Transcripts

This Week in Tech 1006 Transcript

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

 

00:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's time for TWIT this week in tech. Alex Kantrowitz is here from the Big Technology Podcast, daniel Rubino from Windows Central, ian Thompson from the Register. We're going to talk about aliens. Yes, we are the congressional testimony about unidentified aerial phenomenon. We'll also talk about Microsoft. Was it criminal that they offered the government one year of security services free? Why did Netflix stumble when it streamed Jake Paul versus Mike Tyson, that they offered the government one year of security services free? Why did netflix stumble when it streamed jake paul versus mike tyson? And will they stumble again come christmas eve and the onion in a fight with elon musk over alex jones? Info wars who will win? We'll talk about all that and a lot more. Next on twit podcasts you love from people you trust, we'll talk about all that and a lot more.

00:45 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
next on TWIT Podcasts you love. From people you trust.

00:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is TWIT. This is TWIT this Week in Tech, episode 1006, recorded Sunday, november 17th 2024. Underwater Alien Civilizations. It's time for TWIT this week at Tech the show. We cover the latest tech news with a roundtable of esteemed, distinguished, good-looking and mighty smart panelists. Always love to get Alex Kantorowits on from the big technology podcast. Great to see you.

01:30 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
Alex, great to see you. Leo, thanks for having me on you?

01:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
uh, I always ask Alex who he's going to be interviewing for the show, because you get the best guests. You're getting the guy who was the first Neuralink patient yeah, I can't wait for that.

01:43 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
I'm flying out to Phoenix in a couple of weeks and I'm going to sit down with Nolan Arbaugh, the first patient of Neuralink. He can control computers with his mind, so we're going to talk all about that and whether he wants to merge with AI eventually. Wow, that'll be cool.

01:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Awesome. Also here, daniel Rubino, editor-in-chief of Windows Central. Also here, daniel Rubino, editor-in-chief of Windows Central. Daniel, great to see you, thanks for having me. Great to see you guys too Always a pleasure. And our friend, ian Thompson from TheRegistercom. Hi, ian, hey there, how's it going? Our local Brit we had our Brexit moment a couple of weeks ago. Now we're all together now.

02:23
Yeah, yes, that has yet to be determined all together, now you uh you asked for your blue sky handle up there. This seems to be the thing. Now everybody's moving to blue sky effect. New york times, of course, is on it with uh kind of a snarky story how blue Blue Sky alternative to X and Facebook is handling explosive growth. It hasn't all been easy. Mike Isaac writes.

02:52 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Honestly, they've dealt with it fantastically. I mean if you're dealing with a million new users a day, then you know, in terms of the difficulty of scaling. This is a classic use case and in six months' time, I'm going back to these people and saying, right, how did you handle it? Because this is really quite something.

03:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean remember the first five years of Twitter. The fail whale was more common than anything else?

03:18 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
right? Exactly yes, and you know it's like. Yes, there have been ups and downs, the service has gone out, the service has stayed up for a while, but I think they're dealing with it admirably maybe jay graber's experience at twitter helped.

03:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, the blue sky was that was funded by jack dorsey, uh, early on before he put up 15 million dollars because he wanted to do a federated kind of version of twitter. Smart, he was actually thinking ahead. I think he is no longer associated with blue sky. Blue sky has seems to be a threads has also grown considerably since uh, x's, uh threads.

03:53 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I mean, it's the worst kind of meta you know platform. It's instagram followers and an algorithmically challenged platform, to put it politely, I don't know how have the rest of the crew found it?

04:07 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
It's like TikTok and Twitter had a baby. I don't mind it in some ways.

04:13 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
After a bad one night stand.

04:16 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
My feed when I go onto it is literally just like happy stuff.

04:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's just cats and dogs, you're talking about threads or blue sky now.

04:23 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Threads.

04:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah.

04:24 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
And so it's just like videos. It's it's tick tock videos from like a week ago, but it's just all like cats and dogs doing fun things. So at least while I'm scrolling through it, I'm literally like just laughing and kind of enjoying a social network for once. So in that sense it's not bad. Uh, there are a lot of people that I follow and vice versa on it, so that does have that going for it. But I do agree with you in that, like the algorithm, it's a very different network and they they stated purposefully it was going to be a different network.

04:51
So this isn't a network for breaking news, right or delay this stuff. In fact, the algorithm is hilariously like surface. You like information from like two days ago. That's what I'll post, you know, and that's kind of joke. And they've purposely downplayed news and politics and all that stuff, which I respect. They're trying to do something, not twitter 2.0, create their own network. So I think that's cool. But I'm also biased here. I'm kind of against all social networks a little bit. I don't know what's happened the last two years. I just don't kind of care anymore. Um, but I still use them and I'm on blue sky as well.

05:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So it's interesting to watch blue sky because, as people move from Twitter to blue sky, it's starting to look more and more like Twitter, which is both good and bad, I guess.

05:35 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
But that's probably an illusion and I don't want to be the one to pour the cold water on, but I'll just do it. Good for us. What blue sky reminds me of is clubhouse, and we all remember in the middle of the on. But I'll just do it. No, go for it. What Blue Sky reminds me of is Clubhouse, and we all remember in the middle of the pandemic, people ran to Clubhouse. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was the place where all the interesting people were and people put a ton of effort into it.

05:55
And this is what happens in the beginning of every new social network is there's a spike in activity as people try to be super active to grab as many followers as they can and then only then, after a couple of months, they decide whether it's worthwhile or whether they go back to the standard platforms and clubhouse. People have millions of followers. They don't log on anymore because the activity is just not there anymore, and that's because after most of the middle of clubhouse, you know they scratched and clawed and they saw it doesn't get them very much. They left, and I just get the sense that this is going to happen to blue sky as well, and it's certainly going to happen to threads, because what you're seeing is this enthusiasm it's a lot of users that have just not found a place on twitter anymore and there's energy. But I think what most users on threads and most users on blue sky are going to find is that it's just not the mass network that they used to, that were used to in in with when it was coming to Twitter and X, and I don't think it's going to be worth it for most people. And then you go to users and users are going to say, okay, well, we're not finding as good information, we're having less of these influencers posting on these networks than we did on x, and they're going to leave.

07:06
So this is what happens with these social networks there's a spike of activity in the beginning and then they tend to go in a death spiral, and I think that's definitely going to happen to blue sky and meta will prop up threads into this boring, you know, kind of benign social network like it is. It seems like it's just a place for people to complain about threads. At least, that's what my feed is and it will. It will be this sort of zombie social network that will operate alongside the two of them, but I don't know, twitter x is not. Yeah, with x, our twitter, it's not going on x.

07:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Actually, I'm sorry, I called it twitter.

07:38 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
I don't know, I call it twitter all the time also, I know otherwise what the hell yours?

07:41 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
what is that you know what's interesting le Leo.

07:43 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
People call it X now, but they still call a post a tweet. The tweet has not gone away. You're tweeting on X, very confusing, but ultimately it has the massive users and it has the influential users, and when you want to know what's going on in your life, you go there, and I had Ranjan Roy, who comes on Big Technology Podcast, with me on Fridays. He said something really interesting this past week where there was a top of a building that went on fire in Manhattan.

08:09 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
He's not looking at-.

08:09 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
Oh yeah, I saw it. Yeah, exactly, not looking at threads, he's not looking at blue sky for it. He knows the place where he's going to find information, for it is going to be X, and Mark Zuckerberg said that X was, or when it was, twitter it was they drove a clown car into a gold mine and what he's saying is basically, they built the experience.

08:28
There wasn't a lot of brains behind it and it just became this internet standard for people. And that's what it is. It's an internet standard. It's changed a little bit, I think, degraded under Musk to an extent, but ultimately, x is X, twitter is Twitter, whatever you want to call it, and it's going to be very, very hard to displace.

08:46 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
But haven't we seen this with?

08:47 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
oh sorry, please, after you, daniel, I was just going to say with X that the issue is that fewer people are definitely using it. You know as running Windows Central. I can tell you its influence in terms of sharing articles is all but disappeared.

09:01 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
But they're naturally. They are degrading links there, so you might you might not be seeing the same traffic from links, but that's a platform decision they've made, just as Facebook has made the same decision we.

09:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I see a lot of people say I don't. I don't have any direct experience because I'm not on any of those, I'm on mastodon but I see a lot of people saying, uh, that they get more engagement from blue sky personally more engagement from blue sky than they do from x. Is that you think that that's because of something x is up to Alex.

09:27 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
Alex Ferrari.

09:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, look, x has more users, and this is the thing like no, I'm saying that, yes, specs has more users and many of these people have more followers on x, but they still get more engagement elsewhere and the. I guess the implication is that a lot of the engagement on x is phony's bots, it's not no, I don't think so.

09:44 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
Here's sort of what the progression that a social network usually goes through, which is that it has this feel of blue sky, like blue sky has right now, and then so many more people come on and start posting, and then, at every single social network, you hear the same complaint from everyone, which is that organic reach has gone down.

10:03
And why has organic reach gone? Now, a lot of people say it's because the social networks throttle the reach so they can put advertisers on, and if you want to reach people, you have to advertise. But the truth is that the feed is making a decision of how to rank every post within the network, and as a network grows, it's going to get much more difficult for content to be ranked high. So your views goes down. And it doesn't mean that there's less people using it. It just means that, like you, have more competition in the feed, and that is, of course, when power laws start to take over, where you're going to have a handful of users that will get a tremendous amount of engagement and the rest will have to claw for whatever's left. And that's especially true in the case of X, where Elon Musk has rigged the feed to give himself more reach.

10:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, the engagement you're getting on X is not purely algorithmic, shall we say.

10:55 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I think throttling is a polite term on this, but I mean all social networks go through or up until now, have gone through the same cycle rapid rise and then fall away. We've had Friendster, we've had MySpace, we've got Facebook. We've got to scale. The question is whether Blue Sky can do that, and I don't know. It's still a work in progress.

11:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think there's also the question of do we even need this?

11:25 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
There's a question like does it need to replace Twitter Right, like where these networks are going? As far as I can tell, it's federation and I think this is a better system. You know there is OpenVibe now, that app that connects to Mastodon, threads and Blue Sky all at once, so you get one single feed and you can cross post to all three at the same time. Like this might actually be sort of the future and it might exclude a lot of normal people that used to go onto these networks because there are barriers. Macedon is definitely tricky to get onto, blue Sky is easier, threads is the easiest, I would say. But this may be kind of the way things are going. I think that's actually fine. I don't really use x anymore, simply because my own personal account I the people I follow don't post anymore when I do post my engagement as well, so there's no real reason to follow it. As far as breaking news, drudge report still works just fine for most things I still read.

12:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Drudge is the wait a minute now. I must have missed the memo. When did we try that?

12:30 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
place to go. It was on fire during the election. It was, yeah, some of the funniest front page stuff. He wrote he was trolling trump so hard, uh, but like I still got most like breaking news from that and I was, it was fine, like I don't know, like I feel like I get my breaking news from yahoo news, google news, like yeah, I mean you're not normal sources.

12:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right, you're not running an rss reader anymore and I run an rss reader, but I do that for mostly for tech news, because that's my, that's my work feeds, right.

13:00 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
So so am I the only one here that gets their news from X?

13:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think so.

13:06 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
Yeah, that's what you're saying yeah, I do, and I think that one thing that we should really mention. So do you go to X every hour, every five hours?

13:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
every day, not every hour, but I'm on there, probably an unhealthy amount of time. And you go there specifically to see what's going on? Yeah, exactly. I think it's really good to follow breaking news Sorry.

13:26 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Like in terms of what news, like national news, local news there's a test.

13:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Where did you go last night to find out who won the Tyson-Jake-Paul fight?

13:36 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I was on Netflix watching it oh you actually managed to watch it, then I watched it.

13:41 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
I stayed up till past midnight watching this, but hold it. I stayed up till past midnight watching this, but hold on. I just want to make this one point the thing about Twitter is that it has a sense of urgency and because there is news there, you can follow the news there, and so it doesn't follow the pattern of most social networks remains relevant. The same way, the New York Times remains relevant because it has that urgency of breaking news. And just to go full circle with your thought about Blue Sky, ian, that's why I'm bearish on it is because it just won't have the urgency unless the news apparatus moves there, and I just don't see it happening.

14:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, I think one of the triggering events of this past week was the Guardian announcing it was no longer going to post on. Oh my God, yeah, sorry by the one.

14:22 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
The Guardian was like we longer going to post. Oh my god, yeah sorry, uh, by the one. The guardian was like we're going to still have our reporters on twitter. We want our you to share our reporting on twitter. It's just that the official account is not going to be on twitter.

14:33 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
So yeah, but I mean, I think it helped people though they had like 30 accounts, it wasn't just one, which I would found surprising. There's a lot of like sub guardian things, but they said their reporters can post. Not that they're required to post, they're just they're saying they're not forbidding the reporters from posting if they want to. I'll say, though I use there's a cool tool out there now that bridges Twitter to blue sky. So what it does is it looks at who you thought you're following and matches it on blue sky, and you can just one click do it all. Every major news institution I follow on Twitter is now on blue sky. Yeah, so, whether it's and in fact there's a tech, what's really cool about blue sky is the custom feeds that you can do. So I have one just called tech, and if I click that feed, it's literally just a stream, like an RSS feed, of just tech news in real time as it's happening.

15:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's also like regular news. There's your right. There's also like regular news there's your, there's. The default view, of course, is chronological, which is what everybody wants.

15:34 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
By the way, yes, exactly, isn't that funny that the people don't?

15:36 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
want the algorithmic feed.

15:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, no, no, except, I mean except they say that, except that what gets the stickiest is the algorithmic feed.

15:41 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
Right, otherwise companies wouldn't do a real preference, and everybody's revealed preference, is to be in an algorithmic feed right and, by the way, there's a discover feed on blue sky sorry, I was just gonna say there's a discover feed which is algorithm, pretty good as a journalist then twit.

15:55 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I mean I get what you're saying, alex, about, uh, twitter as a, you know, as a good news feed, but it used to be, when it was just a you know, a firestorm of data came out in real time. At the moment, it's so algorithmically twisted that, yeah, you know, if I'm writing a news story, I'll check out what people are saying on twitter. I wouldn't necessarily, you know, believe it entirely, because the whole thing is so full of bots exactly, exactly, but I don't know blue sky could become that.

16:25 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
It all depends whether or not they catch the ball or they fumble it yeah, and I'll just say I'm not saying this as a somebody making the case for x or a fan of x, I'm just saying there's real utility there, and as a sort of psycho power user. A lot of what I do is on lists, so I have lists of different reporters for different topics, and then, finally, the thing that really keeps me back there and, leo, I think you pointed to it is sports. Like every sports reporter, every sports publication is on Twitter. I'm kind of a nut following sports, and so if I want to get up to the information analysis of how my teams are doing, that's where I'm going to find it.

17:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So it sounds like the consensus is yeah, we do kind of need something like twitter, yes and uh. Your your contention, alex, and I think you're right. I think you it is. We forget this kind of uh, you know, this sudden burst of interest isn't going to last, that people, you know, get tired of it. It's kind of like the Gartner hype cycle, where you get real excited.

17:25 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Oh God, if I get one more press release about the bloody Gartner magic quadrant, I swear.

17:31 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
Which quadrant are you in, Ian?

17:33 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I'm the one that says I don't care how much money you give to Gartner. Stop emailing me about it.

17:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, I think they go in my spam bucket. I don't think I ever see that. I think they go in my spam bucket. I don't think I ever see that. All right, well, you know, I mean, it's not a huge story. The truth is, most of the world couldn't care less, isn't spending the amount of time we are spending thinking about, you know, blue sky versus threads, versus Twitter. But in our little circle of tech journalists, there was a lot of conversation this week about blue sky uh, exploding, you know I think you know they only have 17 million now or 18 million which is and twitter is like 300 million, right yeah, I was gonna say the growth is impressive because of you know the percentage change, but obviously it dwarfs.

18:17 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
You know everything else out there it's.

18:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's so far behind critical mass is important for a site like this. Right right. The network effect is huge.

18:25 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
It's the whole thing To a certain extent. But I'll say that like, listen communities are where people talk and are enjoying themselves right, and so there doesn't. This is always I always bring this up with the problem with capitalism. This idea of like whatever, like network or product you create has to have infinite growth to be successful. Where technically that's not possible for a lot of things and because of that we get into this idea there needs to be like one dominant social network where clearly I think we're going into this world where it's very broken up and divided and that might be an okay thing because back in the day that's how the internet was and a lot of people enjoyed it.

18:59
I mean, we're old enough to remember the internet. When it first came out there weren't a lot of people on it, but it was still cool and blue sky has that feeling, which is why I think a lot of people are positive about it. But you know, it has a lot of custom ability that twitter doesn't have. Like I said, with the custom feeds. It has this starter packs, which are really kind of cool, where we have one for windows central. It's just a. If you click the link, it shows you all the authors on Windows Central. I do like that feature.

19:25 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Yeah, we've done the same for the register as well. I mean it's, but I mean this is the way the internet goes. I mean, reddit only got started because Dig dropped the ball Right. Exactly. It's just same with Facebook. Myspace got dull, I don't know. It's going to be interesting, but I think you're right. The federated future is the way to go and instead we're going to have a third-party portal which will allow you to cover all of these things rather than just going to Twitter or just going to Facebook.

19:55 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
And it's ironic that you would think Elon Musk would have actually been for that model, which is like argues against centralized power. You can't buy that, though. Right, right, it's like. That's the way it should be. Instead, he's arguing for the decentralized system where one person controls the algorithm and like remember, the whole idea was like oh, twitter's left wing, it's biased, it needs to be equal balance. And now the guy is like on stage supporting the president and like it's just like, it's just like all over the place, right. So it is a weird situation, but I don't know. We'll see what happens, but I don't think blue sky needs to be. You know, it doesn't need to pass Twitter to be successful.

20:33 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
It could still be its own thing, where people on the left, nerds, uh, media people hang out and talk, and that might be just enough for a lot of people, you know yeah, it could be a Discord server, right, and that's the real question is is blue sky going to be a discord server or a social network with the size to replace x, because everybody has complaints about x, and I think it's. I think you're right, daniel's probably going to end up as a discord server, which actually will be better than clubhouse, which I compared it to earlier. So, yeah, if it does that, then I guess that's some sort of win, but just not what the founders of Blue Sky intended, aka Jack Dorsey.

21:09 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Well, I will always be thankful, Jack, because he gave us one of the smottiest headlines in register history.

21:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But still, we'll drop it. No, you can't stop there. What was the headline? Well, it's when Dick left Twitter. Ok, that's fine, I get it.

21:23 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Yeah, so it dick left twizzer. Okay, that's fine, I get it.

21:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And yeah, no, so it was big dick pulls out jack's in the hot seat, but no, oh my god, you guys well so did you watch the uh, so you watch the fight, alex, because you're a sports fan, daniel, because I love spectacle. It is, I mean, that's not sport, is it? When you get a, what is it? A 20 something fighting a 60 something or late 50?

21:48 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
27 and 58. Yeah, that doesn't seem quite fair don't you think, though, everybody?

21:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
including netflix, was really hoping that mike tyson would just wham jake paul and knock him out in the first round. Absolutely that's what everybody wanted, everybody's hoping for.

22:03 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I wanted to see I wanted to see him beaten like a redheaded stepchild, I mean, it was just kind of like. And then I I logged on to the Netflix feed and all I got was Mike Tyson's ass, and it was just like right, okay, I'll just read what was that?

22:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
was it frozen there or well?

22:19 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
no, he was sort of chapless at one point which, oh god oh no, he's walking away from an interview and it was just as bare ass okay, I caught that I barely watched it. So it's just like a lot of us were just like barely watched this thing and that's like we all saw that and it was just like all right well apparently netflix had a lot of technical issues, but that's probably because what did they say?

22:40 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
65 million people at one point which makes it the the biggest event outside of the Super Bowl, the Olympics and maybe some cricket, so it was massive.

22:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Hashtag Netflix crash and hashtag unwatchable were two of the trending topics.

23:04 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
It did remind me of that episode of silicon valley where they're trying to stream the ultimate fighting championship and it just the stream falls over. It was just that's right I forgot about that there was an image in my head of gavin belson showing. This is. You know, I can't say that word by the way, no spoilers.

23:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
If you haven't seen it, we aren't going to tell you who won. I guess you've learned now. There wasn't a KO in the first round. That's all you know. Uh, I did not watch it, I, I we. We saw one of the undercard fights and it was so brutal.

23:33 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
I just said oh, did you see the female uh?

23:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
apparently that was even worse. No, I saw the first one, oh my God that was.

23:40 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
I mean. I also agree Boxing is brutal, but it is just. I'm trying to find the words to talk about how unbelievable that woman's fight was, because they landed and threw so many punches and the fact that they were able to get through the match was just incredible. I've never seen any boxing like like that, male or female.

24:05 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
it was an amazing fight this is why women's sports are really something to watch. I mean, when it comes to football, for example, you know they, they play harder than the blokes and I've played women's hockey teams. I still have a floating broken bone in my left left arm from that, but you know, I mean it's. It's an interesting area of where sport is going.

24:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's becoming much more diverse uh, it does feel like it was. It was, uh, a money grab on netflix's part.

24:36 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
It was like pure spectacle, right oh of course yeah, but that that's, that's what that was sport was that sport?

24:43 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
really, the first three matches were sport, but the Tyson Paul match was spectacle. It was not sport, but you know what? It is a win for Netflix. They created must see TV. This was their first big scale live production and even though the streaming didn't work, it's all anybody can talk about, right, and it's like it takes a certain amount of brilliance to put jake paul and mike tyson in a ring together, put them at jerry world in dallas and put some really good fights in the undercard and stream it live. And they did it. And I think this is netflix has to make this pit, this pivot. Uh, to live. They're doing this, yeah, they're doing the. They're doing some F1, I believe and they're also doing two NFL games on Christmas day good NFL games, and this is the way they're going to grow. Why? Why is this necessary for them?

25:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
to grow. I think they kind of interviewed Reed. Hoffman. Did you talk to him. Oh, I'm sorry, that's.

25:38 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
Reed Hastings Hoffman's coming on in January. But I think they have to grow because they're saturating. They had a moment where they had negative subscriber, where they had a subscriber contraction, and then they started growing again because they cracked down on passwords and created this ad tier. But ultimately, what's basically all the engagement data shows they're not really growing the pie, they're just making money off the pie. So they're effectively doing de facto rate increases by password sharing and all this stuff and not allowing you to churn. So they're maxing out and the only way to create new audiences is to have must-see tv live events and no matter what you say about it. And I watched and I was disappointed with the paul tyson fight. It was a spectacle and this is the type of thing that only I don't know if only netflix can do, but netflix is certainly the only streamer that can do it and it's, it's huge well, I mean sport is is one of the main areas of streaming which is really growing at the moment, and it has to be live.

26:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You can't do sport I don't know, I mean I I don't know, I mean, I mean you, you might get. Maybe you mentioned this, Alex.

26:42 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Cricket. Maybe you mentioned with Formula One, alex. Now Netflix has grown Formula.

26:46 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
One in the.

26:47 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
US with Drive to Survive enormously. When I came over here in 2008, San Francisco Formula One Club was a couple of dozen of geeky people sitting in a pub Sunday at 9 am watching a race. Last time I tried to go to an actual live race in the city. It was rammed Two entire pubs rammed out. Yeah, Netflix has enormous power on this and sports are one of the few areas on streaming which are actively growing, so I think it's a wise move.

27:16 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
Yes, and they did. In a run-up to the Tyson-Paul fight. They did like a documentary, a three-part documentary following the two fighters, also following the women fighters, and I caught like one and a half episodes before the actual fight happened and they were really well done. They brought Mike Tyson back to Brownsville in Brooklyn and you see him like taking his shirt off on the street and challenging old guys to fights. And it was real. I don't know, it was compelling television Absolutely.

27:44 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Yeah, I mean Drive to Survive is compelling television. I mean it makes a lot of stuff up but at the same time it's brought a lot of new fans into the sport and it's made Netflix an awful lot of money.

27:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Presumably Netflix is doing these also to learn. I mean, they started they had a live with Chris Rock comedy special was live, and then they did the Tom Brady roast. They they've been slowly, incrementally trying live streaming to see where the flaws are, but this was obviously the biggest test of their uh, of their physical plant and they test. They failed but presumably they'll learn from that and uh and solve it.

28:17 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Yes, I should imagine a lot of engineers yeah, a lot of engineers are going to be going over the data and saying, right, where do we fall over here? Where do we fall over there? What can we do?

28:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
you know you there is a risk, of course. If it really looks terrible, it's unwatchable. People may not come back right. And what's what you said a couple of weeks? What's the next thing they're going to do?

28:37 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
christmas, christmas with the nfl and by the way. We are an incredibly forgiving species, and if there's something that everybody's watching, we're going to want to watch it, and I do think.

28:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They bought Monday Night Raw from WWE, so that's going to be live every Monday night. They'll solve this, they'll figure it out and I think you're right.

28:56 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
The point that Ian made is spot on, which is that this was a test. I don't think they realized how big it was going to be. It just it just sort of snowballed. But they will learn from this and they will have to get the NFL right in December. And if they don't get like it's one thing to buffer on the undercard of a Jake Paul Mike Tyson fight. It's another thing to buffer in the fourth quarter when the Steelers are driving down trying to.

29:18 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
You know, take the lead.

29:19 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
You cannot buffer them because, remember, you're the only show in town.

29:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Nobody else is going to have those games you know, I was really think I thought the nfl might have stumbled when they let amazon have the exclusive rights to thursday night football. That has proven to be a huge success.

29:32 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
It's now beating monday night football on the networks the production value on amazon's thursday night broadcast is amazing well, they got al michaels, which doesn't hurt. Yes, they have great announcers, great pre, pregame, postgame, but it also it feels to me like they're using better cameras. I don't know what it is. I actually visited the truck when we were in.

29:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Green Bay for our game. Alex Lindsay got me into the Amazon truck. They spent a phenomenal amount of money to have the best technology capable of 4K. They don't stream in 4K yet, but the capability is there and they're doing graphics packages that are far ahead of what the networks have done. Um, they Amazon clearly saw this as an important and they were right. I thought man, you guys are crazy throwing all that money into this. Are our NFL uh fans gonna gonna subscribe to Amazon Prime just so they can watch Thursday Night Football? Yeah, turns out they are. Who knew?

30:30 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
YouTube is really heavily pushing the sports angle as well. I think this is something that they've recognized. This is something that people will pay for. They want it on spot, and that's something that Netflix has got to get sorted out if it wants to cash in on this market on sport, and that's something that netflix has got to get sorted out if it wants to cash in on this market.

30:46 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
Yeah, by the way, the dirty secret about thursday night football is you don't really need to be an amazon prime uh subscriber to watch you. I'm not a prime member and I just. How do you watch amazoncom?

30:54 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
and it plays, oh, ah interesting, although I'm still not sold on american football.

31:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's armored rugby, nothing more, nothing less thank god for the armor, that's all I can say. Um, yeah, it's interesting because it also show. What it tells me is that, uh, over the top broadcasting is here, like it. This is it for cable television, for broadcast television. If people are completely willing to watch a streaming version of an NFL football game or eight, what was it? 65 million watching that fight, uh, the other night, yeah, that, uh, that shows you. It's, it's made, it, it's in, it's done if I were a cable company I would start to.

31:34
I'd be worried right now. They've been worried for a while I imagine.

31:38 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
I mean, hasn't this just been like a terrible two weeks for uh broadcast news, where you look at the election and the primacy of podcasts and now you see netflix pull you know out of thin air right a spectacle that rivals?

31:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
the super bowl right. The writing is on the wall, that's for sure I've got a quick question. This is benito, by the way benito gonzalez, our technical producer, editor, booker. The guy does it all.

32:03 - Benito (Announcement)
Hello, benito so so my question is like I think the the one issue I see with streaming services doing sports is that not everybody is synchronized watching it, which is not true with a tell. They are live, aren't they?

32:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
they're alive, but you know, everybody's a little I know, because when I'm downstairs in the gym and lisa's watching upstairs, the sounds so is that a problem?

32:23 - Benito (Announcement)
I, I kind of feel like that's a little bit of a problem.

32:25 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
That's interesting.

32:26 - Benito (Announcement)
You got to put your phone on, do not disturb.

32:28 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
I mean I was watching football today and texting with a friend and I was like I was watching on with my bunny ear antenna and he was watching on streaming and I was like 20 seconds ahead and I really made him mad because I was exactly so.

32:41 - Benito (Announcement)
That's what I. That's what I'm talking about. Is that a problem?

32:43 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I mean it's, it's, it's the same with f1.

32:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean I watch and that's always delayed because it's in the middle of the night for us in america, right?

32:49 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
well, no, but I mean I'll if well, okay, we've just had, you know, we've got las vegas coming up and we've, you know, we've just had some races in our time zone. But I will watch that and be on the forums talking to people and they're like, okay, probably. They're like you know, that corner was passed 10 seconds ago while you're commenting on this, so yeah, the differences in speeds.

33:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't think that's important.

33:13 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
I think where it's really going to be an issue. Benito is betting sports betting because the lines change his bets. Come in. And if you're not, everybody's on the same.

33:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And the new push and sports betting and thank it's thanks to that British bookie company is to do real time betting props in the middle of games. Is he going to make that field goal?

33:34 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
But we've seen this with flash trading and the stock exchange and I think we're going to see the same thing in terms of sports betting. If you can get that millisecond advantage, you could clean up.

33:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That was the premise of Michael Lewis's Flash Boys. It was actually fascinating because they were trying to build a fiber optic network from the Chicago Board of Trade to the New York Stock Exchange and it was extremely important that it be straight, that it be the shortest possible line, because nanoseconds could make the difference between getting that trade ahead of time or not could make the difference between getting that trade ahead of time or not, which is why you've got shipping containers parked next to you know the nearest exchanges, with a whole bunch of data servers in there, yeah, um, and they've made enormous amount of money.

34:14 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
But, yeah, the michael lewis book is really worth a read.

34:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, flash boys.

34:19
Yeah, is that what it is, flash boys? I think it is. I think so, yeah, yeah, uh, let's take a little break. We got some flashy boys here right now. We got the. The a team is here, ian thompson from the registercom always a pleasure to have you in your bookshelf, which looks at like at any moment it's going to totter and fall into your head. But and I live in an earthquake zone, so, yeah, I know, I'm, I'm just I'm nervous for you. That's all I can say. I'm nervous for you.

34:45
Uh, also with us, daniel rubino from massachusetts, editor-in-chief of windows central. Great to have you, daniel. And where are you, alex? I forgot new york. In new york we got the. We got the continent, the left and the right coast covered. Alex kantrowitz hosted the big technology podcast and newsletter at bigtechnologycom. Great to have all three of you. I am in the northern california, in the wine country of northern california, and and burke would not let me build this attic studio. He said that bookshelf is going to kill you. Until we had it. Like it's bolted onto the, onto the wall. It's more solid than the wall itself, so, but on the other hand, the lights could kill me, so I don't know.

35:30 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
But you saw, in Petaluma I mean you said sorry, Petaluma is the butter and chicken, the chicken and egg capital of the world. Thank you very much.

35:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But it is the beginning of the wine country of Sonoma, sonoma County. So I of the wine country of Sonoma, sonoma County, so I count the wine as well. All right, ladies and gentlemen, our show today brought to you by ExpressVPN. It's kind of fun. We were talking about Netflix, because ExpressVPN is one of the ways I watch Netflix all around the world. It gives me geographical flexibility, shall we say.

36:06
There are three reasons you'd use a VPN. One, of course, obviously security. Everything coming out of your computer is encrypted from that point until it emerges into the world at the VPN server's side. So nobody in the middle, like your ISP, your carrier, somebody in the coffee shop, can see what you're doing, can steal your stuff. That's good, that's great. That's security. You also get privacy because you know your ISP can't spy on you.

36:35
If you've ever tried incognito mode in your browser, you probably realize it's not incognito. People didn't that? Google just settled a big lawsuit after being accused of tracking users in incognito mode. Google said oh, incognito doesn't mean invisible. We can see exactly what you're doing. All your it's really incognito mode is so that your spouse won't see what you're doing. But that's on you.

37:00
Expressvpn, that's the one I use, that's the one I trust. So why does everyone need ExpressVPN? Without ExpressVPN, third parties can see every website you visit, even in incognito mode or private browsing mode, and other browsers, your ISP, your mobile network provider, the admin of the Wi-Fi network you're sitting on they all know what you're doing. So why is expressvpn the best of the vpns? It's hiding your ip address, which makes it much more difficult for data brokers. Expressvpn not only encrypts that data all the way out to their servers, they they make, they take extra steps to make sure that there's no record of your visit to the server. So your public ip address is this is the server's ip address, not yours. All of your traffic 100 is routed through the secure, encrypted servers and then they make the extra you know effort to make sure that nothing you do is saved. There is visible there, for instance, their trusted server technology and this has been audited by third parties who say yes, it does exactly. This runs in memory. So when you press the button, fire up that big VPN button and the Express VPN app on iOS, android, linux, max, windows. You can even run it on your router they sell really good routers, but it runs on many other companies routers as soon as it's fired up, you're launching the trusted server. It's running in ram on the expressvpn server.

38:28
They have servers all over the world. It's sandbox. It cannot write to the hard drive and the minute you close the connection it's gone and so is every trace of your visit. But that's not even enough for expressvpn. They also run a custom debian distribution. I read about this on bleeping computer. You can see the article. Uh, also run a custom debian distribution. I read about this on bleeping computer. You can see the article. They run a custom debian distribution that wipes the drive every morning and starts fresh. So there's literally there's.

38:54
Their servers have no information about you. Fire up the app, click the button. You're protected, it's easy to use and it works on everything. You've got all your devices. You could stay private on the go. And that third thing is whatever server you're merging on in the world, that's where you're geographically located from the point of view of Netflix, for instance. And I asked Netflix, they said, yeah, that's fine. If you've got a Netflix subscription in the US, then you use a VPN and you're now in the UK. Thanks to vpn, you can watch what's on the on the uk netflix.

39:27
I think expressvpn is a great deal. You get it down below five dollars a month. Take advantage of expressvpn's black friday, cyber monday offer. Now you may say, well, I got a free vpn. Just ask any expert. They will tell you free vpns are not a good idea. They've got to pay for it somehow. The way free VPNs often pay for it is by spying on you and selling your information exactly what you don't want, right? Expressvpn is not free and they charge a reasonable fee so they can rotate IP addresses, they can have high quality, high speed, hd quality video servers. They can do all the things right and protect you, and I think that that's well worth a few bucks a month. Get the absolute best VPN deal you'll find all year. If you go to expressvpncom slash twit right now, you get four extra months with a 12-month plan. Six extra months with a 24-month plan, absolutely free. Expressvpncom slash twit. Get a free, extra four or even six months of expressvpn free when you sign up for one or two years, and I think you're going to want to check it out. Expressvpncom slash twit the only vpn I recommend, the only one I use. Expressvpncom slash twit uh, let's talk a little bit about cyber security.

40:44
Actually, this, uh, this is an interesting microsoft story for you, daniel, from pro publica. Did you see this story apparently? Uh, president biden in the summer of 2021, you may, you may actually remember this brought ceos of the big tech companies of the white house. This was after a series of cyber attacks linked to Russia, china and Iran had left the government reeling, says ProPublica. The administration asked Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, amazon CEOs, apple, google and others to make concrete commitments to bolster US defense. Microsoft said oh well, yeah, we got something for you. Satya Nadella pledged to give the government $150 million in technical services to help upgrade its digital security. Good idea, right? A big win for the Biden administration and a win for Microsoft.

41:43 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
A major win for Microsoft Well well it turns out?

41:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
maybe yes, because it was a limited time. Uh deal, uh. The white house offer this is pro publica writing, as it was known inside microsoft will dispatch microsoft consultants across the federal government to install the company's cyber security products, which were free for a limited time. Once the consultants installed the upgrades, federal customers would be effectively locked in, because shifting to a competitor after the free trial would be cumbersome and costly. At that point, the customer would have little choice but to pay the higher subscription fees. Propublica quotes a couple of microsoft employee sales leaders involved in the effort. They said it's like a drug dealer hooking users with free samples. Uh, any thoughts about that?

42:37 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
daniel, this is your beat I mean, business is going to business, right? Yeah? Yeah, I think we all go. Let all go back to the days of trial wear or you know, anytime you're going to try a you know a new service for 30 days, but it auto renews after 30 days, right, hey, we do that right, we have two weeks free for Club Twit, after which you pay.

43:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean it's only $7 a month. I mean I'm not. You pay. I mean it's only seven dollars a month. I mean I'm not. Uh, microsoft said, quote the company's sole goal during this period was to support an urgent request by the administration to enhance secure the security posture. Federal agencies were continuously being targeted by sophisticated nation-state threat actors. This is from steve fail. Who's a security leader for microsoft's federal business? There was no guarantee the agencies would purchase these licenses and they were free to engage with other vendors to support their security needs yeah, rip out and replace, so it's an easy thing to do the white house disputed that characterization, including tim wu, who was a former presidential advisor.

43:44
He told pro publica he discussed the offer with the company in a short and formal chat prior to the summer but did not sign off. He said if they're saying that I signed off, they're misrepresenting what happened on the phone call. Your business is kind of business, but on the other hand it's a little unseemly for the business to say see, we're helping America, we're helping the federal government with this lovely free trial offer. It's a little disingenuous.

44:14 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Oh yeah, no, I mean I guess I should tell the government for once to read the fine print. Yeah, you know, like this is one of those things where it's I'm not going to justify, you know, like what Microsoft did, but this is just common practice across anything. And if you're a business, securing government contracts is the goldmine, right, that's what everybody knows. It's. You know, once you get into that defense industry and everything it's, it's a lot of money and Azure makes a ton of cash for Microsoft. It continuously grows. It's one of their best business divisions, so it doesn't surprise me. It's unfortunate that this happens, but it's also interesting that we're actually getting kind of transparency on this, whereas a lot of other contracts I would say that probably happens with the defense department especially.

45:02
We don't get any kind of reporting of this or that same kind of coverage, because this is microsoft. But you know, when you look at how like jets are made and stuff like that it's, you know it's way more severe. I mean, oh yeah, billions of dollars, you know. So it's like this is a thing and hey, maybe doge will solve this, but um, You're talking about the Department of Governmental Efficiency?

45:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, I don't think really.

45:30 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Elon is asking for high IQ individuals to come and work 80 hour weeks on Doge for no pay.

45:37 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
If you do that, you're low IQ.

45:39 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Exactly, you have to have a blue check.

45:42 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
You have to pay to use his service, the best and the brightest, my friend, yeah, but I mean, coming back to what daniel was saying, this is oracle's entire business model when it comes to government contracts, you know. I mean it's like get them locked in. I mean, palantir is doing the same thing as well. Yeah, I don't blame microsoft for this, but they really managed to turn you know a tragedy. Which tragedy which was? You know, their accounts had leaked government data to all kinds of foreign actors and they were like okay, well, we'll invest 150 million and we're going to get billions in return. I don't know who the business manager was that came up with that, but I should imagine they're getting a fairly healthy rise.

46:22 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
I also think that this ProPublica article is pretty irresponsible, at least the framing of it. And they say Biden asked Microsoft to raise the bar on cybersecurity. He may have helped create an illegal monopoly. And so I was like, all right, let's read the story and see how many times it mentions monopoly. It mentions it only once, where the issue here is procurement. And I'm not defending microsoft. I do think this is like typical sketchy tech tech sales. But there's a they cite this professor of uh who says that, um, what microsoft did is exclusionary contact conduct, opening the door for an illegal monopoly. I, there's no way that this is a monopolistic uh behavior. It'll never hold up on court and a professor who's calling it an illegal monopoly should have known better than to do it.

47:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So I guess the real question is how hard it would be to, once the one-year free trial wore off, to switch to something else you can switch.

47:20 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
I mean, it's up to the competitors here, right? Like, the way that governments go through this is they do an RFP process, a request for proposals, and then every company that wants the government money and there's a lot of them they bid. And so if you're let's say, you're Amazon, right, are you going to tell me that you cannot outbid Microsoft, like it's? The company that wants it most is the one that gets it, and that's why Microsoft got it is because it wanted it the most. And so I mean, would it be cumbersome? Yes, I mean, switching from Gmail to hey is cumbersome, switching from Twitter to blue sky is cumbersome. But I just think that we can't have such low expectations of our government that when something is difficult and cumbersome for them, that they'll never do it and that, therefore, the company that sold them the software in the first place is a monopoly. It just doesn't stand up to me, just on the basis of facts.

48:12 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I mean, we've seen this before with the Jedi contract, for example, where the government was saying, basically, when it comes to the military, you want a single source provider and the rest of it, which was a dumb idea from the start. But you know, and Microsoft won it. You know, governments like easy, get it in place. Who cares if we have to pay a lot more for it later on, because the taxpayers are paying? So I don't know. The cost of shifting your system is such that I don't know. I think Microsoft played a blinder on this one.

48:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Microsoft, according to ProPublica, was very aware having been through a little fight with the Department of Justice a few years earlier of the antitrust issues. Tim Wu said Microsoft's lawyers were overly paranoid about antitrust concerns. Sounds like Microsoft. Yeah, I made it clear, says Wu. There was no ability in the white house to sign off on antitrust. We can't say that you're indemnified for any antitrust actions on the basis of this. He who said I'm not smart enough to say, oh yeah, that's fine with me, I'm not crazy. Um, so there was an awareness anyway on the part of Microsoft that this, could, this offer could be seen as uh, kind of a little bit skeezy. They didn't want to be accused of antitrust, uh, and they wanted Tim Wu to say no, no, no, you're okay.

49:50 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Microsoft has been playing this game for ever, since it's invested in Apple just to keep you know, an alternative operating system going. They're very, very aware of this and they should be, particularly after the IE case.

49:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The sales teams, according to ProPublica, said they knew customers who accepted the White House offer were unlikely to undo the intensive work of installing the upgrades. Maybe, daniel, you can explain this better. There are different tiers of security for Microsoft products. Most of the federal government was G3. At this point. Microsoft said we'll upgrade you to G5 free for the first year, but moving back to g3 seemed unlikely. They knew that once they were into g5 that they would continue to pay for it. Is that make what I just said make any sense at all, daniel?

50:34 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
yeah, no, I think it's. Uh, anyone who's dealt with it before, even knows a small scale, knows how difficult it can be to roll out something well, also if you've moved to g5, this is, by the way, in the wake of the SolarWinds Orion attack.

50:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
If you move to G5, you're protected for a year and then you say, ok, good job done, and you go back to G3 and suddenly you're attacked again. That doesn't reflect badly on Microsoft, that reflects badly on the organization. So there's also some pressure not to downgrade your security, even though it's now going to cost you money. Salespeople pitched the white house offer again. Pro publica had sources in the microsoft sales organization for this. Salespeople pitched the white house offer as the easy button. Our argument was we have this whole suite of goodness, said a former microsoft employee who worked with the department of defense. You should upgrade because it will take care of everything, rather than have a bunch of vendors that will do one of the 20 things that the G5 can do. Yeah, I mean, this is probably not a non-story. It's more about government procurement. Uh, microsoft did what any company would do say, hey, first year's free. Uh, go ahead and give it a shot.

51:47 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
That's really the question, right, like if any other company got in this position and have the same thing, would they have behaved any differently, right?

51:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
no, and nor should government procurement assume that companies are somehow no longer uh in it for the money well, that's, that's what I.

52:04 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
that's the funny part, they say. Some lawmakers, like Rep Jim Langevin of Rhode Island accused the company of unfairly upcharging customers for what they consider to be basic security. Quote is this a profit center for Microsoft? Unquote, he asked Smith Brad Smith during the hearing. Smith replied I'm putting the um in there. We are a for-profit company. Everything that we do is designed to generate a return other than our philanthropic work.

52:29 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
It's like yeah. Are we paying for this? Yes, congressman, it's called buying things, yeah.

52:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah. So, if anything, maybe we should, congress should look at the procurement process more than I mean Microsoft's just doing.

52:46 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
As you say, what Microsoft does, well, I mean we have seen claims, particularly with Jedi, where you know government procurement officers will offer jobs at tech firms after they retire, and this revolving door is just a recipe for disaster.

53:02 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
That should be illegal. That's the stuff we should be mad about, not about companies that make government a good offer and government taking the offer that they, you know, deem to be the best.

53:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Microsoft, by the way, three years later offered the nation's hospitals a G5 level upgrade at no cost for the first year. Yeah, the first one's free.

53:28 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
Sorry, but like, like. Do the procurement people in these government offices and in these hospitals not look at the pricing for year two? Can they not do like?

53:35 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
an analysis of what the pricing is.

53:37 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
Yeah, because if you're not, if you're legitimately not looking at year two prices, uh, then what are you doing in your job?

53:44 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Yeah, you suck at your job. I mean, it's just that You've got to look at long-term costs.

53:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And also you have to ask your people, your IT people okay, we're going to be G5 for a year. How hard is it to go back to G3? Or are we stuck? Are we going to have to be G5 forever after?

54:03 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
And presumably when you sign up for this, you're agreeing that. You know you're going in with the assumption it's going to work for the first year.

54:10
Yeah, yeah, you're going to like all right, we're going probably hopefully locked us in for a couple of years because it's doing the thing we're told it's supposed to do. So it's like it's weird not to like plan this out with the assumption that you're going to get charged. But you know, I don't know how that stuff works. So I'll say the hospital thing, though, is really important. I I used to work at a hospital. My current partner, she, works at a hospital, and everybody should be scared and nervous about the security systems and the computer.

54:38 - Benito (Announcement)
Oh they're awful.

54:40 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
There are so many years behind. They started the it departments. It's just just. Everything is just uh. We see how hospitals run, especially because the for-profit ones, um, you know, it's a.

54:53 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
It's a horrible, horrible thing that's going on right now with hospitals, and that's why, when you're ever feeling sick, you should just type your symptoms into chat gpt the safest way for care yeah, okay, so you just know that you got cancer then but it's the same problem with the british national health service.

55:10 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Some of their computers are still running xp, right, and you're like what? And they're paying microsoft through the nose for a little extra support and paying micro patches as well. But yeah, you're right, the basic infrastructure of government is running on software that should not be running and this needs to get upgraded and yeah, they're going to pay for it. But yeah, look at the year two, year three, year five costs isn't.

55:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Isn't there a petition going around in the eu to uh force the eu to use linux?

55:43 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
um, yeah, there, there's been a movement around that. In particular, the German government was very big on open source. They've now shifted slightly back to commercial software, but there's still a large open source push that way. But okay, I'm from Britain, I'm Brexit Island, so EU no longer applies to us.

56:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You don't get affected by that, huh. Unfortunately not no, this is the petition Leaving Apple and Google. Support the future of our freedoms. Sign the petition for an EU Linux operating system in public administrations.

56:16 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
This could be the year of Linux and government.

56:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
How hard would that be? I mean, I wonder, shouldn't the government foster uh support open source, uh software you?

56:28 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
know, I don't know how much I know open source is just that buzz phrase that people like to say and it automatically sounds good, it's like cancer free, like how could that be bad? Right, right, and I feel like that's how open source is. But from what I when I was working in a hospital um, we, I was working in a sleep center and one of the reasons we didn't upgrade our operating systems was not because Microsoft was closed source or because Linux wasn't available. It was because the programs we ran to do the sleep diagnostics they were going to have to do a lot of testing and a lot more validation for the software. That would have gone through a whole process and caused sort of commotion. So they would rather just keep the operating system with their custom software running and just be as is, instead of investing to get it all up to date. And that's what you see with a lot of hospitals. It's just this custom software that is just difficult. Sometimes the companies may not even be around anymore or it could take every company.

57:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's not just the public sector, every company has this. We have this problem. We had a young guy in here who wrote us a a sales system and uh, he left. You know know, he was, you know, just kind of almost an intern left after a year and we said, well, are you going to support the system? You wrote he said no, Exactly. And so we, you know, we're running. We've been running on it ever since. It has a few little glitches. He wasn't a professional developer. Two people can't use it at the same time or the whole thing crashes. We've had to hire a developer to come in and try to figure out how to make it work. But companies do that. We did that. It was a sensible thing at the time.

58:20 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Yeah, well, you've seen the billboards around San Francisco and the Bay Area about paying for open source over the last couple of weeks. Oh, really, yeah, there's a movement going. A whole bunch of startups are basically trying to get companies to commit to paying a couple of grand a year to fund an open source project. And this is actually really crucial because, well, they use it for free and they don't. Yeah, but I mean, we did a story. Do you remember the great XKCD cartoon about how an entire operating system was run by one guy from Omaha.

58:47 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Yeah.

58:47 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
We found him. The GPRSS protocol is run by one guy in. Omaha and he supports it entirely on his own, and these people need funding. Otherwise you go to a commercial vendor because you know you're actually going to get support.

59:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And that's the central thing, the chasm that open source has to cross this is the uh the cartoon a modern digital infrastructure which is a very complicated structure of bricks, all supported by one little teeny block at the bottom, a project some random person in nebraska has been thanklessly maintaining since 2003. It's funny, but it's also actually really true in many, many cases.

59:28 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I mean, this is the kind of thing If you're going to build a proper, if you're going to rely on open source, you've got to fund the open source developers that keep it running, and the industry hasn't found out a way to do that yet.

59:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, let's take a little break so we can fund this operation. I'm in it for the money. I admit it. I'm like Brad Smith. Yeah, it's a profit deal here, but we are very happy to have a great panel in working with us here for no cost at all. Right, I think, alex. Yes, daniel's nodding Never did get paid for this. Yes, daniel's nodding Never did get paid for this. Daniel Rubino, editor-in-chief Windows Central. Alex Kantrowitz from the Big Technology Podcast and, of course, the wonderful Ian Thompson, who is a reporter at TheRegistercom, happily returning to his roots as a reporter, getting to write again. It's the fun part. Yeah, I believe that. Do you end up doing a lot of investigative stuff like you dig for?

01:00:28 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
stories. Oh yeah, no, I've got, so I've got some major stuff coming at coming down the line. It's. It's one of the things that when you move away from editing, you've got a lot more time to dig around. Yeah, um, and it's weird how these things come off. I'm speaking to some people at nasa while nasa is still alive, um, about some really interesting technology they're developing do you want to give out, uh like your signal handle or anything for?

01:00:54
um signal I'm. I haven't gone the handle route, but my phone number is on twitter and blue sky, oh good um but yes, people, paris martineau from the information, does this every wednesday in her twig show.

01:01:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
She gives out her signal handle and she also says and don't use your work phone to send me the tip.

01:01:11 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Yeah, that's another tip, and also set self-deleting messages this is something that's come up in the lawsuits over you know fbi investigations. Time and time again people think oh, it's signals end-to-end encrypted and it is. It's the best messaging system out there. But if you don't set messages to delete and someone gets access to your phone, game over.

01:01:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Unlock it. Yeah, good point, I am laport.24. You know what, ian, if you just go to your Signal, it'll show your phone number and then below it, it will show you. Yeah.

01:01:42 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I know, I know, but I I don't like spreading it around. To be honest, if people want to find me, they can find me, okay there you go.

01:01:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I like that. Make them work, make them work for it.

01:01:52 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
It stopped spammers. I I tried it.

01:01:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I got a hell of a lot of spam oh yeah, am I going to regret just saying what I just said well, maybe I mean it's people people are going to signal me and say, hey, would you pass this on to?

01:02:08 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
ian bc, the fundamentally signal is the one to trust. I, I agree, I don't trust whatsapp entirely. No, I don't trust a lot of other messaging services at all.

01:02:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So yeah and don't use email that is notoriously problematic for privacy wow, I mean email.

01:02:26 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
You might as well, you know, leave a trail of crumbs all the way through the forest.

01:02:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yep, yep, all right, we're gonna take a little break, mac, with more you're watching this week in tech brought to you this week. Actually, this is a really interesting uh sponsor by fundrise. Now you're probably familiar with venture capital, you know, as one of the most lucrative asset classes in the world. I mean, if you look at the s p 500, nearly every major tech company on that list was funded in the beginning by venture capital firms, producing billions of dollars of profit in the process. But that's before the exit, right, right Before the IPO, before you could buy, before I could buy stock in it. The biggest venture funds, unfortunately, are almost entirely funded by institutional investors, endowments, sovereign wealth funds. So unless you know a guy who knows a guy, you, me and 99.9% of individual investors just are not going to be able to participate in the pre-IPO growth of any of those blue chip companies. And that's where the real big money happens, right, the big growth. It's happening again. Look at the biggest names in AI. Right now, almost all of them are still private and that means they're just out of reach of your portfolio. Go ask your stockbroker, stock broker. Hey, can I get in on this? No, well, you can. With the fundrise innovation fund. It's changing that. It's more than a 125 million dollar fund. It holds some of the most exciting pre-ipo tech companies in the world and it's designed specifically for individual investors. So this time you can get in early with fundrise. Go to fundrisecom slash twit to learn more. Fundrisecom twit to learn more carefully. Consider the investment material before investing, including objectives, risks, charges and expenses. This and other information can be found in the innovations funds prospectus at fundrisecom slash innovation. This, of course, is a paid advertisement. Fundrisecom slash twit. Thank you so much for supporting this week in tech. It's interesting.

01:04:38
I think the consensus is although it's kind of maybe not completely clear. So it's kind of maybe not completely clear that the incoming Trump administration will be a little less likely to go after antitrust actions, ftc actions, lena Kahn will be gone and so forth. But then there's also the issue of. There are some big tech companies that the president elect does not like. It's not a clear, it's not a clear sale for anybody right now.

01:05:08
For instance, the cfpb the uh, the uh, the uh. What is it a bureau? I guess it's a. The consumer financial protection bureau has taken places steps to place google under federal supervision, which is an extraordinary move this is is from the Washington Post that could subject the technology giant to the regular inspections and rigorous monitoring the government imposes on major banks. Cfpb, of course, is government's banking. It wants direct oversight. This is a major move. Google has resisted the final months of the Biden administration. I think some companies are hoping that maybe they can hold out until January 20th. On the other hand, if you're Google, I don't think a president like Trump is a big fan. What, what, what should Google do at this point?

01:06:02 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
I think it should probably be a little bit worried. Yeah, point, I think it should probably be a little bit worried. Um, yeah, it, just because I mean trump. The thing with trump is like he says a lot of stuff right and I get people you know or like believe him when he says yeah, but he also lies a lot and he says a lot of things that he never does, uh, and so I do like, for instance, even even though the tiktok thing right, which was he was, so yeah, we're I mean, if our tiktok tiktok, according to the law passed by congress, has till january 19th to divest the american subsidiary and get, get the chinese government his hands out of tiktok.

01:06:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
January 19th is not an accidental date, it's the day before inauguration. Yep, congress knew that things might change on january 20th and he led that.

01:06:52 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
I remember being on this podcast talking about trump and like the whole tiktok thing he hated tiktok because microsoft was one of the companies trying to get into it microsoft and oracle both tried to buy it.

01:07:02
Yeah yep, and now it's like the reverse. Right now it's like, oh, tick, tock's great, it's just like. But how he's going to reconcile that with china and his rhetoric on china, I don't know. You know. So, like he said publicly, like remember, with google, the search results, and he said it was favoring kamala and it was all this. They need to be investigated, but I don't know how much it's actually going to matter. Don't forget, a lot of these companies have also kind of rolled over lately. You know Bezos did this, of course, with the Washington post, all of them.

01:07:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Tim Cook and Andy Jassy and, of course, sundar Pichai, all congratulated the president elect. We're let's get going on innovation and, yeah, I have to think that the future for the cfpb is not bright under trump right no, everyone hates it.

01:07:48 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
It's kind of like, um, I mean, lena khan is out, that that seems although uh, jd vance likes her, jd vance likes, yes, exactly, he does he does. And matt gates, uh, sorry, matt's um, who's the sex of it?

01:08:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
sorry, the um who's the sex offender? Oh, you mean matt gates. Yeah, yes, yeah, oh that one I mean he's apparently also a fan um absolutely allegedly. That's what's so interesting about this is is how unpredictable it is. Now, if I'm google, I'm thinking well, at the very least let's's push, you know, let's appeal, let's push this stuff up till January 20th and let's do everything we can to get on the good side of the new administration, right it's not just Google, it's also the system in the Washington Post story.

01:08:39 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
The CFPB has also worked to finalize a broader set of rules that could allow it to impose supervision on others, including amazon.

01:08:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
apple paypal owned venmo all of these companies are kind of in quasi banking apple pay google pay.

01:08:55 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
A republican administration is going to want that much government involvement in private business.

01:09:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's just my guess it also feels like I don't know how much power Elon Musk is going to have, or Doge is going to have a lot, you think?

01:09:08 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
well, definitely they're called has no constitutional power. No, but he's been called the first buddy and he's going to be authorized by.

01:09:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Trump, so he's the first one who's going to defend these companies, is he not?

01:09:19 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
it depends which ones he likes and which ones he doesn't like. He doesn't like meta, for instance. I think he doesn't like meta. Trump doesn't like meta. Meta has a lot of business. Uh, that could be, overseen by the government

01:09:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
and a lot of trump so you know well, they're all kissing up to him. Yeah right, I mean, that's just a given. There's a great piece, uh, and then I think of the new york times about how, uh, tim, how successfully tim cook has managed his relations. Tim apple has managed his relationship uh with the president-elect uh and will probably continue to. Actually, it's a bloomberg. The story uh is from uh, probably from mark german.

01:09:57 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Yeah, I mean, let's not forget that trump was talking about jailing mark zuckerberg's um, you know not a few months ago. It's all about who sucks up the most, and at the moment we're into crony capitalism territory, where, if you have the year of the president, you're going to do very well, if you have the year of musk, you're going to do very well, but I've got the feeling that musk and Trump are going to fall out at some point and that's going to be really interesting to watch was the zuckerberg offense, making the get little remix with uh t-pain in my book.

01:10:30
Yes, I'm sorry when, when, when you hear mark zuckerberg talking about the sweat on my ball don't say it, he did it, he did it, he said it, we couldn't stop him. It was just kind of like really, really actually going there, I played the clip not knowing what it said.

01:10:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I just heard it and then oh no paris martineau had to translate and I went.

01:10:52 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Oh, I'm so sorry I still haven't heard it, so I feel good, yeah, on my show.

01:10:57 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
We were not. We're not fans of that. The get low remix by z-pain, as zuck and t-pain are called together pain. I love it we played it and I did get a text message from a listener being like listen, you hated it so much and you played at the end and it sounded kind of good. It's quite melodic. So I don't want to end up getting the counter effect here. But wow, I don't know, I would not have made that song. I'll put it that way.

01:11:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah. He made it for his wife right as a gift for Priscilla.

01:11:26 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
And then I think he filmed her and put it on Instagram. All of this combined is certainly it must violate some federal statutes.

01:11:34 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Something weird is going on. You saw the statue right that he had commissioned to his wife yeah, that was creepy.

01:11:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And then he designed dual vehicles. Yeah, there's something weird going on how long before we, as a nation, tire of billionaires and their foibles. We won't. I don't think we will.

01:11:53 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
We just voted for just voted for one of them and yeah, with a massive endorsement by another one. And uh, I think peter teal made this point. They're not just billionaires, that you don't know. These are like the ideal of billionaires. You think of billionaires, you think of elon and you think of trump and the nation. Just pretty clearly, it was like we're still on the billionaire train.

01:12:17
So I think uh there's a very interesting as a genre are still in, although zuckerberg might be out if he keeps releasing songs with tv what would you do right now if you were satchin adela sundar pichai tim donate yeah, funnel money to the causes that maga wants absolutely it's not too late.

01:12:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's not too late to donate. To donate, I don't know. I mean sorry go ahead, we're being too.

01:12:52 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I'm being too polite. Please carry on, all right I'll do.

01:12:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I have to arbitrate now.

01:12:57 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Unfortunately, daniel go ahead no, I'm just gonna say I mean, I just think this is how it's going to work, that, like these companies can offer support, they can not be. You know, the Trump 1.0 thing was you had a lot of companies kind of resisting, fighting back, I think when they start donating money or they start supporting openly or even just not attacking, I think it's enough to tweet it, enough to say hey, congratulations, good job, let's get to work it certainly wouldn't hurt now.

01:13:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think it's a start.

01:13:30 - Benito (Announcement)
They all did it yeah, yeah.

01:13:32 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
I think, everyone wants to be on their good side yeah, go ahead.

01:13:34 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
Yeah, uh, beyond donating.

01:13:36
I don't know if donating will happen, but the companies were seen as sort of like a bastion of the resistance during the 2016 era and have been a lot less political, since and I think that, like I don't know, I'm not just going to be prescriptive here it's going to this is a tough leadership choice that's above my pay grade, but I think that what you're going to see from these leaders is um, to be descriptive, they're going to crack down on internal chatter, and you saw that happen a lot in the first term, and one of the interesting things that Gurman points out in this story about Tim Cook and Apple is that Apple didn't have Slack in 2016, and they have Slack now and people put the company on blast on Slack for decisions that they don't agree with. By the way, it's sort of wild thinking that Apple has Slack like the most secretive company has this chat group.

01:14:33
But anyway, maybe that's why Gehrman gets all these scoops. But I would say that I would not be surprised to see Apple shut down Slack. I would not be surprised to see more employees fired for speaking out, and it's going to be a very interesting balance within these companies to sort of try to figure out how to manage the fact that they have an employee base that very much does not agree with Trump and Trump, who is quite important to their future fortunes.

01:15:01 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Yeah, I mean, we saw this with Project Maven and Google. That's right, you know, employees rebelled against it and won that's right and took over that business. And with the current, you know, when you've got Trump and the Republicans controlling the presidency, Congress and really the judicial system, then it's in companies' best interest to play ball and they're going to, as you say, donate, they're going to what's a polite way to put this kiss the imperial ring and, yeah, they're going to make money from it. That's the end goal.

01:15:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
In fact, gurman points out that Apple probably wanted Trump to win because they've had problems with Biden. They were hoping that Joe Biden would save the Apple watch from the Massimo suit. He could, he had the power to do so, did not he? He was saved the apple watch from the massimo suit. He could, he had the power to do so, did not uh, he, uh, he was. Apple was sued by the justice department. They're currently fighting an antitrust case. Um, it's, it's interesting there there isn't necessarily a lot of love for the bind administration in apple, and now there is also a very complicated road here, because apple obviously makes a vast majority of its products in china spot on.

01:16:39 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
Yeah, I mean us. China relations are the most important thing for apple. Remember apple's 20 of apple's business comes from china. Large part of its supply chain comes from China and if Apple thinks, ok, let's. You know, we can have a similar run as we had with Trump in 2016, where he listens to what we need and gives us the exemptions from tariffs so we can make the iPhone, the iMac, the Apple Watch and AirPods without tariffs, as they did in the first term. That's great, but the risk is and there's always outlier risk with trump is that we do end up in some sort of trade war with china or worse, and that impacts apple's ability to operate and well in fact, president trump ran on raising tariffs to china and has the legal authority to do so with executive order, because china is an adversary.

01:17:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He says% tariff on goods imported from China, which would be 60% increase in expenses.

01:17:32 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Yeah, I mean, if you're an IT buyer at the moment or if you're just looking to upgrade your laptop, get it done now, because if those tariffs kick in, we're already hearing from major IT buyers. We're just like we're stocking up our inventory now, because if it does go to trade war, we're looking at a massive increase in costs of course, apple has increased uh production.

01:17:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
foxconn's got a plant in india and in brazil and they are working there. Part of the reason they have such a presence in brazil is because brazil has huge tariffs on phones manufactured outside Brazil. I just got my new Apple Mac Mini and it was made in Vietnam. I was surprised to see and let's not forget the Mac Pro, which has always been made in Austin Texas, and remember the photo op of President Trump and Tim Cook in the Austin Texas factory showing off the mac pro being made in america from parts almost exclusively from china yeah, I mean all the tariffs on them.

01:18:37 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
So yeah, unless there's going to be carve-outs yeah, exactly, I think.

01:18:43 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I think this is going to be it. It's like if you're a friend of the administration, you get a carve-out. Uh, if you're not, then you're a friend of the administration, you get a carve out. If you're not, then you're down with the dogs. It's been really interesting, though, how Vietnam has really tried to take on some of the manufacturing load from China. They don't have the ability to scale as yet, but I was speaking to some White House folks and they're like yeah, vietnam is the new China when it comes to manufacturing Interesting.

01:19:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Vietnam is the new China when it comes to manufacturing Interesting. The reason China is so important to Apple and many other companies right now is and this is Tim Cook's great creation is the way the supply chain works within China. All these smaller manufacturers who feed Foxconn and the assembly. They're all nearby. There is a natural synergy there that would disappear if you moved assembly somewhere else and it might not just be assembly. You might have to also get all those manufacturing, little manufacturing entities to make their devices somewhere else as well.

01:19:42 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
I was going to say also that one of the ways that Apple and a lot of these companies can get on the good side of the administration is simply by giving them those PR wins right. We know that they love that Something Tim Cook's been very good at right.

01:19:56
Yeah. So if they can get you know, apple and the Trump administration to, you know, announce something publicly we're opening a new factory in America, we're going to be doing this. You know, that makes Trump look good, that's how you get on his good side. And next thing, you know, carve outs could maybe happen. You know, so I, I think a lot of these companies will be smart in that way. Another analysis will be, of course, if you know, this administration is like what the left says, which is going to be like a fascist one.

01:20:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is going to be a very bad thing well, it's also complicated because, uh well, I think trump likes tim apple and likes apple a lot. Elon musk does not. No, uh, he has a working relationship with them he does, but he, according to german, he chafed at apple's unwillingness to buy tesla 10 years ago has complained about app store commissions and he has called apple's business model unfair. Now elon is like anybody else. Uh, you know he's gonna be.

01:20:55 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
It's gonna be a transactional relationship, not a yeah, you know that's pretty benign when it comes to elon and, yeah, you'll remember that he did, uh, complain about them. Stop apple stopping to advertise on that's right twitter. And then went to cutino and met with Tim Cook and got them back on. Twitter, so I don't think they're back in the same way that they were, but he's definitely able to do business with them, yeah.

01:21:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well and that's another thing that's probably very good for X. We haven't seen it yet, but I imagine advertisers are going to suddenly discover that X is really a great place to put their ads. Oh yes.

01:21:35 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
It's looking like the boycott is folding faster than a wet tissue. They're coming back in because they recognize that he has the presidency and this will be very useful to them Quite. How long that lasts we'll see, but yeah, there's an awful lot of caving going on. Yeah, we're not talking about the one you know with the submarine and the pedo guy it's gonna be, very it's gonna look.

01:21:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
One thing is obvious it's gonna be a very interesting uh time and uh, every one of these ceos at this point must have a war room where they're trying to figure out what the heck to do. Yeah, to make sure that they do well in the coming four years.

01:22:12 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
But Silicon Valley is also way more plugged in with the Trump administration than they were the first time around.

01:22:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, because of Peter Thiel and Elon Musk and JD Vance.

01:22:20 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
And the all in podcast. Guys like David Sachs is going to be in there doing his thing.

01:22:26 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Yeah, it's been really interesting this election seeing how the tech industry has. Basically, they're all kind of like oh, we'll spend millions on lobbying but we're publicly non-political, and that has changed significantly in this election.

01:22:42 - Benito (Announcement)
Yeah, I have a question. I have a quick question, benito. Yes, question about yes. Um so if the companies like ceos and upper management start cutting people, off.

01:22:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Start, you know, firing people for political views, or or just shut down the slack ever like.

01:22:57 - Benito (Announcement)
Do you think that leaves the door open for finally unionizing?

01:23:02 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
we've seen it. I mean we've seen certainly in the journalism industry and there have been attempts in the tech industry.

01:23:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But to be honest, warehouse go yeah the reason, the reason the Google uh Project Maven boycott worked, is because engineers, although small in number, are vital to these companies, and I think engineers at that. After that said, you know, we've got a lot of power here. Not, we don't need to unionize, we've got a lot of power as long as we exert it. And so it'll be very interesting to see. I don't.

01:23:34 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
I don't think engineering talent is so politically motivated that they will do something that's bad for the company, for political, for their own political interests and also let's not forget that when they protested in 2016, those were in the years of plenty, and, yes, I admit that all these companies have the highest market caps in the world and are much more valuable now than they were before, but there is a different philosophy that has hit them since 2022, in the year of efficiency era. Now that year is over, but I do think there's been such wholesale cuts within the tech giants that there's a lot more paranoia than there ever was, and hence folks are much less willing to speak up and these engineers, most of their compensation comes in the form of stocks options, so it is in their very much in their interest to make sure the company continues to perform well yeah.

01:24:30 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I mean, I was just going to say I mean I'm guessing, but I'm probably the only person on the panel that's been a union member.

01:24:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, heaven forfend, I've been SAG after for 30 or 40 years now.

01:24:45 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Oh you're SAG after Wow. Okay, I was in the Writers.

01:24:48 - Benito (Announcement)
Guild also. I was in the Writers Guild. So yeah, I was was in the writers guild also. I was in the writers guild.

01:24:50 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
So yeah, I was almost in the news guild at buzzfeed, but buzzfeed news yeah I mean the fact of the matter is, if you've got to set up a union, that is a sign of fantastically bad management, because I've been in those discussions and if you have to go through all the pain in the backside you know stuff to actually get a union going, that's a sign that management has really I think that's screwed things up.

01:25:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I'm a union guy and a union supporter, but I think you're exactly right so I mean I I don't think it's going to work in the tech industry.

01:25:23 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I really don't.

01:25:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, um, there are, I think they're going to end up voting their pocketbook yeah, which is traditionally the way human civilizations have gone throughout the years.

01:25:33 - Benito (Announcement)
Yeah, but um, yeah, we'll see even in an industry with like a pretty substantial immigration um that's going to be.

01:25:42 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
That's going to be the big thing if he starts supporting.

01:25:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
If he starts supporting google and apple engineers, then all bets are off. I don't know what's going to happen at that point.

01:25:51 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Well, I mean, I'm a legal immigrant and I have thought about, you know, becoming a US citizen just to cover my back. It does mean that the IRS is going to audit my tax returns for the rest of my bloody life and I'm not keen on that, but you know it's, and also it would break my mom's heart, but you know it's, and also it'd break my mom's heart, but you know, I mean it's. It's one of those things the tech industry relies on immigrants, and in a good way and in a bad way. One of the things I agreed with trump on was cracking down on h1b, because a lot of companies are hiring very low skilled tech workers on h1b visas and using those to replace US workers, and that needs to be cracked down on. But in terms of mass deportations, that's going to be a disaster for this country.

01:26:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All we can say is let's wait and see. I mean, I don't think anybody knows what's going to happen.

01:26:45 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
No we honestly don't I don't think anybody has any idea what's, what's, what's I mean speaking of, not what did you see the breaking news with the us, uk and france have allowed long-range strikes into russia yeah yeah, that's really, really going to happen yeah, biden really held the line on that for a long time because, uh, that's kind of a war-like move.

01:27:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, it sounds like these countries are hoping to win the war before january 20th.

01:27:14 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
Yeah, this is the last, the last sort of go at it before they have. They decide that trump is in and they have to negotiate.

01:27:22 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Yeah, no, I mean, once trump's in, then ukraine's gone. You know, they're gonna have to basically give up large amounts of territory, um to the east, um, because america is by far the largest supplier of weapons to the ukraine, I mean.

01:27:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I would guess, though, that the american people would not support this move that this is. This is a move from a lame duck administration that, uh, would not have done this if, before the election, they didn't. Well, I mean, I don't think americans want to support a, you know.

01:27:57 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
However, um, just and honorable the ukraine people and no, I mean ukraine was a massively corrupt institution from the start, but at the same time it allowed you to bleed out the russian army with no cost to american life russian invading sovereign nations.

01:28:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You kind of have to draw a line at some point. I was talking about at the same time, I don't think americans feel that strongly about it well, I mean americans might, but not.

01:28:24 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
There's a very sort of 1938 feel about this. I was talking to my mom. I do the weekly phone call back to the UK folks Europe gets it when you've got it. Does she remember those days? She's old enough to remember those days. My mom was born before the Second World War. Wow, she grew up in rationing. She didn't see a banana until she was 17. Wow, but no. The message is clear Putin in Georgia and in Ukraine. He's on the rise and next up is the Baltic states, and if he gets Ukraine, we've got Russian forces right up against NATO territory. It's not looking good and so they're fighting back against it, but the us abandons the fight. Yeah, ukraine's gone. Taiwan is the really, really worrying one.

01:29:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah I'm sure I'm sure people are watching closely to see what our commitment, our commitment to taiwan would probably be a lot more aggressive, I think I wonder, you know, under the new regime, if, if china didn't invade taiwan, it just blockaded it what would the us do?

01:29:32 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
that's a good question and also you have north korea involved now, yeah, in russia and ukraine, so you end up having this like very clear division within the world of like russia, china, north korea and ir Iran against the world. Maybe it's kind of unnerving.

01:29:54 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
It is.

01:29:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It really is. If I were your mom, I would have a little sense of deja vu, I'm sad to say. Let's take a break. I don't want to get too grim here.

01:30:03 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
On that optimistic note, on that high end, high note.

01:30:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We're all doomed. My attitude basically, is we just have to wait and see. We know increasingly. I'm not doing stories that are what might happen, because we just don't know.

01:30:20 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
We just, we just the right move, leo, yeah, no everything's up in the air until January, and even then, even then it's up in the air for the next four years.

01:30:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Are you kidding me?

01:30:29 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
yeah, it is fun and worthwhile to speculate, to speculate, I just you know we have a little pool going.

01:30:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I invite you to join on. How long before, uh, elon gets thrown out of the administration?

01:30:39 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
oh, honestly, the the best idea I heard was time magazine making elon guy of the year and that would irritate trump.

01:30:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It would cause the all over divorce trump's always want to be the man of the year. He, that would really be all over. I think june 1st uh is my is the date I'm putting in there, but who knows, you know, these guys uh seem to really like each other. I'll take the over on that. Yeah, I will. You think he's gonna last four years?

01:31:07 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
no but he's not, elon's not in the administration. You know, it's almost like he's going to be this sort of leader, his uncle elon now yeah, yeah, well, yeah, uncle elon, or I mean the first buddy. I mean we have um the rivian ceo on on wednesday on big technology podcast and I was like how do you feel that your number one competitor is now the first buddy in the white house? So it's kind of weird you know it is.

01:31:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It is weird because I remember when elon bought twitter that jason calacanis and david sachs became elon's first buddies and in that same exact sycophantic kind of court, jester role and uh I have to say I wonder what happened to them.

01:31:53 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Jester role and uh. So I wonder what happens to them. Jason didn't cover himself with glory at that moment, no, you know it's one of those things.

01:31:56 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
No, but we did get his uh text message to elon that he would jump on a grande for him and that, I think, is worth everything I am watching with great interest.

01:32:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I wish I had some popcorn right now. Uh, thanks to having it's so great to have all three of you here. Thank you, we'll continue on in a moment, but first a word from our sponsor, 1password. And 1Password has a, I think, a rhetorical question, because I think you know the answer. I certainly know the answer to this. Do your end users always work on company-owned devices? Sure, they never bring their own phone into the network. They always use it approved apps. They're never watching, you know, their plex server on uh on their phone, in their in the in the office. Of course they are.

01:32:43
So how do you keep your company's data safe when it's your data is sitting right next to, even on all those unmanaged apps and devices? Extended access management and it's very clever one password. Extended access management helps you secure every sign-in for every app on every device, including all those byod devices, because it solves the problems traditional IAM and MDM cannot touch. Yeah, this is something new from 1Password. Think of your company's security like the quad of a college campus. There's beautiful ivy covered brick buildings and then, leading from building to building, lovely brick paths. Those are the company-owned devices, the IT-approved apps, the managed employee identities on your network. But every quadrangle also has the shortcuts right, the little pads, the muddy little pads people actually use, worn through the grass, the actual straightest line from building A to building B. Those little muddy pads, those are the unmanaged devices, the shadow IT apps, the non-employee identities like contractors, and you know you got them on your network. The problem is most security tools only work on the happy little brick paths and most security problems happen where On the shortcuts right.

01:34:01
1password Extended Access Management is the first security solution that brings all those unmanaged devices, all those apps, all those identities under your control and ensures that every user credential is strong and protected, every device is known and healthy and every app is visible. It's security for the way we work today, now generally available to companies that use Okta and Microsoft Entra. It's in beta now for Google Workspace customers. This is such a clever solution. Check it out at 1passwordcom slash twit. More than password management, this is really. This is extended access management, the number one. P-a-s-s-w-o-r-d. 1passwordcom slash twit. We thank 1password so much for supporting this week in tech, for supporting this week in tech Apple, by the way.

01:34:56
Just I don't know if this is an example of how you can expect Apple to operate in the new world, but they just removed the Radio Free Europe app at the request of Roskomnadzor, the Russian media regulator nods, or the russian media regulator um and uh. The let's see. The newly removed rfe rl app is that of the russian service for radio free europe, which hosts the websites of its regional products, siberia realities and north dot realities. Apple had removed other rfeE apps prior to this, including their Kyrgyz service and Current Time, which is the Russian-language TV and digital network run by Radio Free Europe. Raskam Nanzor says the Russian service app contains materials from an organization whose activities in Russia have been declared undesirable. You can still download it here, in fact everywhere but Russia.

01:35:52 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Well, russia's done this. Sorry. Apple has been caving to Russia on this for quite some time. I did a story about this last month. They've pulled over 60 VPN apps from Russian users simply on the request of the Russian government, which makes me always slightly okay a slight wry chuckle whenever you see Apple advertising themselves in the US. As we're privacy-focused and it's all about your privacy, offer may not apply in China and Russia.

01:36:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They also removed or hid several Russian-language podcasts produced by independent journalists. You know Apple will say well, we have to obey the laws of the countries we operate in. Several russian language podcasts produced by independent journalists. Um, you know apple will say well, we have to obey the laws of the countries we operate in and this is the law of russia, and indeed they do.

01:36:38 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
And that is, I think, what he is saying is spot on, which is that these companies may put this like we are a benevolent, you know entity, face on in front of, uh, us audiences and european audiences, but at the end of the day, they'll just do whatever a company tells them to do and, like we've said multiple times in this episode, their job is to make money. Yeah, absolutely they will do what it takes.

01:37:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's clear. You gotta yeah, I mean. Anybody who thinks otherwise is is uh not paying attention. That's really all you know.

01:37:09 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
That's what a company is designed to do can't get over that congressman being like so are we being charged for this?

01:37:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, uh, yeah. I love it that brad smith feels like I gotta tell you the truth, so he's, yeah, we're a profit making entity here.

01:37:25 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Good good on brad for not kind of trying to weasel word his way out of that one well, I mean, they still publicly try and weasel word out of it, but when it comes to congressional hearings and I go through a lot of those they're perfectly honest about it. We're here to make money.

01:37:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's simple as that.

01:37:51 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
I have to say and I don't know if you agree with this, daniel, because you cover the company but I feel like Brad Smith's always been pretty much straight shooter, maybe to to the extreme, do you agree? Yeah, he's a very good communicator, um, and he's always. He knows how pr works and how to get ahead of the story right. They've done this pretty well with ai, putting aside the, the co-pilot, uh, some of the fiascos there yeah, I feel like that.

01:38:07
That was one where he somebody was asleep at the switch yeah, I don't think that was his call, but no, yeah, I mean he knows how washington works, so he knows how to negotiate. I mentioned this before that they have. They had a permanent presence in washington a long, long time ago because their strategy is to try to self-regulate and publicly mention that and broadcast it to prevent government from coming in to regulate them, because they feel like in that case one's going to be obviously bad for business, but also they're probably get a lot wrong, because we know how tech is and how government doesn't necessarily understand things like the earlier story, and so he's been very good with trying to look like the good steward for technology and to set standards. So I don't know, he is definitely good at his job and a good communicator.

01:38:57 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
Yep, he has one of the best, I think, leaked speeches or memos I've ever seen where people are asking him like why are you donating to politicians? And he goes. Well, we donate to politicians to get invited to parties and dinners and so we can influence them to make policies that benefit us.

01:39:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's like exactly, you gotta love somebody who's just. We know that, everybody knows that.

01:39:18 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Yeah, admits it right america is legalized bribery and called it campaign contribution exactly but, I mean it's but I have to say he's also a godsend for headline writers, because Mr Smith goes to Washington is just gold. But I mean, yeah, America has basically decided you know, OK, we're against bribery, but we will fund political ads, you know, in other areas in order to get influence. And that's the way it works.

01:39:48 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
And what about allowing papa? I mean speaking of our legalized corruption we allow our politicians to trade stocks on inside information absolutely outrageous. It drives me nuts. I mean I was listening to nancy pelosi's interview on uh, the interview show with the times the day after the election and she's like slamming the table as the democrats you know, being the party for the working class, and it's like, well, yes, Nancy your family's trades are so hilariously on point that people will, you know, basically mirror all of your trading activity as the second they see it, and they're quite successful at it.

01:40:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's a good idea. I didn't think of that. We should create a new Nancy Pelosi index.

01:40:27 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
They have I think they have Pelosi ETFs at this point.

01:40:31 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
And also create a new nancy pelosi index. They have. I think they have pelosi etfs at this point. And also, what the hell is she doing in congress?

01:40:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
at this point she's 84. You know it's dying. Feinstein served until the day she died I mean I think she's still sharp. I don't mind like that if you're sharp, foreign, you're sure dying, but that's fine, yeah you got to be kidding me with the stock trading.

01:40:49 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
It's really disgusting.

01:40:50 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
No, it's the ultimate insider trading. I mean, it's absolutely outrageous. And you know they made Jimmy Carter give up his peanut farm, for goodness sake, and yet Congress critters are allowed to trade on inside information. It's ridiculous.

01:41:07 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
Whatever Jimmy Carter did is working for him. That dude has been in hospice for like a decade now and he's still kicking.

01:41:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think he likes it. God bless him. God bless him, the Onion.

01:41:22
Oh, marvelous, news, Marvelous news, the Onion decides to buy InfoWars. As you know, alex Jones was sued by the Sandy Hook families and they won a massive I think it was more than a billion-dollar settlement which required Alex Jones to divest his InfoWars property in bankruptcy. It took the Sandy Hook family's agreement to take a lesser amount of money for InfoWars for the Onion to buy it. But it's pretty awesome. The Onion, of course, is a satirical news site and says we're going to take InfoWars and turn it into a satire of itself. They've already started by publishing from Global tetrahedron why I decided to buy infowars. This is the phony ceo of global tetrahedron, bryce tetrader. Uh, and so you've. They've already begun, but there might be a fly in the ointment because Elon Musk's X Corp has weighed in and is asking for a hearing with the bankruptcy court and while we don't know what the plan is, they're claiming the bidding process was unfair. It's my guess Elon wants to buy InfoWars himself.

01:42:48 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
I mean, that's what everybody was encouraging him to do. Once they found out the Onion, went in there and bought it. But there's apparently discretion here that the lawyer for the Sandy Hooks family has, which is that they can accept less money so long as it's more in their interest. And that's why they kind of did with the Onion was because the Onion's also agreed to run like anti-gun stuff and do stories around that and they're going to have like a kind of a partnership with that program, that with the sandy hook family. So there's sort of, uh, that reasoning there. But yeah, it looks like that. You know, elon wants to get in their elbows, way in, and be again the savior for people on the right. I'll say I didn't realize that the um ben collins, who was a reporter at nbc, he runs the onion now. Yeah yeah like I.

01:43:40
I followed him on twitter and at some point it turned to tim onion, yeah, which is like uh, his handle and uh. But yeah, he got together with a bunch of people and they bought it when uh, that was it. Uh. That other company got together with a bunch of people and they bought it when uh, that was it. Uh, that other company spun it off and now they went kind of like a a private route and they've been rebooting it. They do the subscription now with the uh, the product, the paper. They've been doing a really good job with it.

01:44:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So absolutely it goes through. Yeah, yeah, thanks to Collins for saving the onion. Uh, even print a paper. Now you can actually get it. It's a newspaper again.

01:44:12 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
No, no, I'm subscribing to the newspaper now.

01:44:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Just to support them.

01:44:15 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Yeah, it used to be when I first moved to San Francisco. You could get it in newsstands for free, free.

01:44:22 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
They handed it out on the subways too.

01:44:23 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Yeah exactly, and some of those papers were absolute gold. Those, some of those papers were absolute gold. Um, a friend of mine still has I think it's the 2000, the september 11th edition, which was just what the nation needed at that time. It was holy, no, I can't say it. Um, but also the little sidebar at the bottom, cleaner road, uh, world trade center says best sick day I took ever. Yeah that's the kind of that's the kind of humor that we needed from the onion.

01:44:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So I don't. I do hope. Now the judge seems like he's a little bit in uh elon's right court here. Uh, it's a, it's a texas uh judge. And he said no judge. Christopher lopez said no one should feel comfortable with the results of the auction. This is the results of the auction being that the Onion had purchased it. So the X Corp filing dated November 14th does not disclose the purposes of X's appearance other than to state the rights reserved to it as an interested party and request all relevant documents in the case. I think the argument will be but, your Honor, we want to pay more as an interested party and request all relevant documents in the case. I think the argument will be but, your honor, we want to pay more and that's better for the bankruptcy. Despite what the Sandy Hook families say, it's a weird position to take.

01:45:43 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Yeah, I mean they should have a play in this because, they were directly affected by the whole thing. You know families had to go into hiding over these lies.

01:45:52 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
So yeah, I say fair play to him and and there's a lot of, I don't think would be out of the realm to suspect if elon bought it he would just give it back to no alex jones, yeah, well, he, you know.

01:46:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Remember that when he has banned from every platform, they they put him up on x. He streamed it on X.

01:46:12 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
But if he gives it back to Alex Jones, I think Alex Jones will have to like sell it back again, sell it again.

01:46:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Ben Collins. I was watching an interview with Ben Collins and he said not only did we get the InfoWars, you know intellectual property, we got the vitamin warehouse yes, all the supplements. We got the vitamin warehouse yes, all the supplements. They got all the supplements. And so he says we're going to melt it down and make a giant health candy bar. Actually, that was what the fake CEO said he was going to do. Now that he owns it, so we'll see what happens. But yeah, they, they, uh, they own not just the uh right and the name to be in fours in the website, they actually own the supplements that Alex Jones was selling. That made him a billionaire. Billion and a half dollar judgment.

01:47:01 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
And that parody. Uh, you know why we're acquiring the onion. There was a hilarious line where it's like we want to make you as scared as you can possibly be and then sell you supplements so you can live as long as you can to be that scared for the longest amount of time possible.

01:47:18 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
They have the most brilliant writers.

01:47:19 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Oh, they really are good they really are, and I don't know it. Just it encapsulates an awful lot of American culture and, yeah, I wish him the best. If X wants to take it over, that's fine, but I don't think they're going to. I think the only one will fight on this one.

01:47:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I hope so. He writes Bruce. This is Bruce Tetrader, the global tetrahedron. Cdo. As for the vitamins and supplements, we're halting their sale immediately. And CDO. As for the vitamins and supplements, we're halting their sale immediately. Utilitarian logic dictates if we can extend even one CEO's life by 10 minutes, diluting these miracle elixirs for public consumption is an unethical waste. Instead, we plan to collect the entire stock of the InfoWars warehouses into a large vat and boil the contents down into a single candy bar-sized omni-vitamin that one executive I I will not name names may eat in order to increase his power and perhaps become immortal. That's good, yes.

01:48:19 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
Tim Grahl satire should be in the hands of the sort of should not be in the hands of the establishment, no, and so I mean obviously, like we're talking about Musk acquiring Infowars, but I just would say, be much better if it was in the hands of the satirists Do a hell of a lot of funny Poke in the eye.

01:48:36 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Yeah, we all know Elon's not very funny. Yeah, he's the worst.

01:48:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He thinks he's funny. That's what's really bad.

01:48:42 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Yeah, the Babylon Bee is not funny.

01:48:51 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
And I'm not saying that just because I'm left the center, but it's just not funny. It's not funny right. But I mean, on a serious point, we've got to remember that satire really doesn't change, does?

01:48:57
it die in darkness well, I mean, the lovely Alan Corrin, british satirist, said that yes, satire has its role. But you know, yes, satire has its role. But you know, germany in 1932 had some marvelous cabaret clubs which we still remember. Didn't do anything to stop it. But you know, there's only so far that humor can do. You know we need to. Actually it's a bad, sorry bad, ending point.

01:49:29 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
But we are living no, I disagree. We're living in a society where, you know, I do think that there needs to be some sort of counterweight defense.

01:49:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Honestly, I think humor is the only defense at this point, and I think Charlie Chaplin's the Great Dictator did a lot to puncture Hitler's appeal, that is a great film, but at the same time time organizing rather than making fun. I think it might be more, yeah yeah, we can do both. We have to do both but you need to puncture the pomposity by by mocking it.

01:49:59 - Benito (Announcement)
Go ahead, benito the satirists are there for an entry point people need an entry point into the issue.

01:50:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's what they're there for yeah, benito lived in, uh, the philippines marcos era philippines, so, oh good lord, I'm so sorry he knows a little bit about this, yeah his family are aquinos, so he knows a lot about this it's like what emma goldman said if I can't dance to it, it's not my revolution absolutely love it. Yeah, she akami. I think she was akami anarchist.

01:50:36 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Her biography was one of the best things I've ever read, really all right, I'll put it on my list and also the craziest life I've ever read and the thing she was advocating for, like in the 20s, it was just. I don't know, she was so ahead of her time.

01:50:50 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Um, what a wild and bear in mind that when the communists took over, anarchists were straight down to the gulags.

01:50:56 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
So yeah, yeah, she was the first one to um her and alexander berkman. They came back, they visited right after the revolution and they came back to the us and went on a tour and they were the first ones to say it's horrible, it's everything that's wrong and it's where. You know it's like one of the worst together ships we ever seen. No one believed them, you know, but they wrote all about it. They were the first ones, uh, but yeah all right, which?

01:51:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
what's the name of the book?

01:51:21 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
my further disillusionment in russia, no oh, that's the one that I was just talking about. That's what she wrote, but, um, I think it's just called living my life, living my life, it's a two-parter, it's two parts.

01:51:32 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I think where is the yeah, um, yeah behind you? No, no, this is uh. You can't win by jack black. I would highly recommend reading that oh, there's another one.

01:51:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Golly, I get get my reading recommendations from twit. That's awesome. Let's take a little break. I have some other recommendations for you. We will continue in a. Golly, I get my reading recommendations from Twit. That's awesome. Let's take a little break. I have some other recommendations for you. We will continue in a moment with our wonderful panel from the Big Technology Podcast, bigtechnologycom, alex Kantorowicz. Always a pleasure, alex Love getting you on.

01:52:04 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
And I love listening to your show.

01:52:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You get such great people.

01:52:07 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
Thanks. We're having fun fun moment right now, launching video on on spotify so we've got the oh nice yeah, so we're trying to do that with the bang. We have the spotify co-president, who's just been on, we have uh rivian ceo rj scringe, we have uh aws ceo matt garman coming up and, of course, nolan arba, like we talked about at the beginning of the show. So always great speaking with you and thanks for having me on look at your set.

01:52:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is that your set, or Spotify?

01:52:34 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
set this. This right. Here is mine, although we are going to be taping some shows at Spotify's studio at four world trade center. I like it pretty nice.

01:52:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I like your webby and uh, and it was very nice of you to put the Spotify logo on the wall up there.

01:52:50 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
Isn't that a Webby over your shoulder there? That's their Webby. That's their Webby. It's a nice studio though.

01:52:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, it's the real deal. Yeah, it looks pretty good Also with us. Do you have a studio at the Register? Ian Thompson.

01:53:06 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
We do have a studio, but unfortunately the lighting is really bad, because we get great views over the San Francisco Bay, but unfortunately the office we're in, the lights come on automatically, so it just throws things off. So I'm working from home today and I have a large cat with me. Much better. Stumpy has been sitting on my lap for the last hour, so if you see my ears, one of those things. But always a pleasure to be on.

01:53:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Nice to have you, of course, and from the wonderful Windows Central Editor-in-Chief, the MIG man, daniel Rubino Always a pleasure to have you as well. Great panel today. Thank you for being here. Our show today is brought to you by, I think, a very clever invention. Imagine a honeypot that's easy to install, easy to configure, can assume an almost infinite number of personalities and looks not like a honeypot or anything vulnerable on your network, looks like something really valuable that bad guys just can't resist.

01:54:14
I'm talking about the thinks canary. We have some in our network as well. It's so cool. It looks like an external usb device. It's only got two connections, one for power, one for ethernet. It could be a skated device, it could be mine's a NAS over here. It looks just exactly. It impersonates a NAS perfectly down to the MAC address. It looks exactly like a Synology NAS, the login page and everything. Simple to deploy, simple to configure. It's so easy.

01:54:42
You might go into your console and change its personality all the time, all the time. But here's the thing it can create files you can spread around your network that look like PDFs or documents or Excel spreadsheets or whatever you want them to be. You can give them provocative names, like employee information and then just wait. If someone accesses those lure files or brute forces your fake internal SSH server, your thinks canary will immediately tell you you've got a problem. No false alerts, just the alerts that matter and get them the way you want them email text, slack. They support web mentions, they support syslog, I mean any way you want them. But the thing is, when you get that alert from your Thinks Canary, you know you've got a problem. Choose a profile for your Canary device, thinkscanary device, register it with the hosted console for monitoring and notifications, and then you just wait.

01:55:36
The problem is, you see, you might have excellent perimeter defenses, but you shouldn't assume that no one's ever going to get into your network. That's the same thing a lot of other companies have assumed. Problem is companies on average don't know somebody's inside their network for 91 days, that's three months. The bad guys can wander around, exfiltrate information about your customers. Your employees look for things to encrypt with ransomware, look for where your backups are so they make sure they get those too. You don't want to let these guys wander around in your network. Instead, with your things canaries, they'll let you know that somebody has breached the network, maybe a malicious insider inside your network accessing those lower files. And now you know and you can take action. It's a really great idea. It's a must-have, absolutely must-have, for your layered security. Have the perimeter defenses, of course, but you also want something inside the network to let you know if you've got an adversary in there.

01:56:33
Visit canarytool slash twit. I'll give you an example of the pricing. It really varies because if you're a, you know some big banks have hundreds of things canaries all over the operation. Some little operations like ours might just have a handful, but as an example, a handful. You'll get five things to can 7 500 a year. You get your own hosted console, you get upgrades, you get support, you get maintenance for the full year and if you use the code twit in the how did you hear about us? Box, you get 10 off the price, and not just for the first year but for as long as you subscribe, for the life of your subscription.

01:57:07
These things cans, canaries are incredible. But if you are saying, well, I don't know, I have to see, let me reassure you. You can always return your Thinks Canaries. There's a two-month money-back guarantee for a full refund, two months. So you have plenty of time to try it see how it works. You will want this. I should point out, though, that we've been doing these ads for thinks canary for I don't know seven, eight years. No one has ever yet not once requested a refund. Once you get your things, canary, you will know hey, this thing is great.

01:57:41
Visit canarytools, slash twit. Don't forget to put twit in the how did you hear about us box for 10 off for the life of your subscription. And if you want to see what other people think about the Thinks Canary, there's a great page, canarytoolslove, and it's all the people on some very well-known names in security singing the praises of the Thinks Canary. Canarytoolstwit. Use Twit in the how Did you Hear About Us box, and we thank you so much, thinkst Canary, for supporting the work we do and for keeping us safe all these years. Canarytools, slash twit. The Thinkst Canary. So you've already talked to the Spotify guy. It looks like you say he's going to be doing AI music and podcasts.

01:58:28 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
Yes, so we had a great conversation last week and okay, so I should say he's not doing those things.

01:58:38 - AI Granny (Caller)
We talked a little bit about how he feels about those formats, but creators are doing it.

01:58:42 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
Creators are doing them Spotify on the.

01:58:43
AI front is doing some really interesting things, like they're allowing you to like write a prompt about the type of playlist you want and it will fill a playlist based off of natural language. And when Gustav uh, who came on the show it's a CTO, cpo and co-president of Spotify uh told me was that he wants you to be in dialogue with your recommendations. So many people every week are like, oh, discover Weekly really got me this week, or Discover Weekly didn't, and there's no real feedback mechanism that spotify has other than you listen or you don't, and what they want to do is put users in dialogue with the app where they could actually guide the recommendations based off of their natural language. So that was that was interesting. But I think what you, what you led with leo, was really the most interesting part of the conversation where I basically pressed the case like do you want your platform to fill with the equivalent of shrimp Jesus, the way that we have on Facebook, which is like we can have AI generated songs, we can have AI generated podcasts they're okay.

01:59:41
Do you want those on Spotify? And I think, like from Suno and stuff like that. Oh yeah, we led off talking with Suno and it's getting good, and so his belief is that you should. You people are going to want to connect with the human behind the music and therefore AI music will have a limited appeal, and I don't agree with that. I think that we're going to get to the point where you might be feeling a certain mood or in a certain emotion and you're going to want music to sort of, um, connect with that mood or emotion and you're going to type in a prompt and you're going to get AI generated music isn't there a huge risk, though.

02:00:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, already, creators are kind of not a huge fans of Spotify. This is just going to piss creators off like crazy, artists off like crazy.

02:00:26 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
I mean that they see AI as competition so this is the argument that he made to me, which is that we already have AI baked into songs that human creators are making. So the question is going to be sort of not should AI be there, because AI is already there, it's going to be. To what degree of AI, you know, are we going to be comfortable with?

02:00:50 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I think ai is is already there, to be honest, I mean, we've had it with auto-tune for 10 years, um, and yeah, but there's a difference between that and a fully ai generated song, absolutely if I'm I mean, look, as a podcaster I'm not.

02:01:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I already think spot Spotify has damaged the industry hugely. I blame Spotify for what's happened to advertising and podcasting.

02:01:17 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Honestly, spotify has led to a lot more gigs, though from people who no longer have royalties, so you know, I've been to yeah, but that's the only way you can make music as a musician now, absolutely Performance, but that's the only way you can make music as a musician now, absolutely Performance. But I mean, if you look at the way that AI is shifting this market, it's much easier to get an AI to do this stuff and the rights involved are still under court.

02:01:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, I understand that's why Spotify loves it. Spotify lives and dies by the music industry and I understand they don't like that one cotton pick a bit. They would love for there to be some other source of content that they could sell, so that they don't have to pay royalties to the music industry and be be at the mercy of music industry raising those royalties.

02:02:05 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
So what this? What? What? This guy, gustav Söderström, the person that he has a lot of titles at Spotify, let's call him the co-president. That's one of the titles. He said they will not create AI music on their own, and my point to him was like you might be leaving yourself open to competition if we end up moving to a place where people are going to want to listen to this more than anything else.

02:02:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, I think that's kind of missing the point, though.

02:02:35 - Benito (Announcement)
I'm not worried about spotify doing this, but I'm worried about everybody else doing it and putting it on spotify. So we had this is already happening, guys. Like this isn't a future, yes, like this is already happening, there's a lot of, there's a ton of ai music in spotify already I know.

02:02:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's why I don't use spotify anymore, because you very frequently, when you do a spotify search, will get something that you didn't want, which is created by some ai or some jerk trying to make money off of search terms but I mean this is hitting us already.

02:02:55 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I mean, we had a case last week where we did jessica uh lance. Our security editor did a great interview with a red team pen tester, we published the story and within a week, an ai had basically stole the story, put in hallucinations or mistakes, as we used to call them, um, put in the wrong photo and published it. And she came back to us and just like, yeah, we have to crack down on this absolutely because, yeah, yeah it's just, it's a new world out there, but at the same time, it's a deeply unpleasant one, and I you know I I'm a big ai booster, I I think ai has a lot of promise, but I well, the one thing I don't want ai doing is being a creator.

02:03:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think humans should get to write the poetry, make the art and do the music and let AI do the other stuff. You know?

02:03:50 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Yeah, that's not where AI belongs. Ai will never break a story, you know they will just steal it. Yeah, it's classic power territory.

02:04:01 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
Yeah, I'm with you all. I just don't think that that's going to be the world that we're living in. I don't know how long it's going going to take, but I think that we need to be ready for it, because ai is going to create music. There's going to be ai artists or people that are prompting with ai that become stars guys, like I said, we're already there that's our future date.

02:04:20 - Benito (Announcement)
That's where we are today yeah, yeah.

02:04:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, but that bothers you, benito, because you're a musician, right it?

02:04:26 - Benito (Announcement)
bothers me the most, because also also I have a personal crusade against spotify, but I won't go, we won't go there I'm sure you've talked about it on the show before, but notebook lm is just.

02:04:36 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
Every time I use it to generate a podcast, I'm blown away and like one of the.

02:04:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, it's amazing what it can do. I don't think it's great quality, but it is amazing what it can do, exactly no I mean as a journalist.

02:04:46 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Otter is uh, you, it's a great product, but I don't trust it. I'll go through and check the quotes.

02:04:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You're talking about otterai? Yeah, that's right.

02:04:56 - Benito (Announcement)
Yeah, that's the transcription tool.

02:04:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, which for?

02:05:00 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
journalists is great, but at the same time you have to check it because it makes mistakes, sorry, hallucinations, whatever the PR term is, but you know I mean it genuinely screws up at times. So yeah, there are tools out there. We should use them, but we shouldn't be dominated by them.

02:05:17 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
For sure, and one of the things that I think is actually a cool use of Notebook LM, which can generate a podcast with like two AI voices speaking based off of the documents and articles you drop in there is you could end up with a long tail of podcasts. So I don't think they'll be like the main shows, but if you want to like create a podcast episode on something really weird that you are one of the few people that enjoy, maybe, ian, you'd want to like do it about F1 back in the days when you were the one person in the bar watching it in San Francisco, you can do that. You can do that, and that might be the use case, in which case I think that's kind of good. But I do worry like is it going to be? Is this going to be a format Like I've thought? Like do I want to make a daily show and just like plug in a bunch of articles I'm reading and have these hosts read it and upload it to the podcast platforms?

02:06:05 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
This is the problem because it takes that human inventiveness out of it. Everyone's big on AI, the rest of it but you need that quirky human brain to keep things interesting and unique.

02:06:18 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
I'm with you?

02:06:21 - Benito (Announcement)
I actually don't think anybody.

02:06:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't think I know a single person who listens to an AI podcast.

02:06:25 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
This is the beginning of the end Notebook, LM actually. Yeah, it makes me more nervous as a podcaster than anything I've touched.

02:06:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There is one thing, however.

02:06:33 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
Sorry, notebook LM makes me more nervous as a podcaster than anything I've touched yeah.

02:06:39 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Definitely.

02:06:43 - Benito (Announcement)
I'm like, oh, you know a single person, though, who's actually enjoyed a full episode of no, no it's.

02:06:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We know it's kind of mediocre garbage exactly for now.

02:06:49 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
This is for now.

02:06:50 - Benito (Announcement)
This is version one, burrito and that's yeah, but you think it's a linear progression and it's not like it's not linear I hope not.

02:06:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean nobody would no, no ai could create a podcast as as kind of weirdly human, with all of its flaws and foibles, as the shows that we do.

02:07:06 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I mean, I know that I agree. Absolutely.

02:07:08 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
Yeah, yeah, but I mean it's enough to give me like a bit of a heart attack.

02:07:13 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Yeah, I mean the thing is, yes, we all say the human element is really important in this, but it's like and then, as you just just said, people don't particularly want trash.

02:07:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But having seen american tv and british tv and tv around the world, people are perfectly fine with trash, you know, as long as ktv can easily be created by ai, oh god, that's an absolute nightmare.

02:07:39 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I don't know about that, I don't think about.

02:07:41 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
I think reality tv is the last thing to go, because the disgusting things that we see in there that are just only humans that is the essence of humanity.

02:07:49 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
That's what we like to ais it wouldn't feel as good watching. Yeah, that's a fair point imagine watching a date.

02:07:55 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
you can't watch a dating show where two ais are like I don't really know if I'm into this ai, but you can watch a dating show where it's news or usba, but no, it's true.

02:08:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, there are certain stories that ai can write very well like financial news and sports news stories.

02:08:15 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I don't know. We, honestly, when ai first kicked in we did experiment with because nobody likes doing financial results stories. They're they're, they are the dullest thing apart and formulaic yeah, but they're the dullest thing apart from batch tuesday. So we built an engine, we tried to make it work and again it's this hallucination problem.

02:08:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And when you're dealing with financial figures, that's really important, so you just can't trust it at the moment I think we want the robots to do the stuff we don't want to do, so that we can have more time to do the stuff we like like, yeah, but do you trust the robots?

02:08:52 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
that's the key issue. I mean, I'm a journalist, I uh, what I write I am, my word is my bond and my reputation depends entirely on that.

02:09:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm not prepared to hand that over to an ai yet so I'm sure this was a marketing plan, but this is something the british mobile operator o2 oh, gorgeous story. Yes, they created an ai bot called daisy that keeps scammers on the line to waste their time. You want to? Now I'm sure this is just basically an O2 marketing ploy.

02:09:25 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Oh, absolutely yes.

02:09:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But at the same time it's a brilliant idea.

02:09:29 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I mean, if you've ever got one of those calls where it's just like hi, someone with a foreign voice who has a ridiculously English name, like Harold the Wake or whatever, just like hi, we've seen the sign that you're infected and you need to download this software. One of the biggest joys of those calls is keeping them on the line for about 20 to 30 minutes and saying, by the way, what's my ip address?

02:09:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
you know it's honestly cut off, but this is a perfect thing for ai to do. I would like the ai to do this and not get involved in podcasts and making music. The AI tool mimics the voice of an elderly woman because, of course, the elderly people like me are prey for the scammers. Let me play a little O2 ad for you.

02:10:25 - Benito (Announcement)
This is Seven in ten Brits have been targeted by scammers, and it's not just our grandparents. I was one of them.

02:10:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I feel like this could be crunk.

02:10:33 - Benito (Announcement)
This film isn't about getting scammed. This is about getting even Meet my friend Daisy.

02:10:39 - AI Granny (Caller)
Hello scammers, I'm your worst nightmare. I'm an AI created by O2 to waste phone scammers time.

02:10:50 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
so w's then a dot three times w and then dot. I think your profession is bothering people, right I'm just trying to have a little chat.

02:11:00 - AI Granny (Caller)
it's nearly been an hour for the love of to have a little chat. It's nearly been an hour For the love of how time flies.

02:11:06 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
That's very British. Yes, it's showing me a picture of my cat Fluffy. It's showing you a picture of your cat Fluffy. Stop calling me dear, you stupid.

02:11:18 - AI Granny (Caller)
Because while they're busy talking to me, they can't be scamming you. And let's face it, dear, dear, I've got all the time in the world that's what ai should be doing.

02:11:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Where can we get this? I want this.

02:11:30 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I want this on my phone I mean, it's a fantastic publicity exercise, but at the same time and they're spamming this out onto the call lists that the the scammers use but at the same time they're going to get wise to it fairly quickly. Yeah, we should change the voice, we should change the attitude, but I love the idea of wasting these people's time because they are utter scumbags.

02:11:51 - Benito (Announcement)
There is a Twitch streamer who does this for a living.

02:11:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, in fact, that's Really so. This is so. According to the PC Magazine story, multiple AI models were used to create Daisy, which was trained with the help of YouTuber Scambaiter Jim Browning. The tool transcribes a caller's voice to text, generates the appropriate responses using a large language model. All of this takes place without input from an operator. At times, daisy keeps fraudsters on the line for as long as 40 minutes since 02. Uh, yeah, I don't want to. I don't want to spend waste my time talking to these guys, but if I could put something, just hold on, let me like give you my grandma and let them talk to daisy for a while.

02:12:33 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Honestly have fun with it. You know, when you get these scammers, have fun with them, but this is what ai should be using for.

02:12:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Used for?

02:12:40 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
yes, I think yeah, but I am sorry to say it, I do think the scammers are moving away from phone calls to text messages. All this do not call they're doing, they're texting. And all this do not call list is going to be for not because it's these pig butchering scams which we've heard about so much, where instead of calling you, they text you. They make you think that there's somebody. They're not.

02:13:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You fall in love with that person I haven't gotten any pig butchering, and I think it's because the campaigns have so overwhelmed my phone that, uh, the pig butchers decided to take the time off maybe.

02:13:14 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
Yeah, they'll be back later till.

02:13:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, they're on break because there's so much, there's so many, there's so many political texts. It was five or six a day, uh, for me, but I'm rich.

02:13:23 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
By the way, bear bear a lot of resemblance, they tell you they love you, they need you and they need all your money yeah, I say stop to every one of them well, I well, I did a story this week which was really interesting because it went the other way. So now malware being spread by mail in switzerland being spread by mail in.

02:13:42
Switzerland. Oh interesting, the Swiss security forces Basically people were getting letters I mean physical letters saying you know you need to download this app and the rest of it Obviously very highly targeted spear phishing, but they're trying anything they can get at the moment. Ai may help on this front and I think it's an o2 publicity exercise, but at the same time, the thought of somebody sitting there for 40 minutes brings joy to the heart here's your story swiss cheesed off.

02:14:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Nicely done. I see what he did there, we had fun swiss cheesed off as postal service used to spread malware.

02:14:24 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
They were mailing qr codes yeah, literally physically mailing, and it cost 1.35 to mail this stuff oh, that's not gonna last from a yeah, from an economic perspective, this has to be very highly targeted spearfishing.

02:14:39 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
Wow, that's they're going against one of my number one internet security rules, which is never click your mail yes, but can you scan the qr code in your mail? Don't do that either yeah, I mean.

02:14:51 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Honestly, scanning qr codes at the best of times is dodgy, unless you absolutely need to do it.

02:14:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is a kit boga. Who is? He says I called scammers, using their own voices oh, this guy's doing the lord's work yeah, he is indeed okay in real time what it's just going really poorly. I I won't play. I'll leave this as a exercise for the listener. Kit boga has 3.6 million subscribers, so I you've probably already seen it and this this one had a million views scammers, so it sounds like them.

02:15:30 - Benito (Announcement)
They're calling themselves sort of like well, he does all kinds of stuff, you know he just he plays around with all the scammers all the time.

02:15:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, see, there's money to be made in scamming the scammers. Speaking of scammers, did you watch the congressional hearings on alien civilizations? Oh, I can't sit through the entire thing. You watch?

02:15:44 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
the congressional hearings on alien civilizations. Oh, I had to sit through the entire thing you watched the whole thing, I did, I did and my word, that was an absolute.

02:15:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I can't say that word, but the little clips I saw were just horrific. Oh, it was just okay. Okay, look. Why is Congress wasting its time?

02:16:06 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
They've had to do it for the last couple of years because the Pentagon agreed to release the reports on unidentified flying objects, or UPAs as they're now known. Okay, look, we've all seen a UFO. We just didn't know what it was. And some of the stuff that was coming up in this hearing, lauren Bloput was just kind of like is this evidence of an alien civilization under the sea, or words to that effect? And you were kind of like seriously, you're a sitting member of Congress and you're asking this stuff. You know it's like I'm a science fiction nerd. I'm all for science. It's impossible that we are alone in the universe. Do I think that they are actually coming through and appearing on videos? No, if you're that advanced across the galactic distances to get here, you're going to have pretty good masking technology.

02:17:00 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
So I just want to chime in on this because, like I don't believe in aliens either, but I love following the lore and the stories.

02:17:08 - Benito (Announcement)
Oh, it's like yeah oh, it's just so.

02:17:10 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
It's just like ghost stories like. I just like listening to it and stuff. So there's actually two really good series on netflix right now. One just started, it was called investigation alien with george knapp he's the guy that broke the Area 51 story like 30 years ago and there's another one called Encounters and they're both really good documentaries because they sort of they approach it seriously and they have scientists on and stuff and they have some kind of counterpoints here and there. The thing with the oceans was really interesting because the theory goes that atmospheres are really tough things to deal with. You have a lot of different pressure, you have different temperatures all over the place, but oceans, when you have a liquid water, are very constant and so it's easier. For if you were going to jump from planet to planet, it would actually be easier to stay in the oceans than it would be in the atmospheres.

02:18:09
Plus there are obviously good places to hide. Lauren bobert was not wrong. Yeah, and a lot of the uaps are sighted near water. They've been sighted coming out of water or being in water.

02:18:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You sound like a believer, daniel I'm not.

02:18:19 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
But well, I believe in the sense that, like in the basic of a ufo right, there are things that we see out there that we just don't know what it is. That doesn't mean it's alien of course they're uap.

02:18:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're unidentified aerial phenomenon. They're not aliens, they're just unidentified aerial phenomenon yeah, and it's.

02:18:38 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
But some of the stories, like you hear them and like some like what's cool about that uh encounter show on netflix, it's. It's looks like it's done by the same team that does the um unsolved the new unsolved mysteries. It has the same kind of production. Yeah, yeah, the same thing.

02:18:51
Uh, it's the same style dramatic music and all of that, yeah all the stories told are ones I've never heard of before, like and these are some been pretty big incidents and so it's been kind of cool. Um, it's kind of funny. I was discussing this with some friends. I was like I don't believe in alien things because it's like, what are the odds? Right, you know, billions of years plus, I don't find humans would be that interesting to other species. Like you could fly across the universe. I don't know why we would be. We're naked, psychotic apes, right, we're not that fascinating. But, um, there's the other theory out there which I don't believe, but I find it, if I had to pick one, makes more sense to me, which is that these aren't aliens, they're humans from the future, coming back in time. Oh, interesting, yeah, which? Especially? Because, if you look at the physiology of the great aliens, right, they're big eyes, two arms, two legs, head round four very humanoid, yeah what?

02:19:45
yeah, what are the odds like there's gonna be life in the universe? It just happens to be like what. They can't be two inches tall. They're not 60 feet tall, no, they're around the same size of humans. They have two arms, two legs, two front-facing eyes, like that seems weird to me that we would just presume life would just automatically go that route versus, you know, evolution, um, but this idea that they're coming.

02:20:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Your solution to this is time travelers from the future. I'm just saying, if I have to pick a, wild that seems a bit of a stretch oh, totally I don't believe it.

02:20:17 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I'm just saying like if I had to pick aliens or this one, I'm like I think that time well, I did love douglas adams's idea with the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy of people called tweeters, who are advanced civilizations who will come down to a primitive planet.

02:20:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, yeah, the td bob was on the head yeah and go, you take me to your leader.

02:20:36 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Yeah, yeah, that's what the cows right, that's the only I can think of with all the cow mutilation stuff. It's like they're just messing around with us, just messing with us.

02:20:43 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
There's only one way for us to find out the real truth about UFOs, and that is for the onions purchase of InfoWars to go through.

02:20:51 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
We go into the archives and we find and learn what they've been hiding from us.

02:20:54 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
I agree Keeping it away from you. They know, but they won't tell you. And until you buy these supplements, I'm not going to tell you either.

02:21:02 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Arthur C Clarke used to tell a wonderful story where he was asked you know, are the moon landings faked? He actually spoke to somebody senior in the US military government and the US military who was just kind of like if they'd have been faked, I would have been chairman of the Joint Chiefs at the moment, because you'd have to take 100,000 people out of the loop completely and none, not one of them, would actually spill the truth.

02:21:25 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Well, there's a problem with conspiracies in general that I have, which is people are really bad at keeping secrets, exactly, especially out en masse. But that said, with the UFO stuff, I think what's alarming, or, as people are concerned, is with the military. There's a lot of these what appear to be kind of drone-like things flying around top restricted areas and air force bases and they don't know what they are. They they try to jam the signals. It doesn't work. They don't know where they're coming from. Like, at the very least, that's a security risk that you need to address. You know whether that's, you know, chinese technology, russian technology or just someone who's just screwing around with things. I don't know, but there are. I'll just say there are weird things. The more you like go through these files and these stories and stuff like that. It's a little like all right, there's definitely stuff out there we don't understand most of the stuff out there.

02:22:18 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
We don't understand yeah that's the truth of it. But we didn't understand planets for a while. You know we didn't understand asteroids and comets.

02:22:26 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
We used to think they were, you know, signs from the gods yeah, and that's the argument here that a lot of people are saying they want this up, brought out, not to be like, oh, aliens, but because they want real scientists to finally start addressing this, because the problem is that as soon as you, if you're an actual scientist and established, you start talking about this stuff, you're you know, yeah your reputation is toast you're ridiculed.

02:22:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think also if you apply scientific rigor to almost any of this stuff, it kind of evaporates like the aliens.

02:22:57 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
It doesn't hold up, it doesn't stand up to scrutiny but this was the troubling thing about about the house of representatives hearings was you were hearing some really crazy stuff from elected legislators in this country and it's just like when you get people saying, oh, they're undersea aliens, is there a government conspiracy? It's like, well, first off, you're in government so you should know this stuff and secondly, apply some scientific rigor to it. You know, it's like make it just try and be scientific about it. It's easy to tell stories.

02:23:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Let's see some proof.

02:23:37 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Let's see some evidence. So yeah, I agree 100%. That's the problem with a lot of this stuff. It's a lot of really good stories, but I will say also, the government does. It's not helping a lot of ways.

02:23:48
There's the gang of eight in the Senate that has security clearance and there was a whistleblower who was one of these people saying all these what sound like crazy things, but a lot of it. He couldn't tell them in person. He had to go into a SCIF the secured compartments and the government is saying what he's saying isn't true and they're like, all right, can we have the SCIF so he can brief us? And they're like, no, they won't give them access to the SCIF, even though they're saying what he's saying isn't true. So it's like, well, why? So there are some weird things that go on here where there are definitely secrets. But the question is are there secrets? Because there's two theories, right. One is that we're running secret programs and this is a cover for it, and they like having a UFO cover story that distracts people from the idea that we're actually testing some advanced technologies.

02:24:42
This happened with the SR-71 Blackbird. This happened with the B-2 stealth bomber, the F-117A. People mistook it for UFOs and weird things. Or the other thing is they're just concerned because this also is.

02:24:56
You know, during the 60s and stuff like that, russia was also having a lot of UFO sightings and they were downplaying both russia and the us that these were ufos because they were worried that there were so many reports coming in that was overwhelming the reporting system and they couldn't tell because every time they did have a ufo report they wanted to investigate it to make sure it wasn't russia sending spy planes over with some technology. But they were getting so many reports in that they were worried that something was going to get through and that Russia could actually attack us and it would be like a Pearl Harbor thing. So they purposely sought to downplay the existence of UFOs so that people would stop reporting them. So there's a lot of weird stuff that goes on here with the government, you know, and whether the aliens thing to me is probably not true, I find the other espionage stuff, the secret programs, like.

02:25:51 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I find this stuff a little bit more interesting and I think you know should be answered okay yeah, the truth is out there, but at the same time, we're not going to know until there's definitive proof and honestly, honestly.

02:26:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I thought when trump got elected in 2016 that he would release all the archives, release all that stuff, because aliens why't he?

02:26:21 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
Do you guys want to meet aliens Like?

02:26:24 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
if you could would you want to meet them?

02:26:26 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
No, I'm kind of no.

02:26:28 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
You have enough stuff going on here. If they can give me superpowers, I don't care.

02:26:33 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Well, I mean, the famous British science fiction author Ian M Banks, called it an outside context problem. It's like, basically, when you've got your civilization running pretty good, you've got a food surplus, you're building up institutions, and all of a sudden this alien species comes in in the case of America with steamships and muskets and priests with a very interesting look in their eye, and that's basically the end of your civilization. Same with aliens.

02:27:01 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
That's a little anthropomorphized. I'm fine with that too that's a little more.

02:27:05 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
You're anthropomorphizing the aliens that way, doing that imagine they show up and they're like hey guys, we are from a different planet and we have a shit ton of bitcoin you guys, there are aliens here there's.

02:27:17 - Benito (Announcement)
There are whales and dolphins. Those are intelligent beings.

02:27:21 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Okay then, yeah, basically yes, but at the same time they're sea beast creatures, which means they can't store food. They have no manipulative organs other than the mouth they can't make fire.

02:27:30 - Benito (Announcement)
That's the problem. Yeah, you know, it's like only fans just to say this bonito.

02:27:35 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
They did evolve from uh land animals to sea creatures.

02:27:40 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Maybe they come the other way true, true, I mean, it's like and yeah, they don't have any fans. But you know, I bought a thing. I bought a CD of whale songs that turned out to be a dolphin tribute band called a hay with the minkies, but no, it's just like my.

02:27:55 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
God, but is that a real thing? Hey, we're the minkies. No, no, sadly, you just made that up.

02:28:03 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
No, it was a great joke by the late and great comedian Linda Smith, but it was just you know, I mean, there are octopuses, an intelligent species. Dolphins, whales, killer whales are absolute buggers, but yeah, they still manage to survive.

02:28:24 - Benito (Announcement)
We're not alone in the universe, can't be mathematically oh no, yes, we can, we can mathematically, we can I, I no, I'm sorry, I refuse to believe that life only exists on this planet.

02:28:33 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
That's uh, you know so I.

02:28:35 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
I think the question is it's like it could at this moment in time, though in this moment in time is the problem the universe is 14 billion years old.

02:28:42
because the idea that that's what bothers me, the idea that there's a civilization that just happens to be advanced enough is at the same time of its, you know, rise as in the 200 000 years that we've been really as humans, and like they just happen to find our plan like that, yeah, this seems, you know, pretty odd to me, unless, of course, you get to really you know, know multi-universe theory and you know different ideas of how everything is structured, then maybe, but it would require faster than light travel or teleportation.

02:29:14 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Yeah, I mean all these are all subspace and hyperspace and the various things. Honestly, let's face it, we're alone in the universe for the moment. Maybe we'll get there at some point.

02:29:26 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
But you know, that's it If Trump wants to. He was supposed to release the JFK files. He didn't do that either.

02:29:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Maybe because there's nothing there, it's just boring. Same old, same old.

02:29:36 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
I'm on the boat. You know, jfk, I think it was just a normal assassination, sorry, I'm sure there was other stuff around it, but I don't think it's the grand conspiracy. When people are like the moon landing was fake, you know, I'm like, so oh, no, I'm sorry.

02:29:51 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
That really grinds my gears, because, okay, the moon landing was fake. Russia was watching this like a hawk during the Cold War. If there'd been any indication this was fake, they would have called it out immediately.

02:30:06 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
That's why I tell people okay, say it was fake.

02:30:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So what Now? What do we?

02:30:09 - Benito (Announcement)
do How's your life any different? I've still got to go to work tomorrow.

02:30:13 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
We have reflectors up there that you can fire a laser off and get a thing back. It's that kind of logical stupidity. It's like like, why didn't you know about holocaust deniers? In which case, why did nobody at nuremberg say this is all fake, you know? It's the same with the moon landings.

02:30:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's just kind of like but but daniel has a point that, even if it were fake, so what right? How does it change anything? Uh, all right, I want to take a break. We're going to come back our final words. You guys have really brought us down a rabbit hole. Rabbit hole. I'm going to dig ourselves out and we'll have final words in just a bit.

02:30:55
With a wonderful panel, this actually is more interesting conversation than I thought it would be. The, uh, the. I'm glad I brought it up, our show today, brought to you by not an alien, but something you might know, called NetSuite. So what does the future hold for business? Right now, it's very much up in the air. Ask nine experts. You're going to get 10 answers. Right, rates will rise, rates will fall, inflation's up, inflation's down. No one seems to know. Maybe we need to invent a crystal ball, maybe the aliens could bring us a crystal ball.

02:31:28
Until that time, over 38 000 businesses have done the smart thing, the intelligent thing future-proofed their business with net suite by oracle, the number one cloud erp, bringing accounting, financial, financial management, inventory and HR into one fluid, easy to use platform. With one unified business management suite, there's one source of truth giving you the visibility and control that you need to make quick decisions. A single source of truth means you know you don't have competing points of view, you understand, you see and you can decide based on what's really going on. With real-time insights and forecasting. You're peering into the future with actionable data and man when you're closing the books in days, not weeks. You're spending less time looking backward and more time on what's next. That's good. I'll tell you what. If I needed an ERP, I would absolutely use this one. Speaking of opportunity, you could download the CFO's Guide to AI and Machine Learning. They've got a great white paper right now at netsuitecom slash twit and it's free. Just go to the website, netsuitecom slash twit. While you're there, learn more about the number one ERP that can save you time, save you money and uh and eliminate worrying about the future. Netsuitecom slash twit. We thank him so much for support of this week in tech. One last story I usually uh if if there's an obituary, close the show with that, and this one is a name that uh should be legendary to anybody who's done any computer programming Thomas E Kurtz, who was the inventor of BASIC, along with his pal John Kemeny Kurtz and Kemeny's BASIC programming language written at Dartmouth, part of the Dartmouth time-sharing system in the 1960s.

02:33:25
In that time there was really no simple beginner language easy to use for undergraduates. Kurtz and Kemeny developed BASIC so that it could be accessed by students around campus on teletypes and began, I think, the computer revolution. I mean Bill Gates used those teletypes programmed in BASIC when he was in high school we had a terminal. I remember it was in a little closet hooked up to a timeshare. It had BASIC on it. It got a lot of people started. 1964 is a picture of Thomas Kurtomas kurtz from the dartmouth college library. He's on the right, his uh, his partner john kemeney on the left.

02:34:11 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
The inventor of basic passed away, I mean it was my introduction to computing, because mine too, almost everybody right, yeah, I mean in the uk um computers were hideously expensive in the 80s you had an Acorn.

02:34:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, I had a.

02:34:25 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Sinclair ZX81, which was a Timex over here and Sinclair was. They didn't bother with. You know, you couldn't do a UI at that time. But basically they gave you a basic manual and said right, this is how you learn to program Yep basic manual. And said right, this is how you learn to program yep. And but every single programmer of a certain age I've spoken to, we started with basic, unless they're even older, and started with you know four or something, yeah, four channel cobalt, but yeah, basically I learned to code.

02:34:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
My first program was written in basic on atari's. That's how bill gates got microsoft started was writing basic for the mitts altair. I have a fake mitts altair behind me running basic I was gonna say that's a real one I'm so jealous, but it's a it's running. It's a raspberry pi and it's an altair 8800, but it's an exact duplicate of the front face of it, but it made it made computing useful, accessible.

02:35:22 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
That's right. It's the same thing that Grace Hopper did in terms of translating machine languages. So incredibly important and a great loss 1964.

02:35:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Thomas E Kurtz, 1928 to 2024. He was an elderly man. He was in his late 90s. A life well, lived A good life, yeah, and did a lot for the computer revolution.

02:35:51 - Benito (Announcement)
The original Angry Birds was in BASIC.

02:35:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No kidding, really it wasn't called Angry Birds it was called Gorillas Darned I typed in a hundred programs from compute magazine.

02:36:05 - Benito (Announcement)
Gorillas on on tops of buildings and they threw bananas at each other. Oh, and you gave it speed, you gave it power and an angle, and then that's how. That's how how we throw the banana. I'll be darned.

02:36:16 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
They were actually happy birds back then, and then they left.

02:36:20 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
But no, I mean Lee you've just reminded me with computer magazines, where you used to have to type in the code yeah, from the magazine, and this is one thing wrong yeah, this is why sub-editors were so important back in the day, because one wrong code and that's it.

02:36:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, and you had to save it to a cassette right and then load it in off of cassette playing the tone control all the time to make sure the computer list, yep, my god.

02:36:45 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Well, I feel like an old fart, right? Sorry guys also snake.

02:36:50 - Benito (Announcement)
Snake was first on basic yeah, I've written.

02:36:52 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Uh, I've written several versions of snake in later languages, but uh, yeah, they've just started reintroducing a nokia feature phone with snake on it, yes, and with a week's battery life, which, I have to say as a camper, is really tempting play snake for hours.

02:37:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, ian Thompson, it is so great to see you. Uh, I'm sorry we don't have a studio for you to come visit any longer, but I always welcome up here in pedal. I miss. Petaluma yeah it's one of those things it was, was those?

02:37:21 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
were the days, yeah, and you had the big chair. So yes, yep.

02:37:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But honestly, I still have the big chair. It's over here and I can show you a picture of the big chair. I have a two-shot there it is. See the Dr Evil chair.

02:37:36 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
We call that You're welcome to come sit in any time. It was fun to sit in it and I will do so.

02:37:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Thank you, Ian, Great to see you once again. Always a pleasure. Reporter at TheRegistercom. Thank you, Daniel Rubino. Always a thrill to have you on Editor-in-Chief of Windows Central. Anything you want to plug, you have a Windows Central podcast. Yes.

02:37:58 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Although we haven't done it for a while, oh, never mind forget, I mentioned it forget, I mentioned it you're too busy writing great stuff yeah, we'll get back to it eventually.

02:38:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But yeah, if we still do that, occasionally stuff on youtube as well yeah, nice thanks for joining us today, daniel I appreciate it and thanks to alex kantrowitz, whose big technology podcast is better than mine and I'll never forgive you for that. But good job, he's got the big names. I'll tell you that.

02:38:27 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
It's always great to speak with you. I love being on the show, I love listening to it, and this was a great panel today, so thanks for having me on.

02:38:33 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Thank you. I'm really looking forward to that. New Orleans gets a view.

02:38:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's going to be fun and he said he might get to play a little Mario Kart. Well, yeah, I hope he might play. Uh, get to play a little mario kart?

02:38:51 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
well, yeah, I hope we're going to play some more. If he's got a direct brain connection to mario kart, I think you're in trouble. He does. Yeah, I mean, how can you? How can you beat that?

02:38:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
we're going to find out, hopefully in a couple weeks excellent technology thank you alex, thank you daniel, thank you ian, and a special thanks to all of our club twit members who make this show and all the shows we do possible. Without you there would be no twit, and if you're not yet a club twit member, I would love to have you in the club. Some really great, smart, interesting people you can hang out with them in the club twit discord. That's kind of inside the velvet rope. We do special events in the discord. We've got a Stacy's book club coming up next month. Uh, we've got Chris Marquart's photo. Uh, segment, coffee segments. Just around the corner we'll do a tasting. Micah does his crafting Corner. You also get video for a lot of the shows that we do audio only in public, like hands on Windows, hands on Macintosh, this week, week in space.

02:39:41
There's so much in the club, but the main reason to join is it keeps us afloat. Advertising dollars have shrunk over the years. All of the consumer ads, like the food boxes and the mattresses, they've all disappeared and we have to make up the difference. And the club has really helped us. In fact, lisa told me the other day the club pays half of our payroll now, so you're really helping keeping people like Benito, employed keeping the lights on. None of it goes into my pocket. It all goes to keeping the operations running. We really appreciate it. Oh, and it's only $7 a month. I mean, it's not a lot of money.

02:40:17
Go to twittv slash club twit. A couple of cups of coffee and there you are. You will be supporting us. Plus, we give you two weeks free, a two-week free trial. See if you like it. We also will give you a free month when you refer another member. So when you join up, you'll get a code that you could post everywhere, put it on your ex or your Facebook or whatever, and everybody who joins using that code gets you a free month. So there are lots of ways to play the game. Twittv club twit. I really appreciate the support. Thank you very much. We do twit every sunday, 2 pm pacific, 5 pm eastern, 2200 utc.

02:40:54
Thanks to the club, we can stream this now on eight different platforms. We've got on discord for the club members youtube, twitch, tick tock, facebook, linkedin, xcom and kick eight different ways. You can watch live, but honestly, the best way to watch is to download a copy of the show, subscribe or go to the website twittv. You'll also see a link there to the youtube channel for the video. If you want to watch the video on youtube, that's a great way to share little clips. You know that's a fun way to do that. So lots of ways to watch. Please do and come back next week. We will see you then. 1,006 episodes, and I've been saying it for every one of them. Another twit is in the can. We'll see you next week. Bye-bye. This is amazing.

02:41:36 - AI Granny (Caller)
Doing the twit. Doing the twit, all right, doing the twit.


 

All Transcripts posts