This Week in Tech 995 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.

00:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's time for Twit. This Week in Tech Got a great panel for you Lou Maresca's here from this Week in Enterprise Tech and Microsoft, doc Rock of YouTube fame and Ecamm star, and, of course, the wonderful Wesley Faulkner who is looking for work and maybe you can help him. We love all three. We will talk about AI and the new Amazon Echo that will cost $10 more. Will it be better, smarter or just chattier? We'll also talk about Telegram CEO Pavel Dorov. We know a little bit more about why the French arrested him last week. X has been shut down in Brazil and it's the end of the line for a non-tech. All that and more coming up next on TWIT.

00:50
Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is twit this is twit this week in tech, episode 995, recorded Sunday, september 1st 2024. The story of us. It's time for TWIT this Week in Tech, the show where we cover the week's tech news. I am, yes, still in the attic. I haven't moved, but we have brought in to my attic some wonderful people to help us take a look at the dearth of news this week. Doc rock is in town from honolulu, aloha good to see you again.

01:38 - Doc ROck (Guest)
It's been a minute I love doc rock.

01:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He is the not only has his own youtube channel, doc Rock, but is the director of strategic partnerships at Ecamm and in a way we are partners. We got married over the last yeah. Because when we moved out of the studio into the attic, we started using Ecamm instead of the TriCaster, so now we are Ecammers.

02:03 - Doc ROck (Guest)
You know it's been very helpful. Believe it or not, we absolutely love it. It's been a fantastic partnership. So you guys have always been the best in tech forever and it was fun to explain to everybody why we should go to it. And you know, ken and Glenn got it right away, the rest of the team. We had to explain to them what a twit was.

02:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh story of my life. No, it's a poor lisa, just a podcast network. It stands for this weekend, doc. Anyway, doc, it's great to see you and thank you for your help at ecamm. We really, uh, we've been so it's a kind of complicated solution we're using.

02:40
we're we're all on a zoom call. Using zoom is which we used for years in the studio, and then Benito is in charge of switching at his house. He is confused. He is Did you do that on purpose, Benito, just to show us you have the power? Is that what? You were.

03:03
Doc did that. Doc, you did that. That was me, don't be messing with us. So Benito is switching from his house. He is logged in via there. He is Hi, benito. He's logged in to Ecamm running using Splashtop, to a Macintosh running in the cloud at Mac Stadium. So the Mac is running Ecamm, he's Splashtopped into it. Splashtop is like VNCs. He's networked into that and then I don't know what Somehow there's a I don't even know how it works, it's too complicated the Zoom call goes into the ecamm at mac stadium and then he switches it and then somewhere it gets recorded and then bob's your uncle, you got a podcast.

03:53 - Doc ROck (Guest)
So thank you, doc you know, uh, this I was messing around. And then I had messed with splashtop eons ago, like probably back at our the last time we had macworld right. So we're talking 2013 2014. And then I had messed with Splashtop eons ago, like probably back at the last time we had Macworld right. So we're talking 2013, 2014. And then, when I was doing some testing and talking to Menino, I went and I got Splashtop Business again. I was in Japan. I had to edit a project in Final Cut and I forgot some of the files that I needed and so I logged in on Splashtop, opened up final cut from fukuoka, japan, back to honolulu, hawaii, two tiny islands floating in the pacific ocean, yeah, and I edited on my mac studio from the bed in my hotel in fukuoka and it was freaking flawless and I wanted to hug benito, but that's basically, what benito does every day, poor guy, anyway, great, anyway, great to have you, doc Rock.

04:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You're not alone, though. Wesley Faulkner is here. Hello, wes, hello, good to see you. It's very happy to be on the show you put up sound blankets to separate the rest of your home from the rest of the world that's a washer and dryer on the other side of that. Oh, okay, that's all right, I don't judge people for where they stream from.

05:03 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Yeah, I can't have all of this room.

05:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I have all of this room, except you don't see what's. This is the beauty of cameras. Whatever's outside that, it doesn't exist. Right as long as it's outside of the frame, it doesn't exist. Yeah, I'm glad you can't see the floor right now.

05:21
Or my desk you can't see the floor right now or my desk. Actually, I have a kind of a spy cam that lets you see the actual setup here. So there you go. That's the whole kit and caboodle. Uh, we won't show that again also with us. Anyway, great to see you, wesley, great to be here. Thanks, wesley83.com. Is his link tree Also with us, the wonderful Lou Maresca, former host of this Week in Enterprise Tech. He's Principal Engineering Manager at Microsoft Lives in UI land.

05:54 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
I do. I do live in UI land, I live in AI land, I live in all the lands, all the lands.

06:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All the lands. Well, who's winning in AI these days? Now, wait a minute, take off your Microsoft hat, don't say Copilot. Who's winning? I guess you don't have it. Well, openai is winning in AI. Right there, I guess OpenAI. I, like Claude, I think we're going to see in a few days. We're going to see what Apple has under its hood Pixel shipped, the Pixel 9. I got that and it's got some interesting AI features. It's quite a race this keeps you busy.

06:29 - Doc ROck (Guest)
It's exciting so open AI too so that's the funny thing about that I will say that Apple intelligence so far in beta, even though it's been extremely limited, is actually incredible, just for it's so personal to you. It's not like you're talking to the diaspora, you're talking to yourself, really that sounds weird.

06:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So we're going to see a little more of that.

06:58 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
The truth is, nvidia is winning.

07:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right, nvidia is winning because they're like the Levi's of all of this. Levi's made money on the gold rush in 1849 because they made the, the levi's the jeans, and even if you didn't hit gold, you needed some jeans. So so that's. They're making the picks and hammers. Is what, uh, what nvidia is doing? Yeah, big winners. Anybody who puts ai on their product is big winners these days. Apple's event has been announced. We know it will now be September 9th, monday, a week from Monday, a week from tomorrow, by the way. Happy September. Can you believe it's September? Unbelievable, what? The hell happened this?

07:38
summer.

07:39 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Happy Labor Day.

07:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm still wearing my white shoes and my white belt until after Labor Day, until tuesday after tuesday.

07:49 - Doc ROck (Guest)
So I'm okay, this for the weekend yeah, oh good, then once tuesday come around, it's over no more white shoes for me.

07:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So apple's event will be a week from monday, and the reason it can be, obviously, is because Apple records these now and nobody needs to work on Labor Day or the Sunday or anything like that. They probably have it already done. They will show their new iPhone 16 and maybe a little more of Apple intelligence, although, according to Mark Gurman and, I think, all the pundits, we're not going to see the real Apple intelligence in public until October. Right, even then, though, even then, it's not going to be full-fledged Apple intelligence. Doc, you're playing with the beta.

08:38 - Doc ROck (Guest)
Yes, and you know what. So here's the funny thing about this, because most of the YouTube pundititry my friends who I yell at constantly, um is they're like it's not full-fledged. Here's a story about ai. It's never full-fledged, it's a growing thing. So adding that label to it I get what your, your sentiment is, but it's never going to stop. That was like. You know, the x86 was the best processor ever until it wasn't you know like. It's going to always grow, so we have the best. My favorite line is ai is the dopest it will ever be today, as good as it would, yeah, it would change, you know, pretty much tomorrow. So people who feel like they're late, jumping in or whatever, I'm like jumping now because it'll be completely different in two weeks um, amazon has decided that they're going to add ai to alexa, is it?

09:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
let me ask the podcasters amongst us is it safe to say the a word now? Do people just say echo, just say echo, say echo, okay, echo I call her alicia. I think you have a butt actually have a button for that.

09:49 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Wait a minute the question is like who's going to pay for it?

09:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
so that's a good question, good question good question oh, oh, there's echo, that's so funny $10 a month Amazon wants for the Echo, your friend Echo, your jolly little AI friend Echo. Right, I'm not going to pay, I don't care how good it is. Of course. Isn't that ironic? Because I paid $20 to OpenAI, right, so right, I pay $30 to Microsoft. I paid $20 to Anthropic and I pay.

10:26 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Well, I was paying $20 to Google, but now I get gemini for free for a year, so I don't have to pay that one anymore. But the issue was that for the amazon echo, people use it for what? Timers and listening to music and just very amazon things. How is artificial intelligence going to make any of that better and how is it going to make it appealing to pay for? And there's always, always an uh. There's always been an issue with these ai or or these voice assistants, where it's discoverability of what it can do. And now you're making it more capable to figure out what you're going to do and it's just going to. There's going to be an analysis, paralysis about this.

10:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
How are people going to figure out how to use the timers will be so much better it will lie to you. Here's why.

11:04 - Doc ROck (Guest)
Here's why you're white, why you are right, wesley, I. One of the things that I used to do on amazon a lot is like I need to pick a product, okay, so leo and I are both, uh, unified people, right, I have a whole ubiquity, yes, set up all over, yes, and then say I'm looking for, I want to add a switch, right and at, they're better now before they would have five models that kind of were almost the same but a little bit different each, and it was Like trying to figure out which is the newest, whatever. So you'd have to sit there in Amazon and go through all the various processes to figure which is which. Now I just go to perplexity and I tell it build me a comparison chart of these ubiquity, models and Perplexity which now Google starting to add to theirs. It would just give me the answer.

11:52
Like I could just pull up this chart real quick. Look at it. See what's going on. Go make my order at UI. Calm, echo might be able to bring some of that to the party. But like I'm not paying you for me to go buy stuff from you, but there's no screen, right?

12:09 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
there's no screen.

12:10 - Doc ROck (Guest)
My kitchen one has a screen your kitchen one has a screen.

12:13 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
But if you do have a screen, then you have to act, they have to interact with it is yeah this screen is tiny for an old man.

12:19 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
Let's just get yeah, I mean, what's compelling for me is the automation scenario. If they can plug it into, hey, go build this automation for me, go set up a routine for me, or that kind of thing, I think they're going to probably drop the ball out of the gate. But if they can do that, that's what will really change the difference between all these AI assistants at this point, because they have connections to all these integrations and hardware. I think that's what they need, but they won won't have that.

12:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It'd be so nice to wake up, open your eyes and say good morning echo, and and and then, oops, good morning echo, go, go, go. And then, uh, I'm wondering, if I do that, if it will stop triggering if I say alexa, so, so, so, will that fix the trigger? I don't know. Anyway, it would be nice to wake up. I'm sorry I'm going to keep my hands off the buttons. I apologize. It would be nice if you could wake up and say hey, good morning Echo.

13:25 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
And it would open the curtains and start the coffee. You know, turn on the air conditioning in the car. Do all the things get you now. If they're building, if they're building it from scratch instead of just using uh, off-the-shelf general purpose llm.

13:30
Apparently they're using anthropic they're using anthropics, which means that they are. Most of their work is going to be like honing it in rather than actually making it focused. So if they started with the basics and saying these are the things that we know are true, these are the things that we know are true, these are the routines that we know about, and not only would they give like a clear saying like these things work and we've tested them and we've made sure that these things work, but now they're just making it a giant like box of chocolate. You don't know what you're going to get when you do one of these commands. How will it interpret it? What one of these commands? How will it interpret it? What will it do? What will it use that information for? Where is this being stored? Who is it sending it to? Are they're going to also send it to their advertisers?

14:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
all this stuff is just like a giant question mark, and especially amazon right yeah furthermore, because this came on the heels of us learning, I think, from the information or no, it was the Wall Street Journal that Amazon had lost tens of billions of dollars on Echo because they had hoped they were subsidizing, I guess, the hardware, and of course it cost money to run the servers. They'd hoped people would use it for money-making things for them, like buying stuff from Amazon. Instead, as you said, they just used it for timing pasta and uh and what's the weather going to be, and that, and that's all we use it for too. To be honest, I love your idea of using it for home automation. I went out and bought the um home assistant server, the ha green, and at least it goes out and discovers everything, but it doesn't. I mean, it's like the first step in that process, right? It'd be nice if you could then say open those blinds, turn that right on and that kind of thing Generic LLMs can't do it.

15:10 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
I mean, you're going to have to, you have to fine tune, you have to add another integration to it. So there's a lot of extra work that Amazon would have to do on top of Anthropic to make it all work. And that's why I'm fairly certain that they're not going to be there in the in the v1 scenario. So we'll see.

15:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah I got all excited because I saw that amazon was going to release remarkable and I thought, oh, they bought the remarkable. No, no, that's what they're calling in a massive confusion. Remarkable makes a nice and I love it tablet that you can write on uh, as does amazon, by the way. Uh, they've, they've named their AI version of Echo Remarkable a word and you use it too. It's great, isn't it? Love it, yeah, yeah, it's great.

15:54
So Reuters says they're going to charge $5 to $10 a month for the new Remarkable version, due release in October, ahead of the holiday season. Reuters is also the one that says it will be using Anthropix. Claude AI, claude sonnet the latest cloud is pretty good. One of the reasons I made for all of these and I forgot they also pay 20 bucks a month for perplexity is so I can try them all and there you know, some are better at some things and than others. I'm afraid that all it's gonna do is is the remarkable Echo will be just chatty Echo, I can't get into the show about it, Leo you didn't get your perplexity for free for being dumb enough to buy one of these.

16:36
Oh, you bought an R1. He's got it.

16:38 - Doc ROck (Guest)
ladies and gentlemen, hey, you know what? I got $200 worth of perplexity credit. So it's's not a come wash. And orange is a color that I love, so it's cute, but it's designed by those who's that, bernardo, that you love so much that. Engineering yeah teenage engine. Well, they said it's called cool and ask them some questions.

16:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it's just. It turns out we found out that that r1 is just an Android device running an app.

17:04 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
That R1 is just an Android device running an app Raspberry Pi in a box, right?

17:07 - Doc ROck (Guest)
Yeah, kind of sort of it's a little portable Pi it's like a McDonald's Pi it's a tiny little Pi.

17:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You got it in a Happy Meal.

17:16 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
New headline tomorrow.

17:20 - Doc ROck (Guest)
Don't those burn you as well? Ooh, shots fired, wesley, you're on fire today, don't keep it in your lap.

17:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's all I'm saying. Uh, initial versions of the new a word using in-house software, according to reuters, simply struggled for words sometimes. Oh, this is your worst nightmare, I'm paying 10 bucks for this sometimes taking seven seconds to acknowledge a prompt and reply it. I'm thinking. I'm thinking here oh, okay, that's why. Okay, this was the version, that in-house Amazon intelligence. That's why they turned to Claude, because it's faster. But is it better? I don't know. At least you won't wait seven seconds for it to respond. You know it's so weird because Amazon had such success with echo. It was, it's in my car, it's in every device, you know. My sonos speaker says will you want to use echo to talk to us? No, uh, my sonos speakers have their own ai voice, that google's voice and alexa's, and it's all terrible. None of it works, although the nice thing about the sonos voice is it's giancarlo esposito, uh, the guy from breaking bad breaking bad those pollos hermanos gus, it's gus fring, gus fring in my, in my sonos.

18:42
So when he says I don't know what you're saying, at least it's gus fring saying that. That's.

18:46 - Doc ROck (Guest)
That's all we can expect in fact really that's a g big brother, oh my I'd almost pay 10 bucks just to have celebrity voices and leave it at that yeah man like scarlett johansson with james that was the best yeah, yeah, I've.

19:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So amazon tried that, but they all expired, right? Yeah, they expired, didn't they?

19:08 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
yes, they had some good ones on ways too.

19:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Like they, these companies do a really good job of getting these celebrities to do them yeah, anthropic, in which amazon owns a minority stake, did not confirm the reuters story um amazon. A spokesperson said amazon uses many different technologies to power. A word when it comes to machine learning models. We start with those built by amazon, but we have used, and we'll continue to use, a variety of different models, including titan, which is amazon's ai. It's funny is that the first time you've ever heard that the amazon's ai is named titan? It is for me. No, unfortunately. No, you knew this. Oh, wait a minute. That be maybe because of your, who your employer used to be. Yeah, yeah, okay, we won't. We'll say no more. Say no more. You are the only person who knew this how much, how tight could it be?

20:03 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
though?

20:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
right is using anthropic yeah, it can't be that Titan future, as well as Partners, build the best experience for customers. Blah, blah, blah, blah. Um, the use of the remarkable a word, that is, it is known internally is expected in October, with a preview coming during annuals event, their their devices and services event, which is coming up pretty soon, I think. Do we know when? I don't know when, sometime this month? Amazon has not yet said when it plans to hold a showcase event. Oh, if I just read the next sentence, I would know.

20:38 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
I've read this, and this is the thing that makes me even more scared about the launch is they don't know anything. Oh, what it be no idea when will we launch it?

20:46 - Doc ROck (Guest)
I don't know if you haven't figured it out now, yeah that means that they haven't.

20:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're waiting the last minute, aren't they?

20:52 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
and so like it's like why don't you have? Why, why didn't you figure this out before you started creating this product? And that's the part where it's just like oh my gosh, you're just throwing things and see what sticks and which you know sometimes works. But also, if you, if, if you don't know internally what you're doing externally, how are you going to project that to get people to buy it?

21:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
and another thing people are going to set expectations that are wrong. Doesn't know.

21:17 - Doc ROck (Guest)
Amazon says it's sold half a billion uh echoes, but it doesn't know how many active users there are, and that's a funny one, too, because one thing is better now, but one thing that they're famous for is disconnected themselves from your network, and so I would always get it telling me oh, you got to reconnect.

21:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And I got sick of it for a minute, so yeah, so that's why they don't know. Do you mean, how many we're connected to now? Or maybe how we ever have been connected to, how many we've ever been? That's even more funny.

21:49 - Doc ROck (Guest)
Well, the reason why it's this funny is if you juxtapose that against all of the people that think the thing is constantly listening to you, I'm like, yeah, I'm sorry that math doesn't matter.

22:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So there's that part of it as well. So I have to ask this, wesley, and just you know, don't say anything if you can. You used to work there.

22:11 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
I used to work at AWS as a division of Amazon.

22:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Not in the AI division. Oh, okay.

22:19 - Doc ROck (Guest)
Don't say anything. That was a look Okay.

22:29 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
You worked somewhere inside aws, somewhere somewhere aside aws, that that was tangentially connected to a lot of different projects and services.

22:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, but you don't work there anymore I don't know, did you sign a piece of paper that says you can't say anything?

22:43 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
if I did, I couldn't say that I did.

22:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Play club. I don't want to pry or anything. You only need to say what you want to say. But obviously we raised that issue, it came up, so I probably should say something about it.

23:01 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Yes, disclosure.

23:02 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
Yes, I used to work for AWS for two years, yeah leo, do you think that this is a uh, an exit from honeymoon phase for panos like I feel like panos panay, who's got to this company, he stepped into this company, into this role, almost the impossible role. This is a way for him to to kind of stretch a little bit of his muscles.

23:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Thanks for bringing that up, panos pan Panay, who was.

23:25 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Oh, that's the link between you and I.

23:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah, he's the tenuous thread that connects the two of you. Panos was, of course, at Microsoft, chief Product Officer at Microsoft. He's the one who was always pumped. He was so pumped to show you the new Surface I'm so pumped and then he left kind of abruptly. You know, there was always the question about whether he was pushed out or we don't know, you don't know, I'm not asking you Lou.

23:55
No, I don't know. Yeah, but he left abruptly and then it was announced that he was going to go to lead Amazon's consumer electronics business, which includes not just Echo but Kindle, fire, tv, fire tablets, the Ring doorbells, eero networking, blink and even the Amazon App Store. So he's got a big thing. But I think this A-Word products showcase, which they do every year, will probably be. I expect Panos to be pretty bumped for all this?

24:28 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
No, I don't. I bet he came into Amazon and had a rude awakening about how much impact he would be able to have.

24:36 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
Everything's stagnated. The whole list that you just gave is just stagnated for like five years now. Ring blank, you name it Because he's not even able yeah, let's move technology for a side for a second.

24:48 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
He's not even no one's able to even do a PR spin around his influence or what is to come, or changes are on the horizon. It's been super quiet and they're not saying anything because there's nothing to be said and probably nothing to be expected. So I think he probably is just like living in his own private hell about the lack of impact and how confusing and chaotic it is inside.

25:19 - Doc ROck (Guest)
Well, that makes it even funny because it does. Makes it even funny because it does okay. So, without saying that we've all kind of like approached this as this is somewhat as a somewhat of a reach for amazon, considering nothing said. But you have to understand that if everybody else is making moves and they're the only ones that hasn't, and they're still considered a pretty big fish, then you look like the dude on the brass, the bass tournament on espn that his rod ain't even flinked once why. Everybody else you know, even the rookie guys, the guests or the celebrities that they bring on even those guys caught a fish. So far you haven't done anything. So they were like, okay, can you swim under there, hook a fish under this thing and then come back up so I can pretend, and this is basically what this is for now. Now they might look up and find something dope to do with this, but it kind of seems like it's just we have to do something, people.

26:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's a certain I don't know there's an irony in the fact that the guy who's famous for being pumped replaced a guy named Dave Limp at Amazon.

26:19 - Doc ROck (Guest)
Dave Limp that's so funny. I laughed at that myself.

26:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know if there's anything to be said about it, but I just I thought that was interesting. So you think this is interesting, you think that?

26:32
poor pano I don't know if I should say poor, but poor panos. I always liked I. He was a, he was a look. It was microsoft's way of trying to find a steve jobs presenter. You know, he's well-liked. He's well-liked, he's a nice people and actually Stevie Batiste, to me, is the guy I would rather see presenting. He's amazing and when he talks about AI at Microsoft, I listen. Panos was always a little over the top for me, but he was that guy, he was a showman. And you're telling me that he's going to get to Amazon and all the air is going to go out of his pump balloon and he's going to be the next Dave Limp. Is that what you're telling me? Let me give you a scenario.

27:12 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Okay, the cornerstone of what would make Amazon a powerhouse is if they're able to connect things together to have more of an ecosystem, because they are in a lot of different things.

27:25
Like, for instance, if you could use this, uh, echo to dictate notes to your kindle scribe, right, oh, wouldn't that be just like?

27:34
And then you're like, hey, start a new document, this is what I'm thinking of, blah, blah, it cleans it up, it sends like the raw version and edited version to your scribe and you can edit up, mark it up or whatever, and make changes. And then you're able to have that synergy that requires you to have like a connection with the team that makes the devices and the software. And then, if you've ever worked at a company like the one that we were talking about, you realize that there are so many cowboys and independents and people are just doing whatever they want to do and they don't have to listen to you. And if you cannot convince them, or if you can't say, like this is what you're going to get if you do this and bribe them, basically you don't get anywhere. And that scenario is is like it took me what? Five seconds to think about it, uh, and it's something that could actually bring value, but let that's not even in the rumors of something that might even happen you had.

28:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You had a visceral reaction. I was watching you. It was like, yeah, yeah, it was clear. Um, well, maybe we'll find out. I mean, they don't traditionally stream that event, uh, in fact, they don't even really allow people to kind of tweet from it, so we have to wait till afterwards to find out what they announce and how it went.

28:57 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
But, um, yeah, I bet whatever they announced it will be ready months or like it would not be that day yeah, yeah, yeah, they need a leader.

29:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They, you're right. So andy jassy maybe isn't that guy, but they need a leader who can unify this all the. I feel like the problem is a little bit that jeff bezos just said, all right, I'm done, I'm out of here, and we just walked away and and got away in the nick of time maybe, but left a company kind of in disarray and I don't think Andy Jassy has pulled it back together again and you're not going to say anything.

29:33 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
It's the same kind of Google problem where they printed a lot of money.

29:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We see this again and again.

29:38 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Where they're just like well, no matter what we do, we're going to be getting money, so why do we try so hard?

29:51
And so the incentive structure internally is not one that lets you take chances or to be able to try something in a way that you can at least structurally saying like, if this works, we're going to hit it big. They'll try something where like, okay, we got to do something, like from the top down, where they're telling us to do AI things and so you make the AI things that someone's telling you to do without any thought behind it, because that's the incentive is to follow the direction of people who sign your paychecks, rather than listening to the ideas from people who work in different departments and then try to get them together and collaborate and build something new and unique and then thrust that forward. If it doesn't come from the top, then maybe you're incentivized to do it, maybe you're not, but you're really, really just want to make sure you rest, invest and just don't get fired and just stay as long as you can, because if you try something new and it doesn't work, you're out of there.

30:39
So Panos might be looking for another job.

30:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Unlike Google and I don't know, looking for another job. Unlike Google, I've read I don't know if this is true, but unlike Google, Amazon doesn't quit to retire things. They just kind of put them on the back burner. You're kind of in this limbo and you don't get resources, you don't get attention, but you also don't get canceled. And maybe Google deserves more credit, even though they get a lot of hell for canceling things. They deserve more credit for at least saying OK, we're done, moving on that is, that is until there's a leadership change in a reorg.

31:12 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
And did we? Didn't they just get like a new leadership structure, new CEO over on the AWS side and and so all all of this is being shaken up. And then there is the return to office mandates and there are layoffs. There's a lot of restructuring going on. So this is the time where they I think, yeah, this is the time where, like the whole you're talking about the Echo Division got like cut off, like things are currently being the house is being cleaned got like cut off, like things are currently being, the house is being cleaned.

31:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He was matt garman, was at 18 years at amazon. That's pretty typical too, I think, for a lot of people before he got pushed aside. So, um well, matt garden got he's in and it's Adam Slipsky who stepped aside, is that? Right. Okay, just to give you an idea. Nobody knows who the hell these people are, or even that it happened.

32:19 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
It's just a giant monolith of a company. 25% of this podcast knows.

32:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, one giant monolith of a company. 25% of this podcast knows. Yeah, one, I, you know it's. This is credit, by the way, lou, and I'm not kissing up to you but credit to Satya Nadella, who took a company that was at the end of its you know their business cycles. It was kind of at the end of its, of its business cycle and brought it back to life in a very big way. The only other company I can think of that's done this in the tech sphere is Apple, which has survived kind of the up and down, but it's very hard. Google's having a hard time, amazon's having a hard time, right.

32:55 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
Yeah, I mean, if you think about it, it's such a took a play out of a jobs playbook.

32:59 - Doc ROck (Guest)
I mean he basically is doing he's made the company the way it is by using relationships, and that's really what Steve did, is he made relationships with companies and, yeah, yeah, so solipski, he also streamlined a little bit as well, like just stop, I think. I think I always called them such a Nutella um.

33:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think he's a Raja Nutella is what Zephyr West calls him in our youtube chat. Right, that's me. Did such a great job of like let's stop trying to do everything.

33:28 - Doc ROck (Guest)
Let's pull back some of the tentacles of just being involved in everything and let's focus on some, some key pillars, and I think that level of streamlining really did help. Uh, microsoft make the turnaround and you know, getting rid of mobile was brilliant, like that was. That was a play that just wasn't going to look good and it was costing a lot of money and it's like what are we doing? Like why do we have to do everything?

33:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
let's just chill out that was ball and people bought Nokia. Bomber really wanted to get Microsoft into mobile. I understand what he was thinking, because he's watching Apple soar with mobile. Uh, so he bought nokia and then the first thing nadela did was dump it, write it off which was crazy because, at the end of the day, windows mobile devices were sick, right? I think you know I'm very I still never got legs was it a good business decision, though? Would it would, would there been A?

34:23 - Doc ROck (Guest)
hundred percent.

34:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it had to be right, it had to be.

34:26 - Doc ROck (Guest)
It's a shame. We deserve more than two platforms for mobile.

34:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's only iOS and Android. It would be wonderful if there were a third, don't you think? I think so.

34:36 - Doc ROck (Guest)
A hundred percent, but at the time their issue is they targeted North America?

34:40 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
If they charted India or something and they launched there, that would have been a winning strategy.

34:47 - Doc ROck (Guest)
That's 100% facts right there. Had they had enough word of it all to reach outside of the confines of the US, they would have probably done a lot better and we'd still have Windows Mobile. But at the time it's almost like I know tech people hate to use a sports metaphor, but I'm gonna use one it's almost like getting rid of. Like what's this face? Tio or AI these are the top players on both teams, but they were pain in the butt and they caused a lot of trouble. And so the Coaches that came in and said we're gonna take a risk and get rid of the legit best player on our team because the whole team needs to focus, completely changed both teams.

35:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Let me translate that into nerd, ok, because no one understood what you just said. Lou did, lou got it. I saw his head. If a team has a guy who's a real PETA, a real pain in the butt, even if he's your best player, you might get rid of him because it's not good for team coherence. Is that what you're saying?

35:52 - Doc ROck (Guest)
That's what I'm saying, and mobile at the time was just as good as it was. It was a complete disconnect from what they were trying to do and what they were focused on and growth potentials. That had to happen, so they had to get rid of it, even though it was kind of a winner.

36:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think it's really complex. I mean they couldn't get developers. Part of the problem was they were the third platform. They couldn't get developers to write for it. They also couldn't get and this was maybe the bigger one they couldn't get Verizon and AT&T to recommend it. They'd put them in the stores and most americans maybe you're right. If they'd gone outside the us they would have a shot, but most americans buy from the, the big phone companies, and if it's not in the phone, I'm told, if it's not in the phone stores. This is what happened to huawei when it got. Uh, they had a deal with verizon and at t and as soon as the us government convinced them, no, you shouldn't have a chinese phone in your stores and they canceled that deal. Huawei said that's it. We're done in the US market because we can't possibly sell direct to consumers. So you can blame the phone companies too. Maybe Microsoft didn't bring the bags of cash to them that they should have.

36:59 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
It was definitely an ecosystem problem. They didn't have all the big apps on there. Every app would come out and it would be missing. Windows Phone. It wasn't that. It wasn't easy to develop on. To be honest with you, it's probably one of the easiest.

37:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They already knew how it was Windows.

37:14 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
This is a chicken and egg problem. They said they can't get any developers, so move to a region where developers don't matter.

37:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Where's that?

37:22 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Places like. India, it doesn't matter if you have the apps, it's because you go low level. You need people who need Internet access and being able to text once you're.

37:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's why Android does well. But those are $50 phones.

37:35 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
You could make a $50. That's what I'm saying. They could have done that. That's where they could have played on them.

37:39 - Doc ROck (Guest)
They had Nokia, they could have absolutely done that. And to Wesley's point, one thing that is very different about, say, developing in a country like India is it's easier to develop when you have a homogenous nation when the culture is kind of sort of one of two things, versus trying to develop for a culture that is six, seven hundred separate things. So, yes, they could have done some things. I think a lot more low-level apps, things that just fit exactly to a culture, and at the time nobody was focusing on that. Once windows mobile went out the window, all the device platforms I'm sorry device sellers like uh, t-mobilet, whatever they built an entire tertiary mobile market into India, like what to do with the phones when they're no longer being subsidized and you're trading them all in, what are you going to do with the second hand or third phones? And they exploded in places like India. So, yeah, they literally were right at the right customers. There's a bad timing. They opened up an all-you-can-eat burger restaurant right when the country decided to go vegan.

38:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's Doc Rock. Always great to have you on youtubecom slash Doc Rock. He's also at Ecamm and we thank you for your support at Ecamm getting us into the modern world. I feel like a Twitch streamer here in my little attic studio, but I don't have those blinky things behind you. I just my blinky things are a pdp and a uh and a mitts altair. That's not, although I'm trying to get the mac to blink. If I get the mac to blink then then then I'll have something also here. Wesley faulkner. Wesley, what are you doing these days?

39:26 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
wesley83.com is your link tree I'm doing a lot of public speaking. Uh, I will be. I was. We were joking in the pre-show, but I'll be at the blacks in tech conference in atlanta next week oh, there really is one oh, that's hysterical I was just teasing you guys, okay yeah. I'll be speaking at CMX Global at the end of the month as well, and Black Python Devs is also having a conference and I will be there as well, so I'm doing a lot of public speaking right now.

39:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And also a spokesperson for neurodivergent folk.

40:02 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Yeah, neurodiverse, and I'm also listed on this. You see some projects I'm working on, so I'm on the board here in Blackson Tech in Southwest Virginia, but I'm also. The Linux Foundation is creating a separate foundation for developer relations. And so I'm part of the steering committee and so we're kicking that off soon and we're going to make an announcement.

40:28
I'll just say this month, and so we're gathering a lot of feedback and so if you're in developer relations and you're listening to this, click on the link for the foundation. It's going to take you to a place where you can find our GitHub discussions. There's a plan for how we're going to take you to a place where you can find our GitHub discussions. There's a plan for how we're going to take community feedback, and so please look it over, give us some feedback about what you think should be changed, if you think we're on the right track, and so please, please, do that.

41:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's Linux-focused because it's part of the Linux Foundation, right?

41:04 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Well, it's developer relations. It's going focused because it's part of the Linux foundation, right. Well, it's developer relations. It's going to be a child organization off the Linux foundations to make sure that shows that we're not beholden to any specific company, and so it's kind of like a nonpartisan part of developer relations to make sure that we service both business interests in general but also the developer community at large, to make sure that we are not just making sure companies get fat but developers get educated and they get knowledgeable about new upcoming services, projects and all that stuff that comes out. So that's something I'm extremely happy about, because developer relations has been around for a bit. But it's one of those things where someone takes it and changes the name, changes what they think it is, and then they just make a definition, uh, of what they think it is. It's like um, people who are make like moot, point moot. The word moot used to mean it's up for discussion, right, and, and now it means the opposite, uh like there's no discussion necessary.

42:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's moved exactly.

42:04 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Yes, yeah and so like or like people are saying I'm nauseous and now it means that I'm feeling sick. But yes, exactly right. And so that's kind of what dev rel's been. It's been one of those things where people have yeah, it's often marketing, isn't it really?

42:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it's often like people think that you should use our stuff. People think that's what it is, or content creators that influence their stuff.

42:26 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
I want you to like going viral on YouTube or on Twitch or whatever. People think that's developer relations, and it's just convincing people at the top of the funnel for awareness or creating content like write a blog post. There's a lot of things that we do that people can see, but there's a lot of things that people don't see behind the scenes, which is really what developer relations is. But if you're just outside looking in, then you don't really understand the mechanics and all of the talent and the skills needed in order to make all this look effortless, and so that's the part that we're trying to make huge respect, that we have a center of knowledge, and not only that. It's just like a real definitions and like making sure that the ownership doesn't go to these people who don't know what they're doing yay sounds good.

43:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Go to wesley83.com and click the link for dev rel foundation. You can get involved. This is a good time to do it right at the beginning. Yeah, thank you, wesley, it's great to have you, and also lou mm, who is a developer, ironically enough.

43:29 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
Yes, yeah for 20 years 20 years.

43:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it's great to have all three of you our show today brought to you by as a new sponsor. I want to welcome flashpoint. For security leaders. 2024 has been uh interesting, shall we say a year like no other. Cyber threats, physical security concerns they continue to increase, and now you've got geopolitical instability, adding a new layer of risk and uncertainty. Let's let's be specific. Last year, there was a staggering 84 percent rise in ransomware attacks. That's almost double. There was a 34% jump in data breaches. As a result, trillions of dollars in financial losses and threats to safety worldwide. That's where Flashpoint comes in. Flashpoint empowers organizations to make mission-critical decisions that will help keep their people and assets safe. How? By combining cutting-edge technology with the expertise of world-class analyst teams and with Ignite, flashpoint's award-winning threat intelligence platform, you get access to critical data, finished intelligence, alerts and analytics all in one place. It's what they say, isn't it? Knowledge is power. Analytics all in one place. It's what they say, isn't it? Knowledge is power. If you have an enterprise to secure, you need to know what's going on out there. You need those reports, you need the analytics, you need what Flashpoint could give you Maximize your existing security investments. Some Flashpoint customers avoid half a billion dollars in fraud loss annually and report a 482% return on investment in six months. That's probably why they earned Frost and Sullivan's 2024 Global Product Leadership Award for unrivaled threat data and intelligence. Here's a quote from the SVP of Cyber Operations at a large US financial institution that shall remain unnamed. Flashpoint saves us over $80 million in fraud losses every year. Their proactive approach and sharp insights are crucial in keeping our financial institutions secure. They're not just a solution. They're a strategic partner helping us stay ahead of cyber threats. Knowledge is power. Knowledge is security. You need to know what's coming down the pike. It's no wonder Flashpoint is trusted by both mission-critical businesses and governments worldwide. You need this To access the industry's best threat data and intelligence. Visit flashpointio today. F-l-a-s-h-p-o-i-n-t. Flashpointio today Intelligence the kind of intelligence you need to stay secure, to stay safe in a changing world. Flashpointio, we're so glad to have the brand new sponsor on the network. So let's see what else. We talked about Amazon. We talked about AI. Let's talk about Pavel Durov.

46:28
The news broke this time last week, so we were right on top of it during Twit Pavel Durov, the CEO and founder of Telegram, arrested in Paris. We weren't sure at the time exactly why he was arrested. He wasn't charged immediately. It took a few days before the, and this is how it works in France. It's a little weird, but the magistrates ended up charging him with a variety of failings the charge failing to properly fight crime on the app, including the spread of child sexual abuse material. Also, by the way, he's out on bail right now, but also, it is believed, not cooperating with authorities. His bail was set $5.56 million.

47:25
The question is and this is a question everybody in the US is asking, and certainly Elon Musk is asking is what was it he did? Was it not moderating sufficiently or was it not giving the keys to encrypted chats to the French authorities? It's interesting. Yeah, dorova was released from police custody earlier in the day, on Wednesday, and the formal investigation announced Wednesday evening does not apply guilt. This is the French legal system.

48:04
It's a little weird, but indicates that prosecutors believe there is an. It's not an indictment exactly, but there's enough of a case to merit a serious investigation, so there is no formal charge. Among other things they were concerned about is the quote near absence of response from telegram to court requests, subpoenas in effect concerning offenses including trafficking online, hate speech and pedophilia. The suspected acts being probed include complicity in the administration of a platform enabling an illegal transaction in an organized gang. So so the concern is one this is a part of the government's worldwide trying to break through encryption, but also it may well be that he did kind of breach the line by not responding to legitimate requests for information. Subpoenas they'd be called in the us. I don't know what they call them in france. Subpoena anyway, um cause for concern. Or is durev uh a bad actor who deserves to be prosecuted?

49:20 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
prosecuted or both okay, I'm gonna say something, but I don. I haven't done all my research, but this is what I am assuming. One yes, I think he just ignored the letters and just didn't respond, and how else are you supposed to do that? But the thing that I think why he personally got arrested is probably this thing that I've heard and I've seen people do who have this much money and want to do whatever they want is that when they run a company, they actually have very little, if any, employees and most everyone is a contractor.

49:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Telegram is famously lean. They have just I think they said 30 engineers and 50 moderators for nearly a billion active monthly users.

50:07 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Which means that they're basically these people, just they are on contract, they're not responsible to there's, they're not responsible to respond to legal notices and there's one person that's in charge of everything, and then be this the owner, the CEO, and so the only person they could actually hold liable is the ceo.

50:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So I mean no one's denying, including durov, that telegram is widely used by a variety of people, including terrorists, people who plotted the 2015 uh murders in france, the people who plotted the january 6th insurrection in the united states. Both the r Russian army and the Ukrainian army use telegram, right. It's kind of used by everybody, nobody's denying that.

50:51 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Yes, and it's also used by the French government and, yeah, by the way.

50:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, every minister in France uses telegram.

50:57 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Yeah, and but the only now is because they are not responding to specific requests. It'd be one thing if they deny the request, but there's been nothing that I've seen that shows that they refused or they actually said that they're not going to do it, or putting to appeal or like challenging anything in court. They're not doing any of that, they're just ignoring it. So that is something I don't think you can get away with, is just ignoring it. It doesn't go away just because you stick your head in the sand and then you don't just get to live your life, uh, and act like nothing happened.

51:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
so because, like a lot of it is speculation oh it's telegram or it's encrypted, or well, partly we have to speculate because the french haven't been very forthcoming in what what they're charging him with. Emmanuel Macron, the president of France said it's not political. In a rare statement about a magisterial action in France, he said they're not saying what they're charging him with.

51:54 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
They're saying why and the reason why, is they're not responding.

51:59
He didn't respond, so I don't think it's cryptic about why he was arrested. What they're actually trying to dig up there's a possibility they don't want to spook or scare off or tip their hand about who specifically they're investigating. So from that point it's vague, and it should be, because it's an active investigation, but saying you know, you don't just get to say no, no, no bueno, so Spanish instead of French, but you don't get to just say whatever you just like, ignore it and just let it go away. I think they made it clear that that was what was happening.

52:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Steve Browning Doro is a joint citizen of the United Arab Emirates and France, but he's a former Russian citizen. He was born in the Soviet Union, left Russia after the Russian government forced him to sell his VKontakte, which is basically a Facebook in Russia, fled to Dubai, has been living in Dubai, but apparently also has a French citizenship, and flew into France on his private plane last week and was arrested almost immediately. Yeah, I wonder. You know, we just don't know. It's related, though, to a similar story in Brazil, where X, formerly known as Twitter, is now blocked. The shutdown started early yesterday, making it inaccessible on the web after Elon Musk refused to name a legal representative in the country. Supreme court justice, uh, alexandre de morais, uh said you must name a legal representative who will be responsible. This is countries do this? Russia does it. China does it as well? Somebody in country we can arrest if, if you don't adhere to our rules yeah, they're waxed and then removed.

53:44
Yep they're given the brazilian treatment. Uh, I, I, uh. So on the one hand, I want to fight for the right of platforms to be kind of uncensored, um, but at the same time there do. There does seem to be kind of a minimum that a platform needs to do to stay in a country. One is, of course, respond to legal warrants asking for information. But what if the government and we don't know this what if the government of France is asking Pavel Dourov to give them the keys to the encryption?

54:19
By the way, telegram is not a very encrypted app. It's not end-to-end encrypted. Probably you have to jump through hoops to turn on encryption, and group chats are never or cannot be encrypted, and most of what's on Telegram is not just unencrypted but is public. There are large public groups, many of which are unsavory to say the least, but I don't know if unsavory to say the least, but I don't know if the con, if unsavory content justifies arresting the founder and owner of the company yeah, that's like almost like taking out the owner of a building because some dude bought a condo and was, you know, selling illegal whatever in there.

55:04 - Doc ROck (Guest)
It doesn't really match, but the harp. To me, the hardest part about this conversation is Elon likes to use the blanket terms of censorship and, you know, controlling and stuff when it works in his favor. When it's something that he doesn't like, oh, he'll censor that. But that's not censorship, right, and it's weird because this dude wants to play both sides of of the situation and I just think he is at a point where he thinks he's lex luther, like he really, really is trying to be the quintessential villain person. Let me disrupt everything, do everything. No one can control me. I got enough money to buy my way at everything, so he's, he's almost acting on a level of I won't use the word, but you squirted out of a bottle ketchup to mustard. Yeah, there you go. Okay, I think he's really funny. I was gonna say this. He's relishing in how like abrasive can he be and get away with it? And and I think he's at this point, just poking for no reason well he's.

56:27
You know, brazil is a very big market for x.

56:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're not anywhere close to the number one social tool. They're not as popular, according to the ap, as facebook, instagram, youtube or tiktok, but still a big platform. You remember when brazil tried to shut down whatsapp? The brazilian court shut down whatsapp for about five minutes and the protests in brazil tried to shut down whatsapp. The brazilian courts shut down whatsapp for about five minutes and the protests in brazil were so aggressive that they immediately restored it. I don't see that happening with x, but it's only been a day. Uh, what will elon do? Well, he doesn't look like he's going to cave.

56:58 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
He's just going to say goodbye to brazil didn't he say that he obeys all local laws? Isn't't that?

57:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
something that he said before that he says a lot of things.

57:06 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Free speech as long as it obeys the laws, but now he's just like those laws are unlawful. So I'm not, you can't do that. Well, I guess you can, but this is what happens. Someone said that they're in the find-out phase of when you start.

57:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, f around and find out phase uh of what you start around and find out. Yeah, yeah, they are both the impact. There seems to be a lot of kind of similarity between what dorav's happening to dorav although elon has not been arrested, but there is in both cases. Large nation states want to control these platforms and I just it's. I'm just concerned that some of this is just governments trying to just concerned that some of this is just governments trying to pierce the privacy protections of encryption. On the other hand, I think a government has every right. If a platform kind of knows there's a lot of child porn going on and they're not really doing anything about it and they're not responding to subpoenas about it, which could be what's happening at Telegram then I can understand why a government would say well, get in here, you need to explain yourself and you need to start cooperating.

58:08
Brazil is going to fine X 50,000 rice each day. That's $8,900. Oh, no, I'm sorry. I'm sorry that's for people using VPNs to get on X Brazilians who get. So if you're a Brazilian, you say no, no, I'm going to use a VPN so I can access X $8,900 a day. Fine, wow, basically, the court says we don't want anybody using it. That's pretty extreme. In fact. The AP says some legal experts questioned the grounds for that decision and how it would be enforced. Others suggested the move was authoritarian the fact that he's pushing back.

59:05 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
Obviously, like you know, like wes was saying, like elon did these things in india and australia, he blocked. He, you know, he took down content that the government didn't like. And now brazil comes along and they don't like something, they want to take it down and he won't do it. So you know, they thought why don't we just turn the big knob?

59:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
they're also going to go after the assets of spacex? Uh, because if they can't get the assets of X, they can go after the assets of Elon's other companies. That is, again, that's a it seems to me, a bridge too far. It's yeah, it's the same guy who founded both and runs both, but it's not the same company uh, this sounds like when you get into it right, but those are our rules in the US.

59:42 - Doc ROck (Guest)
Those are the rules in other parts of the world. Yes, right, so if the other places, they can definitely reach through to your other entities and get your stuff. But you know, it's funny because we want to apply our rules but then yet be global, and that's the problem.

01:00:01 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
I was thinking it's like a car wreck. When you're like a three car wreck Car one gets hit by car two, because car twos get hit by car three and it rams into car one you sue the person who hit you, even though it wasn't their direct fault, and then they have to recover from the person that caused the harm, that caused the whole chain of events. So you take SpaceX's money and then say, okay, we'll get it from Elon because he's one of the yeah.

01:00:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, yeah, elon is also in trouble, or was in trouble, for using his platform to promote Dogecoin, but the courts have said no, get this. This is ridiculous. So Elon Musk and Tesla were being sued is ridiculous. So elon musk and tesla were being sued. The claim was they pumped up the price of dogecoin into a 258 billion dollar pyramid scheme. Investors who lost tens of thousands dollars investing in what was a mean token. Let's face it dogecoin, really. Uh, faulted musk for promoting it to his millions of followers on twitter with statements like one word, doge, causing it to rise. He then said he'd accept tesla, would accept dogecoin as payment, which it never did. I don't think, uh, and he posted this uh tweet baby doge, do, do, do, do, do, baby doge, do, do, do, do. I guess that's baby shark, to the tune of baby shark which I I will not sing. A new york judge on thursday dismissed the claims, finding that musk's statements promoting dogecoin were aspirational rather than factual and susceptible to being falsified, and that no reasonable investor could rely upon them.

01:01:46 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
Yeah, it's clear musk works for himself. He's got idealistic world views, but you know you shouldn't be as a shareholder. Follow him right like he work. You know he wants to make money himself. He doesn't want to make you money. He's going to be funny. But you know, with great power comes great responsibility. Things you say could have impact and I think this is what happened. I mean it's just uh, it's kind of a joke actually he touted dogecoin for months in may of 2021.

01:02:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
After doing that, he appeared on saturday night live as a financial expert in newscast. When pressed, his character in the comical exchange I'm reading from bloomberg finally agrees that dogecoin is a hustle. Before the show was over, it lost 20 billion dollars in market value. I think the judge probably rightly said hey, it's on you.

01:02:38 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
If you believed any of this hype, it's on you I don't like elon musk personally, but not that I know him personally. But I think this was the right call. I mean, he's he's allowed to have things he likes. He's allowed to say that he likes those things.

01:02:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, he there's I haven't seen someone to the edge though right, but did he say like everyone should buy this or like this is financial doge. Yeah, but I think you're right, he was just being funny, he wasn't.

01:03:07 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Yeah, yeah yeah, he likes it. He thought it was funny. He likes the little dog maybe, and so yeah he's a goof, yeah, and so I don't see anything criminal with him, just saying I really like this thing, yeah, like, uh, doc rock could say like I really like this r1. It's amazing. Um and and does that make him liable if someone else buys it?

01:03:29 - Doc ROck (Guest)
I don't think it's a good point yeah, and it's, and you're right about that. And I I think one of the things that's absolutely hilarious at this point is when people make a bad purchasing decision and they try to blame somebody else because they bought it. I'm like yo, that's kind of on you. So, to coin a phrase from dr drew stupid people going to stupid, you know, and I I don't. I don't fault the person who made the recommendation. I fought the person who took a risk without fully understanding what the risk is and seeing if they were malleable to.

01:04:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
If that failed, I'm okay with losing this money and then any of us when they did lose money, saying hey, no fair right, that's.

01:04:11 - Doc ROck (Guest)
Any investment is that, unless you are completely, completely like bamboozled, you know, like through some weird stakes in the university, that's a different story, but like if you took a risk on your own, that's what you're doing so.

01:04:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I guess these two stories are related in the sense that what is the responsibility of somebody like Pavel Dourov or Elon Musk? They own a platform. What is their responsibility? Do they have a higher responsibility or can they just act, in the case of Elon, like a goofball? I don't know. Pavel doroff is a little strange, but uh, that's not illegal. Do we want to defend these guys?

01:04:56 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
defend the law, just follow the law. There you go and then do whatever you there you go and it sounds I mean like these are, these are going through this, the cycles. Those people follow the law, get arrested or they lose their business or whatever. You don't get to just do whatever you want all of the time, just most of the time when you're rich.

01:05:15 - Doc ROck (Guest)
They try to use the law to protect you in other ways. Right, trust me, a lot of people of this elk have sued people when they thought it was going to work for them and then have completely duck suits when they thought it was going to work for them. So you don't get to play both sides of the law. Either you are the law straight through all the way through, or you're not period point blank you're watching a very special edition of this week in Tech.

01:05:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's special because I'm not going to be here next week. I'm going on vacation for a couple of weeks. I'm looking forward to seeing a bunch of you next Saturday in New York City. We're going to do a little meetup in Bryant Park, which might have been a mistake, because I hear that there's rain in the forecast. I just thought it'd be fun to do it outside New York. It's either 100 degrees or it's pouring rain, so either way it might be a little challenging, but the plan is to meet up in Bryant Park September 7th, 3 pm for a couple of hours, and then Joe in our club is going to lead us all on a photo walk, starting at Grand Central Station and ending, time permitting, at the Oculus during the golden hour. It should be a lot of fun. If it rains, I don't know what should I do. Should I just say bring an umbrella? I guess there's no way I can get the word out fast enough if it rains to say, okay, we're going to move it somewhere. I'll be standing there. I'll be a little soggy. If it rains, I'll be a little soggy, so what, I'll wear a hat. We'll see you in Bryant Park on Saturday. I will be off for two weeks and then I'll be back on September 22nd for this Week in Tech. So just a little vacation at the end of the summer.

01:07:03
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01:09:57 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
I loved it.

01:09:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It was the site to go to if you wanted to know if a chip really did what it said it would do, if you want to know if performance was there. They were the geekiest of the geek sites but, like so many sites these days they're saying goodbye 27 years Super bummed about this one.

01:10:19
Me too. Now, Anand Shimpy, who founded it when he was a kid he was like a high schooler left some years ago. I was a little disappointed when this happened to go to work for Intel and it so often happens with people who leave their bylines behind. They just disappear. I don't know what Anand's up to. I don't know what he's doing. The site continued to run for some time, In fact, for more than a decade, under one of its founders, Ryan Smith, but I think, along with a lot of other ad-supported websites, it's just been struggling. It's owned by a future which will be keeping the non-tech website uh and and its existing articles alive indefinitely. So that's a relief. That's good. Now, all that content will be will survive the old content, but there will be no new articles added to a non-tech there's not a lot of sites that bring the geek data to the masses.

01:11:24 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
No like I feel like this is one of the last good ones and really reliable.

01:11:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And they knew how to do benchmarks. And this is one of the problems I see is a lot of the mainstream sites do benchmarks but they don't know what they're doing and they're really not useful benchmarks. But Anand was always really deep in their tech coverage and really understood stuff. Future bought both Anand and Tom's hardware and they're going to continue tom's hardware.

01:11:49 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
it's my guess that that's a consolidation um of the two so back in the early 2000s, uh, I worked for amd, uh, I was a product development engineer, and so that that's where I met Stacey, by the way.

01:12:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, that's when I met you.

01:12:05 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
You were still at AMD, yeah, yeah, and so we had a lot of the technical press there just to make sure that they understood the ins and outs, the guts, make sure they were connected to our future plans because they were integral with making sure that from the technical standpoint, that it was expressed like very clearly to the audience out there, distilling the things of their concerns and the voice of the people who read their publications.

01:12:41
But those types that the work that was involved in that was very labor intensive to do the benchmarking, to do the follow-ups, to really fact check stories and it made it harder and harder to compete with some of the post mills where there are just articles after articles just released multiple times a day to get ads and get the views and to rack up some of the focus and the eyeballs, and so slowly the hard work became less valued from that perspective because they weren't able to capture the attention of the, the people who are looking for that information.

01:13:23
It was some of the easier articles, some of the rumor mills, some of the, you know, just photos and leaks and stuff like that, where people were more appealed to the general public than the, the extreme niche geek that really wanted that information and I miss that. I love those articles. It let me just like that's where I would learn to like solder resistors on SCSI cards and to make them raid cards and like those type of things I don't think people do anymore and it's just like I miss it and it's the end of error and I loved all the people who work there as well.

01:13:58 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
Yeah, I mean remember when the m1 came out the first time, anon came back and actually wrote an article about it and it was like the level of quality that he brought back which just made me realize why I used to go back to that site.

01:14:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, here's a picture of anon back in the day when he first started a non-tech. He out of his bedroom.

01:14:18 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
He was a high school kid some isA slots on that thing.

01:14:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is an old yeah, this is an old motherboard. One of the things Anand has been kind of outspoken about he was when he left 10 years ago to go to Intel, and his successor, ryan Smith, also writes about it and it's even still on the About page at Anand Tech is what he called the cablefication or cable TVification of technology coverage, the slant towards sensationalism and really kind of lower quality link-baity articles articles. The original statement from Anand is actually on the about page at Anand Tech and I hope it will stay up forever. I think this is part of what killed Anand Tech. The advertisers who in the past, might have advertised on Anand Tech have moved over to forgive me, me, doc but YouTubers who are really much more sensationalistic. They draw many, many more eyeballs as a result, but I don't know if their content is as high quality.

01:15:33 - Doc ROck (Guest)
Certainly not as detailed and geeky. This is the conversation I'm having in the chat right now. Everybody loves Linus. Linus, I'll be mean and I'll say it. Linus is clickbaity as all get and he didn't. He's gotten more, so over time I mean 100 it wasn't always that way.

01:15:50 - Benito (Announcement)
It was much more like in the early days, but this is the problem with youtube.

01:15:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It puts prep. To succeed on youtube you have to almost do the thumbnails and the thing and the sensational headline, and I think it's unfortunate.

01:16:05 - Doc ROck (Guest)
That is it. He figured out to Paul's point. He figured out if I become more entertaining and more clickbaity and more abrasive and all of the above, and even during the timeframe I want to call it about, maybe eight years ago, when it was he saw the other Lou Come up with that weird if one of the first Sort of viral gates and how that it worked I think it was been gate and then from that moment on line is like, oh, I'm have to go ahead and Apple for like extra hard and he went, I enter Apple extra hard and he exploded. And so one of the things that he does which drives me crazy is telling a bunch of, let's just say, sub 18 year old kids that these manufacturers are out to get you and charge you a lot for a product that's not really worth it, but will never go in and say the reason why this product is expensive or what expensive really means.

01:17:09
Like, if something doesn't match your value proposition, it doesn't match your value proposition. Like me, I'm never gonna buy certain things because it doesn't match my value proposition. On the other hand, I'll buy a $2,500 bottle of whiskey because it matches a value proposition and most people think that's crazy, like why it all tastes like Jack Daniels. No, it doesn't. Not to me. I'm a whiskey connoisseur. So when you make a blanket statement like oh, everything somebody makes is expensive, just to cause hassle or just make up things that aren't true, you know it drives me crazy and I really, really am appalled at what happened to Linus, because I used to think he was one of the best in the business.

01:17:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And there are people like Marques Brownlee who I think has succeeded by providing quality. He's never done the kind of in-depth stuff a non-tech uh did, but he's I mean he's, I think oprah I just saw him in a picture with oprah. I think he's on his way to stardom, but I feel like there I mean, this is, I guess, why we still exist. There needs to be, uh, at least some content that is just kind of unapologetically geeky and hardcore. We're not as hardcore as Anand Tech was, but we certainly referred to Anand Tech all the time. We had those standards, and I've never been accused of doing link bait. I do three-hour shows that have no real theme or content, but I think we're geeks, right, and we talk to geeks and about geeks from a geek point of view, without trying to pander to an audience, and I think that's what an ontotech was.

01:18:54 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
Yeah, it brings a level of credibility and I think that's what people want. Yeah, do we need it anymore.

01:19:02 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Go ahead. I was going to say being able to discuss this from a deeper level, from a critical level and from people with deep technical knowledge and experience. I think that's where TwitSigns shines is because the people who know this stuff are on this podcast, on this show, this stuff or on this podcast on this show, um, where someone who's running like a content mill they read a press release to read like a pr and and or see a media like marketing sheet, and then they come up with an opinion so they put it out. But so there's a there. You cannot replicate the base of knowledge, the the years sometimes some of us decades of experience to be able to see this through a lens where you understand everything that that led up to that point and realizing what the trade-offs are and what the advantages could be. And you don't do that without uh, you don't have that knowledge, without having the experience behind what are, what are?

01:19:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
there must be youtube channels that carry, continue to carry this torch, though this, this, and I'm you know.

01:20:03 - Doc ROck (Guest)
It's getting harder, harder to find, okay. So one of the one of the biggest Misnomers about YouTube is everybody think there's some kind of like secret algorithm that controls what everybody sees and doesn't see. And our dear friend Renee Would tell you every time you want to stick. The word algorithm is something. Replace it with audience. What they're really doing is feeding the audience. What they want right, that's all the algorithm is really designed for is to feed the audience, because if I can keep your butt watching this particular platform for a longer time, I can serve more ads. That's how you run your business. So one of the things that used to be really really handy for sort of algorithm adjusting would be high levels of engagement. So if you make the weird thumbnail and say something that you know is completely wrong but will start a fight in the comments, that's good. That was good. That's because it's going to keep people on that page, and so what would happen is, while that page is loaded even if they're not watching the video but they're arguing in the comments there's ads on the side and those ads are turning over and being flipped or whatever. So the computer was reading. This data is like this dude from Canada said something stupid about Apple and legit has 40,000 people arguing in this. I'm serving ads like nobody's business, so you get credit for the clickbait, even if it was completely wrong.

01:21:29
The other thing is he's riling up basically people between the ages of, say, 12 and 20. And you know what? Let's be dead honest. Their brains aren't completely formed to make logical decisions yet. So there's a lot of what is the word siloing? Instantly siloing Right.

01:21:50
If you go into a fight about Xbox and PlayStation, oh, you're going to start some stuff and some people never grow out of it, like, even if they become adult. In their past they've developed their allegiance, right, star Wars, star Trek, whatever. So anytime you could make content Around something like Apple V Microsoft, where in the background they're working hand-in-hand, doing what they need to do to make products Right. Or you know Android versus iOS, when they're also doing some things together hand-in-hand in order to make sure that the mobile industry Strives. But you make the kids believe it to fight, 're going to get in their gang areas, they're going to fight. They're going to talk a lot of crap and all it does is just blow up. So the linus is of the world and a bunch of other people like him. He's not alone. Let's just for the people in the comments saying we're bashing linus, I would tell him this stuff straight to his face. Number one I'm bigger than him.

01:22:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Number two he also probably knows what he's doing he knows exactly what he's doing and he's.

01:22:45 - Doc ROck (Guest)
He's smart and built an apple show and he'll go on the apple show himself and bash that. But he was smart enough to build an apple show because he makes a ton of money off of that this is the problem, is it's all about making a ton of money 100. I don't blame people trying to make money and, honestly, the reason a non-tech is going away.

01:23:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Let's be honest, is it? It's losing money, right? Yes, if people were reading it like crazy, uh, it would still be here. So I understand. I mean, we are in a we're in a capitalist society. You have to make a living and you have to make a way to make it work. It just it makes me sad. There must be you can share something.

01:23:24 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Yes, I'm going to share something. Wes, um, this is a little aside, so please bear with me. So you've heard of, like what, uh, the team pixel debacle.

01:23:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That happened, yeah, so google, just to just to be clear, Google hired a PR agency which then offered Pixel phones the Pixel 9, to YouTubers and others influencers. But they had a contract that went along with the phone that says you've got to feature this and deprecate everything else. It's got to be all about Pixel and you can't like anything else. And of course that got out and people were very upset and Google said look, look, these aren't reviewers, these are influencers. This is a pr company and they and we're not going to do that anymore, but I think it's always happened and the root of that is the companies don't want, uh, these wild cards.

01:24:13
They want to know what is they want, why do you think they don't invite me to apple events?

01:24:18 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
yes, and the thing is, people with integrity don't go, they don't take it. Um, the people who are like pay me, I, I'll do it, are the people that then there's a like the ftc where you have to, you have to disclose, disclose, yeah, um, which is true unless you're not an american citizen. If you're a canadian, you're not bound by those laws. I'm not saying that that it's canadians blame canada, but I'm saying if, if, if, people uh there, I know personally uh, some companies that specifically go to uh influencers or people who are in tech to write or give better reviews because they can pay them without them having to disclose that.

01:25:04
I don't think this is new right. I mean, this is always new it's not new, but people don't know that, so that when they're saying that, we would disclose it, or we would say they have to by US law.

01:25:15 - Doc ROck (Guest)
But if they're not US citizens they don't have to say I'm taking money that the camera space, like in the YouTube camera space, some of the top camera guys, they all live just above the line where they don't have to say certain things. And so before the team pixel thing, there was the Lumix launch from Panasonic and right before that was Insta360 and it's funny. But you are 100% correct if you go through the list of the top camera guys, a lot of them live north of the demarcation line of follow the US rules. Yeah.

01:25:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Look, I don't have a problem with somebody who wants to make a living or wants to become famous or wants to appear on Oprah. That's fine, that's your choice. I just think about users and consumers of information. I hope they understand the difference between an influencer and an actual journalist, that they follow journalists who have integrity and don't accept free stuff and that I mean they're there. We I think we need reliable Reporting on these subjects. Maybe we I guess that's the other thing Maybe we don't anymore. Maybe technology has become so commonplace, so much a part of our lives. It's like a toaster. You don't really care if the toaster review website got a free toaster.

01:26:32
Yeah, I don't care Right, because it's just a toaster.

01:26:34 - Doc ROck (Guest)
Well, see, and so that becomes also the problem, because what happens is you got guys so a lot of this. How this started and I can I totally remember it because I've been at this for a long time some of the very original like gear reviewers on youtube were like myself and soldier, like we predate the marquez of the world. I left and went to japan and when I came back, marquez went from being a kid in his basement to like one of the best guys in the planet, which I thought was crazy. I was like, wow, you stepped away too long. Now you got to play catch up.

01:27:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What happens is some of the guys catch up with marquez brownlee.

01:27:07 - Benito (Announcement)
I gave that up right, you know, we tried to hire him.

01:27:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We tried to hire him when he was still in school and he's very sweet guy, really nice guy said I'm gonna try to make it on my own brilliant, yeah.

01:27:20 - Doc ROck (Guest)
So so back in the days of, like you know, patrick Norton and some of the OGs who were in this game with us, there were people who would come on and say, oh well, the reason why they're able to do these reviews is because the brands are sitting them these products. And then, once that happens, people, feeling victimized, would then say, oh, this person is a shill for the product. And then that word became popular. Most people didn't even know what a real shill is Right. Or people would say, well, you know, even even okay, you have always been fair, but people, people would pick at you and be like oh, the reason why Leo said something bad about it, but this time it's because Apple would let him come to the event. You never really changed your position. If you didn't like it, you didn't like it. If you liked it, you liked it. You never played hate against apple because they somehow blocked you from an event with probably one person that was mad about something.

01:28:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't, I don't even care, I make it's mostly, you know at this point I don't really care and I always buy every.

01:28:20
Everything I review I buy because I don't mostly not not out of some holier-than-thou thing, but just because I don't want to be bugged by pr people saying, where's our review? Why didn't you like that? Any of that stuff, you know, I just buy it. Plus, it also gives you, I think, the real world experience. When you plunk down your own money for a product, you definitely have a slightly more skin in the game than if somebody sent it to you, right, and it's hard to do a review when you have something for two weeks. By the way, I think, uh, I have to give credit uh to uh let's see wizardling in our club, twitter discord who came up with the real reason. Anand tech is no longer. This is the Venn diagram of Anand tech users and ad block users and, of course, it's an exact match, but that's something to remember. You know a lot of people I use ad block. We all use ad block. Probably everybody who watches this show uses ad block, but that's another reason why you know, and pretty flat force.

01:29:19 - Doc ROck (Guest)
This guy said something which I mentioned on a show a couple weeks back, long before YouTube. All of the stuff that we're talking about happened in the magazine world.

01:29:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, sure did, it sure, did you ever like in by our magazines? And stereo magazines you guys never knew if that review was legit.

01:29:35 - Doc ROck (Guest)
And you kind of knew that, right, you kind of knew that the the HP printer would come out in bite magazine or computer shopper right next to three full page ads about hp products.

01:29:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I will defend I I have some experience in this. I will defend bite and and the ziff davis publications, pc magazine and computer shop. They really did try to separate, uh, church and state mean there was definitely a wall between sales. In fact I remember at Tech TV when we were owned by Ziff Davis, we were going to have a guy from MIT on named Bunny Wong who had hacked the original Xbox. Bunny had figured out a chip this is really a cool hack A daughter chip you could put on the Xbox. I can't remember why you would want to hack it. I guess to bypass DRM. I don't remember why you would want to hack it. I guess to bypass DRM. I don't know.

01:30:28
But Microsoft was furious and said we will yank all our advertising if you put this guy on and do an interview and show this chip. And to their credit, the management at Ziff Davis who ran the channel said don't worry about that, they'll come back, do the bit. Their lawyers got involved. Everybody got involved and said no, no, no, no Editorial integrity, do the bit. Their lawyers got involved. Everybody got involved and said no, no, editorial integrity, do the interview. We did the interview. Microsoft came back. You know it was a just, it was an empty threat, but so companies do try to control the news cycle. But a good, reliable authoritative in the old days, anyway, big enough magazine could ignore that. Little guys. This is the problem. If you're an individual youtuber, it's a lot harder to say, oh, I'm gonna lose all my ads. So that's the problem. You don't have this big edifice, this powerful edifice behind you protecting you and you're and and maybe you don't even know and care about things like that hey, I'm going to get a free. Uh, tonka truck. I love tonka trucks.

01:31:26 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
There's nothing better than a tonka truck but also if they back up a truck of cash, they will give you 20 grand to give us a positive be like. Okay, who's going to say no?

01:31:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
to that right yeah whereas when I worked, it is dumb not to when I worked at ZD, jim Ladder back, who was our editorial director and now he's at VidCon and is a big influencer, and creators in fact went to the White House at the creators summit. But Jim at the time was our editorial director and he we had a strict policy that you can't accept stuff, you can't go to it. You can't even take a dinner from people and he would God bless him. He went over all around the set at ZDTV and put tape over all the company logos so there'd be no implicit endorsement of Samsung or Zenith or whatever the hell kinds of TVs we were using. He really cared about this stuff and I think that's kind of a journalistic tradition. That is now, I think.

01:32:23 - Doc ROck (Guest)
History. I had dinner with Jim back in in April. We were in Vegas, you know. And so, to your point, and and I think this is the part that's hard I will always feel a little bit irritated because when I left Apple, I Went to go work at a wallet to aUAW, to write articles for TUAW, and one of the things I did was got rid of all my Apple stock at like 128. That's another one.

01:32:49
Yeah, Because as a quote unquote journalist, I'm not supposed to have Apple stock. While I'm writing on, at that time, one of the biggest Apple blogs, I know a whole bunch of people that didn't do that and soon after I got rid of everything, at one, 28, it shot to like 700 and something. So you know, like imagine what happens if I wanted to not be that guy. What if I wanted to try to control and manipulate and you know there's people that do it. So I don't know like the person. Listen and just for everybody, who's defending Linus in the chat is his channel. He could do whatever the heck he wants. Listen and just for everybody who's defending Linus in the chat, it's his channel. He can do whatever the heck he wants. I'm going to always think that he purposely fans flames and clickbaits because it works and the minute it stops working, he'll stop doing it.

01:33:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He used to do that.

01:33:32
so that's why I know it happens and I just hope the consumers understand the difference and that there is somewhere like Anantech in the world where they can go and get reliable, unbiased information, because that was really useful. By the way, in case you're curious, Marques Brownlee will appear on an ABC special about AI. Oprah is going to be hosting this and Sam Altman will be on it September 12th. It's called AI and the Future of Us. Sam Altman, who, of course, is the founder and CEO of OpenAI, maybe has a little bit of a conflict of interest on this. Anyway, we'll explain the fundamentals of AI. Bill Gates will be on. He'll talk about the changes AI may bring to education, healthcare and other sectors. Fbi director Christopher Wray will be on to talk about what AI does for law enforcement and national security, and then YouTube creator and technologist Marques Brownlee will showcase existing products with AI already embedded. It's going to be a dumb, dumb show. He's going to be a dumb dumb show.

01:34:45 - Doc ROck (Guest)
I'm just, I'm just enjoying watching Wesley's face, his reactions to that, a whole entire conversation just.

01:34:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But this is my problem is that the vast majority of people, this is the information they're going to get about AI yeah, it's oh it's cringe yeah, super cringe, ai and the future of us and, of course, the implication is what is the future of humanity in a world?

01:35:13 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
where this is for a general audience. Right, these are for normies, right, it's for normal. How are you, how are these people going to play to that audience?

01:35:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
ABC prime time. Yeah, you know, I used to do kind of what Marquez is doing. I used to do for live with Regis and Kelly oh God, I remember those. Yeah, I did that for years. And it's TV, it's dopey. You know it's not a way to learn about anything. It's TV, it's dopey. It's not a way to learn about anything. It's TV. Take it from me, I've done a lot of it. It's all about pictures, keeping your glue to the TV, and it's not about Can you imagine a non-tech on TV?

01:35:56 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Not only that the audience is not going to know who the heck these people are, Isn't? That tech TV.

01:36:03 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
That's kind of what tech.

01:36:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
TV was actually. Oh my God, I don't think we ever had them. No, we must have had Anand on tech. We did. We had him on tech TV.

01:36:12 - Doc ROck (Guest)
Before Spectrum became Spectrum it used to be Oceanic TV and then we had two on the island Oceanic and Macaw, and then we had two on the island oceanic. In my car I had a weird kind of like box that came with the Tivo or whatever. That got me access to the og Leo Laporte show, and I remember Complaining to, at that time, oceanic cable, like we need to get ZDTV. I forgot what that service was called, that we used to get it in but they never ended up making it out of the you know early phase. Well, but after having tech TV, and even let's take it back to what is it? Three, two, one contact, is that right? Mm-hmm? No, that's not it. Is that it? I don't know what the show before the PBS yeah, it was on TLC.

01:37:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You're on a Tlc show now.

01:37:04 - Doc ROck (Guest)
I can't remember where me, no, I was on it with with soledad o'brien oh, the site.

01:37:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I got the sign over here. Yeah, there you go. Yeah, there you go.

01:37:11 - Doc ROck (Guest)
That was mad mad at my cable company that I would call them every day and be like get zd tv, get zd tv.

01:37:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There are, there are plenty of people who at the time said oh, you're such a poser, you're a TV guy, you don't know anything about technology and blah, blah blah. I'm used to that. That's fine, and you know what? We're saying the same thing about me that we're saying now about Linus. I have no problem with somebody pursuing their career in any way they want to. I just want people to have access to good content, reliable content with integrity.

01:37:43 - Doc ROck (Guest)
If they need such a thing, maybe they don't need it, right, and when you have a strong opinion about something, all I'm saying is delineate it as this is my opinion. You do your own research. That's the only line that anybody needs to add, and you can be completely anti, because I will always say the Boston Celtics is the best basketball team in the freaking planet. And two years from now, when we're back at the bottom, I'm still going to say that in all delusion. But I will always point to the banners. Look at the banners. Player.

01:38:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Look at the banners that's the future of us. What's the future of the knicks? That's what I want to know. Oh, I'm sorry, that's just trash. No, I don't, I'm just kidding that my friends is Doc Rock. He bleeds Irish green. Oh, look at that. I wouldn't have picked you for a Celtics fan for some reason.

01:38:29 - Doc ROck (Guest)
I don't know why, man, all the way, since I was a wee lad, as they say.

01:38:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I was a Red Sox fan. I grew up in Providence and I guess I would have been a Celtics fan.

01:38:38 - Doc ROck (Guest)
Also a hardcore Red Sox fan, but then I am related to Dennis.

01:38:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There you go. Oil Can Boyd Dennis.

01:38:46 - Doc ROck (Guest)
Who Oil Can Boyd?

01:38:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, dennis, oil Can Boyd. Oh well, that's a fish of a different color. Thank you.

01:38:56 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Doc for being here.

01:38:57 - Doc ROck (Guest)
We're the same color.

01:39:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Why is that horse purple Also? Lou. Maresca from this week in Enterprise Tech. It's the world champion.

01:39:07 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
Celtics, by the way, even though, lou, you might Well, you're in New England, huh yeah, I love Celtics Since I was a kid as well.

01:39:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, of course. Thank you, Great to have you and Wesley Faulkner. We don't know what team he's on.

01:39:24 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Are you to have you and wesley faulkner? We don't know what team he's on. Are you a sport fan? No, not really. I used to watch tennis religiously, but not anymore.

01:39:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I uh, I watched a very exciting formula one race this morning. Uh, is that a sport? I guess it is. Incidentally, our 1000th episode of twit is coming in five episodes. This, this is 995. And we've got Patrick Norton lined up, so that'll be fun. He was on the original episode. David Prager, robert Heron I'm working on, and Kevin Rose can't make it, but he'll, I'm sure, send us a little greeting, benito. Have we heard from Robert or David?

01:39:58 - Benito (Announcement)
Not yet. Dude love Prager, we're going to have to put the pressure on.

01:40:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, well, they were on episode one. It was Kevin Rose, robert Heron and Patrick Norton on episode one, and so, filling in it'll be, david Prager was also in many, many of the early episodes that's coming up in five. Count them Five episodes Our show this week, brought to you by NetSuite. The less your business this is business 101. Let me give you a little lesson in business. The less your business spends on operations, multiple systems delivering your product or service, the more margin you have, and you know what that means the more money you keep. So I think you knew that right. In order to reduce costs and headaches, smart businesses are graduating to NetSuite by Oracle. Netsuite is the number one cloud financial system, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, hr all into one platform and one source of truth. With NetSuite, you reduce IT costs because NetSuite lives in the cloud with no hardware required can be accessed anywhere. You cut the cost of maintaining multiple systems because you have one unified business management suite, and you improve efficiency by bringing all your major business processes into one platform, slashing manual tasks and errors. That's not a surprise. Over 37,000 companies have already made the move. So do the math. See how you'll profit with NetSuite. Now, by popular demand, netsuite is extended as one of a kind flexible financing program for just a few more weeks. So head to NetSuite N-E-T-S-U-I-T-E dot com. Slash T-W-I-T. That's NetSuite dot com slash Twit. We thank them so much for supporting this week in tech. We thank you supporting us by going to NetSuite dot com slash Twit.

01:41:51
On, we go with the show. Actually, I kind of ran out of news. Let me see, let's find some more uh news. Oh, did you listen to cereals podcast news, big podcast news? You remember uh adnan saeed who was uh, they said, I think falsely accused of the murder of his girlfriend? Apparently the court listened, released him a few years ago. Now Maryland's Supreme Court has upheld an appellate court's decision to reinstate his conviction, not because of any new evidence, not because there was any reason to think that he did do it, but because the murder victim's family didn't get adequate notice about the hearing. So now they're going to do it all again Now, besides free right now, he had spent 23 years in prison for the murder of his former high school girlfriend and I think I didn't listen to serial, but I think those who did said it made a pretty strong case, compelling case, that he was unjustly convicted and, in fact, his uh, his conviction was overturned because apparently there was exculpatory evidence that somebody else might have committed the crime and that evidence had not been offered to his defense and was not raised in court.

01:43:21
So that's why he was released. After new information about two possible alternative subjects, september 2022, he was released. He's still out of prison. Prosecutors decided to drop all cases against him. However, the brother of the victim said hey, I only got three days notice, I couldn't come, and that violates a Maryland victim's right law. And so the courts had to say well, we got to do this all over again.

01:43:53 - Doc ROck (Guest)
That's bananas. It's kind of bananas.

01:43:56 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
That's not his fault, though, right? No, nothing he did wrong?

01:44:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, did anybody listen to Serial didn't? Yes, okay. Was it convincing? Did he get 100?

01:44:08 - Doc ROck (Guest)
yeah, yeah it was definitely in the reasonable doubt space right right, right and well, the thing about cereal for me and why I listened to it at the time. I think I started listening to it when it was about episode three because I all of a sudden heard all of my muggles talking about podcasts and I'm like they're like, oh, do you still do podcasts? And I'm like yeah, and they're like, oh, there's this new podcast. It's really really good. It's about murder.

01:44:34
I was like nobody does podcasts about murder stuff. We only talk about tech or sports or comedy or news. So that was the first like podcast for normies and I heard all kind of random people who I knew had nothing about podcasts other than the fact that they knew that I did them start listening to podcasts. I was like what is this? And once you start listening to it, you kind of got into it and also I kind of grew up in the neighborhood so I I understood some of the stuff they were talking about and yeah, it was just the reason why to me, it's tech is because it really did launch this second phase of making podcasts.

01:45:15
I hate to give them all the credit, but it kind of almost deserves all the credit for your mama listening to podcasts.

01:45:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Let's put it that way I think a lot of people rightly, I think consider podcasting. It became mainstream after because of cereal first podcast. I think that got more than a million downloads per episode. Uh, it got a lot of attention, you might say. The only bad thing that came came out of it was the the rise of the true crime podcast, which pretty much Dominates now.

01:45:44 - Doc ROck (Guest)
That's almost all you even those are even is Inundated as they are, they're everywhere. So many cases have been relook, that's true.

01:45:55
People got out of jail because people get railroaded by jail, because people get railroaded, um, by, uh, com stats, right, which is the conviction status that police are always trying to win. So the american look good, and com stats cause illegal people to do a whole bunch of dumb stuff and arrest people that don't deserve to be in jail. So the innocence project and all of the true crime podcasts have either solved these crimes and found the, the, the murderers or whomever, whatever they did, and they've also released a bunch of people that didn't deserve to be in jail.

01:46:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I don't think there's anything wrong with it. It's a good genre. I think comedy podcasts have lasted longer and are probably another reason podcasting is still big today. The tech podcasts we dominated in the early days, but the early adop but uh, uh, you know, I mean that's. You know, the early adopters were into tech and they had ipods and they knew how to figure out how to get their ipod connected to the computer so they could download a show and put it on their ipod so they could listen to it in their car. That was a special audience. That was way back when. Actually it's timely because this, believe it or not, is the 20, it or not, is the 20th anniversary. This month is the 20th anniversary of the birth of podcasting. Well, I think I mean you could say there were earlier shows.

01:47:11
Certainly, I offered my radio show for download on the Internet, but what made podcasting podcasting was the idea of putting binary files in RSS feeds. Originally, when RSS was created, it was a way of following your favorite blogs and every blog would have an RSS, a really simple syndication feed, and you would subscribe to it in something called an RSS reader. This sounds so old ad now, but your RSS reader would then let you know there's a new post from your favorite blogger. When Dave Weiner I think it was Adam Curry, actually former MTV VJ and now the host of a kind of crazy conspiracy podcast with my old friend John C Dvorak called no Agenda a conspiracy podcast with my old friend John C Dvorak called no Agenda Curry said to Weiner hey, we should have a way to not only have the RSS's feed say there's a new article, but what if we could do it? There's a new audio file. And Weiner said, okay, he did that. In fact, he did it in 2001.

01:48:25 - Doc ROck (Guest)
Yeah, he played a Grateful Dead album that's right in 2001, but but Curry made him revisit it because of an update that had happened with RSS that's right.

01:48:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So the the first I became aware of podcasting. I would say it was it really. The first podcast were in September 2004. But that's when I Potter X race Likinski's early attempt to make a program dedicated specifically to downloading podcasts was created. I Potter came out in September 2004. I got a phone call in late September 2004 from a kid named Matt Bischoff who said hey, I know you can download your shows on the web, but would you ever think about making a podcast? And I said what's a podcast? And he explained oh, you just make an RSS feed. So I did. My first podcast was the tech guy show, and that was in october 2004. Uh, so I think I I will date back the beginning of podcasting for real as at least the fall of 20 years ago, which is kind of a kind of amazing um pioneer, yeah I went down a rabbit hole and season one of cereal was 2014, so that's the thing.

01:49:46
It was 10 years later that it became mainstream, and then but I thought it was like um a pandemic thing where I was listening during the pandemic and I was, and so I had to look it up.

01:49:57 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
I was like I thought I'd listen to it during like covet and yeah, no, no, no, apparently it's I'm the. My whole time is warped. I thought everyone was in the podcast back then, but yeah, it's been 10 years. This is really crazy.

01:50:10 - Doc ROck (Guest)
That just changed everything, like literally. It brought a whole bunch of people to it and so when cereal was over, that's when people were like, well, what else can we listen to? Yeah, and there was no more of the true crime type of thing. But cereal also did one other major thing it brought not necessarily good it brought the major networks into podcasting right. So about a year after cereal, you had comedy central starting a podcast network, you had I heart starting a podcast network, you had all these other these you know everybody's doing it yeah, the pain in the butt.

01:50:45
Guys made it into it.

01:50:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Let's put it that way so the first time podcasting was mentioned on a podcast was the evil genius chronicles.

01:50:53 - Doc ROck (Guest)
Dave slusher mentioned the word september 18th 2004, so yeah, he was trying to come up with the name for, basically, what was what you were doing prior and even, like Sean King, guys were doing prior, which was these web shows. Right, that you know people were doing their website many years before the long time ago.

01:51:17
Yeah, even I was doing shoutcast, shoutcast and icecast back in the day, right. And so he was like what are we going to call these guys Pirate radio, if it's not really a broadcast and people are going to take these things and put them into these little pods? And then the iPod had just sort of come out. He goes, oh, maybe we'll call it podcast or whatever. And somebody was like I like that and that was the word that stuck, because theoretically, podcasts it will not theoretically 100 podcasts existed long before the ipod, right, because I remember my creative labs 300, rio is that what it called? Rio 300?

01:51:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, diamond rio, that was my first podcast.

01:51:54 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
The diamond, that was my first podcast appliance yeah, I had active sync that would sync it up to my. Pda.

01:52:01 - Doc ROck (Guest)
Yes, yes, put him on to the trio. I had a trio at that time, a handspring trio. I used to put him on there and listen back. I don't think I just thought about recently, when the Apple TV came out in 2009, the big flat, you know, like cheesecake box size one, what's basically Mac mini size. I only bought that because the only video podcast I wanted to see at the time was leo and um, patrick, norton and roger, and they were the only video podcast at that time that were worth getting, and so you had just made a tweet.

01:52:34
I don't even remember what was that 2000 2009, because I still have that and I bet you if I plugged it in and turn it on 2009 because I still have that and I bet you if I plugged it in and turn it on, it would be like three.

01:52:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's pretty funny. Yeah, uh, I don't know what you call what we do anymore because of video and YouTube and and all of that I. It certainly has nothing to do with the iPod. In fact, I doubt anybody listens to podcasts on an iPod anymore. Doc Searles began keeping track you remember doc from uh floss weekly he began keeping track of how many hits google found for the world for the word podcast. His first search was late september 2004 24 results. Uh, on october 1st 2004 there were 2750. Just a few days later, the number continued to. Just a few days later the number continued to double every few days. I don't know, if you search for the word podcast on Google today, it's going to be millions, right, and there are probably more than a million podcasts currently in the world.

01:53:38 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
I'm on two personally.

01:53:39 - Doc ROck (Guest)
Yeah, yeah, there you go, I speak at Podcast personally. Yeah, yeah, there you go. I speak at podcast movement Um, every year. The one that just happened in dc last week I couldn't go to because I was in japan living it up, but, um, it's funny, I see people that have been there from the very beginning and then I see all the brand new people who are bright-eyed and bushy Tail.

01:53:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
but you know, revolution.

01:53:58 - Doc ROck (Guest)
The revolution happened this year when tell. But you know, revolution? The revolution happened this year when youtube is now focusing on podcasts and I've been saying this for about three years now and it's finally starting to happen. And of course, everybody's like well, they don't have rss feed yet I'm like the modern world doesn't need rss nobody.

01:54:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Nobody has rss readers, nobody really knows what's going on.

01:54:18 - Doc ROck (Guest)
But YouTube now basically having a podcast tab, it is going to be the game changer, because YouTube is the largest. Oh, the Spotify to YouTube disparity number is almost hilarious. Youtube is the largest streaming platform in the planet. If you combine Disney, netflix, hulu, uh, the hulu triumvirate right, so which is espn and all of that, and you go down online, they still outcast them by a long time so what do I?

01:54:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
so I go to youtubecom and then click the podcast button. Is that their podcast feed? Yeah, yeah, oh, look there, we are.

01:55:00 - Doc ROck (Guest)
There you are so hey, hi, hi me any show okay. Like say, you have something on your youtube channel that you do, um, let's say lou is talking about you know how people can get into ui design, these are the best colleges, whatever and he makes a series of, say, 12 videos about how to get into ui ux. You take that, make it a playlist. Of that playlist you check podcast, give it a 3000 by 3000 graphic and a description, and now it is a youtube podcast, I guess that's what we're doing automatically convert the audio side.

01:55:32
And yeah, it's a game changer because 2.8 billion active users, every tv sold in the planet for about the last 10 years has a youtube button. There is no pocket cast button, wow or apple podcast, but I remember every tv on the planet has a youtube button so race lakinski, who wrote that first uh podcasting program, ipod, in 2004.

01:55:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I remember sitting next to him, uh, at macworld. Uh, in 2005, a year later, when ste Steve Jobs announced that it was going to add podcasting to iTunes. And talk about a guy who was Sherlocked in like in a minute. That was it. That was it for iPodder. It was gone and Ray knew it and his face just fell and I think even then I said boy, apple, adding podcasting is both the best thing and the worst thing that could happen to podcasting. It's nothing compared to YouTube adding podcasting. Talk about blurring the line. What is podcasting anymore? Is it a show that's on the Internet, right?

01:56:35 - Doc ROck (Guest)
Well, basically, because I have this conversation basically every day, because I have this conversation basically every day, um, the the actual terminology somewhat doesn't matter because there's, we started out with narrowcast, and then we went to widecast, and then we went to broadcasts, and then we went to multicast and, yeah, netcast you love for the pu, that's right this is, by the way, why I wanted to call them netcasts, because they had nothing to do with the ipad they were.

01:57:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They were broadcasts on the internet, but nobody, nobody.

01:57:05 - Doc ROck (Guest)
There was no take up correct and and so now, if you just have a show, that, if you just, if you just have a show, it's just a show put out, that's all like in in a manner where people can digest it seasonal or not and it's on a sort of consistent basis. You can make it a podcast or a broadcast that's all it is.

01:57:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So, yeah, lou, there's your uh everybody's posting their first podcast. Uh tool, there's your uh compact pocket pc.

01:57:33 - Doc ROck (Guest)
I love that thing I still have that thing, I still got mine.

01:57:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, really yeah, and you press the button and it syncs up, and then you get with a foldable keyboard.

01:57:42 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
It was awesome, yeah ipac.

01:57:44 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
I love the ipad the ipad.

01:57:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, all of you, all of you got the ipad. Well, this must have been a kind of critical invention in the world, was that window?

01:57:52 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
had a, had a window c on. Yeah, I had a dell axion though similar yeah similar, probably the same it went to c on.

01:58:00 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
It had the little uh stylus.

01:58:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It was awesome there was, there was didn't compact make one with pie, with palm on it, palm pilot yeah it did. Yeah, because I remember I played bejeweled so much on it because it had a stylus and I used the sounds that there were scratches on the glass, horizontal and vertical scratches from all the bejeweled, all the swiping, all the swiping uh, here is uh dissolving the pixels posted their creative zen micro. This was probably a very popular platform.

01:58:32 - Doc ROck (Guest)
That's one of the very first apps ever created by these two guys from merrimack, county massachusetts, ken and glennpresley was a Palm app and they said, well, we need a name for the company and they named it Ecamm. There was nothing camera involved in it at the time, so Ecamm back in 1999. Everyone thinks it's new because of what we do now, but they started with a Palm app Way, way, way way back in the day.

01:58:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, you know what that's right? I remember that, and I used Ecamm to copy files off my iPhone as well, right?

01:59:01 - Doc ROck (Guest)
Yep iPhone Explorer.

01:59:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I never understood why it was called Ecamm. There was no camera. Now it makes sense.

01:59:08 - Doc ROck (Guest)
They were doing the Google thing of just pick some random words. They knew where they were headed. That's why. It's so crazy here's.

01:59:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Eat the Oligarch's Nomad. This was a Creative Labs podcast player the Nomad.

01:59:22 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
I loaded my MP3s on mini discs Really. On the Sony mini discs.

01:59:28 - Doc ROck (Guest)
Yeah, I have my mini disc right here.

01:59:34 - Benito (Announcement)
Okay, so we're all the same age, because I was a mini disc guy too.

01:59:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
My player recently died. I feel like you would have a mini disc.

01:59:40 - Doc ROck (Guest)
I have a whole bunch of what the hell my tracks from my my days of making an album, back when I wanted to be an elite rapper, and they're here I need to find my player just died and I can't listen to none oh, you got to get to know.

01:59:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
A pretty fly for a sci-fi guy. He's got his uh sony walkman disc player the net md mini dude, that's super funny.

02:00:05 - Doc ROck (Guest)
I've been, I've been like saving these, I'm like, oh, sony kept this like sony, kept that format alive for far longer than any should ever surprise.

02:00:14 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
I'm surprised how accessible that was data storage.

02:00:17 - Doc ROck (Guest)
You know, at one point there was um psyquest made a mini disc drive that you can actually store data with it on here p hall still has his diamond, oh rio oh what's that?

02:00:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
what is that you got? Wes, there it is.

02:00:31 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
There's your mini disc player wow, see mine's in a box somewhere in the attic.

02:00:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Like you guys are, you got it right there someday, archaeologists are gonna dig up all this many discs and say, gee, I wish we had a way to play them many discs were in that critical period of time, right before CD burners became big festival right? Yeah, how, how much could you? They were analog right, or were they? Digital time.

02:00:58 - Doc ROck (Guest)
It was like 60 minutes or 74 minutes 60 minutes 74 minutes is the majority of the ones that I have, so 74 and 80.

02:01:08 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
But the thing is, you had to burn them real time.

02:01:11 - Benito (Announcement)
So that was you had to record. That sucked. Yeah, it was like a tape, but it was like a CD.

02:01:16 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Yeah it was a tape, it was. Yeah, it was a tape, it was.

02:01:18 - Doc ROck (Guest)
it was I used the digital out on my sound on my sound blaster, uh, in order to uh load it onto the digital in into and the reason why I liked mini disc better than anything else at the particular time, because somebody posted one earlier, the uh old yellow sony that stopped the cd from skipping.

02:01:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Like nothing sucked more than having your cd skip while you're trying to do something and so walkman was the early walkman which I remember spending a ridiculous amount of money for skipped like at the drop of a hat I mean the discman, the discman, the discman, the discman walking. That's what I was looking for oh the walkman was cassettes, that's right. The discman, yeah, skipped like crazy. Here's a diamond rio Hall still, or is it Fall?

02:02:01 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
still has it. Most people like the mini disc because I saw some professional versions. They had 24-bit recording.

02:02:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yep, I remember DJs who used mini discs who'd come with a big box of discs. Yeah, yep.

02:02:15 - Doc ROck (Guest)
I guess Tommy that's my deck that just died. Tommy posted a picture of the player, the Sony player like that I had the DAT and the MiniDisc on top of each other.

02:02:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is a digital deck.

02:02:25 - Doc ROck (Guest)
There were twins. So I went from DAT which we recorded on in the music studio to copy to MiniDisc and there was a twin set and so the MiniDisc part of that set died.

02:02:36 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
Aw Well, somebody's found one, so I have to go get my.

02:02:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Zune or something. Now On eBay just $2.99 for the Denon DN-M99 IR Professional MD Minidisc Player. Working Doc, I think I'd snap that up if I were you.

02:02:51 - Doc ROck (Guest)
I remember that. I can't believe. You just made me think of that. The watermelon Zune was a thing. It was like green and kind of like pink accents. Oh my God.

02:03:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We have just had a completely spontaneous trip down memory lane for no apparent oh I know why because this is the 20th anniversary of podcasting.

02:03:11 - Doc ROck (Guest)
That's why, before, there was like a big ipod shuffle this is the story of us, my friends, the story of us.

02:03:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Let's take a little break. More to come with our great panels Lou Maresca, formerly of this Week in Enterprise Tech, but he's still Principal Engineering Manager at Microsoft. Also great to have Wesley Faulkner. Wesley83.com. Are you looking for work or do you have a job and just can't talk about it?

02:03:40 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Well, right now I'm just surviving on my OnlyFans account. Hey, I'll subscribe to that, but yeah, I'm currently on the market. So if you're looking to hire, how can people get a hold of you if they want to hire you? Wesley83.com. There's a contact form that I just set up this morning. If you scroll all the way to the bottom on Wesley, I will vouch for this guy.

02:04:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This guy is great in developer relations, in marketing, in just communication. I'm a huge fan of Wesley Faulkner, so hire him. To hire him, does a geography matter? Are you? Will you travel?

02:04:19 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
No, because I only take remote jobs. So yeah, nowadays I does the geography matter, are you will?

02:04:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
you travel? No, because I only take remote jobs. So yeah, nowadays I I don't know why anybody would do anything less. Right, why go to an office anymore? Is it the end of the end of the line for offices? We, none of our employees, burke was asking me hey, do you ever want me to come and see you?

02:04:39 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
It's not logical, like there's studies that are out there saying like it's just a power grab where companies just want, they just want to keep it, they want to watch you.

02:04:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, but there are no studies saying that it makes you more effective.

02:04:54 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
There was actually a spike during when, when, when most people went remote during COVID and productivity went up. It went up so high and they started hiring more people. And then they're saying, well, if productivity is this high, we can start firing people. And so then the layoffs happened because they didn't need to hire more people because the productivity of each individual person was pretty high. And then they're like, oh, now we want you to come into the office and then. So then people started leaving and now things are just a mess in the chaos it's a mess.

02:05:28
Let's we're in a place of flux, and so hopefully it'll settle in the next couple of years when people will figure out like we just want people to be effective yeah, there used to be a whole trend and it was called row r-o-w-e.

02:05:40 - Doc ROck (Guest)
It was ryan carson from base camp, whatever, his 30 something signals, whatever, yeah, 37 signals and adobe a whole bunch of people. It was called row results only work environment and that was the whole thing. That your employees are more productive if they didn't have to think about what is my kid doing at school. Let me just leave the office and go, you know, pick them up or get them where they need to be. And it was a whole trend and then everybody kind of laughed it off and then the pandemic put everybody in that environment.

02:06:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's why I wanted to go to the office because I had kids at home and I wanted to get out of the house. Honestly, I couldn't wait to go to work. It was like, ah, adults, how many kids do you have, lou?

02:06:25 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
I have five kids and they're all.

02:06:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're trying to run past the door now so they can see them and I don't know what's going on at west's house, but I saw him just throw something at somebody there's a cat just meowing at me, just like staring at me, just meowing like go away.

02:06:39 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
I uh, I have any animals we actually had.

02:06:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So lisa used to have her office next to next to me and you could hear her on the shows. So she's moved away. So I now have a sound lock but she's. She says she's gonna get they make a, a cat bed that go that clamps to a desk. You know how you have those clamps like for a microphone stand, stand the clamps to a desk and then there's a cat bed right like at this level, at eye level, and she says she swears she's getting that. So I don't know I might have a cat stand.

02:07:08 - Doc ROck (Guest)
There's no way anyone don't tell her I said this. There's no way anybody can share office with Lisa when she's on the phone and she's excited.

02:07:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
She's kind of loud. I felt really bad.

02:07:17 - Doc ROck (Guest)
Even me. I'm loud, but Lisa, she would drown me out.

02:07:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
She's enthusiastic. You know what it's? Pure enthusiasm. She's going all the way, a hundred percent.

02:07:25 - Doc ROck (Guest)
Dude, she's a ball of energy. Love her to death, exactly. Don't tell her. I said that, though, because she might hit me.

02:07:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, no, no, but that's really what it is. And the problem is we couldn't have two people. We're bundles of energy and joy, so one of them had to move, and I had already put all this stuff here.

02:07:42 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
We're walking on keyboards too much. I could not have a nest for them to do a quick launch onto yeah.

02:07:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, that's why you put her in the nest, and then, I don't know, maybe Does it have a cage. Is there a lid? I need a cage.

02:07:57 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
A lid. Yeah, they would never stay there, yeah then all you get is all right a little quick.

02:08:05 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
One quick thing I'm uh, it's it. I shouldn't be saying this, but I'm gonna say it anyway. I'm in negotiations to um to do the outline of writing a book about a new way of working um and so and so definitely do it, and so totally do that three or four years when it's ready uh, actually you should do a youtube series and forget the book, but I will help you a youtube podcast, youtube podcast winner.

02:08:34 - Doc ROck (Guest)
Just whatever you do, don't do benchmarks that way, you write the book in real time um as you make episodes about it I did that.

02:08:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So when we're done recording, I'll give you a quick peek the first book I wrote, which was 95 or 90, some. I had a net cam on me and it would take a picture every minute of me and then I would add to the caption page 173 down, page 17 down. It was the most painful. Have you ever written a book, wesley?

02:09:04 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
No, you're going to love it. No, no, it's painful. Right now I'm doing the legal paperwork too.

02:09:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The best thing about writing a book is having written a book. Yes, exactly. Then you can go on tour and you know, talk about your book and you get on nbc and stuff like that.

02:09:25 - Doc ROck (Guest)
maybe the next time they do the story of us, it'll be wesley faulkner and the story of us maybe, leo, you should write your next book and launch your book at the mall that I was at last week. It's called lala port fukuoka, japan.

02:09:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Lollaport is in.

02:09:42 - Doc ROck (Guest)
LA LA POR T. It's uh the Mitsui conglomerate they own. This thing is.

02:09:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I have a mall named after me in Japan.

02:09:49 - Doc ROck (Guest)
I don't even yeah, it's a pretty dope mall and they have a giant Gundam outside that animates it's a super simple Gundam.

02:09:59 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Star malls only have guns. Wow, that's pretty awesome. Oh, geez, dude that is dude too soon.

02:10:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's doc rock, youtubecom slash doc rock great panel saving us in this our show today, brought to you by fundrise. Do you know what fundrise is? So let me talk about investing. Venture capital is, if you've got the money, probably the most lucrative asset classes in the world. If you go look at the S&P 500, nearly every major tech company on that list was started and funded by venture capital firms, which then capitalized on their IPOs, their exits, their acquisitions, producing billions of dollars in the process.

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02:12:51
The only thing good about a doge is it had a uh cork. Was it a corgi or very cute dog in shiba inu inu?

02:12:56 - Doc ROck (Guest)
inu inu inu. So japanese you know what is it?

02:13:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
what does it mean? Shiba inu?

02:13:08 - Doc ROck (Guest)
inu is dog, shiba is we're from the shiba prefecture.

02:13:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It means dog yeah, it's a dog from the shiba prefecture. That's the worst name. That's like if I were named Leo California. Okay, all right, I was all. It's a good name, but if you know what, it means good name, california man. California man. Yeah, it wouldn't even be Leo, I'd just be California man and you'd be Hawaii man, doc hi and you'd be Hawaii man, doc and Wes you'd be. I don't know where you're from. Where are you? Are you in St Louis?

02:13:45 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
American man, I'll just say American.

02:13:47 - Doc ROck (Guest)
I'm in Southern.

02:13:48 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Virginia. I'm in Roanoke, Virginia.

02:13:50 - Doc ROck (Guest)
Roanoke. That's right, Dude. I used to deliver the newspaper in Roanoke, Virginia, before you were born, probably.

02:13:55 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Yeah, I saw that message.

02:13:56 - Doc ROck (Guest)
I was like what? Yeah, so we used to. From the Washington Star and Post, we would drive all of them in a gigantic UPS size truck to all of the tributaries around and deliver it to the mall somewhere where they would deliver it to all the people. So we would meet the mailmen of your neighborhood and give them all the bundles. That's cool.

02:14:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
My brother-in-law. I live in such a rural area, formerly rural area, chicken capital of the world. My brother-in-law used to deliver newspapers on a horse, good Lord, or a horseback.

02:14:29 - Doc ROck (Guest)
Super funny.

02:14:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
When we bought our house. He says oh yeah, I used to deliver newspapers out there on a horse. Tom Hanks warns followers don't believe those ads. You see, with my likeness, these ads have been created without my consent, fraudulently through AI. Do not be fooled. Has anybody been fooled? There are multiple ads promoting miracle cures and wonder drugs. Miracle Cures and Wonder Drugs. I mean, this is not the first time this has happened. Is this going to be a bigger problem, or are all the celebrities going to have to come on and say this is what I endorse, this is what I don't endorse?

02:15:14 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
I saw Bruce Willis like a few years ago was a victim of this, of some ads with his likeness in it. Was it in Russia, I think as well?

02:15:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh it was, I remember that. Yes, yeah, that's right, but I think those are television ads.

02:15:26 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Those are television ads, and the people who are reading this article about Tom Hanks are probably not the same people who are seeing whatever these scams are. That's the problem, unfortunately. So I don't think he's reaching the right people, but I think this is something we need to start talking about. I had a I heard a podcast about the talking about deep fakes and ai, how most of them, especially on the political front, um how they've been used as things that like swifties for trump, where people aren't supposed to feel like that is supposed to be real. It's not supposed to fool people, but it's made to just make fun of other people.

02:16:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's like Dogecoin, it's a meme and it's also a call to the followers, to the in crowd. Yes, wink, wink.

02:16:19 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
But it makes people comfortable. Comfortable, though, with creating this stuff and sitting it out and laughing about it like the pope jacket and stuff like this yeah, that's for now.

02:16:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
that's the point is, that's for now, but but in a year you're not going to know what's real and what's not real. We were talking about this on this week in google, because I took out the pixel phone and did the reimagine thing and I turned my kitty cat into a tiger and it's very credible, it's very realistic, it looks real. I don't know how you know the difference.

02:16:50 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
But it's even the same thing with, like, um, with the posing of uh, what is it like with the pixels they have? Like, you take a picture and then you can get in there and you can actually superimpose someone else who wasn't in the original picture. You could do that with. Do you remember the time where celebrity not celebrities, but people with a political bent would take pictures with an opponent and they would be wearing a t-shirt that was offensive and then taking pictures with them? And you could do that now where you can have people sub in using AI like Epstein and.

02:17:28
Trump or something.

02:17:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
As bad as this election might be, this is going to be the last election where you can believe anything. Here's a picture of Samantha, the cat that's going to be sitting on my desk, and here's a picture of Samantha as a tiger. I think that's pretty cute. I would like that cat. By the way, the original picture she had a big pole coming out of her neck. You know, behind her the fence post. So I was able to remove that, I think completely invisibly. I guess if you knew where it was, you might look carefully at some of the rocks and then I was able to modify it and make her a tiger. All of that in the phone, in the Pixel phone.

02:18:08 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
I think the one that's been freaking people out is. I don't know if you've seen the Doors Brothers, the Door Brothers videos, where they take all those celebrities and they go and stick them in uncertain situations and those are super deep fakes. But they freak people out if you take them out of context.

02:18:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
D-O-R. The Doerr brothers, the Doerr brothers yeah.

02:18:31 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
AI-generated stuff.

02:18:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It looks like AI. Those of us that can tell it won't affect us.

02:18:37 - Doc ROck (Guest)
But there's so many people that can tell. We know what the signs are, we know what to look for, we know to check for shadows, we know to check for lighting that wouldn't cast a particular way. But there's other people that.

02:18:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Isn't it weird, all this stuff, that this, this looks like my dreams. These are what my dreams look like. Is that? Do anybody else notice that AI is is like what your brain does when you're sleeping, without any control. No, I mean, it's just me these are really good they're pretty good, yeah, definitely yeah, I don't know it can. I don't know if I can show all of these, but anyway, probably not yeah.

02:19:20 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
It reminds me when my kids were little, we would watch a television show and they would be like oh my gosh. And I would say, oh, it's not real. But then we'd watch a documentary and they're like oh my gosh is that real?

02:19:33
And I was like, yeah, that's real, and so I had the knowledge to understand the framework of what is real and what is not knowledge, to understand the framework of what is real and what is not, and I think we need to like re-educate everyone to understand that everything can be fake and unless you did it yourself, unless you were able to, willing to go pixel peeping and stuff like that, where it's like, before someone says, do your own research, and before, when you said do your own research, you would actually like take the vials out and actually do the own like experiments yourself, but no one does their own research, and so it's all about who you trust, and and so trust as a, as an exchange, as an economy, as a currency for making sure that you're getting things that no happen is going to be more and more valuable as we move forward the trust economy has been slowly deteriorated for a long time, even before we got to the sort of ai thing or even the tech thing.

02:20:27 - Doc ROck (Guest)
Um, this is funny to me because I'm old enough to remember. But there was a point in time where because I'm old enough to remember, but there was a point in time where you would get into an argument between the Camaro lovers and the Pontiac Firebird lovers and they would have full fights about which one was better, while GM was standing in the back knowing the only difference between those two cars was the shell and the name tag. Every other bit of that car was the same, screw for screw. So we have been pulling this kind of stuff for the longest time. And the name tag Every other bit of that car was the same, screw for screw. So we have been pulling this kind of stuff for the longest time.

02:21:02
And now it's at a level where we've allowed people to get lazy with, so, like you say, doing their own research or vetting these things for themselves, right? We've allowed people to even take positions of power. Right, we've allowed people to even take positions of power by fooling enough people to believe that they're going to do one particular thing and not the other thing, right? We've allowed people like elon to just come in and snatch, which was, you know, a halfway decent platform at one point. Now it's up to us. We really have to go back and re-educate.

02:21:33
And so it's weird for all of us smart people who've always take the time to go study more and learn more and things like that, you know, and it's that smart people is not even the right way to say it, just the people who were curious enough about something to dig deeper. Because now I know highly intelligent people who are being constantly fooled by stuff and I was like I have to look to look at them, like I don't believe you would fall for that, like I see your master's degree on the wall and you're falling for this, and they go. Why? That's not my, you know my, my area of concern or whatever. Well, now, it has to be. Unfortunately, we have to have areas of concern, even in places we aren't necessarily concerned do you think oprah is going to cover this on her special on ABC?

02:22:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, I mean, that's kind of what we need is people like Oprah inoculating us against this. An inoculation is kind of how I think of it. By the way, the Door Brothers video which you posted, lou, has Anthony Fauci coming to your front door with an inoculation. That's not the kind of inoculation I'm talking about. This is the one that was on the door brothers stuff that was on Twitter. Look what he's doing with the, with the post. It's unbelievable. Yeah, yeah, it's obviously fake though, right, I mean, yes, I don't think this, but the point is, at this point it's just funny or creepy, or dreamlike and weird.

02:22:56 - Doc ROck (Guest)
But the reason why it's more creepy, leo, is, although it's obviously fake to the majority of us, we are at a level of, there's a lot of people who are, let's just say, unstable in plain sight, who you never knew were unstable until they cross a line right and again I have to pick on the same person. That's a good point because we kind of seen, we've seen elements of it at one point, but now we really see yo, your man, e is a little bit unstable. Okay, we're starting to see some famous people, like when, when, when, uh, yeezy went sideways, like you know, we watched a whole bunch of people go from, okay, you're a little strange to you're completely unstable, and we watched them progress right and in a way, uh, for us specifically, I would say, a lot of it probably has to do with, like, diet and medicine and then, just you know way, we've not paid attention to an education system where we live I actually think that mental illness is a real problem and it's because it's hidden.

02:24:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, when we see mental illness like yeezy is a good example um, I mean, he's genuinely has a mental, mentally ill. I don't know if he's schizophrenic I don't know what the diagnosis is, but it's clear he's mentally ill. Um, it's unfortunate that it gets exploited, but on the other hand, it's probably better that you see it, because it's honestly going on all the time.

02:24:24 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Uh, it's just, we hide it because it's so, uh, embarrassing or uncomfortable I do want to say really quickly though, because you brought mental illness, that people who are mentally ill are most likely the victims of crime oh, rather than exactly right, exactly, they're not the ones that, yes, no, exactly right, much more likely to be a victim.

02:24:44
Yes, and absolutely being convinced and thinking like going into a pizza parlor and saying, let let the kids out. Those are the people. Those people who are just wanting to do good are probably one of the people that are most dangerous, and not the people who are are wanting to do violence, but they wanted to. They think that it tweaks that their motivation center of them being a good person and then trying to fulfill that trying to be Batman or something could could be a problem where it could, it could be a problem for the rest, yeah, I don't think ai would ever make somebody mentally ill, but on the other hand, if somebody is mentally ill, they could perhaps you said the main thing, though people are learning how to manipulate people's emotion centers.

02:25:28 - Doc ROck (Guest)
That's true, and you're making people who are otherwise good people do crazy things because it's sparking their emotion system. And so when, leo, to your point about YouTube, right, you have people who otherwise good people all of a sudden get a little bit of taste of fame and then being told that their self-worth is based around the number that is attached to the end of their profile and they start trying to my my favorite word embiggen that profile. So they start doing more and more dangerous things. And then you got youtubers putting themselves in harm's way, all for what we used to call s and g's, um, s and giggles, but now it's for likes, you know, now it's for clicks and likes. And so you got people just doing really dangerous things and causing harm to themselves and others.

02:26:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is it worse than it was or is it more visible than it was? It's?

02:26:24 - Doc ROck (Guest)
just visible.

02:26:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's more visible. I feel like though that social media especially has weaponized a certain kind of popularity and search for popularity and, uh, fomo. That might not have been so commonplace when it was, you know. Oh, I read something in a book.

02:26:44 - Doc ROck (Guest)
What it is is. Emotion can take over in the vacuum of proper education. I'm going to say something. I don't mean this in any political standpoint whatsoever. So people put your knives down Now. I had the benefit of going to school in Japan and I'm going to just give you a one strange example about Japan that's so different from us, but it goes to show you what happens in the place where everyone's trying to grow together versus we're trying to hold back a certain sect of people. I can say this from experience, cause I am part of this certain sect Okay, versus we're trying to hold back a certain sect of people. I can say this from experience because I am part of this certain sect. Okay, in Japan, if your kid is misbehaved, you are forced to remove your kid from school, spend money to put him in the school where he can learn how to behave properly. In the US, you put your kid in the paid school to keep them away from the poor kids.

02:27:39
Let's provide this kid a better opportunity, a better education, a better everything books, meals, the whole nine yards. So we're gonna use the pay for school to separate the us from thems. In Japan, you only send your kid to private school because your kids are long right when your kids acting up right. So we've created from a long time ago, from being actually started from the Royals. We ran away from the Royals and came here and recreated the Royals, but instead of blood, we did it based off of of currency, and that set up the US in a place of failure for a very, very long time. We also don't teach kids because we don't let them be together. In Japan, from the minute you're like three, you are taking turns cleaning up for each other and you understand.

02:28:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I know I was always impressed when I learned that Japanese school kids have to clean up the school. Yes, janitors, they clean up.

02:28:39 - Doc ROck (Guest)
There's no janitors there, but the reason why we had janitors there is because my kid is is purebred, so they don't need to clean the grounds. Let's hire some people that look like me to clean the ground instead, because we're less than so. We created that mess so, and then now we have no way to dig out of it because we're less than so. We created that mess so, and then now we have no way to dig out of it because it's so deeply ingrained. Do you think that the people at the highest tell the people at the bottom that someone else is coming for you? They tell the people in the middle. The reason why you can't become at the top is the people at the bottom are holding you back, and so they could just sit at the top, be protected.

02:29:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Do you think that the Japanese or other cultures are better protected against AI because of that?

02:29:22 - Doc ROck (Guest)
No, they still have similar problem, but they're more and there's a definitely more education. I tell you what this will blow your mind. I don't know when's the last time you've been, but I go religiously. There is a bookstore on almost every other corner where we have a magic f ton of fast food restaurants, which they do.

02:29:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They also have a bookstore everywhere yeah, but you could leave your purse on the table at mcdonald's and go to the bathroom and no one will steal it no one will steal it.

02:29:47 - Doc ROck (Guest)
You know that's amazing. So they're the culture like you don't. But this is the test of what your thesis?

02:29:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
are they as vulnerable to this AI and other manipulation as we are, and you are they?

02:30:01 - Doc ROck (Guest)
Yes, yes, no, but in a different sense. There is they're not gonna get attacked based off of their emotions Because they'll do a better job of processing. Is is real. They'll take the time to go Look, we won't even care, we'll just be like Lou. Lou said it, so it must be factual. I don't need to investigate Lou's cool, let me just listen to Lou. You know like they will at least take the time to think it through and test it out and then, you know, ask other people. It's really weird. You know how it is, but there is definitely something to like. I look how it is, but there is definitely something to like. I look at places like, uh, finland and other places. We have really, really strong media literacy, right, someone just said imagine, said it. I look at places where reading is still fundamental.

02:30:43
We went through a phase it might take of the 80s where, being an athlete as I was, and a straight, a student, I had to fight every day in both camps. I had to fight with my nerd camps to let me play the nerd group. They go, no, but you're a jock. Yeah, I'm a jock because I'm the fastest kid in the state, but I still got more computers than you, so I could be in a nerd club. I could be both, you know, and it was weird to be both. But the only reason why I was able to live in both is because I grew up a half breed, so I started always on two sides of a fence. That didn't like each other.

02:31:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But what can we do about it now?

02:31:21 - Doc ROck (Guest)
make people understand that you have to. I don't care if you're an adult and you're not in school anymore. You have got to educate yourself. People need to go back to spending at least an hour a day educating themselves on something, and it is way too much fun to watch the kardashians and watch all these other people do stuff instead of like, find a way to educate yourself again everybody we're talking to in the chat.

02:31:46
We all take time to read up and learn and you know, like all of us are. I hate the smart people term because that's not. I think that's also used to hold people back but we take the time to educate ourselves about the things that anybody could do it and anybody can do it.

02:32:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But I have so many friends that are like yo, I'm out of school, I don't need to learn that anymore I have to say, though, I uh know young people who think that they're doing research, but really they're just going out on the internet and reading crap. A hundred percent, yeah, so true, they are reading up on stuff. They're trying to learn, they have the urge to learn what's true and what's right, it's critical thinking, but they're surrounded by crap.

02:32:24 - Doc ROck (Guest)
We cancel critical thinking.

02:32:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I don't know if there's enough critical thinking in the world to cut through all this. I have a question for you doc rock about the is the.

02:32:35 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
I'm guessing the internal incentive structure might be different in japan than it is here, for instance well, it's collective as opposed to individual.

02:32:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think that's the biggest thing in america. We are an individualistic society.

02:32:47 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
They are much more collective society and we're like what freedom is and what freedoms are if someone said like here in the, you could be rich, but you have to screw over a whole bunch of people. People are like, OK, I can do that Sure, I can do that. But like for instance are there MLMs in Japan?

02:33:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Multi-level marketing.

02:33:06 - Doc ROck (Guest)
Yes and no. It's really funny because yes and no. Ok, so I'm going to prime example. This is going to sound super crazy, just random, as I don't even know what they cost because I don't eat fast food. But let's just say a Big Mac is eight bucks in your town. What does a Big Mac cost in any airport in the US? Almost double, whatever it is at a regular price. Yep, in Japan the fast food in the airport is the same price. It is anywhere At the baseball game still the same price. They don't elevate it just because of the urgency of the event. That kind of stuff is not have search pricing. In japan they don't do search pricing. So although there are multi-level type things, it's never. It's about actually at meeting people, enjoying spending time together and doing business, not trying to jack people out. And yes, let me put this up before anybody says I'm crazy. Japan is definitely not a utopia. They have their own set of problems you've got the.

02:33:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You've got the salary man who works 80 hours a week and gets drunk, that's.

02:34:04 - Doc ROck (Guest)
That's a whole different companies. How they cheat the people that do cheat, they exploit the salary. People like you do not go home until your job is done and there there's a. They have their own mental health issues, whatever. I'm not saying that, but I'm just using their, their when you're nobody in the united states.

02:34:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Ever married a pillow? Well, maybe that my pillow guy, but nobody else and yeah, there's definitely some.

02:34:28 - Doc ROck (Guest)
There are definitely some things there, so let's not get it. This is important.

02:34:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The reason this is important is because you know, and we have listeners 30 of our audience is outside the us. So, even though we are somewhat us-centric, we have an audience all over the world. I hear from them and I love it, uh, but I do think that a lot of what we think about in terms of the perils of social media and the perils of ai are very american-centric, that I don't know if they're the same perils elsewhere. I think you're making that case, doc, right?

02:34:58 - Doc ROck (Guest)
They're different. That's what I'm saying. It is different, but I do know that when, when we were quote unquote top of the food chain and everybody looked up to us and, to this point, as I traveled the world, a lot of people still look up to us Um, they were focused on the thing that is making them better is education. Okay, so let's focus on education. And everybody else spent time getting educated and we spent time trying to stop certain people from getting educated, whether that was women, whether that was people of color, whether that was the poor folks.

02:35:32
Uh, we, we really, somewhere in the eighties and nineties, took this level of uh, let's just start defunding schools, if you will, and the biggest one that we have right now, which is a big pain in the butt to me. I had it hard, so you need to have it hard to like. No, like, I think. I think opening up the education so that everybody can be college educated is brilliant. You know why? Because if there's less stupid people in the world, we have less of the really dumb accidents, because you know there's nobody out here being stupid, you don't think that some people are just stupid no, I don't think so.

02:36:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You think everybody is educable and and and. I, somebody start that right. Maybe I'm fine.

02:36:20 - Doc ROck (Guest)
I always thought that it's. That's why I say it's unfair when people say, oh well, you're just smart. No, I took the time to learn tech.

02:36:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So anybody can see, anybody can be smart. Well, maybe what we call smart is just the desire to learn.

02:36:33 - Doc ROck (Guest)
There you go, or the willingness to be taught but not everybody has your old and even after you're old and degreed and have a status.

02:36:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's the willingness to be taught too many plenty of dumb old degree where they no longer want to be taught or they don't think that they're teachable well, I like your utopia, doc. I don't know if we'll ever achieve that. Uh, no, I I still think, though. My question is well, for instance, lou, you put this story in the wall street journal china's ai engineers are secretly accessing the chips that the chips act bans them from accessing, specifically nvidia chips. Nvidia makes chips for the chinese market that are dumbed down, but they don't want those.

02:37:13 - Doc ROck (Guest)
Um, they want the real deal because they're developing ai.

02:37:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Should we be threatened by chinese ai?

02:37:24 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
I think they're. They're at a race like they are. They are behind and they want to be in front. Are they behind?

02:37:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
actually they may not be behind.

02:37:30 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
I mean, in some cases they probably yeah, right, I mean I would say they're behind in chip manufacture?

02:37:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
for sure, because we have EUV and other technologies which we won't share with them, right, but they have. They've been using AI for social control for a lot longer than we have in the United States, right?

02:37:47 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
right. I think the biggest thing is they are because they don't have access to this. You know it, it's more of a commodity, like they are trying everything they can to get ahead, and I think that's the thing that's really driving them. That's the type of society they live in, and so, you know, will they?

02:38:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
be better prepared than we are for the advent of AI, deep fakes and so forth.

02:38:14 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
I don't know if you can be. Yeah, I don't think there is prep for that.

02:38:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I think in some ways kind of to disagree with you, doc. Human nature is hard to change and there are some ways that we are very gullible and easily fooled and no amount of reading or education is going to change that. That's just human nature.

02:38:35 - Doc ROck (Guest)
Yeah, I think what that? That part of it has to do with Wanting the individualism. At the same time, we do best when we are around others and yeah, Nation of collectivism and individualism might be.

02:38:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's benefits to both.

02:38:53 - Doc ROck (Guest)
Right, there you go because that because that's the problem with Japan the collectivism is so tight you can't get it about a degree on anything, not because no one wants to step up and take the chance of being wrong. So that was funny.

02:39:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Our companies innovate because people are willing to to say something dumb or do something dumb to the degree that they're not willing in Japan and other cultures.

02:39:22 - Doc ROck (Guest)
Right, right. Their AI is not going to tell you to put glue on pizza Never.

02:39:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Or eat rocks, but ours will. God bless it, usa. All right, let me take a little break, last break of the show, and we will continue on with a fabulous show. Doc Rock, lou MM and Wesley Faulkner great to have all of you on the show today. Our show brought to you by our longtime sponsor, melissa, the data quality experts. They've been doing it longer than we have, since 1985. Whether you need the full white glove service or just the basics, the nuts and bolts, melissa is the best for your enterprise. Melissa now offers transparent pricing for all its services. You know exactly what you can pay, eliminate the guesswork and estimate your business budget accurately. Join the 10,000 businesses worldwide that benefit from melissa's industry leading solutions.

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02:41:26
Melissa's committed to the security and privacy, of course, of all the client data in their care Through responsible use. They have a 38-year history of establishing and refining their controls to secure data. They're SOC 2 compliant, hipaa high trust compliant, gdpr compliant. Here's the deal Get started today with 1,000 records cleaned for free at melissacom slash twit M-E-L-I-S-S-A. Melissacom slash twit. We-e-l-i-s-s-a. Melissacom slash twit.

02:41:56
We thank Melissa so much for their longtime support of this week in tech. We thank all of our sponsors. We also thank our club members. We couldn't do it without you, our Club Twit members. You've responded to our call over the last couple of years.

02:42:10
We knew we were going to have to cut costs because ad revenue was down, cut shows and, unfortunately, even cut staff. But I think we've done a pretty good job of cutting corners without cutting the content, and now, with your help, we can continue to do what we do, and I think it's very important If you believe the same, if you listen to our shows and you'd like to join the club, we'd love to have you. Twittv slash club twit. We do some club content that's exclusive to the club, but it's my hope to make everything publicly available. And you know, join the club? Yeah, because you get access to the Discord and you get ad-free versions of all the shows, but also because you like what we do and you want to support it. I think of it as your vote. We'd like your vote to keep doing what we do here at twit twittv club.

02:43:04 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Twit guys, stop passing notes. You guys are passing notes while I'm talking.

02:43:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's so totally ineffective. I didn't hear it. I didn't hear any. Wesley has a sign, says doc, we hear you typing, I don't know, sorry, did you see that sign?

02:43:14 - Doc ROck (Guest)
it's the. Uh, the lovely cherry mx switches oh, you see.

02:43:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, so I bought the mushiest keyboard I could find. This is, uh, this is a logitech mx anywhere keyboard because I can type and you don't know I'm typing. It's really mushy I.

02:43:30 - Doc ROck (Guest)
I don't have to get one cherry. I don't know I can type, so I need to feel the click. But I also came up with IBM Selectic, so you know there's that, isn't there?

02:43:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
a new documentary out called In Search of Mavis Beacon? I almost want to say, you know, give it up, you guys. You're not going to be like In Search of Betty Crocker. Let me see if I can find this. Mavis was made up right. Yeah, I'm pretty sure she was. Maybe you know, I'm gonna watch this documentary and learn otherwise. Seeking mavis beacon two digital sleuths set out to find the woman who lent her image. Oh, so there is a real picture that I mean, she wasn't a famous typing teacher in elementary school. So many people in your generation, doc and younger, learned to type from Mavis Beacon. So this is, I guess, a podcast. They did the podcast Missing Richard Simmons. They found him and then he died. So that's no good. So I'm hoping Mavvis is going to be okay after this. No, I think it's a. It's a movie. Seeking mavis speaking beacon. Did you, did you, uh, learn how to type with mavis, or did you have a real teacher?

02:44:46 - Doc ROck (Guest)
I well, the problem is I had the real teacher, but it was in 12th grade. At the same time, I discovered that girls you know that and the really awesome five leaf plant. So I never went to that class. I was busy working on my uh, my first ever business, which required hanging out by the lockers in the back. Why?

02:45:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
is a quick brown dog. Keep jumping over the cow man, yeah the lazy fox.

02:45:12 - Doc ROck (Guest)
Yeah, so like I completely skipped, which was dumb, because had I known I was gonna be such a computer nerd, I never, ever would have skipped that class completely, would not. But I think the thing that was unique to me and this is again a weird perspective now at the time there was never a software box anywhere with a black female on it. There was never a software box anywhere with a black female on it.

02:45:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, that's true. All you have is, which is definitely not a role that matter, right.

02:45:40 - Doc ROck (Guest)
So at the time I was working when this got popular, I was working in a store called software etc. And I just like, wow, that's pretty a trip, that is such a thing, all right, cool. And so I bought it and I swear I played it like three times. I was like man, I can't type, never mind, I'll just leave it to the fact that I can't type. I'm a fantastic, uh, at music. I can wrap my face off get this you can buy.

02:46:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You can buy mavis beacon teaches typing on steam. Wow, wow, it is still out there. There's mavis, who is not real, but this is still the way kids learn to type and now they do it in steam. Is there a multiplayer option? That would be cool. What are the? I wonder what the reviews are. There's only seven user reviews. It's not. It's not exactly. Uh, taking the world by storm. Yeah, yeah, it's 50 bucks. Do you know how to type Wesley Like real touch type? No, I'm one of these. Yeah me too how about you.

02:46:42 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
Lou you type for a living Typing tutor. Typing tutor from 1989. You did learn how to type.

02:46:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So you're a touch typist.

02:46:48 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
Yes.

02:46:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Wow. But Doc isn't because he found something with five leaves, wesley isn't because I know there's a thing as home keys.

02:46:58 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
That's about the extent of knowledge. My fingers are not home.

02:47:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But then I have to look at the keyboard while I'm typing, so that's no good.

02:47:05 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
I don't use one of my fingers. People look at me weird. I don't use my pinky, so I use all the other fingers, all nine fingers, just not my pinky.

02:47:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, my pinky. So I use all the other fingers, all nine fingers, just not my pinky. Well, it's funny that you should say that because I like emacs. I use emacs and emacs users are always complaining about emacs pinky. I don't know why they're complaining about it. You just put your finger on the control key. There's no, there's no pinky involved. Who types with their pinky? Well, apparently Emacs users do anyway, I think that's all the news that fits the print. It was a light news week. We are going to get ready for an Apple event a week from tomorrow and I will be out of circulation on vacation, so Micah Sargent will be covering that for us, 10 am pacific1 pm eastern time on monday for the apple event. In fact, I don't know what I'm going to do because the iphone is comes out on the 20th. I won't be back to the 22nd, so I might be a little bit.

02:48:06 - Doc ROck (Guest)
You know it's weird. I normally get iphone every year on my birthday because I'm the 12th and the order day will be the 13th, but when I ordered it still technically the 12th because you know hawaii time.

02:48:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, yeah and you have to get up really early in the morning, don't you? What time do you have to get up?

02:48:26 - Doc ROck (Guest)
normally two or three, depending on you know am. Yeah, but last year I had to do my phone in Japan because I was in Japan for my birthday and I Ended up ordering it there and then picking it up when I got home. So I came home and the UPS guy showed up. So oh this. This year I did my Japan, if early, so I wouldn't have that problem, because it was Trying to order a phone from the did you get a new? Phone every year? Super stupid. Absolutely yeah. And then there, do you think?

02:48:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
who doesn't? Like what kind of nerd. I so want. I can't. I will know that I am finally retired when I don't buy the new iphone, the new pixel phone. I can't wait.

02:49:12 - Doc ROck (Guest)
I can't wait. Yeah, we all have our crosses to bear.

02:49:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Good point. It is kind of a first world problem, isn't it? Oh no, I have to buy the new iPhone again. It seems like it was just a year ago. Wesley, what kind of phone do you use?

02:49:28 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
I have a Pixel 7. Yeah, and I don't plan on upgrading until I absolutely need to.

02:49:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, how about you, lou? You have the Windows phone.

02:49:37 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
I know I wish I had a Windows phone. I really wish I did. I do. I know I have two. I have. You know, I have a iPhone and an S22.

02:49:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, the Samsungs are the most popular right in the world. Yeah, I got the flip phone because I thought, oh, I should get a bendy one but I buy them kids.

02:50:03 - Doc ROck (Guest)
I don't. They don't send them to me. I don't get any special treatment. Do you, is there any?

02:50:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
because there was a lot of going in the chat early.

02:50:06 - Doc ROck (Guest)
Is there any of the bendy phones right now would you would say is good? I?

02:50:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
like this yeah, let me, let me see if I can reach.

02:50:12 - Doc ROck (Guest)
It seems weird every time I see the screen with a little weird curve.

02:50:15 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Do you mean good or do you mean better than a slap phone?

02:50:18 - Doc ROck (Guest)
Yeah, I don't know about that, I think it's good, I like this phone.

02:50:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Let me go get it. Yeah.

02:50:25 - Doc ROck (Guest)
To me it's just really weird. Good is relative. Does it make?

02:50:28 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
you more productive? Does it enhance the experience Is good. The bar what would be the bar? In terms of what would make a bar set, I think being a fluffy fellow, the chub of a fatter in my pocket would bother me.

02:50:45 - Doc ROck (Guest)
The chub, you know what I mean, because I got big thighs. I was a track athlete and I played safety slash running back. So my phone is in my pocket and it sticks out. That just seems weird to me.

02:50:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
See, that's what's cool about this. You can put this in your shirt pocket, it's got a screen on the top here like this I think it unfolds to a pretty nice I mean cargo shorts were made for these types of phones. Yeah, I don't wear cargo shorts. I think that I didn't like the the fold or the pixel fold, because those are too big. This is the flip, so it's about the size of a pocket square, in fact. Whoops, here it is. I took it out.

02:51:22 - Doc ROck (Guest)
It's not that bad quippy.

02:51:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Come on, that's super funny what did clippy say? Oh my god, look at that guy right in your pocket there, like that isn't that good. Yes, I, I, you know it's fine I'm I don't know does the screen sad you at all.

02:51:42
No, you don't see the crease. Okay, you don't the thing. The only thing that bothers me a little bit is that, see, there's the crease. You can see it if I angle it just right. Right, the only thing that bothers you is that it doesn't feel like glass. It feels a little, it's almost a little rubbery, and because it has to, be.

02:51:59 - Doc ROck (Guest)
You know, the thing is when you see them in the store, like if I go to spectrum for whatever reason, or stop into the at t store that has been sitting there and manipulated by like 3 000 people. So it's always extremely evident, so I've never really seen one where like a normal person, normal wearing there the other thing that does.

02:52:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's kind of cool. You would, you might like this, you can. You can use it as a camera, sitting like an l, like a beach chair, so you can put it like that and then look at it I'm not a big fan of fish, because one of the best compliments you can give fish is saying it doesn't taste like fish.

02:52:34 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
And when, when I see these flip phones, I have the same feeling of like oh, you can't tell it's a flip phone.

02:52:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You can't tell it's almost a phone.

02:52:42 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
That's the advantage.

02:52:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It doesn't feel like it's worth it, and from somebody in our YouTube chat. This is the open source typing tutor Clavaro chat. This is the open source typing tutor clavaro. Clavaro touch typing tutor, which is available for free runs on uh, unix, linux. That's about it, and there is no lovely woman teaching you, but it will teach you tar ball.

02:53:11
That's how. That's how funky this is. Download the tar ball and explode it and you can learn how to type. If you already know how to do all that, you don't need to learn how to type. You're still in high demand. Lou mm. He is a wonderful fella principal managing editor and I'm sorry principal, I'm sorry I'm losing it at the end of the show. Principal engineering manager for microsoft. Yeah, former host of twiet, we really appreciate it. You. You said uh, you were saying earlier, you stay in touch with all the old twiet guys.

02:53:43 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
Oh, yeah, all the time. Yeah, cheaper sends me. Uh, you know texts pretty much every day about the stuff he's working on down there at the the grounds, uh, so he didn't really retire, he just no, he became a board member of the Orlando Conference Center down there and he helps them with their networks and all that stuff. So yeah, he loves it. Have a good time. Very nice. Well, that's great.

02:54:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Give them our regards. We miss them, thank you. Thank you for being here. Oh, thank you to Chocolate Milk Mini, sip P Hall. Here is an online typing tutor ztype, ztype. There you go. So it's a game and you can learn to type by shooting.

02:54:22
Yeah, it's like the old stuff. Invaders yeah yeah, that's right, this is former kid posts, Whoops Posts. That's kind of cool, that's kind of fun. Thank you, Lou, for being here. Thank you so much, Wesley Faulkner. Everybody go to Wesley83.com. Give this guy a job or join in as the developer relations forum gets underway, starts up. There's lots you can do at Wesley83.com except learn how to type.

02:55:00 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
You can find me on the socials, mostly on Mastodon.

02:55:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And your podcast Radical Respect. How's that going?

02:55:07 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
It's going well. We have another episode recording on Wednesday, nice, really enjoying the guests that. We have another episode recording on wednesday, nice, um, really enjoying the guests that we have lined up. I wish I could, uh, actually. So I saw on the rundown. I don't know if I'm sorry if I this is breaching etiquette, but I think amy webb is supposed to be on twit. Love amy next week.

02:55:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I'm so mad she's gonna be on when I'm gone yeah, trying to have her.

02:55:33 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
She's to get her on, I guess, as a podcast, so that'd be great, um, but yeah, really, really, really exact like happy about this, and we also submit it again for south by next year, so hopefully, our panel gets the nest votes, and so I'll be able to do that next year as well like, based on the book by kim scott, radical respect.

02:55:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, what gets in the way of collaborative, respectful work environments? Lack of respect. And look for wes's new book about the future of work. That's exciting too.

02:56:03 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Yeah, it's exciting too I just locked down the name of it and so I'm excited for don't tell anybody though but I'm not saying it.

02:56:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, no yeah, a book is like a baby you don't tell anybody about it until you're in the second trimester. That's my rule. I just made that up. That's so good, doc. Thank you for laughing, doc Rock. That's why he's on, because he laughs at my lousy jokes YouTubecom slash Doc Rock, that was legit funny. That was legit, funny, funny.

02:56:35 - Doc ROck (Guest)
he's also director strategic partnerships at ecamm which made this show possible. Thank you, thank you. I was blown away by your team when they called me to ask me questions and I was like wait, you can do that. And they're like oh no, you can find out. And I'm like well, I ain't gonna lie to you and say you can do it, but I think you can. And we went through the steps and I was floored. So I think it's uh amazing. I appreciate you guys thank, thank you.

02:56:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, we it's really. We've got an amazing team with some real chops. And what they keep doing, I keep, I keep moving studios and changing the ground rules and they keep, they keep coming up with great solutions, like like this attic studio. So I really really appreciate it. Benito Gonzalez, our producer, technical director. Do you like working at home, benito, or would you rather be coming into the TD in the studio?

02:57:20 - Benito (Announcement)
It has its advantages. You know I'm fine with either Are you lonely, do you? Miss us. I mean, I miss hanging out.

02:57:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's what I miss. That's what you've got to solve Wesley. Yeah, you can get a lot of work done at home, but there's some social element missing. You know, I have a song, I have a fix for it. Oh well, yeah, don't tell me, it's all in the book, it's all in the book. Good, we're thinking we just maybe have a regular monthly.

02:57:48
Uh you know potluck or something here. Have everybody come over? But they don't even. The part of the problem is they're all over the country now. Everybody's distributed. Yeah, I miss you guys.

02:57:59
Anyway, benito, thank you, I appreciate it. It's nice to see you on the other end of the zoom. Uh. Uh, burke mcquinn, our studio. Uh, our new studio manager. Not that there's a studio to manage, but that's his job, his. While I'm gone, he's gonna paint the medallion.

02:58:15
We'll take your votes for colors, whatever you want, but obviously white is the wrong color Because it looks like I have a halo, which is not really what we're going for on this. And, of course, our executive producer, my dear wife Lisa. You couldn't hear all. Could you hear her in the show today? No, because she's way the hell down the other house. We moved her. Thank you all for being here, thanks especially to our club twit members who made this show possible.

02:58:44
We do twit every sunday, uh, two to five pm pacific time, that's five to eight pm eastern, 2100 ut. We stream it on seven platforms. Count them Seven Discord, youtubecom, slash Twitch, slash live, twitchtv, slash Twit. We're also on Xcom, right on the front page, usually because who else is streaming on X? We're on Facebook. We're on LinkedIn. That's six. Oh, and Kik. Although and we'd love your input we're thinking about trading Kik in for Telegram. We can only do seven, so I think maybe Telegram might be better, I don't know. Now that Pavel Durov's in Dutch, we could do that.

02:59:28
If you can't watch live, though, get an on-demand version of the show. It's available at the website twittv All. Get an on-demand version of the show. It's available at the website twittv. All our shows are. Or you can go to YouTube. Each show has its own channel on YouTube, but if you go to the main YouTube channel, you'll see them all. That's youtubecom slash twit, as I mentioned. Or subscribe in your favorite podcast player. That way you'll get it automatically the minute it's available. So you have it for your Monday morning commute. And since nobody's commuting anymore, I think honestly that's going to be bad for podcasting. Wesley, you've got to get people to listen to more podcasts while they're working from home. If you can solve that, that'd be very nice.

03:00:03 - Doc ROck (Guest)
I'd appreciate it oh easy. Use the podcast button on YouTube on your TV.

03:00:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There are a surprising number of people who actually watch the show on TV. I don't know, that's crazy talk. Thank you, doc. Thank you, wesley, thank you, thank you Lou. Thanks to all of you. We'll see you next time. Another twit oh, I won't see you next week, two weeks off. I'll see you on the 22nd. Another twit is in the can. Bye-bye.