This Week in Tech Episode 934 Transcript

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

Leo Laporte (00:00:00):
It's time for Twitter this week at Tech, and we have an all-in studio panel with some of my favorite panelists. Ian Thompson from the register is here. Brianna Woo is here from Rebellion Pack and from the Vatican Father Robert Baer. There's lots of news to talk about and we're gonna get right to it. Next on Twit podcasts you love

TWIT INTRO (00:00:26):
From people you trust.

Leo Laporte (00:00:28):
This is T is Twit.

(00:00:36):
This is twit this week in Tech, episode 934 recorded Sunday, July 2nd, 2023. The scroll bar is jiggling. This episode of this Week in Tech is brought to you by ZipRecruiter. If you're hiring, you're currently dealing with a slowing economy, which adds to your challenges. Thankfully, there's a hiring partner who's focused on you and your needs. Ziprecruiter, four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter, get a quality candidate within the first day. Try ZipRecruiter free at ziprecruiter.com/twit and buy decisions. Don't let complexity block your company's growth decisions. Rules driven process automation software allows you to manage a complex digital landscape, build custom workflows, business rules, software, modernize legacy systems, and improve customer experiences in decisions. Unified no code platform. Visit decisions.com/twit to learn how automating anything can change everything. And by express VPN when your phone carrier tracks you, that's a gross invasion of privacy. You can keep letting them cash in on you. Or visit express vpn.com/twit and get the same VPN I use. Take back your online privacy today. Use my link to get three extra months free and buy Collide. Collide is a device trust solution for companies with Okta. They ensure that if a device isn't trusted and secure, it can't log into your cloud apps. Visit coli.com/twit to book an on-demand demo today.

(00:02:26):
It's time for twit this week at Tech, the show where we cover the weeks tech news This week, all in studio. I am so thrilled to get this panel assembled and I don't know how long this show's gonna go, but if I were you, I'd grab lunch and and a couple of stiff drinks before you start. Ian Thomas sent Ian Thomas. Ian Thompson is here. No mustache. I always think of you as the, you know, the, yeah, no, I shaved off the Covid porn St It was just, it made me took look too much like rock Now from the register. Yeah. Yeah. Good to see you. Was a pleasure. Welcome. Thanks for coming up. Also with us, ladies and gentlemen, all the way from Massachusetts. Brianna. Woo. Hello Brianna. Good

Brianna Wu (00:03:10):
To see you in

Leo Laporte (00:03:10):
Studio.

Brianna Wu (00:03:11):
In studio. I just wanna say, abolish the monarchy in America's the best country on earth.

Padre (00:03:16):
She's Santa, I'm red for a reason.

Leo Laporte (00:03:19):
You'll be back. Just wanna celebrate. See our

Brianna Wu (00:03:22):
Country, our,

Leo Laporte (00:03:22):
Just remember you belong to me, Brandon's executive director of the Rebellion Pack. Yeah. At 4th of July is two days from now. That's right. And we've got a Brit in here. You could be our whipping boy.

Padre (00:03:34):
Well, okay. That costs extra, but <laugh>, you know,

Leo Laporte (00:03:38):
And here to do the whipping, ladies and gentlemen. He's all the way from the Vatican in Rome. Father Robert Baller is trying to scroll through all his Twitter.

Padre (00:03:47):
I'm trying to hit the limit to get to the end. Wanna see the limit here? Right.

Leo Laporte (00:03:50):
There used to be a joke. You'd get to a webpage and say, you've reached the end of the internet. Go back. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, you can actually reach the end of Twitter. Now you

Padre (00:03:57):
Abso you know, but again, no one has told me if it counts just the scrolling or do I have to, I have to click 600 posts.

Leo Laporte (00:04:04):
So Elon on Saturday said to address extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation. He, he apparently was worried as, as, as is Reddit and many others that AI was scraping Twitter data and using it for their large language models. We've applied the following temporary limits, verified accounts. He shouldn't call 'em verified accounts. People who pay me $8 are limited to reading 6,000 posts a day, unverified accounts, everybody else 600 posts a day, new unverified accounts, 300 posts a day. And if you're not logged in zero <laugh>. Wow. Wow. Wow, wow. Almost as soon as he posted this, and this is 10:00 AM on Saturday, Twitter went down

Padre (00:04:54):
<Laugh> pretty much. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:04:55):
Yeah. Users started seeing Rate limited exceeded messages. Every topic was about the topic was about the collapse of Twitter and that Twitter hashtag Twitter down. Thanks Elon. Here's the trending topics. Thanks, Elon. Wtf, Twitter, <laugh> blue sky. Yeah. Damn. Twitter and bankruptcy. Those are the top six trending in the United States at that time. But what's wild, and this came on Mastodon of course cuz you couldn't post on Twitter, but a web developer named Sheldon Chang noticed that as he was trying to load Twitter, the scroll bar was jiggling Uhhuh <affirmative>. What does that mean, father Robert, when the scroll bar jiggling last night, oh, it basically means that your

Padre (00:05:43):
Your browser is trying to refresh over and over again to load the content. Okay?

Leo Laporte (00:05:47):
Yeah. He wrote on Mastodon, this is hilarious. It appears that Twitter is d dossing itself,

Padre (00:05:54):
Best kind of DDoS,

Leo Laporte (00:05:56):
Best kind Twitter home feed's been down for most this morning, even though nothing loads, the Twitter website never stops trying and trying. The reason is Twitter's firing off. He says, and I think he's accurate, I don't think anybody's said that's not true. 10 requests to second two, it itself <laugh> to try and fetch content that never arrives because they've blocked people from Twitter without logging in. So I guess this was only if you hadn't logged into Twitter, this likely created, he continues on some hellish conditions the engineers never envisioned. And so we get this comedy bears resulting in the most epic of self, owns the self DDoS. And then he posts the developer page from his browser. And you can see these are requests, each of these 20 byte requests saying, gimme the data, gimme the data. Can you gimme the data? Please gimme the data. Please gimme. Now, if you have a lot of people doing this, Sheldon said, of course I'm a nice person. So I logged out except wait a minute, Saturday and Evil Sheldon's in charge. So I just stayed there for all while just watching it

Iain Thomson (00:06:59):
Happen. Why don't they'd also have some problems playing their, paying their cloud bills. Right?

Leo Laporte (00:07:04):
Well, there was a lot of speculation, right? Yeah.

Iain Thomson (00:07:06):
I mean, obviously there's, I

Padre (00:07:07):
I thought that was a genius binding that was like the 200 IQ move to not pay your bills because then you get it for free. Right.

Leo Laporte (00:07:12):
Somebody pointed

Iain Thomson (00:07:13):
Out works for their, their office in seven Market Street. But

Leo Laporte (00:07:17):
Yeah. Somebody pointed out that the contract with Google Cloud expired June 30th. Yeah. Tried Elon had famously stopped paying Google Cloud, except that I saw a story this week that said they made some sort of deal. Google's gonna buy some, get some I think free ads and mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. So that's, and then they had moved off of aws. Right. And so, I don't know, I don't

Padre (00:07:40):
Know. Part of this was made worse by the fact that they made some changes since Elon took over to move more of the services onto Twitter servers because, because Elon didn't wanna pay any third parties for services that would normally be provided by third parties. Yeah. Right. The issue with that is that when you have an integrated page, like the Twitter page, which is calling for 40 different elements at the same time, if you now serve out all 40 of those elements, every time a page loads, you are DDoSing yourself, right? Yeah. Right, right. And I mean, there's unfortunately you could fix that, but there's only two coders left at Twitter, so it's gonna take some time.

Iain Thomson (00:08:14):
Well, this is it. You knows everywhere. Oh, everyone. We've had this rash of, of tech layoffs in Silicon Valley of late Yeah. Because it's like enabled by Elon Musk. Well, no, exactly. I mean this well,

Leo Laporte (00:08:24):
Facebook as you Google.

Iain Thomson (00:08:25):
Yeah. But they're just kinda like, well, Elon's almost,

Leo Laporte (00:08:26):
Almost a quarter of a million laid off

Iain Thomson (00:08:28):
For the moment. But you know, it's No, exactly. Yeah. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:08:32):
I just, although Silicon Valley, I don't know if this is has anything to do with layoffs, but the stock market's been loving Silicon Valley this week, so Yeah. Yeah. Maybe they said, oh, it's good. You're cut your costs and now we wanna invest in

Padre (00:08:44):
It. And that's part of the problem because we bow to the, the stock price, because that's what props up the value of the company. Exactly. Even though stock price is not indicative of a company doing something responsible.

Leo Laporte (00:08:54):
Can I point out one company that didn't lay anybody off? Apple is now a $3 trillion there. It's company. It stock jumped as well. Yeah.

Brianna Wu (00:09:05):
Before, before we move on, I wanted just wanted to say a thing about the the Twitter I outage, you know, I was so frustrated with so much of the news coverage about this. I don't know if we have the New York Times article on this on hand. This is like, I know Ryan Mack is an excellent reporter. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, he does really good work. But if you read, it's not this one. Okay. It's the other one. It's announcing

Leo Laporte (00:09:30):
Twitter is down a worldwide outage. No, it's,

Brianna Wu (00:09:32):
It's if you go to my Twitter, you can find it. Anyway, there's,

Leo Laporte (00:09:37):
There's quite a few stories from the New York Times about Twitter falling apart. Sure. This is the one, it's starting to find the one you're talking

Brianna Wu (00:09:43):
About. This is the one from yesterday. Okay. on the

Leo Laporte (00:09:45):
First. If I can get on Twitter, I'll get it. And

Brianna Wu (00:09:47):
The problem with this is they're talking about it, and if you look at the first, I think it's the first five paragraphs, they repeatedly go and only cite Elon Musk giving his pretext for why this is bot scraping. Right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That is not a credible thing. I'm sorry if like, at this point, anyone that works in the tech industry and reports in the tech industry mm-hmm. <Affirmative> can see a pattern with Elon Musk going back to x.com, where he will talk about a problem that the company is having. He will kind of mislead the public about what the actual problem is and a kind of like obfuscate what is going on here. So this piece, like go through and look at it must as the main source.

Leo Laporte (00:10:30):
But this has been a problem with the New York Times in every area. A hundred percent for the last Yeah. Few years. But

Brianna Wu (00:10:36):
This is so like,

Leo Laporte (00:10:37):
And the Wall Street Journal and mainstream media, let's,

Brianna Wu (00:10:40):
Wall Street Journal does better than this, do they? But you know, in my estimation, you read this piece, you've got your Roth, who is a very credible insider,

Leo Laporte (00:10:48):
Former, former Twitter, trust, safety, and safety,

Brianna Wu (00:10:51):
Who gave a very credible statement about why this was on Blue Sky. These reporters could have gone over there Yeah. And looked at this. But they're using Musk and just presenting his face of this whole thing to the public, unchallenged.

Leo Laporte (00:11:04):
Well, that's why people listen to twi. Let's go, let's hear this story. Right. You know because

Padre (00:11:10):
It's because they don't, their purpose is not to write the article. Their purpose is to gain access to Elon. And they know that whoever, whoever blows the most smoke up his back size gets access.

Iain Thomson (00:11:20):
Right. But this is the problem with access journalism. This is why we don't do it, is because you will only get the story that Exactly they want to feed you. Right. And it's like, yeah, it looks great. Yeah. I got an interview with so-and-so and it's like, yeah, but what did he give up for that? Right. You know, I mean

Leo Laporte (00:11:33):
It Well, and I'm proud to say everybody in the tech industry hates me. Apple won't ask me their events. Oh no. I'm pretty

Iain Thomson (00:11:39):
Much to my Apple for 12 years.

Leo Laporte (00:11:41):
Yeah. Took them up on it. I'm pretty much taking your, your, your attack. Is it the register.com?

Iain Thomson (00:11:47):
Yes, yes,

Leo Laporte (00:11:48):
Yes. No, I just wanna see what your coverage is of

Iain Thomson (00:11:52):
This. Oh, of the Twitter one? Yeah. it broke fairly late and half our staff were off for rebellious colonial Rebell Colonial

Leo Laporte (00:11:58):
Weekend. So let's just <laugh> let

Iain Thomson (00:12:00):
Out. Let's

Leo Laporte (00:12:00):
With that for a second. <Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:12:03):
There are, anyway <laugh>

Iain Thomson (00:12:06):
We have this thing called work life balance. It's really

Leo Laporte (00:12:09):
Hard. Yeah. I don't, I don't know how you do that. That's weird. So you look, I also get a lot of heat from people who say, you don't give Elon abr. You know, we personally don't give Elon Sure. Any credit or a break. I was in, I was a big Elon fan until Yeah, sure. Fairly

Padre (00:12:25):
Recently. That is not true. Because I remember when he did the first landing of two rockets

Leo Laporte (00:12:30):
At, at the same time. Awesome. We what we, we

Padre (00:12:32):
Broadcast You covered the tech. Yeah. You, you gave him kudos. You gave him. Alas. So it's, it's all about, look, I think just because you did something nice in the past Sure. Doesn't mean that I'm gonna gloss over the horrible thing that you're doing now. Right. Right. That's what journalists is supposed to do. Sure.

Leo Laporte (00:12:45):
But I do have to point out all four of you, all three of you, you still use Twitter

Brianna Wu (00:12:50):
To an extent. I use

Leo Laporte (00:12:51):
It. You guys haven't

Padre (00:12:52):
Left Twitter. I told

Brianna Wu (00:12:53):
You, hand to God

Padre (00:12:55):
Like Slim Pickens in the Ground

Brianna Wu (00:12:56):
Master on Blue Sky. But my,

Leo Laporte (00:12:58):
You can ride it to the ground. I'm right into

Brianna Wu (00:13:00):
The ground. My problem with this is, I think a decade ago you could defend a newsroom like the New York Times having a not a deep amount of tech reporting. Right. Not really knowing this in an era where this stuff is shaping elections. Right. Yeah. I know Ryan Mack is a good reporter. I know he knows the context around Elon. So I think they owe it to their readers. Look, I'm an Elon Musk critic. I will completely own that. Don't just put me in there. But give your readers that alternate point of

Leo Laporte (00:13:31):
View. I'm gonna guess that the Times got that article out really, really fast within minutes of the event. And all they could get was Elon, I'm gonna hope, let's look that they found other sides to that story. It

Brianna Wu (00:13:45):
Was an normal warning when I looked. There was nothing Huh. This morning. But that was like 10 o'clock.

Leo Laporte (00:13:51):
So all we heard from the New York Times was Musk's

Brianna Wu (00:13:54):
Response. That's

Leo Laporte (00:13:54):
Correct. Yeah. Well that is disappointing. And obviously there was more, I to say,

Iain Thomson (00:14:01):
The fact the matter is you can't speculate into definite proof of what's going on. Sure.

Leo Laporte (00:14:05):
Right. So, and that's true that Sheldon's posts notwithstanding, you know, we don't know. Is that accurate? We

Iain Thomson (00:14:10):
Don't know. We don't know whether it's failure to pay contracts. We dunno if they're trying any things. We dunno if the software's fallen over and he's a very litigious bloke and we have a duty to actually make sure we get it right as well.

Leo Laporte (00:14:21):
And can I say one more thing? I don't think anybody cares about Twitter in the real world.

Iain Thomson (00:14:24):
Mm-Hmm. There is that. It's

Leo Laporte (00:14:26):
Us.

Iain Thomson (00:14:27):
Yeah.

Brianna Wu (00:14:28):
I don't know. I think,

Leo Laporte (00:14:28):
I bet you half our audience says, get on. We don't care. It used

Padre (00:14:31):
To be like that. It tech used to be a safe sector in that you could talk about tech any way you wanted to and it didn't intersect with the normals. Now it does. Tech is now a political issue. Tech is now an overarch.

Leo Laporte (00:14:44):
Absolutely. That's really changed quite

Iain Thomson (00:14:46):
A bit. Yes. Although, whether Twitter or not will remain that way is absolute very much open for

Padre (00:14:50):
Debate. Twitter. Totally. Go the spa, the the way of MySpace and GCDs. 100%. Oh yeah. But this conversation is going to remain, there's still gonna be access journalism. The, the instant take, the hot take, which is the one that everyone wants because that's, that starts, the water cooler conversation is still gonna be there. And big journalists still shouldn't do it, but they're gonna be tempted to. Sure.

Brianna Wu (00:15:09):
I just think it's a problem for the industry when you have Casey Newton and the Platformer is consistently going and getting these inside stories of what's going on in Silicon Valley. And you have our big news fa like, I pay for the Times, I pay for Washington Post and I pay for Wall Street Journal, cuz I want to fund newsrooms with the resources to go get the story. Yeah. And to report it out. It's consistently these smaller blogs that are going and doing the research. And I think that's a real indictment of the big news.

Leo Laporte (00:15:37):
Interestingly though, platformer doesn't have the story either. They don't have any story because they're probably doing what you said suggested. You just find out what happened right

Brianna Wu (00:15:46):
Now. There something I saw. I

Iain Thomson (00:15:48):
Thought I saw it.

Leo Laporte (00:15:49):
Yes. Elon Musk create a spec. No, no, no, no.

Iain Thomson (00:15:52):
I mean, it's, it's interesting in terms of how this develops, but with certain publications, wall Street Journal Springs to mind, there's a very big access journalism element to that

Leo Laporte (00:16:05):
Always been a problem. And so it's always been a problem in the tech sector. Remember the, in the, in the car, in the car automotive mm-hmm. <Affirmative> journalists. It was always hard to trust the big car magazines cuz you knew that in order to do their job, they had to be friends with Ford and a hundred percent GM and Toyota and everybody. And, and it was always an issue with tech. And one of the reasons I started twit twit, and one of the reasons I worked at Tech TV is cuz we, I wanted to do something different. Right. I wanted to really kind of, I thought people deserved honest coverage. It's one of the reasons I don't meet with PR people. I don't sign NDAs. It's hurt us in some ways. We don't get access. But it's in the long run, I think it's more important that we speak as honestly as we can about this

Iain Thomson (00:16:45):
Conversation. No, I agree totally. Which is why where I'm, I am where I am as well. But I mean, talking about the gaming press, for example. Sure. Everyone's really good

Leo Laporte (00:16:53):
Example.

Iain Thomson (00:16:54):
Let's really put, you know, integrity back into the gaming press. It's like you're assuming it was there in the first

Leo Laporte (00:16:59):
Place. No, but to their credit, some of the big gaming sites like COTA and Polygon are really, I think trying They

Iain Thomson (00:17:05):
Did agree. Far too many are willing to accept giving a good review

Leo Laporte (00:17:09):
Or taking a press release, rewriting it.

Iain Thomson (00:17:11):
This is not just the gaming thing. I mean, remember when Apple Maps came out and all the people that got advanced Apples to Apple when Apple, you know, and Apple

Leo Laporte (00:17:20):
Plays that

Iain Thomson (00:17:21):
Game. Nobody actually mentioned that Apple Bounce was criminally bounce

Leo Laporte (00:17:25):
Software. We did Nobody but that. That's one of

Iain Thomson (00:17:29):
Okay. No one. Yes. Who was on

Leo Laporte (00:17:30):
The, it's really, apple knows this. Who gets invited? Who gets to see the Vision Pro? Who gets to try it on mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. Yeah. It's very much, they're very aware of who's PO gonna give them positive coverage. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> and who's not, it's not, if you don't

Iain Thomson (00:17:41):
Necessarily use, you don't get coverage anymore.

Leo Laporte (00:17:42):
Yeah. We just, we just don't get access. I

Brianna Wu (00:17:44):
Do feel like, I just wanna defend my friends very briefly. Jason Schreyer has done amazing labor work in the video game industry, worked at Kotaku, has talked about the labor abuses and no, I agree. Rebecca Valentine. No. I mean I, polygon Yeah. Has done amazing work on some of the sexual scandals in our industry. But I agree overall these have served as entertainment magazines that hype up the next big thing. And we have a

Leo Laporte (00:18:09):
And there's an audience for that, to be honest. It's not just the industry. I get email all the time from people said, you used to have fun in technology. You used to cover the fun stuff and talk about the new things and the fun things. You don't do that anymore. And I think that perhaps we've changed, but I think even the industry has changed. And, and, and so there it is. There isn't like the newest phones are are No. Are just incremental. Yeah. Yeah. There's nothing to get really excited about. Well,

Iain Thomson (00:18:37):
No one's creating anything anymore. I mean, really when you think about Apple, Google, Google, a bunch of other tech firms, they've just either bought in technology from other people or they're the rent seeking point of the technology cycle for stuff that they've

Leo Laporte (00:18:52):
Actually seen. Well, it, it's also hard to innovate now because Yeah. These are mature phones, as an example, are very mature. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. I mean, if, if it, if that's how you feel, then people should celebrate the Vision Pro because that is at least an attempt from Apple to do something new and different. Well, not that new. I spent 13.3 billion

Padre (00:19:09):
Trying to give us something new. Sure. And we Resoundly said <laugh>,

Leo Laporte (00:19:12):
No. Yeah.

Brianna Wu (00:19:13):
There, there are exam like the M one Mac. I think all of us would agree. Huge

Leo Laporte (00:19:17):
Technology is

Brianna Wu (00:19:18):
A huge step forward. This made everyone happy. I didn't see any criticism of that across the industry. Generally. We celebrated that. I do think that this is a tech industry that when Praise is called for, we will certainly give it. Yeah. I just think overall I think Aztech has moved from this kind of niche thing to something that's so central in our life and politics. I think it's appropriate for journalists to be more skeptical of these things. Cuz it's not toys. This is the fabric of our social contract

Leo Laporte (00:19:49):
Today. That's, that is the difference, right? Yeah. It's not, it's not the toy store anymore. Yeah. Yeah. It's life.

Iain Thomson (00:19:53):
Yeah. But I mean, also we're reaching a point where user growth is slowing down in the people who would be on online in the first place are now already online. So you can't rely on that growing user growth to keep Wall Street happy. So what do you do? You start jacking around putting prices and firing people. Story goes off fucking

Leo Laporte (00:20:14):
Some places you go. No. You

Padre (00:20:15):
Go to the subscription model for everything.

Iain Thomson (00:20:17):
Yeah.

Padre (00:20:18):
That's, that's the move right now. Everyone goes

Leo Laporte (00:20:20):
To this. Well, let's look at another,

Iain Thomson (00:20:22):
Their own particular app and

Leo Laporte (00:20:23):
Another arena where a company wanted to make more money. Reddit, Steve Huffman, CEO of Reddit was one of the founders, wrote the original code also Reddit,

Iain Thomson (00:20:32):
By the way, just for his PR team. They've gotta get a better photo of you than that because <laugh>, he just looks like pretty, it's your worst high school photo ever.

Leo Laporte (00:20:44):
Wow. yeah. It isn't a great, is it? Hi

Padre (00:20:49):
<Laugh>. Yeah. I mean, seriously. Hi. Hello. Are you gonna eat those tots? I mean, he looks like he wants to go play Doom in the dorm in 1992. Yeah, I like it. Gosh. Wouldn't be laughing if I had my nunchucks. I've got, I studied the blade while, you know,

Leo Laporte (00:21:09):
So it's kind of, this story is old as time Reddit which just like Twitter is a platform which normal people like us put our content on. Normal, unpaid people like us moderate spend many, many hours to moderate. So the real value of Twitter is just like Reddit is the content Sure. That we have put there. But they provide the platform. Hoffman just like Twitter, just like Elon said, Hey, we're getting scraped to death by ai. I think AI and large language models have been somewhat of a, a prod in this. Cuz those companies are suddenly getting all the attention. Well, based on content they've aggregated from sites like this. I don't hear Jimmy Wales at Wikipedia moaning. I'm sure he was also, you know, a victim of this. In any event, Huffman, who wants to do an I P O, they announced an IPO several years ago. They've been really trying to get the public offering so they can get a big exit. They've never made money,

(00:22:09):
Never shown a profit. They were purchased by Conde Nast a few years ago. Conde spun it out as a standalone company, but a still majority shareholder. I imagine Conde also putting pressure, Hey, we'd like to make some money on this. Yeah. Right. If not through profit, then maybe through an I P o. Huffman now has the burden of, well, it's gotta figure out some way to get some money outta this. So he decides kind of similar to Elon, we're gonna charge for the api. Right. And I think really what the decision was very much like Elon, we're gonna get rid of these third party clients that don't show our ads. They are just a cost center to us. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> because they're, they're sucking our bandwidth without giving us any revenue back.

Padre (00:22:47):
But the only reason they existed was because Reddit's own own system was so pathetically

Leo Laporte (00:22:51):
Bad. And, and and we interviewed actually Jason and Micah interviewed Christian Selig from Apollo mm-hmm. Which is really kinda the poster child for all this. He made a great app, an app I use mm-hmm. Probably most iOS people use for Twitter. It was for Reddit. It was a much better app. He had a call early on with Huffman and Huffman said, yeah, we're gonna charge you 24 cents for a thousand a quarries. And Steve I mean Christian did some back of the envelope math and said, well, that's gonna cost me $20 million a year based on the amount of usage I have. I cannot charge my users enough to make up for that.

Padre (00:23:29):
Right.

Padre (00:23:31):
There was some he knew really well anyway, you know.

Leo Laporte (00:23:33):
Yeah. Well, and he had a, a couple of problems. One is, I, I was a, I paid for it, but you, you know, you don't keep paying for it. A lot of people were grandfathered in at lower costs. Right. you know, I pay for Twitter too. There's twi there is I not Twitter, Reddit Gold or whatever it's called. I paid for. Right. Paid for Reddit Premium. Yeah. Yeah. So I, I mean, I wanna support them. I want them to, to, to do. All right. But it sounded like really the plan from Reddit was to kill the third party clients entirely. Yeah. Almost all of them are gone now. June 30th was the end of the line for Apollo, for Reddit is fun. R i f for quite a few clients. A few still are around. I don't know how they're doing it. Maybe they raised their prices.

Iain Thomson (00:24:15):
Maybe. The thing is, these were admin tools, which you needed if you were gonna be a volunteer moderator. That's right. And Reddit's own tools were pathetically bad. Now they've basically said, we're going for ipo, we need all that. Lots of, you know, all that user data ourselves and we need all those moderator stuff. And the moderators revolted. And I've gotta say, I haven't posted with one exception, anything on the site or submitted anything to the site since this broke out. Because they are to accuse volunteer moderators of being landed Gentry. That was,

Leo Laporte (00:24:49):
That was just a Huffman quote. Yeah. Huffman did a a publicity tour that was very, damn, it was very crash. A lot of bad interviews. Yep. And heard himself badly in the, and I think the thing people weren't considering is these moderators who have been unpaid volunteers and worked really, really hard for a very long time. But some moderators shut their subreddit down some the Sonology subreddit is now nsfw. That's right. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, which takes away their ad revenue. Cause most advertisers don't wanna be on an nfw. Right. W subreddit. So moderators are rebelling. A lot of them have left the, the people who ran the ask me, anythings the AMAs, I Reddit, have all left the form

Iain Thomson (00:25:26):
With one subreddit. A bunch of their moderators got got involuntary terminate. Well, that

Leo Laporte (00:25:31):
This is, well, yeah. So, so the AMA people left said, if you wanna do AMAs, Steve, you should pay the moderators. And they're, so there's been a rebellion. And now Reddit is kind of clamping down and firing moderators for a while. Steve was saying, you know, we're gonna make it so you can vote out. You know, because he, he's right. There are users of the F1 subreddit, let's say. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> who want the subreddit to continue, who say, well, you're just getting in our way moderators. And if there were a vote Yeah. Get rid of the moderators. Cuz we want our, our subreddit to continue. Iphone subreddit moved off onto Discord. There aren't any credible third party. This is the real problem. There's no credible third party replacement.

Iain Thomson (00:26:13):
Reddi itself only got its start cuz dig mucked things up failed so badly. Yeah. Right. So there is an opportunity there for someone else to scoop in from the ring, from the wings. But is there,

Padre (00:26:24):
The problem with Twitter, the problem with Reddit has been the same thing, is they

Iain Thomson (00:26:27):
Go to scale too much. Yeah. They

Padre (00:26:28):
Scaled to the point where they never can never be profitable. Yeah. It's not possible for Reddit to ever make money. They, they took so much investment money Yeah. That right now, either the investors are gonna take a bath or Reddit gonna have to c clamp down on the very people who are creating the content which they use for advertising. Right. That's not possible. It, they're in a no win scenario right now. Now you can say, I, I understand businesses have to make money. They have to keep the doors open. I get it. But if you built your model on getting goodwill from the people who are using your service and that's how you make your money. Yeah. You cannot, you cannot then turn around and say, well, we still want you to do the stuff that you did when we had the goodwill, but you're not gonna get the goodwill anymore. Right.

Brianna Wu (00:27:14):
I think that's well said. And just to add onto that, you know, two things. One Huffman is very famously emulating Elon Musk in this case. Like he's come forward says he secret, I

Leo Laporte (00:27:24):
Think secret, he admits it, right? Yeah.

Brianna Wu (00:27:25):
Having

Iain Thomson (00:27:26):
Calls with him one total funboy in those

Brianna Wu (00:27:28):
Interviews. Yeah. Like wanting to come forward slash costs until it's financially profitable. Choose

Leo Laporte (00:27:32):
Your idols carefully. <Laugh>. So

Brianna Wu (00:27:34):
I'm not gonna go down to Elon Musk like criticism. Holy god, I just wanted to say it. But the wider point to me is if you really look into this API funding scheme that they've got, I don't think this is a credible vision for the future. Because what they wanna do is basically use the Reddit training data, correct mm-hmm. <Affirmative> for machine language learning. Right. Agreed. Now there's a whole discussion to be had about bias built into your, your natural language sets. And for

Padre (00:28:02):
A place like, I do not want my AI trained on red, trained

Brianna Wu (00:28:04):
On Reddit <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:28:05):
No. But I do have to point out matter that, that a lot of us have been modifying our Google searches Sure. With the word Reddit. Because almost always it's a better result that Google's starting to say that's, we're in trouble because without Reddit <laugh>, we don't have, our search results aren't as good

Brianna Wu (00:28:21):
A hundred percent. Look, is it, I use it for a reason. I'm just saying that there's going to, in my opinion, there's going to come a point very soon where they've gotten the juice for that lemon, right? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. So as far as it being a continuing thing to fund all of Reddit, I just, I think you look at the numbers. I agree. It doesn't feel

Leo Laporte (00:28:38):
Credible. This makes me sad because Reddit and Twitter both Right. Were huge resources mm-hmm. Very valuable to the community, both owned by owners who apparently didn't value that and or maybe couldn't afford to keep losing money. I mean, that's, I understand how that is. You can only lose so much money. I think this is

Iain Thomson (00:28:55):
Maybe why they're so desperate to ypo because Uber has been doing this stuff for years, but they actually ipo Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:29:00):
Uber never made

Iain Thomson (00:29:00):
Money. Right. And allowed people to cash out the, the initial investors to cash out their stake. And after that they lost interest and you can run it as a loss making service. Right. Right. But with Reddit, I think you're right. I don't see a way for them to fund this. You know, you can't do that on Reddit gold purchases. Either you pay for a premium service or the money gets

Leo Laporte (00:29:22):
Sold off. Maybe that's what Elon or Huffman should do, is just say, look, we're a paid service. Get over it. That's the way it's gonna be. Sure you want it to succeed, I'd pay five bucks a month and hundred percent would, would enough people do that?

Padre (00:29:34):
That would work with a traditional publication. But the problem is both Reddit and Twitter rely on its users to provide

Iain Thomson (00:29:40):
The content, the

Leo Laporte (00:29:41):
Monetizer. Good point. Right. So you're you're saying, I'm gonna money pay you to monetize money and then make my content that doesn't work.

Iain Thomson (00:29:47):
Yeah, that's a good point.

Brianna Wu (00:29:49):
Do you know what I wonder is also a factor here that they've engineered these apps, you know, particularly Twitter to be more and more addictive. They bring, you know, scientists on to figure out how to keep you scrolling forever that has a cost that's associated with it. So maybe, yeah. Maybe Elon is onto something with this rate limiting idea. <Laugh> that limiting the number of things you, you can scroll until you have to pay for it. Maybe something like that. Like there's a free tier where you can just do it a little bit. But if you're completely addicted to the service like I am, but the

Iain Thomson (00:30:20):
Aries of is if you submit something, then you should get a discount or a freebie on that. Oh,

Leo Laporte (00:30:24):
That's interesting. No point. There's a strategy. Yeah. You

Iain Thomson (00:30:26):
Know, cause I mean, I'm a, you know, I've been on Reddit for far too long, so I've got six digits and camera and comments, but oh my goodness. You know, if they want my comment, but my submissions, then they're gonna have to pay for them. You know? Yeah. It's just, I'm a journalist. We don't work for free <laugh>, it's just like <laugh>. But I mean it the, just to annoyed that many people who your entire business model depends on, I just don't see the rationale behind it.

Brianna Wu (00:30:54):
So here's a wider question. Yeah. To a certain extent, Twitter and Reddit and services like this are the public commons in 2023, right? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, like when I was a teen in the nineties, it was the local coffee shop. We would all go hang out there today. It's these digital commons mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. And two, I, I think there's a question to be asked here, like, should these be for-profit companies? Because it seems to me there's a public stake. Like I have no idea how you get the government to fund something like this where it would be good or well run. But it seems to me that there's a public stake in us having a healthy place to

Leo Laporte (00:31:30):
Go government. Well, but the government's never gonna run. No. Maybe

Brianna Wu (00:31:32):
It's tax credits, maybe it's just giving them money. I think this is very

Iain Thomson (00:31:37):
Valuable, for example, that is run ostensibly as a nonprofit, but here so that nonprofits can use it and Sure.

Leo Laporte (00:31:42):
The problem is you don't know which of these is gonna be winners, which of these is gonna win. Yeah. Win the public a percent. Right. Reddit just came outta nowhere and took over from Digg. Twitter kind of came outta nowhere. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, nobody had ever done anything like it. I mean, what is, what's the next one? No one knows. And I can guarantee you it's not a government funded or even tax credit backed or even 5 0 1 c three. Sure thing. It's

Iain Thomson (00:32:05):
Just, I have to say, I was so disappointed when Twitter first came out. Cause I heard it. It's like, this is brilliant. 140 can people will craft delicate haikus fine quality concept. That's not

Brianna Wu (00:32:15):
What happened.

Leo Laporte (00:32:16):
I had a have chase sandwich on.

Iain Thomson (00:32:18):
Right? Yeah. Blah, blah, blah. Emoji, emoji emoji.

Brianna Wu (00:32:22):
All, all I'm saying here is I'm not arguing for anything. I'm saying that, you know, it's the same thing with local newspapers, right. Our democracy and our public commons mm-hmm. <Affirmative> are weaker with the, the demise of local news. Which again, this is a, people have not found a business model that works. And we see our public commons like Reddit and Twitter having the same problem. It just seems to me this is all a common theme that's making our ability to just connect with each

Padre (00:32:49):
Other there. Is that, I mean, obviously as a child of the bbc, I'm in favor of public, you know, public service broadcasting. Sure. But yeah, I'm not sure that model particularly lines up. Well, I mean, the Canadians make it work, but other than that, it's,

Leo Laporte (00:33:00):
You know, I think to some degree this is a case of we had these high hopes when the internet began, we, we saw

Padre (00:33:07):
It. Oh, you read, have you read the Hacker Manifesto recently?

Leo Laporte (00:33:09):
Yeah. It makes you with the optimism. Yeah. we had John Perry Barlow on some years ago reading it out. I remember

Padre (00:33:17):
It very well. But yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:33:19):
Hackers of the World, you know, or what was it? We are not, oh

Padre (00:33:23):
Gosh, I can't remember. Oh, so we'd have about Racing Creed?

Leo Laporte (00:33:26):
Yes. Yeah.

Padre (00:33:27):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:33:28):
Not so much. So we, I was part of the, you know, the group that really had these kind of utopian dreams for the internet and it really seemed like it was gonna give everybody a voice and Yeah. Yeah. It was gonna be all these things, things. I think what we're just seeing is still does to, it's in a natural evolution. I, I even wondered for, I've been wondering for decades how this continues without any revenue. Yeah. Because it all costs money. Right. And it, and it always seemed to me like it wasn't really sustainable. Yeah. I'm amazed. We got 30 years down the road somehow with nobody making any money. And then of course, Google figured it out, and then it spread like a virus. Oh. You could put ads on these things and you could make money. And then that, that's been a Google nightmare. Google Google's

Padre (00:34:14):
Type of content is different though. And you think about the content you find on Reddit or Twitter, it's mostly one use content. Yeah. You will find it once. You will read it once, and then that's it. Think of YouTube. Youtube. You submit that content, it will live forever on the surface, and it can be watched millions and millions of times over and over, even by the same people. Yeah. So when you've got content that is going to be reused over and over, you have a much more solid business plan than you do if it's a one use post.

Leo Laporte (00:34:45):
Yeah. Yeah. This is what John Perry Barlow wrote. Gosh, it must be 25 years ago. Wow. Governments of the industrial world. You weary giants of flesh and steel. I come from cyberspace, the new home of mind on behalf of the future. I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty. Where we gathered actually that was really wrong. I remember <laugh> when, when we had John Perion to read it, he was embarrassed even then. He said, oh, I don't, I don't like to <laugh>. I don't like to, we have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one that didn't

Brianna Wu (00:35:26):
Pan out.

Leo Laporte (00:35:27):
Yeah. So I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. It is really this, I mean, I've, I still cherish this vision Sure. Of this utopian thing that the internet could be, but in fact,

Iain Thomson (00:35:42):
It gave us the a f that's a hell of a big, you know, <laugh>. Yeah. The

Leo Laporte (00:35:46):
Eef is where I'm reading this from, by the way. He was one of the founders of electronic front. The

Padre (00:35:50):
Downfall of all of this can be summed up with one sentence. Some people suck

Leo Laporte (00:35:55):
<Laugh>. But it's not just that people suck, but that this, it looks like it's free. It isn't. Right. Yeah. It's in fact very expensive. We're, by the way, we're right now bury our heads in the sand with ai, which is horrifically expensive to generate these large language models. That's right. And everybody's betting on the cu just like they did with Uber. Yeah. Saying, well, someday it's gonna make some money. Yeah. And

Iain Thomson (00:36:18):
It didn't, you can't have a pile of whatever this big, and there isn't a pony underneath it.

Leo Laporte (00:36:22):
Yeah. There's no pony. I think that's what people are finally finding out. Yeah. That's what Ellan has found out. It's what Steve Huffman is finding out. And it's, it's very sad. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. But we, we had a good run. Mm-Hmm. But I mean, I think it's over. I didn't say think it's over,

Iain Thomson (00:36:35):
Honestly. I mean, we grew up in the, in the, in the times of print journalism where if you wanted to start a publication before desktop publishing really kicked off in the eighties and and early nineties, you had to have access to a full six color printer and a massive cost and massive distribution costs. The internet ca desktop publishing came round an awful lot easier to produce a magazine. You still gotta print it out. Internet lowered the cost of entry dramatically. What's now driving that cost of entry up is a matter of scale and deliberate policy. Mm. So I I the it's gone sour somewhere along the line.

Leo Laporte (00:37:11):
Well, and that's what's happened to Twit. And so people who are talking about, oh, you what you used to be all fun and all the cool things. It was, but now reality, I sad to say, is has sunk in Sure. For the, for this internet generation. And, and I don't care where you look, you're seeing people saying, we need to make money at this. We can't keep doing this for free.

Padre (00:37:28):
You know what, it took Naati and one of the things that we never say is it's okay for these things to die. They

Leo Laporte (00:37:33):
Have to. Yeah.

Padre (00:37:33):
They're gonna die. They have to die because something else will come along. As long as we, we keep holding onto what we're gonna prop it up. We're gonna prop it up. We're gonna keep investing, we're gonna find a new revenues, then it will stagnate. Because all they're focusing on now is I need to keep the lights on. Yeah.

Brianna Wu (00:37:47):
Do you think so? Like, I was looking at something the other day, just talking about the state of media, right? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And there was such a change in that industry when it went from print to digital media that disrupted everything. You were very much on that forefront of it. Now that everyone is having,

Leo Laporte (00:38:02):
We're dying so much trouble, <laugh>. That's exactly

Brianna Wu (00:38:04):
It. We're seeing digital go, like it's becoming smaller and there's nothing to replace it with. Right? Like, there's just less of it.

Leo Laporte (00:38:12):
So who's gonna, who would build another Reddit or another Twitter these days?

Brianna Wu (00:38:16):
Someone look over at these streaming space for gen Z. So you have a competitor to Twitch. Twitch is in a lot of financial problems despite being on by Amman's, Amazon. And you have Kik, Kik has been like, started passing out $100 million contracts like their candy. They

Leo Laporte (00:38:31):
Just, that is not sustainable. Can I? That's crazy. They just paid ninja QC a hundred million. That's Microsoft paying Ninja from Mixer, shutting it down, down six months later. And, but so now don't get no buts qc a hundred million dollars not, but not even an exclusive.

Brianna Wu (00:38:48):
That's right. Mm-Hmm.

Leo Laporte (00:38:49):
So that's not sustainable. Well,

Brianna Wu (00:38:52):
No. To be, to be fair, the thing with Kik is it's tied into gambling <laugh>. So it's a huge

Iain Thomson (00:38:58):
Gambling. There's lot of money, money flowing around

Brianna Wu (00:39:00):
There. There's a lot of incentive there to kind of plug the user base into online gambling. So that's where they make their money, which is probably a better business model than say,

Leo Laporte (00:39:09):
Twitch. Well, and so that's what happens, right? It's either gambling Yep. Or Google spying on us all and selling advertising or meta doing the same. It's, it's, yeah. Porn. None of these

Iain Thomson (00:39:20):
Porn, you know what

Leo Laporte (00:39:21):
I mean? It's porn that goes without saying. But Well, porn's in trouble too because of the digital environment. Nobody pays for porn anymore, right? Yeah. So, you know, Leo, some people still care about production value. <Laugh>, it's all about story, isn't it? You know? No, I think, honestly, it's good soundtrack. Look at the, and look at the streamers like Netflix Amazon Prime, they're, everybody is suffering. Mm. And it's not because the economy's going south anymore. You can't say that anymore. No. It's

Iain Thomson (00:39:51):
Oversupply. It's bad management decisions by some, some companies,

Leo Laporte (00:39:57):
I think it's cuz it was always unsustainable. Clearly Kik, you can't pay people a hundred million dollars except for not exclusively what is a hundred million for that that is not a contract with a person. That is, that is an enticement for people to invest in Kik. That is, that is an announcement to say, oh, I don't agree. Well, I mean, when you pay out these big deals and you know that you're never gonna get, get an ROI on that deal. Sure. It, it means that you want to move yourself up in the headlines. Sure. It means you wanna make your your business model. This was un sustainable. This is a model. We've seen this. Why Uber, it's why. But in the short term, it's, you know, users at any expense and we'll figure out how to monetize later. But I think we know now. There is no later. But if they can make their IPO and get up billion dollars, how many suck can you find? Twitter was a success story. I the investors got paid.

Brianna Wu (00:40:50):
Yeah. I feel, I feel honor bound to define, to defend train wrecks, who was one of the people the behind kick. I mean, this is someone who, if you listened to him talk about the business model for, for Kik, he talks about the lifetime user value of buying, bringing someone over there and getting them on the, what they call the gamba train. Can't call it gambling. Gotta be Gen Z. Call it the gamba. Of course. You know, and this is something that twist.

Leo Laporte (00:41:14):
Great. So he's gonna addict a whole new generation. I'm saying it gambling's

Brianna Wu (00:41:18):
Saying it's

Leo Laporte (00:41:19):
Rough. You gotta find a sucker somewhere. If it's not the stock market, it's gamblers. I don't know. I dogar readers, Justin only fathers, there's no sustainable business without screwing somebody. Yeah. No, but I mean, you used to be, I mean, the only reason Twitter investors got their money out is cuz some idiot paid 44 billion for it. Yeah,

Padre (00:41:37):
Exactly. All successful businesses are built on Vice. Every single one

Leo Laporte (00:41:42):
Says the priest.

Padre (00:41:44):
No. And, and <laugh>. And he says, says the priest.

Brianna Wu (00:41:47):
What about,

Leo Laporte (00:41:48):
You know, probably better than most.

Padre (00:41:50):
No, I, I'm dead serious. Even nonprofits, you know how we we raise money?

Leo Laporte (00:41:54):
It's all based on breeded. We appealed to ego pride.

Padre (00:41:56):
We appeal to legacy

Leo Laporte (00:41:57):
Lust.

Brianna Wu (00:41:58):
What about Legos? How are Legos built on vice?

Padre (00:42:01):
Legos are built on this idea of idealizing childhood. The simplicity of building something and the

Leo Laporte (00:42:07):
Greed of children. That's very, I gotta have more Lego

Brianna Wu (00:42:10):
To woo Lando like 20,000.

Padre (00:42:13):
I'm not saying, I'm not saying that. Oh

Leo Laporte (00:42:15):
My gosh, I gotta have more get rid of it.

Padre (00:42:17):
But I'm just saying you have to understand that every successful business in some way or form appeals to a vice. Sure.

Brianna Wu (00:42:24):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:42:25):
Wait a minute, let me just look. The seven deadly sins <laugh>. I have to do a little refresher. Oh,

Padre (00:42:31):
We should do the seven W sins and then group the companies in those Zens,

Leo Laporte (00:42:35):
<Laugh>, gluttony, lust, greed, despair. I don't think anybody's making money on despair, but we'll have to, we'll have to.

Padre (00:42:42):
Netflix only fans.

Iain Thomson (00:42:44):
We won't, man. And I think Netflix is making quite

Leo Laporte (00:42:47):
Lot of money. Anger bra Twitter.

Padre (00:42:48):
Oh my gosh. Yes. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:42:49):
Sloth

Brianna Wu (00:42:50):
Video games,

Padre (00:42:51):
Podcasts. No, no. Sloth is door sloth Is DoorDash.

Leo Laporte (00:42:54):
Doordash.

Brianna Wu (00:42:55):
Yeah. Fair

Leo Laporte (00:42:57):
Pride. Who's making money on Pride? Lego, Lego. No, I'm

Brianna Wu (00:43:01):
Proud of myself.

Padre (00:43:02):
Twitter's also pride a lot. Twitter's pride. People wanna post, wanna get those likes, those

Iain Thomson (00:43:06):
Flawless. Nobody actually goes on Facebook and says, oh God, really bad PMs today. My head is killing me. It's so like, had a lovely day today with the family. Here's some art from

Padre (00:43:15):
Taken show. I just woke up. My hair is perfect and my skin is flawless.

Brianna Wu (00:43:18):
That's, that's Instagram, I think. What?

Leo Laporte (00:43:20):
Yeah, I know. That is Swath wrath. I think we got 'em all. Envy. Envy. Who's based on envy? Insta.

Padre (00:43:26):
Insta

Iain Thomson (00:43:27):
In.

Padre (00:43:28):
No, that env fomo. What's what's the one with for Zillow?

Leo Laporte (00:43:32):
Zillow. Zillow

Padre (00:43:33):
Is,

Leo Laporte (00:43:33):
Ow.

Padre (00:43:34):
There you go.

Brianna Wu (00:43:35):
I use Zillow to actually get a house.

Leo Laporte (00:43:37):
So there's some people use it for real, but most people

Padre (00:43:40):
Use it for you may actually be one of the virtuous people, which means you need to get outta here.

Brianna Wu (00:43:44):
Wait, think of go wait. Think of Virtue. Think of Brianna Win. Yes.

Padre (00:43:48):
<Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:43:49):
Isn't that interesting? I think you've got a new, we're gonna call it the Ballas Air Spirit.

Padre (00:43:54):
<Laugh>. It's, I'm so gonna

Leo Laporte (00:43:55):
Do this. I'm gonna make up the poster. Internet companies are based on one of the seven deadly cities. Well, you

Brianna Wu (00:44:00):
Should come up with some elements. So when you talk about Twitter, the, the, this deadly sin comes on. Are there

Leo Laporte (00:44:05):
Any ven that I do that maybe

Iain Thomson (00:44:08):
Every great fortune is based on a crime? Yeah. I'm damned if I could remember probably

Brianna Wu (00:44:11):
Someone British

Padre (00:44:14):
<Laugh>.

Iain Thomson (00:44:15):
Hang God.

Padre (00:44:16):
I mean the monarchy. To get Brianna back in on this,

Leo Laporte (00:44:21):
Behind every great fortune

Padre (00:44:23):
Is a flag.

Leo Laporte (00:44:24):
There is a crime. Bza.

Iain Thomson (00:44:27):
Oh, okay. Yeah. Don't blame the Brits for this one. He's a French good. Guess it was a good guess it. A French spoke with a very dodgy sounding

Leo Laporte (00:44:34):
Name. Didn't say it wrong, but it was the epigraph of the Godfather. It was the epigraph of the Godfather. Oh yes, yes. No, it's it was inspired by a sentence, written by Balza. The secret of grand fortunes without obvious cause is a forgotten crime. See, it just sounds better

Iain Thomson (00:44:59):
In French. Yeah. Yeah. Some languages are better at that. You know, this is the reason there's been no German love poets. You know, it just <laugh> or Finnish.

Leo Laporte (00:45:09):
We're gonna hear from the German poet a minute. The next segment of this show, actually, I have a gift for Father Roberts in the next section of the show. Oh boy. Wow. Alright. Right. It so it's so fun to have an all-in studio. It so much more lively. It's been

Iain Thomson (00:45:21):
A year. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:45:23):
We're all going to dinner after this. Yes, yes we are. So save some conversation for dinner. Brianna Wu is here all the way from these coast. What brings you out here?

Brianna Wu (00:45:31):
I am guest of honor at Beon.

Iain Thomson (00:45:34):
Hey,

Leo Laporte (00:45:34):
Fun. Yes. Is that the conference for people who are big fans of science fiction? Science fiction? Yep.

Brianna Wu (00:45:41):
Kat Vae, who's one of my favorite authors, she's out there headlining it along with me. Oh wow. Along with this guy I'm sort of a fan of Frank Wu is the, so

Leo Laporte (00:45:51):
Frank, he's not only a writer, but he's a great illustrator. I saw his stuff at the Science Fiction Museum, or actually the Museum of Popular something or other in the Seattle deal. Are you

Iain Thomson (00:46:01):
Letting Frank Drive? No. No. Is he? I wanted did you draw the manual of

Brianna Wu (00:46:05):
It? No, no. I'm in

Leo Laporte (00:46:06):
A pri debt's to Front

Brianna Wu (00:46:07):
Pan. I took that picture. Thank

Leo Laporte (00:46:09):
You, man. That's a's great picture of Frank. Look at that with the American Eagle

Brianna Wu (00:46:12):
Right behind him. We call him eagerly. We got that and put it in our front yard because we love America. I Americas I great

Leo Laporte (00:46:19):
Think you only take photos of Frank when he's doing that

Iain Thomson (00:46:22):
Surprise face. I, it's

Leo Laporte (00:46:23):
Like every follow is know. Right? He's,

Brianna Wu (00:46:25):
He loves to perform. He's like you, Leo. He's he's, he's on and he just ca at Frank Theno se he's

Leo Laporte (00:46:31):
Host Mess hands. There we go. Also with this it's so great to have Ian, Ian, Thom Thompson, Richard <laugh>.

Iain Thomson (00:46:40):
I understand. Who's the guy

Leo Laporte (00:46:41):
With a thin mustache that I always think you look like or used to look like when you had the mustache? Don't they do right? No, no, no, no. The famous British Poor Roll or the Gap in his tooth.

Iain Thomson (00:46:51):
Oh, oh. Terry Thomas.

Leo Laporte (00:46:52):
Terry Thomas. That's why I keep calling

Iain Thomson (00:46:54):
You. I have Thomas, I have been assumed. Yes. I ha it has been pointed out to me when I get very, very drunk. I do become apr. You

Leo Laporte (00:47:01):
Remind me a lot of Terry Thomas and I, I Seriously, I thought that's who you were for a long time. So, wait, was he, was he, was he a master in Doctor who No, no, he's long gone. But what a great British actor. And when you had the pencil mustache.

Iain Thomson (00:47:16):
Oh, the, the 13th Ju of Wind boom was my favorite, was by far the best costume you might have put on. Is

Leo Laporte (00:47:22):
That a real Duke or just someone you met

Iain Thomson (00:47:24):
Of? No, no. This is a guy from the Fast Show called The 13th Ju me the 13th Duke of Windham

Padre (00:47:29):
<Laugh>. Here the Ladies

Leo Laporte (00:47:30):
Finishing school with my reputation. <Laugh> Ding Gog.

Padre (00:47:34):
You know, I mean,

Leo Laporte (00:47:36):
Thank you Sir Ian is normally writes for the register, but he also does ions. If you want to invite him to your next party, I'm sure he'll become as the 13th Duke of wi

Padre (00:47:49):
You need a top hat and a monocle, please.

Leo Laporte (00:47:52):
I have both in the other room. We'll get 'em for and a

Padre (00:47:54):
Brandy sifter.

Leo Laporte (00:47:55):
We don't have a sifter. Mr. Robert, father Robert Baller all the way from Vatican City. It's so good to see you. You are here for fun or prophets.

Padre (00:48:05):
No, I am. I am here. I I made a deal with my boss to come home four times a year. Nice. To take care of my father and, oh, take some of the, the pressure off my mom and my sister. That's lovely. That's

Leo Laporte (00:48:16):
Good for you. I'm so glad you are here. It's nice to be home. Love seeing you. Yeah. I missed you in Rome

Padre (00:48:21):
By three hours I think.

Leo Laporte (00:48:23):
Yeah. I could have come to that party, but we were flying out early the next morning and I thought, you know,

Padre (00:48:28):
I, I told you I had so many special I was gonna take you down into the necropolis. I was gonna take you into the back of the Vatican. Yeah. And you could've gotten wicked s and and remember, I I told you, if you get a call from me, it's because we have another one of those afterhour tours of

Leo Laporte (00:48:42):
The v I would be on plane that night. That's call. I will

Padre (00:48:46):
Be nobody but us. They just let us run. Ugh. That's so much fun.

Leo Laporte (00:48:48):
I, I really enjoyed Rome and I, it's funny cuz you do not appreciate it at all. I don't

Padre (00:48:53):
<Laugh>. I feel bad about that. This is the greatest city in the world

Leo Laporte (00:48:57):
And he doesn't appreciate it. I mean,

Padre (00:48:58):
It's what I could see why some people would like it, but I, you know,

Leo Laporte (00:49:03):
When you've, when you've lived in Las Vegas, Rome, it

Padre (00:49:06):
Feels like, oh, good God. I, I look at the Coliseum and I go, you know, I could fix that

Leo Laporte (00:49:10):
<Laugh>. All right, we're gonna have more in just a bit with what a wonderful panel. But first a word from our sponsor, zip, we use ZipRecruiter. And if you're hiring and you're currently dealing with a interesting f economic future, that's adding to your challenge, isn't it? Now, more than ever, it's important to hire the right people faster and more efficiently to keep overall costs down. Fortunately, there's a hiring partner who's focused on you and your needs. Ziprecruiter from pricing to technology, everything ZipRecruiter does is for you and what works best for you right now, you could try 'em free ziprecruiter.com/twi. How does ZipRecruiter prioritize your needs? Well, gotta start with price. Very straightforward Pricing. You know what you pay before posting your job, before posting your job so you can stick to your budget. There's no surprises. Plus you will reach more qualified people because ZipRecruiter casts the widest possible net.

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Padre (00:51:13):
I. That is in August. In August, I am going to Defcon. So you to summer town. I have my ticket. I'm ready to go. Yep. Excellent. Will see that. I haven't been there for three years. Oh, you

Leo Laporte (00:51:20):
Go every year too, don't you? Yeah.

Padre (00:51:22):
Yeah. The last time Ian and I were together at Def Con Uhoh, he was sitting in front of me and I just started. You sneak sheltered. Me just taking pictures of him and putting it on Twitter

Leo Laporte (00:51:30):
<Laugh>. Well, now I want you to take this to Def Con with you. This is, and by the way, this is a huge success. It's the flipper. Yes. Zero. Amazon refuses to sell it cuz it's, they call it a multi-tool for

Padre (00:51:45):
Hackers. It's, it is a multi-tool. It's a security device. I mean, come on.

Leo Laporte (00:51:49):
It's not that dangerous.

Padre (00:51:51):
If you have no idea what you're doing, you, it will not make you an elite hacker. And

Leo Laporte (00:51:56):
If you know what you do, you can buy stuff that will do everything. Correct. Exactly. On here. Plus, but it's just kind of cool. And it's, it has a little snake game on it. So you could pretend, you could pretend when you're going through Italian customs. That's just to my

Padre (00:52:08):
Little snake game. You know, you about Not kidding. For like three bucks now.

Leo Laporte (00:52:13):
$80 million worth of sale sales on the flippers. Zero. It's so funny. I'm teasing

Padre (00:52:17):
Him. It's a flipper.

Leo Laporte (00:52:18):
I'm, I'm teasing him. I I have updated the firmer, but I think you might have to do it again. It's been a while. That's the flipper. Zero Dear

Padre (00:52:26):
Def Con. I'm coming

Leo Laporte (00:52:28):
<Laugh>

Brianna Wu (00:52:29):
Now, just so you know, if that's a sin, you could just give that to me and say,

Padre (00:52:34):
No, no, this is, this is gonna be em emblazoned with a Twitch sticker. So everyone knows that they're being hacked by twit. Oh, please. No, no, no. <Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:52:43):
It's supposed to be a plausible deniability. So it's a, we did, I did a little review of it. In fact, I used it to break into the studio <laugh>, like I cloned Micah's fob. And it really, it does it, it's very easy. It's very trans. My God. Transparent. My god goodness. You can open garage doors in theory. And I was gonna do this, and I was warned against it. In theory, you could break into cars by duplicating the key fob on that little device. The problem is, modern cars will sense it and lock you out. Ooh. And, and then it would have to get all new key fobs way around that. Oh wait. Jeez. See, that's why it's in better hand. Well, do

Brianna Wu (00:53:18):
You ever worry that if there's an actual hacker that gets into the Vatican, like they're all gonna blame you? They're gonna be like,

Padre (00:53:23):
It's not. No, no. That happened. Oh, really? And they call me.

Leo Laporte (00:53:27):
Really? Oh. Oh,

Brianna Wu (00:53:29):
Okay. So they assume

Leo Laporte (00:53:31):
He set up a honeypot.

Padre (00:53:33):
He said

Leo Laporte (00:53:33):
Thought, you know, you were in the, all the newspapers a few years ago when you set up a Minecraft server. The Vaticans Minecraft server. But it turns out it was really more like a honeypot.

Padre (00:53:41):
It was a honeypot <laugh>. But it works so

Leo Laporte (00:53:45):
Well. You caught all the bad guys.

Padre (00:53:46):
It works so well.

Leo Laporte (00:53:47):
All the bad guys. My

Padre (00:53:48):
Sister just bought a Tesla, so, Hey Mel Uhoh.

Leo Laporte (00:53:53):
Oh, this thing, what it really is, is a little inexpensive, relatively, you got thinks 130 bucks. I have a captain device that has a bunch of radios in it, right? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> and firmware that lets you access those radios and do stuff. They're

Padre (00:54:05):
All software defined radios. So you can make them do anything you want them to do. Whoa. we've had setups like this for years and years, but it normally meant you had to have several different radio setups connected to your laptop and run specialized software. This is sort of, hit the button and leave it in your pocket and see what comes up with, you

Leo Laporte (00:54:20):
Could open your system

Padre (00:54:21):
Charging

Leo Laporte (00:54:22):
Port with it. Just press a button and it goes pop <laugh>.

Iain Thomson (00:54:24):
Well, I mean, also, frankly, you could stick it, you could stick it in the bushes in front of a house and collect all kinds of useful stuff. Yes. I was at Defcon. In fact, the last Defcon I went to, there was a very interesting talk where they looked at Bluetooth locks and there they looked at, I think it was a dozen logs. And they found that 10 out of the 12 were broadcasting the codes in clear text. Oh, yeah. And you'd just throw one of those into the bridge, you know, into the hedge and they would pick it up. And of the other two, one of them, which did encrypt its data, was so easy to open. You could do it with a screwdriver. Oh my,

Padre (00:54:57):
My goodness. If you go to St. Peter's and you're walking around the square mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, you will probably get a signal that says Free Vatican wifi. Oh, that's me.

Leo Laporte (00:55:07):
Oh.

Padre (00:55:08):
If you have any idea how much information that's collected, cause I've got a y on top of our roof pointing down into the square, and I'm thinking this is a, thinks that there's free,

Leo Laporte (00:55:18):
Like,

Padre (00:55:19):
Oh

Brianna Wu (00:55:19):
My goodness. Oh, that's, maybe it's the church. Be nice.

Leo Laporte (00:55:22):
I know what's wrong with them. Thank

Padre (00:55:26):
You. Thank that statement three times. Slowly <laugh>.

Brianna Wu (00:55:30):
I just, I I

Leo Laporte (00:55:31):
I might have joined that. Come to think of it. I'm trying

Padre (00:55:34):
To remember. I mean, most of the traffics is encrypted, but you use Oh, look, a surprised how

Leo Laporte (00:55:38):
Much

Padre (00:55:38):
Vatican beautiful in clear tax. Oh, it's amazing. In this day and age, they're still

Leo Laporte (00:55:41):
Clear text. So show me here's a picture of the Vatican City. My God, I took this.

Padre (00:55:47):
We were, go back to that. Go back to that.

Leo Laporte (00:55:48):
We weren't sure where you lived. That right there, is that your studio? God, that statue?

Padre (00:55:52):
Yeah. That's my

Leo Laporte (00:55:53):
Studio. Right. That's your studio right there. And

Brianna Wu (00:55:55):
You're complaining about this.

Leo Laporte (00:55:56):
Look at this. He's overlooking.

Padre (00:55:58):
Oh,

Leo Laporte (00:55:59):
See all these chairs? That's when the pope does an audience. That's where all the people sit. He's right there.

Padre (00:56:05):
Yeah. No, I, I just go up to the roof. The

Iain Thomson (00:56:07):
Roof. Okay. I understand that tourist drive up prices. But that's at still a pretty sweet critic.

Padre (00:56:12):
Yeah. Oh no, it's very nice. It's beautiful. It's, it's, it's, I mean, I can't complain about that. So

Leo Laporte (00:56:16):
Jealous. But

Padre (00:56:18):
The city itself, I mean, I don't dislike it. It's just, I don't appreciate it. I know. I don't appreciate it. I'm self-aware enough to know I'm in the middle of something that's beautiful. And I have no idea what I'm,

Leo Laporte (00:56:27):
Here's another view from St. Peter's Basilica, the church. And there's your, there's your little hut right there on top. Yep. Yep.

Padre (00:56:33):
Yeah. Just look for those trees. Those trees. That's our property. All of that is our property. We

Leo Laporte (00:56:37):
Call them lollipop trees. But there's actually a, another name for them. They like,

Padre (00:56:40):
Love them. What I ask you

Brianna Wu (00:56:41):
This, so I assume you saw Fast 10. Did they get that accurate with the Vatican? They did. They

Padre (00:56:47):
Didn't. They did I get any car chase through, through any part of Rome

Leo Laporte (00:56:50):
Doesn't go the fictional.

Padre (00:56:52):
You

Leo Laporte (00:56:53):
Can't, you can't, you can't. That

Padre (00:56:55):
Mean wheels would fall off. I

Iain Thomson (00:56:56):
Did a test test drive for the must the 2015 Mustang. Oh yeah. And figured, okay, yeah, I'm in San Francisco. Let's do the bullet ride. And it's like, yeah, you can't actually do that. No. It's like, well, you could, but you drive that bit there,

Leo Laporte (00:57:11):
You would ruin the car

Iain Thomson (00:57:12):
Two miles over to the city.

Leo Laporte (00:57:13):
Well, that's true. The rest

Iain Thomson (00:57:14):
Of it.

Padre (00:57:15):
Yeah. By the way, if any of you visit Rome, you can stay with us. We do have guest apartments. I'm just,

Brianna Wu (00:57:20):
Yeah, I can get on the wifi cuz I'll get

Leo Laporte (00:57:22):
<Laugh>. Don't get Whatever you do.

Padre (00:57:24):
It's true. Don't do that.

Leo Laporte (00:57:25):
So this, so this is St. Peter's and you're just right over here. You're right

Padre (00:57:29):
Under Oh no, on the other side. Side. So I'm on side. I'm on

Leo Laporte (00:57:31):
That side. That side. There

Brianna Wu (00:57:32):
We go. Leah, what did you take that with? That's gorgeous.

Padre (00:57:35):
That's very nice.

Leo Laporte (00:57:35):
Iphone 14. No way. I didn't bring a real camera. Wow. Because I wanted to do a test. Like, can I take all the pictures that I want to take?

Padre (00:57:44):
Should I give the audience a tip? Did you, that will

Leo Laporte (00:57:47):
Probably. Or or just keep

Padre (00:57:49):
It for everyone

Leo Laporte (00:57:49):
Else. Yeah, give 'em a tip.

Padre (00:57:51):
So the, okay, the tip is this. If you are gonna visit Rome, the best tour to take is the Sca. S C A V

Leo Laporte (00:57:58):
I. Oh, I didn't know this. I wish I had, it's

Padre (00:58:00):
Only been recently opened in the, the last it the last. So it is the excavation underneath St. Peter's. It's the necropolis. Wow. Ooh, okay. Now the nice thing about it is it's relatively inexpensive. It's only like 13 euros for a ticket. They only take 120 people a day. So of the, of the tens of thousands of people that go through, they only take 120. Oh,

Leo Laporte (00:58:19):
Wow. So it's hard to get

Padre (00:58:20):
Into. It's hard. Well, no, you just have to, you have to. Nobody knows about it. Yeah. So you have to reserve it well in advance. But the nice thing is, after you're done with the tour, they, it pops you up in St. Peter's. So you bypass all those lines, the hours and hours of lines you don't have to deal with. Oh,

Leo Laporte (00:58:35):
There are lines. And they, and by the way, you have to surrender tripods. You have to surrender a lot of stuff.

Padre (00:58:41):
Unless,

Leo Laporte (00:58:42):
Unless you know, somebody knows fabric.

Iain Thomson (00:58:47):
I'm trying to remember Thees under Paris. We went down there in the No, that's

Padre (00:58:51):
What this is. That's what that this I

Leo Laporte (00:58:52):
Would love.

Iain Thomson (00:58:53):
That was quite

Leo Laporte (00:58:54):
Something to do. This. Oh my gosh. I wish I'd known.

Padre (00:58:58):
Well, why have you go back? I just, I just recently found out that one of the tunnels on our property actually connects, is adjacent to the tunnels there.

Leo Laporte (00:59:05):
Wow.

Padre (00:59:06):
So I just knocked through the wall a little bit and

Leo Laporte (00:59:09):
Yeah. I don't know why this is not a picture of the pope, but I think this is

Brianna Wu (00:59:13):
<Laugh>. This is not, this

Leo Laporte (00:59:14):
Is my, this

Brianna Wu (00:59:15):
Is off

Leo Laporte (00:59:15):
Topic. This is my Diablo character. That's No, no. Is that not one ugly brute? That's

Padre (00:59:19):
Francis. I

Brianna Wu (00:59:20):
Think you could have done better. That's

Leo Laporte (00:59:21):
An ugly, ugly brute.

Brianna Wu (00:59:24):
I like the hat. You should get that hat

Leo Laporte (00:59:25):
And wear the studio like deep into that game now. Yeah. Dark. I'm not that far along. It is. So it's

Brianna Wu (00:59:31):
Very culty.

Leo Laporte (00:59:33):
Really. It, as good as people say it is, it's Diablo. If you played the Ablo three, it's just like, yeah. Except I played like 15 minutes and got, I got tired of dying. I got tired of Justm smash, smash smash, smash, smash, smash Smash. Definitely. It really is a slot machine. I realized we were talking a couple of weeks ago with Ashley Sket on the show. She's, she's like World three. She's a top tier. 60, whatever. Oh my goodness. She played a lot of it. And I said, it's just a slot machine. You keep pushing the button until you get loot and then you go somewhere else and you push the button a bunch till you get loot. Yeah. Right. It's more about, that's mechanics of it. There's not a lot of

Brianna Wu (01:00:04):
Strategy. It's more about No, no, no. I, I completely disagree with that. It's about optimizing your build at the highest levels for really high level content. And then farming certain rare elements

Leo Laporte (01:00:15):
By getting loot <laugh>.

Brianna Wu (01:00:17):
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. But it's, the fun is all in how you do your build. That game is so dark. Like I love horror movies.

Leo Laporte (01:00:24):
It's grimmer than it's ever been before.

Brianna Wu (01:00:25):
It's really all the other Diablos are just cartoons. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Like this is seriously unsettling.

Leo Laporte (01:00:32):
Yeah. Yeah. So horror movie type. It really

Brianna Wu (01:00:33):
Is. Wow. It really is. See, I'm

Leo Laporte (01:00:35):
The best. See, I'm not big on that.

Brianna Wu (01:00:37):
Well, don't play this game. You're not gonna like it.

Leo Laporte (01:00:41):
Is it grimmer than Eldon Ring?

Brianna Wu (01:00:45):
Yeah. Sort of.

Leo Laporte (01:00:46):
Is it more grindy than Lost Souls or Dark Souls?

Brianna Wu (01:00:50):
Yes, definitely. Oh,

Leo Laporte (01:00:51):
It's definitely, it's just, that's all it, that's what Diablo is. Just grinding. Yeah. Just see, I don't, I'm not a fan of like, it's fun grinding though. Cause it's so grim. Ooh, <laugh>. I have to say there's a lot more story they have used their time and probably AI to generate a lot backstory. A lot of NPCs, a lot of stuff going on. In fact, I, I realized don't talk to anybody. They're gonna give you a jo a job. Then pretty soon you got all these quests. If you talk to anybody, you know, my father died in the planes a hundred years ago and we still trying to get the keys to the house. Are are all the quests procedurally generated?

Brianna Wu (01:01:29):
No, I think they're scripted, but they're also depressing cuz you show up and it's like, oh, your father died in a ritual suicide. Watch him just kill himself right in

Leo Laporte (01:01:38):
Front of you. Yeah. It's pretty horribles. Yeah. Yeah. It's pretty horrible. I mean, that's pretty normal that, that happens. Speaking of horrible, it looks like Canada is gonna pass C 18. Boo. No. Boy. Wow. And already Meta has said, well, if C 18 passes, which is a link tax, basically this is, this is the one where they did it in Australia. It'll back down like they did in Australia. I did. They, so this came outta Rupert Murdoch who said, you know, Hey mate, you're linking to my content. You ought to gimme some money for that. To which Google says, we're driving all the traffic to your content mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. And you want us to pay you anyway. Legislatures being legislatures get involved. In the case of Canada it's, it's now a law. The government says Google and other companies will have to pay for showing links to news sites.

Iain Thomson (01:02:31):
Blame Canada.

Leo Laporte (01:02:33):
Meta has already said, well, no more news for you Canada in mm-hmm. <Affirmative> in, in any of our feeds. And Google has just announced that they are in fact going to remove links to Canadian news. Now see, how is this good for your, if you're, you know, the Toronto Globe and Mail, they're gonna remove links in search news and discover products. You'll no longer be able to operate the, the Google News Showcase in Canada. So that's gone. Google's basically said, bye-bye.

Iain Thomson (01:03:03):
Yeah. Okay. So someone on the coal face for this, it's not as bad as it sounds. It all depends on, on your readership model. So for example, so

Leo Laporte (01:03:12):
You get traffic that's not referred from the search

Iain Thomson (01:03:15):
Engines. We get about less than double digit traffic from Facebook. We get less than a third of our traffic from Google. We get a bunch of direct people because they love the site. They come directly to us. Now. Yeah. If

Leo Laporte (01:03:29):
You're running, I can't tell you how, if

Iain Thomson (01:03:30):
You're running

Leo Laporte (01:03:30):
A few times, I've seen register, do the register.com. Oh yeah.

Iain Thomson (01:03:33):
Try find us on Techmeme. We're rarer than a Virgin in Manchester. But you know, I mean, it's just like,

Leo Laporte (01:03:39):
I don't know anything about Manchester, but I'm guessing that's fairly rare. But I know, I, like I said, I went to the front page today cuz we were looking for Twitter story. Yeah. But normally I just see links or that I follow. And you're right, you're not on Tech meme. You would be referred a lot by Tech meme if Yeah,

Iain Thomson (01:03:55):
No, I mean, for some reason they've got it. They've, they've got something. They don't believe in it with us. But I mean, it's like, it depends how you've,

Leo Laporte (01:04:01):
But that hurts. You build model revenue that hurts you. If Google search doesn't show you, if meta doesn't show you, if tech meme doesn't

Iain Thomson (01:04:07):
Show we actually got revenue from then taking our copy and publishing it, which it's kind of reasonable enough, then, you know, we wouldn't have a problem with it as it is. So we survive. We do as we do.

Leo Laporte (01:04:20):
That's kind of what happened in Australia, which is Yeah. And I, Murdoch's publications and all the others got together with Google and negotiated a fee. Yeah.

Iain Thomson (01:04:28):
Particularly, exactly the same thing will happen in Canada. Okay.

Leo Laporte (01:04:31):
This

Padre (01:04:31):
Is, I mean, they tried it in Spain, remember Spain that was running for eight years. Yeah. And the Spanish publishers were saying, no, you owe us money. They actually levied a mandated payment. And then Google said, okay, we're gonna stop. Yeah. We're shutting down Google, Spain. Yeah. And they did for two years. And then finally they came back that Spain changed the law. No mandatory payments. And they, because they realized they're actually providing us a service. Same thing's gonna happen in Canada. There's going to be some publishers who are gonna stick to their guns because they are insistent that they were. Right. And the other publishers are gonna look at the bottom line and say, wait a minute, did is this really what we wanted?

Iain Thomson (01:05:03):
We see, I think there's a difference in, in terms of market, because Australia and Canada are much bigger markets than Spain will ever be. There is a very limited market for Spanish language new, well, for European Spanish language news. That's true. Let's put it that way. Whereas Candor Australia, they've got a bit more clout. It all depends whether or not they hang together or hang separately.

Brianna Wu (01:05:27):
So, I mean, look, I I truly don't have strong policy positions on this, but just to play a little bit of a devil's advocate mm-hmm. <Affirmative> here. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, you know, the reality is Google is one of the largest companies in the entire world and they have built a, a revenue model that's about value extraction. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> from a lot of different parts of the industry. I can tell you, as someone who runs a ton of ads and will run literally hundreds of thousands, if not a million dollars in ads for 2024, you know, we give them and Facebook a lot of money cuz their ad tools are the very best in the business. Yep. They've built a, essentially a monopoly or duly, I think would be fair to say. That makes it very hard for smaller people in this phase to, to thrive. So don't you think, maybe this is not the answer, but, you know, Leo, coming back to the hackers like motto that you were putting up earlier. If you look at what went wrong with that vision, it was the big companies like Google and Facebook kind of interceding

Leo Laporte (01:06:30):
And extracting all the value possible out of the, out of the internet

Brianna Wu (01:06:33):
And Balkanizing. Yeah. Like certain parts of the, I know you shouldn't say that word today, but you, you know what I mean? Like, segmenting off the internet and why

Leo Laporte (01:06:40):
Can't say Balkanizing. That's historic. Yes.

Brianna Wu (01:06:42):
It's supposed to be offensive in some way to people in

Leo Laporte (01:06:45):
The

Brianna Wu (01:06:45):
Balkans. Apparently. I, I don't

Leo Laporte (01:06:47):
Wanna get into, I apologize to her friends in the Balkans. Oh, I thought you said Vulcanizing or treating like that.

Brianna Wu (01:06:52):
Very offensive. Very offensive.

Leo Laporte (01:06:54):
So I, this is, to me, this is, so I just searched for the headline of your article about a Google, which we're gonna get to true Brian. Yeah. and I find the link to the register. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, I see a snippet. The snippet is not long. It's not even a f it's not even three sentences. It's two and a half Google accused ripping off advertisers with video ads. No one saw Now the expert view. That's it. Yes. And if I wanna read more, I'm gonna click that link. I don't think they're stealing anything from you with that snippet.

Iain Thomson (01:07:24):
No. But they are taking advantage of content with that they had no input into. Right.

Leo Laporte (01:07:29):
How are they taking advantage? They're giving me searching for this story a little bit so I know what that article's gonna be. And

Iain Thomson (01:07:35):
We are giving you we are giving them a reason for them to look at your side.

Leo Laporte (01:07:40):
Yeah. But I'm gonna click your link. I mean, the only reason this would be costly to you is if I read the snippet and then said, oh, that's plenty and, and didn't go to your site. Mm. But this doesn't give me enough to do

Iain Thomson (01:07:52):
That. They have improved a lot on that. But at the same time, you know, it's, well, look, we

Leo Laporte (01:07:57):
Don't, they're dri are, I mean they are driving traffic to you

Iain Thomson (01:08:01):
Within a limited format. Yes. And they're also benefiting enormously from that traffic themselves.

Leo Laporte (01:08:06):
Well, their service is

Iain Thomson (01:08:08):
Search. They're not news of their own home.

Leo Laporte (01:08:09):
They're doing a search engine and it to do a search engine. Engine

Iain Thomson (01:08:11):
Search engine collects data on the people that do the searches, which pays for Google's bills. Right. You know, it's kind of like you can't build, as you put it, the best advertising engine in the world. Right. Unless you've got a hell of a lot of user data. That's exactly right. And they get that user data from registered readers, from people that go through their site to the register.

Brianna Wu (01:08:30):
I is so specific that I use that information with list matching to like, find out what articles they've read, what they're interested in. Like it is truly, when you dig down into it, it

Iain Thomson (01:08:42):
Terrify. Oh, it's, it's, yeah. Fairly terrifying. Disturbing.

Brianna Wu (01:08:44):
So look, I'm not, I I truly don't have a strong opinion one way or the other. I just think at some point we're going to have to reckon with a tech industry that is built in a way that about three or four companies can really succeed and everyone else is fighting for their life. It seems to me this is having,

Iain Thomson (01:09:03):
It's the American way. Do

Leo Laporte (01:09:05):
You think b do you think Bing should pay you for a link to the register?

Iain Thomson (01:09:09):
Being a kind of you know, that's kind of like

Leo Laporte (01:09:12):
Really, but they're doing the same thing. They're just not doing it as well.

Iain Thomson (01:09:15):
Yeah. No, that's, they're not doing it as well. But

Leo Laporte (01:09:17):
I mean, search engine, we need search engines, right. Of the internet is pretty much unusable.

Iain Thomson (01:09:23):
Well, I've gotta say Google's pretty much unusable over the

Leo Laporte (01:09:26):
Last, I I say I agree that Google has become worse and worse search

Padre (01:09:29):
Engine. Well, I mean, that's why I only use Bing

Leo Laporte (01:09:32):
Or Duck Ducks. Say you duck, duck talking

Padre (01:09:34):
About that. I, I like Bing.

Leo Laporte (01:09:36):
I dunno if Bing is, well, I don't know. Let's see.

Padre (01:09:39):
I, I like, I just like dividing my information among different giants. Yeah.

Brianna Wu (01:09:44):
I like the the ai part of Bing is really, really impressive. Yes. I really enjoy.

Iain Thomson (01:09:51):
Same with, well this, this is funny. I mean, that's funny

Leo Laporte (01:09:53):
Because Bing is actually taking your article and putting it under bing.com/news. I presume they pay you for that or no.

Iain Thomson (01:10:00):
News to me if they do.

Leo Laporte (01:10:01):
Yeah. Okay. The analytics report contends Google's truth. They give their snippet has a lot more information. Yeah. Gives advertisers less value because contrary to the chocolate, they even got the chocolate factory.

Iain Thomson (01:10:11):
I mean, I guess we could sue Microsoft, but that tends to have a fairly short half-life after company's survival, you know? No,

Leo Laporte (01:10:18):
I'm sure Google is a equal amount of clout. I am.

Iain Thomson (01:10:21):
It's the search engine that goes bing.

Leo Laporte (01:10:23):
Yeah.

Brianna Wu (01:10:25):
I feel like everybody likes to dis bing. I mean, it has grown into a pretty, it's it's snow bad. It's not a rounding year,

Iain Thomson (01:10:31):
I'll say up there. Yeah,

Brianna Wu (01:10:33):
What I'm saying as far as being a profitable company, I

Padre (01:10:35):
Mean, I've got 190,000 Bing points. Oh, good for you. I no idea. I wanna get t-shirt. It's point. No, I think I could get like a $5 gift certificate to Olive Garden.

Iain Thomson (01:10:47):
<Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:10:48):
The breadsticks are not free though for people using the certificate. It's just so true. You know? That's true. I

Iain Thomson (01:10:53):
Can say I tried an Olive Garden once. Never again <laugh> that and white cast. It's

Brianna Wu (01:10:57):
Not got that.

Iain Thomson (01:10:58):
No Olive Garden, taco Bell and white cast. I'm sorry.

Leo Laporte (01:11:01):
Things that should, we've got a reservation tonight for the Olive Garden. I thought

Padre (01:11:04):
I I, I may, I may have taken an Olive Garden, signed back to Rome <laugh>. Really? And I put it in the cafe in the, on the ground floor, probably <laugh>. They had no idea what it was. But I just, I was like waiting for tourists to go by and go. Tourists

Leo Laporte (01:11:18):
Would go. What? There's an olive garden in Rome.

Padre (01:11:21):
Wow. That's so great. Hey, when you eat there, you're family. Well,

Iain Thomson (01:11:25):
<Laugh> I do love though, in Vienna, when Michael when McDonald's opened their first Microsoft McDonald's in the old town for the, the one and only time ever, they had to avoid, they had to stop double arches because it's, they put it on a main tourist street. Oh, <laugh>. Where the buildings are. So That's right. Locked down in design. It's just a tiny little McDonald's in one corner.

Leo Laporte (01:11:49):
The, the McDonald's in Rome, there's quite a few in Rome, but the one near the Spanish steps is actually pretty cool. It's really nice. Really? Yes. Because they had to make it fit in

Iain Thomson (01:12:01):
To the, to the local architecture.

Leo Laporte (01:12:02):
The local architecture on all that. Did you go pink? Let's see. The Piazza, the, the Spana they

Padre (01:12:09):
Sell beer at McDonald's in Italy.

Leo Laporte (01:12:12):
Yeah, they do. They sell beer at every, everywhere in Italy. So kind of looks like a McDonald's. It still looks like a McDonald's, doesn't it? Yeah. I like the outdoor seating though. That's kind of nice. The

Padre (01:12:21):
Nuggets are actually better in Italy than they are. Are they? The

Leo Laporte (01:12:24):
United States?

Padre (01:12:25):
And I don't know what it

Leo Laporte (01:12:26):
Is. Who would go to Italy and have a Mc McCafe. That's my,

Padre (01:12:29):
No, the coffee in McDonald's is terrible. <Laugh>. It's even here. It's terrible. But especially in Rome, don't

Leo Laporte (01:12:36):
Do it.

Iain Thomson (01:12:36):
They just, right. Did Domino's actually try and set up franchises in Italy? They,

Padre (01:12:41):
Oh God.

Leo Laporte (01:12:42):
Oh no.

Iain Thomson (01:12:43):
There's hubris for You're coming Simmons?

Padre (01:12:46):
No. In Germany station, there is a pizza making robot. It makes horrible, horrible pizza. God pizza. The only reason why people use it is cause they like to see it. Yeah. Work. That's it. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:12:56):
Oh my goodness. Yeah, the we were talking about earlier, the Tazo Doro, which is mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, one of the oldest coffee shops in the world. They kind of the home of espressos in, in Rome. And the story is that Howard Schultz, the CEO of Starbucks, had a coffee there and said, you know, what we need in America is we need coffee shops. But Rome has to this day, famously forbid Starbucks from opening. Oh no. A store in Rome. There is one. There's one in Milan.

Padre (01:13:22):
No, there's one. So there's one in Milan. There's one in Rome. What? It's at Termine station.

Leo Laporte (01:13:26):
Oh, it's at the train station. Ah, okay. I don't know if

Iain Thomson (01:13:28):
That counts. Actually. I'm still amazed at the, it was the first McDonald's path behind the salesman wasn't shot the minute he, that foot in front <laugh>. Cause it was just like

Leo Laporte (01:13:36):
In, in Portugal, the McDonald's have harmoni Baro in the Yes, yes. Sandwiches. Really tenish ham in the

Padre (01:13:45):
Hamburg. I had to fly through Spain a couple of weeks ago and they have a hamo Barco in the vending machines in the airport. I'm thinking that's a bit much. That's like,

Iain Thomson (01:13:55):
Listen, when you do something that good, you really wanna spread it around it. Really.

Padre (01:13:59):
So I want all three of you just to do a travel show. <Laugh>. I was totally

Leo Laporte (01:14:04):
In search of the perfect, in the

Iain Thomson (01:14:06):
Perfect fair. Patrick gets Italy, I get Britain. It's like, ah, here's fish and ships. He has bangers

Leo Laporte (01:14:11):
And

Iain Thomson (01:14:11):
Rice. You know,

Padre (01:14:12):
It's like when they have Harmon at the Vatican market, it's ridiculously inexpensive. It's like, it's cheaper than McDonald's.

Iain Thomson (01:14:20):
What is the cbo? I don't know what that is. I mean, I remember going to Venice and they good wine though, which ridiculously low. Yes, yes, yes. If you bought your own bottle for Philip, you could, you know

Padre (01:14:34):
So the Vatican market, there's no tax. And they get a, so for example, if you buy a, there was a really nice bottle of wine that someone wanted me to get. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, it was gonna be like 350 euros at the specialty market. I went to the Vatican market, it was 12 euro. I I have no idea how that works. But

Iain Thomson (01:14:51):
You don't have to pay any duty crossing the border or anything like that. No. Right. Okay. Rome it is then <laugh>. How do they not have huge, I mean, particularly in Italy, how do they not have huge market stools stacked with cigarettes? They're going, they

Padre (01:15:02):
Used to, so the market used to sell cigarettes. And oddly enough, a place with a thousand people population was buying enough cigarettes for like a hundred thousand

Iain Thomson (01:15:12):
<Laugh>. Oh my gosh.

Padre (01:15:13):
And it, Pope Francis was the one who came in and he says, look, we all know what's happening here. Yeah. It has to stop. Wow. At first it's a vice. Secondly, we're essentially supporting money laundering. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:15:23):
Oh wow.

Padre (01:15:24):
So they, he, he killed

Iain Thomson (01:15:25):
It. It is the kind of behavior that Jesus would've bitten, beaten people outta the temple with. It

Leo Laporte (01:15:29):
Rose. True. It's one of the things though, that Lisa doesn't like about Rome is the wide smoking. Widespread smoking, everyone smokes. They don't smoke inside, but they're all standing right at the, everyone's outside, outside the door. Yeah. That's gross. Google accused of ripping off advertisers says they're register with video ads no one sees. So this is a special Google thing called true View.

Iain Thomson (01:15:52):
Yeah. Basically you'll farm these ads out to third party sites, and they're listed as being viewed and viewable and,

Leo Laporte (01:15:58):
But they're hidden.

Iain Thomson (01:15:59):
It appears so in some cases, and Google wasn't too keen to make a, you know, much of a, a fuss about this. But now other people are

Leo Laporte (01:16:08):
Some of the, some folks who've bought those True view ads want their money back. Yeah. for that. You know, normally in a skippable ad, you don't have to pay if somebody skips the ad, you don't have to pay. The problem is somebody can skip the ad if they can't see it. Yeah. So these ads are playing through in the background. In the background.

Iain Thomson (01:16:29):
The amount of fraud in the ad industry is already massive. Oh, it's

Padre (01:16:32):
Terrible. Yeah. I mean, Facebook built beat Google the, that. Yeah. They were, they were playing multiple ads at the same time that you couldn't see. But,

Iain Thomson (01:16:38):
And also counted a video as seen. Exactly. If you watched it for three seconds, <laugh>,

Leo Laporte (01:16:43):
Google disputes this, and you have this in your article mm-hmm. <Affirmative> saying they got it wrong. And 90% of the ads on these sites are visible to people across the web. Google has strict enforced policies for third party partners and they support third party verification from other companies like Moat and Double Verify. So, to be

Padre (01:17:04):
Fair to Google, they're a good percentage of, this is probably

Leo Laporte (01:17:08):
Not

Padre (01:17:08):
Their fault. Extensions that are running on, on web browsers to, to block popups and block videos and autoplay.

Leo Laporte (01:17:14):
Well get ready. You YouTube

Iain Thomson (01:17:17):
<Laugh>, that's the

Leo Laporte (01:17:19):
Segue has decided that they wanna start blocking ad blockers. And they are testing right now. A number of people posted this on Reddit ad blocker users. They're saying you can only watch three videos and then it's out. Good.

Brianna Wu (01:17:35):
I, I know it's an unpopular opinion, but I think you've gotta support the, the media. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:17:40):
I completely agree.

Padre (01:17:41):
I'm okay with this. Yeah. I I, people are

Leo Laporte (01:17:42):
Okay with this are hugely upset because Google is trying to block ad blockers, but they want Google for free. A hundred percent. You're basically stealing it. Youtube.

Iain Thomson (01:17:52):
Right. There was a sign also that Google getting smart about this because they didn't say, well, okay, you should therefore subscribe to Premium. They said you should subscribe to YouTube Premium so that some of the funds that you send in will actually go to the advert. That's a much, much more compelling

Leo Laporte (01:18:07):
Argument. Give us money, add free with YouTube premium. And creators can still get paid from your subscription.

Brianna Wu (01:18:13):
Yeah. Though they do not get paid that much.

Leo Laporte (01:18:15):
Like well, they get paid enough. Mr. Beast makes $40 million a year on YouTube. Yeah.

Brianna Wu (01:18:20):
That's through a side deals. I mean, I was looking at the, I have a friend of mine that was sharing with me the analytics that he gets. And you can have a, a video with a million views and get paid less than $2,000 for it. Yeah. Yeah. So it's

Leo Laporte (01:18:33):
I do, I run, I pay for YouTube premium. I do too. I, I turned off YouTube music once and every, and my family came screaming to me saying, <laugh>, what did you, what have you done? And it wasn't the music, it was the videos. Youtube I think is almost unwatchable without either an ad blocker or premium.

Iain Thomson (01:18:51):
I watch it without either. And you

Leo Laporte (01:18:53):
Don't mind the ads really?

Iain Thomson (01:18:54):
No. I mean, honestly, if it's a site where I'm trying to support the site, like this one I, I watch called Adventures of an Old Seadog about a pension who's sail around the world. So you know,

Leo Laporte (01:19:03):
That ad go to the old

Iain Thomson (01:19:05):
Seadog, I'll, I'll cheerfully sit through Yeah. And do something else while the advert is playing <laugh>. You know, and you not

Leo Laporte (01:19:11):
Actually watching the ad. You No, of course not. Okay. I,

Brianna Wu (01:19:14):
I completely disagree. I think YouTube like, look, my money I spend every month on Hulu. Maybe that's a good deal. Maybe it's not. But then, but YouTube

Leo Laporte (01:19:23):
It definitely YouTube.

Brianna Wu (01:19:24):
Yeah. Yeah. That is the highest value I get from any subscription

Padre (01:19:27):
Service. I just wish Yeah. Because I, if it's, if it's a content maker that I enjoy, I will sit through the ads. Sure. Yeah. 100%. I wish there was a way to set up YouTube so that it would front load them. Right. I I would prefer that you give me six ads in a row

Leo Laporte (01:19:43):
And then let me watch the video and then

Padre (01:19:44):
Let me watch and think about it than taking a break every three

Iain Thomson (01:19:46):
Months. Yeah, yeah. No, that is really annoying.

Brianna Wu (01:19:48):
Yeah. But that's why YouTube premium is worth it. So much in information is in YouTube nowadays. Like it is truly the public comment. That would be great. It's like everything from how, like from working on Porsche restoration project and trying to find some rare documentation, YouTube video. Right? Absolutely. If you're studying for this show, YouTube video. Yeah. Political coverage, YouTube, video, rare music, YouTube.

Leo Laporte (01:20:12):
You know what? Yeah. I used of the pronunciation of companies that get cute with the spelling of Oh yeah, we do that all the time. That's, I have to go watch their, their video just to find, how do you pronounce your name? Yeah. So, but we're in a similar position where we offer a free product. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, if you watch the, if you are willing to put up with ads and for seven bucks a month, you don't have to have the ads in our club.

Iain Thomson (01:20:32):
No, that's

Leo Laporte (01:20:32):
Fair enough. Honestly, that's the only Tenable way to survive. Sure. Mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, I'm always amazed by people who say, well, I don't, I don't want ads and I don't want to pay, I just want it for free. That's why my, I'm a loyal fan. I'm a loyal fan and I love you, Lee. I know I'm, I'm talking about qui, but just in general, that that's why the internet doesn't work. That's why Randy's doing what it's doing is cuz people want free, free, free without answer. Now the

Iain Thomson (01:20:56):
Number of emails I will get from just like, I come to your site and I pay your wages, you should write this <laugh>. And it was just like, really? You'll pay.

Brianna Wu (01:21:04):
I'm sorry about that. By the way,

Leo Laporte (01:21:07):
<Laugh>,

Iain Thomson (01:21:08):
Are you the writing style with it was

Leo Laporte (01:21:11):
Frank. Frank was really the one who was saying Frank was very upset about he does an all in caps. That's how you know, right. That's the

Brianna Wu (01:21:16):
Dividend. Okay. But just to be devil's advocate on this, you know, so look, I am on record. I think Jack Dorsey took a left turn somewhere. <Laugh> not maybe at the best of his thinking right now, but you know, a lot of the stuff he's working on with some of his alternate things, it is this, you know, web 3.0 vision, whatever they're calling it where it is. Micro transactions, Bitcoin, like thinking about Ping as you go for content with these ultra micro transactions. Yeah. So I don't

Leo Laporte (01:21:46):
Believe, has it crypto been poisoned at this point though?

Brianna Wu (01:21:49):
Look, I'm not a crypto advocate, but I'm saying this is someone that's thinking about trying to that problem. Yeah. Do you think there's any validity there in a model like that? Like, I know intuitively it's wrong. Well, we

Leo Laporte (01:22:01):
Gotta do something right? Because we want Reddit, we want Twitter sense. Yeah, we want YouTube. Apparently people aren't satisfied with either watching ads or paying for it. So maybe there is some, you

Iain Thomson (01:22:11):
Know, the weird thing I've noticed though in the last year is that micropayments are working for a certain kind of, I don't want to use the well, S h i t poster <laugh>. Someone who will go round and broadcast themselves, insulting people and will get tips from people as they do it. <Laugh>, that's working. Wait a minute.

Leo Laporte (01:22:29):
That's

Iain Thomson (01:22:32):
Missed

Brianna Wu (01:22:32):
My calling.

Iain Thomson (01:22:36):
Well, you know, the really big, big ones are the really racist and, and homophobic ones.

Leo Laporte (01:22:40):
And people pay them to do that.

Iain Thomson (01:22:42):
They'll pay tips on, on a show. Oh,

Leo Laporte (01:22:45):
Well what? It's just that I honestly, that's why so many weird, it's kind of like the free winging broadcasts exist AM radio discovered. This you, the only way to make any money in AM radio, which is a failing medium, is to have ex extreme right wing content on it, starting with Rush Limbaugh. And then it's gotten worse and worse and worse. And people are so devoted to that content. They will stick around. They will.

Iain Thomson (01:23:10):
Well, I mean, there was a lovely quote from biographer of Rupert Murdoch where he said, if you could do Fox News, but for the left, would you do it? And he goes, if we could, but we can't cheap

Leo Laporte (01:23:19):
Skates on the left. That's the problem.

Padre (01:23:21):
So wait, hold on. No, you, you get paid for extremist posts. Extremist tweets. You're telling me that I could get paid for the nine out of 10 tweets that I don't send because I look at it and go, <laugh>. No, that's, that's too

Brianna Wu (01:23:32):
Much. That's money You're leaving on the

Leo Laporte (01:23:33):
Paper. That's the problem is the money you're getting is from extremists. You leave with that.

Padre (01:23:36):
Yeah. Well, I mean,

Leo Laporte (01:23:38):
I'll take their

Padre (01:23:39):
Money. I'm a Jesuit. I could, I could figure some sort of

Iain Thomson (01:23:42):
Justification. They're life from the Vaskin. Now we have swearing, there's,

Padre (01:23:45):
There's spiritual laundering as well. You know, I can move

Leo Laporte (01:23:49):
A couple of, of intermediaries. There's a long history of that. So

Brianna Wu (01:23:52):
What about this as a revenue model? So as I've been really, really researching for my job you know, kick and Twitch and rumble and all these platforms, one way they support their shows. This is really interesting to me. There's a major show,

Leo Laporte (01:24:06):
Gamble, gambling, <laugh>

Brianna Wu (01:24:07):
Not, not gambling. This is actually ethical I think. Okay. So Super Chats are a non-trivial part of a lot of, of these large streamers. Revenue. So the way it works is you have a fan out there that's watching your show live, right. And they really, really, really want to have their say on it. So they will spend, you know, a hundred, 200, $500 to have you read a message from them in the middle of your show. And then it's pinned to the top of your live chat as you're going. I think this is an interesting model because it's audience participation, you know, that you have skin in the game.

Leo Laporte (01:24:43):
I kind of don't like, well I mean, I guess that we're doing this club Twi don't, yeah. I kind of don't like something that I feel like everybody who consumes the content should support the content. Sure. And I'm not sure, I like a system that says only the most extremist, you know, people who are so devoted super fans, they have to pay for it, but I guess they're willing to. Yeah. So that's the advantage of it. It

Brianna Wu (01:25:06):
Tends to be thoughtful comments,

Leo Laporte (01:25:08):
At least in my experience. I would say that's what club Twitter is, is for super fans. Yeah. Right. If you're a super fan that's an interesting Yeah,

Iain Thomson (01:25:15):
Of course. Say also that doesn't quite work as well with the Twitter verified tick. Where it's just like, yeah, I'm gonna pay for that. That's gonna get promoted and the quality of content has gone down drastically. Yeah. But with something like Club Twitter, people care, they wanna pay. Fair enough. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:25:31):
Sure. I guess there's nothing wrong with that. I mean, cuz most, to be honest, I mean, only 1% of our audience pays 99% get to benefit. Well, let see, we still have those ads. So that's, there's revenue in that. And speaking of which, let's take a break. <Laugh>, I gotta do an ad. I'm never gonna get this in an an hour and a half. We only have seven minutes left. <Laugh> never gonna happen. You guys are too good. Your silver tongue devils. Ian Thompson is here from the register.com. Brianna Woo from the rebellion rebellion pack.com. I just was on the rise of the rebellion ride at Disneyland. Oh, it's so

Brianna Wu (01:26:09):
Good. So good. It's so the best ride at

Leo Laporte (01:26:11):
Disney. And I thought of the rebellion pack the whole time. I don't know why

Brianna Wu (01:26:14):
We could sponsor them. <Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:26:16):
You should. And from the Vatican where there are some excellent rides I might add. Father Robert Baer Lee, are you driving an Audi right now? No. Why? <Laugh> Stop it. Unlocked Stop it. Okay. Just checking. <Laugh> already. He's hacking the parking lot. Our show today brought to you by decisions. In today's digital landscape, businesses are faced with an overwhelming number of tools and systems that are necessary to operate effectively. How hard is it to manage all these disparate tools, making sure they work together seamlessly? That could be a daunting task. That's where decisions really can help you. Decisions serves as the ultimate orchestrator for it. And industry experts providing a unified platform for businesses to manage their digital infrastructure By automating routine tasks, customizing workflows, decisions helps businesses reduce operational costs, improve customer service, and streamline their overall processes in a constantly evolving digital landscape where innovations happen on the fringe, adaptability is crucial to staying ahead of the game.

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(01:29:34):
Visit decisions.com/twit. That's decisions.com/twit. All right, you all got to go to get refreshments. I'm stuck here. I got to meet your dog, Lily. It's my, it's Burke's dog. Actually, I hope Burke a big debt of gratitude because I we can do the story. Now I got a call a few months ago from a guy I'd worked with on MSNBC's the site. He was an NBC vice president. He produced executive, produced the site. He actually is kind of, was a legend in broadcasting. He he produced Don Imus's TV show. Don famously used to call him Moose, but Borman, oh my god. <Laugh>. He was he in an affectionate way, I'm sure affectionately, affectionately. He was an original staffer on Nightline. Became executive producer at ABC created World News now, which the GI Wiz is a regular on.

(01:30:36):
Probably you would know his work best at cnn. Do you remember the, the holographic correspondent? Yes. On election night? Yes. He invented that. He was very technical guy. He was, he was a very, very smart fellow. He did news night with Aaron Brown. He worked for vice President Gore. He actually ran Gore's current tv when he was at current tv. He created the Young Turks. Okay. Which you might have heard of. I worked with Jake, yeah. Yes. Serial entrepreneur. Yeah. he had been working as a consultant for many years. He lived up a little ways in Healdsburg. I knew him because he I worked with him at the site. He'd helped develop the site. I've told many stories about him. He was a really great guy. He called me a couple of months ago and said, we're moving out of this beautiful house in the wine country down to Palo Alto.

(01:31:30):
And I am getting rid of memorabilia and I have the original sign from the site. Oh. Which was a show we did on MSNBC from 1994. Oh, that's 96. That what that is. And it, it had, it had, it was hanging up, but it had been broken. The lights didn't work anymore. It kind of fallen apart. He said, do you want it? And he said, when you're done with it, I've promised it to the Computer History Museum. They want to put it there. So this was a show for this when MSNBC launched, it was a joint venture of NBC and Microsoft. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. They came to Zif Davis and said, we need a technology show if we're gonna be. So I, I went out to 30 Rock and presented along with a bunch of other Zif Davis people, a show that we wanted to do.

(01:32:09):
I wrote the long 95 page treatment and it got the site on the air and I was there for the launching. I was I was, that's where I got Miami for the virtual character. Mm-Hmm. I played Dev Noll with Soled out. O'brien was the anchor. So I said, yes, we'll come up. Jerry Wagley, who was our chief operations officer, had just got his Ford pickup, his new electric Ford pickup, the Lightning. And so we drove up, we got it, brought it down here, and I gave it to Burke saying, I said, Burke, can you get this thing working? It's not in great shape. He opened it up. It had had, was custom made for the site. Mm. NBC probably spent $20,000 on this thing. He, Borman told me, he said, we, we did the pilot and and Andy lacks the, the head of, as NBC News called up and said, you need a sign, <laugh>, that thing make, get a sign made for the show.

(01:33:01):
So that was basically, I was looking behind you at the moment. Cart blanche. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We have a big gear. We have a sign. He said cart blanche to do whatever he wants. So he built this sign. It had, it was custom made fluorescent lighting all the way around cuz fluorescent was all we had in those days. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, when we got at the fluorescent bulbs were very Miami voice. Yeah. Burke took it apart. He has been spending many hours fixing this because, sad to say Boorman, David Boorman passed away at the age of 69 last Sunday. Oh very. Yeah. I was very young. He was a really talented producer. A smart guy. I really enjoyed knowing him and I'm very grateful. So, Burke, I said, Burke, I'd love to talk about David on Twitter this Sunday.

(01:33:44):
Can you get the sign working? And, and John, you said he was up till midnight every night for the last Oh wow. Three, three nights. And now it shines and there's the sight. We haven't hung it. I, he said, I get it working, but hanging it is gonna, it's very heavy and we wanna make sure it's safe. It doesn't fall on the in's head. So, so I'm, I'm very thankful about that. Thank you. <Laugh>. So it's not yet hung. We will hang it. What's the, the frame is made out of aluminum. Yeah, go ahead and touch it. It's, it's, I think you'll find that's aluminum. Oh, you just gave an opening, didn't you? It's, I don't know if it's aluminum or aluminum or lead. It's, it's, it's the thing weighs like, see several hundred pounds.

Brianna Wu (01:34:23):
This is what I'm trying to think about for iconography perspective. What you say. Is this supposed to be like Jetson's?

Leo Laporte (01:34:29):
Is it Yeah, it was the future, right? Yeah. the pitch I had made to them, which was early for its time, this is 94, was that there would be a website called The Site. And the TV show, which would be a nightly TV show, would be on the air on msnbc. But all through the day you'd be able to tune in via streaming to watch these people living together in this Victorian house. What year was this again? 94. This,

Iain Thomson (01:34:57):
That's, that's Jenny Cam level of

Leo Laporte (01:34:59):
Yeah, it was very early days. I don't know if Big Brother had launched yet or not, but I thought

Iain Thomson (01:35:03):
You'll No Big Brother launched in 1998 in Yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:35:06):
It was later. So this is Big Brother.

Iain Thomson (01:35:08):
I was, I actually thought about applying to that and my girlfriend at the time said, I will leave you instantly new

Leo Laporte (01:35:13):
On that show. Well you might have applied to this cuz you would be living in this Victorian. And I said we could have cameras on everybody. You people would tune in during the day to watch them creating the show and then turn in at night to watch the show. This was a big long pitch. And of course they cut out all that stuff and just did the show. But, and so you

Brianna Wu (01:35:29):
Realize this is just the equivalent of a hype house. You invented the TikTok Hype House, but back

Leo Laporte (01:35:35):
In the nineties. Yeah, but back in the day. So

Iain Thomson (01:35:38):
It's amazing how many people have copied it as well. Cause Sky News in the uk mm-hmm. <Affirmative> came up with the idea of putting live webcams in the news office, news meeting office. And that lasted one session, I believe, because everyone had been warned so repeatedly. Not to swear, not to swear. Not to swear that somebody just came out and swore and it was just, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I just, it was on my mind. You know, I'm

Leo Laporte (01:36:01):
British, I can't help it. That's what

Iain Thomson (01:36:03):
I loved about my set at the Brick House because I had the producer's Rowe

Leo Laporte (01:36:07):
Behind me. Right. So during the show, you'd,

Iain Thomson (01:36:10):
You see them doing their

Leo Laporte (01:36:11):
Regular thing, that, that was kind of, the site was also an open studio in that respect. Soledad was the anchor. Yeah. And you see this is the logo. It was definitely. Look at that. I was called out at Christmas 1994 to pitch them. Or maybe it was Christmas 95. Yeah. Cuz it launched in July 96 to launch this. And of course MSNBC changed format to be full news about 18 months in. So the show was canceled. But we have the sign, Burke has done an amazing job. He's put LEDs all around the rim cuz that those letters light up because of peripheral,

Iain Thomson (01:36:48):
Peripherally the light. Look

Leo Laporte (01:36:51):
It. Look at that. No. So it really is a remarkable thing. So Burke, I just wanna say your reward free snacks for the rest of your life. And, and I've got the first installment right here, Burke, come on and get it. There you go.

Brianna Wu (01:37:04):
Don't take that pepper patty though. That's mine. You

Leo Laporte (01:37:06):
Can't have that. That's mine. We do not have anything like this in Rome. They don't have a snack ball for you. You know what our snacks are

Iain Thomson (01:37:12):
Wafers bread. Yeah. That's,

Leo Laporte (01:37:15):
You can't eat the, that's illegal, but

Iain Thomson (01:37:18):
It's, it's Italian bread. I'm

Leo Laporte (01:37:21):
Gonna the spill junk

Iain Thomson (01:37:23):
Chocolate you get here, you know, it's,

Leo Laporte (01:37:25):
Anyway, David, thank you. That was a huge contribution to us. That's very cool. I'm really grateful that David remembers me so fondly. And I remember him and David, we will miss you a great television talent. His dad was a TV anchor in Los Angeles, quite famous. And so he got the bug from his dad. His dad was also a hippie. <Laugh>. There's, there's some great stories there. Someday. We'll we'll, we'll delve into

Brianna Wu (01:37:50):
Them. Do you think there's much of a, you know there's a trend I've been noticing, especially as a lot of Twitch and TikTok and Kik and all that gets to be higher and higher production values that they're doing. A lot of, they're, there are very few people that are building actual studios nowadays. Like there's a lot of green screen and compositing and stuff like that. Do you think we're ever gonna get back to a point where people are building these sophisticated sets?

Leo Laporte (01:38:14):
That's a great question. When we built this, even then, people were already doing that. Right. We, we had a TriCaster that could do virtual sets mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. And I'm a big believer, and partly because of people like David Borman, that there's something about a physical presence in a physical real space. Yep. where you can tell there's something behind 'em. In fact, in our old studio, there were windows behind us, you'd see cars go by. I remember when we first built the brick house, a listener, a viewer said, I hate this. I, I just saw somebody walk by with a spoon going to lunch. And I said, yes, because we wanna make this a real place that has a sense of place. And I think that that adds value to it. You know what, it would be a lot cheaper if we just did green screens and everybody was at home.

(01:38:59):
Right. And we didn't have to have a sense of place. It'd be a lot cheaper if we didn't do video at all, to be honest. And if I were starting to it today, maybe I'd consider those. Cuz frankly, our financial our business model is not great. <Laugh>. We, it's cost us a couple million dollars a year at least to run the, run the studio and, and pay for the staff and all that. And we could do it a lot cheaper. I love what we've done. And I loved the site. Same thing. I loved having that physical presence. Yeah. Yeah.

Brianna Wu (01:39:28):
Oh, it's special being here. Like the lights and everything. Yeah. It's definitely a different experience

Leo Laporte (01:39:33):
And it gives the panelists a sense of energy and, right. So I'm a big believer in this, but it's very expensive. It's a, you know, I, I've kinda old school,

Brianna Wu (01:39:40):
I've seen a lot of tricks. Like one of your competitors in this space had a really interesting video the other day about basically a black magic box that's built for you know, basically chroma king around people with

Padre (01:39:52):
The, that was this year, the camera movie. It's amazing.

Brianna Wu (01:39:55):
Was, it was really interesting.

Leo Laporte (01:39:55):
It, it was kinda like, what, what they do with the Mandalorian and, and the Andor, which is in the volume, they have big screens and the perspectives moves is the camera moves and you can do look at, look at the Mandalorian, look at, and or that's a fraction of the cost that it caused to make the original Star Wars moves because of that. And I think it's, everybody's good. In fact, it's better for the actors cuz the actors aren't acting against a green screen. Yep. They're at least in a space that looks like they're in mountains. Yeah. But

Padre (01:40:22):
Even with that, there's already a backlash. You've got the, the hardcore fans were saying, I'm tired of that eggshell green screen thing that they use for Mandalorian and all the new Star Wars films. I'm like, well, okay. It's amazing. Is it not sure how, how, how quickly you get jaded.

Brianna Wu (01:40:36):
Okay. But counterpoint, but card season three, <laugh>, when they went and actually built all those sets and the enterprise d actually flew again. I had, I swear a tear just went down my face just like

Padre (01:40:50):
That. I thought that was one of the big strengths of fireflies, that they actually

Iain Thomson (01:40:52):
Had the full set and everyone could get, you know, in and get that slightly claustrophobic feeling, which works.

Padre (01:40:59):
I, I was talking to David Hewitt, who was Dr. Rodney McKay in the Stargate franchise. And he was saying that when they canceled Stargate Universe mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, they were just gonna toss everything. Wow. They junked every, so he, he called the guy he knew him from, from his Stargate Atlanta station. He said, I'll be there in like three hours. I'll just take what I can. Yeah. And by the time he had gotten there, they had thrown away like 90% of, so he was able to, to get a couple of set pieces, some of the special lights and the sconces. Yeah. But he said, yeah, this is, this is normal. And it's, it's by purpose. It's not that it would cost a lot to store it. It's the producers don't want anyone making any more content with the stuff that they own. Yeah.

Iain Thomson (01:41:38):
No.

Padre (01:41:39):
Sad.

Iain Thomson (01:41:40):
Well, it kind of reminds me of, I was watching the Imitation game on the flight back from New York and it was just kinda like, it's kind of like the end of Bletchley Park where it's just like, right, we need to stop anyone knowing about this, therefore we're going to destroy it all. Yeah. Even the reputations of the people like Tommy Flowers and Alan Sheering that made it mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. So Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:41:57):
That's what made the empire so evil

Padre (01:42:00):
That they wanted to shut down all the copies.

Leo Laporte (01:42:03):
Oh, actually, no. It was the rebellion where they couldn't, they had to let those people go in to die because if they told them they knew the guy who was embedded in the empire would be, nevermind.

Brianna Wu (01:42:13):
<Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:42:14):
That's what made the rebellion so evil. You know there's a really good, I didn't this Jeremy Norman's history of information.com. Look at this. A really good piece. Yeah. We do have the death airplane.

Padre (01:42:25):
Many, many bots die for that, that fay disc.

Iain Thomson (01:42:28):
I did love the Rogue One review, I think it was Cinema Sends the did just like, if you are really into file formats, <laugh>, they take the plans, they put them on a videotape, they put them on another thing, they broadcast them again, and then they put them out.

Brianna Wu (01:42:40):
I saw that. I'm like, that's really good. Infosec. That's a good policy. Sure.

Iain Thomson (01:42:45):
Honestly, I still think Rogue One is one of the top three Star Wars films of all time. But, you know, I look

Brianna Wu (01:42:49):
The way that it worked where it had half of it on one, that's just good page tabling <laugh>, you know, so,

Leo Laporte (01:42:55):
Hey, speaking of good old days, ethernet 50 years old. Woohoo. This week,

Iain Thomson (01:42:59):
Way to feel old, you know? Wow.

Padre (01:43:02):
You know? Okay. There's an entire generation of younger geeks who don't remember a time when it was almost impossible to properly connect two computers, even if they were equipped with network hardware.

Leo Laporte (01:43:13):
Yeah. We're so spoiled in general.

Padre (01:43:15):
We're very spoiled.

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

Padre (01:43:16):
Exceptionally spoiled.

Padre (01:43:18):
Well,

Iain Thomson (01:43:18):
I mean, come on. You remember Independence Day when that as it's the weekend, but the only thing that that mat could connect to was the mothership. And you were like, I can't do that with a PC in that model. Right.

Padre (01:43:29):
Well, the, one of the, the big conference that I used to do interop for years and years, it, it was based on a foundation of engineers. Not the companies of the engineers, but the engineers. Yeah. Getting together at a cafe in Monterrey mm-hmm. <Affirmative> bringing their hardware and deciding how do we make our boxes talk to one another? We just now assume that if you buy a switch from Cisco and a switch from Juniper, that they're gonna talk to each other. No problem. But, but back then you actually had to write custom software. Yeah. And it was, it was that movement where that kind of led to, yeah, let's just do ethernet,

Leo Laporte (01:44:01):
Ethernet 50 years ago at the Xerox park, the Palo Alto Research Center. Bob Metcalf. Yeah. Look at that author to memo describing X wire, a three megabit, Woohoo, by the way, three megabits in 1973. Crazy, crazy, crazy. Yes. No one will ever need all that. A three megabyte co megabit, common bus office, inter bus office network system. It's

Iain Thomson (01:44:25):
One of those great park inventions, which we've all benefited from. And Xerox failed to do anything. Nothing.

Leo Laporte (01:44:32):
<Laugh>, what, what is the We are now I mean if you have Cat six, that's gigabit thousand woo megabits,

Padre (01:44:39):
Cat six can actually do 10 gig,

Leo Laporte (01:44:41):
10 gigabits. And are, is there anything fa We have 10 gigabit connection here.

Padre (01:44:47):
Five. Anything above that. The typically do 100 gig, but there are, there are copper like 20 gig. Right? Like 40 gig.

Leo Laporte (01:44:53):
Wow. Yeah. I

Brianna Wu (01:44:54):
Think it's so frustrating that like, if you're shopping for house, there's so, so few houses have actually invested in like, really good

Leo Laporte (01:45:02):
To buy our house.

Brianna Wu (01:45:04):
I'm going, I have one house in Boston. We

Leo Laporte (01:45:06):
Had a guy a couple of years actually. It was cuz of Covid and everybody was working from home and the kid was going to school from home. We had a guy crawl up in the attic and drop ethernet. We, we did it too. We have ethernet at every desk. Sure. we have ubiquity and we have very high speed wifi gigabit it's a, it's a nice setup. I have to say. It's

Brianna Wu (01:45:23):
Just weird how how few people, like, it feels like ethernet is less and less relevant. Right. It's harder to get,

Padre (01:45:29):
You

Leo Laporte (01:45:30):
Could still buy a house with post and tube wiring. Let me tell you. No, a hundred percent. Yeah. So it takes a while. <Laugh>. Yeah.

Iain Thomson (01:45:35):
Well you say that, but my, my mentor in the UK from PC Magazine, guy cuny got, got a rest of soul was one of the few individuals who actually managed to flag a PBX set up and run it in his house. Oh my God. And he used it for ring phones to the toilet, to the office. Oh,

Leo Laporte (01:45:50):
Was it asterisk or was it something?

Iain Thomson (01:45:53):
It was, it was just a box one. He, it was basically thing that

Padre (01:45:56):
Tricks box. Yeah. Yeah. It

Leo Laporte (01:45:57):
Was so funny. Funny. Because nobody does even tricks boxes anymore. Don't have to. That was the thing, right? Was PB

Iain Thomson (01:46:04):
This is good enough for most people. Yeah. You know, for the

Padre (01:46:07):
20%

Iain Thomson (01:46:08):
Want wired. You

Padre (01:46:09):
Know, am am I the only one who looks funny at people who call themselves true geeks? But then they say, oh yeah, I, you I've got wifi so that's all I need. I'm

Brianna Wu (01:46:16):
Totally judging them. Yeah. Right. I don't, if

Padre (01:46:18):
You don't have a wired connection, I'm just assuming you're

Brianna Wu (01:46:20):
Not serious. We dunno. You we don't know you, you can't sit with us. Wow.

Leo Laporte (01:46:25):
This is a hardcore group.

Padre (01:46:27):
No, no, but

Iain Thomson (01:46:28):
No, I'm with you. It's not true. It's kinda like if you receive a, a press release from someone with a Hotmail address. Oh yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:46:33):
That's bad.

Brianna Wu (01:46:34):
My husband has a Hotmail address. I've trying to talk and we got married for 15 years. Oh, good grief. I cannot get you to

Leo Laporte (01:46:41):
Get rid of this. That hysterical.

Padre (01:46:43):
I reopened my Juno address. <Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:46:46):
Oh, you know what that is. It's now Twe Retro. I know. It's like, oh yeah. Juno. Yeah.

Iain Thomson (01:46:53):
I wonder if I could get my old CompuServe handle back. Oh yeah. I'm pretty sure I could get my old wish. I know you remember yours. I know you know

Leo Laporte (01:46:59):
Your name. I do 75 1 0 3 comma 5 1 56. Wish

Brianna Wu (01:47:02):
I just stopped at Comper. Just, just

Leo Laporte (01:47:06):
Everyone. I'm not a number. I'm a man. UK is added again. The UK regulator stopped the Microsoft acquisition of Activision Blizzard. Yep. And now, now they're thinking maybe we should halt this Adobe acquisition of Figma.

Iain Thomson (01:47:24):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:47:26):
20 billion acquisition of a web-based design company. I don't know on what grounds, but they, they're just saying, well, maybe we're gonna have to, they said this on Friday. We're gonna have to make a deeper investigation because it could quote, reduce innovation.

Brianna Wu (01:47:42):
Well, I got

Leo Laporte (01:47:44):
Any success in technology reduces innovation.

Brianna Wu (01:47:47):
Okay. But look, do you really think, like, I spend, what is it, $50, $70 a month on stupid cloud mm-hmm. <Affirmative> services for Adobe, because I spent, you know, what was it, 15 years developing my Illustrator skills. Right. I need access to that program. I think there's another multiverse out there where Adobe did nots.

Leo Laporte (01:48:07):
No. Adobe.

Brianna Wu (01:48:07):
Yes. Acquire Macromedia. That's a good point. And they were forced to like not That's a good point. Have this monopoly in this space. No, this is it. And we are not all hemorrhaging money just to access the tools that we need. Oh.

Leo Laporte (01:48:18):
The worst

Iain Thomson (01:48:19):
With Adobe was, this

Leo Laporte (01:48:20):
Is just cause everybody hates Adobe though. I love

Brianna Wu (01:48:22):
Adobe.

Iain Thomson (01:48:22):
They make it so easy to hate.

Brianna Wu (01:48:24):
I I wanna be clear, I love Adobe. I think they have revolutionized mass parts of you don't like their business though. I I think the, I think I'm talking about very specific competition, right. Argument here that the fact that they bought Macromedia, what was that, 2000 something, 1998. Somewhere around

Iain Thomson (01:48:41):
Then, around then Yeah.

Brianna Wu (01:48:42):
Century. The fact that they bought that, they bought out the competition and that left no one else in that space to really put forward a first class quality model. Yeah. Don't text me after the show is over talking about like you know, pixel Mader, I love Pixel Mader, but it's not Photoshop, <laugh>. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And, you know

Iain Thomson (01:49:03):
For all its benefits, gimp has some serious weaknesses.

Brianna Wu (01:49:06):
A hundred percent. So you look at Figma here and here is a tool that has really become a it's a, it's a staple of graphic design. And

Leo Laporte (01:49:15):
You could make the case that Adobe bought it because it was gonna kill him. Right. Or limit competition. And so they wanted to get a Figma out of the game. Right. Because otherwise who would pay for a creative cloud

Iain Thomson (01:49:26):
License? Right. Yeah. Well, it's just the same as you know, Facebook buying up Instagram. Exactly. Just go buying up Absolutely. Everyone else. So

Leo Laporte (01:49:34):
Maybe, yeah. Maybe you UK regulator as something here.

Iain Thomson (01:49:36):
Yeah. Honestly, if you actually had some decent market regulation in this country, things would be a lot cheaper. Yeah. Telecoms, you know, it's That's true. You know, internet provision, a whole

Padre (01:49:46):
Bunch of health services. It, it's, I have to recuse myself from this discussion. Why? Because why the co-founder of Adobe was a Jesuit. Was he Which one? Chuck Ky No kidding. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Was he a priest? No, he didn't make it to, he was a priesthood. He was he was a brother. He a brother. So he didn't make it a priesthood. Yeah. He founded a multi-billion dollar company, but it's like a he himself down on that one. Know, that's an I did not know. That's an interesting story. Did

Brianna Wu (01:50:12):
You see what the the base camp guy was talking about this week as far as the Figma deal talking

Padre (01:50:16):
About?

Brianna Wu (01:50:17):
Yes. David

Padre (01:50:18):
Was talking about Hanson.

Brianna Wu (01:50:20):
How he was basically prohibiting anybody that works at Basecamp in their pipeline for using Figma. And I was really stunned by that. I'm like, if you have professionals, I think you should be able to use the tools that are best for your workflow. I found that really surprising. He thought he could get the best work from

Padre (01:50:37):
People. I have been trying to break more of our organizations away from Creative Cloud. Yeah. Because a lot of them actually can't even afford Creative Cloud. Right. Right. So like for video, finally, da Vinci is decent. It's free and you can actually buy the more advanced version. Sure. Yeah. Without having to pay a subscription. Right. For photo. It's, it's still gimp. It's, it's, yeah. Most accessible. But you know, yeah. I I I look at how much money we pay for Creative Cloud, even in our small communication shop in Rome. And it's ridiculous. Well, I mean, and this is, and it, this comes out to what you were saying in that, you know, when Adobe shifted from being able to buy the software Yeah. To having to rent it. It's, it's a massive disparities. So at one point it was actually cheap when they were still selling it in Australia. It was cheaper to fly from Los Angeles <laugh>, I'm sorry, to fly from Australia to Los Angeles, buy a copy of Adobe and then fly back to Australia. Wow. And then they jacked that up further when they insisted on, on classes. How many licenses

Leo Laporte (01:51:36):
Do we have Benito? Do you know? We probably have eight full creative Cloud licenses. Every editor has

Padre (01:51:42):
A full license. And so two, two seats per license. Yeah. Six, six to eight. Well, my favorite is the so they do the, that's they do the introductory pricing. So it's $30 a month, but then you get to the year and it goes up to $59 a month. Yeah. So every year you have to actually, they've automated it. It used to be you had to call and threaten to quit and then they'd give you another year. Right. Now you threaten to quit on the website and then they forward you to another page saying, we'll give you another U at this. But if you don't do it Yeah. If you forget it, get jacked up. Yeah. But the

Brianna Wu (01:52:10):
Old model, I don't know if you, y'all remember this, like, I remember when Illustrator eight came out, right? Right. You would really go and look at the new feature set mm-hmm. <Affirmative> and you'd be like, okay, we have Gradient Message this year. Do I need that? Yeah. This looks like innovation. You would read the, the bus, the magazines, like arguing whether it was a good enough upgrade and you would make a decision every year about which Adobe products were worth your money. I'm gonna do PageMaker this year. Go live this year. You know, it, it was, I feel like that was an era where they really were forced to bring their A game every single time. Yeah. I don't think that's really the case with Creative Clown

Leo Laporte (01:52:46):
Today. There are at least two people in our IRC who are using old versions of Photoshop, Photoshop SE six and Photoshop seven. But they're not gonna be able to do that much longer.

Padre (01:52:57):
I, I it doesn't work about 30 copies of 5.5, which is the last version. That was a good version. It was a very good version. Yeah. And, but the only thing that's missing is it doesn't handle some of the newer file formats. Yeah. Which is, it's a, it's a

Brianna Wu (01:53:09):
Bummer large Photoshop file

Padre (01:53:10):
Format. Yeah. And the other problem is to use my legally purchased copies, I actually have to hack them because they've deactivated the activation service.

Iain Thomson (01:53:19):
Great.

Brianna Wu (01:53:19):
Oh my gosh, Leo. I mean, like, you're a serious photographer. You can't do like raw file format and stuff without Lightroom. Like you

Leo Laporte (01:53:28):
Really do need that. Oh, you totally can need that. But you have to have something else. Well,

Brianna Wu (01:53:31):
What other alternative

Leo Laporte (01:53:31):
Are there? Oh, there's tons of 'em. What's the one I use? Oh, I can't even remember the name of it. Have this. Yeah. there. Oh, absolutely. There are ways to do it. And, and more and more, what's really interesting on the Apple side is there are iPad apps like Affinity the sheriff companies, affinity Photo and others that are, that are kind of, I think, eating Adobe's lunch. Huh. So, I think a lot of at least in the Mac side, a lot of people are abandoning Photoshop and Lightroom. Yeah. I had a $10, the $10 photography subscription, which was Lightroom at Photoshop and I just checked it the other day and it doesn't include Photoshop anymore. Oh my gosh. It's like dudes. And I just, to hell with 'em. I'm sorry. I'm, I'm done with Adobe. There are, there are solutions out there. I think it's Camera One that I use.

Brianna Wu (01:54:18):
I'd love to look into that. I mean, I get light room through my job, but

Leo Laporte (01:54:22):
Camera one is not a subscription. You buy it. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. But it does all of the, no, that's not it. What is the name of it? Ant is gone, isn't he? Somebody was gonna tell me what I use <laugh> <laugh> Capture one. Thank you. It exists. Not Camera One, capture one. Thank you. Chatroom knows more about me than I know. Cause I've forgotten almost everything. Capture one is, let me see the pricing cuz it's, I think it's fairly expensive. Yeah. They do have a subscription. $18 a month complete. Serious. I don't paid $300, but you can get a 300 perpetual license. Yeah, that sounds great. And it, it handles all the raw file formats. So if you really want something that is kind of very similar to Lightroom. Sure. To

Brianna Wu (01:55:02):
Be fair, some of Lightroom like AI tools are, are pretty good nowadays for like removing and stuff like that for masking.

Leo Laporte (01:55:10):
There's some really good stuff out there. But then Adobe now has the, they're they added AI to their Firefly and they have out painting and you know, there's, but they're in a struggle. That's why they spent 20 billion to buy a website basically to buy Figma. Be interesting. See what? That's so much

Iain Thomson (01:55:27):
Easier just to buy the competition than actually in innovate.

Leo Laporte (01:55:29):
Exactly.

Brianna Wu (01:55:30):
And they've got the money. They've got

Leo Laporte (01:55:31):
The money. That's, and that's exactly I think what the regular regulators are, are seeing.

Iain Thomson (01:55:34):
Well, yeah, exactly. And I mean, we've seen this where, you know, you get this oligo of companies just running specific, you know, I mean, Microsoft funded Apple for years just to avoid this kind of antitrust stuff. Yep. you know, you've got three big telcos on the US controlling mobile phones. You've got four or five ISPs if you include Sonic, which I usually do. You know, I mean it's, there's a very limited competition landscape here and for years it's been like, yeah, let it merge. I mean, look at the JetBlue merger that was just gonna go through Yeah. No benefit whatsoever to consumers. So, yeah.

Brianna Wu (01:56:10):
Doesn't it make y'all sound to a certain degree that like Apple used to really have their own tools in this space. The final cut was really,

Leo Laporte (01:56:19):
Really,

Iain Thomson (01:56:19):
Really, did you get taken seriously a production person unless you were eating

Brianna Wu (01:56:22):
Apple? That's absolutely true. Like Final Cut motioned, I understand was never as popular, but Apple was really invested in bringing their own like pro sound and video editing tools for a while. And those are just not as important to the industry anymore. Like, you've really got a near monopoly with you know, premier. Yeah. And I think that's really

Leo Laporte (01:56:43):
Unfortunate. Do you have an iPad? Yeah, I would look at, I mean, I think the iPad pros especially are really becoming the choice for photo editing. Really because it's touch, it's kind of natural. The iPad Pro screens are spectacular. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> better than most computer monitors. This is a very good photo editor for the iPad photo mater. 3.05 just came out. It is does 600 raw file formats and I think it's cheap. I can't remember how much, but the Pixel Mater folks really do stuff inexpensively. Yeah. So there are, there are a lot of stuff out there.

Brianna Wu (01:57:20):
I'll definitely look at that. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:57:21):
I, I find that the alternative, the Mac and the iPad alternatives are really as good as as iPad as Lightroom. The problem is you don't have the Digital Asset management. Right. Which is a big part of Light Room. That's really nice. I just use Apple's photos for that <laugh> and it actually works fine. That should be a new Twitch show content creation with nothing but free software and services. I love it. Yeah. Whoa, I love that idea. Yeah. Do tutorials on We could do that on Floss Weekly.

Brianna Wu (01:57:46):
Yeah. A hundred percent.

Leo Laporte (01:57:48):
Yeah. So there was a, a lot of attention to the US Supreme Court this week. One court, one case though, that affects tech people. The rest of it affects normal people. There.

Brianna Wu (01:57:57):
Are there are people affected in

Leo Laporte (01:57:59):
Yes. Oh, believe me, yes. Absolutely. but I won't get into those. I will talk about a couple of kind of surprising cases that didn't get much coverage because of the big Supreme Court cases this week. But first a word from our sponsor, our show today brought to you by Express vp and we were talking and I asked the tech guys about why you would want to use a vpn. And even today, there are still some very good reasons for security, for privacy to eliminate geographic restrictions. We all spend too much time on our phones these days, buying groceries, sending pictures to friends, maybe ordering a car to the airport. Father, the scary part is your phone carrier sees it all. They collect data on whatever it is you're doing. Verizon admits to it. They say it's so they can better understand your interests, but they understand my interests.

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Really all they wanna do is sell your activity to advertisers and they can, it's completely legal stuff like the sites you've visited, what you've been on to online, the more they can get on you, the bigger their paycheck becomes. If you wanna protect your privacy, your security online, you need a vpn. And I use Express vpn, it's easy to use. It's an app you on iPhone, Android, Mac, Linux, windows. It prevents your phone carrier from being able to see the sites you visit and sell it off to third parties. Same thing for your I S P. Comcast is not your friend. All it takes is one tap of a button and all of your network data is encrypted and rerouted through Express VPN secure servers. I am so impressed with how Express VPN does this. In order to truly protect you. It's important that a VPN provider not log your activity.

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Right. We know that. And of course, it's in the privacy policy. They've had it audited and independently by third parties. But I want to tell you, they go a step further. They use a custom Debbie and distribution on all their servers that wipes the drive every night. They start fresh every morning, so there's no trace of your visit. They run their server technology, they wrote it themselves called Trusted Server in ram and it's sandboxed. So even if it wanted to write to the hard drive, it couldn't. It starts up just for you when you press the button on your Express V VPN app and when you're done, it goes away forever. There is literally no way any trace of your use of express VPN can show up on their servers. It protects all your network data, not just your web browsing. You stay private even when you're using your apps on your phone, whether you're an iPhone, Android, tablet, user Express VPN even works on your routers.

(02:00:34):
They even sell routers. Very nice routers. As a matter of fact, it's express vpn.com/twit and the best part is one subscription covers up to five devices at the same time. So your whole family can use Express vpn. See only VPN I use when your phone carrier tracks you. That's a gross invasion of privacy. Emphasize gross. You can keep letting 'em cash in on you or visit express vpn.com/twit to get the same VPN I use. Take back your online privacy today. If you use our special link, you'll get three months free with a one-year plan. Ex p r s vpn.com/twit express vpn.com/twit. We thank 'em so much for their support and for making a really, really great product. So yes, the Supreme Court said you can discriminate against anybody anytime. You don't have to make a website for 'em. That was a funny case because nobody had actually ever asked that person to be radical.

Iain Thomson (02:01:35):
Sort of, I'm shocked to find out I'm in this thing. I'm married with a kid.

Padre (02:01:39):
The the guy

Leo Laporte (02:01:40):
They said wanted to anyway, stupid case Supreme Court made their I think, clearly wrong decision because it opens the door for discrimination of any kind. And I I think that, you know, protecting people against you know, protected classes against that kind of thing is absolutely vital. They also threw away affirmative action after 50 years. Yeah. They threw and they overturned the debt relief. I don't know how you feel about all of that, but this one really got me mad. They <laugh> Supreme Court rebuffed Apple <laugh>.

Padre (02:02:11):
Hang on. You got a kid about to go to college, so

Leo Laporte (02:02:13):
No, no, no. My kids have gone through college.

Padre (02:02:15):
I'm done.

Leo Laporte (02:02:16):
Okay. I got no more college. Okay. I am done. I mean post postgrad you. Oh no, I, Abby just got her master's last week.

Padre (02:02:23):
Oh, okay. Yeah, she Congratulations.

Leo Laporte (02:02:25):
Although she's saying she wasn't get a

Padre (02:02:26):
Phd. Phd <laugh>. No.

Leo Laporte (02:02:29):
You know, I year NYU U has an excellent PhD program and I went PhD stands for piled higher and deeper. Yeah. Yeah. No, if she wants to, she wants to be Dr. Abby. That's okay with me. Okay.

Padre (02:02:39):
<Laugh> worked out well for Frank <laugh>. He does. Does he have a PhD? He has a PhD. What's

Leo Laporte (02:02:44):
His doctorate in? Genetics. Bacterial genetics. That's right. He worked on the mRNA device. He did. He

Padre (02:02:49):
Did not. The virus. Don't. Wait, wait. Whoa, whoa. Don't antiviolence. We

Leo Laporte (02:02:54):
Got anti

Padre (02:02:55):
Not crazy from going Boston. Claiming for could a story now. Right.

Leo Laporte (02:03:00):
So so broad. This is, this case goes back quite a few years. Caltech

Padre (02:03:05):
Well I've talked to you about this before on the show.

Leo Laporte (02:03:07):
Yeah. I think we probably have 2016 Caltech which is a private research university in Pasadena, has patents on technologies that increase wifi speed and range on mobile devices. In 2016, they sued Apple and Broadcom saying that both the companies were using their patents without license. Millions of iPhones, iPads, and other Apple devices using Broadcom wifi chips, infringe the patents. Apple and Broadcom did something we actually were thinking about doing back when there was a podcast patent troll. Our attorneys, we talked with our attorneys about doing something called an intra partis appeal, which is you go to the patent trademark office and say, this patent's no good. You're, you know, overturn it. Yep, yep. But our attorney said there's a risk if you do that and the patent office doesn't overturn it, you're screwed. Cuz then the jury sees that and says, you see, it was a good patent.

(02:04:00):
So we didn't do it, thank goodness. Oh, Adam Corolla. Yeah. I think it was Adam Corolla raised a lot of money. He did? No, no. It was E f Adam Corolla fight him in court, but the e f went to the patent trademark organization and got the whole patent overturned. So that was a successful case. In this case, apple and Broadcom went to the U S P T O and the patent office said, no, no, that's good. That's a good <laugh>. That's a good patent. Oh. Which is kind of bad news for Broadcom. A jury then hearing that sided with Caltech. This was in 2020 and gave a $1.1 billion award split by Apple and Broadcom Apple's was the lion's share. I think it was almost like 800 million was Apple. It's funny because it's only because Apple used Broadcom ships. Right. It wasn't even Apple directly infringing mm-hmm.

(02:04:52):
<Affirmative>. So I really think Broadcom deserves, but anyway both companies appealed the court of appeals for the federal circuit, which hears patent appeals upheld the jury's findings. It did order a new trial on damages. That has not happened. So the 1.1 billion could be adjusted down. Yeah. in any event, apple took it to the Supreme Court in January, the Supreme Court asked the Biden administration whether the appeal should be heard. The solicitor General in May said, no, please don't take the case. The Federal Circuit did it. Right. Supreme Court did not disagree, did not give them cert. So it's over in that regard. All we have left is a trial for how much the damages should be.

Brianna Wu (02:05:37):
Oh yeah. Leo, I my husband works in, in patent law biotech, and so Oh,

Leo Laporte (02:05:43):
Interesting. I did not know that.

Brianna Wu (02:05:44):
Okay. I have, it's, it's often frustrating for me because I hear, like people on my own side, the left saying stuff that's just wildly inaccurate about biotech patents. Right. Like, you'll hear people say, oh, why didn't we, we funded all of this. Why don't we just have the patents and make them free for everyone? And you're like, I don't think you understand the history of Moderna or how these, these things come to pass. It's a lot more complicated. So I joined to, you know, pre preface this by saying the conversation around biotech patents, I think is frequently stupid. That said, I have personally never heard an argument mm-hmm. <Affirmative> for software patents that I have found compelling. I think these almost universally limit competition. And when I read like the, the limits of what Frank does with his job, it's like a certain target protein. It's a certain like formula that they're using. It's a chemical process. It's so precise and it's something that they've spent, you know, incredible amounts of money, like eliminating others to find the one that works. Right. So I think there's a valid economic argument for patenting that I don't understand. I've, I've never seen an argument for software patents, I think raises to that level. Am I alone here? No, you're not that agree. I mean, we're,

Iain Thomson (02:07:07):
We're still getting letters from that bloke who claims the

Leo Laporte (02:07:10):
Invented email, you know, so Oh my God. 10 years after He's still going after you. He's

Brianna Wu (02:07:15):
Still going after. Is this the guy that ran for office in Massachusetts? Yeah, he's crazy. Oh yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:07:20):
No, don't, you're gonna get us soon. Squirrel

Brianna Wu (02:07:23):
Droppings. It's Brianna.

Leo Laporte (02:07:24):
That's, I think you could say he is nuttier than squirrel droppings. Brianna was, that's a matter of opinion. Opinion, yes. Crazy. Okay. Yeah. In the sense of nuttier than squirrel dropping

Iain Thomson (02:07:35):
Into email. Yes. Decades after the first emails was sent. You know, he might from

Padre (02:07:40):
Capacity, but he has the piece of paper, so therefore he has

Iain Thomson (02:07:43):
A piece of paper from just, it drives me nuts. You know, he

Brianna Wu (02:07:47):
Has a bus. He drives her to Boston saying he's the inventor of emails.

Leo Laporte (02:07:51):
He, he actually sued detector because Yeah, he did claimed that he did not invent an email. And back in 2017, a judge dismissed that lawsuit against detector. Oh my. But that hasn't stopped Shiva Adora from continuing to assert.

Brianna Wu (02:08:07):
I'm not a fan that,

Padre (02:08:09):
Okay. So the, the the from the tech side that the tricky thing about the Caltech patents is it's, it's an interesting idea. Sure. But it would have no real world application if Broadcom had not made their fbar filters. The fbar filters are the, it's the actual device that takes the, the the frequency filtering that the Caltech patents apply to and makes it something that you can actually use. Right. Right. So yes, they did build upon Caltech's work, but it's not as if Caltech actually made the filters. Right.

Brianna Wu (02:08:44):
Mm. And this is my argument that, you know, for the biotech industry, those patents they're going through, they're plugging like dozens of protein sequences in. They're doing experiments, they're seeing if it works. They're running assays. Right. What you're talking about, you know, Broadcom doing is developing a technology, spending that money doing the r and d and a lockout process for a patent. That in my view is essential across the industry. So I just, I, I don't see the value for this and I think it's really disappointing this SCO as enabled

Padre (02:09:17):
This and the Apple part of the judgment is even more ridiculous because Apple didn't even develop the technology. They bought a chip from Broadcom. Yep. Yeah. So I mean, how many times divorced if I started a business using my iPhone? Can Caltech claim that they should get a percentage of that business? Because it their, I mean there

Iain Thomson (02:09:34):
It is. The American legal system is a weird thing. But wasn't that basically just doubling their bases? Apple has more money than Correct. I nearly said more money than God, but look who I'm talking to. No, I mean Apple, apple lot of company, but you know, and so chucking them in there, maybe just in the hope that Apple would pay them enough money for this to go away.

Padre (02:09:52):
Yeah. Well then where does it stop? Apple was not the only company to use.

Iain Thomson (02:09:55):
No, no, absolutely. And in fact, if I was Caltech's lawyers, I'd be looking this if they actually want it and going, Hey, we've got a major pay

Leo Laporte (02:10:03):
Going. There's a long history history.

Iain Thomson (02:10:03):
This is now the industry at all

Leo Laporte (02:10:05):
Because universities own the research that it's graduate students and it's professors do in most cases. You know, Stanford benefits greatly from Google cuz Google was invented by Stanford graduate students and they pay Stanford every year. Millions and millions of dollars for the right to do what they do.

Padre (02:10:24):
Something which Aaron Schwartz was trying to stand up against. Yeah,

Iain Thomson (02:10:28):
Yeah, yeah. Yes. That was,

Brianna Wu (02:10:30):
If we wiped out all software patents today, do we think, is there anything in the tech industry that would be lost?

Leo Laporte (02:10:37):
No. It's a silly idea. Yeah. Now how about DNA patents or sheet? That's Oh,

Padre (02:10:42):
That's okay.

Iain Thomson (02:10:45):
If we cooking just

Padre (02:10:46):
Cause that's kinda like

Leo Laporte (02:10:47):
Software. It's our software.

Iain Thomson (02:10:50):
I mean, I think the thing that would be lost if we go into software patents was all those lovely summer houses that lawyers had <laugh>. But other than that would be, I can't think of anything practical

Leo Laporte (02:10:58):
Talking would,

Padre (02:10:59):
Would go through a recession.

Leo Laporte (02:10:59):
That would be very sad.

Iain Thomson (02:11:01):
Hey, COD would be out of business.

Leo Laporte (02:11:03):
FTC wants to put a ban on fake reviews.

Iain Thomson (02:11:07):
Good. Yeah. Dan about time

Padre (02:11:08):
Too. I would love this. I think it's great. I have no confidence that they'll be able to enforce this. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (02:11:14):
No. Under terms of a new rule, it's proposed by the ftc. They have to go through a comment period and so forth. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> businesses would face fines for buying fake reviews. $50,000 not for each review, but for each time a customer sees one <laugh>, whoa. They could add up fast.

Padre (02:11:33):
Lawyers be comment through the Amazon reviews.

Leo Laporte (02:11:36):
They would not just pub punish the companies that use the fake reviews, but also the brokers that sell them that falsify the feedback. There's a lot, there are companies

Iain Thomson (02:11:45):
Community influences that make them as well.

Leo Laporte (02:11:46):
Well, but there are companies that buy and sell fake reviews as well as those that buy or sell fake followers or views on social media and Yeah. There's plenty of

Iain Thomson (02:11:55):
Influences. No, I've had, I've had offers from my Reddit account

Leo Laporte (02:11:57):
All the time. I get offers. Yeah. All the time. A ban on insider reviews and testimonials prohibiting a company from posting reviews from their employees. <Laugh>, oh my managers or relatives without pr proper disclosure. It also addresses review hijacking. Alright. This is new to me. The practice involves repurposing reviews from other pro pros. Well, this happens on Amazon. Mm-Hmm. You'll put out a product and then get good reviews for it, and then lump that in with others of your products that don't get such good reviews. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. So you have sometimes really pay attention. You'll see a review on Amazon that doesn't apply to the product you're looking at. That's review hijacking. Well, we'll see there. Is it gonna be a comment period? Hmm. I think, you know, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Yelp, all hate fake reviews. Right? We all

Padre (02:12:48):
All hate fake reviews, but again, how are you going to stop it? Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:12:52):
And, and the real issue is generative AI can create fake reviews at at lightning speed. Yeah. Oh, I know.

Iain Thomson (02:12:58):
This is the problem. I mean, it's, you thought Google was bad. Now wait until SEO featured AI written stuff is just spammed out across content farms. It's going to be a nightmare.

Brianna Wu (02:13:10):
I will write you a fake review of this week in tech for only $5 left <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (02:13:14):
Thank you. But you're right. How did, how do I get busted then? Well, fortunately she said it on the air, so she said it on

Padre (02:13:20):
The, but I mean, look, look, if someone is gonna say, Hey you know what I I, I would love for you to post a review because I know you've had a good experience and I So

Leo Laporte (02:13:30):
Is that a fake,

Padre (02:13:31):
Is that a fake review? No. Right. No, no. Or, or they say no, no family or friends, but Okay. How far out does that go? Isn't it an, an acquaintance?

Leo Laporte (02:13:38):
I get emails all the time offering me like 50 bucks for a good review for

Iain Thomson (02:13:43):
Oh God.

Leo Laporte (02:13:43):
Free product.

Iain Thomson (02:13:44):
Yeah. I mean, so I did a quick experiment. I've been away for 10 days holiday and did a quick experiment and started Montreal, my inbox with the out of office things. I, over a 10 day period, I got I think about 17 emails offering to pay for, to, to stick us up at stuff on the site. I also got only one PI who actually read my out of office email. Cause I put a line in there saying, just to check if everyone's reading this what is the s people lost Stephen Unladen Swallow <laugh>. And only one person actually replied with African or European five people replied with repeating pictures over the holiday thing. <Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (02:14:23):
Yeah. I forgot. There's one of the Supreme Court decision, which actually is I, I I put this in cuz of you, Brianna, you've been cyber stalked a little bit. Little bit, little

Padre (02:14:32):
Bit. Yeah, little bit.

Leo Laporte (02:14:33):
Actually I have as well, who hasn't your wife has anybody in public in the public eye these days? Yeah. The Supreme Court in a seven to two decision ruled that if you're gonna accuse somebody of cyber stalking, you have to consider whether they knew what they were saying was a threat. Not what you, what which is felt

Padre (02:14:52):
Horrible because crazy people don't know That's right.

Iain Thomson (02:14:55):
The case. That's why they're crazy. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:14:57):
The case was Counterman versus Colorado. A guy who was convicted Colorado has an anti stalking law after he sent a barrage of threatening Facebook messages to a woman on Facebook that he'd never met. Yeah. the Colorado law just said, Hey, if the, if the recipient of the messages is or any reasonable purpose mm-hmm. <Affirmative> person feels distressed, that's against the law. Yeah. They convicted him. Counterman appealed, arguing his statements were protected by the First Amendment and did not constitute true threats. So true threats are outside the First Amendment. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. So in fact, by the way, stalkers know this, if they said, I'm gonna str strangle you tomorrow. Yeah. I can go after em, that's a true threat of bodily harm. Right. You know this, I'm sure you've talked to the police department and then they'll go after them. But if you say you

Padre (02:15:48):
Should be strangled

Leo Laporte (02:15:49):
Or here's your home address, it'd be a shame if somebody were to cause some harm. Yeah. is that a true threat? So Counterman said that wasn't my intention to threaten the person to creep Supreme Court. Agreed. Yeah. This, this is the majority opinion. Justice Elena Kagan wrote, the state prosecuted counterman in accordance with an objective standard and did not have to show any awareness on counter men's part of his statements threatening character. That is a violation of the First Amendment. So if a nut job doesn't know that a chainsaw would dismember, they're off the hook. Yeah. The problem is how do you know, how can you prove that 10 person knew

Iain Thomson (02:16:37):
That? I do find, I I I do wonder what would happen if this case involve somebody saying, I dunno, doxing a Supreme Court member, a members of their family

Leo Laporte (02:16:44):
Kind of think. Exactly. And actually the only dissent came from Amy Comey Barrett and Clarence Thomas, both of whom I'm sure have, have had people at their front door. They agree that the impact on victims of harassment and stalking could be severe.

Iain Thomson (02:17:00):
The abuser in charge of the process. Just like Exactly. This is, well, I just genuine dly believe that doing this, this is the

Leo Laporte (02:17:05):
Opposite of stand your ground. All the stand your grounder laws are saying, if you feel a threat, you feel that's a good point. Act you can kill someone. This is now saying it doesn't matter about you, it's what do they intend to do? So you should say, come to Florida and meet me. Right. <laugh>. We'll have a conversation. You're both in the right now. Great. Yeah. I would say, and I think you'll agree, but I won't put words in your mouth. Certainly most of the threats I see are spurious. Yeah. Like the person's trying to scare you. Yeah. But isn't really intending We have had though somebody came to Lisa's front door. Yeah, yeah. I mean, person was obviously mentally ill, but that's who you're worried about. Yeah. Right? Mm-Hmm. Yeah.

Brianna Wu (02:17:43):
So

Iain Thomson (02:17:43):
I believe it worse than anyone on the pallet.

Brianna Wu (02:17:45):
I, I think, look, this is a very nuanced, difficult thing and let's not pretend it's not difficult to balance, you know, freedom of speech, which we all believe in with mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, you know, the right to basically exist in America without these kinds of threats coming to your door. That said, you know Maryanne Franks is a good friend of mine. She's quoted in this piece. I really trust her judgment on that. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, and she's worked in this space for a really long time, and something she talks about a lot is the people that do this have gotten very, very good at wrapping their comments

Leo Laporte (02:18:18):
Up. They know exactly have Yeah.

Brianna Wu (02:18:19):
And that little layer of irony. Yeah. Yeah. So it makes you scared. It gets the message across. It's just plausible enough for them to have deniability.

Leo Laporte (02:18:28):
It's with the mafi has done for years, it would be a shame. Oh yeah. If for some reason your front window wanted to get broken. Yeah.

Brianna Wu (02:18:34):
The the other thing I would say is, I'll just tell a very quick story. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> back during the height of Gamer Gate, I gave a talk at a college and this kid raises his hand and identifies himself as a gamer gator and makes an obnoxious comment to, oh God, a room full of 300 people. Oh my gosh. God, whatever I handled him, I'm approached. Doesn't bother me. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, this is why this is important. After this, it was like 11 o'clock at night and I'm there with a, a female member of the faculty that invented invited me to speak at this college and this kid who is, you know, like he's following us to our car.

Leo Laporte (02:19:15):
Oh my God. Just

Brianna Wu (02:19:16):
Going and being like, Gamergate this Gamergate that y'all don't understand and being so aggressive and this kid, I don't think he was a bad person. My point is he had no understanding that following two women Yeah. To their car at 11 o'clock at night was something that made us extremely uncomfortable. Right.

Leo Laporte (02:19:37):
It was just free speech. It was

Brianna Wu (02:19:38):
Him trying to get his opinion out there. Right. So by that standard, you know, he didn't know that what he was doing was threatening mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. And I think that's a lot of these people that are a little bit unhinged, I think they are truly tuned out from what the consequences are of how their behavior affects others.

Leo Laporte (02:19:56):
Difficult. Yeah. It's very difficult. It is a difficult issue. And, and of course in this case, probably there wasn't cause for prosecution. Right.

Brianna Wu (02:20:05):
Exactly. Exactly.

Leo Laporte (02:20:07):
Even though it is absolutely threatening and terrifying

Brianna Wu (02:20:09):
For you it was uncomfortable, but yeah. If you're looking at intent, that's just, it's not a perfect way to look at this situation

Padre (02:20:17):
In your hand because there is no good way to look at intent. Right. Right. You have no visibility into someone's frame of mind when they did what they did. Yeah.

Iain Thomson (02:20:25):
Right. Unfortunately, I mean, as it, it turns out all too tragically in too many of these cases, the police only decide to act when somebody gets injured or killed. And it's how you balance that. I dunno, this is probably why I'm not Supreme Court judge, but it's,

Leo Laporte (02:20:41):
Well, but that was the, the des brought that up. This is, it brings, this is problematic for restraining orders. Mm. yep. In domestic violence cases because,

Iain Thomson (02:20:50):
But they get, they're getting far too smart about

Leo Laporte (02:20:52):
It. I mean, if my intent is just to scare you, is that sufficient to prosecute? I don't know. It shouldn't be allowed.

Iain Thomson (02:20:59):
It's kind of like if you deliberately set out to scare someone walking down the street, you think, right, I'm gonna jump out, you know, with a mask on scare them, or I'm gonna jump out with a carving knife and I may or may not stab them death. That's

Leo Laporte (02:21:10):
The problem. You know, and then it's too late once you find out what exactly you intent is. Unfortunately we found out and it's too late. Yeah,

Brianna Wu (02:21:18):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:21:19):
Final Supreme Court story. Supreme Court gave Google a victory. You may remember Rap Genius, the website. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, the Lyric website Genius did a clever thing with its lyrics. They, they buried an Easter egg in there, right? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And they found the Google search results reproduced the Easter egg. Exactly. I can't, wasn't it, it was kind of funny. Like, you stole this lyric or something like that. Right. It's

Padre (02:21:40):
Like what the Academy Awards does with their screeners.

Leo Laporte (02:21:43):
Just put Yeah. Put

Padre (02:21:44):
Something that identifies where it came from and who

Iain Thomson (02:21:47):
Took it to Yeah. Basically they used different Unicode Right. Prefixes for different apo, different apostrophes. But it was a beautiful case in that regard, but it fell down on one simple fact lyric. The Lyric company didn't have the rights to the lyrics in the first place they didn't own. Yeah, exactly.

Padre (02:22:03):
Yeah. You cannot be upset if someone steals something that you stole.

Iain Thomson (02:22:06):
Yeah. Well look at Apple and Steve Jobs, but no. When it came to Gooey, but yes, it's,

Brianna Wu (02:22:13):
I think that's the theme of the new Indiana Jones movie actually.

Leo Laporte (02:22:16):
<Laugh>. So here, here's the, here's the watermark. It was in the punctuation. I love this one of the lyrics from a song by Alessia Karara, not Today. Google has been secretly watermarking lyrics on its website with patterns of apostrophes. Oh, okay. Which can alternate between straight and curly single quote marks. The watermark surfaced on Google's information patterns panels goo. So, which often appears the first result when you look up a song Google even, or genius even went so far as to make the punctuation marks spell the word red handed in Morse code. Oh my goodness. Yeah. Let me see.

Padre (02:23:02):
Okay. That's just kind of cute. That's just,

Leo Laporte (02:23:04):
I

Iain Thomson (02:23:04):
Mean, this is clever. Yeah. I mean, it was beautiful.

Leo Laporte (02:23:06):
This is smart. The smart apostrophe versus the straight apostrophe. Right. And by alternating straight and smart to spell mor in the morse code dots and dashes, Google did the same exact alternation of the d of the, of straight and curly quotes. So yeah, Google copied it, like cut and pasted it. Yeah. And it spelled out red handed.

Padre (02:23:32):
Well,

Iain Thomson (02:23:32):
As I say, it was a righteous burst.

Padre (02:23:34):
The

Leo Laporte (02:23:34):
Other, the other shoe dropped and yes, turns out the actual copyright holders of the publishers and the authors of the music and rap genius didn't pay them either. Yeah. Whoops. Ww ww

Iain Thomson (02:23:49):
Yeah, they

Leo Laporte (02:23:50):
It's a little more subtle than this, but we don't have to worry about subtly. This is not the place for subtly Let's take a little break and when we come back, final thoughts, final stories. We'll try to wrap this up in under three hours because we got that ship

Padre (02:24:03):
Has sailed. <Laugh> <laugh>. Well see the non twit premium.

Leo Laporte (02:24:08):
Oh Yeah, that one's already, they

Padre (02:24:09):
Don't realize that this show actually started an hour before it started. That's

Leo Laporte (02:24:13):
It did. Yeah. Actually literally,

Iain Thomson (02:24:14):
Yeah. Honestly, re I thought the lap dancing class was a bit

Padre (02:24:17):
Much, but you know, you know, it was impromptu. We put

Leo Laporte (02:24:19):
A pole just for you. I mean,

Padre (02:24:22):
Yeah. You know I do, I do smell like cocoa butter now. So <laugh>

Leo Laporte (02:24:26):
And you still have, wait a minute, a little glitter on

Padre (02:24:28):
Coco, cocoa, cocoa butter, and a brassel look.

Iain Thomson (02:24:31):
I'm sorry, I could only get fives, not tens.

Padre (02:24:35):
You know, you know your Euro coins, those are so uncomfortable. Oh,

Iain Thomson (02:24:38):
Oh yes. Reach the places other coins can't.

Padre (02:24:42):
I'm just gonna drink this one

Leo Laporte (02:24:45):
Place. It's like they prepared this. It's like, well, too well oiled this machine, so to speak. Pun

Iain Thomson (02:24:52):
Definitely intended. No.

Leo Laporte (02:24:54):
Our show today brought to you by Collide, K O L I d, collide. I love these guys. It's a device trust solution for companies with Okta that ensures that if a device is not trusted, it's not secure. It can't log into your cloud apps if you work in security or it, and your company has Okta. This messages for you. Have you noticed that for the past few years, the major majority of data breaches and hacks you read about have one thing in common. It's the employees that's the weak spot. Sometimes an employee's device gets hacked, maybe unpatched software, a copy of, oh, I don't know, Plex that hasn't been patched in a few years. Sometimes an employee leaves sensitive data on in an insecured place like the Downloads folder. And it seems like every day a hacker breaks in using credentials. They phished from an employee.

(02:25:47):
The problem here isn't, though it's not your end users, it's the solutions you use to prevent those breaches. But it doesn't have to be this way. Imagine a world where only secure devices can access your cloud apps, devices, where the software's been patched, the credentials aren't sitting in an insecure place in this world. Phished credentials useless to hackers, and you can manage every operating system, including Linux, all from one dashboard. Best of all, you get your employees to fix their own device security issues, which means less work for your IT team. The good news is, you don't have to imagine this world, you could just start using collide. Visit K O L I D e collide.com/twit to book an on-demand demo today. See how it works for yourself. That's collide. K O L I d.com/twit. We thank 'em so much for their support of our show. What a fun week it was. This week on twit, we have prepared this small video for your enjoyment watch.

(02:28:38):
You get ad free versions of all the shows. You get the Discord, which is wonderful. You get shows we don't put out in public, including we did some events on Thursday. They were amazing. Stacy's book club. She did the new, Anna Lee knew its novel, the Terraforms. Have you read that yet? Not yet. I hear very good things. She, he also got, and I know you know this, Hugh Howie, the author of Wool. Oh yes. Okay. Yeah. Oh wow. Yeah, that's a good quote. Which the Silo series Yep. Is based on that aunt did that at one o'clock. Now that's available on our trip plus feed plus hands on Macintosh with my Ca Sargent hands on windows with Paul Theat, the Untitled Linux Show. Scott Wilkinson's Home Theater Geeks. We launch shows in the club because the club members pay for the club and they they pay for those shows, the show production.

(02:29:28):
And then with any luck, the show builds an audience and like this week in space, we can release it to the public space space. It's actually been a huge success. So what are you doing? You're supporting twit. You're helping us do what we do best, which is create new shows. You're help keeping shows on the air that aren't necessarily getting the advertiser dollars. I think it's a great way to show your support. And it's only seven bucks a month. There's an annual plan, there's a family plan, there's a corporate plan and yeah, the Discords a lot of fun. Yes. It's, it's, I think discord is like the future of social.

Brianna Wu (02:30:03):
Oh, I love Discord.

Leo Laporte (02:30:04):
Smaller communities that people you actually know who, who actually understand that if they misbehave, they are gone. Yeah. Well, if you pay seven bucks to be in a social network, I think you're gonna be hundred percent nicer in them. Right? Hundred percent. And, and anyway, twit people are great people. Like they're smart. They're,

Brianna Wu (02:30:21):
Look, just be real with you. When twit people message me in Club Twit, I will get back to you. You pay

Leo Laporte (02:30:26):
Attention every

Brianna Wu (02:30:27):
Single time. If you, if you're not there and you're on Discord, maybe you got the bottom of the pile

Leo Laporte (02:30:33):
<Laugh>. So anyway, I, I appreciate all our members. We, we love you. We thank you for that. And I especially Thank you new members who are all now going to twit TV slash club twit. It's a little tough in the podcast world right now. Stitcher has just shut down. Mm-Hmm. That's kind of a shock. We won a Stitcher award some years ago. I remember for, I can't remember what the category was, probably Tech Podcast. Siriusxm bought 'em and they said, well, we don't wanna run two apps, so bye-bye Stitcher.

Brianna Wu (02:31:08):
Oh my goodness.

Leo Laporte (02:31:09):
Buy up the competition. Shut it down. Yes. Yeah. That, I guess that is kind of like that, that is kind of like the Bill Gates Simpsons buy 'em out boys. <Laugh> Pokemon Go is just lad off 230 employees. Boy, if there was a game that should be a money maker. Woo. I look at how much money Lisa spends on Pokemon Go. It even exceeds my Simpsons tapped

Padre (02:31:32):
Out. Really costs,

Brianna Wu (02:31:33):
I think it's still playing that stupid game

Leo Laporte (02:31:35):
Game since 2016. That's not that stupid. She has, you know what's good? She, she just looked, it keeps track of your mileage. Yeah. Cuz you have to go out and play the game. She has literally walked across the country twice. She has like 11,000 miles of walking since 2016. And that's not even the total, cuz it only started recently recording it. So

Padre (02:31:56):
That's

Leo Laporte (02:31:56):
A good benefit.

Padre (02:31:58):
I had to stop playing Pokemon Go because my

Leo Laporte (02:31:59):
Phone Yeah, you are a big fan

Padre (02:32:00):
Is so old that keeps crashing it. No,

Brianna Wu (02:32:03):
I had, I had an article back, this is before I got into politics where I think it was for Daily Dot where I paid someone to chauffer me around <laugh> so I could play Pokemon, go in Boston and get the 1% experience of

Padre (02:32:19):
Like, catching. Oh my God. He

Brianna Wu (02:32:21):
Knew my, my specialist Safari guide drove me around to all the places That's Hysteric Embarrassed Pokemon. It was a great,

Leo Laporte (02:32:28):
Now I could get 11,000 miles that

Padre (02:32:30):
Way. You should have been playing it in Rome because I did actually people are telling me that the portals at St. Peter's, cause there's like four of them. Oh, they, they do. There's a very high percentage of like, legendary spawn they

Leo Laporte (02:32:42):
Send you to heaven.

Padre (02:32:44):
Something like that. I dunno. They added, they added all the new Pokemons. I don't even know many. Theyre now,

Brianna Wu (02:32:50):
What is the battle like to take over the gym at the Vatican? That's

Padre (02:32:54):
Gotta really tough. It's actually, the problem is all thousand of us who live there are within range. Oh my, my God. So he keeps, keep immediate, keep doing it. Wow. It's a conspiracy. <Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (02:33:04):
Where is which? Which, what is the

Padre (02:33:05):
So the obelisk.

Leo Laporte (02:33:06):
The obelisk,

Padre (02:33:07):
The two fountains, Uhhuh and the, the front of St. Peter's. Those are Wow. And then also who

Leo Laporte (02:33:12):
Made the fa at St. Peter's a Pokemon Go gym.

Padre (02:33:15):
I know. Well, for a while the, the apartment that Pope Francis lived was a portal. Oh dear. And then it was removed for security. They had to dis I was say, they really want people going up to us from doing. Right. Hey, holy

Leo Laporte (02:33:28):
Father,

Padre (02:33:29):
I was just going after Pikachu. I'm nice to see ya. I think I'm the only person in the, on, on the panel who has actually played it for more than five minutes. Was

Brianna Wu (02:33:38):
A didn't be great. Like, the Pope is walking by behind you

Padre (02:33:41):
And you're in a,

Brianna Wu (02:33:42):
A battle trying to get your register.

Padre (02:33:44):
Hey, I'm trying to,

Leo Laporte (02:33:46):
He's a little bit of a gamer.

Padre (02:33:48):
He's a little bit of a gamer. Yeah. Well, the, the very first time he came over to the house, I didn't know he was coming over to the house. And so it was literally, I was just walking down. I was early morning and I was tired. I was getting my coffee and I walked past the group and Oh, oh, all right. Okay. Okay. You

Brianna Wu (02:34:04):
Think you can get the pot to play Call of Duty with you?

Leo Laporte (02:34:07):
No, I don't think he does. Shooters.

Padre (02:34:08):
He would destroy you in Call of Duty, do you

Brianna Wu (02:34:10):
Think so,

Padre (02:34:10):
<Laugh>, what's, oh my gosh.

Brianna Wu (02:34:12):
I don't

Padre (02:34:13):
Know. Dude. He would go on a killing spirit if he wouldn't believe he would

Leo Laporte (02:34:16):
Kill Tacular. I'm pretty

Brianna Wu (02:34:17):
Good. The Pope gets the nuke and then it's just, you know

Leo Laporte (02:34:21):
What? I think he's more like a sniper. He only uses his knife. He sits back. He only uses his knife sneaks up behind you every time. Man. Stealth like ninja. He's sneaky. I would

Brianna Wu (02:34:30):
Watch that, that

Leo Laporte (02:34:31):
Stream. I, I've gotta say I would as well. He, wow. Let's see how he gets the money from Kick. Really? Is I kick might give him hundred million just to when you get teabag by the Pope. That's it. It's over. Yeah. Oh, don't, oh my God. You're going straight to hell. Oh my God.

Brianna Wu (02:34:46):
That's, he's talking out the traditional, the victory

Leo Laporte (02:34:49):
Days. Oh, exactly. Exactly.

Brianna Wu (02:34:51):
No other

Leo Laporte (02:34:52):
Contest. Don't take this outta context. He does. He Victory Davis. He likes the Earl Gray. He does <laugh>. Yes. He's, he prefers Earl Gray over Oolong or something like that. He likes a little, I I think the Pope would be more of a animal crossing type fan. Yeah. I think that's more, that's more speed.

Brianna Wu (02:35:07):
More his, he goes straight from the GTA on the run

Leo Laporte (02:35:10):
All day. He's four actually. Oh. I could see him doing Forza actually. Yeah. Yeah. Like does he like to drive? He probably doesn't get to drive for. He does. He has the popemobile. This of course. But he doesn't get to drive it. Yes. That would be pretty funny if he drove. You're the, I

Brianna Wu (02:35:23):
Think you get to drive whatever you want. I remember driving and the

Leo Laporte (02:35:26):
Bought my, he is, I'm

Brianna Wu (02:35:27):
Not even Catholic at the Pope's. Like, Brianna, give me your Cayman keys. I'd be like, yes sir.

Leo Laporte (02:35:33):
Oh yeah, man. There you go, man. Is that your hot car right now? That Cayman?

Brianna Wu (02:35:39):
It's not my favorite car, but it's my fastest car.

Leo Laporte (02:35:40):
You like the boxers? I

Brianna Wu (02:35:42):
Thought I like, I've got a Boxer Cayman and two nine elevens.

Leo Laporte (02:35:45):
So she's kind of a Porsche guy. Wait, did you have three nine elevens?

Brianna Wu (02:35:49):
I'm only a two right now. Okay. So sad times.

Leo Laporte (02:35:52):
Ain't nobody needs three nine elevens every time I see you. That would be stupid. Like a Porsche coming up for sale. I always, yeah. You you had a post about how that would be the most expensive nine 11 you've ever bought because of X xy. Yeah. I, yeah. I I can see that.

Brianna Wu (02:36:04):
I've done a really good job at making my brand hashtag synonymous with Porsche. It's

Leo Laporte (02:36:09):
That's good. Maybe someday they'll notice. Yep. <laugh>, I mean, I'm not a huge fan of Top Gear, but when they did get the budget, Porsches Yes. Tried to do the, the, the road trip. That was really wrong. Did that, did I tell you I met the original Stig on the, he was on the cruise. Really? Oh really? Yeah, it was kind of cool. Okay. wait, is this the one who was, who was no longer the Stig? Because he told people he was a Stig? Yeah, I think so. Okay. Yeah. He was the first Stig, he was the white Stig. Yeah. They fired him off the bridge of an aircraft carrier of members. They did, he drove a car off an aircraft. Perry McCarthy. No, I'm sorry. He was the, yeah. The black suited Stig really nice guy for, he drove a little bit in F1 and like the worst car in history in f1. So what <laugh> is the steering broke was Williams? No, it was, oh, it was terrible.

Brianna Wu (02:36:54):
You know what his personal car is? P 9 97 Turbo. You

Leo Laporte (02:36:58):
Know that dude. Seven

Brianna Wu (02:36:59):
Two

Leo Laporte (02:36:59):
Turbo. I wish he'd been on the car cruise with us. Cuz you could have talked to his language. He

Brianna Wu (02:37:03):
Was totally geeked out. Like help out

Leo Laporte (02:37:04):
With, he was great. He gave three lectures. I really en enjoyed it. It was a lot of fun. He's a good guy. Yeah. anyway oh, you would think if you got the rights to run the Apple card program, you that'd be a license to print money. Yeah. No, no. Goldman Goldman Sachs, who does run the Apple Card program is trying to get out of it. They've lost billions dollars.

Iain Thomson (02:37:32):
World's smallest violin.

Leo Laporte (02:37:35):
Aw. So sad. Billions of dollars. Wait. Goldman

Brianna Wu (02:37:38):
Sachs get a break.

Leo Laporte (02:37:39):
Yeah, no, guys, go on. They lost about 3 billion on their consumer lending push over the last three years. A lot of it, because of their relationship with Apple, they're trying to sell it off or offload it as they call it, to American Express. Who knows how to do consumer credit cards. And that's the problem is this is a new business for Goldman. Right. and they just, I guess I don't know how you lose $3 billion taking 12% interest from people, but I was, I was gonna say

Iain Thomson (02:38:10):
They do have a record for shafting people and being very successful at it.

Leo Laporte (02:38:14):
So the bank even has already, its not even

Brianna Wu (02:38:15):
Enough. The benefits are good on the Apple card too, so,

Iain Thomson (02:38:18):
No, I mean, it's pure interest rate. Not bad, but, but

Leo Laporte (02:38:21):
The card maybe, but maybe Apple Card owners don't like run up big balances. I don't know.

Brianna Wu (02:38:26):
I I couldn't, I applied for one, like I make really good money and I couldn't get it. They said I didn't qualify.

Leo Laporte (02:38:33):
Wow. Yeah, it's very hard to get it. You have to have perfect credit.

Brianna Wu (02:38:37):
I, I just don't, I've I've never had a credit card

Leo Laporte (02:38:40):
Before. That's why I think that's, you have no history, no track. I mean it, I'd love to see the numbers. It could just be that the Apple people don't revolve. I bet you that's what it is. That they don't, they don't carry balances every month.

Iain Thomson (02:38:49):
Although on the trip last week to New York, I did see an Apple bank in Brooklyn.

Leo Laporte (02:38:54):
That's, that's not related. Oh,

Iain Thomson (02:38:56):
It's not? No.

Leo Laporte (02:38:57):
Oh, okay. It's like the big apple. It's that kinda apple. Ah, it's, see, this is, it's kinda like, this is where trademark disputes begin. Yeah. I was kinda like, it

Iain Thomson (02:39:04):
Seems very weird. They,

Leo Laporte (02:39:06):
They have a physical, it's been, it's a, it predates Apple computer. Oh, okay. Predates Apple Music. It's been around forever. Apple Bank I used Apple Pay all the time on my watch now. And in fact, all over Europe, everybody took Apple Pay. Yep. Yep. It was the easy way, easy way to pay the bank has already stopped issuing personal loans. They have a home improvement lender they bought last year. They're trying to unload that as well. Oh. So there, there it goes. Goldman which wanted to be a full service bank is saying, yeah, maybe we're stick with that commercial. So Eric definitely is saying that there's been actually a lot of defaults ah, card that's the other side that keep buying too much Apple

Iain Thomson (02:39:43):
Product. Yeah.

Brianna Wu (02:39:45):
That's

Leo Laporte (02:39:45):
Interest. You just, you have to have that night pro. But Goldman's been making a lot of moves. They, the Marcus has been doing quite well. They all, they still have Marcus and they're not, they say they're not gonna get rid of Marcus, but that's mostly a high interest savings. But I mean, they are, they're interest right now is what, 5.1? Yeah. If you, if you've been, that's a good way to lose money, <laugh>. Oh no. Geez. I don't know how they do that.

Brianna Wu (02:40:05):
Put me in charge of that. I will make you some money. Compli

Leo Laporte (02:40:08):
<Laugh>. Did you, you get face recognized when you came into the us

Padre (02:40:13):
I don't even have to take my passport out anymore.

Leo Laporte (02:40:15):
Yeah, you do. You have global entry. I do. Yeah. So the TSA is expanding its face recognition program to almost every airport in the US now.

Iain Thomson (02:40:25):
And they get really ars. See, if you ask to opt out,

Leo Laporte (02:40:28):
You can't opt out. It is opt out. But they don't, they don't like that. The idea is that they, and

Iain Thomson (02:40:32):
They might did it a couple, a couple of months ago, and he was asked to stand right at the back of a very long queue. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:40:37):
Okay, buddy. They

Iain Thomson (02:40:38):
Made it on. Yeah. It's like place study.

Leo Laporte (02:40:40):
You want to Yeah. Yeah. the PRI pilot program currently at 25 airports, the agency has determined its face matching algorithms are 97% effective, quote across demographics, including dark skin tones. But they would not publicly release the results of their tests

Iain Thomson (02:40:58):
<Laugh>, amazingly enough.

Leo Laporte (02:41:00):
Right. Oh, well it works. Really. No. And you can't see the results. Don't

Iain Thomson (02:41:03):
Look behind the curtain.

Leo Laporte (02:41:03):
Mm-Hmm. that's of course one of the big problems with face recognition is how poorly it does with people of color. Hmm. the pilot program is technically voluntary. It uses what's known as a one-to-one face matching technology to verify that the traveler standing at the checkpoint matches the photo on their physical id.

Padre (02:41:24):
It's not voluntary. If you want to make your connection.

Leo Laporte (02:41:27):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, and that's not as bad. But they're also trying out something called that was one-to-one. This is also one to Anne, which has a database of face images from a government records. And then that's kind of what you use with global entry. They've got the database. Exactly. I

Padre (02:41:44):
Had to be scanned at the beginning and they compare it to that. Yeah. But that's just because you know, I, my information is in so many government databases already. Yeah. Just not, not from the hacking side, but from the pre side. Every state I've ever been in because of all the Oh

Leo Laporte (02:41:59):
Wow.

Padre (02:42:00):
You have to file. I'm

Leo Laporte (02:42:02):
Interesting.

Padre (02:42:02):
Mandatory reporter. So that's,

Leo Laporte (02:42:04):
That's really interesting. Yeah, yeah,

Iain Thomson (02:42:05):
Yeah. No, and I'm standing on the UK system for getting into and out of Heathrow. I've just done the pre thing. And the woman looked at me like an idiot. Cause I didn't know what my national, what my social security number was, but I'm not as good at rattling out numbers as I,

Leo Laporte (02:42:19):
I'm scanned into the Disneyland system. <Laugh>,

Padre (02:42:22):
Do you get that fa what do they call it? The Fast Pass or the lightning pass? Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:42:26):
Yeah. We got a lightning pass. It's so

Brianna Wu (02:42:28):
Convoluted now. That

Leo Laporte (02:42:29):
Is, it's it's so expensive.

Brianna Wu (02:42:31):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:42:31):
It's stupid. But So you I'm showing my, I have the ticket on my phone so it's got a barcode, so I show it to them. Yep. And then they go smile. I said, what? They take a picture of you with their phone. Yep. Yeah. And I, and they don't make a ID out of it or anything, so I'm presuming they're saving that forever. A, a, a

Padre (02:42:48):
Corollary. Does the panel think that the real ID requirement for airports is ever gonna go into effect? <Laugh>,

Iain Thomson (02:42:55):
I,

Padre (02:42:56):
They just keep pushing back.

Leo Laporte (02:42:57):
I have no idea. I have real, a real ID in my driver's license. I

Padre (02:43:00):
Just is my, I have my passport.

Leo Laporte (02:43:01):
Yeah. Passport's a real idea. Yeah. But

Brianna Wu (02:43:03):
To come back to this, you know, so I am, yeah. I'm one of these Democrats. I do think national security is a, a very big deal, right? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> like we do have America as a country. We have enemies out there, lot of them. And, you know, there have been people that have smuggled even in the Bush administration, they found somebody trying to smuggle, radiological material Yikes. Into the, the United Terrify States terrify. And they, they managed to stop it. So I'm not, I am not an extremist with trying to keep our airport safe. I think what tries, what makes this a concerning story for me is it's such a quick leap from here Correct. To police departments. Yeah. Having all this information out there particularly when they've got these contracts with companies like

Leo Laporte (02:43:50):
Clear ai Yeah.

Iain Thomson (02:43:51):
Clearview AI

Brianna Wu (02:43:52):
Out there doing that. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, something I learned when I ran for Congress is there, there's a kind of asymmetrical information that the government has mm-hmm. When they're pursuing cases, because they have the resources to go do discovery and to go into Google and to say, look, we have a geolocation fence of view here. Yeah. We have this over here that looks kind of like you. And they can just run that, run that run that, run that. Whereas if you're innocent, you're at such a disadvantage versus all these various programs that they have. So I think if they were able to sandbox this off and say to the public, we're gonna use this for national security and it's not gonna filter out, I would feel more comfortable with it. But they're not saying things like that.

Leo Laporte (02:44:36):
No. And if they do, there's a long history, this stuff getting exfiltrated even from government databases. So you can't have that

Iain Thomson (02:44:45):
Much, remember the OPM hack? Yeah. We were taking, you know, sort of fingerprints, the government small details Yeah. From government's own security screening processes. Yeah,

Padre (02:44:52):
Exactly.

Iain Thomson (02:44:53):
So, you know, it's,

Leo Laporte (02:44:54):
The problem is anytime this stuff is stored, it gets out. Yeah.

Padre (02:44:58):
Well, my, my biggest concern, and I, I'm gonna piggyback on, on Brianna's point here, is the government is deliberately bypassing a lot of the Fifth Amendment protections that we Exactly afforded because they're using a third party. Since the government doesn't own the beta database, since the government doesn't own the cameras, since the government isn't doing any of this screening or running the software, they're not violating your rights. They're just getting a name at the end. Exactly. That's, for me, that's the biggest concern because we've seen that happening. That's what Palantir was all about. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Exactly. give me threat assessment in a way that is violating people's privacy. But because you bought the data and you're a third party company, I don't have to run any civil rights concerns.

Iain Thomson (02:45:38):
Well, I mean, on a sort of slightly more obscene schedule, that was, this was entirely the reason for the Wagner Group in Russia. Yep. Because they actually could outsource his, his fighters to other people.

Leo Laporte (02:45:48):
You know what I saw the other day, what I thought was very interesting, Perian who ran the Wagner group

Iain Thomson (02:45:55):
Also seemed to be Exed. Yes. Yeah, exactly.

Leo Laporte (02:45:57):
Yeah. The man who will soon fall out of a window for no accountable reason,

Iain Thomson (02:46:00):
Accidentally cut his head off while shaking. He needs

Padre (02:46:02):
To stay away from umbrellas. <Laugh>. Yes.

Leo Laporte (02:46:05):
Isn't that how they got Trotsky with a poison, a poison umbrella?

Iain Thomson (02:46:08):
Alo was the ice hack. It was the Bulgarian municipal. No,

Padre (02:46:11):
Yeah. It was po polonium poisoning, right?

Iain Thomson (02:46:13):
Yes. well that was

Leo Laporte (02:46:14):
Polonium in your tea. That's how the valley

Iain Thomson (02:46:16):
Tea. Yeah. Which

Leo Laporte (02:46:18):
In any event, I don't know what's gonna happen to Pergo, but he owned a media holding group which is now being shut down. The media holding group, ran the internet. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>

Iain Thomson (02:46:31):
Research. Yeah.

Padre (02:46:32):
That famous,

Brianna Wu (02:46:32):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:46:32):
Research agency. The Troll Factory.

Padre (02:46:35):
Oh, same blood. It was, it was really weird how on that day, suddenly the troll volume on Twitter just dropped to the floor. It was amazing.

Iain Thomson (02:46:42):
I mean, bear in mind, the NSA has admitted that they deliberately trashed the IRA's computers a couple of years ago. But yeah, this guy has had his finger on the, you know,

Leo Laporte (02:46:51):
It was called Patriot Media <laugh>.

Iain Thomson (02:46:54):
Yeah. Cuz no one else caught, no one calls it what it should be called. Yeah. I mean, but this was the weird thing about the attempted coup. It's like you'd think he either must have assumed that everyone would come to his side, and I think that's what he thought. I think he did.

Leo Laporte (02:47:08):
Yeah. That he would march triumphantly through the Russian countryside, amassing people,

Iain Thomson (02:47:13):
Sort of Mussolini motion.

Brianna Wu (02:47:14):
Yeah. There were a lot of videos of people out there supporting, like, I

Padre (02:47:18):
Mean, but not enough. I mean, he, he did the math and, and he knew, look, he's got about weeks worth of logistical support here. I agree. Agree. If agree, if you can't rally everyone, that's it. It's

Leo Laporte (02:47:26):
Over. Yeah. I think that's what happened So quickly. What, so what was the internet research agency? What did it do?

Padre (02:47:31):
They did amplification of pro Putin, pro-Russia and Pro-Trump. A me that was their, their big target

Iain Thomson (02:47:40):
Footprint. Brexit as well. Yeah. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:47:41):
Oh yeah. They were in Brexit. Well,

Padre (02:47:43):
Really good at, at disinformation. Mm-Hmm. They ran hundreds of thousands of accounts across multiple social media platforms. They could push anything at any time. You know, there was that, that the joke on Twitter of, oh, it's 3:00 AM in the morning. It's funny how suddenly everything is live for pro Putin. Yeah. It's because people clocked into their nine to five.

Iain Thomson (02:48:04):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:48:05):
It's kind of amazing. I had no idea that that was run by Persian. Maybe they're gone. Maybe not. That's the problem.

Padre (02:48:14):
They're never fully gone. I mean, someone else is gonna absorb the assets. Yeah. It's a business model now. It's not just a patriotic thing. Yeah. Yeah. There are dictators all around the world that would love to do some influence, pedalling and, and disinformation campaigns on the cheap. Yeah.

Brianna Wu (02:48:29):
I think it's cheaper to run a troll like a troll farm to undermine your enemies resolved than used to run an army. I do have to say, I was so disappointed by some people on my own side that are, you know, with the Russian coup going on, and they're like, oh, Wagner, like talking about him, like, he's a good person, or this is gonna be beneficial for Russians. I'm like, I think y'all should read a little bit more about this subject. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:48:55):
Yeah. I mean, it's, it was only gonna go get worse. It was never gonna get better. Exactly.

Brianna Wu (02:48:59):
Yeah. Though, arguably better for Ukraine. But that's a whole different discussion.

Leo Laporte (02:49:04):
So I guess r i p the internet

Padre (02:49:07):
Research agent, it'll get another, another name. It'll be called, it's too good an idea to give up. Fancy for some kinda people. Christopher

Brianna Wu (02:49:14):
4.0,

Leo Laporte (02:49:15):
Topher 4.00 yeah. Final final word the passing of man whose name, you may not know John Good enough, but you should know he invented the lithium ion battery. Yeah. In all of our stuff. He was a Nobel Prize recipient as a result. John Good enough, a press professor at University of Texas at Austin passed last week at the age of 100. He won the Nobel Prize for chemistry just a few years ago. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> the age of 97.

Padre (02:49:44):
Oldest winner. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:49:45):
Yeah. For his battery work. If I, you know, if we had not, if the lithium ion battery had not existed, we would've had to invent it. Oh, we did. It allow his discovery led the development of carbon-based materials to allow for the use of stable and manageable negative electrodes in lithium ion batteries. That was back in 1979.

Padre (02:50:08):
Oh

Brianna Wu (02:50:08):
My goodness.

Padre (02:50:09):
Took a while to develop it into a usable

Leo Laporte (02:50:11):
Upgrade. It was originally lithium cobalt oxide is the cathode.

Padre (02:50:14):
Yeah. And

Brianna Wu (02:50:15):
Don't you think it's so interesting that, like for all of our advances in technology, like when it comes to battery tech mm-hmm. I mean, it's gotten marginally better, but

Leo Laporte (02:50:24):
Only marginally. Yeah. Yeah.

Brianna Wu (02:50:26):
Yeah. Really surprising.

Leo Laporte (02:50:27):
Is there anything out there that you've seen

Padre (02:50:29):
That so the, the thing that's not pie in the sky that you can actually get now would be graphene Yeah. Enabled the,

Brianna Wu (02:50:36):
We were talking at that like a lot, like six years ago. And I know it's had industrial applications, but we

Padre (02:50:42):
Might be getting closer to it, not because people are willing to pay, pay more, but because lithium is becoming increasingly difficult to get. Right. Right. It's in more conflict areas now. Right. And graphene actually does offer some amazing benefits. Like the charge time on a graphene enabled lithium battery is, I mean, you can go from zero to percent to a hundred percent in like five minutes. Yeah. It's you know, it's exceptionally good for large current applications, which means vehicles. Right. Yeah. So yeah. I I'm, you're probably gonna see them in, I was gonna say the cost of production's still fairly high, but yeah, it's still very high. So this

Leo Laporte (02:51:16):
Is, we've been talking about this as super capacitor for a while. This is related to

Padre (02:51:20):
That. Yeah. Well, I mean, so a super capacitor, it operates on a different principle. You're, you're basically storing up charge between plates versus typical battery chemistry, which is you're storing charge in a chemical composition. Right.

Leo Laporte (02:51:33):
A chemical reaction, which then is reversed to generate

Padre (02:51:36):
Electricity. Correct. Yeah. So, but I mean, lithium got rid of some of the worst effects that we saw with earlier battery, battery chemistries, where you were literally destroying the chemistry every single time you charged it. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Yeah. which is why it's kind of stagnated, because it's, it's stable right now. It suits most of our needs. It's relatively inexpensive. It's safe ish to handle. This has actually been one of the biggest holdbacks Right. From battery technology, because we're starting to realize if you

Leo Laporte (02:52:04):
Were able to put all the charge that you wanted into a battery, it would be an exceptionally dangerous device. Oh,

Brianna Wu (02:52:10):
A hundred percent though, you know, thermal runaway. Oh

Leo Laporte (02:52:12):
Gosh, yes.

Brianna Wu (02:52:13):
Dangerous phenomenon. We demonstrated that on twit <laugh>, you know

Leo Laporte (02:52:17):
Intentionally or, yes. Okay.

Brianna Wu (02:52:20):
Arguably very bad for the environment. I guess the aggregate the political implementa, the political issues of, of mining these materials. You know, there's a good argument that the Afghanistan war was in. Some support was over lithium. Some part of us getting, you know, these

Leo Laporte (02:52:37):
Resources. Bolivia, new conflict. They've got a huge lithium. A hundred percent.

Iain Thomson (02:52:40):
The deposit, I go to sales though. I mean, a friend of mine is a commercial cargo pilot, and it's his nightmare upon nightmare as being midway across the Atlantic and lithium battery in the cargo hole. Bursts and flame. Yikes. Yeah, because you're not getting out of that one. Right. it's a little

Leo Laporte (02:52:56):
Toxic. Yeah. I'm happy driving my electric vehicle. Don't make me scared. What, what are you driving now? Mustang Mock. I was

Brianna Wu (02:53:02):
Hoping I'd get to see that

Leo Laporte (02:53:03):
Today. It's right out here. You can take a ride right after five minutes. We're going to dinner. It's outside. Yeah. Stop it. Go away. <Laugh>. That's why you wanted to know. He's got that flipper.

Iain Thomson (02:53:14):
Yeah. You,

Leo Laporte (02:53:15):
I'm thinking, I'm thinking this is new. That lease turns out February. If you gave your kid

Brianna Wu (02:53:20):
A toy horn and you're going, this kid's making a lot of noise.

Leo Laporte (02:53:24):
Why are you making so much noise, kid? That's Father Robert Ballas there. The digital Jesuit now is Flipper Zero enhanced. Watch out Vatican. Hi, Def Con Padre SJ on the Twitter or on our mastodon twit.social. And actually, I did announce I'm taking a little vacation from Twitter. I just do it every, it's a mental health thing. It's horrible. Yeah. Just step away. Know what Mastodon is. Ready, waiting and willing to accept you. If you don't know, we run a really great Mastodon instance. Twit.Social could be, you have to be a twit listener to get in. You know, so many people apply saying, I just wanna help promote my business. <Laugh>. Yeah. And Nope, <laugh>. But if you say, you know, I just heard Leo talk about it on twit, I will let you in. It's actually despite all of people comp, you know, saying, oh, mastodons over, it's dead.

(02:54:15):
No, that's great. 57, 50 8,000 interactions this month. It's really, I, which is, which is up 23%. We have 3000 active users. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. So it's small, but all of them are twit fans. I did not get an influx. I thought I might after the Twitter meltdown yesterday, but I think Blue Sky got most of that probably. And Blue Sky, in fact, has had to shut down its invite system because so many people going in. So, but the blue sky's not, those are not serious people. I'm just saying that for the next, next month or so, they're all about butts and, and, and, and lf. It's, I don't get it. That's gonna,

Brianna Wu (02:54:50):
I don't judge your, they're

Leo Laporte (02:54:51):
Doing Alf memes on Blue Sky. Alf, big Alf memes like the eighties. A out of control, not God.

Brianna Wu (02:54:58):
Like metaphorically.

Leo Laporte (02:54:58):
Okay. Stay away from Blue Sky. It's not good for you. No.

Brianna Wu (02:55:01):
Blue Sky is great.

Iain Thomson (02:55:03):
I love Blue Sky. I've just received my invitation, but I heard they've been having some problems today. We

Brianna Wu (02:55:07):
Can possibly log in. We can World Blue Sky. Yes.

Leo Laporte (02:55:10):
Can you, if you have an invitation, can you use it? Or is it I

Brianna Wu (02:55:14):
Think it's on hold

Leo Laporte (02:55:15):
Right now. I think all of it's on hold. Yes. Yeah. I, I see. I had

Padre (02:55:18):
Invite codes and now they're all

Leo Laporte (02:55:19):
Gone. Yeah. I have three invite coats, but I'm not gonna, you know, you don't show that yet. Don't show that. That was my invite codes. You know what's said

Padre (02:55:29):
Google Circles actually would've done really well in

Leo Laporte (02:55:31):
This environment. <Laugh>, can you imagine if Google Plus has still been around? Yeah.

Iain Thomson (02:55:36):
Yeah.

Padre (02:55:36):
Actually, I, tens

Iain Thomson (02:55:37):
Of people would've been attracted.

Leo Laporte (02:55:39):
It required

Padre (02:55:40):
A lot of moderation cuz you had to block almost everybody. But once you got it down to your community, it was a fantastic

Leo Laporte (02:55:46):
Place. I, I, I, I'm, I know it's not hip or with it to say I, I like Mastodon. I like Mastodon. I love, I like her community.

Brianna Wu (02:55:54):
I love Mastodon because it's like, I can take a post and, you know, I've only got like, what is it, 17,000 followers over there. And it is more engagement than, I guess, yeah. With 150,000 followers. Mm-Hmm.

Leo Laporte (02:56:08):
And more thoughtful, I think, and more thoughtful. I think the content is the people who respond to you. The conversation is just fantastic. I agree. It's great. Yeah. Yeah.

Padre (02:56:16):
That's where I'll be putting all the VCAs for the next month or

Leo Laporte (02:56:18):
So. Really good. Yeah. Well look forward to that. If you're not a member. Twit social. We also have forums. People still like the the good old days of forums. Our twit community is@twit.community. And I, I welcome you there too. Those are both 3D use twit social and twit.community.

Iain Thomson (02:56:36):
We need to read to scroll past Alex Jones thing. It's freaking me out at

Leo Laporte (02:56:39):
The, on, on the Discord. Yeah, please. He's wearing a tin felon on Discord, please. Tinfoil hat. Thank you. <Laugh>.

Brianna Wu (02:56:46):
Or just spam it with more Alex Jones. Either way.

Leo Laporte (02:56:50):
<Laugh> way's fine. Good, good. Ant put some stuff in there. And it's all right. Hans, our, our community manager in the discordant. He does. I love aunt. He's such

Iain Thomson (02:56:59):
Ablo.

Leo Laporte (02:56:59):
Isn't he wonderful. Thank you Brianna. Woo. I hope you have a great time at the conference with Frank. I

Brianna Wu (02:57:06):
Will. I was hoping to plug something. Please. I have

Leo Laporte (02:57:08):
A second. So

Brianna Wu (02:57:09):
If we go to Twitter, you can see I DMed you an article. I'm working on something right now. That's one of the things I'm most proud of in my entire career. So about a week ago in the New York Times this story ran above the fold, the battle for contraception. I've been in the New York Times quite a few times, but this was front page above the fold. This project that I'm working on, this is a bipartisan push across this country in the aftermath of the DOMS decision to basically guarantee the right to contraception at a state level. We are going state by state. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, we are pushing on legislators to basically codify these rights at a state level. What I really love about this is most of the stuff I work on in my career, Leo, it, it tends to be pretty partisan, right? This is completely

Leo Laporte (02:58:03):
Nonpartisan. Every agrees percent access to contraception is

Brianna Wu (02:58:06):
90% of people believe in this, except

Leo Laporte (02:58:09):
For Father Robert. I ironically, sorry. No offense. I'm not saying anything. I here. Well, we're still friends. I cannot be snarky

Iain Thomson (02:58:14):
On this. Seriously. The best way you're still friends. Best way to cut abortions is, is a hundred percent is early contraception.

Leo Laporte (02:58:20):
Hundred percent

Brianna Wu (02:58:21):
Agree. A hundred percent. So I am really, really,

Leo Laporte (02:58:23):
Really, so we could say 75% of this panel is probe contraception percent. I mean, don't, don't, don't. I'm not gonna, don't put any words in your mouth. You can't say anything one way or the other. Can't say anything. Exactly. Yes. But

Brianna Wu (02:58:34):
In all seriousness you know, something that I find really rewarding is working with other smart people. They're really plugged into the local legislature. This is not us trying to get someone elected. This is a very, very set, set of policies that we're doing in Nevada. And you know, just Arizona is on the slate and we're just going state by state and it's gonna continue through the 2024

Leo Laporte (02:59:00):
March. Is this rebellion pack doing this? This

Brianna Wu (02:59:02):
Is I'm working with Progress Victory

Leo Laporte (02:59:04):
Work Progress Victory.

Brianna Wu (02:59:06):
Okay. And one of the really interesting projects that I'm working on, Leo, you probably noticed today that I've been talking more about streaming and things like that. Yeah. So this group organized realizes unlike the Democratic Party, that if you're serious about winning in 2024, you've gotta get younger people.

Leo Laporte (02:59:23):
AOC realizes that, but she's the one, she's young

Brianna Wu (02:59:25):
Man. A hundred percent. Yeah. So we are working with streamers and influencers. There's a study that came out that 75% of people under 30 get all of their news from influencers. They don't read the times they get their news from influencers. That's depressing. It is. Don't like that. Depressing. But it is realistic. Yeah. So true. We are trying to develop a playbook to basically get that message out there and work with them to promote messages that they believe in. Cuz this is their own

Leo Laporte (02:59:55):
Healthcare. I want to support you. Where do I go to help?

Brianna Wu (02:59:58):
You can go to Americans for Contraception and support us there.

Leo Laporte (03:00:02):
Americans for contraception.com. I

Brianna Wu (03:00:04):
Think so. I've never plugged this on show before, but that's the group. We are,

Leo Laporte (03:00:08):
Oh, let's see if Google, yeah, it's dot org. Okay. Yep. Dot org. Cuz it's a nonprofit. And you can donate right there. You know, I I donate a hundred bucks a month to Planned Parenthood. Cause I'm a big believer. Hundred percent reproductive health and health rights. And I wanna support that. But I think this sounds like a very good, it's still rumored,

Iain Thomson (03:00:28):
But it's never been confirmed that Bill Gates sponsored the contraception amendment in Colorado. Do you know anything about that? No, I didn't. I dunno. Okay. I

Brianna Wu (03:00:34):
Don't know. But yeah. Something I was gonna say is we have an event coming up where we actually have a bunch of Christians that are gonna be arguing in a debate format, actually talking about that. How they believe in contraception. They think it's a right, for the same reason she support Planned Parenthood layout. That, you know, planned families are a good thing, a good thing you can give the kid what they need.

Leo Laporte (03:00:56):
People should have families when they wanna have families. Not, not because biology has decreed a

Brianna Wu (03:01:01):
Hundred percent.

Leo Laporte (03:01:03):
Americans for contraception org. Good for you. Really proud of this. I, I love all the work you're doing, thank you's. Great. Thank you. Thank you. And of course, rebellion pack.com always

Brianna Wu (03:01:11):
Support

Leo Laporte (03:01:12):
Us. And Brianna Woo. On the Twitter, what's your what's your mastodon handle? Oh

Brianna Wu (03:01:17):
Gosh, I don't even know. It's at, I

Leo Laporte (03:01:20):
Just, are you in me on that? Social? Probably are right? I don't dunno. I'll look it up. Look at this. I'll find it. I can find

Brianna Wu (03:01:26):
It. I love my majo. I really do. It's a great social network. And I

Leo Laporte (03:01:29):
Regret Well, I wanna get you more followers involved on the, you're at m sst d n dot. Is

Brianna Wu (03:01:34):
That a good one? I really wanna

Leo Laporte (03:01:35):
Move over. Doesn't really matter. You can,

Brianna Wu (03:01:37):
I don't know how

Leo Laporte (03:01:38):
To, so there's, if you go to your settings, okay. There's a way to export your followers and following. Okay. You can't save your toots. Oh. So that's sad. Your toots live on on that site. And, and you can't just take them except by manually kind of Sure. Exporting them. There's an RSS feed for your toot. So you could probably

Brianna Wu (03:01:58):
Look at, look at all my drone photos.

Leo Laporte (03:02:00):
Nice. Nice. And the cars. And the cars and the, yeah. Wow. Look at that. That's beautiful. Wow.

Brianna Wu (03:02:07):
That's Massachusetts

Leo Laporte (03:02:09):
For you. Yeah. Brianna. Woo. At mst dn.social. There's no reason to move unless you, I mean, I'd love to have you onto it's social, but I sure. Hang out. I, I we can follow you onto it's social so it doesn't, you know, it doesn't, I

Brianna Wu (03:02:20):
Want to be part of a Mastodon instance that believes in the same things I do. Right. And, you know, some of these battles that you've seen here, it just doesn't align with my, my, my paradigm of free speech.

Leo Laporte (03:02:33):
I can, I can't promise you that twit social is progressive or liberal. No, no, no. It's just twit listeners of all stripes of all. I want smart people points of view. That's what I want. Yeah. Yeah. That's my

Brianna Wu (03:02:44):
Puppy.

Leo Laporte (03:02:45):
Oh, what a cutie. That's a little kaiju. Kaiju. Stop chewing on the power cables. It's not okay.

Iain Thomson (03:02:52):
Oh, good luck. Like any, any dog or cat is gonna stop doing that. I love

Leo Laporte (03:02:56):
Mug sockets. Oh, I'm already following you on Mastodon. Oh, there you go. Of course you are. Who wouldn't be? Mr Ian Thompson. The register.com. Ian Thompson is spelled weird. I a i n t o m s o n.

Iain Thomson (03:03:13):
Yes, indeed. It's Pel in a British way In the proper

Leo Laporte (03:03:16):
Way. Oh boy. Proper way gov. I was watching a movie the other night. The guy says none of you know gov Here. I'm sir to you. <Laugh>. Oh

Iain Thomson (03:03:28):
Please. Wasn't Guy Richie.

Leo Laporte (03:03:29):
It was called Deep End. It was a very weird 1970 movie featuring Jane Asher of all people. Oh. working in a bath. Public bathhouse did in Britain. They didn't have baths for until recently, I think. So people would go to the Public Bath House

Iain Thomson (03:03:45):
Years. Yeah. You know, it's usually had a servant to actually fill them for. Oh,

Leo Laporte (03:03:49):
Well that's different.

Iain Thomson (03:03:50):
Yes. Well, I dunno. I was watching Black Mirror all the holiday week. Oh, God. So, yeah.

Leo Laporte (03:03:55):
What else? This awful. Anything else you wanna plug? God

Iain Thomson (03:03:58):
The Reggie's always around and always there. It's my second podcast of the week. Cause we're now doing a regular weekly podcast. Nice ke Good for you. Good for you. Because as I discovered the collection noun for a bunch of vultures is a kettle, so, oh, it was seen to work.

Leo Laporte (03:04:13):
So the podcast called A Kettle of Kettle of

Iain Thomson (03:04:15):
Vultures,

Leo Laporte (03:04:16):
Yes. Vultures. Wow.

Iain Thomson (03:04:18):
Nice. I don't quite how that started, but still.

Leo Laporte (03:04:20):
So put the kettle on is

Iain Thomson (03:04:21):
Boil a bunch of vultures. We like to keep things fairly bubbly, but <laugh>

Leo Laporte (03:04:26):
The real question is, can you keep them under an hour and a half?

Iain Thomson (03:04:30):
Oh yeah. No, we limit it to, I think it's about 15, 20 minutes. Oh my

Leo Laporte (03:04:33):
God. Yeah. I don't know how to do that. Well, we

Iain Thomson (03:04:35):
Only discuss, well we only discussed one story and we eliminate the swearing mostly.

Leo Laporte (03:04:41):
Occasionally. That's probably saves quite a bit of time. That's a, that's a negative.

Iain Thomson (03:04:45):
Yeah, no, I mean, some stuffs, I mean, we, we discussed the I was talking about this teams profanity band with a mate the other day and just like, I wonder how geographical it is. Is Wanker or Cock womble gonna be allowed in there? <Laugh>. And it's just like, I've got a feeling, you know, there's gonna be some intensive research going on and just what's what? You slip past the team's team.

Leo Laporte (03:05:09):
Look for Kettle of Vultures at a podcast player near you. Indeed. Folks, that's it for this twit. Boy, I didn't want to end it so soon, but after three hours it's time. It's time. It, we gotta do it.

Iain Thomson (03:05:22):
We gotta do it. Goodness. It really has been three hours. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (03:05:25):
I like that. No, how I keep trying. I try. No, you're not, you're not trying. I

Iain Thomson (03:05:29):
I'm doing it way too much, mate.

Leo Laporte (03:05:31):
Seriously, you're not. You know, I, my my philosophy is if you want a 90 minute podcast, just stop it at 90 minutes and that's it. You're done. You get two 90 minute podcasts, or in this case, yeah, you get two 90 minute podcasts, but then you'll have next week it's like a pile of net New Yorkers or National Geographic just

Iain Thomson (03:05:49):
Piling up. I know, I know. I'm sorry. We, we've had to do clean outs on those.

Leo Laporte (03:05:53):
Oh, you heard about

Iain Thomson (03:05:54):
National Geographics firing all its stuff. I did. I know.

Leo Laporte (03:05:56):
Yeah, because they're owned by,

Iain Thomson (03:05:59):
Oh, I don't

Leo Laporte (03:05:59):
Know. Oh, is it Disney? It's

Iain Thomson (03:06:01):
Discovery.

Leo Laporte (03:06:02):
Well, discovery.

Iain Thomson (03:06:04):
Oh, for goodness sake.

Leo Laporte (03:06:05):
So naturally they had to fire everybody. So sad. Oh, actually. And Discovery is

Iain Thomson (03:06:10):
Now owned by Disney in Bone. Dimmer by Disney. Yeah. So <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (03:06:15):
Yeah, they scrape them for money. Oh, I know. They're poor. But it's so No more staff writers. But the magazine goes on

Iain Thomson (03:06:23):
They'll, I'm presuming using Pretty pictures and freelancers willing to work cheap. Wow. But the, the articles kind of made that magazine. It was like, yeah. And he said it was like Playboy.

Leo Laporte (03:06:32):
But, and, and if you ever needed more incentive to join Club Twit, they laid off 17 editorial positions, including all the staff writers, the entire podcast staff. Oh, good. And a group of editors who'd been on staff, some of them for 40 years. Didn't that Geo or

Iain Thomson (03:06:48):
Discovery

Leo Laporte (03:06:49):
By Revision three Discovery did. Yes. That was Discovery. Okay. Yes. All right. We gotta be at dinner in nine minutes. Let's go kids. Okay. If you wanna watch the show live, you can every Sunday, two to 5:00 PM Eastern Time. It is. That's let's see. No, that's two to five Pacific Time fi. That's five to 8:00 PM Eastern Time. 2100 utc. Let me get my math straight at Live TWIT tv. If you're watching Live Chat, live in our irc, open to all IRC TWIT TV Club twit members, of course have access to the Special Club twit Discord. You can also get the shows after the fact on demand at our website, twit tv. You can also let's see, get it on YouTube. There's a YouTube dedicated channel. I think the best thing to do is subscribe in your favorite podcast player, and that way you'll get it automatically just in time for your Monday morning commute. Thank you. It's so great to have everybody live in studio. So great to see You'all. Thank you for joining us. We'll see you next time. Another twit is in the can