put my face on Trinity, but she that's different. That was not hypersexualized. I do. I totally want them to be like my mom and dad. But that's not hypersexualized. You

Leo Laporte (02:24:44):
Put your mom and dad's faces on Neo and Trinity.

Amy Webb (02:24:47):
Sorry. No, I put my own face on Trinity and I posted it somewhat accidentally to our work slack channel. And everybody's like, wow, but yet you are, are you doing today

Paris Martineau (02:24:58):
In Trinity to be your mom and dad, but you are Trinity. I do. I don't know. I've second life I've got. Second life probably has a kink island for that specific scenario.

Amy Webb (02:25:06):
This is, this is not a kink thing. I think this is me just trying to get in touch with my roots Trinity. Anyways, my point was Trinity

Leo Laporte (02:25:12):
Was pretty sexy, but you're right. She was more, no, she

Amy Webb (02:25:15):
Had like a, she a, she wasn't sexualized. She was totally not sexualized. Okay. I don't think so. No,

Leo Laporte (02:25:21):
She had a rubber trench coat, but okay.

Paris Martineau (02:25:24):
I mean Neil rubber trench

Leo Laporte (02:25:26):
Coat. Yeah. They all had rubber trench coats. First

Amy Webb (02:25:28):
Of all, it wasn't rubber.

Leo Laporte (02:25:31):
Was it leather?

Amy Webb (02:25:32):
Stop messing with my favorite movie. Y'all it. Doesn't look. My second favorite movie. Hey,

Paris Martineau (02:25:36):
What are your thoughts on the new matrix movie though?

Amy Webb (02:25:39):
I, I have deep thoughts on that. I, I, I kind, I have loved it. I did you,

Paris Martineau (02:25:44):
I know that's I appreciate I went in there expecting it to be corny and fun and that's exactly what it was.

Leo Laporte (02:25:49):
That was exactly what you expected. Yeah.

Amy Webb (02:25:52):
I was wondering it

Leo Laporte (02:25:54):
Was, I love the first one so much. No sequel ever lived up to the first one. Yeah. That's really the truth,

Amy Webb (02:25:59):
Right? No, those, those second two sh were, were not great. The third one, I, I know if you know the backstory behind what the Wakowski sisters went through, which was pretty horrific and awful. Then a lot of it makes sense. That being said they could, there were so many stupid technical problems with that movie that they could have addressed. And there were like, like janky, silly choices made to represen technology that they should have not used. So that,

Leo Laporte (02:26:27):
Did you like sensate their, their kind of short-lived Netflix series? I

Amy Webb (02:26:33):
Did not see it. I didn't see

Leo Laporte (02:26:34):
It. I think you should watch it.

Amy Webb (02:26:36):
All right.

Leo Laporte (02:26:37):
I think it's still on Netflix or is it a, is it Amazon or Netflix? I it's Netflix. It's Netflix. It was created by the Wich Wakowski sisters and it's kind of beautiful in an interesting way. I don't know. I liked it anyway. Let's see, how did we get there? Oh, I remember I was looking at the information and I got distracted, which

Paris Martineau (02:26:59):
Is, oh, we were talking about Playboy mansion.

Leo Laporte (02:27:01):
Playboy mansion. That's yes. Let's not S not go back there. 

Amy Webb (02:27:08):
Playboy mansion king island. I think that's how we got to now.

Paris Martineau (02:27:11):
Yeah. And then we got to leather, you know it, all it

Amy Webb (02:27:14):
All. And then, and then pleather. They keep

Leo Laporte (02:27:17):
Pulling me.

Amy Webb (02:27:20):
Stop it. Sorry. We'll

Paris Martineau (02:27:22):
Go back to your great NFT Leo.

Leo Laporte (02:27:24):
No, I'm done. I'm bored. I mean I, no, it's all right. Nevermind. Nevermind. Do not make a video of your cat puring because it could get taken down.

Amy Webb (02:27:39):
Why somebody copyrighted the IP,

Leo Laporte (02:27:42):
Somebody copyrighted it. So of

Amy Webb (02:27:43):
Course, of course,

Leo Laporte (02:27:44):
This is a YouTube cut ID nightmare again a user on YouTube last March named dig Haven uploaded a one hour video looping his cat Phantom puring a year later. It, it never went, never went viral. It was not, you know, a big download or anything, but a later EMI music and PRS, another music publishing company took it down. Well, they didn't take it down. They said they demonetize it and put their ads on it. Cuz they claimed the rights to his kitty cats. Puring

Amy Webb (02:28:23):
I I hate terrible world

Paris Martineau (02:28:24):
Where you can't even make money from your cat pers.

Amy Webb (02:28:28):
How, how so? Wait, so the copyright, like what Jack? Sorry. What, what Jack hole in the us PTO. Granted, I think

Leo Laporte (02:28:36):
Jack's actually worse.

Amy Webb (02:28:38):
Worse. What Jack, What? Orange Farn

Leo Laporte (02:28:45):
Ate

Amy Webb (02:28:46):
PTO. Yes. Yeah. What ate that? That's I, I accept at us PTO granted a patent on like,

Leo Laporte (02:28:53):
I don't think, I think it in general, it's just a flaw in the content ID system. It's gotta be, unless some rap artists pulled it, which is I guess possible. 

Amy Webb (02:29:07):
Did Raza, ALA, whatever that

Leo Laporte (02:29:08):
Woman's name do some type of Rael con did it cat cat rap. This, this show is degenerated. I'm

Paris Martineau (02:29:17):
Trying to, I'm trying to think about what other sounds we could cause copyright to cause the most hav oh,

Leo Laporte (02:29:22):
That's a good guy.

Paris Martineau (02:29:22):
Maybe somebody could trademark hit that bell or like, and subscribe. You'd devastate the whole YouTube ecosystem

Leo Laporte (02:29:29):
If you so John is no,

Amy Webb (02:29:31):
No, no, I, I got it. I got it. It's Hey guys. Hey guys. Hey guys. Hey guys.

Leo Laporte (02:29:35):
Trademark. Hey guys.

Paris Martineau (02:29:36):
Hey website goes down. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:29:38):
Oh my God.

Amy Webb (02:29:39):
Own all I claimed.

Leo Laporte (02:29:42):
Would you work on that quickly? We would own it, man. We'd own YouTube. We could take 'em all down, man.

Paris Martineau (02:29:47):
Amy gets, Hey guys. I'll get like and subscribe. And Leo, you can get hit. That bell

Leo Laporte (02:29:53):
Hit that smash. That bell. Okay. Yeah.

Paris Martineau (02:29:56):
We're getting the big bucks guys.

Amy Webb (02:29:58):
This

Leo Laporte (02:29:58):
Is it. It's all over.

Amy Webb (02:29:59):
It's all retire. I'm gonna ND

Paris Martineau (02:30:02):
Advertising. Now we can just,

Leo Laporte (02:30:04):
I need that Spotify money. I got YouTube Paris Martineau. You're fantastic. I love your Sanquin your sequin mannequin or Sanquin thank you. I will call her you're

Amy Webb (02:30:16):
Sanquin

Paris Martineau (02:30:17):
I mean we could, you know,

Leo Laporte (02:30:19):
That's a new word. I love make it. I love your Marza to tomato masks. And, and your disembodied body in the fireplace. I don't know. Just

Paris Martineau (02:30:30):
It's all very important. It's a light it's it's

Leo Laporte (02:30:33):
It's the world of Brooklyn living. That's what we say.

Paris Martineau (02:30:36):
It's truly, I mean, Brooklyn, there's just bodies everywhere. No heads really terrifying,

Amy Webb (02:30:41):
But they're happy in the river. They're

Leo Laporte (02:30:42):
They're no, they're happy. Paris. You're fantastic. Read her stuff on the information. Is there anything else you wanna plug anything at all?

Paris Martineau (02:30:51):
I think last time I was here, I plugged owning a printer. So, you know, we'll re-up that? We'll also plug if you're out there, you work for Amazon or used to oh, hidden. Get my DMS, have me up on signal. Oh,

Leo Laporte (02:31:05):
Let's chat. What's your signal ID. You want to give it out or it's probably on the information. I'll

Paris Martineau (02:31:09):
My signal.

Leo Laporte (02:31:09):
Go ahead. Do it.

Paris Martineau (02:31:10):
Yeah. Hold on a second. Let me pull it up. My signal is 2 6 7 7 9 7 8 6 5 5. And that's on WhatsApp too.

Leo Laporte (02:31:22):
The tip line is open. Let's get her some good tips. Get her a story.

Paris Martineau (02:31:27):
Yeah. Or we can just, you know, we can just chat. We can just chat about your experience. Have

Leo Laporte (02:31:32):
You been I'm curious, have you been watching the finding Anna? What is it the name of it?

Paris Martineau (02:31:38):
Venting? I tried and frankly it was not a fan. I mean, I thought it was just a bit over heavy handed. I think they made some weird choices because they weren't able to get the rights to her life story or like the story of the college they did,

Leo Laporte (02:31:54):
It was a, I mean, $320,000 for the right time. They

Paris Martineau (02:31:58):
Got the right to like they got the rights to the magazine story and then paid her for inclusion. But that's part, the reason why they had to focus on, I see the making of the New York magazine article instead of specifically what happened with the crime, which I think just kind of throws it out of whack.

Leo Laporte (02:32:15):
No, you're right. I, that's a good point now you're ruining it for me, but that's a good point.

Paris Martineau (02:32:19):
I know. Don't don't listen to me, enjoy your content, everybody.

Leo Laporte (02:32:21):
I just love that actress. And I just think it's a great story. And it made me think of you because it's all about a feature magazine writer. Who's been forced, unfortunately, to cover a meaningless me too story you know, two years late and instead, really wants to cover this story of this scam artist who took he side in New York for a ride. And it's a fascinating story, but you're right. It's not quite the story that shouldn't have been told. Is it,

Paris Martineau (02:32:48):
Do love all stories focused on journalists though? Yes, that's fun. Yes. And they made a fake New York magazine called Manhattan

Leo Laporte (02:32:54):
Manhattan with the same typeface and everything.

Paris Martineau (02:32:57):
Same red logo when you go in the building.

Leo Laporte (02:33:00):
Yeah, I thought that was cool. Alright anyway. Great to have you. It's great to see you. Thank you, Paris.

Paris Martineau (02:33:06):
Great to be here as well.

Leo Laporte (02:33:08):
Thank you. Amy Webb's new book. Gotta read it. Must buy, get it on audible. Get it you know, in a bookstore go to your favorite local independent bookstore, buy a copy of the Genesis machine. You will not put it down. It is really good and you are fantastic. This is her fourth hour with me this weekend, then I'm sure she's sick to death.

Amy Webb (02:33:32):
Can I can I take, can I'm not sick to death, but can I just say one thing really, really quickly? Just

Leo Laporte (02:33:36):
Of course, of course.

Amy Webb (02:33:37):
So we talked a little bit about cyber war. Don't know what actually is happening, but I know that the people who work in the industry get very little thanks until something bad happens and then they get criticism. So I just wanted to shout out and say, thanks to everybody working in InfoSec and all the people who are in it, who are keeping things running, you guys don't ever get. Thanks. So just wanted to say, thanks.

Leo Laporte (02:34:00):
You know what, a lot of them listen to this show, I talked to 'em a lot and I know how hard it is. It's really, really tough, but I think they do a very good job. The fact that we are still in a functioning country is test Testament to that.

Amy Webb (02:34:16):
Yeah. So I don't know. What's ahead for you guys over the next, you know, however long, but I just wanna say, like, I know you, I know that nobody tells you thank you. And then the only time anybody really pays attention is when something goes wrong and that's right.

Leo Laporte (02:34:29):
So thanks right on. Yeah. What is your best guess about what will happen in Ukraine? Is Putin gonna back down?

Amy Webb (02:34:36):
I don't know. This is I did a little bit of work in Ukraine and it was served on a presidential commission involving the us and Russia at one point I, I, there's a part of me that wonders if what we're seeing is, is I wonder if what's really happening is digital. It's not physical. Yeah. You know,

Leo Laporte (02:34:56):
I think it's is very complicated and I think a lot of people we didn't spend a lot of time, but we did bring it up. I think a lot of people think that this could easily spill into a cyber war that would not be pleasant for anybody. Yeah. So we'll be, we'll be watching with

Amy Webb (02:35:11):
Thank you in advance. Yeah. To to everybody works in it. We appreciate you.

Leo Laporte (02:35:17):
It always seems to happen on a holiday, you know? Yeah. You know, Christmas Eve and suddenly you've gotta go in and fix all your email servers. Thank you, Amy. Of course future today Institute is your business and keep an eye out for this year's new report, which is out in next month. I'm just sure. We'll have you on to talk about it. That'd

Amy Webb (02:35:40):
Be awesome. Yeah. Yeah. We got a lot

Leo Laporte (02:35:41):
Of good stuff, always available for free on the, on the website, which is great. That's a great website to play with and have a fun FTI future today. Institute dot.

Amy Webb (02:35:52):
Yeah, I broke the I was screwing around, is it broken? I broke it. It's broken

Paris Martineau (02:35:57):
The internet.

Leo Laporte (02:35:58):
She, she used to have this really great. We had this thing. It's

Amy Webb (02:36:02):
Just, yeah, we've got a little script that feeds all the signals. We're tracking into sort of this this like network map that I broke the code on. Cuz I'm whatever, I'm not, I, I should not be touching it, but I did. You,

Leo Laporte (02:36:14):
You actually were in there messing with the code and you broke it.

Amy Webb (02:36:18):
Yes. I was trying to upgrade quotes.

Leo Laporte (02:36:21):
Can you can you, do you have, is it on GitHub? Can you roll it back?

Amy Webb (02:36:26):
Nah, it's a custom built little plug-in thing that we made and I just, I don't have time, like whatever. I just need to farm it out and have somebody else fix it.

Leo Laporte (02:36:33):
And it's, it's my fault. I've kept kept you too long. So future today, Institute com very, very good work and very, very nice to have you both. I don't want this should. And can you tell, but it's gonna have to cuz we're at a time and

Paris Martineau (02:36:50):
That's it. I will say it's very nice to finally have this show on a Sunday night, before a holiday, because normally we end this and I'm not feeling all amp and I'm like, crap, I gotta go to bed. You know, I gotta get prepared for the week. I got a whole day tomorrow, hit the

Leo Laporte (02:37:03):
Clubs, hit the clubs, the masks are off the it's all over guess. Yeah. Get on outta there.

Paris Martineau (02:37:09):
What?

Amy Webb (02:37:10):
Yeah, yeah. And York is like free roam freely, no

Paris Martineau (02:37:14):
Mask, no COVID card. The grocery store. I mean, no, we're still getting COVID carded everywhere as we probably should for a while

Leo Laporte (02:37:21):
As we probably should, but oh man. Do you think that it would be really nice if there were just a moment where it's like over oh boom. Like,

Paris Martineau (02:37:29):
I mean, that would be fantastic if that would require more coordination than I think anyone is possible and anyone is capable of yeah,

Leo Laporte (02:37:36):
We do TWiT on every Sunday afternoon, two 30 Pacific five 30 Eastern that's 2230 UTC. You can watch us do it live@livedotTWiT.tv. In fact, we stream live all day and all night prerecorded shows, you know, post recorded shows if we don't have a live show, but it's always open. So is the chat room, irc.Twit.tv. If you are a member of club TWiT, you also have exclusive access. You can go past the velvet rope into our club. Twit discord server club. Twit is a great way to support what we do. We really appreciate our thousands of members. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. You do get some benefits. $7 a month gets you ad free version of all of our shows. You get a special TWiT plus feed with lots of interesting additional shows and of course, access to the discord. The feed now has the untitled Linux show, the GI fizz with DIC D Bartolo Stacey Higginbotham's book club this week in space with rod pile and te Malik from space.com.

Leo Laporte (02:38:37):
There's a lot of good content on there. Who did we just do? Did we just do Owen JJ stone? Is that coming? That's this week. Okay. Owen's gonna be a guest on our fireside chats. There's a lot going on in the club. All you have to do is go to TWiT.tv/club TWiT to sign up no contract months to months. Give it a try. See if you like it. It sure helps us do a lot of things like yesterday's triangulation, which was ad free, thanks to the club. So we appreciate it. After the fact, all of our shows are still available to everybody. All in sundry ad supported@TWiT.tv. That's the website. You can also go to YouTube. Every show has its own YouTube channel. The master channel is.com/TWiT and there's links there to all the other channels. And of course, because we are a podcast proudly using RSS since 2004, you can subscribe in your favorite podcast player. You like podcast. So do I, that's a good one. Overcast Google podcast, apple podcast. We're everywhere. Even Spotify just subscribe in that way. You'll get it automatically. The minute it's available. Thank you everybody for being here have a great week. Another TWiT is in the San Marano can amazing byebye

Speaker 12 (02:39:51):
Doing the, doing the, doing the, doing the right, doing the baby.