This Week in Tech Episode 886 Transcript

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

Leo Laporte (00:00:00):
It's time for TWiT this week in tech, we've got a great panel for you. Shahan Weisman joins us from our street.org, Dan Patterson from CBS radio news, Jason Snell, from six colors and Mac break weekly. We will talk about the quarterly results for not just apple, but all the big tech companies and what it means for the future. Yes, as Apple's Luca mystery said there was a cocktail of headwinds. We'll also talk about the chips act 52 billion to chip companies to build fabs in the us. But is it a good idea and why big tech is making a big play for live sports? It's all coming up next on TWiT podcasts. You love

TWiT Intro (00:00:47):
From people you trust. This is,

Leo Laporte (00:00:58):
This is TWiT this week in tech episode, 886 recorded Sunday, July 31st, 2022. The barn has left the horse this week in tech has brought to you by user way.org user way is the world's number one accessibility solution. And it's committed to enabling the fundamental human right of digital accessibility for everyone. When you're ready to make your site compliant. Deciding which solution to use is an easy choice to make, go to user way.org/TWiTt for 30% off user ways, AI powered accessibility solution. And by Melissa port data quality can cost organizations an average of 15 million every year. Make sure your customer contact data is up to date. Get started today with 1000 records cleaned for free at melissa.com/TWiT and by collide collide is an end point security solution that uses the most powerful untapped resource and users. Visit coli.com/TWiT to learn more and activate a free 14 day trial today, no credit card required and by the new and recently updated TriCaster two elite buy new tech, the most complete live production system on the planet. There's a TriCaster for every production, including yours. Go to go.new tech.com/TWiT TV, where an interactive guide will advise you on which TriCaster is right for you.

Leo Laporte (00:02:37):
It's time for TWiTt this weekend. Tech the show we cover the latest tech news. Yes, I'm back, baby. Thanks so much to, to vendor Hardwar and Jason Howell, who filled in for the last two weeks one while I was on a cruise one while I was under the weather from COVID, but I'm back, I'm testing negative and I'm ready to play. Let's welcome. Our panel of tech journalists, Jason Snell. Who's here on Tuesdays. We thought because we've got apple numbers. It'd be great to have Mr. Six colors on hi, Jason. Good to see you. Welcome.

Jason Snell (00:03:08):
Hi Leo. It's good to be here. Yet again, I think I was scheduled for this before I, I became a regular and Mac break weekly. So it was think weird, kind of like, but now I'm on every Tuesday and I'm also here too. I love it here.

Leo Laporte (00:03:19):
I don't wanna, I won't burn you out. I promise. But we love of course, having you on all the time. And I thought it'd be a good chance for everybody who watches TWiTt to know that you are now a regular bene Richie. Some people may know, took a job with YouTube as creator, liaison and YouTube. Won't let him do a podcast with us. So, but fortunately, Jason Snell is a great guy.

Jason Snell (00:03:40):
I'm still working in my garage. Take

Leo Laporte (00:03:42):
That YouTube. I love it. Well, I love it. Also with us longtime technology reporter at CBS news, he's got a new position. We'll talk about that in a second. Dan Patterson. Great. See you

Dan Patterson (00:03:54):
Great to be

Leo Laporte (00:03:54):
Here. Yay. You are now editorial director at cyber six Gill, which is a security firm.

Dan Patterson (00:04:02):
Yeah, a threat intelligence company. It's a editorial, so it's not marketing. Which means I can do this and, and they won't be upset and CBS won't be upset. I'm leaving CBS or I've left CBS, but I'll continue to contribute as a technology contributor there. Great. And write and report and I'm also joined by my snoozy, but potentially barky dog.

Leo Laporte (00:04:27):
Fred <laugh>. Fred is a great name for a dog joined by the Snapchat hot dog. Shaana Weisman is here. Hello. Shaana it's great for, for having me first time on TWiT, we had Shahan on TWiTg a couple of weeks ago. You were so wonderful. I said, let's know, let's get her back. She knows she lives in a pineapple under DC. Get it head of digital media@rstreet.org. She is a fabulous, fabulous, smart person. You could find her medium at Senator Shohan what's with the Senator. Are you a Senator?

Shoshana Weissmann (00:05:03):
No, when I was 14, I wanted to be one. And by the time all my stuff was verified. <Laugh> I just figured might as well keep it.

Leo Laporte (00:05:10):
I like it. So you've been Senator Shohan since for the age of 14.

Shoshana Weissmann (00:05:16):
Yeah. Yeah. Long time nerd, like really like just born out of the womb with like a computer,

Leo Laporte (00:05:23):
You know, a walk you're a policy wonk. Yeah. That's exactly right. Well, it's great to have all three of you. It's really nice to come back to the show with a strong panel because well, you've heard a brain fog. Yes, it is. It is, it is real. It is real. And so you'll forgive me. I've been getting for some reason, I don't feel like I have it, but I've been getting dates wrong all week. So I said the, you know, silly things like the Lisa came out in 78 or 2001 as space Odyssey was in the, the seventies. I, I knew better than that. The chips act has cleared Congress, which is a big deal for the tech sector still to be signed by the president. No reason to think he won't. This is $52 billion among other things, 52 billion in funding for domestic semiconductor manufacturing. Some people have said this should have passed years ago. China has in the meantime kind of taken over for semiconductor manufacturing, but I noted TSMC. The Taiwan semiconductor manufacturing company has already opened to plant in the us until was waiting to break ground on it's $20 billion fab in in Arizona till this past. So this is, this is important, not only for competitiveness, but also for supply chain issues, Shan, you cover DC. Do you cover these kinds of stories

Shoshana Weissmann (00:06:52):
A little bit? Some of my colleagues work on this kind of stuff. I do have concerns just anytime the government jumps in to make something more competitive and it can sometimes you know, displace private investment, which we don't wanna discourage, but more than anything, you know, even despite my concerns, I think it comes at a really good time noting that you know, we'll get chips while there's an avocado shortage. I mean, sorry, avocado excess. We have too many avocados. There have been some stories on

Leo Laporte (00:07:18):
It. I thought we had too few avocados.

Jason Snell (00:07:21):
No, there's

Shoshana Weissmann (00:07:21):
Too many recently. Yeah, there's too many. So if any, a time more chips to make this happen, it would be now

Leo Laporte (00:07:27):
More chips is now a necessity. So that, but that's, but actually kind of is an interesting point. They're putting the thumb on the scale and government moves at a different pace than industry. You know, the avocado shirt is a perfect example. The FDA inspectors were mad at Mexican avocado producers cuz they threatened some of the inspectors. So they cut off Mexican avocados, which caused a shortage. And then I guess what happened? The, they, they turned the faucet back on.

Shoshana Weissmann (00:07:59):
Did

Jason Snell (00:07:59):
You stump your panel? Are we, are, are you, do you think we're avocado experts? You seem to know

Leo Laporte (00:08:05):
What was going on in the avocado wars. All right. Well anyway, so

Shoshana Weissmann (00:08:10):
I, I didn't know that avocados were one supposed to be coming from my faucet. I'm going to talk to my utility commission about that. They, they, they, you know, try to take as much as they can. So I'm gonna make sure that that's fixed, but but yeah, you know, just, I do worry about government putting it thumb on the scale sometimes. And I know that's my libertarian Ben, but it's, it's genuine. It's from a place of like, you know, when we didn't allow baby formulas from from abroad and then our few corporations producing it, we're having trouble. And then the FDA is like, oh, well we can we wait? We can wait, oops. Maybe we should approve these ones that are totally fine and just have different labeling. So I I'm always thinking about it in that perspective

Leo Laporte (00:08:50):
Appropriately but at the same time and we always have this debate especially when the technology sector and government on the one hand, I don't really want the technology sector to regulate itself, but it, on the other hand is government the right way to do it, but I don't know what other solution we have, right. We,

Dan Patterson (00:09:07):
This

Jason Snell (00:09:07):
Is a, a really weird scenario too, because what we're talking about, and this was obviously this past with, with some support from both parties, it's this strange combination of on the one hand, it is the government giving money to Intel and I think to TSMC for some American fabs. And that is, that is handing money to a, for profit corporation just right out the government. And that, that goes to that, that has those echoes of like Airbus getting European subsidies and Boeing crying, foul, and all of that at the same time though, there's this perception that China itself is funding all of its chip gains in China, which is dangerous. Some view because of not only China's increased prowess, but the fact that Taiwan semiconductor is basically number one in this space right now. And if you eliminate the need for Taiwan semiconductor to be number one, you're also actually eliminating potentially one of the things that keeps China from invading Taiwan. So there's geopolitics stuff going on here too. And I feel like maybe in this case, what brought the Republicans over to the chips act was a little bit more of the geopolitics of, we need to have American chip fabs and not just have everything be in Taiwan and China rather than the kind of corporate welfare aspect of it. Cuz it is that, but it's also this other thing. Yeah.

Dan Patterson (00:10:32):
Yeah. And I think it was, and I'm sorry to interrupt you, Jason, but I, I think, you know, to that point, I, I think, and it might be in this bird story actually. I think it was criticized by Bernie Sanders for being what he called a blank check. So a, a giveaway to some of these very large companies.

Leo Laporte (00:10:50):
Yeah. Exa he said that. Exactly. Yeah. And these companies are massively profitable as we're going to discuss momentarily. It's funny when you get Bernie Sanders on one side and conservatives on the other side, agreeing on something. I don't know. <Laugh> I don't know what, what,

Dan Patterson (00:11:08):
That's a win for Biden. Yes. I guess,

Leo Laporte (00:11:12):
I guess Bernie does not look happy here. He's very, very unhappy about this, you know, and I agree the, you know giving Bernie says 76 billion to one of the most profitable sectors in the country does seem like a lot, but Hey, you know, it's also important for competitive competitivity. It's also important as you point out Jason for geo political issues. So I don't know. I,

Jason Snell (00:11:40):
Yeah, I speak, I think the truth is that I think fabs have not been, I mean, there's a reason that the fabs aren't built in the us anymore. Right. And there is a reason for that. And so what they're trying to do here is provide this extra incentive to say, no, no, no, we really want there to be fabs in the us. And if you're not gonna build them of your own free will, what if we sweeten the pot a little bit and I get that from a strategic standpoint, but it does always make you do a double take because as Shahana said, you know, you're also, it's the government intervening in a market and basically distorting the market by saying, we will write you a check for, you know, for no reason. Other than that, we want you to build your fab here instead of in another country.

Leo Laporte (00:12:17):
Yeah. I think we can all agree though. Billions to this is good billions to the national science foundation for semiconductor manufacturing research. This is, you know, in a way this has been a because of apple investing so much for iPhone production with TSMC and Foxcon, and they're getting the benefit because they're taking that money. TSMC has done that to really improve their processes, to get down to five and three nanometer processes, thanks to this big influx of money from apple computers. So they could build chips for the iPhone. I think maybe this is a fair place to put money NSF for semiconductor research, cuz we do need to maintain competitiveness. So I, I think that one's probably nonpartisan.

Jason Snell (00:13:02):
It's funny too, because you think about how Intel has just badly misplayed everything the last decade. Wow. Yeah. And they continue to do so. And, and although they're making some changes, you know, why did ACO to TSMC? Well, one of the reasons is that Intel for a long time had the policy that they weren't going to make any chips that they didn't themselves design. And so, and then they kind of blew the design and as a result, they fell behind TSMC. So I, I agree. It's great to see some investment in pure pure research because that's one way that you end up with people in the United States who are on the forefront of chip technology and that, that leads to them going into industry. And that's a more, more of a kind of fertilization approach to this rather than writing a big check. Yeah. So that Intel builds a fab in Phoenix.

Leo Laporte (00:13:47):
Mm. Meanwhile, Intel's quarterly results. Not very good. This was a big quarterly results week for all of the tech companies, Intel announced that they revenue declined 22% year over year revenue missed the market consensus by 14%. So that's why the stock market punished them. This is, I always have to explain nobody. We don't care about how the stock market feels about this. What we care about is how this indicates how these businesses are doing. But the stock market thought they'd do better. And Intel shares went down 10% when they came out with these results 454 million net loss us compared with a net income of 5 billion in the quarter a year ago, that's a big shift Intel, not doing well at all, gross margin down basically Intel suffering. And, and now you gotta really say, are we giving money to the, the wrong company Intel? And when it announced, this also announced that they were killing their Optain memory business, which I th you know, remember reporting five or six years ago this being the future of memory, this what do they call it? Trix, stacked memory, super fast. It was being used not only for Ram, but for kind of Ram based SSDs. There it's gonna cost 'em 559 million in excess inventory. They made too much and they're writing it all off. So that's one of the reasons Intel didn't do very well. Wow. They, they stopped. Yeah.

Shoshana Weissmann (00:15:34):
Loving how much money we're giving them right now. I'm feeling real good about that. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (00:15:38):
That's good. Let's give them some billions of dollars make up for this poorly managed business. That's going down the tubes, the 3d X point technology. I, you know, I don't know if this is a, a slam on the technology or an Intel's management of it. They had stopped producing, obtained storage products for client PCs. They sold their NAND business already to Hicks SK Hicks. You know, I've offline chatted with a Melvin who is R SSD expert ended up leaving PC perspective and going to work for Intel about this. And he says, it'd be a little bit politically difficult for me to come on and talk about it. But at some point we will get Alan on to explain, is it a, is it a problem with 3d Crosspoint technology itself or is it just mismanaged implementation a mismanaged business? You know pat Gelsinger said the industry has shifted to something called CXL based architectures which I guess is preferable to Crosspoint.

Leo Laporte (00:16:44):
I don't know. They sold the fab to Texas instruments, so they can't even make this stuff <laugh>, but they're still stuck with hundreds of millions of dollars in inventory. Wow. Wow. And, and weirdly Tom's hardware is pointing this out last week. We saw initial tests of their next generation obtain memory modules, their DDR, five modules, crows pass. They will not now debut, even though we saw the results last week. So 559 million down the tubes with Optain, should we do better stories? Happier stories. Apples quarter was a little bit better as there's this guy named Jason Snell, does these beautiful color graphs. Whoops, what happened? There we go. Does these beautiful color graphs 83 billion in revenue,

Jason Snell (00:17:43):
But it was a record third quarter for them. And yet everybody's sort of like breathing sigh of relief. That it wasn't a bigger downer <laugh>

Leo Laporte (00:17:50):
Yeah. And this is one where services shrank, right. Services down, iPad se max sales down 10% iPad sales down, 2% iPhone up 3% services were up 13%, but not as much as historically they'd been up. That's one of the weird things about tech is you can have growth, but if it's not fast enough, that's bad.

Jason Snell (00:18:10):
Yeah. Yeah. Cuz services actually did still grow by 10 plus percent, but it was down sequentially and that hasn't happened in two years. Some of this is supply chain based, right? Like the Mac has had a record run and it went down this quarter a lot. But when you ask Tim cook and they do a call with analysts after they do the results, you know, what Tim cook says is it's entirely based on a lack of supply that they assemble most max in Shanghai. And there were Shanghai COVID shutdowns during the quarter. And just before the quarter started, that meant that they basically couldn't make enough max. And if you tried to buy a Mac in the last three months, true, you know, this, because they were really hard to get certain models were very hard to get. So some of it, I mean, that's not the worst problem to have say, oh yeah, people really wanted to buy our stuff, but we didn't have enough for them is better than nobody wanting your stuff.

Jason Snell (00:19:01):
And of course, wall street was relieved that the iPhone sales were okay because the iPhone is half of Apple's business, at least, and on, you know, in most quarters and that it was not down, they were, you know, cuz I think the, the stock market's been so rough lately, especially in the tech sector, I think all the analysts were really relieved that apple did. Okay. And again, okay. For apple, it was still a record third quarter for them. Okay. For apple is pretty great for just about anybody else, but there were some of these signs and they said in their, in their talk with analysts afterward that in certain areas they definitely felt like there were macroeconomic issues that were hitting their products, not on the iPhone. They said literally, if you looked at the iPhone, you would never imagine there were any macroeconomic issues, but in wearables of all things, it seems like they, they felt like there were people who were like, yeah, I'm not gonna buy an apple watch or I'm not gonna buy AirPods.

Jason Snell (00:19:54):
And so they took a, a hit there. But you know, it's, they generally I, I would say it's a good quarter, at least by apple standards, maybe not a shooting off into the stratosphere quarter, but the third quarter's never really one of their best. And, and they did okay. And they had all those supply constraints and you know, it was a little less than $4 billion. They figured that they left on the table because they couldn't sell product cuz it couldn't make it fast enough. So it's a weird, yeah, it's a weird time for them. But again, I Fe I always get the sense from the apple executives that they're a little bit embarrassed to, to be making so much money and doing so well when things are so volatile. And I also, one other note I wanted to mention, which is foreign exchange.

Jason Snell (00:20:36):
We don't think about this a lot or if you're an American, you may, you may know the dollar strong right now. Or if you go to Europe right now, it's kind of one to one with Euro, which is great. If you're a tourist really bad, if you're apple, because Apple's based here. Those foreign exchange rates mean that they can, they can see, you know, four, $5 billion, less in a quarter just based on foreign exchange. And although they do currency hedging and stuff to try and balance it out, there's only so much they can do. So the, the line of the, of the week was from the CFO of apple, Luca mystery, who said, they ha they faced a cocktail of headwinds <laugh> which is quite a mixed metaphor. That's a great, but he's not wrong. I

Leo Laporte (00:21:15):
Love that phrase, a cocktail of headwinds. So you, you named them supply chain so demand exceeded supply. They couldn't make enough. They could have sold more if they, if they could only have made them recession, hurting customers. So they didn't wanna buy apple watches.

Jason Snell (00:21:33):
Their entire business in Russia is gone. So that's a headwind cause you're comparing it to last year. A

Leo Laporte (00:21:37):
Headwind. Yeah. Exchange rate unfavorable. That's a headwind that cocktail of them

Jason Snell (00:21:44):
Don't drink the headwind cocktail

Leo Laporte (00:21:46):
By the way. No, this doesn't sound very

Jason Snell (00:21:48):
Pleasant. Don't re it's just gonna make you sad.

Leo Laporte (00:21:51):
Didn't make

Jason Snell (00:21:51):
Relative. Although it's apple, it may make you very rich though. It

Leo Laporte (00:21:54):
Wouldn't make the stock market sad. I think they, at one point they were up 8%. I mean, yeah.

Jason Snell (00:21:58):
They're, I think it's relief. I think they were really worried that apple was gonna take a tumble, like the other tech stocks. And again, like for apple, it's a little sluggish, but again, apple, sluggish is not anyone else's sluggish.

Leo Laporte (00:22:07):
Yeah. It's not meta sluggish. Oh, meta, oh baby. Meta. Not happy right now. Let's I I'll get to the meta story in a little bit because mark Zuckerberg is already is bracing people. He had a all hands meeting last month in which he said, get ready for an intense period. <Laugh> but we'll get to them. They didn't announce any results that this, this, this week did they? I don't think so. So let's get through the let's go through the other results. Microsoft had a fairly good quarter their revenue, 51.9 billion. That's up 12% operating income, 20.5 billion. That's up 8% net income, 16.7. You know, you make six, you make in, in, in three months and 12 weeks you make 16.7 billion. I think it's a good day. I think it's a day to celebrate. Some things were not up Xbox gaming was down.

Leo Laporte (00:23:15):
I think the I think Azure and cloud was up Microsoft muddies the waters a little bit in their, in their quarterly reports because they, they mix up all these businesses into, into these weird kind of categories, office commercial products and cloud surfaces. That's a, that's a category, but that was up 9% office consumer products and cloud services up 9% LinkedIn revenue up 26%. So a good quarter from Microsoft OEM revenue on windows down a little bit that that's cuz the PC market suffered from supply chain issues, just like the Mac market, Xbox down 6%. Now the big story I think across the board is search and news advertising revenue, Google got hit. Microsoft got hit revenue, including I'm sorry, excluding traffic acquisition costs, which is a big exclude up 18% surface revenue up 10%. So a good quarter for Microsoft, it's kind of a, a, a mixed bag all round, Amazon jumped on earnings. They beat the revenue and have a rosy guidance for the third quarter. Is there any, is there a thread to all of this Dan Patterson? Is there anything you can conclude from this kind of mixed bag of quarterly results from big tech?

Dan Patterson (00:24:39):
You know, it's, that's hard on the one hand this could be related to an economic downturn and a recession and these macroeconomic forces on the other hand you know, when I talk to people inside of tech firms, it's just anecdotal, I'm trying to get a, a sense, you know, barometer, a sense of how people at these companies think and feel. And there is kind of this sense that we have turned a corner and we are perhaps in a new paradigm or a new relationship with large technology firms where they have kind of saturated the market. And each of these companies, while they're undergoing different challenges, they're all kind of facing the same existential reflection and they, they are pulling back they're changing or altering their business and looking for new markets. So it, it's hard to answer your question Leo, because I, I don't know, but I think that there is a sense within technology that things are changing and it might not simply be related to the recession and, and other factors

Leo Laporte (00:25:44):
Maybe looking towards software companies as opposed or content companies, as opposed to a big tech companies' Comcast, for instance, which had an overall good quarter had to report that they had zero growth in internet subscribers and zero growth in peacock, their, their premium streaming platform. That's not good, zero growth in I, in ISP customers and peacock. That's not good. Comcast owns a lot of other businesses, which yeah, probably propelled in other directions.

Jason Snell (00:26:19):
It's a rough time peacock. I mean, it's premium, right? They do a lot of giveaways and they have an ad business and on peacock. So it's not quite as dire as that, but yeah, there is vulture did a, a poll recently of a bunch of industry people about streaming services and peacock was right down there by the bottom. And the question was like, can this, you know, is, are they gonna buy something else or merge with something else because peacock is problematic. It's not terrible, but, and I think they did a good job with the Olympics, but yeah, they're not setting the world on fire and see, clearly they're not selling premium subs. They may be getting viewership through the, the free or cheap version where they're doing ad sales and then they're making money on the ads and maybe that works for them, but the, the premium level where people are shelling out money, just so that they can watch peacock stuff flat is tough. That's a real tough

Leo Laporte (00:27:12):
One. Yeah. And Joe and our chat acquisition. Yeah. Acquisition, just, just a hunch that they might

Jason Snell (00:27:20):
Try to goose some of those numbers

Leo Laporte (00:27:22):
Through acquisition interest and just a hunch. There have been rumors floating around that apple might buy Netflix, Tim jobs at the quarterly analyst call was talking a little bit about their please. They call it Tim jobs. Do they call him that? Yeah, you did. I meant it's FLA. That's fine. That's brain fog. Yeah. Was saying something like we, you know, yeah. We're not against acquisitions, but we wanna make sure they can be folded in, but there have been rumors that they might buy troubled Netflix.

Jason Snell (00:27:50):
Yeah. He was less down on yeah. Purchases than he's been in a while. And that doesn't necessarily mean anything, but it makes you wonder. I mean, everybody who is an expert in in the streaming biz and here's my plug for my podcast downstream, where I talk to Julia Alexander about this, cuz she's an expert every other week. Everybody expects more consolidation. It's gonna happen. Apple's got money to spend whether they wanna do stuff like buy somebody outright or whether they'd rather spend that money on like sports rights and stuff like that. Cuz they've done some of those deals and they're more in the works is unclear, but it's hard to imagine in the long run that peacock and paramount plus and HBO max, right. Like all of them are just gonna be there all on their own.

Leo Laporte (00:28:33):
They feel like they're all in play, don't they? Yeah.

Shoshana Weissmann (00:28:36):
Yeah. I think that's a really good point. And I think that a lot of companies have kind of forgotten how to do the subscription model. Like not even just in this kind of stuff, but I forgot it might have been BMW. That's now having like a subscription for, they

Leo Laporte (00:28:49):
Charge for seats, heated seats. Yeah.

Shoshana Weissmann (00:28:51):
It's nuts. But all that kind of stuff. I think they're, they're re they're reinventing the wheel and doing it poorly and a lot of cases and that maybe companies who kind of know this stuff a little bit better have done this stuff for longer or just have a better handle on it might be likely to acquire. But then you get into like the FTC stuff and the antitrust stuff and like, oh, well, if they acquire anything, then they're a big evil company. So I think there's some competing forces at play. But I do think a lot of the struggles kind of stem from people forgetting how subscription can work, how it's likely to work. And that like, you know, I have Netflix and Hulu and I'm not gonna go over paramount. I, I get Disney just so I can watch the Simpsons, but it would be great if I could just subscribe to the Simpsons or see, you know, something like that people are, I think kind of just the reinvention of the wheel is gonna get old, just like the shiny object era of social media got old in that same way.

Leo Laporte (00:29:40):
Do you, you think that people are rebelling against the, the nickel and dime monthly fees? You know, having $27 charges every month is that I always thought that might be a problem. And, and yet people like you Shahan are kind of, you know, saying, well, you know, I I'm used to it. I have to make a decision about how many I have, but that's not the end of the world.

Shoshana Weissmann (00:30:02):
Yeah. I don't think it's gonna get people to you know, to just completely stop all kind of stuff like that. But I think you might see people be like, all right, I'm not really using this. So that comes off and that's kind of where the subscription novels

Leo Laporte (00:30:13):
Suspicious, but you know how they're trying to solve that is with exclusives. Right? You, you even said it, I subscribe to what is it, Disney for the Simpsons that that's what people do or described for the Mandalorian or, or for, you know, Marvel. And that's what right. Netflix tried to do. They've been struggling a little bit lately cuz they haven't had that tent pole property, you know, stranger things didn't drive a lot of subscriptions. 

Jason Snell (00:30:37):
Yeah I think, I think it's a real challenge because you can churn it's fairly and it's really hard to churn your cellular or your cable company or whatever. Right. It's it's hard cuz there's like, you gotta get hardware in

Leo Laporte (00:30:49):
Streams. Isn't it?

Jason Snell (00:30:50):
It's so easy to turn streaming. And I, I talk to people who say, well, I'm not gonna, I'm gonna keep three at a time, but I'm gonna rotate through them. Yeah. And then the idea there is if it's, if it's, this is actually one reason why you're gonna see a lot more streaming deals for live sports, because what you can't do with live sports is say, I'm gonna wait for the whole season to end and then I'm gonna binge it. Right. Wow. Like you can't do that with like, oh I'm gonna wait for the baseball season to end. And then I'm gonna watch all 162 games, right. At once like that you, you have to be there for the whole season, right. Or for the whole NFL season. But for these others, I think that that's what's happening is instead of it being, I'm gonna just pick three and those are, are gonna be my ride or die streaming services.

Jason Snell (00:31:28):
It's gonna be more like the live action star Trek just ended on paramount plus. And like I heard from a lot of people who said, okay, well I'm dropping off of that and I'm gonna go on Disney plus and get caught up now with the moon night and miss Marvel and you know, get ready for the new star wars show. And that that's their strategy is just kind of picking and choosing. And it's so easy to churn through those streaming services. It makes me wonder if one of the forefronts of streaming in the next few years is gonna be some big discounts if you lock in for a year. I mean, they they're experimenting with that now, but I wonder of that, don't they? Yeah. If they're gonna, yeah. If they're gonna push that even more, because I've done that, I've done a couple of yearlong deals and there does come that moment where you're like, well, should I cancel this? Oh, I've got it for another seven months. So it doesn't matter. And that's that's kind of brilliant if you are the streaming service,

Leo Laporte (00:32:17):
That would be a good, especially as consumers

Jason Snell (00:32:19):
Are more

Leo Laporte (00:32:20):
Budget conscious, wouldn't that be a good startup? Like you, you, you could, you set it up so that it decide you and then you say start this in June, end it in July, start this in August. And you just have all your streaming services

Jason Snell (00:32:34):
To churn churn valet.

Leo Laporte (00:32:35):
Yeah. Churn valet. It's good. Good name. I like it. Go

Jason Snell (00:32:38):
Register. I'll do. Yeah. Yeah. It'll be in my smart hat. It'll be one of my, one of my startups

Leo Laporte (00:32:42):
Churn, valet.com. Let's talk about sports. We're gonna take a break. And when we come back big tech is coming in and I have to say, I think the broadcasters, the satellite guys, they're all a little bit perturbed because here come the big pocket books going after live sports that's coming up next. Great panel. Great to have you Dan Patterson, congratulations on the new gig. Still a contributor at CBS news. But now editorial director at cyber six, skill.com. Always. Great to see you. Great to be here. A new face on the TWiT round table, but always a welcome one. Shahan Weisman who she's head of digital media@rstreet.org. Good to see you and your Snapchat, hot dogs. They're coming. They're coming to take over. You know, they look like

Shoshana Weissmann (00:33:29):
They're market. Ideally. I mean, I think they would have good leadership. You know, they're not, they're not particularly partisan. And I think we need, you know, partisans, is that

Leo Laporte (00:33:37):
An official R street policy? We want the Snapchat hot dogs to run in in 2024.

Shoshana Weissmann (00:33:43):
Yeah. I mean, we're not, we're a C3, so we're not allowed to be political. Oh. But okay. But we do support the Snapchat hot dog in all its forms. So if he runs, you know, we'll, we'll be there to help you, but not overly.

Leo Laporte (00:33:57):
And Jason Snell from six colors instead of Snapchat hotdog, he's got old vintage Mac about to take over. I do.

Jason Snell (00:34:04):
They all

Leo Laporte (00:34:05):
Work. They all work. I see the the lamp Mac, the Mac plus or Mac original Mac, maybe even the Bondi blue iMac and apple two C and the cube. Yep. Somebody called me on the radio show and said so should I buy a bunch of PC juniors cuz they're I see that the apple ones are selling by auction for hundreds of thousand dollars. <Laugh> I had, I had to give 'em the bad news. No

Jason Snell (00:34:35):
<Laugh> no, don't do it. I'd be like buying a lot of like number one, Todd McFarland comic books from the nineties seemed like a good investment at the time. Seemed like a good idea, not a good investment,

Leo Laporte (00:34:45):
Not a good idea. I told him there is a direct correlation between the number of items manufactured and the value of the items down the road. And I think there're just far too many PC juniors gathering Dustin closets all over the world to make them worse, anything at all. Our show. Thank you for all three of you for being here. It's great to have you on my return. And again, thanks to Jason. How jumped in at the last moment last week, cuz that was a sudden discovery. And also to Davinder Hardwar from in gadget a couple of weeks ago, our show today brought to you by user way.org. I'm talking about making your website, ADA compliant accessible. Not only is it the right thing to do because you're opening up your website to a much larger group, 60 million plus people, you have a responsibility to make your site accessible.

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Leo Laporte (00:38:29):
You could book a short call, get their accessibility guide. They're there for you user way, making the internet accessible for everyone. Visit user way.org/TWiTt. Today we thank 'em so much for their support and for our, their help making our site more accessible, big tech, New York times said why big tech is making a big play for live sports. So the NFL Sunday ticket was the first one to come up. This is okay. You sport ball fans have to help me here. This is, I gotcha. This is the, this is the sh this, the games that aren't in your market. Is that right?

Jason Snell (00:39:05):
Yeah. Yeah. It's a, it's a package of direct TV has had for a long time and they pay a lot of money for it basically to drive people, to get a satellite dish on their roof, because it's the only way that you could get out of market NFL game. So out of NFL game, on a local channel, then you can't see it. And if it's a national game, it's not on there, right. But it's every other game. So if you're a Packers fan and they're playing, you know, the Buccaneers on a Sunday morning and you live in California, how do you see that game? And the answer is Sunday ticket, NFL, Sunday ticket. So they, they used that to drive huge amounts of direct TV installations, which was a really smart move for a long time, directs

Leo Laporte (00:39:42):
Back up spent a billion and a half for it, but they've been losing money on it. Big time. It is not, it's not good. So they're not gonna renew it. It's up next year. And NFL says they want two and a half billion. They want a billion more this time.

Jason Snell (00:39:58):
Yeah. It never really made sense from a financial direct financial perspective. It made sense in the, in the idea that they were doing customer acquisition. And I think that it's kind of gone by the wayside. So guess what? The NFL, rather than doing what they could do, which is a direct to consumer product, which they actually launched, or they announced last week called NFL plus, which is kind of not that interesting. Because it's only on phones, it's basically what Verizon and Tmobile used to offer this.

Leo Laporte (00:40:24):
This is so frustrating because I wanna watch the games. Right. And I've got it on my phone, but I can't put it on my big screen TV and I don't understand.

Jason Snell (00:40:33):
So they, they carved this little part out of the Sunday ticket a deal, which was this mobile only thing. And that's NFL plus now it's they took it in house. So, so

Leo Laporte (00:40:42):
They're doing that because then that does an undermine. Whoever's gonna buy a Sunday ticket.

Jason Snell (00:40:47):
Yeah, exactly. Right. It would literally be Sunday ticket if it didn't have that limitation to it. So, but they're starting that's there's there's question why there has

Leo Laporte (00:40:55):
Been rumors. You might be able to Chromecast it. You might be able to airplay it to your big screen TV.

Jason Snell (00:41:00):
I'm sure there are workarounds. I mean, there are also workarounds where you change your DNS and you can get NFL plus to show everything because it's their international product as well. But people aren't, we're not here to talk about that. I have friends who done that read

Leo Laporte (00:41:10):
That silly it's lasted about six months startup where you had vertical video. That was Hollywood's idea of quibi quibi TikTok. Remember? Yeah. And and that was the flaw with quibi. You couldn't put it on your screen.

Jason Snell (00:41:23):
Right? Right. Whereas the NFL thinks that putting it on your screen for a foot, a whole football game is probably what you want to do

Leo Laporte (00:41:31):
This, this is how I wanna watch a football game. Just, just like this,

Jason Snell (00:41:34):
Just like that. Just like you're there

Leo Laporte (00:41:36):
It's so nutty.

Jason Snell (00:41:37):
Right. So I love

Shoshana Weissmann (00:41:38):
So's the thing so

Leo Laporte (00:41:39):
Much you do. Do you like,

Shoshana Weissmann (00:41:41):
I, I get such a kick out of it. It's the same reason. I like the Snapchat hot dog. It doesn't make any sense. Like it's like, this is their like main thing and it doesn't make sense, but

Leo Laporte (00:41:50):
It makes sense. It's greed.

Jason Snell (00:41:51):
It's money, money, money, money, money. That's what, cause here's the thing. They could make NFL plus the replacement for Sunday ticket and sell direct. And they would get the money from their cons, from their customers directly, which is actually good. Make more money. So why don't they, the answer is because somebody will pay them more than it's worth because of extenuating circumstances, because they want to build out something else like DirecTV DirecTV did it. Yeah. Yeah. So who who's up next? Well, it's apple and Amazon because they are making video ecosystem plays that don't have to make direct financial sense because they want to get people to use apple TV plus or use prime video

Leo Laporte (00:42:30):
A that according to the New York times, add one more to the mix who else is as big as apple and Amazon and has other reasons they might want YouTube YouTube. Sure. Apparently YouTube now is gonna be the third party trying to buy these two and a half billion dollar rights to the NFL Sunday ticket. And by the way, Apple's already started to buy. They have major league soccer. They have Friday night baseball, apple sees this. And is it what you were saying? Cause you obviously cover

Jason Snell (00:42:59):
This and, and the rumor to college football too.

Leo Laporte (00:43:02):
Yeah. Yeah. You, you gotta, if you're gonna watch live sports, you gotta have that package. There's no other way to do it. Yeah.

Jason Snell (00:43:08):
If, if you're a fan of anything that is on a particular service, you're gonna be motivated to get that service. And that has value beyond the monetary value. Like if you're apple and, and why do you get Friday night baseball? Or why do you get the MLS? One of the reasons is maybe people will convert and they'll pay. They're still giving away Friday night baseball. They're not even charging for it yet. But what you are doing is increasing the number of people who know how to get apple TV plus onto their TV. Once you do that, the next step is you try to convince them to, you know, you're in the ecosystem. Now you convince them to watch Ted lasso or you convince them to watch severance or whatever it is. Right. It's so they've got this ulterior kind of ecosystem motive. I, Amazon is similar.

Jason Snell (00:43:50):
Youtube would be similar. And for the NFL, you're like, well, we could build this great direct to consumer business. And it would make sense in the long run. And I think in the long run, they will do it. But it's very hard to say, no, if somebody's gonna give you an extra billion dollars for, to be the middleman, right. It's like, okay, great. Let's let's do it. And so that's, what's going on now. I mentioned college football, all the college football rights are churning around right now too. A bunch of them are coming up and although ESPN and Fox are the big players, there, that's another case where there are these ecosystem companies, especially like apple and Amazon who are interested in being a part of that. Because again, live sports is something that you can't cycle through and then binge in a, in a hurry. You gotta keep paying over the course of months and months and months. See Amazon's by the way, Amazon's got the NFL now too on Thursday night. That's right. It's an exclusive for the

Leo Laporte (00:44:41):
First did that go through? Oh yeah,

Jason Snell (00:44:42):
It is. It's exclusive. It's gonna have Al Michaels. They hired Al Michaels. They got

Leo Laporte (00:44:46):
Al Michaels. Part of the problem was finding a partner for Al Michaels that he would want to broadcast with. Right. Who did they find? Did they finally get, oh,

Jason Snell (00:44:53):
I forget. It's it's no lightweight. I mean, it's, it's an imp, they spend a lot of money on announcers

Leo Laporte (00:44:58):
Romo or somebody like that

Jason Snell (00:44:59):
Because they want, they want to, to be taken seriously. And so this is, this is the next money

Leo Laporte (00:45:05):
Does this mean I have to stream Thursday night football. I can't watch it on. Yes,

Jason Snell (00:45:11):
Actually the NFL is the best at this of anybody because they have a standing policy that if it's your local team, it has to be on broadcast TV in your local market. So if you're a 40 Niner fan and the game's on Amazon on Thursday, it'll be on one of the local channels in San Francisco. If you're out of that market, you will need to watch it on Amazon prime

Leo Laporte (00:45:29):
Video. And

Jason Snell (00:45:29):
It's there it is. Kirk her street. It's

Leo Laporte (00:45:31):
Kirk ke street. Wow. Well V Kirk her street. Well

Jason Snell (00:45:35):
Now he is well known in college football circles. I don't his NFL circles, but he's not a, he's not a random dude. He's a semi not random

Leo Laporte (00:45:42):
Dude. Yeah. So sounds like a random dude. I'm wondering Leo sports, sports ball. I'm not it's random to me. Yeah. And, and Thursday night, last season was on two different places. So it was very confusing. You didn't

Jason Snell (00:45:55):
Know, they S cast and they SEL cast it, right? Because they didn't want to fully commit to being UN streaming, but they are now. So this is just, I mean, this is, well, this is huge. Next gold

Leo Laporte (00:46:03):
Rush for Kirk, her street fans. I think <laugh> big. And I to say Shahan, if Nathan's decided to stream the hot dog eating contest, I think you might wanna,

Jason Snell (00:46:13):
Those rights are coming up.

Leo Laporte (00:46:14):
Get those rights.

Jason Snell (00:46:15):
Lot of speculation about, would you, would you have to sign up for a, I think ESPN's gonna lock down the hot

Leo Laporte (00:46:21):
Dog. I'm sorry. I wonder that was a amazing, I

Dan Patterson (00:46:23):
Wonder how sports bars handled this. It, I mean, just it, New York, it's pretty, this

Leo Laporte (00:46:28):
Is like pirate, right?

Dan Patterson (00:46:30):
Yeah.

Jason Snell (00:46:31):
Some

Dan Patterson (00:46:31):
Will it's its I mean,

Jason Snell (00:46:32):
It's

Leo Laporte (00:46:32):
A big deal. You right.

Jason Snell (00:46:34):
They, what I have heard the reports are actually that they're separating cuz right now it's Sunday ticket branded for all of it. And it's direct TV is the facilit

Leo Laporte (00:46:41):
Direct TV, almost $3.

Jason Snell (00:46:42):
My

Leo Laporte (00:46:42):
Under by season for that it's expensive.

Jason Snell (00:46:44):
The reports, the reports are that for, for bars and restaurants and other places like that, they're separating that package Uhhuh because they know that the last thing that a bar, a bar does not have enough internet to stream eight different games at once. Right. It doesn't, there will be

Dan Patterson (00:47:00):
Kinda other, I, you have to be it people at your bar to manage these streams. And do you have to, I mean, that's kind of the, the question my mind goes to and it's huge business

Leo Laporte (00:47:11):
Shaa

Jason Snell (00:47:11):
My guess is that probably still will stay on a satellite, but it'll be like, you'll get the box from the NFL that decrypts yeah, yeah. Multiple streams and puts them on TVs and apple. You won't have to like hook up eight apple TVs to watch football in a bar. Oh my God. Yeah. Let's

Leo Laporte (00:47:26):
Hope Shahan I don't wanna leave you out. What's your sport.

Shoshana Weissmann (00:47:30):
Yeah. I don't do sports. I, I just don't sports, but I will say there's two little things I have for this. And one is that like years ago, I think it was the NFL cracked down on people sharing gifts of their stuff. Like yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:47:44):
Isn't that absurd. Yeah.

Shoshana Weissmann (00:47:47):
Right. And I don't think they know how, how benefits for them work. Like it's no, no. One's like, oh, here's the gift, you know? Like I'm gonna just not watch the game now. Right.

Leo Laporte (00:47:56):
I've seen the gift. What do I need that for? Yeah. Right,

Shoshana Weissmann (00:47:58):
Right. And I don't trust them not to mismanage it because of this. I, I feel like they're really bad at seeing the forest through the trees. And also one thing that I kind of don't understand just as a, a nerd, who's not a sports person. I watch Turner classic movies, a lot. Me too. And me too. Love PCM. Yes. But you have to buy it with a sports package now. And I'm like, well, don't, you know, why would you need extra incentive, buy sports? That

Leo Laporte (00:48:23):
Does seem mutually exclusive. Well, exclusive audiences

Jason Snell (00:48:27):
Cash grab is what that is. That's the cash

Leo Laporte (00:48:30):
TCM. They own Turner. Oh it's they bought all of that with Warner.

Jason Snell (00:48:33):
No, but they, what they did is they put it on the same tier as their sports stuff, as the entertainment package or something like that. And the idea there is basically they're forcing people who like TCM to give them extra. I don't know what it is. $5 a month by putting it in a, a plan and all the, all my movie fan friends who don't like sports. So annoying. What

Leo Laporte (00:48:50):
So annoying. So Sean, I think the NFL had were visionaries because what are they doing now? Officially licensed NFL video NFTs.

Jason Snell (00:49:02):
<Laugh>

Shoshana Weissmann (00:49:02):
Oh my gosh. Like, I don't know. I, I know web three has its uses, but a lot of times I feel like this just, this just feels like a scam to me. <Laugh> like, this just feels like a scam.

Leo Laporte (00:49:12):
Unbelievable. It is. They looked at the NBA and they said, look at all the money the NBA made on their NFTs. $65,000. If you want get a legendary, legendary moment. That's okay. Patrick Mahomes. <Laugh> wait a minute. Legendary. Number 56 is $9,000 is the lowest ask. This is Cray, Cray. Now people who buy this are not because they're big Mahomes fans. They buy this because they think it's $9,000 now, but it's gonna be $20,000 soon. Right. And this is speculation.

Shoshana Weissmann (00:49:53):
Mm-Hmm <affirmative> do you think they brag to their friends that they have this? Like, do you think that the people who buy this are like, oh bro, like check out what I just got. And like also, do you think anyone's impressed by it? Like I'm wondering

Leo Laporte (00:50:04):
This is nobody is impressed.

Shoshana Weissmann (00:50:06):
Nobody.

Leo Laporte (00:50:07):
This don't go on a bar. Yeah. Oh God.

Jason Snell (00:50:11):
This is like the PC juniors and those Todd McFarland Spider-Man number ones. It's speculation. By the time everybody's speculating. It's over

Leo Laporte (00:50:20):
The, the NBA is selling it like baseball cards. Right? In fact they have here's the top shot starter pack. Get your first NBA and w B digital collectors collectables. So you buy the pack like, like bubblegum cards, but but you don't get bubblegum. You don't even get cards. You get Nope. A link

Jason Snell (00:50:40):
Get NFTs. M.Candy.Com is the baseball version of that. They all are doing it now.

Leo Laporte (00:50:48):
Mm-Hmm, <affirmative> unbelievable.

Dan Patterson (00:50:49):
When, when we just passed on this story, like, eh, it just feels like a scam. They, I mean the rage, I've never seen such unprofessional rage from their PR team.

Leo Laporte (00:51:01):
Oh, so the NBA contacted you at, at CBS?

Dan Patterson (00:51:04):
No, the NBA top shots. The NFT company. Oh. And we passed on it. I mean, I, it just, it was like, but it's,

Leo Laporte (00:51:11):
But it's the NBA, isn't it? I mean, they're not, are they in company? The

Dan Patterson (00:51:15):
Company. Top partners. Yeah. Yeah. With an NFT company. Yeah.

Jason Snell (00:51:21):
It's like, it's like the N NFL saying, well, we'll give you a billion dollars to be the middleman. It's also like, all these sports have said, oh, there's some tech startup. That's gonna give us a lot of money to license this stuff. Yeah. And do their NFT thing. All right. Give us the money. Right. That's all they really care about.

Leo Laporte (00:51:36):
Do you think, like in five years, NF will be like beanie babies that will like, just look back on that and say what was going on? What were we smoking?

Dan Patterson (00:51:45):
Yeah. I think we'll care a lot more about those Todd McFarland. Number one, if Jason keeps so I can for sure, an PC junior, I mean, look, there's, I, we could talk about this all day and all night, but I mean, the, there is, there is the line go up principle here, it, and really with, with NFTs and particularly crypto as we all, I don't know if we all know this, but I mean, in order for you to get any value out, somebody else has to put cash in. That is fundamentally the way, right. These products work, they're not technologies. The blockchain is a technology, but NFTs and cryptocurrency and PLA and games. Those are products. And in order for any of these engines to work, money has to go in. So for money to come out, money has to go in. And I, I mean like you can call it a Ponzi, you can call it a, a pyramid, call it what you want. I, in order for this to function, somebody has to lose for you to win, you know, it's so anyway, I, I could go on and on, but like, I will stop. <Affirmative>

Shoshana Weissmann (00:52:49):
I'd kind of like to hear more about how unprofessional they were to you, but it sounds like you have a fun story there.

Dan Patterson (00:52:54):
<Laugh>

Leo Laporte (00:52:56):
How dare CBS not cover top shots? Don't you know where

Dan Patterson (00:53:01):
Future?

Dan Patterson (00:53:03):
Yeah, a little bit. I mean, there is a particular posture that a number of crypto zealots adopt, and they, they chose to adopt this posture, which was, which is to be enticing and warm and try to get you to cover something. And when you pass most other PR agencies know, okay. Yeah, you're super busy, get stuff going on. Don't worry. We'll talk. The next time we have a story, that's just the way it functions and their posture was to get very I mean they used swear words and they tried to go over my head to my editor who was also like very eye rolling. They tried to go to a different department and to, to get a, a story on the air. And I mean, they like, look, it's a small company, we all talk to each other and we generally have, have a similar editorial policy. And it, when you start behaving, like that word goes out. And I mean, we might have covered them a couple months later, but through a different PR agency, it was, it was just a very aggressive posture. And it was one that, that is not unfamiliar. If you've covered the crypto space. I think anybody, any reporter who's covered the crypto space has probably encountered PR agencies that only cover only rep crypto and behave like this.

Leo Laporte (00:54:21):
I don't think it's a coincidence. It's also the same behavior, groomers and abusers use. They love bomb you until you reject them. And then they, and then they scream and, and if you're unlucky hurt you and boy,

Dan Patterson (00:54:35):
I hadn't thought of it like that, but it was like love bumming, and then getting very upset when you don't cover them the way they expect.

Leo Laporte (00:54:41):
It's the same mentality. If you ask me the more I see and hear about NFTs and web three, the less I like it. I just, I keep trying to take the point of view. Oh, it's an interesting technology. There may be something in it, but boy, the people involved do not impress.

Shoshana Weissmann (00:55:03):
It's like microdosing. Like I think microdosing is a thing that can have its uses that I'm sure like for certain people works well, like in a medical setting, but anyone, you know, who micro doses or talks about it, like just completely makes it illegitimate.

Leo Laporte (00:55:18):
You know, ironically, one of my good friends who is a micro doser has lately been talking a lot about web three and NFTs. Yeah. You may not be far off <laugh> I'm speaking a little outta school, but we had a company come to us that wanted a, that was doing ketamine and they wanted do ads. And I said, I'm not gonna, I'm sorry, I'm not gonna do ads for ketamine. And they got very upset. Like, why wouldn't you? Well, because it's not legal in most states, if I don't, why do you mean why wouldn't I it there's something going on. Isn't there. And, and, you know, I think back to the super bowl, remember that Larry David ad, where was it FTX or it was one of the Binance, it was one of the crypto companies. And, and the whole idea was Larry. David is this boomer, somebody my age who just doesn't get it. And he didn't like the wheel and he didn't like toilets and he doesn't like Bitcoin, you know, that's just, they don't get it. And that I find that kind of offensive because I, I think I do get it. And that's a problem. I do get it.

Dan Patterson (00:56:22):
That's a pretty manipulative.

Leo Laporte (00:56:24):
It is. It feels very manipulative. I think that's, I'd never put two and two together until you said that now, but that's what scammers always do. I mean, that's essentially it right? What

Dan Patterson (00:56:37):
QAN on did too. I mean, they would, they would use those exact same tactics is love bomb you, and then try to entice you when you wouldn't get into it. They'd like storm the capital.

Leo Laporte (00:56:45):
Yeah. <laugh> but there you go. Haven't we all, you know who hasn't after all <laugh> wow. Okay. Let's see. Earning Spotify 188 million premium users. That's good. Losing 197 million in the quarter. That's bad.

Jason Snell (00:57:09):
<Laugh>

Leo Laporte (00:57:09):
Overall

Jason Snell (00:57:10):
It is, it is tough to comp. I mean there, so there Spotify's number one. I, I, I assume. Oh yeah. And oh, for

Leo Laporte (00:57:16):
Sure.

Jason Snell (00:57:16):
And competes, but it competes with apple. And this is one of those examples of competing with a tech giant. Who's got an ecosystem play when you are our company dedicated to that thing is it's tough, right? Like, because Spotify has to compete with apple and apple doesn't have to compete with Spotify. Apple can just, apple can lose money. Apple could lose money. Like Spotify loses money until the sun blacks out. And it would be fine, right? Like it would be, it could just keep doing that. And I, I just, it strikes me that Spotify has to make a business at this and, and bless 'em because, you know, they are an independent business and this is what they're doing, but it just, every time I see this, I think how rough it must be to have your, your closest competition, be a company that is a minor cog in a giant tech giant. And that they, you know, that you have to prove something to your investors. And, you know, does apple music get called? They don't even reveal apple music, stats. They just don't care. And Spotify has to, has to do this every quarter and, and go through this R that's it's tough

Leo Laporte (00:58:17):
Business. That's really related to that streaming story, which is, it's hard for people who compete based on revenue from subscribers to compete with people who don't care.

Jason Snell (00:58:25):
Well, Netflix and, and HBO, max, and all those are entertainment companies. Right? And then apple and Amazon are not playing that game. No, at all, they just a different game are not playing. It's a totally different game. The money is different. The reasons are different. I don't what you do if it's,

Leo Laporte (00:58:38):
Yeah. I mean, you can't regulate that. But, but it does feel UN unfair. It feels, it feels like an uneven playing field.

Jason Snell (00:58:47):
Yeah. That's a tough one. I mean, you could, you could make arguments about like, well, if various mergers had not been approved and all that, but like apple, just, I mean, I guess they bought beats so that technically they could said, well, no, you can't buy beats, but they would've just made apple music. Anyway. I've

Leo Laporte (00:59:00):
Always thought Google shouldn't have been allowed to do YouTube. That apple shouldn't be allowed. In other words, apple shouldn't be a content company. It should be a hardware company that makes software too, maybe, but not a content company. Youtube should be a search company, not a content company. If, if you had those more clearly eliminate delineated lines, Amazon should be an online retailer, not a, a streaming service. And it's because those lines are blurred that you get them competing. I guess, there, there is an antitrust idea here, a doctrine here that that's what happens when companies get really big, they get, get a monopoly in one area, they can become too powerful so that when they enter other areas, you can't compete against them. And I guess in a way, that's exactly what's happening, isn't it? I mean, it's the cart. The cart has left. The, the barn has left the horses, left the cart or whatever, but I mean, there's no horse, there's no cart. There's no barn. It's over. Go ahead. Shahana.

Shoshana Weissmann (00:59:53):
So I just pushed back because I don't think Google's gotten into the horse game yet. It, they might at some point, but when they got into the social media game, you know, they didn't do safe. They failed Google plus fail. Yeah. They fail. And I think you, you have to allow that to happen. I also do worry about companies that wouldn't wanna start if they can't be acquired because with regulatory cliffs, you know, you reach a certain point and sometimes you don't want the scrutiny on you or you don't wanna have to handle the scrutiny or whether regulatory or otherwise and being well, why do

Leo Laporte (01:00:19):
They, why couldn't they just be a business? Why do they have to have an exit?

Shoshana Weissmann (01:00:23):
I, I don't know. I, the kind of regulations I've seen that kick in at certain levels, I I'm sympathetic to that. Like if you get clients

Leo Laporte (01:00:30):
Really sucks, so big that it's just too hard to do business without being absorbed by a bigger company.

Shoshana Weissmann (01:00:34):
Yeah. And I think we should make sure that regulatory environment doesn't encourage that, that it doesn't, you know, encourage acquisition where it shouldn't have to, but so far as it exists this way, you know? But also I think these companies can fail on their own. There's a lot of companies that are great at something and think they'll be great at everything. And then they suck or even, but here's

Leo Laporte (01:00:52):
The difference Johan. Yeah. They can survive that failure in a way that a company like Spotify cannot, if Google failed in social big deal, if apple failed in streaming big deal. But if Spotify fails in streaming or meta fails in social, that's a, that is a big deal. So,

Shoshana Weissmann (01:01:09):
Oh yeah. But Meta's kind of one of these big guys, so maybe meta can fail at you know, at you know, video peer to peer video. Right. Maybe they fail at that and keep social. Okay. But their social's not doing so great. No. So then if they fail at that, that's a bigger thing. So they all kind of have their bread and butter that they have to do, you

Leo Laporte (01:01:26):
Know, is it important that Spotify exists, that it succeed? Isn't it doesn't don't they provide competition

Shoshana Weissmann (01:01:35):
No more than any other company in my view, you know, it should, it should com sorry. Laws should support competition, but not specific competitors. So as long as there's competitors, there's ability for people to jump in there's you know, real opportunity. It's fine. I know I'm like on the outskirts, I do Pandora still. I just don't wanna have to switch over all stuff. This Spotify,

Leo Laporte (01:01:55):
Well, that's a perfect example. Pandora crushed by the record companies absolutely crushed. Spotify was about to be crushed by the record companies cuz they, they only can make money if the record companies allow it. And the record companies, you know, have a little faucet, little tiny, teeny faucet that they turn on a little drip at a time. But at any point they could say, yeah, we're gonna charge you 15 cents a stream. Bye-Bye so what did Spotify do as any sensible company? Did they invested heavily in podcasts and audiobooks and stuff that the record companies don't control that hasn't kicked in yet? So Spotify is, is I think very vulnerable. I mean, the fact that they have 433 million users, 180 million subscribers, and they're still losing 197 million a quarter that tells you something that's

Jason Snell (01:02:40):
Well, when their investors lose faith, then somebody will buy them out. Right. So that that's the really, the death sentence for Spotify would be they, they get bought out because they, they, you know, their business is falling apart and their investors are, are trying to exit. They're headed for the, the exits and I, you know, but I brought them up and, and their competition just to say, you know, I don't, I don't love Daniel Eck at Spotify. Nine know he said a bunch of stuff that I think is, is questionable and self-serving and makes him look like a champion ly not,

Leo Laporte (01:03:10):
But he's enemy of podcasts, to be

Jason Snell (01:03:12):
Honest. Yeah. Oh yeah, for sure. But I will say this about Spotify, which is I admire that Spotify has gone at alone against tech giants, cuz everybody's got their own music service. Amazon's got one now Google's got one, Apple's got one. Right. Google's got two. Or they did have two. Now they have one again. I don't know. And they, and they're number one. Like I really admire that and they've gone their own way. I, what gives me pause is just, I look at these losses and I think how long can they keep it up? Right. Because I do like that. They're the number one and they're independent and not one of the tech giants, like for

Leo Laporte (01:03:46):
That in a fair world, because they've created a better product and they have more users, they should be succeeding.

Jason Snell (01:03:52):
Yes.

Leo Laporte (01:03:53):
But they aren't. So that seems unfair in some way, to me, they're doing everything right. But because the record companies have a stranglehold on them, they can't succeed

Shoshana Weissmann (01:04:05):
To me. It kind of goes to the IP law, the record companies as well. You know, I'm not as well versed in that part of media law, but if there's issues there, it should be solved so that we can, you know, figure that out. Maybe you

Leo Laporte (01:04:15):
Need a Fran style licensing for music. You know, we have that in patents. Right? fair, fair, reasonable. Yeah. Patent fees, license fees. So that companies can't strangle other companies with their patents. Maybe we need something like that in music. Maybe they, you know, I want artists to get caught, you know, the problem isn't by the way artists, the problem is the record companies as the middleman, they give the artists pennies and they take dollars from Spotify and who makes all the money that the middleman does. So the record companies have always been the villain in this story always. And

Dan Patterson (01:04:49):
The publishers, I mean, it's not just the labels, right? I mean, it's the publishers that own the ASCAP B BMI and CSAC that's right, right. So I mean the that's the labels, right? I, I mean, I totally agree with the, the behavior of the labels, especially over the last 25 years, but they too are in a pinch and they're fighting for every last sent with the publishers,

Leo Laporte (01:05:10):
Right. Publishers you're right. It's publishers slash labels, but probably more publishers than anything else.

Shoshana Weissmann (01:05:15):
Even though on a like Instagram, you'll see, people will have like background music for a video and then it'll get removed, you know, because for some reason they, it, you know, there's an understanding,

Leo Laporte (01:05:26):
Oh, it happens to us all the time on YouTube. Yeah.

Shoshana Weissmann (01:05:28):
You get it. And it's not like people are gonna be like, oh man, let me tune into this podcast. Halfway through to listen to a quarter of a song. Now I don't need the song. Like that's not

Leo Laporte (01:05:36):
How that like 10 seconds of a song YouTube immediately will either ding me or, or often take it down. I had a, we showed at was a news story. We're a news organization. It's a fair use. It's covered. You know, when the queen celebrated her Jubilee, we showed that very cute video of Paddington, the bear, having tea with queen Elizabeth, as, as part of that, the paddings and the bear people took down that podcast and it's still down. It'll never, it'll never be back up. And I don't think I undermined the rights of PAing and the bear, if anything, I made people like Paddington more, right?

Shoshana Weissmann (01:06:12):
Oh, that's nuts. It's like the NFL gift thing. The same idea. You're actually doing promotion for them. And they're like, oh no, not free promotion.

Leo Laporte (01:06:19):
<Laugh> it's like when you go to a museum and they say, whatever you do, no Instagram pictures. It's like, dude, you, you should be so lucky that some influencer would decide that this is the perfect place for an Insta because that would draw millions.

Leo Laporte (01:06:35):
Alright, let's take a little, oh, one more Spotify story. Despite the fact they're losing all that money, they shelled out a lot of money to take over the podcast industry 295 million for four companies find a way pod sites, charitable and semantic. This is part of their their quarterly earnings. They paid 83 million euros in cash for pod sites and charitable why those are the companies we use both of them that help podcasters monetize by telling advertisers how well their ads are working. Now, Spotify owns them. In fact, charitable immediately shut down. We were using charitable and it kind of put us in a bit bad position. Pod sites still is open, but only as long as Spotify decides not to squeeze the, you know, non Spotify podcast market. So NTIC is an interesting thing. It's a, it's the AI voice platform used to simulate Val Kilmer's voice in, in the recent top gun sequel that's 91 million and then 117 million for find a way which is a digital audio book distributor. So all this money is being spent essentially to give them a new business.

Jason Snell (01:07:52):
Don't forget that. Every minute that you're listening to a podcast on Spotify, you're not, you're not, they're not paying royalties to a music publisher.

Leo Laporte (01:08:01):
Exactly. They're brilliant. They're brilliant. They also bought the, I think the best podcast platform, anchor.fm. I thought that I've always recommended that. That's great. Yeah.

Jason Snell (01:08:12):
I, I don't like them swallowing the podcast industry whole, but

Dan Patterson (01:08:14):
I do do, I do kind of admire it because it is smart.

Leo Laporte (01:08:17):
Oh, I why they're doing it's good for them. Yeah. The problem is the idea of an RSS delivered audio feed, which isn't, you know, doesn't require any particular player doesn't spy on you is gonna be eliminated because SP everybody will have to listen to their podcast on Spotify. And of course they know exactly what you're listening to when you're listening to it, where you're listening to it, who you are, how much you spend, what your credit card numbers are, all that stuff. And the advertisers love it, but it's not so good for the rest of us. That's all right. Sweet. I'm ready to Leo. I

Shoshana Weissmann (01:08:50):
Just, I have a question for you though. Do you mind the acquisition there? Like you get the same, you know, like, oh crap there, like absorbing stuff as you do when it's a larger tech company absorbing stuff.

Leo Laporte (01:09:03):
No, I feel the same way. I mean, when apple started getting a podcast, I was very worried that apple would do the same thing. Yeah. It doesn't matter the size of the companies you're relevant. What it what's happening though, is, is if it they're attempting, if they can to shift the way podcasts work a whole

Dan Patterson (01:09:18):
Yeah. From open standards.

Leo Laporte (01:09:19):
Yeah. From an open standard to a closed standard. And the problem is they can draw. If they pull advertisers along with them, they take all, they happen to blogging too. Right. They take all the air out the room for, for open standards. And it means that if you're podcaster, just like, if you're a blogger, you're doing it for fun because,

Dan Patterson (01:09:39):
And the very few companies, sorry to interrupt. But the very few companies, there were two companies that monitored the, the statistics, the data in podcast and for Spotify to do,

Leo Laporte (01:09:51):
They bought both of them. Sorry.

Dan Patterson (01:09:53):
Yeah. Sorry. My dog friend has very strong feelings about, he's not

Leo Laporte (01:09:56):
Happy either and I

Dan Patterson (01:09:57):
Don't blame him. Right. He's not happy. One bit. He's all about open standards. He likes RSS P M L and open standards because it's better for everyone. Let me make sure Fred's okay. And that's

Leo Laporte (01:10:09):
Good. I'll take a break while, while we while we tend to Fred pan. No, no, I don't mind. And in fact, I enjoy the barking. It's great. I miss my dog, Ozzie, who used to bark during our shows in the old days, Dan Patterson, CBS radio news, and his brand new show show his brand new job as a editorial director at what is the name of that? Again? He's gone. He's gone. Cyber cyber skill.com. I can see it on the screen. Shahan it's great. Johan. Should I say Shahan?

Shoshana Weissmann (01:10:41):
Oh, you're fine. It's Shahan

Leo Laporte (01:10:43):
Shahan or Shahan how do you like it?

Shoshana Weissmann (01:10:45):
The, the chill, the awe, not the,

Leo Laporte (01:10:47):
Ah, Shahan my very first girlfriend when I was three years old was named Shahan.

Shoshana Weissmann (01:10:52):
Oh, really? That's funny.

Leo Laporte (01:10:53):
I was three. So I called her sh shine. I apologize. I know <laugh> not a good name. <Laugh>

Shoshana Weissmann (01:11:00):
Where did you grow

Leo Laporte (01:11:00):
Up Providence. She was Armenian. It was Shahan dank and I think was her last name. So, oh, that that's cool, but is Shahan is it is it Hebrew? Is it, is it Armenian? I, I don't know what it's from.

Shoshana Weissmann (01:11:14):
Yeah. It's Hebrew and it just means roses. So like, there's a million of me there. A bunch of me in New York. Not many of me in DC. I love, but it's great. I get like the share thing in DC.

Leo Laporte (01:11:22):
Yeah. Well, my very first girlfriend, so I have a little thing for Shans that's that's the way it is. It's great to have you always a pleasure. You're so much, you're so much fun. And I love getting somebody with a, with a more libertarian, conservative viewpoint on we are often, oh, thank you. You're often get complaints that you guys are such liberals. And so I just want to thank you for representing that point of view. It's great to have you on. And of course, from six colors.com and now Mac break weekly, the Vanda for Jason Snell. Great to have all three of you. Our show today brought to you by Melissa, Melissa, another girl's name. I like quite a bit. Melissa is the address expert. Did you know, poor data quality can cost businesses an average of 15 million a year? What do I mean by that?

Leo Laporte (01:12:13):
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Leo Laporte (01:13:07):
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Leo Laporte (01:14:59):
Make sure your customer contact date is up to date. Get started today with 1000 records cleaned for free 1000 records cleaned for free. Did I say that 1000 records cleaned for free melissa.com/TWiT. Thank you, Melissa, for supporting this in tech, melissa.com/TWiTt, and you support the show by the way, when you use that address. So please do melissa.com/TWiT. We love our advertisers because they make it possible for us to do the show. Let's talk about Lena con. I don't know if you're a fan Shahan new chair of the FCC young woman known for being a somewhat skeptical of big tech Ft. C staff said, yeah, we're not gonna get involved in me's acquisition of within, which is a VR fitness app, Lena Kahn, the chairman. Overruled. And they are gonna go after meta for the acquisition of win, trying to halt within trying to halt that acquisition. What do we think? I'm I I'll I'll start.

Dan Patterson (01:16:14):
I heard that the barn and the horse had already left Leo.

Leo Laporte (01:16:16):
Yeah, maybe, but I do. I like seeing an FTC that is be, I like seeing a little more scrutiny on these acquisitions. It's the barn is left the horse on Instagram and Facebook, right on what's app and Facebook, but maybe we can, maybe it's not too late to start paying attention. Right. And

Dan Patterson (01:16:35):
I think they're trying to draw analogies with, with this. I mean, this wasn't a huge deal. It was like 400 million. But I think that they're trying to say, look, if, if me is going to pivot to virtual reality, and this company makes apps for virtual reality as the potential to be the Instagram analogous to Instagram type of purchase. And I think that this was the FTC just asserting itself in ways that maybe it regrets not doing so in the past.

Leo Laporte (01:17:01):
I, and I think this is exactly what antitrust is all about a company that has dominance in one market using its market dominance to enter a Greenfield new market using its power. Its, its its money to take over that market. That's exactly what antitrust is all about. Shahana is this overreach?

Shoshana Weissmann (01:17:22):
My view? It is. And I understand people who disagree, but for me it should be about protecting competition broadly. I don't think that that there was a ton of evidence that this was, you know, even like the Instagram thing, but you know, in my view, even that comparison's a little off because Instagram was starting to fail before Meda took it over or it was tiny

Leo Laporte (01:17:41):
Facebook, it was a billion dollars. Yeah. But it was a tiny, it was an app. There had small number of employees. I don't know if it was failing, but it was small.

Shoshana Weissmann (01:17:47):
Yeah. I think if I remember and I might be off, but I think their numbers were going down. It wasn't looking so great and Facebook revived them and even here you know, people complained about for me when it's about monopolies, I guess it has to really be about monopolies. And it's strange to me to say, oh, they can't get involved in something else. It's one thing. If they were looking to acquire maybe TWiTtter or something like that or doing things that would force Quip TWiTtter or something else like that to be under them. But when they're getting involved in new markets you know, they can represent new competition in that market. And so I don't really have an issue with it. But one thing also just from a governance standpoint, it worries me that, you know, she was going against internal FTC people. She wasn't really on the same page with her staff. And I think that's really important for leadership of any agency to kind of act as one as

Leo Laporte (01:18:35):
That's a little troubling. I agree staff though has been accused, you know, they dropped the Google prosecution. They've been accused of being a little lenient. And of course she's been accused of being over aggressive. So maybe there's a happy medium just to make, maybe make this clear within does supernatural, which is a very popular VR app. It's

Jason Snell (01:18:58):
It's the first killer app potentially for VR. Like it is a, it is a huge success on MES platforms. It's an, it's a, a VR

Leo Laporte (01:19:07):
App. They know how well it does. They know

Jason Snell (01:19:08):
It.

Leo Laporte (01:19:09):
They have meta has a competing app called beat saber. So it's as if, you know, I mean, this is, oh, we have beat saber. Let's just swoop up the whole market for fitness.

Jason Snell (01:19:21):
The idea here is you set up an app store. You are the first to market, really at this level with a platform like this, you know, the big, the, the big competition is coming. You know, Apple's coming, you're gearing up your meta, you're doing this. And you can look at your app store data and you can look at your usage data and say, what are the hits? And then you're like, well, I'm gonna buy the hits because this is how you figure out how to be successful in VR is try a bunch of stuff and see what works. And clearly supernatural works so make, and they wanna own it.

Leo Laporte (01:19:51):
The argument would be, make beat saber, better compete instead of buying, you know

Jason Snell (01:19:57):
Well, and I think what they're really doing here is trying to prevent supernatural from being built for Apple's VR platform. You go, right? Like they, they don't want their competitors to get a killer app. And the end result, I think to Han's point, the end result, if you allow this, is that somebody else is gonna build something a lot like supernatural that is gonna be on Apple's platform. And it's gonna be a killer app on that platform because supernatural doesn't exist or meta, if Apple's really successful, Meta's gonna be like, okay, will be on Apple's platform too with supernatural because we want the money like that that's competition. And so I, I don't, I mean, like I get it from the sense that they're trying to say, we don't want apple Apple's platform to be as competitive with us as it would be otherwise on another level, if they buy this it's so early, somebody else will make a supernatural like thing on Apple's platform or any other competing platform. And it'll probably be okay.

Leo Laporte (01:20:52):
That's a good point. That's the,

Jason Snell (01:20:55):
And that's great. I mean, I, I do again, it's the Moxi of Facebook though. Like I, I admire again, I'm here. I am admiring corporations, but like what, what a scam, what a, what a deal? You, you set up an app store, people come up with apps, you find the hits and you buy 'em and then you say, haha, we all, we own all the hits. Right. That's what they're doing.

Leo Laporte (01:21:13):
And yeah, I guess you could say, well then they bought Instagram. And so all these competitors to Instagram popped up no, as soon as Facebook bought Instagram, that was it. They owned that market.

Jason Snell (01:21:24):
Right. I guess the difference here is that we're talking about a PLA a potential, like the apple thing looming here is like, they are gearing up for war, right? Yeah. That's, that's what this really is. Isn't it? And they, and they don't want, they know that supernatural, if it is a standalone is going to either gonna be like a, a triple a game maker who makes a deal with Sony or Microsoft, right? Like for an exclusive, they're gonna have upper hand and they're gonna be able to make a lot of extra money and charge Facebook, meta, extra money or apple to get an exclusive. It's probably limited. And then in the end it's gonna be on both platforms. And like, why would you do that? If you could just spend a few million now and never have to do it cuz you own it. And that's what they'res, I think they're gearing up for war here.

Dan Patterson (01:22:06):
I think the FTC knows that. And that could be one reason they stepped in rightly or wrongly. I'm not advocating for or against this. But I think that they also understand that there is a war coming and they can set a precedent or they can do nothing, which also sets a precedent. Right.

Leo Laporte (01:22:23):
Let's talk about Instagram. Are you Shahan I know you use Snapchat. <Laugh> do you use Instagram?

Shoshana Weissmann (01:22:32):
<Laugh> fun fact. I actually don't use Snapchat. Oh. Except for the hot dog. I put the hot dog on places when I'm hiking. And now I use Instagram mainly to like document my hiking more for me. I've started playing round with it, seeing how stuff works. I don't, it's funny. I don't actually care for it, but it's I like documenting my hiking, showing other people, moose and goats, you know?

Leo Laporte (01:22:53):
Wow. Where do you hike that you get moose?

Shoshana Weissmann (01:22:56):
Oh man, Colorado. Montana. Just the west and Canada. I really like Canada. So

Leo Laporte (01:23:02):
Aren't you based in DC?

Shoshana Weissmann (01:23:04):
Oh yeah. I just travel a bunch of weeks during the summer and nice work and hike at the same time. It's it's the best I just got back from ban and like they pink

Leo Laporte (01:23:12):
Pine. How was that? Yeah. Pink.

Shoshana Weissmann (01:23:16):
Yeah. Oh, I also touched a a psychoactive frog. I thought it had peed on me, but it, it, it put its goo on me that like is psychoactive and I was looking at it and talking to my dad. I'm like, it has a white Stripe down its back. I think, I think this might be one of those frogs and he is like, go wash off your hands. So then later after we're back in cell service, I Google and I'm like had I licked my hand. I would've, you know, gone for a fun ride. <Laugh>

Leo Laporte (01:23:42):
So a little word of advice. Don't lick your hands when you're hiking with Shahan. All of this is recorded in Shan's blog on medium.com Senator Shahan dot medium dot com highly recommended. In fact, you've got a list of your favorite hiking gear, if you're a big hir. Oh excellent. Yeah. Look at all that. I when we were in Alaska, we took a little hike on a tiny little island where Huna is beautiful island, where we were told there are four bears per square mile. There are more bears than humans on this island. So the guy who led the hike had bears spray, strapped to his chest, like ready to use. He had one of those air horns on his back. So he, ah, and he said, whatever you do, if we encounter a bear, do not run they're faster than you. To which I replied. Well, they, I only have to be faster than you. I don't need to be. Yeah. <Laugh> faster than the bear. Nevertheless we'd encounter no bears. I'm sad to say so.

Shoshana Weissmann (01:24:44):
Oh you should. You should go back, go back back. Five bears. Yeah. I've I ended up 30 feet from a grizzly alone once and I got a bear spray. I had a cause you, you hear my voice? I sound like mini mouse. I had to be like, hello, bear like a freaking idiot. And like it worked and the bear went away, but like, I'm like I might die and I'm gonna die. Like an idiot. So

Leo Laporte (01:25:08):
Spray.

Shoshana Weissmann (01:25:09):
Oh yeah. Yeah. I was aiming the spray after I got out the vitamin water and then realized the bear spray was on the other side. <Laugh> and then got that out. I

Leo Laporte (01:25:17):
Hear you spray a bear with vitamin water. They're not happy about it either, but you know,

Shoshana Weissmann (01:25:21):
I haven't tried yet.

Leo Laporte (01:25:22):
I went the whole time I was singing which much to my wife's annoyance. You go through burn necessities. I figured that would scare any bear off. But

Shoshana Weissmann (01:25:32):
Yeah, they don't like responsibility. And when you tell them that they have to have everything in order, they're just not gonna be happy.

Leo Laporte (01:25:38):
The burn necessities of life, Instagram is not good to say that Kardashians to which the head of Instagram Adam Messer says, yeah, you're right. It's not good yet. Yet is what he said. So Kim Kardashian and Kylie Jenner actually made a video saying Instagram really sucks. What has changed? It used to be all about photos, still photos. And now because of the success of TikTok, I think it's pretty clear meta their parent company is saying, well, can you be a little more like TikTok? So every video post turns into a real Instagram's algorithm, promotes videos over photos. It's I, I mean, it's really clear when you use Instagram that it's all about videos now and that's a little bit disappointing. Instagram has backed down a little bit. They they've. They, what they said is some people are seeing a different Instagram because we're trying stuff in AB comparisons. Now, Adam ER says, okay, we're not gonna do that. Because we heard, we heard from the Jenners and the Kardashians and we're not gonna open to full screen photos and videos cuz that's too toy. I don't think that's no

Dan Patterson (01:26:57):
Mark Zuckerberg said that. No, no, no. We're we're doing this. Oh yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:27:03):
He overruled. Ah huh.

Dan Patterson (01:27:05):
Yeah. I mean, what they're doing is shifting from like algorithmic sorting, but it's stuff you've already Optim opted into, which we're all pretty accustomed to almost every social network uses algorithmic sorting to algorithmic discovery, which is what TikTok pioneered is so good at doing Facebook has all of this incredible data. So they think they can be pretty competitive. But look, everybody I talk to at Facebook says that Zuckerberg and the executive team is just terrified. I mean the blue app is also changing like this isn't limited to just Instagram and the blue app saw declines both in revenue and active users in the office. And there's also face

Leo Laporte (01:27:42):
There's an expectation users have. And I think you're on TikTok. The expectation is you're gonna see the algorithm cuz you know, I mean I follows people mm-hmm <affirmative> I never see their feeds, but I see everybody else's that's fine. But your expectation on Facebook is you're gonna see. And I think Instagram, you're gonna see the people you follow and what they're up to. That's why I use Instagram. I stopped using Facebook. The algorithm is the enemy I think, but maybe they they're just so worried about TikTok.

Dan Patterson (01:28:10):
The algorithm is, is the core. It is everything Facebook, right?

Jason Snell (01:28:16):
I, I don't, I understand why they want to be like TikTok cuz TikTok has proven to be so effective. It is even better that it's like the greatest Zuckerberg's gotta be kicking himself. Right. Cause he is like, he, he is a social media mogul and somebody else invented like an even better way to turn your smartphone into like the ultimate dopamine hit in your hands. Right. And it's like, ah, we didn't do that. They did that. And so he's like, okay, well we, what do we have? Let's look around Instagram. Yeah. We'll just make Instagram into TikTok. And like I get it. I totally get it. It's a more lucrative market. It is what the, the kids like it they're they're of course you're gonna get stuff you wanna see if they know everything about you and they're monitoring your behavior. It's kind of brilliant at the same time.

Jason Snell (01:28:59):
I just think it's a shame that they have a, a perfectly good or what was at one point a perfectly good product, different product called Instagram. And they've decided sort of to just kind of cast it away. And I wish they would come up with a more, you know, I would like it for them to come up with a way either in a separate app or with a separate interface. And I know they'd done this with the, your follows part of Instagram to say Instagram is both things, but sometimes I get the sense that Instagram is not gonna be both things. It's really just gonna be the new thing. And if you like the old thing you're here. Yeah. If you like the old thing and you're here for the old thing too bad, just too bad.

Dan Patterson (01:29:33):
Yeah. It's Instagram has Jason. Exactly. To your point. It is shifted from being a pure play app that had core competencies to being a tool that is used to play defense. Now, if we remember, especially, you know, per earlier discussions, Facebook was really good at fending off competition. They acquired other companies. They killed companies when they had to let's look at Snapchat, for example, I mean their growth was stalled because Instagram and Facebook successfully mimic their features. And they used Instagram as a tool to beat other companies. And for the first time in a long time, maybe ever discounting discord. But for the first time, in a long time, there is a competitor to Facebook and Meta's products that they can't do anything about this. They, they seem to be fairly impotent. And, and when I talk to people inside the company, it seems as though the thing that's causing them, the most anxiety is this inability to respond to the competition.

Leo Laporte (01:30:34):
They both Facebook, Instagram and TWiTtter. Now all three have non algorithmic feed choices, right on Instagram. You can on mobile. Anyway, you can click following. Twittter has latest versus home and Facebook this week announced that they're gonna give you a truly chronological feed the people, non algorithmic, the people you follow in order. Isn't that all three companies saying, yeah, we hear you. You hate algorithm or no, they they're gonna do algorithm because the people aren't vocal spend more time on the algorithmic feed. Right?

Jason Snell (01:31:14):
That that's exactly. It's like the nerds and it's not necessarily nerds like us, but it's the nerds of the platforms, the social nerds, the EST,

Dan Patterson (01:31:20):
The

Leo Laporte (01:31:21):
Kylie S

Jason Snell (01:31:21):
Of the world, the ones who wanna control everything of the thing that they love hate it. Right. They always hate it, but there're always gonna be more casual users than there are nerds and the casual users don't aren't completed. So they want stuff floated up. It's more effective. It makes them more money. And as a, as a social media nerd on TWiTtter, let's say which I am you, you gotta have that moment where you just say, please just let me watch it the way I want, do whatever you want to do to the rest of them, but let me have it the way I want it. And, and you know, we'll, we'll see. But yeah, cuz they know it works. I mean, that's the truth of it. Right? They wouldn't do it if it made them less money. <Laugh>

Leo Laporte (01:31:58):
I mean, word, go ahead.

Shoshana Weissmann (01:32:01):
Oh, sorry. I like the word completist too, because I think that really is what a lot of this is about the people who just wanna see everything their way, you know, really have that control. It's a good way to put it because I can, I definitely have those instincts on on platforms that I use a little bit too much. But but I think you're right about the algorithm thing. Like they like it, but at, at the same time I think with Facebook too Facebook's always try and MES always try to do everything at once. I mean, even if you go on Facebook now there's like 10,000 little apps in there that you can integrate into other stuff like farm bill. Isn't much of a thing, but there's still alternatives like that. Like kind of wonder if them not valuing Instagram as much as kind of an extension of that. Like, oh, well we, we need to beat out this other thing. So let's just model this into this other thing and have it become something else rather than like, Hey, maybe this is our competitive advantage in a certain way that will compete with them by being different.

Leo Laporte (01:32:53):
Do you think at some point they phase out the non algorithmic feeds. They're just doing that to appease us completists and then eventually, because the money is, you know, to me it's expectation. I'll say it again, TikTok. I don't have any expectation of seeing everything. I go there for quick entertainment hits and I swipe through it and I don't care if the people I follow show up or not, they have a four you page and a following page. Ironically, I still don't see the people I follow on the following page. I know this cuz I follow my son who is a big talker and I don't, I don't see half of his videos. So I know it, they ignore what I'm saying, but at

Jason Snell (01:33:29):
This I feel like there is a use case though, right? Like I think it won't go away forever because there is a use case, which is you need, somebody says, oh, did you see that thing? I post on Facebook and you're like, no, well my, let me go

Leo Laporte (01:33:40):
For it of Facebook. And I think this is what Facebook started it with. And on Instagram too is I'm gonna see the latest pictures from the people. I follow family, friends, brands, whatever. Yeah. And I'm gonna see 'em in order and that's, that's what I want. And I do think that's the expectation. I don't think it's the expectation on TikTok, but I do think it's the expectation on Instagram and, and Facebook now, TWiTtter, maybe I use both. So when I, when I, when I haven't been on for a while, I'll use the algorithmic feed cuz it shows you high part of this is how well the algorithm works too. By the way, if the algorithm is sucks, doesn't matter. But the algorithmic feed, if I haven't been on for a while, but if it's the middle of the night or it's the middle of the night, I, nobody I know is up. But on the other hand, if I've been checking regularly, I wanna see the chronological fee. I wanna see the latest tweets cuz I don't. I'm afraid that they'll, the algorithm will filter out stuff I care about. So I like the choice and on again, that's three different expectations, one expectation for Instagram meadow, one for TikTok and one for TWiTtter and why should everything be the same?

Jason Snell (01:34:47):
I think that's why choice is good. Right? And, and because, because there is a use case for it. I think to answer your earlier question, I don't think it's going to go away entirely, but I think for people who love it and think it's the number one use case, they're just gonna be sad because it's gonna be buried away as sort of the a, a lesser view, a view that you have to click through a couple of places to get, to see something because most people just don't don't want to use it

Leo Laporte (01:35:12):
That way. Well, and the other reason I don't like algorithmic is more subtle and more of a, maybe a bias, which is, I feel like algorithmic feeds are the feeds that get you in trouble. That YouTubes YouTubes, algorithmic feed is the one that radicalizes you, because it brings you down a rabbit hole that so I I'm concerned that algorithmic feeds are the way that a company can enforce its own worldview and actually modify your worldview using its algorithm, whether intentionally or not. And so, and biases and biases. So I, I that's, I'm kind of against algorithmic because it's, it feels a little icky to me that these guys are telling me what's important, cuz I don't necessarily think that's good.

Shoshana Weissmann (01:35:57):
It's funny. You sound like more of the conservatives I have in my feed who think the same thing, but they think that, you know, all the platforms are just trying to turn them into radical woke liberals and all that stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But but I think part of it too is just that it's, it's all our biases too, that kind of feed into their a little bit. You know, like I have hiking pugs that show up in my Instagram timeline cuz I love pugs and I love hiking and a couple of them that can like breathe through it, do hike. But but I would seek it out on my own anyway. And I think that ends up being the case a lot of the time, like you might discover stuff that you like otherwise, but I think a lot of it really does come down to people like to seek out confirmation bias and that'll happen no matter what. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:36:37):
If you are a TWiTtter fan, you may be distressed to learn that the TWiTtter blue subscription is going up. Thank you Elon. <Laugh> no, I don't know there's anything.

Jason Snell (01:36:48):
I, a TWiTtter blue subscriber and I canceled it.

Leo Laporte (01:36:52):
I'm not gonna pay, I don't mind three bucks. I ain't paying five bucks.

Jason Snell (01:36:55):
Well, I'd like to see some value from it still like the value is super limited and that was the problem is it was just not quite all there. They do. They have taken sort of bits of nozzle and turned that into that's

Leo Laporte (01:37:06):
What I was paying for. I love

Jason Snell (01:37:09):
And it's it's okay. They added a top stories first. It was top stories of people you follow links that were shared. They've added a, of the people they follow, which was a nozzle feature that actually kind of roots up some stuff. That's interesting, but it's, it's so basic. And for, to like to, I was kind of spending $3 on a whim, like, okay, yeah, me too. Twittter. Me too. Let's see where this goes. Yeah. And where it went was no new features and we're gonna charge you more. Well, I mean, it's not going anywhere. Forget it.

Leo Laporte (01:37:39):
My typos aren't worth five bucks a month. So will I lose the nozzle features if I don't pay for it?

Jason Snell (01:37:46):
Yeah. That top stories with links is a TWiTtter blue feature and that's, that's literally the only feature that I was using in TWiTtter blue. Yeah. oh that, that in the, there's a thread, there's a thread reader. That's good that you lose. And, and then there's some site links that turn off ads when you follow through, they they're real limited. Yeah. But like something that you, me,

Dan Patterson (01:38:08):
I would come back three bucks.

Jason Snell (01:38:09):
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. For three.

Leo Laporte (01:38:11):
I, I don't mind mediocre five bucks.

Jason Snell (01:38:13):
The value here.

Leo Laporte (01:38:14):
I want some meat. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So you think this

Dan Patterson (01:38:18):
S nuzzle

Leo Laporte (01:38:19):
Back? I do too.

Jason Snell (01:38:20):
No kidding,

Leo Laporte (01:38:21):
But that's but we're in a specialized field. We we're news types. Right. Nozzle

Jason Snell (01:38:26):
That's really, it is like they nozzle harness the power of TWiTtter and lists and following lists to help people in our situation to kind of like graze the media if it matters and that's a product. Right. And we talked about, about meta buying supernatural, right? Like, so, alright. Nozzle probably was, had run outta road. So they get bought by TWiTtter and it's like a feature leveraging TWiTtter and yet okay. If it's just for people like us, why don't you put a small team on it and make it super awesome and charge us $20 a month or $10 a month or something like that. Or instead it's this kind of halfway thing for three or $5 a month and it doesn't satisfy anybody. Yeah.

Dan Patterson (01:39:04):
Or right. Bake this into, I mean, what it does do if you haven't, if you haven't used TWiTtter blue in the top articles, what it does is show you friends articles that are shared by people you follow and people they follow. And what this really did for me is illuminate the real data value of TWiTtter. And we used to talk about this a lot. In the earlier days of TWiTtter, that it, it was this kind of huge data. It was a front end to a huge data store of social activity and news activity. And what, what the acquisition of nozzle. And then the top articles did for me is show, feature the potential of TWiTtter. It could be a really cool thing. In fact, this maybe should be a regular feature. Instead it's packaged in this kind of mediocre, TWiTtter, blue blah, and it's not as good.

Leo Laporte (01:39:55):
So I have a feeling this is gonna backfire. On the other hand, I have a feeling that TWiTtter is gonna prevail in Chancery court in Delaware and get a few billion outta Elon. So maybe <laugh> maybe they won't need my five bucks. Elon Elon is now counter suing case. You're curious and a judge has decided that the TWiTtter versus M case will go to court in October. They, he actually set the dates. So this'll be fun. I wonder if it'll get as much coverage as the Johnny Depp, Amber herd trial, do you think it will on this channel? <Laugh>

Jason Snell (01:40:30):
No, because it's not as titillating to talk about, about corporate law.

Leo Laporte (01:40:35):
It's not, but

Dan Patterson (01:40:37):
It's like, he might have as many bots as Johnny, Deb.

Leo Laporte (01:40:39):
<Laugh> Johanna, what did you say? Oh

Shoshana Weissmann (01:40:44):
Yeah. I think it just depends on the group. Like, we'll be launching, I didn't follow the herd depth stuff like that was so depressing. Like, oh,

Leo Laporte (01:40:50):
It was awful.

Dan Patterson (01:40:52):
Two.

Leo Laporte (01:40:52):
I just horrible people suing each other. Great.

Shoshana Weissmann (01:40:56):
Yeah. I didn't need that.

Leo Laporte (01:40:57):
No, but I'm, I am a little curious because Elon promised to pay 44 billion sight unseen essentially, you know? No, no due diligence then claimed, well, I want to do due diligence. Twittter said, no, you signed. You're gonna pay. The problem is Elon doesn't have all that money. He only raised, he has about 21 billion. The rest he borrowed. I don't think they can force the lenders to pony up and they ain't gonna get 44 billion outta Elon. So my prediction is it's just gonna be, they're not gonna get the billion dollar breakup fee. It'll be more than that. The chance court's gonna make him hurt a little bit. So it'll be, you know, some number of billions of dollars going into TWiTtter's pocket. And I hope they put it to good use cuz he, he really did cause a mess. People left TWiTtter, a lot of, you know, tumbled. It just was a mess and he should have something, you know, you should pick.

Shoshana Weissmann (01:41:53):
Yeah. I miss when when Elon was kinda like the cool innovator, we didn't know much about

Leo Laporte (01:41:58):
Like I do

Shoshana Weissmann (01:41:58):
Too. You know, the mystery was nice when I didn't know anything like when Rick and Wardy did Elon tusk looked just a cool guy who like, we're gonna do a chill pun with nothing weird about him. He's just very, very, he's just a smart guy. And I don't know anything about his personal life and he is not trying to buy TWiTtter. Like I miss those days,

Leo Laporte (01:42:19):
Our, our, our heroes have feats of clay.

Jason Snell (01:42:22):
They're just people. I mean, that's, that's the truth of it. Take it from somebody who has covered apple for 25 years. Like Steve jobs, you know, again, he's just a person. He had super weird things about him. And also he did brilliant stuff and yeah, I think Elon, I'm not sure Steve jobs did anything quite as weird as some of the stuff that Elon has done. But the fact is I talked to some people who think that he is a fraud and that everything he's done is bad. And it's like, well, that's not already. I hate to tell you, he did. He actually legitimately did revolutionize space. And although he says a lot of dumb stuff about Mars, he also SpaceX is a triumph of a company. He kind of revolutionized the auto industry by forcing electric cars onto the road with Tesla. He's done a lot of great stuff doesn't mean that he isn't also a jerk or a weirdo or does, or makes terrible mistakes like this whole TWiTtter thing. Like it's all part of the package of a human being. He's

Leo Laporte (01:43:09):
Human, it's human. Yeah. Right.

Jason Snell (01:43:11):
He's all those things.

Leo Laporte (01:43:12):
He's. And as big as he is his, his flaws and his you know,

Jason Snell (01:43:19):
He said

Leo Laporte (01:43:19):
Something are big as well.

Jason Snell (01:43:21):
Right. I, I hate to quote an Elon tweet, but he said something perceptive on TWiTtter this week, which I think he immediately then did the wrong thing about, but he did say like basically it was a moment of self realization that everybody is looking for his tweets to see, to jump on them and make them into stories and talk about how he's lost it and all this stuff. And, and that maybe he should just focus on other stuff. And I'm sitting there thinking, yes, Elon, that is you saying, stop tweeting, please stop tweeting now. And of course he didn't stop tweeting,

Leo Laporte (01:43:48):
So, oh, well, meanwhile, he's added a command to the Tesla, which he just tweeted about open butthole. So he's really revolutionized the car business as well. Yeah, yeah. Mm.

Shoshana Weissmann (01:44:01):
That was a south park episode with it like that. That's what I'm hearing there that oh,

Leo Laporte (01:44:06):
He's he's referring to so, but he butt, he put it in.

Shoshana Weissmann (01:44:11):
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. I mean like in, in my mind, I'm hearing south park, but I don't think he is south parking, but I, that was a great episode.

Leo Laporte (01:44:19):
Well, look at this. He is S bobbing. I think you'd appreciate this. When the song you memorized comes on in the car, and then he points out all Teslas, come with a free karaoke app. That's what you need in an automobile these days.

Dan Patterson (01:44:34):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:44:35):
<Laugh> priorities. He does tweet a lot. I'm looking for the tweet you mentioned, and there's so much it's entertaining so much. It's entertaining. Yeah. Our show today brought to you by Cole lied. I know, you know, collide, Jason, they're good. Sponsor six colors.com. I love this idea. It's kind of the antithesis to the old school device management story. You probably know. Well, an it department locks everything down. They put super glue in the USB ports. Make sure you can't do anything. And I understand if you're an it man, that's that's, that's what you need to do, right? To keep your stuff safe, to keep your company safe. But frankly, it has a problem. And you've probably experienced this too people rebel. They don't like it. And so what happens when you lock down security is you create rebels who end up using their own devices, which is far worse, and then bring it into the office, which could be disaster old school device management tools like MDMs force, disruptive agents onto employee devices that slow performance and treat privacy as an afterthought and users know it.

Leo Laporte (01:45:47):
That way of doing things turns it admins and end users in enemies and then creates its own security problems. Cuz users turn to shadow it, just to do their jobs. Collides is a completely different idea. It in it enrolls your users as your allies, instead of forcing changes on them, collide sends them security recommendations. Now you've gotta be a slack house. We are, we love slack. If your business uses slack, you're gonna love this. It starts with the user being prompted to install the collide agent in slack. And it explains everything. It walks them through it. So now already they're part of the team, right? And then it automatically notifies them when devices are insecure and gives 'em step by step instructions on how to solve the problem. But more importantly, I think gives them the information. They need to understand why it's a problem.

Leo Laporte (01:46:35):
So you're reaching out to employees via friendly slack DM. It's not a public message. It's a DM, you're educating 'em about company policies. And as a result, collide can help you build a culture in which everybody is part of the solution. Not part of the problem. Everybody contributes to security because everybody understands it and how and why it needs to be done. When now as an it admin, you're gonna love it. Cuz you get a single dashboard that lets you monitor the security of your entire fleet. And by the way, Mac, windows or Linux that's platform agnostic, you can see the glance which employees have their discs encrypted. For instance, who's got up to date OSS who hasn't updated, who's using password managers, all of this makes it easier for you to prove compliance to your auditors, to your customers, to your leadership. And you're doing it with the, with the, with your allies.

Leo Laporte (01:47:24):
The employees is great collide. User-Centered cross platform, end point security for teams that slack that's the elevator pitch. I'll say it again. User-Centered cross platform, end point security for teams that slack, you can meet your compliance goals by putting users first, visit collide K O L I D e.com/TWiT and find out how, by the way, if you follow that link, you'll get, they'll hook you up with a goody bag, including a t-shirt some nice stickers you can put on your laptop. And that's all just for activating the free trial collide. I really think this is the way to do it. K O L I D E collide.com/TWiTt. It will make your life better. How about that may not make your whites whiter or your laundry better, but it will make your life better. How about that? Collide.Com/TWiTt. We thank of so much for supporting this week in tech on we go with the show Dan Patterson.

Leo Laporte (01:48:26):
It's great to have you. Shahan Weisman. My first girlfriend and Mr. Jason Snell, what else? Happened this week? Oh, wait a minute. I'm looking at the wrong rundown. This is a different show. I thought it looked, I thought it looked different. All of a sudden I'm doing this week in Google. We did the Instagram, Amazon drive shutting down next year. I don't know if anybody used Amazon drive, Amazon photos will continue, which is still the best kept secret for Amazon prime users unlimited free photo storage. But if you've been using drive, you're gonna have to migrate next year. Oh, let's talk. Wawe I've been, you know, and Dan, I, I know you cover securities. I'm very curious for I've gone back and forth on this. The commerce department two or three years ago said to government agencies stop using huawe networking equipment.

Leo Laporte (01:49:23):
We don't trust them it's that we feel like they might be Chinese spies. It seemed maybe that this was at some point during tr the Trump era. I mean predated Trump, but at some point during the Trump era, it was just kind of xenophobia and maybe even kind of prompted by Cisco and other us companies trying to get that networking market. There wasn't a lot of evidence that Huawei was doing anything disruptive. Well now we have some of that evidence and this is a CNN exclusive FBI investigation that said Huawei equipment could disrupt nuclear arsenal communications would it starts the lead is the Chinese government was offering to spend a hundred million dollars to build an ornate Chinese garden at the national Arboretum in Washington, DC, they were gonna do temples and pavilions. There's gonna be a 70 foot white pagoda would attract tourists to be beautiful.

Leo Laporte (01:50:28):
A great, perfect example of Cino us cooperation, but then us counter intelligence officials began digging into the details. The pagoda would've been strategically placed on one of the highest points in DC, just two miles from the capital, a perfect spot for signals intelligence collection. Chinese officials wanted to build the Paco with materials, shipped to the us in diplomatic pouches. So they couldn't be examined ahead of time. The feds killed the project in 2018, but at least for the, at least the last five or six years, federal officials have been very nervous about Chinese attempts to spy on us. And for a long time, there was some question about wawei apparently according to CNN study, there's no question. Wawei equipment has the ability to intercept not only commercial cell traffic, but also highly restricted communications used by the military. And furthermore has the ability to disrupt strategic command communications. Dan, you must have looked into this over the last few years. What, where do you come down on this?

Dan Patterson (01:51:46):
Yeah, the rich real challenge in the last like three to five years has been this mishmash as you alluded to of various actors and their motivations. And you're right. I, I think there was a lot of xenophobia mixed in with these stories. We can, we can have a very similar or parallel conversation with TikTok. But at, at the end of the day, the reality is that our, our law enforcement and intelligence communities although they too have their own partisan actors have been in a nonpartisan way, examining companies like Huawei and there are real privacy and security there are potentially real privacy and security threats. I think, you know, this

Leo Laporte (01:52:40):
That's the problem it's potential it's potential, right?

Dan Patterson (01:52:43):
Yeah. Right, right. And I, I, I say that I'm trying to choose my words wisely or at at least hedge as much as possible. Although this story feels like out of a great, maybe cold war thriller, like yeah, no kidding. It has a lot of narrative components to it. You can see them saying, ah, nice try building your pagoda, that would've disrupted <laugh>. But at the end of the day, we are in an era where, where software and hardware has the potential to gather a tremendous amount of data about us and not just our consumer data, but there are sec secur real security and privacy threats that, that are higher stakes than, you know, the sandwich you, you might have eaten you. I I'm trying to, to be vague, but also, you know, the stakes are pretty high on this.

Leo Laporte (01:53:36):
Yeah. Maybe just be better to err, on the side of caution Christopher Ray, the director of the FBI told CNN that the FBI opens a new China counter intelligence investigation every 12 hours. He says they're probably around 2000 investigations currently on underway. That's not of Huawei specifically, but of China in general. We're very nervous about China. I understand why I still don't think there's a smoking gun with Huawei. And I guess that's the thing I'm waiting for. Although, you know, they make a good point, you know, given where this equipment goes, it could absolutely be problematic. And even if it's completely clean now software updates down the road could, could turn them into you know, weapons of, of destruction in the United States. Shahan is there, is this outside your portfolio or do you have an opinion on this? I don't know what you know.

Shoshana Weissmann (01:54:35):
Sure. Yeah, no, it's it's not exactly in mind, but I do have strong opinions just that like, we need to make sure it's about foreign policy threats and not about economic protectionism, because it's easy to use the first as a threat, as a thin veil for the second. There's a lot of that during the Trump administration where it could go either way, like you could see the security case, but in other cases you're like, does he just wanna do economic protectionism here? So I'm always for being wary and objective, but the Wawe stuff also does not look very good. So it, it's kind of one of those things where I think it has to be a case by case thing where I find myself going back and forth a little bit.

Leo Laporte (01:55:11):
There's also considerable criticism of the the FCCS rip and replace policy Congress set aside, well, they said they set aside $1.9 billion to remove Huawei and ZTE technology throughout rural America. But two years later, according to CNN, none of that equipment's been removed. Rural telecom companies are waiting for federal money. The FCC received applications to re remove 24,000 pieces of Chinese made communications equipment. But it's more than $3 billion short of the money it needs to reimburse. So these companies are saying, well, why do we have to pay for this? And they're not doing it. So it's, it's a little bit of a mess here. And I, you know, I understand intelligence often doesn't wanna reveal the smoking gun because that then you can infer on their methods from what you, what they know. So maybe they don't wanna say maybe they do have evidence and we just, and it's not unreasonable for them to say, look, trust us. There's good reason that we want you to take this stuff out. So I'm gonna err, on the side of that, I

Jason Snell (01:56:23):
Guess that's how they're behaving. I do wonder at what point do you have to say, all I have is your word on this, right. You know, we are, we are banning this company and trying to tell our allies in Europe to not use them because you are giving us the wink, wink, nudge, nudge that something is a foot here, but it, it, it is, you know, I, I like, I also want to give them the benefit of the doubt to a certain point, because I understand this is about you know, spycraft and you know, espionage and it's like, you don't want give away the secrets. Yep. At the same time though, it does give me a little bit of pause that, that there has not been enough for me to feel like, okay, alright. Alright. I buy it. I buy it now instead. It's more like, yeah. Okay. I'm taking you on faith. And the other part of this is sometimes I wonder if we're not seeing the forests for the trees here, because the truth is sure. Something made in China could be subverted by the Chinese government. They could know all the back doors. All of that is true. That doesn't necessarily mean that there isn't stuff made elsewhere that if the chin, if it was installed next to the ICBM silos that the Chinese government would not also have an exploit for. Right. Right. I mean, we don't really know that part.

Leo Laporte (01:57:37):
Yeah. They're talking about, this is a great article. If you want to read it in the CNN, they talk about weather cameras that are, it turns out Chinese weather cameras, high definition surveillance cameras from a company or put up by a company called Valero capturing movement of us, military equipment and personnel. The cameras provided a 24 7 bird's eye view not just of weather, but of military movements. The intelligence community determined the publicly posted live streams are being viewed and likely captured in China. Two sources briefed on the investigation at the time set officials believed it was possible for Beijing's intelligence service to task the cameras and point them in the direction they wanted to look. The CEO of the company said it never occurred to him, but the, that the cameras could be a security risk, but he's gonna rip 'em out, even though it's gonna cost him a lot of money and the government isn't gonna reimburse him for any more than half of the, of the cost of rip and replace. So it's a problem, you know, I guess patriotism and, you know, you're just gonna, he's gonna just donate the, but

Jason Snell (01:58:49):
Again, again, these cameras, like really what's the issue here? The issue is somebody put webcams on the interstate. Yeah. And they could be viewed from anywhere. Yeah. It doesn't matter who made the webcams, it, it matters that the webcams existed. And I would also say, I bet you, there are also some satellites that are able to observe that entire interstate as well. Anyway. Yeah. So it, it, it like I get it. And yet you gotta, you gotta convince me like, this is literally, they were public webcams of I 25, like of P and China could look at them, so could anybody it's true.

Leo Laporte (01:59:22):
Yeah.

Shoshana Weissmann (01:59:24):
Yeah. And I also worry that in a lot of cases, the government officials raising certain concerns are the ones with passwords that are password <laugh>, you know, they're, it's kinda like that kind of situation. Cause we at our street, we've done a lot on cyber threats, a lot of hacking and you know, of government agencies of other large entities. But like, I'm, I'm very open to trying to optimize security, but I'm also like, okay, but like maybe we do the basic stuff, like not have your password on a little sticky note at your desk. You know, as we unfortunately learned during the insurrection, we saw lots of that on government computers. And I think we need better cyber security across the board. And there's, there's many fronts there, but sometimes I, I think it's like like he was saying, you know, the forest through the trees thing, I think we're we're ki we kind of miss that sometimes.

Leo Laporte (02:00:11):
Well, let me give you a bunch of stories guaranteed to make you paranoid. How about that? This is we we'll have a new paranoia section of the show discovery. This is from Dan Goodin, right? In NAS technical discovery of new U E F I root kit exposes an ugly truth. The attacks are invisible to us and they've been around since 2016, U E F I, which is the firmware that boots, most computers, Mac, PC, and Linux. The problem with this attack is it isn't wiped out by a hardware reset by a formatting of the hard drive. It lives on forever. And on Monday researchers from Kaspersky profiled, something called cosmic strand, a sophisticated root kit. The company detected it's been around since at least 2016 in the wild, in the wild and Kaspersky says this discovery begs the final question. If that's what the attackers were using six years ago, what are they using now?

Jason Snell (02:01:17):
<Laugh>

Leo Laporte (02:01:18):
Okay. So there's and there's, you know what, you're compromised, that's it you're done. There's nothing you can do about it. T-Mobile one of the largest data breaches in us history, you may remember this they've agreed to pay half a billion dollars, 350 million will go to customers and lawyers. You wanna guess the proportions of each at least 150 million will go to enhancing data security measures. The T-Mobile admitted no guilt. <Laugh> the, the breach compromised, the sensitive personal information of more than 76 million current, former and prospective customers in 2021. Yeah, we, we, maybe it happened, maybe it didn't, but here's half a billion dollars, which I have to say is a lot more than Tim Hortons is given up. <Laugh> Tim Hortons. We talked about this some months ago their app which people were, you know, Tim Hortons is a coffee shop started in Canada.

Leo Laporte (02:02:19):
I think they're in America too. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> it's an app that was on people's phones. That was just like given up all sorts of information, including location to everybody. And anybody, Tim Hortons has settled the class action lawsuit. And, and I think this is fair. The four different class action lawsuits in Quebec, British Columbia and Ontario the suits accuse Hortons of collecting geolocation data of its users, demand recompense for the breach of privacy. Tim Hortons has reached a proposed settlement in which eligible app users will receive a free hot beverage and a free baked. Good.

Jason Snell (02:02:58):
Hey, amazing. <Laugh> it's unless I understand. Okay.

Leo Laporte (02:03:02):
At least the lawyers, maybe you only get donuts,

Dan Patterson (02:03:06):
Maybe you really should just put all the sensitive data on a sticky note and put it

Leo Laporte (02:03:11):
On. Yeah. Maybe we're better off Russia.

Shoshana Weissmann (02:03:14):
I dunno. When, when I go to court, I kind hope for just a hot beverage, a ice

Leo Laporte (02:03:18):
Tea. That's good. But what more?

Shoshana Weissmann (02:03:20):
That, that's the end goal for me?

Leo Laporte (02:03:21):
What more could you ask for according to apple insider for about 12 hours Russia's Ross telecom tried to repeatedly tried to route users of apple services through Russia, apple engineers, applying counter measures, Russia applying counter counter measures, repeatedly trying to hijack Apple's services could have been just a configuration error. You know, BGP is complicated false route announcements that could make internet connections to its servers instead of apples. But we may never know, was it in purpose or not? And the FBI for some reason. And they're not saying why decided to raid a private business in March, 2021, us private vaults, a Beverly Hills based safe deposit storage business. Okay, fine. They were being accused of, I don't know, money laundering or something. Unfortunately for the users, the customers of private vault, the FBI during the raid, went through all the safe deposit boxes attorneys, representing victims of the raid. Say the depositions can contain important information about how and why the FBI decided to seize and catalog the private belongings, not just of private vault, but of their customers.

Leo Laporte (02:04:44):
They didn't. The word search warrant did not cover that, but agents seized hundreds of safe deposit boxes anyway, opened many of them and rifled through their contents. Under the guides of cataloging, the items, a fishing expedition in search of additional criminality, the warrant explicitly forbade the FBI from seizing, the safe deposit boxes or their contents. The FBI says we have nothing to report. I think we'll see a few lawsuits over that. Alright. Let's see. Let's I, you know what maybe this would be a good time now that we've given you all the paranoia, I didn't talk about Google and Amazon handing over video from your doorbell, but you know, you knew that <laugh> you, you knew that, right. Let's take a little break and come back and we're gonna have some other stories, some lighter stories. I don't like to end the show on a, on a paranoid.

Leo Laporte (02:05:47):
No. But before we go on with our great panel, Jason Snell, Shahan Weisman, Shaana Weisman. And of course Dan Patterson, I want to talk about how we do these shows with this amazing TriCaster you, by the way, our, our it's great to have a Newt. Wait a minute. John's on the TD. Now what happened to bonito? Oh, there's bonito. <Laugh> we have hired a new technical director. Bonito worked for years. He did. We're. We're using TriCasters at TWiTtch and also at CNET. Yeah. So he's one of the reasons we hired him. He's a TriCaster wizard since day one. Since we started video streaming video on the TWiTt, we, I chose the new tech TriCaster and I am so glad. Our show today brought to you by the newest, the TriCaster two elite bonito. Do you want one of these?

Leo Laporte (02:06:41):
Yes. It's the most complete live production system on the planet. We've got a pretty good TriCaster elite, but maybe the TriCaster two elite. Hmm. Some great new features. New tech offers a full line of TriCasters at, at any price point and whatever you select TriCaster puts an entire suite of media production capabilities of your fingertips. Oh, we are using the two. Are we using the two elite? Yes. Oh, we are. Oh, nevermind. We've got the best. Of course we do. The one we use@TWiTt.tv is more than a online production system. We upgraded, I forgot. We upgraded all encompassing digital media solution to create content for the internet, for mobile, for TV distribution. We only use a, we only scratch the surface. This thing is amazing. Late last year, new tech released an updated version of the TriCaster. Two elite, bringing in a host of new and exciting features, the live call connect feature.

Leo Laporte (02:07:34):
That's such a cool idea. Now supports Facebook messenger and WhatsApp and FaceTime. So any production can bring in content from there. In addition, selectable, audio and video return now enables TriCaster tool lead operators to view an audio return like any other output, which makes it much more flexible. The new neural voice isolation tool cleans audio using AI. It can cancel, reduce background noise and automatically detect voices, maintaining an all important production quality. We, we care about that a lot. It's very important. Even in a video production, increased power, flexibility and simplicity have driven these exciting new capabilities. There's variable support and macros. John uses macros to video, to idiot proof the TriCaster from me, cuz when I switch in my studio, I do it all with macros. So I can't, I can't break anything. I still break things sometimes, but he's it's nice. I appreciate that.

Leo Laporte (02:08:28):
The system offers a dynamic and powerful tool that allows me to nest macros to deliver complex productions more easily. It's actually a great feature. You plan ahead. You've got these single buttons you can push to do all sorts of stuff. Tricaster elite two elite now supports encoding three channels at a time from HD to UHD all the same time. That's really nice. They brought the live panel builder into the TriCaster, which means you can people use the live panel builder to create bespoke user interfaces, to customize presets within the user interface. Meaning your distributed workflows are simpler, more cohesive, but as always with the TriCaster, never compromising on quality, the NDI genlock tool. You'll love that gen lock's so great. NDI is great. That's a TriCaster invention that transforms video production, the network digital interface remote workflows. Fantastic. You can send alpha channel through one of the mix outs.

Leo Laporte (02:09:26):
I, all of this stuff is meaningless to me. NDI. That's all NDI now. That's really cool. Wow. That's neat. So we were originally SDI if we converted now to everything to NDI. No, no, no. Oh no. Four. We do four and four. So like this, this point in this PTZ camera is an NDI camera. So it has one connection, power over ethernet and video over ethernet. That's really, really amazing. Since it's arrival a couple of years ago, the TriCaster two elite has offered us an incredibly powerful live production system and all these new updates give you so much more capability. It's really transformative, better than broadcast, but of course there's other choices. The TriCaster one pro for producers, content, creators and publishers, future ready capabilities streamlined live video production, live call connect 4k U HD switching, live streaming recording. I mean it's incredible. Explore the latest in the TriCaster family.

Leo Laporte (02:10:27):
Here's what we've set up for you visit go.new tech.com/TWiTt-tv. That's a long one. I know go dot NewTech, NWT k.com/TWiT-tv where you'll find it easy to use interactive guide that offers advice on which TriCaster is right for you. And if you know, if, if the boss is generous, like our boss is maybe you get the TriCaster two elite really nice go.new tech.com/TWiT-tv. Thank you. New tech for making it possible to do what we do here at TWiTt. We love him. Thank you. New tech. We had a great week this week on TWiT. I I'm I'm I'm a little foggy about the whole thing. So the team made a video for me so I can remember what happened. Watch.

Mikah Sargent (02:11:17):
We were talking a little bit about adding some splashes of color to your setup up, but you know what? I like the corner. It's

Jason Howell (02:11:23):
You? It works. Nobody puts Jason in the corner. Nobody except

Mikah Sargent (02:11:27):
You <laugh>

Jim Cutler (02:11:28):
Previously on TWiTtter. All

Leo Laporte (02:11:30):
About Android.

Jason Howell (02:11:31):
We got a lot to talk about. Today's starting with flow. Who reviews? Not one but two devices. The pixel six, a and the nothing phone one, it looks like a neon sign. That's broken.

Jason Howell (02:11:42):
That's exactly what it looks like.

Sam Abuelsamid (02:11:44):
Tech break. I've got two really interesting new electric vehicles that have come on the market. We've got the brand new 20, 22 Rivian R one T and from a company that's been around for over a century, the Ford F-150 lightning

Jim Cutler (02:11:57):
Windows weekly.

Mary Jo Foley (02:11:58):
This was Microsoft's first time missing on earning since 2016.

Jason Howell (02:12:02):
Yeah. Halfway through the quarter, they said, ah, just kidding. It's gonna be worse. They revised their guidance. And then they still miss that target. That's how this company's doing. Well,

Leo Laporte (02:12:11):
Apple did the same thing. Yeah. Everybody gets to do that now because of recession,

Jason Howell (02:12:16):
You know? Yes. Obviously inflation's really high. Yeah. The high value of the dollar. One of, so one of the interesting

Leo Laporte (02:12:20):
Things, but next quarter's gonna be great.

Jason Howell (02:12:22):
Right? Cause this can't last forever. Right?

Jim Cutler (02:12:25):
If you missed TWiT this week, you missed a lot.

Leo Laporte (02:12:28):
Wow. I didn't realize how congested I sounded on Wednesday. I hope I don't sound that bad. I hope you enjoyed everything that happened on TWiTtter. We'll be back this week with a fabulous week, including Jason Snow on Mac break weekly. Very excited about that. So do you know about leap seconds? I think we're, we, we even talk about it from time to time. You get, you get to new year's Eve it's 11 59, 59, and all of a sudden poop it's 11 59 59 for an extra second <laugh>. Woo. That's because the Earth's rotation and revolution around the sun does not cooperate with atomic clocks. It's a little bit off. So every once in a while, since 1972 world time, keeping authorities have added a leap second to the global clock known as the international atomic time. They tuck in an extra second you know, who doesn't like that computers.

Leo Laporte (02:13:27):
They, they don't get it <laugh> they don't, they don't get it. And so there is a call now from Google, Microsoft, meta and Amazon this week, they launched a public effort to scrap the leap. Second, what's the big deal. In fact, they say, it's gonna take 2000 years before you even notice that the atomic clock and the earth are at a sync. You don't have to worry. Maybe we'll correct it once every 2000 years throw in an extra day, something like that N actually agrees as does the French equivalent. The below was a museum bit M which is even more fun to say the leap. Second triggered a massive Reddit outage in 2012 problems at Mozilla, LinkedIn, Yelp, airline booking service Amadeus in 2017, a leap second glitch of CloudFlare knocked a fraction of the network infrastructure company off servers, offline Cloudflare's software comparing the two clocks calculated time had gone backwards

Jason Snell (02:14:34):
<Laugh>

Leo Laporte (02:14:35):
But didn't know what to do. So I just, ah, screw it. <Laugh> okay. So I guess maybe the Google do has an idea that might be better than eliminating the leap. Second Google has pioneered the idea of the leap schmear

Jason Snell (02:14:53):
Mm-Hmm <affirmative> <laugh> it's it's actually I kind of a brilliant idea. I don't know if this will work or not, but the idea is you take that that day. That is one second too long. And what you do is you stretch every second by teeny tiny amount. So all the computers think that the day is the same number of seconds as it always is. But for that one day, every second is just a little bit longer, but it doesn't, you there's no extra second. It's just all the seconds are longer. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:15:23):
That seems like a bad idea, but

Jason Snell (02:15:25):
Okay. Again, does that solve it though? Google? Does it actually solve

Leo Laporte (02:15:30):
Anything? Aren't they still screwed up? I dunno. Are you excited? Both the Lord of the rings prequel and the game of Thrones prequel at prequels coming HBO max is gonna stream the game of Thrones prequel in 4k HDR next month, the house of the dragon, and to celebrate, they've decided to upgrade all of the game of Thrones episodes to 4k HDR, which really won't improve the last season, but it'll maybe, maybe,

Jason Snell (02:16:02):
You know, it actually will because that season has that episode. That was super dark long night. It will look and it will look, it will look much better in, in a higher bit rate with HDR. It'll actually be actually visible.

Leo Laporte (02:16:14):
It was so

Jason Snell (02:16:15):
Murky it, the entire run of game of Thrones. Even though 4k TVs were a thing HBO back then it was HBO now and HBO go, their pipeline did not allow for 4k. Right? And so, even though they, they made these shows in 4k, or at least they released 4k DVDs and all of that it wasn't until wonder 1 19 84, a Christmas of 2020.

Leo Laporte (02:16:38):
Oh, that was a big deal. Yes.

Jason Snell (02:16:39):
That they put it out in 4k and it is still taking them until now to actually say, yes, this show is gonna be in 4k. And this whole famous show that's in the archive is gonna be in 4k HDR because that's just never been one of their priorities, I guess. Weird, weird.

Leo Laporte (02:16:55):
Supposedly George A. Martin is now finishing the last volume and he says, it's not gonna be anything like the TV show. <Laugh> at least it'll be in 4k HDR Doby, Atmos HDR, 10 and Doby vision. So if you have a, we got there. Yeah. If you have an apple TV, 4k and Amazon Firestick 4k or the Chromecast ultra, you'll be able to watch it. And the house of the dragon in 4k, Hey, big congratulations to marque Brownley. You know him as YouTube star, but watch this. This is marque brown. Lee's amazing catch whoa, which made it to the number two of the top 10 sports highlights of the week on sports center and gave his team the pride of New York, the world, ultimate club championship. Look at that, that guy he has, he can get some air. Woo. And you just thought he was just a YouTube star. Nice. Very, very nice top, top 10 highlights of the week. And then we'll end, I think on a sad note, I know everybody knows that today Uru sent her last message. Michelle Nichols, star Trek, actor, trailblazer role model. This is NASA's tweet who symbolized to many, what was possible. She partnered with us to recruit some of the first women in minority astronauts and inspired generations to reach for the stars. It was Martin Luther king who told her, she said, I wanna quit this stupid ass show. <Laugh>

Jason Snell (02:18:35):
She wanna go to Broadway? She wanted to be on, but go back to Broadway. Yeah. And, and, and Martin Luther king said, you can't quit. You were showing the future with us in it. And not as maids or, or other servants like everybody else on TV, you see us and we're we're peers and we're out there in space and the future is promising. You gotta stay. And she's like, all right, okay, fine.

Leo Laporte (02:18:57):
89, Michelle Nichols hoorah. And if you watch strange new worlds, the new star Trek, you could see the young hoorah

Jason Snell (02:19:04):
That's right. Which

Leo Laporte (02:19:05):
Is pretty awesome.

Jason Snell (02:19:06):
It really, it really does show that all they didn't give her as much to do as they should have. It really wasn't until star Trek, sorry, star Trek nerd here. Hi star Trek three. <Laugh> my favorite horror scenes in star Trek three. She actually has a great moment where she helps steal the enterprise and spoilers for a movie from the eighties. And it's great, but they didn't. So in the, in strange two worlds, which is a great show, they, they have the young Aurura and it, it is great to see them digging into that character because unfortunately, as iconic as she was on that show, they still didn't give her a whole lot to do so. She did get to do some more stuff in the movies. And, and I think her greatest contribution is what NASA tweeted out there. She essentially NASA pu said to her, maybe you should recruit people from underrepresented groups to join NASA and become astronauts. And of course, one of those people was made Jemison who was the first African American

Leo Laporte (02:19:59):
Astronauts. Oh, awesome. Also the first interracial kiss on national television, when she kissed captain

Jason Snell (02:20:04):
Kirk, it's true. Which legendarily they wanted to shoot it both ways and Shatner fouled up the scenes where he didn't kiss her. So they had to use the ones. Good. He did

Leo Laporte (02:20:12):
Good man bill way to go way to go. Here's a great picture. George to K tweeting a late in the later years, obviously they're at a, a Trek fan convention. We lived long at prospered together. Nice. And that I think is a fitting way to end this week's this week in tech. Shaana. Thank you so much for being here. I really, you are so much fun. I really

Shoshana Weissmann (02:20:39):
Oh, thank you for having me.

Leo Laporte (02:20:40):
Yeah. I just, I, I appreciate your point of view and your spirit. You just great head of digital media@rstreet.org. You could follow her blog at Senator shahan.medium.com where she writes about hiking and all sorts of other things. And she's also Senator Shahan on the TWiTtter. Anything you wanna blog?

Shoshana Weissmann (02:21:04):
I actually, it's funny about the URA thing. I mean, you, I was watching, I, I watched TCM a lot, so I was watching this great TCM short. They had about, you know, basically black people throughout movies and it's, it, it really struck me how only recently we've really started to give black people, like really good roles and they've had a bigger role in film and like the industry's allowed them to. So thinking that, you know, she really had such a big role there, you know, a really, really notable one more. So then I realized growing up, cuz I always heard, oh, she, you know, she, and will Shannon always had the first interracial kiss and all that, but really thinking through it, it's kind of amazing that she was able to play such a big role and that you know, that, that she was, I mean, able to recruit people for an NASA because of that. I mean, even in the forties and fifties, a lot of the roles they gave black people were just nothing and, and not that they didn't have the talent, they just weren't giving them the roles. So it's kind of crazy to think how recent this stuff is.

Leo Laporte (02:22:03):
It's so many of the roles were such were step FET kind of horrible racist stereotypes. Yeah. She even said, if, if you've gotta be typecast, at least it says someone with dignity and Aurora always had dignity. She yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. Thank you. Shahan for being here. We're all Shahan fans Gumby in our chat room says, thank you. You Dan Patterson, we're fans of Dan Patterson still contributing to CBS news, but congratulations on the new job editorial director@cybersixguild.com, which is what a internet threat detection company or what, what is it?

Dan Patterson (02:22:42):
Yeah. thanks for having me as I was here.

Leo Laporte (02:22:44):
Of course appreciate

Dan Patterson (02:22:45):
It. Shahan was great to doing a show with you and yeah. And Fred who is and Fred downstairs being very annoying. Aw. Yeah, cyber six skill is threat intelligence. So it's like a Google for the dark web. I, and I don't wanna log roll or, or do too much emotion,

Leo Laporte (02:23:01):
But

Dan Patterson (02:23:02):
It's well, but we

Leo Laporte (02:23:02):
We often give you guys a chance to plug what you're up to. So I don't, I don't feel,

Dan Patterson (02:23:06):
Yeah. And I mean, it's, it's, I wouldn't join a company that I don't believe in. And I mean, as you know, journalism is a call of your, your heart. You have to do the profession because you care about it. And I still deeply care about the profession of journalism and I'm joining this threat detection company because their technology is really interesting. And because the it's not just about the commercial interest, it is a product that MI it, the job I wish I could do as a journalist, it really minds the dark web and provides a, a portal into it in ways that are really fascinating. And I hope to use it for journalistic purposes as well.

Leo Laporte (02:23:45):
Yeah. Well, so here's the big question you get to go to black hat.

Dan Patterson (02:23:50):
I am not going to black hat this year, although I, I love going to black hat in DEFCON, but it is mostly because of COVID and because we have some some fun personal stuff coming out, it's

Leo Laporte (02:24:01):
Probably, I wanna

Dan Patterson (02:24:02):
Stay

Leo Laporte (02:24:02):
Safe. Yeah. Probably wise to stay safe. Lisa and I went on a cruise and came home with a little present. So it's probably better to just stay at home a little bit longer, just a little bit longer. Great to have you, yeah,

Dan Patterson (02:24:14):
Just a little

Leo Laporte (02:24:15):
Better. Thank you, Dan. Just all the best to you and the Mrs. And Fred. Thanks. and of course we love you so much. Jason sell so glad that you're now part of the family <laugh> and I can't wait to see you Tuesday. There'll be lots to talk about, of course, including Apple's results and your color charts.

Jason Snell (02:24:35):
So many, no, the six colors anyway, cuz it's on brand for me. <Laugh> and just during the show, we, we, we coined the term. So now you, if you wanna hear more about me talking to Julie Alexander about streaming. Oh yeah. You don't even have to look it up. Just go to churn valet.com, which I now own. Oh,

Leo Laporte (02:24:50):
You bought it. You are great. This is the new app that you guys are gonna invent <laugh>

Jason Snell (02:24:56):
Yep. At some point we'll, we'll go there, but right now it'll just tell you to downstream where Julian and I talk about the, the business is streaming. I she's brilliant. You

Leo Laporte (02:25:03):
Do so many podcasts. I didn't even know about this one. This is a fascinating subject. I will be listening.

Jason Snell (02:25:09):
I'm just a conduit for, for Julia's really incisive knowledge of this stuff. She works as an, a analyst, parent analytics talking about what the demand for different streaming shows is. And she used to be the verge. And she's just so smart. And it was one of those things where I, I wanted to be, you've done this before. I know which is, oh, I found a brilliant person who should probably have a podcast. I'll just ask them questions and make the podcast happen.

Leo Laporte (02:25:33):
Yeah. That's basically the story of TWiT, to be honest with you. That's all I ever wanted to do. Exactly. And I made Jason create a page for all of his podcasts cuz he does so many true

Jason Snell (02:25:44):
Story. True story. If you go to six colors.com/podcasts, you'll see all look at this podcasts. You're

Leo Laporte (02:25:52):
Nuts. That's like 20 podcasts

Jason Snell (02:25:54):
And Dan, Warren's got a few in there too, but yeah, it's it's mostly

Leo Laporte (02:25:57):
Me. You're busy, busy guy. Great to have you all three of you and thank you. All of you for joining us. We do TWiT on Sunday evenings about 2:00 PM, Pacific 5:00 PM. Eastern 2100 UTC. If I say that so you can watch it live. If you want at live, do TWiT.tv or listen live. If you're watching or listening live, do chat live with us@ircdotTWiT.tv. And of course club TWiT members, you get a special chat platform just for you for seven bucks a month club TWiT members get ad free versions of all the shows that takes about an hour out of every show. I know, I know you also get access to the great club, TWiT discord, where the conversations are fantastic, not just about the ongoing shows, but about every topic that a nerd could be into. And you also get the TWiT plus feed with stuff that doesn't make it to the podcasts.

Leo Laporte (02:26:52):
Seven bucks a month makes a big difference for us. It's kind of our way of getting ready for the Spotify ons slot. We figure if we can, if we can get a little subscription club going, maybe we have a chance of surviving TWiT.tv/club TWiT. If you wanna know more, there are also annual plans and there's corporate memberships as well. Thank you in advance. We really appreciate the support we've been getting from our club TWiT members. After the fact of course, we still offer free versions of this show. Just go to our website, TWiTt.tv. You'll find all the shows there. You can also find it on YouTube. Every show has its own dedicated YouTube channel. And I guess the easiest, best thing to do would be find your favorite podcast, player, podcasts, overcast, Google, or Apple's podcast player, whatever it is that you like and subscribe. And that way you get to automatically the minute it's done. So you got it for the Monday morning commute. You don't have to think about it. Thank you everybody for being here. And the words of or the, the emoji of Jason's Snell live long and prosper. We'll see you next time. Another TWiT is in the can. Bye. Bye everybody!