This Week in Tech Episode 913 Transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word.
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Leo Laporte (00:00:00):
It's time for Tweet This week at Tech. We got a great panel for you. Some of my best friends in the business, Larry magid, is here from connect safely.org. Our good friend Will Harris. His new Unbound books are hysterical. And Denise Howell, formerly of this week in Launch, he's got a new show to announce. We'll talk about quarterly earnings from some of the biggest businesses in tech. I give you a hint, not a great quarter. Elon Musk is off the hook and chat. G p t comes to Bing. It's all coming up next

TWIT intro (00:00:29):
On Twitter.

Leo Laporte (00:00:33):
Podcasts you love

Denise Howell (00:00:34):
From people you trust.

TWIT intro (00:00:37):
This

Leo Laporte (00:00:38):
Is, this is twit this week in Tech. Episode 913 recorded Sunday, February 5th, 2023. Impractical Shorts

(00:00:56):
This week. Weekend Tech is brought to you by Miro. Miro is your team's visual platform to connect, collaborate, and create together. Tap into a way to map processes, systems, and plans with the whole team. And get your first three boards for free to start creating your best work yet at miro.com/podcast. And by express vpn, stop handing over your personal data to internet service providers for three extra months free with a one year package. Go to express vpn.com/twis. Thanks for listening to this show. As an ad supported network, we are always looking for new partners with products and services that will benefit our qualified audience. Are you ready to grow your business? Reach out to advertise at TWI tv and launch your campaign. Now. It's time for Twent this week at Tech Show where we cover the week's tech news. I look forward to every Sunday because I put together a panel of my friends <laugh>. It's really just a chance for me to sit down and talk to people I miss and adore. Like Denise Howell from this week in law, a longtime host on Twits. Great to see you, Denise.

Denise Howell (00:02:16):
It's so good to see you. Thank you so much for having

Leo Laporte (00:02:18):
Me. I'll tell you how long it's been. I'm thanking you for your Christmas card,

Denise Howell (00:02:21):
<Laugh>. Yes.

Leo Laporte (00:02:23):
But it was a great indeed Christmas card. I loved it. And I can't believe your son is 19 now. I

Denise Howell (00:02:27):
Know. I can't either. Oh my gosh. And yet we're somehow aging backward and not changing. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:02:33):
We're not getting any older. Yeah. But it just shows you how long we've been doing this. First twit was 2005, so that's 18 years. So yeah, I mean, when we started working together, he was just a toddler, right? Yeah.

Denise Howell (00:02:45):
Yeah. He was.

Leo Laporte (00:02:46):
I've known Will Harris pretty much as long as well, he is now the c e o of Unbound, which is an amazing publisher. Hello. Will. Hello.

TWIT intro (00:02:56):
It is great to be back from the other side of the

Leo Laporte (00:02:57):
Pond, staying up late. I

Wil Harris (00:02:59):
You're, you're making me feel decisive. Decidedly old. Cuz that was sheet. I was in my twenties when we started working together.

Leo Laporte (00:03:06):
That's amazing. Now I've, how many companies of years have I been through <laugh>? Quite a few startups. You are the serial entrepreneur. I have many of your books right here. These are unique, like things I learned from Mario's butt, which is, believe it or not, a walk through gaming critiques of butt pictures.

Wil Harris (00:03:31):
Just great, just great botts, great butts from different games. And what you can learn from the philosophy of how we do game design and character design,

Leo Laporte (00:03:38):
Like Reen and metal gear. Solid. Maybe we're gonna get a hard R for this. Wow. Yeah.

Wil Harris (00:03:44):
<Laugh>. So you'll get some, some good stuff there. We publish quite a lot of of sort of nerd geek culture stuff. So there's if you're, if you're a fan of Nerd Geek culture, there's some good stuff@unbound.com.

Leo Laporte (00:03:56):
Oh, I'm loving these. And you kind of, it's like a Kickstarter, right? You they fund them so

Wil Harris (00:04:02):
That, and then we produce them and print

Leo Laporte (00:04:04):
Them, produce them. And you do. And you know, even though the name is Unbound, they are actually beautifully produced. They're beautifully bound. <Laugh>. These are not cheap books. These are nice books.

Wil Harris (00:04:12):
No, yeah. And we have one coming out later this year, which is posthumous, posthumous collection of all of Douglas Adams' writing.

Leo Laporte (00:04:20):
Oh, yes. You told us about that last time. I'm, I'm excited. What

Wil Harris (00:04:22):
His

Leo Laporte (00:04:23):
Office, what is the status on that? Yeah, I'm excited about

Wil Harris (00:04:25):
That. So it's, it's now I think close to manuscript being done, but if I say that out loud, I might get shot. So let's, let's pretend I didn't say that.

Leo Laporte (00:04:34):
Ah.

Wil Harris (00:04:35):
But it will be, it will be here in the autumn.

Leo Laporte (00:04:37):
Oh, that's exciting. That's really exciting. These are, these are, it's probably gonna be the last published works of Douglas Adams, right? Yeah. There's not, I mean, I, unless you know, some trove of stuff,

Wil Harris (00:04:51):
Stuff comes out. No, this is, this is the trove Leo. We've got the trove

Leo Laporte (00:04:55):
<Laugh> notes from his office that were just left on his desk and things like that. I can't wait. And

Wil Harris (00:05:02):
Full thoughts of half-written emails and correspondence and wedding speeches and I mean, it's, it's

Leo Laporte (00:05:06):
Hilarious. And of course, the best name 42, right? What a perfect name for that. So Ken John Davies, put that together. The edits are done. You could still pre-order just go to unbound.com if you want to get in line.

Wil Harris (00:05:23):
And we actually had a a really good little bump over Christmas because if you've seen the new knives Out movie. Yes. The Glass Onion with Ryan Johnson loved it. The, the Daniel Craig character is reading one of our books in the bath,

Leo Laporte (00:05:38):
No

Wil Harris (00:05:39):
Unseen <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:05:40):
That's where he is doing the Zoom call. He's playing among us.

Wil Harris (00:05:44):
Yeah. And he's, so we have a we, we have a book called Kane's Jawbone, which is an incredible murder mystery where all the pages are printed out of order and you have to tear all the pages out of the book, then reassemble them all in the right order to work out who done it. I saw that with the very sort of knives out.

Leo Laporte (00:06:02):
I didn't realize it that I saw him reading that. I noticed that he was reading that by Toka Mata and I noticed that as well. I didn't realize it was yours. Well, that's nice. That's really nice. Yeah.

Wil Harris (00:06:14):
So that's, so Kane's jaw bonus is, is well worth a read if you've got a spare weekend and fancy bit of puzzling

Leo Laporte (00:06:19):
Wow. Also with us to celebrate, by the way, from connect safely.org, the wonderful Larry magid. Hello, Larry.

Larry Magid (00:06:28):
Hey Leo. And by the way, I, I get my hair dye from Anderson Cooper. I'm, I'm, I'm not really as old as I look. I'm dirty.

Leo Laporte (00:06:34):
Look just like Anderson. Yeah. Uhhuh <affirmative>. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. What are we celebrating? We're celebrating Safer Internet Day. Is that right? Yeah,

Larry Magid (00:06:42):
It's Tuesday and it's a, a global thing all over the world. The connect Safely is the host here in the US and we've been doing it since 2014. We had Kamala Harris at one of our events. We had Chuck Schumer, we've had superintendents of Schools. But this year we talked about this. Last time I was in your show, we funded a bunch of schools to do their own events. So, and it really worked out well. We're gonna reach 25,000 students c you know, nationwide by giving some money to educate us to do their local events. But people here can still participate. We've got a live virtual event on Tuesday, the the seventh at seven 30 Eastern, four 30 Pacific, that we are co-hosting with a national pta. A really great for parents. And the other thing we've done, if we put together a ton of videos at Safer Internet, a US or you can go to connect safely and find the link there to Safer Internet a.us a ton of videos with like the, a chief scientist of the American Psychological Association talking about mental health and wellbeing and you know, folks from the Cyber Bullying Research Center.

(00:07:44):
And one of the, that in fact, you, that's a picture of Bri Heller who's an expert on the vet on the Metaverse. Just a ton of videos. And the idea that families can watch these videos or have conversations Tuesday night. We give you discussion points. It's internet in a Box. Those are our sponsors. So it's an opportunity just to talk about, you know, are you spending too much time online? Are you spreading misinformation? Are you forgetting to watch Twitch? I mean all all, all important things that everybody Twitch should

Leo Laporte (00:08:12):
Be don't watch Twitch Kids. What Twitch did I say?

Larry Magid (00:08:14):
Twitch. Twi Twitch. Twitch. Actually Twitch is one of ours.

Leo Laporte (00:08:18):
Twitch is one of your sponsors. So I, I'll give, I'll let you go. This, by the way, is an Unbound book that maybe Connects Safely should get called Taming Gaming. Yep. Guide Your Child to Healthy Video Game Habits. 

Larry Magid (00:08:28):
And that's exactly the type of stuff we publish. Yeah. Although we do, our guides are much shorter than that. This is nice. And we have quick guides that are, that are two pages long and longer guides that are been eight pages, but we haven't done books yet. But, you know, and

Wil Harris (00:08:39):
There's a a and there's a section in there about what's legal and what's illegal on the internet. So you've got like a whole sort of synergistic circle of twit hosts this afternoon. I love this on between law, between safety, between publishing, where we've got it all

Leo Laporte (00:08:54):
Covered. We, we've got it. This is the animal crossing. So you, this actually has game recommendations and then pros and cons, what ages it's for, stuff like that. This is the animal crossing page, which is a great,

Larry Magid (00:09:04):
Well, we, you should send me a review copy. We, we, we review books occasionally. I'll

Leo Laporte (00:09:08):
Hook you up. I know the publisher

Larry Magid (00:09:09):
Hook me up <laugh>, you know, the publisher. But anyways, everybody should tune in. Should go to internet. Do us the, don't go to the org unless you want the international event. But the US event is us. Nice. And tune in on Tuesday night and have a conversation at home. I mean, whether you use our materials or not. If you got kids, ask 'em what their favorite game is. Ask 'em what their favorite apps are.

Leo Laporte (00:09:30):
Talk, just talk to

Larry Magid (00:09:30):
Them. Don't lecture them. Don't make it an inquisition. Just, and, and by the way, ask 'em about privacy and security. They might not only surprise you how much they know, they might actually know more than you do. You, you, you'd be surprised how smart a Denise, you've got a a an older teenager and my guess is that he's probably pretty savvy when it comes to security and privacy. At least the privacy that matters to him.

Denise Howell (00:09:51):
Absolutely. They either know everything or they think they do

Larry Magid (00:09:55):
<Laugh>. Right. He, he probably had knows about privacy, like keeping you from knowing what he's doing. I mean, that's probably important to him, at least he is to a lot of teenagers we were

Denise Howell (00:10:03):
Talking about somewhat. But fortunately we have a pretty open back and forth on

Leo Laporte (00:10:07):
That kind of thing. I bet you have a great, yeah, I'm

Larry Magid (00:10:09):
Sure you do. And that's important. That's really important.

Leo Laporte (00:10:11):
We wouldn't my daughter was probably in fifth grade, she was really into something called Neopets, which is still around. And I mean, this is 20 years ago, 25 years ago. And I said, well now honey, you know, when you're online you have to really keep you careful to be private. Not mention once a She said, dad, I'm a 32 year old guy from Detroit who drives a Camaro. You don't have to worry.

Denise Howell (00:10:36):
Oh,

Leo Laporte (00:10:37):
Good. That's, that's good thinking. But she also does something that now may be illegal. I don't know. I'm gonna have to ask. Our intern attorney Netflix, she has my Netflix password. She's in my family. She lives a few miles away. Netflix used to say, here's a tweet from Netflix from 2017. Love is sharing a password. I took Netflix. Whoa. I know. I took, I took Netflix.

Larry Magid (00:11:02):
Whoa.

Leo Laporte (00:11:03):
Yeah. Right. That's only five years ago, six years ago. That's not unreasonable to think that maybe they approved of it. God knows I'm paying enough for that. You know, multiuser multi streams thing. Netflix actually gotten a little hot water because it leaked out what their cuz they've been trying this internationally, but hadn't done anything about password sharing in the us Their potential plan for password sharing leaked out this week to an internet fuel. It, this was on the help center page. It said among, oh, now, now I have to get, now, now I've retracted it by the way. It said, Netflix account is for people who live together in a single household. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Right. People who do not live in your household, which my daughter does not, will need to use their own account. And then they, furthermore said, we are going to require that they check into your locale at least once a month. What

Wil Harris (00:12:07):
Does check-in mean? Yeah.

Larry Magid (00:12:08):
But then people have vacation homes and that's the problem. Or you travel, you know, I don't think they worth

Wil Harris (00:12:14):
That so, so much for being a digital nomad.

Larry Magid (00:12:17):
Yeah. Right.

Leo Laporte (00:12:19):
The up update to the plans was met with significant backlash. Apparently a number of people sufficient to scare Netflix. Cuz by Thursday they responded and said, oh, that was an accident. We didn't <laugh> for a brief time yesterday, a help center article containing information that is only applicable to Chile, Costa Rica and Peru went live in other countries. We, we've updated it.

Wil Harris (00:12:49):
What have they got against those guys? Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:12:52):
Like screw

Wil Harris (00:12:54):
The ChaLEAN.

Leo Laporte (00:12:55):
Yes. Yeah. Screw the Cha Lands. So in those countries, they've been testing something called page sharing, where if they notice that you're sharing your password, a thing pops up on the screen and says, oh, I see you're sharing. Well you no problem. But you're gonna have to pay an extra $2 and 99 cents. For that.

Larry Magid (00:13:16):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:13:18):
For hundred.

Larry Magid (00:13:19):
Have you ever added, added up? How much you, have you ever added up your streaming bill and compared to the old cable bill? I think it's worse for the

Leo Laporte (00:13:25):
Old cable bill. Oh, it's much more, in fact. Yeah. Well, I, and this is all calculated. I gotta point out, first of all, the cable companies knew this was gonna happen. They've raised their internet rates gradually to the, to the point of nosebleed because they knew that people would still need internet if they're gonna cut the cord. And and meanwhile the, the cord cutting services have raised their rates. I I was gonna use YouTube TV right. Until it got to 65 bucks a month for basic cable comp compar. That's the same price. Plus now I pay 20 bucks more for 4k. What's it like in the uk?

Wil Harris (00:14:02):
Oh man. So it's, I would say it's, it's, it's not too bad in the uk. So obviously we sort of pay the compulsory BBC license fee stills.

Leo Laporte (00:14:12):
Do they have little vans going around town looking for unlicensed television

Wil Harris (00:14:17):
Sets? The fans, the, the vans don't exist. The vans are a, a prop. They're prop I was gonna say propaganda. They're prop Vander <laugh>. The, the Vans never have existed. They're

Leo Laporte (00:14:29):
Never Were those vans,

Larry Magid (00:14:32):
Please?

Wil Harris (00:14:32):
No, they've got no idea. You're in a block of flats. They've got no idea which one person in a block of fuck. But

Leo Laporte (00:14:38):
It was propaganda. The bbc or proper Vanda, the BBC promoted

Wil Harris (00:14:43):
<Laugh>. So we have that. We have, you know, Disney is not too expensive. You know, you pay sort of, I guess the equivalent of like 10 bucks for sort of 15 bucks for Netflix. The digital only version of Sky, which is kind of the closest thing we've got to cable here is is sort of 25 bucks maybe. What absolutely blew my mind is I just subscribed to American Hulu for the upcoming, you know, March Madness in America.

Leo Laporte (00:15:15):
We just call that Hulu, just so you know. Yeah,

Wil Harris (00:15:17):
Sorry. Yeah. No, but so there isn't, so there isn't a British Hulu. I subscribe to American Hulu. Okay. It was like 65 bucks a month. And I was like, shh. Yeah.

Larry Magid (00:15:27):
You know, but that's

Wil Harris (00:15:28):
Cuz all I do is watch one channel, you getting one stream, watch ESPN and that's it.

Larry Magid (00:15:32):
It's the same thing here. Google tv, basically.

Leo Laporte (00:15:34):
Yeah. It's a, it's a ca basic cable, basically. Yeah. They've, they've taken it over. Yeah.

Larry Magid (00:15:38):
I've got direct Absolutely. Tv It's similar. Yeah.

Denise Howell (00:15:41):
Right. But didn't DirecTV just lose the football?

Larry Magid (00:15:45):
You know, they football

Denise Howell (00:15:48):
Amazon

Wil Harris (00:15:48):
Has it now. No

Leo Laporte (00:15:49):
Tv. Google,

Wil Harris (00:15:50):
No, not Amazon. Google bought, yeah. Yeah. <laugh>.

Larry Magid (00:15:53):
Well, the good news is that I've got all of those services and that's why I don't have any money left at the end of the month. <Laugh> Yes. You, it doesn't matter.

Leo Laporte (00:16:00):
It's a it's a leak in the, in the bank account. A big hole in the bank. Really? No kidding. So I think Netflix might still go ahead with this, but it's good that they had such a strong reaction to it that they had to say, oh, that was Chile. That was custom.

Larry Magid (00:16:15):
But in the meantime, they're cutting back on their production, you know, their less original series coming out. I mean, I was watching a sh a, a video, a podcast about this listening podcast yesterday about how Netflix is really trying to go on the cheap and they're not gonna be investing in as much great content as they had in the past. So, I

Wil Harris (00:16:32):
Mean, just learning the really hard way that, you know, quality content costs lots and lots and lots and lots of money and it's cheaper to make reality. And that's why, you know, cable went so heavily reality mm-hmm. <Affirmative> and why Netflix was so refreshing, refreshing cuz of all the premium content. But, and of course, you know, it's now nose dived in the wrong direction. But it seems like that's just sort of one of a number of tech companies this week that are all just having an absolute nightmare with sort of, with money, right?

Leo Laporte (00:17:01):
Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, well look at discovery time Warner, whatever the hell. I can't keep track of it, but the, yeah. The owners of H B O have basically moved stuff off of HBO o selling it to free TV and two B it, it's

Wil Harris (00:17:19):
Pluto tv

Leo Laporte (00:17:20):
Pluto. Yeah. Those are ads supported. So they have Oh,

Larry Magid (00:17:24):
But they ads like every three minutes of the 10 minute advertisement. It's horrible. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, how much they inundate you with they ads on some of those, those channels.

Leo Laporte (00:17:31):
So is

Wil Harris (00:17:32):
This when you can guarantee that, you can guarantee that that YouTube 60 bucks a month is gonna be going up with a football cuz YouTube is down, what, 8% this quarter? Yeah. In the Google earnings. So

Leo Laporte (00:17:43):
You're still gonna get, just to be clear, don't mean to scare people next season. When it starts in August, you will still get your local football games. Those will be broadcast on broadcast television. But if you, the DirecTV had this NFL Sunday ticket package, right? Where you can see all the games on a Sunday. And they were paying a billion and a half dollars a year for it. It really was a money loser. The whole idea with DirecTV is, oh, you know, we'll get all these new subscribers and that'll make up the cost of this. And they just, it just didn't pencil out. So there

Wil Harris (00:18:13):
Was also a terrible experience that Sunday ticket, the way that they framed everything, was just like, was awful to watch.

Leo Laporte (00:18:19):
Really? How do you know? Yeah.

Wil Harris (00:18:22):
<Laugh>, because like, you know,

Leo Laporte (00:18:26):
Are you getting American Hulu again, <laugh>?

Wil Harris (00:18:28):
I you know, sometimes you stay in the US and you see these things on a Sunday, you know, so YouTube, when I'm located in a hotel in New York,

Leo Laporte (00:18:36):
Youtube got a seven year deal more than, or a little more than 2 billion a season. $2 billion a season, which is less than the N NFL wanted. They wanted two and a half but seven years. That's a good deal. And why would YouTube do it? Because you will have to pay extra. So they will have subscriptions and they're hoping that what it'll do is drive new users to YouTube tv, which is a, I mean, to be fair is a pretty good system. I like YouTube TV a lot. And then that they'll have the upsell. They do a lot of upselling on YouTube tv by the way. You can get h, HBO, o and Showtime and everything, but you have to pay extra. So yeah. Sunday tickets starting in the, in the late summer will now be on YouTube. Apple was in the running for this. In fact, apple really wanted it, but didn't, can you,

Larry Magid (00:19:24):
Can you pay to just get the te the the football? Or do you have to get the whole YouTube package

Leo Laporte (00:19:28):
To get it? 

Wil Harris (00:19:31):
I think everyone's waiting to find that out. I think you said, I don't think they said officially announced it right

Leo Laporte (00:19:36):
Now. It's, believe it or not, three to $400 a season for the Sunday ticket. I'm gonna guess since the N F L probably gets a portion of that, that that's not gonna go away. Youtube though, Google could subsidize it. Right? Although given that they just fired 12,000 people <laugh>. Yeah. Really? I don't think YouTube, I mean, Google is really in the mood to subsidize anything, including a lot of their own stuff. Verily jigsaw, which was their kind of pro bono stuff, all suffering, massive cuts. Even area one 20, which was Google's blue sky, r and d, almost all of it cut to the bone in these latest layoffs. So all of these companies have decided at least for now, let's not spend any more than we have to, which you gotta hurt. If you just found out that the parent company just gave DirecTV 2 billion a year for for football games, YouTube ad revenue. You Alpha did alphabet did put out its its earnings. This, in fact, this is the week of earnings for a lot of tech companies. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> they missed their Q4 earnings estimates. But the big one is YouTube ad revenue dropping 8%. Wow. not YouTube tv. That's YouTube proper. So ad revenue was 8.2 billion for the most recent quarter. And that's a, do you

Wil Harris (00:21:05):
Know my favorite, my favorite stat in all the in all the cost reductions is that Google has so much office space for so many people that it sacked so many people that the reduction in office space is gonna cost them $500 million in just this first quarter of the year.

Leo Laporte (00:21:24):
What do you mean? Like, so

Wil Harris (00:21:24):
Getting smaller is gonna cost them 500 million

Leo Laporte (00:21:28):
<Laugh>. Why is it gonna cost them money? Doesn't it?

Wil Harris (00:21:31):
Because you have to, you have to pay off all the leases

Leo Laporte (00:21:33):
For Oh, they're paying off the leases

Wil Harris (00:21:35):
That you're closing.

Larry Magid (00:21:36):
It's a great time to get used to office furniture. So there's a, there's this place on in Palo where they sell chairs that are normally $500 for hundred 50 bucks. Cuz they're all former Google chairs. <Laugh>, thousands of them out

Leo Laporte (00:21:48):
There. I used to be friends with a guy who founded Repo Depot.

Larry Magid (00:21:51):
Yes. I remember that guy. <Laugh>. I remember him. Yeah. You was flying. He was a pilot. What's his name? He, oh, I'm, he was pilot flying with him one day. Nice

Leo Laporte (00:21:58):
Guy. He used to be Ron. Ron's something. He used to be Ron. Yeah. He used to be on my show all the time doing gadgets and stuff.

Larry Magid (00:22:04):
He's still alive. He's still with this.

Leo Laporte (00:22:07):
I don't know. I

Larry Magid (00:22:08):
Don't, I don't even, I haven't been touched with him in year anyway, sorry. But Repo Depot.

Wil Harris (00:22:12):
Well, it was a Depot. Depot. We, when WeWork was closing, Diane, that was a good time to get off his furniture. And, but with the, the cuts at the cuts at Google, the cuts at Twitter, the cuts going on. You know, Amazon everywhere at the moment. If you, if you want some stuff for your work from a home setup, now is the time to be doing it. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:22:30):
His name is Ron Rossberg and I'm just trying to find Ron Rosberg. Yeah, I'm trying to find out if he's dead yet. Sorry. <laugh>,

Denise Howell (00:22:35):
Before we pivot completely away from

Leo Laporte (00:22:38):
Yes. Get back, please. 

Denise Howell (00:22:39):
From popular Sports,

Leo Laporte (00:22:41):
Ron is still with us. Thank you very much. Yay. Oh good. Okay. Sorry, Ron. I didn't Yeah, take a drink. Yeah. Okay, go ahead.

Denise Howell (00:22:47):
There's a a point I wanted to make about, you know, people get, have been used to watching sports on their cable or their satellite tv and now it's gonna be on these streaming services that they have to log into if they're not at their home location. And just like you don't attach your phone to a rental car, remember to log out if you're traveling somewhere and you've logged into one of these services. Because I can tell you that when I didn't remember to log out, no, nothing bad happened, but I st you know, the, the place where I was staying the staff generally uses the room where, where my husband and I were sleeping. And I think it was the chef actually who uses the

Leo Laporte (00:23:35):
Room, honey, what are all these porn movies charged on your bill for?

Denise Howell (00:23:40):
Actually, it was so cute. It was, there was no porn. It was all soothing jazz.

Leo Laporte (00:23:47):
<Laugh> <laugh>. Why are you listening to soothing Jazz

Larry Magid (00:23:52):
In a hotel? In a

Denise Howell (00:23:54):
Hotel? Yeah. I, I had to, I had to log out remotely to turn off the soothing jazz <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:23:58):
The, you know, I, I, I always paranoid cuz that actually is a feature I like in hotels now, is you can often sign into your own stuff, right. And, and use your own accounts, which is really much better than any of the options normally, you know, that they offer in hotels. And I always am paranoid about that, Denise. And most of the time I check and it says, we will log you out when you check out, but mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, golly, if they don't, that wouldn't be so good.

Larry Magid (00:24:21):
Well, I always watch my movies either on my laptop or my tablet or even my phone rather than you. I, I don't think I've ever turned, I have turned on a TV in a hotel room in, in a year or two. It could even, even, because I have direct tv, which streams so I can watch, you know, my local TV if I want to from my hotel on my device. So, but

Leo Laporte (00:24:43):
Honey, what's this bill for? $300 in Kenny Rankin videos.

Denise Howell (00:24:48):
<Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:24:49):
That's funny. He was watching Smooth Jazz.

Denise Howell (00:24:51):
Oh yeah. All these very sort of ambient YouTube videos of like coffee shot jazz. Yeah. Oh, I

Leo Laporte (00:24:59):
Love them. I love those videos. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. I have a lot of those on my playlist actually. <Laugh> let's see, what else about YouTube? Youtube shorts. The TikTok videos. I'm sorry. Sorry. Am I not supposed to know? They were just ripping the whole idea off from TikTok. Maybe I wasn't supposed to know that their, their tick, their clone TikTok now averages more than 50 billion views a day. 50 billion. The scale of YouTube is mind boggling. That's up from 30 billion early last year. The good news is, as of February 1st, YouTube short creators are gonna get some ad sharing and they're gonna get a decent amount, 45% based on views.

Wil Harris (00:25:42):
It's causing a huge rockus in the in the TikTok creator community because they're

Leo Laporte (00:25:47):
Getting

Wil Harris (00:25:47):
Diddly out. So absolutely minimum, yeah. That you could start posting, you know, exactly the same content to TikTok recruit people on TikTok to go to your YouTube channel, and suddenly you are making thousands and tens of thousands rather than diddly squad.

Leo Laporte (00:26:01):
I asked my son about this because TikTok has this creator's fund, and you know, they make, they put out press releases. We're putting a hundred million dollars into the creator's fund. Oh, get your share, isn't it? And I, he said, yeah, no, I don't, I don't get much. He makes his own money though, because he has his own advertisers on his TikTok. And to their credit, they don't prevent that. Although I am pretty sure just looking that when he puts an ad, when it's a promoted video, it doesn't get in the for you page. There's no promotion at all. Tiktok definitely does not help those along.

Larry Magid (00:26:33):
Does anybody know how Facebook reels is doing? Because I mean, I see them all the time when I go into Facebook, these short videos, and they seem to know my tastes because they show me a lot of airplanes taking off and landing. I dunno what that says about me <laugh>, but that's what I get.

Leo Laporte (00:26:48):
Yeah, I mean, they're, they of course they probably started that with Instagram. They call 'em reels on Instagram. Yeah. And now you've got Facebook reels. All of it is basically, well, we see them on TikTok, let's get those creators over here. And honestly, if YouTube's offering more money, a creator, I've, I've talked to Henry about this. I said, well, you should do. He does the shorts. You should do more shorts. The problem is they're getting whip creators get whiplashed because then YouTube will stop paying them and the next one will come along. And you, you, every time you move, you leave your audience behind. So mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, I think Henry's smart enough to know that that's you, you can't chase that revenue. So he does, you know, he doesn't worry so much about what he's gonna get from creators funds or any of these systems and really just focuses on monetizing it his own way.

Wil Harris (00:27:36):
I mean, if you think about I, they don't break it out specifically, I don't think in terms of what reels is doing is separate from Instagram. But meta obviously was down, what, 4%?

Leo Laporte (00:27:51):
Not a good quarter for meta. Yes.

Wil Harris (00:27:53):
Not a good quarter for them, including this. I found this to be just a fantastic number. They spent, was it 13 billion in a year on their reality labs? Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:28:07):
Yeah. Last year was 10. Now it's up to 13. 13,

Larry Magid (00:28:12):
Yeah. 

Leo Laporte (00:28:13):
Well,

Wil Harris (00:28:13):
And somebody pointed at teeny bit of that

Larry Magid (00:28:16):
Teeny one connect safely for a parent's Guide to virtual reality. So I'm happy about that. 

Leo Laporte (00:28:24):
So go ahead

Wil Harris (00:28:25):
And tell us somebody point somebody, somebody pointed out the apple back in 2007, spent just over 150 million to make the first iPhone in, in r and d. And Google spent 13 billion in one year. Meta basically doesn't exist. Yeah. Meta. Sorry. Well,

Leo Laporte (00:28:45):
It's a pivot doesn't exist. Actually I'm looking at the meta meta stock went up a lot. Yeah, because they had fourth quarter revenue better than estimates. Right. They also did

Wil Harris (00:28:56):
A 40 and they also said they were gonna fire a bunch of people,

Leo Laporte (00:28:58):
Fire a bunch of people and a 40 billion stock buyback. So a lot of this is just, you know, hey, don't, don't get scared. Their revenue was up a little bit. 32.17 billion. They restructured charges for its family of apps segment and its reality labs unit <laugh>. So it's hard to say they did. And this was a big number, top line number. They did announce 2 billion daily active users. That is kind of amazing. Daily. Daily, almost 3 billion monthly active users. And their average revenue per user, this is for a year is $10 and 86 cents.

Larry Magid (00:29:44):
That's more than a quarter of the people on the planet. It's just under 8 billion people in the world. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:29:49):
It's mind boggling. Now I have to say. Unbelievable. If you know that they make $11 a year on you, why don't they say, Hey, $15 a year, no ads, do a clean Facebook, they'd make more money and you'd have a lot of happy users costs.

Larry Magid (00:30:08):
I wonder though, how much they make on Amer. I mean, not everybody in the world can afford $15 a year. I mean, obviously people

Leo Laporte (00:30:14):
American. No. And so those people can have ads. Those people can have all of the crappy Facebook spyware. That's fine. Yeah. You get what you pay for. I don't know. Maybe they don't wanna do that. Famously Microsoft told Paul Throt when he asked them, why do you have ads in Windows? Why don't, why don't you offer a a, a version of Windows, a subscription version with no ads? And they said to do so would be tantamount to admitting <laugh> and we're crapping up your windows. So maybe Facebook doesn't wanna say, well, for $15 you could have a real nice experience or you could just still have your crappy experience. Revenue in the fourth quarter fell 4% from last year. This was the down part we were talking about will third straight quarter of declining sales. But this is a big one. The company's costs and expenses up 22%. And I think a lot of that is this VR push, this metaverse. Yeah. Push headcount.

Wil Harris (00:31:10):
And again, just so much, so much money in what have they got? Four. so again, 4.2 billion just in q4 in restructuring charges. Yeah. So paying off the people. They they did, they spent another after saying, after me laughing at 500 million for Google. 1.88 billion in Q4 for facilities consolidation. Oh

Leo Laporte (00:31:35):
Wow.

Wil Harris (00:31:36):
That's amazing. I mean, that's

Leo Laporte (00:31:37):
Wild. That is wild.

Wil Harris (00:31:39):
At a certain point, these tech companies are basically like glorified real estate companies.

Leo Laporte (00:31:43):
Well, now I understand why Elon Musk doesn't wanna pay rent. Yeah. Even if the king sues him, he doesn't wanna pay rent. <Laugh>

Wil Harris (00:31:52):
<Laugh>

Leo Laporte (00:31:53):
People are enjoying that, by the way. Will here in the colonies that the kings, the kings estate, the royal, the Crown estate they call it, which is the real estate holdings of the family include offices in London for meta. I'm sorry for Twitter. And Twitter does not pay. They're, so they're suing the Crown estate is suing Twitter for I

Wil Harris (00:32:12):
Have been to those offices. They're very nice. They're in danger of the crown estate and the king, the king is gonna have at them.

Leo Laporte (00:32:17):
Yeah. Do you get special privileges if you're the crown estate in the UK is like the, the guy with the white. Oh yeah.

Wil Harris (00:32:24):
Well, so the, so I'm, I'm almost certain that the income from the crown estate doesn't get taxed.

Leo Laporte (00:32:31):
Nice deal. So

Wil Harris (00:32:32):
If you are the king, you just rake all that money in tax free

Leo Laporte (00:32:35):
Nice deal company. I'm talking about Meta now, not the Crown estate. Although someday we should do a whole show on the crown of state

Wil Harris (00:32:42):
<Laugh> <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:32:44):
I'm fascinated. So are people in the UK reading spare like we are in the us

Wil Harris (00:32:50):
No, we're all sort of you've had enough. I think there's a, there's a, there's a, because it gets serialized so much in the newspapers. I think there is just enough. Yeah. Harry fatigue.

Leo Laporte (00:33:01):
Harry fatigue. Yeah. That's spelled h a r r y, not h a i r y. I believe <laugh> Company expects that meta. I'm back to meta. Sorry. The meta by the way, the United Kingdom government has just cut. Will Harris off completely there? Oh no, he's back now. Okay.

Wil Harris (00:33:18):
<Laugh>. I mean, if one was gonna be a conspiracy theorist, if one was going to be

Leo Laporte (00:33:26):
Rishi sunk, said get that guy off the air. Meta the company, when I say the company I'm talking meta expects its total expenses in 2023 will be 89 to 95 billion. That's lower than they thought due to slower anticipated growth and payroll expenses. Maybe cuz they laid 11,000 people off that would do it. Data center construction going down and again, the $40 billion stock repurchase plan, that's a good way to keep your stock price supported. That's Apple. Learned all about that. <Laugh>. actually this helped meta stock a little bit, which is good. Apple did not have a great quarter.

Larry Magid (00:34:13):
No

Leo Laporte (00:34:14):
Apple sales shrink as pandemic rally ends for iPhone makers as the Wall Street Journal quarterly revenue down on Apple for the first time in four years. Manufacturing disruptions in China meant it couldn't make enough iPhones to sell. That I presume is turning around. Maybe that'll show a better results in in this next quarter. Although Tim Cook once again invoked the, the headwinds. He said good morning, the wind was in our face for the fourth quarter. Economic pressures, Apple's revenue down 5% for the holiday quarter entering in December. Well below analyst estimate, of course, I'm sure the stock did not get hurt in the trip. Miller at the Ghislaine capital partner said instead of playing with tailwinds, they're playing with headwinds now, much like the Chinese balloon.

Larry Magid (00:35:11):
So here's the problem,

Wil Harris (00:35:12):
<Laugh>, if

Larry Magid (00:35:13):
You, if you have a perfectly good iPhone 12 or iPhone 13,

Leo Laporte (00:35:16):
Yeah. You don't need new one. Do you

Larry Magid (00:35:17):
Really need an iPhone 14? No, I was just thinking same thing true with any, any technology, any

Leo Laporte (00:35:23):
Of these. Yeah. Yeah. Samsung this week announced it's Galaxy S 23 and I think they were hard pressed to find a reason why anybody using S 22 should upgrade. It's just Right. Well we got a two interesting, a 200 megapixel camera now.

Wil Harris (00:35:37):
Okay. I mean, interestingly talking about, you know, thinking about head headwinds and tailwinds, the, the interesting sort of noodle on the Apple revenue was that if you took out the currency fluctuations and the, the, the varying weakness and strength of the dollar Apple's revenue actually grew year on. Yeah. It was just the fact that the US dollar has been surprisingly

Leo Laporte (00:36:00):
Resilient. Oh, that's, yeah.

Wil Harris (00:36:01):
To the to the, the rest of the sort of world having a meltdown. That actually it's meant they made slightly less money, which is an Esther. I thought the dollar.

Leo Laporte (00:36:10):
I thought the dollar. Oh, it's cuz the dollar's stronger. Relatively. Yeah. Got it. So

Wil Harris (00:36:15):
Yeah. So they make less money in other territory comparatively.

Leo Laporte (00:36:18):
He also cook also said, we estimated we would've grown on the iPhone absent the supply constraints. So it's foreign exchange rate, flu currency fluctuations and at supply chain problems, held them back. All right. I don't know. I, you know, it feels like, of course Apple, apple also making a bet as is meta on the vir the future of virtual reality and augmented reality. Yeah, augmented. Yep. You always have to get that next big thing.

Larry Magid (00:36:48):
They're not gonna vett the company on it. I don't think we

Leo Laporte (00:36:51):
Well, they don't need to. Yeah,

Larry Magid (00:36:53):
They don't need, they don't need to.

Leo Laporte (00:36:54):
I think I think Mark Zuckerberg saw that the social network part of their business was not gonna, despite 2 billion daily active users. Maybe he's wrong. I don't know. Was not, I didn't have a bright future. So he wanted to pivot Apple, which has, you know, more, almost 50% of its income comes from the iPhone says we're, we're very happy here. Thank you very much. But we should probably invest a little bit of that in what's coming mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, whether it's a car Yeah. Or

Wil Harris (00:37:24):
Although having, I thought it was really interesting that despite sort of saying, you know, they're investing a little bit in, in new things, they announced they're dropping the role of industrial design Chief. Yes.

Leo Laporte (00:37:36):
No. Evans Chany.

Wil Harris (00:37:37):
There is no new Johnny Ive

Leo Laporte (00:37:39):
Yeah. Since Johnny left Evans Hankie's been running it when she, and she announced she was gonna leave and, and now Apple says no. Yeah. We don't, we don't. Do we really need <laugh>, a chief of design industrial designers, they'll still have a team, but they'll report to the chief operating officer Jeff Williams instead of having a design. But

Larry Magid (00:37:57):
Nobody could do a commercial if good of Johnny could. I don't know if they ever put those on the air, but they used to show them at the announcements and he would talk in this British

Leo Laporte (00:38:04):
Accent in the white room very slowly. He lived in the white room. Yeah. Yes. 

Wil Harris (00:38:10):
Today we're announcing the thinnest power of war iPhone we've ever made. Ever made. Yes.

Larry Magid (00:38:16):
Actually. Oh, you know what? It's amazing. Every time they announced a new iPhone, they wish they said the best iPhone ever. Well, course. Why wouldn't it be the best iPhone backwards? The newest iPhone. This is,

Leo Laporte (00:38:25):
This one's not

Larry Magid (00:38:26):
Quiet. No, this is a crappy one. Get glass

Leo Laporte (00:38:27):
Is good. You know what Johnny i's up to by the way. Just want to know, want want you to know. He just designed a clown nose. But it's a really good clown nose. It is much, it's, it's for comic relief. This is the Johnny I designed red clown nose for charity. Oh. It's looks like the old clown nose to me. Well, I think the old one was just, you know, foam. Oh, I see. He's upgraded. Oh, he's upgraded baby. This is like a honeycomb with a <laugh>. Oh my God. So this is, they do this, but

Wil Harris (00:39:02):
This is like, this might seem really weird, but this is a really big thing in England. Yeah. Red Nose Day. Yeah. Is a, is a, is one of the biggest charity of you.

Leo Laporte (00:39:08):
Do you wear a red nose? On Red Nose Day Comic Relief Day?

Wil Harris (00:39:13):
I mean you might do for like a group photo at work, but you, it's one of those things you sort of like buy and then put on your desk.

Leo Laporte (00:39:19):
Yeah. 

Wil Harris (00:39:19):
Yeah. You know, because what am I really gonna do? Like, but

Leo Laporte (00:39:22):
So this benefits comic relief. What does Comic Relief's money go to? Is it aids?

Wil Harris (00:39:26):
Mostly like humanitarian stuff in

Leo Laporte (00:39:28):
Africa. Okay. African relief. Yeah, it's a Honeycombed paper is

Wil Harris (00:39:34):
Like the eighties. This

Leo Laporte (00:39:35):
Is the best red nose we've ever made. Honeycombs,

Wil Harris (00:39:39):
It sounds

Leo Laporte (00:39:40):
Paper construction with plastic art on the side and a hinge detail that lets you open and close the nose.

Wil Harris (00:39:52):
<Laugh>, can you treat me not just well designed, but it sounds like it might be sustainable. If

Leo Laporte (00:39:57):
It's sustainable, it's sustainable. Each nose comes with its own AirPods like case, so you can keep it in your pocket for when you really need,

Wil Harris (00:40:07):
When you really need a red nose.

Leo Laporte (00:40:09):
It does charge in the case, but it is, yes. <Laugh>.

Wil Harris (00:40:11):
Yeah. But it's interesting that I think that Apple has just sort of decided that it doesn't really want these huge personalities dominating. It's kind of, it's new cycles and pressures. And I think we've seen like the last, you know, even the last few announcements, you see more and more VPs and SVPs from different bits of the company standing up and giving these presentations. Yeah. And it seems to me like they're really trying to move away from like, you know, Steve Jobs was always the icon of Apple. And when Steve Jobs left, that was a huge hit. Johnny Ive was sort of the next icon when he leaves. That was obviously a huge hit. It seems to me like they're sort of going more along, like having a squad rather than having just a handful of stars.

Leo Laporte (00:40:51):
I think it's fair to say they felt burned in the last years by Johnny Ive, that it was Johnny Ive who insisted sinner in the face of all functionality, including battery life. And he was the one who championed the butterfly keyboard and would not let Apple get rid of it for years. I'm pretty sure. I mean, we don't know for sure, but I'm pretty sure cause we thanked that as soon as Johnny left, it was like, we're putting ports back on these things. We are taking away the butterfly keyboard. So I feel I'm gonna, this is projecting, but I'm gonna guess they felt a little burned, maybe even by the, the cult of Steve Jobs. But at least when it was Steve and Johnny, Steve could keep kind of a, a, a lid on it. And Steve did seem to have a good eye for functionality and the right thing to do. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> Johnny was designed, I mean, look at this nose. I mean, talk about Overdesigned. Johnny was always doing that. Right. And and I think that they felt a little bit burned. So maybe that's why I mean, I think everybody agrees. Evans hanky was an excellent design chief. But the fact I

Wil Harris (00:41:54):
Think very wise, I mean, you've only gotta, you, you've only gotta look at, you know, Tim, Tim Cook does not have the same cult of personality around his running of Apple that, for example, mark Zuckerberg does. And you've can see what Mark Zuckerberg is currently, you know, the amount of money he is absolutely staffing up the wall at Facebook on this VR project Yeah. Is, you know, not something that they would do at Apple. I think there's a little bit more Yeah. Financial discipline

Larry Magid (00:42:20):
There. And, and Tim Cook himself doesn't have a particularly dynamic personality. I mean, he's, he's a good, as far as I'm, I'm told he's a good c e o and a very competent administrator, but he's not, you know, I don't think many

Wil Harris (00:42:32):
Books. Well, his brand is low profile, right? Yeah. His brand is like Mr. Mr. Calm, but

Leo Laporte (00:42:38):
Also Mr. Supply Chain, Mr. Cut costs increased profit. I mean, under his leadership, apple has become a, an, an extremely successful company. Much more so than under Steve Jobs. Right. Right. So he's got a good reputation. I think, you know, one of the things they did, and this is Tim did this to keep Johnny Ive, who I think in some degrees was kind of the Steve Jobs legacy and maybe in some ways trying to preserve a little bit of Steve is he gave Johnny put him in charge. Not of just industrial design, but in charge of software, in charge of, in charge of everything. And I think in hindsight, that was a mistake for Apple. Apple went through some bad years and as soon as, as soon as Johnny left and they came out with Apple, silicon, their new chips, this is a different company. So Yeah. I can see why maybe they're saying, do we really want somebody with that much power.

Wil Harris (00:43:39):
Yeah. You never want the person to be bigger than the company. Right?

Leo Laporte (00:43:42):
Yeah. So, yeah. So

Larry Magid (00:43:47):
What do we, what do we make of Elon Musk then? <Laugh>

Wil Harris (00:43:49):
<Laugh>. I was actually thinking about, I mean, case in point, right?

Larry Magid (00:43:53):
I missed last week show. Did you guys talk about the price cuts at Tesla at all?

Leo Laporte (00:43:58):
No. You're a Tesla

Larry Magid (00:43:59):
Owner. Oh. So my net worth just went down because I own a four year old Tesla, which used to be worth $40,000. And now it's worth about $30,000 because they dramatically lowered this price. <Laugh>, I'm, it's fine with me cause I'm not plan to sell it right now, but I mean it, but they really got a lot of people angry who had just bought a Tesla to find out a week later they could've bought that same car for $15,000 less. But

Leo Laporte (00:44:21):
Wait, because as soon as the government said, oh, the model Y is an S U V and you're gonna get that $7,500 rebate, they raised the price on the model Y.

Larry Magid (00:44:32):
Yep. Which, the other thing that is, is

Leo Laporte (00:44:34):
Another thing that would irk me <laugh>, to be

Larry Magid (00:44:37):
Honest, if Elon is listening, if Elon's listening, if they would allow people who paid for the full self-driving, which is now 15,000, if they would allow them to keep that software and if they buy new hardware the way Microsoft does, right? If you buy a new computer, you can keep Microsoft Office and put it on your new computer. If they were to do that, they would sell a ton of new Teslas to their existing customer base. But there's like a $15,000 penalty to upgrade if you wanna keep that full self driving software. I think,

Wil Harris (00:45:06):
I think possibly the challenge with that one, Larry, is that the full self-driving has to actually work.

Larry Magid (00:45:10):
Well that doesn't stop me from buying it. <Laugh>, <laugh>, I mean, I, I paid seven for it, but I bought it.

Leo Laporte (00:45:16):
I paid $5,000 for it and my Model X never got it. Never used it, don't have the car anymore

Larry Magid (00:45:23):
And no rebate, right?

Leo Laporte (00:45:24):
Oh, no, no rebate.

Larry Magid (00:45:25):
No. Didn't give it back to you. Yeah, yeah. No free refund. Yeah.

Wil Harris (00:45:28):
So no back

Leo Laporte (00:45:29):
Seizes, the Elon is a little bit in the news besides that because they two stories. One is, yeah, that Twitter is cutting off free access to the API for everybody. And there's some concern among Twitter users that this is gonna get rid of some of the things that made Twitter the most interesting. Some of the automated accounts that people really liked at Twitter because they're gonna have to pay too. And many of the people run these automated accounts say, yeah, yeah, we're not gonna we're not gonna do it. There's an example, Buzzfeed has an example of a Twitter bot called Make it a quote. I'm not, are you familiar with this one has half more followers than me, half a million followers. You can reply to any tweet, add the tag at, make it a quote, and then the bot responds with the tweets text overlaid onto an image.

(00:46:25):
 But the guy who does it, 23 year old German student named Daniel, said, I can't, I'm not gonna pay for it. I'm not gonna pay to do this. He says it's a step in the wrong direction. Most of the a p i usage brings a lot of value to Twitter. And even though I run one of the biggest bots on the platform, I'm gonna consider shutting it down. Now, they still haven't said how much it'll cost. I could see Elon, you know, Elon never, there's no policy that's not changeable. I could see him changing his mind saying, well, for you, whatever. Sure,

Denise Howell (00:46:58):
He seems to be focused on volume right now, but maybe it would be more quantitative and qualitative. Qualitative than quantitative.

Wil Harris (00:47:06):
I think one of the things that's that's been sad about the, the whole API access thing, I mean, quite apart from the fact that, that the tweet bot was my favorite client and is like about a million times better than the the official Twitter iOS client, which is verging on unusable. If you run multiple Twitter accounts from a desktop as a professional, you probably use third party software to manage the sort of flurry of dms and replies and incomings. And by killing that api, they're really making it difficult for the, the people that they're selling to. You know, Ellan keeps saying, what's more advertisers? What's more advertisers on the platform? Well, great, but if I'm an advertising agency and I run 15 different Twitter accounts, you need to make it easy for me to manage them, not have to, you know, log in and out of the actual Twitter dashboard, you know, 30 times a day. It's, it's, he really has not got the left hand talking to the right hand on this

Leo Laporte (00:48:02):
One, there is a bot called Pepito the cat who tweeted, oh, this, this change will kill Pepito, the cat Pepito is part of Twitter history. He posts quality content with great engagement. And of course Elon said, well, okay, I guess we could give all verified users access to the a p i for posts like this eight bucks a month. I don't, I don't understand what, what Elon's at because he's not gonna make enough money from these onesie twosie, you know, small dollar amounts to make up for the 44 billion, 13 billion of which is borrowed. So I don't understand why he's screwing with it, but you know, that's his to screw with. Nobody can deny that. The other story is actually a big victory for Elon Musk. Yeah. You remember the tweet funding secured in which he announced apparently <laugh> Lyingly that he was gonna take Tesla private and that he had secured funding for that. Well, it wasn't true. Shareholders have sued. In fact we were getting a lot of great juicy stuff out of the, out of the lawsuit. But a jury came back after two hours of deliberation on Friday and said Not guilty. Elon did not cost investors any money. Thank you very much. He won the lawsuit. It's over. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>.

Wil Harris (00:49:32):
I was, was surprised

Leo Laporte (00:49:32):
By that. Yeah. I mean, I think, I mean, I didn't, we didn't hear the testimony. I didn't anyway, but Right. I think, you know, you could tell us, Denise, there have to be damages. I like real damages. You can't just say, well, I was offended.

Denise Howell (00:49:49):
Can you bring me up to speed? I was looking at I R C and I kind of lost <laugh>

Wil Harris (00:49:53):
Track of

Leo Laporte (00:49:53):
Where we were. So here's the first tweet yeah. From Elon Musk. This is back in 20:17 AM considering taking Tesla private right at $420, by the way. Yeah. Obviously a meme four 20 number. Of course he believes that mean he paid 54 20 for Twitter. So anyway, I share funding secured. Now if you own Tesla stock, or maybe if you don't own Tesla stock and you look at the price and you say, oh, I can make some money if I bought a lot of Tesla stock right now, cuz it's gonna go for four 20. He settled a lawsuit from the s e C paid 40 million, agreed to run every tweet by a lawyer before, which he's not doing, I don't think. Right. in a second tweet. Yeah. He said investors support confirmed only reason why this is not certain is that it's contingent on a shareholder vote. I think the later the facts of the case, I believe were that he had in fact not, I

Wil Harris (00:51:00):
Mean, he just made up the whole put up thing. Right. Right. Like, what I don't get is if, is this why he can be, if he can be fined, if the f e c find him 40 million for breaking securities rules, then how can it then follow that Tesla shareholders suffered no harm. I mean, they've always suffered at least 40 million worth of harm.

Leo Laporte (00:51:20):
I I, you know, I mean, I could see if somebody would buy stock saying, oh, it's gonna go up. No. Or sell stock. I mean, I could see people would respond to this. The

Denise Howell (00:51:28):
Here, here's the crux. Elon has gotten to the point, and I think this is what came through loud and clear from what the jury did in this private shareholder lawsuit, that he, the jury basically said, we don't take what he says. Seriously, you can't take what he says. Seriously. They had to determine whether the statements that he made had a material impact on their decisions whether to buy a cell hold, et cetera. And they found, nope, it didn't because y you know, basically they didn't, they didn't spell this out, but I think what the jury's sentiments must have been is it's Elon. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:52:10):
The

Larry Magid (00:52:10):
Judge. False in defense, the

Leo Laporte (00:52:12):
Judge

Larry Magid (00:52:12):
Said another thing. The

Leo Laporte (00:52:14):
Judge said, no, you can assume that the tweet about securing funding was not accurate. You can jury, you can say we we're gonna stipulate it wasn't accurate. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. So then the question is, if the market's response to that tweet was Elon's fault, and whether he and the board should be liable, and as you say, we don't know exactly what the jury was thinking, but after a mere two hours, which is pretty quick, takes an hour and a half to fill out the forms, probably the jury said no, they're not responsible. <Laugh> Musk's lawyer in closing arguments said, just because it's a bad tweet doesn't mean it's fraud <laugh>.

Denise Howell (00:52:56):
Right. Right. And I think people have just gotten so inured to what you were saying a minute ago that he changes his mind every 10 minutes, <laugh> that, and that you can't, you know, you really can't rely on what he's saying from one day to the next

Larry Magid (00:53:13):
Was to treat Elon like the onion. Right. It's like, you know, oh, it's, it's satire. It's not true. Anything he said, or

Leo Laporte (00:53:18):
Tucker Carlson either way. Yeah.

Larry Magid (00:53:20):
Or Tucker Carlson. Exactly. I mean, right. Same defense. That

Leo Laporte (00:53:23):
It is the same defense. That's the Tucker Carlson's defense. Didn't

Denise Howell (00:53:25):
Tucker literally say that?

Larry Magid (00:53:26):
It was just what he was saying was satire.

Leo Laporte (00:53:28):
Yeah. It's not news. Yeah. It's entertainment. Your Honor

Larry Magid (00:53:33):
Chief, can anybody get away with that? Can, can Biden get away with that if he lies to the public? Oh, I was just joking around. Well, Eli, well be fair, said that Trump, Trump, Trump actually did say one fee with joking around. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:53:42):
Yeah. But I mean, let's be fair. Elon's not the president. <Laugh>. He doesn't, I mean, I, I mean, he doesn't have like some higher responsibility. He's just some guy, you know? Right.

Denise Howell (00:53:52):
And he's a guy who's not afraid to try lawsuits. He has a lot of success when he actually takes things to trial. Yeah. And goes in front of a jury. And this case, he actually testified

Leo Laporte (00:54:05):
I am looking at a business insider, market insider that says, Elon's funding secure tweet cost investors 12 billion over 10 days. And the jury had that information. But I guess you're right. I think the jury, the jury said, well, it's your fault. It's not, it's not Elon's fault. It's your

Larry Magid (00:54:20):
Fault. I don't know if a C E O tells you something material is gonna happen, it seems to me you have a reasonable glue. You know, it's a reasonable to act on. It's stunning. I would, I'm really surprised by this

Denise Howell (00:54:30):
Jury and that that's what they, the plaintiffs would've had to prove in this case. And the jury found, they didn't prove it, that it wasn't material to their decision.

Larry Magid (00:54:37):
Or I said we weren't in the trial. So who knows what they actually,

Leo Laporte (00:54:40):
Or Denise, is it possible the jury just really likes Elon Musk?

Denise Howell (00:54:45):
It's possible. It was in San Francisco. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:54:47):
I mean, I, we've seen this happen before with celebrity defendants. A lot of times they're given more latitude than, than you or I would be.

Larry Magid (00:54:54):
Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>

Leo Laporte (00:54:55):
And, and despite the Paul that has fallen over Elon's reputation in the last few months until recently, he was kind of, you know, Ironman.

Larry Magid (00:55:08):
Yeah. I wanna put a bumper sticker on my Tesla with, cuz I bought this before I knew what Elon's politics were.

Leo Laporte (00:55:13):
<Laugh>, there is such a bumper sticker. You can get it, but I

Larry Magid (00:55:17):
Probably is. Yeah, exactly.

Leo Laporte (00:55:19):
Let's take a, well, he has, go ahead. Sorry. No, no, no. I

Denise Howell (00:55:22):
Wanna, I was gonna say, he, he has a track record of, of trying to tinker with objects that might have suffered from having innovation in their arena. The, the blame thrower comes to mind. Oh my God. So maybe, maybe he'll

Leo Laporte (00:55:41):
And the boring company has,

Denise Howell (00:55:43):
Right. Maybe he'll, maybe he'll hire Johnny. Ive to, to bring the new and improved clown nose under the Tesla umbrella and rehabilitate his image that way.

Leo Laporte (00:55:54):
Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, do you say, I mean, actually I think history might look back once all the storm and drawing is over at Elon a hundred years from now and say, oh, he was hysterical. He was just what the society needed. He, he was a prankster. He was, he was lowkey. He was he was mischievous. I

Larry Magid (00:56:13):
Think history, he'll certainly be known as important. I mean, the question

Leo Laporte (00:56:15):
Yeah. I think history might be history. Yeah. Look at, look at what they say about Thomas Edison. Yeah. The electrocuting an elephant. Nobody, nobody's upset about anymore. I feel like the Elon's gonna get away with this, to be honest, in this tree. I think so. Decision is just the beginning. And, you know, maybe he should, I'm not, I'm not saying he shouldn't. It's fascinating to watch. That's our Elon segment. Guess you have to have one in every show. Sorry about that. <Laugh>. Let's take a break. We got more to talk about in just a bit. We have a great panel. Denise Howell is here. My internet attorney. Oh, you got a new a new url. Hearsay culture.net. What's that?

Denise Howell (00:56:57):
Yes. aunt, thank you so much for updating on the fly. I wanna give a plug to a podcast network that will shortly be launching@hearsayculture.com, called the Hearsay Culture Network, where I and a few folks who you might have seen on this week in law back in the day. We've got Dave Levine, who's a professor at Elon University and a fellow at Stanford. He's done a radio show at Stanford at K C S U for quite some time. Also by the same name, hearsay Culture and John Terank, who also was a law professor now in private practice. And we're gonna do some shows. So

Leo Laporte (00:57:38):
What a great name for a podcast network. Hearsay culture. I love that. Yeah. What's the name of your show gonna be? Do you know?

Denise Howell (00:57:45):
I'm gonna have my own show called Uneven Distribution <laugh> with a Nod to William Gibson.

Leo Laporte (00:57:51):
You The Future is Here. It's just not evenly distributed. Yes. Love

Denise Howell (00:57:54):
It. Right. And Dave and I are doing a show together called r and d with d and d <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:57:59):
Cause

Denise Howell (00:58:00):
We're Dave, Dave and Denise.

Leo Laporte (00:58:01):
Oh, I love it. Not, not Dungeons and Dragons.

Denise Howell (00:58:05):
No. <laugh> sadly. No, but that'll be be fun. There's, we, we have recorded a sh few shows and I believe the audio for one of them is up on hearsay culture.com if you wanna sample it.

Leo Laporte (00:58:17):
Nice. this is exciting. Congratulations. Thank you. Yeah. Will it be like this week in law, or what do you, what do you wanna do with it?

Denise Howell (00:58:25):
Well, it's funny, we're all lawyers, but we don't wanna do completely law driven shows at all. It's much more about sort of, well, uneven distribution is gonna be much more about looking at technologies and their impact on our lives and looking to the future and trying to help people anticipate what's coming at them if they are not already thinking along those lines.

Leo Laporte (00:58:48):
I'm thrilled and I'm so thrilled. This is great.

Denise Howell (00:58:50):
Yeah. Thank you.

Leo Laporte (00:58:52):
Well, we were was, I was just said that we had to cancel this week in law. It really it broke my heart cuz it's a great show and I'm so glad to see you're back on the air. Or we'll be soon. That's really good. Yes.

Denise Howell (00:59:02):
If they just Yes. We're tinkering with Back End Steph and getting all that in

Leo Laporte (00:59:05):
Order. Tell me all about it. Yeah. <laugh> know a little bit about that. If they go to hearsay culture.com in the, in the weeks to come, you will see the show.

Denise Howell (00:59:14):
Yes. Yeah. As soon as we are live and launched, you will be the first

Leo Laporte (00:59:18):
To know. It's gonna be the Hearsay Culture Network. That's great.

Wil Harris (00:59:21):
Yeah. That's

Leo Laporte (00:59:22):
Really great. I see Christopher Michael oh. Oh, I see. That's a picture Christopher took of Esther Dyson. I would love to listen to Esther Dyson to a show. That's exciting. Oh, very neat. Well, congratulations. Hearsay. Thank you. Culture.Com Also with us, the publisher of some great books like f Yeah. Video games, <laugh> and things I learned from Mario's Butt. Yes. It's Will Harris <laugh>.

Wil Harris (00:59:50):
We we do have lots of high Brower stuff too. There is, oh yes. Is some really

Leo Laporte (00:59:54):
<Laugh>. Oh yeah. Oh no, this is like, for instance, here's another one. Virtual Cities and Atlas and exploration of a lot of video game content, video game cities. What a

Wil Harris (01:00:05):
Good we have. And occasionally, occasionally we get to do really fun things because of the, cuz of the Kickstarter sort of funding model that we do. We did we've got a book called Flipping Patriarchy <laugh>, which is about sort of gender discrimination in the workplace. Yes. And we were able to, if you could send in proof that you were a woman, we would sell it to you for 65% less <laugh> than the cover. Since

Leo Laporte (01:00:29):
You're making that much less, we can't exactly charge you the same as a guy. That makes sense. That's great. And

Wil Harris (01:00:35):
We're overcharged for things like razor blades all the

Leo Laporte (01:00:38):
Time.

Wil Harris (01:00:38):
Yeah, exactly.

Leo Laporte (01:00:40):
But it's pink Denise, that's not cheap. Here's the one, shareware Heroes the Renegades who redefined gaming at the dawn of the internet. This is great. So you, I,

Wil Harris (01:00:53):
Yeah, that's a really good one. And that's like really e early Carmack and Romero. I can't wait to read it. That's really good

Leo Laporte (01:00:58):
Stuff. I I I I've been meaning to thank you cuz you sent me last time you were on, you told me about this and you sent me a pack a care package, and I've been loving the, the production is gorgeous of these two unbound.com if you want to get involved. And 42 is coming soon. That is when I will absolutely be ordering. I can't wait to see that when that comes out. Flipping patriarchy by man who has it all. <Laugh>.

Wil Harris (01:01:26):
It's, it's, it's a, it's a Twitter pseudonym, right.

Leo Laporte (01:01:28):
<Laugh>. I love it. And Larry magid, who is going to be celebrating on Tuesday Safer Internet Day. Woohoo. That's right.

Larry Magid (01:01:40):
Hey, Leisha, I wanna tell you about by the way, if anybody's listening from Utah, you wanna look at Bill SB 1 52, which would require kids up to 18 to get parental parental permission to go on social media. But more than that would require everyone to submit, submit government ID before they could set up a social media account, talk about privacy issues, security issues. It would establish a database if young people in Utah, and we all know that databases can never be hacked, though. It it's a law that I personally in the name of protecting children, actually might harm children though. We are kind of looking into this. I'm just beginning to learn about it. But apparently their hearings going on this week. So if you're in Utah, or if you just love Utah, and I like Utah, check out this SB 1 52. It might be something people might wanna weigh in on.

Leo Laporte (01:02:28):
Unbelievable.

Larry Magid (01:02:29):
It is pretty unbelievable. And, and they claim to protect children. But, and first of all, doesn't a 17 year old have some free speech rights in America? Does the Brist Amendment say something about you have to be 18 to enjoy the right to, you know, access information or say what you believe in? Yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:02:45):
I could see maybe under 13 as the Yeah.

Larry Magid (01:02:47):
13 cop

Leo Laporte (01:02:48):
Law cop says, yeah, but 18,

Larry Magid (01:02:51):
That's ridiculous. That would, you know, any, I mean, you could be an L G B T Q kid whose parents are homophobic. You could be a Muslim whose parents are anti, you know, there's just a million reasons why some kids might want agency to be their parents. But the other part about it, having all of everyone, adults included, having to submit a government ID to get online. I know that the Brits may not have as many problems with that, but America, that that may not fly in this country.

Denise Howell (01:03:16):
There are plenty of school related First Amendment cases where minors Oh, have been found to have First Amendment rights. Absolutely.

Larry Magid (01:03:22):
So, yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. Anyway, so look into that book.

Leo Laporte (01:03:26):
You gotta wonder if the government doesn't want you to read certain books. The governor government doesn't want you to go on the internet. What is the government hiding? May not target or suggest ads. Okay. Shall limit, limit hours of access. What?

Larry Magid (01:03:43):
Right. Yeah. You're you're not allowed to, you're not allowed to use the internet over at a certain time of night. Now not everybody, even kids, have the same schedule. Unbelievable. I mean, if there's something immoral about using the internet at 2:00 AM if you, for whatever reason, maybe, you know, your lifestyle is that you sleep, you don't sleep during those hours. Talk about, and the irony is, I don't know the the political party of who's behind this, but it wouldn't surprise me. I'll

Leo Laporte (01:04:05):
Take a wild guess.

Larry Magid (01:04:06):
Yeah. It's the same party who is so much in favor of capitalism. Yeah. So much in favor of

Leo Laporte (01:04:11):
Politic small government. Let's not, let's keep the government out of our lives.

Larry Magid (01:04:15):
Right? Exactly. Hmm.

Leo Laporte (01:04:18):
All right. I told them I wouldn't get political. Sometimes you gotta SB 1 52, Utah. Let's take a little break. We will come back. I have more to talk about with our wonderful panel. But first I want to talk about a great sponsor I got introduced to called Miro. And I told him immediately, I said, this is gonna, you're gonna ha this is gonna be a challenge because Miro could be anything you want it to be. So how do I describe Miro? Go to miro.com. Take a look. You can you, it's like a whiteboard. Yeah. But you could do so many things. Flow charts can bends mind, maps it, brain writing. Timeline builder. If you're using, if you're doing Zoom meetings, you'd definitely want to use Miro to time your meetings to have to have polls in your meetings. It is an amazing tool. I want you to go to miro.com and, and check it out because it's infinite collaborate.

(01:05:17):
Whiteboard gives teams a space that lives forever. Not like your whiteboard in the conference room where you can just drag and drop insights and data. Nothing is lost, nothing is forgotten. And the breadth of use cases for Miro is mind boggling. You could build visual assets, you could present with Miro. You can run brainstorms, cross-functional teams. It's, it's the perfect thing for a hybrid workspace where you have people at home, people in the office. If you're doing products, it's incredible for product teams. One great product needs input from everybody. That's where Miro can come in with its capabilities to democratize collaboration and input for brainstorming. Miro users love it. But I, I, my, my, my challenge is how do I describe what Miro can do? It can do so much. Here's another thing you might want to take a look at. Go to the Miro verse@miro.com.

(01:06:16):
This is a universe of, of user created and contributed Miro boards. Let me just show you a few of these. These are incredible <laugh> from, from everything from icebreakers to calendars to service blueprint template. I don't even know what that is. Here's a midnight sailboat retrospective or a Beatles retrospective. You're like this one from the British government, a Harry Potter retrospective <laugh> contributed by the UK government. Isn't it nice to know what your government is working on? <Laugh>? All, all these templates are available to you as a Miro user. And, and by the way, did I mention you can start Miro and use up to have up to three boards for free right now. Valentine's Day Love. Aw. Share the love by writing a note of appreciation for one of your team members. Ah, that's a nice idea. This is the Miro verse. Just hundreds and hundreds of great ideas of things that you can do.

(01:07:21):
This is the problem. It's hard for me to describe what Murro could do, cuz I don't know how you might use it. So start thinking about what you might use Murro for in your meetings, in your product planning, in your design kickoffs. It's just endless. It's visual, it's beautiful. It's permanent. It's, it's the largest board you can imagine. M i o.com/podcast. Miro gives your team the chance to always stay connected to realtime information. And it gives project managers product leads, a bird's eye view of the whole project. So nothing slips through the cracks. Go to miro.com/podcast right now and you can get three boards free to start working better. I want you to try it first. Three boards free miro.com. M i r o.com/podcast. By the way, we've been using it for our podcast planning. It's great for podcast too. Miro.Com/Podcast. We thank them so much for their support.

(01:08:26):
 Let's see. Amazon came out. We, this was a lot of earnings come out. Revenue below expectations. But Amazon Web Service is a 20% sales growth. I didn't mention that with Apple. Apple service is also big growth in both cases. These are annuities, right? These are things people subscribe to. And the cash comes in every month. This is that average revenue per user kind of thing. So Amazon Web Services, which is still the king of cloud services doing well a little below, expectations advertising. Did you know Adver, Amazon's business is advertising. They made, they made about half what they made on a w s with advertising alone and above expectations $11.56 billion. But it was their slowest year of growth in a quarter century as a public company. Revenue for the year increased 9%. Aw, that's gotta hurt. So

Denise Howell (01:09:30):
Where, where do you see ads On Prime or like

Larry Magid (01:09:33):
On Prime video?

Leo Laporte (01:09:34):
Oh, get ready,

Wil Harris (01:09:35):
Sponsored placement.

Leo Laporte (01:09:37):
Every single thing you're looking at, isn't it?

Larry Magid (01:09:40):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:09:41):
<Laugh>, because all, a lot of these are paid for. Right.

Denise Howell (01:09:45):
I see, I see.

Leo Laporte (01:09:46):
So yeah, you wouldn't know Amazon's doing ads except that almost all of these are,

Larry Magid (01:09:51):
Many years ago. Will, you might understand this. I was right. I wrote a book for Peach Put Pit, and I call up the publisher. I was so proud because my book was featured on the cover of the Crown Catalog, <laugh>. And I said, that's great. Those editors must love my book. Naive, my publisher just sort of educated me to the fact that it's all product placements. It's all about money.

Leo Laporte (01:10:11):
So they pay the

Wil Harris (01:10:12):
Book. Yeah. The amount of time

Leo Laporte (01:10:12):
You search Cap and Oh yeah, yeah.

Wil Harris (01:10:15):
The amount of time you search for something on Amazon and I mean, it's like searching on Google, right? The top result is the sponsored result. Right. And that's what people, and that's what people pay for. The, the great thing for Amazon is that, you know, that AWS business kind of came outta nowhere because, you know, it was, it was, you know, the great idea to use data center capacity they have, but it's quite, it's, it's high margin, but obviously there's a lot of cost to running those data centers. The cost of running the Amazon ad business is almost nothing cuz you'd be displaying those listings anyway. So the margin on it, even though it's a smaller business in revenue size than Amazon Web services, you have to imagine that by this point it's actually more profitable for Amazon.

Leo Laporte (01:10:57):
Oh yeah. I mean, the fact that they only grew 9% and that's such a disappointment. <Laugh> <laugh> gives you some idea of what they were

Larry Magid (01:11:06):
Expecting. How, how many Americans wished that their income had gone up by 9%. Oh yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:11:10):
Do you get 9% raises every year? No.

Larry Magid (01:11:13):
Yeah. It really speaks, it's about inflation, but,

Denise Howell (01:11:16):
Well, it also speaks to the fact that people must use Amazon very differently than I do. People must go on there and browse and surf mm-hmm. <Affirmative> and poke around. What do you do? I go to Amazon for one thing and I buy it and I'm out. I'm not, I'm not spending time there. Even

Larry Magid (01:11:31):
The only thing you might find, and Exactly. You might find a competitor of that one thing. Like I'm looking for a water pick mm-hmm. <Affirmative> and I went on to go buy a water pick, but there's all these non-water pick type water picks that they are trying to sell me. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, have you come? I've been paying for

Leo Laporte (01:11:43):
That. Denise, you've gone to Amazon looking for that one thing and maybe picked up something else, or maybe bought something different, right? Yeah,

Larry Magid (01:11:52):
Sure.

Denise Howell (01:11:52):
Yeah. Okay.

Leo Laporte (01:11:54):
Do you ever notice what it says? Amazon's choice?

Larry Magid (01:11:57):
Yes. The editor loved it, right?

Denise Howell (01:12:00):
I do. And I'm super leery of that. <Laugh>.

Larry Magid (01:12:02):
Really?

Leo Laporte (01:12:03):
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. These are, these are, most of these are paid placement. Yeah. yeah. It's nice, nice work if you can get it, I guess.

Larry Magid (01:12:12):
Yeah. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:12:15):
Facebook. Now this is from the New York post, so I guess maybe you want to take it with a grain of salt except it comes from a lawsuit. A a data scientist who worked at Facebook, George Hayward was fired in October, sued that lawsuit now has been shut down because like in many companies, Facebook has clause in its contract that says you have to go to arbitration. You, you can't go to court. But the lawsuit was up long enough that we learned about the cause for the Hayward who claimed in a Manhattan federal court lawsuit, he was fired in November for refusing to participate in something called negative testing. It allows tech companies to quote, surreptitiously run down your mobile phone battery in the name of testing features or issues such as how fast their app runs in low power, or how an image might load. Hayward said, I told the manager this can harm somebody. She said, eh, by harming a few, we help the greater masses. Hayward said, pointed out that killing somebody's cell phone battery is a risky business. I refused to do this test. And it turns out, if you tell your boss, no, that's illegal, it doesn't go over very well. He'd been, he would hired in October, 2019, fired November, 2022 because he refused to do the negative testing.

Larry Magid (01:13:51):
It could kill somebody. If he can't call nine one one, if your phone dies, he could literally kill you as well at the battery. But why would they do it? Would they, they actually bring it down to the lower because that way they could see how their app worked in a low power phone. I'm trying to think of motivation for that. Yeah.

Wil Harris (01:14:04):
There's also a, I think there's, it's partly how does things work? How do different phones scale their performance? How does your app get impacted by that performance, but also what new features that they introduce kill battery life quicker.

Larry Magid (01:14:18):
Couldn't they just phones and test it in a lab that

Leo Laporte (01:14:21):
Would do the right thing to do?

Wil Harris (01:14:22):
You just sort think Right. <Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:14:25):
But when you have 2 billion users, why not use them? Yeah.

Larry Magid (01:14:28):
Right.

Denise Howell (01:14:29):
I feel like there are lawyers out there already crafting the complaint on behalf of users, probably under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

Leo Laporte (01:14:37):
Yeah. That's

Denise Howell (01:14:37):
Who

Leo Laporte (01:14:37):
It is for inter Yeah.

Denise Howell (01:14:39):
Yeah. For interfering with people's devices.

Leo Laporte (01:14:42):
Hayward says he doesn't know how many people have been impacted, but believes the company has engaged in the practice because he was given an internal training document titled How to Run Thoughtful Negative Tests, <laugh>, which included examples of such experiments being carried out. I have never seen a more horrible document in my career. He said <laugh> you know, I mean, we'll, we probably won't know the outcome of this because as, as I, a lot of companies, including twit, I might add, have contracts that say you won't sue us, we'll go to binding arbitration. Yeah. Is that, that's still legal, right? Denise?

Denise Howell (01:15:22):
Yes. Arbitration. Yeah, very much so. Arbitration clauses can be set aside if they're not properly drafted, and if they're, if the person agreeing to them doesn't have adequate notice so that they are agreeing to arbitrate things. But in, you know, as long as you've checked all the boxes, yes. They're enforceable.

Larry Magid (01:15:41):
Yeah. And for me, and I keep, I keep signing agreement for I I'm, it's gonna be handled in some state that I don't live in. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:15:46):
That's wonder

Larry Magid (01:15:47):
I get sued by, or, you know, by one of those companies. I have to go to that state to defend myself.

Denise Howell (01:15:52):
You can fight about whether you have to go to that state, but it's possible. Yeah, yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:15:56):
Yeah. Yeah. When we when we were worried that we were gonna get remember there was a podcast troll and we hired a very prestigious law firm. And of course, they explained to us that all of these patent lawsuits happen in what is it? Is it Eastern Texas? Tyler, Texas. Because there's a judge.

Denise Howell (01:16:13):
Delaware, Eastern District.

Leo Laporte (01:16:14):
Eastern District of Texas. Yeah. Mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, because there's a judge there who is very favorable to these patent lawsuits because he believes, you know, these big companies are taking advantage of these small inventors. And so companies go there and, and we said, well, can we get a change of venue? Could we get a, they said that's one o often good strategy. Sometimes companies are able to change the venue to a more favorable locale. They gave us some interesting advice. We were lucky because the EF F filed intra partes motion to get the patent overturned, which succeeded. Great. we thought about doing that and our lawyers said, well, that's a double edged sword. If you win, great. If you lose, you're screwed. Because now the jury has even more reason <laugh> to rule against you. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. So you can only do those if you really, and so we didn't have a choice about whether the e f was gonna do it, and we, I was biting my nails but the ef f prevailed. It was also thanks to Adam Carla, who raised a lot of money in a, in a GoFundMe or a one of those and defend and actually did go to court and defended it. So, oh,

Denise Howell (01:17:26):
I remember this sound. Yeah. Yeah. This was like 10 years ago or, or

Leo Laporte (01:17:30):
More. Right? Yeah. It was very scary because we got a, a letter as many podcasters did, asking for millions of dollars. Our attorneys laughed at that. They said, usually they ask for a number that's gonna be lower than the cost of defending it. <Laugh>, they've, they've asked for so much money that you really need to fight it. <Laugh>, of course, that was the attorneys who would get a lot of that money. Anyway, yeah. That PA podcast troll went away thanks to the Electronic Frontier Foundation for whom I have been donating ever since. Let's see. Oh, here's another one. Speaking of court cases, the New York Attorney General has won a case against a company that sells tracking software. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> stalker wear the bleeping computer calls it. There's a guy, Patrick Hinchey, who sells software called Among Others, auto Forward, easy Spy, D d I, utilities, Hester, mobile Phone, specter, SurePoint. Mm-Hmm. Or the properly named Turbo Spy. Mm-Hmm. these are apps, you probably know a little bit about this Larry, these are apps that mm-hmm. Ex-Boyfriend's, ex-husbands, parents put on people's phones that then Spy on 'em. They turn over to location, browsing history, call logs, text messages, photos, videos, email activity, WhatsApp and Skype chat, social media activity. The idea is you couldn't remotely monitor a user, in some cases, even activate the camera or the microphone.

Larry Magid (01:19:11):
Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, they're often sold as parental control software, but wink, wink, they, they're also for spousal control software as well. Yeah. And we, you know, even parental control, we at Connect Safe, we have a strong opinion that you should never buy a parental control tool that operates in stealth mode. Yep. That everybody has a right to know that they're being spied upon. Even children, maybe especially children. But no, this is, these are designed as, as, you know, catching friends, family, business, associates, you name it.

Leo Laporte (01:19:42):
Leticia James. Well, interesting. The New York State Attorney General sued and won afforded $10,000 judgment. This is her tweet from a couple of days ago. Snooping on a partner's phone without consent isn't just a sign of an unhealthy relationship. It's against the law. Today, we stopped several companies from illegally promoting products that allowed spying on calls, texts, photos, videos, emails, and social media. Hinchey now is going to have to alert his customers victims. This is re this is worse than the $410,000. He's going to have to put a notice on all of these apps, pop up a notice on all the phones with these apps on 'em saying you are being secretly monitored,

Larry Magid (01:20:30):
Especially important for domestic violence victims. That's, that's a common use to this type of software. Absolutely.

Denise Howell (01:20:35):
Yeah. That's gonna bust us some marriages.

Wil Harris (01:20:38):
And also fascinating. The Apple kind of did the same thing of its own volition with the, with the whole air tag situation. Mm-Hmm. Because people were, you know, air, I mean, air tags are amazing for keeping track of things, but people were hiding them in former, you know, spouses or former lovers cars or, you know, handbags or pockets or wherever. And then using that to, to track not just, you know, what they were doing online, but their physical location, which is, which is, you know, super dangerous. Yeah. And Apple, you know, this became reported and Apple proactively then took the step of being, of changing the air padd tracking, air tag tracking such that if an air tag that isn't registered to your phone consistently pops up on your phone, near your phone for like, sort of a couple of days in a row, it's like, Hey, is is that your air? Because there's definitely one that's kind of following you around.

Larry Magid (01:21:31):
And, and if you have any relation, any reason to suspect someone in your household, a partner, whatever, don't give them access to your phone because they can go in and turn on find my phone. They can put ware on your phone. For example, I have, what is the Apple thing? Friend finder, right? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Well, that's great. But I have a friend who I'm linked to who, and I haven't gotten a notice in years, but I still can tell where that person is. Yeah. And luckily we're still friends, but if we ever became ex-friend, that could be problematic.

Leo Laporte (01:22:02):
It's pretty terrible. I'm surprised that Apple and Google PR don't prevent these. I mean, if you didn't have them in the App store warn

Larry Magid (01:22:08):
Periodically,

Leo Laporte (01:22:09):
If you didn't have these in the App store, nobody would install them side load 'em or anything. Maybe they do, maybe that, I don't know. But,

Larry Magid (01:22:15):
But I mean, my thing is that even Apple and Google, for example, Google ha Google Maps, if people may know, allow view to set it up so that people can track you. In fact, my wife and I do that. We, I can know where she is. She can know where I am, and that's the choice we've made. Yeah. Please. Then

Leo Laporte (01:22:28):
I do, and they do

Larry Magid (01:22:29):
Periodically send you a notice. They periodically notify you, which is a good thing, because again, you might have a relationship that could go south. And it turns out that that person may not be as honorable as I suspect. I know my wife is, and I know I am.

Denise Howell (01:22:41):
Yes. Yeah. In our, in our family, we do the same thing. We just use the built-in iOS tools. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Right. I've, I know a lot of people who use that Life 360, and I don't know that much about it,

Leo Laporte (01:22:51):
That uses mdm and that's one that Apple got upset about. You remember Apple? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, right? Shut down Life 360 and a bunch of other similar apps that were parental control apps because they used mdm, which requires putting a profile on the phone and giving, really breaking the phone security. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> Apple came to a, a agreement with life 360. But yeah, apple has, so I have a widget on my front page of my phone with all my family members, and I could see Lisa's in her car. I could see where she's going. She has the same thing for me. But that's by consent. And it should be by consent, obviously. Right. It reminds me in Harry Potter, they had a clock. Remember the Weasley had a clock that each hand was a member of the family, and it would, it would go around and tell you where the, and I thought that was pretty cool that we could see where each other is. And, and you know, and I think that's a handy feature,

Larry Magid (01:23:41):
But I, I'm, I'm so paranoid that one time my wife was driving somewhere and I was really worried about a car accident. And I was so happy to see that she was moving. I didn't care where she was going, but the mere fact that the car was moving made me know that she wasn't in a ditch somewhere. So for, for nervous Nellies like me, this could be very helpful.

Leo Laporte (01:23:59):
I love Reverend d Jen in our chat, our I R C says, my wife and I are pastors that one of our prenuptial counselings after some of our questions and apparently inappropriate answers from the husband, the woman stood up and said, you don't really know me. And walked out <laugh>, and he says it was for the best <laugh> <laugh>. Yeah.

Wil Harris (01:24:19):
Sometimes. But it just goes to show that, you know, we think that Apple, you know, the Apple App store model kind of prevents this kind of nefarious stuff, right? Yes. The Apple is reviewing everything and that nothing will get through. But it's just, you know, one of a few things that have appeared this week that, you know, just shows that Apple's, apple's system is not infallible. I mean, I'm fascinated by this article on ours, Technica, about pig butchering scams.

Leo Laporte (01:24:48):
Yeah. Now, that's a slangy way of talking about, and we've all got these text messages. Hello.

Wil Harris (01:24:54):
I was like, man, I've, I'm always getting people asking me to butcher pigs as a scam. Like

Leo Laporte (01:25:00):
<Laugh> pig. This is the Dan Gooden is great article on ours. Technica Pig butchering scam apps sneak into Apples App Store and Google Play. And actually, it's an interesting scam. So I've received text messages we all have that are designed to get you to respond. Like, oh, gee, Dan, I'm sorry, I can't come to work today. My car broke down. I hope you could find a replacement. And then, of course, being a good Samaritan, you go, oh, this isn't Dan. I'm, I'm sorry. Do you need any help? And then the person says, oh, aren't you nice? No, I guess I got the wrong number. And it starts up a conversation, which inevitably always leads to them talking about their very big gains investing in cryptocurrency,

Larry Magid (01:25:45):
<Laugh>. Oh, yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:25:47):
And this is now called Pig Butchering <laugh>.

Larry Magid (01:25:50):
What, what about all the pretty girls that wanna meet me?

Leo Laporte (01:25:52):
Yeah. Hello.

Wil Harris (01:25:53):
Well, they wanna, they wanna meet you to invest in crypto to convince

Leo Laporte (01:25:56):
Actually no such. That's exactly right. That's what they're trying to, this whole, I think is about getting you to research firm. Okay. so Sofo said on Wednesday, they found two apps in the Apple App store that were part of an elaborate, this is from Dan Good's article on ours. Part of an elaborate network of tools used to dup people into putting large sum of money into fake investment scams. At least one of those apps was also in Google Play. Sofa says first time they'd seen him in the app store, though. Pig butchering <laugh> actually named, relies on a rich combination of apps, websites, web hosts, and humans. Sometimes human trafficking victims. So there's, that's something another whole, another part of the problem. To build trust with a mark over a period of weeks or months, often Larry under the guise of a romantic interest. Yep. Or perhaps financial advisor, successful investor. Eventually the online discussion will turn to investments usually involving crypto that the scammer claims to have earned huge sums of money from. And then says, eh, maybe you'd like to get a taste once you give. So

Larry Magid (01:27:06):
You're saying that those, those women didn't see me on

Leo Laporte (01:27:08):
Twitter? No. And, and fall in love with me? Well, maybe one of them did. I don't know once a

Larry Magid (01:27:12):
Saying, Larry, I really hope you have a huge investment portfolio. <Laugh> huge. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:27:19):
Once a mark deposits money, the scammers, this is interesting too. Beware for this. We'll initially allow them to make withdrawals, but eventually they lock the account claim they need a deposit as of as much as 20% of their balance to get it back. Of course, you pay the money, money's not returned. Scammer comes up with new reasons to give them money. The pig butchering term derives from a farmer fattening up a hog months before it's butchered

Larry Magid (01:27:47):
<Laugh>. Oh, the hog thinks it's getting a good,

Leo Laporte (01:27:50):
The hog says, I love this corn. Give me some more of that slop

(01:27:56):
 sofas anyway, found. Here's one the Ace Pro. And it doesn't, it doesn't, you know, it doesn't say that it's, you know, for pig butchering, obviously. Usually it has some value. Not necessarily this case. It was a QR code reader. That's all QR code checker. And the reason these get through the app store is cuz often they are completely benign QR code checkers at first, but then updates slowly. Add features. Another app was a little more obvious called MBM bit scan, a realtime data tracker for cryptocurrencies. One victim's Sophos track dumped $4,000 into the app before realizing it was a fake. Looks pretty normal. Right? It's just a crypto exchange.

Larry Magid (01:28:44):
What would Oh, I see. They thought they were buying crypto. Yeah. Mm-hmm. <Affirmative> bad enough to buy it in the wheel market. <Laugh>. Well,

Leo Laporte (01:28:53):
Honestly, I mean, I don't, it's too bad because if crypto had any benefit or value or NFTs any benefit or value that's long ago been, you know, hidden by the fact that it's primarily used by scammers and, you know, people like this. I mean, maybe there's some hidden value deep within, I, I'm not convinced, but I, I think we can safely say at this point, <laugh> stay, stay well away. Our own Kevin Rose got hacked. He got social engineered out of his squiggles. You gotta, you gotta,

Denise Howell (01:29:26):
Is that an N F T?

Leo Laporte (01:29:27):
Yeah. You gotta really hurt for a guy who you know, he's got so much money. <Laugh> he made, he and his consortium made 50 million selling these owls, moon, moon, moon, birds. But apparently he he also liked to invest and somebody social engineered him and stole, let me see if I can find his squiggle. He said it was a really nice squiggle stole one of his squiggles. It was worth thousands. There it is. There, it's <laugh>

Larry Magid (01:29:57):
Amazing how smart people can get social engineered. I mean it's, it's, it's incredible. Sometimes.

Leo Laporte (01:30:02):
Well, I mean if, look, if Kevin who is absolutely adept at this stuff can get social engineered, I think that that proves anyone, anyone can. Right, right. Here's even though this was simple, not rare. Loved the pattern. Damn.

Larry Magid (01:30:16):
Yeah. I like to think it would never happen to me cuz I'm really savvy. But now, now I'm getting scared. <Laugh>. Well,

Leo Laporte (01:30:22):
You know, maybe here's another one he's gonna miss. He doesn't chroy squiggle 84 67 by snow fro simple and easily identifiable. Each squiggle embodies the soul of the art blocks platform. Yeah. He loved this one too. Also stolen Chroy squiggle 89 98.

Larry Magid (01:30:46):
Well, if somebody steals an n nft, can you invalidate it? I mean it's, it's all digital anyway. Couldn't you just like,

Leo Laporte (01:30:51):
No, you lost ownership. You don't have control.

Wil Harris (01:30:55):
No. That's the point. The ownership, what's the old phrase of possession is three quarters of ownership. Paul, not 10th of the law. It's nine tenths of the law. Yes. Well, encrypt crypto possession is hundred percent. 100% of the law. Right? Yeah.

Larry Magid (01:31:07):
Maybe I just don't get NFTs. To me, they're just digital stuff that every copy identical to the original. But I understand the well that demonstration of that and

Leo Laporte (01:31:15):
All that content. Well, that's the irony of this is Kevin still has access to the art. He can put it on his Twitter feed. He just doesn't have, I fucking

Wil Harris (01:31:23):
Say I can take a he caner and take a photo of a Jackson poll. Can put that on my wall though. It's not the same thing you

Larry Magid (01:31:28):
Say. This is the real, the fake, real version. And it's actually worth more than the real, real version because I stand behind it and I'm the guy who owned it in the first place. And I don't know. It's gotta

Wil Harris (01:31:37):
Be. I bet, I bet if Kevin collaborated with the squiggle dude and made a second version of each of those squiggles, they'd be worth way more money because of the Kevin Rose name attached to it. Right. Get the limited edition Kevin Rose edition of this squiggle.

Denise Howell (01:31:52):
And I bet to Larry's point, there's gotta be a way to somehow lock your creative works down on the blockchain.

Larry Magid (01:32:02):
Oh, you would think. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:32:03):
Yeah. I'm sure if there was a way Kevin would've done it.

Larry Magid (01:32:07):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:32:08):
I think he, I don't know what happened. This is the thing he was socially engineered. So what happened? Somebody, he pretended to be somebody he trusted or knew and he is, or maybe here, I'd like to buy this for $20,000. Kevin said, great, here you go. And then it turned out not to be 20. Who knows what happened. But yeah. So

Larry Magid (01:32:26):
We should have waited until the check cleared, so to speak.

Leo Laporte (01:32:27):
Always wait till the, yeah, the check. See, this is your problem, Larry. Okay, boomer till the check clears. Sure.

Larry Magid (01:32:34):
I'm waiting for that check. <Laugh>. Yep. Yep, that's right.

Leo Laporte (01:32:37):
Final check clears. When's

Larry Magid (01:32:39):
The last time? Look at my bank book to make sure the money's in there. Right. <laugh>,

Leo Laporte (01:32:42):
You got that little savings book. Right? When's the last time you wrote a check, Larry?

Larry Magid (01:32:47):
Many years ago. Yeah. Will I think I might have written one to the I R F. I'm not sure at one point.

Leo Laporte (01:32:52):
Yeah. Will, do you ever write checks?

Wil Harris (01:32:55):
I haven't written a check in a long time, but I do. I did get a check from over here we pay something called council tax, which is like, you know, the, the money you pay your local authority to pick up your bins and keep the streets done and that kind of thing. And if you move out of an area or move into a different area, you get a refund on the amount that you paid that you, you know, that you've now overpaid. Right. Cuz you pay sort of them in six monthly advances. And they sent me a check back for my refund. Yeah. And I discovered that you can, if I open my online banking app on my phone, you can take a photo of the check Yes. And then it'll deposit in it in your

Larry Magid (01:33:34):
Account. Yes. That wonderful.

Wil Harris (01:33:36):
Can I, can I take several photos of it? You can take

Leo Laporte (01:33:39):
As many as you

Larry Magid (01:33:39):
Want.

Leo Laporte (01:33:41):
Only one more clear

Larry Magid (01:33:43):
I thought. No.

Denise Howell (01:33:44):
And then you're supposed to hang onto it for a few days. Yeah. So they make sure it act The check clears

Leo Laporte (01:33:49):
By the way,

Denise Howell (01:33:50):
Then you

Leo Laporte (01:33:51):
Destroy it. By the way, do that because I got a check issued by twit, a reimbursement check, and I thought I took a picture of it and uploaded to my bank and I kept looking at my account and never saw it. Fortunately, I kept the check, so I resubmitted it and then they went through so they, something happened, but I did keep it. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>,

Larry Magid (01:34:09):
I I found a bank book from 1979 from Amherst savings. Thousand dollars in it. Kids. Do

Leo Laporte (01:34:15):
You know what a bank book is? Kids

Larry Magid (01:34:17):
<Laugh>. Yeah. Kids. But the thing is, it really was my money, but the company, the bank has been out of business for a decades. <Laugh> and the state of Massa. Cause it's probably worth a lot now because it's been collecting interest for 40 years and even low interest. It's something, but the state of Massachusetts can't even figure out, you know, where this money is. So I'm Oh,

Leo Laporte (01:34:35):
Usually the Secretary of State it is, knows when

Larry Magid (01:34:37):
I know California. I, I got a letter just this week from, from the Secretary of State of California, but somebody owes me ego all the time. Thousand bucks. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:34:45):
I, I it's with

Denise Howell (01:34:46):
Leo's Bitcoin somewhere.

Leo Laporte (01:34:47):
Yeah. Somewhere in the ether.

Larry Magid (01:34:49):
You're, you've lost more in your Bitcoin than I did in my savings account. <Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:34:53):
All right. I want to take a little break cuz I have to make up for that loss. And then we are going to get all the stories that the, our hosts submitted cuz there's some good ones in here we haven't got to, but before we do that, great, great to have Larry magid and Denise Howell and Will Harris. All good friends. Oh, longtime members of the Twit family. It's really nice to have y'all here. Oh, a programming note next week Twit will be on Saturday because I guess there's some football game or something on Sunday and we didn't want to com try to compete with the Super Bowl. So twit and asthe tech guys will shift back one day, same times. But, but on Saturday, February 11th ask the tech guys 11:00 AM Pacific, 2:00 PM Eastern, and then immediately following at 2:00 PM Pacific this week in tech.

(01:35:40):
So you can all enjoy the Super Bowl and peace on. I wonder if churches do the same thing. Yeah. God's Day. We're back it up Saturday this week. Yes, <laugh>. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. I it's always a good time to do your shopping is during the Super Bowl or when the, anytime the 49ers are in the playoffs gets very quiet around here. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, everybody stays home. Yep. Our show today brought to you by Express VPN N this is the only VPN I use, the only one I trust. And I'll tell you why. This is the VPN n you want to use. So there's three reasons. People like having a virtual private network. Software you put on your phone, your computer, even on your router that routes your internet traffic encrypted through the internet to a server somewhere else and then goes out into the public internet. W three reasons.

(01:36:31):
One, of course for security because if somebody's monitoring your traffic, your internet traffic, they can't see what you're doing. If you're at a coffee shop and a hotel, they can't see your traffic. They've just see an encrypted blob heading on out two because, well, frankly, privacy is an issue every single time. You go out on the net with your personal IP address, people go, oh, there he is again. Your internet service provider is probably the worst offender. Isps, Collette perfectly legally can collect all your internet activity and sell it to, to data brokers or big tech companies. They spy on you. The third reason you might want to use it in case like Will Harris, you wanna watch American Hulu or <laugh> British Netflix or the b bbc. It's nice to be able to say, I'm geographically in the UK or in Japan or in France or wherever you want to be.

(01:37:24):
We were in Mexico over the holiday and I wanted to watch a Thursday night football. Amazon said, you can't, you're in Mexico. I said, oh, I'm sorry, I'm in Miami now. Thanks to Express p n And it went right through. It really is a great thing to have. Here's the one problem though with a VPN that you ought to be aware of all of those things. You're just kicking the can down the road. So you've gotta trust the server you're using that they're not spying on you. That's why I prefer and use and recommend Express V P N. They take the extra steps to make sure your privacy is a hundred percent protected. They have independent third party audits on their technology, on their privacy policy to guarantee that they are living up to it. They actually go an extra step that a lot of companies wouldn't even think of.

(01:38:10):
For instance, all Express VPN servers and they're all over the world, run a special Debian distribution that automatically wipes the drive and reinstalls every day at startup. So there's never any data collected. In fact, even better, they run their special server server, they've created a VPN n server they've created called the trusted Server. They run that in Ram Sandbox so it can't write to the disc. So when you press that button on your express VPN n app on your Mac or your pc or your iOS or Android device, it automatically spins up a server in Ram can't write to disc. And then when you're done, it's gone. And so are, so all the traces of your visit, there is no way anybody could know you're there. And we know this not only from the regular audits, but we know it because from time to time in countries where they don't believe in knocking before they bash down the door to take the servers, they've done that to express V P N and there's never anything on those servers.

(01:39:11):
We know you are private Express p n and, and the other thing is they invest in their, in their infrastructure. So they rotate their IP addresses so they're always fresh. They, they they, they make sure they have enough bandwidth at every server so you don't feel sluggish. I know you've probably used VPN and said, I don't want to use that. That's slow, not express vpn. And you can, you can actually watch HD video with Express VPN n and you'll never notice the difference. I know a lot of people put express VPN n on their routers and you would not know your whole house is now protected and nobody will say, oh, why is it slow? Because it isn't. That's why Express VPN's rated number one by cnet, by Wired by Tech radar. Countless others, me too. Express vpn.com/twitch. Spell it out. E P R E S S vpn.com/t W I t.

(01:39:59):
If you go there right now, you'll get three extra months free with a one year purchase. I know you're gonna say, oh, I can get a free vpn. No, you, you really wanna spend a little money cuz you want them to put that into the infrastructure, keeping things up to date, working on things like that. Trusted server technology express vpn.com/to what you, you wanna know more? There was a great article in bleeping computer last year all about Express VPN and how their servers work. It's really great. Thank you. Express VPN n for your support. Thank you for supporting us by using that address express vpn.com/twit. We had a lovely week this week on twit. John, do we have a fabulous promotional video to show the the people? Let's see it. Ai, Leo is wife. Haha. Previously on TWI Tech News Weekly said Michael Fisher,

Speaker 6 (01:40:53):
Aka Mr. Mobile was at Samsung unpacked 2023.

Speaker 7 (01:40:59):
One thing that I think a lot of us have been hoping for is a, an Android device that can replace the iPhone. I always have to have an iPhone with me because it is superior in mobile videography. And it was very clear to me when I started seeing the leaks and started learning about the S 23 line and the ultra that Samsung is really coming hard for that and trying to close that gap.

Leo Laporte (01:41:21):
This week in space we're joined by bestselling author Daniel Suarez to discuss his exciting new book release Critical Mass.

Speaker 8 (01:41:28):
So often I'll talk to mainstream people about space who may not follow it and they will immediately bring up, Hey, we have pressing issues here on Earth. I think that that's more important, you know, rather than just make an argument or just say it. I'd like to demonstrate, show how space is going to be absolutely critical in solving a lot of the problems here on earth, especially the pressing ones.

Leo Laporte (01:41:50):
This week in Google, you are gonna test something for me for this week. What was that? The, the New Voice. Better Voice stuff on the oh crap. I was seven. Let me call you. It's really noisy in here. Can you hear me okay? Hear it? So yeah, I don't hear the vacuum at all. I don't

Speaker 6 (01:42:04):
Hear vacuum. I

Leo Laporte (01:42:05):
Don't hear it. Yeah. Twit. Yeah. Could you get over there? You missed a spot. How long are they gonna use that ai Leo? You know, you got the real one. You don't have to use the <laugh>, the AI Leo. It's not so good. I'm just saying <laugh>,

Speaker 8 (01:42:26):
You don't, you don't think chat G p t could do the show better

Leo Laporte (01:42:28):
Than you could? Yeah, probably could, unfortunately. And they're actually really good. Actually scary, good voice synthesis programs like that. 11 ai which four chan used to create celebrity fakes that were, well it's four chan you can imagine, you know they got you know, 11 AI actually had to say wait, wait a minute. <Laugh>, let's step back a little bit. I don't know what's gonna, what's gonna happen. There are a lot of lawsuits, Denise over chat G p t using text from real authors of stable diffusion and Mid Journey and Dolly using real artists' images. Yeah. Do you think these lawsuits are, are gonna succeed?

Denise Howell (01:43:13):
Well, copyright laws a bitch <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:43:16):
Yeah. So

Denise Howell (01:43:17):
Yeah. Yeah. 

Leo Laporte (01:43:18):
But can you prove, yeah. I mean, how do you, so Getty is one for instance, that's Getty images is suing saying Dolly used our images to create its artificial images and we know because we can see that the modified watermarks from our images mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, I think that might be a Yeah. So they've got successful suit.

Denise Howell (01:43:40):
Absolutely. I mean if, you know, if you have a copyright in something and someone has used it for commercial purposes without your permission, you've probably got a pretty good

Leo Laporte (01:43:50):
Case against them. It derivative though. I mean, how, how, I mean, do you get off the hook because it's not the actual image?

Denise Howell (01:43:59):
You might, I mean yeah, derivative works are, are part of the fair use doctrine. So you could come back and say, hey, it's fair use, but a lot of factors go into determining fair use, including whether it's for commercial use or not, or whether it's for education, whether it's for news. So you'd have to go through that whole analysis. The other thing that people can assert, and someone brought this up in irc, is if they're scraping to get all this, which Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So there are, there are ways you can prevent and not just physically block that, but you can, you can have lawsuits that complain and successfully get you damages for people who have scraped if they've, if they've not just if they've damaged you from the material they've gotten, but they, you have to show their impact on your site or service. Right. By doing that,

Leo Laporte (01:44:51):
I mean all arts, it stands on the shoulders of the previous artists.

Denise Howell (01:44:55):
Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>.

Leo Laporte (01:44:56):
I guess the

Larry Magid (01:44:57):
Other question is, if, if I were to publish, let's say I were to have chap G T P write an article for me and I were to publish it under my own name. Do I have the copyright of that? I mean, I didn't write it, it wrote it. 

Denise Howell (01:45:09):
So Chap, G B T and I haven't played with it probably as much as you guys have <laugh>. Yeah. but correct me if I'm wrong, but it's open sourced right now, right? Mm-Hmm.

Larry Magid (01:45:19):
<Affirmative>, I think so. And free They open, they call it open ai. I don't know what that really means.

Denise Howell (01:45:23):
Right? And, and I, I don't know if they're making you click on a license agreement or not before you kick the tires on the thing and put it to use, but I'm guessing no. I dunno. So, so I mean the way that'll all go forward is if there's, you know, it will depend on the licensing terms and just like the things that we use technologically to create creative works now Microsoft Word or you know, whatever. Certainly Microsoft doesn't own your, your works that you create in their products. And I think that that's how this will have to evolve is that either there will be an app applied, an applied or an express license that you own the works that you're creating using these tools. But who knows, someone may decide to try and claw that back a bit.

Larry Magid (01:46:13):
Will you be pleased to know, Denise, that you are a prominent internet and technology lawyer? A well-known commentator. Oh, did

Leo Laporte (01:46:19):
You ask Chad chat

Denise Howell (01:46:22):
GBT about me? That's funny. I haven't done that.

Larry Magid (01:46:24):
It also tells it, it tells me that I wrote for u s A today and I'm still waiting to get checks from u a today. I remember ever

Leo Laporte (01:46:30):
Chat g PT <laugh>, as we've pointed out a number of times on our shows, at no point was designed to be accurate.

Larry Magid (01:46:38):
Yeah. Apparently

Leo Laporte (01:46:39):
<Laugh> no, it's not, it's not in its

Larry Magid (01:46:40):
Parameters, but you are prominent she is prominent. No, but it, it gives, it

Wil Harris (01:46:43):
Gives its answers in a way that's, that's so self confident. I heard, I heard somebody say chat. G p D has all the self-confidence of a not knowledgeable white man. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:46:54):
<Laugh>. It's basically a mansplaining engine. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Confidently wrong. So I'm looking at the use the user terms on chat, G P T, and it says you can't use it in a way that infringes, misappropriate or violates any person's rights. You can't, you can't, looks like you can't, you know, try to reverse engineer. It doesn't say anything about not, you may provide input. Input and output content doesn't say anything about not using, oh, actually,

Larry Magid (01:47:27):
I asked Jack Bei if I could republish it and it said, I can't, you may not republish the content without obtaining permission from open ai. Interesting. Mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, which is interesting, informative. Did they get permission to get, to get the content that they're publishing though?

Leo Laporte (01:47:41):
Yeah, I, I, yeah.

Wil Harris (01:47:43):
Good point. They completely did not. Right? They, they, but I think it's fascinating. I mean, so many of these things that Cha is doing, like there's a great, this great article in Sefo about why even the, the creators of it at OpenAI can't figure out why it won't do certain things. So in this instance, go ahead. If you, if you ask it to write a viral tweet that was this week was when asked to write a poem about the positive attributes of Donald Trump chat, G p t refused to wade into politics saying that wasn't his job. But when asked to do the same thing for Joe Biden, it wrote a poem, <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:48:19):
Yeah. And, and then, then when asked Open AI said, we don't know why it wasn't, we don't know why we didn't tell it not to write about Donald Trump. And it was okay to do Biden. This is somewhat scary, right? That the rules, it also has rules that these things follow are not visible, you know, and

Larry Magid (01:48:38):
They're clearly capricious.

Leo Laporte (01:48:39):
Yeah. Yeah. But we're gonna see a lot more of it. Bing. Microsoft's bing this week number of Bing users reported they saw chat, G p T and Bing Microsoft to invested a billion dollars in open AI has said that they're gonna give them an additional 10 billion to incorporate chat G P T into Microsoft office and into Bing search results. This is scaring the hell outta Google. Yeah. which calls us a red alert because and then they, you know, are right now testing a lot of responses. Google's asking employees to test something called Apprentice Bard <laugh> using its Lambda technology. But Facebook said this ya Lacuna is their ai, one of their genius AI guy said, oh, chappy T gds, nothing. We've got stuff like that. Most of these other companies, unlike Open ai, are doing it in private. But now, because I

Wil Harris (01:49:34):
Don't think, yeah, they, they don't appear to have things that are as good,

Leo Laporte (01:49:38):
Right? I don't know. We'll find out. I mean

Wil Harris (01:49:42):
The most reading, but I love

Leo Laporte (01:49:43):
The idea story is that the folks at OpenAI rushed chat, G P t T out. And I imagine that there is now a rush at Google and Meta and Microsoft and Apple to rush something out to respond, right?

Wil Harris (01:49:57):
But I love the idea of being able to open Microsoft Word and have the long awaited return of Clippy with it looks like you are writing a letter. Would you like me to write most of it for you?

Leo Laporte (01:50:09):
<Laugh>. But, but the thing that's different about chat, G p T is actually smarter than clippy, right? Malware, one of the

Wil Harris (01:50:16):
Big concerns. Imagine if Clippy was good,

Leo Laporte (01:50:18):
Right? One of the big concerns is malware is being written by chat G P T, and it works. It works. Now, we talked about this on security Now

Denise Howell (01:50:30):
All I want is for Apple to have some technology helping out messaging that doesn't try and change every word that you're typing there to something you don't intend to type.

Larry Magid (01:50:39):
My, my favorite story,

Wil Harris (01:50:40):
Are you just writing Doc too much? Denise <laugh>. My

Larry Magid (01:50:43):
Favorite, my favorite spell checker story. This is the true story, is many years ago when I was running for the LA Times, I mentioned that I was at going to a warehouse and I misspelled the word warehouse and ah-huh <laugh> happy editor. It, it wasn't until the syndicate got my story that they realized I didn't mean whorehouse <laugh>. So that could have gotten me in very serious trouble, at least with my wife.

Leo Laporte (01:51:06):
Had that come out when we went down to the whorehouse the other day,

Larry Magid (01:51:09):
<Laugh>. Exactly.

Denise Howell (01:51:12):
Y'all never believe what we found in that H house.

Wil Harris (01:51:16):
That, to be fair, I once had to, if we're, if we're into old, old technology journalism stories, I once had to try and work out one earth. I had a, an editor come back from a very, very traditional boozy English lunch with a, with a PR colleague, filed this incredible copy. He was like, I've got the greatest story. I've got the greatest story, filed this story. And I had to, had copy edited it. And when I looked at it, it looked like complete utter gibberish, but complete utter gibberish in a way that sort of looked like it made sense. And when I sat there and looked at it, and I looked at it and I went away and made a cup of coffee, about half letter, I realized he'd written the entire thing one key to the right

Larry Magid (01:51:54):
<Laugh> <laugh>,

Wil Harris (01:51:56):
But it'd just been so drunkie unnoticed. He just touched, typed the entire thing, one key to the right, and I transposed it all back. And it was a great scoop

Leo Laporte (01:52:04):
Chat. GBT could have done that. You could have just say, Hey, transposed everything one key to the right. It literally, that's the probably thing I could have done. So if The Verge has been really hammering cnet, now, I think there's somewhat of this as an intramural war between two competitors, but they've been hammering cnet. We had Connie Goma, editor-in-chief of CNET on a few weeks ago on Twitter when this story broke, that CNET had used its own artificial intelligence, I think they call it wordsmith, to create 75 articles in their personal finance section. She said, look, these are articles no reporter wants to write. So we had the, the, the AI write them, and then a, a human editor checked them and edit them. And then we put it out because no one wants to write these basic articles, but, but we need them.

(01:52:49):
Then the Verge said, well, okay, first of all, there's still plenty of inaccuracies in these articles. Second, it looks like Red Ventures, the private equity company that bought CNET and a number of other sites, including the Point Sky and credit card.com is using these to create SEO-friendly articles that, yeah, no one wants to write 'em cuz they're stupid. But Chan search engines will come up with the them as a, as a search result if you search for, you know, where do I get the best credit card rate or, or the like. And so they're very lucrative for Red Ventures. Now the Verge is doubling down on this, and this doesn't have to do with AI anymore. The Verge is saying this week that CNET pushed reporters to be more favorable to advertisers. Now, Connie was pretty hopped up about the Verge taking aim at cnet.

(01:53:43):
She said, this is a overblown story. This didn't happen. I don't know how Connie or you know, we've had Lindsay Turntine who is you know, now a big wig at, at CNET Red Ventures on the show too. We have a lot of CNET people on. I like CNET people. I like a lot of these reporters. I'm wondering how they feel about this. According to The Verge who says we have many sources under the ownership of Red Ventures, staff has been fighting to protect c's, editorial independence and rigor amid a push towards sponsored content and affiliate marketing by its new corporate owners. One staffer told the Verge, everyone at CNET is more afraid of Red Ventures than they are of ai.

Wil Harris (01:54:28):
Oh, this, I hate to be like the, the grumpy old man on this, but this is like the story of running every media company of all time that relies on advertising, right? It's like you've got one group of people who are the salespeople who are going, Hey, I could really close this deal if there was like, just, you know, just one little thing. If you could say something nice on the site and all the journalists go, no, get lost. And all the advertiser people, people go, well, you wouldn't have jobs if you, you know, we didn't bring in the advertising and all the journalists go, well, you wouldn't have jobs if we didn't write all the content <laugh>. And it goes back and forth and back and forth, and it's literally been like this way since the avention of the newspaper. And, and I feel, I feel like the Verge is just going like super holier than that. I would wager a large chunk of money. No,

Leo Laporte (01:55:13):
Maybe that

Wil Harris (01:55:13):
There is somebody at The Verge Right. Doing, which is also owned by a venture capital company, right. Which is also right. It it's the same everywhere.

Leo Laporte (01:55:23):
A good company, and I've worked at a few, including Ziff Davis back in the day will have a, a firewall between the

Wil Harris (01:55:31):
Chinese

Leo Laporte (01:55:31):
Wool, right? Yeah. The Chinese wall between, and we don't say Chinese wall anymore, but that, but you know what I'm talking about. Oh, sorry. It's the kung wall or whatever they call it. No, no. The Chinese wall between editorial and advertising. And I remember at Tech tv, we were gonna do a story on how to hack the Xbox, and the ad sales folks went crazy. They said, Microsoft buys a ton of ads on tech tv. And we said, well what do you want us to do? And to their credit, our management said, no, no, go right ahead with that. They'll be fine. Maybe they'll pull ads, which they did for a while, but they'll come back. We don't want to have our editorial influenced, and a good company will do that. Yeah. I'm, you know, there is a, you know, because we're a small company, I do the ads.

(01:56:14):
We don't make a lot of our hosts do ads, but the in-house hosts do ads. You've heard me do it. And we dis but we have some standards. We don't approve advertisers. We don't, like I say no all the time. We always disclaim when we do a story that talks about somebody who is advertised with us. We say that. And I will say absolutely. I always tell all of our hosts, aunt, you'll back me up on this, to tell the truth. It's not, the advertisers should not have any influence over what we say or, or do. And there have been times when that's been problematic. But, but everybody in our company, and I would assume at a good company, understands the editorial integrity is what Yeah. Makes that company succeed. If people start believing that your editorial judgments are influenced by advertisers, you've got nothing to sell to advertisers.

Larry Magid (01:57:06):
You know, I, I, I can tell you, Lou, you know, I've been in this business probably about the same time. You have 40 years, and I've worked for, you know, c bs I've worked for the LA Times, I worked for the New York Times, I've written for the New York Times. I have never ever been pressured. I have never ever been censored. But there was another Phoenix Steroid, and I'm embarrassed to say fate, with at the time, my fame employer CBS BS owned CNET at the time when CNET pulled a product of the, of CS Award. Oh,

Leo Laporte (01:57:31):
I remember

Larry Magid (01:57:32):
That. Remember. And Dish Network was in a dispute with c Bs. And as a C B S employee that was

Leo Laporte (01:57:38):
Blatant,

Larry Magid (01:57:39):
Many of us were very embarrassed. I mean, people in the newsroom were very upset about with, you know, whoever in the company did this. Yes, it was blatant. And they got a, they got a slap slapped around for that. So it's not the first time that they were accused of that. But I, I'm, I'm not as cynical as you are, will. I mean, I, I do know that it happens, but I also know that there is such a strong ethos, e ethos that mean, it's the same argument I have with people who accuse the mainstream media of fa fake news. I mean, do they pick stories based on biases? Maybe. But they don't go out of their way to lie. And when they do lie, they usually, or when they do, when there is an error, it's incredibly embarrassing. And I've made errors in print and I'm very embarrassed, and I've, and I always insist on a correction. You

Wil Harris (01:58:25):
Know, just to be, just to be clear, I'm, I'm not being cynical. I'm, I'm just saying, I'm just or even accusing anybody of anything. I'm just saying that the dance between advertiser and editorial is of course, just as is just as old as media, of course, for someone to Ima you know, I, I find it difficult to imagine that it's better or worse at any particular, you know,

Larry Magid (01:58:45):
And I've been trotted out to go to advertiser dinners and shake hands with Advertis, of course. But again, not to, not to pander to their, you know, to their lying or anything like that.

Leo Laporte (01:58:54):
It is, it is a fine line. And I think what's changed in our lifetimes, Larry is that thanks to YouTube and influencers, this line has become more and more blurred. Yes. And one of the, one of the accusations from the Virgin, again, I wa I, I said it up front, I'll say it again. The Verge is a competitor to seen that. And so you gotta take a grain of salt. But one of the things they accused seen of is a video, YouTube video published by CNET at C from ces, which was last month called Moen Unveils Innovative Smart Sprinkler Products at c e s. The CNET host takes viewers through the company's booth interviewing company representatives, testing products. The video is an ad, but the host doesn't say that neither does the video description. And the title didn't include a disclosure either. Now, sta Denise has told us many times, you've been very good about this, that the FTC looks frowns on this.

Denise Howell (01:59:57):
They don't cotton to that at all.

Leo Laporte (01:59:58):
Cotton to it. No. the only disclaimer was a small popup that YouTube inserted when an uploader has indicated there's a paid promotion in a video. Though CNET doesn't actually specify what in the video is promoted after the Verge asked Red Ventures about the added disclosure was silently added to the videos description. The FTCs very clear that when for instance, if, if I don't tweet about sponsors, but one of, one of our sales staff tweets about a sponsor, they have to put hashtag ad hashtag sponsor. They have to very clearly disclose that this is a sponsor

Wil Harris (02:00:36):
Oh. Hashtag partner. We see a lot.

Leo Laporte (02:00:38):
Yep. But I have to say YouTube is the wild West when it comes to this, and no one can, there's so many videos. I don't think anybody can enforce it. It happens all the time.

Denise Howell (02:00:51):
I, I do, I watch enough YouTube to know that people who, who care about maintaining their YouTube channels and their followers and staying in good standing with YouTube itself, much less the ftc, they are very skilled at this. Yeah. they not only put the right disclaimers in the right places, but they do it at the right time. Like, if only a portion of the video is sponsored, then we do it then.

Leo Laporte (02:01:13):
Right? Right.

Larry Magid (02:01:15):
Connect safely takes money from companies that I write about sometimes. I always put a disclosure at the bottom of the article that, that, you know, I'm c e o connect faithfully, which gets money from that company. I don't know whether that's the requirement or not, but it just seems like the only Right. It seems like the right thing to do. And the readers can make up their own mind if they think I'm biased.

Leo Laporte (02:01:34):
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, we live in a different world, whether a lot of us are freelance working for ourselves, a lot of us in a situation, we're selling advertising at the same time as we're creating content. So it is a new world. It is not the old world where you had this big media company that would defend you, that has lawyers, that has a Chinese wall between advertising and editorial. That that's all. In many cases it's gone. So I trust Connie and Lindsay, I'd be very curious what they have to say about this. They've been on our shows many times, and when Connie was on, not so long ago, I think she made a credible defense. But clearly there's something to talk about here. And and I, I guess the most important thing is to say now it's let the buyer beware As a consumer of editorial content, you always have to ask yourself, you know, how credible is this? How much integrity is this person is being disclosed? Cuz times have changed, right? Yep. larry's world.com, I think a close personal friend of the show wrote this paradigm Shifts of yesterday, yesterday year, today and tomorrow. This is fun. You're talking about things that changed in your many years in this business, <laugh>.

Larry Magid (02:02:51):
When, when I look back at my, I got involved with the tech journalists in the early eighties. When I look back at things that have happened, I mean, first of all, the, the early PCs were a paradigm shift. The Apple Mac was a paradigm shift. Obviously the iPhone with the paradigm shift, broadband with a paradigm, you could, you could count them on probably two hands. The ones that I've witnessed in, in my career, the tech journalism, I mean, the laptop was not a paradigm shift, it was just a smaller version of a personal computer. The tablet wasn't a paradigm shift, it was just a bigger version of a smartphone. And so I'm thinking about what are the paradigm shifts of 2023 and or 2020, you know, this right now. And the two that come to mind are metaverse and and ai, or at least the, the, the, the evolution of AI as, as witnessed by chat G T P. And I'm, I'm thinking the Metaverse, I'm not sure how much of a paradigm shift it's gonna be because it's too early to know.

Leo Laporte (02:03:42):
We don't know. Yeah. So far it's been kind of a bust to be frank so

Larry Magid (02:03:46):
Far. So, but, but, but that, you know, the Mac didn't do all that well. Yeah. It, it, it was amazing. I remember I reviewed it and I was blown away by it, but the market didn't didn't really, you know,

Leo Laporte (02:03:59):
Thing, same thing for a lot of technologies in the early days, they're not impressive. Early video games were nothing compared to today's video games. But, but

Larry Magid (02:04:07):
Even the iPhone initially, until they came out with the app store, wasn't, wasn't a, you know, a blockbuster, you know, again, tech journals like us loved it. But you'd

Leo Laporte (02:04:15):
Agree that that mobile was a paradigm shift.

Larry Magid (02:04:18):
Yeah. Mobile was paradigm shift. Sure. When I got my first cell phone, the fact that I could make a call and not be tethered to a phone to a, to a, to a house or an office and, you know, that was a kind of a car phone with a bag phone even. That was a paradigm. Huge paradigm shift. You had car phones before then.

Leo Laporte (02:04:33):
I, I have come to the opinion probably that metaverse and ar that's distant. I mean, it's not gonna be a paradigm shift until you can wear augmented reality spectacles. Right. Exactly. And who knows when that's gonna be Apples apparently having difficulty making that a reality and they've put that off. Right.

Larry Magid (02:04:50):
Well,

Leo Laporte (02:04:51):
That, there's a real legit question that AI is at some sort of inflection point right now. And I've been asking this in all of our shorts, cuz at, at first you go, wow, look what's going on with images text? We now have AI music. This is something happened. This is an inflection point. Things have changed. But I've also asked the question, or is this just yet another AI spring that will be followed by an AI winner? You know, we thought cars would be driving themselves by now. We thought, I mean this, I

Larry Magid (02:05:21):
Bought one that was supposed to drive itself. Yeah. Right.

Leo Laporte (02:05:23):
Yeah. It's turned out to be harder to do than we thought. Yeah. And I'm wondering if, for all of its Marvels, if Chat g p t or Mid Journey really is just a parlor trick and, you know, in the next few years, we're gonna look back on it and go, yeah, I guess that didn't happen. Or not, or is it about to explode? What do you think, Denise?

Denise Howell (02:05:45):
I have one to add to Larry's list streaming.

Leo Laporte (02:05:49):
Yeah. Yeah. Look what we're doing right now. Yeah.

Larry Magid (02:05:52):
Yeah. I mean, when Rob Blather showed me the real audio at the time, I was blown away by it. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:05:57):
We've, we've been do this, what we are doing right now for people who listen after the fact, you know, we also stream live as we're doing a show is higher quality than television was until very recently over the, with a distribution footprint that includes the entire globe at very little cost to us. It's kind of a revolution. I could,

Larry Magid (02:06:20):
And I would argue the fact that, you know, at least some of us are in almost broadcast quality broadcasting from home. Yes. Right. Technology that costs under a thousand dollars.

Leo Laporte (02:06:29):
Before the pandemic, if you wanted to be on cnn n you would have to go to a satellite bureau Right. And sit in front of a camera and get an earpiece. I know, I know. Cause I used to do it all the time. All of a sudden, thanks to the pandemic, everybody's on Skype and Zoom and Cisco WebEx and, and, and it didn't go back after the, you know, there's, they're never gonna make you go to a satellite bureau again.

Larry Magid (02:06:53):
I'm looking at you Leo, I'm looking at you and Denise side by side. I know you're in a studio with probably very, very expensive cameras. I assumed Denise, you're at home with a, with a web camera, some type. The quality difference between the two images is not dramatic. It's

Leo Laporte (02:07:05):
Minimal. It,

Larry Magid (02:07:06):
It's, it's minimal. Not worth whatever you paid for those cameras. Frankly. No

Leo Laporte (02:07:10):
Offense, we are not using expensive cameras. I'll reassure you, Larry. These are good consumer grade camcorders from 10 years ago.

Larry Magid (02:07:17):
But you know what the funny thing is? When, when, when I'll try and pick stations come out and interview me, they actually do bring $50,000 cameras.

Leo Laporte (02:07:24):
They don't need to anymore. Stop it. I

Larry Magid (02:07:26):
Know. Why did they do that? Watch

Leo Laporte (02:07:27):
CNN or MSNBC or Fox. Everybody's on Zoom now. Or whoever paid the branding. You Cisco on cnn. N but, but everybody's on a, a webcam and sometimes it's terrible, but we're just used to it. <Laugh> Go ahead. What were you gonna say? Will,

Wil Harris (02:07:44):
I was just gonna say I mean, Larry noticed, you know, your fantastic quality. Indonesia is fantastic quality. And I was like, I'm gonna try not take that as, what are you using

Leo Laporte (02:07:52):
A potato? What you got? What are you using there, <laugh>? It's terrible.

Wil Harris (02:07:57):
It's the beard, right? You can't stand the beard.

Leo Laporte (02:08:00):
The beard. It's good to

Larry Magid (02:08:01):
Go.

Denise Howell (02:08:01):
You, you need a ring light?

Leo Laporte (02:08:03):
Yeah. Look at Denise, your lip beautifully. Do you use a ring Light? Light?

Denise Howell (02:08:07):
Have a ring light, yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:08:09):
Yes. As all good influencers do.

Denise Howell (02:08:13):
<Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (02:08:15):
Sorry. Will the

Denise Howell (02:08:16):
Other, the other thing streaming

Leo Laporte (02:08:17):
Did we'll get you better. I got a little glare on your face. Anyway, I gotta fix that here.

Denise Howell (02:08:21):
Go ahead. You remember the hand ringing about lime wire and Napster and Yeah. All of that streaming just wiped all that out.

Leo Laporte (02:08:29):
Yeah.

Larry Magid (02:08:31):
That still never catch up.

Leo Laporte (02:08:32):
Yeah. Yeah. I mean the, the number one record store in the world now is iTunes and people don't buy music to keep. They, they just subscribe. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Yep. that's a huge, we're seeing. I mean, we live in an age of paradigm shifts. It's

Larry Magid (02:08:46):
Kind of amazing. The only time I ever buy CDs, if I go to a concert of like, you know, a a a musician who's not super famous just

Leo Laporte (02:08:53):
To support 'em though, right.

Larry Magid (02:08:54):
The way it's a donation. Yeah. I would, I never unwrap them.

Leo Laporte (02:08:57):
We were, we were at a big stadium show with Motley Crew and Joan Jet and poison. This is crazy. And the, and the, and they went around the Shriners <laugh> went around selling the latest Motley Crew CD and for a good cause. So Lisa bought one and then she, she looks at it and looks at the person sitting next to her and said, what are we gonna do with these? Right. We don't have a CD player.

Larry Magid (02:09:25):
Right.

Leo Laporte (02:09:26):
I think she threw it up.

Denise Howell (02:09:27):
It's like the AOL disks that you to be Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:09:29):
What do we do with this? Well, we was a good, cause we, we don't mind Jo down donating Shriners, but I don't need the cd. You keep the cd. Cuz I, I could just listen on my Apple music, so Exactly. I don't need it. Yeah, we're in interesting times. I, I am on the fence as to whether AI is gonna be this big explosion. That's what everybody's assuming. I think it's perfectly possible that we'll look back on this and say, yeah, well, like Bitcoin. Right.

Larry Magid (02:09:52):
Well, I think, look, first of all, AI has already exploded. I mean, if you think about the Amazon Echo, I don't wanna say the A word because everybody's echoes.

Leo Laporte (02:09:59):
Yeah. We know what you're talking about. I wouldn't say echo. There

Larry Magid (02:10:01):
Is AI in, there's AI in our cars. There's AI in some in, I literally, there's AI in my toothbrush. We're

Leo Laporte (02:10:07):
Like crazy people. We're talking to everything all the time.

Larry Magid (02:10:11):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:10:11):
It's kind of

Larry Magid (02:10:12):
Amazing. My toothbrush actually, we has some way it analyzes if I'm brushing my teeth correctly.

Leo Laporte (02:10:15):
Yeah, me too. You know what that's all about getting the app on your phone so they can spy on you. You know that, right?

Larry Magid (02:10:20):
Probably. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:10:20):
Because who needs an app to tell them <laugh> if they brushed long enough? Really?

Larry Magid (02:10:27):
It also tells if you brush hard enough.

Leo Laporte (02:10:29):
I know, I know. I have the same app and it shows you, if you've got the regions and I and it, it's still, it's not, that's, I don't know. I don't think so. It was only 20 bucks more than the other one. I what know, I know

Denise Howell (02:10:40):
One word mouthwash,

Leo Laporte (02:10:43):
<Laugh>. It works every time. <Laugh> every time. Hey everybody. Leo LaPorte here. I am the founder and one of the hosts at the TWIT Podcast Network. I wanna talk to you a little bit about what we do here at twit because I think it's unique and I think for anybody who is bringing a product or a service to a tech audience, you need to know about what we do Here at twit, we've built an amazing audience of engaged, intelligent, affluent listeners who listen to us and trust us when we recommend a product. Our mission statement is twit, is to build a highly engaged community of tech enthusiasts. Wait, already. You should be, your ears should be perking up at that because highly engaged is good for you. Tech enthusiasts, if that's who you're looking for, this is the place we do it by offering 'em the knowledge they need to understand and use technology in today's world.

(02:11:40):
And I hear from our audience all the time, part of that knowledge comes from our advertisers. We are very careful. We pick advertisers with great products, great services with integrity, and introduce them to our audience with authenticity and genuine enthusiasm. And that makes our host Red Ads different from anything else you can buy. We are literally bringing you to the attention of our audience and giving you a big fat endorsement. We like to create partnerships with trusted brands, brands who are in it for the long run, long-term partners that want to grow with us. And we have so many great success stories. Tim Broom, who founded it Pro TV in 2013, started advertising with us on day one, has been with us ever since. He said, quote, we would not be where we are today without the Twit network. I think the proof is in the pudding.

(02:12:37):
Advertisers like it Pro TV and Audible that have been with us for more than 10 years, they stick around because their ads work. And honestly, isn't that why you're buying advertising? You get a lot with Twit. We have a very full service attitude. We almost think of it as kind of artisanal advertising, boutique advertising. You'll get a full service continuity team, people who are on the phone with you, who are in touch with you, who support you from, with everything from copywriting to graphic design. So you are not alone in this. We embed our ads into the shows. They're not, they're not added later. They're part of the shows. In fact, often they're such a part of our shows that our other hosts will chime in on the ad saying, yeah, I love that. Or just the other day, <laugh>, one of our hosts said, man, I really gotta buy that <laugh>.

(02:13:29):
That's an additional benefit to you because you're hearing people, our audience trusts saying, yeah, that sounds great. We deliver always overdeliver on impressions. So you know, you're gonna get the impressions you expect. The ads are unique every time. We don't pre-record them and roll them in. We are genuinely doing those ads in the middle of the show. We'll give you great onboarding services, ad tech with pod sites that's free for direct clients. Gives you a lot of reporting, gives you a great idea of how well your ads are working. You'll get courtesy commercials. You actually can take our ads and share them across social media and landing pages. That really extends the reach. There are other free goodies too, including mentions in our weekly newsletter that sent to thousands of fans, engaged fans who really wanna see this stuff. We give you bonus ads and social media promotion too.

(02:14:21):
So if you want to be a long-term partner, introduce your product to a savvy engaged tech audience. Visit twit.tv/advertise. Check out those testimonials. Mark McCreary is the c e o of authentic. You probably know him one of the biggest original podcast advertising companies. We've been with him for 16 years. Mark said the feedback from many advertisers over 16 years across a range of product categories, everything from razors to computers, is that if ads and podcasts are gonna work for a brand, they're gonna work on Twitch shows. I'm very proud of what we do because it's honest. It's got integrity, it's authentic, and it really is a great introduction to our audience of your brand. Our listeners are smart, they're engaged, they're tech savvy. They're dedicated to our network. And that's one of the reasons we only work with high integrity partners that we've personally and thoroughly vetted.

(02:15:20):
I have absolute approval on everybody. If you've got a great product, I want to hear from you. Elevate your brand by reaching out today@advertisattwit.tv. Break outta the advertising norm. Grow your brand with host Red ads on twit.tv. Visit TWI tv slash advertise for more details. Or you can email us, advertise@twit.tv if you're ready to launch your campaign now. I can't wait to see your product, so give us a ring. Let's go back to the contributors. This is from Will Harris Hogwarts legacy. Are you excited about Hogwarts legacy because it's coming out February 10th, there is a movement afoot because of JK rolling not to buy this new Hogwarts game.

Wil Harris (02:16:09):
Well, it's kind of fascinating for, for multiple reasons. First of all it's a, it's a game that doesn't include the words Harry or Potter anywhere <laugh> despite that being the sort of multi gazillion dollar franchise. But the really fascinating thing about it is that I think it is the first time that a AAA game release in has come out on the new generation of consoles quite substantially ahead of the previous gen. So we've previously seen lots of games that are, if they're PS five, they come out on PS four and PS five on the same day. Or if they're Xbox, you know, call of Duty, it comes out on Xbox Series X and you know, series X on the same day and PC quite often the same thing. So it's, it's very, very odd to have what Hogwarts legacy is doing right now, which is, it's an early February release for PlayStation five and the latest Xbox. Yeah. But you don't get it until April 4th.

Leo Laporte (02:17:13):
What

Wil Harris (02:17:13):
Do you get the PlayStation four in the Xbox One. Oh. And you don't get it until the end of July for the Nintendo Switch, even though it's exactly the same game. They're all ostensibly finished. And it's, you know, there's a lots of, there's sort of people lost people talking about, you

Leo Laporte (02:17:31):
Think Sony or Microsoft might have paid them to say, make it exclusive for three months,

Wil Harris (02:17:37):
But, but that's just it. They're they're exclusive to their top end console. Not

Leo Laporte (02:17:41):
Even the the Yeah, but keep it off the switch. Keep it off the switch for three months.

Wil Harris (02:17:47):
<Laugh>, screw the switch people. Yeah. Like it would be one thing if it was, you know, February the 10th for the PlayStation five and four and April the fourth for the Xbox series in PC and Xbox One. But it's the fact that it's all the latest gen stuff is coming out first and then the lower gen stuff is coming out later. And then the sort of hardcover, like the switch is Yeah. Yeah. It's, and it's, and yeah, the

Leo Laporte (02:18:09):
Paperback comes out the year after. Right. You don't put other

Wil Harris (02:18:12):
Paperback. Yeah. I don't think it's been done for a AAA title in this generation. And I wonder if it would be, now I, if this is the breaking point,

Leo Laporte (02:18:20):
I wonder if there's some concern about the re the response to it. I, that's what I wonder about. I've already heard people saying I'm not buying another JK rolling. She didn't have anything to do with it, as the companies are quick to point out. But of course this is her intellectual property. A lot of this is based on the books. 

Wil Harris (02:18:42):
Oh, and of course, oh, then just to make it just a little bit more complicated, if you buy the deluxe edition for an extra 10 pounds on PS five or Xbox X you also get it three days earlier than the people that already get it early. Hey,

Leo Laporte (02:18:58):
<Laugh>, it's expensive to make these games, will, you don't want us to make our money back.

Wil Harris (02:19:02):
So it's got four different release dates for the exact same game in the space of four months.

Leo Laporte (02:19:07):
Here's my question. Come mad. When's the TV series based on the game coming out?

Wil Harris (02:19:13):
Yeah,

Leo Laporte (02:19:13):
That's the hot thing right now. Have you watched The Last of Us? Are you getting that yet on your American Hulu

Wil Harris (02:19:20):
<Laugh>? Well, that's, no, we get it on. We get it on, we get it on Sky over here. Yeah. It's quite amazing. I mean that's, but I loved, I dunno if you guys saw Pedro Pascal on SNL last night.

Leo Laporte (02:19:33):
I heard he was wonderful. Yes.

Denise Howell (02:19:35):
He was wonderful.

Wil Harris (02:19:36):
I mean, you did the most amazing skit about an adaptation of Mario Cart, the video game <laugh>. And if you haven't watched it, it's on Twitter. It's on the official snl Twitter feed. It, it is just brilliant. Yeah.

Denise Howell (02:19:50):
No butts. Sadly

Leo Laporte (02:19:52):
No butts.

Wil Harris (02:19:53):
<Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (02:19:53):
No. I

Wil Harris (02:19:54):
Got a book Fun of Mario's

Leo Laporte (02:19:55):
Butts. I got a book for you. I'll tell you, this book is a fantastic look at the, an inside look at Mario's butt. It's all in here. Look at that butt Phoebe Waller Bridge who was a discovery at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and then created Fleabag, which is an amazing series. Later Killing Eve. She's working on a Tomb Raider TV series. She's a great writer. She won't star in it, obviously, nor Will Angelina Jolie. I don't know who's gonna, who's gonna star in it. But I think the success of the last of us, and I think this is people are gonna look back at this and say, this is when TV series based on video games finally lived up to their promise might open up the, the slew skates, as they say, for a whole bunch more like this. And to get Phoebe Waller bridges a pretty much of a coup, especially,

Wil Harris (02:20:49):
Of course, feminist is gonna be coming up. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:20:51):
And to reading.

Wil Harris (02:20:52):
She's gonna be coming off a hot streak this year with having co-written the new Indiana Jones movie. Oh. So you'd have to think nice that having co-written the new Indiana Jones, she'd know a little bit, a bit, a little bit about tomb reading.

Leo Laporte (02:21:04):
Nice. Yeah. But she, I think she's gonna be feminist. So this is not gonna be Tome Raider not known for its feminist quality Subtleties, subtleties, <laugh>.

Denise Howell (02:21:16):
I don't know. Laura's kind of a badass. She's

Leo Laporte (02:21:18):
A badass. True <laugh>. But she's a hot badass.

Denise Howell (02:21:21):
That's true. Yeah.

Wil Harris (02:21:24):
In impractical shorts for adventuring. Yes. You need some le you need some longs for those weeds, man. Honestly,

Denise Howell (02:21:32):
Can we just agree that that's the show title <laugh> in

Leo Laporte (02:21:34):
Practical Shorts, I think is now a front runner. Anyway,

Denise Howell (02:21:40):
<Laugh>

Leo Laporte (02:21:42):
For yeah. For tomb rating. Yeah. okay. All right kids, I think we've had enough. Our fun here is done. Ladies and gentlemen, it is it is a pleasure to see all three of you. Before we go, I do wanna remind everybody that we are gonna have some fun this week in Club Twit, we are gonna do an interview with Daniel Suarez, the author of Demonn and Freedom tm. His newest book just come out couple of days ago, critical Mass. He will join me on Friday at 11:00 AM Pacific, 2:00 PM Eastern for a special interview. And if you're in the club, you'll have an opportunity to ask questions directly of Daniel Suarez the day before. Wintu Dao host of all about Android is a fireside chat, Samal Salmon coming up next month. Stacey's Book Club. And Victor Bona, one of our great editors gonna do his inside twit in April.

(02:22:38):
There's a lot coming up in Club Twit. You get ad free versions of all the shows. You get access to the Fabulous Club Twit Discord. Can I invite you to join Club Twit? We'd love to have you in the club. Seven bucks a month, you get all that. Plus a lot more shows we don't put out in public. Like hands on Windows, hands on Macintosh, on Title Lennox Show. You get I think a full blown experience for very little less, a buck, less than a blue check on Twitter. And you get so much more. Go to twi.tv/club twit and thank you in advance. Cause it's makes a big difference supporting this show in all the shows we do. Twit.Tv/Club twi. Denise has a new show coming soon. I look forward to seeing this. Can't wait here. Thank you so much. Culture.Net, is that right? No. Dot com. Net.Com. Okay. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> dot com. And Denise is gonna be doing a new show, actually two new shows,

Denise Howell (02:23:40):
Including, I'm doing two new shows. There are two shows on the network I haven't mentioned yet. John is gonna do a show called The Artist, which is gonna going to look at concerns for creatives, both in Hollywood and beyond. Nice. and we have a, a well-known, and his name is escaping me musician. And I'm probably not allowed to say who it is. Oh, anyway, but, but, but he's going to do a music and culture show. That sounds like it's going to be very fun. Wow. So, so stay tuned for those. And also speaking of Club Twit, does, does some of that fund the Mastodon instance? It does, because I've gotta say, oh, speaking of also safer Internet Day, my my three months on Twit social has been life changing. Thank you so much. Thank you for the, for Oh my gosh, it's so good. We

Leo Laporte (02:24:34):
Welcome any Twitter refugees that would like to join us. There're about 7,000 members now in the twit social Masin nine instance. As many of you know, mastodons distributed. So there are many instances, more than 5,000 you can join. We restrict this to people listening to the show. So you qualify. If you hear, if you're hearing my voice, you qualify we'd love to have you there with that social Denise, you're more than welcome participant. There, we have some great people in there. And because it's a community

Denise Howell (02:25:02):
And can I just thank you. It totally made my day when I discovered that not only do I, I'm enjoying my account immensely for the last three months, but just the other day I discovered I have an emoji that was just off. Oh,

Leo Laporte (02:25:15):
Yeah. <Laugh>. That's true. I forgot about that.

Denise Howell (02:25:18):
I have an emoji. Yeah. Never in my life did I ever think I would have an

Leo Laporte (02:25:22):
Emoji. One of the cool things about having your own ma on server is you can have custom emojis and there's Denise Howell. You can add her as often as you want. <Laugh> just, just colon. Denise Cole. And she'll be part of your of your toots as they call them. Forevermore. I just tweeted you by itself. People are wondering why did Leo, what is Leo? What's going on there? Twit, that social, that's free. There's no charge. You don't have to be a club member to join, but that it's absolutely supported by the club, as is our forum. Slide a little to the right there, other way. Other way. There you go. Zoom in <laugh> Center, enhance Zoom Center. Enhance. Good. That's close enough. You're the

Wil Harris (02:26:04):
Real chief twit. <Laugh> not the fake chief. Yeah. You're another guy who calls

Leo Laporte (02:26:06):
Himself that. Yeah.

Denise Howell (02:26:07):
The once in future.

Leo Laporte (02:26:08):
Yeah. That was that was pretty much the last straw. That's when I left. You threw

Wil Harris (02:26:12):
Him

Leo Laporte (02:26:13):
<Laugh>. No that's a, I'll tell you that one off the air. We'll tell you that story off the air, but yeah, I'm, I think Mastodon is a kind of more civilized and can never be purchased by anybody no matter how many billions of dollars they have. So I like that. And because it's just twit listeners in, in our local timeline, it's really a great, I think it's a wonderful conversation. Very smart, interesting. People

Denise Howell (02:26:37):
Completely add free, no need for walls of any kind.

Leo Laporte (02:26:40):
Yeah. Yeah. Fantastic. And a lot of people who, including, I think I suspect a lot of those bots that we're gonna get, that are gonna get booted from Twitter will end up here. So this may even be you know, more fun in time. We also have a discourse forums@twi.community, also free and open to all TWI listeners. So, yeah. And, and that, you know, those aren't hugely expensive, but it costs money. It's I don't have advertising in there, so anything you can do to help is great. TWIT TV slash club twit. Denise Howell, always a pleasure. Thank you so much for being here. I appreciate it. So

Denise Howell (02:27:17):
Great to be here. Thank

Leo Laporte (02:27:18):
You. Thank you, Mr. Will Harris. I'm excited about Unbound. It's going well.

Wil Harris (02:27:23):
It's going super well. Really enjoying it. We've got a good good slate of books coming in through this year. Some good backless stuff. The, the Kane's Jawbones still going gangbusters for us all over the world. And yes. An exciting time. You know, sounds, sounds a strange thing to say to me, and it's exciting time to be in book publishing, but it's it's a very, it's a very cool world at the moment. Well,

Leo Laporte (02:27:48):
You're in the kind of book publishing that I think is, is modern, which is you're talking about, you know, like Kane's job on, I mean, this is stuff that was on TikTok, right? You this is 21st Century Yeah. Stuff. And I'm really excited about, you know, what do I mean? I cannot wait. And

Wil Harris (02:28:05):
What we try and publish really is, is, is things that have a, a maybe a niche appeal, but a niche appeal to people who really care Yeah. About that kind of thing. And it's like, you know, book publishing is tough when you're just trying to flog sort of $5 holiday paperbacks. And you've gotta sell, you know, hundreds of them in Barnes and Noble at the airport. But when you can, when you can ha get a book published with, with, you know, just a couple of hundred people who really care about it. That's, that's a really exciting thing. So do you

Leo Laporte (02:28:35):
Think 42 is gonna end up being like a breakthrough? I am. I bet it is. To be honest with you, this is gonna get a lot of attention. There are a lot of Douglas Adam fans out there. Yeah. I, I have a feeling exactly, just a breakthrough. Not that things I learned from Mario's, but is not important.

Wil Harris (02:28:53):
<Laugh>.

Denise Howell (02:28:54):
And, and I have a copy of Taming gaming on its way to me, not Oh, good. My personal use. Yeah. But for, to, to give to someone who keeps hand ringing about what they believe is a, a video game problem. <Laugh>, I

Leo Laporte (02:29:07):
Don't think it's a problem. This is modern. This is, this is kids. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. This is their social life.

Larry Magid (02:29:11):
Now you gotta read that. I agree.

Denise Howell (02:29:12):
That's what I keep telling them. And now I can hand them the book. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:29:16):
And, and again, production. I don't, these must cost so much to make. These are, this is four color reproductions. They're gorgeous. You really do a nice job on these beautifully bound. Well, we

Wil Harris (02:29:26):
Try. Yeah, we try. Thanks for having me Only it's always a pleasure to be up with you guys.

Leo Laporte (02:29:30):
The wonderful Will Harris still on Twitter. He's never given up. W i l h a r r I s. We try and we try Larry <laugh>, Larry Megan, he is@connectsafely.org. He's the president and c e o of that great organization helping parents and kids navigate the modern world. Don't forget, Tuesday is internet. What is it? Internet. Safe. Safer Internet day.

Larry Magid (02:29:57):
Safer internet day. Absolutely. Yeah. And, and you go to Safer Internet Day us and you'll find out everything you need to know. And look at our video if we, I just added video to the nav bar. We've got a lot of really good interviews that we've done with a lot of experts. That looks like you got a l I got a takes a long time to,

Leo Laporte (02:30:16):
You know, I have a 10 gigabit connection. Larry. It's I

Larry Magid (02:30:19):
Phone. Yeah, there you go.

Leo Laporte (02:30:20):
I am on Linux. I'm Firefox and Lennox. So anyway, here

Larry Magid (02:30:24):
They are. So, you know,

Leo Laporte (02:30:25):
Oh, this is an important one. In fact, I'm sending this to a friend whose teenager just got sex extorted. Yes.

Larry Magid (02:30:31):
Oh, this sextortion thing. We should huge. We could, we could do a partnership. We could, we should talk about that in the future show. But yeah. Yeah, just a lot of good advice for parents. We, we've got things going on in schools and here's the thing, Tuesday night you're sitting at dinner, talk to your kids, talk to your, your partner, talk to your colleagues at work. I mean, just don't make a big deal about it. And just talk about things like misinformation, civility I can't even remember other buckets, but just all the things that we talk about on, on Safer Internet day.us or connect safely.org. Again, this is an international event. It's gonna be over a hundred country. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:31:08):
Or doing it. It's not about shutting down the internet. It's about communication and and, and, and being in touch with your kids about what's out there. This is the real world, you know? Yeah, yeah. In, in our day, Larry, you'd tell kids, be careful when you go down to the soda shop, there's that guy Joey <laugh>. He's always bumming bubble gum. Don't give him any bubble gum. Okay.

Larry Magid (02:31:30):
And in my day, I would go out on my bicycle without a helmet. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:31:34):
I'd leave him. What

Larry Magid (02:31:34):
Do we know to come back after dark? And my parents wouldn't have any idea where it was. No

Leo Laporte (02:31:38):
Idea. Phone. What's that? So we

Larry Magid (02:31:39):
Think our kids are, are in trouble. Eh,

Leo Laporte (02:31:42):
In my day, we didn't have seat belts. Dad would just reach out to keep me in my seat if he had to stop.

Larry Magid (02:31:48):
I was a boy scout the boy. We would go on Boy Scout trips and we'd get in the back of a truck. Yeah. And we'd all stand in the back of this truck and we'd drive up to the mountains. <Laugh> bouncing around.

Leo Laporte (02:31:58):
You, I'm sorry. You have to hear this. The old men talking. Thank you, Larry. I am <laugh>. Thank you. Will. Thank you Denise. Thanks to all of you who join us. We do Twitter every Sunday afternoon, Saturday next week. Just, you know, word of warning from two to five in the afternoon Pacific time. That's let's see, that would be 5:00 PM to 8:00 PM Eastern time. 2200 U t c, the middle of the night for Will Harris. You can always <laugh>. He's, he's flagging noticeably. What time is it? Is it like one in the morning there?

Larry Magid (02:32:32):
End to one? Yeah, it's like one, it's one here. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:32:35):
It's not seven. That's a normal time to go to bed. I need more than a

Larry Magid (02:32:38):
Ring light to look good in this this time of day. <Laugh>,

Leo Laporte (02:32:42):
You look fabulous. Will

Larry Magid (02:32:44):
Fabulous. Like your green curtains in the background.

Leo Laporte (02:32:46):
Yeah, that's good. Watch Live. If you want live dot twi tv. If you're watching live chat with us. Live in the club Twit Discord or are open to all irc@irc.twi.tv. You can always download the show after the fact. If you forget that it's Saturday next week, you could still download it Sunday from twit.tv, our website, or go to the YouTube channel. Twit has its own at youtube.com/twit with links to all the shows there. Every show has its dedicated YouTube channel. You can also subscribe and your favorite podcast client. And that way you'll get the show the minute it's available, usually late Sunday in time for your Monday morning commute. Thanks for being here, everybody. Now 18 years I've been saying another twit is in the can. See you next time