This Week in Tech Episode 875 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. Great panel for you. We've got Glen Fleishman back. He is so much fun. Denise Howell from this week in law and a brand new a newbie. But I think she's gonna be great. Caitlin McGarry. She's the news editor at protocol. And she's gonna talk about the drop in Bitcoin values. Just did a whole show on that one. Elon Musk is he abandoning his TWItter deal. And what did Google announce at Google IO? Anything it's all coming up next onto it. Podcasts you love

TWiT Intro (00:00:37):
From people you trust.

Leo Laporte (00:00:40):
This is TWIT tweet.

Leo Laporte (00:00:50):
This is TWIT this week at tech episode 875 recorded Sunday May 15th, 2022. We don't talk about Elon. This episode of this week at tech is brought to you by eight sleep. Go to eight sleep.com/TWITt for exclusive Memorial day savings through June 6th. Cool. Down this summer with eight sleep now, shipping within the us Canada and the UK. And if you're listening after June 6th, use the same URL to check out the pod pro cover and save $150 a checkout and buy Wealthfront to start building your wealth and get your first $5,000 managed free for life. Go to wealthfront.com/TWIT and by Blueland stop wasting water and throwing out more plastic. Get blue land's revolutionary refill cleaning system. Instead, right now you can get 20% off your first order when you go to blueland.com/TWIT and by ZipRecruiter, some people make life easier by helping you out. Ziprecruiter makes hiring easier because they do the work for you. How ZipRecruiter's technology finds great candidates, and you can invite them to apply, go to ziprecruiter.com/TWITt to try it for free It's time for TWIT this week at tech, this show where we talk about the latest tech news, which means it's Elon Musk all the time. No, it's not. It's not I'm it's not. Let's introduce our panel before we get too far down that road, Glen Fleishman is back. We had such fun with you, Glen, on this week at Google, I said, I gotta get you on TWITg. He is a longtime tech journalist, glen.fun is his new website. <Laugh> we talked a lot about type and typography and you taught me the word long

Glen Fleishman (00:02:47):
Ive brought some just in case we have a moment to

Leo Laporte (00:02:49):
Talk about. Glen goes, oh, that's a John Glen. Nice.

Glen Fleishman (00:02:53):
That's a John Glen. I've got a, it's a teaser. If you have time later.

Leo Laporte (00:02:56):
Oh good. Oh, we'll talk about it. That's great. It's great to have you back. Welcome Glen. Thank you. Also from this weekend law the Internet's lawyer, Denise Howell. Always a pleasure. Good to see you, Denise.

Denise Howell (00:03:07):
It's great to see you

Leo Laporte (00:03:08):
All. You have some new comfy furniture in there.

Denise Howell (00:03:11):
Oh no. Same old comfy furniture. That's always been in my office. Oh,

Leo Laporte (00:03:14):
Okay. This just looks even more comfy. <Laugh>

Denise Howell (00:03:18):
Yeah, it's nice. When, when we have to do family zooms with people. Oh,

Leo Laporte (00:03:22):
The family's come and sit behind me. This is your new, this is your zoom studio. I get it. <Laugh> I get it now. And somebody new on TWIT. We're really excited to get the news editor from protocol. Caitlin McGarry on hi, Caitlin.

Denise Howell (00:03:35):
Hi. Thanks for having

Leo Laporte (00:03:36):
Me. You have a beautiful fireplace. Look at that. That is spiffy. I too. Can you put wooden burn things in there?

Denise Howell (00:03:42):
No, that would be bad. <Laugh>

Leo Laporte (00:03:44):
<Laugh> no,

Denise Howell (00:03:46):
It is not functional.

Leo Laporte (00:03:48):
<Laugh> fireplaces are like an 18th century a affectation now. Right? I got a fireplace. I just can't use it.

Denise Howell (00:03:54):
It's kind too. Yeah. It's beautiful though. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (00:03:56):
It's gorgeous. You got a mantle. Mantle are good for putting all your awards on. It's always a handy thing. Anyway. Welcome all three, I guess. Okay. Let's get it out of the way. How about that? But I kind of have to report this on Friday. Elon Musk at 5:44 AM. <Laugh> well, you, you don't want me to do this Glen? Oh

Glen Fleishman (00:04:20):
No, no. I think it's important. It's just that every it's funny. I, I don't wanna interrupt you. It's just every single piece of media is so focused on him. He's gotten exactly what he wanted.

Leo Laporte (00:04:28):
I know, I know. I don't want excuses. I know I don't want give him anything, but it's

Glen Fleishman (00:04:32):
Important. It's important. It is

Leo Laporte (00:04:33):
Important. So we're do this quick 5:44 AM. He says, forget it. I don't wanna buy TWITtter after all. And of course, TWITtter stock goes down to 40 bucks. He's offering 54 20. So that tells you the stock market thinks it's over his bid. He then says, no, it's not over. He then violates his NDA with TWITtter, according, at least according to him because he tweeted that their bot review process only uses a hundred tests or whatever. I don't, I didn't even understand what he was talking about, but apparently the lawyers then called him and said, you're not allowed. You're not allowed to talk about it. He tweeted TWITtter legal just called the complaint. I violated their NDA by revealing the bot check sample sizes 100. This actually happened. I, I am so sick of this story. He is a troll. Is that, what is your position, Glen? He just wants attention.

Glen Fleishman (00:05:30):
I, I think he wants control. I think he's an abusive boyfriend who is taking over the internet is kind of what he feels like, right? Yeah. It's like,

Leo Laporte (00:05:38):
He's,

Glen Fleishman (00:05:38):
He's urial if he doesn't get what he wants, he starts screaming and shouting. He will violate any law. You know, it's not restraining orders in this case, but it's he's being abusive to TWITtter, key employees. He, he may be responsible for TWITtter choosing, you know, indirectly because of how the deal is structured. Indirectly, forcing out to longtime employees in advance of the deal, you know, closing maybe in a few months. And you know, it's pretty clear. He's actually violated I you, alright, so I'm not a lawyer and there is one on this program. So I will not comment in a legal sense, but as at a cursory reading, it seems like the, that he's violated the deal. So TWITtter could get out if it wanted to, but why would it want to get out when it's trading that much lower at this point? Price that he, yeah,

Leo Laporte (00:06:17):
Right,

Leo Laporte (00:06:19):
Please. Both of them have billion dollar exit fees, but I don't think that, you know, if you get out for, cause it's not, you're not gonna have to pay the billion dollars. Right. Two very important employees were fired by TWITtter's current CEO para agro wall agro wall kaon bake poor, who is general manager. He came to TWITtter from Periscope was as far as I know, well liked at TWITtter, he was on paternity leave tweeted, I guess I'm out. Parro says we wanna take another direction. Bruce F the general manager for revenue also fired. Yeah, you have to wonder, is this agro wall trying to keep his job with Elon coming in or agro wall says

Glen Fleishman (00:07:08):
His better deal though, is he, he gets a bunch of money if he has to leave. So aural, if I were him, I don't know. I mean, this is being very piny or something, but if he's forced out or immediately fired by Musk, he gets a huge pile,

Leo Laporte (00:07:20):
Almost half a billion dollars, his deal. Yeah.

Glen Fleishman (00:07:22):
So, right. So why, why stay? Right?

Leo Laporte (00:07:25):
It's all very weird. It's all very weird. 

Denise Howell (00:07:29):
It's all very weird. And I think you hit on, you know, just TWITtter, really one out of this deal, even if it could get out because of a violation of their NDA, which none of us know what the terms of that are. Although this seems like something that would pretty clearly violate an NDA,

Leo Laporte (00:07:46):
Is it violating the NDA to say that I just got called by the lawyers to say, I VI I violated the ND <laugh>. That seems like a double,

Denise Howell (00:07:52):
Totally

Leo Laporte (00:07:53):
Double violation. Maybe they canceled each it's each

Glen Fleishman (00:07:58):
Statistical TWITtter was saying, and I didn't follow this to be honest. Cause I'm not part of statistical TWITtter that said that he absolutely misunderstood what TWITtter is doing. And so he was saying it was a hundred and it was nothing like that at all. So he tweeted that and there was just statistical TWITtter was just like, oh, this is, does the shows, blah. You know, ah, it gave them an opportunity to try to explain what the basis is and which sampling is done. So it's

Leo Laporte (00:08:19):
Not even, and that actually might make the lawyers even more upset because Denise, if the, if the, if the information becomes public, then you're not violating an NDA to talk about it. Is that that's sort of

Denise Howell (00:08:33):
No, I don't know that that would necessarily follow. Okay. And the other, the other thing you might be violating is securities laws, because well

Leo Laporte (00:08:40):
Know that

Denise Howell (00:08:41):
Any of, any of this manipulating the stock price so that TWITtter's stock goes down right then

Leo Laporte (00:08:48):
Caitlin, you said he doesn't care about E C rules.

Denise Howell (00:08:51):
I mean, obviously not. I think the S sec is just

Caitlyn McGarry (00:08:55):
A, a play thing for him at this point. It's like, he's just, he's playing some weird game with them. And I think he, I, I, I don't know. I mean, I think his tweets on Friday were just him having fun. Like, what does it mean to put a deal on hold? You either do the deal or you don't do the deal? Like what, what,

Leo Laporte (00:09:12):
It's actually not in a position to put it on hold. I don't think he's, he's agreed. Oh, they could, they could force him to give up that money. They could, yeah. They could and said complete deal. Right? Yeah. So, which would be hilarious. You gotta admit that would be funny. And then he, and eventually after admit he didn't have the money, how to turn off the algorithm. And then he says something which shows his ignorance of open source. He says, I'm gonna post the algorithm on GitHub. Like somehow that's magical. Like there is even like a, a section of code you could just post on GitHub. That would be the algorithm. Doesn't even for

Denise Howell (00:09:47):
Anybody who doesn't know what you're talking about, Leo, you need to explain.

Leo Laporte (00:09:51):
So Elon has shown in the past his ignorance about what open source means. When Tesla came out, he said, I'm gonna open source how to make these cars, which wasn't what he meant. He meant I'll license it. You could pay me for it. <Laugh> so there's a significant difference when he opensourcing and I'll, you could pay me and I'll tell you how we do it. Sure. So he clearly doesn't understand open source, but he's saying

Denise Howell (00:10:11):
For anyone who doesn't follow Elon on TWITtter,

Leo Laporte (00:10:14):
Right? He's

Denise Howell (00:10:15):
Saying, what is he, what is he talking about when he's talking about the algorithm and posting it?

Leo Laporte (00:10:20):
So when he, when he acquired TWITtter, he said, there's a few things we're gonna do. It's a very simple, it's really easy. Why haven't they figured this out in 15 years? I don't know. It says Elon, but we're only everything free speech. Only if it's illegal, will we, will we ban it and we're gonna get rid of spam. Okay. Right there. That's contradictory. Cuz spam is not illegal. Okay. And then we're gonna open source the algorithm, which I think is nonsense on the face of it. Because I don't think it's one like, okay, here's the 15 lines of code. What algorithm are you talking about? Is he talking about the, I think he's talking about an algorithm, which on TWITtter isn't even like the Facebook algorithm. It's just that if you want, you can go to your top tweets first or you can go to your latest tweets and it's an easy setting.

Leo Laporte (00:11:08):
He even describes it. I that's how I do it. Chronological. Is that the algorithm? I guess that's the algorithm. And is it is it something that's 20 lines of code? Maybe. Maybe it's not that simple. I suspect it's not, I don't think it's simple enough. You could post it on GitHub. And finally there's the problem. Github of course, a place where you could publish open source code, then there's finally, there's a problem that the people who chiefly would benefit from this and people who would like to game the system to get their tweets show up higher. And who's that? Oh, spamers so the whole thing we've had this conversation a million times, I got dragged into it. He's just a troll. I guess the, the last question then we'll go on to more important matters. Is he gonna get TWITtter? What do you think? Caitlin,

Caitlyn McGarry (00:11:57):
This is tough. I

Leo Laporte (00:12:00):
There's no right answer by the way you can.

Caitlyn McGarry (00:12:02):
I know

Leo Laporte (00:12:02):
<Laugh> well, it's not a quiz show.

Caitlyn McGarry (00:12:06):
I'm not sure because like there are so many TWITsts and turns like one week I'm like, oh, this deal is definitely going through. He's gonna buy TWITtter. And then the next week he says something and I'm like, I don't think he actually wants to buy TWITtter. He's like now the funding is coming from a million sources. It's not gonna belong solely to him. Like it's not as fun as it seemed originally when he's set out to buy it. It's getting really complicated. And now I think maybe he's looking for an exit strategy. So I don't know every week I'm my mind just changes. <Laugh>

Glen Fleishman (00:12:38):
Caitlin, isn't he being crushed by the margin or not the margin calls, but like he's got, he's leveraged Tesla. I mean, I don't follow Tesla very closely at all, honestly. And, but it seems like my reading of the financial side of that is he has levered so much of his holdings in Tesla and options and so forth that, that with the drop in Tesla's price, since the deal was announced and the general market downtrend, he could be heavily compressed there. Like I, I wondered when he made this call, it's like, does this wind up with him losing control of Tesla and losing the TWITtter bid at the same time and winding up less wealthy and in, and no longer in that cat bird's seat. And I don't, I don't know. Maybe he could just walk away and pay a billion dollars.

Leo Laporte (00:13:16):
At the beginning of April Tesla stock was $1,145. It is currently $769. And that's because it had a dead cat bounce. It was down to 7 28 half. Oh yeah. That amount. Almost half that amount. So, and yes, he borrowed on margin. He's the richest man in the world based on Tesla stock value. So he's already lost billions and billions of dollars in stock value. And he borrowed against the Tesla stock. There could be a margin call if the stock price goes down enough, that's probably, what's one of the things we're propelling the stock price down. So this is not, this is for those. And every time we talk about Elon, some I get emails saying, he's a genius. How could you, why don't you have somebody on that says he's a genius. So anybody

Caitlyn McGarry (00:14:03):
He's playing fived chess or something,

Leo Laporte (00:14:06):
Fived chess. That's brilliant. <Laugh>,

Glen Fleishman (00:14:09):
He's playing us all. Cause we keep talking about him. I tweeted something about him and then I thought, oh, de got me. I tweeted about him again. I don't I've muted. What the heck

Leo Laporte (00:14:17):
Do you think he's gonna get it, Glen?

Glen Fleishman (00:14:20):
No. I mean, and I'm saying that definitively as if I know anything, but I, I think that the, I don't think the market's gonna respond again. This is, you know, again, I'm saying this, I try not to be a pun, but based on what's happening in the market and worldwide, you know, everything is going on, right? We have this whole situation. A lot of, I think, fairly smart eco econom, excuse me, economists are saying the mark is not gonna rebound quickly because of all these fundamental factors Tesla's down Musk is already finding this a slog. He's already done things that have violated public provisions that were in the deal that was that was filed that you could read and say, oh, he did this and this and this as beyond any NDAs. And you know, does he really wanna spend another five months going through this? I suspect he is going to and is, and this, this, whatever percent he already bought of, of TWITtter is down. So he's taken a loss on that too. So I wonder if he just washes his hand, if it walks away, pays a billion dollars and decides it was a fun thing to yank everyone's chain for several months.

Leo Laporte (00:15:20):
You agree, Denise?

Denise Howell (00:15:22):
I don't know. I was just working through again that he owns a lot of TWITtter stock at this point. And so if he's

Leo Laporte (00:15:29):
Out 9, 9, 9 and a quarter percent, I think it lasts. Yeah.

Denise Howell (00:15:32):
Yeah. So if he doesn't buy it, you know, is he just cutting his losses, selling that stock he's tanked to the stock? I, I don't know. It's

Leo Laporte (00:15:41):
Yeah, he's probably it's

Denise Howell (00:15:43):
Lighter. Like we're living in a simulation

Leo Laporte (00:15:45):
<Laugh> which, which he fully believes by the way. I'm convinced of it.

Glen Fleishman (00:15:50):
He's controlling the dials. That's the problem.

Leo Laporte (00:15:54):
Yeah, I think the deal's gone south. I don't know if I think he wanted TWITtter. I think he underestimated the complexity of what he was embarking on. And I think his shareholders, his boards on the other companies and general sentiment in the public are, are gonna convince him this was a bad idea and he's gonna pay a billion and walk away. We'll find out. I didn't think he was gonna buy it. By the way I said, this is all a joke. He's not gonna buy it. Yeah. So I <laugh> consider my track record.

Denise Howell (00:16:22):
<Laugh>

Leo Laporte (00:16:24):
You meanwhile, state of Texas is not waiting till Elon gets TWITtter to regulate with the new Texas social media content moderation law. We had Mike Masick on TWITg on Friday, sent me in the email or maybe he tweeted this after the show saying I had just read about the decision. There was an injunction that kept the law from being enforced that a, the fifth district overturned and said, oh no, go ahead. And it had just happened. And Mike Masnick came on TWITg. We were talking about it. He said, I, I didn't, I was not clear how awful, how messed up this law really is. He says, I don't think most people actually understand just how truly effed up and obviously unconstitutional the law is. I'm gonna let our official internet lawyer way, way in on this. Although Mike, I think is also a, a law school graduate. I don't know if he ever practiced the law declares, social media platforms, common carriers, which they're, they're clearly not. Why is common carriers important, Denise? What does that even mean?

Denise Howell (00:17:35):
It it's something like the telephone company would be a common carrier. And it's, they're regulated differently by the FCC. Well,

Leo Laporte (00:17:45):
If the FCC say that internet service providers are not common carriers, so net neutrality didn't apply, they've

Denise Howell (00:17:53):
Gone back and forth. <Laugh> under different administrative

Leo Laporte (00:17:57):
Depending on what they wanted to do.

Denise Howell (00:17:58):
Yeah. Yes. Our current status is they are not common carriers. As far as the FCC is concerned. The

Leo Laporte (00:18:06):
Reason that's important is you can't, you don't tell the phone company, this is what the fifth circuit was saying. Yes, well, the phone company is not allowed to listen in on your conversations and say we're gonna ban you cuz you're giving bad COVID information. And since you are a common carrier TWITtter, you shouldn't be able to either,

Denise Howell (00:18:23):
Right. And

Leo Laporte (00:18:24):
Just so bad. That's nuts.

Denise Howell (00:18:25):
That is nuts, but that's not what anybody has to decide at this point. What was in place was an injunction preventing this law from going into effect until a court actually had the opportunity to have briefing and argument and decide those questions. And it's the court that's going to make those decisions. The district court that's hearing this case in Texas that issued that injunction. The attorney general in Texas appealed that injunction to the fifth circuit, which is a very conservative circuit appellate circuit of our federal appellate system. And that court undid the injunction. So the plaintiffs in the case who are challenging, the law are actually now going to ask the Supreme court to weigh in and say, Hey, this injunction was in place and it should remain in place. This law shouldn't go into effect because there is a reparable harm that will happen to, I suppose, they'll say a whole segment of the commercial landscape.

Denise Howell (00:19:33):
If this law does go into effect. So we'll have to see if the Supreme court decides to weigh in and, and reinstate the injunction. That is a thing that could happen. It is an unusual thing for the Supreme court to do to second guess the decisions of courts below it on the question of whether there's been a reparable harm or there's the threat of a reparable harm. So we'll just have to see that could happen. But in the meantime, the appellate court that oversees this trial court has decided, Hey, let's just go ahead and let this thing, let's see what

Leo Laporte (00:20:12):
Happens. Key

Denise Howell (00:20:13):
The law. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:20:14):
Let's see what happens. Yes.

Denise Howell (00:20:16):
While, while it is being challenged on constitutional grounds and what white might wind up happening is all of the arguments for how unwieldy the law is. And all of the its negative impact may wind up playing out while the case is actually pending so that the plaintiffs can actually make some concrete arguments. Hey, we were gonna say that this was likely to happen. Now you can see that it's happening. So it might actually wind up her helping the plaintiff's case to get the law declared unconstitutional.

Leo Laporte (00:20:51):
So there's a and Mike Masick refers to this, a good thread on TWITtter, of course by Pope hat <laugh> who, despite his name is actually litigator named Ken white not the Pope. And he says this is why this is an issue. The, any censorship provision of the Texas law says that any site with more than 50 million monthly active users, can't censor based on the viewpoint of a person or the person's content. So you cannot censor somebody on their viewpoint or how they express it, what you can censor. Well, you can censor content that's illegal. Okay. That's a fairly narrow range, although this is, this sounds a little bit like what Elon Musk was proposing and the site can C C other things, but it doesn't say exactly what those are, which means pretty much according to Ken that every single moderation decision decision will be up to up for lawsuit that it just opens it up.

Denise Howell (00:22:01):
Yes. So you can imagine that if all that starts to play out while this case is pending, and the lawyers are drafting arguments about its constitution, constitutionality and appropriateness and validity, that they may wind up with a lot more evidence on their hands for the court to consider. And remember this court actually granted an injunction that right prevented right this law from taking effect.

Leo Laporte (00:22:28):
But, but then it raises a question. Well, even if this court rules in favor of overturning the law, the fifth circuit could then take it on appeal and overturn it down the road, correct. Since they've already indicated they don't, they kind of in favor of it,

Denise Howell (00:22:41):
They've already indicated and they didn't publish an opinion, but there is a transcript of the argument that undid this injunction and they've indicated they really don't understand very much about the internet, how the internet works, what TWITtter is. What's a common carrier, what's an internet service provider. What is a website? So yeah, I don't have a whole lot of faith in the fifth circuit. Even really understanding these issues well enough to reach a good decision here. Denise,

Glen Fleishman (00:23:16):
I'm not even a simple country, lawyer. And I reading this I, I, you know, I've got no law background of try to stay up on the issues and I read this and it just feels blatantly unconstitutional because at the first amendment from Friday, yeah, right. Like so many different ways, like seems so Prema FAIA I look at it and like, I have no specialized expertise, but just the basic phrases in the law that are used, the kind of imposition it puts on private companies, the way in which it imposes a government mandate. I mean, it feels like they're trying to take aspects of the Sue to prevent of abortion law and apply it

Leo Laporte (00:23:47):
To content. This is, this is Texas shoehorned, our law. This is the new Texas way of doing business. Isn't it? The Texas law lets any aggrieved user Sue. If they think the site sent it improperly, this is according to Ken white and get attorney fees and costs. If they win, if the Texas law stands, he says, there's no more saying it's TWITtter's first amendment right to moderate. This is where it's confusing. Because on the one hand, people say, well, it's my first amendment, right? To say anything I want on TWITtter, that is not the case. The first amendment says government shall make no law, a bridging the freedom of speech

Denise Howell (00:24:25):
Congress. And TWITtter's not the government,

Leo Laporte (00:24:27):
Twittter's not the government. So in effect it would be saying you have a first amendment, right. With TWITtter that they can't moderate, but there, but no social site, no site, our chatroom, our forms would survive. They would all turn into four Chan or eight Coon, if you couldn't moderate. Yeah. You need to be able to moderate. If only to say you can't use the F word, I mean, you need to be able to do that. And, and it's, you don't even need section two 30 to allow us to do that. That's a, we're private businesses running. This is running our own private social networks. Maybe the point is that TWITtter has now some, this is Elon's point some higher standing as the, as the public, you know, marketplace of ideas or something.

Denise Howell (00:25:13):
You you'd need something more than the state of Texas proclaiming that, right. You'd need something at the federal level. You'd need congressional legislation. And by the way, I guess this is just a good time to encourage everyone. We have primaries coming up and there are congressional seats at stake. Please look at your potential representatives and try and research what they know about the internet, what they know about privacy laws, because it's

Leo Laporte (00:25:42):
The, here's the big that

Denise Howell (00:25:43):
They understand

Leo Laporte (00:25:43):
This. I agree a hundred percent. And of course, Roe V. Wade is also up and there's so many issues that we really, you know, it's but I have to say, I also understand how hard it is for voters. We're in California, Denise, we got a four page ballot with a for controller and judges and sheriffs. A lot of people we've never heard of the amount of research. I don't know how many candidates for governor are there in California. It looks like a dozen it's. Yeah. There's your ballot. My

Denise Howell (00:26:15):
Ballot

Leo Laporte (00:26:16):
<Laugh> yes. So which I just

Denise Howell (00:26:17):
Started filling out,

Leo Laporte (00:26:18):
Unless you are gonna go by the yard signs or maybe, you know, you're really sophisticated and you're gonna, well, you get a card from the democratic or Republican party telling you how to vote. You've got a lot of research ahead.

Denise Howell (00:26:31):
You do. So I prioritize the research about your potential congressional representatives, I guess is what I'm saying because yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:26:40):
But then we got governor, Lieutenant, governor controller, secretary of state. Yeah, we got assembly. We've got reg legislator. We've got, it's just goes on and on and on. And I could see how voters are just overwhelmed.

Glen Fleishman (00:26:54):
Le Leo, you hate democracy. I'm confused here about the 

Leo Laporte (00:26:58):
I love

Glen Fleishman (00:26:58):
That democracy. It takes so much effort. I realize my wife is an excellent researcher. I'm I have to admit I'm far worse. She reads the voter pamphlet. She looks stuff up. She makes determined decisions. And I am, I think I'll quicker to quicker to the draw. But

Leo Laporte (00:27:12):
Do you just ask your, so you do what I do. You ask your wife who to vote for?

Glen Fleishman (00:27:16):
I often often ask my wife cuz she's in the research on certain school board positions. She's better at ballot measures. I'm better. You often have. What

Leo Laporte (00:27:23):
Do you do, Kate? You're also in California faced with a four page four pages of unknown names. What are you gonna do?

Caitlyn McGarry (00:27:30):
<Laugh> I'm I'm the researcher. Good. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:27:34):
Mm-Hmm <affirmative> because by trade you are right.

Caitlyn McGarry (00:27:36):
Yes, exactly. But yeah, it's really important to, to know what's happening in your state, in your city neighborhood, if you really care that much which you probably should <laugh> but it's not easy. They definitely don't make it easy to figure out. You know, like, yes. It's important that people in Congress understand the internet, like that's key.

Leo Laporte (00:28:02):
Yeah. That would be a good thing. <Laugh> and judges. Yeah.

Caitlyn McGarry (00:28:07):
Judges. Yeah. So yeah. I, I mean, that's like the bare minimum these days and we don't,

Leo Laporte (00:28:14):
But there's no see that there's no, I wish there were some quiz that, you know, we gave all the candidates, this quiz what is IP <laugh> and, and then we could see their answers.

Glen Fleishman (00:28:27):
Doesn't Buzzfeed have one where you can just go through, you fill out all your positions and it tells you which candidates on the grid support. That would be great. Right. I'm those do exist. I am kidding.

Leo Laporte (00:28:35):
I go to, I go to Ballotpedia. Yeah, which I, I think was a fairly good it's nonpartisan. Right. And I think it doesn't so

Glen Fleishman (00:28:43):
Much information

Leo Laporte (00:28:43):
There. There's a lot of information then there our local newspaper has a debate and has a forum for candidates and stuff. It's the, I mean, I'm, I'm gonna guess it's probably several days. It's probably 30 hours of work for me to figure out who I'm gonna vote for. That's I don't blame people for not wanting to do that. You,

Glen Fleishman (00:29:03):
You were a good citizen. It's really hard

Leo Laporte (00:29:05):
Today. I didn't say I was gonna do it.

Glen Fleishman (00:29:08):
Oh,

Leo Laporte (00:29:08):
I told you already, I'm asking my wife <laugh>

Caitlyn McGarry (00:29:11):
That's 30

Glen Fleishman (00:29:12):
Hours, 30 hours for Lisa.

Leo Laporte (00:29:13):
I will not be doing <laugh>. Yeah. Yeah. Well, but, but, so I understand why we, you, you nailed it, Glen. I am a fan of democracy and it is hard work and I don't think the bulk of voters do it. I think they look at that's why TV ads work. That's why opinion, pages and editorials work. People want to be told how to vote.

Denise Howell (00:29:37):
Yep. And this is well getting back, getting back to Texas for a minute. Yes. And you can understand how, if we're all confused about who to even vote for on these issues how a court, like the fifth circuit might be confused or swayed or yeah. It's somewhat in the dark as to how they should be considering an issue, like an injunction like this. So it should come as no surprise that another circuit court has already held that a similar injunction in Florida should stand. Right. So right now we have a conflict and that is the kind of thing that can involve the Supreme court, even at this injunctive level.

Leo Laporte (00:30:16):
So yes, but now we don't trust the Supreme court anymore. So

Caitlyn McGarry (00:30:20):
Hasn't clue Clarence Clarence Thomas has definitely indicated that he's on, you know, he's he believes in regulating tech companies as if they were common carriers. Yes. And he said a bunch of things about section two 30. So yeah, I don't, I don't know that taking it to the Supreme court is really gonna results in anything different. But yeah, it,

Denise Howell (00:30:44):
I think it is important for anybody. Who's not real for anybody. Who's not real thrilled with the leaked decision that just came out that was authored by justice Alito. And he is the justice in charge of overseeing the fifth circuit. So it would go to him to determine if this is going to stand or not. So if you, and he can decide whether to involve the whole court or he can just unilaterally decide, right? Yes or no. What,

Leo Laporte (00:31:09):
What do they, what do they call that? The secret bench docket? What do they, yeah, the midnight,

Denise Howell (00:31:14):
Midnight secret docket, I think

Leo Laporte (00:31:15):
It's called the midnight docket <laugh> yeah. Shadow, shadow, shadow the shadow docket.

Glen Fleishman (00:31:22):
I will say I, but a Kavanaugh for anything you may think about Kavanaugh the things he writes about commerce and and free speech are more interesting than you would suspect. And I remember particularly because I, I try to hammer the drum about monosomy, which is the ability for a company to control what price it pays, suppliers, essentially the ability to corner a market on purchasing things like Amazon is a monos Sony in part. And the new head of the, well, not new now, but the FTC head. I think we're gonna talk about that later. Lena Conn, she wrote that great paper that was in part about monos and the inability of antitrust laws to affect situations in which the consumer price wasn't the issue. And Kavanaugh's written very interestingly about monos and other consumer protection issues. So I don't know, it's, it's, what's a mixed bag, like on certain laws, you certain things you're like, well, there's a six, three majority now and others like, well, Roberts's gonna shade and maybe Kavanaugh and and maybe non blanket on the fellow who's name, who personally, instead of cor six, cor thank you.

Glen Fleishman (00:32:23):
Didn't wanna say the wrong name there, but they might in previous IANS there's been six, three and five four in which they've been involved in

Leo Laporte (00:32:29):
You, you're saying that the conservative, that the conservative block isn't necessarily predictable when it comes to first amendment. I

Glen Fleishman (00:32:36):
Think on a few things, there's been some surprising stuff or seven, two decisions, things like that. Yeah. Where you'd be like, you'd think there would be a more based on other decisions on sort of, I mean, there's the social progressive side, the progressive and privacy side, and then there's issues that are more mundane that affect commerce where I think there's there is still a middle there led by Roberts who will, who find some majority

Leo Laporte (00:32:57):
There's as the Ken white points out also in the in this thread there is, and I'm gonna have to defer to you to understand this a little bit better, Denise, but there's language in the bill, making it deliberately harder for sites to defend claims. And it made clear that people can keep suing in different Texas courts. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> until a court with authority over all those courts says the law is invalid, non mutual issue, preclusion and non mutual claim. Preclusion are not defenses to an action brought into this section. That's

Denise Howell (00:33:33):
Yeah. And because of all the constitutional challenges to this law in it, they've, they've rapidly added language saying, Hey, to the extent any of this law is held unconstitutional, it's severable and the rest of the law goes into effect. Wow. So any court that that wants to do away with this law is going to have to do away with the whole thing. The

Leo Laporte (00:33:56):
Texas, the Texas

Denise Howell (00:33:58):
Part of it are going to remain Texas

Leo Laporte (00:33:59):
Legislature. And the ag are very good now at coming up with ways to circumvent <laugh> the core, anybody who doesn't agree with them basically. Wow. Wow.

Denise Howell (00:34:12):
Yeah. I, I, I do think there's some interesting,

Leo Laporte (00:34:16):
These are good country lawyers.

Denise Howell (00:34:17):
Yeah. There there's. Yeah. There's some interesting discussions. There's gonna be some interesting stuff for the court when it ultimately gets to a court to consider the constitutionality of this, you know, what exactly does it mean to restrict someone's viewpoint for, for one thing that's a little vague and 

Leo Laporte (00:34:36):
Well also vague is 50 million monthly users. It's not, yeah. It's not clear who would the law does not say who would do the counting. Right. So and, and it's, so it's, it's, I mean, it would perhaps almost certainly impact Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat, Wikipedia, and Pinterest boy, I'd hate for Wikipedia to be forced to couch out of this. Oh God, possibly, but not definitely covered TWITtter, LinkedIn, WordPress, Reddit. They're running the border here. Yelp trip advisor discord.

Denise Howell (00:35:15):
Oh boy.

Leo Laporte (00:35:17):
Discord could be liable to this. So,

Denise Howell (00:35:24):
So back you showing irreparable harm. I mean, if, if that, if that goes into effect and these slew of lawsuits starts to fall upon the companies, you just mentioned Leo, obviously that and debilitating lawsuits. The other interesting part is there seems to have been some effort. And I don't, I don't know if this is what the lawmakers intended maybe, but there seems to have been some effort to discourage companies from just saying, well, out of Texas, you know, no more Texas. And I don't know that that would actually be effective. I,

Leo Laporte (00:35:58):
I do think, well, I think the law prohibits that,

Denise Howell (00:36:01):
Well,

Leo Laporte (00:36:02):
<Laugh>, the law says you can't discriminate against people just cuz they're from Texas.

Denise Howell (00:36:09):
So right. But is that, does that mean

Leo Laporte (00:36:12):
You can't block them?

Denise Howell (00:36:13):
Not just, I'm not sure people that's how the law would be. We're getting a little in the weeds here, but I'm not sure if that's how the law would be interpreted. Okay. That's certainly what interpretation

Leo Laporte (00:36:23):
That's. Well, that's what they're trying to say is, oh, and by the way, you can't look at my IP address and say, well, we're not gonna let you post on the site cuz of the Texas law

Denise Howell (00:36:30):
Or, or maybe what it means is because you are from Texas and you have expressed a viewpoint that we do not want to maintain on the site. We will, we will not carry your content. I don't, I don't know. Could

Leo Laporte (00:36:51):
You make a Texas section <laugh> <laugh>

Glen Fleishman (00:36:54):
Like the smoking check, like the smoking. So if you're not smoking section exactly. You have to check that's right. You're not from Texas. If you Excluded from that, it's

Leo Laporte (00:37:04):
By the way, it's not just Florida and Texas. The EU now is proposing that, closing that all your private chats, this would be WhatsApp. This would be signal. This would be Facebook messenger scanned for child abuse. It would eliminate effectively the any kind of encryption. The European commission a couple of days ago revealed long awaited proposals aimed at CSAM child sexual abuse material. The proposed law creates a new EU center to deal with child abuse, content introduces. And this is the key obligations for tech companies to detect report block and remove CSAM from their platforms. And you don't get to say, oh, it's encrypted. We can't see into it. You're responsible including grooming, which is a very nebulous term. You know, that that really poses some real problems. I mean, grooming is very subtle, right? How do you know it's grooming?

Glen Fleishman (00:38:09):
Yeah. I've got two teenage children who have been relatively savvy online no major conflicts that they've gotten into. And we've always had a policy. We signed a technology contract with them when they were much younger that's wise and said, here's, here's what you can do. And can't do. And here's, you know, and then of course they violated many provisions of it. Did we Sue them? No, not we Texas over a locker. Yes we did not. But we we have always had great negotiating with them. So when we discover they've done something, they shouldn't, they feel terrible, which is how you know, that's good. They know they did something they shouldn't have. And we talk through like what the risk would've been and what could've happened. So but it, it was important to set the limits up front. And I don't think many parents do that, unfortunately, because the kids are savvyer than the parents. Oh,

Leo Laporte (00:38:56):
Good news. If you're in Europe, technology, parents don't have to because

Glen Fleishman (00:38:59):
That's right. The government will just do it for you.

Leo Laporte (00:39:01):
Government will do it

Glen Fleishman (00:39:02):
For you. It always works

Leo Laporte (00:39:03):
If it's passed. And this is always a tricky thing with the EU because they propose they pass. Then the individual countries have to approve and talk about enforcement. So it's always hard to know where in this it's right now, it's a proposed thing. But if it's passed, tech companies would have to conduct Rick it's basically what apple said. They were gonna do that. There was a whole fewer R and the apple backed down. They, but install, they said tech companies must start installing and operating technologies to detect CSAM. And I guess really end end to end encryption would be dead in this case because they say specifically, it has to be used even when end to end encryptions in place. And obviously that means there's no end to end encryption or you couldn't do it. So this is, you know, this is not just Texas and Florida. This is, this is the world coming for you. 

Caitlyn McGarry (00:39:59):
Yeah, companies are definitely nervous about what's happening in Europe right now because the EU is just like, like every couple weeks they're coming out with legislation, you know, they're gonna force all the messaging apps to work together. So iMessage will be forced to open up. Whatsapp will be forced to open up. Like there's, they're just, they're on a tear right now. They're totally like their antitrust chief is just, yeah, she just wants to make sure that everything is fair for consumers and tech companies are very nervous about what's happening

Leo Laporte (00:40:32):
There. Steger the I asked last week, Alex canter Witz who's a big technology guy. If he thought on balance, the EU laws like GDPR were good or bad, he said, they're all, they've all been bad. They, they, they haven't affected, affected the change we wanted. See cuz I thought, well, at least there's some privacy protections. You know that the EU is putting forward, but the cons, the unintended negative consequences have been horrific and you know, you get these cookie banners. Great. Thank you very much. <Laugh> without any real

Caitlyn McGarry (00:41:07):
Promise, accept, all accept all cookies. Yeah. And just move on with your life. Move on.

Leo Laporte (00:41:11):
<Laugh> yeah. All right. Well, all right. That was our, does

Denise Howell (00:41:15):
Anybody see, does anybody see the irony in, in Elon wanting to do away with moderation and the EU going full steam ahead with all forms of moderation? It can muster.

Leo Laporte (00:41:29):
Yeah. I mean, if I, again, this is another argument that Elon should just drop it like a hot potato. Does he really want to get in this battle? Maybe he does. He seems like he kind of likes the feta cuffs. All right. One more Elon story. Then we're gonna take a break. <Laugh> I can't resist.

Glen Fleishman (00:41:50):
Can't resist like candy. It's

Leo Laporte (00:41:51):
Like candy. I'd love it. On Tuesday, Elon praised Chinese workers for burning the 3:00 AM oil. He said that there's just a lot of super talented, hardworking people in China who strongly believe in manufacturing, they won't just be burning. The midnight oil they'll be burning. The 3:00 AM oil. They won't even leave the factory type of thing. Whereas in America, people are trying to avoid going to work at all.

Glen Fleishman (00:42:22):
Is he having his cars made in a prison?

Leo Laporte (00:42:24):
It sounds like it is effectively. It's the closed loop system. You know, that's how they're doing it with COVID where the it's a sealed building and you sleep there, you sleep in the factory. Oh, there are no labor rights, I think. And, and you know, and there's no unions that's for sure. It's funny. It's a communist state. You'd think there'd be unions. Elon loves it. Elon loves it because he can make people work 120 hour weeks. I think that was singularly tone. Deaf for him to say that given the, the life of the Chinese worker in these factories is not as far from wonderful $1,500 a month in his gig of factory. 15. He's

Glen Fleishman (00:43:11):
Always so fast about everything though. He doesn't, he doesn't do any, this is my problem. Jeff Bezos. I don't know if we have that later.

Leo Laporte (00:43:16):
Oh, that's a good one too.

Glen Fleishman (00:43:18):
Has started mouthing off. Look, I, you know, I think I've said this. I know Jeff Bezos. He hired me at Amazon in 96. I gave him a bunch of advice and no, I did not make a billion dollars from it, unfortunately. But I worked there six months and I had lunch with him all the time. Talk to him all the time. Never knew he was gonna become a super villain. Never thought he had these, this sort of disregard for other people. And now he is on TWITtter, making all these economic pronouncements and things like he knows something and I'm like running one company in a voracious manner that disregards workers' health and rights that, that runs rough shot across local regulation that is in, you know, reported, you know, and regular violations of various laws that it's had to settle, settle, civil suits, all these things. Maybe it's become a better company now than it used to be by force and offering better wages and so forth. But it's the same thing. Jeff, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, all these people, they wanna be able to have Dick tots. They wanna be able to say things that are unquestioned that let them assert a version of reality that is poorly researched. They don't want do something happens.

Leo Laporte (00:44:19):
Bezos, when you become a billionaire, I think in 96 Bezos was rich, but he wasn't mega rich. Right? Was he? Yeah,

Glen Fleishman (00:44:28):
He drove a civic and he lived in a tiny apartment. Yeah. And you know, walked to work. And I thought he was a pretty nice guy at the time, but I thought Amazon, I thought it was actually gonna collapse. There were so many problems with it. 97. I was like, I'm outta here. I have things

Leo Laporte (00:44:39):
To do with, oh and a fool.

Glen Fleishman (00:44:41):
I don't regret it. I don't regret it at all. <Laugh> no, I've got, you know,

Leo Laporte (00:44:44):
I regrets. So what people say, oh, you really, you know, dismissing Elon's accomplishments. I think it's not unusual. Same thing with Bezos. These guys absolutely great accomplishments early on. Something happens when you become that rich and that powerful, you can be detached detached from the reality of normal folks. And you're suddenly living in this bubble where no one says no to you. And you suddenly think every pronouncement flowing from your lips is manna from the heavens.

Glen Fleishman (00:45:12):
Howard Schultz is a great example. He ran for president. Why did he run for president? Even? He didn't know why

Leo Laporte (00:45:17):
He ran for P Starbucks CEO. Yeah.

Glen Fleishman (00:45:19):
Starbucks. I mean, this is right. We have all of our local homegrown, you know, our, our CEOs here in Seattle. And I mean, bill gates was smart enough not to run for president. And I think that was a good idea, Howard Schultz out there. And he had nothing to say

Leo Laporte (00:45:31):
If Elon weren't born, it was a, was born in America. I think he'd be running for president, but he's born in South Africa. So he can't. But on the other hand, I'm not gonna put it past him and trying to change the constitution. So he can't, <laugh> Joe Biden,

Denise Howell (00:45:44):
Who knows, who knows if in his game of fifth level three dimensional chess, he's, he's trying to help the us economy or heard it. But by praising Chinese, the Chinese factory system and Chinese working conditions,

Leo Laporte (00:45:58):
It's not what we want.

Denise Howell (00:45:59):
Yeah. It certainly doesn't help the us at all. No,

Leo Laporte (00:46:02):
Not not. We want so Biden tweets, you wanna bring down inflation. And by the way, these are fighting words. Let's make sure the wealthiest corporations pay their fair share to which, oh my God. What a, what sacri weird to which Jeff Pazos replies the new, by the way, thank you TWITtter for giving us a chance to hear from these people, the new, what would they do without TWITtter? The newly created this information board at TWITtter should review this tweet from Joe Biden, or maybe they need to form a new non sequiter board. Instead raising corporate taxes is fine to discuss taming. Inflation is critical to discuss mushing them together is just misdirection. Although I have to say thank you to TWITtter because immediately in the replies, a number of distinguished economists said, no, that's exactly how it works. <Laugh>, that's exactly how it works. <Laugh> you want, you wanna re you wanna reduce inflation tax. The corporations Biden was not wrong. And so it's good. You know, that's one of the things that TWITtter does give you is a conversation. And I think at its best, that's, that's what TWITtter offers us is if we can get it to be, you know, reasonable, <laugh> not crazy and not in, in, you know, threatening violence.

Glen Fleishman (00:47:23):
We're in a weird position. Yeah. Convers because we have, oh, sorry. Oh no, you go ahead.

Denise Howell (00:47:27):
I was just gonna say conversation that, you know, that level of that degree of power is something pretty remarkable. I remember when sun Microsystems CEO, was it Jonathan Schwartz was his name. Yes. Had a blog. Yeah. Do you remember, do you had a blog?

Leo Laporte (00:47:45):
We loved, we loved Schwartz. Yeah. That was incredible of all the CEOs. He would actually say something, right.

Denise Howell (00:47:52):
It was great. And this was sort of pre TWITtter, but it's the same, mm-hmm, <affirmative> sort of zeitgeist of, you know, you're actually getting these people's unfiltered thoughts and, and responses back to them from people who actually know what they're talking about and can maybe persuade them to think differently. It's pretty important.

Leo Laporte (00:48:11):
Yeah. yeah. I mean, to be fair, Bezos is no longer the CEO of anything. Well, maybe he is a blue origin. I don't know, but he's, he's no longer running Amazon, but still it's good that he can say what he thinks and the president can say what he thinks. And then people with knowledge can weigh in. That was a good conversation. Bezos was wrong. <Laugh> it was a good conversation.

Denise Howell (00:48:40):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:48:41):
All right. Let's take a break. That's our Elon Musk segment for the week. I wish

Denise Howell (00:48:46):
<Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:48:47):
I wish I could say forever, but Elon is, if not, you know what it, this is what Trump was very good at. Right? It was, was keeping the conversation, circling in the, you know, where you controlling the Overton window, getting the conversation where you wanted it to be. Elon's the master of that. And he's, I think he learned from Donald Trump, to be honest with you, maybe he didn't have to learn anything. Maybe he knew all along great panel. Glad. It's great to have you finally on the, on TWITtter, on TWITtter. It's not TWITtter. God damn <laugh> is Leo launching a bid for TWITtter? Oh God. Are you buying? No, no, it's come out. I in fact, I found an article that's still online about me quitting TWITtter because of the confusion between TWITtter and TWITtter. Back in 2007, it's still online. <Laugh> I quit for about six months and then I realized this is a fool's errand. And so I rejoined it, but I was right, right, Denise, there was some confusion people. I still have to explain that we're not, we're not TWITtter. And that TWITtter came after TWITtter and all of that, but you know, that's life. Denise hows also here, the Internet's lawyer, Denise hell.info. It's great to have you all as always,

Denise Howell (00:50:01):
Always good to

Leo Laporte (00:50:01):
Be here and a brand new, wonderful contributor to the show. CA MC Carey is news editor at protocol. Love, love protocol. You came from, you said you were at Gizmoto and Mac world. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> where else?

Caitlyn McGarry (00:50:17):
Tom's guide.

Leo Laporte (00:50:18):
Oh, wow.

Caitlyn McGarry (00:50:19):
And I actually started in local news. I was a reporter at the Las Vegas review journal.

Leo Laporte (00:50:25):
Oh, nice. Yeah. A real reporter. Wow. Protocol is a great site. Still free. Thank you. Protocol.Com. and well worth subscribing to the newsletters. It's you've got great people working there. It's really fantastic, including our own Megan Moroni. Who's one of your,

Caitlyn McGarry (00:50:45):
The, the, I, the icon, Megan,

Leo Laporte (00:50:47):
The icon. <Laugh> the icon. And I do wanna talk to you. You do a podcast called the source code podcast, and I do want to talk to you. We got a lot to talk about with Bitcoin and, and crypto and NFTs and more. So we'll get to that in just a little bit. Our show today brought to you by the best thing I've bought in a long time, about six months ago, Kevin Rose had convinced me. And then he was on TWIT and Amy Webb was on and she bought it. And then she said, this is the best thing ever. Now I've got one about six months ago, I got my eight sleep pod pro cover, put it over my existing mattress. Eight sleep also sells mattresses. If you want to get a whole new mattress, but they do something remarkable. It's the most advanced solution on the market for something called I call Thermo regulation.

Leo Laporte (00:51:35):
The pod pro cover can bring your mattress temperature down to 55 degrees or as hot as 110 degrees or anywhere in between. And there's reason why you want it to do that. And by the way, it's got two sides. So each side of the bed can have its own sleep stages that it measures biometrics. It measures bedroom, temperature. It reacts intelligently to all that input to create the optimal sleeping environment. By manipulating the temperature, you start by putting in the temperatures you think you want, I like to get into a warm bed. So I have it warmed up. But then as I sleep, as I go into deeper and deeper sleep, it cools down. That's actually what your body wants and expects. And you probably know that if you've ever woken up burning hot in the middle of the night, that's definitely not conducive to sleep.

Leo Laporte (00:52:20):
And then I have it set. So around seven or 8:00 AM when I'm about to get up, it, it that's the alarm. My alarm is the bed starts to warm up and I wake up very naturally. It's amazing. As a result, eight sleep users fall asleep up to 32% faster, reduce sleep interruptions by 40% and overall get a more restful sleep. I don't have to tell you how important sleep is. It's nature's gentle nurse, the best medicine. It can do so much for your health. And just for your state of mind, lower your blood pressure to decrease the risk of heart disease, even reduce the risk of Alzheimer. And yet 30% of Americans struggle with sleep temperature. One of the main causes, I think we're all starting to learn now that sleeping cool is really important, but I like to get in a warm bed.

Leo Laporte (00:53:10):
So I do that. Lisa likes it really warm. My wife really turns hers up. Doesn't affect my side. She gets her sleep information, her, her sleep, you know, metrics. The bed's very good at that, by the way, because you're, you're sleeping right on it. So I have a number of ways to measure sleep effectiveness. But I think my eighth sleep is really the, the best way to do it. What I get here 80? Oh, I had a bad night. My there's my heart rate. My sleep fitness is only 78%. I have to say, though, if I go back in time, it's gotten better and better. I've gotten up to 99% sleep from this. Here's the temperature dial. You could see that at 10:00 PM. I have plus three. Then it goes down a little bit. Plus two wakes me up at plus three.

Leo Laporte (00:53:52):
You control that. And the sleep doctor will automatically, the autopilot will automatically modify that if it notices your restless and so forth here's an insight, your something your resting heart rate stayed high for longer than usual. I must have been up to something. Your sleeping heart rate was a little high last night. It's really great stuff. Sleep better, more comfortably with eight sleep. It makes me a better person. And I think it will make your nights better too. Go to eight sleep.com/TWITt. They've got great Memorial day savings. Now through June 6th, you can cool down this summer with eight sleep now, shipping within the us, Canada in the UK. I, you know, those hot summer nights. Imagine having an air conditioner in your bed. And if you're listening after June 6th, still go to eight sleep.com/TWITt. Check out the pod pro cover, get you $150 off at checkout. The Memorial day savings are even better. So go right now, check it out. Eight sleep.com/TWIT we're big fans. And if you're doing it after June 6th, the 150 bucks off it, check out on the pod pro cover E I G HT spell it out. Eight sleep.com/TWITt. We thank 'em so much for their support of this week in tech, Google IO. I'm not gonna say anything. I'm gonna let you guys tell me what you think of it. Google IO was this week. Caitlin. Were you excited? Impressed. What did you think?

Caitlyn McGarry (00:55:27):
I was intrigued, I wouldn't say I was impressed, but there were a lot of you know, forward looking announcements. Like there's a lot of hardware coming down the pike, which I think is really interesting. I'm really curious to see the pixel watch because Google has just let, where a west languish and has not been spurring its partners to like really innovate either on the watch side or on the component side. So I'm really, really curious to see how the pixel watch turns out. And I think trying Android tablets again is a really interesting move. That

Leo Laporte (00:56:07):
Is so weird because yeah, they basically let tablets languish and the real problem has always been with Android tablets. The developers aren't making appropriate software, right. That sizes itself appropriately. So it sounded like Google, they didn't, they don't have a tablet cause it may be next year <laugh> yeah, but it sounds like they were trying to encourage developers, but could you please write some software for tablets? <Laugh>

Caitlyn McGarry (00:56:31):
I mean, if, if the iPad has a problem still with, you know adopting, you know, Mac apps for, for tablets, like, I mean, Android has just like,

Leo Laporte (00:56:43):
Oh, it's terrible. It's

Caitlyn McGarry (00:56:44):
It's a disaster. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:56:45):
And yet it could be so good. I don't, I mean, Samsung made some pretty good tablets Google themselves that, that had a seven inch tablet that was beloved mm-hmm <affirmative>. But for some reason they've just kind of abandoned the marketplace. Denise, I don't know. Do you follow these Google announcements? Do you care? Do you, you don't have to.

Denise Howell (00:57:04):
I, I <laugh>. No, I don't have to. I think it's interesting. I think it's good for apple to have competition.

Leo Laporte (00:57:10):
That's true. I will. Absolutely. Yeah. And who better than, I mean, Samsung right now is the only competition, but I'd like to see Google step up. The pixel six is an ice phone.

Glen Fleishman (00:57:21):
Yeah. I mean, doesn't this reflect, oh, sorry,

Denise Howell (00:57:24):
Go ahead. No, I was done. Oh,

Glen Fleishman (00:57:27):
Oh, it's doesn't this reflect, it feels like, you know one of the, my favorite things that fake Steve jobs back in the day wrote was about the open handset Alliance. And I quote this regularly because it was a great insight from a fake character and it was winners don't join alliances. And you know, that was sort of the story.

Leo Laporte (00:57:45):
Did the real Steve jobs say that? Cuz that sounds like something, Steve would've said only the fake jobs.

Glen Fleishman (00:57:51):
It was a perfect, yeah, it was a fake Steve jobs. And I was like, that is it's you know, chef's kiss quote is yeah. The open handset Alliance was a way for Google to dominate a segment of the industry and to give handset makers and telephone, you know, tele phone carriers, wireless carriers, a way to have skin in the game and control the, the outcome in a, in a way that apple wasn't allowing. Right. But in the end, what if we wound up with is you've got really Samsung. I know there are other, I mean there's other companies in the business, but are any of them making a majority? Are they making real profit, doing anything from besides Samsung in the space or doing innovative things at this point, they were a few years ago. So does it wind up being Google and Samsung are really the Android makers and Google has to essentially take over that. Isn't that? I mean, by the, by announcing a 20, 23 tablet, isn't that kind of saying, well, we're getting into the hard, I mean, not getting into, I realize, but we're gonna make this a priority in the way that apple has. It just feels like they've kind of ignored a lot of stuff going by hoping partnerships would make it happen when they weren't as interested.

Leo Laporte (00:58:52):
Well, I remember they didn't say anything during IO about Chrome OS, which is arguably that a very successful, I mean, second, only to Android in terms of success, they didn't even mention it at IO, which was weird. So I, I looked up the fake Steve jobs quote, which came from 2007 and is just as applicable today. He says, does it not occur to anyone that Google is desperately grasping at straws lately? This is 2007. Nothing they've ever done outside of searches ever worked. This is 2007. It's still true. 15 years later. 

Denise Howell (00:59:30):
Okay. Here's, here's something that caught my eye from Google IO. <Laugh> imagine you are on the Italian Riviera. You are recording. Yes. Some very, very cool lightly tinted sunglasses. Yes. To on the beach. And you are so looking forward to interacting with the Italian local populace, aah Stanley Tuchi on his show or what have

Leo Laporte (00:59:54):
You. Yes, yes. You're.

Denise Howell (00:59:55):
You're gonna go to, yes. You're gonna do some cooking. You're gonna do some dining, but you do not speak Italian. They didn't, they have the glasses that are gonna translate for

Leo Laporte (01:00:04):
You. But, but here's the problem. The Italians are gonna look at me wearing these spectacles and say, get outta here to the ugly person. You must be a man <laugh> they

Denise Howell (01:00:12):
Need a better form factor. This

Leo Laporte (01:00:14):
Is it's early days yet. They're very nerdy. Yes. but this is cool, but see, this is my problem. And it's just what you were saying. Caitlin forward looking, they always do this at Google. I, they, they talk about stuff. Remember they, the whole big thing with the Google earbuds and you'd put them in and somebody else would put them in and you'd be talking each and a different language and you'd hear them and your language. And they'd hear you in. Yeah. Remember that, that was five years ago. Where are those? They never came out. It

Glen Fleishman (01:00:43):
It's a measure how Microsoft doesn't promote themselves very well anymore. I think Microsoft's doing some great work it's been done. It's been very solid for years and they added a feature to Skype. I think it was years ago. It's stunningly perfect translation, but also transcription. So my wife has some vision impairment issues. I know a lot of people with, with low vision and hearing, you know, or hearing impairment and so forth. I, I did an interview once with somebody who had no hearing, but was using an AI translator to transcribe as I spoke. So these are incredible innovations. And so Skype has had this feature built in and and nobody knows it exists. I think.

Leo Laporte (01:01:19):
Yeah. I remember a Mike

Glen Fleishman (01:01:20):
Very, very, very

Leo Laporte (01:01:21):
Good announced. It was a very cool demo. It works and it works. It's here and you can use it. It's like, and

Glen Fleishman (01:01:27):
Everyone's like, oh, alright, whatever. It's one of the most advanced thing that's ever been released in this area. I maybe, and that's available instantly. And and I said, oh no, Google that feature they had that they never released. That's the focus. So it's kind of

Leo Laporte (01:01:39):
Funny. Google does have real time captioning, which I love in the pixel six. And I think they're rolling it out to Android 12 as well. And they said that they will have translation in that, which, which again could be very cool. That might be more closer than these glasses. Ultimately, these glasses are great. I mean they showed a video of two women. The mother only spoke Mandarin. The daughter only spoke English. They're wearing these glasses as her mother speaks. She's seeing an English translation and the heads up display. So she's looking right at her mother, but she's seeing the text in front of, you know, pro projected in front of her. So she can, and then she can talk back in English and her mother again, wonderful demo. I thought a great demo. But a demo only, and I, you know, this will, it will remain to be seen. And of course they aren't gonna be so ugly. <Laugh> although, you know, they're not as bad as Google glass, right. I mean, that's pretty cool,

Denise Howell (01:02:37):
But they, they <affirmative>, but it they definite they need to follow me's lead and partner up with someone like RayBan or better.

Leo Laporte (01:02:44):
Yeah. Mm-hmm yeah. Well, but there's a problem cuz you gotta get a computer in there. You know, what they didn't show is the battery life is four and a half minutes probably. You know, I mean

Denise Howell (01:02:53):
It's,

Leo Laporte (01:02:54):
It's gotta fit in the temple. This is a hard thing to do with the current technology. So this is, you know, it's very Google where they show stuff, but it, it might as well be science fiction even. So they did announce the watch. Caitlyn's all excited. And I think it's a beautiful, I think it's a nice looking watch and I'd love to see them do something with Android wear. And I, and as I agree with you Denise, I think it'd be nice to see some competition for the apple watch, which I'm wearing mm-hmm <affirmative> but they said, but it's not a <laugh> it's available this fall with the, with the pixel seven. It's like, okay. So, oh, they announced the pixel six, a available in two months, July 21st, pre-order July 28th delivery.

Denise Howell (01:03:37):
What's I'm wearing an apple watch too. What is the killer app for an apple watch?

Leo Laporte (01:03:43):
I think it's different depending on who you are.

Denise Howell (01:03:46):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:03:46):
For most people it's health. Right. And this is where Google, because they bought Fitbit could make Android wear as good as the apple watch in, in terms of that. I don't know if they will be because even the Fitbits, I think the heart rate that monitor on apple is better than anything. Even the Fitbits. Right. Am I wrong? I don't know. Does anybody wear a Fitbit? I wear old Fitbit. Fitbit.

Caitlyn McGarry (01:04:10):
Yeah. Yeah. Fitbit's definitely gotten way better in recent years. And I think Fitbit software has always been really good, but Fitbit's hardware team. I don't, there's some questionable decisions being made over there <laugh> so the pixel watch looks great and that was like a big concern. So if they can figure out how to marry the Fitbit software and fix some of the problems with wear OS, then it, it looks like a really, you know, it looks like it will be a potential apple walk drive. And I think the timing, I think they announced, you know, coming this fall because like, people are wondering what to buy. They know the apple watch comes out every September with the iPhone. So I, I think setting some expectations there is good. Or maybe they're trying to rush something part of this to to beat Samsung part

Leo Laporte (01:05:01):
Of this is cuz it always leaks out right. As the pixel watch did in the pixel seven, they even showed pictures of that. Cuz it's gonna leak out cause they can't control it.

Caitlyn McGarry (01:05:09):
I mean, they've been talking about there have been pixel watch rumors for right years and years and years. Like I, yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:05:16):
I feel like pic at Google at this point is just saying yeah, yeah, you're right. Here's what it looks like.

Denise Howell (01:05:20):
<Laugh>

Leo Laporte (01:05:22):
But they didn't talk about features at all. So to answer your question, Denise, I think health is one thing, but it's gotta be as good as the apple watch the apple watch. I think apple does a huge amount and I'm look I'm, I'm not an apple fan boy, but I think they do a huge amount of machine learning stuff with people doing a lot of things to figure out what are the rhythms of those exercises so they can accurately measure them. And I think that they really have the Kings of this. So for that for a lot of people, there's a great book that just came out trip Michaels after Steve. In fact I'm gonna interview trip on Thursday. Really wonderful reading it right now. When the apple watch, when Johnny I've designed the apple watch, he envisioned it as a fashion statement. Yeah. He, he, you know, that's why they did an $89,000 gold one. Cause he, he saw it not as, not as, you know, as technology he wanted to compete with Rolex. He saw it as a fashion statement. And then later as time went by and Johnny left and team cook kind of gained a EE, it became, it was clear that it was about fitness, but I still do things. For instance, I have drafts on my complication. I record notes all the time.

Denise Howell (01:06:32):
Oh, that's

Leo Laporte (01:06:32):
Good. So it's useful for that.

Denise Howell (01:06:35):
I, I think it's interesting that you hit on fitness because I've tried to have fitness, be a thing that is useful for me on the watch, you know, like I'll track my workouts and things, but then I, I guess I'm just not the self data Maven, right? That many people are, you know, I know that I worked out. I don't need

Leo Laporte (01:06:54):
Watch.

Denise Howell (01:06:55):
Tell

Leo Laporte (01:06:55):
Does not count unless your ring's closed. In fact, I'll go, I'll go to workout with my trainer for an hour and I'll curse myself Tam and I forgot my watch. Like that didn't count like that did not count cause I didn't get the rings.

Denise Howell (01:07:10):
So there's something wrong with that. Right? I agree Larry. But then agree. That's really the only, the only thing. I mean, people in chat in response to my question said the clock, that's the killer

Leo Laporte (01:07:22):
Terrible watch

Denise Howell (01:07:23):
Time. It is no it's Was gonna say not a great watch. No,

Glen Fleishman (01:07:26):
I was gonna say that. And then thought I was being too facetious because

Denise Howell (01:07:29):
No, no. I think it's actually

Leo Laporte (01:07:30):
A valid time. X makes a much better watch for a 10th, the price.

Denise Howell (01:07:35):
True. But, but the thing that, the thing that keeps me wearing this thing is I don't always have my phone with me. Yes. And yet I always wanna be reachable by my family and clients and other and it tells me, so

Leo Laporte (01:07:47):
For you notifications are a big deal.

Denise Howell (01:07:49):
Yes. Yeah. It tells me when I'm getting a phone call and lets me decide how to respond to

Leo Laporte (01:07:53):
That. Do you answer on the watch ever

Denise Howell (01:07:54):
Sometimes. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:07:56):
It's like the, when they first put phones on airplanes and you go, oh yeah, you won't believe where I am right now.

Glen Fleishman (01:08:04):
Jeff Bezos, by the way, Jeff Bezos, big user of air phone, he would call into, we were having a hiring meeting. I don't think this is still covered by any non-disclosure payments. We're having a hiring meeting for a administrative assistant for a VP. And he called in from the air phone to contribute to somebody who was Sevenly he? And he would've loud conversations on airplanes about corporate

Leo Laporte (01:08:29):
Matters. Oh

Glen Fleishman (01:08:30):
My all the time. And

Leo Laporte (01:08:31):
He was on commercial. He was playing commercial. Yeah.

Glen Fleishman (01:08:33):
He was on commercial. This is

Leo Laporte (01:08:34):
How long ago that was

Glen Fleishman (01:08:35):
By the way before, before the IPO, he would fly and talk air. He run up these huge air phone bills. So during a little insight, his

Leo Laporte (01:08:41):
Air yacht business genius <laugh> it was, and they were so left. So now you do it. You won't believe I'm talking to you on my watch. Nobody's ever impressed by the way, when I do that, cuz actually it sounds just like a phone. It doesn't sound any sound, any worse,

Glen Fleishman (01:08:59):
Say apple used the watch as a way to iterate on this idea. Right? There was nobody who they felt was big enough in the wear space. So they came out with a thing that was engineered around fashion. They didn't know exactly what it would do, what the market was. And they went through a few versions. They're like, oh it's about fitness. And then they leaned into it. Exactly. You know, I've got a, I have an underlying heart condition. It's fully treatable. I should live a long and healthy life. Oh good. And I don't need it monitored constantly, but I gotta tell you the EKG feature and an apple watch. I haven't bought one yet. I owned one, one briefly when the 1.0, came out, I tested it for a while and I sold it to somebody else and I haven't owned one since, but you know, they're slowly the, the, I need a little quantification.

Glen Fleishman (01:09:36):
I work at a desk all day. I need a little quantification to force me to reconcile what I'm doing. Yes. And then these extra features the pulse. I mean I don't know if any of, you know, but no people that this has happened to, but I know at least I wanna say it's three people now who an apple watch has warned them about a cardiac event and it may have saved their life and a couple of them written articles about it. Yeah. but it's, you know, then there's thou and that's a incredible benefit. So they have found use cases that are, you know, not fitness is general, but I think there's a lot of people worried generally about health who are happy to, to get one for the fall, the fall sensor, the EKG feature.

Leo Laporte (01:10:13):
I got my mom an apple watch just for the fall sensor. She's 89. And I want very amazing yeah. To be able to call for help. It was funny. It was kind of hysterical at Google IO. Remember we've all seen the apple ads. It was during the NFL playoffs in the super bowl of, you know, I help I've crashed and I don't know. And I can't, and, and they're calling for help. And the help comes from the apple watch. Google showed the same ad <laugh> they did the same thing. It's like, did you not see that apple already kind of did that ad? I guess they wanna show that they also, you can call for help with your Google phone. Well, not yet, but soon you can call for help with your Google. Don't get hurt yet. Wait for a little bit. I ju I feel like Google's lost its mojo, to be honest with you. Just like fake Steve jobs 15 years ago, I, I feel like they're desperately searching for a follow up and search and advertising is keeping them afloat, but they have yet to find anything that is, you know, that they're good enough at, to be honest with you. I mean, Android's successful, but not cuz of Google cuz of Samsung and a hundred other manufacturers.

Denise Howell (01:11:20):
Now, Leo they're exceptionally good at getting fined by

Leo Laporte (01:11:23):
The EU and that <laugh> That's their secret power. They,

Glen Fleishman (01:11:28):
They just have too much going though. Google fi was interesting idea that they kind of lost steam on the I can't, what was the thing? We saw so many ads for the

Leo Laporte (01:11:37):
Just go the Google phone was a good idea that they lost steam on that's every single Google wave, Google plus Google,

Glen Fleishman (01:11:45):
Do you follow killed by Google on on TWITtter. It's a greats, very active. They have to post all the time.

Leo Laporte (01:11:50):
The other thing I like to follow is web three is going just great. We're gonna talk about crypto web three. Caitlin's got a lot to say about that. She does a podcast about it. That's coming up in just a little bit. So stay tuned. Great to have all three of you. This is fun. I told Caitlin before the show think of it as a cocktail party. And we're just all kind of talking about stuff we're interested in. The only thing missing is an adult beverage. So please, during this break, if you'd like to get a little, a sniffer of Brandy or something, go, go right ahead and be my, I

Denise Howell (01:12:22):
Have my TWIT coffee.

Leo Laporte (01:12:23):
<Laugh> yeah, I saw that. Me too. <Laugh> yeah, me too. I have to drink coffee just to keep up with you guys. I keep the brain going. Let me talk a little bit about, since we were talking about crypto and you've probably seen what's happened to crypto over the last week, our show today brought to you by wealth front every once in a while. I'll see my, well, my kids, for instance, my daughter was doing her taxes and she said, dad, do I have to report crypto? I said, well, did you make any money? She says, oh no, I lost a lot of money. I said, no, you don't have to report that. It's okay. She said, whew. She was big on doge coin. And perhaps you remember it I, this is what I tell my kids. And I tell you, and I especially tell young people and I wish somebody told me this when I was in my twenties.

Leo Laporte (01:13:09):
Sure. It's fun to play. The stock market timing is so hard. You can't really know when a stock's gonna take off or when it's gonna go down. You, if in fact maybe you've learned that same thing with Bitcoin, same within with any crypto look, stock trading crypto. It's fun. It's a wild ride, but the thrill of risking, it all is best enjoyed in moderation. Like, you know, playing roulette or eating tacos from the taco truck down the street. If you're playing the market, I hope for your sake, you're stashing some safer money in a place like Wealthfront day trading stocks is not the secret to investing success. Wealth front has a ton of data show. This is important. This is important that time in the market, almost always beats timing. The market wealth front has globally diversified very important words, globally diversified portfolios. They do a lot of things you would do.

Leo Laporte (01:14:04):
If you wanted to pay attention all the time, like tax loss, harvesting, taking advantage of losses to boost your returns with automatic tax breaks, rebalancing automatically. So you don't don't get too heavy in any one sector. Those are all done automatically. So you don't have to spend a lot of energy thinking about it. Now, wealth front's gotten it's nice because people have in the past, you've put money in Wealthfront and you say, I I have a certain amount of risk tolerance. Here's my timeframe. I'm saving for a college fund for my kids or to buy my first house or maybe for retirement. And then they would make the investments based on what you said. Now you can do a little more, they have a portfolio of funds handpicked by their financial experts in categories. You might be interested in like social responsibility clean energy, yes, even crypto cannabis.

Leo Laporte (01:14:51):
So if you have an interest in a certain sector, you can use wealth front to get involved in those sectors. Again, using their tools to build your wealth over time with a globally diversified portfolio. When we first start talking about wealth front, it was early days. They've done. I'm so proud of them. They've done so well because they're doing the right thing. Now, 27 billion in assets, half a million people are building their wealth with wealth front Investipedia, just named them best robo advisor for 2022. And we're not even halfway through the year to start building your wealth and get your first $5,000 managed for free for life. You go to wealthfront.com/TWITt that's w E a L T H F R O NT wealthfront.com/TWITt to start building your wealth. It's easy. It's automatic wealthfront.com/TWIT gets started today. Wealthfront.Com/TWITt. So that's why <laugh> I always say, you know, I have a Bitcoin wallet with 7.85 Bitcoin in it, which has gone up, been gone down <laugh> but I forgot the password. So I am a oh no, regardless. I'm long hold. Right. <laugh> I am <laugh>

Leo Laporte (01:16:10):
I'm gonna you're hold until quantum, until quantum computering is a real thing before I I'm dead, I'll have a, you know, a hundred cubic computer that can solve it. Meanwhile, I'm just gonna hold it right. There, there have been moments when I've wondered, cuz that's almost eight. That would be almost half a million dollars in at its peak. Oh mm-hmm <affirmative>, crypto's crashed a little bit. Caitlin. You cover crypto and, and other similar things in your, your podcast. Now you're a young person. Do, do you look at crypto thinking, oh, that's the investment of, of the future?

Caitlyn McGarry (01:16:47):
No, absolutely not.

Leo Laporte (01:16:48):
<Laugh> it's cause you saw the ad the, was it FTX that had Larry David saying no to everything and it's like, okay, boomer, you know, you just don't understand. And every time I say it's just a pyramid scheme, don't get involved in NFTs or crypto and people say, okay, boomer, I'm not taking advice from you. <Laugh>

Caitlyn McGarry (01:17:08):
I mean, it is obviously a wildly speculative asset and we've seen over the last few months that you know, as the war in Ukraine has been going on inflation gas prices, like there are just a lot of economic factors happening right now. And everyone who seemed to have some foresight started getting out of crypto last toward the end of last year. And now it's, and now it's hitting, you know, retail investors, just like regular people who bought into the hype and they're left holding the bag like, oh,

Leo Laporte (01:17:45):
If you

Caitlyn McGarry (01:17:46):
Isn't

Leo Laporte (01:17:47):
That interesting

Glen Fleishman (01:17:48):
<Laugh> I know, right?

Leo Laporte (01:17:49):
Yeah.

Caitlyn McGarry (01:17:49):
Weird how people who had incentive to make a lot of money and got out. But

Leo Laporte (01:17:55):
You mean when Matt Damon told me fortune favors the brave, he wasn't <laugh>

Caitlyn McGarry (01:18:01):
I need to, I need to check on Reese Witherspoon's crypto holding <laugh>

Leo Laporte (01:18:06):
Whew. By the way, none of those famous people who pushed crypto are talking right now <laugh> I

Caitlyn McGarry (01:18:14):
Know, of course not. And like, I mean obviously taking financial advice from celebrities is a horrible idea, but people are easily influenced and crypto seemed like, you know, it was on an upward trajectory that wasn't gonna end until it violently did <laugh> so yeah, it's been really actually heartbreaking to watch people on Reddit and TWITtter. Talk about how they've put their life savings in, you know, various currencies and it's

Leo Laporte (01:18:43):
Horrible. Ah, so on one day last Thursday, 200 billion erased from the crypto market because people are getting out. Let me just see what, although Bitcoin is that right now

Glen Fleishman (01:18:54):
I would point out there is an interesting thing, which is that I wonder how much actual money people lost. I think there's a lot of stories of individuals investing at the wrong time, but because Bitcoin doesn't have market makers, I mean, no one knows $200 billion shaved off is artificial. It could be that the actual cash loss that was put in was $5 billion. Right? So there is a sense that with the huge run up and you know, you've seen those numbers about the percentage of people who own any Bitcoin who actually own it's, it's very tiny percentage own the majority of Bitcoin and Ethereum, I think or more than the majority. And so those people, especially people have held it for a long period of time. They had a lot of paper losses, which can feel very painful. So I'm not disregarding, I know a lot of people did buy in, stopped buying.

Leo Laporte (01:19:37):
Okay. Had a very significant paper loss as well. <Laugh> I mean all, was it

Glen Fleishman (01:19:41):
Tied to Bitcoin? Think

Leo Laporte (01:19:42):
It tied to Bitcoin? No, it was tied to the full faith and credit of the fine us economy. Yeah. But

Glen Fleishman (01:19:48):
I I've been watching the chart on my too, and it's very painful some days, very, very painful watch,

Leo Laporte (01:19:53):
But it's, it's easy to forget the gains we made over the last few years. Right? Yeah. It's been a bull market for a decade or more. So, you know, we made a lot of gains then, and it's just a shame to see it going all, go to hell.

Glen Fleishman (01:20:06):
I just told my children, they're gonna have to support me when I'm old and you know, that's now the responsibilities.

Leo Laporte (01:20:10):
So, so you said an interesting thing, Helen, I'm really curious. Why is Bitcoin going down at the same time as the us stock market and other investments are tanking. It's not tied to those wouldn't. I mean, I mean doesn't gold go up when stocks go down, wouldn't they be wouldn't crypto be a good investment now?

Caitlyn McGarry (01:20:32):
Well, because no, I mean, crypto is just like an inherently risky investment much riskier than, you know,

Leo Laporte (01:20:43):
Traditional Stocks gold is made up too. I mean the value, the price of ounce of gold has nothing to do with its actual intrinsic value.

Caitlyn McGarry (01:20:51):
I mean, right. Like we all like money means anything and it's like speculation because we all, we all agree to it. Right, right.

Leo Laporte (01:20:58):
<Laugh> right. It's all Fiat, right? Yes.

Caitlyn McGarry (01:21:00):
If we all decide money is worth nothing then yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:21:05):
So that I really puzzled cuz I, I, I do think that when the stock market tanks, as it has people go to other investments, nontraditional investments like gold and I would've thought that Bitcoin would've benefited from that. I'm just curious. Any, any thought Denise, any thoughts? I don't know if you're the crypto pro or crypto con actually

Denise Howell (01:21:28):
I'm not. I, I tend to think about, you know, how and whether crypto should be regulated and of course there's a call, there are always calls to regulate it because it's at this point not regulated. And the stock market is, and as you point out, people are perfectly capable of losing their shirt in the stock market. Yeah. So apparently our treasury secretary is concerned about stable coins, Janet yell. Well,

Leo Laporte (01:21:58):
That'ss another interesting story, isn't it?

Denise Howell (01:22:01):
Yes. Who are, those would be coins that are somehow supposedly tied to the actual value of the dollar. 

Leo Laporte (01:22:10):
And yet Luna, which is in theory, stable coin mm-hmm <affirmative> has dropped 99, well percent in the

Caitlyn McGarry (01:22:18):
Lunas Luna currency tied to Tara, which is the stable

Leo Laporte (01:22:22):
Coins. Oh, I'm sorry. But Tara went down too, right?

Caitlyn McGarry (01:22:26):
Yeah. There was a,

Leo Laporte (01:22:27):
I thought stable coins.

Glen Fleishman (01:22:28):
I did not even know. This

Leo Laporte (01:22:29):
Could not go.

Glen Fleishman (01:22:30):
These are, these are algorithmic stable coins, which I did. I wrote a book about cryptocurrency last year. I did algorithm stable coins.

Leo Laporte (01:22:37):
Well, welcome, welcome expert.

Glen Fleishman (01:22:39):
Well,

Denise Howell (01:22:39):
Yes. Can,

Glen Fleishman (01:22:40):
Can think Caitlin will know that Glen

Denise Howell (01:22:41):
And Caitlin, please explain all

Caitlyn McGarry (01:22:43):
This. No know Glen, I, I actually was not super familiar with the concept of an algorithmic stable coin which has never been stress tested before. And that's why yeah. The Tara Luna situation has gone so wildly off the rails, but Glen, yeah. If you can dive into like the technical aspects of, of the algorithmic part of the stable coin.

Glen Fleishman (01:23:04):
Well sure. And you know, the reason it didn't come up last years, I don't think people were as widely invested. I think more and more infrastructure got built in this book, by the way, it started as like a neutral like, well, I don't think you should invest in it, but here's how the technology works and what you should do. And it's turning slowly into a like stone invested. It's gonna be like a screen by the time I revise it lately. But you know, a cryp, a stable coin is supposed to be backed just like a, a money market fund. You know, you don't wanna break the buck. That's what that was. What happened during the Lehman brothers meltdown is the buck was almost broken on funds that are supposed to maintain a dollar, right. And in of real money. And that was gonna cause a huge upset in the entire financial market and required massive worldwide intervention to prevent a complete financial meltdown in 2008, right.

Glen Fleishman (01:23:49):
It was 2008. So the stablecoin idea is very similar is tether is the, the organization that has the highest valued one. And they said at one point they maintained a dollar in reserves for every dollar they were issuing. And that has turned out to be entirely not true through their own reporting. And worked by a lot of other people. Who've trying to figure out they own a lot of commercial paper. They own Bitcoin. They own a lot of stuff. That's not dollar. So that's allegedly the best stable coin. And it has tens of billions of dollars in it. The Terra Luna thing is algorithmic stablecoin in which the two, the boy, this is the complicated thing. It's kind of like the two are interlinked so that if one waxes the other should wane, because there's a fixed exchange rate between the two,

Leo Laporte (01:24:31):
The Terra is a UST it's been set up algorithmically. So it can be re redeemed or minted for exactly $1 worth of Luna at any time. That's the problem though, because the value of $1 of Luna <laugh> has dropped 99.7%. It's exactly.

Glen Fleishman (01:24:53):
But neither Luna worth anything. It's like, it's exactly point it's like from,

Denise Howell (01:24:58):
What're saying then this isn't a regulatory problem. This is a fraud and false

Leo Laporte (01:25:02):
Advertising problem. Sure. Sounds like it. Well, except that so people, the, the fed and other government banks have all said, we're gonna have to do crypto sometime, and it's gonna be tied to some sort form a stable coin. And this is why Janet yelling is terrified that that, that Tara is falling. It shouldn't,

Glen Fleishman (01:25:22):
This, it ties back to liquidity though and reserves. And so, you know what upholds Bitcoin, when it, why is Bitcoin worth $65,000 each at one point in 30,000 at another, the liquidity of the exchanges. So you have a small number of organizations that have, do not have super deep pockets. They're not central banks where a bunch of people rush in and say, I wanna sell Bitcoin. And they say, we will, you know, they're making the market. So they're gonna be marketing it up and up and up, or, you know, lower and lower and lower and lower because they don't be, want to be held with Bitcoin. They can't resell to other suckers. So without essential bank, you have no way to prevent this kind of race to the bottom because the exchanges only possess a fraction of the reserves necessary to maintain the entire currency. A stable coin like tether is or SD, let's say tethers S D dollar denominated. One is supposed to overcome that by having actual reserves. So you can't break their buck, but in effect they don't, they've been sued. I think the New York state attorney General's office has a settlement with them. They're under investigation by all these organizations. They, I don't think you can redeem tether in a lot of countries, even it's a mess.

Leo Laporte (01:26:29):
So yeah, the remember in the in the great depression, the run on the banks banks have never kept all of the money that in theory, they hold in the bank, you can't go to the bank and say, gimme my money. But they, but there are there are regulations about the percentage of money they're supposed to hold. Right? well, thank

Glen Fleishman (01:26:50):
You.

Leo Laporte (01:26:52):
I'm trying my best chief Stewart coming for our money. <Laugh>

Glen Fleishman (01:27:00):
Nobody's not here. It's in Mr. Ferrari's

Leo Laporte (01:27:01):
House. <Laugh> yes. And you and your money, you, you built a baseball, so yeah. So yeah. <Laugh>. I don't know where we got, got a little sidetrack, but, but you're saying that the ostensibly, these stable coins claimed that they were fully backed. They were one hundreds percent backed by actual well, tether

Glen Fleishman (01:27:20):
Tether was, was backed. They alleged, they were backed by actual cash reserves, like real cash money,

Leo Laporte (01:27:25):
A percent percentage thereof, or the entire amount.

Glen Fleishman (01:27:28):
Yeah. A hundred percent, a hundred percent. Their thing was at any point you could redeem a dollar of tether for a dollar in real Fiat currency. And they were maintaining reserves. And at one point their site said, we, we do this. And then the site stops saying that. And then there's been lawsuits and, and investigation. Since the algorithmic, stablecoin says, we have two boxes with nothing in them, but we have slips of paper. And if this one starts to get low, we'll give you a certain number of slips of paper for the other. And then that box will fill up. There's no value to any of these slips of paper. They're just two empty boxes. Right. You know, it's weird. It's, it's, it's a, a double faith hypnosis thing. If you believe, you have to believe in both. If you stop believing in one, I guess you're supposed to believe more than the other. And people lost so much faith that I mean, even in this case, the, the organization that sort of keeps Tara running, they have some Bitcoin reserves in order to help stabilize the price. And I think that's one of the stories is that where did the Bitcoin go? That they claimed they had that they could push into this to push the price back up and stabilize the whole Tara LUN exchange.

Leo Laporte (01:28:32):
Somebody in our chat room dens was saying UST was attacked that it was intentionally destabilized

Glen Fleishman (01:28:38):
People claim that

Leo Laporte (01:28:40):
Interesting.

Glen Fleishman (01:28:41):
It'll be, it's gonna be, it's gonna be tricky. A lot of people are, people will cite things like BlackRock and other organiza, other groups. Well

Leo Laporte (01:28:48):
It's rice.

Glen Fleishman (01:28:49):
So the allegations said it all allegations. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. But, and someone could have attacked it, but the, the question is this is always the issue. If someone wants to attack a cryptocurrency, I mean, people have talked about, you know, the 51% attack you could do against Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies where you control enough mining power, you could roll back trans transactions and double spend and do all these terrible things. But the issue is people have so much money invested. So someone would have to have no stake in Tara Luna and expend some amount of money or, or other cryptocurrency to destabilize it in the hopes of getting some gain, unless there's simply a troll in which case they lose all this money. So there's something weird there because why would you burn your own money? And I don't think that's been determined. They're putting a squeeze on something else that they had a hedge against. I don't know. I mean, that's the part that I don't think has been answered.

Leo Laporte (01:29:34):
So I'm God, we're back to Elon again. Aren't we

Glen Fleishman (01:29:36):
Oh,

Leo Laporte (01:29:37):
Comes back to

Caitlyn McGarry (01:29:38):
<Laugh>.

Glen Fleishman (01:29:39):
So I don't think even he would

Leo Laporte (01:29:40):
Do that. So there are some, by the way Glen's book take control of cryptocurrency is available are, and you update that because it's a take control book.

Glen Fleishman (01:29:51):
Yeah. It's updated. I think it's a few months out of date, which means that everything has changed. I need know another updates. So from January is last time. Yeah. But I have argued with the I to argue, I've talked to the editor, I should say, should we call it, take control of not investing in cryptocurrency? Like let's lean really into it. I don't want to give it anything.

Leo Laporte (01:30:07):
Well, there are those who say that you know, cryptocurrency requires the greater fool, right? The value of it depends on somebody coming along saying, well, I'll give you, I'll give you $60,000 for that. Bitcoin. Have we run out of greater fools? Is that what happened? Did the pyramid collapse, or as some say, it's it's because the, the of interest rates going up that it's better to put your money somewhere else. I don't, you know, I guess we, these are questions that just can't be answered. We just don't know. What do you say on your podcast, Caitlin, when this, this must come up, right?

Caitlyn McGarry (01:30:43):
<Laugh> well, our most recent episode was about the crypto crash and our lovely colleague Owen Thomas, who is the FinTech editor protocol came to explain everything to us. I

Leo Laporte (01:30:56):
Gotta get Alex Wilhelm, Owen, Thomas, and maybe Glen, I don't know. We're gotta get some people come in and explain all of this. The thing is they can't either. I ask them and they don't, they no, no one can explain this.

Caitlyn McGarry (01:31:10):
Right. It just, yeah. It seems like everything feels really destabilized right now. And so, yeah, that might be the crypto. The real story crypto is the one thing. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:31:18):
Crypto's big crash. It's the protocol source code podcast. If you wanna,

Glen Fleishman (01:31:24):
I have, I have one quick theory, which is just that we don't understand how leveraged people are, who invested and because the liquid liquidity is so low at these exchanges, it is possible that a relatively small number of people, including small investors, found that with the drop in the market, the rise in interest rates, they're concerned about paying bills. They suddenly realized that they needed to liquidate their Bitcoin or whatever holdings they had and they liquidated, and it could require a small number of people moving out because of the liquidity that it caused the price to crash so rapidly that larger players get involved. And you have algorithmic movements by you know, there's all these institutional investors now involved in cryptocurrency who are doing, you know, second by second millisecond arbitrage and all the other nonsense. So there could have been a, essentially an, almost an accidental crash as people pulled money out, which fed on itself

Leo Laporte (01:32:12):
A, almost a fly flash crash, kind of.

Glen Fleishman (01:32:15):
Yeah. And then those, because those people actually the money, they have to pay their rent or bills or mortgage or food. And so they took it out and, and unless you have big institutional providers, central banks and so forth supporting

Leo Laporte (01:32:27):
That's an interesting

Glen Fleishman (01:32:28):
Financial in instrument at that time. It can collapse and you know,

Leo Laporte (01:32:32):
Yeah. That's very, that's very interesting. There's

Caitlyn McGarry (01:32:34):
Also, oh, fun. I think you, I think you nailed it. Like that's it? Yeah. I

Leo Laporte (01:32:38):
Think we solved it. It's a

Glen Fleishman (01:32:38):
Liquidity. All right. We're done. Yeah, that's

Leo Laporte (01:32:40):
It <laugh>. But, but I also, I also think that people are starting to realize there's shenanigans going on, for instance, we're starting to learn a lot of NFT situations. There's a lot of trading back and forth to get, to boost the price up between people, you know, selling it to themselves and buying it back and selling it to themselves, buying it back to boost up the price, hoping then for a greater fool to come along and say, oh, I gotta get that. Look at the price that's going through the roof. And those shenanigans, I think are scaring people. There's also the story of corn coin base, which, oh, my, now I wanna say this. I don't think Coinbase is going bankrupt. I don't think that's the issue. In fact Brian Armstrong's, the CEO said there's no risk of bankruptcy, but they were required in their most recent S sec filing to say, should we go bankrupt?

Leo Laporte (01:33:32):
<Laugh> you as somebody holding cryptocurrency in a custodial wallet at Coinbase would not be like, if your bank went up belly up, you'd get insurance. It wouldn't be like that. If we went belly up, you'd be an unsecured creditor. In other words, get in line to get your money <laugh> and now Armstrong said, look, we, you know, this is just legalese. We had to, we had to say it we are not going bankrupt, but it is, it does probably gets, gives people a little cause to pause, to think and say, oh, wait a minute. It's not an insured. It's not insured. It's not a bank. It's you know, in fact, I think probably a custodial wallet is a bad idea in general. You should do like me. You should have a wallet that you control and lose the password. I'm telling you It's

Glen Fleishman (01:34:28):
Less safe. The highest security you can have. You've talked about the story before the guy in the guy in England who has the drive that he's put the dump.

Leo Laporte (01:34:35):
I think he give up on it. Yeah,

Glen Fleishman (01:34:37):
I did. I mean, I feel terrible for him. I met a guy once I was researching a story for the economist back. I don't know, like eight years ago. And there was a guy in Seattle I met up with and it turned out, I found out later he was personally generating in his apartment, a single digit number of Bitcoins, like a high single digit number at that point. Cause he had happened to get some of the more faster chips during a brief window. And he said, oh yeah, I've got a, you know, a dead drive over there. I've done everything to recover. It it's my off cold storage. And it has, I think it was like $250,000 in Bitcoin on it, which would be worth, I don't know, like $50 million a hundred million today. And it was just dead. It was dead. He had the keys and I'm thinking, what percentage, how many, you know, ostensible fake tens of billions of dollars are just permanently in a dump or in Leo's wall in Leo's hard drive. Sorry

Leo Laporte (01:35:21):
Leo. Yeah, no it's Denise's brother James Howell who who had a 20 gig hard drive with thousands of Bitcoin on it accidentally in the landfill it's worth, I think billions, half a billion.

Glen Fleishman (01:35:36):
This's not your brother-in-law is it? You said just kidding. No,

Leo Laporte (01:35:39):
Steve was joking. <Laugh> how's it coming?

Glen Fleishman (01:35:41):
The world. It's a it's

Leo Laporte (01:35:42):
Small world. It's Jason how's brother. That's who it is. Nevermind. <laugh> anyway, he's been trying desperately to get people to dig up the landfill cause the hard drives in there. Oh yeah. I think I remember him saying, I just try not to think of it now. <Laugh> I don't

Glen Fleishman (01:35:56):
We got divorced over it. It's

Leo Laporte (01:35:57):
You know, well, our own Steve Gibson, who in the early days of Bitcoin, we did a whole episode on, on, and, and he was in trans by as MI, still the mathematics of it, the, the cleverness of you know, the, the blockchain and what Satoshi had put together was quite, you know, a lot of forethought, brilliant idea. And so he said, well, let me create a Bitcoin mining rig and just see what happens the next morning. He gets up 50 Bitcoin fell out of it, 50. Wow. He has. Since he didn't, you know, cuz it was worth maybe a hundred bucks or something at the time. Yeah. They put the hard drive, the hard drive's long gone, 50 Bitcoin gone. Aw mm-hmm <affirmative> so I, whenever Steve mentions that, I don't worry so much about my, my, my 7.85

Denise Howell (01:36:40):
Bitcoin. So we're, we're joking about all these lost keys and lost drives and things. But when you think about other things that people invest in that are not F D I C insured, they don't have the option of a custodial way of holding those things. <Laugh> right.

Leo Laporte (01:36:56):
Right. Right. So, I mean, at least you could put in a safe deposit box. Yeah.

Denise Howell (01:37:02):
I, what are you gonna do actually hold the share certificates, I guess,

Glen Fleishman (01:37:07):
Are you I'm just old enough. I'm just old enough. I had some sent to me once because I had some restricted shares, a very small amount in an early startup. And I actually had to get the physical shares and do all this weird paperwork. It was like, oh, this is what they're like. There is a story about a guy who I I've never been able to track down the details. Someone told me this. So maybe it's apocryphal. He had worked for a company. It had the value, the shares had gone down so low that he wallpapered his bathroom with him and he forgot about it. And one day he's sitting in the bathroom, he said it and he realizes was sold. It's fortunes were restored. And he steamed them all off his bathroom to exchange them. If anybody knows the origin of that story, I I' was told it so many years ago and it sounds it could be apocryphal, but I love the notion of sitting there on the John and going, oh my God, I'm rich.

Leo Laporte (01:37:51):
There's I can think of a lot of these. There's a, a New York times article about a German programmer living in San Francisco who put his wallet on an iron key, hard drive that gives you 10 guesses to the password. He's forgotten it. He's guest eight, he's got two guesses left. There's about 220 million or was it's now half, half the 220 million in currency. He lost the paper where he wrote down the password <laugh> and he only gets two more guesses. So he's not, he's not thinking they estimate. And I don't, I don't know how much we know, but about 20% of all the Bitcoin mind has been somehow lost 18 and a half million Bitcoin. It worked, it's a whole new meaning to buried treasure. Yeah. Stranded wallets <laugh> things like that. Yeah. let's take a little break. Lots more to talk about with our fine panel.

Leo Laporte (01:38:48):
Glenn Fleishman is here, glen.fun with two NS in the Glen and one N in the fun for all of the stuff he does. We're gonna talk about that. That thing you just bought, which is very cool. That's exciting. A little bit later on Denise Howell is also here, the Internet's lawyer, Denise howell.info and brand new to our panel, but very welcome Caitlin McGarry of news, editor of protocol. I wanna show you all my blue land because we were talking about plastics and it's, you know what I was talking with rod pile does our, this weekend space show about bake light <laugh>, which was a plastic invented in the 19 hundreds. That was the precursor to all the plastics we know today and how it would just crumble. And we've gotten better at better at making plastics. And unfortunately they get thrown out every year, about 5 billion, plastic hand soap and cleaning bottles are thrown away.

Leo Laporte (01:39:53):
That is a lot of plastic. I am personally in my life trying to get rid of single use plastics and blue land has been a really great solution for me. This is an example of a blue land, forever bottle it's made of plastic. Yeah, but the idea is you don't throw it away. In fact, notice it's empty when you get your blue land and they have hand soap. I have the, actually those are nice heavy glass, so you can pump them. I have this is the multi-service cleaner there's window cleaner. I have blue land tablets for my laundry and my dishwasher. They even have Oxy tablets for like for like bleach, but not bleach. All of it is environmentally friendly for a couple of reasons. So what I'll do is I'll fill up this Multisurface bottle with warm water, up to the line.

Leo Laporte (01:40:38):
I'll put in one of these blue land tablets, they smell great. This one is, let me see what the, the set is on this one. I think this is ion lemon. I can't remember, but they smell great. You fill 'em up and they dis the tablet dissolves, and now you've got cleaner, good cleaner in this bottle. You never throw away the bottle it's built to last, but you get more tablets. And by the way, the bottles are about $10. When you buy a kit, the tablet's about $2 and you, they even have subscriptions. You can have a, you know, refresh the plan which we do. So I never run out of tablets. The only thing you're gonna have to get rid of is your preconceived notion that eco-friendly products don't work. These work they're fantastic. A cleaner planet starts by eliminating plastic waste, powerful, effective cleaners for your entire home, by the way, there's another form of waste that comes with all those cleaning bottles.

Leo Laporte (01:41:36):
They're about the, the stuff in the bottles about 90% water. The active ingredient is 10%. So that means we're spending a lot of money. TA trucks bring water around instead of just delivering the active ingredient in a tablet, which you add your own water to. So that's another way. Blueland is really environmentally friendly, beautiful Instagrammable bottles, fill 'em with warm water pop in the hand, Soer spray cleaner tablets. And within minutes you have powerful cleaning products in amazing sense. Iris agave para lemon, lavender eucalyptus. I got the Christmas package last Christmas. I smelled like a gingerbread house for for a whole couple of weeks. It was wonderful. Peppermint. They, they have new scent all the time or unscented. In fact, we use their unscented laundry detergent. It's really great. Blueland even sells wool balls. We have three wool balls. We put in the dryer that reduce static without those wasteful static sheets, they work great.

Leo Laporte (01:42:36):
Oh, and very popular. The Blueland toilet tablet cleaner. You throw in a tablet. You let it dissolve, scrub it with a brush. You're done. They sell out like crazy, cuz they're so good. You can get a kit from the clean essentials kit to their hand, soap duo the plastic free laundry and dishwasher tablets. I actually, they make a great housewarming gift. I gave the complete set to my daughter when she moved into her new apartment. It's so great. It's so great. Bottles. Start at just $10. When you buy a kit, the tablet's just a couple of bucks. Try blue land today. You will love it. Your planet will. Thank you. It's got great ingredients. It's it's great. All around makes you feel good. Right now get 20% off your first order. Blue land.com/TWIT. You gotta go to that address though. Blueland.Com/TWIT. We even use the dish soap.

Leo Laporte (01:43:26):
It's a powder and it comes in that middle bottle in there. It little plastic bottle, you shake it out. It's great. And then you just refill the bottle with more dish. It's so great. Blue land.com/TWIT 20% off your first order of any Blueland product. I, I couldn't recommend it more highly. It makes me feel really good. Refill is the new recycle blueland.com/TWITt. Thank you. Blueland for a great product and for supporting TWITt. Let's see what else is going on. The Royal mail is going to deliver mail to the rural remote islands via drone, the first communities to benefit the aisles of silly happily named. And this it's very muddy Python name and the Scottish islands of Shetland Orne and the Hees 50 drone roots. They're actually pretty big drones. They can hold a significant amount of of mail, a hundred kilograms, 220 pounds of mail do two roots a day, two round trips a day. They don't say in this article, good article from in gadget, but they don't say in the article, what, how the, how they deliver it. Do they just drop it out the back? <Laugh> like they might, I don't know, or put a parachute on it. All it says is after the drone arrives, its destination, a postal worker will retrieve the mail. Maybe they land, maybe they land, it can withstand difficult weather conditions with its autopilot system, wingspan of 10 meters. Pretty cool. Nothing to say about it, but

Denise Howell (01:45:01):
Maybe it just prevents them from using trucks and planes and boats and things to

Leo Laporte (01:45:06):
They'd have to use boats. Yeah. These are all yeah. Pretty remote islands. Yeah.

Denise Howell (01:45:10):
Yeah. Maybe they have a central delivery point and then everybody yeah. Gets their delivery. Oh

Leo Laporte (01:45:14):
Yeah. It doesn't go to you individually. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Although apparently that's what Amazon's doing, which is really weird. Have you seen their sky hook drones where they, they lower your package down? <Laugh> You release it and then it goes off. It's a gimmick. It's gotta be a gimick.

Glen Fleishman (01:45:29):
I, I got a good UK Royal mail story though. Sort of it's a UK story that's related, which is a few months ago. I got an email from a guy who CCD somebody else. I know the Mac world saying I got this problem. I live in Wales and whenever apple adds new or new addresses get added in the UK, like flats of building anywhere in the UK, they put them at my address, apple maps does. Oh. And so I have people showing up sometimes many times a week, driving down my muddy driveway, cuz he is in a slightly rural part of whale. Is there anything I can do about this? And we try, we don't know anybody at apple. We try to get in touch with people and pass it along. Eventually months later, it apparently resolved itself. But literally they would put up a building with the flats and the Royal mail would assign out new zip codes, new postal codes rather.

Glen Fleishman (01:46:11):
And Apple's mapping team. That was the zero point. You know like the, there was a couple was in Kansas who sued Google or someone because people kept showing up. Yes yes cause they were that kind of thing. So it was just like that, except in rural whale. So people would drive, they'd be going to obviously a flat, a building full of flats and they would be driving to rural whales and show up at this guy's house. You and his wife were very perturbed about it, but apparently it was resolved before I could forward into a journalist to write a major story about

Leo Laporte (01:46:39):
The it's funny because yeah, cash Meer hill did that story in the New York times about that. Yes. Port Kansas farm. Oh my gosh. That was, this is the, the, you know, the, the, the problem with G O I P location is if your IP address doesn't show a real location they just put you in the middle, you know, it's kinda the random location. And so Kashmere hill wrote this story, which is hysterical about how an internet mapping glitch turned a random Kansas farm into a digital hell. People would drop off. You know, they'd say you stole my iPhone. No, I didn't. No, I know cuz it's on find my iPhone. It's this house. No, it's just because we are the default. Oh, so this happened years ago and I guess it's happened again. It's again, to this started in 2002, when a Massachusetts based digital mapping company called MaxMind did geo locations via IP address. And if they couldn't figure out where it was, they put you in Wichita.

Glen Fleishman (01:47:40):
Yeah. This guy was in Wales was lucky cuz only new addresses. So it wasn't a default, but it was still they're building stuff in England and Wales.

Leo Laporte (01:47:49):
Yeah. There's a lot of new stuff. Yeah. KME says I do hope the best story I've ever written. Doesn't go offline with the death of splinter she's at the New York times now.

Glen Fleishman (01:47:59):
Oh yeah. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:48:00):
What is splinter news?

Glen Fleishman (01:48:02):
Was that where she wrote? That

Caitlyn McGarry (01:48:03):
Was the, that was goer. Media's like

Leo Laporte (01:48:06):
Politics saying, oh yeah. And look, there's a lot of broken images now. But the date, the articles are still there, but their images, a lot of the images are broken.

Glen Fleishman (01:48:17):
Yeah. You know, I wrote my first article about link rock in 1997. <Laugh>

Leo Laporte (01:48:21):
It's a lot more rotten. Now you knew you knew it was coming.

Glen Fleishman (01:48:26):
Oh my wow. It's already

Leo Laporte (01:48:27):
Happening. Yeah. Link rot. That's a good name for it. Speaking of rotting corpses and carcasses, the iPod is dead. That's gotta the rim way to put it. Well <laugh> wow. Wow. Had a good run. They had a good run. The first iPod came out in October, 2001. The last iPod, the iPod touch apple has announced they will make no more. Actually what they said is something like wall supplies last you can order an iPod touch. <Laugh> the implication being it. Ain't gonna last much longer. It's it's all over for the iPod. Touch all over for the iPod, which was a revolutionary product that in many ways saved apple again, I'm reading this great trip Miel book after Steven, he and he talks about, remember apple was, was a hundred days away from bankruptcy under Gil, Emilio, right in the mid nineties, they were just, they were dead meat because you know, first Scully, you know, drives him in one direction.

Leo Laporte (01:49:35):
Then hair Spindler, Michael Spindler comes in and he does other things. And then Gill Emilio is brought in by the board to save the company. And he had no idea what he was doing. And by the end of those three, there was not much left after they fired Steve jobs. But the one thing Amelia did that was smart. He brought Steve jobs back. He bought next and Steve came in, swooped in, saved the company first by making the beautiful Bondi blue iMac, which did sell very well. But I think it's, it's probably the case that four years later when the iPod came out, that was when apple really started its climb. And of course it was the, it was really the precursor for the iPhone six years later. So the beginning of creating the most valuable company in the world, actually, it's no longer the most valuable company in the world. Is it who I think

Glen Fleishman (01:50:28):
Who's

Leo Laporte (01:50:28):
The I think BP, somebody is now

Denise Howell (01:50:30):
Saudi, Saudi,

Leo Laporte (01:50:31):
Saudi Aramco. Okay. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> ah, sorry. Yeah.

Glen Fleishman (01:50:34):
I remember getting the first iPod for review. I was writing freelance for the Seattle time at the time. So Apple's like, and apple was no big shakes. They're like, Hey, you wanna review this thing before it comes out? I said, sure. And I promptly broke it by sticking in a too long eighth inch adapter. And they were like, okay, we'll send you another one. We'll send you

Leo Laporte (01:50:51):
Another one. You had no idea. Oh, how valuable? Oh my God,

Glen Fleishman (01:50:55):
No. And I, so I sent it back. They sent me another one and I handed it to my niece was, was she 13 or 14 at the time? I said here, see what you can do with this. And she immediately, within five seconds said music playing out of it. And I'm like, there it is. And I think the iPad, one of its unique characteristics was that it never stopped being cool for its kind of primary lifetime before the iPhone took over you could be five or 10 or 17 or 85. And it still, wasn't not cool because adults were using it. Right. It was, I don't know. There's another product. That's quite like that.

Leo Laporte (01:51:27):
Here is from 2001. The very first I think I can show this. Now the statute of limitations is expired. I don't know.

Glen Fleishman (01:51:36):
Is this the panic thing?

Leo Laporte (01:51:37):
This is the very, no, no, no. This is the very first iPod commercial. Oh, oh one second. A guy sitting at his white I or MacBook pro he's dancing to the music. And this was I think before they used real music. So I think I can show this. This is just some random drum track. There he is with iTunes. He really loves, oh no. It's maybe it's propeller heads. He really loves this song. Oh sure. What is that? He's copying, he's using fire wire. What

Denise Howell (01:52:06):
<Laugh>

Leo Laporte (01:52:07):
And now the same song. <Laugh> and he is dancing out the door. This was the famous thousand songs in your pocket. This predates the really legendary iPod ads, which were the black silhouettes with the white headphones. But it did have the dancing in there.

Denise Howell (01:52:26):
Oh, I love this one. It's better. Even than the black

Leo Laporte (01:52:29):
Silhouettes. Yeah, yeah. Going out of his clearly the Brooklyn apartment and he's got the thousand songs in his pocket. God, a

Glen Fleishman (01:52:36):
Thousand songs. Okay. He's no AKA TWITgs, but still.

Leo Laporte (01:52:39):
Yeah. And they still were using think different back in the day. Wow. The

Denise Howell (01:52:43):
Statute of limitations never runs. And to the extent that copyrighted music triggers

Leo Laporte (01:52:49):
I'm dead, any of the they're gonna take me down

Denise Howell (01:52:51):
And then it'll get taken down. But this is fair use because we are doing comment

Leo Laporte (01:52:54):
We're commentary on top of it

Denise Howell (01:52:57):
Ipod.

Leo Laporte (01:52:58):
But as you well know, fair use was, is it different

Denise Howell (01:53:02):
Central

Leo Laporte (01:53:02):
To our that's right? That's right. Re there were some moments with the iPod that we'll never forget, like iPod socks. <Laugh> mm-hmm <affirmative> right.

Caitlyn McGarry (01:53:14):
Yeah.

Denise Howell (01:53:14):
I have forgotten until you said

Leo Laporte (01:53:16):
That phrase, the iPod high five, that was that's so good that Steve jobs said he was throwing out his million, millions of dollars of iPod equipment of stereo equipment. I don't think Steve did. But yeah, the it's kind of the, it's really the end of an era, you know, the last iPod, the iPod touch will no longer be manufacture cuz everybody's got an iPhone or, and now everybody's streaming. It doesn't really, you don't need to store music anymore. You have a, it

Caitlyn McGarry (01:53:48):
Was really, it's really upsetting. One of one of our gen Z coworkers <laugh> was like the iPod touch was the first device that I, that I took my first selfie on and

Leo Laporte (01:54:01):
I was like, oh wow.

Caitlyn McGarry (01:54:04):
I was like, in my day, the iPod did not have a camera. <Laugh>

Leo Laporte (01:54:07):
Do you remember your, do you remember your first iPod? Caitlin?

Caitlyn McGarry (01:54:11):
My first iPod was the blue iPod mini. Ooh. It was very stylish. I got it for Christmas. I re I was in college. I took it with me everywhere. And then eventually I had to upgrade to the iPod classic cause I needed more space for all the songs. I was definitely downloading legally 

Leo Laporte (01:54:32):
From, from Napster. Yeah. I remember that. Yeah.

Caitlyn McGarry (01:54:35):
From any, yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:54:36):
These were great. These iPod minis were really, they were aluminum, which was a big, oh yeah. The original iPods were polycarbonate fronts with steel shiny steel backs. They got rid of the spinning click wheel by this time. So it was just a little wheel. Some, this is from PC magazine. They have a whole history of the iPod at PC mag dot com. There's the iPod nano and Steve jobs. You'll hands. You'll never be able to play video on an iPod iPod. You know, he said that never ever until you can wanna do that. In fact, that's when we learned that Steve will see, will say anything <laugh> you can't do that until you can. Until it's time. Yeah. Remember the iPod shuffle that had no, that was great. Yeah. Basically, no control, no screen. You just, you played what you played. Yep. I had a couple of those. Those were great. One looked like a sticker gum. Right. And then they got one that was a clip that you clipped on. Yeah. I thought they were great. The, the,

Denise Howell (01:55:35):
They still have one of the iPhone precursors. The ones that looked like the touch kind of an iPhone. Yeah. Yeah. The iPod touch that. That was my son's when he was little. Oh. And when we were going through, you know, spring cleaning the house or whatever, he stumbled across it. We still have it. It still works. But the apps are no longer supported. So a lot of them don't work, but a lot of them do. I mean, like to the extent they're just accessing whatever is on that device. And it was so nostalgic for him to go, oh, I remember this from when I was five

Leo Laporte (01:56:08):
<Laugh>. Yeah. Periodically we'll get out my original iPod, which I still have in my museum over here. You have to find a fire wire cable to, to charge it up. And yes, it's Brittany Spears, cuz I guess I was really

Denise Howell (01:56:22):
<Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:56:23):
I think my kids got some music on my IPO. I think that's the real, yeah. That's my real, that's

Denise Howell (01:56:27):
My experience. Likely

Caitlyn McGarry (01:56:27):
Story <laugh>

Leo Laporte (01:56:28):
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. ads are coming to Netflix. Some Netflix tells employees maybe as soon as the end of the year. Hmm. Is this the way to save Netflix is starting to show, I think the reason people subscribe to Netflix is so they don't have to see ads

Denise Howell (01:56:48):
A hundred percent agree with you and nothing irks us more than turning on paramount plus and being confronted with pre-roll when we're paying for that service. Like no that's paying for, it means you don't get that.

Leo Laporte (01:57:02):
Well, if you paid more, you could get rid of them. <Laugh>

Denise Howell (01:57:06):
I don't can you? Yeah. I think I'm paying everything I can pay. Oh really? <Laugh> I think

Leo Laporte (01:57:11):
So. I think you can pay more Hulu and I think is what Netflix will do. They'll the, they all have low price tiers where you watch ads, which is a horrible experience. At least it used to be because they could, they didn't have very many ads. So you'd see the same ad over and over again.

Denise Howell (01:57:26):
They're not third party ads. They're para pound plus ads, right?

Leo Laporte (01:57:30):
Oh yeah. Yeah. So annoying. <Laugh> so annoying. So I guess that's what Netflix is gonna do cuz it works so well for the other guys. What's what has gone wrong with Netflix?

Caitlyn McGarry (01:57:43):
I mean, Netflix just banked on being the only player for a really long time. Like it didn't really have a lot of competition and now, you know, every other streaming service also has really good original content and pretty good library of older content that they own. And now it's like, I don't need to pay for Netflix every single month. Maybe I just subscribe on a month when everyone's talking about the show I wanna watch. And like you can kind of pick and choose how you subscribe. And they also keep raising prices, which is kind of ridiculous when no one else is raising prices. And then you have Disney plus, which just owns children and their parents. And that's a disastrous combination.

Leo Laporte (01:58:30):
<Laugh> even apple TV plus is getting better and better. I wasn't impressed in the early days, but severance is very good. Slow horses. Isn't slow horses. Great. Really? They're they're doing stuff now at a level to compete very well with Netflix and Amazon prime. The other problem Netflix has is unlike apple and Amazon. They have to make all their money on subscriptions. Apple can lose money on apple TV. Plus Amazon can lose money on Amazon prime because it supports their other service and their other businesses.

Glen Fleishman (01:59:02):
Do you get the sense when you're scrolling through Netflix that they're actually creating the programs as you go, right? You go right. And more and more, more and more improbable stuff starts to appear. You're like, is that a real show stuff,

Leo Laporte (01:59:12):
Question scrolling, right.

Glen Fleishman (01:59:14):
Click stuff. You're just like that can't be real. Is it? And then you click through and you like, there's four seasons of this. I've never heard about it. They do a good job. I mean, they, they do a good job of, I think, understanding what people wanna watch. But I think they've leaned into heavily into the algorithm because it starts to get the shows they've commissioned start to get very weird and specific like an AI gone wrong. So maybe they need more human involvement. I mean, I you've, I'm sure we've all done. This sort of doom scroll. Yeah. Through Netflix or Hulu or Amazon prime. You're like, where did this come from? The school was this made for?

Leo Laporte (01:59:46):
Yeah. I honestly think Netflix should put their investment, their investment into their software, that their actual apps do a terrible job of recommending if you're watching something, you know, it's often not the first thing that shows up. So it's hard even to continue watching something that you watched. I just think that the app is terrible. I, it it's it's a, it's there's too many things they've got there. There need to do some. And remember they had a prize for a better recommendation engine and they never, nobody came up with a better recommendation engine. They couldn't do it. Really. These are the top 10 movies in the us today. Senior year.

Glen Fleishman (02:00:33):
Wow.

Leo Laporte (02:00:33):
Our father,

Glen Fleishman (02:00:35):
I don't know what these shows are.

Leo Laporte (02:00:36):
This. I wanna watch

Glen Fleishman (02:00:37):
Duke at least. Yeah. Did. Because Pete Davidson doing a voice in it. I think that's

Leo Laporte (02:00:41):
One of the reasons there you go. Maybe bok what

Glen Fleishman (02:00:44):
Eagle?

Leo Laporte (02:00:44):
I think this, maybe this top 10 list more than anything tells you what's wrong at, at Netflix. Wow. Right now,

Glen Fleishman (02:00:50):
But you've also got cross subsidization going on cuz I've got, T-Mobile subsidizes my Netflix account. So I pay so little. I actually don't cancel it. Disney plus subsidizes Hulu. Maybe

Leo Laporte (02:01:00):
That's the

Glen Fleishman (02:01:01):
Solution T-Mobile's now. Yeah. Subsidizing paramount plus. So I only pay a fraction of what? I mean, I think we have five services. We have Amazon prime because we have still have their delivery deal. So I don't think I really paid directly a hundred percent for anything but Disney plus and we watch the heck out of it. So why

Leo Laporte (02:01:17):
Not? There's another problem for in the long run for Netflix, which is for a long time, they, they spent, I think $11 billion last year on original content, but they owned the market. Now here's apple TV, getting academy award for Coda. It's gonna be a lot harder to convince creators like Martin Scorsese to, to, to go to Netflix. Yeah. The money's there, but you're gonna, you know, you're the Irishman is buried with a thousand crappy movies. <Laugh> right. And that's not what Scorsese he wants. He wants an academy award. He wants to be, you know, featured. So I have a feeling Netflix is problems are multi-layered. I honestly think though they could do so much better job with the app. I just don't feel like the apps are very good. It's hard to find something good. Or maybe cuz there is nothing good. <Laugh> that's <laugh> you wanna, they're looking at live streaming <laugh> unscripted series, stand up specials. Reality shows like live streaming cuz you can vote while it's airing. I don't know if that's a good solution for them either. Honestly. I'm not sure what I would do if I were in charge, meanwhile, Disney plus added 8 million new subscribers. Is that because they own star wars and Marvel is that, is that really the secret there? It's it's gotta be a lot watch hours. A huge part of it. Yeah.

Caitlyn McGarry (02:02:41):
I mean also like they keep putting out these really incredible animated movies. Like everyone I know is watching in Canto like over and over and over. Right. Yeah. So yeah, they've really captivated the, the all important kid audience.

Leo Laporte (02:02:55):
<Laugh> I want somebody to write

Glen Fleishman (02:02:56):
The songs back in my head again. I

Leo Laporte (02:02:58):
Know I want somebody to write a song. We don't talk about Elon. I want that song. Would somebody please write that song?

Glen Fleishman (02:03:05):
That's Randy rainbow will do it.

Leo Laporte (02:03:06):
I'm sure. I bet. I don't know why he hasn't yet.

Glen Fleishman (02:03:09):
It it's funny though. I mean, I just saw an ad on YouTube just the way all this cross ization goes my 15 year old and I are watching something, an ad on YouTube comes up for the most deranged looking chip and Dale movie I've ever seen. It looks like a Roger rabbit. Not it's just bizarre. Although I think it's John LAN I forget the other person. There's some prominent voices in it and and then I discovered it's gonna be released in a few days on Disney plus. Yeah. So it'll only be on streaming. Yeah. And I thought, well, this is kind of a brilliant strategy. They caught us. They figured us out from the YouTube algorithm. They're pushing us to a service. We already subscribe to. Maybe they don't know that. I don't know. We cheer by the way, we watch YouTube my 15 year old and I cheer when it gives us totally inappropriate ads. We're like, yeah, they don't know who we are.

Leo Laporte (02:03:52):
<Laugh> victory. We fool them again. Do you do any active fuzzing or is it just, it's just stupid.

Glen Fleishman (02:03:59):
No, we just watch all kinds of weird stuff. We're watching like engineering shows and new rock stars. Breakdowns of videos and perfect. I'm watching German education. It's just, we confus

Leo Laporte (02:04:09):
Them. Oh, that's the secret. By the way, watch German education videos. There you go. That'll what do they advertise to you? If you watch those?

Glen Fleishman (02:04:17):
I don't know. They're giving us language tapes or something. Nothing interesting. Unfortunately,

Leo Laporte (02:04:20):
Unfortunately

Glen Fleishman (02:04:21):
They want us to buy an F-150 or something. They want us to buy a lot of cars. They really wanna sell its cars, but like we have all the cars we need. You

Leo Laporte (02:04:28):
Live in Seattle. You need a pickup truck. <Laugh> absolutely. Let's take a little break. Preferably two, have two. Let's take a little break. I think it's pretty soon. It's gonna be time to wrap it up. We'd have a couple of a few extra little stories. Usually the fun stuff's at the end of the show will get you some stuff <laugh> but first a word from zip recruiter, zip recruiter is the best way to hire certain people make life so much easier. People. You just don't know what you do without them. Maybe your partner, your friend, your personal assistant. It's it's like if you need to grow your business, zip recruiter makes hiring so much easier. They're kind of like your partner, your friend, your personal assistant for hiring. They do the work for you and they really do a good job. And I could say that from personal experience, many of our best employees have come to us from ZipRecruiter.

Leo Laporte (02:05:21):
And now you could try it for free at ziprecruiter.com/TWIT. When you post on ZipRecruiter, you're posting to a hundred plus job sites with one click of the mouse. That's good because it casts the widest net. And when those applications come RO roaring in, it goes straight to not to your phone or your mailbox, but it goes straight to the ZipRecruiter interface, which makes it easy to rank candidates, reject the people that don't fit and select the right person fast. But there's one more thing. Ziprecruiter does. That's really the secret sauce. Ziprecruiter's technology actually finds the right candidates for your job and then tells you about 'em. You can invite your top choices to apply. It's really clever. They go out through all the existing resumes they have and they say this person to be right for your job. This person, this person now they don't, I, they don't tell that person.

Leo Laporte (02:06:13):
They tell you and you get to invite them. Something happens kind of magical when you invite people to apply for your job. They're so flattered. They respond immediately. They do the interviews. They it's a really great way to reach out. No wonder four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. That's probably why ZipRecruiter rated the number one hiring site based on G2 ratings. As of the beginning of this year, the hardest thing you have to do, just remember our special URL to try ZipRecruiter for free ziprecruiter.com/TWIT again, ziprecruiter.com/t w I T the best way to hire ZipRecruiter. We had a fun week this week on TWIT. I think we've made a little mini movie. You can watch right here. See how it went.

Padre (02:07:04):
I, I will say if someone asked what's the weirdest tech. Okay. Yeah, I was gonna, I was gonna ask you that. What was your weirdest, but somebody already had, has it here in our discord CES this year. Taint tech. What, what taint tech? I did not mispronounce that. <Laugh> didn't oh, I don't even want to Google. I don't wanna know. I don't wanna know. <Laugh>

Leo Laporte (02:07:29):
I don't wanna know previously

Padre (02:07:31):
On TWIT TWIT news.

Leo Laporte (02:07:34):
So there is a glasses.

Google IO man (02:07:36):
You should be seeing what I'm saying.

Leo Laporte (02:07:37):
Oh my gosh.

Google IO man (02:07:38):
Transcribed for you in real time. Oh, kind of like subtitles for the world

Leo Laporte (02:07:42):
Heads up display. That would be an

Padre (02:07:44):
Amazing travel companion, right? Yeah. Like anytime you go somewhere, well, that's

Leo Laporte (02:07:48):
Right. Could you put these glasses on? Cause I'd like to talk to you. Yeah. Right. Flush weekly.

Jonathan Bennett (02:07:53):
So Hector Martinez is the guest and he is the lead developer behind something called Asaki Linux, which is porting Linux to the new apple M one chip, which is just a, a mindboggling achievement that they've been able to make so much progress. So quickly.

Leo Laporte (02:08:11):
This weekend, Google, the Texas appeals court. Fifth district has ruled that the Texas social media law can proceed. A lower court had blocked it.

Padre (02:08:20):
If I were running a social media company right now, I would be talking to my lawyers this very second, trying to figure out if we can still do business in Texas,

Leo Laporte (02:08:29):
TWIT, join the chat room and watch us watching you that by the way that interview with father Robert was on club TWIT and will be on the club, TWIT TWIT plus feed. If you're not a club TWIT member, I want to encourage you to join. It's only seven bucks a month. You get ad free versions of all the shows. You won't even see this ad in your feed. You also get access to the discord, which is lots of fun. Not only discussions about the ongoing shows like right now this week in tech, but about all kinds of nerdy topics from comic books to coding, to cooking, to ham radio software science space. And then we also use the TWIT club to launch new shows. That's where we launched this week in week in space. We've got the untitled Linux show, the gizz fizz Stacey's book club, and all of those show up on the TWITt plus feed, which also has content that didn't make it to the podcast, usually stuff before and after shows, things like that. So there's a lot of good there. TWIT dot TV slash club TWITt. I invite you to join. It really helps us do new things, do exciting things. And we love to have us club members, TWITt.tv/club TWIT. Let's see. <Laugh> from new scientists. Virtual reality mask adds realism by making it harder to breathe. You know, if they wanted to make virtual reality, even less appealing

Denise Howell (02:09:57):
<Laugh>

Leo Laporte (02:09:59):
It would be to make it harder to breathe. They're doing it on purpose. They, I don't know why. It just seems like a, it just seems like <laugh> it just seems like

Padre (02:10:12):
A very, they broke you, Leo, Leo, they

Leo Laporte (02:10:14):
Broke you. They broke me. I it's like what, why would you do that? A mass that controls how much air you can breathe, could be used to simulate environments with a restricted air supply. Don't want to go there. Don't want don't wanna experience that. Thank you very much. I baffles me,

Glen Fleishman (02:10:35):
Is that an escape room without any

Leo Laporte (02:10:36):
Room or, or something? I don't know what that's. I mean, it sounds horrible.

Denise Howell (02:10:40):
Yeah. Where do you go? That it's harder to breathe space? What are we gonna simulate? Yeah. Space

Leo Laporte (02:10:45):
Like, oh, you fell outta your ship. Are you okay? Are

Glen Fleishman (02:10:49):
Closed room?

Leo Laporte (02:10:52):
Here's a, here's a picture of <laugh> the black hole at the center of the galaxy.

Denise Howell (02:10:58):
This is so cool.

Leo Laporte (02:11:00):
This is a lot of computing power, millions of years of computing power, because the way they got this picture, rod Powell was talking about this on the tech guy today is they used hundreds of telescopes all over the globe to do some sort of weird triangulation of this thing. And it took a huge amount of computing power, 300 researchers, 80 institutions turned a network of telescopes into essentially a planet sized observatory called the event horizon telescope like mind boggling. Yeah,

Glen Fleishman (02:11:39):
This, this is a great bit of technology back with the Voyager missions, the deep space network use for for communications, with probes and blenders and so forth through relays. There's a principle that the area of a transmitter and the same thing would be true with telescope. If you combine multiple transmitters at the same time, it's effectively like having a bigger transmitter, but you need the technology to unify them and use them simultaneously. So you could get much painer signals. That's why they're able to take, get pictures back from Neptune and Uranus with Voyager. Two, I think was the one that swung by there. And this is a similar principle. It's just like, you know, well, if you have a bunch of telescopes, you can combine them and have a super telescope because if they're all pointing in the right way and you have that vast amount of power behind it

Leo Laporte (02:12:29):
Three, 3.5 petabytes of data from the telescopes. Now, for some reason, the Smithsonian decided the best way to communicate how much data that is, is to say, that's the equivalent of a hundred million TikTok videos, which doesn't <laugh> you. And, you know, I don't even, what is,

Denise Howell (02:12:45):
That's the only way we understand the world these days,

Leo Laporte (02:12:47):
That's how many TikTok videos would that be? Well was about a hundred million because it was, there was so much data. They could not transmit it via the internet. It just wasn't fast enough. They shipped hard drives around. Sure. Yeah. Sneakernet, but it worked, it worked. We now have a picture. Maybe

Denise Howell (02:13:03):
Quantities of TikTok videos could be the basis for some sort of Fiat currency. <Laugh> yes.

Leo Laporte (02:13:10):
Well, that's a hundred million TikTok videos. Okay. let's see. Anything else I TikTok is now, by the way, more people watch TikTok than watch YouTube in the us time spent scrolling through TikTok. Hmm. 38.6 minutes on TikTok at on average in 2024 minutes. More than Facebook's 34 minutes of what minutes per day, I guess it must be minutes per day. Time spent with Facebook decreasing TikTok coming close to YouTube. Of course, YouTube has created their own short videos trying to complete compete with TikTok. 40% of gen Z spends more than this is a disappointing stat. 40% of gen Z spends more than three hours a day on TikTok. That's more than a hundred million videos a day. No, it's not three hours on, on TikTok.

Denise Howell (02:14:13):
They don't watch TV though.

Leo Laporte (02:14:15):
Right? That's that's their entire con that's their entire thing. I shouldn't knock it. Cuz my son is, is a verifiable TikTok star, much bigger audience than ever than ever. I had. So

Denise Howell (02:14:26):
You're making me hungry again.

Leo Laporte (02:14:28):
I know you've you've seen his videos haven't you? Oh, they're so good. Yeah. while talk's time spent, according to e-marketer will top YouTubes this year, the revenues, the ad revenues won't yet that will happen in 2024 when TikTok nets 11 billion in us ad revenues topping the 10.7 billion that YouTube has today. And actually according to tech crunch, TikTok is starting to share revenue with creators. So salt Henkel, be glad to hear that. Actually you can, you can make some good money I think on TikTok, but you have to kind of do it on your own by selling ads for yourself and stuff. It's the first time TikTok has actually shared their revenue with talkers.

Denise Howell (02:15:19):
I think it's interesting how it's such a it's all video, but nobody thinks that TikTok videos are like YouTube videos, right? I mean

Leo Laporte (02:15:27):
Even no, it's very different.

Denise Howell (02:15:28):
No. Yeah, yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:15:30):
In fact, my, my son is trying to do YouTube. It's different. So he is gotta do longer form. It's very different. You know, his he's, his style just fits TikTok perfectly. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> but not, not so much in YouTube. Although, you know, he's growing fast in YouTube, would you like to buy the house where Facebook was born? This is the house that mark Zuckerberg and his, his cohorts moved into 25 years ago and Silicon valley in Los Altos, six bedrooms, four and a half baths, mark Zuckerberg, 19 Dustin mock Moskovitz, 19 Sean Parker, 24 lived there. The owner is looking to sell her newly refurbished home. How much would you pay for this beautiful home in Los Altos? They're asking $5.3 million. You should be a little plaque. I'd a hundred billion talks for it. Of course <laugh>, There should be a little plaque, mark Zuckerberg, you know, slept here or something. That'd be kind of cool. You could put that on there if you buy it. Yeah.

Caitlyn McGarry (02:16:30):
Yep. It it'd be interesting to look at the Zillow comps for that house. I mean it's expensive anyway

Leo Laporte (02:16:36):
Around that's an expensive neighborhood. Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We should check check to see if that's a little more, if there's a premium because it is the place Facebook was born. Yeah. I think we could just say those were our, our final stories for the week. You guys have been very fun and wonderful. Caitlin. I hope you enjoyed your first visit to this week in tech and I hope you'll come back many more times. Great to have you. Yeah.

Caitlyn McGarry (02:17:01):
Thank you for having me. This was great.

Leo Laporte (02:17:03):
Caitlin McGarry news, editor of protocol. The source code podcast. You do that weekly.

Caitlyn McGarry (02:17:10):
Yes. Weekly.

Leo Laporte (02:17:11):
And is it always about crypto or is it a variety of topics?

Caitlyn McGarry (02:17:16):
No, it's about the week's biggest tech news. We're usually highlighting our really great original reporting at protocol. So we have our excellent colleagues join us and hopefully some special guests from outside of protocol as well. Soon

Leo Laporte (02:17:33):
Is Zealand Musk serious. <Laugh> <laugh> yeah. Yeah. There you go. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Good. I can't, yeah, I'll have to add that to my my subscriptions source code podcast@protocol.com. A pleasure meeting you. And thanks for joining us on this show. I'm I'm glad you knew Glen. I think that's a, that's nice. It's a small world, I guess. Yeah.

Caitlyn McGarry (02:17:57):
Yeah. It is a small world. Yes, Glen. It was so good to see you. <Laugh>

Glen Fleishman (02:18:00):
Likewise is so exciting. I was so happy to see your name on the

Leo Laporte (02:18:04):
Glen Fleishman list. Glen, do fund show us what you just bought.

Glen Fleishman (02:18:09):
Oh, okay. Let's see here. So this is this is a long F L O N G.

Leo Laporte (02:18:13):
I learned about flungs a couple of weeks ago. <Laugh>

Glen Fleishman (02:18:16):
Printing history.

Leo Laporte (02:18:18):
Oh wow. So that's made out of like a paper mache, like material that they then put the led into to make a page

Glen Fleishman (02:18:27):
Exactly.

Leo Laporte (02:18:27):
Of the new

Glen Fleishman (02:18:28):
I've got a plate. So here's what a, what's called a stereotype. This is what it looks like. Whoop says two oh, upside down this great. Doing great with videos.

Leo Laporte (02:18:35):
That's a, that's a comic book comic page.

Glen Fleishman (02:18:38):
Yeah. So this would've been made from a flying and then used for later parts of the printing post.

Leo Laporte (02:18:43):
Oh, John says it's DUNS. It is. Oh, that's,

Glen Fleishman (02:18:45):
It's a DUNS space.

Leo Laporte (02:18:45):
Oh, that's a cool thing to have.

Glen Fleishman (02:18:47):
Yeah. And so somebody saved this because these were all melted down. The same thing. The flungs were made of paper that, you know, paper, wood, pulp, they were burned the paper mache I mean, sorry, the the metal would've been re melted and used newspapers used thousands of pounds of lead alloy every night and then melted it down and used it for the next edition. And newspapers could go through 10 editions in a day, you know, they'd revise the news. It was like the web or something. It would just keep melting lead, but it was the web with lead.

Leo Laporte (02:19:14):
So shows again, this one is John Glenn his first hold upside down.

Glen Fleishman (02:19:19):
Yeah. Yeah. This

Leo Laporte (02:19:20):
Is Glen goes. Launch is okay. Report on orbit, awaited. This is a news day. You could sort of say it front

Glen Fleishman (02:19:26):
Page tone. You can't really there. If I get a little bit

Leo Laporte (02:19:29):
Of an yeah, you can kind of see how would the lead do the half tone.

Glen Fleishman (02:19:33):
It's it's amazing how high resolution this is. You can feel it it's in relief. And so it actually, literally they would cast it. They would cast a half from it that was printed. This is how essentially all newspapers were printed was with this hard, there was a flung before this, but this hard paper flung was used from about 1900 to the 1980s. And it's a, it's a hilarious thing I've got, I'll show you one more thing because is a prize possession I've got more coming though, is it's a peanuts flung me, look at that four color strip from the 1970s and Lucy, Dr. Lucy. And then this is the printed, you know, it's a,

Leo Laporte (02:20:08):
So is that song just the black color? I mean, you'd have to have one for each.

Glen Fleishman (02:20:11):
It's just the black. Yeah. I have all the colors. And then here's the, I found the eBay. This is the printed version from a San Francisco Chronicle in whatever that is 1977. So this is kind of a late example, but this is how I wall away while away my non-digital time is looking at analog things like that.

Leo Laporte (02:20:29):
Wow. Very, very cool. There's a picture on TWITtter of it. <Laugh> that's just neat. And it's, and I'm guessing that's where we got the word stereotype, right?

Glen Fleishman (02:20:39):
Exactly. Yeah. And funny. So stereotype comes from that, cuz you're making a copy of something and cliche is the French word for stereotype, which is funny. And then type casting is from casting type. Somebody who was, you know, your casting type. And so we got three different words that all came into English, but cliche is good. Apparently the sound, when the plates were being printed was cliche, cliche, cliche,

Leo Laporte (02:21:02):
Cliche. That's why

Glen Fleishman (02:21:03):
That's

Leo Laporte (02:21:03):
What cliche is. Eye Onia. That's

Glen Fleishman (02:21:05):
Wow. Yeah. That's what they claim. I don't know if it's true, but it's so it's all from

Leo Laporte (02:21:08):
That. That is a story. Here's another one you bought reds put radio filled Nik in orbit. Nice. This is

Glen Fleishman (02:21:18):
What I love is so that was the most important news of the day, but the big pictures on it are with some kind of blind date competition. <Laugh> honestly they're set for, and you're thinking, so it's the reds go to, you know,

Leo Laporte (02:21:30):
This is Sputnik, but here's a couple about date. We'll hit,

Glen Fleishman (02:21:33):
Moo tests have failed. And then a couple on the cover of news day, this is the most important

Leo Laporte (02:21:38):
Incident. It's long island for

Glen Fleishman (02:21:39):
You. So history. It's how

Leo Laporte (02:21:40):
You live. So is there a flying marketplace? Where do you go to find flying?

Glen Fleishman (02:21:44):
Oh, I buy stuff on eBay because nobody cares about flying except me and a handful of printing historians. So we have a fun time of it, but I just, I have a, the Motherload of flying coming from a guy in Sweden who bought a huge set. I have almost 200 peanuts longs from the us that made their way to Sweden that are coming. I think they're running tomorrow and I'm not a collector because I do not have enough room to collect stuff. I'm bringing stuff in taking photos, documenting it and then sort of distributing it. So I'm donating some to museums. Oh, nice. Been in touch with the Schultz museum about donating or selling some of the peanuts collections.

Leo Laporte (02:22:19):
When you come out to deliver that, we're just down the road. You come visit us. You

Glen Fleishman (02:22:22):
Were down the road, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah,

Leo Laporte (02:22:24):
Yeah. They're in Santa Rosa here in Petaluma, short business. I've offered to go down and lecture about flying. So we'll see if they take me up on okay. Maybe we could split the cost with the oh, with the Santa Rosa peanuts museum. <Laugh> love it. Thank you, Glen. Great to have you. Thank you so much as always Denise, how you're my internet, lawyer, always a thrill to have you on what are you up to these days? Anything exciting to share with us?

Denise Howell (02:22:49):
Nothing too exciting. Just plugging along, working a way, trying to toil in the vineyards of justice, as best as possible.

Leo Laporte (02:22:56):
<Laugh> oh, maybe that's where you'd use the virtual reality mask where you can't breathe. That's probably, that's probably simulating the orchards of justice. Well, I'm, I'm glad you're doing so well. It's great to see you Denise. How.Info is the website? Thank you all for being here. You guys are great. We had a lot of fun. I'm thank you for joining us. If you wanna watch TWITt live, you can we do the show every Sunday, about 2:00 PM, Pacific 5:00 PM. Eastern 2100 UTC. The live stream audio or video is@livedotTWIT.tv. People are watching live chat live. You can. Everybody's invited to join us in the irc@ircdotTWIT.tv club. Members can also join us in the discord. After the fact on demand versions of the show available at our website, TWITt.tv, there's a dedicated YouTube channel for every show. We do. So there's a TWITt channel on YouTube.

Leo Laporte (02:23:51):
I think it's this week in tech and you can watch the videos there, probably the best way to do it. Certainly the recommended way to do it is to subscribe in your favorite podcast player. That way you get it automatically, you don't have to think about it and you can watch or listen at your leisure. And if your podcast player allows for reviews, please leave us a five star review. Let the world know about, I think the longest running tech podcast in the world now in our 18th year. Amazing. Thanks for joining us. Another TWIT is in the can!