This Week in Tech 991 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.

0:00:00 - Leo Laporte
It's time for TWiT, This Week in Tech. The very last TWiT in the East Side studio. So we thought we'd do it out in style Everybody in person, from Alex Lindsay to Jason Snell to Jason Howell and we're shooting this in Vision Pro Spatial, which means a few of you will be able to watch it as if you're here in the studio. What are we talking about? Well, there's a lot of news. We'll talk about the Olympics and how it's changing thanks to creators. Is Apple at the end of the line? We know Intel for sure is. And we'll talk about the song of the day, guy suing the SEC over NFTs. It's all coming up next on TWiT.

0:00:47 - VO
Podcasts you love From people you trust. This is TWIT.

0:00:58 - Leo Laporte
This is TWIT this Week in Tech, episode 991. Recorded Sunday, August 4th 2024: This Show Is Securities Fraud. It's time for TWiT, This Week in Tech, the show where we cover the week's tech news. Our last in-studio show in the Eastside Studio. We're moving out this week, so we thought we'd do something kind of fun, and special Thanks to Alex Lindsay, we can.

0:01:30 - Alex Lindsay
Hello, it's in-

0:01:31 - Leo Laporte
Stereo, Stereo. This is a 3D version of the show which only people with vision pros can see. Is that right?

0:01:38 - Alex Lindsay
You can open it If you see it, if you see the link, you can actually use Safari to open it and you can see a flat version of it. What's the point of that?

But if you're watching a flat version. It's not as Gary just got it. Look at him. I would watch, but it will. You're better off just watching the regular Twitch stream if you're going to watch a 2D version. But if you have Apple Vision Pro and you want to feel like you're part of the audience, you can do C but if you have Apple Vision Pro and you want to feel like you're part of the audience, you can do. Say hi, if you're in the Vision Pro, I can wave at you and that should be dimensional. You should see it in 3D.

0:02:10 - Jason Howell
Is there any way to see it in the browser with the two images side by side and then you can cross your eyes? Not really the virtual version. Swap the eyes.

0:02:29 - Alex Lindsay
That's always a fun thing to do. We used to, that we could hit that we build into our, into our compositors for that, where it would swap the eyes and you get people real comfortable and you push a little button and they're like, oh, so um, but the? No, because the way that, the, the way that the phone delivers this is in hmv, hevc, um, and so what it does is it. It takes the left eye and it captures that and takes the right eye and only only sends the delta between the two um and it sends that out as a stream. It's a much more efficient stream and that's how it's being delivered to the apple vision pro, um. So it's not a true. You can now, with compressor, have it converted to left and right eye, side by side, sbs, right, um, or you can take sbs and and convert it back to the mba, hevc so that all those tools are coming, but you can't do it in real time. So the the vision pro needs to have it delivered in the way that it's designed to send it out.

Yes, sorry there we go, I'll leave it at that. No, no, we'll go more into that, but I haven't even introduced this guy over here, the Techsploder is in the house.

0:03:18 - Leo Laporte
We welcome back Jason Howell.

0:03:19 - Jason Howell
Yeah, uh, of course, the host of uh ai inside with Jeff Jarvis now at a new time oh yeah, so while we've been doing it on Wednesdays, we just moved it to 10 because, as we're the host of AI Inside with Jeff Jarvis Now at a new time, oh yeah, so while we've been doing it on Wednesdays, we just moved it to 10.

0:03:33 - Leo Laporte
Because, as someone pointed out, they were like well, you know what 11, you're competing with Windows Weekly and I was like you know, it didn't even cross my mind, but you're so right Like I don't want to interfere.

0:03:39 - Jason Howell
Thank you, you know, maybe that means more people show up if you're into ai.

0:03:42 - Leo Laporte
That's the play and you can watch that at Youtube.com/@techsploder yeah at exploder yeah.

0:03:47 - Jason Howell
And then, of course, the podcast downloads yeah we miss you, Jason, thank you I miss being here and it's so. It's so weird being here and seeing like panels removed.

0:03:57 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, your set is gone. Yeah, yeah, uh, I took that home actually you showed in pre-show and I took it home like.

0:04:05 - Jason Howell
I think it looks really good actually.

0:04:07 - Leo Laporte
Thank you, I'm happy with the studio setup, yeah well, we'll see the attic, the new attic studio, also with us. Jason snow, we wanted to have all in studio for our last you know it's great to be here, especially with our good friend.

0:04:18 - Jason Snell
Dear friends, for the longest you just got to keep the your Jason's next to each all my Jason's are on the left Over here, yeah.

0:04:25 - Jason Howell
Yeah.

0:04:28 - Leo Laporte
I keep my Jason's on the left and my Alex's on the right. Jason, of course sixcolors.com. You wrote actually a really good piece this week in Six Colors. Oh thanks, you were talking, of course you did your color graphs of Apple's quarter. They announced their quarterly results.

0:04:49 - Jason Snell
They're usually weak third quarter on thursday and it was actually not a bad third quarter. It was a record for their fiscal third quarter.

0:04:52 - Leo Laporte
It was the most boring record quarter where you make 20 plus billion dollars in profit ever, but that's where apple is these days but you did raise an interesting point, which is uh, 24 billion of the revenue was services, and that's a maybe a cause for concern. It it's actually bigger than the Mac business, the iPad business and the wearables businesses put together yeah, the product lines that aren't the iPhone.

0:05:13 - Jason Snell
Yeah, I just had this moment. It's funny. Everybody reads into that article. I try to be really restrained because that's my thing. Everybody reads into it what they want. They can freak out and be like, oh God, apple sold its soul, they. They can also read it and say how dare you suggest that apple would sell its soul. I did neither of those things. I just noticed that when you consider how much money they make from services, it goes up every single quarter and you notice the profit margin on services, which is far more than it is on products like 70, for obvious reasons, yeah it's like in the 70s versus in the and in the 30s 40s.

Apple's hardware are really good, by the way, they're very, very good, but services essentially you do it once, it's hard to beat total profit, it's almost pure profit.

0:05:51 - Leo Laporte
And for the Google, the Google search deal is pure profit essentially, that's the key, and I think that's one of the things that's deceiving about services is. A significant chunk of that is Google.

0:06:00 - Jason Snell
Yeah, and App Store 30% is another big chunk of it. We think of it as and they encourage us to think of it as, things like Apple TV Plus or Apple News Plus. But the truth is iCloud, AppleCare is in there, but a lot of this is the Google search stuff.

0:06:15 - Alex Lindsay
And it's by design. I mean, they've been pushing services because you can't keep on. I think they're right. At some point you saturate the world with iPhones.

0:06:22 - Jason Snell
Exactly and they knew and this started seven or eight years ago. They made their first target about services revenue, where they said we are going to double our services revenue in the next three years or something, and they beat that. That was an easy target. They knew they were going to beat it. But they are trying to satisfy Wall Street and Wall Street wants growth and, as you said, alex, they know that, even though the iPhone and the Mac and the iPad are still growing, but they're growing slowly, they're not going to grow at 20 percent again. Services grows every year and what I thought of this time is this is not a high quarter for iPhone sales. That'll come in the holiday quarter. Services keeps going up and the disparity in profit margin means we're close. I did the math. We're not there yet, but we are the closest we've ever been to.

Apple making more profit out of services than it does out of its hardware, and that is undoubtedly going to happen in the next generation.

0:07:14 - Alex Lindsay
And again, I think that was completely by design.

0:07:16 - Jason Snell
Yes, absolutely, and I also don't think that it's Apple abandoning. I think the danger is that people at Apple stop keeping their eye on the ball in terms of hardware, because I do think that the services revenue stems entirely from the hardware and if they're not successful selling their hardware, they're not going to have any success with their services. The tail needs to not wag the dog. I'm not saying the tail is wagging the dog right now. And there's some people who are like how dare you say that?

0:07:41 - Alex Lindsay
It's like I'm not saying that the iPhone is still a big part of their revenue the iphone is an enormous part.

0:07:45 - Jason Snell
I'm just saying it's an interesting thing to watch when apple starts making more profit from its services than it does from the devices it sells right, which will probably happen next year right and of course this is a little preview of what's going to happen tuesday on mac break weekly.

0:08:01 - Leo Laporte
We'll go into this in greater detail. But I thought what's really interesting is to compare that with Intel's week, which has been the worst week practically since 1972,.

0:08:15 - Alex Lindsay
I think it's a hard time to be Intel. I mean with the excitement, I mean with the M processors. Apple lit a fire under everyone to look at ARM and so, in addition to the challenges that Intel already had competing with AMD and everything else ARM is a big piece of that challenge. Everyone's trying to move that direction and so I think it really puts them under a lot of pressure and for years, for a decade, they've had trouble. The reason Apple moved to ARM, the reason Apple went to another chip manufacturer, was because Intel wasn't keeping up with the Joneses, wasn't continuing to upgrade at the speed that Apple felt like they needed to.

0:08:53 - Jason Snell
And then the double whammy is that Apple, by demonstrating how efficient a personal computer could be running on ARM, made Microsoft and everybody else who's on the PC side say hmm.

0:09:06 - Alex Lindsay
Left them no choice. I mean literally left them no choice.

0:09:08 - Jason Snell
They couldn't stay where they were, yeah, so instead of it being oh well, we lost a customer in Apple, but oh well, it's like wait a second. Everybody is introducing Qualcomm based PCs now, and that's just a. That's. That is the two in the one. Two punch against Intel, right now?

0:09:25 - Jason Howell
Has Intel had much of an AI presence? When I think about the major players in AI, I don't feel like I hear as much about Intel as I do the NVIDIA.

0:09:35 - Alex Lindsay
A lot of times, if you have an Intel processor, you have an NVIDIA card.

0:09:39 - Leo Laporte
It's better than having an NPU and an ARM chip, if you ask me. Intel, though, has absolutely. I mean you can buy a PC right now with a co-pilot. It's not a co-pilot plus PC, but it's got a co-pilot button on it. In fact, I have one. It's an Intel Windows machine, so Intel has all of that capability built into it, but a number of problems were exacerbated by the fact that they have now a series of chips that are crashing and causing real problems. In fact, patrick, didn't you say you have one of those i9s in your, was it you, patrick? Somebody in our? I have one, ah, benito, yep. So the 13 and 14 gen core processors have issues and they've been crashing.

0:10:26 - Alex Lindsay
It feels like Intel and Boeing are in the same space. They're very much in this.

Large companies have had leadership for a long time. Fortunately, intel's only crashing computers, but I think that Boeing and Intel have the same problem of a lot of corporate bloat and a drive to continue to get profits corporate bloat and a drive to continue to get profits and basically moving, not even moving fast, moving slow and breaking things you know and not being able to really stay focused on producing you know great products, which at scale is very, very difficult with all the politics and all the layers and all the different folks with different priorities as a company gets larger. Apple so far has done a relatively good job at managing that, but for a lot of companies, as you become that large corporate entity, it's very hard to continue to stay tight and produce a great product.

0:11:16 - Leo Laporte
This is from Tom's Hardware. Intel is going to issue a microcode update in a week or two to address the crashing issues which cause PCs to crash or blue screen inexplicably during gaming and other workloads due to what Intel attributes to excessive voltage. But this is the big problem and, benito, has this happened to you? The issue can cause permanent damage. The microcode update that they're putting out will not fix processors that are already suffering from crashing. I've had crashes, but just application crashes.

Not while gaming Not like full-on crashes. So, if you, hopefully mine's okay.

So then you'll have the microcode update and with any luck that will fix it and you won't have to worry. Intel has extended the warranty on all boxed Intel. This is important because most people don't buy boxed Intel processors. But if you did, the warranty is now up to five years on the boxed Intel Core 13 or 14th gen processors. Most people buy it in a PC or as part of a kit. I think the motherboard manufacturer, the PC manufacturer, will have to back you up on that one. It impacts all 65 watt and higher models. Anyway, that was devastating enough now. And then intel announces they're going to lay off 15 of their workforce.

0:12:30 - Jason Snell
Yeah, 15 000 people, because 100 000 people worked at intel.

0:12:34 - Leo Laporte
The math was easy well, done it's gonna get a lot more complicated 15 000, I'm like oh well, that was easy

0:12:43 - Jason Snell
thank, thank you to all journalists who didn't do well in math. Thank you for having us divide out of 100. That's really great, you know. The shame of it is that I think in a lot of ways Intel's management now gets it.

0:12:55 - Leo Laporte
But they are paying, pat Gelsinger.

0:12:57 - Jason Snell
Yeah.

0:12:58 - Leo Laporte
He rejiggered the company a couple of years ago, hoping to make it through this tough spot.

0:13:11 - Jason Snell
But they knew this was happening and they're paying the price for years of mismanagement and also difficult circumstances. It's a real textbook innovators dilemma, isn't it? Which is they're like no, no, no, no, no. We know that we could make money and use other people's designs on our fabs, but no, that's not. It's not Intel. We're going to design our own chips and fab them ourselves, and that's our whole business model. It's not Intel. We're going to design our own chips and fab them ourselves, and that's our whole business model. And if they had changed sooner, they did have incredible skill at fabbing and could have turned themselves into these fabs for other designers, and they just said no. And I get why they said no. That's why the innovator's dilemma is a dilemma. If it was easy, they would have just thrown caution to the wind.

0:13:44 - Alex Lindsay
And it happens in so many companies is a dilemma.

0:13:45 - Jason Snell
If it was easy they would have just thrown caution to the wind and it happens in so many companies. But they're a leader who falls by the wayside now because they couldn't change, because they weren't motivated to change until it was too late.

0:13:52 - Alex Lindsay
Well, and I think that sometimes for big companies it's a mixture of not wanting to give up the revenue from A to get to B and that restructure is super scary, in addition to the fact that I'm just not sure whether B is really going to produce more than A.

0:14:04 - Jason Snell
You know down the road Like this is pretty good right now, hey, I worked for a magazine publisher. You don't have to tell me. I mean, they're literally like PC World prints money. Why would we ever do a website about computers? And they allowed CNET to exist at the start and like that was. The jig was up and I get it. They're like but but. I make so much money from magazine advertising.

Why would we ever change? I'm like, well, because of the future, I don't get paid in the future, I get paid today. And here we are.

0:14:30 - Alex Lindsay
I I've told the story of Mac break, I think, but I did a talk for publishers. I got brought in to speak at something or whatever, and it was 200 publishers in 2002. And I just said you all have to get on the Internet and take your subscribers and move them there right now, like right now, right now, right now.

And they literally laughed at me while I was talking like it was it was just one of those things, the only ones that didn't laugh they can't talk to me afterwards was the new york times it's not like intel didn't see this coming.

0:14:54 - Leo Laporte
You can see it coming and still not be able to avoid it. That's the innovation that bill was going to come due yeah, it's not like you can say, oh boy, look at kodak oh, boy, oh, here comes digital, but kodak.

0:15:05 - Alex Lindsay
But kodak created the first digital cameras. They sure did. And then and then they buried it because they were afraid it would, it would, it would hit their film business. This gets into that. That that common problem is. Well, if we innovate in that direction, you know that could that, could eat up something else, cannibalize something else, and I think that's one of the things that apple does fairly well is they're actually often willing to cannibalize their own businesses. Right, you know they're willing to. You know, just ditch them to go to the next thing, almost, you know, at probably a speed almost faster than almost everybody else.

0:15:37 - Jason Snell
It's a classic. Steve Jobs had the best-selling music player, which was the iPod Mini, and they canceled it and replaced it with the iPod Nano, because they knew that a flash-based player was going to win. And so why not replace themselves? And that's, yeah, it's a tough mindset to be in, though. It's just really tough and, like I said, it's not the innovator's obvious answer. It is a dilemma, because you do want to make your shareholders happy and there's such a predisposition toward focusing on the present instead of the future, and and yeah, pat gelsinger knew the bill was going to come due and is just trying to get them to where they need to be, but he's paying off the bills of people in the last 10 years of I hope you didn't have intel stock, because look at this loss.

0:16:21 - Leo Laporte
On friday they lost 26% of their value down to 21 bucks from 35 bucks just a couple of days ago. That's bad and it makes it hard to dig out of the hole. The story with Kodak was maybe more nuanced than that. I've heard economists say that the real problem was digital didn't have the profit margins that film and developing did. So even had they transitioned to to film I'm to digital they wouldn't have been able to maintain a business built on that kind of a profit margin but they were also way ahead.

0:16:55 - Alex Lindsay
You know, like the thing is too early. Well, no, no, I think that they could have had higher resolution cameras, they could have had higher performance. They could have been making, making products, they could have been selling memory cards. They could have been, you know, again, the hard part for kodak was you get into uh, you start do getting people into, digital. This is their issue. Was you buy the memory card once? You don't buy film over and over and over again? That was their big. You know, like they were like we can't have people able to just make images without buying film, that's, you know, like it was a huge problem for them that's part of the delusion that you get.

0:17:26 - Jason Snell
In a corporate culture, though, where you believe that if you, if you say no, the world stops and of course it doesn't. It's inevitable. Change is inevitable, so you have to embrace it. You know right, this was the record industry's mantra when, when piracy started, having everything.

0:17:42 - Leo Laporte
I know we're dead. I just don't want to be on my shift and I just want to get through to retirement and then I don't care what happens.

0:17:49 - Alex Lindsay
And I think that's somewhat the attitude on these and when I was in the music industry you know we were in the early 90s was the heyday like it. We never made more money than I mean the parties, even for alternative rock it's almost always that way, isn't it?

right, oh, you're at your peak, but. But we were sitting there talking about when we had meetings at sony. We would be talking about the fact that we cannot keep on charging 17 a cd because the the cassettes were 20. I think it was 23 cents um per unit for the cassettes and 44 cents per cd. So there was a. There was a 19 cent difference between the two, um that of what it cost to actually produce them. But they were charging 6.99 for the cassettes and 17 for the cds and they were saying, well, it's because of the ip. We were like the ip is the same. We were working there telling them ip is the same, why?

0:18:35 - Leo Laporte
are you charging 11? But? But the answer making one good song per record.

0:18:39 - Alex Lindsay
No, but. But the issue is that the cassette that they were selling for 6.99, they were selling the exact same ip for 18 at tower records and the reason that they would always say is because we can't.

Yeah you know, like they, we can do, we'll pay, people will pay that. And we said but the problem is is that people won't pay that forever and they're going to take, they're going to be on always looking for another alternative. Yeah, and back then we didn't even know that. You know this was going to happen. But we were like eventually they're going to find another way to do this. And so then we had there was this band called ned's atomic dustbin and they had god fodder out and it wasn't selling very well. And I remember we we said, let's just do this for 7.99, just do a special for 7.99. And they did it for 7.99 and sold like 50 000 units in like a week. Like it was just like this incredible surge. And we're like, see, see, and they just went right back to what they were doing.

0:19:26 - Jason Snell
Well, and the truth is because you're taking me back to my high school years here the truth is what would happen is one of your friends or college too, one of your friends would get the CD and you'd tape copies for everybody else.

0:19:38 - Leo Laporte
Napster was Napster says. You know, I, the record industry, didn't want to do it, but I'm going to sell singles for 99 cents.

0:19:44 - Alex Lindsay
Right, and that was also a problem, and he only was able to do that because napster had happened. So the he was able, he had leverage and he knew it hindsight is 2020.

0:19:52 - Leo Laporte
I mean, it's great you can see the whole process. Yeah, with kodak, with the music industry, is that what's happening with intel right now?

0:20:00 - Jason Snell
a little bit. I mean, it's slightly different, but the idea is that intel had its things that it was good at, and it was, you know, pcs and maybe servers and all that and this arm stuff. You know, it's all.

0:20:12 - Leo Laporte
It was for phones it was for low, sneak up on them though.

0:20:15 - Jason Snell
But well, this is the thing, though. It doesn't try to do scale, it doesn't sneak up on you, but it is hard to prioritize the thing that doesn't make you money if you're an executive. This is the problem with, I would say, a lot of industry. A lot of industry is very few. Executives are provided incentives for the long term right very few. They would change if you said I'm going to pay you based on what the stock is in five years, not this year. In five years, you stock options, or you know what our profit is in five years or seven years, and if we're dead in five years, you stock options, or you know what our profit is in five years or seven years, and if we're dead in seven years, you get nothing, no money. You owe us money.

Everybody's attitude would be very different, but instead it's sort of like well, I just got to make my number this quarter, I got to make my number this quarter, and if you think like that, you were going to make bad decisions, bad long-term decisions, and a lot of companies just run that way, even if everybody knows and I'll tell you, this is when we do pundit stuff on MacBreak Weekly, and there's always that moment where you're like I can't believe Apple isn't doing this thing and it's like you can guarantee yourself that there are people inside all of these companies who know it. But the people at the highest levels have so much motivation to make their number, get their money, retire to their boat and be gone that the that this is why big companies make stupid decisions.

0:21:32 - Alex Lindsay
This is why, well, and you just look at the, you know, uh, you know, I've worked as a consultant for many of these companies.

You know, and, and the thing is, is this just a series of meetings and it slowly whittles away into nothing. Like you know, this person doesn't like this, and that person doesn't like this, and you come with an innovative idea and by the time it comes out the other end, you know, it's kind of been whittled down to this little thing that doesn't make any sense anymore. You know, and it's just so easy, you know, when you have that, when you don't have key people making decisions that have, you know, near dictator status over their little area, that can just make decisions and move forward and that's one of the things Apple has had in the past. I think that they're still challenged. It's more challenging now than it used to have. They used to have a person that was making all the decisions for all the major products, and I think that that's always their challenge. But when you get into these committee, you know it's just death by committee, you know, and everybody just keeps on.

0:22:24 - Leo Laporte
You know what's going to keep Apple?

0:22:25 - Alex Lindsay
from falling into that hole. You know, I think that so far they still are, I think, fairly vertical. I think there's not that many people making decisions. There's probably 10 people in there that are making most of the major decisions about products. Whether we agree with them or not is another thing, but I think that they're, and I think Apple is. That's no, that's no protection?

0:22:44 - Leo Laporte
No, pat Gelsinger may be the only person at Intel made decisions. I think that that's not a protection at all, unless you think they're geniuses.

0:22:51 - Jason Snell
So the way that Jobs. So when Steve Jobs came back famously, you know Apple was about to go out of business. One of the things that he tried to do before he died was build something called Apple University, and the whole idea there was what, if we take people from business schools and build a curriculum that literally we are creating a curriculum of the corporate culture that I, steve Jobs, have bestowed on Apple, because if we lose sight of this approach, we will fail. So it's still I mean, it's very close to being the Ozymandias statue in the desert right, like it may not work, but he at least was he's on my works and despair.

but he was thinking like how do we keep this going? I need to, like build a machine to keep the culture going.

0:23:35 - Leo Laporte
Every executive suite has that question I know right, what do we do? How do we-. So the reason I bring this up is Warren Buffett seems to might maybe have lost. He was a big believer in Apple. Big Berkshire Hathaway had a huge chunk of Apple. He's cut his stake by half it's growth.

0:23:53 - Jason Snell
I mean, I think he even said he's got to provide growth for his investors and the challenge with Apple right now is where is the growth coming from? It's been a great ride with the iPhone, but I firmly believe that we're not going to see a product category like the smartphone again in our lifetimes right, it's not the Vision Pro I, just, it's nothing.

0:24:10 - Jason Howell
It's not the Apple.

0:24:11 - Jason Snell
Watch, and there's nothing against the Apple Watch or the Vision Pro or anything like that. It's like the smartphone was unique and they got to ride it. They're one of two companies who really got to ride that thing and good for them. But like, where does the growth come from? Now that's not two percent or five percent. Where's the 30 growth coming from? And other than services, and you know it's, it's a tough one to see. I don't think apple is necessarily a growth stock, even though the execs want it to be before this, this, uh, what we are in now.

0:24:38 - Alex Lindsay
Most blue chip stocks did not grow like tech stocks. You know most of them were three percent or five percent. They were safe. They just kept on growing a little bit. They weren't growing a lot and that's what we got used to. If you have a really big company, you put that in because it's safe, not because it's going to grow quickly. You invest in small companies. So the idea that you could invest in an Apple or Nvidia or these fast growth companies and they're massive and growing fast is a very unusual thing if you look at the history of finances.

0:25:04 - Leo Laporte
I thought, yeah, but I thought Berkshire Hathaway was a value stock buyer. I mean, look at See's Candy, that's not a growth stock. He's trying to find that's value. Right, that's long-term value and I think it's a sign. I don't know. I mean they call him the Oracle of what is it? Des Moines? Where is it Des Moines? Where is it? I can't remember now. Omaha, omaha, there you go, the Oracle of Omaha. But maybe the Oracle is seeing something in the future for Apple that isn't so rosy.

0:25:33 - Alex Lindsay
I think that they have a lot of challenges. I think managing, I mean, I still think that Apple's number one risk is antitrust, and I think that that's going to continue to be. A problem for them is that they are so big and they are still in many ways outperforming most of their competitors in a lot of places. It's very hard for them to stay out of that, out of that pool, and we can see it happen in the EU. We can see the United States hinting at it, we can see a lot of those things kind of going down that path. But that's going to be Apple trying to grow quickly and manage. This issue where they get cut off at the knees all the time by governments, is going to be a very big challenge for them.

0:26:13 - Jason Snell
If there's anywhere where I think what I wrote about about Apple increasingly relying on profit of services will dramatically change and has dramatically changed their corporate behavior, it is in the way they react to regulation. Right where they're, it's like a dragon sitting on a horde of gold right where they, it's a different thing if you mostly make your money on hardware and there's a nice little side business and services for a regulator to come in and say, well, actually you can't be the only market for apps you need to open up. But if it's a huge portion of your profit, even if, yes, the Google thing, but that's under regulation too, that's under scrutiny as well. That's where Apple, that's why Apple is so aggressive fighting regulation I think is because most of what they're being threatened by is not their hardware sales, it's their services, and when you look at that and when you look at their profits, they're making billions every quarter that something doesn't happen.

0:27:08 - Alex Lindsay
So the thing is them dragging this out for the next five years will make them $100 billion. Like. It's not like. They're like, so they're like sure I can just keep going Like I can just keep dragging this out.

0:27:20 - Leo Laporte
At some point, though, you can't. Are they where the record industry was in the 90s?

0:27:24 - Alex Lindsay
I don't think so. I mean, I think that the issue is that most people are pretty happy with the products that they have from Apple. The users I don't know if that was the case. I mean I think a lot of people, at least when I was growing up, really felt like the industry was taking advantage of you all the time. It's kind of like when you see the antitrust in the united states with apple, like no one really I mean none of the users really care. There's lots of companies that care and governments that care, but the users don't care like when you see live nation get hit with antitrust like everybody other than live nation was like burn them yeah, like you know, like everybody had it, like artists, the users, like everyone's like just burned to the ground, and so that's a very what you can see when I think Apple's position is a little different with their users.

0:28:11 - Jason Snell
Well, the iPhone is such an annuity and it's hard. I wrote something a few months ago about how, like imagining how Apple would fall apart and it's like, as long as Apple keeps its eye on the ball for the iPhone and the iPhone is always good, always solid that iOS doesn't fall like so far behind in some area where people are demanding and people are talking. Ai is a threat although I think it's overstated and they're obviously on it. But, like, if they can keep the iPhone reasonable, they're just going to be making enormous profits for probably decades to come and the danger is they'll get comfortable. But I think that's their advantage over some of these industries that have had the train coming right at them is they sort of have got some freedom just because the iPhone is going to be kicking back money for years to come.

0:28:59 - Alex Lindsay
And what has the regulators looking at this really tightly is the number that I brought up a couple of times 87% of kids under 18 using an iPhone. It's not that more people will change, it's that they won't. If they don't change, you have. You know that the percentage of Apple's iPhone usage over the next 20 years keeps going up because those they just keep graduating and buying new phones, and so the thing is is that there's this bulge that's happening at the sub sub 18. That means that apple probably has some time, you know, and all they have to do is keep on making the camera better, like, like, literally all of us just watch, like, okay, what am I going to get? More resolution? Am I going to get more frame rate? Am I going to get like, right now, a lot of us are waiting to see if we get spatial 4k. You know like we're doing. We're doing this one in spatial 2k, but spatial 4K and higher resolution.

0:29:46 - Jason Howell
It's pointing by the way. Yeah, that was a monkey. Right at you.

0:29:50 - Leo Laporte
We're all pointing right at you, there's one camera, which turns out to be an iPhone, that's shooting this in 3D, and that's what we're all spacing Over there.

0:30:01 - Jason Snell
Apologies to those not watching.

0:30:02 - Leo Laporte
Everybody watching is going. What are they doing? What's going on?

0:30:10 - Alex Lindsay
So anyway, but I think that that's going to be. I do think that Apple has a lot of time and I think that, whether we agree with the Vision Pro, that is a company, that a company rolls out a Vision Pro because you were looking for the next iPhone.

0:30:21 - Jason Snell
Whether it is or not, it's a hedge. That's why they did the car project too. It's a hedge. That's why they did the car project too. It's a hedge against having you know. You've got all this money to burn, so burn some of it and maybe you'll find something.

0:30:29 - Leo Laporte
Is there a history of companies that are loaded very successful finding the next thing, or is the next thing usually come from an unexpected place a garage? There's not a great history with it but it's why you see Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft investing.

0:30:47 - Jason Snell
They're scrambling to find the next big thing Because they don't want to be the next, whatever it is, and I would say that Microsoft moving to the cloud was incredibly well done, huge, and they were able to pivot into that market because they missed it at first.

0:31:00 - Alex Lindsay
And even Amazon adding the cloud. They had a perfectly successful business selling us first books, and when I remember when, when they started selling other things, I was like why would amazon sell anything other than books? They're really good at this one thing and they're going to ruin everything by adding books.

0:31:14 - Leo Laporte
And now they now they're like delivering food from. For a long time I was, we would. We were thinking amazon is the best-run company in the world these guys are. You know, jeff bezos is way ahead of the curve. He made that pivot to AWS. They never even thought it was going to make any money. Anyway, maybe that's not the case anymore. We're going to take a break when we come back. Amazon's big bet that flopped a big old belly flop. You're watching a very special edition of this Week in Tech, our last in studio edition. That's why it's got a monkey hanging on a pole. No, that's why it's in 3d. Uh, because you and this isn't the first time you did a 3d version you brought in that 60 000 right, we had a camera, we did an ozo, ozo, nokia ozo.

0:31:59 - Alex Lindsay
We came in and did one years ago, yeah, so I've been fiddling with was that?

0:32:03 - Leo Laporte
I think that was early on in this. That was eight years ago when we first moved to the studio it was very, very, very early in the studio.

0:32:09 - Alex Lindsay
I think I also did it in the brick house. I think it was kind of going.

0:32:13 - Leo Laporte
It was overlapping a little bit well, folks, uh, we're gonna go through some changes. The reason we're going through these changes is, frankly, economy. Uh, we're not as bad as intel. I'm not laying off 15 000, but uh, we, we, you know we have had to cancel shows. As we know, we laid off Jason and Ant Pruitt's in the house too. It's great to see, or he was, did he leave? He's there, um, anyway, uh, this is all a process of kind of adjusting to the, uh, the headwinds, as Apple often says of the podcast business.

Closing the studio will save us at least $10,000 a month, if not more. If we can get out of the rent, it'll save us twice that, and that will make it possible for us to keep doing what we do. There is another thing that's happening At the same time as we're cutting costs. We are trying to improve revenue with our club and we want to invite you to join the club if you want to support us. Keep the shows going and keep my attic is stocked in shiva's regal. You can, no, you can party in the attic party in the attic?

uh, I don't. I don't actually drink, so you're not. You're trust me, your money is not going to shiva's reg. All you have to do is go to twittv, slash club twit seven bucks a month. We really love our community. We really appreciate those of you who've joined the club. You get ad-free versions of all the shows and you help us kind of transition into stage I don't want to say stage four, that sounds like cancer into twit 4.0. The future of Twit, I think, is going to be very different and, I think, better, but with your help we can get there. twit.tv/clubtwit. We thank you in advance.

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On we go. Jason Howell is here. It's great to welcome you back into the studio. Thank you.

You may take that fez if you wish. You have a fez. I do have a fez. Anybody doesn't have a fez.

0:37:25 - Jason Snell
I have a fez.

0:37:26 - Leo Laporte
You know it turns out. Do you need a fez, gary? It turns out. I had a treasure trove of fez. It's like they're like tribbles. They're multiplying in the attic. I don't know what I'm going to do?

0:37:38 - Alex Lindsay
I'm going to try to grab one of them because I have a fez, but I had it years and years ago.

0:37:41 - Jason Snell
You have a ratty fez. It's gone through a couple moves. You need a fresh little fez. You sent us all fezes.

0:37:46 - Alex Lindsay
Yes, I did Right here. Mine just got moved a couple times the red ones.

0:37:49 - Jason Snell
I believe the black ones.

0:37:51 - Jason Howell
Oh, so the black ones.

0:37:51 - Leo Laporte
Yes, I have a black one, I have a red one.

0:37:54 - Jason Howell
Yeah, you don't need another fez.

0:38:11 - Leo Laporte
You can so many hats, I don't know, and I thought I got rid of most of them and it's just, it's they're multiplying. Uh, anyway, we're glad to have you. We appreciate your support, Jason, and and I wish you all the best.

0:38:15 - Jason Howell
I'm glad you're doing well with ai inside, and the tech sploter keep myself busier than I think I've been in a very, very, very long time.

0:38:18 - Leo Laporte
Youtubecom slash at tech sploter, that's right, that's right of course Jason's now a longtime friend of the show.

0:38:24 - Jason Snell
Oh, a friend of the show. I love being a friend of the show. F-o-t-s. You're a FOTS, it's good Fill in, occasional fill-in host.

0:38:32 - Leo Laporte
Yes, in fact, you're going to fill in for me in a couple of weeks, I think so In September.

0:38:37 - Jason Snell
I'm going on vacation.

0:38:38 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, looking forward to it. I'm going to take all my Fezes with me and throw them into the ocean. It's going to be a little fez and if they come back to you, then what then? I know I have no future. It's uh, it's a fezes forever. Uh, also, alex lindsey, who I've probably known longer than I, uh than I've been doing twit. You've been, you, actually both of you guys were on tech tv, yeah, on call for help, so you both predate, uh, even this network. It's great to have you I was.

0:39:05 - Alex Lindsay
I remember that I had a um. There was someone that was in pixel core in our training and they they worked at tech tv um and he said have you, have you heard of tech tv? And I don't watch tv so I don't like, I don't have I was like this is a 1999.

They gave me a vhs of screensavers and I and I and so I had to watch it to kind of get a sense of, like what I was going to do. And I came, I was very nervous. I talked really fast cause I had way too much to say. Photoshop tips in the early days, I think the very first one was uh uh projection mapping image. You know, uh, matte painting I do remember you putting uh we did a little photogrammetry.

0:39:43 - Jason Howell
That was photogrammetry back before it was back in the day before you wave your phone, before, yeah, you just literally pick up, open your camera on your phone and there was, there were no smartphones, we were still on blackberries and things.

0:39:53 - Leo Laporte
Back in that trios, trios oh, yeah, all pilots.

0:39:57 - Alex Lindsay
I mean I, I found my, I still have a trio. Like I found it in the garage. I was spelunking for something else and some box that was oh there's, oh there's my Trio, you know, in this transition.

0:40:06 - Leo Laporte
every time we move studios we have to lose stuff. We had 10,000 square feet of basement in the old place and everybody in the world would bring remember this, Jason. They'd bring us their old computers we had so many, so we had to go. People would ship it in, yeah they'd ship us. They're my dad died he left the entire Commodore 128.

0:40:25 - Jason Snell
I would have dozens of Macs and multiple runs of Macworld magazine if I had accepted all the people who asked.

0:40:34 - Leo Laporte
Surely you want.

0:40:35 - Jason Snell
Macworld magazines I live in a very small house? No, I don't, and I do have some old Macs, but not that many.

0:40:42 - Jason Howell
Do I wish I had the space to store it all? Yes, I do, but am I going to get?

0:40:46 - Jason Snell
a storage locker?

0:40:47 - Leo Laporte
No, I'm not, so there was a great culling when we moved to the brick house. There's been. Now we have culled again and I don't know.

0:40:53 - Jason Snell
Moving clarifies things, doesn't it?

0:40:55 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, because I just I mean the attic is 400 square feet. I went from 25,000 square feet to 400. There's not a lot that made it on the transition.

0:41:08 - Jason Snell
My parents. That's for Leo, oh, this is for Leo. My parents lived on 45 acres with three barns and a house, oh, and they moved into a motorhome.

0:41:16 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, there you go.

0:41:17 - Jason Snell
So I think it's a good thing. This is apparently Remember. Blackberry.

0:41:22 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, the playbook. Oh man, BlackBerry. Yeah, the Playbook, blackberry. Briefly had a tablet.

0:41:27 - Jason Snell
I regret so much that I sent back the HP WebOS tablet that they sent me. Oh, that wasn't anything. Webos was nice. It was so slow, but it was good.

0:41:35 - Leo Laporte
They blew it with WebOS. It was good but slow. I still have WebOS on my LG OLED.

0:41:40 - Alex Lindsay
It runs WebOS. I kind of wish I still had the BlackBerry Storm that they sent me. I did this demo of the Storm and when I watched the BlackBerry movie, when he was having trouble with it, at the end with the Storm, I was like, oh, that was my life, that was my life.

That was when the whole screen clicked the whole screen clicked and I was in Brazil doing it as a demo for Verizon or something like that, that and I was like doing this thing? And I was like I can't get this to work. And I made them promise, I just like I don't have to recommend this thing, I just have to show me using it. I don't have to recommend it or say anything, because I use an iphone and um and I. But I'm sitting there doing this thing and just going. I can't make the buttons work, and so, anyway, it was when I saw that, when I saw blackberry, I was just like, oh my gosh, that was so true like just yeah, that was a great movie, I really enjoyed.

0:42:28 - Leo Laporte
You know, you, I looked at that movie.

0:42:30 - Alex Lindsay
I waited for months going how can that be a good movie like, how can that be a compelling? Movie well also, it looked like it was really goofy, but it was really well done it was like ford versus ferrari for me, like I was like when both of those I waited for months going. I don't think I'm really going to enjoy that, and both of them were killer.

0:42:46 - Jason Snell
You see the Tetris movie I love the Tetris movie. I thought that was really fun too. That's my favorite one. I enjoyed that one. It's ridiculous but great.

0:42:53 - Alex Lindsay
How do you make Tetris exciting and?

0:42:56 - Jason Howell
they did. Well, it turns out. There's a lot of backstory, there's a lot of good backstory.

0:43:00 - Alex Lindsay
It really well produced, really well shot. It looks great yeah.

0:43:03 - Jason Snell
I mean, were there car chases? Probably not, but who cares?

0:43:06 - Jason Howell
I don't care, I don't care. Let's take the reality and turn it up 25%. You know what I mean. Amp it up a little bit, put it in volumetric.

0:43:14 - Jason Snell
Oh man, come on, apple, make a 3D version.

0:43:20 - Alex Lindsay
I'm really interested to see, you know, we see these little tastes of content that they throw into the Apple Vision Pro. I feel like they're very they've been really underperforming as far as how much content they're putting up. I feel like they must be shooting a lot and we're just not seeing it come out the other end, or they're holding, they're keeping the powder dry for some reason. But I feel like what would be really good is just show behind the scenes, like the easiest way to do this is put spatial cameras when you're shooting something.

0:43:48 - Leo Laporte
So funny I feel like we're there. They even put the spatial cameras that they use at the NBA All-Star game in a box, so you couldn't see how they were doing it.

0:43:57 - Alex Lindsay
Because it may not be a publicly available camera.

0:44:01 - Jason Snell
Yeah, but now they're doing more of that. I think there's some new content dropping this week. They did a pre-announcement, but I agree it is I saw the pre-announcement there's a couple new things and I was like, okay, well, that's great mysteries is, is why they haven't got a more solid content plan for what is, I think everybody would agree, the hands-down most interesting thing about the vision pro is that immersive experience and yet there's a couple shots like in all of the immersive stuff.

0:44:26 - Alex Lindsay
There's a handful of shots like there's the rhino shot, where the rhino walks up to you and you're like and like it's the, it's the one moment where you just go and then you're like oh, I'm in a headset, but it was like the only time I mean, there's a few shots like that, but not very many and like then they did the parkour thing in paris and I was like okay, this is like a snoozer.

0:44:43 - Jason Snell
That was more like are you afraid of heights? Well, yeah, I think that that is Leo's waving the white flag.

0:44:49 - Leo Laporte
Okay, okay, okay, you might have a rhino, but I got a monkey. Yeah. See, I told you that was going to happen.

0:44:57 - Jason Howell
There's a monkey down Guaranteed to happen at some point. Monkey down.

0:45:01 - Leo Laporte
All right, well, it all right, well, it's three-dimensional. So that's, yeah, that is a puzzle. You would think that apple, given that they spent so much money, what's going on?

0:45:09 - Alex Lindsay
there. It's weird. I'm excited to see what happens if the black magic camera comes out and can do most of what people say it's going to do.

0:45:15 - Leo Laporte
It's going to be an explosion of content is there any way for us to know how many people are watching this? On a vision pro, I can try to find out. Have a number?

0:45:22 - Alex Lindsay
I can to find out. I don't think it's a giant number, but we'll see If it's more than a dozen, I'd be interested. Oh, it's definitely more than a dozen, because I know a dozen people that are pinging me. Oh, two dozen, yeah, it's two dozen.

0:45:32 - Jason Howell
Okay, when does this Blackmagic camera?

0:45:34 - Alex Lindsay
come out.

0:45:36 - Jason Howell
They've said by the end of the year and Like, like I guess, when I think of Apple getting into the vision pro, I looked at that and I was like, all right, many have tried, They've all had very limited success. Apple is going to get some at least some energy behind it.

0:45:53 - Alex Lindsay
Well, so the, the, the, the, the. The difference with the black magic camera is I've been doing 360 and immersive for uh, of some versions still are video for almost 20 years, so I've watched this, or more than 20 years, and so you watch. I was part of early teams that were working on Nokia's Ozo products and Facebook's products and Google's products, and so I've worked on a lot of these things over, and the big problem that we have is how hard it is to produce content. So to produce stereo immersive content turns out to be really hard and it's expensive and it's complicated, and so that's why I got a lot of work doing it, because when I had those Ozo cameras, I was the only one that had production cameras that could actually do. You could put into a switcher or you could run through a router. That was the big thing about the Ozo cameras is that we could just run them into an STI router and everything would work Right. So so that was as close to production as we had and kept us busy.

The big, the big thing that you know, apple and Blackmagic are working on together is a is a camera that's really built for that headset, you know, and so what it's able to do is a high frame rate. So the rumor is I think Apple said 90 frames a second is what they're shooting for, because there's a and it's not quite enough but it's very close Right. When you go over in the mid 90s, 92 to 96 frames a second, your brain flips and it starts thinking about this as a window and not as video. So that part of getting that frame rate up is a big deal. And the second thing is 8K per eye showed a big 17k sensor at nab and there. And if you take that and you turn that into two eight 8k per eye, 90 frame per second, um, that is not something that anybody buying a commercial headset has seen.

I've had a chance to see footage that looks like that and, uh, it's a completely different experience. Like it's, you know, and so and so, when you get to that higher frame rate and you get to that higher resolution which the headset's, to that higher resolution, which the headsets cable, when everyone says, oh, the headsets way overbuilt, it's because it was built for something that hasn't arrived yet. You know so, so it's, you know, like. So the thing is, is that that footage? When that footage starts coming out and I think Apple's done a little bit of start shooting, sports and um.

You know other events and we've shot. You know, with the ozos we were shooting 4k per eye, stereo at like nba basketball games and it was a very watchable experience at 8k per eye, at 90 frames a second. It'll be an entirely different experience. I would love to see that. So and then the question is we have is we want to do it live. I don't know if that'll be possible. I don't know if that camera the camera I think has four uh ethernets out the back, um, and if that's the case.

0:48:29 - Leo Laporte
We're doing this live, right, why can't uh?

0:48:32 - Jason Snell
doing eight K per eye at 90 frames a second is a hundred megs a second, like it's over a hundred megs a second compressed part is that I appreciate because you've talked about this a lot that we are on the verge of having something that feels like reality and that will be amazing. I would really love for Apple and I can't believe they haven't done this yet and may not all this season. I would be happy if they just did a fairly low resolution, low frame rate stereo experiment at a ballpark on friday night uh, for major league baseball or at an mls game to try like what is the sports experience like and the fact that we're a year in the hard part.

0:49:14 - Alex Lindsay
The hard part with sports is that 3d cameras um are not great in really large venues, so so where the effect is.

It's wonderful when it's close it's like so your 3d effect, like in this camera. So the, the interactual interactional distance of this camera is about four times too close. Yeah, right, so you really have four to ten feet of of real 3d ish, you know, by really, from the that camera to the end of that table is all the 3d you're going to get now at a standard interactional distance. You'll get another, you'll double that, you know you'll have like about 8 to 20 feet is like a you know you're going to, you're going to see more of it. The problem is is that these cameras, because the resolution hasn't been high enough, because it hasn't been 8 or 12k per eye, it just gets soft. It's just it's soft and you're there. But it's Now where it does make a difference is watching a judo match or MMA or boxing or other things like that. That looks amazing, you know, and that's where you should put those cameras.

0:50:11 - Jason Snell
I'd like to be behind home plate, though. I think that might be interesting, but but yeah, we should do it.

0:50:15 - Alex Lindsay
I mean we should take this camera or something else. I you know there's um when the seasons, you know it's not something that can't be done.

0:50:22 - Jason Snell
I'm just surprised that they haven't, either that they haven't experimented, or maybe what you're saying is true, which they have experimented and they're not happy with it.

0:50:28 - Alex Lindsay
Well, I think the problem is like MLS they show it where they're putting it above the net, which puts that camera by the way, at a lot of risk of losing the camera or the lenses. And that's what we found is. The only place we could put spatial cameras for football or soccer or whatever you want to call it is that you have to put them right by the net and you have to capture those. But it's not good to watch the whole game that way. It's really better to watch highlights In a large venue. Highlights are better.

And then Meta has experimented a lot with concerts. But the problem you end up with concerts is they want to put it at a venue where there's actually a concert going on, and that's like the worst, because the camera wants to be right in front and center and you want to be able to give it what, where it wants to be, to be just the right experience for the online audience. The problem is that's right in front of everybody. That's there, right. And so you have to make a decision about who I shot.

I was up here streaming from this phone. I was, we did uh, dengue fever was playing at lagunitas and um, then we shot it at an angle and for a handful of shots. It was a really impressive experience, you know for as a concert, but it's hard to get that working, uh, without all the tools, and so I think that's the part that apple still has to figure out so we have hundreds of people we're watching right now on the various streaming networks YouTube, twitch, fast Company, no, facebook, linkedin, I don't know, I'm probably leaving a few out Discord.

0:51:55 - Leo Laporte
If you're watching right now and you have a Vision Pro and you didn't get the message, what should they do right now?

0:52:00 - Alex Lindsay
They go to streamvoodoocom and get the app you have to get in the beta. Yeah, it would be hard to do it now. It's probably too late. That's why we were kind of pushing it for the last week of going up there, because I think that it's hard to get to now and there's no way we can save what we're doing here and then make it available.

0:52:15 - Leo Laporte
We are, we're going to do that, yeah, yeah, we're saving it so good it might end up where everything else I've saved in a digital library.

0:52:24 - Alex Lindsay
It's all being saved on the server. Assuming my connection is good and this is an internet connection.

0:52:29 - Leo Laporte
So we're saving it and, with any luck, maybe you can donate it back to the archives and we'll put it up. Yeah, is there any way to convert it so that people with a with a meta quest or something can see it? Yes, yeah, it'll take some time okay, it'll convert to like a side by side or something.

0:52:45 - Jason Snell
Yeah, we can convert it side by side, it's just.

0:52:46 - Alex Lindsay
It's just that we have to download it. It's in right now. It's in chunks that went up in hls, so it's an hls chunks, so that all has to get brought back down. Um, the advantage of it is is that the the post version. If you have that link, we'll send the link. We'll put the link somewhere in, at least into the uh twit. Uh yeah, we'll post it. Yeah, and you can watch the vod very quickly. The downside of that takes a little time to bring it down. So okay, especially one this long so, uh, stay tuned.

0:53:12 - Leo Laporte
If you, if you didn't get the memo and you aren't watching on stream, voodoo now on your vision pros is too late, but stay tuned because we'll figure out a way possibly that you can watch it and it'll be like you're you're right in the studio with us. It'll be like you're right here.

0:53:24 - Jason Snell
So the next time you watch an episode of Twit from the studio. You can pretend wait.

0:53:30 - Leo Laporte
Oh God, too soon. You didn't have to say that Too soon. Let's take a break and then back to the tech news. Sorry for that little Vision Pro interlude.

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0:56:29 - Alex Lindsay
Amazon, I have an update yes, 787 people hey that's pretty good, that's like half out there.

0:56:35 - Jason Howell
Yeah it's more than 24.

0:56:40 - Leo Laporte
That's actually a really good number because that's about maybe roughly in there with the total number of viewers we usually get on live streams, so that's really good. Most people and we should just explain, it's only about 10% of our audience even watches live, so that really has driven a larger audience. That's great Welcome, no pressure.

0:57:01 - Jason Snell
To all of you. It's as if there was some desire among vision pro users for content yeah, and proven your point, huh, yeah.

0:57:07 - Leo Laporte
I mean, gary, why have you taken your vision pro off? Because, oh so you would never did get the. You never got it working. Oh well, the best way to see it in 3D is to actually come here, but that's not going to happen.

0:57:21 - Jason Snell
Or to wear it and then record a video of us on the Vision Pro.

0:57:25 - Alex Lindsay
Which is actually more 3D because the interactional distance is wider. It's wider, yeah. It's more like us it's just a weird square Like it's.

0:57:32 - Leo Laporte
Oh, is it really? It's not 16.9?

0:57:35 - Alex Lindsay
No, the square-ish aspect ratio is actually pretty good on a Vision Pro. One of the things I noticed when I was watching the IMAX app was that 1.4.3, whatever is actually a better format for the Vision Pro than 16.9 or 2.3.5. Because you actually see more of what your aperture is there, but it's like one by one so it feels very square ish and it's low resolution out of the out of the headset. So it's not a great yeah, not a great experience.

0:58:05 - Leo Laporte
I apologize, I asked another vision pro question what do you see that's what we keep talking about vision pro.

I just answered the question, that's all no, no, I know it's my fault, it's not not your fault. I promise amazon. We were talking about how brilliant jeff bezos was, but andy jassy, his successor maybe, I don't know not so brilliant amazon actually was under bezos right paid a billion dollars in 2014 to acquire twitch. Jesse, uh, but jassy is about to, I think uh, well, I don't know. He uh has led a profitability review at the company and has shown little tolerance for unprofitable businesses. According to the wall street journal, insiders say they worry twitch is at the risk of becoming what's called a zombie brand at amazon internal projects or acquisitions that have been sidelined not killed, just sidelined because they haven't lived up to expectations goodreads is a decade woot is an example.

See the. We would have right a woot monkey that actually screamed when it flies if amazon with a viable battery, the alexa. The alexa hardware the echo hardware has 25 billion dollars, billions of dollars on it.

0:59:17 - Jason Snell
And the more they try to make profits by turning it into a, a commercial you know pushing product the fewer people want it how can you not make money on twitch? Yeah, it does make you wonder, right, I can tell you why it's expensive, it's okay.

0:59:33 - Alex Lindsay
So, uh, average view time. So the problem with twitch is that you get these average view times that are seven, eight hours long. You know, like a lot of people on Youtube, like average view time on Youtube is like six and a half minutes on a live event, um, and average view time on twitch is like, I mean, it can get up into the two and a half three hour range that's sitting there watching the same channel because it's a let's play, someone's watching because they do this, so they have this.

So the problem is that they have too few people, or a certain number of people watching for a very long time, and that's very expensive, which is why Twitch is constantly trying to find ways to offload that to you, so like, for instance, instead of doing transcoding, they're letting we, you now can use an NVIDIA card and you can do your own, you can build your own ladder. They're trying to do all these things to kind of drop off, to offload the, the overhead, because it's they're not. The revenue doesn't line up with the, with the product you know, and and so and the thing is is that live, like Youtube, is the best at it, at best at live, um, but it's such a small percentage of their revenue, it's such a small percentage of of what people do that it's like this rounding, I mean it's still millions and millions of dollars a month.

1:00:40 - Leo Laporte
So the mistake was focusing on live for Twitch.

1:00:42 - Alex Lindsay
It's the fact that Twitch is all live.

1:00:44 - Leo Laporte
I mean, it really isn't a VOD there was a real

1:00:47 - Jason Snell
opportunity there for them to be a direct YouTube competitor across the board, especially with their built-in gaming audience, and instead they sort of just leaned into live.

1:00:57 - Alex Lindsay
Well, and the other issue is that they can't get out of the gaming world Like they've been trying to get other products in there.

1:01:04 - Leo Laporte
We're on Twitch right now.

1:01:05 - Alex Lindsay
Hello Twitch, but they haven't been able to get and the problem is the culture is so game-driven that you open it up. If you open up chat in Twitch, it is a disaster.

1:01:14 - Jason Snell
Yeah, it is, and in twitch it is a disaster.

yeah, it is you know like and it's and so the the issue is is that they just can't. It's that culture, it's. That's, that's what I was going to say. It's actually really brilliant, yeah, if you're in it, but having uh. So my friend, mike hurley, uh did a bunch of twitch streams for like mechanical keyboard kind of stuff. Oh, that's cool and uh, I, I was a guest a couple of times, but there is a very specific chat room culture on twitch and and and we're seeing it right now.

It's brilliantly done it really is brilliantly done. Yeah, but if you don't get it, if you're not in it, there's a real learning curve, and so it's got the advantages and disadvantages. If you're in the club, it's awesome.

1:01:51 - Leo Laporte
If you're an outsider, it's kind of a story of discord as well, yeah, of a lot of it of.

1:01:57 - Alex Lindsay
I think that it's not. I don't know if it's this. I don't think discord is quite the same, because it really depends on every culture is different when you go to discord, like our culture in office hours is very different than other. I'm on like 25 discord servers and ours is very different than everybody else's.

1:02:10 - Leo Laporte
Um, and because our the average age in our discord is probably in the mid. All I know is we have 88 people watching us on twitch right now and and there are 46 point 46 900 people watching tom clancy's rainbow six siege and the problem is they're watching.

1:02:27 - Alex Lindsay
There's 46 000 people. They're going to watch that for hours. Yes, yeah, you know and and and.

1:02:31 - Jason Howell
Are they being served ads continuously or just at the beginning? You know what I mean. Like, how are they twitch.

1:02:37 - Jason Snell
Twitch is very aggressive at inserting ads in the live streams. I think the question is do you have?

1:02:43 - Alex Lindsay
enough inventory right to to basically sell into that, into, into to support, because if you're doing hours again, if you're doing 1080p at 60 frames a second. So most gamers are also running high frame, higher frame rate, so they want to play at 60 frames a second. So they're at 60 frames a second. So most gamers are also running higher frame rates, so they want to play at 60 frames a second. So they're at 60 frames a second.

1080p A lot of data You're looking like at least 10 megs a second for every single person and it doesn't you know like it's like three cents a gig or two cents a gig, so it's like for every hundred people that cost you two cents every minute, you know, or every expensive, yeah, or every every couple minutes, um, anyway. So, and so the thing is is that so, if you have thousands of them, that starts that's costing them hundreds or thousands of dollars for that one stream, and can they actually have the revenue to pay that off?

1:03:27 - Leo Laporte
and so far they haven't so there's 50,000 people watching the rainbow six siege stream 50,000 people. And you said it's somebody. Do the math. It's two cents a minute per viewer that's a gig.

1:03:40 - Alex Lindsay
Um, so it's an hour, so no. But if you're doing the math is it's. It's in bits, so that's a gigabyte, and you're doing bits, so it's a little bit. There's a one-eighth rule that has to get um put in there.

1:03:51 - Jason Snell
So if they're doing you should be able to monetize that, and I guess that's part of the challenge. Right is that they haven't.

1:03:56 - Leo Laporte
They charge $12 for the ad free a month.

1:04:01 - Jason Snell
That can't possibly For the user.

1:04:03 - Leo Laporte
For the user. That can't cover the user's cost, if you're. If the users are watching all the time. If the users aren't watching, very much totally.

1:04:09 - Jason Howell
It'll cover it.

1:04:10 - Alex Lindsay
They're watching five hours a day. I mean it's hard because you can't keep on going back to the well, I mean. But I have to say that as a YouTube premium user, I can't imagine, like I change my credit card and suddenly I forget to update YouTube. Oh, it's the worst, and you're like what happened? What is?

1:04:28 - Leo Laporte
going on here. This is horrible. Twitch gets millions of visitors a day. It's just the business model that doesn't work.

1:04:38 - Benito Gonzalez
And Benito used to work there, our producer. Is this all ring a bell? Yeah, that's all, every everything that everybody says.

1:04:41 - Jason Howell
It is true yeah it's a good product, good product not a great business enabling tens.

1:04:46 - Leo Laporte
Of this is the journal enabling tens of thousands of simultaneous live streams is expensive and the company has had to invest in tools to moderate the content. Insider says the content itself post challenges, as the long-form live video doesn't align well with selling ads.

Yeah, you can't promise an advertiser right that they're going to have a happy, wonderful place to hang ad blockers also really kill them and uh and everybody on twitch uses an ad blocker so what's interesting is people have been trying to use ad blockers on Youtube and every time it works for a while it gets. You know Google kills it.

1:05:22 - Jason Snell
I also get the sense that Twitch is very successful for Twitch streamers. Oh, the streamers love it the challenge is the intermediary, and how do they make money and how does that work?

1:05:33 - Leo Laporte
Being the middleman is no good in this case.

1:05:35 - Jason Snell
This is tough.

1:05:41 - Jason Howell
But I do wonder if Amazon was the right partner. Partner for this, just in terms of what they're good at right, what? What would amazon need to do to make it profitable? And I suppose that they could have done anything.

1:05:47 - Alex Lindsay
They've probably done it in the last 10 years well, they had to have done vod and they had to have started a while ago.

The problem is that Youtube can just lean into them you know, like for sure, there's just like a like YouTube, this is such a small part of their revenue and what happens is is that, for YouTube, live is a great thing because what it does is it?

You know your shorts increase reach, so how many people know that your channel exists? Your VODs are where you make all the money, where you get all the views and where you get subscribers. And the live builds a connection between the creator and the subscribers. But and the live builds a connection between the creator and the subscribers, but the live isn't where they're making money or where they're getting lots of viewership. It's where they're taking their core audience and building a relationship with them. But it's never, it's rarely, a massive number.

You know like someone has like 200000 followers may get an 18 million dollar, 18 million view, uh, vod, but they've got plenty of um. Youtube has plenty of real estate to sell into that right or they have plenty of inventory to push into that. The problem is is that the live for Youtube they're like whatever you know, like they can you know it's not. I don't. I'm sure someone watching Youtube is is saying no, that's not the way we think of it, but but that, but a lot of that live and their infrastructure is is just so massive because they're doing YouTube TV pays for the infrastructure at a level that is hard Like. It's so massive, you know, like when people go well, they got 100000 people watching, you know, a live stream. Is it going to come down because YouTube is going to be too big for YouTube and and like YouTube is doing, 30 million?

1:07:22 - Benito Gonzalez
streams. I think, at any given time, like 30 million individual streams. Youtube also benefits from Twitch because everyone on Twitch, because there are no VODs on Twitch, they, everyone puts their VODs on YouTube. That's right.

1:07:30 - Alex Lindsay
So all the live just drives more, more into YouTube, more traffic to YouTube.

1:07:34 - Jason Howell
Yeah, so would. So would an independent owner of Twitch like what? What then would they have to do? I guess what I'm what I'm trying to figure out is like, at this state of the game, like Twitch is a brand that's very recognizable, obviously has a lot of people that want to use it for these live streams, but it's obviously not a great business the way it is right now. If Amazon isn't the right company to make the change to make it a viable business, could an independent? I don't think so.

1:07:58 - Alex Lindsay
I don't think so either. I don't think I don't think they have. I think they have a business model that's great for the users and great for the creators, and there is no version of that product that will ever be profitable or significantly profitable. Because the problem is is that the culture is so embedded into the way it is because people who watch games block ads and because gamers want to do really long videos, and because there's a whole bunch of things that are already that are baked into that culture that, unless you're going to use it as a loss leader for another product, that's the way you do it you have to have amazon yeah or amazon, figuring out a way to sell products into it or a way to get, like, closer to click-through rates straight to aw or straight to the amazon.

know those kinds of things, like if you figured out a way to make and you know, do it what I call a Kaiser Sose model, which is what it pays everyone more than the job was worth. You know, and you have to figure out what is that other indirect angle that you're going to generate revenue from, and I don't think that Amazon has figured that out.

1:08:53 - Jason Snell
The big problem, too, is that one way they could solve this is by changing their pricing structure. But Youtube's existence means if you mess it up too bad, you'll, they'll just all go to Youtube, and that'll be the end of twitch, so they're kind of trapped.

1:09:09 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, and they have. I mean, Youtube has a higher quality stream. Um, it's, it is, you know, I mean from the pure like what does the video look like? Youtube is is more stable, they can do 4K, 60. They can do, like lots of things that are really at a level that Twitch can't afford to do. And YouTube is available in Korea, south Korea which. Twitch had to turn off.

1:09:29 - Leo Laporte
They just had to turn it off. Yeah, this is almost an obituary in the Wall Street Journal. Among other things, yeah, it's pretty serious. Among other things, yeah, it's, it's, it's pretty serious. Uh.

1:09:39 - Alex Lindsay
Among other things, they say that uh twitch has not ever been profitable, uh, since uh amazon acquired them it's hard because you look at something and go well, there's so many people and they love it so much, this has got to be a good business here, and they just haven't found just shows common sense does not necessarily mean good business.

1:09:54 - Jason Snell
It looks great, right, right tech industry business model of let's give it away for free and then figure out how to make money, right, well, we don't talk about. Like Youtube did that, right? Like we don't talk about. Well, what if it doesn't ever?

1:10:05 - Alex Lindsay
yeah make money yeah, yeah, and I think that Youtube made money because google had adwords in a way that and yeah, oh yeah, run like. Without that, I don't think.

1:10:14 - Leo Laporte
I think Youtube would have had a hard time well, one of the problems, of course Youtube YouTube is faced is with ad blocking as well. Maybe Google hopes to fix this. They've announced now that Chrome will, when it moves to manifest V3, no longer allow Ublock. Well, ublock origin just won't work. But Raymond Gorehill, who is the lead developer and maintainer, on Friday said because of the support for MV3, ubo is a manifest V2 extension. Hence the warning in your Google Chrome browser. There is no manifest V3 version of uBlock Origin. This is, by the way, easily the number one ad blocker out there. Hence the browser will suggest alternative extensions as a replace for UBO. Gore Hill explained he does offer UBO Lite, ublock Origin Lite, a paired down version with the best effort at converting filter lists used by UBO into a manifest V3 compliant approach with a focus on reliability and efficiency. Uh, this is, I mean.

Obviously, google doesn't like ad blockers. Google's an ad business, plus Youtube, uh, has been in a war with people running ad blockers. It's interesting that you say almost everybody watches twitch. Twitch uses an ad blocker, benito, it's kind of an interesting issue. I'm a big uBlock Origin fan. I'm just going to use Firefox. That's my answer. Firefox. Google has been doing a number of things that are kind of counter to support its ad business and kind of counter the interests of its users, including deciding this week not to uh block third-party cookies, which they announced they were going to do. They say it's because of the eu, but really I think google wants you to see ads and they don't want you to block them well, I mean, it's their business.

1:12:12 - Alex Lindsay
I mean, like google has a lot of other hobbies, but that's their business. Adwordswords is their business. Yeah, like, like AdWords and display ads.

1:12:19 - Leo Laporte
You almost could say search is a hobby, yeah.

1:12:21 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, like, but but there that is. I mean, uh, anytime you see Google like spending money on things like it, it is an entirely different world when they start talking about ads and when you sit in one of their like trains on ad, you know adwords and so on, so forth. I mean the data that they have and everything else is like looking into the sun. Like it is, it is an amazing product and, um, all they have to do is keep people from blocking it too much, not, not keep it's not a hundred percent it's just just keep making it uncomfortable

1:12:48 - Leo Laporte
they were trying to balance it. That was the idea of getting rid of third-party cookies, replacing it with topics, which was a little bit more privacy forward. Steve gibson thought topics was a good solution.

1:12:56 - Alex Lindsay
But I I think that the thing is is that, like twitch, the nature of who watches twitch. They're far more technologically advanced, so much higher percentage of them are because they're building their own pcs and they're doing their you know they're, they're very technical, whereas Youtube is. There's a huge percentage of Youtube that is just, you know, average people who want to watch something that's funny or interesting or whatever, and and they don't know as much. I think that the ad blocking is a much smaller.

1:13:22 - Leo Laporte
I'm not saying it's a small percentage, but it's a much smaller percentage on YouTube I saw almost half of all internet traffic people using ad blockers. It's a huge number. It's surprisingly large percentage of users use ad blockers. Do you use an ad blocker? Yeah, Of course you do. Do you use an ad blocker? Of course you do. Do you use an ad blocker?

1:13:41 - Alex Lindsay
You don't. I don't have anything that I see ads on very much Like, I just don't have. Oh, you must have a pie hole or something.

1:13:48 - Leo Laporte
No I just don't.

1:13:49 - Alex Lindsay
I just don't see a lot of ads.

1:14:01 - Jason Snell
You don't go to that many. I have a handful of websites that I go to, and then I have a lot of apps and I read news and listen to news but I just don't bounce around a lot, I think, and I pay for a lot of content on the internet, so I don't feel bad about it at all.

But there are sites, especially where it's a complete especially if you're on mobile it's a complete sundering of the relationship between the audience and the business, where it's sort of like you will give me content and I will see your ads, and there's like a a really nice medium to be found there. And at some point, you know, most of these websites just dumped as much garbage into their, their site as possible in order to try it.

1:14:33 - Leo Laporte
Six colors is that?

1:14:35 - Jason Snell
yeah, we have we have a yeah every week as well.

1:14:38 - Leo Laporte
You do first-party ads. That's one of the things. That's a little different. Yes, I have no ad network and no ad server and no tech.

1:14:44 - Jason Snell
It's just my content.

1:14:46 - Leo Laporte
So an ad blocker in fact does not block it.

1:14:47 - Jason Snell
I think it depends on what I named the end of the week and there's an RSS item, so it's very hard not to see that. But you know, again, I don't have a problem with seeing some ads. It's when it becomes abusive and you're like I can't even.

1:15:08 - Leo Laporte
Or dangerous, and I think there's also malware.

1:15:10 - Jason Snell
And there's all the details of violations of privacy.

1:15:14 - Alex Lindsay
And I think that for me, what happens is I don't really block the ads, I just go oh, that website has a lot of ads. You don't even see it, I mean I just don't go back. I'm like, okay, well, that's not a website for me.

1:15:24 - Jason Snell
I do custom blocking too, like there are elements like there. There is a, a site network that I'm not going to name, but they added an element where mid article there would be a comment from their comment section, and it was. It would just be inserted as if it was content. But it was garbage and I did a custom blocker for that. I have my. My ad blocker turns off all website comments. I don't want to see them Right? So it's not just ads, it's intrusive content. And thank goodness for reader modes. Reader modes help a lot too.

1:15:55 - Leo Laporte
So that was one of the reasons you block origin is so popular is because it was infinitely configurable. Yeah and uh and really uh worked very well. Um, a good question is whether browsers that rely on chromium will also be moving to mv3, and if they will, then that means they won't support ublock origin. Another ad block is not just you block origin going forward, we'll see. We're in interesting times. And then there's the artist and musician who is suing the SEC over NFT regulatory jurisdiction. This is from decryptco. Five years ago, brian Fry said an elaborate trap. Now the law professor is teaming up with a singer songwriter to finally spring it on the SEC in a novel lawsuit and, in the process, prevent the regulator from ever coming after NFT art projects. Again, the complaint is that the SEC has been selective in its prosecution of nft projects as unregistered securities.

1:17:02 - Alex Lindsay
They haven't really defined what the rules are um, well, I think this might have been opened up by the supreme court to this, this lawsuit, where the supreme court started to pull back on regulatory, the ability for regulators to regulate. You know they, you know where the congress, you know this is a place that's pretty gray and Congress probably didn't write something explicit for this and the sec is interpreting laws, which is what the Supreme court has pushed back on. Um, so it's probably affected the timing.

1:17:29 - Jason Snell
Also, this is friend of the show Jonathan man, who is the musical artist in question. Yeah, and and uh, and he wrote a song before they were even called where he was. Basically the idea was, he said, great digital collectibles. This is a way for me, as an artist, to make money, because he is you know, he is cobbled together, uh, making a living out of doing these songs every day, and I full disclosure, I've had him make a couple of songs for me, yeah, that that I got to use in my projects and were songs of the day.

And he's, he's, the guy makes earworms. It's amazing. But so this is. This has been a perfect setup I've been doing it for 17 for this law professor to use him as an example of why it?

1:18:11 - Leo Laporte
you know, his song is not a security so fry, uh, five years ago, minted an nft of a letter he sent to the sec in which he declared his art project to constitute an illegal, unregistered security, and he challenged the our agency. If it's not a security, you need to say so. The sec never responded, of course not. They didn't know what the hell to do with it, uh, and so he did it again and again. So then, 10 months ago, jonathan Mann created a song called this Song is a Security. Can I play it? Let's find out.

1:18:49 - Alex Lindsay
We have two strikes already.

1:18:50 - Jason Snell
He's a friend of the show I know Are you already on two strikes.

1:18:53 - Alex Lindsay
I don't know.

1:18:55 - Jason Snell
You can find it. It's just out there oh.

1:18:57 - Leo Laporte
I'm sitting, I'm looking at it on YouTube so people can play it for themselves.

1:19:03 - Jason Snell
It's song of the day number 5,369. I think one thing that this gets at is there are lots of things that there are no rules for that the SEC thinks are shifty right, and they're like well, the SEC, I get their motivation. Their motivation is this feels like fraud, this feels bad, so we're going to do something about it. And there's a question of like do they have such a broad latitude? And so Matt Levine, who is a fantastic writer at Bloomberg, has a great column. He has a newsletter you can sign up for, funny, the funniest dry business world column you will ever find, called Money Stuff. He has a catchphrase which is everything is securities fraud.

Right, and it's just who, it's just whether the SEC decides Exactly and this strikes me as being very much that, which is, if the SEC thinks it's securities fraud, I guess it's securities fraud because everything is. But I think it goes to them wanting to have this latitude and we've seen it with some recent court rulings that we may be entering an era in the US where, unless it is very specifically stated that something is not allowed, it is allowed.

1:20:11 - Alex Lindsay
And again, that's what the that's what the Supreme Court said is, basically, these agencies can't keep on making a rule which the agencies need to be able to keep on making, a rule which the agencies need to be able to keep on making a rule, because Congress can't be that specific. These guys barely know how to use email and they were asking them to figure out like how to how to do all this stuff, and so it's like very complicated.

You know so, so you know, like I think the problem is that Congress doesn't know how to do that, Then they can't decide on anything and then the agencies aren't allowed to do anything. So it does feel like it's going to be a little bit of a wild wild west.

1:20:39 - Jason Snell
This is your other side of it, which is for financial issues. It's very serious. There's a lot of scammers out there. People want their money to be protected Totally. Get that the SEC or the cops they're on the case. But the downside of that is, if you want to, you can sort of claim that almost anything in the world is securities fraud, including jonathan mann songs maybe.

1:21:02 - Leo Laporte
So it's an interesting idea. Yeah, it has started for man. When uh actress mila kunis created an nft based cartoon series you might remember called stoner cats classic and uh, to watch stoner cats you had to buy an nft right Dependent on revenue from NFT sales, the SEC went after her and in fact ultimately got a $1 million settlement. The SEC they paid a million dollars to the SEC without admitting wrongdoing, but the suit virtually killed the project as well as another NFT-powered series Mila Kunis was up to and that made Jonathan mad man really mad. So he wrote that day. Cause he's doing a song today.

This song is a security and now he is suing in Louisiana, uh, along with a fry who's acting as his lawyer, uh, the sec. Who's acting as his lawyer? The SEC. The lawsuit filed earlier this week challenged the SEC's standing, even though the SEC, by the way, ignored both Fry and Mann. They didn't pursue it. So it's one of those suits where it's kind of a preemptive lawsuit. They challenged the SEC's standing to regulate their nft based artworks as securities demanded. The agency declare those artworks do not constitute illegal unregistered security offerings, kind of flipping the tables, say well, okay, tell us.

1:22:31 - Alex Lindsay
The sec has declined to comment well, and again, I think that this is the chevron, the chevron difference that's now gone right, right, and without the Chevron difference that you're not going to, yes, he's going to have a hard time because it's not like they're right now that they have a court. I think. I think again, I think the timing of this lawsuit most likely was connected to the fact that the door has been opened to sue the regulatory commission and saying you don't have the power to do this a regulatory commission and saying you don't have the power to do this.

1:23:00 - Leo Laporte
Man has already written a sequel to this song. Is a security called? Of course I'm suing the sec, of course, catchy little ditty.

1:23:05 - Alex Lindsay
I think, I think he should, I think he could. He could put in parentheses this is not a love song he came to our attention because he did a song about antenna gate.

1:23:15 - Jason Snell
Hey, you remember antenna gate and it was very much like if you don't like it, just take your phone back, kind of. It was a very pro apple kind of thing and they played it and steve jobs was sort of like dancing to it as he came out on stage. And that was how we all met jonathan man.

1:23:33 - Leo Laporte
actually his stuff is great. It's great Helps promote Jonathan Mann.

1:23:36 - Jason Howell
Yeah, I'm all for it 5,695 songs he's written so far.

1:23:42 - Jason Snell
Yeah, yeah, I paid for three of those. That's impressive.

1:23:47 - Leo Laporte
He writes they came for stoner cats. This is my response. I guess he really likes stoner cats. Let's take a break. You're watching a special edition of this Week in Tech Special. For a variety of reasons, everybody's in studio Great friends of the show, long time friends. We're doing it in 3D. Is that proper to say 3D? It's a spatial episode.

1:24:12 - Alex Lindsay
It's spatial Stereo.

1:24:14 - Jason Snell
It's a stereo video.

1:24:16 - Alex Lindsay
I think you could say 3D, but 3D could mean a lot of things. It's not really 3D, it's spatial. Yeah, I'm going to try not to over-answer, because you keep on saying it Stereo.

1:24:23 - Jason Howell
I'm going to answer a lot. You're opening the application door again.

1:24:30 - Jason Snell
I'm just pulling back. At some point between now and the end of the show we're going to do the Harlem Shake and break this desk.

1:24:35 - Leo Laporte
We really should. This desk is never going to. It's over for this desk.

1:24:40 - Jason Howell
It's not over until I have two more shoes to do it.

1:24:43 - Jason Snell
This is a beautiful adjustable.

1:24:47 - Leo Laporte
We had this built at great expense, john, how much did this desk cost? Do we know he left? So much, john. No, he's gone. Who's taking the desk? How much would he left so much? No, he's gone. He's gone. Who's taking the desk? How much would you pay for a desk that could do this? Would it fit in my?

1:25:02 - Jason Snell
office. Maybe you can have it if you want Interesting.

1:25:07 - Jason Howell
Do you think my wife would be offended if I brought this into the bedroom where my upstairs podcast studio is?

1:25:12 - Alex Lindsay
I feel like I need to measure it Now that you said that I was like I should measure it.

1:25:15 - Benito Gonzalez
Yeah, but honey now that you said that I was like I should measure.

1:25:16 - Jason Snell
Yeah, I don't know if it'll fit in my office. It's a really big desk, I feel like we spent $10,000 on this.

1:25:20 - Leo Laporte
How much did we spend, john? I don't know, we don't know, he doesn't know. I didn't buy it. No, I bought it and I didn't even want to know.

1:25:30 - Alex Lindsay
Let's get some measurements. I could ask Everyone will think about it. One of us should end up with this desk.

1:25:36 - Jason Snell
Yeah, good.

1:25:37 - Alex Lindsay
It would make me happy. If it fits, I would use it yeah.

1:25:40 - Leo Laporte
Okay, you guys can fight over it. All right, it would make me very, very happy. You can't have it until Thursday, yeah, no, you can't have it until Thursday, oh, yeah, wednesday the last show is Twig.

1:26:00 - Jason Snell
I'd us to fit it, but I'm tempted. Yeah, it's worth. I couldn't fit in my attic, that's for sure I have. Yeah, get out the measure.

1:26:03 - Leo Laporte
I have a 72 inch.

1:26:04 - Jason Snell
We're not trying to steal all your stuff.

1:26:05 - Leo Laporte
No, you know, does anybody want an am radio transmitter? Because that thing, I don't know how much. Five thousand, it's a bargain, wow. So did that include the up and down thing, or just that's just the top Pirate radio? A couple hundred bucks for the up and down thing, only a couple hundred for the up and down thing. I have an up and down thing in my new attic studio so I can do stand up. Those aren't very up and down, it's not a big deal.

1:26:41 - Alex Lindsay
That one it's. We did. We had this, uh, this insert studio and we had we had motorized the table. By the end we had motorized the table, the tv and the chair, and so someone was sitting, oh and the and, and we had like a little manual thing for the camera. But when they walked in you see all the stuff kind of moving around while we figure out exactly, you know, like, like what is the perfect position for everybody. It was a good flex, I would recommend.

1:27:01 - Leo Laporte
This was always a challenge when Ant Pruitt was here, cause he has massive thighs, yeah, and so we could only well you, you're tall, so we can only lower the table.

1:27:09 - Jason Howell
I mean, my legs are like pressed up against the table. Yeah, mine aren't.

1:27:12 - Leo Laporte
I got lots of room, yeah, but when Ant's here, like the desk, has to be like six inches higher. Yeah. Somebody's asking am I giving everything away? Yeah, because I've already got pretty much everything I want from here. There's a few things, but I don't know what we're going to do with it. What else are you going to do with it? We were saying that the 12th we were going to have people in and everybody could take something. We've changed that date, so please don't come to the studio on the 12th. Do you know what the new date is, patrick? Did lisa share it with you? She says we're still going to be around, so we're going to wait a little longer. Uh, we've got a liquidator coming who's apparently sells what they can and throws what they can't. I'm voting for after the 19th because I'll be out of town. Yeah, I think it'll be after the 19th. You want the bronze strip? Rod Pyle says oh, rod, hi, rod, you want the bronze strip. Okay, it's not a bronze strip.

1:28:07 - Alex Lindsay
That's a whole table. It's all attached, you don't have to take the whole thing we took this from the Brick House Uh brick house.

1:28:14 - Leo Laporte
Now, the fun thing is that gear was a two-sided gear in the brick house because you could see it on either side. You know, when you're in the lobby you see one side, when you're in the studio you see the other side, but there's only one side on this one. So I've taken the other side and I have that in my office. It's rather large, it takes up a whole wall. Yeah, sad when that, when you kind of take everything apart, but it's okay because it's a new model and I think podcasting needs to be refreshed a little bit.

1:28:44 - Alex Lindsay
You've been doing well at home for a long time.

1:28:46 - Jason Snell
Yeah, it's great yeah you like it. I absolutely do. It's great. I just find myself saying you know, could I get a larger desk?

1:28:54 - Alex Lindsay
I don't know. I know I'm thinking it's a little over seven feet wide. We'll figure it out. It's big.

1:29:01 - Leo Laporte
My new one at home is only six feet wide. I have a six-foot table in my house. It's only six feet, yeah. And again, there is a very nice AM radio transmitter that only weighs a couple of tons, if anybody would like that I don't know what to do with that. I think the chances are good that that will be in this building until the day the building is torn down.

1:29:25 - Alex Lindsay
It's not gonna be like a safe. Is it working? Yeah, are you broadcasting am?

1:29:29 - Leo Laporte
uh, it is. If you're a ham, you can use it on the 70 meter band, which is an am band, and uh, if you have a ham license, I think you might have to have a advanced license to use it. Uh, you can use it for, uh, hands man radio transmission or pirate radio or pirate I'm just thinking.

1:29:45 - Alex Lindsay
I just put it in my house. I'm on a hill. Put it in the house just turn it on and novato it's gonna have its own radio station but it

1:29:51 - Leo Laporte
comes from a sioux city, am a day timer. I think it was a thousand watts AM and it was Mike Durow who does some. He's very famous for his meters. He sells meters to radio stations and broadcasters. Mike Durow has as a side hobby he goes to old AM stations as they're decommissioning their transmitters. He says I'll take it, and then he fixes it up. It's like a car, you know, like an old car, Mike.

1:30:16 - Alex Lindsay
Durow did that. Yeah, I should actually.

1:30:20 - Leo Laporte
His meters are amazing. If I can get a hold of Mike Durow, I will offer it back to him, because he gave us a sweetheart deal to have this in the studio but then he delivered it. That was the sweetheart part of the deal and that's, by the way, that's a mail sorting desk, so if you have some mails you want to sort, you can do it at that desk. Right there. This chair swivels and everything. Yeah, I don't know where we got that.

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Congress did it this week. They passed COSA and COPPA 2 by 91 to 3. This was a bill that I think a lot of people in tech opposed. I certainly was against it. Many of our hosts have been against it Shoshana Weissman, who works for R Street, wrote a really good piece on why COSA is impracticable.

The Kids Online Safety Act, I mean. Look, the goals are admirable to protect kids in social media, but the way they do it is perhaps problematic. Cosa is I'm reading from the Verge a landmark piece of legislation that a persistent group of parent advocates played a key role in pushing forward. The parents say a bill like COSA could have saved their kids from suffering. I hope it'll do the same for other kids.

It says that online platforms have a duty of care when they're being used by minors, requiring they take reasonable measures without defining what that is to design their products to mitigate a list of harms, including online bullying, sexual exploitation, drug promotion and eating disorders. Exploitation, drug promotion and eating disorders, it says. If the bill it specifies the bill doesn't prevent platforms from letting minors search for any specific content or providing resources to mitigate any of the listed harms. But there is also the issue of who's a child and who's not, and that means this will require age verification for everybody on everything. Yeah, and we know age verification is a privacy nightmare. Marsha Blackburn has justified the bill on the basis that quote. We should be protecting minor children from the transgender in this culture, whatever the transgender is.

The bill was somewhat amended in response to the concerns of the LGBTQ plus community. The revisions got the GLAAD and the Trevor Project to drop their opposition, but there's still considerable concern. It got a 91 to 3 vote in the Senate because I think Did it pass the House? It has and it has gone to the House. I don't know what's going to happen in the House.

Yeah, but when you pass 91 to 3 in the Senate, it feels like that's a good strong bipartisan support for this, but the right and the left support it for different reasons.

Obviously, marsha Blackburn doesn't want. She wants to protect children from seeing anything about transgender. The duty of care is the most controversial, but COSA contains a host of other provisions. They require safeguards for kids on the Internet, preventing unknown adults from communicating with kids or viewing their personal data. That's fine with me. Restricting the ability, but again you have to know who's a kid and who's an adult. Personal data that's fine with me Restricting the ability, but again you have to know who's a kid and who's an adult. Restricting the ability to share minors' geolocation data. Letting the accounts of children opt out of personalized recommendations or at least limit recommendation categories. Platforms that also need to default kids' accounts to the strictest level of privacy settings and make it easy to delete their personal data and limit the time they spend on the service. And make it easy to delete their personal data and limit the time they spend on the service.

Coppa 2 raises the age of the 1998 children's privacy law from 13,. From under 13 to under 17, because 16-year-olds are just as vulnerable. I guess Ed Markey and Rand Paul I'm sorry Ron Wyden and Rand Paul voted against it. They were. The three senators were Ron Wyden, rand Paul and Mike Lee of Utah.

1:36:22 - Alex Lindsay
And we'll see. I mean, what happens is what's happened in the last time, is it looked like it was going to go through and then everyone suddenly realized that it might go through, and then a bunch of people called their congressman and then the congressman go.

1:36:33 - Leo Laporte
Well, now it's up to the House. They have something. Unfortunately, they just left on an august recess.

1:36:37 - Alex Lindsay
Well, that's unfortunate for them, because now there's time, now there's plenty right like. The problem is it kind of felt like we were so caught up with all the trump insanity and all the change of the who's running and everything else that no one was noticing, and they were like hey let's just, let's move this through right now like let's you know while no one's paying attention, but now people have time to pay attention, so it'll be interesting to see if it goes.

1:36:57 - Leo Laporte
Netchoice will probably sue again. They represent Google, meta and other big tech platforms and they have sued in the past on First Amendment grounds. The Verge also points out Kosa will have to contend with that recent Supreme Court decision where the majority said content, moderation and curation are protected forms of expression protected by the free the first amendment I think this, I think that they can pass this number one is because the, the republican, uh controlled house doesn't have to even bring it to the floor right.

1:37:29 - Alex Lindsay
So it's a real safe bet if you go. Hey everybody, we're not going to let it. Actually, go through, then it's like a free, it's like a free vote for a lot of people to vote for that right. The other side other side of that is you know that the Supreme Court.

1:37:38 - Leo Laporte
That's why I passed 91 to three, because I knew it couldn't get through. I think it's not going to get through the House.

1:37:42 - Alex Lindsay
So I think that there's a, and you know who knows?

1:38:05 - Jason Snell
I mean this is random, but I think that knowing that it's not going to go through the House is a free. Is that a lot of this is free because the chances of the supreme court upholding these measures is low. It's interesting. Um, it's not a guarantee that this would even pass if they wanted to. First off, no politician is going to, when prompted, vote against something that I am going to protect the kids how do you vote against that?

it's very hard to go into the details of like well, but it doesn't, because it's going to make you look bad when you're running for office, and all that. However, recently the senate passed a uh or what? No. The house passed a bipartisan bill for the advanced child tax credit and the senate was like no and and put it off. And that was a bipartisan bill from one house, from, you know, one branch of government or not, branch one, one legislative body to the other, where the other one said no, even though it was bipartisan. So there is recent precedent for the house to basically be like no, or, as alex pointed out, even better, what huh we?

1:38:58 - Alex Lindsay
must have missed that one, or or yes, and now we're going to change a whole bunch of things right and now, and then it goes in and then it's unwinnable yeah, so so there's a.

There's still a long way to uh, to get in these past. You know it was interesting that we just didn't see the fire from a lot of the tech companies that we saw in the past. You always feel like something's amiss when there wasn't no, there was not a lot of the tech companies that we saw in the past. You always feel like something's amiss when there wasn't no, there was not a lot. Not a lot of flag.

1:39:22 - Jason Snell
They might have killed it maybe the tech companies think this is not an argument they want to have in public and that maybe they don't. They can save their powder on this one. But you know, the eff is out there, the aclu is out there, and behind the scenes they may be saying to their friends in the house no, this is, this is not, or like look, if this is what we have to do, like we're the incumbents, we're doing okay, we'll deal with this, um, but yeah, it's funny that they didn't come out on thursday.

1:39:52 - Leo Laporte
I missed this. Kill it. The house republican leadership decided not to bring up cosa.

1:39:57 - Jason Snell
Yeah, there you go. Okay, there we go it's already bipartisan support they said well you did it to the child tax credit, so we'll do it to your and very well.

1:40:08 - Alex Lindsay
That kind of stuff happens all the time.

1:40:09 - Jason Snell
The kids lose on both fronts.

1:40:11 - Leo Laporte
I guess poor kids? Uh, mike masnick writes in tech dirk broken clocks may be accidentally correct twice a day and sometimes those broken clocks save the internet. The house gop has killed cosa over unclear concerns about the version of cosa that is approved earlier this week yeah, it actually is possible that they did it, because they made those amendments to.

1:40:33 - Jason Snell
Yeah about the details about lgbtq content and they're like oh no, no, we want that in there.

1:40:39 - Alex Lindsay
Yes, you nailed it and again it lets both sides do virtue signaling. Both sides get to have their cake and eat it too. They both get to say that we were against this because or we were for this, for it, and neither of them actually have to create a law.

1:40:56 - Leo Laporte
So I mean, here's the sausage being made in in public and credit to rand paul who wrote uh and mike masnick points this out a very clear, direct letter about the problems with the bill, presented in a non-partisan, non-culture war fashion. That was persuasive, apparently. Yeah, um so um good, whoo that you dodged a bullet. Dodged a bullet, they did. The senate did approve the intelligence authorization act which mandates pen testing for federally, federally certified voting machines. This is something people have been looking for and asking for, I think we need to go back to the big booths, like.

1:41:33 - Alex Lindsay
I think this whole, like, like none of this electronic. You know, I think it's big, the big booths. I think this whole like none of this electronic, I think it's the big. Most of us, most people, don't remember them. With levers, you want levers, big levers, no hanging chads. No, nothing, just like there's a certain level of theater that came with the big booths.

1:41:51 - Leo Laporte
Right, there is an argument. I think you should have to dip your finger in ink after you vote.

1:41:56 - Jason Snell
There is an argument about the fact that now that we have electronic voting machines with paper trails, that's the key. And this just happened in Venezuela, right where the incumbent said oh no, I won. And then everybody looked at the printouts and said there's no way that you won. Two thirds of the people voted against you in all the places where we could get the printouts and you hid them in other places where you suspiciously won by a lot like. That was a great example of what people have been saying in this country all along, which is electronic funding is fine, but you gotta have without a paper trail.

It's insanity yeah, it is absolutely so. This is good. It's funny because this is a situation where you've got one of the two parties in the us insists insists that there was voter fraud, even though there is no evidence to support that at all. But it makes it hard for them to be against trying to protect against voter fraud, right? So it's got to pass, baby. Ok, we'll fix it.

1:42:50 - Leo Laporte
Let's do it. Yep, this is good, this is good. You may remember a couple of years ago, at uh, defcon or black hat I think it was black hat they had. They had the voting machine, they had all the voting machines and they brought the hackers in and that's right, they were all wide open.

1:43:07 - Jason Snell
It was wide open.

1:43:08 - Leo Laporte
It was a terrible mess. Easy, easy to easy to hack. Uh, you also may have read a little bit about a big prisoner swap earlier this week. Very good news for the Americans who were held in Russia. But you should probably know that the two of the Russian nationals who were returned to Russia were notorious for cyber crimes.

1:43:32 - Alex Lindsay
They now join the other 50,000 that are already there.

1:43:35 - Jason Snell
Yeah, these are the ones we get our hooks into's, just like you know, like these are the ones we get our hooks into and we, you know they were a good.

1:43:40 - Leo Laporte
They were good negotiating uh I think it was worth to get paul whalen and evan grishka back and, uh, you're right, I mean what you know. There's plenty of other people who replaced them in russia. Yeah, roman uh seleznev was known for running extensive cyber crime operations credit card card fraud, theft, selling stolen credit card information on cartersu, which is a cyber criminal forum rings from Cyberscoop. Zeleznev conducted his criminal activities under the alias Track 2 and NCOX. He is, it turns out, the son of Valery Zeleznev, a prominent member of the Russian Duma, the parliament, valeri seleznev, a prominent member of the russian duma, the parliament. Uh, he was sentenced to 27 years in prison back in 2017 for a massive credit card computer fraud scheme. Extradited to the us, he netted 93 million dollars. Oh, no, this is uh.

1:44:32 - Alex Lindsay
This is now the other one uh, uh, whose name was you know, if we just started extraditing everybody to Saudi Arabia, this would all go much faster.

1:44:40 - Leo Laporte
You don't have to worry about prisoner exchanges.

1:44:42 - Benito Gonzalez
There'd be a whole lot of like we can give you back the prisoners. There's nobody left.

1:44:44 - Leo Laporte
Well, I can give you back the prisoners Vladislav.

1:44:45 - Alex Lindsay
I'm just going to type a lot slower.

1:44:58 - Leo Laporte
Vladislav Klyushin was extradited to the US for his involvement in an elaborate hacked, a trade scheme that netted approximately 93 million dollars through security trades based on stolen confidential corporate information. They would break into networks, steal the information and then use it to a trade gotta get those guys out of prison.

1:45:09 - Jason Snell
Gotta get them back.

1:45:09 - Leo Laporte
You know what? At least they're non-violent criminals.

1:45:11 - Benito Gonzalez
I mean the one of the guys who got sent back is an assassin it was an assassin it's's true.

1:45:17 - Jason Snell
And then the people who posed as Argentinian art dealers in Slovenia, which was like the real-life version of the Americans, except, I guess, the Argentines.

1:45:30 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, they were like deep, deep moles.

1:45:31 - Jason Howell
Their kids didn't speak Russian and didn't know who Putin was.

1:45:35 - Leo Laporte
Putin gave them a big kiss and spoke to them in Spanish. In Spanish, because the kids didn't know russian and didn't know who putin was. Putin gave him a big kiss and spoke to them in the spanish because the kids didn't know russia.

1:45:41 - Jason Snell
Wow, apparently they were very bad at their jobs, though that was. The thing is that is that everybody's like who are these people? And their art gallery was really bogus, and they're like is this some sort of scam? And then they went to what they did a thing at enbro fringe, I think. She did an art thing really and and the british. Apparently that was enough to get the british intelligence to look investigate them and they're like this is not she must be, and that's when they got picked up by the slovenian authorities I just think it's amazing.

1:46:07 - Alex Lindsay
The kids didn't know until they're. I mean, it's the most no it's the americans, it's totally the americans like we were, just like the kids didn't know until they got on the plane.

1:46:15 - Leo Laporte
It was like kids, do you think? There are a lot of sleeper agents in the united states, so what?

1:46:19 - Jason Snell
what this story said was that after russia invaded ukraine, yeah there were a lot of these on the books. Spies, essentially, who are diplomats that? But everybody knows they're spies right, who were sent back to russia right by the western countries. They're like get out of here, come on. As a response to that. Come on, you're not attached. What that?

did, though, was activate the sleeper agents, because they needed somebody to coordinate, and the suggestion there is. It still hurt Russia in the sense that the sleeper agents aren't that good at their jobs. I've been sleeping. What do you want? Don't wake me up. But yeah, so it sounds like Putin. According to the story I read, putin really loves sleeper agents because he's a lifelong KGB guy.

1:47:04 - Alex Lindsay
So he's like oh yes, get me more sleepers. Yes, so good. It takes so long. Like the investment in a sleeper agent is enormous. I mean, we all watch the Americans, we all know exactly how this all works.

1:47:14 - Benito Gonzalez
That's right Wigs. Lots of wigs. Yeah, exactly Lots of wigs. Glasses, big square glasses.

1:47:20 - Jason Snell
Those are very useful. If people haven't seen the Americans, you've got to watch it.

1:47:24 - Leo Laporte
It is such a great show and it's a great concept. The Sleeper Agent I think we've gotten a lot of mileage and they got married.

1:47:29 - Jason Snell
It was based on a true the real actors got married. It story um. But my understanding is again in this story that I read today. My understanding is that the sleeper agents are not as good as as the ones of the americans. Like literally, they described one of them as he said he was from philadelphia, but he looked like yeltsin and spoke with a thick russian accent. No, no, I am from philadelphia. Oh yeah, okay, sure go squirtle.

1:47:57 - Leo Laporte
Uh, us border agents, at least at jfk, must get a warrant before searching your cell phone. That's good news. Um, in fact, for the longest time the cbp has thought that it's completely legal for them to search every cell phone if they want I had one that I had.

1:48:15 - Alex Lindsay
I had them search my cell phone one time, but I it was, I kind of expected it, I was. I had flown to rome and then ethiopia, then nigeria, then to iraq then to turkey?

1:48:28 - Jason Snell
what?

1:48:28 - Alex Lindsay
were you doing are you a sleeper agent? No, I was doing shows. I was doing shows. I was doing lots of work. It was all different shows, all different continents. When I came back I had already burnt. I had a burner phone that had like a good Facebook account nothing on it, you're smart and everything else, and so what they don't ask you for is all your phones. They just ask you for your phone and you go sure.

1:48:48 - Leo Laporte
Do they make you unlock it?

1:48:49 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, and I unlocked it. There's nothing to see.

1:48:51 - Jason Snell
See fortunately been to the White House, so we know that he can't be a sleeper agent or he would have struck I got the A badge.

1:48:59 - Alex Lindsay
I got the A badge. If you get a B badge, they're like I slap you.

1:49:05 - Benito Gonzalez
Sleeper agent, if you ever sleep in the. White House just take care of it right then.

1:49:09 - Jason Snell
Yeah, what else, right? That's what you're there for, yahtzee, right, like good to go for it.

1:49:14 - Alex Lindsay
Yahtzee. I've had enough interactions with the secret service that I would never try anything like that.

1:49:21 - Jason Howell
They are pretty decisive, don't?

1:49:23 - Leo Laporte
shout Yahtzee when you do it.

1:49:26 - Jason Snell
You got to say it right before you do it Although although, to be fair, maybe not with the secret service so much.

1:49:33 - Leo Laporte
These days maybe not.

1:49:36 - Alex Lindsay
I like I'm. I'm from butler, are you really? Yeah, so I grew up outside of butler my dad's law firm is. I knew you're from pa but my two older kids live a mile from that site and I was like I can see kind of why they relax, because butler's like the reddest right, the reddest county in pennsylvania. So you kind of be, ah, you know, like what could possibly go wrong?

You know, and there was complaints ahead of time that you know, there were complaints from both the campaign and Secret Service that like, hey, we don't have enough money, like we don't have enough people, not enough resources, and so they were offloading some of the resources and everything else. But it seems like it's insane that you would not. That roof is so close, yeah, that you would not that roof is so close, yeah. Like it seems like somebody just like thought that the stage was going to be somewhere else or something else. Like it just felt like that's like I don't even understand, like how that you know, because it's not a long shot.

1:50:25 - Jason Snell
As a country boy, I can tell you it's actually. It's like a lot of our stories about tech failures. Invariably what happens is it's a, it's a chain cascading failure of of small failures that lead to an enormous failure, because that's always what it is it's. It's very rarely crowd strike right. I mean it really is. It's mostly.

1:50:46 - Leo Laporte
This person didn't say something even crowd strike was kind of a cascading failure because the people who wrote the tests didn't bother. There was just one big cascade there at the end of the process. But yeah, it's.

1:50:56 - Jason Snell
That's what happens, is it's the unknown, unknowns where it's just like you can't anticipate a very small chain of negative events that leads to a disastrous outcome yeah, let me take a little break.

1:51:07 - Leo Laporte
We have still much more to talk about. It's such a great group and perhaps we can discuss the how the vision pro works.

1:51:13 - Jason Snell
I'm going to warn everybody stay, no, no, no, stay, everybody Stay.

1:51:18 - Alex Lindsay
Don't run away. If you're in your Vision Pro, I'm going to warn you that during this commercial break I'm going to take my phone out of its case, which means everything's going to rock around for a little bit. So I'm just warning you ahead of time. Are you going to reposition Because it's overheating? We think it. It's just my phone, it's not the service.

1:51:37 - Leo Laporte
So everybody in a Vision Pro? Close your eyes.

1:51:40 - Jason Snell
Yeah, brace yourself, brace yourself. I'm letting you know, brace everybody.

1:51:43 - Alex Lindsay
If it's a really big screen and we start moving it, it may hurt.

1:51:46 - Jason Snell
If you're not watching the 3D version, relax.

1:51:49 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, you can just enjoy. Yeah, see, another reason not to have a vision While Alex adjusts the image. Let me tell you about something I have been using. I started using this maybe 10, 15 years ago and used to love it. Experts Exchange. Remember that? Did you ever use that, Patrick? God, I loved Experts Exchange. Real people you could go to and ask questions and they would give you great answers.

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I had a great day talking to these people at Experts Exchange and I'm so excited about what you know, their vision and what they're trying to do with this and it was. It was great. It brought me back to the good old days experts exchange e-e.com/twitt. Thank you, experts exchange, for believing in us. We believe in you, humans. We gotta stick together. Uh, really good story in the wall street journal I don't know if you saw this about Alicia, a man who scammed hundreds online, but this is really important. The times did a story like this a few months ago too, and it's really important. You've all seen the pig butchering scams.

I get messages every single day, every day every day, every day you know I can't get to dinner tonight, but maybe we could do it tomorrow, or I got one, the other day are you back in town.

I do the report junk, yeah, yeah or uh, hey, I don't know this number. Is this joe? Yeah, and so you're supposed to. What you're supposed to do is be a nice person, say, oh no, it's not joe, I'm sorry, you got the wrong number. And then he says, oh well, what is your name? Are you nice?

So the people who do this are very often enslaved, in effect, yeah, chinese gangsters traffic people from around the world, bring them to often to remote and lawless places in Southeast Asia like Myanmar, force them to sit at computers all day scamming strangers online. So if you yell at these guys, you're yelling at another victim. Really. So this is a really wild story. The guy was a 41 year old IT professional. He was Ethiopian. He took a job. He thought, right, they'd get recruiters in Ethiopia, offer them great money. Goes there. They take his passport. They say here's your dorm and we're going to beat you unless you do this.

He was trapped in a criminal enclave in Myanmar where his captors made him assume the fake online alter ego of a rich Singaporean woman they called Alicia. They actually had a manual on how to seduce men online and manipulating them into pouring their money into bogus investments. That's the end game, of course to get you to give them your money. After weeks of secret planning, late last year Billy and others in his dormitory went on strike. Punishment was swift, billy said. He was handcuffed, hung by his wrists for about a week where the other captives could see him suffering. Then he was taken to an unlit bathroom stall and tortured for another week. His captors beat him and said you want to get out of here. You need to scrounge up seven thousand dollars. His family did it, uh, and got him out. He and three others with him were among a few hundred have made it out in recent years from these industrial scale scam enterprises.

I mean, we knew about this from the new york times piece. Uh, this is just another one that says exactly the same thing. They, uh, they interviewed the guy. Um. More traumatic than the physical abuse he said was being confronted by the victims whose lives he was forced to ruin. Victims often lose their retirement funds, their families, their wills to live. One Pakistani man who had a wife and four children became so obsessed with Alicia, the woman Billy portrayed wrote her long essays that read what like desperate love poems. When billy stopped responding, he said the man sent him a video of himself throwing acid on his face. Oh my god. He said I will never forget that to the day. I did I mean just horrible.

Yeah, that's so two victims for each of these. Really good piece again from the wall street journal talking about. Here's a picture from 2019 of barren fields in myanmar, and then, within a few years, this dormitory built. Oh wow, where, uh, where these people uh?

2:00:04 - Jason Snell
yeah, it sounds like they. They tend to grab them in thailand and then they take them across the border into myanmar and it's basically lawless and they're stuck and the authorities in these, in these countries, are just look the other way or getting paid off or or I think maybe even in that part of Myanmar there's like the. The central authority basically, is not present out there.

2:00:26 - Jason Howell
Yeah, yeah. A couple of years ago on Facebook, you know, selling something through Facebook marketplace, I got the, the whole scam where someone reaches out to you and says, hey, I want to buy your thing, oh, but I can't come and pick it up, my brother can, we'll do the Venmo thing and then he's going to go ahead and pick it up or whatever. And I had had that about 5 million times and this person was like seriously, like it's such a tired scam, like why, why this again? And his response, he or she, their response was man, if you only knew, do you think I want to be doing this and I didn't know about this, like this article in the New York times piece and that just stuck with me.

After that I was like what's going on here? And so this really puts it into perspective.

2:01:07 - Leo Laporte
It's so sad they're actually sold from one compound to another, it's pound to another, um it's, it's virtually slavery, absolutely it is. Yeah, yeah, yeah, horrible. It's all right, let's cheer up. Have you been watching the olympics?

2:01:23 - Alex Lindsay
yeah when I did you see the biking thing this morning. What happened? Oh my gosh, I finished office hours a little early and so we were, you know, like 10 minutes earlier, two minutes earlier, I was like I'll just see what's going on the olympics, and there's this long, there's like a 25 kilometer outdoor biking race women's biking road race.

And I'm like I'm not a real road race person, I'm not, you know like it's not like a thing I know anything about, but I was like no, there's an American that's doing okay, but she was like 30 seconds behind in this little group when I first started watching, and they slowly catch up and then she slowly catches up to the front and it's so it felt like breaking away. You know like he's like hey, you know like like the American is here, you know cause she wasn't even supposed to be in the she was a replacement.

2:02:02 - Jason Snell
She was a replacement.

2:02:04 - Alex Lindsay
She didn't even qualify for this she hadn't ridden a bike, this 10 years ago she hadn't written a bike, she was a rower who took a bike class in Central Park because she was working in financial industry or something she was

2:02:18 - Leo Laporte
a.

2:02:18 - Jason Snell
VC yeah.

2:02:19 - Leo Laporte
First American in 40 years to win a medal in the event. It's not that she won, it's that she gets up there and then suddenly she just goes.

2:02:26 - Alex Lindsay
She just launched and it was like just watching her just pull away and these are the best in the world. Even I I who don't know bicycling know who the name marianne moe is, yeah, legend. And she just goes. She just jumps out into the, into the front, and then just starts pulling away and they're not even trying.

2:02:42 - Jason Snell
They're like they can't even lose their mind because they're like they're not even going.

2:02:46 - Alex Lindsay
They're not, like they're not even reacting because they couldn't they couldn't figure out how she was going so fast and she just had a whole nother layer, a whole nother gallon of gas. That was just there.

2:02:54 - Jason Snell
I watched that too, and I think I watched it on what is, I think, turned out to be one of the media triumphs of the olympics, which is the gold zone channel on peacock, which is there. It literally uses like nfl red zone. It literally uses two of the hosts who used to do nfl red zone. Um, yeah, because that's a skill, it is because you're going to hire those guys they're like, can we?

have the, the scott hansen and andrew siciliano, and have them be, and they've got a couple other people too. But it's this whip around thing where their priorities are obviously americans that are participating, but also gold medals, right, some. If there's a gold medal on the line, judo, they will show you judo. And then they'll be like now let's look at boxing, now let's go to swimming I gotta watch that and it is uh.

I think it's taken the country by storm. I've read a bunch of media articles that are pointing to it as one of the great victories, and the brilliant thing about it is, finally, nbc has figured it out, which is there's a primetime show. That's the highlights, but they don't hide anything from viewers anymore. All that stuff airs live. It's airing live on usa network and nbc. Every single sport from the world feed is on peacock, and then they built some very clever things. There's a multi-view where you can actually zoom in and out, um, and then there's gold zone, which is you just lean back and their producers take you where they want, and I think with this one, so good, with this one.

2:04:13 - Alex Lindsay
I watched it for 20 minutes, kind of like. Oh, maybe it was like playing in the background while I was working on something else.

2:04:18 - Leo Laporte
And I was just like.

2:04:19 - Alex Lindsay
I just opened it up and it was just like because there's other ones that I've been going. Obviously, the gymnastics I've been kind of going to some of the. Ledecky swimming stuff and some of the sprint stuff. You know, like that's my go to's the shooter stuff, because it gets the Korean shooter and the Turkish shooter.

2:04:40 - Jason Howell
But, the shooter stuff, because it gets the korean uh shooter and the turkish.

2:04:41 - Leo Laporte
But that's because it's social right. Social because you saw it on tiktok and a korean shooter is like so badass.

2:04:44 - Alex Lindsay
And the turkish guy, without any lenses or anything, just goes. He puts his hand in his pocket you wonder what he did before he turned 50, you know like you know, because he's got a lot of practice.

2:04:53 - Jason Snell
Yeah, I wouldn't have seen that road race at all, except for the gold zone, because they're like you gotta see this thing and it's all live.

2:04:58 - Alex Lindsay
But what was amazing was what was amazing watching it was, and I just this is what I love about the current structure of the olympics. Exactly what Jason was talking about is that everything's available. I kind of randomly went up to Youtube. Youtube tv randomly just opened something oh, this is live, I'll see what this looks like. And I was like it's kind of interesting, I get to see part of paris. I wasn't really thinking about it and so it was very low key. And then suddenly you were like what am I watching and I will admit, almost everything I've seen has not been live.

It's all been. I kind of knew who was going to win. I kind of like I just want to see it because it was live. I have to admit, I was like on on my edge at the last little bit, like don't fall, don't fall, don't fall, don't fall like she's going around this thing, like no, don't slow. You know like you're winning, just you, just ruined it for everybody.

2:05:39 - Leo Laporte
We apologize for the spoiler, it's been but you know what you can watch it and don't tell your friends and family. You say, hey, let's watch this yeah we ruined.

2:05:47 - Jason Snell
We should watch this and then the brilliant thing is now, having embraced the fact that people can watch live, is I think the primetime show has gotten better because they've embraced the fact I have to, that it is a challenge highlights and storytelling which it, always it always was that. But they were also bearing the burden of being the only window into the olympics for the viewers, and now they don't have to worry.

2:06:09 - Alex Lindsay
I think that's why I hated the storytelling, because I was, like you know, that there's a sport going on instead of this right, like you know, like now it's like basketball.

2:06:16 - Jason Snell
Well, you could have watched the basketball game, women's soccer. You could. You could just watch that.

2:06:20 - Alex Lindsay
You don't need us to tell to show you 10 minutes of the women's soccer game, as if it's happening another one that I fell into, by the way it's been long enough, I think the other one that I fell into was the women's seven on seven rugby, where I just fell into it live and I was like I fell into it the last five minutes and I literally turned around the last five minutes.

2:06:40 - Jason Snell
I was like what am I watching, you know like it was, and then it was that the one where the us won the bronze medal on. Literally as time expired, she broke away from the tackler and ran all the way down the field. It was yeah, we're big, seven on seven rugby. I rugby team.

2:06:56 - Leo Laporte
I know we're spoiling this, but this is what's been. Really different is and in fact there's a whole article on the Financial Times is the effect of social media on all this. You cannot escape the highlights of the Olympics almost instantaneously.

2:07:10 - Alex Lindsay
My wife was complaining about it. She's like I can't watch the news at all.

2:07:13 - Jason Snell
I can't even look at the news. You can't look at TikTok, you can't look at Twitter.

2:07:18 - Alex Lindsay
You need a Chrome extension that just says block. It's like a Twitter mute.

2:07:23 - Leo Laporte
It's like an ad blocker, but it's like subject blocker.

2:07:25 - Alex Lindsay
I don't want to see anything about the Olympics Article in the Financial Times.

2:07:29 - Leo Laporte
Broadcasters are actually flying in creators TikTokers YouTubers to creators tiktokers Youtubers.

2:07:33 - Alex Lindsay
Oh yeah, to actually create this content, which is super smart, brilliant they finally woke up to the potential talk to me all the time, because I do a lot of stuff with creators and we talk to our brands that we work with and and they go well, we're going to get this person. It's like some broadcast person. I'm like, okay, I just need you to know that nothing that's not going to have any legs, like you have to hire a creator who is actually doing it.

2:07:54 - Leo Laporte
That you cannot hire someone from old media and expect to get any kind of like traction one of the things ft says is that they are, they have, they're creative, they're finding new ways of approaching this content. So it's not the same old right, you know agony of victory and the agony of defeat, or the thrill of it.

2:08:11 - Jason Snell
You know the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat if you say it. It like the White Rose Awards. It's wrong Get there? Yeah, it is, although I'll tell you I've been impressed that NBC has tried to take a page. They're NBC, they're not TikTok.

2:08:25 - Leo Laporte
Putting Colin Just in the sand in Tahiti is kind of smart.

2:08:33 - Jason Snell
Well and they've been sending Snoop Dogg Snoop and Martha Stewart were at the equestrian Snoop got a lot of.

2:08:39 - Leo Laporte
Even Lisa said Snoop's carrying the torch. What's going on he?

2:08:43 - Jason Snell
was hanging on the bus with the basketball team, he's dancing in the stands. And I mean, whoever would have guessed Snoop Dogg would be America's sweetheart? But here we are.

2:08:53 - Alex Lindsay
I think it's the Martha Stewart thing. There's something about watching.

2:08:55 - Leo Laporte
Have you ever?

2:08:56 - Alex Lindsay
watched any of the martha stewart stuff with snooze up he comes across.

2:08:58 - Leo Laporte
It's also the legalization of marijuana also.

2:09:01 - Jason Snell
That is undoubtedly happening, but but so you can't really be a gangster when you're smoking something illegal and they've got like a comedy highlights show that they're doing three or four times a week with a couple of I think it's Saturday Night Live people Like it's first off. So streaming has given a level of freedom to the Olympics.

2:09:21 - Leo Laporte
That's right, that it needed.

2:09:23 - Jason Snell
And they've experimented like 2021,. As it turns out, tokyo was the part where they were supposed to really embrace it. I feel like they got the streaming in 21, but now they get it Like now they actually understand how it should work.

2:09:38 - Leo Laporte
I mean we're not around as far around the world Right.

2:09:41 - Jason Snell
It's a little easier.

2:09:41 - Leo Laporte
It's happening all during the day here, but I think this is actually really telling that how long it takes for a new medium to come along and then really reach its potential Exactly Is a couple of decades. I mean it's four or five Olympics, Right.

2:09:55 - Alex Lindsay
Because they potential exactly is a couple of decades. I mean it's four or five olympics right before because, they're only doing it every four years.

2:10:00 - Jason Snell
The iteration rate is very slow, but it's true in general.

2:10:01 - Alex Lindsay
In general but I mean, but yeah, but yeah it's.

2:10:02 - Leo Laporte
You're iterating very slowly yeah, and you know what it is. We can see it because it's every four years, but it still took them 20 years to figure it out. Yeah, but we see the big leaps every four years right.

2:10:12 - Jason Snell
Right, because because you got originally like it, it was not a problem getting spoiled, because they would even not spoil it on like the radio and the tv. They would be like we're not going to even tell you because we know everybody's watching the olympics tonight. But that went away very quickly and they kept doing it and it's like no, no guys, you gotta, that's not going to work anymore and it took them a long time to get there. The exciting thing actually it's almost surprising is I feel like they got there.

2:10:39 - Alex Lindsay
I feel like this time, well, I mean, they really got it right social media is like, and it's like middle age, middle-aged or even maybe slightly geriatric at this point. So they're, you know they're, they're finally getting to it. I think that one of the other things is you're seeing some creators really take advantage of like um chloe abram did a thing about the shoes, where they cut the shoe in half and they talk about that was wild yeah, and she did such a great job.

Really well done, it was really well done nike and interviews and and the reason she got it, she timed it so it came out right before the olympics, you know and but I think you're going to see social media also realize, oh, I can get a big, you know, like some of them got it, but she really got it and she got. You know she's big enough that she can make that work, but it's.

2:11:20 - Leo Laporte
But she got like 1.8 million downloads in a couple weeks, you know so here the financial times talks about a british food influencer underrated, hijabi, whose signature content involves eating and drinking new foods typically sweets and desserts while sitting in her car. She has 1.8 million followers on YouTube, 3.5 million on TikTok. Eurosport brought her in to shine a light on the equestrian events.

2:11:45 - Alex Lindsay
That's amazing. Well, at least they didn't have her talk about the food, because she was trying the food. I'm sure the food was awful. That would be kind of brilliant, though.

2:11:52 - Jason Snell
It would be, it would be rough, would be. It would be a lot of complaints about the food, which is a shame because it's france right, I know that was like you only had one job like was you know?

2:12:00 - Leo Laporte
are you saying that the croissants and baguettes are not all that they should be?

2:12:03 - Alex Lindsay
no, no, it's that they wanted to make them very sustainable and, and and low, low meat content and everything else, and so all the athletes are like um protein, please I think that, like all left I mean simone- biles posted a five second video of the us team pretending to crunch their way through their newly won gold medals.

2:12:21 - Leo Laporte
Even the teams, yeah, and the, and of course, the athletes, who are young, of course, are all savvy to all, exactly.

2:12:28 - Alex Lindsay
Well, and then really interesting and a lot of the drama 48 million views on the gymnastics drama, but with michaela. Uh, oh, yeah, like that was a like. Yeah, like it didn't talk about like with simone biles talk about someone keeping receipts. It's like that's something that was posted a long time ago some spice to all of this, and she and she on the human side with, with age and savviness and dedication.

2:12:50 - Jason Snell
I would actually say also olympians remind me of create successful creators they are people who have devoted themselves, yes, to this thing and becoming among the best in the world and they're very high profile so it's not surprising, their butts off, and most of them, especially like the gymnasts, are very good at social media as well.

2:13:10 - Alex Lindsay
I mean, they've, they've been, they have, uh, they know what they're doing.

2:13:14 - Jason Snell
They've got endorsements. They're very similar.

2:13:17 - Leo Laporte
What's going to happen when we ban?

2:13:18 - Jason Howell
TikTok. That's a great question, whoops. Well, especially because you've got presidents, you've got the presidential hopefuls using it and relying on it, and everything Whoops.

2:13:30 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, it'll be interesting to see what happens. I still feel like it's a threat. It can't happen. When you get down to actually making the chimichangas, it's hard to know whether you're going to actually take the beans out.

2:13:41 - Leo Laporte
Are you going to spend? You're a sports fan. Are you going to spend $43 a month for the Disney Fox, Warner Brothers, Discovery Sports Streamer venue?

2:13:50 - Benito Gonzalez
I am amazed at the reaction to this, and I shouldn't be because I have been, so I do a podcast about this called downstream.

2:13:57 - Jason Snell
We've been talking about it for a long time now. People are so shocked at that price. But you've got to understand that price is intended to replace the cable bundle. So this is this is a service that's intended to be kind of like. Right now, to get most of the stuff that's in venue sports, you can't just subscribe to paramount Plus or something you have to subscribe to. You either have to have cable or satellite or you have to do an over-the-top virtual cable company like YouTube TV or Fubo.

2:14:24 - Leo Laporte
But even YouTube TV, which is 75 bucks a month, doesn't maybe have all of this stuff.

2:14:28 - Jason Snell
Right and Fubo was actually originally, which I use, was built to be a sports service, but they had to take all these other channels because they were all bundled together. Well, so these three organizations Fox, espn and Warner Brothers, discovery, so TNT and TBS banded together to build a skinny bundle, basically, of their channels that have sports on them.

2:14:50 - Leo Laporte
ESPN, espn2, espnu, secn, which is the Southern Conference, acc, espn news, abc fox, fs1, fs2, bt and tnt tbs, true tv, espn plus yeah, so the the story here is espn cable was never available unless you had something like a cable subscription.

2:15:10 - Jason Snell
It was the most expensive cable TV network also does not have a streaming equivalent. So so my take on forty three dollars a month is I'm paying Fubo like eighty dollars and if, if they have all the sports and I think it's an open question, all the sports that I want, that I'm getting from Fubo now this actually is a pretty good deal as a sports fan, because I don't need all those extra channels. The question is is will they actually cover everything? Because, like I'm a san francisco giants fan, well, you see, are they going to have a re. Are they going?

to have a regional sports network though are they going to have the local?

2:15:43 - Leo Laporte
this is what's happened. All the regional sports networks are failing, aren't they?

2:15:46 - Jason Snell
right? Well, or a lot of them are that one. That one is a little less clear, so that's a question, but the theoretically, you could pay for this and a handful of streaming services like Peacock and Paramount Plus, and you could get all the NFL.

2:16:03 - Leo Laporte
It's a bet that there are people like you who really only want to watch sports, right, yeah, how many people.

2:16:09 - Jason Snell
As long as I get sports, I don't care All. I use Fubo for is sports and Jeopardy. That's literally it.

2:16:16 - Alex Lindsay
That's literally it. I have YouTube TV and I still pay for the NFL ticket so that I can have all of that there.

2:16:24 - Leo Laporte
I do too, and that's expensive.

2:16:25 - Alex Lindsay
It's expensive and worth every penny. It is such a great deal. Finally, there's no blackouts. The four up is really awesome.

2:16:33 - Jason Snell
What it doesn't get you is cbs and fox, local channels. Paramount plus will get you your local unfortunately does fox will not. Will not sunday ticket. Youtube tv will for 70, but sunday ticket won't get you your in market games.

2:16:49 - Alex Lindsay
That's unfortunate. It doesn't most of their licenses require them to. From some, you know, and so the thing is, is it's a real disaster because a lot of the stations, the local stations, have lower resolution than some of the other stations.

2:17:02 - Jason Snell
So the way it works is if you are a YouTube TV subscriber with Sunday Ticket, you get everything. But if you just subscribe to the standalone NFL Sunday Ticket, your local market games are blacked out, right right right, and then you can pay for paramount plus and get your local cbs covered. What about if the 49ers game is on fox right now? The answer is you can't get it, there's nowhere. No, if you get, makes that available.

2:17:27 - Alex Lindsay
Right, because I make, I do it with Youtube tv and then I add 70 or whatever, 75 plus 250 75 bucks a month or whatever, and then I pay for all the yeah, and then, and then I, and then I pay extra. So venue.

2:17:40 - Jason Snell
What venue is all about is trying to take that piece, that is the very expensive cable replacement for 70 or 80 bucks and saying we're going to make a light version of that. That's just getting you sports channels and the question is all right, but will it give me the sports channels I want? And is that a deal I want to make to leo's point of like do do I use live tv for anything else? The idea here is, what they want to create is a service that lets people cancel their cable subscription right and not miss their sports then the 42.99 doesn't matter and I'm saving money and you're you.

2:18:12 - Alex Lindsay
It will save you money in that scenario and what I'll be curious about is how good is their DVR service? Because the thing for me, I don't watch any live things on YouTube TV, like I don't watch anything live on YouTube except for football, and even then it's not technically live, because I usually start watching 20 minutes in, 20 minutes in, yeah and so. But I, when I'm the big thing with YouTube, like with Olympics, I just said, hey, the Olympics are coming up, do you want to record all of these? And you're like, yes, you know, and the same thing with. I mean, I record probably hundreds of shows because it's just metadata to them, right?

2:18:48 - Jason Snell
Yeah.

2:18:48 - Alex Lindsay
And so it's just, you know, hundreds of shows are recorded, and so, and if I see one that I saw, that I wished I had, I hit record. So the next time I don't have to think about that.

2:18:56 - Jason Snell
So the yeah. So the challenge will be, technically, who's building this? Is it Fox? Um, is it Warner brothers discovery? Because it's a joint venture. You would think it would be Disney because of ESPN. But here's the funny thing about venue is, next year, espn is launching its own standalone service the top.

2:19:14 - Leo Laporte
Will they pull out a venue?

2:19:18 - Jason Snell
And I don't know whether they'll pull out of it or whether they will reprioritize or what quite the deal is there. Because for my money, if ESPN could come out with an offering, with some partners or some add-ons and try to build ESPN as the brand for all sports aggregated together, that could be really powerful. That could be a powerful product. But that's next year, not this year.

2:19:39 - Alex Lindsay
And I do think it will partially come down to the player and the service and everything else and whether people feel like it's fluid, you know, and that's you know. Disney has the advantage that they bought MLBAM, so the MLB team best in the world at streaming you know state of the art.

And then the other state of the art is Youtube tv. I mean the infrastructure, like the, to do that little four up is not simple, you know, like you know to do it, because you're using all these local stations and then you're delivering them all to the thing and it's, it's a big, it's a you know, and Youtube tv, or those are the two big players, or ml bam and Youtube tv, as far as the highest quality, I can handle a really complex set of variables.

2:20:16 - Jason Snell
So we'll see. We'll see what happens. This came together really fast. There are some lawsuits.

2:20:25 - Leo Laporte
Fubo was suing them, saying why do you get a skinny bundle and we don't? It's unclear exactly what's going to be in here.

2:20:28 - Jason Snell
There are lots of issues going on here but here's the dream, whether it's going to be Venue or ESPN or maybe nobody, but I think the dream is that if you are a fan who wants to watch a sport and that sport is split across a bunch of different cable and broadcast channels and streaming services, I think the way that you crack this and this is why I keep thinking ESPN might be the ones to do it next year is have a single app that has all the sports in it and that's what Apple did with MLS.

And then what you do is you say, okay, well, we don't own the rights to all the sports, but we've got lots of sports and anything we don't have we will either sell to you and we'll resell you Paramount Plus and you can watch the sports here, or we'll link out to it and you click and then it'll just take you to that other app that's showing that game. If you could build a streaming interface for sports fans on their set-top boxes where you could get to everything, Because the biggest frustration in being a sports fan right now is if you want to watch the NFL, it might be on.

Amazon Prime or CBS or Paramount Plus or ESPN.

2:21:33 - Jason Howell
You need a trillion of sports.

2:21:35 - Jason Snell
It's so much you have to pay, yes, but like it's also just very confusing and frustrating. So if somebody can say, look, all the sports is here and you may, we may need to ask you to subscribe to some other service for that particular thing, but always come to us and you'll see all like would anybody ever do it per game, like a la carte, like I want to?

2:21:57 - Leo Laporte
see that I don't think so. No, because they make, they need to, they want subscription revenue, and what?

2:22:01 - Jason Snell
we found with peacock when they showed an nfl playoff game last fall is they retained a lot of those subscribers who then went and watched shows on peacock and that's the whole game, right there. Right it's. It's not for a one time, it's. Can we build a larger spend out of that?

2:22:17 - Leo Laporte
thanks to alex, we were able to visit the truck that amazon uh thursday night football uses.

2:22:23 - Alex Lindsay
They overspent building that thing they did not overspend. That's what it takes to do those shows like.

2:22:28 - Leo Laporte
That's what it takes to like like doing an nfl game, something like 12 trucks.

2:22:33 - Alex Lindsay
I mean it's incredible, there's not a penny that was overspent on those. I mean that's what it takes to do it. Okay, like it is so complicated, he told me, there was no limit on the budget.

2:22:42 - Leo Laporte
We could buy anything we wanted basically they believed that this was going to be profitable.

2:22:47 - Jason Snell
Because NFL makes money, it makes money you know NFL prints money and that's a top-tier national national game, like the sunday night game, but there was some question there are cheaper trucks.

2:22:57 - Alex Lindsay
But the sunday night games would watch a streaming only version of thursday night football. 8 to 12 trucks is kind of par for. I mean well, I wouldn't say 8 to 12, but there were. It was a big four to eight trucks par for the course, for every football, every nfl game and and this monday, or used to be sunday- night and thursday nights have the bigger big time, because that's a higher production.

2:23:14 - Jason Snell
I mean, it used to be monday but Sunday night and Thursday nights have the bigger packages. Yeah, because that's a higher national production.

2:23:17 - Alex Lindsay
I mean it used to be Monday night, and then it just kind of got ESPN.

2:23:19 - Jason Snell
I think Monday night is now they're doing it more, showing it on ABC and ESPN. They've kind of brought it back a little bit.

2:23:26 - Alex Lindsay
The best Monday night is the Manning brothers. I love Peyton and Eli talking. It's getting better. It's like when they started it had all the dumb broadcast stuff.

2:23:34 - Leo Laporte
I like to watch the Nickelodeon version and now it's getting better Speaking of the Olympics.

2:23:38 - Jason Snell
It's another good example of a broadcaster saying you know what, just because we've got these rights, we could do other things with it, Whether it's having the Manning brothers, MST3K or Nickelodeon do a football game and you're allowed to buy anything you want for those trucks but it's also why abc had abc had great success showing uh monday night football on back on on ABC instead of just using ESPN. And one of the interesting wrinkles in the new contract, the NBA TV deal, is that in winning the B package for the NBA and taking it away from Warner Brothers, discovery and TNT, nbc guaranteed that they're going to just put nba games on in prime time twice a week and that saves them money on expensive scripted shows and it means that you there's still demand for their broadcast channel. It makes their affiliates happy, it makes them money, so you're going to start seeing way more sports on those broadcast channels sports are the last bit they're kind of.

They're their last bastion I mean there's a lot of money to be made there they've been losing a lot of money in a lot of other places.

2:24:55 - Alex Lindsay
They're like we can still make money here. We get the NBA song back too.

2:24:59 - Jason Snell
Yeah, roundball Rock by John Tesh it's coming back.

2:25:02 - Leo Laporte
What? Okay, I don't want to hear that.

2:25:06 - Jason Snell
There's a great SNL sketch about roundball rock, if you want more of this. Jason's got a show Downstream, relay FM slash downstream.

2:25:14 - Leo Laporte
Check it out, yep, let's take. And meanwhile, while they're getting eight trucks, I'm moving into my attic, so you?

2:25:20 - Benito Gonzalez
know you should play more football. I should do more sports.

2:25:22 - Alex Lindsay
Have you thought about quarterback?

2:25:23 - Leo Laporte
I should have. Maybe I could have a puppy bowl in my attic. Our show today, brought to you by Coda. This is a great solution. When I found this, I thought, oh, this is so cool.

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cool, uh, we, this is a momentous occasion I I'm gonna miss having a bunch of people in the same uh room with me. Did you get used to that after a while?

2:27:25 - Jason Snell
yeah, you know not having to it. Yeah, it is. I mean. This is, I mean covet sort of got us all used to. Yeah right.

2:27:30 - Leo Laporte
Well, in fact, if it weren't for code of it covet, I don't know if we'd even consider this.

2:27:33 - Jason Snell
Right but sort of pushed. I was saying to Jason before the show that you know when we started doing podcasting because you came from professional broadcasting, right, podcasting we had to use expensive professional audio gear. But the intervening decade or two the cost of really great gear has come way down way down.

2:27:57 - Leo Laporte
I can't believe.

2:27:58 - Jason Snell
And then, from video production. And then covid gave it this extra kick where all the all the news channels and everything else suddenly realized well, we can't have our guests the standards streaming technology you used to send like a limo to somebody and bring it to your office and things like that.

2:28:14 - Alex Lindsay
Kids, I still do. Yeah, not as big anymore. I mean it's just, it's transformed. What's funny is is that the broadcasters have dropped their standards so much because they don't let anyone just jump on.

2:28:23 - Leo Laporte
I know I see people with AirPods who are regular. It's really bad, actually Like they need to up their game a little no-transcript.

2:28:44 - Alex Lindsay
And what's funny is now podcasters and YouTubers are doing much higher quality than the broadcasters are, which is also part of like well, why does anyone believe us anymore? Well, it's because they're used to looking at A7S footage from YouTubers telling them things. And then they look at you and you look horrible, like coming from there, and they're still coming in from their house In a dark room.

2:29:03 - Leo Laporte
That's probably why Don Lemon agreed to move from CNN. Well, he was fired, but moved from CNN to X, and you remember what happened.

2:29:15 - Alex Lindsay
It didn't turn out well. He interviewed Elon. He poked the bear immediately. You gotta dig in a little bit before he poked the bear and he just went.

2:29:21 - Leo Laporte
I'm just gonna poke the bear, I think he's a journalist and if you hire Don Lemon, a newsman, and you give him an interview, you don't expect him to throw you softballs. Maybe you do. Lemon agreed in January to move his show to x as part of the platform's effort to create premium content to attract advertisers. This is part of linda, like yaccarino's right plan to revitalize x so linda thought it was a great idea.

2:29:44 - Jason Snell
Elon was like this would not be the last time that linda got under money.

2:29:48 - Alex Lindsay
Don lemon just didn't didn't learn the, the, the cardinal skill of the. To stab someone in the, you have to get behind them first, don't do it in front of them. So then you're in position.

2:30:00 - Leo Laporte
You don't agree to pay a million and a half a year which is decent money Probably not what lemon was getting at CNN, but still good money to produce videos exclusively on X. He also said we'll give you a share of the advertising revenue and additional cash incentives as you gain followers. Uh, and he agreed to be don lemon's first guest on the show. This was back in march. Lemon asked the billionaire about his drug use and politics. Apparently, this is the funniest part, don lemon didn't sign a contract. Yeah, what's that all about? Uh, elon told him during a phone call there's no need to fill out paperwork. Don't worry about it, I got you.

Reassured Mr Lemon that X would financially support the show, even if he didn't like the views Don Lemon espoused. According to the court filing, literally, elon walks out of the interview and says you're out of here you are. We canceled this. Uh, mr musk said the questions were quite personal, as I love the new york times as mr lemon pressed him about his drug use. After the interview, musk texted lemon's agent to say uh, this contract has been canceled. Now don lemon is suinging, of course, in San Francisco saying hey you promised me it's going to be huff.

Tough. There was no paperwork it's going to be a little how.

2:31:24 - Alex Lindsay
The question is how did that happen? Email Like yeah, there's gotta be something in writing. Yes. Or maybe not, maybe not.

2:31:29 - Leo Laporte
Elon is apparently fairly cagey, apparently fairly cagey.

2:31:33 - Jason Howell
Yeah, just kind of surprising that Don Lemon would miss that deal.

2:31:36 - Leo Laporte
He might have been a little desperate. I would ask for a contract. You know, even I would ask for a contract yeah, do you have a contract with Espinito? I have an employment contract. Oh, okay, good, I stand behind it, whatever it says. Meta is talking with some big-name stars to get their voices no-transcript and apparently offering them millions of dollars for the rights to record In perpetuity?

2:32:09 - Jason Howell
No, I think there's going to be some restrictions.

2:32:11 - Leo Laporte
You know, if somebody said Leo, here's a million and a half dollars. Can we use your voice forever? I would say sure.

2:32:18 - Jason Snell
I think that's a reasonable thing to say hey, we actually understand that these voices have value and we will pay the people to use their voices. And we will pay the people to use their voices. You know, we got here because there was this feeling like they tried. You know, openai tried to pay Scarlett Johansson and she said no, thank you.

2:32:35 - Leo Laporte
And they're like, well, okay, she's also the highest paid star in Hollywood right now, so she didn't need the money.

2:32:42 - Jason Snell
Exactly, and so this is more like it's akin to the New York Times signing a deal with Apple to license their content for AI scanning. Right, it's this idea of oh, you mean there's a quid pro quo, you mean there's a exchange of value happening here, instead of you just stealing it, ok.

2:33:00 - Leo Laporte
According to Bloomberg, though, negotiations have started and stopped many times because they can't agree on terms, meta would like to secure rights for many uses over a fixed term on a single project. Many uses over a fixed term on a single project, that's not bad. Representatives are seeking even stricter limits. And remember that there's a strike, a new strike. Voice actors on video games have walked out. Sag-a out, sag after members, so there's still a little well, they're in much more.

2:33:33 - Alex Lindsay
Uh, sat the sag actors that are part of video games are in much more pressure than actors are in for films, because you really can replace a lot of their voices with ai, like, what they're really worried about is that there are a handful of them that are well known and everybody knows and everything else. But you could, there's huge amounts of the kind of the bit actors right that are in there that ai can totally do now, totally, you know. And so the thing is is it's in fact, if you're the top golden age for npcs, right, yeah, all those npcs are all like and all the side characters that aren't aren't the main names, that are people that are connected. If you don't know them already, why would you start going down that path? You know, and I think that's the challenge that they're going to have, because you know, with actors, I think it's a lot harder with actors because they it's hard to be a good actor as a human. You know, having a computer do it is really a much more difficult thing. It's in video and it's all these other things, but when in in video games you're not even there, your voiceover you're. You're doing a voiceover Now motion cap caption actors are also like trying to say this is, this is not just data, like the game companies want to say.

Motion capture is just, you know, it's a bunch of little markers that we have and, uh, but I can tell you as someone when we were working on star wars and you know, 20 or 30 years ago, I could see the markers moving and I could tell you who that person was like. I could tell you that that really, yeah, this is joe and that's I could. I couldn't even tell you why, but I just knew that the way the markers worked, I knew who the artist, yeah, but they'll say they're saying that's me, that you're capturing and that I should, you know, and it should, should be carried. And that's a tricky one, because pretty much the industry has treated it like data since the beginning and so it's hard to get them to renegotiate James.

2:35:16 - Leo Laporte
Earl Jones signed over his Darth Vader to Lucas, though for so much yeah.

2:35:21 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, I'm sure.

2:35:22 - Leo Laporte
A lot. I'm sure compensating him, and when you're an actor, I think, towards the end of your career to have a big, it him. And and when you're an actor, at the end of your career to have a big it's like the beatles selling their, their rights to their music.

2:35:31 - Benito Gonzalez
I'd like to push back a little bit on the idea that the bit part players have an easy job to replace, though, because, like, that's still acting and actors still have to get those, it's true, before they get the bigger jobs no, no, you're right.

2:35:42 - Alex Lindsay
So the issue is you're right that they need to get those jobs, get the bigger jobs. The pipe is a really complicated problem with ai because it's going to replace a lot of the inflow, right.

2:35:52 - Benito Gonzalez
So all about everything. That's what, that's what ai is destroying in all the industries of the intake absolutely, and and that that is the issue.

2:35:59 - Alex Lindsay
But I'm saying that the, the producers don't. They're looking at what are we eating today and and they're not thinking about, yeah, their supply chain, and so they're, but that is a. The supply chain is a huge issue in many parts of where AI is, because what it does is it magnifies. The most advanced people in any industry can do a lot more because of AI, but it means that there's not that many junior programmers or novice programmers or anything else, because it's replacing it.

But the companies that are hiring people are not. They're not thinking about that that problem. They're just thinking about well, this costs less to do it.

2:36:36 - Jason Howell
I remember back in the day, didn't you have Samuel Jackson on your, on your ways, or something like that?

2:36:42 - Leo Laporte
Oh yeah I had. My favorite was Dennis Hopper. Dennis Hopper was kind of a stoned hippie and he would at the end you'd arrive at your destination, you've arrived here, but I don't know why anyone would want to go here. It was like dude. That was pretty funny. I missed that.

2:36:59 - Alex Lindsay
Actually, I think it's on tom tom I mean they're having michaels doing the, the uh, I mean the customized. Ai al, michaels is doing the customized. I haven't seen any of them yet. Are they any good?

2:37:10 - Jason Snell
I mean it sounds okay. They obviously got Al Michaels to do a lot of specific training and then they wrote a bunch of dialogue and the idea is it's a personalized highlight package, so it's just generated automatically. It's fine, it'll get better.

2:37:24 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, in 10 years, and that's what they're really worried about. Maybe not, yeah, in 10 years, and that's what they're really worried about. Maybe not even yeah, maybe two. That's what they're really worried about right now. You know it's fake and it's. I was.

2:37:33 - Alex Lindsay
I was thinking about glassy kind of quality. Yeah, my son and I we do a lot of different skills in the pool with throwing the football, you know, and we were like you know we could get hit al michael's voice now and like have it like narrate the whole thing a little little bit of. Nfl films, music in slow motion You'd be sad.

2:37:50 - Leo Laporte
It's only cool the first time, then it's completely devalued. Now Michael's voice is worthless, because everybody's got it. By the way, wow, your son used to be this little guy.

2:38:00 - Alex Lindsay
I have a picture of him standing on your lap, not standing on my lap now, wow.

2:38:06 - Leo Laporte
He's now four inches taller than I am Unbelievable. How old are you? 16. Okay, you're in high school. Yeah, wow, your kids are so great. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's so nice to see you. Thank you for coming Last time. Last time Google made speaking of AI. Google made a little boo-boo. This is right up there with the apple ad crushing all of the tools that artists use to create beautiful stuff. Google had a uh, had a father get his daughter to write an ad to her favorite athlete using ai, dear sydney. It was developed in-house, which seems to be a problem for these companies to promote google's gemini ai platform, but viewers didn't like the storyline in the ad. A father wants to help his daughter write a letter to olympic track star sydney mclaughlin laveroni, but instead of encouraging her to take part in such a personal moment, he has the AI write the letter.

2:39:09 - Jason Howell
It gets to the core of the removing the humanity from the very human thing, which is wow. I idolize this person. I'm going to share a little bit of my humanity by letting them know, and instead it's like why don't you write something that's passable?

2:39:25 - Leo Laporte
enough. And what are you teaching the girl? The funny thing is, you don't need to write that letter Just have.

2:39:29 - Alex Lindsay
AI generate it. Yeah, and move on with your day. The one thing that I write personally is that note. Because cover letters I'm always kind of like eh.

2:39:38 - Leo Laporte
Yeah certain things, I once got a handwritten heartfelt note from Alan Alda saying how much he liked the work we did on Tech TV.

2:39:48 - Jason Howell
That was meaningful, If you didn't AI write it, it wouldn't Now wait a minute. Did you look close at the ink and make sure it wasn't printed handwriting.

2:39:56 - Leo Laporte
It was an auto pen, I'm sure it was.

2:39:58 - Jason Snell
It shows you how clueless a lot of companies are in terms of they're desperately trying to find use cases for AI?

2:40:05 - Jason Howell
Yes, they really are.

2:40:05 - Jason Snell
That's everything they nail right now to find use cases for ai. That's everything right. And and they're struggling to do it. My wife mentioned to me we were talking about this because we watched this ad during the olympics. I haven't seen it since. I think it went away. Well, yep, um. And she said she remembers seeing somewhere that comment about how, you know, I want to use ai to free up more time for me to do gardening and not use ai to do the gardening so that I can have more time doing my office work. This is a little like that. It's like why is a little girl expressing emotion, a thing we must stamp out and replace with efficient ai? It's so.

2:40:41 - Leo Laporte
It's such a bad idea you're right, they pulled the ad.

2:40:45 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, but I think a lot of times you drink your own kool-aid and you're thinking about all those cool things and you're internal and you're thinking about all the things it can do and you're using it for those kinds of things and you're not really thinking about an outside world conversation.

2:40:56 - Jason Snell
It's so heartwarming that this little girl is like no, your product is not heartwarming.

2:41:01 - Alex Lindsay
I think it's Apple. Crushing all the instruments was the same kind of thing. Their idea is we're bringing all these and putting them into your ipad, but that's not how it was the same.

2:41:11 - Jason Snell
I mean, yeah, same tone deafness, just in two different realms and ai is harder, like there are other ways to get across buy a cool piece of hardware, but this is like with ai. It's really like all right, we need to come up with a good use case that will be heartwarming, that we can put on display and or that you can get.

2:41:27 - Alex Lindsay
Like I was talking to an educational researcher or consultant. They design educational curriculum and they and they said that AI is going to change education more in the next five years than it has in 100 years. You know, and I was like I was asking for examples and goes OK, well, think about this way. The first thing you have to do is you have to learn. You have to learn to read so that you can read to learn. But getting kids to be able to learn you know, what books do you have? How do they do it? And then we have these Lexile scores.

Lexile scores define what their comprehension is and it goes up to from like a 100 up to 1400, I think as a senior in high school, or something like that. Anyway. So what he was talking about is we can just have a child ask tell me about horses, and I will give that answer to you in the lexile score that I know you're at, and then I will build a. I will build you a test from what I just gave you to test your comprehension and then the next time you'll either get, the next time you ask about horses or anything else I'll slowly move that lexile score one way or the other, and so and, and, and. The thing is is it's just it's individually adjusting instead of being one of 30 and trying to keep up, or trying to, or going too fast, or whatever.

It's. Every child has an individual learning thing where they're not even reading about a certain subject. They're reading about whatever they feel like they're interested in, and then they're being tested on that comprehension and then it's automatically just moving them along as they can. Actually, I'll be honest with you.

2:42:45 - Leo Laporte
We had this when I was in sixth grade 60 years ago. Was called SRI oh.

2:42:50 - Jason Howell
SRI. I remember that, Remember that, yep.

2:42:53 - Leo Laporte
And you'd read and you'd take a test and you'd get to go to the next color.

2:42:57 - Jason Howell
Oh man, you just brought back some secrets. Yeah, remember that.

2:42:58 - Alex Lindsay
Thank you. That was a great way to teach reading.

2:43:01 - Jason Snell
But imagine it being any subject you're interested in it in and building that up for differences for things like math, where, um, there are a bunch of different approaches to teaching and they don't work, for in different people learn in different ways and so like new math is stupid. Having the ability to adjust, have you two different learning differences?

2:43:17 - Leo Laporte
yeah, have you started playing with the calculator, the apple ai?

2:43:21 - Jason Snell
yeah, I've used it a little bit okay, because I'm hearing some negatives.

2:43:24 - Leo Laporte
So it's we'll talk about this too. Don't say, okay, we'll save it, I'll do some differential equations between now? Yes, with these two guys, alex lindsey and Jason snow, uh, this coming tuesday for mac break weekly. Thank you, alex, for being here. Thank you, how did it go? Do we hi everybody on the vision, bro hi?

2:43:43 - Alex Lindsay
we did have some. We did have, uh, some frame dropping when we got it out of the case and there was it better now. Yeah, it's cooled off. We think it's been fine. It's too hot. Yeah, it was a mixture of that.

2:43:54 - Jason Snell
And then no one, no one's done a two-hour stream on this platform before I mean no, like this is all brand new I mean, this is like there's been a handful of you know, um, yeah, talk, show you know, there's just a very small number yeah, so it's, I mean oh yeah, the talk show did it yeah, yeah, the sandwich at exactly so sandwich did it and we did it and that's been about it, yeah.

2:44:15 - Alex Lindsay
So, so like they're, you know, first 10, uh, spatial streams out there for this, nice, nice, thank you alex for setting that up.

2:44:22 - Leo Laporte
I really appreciate it thank you for you. It's been many years, uh, since before the beginning.

2:44:27 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, it's been a great partnership and I'm kind of copying you now I can't wait to see where it goes, and we're excited to see how you used all the cameras you recommended.

2:44:35 - Leo Laporte
They look nice, they look nice, I got all the hardware. Yeah, you told me to get, so it'll be it should look good anyway, yeah we shall see Jason snell, go back to your garage. We will be back together again and you're going going to take over while I'm on vacation next month.

2:44:50 - Jason Snell
Yeah For a Mac break. I think One of those Mac break episodes may be the day of the Apple event, so that might not work out.

2:44:55 - Leo Laporte
We'll see. Oh, yes, we'll see. You were saying the Apple event will probably be it's Tuesday the 10th. I think yeah, Most likely.

2:45:08 - Alex Lindsay
It can't be the third because that's too close to Labor Day. They've done it on the day after Labor Day, but I think they prefer not to. It's super expensive. I guess it's not a bad now. Now they're just streaming Before. If you do something like the thing you think about on a Tuesday, you're paying like double time on Sunday and Monday.

2:45:19 - Jason Snell
But it's not live, so no fun, just have it recorded.

2:45:29 - Leo Laporte
For Alex and me just check in before you give away this desk because we're going to do, we're going to figure it out, we have an auction.

2:45:34 - Jason Howell
Oh nice, Jason you want to get in on that?

2:45:35 - Leo Laporte
no, I have nowhere to put this ginormous desk uh, Jason, it's so great to see you ai inside 10 am on tuesday or wednesdays. Yeah, 10 am at the tech sploter Youtube channel with the jeff charles. Of course you can watch it after the podcast all over the places.

2:45:49 - Jason Howell
What else are you doing? Well, doing that, you know, doing Android. Faithful, of course.

2:45:54 - Leo Laporte
Oh, that's right. How's that going?

2:45:56 - Jason Howell
It's going really well. We actually went out to New York for a Google event.

2:46:00 - Leo Laporte
We're going down to the hardware event here pretty soon, yeah.

2:46:03 - Jason Howell
Yeah, we're keeping very busy.

2:46:05 - Leo Laporte
Can I see that on the text bloater or where do I?

2:46:07 - Jason Howell
No, that's through the DTNS.

2:46:09 - Leo Laporte
YouTube channel.

2:46:11 - Jason Howell
Yeah, that's through the DTNS network, you can find that. And then, yeah, I'm just doing a bunch of random video content for my YouTube channel. Just really, at this point you know I'm six months into this grand experiment I'm still playing around with a lot of different random ideas to see what are the things that I enjoy, what are the things that connect with people and hopefully, it all you're still playing music and all of that too, I'm sure, yeah, patreoncom slash Jason howell.

2:46:36 - Leo Laporte
if you want to, yeah, support his work yeah thank you, leo, which is great. Uh, Jason snell is at sixcolors.com. Slash Jason. Yes, please, yes, please.

2:46:45 - Jason Snell
Thank you, sir may I have another?

2:46:48 - Leo Laporte
and and, of course, Alex Lindsay at officehours.global and, if you want to hire him, at 090.media. A very big thanks to John Slanina, our studio manager for the last 15 years. He's going to retire in a week, right? Something like that. Last show out of the studio will be Wednesday This Week in Google, or are they going to do Tech News Weekly? Nope, that's it. Last show is Wednesday, so I hope you'll be here for that as I weep and cry bitter tears walking out of the studio for the last time. Great to see Patrick Delahanty, who's normally in Massachusetts, came out to visit for the last week of shows in the TWiT Studio, and Michael O'Donnell, our photo, @photo on the X. Do you still do the X?

2:47:36 - Michael O'Donnell
Just a little not too much.

2:47:37 - Leo Laporte
You got that great handle @photo. You can't leave that behind. That's a hard one. Yeah, it's great to see you, Michael. Where are you putting your photos these days? Shiny red photo.

Michael O'Donnell
Shiny red photo.

Leo Laporte
Shiny red photo. Okay, it's because he has a shiny red camera. It's very attractive, good, very nice. You do corporate work and stuff like that. Michael O'Donnell has been with us since The Screen Savers. You went to like how many episodes of The Screen Savers? It was like 50 or 100 or something. It was like every time, every week. Anyway, great to see you and thank you, Gary, for coming by. Our aquaponics fanatic. Tried to wear his Vision Pro.

2:48:20 - Jason Snell
Decided, reality was better yeah.

2:48:22 - Leo Laporte
You know what, if you're in the studio, there's no point in wearing the Vision Pro. And thanks, of course, to our producer and technical director, Benito Gonzalez. Benito will continue to produce and td the show from his home. I bet you're happy about that!

Benito Gonzalez
Yeah, it should be interesting.

Leo Laporte
Yeah, got three screens...

2:48:43 - Jason Howell
Will Benito still have a microphone?

2:48:45 - Leo Laporte
Uh yeah, microphone and a camera so he can still chime in. Good, good, uh. He's going to be doing This Week in Google and TWiT. Kevin King will be doing Windows Weekly from his house, and what else? Who else is doing...

2:48:58 - Jason Snell
John Ashley.

2:48:58 - Leo Laporte
Oh, John Ashley is doing MacBreak Weekly, of course. Yeah, we're going to continue doing sort of Ask The Tech Guys, Mikah Sargent just going to do Hands-On Tech a half hour every week on Sunday in the Ask The Tech Guys slot. That'll be from his home, from... his he's in his basement. I'm in my attic. We'll see which one is better and he's going to have a lot of fun doing that. So I hope you'll tune in for that. Thank you everybody for being here. We really appreciate it. It's sad leaving the studio, but I think it's going to be an exciting next chapter in TWiT. We do TWiT Sunday afternoons. We're going to continue to do it on Sunday afternoons.

I was thinking let me know what you think about this. I'm moving it a little bit earlier. Right, because we don't. I mean there's nothing, no reason not to do it at noon or one. I um, because we don't. I mean there's nothing, no reason not to do it at noon, or one, I don't know. Think about it. I like to. Two is it is. We've been doing two of this at that time for so long why do you, why are you laughing?

2:49:55 - Alex Lindsay
because I go to I normally go to the sand, the San Rafael farmer's market, so like, I'm always like two is great. Two is perfect. I'm just finishing. Well, we'll keep it. It's not like it's not like I come very. I I'm not up here on Sundays very often, so I don't think I'm probably the only one.

2:50:08 - Leo Laporte
2 to 5 pm Pacific. That would be 8 to I don't know, I can't do the math. 5 to 8 pm East Coast time 2100 UTC.

You can watch the live streams everywhere. Now, we're going to keep doing that. Thank you, Patrick, for helping us with that. Russell Tammany keep doing that. Thank you, Patrick, for helping us with that. Uh, Russell Tammany. Patrick, John uh, Anthony Nielsen uh, we figured out how to use Restream to put us on seven different this is more than we've ever been before seven different platforms.

There's discord for the club members twit.tv/clubtwit if you're not already a member. There's youtube.com/twit/live. Twitch.tv/twit. We are also on Facebook. We are on x.com, often at the top there because nobody else is streaming on x.com. Now that Don Lemon's left uh, I shouldn't say that out loud. Elon will fire me. And uh, also on LinkedIn. Weirdly, who am I missing? Kick, which is one of the newbie new guys in town. Since Twitch was losing so much money, Kick thought, hey, that sounds good, let me get in on that. Uh, so seven different places. You can see us live, but also you can see us after the fact.

Get the, because it is a podcast. Get the shows at twit.tv, our website. There's a YouTube channel dedicated to the video, or you could just subscribe in your favorite podcast client and get it automatically every, every single Sunday night, Monday morning. Thank you everybody for your support. We really appreciate it. We'll say goodbye to the studio and a number of people in the chat room said you know you should play that Jeff Smith song that he wrote back in the day called "I'm a TWiT". So we'll go out with Jeff Smith and "I'm a TWiT". Thank you everybody. See you in the attic, bye-bye. Oh, I forgot to say another TWiT is in the can.