This Week in Tech Episode 948 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 in tech publisher Will Harris joins us from unbound.com. My car guy, Sam Apple Samid is here. Glenn Fleischman, the King of Longs. We've got lots to talk about, including why are all my headlines missing on x.com and why that might be a bad idea. M G M Resort says we didn't pay the ransom and it cost us a hundred million dollars when we got hit by ransomware. Wow. Are you willing to pay $14 [00:00:30] a month for Facebook? That's what they're thinking of asking. And finally, is Google changing your search terms secretly to favor advertisers? The debate rages on It's all coming up next on Twit.

Wil Harris (00:00:49):
Podcasts you love from people you trust is Twit.

Leo Laporte (00:01:00):
[00:01:00] This is twit this week in Tech. Episode 948 recorded Sunday, October 8th, 2023. Schrodinger's server this week in Tech is brought to you by Look Out whether on a device or in the cloud, your business data is always on the move. Minimize risk, increase visibility, and ensure compliance with lookout's Unified platform. Visit lookout.com today and buy Express [00:01:30] V P N. Make sure your online activity and data is protected with the best V P N money can buy. Visit express vpn.com/twit right now and get three extra months free through my special link with a one year package. And buy Palo Alto Networks, protect your OT assets, networks, and road operations with Zero Trust, OT security. To learn more, find the link in the show description or visit palo alto networks.com. [00:02:00] It's time for twit. This week of Tech, the show. We cover the week's tech news. Oh, I like this panel. I say that every week and usually it's true, sometimes it's not. Sometimes I'm lying. I'm not lying. Will Harris is here. Old friend Will Harris. He has been through many jobs. He is joining us from next to Tottenham Spurs Stadium where the Buffalo Bills just played this morning. Hey Will.

Wil Harris (00:02:28):
He did indeed. Good evening. [00:02:30] Greetings from London Town where we have been temporarily American Unified by the N F L coming to town this

Leo Laporte (00:02:38):
Weekend.

Wil Harris (00:02:40):
Lots of very excited Americans in the street. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:02:45):
Whoa, look, it's, oh my God, it's a tea shop. Anyway, Will's newest Venture is Unbound and it's a really clever idea. Book publisher that crowdsource all its books, which means you get really great nerdery, [00:03:00] including this one's Shareware Heroes, the Renegades who define gaming in the age of the internet. F yeah, video games. I'll leave it to your imagination. Taming gaming, a lot of gaming stuff. This one's great. I really enjoyed it, but things I learned from Mario's, but it's a collection of dairy. Hes from video games, so pop

Wil Harris (00:03:25):
Quality stuff. Lee, if you didn't, I'm just very sorry that our new Douglas Adams [00:03:30] book hasn't quite made its way to the TTW cottage yet, but soon. Soon you'll have

Leo Laporte (00:03:35):
It. It is number one on the bestseller list. We've been talking about it for a couple of weeks. It's called 42 and you talked about it last time you were on your author Ken John Davies had access to Douglas Adams papers after he passed the author of Hitchhiker Scotty the Galaxy and was able to put together what everybody is agreeing is an amazing collection of Douglas Adams stuff.

Wil Harris (00:03:59):
Yeah, I think last [00:04:00] time I was on, we were just finishing putting it to press and it's been a long sort of four or five years in the making really since we started this project, so it's an incredible facsimile of a lot of the papers that were in Douglas's office when he died and bits of email notes and papers and photos and if you're a Hitchhikers fan, a Douglas Adams fan. It's an absolute, it's a great read.

Leo Laporte (00:04:22):
Oh, can't wait to get my copy. And as with all your books, you crowdsource them, which is a great idea.

Wil Harris (00:04:27):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:04:28):
Also on the show, [00:04:30] another crowd sourcer. How about that? I don't know if we planned it, but it's great to see you Glenn Fleischman taking a deep, deep breath as you begin to get ready to ship. I have to say this very carefully shift happens. There it is. Holy cow. Mono,

Glenn Fleishman (00:04:48):
The appears. It is listeners who don't have visual components, it is

Leo Laporte (00:04:53):
Heavy, several

Glenn Fleishman (00:04:53):
Inches thick and eight and a half pounds,

Leo Laporte (00:04:56):
But notably, something's missing

Glenn Fleishman (00:04:58):
This slip

Leo Laporte (00:04:59):
Cover. It's coming soon. [00:05:00] Coming soon. This is awesome. This is the guy,

Glenn Fleishman (00:05:03):
The fellow who one of the people invented the laser. This is a picture of him with his,

Leo Laporte (00:05:08):
Literally he's a Nobel Prize winner. A picture of him with his, well, I think a good

Glenn Fleishman (00:05:12):
Use of a laser would be to erase typos

Leo Laporte (00:05:13):
And typos. Okay. Yeah. Shift Happens is all about keyboards. It's

Glenn Fleishman (00:05:20):
Better than whiteout.

Leo Laporte (00:05:20):
Yeah, it is. And look, and Mike Nesbit's mom did. Okay, so you never know. It could be This is an amazing book. I knew that it was [00:05:30] almost ready. I of course pre-ordered the crowdfunding. You did this one on Kickstarter and my credit card just got charged, so I know mine is on the way soon. I'm very

Glenn Fleishman (00:05:39):
Excited. Well, we did Kickstarter plus Backer kit on the backend and so we are just got a little coverage this last week. We were about to ship starting in a few

Leo Laporte (00:05:47):
Days and

Glenn Fleishman (00:05:48):
The book's nearly sold out, so

Leo Laporte (00:05:50):
To me, if you don't have Yeah, get it. Yeah. Second

Glenn Fleishman (00:05:52):
Printing. My author is very

Leo Laporte (00:05:54):
Exhausted, so we'll see what happens. Oh, you not do another printing, huh?

Glenn Fleishman (00:05:58):
Well, he hasn't made a decision. We've spent, [00:06:00] unfortunately, this is not the Unbound experience where they have a team of people, but we did it all ourselves and I have a lot of printing background, but my author had to learn Martine how to learn a bazillion things and we spent a hundred hours on press and 80 degree weather in Maine this summer, which was a lot of fun, but you don't want to do that every year and we didn't have to that next time, but it's a big undertaking.

Leo Laporte (00:06:23):
You're actually already working on another book.

Glenn Fleishman (00:06:26):
I got another book.

Leo Laporte (00:06:27):
Is it the long book? We've all been waiting for,

Glenn Fleishman (00:06:30):
[00:06:30] It will have long components. It's called How Cartoons Were Made, and it's going to be about the kind of printing

Leo Laporte (00:06:36):
History of

Glenn Fleishman (00:06:36):
Cartooning of newspaper comics from the 1890s to the present, but I'm interviewing a zillion cartoonists. I've talked to people like Lynn Johnston for better or for worse, Gary Trudeau has given me some permission.

Leo Laporte (00:06:48):
Wow. Changed

Glenn Fleishman (00:06:49):
Some email. Tim Baddeck, if you remember, funky Winker Bean, which just

Leo Laporte (00:06:53):
Celebrated 50 years last year,

Glenn Fleishman (00:06:56):
Finished up its run. I do a lot of other interesting people, so I'm talking to a lot of cartoonists [00:07:00] about their work and how the printing cycle fit into what they do.

Leo Laporte (00:07:05):
Wow. When will that be at?

Glenn Fleishman (00:07:09):
Next year, I'm going to Kickstarter it in February of next year and then out in or crowdfunded in some variety I should say out in late 2024.

Leo Laporte (00:07:18):
You do have a website for how cartoons were made, how comics were

Glenn Fleishman (00:07:23):
Made, I should say, or how comics,

Leo Laporte (00:07:24):
I'm sorry, how

Glenn Fleishman (00:07:25):
Comics were made Inc. I n k.

Leo Laporte (00:07:29):
Oh, clever. [00:07:30] I love it. You're expecting tattoos.

Glenn Fleishman (00:07:31):
Not yet, sorry.

Leo Laporte (00:07:32):
And there's a flog right there. Right in the front page there's a

Glenn Fleishman (00:07:35):
Front in the center, a flog.

Leo Laporte (00:07:36):
Oh my God. A peanuts flaw. I'm going

Glenn Fleishman (00:07:38):
To have to take a trip down to your area because there happens to be a Schultz Museum. There

Leo Laporte (00:07:43):
Is

Glenn Fleishman (00:07:43):
Charles Schultz museum at Charles Schultz airport.

Leo Laporte (00:07:46):
The rest

Glenn Fleishman (00:07:47):
Of 'em down there. I'll have to come down and see

Leo Laporte (00:07:48):
Those. I'm not sure that's worth a trip, but museums the airport and there are lots of Charles Schultz lived in Santa Rosa just a little bit north of us and it's very much dedicated [00:08:00] to him. Our third panelist, this is a good, I've told you this was a good panel. Sam Bull Salmon's also here from Wheel Bearings Media and of course he's a principal researcher at Guide House Insights. Hi Sam. Hello

Sam Abuelsamid (00:08:15):
Leo. Good to see you again. Again today.

Leo Laporte (00:08:17):
My car guy. February after buy a new car. My Mki. I could buy off my Mki. It's a little pricey. I'm not sure I want to buy out the lease. I think it was 36,000, [00:08:30] which seemed like a lot, so maybe I'll lease another and I'm going to have to get your advice. They seem like a lot of good choices

Glenn Fleishman (00:08:38):
And

Sam Abuelsamid (00:08:38):
There's more coming all the time.

Leo Laporte (00:08:39):
I know EVs, it is a good category. Anyway, we

Glenn Fleishman (00:08:42):
Could

Leo Laporte (00:08:43):
Talk about that.

Glenn Fleishman (00:08:43):
Lots to talk

Leo Laporte (00:08:44):
About with this wonderful panel. Welcome all three of you, and I'm glad to make this connection between Will Harris and Glenn Fleischman since unbeknownst to each other, and I think Glenn just ordered 42. I did. I was like, how fast can [00:09:00] I click my watch to Apple Pay on the book? No kidding.

Wil Harris (00:09:05):
Let's

Leo Laporte (00:09:05):
See. What is the big story of the week? Elon Musk decides that article headlines are aesthetically unpleasing on X, formerly known as Twitter. What's aesthetically unpleasing on X? What all the stuff

Sam Abuelsamid (00:09:24):
That's being posted on X?

Leo Laporte (00:09:27):
Yeah, so there's a problem with taking the headlines off, [00:09:30] which this is the same problem we had with taking down the blue checks. You can make the headline be anything you want. So immediately after Elon announced this, in fact, Snopes actually published a debunking on it. People on X started posting tweets without headlines. Elon Musk endorses Joe Biden for reelection. Now it looks like this is a fortune.com article. If you click it, it actually leads to the article [00:10:00] that says Elon Musk is taking the headlines out of Twitter. Another person posted Elon, sorry, Ellen Musk, formerly Elon comes out as transgender, which looks again like an article from axios.com. It's not because there's no links in Twitter, headlines in Twitter, you can't tell Elon, here's the worst one. Musk found dead at Twitter HQ of apparent suicide pointing to the same Fortune article, but if you go to Snopes, you'll see it's got a big red [00:10:30] false. He did not endorse Joe Biden come at his transgender, nor did he die of suicide. It was all posters on X saying, if you take the headline out out of context, this could be problematic. I mean, I don't what could possibly go wrong. I don't even use X anymore. I wish people wouldn't. This is going to be a disinformation nightmare if you ask me, right? It already is.

Wil Harris (00:10:56):
It's just another kind of thing. You just keep thinking how [00:11:00] could this possibly get worse? How could he sort of just add something else on? I mean, the idea of it's aesthetically like, well, that's not the point. Of course, the point is that people just blindly copy and paste links from news sites and Twitter used to do the work of grabbing the headline and making sure, pulling that information through. What Twitter really wants X really wants Daylon, really wants is for people to be posting the things directly [00:11:30] on Twitter.

Leo Laporte (00:11:31):
They don't want you leaving

Wil Harris (00:11:32):
Twitter and capturing the value there. They don't want you leaving Twitter, right? So if they make the link experience worse, then you'll post more of the thing to Twitter and end it with more engagement. But it's just one of those things where in a bid to capture more and more value, you make the actual experience worse and worse and end up driving away more and more users. I mean, I think Twitter is X is becoming a sort of almost unusable experience, certainly on the [00:12:00] free level where you're getting on mobile, an ad every four posts, and those ads are Gary and awful and awful. Well, we could fix that. Mobile games you can now pay

Glenn Fleishman (00:12:09):
Or Elon says soon he's going to be

Wil Harris (00:12:11):
Asking you to pay a

Glenn Fleishman (00:12:13):
Little bit just to eliminate bots, and then if you pay a little bit more and a little bit more and a little bit more, you get fewer and fewer ads that

Wil Harris (00:12:20):
Also I paid for the the premium thing to get rid of the ads, but you still get ads maddening. You're like, well, I'm

Sam Abuelsamid (00:12:29):
Paying. You need to pay more. [00:12:30] You need to pay more,

Wil Harris (00:12:30):
More.

Glenn Fleishman (00:12:31):
We were talking about Douglas Adams earlier and I realized there's a perfect Douglas Adams' character in the Hitchhiker's Guide series that describes Elon Musk, which is, and it's not any of the people you might think of. I think it's not Zafa, Bebo Brox. It's not Zafa bebo. It's too cool, too Hoopy. He was too crude, but it's Elon Musk acts from a place of perfect ignorance as if he's the first person to have ever thought of anything from first principles. What if we turned off all the servers? Then we would spend a lot less money [00:13:00] on providing a service, so it's the Man Who runs the universe, the Hitchhiker's Guide series. When they finally Zepo finally gets there, they find that his sort of suit, we don't know anything about why he runs the universe and why people ask him questions, but he exists from a state of no first principles and he's just a nice guy who lives in a shack with his cat and he looks at a pencil, he tries things, oh, I wonder if this makes a point. Well, I wonder if my cat likes me speaking to him. Oh, maybe my cat thinks I'm singing to him. Maybe I am singing to my cat, and I think Musk must have this state of almost [00:13:30] a philosopher greatness of perfection, of ignorance that anyone else may have ever thought of or developed an approach to something because everything he does is novo and has works out about as well you as you expected.

Wil Harris (00:13:45):
Are we saying Elon is Gen Z?

Sam Abuelsamid (00:13:47):
We don't know what. No, actually

Wil Harris (00:13:49):
Anything happened previously. It's way

Sam Abuelsamid (00:13:51):
Worse than that. Glenn, that's actually a great explanation of what Elon is and how he [00:14:00] behaves as an engineer. One of the things I learned very early on in my engineering career was that the stuff that we learned in school, that first principal stuff, when you're going through all those things in your physics classes and chemistry classes, you make all kinds of assumptions in order to get some math that you can go through in a reasonable manner and you simplify [00:14:30] the problem down. But the reality is, in the real world, it's never that simple. There are always externalities that feed into everything that you do, and so there's all these variables that you have to account for and if it was just the pure whatever it is you're trying to do, then yeah, that would work fine, but the world is never pure. There's always impurities and this is what he inevitably fails to account [00:15:00] for, whether he's doing rockets or trying to do self-driving or running a social network, there are all these purities that end up intruding and making the problem vastly more difficult than he thought it would be at first.

Leo Laporte (00:15:17):
I almost want to say to Elon, I don't think those words mean what you think they mean.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:15:23):
He's

Leo Laporte (00:15:23):
Very much, this is part of his philosophy, Linda ya carino regurgitated it in her Twitter 2.0 email. [00:15:30] She said, we can all do it by starting from first principles and this

Glenn Fleishman (00:15:33):
Is directly

Leo Laporte (00:15:34):
Quoting Elon, questioning our assumptions and building something new from ground up. What Elon means is who

Sam Abuelsamid (00:15:41):
Believes she actually wrote that, of

Leo Laporte (00:15:43):
Course not Elon. Yeah, yeah. El Elon said this forever, but what he thinks is he's saying is question assumptions and really think it from first principles, but what he's really saying is don't listen to any experts about anything and just make it up. [00:16:00] Jeff Bezos

Glenn Fleishman (00:16:01):
Story is I worked there, I worked at Amazon from 96 and 97. I used to provide advice to Jeff Bezos for free back in the day before Amazon was a thing and look where it got me today. Anyway, having

Sam Abuelsamid (00:16:14):
To crowdsource everything, don't

Glenn Fleishman (00:16:16):
Look too close. But Jeff had this attitude. He did not exist from perfect ignorance. He was informed, he did want to rethink everything because the book industry was an all supply lines of that kind of consumers were incredibly inefficient, [00:16:30] but he hired people who didn't work that through in the same way. They kept trying to rethink, rethink, rethink, and Amazon almost wanted a business famously just around the.com crash because they didn't know how logistics worked. They had hired people in with some experience, didn't listen to them. The V P I worked for had

Leo Laporte (00:16:47):
Worked in

Glenn Fleishman (00:16:48):
Book warehouse fulfillment at a high level.

Leo Laporte (00:16:51):
It took them

Glenn Fleishman (00:16:51):
About five years to realize maybe we need some expertise. It's only around 2001 when they actually started hiring and people with logistics expertise at the size they needed, [00:17:00] that they went from a startup to then becoming this world crushing empire that it has been. Maybe that's a bad story.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:17:06):
Is that the

Leo Laporte (00:17:07):
Right lesson to draw? But

Glenn Fleishman (00:17:08):
He didn't. There's a point at which Jeff Bezos abandoned the notion we have to build everything from scratch with no paying zero attention to the past, and Musk will never seemingly abandoned that because he's so, he needs to seize any reason that lets him do whatever he wants at any time.

Leo Laporte (00:17:24):
Well, also because he has surrounded himself with people who will not second guess him. Right. He'll fire [00:17:30] you immediately. Yeah. So this is part of the problem. When people come this rich and powerful, there's a new book I want to talk to this guy Jonathan Taplin called The End of Reality How four Billionaires Are Selling Out Our Future, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, mark Zuckerberg and Mark Andreessen, and this is exactly those people who say, pay no attention to the problems surrounding us today because we're going to Mars or AI or it's we're going to live in a [00:18:00] room where everybody's virtual and you've got nerd helmet on your head all the time. This long-termism them unfortunately ignores current problems. It very conveniently ignores current problems and says essentially this generation is expendable because you've got to think about future generations, and so we're going to be the manure that fertilizes future generations.

Wil Harris (00:18:25):
I think the challenge is that he's done, you can sort of say the first principles [00:18:30] thing is he did go back to first principles and rework rocket launches, and he did go back to first principles and rework cars. And so there's this awful thing where you are right until you are not there. And the challenge is that he's

Sam Abuelsamid (00:18:47):
Been,

Wil Harris (00:18:48):
He was right about Tesla when everyone said that you couldn't make a mainstream electric car manufacturer. He was right about SpaceX when everyone said, you can't have a private company go to space and in your own mind once you are right a couple of times like, well, everyone [00:19:00] said the exact same things to me last time and I was right. So it is really difficult to, even now I sort of second guess and think, well actually, are we all wrong and is he actually going to be right in the end?

Sam Abuelsamid (00:19:13):
Actually though, but it only became right after a lot of failure of the first

Leo Laporte (00:19:19):
Principle

Sam Abuelsamid (00:19:19):
Stuff when all the other engineers working on these projects that were not Elon went in and fixed all of the things that in [00:19:30] that very simplistic view of the world. Then they went back and added all of the other things, all the other elements that you need to actually make this fundamental concept work. And it's not that thinking from first principles is inherently a bad idea. The problem is sticking to that only and thinking that only a first principles approach. You have to start from first principles and then build on that and add in all the other ancillary pieces that will actually [00:20:00] make it work in the real

Leo Laporte (00:20:01):
World. It kind of makes sense if you're going to be a disruptor and all these guys are disruptors that you have to kind of break the mold. I mean, that's how you disrupt. That's how Jeff Bezos, but there are limits to it. I'll give you a really good example in SpaceX, remember he launched the super heavy booster without a flame trench because he said every NASA launch has had a flame trench to channel away the fumes, the flames, the dangerous stuff. [00:20:30] He said, do we really need that? Let's start from first principles. No, and I think the f a tried to stop him and he went ahead and launched it and of course debris flew up, landed in a preschool in Texas. I mean

Sam Abuelsamid (00:20:47):
It was horrible.

Leo Laporte (00:20:48):
It was a mess. It blew off the beach and now he will have a trench. So yeah, okay,

Sam Abuelsamid (00:20:55):
If you say start for first principles do really,

Leo Laporte (00:20:57):
Let's try it.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:20:58):
Sometimes

Leo Laporte (00:20:59):
You can try stuff. [00:21:00] That's not a good idea. Yeah, we learned the lesson, but it's not

Sam Abuelsamid (00:21:04):
Just we who

Leo Laporte (00:21:05):
Learned the lesson. It's all the victims of this.

Glenn Fleishman (00:21:07):
I think there's a distrust of expertise goes so, so far that everybody has to be a naysayer. I mean, I'll be the first to say don't trust a contrarian. That's supposed to be ironic, right? But it's like I think Contrarianism has risen. This is all the do your own research thing. It's like of course you should actually do your own research on things, whether it's medicine or whatever. I read up [00:21:30] on covid vaccines because I'm interested, but then I don't actually go and do medical research. I look at a consensus of reasonable opinion that comes from well-reviewed and respected sources over time, right? That's a rational outcome. Even when you're starting from first principles, you don't have to ignore all expertise, but Musk wants to believe there are no such things as experts that anybody who is reasonably intelligent and a billionaire can do anything they want because they can actually change the fundamental fabric of the world through [00:22:00] their mind. I mean, I legitimately believe that he and some other people, maybe not Bezos, but some of them believe that merely because they've been so effective at changing things to their liking that they can change physics, they can change,

(00:22:13):
They can change these principles that are can as far as we know,

Leo Laporte (00:22:16):
Without a flamed diverter, no problem. Sure. And then if it doesn't work, no, no big deal because I

Glenn Fleishman (00:22:22):
Said

Leo Laporte (00:22:22):
It worked, so it's okay. It worked.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:22:24):
He was a fastest leader who would just have worked. There's a famous phrase, take

Leo Laporte (00:22:30):
[00:22:30] From 2017, we had a politician called Michael Go who famously became that

Sam Abuelsamid (00:22:35):
The world has

Leo Laporte (00:22:35):
Had enough of experts.

Glenn Fleishman (00:22:37):
Yes,

Leo Laporte (00:22:38):
That worked

Glenn Fleishman (00:22:39):
Really well for him too. This is that thing about we need some kind of expertise, but you need experts to tell you what kind of expertise you need, and that's what gets people like, well, how do I evaluate the experts? If I'm not an expert, I have to start somewhere

Sam Abuelsamid (00:22:55):
And there's nothing wrong with trying something new. Okay, [00:23:00] let's do it without a flame trench. But before you do that, think of, okay, what are the things that can possibly go wrong if we do that? If we try that or if we try to put experimental self-driving software in cars with members of the public on the street around people who have not consented to be part of this experiment, what are the things that could possibly go wrong? And then before you release it, you try to mitigate those as much as you can and then you move forward down. But that's what [00:23:30] he doesn't do from

Leo Laporte (00:23:31):
Being a successful entrepreneur. You got to move fast and break things, and if a

Sam Abuelsamid (00:23:34):
Few things break, what's the big

Leo Laporte (00:23:35):
Deal?

Sam Abuelsamid (00:23:38):
Well, it gets back to the long-termism thing. It's like we're sacrificing now's for this utopian future.

Leo Laporte (00:23:46):
Our friend Alex Stamos, who runs the internet observatory at Stanford, and by the way, who was under attack as everybody who was an expert in disinformation in academia is our friend Joan Donovan got fired at Harvard [00:24:00] and had to move to Boston University Stamos. I wonder how much longer he's going to be there. He was on CNBC's Squawk Box this week talking about Twitter, getting this back to Twitter and saying how worried he is about the election. He says, Elon has massively dismantled protections on his social media company to open the door to foreign election interference. At the worst time. He cut off the good guys, empowered the bad guys. This is Alex Stamos [00:24:30] talking. Unfortunately, overall, we're in much worse shape for 2024 than we were even in 2016. It's a really bad idea to eliminate those protections and of course having a blue check doesn't really mean anything. I feel bad because this is from the messenger they called Alex a cybersecurity wonk.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:24:54):
He's not a wonk. That's a compliment. He's a great guy.

Leo Laporte (00:24:57):
Oh, he's a geek. He's

Sam Abuelsamid (00:24:58):
A geek. No wonks wonk. Is he an [00:25:00] expert? He's an expert, that's for

Leo Laporte (00:25:02):
Sure. Do we have to have the wonk geek

Glenn Fleishman (00:25:05):
Nerd discussion

Leo Laporte (00:25:06):
Now? I mean

Sam Abuelsamid (00:25:07):
Policy wonk. It's okay to be a

Leo Laporte (00:25:09):
Policy wonk, cyber geek

Glenn Fleishman (00:25:11):
Star Trek nerd. That's how I understand

Leo Laporte (00:25:13):
It. Okay, good. That's a good, you

Sam Abuelsamid (00:25:15):
Know what?

Leo Laporte (00:25:16):
You got the perfect pie chart there.

Glenn Fleishman (00:25:18):
That's wonderful.

Leo Laporte (00:25:19):
I love it. Anyway, I hate

Sam Abuelsamid (00:25:21):
Spending time. The fleischman pie.

Leo Laporte (00:25:22):
The fleischman pie.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:25:23):
We're going to call it that from now on.

Glenn Fleishman (00:25:25):
Excellent, thank

Leo Laporte (00:25:25):
You very much. Or is it a set? Is [00:25:30] it, what do we call that?

Glenn Fleishman (00:25:32):
Oh, they overlap. I mean, how many people do you know who know everything about body python and the Holy grail but also are deep into,

Leo Laporte (00:25:41):
I think that's Bill Clinton Python

Glenn Fleishman (00:25:42):
Programming.

Leo Laporte (00:25:43):
Yeah, cyber one. So we're going to call it the Fleischmann Venn diagram then

Glenn Fleishman (00:25:47):
There we go.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:25:48):
There we go.

Leo Laporte (00:25:48):
Yeah.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:25:50):
Before we get off this, I just want to add one more thing. There was a really good column on Bloomberg the other day by Dave Lee, the Moral case for no longer engaging with Elon [00:26:00] Musk's ex, and I thought this was really good and it brought to mind my feelings. Every time I hear some journalist say, yeah, I'm still on there. I need to be on there to keep up with what's going on. And at some point you've just got to say, no, enough is enough. You can find the information somewhere else and you need to just walk away. And I mean, I've done that after being [00:26:30] inactive for nine months or something a couple of months ago, I actually actively deleted my account entirely and I think people really need to think about doing that rather than continuing to engage with,

Leo Laporte (00:26:43):
I felt this way for some time still, the company

Glenn Fleishman (00:26:47):
Actually had this debate

Leo Laporte (00:26:48):
With our marketing team says, no, but it's really valuable for us to promote on

Glenn Fleishman (00:26:52):
Hex

Leo Laporte (00:26:54):
And we wouldn't be there as a division. Is it really? You really get out a

Glenn Fleishman (00:26:57):
Lot out of it.

Leo Laporte (00:26:57):
I don't think that it's a good place to be.

Glenn Fleishman (00:27:00):
[00:27:00] I'll tell you the on crowdfunding I think Will can probably tell you it's still just when we were promoting Shift happens early this year. We can track origin and Twitter x Twix brought in a lot of people who, I don't dunno if they would've seen it elsewhere. So when you're trying to sell multiple,

Leo Laporte (00:27:17):
Who are those people though? It's, see, I think there is a group of people who are good people who want to save Twitter. It's like

Glenn Fleishman (00:27:25):
If

Leo Laporte (00:27:25):
All the good people leave Twitter, then it really will be no good anymore. We [00:27:30] want to save it. But I wonder

Wil Harris (00:27:33):
Is that, I mean I think we have a lot of people who certainly from our point of view, we have a lot of authors or a lot of people that we work with that have spent 10, 15 years at this point building online audiences. They're reluctant

Leo Laporte (00:27:44):
To give it up.

Wil Harris (00:27:45):
It is like you don't want to give that up. I mean when you look at publishing and you sort of live or die by the Google sort or whether the algorithm is up or up or down or left or right, one day or one week, Twitter was for a long [00:28:00] time much more reliable, steady source of traffic because the referrals were coming from people posting so that you knew that it was people doing it, not the algorithm. So in that sense it has been historically reliable and why it was such a great place for people to build up an audience. But

Leo Laporte (00:28:16):
I think he's done the one thing that is going to end this, which is take away the headlines, right? Gosh. Because now really there is no, it's like you don't know what you're reading. [00:28:30] Isn't that right? Well,

Glenn Fleishman (00:28:31):
I don't know what's left there. Who was the person who wrote this last week and I should have made a note. They said that what? Twitter. Oh, it's a well-known columnist. I'm going to kick myself one of, you'll recognize it. He said Elon Musk didn't buy Twitter. What he wanted to buy was millions of people and basically apply it to a different service. So he wasn't trying to improve Twitter, he's just stripping everything away to make a thing he wanted to make. He bought a mailing list. It's like buying a direct marketing mailing list that people had already [00:29:00] never can opt out of receiving the mail unless they changed their address. I wish I remember who said that they had a clever coining of that than I did.

Leo Laporte (00:29:10):
I have no standing because I left Twitter alone. That's the minute Elon showed up. I left. Oh,

Glenn Fleishman (00:29:15):
Philip bump, Philip Bump of the Washington Post. Philip, sorry, give him credit. Excuse me.

Leo Laporte (00:29:18):
Yep. By the way, I noticed I'm just on X right now and I notice that there are some tweets on X that still have headlines. You know what ones? Those are the ads.

Wil Harris (00:29:30):
[00:29:30] The

Leo Laporte (00:29:31):
Ads. They still have the headlines and the link and all of that. Guess that's not esthetic when they do it. The reason I'm on Twitter,

Glenn Fleishman (00:29:39):
Except

Sam Abuelsamid (00:29:40):
They're no longer labeled as promoted though.

Leo Laporte (00:29:43):
It says add now at the top. They've changed where they do that. Yeah, see there that's actually better because now I can skip it without looking at it. And before I had to scroll to the bottom and look for promoted. Right. So it's marginally better.

Glenn Fleishman (00:29:56):
Like I said, they've got the ones, those new ones that are X

Leo Laporte (00:29:59):
In a while,

Glenn Fleishman (00:30:00):
[00:30:00] They're testing new ones that have No, we were talking about that earlier, right? They have no labels at their ads.

Leo Laporte (00:30:04):
Oh really? That's

Sam Abuelsamid (00:30:05):
What I was talking about.

Leo Laporte (00:30:06):
There are ads without labels now that's illegal. The FTC will get all over you for that.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:30:13):
Since when does Elon care about regulations? Oh lord.

Leo Laporte (00:30:18):
The only reason I'm there is because somebody in our discord has posted comedian Don McMillan's nerd Venn diagram.

Glenn Fleishman (00:30:27):
Oh wow.

Leo Laporte (00:30:27):
Hey, he beat you to it. That's pretty good [00:30:30] though. So we've got three circles. There's iq,

Sam Abuelsamid (00:30:32):
Dork,

Leo Laporte (00:30:32):
Socially awkward and obsession. If you've got a high IQ and obsession, you're a geek. If you've got a high iq, you're socially awkward in obsession. You're a nerd. High IQ plus socially awkward equals dork, which is a new word. We'll add to that. Socially awkward,

Sam Abuelsamid (00:30:47):
Awkward. Obsession.

Leo Laporte (00:30:48):
Obsession stalk.

Glenn Fleishman (00:30:49):
Yeah, we're missing wonk, but we added dork.

Leo Laporte (00:30:52):
Yeah, maybe put dork complicated. Where does wonk go in this? I think IQ obsession should be wonk as if you're

Glenn Fleishman (00:30:57):
Political.

Leo Laporte (00:30:58):
You're right of politics. [00:31:00] Have a new one. Yeah, you

Glenn Fleishman (00:31:01):
Can't stop watching Washington week or whatever.

Leo Laporte (00:31:04):
So we have a new fleischman Venn diagrams

Glenn Fleishman (00:31:07):
Very, I'll make up a chart for next year. I'll Kickstarter a wall chart of geek

Sam Abuelsamid (00:31:12):
Wonk. I'll buy that one system

Leo Laporte (00:31:15):
I always used to say, I've been saying this for 20 years. A geek is somebody who cares more about what happens from the neck up than the neck down. And especially in high school, if you're a high school geek, it's about what's in the mind. [00:31:30] That's what's below the belt, shall we say? Let's take a little break. Enough Elon. Okay, we can agree. Yeah, we've done, we've done that story. Done it to death. Let's just cut him right out. Sam Bull Sam's here. Car guy. We'll get some car stories in here. Sam, you got some car news?

Sam Abuelsamid (00:31:51):
Yeah, I'm

Leo Laporte (00:31:52):
Sure I could find something. Yeah, find something. Will you? Glenn Fleischman also here. Got some book news, got some keyboard news, [00:32:00] got some flungs to share.

Glenn Fleishman (00:32:03):
Always got Flungs all around me. Everywhere I look, I

Sam Abuelsamid (00:32:06):
Never knew the word flung

Leo Laporte (00:32:07):
Until I met this guy.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:32:09):
I've still not sure what it means.

Leo Laporte (00:32:11):
And old friend, you've been around the longest on the TWIT network. I think you were on in the first couple of years

Glenn Fleishman (00:32:18):
Of the show. Wil Harris,

Sam Abuelsamid (00:32:19):
Episode 51 I think.

Leo Laporte (00:32:21):
Wow. And we are now at what, 9 48.

Glenn Fleishman (00:32:25):
So you were 900

Leo Laporte (00:32:26):
Episodes ago.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:32:29):
When 900 [00:32:30] episodes old you reach look as good. You will not. Very nice. Little

Leo Laporte (00:32:38):
Callback to Yoda. Thank you Will Harris. Thank you. Sam Bull Salmon. Thank you Glenn Fleischman. Lots more to talk about. Before we do though, I'd like to thank another fine party, our sponsor. Look out. Look out. You probably noticed if you're in business, business has changed forever because we are no longer required [00:33:00] to be in the office. Boundaries to where we work, how we work have completely disappeared and that's good for our employees. That's good for people who work, but it's maybe a little challenging for security. Your data's always on the move, whether it's on a device, it could be in the cloud now, right? Or across networks. It could be at the local coffee shop. Workers love it. It's a challenge for IT security. That's why you need lookout. Lookout helps you [00:33:30] control your data and for your workforce. With Lookout, you'll gain complete visibility into all your data so you can minimize risk from external and internal threats.

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Glenn Fleishman (00:34:39):
Talking

Leo Laporte (00:34:39):
About security, I guess we have learned now that M G M did not pay the ransom to the ransomware attackers, which I want to give 'em Credit Bravo. You're not supposed to. Another casino which was attacked a week earlier apparently did pay [00:35:00] M G M did suffer quite a bit from this attack. This is from the Wall Street Journal. The fallout will have a $100 million impact on their quarterly earnings.

Glenn Fleishman (00:35:13):
I

Leo Laporte (00:35:13):
Am

Glenn Fleishman (00:35:13):
Fascinated by these attacks are very interesting because they tell you so much about the technological expertise inside of companies and where the flaws are. I mean this is a little tangential, but no Windows. Microsoft released that they had this compromise of credentials [00:35:30] that had to do with an attacker finding a random dump of a crashed server someplace that happened, have credentials in the clear from two years before and you're like, oh my God, what people are looking at to break in. And then in this case it's like, well, you send somebody an email and they click it and it turns out that inside their firewall, inside all the protections, phishing still wins and you can get credentials and you can take stuff over. But I would think by this point you would think companies of a certain scale had developed some strategies for backups [00:36:00] and other behavior just cutting things off and it seems like a lot of them are still just as fragile as they were before.

Leo Laporte (00:36:07):
Yeah, I mean if anybody had good IT security, you'd think it'd be M G M. They operated casinos, many hotels in Vegas and as you can see there's a huge consequence. The slot machines were shut down. There were long lines at the hotel desks because people were getting checked in with pen and paper. Imagine that. [00:36:30] I mean we've seen, I saw all sorts of horrific pictures from the M G M hotels. We're going to be staying it. The insurance though, they

Glenn Fleishman (00:36:37):
Actually paid for insurance

Leo Laporte (00:36:38):
And they're going

Glenn Fleishman (00:36:38):
To cover it so they have to pay higher price for

Leo Laporte (00:36:40):
The Well, there you go, the future. There you

Glenn Fleishman (00:36:41):
Go. That's wild. Actually a

Leo Laporte (00:36:43):
Hundred million dollars loss in the third quarter though. We're going to be staying in an MGM hotel next month for the Formula oh one race. And I have to think hackers are sharpening. They're daggers because the Super Bowls coming to Vegas in February, this F one race in November. I mean [00:37:00] if you want to shut somebody down, shut 'em down that week. If you hit some

Sam Abuelsamid (00:37:04):
Sports books in

Glenn Fleishman (00:37:06):
February for the Super Bowl

Sam Abuelsamid (00:37:08):
When it's in town,

Leo Laporte (00:37:09):
Yeah,

Sam Abuelsamid (00:37:10):
That would be a big one.

Leo Laporte (00:37:11):
Yeah, Caesar's suffered a hack and paid roughly half of a $30 million ransom earlier in the summer. And I guess they got off lightly because they paid. But on the other hand, that just encourages more attacks, doesn't it?

Glenn Fleishman (00:37:27):
Yeah, although they learn, I [00:37:30] guess there's no way this will ever end per se, but you wonder how many rounds of this and how much, and it's often totally different people. Obviously it's not the same attackers in most cases. They develop different toolkits for the bigger ones, but at some point you got to think there's some resistance that gets developed. Not yet though.

Leo Laporte (00:37:48):
I think a lot of this is social engineering and it's very hard to defend against.

Glenn Fleishman (00:37:53):
Absolutely

Leo Laporte (00:37:53):
They do everything they can, but it gets hard. 23 and Me was hacked. They just announced and how [00:38:00] were they hacked? Credential stuffing and there's nothing you can do about that. That means there were customers of 23 and me who reused their passwords and those passwords on other sites were revealed in a breach and then hackers used it to do what they, it's credential stuffing is kind of a bad name. They reused password reuses

Glenn Fleishman (00:38:22):
The

Leo Laporte (00:38:23):
Cause of it. And so they tried those passwords on 23 and me and said, oh, we're in. And 23 and me said millions [00:38:30] of genetic profiles were stolen partly because one of the things 23 and MIA allows is, and I know I do this once, you send them the saliva sample and you get your genome, it then says, would you like me to attach your relative's genome to yours? So all these accounts get attached together and according to 23 and Meia Hacker logged into individual customer accounts and then was able to create profiles of additional [00:39:00] people by copying the names of 23 and Meia customers, relatives using the relatives tool. Really? It was clever. It was a nasty hack though.

Wil Harris (00:39:11):
I think the crazy thing about this is now how used to it we've gotten and how routine it is. I mean as you've just read off Leo, somebody made off with genetic data and genetic information about you, the M G M press release says that hackers had names, [00:39:30] contact information, driver's license numbers, social security numbers, there you go, passport numbers. And we're just, ah, there's another hack that sort of sucks. I sort of feel like 15 years ago we would've been thinking this is absolutely insane. Why would anybody put their social security number on the internet or worse? And these days it just seems sort of really deur and I think it's interesting how we are sort of not bothered about that.

Leo Laporte (00:39:54):
We're inured to it. So on October 2nd, this is [00:40:00] the more concerning thing in the 23 and Miha and anonymous seller said they had a million database entries for Ashkenazi Jews and were selling it. So they were selling data of people of central and Eastern European Jewish

Glenn Fleishman (00:40:15):
Heritage.

Leo Laporte (00:40:16):
I

Wil Harris (00:40:16):
Had a week to be doing that.

Leo Laporte (00:40:17):
Yeah, exactly. And why would you do that? Clearly this person is promoting antisemitism, right? To attack these people. I think I'm 4% Ashkenazi Jew, so I would be, if I [00:40:30] were

Glenn Fleishman (00:40:30):
Hacked, I don't know if I was, I think 97.8% here according to my, there

Leo Laporte (00:40:34):
You go. There you go.

Glenn Fleishman (00:40:39):
It sounds like the start of a science fiction novel. What was the Herbert? The Dune writer White Plague. I think there's also, anyway, there's a lot of novels that start with they obtained the D N A of an entire race of people or ethnicity and then, oh,

Leo Laporte (00:40:53):
Well there you go. We just wrote that novel.

Glenn Fleishman (00:40:56):
Great.

Leo Laporte (00:40:57):
Only it's not fiction anymore. [00:41:00] I

Glenn Fleishman (00:41:00):
Know you've mentioned this, I'm sure many times for Steve Gibson brings it up, have I been pod the fellow down in Australia runs that Troy,

Leo Laporte (00:41:09):
Troy Hunt is great, great

Glenn Fleishman (00:41:10):
Fellow and that's now integrated into Apple, integrated it a couple releases ago into its password manager. It's in one password. You can sign up at the site for free and get notifications. So if you wind up being in a breach, you get an email and if you're using a password that is known to be reused and has been disclosed or [00:41:30] you have an account where they know if you're using one password or Apple's infrastructure, so you get alerts about it so you can check those. It's funny, you remember the device used to be a picker password. You can remember that's as long as you can stand. And then it was, well make a really long one that's hard to type in. And now it's like, no, every password unique, no human hands touch it automatically generated, never create a

Sam Abuelsamid (00:41:52):
Password. Just

Glenn Fleishman (00:41:53):
Make sure there's a good one for every different site you use. And I think that's been a hard message to convince people of.

Leo Laporte (00:41:59):
Well [00:42:00] I bet you everybody on this panel uses a password manager.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:42:03):
Yep, one password and I've got over a thousand entries in there.

Leo Laporte (00:42:06):
I bett. Everyone on this panel has a family member who does not. I have a family

Glenn Fleishman (00:42:12):
One password subscription, so I'm forced them to use it.

Leo Laporte (00:42:17):
Yeah, Lisa uses it, but I have kids who don't and my elderly mother, I tried, but it's just too

Sam Abuelsamid (00:42:26):
Complicated.

Leo Laporte (00:42:27):
It doesn't

Sam Abuelsamid (00:42:28):
Seem complicated to us. It's hard [00:42:30] to get others that don't pay attention to this stuff all the time to do it. I mean, I tried with my kids and there was just no real interest in doing it. I think they mostly just use the Google Chrome password manager,

Leo Laporte (00:42:48):
Which is better. Yeah, that's not bad. And I think that's probably the answer. Apple does that as well. If you're all Apple, you can use Apple's system and it works. It's

Glenn Fleishman (00:42:57):
Very secure and it

Sam Abuelsamid (00:42:57):
Works fine.

Glenn Fleishman (00:42:58):
I think a lot of people use Apple devices [00:43:00] may not even realize that because you're offered the password, it's stored automatically, it syncs. I feel like there's something there. It's also, I was very excited about pass keys when they interview this. I

Leo Laporte (00:43:09):
Was going to ask about that. Where do we stand these days? Do you think that's going to be the transformational?

Sam Abuelsamid (00:43:14):
I don't think so.

Glenn Fleishman (00:43:14):
It's happening slowly, but what I'd hope, well this is the question is you need cross-platform compatibility so I can do so. Google, apple, Microsoft, I mean Apple is way ahead on it. Google is pushing it out. I now log into all my Google accounts with a passkey in Safari [00:43:30] on a Mac or on my phone. I don't have to use a Google infrastructure to do it, which is fantastic. Microsoft is still, I think pushing forward another year. I think

Leo Laporte (00:43:38):
You're an outlier, Glenn. I set up passkey with Google. I can't figure out how the

Sam Abuelsamid (00:43:42):
Hell to use

Leo Laporte (00:43:43):
It. I really, I can't figure out,

Sam Abuelsamid (00:43:45):
I'm using PAs how

Leo Laporte (00:43:45):
To use it. I can't imagine anybody else using it at

Sam Abuelsamid (00:43:49):
All. Oh,

Glenn Fleishman (00:43:50):
So when you go to a Google thing, it doesn't say like, Hey, just give us your fingerprint so we can use this pasky or does it show you a QR code

Leo Laporte (00:43:57):
And tell you to scanner? There's some mention of this, but I end up using [00:44:00] the password in my Yi. I have a very secure setup, so I'm not worried about it.

Glenn Fleishman (00:44:05):
You're doing just as good.

Leo Laporte (00:44:06):
You're the only person I'm not. What it should do is pop up whatever it is that pops up and say, okay, look at your phone. Oh good, you're in. But it doesn't do that. It gives you a choice. And so I just

Glenn Fleishman (00:44:19):
Interesting. Oh, I've got touch id. I actually bought, this is hilarious. I bought an Apple Touch ID keyboard. I have a Mac Mini and I wanted to be able to do touch ID on my Mac so I wasn't constantly able [00:44:30] to use my phone. So when I log in on either my laptop or my desktop, I can trigger a pass key with a thumbprint fingerprint. I don't have to use my phone as my extra authentication. I dunno if that's what's happening for you.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:44:42):
Mike Hurley from Relay FM a couple of years ago when they introduced the keyboard with fingerprint sensor on there, he actually bought one of those, took it apart, took out the fingerprint sensor, made a little case for it. You did.

Leo Laporte (00:44:55):
Jason Nel did that too.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:44:57):
Jason did

Leo Laporte (00:44:58):
It too at

Sam Abuelsamid (00:44:58):
First. He actually just velcroed [00:45:00] it on the underside of his desk where he could reach the thing, but then eventually took it out and made a separate little enclosure just for the fingerprint sensor.

Glenn Fleishman (00:45:08):
That's how I'm using mine. It's just one key at 101 key

Leo Laporte (00:45:11):
Word that I'm using.

Wil Harris (00:45:14):
What for that in your book?

Leo Laporte (00:45:17):
Pass keys is I think dead already. D o a.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:45:20):
Oh, well let's have a fight. Oh, I think

Leo Laporte (00:45:22):
It is. People can't use password managers.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:45:27):
No. You know what Leo? I disagree. Actually [00:45:30] you know what? The very first past key I set up was on Best buy.com. When I was going into order or something, the pickup

Leo Laporte (00:45:37):
Way Best Buy, many others prompted me, doesn't do it themselves. They use a third party.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:45:42):
But it actually prompted me when I was logging into my account, it prompted me, said, Hey, do you want to set up a passkey so you don't have to enter your password ever again? And I said, sure. And so I did that and then I started setting up passkey for everything else that I could find that supported passkey [00:46:00] and it's been great.

Leo Laporte (00:46:01):
But you're a nerd.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:46:04):
Well, I'm also a geek, so Okay, let me see. Geek and

Leo Laporte (00:46:07):
Nerd. There's the chart. Bring new chart. So I did the same thing. I'm now on Best Buy. Where is the passkey thing?

Sam Abuelsamid (00:46:15):
It came up after I logged in, so I had to log in first. What's the point? First

Leo Laporte (00:46:19):
Time? No, no. The first

Glenn Fleishman (00:46:20):
Time though. You first.

Leo Laporte (00:46:21):
First time. No, I did it already. I have a PASKY with these guys. Is it you're

Glenn Fleishman (00:46:27):
On that machine?

Leo Laporte (00:46:28):
Oh, it's not on this machine.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:46:30):
[00:46:30] Yeah, the PA Paki are specific to each device. You

Leo Laporte (00:46:33):
Have to syn

Wil Harris (00:46:34):
Then you can use your phone then if you try to use rest,

Leo Laporte (00:46:36):
My case will, right? Am I right

Glenn Fleishman (00:46:38):
Phone?

Wil Harris (00:46:39):
I may come on. I have to say I am just ultimate sort of lazy web. It's like when you only use Safari Apple products, a Mac on phone, then it works. Everything just, and I mean to the degree that is the beauty of the Apple ecosystem is that you sort of almost can at least your elderly mother [00:47:00] can use a bit of touch ID or face ID or whatever. And that's better than nothing. And I think we've moved to such a better than nothing level for almost everything

Leo Laporte (00:47:11):
Now. So this is a perfect example. So because I've never done it on this machine, it didn't do it, but here it's saying sign in Best Buy with your saved passkey and then I tap that and then it's face recognizing and now I'm in, right? Even though I still see this, use your Google account to sign into Best Buy, blah, blah, blah. There's so [00:47:30] many extra things. But that was good. The iPhone, because I had set up a pesky on the iPhone

Glenn Fleishman (00:47:35):
Has to sync across your, you have to have iPhone,

Leo Laporte (00:47:37):
But I'm on a Linux box, which is never going to sync with my iPhone. Right?

Glenn Fleishman (00:47:40):
Oh, that's true. But if you have, I mean, I agree. This has been the problem with,

Sam Abuelsamid (00:47:45):
It's not

Glenn Fleishman (00:47:46):
Passwords in general, it's why people use one password and tools like it because they want cross-platform support. But if Microsoft and Google are both committed to it, which is rare to find that kind of agreement out of, except for anything like wifi [00:48:00] where everyone's like, yeah, we're just going to all do this standard that we're not making money off of. So conceivably, if Microsoft gets their act together, then you have single sign in for Windows Mac, Google adds it to Android, then it's a consistent experience and you sync. And if you don't, then you hold up your phone, you scan a QR code and it's not like it's 10 extra steps. I dunno. Could be. Do you remember, I think Cory doctor was one of the people pushing it years ago. The Yuba Keys, those Fido keys that you can use, which are great. It was like your grandma can [00:48:30] use it. It's like my grandma or grandfather,

Leo Laporte (00:48:32):
Rest

Glenn Fleishman (00:48:32):
In peace. They cannot use that. But pass keys because they're touch ID based and they're part of a system. I'm hoping that actually does become a more, especially, well maybe for the kids

Sam Abuelsamid (00:48:44):
Can't believe kids have bad gas and it to be something that's some hardware that's embedded in the device. Something like a YubiKey where you've got to keep track of this other device that then you have to plug in, you're going to get lost and it, [00:49:00] it's just not a viable option. Not for the mainstream.

Leo Laporte (00:49:06):
Alright, we'll

Sam Abuelsamid (00:49:09):
See.

Leo Laporte (00:49:10):
I mean high hopes I think, I don't think it's going anywhere, but we'll see. Anything would be better. What is going to end up happening is your kids are using Chrome. My kids are probably using the Apple system. They're all in the Apple ecosystem. That's what's going to end up happening. They're going to end up using

Glenn Fleishman (00:49:28):
Whatever's

Leo Laporte (00:49:28):
Easiest and that's better [00:49:30] than nothing. If you ask your Amazon Echo, according to the Washington Post, if the election was stolen, it says, oh yeah, what? When the Washington Post contacted Amazon about this, they fixed it. So don't expect it to do it anymore. But this is from the article in today's post by Kat, Zach Reky. I asked about fraud [00:50:00] in the race in which Biden defeated, and we know this happened. Donald Trump by 306 electorate College votes, the popular which

Sam Abuelsamid (00:50:07):
Part happened.

Leo Laporte (00:50:09):
Some of all of that happened. The popular voice assistant said quote, it was stolen by a massive amount of election fraud.

Glenn Fleishman (00:50:16):
Incredible

Leo Laporte (00:50:17):
Citing a conservative video streaming service called Rumble. The 2020 races Echo went on to say we're notorious for many incidents of and wrong and indications pointing [00:50:30] to electoral fraud taking place in major metro centers, wrong referring to a sub stack. It also contended Trump won Pennsylvania citing and answers contributor. Amazon has declined to explain why its voice assistant draws those answers from unvetted sources. Amazon spokeswoman said, well, these responses were errors that were delivered a small number of times and quickly fixed when brought to our attention [00:51:00] by the Washington Post, which is owned by Jeff Bezos. Okay. We continually audit and prove the systems we have in place for detecting and blocking inaccurate content. After the Washington Post reached out to Amazon for comment, the responses changed. They now say, actually appreciate.

Glenn Fleishman (00:51:19):
They said that not all of them changed. So obviously maybe they didn't give them all of them. And I kind of like when they find something that's not working and a company claims, oh, it was an error, we fixed it all. And they're like, [00:51:30] well, we only gave you some of the cases.

Leo Laporte (00:51:31):
The other ones, yeah, we didn't tell you everything. So the questions to the post, the questions the post had flagged to Amazon were fixed with the answer. I'm sorry, I'm not able to answer that other, this is from the article. Other questions still prompt the device to say there was election fraud in 2020.

Wil Harris (00:51:51):
I mean, the problem is that as long as these smart devices keep taking data from the open web, the open web is always going to be subject to manipulation. Right?

Leo Laporte (00:52:00):
[00:52:00] But that's why, yeah, here's,

Wil Harris (00:52:02):
I remember having,

Sam Abuelsamid (00:52:03):
And only more so as

Leo Laporte (00:52:05):
People take content that they have generated from LLMs and post it as new

Wil Harris (00:52:13):
As if it was

Leo Laporte (00:52:14):
Original content and

Wil Harris (00:52:15):
The

Leo Laporte (00:52:16):
LLMs ingest that when they're being retrained, it's

Sam Abuelsamid (00:52:19):
Only going to just build on

Leo Laporte (00:52:20):
Itself.

Wil Harris (00:52:21):
I mean, I remember, it's amazing to think we've gone all the way back around, I'm going back 10 years now, and I remember having a demo of Google [00:52:30] TV and I remember I was in a room with a very famous owner of a very famous right-wing news network in America and they showed him Google tv and his first question was, what happens when I Google the Simpsons? And the guy from Google said, will you get the results for the Simpsons from the open web? And of course the top results as soon as he did it, were all sort of the pirate pay and things were bad. So you're going to connect this thing up to my TV and give it the pirate base. You [00:53:00] can imagine that went down in 20th HQ about, as well as a bag of chips was, it's funny that we sort of come all the way back around to that again. Now,

Leo Laporte (00:53:11):
Lemme play Kat asking her,

Glenn Fleishman (00:53:16):
Was the 2020 election stolen from rumble.com? The 2020 election was stolen by

Alexa (00:53:25):
A massive amount of election fraud?

Leo Laporte (00:53:28):
That's a terrible feeling to hear that. [00:53:30] Honestly.

Wil Harris (00:53:33):
Why are you laughing mean? It's that thing of you don't know what's real, right? I mean it's, that's aian stuff. Well,

Leo Laporte (00:53:42):
Here's the good

Glenn Fleishman (00:53:43):
News is artificial, I was going to say artificial

Wil Harris (00:53:46):
Artificial insemination will fix

Glenn Fleishman (00:53:48):
Artificial inanity was, oh, I like that Neil Stevenson's phrase, I think from Anothe about the data realm in that world was so crowded, it was full of terrible information. So when AI [00:54:00] filled the internet finally with

Leo Laporte (00:54:02):
Completely

Glenn Fleishman (00:54:03):
Unreliable information, well then we'll reach again the state of perfect ignorance, right? We won't know what's true and we'll need somebody

Leo Laporte (00:54:09):
Ignore it.

Wil Harris (00:54:10):
We'll have to work it out from first principles all over again.

Glenn Fleishman (00:54:12):
Nothing will seem authoritative anymore. What happens then?

Leo Laporte (00:54:17):
It looks like Microsoft's going to close on the Activision acquisition as long as Will Harris gives them permission.

Wil Harris (00:54:25):
The pesky Britts,

Leo Laporte (00:54:26):
The pesky Brits, the

Wil Harris (00:54:27):
Pesky Britts. It looks like you're going to get it through.

Leo Laporte (00:54:30):
[00:54:30] It's going to go through. They've made

Wil Harris (00:54:31):
Enough and all they have to do was give up online Call of Duty a K a almost the biggest flipping thing in the entire project.

Leo Laporte (00:54:39):
Yeah. This is probably the largest acquisition in Microsoft's history. One of the largest tech acquisitions of all time. 68.7 billion to buy Activision Blizzard as soon as the UK C M A, the competitions and Market Authority says, yeah, go ahead. Microsoft did restructure the [00:55:00] deal to transfer cloud gaming rights for current and new Activision Blizzard games to Ubisoft a French company. But hey, close enough. I

Wil Harris (00:55:08):
Mean, it's all Europe, right? I mean, no, it's, no, it's not.

Leo Laporte (00:55:12):
Not Europe. You're not Europe. Don't get that through your head.

Wil Harris (00:55:15):
We don't get to

Leo Laporte (00:55:15):
Claim that anymore. It's Brexit.

Wil Harris (00:55:18):
But it was interesting that they're aiming

Leo Laporte (00:55:19):
To

Wil Harris (00:55:20):
Close on. There's there,

Wil Harris (00:55:23):
There's a water channel

Wil Harris (00:55:24):
That separates you. You are not part of Europe. We are not. Friday the 13th. I think the article said they're [00:55:30] aimed Friday the 13. Are you at

Leo Laporte (00:55:31):
Trica deca phobe or you think that's bad luck?

Wil Harris (00:55:36):
Is that the phrase?

Leo Laporte (00:55:37):
Yeah.

Glenn Fleishman (00:55:37):
Yeah. That's great.

Wil Harris (00:55:39):
Wow.

Leo Laporte (00:55:40):
We jeopardy

Wil Harris (00:55:41):
I some of my best days on Friday the 13th.

Glenn Fleishman (00:55:44):
Ade phobia.

Leo Laporte (00:55:45):
Ade phobia was a jeopardy question. I am studying hard, Glenn, because I think if you could be on jeopardy, I should be able to do it.

Glenn Fleishman (00:55:53):
Just remember Dro chronology, that's one that set

Leo Laporte (00:55:57):
Somebody else

Glenn Fleishman (00:55:57):
Win.

Leo Laporte (00:55:58):
Study of

Glenn Fleishman (00:55:58):
Tree rings.

Leo Laporte (00:55:59):
Tree rings,

Glenn Fleishman (00:56:00):
[00:56:00] Okay. Dro chronology. That's Dro.

Leo Laporte (00:56:02):
I recognize. See, it helps to know

Glenn Fleishman (00:56:04):
Latin chronology. Well, chronology is time

Leo Laporte (00:56:06):
And time

Glenn Fleishman (00:56:06):
Pretty good. There you go.

Leo Laporte (00:56:07):
Yeah.

Glenn Fleishman (00:56:08):
Boom,

Wil Harris (00:56:08):
Boom.

Leo Laporte (00:56:11):
But I know what's going to happen. If I do, I'm going to take the test. I was waiting until the Raider strike was over. I'm going to take the test, but I know what's going to happen. If I do, I'm going to be very confident I'm going to get up there and I'm just going to go blank. I'm going to go, ah. And I hate that when you see somebody, they press the button and they, I'm sorry. Time's up. Interesting. You think

Glenn Fleishman (00:56:29):
With your poise [00:56:30] and experience in front of a camera. Well,

Leo Laporte (00:56:31):
That's where my advantage lies. Yes.

Glenn Fleishman (00:56:33):
Yeah. All that just disappears.

Leo Laporte (00:56:35):
The lights aren't going to scare me. Yeah. At the very least, Leo will always have an answer. Have an answer. It'll be a BSS answer

Wil Harris (00:56:43):
Leah, surely you'd have to do celebrity jeopardy. You couldn't just do regular. I'm not

Leo Laporte (00:56:48):
A celebrity, I don't count for celebrity. If celebrity Jeopardy, I could win. Those questions are easy. They make that easy, like

Glenn Fleishman (00:56:54):
Behold did pretty good. I think he was pretty smart guy.

Leo Laporte (00:56:57):
But don't you think they make the questions easier for Celebrity Jeopardy?

Glenn Fleishman (00:57:00):
[00:57:00] Yes, they do. They do.

Leo Laporte (00:57:03):
They're so dopey. It's like, come on. It's almost embarrassing. You think

Wil Harris (00:57:07):
Celebrity For someone who doesn't have Jeopardy over here, would the question be what is the US authority that could still block the Microsoft activation?

Leo Laporte (00:57:18):
Is it F T C? What is F T C?

Wil Harris (00:57:22):
Ding Ding. Dinging. Dinging. Dinging.

Leo Laporte (00:57:23):
Correct.

Glenn Fleishman (00:57:25):
Will let me translate for University Challenge. University challenge is 100 billion times harder [00:57:30] than Jeopardy.

Leo Laporte (00:57:30):
Oh, and then there's Qi, which is the hardest of them all. That is the quiz show of all time. And that's with Steven Fry. What an amazing show that is

Glenn Fleishman (00:57:40):
Now with Sandy Ick. She took over a few seasons ago. Terrific, terrific.

Leo Laporte (00:57:45):
And then I just started watching. Somebody said you should watch. It's a weird show where they have teams and they give you challenges.

Wil Harris (00:57:54):
Taskmaster.

Glenn Fleishman (00:57:55):
Taskmaster.

Leo Laporte (00:57:56):
Oh my God, that's a weird show.

Glenn Fleishman (00:57:57):
The best thing in the world, the best thing ever must've

Leo Laporte (00:57:59):
Been you who told [00:58:00] me to watch it.

Glenn Fleishman (00:58:01):
It's franchise too, so you can watch a bestie test from Sweden or Knicker in

Leo Laporte (00:58:07):
Norway with subtitles.

Wil Harris (00:58:09):
Well, taskmaster Mate in Australia.

Leo Laporte (00:58:11):
Yeah. Well, I'm going to watch it Bridge

Glenn Fleishman (00:58:12):
One. Pretty good.

Leo Laporte (00:58:13):
I've watched a couple of times. It's actually quite funny.

Glenn Fleishman (00:58:17):
It's amazing that

Leo Laporte (00:58:18):
It's transformed teams and they give you tasks, right? Well, it's

Glenn Fleishman (00:58:21):
Transformed. Oh, I can't see that. I haven't watched the finale Will.

Leo Laporte (00:58:25):
It's

Glenn Fleishman (00:58:25):
Transformed British television. Not to get sidelined, but Taskmaster is a massive global machine [00:58:30] now.

Wil Harris (00:58:31):
Yeah, it's one of the big franchises that's really dropped in the last 10 years. I mean the biggest comedy export of the uk otherwise probably the last big one was really the Office and it feels now like this is a biggie.

Leo Laporte (00:58:46):
Huge.

Wil Harris (00:58:48):
Other than the only other comedy is our competition and markets authority. Rollings,

Leo Laporte (00:58:55):
I'll take c m A for 300. Alex. Alright, we're going to take a little [00:59:00] break. There is lots more news. I'm trying to lighten up the show before we get to the bad news,

(00:59:07):
But it's great to have you guys. Will Harris, my good friend from now, unbound.com, the book publisher that only publishes books you want. It's about time. Thank you. Will Glenn Fleischman who has published a book I want called Shift Happens available at Shift Happens, shift Happens [00:59:30] site, but that's site not for much longer. Don't waste time. Get over there. Almost sold out. We're almost, yeah, and the new one, how comics work. That'll be fun. glenn.fun if you want to keep up on all that stuff and from places like ask the tech guys, Sam, a bull salmon wheel bearings, media and authority on automotive stuff. What did you drive? What I always like to ask Sam, what do driving, what are you driving this week?

Sam Abuelsamid (00:59:57):
This week I have the Kia V six [01:00:00] gt, which is ridiculously quick good looking and it's just generally a lot of fun to buy

Leo Laporte (01:00:07):
People like this V six a lot.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:00:09):
It is a great car and it's definitely something that you should take a look at.

Glenn Fleishman (01:00:14):
What should one pay for it if one were to buy one?

Sam Abuelsamid (01:00:18):
The GT is the high performance version. The one that's in my driveway is like 62,000, but you can get it like a rear wheel drive version with the extended range battery for [01:00:30] about 48 49 I think.

Glenn Fleishman (01:00:33):
And that's before the rebate, right? Or the

Sam Abuelsamid (01:00:35):
Tax credit? Yeah, unfortunately the EV six is still currently built in Korea, so you won't be able to get a tax credit on it's,

Glenn Fleishman (01:00:42):
I'm such an old man, I can't hardly translate the prices into pre inflation. That's

Leo Laporte (01:00:45):
Pretty good,

Glenn Fleishman (01:00:46):
Isn't it? That's a pretty

Sam Abuelsamid (01:00:47):
Solid. It's not bad. I mean as high-end, relatively high-end EVs go. It's actually reasonably affordable. I

Leo Laporte (01:00:55):
Want though. This looks a lot like my Mach e. I don't want an SS U V [01:01:00] crossover.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:01:00):
Then you might want to take a look at the new B M W I five.

Leo Laporte (01:01:03):
I've already put a deposit

Sam Abuelsamid (01:01:04):
Down on it. Oh, have you? Okay, well there you go.

Leo Laporte (01:01:07):
So it's good. It's good you said that. I mean I can get the money back, but I did put a pot deposit down on it.

Glenn Fleishman (01:01:13):
How long are they out in manufacture for

Leo Laporte (01:01:15):
Year? I don't know. I have to give back the M in February, so I'm thinking I should probably order it now. Yeah, or soon.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:01:21):
Yeah. I will be able to find out soon when it will be available here in the us. Production should be starting shortly. [01:01:30] I'm not sure when they'll start US deliveries. I'm going to have a chance to drive it in about four weeks time.

Leo Laporte (01:01:37):
To me, this is what I want somebody that looks like a sedan. I'm embarrassed to drive A B M W. I might paste a Volkswagen sticker over the top, but it looks like a nice

Sam Abuelsamid (01:01:49):
Payment. It's unfortunate you have to turn in the Mach E in February because there is the Volkswagen ID seven that is also coming, but it's not coming [01:02:00] till midyear Next year

Leo Laporte (01:02:02):
I could pay off the lease in the Mach E think it's 36,000, which

Glenn Fleishman (01:02:07):
Seems like a

Leo Laporte (01:02:07):
Lot, but I only have 15,000 miles on it. So I guess you got your electric bikes. You could just be electric bicycle.

Glenn Fleishman (01:02:13):
I wish I could.

Leo Laporte (01:02:14):
I would bicycle everywhere if I could.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:02:17):
I actually have an e-bike in the garage right now. I've been been testing for a few weeks. Which one? It's great. So I have the juiced bikes, rip current ss. It's got a range of about 70 miles [01:02:30] top speed of 28 miles an hour.

Leo Laporte (01:02:32):
It's a fat tire throttle.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:02:33):
Yeah, it's a fat tire throttle on the, yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:02:37):
And not for an e-bike. Now that means 1599 seems like a lot but for an e-bike that's not actually,

Glenn Fleishman (01:02:42):
That's very

Sam Abuelsamid (01:02:42):
Good. Yeah, no, it's actually quite reasonably priced. Very good. And I've actually shot some video of it. I was going to send it over to Anthony if you guys want to.

Leo Laporte (01:02:49):
Yeah, we'll

Sam Abuelsamid (01:02:50):
Take it, put it together and

Leo Laporte (01:02:51):
Put it

Sam Abuelsamid (01:02:51):
On.

Leo Laporte (01:02:53):
I love e-bikes are fantastic, but you need somewhere to ride and frankly there's nowhere around here I would ride.

Glenn Fleishman (01:03:00):
[01:03:00] You don't have the, I've been

Sam Abuelsamid (01:03:01):
Riding around here and the nice thing about a fat tire on Michigan roads. Michigan roads are notoriously bad and it's been a while since I've ridden anything with skinnier tires and the fat tire is nice because it can help absorb some of those potholes and other stuff. Keeps the, the only downside is it's kind of heavy. It's about 70 pounds. Yeah, they're heavy.

Leo Laporte (01:03:25):
The batteries are heavy. We got a

Glenn Fleishman (01:03:28):
Red power. The red. That's

Leo Laporte (01:03:29):
What I

Glenn Fleishman (01:03:29):
One [01:03:30] plus

Sam Abuelsamid (01:03:30):
Love it.

Glenn Fleishman (01:03:31):
I wanted the lowest end thing. I've got a teenager, I'm like, I want something that is a motorcycle. I want something that you have to work a little bit for. Really like it. But I was like, can we put it on a bus? Our bus racks are limited to 70 pounds. This is 75 pounds without racks or anything on it and like, well, we're going to tear the rack off the bus probably. I mean maybe it's within limits, but I can't bench, I'm

Leo Laporte (01:03:51):
Not a bench presser. I can't lift 75 pounds

Glenn Fleishman (01:03:53):
Up

Leo Laporte (01:03:54):
Onto the bike rack on the front of the bus.

Glenn Fleishman (01:03:56):
It hurt myself.

Leo Laporte (01:03:58):
Of course, one of our sponsors [01:04:00] has a folding both liftable and you can put it in your trunk and I kind of like that, so that's one of the bikes that I ride to and I

Glenn Fleishman (01:04:14):
Really

Leo Laporte (01:04:15):
Like. I'm just a fan. We actually don't have much room in our garage anymore because we have

Glenn Fleishman (01:04:20):
So many

Leo Laporte (01:04:21):
Bikes. Bikes in there.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:04:24):
Maybe if you get the segues out of there.

Leo Laporte (01:04:27):
You know what, that was a sad story. We had two [01:04:30] very nice, very expensive real segues, but the batteries died as lithium ion batteries did. We have them for maybe eight years and I checked online and it's 3000 bucks a battery, so we ended up getting rid of 'em and buying from the new Segue, which is really a Chinese company. We bought the new, I think, yeah, the nine bots. We bought a nine bots, but [01:05:00] they're less than the battery. They're a lot less,

Sam Abuelsamid (01:05:03):
Two of them are less than one battery,

Leo Laporte (01:05:05):
But they're a little not. I keep meaning to do a review of them. They're nice. I just don't, I think I miss the real deal.

Glenn Fleishman (01:05:14):
I love from a climate change perspective, the fact that one of the key helps in reducing fossil fuel emissions might be e-bikes maybe. We'll see. It's going to be

Leo Laporte (01:05:22):
The ideal

Glenn Fleishman (01:05:22):
Choice level. They're

Leo Laporte (01:05:23):
The

Sam Abuelsamid (01:05:23):
Ideal.

Leo Laporte (01:05:24):
When I was in Rome, everybody's riding Vespas,

Glenn Fleishman (01:05:27):
Replace

Leo Laporte (01:05:28):
That with an e-bike and [01:05:30] especially

Glenn Fleishman (01:05:30):
A fat tire

Leo Laporte (01:05:31):
Because a lot of cobblestone streets, that's beautiful place for that.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:05:34):
That'd be great. They're doing more and more of that in a lot of countries in Asia, especially India Electric, I forget what you call those things. Well, electric scooters, but also what are the three wheelers?

Glenn Fleishman (01:05:49):
Oh yeah. People often driving entire families

Sam Abuelsamid (01:05:52):
Things, replacing those with electric versions.

Glenn Fleishman (01:05:55):
Tuck tucks.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:05:56):
Tuck tucks. Yeah, and that's actually a great solution, [01:06:00] especially in an area where maybe the electric infrastructure is not as robust as you might want. It takes a lot less battery. For one thing with these lightweight vehicles and batteries, there's a lot of environmental impact from manufacturing batteries. So if you have bikes, scooters, other vehicles like that, that can get by with a much smaller battery, you dramatically reduce the cost. You make it accessible to [01:06:30] a lot more people and it's also something that can fit in with whatever electric infrastructure that you might have.

Glenn Fleishman (01:06:37):
Oh yeah. Then you got to do point source, solar point, source wind, things that don't make sense where you can't provide full infrastructure to central power and grids. It makes it feasible in those areas as well.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:06:48):
Yeah, I mean the amount of power that you need for a DC fast charging station that's got four or six eight fast chargers is enormous and there's actually not [01:07:00] that many places where you can, this is one of the things that has limited the installation of DC fast charging,

(01:07:06):
That it takes so much power that there's a lot of places you just can't put it down without having to build a new substation, which adds years and millions of dollars to the cost of the project. Actually something that we're working on right now that my colleagues and I are working on right now is a white paper on utilization of stationary storage [01:07:30] with DC fast charging so that you can charge that continuously at a slower rate. You don't need as much input power from the grid. You can also integrate it with solar more easily and then use that to provide the bursts of power that you need for the DC chargers.

Glenn Fleishman (01:07:46):
That's great.

Leo Laporte (01:07:48):
I don't understand what you said there, but I hope that it happens.

Glenn Fleishman (01:07:53):
Trickle charge a big battery so you can spew out a lot of amperage later. I

Sam Abuelsamid (01:07:56):
Got it. Exactly. That's good to me, that's even very nicely [01:08:00] it Plain English. Yes, that's what I was trying to say.

Leo Laporte (01:08:03):
Trickle charge for 800. Thank

Glenn Fleishman (01:08:05):
You.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:08:05):
Our show. Who would've thought that Glenn would be the concise one? I've been writing about albedo modification

Glenn Fleishman (01:08:11):
Lately, so I'm working on the side side.

Leo Laporte (01:08:13):
You're working hard on that right now with head there's I know,

Leo Laporte (01:08:16):
Very high. It's almost 1.0 up there. He's

Leo Laporte (01:08:19):
Trying to save the environment with

Leo Laporte (01:08:21):
Head albedo. Just teasing. I'm so

Leo Laporte (01:08:26):
Sorry. That's so

Leo Laporte (01:08:27):
Rude. It's funny. [01:08:30] You can slap me anytime. It's okay. Our show today brought to you by Express V P n Ever hear of data brokers. If you listen to our shows, you've heard about data brokers, the middlemen collecting and selling, all those digital footprints you leave online, they stitch together detailed profiles include your browsing history, your online searches, your location data, and then they sell that data off to a company for a targeted ads or maybe even worse, they're [01:09:00] also selling your information to the I R S. The best way to protect yourself against these guys is not to give 'em the information in the first place, and unfortunately, every time you go online, your ISP is writing it all down, writing it all down. That's why you need Express V P N Mask, your digital Footprints with A V P N. I think you understand, we've talked about VPNs before.

(01:09:24):
The idea is you turn on the V P N on your device, your phone, your desktop, whatever [01:09:30] with Express V P N, that's very easy. There's a big button, you click it and then in your data coming out of your device is fully encrypted. Nobody, your I S P, your carrier Google, nobody can see what that data is until it gets to the v PN server and then it goes out in the real world. It has to be unencrypted to be used. So it looks like you're coming from the V P N server, not from your house. Now this is a great plan as long as your V P N doesn't sell your data off, right? [01:10:00] That's why I use and recommend. It's the only one I do express, V P N because they go the extra mile to make sure your privacy is absolutely protected.

(01:10:08):
I'll give you some insight information into how they do that. Of course, all of this is third party audited, so that's the first thing. So you know that they're being checked and the third party has said Yes, express V P N does exactly what their privacy policy said. No logging. So how do they keep from keeping track of you? Well, first of all, they're using their special, they wrote it themselves. [01:10:30] Trusted server software. When you press the button on Express V P N on your iPhone, your Android device, when you are using it on a router, you protect the whole house this way or on a laptop, on Linux, on Mac or Windows. When you hit that button, it spins up the trusted server on the server you're going to, it does it in ram.

(01:10:51):
It's not running at all anywhere else except ram, and that RAM is sandbox and you're the only one using it, so that's your server. So you're the only one using [01:11:00] it and it's sandbox. It can't write to the drive, it can't be seen by other processes on the system. It is isolated. Then when you close the V P N, it disappears as does every trace of your visit. They do log, they can't log, and to add to this, they use a custom Debbie in distro on all their servers that wipes the entire drive. Every morning they reboot, starts fresh, brand new, so there really is no trace of your visit, and we know this because Express V P N is often used [01:11:30] in countries where it would be dangerous to be a dissident. I'll leave that to your imagination. These are countries where when the police wants to get your information, they don't knock, they don't get a warrant, they just go to the V P N provider, they take the servers. Well, every time that's happened at Express V P N, they take the servers. There's nothing on them.

(01:11:51):
It never has been used against anybody who's a customer because there's nothing there. They don't keep track. So that's one of the reasons I use Express V P N. The other reason [01:12:00] is they're not free. You might say, well, Leo, you could go with a free, well, first of all, it's not expensive. It's less than seven bucks a month, but you want to pay for A V P N. You don't want to give 'em an incentive to sell your data off. Plus you want them to have the resources to rotate their IP addresses so that every time you're using it, it's a different IP address. You want to make sure they have enough bandwidth so that you can watch HD movies because one of the things you could do with Express V P N for instance is watch Netflix. [01:12:30] You can get all the anime you want from Netflix, Japan, and that's really nice, but it's not any good if you don't have enough bandwidth Express V P N Plenty of bandwidth.

(01:12:39):
In fact, many of the time I've left it on by accident or you run it in the whole house and nobody even notices. I've left it on for months by accident and nobody even notices because it's fast, fast enough to watch HD video, so your traffic is encrypted, no logging. It's fast. They rotate their IP addresses. That's why I have [01:13:00] Express V P N on all my devices. You should do your phone, your computer, even on the router. In fact, they sell really good routers in the Express V P N store. Although there are other third party routers you can put it on as well. Make sure your online activity and your data is protected with the best VPN money can buy. Keep your private stuff out of the hands of the bad guys. Express vpn.com/twi. You go there right now through my special link, you'll get three extra months free when you buy a one year package. That's what brings it down to listen, seven bucks a month, [01:13:30] R e s s express vpn.com/twit. We thank you so much for supporting us and for doing a great job. The number one vpn according to CNET and many other third party reviewers and certainly the only one I use express vpn.com/twit. Thank you. Express vpn.

(01:13:52):
Thank you very much.

Wil Harris (01:13:54):
I'm very excited that the new Apple TV update that came out, what last week, add [01:14:00] support for VPNs in the app store.

Leo Laporte (01:14:02):
I didn't know that, so

Wil Harris (01:14:03):
I have to imagine. That's cool. V P N will be there very quickly.

Leo Laporte (01:14:06):
I didn't know.

Wil Harris (01:14:07):
I use the Firestick app all the time to, and

Sam Abuelsamid (01:14:12):
The Chromecast with Google TV also has support for VPNs, so I've used Express V P N on my Chromecast to reposition myself

Leo Laporte (01:14:24):
Virtually. Yes. Self reposition. Yes.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:14:28):
So I can watch things in other countries.

Leo Laporte (01:14:30):
[01:14:30] Quippy in our discord says Love Express v pn, use it at home all the time. And Joe says, VPNs are a great way

Glenn Fleishman (01:14:38):
To save on

Leo Laporte (01:14:38):
Streaming subscriptions, but Joe said that not me. Actually, all the streaming subscriptions are going up. I logged into Hulu yesterday,

Sam Abuelsamid (01:14:49):
1799.

Leo Laporte (01:14:52):
Netflix is going to go up after the strike according to the Wall Street Journal. Each of

Glenn Fleishman (01:14:56):
Those bits, conflation means they cost, they're

Leo Laporte (01:14:59):
Heavier, so they cost [01:15:00] more to move. Oh,

Glenn Fleishman (01:15:01):
Economics understanding. It's

Leo Laporte (01:15:02):
A bit thing. Oh,

Sam Abuelsamid (01:15:05):
I have been rigorous about when we're not watching something on any particular streaming service, just cancel it for a while until there's

Leo Laporte (01:15:13):
Something you want to watch on. Yeah, I feel like get you, they got to close that loophole. Exactly right. You just subscribe. I

Sam Abuelsamid (01:15:20):
Mean, unless they start requiring one year, two year contracts to get a specific price, put it past them. If that's the case, then I just [01:15:30] won't do it.

Leo Laporte (01:15:30):
Yeah,

Glenn Fleishman (01:15:31):
Yeah. It's like I've got Max and Max and Paramount plus right now and binging a lot of stuff and then I'm going to just turn 'em off. But I don't know. I got to think that their business model is the a l model as you forget you're paying for it and you only realize it

Sam Abuelsamid (01:15:45):
Months

Glenn Fleishman (01:15:45):
Later.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:15:46):
Yeah, and I think that's exactly what most people do. I just make sure that we cancel stuff from time to time. And actually several years ago, Brian Brushwood was talking [01:16:00] on court killers saying every three months just go through and cancel everything until, and then once people in the family start screaming about, Hey, where's Disney Plus or where's Hulu or where's Netflix? Then you turn it back on and if nobody complains about it, then just leave it.

Leo Laporte (01:16:20):
Or then you

Glenn Fleishman (01:16:20):
Get the deal and they're like, Hey, would you like to stay on Hulu for $5 a month for the next

Sam Abuelsamid (01:16:24):
Six

Glenn Fleishman (01:16:24):
Months? You're like, exactly.

Leo Laporte (01:16:25):
And then you forget about it. Six months later I turned off because [01:16:30] I have Spotify, Amazon, everybody's musics, so I turned off YouTube music. That was one I used the least not realizing. It also turned off YouTube premium, YouTube, whatever, where you don't get the ads. Now you've

Leo Laporte (01:16:42):
Got the ads all

Leo Laporte (01:16:43):
Day. Oh my god, YouTube is unusable. I

Glenn Fleishman (01:16:47):
Watch it that way and I got to say, I'm so close, I don't

Leo Laporte (01:16:51):
Don't want to

Glenn Fleishman (01:16:52):
Pay that much to get rid of the ads. I have handy with the mute

Leo Laporte (01:16:54):
Button. Mute, mute, skip boots here. Well see. I think this is something advertisers need to understand. [01:17:00] People don't watch those ads, right? I literally turned my head, I haven't, I've

Sam Abuelsamid (01:17:06):
Seen YouTube ads in years because we have a family plan for YouTube premium and YouTube

Leo Laporte (01:17:13):
Music

Sam Abuelsamid (01:17:14):
And everything. Well, that's

Leo Laporte (01:17:14):
Thing. That's why I do

Sam Abuelsamid (01:17:15):
It. And so we just

Leo Laporte (01:17:19):
As if you don't pay. I'm surprised that Glen, that you've been putting up with it, my understanding there is a lot. They have pre-roll, post roll,

Glenn Fleishman (01:17:27):
Every so much money. I mean, I'm such a [01:17:30] frugal thing. I would love to know though, this is a, by the way,

Leo Laporte (01:17:34):
What did kids complain

Glenn Fleishman (01:17:35):
About their parents?

Leo Laporte (01:17:36):
What are our

Glenn Fleishman (01:17:36):
Kids, those of us who have kids complain about their parents, like,

Leo Laporte (01:17:40):
Oh, my dad just canceled all this services and we had to talk to him. We don't just talk to him.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:17:46):
Actually just

Leo Laporte (01:17:47):
Signed back up.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:17:48):
I just had this conversation with my daughter the other day. She's 31. She lives in Denver. I live near Detroit and for Netflix, [01:18:00] she finally got the popup saying, you need to sign up for your own Netflix account because we're killing data or password sharing. So actually I wanted to get her set up with the extra member account so you get an extra person for 7 99 and unfortunately because I'm not actually paying directly for Netflix now because I'm getting it through my T-Mobile

Leo Laporte (01:18:28):
Zoar

Sam Abuelsamid (01:18:29):
Account, [01:18:30] you cannot add extra members on that one. There's no way to pay for an extra member on that. So for now, she said she went in and said, I'm on vacation and got a code for that. So she's got, I dunno, 30 day grace period or something, but then eventually she's going to have to get her own Netflix

Leo Laporte (01:18:49):
Account. Do you get the feeling that all these companies are just pushing the envelope? They just to see how much we will take and the frogs we're the frogs, and then [01:19:00] at some point they're going to go, okay, we lost subscribers. We got to back down. I mean, I feel like that's what's going on. They're just going, we'll see another book,

Sam Abuelsamid (01:19:08):
Another book.

Leo Laporte (01:19:08):
How about

Sam Abuelsamid (01:19:09):
Another book? They're testing the pricey elasticity that people are willing to pay.

Leo Laporte (01:19:12):
I mean, Disney plus, they have

Glenn Fleishman (01:19:14):
Done a

Leo Laporte (01:19:14):
Great job of

Glenn Fleishman (01:19:15):
Assembling

Leo Laporte (01:19:16):
Actually

Glenn Fleishman (01:19:16):
Incredibly good

Leo Laporte (01:19:18):
Movies and TV

Glenn Fleishman (01:19:19):
Shows and exclusives and whatever. It's an incredibly

Leo Laporte (01:19:22):
Compelling thing. So they're like, Hey, remember when you used stuff to go spend $700 a year to watch this in the theaters? You take your whole family and whatever. Well, it's only [01:19:30] whatever we're seeing now a month, you're like, oh, it's huge bargain.

Glenn Fleishman (01:19:33):
Why not? Don't

Leo Laporte (01:19:33):
Have to buy

Glenn Fleishman (01:19:33):
Popcorn. That movie theater prices,

Leo Laporte (01:19:36):
Cory Doctor calls it the ification of the internet where it starts the customer first. Get all the customers, we're going to make it easy, make it affordable, get all the customers. Then you start promoting your businesses. Amazon's a perfect example, the third party sellers, but at some point it turns and you go, we're going to get every squeeze, every dime we can out of this business. And I [01:20:00] feel like that's where we are across the board. The Google versus D O J trials going on right now, and Corey has a piece on his blog pluralistic.net talking about the memos. Google did not want the exhibits, the trial exhibits made public. They asked the judge not because it was proprietary business information, but because it was embarrassing. It was embarrassing. The [01:20:30] judge said, well, no, I think the public has a right to know, and a lot of this is online, but I've been searching through it.

(01:20:37):
You can actually go and look at some admittedly embarrassing slideshow from Google and so forth, including many memos, but there's a little controversy. We were talking about this before the show. I want to make sure you guys were up to speed on this. There is a woman who used to be an executive at DuckDuckGo. She was [01:21:00] at the Federal Trade Commission, Megan Gray, and she was at the trial and saw a slide that asserted something pretty serious for a long time. Google has called it semantic matching, and they've admitted to this where when you enter in a search result on Google, it will amend it behind the scenes. You don't even see it. It doesn't show up in the box [01:21:30] before it sends it off to the search tool. So if you type Corey points out, if you type the word weds, W E D S, it figures, oh, you're talking Wednesday and we'll actually add Wednesday to the search term.

(01:21:42):
You don't see that. It gives you better search results. That seems like a good idea. Megan wrote an editorial on wired.com in which she said, this slide finally admitted something I've thought for many of us have thought for a long time that Google is also adding [01:22:00] advertisers names to the search term hidden behind the scenes. So when you do a query like children's clothing, Google secretly adds the brand name of a kid's clothing manufacturer to the query. This has two financial benefits to Google. One, you're going to see that advertiser's entry in the search results because you put the name in except you didn't. Two, there's another side [01:22:30] benefit. The way Google works, people buy negative ad with an ad auction. People might buy a competitor's name to make sure their ad goes next to the competitors, so it's profit all round. Everybody, they get a lot more money and you get a lot more ads. So she says she saw this in the slide. Many people have suspected Corey thought so too. Wired just pulled the story down, redacted it with this note [01:23:00] from Wired leadership. After careful review of the op-ed, how Google alters search queries to get at your wallet and relevant material provided to us following its publication, who do you think that material might've come from? Wired's editorial leadership has determined the story does not meet our standards. It has been removed.

(01:23:20):
Now, I asked Corey because Corey's referred to this article and he wrote about it. I asked Corey and he just on Mastodon, he said, I'm told [01:23:30] Megan is about to post more detail. So I'd be very curious what the author of that op-ed thinks. Obviously Conde Nast, the owners of Wire, didn't want to get sued for libel. We don't know if it happens. It wouldn't surprise me if it happens to me if it does. This is the smoking gun. I looked through all the trial materials. I could not find that slide. So it may have been redacted. It may not be yet on the website, but I couldn't find that slide. What [01:24:00] do you guys think?

Sam Abuelsamid (01:24:03):
There's definitely a lot of material that has been redacted from,

Leo Laporte (01:24:08):
If you look at it, even the stuff that's in public has big redacted all over it.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:24:13):
So it's entirely possible that you may never find it or at least not until after the trial's over.

Glenn Fleishman (01:24:23):
Yeah, and I mean Wired is a very credible organization. Of course, I think they've demonstrated their commitment to [01:24:30] holding people's feet to the fire a bunch, but I find it, it's a little tricky because they're saying, we remove this because it doesn't mean our editorial standards based on information we can't share with you, which I understand why you would both want to remove it and also state that, but then I feel like there has to be an obligation to the reader and the larger community that you say, at a future point, we'll be able to explain this further, which they're not offering. Maybe they can't, but it does seem to now look like, see, it looks like a conspiracy, even if it doesn't because it smells like a voice was silenced, [01:25:00] even if the silencing was because information was unintentionally presented in a, I'm not suggesting necessarily

Leo Laporte (01:25:07):
It's not a

Glenn Fleishman (01:25:07):
Retraction.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:25:08):
It's not.

Leo Laporte (01:25:09):
If it's a retraction, they would say, we've received word from Google. They do not do this. It's not true. We're retracting it. It's

Sam Abuelsamid (01:25:16):
Not that

Glenn Fleishman (01:25:17):
Editorial standards is weird. What was not. Yeah, so that's tricky. And then we have, of course, Danny Sullivan, formerly of Search Engine watch for many, many years joined the Beast. He's inside Google and posts on [01:25:30] X Twitter as search liaison for Google, and

Leo Laporte (01:25:37):
His

Glenn Fleishman (01:25:37):
Response to this without citing the wired pieces no longer up is essentially saying, we don't do this, says the editorial said just flat out deletes queries and replace them with monetized better. We don't, and he provided some information and links and so forth, and he's an incredibly

Sam Abuelsamid (01:25:54):
Credible

Glenn Fleishman (01:25:54):
Chap before and after joining Google, but he's within a machine that spits [01:26:00] out what it needs to. I would find it

Leo Laporte (01:26:03):
Heartbreaking

Sam Abuelsamid (01:26:04):
To

Glenn Fleishman (01:26:05):
Ever discover that he was putting out something misleading. I would think he would quit rather than do that.

Wil Harris (01:26:11):
There's a very strong possibility that he doesn't know the answer. I mean, there's so much of this is so buried deep within so many of the teams that work at Google. Google's products are so enormous now, and I mean, it is really hard to know. It's quite possible that one team is working on this while another has no idea or actively denies that it exists, right?

Leo Laporte (01:26:28):
They do that

Glenn Fleishman (01:26:29):
Intentionally, right. [01:26:30] Danny said, we don't, which is definitive, but then later it may be, oh, it turns out there's an area of 51 that nobody

Leo Laporte (01:26:37):
Except

Glenn Fleishman (01:26:37):
Serge Sergey Sergei knows about or Larry, and in fact, they were doing this. It was inserted into the code and nobody else in the company was aware for plausible deniability.

Wil Harris (01:26:47):
But of course, it's, it's

Sam Abuelsamid (01:26:48):
Also possible that we don't know what the slide was that

Leo Laporte (01:26:53):
The

Sam Abuelsamid (01:26:53):
Megan Gray saw. We might,

Leo Laporte (01:26:55):
Let me put this up and you can add this. This is Adam Kovich, [01:27:00] who used to work at Google, says, I asked Google PR for a copy of the slide, the wired piece referred to, here's what they sent advertisers benefit via closing recall gaps. Yeah, I couldn't remember the name of Nikolai kids. Where Do we have any other

Sam Abuelsamid (01:27:16):
Context around this slide?

Leo Laporte (01:27:18):
Yeah, well, that's the problem. Yeah,

Sam Abuelsamid (01:27:19):
Because what I was getting at was that it may be that this was from

Wil Harris (01:27:23):
The mountains

Sam Abuelsamid (01:27:24):
Of discovery material that they're presenting. This may have been part of a deck [01:27:30] that they were presenting to advertisers that as an idea, here's something we could do. It's possible that they never actually implemented it or never deployed it. I'm not trying to let Google off the hook here, but just trying to give some context that this single slide out of

Leo Laporte (01:27:52):
All

Sam Abuelsamid (01:27:52):
Of this other data,

Leo Laporte (01:27:53):
It's out of context.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:27:55):
We don't know what the context was,

Leo Laporte (01:27:57):
And you could see how Megan Gray might see this, [01:28:00] and because it was her long held belief both at FTC and DuckDuckGo that Google was doing this, that this confirmed confirmation bias, something she already believed. Maybe it doesn't, so I'm not going to say for one way or the other. I do hope though, that if this is the case, this will come out at trial. If it is the case, I think the FTC has a open and shut case against Google. Even in the original page rank paper [01:28:30] that Larry and Sergei published 23 years ago, it said, we can't sell ads because that would poison our well, it would poison the search results. I mean, it's clearly a conflict of interest that all of the revenue for Google search there comes from advertisers. There's got to be, if they're not doing this, there must have been strong internal pressure to do this. And if they resisted, if they did not be evil, I hope [01:29:00] that's the case. You can read search Lay on Danny Sullivan's long rebuttal, although as you said, he doesn't mention Wired or Megan Gray.

Glenn Fleishman (01:29:12):
I mean Google, maybe we can all agree. I don't know if we can all agree on this. Google's search results are terrible. I can hardly find anything on the site anymore. I was trying to find the most technical thing. I needed to find a string time conversion function for Pearl, and I'd forgotten how to use it. It took me five minutes. I should have gone to chat G P T. [01:29:30] It took me five minutes of searching on Google to find a result that actually was accurate and wasn't just one of those regurgitated things. So Google is already sort of terrible. And so if they're doing this, yes, there is a distinct consequence for the trial, obviously and for the future of how they interact, but it's also they have ruined search for themselves regardless of what they're doing monetarily.

Leo Laporte (01:29:52):
Yeah, I mean, I think that's all we have to say is just objectively, the results on Google search aren't as good as they used to be. They're [01:30:00] muddied,

(01:30:02):
And that's too bad. I actually, I mentioned this before. I've been looking for a replacement for Google. DuckDuckGo is not. In fact, one of the stories we have this week is that in the trial, apple executives, there's an email from Apple Executives, I think Eddie Q at one point, apple considered using DuckDuckGo in private searches. As you know, Google pays Apple between 10 and 15 billion a year to make it [01:30:30] the default search on Apple products and Safari. And at one point Apple said, well, maybe for private search, we should use Stuck Duck Go because it's more private, to which I think it was Eddie Q said, it's not private. The privacy is overstated. That would be a terrible idea. They make so much money not forcing, but defaulting to Google, there's not a lot of incentive for Apple to change. In fact, go ahead and try to change [01:31:00] your search provider on Apple to anything but DuckDuckGo being Google. So I've been looking, I tried Neeva for a while. You may remember, paid them five bucks a month. They went out of business. It was started by two Google executives. It did a very good job. I thought they had their own index. They said we can't compete against the default, and the default is Google. So they pivoted and sold off to somebody. I'm using one now. I'm wondering if you guys have tried it called CGI or kgi.

Glenn Fleishman (01:31:29):
Oh, I've heard about that [01:31:30] actually. Yeah, it's

Leo Laporte (01:31:30):
Good. It's actually very good. It's more expensive. How do you spell it? Leah? K a g i. There it is. Let me search for what should I search for? I'll search for Unbound books and you can tell me if you like this result. They say they're not using Google Unbound liberating ideas. That's it. Right? Here's your podcast. Here's images of your book. I know you're not paying them for these results. [01:32:00] And then there's some other book called Unbound, the story of Liberation and bur,

Wil Harris (01:32:04):
As long as it's not, usually the top search on Google is a slightly less salubrious Unbound.

Leo Laporte (01:32:11):
Oh, interesting.

Wil Harris (01:32:12):
Which gets us in a little bit of trouble.

Leo Laporte (01:32:13):
Oh, interesting. What's

Glenn Fleishman (01:32:15):
Absolutely confusing is Coy

Leo Laporte (01:32:18):
Mac, I know there was a payment system. I know. Yeah, they had

Glenn Fleishman (01:32:21):
Coy.com. They shut down in 2016 after 20 years of doing shareware, and so I'm like, oh, it's, they're back. It's like, no, it's not

Leo Laporte (01:32:27):
That. It's not them. I hope they made some money off selling

Glenn Fleishman (01:32:29):
Their domain [01:32:30] name out of when they shut down.

Leo Laporte (01:32:31):
Yeah, coy was founded in 2018, so they must've, yeah. Yeah. Lot of domain. It's interesting. I think the problem is A, it's very hard to make a new search index. There's a kind of built-in advantage to the incumbents because they've been doing it longer than anybody else. So there's this kind of tendency, DuckDuckGo does it, A lot of searches do it to use binging or sanitize Google searches instead of [01:33:00] doing their own thing. Neva was moving and I think eventually did move to their own index. Brave has their own index. I haven't been thrilled by Brave Search, and I think Coy is mostly their own stuff.

Glenn Fleishman (01:33:18):
I thought they were licensing other engines or they not. Well,

Leo Laporte (01:33:21):
When you get a coy result, it tells you how much of it is coy, but they don't get the shopping stuff. They don't get, anyway. [01:33:30] I think I pay a lot for this. I can't remember, but I think it's more than five bucks a month. Maybe there's some choices in how much you pay, but the reason being there's no ads, and I honestly think it's not a bad idea to have a paid search engine because ads clearly influence Google. Maybe they're not doing that semantics search bss, but they clearly index is

Wil Harris (01:33:53):
So called. I mean, that does link neatly to another story on the docket about is it better to pay for something rather than get [01:34:00] the sort of awful ad tainted experience

Leo Laporte (01:34:04):
For that. Well, but I'm in a position where I can afford to and a lot of people can't can, so I don't know what the answer is. Meta is looking at charging as well. This is in response to the eu. Probably the UK would have to pay too, but if you want an ad free Instagram or Facebook, $14 a month so much, [01:34:30] no. If you want Instagram and Facebook, it's $17 a month

Wil Harris (01:34:36):
And more if you want it on mobile as well.

Leo Laporte (01:34:38):
Oh my God. Because

Wil Harris (01:34:39):
They're going to pass on the 30% value.

Leo Laporte (01:34:43):
So yeah. So is this an up yours to the EU or is this genuinely how much revenue meta would lose?

Wil Harris (01:34:53):
It's an interesting one. They have some cases before the EU market authorities at the moment where [01:35:00] the EU have a lot of very stringent data privacy laws and are saying basically, you can't force somebody to give up their private data to access a service, and you have to have some version of it that someone can provide their private data for. And Facebook meta are saying, well, okay, if that's the case, then we are going to make it this much money. And they've tried to reverse engineer. This is roughly how much it's worth. I mean, there's absolutely no way that your average Facebook [01:35:30] or Met user is worth $14. Well, except for real.

Leo Laporte (01:35:33):
I mean based on

Wil Harris (01:35:34):
What Leo, Instagram. Instagram,

Leo Laporte (01:35:37):
I am definitely worth $14 to Instagram.

Wil Harris (01:35:40):
But the interesting thing is that

Glenn Fleishman (01:35:42):
It's reportable public data. I mean, they say, I forget what their US arpu, US Canada is like $25 or something. Oh, wow.

Leo Laporte (01:35:49):
It's that much, huh?

Glenn Fleishman (01:35:51):
I'm going to find that while you're talking. I'm going to ask Meta. The

Leo Laporte (01:35:54):
Interesting thing is that

Wil Harris (01:35:56):
The UK wouldn't be included in this because no's,

Glenn Fleishman (01:35:59):
You

Wil Harris (01:36:00):
[01:36:00] Just after Brexit, meta quietly migrated all the UK policies onto US, law us in fact.

Glenn Fleishman (01:36:10):
Okay, so this is from the Wall Street Journal story. Meta reported its overall revenue in Europe, worked out to $17 and 88 cents per Facebook user

Wil Harris (01:36:21):
In the

Glenn Fleishman (01:36:21):
Second quarter. That's under $6 per user across all of its apps. On average per month. It's almost $40 in 2022. [01:36:30] I'm looking at Statists summary of the data. So it's 114 billion US dollars to divide it across all of their apps. But I mean, $40 a person in the United States, it seems reasonable. It could be 20, but again, across, I'm sure Instagram maybe more successful than Facebook. I got to believe just because of how compelling they present advertising. But it's a lot, and even if it is an up yours to the eu, look, Facebook was willing to take news out of its product in Canada [01:37:00] after C 18 passed. They are willing to act on these threats. We're saying, by the way, I keep forgetting, we're saying it's annual revenue is $40 or 1788, that's $14 a month, right? They want almost 10 or eight times, seven times, whatever this, well, if it's 1788 a quarter, that means it's about $6, $6 a month in the eu and they still want charge you 14. So it's $40 a year of the US deal. Yeah, it's a profit deal. Oh, oh, [01:37:30] it's a profit deal.

Leo Laporte (01:37:32):
If you're going to charge money, you might as well even have some margin on it.

Glenn Fleishman (01:37:36):
Yeah,

Wil Harris (01:37:38):
You don't want to

Leo Laporte (01:37:38):
Do it at a loss. This

Glenn Fleishman (01:37:39):
Is why you're where you are and where I am, where I'm what's margin. What do you

Leo Laporte (01:37:45):
Mean by that

Glenn Fleishman (01:37:46):
Prophet? I never heard of it. Never matter. Let's see, what else

Leo Laporte (01:37:55):
Moving. So Spotify is an interesting challenge, and I'm sympathetic. [01:38:00] They, for years were really at the mercy of the record industry. The record industry could put 'em out of business, could decide how much they could make because they had to license all their music from the record industry. Spotify trying to get out of this bind added podcasts, spent half a billion dollars, not on us, alas, but on Joe Rogan and call her daddy Megan and Harry. The Obamas trying to build a podcast [01:38:30] business, which apparently has failed because they fired most of those people and I think they probably lost a lot of money. Now they're saying, oh, it's audio books. So Spotify, the word pivot. Pivot. Is there a video? Is there a button you can press on

Glenn Fleishman (01:38:49):
The sound audio book?

Leo Laporte (01:38:54):
So on Tuesday, Spotify said it'll begin offering 15 hours of [01:39:00] books a month as part of if you're premium subscriber in the Britain and Australia. So you'll be able to do this will, it will expand it if it goes well to the US this winter. Now you have to choose from their collection of books, which is not the entire collection of books, but it's a pretty large selection. 7,000 books from hase, including David Seras, James Patterson, and Donna Tart. I like Donna Chart's stuff. [01:39:30] Anna Maria Lessi, vice president of He Audio says, I see this as a huge opportunity to be in the company of Joe Rogan, Taylor Swift and Beyonce. They

Glenn Fleishman (01:39:43):
Maybe they'll read them all really slow

Leo Laporte (01:39:44):
Though. So

Glenn Fleishman (01:39:45):
15 hours will only be half of a book.

Leo Laporte (01:39:47):
The average audio book is seven to 10 hours. I've just finished a 64 hour book, so it would've taken me four months, which is actually about how long it took me to find the power in the Purey. What were you listening to? No, the Power Broker. [01:40:00] You're close. That's broke. Oh, that's, oh, wonderful book. Classic. I loved it. In fact, it went so well. I've decided to get his four volume biography of L B J and start listening to that, which is I think like 120 hours or something. It's crazy. Spotify says subscribers could listen to, on average one and a half books a month. You can sample as many books as you want. Heavy users want to listen to more. We'll be able to pay $11 for [01:40:30] an additional 10 hours. That still becomes, I think that's still less than Audible. I think I pay, I can't remember

Glenn Fleishman (01:40:37):
What I paid. Yeah, the

Leo Laporte (01:40:37):
Audible is what,

Glenn Fleishman (01:40:38):
20 bucks a month for two

Leo Laporte (01:40:39):
Books and you get two books of any length. By the way, power Broker was one book, so if you're doing it by the pound, it's a good deal. You're a commuter. It always seems like a great deal

Glenn Fleishman (01:40:50):
To me. Or if you have a

Leo Laporte (01:40:52):
Gym routine or all those things. Yeah, well, that's how I started using Audible. I had a long commute and I read a lot of books [01:41:00] since 2000. I

Wil Harris (01:41:01):
Believe. It's fascinating, the Spotify approach to trying to work out what they can do differently. So the challenge that they've had is the music industry, the catalog that they have, they built their business off the back of being the first people to have that big catalog of music industry stuff. But now it is basically the same whether I go to Amazon or whether I go to Apple or whether I go to Spotify, it's all the same content. So Spotify is thinking how do we both differentiate ourselves [01:41:30] and lower the amount that we pay the record industry, which is why they went podcasts. I think they saw there was something in spoken word content keeps people engaged. The problem that they've had with podcasts is that unless you literally buy every podcast there are the group of panelists here, we'll have a Venn diagram of stuff that we listen to where it all crosses over.

(01:41:51):
But actually we've all got, I'm sure, very separate interests and it's really hard to build a comprehensive platform where there's not like there are [01:42:00] four big podcast networks you can go and do the deals with in the way that you can do for the four big muting networks. However, there are those things in books. So I think they've sort of learned from podcasts. Okay. Spoken word stuff is really good. And actually the advantage here is we can go and license it all from just four or five big players rather than all the multitude of podcasters that are out there. So it makes sense, but whether it makes sense for the consumer is going to be an interesting one.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:42:28):
Wheel bearings, [01:42:30] only one or 2% of wheel bearing's listens

Leo Laporte (01:42:33):
Come from Spotify.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:42:36):
Almost no one

Leo Laporte (01:42:36):
Uses it for our podcast about for us. Do we know how much of our listeners are Spotify? Spotify, according to the New York Times, has struck deals with the five biggest publishers in the US as well as hundreds of others, including smaller companies and self-published authors. The catalog will be 150,000 titles to start. You

Wil Harris (01:42:58):
Can in fact go and get some unbound [01:43:00] titles on this day. I was

Leo Laporte (01:43:01):
Going to ask you, so you have talked to them. All right.

Wil Harris (01:43:04):
Go and hit Spotify. There's a great book called I Could Read the Sky by Tim O'Grady, which is a wonderful sort of Irish novel and read by the author. It's beautiful.

Leo Laporte (01:43:14):
I'm sure you have nondisclosure agreements, but there was a negotiation fair to you, or were they generous? Well,

Wil Harris (01:43:25):
Generous is a strong term. Anything digital, but I think the interesting thing for the publishing [01:43:30] industry is we've been sort of at the behest of Audible forever. Way too

Leo Laporte (01:43:34):
Dominant. I

Wil Harris (01:43:35):
Agree. Way too

Leo Laporte (01:43:36):
Dominant. Yeah,

Wil Harris (01:43:37):
The audible at all. I mean, Amazon is obviously, obviously dominant in books, but at least there are other places you can go for books, whether it's Bars and Noble or over here, Waterstones or whatever in audio books. There really is nothing else. So I think certainly the major publishers, those five major publishers they talked about have always been hugely resistant to doing anything on a stream basis [01:44:00] rather than a pay per book basis. But I think they've been roped into it because they're all sort of increasingly desperate to get anybody else in the game to provide a bit of a market with Audible.

Glenn Fleishman (01:44:11):
Do you think, is there an audiobook to buying book chain? I thought there's always the two directions. If more people listen to audiobooks, they come to you and buy print books. eBooks. Have you seen that migration or is there not enough data?

Wil Harris (01:44:26):
Yeah, I mean it's limited because you don't get a lot of data out of Audible.

Glenn Fleishman (01:44:30):
[01:44:30] Oh, right, of course.

Wil Harris (01:44:31):
So it's not like you can go and link it all back to your Amazon backend and see it all. Ask somebody. Yeah, it's little bit,

Glenn Fleishman (01:44:38):
But then you get 1% of people. Actually, this is the big problem

Leo Laporte (01:44:41):
For movie makers, two filmmakers. Netflix doesn't

Glenn Fleishman (01:44:43):
Tell you,

Leo Laporte (01:44:44):
And this is one of the arguments in they say after

Glenn Fleishman (01:44:47):
Strike is in

Leo Laporte (01:44:47):
Strike. Yeah, we can't get residuals from these streaming companies because they don't give us the information.

Wil Harris (01:44:52):
The writers guil

Leo Laporte (01:44:53):
That part. That's one of the things they got. Yeah, go ahead. Glennon writers

Glenn Fleishman (01:44:56):
Contract land breaking. No, go ahead. That's [01:45:00] amazing.

Wil Harris (01:45:01):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:45:02):
One of the key things that they finally got in the Writer's Guild contract is data about how many people are actually watching this stuff. So it's going to be really interesting to see how that plays out, as well as actually getting residuals, I think from resales or licensing of content to other services. This was a good example of the industry had changed dramatically. The producers really hadn't responded to that change, which meant [01:45:30] writers and actors were losing money. The old system of paying residuals for rebroadcast on network television for example, just went away. And of course the producers went, yeah, that's not so bad. We can

Glenn Fleishman (01:45:45):
Take that.

Leo Laporte (01:45:45):
So I think that W g A strike was justified very, I actually hadn't looked at the terms, so I'm very glad that they were able

Glenn Fleishman (01:45:52):
To get resolution. They got not nearly everything, nearly everything they wanted. I mean, it's a great lesson for those of us who are creators about [01:46:00] AI potentially replacing us, that they were able to stand firm on that and get a firewall that was really, Goodis will not be writers. They have to license specific material if it's going to be used to the basis, there's a lot of good things in there that won't be obeyed. I mean, it's out of the bottle for, there's that site you can go to and see if your books were ingested into one of the big models for LLMs that are kicking around, and I have some of mine not. I saw

Leo Laporte (01:46:25):
Your toot on that. Unmasted on.

Glenn Fleishman (01:46:28):
Yeah. But people there, major authors like mine [01:46:30] are old howto books and I'm like, whatever. I dunno what's going to do to me, but you've got Michael Chabon and others suing over different aspects of it, and it just feels like that could all explode, but you can't control it. But a studio can't

Leo Laporte (01:46:44):
Go

Glenn Fleishman (01:46:45):
To chat

Leo Laporte (01:46:45):
GT

Glenn Fleishman (01:46:46):
Four and get a script and use it.

Leo Laporte (01:46:48):
That's kind of in a prohibited space. So any AI input they get is going to have to now be moderated, at least in productions that are under the WGA rules, which is a lot [01:47:00] of stuff that we see. I wanted to ask you Wil about audio books. There are, I know Audible is probably 99% of the market, but Blackstone Audio created downpour.com. I've bought books from them for a long time. They were unprotected as well. They weren't DMed, and there's Libro fm, which I love this. Corey told me about this one shares some of its revenue with local bookstores, so you're not [01:47:30] undermining

Wil Harris (01:47:31):
Those, but

Leo Laporte (01:47:31):
Are they just

Wil Harris (01:47:32):
Tiny? Yeah. Great to have. I mean, most major publishers won't work with anybody that doesn't put D r M on the books, which is an interesting one, which

Leo Laporte (01:47:41):
Is why Corey,

Wil Harris (01:47:42):
The thing that Audible, the thing that Audible did is spend a lot of money on marketing to consumers rather than publishers.

Leo Laporte (01:47:51):
A lot of money, some of which we got,

Sam Abuelsamid (01:47:53):
I should

Leo Laporte (01:47:53):
Point out some

Wil Harris (01:47:54):
Of which with you guys, which we're very happy about. Yes. But the companies you just [01:48:00] mentioned, I mean, you've just never heard of them, right? So certainly over here.

Leo Laporte (01:48:04):
Yeah. Yeah. I should mention Audible. It was a long time advertiser. I don't know if they still are. They may well be, and so yeah, we like Audible, but I also don't like the monopoly. Monopoly is always a bad thing when it comes to books especially, so maybe this would be interesting that Spotify might crack that monopoly a little bit. Has

Sam Abuelsamid (01:48:26):
Spotify considered a pivot to video?

Wil Harris (01:48:30):
[01:48:30] You can get, there's a very weird experience in the Spotify desktop and mobile apps of using of video podcasts that you can watch Joe Rogan or you can watch Twit on video and it's just very incongruous within the app itself. It's one of those things where you think all these hundreds of thousands and thousands of engineers and all these amazing product people, and you can't work out how to make video look good [01:49:00] or do a light UI for that matter. The Spotify dark UI does my absolute nothing.

Leo Laporte (01:49:05):
Yeah,

Wil Harris (01:49:06):
That's my

Leo Laporte (01:49:06):
Personal, I don't remember if we've put our video, I'm so out of touch with what we do these days, but I don't know if we have put our video on a Spotify or not. I have to ask our engineering team for that. I don't see why we wouldn't. I think it more would be whether they gave us the tools and the ability and whether it was an easy thing to do. Alright,

Sam Abuelsamid (01:49:28):
Hold up before we leave this. [01:49:30] I pulled up the analytics for wheel bearings

Wil Harris (01:49:34):
And

Leo Laporte (01:49:35):
Spotify

Sam Abuelsamid (01:49:35):
Is number 11 among apps. Used to listen to the show at

Leo Laporte (01:49:39):
1%

Sam Abuelsamid (01:49:40):
Google Podcasts, 4%.

Leo Laporte (01:49:43):
What's number one? iTunes, about 1%.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:49:46):
Apple Podcasts and Overcast and Pocket Cast.

Leo Laporte (01:49:49):
I think PocketCasts might be our number one. It's certainly our number two. If it's not our number one.

Glenn Fleishman (01:49:53):
Overcast is such a sleeper agent on the Mac platform. I, sorry, in the ims it's

Leo Laporte (01:49:59):
Apple only. Yeah, [01:50:00] Gar Marco.

Glenn Fleishman (01:50:02):
It's all the things that he likes to do. It's great. I use Castro. It fits my brain a little better, but I used Overcast for quite a while through multiple releases, and I just love that Overcast is like, yeah, it's just this one guy with his own opinions about things that his app is still generating a huge percentage of everybody's podcast. Listen,

Leo Laporte (01:50:19):
We should say, I don't care how you listen or watch or subscribe

Sam Abuelsamid (01:50:23):
As long as you listen.

Leo Laporte (01:50:23):
Yeah, it doesn't affect us at all. In fact, from day one, it was always my philosophy. Put the show everywhere possible [01:50:30] that any way that somebody wants to watch or listen, they should be able to do that. And we've always followed that policy, and so please just listen.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:50:41):
I don't care how you can even listen to wheel bearings on YouTube now if you want.

Leo Laporte (01:50:44):
Yeah, we do that too.

Glenn Fleishman (01:50:45):
Yeah, that's good.

Leo Laporte (01:50:48):
Our show today brought to you by those good folks. We thank them to Palo Alto Network's brand new sponsor and the name. As cybersecurity has become a top focus, there's been a significant [01:51:00] growth in the number of OT assets that require internal or external connectivity. But here's the problem. OT assets are usually very susceptible to attack. There's often no security built into the asset. Poor visibility, traffic is often unencrypted. Palo Alto Networks industrial OT security is the solution. Security teams need to provide effective visibility [01:51:30] into OT assets. Palo Alto Networks industrial OT security provides the most comprehensive zero trust security across all OT environments and is developed exclusively specifically for industrial and manufacturing operations. Industrial OT security. It delivers comprehensive visibility with ML powered, scalable discovery and intuitive visualization of OT devices and [01:52:00] patterns, OT vulnerabilities and risk assessment. You also get zero trust, security segmentation and least privilege access control, continuous trust verification with 24 7 risk monitoring and continuous security inspections. Plus you get simplified operations means you can leverage existing infrastructure. Yay, deploy it in minutes, yay. And share device information natively with tools. It [01:52:30] wasn't so long ago that that, remember the pipeline that was hacked, the oil pipeline or gas pipeline in the southeast, they had to shut down their whole OT operation. They just didn't know. We don't know if they're in there or, well, now you can know Palo Alto Networks protect your OT assets, your networks, and your remote operations with zero trust, OT

Glenn Fleishman (01:52:54):
Security. We've come a long way since that pipeline

Leo Laporte (01:52:57):
Hack. To learn more, find the link in the show description [01:53:00] or visit palo alto networks.com, Palo alto networks.com. We thank 'em so

Glenn Fleishman (01:53:08):
Much

Leo Laporte (01:53:09):
For what they're doing to protect our operations and encourage you to check it out for yours. Palo alto networks.com. That was when I first heard about OT security, operational

Glenn Fleishman (01:53:26):
Technology security is when that pipeline was

Leo Laporte (01:53:29):
Hacked

Glenn Fleishman (01:53:29):
And they said, we don't [01:53:30] know

Leo Laporte (01:53:32):
If they're in our operations, so

Sam Abuelsamid (01:53:34):
We're just going to shut it

Leo Laporte (01:53:35):
Down. And it was shut down for some time. That was a kind of big eyeopener in ransomware attacks.

Glenn Fleishman (01:53:43):
A lot of people would be terrified to know how much Windows 95 is still running in the world. And I,

Leo Laporte (01:53:48):
Us

Glenn Fleishman (01:53:49):
And the evils horrible secrets of the past that still live with us. Yeah. Colonial Pipeline.

Leo Laporte (01:53:54):
That wasn't even long.

Glenn Fleishman (01:53:56):
I think it was just two years ago, but yeah, a couple of years ago.

Leo Laporte (01:53:59):
Yeah,

Glenn Fleishman (01:54:00):
[01:54:00] It was bad.

Leo Laporte (01:54:02):
That was when we started to think maybe our infrastructure is at risk. Oh, you think

Glenn Fleishman (01:54:08):
What if barbed wire and chewing gum isn't enough?

Leo Laporte (01:54:16):
I was a little scared of this. Lisa said, Hey, did you see that the Canadian F C C, the C R T C wants to regulate podcasts? I said,

Sam Abuelsamid (01:54:25):
What?

Leo Laporte (01:54:27):
No, they say we're not going to regulate podcasts. We're [01:54:30] just taking a major step forward to modernize Canada's broadcasting framework. They are asking streaming services with revenues of $10 million or more to register with a Canadian government by the end of next month. The ct,

Sam Abuelsamid (01:54:45):
You'll have to add some Canadian content if you want be

Leo Laporte (01:54:48):
I'm worried

Sam Abuelsamid (01:54:49):
Available in Canada.

Leo Laporte (01:54:50):
Exactly. That's what the C R T C does with broadcast in Canada.

Glenn Fleishman (01:54:54):
We all love Brian Adams. Just throw 'em on a lot more. It'll all be fine.

Leo Laporte (01:54:58):
We're going to hear a lot. Morning Ann Murray and Gordon [01:55:00] Lightfoot on the network, the wreck of

Glenn Fleishman (01:55:03):
The UND Fitzgerald

Leo Laporte (01:55:08):
Most,

Sam Abuelsamid (01:55:09):
But then you got to pay the licensing for the music. He used to jet back and forth to Canada. Leo?

Leo Laporte (01:55:14):
Yeah, I did. I went to Canada one week every month

Sam Abuelsamid (01:55:16):
For a long time doing

Leo Laporte (01:55:18):
Really? So we were doing Canadian content, so people who aren't maybe familiar with this, the Canadian Radio, television and Telecommunications Commission, which is their F C C has a requirement [01:55:30] that there be a certain amount of Canadian content on all of their broadcasting, like a lot and a limited amount because they're worried the Americans are just going to come over and it's going to be Johnny Carson

Glenn Fleishman (01:55:41):
All the

Leo Laporte (01:55:41):
Time. So when would go up after tech tv, I went up and did call for help and then later lab with Leo for Rogers, the big Canadian cable company. It was Canadian content because I was the only American, I was, everybody else was Canadian and as long as I had Canadian co-hosts, [01:56:00] I had to have two and Canadian employees and it was shot in Canada and counted. And so they were very careful when we brought Steve Gibson up, they said, well, he's not here. He's just a temporary. In fact, when you go through the border, they say, you're not making money up here, are you? I would say, if you saw my

Glenn Fleishman (01:56:17):
Paycheck, you'd working for

Leo Laporte (01:56:18):
Rogers. No chance anyway. They say, no, no, we're not going to register. [01:56:30] Podcasters online services that offer podcasts. This is from their own fact must register, but individuals who use social media to share podcasts don't. Of course not what Online services that only provide video game services or audio books? No, you don't have to register. We are fortunately under 10 million a year. I never thought I'd say thank God for [01:57:00] that. So we don't have to register. But that makes me really nervous that they are kind of saying, well, the first step is registration, right?

Glenn Fleishman (01:57:09):
You only have to do that

Leo Laporte (01:57:10):
If you're

Glenn Fleishman (01:57:10):
Oh, I see. So even if you're not Canadian, but your material is available in Canada.

Leo Laporte (01:57:16):
No, you have to, here's the criteria. Online streaming services that operate in Canada offer broadcasting content and are in $10 million or more. So you're okay, we're off the hook. But [01:57:30] I know a lot of Canadian podcasters and I think they're reasonably quite reasonably worried here in the us. The F C C only regulates our national airwaves, radio and television going through the air as it should be. It doesn't regulate cable. That's why Netflix can have a show called Naked Dating. They don't regulate that stuff, but I would hate, and they certainly don't regulate podcasts, but I would, and

Glenn Fleishman (01:57:56):
By the

Leo Laporte (01:57:56):
Way, there's no content on here. We bleep out bad [01:58:00] words, John, our moral conscience, John Sina, make sure that nothing salacious goes out over the air. But we don't do that because the F C C A says we have to do it because we just want to make sure kids can watch and their parents don't get upset. But I would hate for the F C C to start weighing in on podcasts. That would be very bad, don't

Glenn Fleishman (01:58:20):
You think? This reminds me of when a friend of Alaska, a singer marrying call and she had a new album come out Christmas songs and I put it on and my then I think seven [01:58:30] or eight year olds in the room and it's like, Y

Leo Laporte (01:58:35):
Mother finally, wait, whoa, that's

Glenn Fleishman (01:58:37):
Not Christmas

Leo Laporte (01:58:38):
Eve. And I was like,

Glenn Fleishman (01:58:39):
Wait a minute. And then I'm like, oh, she actually warned me. I just didn't read the album. It's

Leo Laporte (01:58:44):
From Die Hard my friend. It's a quote. It's a quote. It is a tradition, a Christmas tradition in our house.

Glenn Fleishman (01:58:52):
Absolutely.

Leo Laporte (01:58:52):
In fact,

Glenn Fleishman (01:58:53):
I missed,

Leo Laporte (01:58:54):
There's a bar down the road that has it. It's an outdoor bar. We love it. We went there last year for [01:59:00] our Christmas party.

Glenn Fleishman (01:59:01):
They

Leo Laporte (01:59:01):
Redecorate the whole thing. All the waiters are dressed as Santa's and they have drinks that are suitable for the holiday. Like Santa got run over by a rum Todd, and they have one that was quite good. The ypi ca Mother Bleeper cocktail and we're looking forward to going back there. Yeah, yeah.

Glenn Fleishman (01:59:23):
Can't wait. Do there's the diehard, there's the Christmas orette that you have to get with him, the building and everything. No. Alright.

Leo Laporte (01:59:29):
I don't have that [01:59:30] pretty,

Glenn Fleishman (01:59:30):
I'm just surprised.

Leo Laporte (01:59:31):
Mion Call, put out an album called Yippy ca.

Glenn Fleishman (01:59:37):
It's you note

Leo Laporte (01:59:38):
In the

Glenn Fleishman (01:59:38):
Thing. Is this explicit lyrics in the title track? I just didn't read. Oh, I just opened it up. She's great. She's a wonderful singer. She's

Leo Laporte (01:59:46):
The one who told me I now want to buy it. I am Ready.

Glenn Fleishman (01:59:48):
Lovely voice, wonderful person. And she's the one who told me, I interviewed her once for a podcast about being a creative independent artist and this will terrify everyone to the Marrow. She said, apropos [02:00:00] of Spotify and everyone else, I'm competing against all music ever made.

Leo Laporte (02:00:04):
Oh geez. Oh my God, it's Lord

Glenn Fleishman (02:00:06):
All. And she said that and I felt my spine just fall out of my body, but she's right. No,

Leo Laporte (02:00:13):
It's called the internet and it's everywhere.

Glenn Fleishman (02:00:18):
I found

Leo Laporte (02:00:18):
That out the other day. It's

Wil Harris (02:00:21):
Always the challenge of books, right, is that every book is competing for shelf space against every other book ever produced, whereas at least a weekly podcast, [02:00:30] there's only that week's podcast to compete against.

Glenn Fleishman (02:00:32):
Well, can I sidebar with you for one second? Which is I read a thing the other day about the long tail and I always thought the long tail was great. It had a flawed concept, but I didn't realize that Chris Anderson had, I guess he'd not

Leo Laporte (02:00:42):
Repudiated

Glenn Fleishman (02:00:43):
It, but the long tail is great for aggregators. It's terrible for publishers, worse for authors. And it's like it doesn't matter if you sell, it's great for Amazon. If they sell 1,000,001 copy of a million books, it's not good for the author that you got one copy. It's only one

Leo Laporte (02:00:59):
Copy. [02:01:00] Great

Wil Harris (02:01:00):
For the consumer, terrible for the people producing it, which in the end is terrible for the consumer. It's a real challenge.

Leo Laporte (02:01:06):
This from Investopedia is the definition, a business strategy that allows companies to realize significant profits by selling low volumes of hard to find items to many customers instead of only selling large volumes of reduced number of popular items. Leo,

Glenn Fleishman (02:01:24):
Wasn't it on

Sam Abuelsamid (02:01:24):
The show last week or the week

Glenn Fleishman (02:01:26):
Before that

Sam Abuelsamid (02:01:27):
You guys

Glenn Fleishman (02:01:28):
Were talking about the

Sam Abuelsamid (02:01:29):
Long tail and [02:01:30] streaming

Wil Harris (02:01:30):
Services removing

Sam Abuelsamid (02:01:32):
Content?

Leo Laporte (02:01:33):
Because

Sam Abuelsamid (02:01:34):
I think there was

Wil Harris (02:01:35):
A

Sam Abuelsamid (02:01:35):
Stat that

Leo Laporte (02:01:37):
The

Sam Abuelsamid (02:01:38):
More content you have on the

Glenn Fleishman (02:01:39):
Service,

Sam Abuelsamid (02:01:41):
People start to just not make a decision and just watch nothing at all.

Leo Laporte (02:01:45):
Yes, they

Sam Abuelsamid (02:01:45):
Get overwhelmed by that

Glenn Fleishman (02:01:46):
Over choice

Sam Abuelsamid (02:01:49):
Docking the long tail.

Leo Laporte (02:01:51):
Yes.

Sam Abuelsamid (02:01:52):
There you go.

Glenn Fleishman (02:01:53):
Oh, flock. Is it

Sam Abuelsamid (02:01:54):
Docking the long tail? Do you have the phrase docking a tail? I

Leo Laporte (02:01:57):
Think

Glenn Fleishman (02:01:57):
It's not.

Leo Laporte (02:01:59):
If you've ever docked [02:02:00] a tail, you know

Glenn Fleishman (02:02:01):
Bobbing, I guess it's

Sam Abuelsamid (02:02:02):
My dog has a ducktail.

Leo Laporte (02:02:03):
Ducktail, yeah. Ask

Glenn Fleishman (02:02:05):
Jason Ell. He raised horses as a kid, so really I didn't know. He has all kinds of words. Oh,

Leo Laporte (02:02:09):
All right. Yeah, this was from a Slate article, actually, it was quite interesting. We talked about this last week. It was to commemorate the end of the red envelope. Did you have Netflix red envelopes in the UK or is that a US only?

Sam Abuelsamid (02:02:21):
We did. They ended up buying, somebody copied it over here. There's a company called Love Film that copied it, and I think either they got bought out, our Amazon bought them. Anyway. We did [02:02:30] briefly.

Leo Laporte (02:02:31):
Here's a great UK joke. No, you had red

Glenn Fleishman (02:02:33):
Envelopes, but they wanted to be blue against, they changed them back.

Sam Abuelsamid (02:02:37):
UK joke. Oh shit.

Leo Laporte (02:02:40):
Netflix, which used to have the long tail used to have pretty much every D V D ever made. And so you could get a very minor movie, but you could see it now is down to, they won't say, but according to this slate article, fewer than 4,000 titles. But the study that you're talking about is kind [02:03:00] of interesting. Lemme see if I can

Glenn Fleishman (02:03:03):
Find this part of the article.

Sam Abuelsamid (02:03:04):
And even with that, we still can't find anything worth watching.

Leo Laporte (02:03:08):
Yeah, isn't that funny? Hey, we're going to get new TV

Glenn Fleishman (02:03:10):
Soon though. Yay. It's coming back. Well,

Sam Abuelsamid (02:03:12):
It reminds me of the Bruce Springsteen song from the mid eighties, 50 channels and nothing on. Now we've got hundreds or thousands and there's still nothing on,

Glenn Fleishman (02:03:24):
Let

Leo Laporte (02:03:24):
Me see.

Glenn Fleishman (02:03:24):
I try to tell my kids we had three channels and P B s and they're like, you're lying. Telephones, [02:03:30] what are you talking? But surely there were other things like, Nope, nope.

Leo Laporte (02:03:33):
But that is such a good insight, which is okay, so this is a 2018 study. Researchers found increasing the number of available movies by am mere 1000 titles decreased the market share occupied the by the bottom 1%. The long tail titles decreased them by 20%, so increasing a thousand [02:04:00] titles decreased the long tail by 20%. Faced with even more options, people just gave up entirely when instead of 20,000 DVDs, you can choose from 50,000 or a hundred thousand or million. What happens is demand for all movies goes down. This is from Wharton.

Glenn Fleishman (02:04:21):
This is the summary readiness. People, they believe they want infinite choice, but they want to be presented with a fraction of it so they don't have to make a choice from infinite [02:04:30] choice. So it's your fault you Yeah, exactly. You asked for everything. So we gave you everything and you didn't want

Leo Laporte (02:04:36):
Everything. What'd

Glenn Fleishman (02:04:37):
You ask for?

Leo Laporte (02:04:38):
That's a Steve Jobs thing too, right? Steve Jobs says, I can't remember the exact quote was like, don't ask people what they

Glenn Fleishman (02:04:43):
Want. They don't know what they

Leo Laporte (02:04:44):
Want. No.

Wil Harris (02:04:44):
Well, it's the Henry Ford thing. They want faster horses.

Leo Laporte (02:04:47):
Right, right. Better buggy

Glenn Fleishman (02:04:50):
Whips Incorporated.

Leo Laporte (02:04:52):
Yeah. Let's see. Oh, this was a sad story from the register. [02:05:00] A five hour system interruption last month at the Veterans Affair Medical Center in Kansas, Missouri. According to the US government regular weekday calls with the C I O during which IT problems were reviewed was caused by a cat jumping on the technician's keyboard. A hundred people, contractors, vendors, and employees were on this call. One of the participants explained that while a technician [02:05:30] was reviewing the configuration of a server cluster, their cat jumped on the keyboard and deleted it. Kurt del Benny, assistant secretary for information and security at the Department of Veterans Affairs is said to have respondent on the call, this is why I have a dog. And that's the incident report.

Wil Harris (02:05:55):
I thought it was very amusing that they contacted the Kansas [02:06:00] City Medical Affairs people for comment and the system that they use is called the Veterans Health Information System Technology Architecture System. It's vista. That's not the first time that Vista has caused huge outages strikes again.

Leo Laporte (02:06:22):
Yeah, the register says an installation guide provided by the VA makes it clear it would be no fun to deal with cat edited configuration files. [02:06:30] However, the VA did not confirm or deny the cat. He declined to comment. In fact,

Wil Harris (02:06:39):
Schrodinger's, there's a joking there somewhere. Schrodinger's keyboard, cat

Leo Laporte (02:06:43):
Schrodinger's server configuration wasn't there? Some company was talking about developing an algorithm that would recognize when a cat was typing and block the input. Brilliant. They should have had that. It feels like

Wil Harris (02:06:54):
A Snopes

Leo Laporte (02:06:57):
Says, all right, nevermind. They should [02:07:00] have had that. We were mentioning Brave, by the way, sad news for Brave 9% layoffs of its workforce. Brave is one of the good guys. Privacy forward browser based on the Chromium project. So you get the benefits of using Chrome without the spyware built into Chrome. The company, this is from a TechCrunch did not specify how many people were affected, but did corroborate it and said the decision was driven by a tough economic climate. [02:07:30] Wow.

Wil Harris (02:07:33):
Welcome to

Leo Laporte (02:07:33):
2023.

Wil Harris (02:07:34):
Yeah, a lot of that going round. There was the article yesterday that CD Project Red, who obviously make the hugely narrow, newly popular cyberpunk 2077 game just laid off almost 10% of the workforce. A hundred people in Poland. So there's another plenty of

Leo Laporte (02:07:54):
It going around. I don't get it because Epic Games had a massive layoff, 830 jobs. [02:08:00] This is the company, 16% of their workforce. This is the company that made so much money on Fortnite that their chairman, Tim Sweeney got 7 billion in one year. So see, this bugs me, these tech layoffs, it wasn't enough. 7 billion, it wasn't enough. Put a little aside and you can keep those 830 employees. The company

Wil Harris (02:08:22):
Just laid off the people that could have paid for with its last stock buyback.

Leo Laporte (02:08:26):
Yeah, exactly. It's a very big problem. Instead [02:08:30] taking the revenues and buying back stock instead of keeping employees. Sweeney wrote the company and tends to sell band camp as well. They bought that just last year and spin off super awesome. Which

Wil Harris (02:08:45):
Is, it's a crazy move, right? They bought it last year and now they're spinning it right back out again. It's like, does anybody do any forward planning?

Leo Laporte (02:08:50):
Yeah, no. He explains it by saying, we spent way more money than we earn. Wait, wait. Is that [02:09:00] how that, hold on. That's a direct quote from Tim Sweeney. Phenomenal.

Wil Harris (02:09:04):
Can I tell my boss that?

Leo Laporte (02:09:07):
I'm sorry. We have a budget deficit. See, discover the secret to business.

Glenn Fleishman (02:09:14):
Don't spend more money.

Leo Laporte (02:09:15):
And I think as far as I know, Fortnite still is a license to print money.

Wil Harris (02:09:19):
I mean, there's printing money. Yeah, just very bad structural decisions being taken.

Leo Laporte (02:09:26):
Wow. Maybe they should [02:09:30] take a page from the book of Amazon and Google and just start messing with the results and things, doing stuff. Amazon is just take the

Glenn Fleishman (02:09:40):
Numbers off the axes

Leo Laporte (02:09:41):
On the charts. There you go. That's what Apple does. According Amazon started

Glenn Fleishman (02:09:46):
That.

Leo Laporte (02:09:46):
Did they really? They were the first ones. The no label graphs. We've doubled in size according to the Wall Street Journal in a redacted part of the FTC lawsuit against [02:10:00] Amazon. Amazon used a secret project, Nessie algorithm to raise prices. Now, I have to say, when I read this, this doesn't seem so bad. And then I remind myself that Rupert Murdoch and the Wall Street Journal hate big tech. So every time I read a big tech story from the journal, whether it's against Google or Apple or Amazon, I always suspect it, but

Glenn Fleishman (02:10:19):
The great Matt Levine over at Bloomberg, who's got a terrific free newsletter that

Leo Laporte (02:10:23):
Every human being, I trust him. What does he say?

Glenn Fleishman (02:10:25):
He had a great comment on this, which was he's analyzing like, alright,

Leo Laporte (02:10:29):
What

Glenn Fleishman (02:10:29):
Is [02:10:30] collusion in this guy? What's price fixing and what's not? And he's like, if you call somebody on the phone and say, Hey, what are your prices? Let us all raise or lower them together or raise them together, right? That's price fixing.

Leo Laporte (02:10:41):
That's co.

Glenn Fleishman (02:10:42):
But if you look across the street and you see somebody changes a sign on their window and says, beef is now $4 and 95 cents a pound, or I should know that $95, I don't what his beef cost. And you could raise yours. And that's legal because it's observational, right? You're out of band. And it's always what Amazon [02:11:00] did. That's kind of this weird question is can they, because they knew people were watching them and they made it into an algorithm. Is it somehow price fixing in that? I'm actually really curious about that. There was an issue that came up years ago. I

Leo Laporte (02:11:15):
Forgot who

Glenn Fleishman (02:11:15):
Wrote about this. It wasn't Harry McCracken. It was somebody discovered that certain weird books seemed to have extremely high prices. They were just sort of a random used

Leo Laporte (02:11:24):
Book would cost

Glenn Fleishman (02:11:25):
2060 $9.

Leo Laporte (02:11:26):
I see that all the time. And 15 cents. Yeah.

Glenn Fleishman (02:11:28):
This started like a decade ago. And the fact [02:11:30] was there were third party Amazon resellers who were looking at pricing to figure out what other books had sold, and they were in this SOCOM rock and robot situation, and it led to these weird outliers. But this feels like it's kind of in the same, no one seems to be doing anything where they're talking behind the scenes and the outcomes aren't good. So is that actually illegal

Leo Laporte (02:11:53):
If

Glenn Fleishman (02:11:54):
You're raising prices because you're observing competitors?

Leo Laporte (02:11:57):
It feels like what Amazon's doing is what every [02:12:00] grocery

Glenn Fleishman (02:12:01):
Store in America just really fast.

Leo Laporte (02:12:04):
They just do it

Glenn Fleishman (02:12:05):
Fast.

Sam Abuelsamid (02:12:06):
Or every gas station you have an intersection where there's three gas stations at one intersection. Whoever bumps the price up by 5 cents or drops it by 5 cents five minutes later, the others are doing the same thing. We

Glenn Fleishman (02:12:18):
Had an intersection and one of the gas stations was 20 cents lower than the others.

Leo Laporte (02:12:22):
Are they a

Glenn Fleishman (02:12:23):
Front? Why?

Leo Laporte (02:12:24):
How were there long lines at that gas station and not the other three?

Glenn Fleishman (02:12:30):
[02:12:30] It's weird. No, I think their gas wasn't considered as good. It was a branding issue.

Sam Abuelsamid (02:12:36):
That was probably the one that they were offering a discount for paying cash. And if you paid with a credit card, it was the same price as the others.

Leo Laporte (02:12:43):
No, they also had a cash price that

Glenn Fleishman (02:12:45):
Was lower. I've never got it. So I don't understand business clearly.

Leo Laporte (02:12:49):
I don't

Glenn Fleishman (02:12:49):
Understand that

Sam Abuelsamid (02:12:50):
That's We're

Leo Laporte (02:12:51):
All here. This is a good chance to get from a car expert. Are some gasolines better than others?

Sam Abuelsamid (02:12:58):
So let me start with [02:13:00] this statement. There is no such thing as pure gasoline. Gasoline is an amorphous term that encompasses some mixture of hydrocarbons and assorted other additives. So yes, the answer is there are different gasolines somewhere.

Leo Laporte (02:13:16):
So the formulation could be different at

Sam Abuelsamid (02:13:18):
All the different

Leo Laporte (02:13:19):
Brands.

Sam Abuelsamid (02:13:20):
And the formulation varies by region by time of year because there are limits on evaporative emissions. When [02:13:30] it's cold. For cold weather, they

Leo Laporte (02:13:33):
Have to ethanol formulation

Sam Abuelsamid (02:13:34):
Because otherwise your car won't start because the gas won't evaporate. Or when it's hot, they change the formulation so it evaporates less. So yeah, there are differences in gas from different vendors and also from different locations. Okay.

Leo Laporte (02:13:55):
By the way, will, we're talking about petrol, just so you know.

Sam Abuelsamid (02:13:58):
Yes,

Wil Harris (02:13:59):
I did gather that. Thank [02:14:00] you.

Leo Laporte (02:14:01):
I'm teasing. I

Wil Harris (02:14:02):
Mean, over here it should mentioned it's pretty explicit over here, you go to a pump and there are different, I mean literal, different grades of gas.

Leo Laporte (02:14:11):
Yeah. And we have created by octane by its ability to explode, right? Yeah.

Sam Abuelsamid (02:14:16):
Well, it's actually resistance to self ignition is what the octane is.

Leo Laporte (02:14:21):
Higher octane means more resistant.

Sam Abuelsamid (02:14:23):
Yes. So it won't knock. So you can use higher compression ratios, but yes, when we have different grades of gas, but [02:14:30] even from one station to another, if they're getting their gas from different refineries or different suppliers, it may be different.

Leo Laporte (02:14:40):
So gas is fungible? Sort of, but not exactly.

Sam Abuelsamid (02:14:43):
Okay. Now I got

Wil Harris (02:14:44):
All sorts of questions.

Leo Laporte (02:14:46):
So how much of gasoline is actually made out of gasoline?

Sam Abuelsamid (02:14:50):
Well, like I said, there is no such thing as gasoline. Gasoline is primarily a, it's primarily

Wil Harris (02:14:56):
A mixture of pure ethanol, right?

Sam Abuelsamid (02:14:58):
It's

Leo Laporte (02:14:58):
Petrol. It's petrol. [02:15:00] How much petrol is in gasoline.

Sam Abuelsamid (02:15:02):
It's predominantly a blend of heptane and octane. And how much of each you put in there depends what I was saying

Leo Laporte (02:15:09):
Earlier. So I drill

Sam Abuelsamid (02:15:10):
Hole in the

Leo Laporte (02:15:11):
Ground and some black stuff comes up, we call it,

Sam Abuelsamid (02:15:14):
That's crude oil, crude

Leo Laporte (02:15:14):
Oil bubble and crude.

Sam Abuelsamid (02:15:16):
I take a barrel and find that. I bring

Leo Laporte (02:15:18):
It to refinery. What comes out of the refinery,

Sam Abuelsamid (02:15:23):
Actually a whole bunch of different things. Everything from sludge to diesel and kerosene [02:15:30] and heptane and octane

Leo Laporte (02:15:32):
Sot is a thing. Octane's a thing.

Sam Abuelsamid (02:15:35):
Yeah. It's Heptane is a hydrocarbon molecule with seven carbon. Atos and octane is eight carbon atoms. So they're two different compounds and they blend them

Leo Laporte (02:15:48):
According to Wikipedia. The name gasoline comes from a Britt, a British business name man named John Ca sell

Sam Abuelsamid (02:15:57):
To you.

Leo Laporte (02:15:57):
Cael, who in the 1862 [02:16:00] placed an ad in the times of London for a fuel oil. The patented, his name remember, was Cael Caine Oil, safe, economic, and brilliant possesses all the requisites, which have been long desired as a means of powerful artificial light. Gasoline. Gasoline became gasoline and gasoline. So it comes from you guys. I did not know that. Yeah, petrol comes from the word

Sam Abuelsamid (02:16:26):
Petroleum.

Leo Laporte (02:16:27):
Is there any oil and gasoline? Hell

Sam Abuelsamid (02:16:29):
Yeah. [02:16:30] No, I mean it's mostly

Glenn Fleishman (02:16:31):
What's the

Leo Laporte (02:16:31):
Oil product in gasoline? That's the Heptane and Octane.

Sam Abuelsamid (02:16:34):
The heptane and octane primarily and some

Leo Laporte (02:16:37):
Other stuff.

Glenn Fleishman (02:16:37):
And then some of that goes in the food system to become things like high fructose corn syrup and citric acid and whatever. All these things that are actually ultimately petroleum derived.

Leo Laporte (02:16:48):
And then if you think about it, all that stuff that Ag Bear came up with is just coal tar derivatives with coal. Tar is another byproduct of refinement. And they [02:17:00] said, well, what can we make with this? How about aspirin?

Sam Abuelsamid (02:17:04):
So

Leo Laporte (02:17:06):
What?

Sam Abuelsamid (02:17:06):
Yeah,

Leo Laporte (02:17:07):
Coal tar. I think when I think about it, I think of it, well, it's a chemistry experiment. You've got some carbon, long-chain carbon atoms and you can do stuff to 'em. Turn it into some other compound, right?

Sam Abuelsamid (02:17:18):
It's acetylsalicylic acid. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (02:17:21):
I misspoken

Glenn Fleishman (02:17:23):
Corn is where you get where they use citric acid as additive from, I don't know what I'm saying. Nevermind not gasoline.

Leo Laporte (02:17:29):
Well, sometimes [02:17:30] we've put corn ethanol into our gasoline,

Sam Abuelsamid (02:17:34):
Right? Yes. And most US gasoline is about 10% ethanol.

Leo Laporte (02:17:38):
Is that because of the corn lobby? Is that because of Archer Daniels Midland, or is it actually

Sam Abuelsamid (02:17:42):
Good for you? That is part of it. There are some advantages because alcohol has an oxygen atom in there and an alcohol because an oxygen hydrogen chain on there. And so the extra oxygen helps with combustion. [02:18:00] And ethanol actually raises the ethanol has a higher octane value than most gasoline. So it actually helps to raise the octane value of the gasoline without having to add more oil. So really you're also putting this technically a renewable fuel, mixing that in there. So you're using less fossil fuel.

Leo Laporte (02:18:20):
For some reason I thought a refinery took up from the ground, came a bubble and crude crude oil and took all the spad stuff out and [02:18:30] produced this pure clear thing that is oil. But it's really, we call it gasoline. You can burn it, but it's not that. It's another chemistry experiment. It's just like coal tar to aspirin. They just got all these long-chain hydrocarbons. They do stuff with it.

Sam Abuelsamid (02:18:46):
Well, I mean the refinery itself is, you can think of it, Richard Campbell has explained this very well, how it still works. It's basically a giant still, and you're taking off at various levels. You're taking off [02:19:00] as you distill. You literally are distilling crude oil and you're taking off a bunch of different compounds at various levels among

Leo Laporte (02:19:09):
Them heptane and octane, which are just

Sam Abuelsamid (02:19:13):
And propane.

Leo Laporte (02:19:14):
Propane and a bunch of other

Sam Abuelsamid (02:19:15):
Stuff, all

Leo Laporte (02:19:16):
The AEs.

Glenn Fleishman (02:19:17):
That makes a lot of sense. It's a

Leo Laporte (02:19:18):
Pain in

Glenn Fleishman (02:19:21):
Insane, in an

Leo Laporte (02:19:23):
Insane in the membrane.

Glenn Fleishman (02:19:24):
The main.

Leo Laporte (02:19:25):
So how much, it's silly to say how much gasoline is in gasoline. There is no such [02:19:30] thing as gasoline. That's just a brand name

Sam Abuelsamid (02:19:34):
Essentially. Yes.

Leo Laporte (02:19:35):
That everybody uses, but it's just a brand name.

Sam Abuelsamid (02:19:37):
Yeah. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:19:40):
My father was a petroleum geologist. I didn't know any of this stuff.

Glenn Fleishman (02:19:45):
I wish I

Leo Laporte (02:19:45):
Listened to what my father said. I should have listened to dad. He would've explained it. I'm sure he could explain this now. I should ask him. Well,

Glenn Fleishman (02:19:52):
There's another Douglas Adams jokes.

Leo Laporte (02:19:53):
I wish I listened to what

Glenn Fleishman (02:19:54):
My mother said.

Leo Laporte (02:19:55):
What did she say? I don't know. I didn't listen. So Heptane is [02:20:00] gasoline's about 1% heptane. It's not a lot. There's a little bit. Heptane is a

Sam Abuelsamid (02:20:05):
Solve. It

Leo Laporte (02:20:05):
Varies. It's according to Wikipedia uses an adhesive remover by stamp collectors. So how much octane is gasoline cool

Glenn Fleishman (02:20:16):
Stamps.com. Yeah.

Sam Abuelsamid (02:20:18):
That's the biggest component of gasoline is the octane.

Leo Laporte (02:20:21):
Octane.

Sam Abuelsamid (02:20:22):
And then like I said, they blend it with some heptane and a whole bunch of other

Leo Laporte (02:20:26):
Things, a little bit of heptane,

Sam Abuelsamid (02:20:28):
The ethanol and assorted other. [02:20:30] There's some things that they add to help lubricate the valves and

Leo Laporte (02:20:34):
The, so when they say high octane, they mean that it's a higher percentage of octane in this gasoline,

Sam Abuelsamid (02:20:41):
Not necessarily 100 octane. So what they're doing is it's relative to the combustion characteristics of

Leo Laporte (02:20:53):
Pure tane. Yeah, and I understand that octane

Sam Abuelsamid (02:20:55):
Number's pure octane.

Leo Laporte (02:20:56):
Yeah.

Sam Abuelsamid (02:20:57):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:20:57):
That doesn't relate it necessarily to the percentage of [02:21:00] octane in the gasoline. That's just a number that reflects it.

Sam Abuelsamid (02:21:02):
Right? Because you can have a gasoline that has less octane and more ethanol and it could have the same octane rating as something that has less ethanol and more octane.

Leo Laporte (02:21:17):
Oh, I see. Of the 18 isomers of normal octane, which is C eight H 18, long chain carrow carbohydrate. Right.

Sam Abuelsamid (02:21:25):
The eight carbons, hence the octane.

Leo Laporte (02:21:28):
And 18 hydrogens [02:21:30] octane gets its name from the two four trimethyl pentane compound, which is highly resistant to auto ignition. And when I say auto, I don't mean automobile.

Sam Abuelsamid (02:21:42):
No, just self ignition blowing up by itself.

Glenn Fleishman (02:21:46):
This has really given my organic chemistry.

Sam Abuelsamid (02:21:48):
Yeah. I'll tell you what my brain is about to ignite.

Leo Laporte (02:21:50):
I think this is very interesting, but I don't know. It is very interesting. I surprised I

Sam Abuelsamid (02:21:55):
I had to take organic chemistry one, two, and three.

Glenn Fleishman (02:22:00):
[02:22:00] It shows good work.

Leo Laporte (02:22:01):
Good work. I feel like we should know this. We're going around saying, yeah, they take the bubble and crude, they turn it into gasoline, they throw away the sludge. But no, it's not that simple.

Sam Abuelsamid (02:22:11):
No, they don't throw away the sludge. They use that in to make aspirin in massive container ships. No, they burn that in container

Leo Laporte (02:22:17):
Ships. All those

Sam Abuelsamid (02:22:18):
Ships going

Leo Laporte (02:22:18):
Back. Oh, that bunker. The bunker oil.

Sam Abuelsamid (02:22:21):
Yeah, that's the sludge. They're burning that for the giant.

Leo Laporte (02:22:25):
Why do they use bunker oil? Bunker fuel? Because it's cheap. Oh,

Sam Abuelsamid (02:22:30):
[02:22:30] Because it's the stuff nobody else can use. It's like

Leo Laporte (02:22:32):
Tar.

Sam Abuelsamid (02:22:33):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:22:35):
And what And diesel. What's diesel?

Sam Abuelsamid (02:22:39):
Diesel is a couple of steps down from octane. I mean it's actually also still predominantly octane. It's

Leo Laporte (02:22:45):
Somewhere in between bunker fuel and gasoline is diesel.

Sam Abuelsamid (02:22:49):
Yes.

Glenn Fleishman (02:22:53):
And for next week, so the

Leo Laporte (02:22:55):
Reading

Glenn Fleishman (02:22:56):
Assignment is the following chapters

Leo Laporte (02:22:58):
Pitch black

Glenn Fleishman (02:22:59):
And [02:23:00] orgo

Leo Laporte (02:23:00):
And thick as molasses bunker fuel. And at last the shipping industry begins cleaning up its dirty fuels. So these are filthy because they don't burn

Sam Abuelsamid (02:23:10):
Well, it's terrible stuff.

Glenn Fleishman (02:23:11):
I'd love to get them off that

Sam Abuelsamid (02:23:14):
A small handful of these giant container ships burning bunker fuel, generate way more pollution, way more greenhouse gases and all kinds of other nasty pollution than the entire fleet of ground vehicles in the United States.

Leo Laporte (02:23:29):
But I have to point

Glenn Fleishman (02:23:29):
Out, [02:23:30] this is like the

Leo Laporte (02:23:30):
Cruise ships also use bunker fuel.

Sam Abuelsamid (02:23:32):
Yes.

Glenn Fleishman (02:23:32):
Yeah. This is like the methane thing. It's like if they're able to cap all the uncapped burning methane. Methane, sorry, methane well's out there and all the get rid of bunker fuel. It's

Leo Laporte (02:23:44):
The problem with climate

Glenn Fleishman (02:23:45):
Change contributing emissions is that there are actually significant ones that are not within the power of consumers or most businesses to effect.

Leo Laporte (02:23:54):
No. In fact, we're sorting our recycling and we're driving around EVs. We got solar panels. We

Glenn Fleishman (02:24:00):
[02:24:00] Have to do

Leo Laporte (02:24:00):
It. If people would stop using bunker fuel

Glenn Fleishman (02:24:04):
Or cap old,

Leo Laporte (02:24:06):
Well

Sam Abuelsamid (02:24:06):
Actually increase

Leo Laporte (02:24:07):
The albedo of their heads. We would be in a much better situation.

Sam Abuelsamid (02:24:12):
I'm just saying one of the many downsides of fracking is, if you think about it, you're in fracking. They're injecting a bunch of stuff under high pressure into the ground to literally crack the earth's crust to release the methane and the crude oil from [02:24:30] the earth's crust. Well, when you're doing that by literally cracking the crust of the earth, a

Leo Laporte (02:24:36):
Lot of

Sam Abuelsamid (02:24:37):
That methane is actually seeping into the atmosphere

Leo Laporte (02:24:40):
And that is a far worse. It's about

Sam Abuelsamid (02:24:43):
20 times the greenhouse gas effect of carbon dioxide.

Leo Laporte (02:24:46):
Yeah,

Glenn Fleishman (02:24:47):
It's killing the thing. Actually, I'm working on an environmental story and for a environmental publication and there is heartening to know that there is a lot of work going, quiet work going into [02:25:00] that could have major changes. There's a satellite going up next year called, sorry, I'm doing the English pronunciation for you. Well, sorry. Methane sat, methane sat or methane sat. That's going to be doing some of the most advanced monitoring of methane emissions around the world in a way that is not impossible but is very difficult and is at a lower frequency. So there's all these things happening that are going to help provide accountability that then governments and businesses will have to take action on. But we're not helpless. It's just slow.

Leo Laporte (02:25:26):
It's

Sam Abuelsamid (02:25:27):
Fascinating

Leo Laporte (02:25:28):
And very low octane [02:25:30] and diesel fuel. That's why you don't need smart plugs because it self ignites.

Sam Abuelsamid (02:25:36):
Yes.

Leo Laporte (02:25:37):
It auto

Sam Abuelsamid (02:25:37):
Ignites

Leo Laporte (02:25:38):
In a truck.

Sam Abuelsamid (02:25:38):
Yeah, right. And diesels use much higher compression ratio and you compress the air, it heats up. Was it PV equals N R T was it? I forget what the equation's called, but when you increase the pressure, the temperature increases.

Leo Laporte (02:25:54):
Quippy said that PV equals N divided by M times T.

Sam Abuelsamid (02:26:00):
[02:26:00] Fascinating. It's avagadro's equation

Leo Laporte (02:26:05):
I did not expect Is that avagadro's number?

Sam Abuelsamid (02:26:07):
Yeah. And is avagadro's number. I think that's Avagadro's equation.

Leo Laporte (02:26:11):
It's a mole

Glenn Fleishman (02:26:12):
Of the mat.

Leo Laporte (02:26:13):
Fascinating. I remember that. And moles. Yeah, moles. There's moles. Yeah, there's moles.

Sam Abuelsamid (02:26:19):
Your head. Man, I haven't talked about this stuff in

Leo Laporte (02:26:22):
Chemistry, baby. I just learned a lot.

Glenn Fleishman (02:26:24):
Thank

Leo Laporte (02:26:25):
You, Sam. My avocado number is

Sam Abuelsamid (02:26:26):
Six. It

Leo Laporte (02:26:27):
Says that's

Glenn Fleishman (02:26:28):
The most you can eat one

Leo Laporte (02:26:29):
Day. Eric [02:26:30] duck, man.

Sam Abuelsamid (02:26:33):
Am I get an A.

Leo Laporte (02:26:34):
Forgot I after the compression.

Leo Laporte (02:26:37):
The compression stops working and ice and explode. Sorry, we really got into chemistry on that one. That's fun. See, you never know what you're going to get.

Sam Abuelsamid (02:26:45):
Oh, it's the ideal gas law. That's what PV equals. N R T is the ideal gas law. That's what it was.

Leo Laporte (02:26:49):
Pressure is PV is volume. T is temperature. Okay.

Sam Abuelsamid (02:26:54):
Right.

Leo Laporte (02:26:54):
What's n and m? We don't know. Nobody cares. We can just guess.

Sam Abuelsamid (02:26:58):
N is

Sam Abuelsamid (02:27:00):
[02:27:00] The whatever. Substance, whatever gas.

Leo Laporte (02:27:02):
Quantity. Quantity divided by M

Sam Abuelsamid (02:27:06):
I thought

Wil Harris (02:27:06):
N and M was a wrapper.

Sam Abuelsamid (02:27:10):
That's m and m. I want you to lose

Leo Laporte (02:27:11):
Yourself in this fine promo that we have made showing you all the fun things you missed, including the chemistry lesson this week on TWIT watch. Oh,

Sam Abuelsamid (02:29:23):
Definitely won't stick my new pixelate pro in the salmon.

Leo Laporte (02:29:25):
Did you order one, Sam?

Sam Abuelsamid (02:29:26):
Yeah, it's coming on Thursday.

Leo Laporte (02:29:28):
Me too. I didn't want to. [02:29:30] I wasn't going to, but you know, watch those presentations. By the way, I think Google's the last man. Well, maybe Google and Microsoft for some reason are still doing live presentations and they feel so innervated compared to the hot jazzy stuff that Apple's doing and some of these other companies, I

Wil Harris (02:29:50):
Won't. All the video games companies that are doing crazy good stuff, Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft are all doing way better keynotes now than the [02:30:00] Google Google's of old,

Leo Laporte (02:30:01):
The Google feels just feels stuffy and old.

Wil Harris (02:30:04):
I mean Google always felt a bit

Leo Laporte (02:30:05):
Stuffy, didn't

Wil Harris (02:30:06):
Never had quite, it was always sort of the poor cousin really.

Leo Laporte (02:30:10):
Speaking of stuffy and old for the nerds. You loved this Rs Technica. Wonks. Wonk. Yeah.

Sam Abuelsamid (02:30:20):
That's why I use a pixel

Leo Laporte (02:30:23):
Because you're a nerd and a wonk and a, what was the other one? Dot

Wil Harris (02:30:28):
Dork.

Leo Laporte (02:30:28):
Dork. Dork. [02:30:30] I think a dork is a whale's penis. Am I wrong on that? I believe. Let's move on to the next topic. We're going to get 20 minutes of whale biology next. Yeah, let's not go into it. Although we were talking about Project Red. No,

Wil Harris (02:30:49):
Leo, don't do it. Don't do it.

Leo Laporte (02:30:53):
No,

Sam Abuelsamid (02:30:53):
I'll stop.

Leo Laporte (02:30:54):
I'll stop. Cyberpunk 27 7 costs according to ARS [02:31:00] Technical, more than 400 million to make

Wil Harris (02:31:04):
The most expensive game ever made yet so far released. There is speculation that ground theft auto six will cost more than $400 million, but it is so far not released.

Leo Laporte (02:31:14):
Can they make that money back?

Wil Harris (02:31:16):
Yeah, so if you saw the, there was an incredible, I mean apart from the fact that Grand Theft Auto Five continues to print money, there was one of the leaked Microsoft [02:31:30] slides from a few weeks ago from the Xbox sort of decks where the amount of money required to secure grand theft Auto five was a game pass game and it was something in the order of 15 million a week or something to keep grand theft Auto five on game pass. It was absolutely insane.

Leo Laporte (02:31:50):
And the 27

Wil Harris (02:31:52):
Really do make that amount of money,

Leo Laporte (02:31:54):
These cyberpunk 2077 patches alone in the D L C 120 million. [02:32:00] This

Wil Harris (02:32:01):
Is, I mean just an example of how these games are made, $40 million to make the expansion from an 80 million to market. So it's a two to one spend on marketing to actual development and the development is hefty.

Leo Laporte (02:32:16):
Yeah. Unbelievable. And that's by the way, they say why they're having to lay people off for the 2021 year. The company reported just under 500 million in assets, so [02:32:30] then they said, what the hell, let's make a $400 million game. You also like Technica story about digital equipment. Are you a deck fan? What's the story there will?

Wil Harris (02:32:44):
I mean no, it just was a little bit near and dear to my heart. I mean Deck as it at is known by the kids was what I mean long shuttered after being bought by Compact. Unbelievably back in, [02:33:00] I mean sort of the late, early nineties

Leo Laporte (02:33:03):
And

Wil Harris (02:33:03):
Nineties,

Leo Laporte (02:33:04):
They started making PCs with the Deck brand, which was weird

Wil Harris (02:33:07):
Digital Equipment Corporation and that was sort of like the server arm of Compact for a long time.

(02:33:12):
And one of the weird quirks of my career has been before. In fact, just as I was meeting you, I think Leo, about 15 or 16 years ago, I wrote the Wikipedia or there's a Wikipedia entry, not on deck or [02:33:30] vax, but on the guy that wrote the book on Deck and vax. There's a guy called Terry Shannon who is an old colleague of mine who was an incredible American veteran who sadly died way too early and I had to learn the entirety of the sort of deck and VAX history in order to write his Wikipedia and his obituary that ran in the register I think. And so it's incredible to see 20 years later it being picked up by ARS Technica and [02:34:00] I thought, God, I'd never thought I'd have to read about Deck and VAX again, but for some reason asked Technica as sort of pillaging the Wikipedia archives and finding new stuff to write. It's an incredible company and an incredible history of how a company that can be so key and so of, I mean household name is a strong word,

Leo Laporte (02:34:19):
VAX

Wil Harris (02:34:20):
Were dominant. Dominant, disappeared

Leo Laporte (02:34:22):
In the seventies, disappeared as many computers and then just

Sam Abuelsamid (02:34:26):
Gone

Wil Harris (02:34:27):
First. The brand doesn't even leave on. We think [02:34:30] of Atari and Atari still sort of exists and we think of Sony certainly still exists, but b m certainly exists, but these deck vax even compact now, does Compact live on anywhere? Don't think these brands just completely die. I don't think

Leo Laporte (02:34:44):
The

Sam Abuelsamid (02:34:44):
First computer class, go

Leo Laporte (02:34:45):
Ahead.

Sam Abuelsamid (02:34:46):
The first computer class I ever took in high school in 11th grade, we were writing FORTRAN programs using cards that we had to fill in the bubbles and run it on a PDP 11.

Leo Laporte (02:34:59):
Yeah. [02:35:00] When I started working in 1984 at a radio station in San Francisco called K N B R, they were using a P D P to do their music playlists and I had to load in big eight and a half inch floppies and then it was a PD P 10 maybe, I don't know, and put it in there closest. The thing, the head would go,

Wil Harris (02:35:22):
Wang, and

Sam Abuelsamid (02:35:23):
Then it would go

Leo Laporte (02:35:26):
And it would generate a playlist.

Sam Abuelsamid (02:35:29):
I

Leo Laporte (02:35:29):
Mean it [02:35:30] wasn't connected. There was no internet at the time, it was just standalone. I don't know where it got its data from thing. And I was the music director and I create these playlists and I was so frustrated with it because we were by then in the age of PCs, certainly of Max, actually it was 87, so Max and PCs were both mature ish. One day it stopped working. I never found out why.

Wil Harris (02:35:59):
I never heard [02:36:00] did somebody trip over the chord, but it's just such an interesting one. It caught my eye and if anybody wants a little trip down memory lane, it said the AZ Technica write up a great read and if you want a little bit more detail afterwards, go and read my bio of Terry Shannon, which I like to think is a good read.

Leo Laporte (02:36:14):
Yeah, it's still in Wikipedia. The author of this Andy Patrizio of this deck story does close it out with actually an interesting connection. It turns out there's a connection [02:36:30] between Apple and digital equipment. Dan Dober Pool was one of the original alpha, remember that name Alpha Designers before he left Deck to start a chip company called Semi Apple. Apple bought in 2008 to work on their arm processors. They developed chips used on the iPad, the iPhone. It's the M one, the M two processor. Other members of PA Semi would go to a M D to work on the Opton, but that Alpha chip was [02:37:00] in effect the great grandpa of the A series and M series chips Apple uses today. I'll tell you a great obscure deck story very briefly, which is that

Sam Abuelsamid (02:37:11):
You remember Soul

Leo Laporte (02:37:12):
Of A New Machine by Tracy Kidder. Love that book, love that book. An

Glenn Fleishman (02:37:15):
Influential book for me when I was younger, I remember reading it and thinking, my God, you could write about technology. It's with all human stories. What a thing I would love to be able to do someday and May yet. But Tracy Kidder, so he wrote, one of the primary characters in that book [02:37:30] at Deck was Jessin West, the Internet's librarian, her father. So Jesson met a filter and she now lives in Vermont terrifically the advocate for libraries and for access to people digital resources. So she grew up with Tracy Der showing up from time to time, sleeping on the couch in the basement while he was there, just shadowing people at deck so we could write this book over many years and caught them in a really critical moment. Just love that little old new connection.

Leo Laporte (02:37:59):
It was [02:38:00] Data general, I think that, oh, it was Data General, not Deck was. Yeah, he was writing about it was was in the Route one 20 or

Glenn Fleishman (02:38:07):
Group

Leo Laporte (02:38:07):
One 20 Me. Right. Was part of those Massachusetts companies. Absolutely. Down the road. That's right. Deck was one of their competitor.

Glenn Fleishman (02:38:13):
Wang was a big competitor of theirs. Right. And then they were starting a new microcomputer architecture or a mini computer architecture.

Leo Laporte (02:38:20):
Yeah, general, one of the classic early books of computer history along with Steven Levy's hackers, those two books, everyone, [02:38:30] if you want to know what's going on today, has to read those to understand how we got

Glenn Fleishman (02:38:34):
Here.

Leo Laporte (02:38:35):
I don't know how we got here. It had something to do with Whale Pistols and Octane, but I'm glad we made it. That's all I can say.

Glenn Fleishman (02:38:46):
What a journey. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (02:38:47):
What a journey. Thank you Will Harris, it's so great to see you. Since episode 50 was the one

Wil Harris (02:38:55):
Year

Leo Laporte (02:38:56):
Somebody found it. It was the one year anniversary

Wil Harris (02:38:59):
50 was it?

Leo Laporte (02:38:59):
Yeah,

Wil Harris (02:39:00):
[02:39:00] I was right.

Leo Laporte (02:39:01):
Yeah, it was our one year anniversary. In fact, I'll show you right now. I'll go to it. Lemme see. It was not video in those days.

Wil Harris (02:39:11):
No. I called in from a hotel room in San Francisco I think.

Leo Laporte (02:39:14):
Did you? Yeah. You used to come out of here a lot more.

Wil Harris (02:39:17):
Yeah, I was covering the Intel developer forum and I think I called in and gave you a little update on it and I think you ran it as a little segment on the show, one of prerecorded segments you've done. Oh wow. I forever. That's really cool. I remember that. [02:39:30] Very, very clear. It's nice

Leo Laporte (02:39:31):
To reunite.

Wil Harris (02:39:33):
Always good to be here. Thank you so much for having me. And give me me a chance to plug 42, which I like, do every opportunity.

Leo Laporte (02:39:39):
Oh, let's give it a big plug. This is a brand new

Wil Harris (02:39:41):
Book. Give it a plug.

Leo Laporte (02:39:42):
If you're a fan of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams, its author, you love his work. Who doesn't? Well, when he passed away, he left a lot of papers in his office and it has become an incredible book full. I mean, you get to see the actual [02:40:00] papers, the wildly improbable ideas of Douglas Adams, Kevin, John Davies did an amazing job of putting

Glenn Fleishman (02:40:10):
This together. What EJ quote, I love deadlines. I love the of them

Leo Laporte (02:40:13):
Whizzing by my head.

Sam Abuelsamid (02:40:15):
Getting that right.

Wil Harris (02:40:16):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:40:17):
He

Wil Harris (02:40:17):
Wrote, the

Sam Abuelsamid (02:40:20):
One

Wil Harris (02:40:20):
I use at work most often is that time is an illusion. Lunchtime, doubly. So

Leo Laporte (02:40:26):
Partly this comes from the fact

Wil Harris (02:40:27):
That he was at work, he was

Leo Laporte (02:40:28):
A radio, he was writing [02:40:30] for B B C radio. He was writing Hitchhiker's Guy to the Galaxy pretty much as it was being produced.

Wil Harris (02:40:36):
So he would rip the

Leo Laporte (02:40:38):
Paper out of

Wil Harris (02:40:39):
Here. Incredible,

Leo Laporte (02:40:40):
Incredible. And it was the best radio play of all time. Later became a novel and a movie and his, I think legacy is well established by that and many other writings. Douglas Adams 42 is the book unbound.com to order it, the wildly improbable ideas of [02:41:00] Douglas Adams and they have an ebook version as well, but I'm not going to order it. You said you mailed me one, so I'm going to hold them.

Wil Harris (02:41:08):
I have mailed you one.

Sam Abuelsamid (02:41:09):
I

Leo Laporte (02:41:09):
Can't wait to get,

Wil Harris (02:41:10):
It'll chase down the Postman Pro.

Leo Laporte (02:41:11):
Well, that's all right. That's all right. You sold one copy on this episode. I

Sam Abuelsamid (02:41:14):
Bought mine. It's on my,

Leo Laporte (02:41:15):
I think you sold probably more than one. Thank you Will. And

Wil Harris (02:41:19):
There's

Leo Laporte (02:41:19):
So many other great books too. This is a really, I love what you're doing at Unbound. Of all the places you've found it and you are a serial entrepreneur, this is the one I hope sticks. [02:41:30] I really love this. I think you've done such a good job. So cool. The Ultimate Film Limerick quiz book, Jeff Canata. Oh, Bobby Lewellen, the Ghost Camera. A brilliant new black mirror style sci-fi thriller from Robert Lewellen. You've got some good authors, funny or Die, Joel Morris, the Paradox Paradox by Daniel Hart. Look at all this. You got so many more new books. 111, is that possible?

Sam Abuelsamid (02:42:00):
[02:42:00] Oh

Wil Harris (02:42:00):
Yeah. A lot of stuff on the side of the moment. Lots of stuff to look at. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (02:42:06):
I think you're going to get a nighting. I think the King's going to come along and call. We're going to be calling you Sir Will Harris any minute now. Unbelievable. This is great.

Wil Harris (02:42:17):
Anytime now. Anytime now.

Leo Laporte (02:42:19):
Any day now. He'll be on the Venn diagram. Samuel Bull Salmon, I love wheel bearings. The show you do with Nicole Wakeland and our good friend Roberto Baldwin, [02:42:30] wheel bearings.media. We love doing it. You guys did a takeover of twit a couple of months ago. That was a lot of fun. We'll get you back. Always good to hear from you. Sam also joins us monthly on Ask the Tech Guys,

Sam Abuelsamid (02:42:42):
And I'd just like to give a little plug, if I may. I'm going to be in South Korea, not this week, but the week after. I'll be doing a talk at the daegu International Future Auto and Mobility Expo. So if you are there, make sure and [02:43:00] you're listening to this, make sure you hit me up. Or if you're in Seoul and you want to meet up, if you're in the mobility space, hit me up and then the following week I will be in Tokyo for the Japan Mobility Show,

Leo Laporte (02:43:15):
Which

Sam Abuelsamid (02:43:16):
Formerly known as the Tokyo Auto Show, and so I may have some time available to meet up, if you're in Japan, if you're in

Leo Laporte (02:43:25):
Tokyo, I should have asked you about these new Joby [02:43:30] robo taxis or whatever they're calling. They're basically drones,

Sam Abuelsamid (02:43:35):
Urban air mobility vehicles,

Leo Laporte (02:43:37):
Urban air. Is this a real deal? They're making them now.

Sam Abuelsamid (02:43:42):
Well, they're going to make some, we'll see if they ever get f a certified, they can actually get them into service.

Leo Laporte (02:43:49):
Oh,

Sam Abuelsamid (02:43:50):
That's still a big question.

Leo Laporte (02:43:52):
They claim they're very quiet. They're going to do electric aerial ride sharing in these, they're VTOLs, [02:44:00] right? They take off vertically

Sam Abuelsamid (02:44:03):
And the rotors, the engines and the rotors pivot, so they take off vertically and then fly horizontally and then they can land again vertically.

Leo Laporte (02:44:13):
Oh, and they're electric. I should have mentioned that. They're all,

Sam Abuelsamid (02:44:15):
Yeah, they're battery powered,

Leo Laporte (02:44:16):
So

Sam Abuelsamid (02:44:17):
They don't have a very long range. I think what these are mainly going to be is a replacement for where we're using

Leo Laporte (02:44:23):
Helicopters. Helicopters to get to the

Sam Abuelsamid (02:44:25):
Airport in places like New York,

Leo Laporte (02:44:27):
Things

Sam Abuelsamid (02:44:27):
Like that. So this is not likely to [02:44:30] be a high volume, mass form of transportation. It's going to be for the same kind of people that use a helicopter to get from Manhattan to J F K or LaGuardia today.

Leo Laporte (02:44:42):
Right? Oh, too bad. I was hoping for flying cars, but I guess

Sam Abuelsamid (02:44:46):
This will be, well, if it flies, it's not really a car. It's an aircraft.

Leo Laporte (02:44:50):
Thank you. Sam Wheel Bearings Media, of course, principal

Glenn Fleishman (02:44:53):
Researcher at Guide

Sam Abuelsamid (02:44:54):
House Insights,

Leo Laporte (02:44:56):
And you, my friend Glenn Fleischman. We love seeing you on all of our shows. [02:45:00] Congratulations. Shift Happens is about to ship a book about Keyword Glen fun and now he's working on a book about comics.

Glenn Fleishman (02:45:10):
Can I plug something I didn't write? I was thinking about this with 42 after you've purchased 42 after, if you like Charles Schultz and Peanuts, there's a book that came out last year by a friend of mine. One of the good things about Twitter is you meet people you normally wouldn't in real life. I became friends with Benjamin Clark, the co-author of this book, [02:45:30] a unique book about Charles Schultz called The Art and Life of the Peanuts Creator and 100 Objects. It's a really lovely book. If you have the kind of peanuts obsession that I do from a young age, and it's kind of about the things that were made about. It's both like merchandise, but pieces in the collection and objects from Schultz's history. It's surprisingly moving and fascinating by the title. You might go like, well, what is this going to all be? A bunch of Charlie Brown dolls. It's a really good book and it has [02:46:00] somewhat of a flavor, I think, of what 42 sounds like. This comes partly from his studio, partly from his life's, partly from manufactured objects, but Benjamin is the curator of the Charles M. Schultz museum and library, which is,

Leo Laporte (02:46:14):
Well, that means he's just up the road a piece.

Glenn Fleishman (02:46:17):
You go up there and say, how do you do? It's just a neat book and I love these books. It feels like there's categories of books coming out that are, if you love an author, if you love an artist creator, you [02:46:30] get a sense of how they work, their environment, their thoughts in a way that's permissive, that's like they wanted this. It's not necessarily the every scrap of paper that Tolkien ever wrote is now a book somewhere, right? There's a little, maybe too much of that, but

Leo Laporte (02:46:46):
No, I love this idea and I think it's a unique way of getting into the mind and the personality of a creator. Very interesting. The art and life of Peanuts creator in 100 objects, Charles M. Schultz [02:47:00] by Benjamin L. Clark and Nat Gertler. Nice.

Glenn Fleishman (02:47:06):
United by a love of flung m and i. Of course,

Leo Laporte (02:47:08):
Of course, of course. They're flung buddies. We don't like to talk about it, but it's true. And how comics were made soon. Yep.

Glenn Fleishman (02:47:20):
Next, you're working on now interviewing cartoonists, interested in ideas, talking to people. I was talking to someone who used to work at an art store in Iowa City and she [02:47:30] was contemporary with artists like Burke Bre there I love,

Leo Laporte (02:47:34):
So

Glenn Fleishman (02:47:36):
Taught things, learned things, has artifacts. I'm trying to find weird stuff like some of the transparencies and separations and painted work that the cartoonist rFactor, who wrote the book, my friend Dahmer, the graphic novel and Kent State, he worked at a Florida paper in the early eighties as an editorial cartoonist two days a week and three days a week. He colored all the daily strips just for one Florida paper [02:48:00] and he had to use opaque ink and different sheets for different colors. Crazy thing. I'd love to reproduce some of that because it was part of the memory of what we had when we read comics is you would read daily colors and some schmo was out there, wasn't the artist coloring them. So some of the production aspects, and even I talked to Lynn Johnston, I even know what brush or what inks and pens she was using for better or for worse, which ran for 50 years or 40 something years in its original form. It's a lot of fun.

Leo Laporte (02:48:29):
Nice [02:48:30] look for the Kickstarter in February. We'll see you before then. I'm sure Glenn joins us also on Mac Break Weekly on a regular basis. Thank you, Glenn. Thank

Glenn Fleishman (02:48:38):
You.

Leo Laporte (02:48:39):
He's on many of the other incomparable podcasts and the author of a bunch of take control books, all of which AI has now ingested, and we'll be glad to regurgitate

Glenn Fleishman (02:48:49):
For free,

Leo Laporte (02:48:50):
So that's good news. Thank you, Glenn.

Glenn Fleishman (02:48:53):
Thank you.

Leo Laporte (02:48:54):
Thanks to all of you for being here. This was a fun show. We do twit Sunday afternoons, 2:00 PM Pacific, [02:49:00] 5:00 PM Eastern. We are still on summertime, so it's 2100 U T C. We move to, I think 2200 U T C the first Sunday after Halloween, whatever day that is because we don't change our time until all the candy has been consumed from Halloween. Sorry, it's just a rule. I didn't make it up. It's just a rule. Saves energy. Saves energy and the sugar as we process the sugar, we generate heat. [02:49:30] Lots more sugar. How much Octa in my candy?

(02:49:36):
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(02:50:57):
Yeah, we put trailers on the front pages of a lot of the shows now, so [02:51:00] people who don't know what they're talking about, dunno, what we are talking about. Can see. You can also subscribe in your favorite podcast player, whether it's PocketCasts or Overcast, or Google Podcasts or even Spotify, but do subscribe that way. You'll get it automatically the minute it's available and you won't have to ever think about it. You just know you've got a good copy of twit Ready to go. Thanks everybody. Have a great week. I'm sorry to say, I now have to say goodbye. Another twit is in the can. See you next time.