This Week in Tech Episode 931 Transcript

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

Leo Laporte (00:00:00):
It is time for Tweet this week in tech and this week it's a wheel bearings takeover. Sam Abul. Sam has brought his co-host from the Wheel Bearings podcast, Nicole Wakeland and Robbie Baldwin. And we have lots to talk about, not just cars either. We're gonna talk about Apple's Vision Pro headset, and whether it really is the future, what's happening at Reddit. It's kind of shocking. There is some car news too, though. Tesla's autopilot seems to be even more dangerous than Elon Musk admits. And is Elon about to take over Ev charging Nationwide? All of that more coming up next on Twitter.

TWiT Intro (00:00:40):
Podcasts

Leo Laporte (00:00:41):
You

TWiT Intro (00:00:41):
Love from people you trust. This

Leo Laporte (00:00:45):
Is Twit Twit. This is twit this week in Tech. Episode 931 Recorded Sunday, June 11th, 2023. A pork pie for your ears. This episode of this week in Tech is brought to you by decisions. Don't let complexity block your company's growth decisions. Rules-Based process automation software allows you to manage a complex digital landscape, build custom workflows, business rules, software, modernized legacy systems, and improve customer experiences in decisions. Unified no code platform. Visit decisions.com/twi to learn how automating anything can change everything.

(00:01:34):
And by ZipRecruiter. Did you know that hiring can take up to 11 weeks on average? You have that time to wait. Of course not. Stop waiting and start using ZipRecruiter. Ziprecruiter helps you find qualified candidates for all your roles fast. And right now you could try it free at ziprecruiter.com/twin and by Miro. Miro is your team's online workspace to connect, collaborate and create together. Tap into a way to map processes, systems, and plans with the whole team. And get your first three boards for free to start creating your best work yet at miro.com/podcast. And buy lookout. Whether on a device or in the cloud, your business data is always on the move. Minimize risk, increase visibility, and ensure compliance with lookouts Unified platform. Visit lookout.com today. It's time for tweet this week in tech, the show we get together with my favorite tech journalist to talk about the weeks tech news. What a week it has been and what a week to have a takeover this, this week we are being taken over by the Wheel Bearings podcast@wheelbearings.media. Now you know Salmon cuz Sam's on all the time. He is a principal analyst at Guide House Insights. He is the host of the Wheel Bearings podcast and is a regular on all of our shows. Sam, introduce your your co-hosts.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:03:15):
Well, joining us today Leo is Nicole Wakeland.

Leo Laporte (00:03:19):
Hi Nicole. Hi. Hey

Nicole Wakelin (00:03:21):
Leo. How

Leo Laporte (00:03:21):
You doing? In New Hampshire?

Nicole Wakelin (00:03:23):
In New Hampshire,

Sam Abuelsamid (00:03:25):
<Laugh>. Oh, right. Nicole is one, one of, one of the co-hosts of Wheel Bearings and a freelance automotive journalist. So you can find her byline all over the place. And also is Roberto Baldwin, who the the TWI audience probably already knows.

Leo Laporte (00:03:39):
We know Roberto just

Sam Abuelsamid (00:03:40):
Need no need for introduction though. The

Leo Laporte (00:03:41):
Only reason I'm doing the takeover is cuz I've been trying to get Roberto back on the show for probably 10 years, <laugh>. And I finally figured out how I get your cohorts to strong army into it. This

Roberto Baldwin (00:03:54):
Yeah, I'm sorry

Leo Laporte (00:03:55):
Roberto. It's great to see he's not No, you're not. Sorry. It's fine. It's great to see. We used to have Roberto on when he had a game when he was gainfully employed, but then once you became freelance you had to work once, once

Roberto Baldwin (00:04:04):
Your freelance, every, every they're weekends. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:04:08):
Are really, you're working air close. Yeah. Not to mention he's got five count 'em, five cover bands,

Roberto Baldwin (00:04:14):
Five cover bands.

Leo Laporte (00:04:15):
What are your cover bands?

Roberto Baldwin (00:04:18):
I have five bands. I have a Daft Punk thing.

Leo Laporte (00:04:21):
Yeah. In fact, your helmet's over there on your left if you ever wanna, this is the, put that on <laugh>.

Roberto Baldwin (00:04:25):
There's an old helmet that's like the Mark two. It's a it's, it's, it's paper mache. So it's, it's sort of, it's collapsing upon itself. The new ones have like a urethane resin <laugh>. It's a whole, you should

Nicole Wakelin (00:04:37):
Put one on at some point. You need to just wear

Leo Laporte (00:04:39):
It. Okay. So there's the dph there's the Daft Punk Band. Yeah.

Roberto Baldwin (00:04:44):
There's the Divo band, Divo suburban robot. Do

Leo Laporte (00:04:47):
You have flower pots for that?

Sam Abuelsamid (00:04:49):
I, yeah. You can see it up on the

Leo Laporte (00:04:50):
Shelter. Do you only do bands that wear hats?

Roberto Baldwin (00:04:53):
<Laugh>? No, I don't wear a hat. That's the weird thing. Cause I don't want, okay. There is the the, the newest band, which is the Becky Boys.

Leo Laporte (00:05:02):
The Becky Boys. It is

Roberto Baldwin (00:05:03):
A Beck slash Beastie Boys cover band. <Laugh>. Because the Venn diagram of people who like Beck and the Beastie Boys is essentially a circle <laugh>. And then there's the big band, the one that like everyone actually gives us money for north Americans scum. And that's the Talking Heads and or LCD sound system. Cover band.

Leo Laporte (00:05:23):
Oh my God. Okay.

Roberto Baldwin (00:05:25):
And then finally number five is drastic Cats, which is a a an originals band. It's a chaos band is what me and the other person who are in it. Cuz it's just pure chaos. And you can just look up drastic cats.com. We're on band camp and every song is a different genre. It's all chaos. We just, we, we write and record songs in about an hour.

Leo Laporte (00:05:46):
So do you Wow. And you're the singer in these bands? You don't, do you play an instrument?

Roberto Baldwin (00:05:52):
I play bass, guitar, drums.

Leo Laporte (00:05:56):
Oh, you're a man of many talents TV boards.

Roberto Baldwin (00:05:58):
Well, I, I mean, I play all those things. I'm not good at them.

Leo Laporte (00:06:01):
<Laugh> play poorly. Okay.

Roberto Baldwin (00:06:05):
Like I, I collect musicians. Like other kids play

Sam Abuelsamid (00:06:07):
Like most modern bands.

Roberto Baldwin (00:06:08):
Yeah. Yeah. I like, I I collect like, really good musicians. That's what I'm really good at. I'm really good at like, collecting musicians. Like they're Pokemons. Like I just gotta catch 'em all and then I force them into my bands Perfect

Leo Laporte (00:06:19):
Force

Nicole Wakelin (00:06:20):
Labor. <Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:06:20):
Perfect. It's actually cool because Roberto, he's kind of like a renaissance man for our times. Cuz you used to write for T M Z doing celebrity gossip <laugh>, right? He

Nicole Wakelin (00:06:32):
Did not. Did you really? Yeah. I didn't

Roberto Baldwin (00:06:35):
Know that I was employed like number four.

Leo Laporte (00:06:38):
Wow. <laugh>. Oh, I'm sorry. I didn't have Leo. Leo

Roberto Baldwin (00:06:40):
Always brings it up. I didn't

Leo Laporte (00:06:42):
Mean to have you. I didn't realize it was a secret. <Laugh>. and then you

Sam Abuelsamid (00:06:46):
No, I I'd heard that one before. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:06:47):
And, and you started talk on our show cuz you were a tech writer, but you focused now on, on on cars and mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, all three of you drive different cars pretty much every week. What are you driving today, Nicole?

Nicole Wakelin (00:07:01):
I have a Lincoln Corsair plugin hybrid.

Leo Laporte (00:07:06):
Nice. Yeah. Do you like it?

Nicole Wakelin (00:07:08):
And Pants car? I do. I like plugin hybrids. I think they're the good, happy medium if you're like, afraid of EVs and you don't wanna have a gas car. And I like the Lincoln's all fancy. The, the, the, they have an adjustable seat and there's a separate thing for each of your thighs. Like you want your left thigh to be there than your right thigh. You can pick a minute, like who does that? Each

Leo Laporte (00:07:27):
Thigh has its own seat.

Nicole Wakelin (00:07:29):
It each has its own little, little, little adjustable thing. So your thigh support can be like, I want my right leg a like a centimeter higher than my left leg. I don't, I don't, I play with 'em. Like, this just feels weird. Put 'em the same.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:07:41):
Nope. Nobody has a symmetrical body, so you have to have asymmetrical controls. Yeah,

Nicole Wakelin (00:07:45):
I guess. But how

Leo Laporte (00:07:46):
I've never seen a car with separate thigh seats before

Nicole Wakelin (00:07:50):
It, it's like separate spoil. You need to go find yourself a Lincoln Corsair plug-in hybrid and then you can put

Leo Laporte (00:07:54):
Value. I, so, and yeah, if you're in New Hampshire and it's cold, I think a plug-in hybrid probably is a good idea because your range varies with the temperature and you, this way, you know you're not gonna get stranded.

Nicole Wakelin (00:08:04):
Right. Because, and it does, even with that, I can see it come way down as soon as it's chilly out. But it, I it's not a big deal cuz there's that. Yeah. Gas engine is backup. So you don't have a panic attack.

Leo Laporte (00:08:13):
<Laugh>, what, what about you Sam? What are you driving?

Sam Abuelsamid (00:08:16):
I currently have a Ford Maverick tremor in the driveway that,

Leo Laporte (00:08:20):
See that seems like the downside of being an auto journalist <laugh>. No,

Sam Abuelsamid (00:08:24):
Actually I, all of us really love the Maverick. It is really like the maverick is, it's actually the perfect truck for most people. Okay. Most, most people do not belong in a full size pickup. You know, they want something to haul from mulch every once in a while and things like that.

Leo Laporte (00:08:39):
I see people downtown San Francisco drive in an eight foot tall four wheel truck with a snorkel. And I'm thinking, dude, you're going to work and back. You're from Daley City. What do you do? What? It's crazy. What

Roberto Baldwin (00:08:54):
If they drive into the bay by accidents? True. They're covered. You don't know. You don their

Leo Laporte (00:08:57):
That's true. So the Maverick's just a little truck if you wanna just, you know, bring some antiques.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:09:02):
It's a little yeah. Little compact truck. It's got a big enough bed for most of the stuff you're ever gonna want to do. It's got room for room in the cab for four people. And you can get really ridiculously cheap. The, the base maverick now starts at $22,000 for a hybrid. Wow. That gets 40 miles per gallon.

Leo Laporte (00:09:21):
Wow. See

Sam Abuelsamid (00:09:22):
That's my, my next door neighbors have one. They love

Leo Laporte (00:09:24):
It. It's smart. Yeah, it's smart. Robbie somebody in our chat room, Igor says that your next band should be called Thigh Support, which I think is <laugh>

Roberto Baldwin (00:09:34):
Probably true. All we play is air supply. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:09:37):
Thigh support. There you go. Now I saved the best for last. Robbie, what are you driving?

Roberto Baldwin (00:09:42):
Wait, am I the best or is the car the best?

Leo Laporte (00:09:45):
<Laugh> you're the best baby. Yeah.

Roberto Baldwin (00:09:48):
I am driving a Lamborghini Huan Technica. Oh my God.

Leo Laporte (00:09:53):
Which

Roberto Baldwin (00:09:53):
Is, it's pretty much just like the, the, the Lincoln, you know, Corsair <laugh>

Nicole Wakelin (00:09:59):
Exactly the same. There's almost

Leo Laporte (00:10:00):
No difference. No difference. They,

Roberto Baldwin (00:10:01):
They both have steering wheels. Yeah. They both have

Sam Abuelsamid (00:10:03):
Four wheels. Four wheels and

Leo Laporte (00:10:04):
Tires. Do you have, which does

Nicole Wakelin (00:10:05):
Yours have thigh support? Yeah.

Roberto Baldwin (00:10:07):
That splits? No, no it doesn't. Sports seats that are built for someone.

Leo Laporte (00:10:11):
What color is it? Lime green. What color is it?

Roberto Baldwin (00:10:14):
It's it's a matte gray. Oh. So it's, it's, which, which is nice because I can hide it between my two cars and my, in my driveway when people drive by. So they're not like, whoa, what? Whoa, whoa, whoa. What's going on in this house? What the hell

Leo Laporte (00:10:26):
Are you having a midlife crisis? Or what? I mean,

Sam Abuelsamid (00:10:29):
If, if you gotta park your Lamborghini outside in the driveway, you definitely want something that's not going to attract too much

Leo Laporte (00:10:36):
Attention. That's probably, that's the auto writer's special color. Yeah. Neutral gray. So while there are many car stories and we will get to those a little bit because I got the wheel bearings folks here, I think probably there are two big stories of the week that have nothing to do with automotive technology. One is Apples WW d c was on Monday and they finally en announced the Mac Pro. No, no. Well actually they did finally announce the Mac Pro, but nobody paid basically

Sam Abuelsamid (00:11:04):
A giant case with a little Mac Mini in. Yeah, it's

Leo Laporte (00:11:06):
Could be a Mac mini basically. But they announced their nerd goggles. They call it the Vision Pro. The operating system is the Vision os. Although we had heard, you know, all these wild trademarks that they were and including, I think everybody thought it was gonna be XR o s. And it turns out in one of the, A reality os a reality os one of the breakouts actually all the slides said XR os and the, and the presenter said xr. So that must have been the internal code name. But Vision Os is the final name. And we, and you know, bottom line, which you probably already know cuz it, you know, everybody's been talking about it, is it's $3,500 and it won't be available to early next year. In other words, it's, it's a ways off. But I would be interested in your thoughts, Nicole, why don't you kick it off. I know this isn't your normal beat, but I

Nicole Wakelin (00:11:58):
Know. Okay, so I look at this and the first thing all I see are like goggles for like going, when you're skiing, they look like giant ski goggles.

Leo Laporte (00:12:05):
They look like ski goggles. You're right. That's

Nicole Wakelin (00:12:07):
What they look like. Which I would never wanna wear unless I was actually skiing. Cuz I feel like they'd be weird, like intrusive. I,

Leo Laporte (00:12:15):
That is kind of the test is like, would you wear ski goggles around the house or in Right In

Nicole Wakelin (00:12:20):
Public? I don't, generally, generally when I'm not skiing, they're not out in the snow. I don't wear ski goggles. I, I mean like, really they're, yay, they're cool and nerdy, but $3,500 for fancy ski goggles is not gonna be my thing. And

Leo Laporte (00:12:33):
One thing ski goggles don't have is a wire off the back to a battery in your butt. And Right. <Laugh>

Roberto Baldwin (00:12:38):
Really? Where do they store the battery?

Leo Laporte (00:12:40):
Well, wherever you put it, you can put it anywhere you want.

Nicole Wakelin (00:12:44):
You put in your pocket

Roberto Baldwin (00:12:46):
Presentation. You remember that portion of the presentation at all?

Leo Laporte (00:12:51):
The other, well, the wire always goes behind. I don't know why. I guess they just, they want you to have it back there somewhere in your, in your hip pocket. But then the other thing that you're goggle, they don't want you to get

Sam Abuelsamid (00:13:02):
Your hands tangled up in it.

Leo Laporte (00:13:03):
Oh. That's why. Sure. Okay. That makes sense. It's like a tail. And the other thing, and I swear to God I think this is creepy, is these eyes in the front. They're weird. Ah, in

Sam Abuelsamid (00:13:17):
Fake eyes.

Leo Laporte (00:13:18):
Yeah. I just don't like 'em. They're using lenticular screens. So when they record your eyes or when they model your eyes, because these aren't, this isn't exactly a picture of your eyes. They have cameras facing you, but it is somehow modeled. They record a variety of angles. And then depending on how you're viewing these, you'll get a different angle up to 16 different angles of these eyes. And then the eyes do mirror whether you're blinking or whatever else you do with your eyes. They mirror that. But I don't think it's a direct image from your eyes. I think it's generated somehow. It's

Sam Abuelsamid (00:13:57):
Unclear. Well, I think they, I think they use the internal cameras to track what you know, where you're looking and Right. What your expression is. And then replicate that in the screen. And using those lenticular lenses, try to make it look as if your eyes are actually back, like, at the level of your face rather than on the outer surface of the, the goggles. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:14:20):
So there's this depth, because that

Sam Abuelsamid (00:14:21):
Would look even weirder.

Leo Laporte (00:14:22):
It's weird. Anyway. Yeah.

Roberto Baldwin (00:14:24):
I wonder if you can end up with that like weird, like 50 yard or a thousand yard stare from like the Polar Express movies,

Leo Laporte (00:14:31):
You know? Yeah. It's uncanny Valley <laugh>.

Roberto Baldwin (00:14:32):
Yeah. Like you can't tell where the person is. Oh, look at how

Nicole Wakelin (00:14:35):
Big that is in the back. And even catches like, not even like a fit. It's this huge band in the back. Well

Leo Laporte (00:14:40):
That's so you don't get dents in your hair, I guess. I don't know. There's also, and they never showed it, but they're, they're either,

Sam Abuelsamid (00:14:46):
They're trying to spread out the load. Yes. So

Leo Laporte (00:14:49):
They're spreading out the load. It's basically like separate thigh support <laugh>,

Roberto Baldwin (00:14:54):
Like one thigh, other thigh.

Leo Laporte (00:14:55):
Yeah. And then and actually this would fit your thigh quite nicely. And then there, and they never showed it. There's another strap that goes over the top, which a number of that's optional on, for instance, the Oculus prose to relieve some of the weight. These weigh about a pound, I'm told, although Apple did not say. But that's a, that's not an insignificant amount of weight. If your ski balls weigh a pound, you would not like them.

Nicole Wakelin (00:15:20):
You would not like for your ski ball. You want them to be as light as they possibly can be. Yeah. This is, this is, there's another, I feel like it's not, it's making me think of a C P A P machine where it's like you're all strapped in.

Leo Laporte (00:15:31):
Yeah. But you'll never snore again. But

Nicole Wakelin (00:15:33):
You never snore again. <Laugh> never snore again.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:15:35):
Or, or you know, because of the way you look. No one's ever going to be where they can hear you. That's

Leo Laporte (00:15:40):
True. You'll be sleeping alone.

Nicole Wakelin (00:15:42):
Yeah. Forever. Forever. <laugh>,

Roberto Baldwin (00:15:44):
A lot of divorce papers filed right after this just hits the market. Like, no, no. That's not what I signed up for. I'm sorry. I don't care. Better or worse. Hold on. Where's

Leo Laporte (00:15:52):
I do, do, do any of you thirst for these? Is this something? No, no, no.

Roberto Baldwin (00:15:58):
I don't. I don't want a hot computer on my face. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. I'm not, I'm not a fan of hot things on my face. Well, it's

Sam Abuelsamid (00:16:03):
Okay cuz there's a fan in

Leo Laporte (00:16:04):
There. Apparently Apple again is not revealing it, but there's a, there are openings you talk about cooling openings. I think there has to be a fan in it. But the, again, no one's

Sam Abuelsamid (00:16:14):
No. They've said there, there is definitely a fan in there. Okay. All right. And the fan, I guess the intakes are on the bottom of the goggles and then it blows the hot air out the top fence. Great.

Nicole Wakelin (00:16:24):
So is your hair gonna be like blowing a little bit in the wind? The whole tiny

Leo Laporte (00:16:27):
Nineties? Actually that's not a bad idea. But then

Sam Abuelsamid (00:16:29):
Nice sexy look. Yeah. <laugh>

Nicole Wakelin (00:16:31):
Like his wind blown. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:16:33):
So there are <laugh>, you know, Robbie needs this. I have

Roberto Baldwin (00:16:36):
To wear for the DAF punk thing. I end up wearing like wearable, like a wearable monitor. Oh, this

Leo Laporte (00:16:40):
Could be a huge, so

Roberto Baldwin (00:16:41):
I'm wearing like goggles. Like it's like that. But I don't like it. It's just that I can't see out of the, the helmet because it has LEDs in the front. So I can't see anything. So all I see is the computer screen for the dj. So I can dj

Leo Laporte (00:16:55):
I knew that the not fun tech press <laugh>, well first of all, when they, when they announced these they did it at the Apple campus. Micah Sergeant was there. Jason Snell, a number of our contributors. I of course do not get invited to apple vents, but that's okay. I didn't, I didn't, I didn't get to go. But when they announced it <laugh> and they started talking about it as usual you know, you get a lot of oos and AHS at these Apple events. But then they mentioned the price. And let me let me play for you cuz I have audio of this, the reaction. This was somebody tweeted this Apple Vision
Pro starts at 34 99. It will be available

Leo Laporte (00:17:41):
<Laugh>. That's not what you expect

Sam Abuelsamid (00:17:43):
From a, can you imagine the way Steve Jobs would've responded if he was standing on stage

Roberto Baldwin (00:17:49):
That announcement and the audience

Leo Laporte (00:17:51):
Did that? Oh. Oh

Roberto Baldwin (00:17:53):
Gosh. What would he done? What he said? Everybody out

Leo Laporte (00:17:56):
Out <laugh>.

Roberto Baldwin (00:17:57):
You're ouch. I I I I was at the event where they had to give us all <laugh> covers for our phones because they were talking You're holding it wrong. Remember the

Leo Laporte (00:18:08):
Oh yeah. The bumpers. The bumpers. The bumpers. Yeah. On the flus.

Roberto Baldwin (00:18:13):
Steve Jobs was so irritated that entire event. It was my favorite Apple event. It was in that little a b d theater that they used to have. Yeah. That, that was barn none my favorite Apple event I've ever been to. Anything else after that? Didn't matter. I didn't get, you have to

Leo Laporte (00:18:27):
Understand

Roberto Baldwin (00:18:28):
The whole time I'm like giggling to myself writing my articles. <Laugh>. They,

Leo Laporte (00:18:31):
They, we called this antenna gate because when you held the four s the antenna was that metal bar around it. It would, we could actually watch the signal disappear as you held it. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> cut down to zero, it would cut off your calls. And Steve Jobs and his entire family were in Kona, Hawaii at Kona Village. Vacationing <laugh> when this came out. And he was so pissed off, he had to fly back and solve this problem. You remember what his reaction was? You're holding it wrong.

Roberto Baldwin (00:19:00):
You're holding it wrong.

Leo Laporte (00:19:02):
He was just irritated. User error. So they made a 13 cent rubber bumper that basically insulated the metal strip from your hand. That was their solution. And they gave it away for free to everybody who was stuck with this phone

Roberto Baldwin (00:19:16):
Because they used to be able, they used to be able to see the signal on the phone. You could see it in a diagnostic note mode. Right. And see the signal on the phone. You could see when you held it. But what was funny is it's, I had some people bring over some Android phones and I put those in diagnostic mode. You could do the same thing. <Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:19:31):
Really? Yeah. All phones pretty much your hands. So

Roberto Baldwin (00:19:33):
All phones did exact same. As soon as you grabbed it, you could see the signal go down. They're like, oh, we're just horrible, horrible

Leo Laporte (00:19:40):
Apples. Other

Roberto Baldwin (00:19:41):
Solution we're the anti cell tower,

Leo Laporte (00:19:43):
Which was not promoted quite as much we talked about. It was they changed the algorithm that showed the bars to <laugh> to show more bars so that you wouldn't know that you had lost signal.

Roberto Baldwin (00:19:55):
I like that fix. Crazy. Yeah. Just recalibrated gauge. Yeah. And they got rid of, they got rid of diagnostic mode so you couldn't look at it. You can see the actual none of your

Leo Laporte (00:20:02):
Business. Oh, get outta there <laugh>. Anyway

Leo Laporte (00:20:08):
The Protect press in general was, was fairly fawning over the Vision Pro when it came out. And absolutely. The people who got to put them on the special few, the proud, the, you know, the several hundred journalists and YouTubers who got to put them on. But I, and I knew there would be a certain amount of, cuz I've seen this before with other VR headsets. When you first wear these, they're like, wow, this is amazing. There's the, there's that Walk the Plank game where you can't step out on the plank cuz you think you're gonna die except, you know, you're standing on your carpet. But it's, it, you, you go crazy and then five minutes later reality sets in and you never wear 'em again. They gather dust. And I knew that this would happen with Apple too. There was this kind of wave of Resod reporting. And then now we're starting to see stories come out like the Wired story. Where Kate Nbbs, I think that's how you pronounce it. K N I b b S. It could be Kate Cibs writes Apple's Vision Pro isn't the future. The new mixed reality headset is an alarming misfire. Has Apple lost its innovation mojo? I I, I am not a bullish on this. I I I don't have any, you know, there's no consequences to me saying that. Speaking the truth here, <laugh>, I feel,

Sam Abuelsamid (00:21:31):
What's the worst I can do Not invite you to the <laugh>. Exactly.

Roberto Baldwin (00:21:34):
Yeah. That'll show you. I,

Leo Laporte (00:21:35):
I, and I just, I don't understand it. I feel like almost Apple just said, well, we've spent 10 years developing this and untold billions of dollars. We just have to release it. I think kind of think $3,500 probably is pretty close to the cost of making it right. I don't think they're making money on them.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:21:53):
Well, yeah, I mean, given, you know, two 4K displays in there, plus the fans and

Leo Laporte (00:21:59):
There's 12 to

Sam Abuelsamid (00:21:59):
Processors.

Leo Laporte (00:22:00):
Yeah. Cameras. There's, and there's by

Sam Abuelsamid (00:22:03):
The way, got a Lidar sensor, these

Leo Laporte (00:22:04):
Screens on the front, which by the, I think personally, that's the first thing. That's not, they're not gonna ship with that. That's too creepy. Can you

Nicole Wakelin (00:22:12):
Make it not show that? Can you make the screen? Not

Sam Abuelsamid (00:22:14):
You

Leo Laporte (00:22:15):
Hide said it show, it shows a plasma. No, no, no. You can't. So you can only hide your eyes by hiding your view. So the eyes show when you can see the room and there is a little crown, a digital crown. And you can say, I don't wanna see the room. And then your eyes turn into a plasma blob. But <laugh>, if you're seeing the room, I think they want to show your eyes because they want people to know you're looking.

Roberto Baldwin (00:22:37):
Oh.

Leo Laporte (00:22:37):
So I don't think they're gonna disable that glass.

Nicole Wakelin (00:22:40):
Yeah. So it's not like the Google glass where you can't tell whether they're looking at you or they're looking at their Google Glass stuff.

Leo Laporte (00:22:45):
Well, and the creepiest thing in the demo was the, when they showed the, the father at the birthday party wearing these recording amazing 3D video of my kid blowing out the candles. Can you imagine wearing these with daddy's creepy eyes during the birthday

Sam Abuelsamid (00:23:04):
<Laugh> compared to somebody doing something, you know, wearing these goggles to record some event. You know, having, you know, having a parent wearing Google Glass would've been nothing. You know, I mean, those are relatively unobtrusive like, comparison to this. You know, you can, you can

Leo Laporte (00:23:20):
Actually look at what happened to Glass

Sam Abuelsamid (00:23:22):
Real Eyes.

Leo Laporte (00:23:23):
People reacted so negatively to the glass. It basically killed it. It took 'em a while.

Roberto Baldwin (00:23:28):
The the press loved it. And well, not me, I didn't love it, but I didn't love it. <Laugh>. I'm just like ripping it apart, like right from the beginning. Everyone's like, you're being mean. I'm like, no I'm not.

Leo Laporte (00:23:38):
We called them, we called the wearers of Google. Glass. Glass holes. Glass holes. Glass holes. Yeah. I mean, they're right there. That tells you something. There's a problem. So can you imagine sitting across from your lovely wife and, and and she's smiling at you and, and staring deep into your eyes with her? That's <laugh> lenticular. It's so creepy, creepy eyes. No, no. That is, why is she wearing those? Definitely. She's talking to her husband. Why is she wearing those? Take those off, dear. I'm recording you. They're the creepiest things. I'm stay connected. I thought this was a good idea. Who thought this was a good idea?

Roberto Baldwin (00:24:17):
VR and Is been and ar and they've been trying to make it happen. It's like fetch <laugh> just don't make fetch happen. It's, they keep trying and trying and it has, it has its uses. It has a very niche market. Like gamers love it. And, but I don't think that the general public cares. I just

Leo Laporte (00:24:38):
Think I was, yeah. I don't,

Roberto Baldwin (00:24:39):
I have a VR headset somewhere in my

Leo Laporte (00:24:41):
Office. Yeah. So do I. Someone

Roberto Baldwin (00:24:42):
Won't take back

Leo Laporte (00:24:44):
<Laugh>. And

Roberto Baldwin (00:24:46):
I've had it for about three years now and I, yeah, I, I put put on like a few months ago to like test something out for the band. I'm like, oh, this won't work for that. Nevermind Mer

Leo Laporte (00:24:56):
I bought every one of them. Bought 'em. I contributed to the Oculus Rift. Kickstarter bought it.

Roberto Baldwin (00:25:02):
They got you.

Leo Laporte (00:25:03):
They got me. I just bought the Oculus Pro, the Quest ProQuest Pro for six. I I paid 1500 bucks for it. You can now get it for a thousand. And it's just sitting in my office on a stand. It looks nice. Collecting dust, collecting dust, doing nothing. But is it just, there are some, so this is the thing I wanna know. Is it just me or Certainly you can come up. There are, there are people who are go on Twitter. There are people going crazy about this thing.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:25:29):
I think people that, people going crazy. There are realistic applications. Like for example, you know, in a design studio, you know, the first time I tried VR goggles was actually in a, in a Ford design studio. Yeah. You know, and, and walking around a virtual model of a vehicle, you know, before you invest in building that thing. Ha You know, being able to see all the pieces in, in, in order, you know, in this 3D environment actually works really well. But I think those kinds of applications are few and far between. And they're, you know, for, for average people, you know, I mean the idea of wearing these glasses all day and trying to type and, and do my job in that kind of environment. It's just, it's absurd.

Roberto Baldwin (00:26:12):
Yeah. But when I, when Google Glass was first announced, I talked to an ar researcher and his first thing was, we don't even really know what these are good for. Beyond like <laugh> Industrial uses, like helping people, you know, fix things. Cuz you can see through the glasses, you can see, oh, put this here, put this there. I mean, it's wonderful for that. Like, if you go to a car and it says, Hey, this is, you need to take this bolt, this bolt, this bolt and this bolt out. And you're like, oh, that's great. And you take them out. But around town and I don't know, let, the technology is still really bulky. I

Nicole Wakelin (00:26:46):
Think it's like, like a segue. You know how Segway was gonna change the entire world. We're all gonna be writing these few little segues everywhere. And now the only people who use 'em are like mall cops. I feel like there's like a limited number of applications for things <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:26:56):
That's a good point. <Laugh>. That's a good point. There are some people who use Segueways. I've, I've a segue to me is a good example that it was widely lauded when it, when it was introduced. Remember Bill Gates said, it's gonna change the way we designed cities. I mean, people thought this was remember project Yeah. Ginger, it was gonna change everything. But then people got on them and they, they're nine feet tall and they look pretty stupid riding them. I know. Cuz we have two of them. And the, the original thing you do, you have two.

Roberto Baldwin (00:27:26):
Oh my gosh. And you Okay, I'll trade you one Lamborghini for <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:27:30):
Well wait, there's more. But wait. But I think that the dork factor with some of this, and this is why I pay attention to the, the, the creepy eyes. Because I think, and it's the same thing with glass. There's a certain, if people mock you when you're using a technology, you pretty quickly put it aside. Most normal people go, eh, I don't wanna be mocked. And I think that's what happened to Segway. So we have, we bought two of the original $7,000 segues. Oh my gosh. And we had a lot of fun with him. The, the kids loved him. Our son when he was about 12 and his other boyfriends were jousting with them. So they got, you know, pieces of old splinter wood <laugh> and they, and they carried it under their arm and they segued Jain until I caught them. And I said, what are you doing? You're gonna, I bail each other? We had them in the garage for a while. The batteries finally died about a year ago. It couldn't chart, it wouldn't take a charge anymore. And I looked into it and it would've cost another $3,500 each for new batteries. Wow. You

Nicole Wakelin (00:28:38):
Know, like, I just remember they were up here because they're, they were based in New Hampshire. Yeah. So there was a, where they were in the mill buildings, see these old mill buildings and they would, you'd be like just walking into the building to whatever business and like zoom, zoom, zoom, sways were everywhere. And I remember thinking, I've almost been killed by these things 20 times. Yeah. And I was like, look out, look out, look out. I'm like, this is not gonna make my life better.

Leo Laporte (00:28:55):
Steve was coming by accident 20 years ago, brought Segways to the screensavers and we had cuz he was into Segway Polo, by the way, <laugh> another polo. That was a thing that was a Segway

Nicole Wakelin (00:29:05):
Polo.

Leo Laporte (00:29:06):
Oh my goodness. He had many of them. And, and we all got to play with him. But that was 20 years ago. Anyway, that was a famous mm-hmm. <Affirmative> example of mm-hmm. <Affirmative> something that has some real use and some merit. You still see 'em in tours around the cities all the time. You do.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:29:20):
Yeah. Well, I think, I think that, you know, the idea that they had around Segways changing the way cities are, are built, the, that idea was actually directionally correct, but it was ahead of its time. And I think the segue itself in the form that they built, it was the wrong vehicle. Because what we've seen in recent years is that same idea of changing the way we move around cities coming to us in the form of modern micro mobility, you know, with electric scooters, e-bikes, things like that. And, you know, particularly during the course of the pandemic, when in the early days when there was very little traffic, we actually saw a lot of cities use that opportunity to go in and install permanent protected bike lanes, you know, and, and access lanes for bikes and scooters and so on. So they weren't on the sidewalks. And in fact, the, the idea of changing the way cities are built,

Leo Laporte (00:30:16):
It's still a good

Sam Abuelsamid (00:30:17):
Idea. Slow starting to come to fruition. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And it, I

Leo Laporte (00:30:19):
Remember, Sam, you showing me some electric mobility devices designed for cities. Was it, was that from General Motors? I can't remember.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:30:28):
Oh, at ces.

Leo Laporte (00:30:29):
At ces,

Sam Abuelsamid (00:30:30):
Yeah. The Envys, the env, those little autonomous pods.

Leo Laporte (00:30:33):
They were really cool.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:30:34):
And, and those were actually built on Segway platforms. Oh,

Leo Laporte (00:30:36):
Interesting. Yeah, there were two weird, yeah, they,

Sam Abuelsamid (00:30:38):
Yeah. Yeah.

Roberto Baldwin (00:30:40):
So the segue was the idea was correct, but the e-bike is the correct form.

Leo Laporte (00:30:45):
I agree with you a hundred percent. Exactly. <laugh>.

Nicole Wakelin (00:30:47):
So that's, is that what's gonna happen? The, the, the these vision goggles Vision pro with the ideas. Correct. But what we're gonna end up with is something that I think we're gonna, in 20 years,

Roberto Baldwin (00:30:56):
Something we've seen like from BMW where it has augmented reality in the car where like it can, like the windshield is essentially augmented. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (00:31:02):
That makes sense. Where

Roberto Baldwin (00:31:02):
You're driving, it's like, oh, you need to go over here, you need to go over here. I think that's the

Sam Abuelsamid (00:31:06):
Yeah. And there's already augmented reality heads up displays in some cars that, you know, traditional heads up displays display the information in a single plane that looks like it's floating over the, the front edge of your hood, you know, maybe 4, 3, 4 feet in front of you. The, these ar HUDs actually are multi plane displays. Mercedes has them in the s-class and the EQ s and, and some other models. And it's coming to other vehicles. You, you actually see the information floating at multiple distances away from you. So when you're driving down the road with navigation, it actually looks like it's overlaying the directions right on the road. An arrow

Roberto Baldwin (00:31:48):
Floating above everything.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:31:49):
Yeah. Yeah. You have an arrow floating above the intersection where you're supposed to turn, but it doesn't

Leo Laporte (00:31:52):
Look like it's closer to it. It's reflected off the windshield. It actually looks like it's on the road.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:31:56):
Yeah. It looks like it's further out in the distance. So it, it, the focal distance is, is different. And you see, you see different bits of information at different locations in your field of view, different distances. So I think that's b like, so the, the turning prompts look like they're floating over the intersection and they're, they're stuck there, you know, over that intersection. So as you get closer, it looks like it's getting closer to you and says, here's where you're supposed to turn. And I think, you know, that sort of thing, you know, actually really works. And if, if you can do that, you know, in something like, you know, you've talked about, you know, in the form of traditional eyeglasses, you know, as opposed, you know, so it looks like you're just wearing glasses that I think, you know, that's gonna be, that's still long ways away. But

Leo Laporte (00:32:40):
It's interesting that you can get it today in an automobile. Is that what

Sam Abuelsamid (00:32:45):
Well, because it's, it's a, it's a much larger device. It's a

Leo Laporte (00:32:47):
Big heavy device

Sam Abuelsamid (00:32:48):
Dashboard. Yeah, right. It's not something you can wear on your face and

Roberto Baldwin (00:32:51):
It's based off to track your eyes in order for it to work correctly. So in the Mercedes-Benz, there's actually, I trackers in the dash, they're tracking your eyes. So that's, it'll re it'll project the, the the arrows and the information to tell you to go left or right or whatever.

Leo Laporte (00:33:04):
That kind of makes more sense. That's that's a very good use of ar also the technology to shrink that down to your spectacles is not, doesn't, I don't think it even exists yet. I mean that's, no, it

Sam Abuelsamid (00:33:15):
Doesn't. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:33:16):
Yeah. But it does exist in cars. I, it's funny that they're not getting more attention for that. But Apple's getting all this attention for basically what's a computer strapped to your forehead? <Laugh>. Which yeah, not appealing.

Roberto Baldwin (00:33:30):
At least everyone's been waiting for Apple to do this. Yeah. It's like the Apple car. Like when the Apple car comes out, if or when it ever comes out, it's gonna be a huge deal. Meanwhile, all these other automotive startups have been doing this and traditional automakers have been doing this <laugh>. And it's just, it's because Apple, like, you know, the hype machine around Apple and the fact that we've, that we've known that they've been working on it for years.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:33:53):
Well, and plus, you know, apple, you know, they, they created the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad. And these were all devices that had been done before. You know, we'd had MP3 players, we had smartphones, we had tablet computers. But when, when Apple did it, you know, they, they really executed it correctly. And so the assumption was when they, when Apple finally did this headset, that it would be the one that finally breaks through and gets and fixes all the problems with all the ones that came before. And I don't think that they're there yet.

Roberto Baldwin (00:34:26):
No.

Leo Laporte (00:34:27):
So,

Sam Abuelsamid (00:34:27):
I mean, I could be wrong cuz I've never, obviously I've never actually had one of these on my face. Right. But I I I've remained dubious

Leo Laporte (00:34:35):
<Laugh>. Yeah. I'm dubious as well. Although maybe this, the whole point of this, you said something interesting Robbie, is to gather information about how it would be used and what works and what doesn't work for an Apple car, for instance. Maybe this is a stealth product cuz they surely don't expect to sell many at 3,500 bucks.

Roberto Baldwin (00:34:57):
No, they're, they couldn't.

Nicole Wakelin (00:34:58):
No. Not that many people are gonna buy into

Roberto Baldwin (00:35:00):
It for that price. They had to, they had to like put it like, we have it, we've been working on it. Let's put it out. It's a niche product. We know it's a niche product because they've always been a niche product at up until this point. So let, let's put it out there. Let's get some information about it. And maybe 10 years from now we'll have like actual just regular glasses that, that have

Leo Laporte (00:35:19):
This. Would you be interested in this? And one of the things they're pushing is the idea that you can wear this and have giant screens. You don't need monitors anymore. Your computer display can be huge and spread out like minority reports spread out across your field of view. Does that appeal?

Roberto Baldwin (00:35:36):
No.

Leo Laporte (00:35:37):
I already have a, a 35 inch monitor in front of <laugh>.

Roberto Baldwin (00:35:40):
Like, monitors are super cheap. I don't, I don't Why, why would I

Leo Laporte (00:35:44):
Need And you don't have much in your

Roberto Baldwin (00:35:45):
Head face. Yeah. And like, you know, my dogs come in, my cats are here, you know, I'm like trying to type and all of a sudden the cat's walking on something. I'm like, what's going on? It's chaos. I know the cat's there just can't see it. Cuz you got this thing on your face also wearing this thing on your head for hours on end. Like the DAF punk thing. We wear these helmets for the, the set list is about an hour and 20 minutes, but after about 45 minutes, I'm just like, I'm just begging for this at the end. <Laugh>

Leo Laporte (00:36:09):
<Laugh>.

Roberto Baldwin (00:36:10):
It's just like, it's heavy.

Leo Laporte (00:36:12):
Do you think that's why DAF punk retired this that just couldn't do it? <Laugh> they just couldn't do it anymore? Well they don't,

Roberto Baldwin (00:36:16):
They they just have like a helmet on. But maybe, maybe that. I always thought dLAN was more like the dread pirate Roberts of

Leo Laporte (00:36:22):
Musicians. There's 20 different people. They they

Roberto Baldwin (00:36:24):
Create all the music. Right. But then they just send some random dudes, dude like, Hey go, could be anywhere the show man. How would you know? Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:36:31):
You

Roberto Baldwin (00:36:31):
Never know.

Leo Laporte (00:36:32):
And they're not really doing anything. They just, because they're push, it's a, they're DJs right? So they don't, they don't really actually this,

Roberto Baldwin (00:36:39):
No, they didn't like, actually they actually do some, there's a, there's a, there was a really great live stream. They did right when they said they were breaking up of them before they had their helmets and they're actually playing all these instruments. Ah. And they're, you know, and, and for me, I have to like, I actually have to trigger every single sound that's happening in the show. So it's, I it's not just push play

Leo Laporte (00:37:01):
You, how do you see in the thing?

Roberto Baldwin (00:37:04):
Because I have that monitor on all I can see literally all I can see when that stupid helmet on <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:37:09):
You are actually only for monitor. I know who actually wears one of these all the time. This might be made for Roberto Baldwin. Nah, that's too big just for you Roberto. That's all thing

Roberto Baldwin (00:37:19):
Is the whole thing. Need, all I need to be able to see is the monitor of my computer. I don't need to see anything else. And

Leo Laporte (00:37:25):
So how do you feed the, do you have a camera or,

Roberto Baldwin (00:37:29):
Or htm? I

Leo Laporte (00:37:30):
The, so the computer is feeding your, your helmet?

Roberto Baldwin (00:37:33):
Yeah, the helmet is actually, it's, it's actually a monitor. It's actually a wearable monitor. And so it has HT m I input ht m i into my computer. We used to have this whole thing where we were assets. You know, we were, we were, we were using a wifi network and we were like s SSHing into two different computers. And I had a mixer and it was this whole crazy thing. And then I have a little camera, like out of the mouth hole where I could, couldn't really see anything cuz the camera was so low res <laugh>. It was, it was incredibly complex. Like every time something happened, I couldn't see what was going on. And then it turns out that the, the monitor couldn't handle the ProRes. Like, like

Leo Laporte (00:38:07):
<Laugh>. I dunno who you're, but you all look like potatoes <laugh>.

Roberto Baldwin (00:38:13):
Yeah. They always like, so it's a dark club and all I see is like little brown blob dancing. I'm like, well this is no good. And then like, one of my computers, my MacBook Air my, my current at MacBook Air, the resolution is so dense that it was too dense for the monitor. So <laugh> the cursor was so tiny I couldn't find it <laugh>. So I have to move the cursor up to the top right hand corner and then slowly move it down <laugh> to trigger the next section. And I'm just like, on stage and I'm freaking out. I'm just like, oh my God, this is gonna, this is the worst thing that's ever happened because you have to trigger it like at the right time. You know, you have to keep time. If you trigger it the wrong time, it sounds weird and messes up and you trigger the wrong section. <Laugh>. And then I would go back to my 2015 MacBook Aaron and it'd be fine because you know, the, the, the resolution density isn't as tight. I'll have

Leo Laporte (00:39:06):
To show how, how you make your mouse cursor bigger on the Mac. Cuz you can do that. And I feel really bad before you <laugh> so.

Roberto Baldwin (00:39:14):
Well I didn't know it until I was on stage. Yeah. Now, now I just use one computer. Yeah. And it has this like, every time the music changes, it's a new scene and it's like 300 scenes. It's just, it's Bon Is

Leo Laporte (00:39:25):
There video anywhere of the <laugh>? What is it called?

Roberto Baldwin (00:39:30):
I use Ableton Live.

Leo Laporte (00:39:32):
No, but no, I mean, or the band. What's the band called?

Roberto Baldwin (00:39:34):
Oh, robots after All.

Leo Laporte (00:39:36):
Robots after all. Yeah. Is there any is there anywhere we can go? See <laugh>,

Roberto Baldwin (00:39:41):
See you somewhere. See this is crazy. <Laugh> well on. Well, like from the, from the audience it looks cool, but on stage I'm having like a low, you're

Leo Laporte (00:39:49):
Suffering, you're suffering, you're paying for your, they can't see your panic under the helmet.

Roberto Baldwin (00:39:53):
The other guy in the band passed out at a show <laugh>. Cause he got so hot and overheated helmet. And you know what? I didn't know <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:40:04):
Cause you were in a helmet and you

Roberto Baldwin (00:40:05):
Couldn't see

Leo Laporte (00:40:06):
Because

Roberto Baldwin (00:40:07):
I, I used these inner monitors. So all I can hear is the music that I'm playing and all I can see is the computer and that's it. And I can see like right below me right here, so I can see like my mid controller and Everyth. There it is. Yeah, there's the band <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:40:21):
I'm so sorry. <Laugh>. Some

Roberto Baldwin (00:40:23):
Poor guys

Nicole (00:40:24):
Like lying on the stage and you're still like going

Roberto Baldwin (00:40:26):
On. He just like the guy, like he sat down and then he just fell over and I didn't know. And I looked at the video later and like someone from the audience was like, that guy fell down. And like all these people come up behind me into the video, into the DJ booth and we're helping him and taking his helmet off and they took him offstage and I'm still up there do <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:40:44):
So

Roberto Baldwin (00:40:44):
There you adjusting things is adjusting. And so people in the audience, you think either A, the show must go on, he's a trooper or b I'm the world's biggest jerk. <Laugh>

Leo Laporte (00:40:53):
<Laugh>. I'm just trying to find my mask. So leave me alone

Roberto Baldwin (00:40:58):
Trying.

Leo Laporte (00:40:59):
Can't find it. Wow. I am, I'm impressed by your perseverance. Well done. Roberta Baldwin. And here is a guy who pretty much has experienced a vision pro. And, and there is his un he built his own, he built his own <laugh>, his unbiased review. <Laugh>. Wow. It's a wheel bearings takeover. The wheel bearings crew is with us. It's great to have you Kel. Nicole Wakefield, Roberto Baldwin. And you said a Ron. He saying it wrong, said Wakeland. You said wrong. I'm gonna start Wake

Roberto Baldwin (00:41:30):
Wakeland.

Leo Laporte (00:41:31):
Start making a different name. You, you just change your name. Waki. Waki. Nicole Wakey. Wakiki. <laugh>. Sorry. I know I don't have Why I have Wakefield in my in my head. That's okay. I I know somebody named Wakefield, that's why. Yeah. Okay. Nicole Wakeland, Roberto Baldwin, and of course Sam Abel Salmon. We will have more with our fabulous crew. I can see why this is, I can see why your show is so good. You guys are great. <Laugh>. We'll have more in just a bit. But first a word from our sponsor decisions. I love the name decisions. In today's digital landscape, businesses are faced with an overwhelming number of tools and systems. You gotta have 'em right to operate effectively. But managing all these disparate tools, ensuring they work together seamlessly, that ends up being the biggest part of the job, right?

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That puts them ahead in the financial industry. I ca there's so many great stories. If you go to the website, decisions.com/twit, look at some of the case studies. Look at some of the people who are using decisions. You'll see what an amazing thing decisions can be. Automating these little decisions, creating these rule-based flows frees up valuable time for your team to focus on the bigger decisions, the ones that you know, really need your brain to solve. With decisions, you can customize workflows to automate routine tasks, to reduce operational costs and to serve your customers better. I think these days the complicated digital landscape really needs something like decisions. A powerful no code solution that unifies business practices and makes managing your digital landscape easier than ever before. Discover the power of decisions. Get that free demo. We're just showing you the form. You fill that out at decisions.com/twi.

(00:46:26):
You can try it for yourself. In today's constantly changing digital landscape, the ability to manage all these tools, all these disparate sources of information, put them together in one simple interface is huge. You, you gotta be able to do this. And decisions, no code automation software really simplifies the complexity of managing multiple systems, which means you can unify your operations, you can reduce your operational costs, you could drive company growth to learn more about decisions. And there are no code automation platform. It's really mind boggling. Claim your free demo at decisions.com/twit. Again, decisions just like the word decisions. You got a lot of them to make. This is an easy one. Decisions.Com/Twit. We thank 'em so much for their support this week in tech and our wheel bearings take over.

(00:47:21):
The other big story, I said, there were two really big stories this week. The other one I think affects us all. And this is what's at Reddit. I imagine you pay attention to this. I'm a mm-hmm <affirmative>, I'm a big Reddit user. It all started when Reddit decided, first of all, it really all started. The truth is it really all started when Reddit decided to go public to to do an I P o. Reddit was purchased by Conde Nast. They spun it out as a standalone company, but they still have the majority holder. They decided to have an I P O. And of course, when you ha the problem is Reddit's never made any money. It's only lost money. So before you do an I P O, you wanna figure out a way, how can we show people that we are gonna make a nice tidy profit?

(00:48:02):
Well, the first thing you do is you look over at Elon Musk. What's he doing over at Twitter? Maybe not the best idea, but anyway, that's what they did. And they said, oh, look what Elon did. He, he, he started charging for the api, started charging a lot for the api. Reddit announced that all third party apps, anything that integrated with Reddit that wasn't company property would pay these fees. It really, the battle began when apo, the critter of Apollo, which is an excellent iOS third party app for Reddit's, the one I use on my iPhone and iPad. I love Apollo. Christian Seig posted. Hey, I've, I've talked to Reddit about this api and based on my number of users, it's gonna cost me 20 million a year to continue to run Apollo. He's since announced that June 30th Apollo goes away.

(00:48:56):
It's gone. What? He doesn't wanna pay 20,000, 20 million a year. Yeah. How, what, what Steve Scap. What kind of fool are you? Come on. It's only 20 million. Reddit is fun. Rif f also going away. A number of third party apps have decided to go away. A number of subreddits the Reddit communities have announced they're going dark starting tomorrow. Little boycott one iPhone says, we're going dark forever. Then c e o Steve Huffman says, let's have an ama I can, I can solve this. Doesn't answer a lot of questions. He's, I think the last time I saw his karma was down below a hundred thousand. <Laugh> like this, as bad as you can get. The moderators of slash r videos wrote that Huffman's Ama performance was a collage of inappropriate responses. Goodness. he also kind of implied that Cel, the creator of Apollo was lying.

(00:49:56):
Celick said, you know, just turns out I live in Canada, a one-party country. I recorded all our conversations, Steve, and he posted them <laugh>. Ooh. And showed that in fact, Huffman was misrepresenting the conversation completely. Huffman at that point in the AMA said, well, we're just not gonna do business with this Apollo guy. There is a nasty battle of Bruin. And I wonder how this is gonna affect Reddit. Cuz I tell you what I can get away with. I can, I can lose not happy about it, but I can lose Twitter. I don't wanna lose Reddit. And it looks like it's almost as if users have finally realized, Hey, you know what? We have the power here. What do you think, Sam?

Sam Abuelsamid (00:50:41):
It obviously, you know, Reddit does need to make money. There's a cost associated with providing these APIs just as Twitter and every other company that does APIs like, you know, Google and, and Microsoft and Facebook and everybody else there. There's a cost associated with that. And it's not unreasonable to, you know, charge some amount of money to cover those costs. You know, it's the way business works. I don't know, you know, Reddit's financings, I don't know how much it actually would cost them to provide these APIs. But I'm guessing that it's a lot less than 20 million a year <laugh> you know, for at least, you know, for the amount of hits, you know, that they would get from somebody like Apollo. So, you know, I, again, like I said, I don't know what Reddits Financial, you know, what, what their costs are.

(00:51:37):
But I think, you know, if there were a reasonable cost for access to those APIs, I think, you know, that would be perfectly fair. It's, you know, it's legitimate. And, you know, if, if you're making, if you're building your business on top of somebody else's platform, you know, there, it's not unreasonable to expect to be paid or to expect to, to pay some amount for access to that platform. It's just a question of, of fairness, how much is actually fair based on the, the real cost and, and what, you know, what people are willing, you know, what your downstream customers are willing to pay.

Leo Laporte (00:52:13):
Yeah. My initial, when, when Reddit announced this, my initial reaction is, well, at least they gave you notice. Twitter just pulled the plug.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:52:19):
Yeah, very true. And

Roberto Baldwin (00:52:21):
One day everything just stopped

Leo Laporte (00:52:22):
Working, stopped working, and then they, and then they said, what are you talking about? And then they said, oh no, these, these these you know, third party apps have have broken our rules. That's it. They broke our rules. And then, you know, the creator of Tap Bott said, what are you talking about? We've been doing this for 15 years. What rules do we break? And then Reddit said these rules, the ones we just wrote, and I mean, not Reddit, twit Twitter said these rules, the ones we just wrote, it was just a na it was terribly handled. Right. and so I thought, oh, Reddit, at least they announced it. They gave you time. You're right, Sam, they have a right to make money on this if they're losing money and others, third parties are making money share in the proceeds, of course, 20 million's a little, that's, I'm sure more than Apollo

Roberto Baldwin (00:53:08):
Makes, seems a bit disingenuous that it cost them 20 million to, to host you know, they have to have these APIs going for this one app. I'm like, I think you would've collapsed years ago if that was the case. <Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:53:19):
Yeah. I think that was Christian's point is, look, I understand. I'm willing to give you some of my money, <laugh>, but, but you know, it's only you're asking for much, much more than, than it's costing you. And if it, you know, and well, and this is the thing that he then said, look, if you say that I'm costing you 20 million, why don't you buy Apollo? I'll sell it to you for 10, and you're gonna make money, <laugh>, you're gonna make money. You good for? And then they said, no, <laugh>.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:53:49):
My, my my guess is that, you know, Reddit doesn't see a whole lot of potential revenue streams. Yeah. And they've got a lot of costs across a lot of different things that they can't necessarily directly recover revenue on that. And so they, they look at the APIs and say, well, that's one place where we can pull in some money. You know, let's use that to cover the cost of all this other stuff that we have to do. And, you know, so anybody using those APIs is getting disproportionately hit by those costs.

Leo Laporte (00:54:19):
Well, and remember, if you're using a third party app, you may not be seeing the ads mm-hmm. <Affirmative> that Reddit posts on. And Reddit, by the way, has apps. They're not very good. That's why people use the third party apps. And of course, they have a website where you would see the ads, or you can, as I do pay for Reddit. So that I don't see the ads. But I guess just like the Twitter third party apps, Reddit's feeling like, well, you're, you're hiding our ads, so you're costing us money and you're not letting us recoup that money. That's not, I feel

Roberto Baldwin (00:54:49):
Like there could have been a resolution that included ad share revenue, you know? Yeah. Or ad ad revenue sharing Yeah. Was between the, the, the the applications in Reddit. I mean, there, there's a lot of ways that Reddit could have figured out how to do this, but instead they just went like, full hammer. Like, well just like charged for APIs because we saw that worked out so well for Twitter <laugh>,

Nicole Wakelin (00:55:11):
It's such a weird choice. Like, even if they do that, like isn't somewhere, there's some bean counter who's like, well, if we charge X and the break even, we'll lose these guys if we go this high, and we'll keep these guys, if we go this low. Like, you feel like somebody should have crunched some numbers back there and said, 20 million is going to be unreasonable. We will make absolutely nothing on that. Like, I, it feels like somebody, they forget to check with an accountant.

Leo Laporte (00:55:33):
That's a good point. You know, you priced it so high, you're not, you lost the sale in effect. Right. Yeah. That's a very good point. Tomorrow, according to the bbc, 3,500 subreddits will go dark most for two days. Although, as I said, our f our slash iPhone and r slash music, two of the biggest subres are gonna go dark. They say forever. And they're you know, I think there's gonna be some people that leave Reddit. The problem is there is really no good alternative. It's not like Twitter, where there are lots of places you could go. There is a Fed of

Sam Abuelsamid (00:56:08):
Dig. Oh no, nevermind. Nevermind.

Roberto Baldwin (00:56:10):
Good dig.

Leo Laporte (00:56:11):
<Laugh> never. Oh, actually Red Discord is a place Dig, didn't it?

Sam Abuelsamid (00:56:16):
Yeah.

Roberto Baldwin (00:56:16):
I think Discord is a place that a lot of people are gonna start ending up for some of these very niche communities. Cuz you can just start a Discord server and you can have people on there. And then if you know you're on Discord and you want a better experience, you can pay a little bit more to get Nitro. Or you can pay, you know, so you have enough people on your, your, you know, your your community here paying for Nitro, and then you're paying a little extra so you can do more things with your community.

Leo Laporte (00:56:40):
Yeah. Discord seems to figure it out a way to make money doing this, right? Yeah. actually that's what iPhone's doing. If they say, if you go to the slash r slash iPhone, they'll say, join our Reddit, I mean our Discord. And here it is 12,000 members now, 1060. Wow. 687 people actually actively online. So maybe they have found an alternative. But for me, I mean, I, so I, I'm a Reddit lurker. I confess I don't contribute as much as I auto, I've done AMAs and stuff, but mostly I'm a read only Reddit user. I will, that's a big loss to lose the content on Reddit. It is. And, and, and frankly, Reddit is so useful that a lot of people, instead of searching Google, they search reddit.com for answers to questions. Like, you know, what's the best car? Right. What's the best ev Yeah. It's a much better place to search than Google. Not as good as Will bearings though. Best place to be. Got Wheel, obviously <laugh>. You just,

Roberto Baldwin (00:57:39):
You just hassle one of us on the internet and we'll, we'll

Leo Laporte (00:57:42):
Tell you. That's what I do. I ask Sam, he was a good

Roberto Baldwin (00:57:44):
Old, old

Leo Laporte (00:57:44):
In <laugh>. I, I can't buy it until I talk to my expert here, Sam. I think we, I mean, I'm kind of mourning the loss of Twitter. I know you guys still use it, but I feel like Twitter is turned into something that it wasn't.

Roberto Baldwin (00:57:59):
It's, I I

Leo Laporte (00:57:59):
Don't use it anymore. You stopped. I'm,

Roberto Baldwin (00:58:01):
I'm, I'm on it. Cuz they're, they're, I have friends who are still on it and they refuse to move to Mastodon or Blue Sky or whatever. The other 50 things that are out there right now. I

Nicole Wakelin (00:58:09):
Have a lot of friends who are still on it. Same things I haven't

Roberto Baldwin (00:58:12):
Left. But I mean, it's, it's never been good for traffic ever. It's never, you know, if you've ever worked at any website and you've known anything about the analytics of that website, you know, that Tri Twitter traffic to your site is nothing. It's really nothing. It's mostly just a place where everyone just goes and hangs out and like, Hey, look at this thing. And five people look at it.

Leo Laporte (00:58:29):
There is a fed averse version of Reddit named Lemy of, of all things <laugh> <laugh> I don't know if it's named after Lemy, like the bass player, like the, I dunno if it's name from Motorhead. Yeah. I dunno if it's named after Motorheads Lemy or, or what I'm on. So it's, it's federated. This is the one I'm on lemy.world, which is the biggest instance right now. It just, it's like a few weeks old. And they, they have, if you go to the communities, they have there's slowly, communities are their subreddits basically. They're slowly creating a bunch of subreddits. But it's not, it's nowhere near the volume of traffic. And ironically, because this all started because third party apps didn't want to pay the API there. As far as I know, no le me third party iOS or Android apps. So there's no mobile apps, <laugh>. So I don't know if Le me's gonna be a reasonable alternative. I don't, I just don't know. I don't think there's anywhere like Reddit in the world.

Roberto Baldwin (00:59:29):
That's, there's a lot, not really lots of knowledge on there that's, that's sadly going to be either decimated or, you know, we're gonna have, it's gonna disappear in five, 10 years because they've blown it over Reddit because they keep driving people away and then they just delete everything. Or it's, you know, are are, people aren't going to get contributing to it anymore. So all the information, any, any new information is gonna be contributed to all these other these other sites. And so you sort of lose that one central spot where you can find out about, you know, who played the dog in gremlins and, or, you know, how do I hard reset an iPhone 11? Or, you know, whatever people are looking for on, on Reddit.

Nicole Wakelin (01:00:09):
And that's sort of the thing, it's like trying to figure out what it's gonna be. If like, there was one clear like, well instead of Reddit here, but there's not, you have no idea what's gonna take over for it. So if there's a bunch of little things that pop up, like Lemi and other things that are all sort of substitute Reddits in the time it takes to figure out which one's gonna win, you've got your information scattered all over the place.

Leo Laporte (01:00:30):
I I think the ownership is thinking, well, this, this too shall pass. There've been numerous revolts on Reddit in the past, but I also think there's a lesson to be learned from Twitter that users are starting to understand that they are the, they are the, they're what's brings the value to these social platforms without you're the

Roberto Baldwin (01:00:52):
Content you're creating. What, why these things are, are worth anything. Right. It's, you, you are the reason why Twitter is good. It's not because Twitter was ever run really well. It's never been run well. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> you know, it's just run horribly. But ev the only reason Twitter exists and Twitter has thrived is because the people who are on Twitter, not because of the corporate overlords.

Leo Laporte (01:01:12):
Exactly. and this is the same thing for for Reddit. I ho I wonder if it's just I mean, there are people saying, I'm gonna delete all my content and I'm, I'm leaving. I will never post again. There are at least two major subreddits who are saying, we're closing, we're gone. I hope this isn't just a, it feels a little, I can't decide, is it a temper tantrum by the users? Are they feeling empowered by the social media spring? And, and are they revolting? And maybe they're gonna break something irreparably that never will be recreate, recreated. Should we just put up with this? I mean, honestly yeah, it's sad for Christian and other third party app developers mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. But is that a, is that a good enough reason to, to abandon Reddit? Something upset? No. No. Is

Nicole Wakelin (01:02:05):
It a, is it trying to make things, I mean, is that the sacrifice sort of, that needs to be done for the greater good? Like, do you need to sacrifice now and get rid of some of these, these big things that are leaving Reddit? They're saying that's it. We're shutting down, we're done so that whatever comes next.

Leo Laporte (01:02:20):
I

Nicole Wakelin (01:02:21):
Have the situation. I

Leo Laporte (01:02:22):
Feel like it's a little, I don't wanna say this, but I feel like it's a little childish on the part of Reddis who are saying, well, darn it. That's it. I'm outta here. I mean, look, I'm, I don't, and I, you know, I don't think Steve Huffman's doing the right thing by any means are the Reddit owners are doing the right thing. They have the right to do that. I

Sam Abuelsamid (01:02:42):
Just don't, well, what other recourse do you have to, to making, you know, as a community member to making your voice heard? Right. You know, if, you know if, if the, if these third party apps make the Reddit experience so much better and Reddit is effectively killing off those apps, and they are worsening your user experience on that site, on that platform, how Well, you know, aside from saying, I'm gonna leave or we're gonna shut down the subreddit. H what other means do you, you mean you can do send a tweet to Steve Huffman or send him an email and complain? No, you're

Leo Laporte (01:03:18):
Right. Yeah. But I also have to say

Sam Abuelsamid (01:03:20):
The recourse that we have,

Leo Laporte (01:03:21):
Huffman is acting like, I don't care what you do, we're go, this is happening. He's not showing any flexibility. I thought initially, once he sees this reaction, he's gonna back down. They're gonna a, adjust the pricing. They're gonna do something to keep Apollo and riff and all the apps going. Somebody's saying in our irc, and it's really true that if you, if you try to use Reddit on mobile and the, you have to use a third party app. Cause the Reddit apps are terrible.

Roberto Baldwin (01:03:49):
But it's horrible.

Leo Laporte (01:03:50):
Yeah. On the web, Reddit's, right. It's funny. Right? But

Roberto Baldwin (01:03:53):
You're like, no,

Leo Laporte (01:03:54):
<Laugh>. Yeah. I won't, yeah. Apollo is so much better. I use Joey on Android. It's so much better than the native Reddit apps, which are really terrible. But I don't wanna lose red. I'm I'm, I I don't wanna lose Reddit. I think this is a huge loss to the internet.

Nicole Wakelin (01:04:12):
Do you think maybe as, as we're recording this and as this is all happening, the behind the scenes, someone's saying, wait, we can't let this happen. So gonna take some

Leo Laporte (01:04:19):
Changes. Hope that's what I thought

Nicole Wakelin (01:04:20):
Was gonna happen. Conversations happening. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:04:22):
Yeah. That's seriously what I thought was gonna ha that's what I said earlier this week. I said, well, with this kind of action from its users, Reddit's gotta back down. But I see no signs of that. And, and the ama

Nicole Wakelin (01:04:33):
Maybe Monday morning,

Leo Laporte (01:04:35):
Maybe Monday,

Nicole Wakelin (01:04:35):
Monday everything will change. Something is like, oh, we

Leo Laporte (01:04:38):
Is Nicole the optimist of the wheel bearings crowd? I think so.

Nicole Wakelin (01:04:44):
Maybe. I'm trying, I'm trying. I don't wanna see Reddit disappear. I'm gonna try and be optimistic.

Leo Laporte (01:04:48):
It's gonna be all right. The

Nicole Wakelin (01:04:49):
World's gonna persevere. It's gonna be okay guys.

Leo Laporte (01:04:52):
Is it It's gonna be all right. Okay.

Nicole Wakelin (01:04:54):
It's gonna be okay, Leah. Thank

Leo Laporte (01:04:55):
You.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:04:55):
Somebody's gotta counteract the cranky old guys. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:04:58):
<Laugh>.

Roberto Baldwin (01:04:58):
I mean, it's sometimes people just buy things and they don't know how to run them. Like a lot of places that have bought publications, <laugh> just, oh yeah, I wonder how to understand how these businesses work. So I'm just gonna lay everyone off and get, I don't know, AI to write things. You're like, oh no, you're, that's not how, okay, <laugh>, you've just destroyed 20, you know, decades of reputation. But sure, sure. You saved, you know, $500,000 last year. Good job. Good job.

Leo Laporte (01:05:26):
<Laugh>. I, I do understand Christian's point of view. I think he's being a little cranky about it, but I understand his point of view. There's no way he can run that, that app. I don't know how much he makes, but I doubt it's 20 million a year. There's no way he can continue. So he has to close it down. Yeah. And I think it's, I think it's on Reddit to save it.

Nicole Wakelin (01:05:48):
They might positivity Leo. They might, they might be right now trying to figure out they've created a disaster. Yeah. They've created a mess. They've killed, they're killing Reddit. How do you save it? You have to, you have to backtrack on some of this. And that's, that's really the only way to save, save a little bit of it. Otherwise it's gonna be a problem.

Roberto Baldwin (01:06:06):
Is the backtrack the CEO more interested in saving Reddit or saving face. That's where you're really coming.

Leo Laporte (01:06:09):
No, that's a good point.

Roberto Baldwin (01:06:10):
A lot of CEOs are very much like, I, I can't be the guy who was, who was brought down by the guy who makes that one app <laugh>.

Nicole Wakelin (01:06:17):
Are you the guy who's gonna bring down all the Reddi? Cuz you wouldn't change what you're doing, which is worse.

Roberto Baldwin (01:06:23):
Well, that's the thing is, as a ceo, you just get another job. They pays you a lot of money. Well,

Leo Laporte (01:06:28):
The interesting thing about Steve Huffman,

Roberto Baldwin (01:06:29):
They lose their jobs.

Leo Laporte (01:06:31):
He's one of the original founders. He and Alexis Ohanian founded Reddit. Steve wrote the original code he wrote in Common Lisp. I've inter I've interviewed him and Alexis in the past on triangulation. So you, I I have to think Steve has some deep-rooted love for the platform he created. So I can't imagine he wants it to go away. Now, he of course, has a board and he has, you know, Conde Nast breathing down his throat and share other shareholders. So he may not be free to do whatever he wants. Christian Sellick says he has 50,000 subscribers to Apollo. So he would have to charge them <laugh> a lot of money. <Laugh>

Nicole Wakelin (01:07:19):
To make up 20 million

Leo Laporte (01:07:20):
To make, to make $20 million. It's not like he's, he's got that kind of income going from, he wrote going from a, that's only 400 bucks a year. <Laugh>. Yeah.

Roberto Baldwin (01:07:33):
The person, it's only 400 bucks a year. We're both doing math for, hold on.

Nicole Wakelin (01:07:36):
I know that's gonna take on scene.

Roberto Baldwin (01:07:38):
He just got really quiet while everyone was getting their

Nicole Wakelin (01:07:40):
Calculator. We're all math <laugh>. I mean, you know, if you can pay 400 bucks for the information,

Leo Laporte (01:07:44):
You can pay 400 bucks for, for Reddit, right? Yeah. Come on. It's

Roberto Baldwin (01:07:50):
Up to you. Users pony up.

Leo Laporte (01:07:52):
I think Reddit's gotta give on this. I pray that Reddit gives I bet they, I would say users stop being so cranky, but it's too late. Somebody in the <laugh>, somebody in the discord crank. This happened. Somebody at this court says, once you cut off your nose and spite your face, it's kind of hard to put it back. Mm-Hmm. Yeah. And I, you know, but I don't think that either Steve or Christian can pray that the Redditors will solve this. So it's up to you, Steve, please fix this. You know, you can still make money. I understand why you need to make money. Absolutely. But you, you can't make that much money. <Laugh>. And, and by the way, you're gonna kill the goose a little less. Make a little less. You're gonna, you're not gonna make it. You're just, you nailed it. Nicole, by charging more, so much more, they're gonna actually kill the product. They're gonna lose everything. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>.

Roberto Baldwin (01:08:47):
And, and also, I don't know, figure out another way to make money. How about that? How about use your

Leo Laporte (01:08:52):
Brain? Well, they have advertising. How about just,

Roberto Baldwin (01:08:54):
Yeah. How about don't just like, well, well, Elon Musk did it. That's not a great, that's no <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:09:00):
This is, by the way, I have to say this is one side effect of Elon's whate. What do you call, what happened to Twitter? <Laugh> no one knows Elon. No one knows. One side effect, I think decimation is, is decimation description is that executives are looking what Elon's doing. And, and some of them are emulating him say, oh, we a lot of, we can make people come back to work. Look, Elon did it. We don't have to pay rent. Look, Elon doesn't. I think this is cost pair of Google Cloud bills. Yeah. This has caused a lot of bad behavior. Yeah. Among CEOs.

Roberto Baldwin (01:09:34):
We all think they're Steve Jobs, but none of them are Steve Jobs. Yeah. Like, I can keep kind of a jerk and get people to do things. I'm like, yeah, but you're not smart. <Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:09:42):
Let me take a little break, find out the hard way. Let's talk about Tesla since you guys, I mean, you cover it. Let's talk about Tesla. Let's talk, there's actually some Tesla news, quite a bit of it. When we come back with our wheel bearings takeover on this week in tech, we're finally gonna talk about cars. How about that? Woohoo. Woohoo. But first a word from ZIP Recruiter. Let's talk about jobs. If you're a, a business owner, we, we, Lisa and I have a, this small business called twit. You know, it is hard when somebody leaves, or you have jobs you need to fill. On average, it could take 11 weeks to hire for an open position. That's 11 weeks where you're working double time, filling the hole that's left behind by the, the empty position, but also doing all the work it takes to hire somebody to fill it.

(01:10:32):
That's two and a half months down the tubes. Do you have that time? If you're listening, I've got some advice to you. Do what we do. Stop waiting and start using Zip Recruiter. I have to tell you, it's always hard when an employee says, you know, I, I got another job, or I don't, you know, I'm, I'm going to go back to school or whatever. We hate that. We love our employees, but they've got a life to live. And now we've got a job to fill. What Lisa does is go to ZipRecruiter. Ziprecruiter can help you find qualified candidates for whatever role you have fast. It's not just for podcasters, believe me. And right now, you can try it for free if you want. Ziprecruiter.Com/Twit. Usually it's Lisa says, all right, well, I gotta fill this job. Most recently Ashley and our continuity department decided to get a job closer to home.

(01:11:20):
So she didn't have such a long commute. Good for her. But that meant we've got an empty seat in our continuity department. We've really gotta fill it. Lisa posted on ZipRecruiter that morning for breakfast before lunch. In fact, within an hour or two, I'm, I'm worried cuz I'm going, oh, this means, you know, more work for all. Lisa said, oh, look, here's a great, oh, here's another great. Can. We had three or four great candidates before lunch. How does ZipRecruiter do it? Well, they use powerful matching technology to f They have more than a million current resumes. People come to ZipRecruiter looking for work. They will go through those resumes and find the most qualified people for that role. They know what you're looking for. They say, oh look, here's the three people that fit this role perfectly. Now, they don't invite them to apply.

(01:12:04):
They send 'em to you and you can look at them, check 'em out, and if you like one or two, you can invite them to apply with one click. It's just button. It says click. Yeah, ask this person to apply. And I gotta tell you, when you ask somebody to apply for a job, they re they respond quickly. They're so flattered. They go to the interview, they pr they go through the process. They, that's a great way to start a relationship with a new employee. It works so well. Four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a qualified candidate within the first day. That's been our experience. That's why we use ZipRecruiter. That's how we got Viva. It was great cuz we had three or four people to choose from. We interviewed them. The nice thing about ZipRecruiter, you might say, well, I don't know.

(01:12:45):
I don't want hundreds of people applying for my job. I just need that one. Don't worry. They all go into the ZipRecruiter interface. They reformat the resume so you can scan them quickly. They give you screening questions. Yes, no, true false. Multiple choice. Even essay questions that make it very easy to screen out People who just, you know, don't have the qualifications. They allow you to put little tags on there, like remote work Okay. Or offering training that helps bring your, you know, your, your listing up to the top for a lot of people. And then you can quickly go through 'em. You don't get emails, you don't get phone calls. It all goes in the ZipRecruiter interface and hire the right one fast. It really is a system that works so well. We've been very happy with it. Speed up your hiring process with ZipRecruiter.

(01:13:34):
3.8 million businesses have come to ZipRecruiter for their hiring needs. Just like us. Try it for free. When you go to ziprecruiter.com/twit ziprecruiter.com/t W I t try it. The next time you need to do some hiring, you will be blown away. It is the smartest way to hire. I will vouch for that. Ziprecruiter.Com/Twit. Thank 'em so much for their sport of this week in tech. I mentioned to Sam earlier. I think I actually told all of you you know, I have I have the MAE with, with blue crews. So it's, it's hands off in only in certain areas. It goes, it goes blue and I don't have to have my hands on the wheel. I really, I really like that. I mentioned earlier that I was I put down on a deposit to pre-order the new B M W I five, which comes out later this year. They say on that, you got that on and if you just look at the side mirrors, it'll change lanes for you <laugh>. And I thought, well, I'm not gonna turn that on <laugh>, and that's a terrible, what a terrible idea. I remember go wrong. What could possibly go wrong? I, I think what they say is it'll only change lanes if, if you know there's nobody behind you and you're being slowed down by traffic in front. Like it's Yeah. Like

Sam Abuelsamid (01:14:56):
Currently. Yeah. Currently if you you have to tap the turn signal stock right. You know, left or right and then the sensors will check in. If the adjacent lane in the direction you pointed is clear, then it will execute the lane change. Now it's doing that, you know, when you look at the mirror and I'm, I'm not sure all the details of Exactly.

Leo Laporte (01:15:17):
Yeah, we don't. I'll tell you when I get it. I'll let you know. <Laugh>. Yeah,

Roberto Baldwin (01:15:20):
There's gotta be like a time. Like you can't just be like Lansing. You're like, whoa.

Leo Laporte (01:15:24):
All

Nicole Wakelin (01:15:24):
Of a sudden you've changed lanes. I don't get it. Like you're checking behind you the car's going back and forth left lane. Right? Yeah. Don't

Sam Abuelsamid (01:15:29):
Be, don't be scanning your mirrors in this car. <Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:15:31):
Yeah, because I drive, I scan my mirrors all the time as I'm driving. I, yes. This seems like a bad idea. Anyway. We'll see. I did have the, the change lanes when you do the blinker on the on the, on the Model X, when I had a Tesla and it was a much more aggressive than I was. It's supposed to wait till, you know, you have clear, it would change lanes in front of a car that was a lot closer than I would've changed lanes. Maybe it was safe. Maybe

Nicole Wakelin (01:15:56):
You're just nervous. Maybe you're just Tesla. I'm just kind the driver yet.

Leo Laporte (01:15:58):
I'm just scary. I'm just a scared driver.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:16:00):
The Machi has that. Now if you get, if you have the version 1.2 of Blue Cruise, you do that when you tap the turn signal stock and it's, it's pretty conservative. I was just driving a machi over the past week to test that new version of Blue Cruise. And it, it is. And the same thing goes for the new Nissan Aria and super crews. They're all fairly conservative. You know, they're, they're not gonna try and squeeze into a, a little gap in the traffic. You know, they'll wait until it's really genuinely clear.

Leo Laporte (01:16:30):
I bring this up because the Washington Post did little data digging and came up with kind of a scary headline. 17 fatalities, 736 crashes. The shocking toll of Tesla's autopilot. They say Autopilot's been involved in far more crashes than previously reported. Now they did that by digging into the NHTSA's data. Do you, what do you, what do you think of this story? Is this, should I, I guess is it reliable and then is that a large number I guess I should ask?

Sam Abuelsamid (01:17:15):
Yeah, it is reliable cuz what they're doing. LA was it last year or the year before? The neta, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration issued a standing general order for all automakers and all companies developing automated driving systems. Any crash that occurs while the system is either active or if it's been active within 30 seconds prior to the crash, at any point in that phase. Cuz one of the things that we've seen now that this is hap now that this date is available, is that a lot of the Tesla crashes happen shortly after autopilot decides to deactivate for whatever reason. And the driver has not realized it and

Leo Laporte (01:17:57):
Oh, that's interesting

Sam Abuelsamid (01:17:58):
Crash. They thought it was active and it wasn't.

Leo Laporte (01:18:00):
Right. so that's interesting. And or you could deactivate it. I mean, all of these systems, if it's starting to steer into a wall, you can take the wheel or maybe the wheel, maybe it's too late in this process.

Roberto Baldwin (01:18:12):
Get the brakes. Yeah. There's a lot of things that

Leo Laporte (01:18:14):
Can happen that's contributory to a crash as well. But you're saying that someone one grabs

Roberto Baldwin (01:18:18):
The wheel of your car and, and points you towards a toward

Leo Laporte (01:18:21):
That's contributory and you go

Roberto Baldwin (01:18:22):
To turn it the last minute.

Leo Laporte (01:18:24):
Yeah. It's their

Roberto Baldwin (01:18:25):
Fault. It's not your fault you hit, it's, it's not your fault. You hit the wall <laugh>. Right.

Leo Laporte (01:18:28):
Yeah. But you're saying that's interesting. You're saying that Tesla's consciously disabling automatically, or what,

Sam Abuelsamid (01:18:38):
You know, I mean all of these systems have,

Leo Laporte (01:18:40):
They willable

Sam Abuelsamid (01:18:41):
Where, when and where they can function. Right? Yeah. So there, there are certain, there are situations where the systems just can't function. Like I'm sure if you've used blue crews, you've noticed Yeah. You know that there are times when the system will ask you to put your hands back on the wheel, which is fine if you're, if you're going down the highway and it hits a curve that it can't, doesn't think it can handle, it'll ask you to put your hands back on the wheel here

Leo Laporte (01:19:02):
In ca, California. Lines sometimes weirdly just disappear and there's no lines and Right. So then the car says, you know, I think you better take over cuz I don't know where I am. That's

Sam Abuelsamid (01:19:12):
Fine. But the, but, but the key thing is that the vehicle has to make it really clear to the driver, ah, hey, I need you to put your hands back on the wheel and take control now. Yeah. The

Leo Laporte (01:19:22):
Fourth been beeps loudly at me.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:19:24):
Yeah. And, and this is one of the issues that, you know, with Tesla is it's not always obvious, you know, when you know with their, their hmi, their human machine interface, when the driver is actually supposed to take control or that it's changing modes. And so a lot of drivers get confused because, you know, they think they're in one mode when the, the vehicle has actually transitioned and they haven't taken back control yet.

Leo Laporte (01:19:50):
Yeah. That's the thing. I mean, some of this might be human error. Like, okay, you were driving along and then the Tesla said, well, I can't keep driving. So it's your turn, take over and you ignore that or you don't notice and it plows into something that's kind of more your fault, isn't it?

Sam Abuelsamid (01:20:09):
Well,

Roberto Baldwin (01:20:10):
It's, it's issue. My issue. Yeah. It's like if you don't know, like if they're not, like, one of the things that's that's great about super crews, Mercedes and BMW is that on the steering wheel, there are lights that tell you what mode you're in. Ah. So if it reduces mode confusion, if you don't have any sort of like very just blatant warning that tells you, Hey, you're not in this mode anymore, you are in charge, then it's, it's whose fault is it? Is it, is it, is it Tesla's fault because they just built a bad system <laugh>? Or is it your fault because you didn't notice until it's too late? How

Leo Laporte (01:20:44):
Does the Tesla tell you

Roberto Baldwin (01:20:45):
Again, again, it's the, it, it's like the guy who grabs the wheel of your car and, and, and steers you towards the wall and then you, and then suddenly it turns off and you have to grab the last minute and turn. Is it your fault that you ran into the wall because you didn't realize

Leo Laporte (01:20:56):
<Laugh> in that case? No. Yeah. Pretty clearly. How does the Tesla, I don't even remember. How does it warn you? I think it buzzes at you and bleeps. I, I remember at one point my Tesla said, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna drive anymore. You're, you're not paying attention and turned off. And I couldn't continue to use autopilot until I, until I started a Noom ride.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:21:19):
Yeah. And you know, especially on the, the model three and the model Y, which are, you know, that's the, the vast majority of their Yeah. Their volume. Those vehicles don't have an instrument cluster in front of you. They only have that center screen. That's correct. Oh, and you know, the kind of the left hand strip of that screen is where they have control information. The rest of it is maps and audio interface and things like that. And, you know, when I went for a drive and a friend's model three with their full self-driving beta to try that out, you know, it had, you know, all it showed, you know, there was a little icon of a steering wheel with hands, I think in the top left-hand corner. So it was kind of often my peripheral vision, but it wasn't particularly obvious when, when it wanted you to take control. And I'm pretty sure it didn't make any sounds. It might have made a, a, a slight sound, but it would, it was not at all obvious. And this is been one of my complaints, you know, if you are going to have a system where, you know, any sort of automated system where you expect somebody, a human to supervise, first of all, that's a, I think a fundamentally tr problematic idea because humans are terrible at supervising automation,

Leo Laporte (01:22:32):
Especially when you call it autopilot that I implies.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:22:34):
Right. And if it wor if it works, most of the time you are going to get complacent. Right. That is a known reality of the way humans behave. Which is why, as Robbie mentioned, Tesla or GM and BMW and Mercedes and others use, you know, very obvious interface devices like a light bar in the steering wheel, you know, or you know, Nissan with their, their cluster and heads up display that cha completely changes the color scheme. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, there's changing modes tho you know, you need, as an engineer, it's your responsibility to anticipate the way things could go wrong and do everything reasonable. You know, to mitigate that, you know, to mitigate the consequences of that. To try to, to try to avoid anything bad happening when things inevitably do go wrong. I

Leo Laporte (01:23:24):
Remember, and

Sam Abuelsamid (01:23:25):
This is where I think Tesla has done it wrong.

Leo Laporte (01:23:27):
I remember a couple of years ago when you took me for a ride in that Cadillac, what is it? The ctx Cts

Sam Abuelsamid (01:23:32):
CT six. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:23:33):
CT six which had a camera, this was the first experience I had at this. My, my Ford now has this monitoring my eyes, and you made me <laugh>. It wasn't easy. You said, don't look at the road. I said, I have to look at the road. I'm, it's driving. He said, no, don't look at the road <laugh>. So I, I went like this. I put my hands for my eyes, but I peeked <laugh> and it, it shook the seat. It buzzed. It was like, wake up, wake up, wake up. It was very aggressive. And it, you know, it started, it ramped up and it got more and more aggressive as I continue to peek through my eyes. <Laugh>. that was good. That was a system that really did make me pay attention. No question about.

Nicole Wakelin (01:24:14):
Well, I think part of the challenge too, though, there are so many, excuse me. There's so many things that your car now warns you about that, that you don't always know what is Oh, that's true. Being dinging. Like what? You hear it and you're like, what, what does that tone mean? What is that my,

Roberto Baldwin (01:24:30):
There's a mystery beat in my Hyundai. I have no idea what it does. Sometimes you just drive, boom. I'm like, I don't know what that's, is that a warning? You don't understand how machine that

Sam Abuelsamid (01:24:38):
Goes ping.

Roberto Baldwin (01:24:39):
Right? It's like, I don't know what that beep is for Literally, my job is to know <laugh>

Nicole Wakelin (01:24:44):
And you dunno. But

Roberto Baldwin (01:24:45):
My for that's

Leo Laporte (01:24:46):
Fork is that when the tailgate goes up, half the time it beeps twice for some reason. I don't know why. You don't

Nicole Wakelin (01:24:52):
Know why. Like, that's the thing. There's so many beeps and, and bells and whistles and whatever. You're like, I don't, and you look at your car, you're thinking, I think I'm doing everything right. I'm in my lane. I'm doing the speed limit. No one's about to hit me. Did I witness? Why are you beeping at me? It's

Roberto Baldwin (01:25:06):
What's happening? What's

Nicole Wakelin (01:25:07):
Happening? There's confusion. Yeah. Is there a

Roberto Baldwin (01:25:08):
Murder in the back seat? Like, what are you telling

Nicole Wakelin (01:25:10):
Me? What am I missing? It's like

Roberto Baldwin (01:25:11):
Trying to talk to Lassie, but lassie's really bad at communication.

Nicole Wakelin (01:25:15):
And like, they beep when you just turn like, I hate it. You, you turn on a car and you're in a parking space, you haven't done anything and it's beeping at you. Then you put it in reverse. You're like, I'm not even going forward. Why are you beeping at me that there's something too close to my front bumper? I'm literally in reverse going the other direction. It it, the beeping is too

Leo Laporte (01:25:30):
Much. So it shouldn't be a surprise that we ignore our cars. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> Elon Accord. The Washington Post says Tesla, c e o Elon Musk said, cars operating in autopilot mode are safer than those piloted solely by human drivers citing crash rates when the modes of driving are compared.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:25:51):
So let, let earlier today when we recorded the new episode of Wheel Bearings, we talked about a story that came out the other day. Money money com, money.com magazine did a review of Tesla auto insurance. I dunno if you know, but a couple years ago, Tesla actually started selling their own auto insurance. They're now in 12 states because a lot of insurance companies were charging Tesla owners more for insurance than for other vehicles. And you know, that's because their cars are more expensive to repair. And also that they had more claims. But one of the interesting details about the Tesla auto insurance, because the vehicles are connected, they have access to all the data about how you drive. You know, most auto insurance, you know, every six months you get a bill to pay for your insurance. And, you know, at six months, you know, they may adjusted up or down, usually only up, but sometimes it goes down. <Laugh> never goes down

Nicole Wakelin (01:26:47):
The lie exam.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:26:48):
<Laugh>, you know what, what Tesla does is they have dynamic pricing so that they're constantly monitoring your driving behavior and calculating a safety score based on how hard you accelerate and break and steer and so on. And if you, if your safety score goes down the next month, your insurance bill will go up and vice versa. If it, if your score goes up, your insurance premium goes down, one of the factors that they include is actually your use of autopilot. If you use autopilot, you will pay more for Tesla insurance.

Nicole Wakelin (01:27:26):
So it could only be like, it's supposed to be safer. Yet if you have it, Tesla's own insurance charges you more for it. The,

Sam Abuelsamid (01:27:32):
The, yeah. So clearly they don't believe their own rhetoric. That's

Leo Laporte (01:27:36):
Hysterical.

Nicole Wakelin (01:27:38):
Or their insurance company doesn't <laugh>

Sam Abuelsamid (01:27:39):
Well, I remember they're their insurance company. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:27:41):
When I first got a model X I called our insurance, I think it was Geico, and they said, oh, <laugh>, <laugh>. And they sure it's just a lot more. I don't know if cuz it was an expensive car because of the autopilot, but it, I have a feeling was the autopilot. So this is what the Washington posts analysis said. Tesla's 17 fatal crashes revealed distinct patterns. The post found four involved a motorcycle. That's, that's a quarter of them. Another involved emergency vehicle. Ooh. Meanwhile, some of Musk's decisions such as widely expanding the availability of the features. And, and we've talked about this a little bit Sam stripping the vehicles of radar sensors, he thinks that all you really need is cameras. You don't need lidar or radar appear to have contributed to the reported uptick in incidents. According to experts who spoke with the post Tesla and Neon did not report, respond to a request

Sam Abuelsamid (01:28:37):
For, oh, by the way, sock Tesla is soon gonna be adding a radar sensor back into the cars. But it's a different better

Leo Laporte (01:28:44):
Radar. That's a tasci admission that maybe that was the wrong Yes. Yeah. Thing to do. Whoops. Whoops. Sees Nitsa said a report of a crash involving driver assistance does not of itself imply that technology was the cause. That's what we were just talking about. NITSA does have an active investigation into Tesla autopilot, including full self-driving. Nitsa reminds the public that all advanced driver assistance systems require the human driver to be in control and fully engaged in the driving task at all times. All state laws even

Sam Abuelsamid (01:29:20):
Holding when you're using full self-driving.

Leo Laporte (01:29:21):
Yes. According to all state laws, hold the human driver responsible for the operation of their vehicles. I don't care what you got going. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> is so what do you think? I mean seven fatal crashes, that's pretty serious. Four of with motorcycles, one of 'em with an emergency vehicle. We've seen reports that sometimes Teslas don't notice fire trucks that are stopped

Sam Abuelsamid (01:29:49):
Frequently.

Leo Laporte (01:29:49):
Frequently. Mm-hmm.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:29:51):
<Laugh>

Leo Laporte (01:29:52):
Crashes evolving. Tesla's driver assistance system have grown, but so is Tesla sales. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, I wouldn't be surprised. I can't decide if this is legitimate or you know, kind of over the top hit piece almost.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:30:06):
No, I you mean it is, it is legitimate. Yeah. The data from this standing general order, it's, it, they pu Nitsa publishes it. You can download an Excel spreadsheet and they update it every month with, you know, the new reports that have come in. And all automakers are res are obligated to submit their data. And you can go through and, you know, you can see how many crashes there have been, you know, where level two or above systems were active and, you know, you compare the, the number of crashes with Tesla vehicles versus the population of Tesla vehicles and the number of crashes with vehicles from other manufacturers. And the, you know, the, the numbers are disproportionately Tesla in terms of the number of crashes that, that those vehicles had. Now, it, it's also important, you know, when you look at the, and you look through the, the report, the, the data in detail, which I have done as part of my job you know, what you'll also find is that, you know, because of the way the, the requirement was was written, you know, any crash where the, where the driver assist system was active at the time of the crash or up to 30 seconds before they you know, they have to submit it, even if that system had nothing to do with the crash.

(01:31:26):
Hmm. So for example, in in that data, there are two crashes involving Honda vehicles. The, I think the only two crashes, one of them involved the, the vehicle, you know, was use, the driver was using the system. Which technically isn't even really a level two system and probably shouldn't have even been reported. But Honda was being overly aggressive, I would say in in reporting you know, not to leave anything out. And in that particular instance, the the vehicle was going through intersection legally and was t-boned by somebody who ran a stop sign in the other direction.

Leo Laporte (01:32:03):
Yeah. That's not the, that's

Sam Abuelsamid (01:32:04):
Not the fault of the system. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:32:05):
Right. So

Sam Abuelsamid (01:32:06):
If you look at the, the Tesla data, you know, it's not those kinds of crashes. Tesla

Leo Laporte (01:32:12):
And the other reported 736 Yeah. Crashes under auto pilot. The number two worst car was Subaru with 23

Sam Abuelsamid (01:32:22):
<Laugh>. Right.

Leo Laporte (01:32:23):
That's a significant difference. Now there's a lot more Teslas out there, but there's also not

Sam Abuelsamid (01:32:28):
That many more. There's

Roberto Baldwin (01:32:29):
A lot of Subarus on the road. Okay. Yeah. There's a lot of Tesla. Cause you look at that. Yeah. You look at that, yeah. You look at that, that data based on EV sold or Yeah. There's way more Tesla EVs in the world than anything else. But when you look at actual auto sales, there's a lot of, yeah, there's a lot of Subarus.

Leo Laporte (01:32:46):
The post says the enormous golf probably reflects wider deployment and use of automation across Tesla's fleet of vehicles as well as Ari, wider range of circumstances in which Tesla drivers are encouraged to use autopilot for, for one I can't use autopilot anywhere, but mapped highways in my Ford. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, you can use it on city streets in a Tesla.

Nicole Wakelin (01:33:10):
Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>.

Leo Laporte (01:33:11):
That seems problematic.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:33:14):
Yeah, no, it absolutely is. And you know, as you know what, what you were saying, what Robbie was saying, you know, the, the number of vehicles, excuse me from Tesla and other manufacturers that have these kinds of systems is not necessarily that different. It's not like Tesla has dramatically more vehicles with autopilot on the road than some of the other systems that would qualify under this regulation. But I think that Tesla drivers are far more likely to be using those systems. Yes. And because they are not restricted in any way. That's that's right.

Leo Laporte (01:33:48):
That's

Sam Abuelsamid (01:33:49):
Right. They're more likely to be using them in system, in, in scenarios where they probably shouldn't. And then that's when you end up with more with more crashes. And

Nicole Wakelin (01:33:59):
I wonder about that because the, because so many Tesla folks are sort of, you know, were early adopters of EVs and they're sort of people who are willing to give tech a chance that maybe other people don't have. Many people have self-driving stuff, or not really self-driving driver assistance, whatever you wanna call it, on their vehicles that are non Teslas. They're just like, I'm just not using that. So it doesn't seem like there's as much happening because they just don't use it as often.

Leo Laporte (01:34:21):
Three months ago, Tesla claimed full self-driving crashes are five times lower than vehicles in normal driving based on the number of miles driven per collision.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:34:32):
The problem is Tesla is very selective about what data they publish and, you know, they, they are almost, they don't really tell us what the context of that data is, you know? Yeah. You know, compared to what

Leo Laporte (01:34:47):
Tesla, even if they're

Sam Abuelsamid (01:34:48):
Almost certainly comparing

Leo Laporte (01:34:50):
Tesla even forces Nitsa to redact what kind of mm-hmm. <Affirmative> softwares.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:34:54):
That's another one of my complaints. Yeah. But you know, as far as you know, that five times fewer crashes, they are almost certainly comparing, you know, their vehicles, which are the, like 80% of their vehicles, 90% of their vehicles are less than five years old. Yeah. They're comparing their vehicles to the entire population of 290 million registered vehicles in the United States. Yeah. Most of which are much older and don't have these kinds of systems on them. Because, you know, the average age of vehicles in the US is 12 and a half years. Those vehicles that are 12 and a half years and over, they don't have these kinds of systems on them. So they're comparing, they don't have Tesla if, if you were to compare Yeah. You know, Tesla, a premium vehicle with, you know, a lot of stuff on it to only to other five years or, or younger premium vehicles, you know, so you, you ha you had a real valid comparison base. I I would guess that the numbers are probably very, very different and probably not better and, and very likely worse than the rest of that population of vehicles.

Leo Laporte (01:36:03):
And in one expert said, and if you're a motorcycle, stay away from Teslas <laugh>, it's gonna say they don't see as

Roberto Baldwin (01:36:11):
Someone who rides a motorcycle, I get, I get very, very concerned riding around Tesla, cuz I know people like, because the selling point is ev autopilot. Yeah. That's it. That's the things that sells Tesla. Yeah. And I just don't feel comfortable driving by someone who has a Tesla who is clearly not paying attention because the selling point for their vehicle was autopilot and they're just like, I'm just going to go over here <laugh>. No, no, no, no, no, no. Yeah. Get around from this portion.

Leo Laporte (01:36:38):
So what's the answer here? I mean, it's probably the case that fully automated vehicles would be safer than, I mean, human drivers are notoriously bad, but they're better than the Tesla,

Nicole Wakelin (01:36:53):
I think. I think there's a point at which a car will be able to do it better than a human overall. I mean, there's still gonna be accidents even when it's the car. Right. You know, nothing's ever gonna be perfect, but I just don't think we're quite there yet. So this is sort of showing the growing pains of it pretty dangerous time. Are you

Sam Abuelsamid (01:37:08):
Implying that our ride the other night was less than perfect?

Nicole Wakelin (01:37:11):
Our ride the other night was not quite entirely perfect.

Leo Laporte (01:37:13):
Sam, wait a minute. So now tell me about that. You were on a, with a cruise. What were you in?

Nicole Wakelin (01:37:18):
We had, we went for a robo Taxii ride in Austin. And was it,

Leo Laporte (01:37:24):
Did you wanna say who's,

Sam Abuelsamid (01:37:25):
Yeah, it was Cruz. It was Cruz.

Nicole Wakelin (01:37:26):
Cruz. Yes. It was Cruz and it was <laugh>. There were, it was a comedy of errors from the minute we hailed the silly thing. Like we, it was, we were in a certain zone, like there's a certain area of Austin where you can hail these and Sam hails and it says, this is gonna be right there, right next to you. And then this is, we have arrived and we're both looking like ne haven

Leo Laporte (01:37:44):
Where, where, and you can't miss these because they got all sorts of no sensors all around 'em. And they got things on the top. The light are spinning and there's

Nicole Wakelin (01:37:51):
Just like, stuff everywhere. Like, there's no mistaking like maybe mine. No, that's not, that's a normal car. Here's mine with a million things sticking off the roof. And we're both sitting there going, it's, it's not here. And it was saying it was there, but it was really two blocks away. So we walked the two blocks and we're trying to get to it. By the time we get there, it's already left. It's like, you took too long. It's like, and then it, we held another one and it's like, no, we gotta walk another two blocks. I think we, we walked like six blocks to hail this stupid robo taxii <laugh>. So, and then it just kept going from there. Nothing like horrific, but just these, like, this is not right. This is not making my life easier. This is making my life harder.

Leo Laporte (01:38:29):
You guys posted the video on their wheel bearings, YouTube channel of your experiences. If anybody wants to see this inaction. I got the, the entire, the entire Rio is in there from the time we got in the vehicle. Yeah. Did it drive okay once you was there a safety driver or was it no, no. Let it keep running for a second. You see, there's, there's nobody in the front seat that's a little

Nicole Wakelin (01:38:52):
Creepy. It's completely empty in the front. Just, it was

Leo Laporte (01:38:54):
Just the two of us in the back seat. It

Nicole Wakelin (01:38:55):
Was creepy. Yeah. And it, I mean, and it wasn't ever a scary, like dangerous. There's scary like one point. It was going very, very slowly and we didn't know why. I'm thinking what's happening <laugh>, like how do, what, what is it doing where you just, at least it makes it feel a little bit like, you know, you're driving that really nervous driver who either doesn't know what they're doing or maybe you're, you're not from this town, you have no idea where Elm Street is and you're desperately trying to find Elm Street, so you're driving like, past every road and kind of pausing. That's kind of how it felt <laugh> for a good bit of the draw.

Leo Laporte (01:39:25):
It was, it was a little cautious. And it was a little

Nicole Wakelin (01:39:29):
Cautious.

Leo Laporte (01:39:30):
And then, then we had our cruise robo taxii honking its horn at another cruise. Robo taxi. Yeah.

Nicole Wakelin (01:39:35):
Launch at each other, which is

Leo Laporte (01:39:37):
Kinda fun. Why did they honk at each other?

Nicole Wakelin (01:39:39):
Because the one was confused. It thought it was gonna hit a car even though it wasn't. And so it decided to back up, but we were behind it. So as soon as it started

Leo Laporte (01:39:47):
Back, oh my god,

Nicole Wakelin (01:39:48):
Ours, which by the name was by the way, was named Alcatraz, which I felt right there. Were told enough to get in the car. Yeah. Like, we're riding in a prison. I don't like these, I don't like this. I don't like this. You

Leo Laporte (01:39:57):
Were your, was yours called Leavenworth? That would've been funny. <Laugh>. no. We were in Alcatraz. We were, we were famous federal prisons. That's it's just the way it is. Yeah. Right. They have, they have all kind, they're all, they all have names on them so that you can identify em. So in the app, when, when it pulls up, you know, it tells you, you know, Alcatraz is al arriving road runners arriving. Seems like a terrible You can idea. Yeah. Find the right one was don't. So was

Nicole Wakelin (01:40:22):
This why they picked the name of a prison,

Leo Laporte (01:40:23):
Nicole? Was this your first time in a Robo Taxii?

Nicole Wakelin (01:40:26):
The first time in a Robo Taxii I'd written in things where there was an engineer, like sitting there with a keyboard frantically typing in the passenger seat up front and another guy just behind the steering wheel. Just in case this is the first time there was absolutely no one in front. So if things had gone wrong, Sam and I would've died a terrible death. Like there was nothing anybody could do. <Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:40:46):
There's no one to help us. There was no, no one an incident. You know, we had a mass shooting in San Francisco a couple of nights ago in the mission. And one of the stories was that a cruise blocked safety crews spawning to the shooting. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> that it, that it, it just here's the video that was was posted on Twitter. The car stopped in the middle of the road on 24th and Folsom, it's probably confused by emergency vehicles. It's just stuck there and and got in the way of the response.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:41:22):
Well they, they do have, you know, these vehicles and the Waymo vehicles at least. And I think some others they have, one of the things they have on there is microphones on the outside of the vehicle to listen for emergency vehicles. So if they hear a siren, you know, they're supposed to pull over and stop just like, just like we do. Right. and so there's you know, it may have heard the sirens and

Leo Laporte (01:41:46):
It didn't know where it was. I'm

Sam Abuelsamid (01:41:48):
Just gonna stop right here. I'm

Leo Laporte (01:41:48):
Just gonna stop. Got confused. Yeah. Which is the safest, probably the safest thing to do. Guess, guess,

Roberto Baldwin (01:41:52):
But that's, that's the issue with self-driving cars, is that getting them to go from here to here in a straight line where on a highway is, is easy. But when you have the context of, you know, you've been driving a car for decades, you understand, oh, I'm in an area. Yes, there are sirens going on, but I definitely need to get out of this area. Or I'm in the way, or I'm doing this. And the, the, the driverless car doesn't know that. It doesn't understand that, yeah. It doesn't understand edge cases. And so you can keep throwing edge cases at it and keep throwing edge cases at it. But it's still, it's a very, it's, it's, it's very difficult for a car to react like a human who understands the entire world and the context of what is happening in the environment they're in at that moment.

(01:42:32):
Like, if that cruise had pulled up and there'd be a bunch of, let's say sheep, a bunch of sheep got out, you would know, oh, okay, I can just sit here and wait till the sheep go by. There's a sheep herter or whatever. Like, oh, this is fun. Let's shoot video. The car doesn't know what's going on. All it knows is there's a bunch of dogs, <laugh>. And now it's completely confused. <Laugh>, it's just like little BB things. Like, you know, someone throws a firework in the road, a a car doesn't know what's going on, you know, what's going on. And so it's, it's, it's like all the edge cases is the reason why self-driving cars are still, I mean, to be honest, pretty far out. Yeah. in, in a, in a way that we think that a self-driving car will be what you get in the car. It drives you from your house to your office without you interacting at all. That means surface streets, that means the highway. That means, you know, with, with construction zones, with weird traffic patterns, like that's still pretty far off.

Leo Laporte (01:43:23):
Well, it's, if we've learned anything, we almost, autonomous is worse than no autonomy at all. Right. yeah. The, the impression of autonomy is terrible. You know, if they're not gonna, and, and I, this, by the way, this is also the lesson we're learning in general about ai. It doesn't think, it's not thinking

Sam Abuelsamid (01:43:43):
It, it doesn't, it doesn't actually have understanding. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:43:47):
It doesn't know what's going on.

Nicole Wakelin (01:43:48):
It's just processing the information and the first time it gets information hasn't hit before. Right. Suddenly it doesn't know what to do. And that's, that's a problem when you got emergency vehicles trying to get by a car, <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:43:58):
And yet we seem to be moving full speed ahead. Mercedes just got approval in California to sell hands free eyes off automated driving vehicles.

Roberto Baldwin (01:44:08):
But that's still on, like, it's, it's on map roads. It's, it's, it's only on the highway. It's only up to certain speeds and the amount of, of, of like they have these super high, high quality g p s sensor that tells you within like a few centimeters of where the vehicle is. I mean, there's a lot that goes on to this vehicle, essentially. So if you're stuck in traffic, if you're stuck in gridlock, you can do something else. That's it. That's really what it's for. The, the, the, their, their level three system is really for, if you're stuck and you're not going above a certain, you know, a certain speed, it's literally just like I'm stuck in traffic. I'm not getting off the freeway for the next 20, 30 minutes. So I guess I'll watch a movie.

Leo Laporte (01:44:56):
You could watch a movie. It also

Sam Abuelsamid (01:44:57):
Doesn't work at night or in the rain. Yeah. Oh,

Roberto Baldwin (01:44:59):
Yeah. It also doesn't work at night in the rain. And they're very like, they're very forthcoming. Like, yeah, there's sensors here just in the wheel wells, just in case the other sensors don't know it's raining. There's a moisture, there's a moisture sensor in the wheel. Well, so they'll have this redundant sensor to tell them when it's raining. Like, Nope, nope, we're not working anymore. We're done. <Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:45:16):
This is maybe what Tesla should be doing. The the drive pilot system has both lidar radar and cameras. It's only available, it speeds up to 40 miles an hour during daylight hours on certain highways. It will not engage on city or county roads in construction zones during heavy rain, heavy fog on flooded roads during weather conditions, determined impact performance on the system, or when there are sheep in the road. None of those situations <laugh>,

Roberto Baldwin (01:45:44):
No sheep

Leo Laporte (01:45:44):
In the road. No sheep in the road. So there's,

Nicole Wakelin (01:45:46):
So five minutes of your one hour commute, can you actually use this?

Leo Laporte (01:45:50):
So this is really, this, this is for stop and go traffic in, it's

Roberto Baldwin (01:45:52):
Literally LA Yeah, it's,

Sam Abuelsamid (01:45:54):
It's LA built for the 4 0 5 or the 1 0 1

Roberto Baldwin (01:45:56):
<Laugh>. It is definitely built for la And when I, I've done a bunch of demos in this vehicle, <laugh>, and one of the demos was in la They're like, we're going to LA because of course we're doing it. Do this in else.

Leo Laporte (01:46:07):
Yeah. There's, there's never a time in LA where there isn't a traffic jam. It's always, yeah. It's always bad and it's usually not cheap. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Yeah. I just should usually, usually,

Sam Abuelsamid (01:46:18):
You know. Yeah. I want, I want to address something you mentioned earlier about, you know, how bad human drivers are. Yeah. And granted, you know, 40,000 people a year dying on the roads in the US is

Leo Laporte (01:46:29):
A million worldwide. I mean, it's terrible.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:46:31):
Yeah. And we absolutely need to do something about that. But you, you actually, you have to look at it from the other side as well. You know, it's, it's, this is a classic case of Tell me which side the argument you're on, and I'll give you statistics to prove. You're right. You often hear 94% of crashes are caused by human error. Well, that's only partly true. Human is a factor in those, but it's not, it's almost never the only factor. And when you consider how much we actually drive, we drive in the US we drive about 3.2 trillion miles a year. Wow. That's trillion with a T. Wow. And we have about six and a half million crashes. So that works out to about one crash. And this is not fatal crashes. This is all crashes, you know, even fender benders. But one crash every half a million miles, if the average person drives 15,000 miles a year, that's, you're gonna crash. Your, your odds of crashing are about once every 30 years.

Leo Laporte (01:47:21):
That's about right.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:47:22):
Yeah. So, you know, that's, that's actually a remarkably high threshold or an automated system to overcome. Yeah. And they have not done that yet. Yeah. You know one crash every, every 30 years, every half a million miles, we've still got a ways to go. And that's, that's those, those human crashes under all conditions that's in blizzards in, you know, monsoons and dust storms and at night. And that includes drunk drivers and everything else. So, you know, it, it's actually really, really hard to make an automated system that is better than a human driver.

Leo Laporte (01:48:00):
Boy, that's such a strong point. I'm glad you said that. I did not know that. It would be difficult, wouldn't it? Yeah. Yeah. It,

Roberto Baldwin (01:48:08):
It boggles my mind when I'm driving to think about, I just drove with all these thousands of other people from this place to another place, and we're all doing all these different things. It's amazing, isn't it? And there's all these lights and there's all these stop signs, and there's all these things that happened, and there's construction and people walking in the road. And again, the sheep and, you know, all these things are going on <laugh>, and we just, yeah. I'm doing my thing.

Leo Laporte (01:48:30):
I always think if you're in

Sam Abuelsamid (01:48:30):
Michigan, it's deer <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:48:32):
I always think that Turkey, when I watch the fifth element, you know, it's Bruce Willis is the flying cab driver, and he zips into the flying cabs and is driving around. And I'm thinking, you know, as impossible as it seems, probably that's not that much different from us driving around day, day to day in our, we're just used to it. That's all. Yeah. And it's probably, you know, in the, in the, sometime in the future with flying cars, I, I always thought we wouldn't have flying cars until we had full autonomy. That's the only way. Cuz if a flying car crashes, he falls on your head. It's not a

Roberto Baldwin (01:49:08):
That's the problem. And the FAA cars

Leo Laporte (01:49:10):
Falling out of the sky. It's

Roberto Baldwin (01:49:11):
Not a worry about not a

Leo Laporte (01:49:12):
Good luck.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:49:13):
Yeah. It's not a

Roberto Baldwin (01:49:14):
Good luck. And

Sam Abuelsamid (01:49:15):
Speaking of which, sort of a

Roberto Baldwin (01:49:16):
Bad idea. Yeah. You

Sam Abuelsamid (01:49:17):
Know, that, that's something else, you know, probably the first regulation we need to have, cause we don't actually have any regulations at a federal level around automated driving. The first thing we actually need to have is a change in the rules that if the vehicle is in an automated driving mode where the human is not required to watch the road. So level three and above, the manufacturer must be liable. If a, if something happens while you're in that mode, the human should not be liable.

Leo Laporte (01:49:44):
That would shut Elon up fast. Fast. Yeah. Well, Mercedes and Volvo, and I think B M W have all said that they will be. Yeah. And, and most, most automakers have said, at least, you know, off the record, they haven't necessarily discredit publicly, but they said that, yeah. That's their intention. That's fair. If, if the human's not supervising, then the, you know, they're responsible. The only one that has never said that is Tesla. Yeah. That's the last thing they'd want. Is there a chance Congress could ever pass something like that? Or is it Nitsa that would've to do that? I don't, I don't know that. I don't know if Congress necessarily has to. I I think it could just be a nit, probably Nitsa or Nitza, maybe the ftc Yeah. Makes the

Nicole Wakelin (01:50:21):
Whole, yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:50:22):
Yeah. Interesting. Well, then at some point the courts would test it, because Yeah. Yeah. Elon would say, well, wait a minute. I'm not, I'm not liable. All right, let's take a little break. Lots more to come with our wheel bearings. Takeover from wheel bearings, dot media, Samal, Sam, he's also regular. And ask the tech guy. And on Twit and many of other shows. Great to have you Sammy Ron Athetic guy. Earlier today, we talked about Elon's imminent takeover of the entire ev charging infrastructure in the United States. You should probably should talk about that a again, on this show. Give Robbie and Nicole a chance to respond. Robbie Roberto Baldwin as, as he's known to his enemies freelance journalist, dude, <laugh> leader of many cover bands, wear of the Daft Punk helmet, <laugh> and Nicole Wake Lynn. Wake Lynn. Yay.

Nicole Wakelin (01:51:16):
Wake Lynn.

Leo Laporte (01:51:17):
Automotive journalist from New Hampshire. You're, are you a native of New Hampshire, Nicole?

Nicole Wakelin (01:51:23):
Oh, pretty much. I moved here when I was like two, so I would say That counts. Yeah, that counts. Yeah, that counts. I

Leo Laporte (01:51:29):
Grew up in Rhode Island, but, and, but I, you know, I lost the accent when I moved. But you, you don't have any New Hampshire accent. You can't get that from me up.

Nicole Wakelin (01:51:38):
No. My mom was from Pennsylvania and she hated the New England accent. So she corrected every time I said fire instead of fire, and Waa instead of Waa. She corrected me my whole life and drove me nuts. But now, thanks mom. <Laugh>. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:51:53):
Yeah. I guess I owe it to my mom too, that I never got the Cranston accent. She still lives in Cranston. See, that is the worst New England accent. If you wanna pick one. It's Cranston.

Nicole Wakelin (01:52:01):
Cranston. We have one. Yeah. Is that the one?

Leo Laporte (01:52:03):
Some nasal. Some nasal. Our show. Your

Nicole Wakelin (01:52:06):
New England's accents are good. I

Leo Laporte (01:52:08):
Think some of 'em are great. Yeah. I love the Boston accent, as does Hollywood. So there you go. Our show today, brought to you by Miro. You know, I always struggle with Miro cuz I, I don't know how to describe it because it's could be anything you need it to be. It is a workspace for you and your team to get the job done, to brainstorm, to share ideas. If you and your team are still going from tab to tab and tool to tool, you know, every time we switch context like that, you lose ideas. You forget where you are. Right? Important information just drifts away with Miro. You don't have to do that. Miro is a collaborative visual platform that brings all your great work together, no matter where you are, no matter what you use. Cuz it integrates with all the tools you use today.

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And you can for free three boards free to start creating your best work yet. Miro, m i r o.com/podcast. It's, it's, it's, it, I can't tell you what you could do with it. You gotta try it and you will see it's really amazing. Miro.Com/Podcast. We thank 'em so much for their support of this week in tech and our our big wheel bearings, takeover wheel bearings media. Do we wanna talk about the I, you know, I'm a little worried that Elon is gonna all the Carmen, well, Ford and g GM at least, but I think if once Ford and GM do it, probably others will. Well as well are saying we're gonna support the Tesla supercharger. And, and Sam you said this will ultimately be in replacing the fast charging system that we use today.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:56:30):
I I think it will be. I, I think it's the, the supercharger connector, the so-called North American Charging Standard connector which Tesla just rebranded a few months ago. From, you know, it previously didn't really have a name. Now it's N A C s. They that is going to become the standard. And c c s is eventually just going to fade away much like H D D V D is so popular today.

Leo Laporte (01:56:58):
<Laugh> does <laugh>

Nicole Wakelin (01:57:00):
What?

Leo Laporte (01:57:01):
Hold on.

Roberto Baldwin (01:57:01):
Earlier, earlier today, I, I I I, I said it was like the VHS beta max battle, you know, back in the eighties or seventies. Yeah. And but this time Beta Max won the, the proprietary. Is it better one this time?

Leo Laporte (01:57:16):
Betamax was always better, right?

Nicole Wakelin (01:57:18):
It was better.

Roberto Baldwin (01:57:19):
It was better. I, you know, if these, these these charging companies, they've had, they've had time, they've had time to build a nice, robust, reliable network and they've not built a reliable network. That's

Leo Laporte (01:57:32):
The explain to me why not. This is the thing that puzzles me. It's, yeah. I, I, I, you know, as somebody drives an ev day in, day out, I agree with you. I mean, half the time you pull up the charger, it's out of out of order. Why is that? They have a

Nicole Wakelin (01:57:44):
Million reasons. Like when you talk to 'em, I did a road trip from Disneyland to Disney World in an EV to see Wow. How go, yeah. I was insane. So I did this and it was to see like, just, okay, if you just did it and you just stop at charging stations, how hard is it to do? And how long will it take? And they just, they didn't work. And then when I talked to them after the fact, like, well, you know, when we installed these, we were trying to get 'em out really quick and we were limited to where we could put them. Excuses, excuses, infrastructure. And it was just a million different excuses. So I like, we're really doing our best and we're making it better. I'm like it, but it stinks. It was terrible. Like, I would not having, just having things, you walk up, it's like, oh, I'm, I'm gonna sup, I should be getting tons of power. Seven kilowatts. I'm gonna be living at this charger now for the next five hours. <Laugh>. Like, it was just, it was ridiculous. And they just, there's no, there was never any kind of, we messed up and this is why it was like, well, all these things made it impossible for us to do better. We just couldn't, we couldn't.

Roberto Baldwin (01:58:41):
Meanwhile, Tesla had done it like 10 years ago.

Nicole Wakelin (01:58:43):
Exactly. I'm like, well, Tesla did it. How come you can't do

Leo Laporte (01:58:46):
It? It's, but I don't want Elon to have a monopoly. One more thing. I mean, Elon is going to own the solar panels, everything. He's gonna own the EVs, he's gonna own the charging infrastructure. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. I think that's a bad thing. I mean, you need choice. Oh,

Roberto Baldwin (01:59:03):
It's, it's a horrible thing. Because if I have a problem with Electrify America, I can contact someone at Electrify America. Okay. There's an

Leo Laporte (01:59:10):
800 number printed right on the charge.

Nicole Wakelin (01:59:12):
Yeah. And they pick up right away. And they're very helpful. Actually. If I

Roberto Baldwin (01:59:14):
Have a problem with Tesla camera and I email them, I'll probably get a poop emoji. Like, if, like the way, if you email about Twitter, it's, there's just like, well, we don't have to talk to you. And so it's not, it's not an ideal situation <laugh>, but, but if someone comes up to me and says, I want to drive an EV across country, what's the best way to do it? My immediate answer is, and even though I don't want this vehicle, I wouldn't recommend anyone buying this vehicle other than this situation. Buy a model three.

Leo Laporte (01:59:41):
It is one of the reasons I bought a Model X. I actually, my first electric vehicle was a Tesla Model X. And I didn't buy it until they put a supercharger just down the road in Petaluma. Cuz I, in my mind, and I think it's probably true, a lot of people who have never owned EVs thought, oh, I need to have a supercharger or, you know, and what I didn't realize is 99.9% of the time I charge at home,

Roberto Baldwin (02:00:02):
You never, we

Leo Laporte (02:00:03):
I have a gas station in my house.

Roberto Baldwin (02:00:05):
Yeah. I have all this free charging credit with Electrify America for a Hyundai, for our Kono lx. Me too. That we, we used it the first, like, the first two times we charged and we haven't used, it's been like two years. Yeah. We have to use these <laugh> and I can't use, I have a

Leo Laporte (02:00:18):
Quarter million miles for my four Mak and I've used EA once.

Roberto Baldwin (02:00:25):
Yeah. You just don't use, I don't need it. Plugging it at home. Yeah. And I'm like, we have to figure out, we have to use it somehow. My wife went on one road trip to like San Joaquin Valley and used it. Then there's still probably 225 3 kilowatt hours of hours. See don't tip

Nicole Wakelin (02:00:39):
Though. If you do the road trip, it's the road trip thing. If you drive long distances, you go outta your little circle of comfort where, you know, where Chargers uhuh then. So you wanna use, use it.

Leo Laporte (02:00:49):
Not gonna do it. I like my circle. Never gonna go.

Nicole Wakelin (02:00:51):
Never gonna go. He's staying in your circle. That's it. Okay. But Americans but meant worry about it. Leo <laugh>.

Roberto Baldwin (02:00:55):
That's the crazy thing is that Americans think they take way more road trips than they actually,

Leo Laporte (02:00:59):
They really don't.

Roberto Baldwin (02:00:59):
Yeah. Because they all remember as kids, because flight was so incredibly We did when we were

Leo Laporte (02:01:04):
Kids, when

Roberto Baldwin (02:01:04):
We, you everyone drove everywhere. But now you can get a flight for 50 bucks Yeah. To like, to, to like LA from San Francisco where you don't

Leo Laporte (02:01:12):
Have to spend three days in the car with your kids. <Laugh>. Yeah. We're taking, we're taking Michael to Green Bay to see the Packers. Cuz somehow I don't understand how this kid grew up in the Bay Area is a Packers fan genetic mutation. But we're sure as hell not driving to Wisconsin. That would be insane. Yeah. But

Roberto Baldwin (02:01:28):
In the seventies and eighties you would. Yeah. And so all the kids who have grown up now, we all think we're doing all these crazy road trips. The reality is we're not. And you know, when you're driving to work, you feel like you're driving so much further. You actually are because you're stuck in traffic. It takes an hour to go 20 miles. Yeah. We, yeah. So it, but so it, there's this like, so there's this huge like mental, like block within the American psyche when it comes to driving that. No, I need to have a supercharger. I need to be able to drive from here, from San Francisco to Philadelphia. Adam,

Leo Laporte (02:01:58):
Notice <laugh>, you never know. It

Roberto Baldwin (02:02:01):
Could happen. You never

Leo Laporte (02:02:02):
Know. You never know. You

Roberto Baldwin (02:02:03):
Never know what's gonna happen. Okay. And even though every morning you get up and your car is full of, you know, gas. If you have an ev it's, it, the tank is full of electricity mm-hmm. <Affirmative> every morning. You never have to go to the gas station. You have to deal with that junk ever again. If, if, you know, if you're just cruising around town, like we, mostly what we do, the the, we are still stuck in that mindset that we're always driving hundreds and hundreds of miles every week.

Leo Laporte (02:02:26):
We all think

Sam Abuelsamid (02:02:27):
So. So we're the

Leo Laporte (02:02:28):
Blues brothers

Sam Abuelsamid (02:02:29):
Flip side. Yeah. Let me, let me give you the flip side of, of what Robbie just said though. <Laugh>

Roberto Baldwin (02:02:33):
The blues

Sam Abuelsamid (02:02:34):
<Laugh>. Yeah. So he's absolutely right that God, most people rarely, if ever take long road trips and you know, 85% of daily driving is less than 40 miles a day. So the vast majority of people could get along just fine with an EV that has a 200 mile range. And at, I mean, or 110 mile range as Lisa has found out <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (02:02:58):
But that's, by the way, that sounds a good day with a win at your back and her mini Cooper, it's usually more like 80 miles <laugh>. But you know what, that's plenty because she drives it to work and back. She drives it around town. That's plenty.

Sam Abuelsamid (02:03:12):
Right. But but what you said Leo, you know about, you know, you charge it at home almost all the time. Yeah. Same for same for Robbie. Yeah. And you know, when you look at the people that are buying EVs today, that is absolutely true. The vast majority of 'em just do most of their charging at home. You know, and but the reality is most people don't buy new cars. We sell three and a half times as many used cars in the United States every year. Cause most

Leo Laporte (02:03:37):
People are smart. I'm the only idiot buying a car that's going to depreciate 50% the day I drive it off Those <laugh>. Why? But that new car smell though, oh, it's worth it, isn't it? Right. Doesn't, that's all you guys ever smell. You're like the queen. They say the queen of England. Only everything smelled like fresh paint to the queen of England. Cuz she never went anywhere that hadn't just been freshly painted for her visit. Yeah. You guys think all cars smell really good. All cars smell like new cars smell. It's only driven new cars. <Laugh>. Mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. So it's glorious <laugh> so

Sam Abuelsamid (02:04:06):
Jealous. You know, the the reality is, you know that people that actually can afford to buy new cars are much more likely to live in a single family home with off-street parking. And they will, they will charge at home. But as, as EVs start to filter into the used car market. Oh, that's a good point. Buy people

Leo Laporte (02:04:21):
In apartments.

Sam Abuelsamid (02:04:22):
10, 15 year old cars. Yeah. Yeah. You have a much higher proportion. You know, probably half of those people that don't live somewhere where they have off-street parking. Those people are going to be dependent on public charging infrastructure. That's a great point. A lot of which is gonna be DC fast charging. Yeah. So it is critical that we actually make this stuff reliable because even though we may not use it as much as, as you think today, 10 years from now, we'll be, a lot of people will be much more reliant on those public chargers. And so, you know, going to Tesla today and which will put economic pressure on the Electrify Americas and Ev goes and, and charge points of the world to get their act together and improve their charging network reliability is, I think is really important. Yeah. I don't want, I don't want Tesla to have a monopoly and I don't think they will. I think that the competitive

Leo Laporte (02:05:17):
Pressure, he says, you told me on asthe tech guys, he has op in effect open sourced the the ncast charger. Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Sam Abuelsamid (02:05:25):
The connect mm-hmm. The connector's open source. Okay. cuz GM and Ford both confirmed to me in the last couple of days that no, they're, they don't have to pay any royalty to,

Leo Laporte (02:05:33):
They would never

Sam Abuelsamid (02:05:34):
The free

Leo Laporte (02:05:35):
Of charge adopted it if they'd had to pay Elon. No. Yeah. No. Okay. Okay. Because that's the, that's the last thing we'd wanna see, which is, I mean, Elon's bad enough, but if he owned every, effectively every gas station in America, he'd really be insufferable. I mean we, because he's not now <laugh>. Well just imagine. Right. Well, how do we feel about Mr. Bean? That's the question. Rowan Atkinson running in the Guardian. I love electric vehicles and was an early adopter, but increasingly I feel duped. Now you might wonder why you would listen to Mr. Bean about anything, but he points out that he in fact got his university degree in electrical and electronic engineering and a master's in control system. So I guess I didn't know this. He was an engineer before he became famous for being stupid. <Laugh>, that's, that's the most after description of Mr.

(02:06:32):
Bean famous for being stupid. Stupid, okay. Yeah. Famous for being stupid. Yeah. He says, when you drill into the facts, electric motoring doesn't seem to be quite the environmental panacea it is claimed to be. Now we've heard this before from the gas vehicle industry that, oh. And, and anybody who doesn't like electric cars, which is most people who own ice cars oh. You know, those emissions in the making of the electric cars are, are so high and the usage of you know, rare earth elements and lithium is so bad for the environment. <Laugh>, is that true?

Sam Abuelsamid (02:07:09):
Not entirely. No, not really. It does, it does take more energy and there's more emissions associated with producing batteries and EVs than it is with internal combustion cars.

Leo Laporte (02:07:20):
He says Volvo released figures at greenhouse gas emissions during production of electric car are 70% higher than for manufacturing a petrol one. Is that right?

Sam Abuelsamid (02:07:30):
That, that is, that is absolutely correct. Based on the way that we make batteries today. Which means mining lithium and nickel and cobalt, you know, out of the ground and shipping it to China, you know, from South America or, or Indonesia and processing it there and then shipping it to nor to, to a Volvo factory in, in Sweden. So yes, that is correct. So as far as it goes, but it's not the whole story. Once that vehicle is in, in use and it's not emitting anything or, or at least it's not directly emitting anything, even when you factor in power plant emissions, the crossover point is on average is usually somewhere around three to four years after, after three to four years in use from that point on, the EV will have less life cycle emissions over, over its entire vehicle life there. No

Leo Laporte (02:08:22):
Gas emissions, the gas

Sam Abuelsamid (02:08:23):
Vehicle. Yeah. Right. Cuz you're not adding any, or you're adding very much less in terms of power plant emissions. And that

Roberto Baldwin (02:08:29):
Isn't taken into account like the, the drilling for oil, transporting oil. Right. You're in a boat for oil doing this other thing for oil, doing all these things that have the, you know, the oil industrial complex, all the things that are going on that's not even taking any of that into account. While at the same time they're taking into account the mining of lithium. They're not taking into account the, you know, drilling for oil

Sam Abuelsamid (02:08:51):
Mm-Hmm. <Affirmative>. And, and when, when that battery reaches its end of life after 150, 200,000 miles, we can recycle that battery. We can't do that with oil. And when you reci, when you take a, a lithium ion battery and you recycle it and then you take those minerals instead of mining them and processing them, you can put them right back into new battery production at a tiny fraction of the total energy cost and emissions of building that new battery. So that 70% number is only true for the first time the original battery being made from virgin materials. After that, those numbers start to go way down. So it's, it's only true as far as it goes, which is not very far.

Leo Laporte (02:09:34):
Mr. Bean says <laugh>, we should Mr. Bean,

Roberto Baldwin (02:09:39):
But Mr. Bean,

Leo Laporte (02:09:40):
Mr. Mr. Bean, Mr. Bean says black adders says we should look at <laugh> hydrogen. Neither vehicles neith and synthetic fuels,

Roberto Baldwin (02:09:52):
Synthetic fuelers still fuels and hydrogen. There's no infrastructure and you still have to make hydrogen <laugh>. And right now the

Leo Laporte (02:09:59):
Idea hydrogen, green hydrogen is a, is a misnomer. The hydrogen is not green yet.

Sam Abuelsamid (02:10:05):
It's like there is green hydrogen, but there's only a tiny amount of it being made. Yeah, yeah. Make, you know, making it by splitting water using renewable energy, you know, it is green hydrogen, there's, there's zero emissions associated with that. Right. But, you know, there is only a tiny fraction of what we would actually need is produced that way today. Someday. Hopefully that will change today. That's not the case.

Leo Laporte (02:10:27):
Formula One says that by 2026 they're gonna go to synthetic fuels that they hope will be net net zero impact on carbon emissions. Is that possible?

Sam Abuelsamid (02:10:40):
Yeah. there's, there's work being done on, you know, so-called eels or synthetic fuels.

Leo Laporte (02:10:45):
I feel very guilty cuz I love Formula One and I'm looking at it and not, not, not just the cars. They're all taking private jets all over the world. 23 weeks a year. I mean, there's a huge carbon footprint, but they're

Sam Abuelsamid (02:10:58):
Getting rid of tire warmers next year. So that'll

Leo Laporte (02:11:00):
Fix. Oh, that'll help it <laugh>. Thank goodness.

Sam Abuelsamid (02:11:02):
Yeah. You know, the, the big problem, the problem with those synthetic fuels, you know, they're, they're using, they're taking, what are they from

Leo Laporte (02:11:08):
The atmosphere? What are they made from? What are they?

Sam Abuelsamid (02:11:10):
Oh, they're, they, they use CO2 from the atmosphere and some other stuff and they, they run it through a process that generates a liquid hydrocarbon fuel that can be a drop-in replacement for gasoline.

Leo Laporte (02:11:22):
And then when you burn it, does it put carbon back into the air? Yes. But the same carbon it took out of the air in the first place.

Sam Abuelsamid (02:11:29):
Yeah. So it's effectively a net zero process. But it's, it's a process that has not yet been scaled up to anything that would be useful for, you know, the amount of fuel that we actually use for ground transportation or aviation. And it's also much more expensive than producing fuels from crude oil.

Leo Laporte (02:11:51):
Well that's fine for Formula One, but probably not for Exactly. It's your Corolla. Yeah.

Roberto Baldwin (02:11:54):
It's great for Formula One because they're already spending billions and billions.

Leo Laporte (02:11:58):
Yeah. Right. It's the least expense.

Roberto Baldwin (02:11:59):
Lots of So we can watch money so we can get that Netflix series every year. Yeah. I literally ignore all of Formula One just so I can watch the Netflix series. I tried to watch Formula One.

Leo Laporte (02:12:07):
It's much more fun if you just watch drive, but I was just like, you

Sam Abuelsamid (02:12:10):
Know what? No,

Leo Laporte (02:12:10):
No, they really

Roberto Baldwin (02:12:11):
Dunno. Know who wins. They take a whole season. Who gets the,

Leo Laporte (02:12:13):
It's the whole season. None of doesn't matter. Yeah. It doesn't matter. None

Roberto Baldwin (02:12:16):
Of that. None of that matters to me. All my friends are always talking about Formula One. I'm like, la, la la la, la. Really? Netflix. All

Leo Laporte (02:12:21):
Right. I don't want know who won cuz I wanna see it on Netflix in a year.

Roberto Baldwin (02:12:25):
Exactly.

Leo Laporte (02:12:26):
<Laugh>. Okay.

Sam Abuelsamid (02:12:27):
That's a good policy. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:12:29):
<Laugh>

Sam Abuelsamid (02:12:30):
Spoiler alert it was Max.

Leo Laporte (02:12:32):
Max. Yeah. It's all Max. All right. I think actually I, I'm intrigued by the idea of making hydrogen with, you know, wind power or somebody, our Chapman says, I'm a nuclear engineer. You can make it with nuclear power. Yeah,

Sam Abuelsamid (02:12:50):
Yeah. Any, any, any source of electricity will work.

Leo Laporte (02:12:53):
So maybe that's the, does it use a lot of electric? It's pretty heavy use of electricity. Well, it

Sam Abuelsamid (02:12:58):
Uses a fair amount, but yeah. You know, I mean if you're, if you're doing it at scale, you know, if you make large wind farms or solar farms or a nuclear plant, you can generate a lot of hydrogen. Yeah. from water. And you know, the other thing, if you do it in coastal areas, you can use that nuclear plant to drive a desalination plant that you can then take that water and you make potable water and you can also take some of that Oh. And split it to produce hydrogen. And, and you know, there's, you know, because

Leo Laporte (02:13:27):
We're gonna need those des fertilization plants real soon.

Sam Abuelsamid (02:13:30):
The, the fact that we, the fact that there aren't any yet along the west coast Yeah. Is quite, should probably quite remarkable to

Leo Laporte (02:13:36):
Me try to be building on those mm-hmm. <Affirmative> and let Mr. Bean have his gas vehicle and <laugh>

Sam Abuelsamid (02:13:42):
Some, somebody poor, bean

Nicole Wakelin (02:13:43):
Poor.

Sam Abuelsamid (02:13:44):
Somebody in the chat did make an interesting point though about tire emissions. You know, over the last, you know, decade or so as particular emissions from diesel engines, you know, the soot that used to be the biggest source of particular emissions had largely gone away because of particulate filters on diesel engines. The biggest source of particular emissions now is tires. And

Leo Laporte (02:14:12):
I know cuz I see on the Formula one racetrack, there's just tire debris all over right there. Yeah.

Sam Abuelsamid (02:14:18):
And, and you get, you know, from road, you know, from regular road tires, you get a lot of airborne particulates. That's right. Because you know, when your tires wear out, I mean, that stuff doesn't just magically vaporize, <laugh>, you know, those little, those little chunks of rubber they end up floating in the

Leo Laporte (02:14:30):
Area. Is that bad stuff that

Sam Abuelsamid (02:14:32):
Rubber Oh yeah. It's very bad for you. Yes. Great. So we live, we tire companies are, are working on trying to reduce that, you know and make tires that, and be, and EVs because they're heavier and also have you know, that instantaneous torque, they put more stress on the tires. So they do, ev tires do wear out faster. And so tire manufacturers are working on new tire formulations to try to reduce that impact.

Leo Laporte (02:15:01):
We live about 200 feet from highway 1 0 1, so that means I'm breathing that <laugh>.

Nicole Wakelin (02:15:06):
Yeah. It's not going to the airs. All we're holding,

Roberto Baldwin (02:15:09):
We're holding these, these, these companies accountable for what they've been adding to, to the environment, which before we weren't really, you know, well we're just driving, you know, javelins and Chargers everywhere and peeling out and, you know, using leaded gasoline. And so over the decades we we're started holding these companies accountable and they have to make changes in order to make the world a an easier place to breathe and live. So it's,

Leo Laporte (02:15:33):
I mean, it's an important point. We, the price we pay for stuff does not reflect the total cost of that stuff. Yeah. And, and the rest is, there's a lot

Sam Abuelsamid (02:15:42):
Of externalities. Mm-Hmm.

Leo Laporte (02:15:43):
Yeah. Those externalities are subsidized either by the government or by us or by our lungs. And that really should be part of the total. Cause, you know, 33 cents a gallon gasoline for decades in my use really cost a lot more than 33 cents a gallon in the long run. And if you, and if you live in, are you getting any of the smoke from Canada in New Hampshire? Or is it blowing?

Nicole Wakelin (02:16:07):
I did. We did. It's gone now, but for a while it was actually pretty bad. You could, you couldn't smell it, but you could see it. We have that weird sort of orange hazy tattoo. You looked to the sky mm-hmm. <Affirmative> for about two days. <Laugh>. yeah. And they, you know, everybody who, anybody who had any kind of breathing issue, you noticed it. So yeah, we did have that from the fires

Sam Abuelsamid (02:16:26):
For a bit. Yeah, that's a perfect, and Tuesday, Wednesday the air

Leo Laporte (02:16:28):
Quality index around here was about around two 50. Oh yeah. In New York. Well over 400. That's terrible. Just a terrible, terrible thing. And I think they said it's gonna continue for a while. Yeah. cuz those fire,

Nicole Wakelin (02:16:42):
We can off and on warnings. Like, they're like, today's bad, tomorrow's not. Like, you gotta look at the weather for day to day at

Leo Laporte (02:16:47):
This point. And honestly, that is also the cost of 33 cents a gallon gasoline and a bunch of four gallon a mile gas guzzler for decades. That's part of the cost. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>

Roberto Baldwin (02:17:02):
And the, the, the, the thought process is like, well, EVs aren't gonna solve it all. I'm like, yes. It's, it's a part, it's a part of a solution. And it's like, you know, we, we used to still have to,

Leo Laporte (02:17:11):
We got a lot of solve the do, let's put, we got

Roberto Baldwin (02:17:13):
A a lot of solve the, do we, you know, we need a, we need a more robust public transportation system. We need more, you know, more protected bike lanes for people to ride their bikes who don't have, you don't need to drive your car everywhere. You can have a nice bike ride and we want to go somewhere, you know, there's, you know, we have to change. We try to get rid of all the, you know, the, those high emission peakers on the grid try to get rid of coal fires, you know, and all these things are changing, but mostly they're changing because of, for monetary reasons. Right. Like, it's cheaper to have batteries next to a, a power plant than it is to, to to fire up a, a coal burning or a diesel burning peaker on, on the grid. It's not because the, you know, the, the utilities feel better about making us feel better <laugh>. It's because, oh, it's cheaper to do this. Right. It's also cleaner, but it's cheaper.

Leo Laporte (02:17:56):
<Laugh>, you know, I don't care what their incentives are as long as they do the right thing. Yeah. Please do the right thing. Yeah, because it doesn't, it doesn't, it's not looking good. I gotta say, meanwhile, the US government wants you to believe in UFOs, <laugh>,

Roberto Baldwin (02:18:13):
Don't you?

Leo Laporte (02:18:15):
<Laugh> you say that as if you don't believe in UFOs. I don't believe in UFOs, but there's, there's a lot of people very excited about alien visitors. Apparently lately what's been going on is a former national security professional who was assigned to the unidentified aerial phenomenon task force for three years now, says he's seen things <laugh> <laugh> you not believe, believe

Roberto Baldwin (02:18:50):
I've seen things.

Leo Laporte (02:18:51):
He's seen parts of alien seen things craft, and he's seen alien b bodies apparently that the government is Oh, Bob

Roberto Baldwin (02:18:59):
Lazar, are we talking about Bob Lazar?

Leo Laporte (02:19:01):
No, no, no. That's a, now Bob Lazar has been discredited. I a different way think different. Right. Okay. Alright. That was, that was back in seen seen.

Nicole Wakelin (02:19:07):
Maybe you don't believe him, but you never know, you know, it

Roberto Baldwin (02:19:09):
Was all part of maybe the government scheme

Leo Laporte (02:19:11):
Anyway. No, this is a new guy Dave gr who I don't know what he's seen, but he says he's seen <laugh>, he's seen things you wouldn't believe stuff. And the, and this is an interesting in the New York Times from Russ Duta who says, okay, why is this guy who is actually a credible, he's still working in the US government. He's operating through national normal national security channels making this report. Why is this guy all of a sudden surfacing? And he says he actually thinks it's the US government doing this. He says, there may not be alien spacecraft, but there clearly now is a faction within the national security complex that wants Americans to think there might be alien spacecraft.

Nicole Wakelin (02:20:01):
Why? What would the Well,

Roberto Baldwin (02:20:02):
There's a, there's a couple of reasons. A if they do know, and eventually it's gonna get out, eventually someone's gonna get, because we all have cameras on our, with us at all times. Eventually someone's gonna get real credible e evidence and if we've already like accepted it, then it's fine. B they're doing some crazy stuff with, with planes and technology and it's super easy to just, oh, pretend like it was a, Hey, no

Leo Laporte (02:20:26):
Attention. That's not our vehicle. That's an

Roberto Baldwin (02:20:28):
Alien. It must have been a ufo. Right.

Nicole Wakelin (02:20:31):
It's a great excuse for hiding all sorts of, of super secret stuff. Well, that's

Sam Abuelsamid (02:20:36):
An alien. Actually, you know what, what it really is is, you know, it's all those companies doing urban air mobility craft, you know those EVs Yeah. Ev towels that are crashing. That's what he's actually been seeing is the crashed VTOLs <laugh> be, they don't want, they don't want to upset the investors. So the, the, the, the, the military has been collecting these, these crashes, crash vehicles and hiding them away. So nobody knows that these things are inherently unsafe.

Leo Laporte (02:21:01):
He says this is why there was all that attention to military shoot downs of balloons earlier this year. C c it also includes, according to Duta, examples of other credentialed figures like the Stanford pathology professor Gary Nolan, who claimed they're being handed evidence of extraterrestrial contact writers are being fed. Strange stories, <laugh> strange,

Nicole Wakelin (02:21:29):
Strange stories. What strange

Leo Laporte (02:21:31):
Stories? Now I have to say the, the, the, the mere thought that somebody would have the skills, the faster than speed of light vehicles. The ability to transit huge distances to come here and then just crash seems unlike me.

Roberto Baldwin (02:21:49):
Well, well, you know what it, they had autopilot on and they're like, like, cuz most of the time it's fine. And every That's right. Once in a while it's

Leo Laporte (02:21:57):
Like the highway driving and then we got, there's a planet. We got to the 4 0 5 and of course we crashed. It was the pale

Roberto Baldwin (02:22:04):
You planet Earth is like a, like a, like a flock of sheep in the room.

Nicole Wakelin (02:22:08):
<Laugh> we're giant pile of sheep. It's one giant sheep.

Sam Abuelsamid (02:22:11):
I read Project Hail Mary while I was on vacation. Great book. Yeah. It's clear that you can, you can do all of that stuff. And they, they have just come here. I mean, look at how many times they've very nearly crashed in that book. That's true. So I think, I think what aliens you said is entirely

Leo Laporte (02:22:25):
No better than Mr. Bean. Once they get here, <laugh> anything. They're

Nicole Wakelin (02:22:30):
All,

Leo Laporte (02:22:30):
Anything could

Nicole Wakelin (02:22:31):
Happen. Anything could happen.

Roberto Baldwin (02:22:33):
My dad works for the military and he would go to area 51 occasionally to work on planes. He had top secret clearance and he would not say, tell me a goddamn state he knew. So I become very, I became very obsessed. And so in the nineties I ended up finding a bunch of of information online, like this big book

Leo Laporte (02:22:52):
About So that's how you knew about Bob. Very, so

Nicole Wakelin (02:22:55):
That's Yeah. He's part of it. He's part of it. Robbie's part of the writers being willing to fed weird science. So

Leo Laporte (02:23:01):
That's, so Robbie, what is you, you know, you've done the research. What's your thinking on this?

Roberto Baldwin (02:23:06):
We all have phones. How come we don't see anything? <Laugh>

Leo Laporte (02:23:09):
<Laugh>.

Roberto Baldwin (02:23:10):
It's like Bigfoot Yeti, all the things that we are like, oh, well we had a picture, but you know, you don't always have a phone. Now everyone's walking around Loch Nest with phones in their pocket. We're all in the woods because, you know, we love the hike. There's a whole, you know, there's r ei, there's sports basement, there's all these companies that just go out in the woods and wander around. And we have, we have phones with us there. We have cameras for everything. And we, we just don't have anything. No, see,

Nicole Wakelin (02:23:35):
Because the aliens are cagey.

Sam Abuelsamid (02:23:36):
Ro Robbie was indoctrinated by his father. So he's clearly part of this conspiracy. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>.

Roberto Baldwin (02:23:40):
That's true.

Sam Abuelsamid (02:23:41):
That's also think, think about it, the with with all of the image processing that we have on our phones, do you really think that if we e even if we did see something, then our phones would actually allow us to capture that information. Oh, that's

Roberto Baldwin (02:23:52):
Another good thing. They've

Sam Abuelsamid (02:23:53):
Clearly been programmed. They

Roberto Baldwin (02:23:53):
Have cloaking devices like Clingons. They've, and the

Nicole Wakelin (02:23:56):
Men in black guys, when you see it, they did a little pew thing and that's it. Now. Poof. You don't know anything. You took the video, you deleted it. Poof. Now you've forgotten. I

Leo Laporte (02:24:04):
Think the very clear evidence there is no such thing is if there were Donald Trump would've accidentally revealed it long ago.

Nicole Wakelin (02:24:11):
<Laugh>,

Sam Abuelsamid (02:24:12):
There's, yeah, you're probably

Roberto Baldwin (02:24:13):
That's true. He would've like just tweeted. Tweeted no. And then the aliens calls

Leo Laporte (02:24:18):
Redacted. Says it. You

Sam Abuelsamid (02:24:19):
Know, it's all, it's all in Trump's bathroom. <Laugh>. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:24:21):
You know that. All right, let's take a little break. We've got a few more stories. We can wrap it up soon. You guys are fantastic. The wheel bearings takeover has been a massive success. Thanks to thanks to you three, Nicole and Robbie. And Sam, it's great to have all three of you on the show this week. We really appreciate it. Our show today brought to you by Lookout, look out you, aliens, <laugh>,

Nicole Wakelin (02:24:45):
You're on the 4 0 5. There's

Leo Laporte (02:24:47):
Sheep business. Not that kinda lookout. Different kind of lookout. Business has changed forever. Boundaries to where we work, even how we work, seem to have just vanished in the haze. That's mean. Your means your data now is, is always on the move. It could be anywhere. Right? Whether on a device in the cloud, across networks, down at the local coffee shop, great for your workforce. A little bit of a challenge for your IT security. That's why you need Lookout. Lookout helps you control your data and free your workspace. Lookout gives you complete visibility into everything, all your data, so you can minimize risk from internal and external threats. You can ensure compliance and by seamlessly securing hybrid work, your organization doesn't have to give up productivity for security. Lookout makes it security a lot simpler working with multiple point solutions and legacy tools in today's environment.

(02:25:41):
That's just too complex. Lookout gives you a single unified platform that reduces it Complexity, gives you more time to focus on whatever else comes your way. It loves it. Your users will love it. You'll love the security cuz the truth is good data protection shouldn't be a cage. It should be a springboard so that you and your organization can leap forward into the future. If you're making visit lookout.com today to learn how to safeguard data secure hybrid work, reduce it complexity. Lookout Lookout, L O O K O U t lookout.com. We thank up so much for supporting twit, you support TWIT by using that address. Then they know you saw it here. Lookout.Com. Now look out because we had a great week this week and I've made a little video so that you can enjoy all the highlights. Watch,

Leo Laporte (02:28:15):
We also want to thank all of our club Twit members for making this show possible on all of our shows. Club Twit is seven bucks a month. You get a lot of benefits including ad-free versions of everything we do. You wouldn't even hear this ad for Club Twit in the club. Twit feed and shows, we don't put out anywhere else. Like Home Theater Geeks with Scott Wilkinson, hands on Mack with Micah Sergeant. There's some great shows just for the club. We use the club to launch new programming. That's where this week weekend space came from because club members subsidize it. They've, they've, they've, they've, they help us do this stuff on the air. So if you're not a member of Club Twit, you wanna get ad free versions of the shows. You want to see those other shows. Oh, and by the way, you want to get in the Discord, which is a wonderful hang. It is. It is the future of Social twit tv slash club twit. Seven bucks a month, $84 a year. Tell your spouse, we don't want <laugh>, we don't want any chargebacks. We got, we got a couple of chargebacks. I think almost all of our chargebacks come from geeks who bought a year-long subscription. And then their wives or husbands, their spouses noticed this and said, what's this? And, and said, that's fraudulent <laugh>. And now we have to pay them back.

Sam Abuelsamid (02:29:31):
Please.

Leo Laporte (02:29:32):
Does that happen on your Patreon? Does that ever happen to you guys?

Sam Abuelsamid (02:29:37):
N not that

Leo Laporte (02:29:39):
I know must be a unique thing. That's just us. I don't know why, why that is. And chargebacks, you know, this are terrible. I mean, all of a sudden mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, at some point, Stripe is gonna say, you can't use us anymore. So please tell your spouse. Okay. That's all I ask. <Laugh>, Coinbase and Binance getting cracked out. Is it over for crypto a Coinbase? I hope

Sam Abuelsamid (02:30:02):
So. <Laugh> No,

Leo Laporte (02:30:04):
Never.

Sam Abuelsamid (02:30:04):
Crypto is never going, never gonna die. It's never going away. Ever, ever. It's gonna be around forever. Morphing religion. It's religion Now.

Leo Laporte (02:30:12):
The Security Exchange Commission says Coinbase Base and Binance are unregistered security exchanges that crypto is a security. And Coinbase said, well, you, you should have told us that the rules weren't clear. We like many other crypto entities that have been asking for regulation, asking for clarity, Paul Gral, Coinbase chief legal Officer, says the solutions' legislation that allows fair rules for the road to be developed transparently and applied equally not litigation. So s e C has now sued Binance, the world's largest crypto trading platform. And now Coinbase oh,

Sam Abuelsamid (02:30:59):
I don't, I don't think it's the s e c that should be regulating crypto, but the Nevada Gaming Commission. Yeah. <laugh>. <Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (02:31:06):
It's kind of a gamble. Is that what you're saying? A little.

Sam Abuelsamid (02:31:10):
And the house always wins.

Leo Laporte (02:31:12):
It does seem to fall in between the cracks. Is it, is it money? Is it, is it speculation? Is it security? I don't. It is. It's it's something new that doesn't exist. That never existed before. In any event Robinhood has announced they're gonna stop letting you buy crypto at the end of the month. Mm. I wonder if it's the end of the line for cryptocurrency. No, I don't

Nicole Wakelin (02:31:35):
Think it's gonna keep going. I think it's just gonna hang on there. It's gonna keep changing. It's never going away. The S E C's gonna sue one guy and then another guy's gonna come up and they're gonna have to change like

Leo Laporte (02:31:43):
Whack-A-Mole.

Nicole Wakelin (02:31:44):
They'll sue. Yeah. Like Whack-a-mole. Oh, the next guy b Pop Bob. And they're gonna keep Yeah. Going after him.

Leo Laporte (02:31:50):
It is 10 years since Edward Snowden and his revelations changed our world. Snowden says, you know, thanks to me, end to end, end to end encryption is everywhere. We now under understand what the governments are, are learning about us and we, and we are more aware of privacy. I also think <laugh>, it's a little weird that he is now a Russian citizen, <laugh>. He's been living in Moscow for the past 10 years. But that's mostly cuz the US wouldn't let him live anywhere else. He was in Hong Kong, they chased him outta Hong Kong. He had planned to go to Ecuador until he was told you can't go there. So now he's a Russian citizen. The good news is you can't be extradited if you're a Russian citizen. I am so up in the air on this one. I just, I don't,

Roberto Baldwin (02:32:48):
Yeah, I think it's the same. Like on one hand you're like, okay, he brought a lot of, you know, horrible things that are going on to light. And he did, you know, he did for the public to understand privacy and encryption is a huge deal. But at the same time,

Leo Laporte (02:33:03):
He jeopardized national security. Keith Alexander, who was an NSA director, well he also

Roberto Baldwin (02:33:07):
Trusted Glen Greenwald, which is

Leo Laporte (02:33:09):
Another mistake is

Roberto Baldwin (02:33:11):
Possible. They just, that, that right there is the biggest mistake he made. It wasn't like the, it was like, oh, I'm gonna trust the biggest idiot in, in journalism, <laugh>

Sam Abuelsamid (02:33:19):
<Laugh>. You know, I, I think, I think what the way Snowden did it, you know, I think his intentions were good, you know, and, and, you know, trying to pick somebody to work with and make sure everything stayed encrypted and, you know, review everything. And, and not just like, WikiLeaks just published the whole thing, you know? He, he tried

Leo Laporte (02:33:37):
To do it. No, he went to a bunch of journalists. Yeah. He let them vet the information. Right.

Sam Abuelsamid (02:33:42):
And, and do it in a res, tried to do it in a responsible way. He

Leo Laporte (02:33:45):
Said, I went to, to Robbie's

Sam Abuelsamid (02:33:46):
Point, Glen Greenwald.

Leo Laporte (02:33:48):
Right? Well, but you know, at the time, we might not have known, you know, that Glen was what he was to become. But honestly, he says, Snowden says, I tried whistle blowing. They, it didn't work. They wouldn't listen to me. I had to do this. And it certainly, we've learned a lot from him about you knowl scooping up everyone's records. In in 2015, Congress wrote the U USA Freedom Act, which made that illegal rightly so. So there there've been some shifts and benefits. This is terrible. But I f I feel like he should have done what reality winner did what Chelsea did, Chelsea Manning, he should have done what he did, and then stood up and, and, and taken the charges. But in respon, you know, he said, I'm responsible. Look, I think this is important. I will go to court. I will, I will be tried. And if you put me in jail, you put me in jail. Yeah. Going to Russia taint him a

Roberto Baldwin (02:34:50):
Little bit. It yeah, it does. It taints it a lot. Because, you know, he, he, he can't say any, you know, how, how do you feel about the Ukraine War? Edwards? No, you're never gonna hear about that <laugh>, because

Leo Laporte (02:35:00):
Russia, he says, I'm Russia. He says, according to the, to npr, I'm constantly criticizing the Russian government's policy. The Russian government's human rights record. Even the Russian president by name, I think he's not doing it really loudly. I

Roberto Baldwin (02:35:13):
Think he's

Nicole Wakelin (02:35:14):
Criticizing

Roberto Baldwin (02:35:15):
At night

Nicole Wakelin (02:35:16):
Super quietly. He whispers

Leo Laporte (02:35:18):
No blanket over his head.

Nicole Wakelin (02:35:19):
Right. He's like, the president's terrible. Okay, now I'm going to bed. Like, what? How does that

Roberto Baldwin (02:35:24):
<Laugh> And, and also you live in Russia, so I, you know, if you're not being critical of, of Putin because you live in Russia and you don't want to fall out of a window <laugh>, which thing that happens to happen a lot in Russia. Yeah. then Yeah, I understand. But it also seems you need better railings, sir. I, I dunno, <laugh>, you need better railings, better windows. I don't know what the, the situation is with Russia and Windows, but, but the people just fallen out of 'em. And they always to be people who Putin are angry with. Maybe they're just so sad because Putin's not happy with them. They're just leaning on the window, smoking a cigarette. Ah,

Leo Laporte (02:35:57):
Who, who put Pluto? I mean, my tea <laugh>.

Roberto Baldwin (02:36:00):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:36:01):
What? That's crazy. How

Roberto Baldwin (02:36:04):
Did people, how did I get poisoned? Just because I was critical of the President. I

Leo Laporte (02:36:09):
Actually like how quippy Quint in our discord chat put it, he did the right thing in the wrong way. Yeah. That's kind of how I feel.

Roberto Baldwin (02:36:21):
Yeah. I think

Nicole Wakelin (02:36:22):
A lot of people feel that way. He's trying to do a good thing, but he just did a good thing. Bad <laugh>. He is

Leo Laporte (02:36:26):
Still charged. If he were to come back, he would face charges. He's got a family and children now in Russia.

Roberto Baldwin (02:36:32):
Oh, he's not coming back

Leo Laporte (02:36:33):
Then. He's not coming back.

Nicole Wakelin (02:36:35):
It's the truth. He's not coming back.

Leo Laporte (02:36:37):
So I'm grateful to him for what he did. I really am. I think it was important. I yeah, I just yeah. I don't know. I think you, if you're gonna do something so honorable, so important it's hard. But you gotta stand up and, and, and take the face. The don't do the crime. If you can't do the time in the words, Kelly,

Nicole Wakelin (02:36:58):
The have the courage, encourage your convictions. Like, to, you're gonna, if you're gonna do that, and you're gonna go out there and you're gonna do something, you know, is iffy for a good reason, then like, okay, I believe in it so much. I will take the heat for whatever I have done in the interest of getting this information out there.

Roberto Baldwin (02:37:11):
And then the trial, just even in, in discovery for the trial, they would've been able to, you know, uncover more things that had been going on. Right. There's a lot of, you know, and even if he gets convicted, you know, there's gonna be, there will always be people who are like, oh, well, what he did is just wrong, top to bottom. And like, all right. But I think a majority of of of people understand what he did. And, and what that means for us, privacy and encryption wise is it was a benefit. And I think, you know, at some point a president would be like, you know what, just go home. And wherever you're from that don't

Leo Laporte (02:37:44):
Know where. That's

Roberto Baldwin (02:37:45):
Edward Stone,

Leo Laporte (02:37:46):
Chelsea Manning, right. Obama commuted. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> her,

Roberto Baldwin (02:37:51):
You're like, you did a, you did a,

Leo Laporte (02:37:53):
You did a bad thing. You

Roberto Baldwin (02:37:54):
Did a bad thing for a good

Leo Laporte (02:37:55):
Reason. For a good reason. Exactly. Yeah.

Roberto Baldwin (02:37:57):
That benefits others. So, and the country in general.

Leo Laporte (02:38:01):
Anyway hey, I'm so glad you guys were here. What a, what a great time to spend some time with the wheel bearings crew. Sam suggested this and I was glad you did. We've done some takeovers with other podcasts and it's really fun cuz you have a relationship. You know, you guys, you work well together and I'm glad you could let me be part of of that of that team.

Sam Abuelsamid (02:38:23):
Thank you. It was fun.

Nicole Wakelin (02:38:24):
Thank you. This was fun.

Leo Laporte (02:38:25):
Is wheel bearings, do you, I mean it mostly you talk about the cars you're driving Right. But, you know, basically,

Sam Abuelsamid (02:38:31):
Well we, and we also talk about you know, some of the, you know, the transportation news of the week. Yeah. You know, we do interviews with people in the industry from time to time. While, while we're on vacation a couple of weeks back, you know, we actually have published a whole episode that was just interviews that we did at the New York Auto Show. I

Leo Laporte (02:38:51):
Listened to that one.

Sam Abuelsamid (02:38:51):
Yeah. With executives from a bunch of different companies. So yeah. You know, and, and we answered listener questions as well, you know, so if you wanna, if you wanna send us questions about, you know, what you should buy or, you know, if you have comments about some topic related to vehicles, you know, feedback@wheelbearings.media, you can send it there. Or you know, we've got a discord as well. So we, we welcome the input from from listeners

Nicole Wakelin (02:39:18):
And they talk about cars. And I talk about how cars hold cookies cuz I like cookies. Yeah. So there's always an element of we're the best place to store cookies are in a car. Cuz treats are important.

Leo Laporte (02:39:27):
<Laugh> It is interesting how for so many years cars didn't have cup holders, then they had dozens. See <laugh>. Yeah.

Nicole Wakelin (02:39:34):
These are important things. You have to, you have to talk about this stuff. Real people want. I don't care about the horsepower and the torque. Like, where am I gonna put my coffee?

Roberto Baldwin (02:39:41):
Perini does not have a cup holder. What? Right. It does not have a, the Lamborghini does not have a cup holder. Does it have a cookie? Cookie holder? Wait for your phone. Okay. And there's room for maybe another phone. And that's it

Leo Laporte (02:39:52):
Really? That's

Roberto Baldwin (02:39:52):
It. It is just it. Yeah. That's it. You, it's, or you can put something in your, in the glove compartment, but the little shelf behind you, there's a fire extinguisher because, you know, <laugh>. So yeah, there's like, yeah,

Leo Laporte (02:40:05):
I think every car should have a fire extinguisher. Just to remind you, that's

Sam Abuelsamid (02:40:08):
Actually not a bad idea.

Nicole Wakelin (02:40:10):
Just in case. In case you never know what could happen.

Leo Laporte (02:40:12):
Wow.

Roberto Baldwin (02:40:13):
Important to be safe.

Leo Laporte (02:40:14):
It's an interesting statement by Lamborghini. You never know what's gonna happen as

Roberto Baldwin (02:40:19):
Soon as you're going on a track. If you're going on a track, you have to have a a, a fire extinguisher anyway. It's

Leo Laporte (02:40:23):
A race car. You have a race car and you're driving on the street with it. Yeah. What could possibly go wrong? No,

Nicole Wakelin (02:40:29):
I'm more worried about the cookies. The car can catch fire. I want a spot for my cookies. Where

Leo Laporte (02:40:32):
Do you put your cookies?

Nicole Wakelin (02:40:34):
You ha it depends on the car. Sometimes you have a little spot in the center console. They have this whole table in the F-150 that like flips out and you can, like the

Leo Laporte (02:40:42):
F-150, you can get a kitchen built in. Right? Yeah. Well that's pretty,

Nicole Wakelin (02:40:45):
That's what I want. You have like, you can put, I, I did a video of it and I had it on. I have a site, the road reflected, and I do another podcast. And I did a whole thing about the cookie table that Ford calls a work table. And it's a misnomer. It's a cookie table.

Roberto Baldwin (02:40:57):
It's a burrito table. If you're in West coast, it's

Sam Abuelsamid (02:40:59):
Perfect for a box of crumble cookies. It

Nicole Wakelin (02:41:01):
Is, it holds a box of crumble cookies. East

Roberto Baldwin (02:41:03):
Coast is cookies. West Coast

Nicole Wakelin (02:41:05):
Practice <laugh>.

Roberto Baldwin (02:41:06):
That's how, that's how, that's how it breaks down. Like somewhere, I guess in Colorado it probably is where the split is, to be honest.

Leo Laporte (02:41:12):
Do you find if

Sam Abuelsamid (02:41:12):
You're in Hawaii, you get a

Nicole Wakelin (02:41:13):
Poke split?

Leo Laporte (02:41:14):
Is is the, is is the more expensive the vehicle, the more likely it will have a cookie table? Or is it the other way around?

Nicole Wakelin (02:41:21):
The more expensive vehicles have more storage spots. They do. I just wanna point out like tables and like little nooks and crannies and little shelves and things where you can put cookies

Leo Laporte (02:41:30):
In every single episode of the road. Reflected has food in the title.

Nicole Wakelin (02:41:34):
It does. There's Turkish always food, something.

Leo Laporte (02:41:37):
Cookies. Donuts.

Nicole Wakelin (02:41:38):
There's always, it's like car, car food.

Leo Laporte (02:41:41):
Yeah. So is a, is it a car podcast or a food podcast? It's

Nicole Wakelin (02:41:45):
A car podcast, but at the end there's a treat at the end. There's a little bit of food.

Roberto Baldwin (02:41:49):
Nicole wanted to write off all of her treats. That's all she was. She wanted trash right off for all of her snacking. This

Leo Laporte (02:41:55):
Is a very,

Roberto Baldwin (02:41:56):
I do this podcast, very

Leo Laporte (02:41:57):
High, high concept podcast <laugh> last night.

Nicole Wakelin (02:42:01):
Cook food is important. Leo, you're lying if you don't say you think about the food you take on your road trip. I've met

Leo Laporte (02:42:06):
It all time. Last,

Sam Abuelsamid (02:42:07):
Last we went to Montana to drive the, the Jeep Grand Wagoner L Yes, yes. And on the, like, we, we drove, you know, up the drive route to a place where we stopped for lunch. And on the way back we grabbed Jim Morrison, who's the head of not, not, not the one from the doors, but he's the head of the other one of Jeep north America. And you know, cuz we were doing an interview with him in the car, in the SUV while we were driving. And of course, you know, rather than going straight back to the hotel like we were supposed to, we did a little diversion. We found a crumble cookies in Bozeman. Really? Yeah. Went there with, with Jim and, and bought a couple of boxes of cookies that Yes. Most of which she took back to his wife. Cuz he did. Yeah. So it was great.

Nicole Wakelin (02:42:52):
The man has a sweet tooth. It was easy to take him for cookies. And then Sam and I got cookies out of him. He is like, get some cookies, guys. See I was ior motive free cookies.

Sam Abuelsamid (02:43:00):
And then when at the New York Auto Show, I was interviewing Jim and Christian Munie, who is the the head of Jeep Global, the CEO of Jeep, the Jeep brand. And Nicole, we had a, a scheduling

Leo Laporte (02:43:10):
Conflict. So Nicole was interviewing somebody else at the same time and they said, where's Nicole? And Jim said, where's Nicole? And he said, I've got cookies for her <laugh>. And so I told Nicole, oh my God, to go see, go find Jim later. And he actually had cookies for her.

Nicole Wakelin (02:43:23):
That's, he had a box of cookies. You brought 'em over to me and box of really yummy cookies. That's

Leo Laporte (02:43:26):
A good reput.

Nicole Wakelin (02:43:27):
I worked this.

Leo Laporte (02:43:27):
And when you, this reputation, are you so far north of New Hampshire that you're close to the Canadian border?

Nicole Wakelin (02:43:33):
I'm not super close. I'm, I'm think I'm about five hours from Montreal. Oh, so that's quite a drag. Four hours from the bo Yeah. It's,

Leo Laporte (02:43:39):
But close enough to get close Canadian Boston pie.

Nicole Wakelin (02:43:42):
Yeah, because there's all sorts of French Canadians in in Nashua in the town that's near me. So I, there's New Hampshire has lots of, has very large Canadian population and all the, what do they always call 'em? Mes the, their grandmothers, they always made Canadian pork pie and you can Oh, get it at someplace. Good stuff if you've never had it. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:44:02):
I'm something really, really good. I don't know if you notice, but my name is Leola Port. I am French Canadian from a Montreal. Well see. And I grew up in Rhode Island, which was, there were 21 Leola ports in the phone book when I was a kid. It's a very big place for kooks. Okay. And and I am one. I are one, but I've never had Canadian pork pie. So now I'm feeling like how's possible my national heritage requires if my

Nicole Wakelin (02:44:28):
Local bakery has them. My, like you can get them at the bakery in town. They have that. You can see

Leo Laporte (02:44:32):
What makes them Canadian?

Nicole Wakelin (02:44:34):
I don't know. It

Leo Laporte (02:44:36):
Probably is back bacon. Oh, there you go. It's not, it's not Canadian bacon. It's back bacon. Back bacon, bacon. It's, I dunno.

Nicole Wakelin (02:44:43):
Call it, they call it Canadian pork pie. And you find it on the menu all over the, see I

Leo Laporte (02:44:47):
Buy DERs a car that had a Canadian pork pie hatch. That would be <laugh> what's in there? Pork pie. Pork. I don't think I'll find that now.

Nicole Wakelin (02:44:56):
Pie. Yeah, that would work. <Laugh>

Leo Laporte (02:44:59):
Robbie, I haven't seen you in so long. Roberto Baldwin, he writes about cars for a variety of publications, but better than that, if you're in the East Bay area or anywhere in the Bay Area and you get a chance to see Robbie performing <laugh> is either robots or real <laugh> or what are some of the, what are the other band names? Let's get all the band names out here.

Roberto Baldwin (02:45:22):
So there's robots after all. That's the DAF podcast

Leo Laporte (02:45:24):
After all. Robot as opposed to humans after all. Which is, yeah, yeah. The, the,

Roberto Baldwin (02:45:28):
Yeah. So then there's suburban Robots, which is the Devo band.

Leo Laporte (02:45:33):
Oh, they're all robots. Oh, okay.

Roberto Baldwin (02:45:36):
There's North American Scum, which is the l CD sound System and Talking Heads band. Yeah. And then there is the Becky Boys, which is the Back Beastie Boys and Beastie Boys band. And then finally there is drastic Cats, which is the originals band, which is just chaos. And go by the Drastic Caps album because it's chaos. It's on Dan Chaos. Yeah. If you want to, if you want to hear songs that sound like it was written and recorded in an hour because they were go <laugh>. It is it it is The Beat

Leo Laporte (02:46:10):
Man and recorded a few songs. But wait a minute. So it's the, the Bestie Boys, but it's Beastie Boys and

Roberto Baldwin (02:46:17):
Beck. The Becky

Leo Laporte (02:46:18):
Boys. The Becky Boys. The Becky Boys Last train to I'm a Loser Baby or something like that.

Roberto Baldwin (02:46:24):
Sort of. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's Beastie Boys and Beck. Playing Beck is really fun. I get, I mostly play ba play bass and sing on that. Rapping is really tough. It's hard. That's that's what, that's what we were learning in this band, <laugh>. That's good. That's good. How, how tough it is to rap. So there's a bunch of shows that are coming up. Just look up those names, you'll find them.

Leo Laporte (02:46:43):
Well, I'm so glad we could get John, Rob. I miss having you on the show more often, but you know, I understand you're, you're a busy person with your many pursuits, but you're always my 50

Roberto Baldwin (02:46:55):
Bands.

Leo Laporte (02:46:55):
You're always welcome here at Twit Next time Drive the Lambo up. That's what I want. That's,

Roberto Baldwin (02:47:01):
Yeah. Next time I get a good car, I'll, I'll hit you up for

Leo Laporte (02:47:04):
And, and Nicole, next time you get a good pork pie, would you, would you fly out and bring me a piece of that? Yeah. See? Mm, that's looking good. Oh,

Nicole Wakelin (02:47:12):
That

Leo Laporte (02:47:13):
Tough. Is that what it looks like?

Nicole Wakelin (02:47:14):
That's, that's, I don't, no, I don't, I've never mine. That looks different than what I get at the local bakery. I don't know what this is. Picture of the pork pie.

Leo Laporte (02:47:20):
Yeah, I'll eat that though. That's different.

Nicole Wakelin (02:47:21):
Yeah, that looks good. But that's not what I, yeah, <laugh>, that's good stuff. I'm telling you, you guys <laugh>,

Leo Laporte (02:47:27):
You had me at Pork, I had me at Pork. Sam, Sam, apple, Sam, principal Analyst at Guide House Insights where he writes about cars and a lot of other stuff. He's also the, the host, the producer of wheel bearings@wheelbearings.media and joins us on a regular basis. Thank you Sam, for bringing the gang together for us. I appreciate it. Thank you for having us, Leo. Yes. This has been a blast. Always fun. Always fun. Yeah. We do Twitter every Sunday. 2:00 PM Pacific. 5:00 PM Eastern. 2100 U T c. Now I only mentioned that cuz I mean, normally people download it, but if you wanted to watch it happen live, you could. That's the time. And the way you would watch is going by to the website twit tv slash live. There's audio and video there for your enjoyment. And if you're watching live, you might as well chat live with the folks who chat as they watch either on our irc, IRC dot TWI tv. All you need is a web browser. Although you can use an IRC client cuz it's real irc. Or if you're a Club Twit member and you want animated gifts, you should probably go and sign up for Club Twit. There's a discord associated with it. Oh look, here is from New england.com. A website. Thank you Joe to the Canadian Crazy. Oh, this looks good.

Nicole Wakelin (02:48:56):
That

Leo Laporte (02:48:56):
Looks, you might have to go to, might have to go to New Hampshire just for one of these. Let's do the show in New Hampshire. I never thought I'd say that. New Hampshire. I never thought I'd say that. Let's go to New Hampshire. A after you watch, if you watch, you can you can download copies of the show whether you watch or not. Actually, that's the whole idea. It's a podcast. So go to twit.tv and download it there. There's a YouTube channel dedicated to this show. It takes a couple hours to edit it Later tonight. It'll be up there. Actually the best thing to do, so you don't even have to think about that. Find a great podcast client, overcast Pocket, apple Podcast, Google, whatever you use, subscribe. That way you'll get the show the minute it's available. You don't have to think about it.

(02:49:38):
You'll have it tomorrow for your commute or, or whatever, you know, whenever you like to listen to it. There's even a, by the way, they're special feeds. Like all the Twitch shows. If you search for twit, you find that subscribe, you get 'em all. And then you've got like this wonderful popery, it's like a pork pie for your ears of Ooh yes. Of stuff <laugh>. And you just listen at your leisure when you're in the mood. How about that? Well, and, and Will Barings is now available in YouTube music podcasts if what? For some reason you feel like you have to listen to podcasts and YouTube music. Are we available in YouTube Music Pod? I guess we probably are. Yeah. That's cool. I didn't even Yeah, you have to make a playlist and, and tag it as a podcast in YouTube Studio and then it'll become a podcast in YouTube music. Well, if we aren't already, we're gonna be by the end of this week. I can tell you right now. <Laugh>, thank you, Sam. Thank you Nicole. Thank you Robbie. Thanks to all of you who watch. I hope you enjoyed the show. We'll see you next time. Another twit is in the can. Bye-Bye. Bye boy. Bye bye. Bye bye.