This Week in Tech 1021 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 at Tech. Emily Forlini from PC Magazine joins us, Doc Rock is here, Yanko Reckers and lots to talk about. Yanko and Emily both wrote about Amazon's new AI A-word. We'll talk about that and why Siri may not get smart until 2027. Plus, it's the end of the line for an old favorite. All of that and more coming up next on TWIT Podcasts you love.

00:32 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
From people you trust.

00:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is TWIT. This is TWIT this Week in Tech, episode 1021. Recorded Sunday, march 2nd 2025. Benito on high. It's time for TWIT this Week in Tech, the show we come for the week's tech news. I have assembled a fabulous panel for you today. Doc rock is here, our friend from uh aloha. Doc rock from youtube and ecams.

01:12 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Good to see you thank you, brother, good to see you as well wonderful to see you?

01:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
uh, it always is. I always is it beautiful, and right now in honolulu yeah, today is good.

01:22 - Doc Rock (Guest)
The last couple weeks have been a little weird, but today is flawless outside.

01:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So I'm so jealous. Uh, emily forlini is also here from pc magazine and you're in beautiful new jersey the most beautiful place in the world.

01:38 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
It's in the world, you know it's the garden state, come on comparable to hawaii. Yeah, it's the hawai.

01:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Come on, it's comparable to Hawaii. Yeah, it's the Hawaii of the mid-Atlantic states.

01:48 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
It's definitely not the densest state in the Union. It's definitely not super built up outside New York. No.

01:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
People, I think, have a bad impression of New Jersey because they do. They look over the river and they see New Jersey and they go ew, but really it is the Garden State, it's beautiful farmland, it. They see new jersey and they go ew, but really, uh, it's the, it is the garden state, this beautiful farmland, it's beautiful, it's true, yeah, I mean I I'm in a really, I would say, desirable place to live, so I'm happy here good, it's great to see you also joining us, yanko rutgers.

02:16
Yanko, are you in la? Where are you? I'm in oakland oh, it's kind of the east, it's kind of the la of the northern california, it's kind of the LA of the Northern.

02:25 - Janko Roettgers (Guest)
California or no, there's no way. I mean the East LA of, yeah, the East LA of Something.

02:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I've heard. Anyway, great to see you. Lowpasscc is Janko's newsletter. Of course you remember him from GigaOM. I'm going to mention all the old places and variety and it's great to have you here on Twit this week. Did anybody Emily? You were nearby. Did you go to the Amazon Echo event?

02:55 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
Yeah, I did.

02:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm a little jealous they don't stream it.

02:58 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
I know it felt cool. When they do that it justifies me going there in person, so I kind of like that. But yeah, it was a big event and they had tons of execs there. Andy Jassy, the CEO, was there, so I thought that kind of said a lot and how important the event was to the company. So yeah, I'm sure we'll get into it, but yeah, I was.

03:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, we're into it now. This is it. So Panos Panay, who came from Microsoft, was the guy who kept saying how pumped he was about the new Surface devices. Did he use the word pumped at all?

03:29 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
So I didn't know the legend of Panos Panay. And so he walks on stage and he goes. Remember the first moment that you asked Alexa a question. What a moment. And I was just sitting there by myself and I said in my head this guy is a wacko.

03:49
Who is this guy and I didn't know he was wearing jewelry and I mean I used to work at Amazon so I was like this guy is very not cut from the Amazon cloth and I was just trying to figure him out. So I wasn on on radar for the whole pumped thing.

04:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I was just taking in everything else that comes with this guy good, which means you were paying attention to the important stuff, not my our silly little game. I would have been fun.

04:16 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
You know I could have been in a whole, the whole pumped joke, but I was.

04:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I was a total like uh novice, you immediately got panos's, yeah, and I shouldn't knock it passion for the products. I think was probably a smart move to hire him, since Amazon's lost billions on Echo over the last decade. This is the uh. This is the beginning of the next kind of era of uh, and I'm trying to avoid to say saying the a word alexa, yes-e-x-a.

04:45 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
Yes.

04:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Because I don't want to trigger anybody's device. But does anybody really have an Alexa in their house anymore? I do.

04:53 - Doc Rock (Guest)
I swear I don't talk to it. I do, and it's a complete disaster. It's a disaster.

04:59 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
It doesn't work. It doesn't work. And I was thinking about that the whole event, and I was like the big question is like can they make Alexa cool again? And I didn't come away from that event feeling like an affirmative yes, they can. It was just a typical voice demos on stage, but there were some things that were promising like okay, so I'll give them credit. It's interesting that it's going to be able to take actions for you. So, instead of just doing interesting that it's going to be able to take actions for you. So instead of just doing, you know Alexa's at a timer, alexa play music. You know it should be more human-like. And then you can do things like, say, text, mom, I'm on my way, or what else. They give so many examples. They had crazy ones like-.

05:37
You can call an Uber, yeah, get a mechanic to the house to fix my oven, and you can upload documents to it, like your kid's soccer schedule, and it'll remind you like hey, jimmy, you're bringing oranges on Thursday, and so they just want to know everything about you. And then they want to be able to take actions for you, and that's their assistant vision.

05:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Jennifer Patterson, too, was excited about that. She just reviewed a giant screen that does your family's soccer. You know soccer and lessons schedule and everything in the kitchen skylight, skylight. Thank you, doc, you knew about katie.

06:10 - Doc Rock (Guest)
No, katie has one. Well, my um manager at ecam, she has one in her house and I love it and I kind of want one, but I kind of I don't know, like I just want one just because it looks really cool and it does work, and so you know what I did. I'm an idiot responsible to pick up my niece or whatever.

06:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So I ordered the 21 inch amazon echo. There's a 21 inch screen which is basically like the skylight, and because this is one of the new features of alexa plus is this uh, you know, ai generated calendaring thing. Um, by the way, it'll be $19.99 a month unless which is a lot, uh, unless you're an amazon prime member, and then it's free so so nobody will pay $19.99 a month for it exactly. Prime is like $14 a month exactly.

07:02 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
I did the math. So it's 139 a year for prime and it's 240 a year if you get it on its own. So it's a little fishy, I I think either they'll increase the cost of prime because it hasn't gone up since 2022, which is a lot's happened since 2022. We got inflation. We're in a whole new world and then the other thing they could do is they could only add the coolest features to the paid version. You know, like ChatGP.

07:29
Yeah, there might be a difference there might be a difference and they were just trying to hype it and not make it. So all the press people like me were harping on. You know the differences between the two, so they're just trying to be positive. But I think that we'll get more information about what's offered and where in probably the next couple of weeks or months.

07:45 - Janko Roettgers (Guest)
I could see them offer it through Prime for maybe even a year or two and then slowly start to separate those things Get you hooked, kind of like the same way they do it with Prime Video now.

07:54
So you get Prime Video still as part of Prime, yeah, but if you don't want to watch ads, you have to pay more, right, and so they're starting to give you some stuff. They get you hooked exactly, and then they offer you an add on subscription for this and that and ring and whatnot. So I think they've gotten pretty good at using Prime to get people into the door and for them. I think that's actually the most interesting thing about Alexa Plus. It's, for the first time, a voice assistant LLM Power voice assistant new generation of voice assistant that's available to millions of users out of the gate and they don't have to go to like a chatbot web interface anymore. They don't have to like install something else. It's just going to be there for them, for a lot of people, and it's going to be free. So a lot more people are going to be exposed to this type of stuff and it's going to be free.

08:46 - Doc Rock (Guest)
So a lot more people are going to be exposed to this type of stuff. I think the biggest problem so far with Echo has always been I know this is going to sound so mean I know a lot of muggles who have Echo because it was the cheapest entry-level assistant device, but because that's the baseline clientele most people only know to check notifications for their package, like they don't even use it to order stuff like amazon thought they were gonna do. I did in the beginning. I got a couple of misshipments and I was like you know, it's easier for me to do it on my phone right before you order all the time because like I run out of razor blades and I go, uh, hey word, order me some razor blades.

09:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And then she says this is what you ordered last time. That shows you three or four. Would you like me to order those again? And I say yes, and it says what's your, you know code? I say my code and then it's done. I think it's a pretty, but see Amazon themselves.

09:40 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Amazon says nobody does this, so I'm just right and so that that part I think it works. But I think a lot of moguls don't do that, so, like I've used it to order things before and I do you know find out when packages are coming.

09:52
But other than that, I think the primary thing I use echo for is to do conversions that I can't do in my head just because I mean I do timers for cooking, we do lisa and I both do because it's in the kitchen, yeah so I have the echo in the kitchen and a dot in the living room and we have a big echo down here that we don't even use anymore because the home pod sounds better. The home by mini sounds better. It's not great for music, yeah, yeah. So I mean legit. Like it literally became notifications and timers. So if they can, with this, seemingly what they demoed seems like some things that you might be able to get not just the muggles in but other people in. But Yanko is right, because of this device that you can get into for 19 bucks, anybody can get it. It doesn't require a 1500 phone or a thousand dollar phone, or what is it now? 599.

10:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Like do you think people want AI in the house?

10:44 - Janko Roettgers (Guest)
Do you?

10:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
think people want AI in the house.

10:46 - Janko Roettgers (Guest)
Well, they're going to have it so there.

10:47 - Doc Rock (Guest)
You may not want it, but you're going to get it, but that's the thing.

10:51 - Janko Roettgers (Guest)
We all bought these smart speakers at one point. I have more Google devices around my house, but the same thing. I use them for timers, I ask them for the weather and that's pretty much it. Maybe you like to play some music, but it's also because they're so bad at any added complexity. And if you just make that a little bit better and some of the demos that they show are pretty promising, right?

11:11
So this whole thing, even like a home device control, where they were like well, play music everywhere, but don't wake up the baby, and then it deducts from that that it shouldn't use the speaker in the nursery without you having to explicitly say, oh, play it in this zone and move the music into that room and that device has this name. Now it got so complex with a lot of these things. Like taking away a little bit of that complexity, I think people will really appreciate, and then it doesn't really matter that much to the average consumer whether it's like the newest generation of AI or something. It's just it works better, it's just a tool that works.

11:44 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
I think it just depends. There's a lot of people who are still feeling burned by the whole, like, oh, it's listening to me and maybe people who are interested in tech are more open to the AI, not only having all these longstanding issues of listening to you and whatever. We'll never know if that's true, but now it's saying now it's accelerating that and saying we want to know everything about you, upload all your documents, tell us about your whole home. One of the demos even had a camera in it. It looked around the room and talked about what was in the room. So I think a lot of people actually don't like that. And maybe another issue for Amazon would be a lot of people don't even know how to use it, so they're going to have to teach people. So there's like different customer segments and they're going to have to figure that out. They're going to be successful in making Amazon Alexa cool again.

12:32 - Janko Roettgers (Guest)
I think, one of sorry, leo, I think the main thing that's going to hold it back is that they don't know enough about you. So they showed the demo, where they're like upload your kid's soccer, schedule it. It sounds good, but it starts with you having to find the document and having to upload it through some web interface or having to use a special email address. Even like for emails, you have to send it to alexa at alexacom. I was told by alexa, by a amazon spokesperson um, when you compare that to google's gemini they showed very similar things last year when they unveiled it at Google IO but it can search all your email because it already has all your emails. That's true, it can search through all.

13:12 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
So instead of summarized as one document or summarized as one email, you can just tell her to summarize all the emails that you recently got from your kids' school, which is a really compelling demo to anybody who has square children yeah, we'll see if, uh, google I mean, I'm sure google is watching this and saying, all right, we're going to have their event where they're going to put gemini in google home, and so the big question is, which one's going to be better, right?

13:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
did the amazon address the privacy thing at all in the uh event?

13:41
no, they put the foot on the gas and they were just like we're going to quite the opposite all your data, quite the opposite, yeah uh, they, that is, I noticed in some of the stories what they consider a selling point. It's one of the problems apple's having, uh, right now is, uh, they don't intend they're trying to protect your privacy and so, unlike uh these other companies, google and amazon especially, they're not doubling down on hey, we know everything about you. Amazon said that right. They said you know, hey, think of all the things we know about you. Isn't that a good? Isn't?

14:11 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
that a good thing, yeah, and also you can tell us more.

14:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Tell us your soccer schedule.

14:17 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
Tell us everything about your kids and you know all your medical information. Tell us what's in your house. It looks like who's doing what in what room, what you're buying, where you're going, who you're talking to, who you're emailing. That's what they want to know will people it's going to sound crazy go ahead?

14:35 - Doc Rock (Guest)
yeah, I think I think so, but this is going to sound crazy. You know the best way amazon could get this to pick up? I think we didn't talk about this. I think a lot of people pulled back from the momentum that Echo had when it was going, because all the TV channels I mean movies and stuff were talking about it. It was ending up in all types of you know, like SNL and not just to make fun of it. But it became Alexa, became a verb, just like Google for a minute. Right, it was something that we all talked about, but when all of the stories came out about the mistreatment of workers, I think a lot of people also got soured on amazon and they could easily fix it by just be like listen, okay, we're going to go take better care of the people, and then that would allow more muggles to want to buy into the whole amazon thing because I have so many people.

15:19 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
Can we talk about it before we go?

15:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, those are the people who don't have magic, right, doc?

15:24 - Doc Rock (Guest)
yeah, yeah, you know, I and that's my term for like normal people that are not like those of us who came emily, tell me you read harry potter, of course, multiple times.

15:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm so jealous.

15:34 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
You're using muggle in a sentence and I'm oh I always use your ways.

15:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We used to call them normies, right yeah, I don't like the yeah, that's even better.

15:45 - Doc Rock (Guest)
I don't use normies because I'm definitely not normal and then I might sound like a diss, but I think I think that you know it has such a an opportunity and I know so many people that hate the fact that they're relying on amazon because they're mad at amazon for some of their other stuff, and I'm like if any one of these guys would clean that part up, they could just take over and it's. It just seems. I think the tech is just bad.

16:08 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
I think most people like Amazon is so mass market. I think most people don't know or care about that stuff and I I just think it it's not that good interesting.

16:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think it is anybody who. I use AI like crazy and I've given up on privacy years ago, so to me it's become very clear that you want to give AI more information because it'll be more useful. Here's an example I just took a picture of all my supplements and asked ChatDBT to analyze it, and it did a great job. Now, of course, somebody somewhere now knows all the supplements I take and uh, but I didn't care, you know is that how we're? Gonna be or are people gonna go the other way and go.

16:55 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
No, I'm not giving them that information well, I don't know, and I think another thing about this does. Amazon's vision actually is is the same as every other tech company's vision in terms of these AI assistants. So all of them want to know as much about you as possible, all of them want their tech to be with you throughout the day as your assistant, and so that's the whole agentic AI buzzword that everyone hears. That's what it is. Amazon is maybe different because they have the physical device in the home versus a phone or computer based thing, but it's not unique to Amazon. This is just the direction the industry is going.

17:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, to that point, there's an interesting article every Sunday. Mark Gurman, who's the rumor guy, the Apple rumor guy at Bloomberg, puts out his power on newsletter and every Sunday there's this massive dump of stuff about Apple, some of which is well sourced. He's very good at that, some of which is his own speculation. In this case, he's identified Apple's AI crisis and he is sourcing this from people who, with knowledge of the situation, he's actually saying Apple is not going to get its full ai. What? What amazon just announced? In effect, what other ai companies are already doing? Until 2027, until ios 20, which is pushed back already to 2026.

18:17 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
it was right, yeah, so that's that's bad.

18:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is that bad news? Or is apple gonna be? I'm cool with it looking back and saying see we, we told you that stuff's crap listen, I'm cool with it.

18:29 - Doc Rock (Guest)
You know why? Because apple is so. If you do, you know this as well as I do. Apple is super famous for rolling into the party late. Looking fly as hell. They're gonna be suited and booted. When they walk in the door, they're gonna be like open ai. You look like a nerd, sit down. They're going to be like Alexa. That outfit is played. Beat it, Google. All right, formidable, but move out of the way. They always walk into the door looking like Aegis Elba.

18:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, but they're so far behind this time, gurman says Apple's half a decade late to the game and even bleaker timeline than many of us imagine. I'm reading from his newsletter. On top of that, apple's rivals are not standing still, given the speed at which they're operating now.

19:09 - Janko Roettgers (Guest)
Imagine where open ai and google will be in two years I also think that's not necessarily true anymore, that apple always waits and then rolls out the best product, case in point, vision pro. I mean it's a great visual device and so forth, but they really were like not there yet, where they wanted to be too highly priced and so forth. And then the other thing they're going to roll out. If the rumors are true and I think Mark has reported on that quite a bit too they're going to launch a smart display, possibly as early as this year. So if the AI isn't ready, what's the smart display going to do?

19:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
How is that?

19:43 - Doc Rock (Guest)
going to compare to what is to do?

19:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
How smart could it be? Does it be a pretty display, as always? Yeah, but see, I think that 21-inch Echo that I just bought already is a smart display, and in a couple of months, do you think? By the way, amazon reported that they were having trouble with the AI. In fact, last year they kind of punted, were having trouble with the ai. They, in fact, last year they, they kind of punted. Uh, this year they said we're going to have a meeting on february, a go or no go meeting on valentine's day, february 14th. That was a week before this event, or two weeks before this event. Uh, and apparently that was a no-go, which is why they weren't able to announce availability at this event. What did they say about availability, emily? It sounded a little mushy.

20:26 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
They said, in the coming weeks, which is what everyone says for everything, but that's pretty mushy, that's what everyone says I can't tell you how many times. I write articles and I quote coming soon or in the coming weeks. That's pretty standard, and the one thing was they did not allow us to interact with the product.

20:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh-huh, that's telling.

20:44 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
So there were no hands-on demos and we tried and they were sketchy about it. They were like come back in 10 minutes. Then we came back and they were like, yeah, no, you can't do it, and it was really weird, Wow. So it's kind of like we don't know how much was canned and how much wasn't, but we definitely were not allowed to try it ourselves, so that was a bit sus the good news is because all of the ai will be server side.

21:07 - Janko Roettgers (Guest)
Virtually every echo device made, even the old ones, will work with this right now they they're ruining a couple ones out, like the first generation, the really old echo show device, not even super old ones like the echo show devices. So the screen not every of them will get it. I think third-party devices with Alexa built in are generally not going to get it.

21:29 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
Well, they said it's only coming to Echo Shows first, like probably the newer ones.

21:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, it's not coming to the Dots.

21:38 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
It has to have a display. There's no timeline for anything besides the shows right now.

21:44 - Janko Roettgers (Guest)
And I talked to one of the spokespeople there. I emailed. I wasn't at the event but I wrote about it for my newsletter. So I went back and forth over email quite a bit and she told me end of March is the timeline for the early access rollout.

21:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's what I had heard as well. That's early access. So what does that mean? Heard as well? That's early access. So what does that mean? Not normally, normal people won't get it or you'll have to sign up for an early access version.

22:11 - Janko Roettgers (Guest)
My understanding is that early access means only people who have certain devices out of the gate will get it. So later on it will be available on the Alexa app on your phone and so you don't even need to have an echo necessarily to use it. But initially it will only be for devices for people who have some of these screen devices in their houses. So that's already access.

22:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Basically you also need a willy wonka golden ticket no I have to sleep with grandpa to get that two ends of the bed.

22:43 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
Terrible, I know I agree with you. So I'm looking. I have a five and eight and a ten.

22:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It'll work on all the, on the five, eight and the ten right. These are all ones I've purchased I don't know, this is ridiculous I'm wrong with me? Look at this why do I have so many of these?

22:58 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, you're learning a lot about your consumption habits see, I told you I don't care, I got no privacy so what are?

23:08 - Doc Rock (Guest)
your supplements? Just kidding, I don't want to know. Leo, listen, I like this coming from the chat because this drives me crazy more than anything else. You know when you? The reason why we sit here walking around the words of the s lady and a lady or whatever, is because why is it 2025 and we can't name our devices yeah, no, I, I'm a no joke, mine would be named Emily remember when the Moto X came out?

23:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
when did the Moto X come out? That was like 10 years ago, yes, and you could say you could change the. This was a Google device, because it's when Google owned Motorola. And you could change the wake word. I had mine, be help me Obi-Wan Kenobi, because I figured if. I that's a good one, because I'm not going to say that by accident, unless we're watching Star Wars, I think we're okay so so I looked at just circling back, I just looked it up again.

23:55 - Janko Roettgers (Guest)
Uh, you will have to have an Echo show 8, 10, 15 or 21 to get early access so my fives will five is out of the gate, out of the door but it says eventually, they're gonna.

24:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're gonna eventually have it for almost quote, almost every right.

24:10 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
Well, actually my colleague will greenwald at pc mag made a good point that it's interesting that they didn't launch this as along with a new device that supports it, which is like what apple did.

24:21
Right, you have normally newest iphones to get the best siri and all this right you have to get newest iPhones, to get the best Siri and all this AI stuff, you have to have the 16 or a Pro 15. But Amazon didn't say that. I think I saw a report that they're going to come out with new devices to go with it, so that's kind of TBD too.

24:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Do you think the world I mean, we're spending some time talking about this, but do you think the real world is even aware of this? No, no, no.

24:48 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
The tech world is yes, no I mean I think it's sad for apple. We've just totally glossed over them. I mean, do we even care?

24:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
well, german says, uh, despite what apple has said. Apple says, for instance, iphone sell better in markets where Apple intelligence is available. That may have nothing to do, by the way, with Apple intelligence, that may have a lot more to do with the, the you know affluence of that market. But uh, german says, people aren't really like excited about Apple intelligence. No consumer is desperate to use it, and that's partly because it's crappy. No consumer is desperate to use it, and that's partly because it's crappy. Um, I wonder if echo plus is going to be a selling point, or if people are going to care, amazon may be stuck in that boat where they you know they lost 10 billion dollars in the first 10 years of echo are.

25:39
Have they done anything to make make a difference? Are they more likely to make money on this? That's the whole problem. That was emily's whole point. Like the tech is just bad and and honestly, even with apple Anything to make a difference Are they more likely to make money on this.

25:44 - Doc Rock (Guest)
That's the whole problem. That was Emily's whole point. Like the tech is just bad and honestly, even with Apple intelligence, I wish it was better. But I will say that the summary of emails that I can just get rid of without bother reading it, that does enough. Like I wish it did more, but that saves me so much time. And then even summaries of notifications on the home screen saves me so much time. It shouldn't be a whole big deal. It shouldn't be like any one particular phone you got to get to make it work. So hopefully, whatever they decide to come up with in 2027 is better than that. But that itself is actually good. It's not that that's terrible.

26:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And, incidentally, you can rename the Echo it can be Alexa, it can be, computer, which is even worse.

26:29 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
And it can be Echo. Do you guys think they're just followers and maybe that's a bad sign? Because, like I said, I feel like their vision is the same as the industry's. I personally think voice assistants are bad tech and I have never liked them. I hate them. I hate them in cars. I mean the crash into the media and you're trying to get it to do something basic. You know, like my Alexa is collecting dust, I can't connect to my. Spotify has taken it five years to figure that out. You know, like I've never, ever, had a good experience with a voice assistant.

27:00
It's often frustrating it feels very tone deaf to me that the industry, is it disconnects?

27:04 - Doc Rock (Guest)
from the Wi-Fi often.

27:05 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
Right, but yeah, so many issues and just the voice like Alexa set timer. I don't want to do that.

27:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, like I've just, I'm out on this test. You just need to get more conversation.

27:17 - Janko Roettgers (Guest)
But I think. So the bar is so low that improving that just a little bit, making it just a little easier to have a more natural conversation with these devices and that's what LLMs are great for, right so if you don't have to remember these exact phrases anymore and get it 100% right, and otherwise Google is going to tell you I'm sorry, I don't know what to do with that. So the bar is so low that getting it better is actually not that hard, I think.

27:43 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
Right. It's just about the things they could invest in. I'm like is this the right one? Is there momentum, Is there potential?

27:50 - Doc Rock (Guest)
So you just brought up something very, very valuable, yanko. I talk to Claude Gemini Chad his name's Chad all the time, and their ability to just talk like normal and answer like normal is so good. Why the heck does the smart speakers don't work? So Google technically should be smoking everybody, because talking to Jim and I is phenomenal. I have business conversations with it all the time. I'm doing this project and I want to really define the customer avatar. So I'm like interview me to make sure that we're on point with this new ad campaign that we're about to run on Twitter. So it gives me all this great information that we can use, and we use it all the time. So why is it that the device in my house can't do that? It drives me nuts.

28:41 - Janko Roettgers (Guest)
Well, I think the problem that everybody had in the industry is getting these conversations right with LLMs is not the hard part. The hard part is actually plugging into all the existing shit that you have around your house and making the device now also know how to control light bulbs, also know how to deal with all the existing tech in your house, also plug into the existing services that was another part of the announcement where they're like oh, it's also going to work with spotify and I don't know, hulu and netflix and all those things by using existing apis. But they had to like retrofit it to work with all the existing stuff without reinventing the wheel. So that's the extra step that everybody had to go through. Uh, just talking to gemini on your phone, I agree it's incredibly impressive, fabulous, but at the same time, until not too long ago, it would tell me no, I can't turn on the light for you.

29:32 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
And that's probably what's taking Apple a long time, because Apple wants it to be able to send text and have its little tentacles in the whole Apple ecosystem and they also want it to be privacy focused, and so I think, if anything, all those integrations would be what's delaying it. But also, mark Ackerman is the main voice saying it's delayed, so I know we trust him, but he's the only one who said it was 2026 instead of 2025. And then he said now it's 2027. So I don't think this is official.

30:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He could be wrong.

30:01 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
It's not official from Apple. I just think that's important to point that's fair.

30:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, that's fair. He could be wrong. What do people want with their ai assistance? Do they really want to have a conversation with them? Do you emily? What do you? Do you use ai for anything?

30:15 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
I use um chat, gpt and gemini for like researching and ideation do you talk to it or do you type to it?

30:21
no, I think I'm just like so out on voice tech, I talk to it if I have to to write articles, and I have had that moment that Panos wanted me to have. I've had that with Google Gemini and ChatGPT voice mode, where I'm like wow, I'm actually talking to a computer for real right now. I think it's cool, but I think just using my good old fingers, just typing, texting, I'm getting done what I need to get done and I'm using AI in other ways.

30:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So I haven't really found a reason to talk to an AI I find myself talking to. I have set up on the iPhone the action button to talk to chat GPT and I do talk. I do. I will ask her. Or is it might be perplexity? That's the other one I use all the time. Is perplexity? Perplexity that's the other one I use all the time is perplexity. Complexity is good. I really like I don't. That's what I use for search now instead of google. Yeah, same here.

31:10
Um, you don't get a. What's hard is you don't get a link necessarily. You often just get a summary. But for a lot of things, uh like for a lot of research, like last night we were watching the brutalist trying to get ready for the Oscars tonight and I noticed that they had those fixed position construction cranes which I thought were first used in New York City for skyscrapers. You know, the ones where it's just and it rotates around and as the skyscraper gets taller, the crane gets taller and I saw those in the background on this hill and I thought that's anachronistic. They didn't have those and they certainly didn't have them unless you're building a high rise. You didn't have them in the 50s. So I did a long, deep search on perplexity and learned a lot about construction cranes in the process, but never once went to a web page, which I think is probably a bad thing for those.

32:04 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
I have the same feeling after I. I do use chat to bt a lot and to google or not even I said google, you know that's that's the word for researching but I use it to get information, but it leaves me with a weird feeling like yeah like where did I?

32:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
ripped people off?

32:19 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
you've ripped people off and also, like I actually can't fact check what you're saying because it's coming- from so many places, and so it leaves you with just a twinge of doubt, I think.

32:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I have a whole thing on construction crane history, on my perplexity with videos and pictures, and this started in Mesopotamia in 3000 BC. And those modern cranes, they have a specific name. I can't remember what it is, but fixed high-rise cranes you use elevator shaft are called internal climbing tower cranes.

32:52 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
So just so you know all right, quick fact check people in the chat well see, and that's maybe my fault, I I don't.

33:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't assume it's hallucinating, especially perplexity, because it's.

33:05 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
He's usually going out on the web to find answers and people tell me you should be fact checking, I guess, if you're a journalist yeah, I would before using an article that affects my opinion towards ai, because I actually really need things to be right and it is it can create more time for me, and so it could be why I'm a little more hesitant. It just doesn't really fit with my line of work right perfectly that makes sense.

33:30 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Yeah, journalists when you when you ask it to do um, things like that, especially poor research. One of the key things you could always tell it to is to pull you the sources, and I always tell it to double check its facts. And then often time catch itself and it was like oh yeah, sorry I pulled that one, but you should look at this one and it'll give you the link. So it still speeds it up because, yeah, perplexity does that it has foot.

33:50 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
It will build you a list and you can tap the footnote to see where that came from yeah, so it makes it fairly easy to it would be real bad if it's giving you the wrong links because it is google and it has it often gives really one time I asked it a question and it one of the links was a poster website like a poster related to my question, and I was like it's like posterscom that's not a good source probably yeah, I'm thinking I kind of use it as like a directional thing, like I kind of it's like a vibe giver, like initial information, and that it can speed things up for sure. It's not useless, it's just I also have to use google for sure.

34:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So that's the observation most experts have come up with is that ai is good, useful, in conjunction with a human. That it is. It is a partnership, but the humans in charge that's the problem I have with amazon's echo is there's no follow-up or anything. You're just talking to this box and you have to assume it's right, and I don't feel like you're as involved because of the way the interaction is set up.

34:55 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
Yeah, especially the one where it's like bring a mechanic to the house to fix my oven.

34:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, what the hell.

35:00 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
I'm almost like I know. All these Amazon execs have tons of money. They don't care who comes to the house.

35:07 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Any mechanic will do.

35:08 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
I want quotes, because mechanics especially if anyone's ever done work on their house you don't know what the heck you're getting and I definitely don't want Alexa sending Joe Schmo to my house and then I end up with a $750 bill.

35:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I hear you want a bathroom remodel. Is that right? Yeah, I did that the way on the web. I was looking for somebody to repair my shower and I made a mistake. I went to a site that I think was a bogus site from Angie's list and I got, literally for the next two weeks, five or six calls a day from people who said I hear you want a bathroom remodel. No, I just wanted my shower fixed.

35:44 - Doc Rock (Guest)
No, we had the ac go out the other day and I called the company and I know the owner of the company and then he's like, okay, I'll send it by tomorrow.

35:52
and it's like yo, we have guys that work with him, that are that's what you need, I love, and and so he knows not to send guys that we don't like because that would just be a waste of time. Well, it's not we, it's the other person. Well, I mean, if it't like because that would just be a waste of time, well, it's not we, it's the other person well, I mean, if it's a bad person, I'd just be like talk to my alexa like I didn't call you hey come here can you just work this out with alexa, because I don't want to have anything to do.

36:15 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
Yeah, I'm not feeling it.

36:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It seems like a bad match also, she'll pick up the bill you know your site visit bill or whatever.

36:25 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Okay, so, le. So Leo, you asked the question, I'm going to answer it now. Thank you, emily, you said. Leo said what do you want your AI to do? I want my AI to sit on hold with spectrum to tell them that I've been in tech since Jesus walked in Nazareth. I know I rebooted everything. I know what's broken, just restarted. On your end, they will fight you for like three hours and when they finally do it, they go.

36:45 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
Oh look that worked.

36:46 - Doc Rock (Guest)
So that's what I want Alexa to do.

36:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I want Alexa to fight with spectrum until Wasn't that the idea Google announced this years ago? Oh yeah, that was like years ago it would call and intercede for you, and I don't think that went so well.

37:00 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
Well, that's what they're saying in this case is that they will call the mechanic. So I guess that mechanic is going to be bumbling around town in his van and he's going to get a phone call from an AI that's like do you want to go fix an oven at 123 Downtown Street? And he's going to be like what? And this is going to be the most just idiotic interaction of all time. And that's, I guess, the world that people want.

37:24 - Janko Roettgers (Guest)
Put up the alexa signal did you all see the video where two ais were talking to each other and then like oh, now the ais recognize that they're talking to each other and said they're switching to this weird tweet mode and they were just playing modem sounds to each other. Oh, wow, that was fun. Yeah, it was, it's like that.

37:41 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
But the guy on the other end. I mean I'm in Jersey is some like Jersey Italian contractor and you know that's like oil and water. What are you calling? Me, for they can't even send an email. I mean, it's bad. I've gotten quotes that are like screenshots of a screenshot of a screenshot. It's like where the heck? Who?

37:58 - Doc Rock (Guest)
are you guys?

37:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I had a plumber.

38:00 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Emily, you have just discovered what a muggle is.

38:02 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
That, Emily. You have just discovered what a muggle is. That's a muggle I know. I love that you use that. Muggles are from Jersey.

38:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I had a plumber come out and he said boy, it was hard to find. I said what do you mean? It was hard, it's on the Google Maps. He said oh yeah, I don't have any of that stuff.

38:15 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
Exactly that's my point. They're saying they're going to call these guys oven like I don't know how to get there.

38:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Let me look at the thomas guide yeah, yeah, oh well, yeah we are having some fun. Now let's talk more about tech in just a bit with emily forlini from pc magazine, doc rock, the youtube. Doc rock that one, not do crock, that's a different one. Doc rock also now is did you say that ecam's gonna to buy some ads? Because I heard you say that.

38:46 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Yeah, what we're doing is like we're running it through all of this stuff and coming up with a new marketing plan because you know it's almost that time of year.

38:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh good Twit's here for you, but that's not why Doc Rock is on. We love.

38:54 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Ecamm. In fact, we're using it right now.

39:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We use it with Zoom. And so Benito, who's running the operation at his house because he's got 10 gigabit symmetric ether internet, has Ecamm running on a Mac which is also running the zoom, which is this call. It's a complicated thing but it works quite well. He's doing the switching with Ecamm anyway. Great to have you, doc. And of course Yonko Rutgers, long time friend, going way back to the giga home days. Lowpasscc is a must read, uh and I subscribe really must read um. Is it substack? Who do you use for your newsletter?

39:35 - Janko Roettgers (Guest)
I use beehive and actually much better.

39:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Very happy with them yeah, I hear, I hear very good things about beehive. Um good, well, that's glad you got 17 000 uh people subscribing. That's very nice. Good for you, yanko. I think this is the future in so many ways. You know, uh, a talented reporter who's made a name for himself and then does it on his own why should I have a paid tier?

40:04 - Janko Roettgers (Guest)
and I also do ads, so if any Ecamm-like company wants to do an ad in my newsletter, let's talk Hint, hint hint.

40:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm putting you in Hint hint. We'll have more in just a bit. It's great to have you all here too. Our show today brought to you by our good friends at Thinkst Canary.

40:22
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43:33
So, uh, we were going to talk about apple. I guess we've kind of talked about apple and and and and. It's LLM Siri, we should say. Somebody said in the chat room. Oh, apple intelligence is here. Yeah, we're talking about smart Siri. Siri's not gonna get smart for some time. She's actually gotten dumber right yes, that's the sad thing 100.

43:56 - Janko Roettgers (Guest)
I like to think we all get smarter, but perspective we're getting yeah, maybe we're getting dumber too, I know as I age, I've forgotten more things than I knew.

44:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Um, google's founder, we were talking about gemini uh, larry, larry, uh, not larry. Uh, sergey brin Larry, not Larry. Sergey Brin has told the AI team stop building nanny products. You know, for a long time, one of the things AI companies have really worked on is AI safety, so that the AI wouldn't say something horrific or wouldn't teach you how to make bombs and so forth. But maybe that's holding you back. He sent a message to all the employees in Google's DeepMind division saying it's been quote, it's been two years of the Gemini program and GDM, which is Google DeepMind New York Times reported this. And gdm, which is google deep mind, new york times reported this. Uh, we've come a long way in that time, with many efforts we should feel very proud of, he says at the same time. Let me refresh this because I can't scroll it past that point you've just been making it up this far thus far I I've been making it up, I can't read it.

45:16
What is at the same time? What? What's going on? Is the verge turned off scrolling? All right, let me go to the. It might be their paywall. You hit their paywall oh, if they have a paywall yeah, the verge was free no, they added a subscription tier this is the problem now. I have to pay for every source well, ai, I mean someone oh yeah, I could ask perplexity, what Larry said, does anybody? Can anybody see it and tell me?

45:45 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
what Larry said. I feel like any products.

45:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think that's no more nanny products what does that mean? Like he says at the same time, competition accelerated immensely and the final race to agi is. I can't read the rest of it.

46:01 - Janko Roettgers (Guest)
What is? It is a foot. And then he says I think we have all the ingredients to win this race, but we are going to have to turbo charge our efforts what does it mean to stop building nanny products?

46:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
does that mean abandon ai safety?

46:18 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
nanny products does that mean abandon AI safety? Okay, so I'm trying to think of the word nanny, like that's like someone who takes care of kids.

46:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, you know, sometimes they talk about nanny government, right, a government that doesn't trust its people enough so it has to tell them you gotta wear a motorcycle helmet or you have to wear a seat belt.

46:35 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
That sometimes people say that's the nanny state well, those things are really good ideas, by the way, yeah yeah, no, I'm not saying I agree with them, but that's that's kind of the attitude and I guess that's what, uh, sergey Brent is is saying well, I think it's hip right now to hop on the like, you know, less AI regulation train that kind of like the trump administration is ushering into, and they, you know, went to the the paris ai summit and the whole thing was like less regulation, less regulation, and so it seems to be in in vogue right now to talk about not, you know, being irresponsible, which I I kind of feel like they're setting it up so people have to pick, like you should just have an innovative product that also doesn't like kill you or teach your kid how to make a bomb, and I guess that's too much to ask. I don't know.

47:26 - Janko Roettgers (Guest)
I mean there's something where you could make the argument without calling it a nanai, Nanai, yes, Nanai, Nanny product, Nanai. They're sometimesai A nanny product Nanai. They're sometimes overshooting it a little bit. When I was trying out the Ray-Bans Meta Ray-Bans I was trying a couple of things where I would just take a photo of a car and I was like, tell me about this type of car. And the AI was initially told me right away oh, I can't identify this license plate. I can't talk about people's cars.

48:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I was like I don't care who owns, tell me like like, which year was this car made? Or something like that exactly. Well, here's the good news, because perplexity has gotten around the verge paywall and I have the rest in the leak internal memo. Brin expressed concern for google's ai offerings are quote overloaded with filters and various restrictions exactly what you were saying, janko and he said we have to trust our users rather than creating overly cautious products. He also said the AI team should be working 60 hours a week and should come in at least every weekday. Is that reasonable? Nope, none of the people here even go into the office, right?

48:41 - Doc Rock (Guest)
No, listen, I definitely bust my you know, first of all, you know how long it would take me to commute every day to work. That's 13 hours a day in both directions, 26 hours a day. It doesn't work this thing. Years ago, adobe had a thing called ROWE results only work environment and they were working deep into this. This was way back in like 2014. As a matter of fact, the last conversation I had about it was at a coffee shop in San Francisco with O'Malick how about that? That's how long ago this was. That's how long ago this was Talk about full circle and it was starting to catch on.

49:22
And I was over here doing workshops teaching companies in Hawaii because our traffic is so bad that this works and people are more, you know, advantageous with their work because they're not thinking about their kids, what they need to get done, because they're they can do stuff. And a couple of years ago, somebody said, oh, because they can do stuff. And a couple of years ago, somebody said, oh, everybody needs to get back to work because they think everybody's lazy. And now everybody's going back to it and it was so dumb. It's really, really stupid.

49:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Like if you go to work, you go to work, it doesn't matter. He says 60 hours a week is, quote the sweet spot of productivity and allows for maximum output without risking burnout. That's five, 12 hour days a week.

50:04 - Janko Roettgers (Guest)
I don't know. I think I'd be burnt out. I think what's happening here is that people at Google and matter and so forth.

50:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All have mask envy.

50:10 - Janko Roettgers (Guest)
They realize you can be an a-hole and you can't treat people terribly, and maybe that accelerates your product a little bit, and then they build these to the point of how much AI safety you need. It's the same thing, right, where they build all these safeguards into their products and then Grok comes along and has an what's it called A-hole mode, musk mode?

50:27 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
I'm not sure.

50:28 - Janko Roettgers (Guest)
Unhinged. Yeah, exactly, that's a technical term, but really I think they're giving up too much and they're like going way too far in the other direction.

50:39 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
Yeah, it's like an a-hole competition, but yeah, maybe uh are?

50:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
are we lazy? Uh, americans, and you know, in other countries they're working those 12-hour days. And you know, are we afraid that China or India, or I don't? Know, germany is gonna exceed us, become better than we are, but I think we're a little lazy, for sure.

51:00 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
I mean, if you think about, like what our grandparents were doing, like both my grandfathers were war veterans and I'm, you know, at home on a podcast and that's like the hardest thing oh, it's sunday night, I have to get in a podcast.

51:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, we're, we're a little wimpy, you know, if they were the greatest, what would you call your generation?

51:18 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
The soft internet generation, the softies, maybe Soft-shelled turtles, I don't know.

51:27 - Benito (Announcement)
This is Benito. This is the reason they did all that, though so that you could have a life like this.

51:33 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
I know it's true.

51:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's why they did all that they far for your right to sit on your death.

51:38 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Benito, I want you to try that with uh lolo. I just really I want to see you try that yeah, I mean leah, like I.

51:45 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
I inherited a gun from my grandfather who picked it up off a soldier in japan in world war ii and I'm like I've seen the gun and I'm like this couldn't be more different from my life.

51:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it is a very different life.

51:59 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
But to bring it back down to earth, I'm of two minds about the return to office. So I actually moved from Chicago to New York because I wanted to be closer to the PCMag office, because I think it's important to feel a connection to your work and your coworkers. I do not think that means working 12 hours a day, but I think if you're spending your whole day doing something, you shouldn't just be talking to a computer, you should be talking to a person. So to me that sounds like a healthy, balanced society, but I definitely think there's a. I think the crazy like you have to be in five days a week, working 12 hours is is something different than that.

52:38 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Yeah, that's true, cause, like I do on average, I'm out of here at least once a month to go either to headquarters or to meet them at some conference. So we just came back from Orlando and Pensacola and I also went back to headquarters in Boston. So I see my team pretty much every month, if not every other month, which is important yeah.

52:52
Which is important. Yeah, we have a blast because we get to see each other all the time, and it's always like we look forward to the time that we do get to work together, and I'm about to do Chicago and then NAB. Nab is big for us. So, yeah, I think you're right. Like having that connection is fine, but just tell us about it. I got to see you every day for this amount of time a day or whatever it's just yeah, that's actually unproductive for sure.

53:13
But sometimes it's almost like I think so too. All we talk about is Game of Thrones.

53:16 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
Yeah, no one cares. It should only be insofar as it's beneficial to your work and your career. I don't necessarily need to know what everyone's doing on the weekend, but if we're working together in a company, there should be an element of what are we doing and there should be some ability to talk about that in a more casual setting and it just gets lost over the computer.

53:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
By the way, you're right, the Verge wants 50 bucks a year, or seven bucks a month, for me to read the rest of that article.

53:41 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
Yeah, but sometimes it's like almost uncool to think that going into an office is smart, like there's just become this whole trend that it's like if I want to be in the office, people are like oh, are you a boomer?

53:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's like no, I just want to be invested in my work. I kind of miss I'll be honest, I miss, uh, having my colleagues around me in the studio. We're now a completely remote company.

54:02 - Janko Roettgers (Guest)
I mean there are remote first companies that are doing great right, so I don't think you can make a universal rule, like people have different needs. Companies have different needs. Sometimes maybe it matters some for some other jobs. I always thought it was really distracting. I've worked like in both worlds. I've been when I was a variety. I was remote just by the nature of me being up up north and all of those folks being down in la. When I was at protocol I went back to the office and I always thought like I got the least amount of work done in an office because of the meeting, somebody talked to you and those doofuses who look over the barrier and say, hey, what you doing?

54:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yanko, you're writing exactly.

54:40 - Janko Roettgers (Guest)
You're doing anything so you know, I always felt like, if I really want to write and I want to actually get something done, I have to go home, I have to go to a coffee shop, um so a lot of people feel like that it's, I think, writers do need some solitude, that's normal right and it's also like different stages of your life, like if you're raising kids or you're taking care of an aging parent, or you have like responsibilities at home, or even just you know someone you have to let in.

55:04 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
The mechanic that Amazon called, like there's reasons that you have to be home sometimes and it's like the black and white of this guy saying like you have to be in the office 12 hours a week is just like do you even know how society works?

55:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
that's a really good point. I mean, how are you going to get your laundry done? How are you going to bring the? What are you going to do with your kids?

55:26 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
I mean, 60 hours is a lot to spend in an office that's not good at all. Why would that? Why would we want that?

55:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, well, it's not good quality of life, maybe. I mean it is in the old days of startups, the startup culture, apple and so forth. The guys who designed this Macintosh behind me probably worked 80 or 90 hours a week while they were developing it. I mean, that's how Silicon Valley started, isn't it?

55:48 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
Yeah, but then they got rich and then they stopped working and there's different times of your life when you need different things, and some blanket statement about you have to be in the office 12 hours a day.

55:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
the rest of your life is just dumb somebody uh is pointing out that our old studio is now a? Uh shared workspace for remote workers. It's true, why do people? Why do people do that? Do they?

56:12 - Doc Rock (Guest)
that's because people need some human contact though, right, yeah, yeah, yeah, dude, co-working is, is the bomb. I mean, I had a cork in space for a while and it's. It's really a thing that is for that like. So yanko said like you want to be by yourself, but every once in a while you want to be around people who will sort of push you, and that competitive spirit of like I'm over here at that time writing for two, I'm doing my articles and these kids are coding all kind of crazy stuff. I'm like damn, I'm just a low-life tech writer right now.

56:40
Then I kind of was jealous. I wanted to learn how to code and so it kept me. It kept me in the game, but also I was able to add some of what's going on in their world to our articles and our stories and things. So it was great. You know it was. It was fun and you know the best thing I had of that? I dragged a bunch of coder kids with me to like the last mac world something they never would have thought about going to, and they they all say, like that was like one of their greatest experiences.

57:03 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
Yeah, right yeah, it's like the random world as well. Yeah, you wouldn't have predicted that, you know. But if you're just at home and you have, uh, you know, three recurring meetings that have been on your calendar for three years and you're just at home doing the meetings like that's not great we get, we are more isolated.

57:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, in this era, are we not? I mean, and I, that seems to be not a good thing for humans. It's been the trend in in the industrial age to become more and more isolated and to be moving away from your, your family and your tribe. And you know, I, I don't. I feel like that's, in the long run, maybe not good for our biology like we need.

57:43 - Doc Rock (Guest)
That's why I go live twice a week, so that I try to come and hang out on Zoom, so like they're sitting in the back room.

57:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Look, I'm with you guys right now, but it's not the same as if we were sitting around having a beer and and and shooting the breeze is.

57:56 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
It would be very fun. I would love it would be more fun. Yeah, I'd love to get a drink with you guys and talk.

58:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I know like that'd be great this is kind of sort of what this is, but it's it's. It's the ai version of it, it's the, you know the best thing is, emily, go to italian restaurant with lisa.

58:10 - Doc Rock (Guest)
That's the party right there. When did you do that? We were in den Me and Lisa Micah Maximilian.

58:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Was it wild? That was so much fun. Yes, oh, that's the one. The three of them came home with COVID. It wasn't my fault, I was good. I remember that. Yeah, that was fun. Is that when this started Is five years ago with the COVID epidemic? Is that when we all kind of started, yeah, right ago with the covid epidemic? Is that when we all kind of started, yeah, right, yes, yes, the year is 2025, that was 2020.

58:40
it's so crazy, right, it doesn't seem like that long ago, but it is I know well in fact it's exactly because uh march 17th is when california closed down, so it's exactly five years ago that we started to get the news right around now into February, early March.

58:56 - Janko Roettgers (Guest)
I remember I wrote an article in late February where I was looking at people on Kickstarter delaying their campaigns out of China and this guy somehow got. I got somehow in touch with somebody who was developing a hardware product in China and he was sending me photos of himself going shopping with a mask and with gloves on and I was like that is crazy. Who?

59:16 - Doc Rock (Guest)
would want to ever do that.

59:20 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
Seattle was the first city to do the shutdowns as we had the first cases, because I lived there at that time and everyone thought we were crazy, like what are you guys doing? Like you guys totally overreacting. And then it spread. But it was it.

59:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It was really bad in Seattle. That was the first place in the US. That was really bad.

59:41 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Yeah, it was funny to me. Everybody's a visceral reaction. I went to school in Japan. So like masking up is normal, like if you have a sniffle you don't come to class sniffling in front of the whole class. You mask for the whole class so you don't make everybody else sick, don't make everybody else sick. So like I already had the equipment and everything because we go to japan a lot. But it was so weird. Everybody's a visceral reaction to like, oh, you're going to die from breathing in the mess. And I'm like when you as a child, when you were coming out, your mom was in labor for like eight hours with you, you know what they were wearing masks. You're not gonna die. You came into the world looking at people in magic you really took it all the way back to child.

01:00:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I pray that I don't go out of this world. Looking at people in magic, you really took it all the way back to child. I just I pray that I don't go out of this world looking at people wearing masks.

01:00:21 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
That's not what I want. Yeah, I would like to see their faces bad for dentists, like no one would be getting dental work done I didn't even think of that how did that come up for you?

01:00:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
emily, is your husband a dentist. What's going on?

01:00:34 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
no, because I thought. I thought during covet it was weird, you never saw people smile oh and then that made me I thought about that and I thought it was nicer when people took the masks off, because you can see, like the full range of people's emotions. And then I thought about the dentist and I thought about the dental industry and then that comment came out I hang out with ugly people.

01:00:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I wasn't gonna put the mask back on I just, uh, for some reason fixated on the thing that you said you had all the equipment. I just you know, doc rock has all the equipment masking gloves is like normal for me.

01:01:06 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Number one I always had gloves.

01:01:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I was a paramedic, so remember it turned out you didn't need clubs. Remember we were hosing down our groceries?

01:01:13 - Doc Rock (Guest)
I would wipe everything down with alcohol swabs before bringing it in, leave things outside for hours just to make sure that you know there's. No, yeah, we did all that, but, like mass, I still have. I always have them on deck because you know I have them right over here. I think the most frustrating thing though now because I fly more and maybe I notice it more because I'm always in an airport how are we adults and we don't know to cover our? I want to insert bad words on twitter cover your mouth when you cough people, so many people. I'm like bro, like what have we learned?

01:01:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
nothing. Oh my god, it drives me crazy. From the guardian. I want him to be prepared. Why parents are teaching their gen alpha kids to use ai? Yeah, it makes sense now you don't have kids, emily, uh and yeah, so none of us here have young people but the but I teach my niece and my nephew like I want them to know everything and it used to be that you would teach kids to code, right?

01:02:18 - Doc Rock (Guest)
that you would teach kids to code right now. You teach them how to prompt.

01:02:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, I would not.

01:02:22 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
I think coding is going to be less important in time I think though, like the curriculum's kind of just catching up, like it definitely wasn't standard to have computer science classes in school when I was in school and now it's like, yeah, my niece is in like computer science class and so it's kind of still catching up. I maybe prompting you could add it in, because it's supposed to be so natural. Everyone can do it.

01:02:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Maybe you don't need a class it's also that they're doing more than just saying here's how you use ai. They're teaching them how ai hallucinates, how to validate, uh, what you get. Um, they talk about one father who exposed his child to AI's hallucinatory flaws by having him debunk chat. Gpt-generated world record claims by verifying it with the Guinness Book of World Records.

01:03:09 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
You know what's so funny Like? When I was in school, they were teaching us the dangers of Wikipedia. Yeah, that's changed, don't cite Wikipedia, and that is like the number one source for all chatbots is wikipedia you were in school when wikipedia was around? Yeah, I was so young we were, we were growing together I have uh in my, uh.

01:03:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
In the other room I have the world book encyclopedias that I foolishly bought my children when they were little thinking that's what I grew up looking at the world book.

01:03:42 - Doc Rock (Guest)
They never, never, needed that dude world book in botanical sundays after church just in there reading about snakes and yeah, I had the one with the colored pictures like I lived in those things.

01:03:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I loved that it was it was a great way to learn stuff, but that was in an era where the other choice was to go to the library. There was no other way to get information. Yep, you know, do you?

01:04:02 - Doc Rock (Guest)
remember, like when we got Encantra? Is that what it's called? Encantra, the world book on the sea?

01:04:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Encarta, encarta, yeah, encarta, the crappy one that they sold at grocery stores. I thought I was in heaven and I was like that was based on collier's encyclopedia, which was sold volume by volume every month. If you got enough grocery stamps, you would get it. You'd get here now. This month is b. It's b volume and microsoft was so cheap they bought the lowest.

01:04:30
They didn't buy britannica, they didn't buy the world book, they bought collier's encyclopedia and started on carta. But yeah, I bet, emily, you must have had encarta when you were little yeah, no you, you know, I remember that name.

01:04:43 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
I know the name. I don't see I used it. I can't say.

01:04:45 - Janko Roettgers (Guest)
I have memories but remember about all the people. That's because it was in the case in the drawer he's never used it, it was just in the drawer from somebody.

01:04:52 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
Remember cd roms, emily yes, I had a cd case and it was like awesome was it music, or was it games and stuff?

01:05:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
music music yeah yeah, it was like some 41 and avril lavigne and evanescence skated boy and all american rejects and my, my burned cds and yeah, yeah, I used to have a case full of burned cds yeah yeah, that didn't last that long, did it?

01:05:23 - Janko Roettgers (Guest)
I think it's making a comeback as somebody who has teenagers at home.

01:05:27 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
One of them collects cds it is, yeah, it's so weird it's going to like a thrift store.

01:05:34 - Janko Roettgers (Guest)
She's big into thrifting anyway, so going to a thrift store, going through all these CDs and finding something that you can't find on Spotify apparently really gratifying.

01:05:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We have a record store in town. Yeah, but I, I this. I I saw this this morning, a review of a cassette player in wired magazine and I thought what the hell, why aren't you reviewing a cassette player?

01:05:58 - Janko Roettgers (Guest)
that is a good-looking cassette player there's a bunch.

01:06:01 - Doc Rock (Guest)
There's a bunch of them coming out. Uh, teenage engineering even has one coming out soon, but but it's crazy. That's a terrible format for music yeah, rather than bring back the md this, these.

01:06:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This does look very cool.

01:06:16 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
It says we are rewind on the front I mean, cassettes have been cool for like five years they've been coming, have they really? Yeah, that's not new hi, this is benito.

01:06:26 - Benito (Announcement)
So the reason this is happening, I think my theory is that, like vinyl is getting expensive, now vinyl is expensive. Now it's not cheap anymore like you used to be able to get cheap vinyl, but since the that got big, so now. Cassettes are cheap, so like worth every penny. So people are buying cassettes or CDs. Cds are still cheap.

01:06:41 - Doc Rock (Guest)
That makes sense. But you know, just like, maybe like two weeks ago I was, I had my niece. You know I'll pick her up after school. I went and go get Froyo and then she's like, hey, can we go to the Vinyl store store, and I was like the what it says right here this. This place has a vinnyal store and I was like you mean vital? And then she was like, oh yeah so you know what?

01:07:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
why do we pronounce it?

01:07:05 - Doc Rock (Guest)
vinyl. It should be vinya listen. It was just cute to me and, being an ex-dj defective, my niece is in the vinyl. I'm about that life. I'm like listen. I still have some, but I sold most of it, you know, right before you were born. But I still have all the music in a server you seem like you could be a dj you had a

01:07:24 - Benito (Announcement)
good radio. Like I trust you with my music yeah, yeah, but honestly, five years.

01:07:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Any recording medium where the trick to get good audio out of it is to boost the hiss when you record the cassette so that you can lower the hiss when you play back the cassette, that's Dolby audio. It's not. That's not a good sign.

01:07:48 - Janko Roettgers (Guest)
That's not a good sign but the the limitations that came with the tape that you have to like figure out how to get your perfect playlist for that special someone onto 45, that's true mixtapes and like figure out, like you probably don't every day after school.

01:08:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Dude, in seventh grade, did a boy ever make a tape for you? No, he probably burned a cd for you yeah, burned a cd.

01:08:12 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
Yeah, the only tape I ever had. I won at a roller rink um, it was a backstreet boys, I won a roller rink contest and I got a backstreet boys tape so that's nice backstreet's back baby I I'm pretty sure leo is the same, but I submitted my audition to kikfm.

01:08:32 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Oh yeah, tape, you have real tape I used, or tape.

01:08:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh yeah, reel-to-reel tape. I had little 7-inch boxes. I made dozens of them and would go to radio stations and say here's my resume and tape, here's my tape.

01:08:45 - Doc Rock (Guest)
I used cassettes but I had a Kai reel-to-reel. But yeah, every day in school sitting there and trying to make a different mixtape for everybody that I know, Just pause and record and stop and then getting that right amount before the auto reverse so that it came into another song like that was.

01:09:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
that was right, that was technique yeah, you seem like the kind of guy who made mixtapes. You were definitely making mixtapes for the ladies mixtape king I was slinging these tapes.

01:09:15 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Did you call yourself back then? No, no, I was dj yogi back then because I was smarter than you.

01:09:20 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
Every year he's mixed tapes I think they still use the word mixed tapes, like I I know that word.

01:09:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It just they applied to cds, it just wasn't tapes anymore just the word you know persisted right, oh, okay, so I got a question for leo and there's a great movie, by the way, with john cusack, called high fidelity, in which he makes yes, perfect mixtape and I suppose, as long as, uh, people still know what that's all about, there's hope for this world. What were you going to say, doc?

01:09:48 - Doc Rock (Guest)
I got a question for you and Yanko did you have a brand that was like your go-to brand? For me it was maxell sf pro 2 crew I, I was kind of cheap.

01:09:58 - Janko Roettgers (Guest)
I bought tdk whatever you guys are so old oh no

01:10:06 - Doc Rock (Guest)
because, they had a cell with the memory when, when emily's crew came around memory tried to be hit because of la looks and swatch, so they had these plastic ones with red circle and a square and a triangle and it was like looked like toy and I was like I'm never giving anybody one of those I feel like you're acting like emily, like when she was hatched, like this little hatchling young hatchling.

01:10:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Do you remember in the 70s, memorex had a ad for how good its tapes were, with ella fitzgerald singing a high note and shattering a glass? Do you remember that? Yes, 100, we could watch it if you want. Can the amplified voice of ella fitzgerald shatter this glass of? Ella fitzgerald shattered this glass. Believe it. Mythbusters proved it possible with mrx2 oxide. The key is mrx2 oxide. It did it and that was also the one that had the guy sitting in the chair.

01:11:18 - Doc Rock (Guest)
That's maxell. That's maxell. That's why I bought maxell. I think you're right. And those speakers?

01:11:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
that pass by him are b in dot, not b, that's. Those are jbl uh sentries, right, I think?

01:11:23 - Doc Rock (Guest)
on this one on one of the commercials is the 801s, but yeah oh yeah, the 801s are really good.

01:11:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah, but you can tell it's the jbl in front.

01:11:31 - Janko Roettgers (Guest)
We are so old junk, but loud I still have a box or two of tapes in the basement, somewhere that I feel just dig it out can't get rid of it just like all these messages now that you know that the tape's going to go bad, so you better get them digitized get them digitized.

01:11:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You have to go out and buy it.

01:11:53 - Doc Rock (Guest)
This would come back instead of tape, because at least many of this of tape, because at least mini disc is recordable, but at least it sounded good yeah, mini disc was higher quality because it was.

01:12:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It was digital. All right time out. We're gonna take a break. Come back with more with the young emily forlini, the old leo laporte and the middle-aged guys doc rock and yanko records. Great to have you I'm the old guy here.

01:12:15 - Doc Rock (Guest)
I've seen it, I've seen it all my friends. I'm catching up.

01:12:18 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
I'm pretty close with everything going on in the world, it's probably better to just be old.

01:12:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's probably better to just well, my attitude is I'll be dead before it all comes. All the chickens, yeah. That's why you're giving all your information to.

01:12:29 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
AI you're like hey, hi, here I am, and then you're just gonna no exit.

01:12:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, that's true. No, but you actually said something. Because I've been a broadcaster for 50 years and done so much in public, I feel like if anybody's going to give it all and forget privacy, it'd be me, because I have no privacy and haven't had it for years, so I'm a good guinea pig. I understand why anybody, especially you, emily, would be reluctant to give over that information you're like an organ donor for ai, I'm like an organ donor.

01:13:00 - Janko Roettgers (Guest)
My organs show title you can have my organs, but I'm gonna keep my tapes or something not my organs, but they don't work so well anymore I like it.

01:13:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
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01:13:47
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01:16:29
Well, this was a sad week when we first started TWIT back in the aught fives. Uh, we used skype because at the time that was the best way for me to get people on from all over the country, all over the world. Uh, eventually, we built colleen. Colleen kelly did it. She built something called skype asaurus. You might remember this. In the early days of twit, we had a different mac mini for each person on the panel. So we would have three or four Mac minis for this panel and then they would call into that Mac mini and then we would combine them all and that way we get separate channels for each person and I could mix out noise and so forth. Skype's coming to a close. After two decades. Skype is. Overrosoft bought it. They spent eight and a half billion dollars buying it 14 years ago. They announced they're killing it in a couple of months. It's going to be uh, it's going to be over in may and they're going to move everybody over to the much beloved Microsoft teams. You're laughing, yanko?

01:17:39 - Janko Roettgers (Guest)
Yeah, everybody loves teams. Everybody's favorite product, skype, is kind of sad, it's a, it's very sad. It was the really the thing for me as somebody who moved to the U? S and a little over 20 years ago, that was the thing that kept me connected to my family back in in europe and I used it all the time, for quite I had a remember when they used to do the thing where you could buy phone numbers through skype I did that my daughter in high school spent a year in france for 90 bucks.

01:18:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I was able to get unlimited video calls with her in fr, france, and we that's how we stay in touch in Japan yeah yeah, go where you're from. Germany nice uh, skype was first released in August 2003, so it's 22 years old almost. Nicholas zennstrom, janus freeze and four Estonian developers, ebay, remember. Ebay bought it briefly and then Microsoft bought it from eBay for eight and a half billion dollars.

01:18:43 - Janko Roettgers (Guest)
The thing about ZenStrom and freezes those are the guy who's who built Kazaa, right the file thing and Skype used the same technology. It was for the longest time. I don't know if it was in the end anymore they probably switched it out on Microsoft but for the longest time it was a peer-to-peer product essentially, where they had these not to nerd out on it too much, but I used to write a P2P blog so they used to have this super node structure where they were basically like super users that had a couple of hundred people under them and a whole peer-to-peer decentralized architecture so it would work without servers, which was really impressive for keeping a couple million people online and I, I know this very well because, uh, when, because we use Skype for a long, long time to run the network and we would have people turn off their supernode, say don't be a supernode, because we don't, you need all the bandwidth.

01:19:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And we were, we we got really good at getting Skype to sound and look really good, uh. But when microsoft bought it you're exactly right, yanko they turned off the peer-to-peer feature. They started hosting all the calls and, frankly, that's when skype's quality went downhill.

01:19:45 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
It was better as a peer-to-peer network I think skype is no doubt, like a very, probably one of the most famous and important technologies in terms of internet life. But I mean we got to admit it's kind of past its prime. I mean none of does anyone still use skype. I think it's fair there in 2023.

01:20:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
36 million people used it daily yeah, what who?

01:20:09 - Doc Rock (Guest)
yeah, so this is funny. I'm sorry that it's funny. Emily said that. So, for for ecamm, in beginning we ended up building our own interview part. But it used to be if you wanted, if I wanted to interview Leo and I'm using Ecamm, he would call in through Skype, but it got just problematic in mid 2020. So in 2021, we rolled out our own like interview situation, which was working kind of good, but then we just realized that everybody knows how to use zoom. So alex introduced me to andy at nab. Andy carlucci, yes we love it.

01:20:44
Andy's in the chat. I think he's hanging out somewhere. And then I was like yo, you need to talk to your nerds, need to talk to my nerds yeah we have, now we have, we have. We migrated to zoom.

01:20:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
um, one of the things that was missing was this independent channel thing for each audio channel, and Zoom ISO, which Andy Carluccio wrote as an independent developer and then Zoom acquired his company, made it possible to have separate channels for everybody.

01:21:09 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
But, why did Skype not? That was the death of Skype to me, yeah. Why did Skype not win that race?

01:21:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Isn't that? A really good question.

01:21:17 - Doc Rock (Guest)
I say the same thing about Citrix and WebEx as well, because they were prime. And then when they saw Zoom Zoom and BlueJeans was these two little companies that were making a lot of noise but nobody was really using it. And I swear to you, three months before the pandemic hit I built a conference room for my buddy who owns a construction electric company here, and we did it off of the Citrix product, like go to room. Because it's like oh, zoom is a toy, don't worry about it. And then the pandemic came and the Zoom went boom. And then I was like oops, so I had to go back and retrofit that whole thing.

01:21:51 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
Zoom has a dorky name, Zoom. I mean, could be better and there's other tech out there, but it okay, I was just so dumb, but it zoomed ahead. You know, like it it won. Like how, how did this happen?

01:22:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's funny because we have three experts in our in our club Twitch chat right now. Andy Carluccio is there. It works for zoom. Alex Lindsay who became instrumental in moving us to Zoom. Along with Andy, we had Skype TX appliances from our TriCaster fellows, visrt, trying to get Skype to work in multiple. I mean mean, we did everything to make skype survive and it just once zoom took off. It was so much everybody knew how to use it. The look at the quality we're getting it's so good.

01:22:44 - Doc Rock (Guest)
It's amazing to me about zoom, zoom matches almost mike tyson's little joke everybody has a plan until you get punched in the face. And zoom came and punched everybody in the face. Richard campbell's also in there from our windows weekly.

01:22:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He's a microsoft expert. He says the audio video ddl that runs, uh, skype is the same one teams uses. So in some respects the skype technology lives on in teams, uh, but but nobody liked nobody likes teams that I know of. He says Microsoft had to migrate off the peer-to-peer product that we were talking about, yanko, too much liability. They didn't. You know, it makes sense for a big corporation to think you know these calls are being hosted by anonymous people all over the world. We don't even know them. He also said they took on Skype for eight and a half billion because they owned endpoints all over the world to access the telephone system. Microsoft did so. Buying Skype helped Microsoft turn into a kind of telco. I think that was a vision that is not survived over the last uh, what is that?

01:23:52 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
14 years yeah, so Microsoft's 50th anniversary is in early april oh and I am. I have to write a piece, uh, about like what are the? What does the next 50 years look like? And it's just interesting when you think about this, because it's kind of like, well, they kind of messed that up, so now zoom kind of dethroned them, and then they have their office products and google is competing with sheets and docs and Gen Z really loves that web hosted service. So it's kind of like what's going to remain for?

01:24:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
AI. What's next? Do you think there's something that'll beat Zoom?

01:24:26 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
Well, they're all in on AI and Adela has, like, pat himself on the back with his big chat, gpt investment. And they're adding Copilot into all their products. Like, excel has a co-pilot button and you can just ask it like write a formula for me.

01:24:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So there we have for the first time ever, we've turned on zoom's ai companion during the show. I'm very curious what we're gonna get. We've never used it before. We always use our own after the fact ai so why did you know what you're?

01:24:55 - Doc Rock (Guest)
it's funny leo zoom is patrick mahomes. They're just really good. He's the dominant, it's the goat. And people, people try to hate it, but no matter how much you try to hate it, they just come back and go again and again, and again.

01:25:08 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
I thought that the whole thing was. We all agreed that the whole goat discussion was completely gone for patrick mahomes after the super bowl yeah, I hope so, because I'm a Raiders fan.

01:25:20 - Doc Rock (Guest)
I can't stand him, but I mean like fans.

01:25:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We're talking, by the way, about, uh, handouts, sport ball, but uh, but so it's just too good, so nobody can out Zoom, zoom. So the pandemic obviously put Zoom on the map but you asked the right question.

01:25:37 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Why?

01:25:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
zoom, why not skype? Why not they were?

01:25:40 - Doc Rock (Guest)
ready when the moment came and everybody else was trying to win off of their status of where they were. They weren't trying to hear what the people wanted and zoom was ready and highly flexible and this is my opinion. The best thing that happened to zoom was in that third or fourth week of everybody talking about it. They had like the naked people showing up at everybody's call.

01:26:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There was Zoom bombing.

01:26:03 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Remember the Zoom bombing? Yeah, the Zoom bombing. So they had to fix that. So what they proved that nobody else would do Sky would have problems and so would Citrix or whatever. But Zoom was like okay, we'll fix it. And they fixed it. Everybody else was still we're Citrix, you're new, you don't know us. You do what we tell you.

01:26:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, also remember Remember Zoom kind of got dinged because they claimed they were end-to-end encrypted and then people said, well, you're not, and then they went out and they got hired people like Alex Stamos to fix it.

01:26:35 - Doc Rock (Guest)
They bought it. I was very sad they listened to people and fixed it. That's what I thought Because they listened and fixed it, instead of standing there laurels and beat their chest like we're the big tech guys. Shut up muggles.

01:26:44 - Janko Roettgers (Guest)
I think everybody else built products for conference rooms. Essentially they were like we're going to build this big enterprise product and then Zoom built a product for everybody that worked for schools and homeschooling and all this stuff and really if you had put those people on, if I had to deal with my kids being on webex or something, or teams or chime remember chime that just shut down the amazon product yes, amazon just shut down their version of this, so that's true that was a nightmare yeah I think they just didn't predict the trend and Leo said it and Alex backed it up, so I'll say it verbally.

01:27:19 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Zoom also went out and got good people, so when they saw what Andy was doing, they didn't get mad. A lot of companies would have got mad at what Andy was doing, but Zoom was like, oh, let's bring them in. And Andy definitely made Zoom better. So I'm going to back up my buddy, alex, because I don't want to have to fight with you when I get the interview.

01:27:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Zoom did something. That I think was one of the main reasons they succeeded, but it also was one of the main reasons not to like them. When you installed Zoom, they installed a background process that would always run on your computer, and it's one of the reasons Zoom was so quick and easy to use, because it was all. It never stopped running and they actually it became a problem on the mac side because they were also running a web server and when people figured it out they kind of got mad. But but it was the secret sauce to some degree. Zoom was ready the minute you wanted to make a call.

01:28:14 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
It just popped up right I feel like, okay, here's a wacky theory. Do you think part of it is kind of sociological, like people were just ready at that time for new tools. They were like this whole pandemic thing is completely new. I need to reassess my whole life. I need the new thing. I have to meet the moment and everyone was like, oh, it's Zoom, you need Zoom. You need Zoom Because I was just using Zoom, because people were saying you got to use Zoom now. But if everyone was like, oh, you need Skype or you need WebEx, I would have just used that, but it seemed like everyone rallied behind.

01:28:43 - Doc Rock (Guest)
But Skype was problematic during the pandemic. It caused so much trouble for us. It was always down and always broken and always not working, and then we were technically probably losing people to just doing it with Zoom I. So, yeah, you know the, I honestly think it, I think they were just good at the right time and I swear to you, I stand on, I stand on this business because I really believe that they listened while everybody else was being cocky can I say something?

01:29:09 - Janko Roettgers (Guest)
oh, malik wrote a story a couple days ago saying, basically, skype died because they had too many middle managers and that was what they were relying on, and so that slowed them down to a crawl while Zoom was coming in and like super fast, fixing things as they as they came up.

01:29:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think it could have been as simple, as it had a better name. Well, I think Zoom, doesn't Zoom sound like a great thing, don't you want it?

01:29:35 - Doc Rock (Guest)
I think it sounds. I think it's easy to remember. It's not a tech word.

01:29:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
If you think about it. Skype is a tech word.

01:29:40 - Doc Rock (Guest)
WebEx, skype, zoom, zoom is the only normal word there, and so that's muggle ready. Yeah, muggle ready.

01:29:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Blue jeans is not a tech word Blue jeans sounds down market.

01:29:51 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
Benito on high.

01:29:52 - Benito (Announcement)
So, like what happened here is that Skype was garbage, really Like no, it just was garbage, so like no one could use it properly. I was working at Twitch at the time and we were doing a lot of this kind of stuff also, and Skype just never worked. And that's really it Like. If Skype had just worked maybe 75 to 80% of the time, it wouldn't have lost.

01:30:12 - Janko Roettgers (Guest)
And they started adding these weird features to it, where suddenly there was news in your Skype feed or you had a Skype feed for some. Why would you need a Skype feed? You just want to talk to people, right? So they?

01:30:24 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
didn't predict the trend. They were developing a product for something else, that the way things happened didn't end up being what people needed. And they didn't predict that we would all be using video chats all the time.

01:30:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Let me read what else Ohm said, because I I think it's it's it's really good. This is Ohm's blog. At Ohmco, microsoft now talks about Teams being their focus, showing that even today they haven't realized what made Skype a cultural consumer force. Microsoft Teams is a terrible product and I dread using it. In the simplest terms, teams is a terrible product and I dread using it. In the simplest terms, teams is a perfect encapsulation of a bureaucratic, archaic and outdated 50 year old company that's trying to reinvent itself as an ai leader. Does ohm hate microsoft?

01:31:08 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
I agree I agree, that's what I was saying, I agree he says.

01:31:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
For now, let's call it what it is microsoft bought and effectively killed skype. I could write a phd dissertation on this. For now, this is all I have to say. Microsoft didn't know how to nurture skype, and its bureaucracy killed one of the most iconic brands of the new century.

01:31:30 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Yes, that's actually he's right, isn't it a hundred percent? And so this was makes it funny, because we said that skype was a tech word. But at the time that's what everybody was doing making up these weird words. You know your skypes, your googles, your yahoos, your uh, not lincolns, what was it called, I forget. Anyway, people were making up these weird web 2.0 words and everybody was about that life. So it got so popular that oprah would call people on skype. Yeah, you know what I mean.

01:31:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So that's when I knew that they had made it, when I saw Oprah using it on the show, and then Microsoft bought it and corrected it and also and Yanko, your use and my use with my daughter in France confirms this it killed the long distance, calling business 100%.

01:32:13 - Doc Rock (Guest)
It was so much cheaper than a long distance call. It was called Skype out number, right? I remember buying a skype skype in and skype out and I was, and I had a skype in number two.

01:32:21
You could call me by phone and so when I got to japan and I was able to call home all the time and just check to make sure everything was good, it was such an amazing situation and I remember we were talking about this earlier, about that corny moment from panels, but but I remember the first time I'm sitting on a call and we had at that time my buddy, Patrice, was in Germany, and then I'm here and my other friend was in California and we're having a conversation over Skype right, the whole Twit team I'm sorry to our team and we're like is this wild? We're in so many different places and we can have this conversation right now Like this is wild.

01:32:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We're in so many different places that we can have this conversation right now. Financial Times interviewed Nicholas Enstrom, one of the founders, just the other day. He said Skype was a revolutionary product of its time and I'll always be proud and grateful for the early team members and investors who took a chance on us. Now other firms are innovating in this space to offer new services for a whole new generation, many of whom will have no idea how expensive it used to be to call Australia. You don't remember this, emily, but it used to be. When you were calling long distance, you'd say I gotta make this quick, it's long distance, right, it was. So calling home from Germany to or calling Germany from America was a dollar a minute. It was hugely expensive and the other way around.

01:33:40 - Janko Roettgers (Guest)
My grandma still thinks that's the case when she calls me across the country, emily I can't talk long I'm calling long distance there used to be this whole thing when I still lived in germany, where you had to call a number before you dial the actual number to then pay another company and like a weird calling card, oh yeah you'd have a calling card.

01:34:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We had that calling card yeah, you call the calling card number here so that you could get it down to a buck a minute instead of five bucks a minute or whatever.

01:34:09 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Yeah, mci, that's how mci and and the phone job that's's. We got spread the FOM because the phone drops.

01:34:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So then this way the F4 memory lane kids cards, first cassettes, now Skype, I think.

01:34:23 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
Skype. You know you got a skill in life as you have to know when to say goodbye when you got to hang up the hat. I think Skype did its time. It was amazing. Maybe someone's call write a book about Skype. We have some Skype aficionados.

01:34:38 - Doc Rock (Guest)
So Skype is Tyson and Zoom is Logan Paul.

01:34:41 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
Yeah, yeah, I think it's over. It's okay, like Microsoft has a new tech, they think they're going to make better, whatever. But why would they want to keep nursing this like dying video conferencing software?

01:34:53 - Janko Roettgers (Guest)
The thing that I'm really sad about is that my father-in-law, to this day, calls it skypey, and I'm gonna miss that? I think I'm gonna miss that the most I'm gonna call you on skypey.

01:35:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, the other thing that was interesting before spotify, skype was a european company, I it was an estonian company, and that was pretty novel, at least in the US, that there would be a European startup that was so dominant you know, I actually saw that Estonia and chat GPT made some kind of deal this week where they're giving all students in Estonian public schools chat GPT and I'm not, I'm not kidding, this is real like.

01:35:32
So it's very uh digital uh. First, you know the like a lot of former soviet uh satellites. Uh, they're trying to find their way in a new world and they early on said you know our way forward is going to be digital, a digital economy. They have a digital id card. It's actually a really cool uh country.

01:35:51 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
I've been there yeah, many times.

01:35:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, twice, really, two times, that's many times. One too many?

01:36:01 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
well, not many, almost many I would say, two times being to estonia is many times well, it's not the the yeah, exactly, yeah, it's not, maybe I'm sounding too american, I don't know.

01:36:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I just I've never considered going it's beautiful, beautiful Italian is a beautiful City. I remember walking through it, lisa and I, and a guy running up to me saying oh Leo, I been looking for you. I knew you were in Estonia and I guess it's small enough. He found me, but he was going. He was going to Parliament because he designed this year's Estonian Christmas card and he was going up to Parliament to show it to them. I I hope you're still listening. If you are, I remember you. Let's take a little break. Uh, more memory lane. I don't know, I have to look, but maybe I hope you're enjoying the show. We are Emily Forlini, yonko Records, doc Rock. Great to have all three of you. Our show today brought to you by zip recruiter love, zip recruiter. Uh, you know, look, I like being a podcaster. Uh, having my own shows, interviewing, uh, incredible guests we had stephen wolfram on on wednesday and having a wonderful team people like benito that help make it happen.

01:37:13
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01:39:29
Go to our exclusive web address. Try it for free ZipRecruitercom slash twit. Please use that address so they know you saw it here. That's ZipRecruitercom slash twit. Please use that address so they know you saw it here. That's ziprecruitercom slash twit. I will vouch for it. It really works. Ziprecruiter the smartest way to hire. No-transcript Our little show here and we are having some fun, I you know, I think. Just to briefly go back to Skype, it was the technology that made Twit possible and it was the technology we used for the first. I don't know. 10, 15 years of Twit. We're going to be 20 years old next month, so I really I feel a little sad. I think we use Zoom now and we've been using Zoom for well since the pandemic, so five years and it's been great. But Skype, thank you. Thank you, nicholas, for a great product that we wouldn't be here without. So I just wanted to say that it's kind of sad to lose it, but again, we stopped using it years ago, so I can't really. It's a little hypocritical of me, isn't it?

01:40:46 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
Yeah, I feel like I'm coming in as the I don't know hatchling naysayer, like I didn't have the memories from it.

01:40:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You don't have any fun for it at all I do.

01:40:56 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
I do have some fondness for it, of course, but not the same way you guys do. I didn't build a business with skype, and so so my like unemotional view is just like yeah, it's time to kill it, but I understand it's probably time to kill it. It is, yeah, but you can also, you know, give it a ceremonial burial, which I think I mean, look, we've gotten rid of skype, asaurus.

01:41:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We got sold those machines off years ago. I mean, we don't, you know, we the skype tx machines we got rid of. So you know, we've been zoomed for a long time and and really a lot of credit to andy carluccio uh for making it possible for us to use zoom like this and to ecam doc.

01:41:32 - Doc Rock (Guest)
I give you some credit because ecamm's integration with zoom is a big part of why we still use uh zoom, you know it's just one of those things that everybody knows how to do now, and I think that's that that greased the wheel, like even still, at some point we had to teach people how to use skype like you zoom, you just click link, you're good well, and look at the network news.

01:41:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, um, you know, I was reminiscing with jeff jarvis. He was on cnn, um, not so long ago and I think last last wednesday actually, and uh, he had to go in, but, and I remember going to be on cnn, you had to go to a satellite bureau and you'd sit there and you'd have the earpiece, and you know, and uh, now it's all zoom or or actually I guess they use webex, but whoever they made a deal with. But uh, the aesthetic has changed, the technology has changed. You see people in their living rooms and kitchens. Uh, that can be weird, it is a little strange and it's hard, but getting used to that, and you, see them wearing AirPods.

01:42:35 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
Yeah, I'm doing a bi-weekly segment on CBS for tech news. Oh neat, I'm literally just in this room it's just like this In a studio a huge picture of me, and then there's the anchor talking to me and I'm on Zoom and I'm just like well, guys.

01:42:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Where can we see that? I didn't know you were doing that.

01:42:54 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
Yeah, it's just through a through work. It's like a PC mag.

01:42:59 - Doc Rock (Guest)
So I've seen it. I've seen it on CBS. I can send you some things to make your studio like dope.

01:43:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Look at his studio. It's dope, but then they'll think you're like DJ. What?

01:43:13 - Doc Rock (Guest)
is it MC DJ rock? No, gave me dj info. Get it, because you're here for the info. Get it. So who?

01:43:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
okay, whose studio do you like better? I mean background do you like doc?

01:43:23 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
rocks, or do you like? This isn't this nice, this is nice. You guys are definitely competing directly.

01:43:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I would say I think this is pretty special what I got here.

01:43:31 - Doc Rock (Guest)
I love it we actually just did a show where we were talking about people building their studio rooms and I used yours as one of the examples. Thank you, because I I absolutely love it well, I have it.

01:43:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, I credit to anthony nielsen and uh, burke mcquinn, who, and russell tammany, who put this all together. Uh, it doesn't look as as nice from the other side, I have to tell you. It's's kind of dumpy to be honest.

01:43:57 - Janko Roettgers (Guest)
Oh no, don't break the club.

01:43:58 - Doc Rock (Guest)
We call that the cone of cleanliness.

01:44:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I had to get some trash out of the way before you saw me grab it. Oh, my gum's sitting there, never mind, oh well.

01:44:10 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
I feel like Doc Rock kind of looks like you have a fog machine going or something. You should have a fog machine, it's the DJ vibe.

01:44:16 - Doc Rock (Guest)
It's the. Dj vibe and now I know. You know what I have. I have what's called a black promise filter and anybody that sees video it's like something you should do, especially when you pass so you're not old enough yet when you pass 50, you want a black promise filter on your I'm so far past 50.

01:44:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I need the, the double promise filter promise filter.

01:44:37 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Uh, like a 1.8 and you're good is that like vacillate on? The lens. What is that? Almost like it adds hilation to the highlights and then it kind of like smooth things out can I get one of those, anthony? Because, look at me deceiving us I look so old. 100%, dude, I'm older than you With the wrinkles, what's going on over there. I need the filter. They say black, don't crack, but it sure as hell wrinkles you look good.

01:45:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, you look really good. You look like a young man yeah.

01:45:05 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Now just use it for the highlation, because it makes the lights look better and not so yelly in your face. Right's why I want to dji osborne. Um, what do you call that little nick thing? I have it right here. That's why that's the most popular filter, because it looks really good at night I'm writing this down.

01:45:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I gotta order this sucker right now.

01:45:22 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
Yeah I'm gonna so you're gonna have to redo my whole thing you're moving, you just got there yeah, I know where are you moving to? I'm just moving like across town because we bought a house, stay in new jersey oh, congratulations, thank you.

01:45:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, so just you know do you have a dog yet? No, we have a cat okay, so first you buy the house, then you get the dog, but you know what comes after that.

01:45:46
I don't want to say but uh yes, no, I don't want to say I told you I don't want to say so the biggest heist in hit, and first I was saying the biggest crypto heist, but I realized if it weren't for crypto, you would never steal. How would you steal 1.4 billion dollars from a, you know, a armored car? You couldn't right. Or froma bank the biggest heist in history. We talked about it a couple of weeks ago the Bybit crypto I think they're the number two crypto exchange lost $1.4 billion in Ethereum and now it is pretty clear it's the North Korean government hacking group, lazarus Group, that did it. They know that because it went to a wallet that Lazarus Group that did it. They know that because it went to a wallet that Lazarus Group has used before Law enforcement pretty much seems to agree the same wallets used against Femex and BingX and PollenX In North Korea.

01:46:52
Of course, they have a problem with hard currency, right? Uh, so one of the ways they get hard currency is by stealing cryptocurrency and converting it into dollars and other hard currencies. Um, so at least I guess the that, maybe. Is that a little reassuring that it wasn't just some guy?

01:47:14 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
no, instead it was like an organized ring it was the nation state hackers.

01:47:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, that's reassuring it was actually a very sophisticated heist because one of the things bybit did to protect the wall is they had multi signers head. It was like in the nuclear facility when two people have to turn the keys in opposite sides of the room to launch the wallets. They had multi-signers. They had. It was like in the nuclear facility when two people have to turn the keys in opposite sides of the room to launch the missiles. Multiple people had to have, had only had part of the keys, had to sign in and they used a very sophisticated uh hack to get to fake that. Basically, um so it's kind of impressive. Largest heist ever. The regime's hackers lazarus group has been linked to 58 at least 58 crypto heists and last year they stole 650 million dollars in crypto hacks.

01:48:05 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
This year, one hack 1.4 billion dollars I think everyone just doesn't know what to do with all the the hacks in the world. It just everyone feels so powerless. I mean crypto maybe don't buy crypto, but it's like every day there's a new hack and there's just. That's probably why everyone's quiet. It's like, at this point, what do we say? What?

01:48:25
do we do Breaches and hacks we just keep giving our data over and we're all just kind of like do do, do, hope this works out jimmy in our youtube chat is saying uh, you could.

01:48:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You could steal a 1.4 billion dollars in diamonds. Okay, but has anyone ever done that? Jimmy is the question only on mission impossible.

01:48:45 - Doc Rock (Guest)
I saw the funniest meme the other day and it was so funny but yet it was so true. So you know you get these messages all the time. They're just like hey. And then you know they expect you to start a conversation that we know better because, again, we're not muggles. But somebody was like, hey, is that you? And the person and the meme said you know what? Just send me the scam links already I don't have time for this. Insert your favorite bad word. And that thing made me laugh so hard because I get like 20 of those freaking messages a day and they drive me crazy. And then I signed up for one of those services like Leo was talking about and it has slowed down, but they're just so obnoxious and we know better than to answer them. But I know lots of people who answered them and I'm like please don't talk to them.

01:49:31
You're just know you're just making it worse, but oh my god, it's super obnoxious yeah, I got a hit with one.

01:49:38 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
This past two weeks I've been getting calls from the same like scam operation and now I'm just like, is this my new reality? Like why does? Why do those things start and why do they end?

01:49:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it's just oh god, so 12? So, speaking of the trump meme coin, 12 billion dollars in value lost, that's a lot of people who I mean. That's another kind of heist, isn't it? 12 billion dollars, um, melania is even worse, but I think I don't think as many people bought Melania, so that's maybe better, I guess.

01:50:18 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
Melania, my girl. What are you doing?

01:50:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What are you doing? What are you doing? So there is Congress, this won't pass, but a California Democrat has introduced legislation to prohibit the company's top officials and their families from capitalizing on meme coins. It's called and I love this the modern emoluments and malfeasance enforcement act. The meme act would prohibit the the president, vice president, members of congress, senior executive branch officials and their spouses and dependent children from issuing, sponsoring or endorsing a security, future commodity or digital asset.

01:51:03 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
Well, that's good. I feel like the adults have entered the room on that one.

01:51:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, you know, first of all, he's never going to get through Congress, but it seems like they shouldn't have to make a law to prevent that. There is the Emoluments act, which has been around like as long as the country's been around, um yeah, they made carter sell his peanut farm, you know they made jimmy sell his peanut farm. But no, your your dollar sign, trump, let's make corruption criminal again, he said the congress person. Our public offices belong to the public yeah, I mean.

01:51:36 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
It's like I said, like the adults have entered the room, it's like a parent with a teenager like you shouldn't have to tell them not, you shouldn't have to say this banana peels all over the kitchen and pretend it's mario kart. But you know, if they start putting banana peels you gotta be like. By the way, you can't put banana peels everywhere and that's kind of like the vibe with this whole situation wow, now I do have to say, uh, okay.

01:51:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So people are gonna say, leo, don't be political. But there I do want to say, uh, thank you. I never thought I'd say this to our new director of national intelligence, telsey gabbert. So you may remember that the UK it was, it was never fully confirmed by the UK told Apple that they would have to provide a back door to their advanced data protection and end encryption on iCloud. Uh, this was leaked and a number of uh publications reported it. And a number of publications reported it. Apple in effect confirmed it by the next week saying yeah, we're not going to offer ADP to anybody in the UK anymore. Apparently, there is an agreement between Washington andon not to do that.

01:52:55
Uh, the biden justice department kind of downplayed, according to the washington post, the demand for an apple back door. On tuesday, uh, dni director uh, tulsi gabbard called the british demand an egregious violation of american rights and on Wednesday, lawmakers asked the Justice Department to investigate. Right on, right on. It turns out there was a kind of probably not publicized agreement that Britain wouldn't try to spy on americans and america wouldn't try to spy on britain's. But remember, this uk order wasn't just for uk citizens, it said, anyone in the world using advanced data protection. Um so, uh good, I hope this administration takes this seriously and protects our encryption. It is a little contrary to what previous administrations, previous directors of national intelligence, previous FBI and CIA directors have said.

01:54:12 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
They all have said they want end-to-end encryption to have a backdoor, because that's how law enforcement has to work in order to catch bad guys, terrorists and pedophiles. So that's how it works.

01:54:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It gets encrypted unless law enforcement wants access yeah, so until advanced data protection, apple had the keys to iCloud and if law enforcement and this happened again and again in fact they just caught some guys. Do you remember the heist where, uh, some major sports figures like Travis Kelsey got their houses broken into while they were on the road? You were on a televised football game and then the bad guys broke into his house and stole all his fancy watches. Well, they also made the mistake of taking selfies of each other with the contraband and posting it on their iCloud right, and, of course, apple turned it over to authorities. They authorities must have figured oh, we think we know this and asked for it, and they got busted like they weren't using ADP. If they were using ADP, apple would not have been able to do that. And in the, the UK now, apple will always be able to turn over anybody in the UK's information because they don't allow them to have end-to-end encryption.

01:55:21 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
It sounds complex. It sounds like you wanted to just work however benefits you most Like. If you committed a crime, you don't want them to be able to access the data, because then you can't do your thing.

01:55:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The problem is and I think we've said this many times that if you put a back door in, it never is own. It never ends up being only for law enforcement. Any back door means that it's not going to work well, uh, and we know this from kalia, the law enforcement act of what was that? 1996 or something, where, uh, the director of the fbi at the time said we need a backdoor into, uh, digital telephony, we need phone backdoor into phone systems. Uh, because we can't you know, we can't wiretap the bad guys anymore because you're using digital phone systems.

01:56:08
Congress approved kalia and, oh well, what a surprise. Here we are in 2025 and the government's saying, yeah, we can't get Chinese hackers out of our phone system. They used that same loophole, that same back door. So, yeah, it was good for law enforcement, was also good for Chinese hackers who now live in our phone system. And then, and the government has said, yeah, it's too going to be too expensive to to get them out. We'd have to shut down the phone system, the national phone system, for a day in order to get them out and upgrade all our equipment, and so we're not going to do that maybe they can you just move everybody over to skype for a day before it shuts down just for a day.

01:56:52 - Janko Roettgers (Guest)
You all use skype trap the chinese there, the Chinese hackers, then shut it down, they'll never get out anyway.

01:57:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I I am often critical of the administration, but in this case I would and and I don't. We'll see what happens, because it is somewhat unpredictable. But at least Telsey Gabbard understands that the UK demanding that Apple eliminate its end-to-end encryption was a violation of an agreement that the Cloud Acts requirement, that the terms of the agreement shall not create any obligation that providers be capable of decrypting data. If this administration stands up for end-to-end encryption, I'll be very happy. That will be something to laud them for, and I want to make sure that I'm fair enough to laud them when they uh, when they aren't when it's due. On the other hand, maybe the reason that we don't have restream anymore is because it's been shut down in ukraine. I don't know. Um.

01:57:54
One thing I'm not thrilled about pete hegseth, the new secretary of defense, has ordered the cyber command to stand down from all planning against russia, including offensive digital actions. Uh, we, we were hacking them. We were attempting to hack them, because of course, russia hacks us. Uh, we, we were hacking them. We were attempting to hack them because of course, russia hacks us all the time. In fact, it is widely considered that a lot of the ransomware gangs coming out of russia are operating with the tacit support of the russian government.

01:58:26 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
Uh, the nsa sorry why did he do that? Like I feel like I'm just missing something with this administration in russia. Like why is it not a problem that they are working so closely with russia and they're telling people that's a reasonable question?

01:58:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
russia inquiring minds would like to know why would you shut that down? Furthermore, uh, the uh, asisa, the um, the security folks who have been, up to now, very protective of our elections, has been basically uh, shut down by doge um yeah, like that's kind of the c says place several members of the election security group, especially those focused on misinformation and disinformation on administrative leave.

01:59:19
Um, the US digital service has been taken over by Doge and there's um a group, a government group that I don't I did not know about that, I don't think is widely known called um. Was it F18?

01:59:37 - Janko Roettgers (Guest)
no, that's a yeah, it's F18 it's.

01:59:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
F18. Uh, this is the group that, like the US digital services, helps the government with modern Technologies, including the IRS direct file system right, which was a huge win for people to help I think it's a win digitally.

01:59:57
That was one of a very exciting thing uh, elon tweeted about or x or whatever you call it about three weeks ago that they had shut down direct file, which surprised me because, of course, directfile was a free tax filing system that, for years, companies like TurboTax, intuit's TurboTax and H&R Block's tax prep software fought against because they wanted you to pay them to do your taxes.

02:00:29 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
Like a lobby situation.

02:00:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, they lobbied hard against it.

02:00:32 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
Yeah, but now they're happy, they're thrilled well that's what's interesting.

02:00:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The irs had a trial last year with direct file was very popular, I think. 18 to 20 states very popular. Um, I, when elon said deleted, I immediately went to direct file and started to file my taxes and it was fine. But apparently elon knew a little bit more than I did about what was coming, because now the company that wrote the software has been deleted, so maybe I don't. You can't use that for your taxes this year well, I don't know if it's still ar, if it's still up or not.

02:01:06
If it, that's what it is if it breaks, no one will fix it. Yeah, and it will.

02:01:11 - Doc Rock (Guest)
You know, that's in the middle people already started and then you know people who are early. They started but then, like anybody that comes now you're not gonna get in, like that would be absolute mess well, and and giving in to uh, the.

02:01:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know those companies the gsa has eliminated.

02:01:30 - Janko Roettgers (Guest)
This is the latest workforce action for the general services administration, the entire team of 90 employees, uh, who worked for 18f, a government tech consultancy that helps other agencies with their technology I saw today that mark cuban apparently offered to sort of fund them as an outside group, with the logic that eventually everything's going to break and the government needs to hire them again, and then they can become outside consultants and keep their jobs and do good work.

02:02:00 - Doc Rock (Guest)
So like, if you're going to privatize it, I would get as many of the people in the office except, you know, todd, because todd's, todd and I would start a whole hr block. You know, hopefully, with somebody, one of our friends from the valley would keep them going because it was great. You know, it actually worked. It worked better than TurboTax and all the rest of those things.

02:02:20 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
Well, that's the thing. Like Elon is supposed to be pro-tech, and that was finally the government was getting techie and you could file your taxes instead of having to pay some other tech company to do it, so that was a real marker of the government becoming more tech forward, and so I I that seems like something that they would keep.

02:02:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Elon uh tweeted that group has been deleted. Uh, it was. Uh. He retweeted somebody who said it's a far left government-wide computer office. I'm not sure how it's far left um it is.

02:02:56 - Janko Roettgers (Guest)
It is now gone. Everything that is free and publicly run is far left in the logic of something.

02:03:03 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
Oh, okay, is that it.

02:03:04 - Doc Rock (Guest)
It's like well, I'm sure intuit, and then hr block are thrilled right well and guarantee you those two hr block in uh into are definitely not far left. But it's funny. These guys get to the thing where it's like okay, listen, I have admitted it 100,000 times, I am a diehard Raiders fan, but I cannot be like, oh, tom Brady's the worst quarterback that ever lived. That's just stupid. He's good. I can't stand him, but he was good. These guys can't do that. That's the part that makes it so upsetting is they will just pick a line because the line is there and put no normal logic whatever's, and realize that in in the end, if we start to make our government less tech capable, that makes us vulnerable absolutely it is very odd that you would kill 18f um, given that it was.

02:03:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It was dedicated to keeping our, our government technology modern and secure and up-to-date.

02:04:05 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
Same thing with sisa well, maybe what he wants to do is it's he, it took his glory, kind of like he wants to see that model and then like he wants to launch a new tax service and get the credit for it.

02:04:18 - Janko Roettgers (Guest)
I also just Googled this really quick. Apparently, Intuit paid one million for the inauguration. Ah, you know.

02:04:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They've lobbied hard for a long time against any government free filing, time against any government free filing. I guess you know, if you don't, this I mean it's it's impossible to impute the intent or or the reasons why. We just don't know enough about why you would do this. But it may be that if you feel all government is bad, that any way to file your taxes through the government would be bad, you should be done by free enterprise. But who's going to collect the taxes?

02:04:53 - Doc Rock (Guest)
the government what does the tax money go to?

02:04:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
the government. I just don't understand. You know there is there and I wonder if this will proceed there, because he's already fired 6 000 people from the internal revenue service. Maybe we shouldn't just shouldn't file our taxes this year what yeah? Who's gonna? Who's gonna stop us?

02:05:16 - Doc Rock (Guest)
right. You know, I heard something that was really good recently and it kind of nailed it. So the idea of government in theory, for just about anybody, is about service. And so I remember way back in the day, when I was a little kid and I just got a chance to vote, I was like, oh, ross Perot would be great for government because he's a business person, and it made the most sense to me because I was going to school to be a business person. But it turns out that government can't be profitable. Government's job is service, it's not to be profitable. So unless you're ready to run, uh, a service-oriented business that intention is not to make a profit, we're going to always keep breaking stuff. Like you know what I mean. Like it it just doesn't work. Because if it worked, then if it was profitable, just like oh yeah, the ambulance will come if you pay first. Oh, the fire department will come if you pay first.

02:06:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know it's like well, it used to be, I don't know. Uh, you remember the gangs of new york, martin scorsese's great movie about 19th century new york city, daniel day lewis yeah, with daniel day lewis.

02:06:25
It used to be. Fire departments were private. They would set fires in order to in order to make some money and worse would if there were a house on fire. The competing fire departments would show up and say, well, who are you going to pay to put that fire out and how much you're going to pay? They would auction off the cost of putting that fire out. So I don't know if private fire departments are such a good idea. I definitely don't want a private police force.

02:06:56 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
Well, this one's like. I mean, I went to the library a couple of years ago with my niece and the library was hosting a class on how to file your taxes, because it's so complicated, and that was a service the library was providing. And you know, a lot of people there didn't speak English, or you know didn't have money to pay for a private tax service and there's a real swath of people that struggle to file their taxes.

02:07:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's ridiculously complicated. Exactly.

02:07:24 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
But if they don't do it, they're criminals, and so it's a real problem that the government created and it was trying to fix and so I think people are created and it was trying to fix um and so I well yanko, in germany, you don't uh, fill out a big tax form.

02:07:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The government tells you what you owe and you pay it.

02:07:41 - Janko Roettgers (Guest)
Probably they already took it you do have to file taxes. You do have to file in scandinavia.

02:07:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They send you a postcard. I'm not sure what they do in germany, scandinavia. They send you a postcard. They say according to our calculations, you made this much, you owe this much. Thank you, we already took it out of your account. I can see why people wouldn't like that idea. By the way, I did go to the direct file. My current tax return is you know, it's still there, it's still online. Uh, I am. I am still you continuing my 2024 federal tax return. So it's not down, but I think you're. I think you kind of nailed it yeah, go, when you said but if anything goes wrong, there's no one who could fix it, cause no one understands it.

02:08:27 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
I think it just feels like there should be more accountability for like why a service that touched so many people just can get pulled like that. Like it feels almost like your rights are being taken at that point and everyone's just so beside themselves with what's happening in Washington right now and again, so powerless that, and people are also afraid of Elon Musk, like they don't want to speak out against him. So there's's people feel frozen on this topic and it's like someone just needs to break through and be like what the heck is going on and you just.

02:09:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We also started a culture of hating taxes.

02:09:06 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Like I don't know when that started because I don't remember it back when I was a little kid, but I remember it as I guess sort of as a teenager. A little kid, but I remember it as I guess, sort of as a teenager. Like maybe it was 84 or whatever after Reagan. But like our whole culture of like I tried to avoid paying taxes or I hate paying taxes or taxes are bad or whatever, it's kind of crazy, cause I again I've lived in a bunch of different countries and other countries just don't think that way. They just think it's something that you have to do, do, but like we have an eviscerable reaction to it, even though we use things that are heavily tax subsidized on a daily basis and have no problem using this stuff.

02:09:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I just don't want to pay for it yeah, like roads yeah the irony is elon musk's billions and elon musk's businesses all come from heavy government subsidy, including space, spacex and Tesla.

02:09:56 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
Yeah, I think it's like almost $3 billion has gone to Tesla for government subsidies. Yeah.

02:10:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Let's take a little break. We need a little subsidy from our sponsor. We'll have more with Yanko Rickers, doc Rock, emily Forlini. You're watching this Week in Tech Brought to you this week by Zscaler, the leader in cloud security.

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02:13:05
I did not see this. Do you use instagram? Apparently it was flooded with violent content. Meta has apologized for an error that filled some users' Reel feeds with graphic videos of people getting killed. This happened on Wednesday. What?

02:13:26 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
kind of error? I don't know. Zuckerberg press share screen.

02:13:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Share screen shared screen. Share screen share screen. The videos which were recommended on some users reels tab included. Well, I don't even want to. I don't even want to say what it was, let alone show you pictures of it. Some of the videos had sensitive content warnings, but others did not. Wall street journal had this story saying a wall street Journal reporter's account features scores of videos of people being shot, mangled, my machinery ejected from theme park rides, often back to back what?

02:14:02
they just backed up the garbage truck and just dumped it on everyone view counts on some of the promoted videos suggested that Instagram's recommendations had massively boosted their viewership, view counts going into the millions maybe that was it, they just they.

02:14:22 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
It was like a machine learning thing where it was just trying to get the most views and it accidentally tapped some sort of file?

02:14:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, uh, a instagram spokesperson said we apologize for the mistake.

02:14:36 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
Yeah, I'm, sure they do we have fixed an error.

02:14:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
By the way, even after Meta admitted it and said they fixed it, this Wall Street Journal's reporter's feed was still full of horrific stuff, of horrific, horrific stuff appearing, some appearing next to advertisements for law firms, massage studios and timu, which is, if you don't know, a chinese e-commerce spokesperson said that the torrent of videos was unrelated to the company's decision to adjust its content moderation policies, but I feel like you could sue them for harassment or emotional distress if you have bad dreams and you can't sleep well at night because of it.

02:15:25 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
Yeah, yeah, I mean meta removed more than 10 million pieces of.

02:15:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But what's interesting is they had these videos right right, they were in the system. These videos, right right, they were in the system. There's a trove, there's a trove, it's a treasure trove of violent imagery, I mean that does not sound good.

02:15:41 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
I mean, that's what's going on.

02:15:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They say they remove more than 10 million pieces of violent and graphic content from instagram in the july through september period of last year.

02:15:51 - Janko Roettgers (Guest)
That was in its transparency report now we know how the people who uh used to moderate stuff for instagram felt like, because that was basically their nine to five.

02:16:01 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Yeah, just these videos non-stop there's a great report I saw recently about the these people having problems now because they had to do all of that vetting. Oh, it's traumatic. They had to watch so much of it like yeah, it's like completely checked out and you know, fighting for their. What is it like trying, you know, you're trying to get the company to pay for their health stuff. But a lot of these guys got fired right and then like, so they're trying their cobra that's the word I'm looking for fighting for cobra exchanges and things like that. Because, like, they're still effed up but their cobra is going away.

02:16:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah, amethyst says well sorry, yeah, that's the word I was trying to say well, by the way, cobra is also garbage and crazy expensive. Yeah, yeah that's the after you lose your job the six months continuation of your health benefits consolidated, but you have to pay for it.

02:16:50 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Reconciliate benefits act that's good you left out an r there somewhere.

02:16:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I said I'm sorry.

02:16:55 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Omnibus Reconciliate Benefits Act. That's good. You left out an R there somewhere. I said I'm sorry. Consolidated Omnibus Benefits Reconciliation Act.

02:17:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Cobra, wow, I'm impressed. You're better than an AI. Doc Rock, that's good. How did you know that?

02:17:08 - Doc Rock (Guest)
I'm impressed, man, my brain is broken bro Grant Robb.

02:17:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The journal quotes a one person, a 25 year old, who works in the supply chain industry, saying he was shocked to see graphic videos of people getting shot and run over on reels on wednesday. It's hard to comprehend. This is what I'm being served. I watched 10 people die today. What what you kept scrolling? What that? Oh, oh oh. Robinson said similar videos are being surfaced to all his male friends, age 22 to 27 oh, that's why I didn't see none we were not in the right demographic.

02:17:49 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
It's the joe rogan crowd radicalize our young man out here, one day at a time fascinating, by the way.

02:17:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Youtube says it now has more than one billion monthly view. One billion monthly viewers of podcasts, 100 wow, this is from variety your old home.

02:18:07 - Doc Rock (Guest)
No, no, this this actually came from um the ceo himself.

02:18:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah he said it yeah, yeah, yeah broke it down.

02:18:13 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Here's what's crazy this. So I've been preaching this forever because I coach YouTubers right, and I've been telling everybody like, yeah, short is cool and short is a nice flash in the pan, but you really want to stick to your long form content and you need to remember that people are watching this on TV. So not only do they have that 1 billion hours of people watching podcasts on TVs, so just like not on their phones, not on their computers, but on their televisions in the living room.

02:18:45
So like when you're doing, when you're doing the big news, that kpix, whatever yeah the dad. Like people are watching that on YouTube on their 65 at home, Like so it's not good.

02:18:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You look so great, emily, for leaning and have a full day.

02:19:00 - Doc Rock (Guest)
We have a face for radio, but I think that's super impressive because it finally beat the other streaming platforms or device. I'm sorry it used to be, oh, everyone's watching on your phone and that that that conversation is gone. Most people are watching on TV in the US.

02:19:14 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
It's kind of nice. It kind of feels like we defeated the vertical video trend in part, like there's life beyond.

02:19:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
More than that, we're defeating TV. We're defeating the networks, we're defeating television, but it's funny. It cracks me up, though, because he says podcasts with video are more than just a trend.

02:19:36 - Doc Rock (Guest)
That's funny we've been doing video since 2008 people, people mocked me for doing video. They said your podcast.

02:19:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What are you?

02:19:45 - Doc Rock (Guest)
doing video for yo, I'm at a podcast event last month and I fought for your honor because people are like oh, you know, it's not a podcast, because youtube doesn't have an rss feed and blah blah and video is just a fad. I'm like, bro, we've been doing video we have a video podcast since about 20 years old. We've been doing this mess forever and I was like leo was one of the first.

02:20:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Thank you back in the day and I'm like you you said leo or did you say I know this guy who was? No, I said leo. You know why said Leo?

02:20:13 - Doc Rock (Guest)
You know why? Because Tim, you remember Tim Stewart, right, I love him. He got a podcast. Tim Street he got a podcast. Tim sorry Street. He got a podcaster Hall of Fame award and so we were talking about it and so we were trying to defend, because the audio guys are mad that, like podcasting and video is getting so big.

02:20:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know what? Tell them not to worry, there's still plenty of people who listen to audio podcasts 100.

02:20:35 - Doc Rock (Guest)
It's not that they don't listen. These guys don't want to do video because they think it's more work.

02:20:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm like video is technically easier if you ask me well, I don't know. I mean it's more expensive, that's for sure, definitely more expensive. How much do you think that costs? You know, I mean it's not cheap, this stuff, tim street. Though let me just point out, because I've been around for a while, I've known tim since back in the day he ran french made tv, you remember that, yes, he did so good it was women.

02:21:01
I don't know if it was good. It was women dressed as french maids explaining stuff, right yeah that's so old-school that was on blip or something like that right was it well, you guys are just

02:21:22
waiting for me to comment on that? No, no, no, like there's just waiting. In the early days of podcasting there was a lot of experimentation. I would say, yes, a lot of weird stuff. He tried a lot of weird stuff. Remember um tiki bar, tiki tiki bar tv that was great, a lot of weird stuff. Remember um tiki bar, tiki tiki bar tv that was great, loved that uh that was video.

02:21:39 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
I think video is a big trend these days, like that, video podcasts are a big trend we are now on uh doing video.

02:21:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We used to do only audio on spotify. We now upload all our videos to spotify I worked for cnet in 2008.

02:21:54 - Benito (Announcement)
We were doing all of our podcasts video already back then.

02:21:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, Well, that's because CNET was a television network, cnet was CNET, so they had all the equipment right.

02:22:04 - Benito (Announcement)
No, no, we had to build a new podcast studio. I had to build the studio, oh, did you? Yeah, we built the studio, oh.

02:22:08 - Doc Rock (Guest)
I was doing this mess. When they had all the equipment in my living room, I had to make it. It wasn't it, but it's still, I guess because my family owned an electronic store, so we had video you had it all still, that's cool it. It's always been easier because of this. Like I can see you guys when I'm talking to you and that's different from just being in your ear, right according?

02:22:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
to youtube face. 31 of weekly podcast listeners choose youtube as their preferred service 27%. Spotify, apple podcasts only 15%. Actually, that's not YouTube, that's Edison, which has been doing podcast metrics forever and ever and I think it's fairly reliable. Youtube would be, with 1 billion monthly podcast users, would be far bigger than Spotify, which, all told, had 675 monthly active users for music and video at the end of 2024.

02:22:58 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
so, leo, how does this make you feel about the future of the podcast biz? Uh, podcasts old hat we need a new word like a podcast video hey, I was lobbying against the word podcast.

02:23:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Forever, since 2005, I've been saying, yeah, what it's what? What medium do you? Why would you call it a podcast? That's focusing on the fact that you're listening to it on an iPod. That's not what it's about. I wanted to call them netcasts, because you get them over there that's what you love over the internet.

02:23:30 - Janko Roettgers (Guest)
Yeah, but okay, I have a different idea. How about we just call it tv?

02:23:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, we're not even tv. It's their show video and you consume them in a variety of ways. You might listen, say. People probably listen to them on the telephone, I don't know. There's lots of ways to consume it, and you shouldn't focus on how it's getting delivered. You should focus on the fact that it's of its content, what it's delivering, and so if?

02:23:53 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
if they filled the coliseum in rome with people and they played twitch in the middle, what would you call it?

02:23:59 - Doc Rock (Guest)
yeah, a podcast yeah, are we not entertained?

02:24:07 - Benito (Announcement)
I think it's the podcast like podcast is just it's a format. Now it's not really, it's like a genre, so it's not a method of delivery or anything like that I wish the name had died.

02:24:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a format now, it's not really, it's like a genre, so it's not a method of delivery or anything like that. I wish the name had died. It's not a, it's not a good name, especially the ipod is going to need to. On high, I gotta say I agree with you.

02:24:25 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Not many shows have a bonito on high, so that's as a person who was doing music back in the day, like I hated the conversation where some people call it rap and some people call it hip hop. Right, like they're the same but they're not. But hip hop is the overarching culture and one of the styles of music in there is rap, but there's a bunch of other styles of music in there as well, and it was always that fight for the definition. So I kind of agree with you. It's more of a genre than anything else, so I kind of agree with you.

02:24:57 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
It's more of a genre than anything else. I still think we need a new word for the video podcast.

02:25:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a show, mock show.

02:25:04 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
It's a show. We're back to talk shows. It's a talk show. It's a show with talking. This is basically talk radio. This is basically talk radio.

02:25:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, we're doing talk radio, that's right.

02:25:20 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
Wow, I like vodcast it's my favorite word vodcast video on demand, because I can listen to it when I feel like it.

02:25:24 - Doc Rock (Guest)
What about pidio?

02:25:26 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
welcome to our pidio kind of sounds a little too much like a ped of sounds a little too much like a head the patio.

02:25:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Um, let's see what else is going. Are you going to watch the oscars tonight? We're going to get out of here because it's uh I think the show's already begun conan o'brien on it. There's a little bit.

02:25:45
There's controversy about a number of the nominees for best picture. Here's what's uh an interesting one the brutalist uh, which uh starred uh I thought was quite wonderful adrian brody and felicity jones as uh hungarian refugees after world war ii who escaped the nazi death camps and managed to make it to america where he became an architect. Well, he was an architect where he resumed his career as an architect. They speak hungarian to each other and even though they had dialogue coaches, they wanted to make the hungarian that they were speaking more accurate. So they used an ai tool from a ukrainian specialist called reese speecher to tweak brody and jones Jones Hungarian dialogue in the film to make it sound more authentic. Um, that has sparked outrage in among the ancients who run the Hollywood, uh, that they would dare. They would dare use AI in any form or fashion. In fact, some suggested it should disqualify it for awards consideration.

02:27:00 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
There's so much fear of ai in hollywood, isn't there right now among creatives in general there is, and I feel like the industry is very much going towards at least some part of the movie is made with technology at least some part of the movie is made with technology.

02:27:19 - Janko Roettgers (Guest)
It's so it is technology, I mean, however you make it, it's technology. We had visual effects for such a long time, right? Nobody's outraged because something's shot in front of a green screen or something? Where's the real art here?

02:27:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
right, yeah, right uh, much of the film's dialogue is in hungarian, um and uh, apparently the and I don't speak hungarian, but the the hungarian that brody and jones uh speak is very accurate. It's a difficult language to pronounce. Um, and they were able to do it. It was. It's a very, by the way, it's a three and a half almost. It's three hours and 20 minutes very long. There is a mandatory 15 minute intermission in the middle. Uh, it's that long. Only cost 10 million dollars to make. It was kind of a low that for now for a Hollywood film, that's a low budget film extremely low, extremely it was shot on Vista Vision.

02:28:13
When they, when the movie came on, I watched it at home. I didn't want to go to the theater. It said VistaVision. I thought, wow, I didn't even know that was still around. I found out, though. I watched an interview with a cinematographer from Vanity Fair, and he said all VistaVision is is 35 millimeter film like you would use in your camera, turned on its side, so it's wide. Know, film like you would use in your camera, turned on its side, so it's wide, and uh, and so the the normally film cameras, I guess run up and down. I didn't know this. That makes sense. They've got a spool and it goes through this bracket like this. They run it this way the spools are on the side and they run it across, so it's it's still 35 millimeter, but it's wide angle. Um, it's beautiful. It's a gorgeous film with an interest, a really interesting soundtrack, and I don't think that a little bit of ai to make the hungarian sound better is. Oh, wait a minute.

02:29:02
There was also some generative ai used for a sequence at the end of the film but I think also just to generate a couple of buildings or something like that architectural essentially assets or so yeah, because they had drawings at the I don't think I'll spoil it to say at the end is a retrospective of his work as an architect.

02:29:20 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
And they have drawings and they were not drawn by a human but they were generated I mean, I do think there is some some line like the deep fakes in hollywood are an issue like okay, there's a formula one movie coming out, brad pitt stars in it. If we found out that the brad pitt we were looking at was actually just ai recreation of him, that'd be creepy feel like we'd be like violated as viewers.

02:29:43
You'd be like wait, what the heck? We would feel betrayed. So there is some line, but what you're describing I don't think crosses it and, as far as I'm concerned, yeah, yeah you're right, you definitely don't want to.

02:29:56 - Doc Rock (Guest)
I don't know like it's just so weird because we watch so many things and a lot of us especially the nerds like you guys, any of us our favorite movies we're like star trek, star wars, like all kinds of sci-fi oriented things, tron, even the cgi, like the movie wouldn't happen without it. So you couldn't do tron without some sort of special effect I don't think that's us, though, and I I like what sandra said. The reason why they're mad is because they only spend 10 million and they're nominated.

02:30:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Everybody else's budgets was way higher well, if you want the real deal, you should go to netflix house.

02:30:28 - Janko Roettgers (Guest)
Yanko, tell us about netflix house yeah, so that's actually something that's gonna come. Later this year. Netflix is opening two locations in malls where you can go and there's gonna be a restaurant, there's gonna be live experience so you can play a Squid Game without dying, and then you can go to a store and buy also some merchandise for your favorite Netflix shows. It's basically like a mini theme park in a mall, which is really interesting, and netflix has sort of worked its way towards this with. They had some pop-ups around, a bunch of shows like stranger things. They had a pop-up restaurant. They just opened in las vegas a permanent restaurant called it's called netflix bites.

02:31:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, you can go there and have uh at the MGM Grand.

02:31:17 - Janko Roettgers (Guest)
I want to go there and we can buy your chicken and waffles there with like uh 11 Stranger things tie in some, so it's food from Netflix shows. Yeah, essentially it's. It's all themed around Netflix shows well, wait a minute.

02:31:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I want to see the menu. Let's see Our menu.

02:31:35 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
I'm kind of hungry right now.

02:31:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a well-designed.

02:31:37 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
I know it's getting to be time I could go for a Fab Five avocado delight or a Queen Charlotte's fruit tree.

02:31:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, that's from Bridgerton, right, I don't know what the Fab Five is Beef and eggs.

02:31:58 - Janko Roettgers (Guest)
But essentially so. I wrote about this for sherwood news. Um, they're building this whole life experiences business, um, but they're doing it different than than than disney does, because disney has the big theme parks that are billions of dollars of buildouts, and netflix does these small things like in a mall, relatively cheap, because malls have too much space to go away now, uh, and it's potentially a lot more scalable where you could have one of these in every city, essentially, and then you can go to your Netflix house after you watch a watch a movie or whatever, uh, during the weekend. And so it's a very different model and I called it the anti Disneyland, but I think it's a smart model where they really like get instead of going to Disneyland once or twice in your life or maybe a few more times, but many people go only once. I guess you could go to this multiple times per year and they can like swap out things and really make this sort of a more like a movie theater experience, essentially. Essentially.

02:32:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Isn't that funny you don't go to a movie theater to see the show, but you'll go to a venue to experience the tea, regency tea from Bridgerton, with finger sandwiches, scones and pastries themed to the favorite families of the ton. Oh, I get it, you call Bridgerton the ton of the ton. I didn't. Oh, I get it, you call Bridgerton the ton. Served with a paper menu designed by Lady Whistledown herself.

02:33:21 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
Wow, netflix is apparently very confident their shows are going to be good in five years from now, which I I am not so confident they made some very good movies and yet to have won Best Picture Roma was amazing, I mean.

02:33:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So many good movies coming out of Netflix. They spend a lot of money, but Hollywood guess what doesn't want to give them an award. They're trying to save movie theaters. I think it's too late. Hey, we have to take one more break before we wrap it up, uh, and let you go watch the Oscars, and let you go have something to eat, because I know it's late in New Jersey. Uh, it's great to have you here, though. Thank you, emily and uh, of course, and yanko and uh and doc. It's good to have all three of you.

02:34:02
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02:34:38
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02:35:12
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02:36:59
Uh, let's see final stories here. A small microbial system is far formed on the international space station. Maybe we don't want to go into that so much. Did you watch the? Uh, the land, the moon landing last night at midnight? Firefly I didn't stay up till midnight, but very cool, you know. You did know that there was a lunar lander last night, that january 15th. It landed last night in the mare chrysium, a region on the moon's near side 10 nasa instruments aboard, including a drill to assess thermal flow and an electrodynamic dust shield. It's a Firefly. It's the first private company to land on the successfully land on the moon Blue Ghost Mission 1.

02:38:05 - Doc Rock (Guest)
So when they did the launch, we had just got to Orlando for this podcast event and Ken was trying to get me to go with him and I was like dude, I just flew.

02:38:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm tired, I want to go to bed. And I was like dude, I just flew. I'm tired, I want to go to bed. Here's a picture. This is its shadow. But he went and watched it.

02:38:22 - Doc Rock (Guest)
I'm like I'm not getting up.

02:38:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's pretty awesome.

02:38:26 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
That is pretty cool.

02:38:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, we're back on the moon. There it is.

02:38:29 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
You see that Bezos sending his new wife to space All female crew. You see that bezos sending his new wife to space all-female crew I want to make a terrible joke about her, but I'm not gonna.

02:38:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm just gonna say, good, have a good time. She's, he's not going, they're not going into orbit uh, yeah, I don't know what no, it's so. It just goes up and down. That's the one shatner went on.

02:38:53 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
It just goes up and down yeah, it's pretty high yeah, I mean I don't really like that. It's all like, oh, it's an all female crew. It's kind of like I don't really think that your husband funding this. I mean we could go into that, but I don't think she's a feminist icon because she's date she, I mean enough said maybe it was actually astronauts, it would be a little bit um, would be different, sorry yeah, I just just just going to the moon and an all-female crew.

02:39:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's like, okay, you're not inspiring me so the crew includes, by the way, not just lauren sanchez, katie perry, gail king from cbs mornings, your colleague aisha bow, who's a former nasa rocket scientist, amanda winn, who's a bio astronautics research scientist, and carrie ann flynn, who's a film producer. It will launch in the spring the 11th human flight for new shepherd. I'm not going to make the obvious uh joke that the new shepherd is looks somewhat phallic, so I'm just not gonna make that joke. Okay, I think you just did.

02:40:03
Oh, I did yeah it does, though, doesn't it? They all do well, no, this one more than all right, I should. I'll probably glad restream is down yeah um, all right, I'm going to show you a picture of the new Shepard rocket and you tell me if you feel like no I think you you need to describe why you think it looks phallic.

02:40:38 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Why you think it looks phallic I mean, I agree, all rockets are roughly that shape, yeah, but what are the details you have in mind it? Well, rockets are a common name brand used for such um no, it's not because of that.

02:40:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Let me find a good picture of it, so you can you're not helping.

02:40:52 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Did you know that the rocket company? When we were kids?

02:40:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
what does that look like to you there? It looks like a rocket it looks like every other.

02:40:59 - Doc Rock (Guest)
This model rocket sells a model version of the blue orange. Oh yeah, you can get a model one.

02:41:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's an estes rocket kit I I have I used to. I love those.

02:41:13 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Those are so much fun the heck out of those things. I put a. They had the first one. They had a payload. It had like a little clear tube you could put stuff in it, and I put cockroach in it and the first cockroach in space.

02:41:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It was super dumb. Did uh? Did you recover the cockroach after the launch?

02:41:32 - Doc Rock (Guest)
no because you know, the hardest part is If those things caught a wind, you had to go too far to pick them up, so they go way down, just leave it and then go buy another one next week.

02:41:42 - Janko Roettgers (Guest)
Maybe it's still up there somewhere, who knows it?

02:41:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
still is the cockroach said wow that was a trip that was wild.

02:41:49 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Well, we eventually ended up putting the like you know, model cars and just running them straight across the parking lot, which is also stupid almost started a couple fires then they go really fast, don't they? Yeah, it's really fast until they hit a bump because it's grounding smooth, and then it's just a mess all right.

02:42:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, all 50 states have now introduced right to repair legislation. It hasn't passed everywhere, but the I I feel like the right to repair movement has has really, uh, got a lot of traction. I think that's great. It's the time has come right. Wisconsin on Thursday became the final state in the country to introduce a right to repair law. So far, laws have been passed in Massachusetts, new York, minnesota, california and Oregon. Here's the map from iFixit. Actually, this is from 404 Media, but the map, I think, was generated by iFixit. The dark red is current, active and past, the pink is historic and the black is past. I don't know why I can't read this map. I don't know what it means, but anyway, that's good.

02:42:57 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
That's good. That's good.

02:42:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, ladies and gentlemen, we think it is time to conclude this gripping edition of this Week in Tech. Emily Forlini writes for PC Magazine. Not just cars anymore, though. Yeah, everything. Everything, all emerging tech topics yeah, do you drive an ev? No, do you have a gas vehicle, would you, are you interested in driving an ev?

02:43:28 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
um since you cover them I mean, I've driven so many, I get press cars all the time and stuff um, they're so so, so nice um I love it. Once you drive an ev, it's hard to drive a gas vehicle, yeah I just think in a cold area like I live I, if it's my only vehicle, I wouldn't yeah, well, it's so nice to see you.

02:43:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Thank you for joining us uh emily forlini. Now on all the socials, anything you want to plug. What is that orange thing behind you? I've been dying to know what that is I bought that to be an intriguing object it is intriguing. Typically it looks like a dyson tick tock machine or something it's so dark in that corner yeah, you need to hit it with a light.

02:44:10
You need to hit it with a light yeah, if you want it to be intriguing back. If you back off, it's your shadow back up and we can see it.

02:44:17 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
Yeah, see, what does it do um?

02:44:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it's a lamp hold on it come. It's good. Intrigue the lamp. It is a weird looking lamp. Where is the light? Where does the light come from it?

02:44:31 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
It's not charged right now, but it's like what. Wait a minute, so they're magnets I got this from the MoMA design store, which I really recommend if you're looking for cool household objects.

02:44:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, I see it glows around the ring and it has two magnetic balls in the middle.

02:44:53 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
I turn it on and off.

02:44:54 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Oh my God, need, need, that is cool the ring and it has two magnetic balls in the middle that turn it on and off.

02:44:56 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
oh my god, need, need, that is cool yeah, so that's a work of art like if you want to, I mean yeah for your setup or your, you know yeah anything kitchen home. They just have tons of cool stuff. It's intriguing design store, yeah, and I wanted intriguing objects, so I'm so glad you were intrigued I was.

02:45:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Thank you, emily yes doc rock is studio full of intriguing objects yeah, I'm intriguing.

02:45:21 - Doc Rock (Guest)
You know, every time I go to japan, especially in kyoto, one of my favorite places, the moma design store, it is so crazy you can find the coolest things there. So now I'm in trouble because I'm going shopping uh-oh, are those lights behind you.

02:45:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, synchronized to your voice, it feels like oh, they are yes they are oh, that's really cool um, they're, they're govi curtain lights.

02:45:43 - Doc Rock (Guest)
But now they just came out with a new model that is actually nine feet, so I can cover the whole fill up the wall I'm gonna get rid of these and get the new ones.

02:45:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I just looked it up yesterday I'm so tempted to just add more and more things behind me. I'm just going to stop because I think it's just nice. Doc Rock is, of course, on YouTube. Youtubecom slash Doc Rock. He's also director of strategic partnerships at Ecamm. We're very grateful to Ecamm. They make the software that we use to switch the show remotely. Benito is running ecam as we speak thank you, doc.

02:46:17 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Hi, you must address him properly. It's benito, you know, on high don't get it twisted and you don't put some speck on his name.

02:46:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Hello doc, aloha repent thank you, I am Benito and hi Yanko records as a great and I highly recommend a newsletter called low pass. It's at lowpasscc. There is a free tier, so it's you don't have to pay, but there's a free tier.

02:46:46 - Janko Roettgers (Guest)
I'm gonna do one more thing. I'm gonna just paste the link for one month free trial into the chat. Oh so, if you want to try it out, uh, give it a try, and if you, for our club members give the club members a little, uh, a little bonus there their one month free trial.

02:47:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Thank you, that's very nice of you true thing sfbasocial. He's on the mastodon at jank0 because he's elite thank you.

02:47:12 - Janko Roettgers (Guest)
Yeah, it's great to see you 20 some years. Very neat, I guess I want to plug.

02:47:19 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
I'm uh, you know looking for blue sky followers oh good act with people on blue sky. I still go on x a couple times a week, so you can follow me there too, but don't, don't, just don't.

02:47:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I like blue sky. Uh, it's everything Twitter used to be.

02:47:36 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
Yeah, like I'm excited about connecting with people on blue sky and like I some people I've followed recently through my work or my podcast appearances like I do keep up with and like they comment on my stuff and I talk to them and I'm. It's just been fun, so I guess I'll plug like if you want to follow me on blue sky, I'd love to see you there.

02:47:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Good, emily Forlini, e-m-l-e-m. Let me do this.

02:47:57 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
E-m-i-l-y-f-o-r-l-i-n-i yeah do you follow me, Leah? And there she is bskysocial.

02:48:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Emerging tech reporter for PC Magazine. That's me, former Amazon person, and I'm not following you. I'm gonna follow you right now. Look at that, make, make, make Blue Sky better by following the good people yeah, yeah, I think it's getting very close now to being a good Twitter replacement. Are you on blue sky, doc rock?

02:48:28 - Doc Rock (Guest)
yes, I am. What's your? Is it just doctor? How to type for Lee, I know how to type my fingers were not behaving f-o-r-l-i-n-i.

02:48:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I am doc rock at b sky, not social there are a lot of doc rocks on here yeah, those guys are not me this is the real doc rock content coach, podcaster, whiskey and coffee lover. There you go. Am I following you, let me see? Yes, I hope so. And Yanko, is it just mastodon for you, or do you?

02:48:59 - Janko Roettgers (Guest)
also, I'm also blue skin. I'm not super active, but uh, same same name with the zero, also on blue sky.

02:49:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I said from my old Twitter days I don't feel a strong need for a Twitter replacement. But if there, if I did, this is a very weak endorsement. If I did feel a strong need for a twitter replacement, it would be blue sky. How about that? He? Uh, he is there, right there, yanko rickers.

02:49:24 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
I mean, I feel like we could just I'll take a break from social media as well, but yeah, oh, I'm not following you either.

02:49:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I better follow you, we're gonna be on it.

02:49:31 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
That's the place I find the least.

02:49:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, yeah, exactly as it matures, it's getting more of the negatives of the old twitter as well as the possible yeah yeah, unfortunately, that's life.

02:49:46 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
Yeah, we'll have it.

02:49:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We're having fun for the moment and we'll see what the next thing is, and well, you know, there's a good reason to ask, because I'm about to go watch the oscars. I'll be tape delaying it, I guess because I missed the first hour. But uh, I like to watch.

02:49:59 - Janko Roettgers (Guest)
I used to love to watch twitter while I was watching the oscars, and that I'm not going to do with twitter if you tape delay, the best choice is threats, because they're only going to have the updates tomorrow, so you're going to be ahead of time.

02:50:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'll watch it tomorrow and use a live feed on threads. That's a good idea. Thank you, yanko, thank you Emily, thank you Doc Rock. Thank you all for watching. Special thanks to our club members. You got a little benefit there with that free month of lowpasscc. Our club is $7 a month. It gets you ad-free versions of all of our shows. It also gets you access to the Discord and a lot more fun. Uh, we had, uh, stacy's book club last week, micah's crafting corners coming up. Thursday we're going to do our photo segment with Chris Marquart. Uh, all of that, uh, just as a way of thanking you for doing what the club does so well, which is support our network.

02:50:51
If you'd like to know more twittv, slash club twit. If you want to watch live, we lost the stream halfway through a restream. Some somehow cut us off for most of the streams. I think tick tock and the Discord were still up. But if you do want to watch live normally, uh, you can on all of those eight channels, uh, youtube, twitch, xcom, tick tock, facebook, linkedin, kick and, of course, in our club to a discord every sunday afternoon 2 to 5 pm pacific. Uh, that's 5 to 8 pm eastern time, 2200 utc. But you don't have to watch live because we are. What do? We decide to call it a vodcast.

02:51:31 - Emily Forlini (Guest)
We are we're a video.

02:51:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We're a video. You can watch the video, whatever that is, uh by either going to the website what it is, that's the whole idea we don't know yeah you go to the website twittertv or the youtube channel dedicated this week in tech or, best thing, get your favorite video player.

02:51:54 - Doc Rock (Guest)
They used to call it podcast players and uh, subscribe.

02:51:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You could do it on YouTube too. Subscribe, and that way you'll get it automatically. Uh, the minute it's available, just in time for your Monday morning commute. Next month our 20th anniversary that's pretty exciting. It's a long time to be doing video, uh, if you, uh, if you want to celebrate with us, we'll do. We have anything planned. I don't think we do benito on high. I think we have to plan something for april, uh, whatever 15th, um, but I have to say good night now and, as I have said for the last 20 years at the end of every show, thanks for being here, we'll see you next week. Another twit is in the can bye-bye.